In the final episode of the season, Cardiff Garcia is joined by Malcolm Gladwell to discuss his work as co-founder and president of the audio production company Pushkin Industries, and host of “Revisionist History,” the successful podcast in which he reconsiders overlooked or misunderstood events of the past. The conversation took place in Pushkin’s recording studio in Hudson, N.Y., with topics spanning from what it means to challenge conventional wisdom to the delicate science of “hiring nihilism.”
In the final episode of the season, Cardiff Garcia is joined by Malcolm Gladwell to discuss his work as co-founder and president of the audio production company Pushkin Industries, and host of “Revisionist History,” the successful podcast in which he reconsiders overlooked or misunderstood events of the past. The conversation took place in Pushkin’s recording studio in Hudson, N.Y., with topics spanning from what it means to challenge conventional wisdom to the delicate science of “hiring nihilism.”
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Cardiff VO: My name is Cardiff Garcia, and this is The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class.
Hello, and welcome to the show. Today, In our final episode of the season, we are speaking with Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm is the president of Pushkin Industries, an audio production company that he co-founded in 2018 - and he’s the host of the podcast Revisionist History where he reconsiders overlooked or misunderstood events of the past. He’s also the author of five New York Times best sellers, Blink, Outliers, The Tipping Point, What the Dog Saw, and David & Goliath, and his most recent book is The Bomber Mafia, which is meant to be heard as an audiobook.
I invited Malcolm on the show to talk about how to challenge conventional wisdom, the concept of “hiring nihilism,” and what he’s learned from his transition from author to author and podcast host and co-founder of an audio production company.
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Cardiff: Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks so much for being on The Next Chapter.
Malcolm: Thank you.
Cardiff: So Malcolm, first question. When you started Pushkin after, decades as primarily a writer, book author, and you still do those things, but now you're becoming a podcaster and you're becoming somebody with responsibility for a whole company that you're, co-founding uh, you must have had some anticipation for what it would be like, and so now that you've been doing it for several years, I'm curious to know what has been both unexpected and really hard about it?
Malcolm: Well the hard thing is it's a lot of work, and, there's a whole lot of moving parts.
There's coordinating my own activities with all kinds of other people at a big enterprise and not saying that I dislike it, it's just, it's a little shocking to think that you're a hard worker and then at an advanced age start something that makes you have to work even harder.
The unexpected thing has been how much fun it's been though. After, you know, having a very solitary writerly existence for my whole life, being part of a team and, understanding how much fun it is to work with other people I didn't anticipate that I would be enjoying myself as much as I am.
Cardiff: Sometime ago, you wrote an essay about an economist named Albert O. Hirschman. Happens to be my favorite economist, is an intellectual hero of yours, you've brought them up in your podcasting as well. And you were writing about one of his ideas known as the principle of the hiding hand, which is sort of this idea that we underestimate the scale, the difficulty, the challenges of a new project, but that that's great because by underestimating it, we end up actually pursuing more daring kind of ventures than we otherwise would.
But we also end up underestimating our ability to deal with those challenges once they arise, and I want to just quote you to yourself in describing this idea. You write, quote, the entrepreneur takes risks, but does not see himself as a risk taker because he operates under the useful delusion that what he's attempting is not risky.
Then, trapped in mid mountain people discover the truth, and because it is too late to turn back, they're forced to finish the job. Unquote. Do you think that you yourself were maybe a little bit diluted before co-founding Pushkin?
Malcolm: Usefully diluted? Probably, uh, Hirschman in his argument about the hidden hand uses an example of a railway tunnel, not far from here in the river line between Albany and Boston, which had to pass through a mountain, presumably the Berkshires. And the people building the railway line made these absurdly optimistic assumptions to investors about how easy it would be to dig through a mountain. Every one of which, every one of those assumptions turned out to be false, but they couldn't turn back right? They got halfway through, ran out of money. But what choice did they have, but to go forward?
Cardiff: They were mid mountain, they were halfway through the mountain.
Malcolm: They were mid mountain, halfway through, yeah. So I love that, and I think it's actually almost everything Albert O. Hirschman says is true. That maybe even more so than others, but you also underestimate your capacity to handle more work, right? There's a lot more slack in the day. Slack, another, Albert Hirschman concept. THere's a lot more slack in the working life of a professional than you than most of us realize. Oh, at least there was for me. And I've responded to this by becoming more efficient, which is not a bad thing.
Cardiff: Yeah, no, that's great. I've heard you refer to yourself as a kind of low risk guy. So fitting into this idea that you don't see yourself as a risk taker, but co-founding a company and completely changing the trajectory of your own career to do something different in a totally different medium?
That sounds at least from the outside, like a risky thing, so how do you sort of reconcile those two things?
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Malcolm: Well, I actually don't think it's risky at all. I think it's, uh, was risky for many of the others who were part of Pushkin, but I was, already had an established career. If, if this failed, I could always go back to that.
you know, I'm older. I don't have the same kinds of financial challenges as other people who are joining an enterprise at 30 and getting up on. So it wasn't kind of risky in that sense. I also thought there is a very large and underestimated risk in not changing your career trajectory.
So we have a known risk here, which is that writers as they approach middle age, very often stall. They run out of ideas. Their audience grows bored with them. They lose their motivation and passion. That's the risk. The risk is just keeping doing what you're doing and expecting to have the same level of success. Starting a new thing and going off in a different direction does not strike me as being risky at all. It strikes me as a response to a known risk. Similarly, when I was 30 or so I left newspapers. Some people thought what a risk you're taking. I said, that's not a risk.
I remember I went to a meeting, and the meeting was all about how A, young people didn't read newspapers, B classified ads were dying and C, advertising income from department stores, which was our mainstay, was going away.
I said to myself, as I sat there, the risk is in staying here.
You know? So it just depends. I tend to think that people when they use the word risk. Um, forget, the notion of risk has to be, uh, judged against the alternative. And if what you're doing is less risky than the alternative, that's not risky
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Cardiff: Do you often apply the lessons of the stuff that you write about in your own personal life? And do you find yourself sometimes deliberately thinking about it, in other words, well, I wrote this thing five or 10 years ago or something, or even maybe something that you podcasted about recently and thinking, wait a minute, why don't I do that?
It's hard. I think sometimes if you're somebody who traffics in the world of ideas to actually take those ideas and then apply them every day, which is, I think harder than just recognizing them.
Malcolm: Yeah. I do, not, I mean, not as often as perhaps I should, but since we're talking about Albert O Hirschman, my favorite Hirschmanism is his whole idea that Hamlet was wrong. That Hamlet was someone who was debilitated by his doubts, and Hershman's point was you shouldn't be debilitated by your doubts. You should be invigorated by them because once you concede to yourself that you don't know where you're headed, or the world is headed, you're free to do whatever you want.
It's very freeing. Once you give up on the notion you can understand what's next, or understand what the risks or benefits are of a given course of action and so Hirschman would take, over the course of his life, these wild risks. Because he would say, I don't think of them as a risk because I think we're telling ourselves a lie, when we think we know what the future looks like. I've tried to apply that myself and I observed this all over and over and over again in people's behavior where they get scared of an outcome because they're convinced they know what the outcome is.And then when people, other people see that and say the correct response is to treat the fear. No, no, no. The correct response is to treat the false belief that you know, what the outcome is.
Cardiff: If anything, it's to apply more fear to the thing that seems safe right now, so that you realize it's no different from the thing that seems risky.
Malcolm: The classic example of this, and I say that as someone who's just had a child, whether or not I'll be able to follow through this on this is another matter, but the classic example of this is the way that parents agonize about the school choice for their children. Why do they agonize?
Because they have developed a theory that is hardened into, beyond prediction, about what the effect of a given school will have on their child, right? What the effect is of a given school environment on their child. The correct response to all of that hand-wringing and anxiety and neurosis is to say there is no way to predict how your child will respond to a given school environment. None whatsoever. In fact, I even broadened this further. I no longer believe when people say of such and such a school, that it is a good school. I now I think that is a meaningless statement. What does that mean?
Cardiff: Yeah. What are we measuring here?
Malcolm: What are we measuring here?
Because you can, as an adult measure, a set of variables that you think correspond to goodness, but are they the same variables that your kid uses to measure the quality of a school? My school was of high quality when I was growing up principally because I happened to be in a classroom first with my friend Bruce, and then later in middle school with my friend, Terry. Two complete accidents.
like two random people who proved to be enormously influential in my life. It had nothing to do with a class size, nothing to do with the teachers, nothing, nothing to do with the crime rate, nothing to do with all these things that parents, nothing to do with the spending, nothing to do with the quality of the school board.
It was that Bruce Headlem sitting next to me in first grade. Terry Martin my lab partner in sixth grade. Right? That's it. So like for someone else, it could be another completely different random set of circumstances. My parents in a million years could never have predicted that my school would be beneficial to me because of the presence of these two random individuals who they knew nothing about, and I knew nothing about.
Cardiff: Right, so as opposed to looking at whether or not a school will help you get good scores on standardized tests and get you into a good college, which then gets you into a good job and so forth, it turned out that you got a lot out of your school because of the joy you got from your friendships.
Malcolm: Yes. But even that, even if we say the point of school is to get you Into a good college, and then to get you into a good job, that causal chain is completely fictitious. There's no, there's no data. In fact the data suggests that for some people, a good college helps you get a good job, for other people it does the opposite. There's a whole school of class, I wrote about this in David and Goliath, a whole school of people who are debilitated by quality schooling environments. They get discouraged and, they lose their motivation and they give up. Do you know which group your child belongs to?
Maybe, maybe not so Hirschman has allowed me, permitted me, just to shrug about most of these questions and that's the most wonderful and freeing thing.
Cardiff: That seems like an idea you absolutely have internalized, like one that you have thought about repeatedly and have applied. Is that accurate?
Malcolm: Yeah. It ties in with another idea that I have internalized, which is I have now more and more a believer in lotteries as a solution to virtually everything. I think we should choose our leaders by lottery. We should assign places and lead institutions by lottery. I think the NIH should dispense research grants by lottery.
I think everything should be lottery because the lottery is the Hirschmanian solution to the problem of the world, which is, you're pretending to make a prediction about something about which no prediction is possible.
Cardiff: That does run up against limits at some point, right? For example, the host of Revisionist History could not have been chosen by lottery, that had to be Malcolm Gladwell.
Malcolm: Yes, but the, Pushkin didn't hold a contest to see who would be the host of Revisionist History. Malcolm came to Pushkin with revisionist history, so there's a difference. Where we holding a contest among qualified applicants to see who would be the next host of our next podcast, I would say a lottery's not a bad approach.
Cardiff: Okay. Uh, I'd love to see that by the way. I think it'd be fun to do it that way and to see what happens.
Malcolm: We did a podcast, uh, it's one of my favorite ever, Revisionst History, on this guy who goes to Bolivia, and works with student councils in Bolivian high schools, to encourage them to choose their student council by lottery.
And what they discover is that everything gets better. The quality of student government gets immeasurably better when they choose the student leaders randomly. Lots of kids run who wouldn't run.
And the, the things student governments think about, when you choose your government by lottery, are fundamentally different because you're electing a much broader cross section of students. So their interests are far wider.
The last thing you find out is that, to our point, every prediction you would have made about uh, individual student's fitness for student office is blown away by their actual performance in student office. You have no idea who's going to be a good leader.
Cardiff: So you can't sort of map like the qualities that somebody has to the success they're going to have.
Malcolm: Because the shy person who you think is too shy, as it turns out they really like it and they aren't shy anymore. Or their shyness is really useful because it allows them to relate to kids who.
Cardiff: Yeah, they're good listeners or whatever. Yeah, sure.
Malcolm: Yeah.
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Cardiff: You have said in one of your Revisionist History episodes, the one about Albert O. Hirschman and doubt, which was actually about hiring people, you have said that you are essentially a hiring nihilist.
Malcolm: I am a hiring nihilist.
Cardiff: So it must be easy for, for, you know, somebody say, well, we should run this hiring decision by Malcolm, and it's like, well, he's just going to come back and say, do whatever, because we can't anticipate how they're going to do.
Malcolm: Much as I believe intellectually in the hiring nihilist position, which I should explain is the position that it is impossible to learn from any of the normal hiring rituals, whether the person you're hiring is right for the job, so my response to that is, well, then don't bother.
Cardiff: Hiring rituals like interviews, like I don't know, looking at their resumes and their grades or something,
Malcolm: Talking to references. I believe all of that is so either misleading or useless that, um, I don't do any of it anymore. But as much as I think that's a defensible position, you cannot run a company, you can't be a hiring nihilist you know, I probably, as I like to do, take that idea to extremes, and so, I, you really don't want me in the c-suite.
Cardiff: In one of your episodes of Revisionist History, you talk about war games, as they apply by the way to actual wars. And the point you make is that it's really hard to figure out what obstacles are going to emerge from just planning that you actually have to have these sort of playful sort of games.
And I'm wondering how applicable that is beyond just war. Like, can you war game, you know, Pushkin, for example? LIke, can you sort of apply that to a company that you're a part of now and is it worth it?
Malcolm: You know, it's a really interesting question. and I've had conversations with people who do war games to ask them whether the same, practice could be extended, outside of the military field.
The difficulty is there are a relatively limited number of known variables in a war game for you to manipulate right? you have a set of weapons, your enemy has a set of weapons. You pretty much know what weapons your enemy has, you know, their capabilities.
There's a lot of a big body of kind of shared knowledge that allows you to proceed. There's just an awful lot more unknowns in say the business environment, that, uh, make it a little trickier. But that being said, is the idea of building in, essentially, dress rehearsals into a whole series of activities a good one?
I think absolutely it's a good one. Like, you go back to the example of schools. We could probably empirically figure out how long most people need to be at a new school before they know whether they like it, right? Let's say it's three weeks. Is it a bad thing if you're going to be spending four years and $200,000 at a school that we have these three week trial periods that are considered to be a normal part of the choice? You know, similarly, in hiring, I mean, we do have trial periods, but it's considered to be, if someone fails the trial, it's considered to be a kind of failure on their part.
Cardiff: Yeah there's a stigma attached.
Malcolm: A stigma attached. There shouldn't be a stigma. It should be stigma free. It should be like, let's try you, see if you like it. And if one or both parties don't like it, it should be fine to move on. I, do think that we, we under experiment with our, in fact the theme of this year's Revisionist History is experiments for this exact reason, um, that I think we do far too few of them.
Cardiff: Yeah. You told Tyler Cowen in a, another interview that a great way to experiment more is to have safe spaces for mediocrity, which I love this idea because I think a lot of us think of, you know, really great companies as places that have quote unquote, cultures of excellence, where if you do something, you've got to be the best or striving to be the best.
You have to make a very high quality product or a service and so on. But if you're somebody who does have a sort of experimental bent, well, that turns out to be really intimidating because you show up and you might suck at it right away, which makes sense, because you just started and then you might get discouraged and just not bother.
So, yeah, I'd love to actually just hear more about how to put in place a deliberate, strategic culture of mediocrity and how that can help.
Malcolm: This is one of my favorite examples of this was my father who was a great believer in mediocrity. Um, he, he,
Cardiff: Sorry, great phrase.
Malcolm: He arrived, he's a big gardener. We moved to Canada. He wants to build a greenhouse, because it's cold, right? He has no experience building anything and he doesn't have any money. So what does he do? He builds his own greenhouse using as his labor force, his three sons, the eldest of whom is at the time... 10? Okay. maybe 12. The greenhouse is, I mean, it functions as a greenhouse.
It's a disaster. Like, and no one is prouder of its imperfection than my father. He would boast that there's not a single right angle in the entire thing. It's this kind of completely, it's looks like something that was constructed by a man with no construction experience and his three pre-adolescent sons.
Cardiff: Kind of a Pissarro painting or something like that.
Malcolm: But his whole point was that if he didn't accept it with all of its flaws, he never would have built it. Right? If he was a perfectionist, he wouldn't have a greenhouse. And how much worse would his life be? He needed a greenhouse. He didn't need a perfect greenhouse. And also the point of the greenhouse was not to build a beautiful greenhouse.
It was to create a place where plants could grow. So like he's focused on the plants, not the greenhouse. He didn't care about the greenhouse. right? So it's like, he might be a much more of a perfectionist when it comes to the outcome, which is, can I produce seedlings and I can replant them in the spring.
That's what he wanted to do. Did he do that really well? Yes, he did. The greenhouse? Disaster. But who cares, right? And I loved the enthusiasm with which he would present the flaws of his own work. As proof of this point that like, if you're hung up on the building and not the flower, you've totally missed the point of what it means to be happy as a gardener. Right?
That notion was so crucial to me as a kid and I've never, I've never forgotten it. It's… people pursue perfectionism as a kind of all-inclusive ethic. And that is such a terrible mistake. I began life as a very, very serious age class runner who thought that running was about winning races.
And I subsequently realized that that is the craziest stupid and most self-defeating notion that I ever had. And that running is most beautiful for people who do it badly, who aren’t going to win Olympic medals, who are not badly, but who, you know, if you just, if you go running it’s just to enjoy yourself and get in good shape. It doesn't matter if you run a four hour marathon. It's totally fine. Like this kind of obsession we have that everything has to be done perfectly just gets in the way of happiness.
Cardiff: When is it good to be restrained and when is it good to be obsessed?
Malcolm: Well, I mean, people who are obsessed with productive things are far more interesting to people who are not. Any bad thing that arises out of obsession I'm willing to live with, because I think the good things that come from obsession are so much greater.
But, obsession is not absolute. Obsessive people are not generally obsessed about everything. They have a thing that captures their imagination, a very specific thing. And so that's sort of what saves them. That they're choosing to focus in one particular area and to kind of accept, and to be restrained in all other areas. So maybe the trick is that kind of combination is learning how to balance to turn off your obsessive temperament when it's no longer useful.
Cardiff: I asked that question because you were having a fun and playful back and forth with Adam Grant, the psychologist, and who I think you've known for some time and he made the point that you must be somewhat obsessive because you're a runner and you've been running your whole life. And you countered that actually running is the sport of the restrained.
That it's very easy if you become obsessed with running to become a terrible runner and you won't enjoy it because you'll get injured, you know, and you'll get hurt.
Malcolm: I mean, show me an obsessive about it and I'll show you a runner who's not running because they're injured. It was awfully rich for him to say that, I love making fun of Adam, he was a diver for goodness sake. Those guys spend hours in the pool.
So here he was, the pot, the obsessive pot who spent like six hours a day in the pool in high school and college telling me who, you know, a track workout can be over in 40 minutes. Like, wait, who, who's the obsessive here? It's like the six hour guy or the 40 minute guy?
Cardiff: Yeah.
Cardiff: You’re listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Businessclass. When we come back. I ask Malcolm Gladwell what’s next for him.
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Cardiff: Your podcast is obviously called Revisionist History.
But because your specifically investigating things that are overlooked, things that are misunderstood, as I think is the tagline of the show, you're constantly doing stories about things that are sort of naturally appealing to people, right?
Cardiff: I think what people are psychologically wired to find interesting is the stuff that surprises us. It's appealing, but it seems like it would also bring certain dangers, right? Like we would end up finding ourselves, wanting to believe the thing that overturns the conventional wisdom, right? So I guess a question I have is in making the show, how do you sort of steer clear of what might be like the siren call of the, oh my God, that's so interesting. I hadn't thought of that.
That that must be, you know, something we should do just because it's so interesting. Because in some cases, the thing that is interesting, the idea won't turn out to be true and this is a show about true and interesting stories.
Malcolm: Yeah. Well, you know, I would say that not every show we do is about things overlooked and misunderstood. It's a tagline.
And two, there's a great deal of play in the show, so we're having fun with ideas and encouraging people to explore ideas that they wouldn't have explored before. I'm not trying to produce revisionist historians who follow in the path of Malcolm Gladwell, nothing would horrify me more.
Um, but I do like the idea that, you know, so one of the episodes I'm just working on now, in the current season is all about Will and Grace,was Will and Grace responsible for changing public attitudes towards gay marriage? A. B, if so, why? And C could that happen again?
Cardiff: OK.
Malcolm: Now are those counterintuitive notions?
Not really, but they may be things that people haven't thought about. So maybe they thought about A, they watched will and grace but B and C are things that maybe you haven't thought about. Like the reason we have journalists in the world has said, you know, journalists have, the opportunity to ask around and dig into the question of well exactly how would a television show change people's minds? And then the third one is a kind of whimsical question, which is, could we do that again? So let's grant the Will and Grace phenomenon is real, but that was 1998 to 2004 or six, whatever it was. It's now 2022. Do the same ingredients exist for a television show to change popular minds, right? So three questions being explored in that episode, none of them are really, everything you thought is wrong, but they are in the class of, this is stuff you might not have explored in depth.
Malcolm: And that's, most of Revisionist History, is about that question.
Cardiff: Yeah, that's interesting. It reminds me a little bit also the fact that like our knowledge of things changes over time, you know, new experiments arrive and overturn old ones. Sometimes the old ones can't be replicated it's known as thereplication crisis in psychology. but this happens also in economics and these, you know, and sometimes you can only just kind of do your best with what you've got. And it's okay to do that, right? It's okay if new knowledge arrives later, showing that everything that came before is nonsense.
But anyways, I'm curious to know how you also navigate that.
Malcolm: You know, I think the paradigm that says that our positions on things our knowledge of things is a kind of binary all or nothing. I believe that charter schools work or I believe that they are a terrible idea.
Y ou know, I'm in the first group and then, I listen to a podcast on charter schools, which convinces me, everything I thought was wrong, and I flipped. That's actually not the way it works. What is, the way it works for most people is, I think, that you have a vague collection of experiences with charter schools, things you've read. Things you've observed. Things friends have told you.
Your cousin who lives in Cleveland, sends their kid to a charter school, and this is what happened. You have all those things, a cluster of stuff in your head. You haven't really looked for a through line or organized it according to a theory, but it's like a mosaic.
And then if you reflect on it, you say, well, in balance, the 10 things I know about charter schools suggest to me that there are times when it can be really useful.
So let's say Malcolm does a Revisionist History episode on charter schools are the worst thing of all time. You listen to that, you just plug it into your mosaic.
You say, okay, here's another data point. Now we have 11 data points. Maybe that shifts me a little to the, being a tiny bit more skeptical of charter schools. I think that's the way things work, in my mind. So what I'm doing is, if I'm giving you a, an intellectual experience, which replicates something you already have, it's not useful.
I haven't made your mosaic better. You've got a blue tile. I gave you an identical blue tile. What good is that? But if I give you something that's, you know, kind of fuchsia, which looks nice next to the blue, right? Which augments your understanding a little bit, even if you don't entirely like fuchsia, you can plug it into your mosaic, and now you've got a better perspective on the world.
So the joke of revisionist history is that we pretend to be playing the binary game. We pretend to be saying, I'm going to tell you something, that's going to overturn everything you thought before. That's the joke. It's a joke, right? And everyone gets the joke who listens. We understand that. No, no, no, no. no. What I'm going to do is I'm going to shine a light on a little thing that maybe you hadn't thought about, and that will enrich your understanding of the world.
Cardiff: Last question. Uh, any plans to keep challenging yourself when it comes to storytelling innovation, either in terms of Pushkin your company or in terms of your own projects, uh, can you give us a little tease on where you might be headed?
Malcolm: I'm writing a book right now, which is uh, like Bomber Mafia, something of a departure, I've written a certain kind of book for most of my career. You know, these narratives around ideas that span many different stories from many different, but this idea of doing books that are really more single narratives.
Cardiff: One story all the way.
Malcolm: One story all the way through, so we always wanted to do, I tried it out with Bomber Mafia, and I liked the results, and now I'm doing this book, the main character is uh Tom Bradley, the former Mayor of Los Angeles. Who I think is, I've convinced myself as one of the most interesting public figures of the 20th century.
He's a fascinating character and under, utterly underappreciated, uh, both in his time and subsequently. But it's this really interesting way of looking at temperament, which is something again that I'm interested in, this question of, you know, here is a man born in poverty at the height of kind of Jim Crow, comes to LA when LA is still very much a deeply segregated racist city and becomes mayor of a minority black city. I mean, the African-American population of LA has never been greater than 15%, becomes mayor in 1973. Like you try that, right? And stays mayor for 20 years.
And the question of how you do that under those circumstances, under those constraints, how you stay on top of that long, what are the personal sacrifices you have to make?I just find that such an extraordinary, fascinating question. That's a very different, I would never have tried to write a book on that specific question when I was writing books 25 years That's new
Cardiff: Something to look forward to. Malcolm Gladwell, thanks so much for being on the next chapter.
Malcolm: Thank you.
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Cardiff: You’ve been listening to the Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. A special thanks for Malcolm Gladwell for coming on the show today, and also a final thanks from me to you, the listeners. It’s been a true pleasure to interview all these authors, thinkers, to revisit their bestselling classics, and to get their updated thoughts on how their ideas apply in these strange and often difficult but fascinating times that we’re living through. And I’m really grateful to all you listeners who have given your time, your attention, and your feedback throughout the season.
And if you haven’t gotten a chance yet, please, go back and check out my interviews with Angela Duckworth about grit, Mori Taheripour on negotiating, Luvvie Ajayi Jones on making trouble, Priya Parker on having meaningful gatherings, and Adam Grant on original thinking. This has been The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class, and I’m Cardiff Garcia. Thanks one final time, for listening.