Malcolm Gladwell

If you read one of my books and you liked it, you're giving me a direct compliment.

You're saying, I like what you made.

But when you listen to a story,

made up of interviews with all sorts of people and archival tapes stitched together with bits of narrative here and there, you aren't saying, I like what you made.

You're saying, I like what you found.

And that's a very different thing.

One episode listeners ranked as a favorite on my Twitter poll, for example, is My Little Hundred Million from season one.

An episode all about the strange phenomenon of wealthy people giving millions of dollars to colleges that already have millions of dollars, as opposed to schools that don't have millions of dollars.

There's a moment in the episode where I call up John Hennessy, who was the president of Stanford University at the time.

Stanford is a tiny fraction of the size of its neighbors in the University of California system.

And yet in 2016, Stanford's endowment was $22 billion.

The UC system's endowment?

Much, much smaller, by about $8.5 billion.

So I asked Hennessy, do you ever imagine that a president of Stanford might go to a funder and say, at this point in our history, the best use of your money is to give to the UC system, not to Stanford?

It's an amazing answer.

And what's amazing is that he had every reason to duck that question or brush it aside or tell a lie.

But he doesn't.

He decides to be completely honest.

He owns up to the fact that even though he is an educator, he is not primarily in the education business.

He's in the Stanford business.