The Tipping Point Revisited: Live with David Remnick

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Hello Revisionist History listeners. This is Revenge of the Tipping Point month at Revisionist History, where we bring you stories and snippets in tantalizing tales from my new book, now available everywhere. And in this episode, we're bringing you the very first stop on my book tour, a conversation I had about my life and career with my old friend and former boss, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. We did this at the ninety second Street Why in New York City, my home away from home. I first met David almost forty years ago when he was a star at the Washington Post and I was a cub reporter who'd never written a newspaper story before. He's one of the people in the world who admired the most and our conversation was hilarious and fun. I hope you enjoy.

00:01:13
Speaker 2: It's been a while.

00:01:15
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, Malcolm.

00:01:16
Speaker 3: I have to tell you that the title of this book is so brilliant because it's it's like Revenge of King Kong.

00:01:22
Speaker 2: That's fantastic, And.

00:01:28
Speaker 3: And I have to say that one of my fondest memories at the New Yorker.

00:01:33
Speaker 2: And we'll go back even earlier in a moment.

00:01:36
Speaker 3: But at the New Yorker, you're telling me, you know, I've written two pieces now, the Cool Hunters and The Tipping Point.

00:01:43
Speaker 2: I have this idea for a book.

00:01:45
Speaker 3: You got an agent there, a doubtable, Tina Bennett, and you thought, you know, if I could make just a small amount of money, I could help out my family and and and let's just say, by the end of the day things things went well. And now twenty three million books later, things have gone really well. But what interests me most is not success material success, however deeply jealous I am. What interests me is how you invented yourself and what you do because we have a not dissimilar background.

00:02:24
Speaker 2: We were both at the Washington Post, both at.

00:02:25
Speaker 3: The New Yorker, and I couldn't have them in many ways, a more conventional approach to journalism. I wonder when you look back and you look you at you were at the Spectator, you were at the Post, and then you came to the New Yorker. But something happened at a certain point that a more conventional story was left behind, and even a humorous story like the one at the Washington Post, where you did you had a dog on death.

00:02:55
Speaker 2: Row and you try.

00:02:56
Speaker 1: Oh, that was my finest work.

00:02:57
Speaker 2: It really was.

00:02:58
Speaker 1: There was a dog in Bergen County. Well, should I back up and tell it story?

00:03:03
Speaker 2: Sure?

00:03:04
Speaker 1: I was. I became the New York correspondent for the Washington Post, and I, uh, they were uninterested in stories about New York at that point. I don't know why. And then I decided to make my life more interesting and maybe increase my profile in Washington. I would only write stories from Bergen County, my county. Yeah, because I decided that Bergen County was more interesting. I still believe this than New York City. So I just every day I would read the Bergen County Record Record, that's right. And I saw a little tiny mention one day of a dog, a Nikita named Tarro, who had been confined to doggy death row. Now, doggy death row in Bergen County is in Hackensack, where I was born. Were you born in Hackeen? You bet there is. You know what you think I'm joking when I say this doggy death row. No, it is actually doggy death row. It's a you can't get there. There's like a ravine and if you want to you're on the other side of the ravine, and then you see a long string of cages, and that there's all these dogs who are there pending tho'se all kinds of appeals, obviously, and if they lose their appeals then they are euthanized, and they're there for biting people. And Tarrow what had happened was he had been asleep and a child, the nephew of his owner, had stumbled across him in the middle of night on the way to the bathroom, and Tarrow had swiped the kid. This is now all these claims I'm making, was subject to a great amount of litigation, and had cut stipulated, had cut the kid's lip, and the result was like they're like seven different lawsuits had and I became convinced that Tarrow was wrongfully convicted, and I rode for the Washington Post. I mean it was thousands impressively long, and the editor of the Washing Post the next day after it ran, came out to me and said, that was a very good piece on Tarrow. It was, however, four times too long. Just the greatest thing that was ever said to me. And they were t shirts. The owner printed up t shirts, Free Tarrow. They were distributed and the story made the front pench of the New York Post. That's the goal, that was they the Post, The New York Posts picked up my story.

00:05:20
Speaker 2: That's the heaven.

00:05:21
Speaker 1: Yeah. So my point this, it was so my whole strategy of conceiving of Bergen County as being a kind of more fertile ground for.

00:05:31
Speaker 2: But this was this was rebellion.

00:05:34
Speaker 3: This was the beginning of the Gladwellian rebellion against the conventional which is that New York, as I believe, is not only the most interesting place, but on certain days the only interesting place.

00:05:49
Speaker 2: I'm a patriot.

00:05:53
Speaker 3: So but when when, at what point, as we know what a Malcolm Gladwell story is, the kind of sense of surprise, playing with ideas, exploring ideas, readings, social science, when when did that begin to click?

00:06:08
Speaker 1: I think it's starts to the Post. Because the problem, you know, whenever I would take a job, take a job, you have to kind of conceive of what is the problem that you're trying to solve on this job. And the problem that I had when I got to the Post was that I was twenty three and I had never written a newspaper story in my life. I had no idea how to do it, and I was surrounded by people who were the greatest, like yourself. Yeah, yeah, No. For those of you who don't know, David in his day was an absolutely legendary one of the great newspaper reporters of his generation. And they were they were Woodward, Bob Woodward was when I got to the watch host. I was in the business section. Woodward was there and I would watch and like Steve call Dret Steve Colho went on to become I mean, he's still around me. He ran the Columbia Jerones in school call when he I think you told me you pointed this out to me. When you know, when we had the push button phones, Yes, he would. You know, when I dial, it would be like do do do do? To call was like that's too slow, and he'd be like it was like a concert pianist, you to play a chord. Yeah, like the white He'd get the White House. It would be like it would take him like five seconds. I'm like that was all. And I had Mike, the legendary Mike iss to Off was next to me. Anyway, my point is I'm surrounded by all these people who were just better at daily journalism than I am. And so the problem was, how do you succeed in an environment whatever? And you succeed in that environment by being the thing that they are not. Right, everyone else was fast and fluid, So I decided I would be slow and weird right and then.

00:07:48
Speaker 3: And in fairness, the Washington Post did not prize weirdness.

00:07:55
Speaker 1: No, it did not, although the key was the key. I mean, the problem to be solved was how do you stand up in an environment where everyone around you is a total pro And so the to stand I get to what everyone else is not doing. So people around me were not writing five thousand wood stories on death rod dogs.

00:08:15
Speaker 2: No, no.

00:08:17
Speaker 1: And I remember the first time I wrote a story for The New Yorker. I was still at the Washington Post, and I was writing the talk to the Towns before they were signed, because that's so that way I could freelance without them knowing, so I would. I was writing these talk of the towns and I went to see Chip McGrath and.

00:08:33
Speaker 2: It was Tina brown'stupadias.

00:08:35
Speaker 1: And Chip said I had written this little talk of the town and he had some problem. He said, this is I want you to fix this problem? He said what, and so I said, I took it from him. I said okay, and I just wrote in the margins my fix. And I remember the looking at him and he was astonished.

00:08:53
Speaker 2: Vulgarian.

00:08:55
Speaker 1: It was vulgar. It was vulgar. He expected me to go home and come back in a week with the fire. I was like, no, I'll just just here do that. And it was that's at the New Yorker. You had to be that otherwise you if you wanted to be slow and thoughtful and weird, then you were competing with everyone else.

00:09:10
Speaker 2: Right.

00:09:11
Speaker 1: So I got there and I had to completely change. I had to work hard. I had to do all these things that I wasn't doing at the Washington Post. We'll be right back with more from my conversation with David Remnick.

00:09:34
Speaker 2: Which piece would you say set you off.

00:09:39
Speaker 3: Into You're now at this retrospective moment in your literary journalistic life where you're writing a piece that echoes your first book and you're no longer twenty three years old. Yeah, there must be some sense of self examination about that.

00:09:54
Speaker 1: It was probably a piece called the Cool Hunt, Remember the Coolhid, where I I don't know how I found a woman who's still a very good friend of mine, Did Gordon, who was a who went around whose business was going around America telling corporations what was cool T shirts and T shirts. And she was and still is absolutely hilarious. And she I wrote a piece about her about this idea that she would just go around and she would declare something cool and she would tell you what was and.

00:10:28
Speaker 2: Companies would hire her and hire her.

00:10:31
Speaker 1: But the whole point of that piece was the title the Cool Hunt. Once you had the title, just like it's like and there was you know, someone wanted to make a movie out of course never nothing ever came of it. But it was the first time I realized like, like that was you know, that kind of it was something else. There was something fun about taking being interested in pop culture for the New Yorker And did New.

00:10:58
Speaker 3: Yorker never have that kind of thing before? Now now this kind of story comes up. But was that an absence that you were feeling a vacuum?

00:11:06
Speaker 1: I didn't know anyone else in the New York It was the same. It was the same thing about trying to be different. So I didn't know of anyone else who was writing about DeeDee Gordon was not the typical subject of a New Yorker profile. No, I mean she you know, she was this kind of strange, hilarious. Uh. She had this crazy crush on Keanu Reeves. She was obsessed with Keanu Reeves. But I just thought, like, this is different in a way, this is this will stand outlets I needed you just needed to stand out.

00:11:37
Speaker 3: And then you did the tipping point, which you know is now associated with with with you. But as you've said repeatedly that you what you were doing is taking an idea that was very much in the air in sociological terms, uh, in terms of crime and much else.

00:11:57
Speaker 2: So what was the idea for the book?

00:11:58
Speaker 3: You had these two pieces, and how did you cast out what the what the book? What would what it would be, what shape it would take, what voice it would have?

00:12:09
Speaker 1: Well? I didn't. My agent came Tina, who I knew socially, and then she became an agent. She was just like a She worked in the admissions department of something. She'd been a graduate student, graduates in history. Yeah, and I just knew she's friends of friends, and then she became an agent. She said, can I be your agent? And I was like, I guess sure. And then she's now like the powerhouse, the powerhouses. But I knew her, and she said, you should write a book on this, and I but what is this the article the tipping point? Because people got really interested in it, and I started like someone in California flew me out to speak to their group about it. I remember thinking that was really weird that piece of New Yorker could so I thought, oh, maybe people are kind of into this, and Tina's like, yeah, you should do a book. So I knew the article in New Yorker was a chapter literally a chapter or a part of a chapter. And then I had to kind of improvise. I'd never written a book before, I had to kind of ye.

00:13:04
Speaker 3: But before we get to the way you reconsider the idea, because it's it's a very interesting bridge. I want to know it probably is not in the stack of cards here. I want to know how you invented yourself as a voice, and how naturally or not that came to me.

00:13:19
Speaker 2: Because I can.

00:13:20
Speaker 3: Read a paragraph of yours or a page of yours, and I know it right away that's you. There's a certain cadence, there's a certain way that a chapters end is there. There are moves that are as distinctive as somebody's you know, a piano player or an athlete.

00:13:38
Speaker 2: You you you know, you.

00:13:40
Speaker 3: Watch enough athletes, you you listen to enough music. There's a there's a Gladwell cadence. There's a Gladwell sense of humor. It's very, very distinctive. How self aware are you of it? How did it become itself?

00:13:58
Speaker 1: Well, it's hard to say, you know that. So I spent ten years at the Post, and there's something I think that's crucial, because what happens at at the Post is you learn how to write, meaning you learn how to write without fear and self consciousness. You're forced to remember by the end by time with the Washington Post. I remember when I was one of the last stories I wrote before I left for the New Yorker, there was a shooting on the l R R. And it happened at like four thirty in the afternoon, and back then the deadline was like six thirty. Yeah, So I get on the LA R and I go out to the scene. I get there at like five thirty and it's clearly a front page story, and they're like we need the story.

00:14:49
Speaker 2: And there's a shooting on the Long Island Railroad is a front page story in the in the Washington Post.

00:14:54
Speaker 1: It was a big shooting. Ah. It was like serious, it's gonna be well. I mean my assumption was I was telling them, of course, it's a front page story. That's the way it works. This is huge Apeah, someone got shot in New York City. Hold the front page. It's about the fold, you know, like the whole nine year You know this. You did this drill yourself many many times.

00:15:14
Speaker 2: Oh my god.

00:15:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you can do it from Moscow and you could use They all get nervous.

00:15:20
Speaker 1: Michael Spector used to his colleague ours was so good at this. He would do a kind of salami slicing where he'd take a story and do ten stories out of it, and each one would get on the front page because he would it would be like it's changed. I said, there's another wrinkle, and they're like, oh my god, And they put the first wrinkle on the plump page, the second wrinkle, and then there's day three. Oh my god. I go out there. I'm on the l A R. And I remember this is like this is when I was at the peak of my powers. So I interviewed all these people. I don't have time to don't there's no laptops back then, there's no like. And I did the thing which I had heard, you know, hard bitten newspaper. I picked up the phone and I called it in. I remember that feeling of like. I dictated a fifteen hundred word story into the phone to someone typing on the other end, straight through, and I was so pleased with myself. But I realized at the moment, I got nothing else to learn here. I have, they have. But that's what you learned like, and that you never lose that liquidity they hit so in no other was every bit, every every bad habit you have as a writer gets beaten out of you at a newspaper because it's just discipline. It's like boom, you know, tell the story, tell them in a way that's compelling.

00:16:49
Speaker 2: But something happens to your pros. And I will linger on this too long.

00:16:51
Speaker 3: But if I read Anthony Lane, for example, I can read him and I know that obviously Anthony is an incredibly airudite reader and writer, but I know that he did not get through life without reading PG. Woodhouse over and over again, that that informs this texture of this, this this tapestry. Who was that for you or was it just the newspaper business?

00:17:19
Speaker 1: Well no, no, no, So then I get to I don't think, I think I have a little bit of that the post, but it's but it's gets by putting it, you get you get pared down, you get rid of all your bad habits, and then you you have It's like a It's like you know, in playing a musical instrument, you spend the first ten years mastering the fundamentals, and then you're free to develop some kind of state. But you have to do the compulsory, you know, work to go to. And that's what the post is. You it it just you get reduced to the simplest essence of how to tell a story, and now you have the freedom and it come to the A lot of it was Adam Gopnik. So I was reading Gopnik long before I joined The New Yorker. And Gopnik is an exceedingly distinctive voice, right, and I mean a beautiful way of expressing himself. And and there's there's little kind of beautiful little frill. I mean, his his pro sings, his little choruses and frills, and it's just like and reading that, you know, he's I'm a I'm half a generation.

00:18:28
Speaker 3: But his move is he has many But what is the pop culture or boomer pop culture as he and I have discussed with reference when discussing something like you know, Nietzsche or the Friends.

00:18:41
Speaker 1: That's crucial. So this reminds me of something when I was very when I was in middle school, I met my lab partner was a guy named Terry Martin who no Urn Martin now a Soviet scholar, but he by happenstance in our little town in Canada. He was my lab partner. And Terry was an absolutely brilliant guy. And we were in biology together and we would do these experiments and he would always refuse to do the experiment the way we were supposed to do it, like as a matter of and I remember at first utterly horrified because we would never we couldn't finish anything, nothing was ever handed in. We would always get terrible grades. And then about like by kind of November of seventh grade, I realize it's genius because what he taught me was that you have the freedom. I mean, he wasn't being destructive or nihilistic. He was like saying, okay, so they're all going to do it this way, but we don't have to do it that way. We can there's another way to learn what's going on here. He was deeply interesting.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: This is what so interested me. So play is what you use the word. And I think it.

00:19:59
Speaker 3: Even caused some people alarm or or they're offended intellectually or otherwise, or they're jealous or whatever it is.

00:20:06
Speaker 2: You use the phrase playing.

00:20:08
Speaker 3: With ideas as if this is to them somehow irresponsible. What is playing with ideas mean?

00:20:15
Speaker 1: It begins with Terry in seventh grade because Terry and I then we developed this deep friendship and we would play endless games of monopoly, and we then deregulated monopoly, and his whole our idea was this, This is our idea was the rules? At that point we were like, well, the rules make no sense. Like the game as it's a brilliant game, but for example, why do you start with fifteen hundred dollars? That's that is by the way, if you're interested. This is the great flaw with monopoly, because the point of monopoly is when you're playing it, it should be a question of what can I afford? Should it should be a difficult question. I land on Marvin Gardens, Do I want to buy Marvin Gardens? Should be a question that you have to entertain and come up with a serious answer to. If you give each player fifteen hundred dollars to start and you land on Marvin Gardens, you just buy it. How was that interesting? That's absurd?

00:21:11
Speaker 2: So it's a little bit like inherited wealth.

00:21:13
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. So we started with one dollar and what.

00:21:20
Speaker 2: Could you buy with one dollar?

00:21:22
Speaker 3: So you can't even get a slice of pizza much Marvin guard you.

00:21:26
Speaker 1: So the first ten minutes is just speed circling the board a kim living capital and then and then you, and then you. We have to come up with all kinds of ways to Basically, we created systems for creating leverage, so you.

00:21:40
Speaker 2: Have too much time on your hand.

00:21:42
Speaker 1: We played so much monopoly, so we What I realized now is that we would sell the derivatives. So I would say we like, if I landed on your property, you had improved, you know, the blue property, you know, Vermont and Oriental and what have we? And I owe you five hundred bucks. We'd never pay the five hundred dollars. That's silly. Why would you pay the five hundred dollars? Instead, it should be an invitation to a negotiation about there are clearly I owe you five hundred bucks, all right, So how can I be useful to you in some other way? Right?

00:22:21
Speaker 2: So it's goods and services.

00:22:22
Speaker 1: Yes, you know, I have you land on you land on on Vermont, you'll meet five hundred bucks. I have Broadway and eat park Place, So I say, okay, pay me a hundred But if you land on park Place, I have the right of first refusal to buy that property front you right now, that's a that's a simple example. We constructed these insanely elaborate, massive derivatives and we would play Did they have No Drugs? In Canada? We would play with Terry's cousin Fred, and we would play like three or four games an afternoon, and we would play hundreds of games a summer and we'd just would get together every morning just play the game like but it was the same thing. It was like, you know, and each over the coast of the summer we would create ever more elaborate structures around. But that's that's the origin of play. Because Terry's assumption. This is what Terry taught me. He was like, what does Parker brothers know about monopoly? That was self confidence of that was brilliant.

00:23:22
Speaker 2: Fair enough, But when you're when you were dealing with.

00:23:28
Speaker 3: Auto safety, medical tests, all the many subjects.

00:23:34
Speaker 2: In other words, at what point do you feel.

00:23:39
Speaker 3: Grimly responsible toward the set of ideas and the and the facts and and and how does that interact with playing? What's the difference between what you're doing and what an academic feels obliged? Because I mean, I remember having a piece of yours and there was a piece and it was so mean to Ralph Nader, who I was.

00:24:00
Speaker 2: So great, who I was brought up.

00:24:02
Speaker 3: To think was just an incredible hero for all. Okay, he lost the election at one point, but another mind.

00:24:10
Speaker 1: But I can tell you where that came from. So this goes to you.

00:24:13
Speaker 2: And then you blamed poor Ralph Nader for what like.

00:24:16
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so genius that so on the sense of play? What shoot? The first the first layer of play is understanding other people who want to play, right, So I got I like cars, and I thought it'd be fun to write about autobile safety for the New Yorker because nobody was running on other books, and if they were writing about it, they were writing about it, and this kind of really kind of wrote boring. So find someone who has an interesting take on auto safety. Now where would that person reside, Well, not in academia. They would work for a car company. Right. Turns out there's a Scottish guy called Leonard Evans who ran the safety department at General Motors. And Leonard wrote a book called Traffic Safety in America, which is so genius. And I read Traffic Safety, I was like, oh my god, Leonard, you're a genius. So call up Leonard and he's got this whole Scottish brogue accent, and.

00:25:06
Speaker 2: He's been waiting for you all.

00:25:07
Speaker 1: He has been waiting for him for me his entire life. No journalist has ever called Leonard, of course left. And Leonard's sitting in his office in like Dearborn, wherever the hell he is, and he doesn't even bother the clearer it with General Motors public Relations because he's never had a journalist call him before. He's just on the phone with me and Leonard does something. The first story Leonard gives me, he goes in his Scottish accent, which I can't do. He says, you realize we're talking about airbags. And one of this is in the mid nineties or in late nineties, and one of Leonard's points was airbags were suddenly a big deal. Everyone was in love with airbags. And his point was the airbag, if you're not wearing your seatbelt, the airbag is kill you can kill you, particularly if you're very young, or very old, or very small. And Leonard said, the reason we don't realize this is that the reason we have airbags is because of Ralph Nader. And Ralph Nator didn't understand this fact, and he was promoting the airbag without he thought it was an alternative to the seat belt, as opposed to an accompaniment of the seat belt. And then Leonard said, and I never wrote about this. He said, what you should do is you should file a Freedom of Information Act request with the whatever the automobile, whatever the transit automobile bureaucracy is and ask for all the cases of people who died because they weren't wearing a seat belt and the airbag went off. And that's the blood that's on Ralph Nader's hands and I was like, oh my god. So I file, I file the foil request and like two months later, like seven huge boxes show up at the Washington Post and it's all the case files. What did I do with that story? Nothing? And then so I remember this, and I remember letter, and I get to the New Yorker and I'm filled with shand I never wrote the story. I would have won the pull of surprise. I would have won the Letard gave me a pull of surprise. He was all there in the boxes. It was like hundred of people. I mean, it's sad.

00:27:14
Speaker 2: He did say it was sad hashtag sad said.

00:27:19
Speaker 1: And Leonard is not happy with me for not doing a story about this. So then I say, okay, I'll do the Ralph Natter story. Just I can't. I'm not now the ship is sailed, but we'll do the Ralph Natter story. And then I go. So then for some reason, I go to Detroit, but I don't hang out with Leonard. I hang out with his competitor at Ford, and I think he got very well. Lennon certain about that. It was unhappy. But the guy at Ford had this whole thing about three point belts and we crashed all these cars. It was so much fun. And then so I came back. But the point it all starts with Leonard. Like Leonard was a guy who wanted to play. He was an iconoclast, ignored, sitting in his office in Dearboat and nobody was listening to him, and he was writing these books that were read by seven people, and he was just great. He was just like and when you want to cover someone like that? And he was so thrilled with the idea that.

00:28:13
Speaker 3: I think another thing that thrilled you is that all the rest of us slobs who are writing about politics or show business or sports are obsessed with access. Right, you want to write a profile of Lebron James, you want to write a profile of Kamala Harris or whatever, and you have to go through these tentacles and seaweed of handlers and no and no, and can we have quote approval and photo approval?

00:28:44
Speaker 2: And the answer is no. Okay, blah blah blah. It's terrible. It's terrible.

00:28:49
Speaker 3: And I think part of it, And tell me if I'm wrong, was your antipathy to that? I mean, the closest I think you might have done to a true celebrity profile. One of my favorite pieces was the guy who was the Ronco what was it called the Ronco jar and bottlecutter.

00:29:06
Speaker 1: Oh, that's one of my favorite pieces of to all. Yeah, that I ever did. On the guy who did the Showtime artisary.

00:29:11
Speaker 2: That's really the right o. The retissary chicken God.

00:29:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, And but what I gleaned from that also, you you had a very early interest in here. We're going back a little bit. Before you were in journalism, you were in advertising.

00:29:29
Speaker 1: What was I wanted to be in advertising? I think they couldn't get a job.

00:29:32
Speaker 2: You couldn't get a job. Why did you want to be in advertising?

00:29:35
Speaker 1: Well, because I liked the idea that someone can tell a story in thirty seconds. I just thought that was fantastic and I was in awe of I thought the greatest achievement was a well told thirty second story was the hardest thing in the world. And the idea that it can make you laugh or cry in thirty seconds while they're selling you something. It's just in the degree of devillion on that is just author.

00:29:58
Speaker 2: Charts well Son, I wanted to do that. Hence what was his name, the Ronco Jority.

00:30:01
Speaker 1: Bottle, so Ron Pape he did the remember he did the He used to do the late night infomercials. He was the infomercial king and he did He made him a number of things. But his showpiece product was the Showtime Ortistery Oven, which was I claimed, dollar for dollar, the finest kitchen appliance ever made, and I still believe that to be the case. And I went out to la and I hung out with Ron, and it was I decided to go deep on Ron. And he turns out he's from like Asbury Park or somewhere in his His people were all.

00:30:37
Speaker 2: They were tumblers.

00:30:39
Speaker 1: There were sales on the boardwalk in New Jersey. They all sold like knives and stuff on the boardwalk. And Ron was the you know, another guy Ed McMahon was part of that circle. And a guy named Kidders Morris, who was rom p Appeal's grandfather, was a legendary guy from the Old Country who came over and was selling kitchen gadgets on the boardwalk. And they were they would do the spiel and you know, the chop chop chop. They'd have the they'd have the all the vegetables and they'd be sitting on the boardwalk and they would show you the knife and they go chop chop, chop, chop shop. And the whole thing was to turn. This is a crucial thing that he learns back then, which is so the crowd gathers around you and you got the Ginsu knife and you're chopping vegetables, and then at a certain first of all, you can't you have a He taught me this. He's like, you got the carrots and the potatoes, and you got the pineapple. You can't ever chop the pineapple because it's so expensive. It's just there. It's the thought that he might somehow one day chop the pineapple. That keeps the people coming. But no, no, you chopped the carrots. The carrots are like five cents of carrot. But the key thing is a turn. So the people come close to get around you, you're going chop chop, chop chop, and you got to sell them the knife, and they got to get out of there because the news one do people have to come in. That's the key, so that anybody could do the thing. Chop chop, chop, chop chop. People got around, But it's turning that crowd and bringing in a new one in a seamless fashion. That's and Ron was battle tested on the board He was the greatest of all the boardwalk. And then he goes to l A and he takes it up a notch and he starts doing late night infomercials. And he was so good. And I hung out with him and he from I was out there for like two weeks, mostly goofing around, but hang and I talked with the guy who collaborated with on the showtime oven, and I actually got it. I used to eat for years. I used to cook my chickens on the Showtime. It was amazing. No more, I think, I don't know what he got really squeaky In like year six, he had a squeaky road. I had a squeaky one. And Ron told me that I had to fix it, and I.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: Threw it out.

00:32:48
Speaker 1: But his big thing was you threw out the oven. I did his big thing that. You know a lot of the back then in the old days, the rotisseries. Uh, they they went like this like this is the spirit. They were vertical. And Ron's like, why do you do it? Vertical? Makes no sense? The juices flow to the bottom. Crazy, It's got to be horizontal. He's the guy who starts through Arizona at history and he was so it was so and getting into the family history and at one point he takes me to the grave site in New Jersey where all the whole the three generations of these legendary pitchmen who work the board bark and they're all buried in this thing. And he starts to cry, and it was just like it was just unbelievable. But the move there and this minitor, your dear friend Henry Finder, was very He was another very formative figure in this. He's like everyone. The standard move is to make fun of Ron Papeal. Do not make fun of Ron Papeal. You have to genuinely. He's a hero you have and if the reader thinks for a moment you're mocking the man, you've failed. And that is the single and to this day people make this air journalists due they think at some point they have to demonstrate their superiority to the subject. Yep, no, the subject. The subject is the hero, and you have to find your job. There's ten ways to write that. Peel had a very complic.

00:34:24
Speaker 2: Except in political reporting.

00:34:26
Speaker 1: But okay, yeah, well, but Ron had a. There's ten ways to write the ROMP Appeal profile. Nine of those ways you make fun of him, thank you, and one way you reckon. You look for what is what was fantastic about this guy, which is he devoted his life and his people for a three generations, devoted his life to making working in the kitchen a happier, healthier, easier, more efficient. That's a fantastic He cared about whether the chicken was vertical or horizontal. We'll be right back. We're back at the ninety second Street Y with David Remnick.

00:35:18
Speaker 2: You are no Lorna twenty three and you've just had a couple of kids. They're how old though?

00:35:26
Speaker 1: I got a toddler and a baby. I'm forbidden. I've forbidden sixty are you? You're fourteen?

00:35:38
Speaker 2: First of all, good luck, second of all, second of all.

00:35:45
Speaker 3: Famously And you once told me you know how you did one of your moves about college admissions.

00:35:53
Speaker 1: I love that stuff.

00:35:54
Speaker 3: Crazy they're getting in And then ninety second Street Y Kindergarten and Ivy League this and Da Da da and Canada. We just filled out an application the night before and I okay, all right.

00:36:07
Speaker 1: No, no, not even the night before you the day of day up, David. My parents weren't even involved. My father asked me where you applying to college? I was like, well, I'm just doing the form now.

00:36:20
Speaker 2: And what did you put on it? Monopoly?

00:36:23
Speaker 1: No, you just send the form in. It's like a page. You just send it in, all right.

00:36:27
Speaker 3: So your kids are gonna not stay toddler and yeah, baby for very long. I promise you that I this This is one area where I know more. How are you going to feel about college admissions when they get to be sixteen, seventeen eighteen, because you're your your rant about Ivy.

00:36:46
Speaker 1: League, which I've been doing for years.

00:36:48
Speaker 3: Which is it's one of the most perfected rants of all time.

00:36:51
Speaker 1: I got a new rant, by the way, I got I got two episodes of my podcast. It is so I've been working on this rant. You're right, fifteen years. I have perfect I got two episodes of my podcast coming out I think next week. It's called the Georgetown Massacre. It is when I say this is this is like it is my Beethoven's fifth it is my it is my White album, it is my everything else I have done.

00:37:22
Speaker 2: This is what's going on is just like.

00:37:26
Speaker 1: Chump change compared this is two parts two parts on one case involving a tennis player goes to Georgetown. And every single everything I've done as a writer has been building, building towards It's so genius and like, by the end, it's just like and it has twists and turns and it's just.

00:37:51
Speaker 2: It's Would you like to preview it?

00:37:58
Speaker 1: No, I don't want to give it away. You gotta listen to it, so I'm not giving it away. So good. No, but this is why I have to work for a living. But no, I know what you're saying. Am I going to be a hypocrite? Yeah? Of course? What the one thing I will not do?

00:38:15
Speaker 2: Though?

00:38:16
Speaker 1: Yeah? What? There was one place where I believe.

00:38:19
Speaker 2: Where are you gonna We're gonna draw the line?

00:38:20
Speaker 1: S a t prep Now I'm not I'm not making the call.

00:38:25
Speaker 3: Oh okay, you mean the call to the the mocher.

00:38:28
Speaker 1: Call you call in. I know, the guy who knows, the guy who knows the guy who's on the board, not doing that, Okay, I say.

00:38:40
Speaker 3: We talked about voice before and and one of the reasons I think that your podcast is so successful and so seductive and I don't miss them is that it has a real human voice. It doesn't feel read, even though I know damn well that you've worked on them really hard. Similar to your pros, it feels your written crows feels spoken, and vice versa, which I mean is high high praise. Podcasting is a relatively new form. Why did you gravitate toward it in such a complete way?

00:39:16
Speaker 2: It's not, it's not. This is not some advocation.

00:39:19
Speaker 3: In fact, at a certain point, you know you've done work where the book is an extension of the podcast is with the Bomber book. So tell me about that in your attraction to it.

00:39:29
Speaker 1: Well, there's certain kinds of stories. So for example, the story I was just telling you, what's George Semasker. You could you could write it, but it's not nearly as fun in written form. Right, So there's a certain kind of story which lends itself beautifully to audio, where audio permits you it could be more playful. You can get away with stuff. What does that mean? Get away with stuff? Yeah, there's no critical infrastructure, so it's like.

00:39:58
Speaker 2: No one's gonna I don't understand. You could be more full of shit.

00:40:02
Speaker 1: No, you could be like you have to be.

00:40:03
Speaker 2: You're careful I mean.

00:40:05
Speaker 1: I am. We're not not making stuff up. What I'm saying is people are more accepting of a kind of playful outlandishness. So part of the the Georgetown Masker episodes there there's the tongue is in the cheek, right even as I'm making a substante point, and.

00:40:25
Speaker 2: You feel you can do that more than on in Caslon type in.

00:40:29
Speaker 1: The Again, you would not let me write that for The New York You take it.

00:40:33
Speaker 3: Out because I would feel what it wouldn't work.

00:40:37
Speaker 1: It's like, I don't. It's hard to explain because a lot of what's playful about audio is stuff you're doing with your voice, right, So you're you know, I can I can adopt a tone of voice that says we're.

00:40:53
Speaker 2: We're having a fun, right, we're playing.

00:40:55
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like there's a character in the Georgetown Masker. Uh, there's it's part of it. There's a turn and we meet there's a guy who's charged in a case and he takes as his lawyer. There's the two legendary two greatest defense lawyers in the country, Roy Black and Howard Trevnick. These two guys in Miami and we meet Royan Howard. Now the first crucial thing is.

00:41:22
Speaker 2: I can.

00:41:23
Speaker 1: If I'm running a print version, you'll meet Royan Howard. I describe them like you gotta hear. When you hear them, it's just so much better and you realize, like, and then when you're describing them, I can describe them in a much more colorful way when I know you're going to hear their voice. Right, I can't explain it better than that, But there is something about I can. Like, Howard has got long hair and rides a motorcycle in the early morning hours and it looks like a movie star. And uh does this he in this trial? He does a he does a direct examination of the defendant's daughter that is just so masterful. I mean, it's just it's like and I was reading, you know, you read the transcript and you come to this thing and you're like someone because people like you and I. You know, our business fundamentally, it's not about We're not in the writing business. We're in the interviewing business. Right. We only to write because we've interviewed somebody. It's really interviewing.

00:42:28
Speaker 2: You think of it that way.

00:42:29
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, really, oh yeah, the whole game is interviewing. It's not okay, the writing is I would never write something without it. The idea of writing something just without having sat down first to talk to someone is unthinkable to me. Right, So when you a defense lawyer, is just a stipulate.

00:42:47
Speaker 3: That's the fun part for you. That's the that's the that's the juice of it above all.

00:42:51
Speaker 1: Well, I don't find the writing part hard. I find the the writing part is just it's just a matter of sitting down, and it's the it's unders.

00:42:59
Speaker 2: Tell any writers that, no, But that's the.

00:43:02
Speaker 1: Gift of being at the Washington Post for ten years. It used to be hard, and it wasn't. By the time I was done there, I was on the phone dictating the story. Like they solved that problem. The hard part is can I sit down with somebody and can I understand who they are and what they're trying to say and represent that in a way that's meaningful and powerful and all of that is stuff you get from the interview. You don't. You can't make it up after the fact, So you have to. Like I was doing this summer, I spent I spent like twenty hours maybe I've forgotten how many hours, ten fifteen, twenty hours with this woman he was a psychologist, and it was incredible, Like she agreed, thank God, to sit with me for that long. Who's telling you steal it? You're like the competition for goodness sake, that.

00:43:57
Speaker 2: Hurts me very much.

00:43:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, not telling you, I'm telling you. It was the same thing with the Paul Simon thing that we did. Yeah, I've heard of him where he you know, he sat for forty hours and the whole thing. The trick, not the trick, the what's interesting, what's hard about that was not writing it up afterwards. All those problems were solved in the interview. The trick was when we were talking.

00:44:22
Speaker 3: To him and I if I started to interrupt, which is the worst thing you can do in an interview. But I've interviewed Paul Simon. He's not immediately easy. And you had him for you know, on and on and on, and it got richer and richer and richer, and he is something you did something about you, your patience, your interest, your silence, whatever, whatever it was, and drew out a guy that I think it's fair to say, is not immediately thrilled with being the process of being interviewed.

00:44:57
Speaker 1: He was. I don't understand why he was so he was. He kept on. I kept on saying I'm done, and then he would he would say, no, let's when are we meeting again? And we would me and Bruce, my friend Bruce did it to get there, and Bruce I would look at you, yeah, Bruce, I would look at you like he really wants to do it again, and he would always do it again.

00:45:17
Speaker 2: And then I couldn't believe it.

00:45:18
Speaker 1: And I think that, you know, if I was kind of reconstructing why he was so kind of generous with his time, that would be part of it. Part of it was, I think we were uninterested in the parts of his life that he felt had been picked over. So we're not interested in your marriage to so and so, in the relationship with Art Garf, but we were really interested in his dad. And I remember there was one moment were was a musician who was a musician. I remember there was one time where Bruce and I asked him some question. I asked him some question about his dad, and he went He talked straight for like half an hour, got incredibly emotional, and then he said I have to stop, and he got up and walked outside. I was like, wow, it was there was something really deep and the idea it's so interesting, and it's that thing moment when you're giving somebody. First of all, it never gets old when you tap into something. So we had talked into something that was real about him. That his relationship to his father. He's a man in his seventies, his father's been dead for thirty years. He eclipsed his father in every conventional way by a million miles. And yet and he was still you realize, he was still writing about his father. He was still dreaming about his father. His father was still like with him. You know. It was just such a kind of like. But that when you get there, and that was that's a long time for us to get there. When you get there with somebody that, like I said, the writing is not hard when you get that kind of moment on the How.

00:46:54
Speaker 3: Did your parents affect the way you look? You're now at this some you're moving forward but slightly retrospective. You have kids, your life has changed.

00:47:06
Speaker 2: You look back on it. How did your parents inform who you are in your work?

00:47:13
Speaker 1: Well, my dad was uh was a He was a mischief maker in the He was someone who had no interest whatsoever in any authority in any he did not. The psychological term that best describes him was disagreeable. Not the psychologis. When he's a term, they don't mean obnoxious. He was the furthest thing obnoxious, incredibly gracious man. In psychological terms, disagreeable means you are uninterested in what in the approval of others. No, could care less. Just the idea of standing out and being different was just second nature for him. It wasn't that he relished that being different. He didn't care, just did what he was.

00:48:05
Speaker 2: He different, he taught man to man.

00:48:08
Speaker 1: He was. He was that kind of I've told this story many times, but he we came, we moved to Canada, were living in rural Canada and in kind of men in nite country. It was all these old older Mennonites, people who are like the Amish. They're in driving buggies and a barn would burn down and they would do a barn raising that all gather the next day and they would raise the barn in one day. Hundreds of Mennonites would come in their horses and buggies from miles around and they would, you know, have huge spread of food and they would just it was incredible to watch actually if you go to a barn raising, hundreds of them putting up a barn and and my father decided to join. And he see, so there's one car, a kind of you know, a volt his Volvo in with like a hundred horses and buggies, and he is like an English guy. They're all like clean shaven, wearing black pants and like these you know hats, straw hats, and he's like got a big beard and a tie, and you know, he looks like a mathematician, an English mathematics and drives up in his ball though with his kids in tow, and not an ounce of self consciousness, not even for it didn't even occur to him to ask permission to show up. He shows up and says, you know, basically, put me to work, and they're like okay, and they he doesn't know what they're doing. So he's doing the most manual labor. No one, none of the one hundred people this barn raising had more than a sixth grade education. He has a PhD in advanced mathematics. And he's the happiest man there. That's so my dad he's just like like and like went home and then never spoke about it again, or my other favorite story of my dad, a story he told me when he was in his seventies. I don't know why I never told him this before. He's married my mom. My mom is Jamaican. They're in Jamaica. He's teaching at the University of West Indies, where one of his students is Kamala Harris's dad common as a stat and he decides he wants to write. He's writing some paper and back then, if you needed a book, you would it wasn't There's no the book he needed was not in the University of West in his library, and he figures out it's at the Georgia Tech library, and so he's going to go to Georgia Tech. And so he writes a letter to the professor friend who knows that Georgia Tech. My name is Graham blahblah, I'm a professor University of we Sidey's I would like to come to Georgia Tech to read your use your library. Guy says yes, and he's preparing to go, and he learns later that it kicks off a panic at Georgia Tech. Because it's nineteen sixty Georgia Tech is segregated and they don't know whether he's white or black. They just know he's a professor from the University of WestIndies. God knows he could be a black guy coming to our camp. But we just invited a black guy to the campus. Holy shit. And like they go nuts. And finally there's no telephon there's no there's telephones, but there's no direct line. They try and find out who. Finally they reach you on the phone before he's about to come, and you know, he's called to the switchboard whatever, you know, Professor Glappel, Yes, this is so and so from Georgia Tech. Yes, are you white? He goes yes, and they go, oh, thank god. So then but this is the story's out over. So then now they're going to roll out the red carpet, right. But so he gets on the boat, sails from Jamaica. I'm like, he gets on the bus. How you did it? Back? Then takes the bus from Miami to Atlanta, goes they have a welcome dinner. They're all sitting down, all like these white men, right, And halfway through the meal, he pulls out a large eight by ten photo of my mom. He says, yes, my wife, I was going to bring over. I said it again, hands it around the room like no, to him, that was a fantastic moment, like show these guys never mentioned a word about that story for forty somewhere and then he's ran, He's like, oh, I went to Georgia Tech and I I had interviewed some guy there who was the head of the political science department, who was a black guy from Atlanta. And I told it to my dad and goes, oh, it's so funny. Was it all was that way? And then the story but his that was so hammy, just like he just it was like he just liked, he loved nothing more than like poking the bear. But he didn't, you know, you didn't make a big.

00:52:40
Speaker 2: Deal about it.

00:52:40
Speaker 1: He just wanted to go around poking the bear.

00:52:42
Speaker 3: Before I asked about your mom, you mentioned that your dad was taught Kamala Harris's far.

00:52:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, Donald Harris was a student of his. We knew him somehow. Donald Harris told me this, not my dad, because my dad obviously had passed by the time Kamala became a big deal. But yeah, they were Donald Harris. My mom knows Donald Harris is from is from Brownstown, which is where my mom went to school. She knows she went to school. She went to church at his father's church, and like they clearly must have seen each other across a few at the age of the degree of excitement in well all, I mean, first of all, what's hilarious is there's one group that says Kamala Harris is black. Then there's another group that says she's Indian, and then there's the Jamaicans or like she's a Jamaican, right, And so the level of excitement among the Jamaicans over her is my mother like, literally she's ninety three. There is zero chance she will exit this world between now and the election. Zero. It's it's not happening. Like the degree to which her defense I call her up, she's just the first time that's just defending Kambala against they were attacking her for her big thing is attacking her for not revealing her positions. She's just started. How can you how could she have positions before she's started? My mother's the whole thing is this should unfold over the passage of time.

00:54:21
Speaker 3: Is I remember I had the privilege of meeting her a few times, particularly in Washington, and she she struck me as a very proper.

00:54:29
Speaker 1: She's my mother is a very very Yes, she is a very refined, dignified Jamaican lady. Yeah, you don't nobody messes with she was. She also, you know, she loved also confronting authority and did it endlessly and to great effect in our little town. They had never met.

00:54:50
Speaker 2: How did she navigate rural Ontario?

00:54:54
Speaker 1: She just sailed right in. She she met all the kind of power brokers in town, charmed them, got on all the right committees. And I mean it was menn nights. So the men nights are There's no, they're not. They're the opposine end of the.

00:55:10
Speaker 2: They are not racist.

00:55:12
Speaker 1: It's no racist. There was no racist. You know, it was nothing. And also it's a very different now that I understand this, it's a very different different story when you're the only black person in town. I don mean, well, she talked about this time book. An outsider is not threatening at those in those numbers, right, particularly an outsider who is and she was. This is a deeply Christian town, and my mother is a very devout woman, and so she read very she seemed very familiar to them, even if she was at the same time in some sense exotic, but she's very She would never register even if something untoward was done to her, she would never register that in the moment, you know, she would hold it back and she would tell you about it maybe later, but it was in a And also there's a lot of us things will tell you this. It's very different to come from a culture where you're in the majority. You know, a story actually I told her an Elars when my mom was in she was a scholarship student at a boarding school in Jamaica, and all of the scholarship students were black, right, and they would be and they were all there because they were really good students. And so she's like eleven years old and she reads in the in Psyclar Britannica that black people are genetically inferior to white people when it comes to intelligence. And she is, no, she can't comprehend this because in her world, all the smart people are these in the Britannica. Yeah this is like from nineteen hundred. Ye they're still in Jamaica in nineteen thirty whatever. But in her world, all the smart people are black and the dumb ones are the you know, the plantation owners daughters you know these white kids from you know one general, They're like, what are they doing here? You know? And so it's like that's the if, that's your mindset when all you you know her, so she has a So you come to Canada and you have no comprehension of the base. You think of racism, You think of racist tropes as absurd, as opposed to being malignant.

00:57:19
Speaker 3: Malcolm, I, I want to thank you deeply for your your work and your friendship.

00:57:26
Speaker 2: I miss you. You live in like god knows where in upstate New York.

00:57:30
Speaker 3: I wish I saw you much more often.

00:57:34
Speaker 1: Your idea of Upstate New York is like Awestening. That's about as far as you go. You're like, we're we're thinking you and I are going away where you're going?

00:57:44
Speaker 3: Yonkery, what was your theory there was?

00:57:50
Speaker 2: What was the mountain Jews? I'm not a mountain Jew you, No, I'm really not.

00:57:56
Speaker 1: You know.

00:57:56
Speaker 3: I'm an environmentalist because I want there to be a wonderful and healthy environment for you.

00:58:03
Speaker 1: No, you're an environmentist because you you've you've been told there is an environment out there.

00:58:08
Speaker 3: I'm I check in with Betsy Colbert and Bill mckibbon and and and others.

00:58:16
Speaker 2: And I'm told, like the other day, I was.

00:58:19
Speaker 3: Walking into my my building and I heard this racket.

00:58:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I said, what is that?

00:58:26
Speaker 3: And the and the dork I said, those are birds. Evidently this is a bad attitude. I want to close by asking you a very crucial question. You you have have an ambivalent relationship with sports. With sports, you once said, and you're a huge sports fan, Buffalo bills running, You're terrific runner. But you've also said that sports are a moral abomination.

00:58:59
Speaker 1: Did I say that you did? Yeah? Yeah, I remember what what in what era of.

00:59:05
Speaker 3: My I think you were your annoyance with professional sports?

00:59:11
Speaker 1: Well, I do you know? So here's my in a nutshell, my current thinking on this. I was a very good high school runner, and then I quit and did run for thirty years and started again and became a kind of slightly better than mediocre.

00:59:30
Speaker 2: Better than that.

00:59:31
Speaker 1: But yeah, when I was at sixteen, I was up here. When I was fifty, I was down here. And I had way, way, way more fun when I was at fifty in mediocre than I did when I was fifteen and a national champion. And it is maybe realize that you actually you want to be mediocre. You don't want to be you don't want to be good, aside from the very very small group of people who genuinely if you're Lebron or you're Usain Bolt, fine, but the idea that the rest of us should be pursuing that kind of athletic excellence is in the stake and what's happened there is I think in the audience a woman named Linda Flanagan, who wrote this book I adore called Taking Back the Game, which is this critique of what's gone wrong with youth sports, and this is I think one of her this is one of her central arguments in this wonderful book which really changed the way I think about, which is that we've destroyed the very thing that made sports fun, play play right by this kind of professionalizing of youth sports. And I realized that was my problem. When I was fifteen, I was caught up in a fantasy about that I was going to go to the Olympics, and it ruined running for me. And I didn't run for thirty years. And that's heartbreaking because I learned running more than almost anything else, and I recovered my joy of running only when I was coming in twenty eight in my local five K. And so that's what I mean by like this. We shouldn't be telling. We shouldn't be Linda would tell you, why are you taking a thirteen year old and putting them through the torturing, the torture and getting in a car and driving for three hours for like a soccer match. Why the drive should never be longer than the match. That should be a rule, right, Malcolm Blodwell, thank you, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to that conversation with David Remnick at the ninety second Street. Why you can find Revenge of the Tipping Point wherever you get your audio books. Next time on Revisionist History, an update on Broken Windows theory. Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Ben the Daphaffrey and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Original scoring by Luis Kira, mastering by Echo Mountain, ring by Nina Bird Lawrence. Production support from Luke LeMond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and as always El Hafe Greta Cone. I'm Malcolm Glappo.