Malcolm Gladwell on the page and in the podcast
To the Point
KCRW
4.4 • 583 Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2019
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, “Talking to Strangers,” is out, while he’s hosting the podcast, “Revisionist History.” In both media, Big Ideas reveal surprising connections between disparate events and actions. Warren talks with one of America’s most popular public intellectuals.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Warren Alney. My guest today is Malcolm Gladwell, a very familiar person to readers of newspapers, |
| 0:08.6 | books, and magazines. He began with The Washington Post. He's now at The New Yorker. He's written |
| 0:14.1 | five New York Times bestsellers, which all explore very interesting ideas. He's here to talk |
| 0:20.3 | about his latest talking to strangers. We'll hear some very interesting ideas. He's here to talk about his latest talking to strangers. |
| 0:23.1 | We'll hear some very interesting ideas about what we should know about the people we don't know. |
| 0:27.8 | But first, Malcolm is also familiar to listeners with a podcast called revisionist history. |
| 0:34.3 | It also explores ideas he's interested in, including memory. Since to the point as a |
| 0:39.8 | podcast, we'll start there. Malcolm Gladwell, welcome. How did you get into this? Well, it started as a lark. |
| 0:45.9 | My, one of my oldest and dearest friends, Jacob Weisberg, who was running the Slate Group, |
| 0:52.3 | which had a whole whole lineup of a podcast, asked me if I wanted to do one. |
| 0:56.3 | And I said, thinking it was a kind of thing I could do on the side, |
| 1:01.9 | you know, easily and move on. |
| 1:05.0 | I said, sure. |
| 1:06.0 | And then here we are four years later. |
| 1:07.8 | And it is pretty much taken over my life. |
| 1:11.3 | So that's how it began, as most of these things do, |
| 1:16.1 | with me having no clue whatsoever about what I was getting into. |
| 1:20.5 | There are in the neighborhood of 700,000 podcasts. |
| 1:24.5 | Yours is among the most listened to of all. |
| 1:30.0 | How do you account for that? Well, I mean, |
| 1:36.8 | I had a tremendous advantage, which was that I had been writing books for 15 years. And so, |
| 1:42.9 | and before that, you know, had had been writing for the New Yorker. So I, you know, I had the advantage of bringing my audience |
... |
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