Three Takeaways from Malcolm Gladwell on KindredCast
Malcolm Gladwell is nothing short of a media maven. The self-described “Skinny Canadian” is the host of the hit podcast Revisionist History, as well as a co-founder of the podcast and audiobook publisher Pushkin Industries. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1996, is a trustee of the Surgo Foundation, and currently serves on the board of the RAND corporation. His latest audiobook, Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, is a part memoir, part investigation, complete creative portrait of one of America’s greatest songwriters. On our latest KindredCast, the celebrated business thinker and intellectual contrarian joined LionTree’s Alex Michael to opine on everything from why it’s smart for Pushkin to make big budget audiobooks to what he sees as the future of the workplace. These are the three biggest takeaways from their conversation.
- Malcolm Gladwell Believes That Genius Work Can Be Created Later in Life
When he was working on Miracle and Wonder, Gladwell compares the music icon to artists like Cezanne and Picasso. Both were geniuses in their own rite, but Picasso’s greatest work was created early in his life whereas Cezanne peaked later in his career:
Malcolm: So this is an idea that comes from an economist named Dave Galinson, who’s very interested in kind of trying to understand
the different ways creative geniuses manifest and he makes this argument
that creative genius is bimodal. There’s two very distinct distributions. There’s a distribution of the people who do all of their most important and valuable work very early on in their careers. And then’s another group, which we tend to overlook, some would argue, who don’t do their best work until the end of their careers. So Picasso and Cezanne are the classic examples of this. Picasso
does his best work in his twenties. Cezanne does his best work in his late fifties, sixties? And we lump them together and Galinson would say, “No, they’re totally different.” Picasso is what he would call a conceptual innovator, someone who has a kind of breakthrough idea and very rapidly enacts that idea in his art. Cezanne is someone who is not conceptual. He’s experimental. Everything is trial and error. He doesn’t have any big ideas.
You have a conversation with Cezanne when he’s 30 years old and you ask him what he’s doing, he can’t tell you. Picasso can tell you, right? Cezanne has… It takes him so long to…If you work through trial and error without a guiding idea, it takes you your whole career to reach your point of genius. And so that’s why Picasso peaks… You go to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and look at all that room full of Cezannes, the greatest room of Cezannes in the world, look at the dates that they’re painted. It’s all at the end of his life…And so my argument in Miracle and Wonder is that Paul Simon is Cezanne.
2. He Believes That Quality is Paramount in Audiobooks
When discussing the business model for Pushkin, Malcolm Gladwell does not hold back on what he feels is the biggest issue for most audiobooks: quality.
Malcolm: In audiobooks where the one, my one big contribution to the company has been I have been the one pushing the move into audiobooks the hardest, and there, my position is that publishers have been…Traditional publishers have been asleep at the wheel. They have considered audiobooks to be an afterthought. They’ve invested no money or time or attention or creativity in making them. They put you in a sound booth for four days. You read the manuscript of your book, and they spend $10,000 turning it into an audiobook.
That, the idea that that is a good model in 2022 when the audience who’s interested and who we want to reach, their expectation about the quality of content is so much higher. These are people who have been raised on Pixar and Disney, who have, in every aspect of th eir creative
life, have been exposed to things done at the absolute highest level and who’ve watched HBO reinvent quality television, and yet when it comes to an audiobook, we’re really going to expect them to listen to seven hours of an author who is not trained in reading, droning on into a microphone. It just drives me to distraction.
3. He Believes That Returning to the Office is Important for Mental Health
The remote work revolution is taking over corporate America, but Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t necessarily believe in the power of constant Zoom calls:
Malcolm: I’m fully aware that there are some pluses to it. You can be more productive. But what is the single-most important issue facing working Americans under the age of 30? It’s a cluster of things around mental health. No question about that. These are issues that exist today on a scale that did not exist 25 years ago. If you talk to any college administrator and have them compare their jobs today to their jobs 30 years ago, that’s all they’ll talk about. 30 years ago, we didn’t talk about mental health issues.Today, that’s what we do. If you accept the fact that that is the single gravest problem facing young people in this country, how can you want to perpetuate a system where they are working at home alone in their apartments?I mean, it’s nuts. It is nuts.The last thing they need is social isolation and a universe that encourages them just to work all the time.
To hear the full conversation, you can watch it here on YouTube or listen wherever podcasts are found. Also, subscribe to our newsletter, Take a Break with Kindred Media, for all of the latest in media, tech, gaming and more.
