[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: The podcast. We should just say to sort of set the ground here. Set the ground? Does that ...?

ROBERT: Set the table.

JAD: Table? Whatever. That we are on the cusp of delivering five really fantastic shows right now.

ROBERT: So we're busy, busy, busy.

JAD: Very busy.

ROBERT: Which got us thinking about a conversation that I had a few years ago. [laughs]

JAD: Which is conveniently there waiting for us.

ROBERT: Yeah. With Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers and Blink, I was over at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Okay, just pull it to your mouth there.

ROBERT: The subject was: how do you explain people of really unusual exceptional talent?

JAD: Like, why are they so good?

ROBERT: Yeah. What is the nature of being exceptional? Is this working hard, or innate ability? Is it an accident? As we all know, in America, there's a real hunt on from a very early age to find the gifted and talented children. And we have programs in our schools all over the country trying to identify exceptional kids. Malcolm Gladwell hates gifted and talented programs.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: It's ridiculous. Why do you decide? So a gifted program says that we identify a child, and call that child gifted because of their performance at the age of whatever, nine or 10 or 11 years old. Why do we care particularly how well a child performs at nine or 10 or 11 years old? They're nine or 10 or 11. They're a good 25 years to making any kind of substantial contribution to the world. Why don't we wait? What's the hurry? And also, how do you know? So, you know, one child learns to read at four, one child learns to read at two and a half, right? So what? Why does it matter? Are the things that are being read between two and a half and four are such incalculable ...

ROBERT: No, no, no. It's just the normal parent’s response to, "Oh, if he's reading at two and a half, think of the things he'll do—" and it's just an extrapolation.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Reading is reading. Once you can read, we're done. I mean, it's not like there's an infinite scale, and that so and so reads better and better and better. And I can say—we can say today of Gladwell that he reads so much better than Krulwich, and that this is what separates the two of us. It's reading. I mean, like ...

ROBERT: Well, there is also among your—you used the phrase "The Matthew Effect." What is that?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Matthew Effect is a phrase coined by Robert K. Merton, the great genius sociologist of Columbia. He's the guy who says in the verse in Matthew, which says that, "To him who has much more will be given." And he uses this to describe the Matthew Effect, which is this notion that a small initial advantage, difference in—a small initial difference in the performance of any two people will inevitably grow because the person who's a little bit ahead will get so many more advantages that they will end up being far ahead. So a good example—there's all kinds of great Matthew Effects. So if you're born—if you're a young boy born in October, November or December, who has designs on being a professional soccer or hockey player, the deck is stacked against you. There's not much you can do. You should probably give up.

JAD: Wait. Why exactly?

ROBERT: Well, it's really an accident of birth thing. The month you were born in, Malcolm thinks, might make a huge, huge difference in your life. And here's his way of describing this. I'm gonna read here a passage from his book, Outliers.

ROBERT: On page 23 of your book, you do a play-by-play.

ROBERT: Kind of a clever way to do this.

ROBERT: We're at the Memorial Cup hockey championship, and I want to read what you wrote. "March 11 starts around one side of the Tigers net, leaving the puck for his teammate, January 4. He passes it to January 22, flips it back to March 12, who shoots point blank at the Tigers' goalie, April 27. April 27 blocks the shot, rebounded by Vancouver's March 6. He shoots, Medicine Hat defensemen February 9 and February 14 dive to block the puck. January 10 looks on helplessly. March 6 scores!" Question is, why did you choose this peculiar kind of nomenclature?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Because I wanted to make this point that all—an extraordinary number of hockey players are born in the first three or four months of the year.

ROBERT: 17 of the 25 players on the Medicine Hat team were born in those first three months.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes.

ROBERT: Why?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Because the eligibility cutoff date for age-class hockey in Canada, in the world is January 1. And we start recruiting all-star squads in hockey in Canada when kids are nine and 10 years old. But of course, when you're nine years old, the best one is the oldest one, right? So all you do is you choose the kids who are born closest to the cutoff date, and then you give them special coaching and put them on all-star squads until nine—and extra games and extra practice, until eight and nine years later they really are the best. And by the way, we see exactly the same effects in school systems, right? The relatively youngest kids in the class underperform the relatively oldest kids, and that underperformance lasts into the college years. The kid born—kid born in the last three months of—the youngest three months of their age cohort in school are something like—I forget the exact number—nine or 10 percent less likely to go to college than those born in the three oldest months. And we can fix it really easily. You've got three classes in an elementary school, right? Typical elementary schools divide them up by birthday.

ROBERT: Well, doesn't that mean, though, that you have to get—you have a half dozen soccer moms to work out the logistical problems because you've now got four leagues where you used to have one. And someone has to be in the Seward Park on Mondays and Wednesdays, but who's gonna be in Seward Park on Thursdays and Fridays, that kind of thing?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: So you would—just for the sake of efficiency ...

ROBERT: No, I wasn't saying that. I want to know.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, this is exactly—I brought this up with—I had a conversation with this hockey guy in Canada. Big deal, hockey macher. I don't know whether they call them machers.

ROBERT: You can call them machers here, absolutely.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: And I say to him, "Look, you're Canada. You want to be the best hockey country in the world. Why don't you have the three parallel leagues? How hard is that? Every single town in Canada has, like, 25 different hockey teams. Just divide them up. How hard is this?" And he's like, "Oh, it's too difficult."

ROBERT: Hmm. Well, let me give you a harder one, because—just another success puzzle from the book. I'll have to set up for you. It's about the Janklow family. So there's two Janklows. We're gonna talk about Maurice and Mort, but since those names are so similar, we'll call one Daddy Janklow and one Sonny Janklow.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah.

ROBERT: So Daddy goes to Brooklyn Law School, class in 1919. Sets up a practice in Brooklyn. He's an elegant fellow, dresses in a Hamburg, Brooks Brothers clothes, drives a big car, moves to Queen's, marries the right girl, works hard, hard, hard, hard, sets up a business, goes nowhere. Now the son, Baby Janklow, born 30 years later, gets a law degree, marries nicely too, works hard too, puts together a cable franchise, sells it to Cox Broadcasting, makes a fortune, creates a literary agency, Janklow and Nesbit, signs you. Now he lives on Park Avenue. He has an Anselm Kiefer painting and his own airplane. So the question is: the son succeeds, the father fails, why? Is this a question of talent or ...?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, that part of the book I'm really interested in generational effects. The worst year to be born in the 20th century is—all kinds of sociologists figure these things out—it's between 1900 and 1907, or maybe 1900 and 1910, that decade. Because you get out of college, and just as you're getting going the Depression hits.

ROBERT: Yeah.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: You have nine years of depression, and just as you're emerging out of the Depression and trying to make a go of it, you're shipped off to war for six years, right? And so by the time you come back and want to start your business, you're in your late 40s, right?

ROBERT: Yeah.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: So it's really, really hard for—whereas the best year to be born in the 20th century, if you live in—grow up in New York City—actually, I think anywhere, but particularly New York City is 1935.

ROBERT: Because?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Because it's perfect. Because you—it's the smallest birth year of the 20th century. You always want to be part of a really small birth cohort, because no one's competing with you, right? Think about it. So the difference between being a part of the smallest birth cohort and the largest one, the differences between the smallest one is enormous. It's like, per capita twice as many babies are born in, you know, 1920s than 1935. So if you're in 1935, there's this huge generation before you. So what did they do for that generation? They build big, huge, shiny schools and hire tons of teachers, right? Then there's no more kids. So you sail in, and all of a sudden your older brother had 35 kids in his class, you have 18. Your older brother competed against a zillion people to get into City College, you competed against no one. You wanted to join the debate team. No one went out for the debate team. You were captain of the debate team.

ROBERT: [laughs]

MALCOLM GLADWELL: You know, it's funny. You always talk to people in—born in these small cohorts, and they always think—you're talking to some guy, accomplished old guy, grew up in the Bronx, white hair, and he'll tell you about his extraordinary high school experience and he'll say "You know, I was the captain of the basketball team." And you look at this guy and he's 5'2".

ROBERT: [laughs]

MALCOLM GLADWELL: And you say to yourself, "This is a man who belonged to a small generation." Nobody was going out for basketball. Like, so these guys, they have it made it in the shade. And then they come into the workforce. They go to Harvard Law School. Of course, they go to Harvard Law School, right? No one's applying to Harvard Law School. Then they get out in the workforce. Do they get a job? Of course they do. Everyone's desperate for work because there's no one out there. And then what's behind them? The biggest generation of the 20th century. So they sail into positions of authority, and they have in front of them this enormous market to serve, right? It's just genius. You can even go more specifically. There's this "great" thing that happens—"great" in quotation marks—in New York City in the Depression, which is that a whole bunch of very, very, very able people can't get jobs in the private sector. There are no jobs in the private sector, so what do they do? They become teachers.

ROBERT: Yeah.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Right? And you talk to this generation born in '35 about their high school experience. And I lost count of the number of people of that generation who went to public schools in New York who told me, for example, that their math teacher had a PhD in math. And so here's a generation who not only could they be captain of the basketball team, but their teachers were these extraordinary people who were—by virtue of a lack of opportunity, ended up in the public school system.

ROBERT: So is that the difference then between Janklow dad and Janklow son, that it's just the axiom ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: It's the beginning of the explanation. I mean, I never met Janklow. I mean, you can only go so far with this, but it helps you to sort of set the stage to understand that here you've got these two very capable people, one of whom achieved extraordinary success and one didn't. And you—I think you have to go beyond the individual to make sense of that.

ROBERT: So there is such a thing as getting an accidental boost. And I mean, you know, nobody chooses when they're gonna be born. It's always mom and dad's fault.

JAD: Yup.

ROBERT: But there's something even bigger and even more important than good luck with your birthday. And to illustrate this, Malcolm cites the example of Bill Gates.

JAD: Billie.

ROBERT: The so-called genius behind Microsoft.

JAD: Why do you say so-called?

ROBERT: You'll see.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: He's the luckiest guy in the world. And he's the first to tell you that. He goes to—he shows up for eighth grade in 1968 or '9 at Lakeside Academy. And for reasons no one can remember, somebody on the parent's committee bought a computer for the kids, and—a little teletype hooked into a mainframe in downtown Seattle. And Gates has essentially—now what that allows you is to do real-time programming. Everyone's programming with cards back then, which is incredibly laborious, time-consuming, and you don't really learn how to program because it just takes too long. He can do real-time programming the way we program now on this little teletype. And he does that starting in 1968, basically for his entire teenage life.

ROBERT: You mean that almost literally.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. He told me this one story about he then goes through this whole series of things of finding other computers. At one point, Paul Allen, his classmate at this school, discovers that there's a mainframe that's free at the University of Washington Medical Center between—it's free between 2:00 and 6:00 in the morning on weeknights. And he's now 15 years old, and so he sets his alarm for 1:30 in the morning, and he crawls out the window, right? Because he doesn't want his parents to know. At 2:00 in the morning, walks three miles to the University of Washington, programs from 2:00 till 6:00, walks home, and goes back to bed. And his mom, upon discovering this years later says, "I always wondered why it was so hard to get Bill up in the morning." So the question is—he's clearly a brilliant guy, no one's taking that away from him, but he has this other thing which he—by the way, what's really remarkable about that story to me is when he does that, he's 15 so he's a teenage boy. And all of us here know about teenage boys, right? What does a teenage boy want to do? Well, what is one of the things a teenage boy wants to do? Sleep! Here's a kid, here's a teenage boy who was willing to surrender his sleep five nights a week to program from 2:00 to 6:00 in the morning. That is what's special about Bill Gates.

ROBERT: And it accumulates, right? It's three hours or four hours a day, and then five hours a day, whenever he can make it six hours a day. And for years and years and years now until he clocks in a lot of hours.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah.

ROBERT: And Mozart, I guess, played the piano for lots of hours, and Tiger Woods just played golf for lots of ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: These people are all examples of what's called the 10,000-hour rule, which is this notion that this brilliant guy named Ericsson, a psychologist, has kind of formulated this principle that if you look at any kind of cognitively-complex discipline, it seems almost without exception that in order to be good, you must practice at least 10,000 hours.

ROBERT: What sort of surprised me is you put the Beatles on this list. Why are the Beatles ...?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Because they go to Hamburg. Before they come to America, as teenagers they go to Hamburg and they play. They're the house band in this strip club, and they play eight-hour sets, seven days a week for months at a stretch. I mean, it's incredible. I mean, parenthetically, one cannot imagine a more dismal experience than playing—first of all, playing in a strip club. Secondly, playing in a strip club in Hamburg, and thirdly, playing in a strip club in Hamburg in the '50s. I mean, can you imagine?

ROBERT: [laughs] So they learned in those hours and hours and hours of playing every night, they learned just to play and play and play and play whatever, and somehow—because I mean, there is—in the book you're arguing, I think, that—you could say, by the way, that the Rolling Stones, I don't think went to Hamburg, and there probably were other Liverpool bands that did go to Hamburg and played in the same strip clubs and you do not know their names. So I don't know how you ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: It's a necessary—is it necessary and not sufficient, or sufficient and not necessary? I forget which way it goes, but whatever way it goes, it's that.

ROBERT: Okay. But now so what we got here then is you have this talent plus the persistence versus this Matthew Effect. That is with the Matthew Effect, you start out with these little accidental differences, and then coaches and situations magnify them so they get bigger and bigger. But with persistence, what seems to be happening here is the accidental differences that may have given you advantages get narrowed when you add the practice, add the practice, add the practice. Mozart at 13? Eh, you know, copying other people's work. Practice, practice, practice, practice. Mozart at 17? Better. Mozart at 23, 24, oh, my God, right?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah.

ROBERT: So Lennon and McCartney, eh, at 15, 16, 17, but when they make their jumps, they make leaps of a genius nature, leaps that are not available to other people. Isaac Newton, he goes home for vacation and thinks about, "How am I going to measure this?" He invents calculus. So you are being accused of being a genius denier.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes.

ROBERT: Are you a genius denier, or are you simply a genius disliker?

[audience laughs]

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, so there's clearly this thing called talent, right?

ROBERT: Right.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: And it's this—it's the magic dust that gets sprinkled onto persistence. It turns a lot of hard work into something great. And the question is: how large a role does it play, and what does it consist of? There's a piece I wrote years ago for The New Yorker. I remember writing about Wayne Gretzky and reading a biography of Wayne Gretzky. And he's a ...

ROBERT: He's a great hockey player.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Great hockey player. Greatest hockey player of all time. And as a kid, when he was two years old, his parents would sit him in front of the television and he would watch hockey games on Saturday nights. And when the game ended, he would burst into tears. And it was this little glimpse into his future greatness because here he was at two, and he loved this thing. He couldn't even play hockey. He's two. I mean, he can barely walk, but he already has understood he loves this thing so much that for it to end is an unconscionable burden, right? And it's just—it's like the world is ending and he's disconsolate. So what is Wayne Gretzky's talent? Well, part of it is his extraordinary vision, his coordination, his whatever it is, but a lot of it is this guy loves this game so much that he would do nothing but do it and think about it and engage it and do all those things. Now is this magic dust called talent, is that all it is? Maybe. I don't think that's denying or hating genius, though. I think that that definition of genius is far more appealing to me than the notion that it's simply some sky-high IQ or some ...

ROBERT: Well, this is the genius which just won't quit. And it can't—it won't quit you, sort of like Breakback—the movie about the two guys on the mountain.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: I'm recasting it. Sort of like what? [laughs]

ROBERT: Brokeback, Breakback. You know, I won't quit you. It's the love of hockey that will not speak its name.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Dare not speak its name. Yes, I suppose. That's not an analogy that would have occurred to me. [laughs]

ROBERT: Let me try it a different way. Maybe one of the things that I detect is that it's not that you don't like geniuses, it's that maybe you don't think we need them.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, no. Roll it back for a moment.

ROBERT: Okay.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Why are people so hostile to the notion that what genius is is an extraordinary love for a particular thing? Why is the love—you know, we hear the ability, definition of genius, the rare ability definition, and we think, "Oh, that's so plausible. Totally that's what it is." But then we hear the extraordinary love definition of genius, and we say, "He's a genius denier." Why? Why is—why are we so hostile to the notion that what separates the genius and the rest of us is the genius loves what he or she does more than we do, but we have no problem at all that what separates the genius is that they have some, you know ...

ROBERT: Well, because it misses the point. I mean, there are people like Paul McCartney ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Are you hostile to the notion of love, Robert? Is that what it is?

ROBERT: [laughs] No, I just want to make an obvious point here that, you know. Harry Smith—no, that's a real person. Harry X could love writing songs, but Paul McCartney could love ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Even the way you say love though is so—really, have you thought about this?

ROBERT: Come on. Your Harry X could love, love ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: That's better.

ROBERT: ... writing songs.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: He loves writing songs so much that he can't stop, but for lunch and dinner and sometimes not even those. But next door is Richard Rogers, little Ricky Rogers. He loves writing songs too, but for some reason Harry writes and loves writing, Ricky writes and loves writing, and Harry writes an unmemorable song called "The Babbling Book Goes To and Fro," and Richard writes "Some Enchanted Evening."

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, no.

ROBERT: But there's a difference there.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No. Well, hold on. Hold on.

ROBERT: The love doesn't get you.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, no, no, but the love does. So think about this. Love is not the complete explanation. Love is the way in. Because Wayne Gretzky loves hockey so much, he thinks about it all the time, and does more than that, he engages the sport in a way that no one else has ever engaged it. So there's this wonderful—I remember when I was writing about Gretzky, there's this thing that he famously did once where he scored a goal from behind the net, and he flips the puck over the net, like, kind of does a little thing and goes in. And the reason no one had ever done that before was not just that no one could do it, lots of people could do it, it had never occurred to anyone else.

ROBERT: Right.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No one had engaged the sport on that level. So why is Gretzky engaging in that way? Why is he thinking about it that deeply and creatively? Because he can't get hockey out of his head, right? Whenever I encounter someone like that, I cannot get past that sense they give off that they have—they have found their calling, that they are actively in love, in almost a romantic way with this thing that they do.

ROBERT: No, you're right.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Absent that you can't be a genius. I'm sorry, you can't.

[audience applauds]

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Are you convinced yet? Are you still holding out for some chilly abstract, you know Nietzschean notion of ...

ROBERT: No, I'm gonna pull back for a minute here.

ROBERT: We went on a little bit longer, but I think I can push ... [laughs]

JAD: Go Malcolm, that's what I say. I say go Malcolm right there. Although, I would say he might be shortchanging the idea that there's a diversity of ability out there.

ROBERT: Innate talent.

JAD: Yeah, but I do agree with him though, that the idea of genius, that old 19th century stupid idea, does contain within it a really dangerous thought, which is that our abilities are just sort of God-given and so they're fixed.

ROBERT: But his argument would be, you know, you need some talent, and you need certainly a little bit of good luck, but what you really need is this strange love of the thing you're doing. And it's the love—or the determination to succeed, if that's what love equals—that makes you just want to do it and then do it and then do it some more.

JAD: Amen. Okay, we should thank the 92nd Street Y and then get the hell out of here.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Thanks to them.

ROBERT: Thank you to Malcolm Gladwell.

JAD: And to you for listening. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: All new episode in two weeks. See you then.

[LISTENER: Hi this is Alicia, Radiolab listener from Grinnell, Iowa. The Radiolab podcast is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. Thank you.]

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