E-mail a friendMalcolm Gladwell
airdate October 26, 2009
Award-winning journalist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer with The New Yorker. Named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People, his books are provocative and thought-provoking. Gladwell originally planned on a career in advertising, but a job with the conservative monthly The American Spectator changed his course. He's reported on business and science and was The Washington Post's New York bureau chief. The British-born Canadian's new book, What the Dog Saw, is a collection of his famous New Yorker pieces.
Best-selling author talks about the importance of seeing the world the way others do. (1:16)
Full Interview (12:11)
Malcolm Gladwell
Tavis: Malcolm Gladwell has established himself as one of the most influential and widely read thinkers and writers of our time, with a string of best sellers including "Outliers," "Blink," and "The Tipping Point." His latest is a collection of stories called "What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures." He joins us tonight from New York. Malcolm, nice to have you on the program.
Malcolm Gladwell: Glad to be back, Tavis.
Tavis: I assume that because the word "dog" is in the title this will be another "New York Times" best-selling text?
Gladwell: (Laughs) That is the surest route to the best-seller list, you're absolutely right.
Tavis: What do you make - we're making jokes about this, but what do you make of the fact that there are so many books now and certainly over the last five years about dogs?
Gladwell: Well, I don't know. It just kind of taps into something - I guess it's because people associate dogs with positive things. It's hard to read an article about a dog that's a downer, isn't it? Maybe that's it, I don't know.
Tavis: Of all the titles you could have chose for a book that is a collection of some of your best work, why the title "What the Dog Saw?"
Gladwell: Well, it's the title of one of my favorite stories I ever wrote for "The New Yorker," which was all about Cesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer. The theme of that piece was instead of trying to understand how Cesar sees dogs; I wanted to understand what the dog sees in Cesar, right? That's actually typical of a lot of the writing I do, where I try to get inside the head of the person I'm writing about and see the world through their eyes. In that case it was the eyes of a dog, but in the other cases in this piece it's the eyes of cops and surgeons and athletes and whoever else I'm writing about.
Tavis: To your point now, and you've written about this in a variety of ways; I'm just going around the edges here, what matters most - what people see in us or what we see in others?
Gladwell: Well, it's hard to choose between those two things. I would phrase it a little differently. I would say that it is really important to be able to completely put yourself inside the head of the people you're dealing with because one theme I come back to again and again in these stories and in my books as well is that the way each of us views the world is highly idiosyncratic.
We always slip into this mistake of thinking that because we see things in a certain way everyone around us is going to have exactly the same perspective, and that turns out to be sort of radically wrong and that's been a big theme of mine in my writing.
Like in the title piece in "What the Dog Saw," you really - until you kind of figure out how dogs see the world you have no idea how to treat them. You think you - if you treat them like human beings you make a grave error because they see things in a radically different way.
Tavis: So I'll set the dogs aside for just a second and forgive the naiveté of the question but it's deliberate - what, then, is the value of us getting inside the head of the people we work with? What's the point, what's the value of it?
Gladwell: Well, because each of us is shaped in such a kind of dramatic way by our training, by our culture, by the circumstances that we're in, by - the first piece in the collection is a piece about Ron Popeil, the guy who invents the Showtime Rotisserie oven, the guy who does the infomercials on TV.
Tavis: Yeah, that and a million other things he's invented.
Gladwell: Yeah, and a million other things. I was really interested in that one because we make fun of these guys on late-night TV, but I wanted to not make fun of him but actually credit him. I think he's the - I call him the first family of the American kitchen. I think he's really invented some really brilliant - they're not - they're more than gadgets, they're things people use in their kitchen every day.
What's fascinating about him is when you get to know his history and you understand; he comes from this family that's been making kitchen gadgets for three generations and that sold them originally on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. When you get all that kind of history and family perspective you understand why the Showtime Rotisserie is the way it is.
Now that seems like a really trivial thing but it's sort of not. It gives that object, the oven, a certain amount of dignity, and it gives Ron Popeil, who you might have thought of as a figure of fun, you realize oh, no, actually, this is a serious, fascinating and economically important entrepreneur who we can learn from. That's the kind of thing that I think that you - I think when you get inside people's heads it dignifies them and you take them more seriously, and that's a huge theme in my writing.
Tavis: Speaking of your writing, I was in a conversation about you the other day and I was trying to describe you to someone who was a fan of yours but had not met you. I summed you up - and I may be right or wrong about this, but this is my perspective, having talked to you a number of times over the years - I summed you up with one word and that word was "curious."
A lot of people write for a lot of different reasons but I think part of what turns so many of us on about the stuff that you write or attempt to get at, whether it's in columns or books, is that it's born of some sort of curiosity. You put it another way a moment ago; you like to get inside the head of other people. But tell me if I'm right or wrong about what drives you relative to the writing that you've shared with us to read over the years.
Gladwell: Yeah, I think that's - I'd use that word. Because I kind of operate on the assumption that there's an interesting story behind everything, so there's a piece in the book about ketchup, about why has Heinz ketchup dominated the ketchup world ever since its creation over 100 years ago?
It gets into this idea that Heinz is actually a kind of perfect food, and it's - I won't spoil the story for people but the point was somebody - I had a conversation with a friend of mine in the grocery business and he just let slip this weird fact that every other item in the supermarket has been divided up a million ways. There's 50 different kinds of mustard, there's 12 different kinds of salt, there's - except for ketchup. There's really only one ketchup.
That sort of - the minute I heard that my ears popped up and I thought, whoa, maybe there's some - there must be some interesting behind that and there is, it turns out. I guess I just wait for those moments when somebody tells me something interesting.
There's another piece in the collection, it's all about John Rock, who was one of the inventors of the birth control pill, and that all started when someone told me that one of the inventors of the birth control pill was a devout Catholic who went to mass every day.
I heard that and I thought, that is fascinating. He didn't think that what he was doing with the pill was inconsistent with his faith, because the Catholic Church still hasn't recognized the pill as something Catholics are allowed to use but it was invented by a Catholic. That's interesting. I hear that and I just think oh, there must be a story there.
Tavis: PBS has a lot of smart people that watch it. I do PBS, as you know, and public radio every day, so I'm honored to engage a relatively smart audience, I think, every single day.
Yet I talk to folks sometimes who are not as educated - I work in a hood, I've lived in the hood for most of my life, so I talk to everyday people, many of them not the most educated all the time - not to say that because you live in a hood you're not educated, but I think you get my point here.
What I'm trying to get at is whether or not, to your point now about ketchup and other things, whether or not those who happen to be uniquely gifted and extremely bright, whether or not we ever, in our own worlds, push the envelope of intellectual curiosity too far.
Does it really matter why ketchup is ketchup? Does it really matter why Heinz has dominated? Aren't there other things? I'm just trying to figure out honestly whether or not you think sometimes in our quest to be cute we've pushed the intellectual envelope just a little too far.
Gladwell: Well, that story's in there because - along with lots of other stories that deal with homelessness and education and - so it's a mix. You can't write about - as a writer, in order to keep myself fresh I feel like I have to write about serious things, trivial things, it's a kind of - but also I think that you can learn really interesting things from seemingly trivial subjects and you don't always know when you start writing about something trivial, where it's going to lead you.
Tavis: That's fair.
Gladwell: I think there's a theme - one of the themes in my writing, I've always thought, is that there - I've always had a tremendous amount of more than respect, kind of fascination with just how crazily diverse people are. There's a number of different ways to explore that idea. You can explore it in a kind of very serious, straight-ahead way and you can also explore it in a kind of roundabout way.
So my point is that sometimes things that seem like they're not that serious and they're just sort of being playful without advancing the cause of humanity can actually - we can actually learn cool things from them as well. So I think it's useful as long as there's a kind of mix of subjects. I think it's always useful to follow your curiosity.
Tavis: That's a fair answer. How does one get inspired every day, beyond your curiosity, beyond your fascination with interesting things, beyond the idea of getting inside people's heads, what drives you when you get to a point in your career where pretty much everything you write ends up being a best seller?
I'm trying to figure out when you get to that point in your life how you keep putting out good work when you know that pretty much anything you do is going to hit the list, does that make sense?
Gladwell: Yeah. Well, because I've never been motivated by that kind of external validation. I've always written for myself and for my friends. If they're not happy, they're my - my toughest critic is my mom, and if my mom is not happy with something I do (laughter) I'm not happy. I don't care - I could sell 10 million copies.
She told me when "Outliers" came out, she was like, "I liked 'Tipping Point' and I liked 'Blink.' I really liked 'Outliers.'" What she was saying was, "This is your first good book." (Laughter)
Tavis: Never mind how many copies the other ones had sold.
Gladwell: So as long as my mom's around she's going to keep me honest, and I think that's true for a lot of us.
Tavis: It certainly is for my mother, who watches this show every night and offers her same assessment so I know what that feels like. Finally here, "What the Dog Saw," as we've already established here, is really a collection of some of your best stuff. When Malcolm Gladwell, never mind the fact that millions of us buy your stuff all the time, when you look at your body of work to date, overall, what do you make up?
Gladwell: Some hits, misses, hopefully I've learned something along the way. I don't know, I sort of think that I - what I've always tried to do is take chances in my writing and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But the thing I always look for, the thing I've been proudest of, is I've always tried to tackle something new or interesting and take a chance on it.
Tavis: Well, thank you for taking all the chances that you have taken and will continue to take, for those of us who read your stuff all the time. Malcolm Gladwell's latest is called "What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures." Malcolm, nice to have you on the program and all the best to you, sir.
Gladwell: Thanks, Tavis.
Tavis: Appreciate it.
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