Malcolm Gladwell

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

Malcolm Gladwell seems to be everyone’s fantasy dinner guest. Also a contender for America’s greatest intellectual, he’s a Canadian with roots in the UK. The writer and host of the Revisionist History podcast is back with a new book: “Talking to Strangers”. In it he explores what we should know about the people we don’t - and how some of the most infamous cases of recent history stem from people misreading each other. He came to the Beyond Today studio to talk about the importance of slowing down and his fear of running out of ideas. Producer: Lucy Hancock Mixed by Nicolas Raufast Editor: John Shields

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.6	Hello, I'm Tina Dehealey.
0:08.4	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:11.1	A space to ask one big question about one big story. Every now and then we take a break from the news to chat to a person who's also trying to make sense of the world. Malcolm Gladwell is
0:34.9	definitely one of those people. He's probably one of America's most popular
0:39.7	intellectuals. He is in fact from Canada. He has Jamaican heritage.
0:44.7	And then my father was originally from Kent.
0:47.3	Okay, yeah.
0:48.3	A woman, Lucy is waving through the glass. She's from Kent as well. Two of his best-selling books,
0:55.4	The Tipping Point and Outliers, changed the way many people think about human behavior,
1:00.5	and his podcast, Revisionist History, pieces together misunderstood aspects of our past.
1:07.2	He's just released a new book called Talking to Strangers, which looks at what Amanda Knox,
1:12.4	Sandra Bland and Bernie Madoff all have in common. What's striking is how many of the kinds of things that we get hung up on these days
1:30.0	are really talking with strangers problems.
1:33.0	So I have a chapter on the Amanda Knox case,
1:36.0	you know, one of the most infamous murder cases of the last 10 years.
1:41.0	What is that case fundamentally about? It is about the
1:44.2	inability of the Italian police and the British tabloid press to understand a
1:49.3	foreigner, an American schoolgirl who is perfectly innocent but somehow everyone
1:56.6	manages to convince themselves that she's guilty why because they
1:59.8	misread her or I have a chapter on Bernie Madoff, the you know the most notorious
2:06.1	Ponzi scheme in financial history. What is that about? It is about people
	...

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