Hey there, it's Skivin' Dubner.

I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, hey, what's Freakonomics Radio doing in my podcast feed today?

Today's not there day.

Today's the day I get my knitting podcast or my home brew podcast or my how to learn

Mandarin podcast.

You're right.

It is not our turn, but we snuck into your feed to give you this bonus episode.

It is not the kind of episode we typically produce.

It is nothing more than a straight up, barely edited conversation with Malcolm Gladwell.

Here's a story.

Our previous episode was called How to Become Great Just About Anything.

It was about deliberate practice and the research of the psychologist Anders Erickson.

In that episode, Gladwell appeared to talk about his interpretation of Erickson's work,

especially the 10,000-hour rule.

That's an idea that Gladwell helped popularize in his book Outliers.

As is typically the case, when you hear a conversation like that in a podcast, it's usually

drawn from a much longer conversation that gets edited way, way down.

We usually record at least a few hours of raw tape for every finished podcast.

It's maybe 30 or 45 minutes long.

That raw tape usually just sits on a hard drive, unheard by everyone but us.

In this case, however, Malcolm Gladwell being a preternaturally interesting person, I thought

...