Malcolm on No Small Endeavor

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States since it was established in 1861. There have been 3,517 people awarded with the medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm sharing an episode of the acclaimed podcast No Small Endeavor, where I sat down with my friend, the host and award-winning theologian Lee Camp, to discuss some of my most cherished moments in my journey. Thus far. Produced by Great Feelings Studios and PRX, No Small Endeavor brings you thoughtful conversations with best-selling authors, artists, theologians, and philosophers like Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and civil rights hero reverend James Lawson. About what it means to live a good life. In my episode, we discuss some of my favorite stories. From receiving permission from my mother to cut class, to spending three days a week in Freudian therapy as a young adult, all of which contributed to who I am today. Be sure to check out No Small Endeavor wherever you get podcasts and tell them, I say hello. And without further ado, here is the full episode.

You're probably familiar with the work of Malcolm Gladwell. Perhaps you've read one of his New York Times best-selling books like The Tipping Point or Outliers. Or maybe you listen to Malcolm's podcast, Revisionist History. But how well do you know the man himself?

I'm Lee C. Camp. This is no small endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

There's a fascinating scene in the TV show Ted Lasso, where Ted makes a huge bet on a game of darts to help out a friend. His opponent assumes Ted knows nothing about the game, as Ted makes a few less-than-excellent throws with his right hand. But that's when Ted reveals that he's not right-handed and hits a bullseye with his left. And while Ted is hustling his opponent, he says, Guys have been underestimating me my entire life. But he continues that he'd come to realize that their underestimating him had nothing to do with him, but rather them.

They had failed, says Ted. To practice that wisdom, be curious, not judgmental. And just before he clenches the win, Ted says that if they were curious, they would have known that. He played darts every Sunday with his father from age 10 until he was 16 when his father passed away. It's one of the great moments of television, this poignant moment of character development, granting insight that reveals new depth, new dimensions. This fundamental posture to be curious, not judgmental, allows us to ask good questions. And thereby get a glimpse into the fascinating journeys which have led another to become the person they are. We try to do this in some way with all of our guests, but our interview today is an especially such poignant moment.

You may think you know Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author of Outliers, The Tipping Point, Blink, host of the wildly popular podcast Revisionist History. And when I first began to prepare for my time with Malcolm, I was first drawn into curiosity about the stories Malcolm tells so well. But then I began to note the tendencies and habits and traits Malcolm exhibits in his storytelling. And that made me curious about why Malcolm is Malcolm. How his family's inability to explain things made him want to explain things, how his dad taking him to a mennonite barn. Raising as a kid influenced what he thought was possible and what regrets he may or may not have. Including a year of Freudian therapy three times a week in New York City today. Our conversation with Malcolm Gladwell taped in front of a small audience in Nashville, days before our annual Thanksgiving show at Nashville's Skirmerhorn Symphony Hall, where Malcolm headlined.

Enjoy.

Welcome to Nashville again.

Which you could do right. I go running.

Not just mildly lost, like, completely a hundred percent. I have no idea where I am, I can't see any lights, I don't know what I'm going to do, so I'm drenched in sweat and I'm just wearing a pair of shorts.

And I stand by the side of the road and I hitchhike.

Big, beefy guys in like Ford F-150s, don't stop, take one look at me. Just not no part of it.

Finally, a girl, and I say, a girl, because she was probably in her early 20s. Little, battered Honda Accord stops roll down the window. Can I help you, sir?

And I said, First of all, you should not be picking me up. Are you nuts? What are you doing, strange dude? In the middle of the night, drenched in sweat.

I get in and I said, Why did you do that? and she said, Well, I was coming from Bible study, and today we studied the story of the Good Samaritan.

I would say that over the course of her life, the way she ranks all of those identities has changed. And I think it constantly changes. And I think she's 92. I think they may change again. But like the world, you know, various people in the world would look at her and say, she, maybe she's number one, a Black woman.

And she would say, I don't know. I might have been number one, a Black woman when I was 23. And in England for the first time. And being treated like, you know, less than a full person, but I haven't been treated that way in 30 years. Why should I foreground that identity?

Anyway, that idea that there are many parts of us and we get to choose which part is most important is. I think that's what I picked up from all of those kind of shifting situations, environments when I was a kid.

Will you unpack more? Why that sharply irritates you?

I did an Ask me anything with the staff and someone's asked in a relatively hostile way. Did I think the company was sufficiently diverse? And I said two things in response, one is, Don't I count? And the second thing I said, Well, I said to the whole staff, if any of you is a Republican, raise your hand and no one did.

And I said, Well, if we're going to call ourselves a diverse company, shouldn't we have some Republicans now? This was treated like I had said some terrible thing. I'm serious. I mean, my definition of diversity encompasses a dozen different dimensions of human complexity, and I think I actually value diversity very, I take it very seriously.

And the book I'm reading right now has a lot about diversity, but my definition of diversity is broad. If I had my way, we would have more of every kind of person and we would be a richer place for it. And I object to a definition of diversity that is super narrow. And that's why this is a kind of top of mind issue.

Yeah.

When a barn burned down, they would all gather. These are mostly conservative Mennonites, so people who drove horses and buggies, they would all get together. Like the next weekend, hundreds of them, they would descend on that farm and they would rebuild the barn in essentially a day, right? Famous barn raising My dad decided, when I was a kid once, that he would attend a barn raising.

So if you can imagine, we drove, you know, off into the middle of the countryside in our volvo, of course.

But my point is my dad was the kind of person who. It never occurred to him that that was a socially awkward thing to do. It just didn't occur to him. He was like, I'm your neighbor, I live down the road, I know some of you.

I love farming. He wanted to be a farmer. I mean, there was no part of him, you know, he believed in the same God, God. What does the Bible say? It says? Help your neighbor.

So he was there, right? That's the sort of that's what I grew up with. Now. Would I do that? Probably not, but it's incredibly powerful influence on you to have, as a father, someone who does that without even thinking about it.

He never even discussed it with us. He just like, we're going get in and came back and thought it was like the best experience.

What do you call it? When you are? It's being done with your parents consent. I don't know what that is, but it was parental hooky that we played. And he, I would just wander around the university library, you know, it'd be 10 or 11 and and then I would have, you know, have lunch with him and have a hamburger in the cafeteria.

It was fantastic. Never had hamburgers at home.

Malcolm is sick today and cannot attend school. And leave the date blank. And just give me a bunch of them.

Mathematics, gardening and the Bible, and on everything else. He was open to suggestion, and that was really his position. That he just assumed if he met someone. That they knew more than he did on their subjects of choice, and that he should just ask questions and learn. And my whole childhood was spent listening to my father meet random strangers, figure out what areas they knew more about than he did, and him asking them questions. I thought that was normal.

I discovered later that that's not normal of this kind of extreme, and a lot of it was grounded in. He had no insecurities about declaring himself ignorant in an area. There's no problem with that.

It's like, Oh, I don't know about that, even on things he knew a lot about. If he met a theologian, he wouldn't even pretend to know more about them than the Bible. Or gardening, if he thought that you know more about delphiniums than he did. All ears, let's go. It's a kind of extreme version of curiosity again. I don't think I can match that.

But it's a really powerful model to be given as a kid.

One is humility that you don't presume that you know things you don't know. But you also have to have a lot of self-confidence because you have to be completely indifferent to the consequences of letting the world know about what you don't know. You have to not care, right? And my dad was a supremely self-confident person, so that allowed him, I think, to to kind of expose himself in this way. As as being, you know, he didn't have any kind of hang up. But most people. The real reason people aren't curious, I think, is not so much that they lack humility, but that they lack confidence and they're not.

They're not willing to kind of show themselves to the world as not knowing things.

Miss Wilde, it's so very nice to have you joining us. You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes and a full transcript. We would be most delighted if you tell your friends about no small endeavor and invite them to join us on the podcast. Because it helps extend the reach of the beauty, truth and goodness we are seeking to sow in the world. Also, Malcolm joined us for our big end of year blowout show at the Skirmishhorn Symphony Hall.

We will be releasing those interview segments on NSC. If you're not a subscriber to NSC, you can do so by going to our website at nosmallendeavor..com and click Subscribe. Coming up, Malcolm and I discuss tactics for explaining things to people, the moral and practical importance of storytelling, and his rather strong opinions on Ivy League schools.

So you know how you're constantly playing games as a kid, and there's always a moment where you've got to teach your cousin how to play hearts. And so my father would be incapable, and my brother would give this incredibly long explanation of it going over. And then, finally, in frustration, I would just say, Okay, everyone shut up. This is how you play hearts and the mistakes people make in explaining things. This is driving me, I can remember as like an eight-year-old being driven crazy by this.

The thing you start with is what is the point of the game? start with that. The point of monopoly is to amass as many properties as you can and put everyone else bankrupt, right? You don't explain the game before you explain the point, right?

People would start without doing, and I would read the Parker Brothers instructions and I would say, why didn't you tell me what the point is in the first step?

So I think that was where my career as a journalist was born. I was like, I grew up in a household where 60 of the members of my household could not explain the simplest thing to anybody else.

They don't have a club, they have a varsity women's rugby team, and they go to, like New Zealand to recruit people for it. They got like multiple coaches. They fly around the country, they destroy other teams by the score of like 105 to nothing they have, like a pro rugby team. They introduced this in 2013 and they already, you know, Harvard already has more varsity sports than any other college in the world.

I have read stuff about particularly Ivy League colleges, which I think are completely and utterly morally bankrupt and should be shut down tomorrow. And the idea that Americans stand by-.

What's the root of the moral bankruptcy?

And it's absurd at the other end of the equation. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of students in this country who are holding enormous amounts of debt. Because the schools that they went to couldn't afford to give them financial aid, who would construct such a system? It makes no sense. If you're going to have $45 billion in the bank, the very least you should do is educate 100,000 students a year at minimum.

You should educate 10 times as many students as you do in Canada, where I come from. The most prestigious school in Canada is the University of Toronto. it has an undergraduate population of 70,000 students. As it should, your most prestigious school should be your biggest school, right? Like, if you really do have the best faculty and the best facilities, and the most money and the greatest reputation. You should try and help the maximum number of students.

This is like saying, if I were to build the greatest hospital in the South, and I said, Lee, I'm going to open it in Nashville, it's going to be the greatest hospital in the world. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to let in 100 patients a year, you can bring in people on a stretcher, and 50 a day have the ambulances line up.

And then I will spend the next two weeks assessing them. And I will choose one for admittance to my Elite Cardiac Center and one for the I'll take in one. I'll have a neurosurgeon and he'll do one operation a day just to make sure it's the absolute top notch. If we did, if they did that, we would think that's bananas, right?

That's exactly the system we tolerate in American higher ed. It's preposterous and by the way, I'm not done.

What do rich people in this country do? They look at that state of affairs? And they write increasingly large checks to the schools that already have the most money. That's even crazier, right? The marginal value of a dollar given to Harvard University is zero. There's literally nothing they can do with that.

Every base is already covered. If you gave a million dollars to this college, I mean, we could talk all day about what that could do, what you would do with that. If you gave a million dollars to Harvard, you might as well just burn it in front of Harvard in Harvard Square. It's just crazy and literally not a week goes past when some hedge fund guy doesn't write a check for $200 million to Harvard University.

And every time I see that, I just think, you are a moron, right?

I want to move to moral philosophy just a second. And actually, I'll do a quick callback to something you said a moment ago about roles and multiplicity of identities. Which is something that narrative theology and moral philosophy that takes narrative and story seriously, talks about that a lot. But it strikes me that since the enlightenment, moral philosophy typically has much more focused on rules and principles. Just tell us the right thing to do, rules and principles. But prior to the enlightenment, a lot of ancient moral traditions. They focused very much more on story. Because storytelling was fundamentally a morally formative practice. In helping people think about their sense of self, about what they saw as beautiful and true and good.

And obviously, this wasn't moralistic storytelling, but it was story as a moral practice, and it seems to me that that's the kind of storytelling you like to do. That is that you're trying to tell stories that invite us to a different sense of self, or a different way of seeing the world. That is then an invitation to be changed in some way. Do you resonate with that?

Or does that seem to be?

But they didn't. They studied a story, a very concrete story about, you know, a member of a despised minority who goes out of his way. He disrupts his routine and puts himself to a lot of trouble to help somebody he doesn't know, right? Very concrete story.

That's in her head, she's driving down a road, and what does she see? Someone in distress by the side of the road? And she has to put herself in some kind of jeopardy to stop and help.

And she has that story in her head, so she does it right, like, that's what a story can do. I don't think she stops if it's just an abstract thing.

But there was some kind of.

In the specifics of the story of the Good Samaritan, there is something really powerful that moves people in a way that the abstract discussion does not, which is not to say the abstract discussion is without value. Sure, but there's a particular power attached to the story that....

And I've always loved that, and I did the six-part series on Guns for the Revisionist History this year and the last episode. I went to the University of Chicago and I was interviewing someone there for and while I was there, she said, Oh, you should really talk to my colleague Abdullah.

And so this is a totally random thing. And I went, Oh, okay, and I go and meet this guy who's an E.R. doc at the University of Chicago. Grew up in the south side of Chicago. Black Guy.

Who chose to practice emergency medicine in the same neighborhood he grew up in, which is one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country? And he was describing the experience of On any given day, he will see someone brought in on a stretcher, who's been shot, who's someone he knew.

And there's a moment in the conversation where he talks about.

I ask him how many friends he's had who had been killed, and he actually has this, he said. Do you mean, like people? I was close enough to that, they were in my phone like I'd been texting with him.

I go, yeah, he goes 15..

And the whole conversation is.

And I had framed it in the the episode is framed by this comment that this....

I had done a couple of seasons ago this whole thing about the jesuits, thinking like a jesuit.

And this one Jesuit said to me, sin is the failure to bother to care, and the whole episode is all about what does it mean to bother to care? Now? Sin is the failure to bother to care is the abstract rule. This guy, Abdullah Price's decision to forego a much easier, more lucrative life.

Practicing as an E.R. doc in a suburb, someplace, to go back and practice in his own neighborhood and run the risk of this traumatic thing. Where it's kids, he knows coming in, right? That's a story.

It's real about his choices, and it's just emotionally moving in the and it makes that principle come to life.

What's the Jesuit mean? When he's saying sin is the failure to bother to care, he means that he means you have to make the same kind of choice that that guy made.

Happiness, defined a particular way, is seen as the point of life.

And I wanted to do a little short experiment here, and I wanted to read you a short passage from a Catholic theologian whose work. I like Paul Waddell, and I've used his book in a number of my ethics classes. It's a book called Happiness and the Christian Moral Life, and I want to see what you make of it.

So, Waddell says, this, the trajectory of our lives, can be read as an endless pursuit of whatever we think will satisfy us, content us, and fulfill us. All of that reveals what we believe will bring us happiness and satisfaction. The trouble, however, is that we are often confused and easily misled about what will really fulfill us. Then he's talking about Aquinas and Aristotle.

He says for Aquinas and Aristotle, happiness does not reside in having my wants and desires satisfied, unless I have learned to want and desire what is best.

We just willy-nilly follow what's in our gut as often as not screw up, right? My book, Blink, which was misinterpreted as a book celebrating gut instincts, when in fact it was the opposite, was about this. Unless you're an expert, your instincts lead you astray, you need to educate them in some way. And the idea that one of those civilizing institutions in life is the church is a really good one.

That's like, I love the way he phrased it.

So I'm much more comfortable saying I was happy doing X or I was happy when. Do you know what I mean? I fixed a problem in a chapter I was working on this morning in a little coffee shop in.

What about when you think about being 60? What regrets or hardest lessons learned, to whatever degree you want to talk about those?

Do you know what I mean?

Can you classify them as regret, as regrettable? They're not regrettable. Because I came out different than I. I get confused by that question because I don't know how to categorize like I. There was a period of my life where I spent a huge amount of time in Freudian therapy, right? three days a week.

So, and I had a job that wasn't that demanding, you can't have a demanding job.

Three is a magic number, so you do one day a week. It's like, fine, whatever, lots of people do one day a week, you do two.

It's like a lot, you do three, it completely takes over your life, nothing, everything else fades into insignificance.

You are someone who does therapy, that's what your self-definition is, by the way, astounding how it takes over your life. I've never been through anything equivalent to this.

Had the most horrendous nightmares. Everything I was my unconscious, because all the Freudians care about is your unconscious. My unconscious basically took over my life for a year. It was a massive amount of time and a massive amount of money was spent on this.

It's the last year in my life, so you might say, was that a regret? Well, no, because actually I didn't. It didn't solve any of my problems, but it was, in retrospect, a failure. That was deeply fascinating. Yeah, that taught me something really extraordinary about not really my mind, but about the human mind.

Right, man, there is a thing called your unconscious, and it is ginormous, it sits in your brain wanting to get out. And if you even so much as crack the door, it will rush out and take over your life, it says. We are scary, right, human beings.

That was a really interesting thing to learn. Yeah, right, I mean, a very costly lesson. But you know, who knows what book I could have written in that year, that last year, but I'm glad I did it.

And he was a shepherd who would write poetry and at some point on into his life. Near the end of his life, he wrote this essay in which he examined the ups and downs of his life. And then he came to the conclusion This is my life.

You're a little envious of Brad Pitt, he's a handsome dude. Then you have to say no, no, no, you can't just have his looks. Got to have his whole life, you really want his whole life.

No, you don't want his whole life, you want Angelina Jolie filing suits against you. You can't go to the store and get a pint of milk because you'll be mobbed. I mean, you're a prisoner, it's a horrendous life.

Think about it, you're living in some grotesque house in L..A. and you can't go out. Some guy's got to pull up in a suburban to take you in a black suburban with tinted windows, so you can go to the movies. I mean, you don't want it.

And if you go down the list, you realize you actually don't want anyone's life except your own. It's really, really useful, that is very useful.

OK, I want to shift the conversation. Another phrase that I know I've heard you say repeatedly is a weeper.

He'll say, This is a real weeper.

And if you're not crying, there's nothing I can do for you.

So under what circumstances could I make some portion of you right now cry really hard, right? So I'm naturally attracted to the more difficult of the narrative tasks.

It was a TV commercial and it's you see the daughter who's just gone off to college, and you see the dad who's chatting with her.

And it's like the dad's typing in the chat line I miss you so much. You know it's been. And then you realize, you know, it's been so long since mom left us or something, and you realize she's his only daughter.

His wife, the Mom, has died, and as he's typing that thing about mom to her on Google Chat, the cursor slows down. So you realize he's choking up, right? It's insanely manipulative. If I showed it to you right now, we're all in tears, but that's not real, right?

I want it real. They're like, you think about them and you, you. You ask questions about your own life, like, would I have done that? should I be doing that? why am I not doing that?

Right, why am I not the good Samaritan? Like that's, that's the kind of story that's important and powerful.

What is there about Malcolm Gladwell that you've not given us any glimpse of that you would be happy for people to get a glimpse of?

And that is, you have to care about something, I don't care what it is. You have to care about something and you have to make a sacrifice in pursuit of that thing you care about. And you have to try, right? And if you're not caring, putting some effort towards something and making commitment to it, then I honestly I don't have any way to relate to you anymore.

I don't, I can't, I don't have room in my life for people who aren't, who don't have a connection to whatever it is like. I said, I don't really care what it is. I want someone to find something that they apply themselves to. Because if you're not doing that, I don't understand why you're here, right? I don't think we were put here to twiddle our thumbs. I just don't. I wouldn't have said that at 25, because at 25 I think I was in some sense twiddling my thumbs.

I look back on that with a little bit of horror. I, you know, in my twenties, I did what people in their twenties do. I partied a lot and I would sleep in until one o'clock on a Sunday and I would. I don't understand that anymore. I don't know, I'm not sure this is, I'm not sure this feeling I have is correct.

I worry that it's ungenerous and whatever, and but it just is. It's just like, that's what I when I think about the people I surround myself with. Now. I kept the people who care about something, and I have not kept the people who I think don't like. I said, I don't know whether that's fair, but it just is, you know?

All right, thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christy Bragg, Jacob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hayes, Mary Evelyn Brown, Cariad Herman, Jason Sheasley, Ellis Osborne and Tim Lauer. Thanks for listening and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together. No small endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell. And our new podcast from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor Stories of Courage on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.