You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today has achieved global fame and no little wealth by writing books challenging us all

to think hard about the reasons why we behave the way we do. Malcolm Gladwell isn't a

behavioral scientist or a psychologist. He's a journalist with a flair for telling stories.

His greatest gift is spotting, fascinating,

often counterintuitive trends in other people's research work and turning that raw material

into highly accessible best-selling books, which encourage us to reframe the way we look at

ourselves and the world. His latest book,

Talking to Strangers, challenges the assumptions we make about trust and truth in our

encounters with other people. It raises the question for those new to Malcolm Gladwell,

how far can we trust his ideas and conclusions?

Well, he joins me now.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you.

Can I begin by asking you how you would describe yourself?

And clearly, you're a journalist of longstanding.

You're a writer.

But would you also, in some senses, describe yourself as a behavioral psychologist of some sort?

No, no, not at all. I would, I'm, I'm purely a journalist. I'm, I'm, this is, these are subjects that I approach like journalists. I do my reporting like a journalist. I write them up

like a journalist. I have no advanced degrees to my name. I don't belong in the

academy. I would never pretend to be on that level. But you do dig deep into areas of deep academic

...