THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.118 - MALCOLM GLADWELL

Episode Date: April 5, 2020

Adam talks with Canadian author and journalist Malcolm GladwellPart of the conversation with Malcolm focusses on how surprising circumstantial factors may prevent some people from acting on suicidal impulses. If you find yourself considering taking your own life, THE SAMARITANS are a source of support for people when they feel hopeless. Please give them a call.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Matt Lamont for additional editing.RELATED LINKSDR BUCKLES' NICE WEATHER SELECTION (SPOTIFY)TALKING TO STRANGERS AUDIOBOOKMALCOLM GLADWELL’S REVISIONIST HISTORY PODCASTJON RONSON MEETS MALCOM GLADWELL (BBC CULTURE SHOW, 2013)A DEFENSE OF GLADWELL (from a 2013 blog post by game designer Sam Rosenthal)RICHARD HERRING STREAMING AND VIDEOS ON TWITCH Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Rosie, let's go a different way today. Let's go through this field.

Come on. You go under there, look. I'm going to climb over. Mixing it up. We're going off the track into a field. I think the field is not being used at the moment. Sometimes there are cows grazing up here, but not at the moment.

It's a lovely day. Warm, quite windy. Oh, actually, there are cows here. Rosie, I didn't realise there are cows. Let's get out of the cow's field. They might have coronavirus. What? That's not a funny joke, Rosie. Coronavirus. What? That's not a funny joke, Rosie. Let everyone down. Come on, out we get. Hey, how you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here, back on the beaten track where we belong. Out here in the east of England towards the beginning of April 2020. I'm going to cut to the chase because I've got to go back and continue working on my audiobook.

Still hoping to have it available for you in the next few weeks. A couple of days ago I remotely recorded a special bonus edition of the podcast with Joe Cornish. I sent Joe the text of my book, so he kind of interviewed me about it, roasted me a little bit. It was fun. And the idea is that that's going to appear as a kind of exclusive bonus podcast at the end of the audiobook. Wow, it's quite windy now. But it's nice hot wind. appear as a kind of exclusive bonus podcast at the end of the audiobook. Wow, it's quite windy now. But it's nice hot wind. Anyway, look, I am not cutting to the chase, am I?

Apologies. So let me tell you about podcast number 118, which features a conversation with Canadian author, journalist and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell facts. Gladwell, currently aged 56, was born here in jolly old England to a Jamaican psychotherapist mother and an English mathematician father. They moved to Canada when Malcolm was six. He went with them. They didn't leave him behind. Malcolm worked as a journalist at the Washington Post before becoming a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. I've sort of made it sound as if he

was working as a journalist at the Washington Post when he was six. But no, that was a while later. working as a journalist at the Washington Post when he was six. But no, that was a while later. This is a very condensed overview of Malcolm and his achievements. He was a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1996 onwards. It was that year that he wrote a couple of articles that would become the basis for his first book, The Tipping Point, published in 2000, or the year 2000, as we used to call it. I mean, you can say the year about any of the years,

but with 2000, for some reason it felt obligatory. The Tipping Point, subtitled How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, considered how and why certain ideas and types of behaviour catch on and spread, dare I say it, virus-like, I do dare say it, throughout a culture. The book was an international bestseller and contained several themes that Gladwell would explore further in his subsequent books Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and more recently Talking to Strangers, all of which consider, one way or another, how our

behaviour and subsequent successes and failures can be influenced in ways that are surprising and counterintuitive. Malcolm's latest book, Talking to Strangers, was published last year, 2019, and it features several case studies that examine the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know and assess them, and how those tools and strategies can sometimes prove disastrously inadequate. Rose, let's go this way. There's a big old puddle there that I'm frightened of. My conversation with Malcolm was recorded at his publisher's London offices last November 2019. Back then, one of the big news stories

was about the possibility that Donald Trump might be impeached. Remember that? Ah, the olden days, when there were lots of different depressing news stories instead of just one. Now, my conversation with Malcolm got off to a slightly strange start, in my mind at least. I hope it doesn't sound strange, because he told me that I had been described to him as the British version of the phenomenally prolific and successful US podcaster and stand-up comedian Joe Rogan. And I felt that it took me a while, and maybe him a while as well, to come to terms with that comparison and how completely unhelpful it is. Nevertheless, it was exciting to meet Malcolm, whose books I've enjoyed for many years, and we talked about, among other things,

the questionable value of manners, why it's good to go to art school, and we touched on some of the objections occasionally voiced by critics of Malcolm's books. We also talked about a few of the case studies featured in Talking to Strangers, including the chapter that considers the suicide of the writer Sylvia Plath in 1953, and how something as serious as a person's decision to take their own life might in some cases be affected by seemingly trivial factors. We talked as well about why it was that so many people found it hard to believe Amanda Knox was innocent of the murder of her roommate Meredith Kircher in 2007 and how in 2015

what should have been a straightforward interaction between a Texas policeman and Sandra Bland, a young woman who had done nothing wrong, ended with her being found dead in a police cell three days later. But before all that, Malcolm began by enthusing fulsomely about how much he enjoyed being in cosmopolitan London. fulsomely about how much he enjoyed being in cosmopolitan London, perhaps not realising that if he'd really wanted to impress me, he would have been eulogising about how progressive and harmonious life is in Norwich, which it is. Back at the end with details of a new Spotify playlist created for you,

no, that's fine, you're welcome, And a live video streaming podcast appearance with Richard Herring coming up in a few days. But right now with Malcolm Gladwell, here we go. First on this, then concentrate on that Come on, let's chew the fat And have a ramble chat Put on your conversation coat And find your talking hat La, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, coming to London, I come twice a year.

I live in New York. London is so much more effortlessly diverse. I mean, New York is held up as a great diverse American city. It doesn't hold a candle to London. It's really interesting. I wonder whether the British give themselves enough credit for how the society has been transformed with a relatively low level of stress in a very, very short period of time. It's one of the great, I think it has to be considered one of the great accomplishments of the modern world in the post-war era was a complete demographic transition.

I mean, other societies who would have tried this would have ended in chaos. I mean, in America, we're saddled with Donald Trump in part because of a overreaction to much, much more modest demographic transition. Well, of course, out in rural communities in the UK, it's a different story. Yeah. And that's part of Brexit. That's part of the Brexit story, I suppose. But still, even given that, I mean, you would always expect there to be some backlash. Yeah. Always. That's human nature. That doesn't surprise me. I'm just saying, I think you ought, the English should pat themselves on the back for how mild how relatively mild their backlash has been. Do you get a sense of London as a harmonious place then?

I do. I find it much lower. It's funny, I travel around the United States a lot for my job, essentially. And I do find the city feels far less anxious than many American cities when it comes to things like race. Yeah. And, you know, we have manners here in this country, Malcolm. Yeah. You know, it's a tradition of being well-mannered. Although, can I?

Go on. No, you go on. I was being glib. But I was going to feed that into talking about talking to strangers. Yes. talking about talking to strangers yes and suggesting that maybe there was something to do with how the world on the whole is becoming less formal and less concerned with manners and thinking of manners as actually being a hangover from a rather more uptight class obsessed time and we can dispense with those now and actually maybe that's made it more difficult to interact with strangers.

Manners were an important part. And social codes were an important part of easing our interactions with people of different backgrounds and classes and races and all those kinds of things. Manners is a very interesting subject. And the most kind of polite societies were often the most divided and dangerous ones. So, you know, the most dangerous part of America, for example, historically, is the South. But the South has a tradition of gentility and excessive politeness, and everyone's supposed to smile at you. And they smile at you because they're terrified of you, you know, because underneath the surface

is this long history of all manner of nastiness and racial conflict and class division. So, you know, it's a luxury to be able to get rid of manners because you can get rid of manners when you've kind of resolved some of those underlying issues. And the other thing I would say is, generationally, what always strikes me is, there's all this hubbub about, you know, political correctness in the digital generation. That's their version of manners. And it's a lot truer and more authentic than the previous generations. The previous generation used manners to cover up a lot of nastiness and hostility.

This generation says, enough with the surface presentation. Why don't we solve the underlying hostility? Which I really like. And every time, you know, the kind of, yes, that has its excessive moments, but it's a much more socially ambitious project. And I applaud it.

I mean, enough with the fake manners. I mean, can we actually deal with the underlying fact that we're quite nasty to each other below the surface? Yes. It is a social system constructed around the very problem that I'm interested in looking at in my book, which is how do you account for the fact

that we're really bad at dealing with people we don't know? So one way to do it is to have a whole system of rules that kind of guide you through that process. But it gets harder when the rules get thrown out the window. It does. Although I agree with you about the so-called political correctness era, that on the whole, the benefits vastly outweigh the drawbacks. But one of the drawbacks is that a new set of codes has been created. And you do feel sometimes when you meet people who are not from your own social background, whether they identify differently in terms of race or gender or whatever. You do feel, especially as a white, straight man, privileged white, straight man, like, oh, shit, I've got to be careful. If you get it wrong, you are allowed to say, I'm a middle-aged, straight, white man. Help me out.

And people are quite forgiving, I think, if you appeal to your obsolescence. I often think about you. I've read your books since The Tipping Point came out in 2000. Yeah. I got into the habit when audio books became a thing of downloading those as well. So I'd read them and then I'd listen to them and really enjoyed them in that medium. And audio books and I think podcasts are very good at colonizing people's thoughts and form what feels like a really real friendship or a relationship with the person you know what i mean yeah and your books very much stick in

people's minds and inform the way they think about the world and look differently at the world after they've read them and so one of the ways i think about your stuff is when when i look at design like do you think a lot about design i'll give give you an example. Things like toilet paper dispensers in trains. Every time I see one of those in the UK, a lot of the trains that I travel on have these little square metallic toilet paper dispensers and they pack the paper in much too tight so that when you try and pull one sheet out, it's impossible. You have to pull a whole wad out and it's a total waste of paper the floor of the toilet is just covered in all these bits of disgusting you've taken up this critique with the railway management uh i've written several letters and you have really no i haven't but i should you should i should yeah but i was wondering if you ever think in those terms if your brain works that way for everything you see in your life, you know, if you're looking deeper at all those things or if it's just generally kind of social psychology.

No, I'm actually, it's funny because on the things that regard my work, I am, as you suggest, quite sort of excessively perhaps analytical and obsessive and all those kinds of things. But on stuff outside of my area of expertise, I'm the opposite. So I am the most uncritical reader of thrillers. My capacity to enjoy a bad movie is almost unmatched. When I get on the plane and I look at all the movie offerings, which are invariably, they systematically pick the worst movies often on the plane. at all the movie offerings, which are invariably, they systematically pick the worst movies often on the plane. I'm perfectly happy watching, you know, a kind of dubbed Hong Kong fight movie. I have no problem with that. Whereas most of my friends would sooner jump off a cliff than read,

watch one of those things. So I'm outside of my areas of interest. I'm the opposite. You know, if my brother says a bottle of wine is okay, I'll drink it. I won't, you know, I don't bring to the table all of my powers of analysis to every single thing. Yeah. Okay. That's sort of disappointing, I suppose. I mean, I was imagining you going to see Star Wars or whatever and doing an analysis of where the franchise has gone wrong. We're 10 minutes in and I've already disappointed you. Although what I really love about people, exploring people's areas of expertise,

is I like seeing that version of my analytic self surface in someone else's area of expertise. So I have, for example, I have a friend named Stephen, who's a screenwriter, very successful screenwriter. And I'll go to a movie with him. I remember once going to a movie with Stephen, and I thought it was fantastic. And afterwards, I said, oh, wasn't that great? And he said, and normally he's this sort of mellowest, charming, easygoing southerner.

And he turned on me and he said, absolutely not, for seven reasons. Here's why. And he goes, boom, boom, boom. And he gives like seven kind of, you know, incredibly insightful, vicious, compelling, impossible to argue with reasons why this was the worst movie maybe he'd seen in like five years. And it was like,

it was, I still remember it. It was like so magnificent. I wish I'd captured it on. And it was just like, that was his area of specialty. And he could see something something he was watching a different movie right i mean he was now but that's i find that whenever you see someone in that mode i find it uh i just find it that's i mean a lot of my journalism is about finding people in that mode and observing them and writing down their peculiar reactions. I really enjoyed Talking to Strangers.

And I think it's one of your books that – do you have an impression of what people think of your stuff? Is there a very particular way that you are characterized? What is – like, for example, Gladwellian. Oh, that word. Do you have a sense? I hate that word. Sure. I think that word was invented by one of my publishers in a weak moment.

exploration of ideas, particularly difficult ideas or counterintuitive ideas or ideas that might be wrong, maybe in part or slightly, to be really fun. I don't mean fun in a kind of trivial way, but I really enjoy the process of playing with complicated ideas. And the people who like my books are people who share that joy. So I did an event at South Bank. And of this long book tour, it was the most fun event I had. And it felt like everyone in the crowd, I don't think they necessarily agree with everything I write and say. there because they, like me, really enjoy the play and the kind of joy that you can find in looking at things in a different way and in adopting a different set of lens, maybe even just for the moment in turning something upside down and seeing whether you still agree with it. I mean, all those kinds of things, they were along for the ride. I feel like when I sense that in my

audience, I feel like I'm being understood. And where I'm misunderstood are people who somehow haven't picked up on that sense of play and who get all kind of huffy. I suppose the objection that I've seen leveled at you before is that your stuff, it has elements of kind of social psychology and academic analysis, but then it's presented in this popular and easy to understand way. And that somehow seems like you're cheating or something. There's this oddly kind of unexamined elitist critique, which is it shouldn't be so popular. You shouldn't be writing it in such a way that it only appeals to a fraction of the audience, which I don't even know how to answer that. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Like, the art, which sometimes I get right and sometimes I don't, is that you simplify it in a way that doesn't lose or obscure the fundamental meaning of what you're writing about. But you can't, if you represent a complicated academic notion in all of its original complexity, no one would read the book.

My father was a mathematician. We actually, this is not a joke, we use his textbooks as doorstops in my mother's house. And, you know, I would always joke because I would go on Amazon and I would say to my dad, your book is ranked 385, 761 thousands. Yeah. And, you know, have you ever thought of doing something to boost your rating? Could you dumb it down a little bit? But the point is he was writing for an audience of, I don't know, a couple of hundred, I guess, at most, very, very serious mathematicians. That's his job. That's not my job. My job is to

write for all of us. And so the accusation that you could level it, Professor Graham Gladwell, would be, could you please simplify it so that more than 200 people could understand it? But that is as illegitimate as looking at me and saying, why don't you make it so hard that your book will be read as infrequently as your father's? Yeah. It's weird, isn't it, that you're within certain disciplines, academic or creative. It really still is frowned upon when you start introducing elements that are not seen as traditionally belonging there. I went to art school and I did sculpture and I would make video installations and things like that. But they were generally quite silly and funny, hopefully.

But that was frowned upon. It was like, no, that's not what we do in the art world. Art's serious. Yeah. Can we do a short digression about art school? Sure. So you must know this. So, you must know this, every time I run into some kind of English musician, popular musician of a they were organized and what they encouraged people to do that they were this is actually the reason for

english dominance of popular music do you do you agree with this uh yes i'd subscribe to that it's a fun place to just try things out and it doesn't have to be art especially you know the the assumption when i was at school was like you only go to art school if you can't get into a proper university. Yes. You know, there's two kinds of artists. There's really super talented ones who are going to paint beautiful paintings and make lovely sculptures. They'll get into the Slade or the Royal Academy and make some proper art in inverted commas. and make some proper art, in inverted commas. And then there's the chance-ers who are too thick to get into proper university, and they'll go off to some art school

and piss about taking photographs of their genitals. But the extraordinary success of people who came out of that generation of art schools suggests that they were... I mean, in the end, the cultural contribution from the art schools was much greater than the cultural contribution from the Slade. Yeah. Right? I mean, it's not even close.

Exactly, because the Slade was all still, I'm generalizing, I don't know what I'm talking about, I've never been to the Slade, but the Slade and the Royal Academy suddenly became these uptight places that were more concerned with technique and craft maybe than they were with ideas. And that's where the 60s art schools really started thinking, actually, look, you can make an art which is about ideas and that will be a new way of expressing yourself, a new way of creating things. Whereas in the past it was all about brush strokes and I don't know what.

What it's showing is the virtues of a certain kind of messiness, that the formal art schools had a very strict idea of what it meant to be good, and a very strict idea of what it meant to educate someone and prepare them for the profession. The world that you came out of was the opposite, didn't really have a clear idea of what good was, took the people who couldn't get into the slate, and didn't have an incredibly narrow definition of what their function was, but rather, it was a place that allowed for experimentation. And I feel like this is said that way, it sounds really obvious, but I feel like this is a lesson that just eludes us over and over and over again. We forget all the magic that comes from messiness and from delaying predictions, right?

Whoever said it was a good idea to try and predict whether someone was going to be good at something at the age of 18, right? You can't look at 18-year-old Brian Ferry and understand what's going to happen. What you can do is give him a place where he can muck around and experiment and meet interesting people and figure out what he wants to do. And that's like that's the kind of lovely thing about the feeling. This is just an all elaborate way of me patting you on the back. Thanks very much. Yeah, I know. I appreciate the obsequious moment out of the way.

I like it. No, it's good. I agree with you, though. I agree. of the way i like it no it's good i agree with you though i agree it's i think that there's so many people you know the culture tends to be obsessed with people who knew what they were going to do from a young age and were clearly good at something or had a dream or had an idea of yeah what their life was going to mean and those are the people everyone you know you make films about you don't really tend to see too many films about a guy who was or a woman who spent, you know,

25 years of their lives just pissing about not really doing much and then very gradually and slowly becoming good at something. You know what I mean? There's a lovely theory by an American economist about art in which he distinguishes between what he calls experimental innovators and what's his other term? But the way of understanding it is he says, if you look at geniuses, he says they fall into two quite distinct camps. The paradigmatic forms of these two camps are Picasso and Cezanne. The Picassos are the ones who have a very clear idea from very early on what they want to do. It's revolutionary. They rearrange the world. And that idea is expressed very clearly and quickly in their career. So Picasso was doing some of his best work

in his early 20s. Cezannes are experimental innovators. And they're people who can never tell you what they want to do. They don't know themselves. They have some vague thing they're working on, but they can't work it out. And they go away, and they paint in obscurity for decades. And then they finally figure it out at the end of their life. So Cezanne's greatest work is all done in his 50s and 60s, right? He's the exact opposite of Picasso. And this guy says both are legitimate, but as a society, we tend to be obsessed with the Picasso types because they're precocious, because they can stand up in the full bloom of youth

and say, I see a different world, right? And we forget about these other types who contribute every bit as much. But the interesting question is, so these late bloomer types, if we wanted to reorganize the world to give the late bloomers their due, what would it look like? And the answer, one of the ways it would look like is more art schools. Art schools seem to me much more favoring the late bloomer types because they're giving you, like I said, time to mess around and figure out what you want to do as opposed to the slates are the ones that favor the ones who have it all worked out at 18.

Yeah, yeah. It's so odd that we, you know, the expectation that you should have things figured out at 18 was set at a time when the life expectancy was 40. So, the fact that that's reasonable. If you're going to live to your 40, I think you should figure out what you want to do by 18. That's halfway through, right? Well, now if the life expectancy is 85, then, I don't know, we should give maybe people a little more time to work things out. And we shouldn't frown on people who want to experiment in their 20s as opposed to come in. I think maybe sometimes your work is characterized by your detractors as being, it's like, duh, obviously, you know, you're sort of pointing things out that are glaringly obvious.

And people are going, well, you know, 10,000 hours, yeah, it takes a long time to get good at something. Or, I don't know, they can pick any number of things from from your books and go well yeah and what but the thing that always happens when i read your books is that any preconceptions you have like that are overturned in the course of doing it that's half the fun of it you start thinking oh right okay like the example in this book in talking to strangers you've got several case studies that shed light on how and why our interactions with strangers sometimes go wrong. And one of the cases you talk about is Sylvia Plath. Yeah. And that's towards the end of the book. But I thought, why is this in here? Like, how does this fit in with that whole framework for the book?

And also one of the things you talk about, well, you talk about the idea of coupling, which perhaps we'll explain in a little bit. But before I understood about that idea, you're talking about the fact that maybe Sylvia Plath would not have taken her own life if she'd been born in an age where there wasn't a certain type of gas that was available, carbon monoxide rich. If it had been a few years later, perhaps she wouldn't have taken her own life when those kinds of cookers weren't there. And I just thought, what?

That doesn't seem right at all. Surely, if someone wants to take their own life, that's a bit more profound than what kind of cooker they have access to. Did I convince you otherwise by the end of that section? A hundred percent. Yeah. In a really strange way that then asks a load more other questions that you can't obviously deal with all of them. deal with all of them. Yeah, talk to me a little bit about that and what made you think about that case particularly and why that fitted into the thesis of talking with strangers. Well, I'm trying to understand in talking to strangers why we're so bad at making sense of strangers. And I offer a number of explanations. First explanation is we evolved to believe

people. That's just how we were constructed as human beings. That makes it hard for us to deal with liars. The second is we're not good at reading people's facial expressions. We think we're good, we're not. But this coupling is the third one. And the idea of coupling is that many behaviors are tightly wound up with very specific contexts. And unless you understand the context, you can't understand the behavior. And I illustrated this a number of ways, but the one that you're referring to is, I was discussing this in the context of suicide. So our common view of suicide is that if you are someone who wants to take your own life, you'll use whatever means is available, right? If you can't jump, if there's no bridge around to jump off,

you'll jump in front of a train. If there's no train to jump in front of, you'll overdose on pills. I mean, you want to take your own life, and so you just go through the options until you find one. Turns out that when we look closely at suicides and suicide attempts, that's not the way it works, that people who want to take their own life have fixations on very specific methods. And if they're thwarted in the use of that particular method, they won't go and hunt down another method. So the classic example of this would be the place where more suicides have happened anywhere else in the world over the last hundred years is the Golden Gate

Bridge in San Francisco. Thousands of people have jumped to their death off it. And for the longest time, the idea was that it would be pointless to put up a suicide bridge prevention fence on the bridge, because if you couldn't jump off that bridge, you'd simply go to the, you know, the Bay Bridge is another bridge that's three miles away, and you jump off that one. And then someone did a study in which he interviewed people who either survived the jump, or were prevented from the last minute someone grabbed them before they could jump. And he simply asked the question, did those people who were intending to kill themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge, and were th thwarted simply kill themselves some other way?

And the answer is almost none of them did. In other words, they wanted to – their desire to take their own life was coupled to a particular moment and a particular place and denied the moment and the place in 90-some-odd percent of cases. They never again tried to take their own life. And the thing that seems odd about that idea is that we think about someone who is considering suicide, quite rightly, we empathize with their, you know, with their distress and their sadness and their hopelessness. And we think that that must be a very extremely profound feeling to make them think about ending their own lives. And the idea that it's connected with those circumstantial considerations seems somehow to trivialize that feeling that they're going through. It shouldn't diminish our empathy. It simply says that suicide,

the decision to take your own life is an extraordinarily complicated one that is a function of a large number of factors, chief among them, your own personal emotional distress. But your ability to successfully execute what is a profoundly difficult act is the result of many other factors outside of your own control,

the availability of a means to take your own. It is not easy to take your own life. I would reverse it and I would say that once you understand that fact, it actually makes a profound difference in our ability to minister to those who are suffering in this way, because all of a sudden now we have a way to help them. Because if I understand, oh, your decision, you wanted to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge today. And if I can stop you from doing that today, I can make a meaningful difference in your chances of getting through this difficult period. Whereas the old idea that says, you want to take your own life, you'll find whatever means possible, is a kind of defeatism. It says, well, what's the point in preventing you from jumping off the Golden Gate

Bridge if you're just going to go to the bridge down the road and jump off that one? That's defeatist. And in some way, it's about giving up on these people. Whereas this view says, no, never give up on someone who is in this kind of dire straits, because their evidence suggests that if you could help them through this difficult moment, they may never revisit this darkness again. That is such a powerfully beautiful message about how to minister to those who are suffering. But Plath, so the Plath story is a version of this. You know, until the mid-60s, The Plath story is a version of this. You know, until the mid-60s, almost all English homes had what were heated, and your oven worked off town gas, which was full of carbon monoxide.

And so if you wanted to commit suicide, you put your head in the oven. And thousands and thousands and thousands of people in the UK committed suicide that way between the 20s and the 60s, including Sylvia Plath. So what happened when town gas was swapped out for natural gas, which has very little, hardly any carbon monoxide at all, it is now almost impossible to commit suicide by sticking your head in a gas oven. The old view would have been, oh, those people would have just moved on and committed suicide some other way. And the answer is, that's not what happened. The overall suicide level dropped. So that's why I suggest that if Sylvia Blath had been in her dark moment, just a few years later,

when town gas was no longer heating her apartment and fueling her stove, she might not have taken her own life, right? I mean, it's a kind of weird thing, way to think about it, but I think that's the logical conclusion from this particular analysis. It's unsettling to think that that's the way that important things might actually work in the world, you know? Maybe that's behind some of the objections that people have

to your stuff sometimes, and they just think, no, surely it couldn't be, you know, these trivial circumstances couldn't affect things that are so important to the degree you suggest. It's odd. I'm always attracted to those notions, those ideas where there is a discrepancy between what the public thinks and what those who study an issue think. Whenever there's that gap, I just think, oh, what an opportunity for me. That's what I do. I try and bridge that gap. oh, what an opportunity for me. That's what I do. I try and bridge that gap. And this understanding of suicide is one such example where lay opinion is out of step with what

the research says. You talk about the Amanda Knox case. Oh, yeah. And did you think she was guilty? I don't know. There was so many weird prejudices at play. And one of them was definitely to do with her being so attractive you know what i mean it just seemed so weird to have this woman who looked like a kind of film star yeah at the center of this case and then she was not behaving in the way that you thought yeah an innocent woman should be behaving in this situation. Yeah. And all those factors conspired to make me think, yeah, she's probably guilty, isn't she? She just seems like a bit of a psycho. And so, of course, you talk in the book about exactly that, about how she wasn't sending out the signals that generally in society we agree that you would send out in those situations. Yeah. She's an example of what the researcher Tim Levine would call mismatched behavior. We have the

best time, the easiest time in understanding people whose behavior is matched, whose facial expressions, body language, comportment is consistent with what they're feeling, or at least consistent with our stereotypical notion of how you ought to represent those emotions. People who smile when they are happy and frown when they're sad. People whose jaws drop when they're surprised. These kinds of strangers we're good at making sense of. But there are lots of people who are mismatched, who don't represent their emotions in the way that we're expecting. So Amanda Knox is a classic example of a mismatched person. She was, it's safe to say now, 100% innocent.

She had nothing to do, despite the protestations of the British tabloid press. By the way, in retrospect, the Amanda Knox case is the nadir of the British tabloid press. By the way, in retrospect, the Amanda Knox case is the nadir of the British tabloid press. Their behavior was so irresponsible, so appalling. I mean, I can't even... To go back and... There were books written by members of the British press on this case that, in retrospect, are so absurd. And the effect was an innocent woman went to jail for four years in Italy because also the Italian police shared these same ludicrous notions. Amanda Knox was just a weird, immature 18-year-old. And she was as upset and grief-stricken as anyone else. But her distress and grief manifested itself in a different way. Why? Because she's weird.

That's her crime. She's someone who, when her roommate gets murdered unexpectedly and she's in the police station the next day, she deals with that by kissing her boyfriend, right? I mean, I don't know. Is that inappropriate? Sure. Does it qualify you for four years of prison? No, it doesn't. Does it make you guilty? No, it doesn't. She got bored while waiting for three hours in the police station, and she started doing yoga exercises. And then the police saw her and thought, oh,

why is she doing splits, and this must mean she's guilty? No. She's 18, she's bored, and she can calm herself down by doing yoga exercises. I mean, on every level, this whole thing was completely absurd. But the larger point is there are lots and lots of people like that. And they are the ones who we get wrong. And getting people wrong because we have this incredibly narrow sense of what is appropriate behavior can have real consequences. narrow sense of what is appropriate behavior can have real consequences i just people couldn't get their heads around the fact that this girl who she's not autistic she doesn't have any other diagnosed condition in that way that might just young she's just young yeah but people sort of

thought they couldn't relate to how could you be accused of murder and not be looking mortified and frightened? This comes up all the time in people who are on trial for some kind of heinous crime. And then the jury will give them a very harsh sentence because the jury will say they didn't show remorse. This happens countless times. This is another good example of what I'm talking about. What does remorse look like? Sad face. I mean, but it's a preposterous notion.

When a dog feels remorseful, we know what that looks like. Yeah, yeah. Right? Lowers his nose, kind of drags along, doesn't look you in the eye. Or at least that's how we think the dog is feeling. Exactly, exactly. Because it looks like a caricature of remorse. Yes. But human beings can show remorse in any number of ways. Who is to say that if I feel genuinely

remorseful, it's going to show in my face in some kind of predictable way? What if I'm someone who actually is capable of deep feelings of remorse, but that's manifested in my case with just a blank look or a nervous smile. I mean, why is there one way to represent a complex emotion? As a test, when I was doing my book, I called up people who study facial expressions. And there are a whole community of psychologists who do this. And I said to them, and they have a language for describing facial expressions. So there are 43 muscles in the face.

You know, you use, there's a name for every muscle, and so they construct these long chains of... That's a D5 with an X. With an X1 and a something, something. And I said, well, what's the definition of remorse? And they said, well, there isn't one. So we know what, you know,

we know what a satisfied smile looks like. We know what deep distress looks like. We know what anxiety looks like. We don't actually know. We don't have a kind of, that's something that, that's just a kind of only in novels and bad television shows is there such a thing, a clearly identified facial expression called remorse. But yet we persist in pretending that it exists. And if you don't show it in appropriate moments, we're going to put you in jail for another five years.

Talking to strangers is bookended with the case of Sandra Bland. Yes. So for people who don't know about that case, could you explain what happened with her? Yeah, that is, if you remember the Ferguson case that led to all those riots in Ferguson, Missouri, which was a young black man shot by a police officer, that led to this. It was a string of these high profile cases in America following Ferguson. And one of them was this case involving a woman named Sandra Bland, who was a young woman from Chicago who had gone to a small town in Texas to apply for a job.

And she's pulled over by a police officer in the middle of the day for failing to use her turn signal. And then the police officer comes up to her and they have a conversation and then it turns into an argument. And the police officer yanks her out of her car, forcibly arrests her, and then she is found dead in her cell three days later. Having taken her own life. Yeah, having taken her own life.

And the whole exchange was captured on the officer's dash cam video. And so we know exactly what happened. And you can watch it online. I mean, it's an extraordinary exchange. You just watch in a space of 45 seconds a completely harmless encounter between a police officer and someone who did nothing wrong. Turn into this, I mean, it just blows up in front of your eyes. It's such a heartbreaking case. And it's so stupid because she's this thoughtful, educated young woman in a sleepy Texas town in the middle of the day who doesn't put her blinker on when the cop pulls up behind her.

I mean, it wasn't in a dark alley. It wasn't, you know, ambiguous. She wasn't carrying a gun. She didn't just rob a bank. The notion that something like that could go completely off the rails, when I heard about that, I was both incredibly angered by that. And I'm still angry about that case. Felt that I had a, I could play a role in helping to understand it, and also felt like there is no more perfect example of what

I'm talking about, what I want to examine. Then this is a talking to strangers problem. The police officer completely misunderstands who she is, Doesn't understand her motivations, her intentions, her personality, doesn't understand why she's upset. I mean, it's just a kind of, it's textbook. And so I use that, I begin and end with that case. And I frame the balance of the book as an attempt to really figure out how a harmless encounter between strangers could go so wrong. The cop, he's pulled her over because she took an illegal right or something? No, it's actually worse than that. He sees that she's from out of state, that she's black, and she had rolled through a stop sign,

but she was still on the property of the university that she's coming out of, so he can't stop her there. So he puts that together, rolled through a stop sign, young black woman from Chicago in a Hyundai and says, oh, look, I'll pull her over.

So what he does is as she's driving down the highway, he pulls up really fast behind her and she thinks, oh, he's on his way to an accident or something and pulls over to the side of the road to let him pass and doesn't use her she doesn't signal signal right and then he

says aha i got you and then pulls up behind her and she's like understandably she's like wait a minute i was trying to get out of your way yeah yeah why would i use a turning signal when it's clear that when a cop comes up behind you, you get out of the way, right? And so he traps her, tricks her really into committing a quote unquote offense. And she's upset. And she's had a history. You know, you can't be young and black in America and not have a history of being pulled over by police. She's had a history of this very thing.

So she's just thinking, oh, no, this is all over again. And this is the most ridiculous of these things and so she's upset and he understands that but he thinks he reads her disquiet as being evidence of something malicious as defiance and he doesn't like that and like that and then this is generational thing. I thought about this a lot. She lights a cigarette. And 20 years ago, you and I are both old enough to remember that people smoke cigarettes to calm their nerves. And if someone in a stressful moment lit a cigarette, we understood, oh, they're trying to calm down. Right? Well, in a world where a few people smoke, I feel the social meaning of that gesture has been lost.

So here we have a 28-year-old police officer. She lights a cigarette. And what she means by doing that is I'm trying to calm myself down and de-escalate the situation. So it's a sign, actually. She wants to cooperate with him, resolve this. And he sees, he doesn't understand the social meaning of lighting a cigarette. He thinks, oh, she's essentially giving me the finger. She's like, I'm going to blow smoke in your face, you jerk.

Right? It's not what she meant to do. So this is another, I mean, on the list of ways in which he misunderstands her, this is like number 10. And even if it was what she meant to do. Who cares? Who cares? And it's her right. You can smoke in your car.

Right. And he still is obliged to maintain professionalism in order specifically to stop the situation from escalating unnecessarily. Exactly. To avoid everything that might lead to something worse. I mean, the case is interesting because you can analyze it on sort of three different levels. One level is this is not a police officer with strong interpersonal skills. That's the level I'm least interested in, if only because it's the most obvious. But I think that that case also permits us to ask a lot more searching questions

about why would we put a police officer in a situation where he was required to make sense of someone's complicated feelings, a stranger's complicated feelings in an incredibly short period of time? I mean, that's crazy. Like what the police officer was trying to do is is impossible. Right. He was trying to size her up and decide whether she was a criminal or harmless in 20 seconds. And that's crazy. You can't do that, right?

You can if you see a gun, but the only thing he sees is a cigarette. And he's still crazily jumping to conclusions. And one of the things that's happened in American policing over the last 20 years is that police officers have been trained to do that very thing. They have been encouraged to be really aggressive and to go into situations and stop seemingly innocent people on the faint chance that they might be criminals. And that is a virtually everything you hear from afar

about the deterioration of relationships between the African-American community and law enforcement is a result of that style of policing right they have asked for trouble and in part this book is a kind of a response to that attitude and sort of ask the question why we continue to perpetuate this this strategy of policing i mean of course you know no one is suggesting that it's an easy job to be a cop and to be running into all so many different people in so many different states i'm not talking states geographically but in emotional states you never know what's going to happen it must be extremely frightening and unpredictable but yeah the answer is not to default to this kind of

is not to default to this kind of mean paranoia right yeah that's so easily just i mean it immediately rubs people up the wrong way my thing was always in this country a lot of the cops have i'm being careful here because i don't want to be in trouble with the cops but um a lot of the cops do this thing of just this kind of patronizing attitude of a bit of a stupid prick aren't you oh dear oh dear yeah so uh what do you got to say for yourself you stupid prick and you begin to produce the very behavior you're trying to prevent right right that's the thing that the people who are particularly young people respond to the environment in which they're operating. The great conclusion, the fascinating conclusion, and I talk about this in my book about the Ferguson case when it was finally examined by the Department of Justice, the federal investigators,

was that the officer who shot the young black man was actually justified in shooting him. The young guy had attacked him, essentially, and tried to take away his gun, and they had wrestled and fought, and criminal charges were not filed against the police officer. At the same time, however, they detailed patterns and practices of police behavior in that town, which were so socially corrosive, so morally bankrupt. I mean, they were basically shaking down the black population of that town in order to fund the city's budget. It's fill its coffers. They were stopping people on the flimsiest of pretexts, giving them outrageous fines, you know, treating them with no respect. And so that they had created an environment where

they had destroyed whatever trust existed between the police department and the general population. And that's why the young man goes after the police officer, because he doesn't respect the police officer because he lives in a town where there is no respect between the police department and the general population. So these things are connected. And I feel like we spend too much time focusing on the particulars of that interaction between an officer and a citizen. And too little time thinking about this broader contextual question. Yeah, how did we get there? How did we get there? Yeah. so

so Something that I've said to people about your stuff before is that I feel as if it's encouraged me to not only look deeper into things in a valuable way, but also to start overthinking things in a way that is sometimes almost paralyzing. You know what I mean? Always happy to help. Has this been said to you before, though? Why do you make people think so much?

No, it's not just that. It's like thinking is a good thing. I'll accept that. But, you know, it seems as if people now don't like that feeling of being unsure of things. And what your stuff does is encourage you to think there are different ways of looking at almost everything that we have traditionally taken for granted yeah you know and so i wonder if there is a connection to be made between

a kind of rise in popular i'm not i'm not saying that this is directly your fault yeah i'm saying that you know that there's a wave of populism in the world at the moment and it seems that part of what's behind it is people wanting to be sure of things and gravitating towards the leaders that shout the loudest and who claim to be the surest yeah and a lot of what you do in your books is sort of the opposite. It's like saying, well, you can't be sure about anything, really. It's not that I'm a nihilist. The things that I believe in are not the conclusion. I believe in the system through which we reach conclusions. So I'm dogmatic on the importance of curiosity

and dogmatic on the importance of having an open mind and being willing to examine your conclusions. And I'm dogmatic on your responsibility as a human being is to try and understand others on their terms, not just on your terms. So those are principles that guide a lot of my writing. And that's what's supposed to stabilize you. So even as I'm saying, you know, there's a way to think about suicide that's very different from popular. That's not supposed to make you throw up your hands. It's supposed to reinforce your belief in the importance of kind of free inquiry and curiosity so i think in you know properly understood that's what i think that's what draws people to my writing and that's why it isn't it shouldn't leave them unhappy and anxious it should do the opposite It should sort of kind of redeem their faith in the human enterprise.

I mean, yeah, I wasn't suggesting that it is. I certainly wouldn't call it nihilistic. Yeah, I'm a mischief maker. I mean, a lot of um some of the things that people on the right might say or some of the objections they have to people they characterize as libtards or progressives or whatever they've thought themselves into a hole and actually what they need to do is go back to a simpler set of values yeah and you know and that's how you end up with trump who says like no no no this is all bullshit yeah you're thinking too hard it's pretty simple what you do is this put these people over here put that lot over there and he's you know he's in the last couple of weeks i feel like trump has melted down to it's an open question who's melting faster the polarized gap or i never

thought he was unwell before, and I'm now beginning to feel he actually is, something's not right. On the basis of tweets, or... Well, the tweeting behavior is now out of control. There was a day recently where he tweeted 82 times. If any other human being tweeted 82

times, you would take them to the doctor. You would say, there's something organic here we have to explore, right? And, you know, he stopped going into the office. So you have, the oval office is on one floor, and your apartment, where you live, is on the floor

above. So going to the office, it's not like you have to commute. You're not getting on the tube and running, you know. You're walking down the stairs. He stopped walking down the stairs. He now doesn't leave his apartment. He sits in his apartment eating McDonald's and watching Fox News and has stopped going into the office because he no longer trusts his own aides.

It's just crazy. Do you think there's any chance that Trump will get impeached? I don't think he'll get impeached, but I also don't think he's going to win the next election. Right. Okay. I think he's any chance that Trump will get impeached? I don't think he'll get impeached, but I also don't think he's going to win the next election. Right. OK. I think he's going to lose. If you've lived in New York, as I have for 25 years, he was in our lives every day. He was in the tabloids every single day. He was a constant presence. He was one of the most visible people in the city. He was so closely identified with the city. So anyone from New York has a very different understanding of Trump than people who discovered him for the first time when he went on television or when he was elected.

So I feel like I grew up with Trump. And his buffoonery was sort of has been on full and public display in New York since the 80s. And he was hanging around the worst nightclubs, sort of hitting on porn stars. And his friends were just the worst of the worst. And he was just spending his dad's money. I mean, he just like there was so like, well, anyone from New York has no illusions about him. We never so this thing he did when he transformed himself into a kind of tried to pretend to be someone who could speak non-to-be about public policy you can buy that if you learned about him for the first time

in 2015 but if you if you're from new york you'd like oh god no he's gonna self-destruct the guy's guy's just a lunatic i was interested in a twitter exchange you had after Steve Bannon was pulled from the New Yorker Festival of Ideas in 2018. So this is David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, was going to have a debate interview, whatever you want to call it, with Steve Bannon, who was Trump's former advisor, Breitbart guy. Some people would call him a white supremacist. Certainly he has those links and those sympathies with some of those people. Anyway, a controversial figure at the very least. And so there was a lot of objection to him being part of this New Yorker festival of ideas. And David Remnick eventually bowed to pressure, removed Steve Bannon as this headliner. And you

tweeted, call me old fashioned, but I would have thought the point of a festival of ideas was to expose the audience to ideas. If you only invite your friends over, it's called a dinner party. And then you tweeted again, Joe McCarthy was done in when he was confronted by someone with intelligence and guts before a live audience. Sometimes a platform is actually a gallows so i was really interested in that because i thought that that summed up so much of the differences at the moment going on even within the left yeah the whole no platforming thing the whole extent to which you should engage with someone you disagree with yeah and how do you feel about that? Has your opinion changed at all? No, I still would support that. The thing is, there's a difference between uncritically broadcasting someone's views or presenting them, as we were just talking about now, that Trump got a lot of this kind of uncritical exposure, which really just had the effect of drawing people to him and giving him a statue he would not others have had.

Bannon was someone who was an enormously significant figure in the sense that was probably as responsible as anyone else for the election of Donald Trump. And so if you want to understand how Trump got elected, if you're radically opposed to Trump, you still want to talk to Bannon because you've got to figure out how did this happen? You know, what did this guy do? So he's not useless as a discussant. He's actually, I think, potentially extremely interesting if the discussion is done by someone who is capable, can ask him tough questions. You know, I was just on this tour earlier today on a BBC program, Noon Politics Show. And the presenter, his name is Joe, I think, she had a series of politicians on. You know, you cannot get away with anything on that. She was so uncompromising

and on top of things that no one has a chance. So someone like that, you can have anyone you want on that show, and if they don't represent their case intelligently, she'll cut them to ribbons, right? Renwick's the same way. Renwick is more than intelligent enough to make sure that Steve Bannon does not turn that particular platform into a way of promoting his own brand of white nationalism. He is also capable enough to use that to productively try and figure out what can we

learn from this man that will help us repair the damage that's been done to the American political system. Under those circumstances, I am wholeheartedly in favor of conversations between people who are politically difficult. I'm not in favor of them when the person doing the interviewing is gullible or naive or ill-prepared. Did you watch The Brink, the Steve Bannon doc? Oh, no, I haven't seen it. It's quite good. That's got some interesting stuff directed by Alison Klayman. Yeah, yeah. I imagine it was an appropriately bracing and rigorous.

Well, I mean, I think a lot of people criticized that as well for not being tough enough on him. And she got criticized from both sides. People saying it was a hatchet job on Bannon and then other people saying, you know, the left saying she gave him a platform and she shouldn't have done. And you can't. I have such issue with have done. Well, you can't. I have such issue with deep platform. Yeah. You can't hide your head in the sand. These things are going on. You have to understand them.

You know, imagine in a scenario, I talk in the book about Neville Chamberlain's visit to Hitler in 1938 and how he meets Hitler. And for a variety of reasons, among them Chamberlain's own naivete, and he wasn't an expert in foreign policy, and his diplomats over in Berlin were in the pocket of the Nazis. And I sincerely doubt whether he'd read Mein Kampf. For a variety of reasons, he gets taken by Hitler. Hitler pulls the wool over his eyes. How would we have felt about a scenario in 1938 if Hitler had come to England and had been interviewed on the BBC by one of these really kind of crack journalists that the BBC has? You know, someone who knew what they were doing, walking through the absurdities, the contradictions, the outrages of Hitler's

position in 1938 would really have gone a long way towards educating the world. In particular, can you imagine, I mean, if the Americans had entered the war a year earlier, it would have been over a year earlier, right? Something like that would have gone a long, might have gone a long way to convincing the Americans of the moral enormity of the Nazi threat. There are clear situations where exposing someone with noxious ideas to rigorous public review is in our best interests. And my suspicion was that the Remnick interview was in that category. Did you have debates with your own friends about that? Oh, yeah, you should see I got so many hilariously nasty responses on Twitter.

And so many of my colleagues at The New Yorker disagree with me that there was quite a sharp divide. Did they explain their point of view to your satisfaction, though? I understand why they had the position they did. And I'm intrigued by the extent to which it was generational. That the younger people were just more interested in... Don't give them oxygen. Yeah. That does seem to be in a really interesting way. And that fact gives me a little bit of pause and makes me think, am I sure I'm right? I'm not 100% sure I'm right. My instinct is to say he

should show up. But the fact that there is a very large body of people who I respect who think otherwise does make me think, you know, I'm persuadable. But my initial thought is I'd rather air these things and deal with them in a rigorous way in the public. I feel the same way. But yes, I mean, I'm conflicted about almost everything. And we've established that it's mainly your fault.

The right human position is to be conflicted on nearly everything. Yeah. Wait. This is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch,

use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. Continue. Hey, welcome back, podcats. Malcolm Gladwell there, chatting to me. The British Joe Rogan. I think he realised by the end that I'm not the British Joe Rogan.

I couldn't tell if he was pleased about that or disappointed. Anyway, I was very grateful to Malcolm for his time. I do recommend talking to strangers, the audiobook. I mean, I do like his voice, I must say. That was one of the slightly unsettling things about meeting him was just how familiar I have been with his voice in various forms over the years. Listening to his audio books and his podcast, I find his voice very relaxing. Yeah, the audio book of Talking to Strangers is well worth a go. And, you know, Tipping Point, it's a good one to start with. But there are things in that book that he has since revised his thinking on.

One of the main ones being a chapter about the so-called broken windows policing strategy that took place in New York in the 90s. that took place in New York in the 90s and John Ronson the journalist and friend of the podcast talked to Malcolm about exactly that in 2013 for an interview that John did for the Culture Show I've put a link to it in the description of this podcast what else have we got in the links well link to Malcolm's Revisionist History podcast. Lots of good episodes of that. Link to the audiobook. Well, there is a link to a new playlist that I've created for you, called Dr. Buckle's Nice Weather Selection,

featuring some of my favorite bits of music to listen to when the sun comes out and spring is beginning to take hold. I don't know, there might be a few things in there that'll be new to you. What else? Oh yes, there is a link to Richard Herring's Twitch channel on which you'll find various bits of video that he's recorded. I'm not really familiar with Twitch, I have to be honest, but I'm going to be on it this coming Wednesday. What is the date? I've kind of lost track of dates.

Wednesday the 8th at 8pm on Richard's Twitch channel. He and I will be having a video chat. I didn't realise it was a video. He sort of said, look, I'm doing remote podcasts, but then I hadn't properly hoisted on board that it was a live streaming video podcast. That's not my preferred medium. Rosie, stop chasing pheasants.

Come on, let's head back. uh it'll be nice to see richard and waffle with him for an hour or so on wednesday and i imagine that after it's been streamed live the video will sit there on richard's twitch page for you to check out if you feel so inclined what else oh yes link in the description of this podcast to the adam buxton podcast merchandise site where you can find still i believe copies of a new signed limited edition poster by luke drd. And I think that's it. OK, back to audiobook work now. Thank you very much indeed, once again, to Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support. Thanks to Matt Lamont for additional editing on this episode.

Much appreciated, Matt and Seamus. But thanks most of all to you for downloading this episode and for listening right to the end. Back in a week or so with another slice of hot waffle. Until then, wishing you all the best. Hoping you're keeping safe.

Now I'm going to exercise my privilege of being out in the middle of nowhere. Being able to shout extremely loudly that I love you. Bye! Thank you. Bye. Thank you.