Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome this evening's moderator, American journalist and culture critic, Virginia Heffernan.

I am so lucky to get to be here with an old friend of mine, Malcolm Gladwell, and we're going to talk about what making this podcast sort of meant to him.

And then he's going to do for you, render for you the final episode

of the first season of revisionist history.

Podcasts are clearly this extraordinary form and Malcolm's a master of it after only one season.

So we're going to have a quick question and answer and then and then he's going

to do the last episode. Thanks. Here he is, Malcolm Gladwell.

Hi. Hi, Virginia. I'm excited. Okay, so without knowing anything about this final episode, I want to ask you first about

podcasting generally because when I first met you, I was a fact checker and you were a writer,

and we did not think about our voices and our hair and our how we sat on

stage you just thought about reporting and how to put a story together and somehow

you had to become a radio personality and use your voice why switching to audio

did you did you do gargle do you do freeing the inner voice exercises like actors?

Well, there's, there's a moment of insecurity when you wonder whether you're one of those

people who has an interesting voice or not. Because the minute you do something that's about

audio, you instantly realize that you have been consciously or unconsciously judging everyone

you've heard on the radio according

to their voice, right?

You have a set of prejudices, actually I can't stand listening to that person, actually

I can, I really want to listen to that person.

And you divided up the world into the unlistenables and the very listenables.

And then your first thought is, oh my God, am I part of the unlistenables?

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