The Daily Stoic - Malcolm Gladwell on Running, Writing, and Storytelling

Episode Date: June 19, 2021

On today’s episode of the podcast, Ryan talks to Malcolm Gladwell about his new book The Bomber Mafia which is an exploration of how technology and good intentions collided in the heat of the second world war, their mutual love of endurance sports, the critical infrastructure that surrounds art and culture, and more. Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. You can get Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the  platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase. ***Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoicFollow Maclolm Gladwell:Homepage: https://www.gladwellbooks.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/GladwellInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/malcolmgladwell/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke each weekday We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics Something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage justice up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time.

Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wendery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward.

Listen to business wars on Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. My guest today is one of the goats of nonfiction, greatest of all time, journalist, writers, public speakers, podcast too. I mean, is an incredible, I wanna say Renaissance man,

because they feel like it's all about the same core skill. But just an incredible storyteller and thinker and someone I've very much looked up to for a long time. I remember I first read the tipping point that I read, Blink, then Outliers, most recently his book, then David and Goliath, which is also very good. But then when I read talking with strangers last year,

I read it, actually before last year, I read it when I was on my book tour for Stillness is the Key. I remember I shot him an email and I said, Malcolm, this book is like the definition of mastery. It's like watching a master at work. You took this subject matter that should have been so difficult and frankly not interesting and it's fascinating. And his new book, I would argue, is a much more interesting subject matter than any of the other books.

The bombing campaign, the final days of the Second World War and the Pacific Theater, and again, manages to find a very counterintuitive read on it. And if that weren't enough, if you haven't listened to the revisionist history podcast, so good, listen to his one about golf courses, just a mind-blowing episode. He always finds, like, the story inside the story, or where you didn't even think there was a story. And that's why he's Malcolm Gladwell. That's why people describe things as Gladwellian because he's in a class of his own. It's a distinctive style tone approach. And as I say at the end of this episode, he also has a lovely, fascinating voice. And it's just a pleasure to listen to.

So today, my guest is the one and only Malcolm Gladwell, the tipping point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, talking with strangers, and now his new book, The Bomber Mafia. And of course, if you haven't listened to revisionist history, you absolutely must hear is my interview talking about history, philosophy, endurance, sports, critical infrastructure, like the infrastructure that criticizes art, culture, etc.

And then we get into a little fascinating discussion about vaccines and vaccine hesitancy at the end. I love this episode. I loved talking to Matt Gladwell. Enjoy. First question. Do you run in the morning or do you run in the afternoons? I run in the afternoon. I always have. Never in the morning. Never not even like when you're traveling. Never. So, so do you write first and then run? Yes, right. Morning is thinking time. And so it's creative time and seems crazy to put a run in the middle of the most cognitively valuable stretch of the day.

I agree, except if I think it's unlikely I'll be able to run in the afternoon because the day is not sort of mine to control. Sometimes I'll get it done early and then I've crossed it off the list. But do you find that when you go for a run, like, so let's say you spent all morning writing, whether it went well or it went poorly, do you find that running unlocks things for you creatively that takes you back to writing or helps you the next day or they totally unrelated pursuits for you? Well, you know, I imagine it does unlock things, but not in a conscious way. Sure. So, I mean, it has to help, right? But I just don't know whether you can, you can ever know how it's helping. Any kind of

extended time, like I typically run by myself and I run without music or any accompaniment. Really? Yeah, I never. So it's, you know, I feel like it's just a, it's like, it's like a form of meditation. It's just letting my mind wander.

That is that what you, is that what you're doing is your mind wandering or are you thinking about very specific things? Like are you in control, or is it nothing? I'm usually daydreaming, or if I'm doing a really hard, like, a track workout, then I'm a little more locked in. But if I'm just going, just for a kind of easy run, I'm letting my mind wander or I'm just thinking about various random things.

It's very similar to the kind of thinking I do before I could sleep. It's that. That's the analogy, I think. And why don't you listen to music? Or some people, I'm sure you hear from people all the time that say, I listen to your audio books when I'm running. I am baffled by people's ability to consume this podcast episode or any sort of conversation while they're running. Yeah, I'm with you. I never figured out the logistics of it. I don't like

where would I put my phone? I'm not going to carry my phone on a 10 mile run? That seems nuts. But also, I don't even know. It's never going to do it on the Apple Watch. I think that's what a lot of people do. I just never even occurs to me to, I mean, it's just like, there's so little time. Like, even when I'm driving, I only

ever listened to something on the car, in the car, at the end of the day, never in the morning. But I think it's a precious time. You have with your own thoughts. Yeah, and I think for a writer, that's when your sharpest, you know, is sort of in the morning before the crap of the day has entered your world. And so to willingly, like, mainline other people's thoughts or information strikes me as a bad idea. Yeah, yeah, it's just disruptive.

Although I read that you write in coffee shops, probably not during COVID, but I can't be around, I don't want anyone in the space. I want kind of like a sacred quiet space. So it's interesting. Oh, I love the company in the noise. But remember, I began my career as a newspaper reporter

in At the Wash Supposed, in a big, loud, crowded newsroom. And that's what I associate with, right? You know, I love that energy. I fell in love with that energy. And so I try, I could, I recreated as best as I can in, in, in coffee shops. So I like having, and also I like variety. So I'll move around over the course of the day and write in four different places, you know, my desk being one of them But then I need that kind of to change it up a little bit What's like I imagine maybe it's a little bit like ambient noise like someone who grew up in the city listening to sort of city noises on a white noise machine Or someone who grew up near the ocean needs to hear waves. Yeah, yes, I think it's that that kind of And I I need to hear waves. Yeah, I think it's that kind of, and I never had thing is when I'm actually writing, so little of my life is actually writing.

Sure. People don't understand about writers, which is that, you know, our writing takes up a tiny fraction of, and I find that I'm very unconflicted about the writing part of my. So I don't, you know, I know I really never get writers block or it's very kind of, it's just so pleasurable to construct something for me that, you know, it's fine if there's things going on around me. I'm locked in. I don't, it doesn't sort of affect my process. So let's say for scheduling reasons or you're sick or whether whatever, I'm curious for you, what's more painful? What leaves you more blocked up? Not being able to

write research build stuff for a few days or not being able to get out and physically exercise like run or workout. Which one, if you had to sort of deprive yourself of one, which would you choose? That's easy. Depriving myself of physical activity is way more painful than depriving myself. Because I, you know, if I always just on, took a little three day holiday, I did some work. But most of the red books, that was like totally, I don't know, I could have read books

into your time. I could not have not gone for a run in that time. That would have been painful. So what is that? Is it an addiction? Because I suffer the same thing. It's I was talking to, do you know who Dean Carnasis is? Is that the thing? Yeah, that it's hard,

we were talking about, it's harder for me to not go for a run because I'm sick because I'm hurt because it's somebody's birthday or something. It's harder to not run than to run. I could take some more willpower to not do it than to do it at this point. Yeah, although it's funny, does it take? I mean, I enjoy my day.

So I, because I'm old, I run, you know, two days on, at most sweet days on, one day off. So I'm, I have plenty of off days, and I don't, they're not painful for me. I'm quite happy. I mean, tomorrow I'm not running. I don't have a problem with that. This isn't make me try to. So it's not that. It's just like,

I don't know. It's hard to describe the place. I had the son of a friend of mine came, was passing through and stayed right out of my house. Yes, stayed. We went for a run in the afternoon. I never run with him before. Typically, because I boy upstate, I run, do my most in running by myself. It was a beautiful day.

And we went on this kind of, this new trail near where I live, this beautiful, crushed stone trail that goes for miles. And, you know, we started really easy and then we just decided to pick it up on the way back. And it was just like so great. I mean, she's no other... Sure. You know, we went from started just over eight

minimum pays, ended up with six minimum pays. And it was just like, I don't know, there's just nothing beats that. I just, I was just happy for the rest of the day. It was just so satisfying. I didn't get connected to something very primal. It's like, you're sort of like, this is what the body was meant to do. Yes. And for some reason, I'm aware, as I've, she is, I was going to say, it's always been

this case. I've been, and maybe I was going to say, it's always been this case. I've been, and maybe I have no idea what this is true of all runners. Maybe it is. I, my running is incredibly variable. So I can have days where I'm on fire. And I have days where it, it's a real slog. I don't, I can't point to a rational reason why in both those those instances I may have had a full-night sleep,

I may be perfectly happy in my life, I may. But, you know, sometimes it's a struggle, and yesterday was one of the days where it was not a struggle. It was just, I could have run forever. I mean, it was, when I was a kid, there was a period where, when I was 15 years old, which was the best, I stopped running competitively at 15.

But right before I stopped, I was in, there was a stretch of about two weeks where I was in the greatest shape I'd ever been up to that point. I'd never been in that kind of shape again. And I had that feeling every day that I, nothing, I could just run forever as fast as I wanted. I've always remembered that. It was like the most magical period of my entire life. I think back on some of the workouts I was doing in that window, it's incredible. It just, I was just in a state of physical flow. I know it's a good play. What's weird is that writing and running are kind of on opposite trajectories.

So running, you kind of get worse at it as you get older to some degree, and that the body is rebelling and breaking down as you get older. But writing is unique. I would imagine, I would argue, unique among the artistic or cultural pursuits in that you not only do you tend to get better at it the longer you do it, but also society and the market, accepts the output of your work longer. So a musician, you know, you start, you hit your mid 30s musicians start to be irrelevant culturally. They're moving on to the younger person.

But a writer could hit their stride at 40 or 50 or 60. I was just reading about Janet Malcolm who died yesterday. It's like her first book was published at like 40 or 45 or something. They're kind of opposite pursuits. I like that writing, you could be at your absolute peak at Robert Carrows age. And it's a very forgiving pursuit in that sense. Yeah, no, it's, um, that's the, I didn't realize that when I started. And now I realize, oh, my goodness, the best possible fashion to age, to age in. Um, are there there writing running? I would clip it with your, I find running to be far more

pleasurable now. Now, the only, that I did when I was a kid, the only problem is you're, I guess you're more likely to get injured when you're older. Although, I was injured all the time when I was gone. So I'm not even sure that's true. It's more forgiving than basketball, I just mean. It's probably more pleasure boys to get older, but you can do it as, and even some of the best runners in the world are competing at an elite level later than a lot of the other sports, but yeah.

So yeah, I think it's, I mean, I hope still to be shuffling around when I'm 80. I mean, assuming that my, you know, joints all hold up, I think I should be able to do this for a long time. Do you feel that with writing as far as aging into the profession? I mean, I think I messaged you this when I read Talking With Strangers and it just felt like this was watching a master at work. Not that the other books weren't good, they were very, very good, but I would argue that

the subject matter of Talking with Strangers, and then also with the Bomber Mafia, these are much, the other subject matter, it was easier to make a great book out of, you were dealing with harder material. So for it to be at the Malcolm Gladwell level, or to just be at the readability level that they were with the raw materials you were working on on these harder books, it struck me as really watching the culmination of a person who'd done this a very long time. Yeah, I do feel like I've gotten, I do feel that I do feel like there is some cumulative benefit of my experience now that I can see. I have a lot, I have a lot of confidence

now. Particularly the podcast, you know, in, I'm in my six season, we're just finishing up our six season now. So that's 10 episodes of season. It's 60 episodes in six years. Each episode is roughly, let's say, 7,000 words. That's like a lot of words. Yeah. It feel like, and I feel like that kind of has, It feel like, and I feel like that kind of has, has sped up the process of, of mastery. Just. And I've, I just have a lot of confidence now that I can find. And also, because I'm in the podcast rule, do you have more help? So I just, you know, the component is now much more of a team activity. And that and in combination with my own kind of experience,

it feels a lot different and it feels a lot easier. Sure. And I'm not, you know, I enter these seasons and I'll have, I have to be done by the end of June and in January, February, I'll have no ideas. Like, I couldn't have handled that at 30. I couldn't have handled that now. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show.

Stay tuned. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Diss and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears.

When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondering App.

Even though you're not interacting with the audience the same way, I think there's also something empowering and educational about working at scale. I think this podcast has done 50 million downloads. I could write my whole life and not reach 50 million people. I mean, that's like an insane number. And so you do learn something also by like putting stuff out, hearing from the audience, seeing what's working not working. But like, even a book that sells a million copies is like, you know, an album that sells 15 or 20 million copies, right? So rare to reach that scale. And so books have always been this kind of, I don't want to say a ghetto, but it's a smaller niche that you don't get the sense of what's working for large amounts of people the same way

I feel like you do an audio. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. Or at least they're very, they're so, I had thought when I started that what a podcast was was simply a book that you read. Like my kinds of podcasts, narrative podcasts. But now I realize it's a completely different

animal. That's experienced in a different way that it's a different kind of storytelling. It's remembered differently. It's, you know, it's much, I don't know, I can't, I'm still kind of fumbling with my appreciation of how different it is, but the more I do revisionist history, the more I, I just think this is like a, this is a whole different animal than I was doing before. All that, all that has in common is that I'm doing it, but that's it. I don't know. It's like, I mean, I feel like I'm a guitar player who took up the trombone at 50. It's a unique medium too, and that it's long form, and yet not viral.

So you're not worried about how it spreads in the same way that you are with an article, even a book you want sort of word of mouth. There is something special about like you have an audience, they subscribe, you push it out to them. So it really can kind of be whatever you want. There's a large audience, but you're not subject to the pressures of the internet or even like the best seller market. And I think that's why such good content comes out of podcasts for the most part, is that it kind of exists in one chunk, as opposed, even like talk radio is like sort of live. And if you're not holding the attention, they turn off or switch to a different channel, it's kind of immune from these wicked incentives that I think have

ruined some other mediums. Yeah. And also, it's this wonderful. So there's no critical infrastructure for a podcast, right? There's no, there's not even really a bestseller list, I mean, a kind of is, but not really. There's nobody knows what it means, what the ranks mean, how many downloads it is, nobody knows. They're not podcast critics who publish regular things and everyone reads.

There's no, and what we're getting is a kind of a little case study in what happens to creativity in the absence of criticism. And the results suggest, to my mind as well, at least, that the contribution of the critical infrastructure to writing, to publishing may be greatly overstated, that the world would actually be, if there were no movie reviewers, maybe movies will be be, if there were no movie reviewers, maybe movies will be better. If there were no book reviewers, maybe people would take more chances. I'm not what the kind of creative flowering you see in this new medium, in the absence of some kind of institutional reviewing function, suggests to me that maybe these reviewers were

screwing things up, They weren't helping. I mean, I would totally argue that they are even to go back to publishing. This is always something I've noticed about your books. Your books appear on the New York Times nonfiction list, whereas almost all of the rest of us operating in very similar spaces, get jammed in the advice how to nonfiction ghetto, where we're competing with the Guinness Book of World Records and the no belly fat diet books and all this other stuff. And what is that distinction? Who decided that what Malcolm Gladwell writes is high brow enough to be nonfiction

and then basically anyone else writing nonfiction that has even a sliver of advice in it gets put in the miscellaneous bucket. And yet that determines so many other things. And it's just like some random person probably made this decision all these years ago. And the downstream consequences of that is it sort of has to do with rankings and all this other stuff. It is interesting, even the bestseller list, I always find it funny, like if you look at the fine print

of the New York Times bestseller list, it excludes like books that are assigned in school. It excludes like perennial sellers. And it excludes things that should be on the list every week or every month. And so people end up inevitably trying to gain incentives, right? And I think your point about there not really being

anything to game with podcasts means all that energy gets focused on just making stuff that people want to make. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, this kind of like, the existing publishing infrastructure is super creaky. It's just like, it has people, even something is dumb as, I mean, we're sort of getting the weeds here. But the New York Times list is a list of print books, and then they also have a list of ebooks. They don't fold in your audiobooks. But audiobooks, in my case, I sell more audiobooks and print books.

It's like 30 or 40% of sales of most books. In my case, it's 60% of sales. So I don't understand, why does the Neartons think that they should count my print book, but not my audio book. I mean, I just don't, I mean, it's just like dumb. Or why is Amazon weighted, dispro- underweighted, but independent bookstores are overweighted? Meanwhile, I think, you know, independent book sales. And I have an independent bookstore is like one or two percent of my total sales. So, somebody decided that because they love indie bookstores, that's going to be disproportionately weighted on the list. You haven't, you haven't, indie books? Yeah, I have a small bookstore in this small town here in Texas. Really?

Yeah, so I was talking to you from my office, which is above the bookstore. I needed it like an office space to write. And so I bought this small building and beneath it is a store front and I opened a bookstore. What town in Texas do you live? Bastrop, Texas, which is right outside Austin. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I know. I go to Austin the whole time.

I should come and you should. I should come and check out your bookstore. We have all your books. They're very popular. Yeah, yeah, for this funny. But yeah, it's strange how, you know, again, this sort of arbitrary criteria, which is, I guess kind of the, the through line of a lot of your books,

what is the underlying hidden logic of how a lot of systems or people or assumptions operate and it's not usually what people think. There's usually something going on. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know it's funny. Yeah, I am that kind of side of it always has fascinated me. I'm doing a, the next big project I'm doing

is on the LAPD. It's a kind of history of the LAPD, but it's a different kind of history of the LAPD. It's a kind of history of the LAPD, but it's a different kind of history of the LAPD. It's like, I'm trying to describe how did one of the great American institutions go wrong? And it's really at the, you know, when we talk about police, problematic police behavior in this country,

we often talk, that's not what I was talking talk about it in terms of bad people, like the guy in Minneapolis, who's just a bad actor. And we think we need to get rid of the bad actors. But the focus of my book is not on bad people, but on bad systems. And how, if you look very closely at the history of the LAPD, you realize that there's a kind of an original sin in the way the institution was set up in the 30s. And the results, the consequences of that

warped the way the city was policed for two generations. And it took a heroic effort to change that. And it's like, it's such a kind of like, and people almost know and talked about this for 60 years. I mean, just never came up. And they were always talking about, well, is there something wrong with the cops? Is there something wrong with the people just who complain about the cops? Just complainers? Are they, you know, there was a million, maybe this problem doesn't exist.

There was a million explanations given for what was for the, to try and identify the dysfunction in Los Angeles. And the truth was like there in plain sight, but it just was in a form that no one no one wanted to think about. It's all about the way the city charter is written. It's like the nerdyest thing, but that's it. That's at the core. It's set up a system which perpetuated itself for 50 years. That was my favorite part of the new Mark Lewis book, the premonition where, I don't know if you remember this part, but like they were trying to find out something about droplets and what size droplets were.

And there had always been this assumption in epidemiology that it'd come from a very specific thing. And someone was like, well, let's go find what study that's based on. And nobody could. They found it. Ultimately, it was traced back to this obscure book. And it might have been a typo. It's always interesting that it was like one guy,

because it's usually, unfortunately, a guy. Some guy laid down a rule or a law, as you said, like 60 years ago, and everything is descended from that. It's all fruit from the poison tree, but it doesn't feel like that because nobody even remembers who that person was and that they would have had so much power at that time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's fascinating. Yeah. So, you mentioned upstate earlier, I meant to thank you. I believe your neighbor up there, Charles Randolph, is he told me that you were the one that recommended that he do the screenplay

about one of my books. I wrote a book about Peter Teal and Gokker. Oh yeah. And he said it was you that recommended it. He may be being over the generous, but Charles is one of my best friends. Yeah, he lives 100 yards for me. He's a, that was, yeah, that was a, that was a really, really interesting book.

Yeah, and they're, they're, I don't know where the, what the status of the movie is at the, I have no idea either. Yeah, yeah. No, Charles is a genius. Very brilliant guy. Yeah, yeah, no, Charles is a genius. Very brilliant guy. Yeah, no, the screenplay he did was amazing. Hopefully it ultimately gets made. But, all right, so a couple more questions.

So the knock against you, when usually sort of jealous academics are mad at knock on Clydewell, you get something that I get as well, which is ago, oh, he's just a popularizer. This strikes me as a preposterously complimentary insult. Why do people think that that would be a bad thing? Isn't that the whole job of writing? Yeah, I've never understood that. It's like, It's like, well, you know, it's funny.

I think that there is something else going on here, which is in part legitimate, which is, and I'll use a running example. Every now and again, there'll be an article about running written for a popular audience by someone who, you realize half of the articles, not themselves or runner. And there's always a moment when I read an article like that, when I get so angry, how are they,

what are they talking about? How could they possibly say that? What a ruff. And then I stop and I say, oh, no, no, no, Malcolm, don't get angry. Because this is a structural feature of journalism because this is a structural feature of journalism. That is the insider is always going to be unhappy with the account of their world written by the outsider,

necessarily. One because the outsider could never get all the nuance. But also the outsider who's writing about your world is not writing for you. I should remember this lesson if there's an article about running in the, you know, New York Times magazine. Don't read it, Malcolm. It's not for you. You're happy. It's not for you. Like, if they're writing about, I think there was maybe some article years ago about Mary Kane that there was just so much stuff that had known me about it. But then it was, it's for people who don't

Know about Mary Kane. Well, there was an article about 20 that I was remembered. It's really so crazy. There's an article about Where they're trans and it was that whole argument of the thing about whether trans athletes should be allowed to compete alongside You know, in conventional gender categories. And at one point they were talking about, well, what role, what is the added benefit of having higher male levels of testosterone? And the person running the article said, you know, it's trivial. It's only about like 2%, or 3%, you know, it's trivial. It's only about like 2% or 3% you know, it's a runner. I was like, oh my god, 3% is everything. So it's different between being first and last, but it's between making the Olympic team

and not even making the final. That can be several minutes in a marathon. Yeah, it's like huge, but I, you know, that is an egregious mistake. But at the same time, the same rule applies. It's not to the kind of person. It was otherwise a very intelligent article trying to introduce people who never thought about this issue to this issue. And it's fine if not everything is perfect. It's not the point, you know, the people reading it are not going to be the ones passing judgment

on this very complicated issue. This article is simply saying, here's your introduction. If you're interested in this, you'll read more. Yeah. And you'll correct. You'll understand eventually that's few percent a lot. You'll get there. But like, so I think of what's happening with you, people like you and I, is that the same thing. The insider's reading it, and of course,

they're gonna see a nuance that we didn't see, but they should just like chill. That's not for them. Well, you'll see it as someone who go like, don't read Ryan, go read the original Stoics. And to me, that would be the equivalent of like, don't read Malcolm Gladwell, go read hundreds of scientific journal articles.

Nothing could make you or I happier than millions of people deciding to be as nerdy and dedicated and detailed about their what they read as that. Yeah. Also realistically, that's never gonna happen. If everyone loved journal articles, we wouldn't have books, we just all read journal articles. Like, I think people struggle with the idea

that not everyone has the time or energy or frankly, the ability to go as in depth as a topic. And they have to start somewhere just as you didn't start with journal entries. And everyone has to start with a general introduction to something. And why would like of I always I always get mad to not matter. People go like, you know, as people in Silicon Valley are reading Ryan holidays, you know, books about stoicism.

And it's like of all the things they could be reading that you would be upset about. It seems like an ancient philosophy would be like the least bad thing for them to be consuming. Like, for, of all the things that you could be popularizing, it's not like you're popularizing QAnon or, or, or, or, you know, the law of attraction, you're, you're popularizing science and, and research. This is a good thing. Why be upset about that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't. I kind of stop paying attention. One of the blessings of experiences, you know, you stop paying attention to dumb criticism. And you realize it just doesn't matter. It's not like that. But the rule I always have is if you imagine as a hypothetical scenario that let's stipulate that 90% of the people who read your books love your books and 10% hate them. That's a very,

very generous. I'm going to give you that. So if you sell 10 books, then you have one critic, and nine people will love your books. No one's even going to notice that one critic, right? If you sell a million books, you're going to have 100,000 critics, right? All we're going to be in and dated with the critics of Ryan Holiday. But you sold a million books, and you have 900,000 people who love them. Now, which of those two, which of those two scenarios do you want? Right? Do you want to sell one credit or 100,000 critics?

I want to have 100,000 critics. Right. The other feature of that is that the haters always hate more than the people who are fans. Of the 90% who like you, most of them were like, oh, it's okay. Or I read that outliers, that's the one with the 10,000 hours, that's what I took away from the book, right?

But the hater is the one who's obsessed that on page 62, you made an assumption that they don't agree with, and therefore, you are the devil, and they were gonna spend all their time on the internet letting everyone know. I tried a couple of years ago, I realized this. I realized that I was like everyone far more free with my criticism than my praise. And I decided to make a concerted effort to be, to equalize that. So to, and so I started, you know, Janet, you just mentioned, Janet Malcolm died yesterday.

Janet Malcolm was, she was the most important influence of my own writing. I wrote everyone of her books, some of them more than once. I was obsessed with Janet Malcolm. And I was, oh, you know, I need to start telling the world this. So starting about five years ago, maybe even longer, whenever I was, had an opportunity, I would say, and my five favorite writers, Janet Malcolm. And then finally, last year, a couple of no, a little handwritten no from Janet Malcolm,

saying, I heard you say on some, some friend of mine alerted me to some, you know, interview you gave, well, you said you, I was your favorite writer. I'm so touched. I was like, you know, that I wish I'd started doing that 30 years ago. Yes. That, you know, she has been trapped in a world. She was in her 70s or 80s by that point. She'd been in this world where her haters were much louder than her supporters.

And the only way that's ever going to reverse is if people like me who like who work speak out, right? And better that you speak out while she's alive and she could actually hear about it. Yeah, it was the sweetest little note. I was like, I think I brightened today. Like I was so thrilled to get that little note from her. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show.

Stay tuned. No, that's a great rule. Okay, back to the insider thing and then I wanna talk about the new book. I think one of the things you kind of just described there and I might be pronouncing it wrong, but what is it, the gal amnesia effect or the gel amnesia effect?

Do you know about this? No. I actually heard about it from Michael Lewis. But it's basically that whenever you read an article about something that you are, in fact, an expert about, you immediately see that the journalists or journalists in general have no idea what they're talking about and that you can't trust it. And so you read this about running or something in the market because you run a hedge fund or whatever it is that you're an expert about, you read it and you're just disgusted without inaccurate it is. And then you turn

to the next page and you click the next article and they tell you about an upcoming ruling of the Supreme Court and what it means or what's going on in the Middle East or the latest news about this scientific breakthrough. And you absorb it and trust it completely as if it is not just as inaccurate to the insiders, but you are unaware of your own ignorance. Yeah, that's best to you. That's so true. That's exactly what I'm talking about because, you know, I will legally can, you know, I'll be throwing my hands up over the American article and then I'll, you know, legally read every other article in the magazine. Yes. Yes. Well, so I thought the new book was fascinating. Again, it seems like maybe you're trying to challenge yourself to write about something

that you must have known the vast majority of people were going to be upset about you for daring to talk about and for not sort of taking. I don't want to call it the party line, but let's call it the liberal consensus about this part of the Second World War, were you trying to challenge yourself or were you just compelled to tell this story? I mean, I was, I didn't think it's funny. I, from my perspective, I have never gotten such positive reviews on a book in my life. I'm used to getting, I have on many of my books, run the table and got not a single major poster review. So that's my baseline.

So this one, I've just been flabbergasted by how positive the response has been. I wasn't trying to do anything controversial at all. I was, but I was trying to stretch myself in the kind of story that I was telling. I wanted to tell a single narrative, which I've never done before, I book length. I always have a book that has multiple narratives. And I was like, you know, why can't I tell a story from beginning to end? Because I've always been an awe of someone like Michael Lewis who does that. And I know I understand how he could do it.

So that was the first thing. And I wanted to write a book that didn't, that withheld a conclusion. I wanted people to make up their own mind about what we should have done at the end of the Second World War, or whether what Curtis Dome did over Japan in the summer of 45 is a good or a bad thing. Because I'm not sure I know what to make of it. So I just thought I would lay out the two sides and that people interpreted as they may.

I think that in binaries, that's what people have done, is they've just accepted the fact that war presents you with a series of impossible choices. And they're no less impossible with the passage of time. I mean, it's not any easier

to make sense of what was doing, what were they were doing in 45 today than it was in 45. So that's what I was trying to get at, at is you know, I feel like this is the thing I've actually begun to feel quite strongly about in many. This idea of degree of difficulty is the thing we have the hardest time with and you know the I've seen this you know, the, I've seen this, you know, and all I've done a ton of writing about police and law enforcement in my life. And the thing I always come back to is most people who are not in law enforcement underestimate how difficult that job is.

Similarly, you know, I think the same is true of teaching. I think most non-teachers underestimate how difficult it is to be a good teacher. It's really hard. You know, I had a brother who was an elementary school principal for many years. And so I had, I got a kind of insight into that world. Man, like you, you know, to do it, to do, to walk into a classroom of eight-year-olds and keep them interested and entertained and learning day in, day out for nine months, that's like, there is nothing I do that's

that that's that's that hard. So that sort of that a pretty and I wanted to give that same appreciation for people who fight wars. It's just like, it's really easy to judge after the fact that man, walk a mile in their shoes. And that's really what the Bombermawphe was an attempt to do. I have a theory that, you know, you study something like the Civil War or you study something like the Second World War,

we had these very simple historical narratives, right? The Civil War is about slavery. We dropped the atomic bomb on Japan to save millions of casualties from the invasion. And then you do a little bit more research. You actually realize, oh wow, this is very complicated. There's all these factors, there's a bunch of stuff you weren't told about. It turns out, hey, Lincoln, wasn't, was opposed to slavery, but not really opposed to slavery.

And look at all these horrible quotes. And then you go, yeah, but actually maybe it wasn't going to be a million people who died in the invasion. And actually, Japan was almost going to surrender. You start to hear that stuff and gets really complicated. But then you do another level of research, and you really get into the minds of the people who were there at the time, you read the primary sources. Weirdly, it kind of becomes simple again. You're like, oh, the Civil War really just entirely was about slavery. And really, they were looking at the horrendous human costs of invading Japan after all of these island invasions.

And that's why they made the decision again. So it's this weird thing where it's simple, then hopelessly complex, and then weirdly, what comes out of it is a kind of simplicity. But it's a different kind of simplicity. It's not the patriotic propagandistic simplicity, but you do kind of end up getting to roughly the same place. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting. It's the layers, it's funny how different levels of experience and expertise give you dramatically different perspectives on the tasks that you're, and you have this, it's like what you're describing is a U-shaped curve, right? That, and you start out in, at baseline, somewhere, the curve goes up and you're moving on, and then you just come back to baseline. It's like, there's a lot of, I, which book, there was one of my books

where I talked a lot about U-shaped curves and how commonly they describe our experience and how infrequently we understand that we're just writing this curve and it's gonna be confusing. The classic U-shaped curve is, I remember, that's, it's right, I was talking with this with respect to class size and education. Large classes are bad.

We all know that. Then you make the class, as you make the class smaller, the task of learning gets easier and easier and easier, but then when the class gets too small, learning gets harder again. And people understand it. They think it's just a straight line. And you'll hear fancy schools say, we have one teacher for every eight kids. Well, I'm sorry, a class full of eight kids is a bad learning environment. You're only learning from seven other kids.

That's crazy. Why would you cut yourself off in a class of 25 kids, you learn from seven other kids. That's crazy. Why would you cut yourself off in a class of 25 kids, you learn from 24 other kids. What's better? Learning from seven or learning from 24, right? How do you have a meaningful discussion about anything with seven kids? Seven other kids.

You can't. Like I could go on. Teachers, hey, teaching, I talked to all these teachers, so fast today, I was like, what's your ideal class size? I never met a single teacher who thought an ideal class size was less than about 18. Really? They were just like, particularly when they were teaching hard subjects, they were like, you try and teach history to seven kids and man, you will have a lot of

and they also talked about how hard discipline is, which I thought was so counterintuitive. Dispens really hard with 35 kids, but it's also really hard with seven, right? Because one kid one kid can just dominate and you cannot get away from that one kid. And there's no way to cancel out the effect. It's like the three kids in a backseat of the station where you can drive across country. You're screwed if they don't get lost. I kind of feel like your book's actually kind of applied to this too, where it's like, you know, here's the theory behind the tipping point or here's the theory behind, you know, it takes 10,000 hours to become a master of something. And then people are like, but look at all this research that says it's much more complicated than that. And then

you keep researching. And then maybe you try it yourself. And you're like, sure, but it does take thousands of hours to be good at something. Like it's, it's, it's, it's, you get back to the same place. And I think people often hear this, that sort of conclusion and they assume that you have disregarded all this information. And it's like, no, that was integrated into the conclusion. And of course, there's edge cases and exceptions that prove the rule. But generally, this is a pretty good hypothesis or theory for going through the world. And by saying, no, no, no, no, no, it's more complicated. You're not actually

proposing anything different or arguing against it. You're just pointing out what actually exists. Like my, I have this book, Ego is the enemy and, and people go, but, but sometimes Ego is a good thing. And you're like, you think I didn't think about that once writing, you know, a 300-page book about the topic of course, but generally as a rule, this is something that I feel strongly enough about to have tattooed on my arm, okay? Like I did the work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fascinating.

I feel like with the bombing of Japan, this is probably very politically incorrect, but the more I've read about World War II, the more I've read about like a Carthor, for instance, and just how brutal a lot of these campaigns were, I almost wonder if there's kind of a perverse racism at play where it's like nobody feels as strongly about the bombings of Europe, right?

Because we have this sense of who the Nazis were, how real and threatening that was. And I think there's also just like the image we have of the Nazis is one thing. And then when we think about Japan, we have trouble getting ourselves into the headspace of where the world was in regards to Imperial Japan in 1940. We have trouble conceiving of people being very scared and taking the threat of the Japanese

army as seriously as the people who actually fought it in those jungles came to take it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, there's two, there's a whole series of things that are playing into this. One is that there was legitimately a very, very wide swath of racism in our attitudes towards the Japanese in the Second World War. So did, if you just read, you know, the letters and statements of military leaders during the Second World War about the Japanese, they didn't think of them as human. Now, simultaneously, there is an observation that is accurate, which was the fighting between the Japanese and the Americans was far more vicious than the kind of fighting that was taking place in Europe. If you just read about the Pacific theater and what

was going on, insane casualties and a complete unwillingness on a part of the Japanese to surrender, even when all was lost. I mean, so that's the mindset heading into the 1945 is that these guys never give up. And if you are fighting an enemy who has shown no sign that they will ever give up even in the face of overwhelming odds, you have a very different problem on your hands, right?

I mean, the Germans, they were factions of the German army that tried to, remember, that broke away from Hitler and tried to make an independent approach to the Allies in 40, I don't know, it was 42 or 43. So it's like a whole bunch of Germans wanted to give up. You know, years ago, yeah, no more. Nobody on the Japanese side was trying to break away in petition for peace in 1943. So you've got these two problems. One is that we do have a genuine erase of attitude.

And two, we have this really difficult experience in fighting in that theater. And those two things come to a head in 45. And again, it's just a, yeah, that's part of that's sort of the backdrop for the story I was trying to tell in Baramafia that leads to this just impossible set of decisions. And what I'm saying is there's almost a soft bigotry today where we have the inability to conceive of Japan as a dire existential threat that people legitimately felt, it necessary to drop an atomic bomb.

It seems like we see ourselves as America now, Japan today, and we go, how could Truman have been so cruel? How could he have been so awful? Because we can't conceive of what the dynamic was in 1945. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's, I mean, this is why we read history. You know, it's just insanely valuable to get a kind of course in how differently people

thought about whatever the subject of the history is. In the period you're under, like, you can't, you cannot extrapolate back from 2021 to 1945. You just can't, right? There's, I feel like there's also an analogy to the US Civil War where sort of the breakthrough of the US Civil War is Sherman realizing that the backbone of the Southern Army is the Southern people, that there is this war machine that's being sustained by an entire culture that is in line with the aims of its army. Now, there's certainly an element of that in Germany, but there's also a degree to which Germany is sort of captured by the Nazis, which are always a very small minority,

and sort of they take hold of the levers of the state and use them for these horrible aims. So the population is guilty and that they don't rise up against it, but it's not quite the same as Japan, which seemed to a certain degree to be a culture in line with an entire, maybe I'm generalizing a little bit, but there was a need to take the war to the enemy in the Pacific theater that for whatever reason was not quite as necessary in the European theater. Or am I incorrect? Well, I don't think you're incorrect at all. I mean, I think that, you know, the heart of the Baramafi is the argument that logistically the war also, you're trying to

fight an enemy who is who is on an island thousands of miles away. And like that's, you know, my story is all about these pilots and who are given this assignment to bring Japan to its knees. And it's an assignment very different from the assignment given the Air Force or the Army in Europe. It's, you know, you're just,

when you're bombing Berlin and you're flying from Airfields and southern England, you're crossing this channel and a couple of hours in, you're going to come home. Japan is like, we couldn't even touch it until we took Guam in the summer of 1944. We couldn't even get there. Like it's just too far away. I mean, we forget now you can go wherever you want. I mean, now the B2 takes off from Kansas and gone bombs Kosovo and then comes home and the pile has dinner, right, that night.

Yeah. It was, you couldn't do that back then. So you have this in the whole, that whole part of the war is consumed with this logistical question of how do I get close enough to Japan to do damage to their war-making machinery, right? And it's just like getting, I mean, I just found getting into those questions and into that world to be so fascinating. I mean, it's just like the insane amount of effort that went into that war is just, it's just mind-blowing.

Is Limea a genius or is he a hammer and a nail? I wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis a lot in my last book. And it was fascinating. You can listen to the, they recorded a lot of the discussions between Kennedy and the joint chiefs. And you listen to the May and you're like, has this guy lost his mind? Like he thinks we're just going to bomb Cuba off the map and Russia is not going to respond. And then you sort of go, where was this guy's head, you know, 10, 15 years earlier? Was he, did he lose his mind? Did he learn the wrong lesson from Japan or was he crazy the whole time? And it just lined up with what the horrible job

that needed to be done. There's one of the pilots, one of the Air Force historians I talked to, talking about Lemay, said. He was like, Kurtis Lemay did not stick his landing. It meaning the second half of his career is pretty bizarre. And I think it's pretty clear that he goes, I didn't talk about it in the book, Lemay goes rogue in the summer of 45. You know, he has, he starts out with this, the fire bombing of Tokyo in in the spring.

And then he keeps going and he fire bombs basically every big city in Japan with the with the exception of of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course, which are being reserved for another kind of bombing. And it's really I was just fascinating, people by a historian, who points out like, he's not, he's on his own. He's not, he's not carrying out orders from Washington. He just kind of goes rogue and just starts burning, napombing everything he can. And he'd never, something happens to him.

Early in the war, he is this brilliant tactician who is largely responsible for the effective bombing of Europe in 43 and 44, but the time he gets to Japan, something happens. And then his career after the war takes off and he becomes head of the strategic command and ultimately he becomes chief of staff of the Air Force. And I think you're right, I think he's not sput the end. I really do. I wonder if it goes back to the the distance thing you were talking about. Is it if you read the William Manchester biography of MacArthur? No, I haven't. Oh, it's incredible, But he basically argues that never before in American history and maybe

going back not until the Romans, do you get like an analogy where MacArthur is basically a pro-console of the empire. He just rules the Pacific theater because it's so far away. Like Truman has to go and visit him, but it's like Truman is visiting another head of state. Like, MacArthur just has his own universe over there because it's so inconceivably far away, so far from our preconceptions of, you know, our shared culture with Europe, for instance, that the guys just kind of were on their own and they did, I don't want to say lose their minds, but they just, it's like, you know, they were so far up river that they just, they just went, crazy, so, so, so, so, so, so, last, last question for you, this is going to touch the third

rail, I think, because I love the new book, but go back to what we're talking about with athletes. I love the new book, but go back to what we're talking about with athletes. I am fascinated by sports. You have these athletes who are always who are willing to do anything that will give them the slightest edge. They'll put, if they can get away with it, they'll put the most obscene things in their body. You know, they'll do anything for an edge. And then also they're always into like nonsense, you know, like whether it's those, those cups's those cups, or they'll do the most experimental treatments you can imagine, even if the results are not there.

How does one explain vaccine hesitancy in professional sports? I think it's the, if we can unlock this, it might help explain vaccine hesitancy in the rest of the world. Well, so, are you talking about John Rom? I'm talking about John Rom, Cole Beasley, who plays for the bill,

just came out with a big thing. He was like, the odds of me getting COVID are lower than the odds of me making the NFL. I'm just going to continue my street. There's a bunch of players who are opposed either to vaccines or protocols, only like two-thirds of major league baseball is at 85% vaccinated. So what's interesting for sports is not just the individual advantage. Like for John Ron, he loses $2 million. But a team that's fully vaccinated can relax

protocols and then function more effectively as a team. They could have meetings together. They can travel together. They can go out and you know, there's so many incentives lining up to get athletes to vaccinate aside from your sort of basic civic duty as a human being, I would argue. And yet it's perhaps less widespread in sports than other domain. Well, you're going up against the, you're dealing with young men, almost entirely here, who had been raised to feel physically not just superior to all those around them,

but also invulnerable. Sure. If you're playing football and you're worried about the riskiness of what you're doing, you can't play football. Right. So I don't, you know, it's a difficult thing for them to grapple with an unseen threat, particularly when their, you know, their whole identity is wrapped around their physical

prowess. John Rahm is a harder one for me to understand because it's like you knew the rules. Like, yeah, I mean, even could have run out and gotten vaccinated after he was up by three shots after the first day. Like, you know, it doesn't really make a lot of, I agree with you, it makes no sense whatsoever, but there is this kind of macho thing too, that like, you know, FITMAN, I can deal with this, I'm a tough guy, I'll be fine. And by the way, you know, they probably will be fine, probably will be fine.

Only people, I wonder about football. I mean, I do think that Lyman and football are precisely the kind of people who are very vulnerable to sure. If I'm a big right tackle and I'm not vaccinated, man, am I taking a risk. And then I also, also adding to your point, the, you look at the NBA players who had COVID, like Jason Tatum was on the sideline taking oxygen. Like it seemed like months after he had COVID.

I mean, you have to look around you. You see, like Jason Tatum is as spectacular and an athlete as exists in the world. I mean, if you talk about an invulnerable, perfect physical specimen, that's Jason Tatum. And that guy was laid low by COVID. Like, so I don't understand why they wouldn't look at Tatum and just say, oh, okay, I thought I was,

thought I was gonna be fine, but man, like I don't want that to happen to me. This, I mean, maybe, maybe if Tatum had stood up and didn't really, really, really vocal about it and said to all of his fellow athletes, guys, this is crazy. Don't go, don't do this. Maybe that would have made a difference, but there is also a level of wimpiness here that I don't understand.

I, everyone I know in the business world has had this problem that some portion of their employees haven't gotten back to it. And they've all just laid down the law. I've just said, right, sorry, you have to get it. And it works. People just go, right, this, I don't understand why, you know, why, the NBA just doesn't give a deadline and say, you're vaccinated by this deadline, or you're, you know, it's it like it. It's also kind of revealed our insane attitude towards illness generally. I was talking to someone with the Yankees who, you know, they were talking about the COVID,

the vaccine breakthrough cases that they had there. And so obviously most of the players have been vaccinated, they reach the level. But he was like, what happened is a coach came in who thought he just had the flu or a cold, right? And so obviously that's insane to do in the middle of the pandemic, but it's interesting to me that a guy who works for a team

that has elite racehorses essentially, like elite machines that have to be taken care of was fine just introducing germs that he knew he was carrying into this small space. Like, our attitude of like, I know you travel a lot and where you're just like, oh, yeah, I'm sick several days a year. This is just a normal thing that we do and go out in the world. I think the pandemic has kind of reminded us like, oh, hey, that's like a really selfish and stupid and self-defeating thing to do that we just go around getting each other sick instead of like taking a day off. Yeah.

It maybe we have massively undersold this vaccine. That's also part of the problem. It's magic. It's akin to the moon landing. It's it's some believe. I mean, we've just witnessed one of the problem. It's magic. It's akin to the moon landing. It's it's some believe I mean, we've just witnessed one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of our lifetime. I mean, this is, I mean, it's insane. I don't think that story should have been told aggressively. Instead, we were telling all of these kind of like weird, like, I don't know, it's like, I don't know why we suddenly got shy about tuning our own horn here. Like this was a chance to stand up and say, for the last two generations in America,

we have invested billions of dollars into building the greatest scientific institution, institutional infrastructure in the history of mankind. Guess what? It just paid off. Yes, right? And it was with these guys in the history of mankind. Guess what? It just paid off. Yes, right? And it was with these guys in the main, I mean, there was some obviously, some of these people are not from America,

but you know, there's a, you know, all of these MR and A stuff, you know, NIH and American schools are all complicit. You know, this is your tax dollars educated these people, right? This is why we have government. Like, we could have said, guys, I know you complain about your paying taxes and you could play on government, but it, dude, looked just what happened. You produced a miracle, you produced it.

You paid for it, right? And we promised you when you did that, that one day it would pay it off. And guess what, it just paid off, right? Why didn't no one make that argument? Well, and I would also argue is after I do this, I'm going, I volunteer at this vaccine clinic in the town that I live in, like logistically, also a miracle. Like we've given out 160, 70 million shots to 300 million people, a lot of whom were located in extremely rural or difficult to reach areas.

And it wasn't the federal government that didn't necessarily. It was this massive, distributed, interconnected network of giving, they're injecting a shot that has to be kept at an insane temperature and done just the right way. And how few side effects there have been and how rarely it's gone wrong. Also logistically, like we did an incredibly hard thing together. Yeah, yeah, no, it's been, I think we're going to get there. I also think that when we come out with patches, I mean, a lot of probably, a lot of people are scared of needles and just don't want to admit it. Yes. Yes. It's a huge part of this. When we start, you know, these transdermal patches are

actually a more effective way of delivering the vaccine. And if I just told you, can you slap on this patch for a day? I feel like we could get up to, you know, we could, that would make a big, big difference. I was, I started asking my friends about this. You know, all people who ended up getting vaccinated. And the number of them who said, I have a pathological fear of needles. It was really hard for me. It's surprised me. It's not a trivial thing. I think that's why we give them to kids because they don't have a choice. So you get it done early and then you can't overthink it. Yeah. Yeah. To go back to your point about, there's a wind being this where we can't just mandate it, when you look at how they solve tough problems

in the Second World War, for instance, I struggle to think that they'd be like, hey, this vaccine is voluntary. Let's just see if, like, don't you think logistically we would have figured out a way to, you know, that, think about how we, we did post-mast polio vaccinations in the 60s.

They, We did post-mast polio vaccinations in the 60s. They, you know, a group of nurses would show up at your school, set up shop in the auditorium, and they would march every single kid in line through, and you would get your shot. Like, there's no kind of consulting with parents and getting to sign forms and taking notes and like considering objections, you lined up, you got shot and then we got rid of one

of the scariest you know, diseases of that era. That's, you know, for better or worse, we're much more cautious these days about it, but I just wonder whether the pendulum is swung too far. And we just are overthinking this. Just like, just go to schools and just do every kid in the afternoon and then go to the next school and do every kid the next morning. I mean, that's that is the way to do it. Well, it's like even voluntary in the military right now. And the military only has like a 50% vaccination rate. It's crazy to me that the one place where the government does have essentially complete control over people.

It's wavering. It's a strange, it means something. I don't know exactly what it means. It couldn't mean a good thing, but it seems like it's probably a bad thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's troubling. Well, I love the new book. It's amazing.

I love all the books. One other complaint. I feel like it's unfair both you and David McCullough to be both great writers and then also to have very interesting voices. It's an unfair, it's an unfair advantage that I very much enjoy listening to revision and history. Um, Ryan, when I'm next, um, you know, Austin, we should go for run. Although I suspect you're much faster than me. I don't think that that's true. Uh, I think your mile time recently was my mile time in high school. So, uh, that's pretty impressive. But I would love to, I would love to run with you or, or in New York,

or if we're both in DC, let's run with, uh, with David Epstein. Yes. That'd be really fun. Have you run with David in DC, let's run with David Epstein. Yes, that'd be really fun. Have you run with David, have you run with Rich Wall? No, I haven't. But he's serious. He's very serious, but yeah, I was looking at that. I mean, I think this kind of, the great thing about Strava now is that, it's when I travel, I'll post a run and then locals will see it. And I was in Phoenix and I posted a run of Phoenix.

Guys, I come and join a Sunday morning and I joined it. I mean, it was so much fun because they knew this insane route through the foothills of Phoenix past all these incredible houses and down this wonderful trail. And it was just like, I was like, oh, this is like, this is actually what the internet's for. We think the internet is for, you know, X, Y, and Z, no, it's just not.

It's, what the internet's for is finding people to go for a run on a Sunday morning in the city, you don't know. That's the best part. The only downside is you are like telling people exactly where you live because it's like, oh, conveniently, Malcolm seems to be leaving and coming back to the exact same middle. I don't post those rins.

I don't post those rins. So you only do it, because I only do it when I'm traveling for the same reason. I just don't do it for my house. I really run through my house because I have to go. So right, you know, the general area, but you can't figure out where I live from my struggle. Did you see that study where they found that they were accidentally

like revealing the locations of secret military and CIA basis through straw? I love that so much. I love straw. Straw is just the best. It totally is. Well, Malcolm, thank you very much. Can't wait to meet you someday and appreciate all the books. Thanks so much for listening.

If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference and of course every nice review from a nice person helps balance out. The crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.