Hi, I'm Alan Alder, and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

Now if I asked you, I said, Alan, how do you think you looked when you stepped out of

the classroom and all of a sudden saw your best friend under a single lamp in the middle

of a room with a painted bright red when you thought you were just going to be walking

down the hallway? And you would say, well, I would assume that my eyebrows went up, my

eyes grew wide, and my jaw dropped. This is a myth we've told ourselves. Emotion is only

sporadically and inaccurately and irregularly expressed on the face in the way that we

would expect from watching movies and television shows.

That's Malcolm Gladwell with one of his trademark insights that are gleaned from often obscure

social science research and that have been livened his best-selling books like The Tipping

Point, Outliers, Blink, and his latest Talking to Strangers.

Malcolm, this is great. I'm so glad to be talking to you today. Your books have stimulated

me over the years as they have approximately 17 million other people. I don't know.

You've sold so many books. But one of the things that interests me is your first book, The

Tipping Point, and your latest book, Talking to Strangers. They seem to me to fall under

the same categories as this podcast where we talk about connection and communicating.

Tell me about connectors. I mean, the lady in Chicago and Paul Revere both fall into that

category and I love that.

You know, it's funny. We're in the middle of an epidemic right now. And one of the things,

one of the fascinating things we learn when we look at the epidemiology of an epidemic

like COVID-19 is that transmission is asymmetric. So if there are 10 people who all have,

who are infected with coronavirus, one person probably in fact, may infect 10 other people,

...