All language subtitles for MasterClass Malcolm Gladwell Teaches Writing_Full

The act of writing about others is not a

trivial act. It's not entertainment.

It's not a distraction.

You don't read non-fiction for the same

reason that you chew gum or watch the

Kardashians on television.

You read it because you're in search of

something powerful and fundamental

about what it means to be a better

person.

I've never done a class like this

before. Um, and I thought it would be

really fun to do because, uh, it's a

chance for me to reflect on my career,

which is at this point is

almost too long. Really, really long.

and help other people who want to who

would like to pursue a similar kind of

um uh line of work. One thing I want you

to take away from this class is um the

idea of writing as a calling. It's uh an

activity that has a uh a higher purpose.

It's part of the way in which uh we

fulfill ourselves as human beings. um uh

both in the words that we write and in

the words that we read. So over the

course of these classes

uh we're going to talk about my career.

Uh we're going to talk about uh where I

get ideas. We're going to talk about the

techniques I use in my writing about

puzzles and tools and the virtues of

withholding information, suspense. Um,

I'm going to talk about what I'm not

good at as a writer and how I compensate

for that. Uh, I'm going to talk about

writers that I love and what I learn

from them. Um, I'm going to talk about

what's satisfying to me about the work

that I do. Um, and I'm going to try and

translate some of the insights I think I

have

uh, gleaned from my years of writing in

a form that I hope that you listening,

watching can use.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell and this is my

master class.

So, I like to do puzzles as a child,

jigsaw puzzles,

but um but I always uh I always uh

wondered why I liked doing jigsaw

puzzles. It's not obvious why. To this

day, I find jigsaw puzzles baffling for

this very reason. I am drawn to them and

I see other people are drawn to them. In

fact,

this summer my family took a big

vacation. There was a incredibly

complicated jigsaw puzzle and it was we

were in the French countryside. It was

gorgeous. There was like castles. There

were walks to do and huge numbers of

hours were spent in this kind of dark

and dingy living room of this house we

were in working on a puzzle that we

could have worked on anywhere. Right.

The puzzle was more fascinating to us

than the French countryside. Now, that's

pretty powerful stuff, right? That

suggests there's something about a

puzzle that is that has a hold over our

imagination in a way that's not obvious.

I mean, simply putting pieces together.

And by the way, the puzzle is not even a

grand like there are certain kinds of

challenges that draw you in because

there is a reasonable chance the problem

can't be solved. A puzzle, there's a

100% chance it can be solved. It was

once a full In fact, you have the

picture in front of you, right? So, it's

not even like it's some magical kind of

high-end

Einstein level problem you're dealing

with. No, no, no. It's a problem that

has been solved for you and they've

given you a picture and all you have to

do is like, so but even that draws you

in, right? So it's like that is I guess

how strongly some of us are hardwired to

want to just make the pieces fit. And I

think on some level the write writing or

at least my kind of writing is about

making the pieces fit. So, I have like I

have my little shelf of objects and I

want to arrange them in a way that's

compelling to readers and it's the same

it gives me the same kind of

satisfaction

as finishing a puzzle does except that I

don't have the picture in front of me

from the very beginning. I have to kind

of construct the picture. So, it's a

little, you know, maybe it's a little

bit higher order puzzle, but it has it

satisfies

it satisfies me in the same way.

There's a thing in puzzles where

the there are pieces that don't actually

fit, but you convince yourself that they

fit, right? like and then you look and

you realize it's like a little tiny gap

and there shouldn't be a gap and it

isn't quite well. The one thing with

writing is that you can you can actually

if they don't naturally fit, you can

kind of make them fit just by the way

you write the by you can kind of write

your way out of the problem. And that

always I was I'm always that part is

always really

um uh fun to me and it's a reminder of

this really important principle which is

that

um

the best kind of arguments are the

arguments that are imperfect

because the perfect argument is too

obvious. It's like saying that the rule

of the simile

or the analogy

actually the rule of the analogy is that

the two things that you are analogizing

are not identical right um to the extent

they are too identical the analogy is

useless if I say macintosh apples are a

lot like

delicious red delicious apples I haven't

helped you that doesn't that's kind of

absurd analogy, right? If I say apples

are kind of like oranges,

that's actually sort of interesting

because we have a phrase that says

apples and oranges when we're talking

about how things are very different. But

in fact, apples and oranges have a a lot

in common. So if I can say actually, if

you think about it, apples have a lot in

common with oranges. Now we're kind of

now my interest is peaked. It's an it's

a very imperfect analogy that and that's

what draws you in is the imperfection

and in writing and in constructing

puzzles the puzzle you don't necessarily

want the puzzle to be perfect at the

end. You want it to be a little bit odd

because that's what makes attracts

people's attention and that's what makes

them want to talk about it.

Right? So if you listen to the way

people talk about things, they will talk

about objects of art, things they've

watched, read, seen, heard, they're

drawn to the things that are done really

well, but they're also drawn to the

things that are done imperfectly. And

they may actually t spend more time

talking about the imperfect things that

rubbed them a certain way, maybe rubbed

them the wrong way, or maybe got stuck

in their head somehow. right? That

didn't didn't go down the way they were

supposed to go down. That's what you

return to. And that's you want to as a

writer, you want that response. You want

to kind of um do something that uh that

irritates the reader in a kind of in a

kind of m not in a not in a serious way,

but in a mild way. that you know that

the way that when you put red pepper on

something, the red pepper taste is a

little bit it's um it's a little bit

kind of harsh and it sticks in your

in your throat a little bit longer,

right? There's an aftertaste. That's

what you want. You want aftertaste and

that comes from not everything

being perfectly blended together and all

of the pieces fitting so wonderfully

that it looks at the end like a

photograph. Um you know the question is

what is interesting? That's the question

that has to drive

uh writing any kind of creative act.

What do people find interesting? What

does the writer find interesting? And

what you find interesting is not

perfection.

I don't think it's necessarily a problem

for writers to make promises they don't

keep.

And if you talk to people who write

movies, they're obsessed with this.

They're always they always talk about

then you should never create an

expectation that you don't fi fulfill.

If you if the listener, the viewer or

what have you has a sense that a a

character has some dimension, you pro,

you know, or you promise some kind of

plot thing, you have to deliver or the

person will walk away feeling cheated. I

I sort of wonder about that. People who

say that have this impulse to be neat

and tidy. They think being neat and tidy

is the goal of a narrative. And I don't.

I think that it's fine for narratives to

be a little bit um messy. That I'm much

more interested in um the idea that

someone might work through a problem

imperfectly or

or or even fail at the tasks they've set

out to do, but if the failure is

interesting, I'm fine with it. It

strikes me as being it goes back to what

I was saying about how being interesting

is the most important um is the most

important goal. So being complete or

being um truthful to your intentions are

not the same as being interesting. So if

if if it's more interesting to be to go

down a kind of messy um dead-end road,

fine.

One of the criminologists that I'm

talking to at the moment, he was asked

back in the 70s when he was working for

the British government to investigate

why certain schools for delinquent kids

um why kids were running away. They were

like, you know, either they would run

home or they were these are these are

kind of institutions. they would run

away, they would go home, or they would

just like take off. Some he was trying

to figure out why. So he would he went

to the schools and he interviewed all

the kids who ran away and tried to see

was there something about their

personality. Was there something about

and finally he realizes, oh, he's

barking up the wrong tree. You looked at

the data on all of the

schools of for delinquent kids in all of

all over England and realized there were

some schools where kids always ran away

from and some schools where kids never

ran away from. In other words, it wasn't

the kids, it was the schools. So he he's

writing this article about this. He's

describing his thought process and it's

how he came to believe that as human

beings we spend far too much time

thinking about how people's personality

affects their decisions and not enough

time thinking about how their context

affects their decisions. So he's

describing all this and you're waiting

for him to say and this is what caused

this is the reason why some schools are

so terrible that kids want to run away.

Right? You want the answer. What is it

that makes kids want to run away from

some schools and not others? He never

gives it. He says, "And then just as I

was about to finish that research

project, I was called away to another

project and never figured out why some

schools caused high rates of and like

you're you're a reader at this point.

You know, you're 3,000 words in to this

story from like 30 years ago. And if

you've made it that far, you totally

want to know, right?" And he's like, "I

never found out what." And my point is

like you're frustrated, but that that's

the thing I'm talking about now, right?

The thing that made me remember that

story is the fact the story is

incomplete. So I spent the rest I I got

that far and I was like, well, what what

was it? And then I found myself randomly

this morning thinking, what could it

have been? I keep returning to the

puzzle, right? Because the puzzle piece

didn't fit perfectly. And I was worrying

it and thinking about it and wondering

where that's the virtue that that

argument is incomplete. He never he

never finished the thought. But it's

interesting and it's interesting because

he what he did essentially is he

transferred responsibility for the

puzzle from him to the reader. you

basically say you figured out I don't

know I got a job somewhere else right

you know and it's sort of that's a a

beautiful example of the of the peculiar

power of the imperfect

puzzle

I used to regularly have lunch with this

guy who was actually the brother of one

of the people in the BC boys and he was

in the grocery business and he was super

interesting. We would just talk about

groceries. He was also interested in he

was the America's leading expert on um

on uh

uh coupons, the coupons you would get in

the groceries. He was the guy who he was

the the brains behind

coupons.

Who should get coupons? How much should

coupons be? How often should you give

them out? I mean, that was his whole

thing. Anyway, he was super interesting

and we would have lunch like every six

months and we would talk about it.

Anyway, he once said this thing to me

about ketchup. He was like, you know,

every single condiment

in a grocery store has been reinvented

except ketchup.

Mustard went a million different ways.

There's 10 different kinds of salt.

There's a zillion vinegar, but there's

really only heights, right? And he was

like, and people, millions of dollars

have been spent over the years trying to

do to ketchup what was done to mustard,

and no one's ever succeeded. Ketchup

stands alone. He just is the is the

Goliath of the condiment aisle. Everyone

else has been broken into a million

pieces. So I thought, that's a really

good story. So I began to report the

story and I found and I met this guy

named Howard Moscow who is this

hilarious character who was the guy who

was

he was the guy who figured out how to

break stuff. He was the guy who figured

out that there should be seven different

kinds of spaghetti sauce, not one. Or

there should be he was the guy who

figured out how to make you know there

used to be just Pepsi. And the question

was if you well can we do other kinds of

Pepsis and he was the guy who figured

out how to do diet Pepsi and how to do

because by the way diet Pepsi as Howard

explains is really hard problem. So you

have standard Pepsi we all like Pepsi or

we all like Coke. You want to do Diet

Coke.

How sweet should Diet Coke be? Ever

thought about that? Like

you you're starting from scratch. It has

to be Cokey cuz it's Diet Coke. It's got

to resemble Coke. But there's no history

or pattern or heritage. You're starting

what should it be 10% sweet, 9% sweet,

8% sweet. So you have to if you're Coke,

you got to answer that question. Anyway,

he was the guy you called.

So I spent all this time with him. He

was hilarious. He kept a parrot. He read

like Thusidities in the Greek. I mean,

he was just this sort of weird one in a

million kind of guy. Everything that

came out of his mouth was funny.

everything without any. So I hung out

with Howard for like days, taped

everything, just had the time of my life

and realized when I was finished that

everything Howard had told me had almost

nothing to do with ketchup. He had no

interest in ketchup. He hadn't worked on

ketchup. In fact, everything he did was

about the opposite of the ketchup

problem. He was the guy who figured out

how to break one condiment into 10

different pieces. He wasn't the guy who

figured out why ketchup alone was the

one condiment that couldn't be broken

into 10,000 pieces. So, I had spent all

my time with a guy who didn't at all

support my argument or help my argument

or advance my argument. So, I was like,

what do I do? Do I do I write another

piece about Howard Mosquitz? Maybe.

Do I just leave him out? No, that's

criminal. Why don't I just write the

piece and have a whole chunk about

Howard and then at the end of it say,

"And by the way, Howard doesn't help us

understand the ketchup problem." And so

if you read that piece, it starts about

ketchup and then I just go in for

thousands of words on Howard Moscowitz.

You fall in love with Howard Wasquitz.

And then I say, "And Howard, the most

brilliant man in all of the grocery

store aisles, can't help us solve the

ketchup problem. It's totally imperfect,

right? But it doesn't matter." Why?

because it's interesting and because I

want it in a way in a weird kind of way

the best way for me to convince you that

the that ketchup really is a puzzling,

deeply convoluted, impossible to solve

problem is to present to you the

smartest man in the world of food and

say, "Not even Howard Moscowitz can

solve this problem." And by the way,

don't worry that I've just wasted, you

know, 3,000 words of your time on a

digression because if we can't solve the

problem, all we can do is digress,

right? That's all that's left to us.

Whenever I write anything,

I break everything I write into sections

and I number the sections.

Even if when the article finally

appears, the book finally appears, they

take the numbers out.

But

the minute you think that way, writing

things becomes way easier because you

can solve the problem of transitions

just by numbering sections. So you don't

need one of the biggest problems that

people have in organizing a piece of

writing is I want to switch. I want to

move from A to B, right? How do I move

from A to B? what connects A to B and

you so you construct all this language

often clumsy that basically says okay

we're done talking about this and now

we're going to talk about this and I

don't do that I just say when I'm done

talking about it I end the section and

then I just put two and I start the new

thing and I can refer back to the other

thing but the reader is fine just signal

to the reader that this thought is

finished trust me the next thought will

be connected. We'll figure that out. But

for the time being, just we're

restarting here and we're I'm opening a

new window on the browser and we're

going to talk about this for a while.

Right? You can do that. You know,

structure

is your friend. You don't have to not

everything has to be done with language.

You can just do two, three, four. Every

single thing I have written. I

discovered this because I read I was

roommates

when I was 21 years old with a man who

was still one of my best friends, Jacob,

and he was taking a year off from

college and he was writing a paper

for like English class that he hadn't

handed in. And I looked at it and I saw

that he numbered sections. It never

occurred to me before. I was like, "Oh

my god, that changes everything." And

ever since then, every single thing I

have ever written has numbered sections.

I spend a lot of time in a lot of my

pieces uh sketching out some kind of

theory or framework for the task at

hand. So I give you tools

to to follow along or to think like I'm

thinking or think like the people I'm

writing about how they think. And I

always feel like the provision of tools

is one of the things that compels people

forward. So I introduce I say, "Let's

we're going to tell we're going to I'm

going to tell you a really fun story

about X." And then I pause and I say,

"Okay, but in order to understand this

story, you're going to need to carry the

following tools. Here's what they are.

Here's how they work. Here's the theory

that explains them." And once I've given

you a tool, your natural next question

is okay, I want to use it. Now that I've

given you, you know, in this thing I was

been writing right now is a very

distinct there's a very beautiful

distinction between displacement and

coupling.

They're separate things. They don't has

no meaning to you outside of the

context. But I tell you this whole story

and I say, okay, there's two there's

these two categories. displacement

coupling

and your you know your natural

inclination is towards one and very

often the truth is the other and the in

it may not work but the intention is

that once I've given you this little

framework and then I play a little game

in which I I give you a scenario and I

say well which do you think it is

and then that's a kind of break from our

narrative and then I go back to the

narrative but now you've gone back and

you've got this you've learned this

shiny new you I've given you this shiny

tool and you want to use it, right? And

I my hope is that that desire to use the

tool keeps you going. The reader needs a

tool sometimes to want to keep going.

So, give them one. Come up with a fun

one, you know, and everyone doesn't

People don't mind a little time out to

kind of learn the rules of the game and

then they'll plunge back in with renewed

enthusiasm.

People mistakenly think of data as

boring,

but in truth, again, I I hate to bring

everything back to my childhood, but

as a kid, what do you notice about data?

What are your first what's your as a

kid, your first exposure to data is the

grade you get on a test, right? That's

data. Now, in my I think I don't think

they do this anymore, but when I was a

kid in my little rural Canadian um uh

town, you would sit in a classroom

according to your grade on the last

test.

So, the person with the highest grade

would sit in the far lefthand corner.

Person with the lowest grade would sit

in the front right hand corner. That is

a that's first of all, that's inhumane

and horrible, but it's also that's a

chart, right? It's a physical chart. And

what do you discover when you do that?

That kids are enormously interested in

the chart. They enormous they talk about

it. They're obsessed with it. They get

upset over it. They're creates enormous

excitement. So a group of people who if

you ask them, are you into data? They

would always say no. Why would I be into

data? In fact, keenly interested in data

when it is about something that they're

connected to. So similarly,

I was a runner as a kid and then what

would happen back then is you'd be at

the meet, you'd run your race and then

half an hour later they would put up the

results of the race on the bulletin

board and everyone would gather around

and stare forever at the results. Well,

what are the results? That's data. And

everybody was fascinated by it and we

would take the pages home and they would

give us copies and we would put them in

our scrapbooks and we would fetishize

them and talk about them. So like this

notion that we're not interested in data

is if you've had your eyes open from the

earliest beginnings completely false.

The issue is do we have a connection to

it? And so all you need to do is create

a connection. People need a reason to

look at a low a row of numbers. Um and a

better reason than they need just to

read a story. I'll pick up a thriller

and read it without knowing much about

it because I know it's a thriller and it

promises great things. Will I pick up a

book of statistics of charts and graphs

without some strong reason to? No. I

need a I need someone to explain to me

why it matters. But if it's a book of

the results of races that all of my peer

group ran in the same year I was running

races, will I pick it up? Totally.

Because I know what it means. You know,

will the kids obsess over the chart that

is their classroom in fifth grade math

class? Yes, they will. Right? it's

matters. So you just need to take the

time to set it up. So I will use charts

and graphs in my writing all the time,

but only when I've told you a story as

to why the chart and graph is meaningful

and how to read the chart and graph. And

some of the times what I do is I'll

break it up. A chart might be, think

about a classic chart, 10 rows by 10

rows, right? So a hundred different

numbers on a grid. Well, don't give

people the hundred different numbers all

at once. Give them one row, 10, and say,

'Now think about what that means. Then I

give them two rows, and they say, "Okay,

now compare that row to the other row."

And then maybe five pages later, I give

them all 10 rows at once, and they know

what they're looking at now, right? And

they're like, "Oh, I can see the

pattern." And then maybe you represent

it in a different way with a graph, and

you say, "Actually, it's better to see

it. You can see it. You can see that row

of numbers differently. and more in a

more you can have an insight into what

it means if I show it to you this way.

Right? So there's you know in under

those circumstances everyone

likes numbers. It's just a matter of of

preparing the um preparing the reader

for for to appreciate them.

From time to time in my writing, in

conversations with my editors, we have

talked about this notion of candy, about

the treats that you need to give your

audience.

And

uh I think it's important to understand

that the there's a difference between

the meal and the treat. And that

corresponds to a difference in the way

that people talk about things and think

about things. So, for the longest time,

I've noticed that when

people are in casual conversation about

something they have consumed, whether

it's a meal, a movie, a book,

a song,

they don't talk about it the same way

they think about it

for a good reason. The way you think

about something, it's complicated, may

have many different parts. It may be

contradictory in certain ways in ways

that you're trying to resolve or maybe

not resolve you. Large parts of your

understanding on a deep level of some

work of art may may be outside of your

ability to explain to articulate.

Um but the things that you talk about

when you've consumed something are the

things you can talk about. the things

that come to mind, the things that you

remember, the things you can express,

the things that can be talked about in a

short period of time. Because how long

do you have the stage in a conversation?

Not that long, right? Maybe you're just

pausing and chatting with somebody. So

what do you do? Well, you represent in

conversation a little snippet of the

thing you've consumed, which is not the

same thing as the way you think about

the thing you've consumed. So once you

understand that talking about something

and thinking about something are

different categories, then you say, "Oh,

my task as a writer is to give you

something to think about, but also

something to talk about, and they may

not be the same." And so candy in a

story is stuff for people to talk about.

It's the fun stuff. And then the meal is

the things that they dwell on and take

home with them and process on a much

more meaningful level. And it's totally

fine to have candy as long as you have a

main meal, right? As long as you have

the the the entree. Um it's a bad idea

to have candy and no entree, but also a

bad idea to have an entree and no candy,

right? You want people to talk about

stuff because the conversation in the

elevator in which candy is explained is

the entree point for the other person to

go and

and sample your work and be introduced

to it. And the other person, by the way,

when someone shares candy to you, when

they say you were of a movie,

you might say in the elevator, I just

saw this movie last night. there's this

one scene or the woman who plays the

mother is unreal.

You're not suggesting that's the only

reason you like the movie. What you're

saying is in this time and place where I

have 10 seconds with you and I'm trying

to convince you to watch the movie,

that's my best way of convincing you.

That's the candy. This So, it is

understood when I say the woman who

plays the mother is unreal. It's

understood that what I mean to say is

this is one of many things about this

movie that I loved and this is the one

that just comes to mind. Right? Well, in

writing, why not if if that's the way

people communicate, then serve that

need. Give them little moments, give

them little digressions that can be

represented in the elevator that will

help them kind of sell their piece to

their friends or um give them the

opportunity to pleasurably talk about

what they've just um uh committed to or

consumed.

I love as candy the little thing where

you're talking about someone then you

say

in parenthesis

by the way so and so is the same person

as the person who did this or so and

so's mother was and then I it's someone

you knew in a total different context.

You do some little quirky

biographical fact that kind of

people like, "Oh, really? That's so

weird. I had no idea." You know, there's

that kind of thing. The other kind of

candy, another kind of candy, I did one

I did this in David and Goliath.

I have a section in David and Goliath

where I talk about what's called the

CRT which is

is there was an attempt by psychologists

to come up with the shortest possible

intelligence test. So most intelligence

tests have 100 questions. So the

question was raised can I have a test

with three questions

which is a reasonably good predictor of

your intelligence or maybe two

questions. It's never going to be as

good as the one that's 100 questions.

But is there a way to really

zero in on something that's so

simple yet sophisticated that it can

measure something as crucial and as

unwieldy as intelligence? So there was a

whole campaign to come up with one. And

people came up with something called the

CRT, which was a series of very, very

simple kind of brain teasers which do a

pretty good job of letting you know how

intelligent someone is. Well, then there

was a joke version of this

that involved two famous psychologists

called Conorman and Tverki and people

would say the people who were engaged in

the shortest coming up with the shortest

possible intelligence test of all time

had a joke version which was the really

the shortest of all intelligence tests

and is about this guy Tverki and Tverki

was famously the most brilliant man who

ever lived. So the shortest intelligence

test in the world is

uh after you have had a conversation

with Tverki, how long does it while

you're having a conversation with

Tverki, how long does it take you to

understand that Terski is smarter than

you? That's the shortest intelligence

test of all time, right? So

in the context of a discussion about how

short intelligence tests can be, that's

kind of funny. So I put that as a

footnote in the page. That's candy.

doesn't serve any function. It's kind of

hilarious. And if you you know the long

Oh, and the the answer is and the longer

it takes you to understand that Tiverki

is smarter than you, the dumber you are,

right? That's the intelligence test.

Real simple. We measure it in seconds.

Um that's candy. You know, maybe you'll

read the footnote, maybe you won't. If

you do, you'll tell that joke, I hope,

the next time you're at a party and

they'll say, "Where did you hear that?"

Oh, in this book I'm reading, David and

Goliath. Um, so yeah, I do I do make a

practice sometimes of inserting uh candy

into uh into the things I'm writing.

I have a very good friend who does this

thing which drives me crazy, which is

that when you

say something to her

and you're pretty sure you're telling

her something interesting and new, she

will always act as if she knew it all

along or that it's not a surprise. She

will essentially say, "Yes, of course."

And

that a makes it makes me unwilling to

tell her other interesting things

because I don't get the reward. The

reason we tell people funny interesting

stories is we want the reward of them

having that look on their face and and

being surprised and being pleased at

hearing something new. And there is no

greater encouragement than me going

really that's amazing right? That keeps

you going. As a writer, your job is to

get people to keep going. So just even

if you don't feel it, even if you've

heard it before, you need to say, "Wow,

right, you need to practice that that uh

openness in the face of someone taking

the risk of telling you a story." Right?

A story in conversation is a risk. I am

taking I am telling you something

without knowing whether you're going to

how it will be uh greeted whether you'll

greet it with disdain,

disgust, enthusiasm, boredom,

excitement, we conversation works

because we're risktakers. And if we

continually are met with disdain and

boredom or disgust, we stop

engaging in conversation in meaningful

conversation, right? It shuts down. So

your job as a writer is to create an

environment where stories can be told.

Part of that sometimes that requires

faking it. But actually 99.9%

of the time it requires um an honest

examination of what you really did know.

Right? The easiest thing is for you to

say you tell me a story and for me to

say well I knew 75% of that. So, what

I'm going to do is I'm going to take

credit for knowing all of it. Right?

That's the that's your ego speaking. Oh,

they had this little bit of an insight

which I didn't have, but I'm going to

fake it and say, "Oh, I knew that."

Right? The first thing you have to do is

to

stop that impulse is to understand that

the even if that little piece you didn't

know is only 2%. is to say, "Oh, you you

added to my knowledge of this crucial

subject by 2% and that's meaningful,

right? I now look at the world from a

slightly different angle as I did

before." And so

cultivating surprise, I think, is a

um a central part of of what it means to

be um a writer in the world, a writer

about ideas, at least in the world. Um,

and I I have always the the more I know

in a certain sense, the easier it is for

me to be surprised, right? Because I get

better and better and better at

identifying the little piece that I

didn't understand before.

The more opportunities you build into

your pieces for reactions,

um, the better off you're going to be.

the more engaged and memorable engaged

they'll be with the reading process and

more memorable the what you've written

will become. So I I did it more when I

was starting out than I do now. But I

always like if I can if there's any

opportunity I can give to let the reader

to invite the reader into the same

thought process I'm going through then I

do it right. So, I was uh

you know, there's a in the thing I'm

writing now, I I tell this long story

about suicide rates in England. It's

more it's not as dark as it sounds. And

I pose a puzzle. And in the way that I

write the puzzle is I don't say that it

was a puzzle faced by criminologists at

the time. I say this is a puzzle for

you, the reader. What do you think?

right now it's a little bit colloquial

but it's I actually want the reader

and the reason I do that is that I was

giving a talk and I in in the kind of

Q&A afterwards in answer to some

question I told this story about British

suicide and I said well wait raise your

hands if you think it's X and raise your

hand if you think it's Y and almost

everyone thought it was X and X is wrong

so I thought oh this is

Most people think it's X. I'm going to

tell them it's Y. So, if I can invite

the reader to guess, they're going to be

surprised when I tell them it's Y,

right? Because they're going to say X.

Um, so that there's a case where I've if

I told if you guess X and it's actually

X, there's no point inviting the reader

in to confirm something they already

believed. There is it is fun to invite

the reader in if you're going to

challenge their expectation. So now that

I know that

most people are going to have their

expectation challenged, that's a fun

game.

If you're describing

some phenomenon or some trait or some

some thing that people do to the extent

that you can render it in a form where

people can say, "Oh, that's me." Or,

"Oh, that's my

husband." or you know I was doing a uh

that's a I was thinking this because

there's a quote in my book I'm talking

about this phenomenon that

the way we interpret the emotions of

people that we know is very different

from the way we interpret them in people

we don't know. So you're much more

forgiving in people you know. And so I

was talking to the psychologist and she

says, for example,

whenever my husband is concentrating

hard on something, he looks like he's

really angry. And if I didn't know him,

I'd say, "Why is he so angry?" And she

says, "In fact, I know my husband is the

least angry person who ever lived. He is

the calmst, sweetest, you know, but when

he concentrates, it just looks like he's

angry." And I know that. And so I and

what I loved about that is

the minute she starts talking about her

husband. So she breaks out of character.

I've been talking to her about her work

and she's been speaking as scientist.

She's never mentioned family, husband,

anything. And then she breaks

that kind of frame and she says she was

talking about her husband and with great

affection and also talking about how um

her knowledge and love of her husband

allows her to appreciate him in a way

that the rest of the world does not.

Right? It's this it's this beautiful

human moment. And what happens when you

two things happen when you read that?

One is that suddenly you see this

psychologist in a different light. She

was a psychologist before and now now

she's a loving spouse and suddenly you

you fall in love with her. You'll

suddenly you care about what she says

and you if you had doubts by the way

before you're like oh no no no they're

off table she's great. And then the

second thing you do is you immediately

start thinking you put yourself in her

shoes and you say, "Oh, wait a minute.

That's just like with my son who, you

know, when he

he can be incredibly amused by

something, but he doesn't smile. It's

all inside, right?" And I know that look

now that that means he's cracking up,

but he's not telling you. You know, like

you'll do some version of that at that

moment. I could have told you that in

abstract terms, but you wouldn't do

that. I But I by giving you the example

of someone personalizing it, I've

invited you in. You do the same thing.

Everyone wants the reader to keep

reading. That's the great the central

struggle of the writer is to create

something that people will persist with,

right? We'll keep on going past the

point when normally they would stop.

That's your struggle. And how do you do

that? Well, there's many ways you can do

that, but one of them is by withholding

the prize until the end. Now, if I've

written a 50-page legal brief uh and I

want people to go to the end, should I

withhold the prize? Maybe I should I

mean nothing wrong with that. I mean

unless you unless no one will read to

the end and so that no one will get to

the point. But there are always you

don't have to withhold the main

argument. You can withhold pieces that

will nonetheless compel the reader

forward. So I think there's a

withholding and thinking about what

you're not going to say in the beginning

is a crucial part of of preparation.

There's way too much anxiety about

getting all the facts in early. I think

in writing, it's fine to kind of take

your time and unravel the story and uh

in pieces. I mean, I I first I would

think about this as a kid because I was

as a kid, you're in the position of

listening to adults for my parents would

take us everywhere, but we were required

to be silent. Um, and so I was in the

pose of listener for most of my

formative years. And I paid keen

attention to those who could tell a

story and those who couldn't. And you

know, my dad is a terri was a terrible

storyteller. I mean, I mean that in the

most affectionate way. He just wasn't

very good at it. Mostly because he just

refused to fill in the blanks for his

audience. He assumed the audience knew

as much as he did. Um, so that was one

extreme to avoid. But at the same time,

I was also aware of how the strategic

with how effective the strategic

withholding of information was in the

good storytellers. They they weren't My

dad was withholding information because

he was oblivious, but the great

storytellers were withholding

information because they had a reason to

because they were interested in in

springing something on you in the final

chapter. Um and that was a kind of

enormous revelation

uh uh for me as a kid.

Suspense is a function of many things

but it is in large part a function of um

time.

So suspense is the

writer playing with expectations around

time. Suspense is when you expect to

have been told something by now and you

haven't been. Right? So you're it

creates this little buzz inside your

head like wait I don't know this fact. I

need to know this fact. Why am I not

being told this fact? Right? And then as

your puzzlement over why you don't know

this why this hasn't been resolved

because you're used to narratives are

about the resolution of problems.

That's what a narrative is. It's I set

up a certain kinds of things and and

then I solve all of the little

questions. I answer all the questions

you have in your mind. With suspense,

there's certain questions I don't

answer. And so your natural reaction as

a reader is, wait, why? Right? So

there's no reason why suspense should be

specific to movies or television shows

or fiction. You can do exactly the same

thing in a work of non-fiction. you can

withhold information uh for unreasonable

periods of time and leave your audience

saying well wait a minute why haven't I

been told that or wait a minute I know I

don't have the whole story why don't I

have the whole story because maybe they

don't know what they haven't been told

but they just know that there's

something missing right there's some

piece and the minute there is that now

that there's a crucial distinction

between surprise and suspense so

surprise is where I tell you something

and you had no idea you didn't. There's

you had no idea you it was coming or

that you needed to know it. Suspense is

where you know that you need to know

something and you haven't been told.

You're not sure what it's what it's

going to be.

Very similar, but they're quite

different. You can play surprise games

or suspense games if you want. Um, you

know, a good writer will will do both

depending on the nature of the of the

narrative. But again there's nothing

these are techniques that are open to uh

any any form of storytelling imaginable.

The very thing that makes you love

Google is why Google is not that useful.

So you love Google because I want to

know what the capital of

Tanzania is. So I say, "What is the

capital of Tanzania?" And it tells me,

right? But that that Google, in other

words, has given me a dead end. I have

my question. It answers my question. If

I'm looking for a story, I don't want a

dead end. What I want to do is I want to

be led somewhere entirely new and

unexpected. So how do I get led to

somewhere entirely new and unexpected?

If I type in what is it? Capital of

Tanzania. I suppose I could type in

Tanzania. That kind of helps. But now

I'm still getting all the stuff on

Tanzania. Anyways, Google's too good.

What you really want Google to do is to

make mistakes

to type in Tanzania and Google gives me

a bunch of stuff on Tanzania, but it

also randomly because it screwed up

throws in three things that are sort of

about that, but are actually about

something entirely different that makes

me think, "Oh my goodness, I had never

thought of this." or and then Google

gives you everything ranked by its

popularity, right? That is the worst

thing imaginable. Can you you're trying

to write an article that's about

something new and fresh that people want

to read. What does Google show you? All

the things that people have been

reading. It's set up to conf to confirm

the direction that you're already on.

And that's fine if that's the kind of

story you want to write, if you know

exactly where you're going. But I think

the real problem, the central challenge

of the uh writer is the challenge you

have at the beginning. What direction

not is what direction do I want to go

in? Right? I mean, of all the different

places I can go in the world, give me I

want to find me some new interesting um

place to go. And that is where the

computer's not your friend.

Librarians as a class are the

friendliest people in America. Let's

just start with that fact. Their job is

to help you access the knowledge they

have under their control. That's their

job. They're trained to do that. That's

what brings them pleasure. So once you

understand

that that they're there for you, then it

then the world is your oyster, right?

you they they want you to come into

their library. They want to help you

find stuff. They want to they want to

root through the archives for you. They

want to do everything for you. And they

I think their their biggest problem is

they think the world has forgotten about

them. So you are I mean answering so

many basic human needs by showing up at

the library. Um so that's that's the

easiest part of it. The hard part is the

library is I mean it is the physical

version of of the internet. I mean it's

like the problem is where do you go? I

even do things something as simple as if

I read a book that I really love. I will

go to the library and I will see what

books are around that book on the

shelves,

right? Because if that topic's really

interest books are arranged by topic, so

they've done all the work for you. And

weirdly, the way that libraries are

organized,

you know, they're organized like a

really good conversation.

The book that's right next to the book

is the book that's most like it. And

then the book that's right next to that

one is a little bit different. And by

the time you get 10 books away under the

Dewey decimal system or whatever it's

called, you're getting into a book

that's in the same general area but a

little bit different, like even more

different. And then two shelves above,

it's like we're still on the Vietnam

War, but now we're talking about a

totally different part of the Vietnam

War.

So the the the actual physical

construction of the library shelf is

your friend. It's showing you how to

think, right? So what do you do? You go

to the library, you find the one you

like, and then you just start looking at

all of the volumes next to it, right? I

mean, it could not be easier. And then

if you get stuck, you go down like three

stories and there's a librarian there

and you say, "Help me." And they say, "I

would love to." And they mean it. So,

it's like, you know, these are It

baffles me why people don't want to use

these resources more. They're amazing.

The real fun I have is in searching

through. So when I if I for example find

a book or or a article that I really

like, the footnotes are very often an

incredibly fruitful

um place to spend some time because they

tell you how the person who wrote the

thing that you're reading thought.

You can retrace their steps. Um and very

often retracing someone else's steps is

an incredibly useful way to introduce

yourself to a topic. At the moment I'm

writing about this paper this uh that

was written by a British criminologist

in 1988

and it is about this incred it's about

suicide but it's not really about

suicide. It's about something else. It's

sort of hard to explain it but I ran

across this paper because I was talking

to someone who had been a student of

this British criminologist and he said

well have you seen Ron's 1988 paper? So

I said oh I haven't. I went and found

it. And then he has I read it. It's

fascinating. He has eight pages of uh

footnotes, endnotes at the end of all

the things he read when he was coming up

with his article. So then I go to the

library and I go down that list and all

the ones that seem cool or interesting

or weird I get for myself. So from one

article, I then get

20 articles which are some fraction of

the things that British criminologist

read when he came up with this brilliant

paper. And then I go through those 20

and I go through the endotes of

footnotes of and endotes of them and

find

further articles that are really

interesting. Now at this point, you

know, I may be if he wrote his article

in 1988, his sources were all from the

50s and 60s and 70s. And then you go

back to the 50s and 60s and 70s and you

get the stuff that they were reading

which was stuff from the 30s and 40s and

50s that's not online, right? It's only

in a library. And another mistake people

make is they assume that if something is

not current,

it's not useful. Nothing could be

further from the truth. Right? In fact,

I almost feel like the better stuff is

the older stuff. Um, particularly stuff

that stood the test of time. You can

waste a lot of time messing around with

things that are from the present day um

without realizing that most of it is

crap and will be forgotten in 5 years.

Why did you why did you waste a week

reading all this stuff that was

generated in the in the last month when

it's going to disappear?

So years ago, I ran I read an article in

the New York Reveal books by Helen

Epstein and it was this is in the mid

90s I think and it had in the middle of

it a little description of a town in

uh eastern Pennsylvania called Rosettto,

which had been the subject of a a

medical study in the 1950s.

based on the fact that no one in this

town ever seemed to die. They just

didn't. The town had no alcoholism, no

heart attacks, no suicide, no

depression,

and everyone lived to like 95. It was

this puzzle. And they were all

overweight, smoked like chimneys, and

ate the worst diet you could imagine.

Um, and so there was a whole examination

of do they live longer, which they did,

and why? and she talks about this and I

I was talking about this article with a

friend of mine named Virginia and

Virginia says to me, "Why don't you go

there?" I was like, "What a great idea."

So, I rented a car and I drove the two

and a half hours to Rosettto one Sunday

afternoon and I just walked up and down

the town and I chatted to people and in

fact I met the mayor and the mayor took

me into his home and like fed me tea and

some Italian delicacy and we talked

about this weird fact that nobody died

in Rosettto and they had no problems to

speak of. And I thought it was totally

fascinating. I kept my notes. I kept the

tape of the interview. I came home and I

never used it. I mean, it was one of

those things that I didn't have a place

for it. I didn't know what I would do

with it. It was struck me it was it was

a cool story, but the story had already

been written. I mean, a book had been

written by the guy who did the study,

which you could buy. And I was like, am

I just going to repeat what he said? 15

years passed and I was thinking about my

book outliers and I remembered the story

of Rosettto. So, it was one of those

things that was sitting in my head,

right, along with a thousand other

random things. And I thought, "Wow, what

a great way to begin the book." And so,

I rooted through my desk and lo and

behold, there was the tape and the notes

from long ago. And that was the And it I

was lucky because the people I talked to

were all these old people in 1996. They

had finally died at the age of like, you

know, 104. So, I So, I was lucky that I

had this little snippet. Well, you know,

that's not an atypical

thing for me. I think you have to be

feel free to go down to to go down roads

that don't lead anywhere immediately. It

should be fine to go. I was essentially

going for a wander and collecting

something and stick it on a back shelf

in the hopes that I would someday use

it. And I did. And that if you do enough

of those little wanderings, then you

have a shelf that's packed with all

kinds of really, really cool things. But

doing something only because you can

perceive in the moment that it might be

useful is a really good way of not

gathering anything at all because you

can't know in the moment that the

pressure is too high. Like who knows

what will come of some, you know, stray

fact. You just have to be patient.

I did a story once about a school

shooter

uh who was caught, a wouldbe school

shooter about a kid in Minnesota who

planned to blow up his school and he

made he knew how to make bombs and he

gathered in a storage locker enough

explosives to have killed hundreds of

students. And when he was arrested by

the police just before he he allegedly

was going to blow up his school, he told

them exactly how he was going to do it.

He had it all planned out. And

went completely unnoticed in the

national media.

Not for any nefarious reason, but

because what I didn't realize until I

did this story is that school shootings

are incredibly common. They happen

virtually every week. We're just so over

them now and bored with them. We only

hear about the bad ones. Everything that

was of value for the story was contained

in the this extraordinary interview that

he gave to the police which lasted four

or five hours. The transcript of which

is just online.

And if you read the transcript, it's

unbelievable.

One of the most gripping, weird,

fascinating, chilling things I've ever

read. Um, I have no idea how I found it.

Uh, I remember reading it. I remember

what happened when I found it. I read it

in one go and I just said, "Oh, this is

it's all here. It's an amazing story.

There's almost nothing else I need to

do." I mean, I

I added a theory.

So, this was a kid who was there was

nothing wrong with him. He was a a

little bit on the spectrum, but he came

from a happy family. Wasn't abused as a

kid. He wasn't

didn't harbor deep dark thoughts. He was

just a kind of nerdy kid who kept to

himself and had loving parents and

sister who he was really fond of and had

friends. And I was trying to explain,

well, what happens when the school

shooting contagion, the point of the

article was as it as the school shooting

contagion spreads, the people who get

swept up in it are more and more normal.

And then you get to this kid in

Minnesota and like,

you know, when he's arrested by the

cops, his parents get upset because he's

out past 10 o'clock or nine o'clock and

he's never out past 9:00. He's a high

school junior.

and he's such a good boy that he's

always home by 9:00 and they're like

freaked out. Where is he? Where is he?

Like that's how normal this kid is. So I

was trying to describe that process. So

that's what I had to add to the piece.

Some kind of explanation as to why this

happens. But everything else is in the

transcript. It was like

from a strictly journalistic standpoint,

it was I've never received a more

beautifully wrapped gift in my life. It

was just like it's this unbelievable

thing that I somehow found. And like I

said, I have no idea how I found it. I

can't even I wasn't even I don't think I

was looking for something about school

shooting. Maybe I was

I just I was just kind of screwing

around on the internet, you know, like

you do.

and somehow found this PDF file that I

don't think anyone I can't I don't think

any other journalist could ever have

read the PDF file because if they had

they would have written the same article

I wrote. I mean it was a it was waiting

to happen. Um so sometimes yeah magic

does sometimes magic does happen.

I think all good stories have one thing

in common and that is they have an

ending that I don't want to say

satisfies because some great stories

have unsatisfying endings which is why

they're great stories but have an ending

um that transports you somewhere. You

have to be in a different place when you

end than when you were in the beginning.

And if all the story has done is taken

you back to right right back to the very

place you were when you read the first

sentence, then it was a waste of your

time. You have to have been challenged

or transported in some way for the story

to be to be a great story.

This is a good example of how

serendipitous

story selection is. So this all came

about because many many years ago a a

criminologist at uh University of

Maryland approached me and he wanted to

use something I'd written in one of his

classes and so I chatted with him and

then I said what kind of work do you do

and he told me and it was completely

fascinating. He was the first guy to

start studying how to fight crime the

way scientists study disease. So instead

of just having random ideas or theories,

he constructed experiments with a, you

know, where half of the people tried

some new idea and the other half with a

control and he would run the experiment

for two years. And he would write up the

results the exact same way you would if

you were testing a new drug for cancer.

And he'd come to all these incredibly

interesting conclusions. There was one I

remember that I've always thought was

fascinating, which was that uh if there

is a dis domestic disturbance, is it a

good idea to arrest the husband if he's

the one who hit his wife? You would

think, of course, right? Get the guy out

of there, shake him up, put him behind

bars, he committed a crime. And what he

discovered was it depends on the

educational level of the husband. If the

husband is well reasonably well educated

and a member of the middle class, you

should arrest him. If he's not,

arresting him has the effect of making

him so much more angry and ashamed that

he will do even more damage in the

future to his wife, right? That's the

kind of thing you only find out if you

do formal study. Anyway, this guy was

kind of fascinating and I have been a

kind of student of his work. And then I

was returning to the question of crime

in my new book and I called him up and

he started talking about his friend,

this guy David who's in Tel Aviv. So I

was like, "David sounds really

interesting." So I emailed David and

said, "When are you next going to be in

New York?" And he's like, "In two

weeks." I said, "Can we have lunch?" So

we had lunch. And I just had the tape

recorder running the whole time. And

David told amazing stories. and he was

like, "But you really need to talk to my

old boss, Ron." So, I called Ron, and

Ron's the guy who wrote the famous paper

from 1988. So, it's all of this kind of

it starts with a kind of random

connection with someone and me asking,

"Wait a minute, what do you do?" And

then reading a paper and saying, "This

guy is really kind of interesting." And

then realizing interesting people

don't exist. They're not on an island.

No interesting person is by themselves.

If you find an interesting person, it

means that they are part of an

interesting group. And that's a crucial

thing to remember when you're looking

for story ideas that the place to look

for story ideas is the same place you

found good story ideas in the past

because

people generate interesting ideas

because their friends are all

interesting. Like I get a ton of ideas

from my friends because my friends are

really interesting if you you know. So

the same is true for everyone. So you

look you use that principle of of of

connectedness

um as a way of uh finding more good

ideas.

Okay. So, every now and again I do these

email exchanges with the sports writer

Bill Simmons and we have a lot of fun

and we were we did one that was about

the future of football and we were

talking about

uh the NFL

uh

Harvard University published a study in

which they made all kinds of

recommendations for improving the health

of NFL players. One of the

recommendations was the doctors who

examine players on the field should not

be employed by the teams.

It's a conflict of interest. You can

have the doctor who's trying to who's

giving you advice on whether you should

return to the field of play be employed

by the team whose interests whose

interest is in having you return to the

field of play. Right? the doctor who

determines whether you return to work is

by and large not employed by your

employer making sense. Anyway, every

doctor in the NFL is employed by the

team. It's crazy. So, one of the things

the report out of Harvard said is that

we should end this practice. And what

how does the NFL respond? Well, as I

write, so what happened? The league's

senior vice president for health and

safety,

Jeffrey Miller, fired off an indignant

33page rebuttal.

Then I So I know what you're thinking,

Bill. The NFL has a senior vice

president for health and safety. Yes,

they do. And then we go and we have fun

with this notion that a league which is

notorious for killing its players

essentially has this hilarious title of

someone who's responsible for health and

safety.

while we were doing this back and forth,

we do them over several days. So, I got

really interested in this guy. Who is

this guy,

Jeffrey Miller, who's the head of NFL's

uh health and safety, right? And the

thing that I couldn't get over was the

fact that everyone kept calling him

Jeffrey Miller.

Why didn't they call him Dr. Miller? So

then I thought, well, wait a minute,

maybe he's not a doctor. I thought, that

can't be. How would the NFL appoint

someone as head of player safety and

health who wasn't a doctor? Right?

Doesn't make any sense. So then I

started rooting around on the internet

and uh I discovered that that is true.

He's not a doctor. So I wrote, "By the

way, I'm talking in my response to Bill.

I think it's worth pointing out that

Miller is a Mr. Miller, not a Dr.

Miller. That's right. The NFL executive

responsible for player health and safety

is not a physician. He's a lawyer. More

precisely, he's an antitrust lawyer.

Miller began his career as chief counsel

for the antitrust and business

competition subcommittee of the Senate

Judiciary Committee. Honestly, you

cannot make this stuff up. In response

to a rising medical crisis on the

football field, Roger Goodell, the NFL

commissioner, hired someone to make sure

the rising medical crisis doesn't cause

Congress to take away the NFL's

antitrust exemption.

That point all grew out of the fact that

I didn't understand why he wasn't called

doctor.

In other words, you have to read I

wasn't just interested in when you read

someone's response, you typically attend

to their words. But here I was attending

to

the

prefix before his name. Right? So I was

interested in where the words come from.

And that's a very that's something as a

journalist that you're trained to do.

And it's not something you would do in

normal conversation.

Everyone if you're just talking or

listening to Jeffrey Miller or what have

you, you would take it for granted he

was a doctor. Of course he's a doctor.

Have to be a doctor. He's the head of

player health and safety for the for a

league with assets of billions of

dollars, right? Makes no sense. He

wouldn't be a doctor. But a journalist

is someone who is if they're good at

their job or even remotely competent at

the job is supposed to look at the look

closely at the little fine points and

kind of worry the details. Um, and that

whole exchange comes from my

stubbornness with this the fact that he

wasn't being described the way I was

thought he was supposed to be described.

Anyway, it's just a good example of what

your job is as a journalist and how you

can find gold in the smallest of details

if you're willing to be. By the way, it

took me half an hour online to figure

out that this was the same Jeffrey

Miller who I mean they had the NFL had

scrupulously

wiped the internet clean of any mention

of this guy's professional background

precisely for this reason. They didn't

want you to caught on to the fact that

they had a guy responsible for player

health and safety who knows nothing

about health and safety. Once you've

identified the little this little random

fact that he they have a lawyer running,

then you can like have fun for days. You

know what I mean? you're off to the

races because you've you've identified

that little fact becomes a symbol of the

way they do business which is in

contempt

of any kind of normal standards of

proper behavior and um and objectivity.

And that's the that's what the best kind

of writing does is identifies those

details that stand in for a much larger

argument.

People sometimes write in the first

person because they think it's easier

than writing about something else. This

is false. It's harder. Right? Rule

number one. If you're going to write in

the first person, you have to understand

that the bar is way higher than if

you're writing about uh another person,

another object, another activity. Why?

Because the reader's expectations are

higher. Nothing to do with you. Has to

do with the reader. The reader has been

educated

on stories of great people.

You read the when you read an

autobiography. Who do you read the

autobiography of? You read Hillary

Clinton's autobiography. You read

General MacArthur's autobiography. You

read a biography of Julius Caesar. You

read biographies and autobiographies of

people who have done something

extraordinary in the world. That's what

you're thinking when you're hearing

someone tell their own story. You're

thinking, "Oh, this guy or this woman

was the one who in who cured cancer, who

discovered a continent, who, you know,

broke the code of some famous puzzle,

who So, when you're when your

expectation is that high, that's that's

what you have to deliver. If you're

writing about yourself, you're facing

these skyhigh expectations of what the

story is going to be about. So, that's

sort of problem number one. And problem

number two is

the when you write about yourself, you

are engaging in a self-indulgent act.

Now, I don't mean that in the sense of a

narcissistic act or an egotistical act,

but you are turning your gaze inward. uh

you are dealing with the contents of

your own heart and mind and experience

and um that raises people's suspicions.

So the first question we have is now who

is this person who thinks that they're

so interesting that I have to read what

has gone on in their life? And I think

that's that expectation

concerns me as a writer. I'm not sure I

have a good answer to the question of

why someone should care about my life so

much and that means that I have written

about my own life very sparingly now

not never told a couple of stories from

my own life but I mean the number of

things I can talk about from my own life

that I think

uh justify the self-absorption and can

compete with the grand stories that are

told about people's lives out there is

very small right it's two or three and I

can only tell them in a context where

you will accept

um the kind of uh

diminished dimensions of my own personal

narrative.

the act of explaining an idea

to somebody else uh is a really good way

to figure out how to tell the story and

what parts of the story work and don't.

So I will very often when I'm working on

something tell it over and over again to

different people and each time I tell it

I look to see do they find that

interesting or not and if they don't

find it interesting why when do their

eyes blaze over when do they change the

subject when do they jump in with

questions when do they and what do they

say next after hearing it all those

things are that's incredibly valuable

information because they are standing

standins for my eventual audience. And

people when you tell a story in my

experience to them in person are much

more honest in their feedback than if

you, you know, have them read a draft.

When they're reading a draft, they're

first of all, you're asking a lot of

them. Only a few people will do it.

They're concerned about your feelings.

They know that you've gone to all this

work. And so for you to say to them,

"Oh, this is all crap." is really hard.

But if I'm just randomly telling you a

story, you can say, "Malcolm,

super boring." Or, "I read that

somewhere." Or, "Why would you or I

don't believe that or wait a minute,

you're going to say something that

offensive?" Or there's a million

different responses that are incredibly

useful to me that people will freely

give you if you

uh if you lower the bar, if you make it

easy for them, right? And that's what I

was I mean I have specific friends who

I'm sure I bore to death because I I

will come back to the same thing and

tell it a different way each time I see

them until I think I've got it in a form

that they'll like. And also I always

have to be careful that you know the

things I find interesting and the things

the world find interesting. I know from

past experience they overlap but they do

not overlap perfectly. So, you know, I

can talk forever about running. It is

quite clear to me that my audience does

not care about running the way I do. And

so, I need to be careful if I'm going to

write about that to do it in such a way

that will appeal to them.

If everyone has that shelf in their head

full of random things, then why limit

yourself to your shelf? People got stuff

on their shelf that they will give you

quite happily because they don't know

what to do with it. They'll just toss it

your way. And so the most common

reaction from anyone when you tell them

a story is, "Oh, that reminds me of,"

right? That phrase is uttered trillions

of times every day around the world.

Listen, I spend a lot of time working in

coffee shops and which means I spend a

lot of time listening to people talk and

in conversation. you'd be stunned.

That's what conversation is. I tell a

story from my head and you respond with

a analogous or tangentially

connected story from your head and we go

back and forth, right? And we build a

conversational stream and each building

block is oh, it's basically, oh,

you know, here's my version of that

slightly different. and if they're good

conversationalists that those versions

all progress to something somewhere

interesting. Well, why not start one of

those chains if it's in your own best

interest. So, I tell you, here's this

story I'm working on that's in my head.

Where does it what does it remind you

of? Right? And people will give that to

you without asking. They'll say, you

know, that happened to me once. Do you

know how many

times that has that response has sparked

something super or I knew someone I know

someone you should talk to or or I read

this last year and I hadn't made sense

of it until now and I turns out I've

never heard of that thing they read.

Right. So

to cut yourself off from the most

valuable form of idea generation

is crazy.

I I wanted to do a podcast episode and I

think I'm going to do it, but I haven't

figured out how to do it. But it's all

based on I was obs I was really

interested last year in memory and how

how do the stories we tell about our own

lives change over time and my friend

Charles who is my most reliable source

of

he's the he's the person I tell these

things most to and he's the most he

always comes up with the most

interesting oh you should think of or oh

this reminds me of and he's Charles says

on this subject. There's he says there's

that great line from Kofka. Everyone is

necessarily the hero of their own

imagination.

And I don't know why I love that line so

much. I love it. It's perfect. It framed

exactly what I wanted. Will I even will

I use that line in whatever I end up

doing? Maybe not. But the point is

it suddenly I that's what I was trying

to get at. And actually when Charles

told that to me, he repeated it a second

time. He's a little bit pedantic. He

said, "Everyone is necessarily the hero

of their own imagination." In other

words, as human beings, we have an

unstoppable impulse to valorize our own

memories to to retell the past, stories

from the past in such a way that we

become the hero, right? And once you

understand that, so there's all of this

research about memory out there. They're

all trying to get at what Kofka said

beautifully 100 years ago, right?

They'll say, "Well, your memories are

bad. You you change your memories. You

none of that answers the central

question. Why? Why do we change our

memories?" Because we want to make

ourselves the hero of our own

imagination, right? It's perfect. So,

like, would I do I read Kofka? No, I

never read Kofka in my life. I barely

know who Kofka is, but I know Charles.

And Charles knows Kofka. And I bore

Charles for 15 minutes with my memory

stories. and he turned to me and said,

"What did Kofka say? Everyone is

necessarily the hero of their own

imagination." Right? That's why you talk

about what you're doing.

I came up with a title for a story once

before I came up with a story. The title

was very simple. The title was the art

of failure. And I wanted to understand

why people screw up. By the way, a very

very common topic in all kinds of

branches of psychology and such. So I

want to do my own version of this. And I

was thinking a lot about

sports, how people fail in sports and

other kinds. And I it occurred to me

that choking and panicking

were

completely different. They were polar

opposites.

Choking was when you knew how to do

something, but in the moment you

couldn't do it. You somehow lost track

of your ability to produce a familiar

behavior or action. Panicking was when

you were in a situation where you needed

to do something and you had no idea how

to do it. You were in over your head. We

use that phrase in over your head.

Meaning there is nothing in your head

that tells you how to manage this

situation. You are the

kid in a car

after you've been driving for two weeks

and you're skidding off the road and you

have no clue how to handle it. Um

whereas choking, you know, there was a

famous basketball a famous baseball

player for the Yankees, second baseman

who somehow uh forgot how to throw the

ball to first base. So he he knew how to

do that his entire life. He'd done it

tens of thousands of times and he

somehow couldn't find that ability when

it counted. That is the exact opposite

of the kid soding off the car. Um, so I

wanted to write an article on the

difference between these two things. And

the idea I had for panicking was right

when I was writing the article, JFK Jr.

I was flying in an airplane from New

York to Mother's Vineyard and he crashed

in the Atlantic Ocean. And from the

reconstruction of the flight path and

such, it became very clear that he had

been flying into a haze, an evening

haze, and he was not experienced enough

to understand how to fly under those

circumstances. He had, in other words,

panicked.

He was in a situation where he needed to

have a skill. Didn't have it.

And I thought, "Oh, I need to describe

what that must have felt like."

And so there it struck me that here was

an occasion where doing a kind of

experiential almost like doing a stunt

made a lot of sense. I needed to go up

in a plane under those exact

circumstances and describe to the reader

what it felt like because that would be

very close to what JFK Jr. felt like

under those circumstances I could be JFK

JFK Jr. Because in the moment he didn't

know what to do and in the moment I

don't know what to do either. I can't

fly. And in that moment he couldn't fly.

Right. So I could be JFK Jr.'s eyes. So

I got a pilot, experienced pilot and we

went out to Mterrey Bay in Northern

California and we went up in the air at

dusk sort of a hazy evening and we went

into what's called a spiral dive which

is when the plane goes like this. it

goes, it starts to turn over and over

and over and over and over again. You

start spinning and as you spin, you go

faster and faster and faster and you

fall towards the earth. And that's

exactly what happened to JFK Jr. in the

last moments of his life. He went into a

spiral dive and crashed into the ocean.

And the thing about a spiral dive, which

doesn't make any sense until you do it,

is that as your plane is spinning around

and around and around and around, you

have no sensation while you're in the

plane that it's spinning. It feels like

you're totally level. Now, that makes no

sense whatsoever because you are

spinning like a top.

But the weird thing is you can't tell.

And that's why he crashes because he

doesn't he's in a spiral dive and

doesn't realize it, right? And only an

experienced pilot would understand by

looking at his instruments that oh my

goodness, I'm about to crash. So we went

in, we went high above Mterrey Bay. We

went into a spiral dive.

I the pilot turned to me and said, "Do

you feel anything a miss?" And I said,

"No, I don't." He said, "We are spinning

around like a top." And then all of a

sudden he pulls out of the dive. the

G-forces pull me back in my chair and

you know I'm alive today. And he I said,

"How close did we come to crashing?" And

he said, "A minute, a second and a

half."

That that's all in the story, right?

That was me describing what that feels

like. But that works, I think, because

it is a kind of stunt, but it's not a

stunt because a stunt is something

frivolous. It's something you didn't

need to do. That's what makes it a

stunt, right? The the teenager who, you

know, uh is riding his motorcycle on his

uh on one wheel as he goes down the

street, that's a stunt. That is just to

show off. It has no purpose. It puts his

own life needlessly at risk.

This wasn't really a stunt because it's

clear why I'm doing it. I'm trying to

describe something very hard to believe

to my reader. And I think where you have

created a situation where the experience

that you've engaged in um is is clearly

and transparently linked to your

narrative purpose. It's fine.

I've never thought I was a great

interviewer because I'm not capable of

getting someone to tell me something

they don't want to tell me. So that's

there's one class of epic kind of 60

minutes interviewer who will or who's

like a prosecutor who will extract some

truth from an unwilling subject. I can't

do that. Not even close. In fact, and

when I do get something that I sense

they didn't want to tell me, my first

impulse is to say to them, I'm not going

to report that or are you sure you want

to tell me that? I had an interview I

interviewed this guy

last month for my book and he's a he

worked he's an old uh counter

intelligence officer

who was involved in a very famous spy

case. And at the end of the interview,

he told me something that he should not

have told me. It was something that

would get him put him in jail. And I I

was like, "Please stop." You know, I'm

and I know that that was that is the

anti-journalistic impulse, but that's

not what I don't want you to be I don't

want to put you in harm's way in the

course of some dumb story. You know,

you'll get in trouble. It was

fascinating what he told you. what he

told me and I wish I could say that now

but um but I'm so I'm another kind of

interviewer which is that I'm trying to

get you

uh to be yourself. I want to draw out

your best self.

The central problem that all people have

and particularly interesting people is

that they're not always aware of why

they're interesting. So the job of the

writer is not to um supply the ideas um

in any kind of encounter. It is to be

patient enough to find the ideas that in

any encounter. So you just have to know

where to look and know how to listen and

know how to push people in the right

direction and make sure they don't go

off on a tangent. Um, you know, the when

I was describing the guy who did the

study about should you arrest

the husband in a domestic disturbance,

I don't know whether he realizes how

profoundly interesting

that insight was and nor is he aware of

how of that. I mean, he might be aware

in some ways of it's a difficult insight

because

he's saying we should treat people

differently according to their level of

education. I don't know how you do that.

Um, and also he's saying that your

immediate impulse

when someone does something wrong is to

arrest them and you should sometimes

resist that because of something that

might happen a month from now or two

months from now. That's an incredibly

fascinating thought. But because he's

lived with that and did the research and

has talked about it 50 times, he may not

understand how problematic that is or

how fascinating it is or he's in the

world of criminologists and there and

his friend in his little circle that's

the way they think, right? So

my job is to listen and to appreciate

what he's saying. And all I have to do

is to bring my

I bring myself to it and I bring my

naive self. You know, my job is not to

be a criminologist like him. It's to

react as a noncriminologist and to say,

"Wait a minute. I've never heard of this

before. That's crazy. How do you do

that?" Right? What what do people say

when you went to them and said, "Don't

arrest

the poor husbands?"

Right? like that's you know he so it's

it's about alerting people to those

parts of their lives that are

that that um may seem bol to them but in

fact are not um and that that's about

the the writer has to stay I don't want

to say dumb but naive is the right word

it's important to be naive it's not a

failing

If you, the interviewer,

has a question,

chances are your reader has a question.

So, your reader

is typically much closer to you than to

the person you're interviewing,

right? Um, so your questions are their

questions. So you're you're representing

your audience when you give an

interview. So I think that your own

instincts are your guide. If you don't

get it, then you should say, "I don't

get it." And if you find that something

fascinating, you should stop them and

say, "Wait,

that's fascinating." The word wait is

something that I when I transcribe

interviews my that I've done, I use that

word a lot because

getting someone to slow down

when they're talking to you solves all

kinds of problems simultaneously. It

gives you time to think so you can think

about what it allows them to they may

have skipped over something because they

don't understand that it's interesting

and it allows them to you to figure out

oh is that actually interesting

and it also uh allows you to gives you a

better shot at understanding what

they're saying. You know sometimes you

don't understand it because you can't

but a lot of times you don't understand

something because it's just moving too

quickly.

So wait, I'm kind, you know, my

interviews are full of me saying, "Wait,

wait."

Almost kind of pathetically, but you

just see you hear these little weights

on the tape.

Go over that again.

So humility is two things. It is a trait

and a tactic. Um,

I think human beings have a uh an

obligation, a moral obligation to pursue

humility as a trait. Um, we are better

people when we are humble. We're it's

easier to learn. It's easier to get

along with others. It's easier to

appreciate the world around you. There

is an infinite number of reasons. We are

we are truer versions of ourselves. Um,

and we are better friends and family to

others when we're not putting ourselves

first. I was reminded of this. There's

this cafe I always go to in um when I'm

in LA, which is around the corner from a

seminary. And so all the conversations

that you overhear are conversations

about God and scripture. And I was last

time I was there was a young woman

talking to someone who I assumed was her

professor

about what she should do next when she

graduated. She couldn't figure out she

was had all kinds of choices and

questions and anxieties in her mind. And

what she said was not I can't figure out

what I want to do but her question was I

can't figure out what God wants me to

do. She put herself second. It wasn't

about looking inside herself and finding

some sort of inner truth about herself.

It was about looking

for a higher purpose. I need to

understand what my relationship is to

some higher purpose. Right now I don't

doesn't matter whether you're religious

or not but you can see what is beautiful

in that attitude and how that notion of

humility that informs that what does God

want me to do is a statement of

humility. How much how that changes the

way she navigates the world. And by the

way

among other things is so profoundly

interesting. Why did I eavesdrop on that

conversation? Because what does God want

me to do in the world is interesting. I

wanted to know what does she think God

wants to do in if she if she had said

what do I want to do in the world that's

every conversation you've ever heard and

I would have gone back to my writing

right so humble questions are almost

invariably more interesting than

self-centered questions but humility

that leads me to the other side of

humility humility is also a tactic I

don't mean that in a cynical way but it

is something that allows you to navigate

the world so much more easily And when

you go and adopt a tone of humility in

an interview, the interview is just way

better. So if you listen

to people's interviews, like you on the

radio or whatever, whenever you're

listening to an interview or in a

podcast,

um I'm always alert to the ones that

don't work and figure out why don't they

work. And they invariably don't work

because of this exact reason that the

the interviewer is so anxious to insert

their own experiences and self into the

conversation that they derail it.

They they're like, you don't want to I

don't want to hear the interviewer. I

want to hear the person you brought into

the studio. And it's not that I don't

want an interaction. I want an

interaction, but I want an interaction

that begins from a position of humility

where the interviewer says, "I am

genuinely interested in you." Not only

that, for the purposes of this

interview, I am more interested in you

than me. Those are the terms. The terms

are humble terms. It's a tactic. In real

life, I may be twice as interesting as

you, but for this conversation, the way

it's going to work is I think that you

are fascinating and I'm going to do my

best to make you fascinating and I'm

going to subjugate

all of myself in order to make that

happen. That's a humility as a tactic.

And that's why those kinds of interviews

succeed. And when do they fail? When if

you ever watch so late night television,

those interviews are not interviews,

right? Because that's not those aren't

the terms. The terms are that the late

night host is using you to demonstrate

their own

uh charm and wit, right? the the host is

the the the person who comes on the

show, they may start out being,

oh, they're they have an interesting

story, but ultimately what the host is

trying to do is just use them as a

springboard for jokes, right? They want

to br they try to bring the attention

back to themselves. Now, nothing wrong

with that in that context, but just to

be clear, those that's not interviewing.

That's entertainment. That's a show.

That's something else. That's not

journalism is not taking place when

Jimmy Fallon interviews,

you know, the hottest young actor in

Hollywood. Something else is going on.

They're constructing a kind of a little

weird television

work of art. Um, but an a true interview

is something that proceeds on different

a different kind of power basis.

I get very very tired when I interview

people and so as a rule I never try I

try and if the interviews goes more than

two hours or two and a half hours I stop

it and either come back another day or

another week or I just don't think

I can function. I don't even know about

the subject. subjects get tired too, but

I can't listen to listen intently for

more than two hours is too much. Um, and

so when I find myself yawning, I stop.

And I think that's important because,

you know, just running an interview when

you're tired is a waste of time because

you're not you can't listen. You need to

listen to kind of um to understand where

the next question should go. Um, that's

another problem that people I think have

in interviews, which is I don't script

my interviews. I have a couple of

questions written out. But

if you write out the questions ahead of

time, then you're making this colossal

mistake. You're first of all, you're

assuming that you know what you want

before you've started and you're

assuming you know have some general

sense of what the person is going to

say. How do you know that? The most

interesting thing anyone can tell you in

an interview is the unexpected thing.

And if you have the list of questions in

front of you that you're devoted to,

then you're closing off all kinds of

opportunities. You're closing doors

before you started.

I know that one of the weaknesses I have

as a interviewer is I I don't like it

when I'm I don't like um covering

emotionally complicated terrain

with my subjects. I find it weird to

talk about intimate subjects with people

with whom I'm not intimate. And so

that's a necessary part of certain kinds

of stories. And I had this problem when

I was writing my book David and Goliath

that I wanted to talk about what it

meant to be

uh someone living in Belfast during the

troubles during the 20 30 years of

non-stop violence that marked um that

period in Northern Ireland's history

when the Protestants and Catholics were

at each other's throats. And I was just

incapable of getting of of of

getting people to of eliciting that kind

of understanding from people I was

interviewing. And finally I I was there

for weeks trying to do this and it

wasn't working. So finally I had this

assistant named Jane who was very kind

of savvy and emotionally savvy. Finally,

I just came home and sent Jane and Jane

went for like two days and got the most

amazing interview with this woman named

Rosemary Lawler, which was the whole

chapter. So, I mean, it was a kind of

like really good lesson in, you know,

uh, a little bit of self-nowledge would

have saved me several weeks of worry. It

was also a kind of interesting

an important lesson because my

like most writers are independent

contractors. You do everything yourself,

right? And it's important to understand

that, you know, sometimes you can behave

in the normal world. People assign jobs

to those who are best capable of doing

them. We're not used to that as writers.

We're we think we have to be the jack of

all trades. But you don't actually, you

know, Jane,

you know, was infinitely better than I

was at getting someone to open up about

emotionally painful subjects. Why

wouldn't I just use Jane? I mean, why

did it take me a month to figure that

out?

I often think of this profile that I did

of an an investor named Nim Taleb. Um

because

when I met him, I found him delightful.

And I not delightful in a kind of he's a

fun guy to hang out with, but I thought

he had a kind of magnificence of spirit

that was wholly unusual that I hadn't

really uncovered in anyone. Um I didn't

particularly agree with everything he

said. Many things he said I found weird,

sometimes even offensive, but it didn't

matter. He had there was just something

about him

that was uh magnificent. Like I said,

that's the right word. And so when I

described him, what I wanted to do was

describe him in such the task was to

describe him in such a way that you got

a glimpse of that.

You couldn't get all of it cuz you have

to meet him to get all of it. but you

get some of it. And so I I had to kind

of I had to summon him for the reader,

not just um in a literal way, but in a

way that captured his spirit. And I've

um

uh so let me just read to you from my

description of him. And um hopefully

that comes through.

One recent spring morning, the staff of

Empirica, which is the name for Nim's

trading firm, were concerned with

solving a thorny problem having to do

with the square root of n, where n is a

given number of random set of

observations, and what relation n might

have to a speculator's confidence in his

estimations. Keep in mind, these guys

are supposed to be trading stocks, and

instead they're having an argument about

essentially algebra. TB was up at a

whiteboard by the door, his marker

squeaking furiously as he scribbled

possible solutions. Spitzenegel and Pup,

these are his two employees, looked on

intently. Spitzenegel is blonde and from

the Midwest and does yoga. In contrast

to Taleb, he exudes a certain laconic

level-headedness. In a bar, TB would

pick a fight. Spitzenegel would break it

up. Palop is of Thai extraction and is

doing a PhD in financial mathematics at

Princeton. He has longish black hair and

a slightly quizzical air. Palip is very

lazy. TB will remark to no one in

particular several times over the course

of the day. Although this is said with

such affection that it suggests that

laziness in the Talebian nomenclature is

a synonym for genius.

It's it's

that's the moment that's the that's the

moment where I'm trying to communicate

to you just how wonderfully and

spectacularly weird he is and the

delightful fact that he would call one

of his employees over and over again to

the world lazy and it's actually a

compliment. Once you kind of grasp that

fact about Nasim Taleb, I think you

understand who Nim Taleb is

in these two descriptions.

Um

there's very little complicated about

it. Um and so for example, when I

describe Spitzenegel, I say Spitzenegel

is blonde and from the Midwest and does

yoga. That is the most cliched,

right? I've told I've summoned three

cliches. He's blonde, so you think, oh,

he's like not that smart.

He's from the Midwest. He's boring. He

does yoga. He's some kind of dreamy

millennial, right? The in combination,

you get a little somewhere. But I don't

want to get complicated with Spitzenegel

because I want you to stay focused on

Nim. His only function I mean I happen

to have liked him a lot as well and he's

a brilliant guy but his function in this

passage is to be a counterpart to Nim

Taleb and to remind you that part of Nim

TB's genius is that he's quite he's

totally he's delighted to spend time

with people who are about as different

from himself as is humanly possible.

Right. Nim is from Lebanon. He's out of

his mind and he's got this huge nose and

he's like, you know, waving his fingers

in the air. And who's his like best

friend at work? It's this blonde guy

from the Midwest who's like, and then I

say, you know, Tilly would nine would

pick a fight, Spitzenegel would break it

up. And so you you get a sense of I I

think I I was trying to reveal

Spitz a little more of Spitzenegel's

personality in that imaginary

moment. You can and you you you

understand that they are at opposite

ends of the continuum. And again this

see that is that guy who loves that

fact. Um and then Lazy Popup who later

on I describe how Popup doesn't even

look at anybody. He turns his chair

around so he's looking out the window

and just sits there reflecting, right?

And they love that about him.

And again, the same the guy is he's

paying Paul a salary and Paul is staring

out the window and Nim thinks it's

fantastic, right? Like that's the but

all of those are very

these are very simple concrete some of

them cliched images that if you stack

them on top of each other I think you

get somewhere right you don't need to do

this you don't need to be ped and do

some pages and pages and pages of

description I think it can be done

relatively um uh efficient in the way

you describe people here's the line

about Palop's computer was untouched and

he often turned his chair around so that

he faced completely away from his desk.

So it's like he's just like he didn't do

anything. Sat there and everyone found

it enormously amusing.

writing with my friend David for this

medical journal. the story

of uh

of an interview that I conducted 25

years ago with a biologist named Howard

Teman

and he had won the he later won the no

he at that point had won the Nobel Prize

for his work on what's called reverse

transcriptise

and uh

paragraph in two paragraphs I tell you I

met this guy

but he wasn't the typical scientist.

Second sentence or the third sentence is

he was raised by activist parents in

Philadelphia. His bar mitzvah money was

given to a refugee camp. When he gave

his valadictory address, when he gave

the valadictory address at his high

school, he spoke about the hydrogen

bomb.

So you have scientist, Nobel Prize

winner. You you have a notion of what he

is. He's the nerd. He's buried himself

in the lab. He's so smart. We can't

understand him. And then we're like,

wait, his parents are activists.

Bar mitzvah money got given away. So, we

know he's we can locate him all of a

sudden. We know that he's he's Jewish.

He's from he's from that, you know, his

parents are activists. So, we suddenly

sense, oh, maybe he's political. You

know, we have a kind of sense of where

he places himself in the sociological

firm firmament.

And then a kind of selflessness

gives he's 13 gives his money away to

like a refugee camp. And then we have he

was the valadictorian. Oh, brilliance at

an early age. But what does he talk

about? He talks about the fact that the

world could get blown up. And then

um the la last line of the first

paragraph is

that during our conversation he didn't

talk about science, he talked about

philosophy and literature.

So I go to visit a man who has won the

highest prize that can be given to a

scientist and he doesn't talk about

science. Right? And that's the whole

point. The whole point of this little

thing that we're writing together is to

talk about what is the benefit to a

scientist of learning something outside

of science. How does are you a better

scientist if you know stuff that has

nothing to do with science? And my

argument about Teman that I make was

that it was Teman's reading in

literature and philosophy that allowed

him to make this radical jump that

resulted in his Nobel Prize. That's my

argument anyway. That the habit of mind

that led to his scientific discovery was

a literary habit of mind.

But this, you know, Howard Teman with

his crazy hair and his dancing eyes is

just a really quick way to get to it.

You know, I I want to get I want you I

want you boom in that frame of mind of,

oh, this brilliant scientist gave his

bar mitzvah money away, right? You know

what did that mean? That's what I that's

what I want you. And I get I try to I

get you there by sentence three.

So I want to talk a little bit about

establishing

worlds

that um you know the as there is as much

value in describing the world someone

inhabits the physical space they inhabit

as

the person themsself. So a simple way of

thinking about this is

uh

imagine if you were going to describe

your

uh

sib one of your siblings

um to an audience, a general audience.

And I give you a choice. You could

either go into your siblings room and

describe the contents of his or her

closet, bookshelf, the way the room

looks, the posters on the wall or what

have you. Or you can just describe

your sibling as a person, what they look

like, how they walk and talk. What's

better? I actually kind of think that

you get a better sense of your of

someone by describing their bedroom.

or at least the bedroom

is just as good. If if you went into,

you know, if you if you just walked

through my apartment without me there

and just made just describe what you

saw, you would have an you would have an

incredibly effective portrait of me. I

mean, you wouldn't know that I was

skinny and had curly hair, but actually

you kind of would because you could see

my clothes. But just by poking around my

closet and looking at the books on and

is is my apartment messy or tidy? Is it

um how are things arranged? What's in

the fridge? I mean, there's tons of

things you could learn about me. Anyway,

so I'm always a big I'm more I'm a I'm a

bedroom person, not a not a personal

description person. I'm a space person,

not a person person. So this is an

example of so this isn't a terribly good

description but it works in context.

It's an article I wrote years ago about

I'm talking about the world of

advertising in the 1960s.

Um when

advertising mattered we it sort of

doesn't matter in the same way then now

but back then it was a really really big

deal. people went into advertising who

today would go to Hollywood or Silicon

Valley. I mean, it was the place that

captured the best and the brightest. And

there was a legendary ad firm um that

was called Tinker. and Tinker

and I'm describing I'm talking about a a

woman named Hera Herszog who worked for

Tinker and Hera Herzog was essentially a

Freudian analyst and Tinker was this

sort of was the hippest advertising

agency of the day it was madmen on

steroids and they decided they needed to

have a Freudian analyst on their staff

and so I'm I we've met herzog who's now

in her 90s and lives in the Alps in

Switzerland that I somehow managed to

con my editor descending me to go and

see her to Herszog and she was like very

close to the end of her life and she was

actually in an oxygen tent the entire

time. It was this crazy thing but I want

to describe the heyday of her career

when she worked for Tinker.

Um so I begin the description with

Herszog worked at a small advertising

agency called Jack Tinker and Partners.

And people who were in the business in

those days speak of Tinker the way

baseball fans talk about the 1927

Yankees.

And so you right away you get a sense of

like, oh, it's like this was the place.

And Tinker was the brainchild of the

legendary adman Marian Harper, who came

to believe that the agency he was

running, Macccan Ericson, was too big

and unwieldy to be able to consider

things properly. His solution was to

pluck a handful of the very best and

brightest from Macan and set them up

first in the Waldoff Towers in the suite

directly below the Duke and Duchess of

Windsor and directly above General

Douglas MacArthur and then more

permanently in the Dorset Hotel on West

54th Street overlooking the Museum of

Modern Art. The Tinker Group rented the

penthouse complete with a huge terrace,

Venetian tile floors, a double height

living room, an antique French polished

Peter bar, a marble fireplace,

spectacular skyline views, and a

rotating exhibit of modern art hung by

the partners for motivational purposes

with everything,

walls, carpets, ceilings furnishing a

bright, dazzling white. And so like you

understand this is crazy, right? It's

like it's not like the first of all it

tells you about the 60s. Today they'd be

in a warehouse with like a pingpong

table and you know it today the

aesthetic of hip firms is to be kind of

industrial and edgy. And back then, oh

no, back then it was like everything in

white, modern art in the walls, the

penthouse overlooking, you know, MoMA or

one floor down from the Duke and Duchess

of Windsor. Like they're like that's how

kind of I mean just gives you a flavor

of what was going on at that time. And

the idea that in the middle of this

crazy everything painted white is like

so 60s. It's fantastic. And you can just

imagine in your mind the way they're

dressed, right? I mean the whole nine

yards. And then in the middle of this is

this woman Hera Herzog who's like a

she's like a vianese trained

psychoanalyst. Right. So you're the the

the juxiposition of Hera with her insane

vianese accent in the middle of this

crazy penthouse painted white. That's

what I want. Like I want I want you to

see her in the space. And it's that's

what's kind of arresting about the

image. This is a good description of

her. This is just for fun. I interviewed

all the people who knew Hera Herzog. Her

was graceful and gentle and articulate.

Herbert Krugman who worked closely with

Herzog in those years says she had

enormous insights. Alka-Seltzer was a

client of ours and they were discussing

new approaches for the next commercial.

She said, "You show a hand dropping an

Alka-Seltzer tablet into a glass of

water. Why not show the hand dropping

two? You'll double sales."

That's so fantastic. By the way, the

fantastic thing is it was the Freudian

analyst from Vienna who's like, "Just

drop in two and you'll have twice as

many. You'll sell twice as many

tablets." I mean, it's just the whole

thing is just like

so crazy and so bananas. And the fact

that, you know, it's all taking place in

a white painted penthouse full of modern

art is with like French antique Peter

bar and a marble fireplace is just

that's just the payoff. After retiring

from Tinker, Herszog moved back to

Europe, first to Germany and then to

Austria, her homeland. She wrote an

analysis of the TV show Dallas for the

academic journal Society. Like I mean

right then and there you get a sense of

the pure nuttiness of these characters.

It's useful sometimes to think of

yourself if you're a writer as a the way

an athlete thinks of themselves. Um

athletes practice. They spend way more

time practicing than they do playing. Um

so you should practice your writing. Um,

I I talked a little bit about how much

can be learned about someone by

describing where they live, what their

room looks like. That's a good

that's a good practice session. Go to

someone who you know's bedroom and spend

a good hour there and then try and

describe them. Do a kind of profile of

your friend just through the contents of

their bedroom.

How closely, how well can you summon

your friend for a reader just by

describing their most intimate space?

Another good another fun writing

exercise that's analogous to writing

about someone's room instead of them is

to write about someone entirely through

the eyes of their friends and family.

So, do a profile of someone where you

deliberately never talk to the person

that you're profiling, but just talk to

people around them. Um, co-workers,

friends,

family, siblings, parents, anyone you

can come up with who has a perspective

on them. Um, and try and summon them

that way. And then at the end, it might

be useful, you know, show it to the to

the subject to the to the the absent

subject and see what they think. And

it's and and then also reflect about how

different that profile turned out than

if you had talked to the person

themselves.

You have a kind of

uh friends say your friends describe you

very differently than you describe

yourself. So when you do a construct a

profile entirely through the eyes of

friends, you construct a different

profile and you can sort of answer the

question, do you prefer this one to the

one that you would construct by talking

to the subject? Sometimes

uh sometimes you will you'll find you

really do. I actually

I much prefer constructing profiles from

uh from people within someone's circle.

I think you get a better a way

uh more telling uh portrait from friends

than from

the person themselves.

So, this is a book. This is a a a

profile I wrote of Ron Papiel. Um, one

of my favorite prof profiles. He is the

creator of and salesman of uh a variety

of kitchen gadgets and the Showtime

rotisserie oven, which is the real

subject of of this um particular

profile. And I want to read start by

reading the first

uh line of the the opening line of the

profile. The extraordinary story of the

Ronco Showtime rotisserie and barbecue

begins with Nathan Morris, the son of

the shoemaker and caner kidders Morris

who came over from the old country in

the 1880s and settled in Ashbury Park,

New Jersey.

Nathan Morris was a pitchman. He worked

the boardwalk and the five and dimes and

country fairs up and down the Atlantic

coast selling kit gadgets made by Acme

Metal out of Newark. In the early 40s,

Nathan set up NK Morris manufacturing

turning out the Kiki Pie and the Morris

metric slicer. And perhaps because it

was a depression and job prospects were

dim, or perhaps because Nathan Morris

made such a compelling case for his new

profession. One by one, the members of

his family followed him into the

business. His sons, Lester Morris and

Arnold the knife Morris became his

pitchmen. He set up his brother-in-law,

Irving Rosen Blum, who was to make a

fortune on Long Island in plastic goods,

including a handgrader of such

excellence that Nathan paid homage to it

with his own Dutch kitchen shredder

grater. He partnered with his brother

Al, whose own sons worked the boardwalk

alongside a gangly Irishman by the name

of Ed McMahon. Then one summer just

before the war, Nathan took on as an

apprentice his nephew Samuel Jacob Poil.

SJ as he was known was so inspired by

his uncle Nathan that he went on to

found Poil Brothers based in Chicago and

brought the world the dilemmatic, the

Chapamatic and the Veomatic. SJ Papille

had two sons. The elder was Jerry who

died young. The younger is familiar to

anyone who has ever watched an

infomercial on late night television.

His name is Ron Papiel.

Now

that incredibly lengthy beginning,

there's a point to it which is that

this is a profile of Ron Papiel. But

what is interesting about Ron Pille is

his family and where he comes from. He

is a perfectly

charming, intelligent person. He's not

fascinating. I mean, I don't mean that

in any way to to

as a criticism of him.

He's he's not the most kind of uh what

is if I had to locate the kind of the

thing that would draw you into the story

of Rampil, it is the world in which he

is immersed and the all of the

significant conflicts in his life are

with his own heritage. He did what he

did in part out of an attempt to emulate

his father but also because his his

father out of a reaction to his father

who was not a good father who really

abandoned him and there's this the

underlying story of his career is an

attempt to kind of win his father's

absent approval right so there's a

psychological element there and also the

colorful the characters in his family

were all the ones in the previous

generations the ones who I just went

True. So what I want to the beginning of

that story is an attempt to tell you

this is a story about a family and about

a heritage.

And I'm going to end up talking about

this one guy Ron Papiel. But Ron Papiel

does not exist outside of this history.

Other people exist outside their

history. Right? You can talk very

happily. Who ever talks about Albert

Einstein's father or mother? No one ever

does. I mean, in a biography, but if I

was talking about if I was writing 5,000

words on Albert Einstein, I wouldn't

talk to you about his parents. Wouldn't

seem relevant. If I was writing 5,000

words about

Shaquille O'Neal, I might mention his

father in passing, but Shaq is kind of

his own thing, right?

Michael Jordan, I would talk about other

people in his life, probably not his

parents or his upbringing, but Ron, you

can't talk about him without talking

about the fact that he's the third

generation of people who pitch pitching

gadgets. So, I think you got to start

with that. Now having established that

fact that he is a creature of where he

comes from that means that I have to

delay my discussion of

Ron Poil as an individual because we're

not thinking about him as an individual

to begin. We're thinking about him as

the heir to a legacy.

So as a result, this is a piece that's

probably 8,000 words. Um,

I give you a brief physical description

of him in the next section. Ron Papil is

a handsome man, thick through the chest

and shoulders with a leonine head and

striking oversized features. He is in

his mid60s and lives in Beverly Hills

halfway up Cold Water Canyon in a

sprawling bungalow with a stand of

avocado trees and a vegetable garden out

back and tell you a little bit more

about him. And then that's it. We meet

him, but we're not giving you we're not

coloring in Ron Papiel any more than

that until pages go by. And I talk about

his dad in great great detail. I talk

about his uncles in great great detail.

We meet his patent attorney, his

partner. We meet his, you know, we meet

Arnold the knife Morris, his cousin, who

was this famous was a guy who who would

who pitched the Ginsu knife on

television, if you remember that on late

night TV. And I go to Asbury Park and I

meet all these characters. I go to the

grave site where his family is buried.

And then pages in, twothirds, 3/4 of the

way in, I finally come back to Ron and I

tell you about his childhood.

Um, because now I feel you're ready to

hear about his childhood. I filled in

all the other blanks and suddenly the

facts about his childhood mean something

because this is a man for whom family is

everything. Everything that he has done

in his life is a function of his

these generations of pitchmen. His

professional life, his personal identity

is bound up in the Popil legacy that

begins with Nathan Morris. Right. Way

back when. Morris Kders, whatever those

What were the names? Hold on. I've even

forgotten. That begins with Nathan

Morris. Yes, that's right. The son of

the caner kidders Morris.

And then I tell you about his childhood.

And what is the central fact about his

childhood? He grew up alone. Right? So

there's a line I want to read which is

the most important line in this

particular um account of Ron

and this is right at the very very end

of the piece.

Hold on. This is in the seventh if the

piece is divided into sections. Um this

is in the a total of eight sections in

the piece. This is the seventh section.

Ron Papiel did not have a happy

childhood.

We're finally very very end having gone

through all this stuff. His parents

split up when he was very young. SJ went

off to Chicago. His mother disappeared.

He and his older brother Jerry were

shipped off to a boarding school in

upstate New York. So, just so we're

clear,

his father's in Chicago,

alive,

a wealthy man, has this big business. He

ships his two sons off to essentially a

boarding school in New York halfway

across the country. That first weird

fact. And then this is Ron talking.

I don't remember seeing my father ever

until I moved to Chicago at 13. When I

was in the boarding school, the thing I

remember was a Sunday when the parents

visited the children and my parents

never came. Even knowing that they

weren't going to show up, I walked out

to the perimeter and looked out over the

farmland and there was this road. He

made an undulating motion with his hand

to suggest a road stretching off into

the distance.

I remember standing on the road crying,

looking for the movement of a car miles

away, hoping that it was my mother and

father, and they never came. That's all

I remember about boarding school.

Ron remained perfectly still. I still

don't remember ever having a birthday

party in my life. And he goes on to talk

about all the things he doesn't he never

had.

And

that little fact about him, had I told

you that at the beginning, you would

have said that's sad. But you would have

said this is a man who has heroically

overcome

this childhood. If I tell you that at

the end you realize this is a man who

has carried that fact with him his

entire life and has suffered the most

grievous injury a man like him can

suffer which is to be cut off from this

legacy. He is the inheritor of a legacy

and the legacy is not there. Right? I

mean it's like it's suddenly it's

heartbreaking. Right? And then I've told

you leading up to that point all of the

ways where as an adult Ron goes back and

locates all of these relatives and

learns from them and tries to win his

father's love and returns to Chicago and

works in his father's factory as a kid

as a 14-year-old. he's working in a

factory like making these gadgets and

all of a sudden all those facts take on

this incredibly moving heartbreaking

um emotional significance. And it's all

it's not just because of that thing he

says that's so heartbreaking. It's

because of when I tell you that thing

makes all the difference.

The job of the storyteller in this

instant was simply to let Ron and the

crazy cast of characters that made up

his family speak. Just make them let

them be heard. And that's all you needed

to do. And so the question I had was

in writing the story, the question was

not how to tell the story. That was

obvious. The story there with the story

that just turn the tape recorder on. The

question was how to make sure the

audience appreciated their story, right?

So that I had to make sure you

understood what you were getting that

this was something special. And so to

the extent that I added ideas and

context to the story. It was all about

helping you to understand that when Ron

does this one thing, that's amazing.

Just so we're clear, because here was a

he was someone who basically does

something that we laugh about, we make

fun of. He's the guy literally at 12:30

on channel 128,

he comes on in an infomercial and tries

to sell you a rotisserie oven or a knife

that can cut slice carrots in no time.

Right? Your impulse when you see that is

this is totally schlocky. he's selling

it for $9.99 and you write into a PO box

number, you call an 800 number, what you

know, it's the kind of thing that we

roll our eyes at and we think and

you're, you know, it's one you're half

awake. I mean, it's not something you

take seriously. And what I wanted to say

was, I've met this guy. He's actually

amazing. What he does is really

interesting and really hard,

right? So, I need to convince you that

it's interesting and more important that

it's hard because your impulse when

you're half awake at 2:30 in the morning

is to think it's easy. He's just another

he's a dude off the street who's like

chopping peppers. I mean, what's the

deal with that? Like, but you spend

an hour with Ron Appil and you realize

actually, whoa, that's super hard,

right? I could not do what he does. And

let me ex so let me explain to you why

this guy is exceptional, right? So that

when I when I expose you to him and all

of his hilarious, charismatic glory, you

get what you you you understand what

you're getting.

So it's that's about like so all the

storytelling was doing was was kind of

um

setting the stage

uh for

uh so that when I gave you Ron you you

were properly in awe like that's what

you wanted you wanted all

I don't write profiles rarely ever write

profiles of people who I do not like or

I'm not trying to find a way to like so

I don't do hatchet jobs not excl I mean

I have once or twice but not I don't do

it as a rule and my test is I would like

the subject of the profile to read it

and be glad that they talked to me now

not necessarily agree with everything I

say but be glad that they took the time

out to explain themselves to me. So to

to feel like they were treated fairly.

So Ron after that profile ran in the New

Yorker of Ron Papiel, he would in his

late night infomercials, he would hold

up a copy of it and he would say there

was a there was a story on me in the New

Yorker magazine and he would always go

he'd look at the camera and he go very

accurate very accurate which I always

loved but not insightful not I mean it

was sort of it's sort of like it was it

was actually almost the best

the the it was the highest compliment he

could pay that I had you know, I had

rendered him um I had rendered him as he

saw himself, right? And that's a kind of

I think that's a lovely thing to aspire

to. Uh is to represent someone Ron can't

explain himself to the world. He's not a

writer. Um he's a salesman and an

inventor, but I can do that. And so I

stepped in and performed that function

for him. And he was glad I did. And that

no that means I can't I shouldn't be the

one who profiles war criminals or bad

people or you know that's not for me.

It's not I don't really want to do that.

I don't want to spend time with someone

I don't like and I'm not comfortable

with

the gotcha moment where I you know

reveal someone as being hopelessly evil

or venal. Um others Janet Malcolm can do

that. I can't. I know what I want to do

and what I want to do is um like I said

represent someone else uh for them to

the world.

There are these software programs that

um you run pros through them. So you

download

a couple thousand words of someone's

pros and you run it through the program

and the program will tell you what grade

level the person is writing at and based

on how long their their choice of words

and how long their sentences are. And I

was enormously pleased to learn I

actually have forgotten the exact grade

but it's something like I'm writing at

the eighth grade level um or maybe the

ninth um and my sentences are super

short on compared to my peers. So the

person who did it for me with analysis

was another writer who writes about

similar things and and he was he

observed that he was writing at a level

three grade grades higher and his

sentences were way longer and we didn't

know what to make of this but I was

secretly pleased because

my goal is to write at an eighth grade

level but with ideas that are

super sophisticated. In other words, it

doesn't mean that I'm what I'm writing

is dumb. It means that the way I'm

writing a way I'm writing is super

simple and straightforward. An an eighth

grader can easily read one of my books.

They may not understand every idea, but

the writing is not going to defeat them.

Writing should be simple enough that it

does not defeat the reader. The reader

should never say, "Wait a minute, where

did this sentence start? I've lost

track." And once a reader does that,

it's like it's not good. Um, so I try

and discipline myself and when you have

lots of short sentences, when you do

want to do a long one, it pops and it's

like super fun. So in that passage

that I was reading, so I have all of

these short sentences. Spitzenegel is

blonde and from the Midwest and does

yoga, you know, in a bar to would pick a

fight. Spitzn period. Spitzenegel will

break it up. Period. Then I have that

sentence. Palip is very lazy to level

remark to no one in particular several

times over the course of the day.

Although this is said with such

affection that it suggests that laziness

in the Tbian nomenclature is a synonym

for genius.

That's a super long sentence with all

kinds of moving parts but it's like the

cherry on top. It's your reward. It's

what I can do because I have been

rattatattat short sentence short

sentence short sentence and you're in

the rhythm and then the payoff is this

one long windy super fun with a little

punch line at the end right that you so

I think it's uh it's not that you should

be scared of long sentences it just use

them sparingly you your reader has a

limited appetite for them but they'll

enjoy them if um if they've been um set

up appropriately.

I begin with a very very long sentence

uh for a reason and I'll read you the

sentence and then I'll explain to you

the reason.

The extraordinary story of the Ronco

Showtime Rotisserie and Barbecue begins

with Nathan Morris, the son of the

shoemaker and caner kidders Morris who

came over from the old country in the

1880s and settled in Asbury Park, New

Jersey.

So that and then the next sentence is I

describe what Nathan Morris did and then

I go in and I talk about his sons and I

talk about how they were all in the

business of selling kitchen gadgets and

all of the sentences almost all the

sentences in the beginning are long

uh which is a deviation from my normal

style and I what I'm trying to create

there is I'm beginning a very very long

story which is about

a man who is the heir to a long legacy

uh who is um

who is the kind of embodiment of a

tradition that goes back many

generations and this is supposed to

invoke

biblical language because

um I one is it's kind of funny

to use an Old Testament feeling to

describe a family of of kitchen gadget

inventors and salesmen, but also because

um I want you to take him seriously and

his lineage seriously. He's someone who

Ron Papiel who appeared on late night TV

and infomercials and I want to dignify

the whole piece is about dignifying what

he does and what is more dignified than

the Old Testament, right? It has that

kind of grandeur and that's what I'm

trying to summon with the long

sentences. So the senses are that way

because of the way they feel or the way

they feel to read and hear. Um not

because they need to be for purposes of

of um of uh of of imparting information.

Um it's there's something larger that

I'm trying to accomplish.

The important thing to remember about

punctuation is that punctuation is um

is uh how you one of the ways in which

you establish rhythm.

So you I always think it's super

important to read things aloud. When in

my very first job in journalism at a

little magazine called the American

Spectator, when all of the articles were

done and we were going through them for

the last time, I would sit in my boss's

office. My boss's name was Vlad Sloth.

And Vlad and I would read every word in

the magazine to each other. Um, and we

were looking for typos and kinds of

things, but those and we did this, you

know, it takes a long time to read an

entire magazine and we but as we would

do this, I got uh it first of all

reminded me of when my father would read

to us as kids and it also reminded me

that you don't really understand writing

until you hear it or there's a way in

which you understand writing when you

hear it that you that gives you insight

you don't have when you just read it.

Particularly what you get is the

musicality of writing, the rhythms and

the and what punctuation does is it

establishes those rhythms. You're

instructing your reader when do you want

them to pause? When do you want them to

savor something? If you say something

really pathy and great that you think is

worthy of then don't bury it in a big

sentence. Um, if you want to tell a

joke, tell the joke. Like in that

sentence that I read about polip, the

joke is the the punchline is the last

bit. You can't say the that bit anywhere

else. If you want to have a punchline,

make sure it ends the

sentence. I'm also wary of things like

semicolons because a semicolon, it

strikes me, is neither here nor there.

So, what what are you telling the reader

with a semicolon? I want you to stop,

but not really. I'm not sure where we're

going. I mean, it seems it's so kind of

it's such a gray area. I mean, if you

want the sentence to be over, then you

use a period. If you don't want the

sentence to be over, then you use a

comma. I don't know what this middle

period is. It's very it's distressing to

me.

Those are things that your audience

tells you when you do public speaking.

So if you can tell when you're losing

them and

because you just you can feel it the

room the attention in the room goes

somewhere else and you know when you see

that you need to speed up. You can also

tell when you're going too fast. They're

not they want to follow but they can't.

They're not getting it. And then you

slow down and you the more you speak the

more adept you are at picking up on

those kind of group cues. Um, and

there's always somebody I've always when

I give a talk, there's always someone in

the front row who

uh will assist you. They don't mean to,

but the kind of people who sit in front

rows are the kinds of people who want to

be engaged with you. And so, I mean, the

front several rows and they're the

people who when they get it, they'll nod

vigorously. And when they don't get it,

they'll just sit and look at you with a

puzzled look on your face. So if when

you're talking and I you just look at

that, you find that person early on and

you just kind of glance over every now

and again to see what's going on with

them. If they're nodding, fine. Just

keep rolling. If I see them looking at

me with this weird look in their eyes,

I'm like, "All right, I got to do

something here." Like something is this

is going off the rails. Um because my

buddy over there is just not he's not

down with where I'm going. So you you

get more

your attentiveness to you get you you if

you take it seriously, you learn to be

attentive to your audience and that

carries over to your writing because now

the audience as you're writing and

you're thinking about pacing, you think,

"Oh, so is that was that woman who

nodded along with me? Is she nodding now

or is has she tuned out?" Right? You

kind of internalize

your experience in the room and take it

with you when you go back to your

computer and you're sitting alone

writing.

Jargon is the are in the best sense of

that word are the words and phrases that

people inside a world use to describe

complicated notions. they're it's a it's

a form of shorthand. It allows them to

um communicate more effectively. And so

it's a very useful exercise to find

bits of jargon and explain them

to your audience to give your audience a

window of how someone inside that expert

world thinks. So

the if you're a writer and you're trying

to represent a world, a different world

to your audience,

the kind of jargon that is used to

render complicated arguments more simply

is incredibly useful to you, you should

use that jargon. The kind of jargon that

is just simply people's attempt to keep

the world out and to be pretentious and

to make them sound like they're more

expert than they are is the kind you

should avoid. So let me give you an

example. I was once writing an article

about a guy a company that was testing a

new drug for

uh cancer for melanoma

and in the world of drug testing there

is something called a Kaplan Meyer curve

and Kaplan Meyer curve is very simple

thing it's two lines on a graph the

first line is

people with this disease so if we start

with a 100 people who have this disease

and we simply

uh chart their survival rate over time.

So on day one there's 100. They're all

alive. On week one, on week two, 98 are

still alive. Week three, 90 are still

alive. Week 50, two are still alive.

Right? That's a graph like that. And

then on top of that graph, you graph the

survival rates of people who are taking

your drug. And if the two lines are

exactly the same, your drug doesn't

work. It's not changing the survival

rate of people. If the two dry lines

converge, something's happening. If your

line, if you're testing a new drug and

your line dips below the original line,

it means your drug is killing people. If

it's above

your line, it means your drug is saving

is extending people's lives. Right? So

in the world of drug testing, they talk

about Kaplan Meyer curves and was your

Kaplan Meyer curve positive, negative or

neutral.

When you submit a drug application to

the FDA, you submit in some cases

millions of pages of documents, but all

everyone cares about is the capital meer

curve, which is one chart with two lines

on it, right? And when they give their

big fancy meeting, they'll talk for

hours and hours and hours and then they

will put up on the slide on the

PowerPoint the Kaplan Meyer and that's

all people. They're just waiting for the

Kaplan Meyer. Wait, wait, wait. hours,

hours, hours, and then finally, and

they'll say, and it's a big suspense

thing, and they'll build up and build up

and build up, build up, and then they'll

say, they'll hit the button, they'll go,

and this is the Kaplan Meyer, and

everyone goes, "Oh my god." And it's

either oh no or uh or oh my god. There's

a famous story of a drug for breast

cancer,

uh, one of the best drugs for breast

cancer we ever had. And it was a drug

that people had given up on, and they

did a big breast cancer trial. And the

researchers

presented the data at the big cancer

meeting and it's you know there's every

major oncologist in the world is in the

audience. It's the big meeting

international meeting and they give

everyone's been waiting for the results

of this incredibly important trial. It's

taken years, millions and millions of

dollars and they're testing this new

drug for and they do the guy gets up

there and he gives the preamble for like

45 minutes. He describes how many people

in the trial, where they did the trial,

how much money it cost, this and this

and this and this. And the audience is

like on the edge of their seat. And then

he hits the button. The Kapla Meyer

comes up. People see space. They see

that the drug line is higher than the

normal Kappa Meyer line. And the

audience just there's like a standing

ovation and people are in tears and are

hugging each other or jumping up and

down because that means that

literally hundreds of thousands of women

are going to live longer than they would

otherwise. That curve that's what it

means. Anyway,

I wrote a story about the drug approval

process, about this company that was

coming up with this.

And one of the first things I do, in

fact, in the first or second paragraph,

I tell you what a Kaplan Meyer curve is.

And I tell you the story I just told you

about the Kaplan

Meyer curve that was presented for the

breast cancer drug. Even though that's

not what my story is about. My story is

about melanoma and another company years

later. It has nothing to do with breast

cancer. Not but you have to know that

little bit of jargon. Why? Because it's

thrilling and it's it's like and you

feel like you're smart. You are smart.

You now know the thing you need to know.

It's the simple beautiful thing you need

to know if you want to understand

cancer drugs. Kaplan Meyer. And you hear

that and you think your first thought is

who's Kaplan? Who's Meyer? like you I've

person you know it's not impersonal it's

not some jumble of legal ease that makes

no sense it's two people's names two

people who described a phenomenon that

allows us to really quickly and

elegantly understand whether something

can save lives or not right that is

jargon at its best it is I can explain

that to you and that's the little I've

given you this little tool and now I've

got you Right now, you want to know, so

this article goes on for another 8,000

words. What do you want to know the

entire time? I'm talking about this new

drug for melanoma. Melanoma is a

disease. Basically, we have no drugs for

melanoma. If you get stage three

melanoma, you die, right? Here was a

company that thought they had a way to

cure melanoma or at least cure some

portion of it. and I'll walk you through

everything they went through in the

discovery and testing of this drug the

whole time. What are you thinking as a

reader? I want to know what the cap I

want to see the Kaplan Meyer. I want

where's the Kaplan Meyer? And you know,

you turn the page and you see another

1500 words. You're like, where's the

Kaplan Meyer? You keep reading, right?

You want to know the Kaplan Meyer and I

tell you the Kaplan Meyer in the last

paragraph,

right? That's because I've what have I

done? I have made you I have turned you

into one of those people in the audience

at the cancer meeting waiting for the

Kaplan Meyer for the breast cancer drug

on the edge of your seat for 45 minutes

as I go through the preamble. The whole

article was preamble, right? That's what

you can do with that's the that is the

beauty of insider language is I can pull

you into the world. Now the thing I

didn't do is give you 15

other jargon terms from drug discovery.

There are many many others. I can I can

bury you in jargon from that world. No,

that would defeat my purpose. I'm not

turning you into the exact replica of I

don't want to turn you into an

oncologist. I can't. That's not the

point. I want to recreate the feeling

though that the oncologist has when

they're sitting in the audience and

Kaplan the words Kaplan Meyer and the

mental image of the the two curves that

does it gets that gets that feeling in

the pit of your stomach. So that story

you know goes back to all a lot of

things we've been talking about. It's

one selective use of the language of the

world you're describing,

particularly that the kind of language

that elegantly communicates something

complicated and central. Two, it's about

suspense.

The the Kaplan Meyer is always used in a

suspenseful

manner. It is the punchline. It is the

last sentence of the presentation,

right? It's what you so it is a it is a

concept that has that carries with it

inherent drama and when you you and so

it it creates a story for you and lastly

it's a tool. It's a way of thinking in a

kind of very clear way about what the

challenge is for someone who's making a

drug. Right? That's what I'm what I'm

trying to do when I was writing that

article was I wanted you to understand

what people in the world of

people who try and come up with drugs

what what

uh what does it feel like and what do

they what are the obstacles they face

right and their the obstacle very very

simply is to get the two lines on the

capital meer curve to diverge if only

for a short period of time right if they

can do that they win. That's what

they're just a little space. If you can

see daylight between the two lines, then

they have they have succeeded, right?

Years and years of years of work will

come through. So all of that

in that little simple idea there's

there's a a way to tell a story just

contained almost in that phrase Kepler

Meer.

You know we live in a society which

fetishizes

laughter. The production of laughter is

something that is uh taken very

seriously in our world. We pay people

enormous amounts of money to make us

laugh. We venerate comedians. I mean

Jerry Seinfeld is a cultural figure on

an extraordinary level. I mean he is a

he's a guy who used to do standup in New

York

bars who's now practically a billionaire

and could can't walk down a street

anywhere in the Western world. I mean

maybe even beyond the western world

without being recognized. That's an

incredible um social status for a joke

teller. So, we take that really really

seriously. It's an odd thing to take

seriously because um we laugh a lot.

It's not like laughter is something

rare.

You know, if you if you just listen to

the way people behave in everyday

context, they're constantly laughing.

Laughing is ubiquitous. Laughing. I

mean, I I've never counted how many

times I laugh in a day, but like all of

us, all of us are laughing all the time.

So, when you're when you're producing

laughter, what you're doing is you're

producing a very familiar

emotion. Um,

sadness on the other hand is quite

genuine sadness is quite rare. You know,

we have you think about in the course of

in a given day, how many moments of

genuine melancholy do you have? Very

few. You might not have any. You might

you might I mean there's a reason where

you can remember the last why you can

remember the last time you were very sad

and you probably can't remember with

accuracy the last time you laughed

because laughter is cheap happens all

the time. Sadness is something that's so

the the task of

producing of inducing

strong

um uh strong emotions, sadness,

melancholy in your audience is a very

very very different task than the task

of of producing levity um in your

audience. So I like I think of them as

being almost at opposite ends of the of

the continuum from each other. And I've

always been more

I'm way more interested in sadness,

melancholy than I am in laughter as a um

as an end point of in my audience. I

think that uh I don't think of it as a

great accomplishment if I've made

someone laugh whereas I think of it as a

extraordinary accomplishment if I have

managed to provoke deep uh reflective

emotion um in someone.

The other thing that's different between

laughter and sadness is that

laughter can be induced by

inauthenticity. In fact, it almost

always is induced by inau. You laugh at

when I'm out of character. If I do

something you're not expected, if I'm if

I play a role I don't normally play.

Whereas you can't make someone cry by

being out of character, you make someone

cry by being by exposing some aspect of

your authentic self, right? So it's

uh it's a totally different kind of

operation, right? Uh,

and so to kind of get to to to write

something that comes from something deep

within you and that opens up a genuine

window into who you are or or into who

someone else is, that's

uh an amazing powerful and really hard

really hard thing to do. So if you think

about that idea of sadness as

authenticity,

then rule number one is

that no element of

uh your description or discussion of

this that topic can be inauthentic.

So you can't try too hard.

So I can remember in one of my books in

David and Goliath, I was talking to a

mother who a woman named Wilma Dirkson

whose daughter was uh killed by a sexual

predator and who then

found it within herself to forgive her

daughter's murderer, publicly forgive

him. And

it's this incredible I was interviewing

her in her backyard in Winnipeg

and she's remembering it was 10 years

since her daughter had been killed and

she's reliving that moment and talking

about how she came to this

um almost unbelievable

decision that she would stand up and say

who this was even before the guy had

been caught. Whoever you are out there,

I want you to know that I have forgiven

you. I mean, it's I mean, it's un almost

unbearably

um heartbreaking that moment. So, the

question is, how do you render that on

the page? And one of the things you have

to do is to resist the impulse to

overplay it.

It's not a soap opera,

right? You're

she's doing all the work. You You don't

have to say and as she told me this, her

face was etched with sadness. No, it's

clear. If you do your job properly and

you just simply

if you simply describe someone saying

these almost impossible to believe

words, the reader has filled in all of

those has created a picture in their own

mind. They're doing all the of of your

work uh uh for you. If you do that, if

you make the mistake of going too far

and saying and her face was etched with

sadness and then the first question the

reader has is why are you trying so

hard? Is it because it wasn't you

weren't moved in the moment? Are you was

the was that moment in the backyard in

Winnipeg with Wilmer Durkman so trivial

or insubstantial for you that when

you're describing it you have got to

pile on the adjectives and add all of

this extraneous stuff you create doubt

in the mind of the reader and the minute

you have doubt all is lost right you're

they're out of the moment they've

they've taken a step back and they've

said there's something fishy about this

Malcolm is hitting me over the head with

it and I would have thought the moment

spoke for itself. So restraint

in the production of real emotion is

absolutely central

to pick up on a theme that I've been

talking a lot about um that of

expectations.

Uh,

funny is very hard when there is an

expectation that you're going to be

funny. So, the job of the comedian who

walks on the stage at a comedy club is

really hard because everyone thinks the

first thing out of his or her mouth is

uh something that you're supposed to

laugh at. And if you don't laugh, then

you think you've been cheated in some

way. A far easier way to be funny is to

set the expectation um for humor to the

off position before you start. Right?

So, uh it's easy to be funny

unexpectedly

in the context of something else. So, I

can do the latter. I can be funny in a

context where I'm not expected to be

funny. I cannot be funny in a context

where I'm expected to be funny. Um, so

that's a a kind of an important thing to

keep in mind that if you do want to have

as an outcome for whatever piece you're

writing that someone smiles or laughs,

then better to do it quietly

um, as a side effect of your writing

project than as a direct effect. Never

announce that you're going to be funny

in any I don't when I say announce I

mean don't set it up as a humor piece. I

always think, you know, in the New

Yorker, they have a a humor column

called shouts and murmurss. And that is

precisely the reason why I will never

write a shouts and murmurss, right?

Because they tell you before you even

start that it's supposed to be funny.

Um, but to slip in something at the end,

remember, humor is merely a pleasant

deviation from an expectation. That's

what it is, right? You laugh because you

have been taken by surprise by the by

the connection that the person you're

communicating with has made. They've

jumped somewhere you didn't expect them

to jump. And that moment in that moment

you you oh you you you burst out

laughing. Um so there's a that and that

jump can be out of playfulness. It can

be out of a kind of pretend malice. It

can be out I mean there's a million

reasons insight to make that unexpected

jump. And so it's a matter of of uh of

creating a context where uh those kinds

of responses

um are uh are uh are easily found,

easily produced.

So I had done a piece for the New Yorker

many years ago about a psychiatrist

named Dorothy Lewis who specialty was

serial killers and uh it's a long long

article kind of a profile of her work

her and her work. 10 years pass and a

British playwright named Byron Leverly

Levery wrote a play a very good play in

which some of the dialogue a good

portion of the dialogue had been lifted

directly from my article

maybe 15 or 20 lines I can't remember

how much this was brought to my

attention and my initial reaction was

this is outrageous she stole my work and

then I read the play. I was like,

actually, the play's really good. And

then I thought,

well, maybe I should meet the playwright

and find out what happened. So, I called

her up

and we had a long really interesting

conversation. She was incredibly

apologetic.

But I the more I thought about it, the

more I realized why did I think I was

victimized?

Like, it seemed like an odd I couldn't I

couldn't figure out why I was

victimized. So, she didn't take my

entire article,

put her name on it, publish it, and make

money off it. That's theft. That's clear

to me. She took a little She read my

article, was clearly inspired by it to

write a really good work of fiction, and

she took a small piece of text in 20

lines out of a 7,000word piece and other

little details and plugged them into her

fictionalized narrative. She was taking

my work and turning a small part of it,

the idea and small part of the building

blocks of it into something new and

really good.

She had contrived to create art out of a

work of non-fiction.

Why wasn't I, as I thought about it, I

realized, why was my first reaction not

to be flattered?

I mean, how often does that happen? Not

only that, she took it and the show ran

on Broadway and got incredible reviews.

I mean, what was my problem? essentially

when I as I thought about it and it was

then it was when I realized that I

didn't

that I had that reaction that I realized

oh this is a case where I think I can

write in the first person because I do

have an interesting story to tell

because we've all read a million times

the story about the writer who's

plagiarized and it's they're full of

outrage and they're they act as if you

know they had built some they had

written the Bible and someone had ripped

it off and was selling it in Walmart

under their name, you know, and I've

read that story so many times now. I

don't read another one of those. So,

that's was my why I would never have

written about this had it had I had I

had the conventional response. But once

I realized that actually

um I was flattered on some level to have

participated in a work of artistic

transformation then I thought well

actually this is a case where people

might actually be interested in my

story. And then when I realized wait

this is a great way to talk about the

way art is created and how we're very

dishonest about it and that all art is

about this. This is what people do. you

you take bits and pieces from here and

there and you combine them into

something new. That's art. And I had a

the middle of the piece is all about um

songwriting because musicians are the

most open about this. They don't get

hung up about sometimes they do, but m

musicians borrow and steal and recombine

and take riffs from each other and then

half the time they'll tell you

this. I got this idea from here and

there and there and they're all pleased

as punch with their ability to kind of

filch from various sources and I thought

why can't writers be as generous as

musicians. Writers have this are so

weirdly defensive and self-protective

and narcissistic about their work drives

me crazy. It's like everyone should just

relax and understand that everything we

do is a function of little bits and

pieces we've learned from others. And

the sooner we accept that fact and have

a little humility about our work, the

better off we'll be.

If you're talking about writing about

somebody, um there's a moment when

there at some point you have to bring

your subject to life, not just with

what they say, but with some kind of

physical description. And I'm not very

good at that. You know, I read novelist

descriptions of characters and they're

amaz, you know, a good novelist is

amazing at that. That's why I'm not as

nearly as good. And so I always feel I

have to kind of uh in some way

compensate for my weakness in that area.

And so what I try and do is I try and

make sure that the description is

attached to a narrative moment that

gives it

um makes it more consequential.

Um, so in my piece I wrote about called

Something Borrowed about the playwright

who who plagiarized me, at the very end

of the piece, I invite her to my house

and we talk and she starts to cry as she

describes about all the controversy that

she brought upon herself because she

plagiarized my work. And I have spent

the rest of the previous all of the

previous arguments in the piece have

been about convincing you that she's not

an evil person and that in fact she

created something wonderful from the

words she took from me and that we

should revise our feelings of plagiarism

to be much more generous about this

practice and not to get so crazily

worked up about it. And so when I when

we finally meet her, I want you to love

her.

Um, and I want you to kind of whatever

feelings, negative feelings you might

have had towards her at the beginning

when I told you that she stole 20 lines

from me, I want them to go away. And I

want you to say, "Oh, actually, I was

wrong. There's she did something

praiseworthy."

And we visited all of this controversy

on her for no good reason. She was just

creating art, right, in a way that is

how art is created. And so

at that point in the piece, then I

describe her because my description

works to win you over. It's part of the

process by which I'm trying to change

your mind about her. And once I have

turned her from a name on a page into

someone who's flesh and blood, then I

think I expedite

the process by which you embrace her as

a person and her choices. So I'll read,

let me just read

the moment that I do this and why it's

where it is.

And I'm trying in that moment. I want

her to be sympathetic.

Uh I want you to kind of um forgive her

and uh

and I want to be non as nonjudgmental

as I can. Um, and that notion that I

wanted to be as non-judgmental as I can

made me think that I wanted to be as

parsimonious in my description as

possible.

The more the longer you spend and the

more

uh words you use and phrases you summon

and analogies you make in describing

someone, the more your own point of view

creeps into the

um the picture. the more it becomes

impossible to separate my own biases,

the writer's own biases from the image

that is emerging. And I didn't want to

do that.

Um, and I didn't want to feel I didn't

want it to feel writerly either. I

wanted it I just wanted her to show up

and talk. And so I don't tell you she's

coming to my apartment. I just start a

new section and says

Byron Levery came to see me in early

October of that year and it was a

beautiful day.

And right even right there even it's an

important detail because it's not dark

and stormy. You know, the skies weren't

threatening. It's a lovely day. We sat

in the sun, you know, and I say

there's only two sentences of

description. She's in her 50s with

short, tusled blonde hair and pale blue

eyes and was wearing jeans and a loose

green shirt and clogs. There was

something rugged and raw about her.

That's enough, I think, to tell you

something about her, who she is. She

didn't She was coming She didn't know

what would happen. She She at that

point, she had no idea that I was on her

side. For all she knew, she was coming

to be dressed down, exposed, denounced,

and she put on her kind of working

clothes, right? Her simplest clogs, a

loose shirt, and jeans. And her hair is

tussled. It's not combed. She's not

wearing pearls. She didn't. And she

comes and I use those two words, rugged

and raw. And that's it.

We're done. I'm not giving you any more

of what she seems like, looks like. I

mean, I I will describe things she does

in my apartment, but you have to make do

with

with the jeans and the loose shirt and

the rugged and the raw. And

the rugged and the raw tells you those

are two words that are they're not

opposites, but they're pretty far apart.

rugged is that she's not

refined. She's not a perfectionist.

She's not obsessive and anal. Not every

little piece

part of her is in is is in is in its

right place, right? Which sort of is

part of my attempt to get you to forgive

her. Someone who was if she had been the

person who was obsessive, the opposite

of rugged. If she had been the perfectly

put together person and she had done

this, then it would be impossible for us

to understand that it was um

unintentional.

I mean, when obsessive anal people

plagiarize, they it it didn't happen by

accident, right? Because nothing escapes

their notice. If she's rugged and

unfinished,

then you're like, "Oh, she's the kind of

person who would just kind of cobble

things together and go with it." And Raw

suggests that she's open.

She's she carries her wounds. She has

wounds. And her wounds are evident. So

she's not she didn't show up in a suit

of armor.

She didn't show up with lawyers. She

didn't show up with a long prepared

statement. She showed up vulnerable.

Right. and that your heart is my heart

went out to her when I saw the way she

is and I want the reader's heart to go

out to her. So there's and then I'm like

I said I'm done. I can't to go on any

further is to is to have is to intrude

too much on what she's about to say.

From there on it's all all the words are

hers. So, I talk about her. She tells

her whole side of the story. And then

the last paragraph, in the last

paragraph of the piece,

she starts to cry. She's just, and you

realize how completely devastated she's

been by this whole controversy. And that

far from being

the culprit, the perpetrator of the

crime, she's the victim of the crime.

Right? and all those details that I drop

at the beginning that she she comes and

she's raw and she's just been savaged by

someone in the paper and then I tell you

the whole story about how it was just a

kind of clumsy innocent mistake that she

used the stuff that she used and she was

trying to do something new and unusual

and she she pulled it off but then this

little weird controversy derailed the

whole thing and now she has a new play

out and no one likes it And you know,

she's sitting there.

It feels absolutely terrible. I've had

to go through the pain for being

careless. I'd like to repair what

happened and I don't know how to do

that. I just didn't think I was doing

the wrong thing. And then the article

comes out in the New York Times and

every continent in the world. The story

of her plagiarism was there was a long

silence. She was heartbroken.

But more than that, she was confused

because she didn't understand how 675,

that's how many words she took from me.

Rather, ordinary words could bring the

walls tumbling down.

It's been horrible and bloody.

She began to cry. I'm still composting

what happened. It will be for a purpose.

Whatever that purpose is, that's the

end, right? And

I want your heart to go. My heart went

out to her. I want your heart to go out

to her. And that's all of that stuff

um is what makes the the physical

description is embedded in all of that

stuff because it makes sense to you now

that she looks the way she looks raw and

um

uh almost like she she sounds like she

had dressed in a hurry without thinking

in the morning. She's wearing like clogs

and jeans and she hasn't brushed her

hair and she comes and I give her some

tea and she starts to cry. You know, um

any of those facts earlier in the piece

wouldn't have had that same emotional

meaning.

I'm fascinated by

that notion of capturing someone's

attention. And that's what a title is,

right? A title is an even more

um edited

attention grabber. So, I think I spend

enormous amounts of time thinking about

the titles to my books,

Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers,

and no one for each of those titles.

Well, for Blink and Outliers, there were

people who thought that tried to talk me

out of those titles. And I I will not

get I I cannot be talked out of my

titles. That is the one thing I can I

will open I am open to criticism on

every level. And I but not about titles

because that's the thing that I feel

most strongly about. You know, my

podcast revision is history was no one

wanted that title. I was like, nope,

that's what we're going to call it. Um

because it's so these this is something

that I've that I have um uh that I kind

of prioritize that notion of because a

title a title or a phrase frames

something

quickly in someone's mind and that once

you own the frame you have a huge

advantage in capturing their attention.

Like the title of my podcast,

Revisionist History, that's it. That's

everything I want to do, right? I want

to go over the thing that I that you

think you know and I want to twist it,

right? Uh

uh outliers

the the it's one of those beautiful

words that it's it it it the definition

of the word is in the word. I don't know

this. Is there a is there a word for

that? There must be it someone who lies

outside of the mainstream. That's what I

wanted to describe. How do you get

outside

is this great, fantastic one-word

description. And blink was about that's

what it was about, right? That moment,

what happens in a moment. Um you don't

need any other words if you've got that

um word. And so I think those um very

often in writing we leave the titles to

someone else which is in my you know a

mistake. You have to spend as much time

I think thinking about titles as you do

about content. In fact I sometimes do

this and I think I mentioned it once. I

have more more than more than one

occasion come up with a title first and

realize oh that's a great that's a great

story to write. I don't know what the

story is, but the title's fantastic,

right?

So,

titles and conceptual names and whatever

are always more powerful when they're

when there's an emotional connotation

attached to them. It's like the on the

theory of titles, I once made a list of

what I thought were the 20 or 25

greatest book titles of all time. And

there's a very very consistent pattern

in great book titles, which is that they

there is a if there are two words, the

two words in the title are intention,

they're contradictions.

Ralph Nater wrote famously wrote a book

about how unsafe cars were. It was with

the Corveyor and was called unsafe at

any speed.

The title has a contradiction, right?

Speed is about is a is a continuum with

safety on one end and unsafety on the

other. He's saying unsafe at any speed,

meaning the continuum doesn't work

anymore, right? it doesn't or uh silent

spring by the famous book by Rachel

Carson that's a contradiction

spring is about noise that's the spring

is about many things but principally

what what happens in spring the world

wakes up and you hear spring even before

you feel it or smell it or you hear it

the birds come out the crickets come out

the whatever and she's saying it's

silent it's a really simple

two super simple words in juxiposition

And the tension between those words

creates a book title that people

remember to this day. People don't even

read that book anymore, but they know

what that that title has lingered. When

you see two words in combination that

aren't supposed to be together, some

part of you reacts like what's going on.

That's not right. Right? And that's what

these titles are capitalizing. They're

capitalizing on that feeling of that you

have that something's not that something

is imperfect, that something's not

right, that there's something's in

conflict. Right? So, anytime you can

take a word that has this has some kind

of emotional weight attached to it, I

think you're doing well.

I wanted to go into advertising

when I was in college. That was my that

was what I that was the world I wanted

to end up in. Um because I was and

remain

fascinated by the notion of

communicating something to someone under

severe time constraints.

If you're willing to give me four hours

of your time, how hard is it for me to

if you say I'm going to read your book?

Like it's a relatively easy task. You've

you've given that kind of commitment.

All right. I can tell a story. I can

take my time to get to the to the point.

I can take you on all kinds of of of of

uh digressions. I can do all these

things because I have the lux the most

important luxury of all. I have the

luxury of your attention. In

advertising, they don't have the luxury

of your attention. Right? Time is money.

People most most times people ignore

ads. They skip over them. They go out of

their way to avoid them. And even if

they pay attention, they pay attention

in the television for 30 seconds and

you're done. Right? So I have always

been

captivated from the

from the very beginning I've been

captivated by ads. There's a Google

there's an ad for Google Chrome

where a father is emailing with his

daughter and it's 30 seconds long. Let's

just be clear. And she's in college.

she's just left for college and he's now

he's like missing her and she's missing

him and they're emailing back and forth

and then you become aware that his her

mother his wife um has died just

recently because they start talking

about oh I miss mom and he goes I miss

mom and it's an ad for email and while

they're talking while they're emailing

about their mother his her mother his

there. The keystrokes slow down

and

you know it's emotional bananas. I mean

it's like you're in tears. I mean of

course you are. You have no choice. It's

kind of wrenches your heart out in 30

seconds, right? Like how can you not

think that is the most incredible thing?

I mean that you can do that that you can

take someone from

um

from ambivalence, not even ambivalence,

from hostility. Nobody wants to watch an

ad to tears in 30 seconds. My hat is off

to that. I was walking down

uh some street in LA once and some guy

stopped. I was chatting to some guy who

was in advertising and I was like I was

like when I meet people like that it's

like what's your favorite ad? He's like,

"Oh, that Google Chrome ad." He's like,

"We all we're all obsessed with it." A

title is another example of time

constrained communication. And that is

something that I am um

uh I am passionately interested in.

To me the most important thing is what

is your expectation as a writer for how

much you can write and my I think it's

very important to set a realistic

expectation. So the feeling of failure

that writers sometimes have is very

often caused by the fact they have too

high an expectation for how much they

can produce in a given day or given

sitting or they'll say, "Oh, I only did

two paragraphs today." And they'll feel

like a failure and it'll cause anxiety

and they won't sleep and the next day

they'll wake up and they'll, you know,

be exhausted and full of stress and

won't be able to write. The truth is you

can't write a lot in a day.

You can't. It's demanding creative work.

It It's demand. It's physically

strenuous. It's uh mentally strenuous.

It wears you out. It you know it it may

take I often find myself mulling over

something just in my head for 10 times

longer than it than I would actually

spend writing that section. So it's uh

so I think if I a productive day for me

is a day where you know if I have a good

page

I'm delighted that's you know a book is

if a book is 300 pages and I do a good

page in a day that suggests I can do a

book in a reasonable period of time

that's a lot actually but there are some

writers who if I told what is a page

three and a half paragraphs four

paragraphs some writers would say if I

only four paragraphs in a day, I've I've

failed. I think that's again, you've set

yourself up for for disappointment. Um,

if you raise the bar that high, a few

good paragraphs represent a substantial

achievement. Um, so once you think about

it that way, you think, well, when I

think about it, I think I can if I'm if

I work first, if I get up in the morning

and do my writing when my mind is fresh,

I should be able to accomplish what I

need to accomplish by lunchtime.

So, I work in the mornings and I rarely

do anything of of creative value. In the

afternoon, I organize my life and

organize the next days, do my reporting

and all those kinds of things. But uh

the morning is if I can do a couple of

good hours in the morning then I'm then

I'm I feel like I have moved the bar

that day. Moved the ball that day

rather.

The perfect is the enemy of the good is

one of the most important

apherisms that I repeat to myself. So if

you're trying to produce the perfect

piece,

you'll never produce it. So you have to

accept the fact that your first couple

of drafts are going to be bad. They're

always bad. By definition, they're bad.

You don't know what you're doing yet.

But it's very, very important to go

through the stage of just getting things

on the page. And also the act of

explaining your argument or make or

telling your story is how the story

emerges. You figure out how to tell the

story as you tell it necessarily, right?

You're responding to

pieces that you think will work don't

together don't work together or pieces

you don't think won't work together do

you know unexpectedly or you find ways

to link things just in the moment as

you're writing. So you have to trust

that process and just get things down

on. So when when I start I'm just

getting things down on the page and I'm

I have big gaps or if I have problems I

can't resolve I just don't resolve them.

I just have

you know I'll have a section of a

chapter of a book or something and I'll

just have the two versions. I'll just

stick them in there and leave them keep

going. Um, the next time round I'll

decide which one works and get then the

next time round I'll do another. I might

go through it countless times, dozens of

times sometimes. Each time doing

something different to it and each time

stopping well before I'm finished,

just so I don't I don't want to get

bogged down. I don't want to get sick of

it. I want it to be I want to keep

coming back to it fresh. Um,

so one of the things I'm puzzling now as

I'm writing my book is uh

there's just an there's an argument

particular point I want to make. Does it

belong? Is it the end of an existing

chapter or a chapter of its own? Super

simple boring writer's question. Turns

out in terms of organizing the book

that's a big it's a big deal

and I can't decide right now and I won't

decide. I'll decide

maybe in January I'll decide I don't

know February months from now. I mean

there's no reason to do it now. Book's

not due right away. Just leave it. Come

back to it. I know what I'm going to

say. I could figure out what I'm going

to say and write it even and just leave

it as the end of a paragraph as the end

of one chapter and maybe I'll yank it

out later. Um but this uh I said the

good enough is fine for now. Um, and if

I'm trying to be perfect in the moment,

I'll I'll be stuck on this chapter

forever.

So, I have changed the way I do writing

and reporting in recent years. And what

I do now is precisely because there is

this problem of an almost infinite

number of sources or infinite number of

of uh in infinite number of books to

read and people to talk to. I write as I

go along.

So I will I'm thinking of this right now

with a chapter I'm writing for my new

book. Um that there was a group of

I should talked about this earlier. the

criminologists.

It was a group of criminologists and I

began with the first one. I began with

Larry and then I moved to David and then

I went to Ron. After I talked to Larry,

I wrote up

I wrote a part of the chapter as seen

through Larry's eyes as Larry would the

way Larry would argue things and see the

world. Then I talked to Larry's

collaborator, David. And David and Larry

are good friends, but David sees the

world slightly differently. So I went

back and I revised the chapter.

This time, David plus Larry.

And then I talked to Ron. And I right

now I'm writing Ron plus David plus

Larry. Now what's the virtue of doing it

that way? The virtue is what I used to

do is I'd talk to Larry, I'd talk to

David, and then I'd talk to Ron last.

And because Ron got to me last, Ron

always won. Or I would do it that I

would talk to Ron and David and Larry.

And Larry was really dry. David was

incredibly charismatic and Ron I could

only talk to on the phone. I couldn't

meet him and we had limited amount of

time. So I was like, so what happens

there is it's all about David because

he's the one who's amazing and whatever.

This way everyone I talk to gets almost

their own hearing. Do you know what I

mean? So I I feel I'm much truer to

because you're a human being when you do

research. You're you're drawn towards

the person who is the most compelling,

most unexpected, who you had the best

chemistry with. I mean, there's no

you're not you don't behave differently

when you're working as you do in real

life. In real life, you're the same way.

So, you have to kind of guard against

that bias because the most compelling

and charismatic people are not always

the ones who are the most useful or

interesting or important. So, by letting

everyone by committing everyone's ideas

to paper right after I've talked to them

and by fashioning the narrative in their

eyes and then adapting it later, I think

I do a better job of of correcting for

that bias. Um, so in this case, I talked

to David for hours

in person.

Larry briefly, but I knew him from

before. Ron on the phone, but it was so

good. I'm gonna go and see him. So, it's

all these are very different ways of one

person I'd known for a while, one person

was a revelation and it was like blew my

mind and one person I was like tentative

about and then I was like, "Oh, wait a

minute. I thought about it. That's

fantastic. I'll go and see him again."

So there's, you know, there's each of

that is a different sort of emotional

connection, a different sort of

relationship, and you have to make sure

that you manage those very different

relationships um in a fair and equal

way.

One of the mistakes I think writers make

is they spend a lot of time thinking

about how to start their stories and not

a lot of time thinking about how to end

them. Now, that makes sense because you

invariably spend far more time on the

beginning than you do on the end. then

the beginning may be a lot harder than

the end because you're trying to

understand how to introduce a huge

topic.

But I do think that sometimes it's

enormously

clarifying

to figure out how you want to end it and

work backwards. And I once did a moth

story about a wedding that I once

attended where um a number of friends

and I sang a song. Um, we were all

friends of the groom and the song which

was supposed to be funny went terribly

arry and in fact no one laughed except

for us and the wedding collapsed in a

disaster and we were kicked out. I mean

it was just as much of a nightmare

there.

It was clear from the beginning what the

ending should be. I began with the

ending. The ending is the song.

What is this man?

What has he got? A shelf of bricks, a

squeaky cot. She pays the bills.

He sits and rots. She has her doctorate

and he has not.

He's on a leash. He's made his peace.

He'll do it her

way.

The minute you've

sung the song

and provided final proof of why this

wedding went so disastrously arai, your

story is over, right? I mean, maybe not

over in that moment with the final line

of the song, but it has to end really

soon because that's where everyone's

gasping, laughing, horrified, whatever.

The maximum emotional response is when

you have recreated in the audience the

feeling of the audience in the wedding.

They're like, "Oh my god, that's

outrageous." And, "Oh my god, how

outrageous would it be if this was my

own wedding?" Right? So, you have that

totally powerful moment. And if you have

a powerful moment, you never want it to

dissipate.

Why waste it? That's boom. That's your

ending, right?

So then the when it came time to write

that story for the moth,

I knew that it had to it ended with the

final note or very close to the final

note of the song, the issue was what

came before. So then I worked backwards.

So what do you need to know in reverse

order to make sense of that song? So

what information do I want to withhold?

what information

you know you what makes the now that I

know what my ending is what will

maximize audience surprise and suspense

in listening other ways where I can

divert my audience so one of the crucial

things I realized when I ended with the

song was that the audience is expecting

me

to be apologetic about ruining my best

friend's wedding. He wasn't actually my

best friend, but I pretended he was.

They're waiting for that moment of

remorse. So, I thought the funny thing

here is never give them the remorse.

That the reason it's funny to end on the

song is they're waiting for me to say,

"And it was and I've never recovered. It

was the saddest. It was the dumbest

thing. I every day I I say to myself,

"How could I have done this to my best

friend?" No, don't say that. They want

to hear that. Don't give it to them.

That's even funnier, right? So, you

know, knowing where you're going to end

sets up the whole story in your mind.

You're like, "Okay, I'm going to create

an expectation of remorse and never give

it to them." That's crucial, right?

That's what's sort of additionally kind

of captivating about the story. So, I

have to kind of the trick is to set all

that up. Now, how do you do that? Well,

since you know the song is so absurd and

over the top and disastrous, then you

want to have the opposite in the setup.

So now I know that oh, the setup has got

to be as flat and

uh undramatic and matterof fact and

dispassionate

and it has to hint that I am what I'm

about to tell you. I have ever since

been deeply saddened by. This is Malcolm

at his worst worst. That's what I need

to plant in the mind of the listener so

that when Malcolm delivers Malcolm at

his worst and is gleeful about it,

right, you're like, that's, you know,

that punches you in the stomach.

So knowing, it's a good example of how

knowing my ending makes the beginning

super easy.

Many years ago, I ruined a beautiful

friendship. And it was over a song,

which sounds like a strange thing to

ruin a friendship over. Um, and what

makes it even stranger is that the song

was sung with the utmost love and

affection. So that I would that whenever

you can begin at the end and work

backwards, I think that that can make

your life as a storyteller much easier.

I never react to being stuck by

stopping. I react to being stuck by

either I jump ahead or I redo something

or I uh uh or I'll a lot of times I'll

write little pieces of an article

without knowing where they fit. I just

the import the important thing is just

to keep going and because a lot of

problems are resolved in the doing. So

you can't The reason you get stuck I

think in writer's block is that you're

trying to imagine how to solve the

problem at hand in your head. Um trying

to work it all out and then put it down

on paper as opposed to understanding

that no put it down on paper and it will

invariably work itself out. Um and so I

think it's that is avoiding that kind of

and this has been a constant theme I

realized throughout this conversation

that the task of the successful writer

is to lower the bar. You want to avoid

areas of high difficulty. So a high

difficulty task is having your story in

your head before you write it. That's

too hard to do. You got to be really

smart to do that. I'm not smart enough.

So why would I put that myself in that

position? Just start writing and then

work it out on and you can always

rewrite it. You can change it. You

that's the great luxury of being a

writer that you're not you're not we're

not surgeons, you know. The world does

not hold us to our first pass. You know,

if we botch the heart, if we kill the

heart patient, we just get to operate

again 10 times before we get the

operation right. So, make use of that

extraordinary freedom and just get stuff

down and come back to it.

It is invariably the case that anyone

writing anything of any length or value

uh as you approach the end of the

process, you will lose all perspective

on what you've done. Right? You no

longer know it anymore. You're too close

to it. You don't see the flaws in it.

Um, which is why I always tell the

number one piece of advice I give people

who are writing something is that as

they approach the end, if they can, they

should put whatever they're writing

aside, walk away and don't think or look

at it for as long as possible.

If in a perfect world it would be weeks

or months. Um, and when they return to

it, they'll see it in an entirely new

way. Perspective is your friend. And the

only way to gain perspective is time. So

I when I'm writing my books, what I'll

do is I'll do draft a rough draft of a

chapter, rough draft of a chapter, rough

draft of a chapter, put it all aside, do

something else, come back months later

and reread them. And I can sit

and read something if I've read reading

it for the first time in three months

and know instantly what's wrong with it

just because now I'm reading it like a

critic would, right? It's not even my

work anymore. was done by some guy I

barely remember, three-month-old

Malcolm. Three months ago, Malcolm. Um,

and that's you can't do that when you

were when you're reading the work that

you just were writing yesterday.

One of the first serious books I ever

read was a uh my mother wrote a memoir

in in the late60s and I read it as a

very very young child and was struck

by how clear it was. It was written the

I I didn't even begin to grasp the

content of the book. That was very

sophisticated. But the way in which it

was written was was sufficiently simple

and clear that an 8-year-old could read

it. And I was kind of amazed

at how access this was my first adult

book I'd ever read. And I was like,

"Wait a minute, this is an adult book

and yet I can follow along quite

happily." Um, and that made a very

powerful impression on me. And

subsequently, my mother would always

say, "Your first goal is to be clear and

simple." That she was a great foe of

jargon. Um

and uh that has always been one of my

um

to me what the the

uh process of editing is always about

simplification.

It is not about if you are complexifying

your argument during the re the revising

process then you're writing in the wrong

way. Your first draft should be

complicated and messy. that's what

they're supposed to be. And then you go

back and you polish the jewel, get rid

of all of the impurities. Um, I think

that's a far better way to approach

writing than the reverse. Strikes me as

very hard to add complexity to

simplicity, but but totally intuitive to

do the opposite.

Once you've written something, it no

longer belongs to you. It belongs to

your readers. When your readers buy your

book, they really buy your ideas and

they're your ideas become theirs. And

you can waste a lot of time and energy

worrying about how they use your ideas,

but you shouldn't because they're not

yours anymore. So, when I was writing

Outliers,

I ran across this bit of research

about trying to estimate how long

people have to do something complicated

before they master it. And this is the

literature that

is described as a 10,000 hour literature

because the notion is that you need to

have 10,000 hours of deliberate practice

to be good at something. So I wrote this

in an article in a chapter of my book

outliers and thought nothing of it. I

didn't think it was that significant. It

was in the in the service of another

point. I was trying to make the point

that if it's really that long, then no

one can do can prepare for something

hard by themselves. So 10,000 hours is

takes you 10 years of practice to get up

to 10,000 hours roughly speaking. So it

takes you 10 years to be good at

something. You got to have help.

Parents, a spouse,

government, I don't know, somebody's got

to help you out. You can't do 10 years

of preparation on your own. Right? That

was my point. And then I just kind of

went on with the book and then the book

comes out and it there was a time when

it seemed like the only thing not the

only thing but the chief thing people

got from the book was that 10,000 hours

was necessary to be great at something.

And then as that kind of

took off, the argument that I made was

simplified and further simplified and

then distorted until it came. There was

a version out there at one point that

said, "And Gladwell thinks that talent

is unnecessary for being good. All you

need to do is to practice 10,000 hours,"

which is not what I said, even remotely.

And I had this curious sensation of

reading people attributing a position to

me that I'd never taken. Now part of you

is like

that's a good problem to have that

you're w enough in order to be in order

for your work to be misconstrued your

work must first be read. So it's better

than being ignored I suppose. And then I

got went through a period of where I was

constantly trying to correct the record

and say I never said that blah blah. So

I was irritated by the way. And then I

realized, well, if you're

misinterpreted, it's probably your

fault,

right? I should have written it more

clearly. And then ultimately I took the

position that I am not the police of my

readers. If my readers would like to

conrue an idea a certain way, that's

entirely up to them.

I wrote my first book called The Tipping

Point. Uh,

and I had no expectation that it was

going to be successful. I was just

thrilled that someone wanted to publish

something that I was that I had written.

I cut my I was at the New Yorker and I

would write write my book in the morning

and go into the New Yorker in the

afternoon.

I did that for a year until the book was

done and then I thought nothing of it

and the book didn't do well in the

beginning. So I just it was a kind of

modest success but but I got it in my

head that if I kept touring and kept

giving talks about it and kept promoting

it,

it might

revive. And so I just started I

basically just did endless promotion for

two years. If you called me up and told

me to come to some small town in

Wisconsin and speak at your library, I

went. You know, that was the mode I was

in at that point. I was, you know, uh, I

guess I was ambitious and it paid off.

The book went back on the bestseller

list as a paperback and that's when it

was really a successful book. It's in

its second iteration. um months, years

after

um

it was it had its greatest success two

or three years after publication.

Bad reviews when they're done well, when

they're done in the right spirit are

helpful. They're it's feedback and it's

high level feedback if it's done by

someone who's knows what they're doing.

um and they can help you grow as a

writer. Uh in that sense, they're no

different from some people read your

manuscript or your article before it's

published and give you feedback. A

critic is someone who reads your article

after it's published or your book and

gives you feedback. There's no

difference. One is private, one is

public, one you can do something about

in immediately and one you can do

something about in the long term. So

there are different forms of the same

thing.

um one is painful, one is helpful when

it's negative. Um so but they amount to

the same thing. They are opportunities

for you to examine, to introspect about

what you've done.

The mistake you make when you are

criticized is to think of your critic as

standing in for your audience. So you

think if one person criticizes you, it

means that everyone hates your piece.

It's not true. That's just one person.

The second mistake you make is you think

that anyone who was on the fence or

didn't know about your piece and who

reads the nasty critic will be convinced

that you've done something terrible.

They'll agree with the critic. Also

false. People disagree with critics as

much as they agree with them. In fact, I

think it is far more often the case that

someone reads some nasty thing that

someone has written and rolls their eyes

and says, "Oh my goodness, another nasty

person." The critic, if they are

unreasonably critical, does themselves a

disservice. They remove their own

legitimacy. They undermine their own

legitimacy. And readers pick that up.

They know what's going on. They're not

dumb. So you need to you know the

response of the if you feel you have

been treated unfairly by a critic

chances are most of the people who read

that same article will agree they'll

also say what is this person they got an

ax grind you know why are they like

being so nasty this is uncalled for

critical reception is not a unifier not

a universal signifier of a flaw in the

piece it is a unifi it is simply a

signifier of the opinion of the person

who wrote about the critical

review.

The way to keep your reader in mind as a

writer is first and foremost to be a

reader. And when I say that, I don't

just mean someone who reads, but I mean

someone who takes the task of reading

seriously. One of the things that drives

me crazy about

bad book reviewers is that bad book

reviewers are ones

who the question they're trying to

answer when they write their review is,

"If I were writing this book, how would

I have written it?"

And if the way the author wrote it

deviates from the way the reviewer would

have done it him or herself, the

reviewer gives the book bad review.

That's being a bad reader.

The good reader is the one who says,

"What did the author intend

when he or she was writing this book?"

And if you feel like the author lives up

to

the intention, his or her intention,

then the book is a success. Now,

discovering someone's intention, it's

not easy. It requires attention and work

and thought, and

it means you have to pause every now and

again and like reflect on what you read,

just read. It means that you maybe

shouldn't read in huge big gulps. Maybe

you should read in little

in little pieces so that you can um chew

over what you've just learned. Reading,

when you think about reading as a as as

a an act as consequential as writing,

it's not less an it's not a lesser act.

You don't read because you can't write

or you don't want to write or you want

to leave writing to others. Reading is

of is of equal importance to writing.

There is no writing without reading. You

wouldn't. Some people say I would write

I I write,

you know, even if no one reads it.

Nonsense.

No. If no one read stuff, no one would

write anything. These two acts, reading

and writing, are are uh symbiotic.

They're they are coupled. Um and uh to

do one well, requires doing the other

well.

The problem with writing criticism as

it's called is the word criticism.

So people

you know we call a film someone who

writes about film a film critic and the

the implicit assumption driven by that

word is that the job of the critic is to

criticize.

Um that's not true. The job of the film

critic is to appreciate. Sometimes in

appreciation, what we do is we point out

the things not that are not worthy of

our appreciation. But the real job is to

point out the things that are worthy of

our appreciation. There is no point to

that.

There's no point to being someone who

writes about other people's creations if

you're not enthusiastic about the world

that you're writing about. So when I the

thing I look for in a book reviewer that

I love,

there's a book reviewer for the New York

Times called Dwight Garner who is I just

adore him. I've never met him. I adore

him. Why do I adore him? Because he

gives you the sensation that he really

enjoys reading books. It's as simple as

that. and he looks for things in the

books that he writes about that made him

happy

and he doesn't think that his job is to

be a downer and is to seek out

criticism. One of the things seek out

reasons to be critical. One of the

things that you learn if you've written

a lot of

criticism is that being critical is the

easiest thing in the world. I could, you

know, if you asked me to do a a hit job

on War and Peace, I could do it.

I can write an article if you've never

read War in Peace before and the only

thing you've ever read is Malcolm's book

review of the greatest novel ever told.

I can make it sound like the worst piece

of trash. It's just not that hard to do.

The hard thing is for me to tell you the

interesting thing is why is this novel

great?

Right? That's that's where and that's

the memorable

that's what will stay with you and

that's what will make you want to

investigate art on your own. If someone

has shown you ways in which you can um

appreciate and reproduce a sense of

wonder in yourself

I think that's a much higher calling

for Radu.

So this is a passage from my first book,

The Tipping Point. And I was then

uh in part writing about crime, which is

continued to be an obsession of mine

over the years. In I think in every book

I've written, I've had

not every book, but almost every book

I've written, I've had some section

where I deal with crime. And in this

one, I'm talking about the why did crime

decline in New York City? And I talk

about something called the broken

windows theory. And I'm going to read my

description of this theory.

It's a theory that was uh

uh put forth by uh two criminologists,

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. And

they Wilson and Kelling argue that crime

is the inevitable result of disorder. If

a window is broken and left unrepaired,

people walking by will conclude that no

one cares and no one is in charge. Soon

more windows will be broken and a sense

of anarchy will spread from the from the

building to the street on which it

faces, sending a signal that anything

goes. In a city, relatively minor

problems like graffiti, public disorder,

and aggressive panhandling, they write,

are all the equivalent of broken

windows, invitations to more serious

crimes. Then I go on and I quote from

and

I wrote this in 1999.

Since I've written it, several things

have happened. One is that we've come to

a much more nuanced understanding of

the broken windows idea. and two is

that's sort of how the field has changed

and the experience in New York for

example led people to the conclusion

that yes disorder leads to crime but

also cracking down too strongly on

disorder leads to a backlash that maybe

everything every bit is worse if you so

enrage your citizenry by harassing them

at every turn particularly if we're

talking about young black men in poor

neighborhoods then you haven't made the

problem better you've made it worse and

what we witnessed in Ferguson and in the

countless cases that have um captured

our rightfully captured our attention in

terms of police conduct in the last

couple of years. What we've seen is the

flip side of this. In the 1990s,

people's concern was there was too

little policing and we overcorrected.

And now many of the things that catch

our attention are examples of too much

policing when the police have gone too

far. When I wrote that, I didn't

anticipate

the backlash. I was writing that was

written at a particular moment in

history when we thought that our

problems were an absence were from a

passive police force or an absent police

force. And now we think now with 15

years under our belt we think of things

very differently. Um, I say this not to

tell you not to buy my book, which I

think you should still do, but uh, but

to say that when you write, writing,

writing is situated in a time and place

and you, um, you have to understand that

when you read something, when you read I

once wrote an article for the New Yorker

in which I was a long critique of

Tequilla Mockingbird,

um, a novel I do not like and have never

liked and I sort explain my reasons for

not liking it. And um part of also what

I was trying to do in that article was

situate To Kill a Mockingbird in its

time and place that in order to

understand where that novel comes from,

you have to understand what was going on

among white liberals in Alabama in the

1940s. How did they 1930s,4s, 50s, how

did they think, right? And my point was

that novel reads very differently when

you understand what was going on

racially in smalltown, Alabama in those

years than it does to us now. And that

we read into that story all kinds of

things from the present day that don't

really belong. So the first lesson is a

lesson about reading things. When you

read the tipping point, remember I wrote

it in 1999. Um but the second thing is

about writing things that as a writer

you will move on and you have to

understand you have to feel free to walk

away from things

that you once believed that you no

longer believe. I no longer have this

position. I now I now I think have a

much more nuanced and sophisticated

position. And in fact, in my newest

book, I'm going to return to this idea

and pinpoint where I think the truth

where I now believe the truth to lie,

which is different from where I believed

it lay back then. Um uh so that's a um

uh that's just a a reminder about

supplying the context to what you read.

So, if you're looking for some

ideas about how to develop as a writer,

um thought I'd share some suggestions.

Some of them I've mentioned before, but

one is to

um reconstruct someone's thought

processes. So

find a book that you really like

and a non-fiction book and then go to

the back once you finished and look at

all the books the sources that writer

used and start reading some of those

sources. Not all of them. It'll take you

forever, but pick ones that look

interesting or if they mention articles

they read or go and find the articles

and read them yourself. And so you're

putting yourself in the mind of

the writer and it'll give you insight as

to how that work that you like so much

was constructed

and you'll see how people used

sources

uh to build a a narrative particularly

you know if it's a book that's about the

past a historical book where no you know

where everyone's almost no one is alive

anymore like I read a book recently

about the Korea about a guy in the

Korean War. So you got to figure most of

the major characters in that story are

dead. So almost everything in the book

was some combination of relatives

of the people he's talking about who

remember

you know the person and and archival

stuff, newspapers,

memoirs, other histories. And it was

kind of fascinating to go through

when I was finished. I really like the

book to go through the endotes and sort

of see how did he do that, right? He

wrote an entire book about someone who

we couldn't talk to. That's sort of an

interesting process. And so that I would

recommend playing with that idea as a

way of getting insight as to how the how

really good writers work when they're

constructing a narrative.

I have read every novel by Lee Child. So

all the Jack Reacher novels and the Jack

Richard novels are super interesting

because for many reasons, but princely

because

he's interested. You think what they are

are

kind of written versions of action

movies. They're not. They're the

opposite. So, there's a lot of action.

Jack Reacher in the course of every Jack

Richard novel, usually there's two or

three moments where he beats up and

kills a bunch of people.

But

the thing that's interesting about those

moments is the way that Leech Child

describes the thought processes of Lee

of Jack Reacher, not the act themselves.

So it's not that there are some in noir

fiction or standard thrillers you read

it and it's like the guy two guys meet

in a dark alley and he punches some they

describe the action punch punch pulls a

knife

this and then they're done. The whole

thing about

Lee Child is that the key is the is he

lets you into Jack Reacher's thought

process before the action occurs.

So this massive preparation, so the

actual action is relatively brief, but

he'll do paragraphs,

pristian paragraphs on the on the inner

workings of Jack Reacher's mind as he

prepares to destroy, kill, maim, what

have you, the various bad guys he's um

he's encountering. And that is first of

all a massive innovation in that world.

I know because I read these novels

obsessively. Um, and super interesting.

You really That's what's drawing you in.

If you were if you think about those

books, they're now sold cajillions of

millions of them. They're all exactly

the same. Every every the plot of every

single one is the same, right? Minor

variations. So why do I among millions

keep reading them? The answer is because

we find that thing among other things.

We find that thing deeply fascinating to

be led into the mind of a highly

intelligent, highly calculating

essentially psychopath. Because let's be

clear, I once had as for fun try to

total up how many people Jack Reacher

has killed over the course of the 24

Jack Reacher novels. It's in the

hundreds. So anyone who's killed

hundreds of people outside the field of

combat is a psychopath. So we are

reading a novel about a psychopath as

hero. Why? Because we want to know.

We're fascinated by this the

psychopath's calculation of the angles,

the geometry, the physics, the

psychology, the what have you of

encountering a bad guy in a difficult

moment. And also the fact that

to to add kind of insult to injury, Jack

Reacher doesn't carry a gun. So in all

of this there ever invariably has to be

the calculation of how can he acquire a

gun before he gets shot himself, right?

So it's like it's like this it's a p,

you know, it's there his version of a

puzzle. He's constructed this question.

How on earth is Jack Reacher gonna

figure out how to name the guy in front

of him? And I'm gonna walk you through

the kind of internal mental and

emotional processes that predate the act

of the psychopath.

As someone who's interested in writing

about the life of the mind, I find this

riveting and so do you know countless

others. Uh so that's had a that idea

that you your the reader will happily go

along with paragraphs of essentially

introspection

as long as it's

novel and clever and is

deeply kind of fascinating and um

encouraging to me because I'd like to do

that you know in in my I would I would

like to do that but about non-fiction

characters to really to do an interview

such that when I represent someone a

character to you in one of my books or

articles that we can do that preparatory

step

walking through all of their their uh

introspective processes before they act.

So when you read

something written by Dave Epstein, what

you are struck by, you immediately he

communicates to you in the

sophistication and depth of his writing

just how much work he did. In other

words, you have full confidence

as a reader that he's covered all the

bases. You know he's not pulling a fast

one on you. You know he didn't like fail

to read this part of the literature. you

know, he didn't track down this one

person who he has to track down. He's

not playing any kind of game with you

and kind of writing his way around the

problem. And I think that's an important

thing to remember that viewer readers

are not dumb.

So the one of the things that you're

doing if you're reading something as you

are reading it is there's a little part

in the back of your brain your kind of

internal critic who is asking the

question is this worth it? So my little

Malcolm critic in the back of my head

says to me as I read something or watch

a movie my little Malcolm critic says

there are an infinite number of things

you could do with your time. Your time

is limited. Is this a good use? And when

my little Malcolm critic says, "Oh, come

on." That's when I close the book or

turn off the TV. Right? The way to

silence that little critic in your

audience, is to communicate immediately

to your reader that you know what you're

talking about, that you've done your

homework, that you've covered your

bases, that you've thought this thing

through. David's work is compelling.

Not he's a very good writer but his work

is not compelling because he's a great

writer. It's compelling because he's s

that critic has nothing to say. The

critic is sitting there and saying I I

got no problems whatsoever with this. Go

right ahead. Right. I worry in sometimes

in my writing that the critics halfway

through

uh says, "Wait a minute. Malcolm did

four interviews and interviewed four

people and he should have interviewed

eight. I'm wondering whether you should

go elsewhere. That's my anxiety as a

writer that I don't produce that same

sense of certainty that someone like

David Epstein does.

Initially, I think

when you're starting out as a writer,

it's not useful to dwell on your

shortcomings. You should address them as

opposed to avoid them. I only say that I

I'm aware of my shortcomings and act

accordingly because I'm old and I'm

unlikely I'm unlikely to change

dramatically at my point at my my age.

But I do remember

reading 10 years or so. I began to read

a lot of Michael Lewis

15 years ago and I went through a period

where I very consciously tried to write

like him because I was aware that he was

doing something that I had not been

doing and perhaps wasn't nearly as good

as doing which is his examination of

character

was really amazing. If you read a

Michael Lewis book, you really do feel

like you know all of the characters by

the end. Um, and I I do not think that

was true of my own writing. And so I

that was a shortcoming that I chose to

address. Um, now why address that one

and not others? One was one reason was

that I felt I could learn that it wasn't

outside of my abilities to learn to be a

better uh do better character studies.

And two, I felt my writing would be

enormously improved by that. Um, and I

was, to be honest, jealous that when I

read his books, I was like living

alongside his characters, but when I

read my own writing, I never had that

feeling. Um, and I wanted that feeling

in my readers as well. Am I at Michael

Lewis's level? No, of course not. I'm

not I'll never be that good, but I'm

better. I do feel like in the last 10

years, my writing has had a better

appreciation of character. He clearly

spends profitably spends days and days

and weeks with his main characters.

It could I could no more do that than I

can go to the moon. They would get sick

of me. I would get sick of them. And by

the way, the first one is more important

than the second one. It's not just that

you have to want to hang out with

someone. They have to want to hang out

with you. Everyone wants to hang out

with Michael Lewis. He has written, I

don't know, 12 books. In each of those

books, he has spent an extraordinary

amount of time with the lead characters.

So, we now have a database of dozens of

randomly selected Americans, busy,

famous, complicated, randomly selected

Americans who are content to let a

stranger follow them around for weeks.

That is an extraordinary testament to

Michael Lewis, right? that he conduct

people I don't think people would let me

follow them around for weeks. So he

clearly has something going on that's

worthy of admiration.

Every single profession has a category

of people who are revered by insiders

but not by outsiders.

Uh there are musicians, musicians,

architects, architects, filmmakers,

filmmakers, you know, filmmakers are

obsessed with, you know, I don't even

know. I mean, there's a whole list of

like French and German filmmakers who

everyone adors, but no one else watches

them. There are musicians who I don't

know their names because I'm not a

musician, but I have talked to musicians

who will say that I talked to one guy

once who's who argued that D'Angelo is

the musician's musician.

Musicians are obsessed with D'Angelo.

Anyway, Janet Malcolm is that figure for

writers. She is still active, but in the

she wrote a lot in the kind of 90s and

as she's primarily a profileist.

and she has written books about she

wrote a book about someone who was

trying to challenge the Freudian legacy

called in the Freud archives. She wrote

a book about a a guy called Joe McInness

who was a kind of non-fiction writer

who'd written a kind of problematic book

that she wanted to she wrote a book she

writes about writers and literary

figures and

every expectation you have going in is

that this can't be interesting and every

one of your expectations is violated

because it's always interesting. She I

would read her shopping lists at this

point. She just has a way of

soaking

soaking in someone's work and life and

um interpreting it and but almost with

an edge. I mean she has destroyed people

in her in this kind of calm methodical.

She's in no hurry. you wait for the

guillotine to drop, for the blade to

drop when you're reading her. And by the

end, you just feel like there's if she

ever did that to me, I would never get

out of bed again. Um, so she is a kind

of and I don't know why she's not more

why she's only a writer's writer and not

a non-riter's writer. She deserves to be

way way way more popular than she is.

She tends to write about people who have

themselves written a lot. and her

ability to in to extract their character

and personality and motivations from

their writing. It's kind of amazing. And

she's the one

I also don't think I can do what she

does, but she's the one who I think I

understand what she's doing

more than I I don't understand how

Michael Lewis does what he does, but I

understand what how I understand how she

does it. I can't duplicate it, but

there's clearly an extraordinary amount

of reflection

that is going on um prior to the act of

writing.

There's a principle in psychology called

the other mind's problem. And the other

mind's problem is the problem that a

child faces when he or she first comes

into the world. In the very beginning, a

child assumes that the contents

of their own mind is the same as the

contents of everyone else's mind. If a

child wants a cracker, the child assumes

that his mom wants a cracker. He doesn't

he can't make a distinction. But there's

a certain point, a crucial point in the

development of a child when it suddenly

occurs to him or her that if he wants a

cracker, it doesn't necessarily follow

that his mom wants a cracker. That is

when a child develops a theory of other

minds, right? That people have minds

different from his own. And it's a

crucial point in development. And a a

lot of what a 2-year-old does when a

2-year-old is being terrible is a

2-year-old is simply experimenting with

this new insight that the reason the

2-year-old does something outrageous and

then looks at his mother or father is

that he's so delighted by the notion

that his father and mother think

differently than he does. It's never

occurred to him to that point. And I

think that it's not just two-year-olds

who are fascinated with the discovery of

other minds. this marvelous, incredible

insight that every single human being on

the planet has something different going

on inside their head. I think that we

all are and that a lot of what a lot of

what makes us brings us pleasure in

reading or in writing or in the act of

engagement with all sorts of art is a

version of the other mind's discovery.

It is the pleasure we get in

investigating the contents of someone

else's mind and being reminded once

again how amazing it is that you don't

think like me. Right? So, I wanted to

read something that I wrote on this as

it as it pertains to writing and then

talk a little bit about that because I

goes to the heart of why I do what I do

because I think very explicitly about

the other mind's question when I'm

writing.

And I'm reading this selection from the

introduction to my book, What the Dog

Saw, which you should all buy in

triplicate. And I start by talking about

this two-year-old thing.

Why is a 2-year-old terrible? Because

she is systematically testing the

fascinating and to her utterly novel

notion that something that gives her

pleasure might not actually give someone

else pleasure. And the truth is that as

adults, we never lose that fascination.

What is the first thing that we want to

know when we meet someone who is a

doctor at a social occasion? It isn't

what do you do? We know sort of what a

doctor does. Instead, we want to know

what it means to be with sick people all

day long. We want to know what it feels

like to be a doctor because we're quite

sure that it doesn't feel at all like

what it means to sit at a computer all

day long or teach school or sell cars.

Such questions are not dumb or obvious.

Curiosity about the interior life of

other people's day-to-day work is one of

the most fundamental of human impulses.

And in that same impulse is what led to

the writing that you now hold in your

hands.

That's what my writing is about and

that's what I think

almost all good non-fiction writing is

about. It is giving us a window into

other people's hearts and souls and

minds. In that sense, it's different

from some forms of art which are about

giving us a window into

the artist's mind. Right? You go and see

a Picasso, you are seeing, you're

getting some glimpse of the contents of

his brain. So it's a so Picasso's work

as an artist is to represent himself to

the world. That's not what a non-fiction

writer does. I mean, it's what a

memorist does or a an autobiographical

writer does. But in the main, the kind

of work that people like myself does is

not about representing the contents of

our own mind to our audience. It is

going out and finding someone else and

inhabiting their world and representing

it to readers. And that is

it's odd to use this phrase, but that's

a selfless act. Um, it's part of what

has drawn me to writing that writing is

an act of service. It's a it's a and

it's also an empathetic act. It is

teaching us what goes on in other

people's minds. And without having some

understanding of what goes on in other

people's minds, you can't be fully

human. You will always be you'll be

you'll be lost forever on some

narcissistic island. And you'll have no

ability at all to kind of transcend your

own experience. No ability at all to uh

to see something from someone else's

perspective, to develop sympathy for

another position, to empathize with

another's plight or with another's

genius. I mean, all of the things that

are

that are constituent, I think, of

um living a fully realized life spring

from the ability to go outside your own

experience. And how do we do that? How

do we learn to do that? We learn to do

that through stories. Um we learn to do

that through fiction and we learn to do

that through non-fiction, which

uh represents the world to you um as it

is. I'm not changing and altering and

embellishing on the picture I'm giving

of other people's lives. I'm trying to

be as close as possible to the truth.

It's why when I said when I do a profile

of someone, I want them to be when they

read it to be grateful that they

spoke to me, that they spent time with

me. I don't want them to say I regret

it. And why is that so important to me?

because I am trying to represent their

mind to the world. And if they read what

I wrote and regret talking to me, it

means I failed.

You know, doesn't mean that I've been

no nonsense and tough and a truth

teller. No, I failed. I didn't I didn't

I took a peek inside their mind and I

didn't get it right. I was so wrong that

they looked at the portrait and they

said, "That's not me." Right? And if the

profileist

gets that kind of reaction from the

person they've profiled, they have

failed. They you want them to say that

is me. Or even better, that is a version

of me that I've never seen before, but I

think you've I think it's true. I think

you've revealed something to me about

myself. That's the greatest of all

reactions a writer can get. I want to

thank you all for watching. I hope you

found this as fun as I have. And if you

are a reader or writer, I wish you all

the best in all of your future work.

Thank you.