Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, please visit our website. The music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4l for. My castaway this week is the writer Malcolm Gladwell. To read his work is to experience the sense that after years... Of bumbling about short-sightedly in the human experience, one has suddenly put on a pair of perfectly intellectually focused spectacles. Always concise, frequently counterintuitive and unexpectedly beguiling, his work...

Wonders the world in such a way as to make previously opaque human behaviour into vividly illuminating patterns. He believes that only by understanding people's backgrounds can we unravel the logic behind their success. His own achievements can persist. Then be attributed not just to his keen mind and polished prose, but also to the concerned cultivation of his parents, an English mathematician and a Jamaican psychotherapist. He says, I am the bird attached to the top of a very large beast. Pecking away and eating the gnats. I am someone who draws inspiration from the brilliance of others and repackages it. I am a populariser, a simplifier and a synthesiser. By your own admission then Malcolm Gladwell, you're interested in things that tend to be considered every day, whether it's sort of mid-price cars or Heinz ketchup or hair dye. Why is it that you focus your considerable talents on these rather middling subjects?

I'm middling. The things in the middle are the interesting things. You know, I always use the example of cars. I'm a huge car lover. But a Ferrari is actually, at the end of the day, not interesting. I give you a million dollars, you really should make an interesting car. Not that hard to fail at the task. If I give you 10,000 pounds and ask you to make an interesting car, that's an incredibly difficult proposition. I'm also drawn to the things that I think are the most kind of interesting and complex explorations, which are the things in the middle, right? Often begin, you realize in by telling a story, you are by your own characterization a teller of stories. You're a re-teller of true stories. You begin at the point of saying this happened. Happened. And from all of this we can weave in evidence that most of you will never even be aware of or have bothered to read because it comes from dense intellectual sources and you draw a conclusion at the end of it. Do you think of yourself...

Primarily as a writer or as a thinker? Oh, I think of myself as a storyteller. What I've tried to do in many of my books is... Is to bring insights from social science or history and use stories as a way of exploring those ideas. But to wrap-- Something in a story is to give it a kind of power that it wouldn't otherwise have. You may know my role today is to cast you away to this island for a solitary existence and to do that we surround you with only a few things, among them eight discs. What's been your criteria for picking your discs today? Well, they're all profoundly depressing. To my mind, music is at its finest when it explores the melancholy. Side of human nature. I'm not a morose person, I just like morose music almost exclusively. Tell me first about your Marosa choice. This one really does take the biscuit. Well, it's Billy Bragg's Levi's Dubs Tears, and it has the most depressing opening couplet.

I think in the history of modern music, I mean, it's an extraordinary achievement. With the money from her accident, she bought herself a new car. And mobile home so at least she could get some enjoyment out of being alone. I don't think you can top that. The achievement of bringing someone to tears is infinitely greater than the achievement of bringing them to laughter. I happen to be obsessed with this notion. We laugh Easily. I have probably laughed five times already today and will laugh another 20 times and yet we continue to reward people who bring us to laughter as if it's some great feat. It's not. It's the easiest thing in the world. I will make you laugh over the next whatever minutes. I will not make you cry. Am simply not good enough to make you cry. So I think the people who bring us at least to the brink of tears are geniuses. And to do it in... to it.

Lines? I'm ready to be moved after I hear those two lines. That was Billy Bragg with Levi Stubbs T-shirt. As well as your writing, you do a lot of public speaking. You're a sort of public intellectual, if you like, and you do this at various thoughts for a while. People will have seen I'm showed online your your TED talks and so on and you go out and and talk to companies and try to I don't know what are you trying to do inspire people make them think in a different way turn their world a little bit upside down and shake things about a bit

Performing. Do you like performing? I suppose I do. You know, I'm not an extrovert, and so it's... Yes, that's why I ask because I think you seem like rather a private... Yeah, so I like the challenge of standing up in front of a group of people and being required to reach them is a really interesting problem to me. It appears to me when I've watched your talks, and I've only seen them online, I haven't seen you as part of a live audience, that you are almost daring people to be bored by you. You walk out and you don't hit them between the eyes with a big opener. You come out and you you amble around the stage and you might say I'd like to talk to you about spaghetti sauce. Yeah When you are giving a live performance, you have a certain grace period. I believe that by virtue of making the journey to wherever the event is taking place and buying the ticket and people are they're like, All right, I'll give you 15 minutes to prove your case. Right? So I think you should take full advantage of that.

It's much more fun. That takes a terrific amount of underlying confidence. Where does your confidence come from? your belief in your own intellectual rigor and capability? Does it take confidence? Or I just sort of felt like... Oh, I think it does. Oh, I sort of felt I had nothing to lose. The only thing you have to lose is to be perceived as uninteresting. What an audience wants is to be taken... Seriously. They're willing to put up with a lot if they have the sense that you have thought about what you're doing with them in some kind of considered way. Once they get that sense from you... They will travel with you in many far and distant directions. What turns off an audience is the notion that you're giving them the same talk that you have given to, you didn't even think about them when you were thinking about that morning what you wanted to say. As long as I communicate that notion that you are special to me.

I'm giving you this talk for a reason, then you're fine. Let's have your second piece of music, Malcolm Gladwell. Tell me about this. Why have you chosen this one? This is a song by a kind of sophisticated-- she's from New York, Killian Welch, and she's picked up edgy folk music. And she's written a song that is utterly-- About a woman, a young woman who's won the Miss Ohio contest and thinks that she's achieved something great in her life. And Gillian Welch is saying, No, you haven't. This song brings up so many complicated emotions in me because she's so brutal about the kind of fatuousness of the subject of her song's life, you know? It's heartbreaking. ♪ Woe me on my own ♪ ♪ Look at Miss Ohio ♪ ♪ She's running around with her rag top down ♪

She says I want to do right but not right now ♪ Gonna drive to Atlanta ♪ Look at Miss Ohio from Gillian Welch there. So Malcolm Gladwell, you have described yourself rather wonderfully as a Commonwealth baby. Tell me about the background of this Commonwealth baby. Well, my mother is Jamaican. My father is English, from Kent. I grew up in Kent. What more do you want? You know, the only thing missing is a kind of extended stint in Australia and New Zealand, right? It's sort of, and you know, my parents are a kind of metaphor for the British Imperial I feel a degree of self-consciousness in asking you about your, I often do with guests, I say, you know, tell me about your childhood, what was it like? Know that you yourself think that most of our memories you've said are actually reconstructions anyway. So on that base...

I want you to reconstruct a bit of your early childhood and tell me about it. What do you now imagine it was? I know that I've edited out anything unpleasant. But I don't think there was a lot of unpleasantness. I think that I was bored a lot as a child. Telling my mother this and my mother telling me that it was good to be bored and it took me many many years to understand that she's absolutely right that to be 11 and bored is not a bad thing to be forced to kind of Construct an imaginative world for yourself. So would I have found you catching tadpoles in a jar, or reading a book, or painting a picture, or just dawdling among the trees? How would you have been spending your time? Lots and lots of time was killed by schools.

Were written. I used to construct these elaborate maps of imaginary worlds, which I would revise endlessly, which I realize now is sort of a metaphor for how badly I wanted to get out of Canada. And I read a lot and I I became a runner and I, in comparison to the lives of a contemporary 11 year old, it was completely empty of any activity. We had no television and we, you know, sort of like, but in retrospect, I realised how incredibly valuable it was. I'm comfortable, sort of with my own thoughts. And that's what happened in those years. I think I learned how to do that. And not having a television, given the background of your parents, I'm imagining that wasn't a financial decision. That was, they just didn't want one in the house. Yeah, I don't think we thought there was any other way.

Much value to what was on the television, which in 1970s Canada is probably an accurate statement. And it was a very religious household? A very religious household in a very religious part of Canada. It's a Mennonite community, so religion was a huge... Part of the world that I grew up in. So among Mennonites there would be groupings who, for example, would be in ponies and traps and that sort of thing, that wasn't... Yeah, our neighbours, for example, had no electricity and a horse and buggy. They were old order Mennonites. Most of the people I would go to school with would be what's called modern Mennonites. Many of them would still quit school at 16 to work on the farm. I didn't realise it at the time but it was quite exotic as a place to grow up. And your parents, as your mother black, your father white, when they had been in London, I understand that they had met a fair degree of prejudice. How did that work in Canada? One of the wonderful things about the community that we...

What we moved into was the Mennonites having a real open-mindedness. They were extraordinarily accepting of my mother. I think we got very lucky. I don't think there are many places in the world where a mixed race couple in the sixties, early seventies, could have been as happy. My father made this great leap of faith. We moved from Southampton to rural Ontario. Quite dramatic. Let's have some more music, Malcolm. Tell me about your third. Daniel Lanois, French-Canadian, and it's a song about his family. I didn't realize it was a song about his father, but it's a song about his father who was abusive to the family and leaves. It sounds very upbeat, but when you start to listen closely to the lyrics, it brings you down in the way that I... So love.

That was Danielle Lanois and Jolie Louise. You tell us in your book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, that 10,000 hours is the magic number for achievement. You were, as a young teenager, a middle decision. Runner is that right what was your chosen distance 1500 meters 1500 meters so what would typically in a week how much running would you be doing i mean hours would you oh well you know i don't think this applies to sport but nonetheless uh you know i would run five six days a week i suppose uh runners you know you can't over especially when you're young you shouldn't run too much i think of the 10 000 hour rule is applying to cognitive I see. - activities more than sports. - So this can be learning the violin? - Yeah, you know, brain surgery, computer programming, these are things that sports is a... Although the interesting question is are there sports for which this... you could apply this principle. So do you have to do 10,000 hours before you're a good golfer? I could see that. Or a tennis player, I could see that. Running is not...

There's nothing cognitive about that, right? - Just to quantify quite how good you were, in high school, I understand you beat somebody called David Reed, who went on to be one of Canada's top runners. Why did you chuck it all in if you were so good at it? - Well, I sensed accurately that I had peaked at 14. So when I was 14, I won the Ontario Championship. I set a Canadian record when I was 13, and I repeated as Ontario Champion when I was 14. And I sort of had this sense that... Even though I was winning, it wasn't going to last. I think I was right. I also got a sense of that to continue to excel at sports. Would require an enormous chunk of my physical and mental and psychological energy. And I wasn't willing to make that sacrifice. There were too many other things I wanted to do. So what other things would you have been doing then?

teenager what else was occupying your your mind if you're going to be an elite runner the thing that people don't think a lot of enough about is that it occupies your imagination you have to think about it and you have to rehearse Faces and you have to, you end up obsessing about your own performances and your training and you, even back then it struck me that my Imagination is a finite resource. And if I dole out half of it to something as kind of ultimately trivial as running, much as I loved it, it's just that, you know-- Wasn't Sebastian co I wasn't gonna go to the Olympics. It was just something fun that I did. Why was I kind of? orgaging my intellectual future for something that, for running around a track. It just seemed, it didn't make any sense to me. - Let's have some more music, Malcolm Gladwell. Tell me about your fourth.

Well, no, I won't go to the desert island without Brian Eno, who I regard as a kind of god. And this song is very moving to be... The first woman I fell in love with in college was a huge Brian Eno fan and I'd never heard of him and she was incredibly cool. And Brian Eno ever since then correctly stands in for he represents all that is thing they call in the world. And this is the song that the first song she introduced to me but she later broke my heart and this happens to be a song

Graduation. I'll come running to tie your shoes That was Brian Eno and I'll come running. I have to tell people Malcolm Gladwell that during that you were glancing down your list and you said there's an awful lot of unrequited love in here. I wonder, are you slow to heal from having your heart broken? - Oh dear, probably, possibly, yes. - Is that it?

Because you're single. Do you know I nearly said famously single there? Because everything I've read about you leading up to today, you know, people say, Well, he's single Malcolm Gladwell. And we think, you know, we hope that you have another life that's not just a thinking life. Yes. Do you? I do, yes. Any more than that you're willing to share? No, you know, it's, uh, English journalists are always, you don't expect them to be nosy about people's private life, but they are. You always think the English are going to be very kind of, um, reserved in the way that their questions but they're not. Well I'm Scottish and I'm very nosy so I'm gonna keep on at it. Let's talk for a little bit about your background some more. Your mother wrote, I understand in fact it was at the time a best-selling book called Brown Face Big Master. She released that for the first time in 1969. Do you think that maybe you did it? Some of your talent from writing? You have a very concise and fluid way of writing. Yes. Do you see some of her ability there in your...

Absolutely, and more than that, my mother is extraordinarily articulate. I think her speech was as more of an influence than her writing even. I always have had that in my mind as a mother. At all. You've written in your book Outliers about how crucial good timing luck we could call it is. To success. What do you think the most profound piece of luck you've experienced in your career I'm wondering if it might have just happened early on when you went to work at your first jobs in journalism and found that the glove fitted. Washington DC and I knew no one and was a Canadian, was actually illegal. And I had a roommate who answered an ad in a newspaper and took a room in the house I was living in, who was the most supremely connected person. And his name is Jacob Weisberg. And it's because of Jacob that basically I got all my early jobs in journalism. And met everyone who had proved crucial in my life. It's this incredibly random act.

21-year-old walks into my house in 1985 and unlocks the world of American journalism, if that's not luck. Working at the New Yorker, I mean, famously, you know, the very definition of what it means to be a great journalist, and I mean that with a capital G. None of that was overwhelming for you. You took it all in your stride, did you? Well, no, I mean it was it was a really interesting transition, difficult but interesting in an interesting way. As I've developed as a writer the crucial thing has been not the development of self-confidence but the dismantling of self-confidence. Self confidence. So as a newspaper writer, what you learn is self confidence. I can do it in 10 minutes, right? And you think you're king of the hill. You come to the New Yorker and you have to be all that has to be taken down. You can do it. In a week but it's not any good. You think it's good, it's not, it's terrible. Go back and do it 10 more times. So now I am...

Far more appropriately, I think, insecure and humble about my writing skills than I was when I started 20 years ago. Let's have some more music, Malcolm Gladwell. Tell me about your fifth choice. It's Elvis Costello, Deportee, a song about an Englishman in America. It's basically an Englishman depressed sitting in America, like, wondering how in God's name did he end up in this horrible, brutal... Country so I have a great deal of I warm to it. ♪ Do another faceless, backless dress, snap skin ♪

That was Elvis Costello and Deportee. The success of your books and the millions and... They have sold inevitably leads to an enormous degree of scrutiny and the people who would be scrutinizing you are normally people in print so they are if not quite your fellow journalists people who have traveled a similar paths and inevitably the amount of success that you've had engenders a huge amount of, well, my mother would have called it green cheese. Know they're very jealous of you. How do you cope with the criticism that you know really you're somebody who does not much original

thinking you're just very good at telling us about the original thinkers and that, you know, beyond that there's not much to it. Oh. Well, I don't think it's jealousy, first of all. The element of that that I would object to is simply that there are people who denigrate the contribution of the storyteller. Sometimes, for example, academics will think that the step that someone like me takes, which is to take an idea... And refashion it in a form that is accessible. They won't understand that I've actually helped their cause. They think it's sort of a slick act of repackaging as opposed to a way of giving an idea new life. There's a long intellectual food chain, and I think all of us on that food chain -- and I'm somewhere on the food chain, too -- sometimes make the mistake of overvaluing on our own contribution and undervaluing.

Everyone else's. How difficult is it for you? I wonder, you know, 20 odd years ago when you began as a journalist and throughout your early career, you know, you just arrived on people's doorsteps or you made appointments to see academics or you know... You meandered into a coffee shop and overheard something that sparked your imagination and asked to speak to the person and you were just a guy with a notebook and a tape recorder. Gladwell. Do you find it more difficult to source authenticity, if you will, and to get people to talk to you on a, you know, just... It's much easier now. It's easier for a reason, and that is that I have tried very hard in my writing to write generously. So one of my rules is, if at all possible, I never want the person who I talk to to regret having talked to me. Now this does not mean that I'm nice to everyone.

I interview. But even in those cases where I disagree with them, I would like them to think, Oh, that is a fair representation of what I said. That does not mean I am uncritical. It means that I am not... Hostile to those I talk to. As I get older, more and more understand how many doors close when there's a lack of generosity on the part of the journalist towards his or her subject. Three cheers to that. Let's have some more music then. We are on year six, Malcolm Gladwell. Tell me why you've chosen this and what it is. This is Marvin Gaye's... It's a song called Piece of Clay which is bizarrely not one of his better known songs. I don't understand why. The opening line is Father, stop criticizing your son. And of course what's heartbreaking is that Marvin Gaye... Not that long after he records the song is shot to death by his own father. You cannot listen to the song

without bearing in mind what happened next. Mother, stop criticizing your son. Mother, please leave your daughters alone. That was Piece of Clay sung there by Marvin Gaye. You once said Malcolm Gladwell was a man of love. But if you wanted to rebel in Canada in the 70s, you had a poster of Ronald Reagan on your wall, which indeed you did. You were a -- -I did. -Yeah. Were you being ironic, or were you indeed -- -I had a brief worship spell as a conservative American.

Candidates 1978 your prime minister's a socialist who goes in is in Cuba. There's no room on the left. Meanwhile, in America, what's going on? There's a kind of revolution happening. Biological revolution also in England is a revolution happening. My friend Terry and I, we became these kind of gleeful right-wingers for a little spell in high school at the beginning of college. You know it ended when the real world came into focus and I had a poster of Ronald Reagan on my wall and I spent two summers in Washington working at various right wing organizations when I was in college. We never think that the people in the right are having the most fun. The threat of all conservatives is that they understand that culturally those on the left are doing all the drugs, having all the sex.

Listening to the much better music, you know, going to all the cool clubs while they're being all stuffy and smoking cigars at White's. But I feel like for a magic moment in the late 70s and early 80s, the tables were turned and Ratwingers had the fun and that's when I was lucky enough to be a Ratwinger. Do you get a kick out of being a contrarian? I am A mischief maker. Yes. I know you made it clear to me earlier that you're always slightly confused and maybe even perturbed by English, British journalists preoccupation with people's private lives. As Malcolm Gladwell, it is good to try to get a sense of what you don't do when you're pumping out these great big beefy bestsellers that we've got. We all love. I mean what do you spend your time doing when you're not writing? Well I'm still a big runner so I do a lot of that. I'm a huge sports fan so I'm tracking international track and field on obscure websites. I spend a lot of my time travelling.

Both for fun and for work. I don't make a sharp division between my work and my play. As something of the outsider, do you think that makes you a better writer and understander? Of America because you're engaged but you're one distance away from that. Yes, and more than that as an outsider you can take far more risks. I can always go home to Canada if I offend everyone in sight. Let's have some more music Malcolm. Tell me about... Your seventh choice. Another Marvin Gaye you can't have too much at the 1983 National Basketball Association All-Star They always sing the national anthem and they bring in someone famous to sing it and he sang it that year. And he gave this extraordinary rendition of this very familiar song. And you have to know that he was probably high on coke as he sang it. This was the height of the cocaine era in American society. So he's high and he is doing this bizarre thing to the song and it's only

when you hear the song out of context, that you realize what a kind of nasty-- Piece of work the American national anthem is. They're blowing stuff up. This is their national anthem. It's about rockets and bombs. Do you need better into the heart of the American soul. And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. ♪ Better than you ♪ *Music* For the NBA All-Star Game in 1983. That was Marvin Gaye singing part of the Star-Spangled Banner.

Your latest book David and Goliath you talk there about how you have would it Rediscovered your faith. We heard earlier this morning about the fact that you were brought up by religious parents and you went to church and you read Bible at home and all of that was normal. Why have you come back to it and what effect has it had upon you? you. Well, I came back to it because in the course of... I was trying to write a book about conflict and about how the things we think that determine outcomes in conflicts are... Important as we imagine. So resources, conventional sources of power and might, you know, the things that Goliath has, size, strength, armor, they don't end up being as important as we think. And that other things, the weapons of the spirit, determination, audacity, imagination, those end up being actually really crucial, lots and lots of cases. And I sort of...

Began walking through what I thought were obvious examples. Insurgencies, why are so many entrepreneurs dyslexic, cases where people have kind of, you wouldn't have thought they would have won, but they did. After you sort of do that for a while, you start to. Ask yourself, okay, so the weapons of the spirit are more powerful than conventional weapons. Well, what are the weapons of the spirit? At the end of the day, you end up with... This extraordinary respect, and it grows to more than that, of what faith is about. Because ultimately what underdogs have when they triumph is they have faith in their ability to overcome all kinds of obstacles. And that faith turns out to be phenomenally powerful. And that was a very kind of transformative moment, you know, for, for me.

So it's present now in your life, does it tangibly change things now that you've, you're closer to faith and to belief than you were in your 20s and 30s? I am still in the process of kind of unraveling what this insight means for me. It's almost as if it's sort of opened up a new dimension. I'm not being very articulate about it I'm afraid. It's a process, I suppose. It's just funny, after spending 30 years not thinking about a subject like faith at all, to suddenly pivot at the age of 50 and start to think about... It is disruptive in a Silicon Valley sense of the word which is a good thing. To cast you away to a desert island as you know. How will you deal with your own company day after day after day after day? Well I'm quite good at solitude.

The first few years will be a relief that I don't have to interact with the rest of the world. At last, some alone time. Do you like it that much, do you? I do like my solitude, yes. Yes, that's-- Yourself off? Do you try to find time during a year to do that? Yes, I mean, part of the reason I like to run so much is that running is perfect alone time. Something about the fact that you are exerting yourself physically. As you are being introspective makes the introspection all the more powerful and meaningful. So the eighth disc, what are you gonna play? Tell us about this. John Prine. This is the ultimate. Man Spurned by Lover Song. If you listen very, very closely, he's just so upset. And sad, but it's so artfully done. You know the thing that I love about a lot of this, the music that I've chosen is that it is morbid and depressing but

They managed to make Morbid and Depressing appealing. And I'm very, very conscious of the fact that if all of these eight people had lived-- blissfully happy lives, I would be worse off. I am profiting from their misery. And that's just weird. um let's give That was John Prine and all the best.

Malcolm it's time for me I always give Castaways books I give them the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare I will give you those now And you get to take another book along with you to this island, what's it going to be? There's a wonderful English children's book writer named, I think he's long dead, Geoffrey Treese, who wrote dozens if not hundreds of historical novels for kids, for boys, that I read so avily as a child. And I would take just a random sample of his books with me. They would remind me of a very happy time in my life because I'm obviously really lonely eventually on this desert island. And they are also just pristine examples of storytelling, to read examples of his master at work. Be enormously comforting in my solitude there. So we will hope that there is a collected works and we will give you that. And a luxury too, you're allowed one single thing, really not useful.

Something that would help you deal with the privations what will it be? A set of golf clubs. I don't golf I've never golfed I will never golf. Why? Because it's the preposterous sport that chews up your enormous amounts of time, it leads to nothing but frustration. But I'm on a desert island. I can construct a little golf course and I can... I can while away the hours, you know, teaching myself how to play. So I thought that would be the only time in my life when I can actually master that sport. Constantly in the bunker and I'll even give you some golf balls to go with the clubs. And of these eight tracks, if you had to save just one from the waves, which one would it be? Such a good question. I think I would save the Marvin Gaye Star-Spangled Banner. Every time I listen to it, I hear something else. So I even find when he says, Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free, it is always poignant when someone African-American sings that line,

Because it wasn't the land of the free for them until relatively recently in America. So to have a descendant of a slave sing that, there's always more. Moments in that song that always, to hear something so iconic and so familiar in a different light is really powerful. It's yours Malcolm Gladwell, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you.

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