Malcolm Gladwell sits down with Trevor and Christiana to discuss his new book, and why values should be held tightly but ideas should be held loosely. The trio also delve into the importance of television in shaping culture, and into their respective African roots (yes, Malcolm has African roots). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
How did Malcolm discover his African roots?
They thought they were exactly the same. Two committed Christians who, you know, their fathers read the same books. I think that's the issue. It's just not good to spend all your time wallowing in political arguments.
But I also think it's this. I think, you know, I remember a friend of mine describing to me, he worked as a computer programmer. And I remember one day he was explaining the concept of the second system effect. The second system effect is what they teach programmers and coders about when working on a program and then moving it to the next version. And they go, you always have to consider
the things that might happen that you don't know might happen because you've now changed the program over. Because you always think of what you're updating, you always think of what you're improving, but you seldom think of what that could cause as a knock-on effect to what you didn't want, an unintended consequence. And oftentimes that's what happens, right? You...
You'll see it on your phone all the time. They'll go new software. And then very quickly afterwards, they'll be like, new software on top of the new software. Because we just realized that what the new software did was it made the keyboard unusable when you were sending a text to certain people in a group chat. That's a second system effect, right?
And that gave me a whole new way to think about life. Because now I would go, oh, sometimes we make a change. That is oftentimes an improvement, by the way. But we don't think of what the possible second system effect could be. Like streaming and the proliferation of TV shows and like, you know, like on demand. You can watch Breaking Bad when you want to watch Breaking Bad.
And have you watched Game of Thrones? I'll watch it when I, you know what I mean? It's given you so much choice. But what a lot of people don't realize is it's robbed us of communal consumption. But then what have we all seen? The debate. Oh, I saw the debate. Oh, I saw the debate.
Did you see the debate?
And so unfortunately now, I don't think it's politics so much as it's live. Live is the only thing that still exists in society that forces us to experience it at the same time. And so it's not sports and it's not politics. It's just these are the final vestiges of live television. The debates are live. The election is live. The Trump assassination is live. The Olympics are live.
The Super Bowl is live. But I think what it's done is it's robbed us of shared realities is what I think. I used to watch the same TV shows as my parents, not because I wanted to, but because I had to. And inversely, they had to watch the same shows I watched.
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