The art of leadership network pretty maturely buried the story. You know, the longest people have said, "Oh, you know, our attention spans are getting shorter." And I don't buy that. I think what's happened is that things that can be shortened have been short. Welcome to the "Carry New Half Leadership Podcast." Hey, I'm so excited to join us today. I hope this episode helps you thrive in life and leadership. Today, you and I sit down with Malcolm Gladwell. We're going to deconstruct his writing process. We're going to talk about his theory about how to reach people in a crowded world. And we'll talk about the revenge of the tipping point. What happens when tipping points aren't always good? And man, what a thrill to bring you this conversation. Today's episode is brought to you by the Art of Leadership Academy and by Compassion. You know, in leadership, you can find yourself feeling overwhelmed, exhausted out of ideas. You ever found yourself stuck and you want to get around really great leaders? Check out the artofleadershipacademy.com. You'll get instant access to my training programs and an incredible community. And Compassion is someone I've partnered with when I was lead pastor and personally I have pastored with for over a decade. I would have encouraged your church to get involved in child sponsorship to find out more go to compassion.com/carry. Well, Malcolm Gladwell is one of those who really doesn't need an introduction. But here it is anyway. He is the co-founder and president of the audio production company Pushkin Industries, which is the home to his popular podcast revisionist history, as well as his most recent audio book Miracle and Wonder. I highly recommend that we talk about that in this conversation. It's super innovative audio biography of Paul Simon. Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. In 2001, he won a national magazine award for a New Yorker profile he did. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling books, The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, the Bomber Mafia, and soon I'm sure revenge of the tipping point. Well, in leadership, you can find yourself feeling stuck overwhelmed and kind of out of ideas sometimes. Trust me, we've all been there before. I got stuck as a leader and so I would reach out to people. Well, fortunately today we've got something called the Art of Leadership Academy. It's something I created a couple years ago. It's got online courses, comprehensive guides, a private community, live coaching, and a whole lot more. They all support your growth as a leader. So think about it. You could finally have a place to go to get the answers and clarity you need to get your mission growing and it's available at your fingertips 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So the next time you get a little bit stuck as a leader, you can simply open up the app and the answer is just a click or a DM away. Join today. Go to the artofleadershipacademy.com. You will get instant access to the training programs and community. That's the artofleadershipacademy.com. And also as a pastor and a leader, a common thread I've seen in those who make an impact in the lives of others is the faith to say yes to a bigger mission. And for over 70 years, that's what compassion has done. Connecting local churches with churches around the world to lift children out of poverty. So my church has partnered with Compassion for over a decade. I want to encourage your church to get involved. If you want to find out more, simply go to compassion.com/carry. Again, that's compassion.com/c-a-r-u-y. And now my delightful conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back. Yeah. So I want to begin by looking at why you decided to revisit the tipping point 25 years later. It was... Well, I was originally just going to do a 25th anniversary kind of refresh. Like a new introduction or something like that. Yeah, new reduction. Maybe swap out a chapter or two. And then I got into it and I realized actually what I really want to do is to write a sequel. I want to go back and rethink everything I approached 25 years ago through the lens of what's happening. Because what I found was 25 years is a very long time. And particularly these days, these things seem dated after two years. So it just seemed weird to do a revision on something that was so rooted in the pre-internet age, in the pre-pandemic age, in... I mean, there's so much change. And we know so much more now than we did about these things. So I just said, no, it would be much more fun to kind of start from scratch and think of this as part two. Yeah, well, it is an entirely new book. So we'll get into the content of it in a little bit. But I was telling you, it was my weekend read, I got it Friday, I think, and it was prepping for this interview. And I got into the first page and I'm like, oh, thank goodness, it's Malcolm Gladwell. And you just have such a wonderful way of writing. And you drew me in like you hooked me. And I thought, this is magic the way that you write. And I'm wondering if you could talk to us, because this is book number, what, six or seven for you, of major titles, what your approach to writing is. It seems to be a beautiful combination in your different books of like analysis, statistics, narrative story. And I find it very compelling. So how would you characterize your approach to writing? Well, I guess it's always, I always start with it. There's always a question I want to answer. And a story I want to tell. And I think of those as being, if you know the story you want to tell and the question you want to answer, it makes your life a lot easier when you're writing. So your story gives you character and plot. And the question gives you suspense. You know, that there's a lot of the chapters in this book, as in so many of my books, you know, they pose a question at the beginning. And the answer is not obvious. So there's a reason then for the audience to stay tuned, because there's something they want to know. And it's also from a writer's standpoint. There's a clear logic to the story I'm telling, because I'm I'm on this quest to reveal the answer to this kind of oddball question. You know, like there's a chapter in the book on the way we thought about the Holocaust in this country and how for years, decades after the Second World War, no one talked about the Holocaust, which, you know, is so surprising to any of us now who think about it. Oh, we must all have been. But no, no, it was it was this subject that just never came up until the 70s. That's sort of an incredible. And then but that raises this incredibly interesting question, which is why. Right. So the minute I start by telling you something that I think you didn't know. And the reason I think you didn't know is that I didn't know. I thought I didn't know there was this kind of like mystery about the Holocaust for 30 years after the war. And then we embarked together on this journey to figure out why. And along the way, we meet this incredible cast of characters, you know, so that's the kind of that chapter, which I in the book, which I really love is a kind of it's a really good example of the way I like to tell stories when I when I'm I have a I have a I have a story and then I have a purpose for the story and they they come together. Well, it's inductive, rather deductive, which I must say as a podcaster's interviewed hundreds of people makes your books, not very skimmable, but very compelling. Do you know what I mean? Because sometimes it's like, well, the word Holocaust didn't show up until 1978. And strangely, it was April of 1978. You don't give away the ending. And what makes it really fascinating to me, you know, we live in the attention economy now that's different than 25 years ago. But it's got it's got it's an interesting combination of what feels like it could be really great fiction, like a screenplay or a story, except it's rooted in, in, you know, facts, analyses, whether that's the Holocaust or what's that town called Poplar Grove or whether it's the opioid crisis and the role of Oxycontin in the midst of it, etc, etc. So it's a masterful storytelling thing. What else about your approach to story? Have you developed over the years? Well, one is another difference. You know, when I went back and I read the original tipping point, which is my first book. So that was really that's me at the beginning of this kind of journey I've been on. And this is my seventh or eighth book. And there has been a sort of a significant evolution along the way and the way that I tell stories. And one of them is that I was much more reliant. There's always in my stories, I kind of, I toggle back and forth between data and scientific evidence and studies, psychological studies and storytelling. And I think back then I leaned more heavily on the data and the science end of it. And now I lean more heavily on the story end of it. And I think that's an evolution where I've come to understand is that you don't need a lot of I didn't have as much faith in the power of scientific evidence in the beginning as I do now. You don't need a you don't I don't need to give you seven reasons why something why why researchers believe something to be so. If I pick the strongest of those reasons and build a story around it, I feel that's sufficient. You know, there's a little factoid in the book about comes and I'm just thinking of this at random. There's a little factoid about the black, white test score gap in schools. And, you know, we've known for decades now that if you test a random sample of black and white school children, there will be a gap in their performance and the gap's not trivial, right? And we've been having this argument about why why that gap. I think 25 years ago, I would have spent 15 pages talking about all the evidence for this gap. And then I would have told you a story about it. And now I've realized, no, no, no, why don't I spend 10 pages telling you the story and then give you the strongest and most elegant study to support my claim. That's the shift. I think I'm, I'm just more, because in conversation, we don't use a much more interest in the rhythms of conversation now than I used to be. When I'm talking to you about this, if I can establish my credibility as a, as a, on a particular subject, I don't need to spend half an hour combing through the evidence. I can say, you know, Carrie, I've looked at the evidence. Here's an example of what many people believe and then tell you a story. And that's much more likely, I think, to resonate with you. So that's been a big, I think, when I went back and looked at the original and told me what I was like, the balance is all off. It's not the way I would write the book today. Is that an evolution in you or an evolution because a lot has changed in 25 years in our attention span collectively or a mix of both or something else? I think it's an evolution in my understanding of how to reach people. You know, at a certain point, I got much more interested. You know, I would always joke with my dad who was a mathematician and a theoretical mathematician. And I would go on Amazon and I would see what ranking his books were. He wrote these incredibly complex books that were translated into like Chinese and Russian. And they would be, you know, they would be 20, they'd be ranked 20 millionth on Amazon. They would sell like 25 copies a year, but it would be the 25 biggest people in his field, right? It would be like the 25 geniuses who could understand what that's who he sold. And so he wrote his books for an audience of whatever 50 people here. That's who went to his conferences. That's who could speak his language. And that's one very legitimate, by the way, an extraordinary amount of what is powerful and important in the world is written for a narrow audience. When your brain surgeon writes about a breakthrough in treating brain surgery that will save a zillion lives, they write that up for a benefit of, you know, a couple hundred people in their field, right? That's the way we want it to be. We do not want it to be like, that's, I don't mean to decide it anyway. But I began to realize that's not the world I want to inhabit. I really do want to reach as many people as I can. And so I want to, I've systematically tried to dismantle all the barriers to the, to not a mass audience, but I want anyone who's curious and educated, reasonably educated to be interested in my books. And that's, and anything that stands in a way of that I think has to be reexamined and removed. I think it's, it's really interesting because it was gripping. And you're right. I mean, I've seen the evolution. I've read most of your books, if not all of them, I think most. And you do spend a lot of time on a story, and you might spend three quarters of a chapter just sort of explaining what it was like in Poplar Grove or the Jewish community in LA following the second 1960s, I guess you kind of pick it up. Or the whole opioid crisis story through the lens of one or two people are fascinatingly the grafting corruption of South Florida, Miami, after the 1970s. You're not, you're not in South Florida. Are you carrying? Oh, I'm not. No, I'm North of Toronto. So I'm okay. I'm okay. I've like, I got friends leading churches there. That'll be really interesting. No, lots, lots of Canadians are in South Florida. That's why I asked, I'm not sure. No, you know, so it, but I'm thinking about it because you have so many preachers and communicators listening here. One of the things that's been fascinating to me is, you know, the world is getting shallower, more superficial, quick bites, tick talks, you know, quick videos, lots of views, etc. And I think there, I'm trying to think through, what does it look like to zig when everybody else is zagging? How do you go deeper when the world is getting shallower? And I love the idea of, because we are human beings, you know, for thousands of years, we've sat around campfires listening to stories. We're entangled in people's lives. So that idea of a single story framing a narrative seems really compelling in the right direction to me. Any further thoughts on that or advice to communicators on, because you mentioned a few times, you really want to reach people. And you think this is a more powerful way than stats and graphs and data, etc? Well, I think, one is I think that we have pretty maturely buried the story. You know, the longest I've ever said, Oh, you know, our attention spans are getting shorter. And I don't, I don't buy that. I think what's happened is that things that can be shortened have been shortened. You know, I have discovered that I'm a huge basketball fan. I don't need to watch 82 basketball games a year to be a basketball fan. I can watch highlights and then tune in on crucial games during the season and the playoffs, right? So is that evidence that my attention span is shorter? No, it's evidence of me understanding that what it means for me to be a basketball fan means I don't I don't need a hundred percent participation, right? Some people do I don't. But at the same time, you know, I just finished watching that Apple TV series presumed innocent, of which I have many complicated feelings. But you know, what was it eight episodes of roughly an hour each? I spent eight hours of my life watching that show. But I don't have eight hours. I will put it out. No, I suspect no to a lot of people, but I still spend eight hours watching. Now, does is my attention span getting shorter? No, I just I just invested an enormous chunk of time in a story that was, I mean, gripping in parts and other parts, not terribly interesting. But it did hold me and it took me all the way to the end. And I think what's maybe a better way of saying that it's not that our attention spans have gotten shorter, it's that maybe the bar has been raised a little. We will devote attention to something that compels us that moves us that has meaning. And I think that's the difference. You have to work a little harder to get people's attention. But they're perfectly willing to give it to you. You know, what was the the single most successful literary phenomenon of the last 25 years is Harry Potter, right? Those were enormous books. I can't, my daughters and I quite of the age to read that yeah, I can't wait till they are. They're huge. It's like, I have, I have months and months and months of reading Harry Potter to my kids ahead of me, right? That's not a, that's not a culture with an attention span crisis. It's a culture that responds to great storytelling. And that is, that is impatient with lousy storytelling, but not that's given up. It's attention span. That's a beautiful call out. I'm really going to camp on those words and think about that as I get ready to tackle my next book. I think you raise some really good points. Can you take us into, I mean, seven or eight books after 25 years, your books take a lot of research. Can you walk us through the writing process and the research process, what that looks like for you, any habits, disciplines, approaches that you follow these days? I think this has changed a little bit. I write as I go along as opposed to doing all the research and then writing it up. I find it much more useful. I learn something. I start writing the chapter and then I keep adding the more I learn. And each, each revision usually includes adding a whole bunch of new material. And I find that's a much more, the more iterative you can make the writing process, I think the better the writing process is and the less intimidating it is. The biggest issue with starting a book is that you think, I have to write whatever it is, 80,000 words. And you just think, oh, I can't do that, right? It seems too overwhelming. But if you can understand that, no, no, no, an 80,000-word book is a book written in thousand-word increments over the course of a year and a half, two years, three years, whatever. And then you want to say, oh, actually, it's quite manageable. And even a chapter, a nice, long chapter actually starts as a very short chapter. And then you talk to someone else and then you go back and you rewrite what you learned. And it gets you in the habit of also understanding that where you start a chapter is not necessarily where you end up. If you start something, you should, I love the idea of, I've written half the chapter and then I changed my mind. And I realized, oh, actually, no, no, this is the story of something else. Or the conclusion I drew is premature or, you know, that. And that's when I think stories start to get complex when you, but that, so I try to kind of lower the stakes. In other words, in the writing and nibble, as opposed to take big gulps. Well, that makes it a lot more doable. And it's interesting, you know, in law school, I studied inductive versus deductive reasoning. You're very inductive. It's like, we're all on this journey and we will get to the point at the end. But it sounds like that's what your writing and research process is as well, right? You begin with a question and then it's a quest to try to figure out what exactly is happening here. Yeah, we did a, at Pushkin, we did this podcast series, me and this, one of my colleagues, Ben Dafaffrey on the 1936 Olympics. And it was the perfect example of this because it ended up being nine episodes. We started without a plan. None. We sat down and we said, we'd like to say something interesting about the 36 Olympics. And we just both started reading. And then I said, I think we should start with this story. And then Ben was like, I don't understand what that has to do with, and I was like, I don't know, let's just start here. And we did. And then he came back with this, he won't do something on Jesse Owens. He told me his idea and I quietly inside said, that's, that's the dumbest idea. I was like, you know, my suspicion about Ben was Ben goes off on tangents and they're really like, you know, they're for a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny audience. And I was like, oh, Ben. So he goes off and does it and it comes back and it's the greatest thing in the whole series. So the whole point is like, then I realized why, why even bother trying to figure it out beforehand? I didn't know what he was going to do with the material. Not even sure he did. He had this idea and he wanted to develop it. And what I really needed to do was just to say, you know, like, just to say, you know, go for it and how can I help keep my mind open and let's go on this journey. And then I came back and said, let's go to Alabama. And he said, why are we going to Alabama? And I said, let's find out. And it turns out, you know, that was a great, it's a great last episode of the whole series. But that kind of more and more, I've fallen in love with that kind of adventure storytelling. Well, you don't, you know, my dad, when we used to go, I was reminded of this, it was this morning, I was thinking about this. When I was a kid, my dad, we would go for family drives. My father is before, obviously, Google Maps and Waze and everything. He never looked at a map. And he loved getting lost. And he would always look at us. And he would say, you know, I'm like 12 years old in the passenger seat. And he would say, I'm going to follow my nose. And what he meant was this figure out. I mean, we're in Southern Ontario. Like, you can't get epically lost, right? You're mentally going to hit a great lake. You're going to hit a great lake. You know, there's a limit. But he would do this in your, I mean, he would do this anyway. But his point was you can't like, we're not in the, we're not in the Amazon. Like a wrong turn is not going to, we can figure this out. And by the way, he began to communicate to me how much fun it was to figure it out. That was the fun, right? And that's that I realized that a lot of my writing is an attempt to unconsciously capture that feeling of mischief that my father had about, I don't know where we're going. I don't have a map. Your mother may be complaining right now, but like, let's just figure it out. Right? That's, and that is, you know, that's a delightful feeling, you know, when you've bought into that. And now a quick word from one of our partners. Today's episode is brought to you by preaching cheat sheet. A recent study showed that 46% of pastors say one of their biggest struggles is feeling like attendees don't absorb or use what they preach. Did you hear that? 46%. A pastor's feel that way. Look, I get it. Okay, we've all been there. 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That's preaching cheat sheet.com to download your copy for free. And now back to the conversation. It is, you know, one of the you did some experimenting to with your last audio book, which was really an autobiography of Paul Simon. And what struck me about that, my wife and I listened to it in the car over, you know, multiple weeks months when we were together. What got me about that was it almost felt like the original source tapes that you would use for an autobiography or a biography of Paul Simon. But it was actually that exploring, sitting in his room, having a conversation. I think it was you and the producer and Paul Simon just kind of going through his life, going through his career with the odd editorial comment here or there that became the book, right? And it was completely multimedia. Do you want to talk about that approach? Because I think there's promise in it. It was almost like a long, long, long Paul Simon podcast that became the book. Yeah. So this is something I've fallen in love with recently, which is I've done it more since doing that Paul Simon book. The trick there was normally when you call up a celebrity and you say, I want to do something on, they say the publicist says, okay, you've got 45 minutes, right? That's nine times out of 10, that's what you get or 99 times out of 100. Yeah. I went to Paul and he said, well, how long do you, every time, you know, how much time do you need? And I said, I don't know. And to my other surprise and amazement, he said, okay. And we would meet and just talk. And then he would say, when are we meeting again? And I would do a little happy dance in the car and I would say, okay, and I would give him a date and we'd go back. And he would, you know, we started meeting him. He was has a house in Hawaii. We went to Hawaii. We just met every day in Hawaii for, and then he came back and he was in Connecticut and we went once a week to his house in Connecticut. And then he went to Texas to do some thing. And he said, you want to come to Texas? We just kind of like kept going. And the longer the conversation became, the much more beautiful and useful it became. And the more opportunities opened themselves up. And I realized, one of the huge mistakes that journalists make of necessity, because we can't get access to people the way we want to, is that we never really get below the surface. And with Paul, because we ended up, Bruce and I ended up talking to him for 40 hours, actually more than 40 hours, I got because I did an extra four hours at the end, 44 hours. And that's an enormous amount of tape. And then that became a raw material for all the, as you say, as we were recording those, I was in my back of my mind, kind of ruminating on it. And all of those chapters that we do are the kind of me kind of riffing on the conversations that we had, you know, these moments. They were just these moments that were just so interesting and so kind of thought provoking. You know, when we realized how invested he was by the music in the music he was listening to in his early teens, and how incredibly formative growing up in Queens in the 50s was. And that is all chapter on the gift of Queens. It's just about like, all right, so I went home and I was like, all right, so let's figure out like, what was going on in Queens in 1950? If you were a kid playing on the street, what music did you hear? And if you were a musically minded kid who was actively learning from what you were listening to, how did that influence you? It's very different from growing up as a kid in Appalachia, growing up as a kid in Nova Scotia, or growing up as a kid in, you know, you can think of all kinds of different places that would have an influence, New Orleans, or that was when I realized there was something specific and beautiful about Queens that allowed me to write a chapter around his memories of being a child. Same thing that there's a lot about in there about his dad. You know, by our 35 of the 40 hours, we realized, you know, he's talking a lot about his dad. This is a man in his late 70s, and his father is still with him, which is moving to me because I had just lost my own father. And I realized that's true that your parents, I had this great fear when my dad died that he would leave, you know, and I realized that he doesn't leave. And you can keep your loved ones alive. That's what grief is, is a way of keeping them alive. Paul was still grieving about his father, even though his father had been dead for 30 years. And it was coming up in his music in a way that not even he was conscious of. And then we only got that because we're sitting there listening to him. And we're an hour at 35, and we're like, there is so much about his dad, right? So much about it. He would bring up his dad. And he would, he's still fighting in a lovely way, fighting with his father, who is a genius, musical genius, among other things. Clearly his father, you know, he's in the shadow. Imagine you're a musical genius, you're Paul Simon, and you grew up in a shadow of this kind of, you know, powerful, intimidating, intellectual figure who is a better musician. You think of him as a better musician than you will ever be, right? Now, that's an interesting dynamic for someone who's a great, I think the greatest songwriter of the 20th century, right? Yes. Still in the thrall of dad, trying to measure his dad, measure up. Yeah. And still arguing with it. You know, that's, like I said, that's like, so there's a whole, I think the best job for the book is just, it's us getting into his, not in that kind of, and I didn't think it was a kind of cheap Freudian way. I felt it was like an honest way about how, and this, sorry, I have so much to say about this, but this really interesting thing that you don't begin to appreciate your parents until they're gone. Not a friend of mine said this to me that, you know, my father died 20 years ago. I know him better now than I did when he was alive. I've never forgotten that. And I think of that as so insanely insightful. Your parents have had a huge influence on you. Have a day. Your mom is still with you. Your dad died a number of years ago. How have they shaped you as who you've become? I realize that's probably 90 minutes, 90 days on its own. Oh, yes, there's many. Well, my dad was someone who took delight in the world. I mean, I think he just, I don't think he ever woke up and said, you know, I'd rather not be here or I'm not looking forward to today. I think everything. And I think he knew, he had this lovely balance, you know, he was a deeply devout Christian. And it informed his sensibility in the best possible way. He saw everything he did as an expression of God's genius and he loved flowers and he saw you know, they were beautiful. And I think it fueled his faith that someone created this thing that is just insanely beautiful. And he saw mathematics. This thing that came out of him, sort of unbidden as coming from this supernatural spiritual force. I mean, that's I think that's how he made sense of it, you know, that it was that these incredibly elegant, he participated in a world of incredible elegance. That's what math was to him. And it was, I think it was divine in some ways for him. But it just meant his life. I mean, I think his sort of life was, but he had his own chair of like anyone's things he worried about and struggles, you know, raising a family in Canada in the 70s when I just would remind that he, we built a new house in 1977. And the interest rate on the house was, I think it was 20%. That's right. That was about right for that era. I can't imagine the stress he must have been under financial weakness. I know it just kind of like, but anyway, like, but at the same time, that was that idea that it's possible to find enormous joy in learning and experience in the world. And my, my mom is just a kind of incredibly empathetic, thoughtful person who loves to listen to people. And that's also been an enormously valuable lesson in my life. I love your approach because, you know, talking about zigging when everybody else is zagging with the Paul Simon biography, or also, you know, the podcast series you did on the 1936 Olympics, or even this new book, Revenge at the Tipping Point, you can't be on a super tight deadline. It can't be like three months to write this book. I have three months. So can you talk about, you know, how you've resisted the temptation? I'm sure you have to hit deadlines, it's a major publisher, et cetera, et cetera. But why that's so valuable? And some of the rhythms in your life that allow for that kind of beautiful meandering that may or may not be productive. Well, a lot of it is the benefit of being as old as I am. When you've been at it, this is what I didn't understand when I was young, which is just the sort of store of things, of experiences, of knowledge that you have, just by virtue of having been around a while, is so great that you can draw on it. You know, a lot of my writing is about seeing parallels between things, and it's easier for me to see parallels at my age than it was at 25, just because I've experienced so much more in those years. You know, so like there's a gift. It made me a lot, you know, you give up a certain number of things as you get older, but you gain, it strikes me, you gain way much more. And, you know, that's one of them. You have a, like to go back to that chapter we were talking about, about the Holocaust. I wouldn't have written that chapter if I didn't remember, which is all about this epic change that happens in the 70s. Having lived through the 70s made me understand that chapter, made that chapter possible. It just was real to me, you know, and I, there are kind of, when you live through something, you experience it in a way that you cannot, if you only read about it or experience it secondhand. So that's this fair. It gives, it gives your experiences a kind of depth. You know, my favorite sports writer, Bill Simmons, who's roughly my age, he's very historically minded when he talks about basketball, for example. And so he's constantly saying, you know, this is the best thing, you know, since the 87 MBA finals. And like, you know, it's like, it's funny in some sense that he's going back 40 years, whatever it is. But it's also really, really useful. Because what he's saying is, you can sit back and say, wow, LeBron James is a great player. But it's meaning, it's not meaningful, unless you have some understanding of the people who came before him, right? You can say, well, okay, so I remember Magic Johnson. Is he better than Magic? I remember Michael Jordan in his prime. I have a point of comparison. And you know, it just allows you to have some kind of, so that's been just an enormous benefit of kind of having some years under my belt. So if you had advice to young writers, we have a lot of young leaders listening, some of whom want to write, or they want to make a contribution, etc. Any advice to them on what to really pay attention to, especially trying to break out in a culture at a market like today? Well, what is patience? You know, I didn't write my first book, Tipping Point, was written. I wrote it in my late 30s, published it basically on my when I was, yeah, my late 30s, which is, you know, probably later than most people. I didn't achieve real successes right until I was in my 40s, which is probably later than most people would I think imagine success to come. And I think that was, that's expectation number one, is I think maybe people are in too much of a hurry that you particularly writing a book, which is such a kind of enormous undertaking. It's just so much easier when you have more experiences under your belt and more. So that's patience would be one thing. Until I think, I realize in retrospect, I spent a lot of time in my 20s, filling the tank of with experiences that I could later draw on. And I think that's really important as well, that you should, people really should think of their early years in their career as filling up their brain with as a wide, building as wide a base as possible from which to work from. That just becomes incredibly useful in later life when you've got disparate experiences drawn to have something to actually write about rather than, oh, I want to be a writer, right? Yeah, I tell young writers, don't study writing, study something else that you can write about. It's much more important to know what you want to write about than to be writing itself will come as the more experience you what practice you have that you can become a good writer. But experiences are something you have to go ahead and acquire deliberately and intentionally. And that's what you should be focused on. What do you care about? Like, things people, people write most powerfully and compellingly about the things they care about. So the first question should be, what do you care about? And if you don't know, if you can't answer that question in the immediately and emphatically, you shouldn't be writing. That's a fair point. That's a really fair point. So 25 years ago, any idea what tip the tipping point, ironically, what you wrote about happened to your book? It hit a tipping point where it sort of invaded the popular consciousness, sold a lot of copies. A lot of the ideas in the tipping point actually came true in how widespread that book became. When you look back on it, what were some of the factors that made your debut book take off at the time pre-internet, pre-social media, pre-influencer, all of that back in 2000? Yeah, I mean, you don't have a good answer to that. I mean, I know that I think a good part of it is luck. I think that there was something that just happened to kind of put my finger in the zeitgeist for a moment. I think that it was a hopeful book at a time that was profoundly optimistic. The early 2000s, I mean, we've forgotten what Cold War was over. World was getting more prosperous by the day. It just seemed like after years and years and years of anxiety, the world was headed in the right direction. So a book that sort of talked about how you can create positive change was hit a chord. I spent so much time on the road promoting it that in a way that you would be impossible today. But I spent years. It didn't become a bestseller as a hardcover as it became a bestseller as a paperback. I didn't know that. Really? I actually hit the bestseller list until my second book Blink came out four years later. Really? And it wrote, people read Blink and went back and got tipping point. I had been promoting it in those intervening years nonstop. I just was on the road for just going to one place after another. It was very, in that sense, it was very, very old school. It was like a rock band going from club to club, getting the word out. So there was a lot of shoe leather there. And I still think there's still no, particularly now, there's still no, there is no substitute for the particular power of a face-to-face interaction of doing some kind of event where people see you in person. That is the most that is the most important way to reach people. Every other way we come up with to replace that is a compromise. So even podcasting, not the same as being there in person and doing a live event in your view. Podcasting? I mean, it's not the same. No, what a lot of podcasting allows us to do is it gives us access to a wide range of things that we could never get if we had to do everything in person. So I'm willing to give up on the power and exchange what I get is range. I can listen to podcasts about track and field. I can listen to your podcasts and I can listen to someone dissect some intellectual thing all of my way to work. Can't do that if you do it in person. So it has a marvelous qualities, but there's no question that if you and I were doing this in front of a live audience of 300 people, the effect of our conversation would be far greater on those 300 in the room. Well, and probably the questions would be different. I don't know, there's a vibe when it's you and me via Riverside and there's a vibe in front of a live audience. It's just, it's a different experience for sure. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's true. For people who may not have read the original tipping point, can you give us the real short thumbnail of what the big idea was in the book? And then I want to get into how you revisited it and came up with the revenge of the tipping point. Yeah, the tipping, the original tipping point was a book that simply that said the best way to understand how ideas and behaviors move through society. How that kind of change happens is to think of them as behaving like viruses. But the rules of epidemics don't just cover illnesses and diseases. They also help us explain everything from why we buy the things we buy, to why we say the things we say, to any kind of contagious idea follows the principles laid down by those who study epidemics. That seems very commonplace today. It was a little less so, but 25 years ago. You were writing about going viral before we had that term. Yeah, that's right. I was trying to kind of... But before the internet, well, before social media, the internet was there, but it wasn't easily shareable. Social media changed that a few years after it came out. Your book came out. Yeah, so now you're revisiting the idea. You decided to write a whole new book. And in part, it was shaped, if I understand correctly, by how much you've changed and the world has changed. Do you want to talk about the different angle and any similarities between revenge at the tipping point and the original tipping point? Yeah, so in the intervening 25 years, as we've said, it has become a common place to understand the movement of ideas and behaviors as following the patterns of epidemics. And so what I wanted to do is to say, okay, well, what are the consequences of this? And so this book is an exploration of the ways in which people are using the principles of epidemics to further their own ends. Some positive, some negative, some overt, some surreptitious. I'm very interested now in social engineering in the kind of manipulation of the rules of epidemics for one purpose or another. And I'm very interested in the kind of difficult questions that arise when you take epidemics seriously. So a lot of the book is, like, for example, there's a chapter on COVID on a story of the one of the biggest super spreading events of COVID. And the point of the chapter on COVID is that there is one thing about COVID that we fail to properly grasp during that pandemic. And that is that the overwhelming majority of people who are positive with COVID pose no real threat to anyone else. But the virus was being spread by a very, very, very, very small number of people who were emitting orders of magnitude more viral particles when they breathed and sneezed and caught on everybody else. In other words, if a thousand people have COVID to maybe five people who are actually spreading it to others, everyone else is really just begin to COVID stops. They get it and doesn't go anywhere. Once you understand that, you understand that, oh, wait a minute, the way we were fighting it A is all wrong, or at least not going to be very effective. So those thousand people, only five of them need to stay home. The other 995 can quite safely move to the world and not really be any major risk to others. But then there's an ominous thing, which is, okay, if we knew who those five people were, we could predict who they would be. What do you do with them? What do you do with that? Right. What do you do with that? Right. That's a hard question. I don't have a good answer to it. My point is the next time we have a pandemic, that's the question we're going to be asking. And someone's going to come to you, carry and say, carry. We just figured out like these kinds of first of all, this thing is not randomly distributed. The idea is that there are certain people who, as a feature of their physiology, just emit more virus particles than everybody else. So if they will come to you and say, carry, when you have a cold, everyone gets a cold. When you have the flu, everyone in your life gets the flu. And when you have COVID, everyone in your life is going to get COVID. You are a super spreader. We are now facing an outbreak of this new deadly respiratory virus. I'm sorry, you can't leave your house for the next six months. Now, that's, what do we do with that? Oh, you can't, you know, you can't, you want to go to a restaurant? No, you can't. Sorry. No, you want to fly on an airplane. No, they're not going to let you on an airplane and no one's going to sit next to you if they do. Your family is going to say, well, what is this virus? Is deadly? Are they all going to leave you? I mean, I mean, it's just like the whole, wow, this gets really, really difficult, really, really quickly. And moreover, moreover, like, no, I mean, I don't even need to do them moreover, that chapter is just about, let's start having a conversation now about what happens the next time we have one of these, because I don't know the answer to these questions. These are hard questions. And we've been telling ourselves a fairy tale about the transmission of respiratory viruses, because it's easier, it's easier to say we're all at risk of passing on our virus to somebody else. And it's, it may be easier, but it's not true, right? Wow. So I do, repeatedly through the book, I try and there's these occasions where I just say, look, it's the only, the only way to do this properly is to have a conversation now. And, and if we don't, then other people will, you know, go behind our backs and start using these principles of epidemics for some kind of nefarious end. That, that's not better than us having an honest conversation now. Well, I'm back to the earlier idea of super spreaders, right? If that's true in viruses, it's also true in ideas that you don't need a thousand people to share your idea. But if five of the right people share this idea from good or for bad, it can become the dominant thought in a heartbeat. That's sort of the idea behind it, right? Yes. So I had raised this in my first book, the tipping point. I talked about connectors and salesman and mavens as versions of this. People who carried much more of the burden of any kind of social epidemic. But now I think of this as the difference is the second time around is that I think the, the influence of these few, I called it the law of the few in my first book. Now I call it the law of the very, very few. I think it's, it's way more concentrated in a small number of people than I previously had imagined. It's, we're talking about five out of a thousand, not 15 out of a hundred. And once you, so it's like, it's even more like I have a chapter on the opioid crisis without giving too much away. The point of that chapter ultimately is that what OxyContin, the makers of OxyContin realized was that they didn't need to convince the majority of doctors to prescribe their drug, OxyContin, in order for them to have a home run. It didn't even need to convince a small majority or even a minority. They needed to convince a couple of hundred doctors throughout the entire, the United States to start the most devastating overdose epidemic in the history of the world. Right? Like, that's weird. Like, yeah, that's, that's what the charts that you include in the book certainly suggest. It was, it's, it's hard carry because our first impulse, when we looked at this overdose epidemic, which was started by doctors prescribing painkillers inappropriately, was to say there's something wrong with the medical profession, right? No, there's nothing wrong with the medical profession. 99.9% of doctors behaved, not just ethically. Perfectly. They did what they were supposed to do. They said, this is dangerous. I'm not going to, and then 0.01% didn't. And that was enough to spark up epidemic that now claims more than 100,000 lives a year in the United States. Like, that's scary. That's a really, really complicated, scary, difficult idea. And it was the apple again, not doing a spoiler alert here because that's where the book goes. But there was, you know, you allege the work of a pharmaceutical company and also a consulting company that said, yes, but if you do it this way, you will have even more market share of the opioid market. And they did, and they made gajillions of dollars off of it. And it was using that law of the very, very few to engineer something for their own personal gain at great social cost and the cost of over 100,000 human lives. Yeah. Wow. Well, hundreds of thousand, 100,000 human lives a year, hundreds of thousands of, yeah, no, it's a kind of, but we sort of known, you know, to bring it back to your world, you know, the story of the beginnings of Christianity, it's a story about a handful of people, right? Super spreaders, the apostles. It's like, it's the apostles and it's Jesus. It's not like, like, who are spreading the word in an extraordinarily large geographic area? No, I know that they would recruit others, but the core story, it's not this kind of mass movement of, you know, 200,000 people sign up at a massive, you know, outdoor concert in, in, you know, Solanica, whatever. No, it's like, it's like, it's a very small group of people around one incredibly charismatic man. And that's sufficient to set in motion, an epidemic that has lasted 2000 years. Like, that's the, you know, as is always the case, the, the earth story is right there has been right there in front of us for forever and ever. So that gives those of us in positions and, you know, just a leadership podcast. They have leaders, whether they run a company, whether they lead a church, whether they preach every weekend, they do public speaking or their social media influencers or whatever, you know, we have disproportionate influence each to his or her own. I would love to know, what are the ethical concerns when you have the power to change opinion? Like, what questions should we be asking as people who perhaps, you know, you've got some super spreaders listening right now? What do we need to think about? I mean, I think it, I think it has to do with leaders with that kind of moral authority need to have clear limits on, I don't mean this in a, in a kind of institutional, you know, there's a version of that that's kind of almost sort of punitive, you know, we you can't do this, you can't do this, you can't do this. I just think internally, someone who understands that they have that kind of authority needs to be very clear about the ends to which they're going to use it, right? They need to be able to say, this is, I am trying to do this one specific thing, because I think what happens, the danger comes when people start to drift away from their original purpose, when it becomes a cult of personality, when it becomes, you know, when they kind of lose sight of whatever mission motivated them in the beginning, it's, that's the kind of, it's the drift, that's the problem. I don't think there's any, we're, we're never going to get away from nor do we want to get away from a world where a small number of very charismatic people carry a kind of disproportionate load in leading us and spreading the word. That's what's beautiful. It's always been us. Always been us. We're not, we're not getting rid of it. We're not, yeah, we're not, we're not getting rid of it. It's about, um, it's about sort of understanding what that's for. Um, you know, I, I, this, I have a friend, good friend who's a, um, and then I passed her to the Ontario and made me listen to this podcast to your other, Jim. What, a long time, I was told, I've told this story to my people many times, but years and years ago, we were at dinner and a friend of mine who, Jim did not know, had come to dinner and Jim was listening to him and Jim, after the dinner came out to me and said, Jim, your friend is in a great deal of distress. And I, I almost wanted to kind of pull him aside and talk to him about what's going on in his life. And I was like, what are you talking about? I mean, I thought we were talking about everything he seemed really good mood, no idea what Jim was talking about. Within a couple of months, my friend, one of his kids committed suicide and his marriage broke up. And I just thought, Jim's got a gift, incredibly powerful gift for understanding what, what people are going through. And, you know, that's a gift, not trivial. You could, you could imagine all kinds of scenarios where that could be used. If Jim wanted to be a con man, he wanted, if he wanted to start a Ponzi scheme, if he wanted to give you any number of things he could do, thankfully, he's a men and administer, like, not on his radar. But my point is like, he knows exactly what he wants to, I think he knows he has that gift. He knows exactly what he wants to use it for, right? And he, it would never occur to him, but there are lots of other people who, when they realize they're in a possession of that kind of gift, they don't place those kinds of restraints on themselves. That's where we get into trouble. Well, and that leads me to, we teased it out earlier, but South Florida, Miami, right? So you paint the profile of this business person who appeared to be living a fairly ethical life, moves to South Florida at an interesting time, and suddenly finds himself the king of graft and corruption and greed and all of these things. And those, those stories always, well, they really, they really terrify me, they grip me. It's like, oh, look inside, you know, physician healed, I self, be careful. It's almost like a culture, right? That can sweep you away when the incentives are good enough. Can you tell some of that story and what you learned when you studied that case study? Yeah. Well, I got very interested in this idea called Small Area Variation, which is this idea that there are enormous differences in the way not people behave from one community to the next, but in the way communities behave. Right. That you can, the simplest way to look at this, look at how medicine is practiced. People think medicine is practiced the same way all across North America. False. If you live in Buffalo, I use the example Buffalo and Boulder. The kind of, the kind of cardiology care you get in Boulder looks nothing like the kind of cardiology you get in Buffalo. It's not that one is better than the other. They're just wildly different. And there's also, I was, it got buried into this because it struck me that epidemics, these are epidemics are contagious behaviors that, that in fact, a community of practitioners of some, but they're local. The contagion stops at the border of the community, right? That's what interests me. So I got really interested in South Florida because South Florida turns out to be the Medicare fraud capital of America. No one else is even close. If there's a scam or something going on, it's happening in Miami. And the, and the question is, why? And so I tell the story of a guy who's a nursing home operator in Chicago who moved to Miami. And Miami got ahold of him. And in this way, that was like so kind of both like weird and sort of a little bit hilarious. And it just like, and it was, it's all about the corrupt, the way that a place an environment can corrupt, can corrupt you. And it made me, I've always been a little bit of an environmentalist in the sense of that I think environments have much more of our immediate context was much more of an influence on who we are now we behave than. But this really cemented for me. I just had no, I would never have, that chapter is the kind of most aggressive version of the contextual case for behavior that I've ever made. It does really does seem to key the case that when people in certain professions move to Miami or South Florida, their behavior changes and not for the better, that there's just local norms that are different. And that if you never thought about doing fraud before you got to Miami, it'll come up once you move there. And what's funny as well is that I didn't really get into it in the chapter, but Miami is the fraud leader in like an insane number of different disciplines. It's a deeply, weirdly, hilariously corrupt place. And that's what I was trying to get at this idea that we have this kind of notion that a contagion is something that's out of control that just kind of spreads and you can't stop it. And it turns out to be absolutely false. Contagions belong to certain ecosystems, certain communities, certain, they have boundaries and they respect the boundaries. And maybe, by the way, more than ever convinced it, the notion of a change is as good as a rest. You got some kid who's struggling and you're a parent. The value of all parents kind of know this, I guess the value of moving your kid to a new environment cannot be understated. It really, really, really, really, really makes a difference if you can choose the right new place. And this was kind of proof of that principle. Well, and what was interesting to me is that principle and also the thing about Poplar Grove, where high-achieving families, high-achieving families eventually drove their kids to despair. That talked to me about the importance of culture and leader-set culture. If I'm in a culture of a geographic or denominational or cultural setting where everybody cheats and everybody lies and everybody inflates whatever. So, for example, I worked at a law firm. If everybody just inflates the hours that they actually worked on a case to pad billing, it becomes easier to do that than if you're in a firm where it's like, "Well, are you sure you worked?" "Oh, you're right, I miscalculated. Okay, let me estimate that down." The integrity we have as leaders really dribbles down, like drifts down to everybody else in the organization. I'd love for you to talk about the importance. Is it inevitable that if you move to Miami, we do have Miami listeners, so I'm excited. I'll share the mailbag with you, Malcolm, when they hear this episode. Not everybody in Miami is corrupt, but what you're arguing is the likelihood of you, if you have that in you, the likelihood of that being encouraged or fostered where all the fraud is higher in that area than, say, Iowa or even Connecticut. I'm just curious how that works. Well, it's not just there is unconscious contagion. I go to a place and something that I used to think of as a gray area or a no-go area is suddenly being defined differently. People are kind of shrugging it off, and that becomes hard to resist after a while. Then there's the deliberate version, which is, if you're like this guy who's profiling, who's in nursing home business, if your competitor is running a nursing home and they're cheating, and it's a difficult business to begin with, it comes really, really hard for you to stay in the straight and narrow. You might go out of business, right? Yeah. There's a kind of existential choice that people have to make, which is, do I fight this and potentially put my livelihood at risk? Or do I just say, I don't have any choice? That's the way business is done here. For years and years and years in New York, everybody who had garbage, every commercial, the waste removal business was dominated by the mafia through the 1980s or '90s even. And otherwise, upstanding people paid surcharge to mafia waste companies to state the garbage away because they didn't have a choice. Was that or nobody would take your garbage or somebody would disrupt your business in some way? These are honest people who are being forced by their environment into that for competitive reasons. So there's a little bit of both going on. There is that kind of culture setting I get swept up in something and then there's a kind of rational version of where people say, I don't have any choice. Both are deeply problematic and both can only be fixed by some kind of, that's what leaders are there to do, is to fix those kinds of problems and to set a new tone and say, this is the appropriate standard of behavior here. And that is something that I don't think we can take for granted. And if you lose that, something kind of leeches out of the culture of your organization. Yeah, that's sort of one of those. As for me and my house, this is what we're going to do, right? Or as Jesus would say, among you, it'll be different. And I think that's a really good reminder for those of us who have influenced our leadership. I'm curious because you say it's a darker world now than it was in 2000 and I have a working memory of 2000 and I would agree with that. That's come up numerous times on the podcast over the years. I wonder what writing revenge, like revenge at the tipping point, did for your sense of optimism or cynicism. I mean, I find myself at my age and my stage, I want to be an optimist, but some days it's a fight. This is a decision I'm making, not an emotion I'm feeling. What happened to you is you kind of looked at the shadow side of the tipping point that sometimes it isn't always used for good. How's that internal battle going on inside you these days, Malcolm? Well, I'm sort of a congenital optimist. So it's hard to dislodge my optimism. And I feel like identifying malevolent actors and detailing their strategies and alerting us to the way in which we are being cheated or is a form of optimism. I mean, it's like, you know, what the games that, you know, Purdue Pharmaceutical, we're playing around OxyContin that caused this, here they are. There's a pattern here. Here's the strategy of the strategy. Here's what it tells us. Here's how we can defend it next time. It's not this black box that we're... There's no reason in other words to be passive. I think what the book is really addressing is the tendency to want to curl up into a little ball and say there's something I can do. And I think there's always something you can do. And so each one of these chapters is an invitation to, I think, a more kind of positive response to the world, a kind of proactive response to the world. You know, there's that long chapter on kind of the fun chapter on why does Harvard level women's rugby team is, you know, it's like, it tells you something. It's like, here's what they're doing. Here's why they're doing it. Draw your own conclusions. Maybe your conclusion should be, I'm going to stop venerating Harvard University in the way I did before. And that will be a very useful thing to come out of it. It's not a sinus. I'm not being cynical. I'm just saying, I'm not being despairing. I'm not being... I'm just saying, looks what they're doing, right? To bring a game here. Like, just be aware of the game and adjust your expectations accordingly. What is one thing you wish somebody would ask you about that nobody ever asks you about? You get a lot of questions fired your way. I get a lot of questions fired my way. Well, which of the ideas that I hold are bad ideas? Okay, that's a great one. Which of the ideas you hold are bad ideas, Malcolm? I have a long-standing aversion to air conditioning. I believe the world will be better off with no air conditioning, which I recognize is a bad idea, but I will hold to it nonetheless. My sweltering during this podcast is just... Sadly, in an air conditioning place, I would rather I would not. That's a trivial example. I think I am a running snob. That's a bad thing. I have a belief that if someone is a good athlete, that makes them a better person. What's wrong? It's wrong. It's a bad idea. I just can't help. I can't shake. It's a weird thing. If you're too heavily in the sports as I am, there's a point where you cross over and you come to think of physical talent as a form of virtue. It is an incredibly pernicious idea. It leads you astray in all kinds of subtle ways you don't understand. I recognize that in myself, but I can't really stop it. I just think, oh, so-and-so ran a two-hour and six-minute marathon. They must be really smart and interesting. I literally think that. The more fit you are, particularly in running, the more virtuous you are as a human being. I have joked that if I ran a highly selective elite university, I would only let in people who could run under a certain five-thirty mile. I would just say, I think it would be a better school if everyone could run. Point of fact, that is completely not really false, but I do actually believe that. Isn't that interesting? Any other ideas? You're revisiting the tipping point. I heard you, oh, what was it? When you did the monk debate in Toronto a few years ago, it didn't go particularly well. It was not my best. Wasn't Douglas Murray, you were a hobby expert. Somebody warned me about him. I should have listened anyway, yes, very badly. Yes, but what you did was you did a podcast series on how you blew the debate and what you might do differently. Didn't you put yourself through a debating or a public speaking course or something like that? I did. I went and got schooled on how to be a better debater. Are there any big ideas? That's a do-over moment you wish you had back. Are there any big ideas you've written about or publicly shared over the years that you're like, oh, I think I was wrong on that? Yeah, although you know, it's funny. The debate, I wouldn't have said I regretted screwing up in the monk debate. I'm actually glad I screwed up because it's had I not screwed up. Suppose I had just done a standard debate. Suppose we had won. I would have taken away nothing from the experience. It would not have been an opportunity to be. By the way, if I'd spent two more hours preparing, I could have done fine. I just didn't think about it properly. So if I'd done that, I wouldn't have done any soul searching. I wouldn't have gone and had someone teach me about debating. I wouldn't be a better debater. I mean, nothing would have happened. It was only because I screwed up that I took steps to improve my performance. So I'm actually grateful in the grand scheme of things. I'm grateful I screwed up. But you learn more from your mistakes, and once you recognize you learn more from your mistakes and you do from your successes, you realize actually, it's probably really, really useful to screw up with me now and again. Now, if you're going to screw up, screw up big. So you're forced to- Yeah. Well, you did. Publicly too, right? But then you took your learning and your lessons public too, which I really admire. I think that was brilliant. That was- I do think- if you look at the- if you read all of my books, I've been having an argument with myself about crime for the last 25 years about. Every time I think about crime, I think about it. I reexamine what I believe and I come up with a new- I can't- it's a subject. It's so- I'm sort of obsessed with crime and how to stop it and its consequences. And I'm continually impressed by how easy it is to jump to conclusions, how often I have been wrong in the prescriptions I've given and how the only honest position is- it's a mistake to be certain about the subject that it's- there are so many different and deep roots to why people would behave and why people would commit crimes, that you can't just have a simple prescription. The only other thing can be said with certainty is that we don't do a very good job of dealing with it. That's all I can say with certainty. But I have been- at various times in my life, I would not have been that. I would have said, "Oh no, no, here's the way to do it." "Oh yeah, this is the story." And I, you know, the process of the last 25 years of this debate I've been having with myself has been a steady retreat from certainty. That's, I think, you know, even I go home to Ontario and- in case you know what, Lou, the- on the police cars, it says on the slogan on the back is people helping people. Oh wow, which I love. But then I say to myself, I love that, I love that sentiment. But also, it is an awful lot easier to be a police officer in Kitchener Waterloo than it is in the American South. Think about the historical legacy you're dealing with. Think about the public institutions, think about the quality of the schools, think about the mix of, you know, Waterloo is a place filled with like people who came from all over the world to make their lives better. They're not like shooting each other in drunken rages. Like, it's just a different world. So do I know whether I look at people- helping people I think will look- there's something beautiful here about the way policing is conceptualized. But even if that's true, that doesn't answer the question of why there's so many- so much lower crime rate in Kitchener Waterloo than there is in Birmingham, Alabama, right? So I'm just like everything- every time you examine the issue, I think you come away humbled and saying I don't- it's just a tiny piece of this incredibly complex mosaic, you know. The dominant culture in Kitchener Waterloo is Mennonite's preaching pacifism. You don't think that has an effect on the crime racing? Yeah, right? Like, you know, if we could magically move every Mennonite from the KW area to various places around the world, don't you think that would lower the crime rate? Yes! You have a third-grade teacher whose name is like, you know, Brenda Bauman? You don't think Brenda Bauman gives you a different view of the world than someone who comes from a culture that never even thought about nonviolence? Like that's like- so like, I don't know what to do with my point. Like, the more you learn, the more you just think it's complicated and people who tell you they know what the solution is, are probably wrong. Well, what you've done so beautifully, Malcolm, is you've set yourself up by holding your ideas loosely and being willing to go, "Oh, you know what? I'm not so sure what I said 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago is maybe the right take on it, and here's another take." Or, you know, you're holding it loosely. I think the trap that's so easy for us to fall into, for those of us who ever have a microphone in front of us or, you know, are preaching on a weekend or holding a position of leadership is that we feel shackled to our ideas. In other words, I said this five years ago, or I said this 10 years ago, "I'm not sure I believe it anymore, but I said it 10 years ago, and I don't want to be publicly wrong or contradict myself, so I'm just going to hold to it." And that, of course, just becomes less and less tenable as time goes on and it creates a great dissonance in us. I'm curious, are you naturally wired that way or is that something you had to develop or intentionally commit to? To say, I'm going to hold some of my big ideas which have sold millions of copies loosely. Yeah. Well, I think if I had to be totally honest, I would say that I believe it's way more fun to hold right. I also believe it's highly, it's the right thing to do, it's functional, it's ethically correct, it has all kinds of broader, but fundamentally, for me, the motivation was that it's boring to make up your mind and stick to it forever. On issues that are ever-changing. It just struck me as like, I actually delight in learning something that upends my worldview because it's like everything's fresh again. It's like a kid's at, why do kids love Etches Sketch? Remember Etches Sketch? They love it because you shake it and you give a brand new screen again. I watch my daughter with Etches Sketch. The fun part is the most fun thing is not the drawing on the Etches Sketch, the most fun thing is getting rid of the drawing on the Etches Sketch. You draw so you get rid of it. That's what's driving. That's the motivation there. That's messing up and start over. They look of glee on her face when she's like, "That's the thing that I agree with. I'm with her on that. Let's shake it." Maybe you draw the exact same thing. Maybe you decide the second time around. The thing I did is a thing I want to redo. Fine. But you're going to shake it up. That's a very useful moment, fun moment. The freedom in that, when you really think about it, for the next couple of decades, is fascinating. Really, when you think about your next 20 years and what you're going to contribute or I think about my next 20 years, we have our values, we have our beliefs, we have the things that we hold dearly. But the ability to say, "I don't take myself too seriously. I could be wrong. Why don't I learn something here? Why don't I go on an unstructured inductive journey and see where it leads me?" Maybe I don't take a map and let's see what we discover. I really, really appreciate that framing. If there was one thing, last question, Malcolm, that you wish the church would be doing differently right now in this moment, what do you wish we would be doing differently right now? I mean, I don't know if I have an answer that is different from what people within the church have been saying, but I think that meeting people where they are. I mean, it's a very kind of vague thing, but the church used to be at the center of the culture. It's not anymore. And I can't keep pretending that it is. And I don't think that means changing what it's saying. I think it means changing where it is. That increasingly, I come to think of the notion of a big fancy church with huge carrying costs that uses it once a week as an anachronistic notion that was worked fine in the 18th century and the 19th century. Is that really what we want to be in the 21st? It's that kind of thing, because I don't think the relevance of the message is more relevant than ever. It's just that if the delivery is a little bit, seems to me, hasn't kept pace with the way that the culture has moved. That would be my... I don't think that's an original statement. No, but that's helpful. And there are young leaders listening who are ready to go off the map and wonder where it takes them and take the message in fresh directions. I did a podcast episode last year on this guy who's the president of Hope College, religious college in Michigan, and who took over. And the first question he asked was, what would our college look like if we took Jesus' teaching seriously? And his answer was, he wants to make college free to find a way to decouple economic necessity from an education. And he's embarked on this big massive campaign in Peru. But that's an example of what I'm talking about. He was like, "Your college should represent what you believe to be the most important thing in Christian teaching." It shouldn't. It's not a Sunday thing. It's a school year thing. And they should have an engagement with the people who graduate from this school for the rest of their lives based around that notion. So that's what I mean by someone who's moved to teaching to where the culture is. It's like, I don't know whether he'll succeed or not, but I mean, he's got any Matthew Skogan at Hope College. I just have enormous... You should have him on your podcast. Okay. I'll have to look at that episode. It's called... It's about Hope College, S-C-O-G-I-N. And he's just brilliant. I love him. Oh, cool. Well, that's new to me. Matthew, I can't thank you enough. This has been great. I loved Revenge of the Tipping Point. I am very, very excited to see that get out into the wild. It's available everywhere by the time this airs. And if people want to follow you online these days, we're just a really good place to connect. Well, I guess Twitter, although I barely tweet. Not much. I've seen a podcast. My podcast, Revisionist History, is the best place to keep in touch with me. Yes. Absolutely. Malcolm, I can't thank you enough. Thank you so much. Thank you, Carrie. Well, that was interesting, wasn't it? It really made me think about the power of storytelling and the next book I write. We're really going to pay attention to that. Hey, today's episode is brought to you by the Art of Leadership Academy. If you want help when you feel stuck overwhelmed or you're not sure what to do and you want to ace community to help you do that, by the way, I'm there too. You can get access 24/7 to the Art of Leadership Academy by going to the artofleadershipacademy.com. When you sign up, you'll get instant access to training programs and the community. And compassion has been tirelessly connecting the local church with churches around the world for over 70 years to help lift kids out of poverty. If you want to get involved in that mission, I'm involved. Go to compassion.com/carry. I'll tell you, it'll change a lot of lives, including your own. Well, if you enjoyed this episode, we've got show notes for you. You can find those at karrynewhoff.com/episodes682. We also have transcripts and a whole lot more. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review. And if you would be so kind, share it with a friend. We love getting the word out. When you do that, this podcast grows and we get you incredible guests like Malcolm Gladwell. Speaking of great guests, Nona Jones is on the podcast next time. We get really personal and we talk about the impact childhood trauma and abuse can have on leaders, top lessons from Facebook and Meta, and a whole lot more. Also coming up, Seth Godin, Lee Domain, Henry Cloud, Pete Scazero, Tim Ross, Al Gordon, Will Gadera, and a whole lot more. And I've got something for you. My weekly newsletter on the rise is something that I offer every single Friday. Well, over 100,000 leaders subscribe to it. And I include some really curious things in it. Often there's a article related to church, but sometimes I'll take you to the best sandwiches in every state or a link to a video I'm watching or a quote I'm pondering. Basically, you can think of it. Not only is it the best of the web for you every week, but it's pretty good sermon research too. If you're looking for anecdote, stories, and different perspectives, that's what we offer on the rise. It's a curious mix. You can subscribe for free at ontherisenewsletter.com. Just go to ontherisenewsletter.com and you can subscribe for free. Thanks so much for listening everybody. I hope you really enjoyed this episode. I did and hope it helped you identify and break a growth barrier you're facing.
