Malcolm Gladwell, welcome to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
Thank you. I'm very flattered to be... to be on it.
I'm honored to have you here, because, um...
I said this to you before we started recording,
but I'll say it to you again while people are watching,
so there's witnesses-- you are one of the people
who has taught me to always question what I think I know
about the world.
And you're an expert in doing that in your books.
You know, you-you... you create and tell stories
about things that are seemingly unconnected,
and then, by the end of the story or by the end of the book,
we start to realize how everything is connected,
or who everything affects something else
in a way that we never thought possible.
Um, your podcast does that as well.
And one of my favorite episodes in the podcast
is where you talk about elections.
And what was really mind-blowing for me
was getting to a place where I realized,
as human beings we are horrible at predicting
who is going to be a good leader.
And so I found myself, at the end of that episode
of the podcast going like: Wow, maybe...
maybe elections should be lotteries.
Maybe we should have no elections, no money being spent,
no people campaigning-- just a lottery system
of all the people who want to run should run.
Do you still stick by that, though?
Is that something that you believe in
when you look at elections?
The cues we use to predict who's gonna be a leader
are faul... are faulty.
Do I think that should be true of... a presidential campaign?
No. But... I do think there is a way
to restructure our elections
where we do cast the net a lot wider.
And maybe at a local level, we should go with lotteries
as a way of picking who our leaders should be.
I think there is something to that.
Right now America's going through
a really, really tough time.
I think it's exacerbated by coronavirus.
The George Floyd protests have now swelled
into a nationwide movement, where people in the country
are saying: We want to see change,
um, predominantly within the police force.
For those who think they have an idea
of police, police reform,
defunding the police, or even abolition,
what do you think some of the unthought thoughts should be
about this whole process?
Well, my question would be,
we've done a very good job,
I think, in the last couple of months
focusing on what reform of...
of police behavior in this country looks like.
-Mm-hmm. -Right?
Now I think it's time for us to turn the attention on ourselves.
What are the kinds of things we can do--
non-police officers can do--
to make the job of policing better in this country?
And I think that's the part we've neglected.
We make the police in this country
deal with things like mental illness and homelessness.
-Right. -Why? Because we have radically underfunded
the social support mechanisms for those two social problems.
The cops get that job by default.
It's a really hard job, they are not trained to do it,
and they don't want to do it.
Right? And so what we're doing is,
we've taken a group of people,
who already have an insanely difficult job,
-Mm-hmm. -and we've made it a lot harder.
Why? Because we're too cheap and we're too unfeeling
and we're too lazy to build adequate support systems
for people who are very much in need in our country.
So there's a case where I think stage two is peop...
is-is time for people, like me,
and you and all of us to stand up and say:
Okay, I am willing to support greater funding
for homeless services, for mentally ill,
in order to improve the quality of policing in this country,
-among other reasons, right? -Right.
That's where I think we should be headed right now.
And I feel like if...
if people in the police department saw that,
they would be much more willing to embrace reforms.
'Cause they would say: You know what,
we're all in this together.
It's a very different place to start reform conversation
than a conversation that's all about,
"Here's what you're doing wrong."
It's interesting, because--
actually, you're the perfect person
for me to ask this to, because there's a puzzle
that I've been trying to solve in my brain,
and the puzzle that I have is around protest.
Right? In America right now,
there's an interesting conundrum.,
People go, "What is the correct way to protest?"
And although I'm distilling it down,
there seems to be two schools of thought.
Protest should be something that doesn't, you know,
disrupt the status quo, doesn't, like, break anything,
doesn't, you know, put anybody out of their way.
Another school of thought is: No, the very definition
of protest is that it is meant to make society itself
uncomfortable and, uh, you know, not be able to live its life
as if everything is normal.
And I think to myself, protest in many ways is defined
by your standing in life.
You know? So the more you have,
the less of a tolerance you'll have for protest.
In all your studies and in the work that you look at
and the ideas, have you come across anything,
or do you even think the mind of Malcolm Gladwell can go like,
"There is a definitive answer to this," or is this something
that society has never, ever figured out?
Yeah. There is no definitive answer.
I mean, it's funny you-you... you said, wha...
you said that I would be the appropriate person to ask.
I would say, actually you are.
You're South African.
The best contemporary example of how to handle a...
uh, successful protest reform movement
in the last 25 years is Nelson Mandela, right?
Um, and what does Mandela have in common
with other successful historical examples?
Martin Luther King. We could make a list.
-Mm-hmm. -Gandhi.
Uh, that they are... their protest is purposeful
and disciplined.
What I would like to see from the protests that we have now
is that same discipline and purposefulness.
I think we have, uh, it in large part, but there are times
when it doesn't seem to be out of those things.
When a bunch of, you know, people get out of control
and just start breaking windows, then I say,
"I don't really know what that is achieving."
When I see people-- those kinds of protests
that were in New York, or in major cities,
where, you know, tens of thousands of people
would march pur... purposefully and peacefully
with one voice, demonstrating to the world
that this is not some...
minor, niche group in society that's upset,
-Right. -this is everyone.
That, to my mind-- I had a number of people
who studied police reform very closely
say to me that that had tremendous impact
in moving... in getting people like Congress
to take police reform seriously.
So, that was... that's one side of my brain.
There is another argument, though,
and that is that without that side of the protests,
they wouldn't have been seen as the-the...
the reasonable person to deal with, the reasonable...
You know what I mean. People say
Martin Luther King Jr. needed Malcolm
as much as the other needed the other.
That's the puzzle I'm playing with in my head as I go like,
is... is it...
is it the peaceful protest that works,
or is it the fact that the peaceful protest
is seen as peaceful relative to another protest?
You get what I'm saying? So for instance,
Colin Kaepernick was protesting peacefully.
He was met with the utmost resistance
that anyone could be met with.
And I'm sure now if he kneeled, people will say,
"Well, that's a much better way to protest
than breaking a window."
Yeah. Yeah, I do think there's something to what you're saying.
I would only add that,
to my mind there is an immediate existential threat
to all of this, which is the possibility
that Trump gets reelected,
and all I care about right now
is that we get through this election intact.
-Mm-hmm. -Um...
you know that an awful lot of what we're seeing
that is malignant and pathological
in America right now is simply a result
of this guy in the White House.
So, you know, my fear--
I don't whether it's a legit fear or not--
but part of me worries that the more violent kinds of protests
have the affect of aiding Trump's reelection.
Before I let you go--
you have done a lot of work looking at the way
human beings see each other,
the way human beings interact with each other,
and how that can define progress
or a stagnant... society.
Is there a better way for us to communicate,
specifically, I should say, with people we don't agree with?
And I'm not talking about Nazis.
I'm just talking about people who we just have, like,
some-some, you know, political disagreements with.
We need to find a way to communi...
to understand the complexity of the people we're talking to.
So you and I could come... could make a list
of all of our identities.
You know, uh, you are South African.
You are biracial.
-Mm-hmm. -You are a comedian.
You are a successful author.
And you and I may have profound disagreements
along one of those lines,
-Yes. -But we may agree on six of them.
And I feel like what's happened in our society now is, you know,
you'll talk to someone who's a...
who loves Trump, and you'll assume
that's the most important dimension in their life,
and that the difference between you and that person politically,
um, is irrevocable, there's no way you can bridge that gap.
But then, if you talk to them for a little bit longer,
you would discover, you know,
they're a massive basketball fan, and so are you.
-Mm-hmm. -They love...
And I think that a lot of times,
those other identities are a lot more important
than the ones we spend all of our time obsessing over.
And I think it's time for us to start, um,
looking for ways to find common ground with people
and getting beyond the most kind of obvious
and salient of their identities.
I could talk to you for hours, but luckily, uh,
I've got the podcast for that. Um, I've got the books.
Thank you for taking the time.
Congratulations on another wonderful podcast season,
and, uh, I hope we'll be seeing many more.
Thank you, Trevor.