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The Mystery of Mastery with Adam Gopnik · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello everyone, Malcolm Glable here. You may have
0:25
Speaker 1: noticed that Revisionist History looks a little different this season,
0:29
Speaker 1: more things in your podcast feed, but I want to
0:31
Speaker 1: make clear you're still going to get your annual dose
0:34
Speaker 1: of ten scripted revisionist history jewel boxes. It's just that
0:39
Speaker 1: people kept coming up to me in the subway and saying,
0:42
Speaker 1: why can't we have more revisionist history, And finally I thought,
0:46
Speaker 1: like the man said, give the people what they want.
0:50
Speaker 1: So coming up this year we had the standard old
0:53
Speaker 1: school revisionist history lineup, including some on education, a crazy
0:58
Speaker 1: one about mothers, and a bunch on guns. And I'm
1:00
Speaker 1: very excited about it. But we're also doing more episodes
1:04
Speaker 1: answering your questions or arguing with you with the help
1:07
Speaker 1: of our embarrassingly overqualified ombus person, Maria Konikova. You can
1:12
Speaker 1: reach us by the way and Maria at info at
1:16
Speaker 1: Pushkin dot fm if you have questions or concerns or
1:19
Speaker 1: just want a rant for a while. And one of
1:23
Speaker 1: my favorite things we're doing though, is we're bringing you
1:25
Speaker 1: a series of conversations live talks or taped live anyway
1:29
Speaker 1: with people I admire, people I want to learn something
1:32
Speaker 1: from and who I think you'll enjoy as well. We
1:35
Speaker 1: had an amazing reaction to the chat with Justin Richmond.
1:38
Speaker 1: If you haven't heard that yet, please go back and listen.
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Speaker 1: This week and next we're running a match set of
1:46
Speaker 1: revisionist history live conversations we taped at the ninety second
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Speaker 1: Street Y in New York. The first Today's episode was
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Speaker 1: with my old friend New Yorker magazine colleague, and most
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Speaker 1: crucially fellow Canadian, Adam Gopnick. Maybe you know his most
2:01
Speaker 1: famous book, Paris to the Moon, or perhaps you saw
2:04
Speaker 1: his cameo in the film Tar, where he played himself
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Speaker 1: convincingly How might add Adam is a new book, The
2:13
Speaker 1: Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery, in which he
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Speaker 1: follows masters of their craft to find out just how
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Speaker 1: they do what they do. So here we go my
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Speaker 1: conversation with the one and only Adam Gopnick.
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Speaker 2: Thank you all for coming, Adam, it's.
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Speaker 3: A pleasure to see you. Malcolm.
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Speaker 4: It's the first time we've been together, certainly since the pandemic.
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Speaker 1: Yes, the last time we were on stage together was
2:45
Speaker 1: Were we not both debating the proposition that cats were
2:50
Speaker 1: better than dogs or dogs are better than cats.
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Speaker 4: We were, and I took the dog side. I took
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Speaker 4: the cat, and you took the cat's side. And I
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Speaker 4: ended my puration, my claim by saying that you had
3:04
Speaker 4: to understand that not only was it the case that
3:07
Speaker 4: on the merit it's all cats were Republicans and all
3:10
Speaker 4: dogs were Democrats, but you also had to understand that
3:13
Speaker 4: all cats were Buyish and all dogs were Jewish. And
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Speaker 4: somehow we won the debate in the middle of Manhattan.
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Speaker 3: It was the dirtiest thing somehow you wanted to be.
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Speaker 3: I was going to say it was the dirtiest that.
3:23
Speaker 2: Is by appealing to Jewish democrats.
3:26
Speaker 4: Well, there are so few of them in New York.
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Speaker 4: You know that it showed some bravery.
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Speaker 1: You were, yes, playing to the crowd. I suspect there'll
3:38
Speaker 1: be more than a little of that tonight as well.
3:40
Speaker 1: We're here to discuss your book, but as it's always
3:43
Speaker 1: the case, we shouldn't really just discuss the book tonight,
3:46
Speaker 1: because we want people to read the book. Yes, so
3:48
Speaker 1: I thought we'd talk around the book.
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Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's a book to talk around.
3:52
Speaker 2: And I want to do something very specific.
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Speaker 1: But before I introduced the specific thing i'd like to
3:57
Speaker 1: do I'd like to offer an overly simplistic, highly reductionist
4:02
Speaker 1: theory about.
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Speaker 3: The difference between dogs and cats.
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Speaker 1: No, no, between you and I? Or is it you
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Speaker 1: and me?
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Speaker 3: Me? Me? Yes, me, that would be one of the differences.
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Speaker 2: Right, Yes, here's the theory.
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Speaker 1: Right, I start with an idea, I'd like to explore,
4:27
Speaker 1: search for someone to be kind of window dressing, someone
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Speaker 1: appropriate to dress it up, and then pursue it.
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Speaker 2: This is the problem with my writing, of.
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Speaker 1: Course, because the reader's senses halfway through that I've chosen
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Speaker 1: the subject the person simply as a convenience to advance
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Speaker 1: this agenda of mine.
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Speaker 3: I'm going to dispute that, But all right, you.
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Speaker 2: Do the opposite.
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Speaker 1: Essentially, all of your writing is about you meet someone,
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Speaker 1: you fall in love with him, and then you come
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Speaker 1: up with some elaborate theory to justify your affection for
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Speaker 1: your character.
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Speaker 3: That I will I will accept that as a roughly true.
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Speaker 4: I think that there are a lot of people in
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Speaker 4: your stuff, Malcolm, who live on you.
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Speaker 2: We're not discussing me, all right. You can only discuss you,
5:07
Speaker 2: don't discuss your half.
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Speaker 4: I certainly think it's generally true. And I will say this,
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Speaker 4: and I will I will say it with a certain
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Speaker 4: amount of vanity that I love getting engaged with people,
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Speaker 4: odd people, strange people, interesting people, and I you know,
5:24
Speaker 4: John Opdyke once said, you know, someone said what's the
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Speaker 4: purpose of life? And he answered instantly to give praise?
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Speaker 4: And I always thought that was a beautiful.
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Speaker 1: Well, this is exactly what I was going to say next,
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Speaker 1: which is the other distinctive feature is of your writing,
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Speaker 1: is that all of your real pieces, as opposed to
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Speaker 1: your critics pieces, which I don't mean they're not real,
5:44
Speaker 1: but I mean all the pieces of some journalists.
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Speaker 3: That are not the higher homework. Right, yea.
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Speaker 1: You always like the subject the subject. You're never at
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Speaker 1: odd to the subject. And even when you are at
5:53
Speaker 1: obvious of the subject, you've got to great pains to
5:56
Speaker 1: suggest you're not really at allous.
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Speaker 2: That just happens in his book, but he will get there.
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Speaker 3: Yes, Yes, that's interesting you say that, Malcolm. I've never
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Speaker 3: quite conceptualized it that way. I think it's true.
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Speaker 4: You know, the great kind of transformative moment of my
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Speaker 4: life as a writer, my life is a man as
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Speaker 4: a person, was when I joined the New Yorker in
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Speaker 4: nineteen eighty six, and I was put to work writing
6:18
Speaker 4: the Talk of the Town. Back in those days, Talk
6:20
Speaker 4: of the Town was beautifully anonymous. That was part of
6:23
Speaker 4: the glory of it, because John McPhee would contribute, or
6:27
Speaker 4: John Updyke, and then you know, a little schnor like
6:30
Speaker 4: me would be thrown into the mix as well. And
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Speaker 4: it was the great epiphany of my life because up
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Speaker 4: until that moment I had been a graduate student. I mean,
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Speaker 4: my whole life, I'd been a graduate student. I was
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Speaker 4: a graduate student when I was six years old because
6:42
Speaker 4: I come from an like you, I come from an
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Speaker 4: academic family, and that was the way I had been raised,
6:48
Speaker 4: you know, pursuing a PhD since third grade, and the
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Speaker 4: way you become, the way you're trained and taught to
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Speaker 4: think and write is argumentative through buts my sister, Allison,
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Speaker 4: brilliant mind still works that way, right. Somebody says something
7:04
Speaker 4: and you controvert it, you say, but on the other hand,
7:07
Speaker 4: that's not entirely true. People say that parenting is the
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Speaker 4: most important thing in the world, but in truth, you
7:12
Speaker 4: can't parent.
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Speaker 1: The difference between improv and academia, yeah, academia is.
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Speaker 5: Yes, but yes, improv yes, And and that's what I
7:21
Speaker 5: realized when I was thrown out onto the streets to
7:24
Speaker 5: go cover table hockey tournaments in Flatbush and wonderful editor
7:27
Speaker 5: Chipmograph and you know slack rope walkers lived on house
7:31
Speaker 5: boats in the Hudson is that you couldn't argue with
7:34
Speaker 5: these people.
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Speaker 4: You had to illuminate them. You had to caricature them
7:38
Speaker 4: at times in a positive sense. You had to draw
7:40
Speaker 4: quick portraits of them. But yes, exactly, it was yes,
7:43
Speaker 4: and and that the only way to write beautifully, the
7:46
Speaker 4: only way to write descriptively, evocatively, significantly, was to construct small,
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Speaker 4: descriptive sentences connected by Ann's not long contentious sentences disrupted
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Speaker 4: by butts. And that moment of moving from one to
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Speaker 4: the other was the great moment in mind.
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Speaker 1: You were the first person to come to the New
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Speaker 1: Yorker and be forced to dumb it down.
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Speaker 4: Well, yes, there's a truth in that, but dumb it
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Speaker 4: down on not in the in ultimate sense. To embrace
8:12
Speaker 4: a form of if you like, phone naive writing, To
8:15
Speaker 4: embrace a form of minimalism, that wonderful New York And
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Speaker 4: tradition that extends from eb White and Thurber right into
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Speaker 4: my fingers. At least if no one else is, and
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Speaker 4: that with many others, but I mean I esteem it particularly,
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Speaker 4: So Yes, I think that's true, and I think it's
8:30
Speaker 4: one of the things that makes the New Yorker tradition remarkable,
8:33
Speaker 4: is the is its insistence, or it's implied insistence through
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Speaker 4: a tradition that the best writing are small, descriptive sentences
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Speaker 4: connected by ants.
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Speaker 2: Okay, so here's what I want to do.
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Speaker 1: Yes, I'm just gonna I'm just going to name names
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Speaker 1: from the book, and I would like you to tell
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Speaker 1: us something about your relationship with that character. But how
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Speaker 1: you met them, why you like them, what they're like.
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Speaker 1: You don't need to touch on their role in the book.
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Speaker 2: You can get there.
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Speaker 1: But there's all these there's a ton of names, and
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Speaker 1: I'm going to pick them more or less at random,
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Speaker 1: and then some of them my moony pick because I
9:09
Speaker 1: have things I want to say about them, just so
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Speaker 1: I can be involved in this conversation.
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Speaker 2: But let's start with your mother.
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Speaker 3: Oh, my mother? Where to begin with my mother?
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Speaker 2: First? Describe your mother, like physically, physically.
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Speaker 4: My mother is a small woman who is, among other things,
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Speaker 4: was a professor of linguistic It's a very distinguished scientist
9:35
Speaker 4: instrumental discovering the first gene for Grammar HOFX and P.
9:40
Speaker 3: We all had to learn the name of it when
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Speaker 3: we were children. But she's a small one.
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Speaker 4: She also designs jewelry, and she wears somewhat eccentric clothing.
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Speaker 4: So if you saw her, you'd see this woman with long,
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Speaker 4: unkempt hair, looks atle like Stregananona, who's wearing all of
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Speaker 4: this avant garde jewelry. You can't really approach her to
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Speaker 4: hug her because it's too dangerous. The jewelry is a
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Speaker 4: little like barbed wire and is an in constant activity,
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Speaker 4: constant active. And I should add that she's, you know,
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Speaker 4: a little more subdued now at eighty eight than she
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Speaker 4: used to be in the book, I go up to
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Speaker 4: bake with her because I had never done that. I
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Speaker 4: have a complicated relationship with her. I don't mean to
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Speaker 4: be sacriine about it at all. You know, we're very
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Speaker 4: much alike. And she's a driven person, as am I
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Speaker 4: in lots of ways, in every way. But she's an
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Speaker 4: amazing baker, and she's an amazingly inventive.
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Speaker 3: And impatient person.
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Speaker 4: And I thought in this book and in life generally
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Speaker 4: that the best way I could connect with her was
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Speaker 4: through a shared activity. It's always been only the best
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Speaker 4: way to connect with her. You know, can't really can't
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Speaker 4: really talk with her. I mean, of course you can,
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Speaker 4: but I have a conversation. But the happiest moments were
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Speaker 4: always when we were doing something together. I have this
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Speaker 4: incredibly intense memory, which is the book begins with, of
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Speaker 4: when I'm really little with my I have many sisters,
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Speaker 4: but this is my sister Allison, and she was unrolling
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Speaker 4: strudle on a table.
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Speaker 3: We were living in a housing project at that point, and.
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Speaker 4: Just watching her looking up and watching her unroll this
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Speaker 4: rule and make it kind of parchment thin. I thought,
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Speaker 4: that's real. That was my first experience of mastery. That's
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Speaker 4: my mother.
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Speaker 1: Since you're talking about you, whether I want to test
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Speaker 1: seven ideo. Recently, I have come to believe in the
11:21
Speaker 1: asymmetrical theory of parental memories, which is that everyone, when pressed,
11:28
Speaker 1: has way more memories of one parent than the other.
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Speaker 1: So we all have one not that we one parent
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Speaker 1: that we favor, no, but one parent who is who
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Speaker 1: is vivid, yes, who consumes all of our kind of storytelling.
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Speaker 1: In your case, your mother and your work has loomed
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Speaker 1: much larger than your father.
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Speaker 4: Yes, although even though in fact I'm extremely close to
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Speaker 4: my father and admire him limitlessly, dedicated the book on
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Speaker 4: Liberalism to him because he had taught me all of
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Speaker 4: those things. But my father is, in his nature a
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Speaker 4: more recessive person than my mother. There is one chapter
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Speaker 4: that's very much about my father in this and it's
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Speaker 4: the first time I've ever really written about him about
12:05
Speaker 4: learning to drive, because when I was learning to drive
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Speaker 4: in my fifties, with my son Luke getting we got
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Speaker 4: our licenses on the same day. I believe that's the
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Speaker 4: only time that's ever happened. And my father was haunting
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Speaker 4: me the whole time. Because my father is the most
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Speaker 4: gently competent human being you will meet. And one of
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Speaker 4: the things was he had been driving since he was fourteen,
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Speaker 4: and he was the sort of person who thought nothing.
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Speaker 4: You know, he has six kids and twenty grandchildren of
12:29
Speaker 4: driving to a grandchild in Baltimore from rural Ontario where
12:33
Speaker 4: they live for nineteen hours, and we just would do
12:37
Speaker 4: things like that. He was an utterly competent man. And
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Speaker 4: I think we all make ourselves a little bit in
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Speaker 4: the shadow of our father's accomplishments, but also by bending
12:46
Speaker 4: away from the shadow into our own sunshine. So my
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Speaker 4: father was so super competent in all those ways that
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Speaker 4: I made myself notably incompetent in the little tasks of life.
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Speaker 4: So my wife Martha did all the driving in our family,
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Speaker 4: and I was the one in the as my daughter Olivia,
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Speaker 4: who's here someplace? And I would point out the gendered seat,
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Speaker 4: which we usually assigned to women in our culture. Sure
13:09
Speaker 4: where I'm the one passing out the cookies and saying, hey, kids, kids,
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Speaker 4: got to be quiet. Mom's trying to find the exit. Now,
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Speaker 4: you know when we would be that will be there soon.
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Speaker 4: I promise you will be there soon. Let mom concentrate.
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Speaker 4: And I was in that seat for decades, and then
13:23
Speaker 4: I wanted to just nudge over to the other seat
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Speaker 4: a bit. And so that was very much about my father,
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Speaker 4: But absolutely my mother is the vivid person.
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Speaker 1: All right, all right, next name on the list. None
13:33
Speaker 1: of us knew him, but both of us are fascinated
13:35
Speaker 1: by him. Bud Schulberg. Oh we do a Bud Scholberg
13:38
Speaker 1: shout out.
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Speaker 3: We should definitely do a Bud Shoulberg shout out.
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Speaker 4: We're better than at the Why I've been trying to
13:43
Speaker 4: get the Library of America to put Bud Schulberg in print,
13:46
Speaker 4: you know, for a while, and maybe I still can't.
13:48
Speaker 4: Bud Schulberg, as all of you will know, was a writer,
13:53
Speaker 4: a journalist, most famous as a screenwriter, wrote the screenplay
13:56
Speaker 4: for On the Waterfront and other things.
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Speaker 3: But he wrote one of the most beautiful and.
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Speaker 4: Forgotten novels in American English, called The Disenchanted, about his
14:06
Speaker 4: bizarre adventures writing a screenplay with the then on the
14:09
Speaker 4: brink of death Scott Fitzgerald. And it's the most beautiful
14:12
Speaker 4: portrait of Scot Fitzgerald that we have, and remarkable.
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Speaker 3: Guy, and his stuff should be back in print.
14:18
Speaker 4: And I suspect quick parenthetical that his name hurt him.
14:24
Speaker 4: One of my pet theories is that writers are very
14:26
Speaker 4: dependent on their names. Right, there's a moment there was
14:29
Speaker 4: a Dr Johnson says someplace that there was a poet
14:32
Speaker 4: laureate in England named Elkana Settle, and no one could
14:35
Speaker 4: ever believe that he could write a good poem with
14:37
Speaker 4: a name like el Conna Settle.
14:39
Speaker 3: And I have struggled with this my whole life.
14:41
Speaker 4: Because Gopnik has got to be the single ugliest, most
14:44
Speaker 4: non euphonious name there is. And Bud Sholberg, right, it
14:47
Speaker 4: sounds like a guy who runs a store, right, Whereas
14:50
Speaker 4: you know, J. D. Salinger is clearly a writer of you.
14:53
Speaker 4: So that's something we all say.
14:55
Speaker 2: There should be a version of Elis Island for writers.
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Speaker 4: Yes, exactly, exactly, that's the whole story there about why
15:02
Speaker 4: the name got didn't get changed at Elis Island.
15:04
Speaker 3: But I'll spare you for the moment.
15:08
Speaker 4: Jamie Swiss, Oh, Jamie Swiss is a different I just
15:12
Speaker 4: was texting with him. Jamie is the most gifted and
15:16
Speaker 4: most irascible magician there's ever been. He's a true intellectual
15:20
Speaker 4: of the magic world, and he is a truly contentious person.
15:23
Speaker 4: And what I love about Jamie's is he's a magnificent
15:26
Speaker 4: sleight of handman, a great teacher. He taught my son
15:29
Speaker 4: Luke card magic, and he was the most exacting, demanding
15:33
Speaker 4: and rewarding, replenishing teacher you could possibly have. But Jamie's
15:37
Speaker 4: just a beautifully irascible person who cannot take anything lightly.
15:42
Speaker 4: You know, as you know I say in the book someplace,
15:45
Speaker 4: you know that people don't take magicians seriously right. And
15:48
Speaker 4: they go up to the magicians say oh, I know
15:50
Speaker 4: how you did that, which is like going up to
15:52
Speaker 4: yo yo ma and saying, oh, I know how you
15:54
Speaker 4: did that. You just scraped that thing along the strings,
15:57
Speaker 4: didn't you. I know how you did that. I have
15:59
Speaker 4: an uncle who does the same thing all the time.
16:02
Speaker 4: And most magicians just kind of bite their lips and say,
16:05
Speaker 4: oh good, And I'm glad to hear that. And Jamie
16:07
Speaker 4: is the one that says, you have no idea, Yeah,
16:09
Speaker 4: how the fuck I did that? You have no fucking
16:12
Speaker 4: idea how I did that, So don't tell me you do.
16:15
Speaker 4: And he's a contentious magician and it's wonderful and he's brilliant.
16:19
Speaker 4: He's one of my dearest friends, and I love him
16:22
Speaker 4: exactly because he takes magic at the most serious and
16:26
Speaker 4: conceivable level and won't allow it to be minimized or
16:30
Speaker 4: condescended to though he did say to me once, the
16:33
Speaker 4: only reason mimes exists is so the magicians have someone
16:36
Speaker 4: to patronize.
16:39
Speaker 1: What I love about your the best way. The chapter
16:42
Speaker 1: of this book on magic is magic. It's the thing
16:46
Speaker 1: that I never really understood about magic until you wrote
16:49
Speaker 1: about it. And I could never tell whether this is
16:52
Speaker 1: true of magic or just true of you on magic,
16:55
Speaker 1: which is that all these magicians, at least the ones
16:59
Speaker 1: you writ about, have thought so deeply and beautifully and
17:05
Speaker 1: profoundly about their craft in a way that no other
17:09
Speaker 1: you know, I've just spent for pat of reasons the
17:12
Speaker 1: last couple of weeks months really interviewing one trauma surgeon
17:16
Speaker 1: after another. Uh, and trauma surgents are incredibly interesting.
17:20
Speaker 2: The work they do is really, really, really really hard.
17:23
Speaker 1: The technology changes every and technique changes every ten minutes.
17:27
Speaker 2: But they don't.
17:28
Speaker 1: They're not talking about it on a philosophical level. It's
17:32
Speaker 1: they've taken something that's beautifully powerfully complicated and they have
17:37
Speaker 1: made it intensely practical.
17:39
Speaker 4: And they talk about it well. Shop talk is the
17:42
Speaker 4: most beautiful talk that there is. One of the reasons
17:44
Speaker 4: writers are so occupationally miserable, it's because we have no
17:48
Speaker 4: shop talk really to talk about, right, talk about keyboards, computers,
17:52
Speaker 4: advances and publishers, and then that's it, right, we don't.
17:55
Speaker 3: Magicians have the most beautiful.
17:57
Speaker 4: And rapturous shop talk of anyone because they can only
18:00
Speaker 4: talk about it to other magicians. They have a high
18:02
Speaker 4: level of trauma surgeon like technique. But they can't tell
18:06
Speaker 4: you or me about it. They can only talk about
18:07
Speaker 4: it to other magicians. There's an intensity, an intellectual intensity,
18:11
Speaker 4: of what they do. I will add as well, of course,
18:13
Speaker 4: and this is the implicit, if tenderly loving accusation you're making.
18:18
Speaker 4: I seek out the intellectual magicians, and they seek and
18:21
Speaker 4: they choose to speak to me.
18:24
Speaker 2: What is it that drew you to magic? Was it
18:27
Speaker 2: that did Luke discovered? Or did you Luke?
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Speaker 4: It was simultaneously that my son Luke discovered magic and
18:33
Speaker 4: found that he gave him far more meaning, accomplishment, significance
18:37
Speaker 4: than anything he was studying in school. So I was
18:39
Speaker 4: drawn into it through Luke's obsessive interest in magic. But
18:44
Speaker 4: then I loved it too once I started going to
18:47
Speaker 4: Monday Night Magic and other things too, because it seemed
18:49
Speaker 4: like such a model of art of a very modest kind.
18:54
Speaker 4: You know, magicians aren't because they feel oppressed all the time.
18:58
Speaker 4: But the idea that you would have a profound technique
19:03
Speaker 4: that you kept to yourself, the idea that your primary
19:06
Speaker 4: impulse was to entertain rather than to impress or to intimidate,
19:14
Speaker 4: That that would be that you would have all of
19:15
Speaker 4: these skills, but you would use them for the purposes
19:18
Speaker 4: of delight. That spoke somehow to my ideals for writing
19:21
Speaker 4: and my ideals for art generally. And I was very taken,
19:24
Speaker 4: instantly taken by the company of magicians.
19:26
Speaker 3: I loved the company of magicians.
19:28
Speaker 4: The people I most have enjoyed hanging out with in
19:31
Speaker 4: life are magicians and cooks, and they have a great
19:33
Speaker 4: deal in common.
19:34
Speaker 3: They both.
19:35
Speaker 4: There's an artisanal basis to everything they do. They are
19:38
Speaker 4: expert at doing something. But there and there tend to
19:41
Speaker 4: be very temperamental people who have very difficult lives. Nothing
19:45
Speaker 4: is harder than running a restaurant, except running a magic show.
19:49
Speaker 4: And yet the whole purpose of their existence is to delight.
19:54
Speaker 4: And I find this something sort of noble and even
19:57
Speaker 4: saintly about that.
19:58
Speaker 3: I love it.
19:58
Speaker 1: There's no high theory attached to the cookiechef.
20:02
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, there is.
20:03
Speaker 4: If you get chefs talking that, you know, I don't
20:06
Speaker 4: have it as much in this book. But you get
20:08
Speaker 4: chefs to talking about the ethics of seasonality or what
20:12
Speaker 4: counts as local and what doesn't, or you even get
20:15
Speaker 4: them talking about whether you have tarragon leaves or Tarragon
20:19
Speaker 4: stems in a Brene sauce.
20:21
Speaker 3: They'll go on forever. You know. They have the same
20:23
Speaker 3: kind of passionate chop talk which I love to hear.
20:29
Speaker 1: More from the real work on the mystery of Mastery
20:33
Speaker 1: in a moment. Now back to my conversation on Mastery
20:53
Speaker 1: with Adam Gopnik at the ninety second Street Y in
20:55
Speaker 1: New York.
20:58
Speaker 2: George Plimpton. I bring him up only because.
21:02
Speaker 1: In this book, Adam goes in a series of quests
21:07
Speaker 1: to master certain activities baking, boxing, magic, et cetera. Driving, drawing, Uh,
21:16
Speaker 1: drawing is the first one, and I'm wondering, is it
21:19
Speaker 1: an echo of George Plimpton? And how do you feel
21:22
Speaker 1: about George Primpton?
21:23
Speaker 4: That's a that's such an acute question, because I deliberately
21:26
Speaker 4: dropped George Plimpton's name in the opening chapter, thinking no
21:31
Speaker 4: one will pick up on my little homage to Plimpton
21:34
Speaker 4: in the opening chapter because it goes by very quickly.
21:36
Speaker 4: But I put that there exactly for that reason. George
21:39
Speaker 4: Plimpton did these wonderful books paper Lin, mad Ducks and
21:41
Speaker 4: Bears about his own engagement as an amateur. We'd go
21:46
Speaker 4: and he would box, with Archie Moore, or he would
21:49
Speaker 4: play quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and so on, and
21:52
Speaker 4: so there's certainly an element of plymptoness in this. His
21:56
Speaker 4: book Mad Ducks and Bears is one of the most
21:57
Speaker 4: entertaining sports books ever written. So I greatly admire his
22:01
Speaker 4: prose writing. But it isn't the plimpton like book in
22:03
Speaker 4: the sense that Plimpton's comedy came out of his.
22:09
Speaker 3: Incapacity to do it.
22:10
Speaker 4: You know, Plimpton was making it was had he was
22:14
Speaker 4: a wonderful writer, but he had kind of one joke
22:16
Speaker 4: to tell, right, I attempt to do this thing, I
22:18
Speaker 4: learn a lot, and then I fail at it. And
22:21
Speaker 4: I wanted to tell two jokes. I attempt to do
22:24
Speaker 4: this thing and I enter into the world of the
22:28
Speaker 4: people who do it.
22:28
Speaker 3: Well, Plimpton did that too, I guess.
22:30
Speaker 4: But yes, certainly Plimpton is one of the ghosts to
22:32
Speaker 4: someplace in the back of the book. And I put
22:35
Speaker 4: him in one sentence and you caught it.
22:39
Speaker 1: But he But I want you to talk a little
22:41
Speaker 1: bit more about the difference. So both of you are
22:44
Speaker 1: beginning in the same spirit, yes, which is there are
22:48
Speaker 1: worlds outside your own experience, that fascinates you, and you
22:52
Speaker 1: would like to you would like to bear witness to them,
22:56
Speaker 1: to experience.
22:57
Speaker 4: I guess, and I say this in there's every reason
22:59
Speaker 4: to prefer Plimpton's approach, which is more amateur to my own.
23:04
Speaker 4: But I can't resist being a bit of a generalizer,
23:07
Speaker 4: a theory producer about it. And the book is full
23:10
Speaker 4: of my generalizations, my guesses, my attempts to find the
23:15
Speaker 4: commonality across all of these dimensions, boxing and dancing. What
23:20
Speaker 4: do they have in common? What's similar about the way
23:23
Speaker 4: we learn them? I can't I can't not be my
23:25
Speaker 4: mother's son in that way. My mother was a professor,
23:28
Speaker 4: my father was a professor. All my brothers and sisters
23:30
Speaker 4: are professors. So I am the only one who isn't.
23:34
Speaker 4: I'm what's called a Jewish dropout, and the and every
23:39
Speaker 4: so I think that that urge to teach, to explicate
23:43
Speaker 4: is very strong. Was not at all in you know,
23:45
Speaker 4: Plimpton was an aristocratic wasp, and for him teaching and
23:49
Speaker 4: explicating I think was a little vulgar.
23:51
Speaker 2: He was he's a performer.
23:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's a performer.
23:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, a literary performer. And yes you are.
23:56
Speaker 3: You're much more of a professor.
23:58
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm there's I'm a ham as well, but there's
24:02
Speaker 4: more professorialness in my performance than there ever was in his.
24:05
Speaker 2: Yeah.
24:06
Speaker 1: One thing you don't talk about in this book was
24:10
Speaker 1: your foray into music.
24:15
Speaker 4: I do talk about it a bit, a little bit,
24:16
Speaker 4: a little bit, not a great land.
24:18
Speaker 2: I thought I was wondering about.
24:19
Speaker 1: There has always been this kind of desire to experiment
24:24
Speaker 1: with your experiences in a way that that's not true
24:28
Speaker 1: of a lot of very adventurous and one of the
24:31
Speaker 1: aterestings you did was describe a little bit about your
24:34
Speaker 1: kind of musical adventures.
24:35
Speaker 4: And well, when I came to New York, when Martha
24:38
Speaker 4: and I came to New York on a bus from Canada,
24:41
Speaker 4: like in the Bad Forties movie, I wanted to be
24:45
Speaker 4: a songwriter. That was my primary ambition. Well, I wanted
24:47
Speaker 4: to be a songwriter and a writer for the New Yorker.
24:49
Speaker 4: I figured I could do both. I could be Stephen
24:51
Speaker 4: Sondheim and John Updyke simultaneously. It turned out not to
24:55
Speaker 4: be the case, but I wanted to do that, and
24:58
Speaker 4: I never pursued it adequately. You know. It was one
25:02
Speaker 4: of those things that I left behind too soon. So
25:05
Speaker 4: in the course of life, a wonderful composer, David Schier,
25:10
Speaker 4: approached me about writing a musical with him, and I,
25:13
Speaker 4: to somewhat to his shock, I jumped at the opportunity
25:16
Speaker 4: because it was the form I love most in the world.
25:18
Speaker 4: And we wrote a show called Our Table, which you
25:20
Speaker 4: can find on Spotify, and we wrote some sixty songs together,
25:24
Speaker 4: and I am I loved it.
25:26
Speaker 2: Excuse me how many songs?
25:27
Speaker 3: Sixty songs?
25:28
Speaker 4: Zero six zero, because that's the usual ratio in Broadway musicals.
25:33
Speaker 4: They have a very strong you call them trunk songs.
25:35
Speaker 4: You write sixty songs and you throw out forty. I mean,
25:38
Speaker 4: that's the standard rate at which it's done. It's a
25:41
Speaker 4: funny thing. Not that the forty or worse than the twenty.
25:44
Speaker 4: It's a kind of weird, kind of almost religious discipline
25:47
Speaker 4: that Broadway people have.
25:49
Speaker 3: And in anyway, I love it.
25:50
Speaker 2: Hold on, take it over. This sixty.
25:54
Speaker 1: So every Broadway play has forty songs. They're just lying
25:59
Speaker 1: in a vault somewhere.
26:00
Speaker 4: Yes, in a word, yes, And those are called trunk songs.
26:03
Speaker 4: I don't know if it's always forty and twenty, it
26:05
Speaker 4: could be sometimes thirty and ten. But yes, every songwriting
26:09
Speaker 4: team and everybody songwriter will tell you that they even
26:12
Speaker 4: Somedheim threw away four different endings for Company before he
26:17
Speaker 4: arrived at Being Alive.
26:18
Speaker 3: It's part of the discipline of the craft.
26:20
Speaker 4: I'm not always sure that it's a productive discipline in
26:22
Speaker 4: the sense that the ones you throw away may actually
26:24
Speaker 4: be better than the one you arrive at.
26:27
Speaker 1: Does anyone independently analyze the ones that are thrown away? Like,
26:30
Speaker 1: is there some this should be some central committee of
26:33
Speaker 1: Broadway that kind of takes all these in and.
26:35
Speaker 4: Like like a FDA inspectors who come in and say,
26:38
Speaker 4: you don't have to throw this away.
26:40
Speaker 3: This smells good to me, Yes, exactly.
26:43
Speaker 2: This is unbelievable.
26:44
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's such a it's so show off hee,
26:47
Speaker 1: by the way. You know, the rest of us are
26:49
Speaker 1: like making use of every last scrap.
26:52
Speaker 4: But so I did that, and I loved it, and
26:54
Speaker 4: I wrote all the lyrics and I felt, you know,
26:56
Speaker 4: and I put myself to work to master that craft
27:01
Speaker 4: and that art as much as I could because my
27:03
Speaker 4: ultimate heroes, Lorenzo du Ponte, Lorenz Heart, Larry Hart took
27:09
Speaker 4: part in that field.
27:09
Speaker 2: And I have no fear of embarrassment.
27:13
Speaker 4: I live in total fear of embarrassment. But I suppose
27:17
Speaker 4: when it comes to the contest between my egotism and
27:20
Speaker 4: my embarrassment, my egotism wins somehow.
27:22
Speaker 3: I don't know.
27:23
Speaker 4: I mean, if I can put it in slightly kind
27:26
Speaker 4: of terms to myself, I'm ambitious, you know, and I
27:30
Speaker 4: like doing ambitious things. And I you know, it's not
27:33
Speaker 4: like I'm out there, you know, trying to compete with
27:36
Speaker 4: elon musk and rocketry. You know, what I'm good at,
27:42
Speaker 4: or what I believe myself to be good at, is
27:44
Speaker 4: shaping sentences. And some of those sentences are essays. That's
27:49
Speaker 4: the form I love most in the world is.
27:50
Speaker 3: The essay, what's sometimes called the.
27:53
Speaker 4: Personal essay and the and the but writing lyrics or
27:58
Speaker 4: writing a show is it's the same enterprise, right. It's
28:02
Speaker 4: organizing language in ways that express emotion. And for me,
28:06
Speaker 4: you know, the thing I love mode is exactly the
28:10
Speaker 4: moments in that act when you get an emotion and
28:14
Speaker 4: I had an idea humming together. And that's what I
28:18
Speaker 4: always tried to do in things, is what you were
28:21
Speaker 4: talking about before, and when it's just ideas, it feels
28:23
Speaker 4: arrid to me, and when it's just emotions, it feels
28:26
Speaker 4: amateurish to me. And there's no form known to man
28:29
Speaker 4: in which ideas well you did this, you talked about
28:32
Speaker 4: this with in your Paul Simon audiobook. There's no form
28:35
Speaker 4: in which ideas and emotions come into such intimate entanglement
28:40
Speaker 4: as in a song. So anybody who can write one
28:43
Speaker 4: good song, one memorable song, has got a little bit
28:46
Speaker 4: of purchase on immortality. And I think I've written one,
28:50
Speaker 4: but I will continue to write more.
28:53
Speaker 1: On one level, what this book is is about the
28:55
Speaker 1: special pleasures of mediocrity.
28:58
Speaker 2: Yes, And because you embark on.
29:00
Speaker 1: A series of things, and implicit in not all of them,
29:03
Speaker 1: but in some of the things that you embark on,
29:05
Speaker 1: is that you're not never going to be good.
29:07
Speaker 2: You're never going to be good at them.
29:09
Speaker 1: And this is the great discovery of my middle aged
29:12
Speaker 1: When I was very young, I only pursued things that
29:15
Speaker 1: I was good at, and I realized when I hit
29:19
Speaker 1: forty that that was a trap. And you know why
29:22
Speaker 1: I realized it. I realized it because I went to
29:23
Speaker 1: Bard and when I was using the gym, I saw
29:26
Speaker 1: the barred lacrosse team practice and I observed them and
29:31
Speaker 1: they observed that they were the most laughably inept lacrosse.
29:36
Speaker 3: Team I've ever seen.
29:37
Speaker 1: And my first thought was, you know, I have all
29:41
Speaker 1: kinds of athletic pretensions, so I was looking down my nose.
29:44
Speaker 2: And then my second thought.
29:45
Speaker 1: Was that is fantastic because it means that anyone who
29:49
Speaker 1: wants to play lacrosse at Bard can play lacross at Bard,
29:52
Speaker 1: and that is such a better model than every other
29:55
Speaker 1: lacrosse team. If you want to play lacrosse at Johns Hopkins,
29:57
Speaker 1: it's impossible.
29:58
Speaker 3: Because you're never going to be good.
30:00
Speaker 2: You're never going to make the team. It's a pleasure
30:02
Speaker 2: is denied to you.
30:03
Speaker 1: Why, for the completely random and totally unfair reason, the
30:09
Speaker 1: number of kids that have been playing lacrosse in you know,
30:12
Speaker 1: suburban Baltimore since they were six years old because their
30:16
Speaker 1: parents had the nutty notion that mastery.
30:19
Speaker 2: Of lacrosse was something they wanted to use their have their.
30:23
Speaker 3: Kids and would get them into Johns Hopkins.
30:25
Speaker 1: But so what do we do we impoverish the vast
30:28
Speaker 1: pool of kids who would really enjoy playing well across
30:31
Speaker 1: in favor of a small bart flips.
30:33
Speaker 2: It just says we're going to have a bad cross the.
30:35
Speaker 4: Same, yes, I know, but not to be pious. But
30:39
Speaker 4: that's sort of one of the themes of the book.
30:41
Speaker 4: Maybe is the theme of the book, because the truth is,
30:43
Speaker 4: and I have a little chapter called the Mystery of
30:45
Speaker 4: Interiority where I look into that old folk legend that
30:50
Speaker 4: hummingbirds and elephants have the same number of heartbeats in
30:52
Speaker 4: the life, and find that there's actually at the University
30:55
Speaker 4: of North Carolina State, there's a scientific team that looks
30:58
Speaker 4: into this question, that took up this question, and it's true.
31:01
Speaker 4: And the point of it, the metaphor of it is,
31:04
Speaker 4: is that the hummingbird's sense of existence is just as
31:07
Speaker 4: extended as the elephants. It just is only that feels
31:10
Speaker 4: that way for the hummingbird, right, not for the elephant.
31:13
Speaker 4: And in exactly the same way, the accomplishments that we
31:18
Speaker 4: master or attempt to master at which we're no good,
31:21
Speaker 4: give us the same sense of, you know, little steps
31:25
Speaker 4: turning into a seamless sequence, the sense of the flow,
31:28
Speaker 4: which is the key to happiness. Happiness is absorption. Happiness
31:31
Speaker 4: is reaching that flow state, and in a weird way,
31:34
Speaker 4: any time you achieve it, you have the hummingbird's heartbeat
31:37
Speaker 4: inside you, you have a strong interior sense. Like the
31:40
Speaker 4: kids in at Bard, right, they didn't know they were
31:43
Speaker 4: bad lacrosse players, and I'm sure they talked about lacrosse
31:46
Speaker 4: all the time and tried to improve their game.
31:48
Speaker 3: And that's exactly bid.
31:50
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, they do know they're bads.
31:54
Speaker 1: No, no, I don't mean that it's a joke, right, because
31:55
Speaker 1: it's the second The corollary to the observation that there
31:59
Speaker 1: is beauty in badness is that the second thing is
32:04
Speaker 1: that it is only through pursuing something not badly you
32:09
Speaker 1: weren't bad at these things, but inexpertly, yes, that you
32:13
Speaker 1: come to a full appreciation of the expert.
32:15
Speaker 3: Yes.
32:16
Speaker 1: The person who goes up to the magician and says,
32:18
Speaker 1: I know how you did that is someone who doesn't
32:20
Speaker 1: try to be a mediocre they have If they were
32:23
Speaker 1: a mediocre magician, they would know better that they would
32:26
Speaker 1: be an how they would be.
32:27
Speaker 2: A true awe. It's the same thing I was gonna
32:29
Speaker 2: say this with It is only when.
32:31
Speaker 1: I became a mediocre runner in my middle age that
32:36
Speaker 1: I that I began to appreciate what a world class runner.
32:38
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, And it's only by being a terrible pianist
32:41
Speaker 4: that I have some glimpse of what it is to
32:43
Speaker 4: be Bill Evans or Errol Garner.
32:45
Speaker 2: This is the greatest case for community theater.
32:49
Speaker 3: Yes, this is true.
32:51
Speaker 1: Which is the is the kind of whipping boy. Community
32:54
Speaker 1: theory is the whipping boy of every pretentious intellectual. I
32:57
Speaker 1: grew up with a community theater, and I'm here to
33:00
Speaker 1: tell you civilization.
33:01
Speaker 4: Is community theater is based on community theory. I mean that,
33:06
Speaker 4: but you know that's not you know who said that?
33:08
Speaker 4: Forgive me for a professorial moment. Frederick Laul Olmsted, the
33:11
Speaker 4: great designer of Central Park and one of the great
33:13
Speaker 4: American political thinkers, said that the thing that the commonplace
33:18
Speaker 4: civilization of a liberal society depended on community theater. He
33:22
Speaker 4: talked about glee clubs, he talked about amateur opera societies.
33:25
Speaker 4: That's the living, beating heart of a liberal society.
33:29
Speaker 3: Are those things? Yeah, yeah, give me one more name.
33:32
Speaker 3: I'm in loving this so much. I'll give you It's
33:35
Speaker 3: like being in therapy, and.
33:38
Speaker 2: We'll do David Blaine, why not, let's finish on magic.
33:40
Speaker 4: David Blaine was so Luca, my wonderful son who is
33:44
Speaker 4: now doing his PhD in philosophy at the University of Texas.
33:48
Speaker 4: After all of his adventures magic and music, he had
33:51
Speaker 4: ended as a philosopher went to work as David Blaine's
33:56
Speaker 4: personal assistant. David offered him that job, and it was
33:59
Speaker 4: a wonderful learning experience, much better than going to progressive school,
34:05
Speaker 4: because he had to learn how to keep you know,
34:07
Speaker 4: Russian models away from each other, and how to care
34:09
Speaker 4: for an albino alligator, and money other things, and David
34:13
Speaker 4: in the middle of it. This is my favorite anecdote
34:15
Speaker 4: in the book, was doing a bullet catch, now bullet cap.
34:18
Speaker 4: He was doing it for a TV special. And in
34:20
Speaker 4: the bullet catch, the magician has a steel cup in
34:24
Speaker 4: his mouth or her mouth, and somebody fires a bullet
34:27
Speaker 4: from a rifle directly into the cup. You have to
34:29
Speaker 4: catch the bullet. And now normally it's done as a trick,
34:33
Speaker 4: as a gaff, because it's too dangerous. Twelve magicians were
34:36
Speaker 4: killed in the early part of the twentieth century doing
34:38
Speaker 4: the bullet catch on stage, so nobody does it that way.
34:41
Speaker 4: And Luke explained to me David was going to do
34:43
Speaker 4: a true bullet catch, and I said, well, what's how
34:45
Speaker 4: do you do a bullet catch? And he said, well,
34:47
Speaker 4: it's a very strong titanium cup and it's a very
34:51
Speaker 4: low velocity rifle and a very small caliber bullet, and
34:55
Speaker 4: it's all laser guided. I said, oh, really, so there's
34:58
Speaker 4: no trick to the bullet catch and he said, oh no, Dad,
35:00
Speaker 4: there's a trick to the bullet catch. The trick to
35:02
Speaker 4: the bullet catch is catching the bullet. And as soon
35:07
Speaker 4: as Luke said that to me, I said, that's the
35:09
Speaker 4: wisest thing I've ever heard, right, because we all instantly
35:13
Speaker 4: know what that means, Right that, after all the preparation
35:16
Speaker 4: you do when you're writing or talking or anything, after
35:19
Speaker 4: all the ways in which you make sure that you
35:22
Speaker 4: will not be killed by the bullet, at some point
35:24
Speaker 4: you have to stand there with your mouth open and
35:26
Speaker 4: the cup in it while somebody points a rifle at you.
35:30
Speaker 4: And that, for me is, you know, the existential leap
35:32
Speaker 4: that we all have to make in artistry, mastery, whatever
35:35
Speaker 4: we choose to call it. And I thought so, I
35:36
Speaker 4: thought it was a wonderful story because everybody knows what
35:39
Speaker 4: that moment is of catching the bullet.
35:42
Speaker 1: That trick can only be done in certain states.
35:46
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly stand your ground laws.
35:49
Speaker 3: I can.
35:49
Speaker 4: I can I thank you Malcolm for your incredible generosity
35:52
Speaker 4: in doing this. And can I tell you a story
35:54
Speaker 4: that I don't think you know, is that Malcolm is
35:57
Speaker 4: known in our house, as my children were growing up,
36:00
Speaker 4: as not that you're not dad, Malcolm, because this is
36:03
Speaker 4: the conversation we would always have. Malcolm would come for dinner,
36:05
Speaker 4: dazzle Luke and Olivia and then go in and they
36:09
Speaker 4: would say, Malcolm tells the most interesting anecdotes and he
36:12
Speaker 4: always finds the one right story to illustrate it not
36:15
Speaker 4: that you don't dead, or Malcolm always has exactly the
36:21
Speaker 4: right question to ask, not that you're not doing that dead,
36:24
Speaker 4: And so we in our household, Malcolm Ladwell is known
36:27
Speaker 4: as not that you're not dead, Malcolm.
36:28
Speaker 3: So thank you. It's not that you're not.
36:37
Speaker 1: Adam Gopnik's book, The Real Work on the Mystery of
36:41
Speaker 1: Mastery is available now, and be sure to check out
36:44
Speaker 1: the audiobook version at pushkin dot fm. Special thanks to
36:49
Speaker 1: the ninety second Street Why for hosting us. This episode
36:53
Speaker 1: of Revisionist History was produced by Kiara Powell with ben
36:56
Speaker 1: Adafh Haffrey Leamingestu and Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Kashelle
37:01
Speaker 1: Williams and Tully Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Extra
37:05
Speaker 1: special thanks this week to Julia Barton, Morgan Rattner, Kerrie
37:09
Speaker 1: Brody and Eric Sandler. Original scoring by Luiscira, mastering by
37:14
Speaker 1: Sarah Bruguerer, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Glappa.