Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell is on the show today, who's one of the most influential nonfiction writers in the 21st century.

You know him from books like Outliers, The Tipping Point, David and Goliath, his essays, and The New Yorker.

And I said, Malcolm, I want to learn one thing from you.

I want to learn how you tell a story like you do.

Yeah,

in Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell said that by that point, by the time the Beatles had stopped playing in Hamburg, they'd already played more hours live than you two have done in a whole career.

There you go.

It's quite a

And then there's the authority gradient.

This case became world famous when Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in Outliers, arguing that Korean hierarchy and indirect speech kept the junior crew from confronting the captain, and that Korean Air later fixed the problem partly by pushing English in its cockpits.

It's a compelling story, and it's genuinely contested.

Critics point straight at the tape, sir.

Nobody gets good at anything by accident.

Malcolm Gladwell made 10,000 hours famous in Outliers back in 2008.

It came from research by a psychologist named Anders Eriksson on violin students.

Here's the part that didn't make the book cover.

It's so good.

His books, Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath.

His new book, which I would argue is his most important to date, is called The American Way of Killing: An Invention of an Epidemic.

He brings to light some elements of this debate we've never even heard or thought of, and they're so-

But it just really does unlock a memory for me of how I was feeling at that time, which I think is going to be super, super exciting for writing the next album.

I'm really excited to start going back to it and just gathering inspiration because I also love having specific stories and names and ideas and places in songs.

And this is just going to really help me formulate that, I think.

What advantage does this have...

And I was at a dinner recently and started talking about Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour rule.

And for those that don't know about that, Malcolm Gladwell from Elmira, Ontario, not far from where I am today, wrote a book called The Outliers in 2008.

And within it, he postulated, frankly, that to become... a world-class expert in something to complete the skill acquisition and knowledge acquisition.

Research shows that it's about 10,000 hours of deliberate direct practice in that area.