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Hello, Ghost Family.

Welcome to Family Ghosts.

One of my biggest inspirations in starting this podcast was a straight comment from my

first acting teacher who said all of the great dramas begin with the family.

He was talking about dramatists like Shakespeare and the Greeks and encouraging us to stop

thinking of their plays as capital C classics that required this grand performance style.

He wanted us to think of them as simple domestic stories that just so happen to involve

mythic gods and kings and queens.

The key he told us to understanding any character, no matter how distant or exotic their story

might seem on paper, is to start with their family.

Today on the show, we've got something a little bit different, but also pretty special.

This is an episode about a family story that offers some insight into the mind of one

of our foremost public intellectuals.

One whose work has opened millions of minds, sparked millions of arguments, and sold millions

of copies.

A few years back, one of our former producers, Jacob Smith sat down with Malcolm Gladwell,

the legendary author of Blink and the tipping point and the host of the podcast revisionist

history on which Jacob also works as a producer.

Malcolm is the sort of person whose legend looms so large in our cultural discourse that

it can be easy to assume that his groundbreaking ideas just poured out of him one day, fully

...