Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Hello Revisionist History listeners. This is Revenge of
Speaker 1: the Tipping Point month at Revisionist History, where we bring
Speaker 1: you stories and snippets in tantalizing tales from my new book,
Speaker 1: now available everywhere. And in this episode, we're bringing you
Speaker 1: the very first stop on my book tour, a conversation
Speaker 1: I had about my life and career with my old
Speaker 1: friend and former boss, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.
Speaker 1: We did this at the ninety second Street Why in
Speaker 1: New York City, my home away from home. I first
Speaker 1: met David almost forty years ago when he was a
Speaker 1: star at the Washington Post and I was a cub
Speaker 1: reporter who'd never written a newspaper story before. He's one
Speaker 1: of the people in the world who admired the most
Speaker 1: and our conversation was hilarious and fun. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 1: It's been a while, haes.
Speaker 2: Yes, Malcolm, I have to tell you that the title
Speaker 2: of this book is so brilliant because it's it's like
Speaker 2: Revenge of King Kong. It's fantastic and and I have
Speaker 2: to say that one of my fondest memories at the
Speaker 2: New Yorker. And we'll go back even earlier in a moment.
Speaker 2: But at the New Yorker, you're telling me, you know,
Speaker 2: I've written two pieces now, the Cool Hunters and.
Speaker 3: The Tipping Point. I have this idea for a book.
Speaker 2: You got an agent. They're a doubtable Tina Bennett, and
Speaker 2: you thought, you know, if I could make just a
Speaker 2: small amount of money, I could help out my family.
Speaker 3: And and and let's just say, by the end of.
Speaker 2: The days things went well. And now twenty three million
Speaker 2: books later, things have gone really well.
Speaker 3: But what interests me most is not.
Speaker 2: Success material success, however deeply jealous I am. What interests
Speaker 2: me is how you invented yourself and what you do
Speaker 2: because we have a not dissimilar background. We were both
Speaker 2: at the Washington Post, both at the New Yorker, and
Speaker 2: I couldn't have them in many ways, a more conventional
Speaker 2: approach to journalism. I wonder when you look back and
Speaker 2: you look at you were at the Spectator, you were
Speaker 2: at the Post, and then you came to the New Yorker.
Speaker 2: But something happened at a certain point that a more
Speaker 2: conventional story was left behind, and even a humorous story
Speaker 2: like the one at the Washington Posts, where you did
Speaker 2: you had a dog on death row and you try.
Speaker 1: Oh, that was my finest work.
Speaker 3: It really was.
Speaker 1: There was a dog in Bergen County. Well, should I
Speaker 1: back up and tell it? Storty, Sure, I was. I
Speaker 1: became the New York correspondent for the Washington Post, and I, uh,
Speaker 1: they were uninterested in stories about New York at that point.
Speaker 1: I don't know why. And then I decided to make
Speaker 1: my life more interesting and maybe increase my profile in Washington.
Speaker 1: I would only write stories from Bergen County.
Speaker 3: My county.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I decided that Bergen County was more interesting.
Speaker 1: I still believe this than New York City. So I
Speaker 1: just every day I would read the Bergen County Record Record,
Speaker 1: that's right. And I saw a little tiny mention one
Speaker 1: day of a dog, an Akita named Tarro, who had
Speaker 1: been confined to doggy death row. Now, doggy death row
Speaker 1: in Bergen County is in Hackensack, where I was born.
Speaker 1: Were born in Hackeye. You bet there is. You know
Speaker 1: what you think I'm joking when I say this doggy
Speaker 1: death row. No, it is actually doggy death row. It's
Speaker 1: a you can't get there. You have there's like a
Speaker 1: ravine and if you want to you're on the other
Speaker 1: side of the ravine, and then you see a long
Speaker 1: string of cages, and that there's all these dogs who
Speaker 1: are there pending those all kinds of appeals, obviously, and
Speaker 1: if they lose their appeals then they are euthanized. And
Speaker 1: this they're there for biting people. And Tarrow what had
Speaker 1: happened was he had been asleep and a child, the
Speaker 1: nephew of his owner, had stumbled across him in the
Speaker 1: middle of night on the way to the bathroom, and
Speaker 1: Tarrow had swiped the kid. This is now all these
Speaker 1: claims I'm making, was subject to a great amount of litigation,
Speaker 1: and had cut stipulated, had cut the kid's lip, and
Speaker 1: the result was like they're like seven different lawsuits had
Speaker 1: and I became convinced that Tarrow was wrongfully convicted, and
Speaker 1: I rode for the Washington Post. I mean it was
Speaker 1: thousands than impressively long, and the editor of the Washing
Speaker 1: Post the next day after it ran, came out to
Speaker 1: me and said, that was a very good piece on Tarrow.
Speaker 1: It was, however, four times too long is the greatest
Speaker 1: thing anyone was ever said to me. And they were
Speaker 1: t shirts the owner printed up t shirts Free Torrow.
Speaker 1: They were distributed and the story made the front pench
Speaker 1: of the New York Post. That's the goal, that was
Speaker 1: they the post, The New York Posts picked up my story.
Speaker 3: That's the heaven.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So my point this, it was so my whole
Speaker 1: strategy of conceiving of Bergen County as being a kind
Speaker 1: of more fertile ground.
Speaker 3: For But this was the this was rebellion.
Speaker 2: This was the beginning of the Gladwellian rebellion against the
Speaker 2: conventional which is that New York, as I believe, is
Speaker 2: not only the most interesting place, but on certain days
Speaker 2: the only interesting place.
Speaker 3: I'm a Patriot.
Speaker 1: So but when when?
Speaker 2: At what point, as we know what a Malcolm Gladwell's
Speaker 2: story is, the kind of sense of surprise, playing with ideas,
Speaker 2: exploring ideas, readings, social science, when when did that begin
Speaker 2: to click?
Speaker 1: I think it starts to the Post because the problem,
Speaker 1: you know, whenever I would take a job, take a job,
Speaker 1: you have to kind of conceive of what is the
Speaker 1: problem that you're trying to solve on this job. And
Speaker 1: the problem that I had when I got to the
Speaker 1: Post was that I was twenty three and I had
Speaker 1: never written a newspaper story in my life. I had
Speaker 1: no idea how to do it, and I was surrounded
Speaker 1: by people who were the greatest, like yourself. Yeah, yeah, No.
Speaker 1: For those of you who don't know, David in his
Speaker 1: day was an absolutely legendary one of the great newspaper
Speaker 1: reporters of his generation. And they were They were Lot Woodward,
Speaker 1: Bob Woodward was when I got to the watch was
Speaker 1: I was in a business section, Woodward was there and
Speaker 1: I would watch and like Steve call Dur Steve coll
Speaker 1: who went on to become I mean, he's still around,
Speaker 1: but he ran the Columbia jernalsm school call when he
Speaker 1: I think you told me you pointed this out to me,
Speaker 1: when you know, when we had the push button phones, Yes,
Speaker 1: he would. You know, when I dial it would be
Speaker 1: like do do do do? Call was like that's too slow,
Speaker 1: and he'd be like it was like a concert pianist,
Speaker 1: you go to play a chord, Yeah, like the White Hed,
Speaker 1: get the White House. It would be like it would
Speaker 1: take him like five seconds. I'm like that was all.
Speaker 1: And I had bike. The legendary Micisic Goof was next
Speaker 1: to me. Anyway, My point is I'm surrounded by all
Speaker 1: these people who were just better at daily journalism than
Speaker 1: I am. And so the problem was, how do you
Speaker 1: succeed in an environment whatever? And you succeed in that
Speaker 1: environment by being the thing that they are not. Right,
Speaker 1: everyone else was fast and fluid, So I decided I
Speaker 1: would be slow and weird right and.
Speaker 2: Then, and in fairness, the Washington Post did not prize weirdness.
Speaker 1: No, it did not, although the key was the key.
Speaker 1: I mean, the problem to be solved was how do
Speaker 1: you stand up in an environment where everyone around you
Speaker 1: is a total pro and so the to stand out
Speaker 1: to see what everyone else is not doing. So people
Speaker 1: around me were not writing five thousand wood stories on
Speaker 1: death rod dogs.
Speaker 3: No, no.
Speaker 1: And I remember the first time I wrote a story
Speaker 1: for The New Yorker. I was still at the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: and I was writing the talk to the Towns before
Speaker 1: they were signed, because so that way I could freelance
Speaker 1: without them knowing, so I would. I was writing these
Speaker 1: talk of the towns and I went to see Chip McGrath.
Speaker 3: And it was Tina Brown's depitias.
Speaker 1: And Chip said I had written this little talk of
Speaker 1: the town and he had some problem. He said, this
Speaker 1: is I want you to fix this problem, he said,
Speaker 1: And so I said, I took it from him. I said, okay,
Speaker 1: and I just wrote in the margins my fix. And
Speaker 1: I remember the looking at him and he was astonished.
Speaker 3: Vulgarian.
Speaker 1: It was vulgar. It was vulgar. He expected me to
Speaker 1: go home and come back in a week with the fire.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, no, I'll just move this here,
Speaker 1: do that. And it was that's at the New Yorker.
Speaker 1: You had to be that otherwise you if you wanted
Speaker 1: to be slow and thoughtful and weird, then you were
Speaker 1: competing with everyone else.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So I got there and I had to completely change.
Speaker 1: I had to work hard. I had to do all
Speaker 1: these things that I wasn't doing at the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with more from my conversation with
Speaker 1: David Remnick.
Speaker 3: Which piece would you say set you off.
Speaker 2: Into You're now at this retrospective moment in your literary
Speaker 2: journalistic life where you're writing a piece that echoes your
Speaker 2: first book and you're no longer twenty three years old. Ye,
Speaker 2: there must be some sense of self examination about that.
Speaker 1: It was probably a piece called the Cool Hunt. Remember
Speaker 1: The Cool Hid, where I I don't know how I
Speaker 1: found a woman who was still a very good friend
Speaker 1: of mine, did Gordon, who was a who went around
Speaker 1: whose business was going around America telling corporations what was
Speaker 1: cool T shirts and T shirts. And she was and
Speaker 1: still is absolutely hilarious and was she I wrote a
Speaker 1: piece about her about this idea that she would just
Speaker 1: go around and she would declare something cool and she
Speaker 1: would tell you what was.
Speaker 3: And companies would hire her, hire her.
Speaker 1: But the whole point of that piece was the title
Speaker 1: the Cool Hunt. Once you had the title, just like
Speaker 1: it's like and there was you know, someone wanted to
Speaker 1: make a movie out of course never nothing ever came
Speaker 1: of it. But it was the first time I realized
Speaker 1: like, like that was you know, that kind of it was
Speaker 1: something else. It was something fun about taking being interested
Speaker 1: in pop culture for the New Yorker And did.
Speaker 2: New Yorker never have that kind of thing before? Now
Speaker 2: now this kind of story comes up. But was that
Speaker 2: an absence that you were feeling a vacuum?
Speaker 1: I didn't know anyone else in the New York it
Speaker 1: was the same. It was the same thing about trying
Speaker 1: to be different. So I didn't know of anyone else
Speaker 1: who was writing about. Deede Gordon was not the typical
Speaker 1: subject of a New Yorker profile. No, I mean she,
Speaker 1: you know, she was this kind of strange, hilarious. She
Speaker 1: had this crazy crush on Keanu Reeves. She was obsessed
Speaker 1: with Keanu Reeves. But I just thought, like, this is
Speaker 1: different in a way, this is this will stand out.
Speaker 1: I said, I needed you just needed to stand out.
Speaker 2: And then you did the tipping point, which you know
Speaker 2: is now associated with with with you. But as you've
Speaker 2: said repeatedly that you what you were doing is taking
Speaker 2: an idea that was very much in the air in
Speaker 2: sociological terms, in terms of crime and much else. So
Speaker 2: what was the idea for the book?
Speaker 3: You had these two pieces, and how did you cast
Speaker 3: out what the what the book?
Speaker 2: What would what it would be, what shape it would take,
Speaker 2: what voice it would have?
Speaker 1: Well? I didn't. My agent came Tina, who I knew socially,
Speaker 1: and then she became an agent. She was just like
Speaker 1: a she worked in the admissions department of something.
Speaker 3: She'd been a graduate student, graduates in history.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I just knew she's friends of friends, and
Speaker 1: then she became an agent, and she'said, can I be
Speaker 1: your agent. And I was like, I guess sure. And
Speaker 1: then she's now like the powerhouse of powerhouses. But I
Speaker 1: knew her, and she said, you should write a book
Speaker 1: on this, and I but what is this? The article
Speaker 1: the tipping point? Because people got really interested in it,
Speaker 1: and I started like someone in California flew me out
Speaker 1: to speak to their group about it. I remember thinking
Speaker 1: that was really weird that piece of New Yorker could
Speaker 1: so I thought, oh, maybe people are kind of into this,
Speaker 1: and Tina's like, yeah, you should do a book. So
Speaker 1: I knew the article in New Yorker was a chapter,
Speaker 1: clearly a chapter or a part of a chapter, and
Speaker 1: I had to kind of improvise. I'd never written a
Speaker 1: book before. I had to kind of ye.
Speaker 2: But before we get to the way you reconsider the idea,
Speaker 2: because it's a very interesting bridge, I want to know
Speaker 2: it probably is not in the stack of cards here.
Speaker 2: I want to know how you invented yourself as a voice,
Speaker 2: and how naturally or not that came to me. Because
Speaker 2: I can read a paragraph of yours or a page
Speaker 2: of yours, and I know it right away that's you.
Speaker 2: There's a certain cadence, there's a certain way that chapters
Speaker 2: end is there there are moves that are as distinctive
Speaker 2: as somebody's you know, a piano player or an athlete.
Speaker 3: You you you know, you.
Speaker 2: Watch enough athletes, you you listen to enough music. There's
Speaker 2: a there's a Gladwell cadence. There's a Gladwell sense of humor.
Speaker 2: It's very, very distinctive. How self aware are you of it?
Speaker 2: How did it become itself?
Speaker 1: Well, it's hard to say, you know that. So I
Speaker 1: spent ten years at the Post, and there's something I
Speaker 1: think that's crucial, because what happens at at the Post
Speaker 1: is you learn how to write, meaning you learn how
Speaker 1: to write without fear and self consciousness. You're forced to
Speaker 1: remember by the end by time with the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: I remember when I was one of the last stories
Speaker 1: I wrote before I left for the New Yorker, there
Speaker 1: was a shooting on the l R R. And it
Speaker 1: happened at like four thirty in the afternoon, and back
Speaker 1: then the deadline was like six thirty. Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: get on the LA R and I go out to
Speaker 1: the scene. I get there at like five thirty and
Speaker 1: it's clearly a front page story, and they're like we
Speaker 1: need the story.
Speaker 2: There's a shooting on the Long Island Railroad is a
Speaker 2: front page story in the in the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: It was a big shooting. Ah. It was like serious,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be well. I mean my assumption was I
Speaker 1: was telling them, of course, it's a front page story.
Speaker 1: That's the way it works. This is huge. Someone got
Speaker 1: shot in New York City. Hold the front page. It's
Speaker 1: about the fold, you know, like the whole nine year.
Speaker 1: You know this. You did this Jill yourself many many times.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you could do it from Moscow and you
Speaker 1: could use They all get nervous. Michael Spector used to
Speaker 1: his colleague ours was so good at this. He would
Speaker 1: do a kind of salami slicing where he'd take a
Speaker 1: story and do ten stories out of it, and each
Speaker 1: one would get on the front page because he would
Speaker 1: would be like, it's changed. I said, there's another wrinkle,
Speaker 1: and they'd be like, oh my god, and they put
Speaker 1: the first wrinkle on the front page, the second wrinkle.
Speaker 1: Then there's day three. Oh my god. I go out there.
Speaker 1: I'm on the l A R. And I remember this
Speaker 1: is like this is when I was at the peak
Speaker 1: of my powers. So I interviewed all these people. I
Speaker 1: don't have time to I don't there's no laptops back then,
Speaker 1: there's no like. And I did the thing which I
Speaker 1: had heard, you know, hard bitten newspaper. I picked up
Speaker 1: the phone and I called it in. I remember that
Speaker 1: feeling of like. I dictated a fifteen hundred word story
Speaker 1: into the phone to someone typing on the other end,
Speaker 1: straight through, and I was so pleased with myself. But
Speaker 1: I realized at the moment, I got nothing else to
Speaker 1: learn here. I have, they have. But that's what you
Speaker 1: learned like, and that you never lose that liuidity. The
Speaker 1: hit so another was every bit, every every bad habit
Speaker 1: you have as a writer gets beaten out of you
Speaker 1: at a newspaper because it's just discipline. It's like boom,
Speaker 1: you know, tell the story, tell them in a way
Speaker 1: that's compelling.
Speaker 3: But something happens to your pros. And I will linger
Speaker 3: on this too long.
Speaker 2: But if I read Anthony Lane, for example, I can
Speaker 2: read him and I know that obviously Anthony is an
Speaker 2: incredibly airudite reader and writer, but I know that he
Speaker 2: did not get through life without reading PG. Woodhouse over
Speaker 2: and over again. That that informs this, the texture of this,
Speaker 2: this this tapestry. Who was that for you or was
Speaker 2: it just the newspaper business?
Speaker 1: Well, no, no, no, So then I get to I don't
Speaker 1: think I think I have a little bit of that
Speaker 1: at the Post. But it's but it gets by putting it,
Speaker 1: you get you get pared down, you get rid of
Speaker 1: all your bad habits, and then you you have It's
Speaker 1: like a It's like you know, in playing a musical instrument,
Speaker 1: you spend the first ten years mastering the fundamentals, and
Speaker 1: then you're free to develop some kind of study, but
Speaker 1: you have to do the compulsory, you know, work to
Speaker 1: go to And that's what the post is. You it
Speaker 1: it just you get reduced to the simplest essence of
Speaker 1: how to tell a story, and now you have the
Speaker 1: freedom and it come to the A lot of it
Speaker 1: was Adam Gopnik. So I was reading Gopnik long before
Speaker 1: I joined The New Yorker. And Gopnik is an exceedingly
Speaker 1: distinctive voice, right, And I mean a beautiful way of
Speaker 1: expressing himself. And and there's there's little kind of beautiful
Speaker 1: little frill, I mean, his his pro sings, his little choruses,
Speaker 1: and frills, and it's just like and reading that you know,
Speaker 1: he's I'm a I'm half a generation, but his move
Speaker 1: is he has many But what is the pop culture.
Speaker 2: Or boomer pop culture as he and I have discussed
Speaker 2: with reference when discussing something like you know, Nietzsche or
Speaker 2: the friend that's crucial.
Speaker 1: So this reminds me of something when I was very
Speaker 1: when I was in middle school, I met my lab
Speaker 1: partner was a guy named Terry Martin, who I no
Speaker 1: turn Martin now a Soviet scholar, but he by happenstance
Speaker 1: in our little town in Canada. He was my lab partner.
Speaker 1: And Terry was an absolutely brilliant guy. And we were
Speaker 1: in biology together and we would do these experiments and
Speaker 1: he would always refuse to do the experiment the way
Speaker 1: we were supposed to do it, like as a matter
Speaker 1: of and I remember at first utterly horrified because we
Speaker 1: would never we couldn't finish anything, nothing was ever handed in.
Speaker 1: We would always get terrible grades. And then about like
Speaker 1: by kind of November of seventh grade, I realize it's
Speaker 1: genius because what he taught me was that you have
Speaker 1: the freedom. I mean, he wasn't being destructive or nihilistic.
Speaker 1: He was like saying, okay, so they're all going to
Speaker 1: do it this way, but we don't have to do
Speaker 1: it that way. We can there's another way to learn
Speaker 1: what's going on here. He was deeply interesting.
Speaker 3: This is what so interests me. So play is what
Speaker 3: you use the word.
Speaker 2: And I think it even caused some people alarm or
Speaker 2: they're offended intellectually or otherwise, or they're jealous or whatever
Speaker 2: it is. You use the phrase playing with ideas as
Speaker 2: if this is to them somehow irresponsible.
Speaker 3: What is playing with ideas mean?
Speaker 1: It begins with Terry in seventh grade because Terry and
Speaker 1: I then we developed this deep friendship and we would
Speaker 1: play endless games of monopoly, and we then deregulated monopoly,
Speaker 1: and his whole our idea was this is this is
Speaker 1: our idea? Was the rules? At that point we were like, well,
Speaker 1: the rules make no sense. Like the game as it's
Speaker 1: a brilliant game, but for example, why do you start
Speaker 1: with fifteen hundred dollars? That's that is by the way,
Speaker 1: if you're interested, this is the flaw with monopoly, because
Speaker 1: the point of monopoly is when you're playing it, it
Speaker 1: should be a question of what can I afford? You?
Speaker 1: Should it should be a difficult question. I land on
Speaker 1: Marvin Gardens, do I want to buy Marvin Gardens? Should
Speaker 1: be a question that you have to entertain and come
Speaker 1: up with a serious answer to. If you give each
Speaker 1: player fifteen hundred dollars to start and you land on
Speaker 1: Marvin Gardens, you just buy it? How is that interesting?
Speaker 1: That's absurd?
Speaker 3: So it's a little bit like inherited wealth.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. So we started with one dollar and.
Speaker 2: What could you buy with one dollar?
Speaker 3: So you can't even get a slice of pizza?
Speaker 1: Much left?
Speaker 3: Marvin guard you.
Speaker 1: So the first ten minutes is just speed circling the
Speaker 1: board a cumulating capital, and then and then you, and
Speaker 1: then you. We have to come up with all kinds
Speaker 1: of ways to Basically, we created systems for creating leverage.
Speaker 3: You have too much time on your hand.
Speaker 1: No, No, we played so much monopoly, so we What
Speaker 1: I realized now is that we would sell the derivatives.
Speaker 1: So I would say we like, if I landed on
Speaker 1: your property you had improved, you know, the blue property,
Speaker 1: you know Vermont and Oriental and what have we? And
Speaker 1: I owe you five hundred bucks? We'd never pay the
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars. That's silly. Why would you pay the
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars? Instead, it should be an invitation to
Speaker 1: a negotiation about there are clearly I owe you five
Speaker 1: hundred bucks, all right, So how can I be useful
Speaker 1: to you in some other way? Right?
Speaker 3: So it's goods and services.
Speaker 1: Yes, you know, I have you land on you land
Speaker 1: on on Vermont, you'll meet five hundred bucks. I have Broadway,
Speaker 1: I need park Place, so I say, okay, pay me
Speaker 1: a hundred But if you land on park Place, I
Speaker 1: have the right of first refusal to buy that property
Speaker 1: front right now. That's a that's a simple example. We
Speaker 1: constructed these insanely elaborate, massive derivatives and we would play.
Speaker 3: Did they have No Drugs? In Canada?
Speaker 1: We would play with Terry's cousin Fred, and we would
Speaker 1: play like three or four games an afternoon, and we
Speaker 1: would play hundreds of games a summer, and we would
Speaker 1: just we would get together every morning to just play
Speaker 1: this game like but it was the same thing. It
Speaker 1: was like, you know, and each over the course of
Speaker 1: the summer we would create ever more elaborate structures around
Speaker 1: But that's that's the origin of play because Terry's assumption.
Speaker 1: This is what Terry taught me. He was like, what
Speaker 1: does Parker brothers know about monopoly? That was self confidence
Speaker 1: of that was brilliant.
Speaker 3: Fair enough, But when you're when you were dealing.
Speaker 2: With auto safety, medical tests, all the many subjects.
Speaker 3: In other words, at what point do you feel.
Speaker 2: Grimly responsible toward the set of ideas and the and
Speaker 2: the facts and and and how does that interact with playing?
Speaker 2: What's the difference between what you're doing and what an
Speaker 2: academic feels obliged? Because I mean, I remember having a
Speaker 2: piece of yours and there was a piece and it
Speaker 2: was so mean to Ralph Nader, who I was so great,
Speaker 2: who I was brought up to think was just an
Speaker 2: incredible hero for all. Okay, he lost the election at
Speaker 2: one point, but another mind.
Speaker 1: But I can tell you where that came from. So
Speaker 1: this goes to you, and.
Speaker 3: Then you blame poor Ralph Nader for what like.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so genius that so on the sense of play,
Speaker 1: what should the first The first layer of play is
Speaker 1: understanding other people who want to play, right, So I
Speaker 1: got I like cars, and I thought it'd be fun
Speaker 1: to write about autombile safety for the New York because
Speaker 1: nobody was unning on other books, and if they were
Speaker 1: writing about it, they were writing about it, and this
Speaker 1: kind of really kind of wrote boring. So find someone
Speaker 1: who has an interesting take on auto safety. Nowhere would
Speaker 1: that person resigne, Well, not in academia. They would work
Speaker 1: for a car company. Right. Turns out there's a Scottish
Speaker 1: guy called Leonard Evans who ran the safety department at
Speaker 1: General Motors. And Leonard wrote a book called Traffic Safety
Speaker 1: in America, which is so genius. And I read Traffic Safety,
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, Leonards, you're a genius.
Speaker 1: So call up Leonard and he's got this whole Scottish
Speaker 1: brogue accent.
Speaker 3: And he's been waiting for you.
Speaker 1: He has been waiting for him for me his entire life.
Speaker 1: No journalist has ever called Leonard, of course, Lend And
Speaker 1: Leonard's sitting in his office in like Dearborn, wherever the
Speaker 1: hell he is, and he doesn't even bother the clearer
Speaker 1: with General Motors Public Relations because he's never had a
Speaker 1: journalist call him before. He's just on the phone with
Speaker 1: me and Leonard does something the first story letter gives me.
Speaker 1: He goes in his Scottish accent, which I can't do.
Speaker 1: He says, you realize we're talking about airbags. And one
Speaker 1: of this is in the mid nineties or in the
Speaker 1: late nineties, and one of Leonard's points was airbags were
Speaker 1: suddenly a big deal. Everyone was in love with airbags.
Speaker 1: And his point was the airbag, if you're not wearing
Speaker 1: your seatbelt, the airbag is you can kill you, particularly
Speaker 1: if you're very young or very old or very small.
Speaker 1: And Leonard said, the reason we don't realize this is
Speaker 1: that the reason we have airbags is because of Ralph Nader.
Speaker 1: And Ralph Nator didn't understand this fact, and he was
Speaker 1: promoting the airbag without he thought it was an alternative
Speaker 1: to the seat belt, as opposed to an accompaniment of
Speaker 1: the seat belt. And then Leonard said, and I never
Speaker 1: wrote about this. He said, what you should do is
Speaker 1: you should file a Freedom of Information Act request with
Speaker 1: the whatever the automobile whatever the transit automobile bureaucracy is
Speaker 1: and ask for all the cases of people who died
Speaker 1: because they weren't wearing a seat belt and the airbag
Speaker 1: went off. And that's the blood that's on Ralph Nader's hands.
Speaker 1: And I was like, Oh my god. So I filed.
Speaker 1: I file the foil request and like two months later,
Speaker 1: like seven huge boxes show up at the Washington Post
Speaker 1: and it's all the case files. What did I do
Speaker 1: with that story? Nothing? And then so I remember this,
Speaker 1: and I remember letter, and I get to the New
Speaker 1: Yorker and I'm filled with shand I never wrote the story.
Speaker 1: I would have won the pullet surprise. I would have
Speaker 1: won the Leonard gave me a pull of surprise. It
Speaker 1: was all there in the boxes. It was like hundreds
Speaker 1: of people. I mean, it's sad. He did say.
Speaker 3: It was sad, Hashtag said said.
Speaker 1: And Leonard is not happy with me not doing a
Speaker 1: story about this. So then I say, okay, Leonard, I'll
Speaker 1: do the Ralph Nader story. Just I can't. I'm not
Speaker 1: now the ship is sail. But we'll do the Ralph
Speaker 1: Nader story. And then I go. So then for some reason,
Speaker 1: I go to Detroit, but I don't hang out with Leonard.
Speaker 1: I hang out with his competitor at Ford, and I
Speaker 1: think he got very well certain about that. He was unhappy.
Speaker 1: But the guy at Ford had this whole thing about
Speaker 1: three point belts and we crashed all these cars it
Speaker 1: was so much fun, and then so I came back.
Speaker 1: But the point it all starts with Leonard. Like Leonard
Speaker 1: was a guy who wanted to play. He was an iconoclast, ignored,
Speaker 1: sitting in his office in Deerboat and nobody was listening
Speaker 1: to him, and he was writing these books that were
Speaker 1: read by seven people, and he was just great. He
Speaker 1: was just like and when you want cover someone like that?
Speaker 1: And he was so thrilled with the idea that.
Speaker 2: I think another thing that thrilled you is that all
Speaker 2: the rest of us slobs who are writing about politics
Speaker 2: or show business or sports are obsessed with access.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: You want to write a profile of Lebron James, you
Speaker 2: want to write a profile of Kamala Harris or whatever,
Speaker 2: and you have to go through these tentacles and seaweed
Speaker 2: of handlers and no and no, and can we have
Speaker 2: quote approval and photo approval?
Speaker 3: And the answer is no. Okay, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: It's terrible.
Speaker 3: It's terrible.
Speaker 2: And I think part of it, And tell me if
Speaker 2: I'm wrong. Was your antipathy to that? I mean, the
Speaker 2: closest I think you might have done to a true
Speaker 2: celebrity profile. One of my favorite pieces was the guy
Speaker 2: who was the Ronco what was it called the Ronco
Speaker 2: jar and bottlecutter.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's one of my favorite pieces of all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that I ever did. On the guy who did the
Speaker 1: showtime artissorary.
Speaker 3: That's really the right o. The retissary chicken.
Speaker 1: God.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but what I gleaned from that also, you you
Speaker 2: had a very early interest in here.
Speaker 3: We're going back a little bit. Before you were in journalism,
Speaker 3: you were in advertising.
Speaker 1: What was I wanted to be an advertising? I think
Speaker 1: they couldn't get a job.
Speaker 3: You couldn't get a job. Why did you want to
Speaker 3: be in advertising?
Speaker 1: Well, because I liked the idea that someone can tell
Speaker 1: a story in thirty seconds. I just thought that was
Speaker 1: fantastic and it was in awe of I thought the
Speaker 1: greatest achievement was a well told thirty second story was
Speaker 1: the hardest thing in the world. And the idea that
Speaker 1: it can make you laugh or cry in thirty seconds
Speaker 1: while they're selling you something, it's just in the degree
Speaker 1: of defilion on that is just off the charts.
Speaker 3: Well, so Henny wanted to do that. Hence what was
Speaker 3: his name, the Ronco majority.
Speaker 1: So Rona he did the remember he did the He
Speaker 1: used to do the late night infomercials. He was the
Speaker 1: infomercial king and he did he made him a number
Speaker 1: of things, but his show piece product was the Showtime
Speaker 1: Ortistery Oven, which was I claimed, dollar for dollar, the
Speaker 1: finest kitchen appliance ever many and I still believe that
Speaker 1: to be the case. And I went out to la
Speaker 1: and I hung out with Ron, and it was I
Speaker 1: decided to go deep on Ron. And he turns out
Speaker 1: he's from like Asbury Park or somewhere in his His
Speaker 1: people were all.
Speaker 3: They were tumblers.
Speaker 1: There were sales on the boardwalk in New Jersey. They
Speaker 1: all sold like knives and stuff on the boardwalk. And
Speaker 1: Ron was the you know, another guy, Edwin McMahon was
Speaker 1: part of that circle. And a guy named Kidders Morris,
Speaker 1: who was rom p Appeal's grandfather, was a legendary guy
Speaker 1: from the Old Country who came over and was selling
Speaker 1: kitchen gadgets on the boardwalk. And they were they would
Speaker 1: do the spiel and you know, the chop Chop chop.
Speaker 1: They'd have the they have the all the vegetables, and
Speaker 1: they'd be sitting on the boardwalk and they would show
Speaker 1: you the knife, and they go chop chop, chop, chop, shop.
Speaker 1: And the whole thing was to turn. This is a
Speaker 1: crucial thing that he learns back then, which is so
Speaker 1: the crowd gathers around you when you got the Ginsu
Speaker 1: knife and you're chopping vegetables, and then at a certain
Speaker 1: first of all, you can't you have a He taught
Speaker 1: me this. He's like, you got the carrots and the potatoes,
Speaker 1: and you got the pineapple. You can't ever chop the
Speaker 1: pineapple because it's so expensive. It's just there. It's the
Speaker 1: thought that he might somehow one day chop the pineapple
Speaker 1: that keeps the people coming. But no, no, you chop
Speaker 1: the carrots. The carrots are like five cents of carrot.
Speaker 1: But the key thing is a turn. So the people
Speaker 1: come close to gather around you. You're going chop chop,
Speaker 1: chop chop, and you got to sell them the knife,
Speaker 1: and they got to get out of there because the
Speaker 1: news one do people have to come in. That's the key,
Speaker 1: so that anybody could do the thing. Chop chop, chop,
Speaker 1: chop chop. People got around, But it's turning that crowd
Speaker 1: and bringing in a new one in a seamless fashion.
Speaker 1: That's the and Ron was battle tested on the boarder.
Speaker 1: He was the greatest of all the boardwalk. And then
Speaker 1: he goes to l A and he takes it up
Speaker 1: a notch and he starts doing late night infomercials. And
Speaker 1: he was so good. And I hung out with him
Speaker 1: and he from I was out there for like two weeks,
Speaker 1: mostly goofing around, but hang and I talked with the
Speaker 1: guy who collaborated with on the showtime oven, and I
Speaker 1: actually got it. I used to eat for years. I
Speaker 1: used to cook my chickens, and on the Showtime it
Speaker 1: was amazing.
Speaker 3: No more, I think, I don't know what.
Speaker 1: It got really squeaky in like year six, you had
Speaker 1: a squeaky road. I had a squeaky one. And Ron
Speaker 1: told me that I had to fix it, and I.
Speaker 3: Threw it out.
Speaker 1: But his big thing, you threw out the oven. I
Speaker 1: did his big thing that you know a lot of
Speaker 1: the back then in the old days, the rotisseries. Uh,
Speaker 1: they they went like this like this is the spirit.
Speaker 1: They were vertical. And Ron's like, why do you do it?
Speaker 1: Vertical makes no sense. The juices flow to the bottom. Crazy,
Speaker 1: It's got to be horizontal. He's the guy who starts
Speaker 1: through Arizona Ortissory, and he was so it was so
Speaker 1: and getting into the family history, and at one point
Speaker 1: he takes me to the grave site in New Jersey
Speaker 1: where all the whole the three generations of these legendary
Speaker 1: pitchmen who work the board balk and they're all buried
Speaker 1: in this thing. And he starts to cry, and it
Speaker 1: was just like it was just unbelievable. But the move
Speaker 1: there and this monitor, your dear friend Henry Finder, was
Speaker 1: very He was another very formative figure in this. He's
Speaker 1: like everyone. The standard move is to make fun of
Speaker 1: Ron Papeal. Do not make fun of Ron Papeal. You
Speaker 1: have to genuinely. He's a hero you have and if
Speaker 1: the reader thinks for a moment you're mocking the man,
Speaker 1: you've failed. And that is the single mon And to
Speaker 1: this day people make this air. Journalists do they think
Speaker 1: at some point they have to demonstrate their superiority to
Speaker 1: the subject. Yep, No, the subject. The subject is the hero,
Speaker 1: and you have to find your job. There's ten ways
Speaker 1: to write that. Peel had a very comp.
Speaker 3: Except in political reporting.
Speaker 1: But okay, yeah, well but Ron had a There's ten
Speaker 1: ways to write the Ramp Appeal profile. Nine of those
Speaker 1: ways you make fun of him, thank you, and one
Speaker 1: way you reckon. You look for what is what was
Speaker 1: fantastic about this guy, which is he devoted his life
Speaker 1: and his people for a three generations, devoted his life
Speaker 1: to making working in the kitchen a happier, healthier, easier,
Speaker 1: more efficient. That's a fantastic He cared about whether the
Speaker 1: chicken was vertical or horizontal. We'll be right back. We're
Speaker 1: back at the ninety second Street Y with David Remnick.
Speaker 3: You are no longer twenty three, and you've just had
Speaker 3: a couple of kids. They're how old though?
Speaker 1: I got a toddler and a baby. I'm forbidden. I've
Speaker 1: forbidden sixty are you? You're fourteen?
Speaker 2: First of all, good luck, second of all, second of all,
Speaker 2: famously And you once told me you know how you
Speaker 2: did one of your moves about college admissions.
Speaker 1: I love that stuff.
Speaker 2: Crazy they're getting in and the ninety second Street Why
Speaker 2: kindergarten and ivy League this and Da Da Da and Canada.
Speaker 2: We just filled out an application the night before.
Speaker 1: And I okay, all right, no, no, not even the
Speaker 1: night before you the day of day up, David My
Speaker 1: parents weren't even involved. My father asked me, why are
Speaker 1: you applying to college? I was like, well, I'm just
Speaker 1: doing the form now.
Speaker 3: And what did you put on it? Monopoly?
Speaker 1: No, you just send the form in. It's like a page.
Speaker 1: You just send it in.
Speaker 2: All right, So your kids are gonna not stay toddler
Speaker 2: and yeah, baby for very long. I promise you that
Speaker 2: I this This is one area where I know more.
Speaker 2: How are you going to feel about college admissions when
Speaker 2: they get to be sixteen, seventeen eighteen, because you're your
Speaker 2: your rant about Ivy League, which I've been doing for years,
Speaker 2: which is it's one of the most perfected rants of
Speaker 2: all time.
Speaker 1: I got a new rant, by the way, I got
Speaker 1: I got two episodes of my podcast. It is so
Speaker 1: I've been working on this rant. You're right, fifteen years.
Speaker 1: I have perfect I got two episodes of my podcast
Speaker 1: coming out I think next week. It's called the Georgetown Massacre.
Speaker 1: It is when I say this is this is like
Speaker 1: it is my Beethoven's fifth, it is my it is
Speaker 1: my White album, it is my everything else I have done.
Speaker 3: This is what's going on is just like.
Speaker 1: Chump change compared. This is two parts two parts on
Speaker 1: one case involving a tennis player goes to Georgetown. And
Speaker 1: every single everything I've done as a writer has been building,
Speaker 1: building towards It's so genius and like, by the end,
Speaker 1: it's just like and it has twists and turns and
Speaker 1: it's just.
Speaker 3: It's Would you like to preview it?
Speaker 1: No, I don't want to give it away. You gotta
Speaker 1: listen to it, so I'm not giving it away. So good. No,
Speaker 1: but this is why I have to work for a living.
Speaker 1: But no, I know what you're saying. Am I going
Speaker 1: to be a hypocrite? Yeah? Of course? What the one
Speaker 1: thing I will not do? Though? Yeah? What? There was
Speaker 1: one place where I believe where.
Speaker 3: Are you gonna? We're you gonna draw the line?
Speaker 1: S a t prep Now I'm not. I'm not making
Speaker 1: the call.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, you mean the call to the the mocher call.
Speaker 1: You call in. I know, the guy who knows, the
Speaker 1: guy who knows, the guy who's on the board, not
Speaker 1: doing that, Okay, I say.
Speaker 2: We talked about voice before, and and one of the
Speaker 2: reasons I think that your podcast is so successful and
Speaker 2: so seductive and I don't miss them is that it
Speaker 2: has a real human voice. It doesn't feel read, even
Speaker 2: though I know damn well that you've worked on them
Speaker 2: really hard, similar to your pros that it feels your
Speaker 2: written pros feels spoken, and vice versa, which I mean
Speaker 2: is high high praise. Podcasting is a relatively new form.
Speaker 2: Why did you gravitate toward it in such a complete way?
Speaker 3: It's not, it's not. This is not some advocation.
Speaker 2: In fact, at a certain point, you know you've done
Speaker 2: work where the book is an extension of the podcast is.
Speaker 3: With the Bomber book. So tell me about that in
Speaker 3: your attraction to it.
Speaker 1: Well, there's certain kinds of stories. So for example, the
Speaker 1: story I was just telling you, what's George Semasker. You
Speaker 1: could you could write it, but it's not nearly as
Speaker 1: fun in written form. Right, So there's a certain kind
Speaker 1: of story which lends itself beautifully to audio, where audio
Speaker 1: permits you it could be more playful. You can get
Speaker 1: away with stuff.
Speaker 3: What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Get away with stuff? Yeah, there's no critical infrastructure, so
Speaker 1: it's like, no one's gonna you can.
Speaker 3: I don't understand. You could be more full of shit
Speaker 3: on red No, you could be like you have to be.
Speaker 3: You're careful.
Speaker 1: I mean I am no, No, we're not not making
Speaker 1: stuff up. What I'm saying is people are more accepting
Speaker 1: of a kind of playful outlandishness. So part of the
Speaker 1: the Georgetown Masker episodes there there's the tongue is in
Speaker 1: the cheek, right even as I'm making a substanute point, and.
Speaker 2: You feel you can do that more than on in
Speaker 2: Caslon type in the Again.
Speaker 1: You would not let me write that for The New
Speaker 1: York You take it.
Speaker 2: Out because I would feel what it wouldn't work.
Speaker 1: It's like, I don't It's hard to explain because a
Speaker 1: lot of what's playful about audio is stuff you're doing
Speaker 1: with your voice, right, So you're you know, I can
Speaker 1: I can adopt a tone of voice that says we're.
Speaker 3: We're having a fun, right, we're playing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like there's a character in the Georgetown Masker. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's it's part of it. There's a turn and we
Speaker 1: meet there's a guy who's charged in a case and
Speaker 1: he takes as his lawyer's the two legendary two greatest
Speaker 1: defense lawyers in the country, Roy Black and Howard Trepnik.
Speaker 1: These two guys in Miami and we meet Roy and Howard.
Speaker 1: Now the first crucial thing is I can. If I'm
Speaker 1: running a print version, you'll meet Royan Howard. I describe
Speaker 1: them like you gotta hear. When you hear them, it's
Speaker 1: just so much better and you realize, like, and then
Speaker 1: when you're describing them, I can describe them in a
Speaker 1: much more colorful way when I know you're gonna hear
Speaker 1: their voice. Right, I can't explain it better than that,
Speaker 1: But there is something about I can. Like, Howard has
Speaker 1: got long hair and rides a motorcycle in the early
Speaker 1: morning hours and it looks like a movie star. And
Speaker 1: uh does this he in this trial? He does a
Speaker 1: he does a direct examination of the defendant's daughter that
Speaker 1: is just so masterful. I mean, it's just it's like
Speaker 1: and I was reading, you know, you read the transcript
Speaker 1: and you come to this thing and you're like someone
Speaker 1: because people like you and I. You know, our business fundamentally,
Speaker 1: it's not about We're not in the writing business. We're
Speaker 1: in the interviewing business. Right. We only write because we've
Speaker 1: interviewed somebody. It's really interviewing you think of it that way.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, really, oh yeah. The whole game is interviewing.
Speaker 1: It's not okay writing is I would never write something
Speaker 1: without it. The idea of writing something just without having
Speaker 1: sat down first to talk to someone is unthinkable to me. Right,
Speaker 1: So when you a defense lawyer.
Speaker 2: Is just a stipulate. That's the fun part for you.
Speaker 2: That's the that's the that's the juice of it above all.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't find the writing part hard. I find
Speaker 1: the the writing part is just it's just a matter
Speaker 1: of sitting down and it's the it's undn't.
Speaker 3: Tell any writers that, no, but that's.
Speaker 1: The gift of being at the Washington Post for ten years.
Speaker 1: It used to be hard, and it wasn't. By the
Speaker 1: time I was done there, I was on the phone
Speaker 1: dictating the story. Like they solved that problem. The hard
Speaker 1: part is can I sit down with somebody and can
Speaker 1: I understand who they are and what they're trying to
Speaker 1: say and represent that in a way that's meaningful and
Speaker 1: powerful and all of that is stuff you get from
Speaker 1: the interview. You don't. You can't make it up after
Speaker 1: the fact, So you have to. Like I was doing
Speaker 1: this summer, I spent I spent like twenty hours maybe
Speaker 1: I've forgotten how many hours, ten fifteen, twenty hours with
Speaker 1: this woman I was a psychologist, and it was incredible,
Speaker 1: Like she agreed, thank God, to sit with me for
Speaker 1: that long. I'm telling you, steal it. You're like the
Speaker 1: competition for goodness sake, that.
Speaker 3: Hurts me very much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not telling you, I'm telling you. It was the
Speaker 1: same thing with the Paul Simon thing that we did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've heard of him.
Speaker 1: Where he you know, he sat for forty hours and
Speaker 1: the whole thing. The trick, not the trick, the what's interesting,
Speaker 1: what's hard about that was not writing it up afterwards.
Speaker 1: All those problems were solved in the interview. The trick
Speaker 1: was when we were talking to.
Speaker 2: Him and I if I started to interrupt, which is
Speaker 2: the worst thing you can do in an interview. But I've
Speaker 2: interviewed Paul Simon. He's not immediately easy.
Speaker 3: And you had him.
Speaker 2: For you know, on and on and on, and it
Speaker 2: got richer and richer and richer, and he was something
Speaker 2: you did something about you, your patience, your interest, your silence, whatever,
Speaker 2: whatever it was, and drew out a guy that I
Speaker 2: think it's fair to say, is not immediately thrilled with
Speaker 2: being the process of being interviewed. He was.
Speaker 1: I don't understand why he was so he was. He
Speaker 1: kept on. I kept on saying I'm done, and then
Speaker 1: he would he would say, no, let's when are we
Speaker 1: meeting again? And we would be and Bruce, my friend,
Speaker 1: Bruce did it to get and Bruce I would look
Speaker 1: at you, yeah, Bruce, I would look at you like
Speaker 1: he really wants to do it again, and he would
Speaker 1: always do it again. And then I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: And I think that, you know, if I was kind
Speaker 1: of reconstructing why he was so kind of generous with
Speaker 1: his time, that would be part of it. Part of
Speaker 1: it was, I think we were uninterested in the parts
Speaker 1: of his life that he felt had been picked over.
Speaker 1: So we're not interested in your marriage to so and
Speaker 1: so in a relationship with Art Garf, but we were
Speaker 1: really interested in his dad. And I remember there was
Speaker 1: one moment we was a musician who was a musician.
Speaker 1: I remember there was one time where Bruce and I
Speaker 1: asked him some question. I asked him some question about
Speaker 1: his dad, and he went he talked straight for like
Speaker 1: half an hour, got incredibly emotional, and then he said
Speaker 1: I have to stop, and he got up and walked outside.
Speaker 3: I was like, wow, it was.
Speaker 1: There was something really deep, and the idea, it's so interesting,
Speaker 1: and it's that thing, that moment when you're giving somebody.
Speaker 1: First of all, it never gets old when you tap
Speaker 1: into something. So we had taped into something that was
Speaker 1: real about him. That his relationship to his father. He's
Speaker 1: a man in his seventies, his father's been dead for
Speaker 1: thirty years. He eclipsed his father in every conventional way
Speaker 1: by a million miles. And yet and he was still
Speaker 1: you realize, he was still writing about his father. He
Speaker 1: was still dreaming about his father. His father was still
Speaker 1: like with him. You know. It was just such a
Speaker 1: kind of like. But that when you get there, and
Speaker 1: that was such a long time for us to get there.
Speaker 1: When you get there with somebody that, like I said,
Speaker 1: the writing is not hard when you get that kind
Speaker 1: of moment on the.
Speaker 2: How did your parents affect the way you look? You're
Speaker 2: now this some you're moving forward, but slightly retrospective. You
Speaker 2: have kids, your life has changed, you look back on it.
Speaker 3: How did your parents inform who you are in your work?
Speaker 1: Well, my dad was uh was a He was a
Speaker 1: mischief maker in the He was someone who had no
Speaker 1: interest whatsoever in any authority, in any He he did not.
Speaker 1: The psychological term that best describes him was disagreeable. Not
Speaker 1: this psychologie. When he was a tom, they don't mean obnoxious.
Speaker 1: He was the furthest thing obnoxious, incredibly gracious man. In
Speaker 1: psychological terms, disagreeable means you are uninterested in what in
Speaker 1: the approval of others. No could care less. Just the
Speaker 1: idea of standing out and being different was just second
Speaker 1: nature for him. It wasn't that he relished that being different.
Speaker 1: He didn't care, just did what he was. He different,
Speaker 1: He taught man, taught man. He was. He's a kind
Speaker 1: of I've told this soy many times, but he we came,
Speaker 1: we moved to Canada, were living in rural Canada and
Speaker 1: in kind of men Inite country. It was all these
Speaker 1: old older Mennonites, people who are like the Amish. They're
Speaker 1: in driving buggies and a barn would burn down and
Speaker 1: they would do a barn raising that all gather the
Speaker 1: next day and they would raise the barn in one day.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of Mennonites would come in their horses and buggies
Speaker 1: from miles around and they would, you know, have huge
Speaker 1: spread of food and they would just it was incredible
Speaker 1: to watch actually, if you go to a barn raising,
Speaker 1: hundreds of them putting up a barn and and my
Speaker 1: father decided to join. And he see, so there's one car,
Speaker 1: a kind of you know, a volt his Volvo in
Speaker 1: with like a hundred horses and buggies, and he is
Speaker 1: like an English guy. They're all like clean shave and
Speaker 1: wearing black pants and like these you know hats, straw hats,
Speaker 1: and he's like got a big beard and a tie,
Speaker 1: and you know, he looks like a mathematician, an English
Speaker 1: mathematic drives up for his ball though with his kids
Speaker 1: in tow, and not an ounce of self consciousness, not
Speaker 1: even didn't even occur to him to ask permission to
Speaker 1: show up. He shows up and says, you know, basically,
Speaker 1: put me to work, and they're like okay, and they
Speaker 1: he doesn't know what they're doing. So he's doing the
Speaker 1: most manual labor. No one, none of the one hundred
Speaker 1: people this barn raising had had more than a sixth
Speaker 1: grade education. He has a PhD in advanced mathematics. And
Speaker 1: he's the happiest man there. That's so my dad. He
Speaker 1: was just like like and like went home and then
Speaker 1: never spoke about it again. Or my other favorite story
Speaker 1: of my dad, a story he told me when he
Speaker 1: was in his seventies. I don't know why I never
Speaker 1: told him this before. He's married my mom. My mom
Speaker 1: is Jamaican. They're in Jamaica. He's teaching at the University
Speaker 1: of West Indies, where one of his students is Kamala
Speaker 1: Harris's dad common as a stat and he decides he
Speaker 1: wants to write. He's writing some paper and back then,
Speaker 1: if you needed a book, you would it wasn't There's
Speaker 1: no the book he needed was not in the University
Speaker 1: of wes Indy's library, and he figures out it's at
Speaker 1: the Georgia Tech library, and so he's going to go
Speaker 1: to Georgia Tech. And so he writes a letter to
Speaker 1: the professor friend who knows that Georgia Tech. My name
Speaker 1: is Graham Blablah. I'm a professor University of Sindy's I
Speaker 1: would like to come to Georgia Tech to read your
Speaker 1: use your library. Guy says yes, and he's preparing to go,
Speaker 1: and he learns later that it kicks off a panic
Speaker 1: at Georgia Tech. Because it's nineteen sixty Georgia Tech is
Speaker 1: segregated and they don't know whether he's white or black.
Speaker 1: They just know he's a professor from the University of
Speaker 1: West Indies. God knows he could be a black guy
Speaker 1: coming to our camp. But we just invited a black
Speaker 1: guy to the campus. Holy shit. And like they go
Speaker 1: nuts and finally there's no telep there's no there's telephones,
Speaker 1: but there's no direct line. They try and find out where.
Speaker 1: Finally they reach you on the phone before he's about
Speaker 1: to come, and you know, he's called to the switchboard whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, Professor Glappel, Yes, this is so and so
Speaker 1: from Georgia Tech. Yes, are you white? He goes yes,
Speaker 1: and they go, oh, thank god. So then but this
Speaker 1: is the story's out of them. So then now they're
Speaker 1: going to roll out the red carpet. Right. But so
Speaker 1: he gets on the boat sails from Jamaica and I'm like,
Speaker 1: he gets on the bus, how you did it? Back?
Speaker 1: Then takes the bus from Miami to Atlanta, goes they
Speaker 1: have a welcome dinner. They're all sitting down, all like
Speaker 1: these white men, right, and halfway through the meal, he
Speaker 1: pulls out a large eight by ten photo of my mom.
Speaker 1: He says, yes, my wife, I was going to bring over.
Speaker 1: I said it again, hands it around the room like no,
Speaker 1: to him, that was a fantastic moment, like show these
Speaker 1: guys never mentioned a word about that story for forty somewhat.
Speaker 1: And then he's He's like, oh, I went to Georgia
Speaker 1: Tech and I I had interviewed some guy there who
Speaker 1: was the head of the political science department, who was
Speaker 1: a black guy from Atlanta, And I told it to
Speaker 1: my dad. I'm goes like, oh, it's so funny. Wasn't
Speaker 1: always that way, and then tell the story. But his
Speaker 1: that was so hammy, just like he just it was
Speaker 1: like he just liked, he loved nothing more than like
Speaker 1: poking the bear. But he didn't, you know, you didn't
Speaker 1: make a big deal about it. He just wanted to
Speaker 1: go around poking the bear.
Speaker 2: Before I asked about your mom, you mentioned that your
Speaker 2: dad was taught Kamala Harris's far.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Donald Harris was a student of his. He knew
Speaker 1: him somehow. Donald Harris told me this, not my dad,
Speaker 1: because my dad obviously had passed by the time Kamala
Speaker 1: became a big deal. But yeah, they were Donald Harris.
Speaker 1: My mom knows Donald Harris is from is from Brownstown,
Speaker 1: which is where my mom went to school. She knows
Speaker 1: she went to school. She went to church at his
Speaker 1: father's church. And like they clearly must have seen each
Speaker 1: other across a few at the age of the degree
Speaker 1: of excitement in well all, I mean, first of all,
Speaker 1: what's hilarious is there's one group that says Kamala Harns
Speaker 1: is black. Then there's another group that says she's Indian,
Speaker 1: and then there's the Jamaicans or like she's a Jamaican, right,
Speaker 1: So the level of excitement among the Jamaicans over her
Speaker 1: is my mother like, literally she's ninety three. There is
Speaker 1: zero chance she will exit this world between now and
Speaker 1: the election. Zero. It's it's not happening. Like the degree
Speaker 1: to which her defense I call her up. She just
Speaker 1: the first time. That's just defending Kamala against un They
Speaker 1: were attacking her for her big thing? Is they attacking
Speaker 1: her for not revealing her positions she's just started. How
Speaker 1: can you how can she have positions before she's started.
Speaker 1: My mother's whole thing is this should unfold over the
Speaker 1: passage of time.
Speaker 2: Is I remember I had the privilege of meeting her
Speaker 2: a few times, particularly in Washington, and she she struck
Speaker 2: me as a very proper.
Speaker 1: She's my mother is a very very Yes, she is
Speaker 1: a very refined, dignified Jamaican lady. Yeah, you don't nobody
Speaker 1: messes with she was she also, you know, she loved
Speaker 1: also confronting authority and did it endlessly and to great
Speaker 1: effect in our little town. They had never met.
Speaker 3: How did she navigate rural Ontario?
Speaker 1: She just sailed right in. She she met all the
Speaker 1: kind of power brokers in town, charmed them, got on
Speaker 1: all the right committees. And I mean it was Mennon nights,
Speaker 1: So the men nights are There's no, they're not the
Speaker 1: opposine end of the.
Speaker 3: They are not racist.
Speaker 1: There's no racist. There was no racist. You know, it
Speaker 1: was nothing. And also it's a very different now that
Speaker 1: I understand this, it's a very different different story when
Speaker 1: you're the only black person in town. What do you mean, Well,
Speaker 1: actually talk about this in my book. An outsider is
Speaker 1: not threatening at those in those numbers, right, particularly an
Speaker 1: outsider who is is and she was. This is a
Speaker 1: deeply Christian town and my mother is a very devout woman,
Speaker 1: and so she read very she seemed very familiar to them,
Speaker 1: even if she was at the same time, in some
Speaker 1: sense exotic, but she's very She would never register even
Speaker 1: if something untoward was done to her, she would never
Speaker 1: register that in the moment. You know, she would hold
Speaker 1: it back and she would tell you about it maybe later,
Speaker 1: but it was in a And also there's a lot
Speaker 1: of us things will tell you this. It's very different
Speaker 1: to come from a culture where you're in the majority.
Speaker 1: You know, a story actually I told in Lars when
Speaker 1: my mom was in She was a scholarship student at
Speaker 1: a boarding school in Jamaica, and all of the scholarship
Speaker 1: students were black, right they would be, and they were
Speaker 1: all there because they were really good students. And so
Speaker 1: she's like eleven years old and she reads in the
Speaker 1: encyclop Britannica that black people are genetically inferior to white
Speaker 1: people when it comes to intelligence. And she is, no,
Speaker 1: she can't comprehend this because in her world, all the
Speaker 1: smart people are these.
Speaker 3: In the Britannica.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is like from nineteen hundred. They're still in
Speaker 1: Jamaica in nineteen thirty whatever. But in her world, all
Speaker 1: the smart people are black and the dumb ones are
Speaker 1: the you know, the plantation on her daughters. You know
Speaker 1: these white kids from you know, one general, they're like,
Speaker 1: what are they doing here? You know? And so it's
Speaker 1: like that's the if, that's your mindset when all you
Speaker 1: in her so she has a So you come to
Speaker 1: Canada and you have no comprehension of the base. You
Speaker 1: think of racism, You think of racist tropes as absurd,
Speaker 1: as opposed to being malignant.
Speaker 2: Malcolm, I I want to thank you deeply for your
Speaker 2: your work and your friendship.
Speaker 3: I miss you. You live in like god knows where
Speaker 3: in upstate New York.
Speaker 2: I wish I saw you much more often.
Speaker 1: Your idea of Upstate New York is like awesening. That's
Speaker 1: about as far as you go. You're like, we're we're thinking,
Speaker 1: and I are going away. Think where are you going?
Speaker 3: Yonkery? What was your theory there was? What was the
Speaker 3: mountain Jews? I'm not a mountain jew you, No, I'm
Speaker 3: really not.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I'm an environmentalist because I want there to be a
Speaker 2: wonderful and healthy environment for you.
Speaker 1: No, you're an environmentist because you you've you've been told
Speaker 1: there is an environment out there.
Speaker 2: I'm I check in with Betsy Colbert and Bill mckibbon
Speaker 2: and and and others, and I'm told like the other day,
Speaker 2: I was walking into my my building and I heard
Speaker 2: this racket and I said, what is that? And the
Speaker 2: and the dork I said, those are birds. Evidently this
Speaker 2: is a bad attitude. I want to close by asking
Speaker 2: you a very crucial question. You you have have an
Speaker 2: ambivalent relationship with sports. With sports, you once said, and
Speaker 2: you're a huge sports fan, Buffalo Bills running, You're terrific runner.
Speaker 2: But you've also said that sports are a moral abomination.
Speaker 1: Did I say that you did? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I remember what?
Speaker 1: In what era of my I think you were?
Speaker 3: You you're annoyance with professional sports?
Speaker 1: Well, I do you know? So here's my in a nutshell,
Speaker 1: my current thinking on this. I was a very good
Speaker 1: high school runner, and then I quit and did run
Speaker 1: for thirty years and started again and became a kind
Speaker 1: of slightly better than mediocre, better than that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: when I was at sixteen, I was up here. When
Speaker 1: I was fifty, I was down here. And I had way, way,
Speaker 1: way more fun when I was fifty in mediocre than
Speaker 1: I did when I was fifteen and a national champion.
Speaker 1: And it is maybe realize that you actually you want
Speaker 1: to be mediocre. You don't want to be you don't
Speaker 1: want to be good, aside from the very very small
Speaker 1: group of people who genuinely if you're Lebron or you're
Speaker 1: Usain Boat, fine, but the idea that the rest of
Speaker 1: us should be pursuing that kind of athletic excellence is
Speaker 1: a mistake. And what's happened there is I think in
Speaker 1: the audience a woman named Linda Flanagan, who wrote this
Speaker 1: book I adore called Taking Back the Game, which is
Speaker 1: this critique of what's gone wrong with youth sports, and
Speaker 1: this is I think one of her this is one
Speaker 1: of her central arguments in this wonderful book which really
Speaker 1: changed the way I think about, which is that we've
Speaker 1: destroyed the very thing that made sports fun, play play
Speaker 1: right by this kind of professionalizing of youth sports. And
Speaker 1: I realized that was my problem. When I was fifteen,
Speaker 1: I was caught up in a fantasy about that I
Speaker 1: was going to go to the Olympics, and it ruined
Speaker 1: running for me. And I didn't run for thirty years,
Speaker 1: and that's heartbreaking because I loved running more than almost
Speaker 1: anything else. And I recovered my joy of running only
Speaker 1: when I was coming in twenty eight in my local
Speaker 1: five K. And so that's what I mean by like this.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't be telling. We shouldn't be Linda would tell you,
Speaker 1: why are you taking a thirteen year old and putting
Speaker 1: them through the torturing, the torture and getting in a
Speaker 1: car and driving for three hours for like a soccer match.
Speaker 1: Why the drive should never be longer than the match.
Speaker 1: That should be a rule, right, Malcolm Gladwell, thank you,
Speaker 1: it's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to that conversation
Speaker 1: with David Remnick at the ninety second Street. Why you
Speaker 1: can find Revenge of the Tipping Point wherever you get
Speaker 1: your audio books. Next time on Revisionist History, an update
Speaker 1: on Broken Windows theory. Revision's History is produced by Lucy
Speaker 1: Sullivan with Ben the Daphaffrey and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our
Speaker 1: editor is Karen Shakerji. Original scoring by Luis Kira, mastering
Speaker 1: by Echo Mountain and erring by Nina Bird Lawrence. Production
Speaker 1: support from Luke LeMond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Sarah Nix and as always el Hafe Cretacone.
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Glappo