JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: Subject is ...

JAD: Fate. And ...

ROBERT: So after the marshmallow story, I was thinking, you know how people, when they hear a thing like that—that your child will be successful through life if it ...

JAD: You could know it at age four.

ROBERT: Right. This is actually how people behave. They try to figure out in their children, well, where are the deficits? Where are the advantages? How can we ...

JAD: As early as possible!

ROBERT: And yes, and they project out from the four year old straight to college.

JAD: Yep.

ROBERT: And there are some people in this world who find this obnoxious. And—and one of them is Malcolm Gladwell who grew up in Toronto.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Okay. Just pull it to your mouth there.

ROBERT: It's Canada. So they don't do any of this sort of thing. He's the author of Outliers. And at the 92nd Street Y, he told me how much he hates gifted and talented programs.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. It's ridiculous. Why do you decide? So a gifted program says that we identify a—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 from 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, like, my—you know, so 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 of such incalculable ...

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

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No but, like, reading is reading. Once you can read, we're done. I mean, it's not like there's an—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 like what separates the two of us. It's reading. I mean, like ...

ROBERT: Well, but now the effect, for example, on, like—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 a 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—you should probably give up.

[laughter]

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. Here—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. Oh, I want to read what you wrote. "March 11th starts around one side of the Tigers' net leaving the puck for his teammate January 4th. He passes it to January 22nd, flips it back to March 12th, who shoots point blank at the Tiger's goalie, April 27th. April 27th blocks the shot rebounded by Vancouver's March 6th. He shoots! Medicine Hat defensemen February 9th and February 14th dive to block the puck. January 10th looks on helplessly. March 6th 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, and are born in the first three or four months of the year.

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

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah.

ROBERT: Why?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Because the eligibility cutoff date for—for age class hockey in Canada, and the world, is January 1st. And we start recruiting All Star squads in hockey in Canada when peop—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 kid—the relatively youngest kids in the class underperform the relatively oldest kids, and that underperformance lasts into the college years. The kid born—the young kid born the last, you know, three months of—the youngest three months of their age cohort in school are something like—I forget the exact number—nine or ten percent less likely to go to college than those born in the—in the three oldest months.

ROBERT: But you know, Jad, I—I agree that, you know, when you're born matters, of course.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But I kept saying to him, well, what about, what about natural talent? What about if you really were a great hockey player?

JAD: Just popped out with it.

ROBERT: Just popped out with it. And then he said, "Well, it's really practice, you know, ability plus practice. Emphasis on practice." I said, "No, no, no. What about the idea of just being a genius? He has this problem.

ROBERT: You were being accused of being a genius denier.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes.

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

[laughter]

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, right, that gets sprinkled onto persistence. It turns a lot of hard work into something great. And the question is, how large of a role does it play? And what does it consist of? I mean, is a—you know—a piece I wrote years ago for the New Yorker, I remember writing about Wayne Gretzky and reading a—a biography of Wayne Gretzky. And he's a—he's a kid.

ROBERT: He's a great hockey player.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Great hockey player. Greatest hockey player of all time. And as a kid, when he is two years old, his parents would sit him in front of the television. He would watch hockey games on—on Saturday nights. And when the game ended, he would burst into tears, right? And it was this little glimpse into his future greatness, because here he was at two, and he loved this thing. He was, 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 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, you know, 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 if—is this magic dust called talent, is that all it is? Maybe. Why are people so hostile to the notion that what genius is, is an extraordinary love for a particular thing? Why is the love—so we're—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—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, some ...

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 that is? ROBERT: [laughs]

[laughter]

ROBERT: No, I just wanna 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 ...

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

ROBERT: Okay, come on. I'll do it different. Your Harry X could "love" ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Uh huh.

ROBERT: ... "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 Richard, Ricky Rogers.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: He loves writing songs too, but for some reason, Harry writes and loves writing, Ricky writes and loves writing. And Harry writes a unmemorable song called the "The babbling brook goes to and fro," and Richard writes "Some enchanted evening."

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, no, so, you're ...

ROBERT: But there's a difference there.

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

ROBERT: The "love" doesn't get you.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, no, no, the love—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—that remember in, 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, and it 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 them could do it. It had never occurred to anyone else before, right? No one had engaged the sport on that level. So why is Gretzky engaging it 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 in—actively in love, in almost in a romantic way, with this thing that they do.

ROBERT: No, you're right.

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

[applause]

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Are you convinced yet?

ROBERT: I—I ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: 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 and try another tackle altogether.

JAD: Well, let me just ...

ROBERT: I got a little shy there at the moment.

JAD: Yeah. But—but to give you credit, my Nietzschean co-host ...

ROBERT: Thank you.

JAD: You know, there are people who—who try, try, try, try, try, love what they're trying to do deeply and yet fail over and over.

ROBERT: But that—that's because they—they don't have the talent. That's what I was arguing. Doesn't have the talent to do it.

JAD: No, but I'm—I'm thinking of a whole 'nother category of being who just seemed doomed.

ROBERT: To failure?

JAD: Endless failure.

ROBERT: Like?

JAD: Well ...

JAD: Walters, you wanted to just play this from the beginning?

PAT WALTERS: Yeah. Just one second here.

JAD: This is our producer, Pat Walters.

PAT: You—you live in Arkansas, is that right?

MIKE BARRIER: That's correct. Yeah. Yeah.

PAT: I don't think you have road runners down there, do you?

MIKE BARRIER: No, the road runner—I think—I don't—I think they've—maybe gotten into the far western part of the state.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Road Runner: "Meep Meep."]

PAT: You know what that is, Jad?

JAD: I hate that freaking bird.

PAT: Yeah, exactly!

JAD: It's the Road Runner. And who is this—this dude?

PAT: This is Mike Barrier.

MIKE BARRIER: I'm the author of a book called Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation and its Golden Age.

PAT: He's basically the guy you call if you have, like, a big profound question about Looney Tunes.

JAD: [laughs] Looney Tunes.

PAT: Yeah. A few months ago, Lulu and I started wondering like ...

JAD: Lulu Miller, our former producer.

LULU MILLER: Why is the Road Runner so good? Because I am at least in the camp ...

ROBERT: That's her question?

PAT: Yeah, but before we get to the answer, I just wanna give you a little background on the cartoon.

JAD: All right. Go for it.

PAT: It's 1949, and you're at the movies with your wife. You go in and you take a seat. And when the movie starts, one of the very first things you see is a cartoon. And in the '40s and '50s, most of these cartoons were ...

MIKE BARRIER: Chase cartoons. Tom and Jerry being the prime example.

PAT: Problem was, this chase thing was a formula. It was rigid. And it got a lot of cartoonists kind of bored.

JAD: Yeah.

PAT: So one day this kind of famous cartoonist named Chuck Jones was sitting around with his buddy, Mike Maltese.

MIKE BARRIER: Just talking about what oddball combinations of characters that could be chasing each other. I think Maltese thought about having an aardvark chasing a gnu or something like that.

PAT: What's like a gnu? I don't even know what a gnu is. But just cut to the chase. Eventually they decided, "Let's make a cartoon about ..."

MIKE BARRIER: Coyote chasing a road runner.

PAT: And when this cartoon came out, it was huge. It was a hit.

JAD: What does it mean for a cartoon to be a hit?

PAT: Like, in those days, cartoons usually only ran one time.

JAD: Huh.

PAT: But this one was different.

MIKE BARRIER: Six months after it came out, they started making another one.

PAT: Which was almost completely unheard of. Which brings us back to Lulu's question.

LULU: Why is road runner so good? Because I am at least in the camp that it's way better than Tom and Jerry.

PAT: And Mike says it's actually all about ...

MIKE BARRIER: The coyote. He's an extraordinarily human animal.

PAT: And not just like in the facial expressions that he made and the ways that he looks at the camera a lot.

JAD: Yeah.

PAT: But actually it kind of was about the predicaments that he found himself in.

JAD: Meaning?

PAT: Take, for example, this one really famous cartoon. Like always, Coyote has got a plan. He has made a painting of the road.

MIKE BARRIER: Showing the road, continuing over a chasm.

PAT: Like, he's put this painting right at the edge of the cliff.

MIKE BARRIER: Had you thinking the Road Runner would run through the painting, gravity would take hold of him, and he would plunge into the chasm.

PAT: Road Runner comes flying down the highway and he gets to the painting ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Road Runner: "Meep Meep"]

PAT: ... but he doesn't fall.

MIKE BARRIER: Instead, the Road Runner runs into the painting as if it were—the road were actually continuing. But then when the coyote tries to follow the Road Runner into the painting, he runs through the painting and falls.

LULU: [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: long whistle and then a loud "bang" when Coyote lands.]

PAT: And he looked up at the camera and he shrugged, and he’s like, "Why did the bird get to run into the painting and not me?"

MIKE BARRIER: Gravity isn't this uniform indifferent force.

LULU: Mmm.

MIKE BARRIER: It's a malignant force that actually—that comes in and outta play, according to how inconvenient it can be for the coyote.

LULU: But that's interesting. The—the Road Runner isn't his real opponent at all. It's—it's the universe.

MIKE BARRIER: Right. Oh, yeah. No, he—he's chasing the roadrunner, but the universe is his opponent. Absolutely.

PAT: And that's kinda what makes the Coyote seem so human. He's in that situation that all of us feel like we're in sometimes: like the very laws of physics are against us.

MIKE BARRIER: Yeah. Yeah. It's almost—almost a primitive way of thinking, but you—but I think all of us lapse into this, you know, how can this happen?

LULU: Right. The universe is out to get me, like ...

MIKE BARRIER: Yeah, yeah. You can't be human and not feel that way.

PAT: On the other hand, even though the universe is screwing you, at least it's noticing you.

MIKE BARRIER: It's kind of flattering in a way. [laughs]

PAT: It's totally flattering, yeah.

PAT: And this, Mike says, is why the cartoon works. Like, on the one hand, it confirms our paranoias, and on the other, it kind of plays to our vanity.

JAD: Flattering. Is that really—I mean, when you said flattering a second ago, is that—is that really what it is?

PAT: You don't see it that way?

JAD: I don't know. I've never liked this cartoon because he never wins. It's like, what's more flattering to live in a world that actively screws you at every turn or one that just doesn't care about you? Like a Nietzschean void.

PAT: I don't really know. That's kind of tough.

JAD: I go with the void.

ROBERT: No!

JAD: What do you mean "No?"

ROBERT: Totally ignored by the universe?

JAD: Yes!

ROBERT: That's the worst!

JAD: As opposed to being actively, actively screwed by the universe? Yeah, sure. Ignore me.

ROBERT: You don't know—what you don't know—let me tell you a story.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: I went to ABC News and I did a story. It went very well. And then the next week I did a story which went very badly. And the head of the place, Roone Arledge called me into his office. And this was Roone Arledge, a legend in broadcasting. And then he put his face right in front of my face. His nose almost touching my nose, and said to me, "I hated this! I hated that! What's wrong with you?" And instead of being sad and upset, inside my head, like Wile E. Coyote himself, I thought, "Wow, he knows my name!"

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: "He watched my story!"

JAD: But if Roone Arledge had said that to you every single day.

ROBERT: He didn't do it every single day.

JAD: I know, but in cartoon form, that's essentially what's happening here.

ROBERT: Yes. But, but ...

JAD: The universe ...

ROBERT: ... cartoons ...

JAD: ... is yelling at you.

ROBERT: But the reason I like Wile E. Coyote ...

JAD: No. No. No.

ROBERT: ... is because I—I admire the guy. He has no evidence at all that anything good will ever happen to him, and yet he wakes up every day with hope.

JAD: Hmm.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Roadrunner: "Meep Meep."]

JAD: Hope schmope. He's just a masochist.

ROBERT: Thank you, thank you, Pat and Lulu. Thank you to Pat and Lulu!

LULU: See ya!

JAD: [laughs] we'll be right back.

[LISTENER: Support for NPR comes from NPR stations, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, helping NPR advance journalistic excellence in the digital age, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information at MacFound.org. And the George Lucas Educational Foundation, providing schools that work, strategies for 21st century success. Learn more at Edutopia.org.]

 

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