Speaker 1: The Quest Loft Show is a production of iHeartRadio. Good people,
Speaker 1: What's up? How you doing? Today's episode is actually the
Speaker 1: very first episode taped as the Quest Love Show. It
Speaker 1: was with author podcast hosts and my pal Malcolm glad Well.
Speaker 1: We did this live on stage at the iHeart Cafe
Speaker 1: in can France back in June, and you'll hear me
Speaker 1: explore with this format, asking some random questions to get
Speaker 1: to know people in new ones. Malcolm seemed to have
Speaker 1: fun with it, and along the way we discussed his
Speaker 1: latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. So please enjoy
Speaker 1: this episode and let's go back live to the iHeart Cafe.
Speaker 2: All right, all right, who's excited to hear a great
Speaker 2: podcast tonight? About five years ago we hear it. I
Speaker 2: Heart had the chance to begin working with one of
Speaker 2: the great podcasts out there. By the way, I'm Will Pearson,
Speaker 2: President of iHeart Podcast. We are so happy to have
Speaker 2: Well was that what that was about? Just was great, guys.
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna sit down and chat for a bit.
Speaker 2: Thank you now. But I'm pleased to introduce one of
Speaker 2: our favorite podcasters, a true cultural powerhouse. Of course, he's
Speaker 2: a founding member of the legendary roots. Let's give it
Speaker 2: up for the roots. He's a best selling author. He's
Speaker 2: gonna do the wander up here. He's never patient. He's
Speaker 2: not a patient man. He's a historian, he's a creative
Speaker 2: visionary and as of three years ago, an Academy Award winner.
Speaker 2: Let's give it up for the Academy Award winner for
Speaker 2: Summer of Soul, about the nineteen sixty nine Harlem Cultural Festival.
Speaker 2: If you haven't checked out this year's documentary that he
Speaker 2: did about the brilliant sly Stone. Unfortunately we lost him
Speaker 2: just last week.
Speaker 1: It is a.
Speaker 2: Brilliant documentary as well. He's of course an incredible DJ.
Speaker 2: I don't know if anybody got to hear Him's not
Speaker 2: up at Hotel do Cap an incredible setup there, but
Speaker 2: we here love to celebrate his genre hopping podcast, where
Speaker 2: he gets the chance to chat with people such as
Speaker 2: Michelle Obama, Chris Rock, Shaka Khan. The list goes on
Speaker 2: and on and on. He's the ultimate multi hyphen it
Speaker 2: and he is interviewing someone also incredibly interesting. Please join
Speaker 2: me in welcoming the one and only Questlove.
Speaker 1: How's everyone out there? All right? I was handing to
Speaker 1: this le boo boo like five minutes ago. So I
Speaker 1: know most of you don't know who this is, neither
Speaker 1: do I, but I just learned what a lobuobu was. Well.
Speaker 1: First of all, welcome to can Lyon. Thank you for coming.
Speaker 1: Shout out to my iHeart family for organizing and putting
Speaker 1: this together. Shout out to the two one five family
Speaker 1: as well. So basically this platform is primarily known as
Speaker 1: where I dissect music or musicians. Occasionally an actor, director
Speaker 1: and author comes on the show, occasional politician. But we're
Speaker 1: going to do something different today pretty much. I'll say
Speaker 1: that our guests thinks different and probably specifically to me,
Speaker 1: but for a lot of us. He taught me how
Speaker 1: to think different and didn't think about the power of
Speaker 1: critical thinking probably until the beginning of the aughts in
Speaker 1: the early two thousands and whatnot. And I know he
Speaker 1: hates all this attention, but no, he's really changed my
Speaker 1: life as far as me understanding my personality for wanting
Speaker 1: to practice or knowing the science of what's behind things
Speaker 1: and whatnot. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Malcolm Gladwell to
Speaker 1: quest Love Support. How you doing, man, I'm good, Okay,
Speaker 1: delighted to be here. Well, let me start off asking
Speaker 1: because you know, when I first met to you twenty
Speaker 1: years ago, like both of us were arriving at a
Speaker 1: new place where you know, we kind of reached our
Speaker 1: prominence at the same time. Now that it's twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five years later, I'll just ask you just off the cuff, like,
Speaker 1: does it ever get exhausting when people are always running
Speaker 1: to you for answers or how to explain things?
Speaker 3: Well, it'd be worse if they didn't do that, right,
Speaker 3: So you always have to think about the flip side
Speaker 3: of it. If you produce stuff and no one it
Speaker 3: never caused a ripple, that would be worse. Okay, So
Speaker 3: this is a problem I'm happy to have.
Speaker 1: Okay, I can accept that. Normally I start with a
Speaker 1: music related question, but I know that's not your forte,
Speaker 1: But I'm going to ask you anyway.
Speaker 3: It's unfair to say it's not my forte. I don't
Speaker 3: know next to you, I don't.
Speaker 1: Know what about it. Okay, Well, I mean you told me before.
Speaker 4: That, Well, I was worried you were going to start.
Speaker 1: You know, That's why I'm asking this question, all right,
Speaker 1: What was your first musical memory in life.
Speaker 3: Oh, I know exactly what it was. We had just moved.
Speaker 3: It was nineteen sixty nine. We just moved to Canada
Speaker 3: from England. We did not have a television, but my
Speaker 3: parents decided to buy a record player.
Speaker 4: But we had no records, and so I went.
Speaker 3: With my mother to the public library and we checked
Speaker 3: out two records Peter PAULA. Mery Greatest Hits, which I
Speaker 3: listened to once.
Speaker 4: It was like EH and.
Speaker 3: Bridge over Troubled Water, which Simon and Garrom Simon and Garfunkle.
Speaker 1: I know, the a Wreatha Franklin version, so.
Speaker 3: Which you know, if you think about sort of serendipitous
Speaker 3: moments in your life, if that was really the the
Speaker 3: first album I ever listened to, really the first mut
Speaker 3: We didn't listen to the radio except for like news radio,
Speaker 3: and we didn't have a TV. I had no exposure,
Speaker 3: your zero to popular music. And the first popular music
Speaker 3: I was ever exposed to in a concentrated way was
Speaker 3: one of the greatest albums of all.
Speaker 4: Time, which is pretty over Trouble.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: That's like if the first novel you read was War
Speaker 3: in Peace, or the first scientist you met was like
Speaker 3: Einstein or you know what I mean, it's like incredibly
Speaker 3: lucky and that I was. To this day, I remember
Speaker 3: exactly what it was like to listen to all those songs.
Speaker 1: Well, I was going to ask you, what was it
Speaker 1: about that record that spoke to you at the time, it.
Speaker 4: Was It's funny because I didn't.
Speaker 3: Later forty years later did an audiobook with Paul Simon,
Speaker 3: who I interviewed him for like forty hours, and which
Speaker 3: was this great sort of full circle. But I think
Speaker 3: it was I hadn't realized how much joy there could
Speaker 3: be in pop music. Remember, I had no exposure to it,
Speaker 3: and if you have no exposure, you have no emotional
Speaker 3: context for it. So I didn't know what pop music
Speaker 3: was supposed to be. Was it supposed to be? All
Speaker 3: I knew was church music. I knew music that was
Speaker 3: supposed to be kind of ceremonial and formal and kind
Speaker 3: of waited with moral meaning. I didn't know joy in music.
Speaker 3: I knew Nursey rhymes, but they were silly, they weren't joyful.
Speaker 3: That album is you know Cecilia and that drum solo
Speaker 3: and on and on, and then the kind of in
Speaker 3: the middle of it they dropped the bomb of Bridge
Speaker 3: over Troubled Water, which is like a full on gospel
Speaker 3: song sung by two Jewish guys from Queens, and like,
Speaker 3: even then is genius. You discover the genius of a backtrack.
Speaker 3: I grew up in a household that was a cultural contradiction,
Speaker 3: a black mother and a white mother and a white father,
Speaker 3: and I was aware of the fact that was a
Speaker 3: discordant idea in the culture. I didn't know anyone else
Speaker 3: who had that combination. And then I come across this
Speaker 3: record which has a similar discordant thing. I know, I
Speaker 3: know what gospel music was, and this was a gospel
Speaker 3: song sung by two Jewish guys and queens.
Speaker 4: Like that's in if.
Speaker 3: You're seven six, that's really interesting and you're kind of
Speaker 3: a student of this.
Speaker 1: So even at the age of six, you had the
Speaker 1: wherewithal the bandwidth to sort of differentiate emotion or well.
Speaker 4: Remember I was well churched.
Speaker 3: So I've been growing up in the evangelical churches of Jamaica,
Speaker 3: the you know, the formal churches of England.
Speaker 4: The so I knew if you if you're.
Speaker 3: Well churched, you you quickly become acquainted with a whole
Speaker 3: range of kind of cultural forms.
Speaker 1: Was the air quotes secular music not allowed in the
Speaker 1: household or did they frown upon it or not.
Speaker 3: It's not that we was frowned upon, it was we
Speaker 3: never got around to it.
Speaker 1: You just never knew existed.
Speaker 4: My mother, the first.
Speaker 3: Movie she ever watched in its entirety was the movie
Speaker 3: remember the Melanie Griffith movie Working Girl. Yeah, my mom
Speaker 3: watched that with the sound off.
Speaker 1: Because she did that was like late eighties.
Speaker 3: My mother was born in nineteen thirty two. The first
Speaker 3: movie she saw, It's full was on a plane and
Speaker 3: she didn't realize she could buy the sound so she
Speaker 3: just watched it, right, And her comment was, so we
Speaker 3: didn't have a TV, so she was really encountering a
Speaker 3: movie that form for the first time.
Speaker 4: She was completely blown away by it. And I remember
Speaker 4: as a kid thinking that is deeply hilarious that.
Speaker 3: She thought, this is this is magical without the sound
Speaker 3: mind you right, this is magical. Welcome that was an
Speaker 3: extraordinary film. It is the is the comment that she goes.
Speaker 3: But like, we didn't have a rule against it. We
Speaker 3: just we just didn't do TV and we didn't go
Speaker 3: to the movies, and we didn't buy records.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I have a theory that boredom is necessary.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, wait, I said I had a theory about
Speaker 1: You're the one that showed me that theory. I think
Speaker 1: your own theory.
Speaker 3: No, it's my mom's theory, because I would say to
Speaker 3: my mom repeatedly, I mean, I'm living in this what
Speaker 3: I consider to be a cultural desert in the middle
Speaker 3: of rural Canada. And I would say to my mom
Speaker 3: every day on bored and she would say, Malcolm, that's
Speaker 3: a good thing.
Speaker 4: Your mind needs a rest.
Speaker 1: I agree. Did you agree with her at the time.
Speaker 4: Or I do now. I was aware of.
Speaker 3: How I was forced to manufacture my own fund and
Speaker 3: I grew to really, really love there was a kind of,
Speaker 3: in a wonderful way, a pressure to make my own
Speaker 3: fun and I would the hijinks I did as a
Speaker 3: kid were so elaborate and so complex and so ironic
Speaker 3: in kind of many layers that it was the result
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 1: So no cousins or siblings on the other side of
Speaker 1: the town you never knew about, or.
Speaker 4: We're living in the middle of rural Ontario.
Speaker 3: In our neighbors are Old Order Mennonites who drive horses
Speaker 3: and buggies and don't have electricity, And like I said,
Speaker 3: we have no TV, and we don't.
Speaker 4: Go to the movies.
Speaker 3: We don't really ever go to restaurants. We go to
Speaker 3: Jamaica once a year at Christmas, and we read a
Speaker 3: lot of books.
Speaker 4: That's what's going on.
Speaker 1: So give me an example of how you would entertain
Speaker 1: yourself in your childhood.
Speaker 3: Well, my best friend was a guy named Terry Martin,
Speaker 3: who I was again, just as I was lucky to
Speaker 3: have encountered Bridge over Trouble Water as the first real record,
Speaker 3: my first really close friend was this guy Terry Martin,
Speaker 3: who was another Neither of his parents went to college.
Speaker 3: He grew up his dad was a chicken farmer, he
Speaker 3: grew up down the road. He's now, by the way,
Speaker 3: a tenured professor at Harvard. But that's the luck. He
Speaker 3: happened to be the guy I ran into in elementary school.
Speaker 3: And he's genius, okay, And he had a sense. He
Speaker 3: thought that all rules should be broken. And we convinced
Speaker 3: our moms that this was true because our moms knew
Speaker 3: each other, and so our moms basically let us do
Speaker 3: whatever we want, including not go to school and wait.
Speaker 1: You would tell them that you're cutting school.
Speaker 4: Oh, my mom was complicit. We had a thing.
Speaker 3: Terry and I decided that it was too easy. We
Speaker 3: were recompetitive. It was too easy to compete on who
Speaker 3: could get the best grades, because like, how hard was that?
Speaker 3: Because no one my school, like ten people went to
Speaker 3: college every year from high school. So we decided what
Speaker 3: we would do is we would create I never forgot
Speaker 3: what we called it. But the number we cared about
Speaker 3: was your average times a number of absences you had
Speaker 3: that year, and the winner was the one with the
Speaker 3: highest number. So we competed not only to get good grades,
Speaker 3: but to see how many days of school we could skip.
Speaker 3: It was fantastic. That's an example of the kind of
Speaker 3: shit that we were doing. And so you seem like
Speaker 3: it's no, but it's not. The genius was it's rebellion,
Speaker 3: but it's highly constrained, institutionalized rebellion, because the point was
Speaker 3: to excel at school while never going there. Right, that
Speaker 3: it was the contray that interests That's what interested it.
Speaker 1: I'm so smart that I was.
Speaker 3: We're not gonna we're not blowing off school. On the contrary, right,
Speaker 3: we're like, we intend to ace out while never showing up,
Speaker 3: and then I terry won that. But then I decided
Speaker 3: what I would do is skip a year of high
Speaker 3: school basically without telling anyone. So I just enrolled in
Speaker 3: one year ahead classes in my senior year and no
Speaker 3: one appeared to notice, which tells us about Canada in
Speaker 3: the seventies.
Speaker 1: And wait, Charlotmagne's face right now, like, I'm that, how
Speaker 1: is this scientifically possible to happen?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 3: No, So the key I thought about this a lot
Speaker 3: when I was a kid. I realized that the only
Speaker 3: subject matter where this was going to be hard was
Speaker 3: math because math was sequential, right, So if you were
Speaker 3: going to skip junior year math is what I was
Speaker 3: intending to do, then you might have a problem.
Speaker 4: But then what's my ace in the hole?
Speaker 3: My dad's a mathematician, so I just had him like
Speaker 3: whenever I had a problem, I was like, Okay, what
Speaker 3: am I missing here?
Speaker 4: And he'd say, oh, yeah, it's just this, this, this.
Speaker 3: I don't know why I'm going on about high school years,
Speaker 3: but they were such fun. I also realized you didn't
Speaker 3: have to graduate from high school once that in Canada
Speaker 3: at the time you did, they were loopholes which I
Speaker 3: was too boring to go into. But I had this
Speaker 3: insight at fifteen that I didn't have to get a
Speaker 3: diploma to go to college. And once I realized, I
Speaker 3: was like, well, all that's are off. That means why
Speaker 3: I don't have to show up for school. I don't
Speaker 3: have to take my junior year. It all kept skated.
Speaker 1: But did you generally just not like school?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: What about the whole social angle of it?
Speaker 4: All came later?
Speaker 1: Nevermind I didn't like it, So what would you consider
Speaker 1: your first foray into this cold world we have outside?
Speaker 1: Like if you're inside of an isolated bubble where yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you're allowed to cut school and without repercussions.
Speaker 3: Or yeah, you know, I think I'm still inside the bubble.
Speaker 3: I don't think i've ever I'm not. You have to
Speaker 3: to backtrack. I was raised to believe and it was
Speaker 3: a correct belief, and my greatest frustration with people in
Speaker 3: my positions they don't recognize it, which was I was
Speaker 3: a middle class male growing up in a developed country
Speaker 3: in the seventies who had came from a healthy, happy
Speaker 3: home life. The world was constructed for me. The whole
Speaker 3: architecture of western society was constructed so the people who
Speaker 3: were like me would succeed, Like you had to really
Speaker 3: work hard not to That was my I think that's
Speaker 3: the correct positions. Why I have such frustration with like
Speaker 3: people in my position who whine about their lives. It's like,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, Like the whole world was built for you.
Speaker 4: You have no business whinding about anything.
Speaker 3: Ever, there were no obstacles, like institutionally every obstacle. All
Speaker 3: around me were people who faced obstacles, but not me.
Speaker 1: By three, I had a fight or flight situation, you know,
Speaker 1: like growing up in my neighborhood where you instantly had
Speaker 1: radar of which route was safe to go to school,
Speaker 1: go home, Like growing up in crack Era West Philadelphia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you never had a fight or flight existence.
Speaker 3: My mom was like friends with the principal, and if
Speaker 3: I got in trouble, she would lecture in about like
Speaker 3: wait wait what oh yeah, she would call him up.
Speaker 4: Same was Roger Millican. She knew Roger. She'd call him
Speaker 4: up and say what are you doing?
Speaker 3: Like you have bigger problems than worrying about Malcolm, which
Speaker 3: I think was a correct position. Wow, she's now in
Speaker 3: a nursing home. But she's still like doing battle with
Speaker 3: the Nursing Home administration. Still, oh yeah, you can't like
Speaker 3: the West Indian Lady is an is an indefatigable and implacable.
Speaker 1: Force for you. What were your aspirations of did you
Speaker 1: know from the gate that you wanted to be like
Speaker 1: in the social structure?
Speaker 4: I didn't think about it.
Speaker 3: Never occurred to me to think about the future in
Speaker 3: that way, and I still don't in a I'm not
Speaker 3: someone who I'm not a plan and I'm not a
Speaker 3: I don't really think beyond next week.
Speaker 4: I assume or even tomorrow. I assume.
Speaker 3: I'm optimistic enough that I assume things will work out.
Speaker 1: So you've always lived in the present, Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3: I'm not someone who once the day is over, it
Speaker 3: is erased.
Speaker 1: From my living in this administration, Yeah, forced me to
Speaker 1: start living in the present like right now. Ever, since
Speaker 1: November seventh, my only goal in life is to have
Speaker 1: the best June seventeenth, of twenty twenty five that I
Speaker 1: can have. So will mean I'm not doing it, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not doing a four polow some thank you. But
Speaker 1: previously my thing was literally strategic planning, like professionally, as Questlove,
Speaker 1: my life is planned in three year increments, where I
Speaker 1: at least know that I still have work booked until
Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight. But like living day to day, like
Speaker 1: the undoing of waking up every morning thinking like financially,
Speaker 1: like my bills, my staff, growth, my survival, and so
Speaker 1: for you, is this always like twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 3: I probably have, on an unconscious level all the same
Speaker 3: anxieties you do, but I have, as a psychologist say,
Speaker 3: I'm probably better defended. Living in the present is my
Speaker 3: way of warding off those anxieties. If I open that
Speaker 3: door and start thinking about next year, I worry that
Speaker 3: an avalanche of things will bury me.
Speaker 1: So when you release a book, you're not instantly thinking
Speaker 1: what's my next project in two years?
Speaker 4: Or no I have I know what I'm working on now.
Speaker 3: But what I know is that the process of inspiration
Speaker 3: is so serendipitous and unpredictable that it's just foolish to
Speaker 3: try and plant it out. It will always like I
Speaker 3: was doing this thing this, I'm doing this big podcast
Speaker 3: right now, which is this long series about a true
Speaker 3: crime thing about a murder in Alabama, And I thought
Speaker 3: I was going to do it one way. And then
Speaker 3: I go and make a reporting trip to Muscle Sholes.
Speaker 3: It'square the stake place in the Quad Cities. Muscle Sholes
Speaker 3: is Alabama. Yeah, Florence, Discumbria. And I'm sitting in a
Speaker 3: coffee shop in Florence, Alabama, and a guy comes up
Speaker 3: to me and says, hey, you're Malcolm Melalla.
Speaker 4: What you What are you doing here?
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm doing this thing about this murder took place
Speaker 3: forty years ago. He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, you know
Speaker 3: you should talk to my friend Grant. I was like, okay,
Speaker 3: So I call up Grant. He's like, oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: know all about that. And Grant fixes me up with
Speaker 3: like fifteen people who knew everything about this murder. And
Speaker 3: then I go back in the second time and I
Speaker 3: meet some of those people, and then one of the
Speaker 3: guys says, Oh, my friend Ricky, who I have breakfast
Speaker 3: with every morning, he actually investigated murder.
Speaker 4: I thought everyone who investigated with dad.
Speaker 3: So I just like get in my car and drive
Speaker 3: one mile and there's Ricky and Ricky tells me everything
Speaker 3: like if that's your that's to my mind, is the
Speaker 3: way not just the world works. But it's the way
Speaker 3: that creative process works is you just put yourself in
Speaker 3: harm's way of something and things will hit you. And
Speaker 3: I kind of, on some level have a confidence. The
Speaker 3: reason I went there is on some unconscious level, I
Speaker 3: knew that I would have an encounter like that one
Speaker 3: in the coffee shop. Maybe it was I didn't inveage
Speaker 3: in that particular thing, but I knew if I went
Speaker 3: there something would come out of it.
Speaker 4: So I went there without a plan.
Speaker 1: I like, what's your creative ecosystem, Like, are you just
Speaker 1: a circle of one? Or do you least have someone
Speaker 1: that bounce ideas off of someone that says that's not
Speaker 1: a good look?
Speaker 3: Or I have Informally, I think I have a fair
Speaker 3: amount of that. I'm operating within and Pushkin my audio company,
Speaker 3: where I have a built in ecosystem of editors and
Speaker 3: when we have you know, table reads where we and
Speaker 3: where I read stuff alout and get feedback.
Speaker 4: And I've realized how valuable that is.
Speaker 3: What I've always believed is that if you have an idea,
Speaker 3: what you should do is talk about it obsessively. So
Speaker 3: the minute you have what you think is a special idea,
Speaker 3: the first thing you should do is share it with
Speaker 3: as many people as humanly possible, which is counterintuitive, right,
Speaker 3: because your instinct is to hold on to something that
Speaker 3: you think is special. But you have to fight that
Speaker 3: instinct because only it's not just that there is value on.
Speaker 4: People tell you when they hear the idea, but there
Speaker 4: is value in you.
Speaker 3: Iterating on the idea in conversation because you will. You
Speaker 3: won't explain it the same way twice. The tenth time
Speaker 3: you've explaining it to someone, you realize you're explaining it
Speaker 3: in a totally different way, because it's the same way
Speaker 3: up a stand up comic does for months of practice
Speaker 3: in comedy bys before they do their Netflix special, right,
Speaker 3: because it's incredibly valuable to say something to somebody and
Speaker 3: to listen to their pauses, and to a musician is
Speaker 3: the same way, right, And so I think you had to.
Speaker 4: You have to if you're a.
Speaker 3: Writer, you have to build that into your sort of practice.
Speaker 3: And so I have a really good friend who's a
Speaker 3: very successful screenwriter and my best friend, and I tell
Speaker 3: him everything.
Speaker 4: I just watch his eyes and he will.
Speaker 3: Let you know if he just didn't work for him,
Speaker 3: or if it's why are you doing it?
Speaker 4: That, like, he's really honest, you know.
Speaker 1: And I was going to say, are people lowed to
Speaker 1: be honest with you? Even now that you're Malcolm glad
Speaker 1: Well You're past You're an adjective. People now just say
Speaker 1: glad Wellian or like in describing.
Speaker 4: Usually in disparagement. But yes, they do.
Speaker 1: Use that glad Wellian theory.
Speaker 3: No, because the older and more successful I've gotten, the
Speaker 3: more willing I am to accept criticism because like I
Speaker 3: don't have any the stake so lower, right, Like.
Speaker 1: When's the first time you got pushed back for one
Speaker 1: of your theories?
Speaker 4: Oh? Well, I mean so often I can't even keep trying.
Speaker 1: When's the first time you took it personal? I'm only
Speaker 1: asking this simply because the irony is, of course, you know,
Speaker 1: I read your book in two thousand, right when the
Speaker 1: height of my recording career was just starting. And you know,
Speaker 1: the one album in my canon that's kind of like
Speaker 1: the Redheaded Stepchild is The Tipping Point, which that's the
Speaker 1: first time, you know, as someone that was a straight
Speaker 1: a student with critics and always on the top ten
Speaker 1: lists at the end of the year and all that stuff,
Speaker 1: that's the first time we got pushback and so wow,
Speaker 1: when people are like, but we're still friends, We're still
Speaker 1: no non playing, No, we are. But for you, though,
Speaker 1: what now? I have a good relationship with what they
Speaker 1: call failure one. I don't take the undesirable result as
Speaker 1: personal as I used to. And you know, it's depressing,
Speaker 1: like I'd have many times. I've had panic attacks, and
Speaker 1: you know, artists are always in their head and all
Speaker 1: that stuff. But for you, though, you just you knew
Speaker 1: out the gate ped No.
Speaker 4: It's I don't.
Speaker 3: My feeling is it's you know, I'm a distance runner
Speaker 3: and that has really powerfully shaped my perspective on life.
Speaker 3: And I really, I mean it sounds corny, but I'm
Speaker 3: running a very long race. So somebody disliking a critic
Speaker 3: attacking something that I've done is like someone pulls ahead
Speaker 3: of you in lap two and my position is well,
Speaker 3: but the race is fifty laps, so like, who care?
Speaker 3: I mean not, who cares? It her at sea will sting.
Speaker 3: But it's not a terminal, it's not devastating. I once
Speaker 3: read years ago this thing that has always stayed with me,
Speaker 3: which I think is incredibly interesting. It was a guy
Speaker 3: named Dean Simonson who studied creativity he was trying to
Speaker 3: figure out what distinguishes highly created people from people who
Speaker 3: are not as creative, and his initial thought was a
Speaker 3: creative person, a successful creative person, a genius is someone
Speaker 3: who has a higher hit rate. So for every ten
Speaker 3: ideas they have, eight would be good, whereas someone who
Speaker 3: was mediocre, they'd have ten ideas and they'd have two
Speaker 3: of them would be good.
Speaker 4: That's what he thought.
Speaker 3: He does this long, complicated analysis of like two hundred geniuses,
Speaker 3: and he realizes he's totally wrong. The hit rate is
Speaker 3: exactly the same, except that the genius has ten times
Speaker 3: as many ideas. So like by definition, the genius has
Speaker 3: more failures than the mediocre person because their output is
Speaker 3: just greater. Right, I thought that was It's so interesting
Speaker 3: Einstein has a jillion bad ideas, but he has so
Speaker 3: many ideas it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you them, because, uh, kind of
Speaker 1: in my field of work, you know, oftentimes, especially in music,
Speaker 1: the word genius is completely overused. And you know, I'm
Speaker 1: also in a field of entertainment in which those that
Speaker 1: put numbers on the board are often rewarded with accolades
Speaker 1: and that sort of thing, and oftentimes people that I
Speaker 1: really think that are making artistic strides and whatever they
Speaker 1: do don't get hits whatever. So in music especially, I
Speaker 1: tend to think that the geniuses are often overlooked and
Speaker 1: under celebrated, as opposed to oh, I had a good
Speaker 1: idea and it works. I mean, do you agree with
Speaker 1: that or yeah?
Speaker 3: I'm not what I'm talking about success in this context,
Speaker 3: I'm not necessarily necessarily talking about commercial success. Like to
Speaker 3: go back to my Paul Simon, one of my favorite artists.
Speaker 3: I thought his last album, which was done when he
Speaker 3: was whatever, eighty seven seals, it might be my favorite
Speaker 3: Paul Simon album.
Speaker 4: So that's in his repertoire. What is that number?
Speaker 3: I don't know, eighteen, I don't know how many albums
Speaker 3: he's done. But to my mind, what qualifies him as
Speaker 3: being at the very top of the pinnacle is sustained
Speaker 3: excellence over a very long period and an unwillingness to
Speaker 3: accept the notion that he he didn't stop, He didn't
Speaker 3: sort of accept the fact that his commercial decline was
Speaker 3: somehow indicative of his own creative failure. He persisted, and
Speaker 3: I think seven seals, seven seals like it took me
Speaker 3: like five listens by the fifth listen, I was like.
Speaker 4: This is unbelievable.
Speaker 3: This is such a mature, complicated, brilliant more than a
Speaker 3: summation of his previous work, but a departure in this
Speaker 3: really beautiful way. And that's what I'm talking about that
Speaker 3: he had he'd be the first time. He's had some
Speaker 3: crappy albums along the way. But that's my point that
Speaker 3: the truly creative person is defined by their productivity and
Speaker 3: not by their success rate.
Speaker 1: I call it the Thriller effect. So the Thriller effect
Speaker 1: to me was, you know, when Michael Jackson's previous album,
Speaker 1: Off the Wall came out, it was critically acclaimed and
Speaker 1: it was a success. It sold eight million copies. He
Speaker 1: thought it was a failure because he only got two
Speaker 1: Grammy nominations and basically had his joker, what way they
Speaker 1: get a load of me? Like that was his Thriller
Speaker 1: is going to be his revenge. Now, the thing is,
Speaker 1: as an artistic statement, Thriller is a success, but what
Speaker 1: happens is people the conversation of Thriller was the first time,
Speaker 1: especially music in which the quantity was at focus and
Speaker 1: not the quality of it. So in other words, it
Speaker 1: won eight Grammys, it's old sixty four, blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: a million, it made him hundreds of hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of dollars. So and then suddenly that became
Speaker 1: our north star. And I understand the need for survival
Speaker 1: and security, especially for black artist is important. But suddenly
Speaker 1: that to me is sort of when the conversation changed
Speaker 1: with art, where now it's like how many units did
Speaker 1: you sell? How many?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do you think that's problematic? Like can we ever get
Speaker 1: to a place where people genuinely judge art or just
Speaker 1: get taste? I think taste is kind of the I
Speaker 1: don't know if we still have good taste and are
Speaker 1: chasing success.
Speaker 3: The kind of thought experiment is, would your cultural consumption
Speaker 3: be different if you were unaware of any of those
Speaker 3: indices of creative work success? So if you never knew
Speaker 3: where a song charted when you listen to the song,
Speaker 3: if you never knew whether a book was a bestseller
Speaker 3: or not when you read the book, or on and
Speaker 3: on and on. I kind of think our choices and
Speaker 3: our preferences would be quite different. And I'm guessing in
Speaker 3: a really lovely way.
Speaker 1: That is correct. So often my friends laugh at my
Speaker 1: rock choices because my rock knowledge is coming from that
Speaker 1: standpoint that I will get something without me knowing the
Speaker 1: history or the background of it. In other words, the
Speaker 1: first Dylan record I like was Self Portrait, which was
Speaker 1: like the Christian phase of Dylan, which critics were like,
Speaker 1: get out, you know, they didn't like it, and I
Speaker 1: dug it because I didn't have the knowledge of it.
Speaker 1: Or even with the the Stones releasing an emotional rescue,
Speaker 1: or when rat on Hum came out from you like,
Speaker 1: if it's critically bad, then that's the album.
Speaker 3: I like, well, you were seeing it. It's like my
Speaker 3: mom with Working Girl. You were seeing it with fresh
Speaker 3: eyes right exactly.
Speaker 1: And only then like years later, I was like, oh
Speaker 1: that Almo was critically planned or people think that that's
Speaker 1: his worst album. Yeah, Dylan fans hated that record, but
Speaker 1: one I liked it because as a hip hop artist,
Speaker 1: it's just like at least four gems on there that
Speaker 1: I hear music different than you know, the average person.
Speaker 1: So but I believe that's true if you don't have
Speaker 1: the knowledge of Yeah.
Speaker 3: A lot of this also has to do with the
Speaker 3: kind of failure of the critical function cultural function in society.
Speaker 3: So in its original sense. The role of critics was
Speaker 3: to help us understand the intention of the artists, right.
Speaker 3: It wasn't to kind of pass judgment on whether we
Speaker 3: thought we it was in my I mean I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't mean when I say original, I mean in
Speaker 3: the best sense of what criticism was supposed to do.
Speaker 1: I thought, after like Lester Bangs and seventy three, like
Speaker 1: the whole point of critics was just a flex for
Speaker 1: each other, like watch this take.
Speaker 3: Maybe I'm talking pre seventy three then okay, But when
Speaker 3: I say original, I mean original, original, or at least how.
Speaker 4: We would like criticism to work.
Speaker 3: Is it someone who knows more than us about a
Speaker 3: cultural subject helps us to understand the intention of the
Speaker 3: work of art and whether the art succeeds it by
Speaker 3: its own and according to its own intentions.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: In other words, the critic has to be faceless and
Speaker 3: selfless in their evaluation. That notion has gone out the window,
Speaker 3: and with the result, it has corrupted.
Speaker 4: Our appreciation of a lot of art.
Speaker 3: And instead of helping me understand, well, why is you know,
Speaker 3: pat sounds a great album. I listened to that and
Speaker 3: I think I can't what is this about? I need
Speaker 3: someone to help me. I feel the same way about
Speaker 3: I once trod something about Norm McDonald, who was the
Speaker 3: Comedians comedian, and I would listen to all these routines
Speaker 3: and I would be like, you know, I don't find I.
Speaker 1: Never even get a file.
Speaker 3: It worked for me, but I knew that people who
Speaker 3: knew a lot about comedy thought he was a genius.
Speaker 3: And what I wanted was someone who knew a lot
Speaker 3: about comedy to tell me why they thought he was
Speaker 3: a genius. My first thought it was like, I don't
Speaker 3: like this, but people who know more than me do,
Speaker 3: and so my first thought was curiosity about Okay, what
Speaker 3: am I missing? So the critic's role is to explain
Speaker 3: to me what I'm missing it. Maybe he doesn't get
Speaker 3: me to the point where I love Norm McDonald, but
Speaker 3: it gets me to the point where I receive spect
Speaker 3: normal right. But when critics have abandoned that role and
Speaker 3: they're simply saying I hate this, it didn't work for me,
Speaker 3: or this art is violating some ideological predisposition I have,
Speaker 3: it's like, well, what's the point of your criticism? Like
Speaker 3: why don't I just walk down the street and like
Speaker 3: ask some random person what they think of it.
Speaker 4: Right, So it's like the failure of that.
Speaker 3: That's why I say that when we remove evidence of
Speaker 3: something's marketplace power, essentially what we're doing is we are
Speaker 3: removing a kind of criticism, right, a bad criticism, and
Speaker 3: allowing us to see the art with fresh eyes.
Speaker 1: Side note, has anyone ever sent you Norm McDonald's chorus
Speaker 1: Leachman roast?
Speaker 4: Duh?
Speaker 1: Okay, this is what I gotta tell you. So this
Speaker 1: is what I thought was genius because you've seen those
Speaker 1: like celebrity roasts that they have on Comedy Central. So
Speaker 1: Chlorus Leachman is getting roasted, and or McDonald decides early
Speaker 1: that he's going to fall on his sword, but not
Speaker 1: in that the Aristocrats way. Are you guys familiar with
Speaker 1: the Aristocrats joke? It's a joke where if a comedian
Speaker 1: is having a bad set on stage, he will somehow
Speaker 1: signal to his friends in the back, his fellow comedians,
Speaker 1: that I failed, and he'll tell this Aristocrats joke, clearly
Speaker 1: freaking out the audience. But you know, he's again performing
Speaker 1: for the eight people in the back. So McDonald decides
Speaker 1: that he is going to tell not even flat jokes,
Speaker 1: but horrible jokes, but he's not going to wink, like
Speaker 1: there's a way where you're going to give a bad performance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but maybe thirty seconds suit and to it, you'll like
Speaker 1: win to the audience, like I'm doing this on purpose.
Speaker 4: Like he would not portray that dude the way.
Speaker 1: The first of all his set was like ten minutes
Speaker 1: and the collective look of horror on the people in
Speaker 1: the audience, like you know when you're forcing yourself to
Speaker 1: laugh at somebody like I was normally that I was funny,
Speaker 1: but they were all looking like he lost it or
Speaker 1: but he did it on purpose, like he never once
Speaker 1: let up, like psych I was reading these jokes from
Speaker 1: a nineteen forty joke, that's what he was doing. He
Speaker 1: got a joke book from nineteen forty to see if
Speaker 1: I could work in the new millennial and it didn't.
Speaker 1: And he literally didn't care. And you know, at the
Speaker 1: time when I'm in therapy, one of the things I
Speaker 1: had to learn was you have to care so much
Speaker 1: that you don't care, you know, like that's zero Fox
Speaker 1: times twelve billion, where you just operat in life where
Speaker 1: you literally don't care what people think. And yeah, once
Speaker 1: I saw that, then I looked at his.
Speaker 3: It's a classic thing that insiders do for other insiders,
Speaker 3: which is, for the outsider, what you're interested in is
Speaker 3: the quality of the spectacle, without absent any kind of
Speaker 3: larger context. What the insider's interested in is that plus
Speaker 3: degree of difficulty. So the reason the comedians are laughing
Speaker 3: at Norm McDonald is they understand that what he's doing
Speaker 3: is insanely difficult and courageous, and they know they could
Speaker 3: never pull it off themselves, and it's hilarious to them
Speaker 3: that they know someone who would attempt it. Right, you
Speaker 3: have to have done stand up and bombed to know
Speaker 3: why that's genius. And I've not done stand up and bombs,
Speaker 3: so I don't know that feeling right. So that's why
Speaker 3: it's inaccessible to me. But I still understand why it's
Speaker 3: appealing to the insider.
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you, Ben, could you pull off
Speaker 1: a children's book, a book for a three year old
Speaker 1: where you're limited to just if that sixty words? Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you think you can pull it off?
Speaker 3: Well? I have a three year old and I tell
Speaker 3: her I make up bedtime stories. Does that count?
Speaker 1: Well? I mean, but that's that's in the safety of
Speaker 1: your your your own bubble, Like, yeah, could you release
Speaker 1: a children's book and be as effective in thatgy?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: You know't think so?
Speaker 4: No, I think, actually could I do it?
Speaker 3: I mean, now that I know children's books because I
Speaker 3: have a three year old, I'm aware of that eighty
Speaker 3: five to ninety percent of them are really terrible. So
Speaker 3: I'm aware of how hard it's really hard to make
Speaker 3: a good look. Really, I don't I'm not dissing children's
Speaker 3: books writers, but the genre is fiendishly difficult, it is,
Speaker 3: and so I don't think absent like a good ten
Speaker 3: years of immersion in that. Like even when I'm telling
Speaker 3: a story to my daughter. I told her story for
Speaker 3: like a couple of weeks and now she's like no, no, no, Daddy,
Speaker 3: Like she gives me the story. It's like, we're going
Speaker 3: to do a story by cat Is called Biggie Smalls.
Speaker 3: So she says, Biggie Smalls is going to be, you know,
Speaker 3: out at a party with his best friend something like go.
Speaker 1: So she doesn't even premise.
Speaker 4: She doesn't even.
Speaker 3: Trust me anymore. Like basically she's saying, Daddy, you're set up, suck.
Speaker 3: I have to step in here, and like this is
Speaker 3: how it's gonna do it. Like for me, so I've
Speaker 3: already you know, the market has judged me, and it's
Speaker 3: judged me harshly.
Speaker 1: Maybe she'll teach you. You know, I think you could
Speaker 1: do it. I know that you're a passionate runner. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I believe that in order for someone to be
Speaker 1: creatively successful, there has to be an element of breathing
Speaker 1: that sort of releases the endorphins or whatever it is
Speaker 1: that our brain gives us. And at first I thought
Speaker 1: people who were obsessive joggers did this just for you know,
Speaker 1: health's sake. But I didn't realize that, Oh, at the
Speaker 1: end of jogging, you're doing a lot of breathing, which
Speaker 1: for me meditative breathing or DMT breathwork or advanced level
Speaker 1: of breath work. It's kind of how I do it.
Speaker 1: But what was it about running? Like, did you at
Speaker 1: any point in life dream of professionally running?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 3: I was quite a good high school runner, but very
Speaker 3: very early on I realized that I was, you know,
Speaker 3: one massive tier below the great You know, even at
Speaker 3: thirteen and fourteen, you recognize the kids you're running with
Speaker 3: who are going to the Olympics. You just I mean
Speaker 3: they're just on a different level, right, So I never
Speaker 3: had that. That fantasy lasted a very very very short time,
Speaker 3: but I found it.
Speaker 4: It's funny.
Speaker 3: It is valuable to me as an adult in a
Speaker 3: way that it wasn't as a kid, for that exact
Speaker 3: reason that I don't have any other escapes, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: every other aspect of my life is and I have
Speaker 3: no the kind of opportunities just to let your mind
Speaker 3: wander are so limited, and I think creativity begins in
Speaker 3: that kind of free association.
Speaker 1: So what is it creative process with the tipping point
Speaker 1: versus your creative process for revenge at the tipping point?
Speaker 1: And that twenty five year gap, like what walked me through?
Speaker 1: Like do you use music? Do you like?
Speaker 3: There's usually a story that I want to tell. That's
Speaker 3: the It's not the beginning of the book, but it's
Speaker 3: the heart of the book. And the first tipping point
Speaker 3: it was just I was living in New York and
Speaker 3: New York suddenly got safe and I didn't understand why
Speaker 3: that was as simple. I just wanted to explain that
Speaker 3: how that could happen? This one I was thinking a
Speaker 3: lot and writing about COVID and this idea which people
Speaker 3: couldn't understand in COVID, which was COVID was spread by
Speaker 3: one person in a hundred. In other words, if everyone
Speaker 3: in this room had COVID right now, only one of
Speaker 3: you would pose any substantial risk of transmitting your virus
Speaker 3: to anyone else. And that's because, for reasons we don't
Speaker 3: understand a tiny fraction of human beings, you spread COVID
Speaker 3: with what are called aerosols. In this room, there is
Speaker 3: someone who produces one hundred or a thousand x more
Speaker 3: aerosols than the rest of us. Again, we don't know why.
Speaker 3: It's just a random genetic thing. That person gets everybody sick.
Speaker 3: The rest of us do not. And nobody during COVID
Speaker 3: would appreciate this fact, like we're scientists saying it's not
Speaker 3: every one of us, it's one in one hundred. If
Speaker 3: you understand who they are, you could stop this thing cold.
Speaker 3: No one was interested in that message, and I was
Speaker 3: fascinated by that, and to me, it was this beautiful
Speaker 3: illustration of one of the fundamental principles of epidemics, which
Speaker 3: is they are profoundly asymmetrical.
Speaker 4: Right, small number of people.
Speaker 3: Do all the work, So that kind of rekindled my
Speaker 3: interest in the idea, and I just then I started
Speaker 3: to build on that. Why do we have trouble with that?
Speaker 3: What would the implications of the fact we overlooked it?
Speaker 3: What are other examples of this?
Speaker 1: You know? On it?
Speaker 3: You just kind of like build out from a lot
Speaker 3: of that's just kind of very random musing about what
Speaker 3: you're learning as you as you write about that phenomenon.
Speaker 1: So, in the pandemic, in which I always say seventy
Speaker 1: five percent, other people were faced with a challenge of
Speaker 1: a pivot or a tipping point or a change in
Speaker 1: their life, which basically, I mean, unless you're under a rock,
Speaker 1: your life, whatever your life was before March of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: was not the same after twenty twenty, whether you regressed
Speaker 1: even further for the worst or thrived in a whole
Speaker 1: nother area. Was that true for you, Like, how was
Speaker 1: twenty twenty or twenty twenty one different from you as
Speaker 1: opposed to what was now in your rear view mirror.
Speaker 3: It's a really interesting question, and I'm going to cop
Speaker 3: out in a sense that that's the kind of question
Speaker 3: that I don't think I have.
Speaker 4: I totally agree with you, Okay, but I.
Speaker 3: Also think that I don't think I will really know
Speaker 3: the answer to that question for a long time. I
Speaker 3: think we forget how recent all this was. And not
Speaker 3: only is it recent, but also we did a spectacular
Speaker 3: job of burying this phenomenon. So it's this weird combination
Speaker 3: of something catastrophic happened, which we then very successfully swept
Speaker 3: under a rug like a million American deciderer close to
Speaker 3: a million American size, the hell of a lot of people,
Speaker 3: like an insane amount of people. Yeah, and then around
Speaker 3: the world. You know, we just kind of like decided
Speaker 3: we weren't going to talk about it anymore, and we
Speaker 3: weren't going to So it's like, under those circumstances, how
Speaker 3: do I know what the impact? Well, how do I
Speaker 3: know now what the impact was? It's just give me
Speaker 3: another five years.
Speaker 1: Well, since you live in the present, and I consider
Speaker 1: you a historian, like, how does that work?
Speaker 3: Well, I live in the present with respect to myself,
Speaker 3: which is why I'm struggling with this question, right because I.
Speaker 4: Don't like to think about I'm one of those people
Speaker 4: who buried it.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, Well, for you, then, is your infamous ten
Speaker 1: thousand hour equals perfection theory still relevant in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: or are we playing with a new set of.
Speaker 3: Rules with my version or the version that people mistakenly
Speaker 3: took when.
Speaker 1: They Okay, so what's I was going to ask you,
Speaker 1: what's the one fact about you that people get wrong
Speaker 1: all the time? And well, are you tired of the
Speaker 1: ten thousand hour theory? No?
Speaker 4: I mean it's like whatever, but it's you know, let.
Speaker 1: Me make clear, ten thousand hours of practice equals genius.
Speaker 4: That's that's not the theory.
Speaker 1: Okay, Wait, so is that Am I doing a Mandela
Speaker 1: effect right now?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 4: No, no, No.
Speaker 3: The idea was ten thousand It takes a long time,
Speaker 3: I e. Something like ten thousand hours for talent to
Speaker 3: be manifested. I could spend ten thousand hours on a
Speaker 3: golf course and I'm not turning into Scotti Scheffler.
Speaker 1: Okay, right.
Speaker 4: But the idea was that.
Speaker 3: It's about the insufficiency of talent and it's about the
Speaker 3: duration of practice. It's those two ideas in combination. And
Speaker 3: what people wanted to the way that idea was misunderstood
Speaker 3: was that people thought I was saying that with practice,
Speaker 3: any kind of excellence is accessible. And no, that's nonsense.
Speaker 3: Who would think that? That's like nuts? Do you think
Speaker 3: if could I turn myself into you? Tend to know
Speaker 3: you have some god given thing which you have carefully
Speaker 3: cultivated over time, But it begins with you having some
Speaker 3: God given thing. I could have if we had a
Speaker 3: conversation as five year olds, I would have said, there's.
Speaker 4: Something going on with you.
Speaker 3: That's really I mean, if I was a sophisticated five
Speaker 3: year olds, I would have said, and you've had this.
Speaker 3: Now that I'm in the world of kids, it's always
Speaker 3: astonishing to me. Like you meet kids and you and
Speaker 3: one in a hundred you realize, oh, they've got that thing.
Speaker 3: I don't know what it is yet, but oh, this kid,
Speaker 3: you can see it right, like something's going on there.
Speaker 3: And then you pray that they're going to be able
Speaker 3: to nourish it and access it and get support for it.
Speaker 3: But it's clearly there, right, it's some I was at
Speaker 3: the my daughter's pre K graduation. The idea this is
Speaker 3: a pre K graduation, by the way, it's like that
Speaker 3: is like how preposterous our society has become. It's pre
Speaker 3: They they barely know they're at PreK. How do they
Speaker 3: know they're graduating. Nonetheless, this is an opportunity to shake
Speaker 3: down the parents. But there's this kid my daughter's playing.
Speaker 3: My daughter is like clearly has a crush on this
Speaker 3: kid called THEO. We've been hearing about THEO for months,
Speaker 3: and THEO like pushes her over and she's constantly reporting
Speaker 3: on some new indignity that's.
Speaker 4: Been visited on her by THEO.
Speaker 3: We're like, well, why are you hanging? She goes and
Speaker 3: THEO should come over for a play date. Well, THEO
Speaker 3: is white. So finally I meet THEO with the play date.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh, Theo's just God charisma, Like he's three,
Speaker 3: and it's like, I get it. If I was you,
Speaker 3: I would be hanging out with THEO like he's in
Speaker 3: a world by himself.
Speaker 4: It's magical. But can I make another comment?
Speaker 3: I'm just can I do this incredibly tiresome thing that
Speaker 3: parents do? This is the beginning of cultural I'd never
Speaker 3: I never figured out where cultural discernment comes from. How
Speaker 3: do you learn to decide what you like and what
Speaker 3: you don't like?
Speaker 4: Write? It's a mystery to me.
Speaker 3: So I drove my daughter to preschool every morning and
Speaker 3: we listen to some kids music collection on Spotify, and
Speaker 3: in the beginning, it's all the same forty songs on rotation.
Speaker 3: By the way, Spotify, surely there are more than forty
Speaker 3: children's songs like let's get our act together, right, right,
Speaker 3: But the first time round she listens to them all,
Speaker 3: and the second time round she says, oh, no, no,
Speaker 3: like for like two of them, don't play that one.
Speaker 3: The third time round she's rejecting six of them. And
Speaker 3: now she's basically rejecting two thirds of them. And I'm
Speaker 3: realizing that what I'm witnessing is the rise of discernment, right,
Speaker 3: Like she's figured out that it's okay to have a
Speaker 3: position on a work of art, right, and that her position.
Speaker 3: She's not asking me, daddy, do you like it? She's
Speaker 3: not deferring. She's affirmatively saying, like she has turned on Raffi.
Speaker 4: No more Raffi.
Speaker 1: Wait, Raffi is still a thing?
Speaker 4: They play them on Spotify.
Speaker 1: Oh, there is way more kids, There.
Speaker 4: Is way more way.
Speaker 3: There's a genius guy called uh a Randy Kaplan. Randy
Speaker 3: Kaplan gets two thumbs up every one of his songs.
Speaker 3: Don't fill up on chips.
Speaker 1: This is a masterpiece, masterpiece, don't fill up on chips.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Then the chorus is kids going, why Mom, why Mom?
Speaker 4: Salsa, m guacamole, They're just dips. They're just dips. Goes
Speaker 4: on like that.
Speaker 3: But but I'm realizing that, and there's a lot I'm
Speaker 3: also detecting the beginnings of a logic in her choices.
Speaker 3: She's steadily rejecting the ones that don't have extra level
Speaker 3: of cleverness or and it's like fascinating.
Speaker 1: Like is she your case study? Now? Like are you?
Speaker 4: I think you're gonna do.
Speaker 3: The thing that's so tires in, which is people have
Speaker 3: a kid and then they all to do is right
Speaker 3: about their kid.
Speaker 1: But I will bore you, Oh you know you are.
Speaker 3: So I will bore people in a setting what you
Speaker 3: can't leave. I will bore you with stories about my daughter.
Speaker 3: So now that I'm in conversation with you, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: guess that at three and four you were doing that
Speaker 3: exact same thing with even more sophistication.
Speaker 4: I didn't convinced of it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So here's the deal. I grew up in
Speaker 1: a three thousand album household. But here's the rule. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't touch my stereo or else. And you gotta put
Speaker 1: a lot of emphasis on those last two words. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you see what my dad looks like, you
Speaker 1: know that or else it comes with a heavy price
Speaker 1: to pay. So as a result, I think between the
Speaker 1: ages of two maybe fourteen, like I did not have
Speaker 1: a cynical bone in my body, and to grow up
Speaker 1: in a household where Glenn Campbell's ron Stone Cowboy and
Speaker 1: the Jackson five Dancing Machine are getting equal time. You know,
Speaker 1: Rita Coolidge and Natalie Cole are getting equal time, the
Speaker 1: Hudson Brothers and Tavars are getting equal time. I didn't
Speaker 1: know what discernment me I didn't have. The first time
Speaker 1: I heard my dad panned something, he left music altogether.
Speaker 1: So we were waiting for Stevie Wonder to release his
Speaker 1: follow up to Songs in the Key of Life Now
Speaker 1: my household. Stevie Wonder records were like events, like to
Speaker 1: think of War of the worlds Orson Wells nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: where we're sitting as a family, staring at the turntable
Speaker 1: and putting on side one of the songs in the
Speaker 1: Cave of Life and listening into all six sides of
Speaker 1: that record, going through the liner notes and I'm five,
Speaker 1: and like, I've completely had an adults understanding of music.
Speaker 1: And he takes three years to do his follow up record,
Speaker 1: and of course he does the departure album, which, for
Speaker 1: those of you don't know, if you release an established classic,
Speaker 1: oftentimes when you have fear of follow up, and Stevie
Speaker 1: will deny that Still Cows Come Home, you do an
Speaker 1: album that's the complete opposite of what you were known for.
Speaker 1: And some say it's a psychological exercise of not wanting
Speaker 1: to face a fear. So don't make an album that's
Speaker 1: even remotely close to songs than Cave Life. Do a
Speaker 1: classical album, which is what he did without warning. So
Speaker 1: my dad was, I mean, he was so heartbroken over
Speaker 1: that record where and defeated. Then I could touch the
Speaker 1: stereo like he just stopped listening to music.
Speaker 4: A broke you wonder broke your dad.
Speaker 1: It totally broke. But I mean he was also forty
Speaker 1: at the time, which I think in the eighties forty
Speaker 1: might as well have been sixty. So the whole point
Speaker 1: was that I never knew what I didn't know what
Speaker 1: cynicism was until.
Speaker 3: So you didn't have the ability to do what my
Speaker 3: daughter does, which is skip that song.
Speaker 4: But yeah, but you're.
Speaker 3: Getting actually an even better at education, which is he
Speaker 3: your father is implicitly forcing you to find what is
Speaker 3: beautiful in an incredibly wide variety of music, which is
Speaker 3: that is the education that allowed you to be you?
Speaker 1: Right it is. But I do wonder if there's an
Speaker 1: alternate Earth version of me that listens to all these
Speaker 1: albums completely without skipping, without the fear of I will
Speaker 1: get hit if I do this to go to the
Speaker 1: next gong or skip to the next By.
Speaker 3: The way, you mentioned Stevie and Glen Campbell, I trust
Speaker 3: I watched this maybe a thousand times, the YouTube of
Speaker 3: the two of them singing the Blown in the Wind,
Speaker 3: which is like so un believable, and it it's for
Speaker 3: so many reasons, but like the sheer delight. Glen Campbell,
Speaker 3: by the way, because you know, is a legend in
Speaker 3: his own right, like a brilliant guitar player, like an
Speaker 3: incredible voice. Is the absolute The look on his face,
Speaker 3: it's like he's saying, this is I am sitting on
Speaker 3: a piano bench next to Stevie. Wonder it's never going
Speaker 3: to get better than this. It's like it's just it's
Speaker 3: and Jack Ben Campbell is like a Church of Christ
Speaker 3: guy from Alabama wherever he's from. It's like he could
Speaker 3: culturally that this has been him and Stevie is It's
Speaker 3: thousands of miles of cultural difference, and he to see
Speaker 3: the look in his eyes when like, none of that matters.
Speaker 4: I'm sitting next to Stevie, I see it like and
Speaker 4: egging them on, Like.
Speaker 3: I mean, if you've never watched this on YouTube, it's like,
Speaker 3: this is what you should watch when you go home.
Speaker 4: It's so magical.
Speaker 1: So wait, because you told me that my theory was wrong,
Speaker 1: which was ten thousand hours equal genius. So the thing is,
Speaker 1: until this moment, I will accept that that's not what
Speaker 1: you meant, but in my mind, that's what you meant.
Speaker 1: So that said, I've made a decision. Maybe seven months ago,
Speaker 1: I had a life redo and I decided that I'm
Speaker 1: going to be an amateur and with a child's mind
Speaker 1: of everything I do creatively. Now this is coming from
Speaker 1: someone that's a studied obsessive. I gotta figure out like
Speaker 1: everything about the thing that I'm interested in and do
Speaker 1: all this thorough research to it. And now I believe
Speaker 1: do you believe that the opposite can be true. Now,
Speaker 1: like someone that doesn't put in ten thousand hours, someone
Speaker 1: that just walks into a type rope situation and successfully
Speaker 1: gets to it. Do you think that it' seemed impossible
Speaker 1: to sort of wild the same results of.
Speaker 3: Well, what you can get is a different, but in
Speaker 3: many ways just as beautiful experience. So this is something
Speaker 3: that I thought about when I was running as a kid,
Speaker 3: and I was a very competitive runner. I liked running
Speaker 3: and I enjoyed it, but I was also aware of
Speaker 3: how stressful and difficult it was. And then I came
Speaker 3: back to running as a much older person and was
Speaker 3: no longer an elite runner. I was now a good
Speaker 3: runner all right, and I found running as a good
Speaker 3: runner to be in every way superior to running when
Speaker 3: I was an elite runner. And I realized that there
Speaker 3: was a there's a category of enjoyment that is only
Speaker 3: open to you if you're not an expert. If you're
Speaker 3: encountering things. It comes back to the my to my
Speaker 3: mom and working girl. Seeing things with fresh eyes and
Speaker 3: being unencumbered by all of the kind of contexts that
Speaker 3: comes with the steady acquisition of expertise allows you to
Speaker 3: enjoy things in a really kind of simple and pure
Speaker 3: way that maybe would be impossible if you were immersed
Speaker 3: in something like my friend Charles is a screenwriter.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 4: You have a number of screenwriter friends of mine.
Speaker 3: If you go with them to the movies and you say,
Speaker 3: and I'll say that's a great movie, they'll say, actually, no, no,
Speaker 3: you don't understand. Act one was all wrong for the
Speaker 3: following reasons. If I was doing it, I'm like, they
Speaker 3: didn't enjoy the movie. They knew too much. I just thought,
Speaker 3: I don't know, I thought it was great. I'm done right.
Speaker 3: And so I think that we underestimate those the kind
Speaker 3: of simple joy that comes from an amateur's perspective, and
Speaker 3: we overstate I think, the pleasure, not the value, but
Speaker 3: the pleasure that comes from being an expert.
Speaker 1: All right, So I have a last question. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do quick lightning around with you. So my final question is,
Speaker 1: because twenty twenty five is defined by I guess what
Speaker 1: I dub research versus research? Is it frustrating to you
Speaker 1: to live in a time in which having an amplified
Speaker 1: microphone doesn't necessarily mean that you're saying anything factual at all? Like,
Speaker 1: as a person who's like creative existence is doing research
Speaker 1: and gathering. Do you trust the next generation of writers
Speaker 1: to continue what you started twenty five years ago?
Speaker 4: I mean, yes, I do find it frustrating.
Speaker 3: I did a podcast episode of Revision's history basically going
Speaker 3: after Joe Rogan for being a terrible interviewer and letting like, yeah,
Speaker 3: who's on his show and like never calling them on anything. Right,
Speaker 3: that's frustrating because he's someone with a lot of cultural authority.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, like we're always going to have
Speaker 3: that there was an equivalent to him in some other
Speaker 3: form twenty five and thirty and fifty years ago. So,
Speaker 3: and I think these things are self correcting. You can't
Speaker 3: persist indefinitely with that level of intellectual laziness and still
Speaker 3: be a part of the conversation. So there's so I
Speaker 3: have some I don't. I'm not a gloom and duomer
Speaker 3: about that question.
Speaker 1: Okay, However, I mean, as far as the future of
Speaker 1: storytelling and research, especially with not the obsession the discussion
Speaker 1: of AI technology and whatnot, do you have any concerns
Speaker 1: as far as the value of what we used to
Speaker 1: know as facts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, AI is actually a pretty useful corrective to
Speaker 3: a lot of nonsense. So if you type do vaccines
Speaker 3: cause autism into chat GPT, chat GPT will tell you
Speaker 3: that they don't, because chat GPT surveys the whole literature
Speaker 3: and doesn't take something out of If you ask RFK
Speaker 3: Jr that you'll get a different answer. So do I
Speaker 3: in a world without chat GPT and only RFK Junior.
Speaker 4: We're in trouble.
Speaker 3: But at least now there's a corrective to the nonsense
Speaker 3: of people like him. So not in that sense, I'm optimistic.
Speaker 1: About Okay, rapid fire time. What was the first job
Speaker 1: you ever had?
Speaker 3: A dishwasher at the Stonecock restaurant in Elmira, Ontario.
Speaker 4: Fifteen years old? Fourteen years old?
Speaker 1: Favorite cereal?
Speaker 4: Don't eat cereal, never.
Speaker 1: Have, never have. You don't know the joys of Captain Crunch.
Speaker 3: I will add to the list of things I did
Speaker 3: not grow up with cereal.
Speaker 1: Really doing to cereal? Okay, by choice or by just
Speaker 1: not happen, it's.
Speaker 3: Not I mean, I can conceive of the utility of
Speaker 3: a bowl of corn flakes, but it's like dessert.
Speaker 4: It's not breakfast food. Right way?
Speaker 3: Did you offer me corn flake crisp after a nice dinner.
Speaker 3: I would say, yeah, that's appropriate, But why would I
Speaker 3: have it at seven in the morning?
Speaker 1: Cereal at nighttime?
Speaker 4: Okay, it's sugar, it's.
Speaker 1: A delivery system for sugar. Okay. For you, what artists
Speaker 1: do you wish that you discovered earlier?
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a really good question. When you say artists,
Speaker 3: you mean very broadly.
Speaker 1: I'man you know, I'm a music platform. But for you,
Speaker 1: acting author.
Speaker 3: I think the greatest nonfiction writer of my generation is
Speaker 3: was she died, Janet Malcolm, And I wish i'd been
Speaker 3: reading Janet Malcolm from the beginning of Janet Malcolm. I
Speaker 3: discovered her in my fifteen years ago. I wish i'd
Speaker 3: discovered her much before then, because she's influenced by writing a.
Speaker 1: Law okay, and what is next for you?
Speaker 3: My big Alabama true crime thing. And then I've been
Speaker 3: working forever on this book about Tom.
Speaker 1: Bradley, mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, and what's your angle?
Speaker 4: I'm really interested in the uses.
Speaker 1: Of anger, the uses of anger.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The idea is that people who are disenfranchised are angry inevitably,
Speaker 3: but they have a series of choices about how to
Speaker 3: express that anger. And he was part of a cohort
Speaker 3: of people who grew up in South Central in the
Speaker 3: thirties who all made very dramatically different choices about what
Speaker 3: to do with their anger, and his was the most stark,
Speaker 3: and he was the one that went furthest and he
Speaker 3: was the one who makes the least sense to us today.
Speaker 3: And so I want to tell that he grew up
Speaker 3: with Jackie Robinson, Right, Jackie Robinson goes this way with
Speaker 3: his anger. Tom Bradley goes this way with his anger.
Speaker 3: Super interesting.
Speaker 1: That is interesting because I think historically Black people and anger,
Speaker 1: There's like I grew up in you weren't allowed to
Speaker 1: be angry in my household without paying a price for it.
Speaker 1: And even today, you know, for black people to walk around,
Speaker 1: no one wants to get tag, you know, the angry
Speaker 1: black person at work or exactly. You know, for me,
Speaker 1: so many years of unexpressed emotions, I fear that that
Speaker 1: anger might result into something else, which is why I like,
Speaker 1: maybe I chose music to.
Speaker 3: So Tom Bradley, the central drama of his life is
Speaker 3: that he honestly he joins the LAPD in the nineteen forties, okay,
Speaker 3: and honestly believes that he could be the first black
Speaker 3: police chief of LA because in his own eyes, he's
Speaker 3: the smartest, he's the he's the biggest, he's the handsomest,
Speaker 3: he's the best, and he's that all that is true.
Speaker 3: The guy was like a super star like you cannot imagine,
Speaker 3: and he naively believed that would be enough to allow
Speaker 3: him to be chief of the LAPD. And he gets
Speaker 3: this far and they they shut him down, and he
Speaker 3: spends the rest of his life dealing with the consequences.
Speaker 1: Of that rejection, despite being the mayor of Los Angeles.
Speaker 4: Mayor is the consolation prize.
Speaker 1: He'd rather be Oh my god.
Speaker 3: That was your this is the this is the thing
Speaker 3: about him that's so fascinating.
Speaker 4: Mayor is the consolation prize.
Speaker 3: It's what he did because he couldn't be LAPD chief
Speaker 3: and Rodney King is his. He waits thirty years for
Speaker 3: his revenge and keeps his anger in check until Rodney
Speaker 3: King allows him to go back and eviscerate the LAPD.
Speaker 3: It is like that. It is all about revenge. Is
Speaker 3: a dish best served cold. That's his whole life. He
Speaker 3: like didn't let anyone see how absolutely devastated and furious
Speaker 3: he was over.
Speaker 1: That regispite being mayor.
Speaker 3: It was it was not it was all about. It
Speaker 3: was all about. It's an incredibly, incredibly and there's this story.
Speaker 4: Okay, we're going on, but I can tell you one
Speaker 4: last Braddy story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's the first black guy to move into a
Speaker 3: neighborhood in in our which was previously a redlined, all
Speaker 3: white neighborhood.
Speaker 4: And they change. The Supreme Court has out ruling.
Speaker 3: It allows a lot people to move in, and it
Speaker 3: still has his resistance. He gets a white person to
Speaker 3: buy the property forum and then they switch the.
Speaker 4: Thing and he drives with his family.
Speaker 3: Through the streets and all of the other people in
Speaker 3: the neighborhood come out on the sidewalk to watch the
Speaker 3: first black family move in, and.
Speaker 4: They are, you know, screaming at him and yelling.
Speaker 3: And remember he's six foot six two point fifty and
Speaker 3: like he parks his car in his driveway, gets out,
Speaker 3: and out emerges this enormous man in his policeman's unique form.
Speaker 3: He takes out his gun and he holds it up
Speaker 3: like this. He turns and faces everyone and marches his
Speaker 3: family into his house. And then this is the best part.
Speaker 3: The next morning he knocks on his neighbor's door, the
Speaker 3: neighbor who is the most upset about him moving in
Speaker 3: and says, you know, ma'am, I see your lawn needs mowing.
Speaker 3: I'd like to mow your lawn. And he mows her
Speaker 3: lawn every week until she does. That's Tom Bradley. Think
Speaker 3: of that out.
Speaker 1: I need you to write this book. Ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell, thank you for joining me on QLs and
Speaker 1: I'll see you all the next go around. See y'all.
Speaker 1: Quest Love Shows hosted by me Amir quest Love Thompson.
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