CHARLIE ROSE: Malcolm Gladwell is here. He is the bestselling author of "The Tipping Point," "Blink," and "Outliers." After starting his career at the "American Prospect" at "The Washington Post" he moved to "The New Yorker" magazine in 1996. Since then, his unique blend of analysis and storytelling has been widely emulated. Now he has compiled 19 of his favorite "New Yorker" pieces into this single volume. It is called -- what a great title -- "What the Dog Saw." I’m pleased to have him here at the table again. Welcome. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you, Charlie. CHARLIE ROSE: The title? MALCOLM GLADWELL: It’s a title of one of my favorite pieces, which was a piece I did about Cesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer on television. And that piece is all about -- I started out thinking I should really do it about what does Cesar see when he looks at a dog. And then I realized that’s not the interesting question. The interesting question is what the dog sees when he looks at Cesar. CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly. MALCOLM GLADWELL: So "What the Dog Saw" is -- and I thought it was this wonderful -- a lot of these pieces are attempts to look at the world through the eyes of someone who has a privileged position, right, a privileged knowledge, privileged something, and how differently we see things when we enter through their frame of reference. CHARLIE ROSE: Is there any connection between how you see the world and how the guy from "SuperFreakonomics" sees the world? MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, anytime I can associate myself with Steve Levitt I will. But he’s an economist, and I’m much more interested in culture. So that aside... CHARLIE ROSE: But you’re interesting in something that has a common denominator. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes. I do think -- we’re -- there’s certainly a mischievous element, a lovely mischievous element that I try to sometimes seek out as well, just to kind of play with our expectations or upend some of our certainties. CHARLIE ROSE: Because people want to duplicate your success, they always ask this question, how does the find the story which you finally have told us? MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes, I mean, I try in a forward to the volume to answer this question because I do get it all the time, and there isn’t a neat, pat answer. But as I say in the forward, it’s about teaching yourself that everything is interesting, because our natural inclination as humans is when we’re confronted with things, try to edit. And we have to dismiss things and say I’m not interesting in that and I’m not interested in that. And as a writer I think you have to -- particularly if you have to write as many words as I do if you have David Remnik hanging over your head demanding you turn in story after story, you have to reverse that very common human desire to edit and just to surrender. CHARLIE ROSE: To say everything is interesting. All I have to do is show it. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Is ask questions, is follow-up. If you get trapped next to someone on an airplane and they start talking to you, you have to resist the impulse to say "I don’t want to hear it," and say maybe there’s a chance -- and believe me, I’ve heard things from people in airplanes that have perked up my ear. And all of us have a blind spot about our stories, and we don’t realize what’s interesting about our own lives. And I count myself among them. It takes an outsider sometimes to see what’s beautiful or interesting in someone’s life. CHARLIE ROSE: But I also find that people like to tell their stories. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes. There’s a moment, I remember ones of one of the stories in my collection is about Ron Popeill, the king of the infomercial. And there was a moment I was sitting in his kitchen, and we’re hours in at this point, we’re well passed all the normal topics. And he just starts talking about his childhood. And he was in an orphanage for a while, he and his brother, because they were abandoned by his parents. And the parents, and it was like a juvenile home or something, and the parents would sometimes come and visit on the weekends the other kids. And describes standing up in the hills of upstate New York, he describes standing outside on the weekends looking off into the distance, seeing cars approach and wondering whether it was his father and his father never came. And it was one of those incredibly heartbreaking, chilling moments. And you realize that’s what you get to after hours with somebody, you know? The little kind of thing that -- and what to me was so extraordinary about that moment was really what that piece is all about in a sense, is how he transcended the incredibly bleak childhood that he had. But more importantly, that was the father he had, and yet what did he do? He emulated his father in every way. And when I asked who are your heroes? He said, number one, Steve Wynn, and number two, my father, this man who abandoned him. It’s just the complexity and richness below the surface. CHARLIE ROSE: But do you think your gift is the capacity to hang in there and get the story or the capacity to recognize it and connect it in some important way? MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, there another moment in the book, there was a piece I did about mammography and bombing. And it all started because I went to see a radiologist uptown at Columbia Presbyterian, or one of the big hospitals. A really interesting chap. He’s chatting to me. CHARLIE ROSE: East side or west side, and I’ll tell you which. MALCOLM GLADWELL: East side. Sloan-Keterring. CHARLIE ROSE: Sloan-Keterring, right. MALCOLM GLADWELL: And he’s talking about reading a mammogram. And it happened to be that very moment when right before the gulf war when Colin Powell was on the Hill at the U.N. with those spy satellite photographs of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. CHARLIE ROSE: Supposedly how they were moving the things around. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Exactly. And he says this thing. He’s just talking away about reading a mammogram, and he mentions that. And he says, you know, I have such enormous sympathy and respect for what they do over there, because we’re in the same business. And I just thought, that’s really fascinating, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but they are of course. That’s what the piece is all about, what it means to look at a picture. The people who to, who are given pictures have to make sense of them. And everyone on the outside thinks once you have a picture the answer is obvious, right? And both struggle with trying to communicate to the public that no, no, the picture is the source of more illusion and heartbreak and ambiguity than you can imagine. And that’s how the piece evolves. It tells two stories, the story about the struggle of people in the intelligence world to make sense of the photographs they take of whatever, bombing sites, what have you, and the struggle of mammographers to make sense of these pictures they take of women’s breasts, which are invitations to ambiguity. They raise as many questions as they answer. And also in both cases there’s something had heroic in the struggle of these experts to bring some order to this kind mystery that the photographs expose. When you talk to these people in privileged positions, which is what I love to do, you always discover some kind of hidden artistry in what they do. You think you understand what a radiologist does for a living, and then you sit down and talk to a radiologist, and about two hours in, you’re like, oh, I see. There is a whole other layer I didn’t understand. And you understand this guy or this women is not a technician, or a -- they’re an artist in some kind of fundamental way. CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly right. Ron Popeil, who I’ve met, as I said, he understands the art of the sell because he knows he’s selling, that the product is the star. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes. That story is one of my favorites. That’s the story kicks off the collection. And what was interesting about Ron Popeil that I hadn’t understood from watching his infomercials on late-night TV was that he comes from this tradition, this family, I call them the first family of American kitchen -- cousins, uncles, father were all inventors of kitchen gadgets, his grandfather was. His people are the peddlers of Eastern Europe. That wave of Jewish immigrants, and they come and they transfer their skills to early 20th century America, starting on the boardwalk of Atlantic City. And he is the logical extension of that tradition. The infomercial is pushcart peddling and boardwalk selling updated to the time of television, right? So first of all you place him in the context. And then you realize that he’s still what makes those infomercials work, and his informercials where in a way that is unimaginable. They sell product like you wouldn’t believe. And it’s that principle you talked about, it’s that same principle that began with the peddler and was transferred to the boardwalk, which is when you’re hocking the product, you’re not the story, right. The product is the story. And that’s what -- I feel like in the commercials of -- television commercials of the last 25 years or 50 years we got away from that. We try to sell the products with a star. Michael Jordan sold underwear. And so you’re focused on Jordan and not the underwear. Ron’s Popeil’s whole thing is it’s not me at all. It’s the show time rotisserie. CHARLIE ROSE: The only thing he does is it’s his passion for the product makes the product come alive. Here’s another interesting thing about this -- ketchup. There are 100 varieties of mustard. Mustard, you think this may be good because it says a fancy European name, and this is a variation of that, and that’s got to be good. There is one ketchup that most of us know, Heinz 57. Why is that? MALCOLM GLADWELL: This was a question -- every now and again I have lunch with this friend of mine, Dave Diamond, who is in the grocery business, a marvelous guy. And we’re chatting one day over lunch, and he starts talking about this fact, that many a fortune has been lost trying to take on Heinz’ dominance of the ketchup business. And he said, look, in every other aisle of the supermarket, what do you see? You see diversity and profusion. You see 50 kinds of salt for goodness’s sake. And you go the ketchup section and it’s just Heinz with some little minor thing going on. And he’s like, you know, why is this? This is this great mystery that all of us in the grocery business struggle with. And when you hear that from someone who knows, you think what a great story idea. And so I wrote this piece on why just Heinz? Why do they stand alone? CHARLIE ROSE: Why is it? MALCOLM GLADWELL: The answer is that Heinz ketchup is perfect. (LAUGHTER) It sounds ludicrous, and of course it is, kind of. That is tongue in cheek. But there are sweet, salty, those are the basic... CHARLIE ROSE: Ingredients? They are the basic what? MALCOLM GLADWELL: They are the basic tastes. Heinz ketchup is one of the only products in the supermarket that touches every one of those fundamental human tastes. So it satisfies every aspect of our mouth. CHARLIE ROSE: OK, so then why couldn’t somebody figure out that and therefore make the ketchup and make the ketchup that would be competitive and by charging a dollar less, or whatever? MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, it turns as well, and here Charlie, we’re going to get into, I could talk about tomatoes for the rest of the -- we really don’t want to do that. CHARLIE ROSE: Why, because you love tomatoes? MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, it turns out that tomatoes are so highly variable that managing your tomatoes so that you have the absolutely perfect ratio of solids to liquids consistently in batch after batch after batch is really, really hard, and only Heinz has figured out how to do that. Making ketchup actually is rocket science. Maybe rocket science is not as hard as we think it is. CHARLIE ROSE: Do they have some formula like Coca-cola has a formula. MALCOLM GLADWELL: It’s more than that. It’s kind of like you have you to go into the fields and manage the varieties and the growing season, and soil. CHARLIE ROSE: Tell us about Million-dollar Murray. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Million-dollar Murray was a story that I still think of all the time. I was reading an account -- I don’t remember why or how -- of this guy named Murray, who was a homeless guy living in the streets of Reno. And there were a couple of cops who knew him really well and were friends with him. And they get into some fight in Reno over homeless policy. And the cops are upset, and some people are saying in the community, you know, why are you guys worried so much about the homeless people? Let them be. They’re not any trouble. And these guys are like, no trouble? We spend 60 percent of our time dealing with the homeless. So they march down to the local hospitals and said can you tell us what Murray’s hospital bill, this guy that’s been living on the streets of Reno for three years. It turns out over the course of the previous 12 months Murray had run up a bill in the various social services institutions of Reno of $1 million dollars. He’s Million-dollar Murray. This man who lives on the streets... CHARLIE ROSE: Costs the city $1 million. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Costs the city because the goes to the emergency room 30 or 40 times a year because he’s being picked up by the cops three, four times a week, because he’s double pneumonia every winter and is in the hospital two weeks at a time. And it turns out that insight has been verified many times over now, that we really the hardcore homeless who have been on the streets for years who we ignore and step over cost us infinitely more than the most severe hypochondriac on the upper east side. CHARLIE ROSE: And all we have to do is what? MALCOLM GLADWELL: That’s what this is about. People have come to understand that it costs more to ignore the homeless than it does to solve it. In other words, if Murray costs $1 million lying on the street, you can get him a suite at the plaza and personal assistant for less. And all around the country, that’s what cities are starting to do. They’re not getting a suite at the plaza, but they are getting homeless people into housing and getting them into drug treatment programs. CHARLIE ROSE: Trying to find some structure for their lives. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Giving them some structure because it saves money, not principally because out of some altruistic motive. And that in turn opens up all kinds of interesting questions. CHARLIE ROSE: Writing these stories -- when you start out, do you want to hang out, or do you have a question? MALCOLM GLADWELL: I usually have a question. I have something I’m interested in exploring. I have something they want to do, like in the piece in there on choking and panicking. CHARLIE ROSE: This is really a powerful story. Go ahead. MALCOLM GLADWELL: I’m always interested in failure. Failure is a fascinating topic. And I wanted to do a piece about... CHARLIE ROSE: But these are stories of success, too. Ron Popeil... MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes, Ron Popeil is. But every now and again you want to come back to the giant screw ups. CHARLIE ROSE: Outliers is full of stories of success. MALCOLM GLADWELL: So I wanted to describe the difference between choking and panicking. We use these terms all the time. Sometimes we use them interchangeably. But it struck me that actually they’re really different. I also I thought -- and also what an invitation to kind of immerse yourself in some famous story of failure. And so one of the stories I told -- I reconstructed John F. Kennedy’s Jr’s plane crash. CHARLIE ROSE: Fatal crash. MALCOLM GLADWELL: I went up in a plane and had a pilot recreate John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fateful last flight. CHARLIE ROSE: So it’s dark, and that plane is... MALCOLM GLADWELL: We went into a spiral dive at dusk on a summer day over the west coast, and we went into the exact same thing he went to, which is where you lose control of the horizon and your plane is plummeting towards the ground like this. You’re going round and round and round and faster and faster, and you don’t realize it’s happening to you. And then he pulled out of the spiral dive, and you suddenly went oh, my goodness, and the g-force hits you. It feels like someone socked you in the stomach. And I turned to him and I said "How close we were to crashing." And he said five seconds. So basically -- I wanted to see -- feel like John F. Kennedy Jr. felt like in the last few seconds of his life. CHARLIE ROSE: So how did he feel, though? MALCOLM GLADWELL: Nothing. That’s what so fascinating and sort of chilling about that, which was when you lose control of the horizon in an airplane and go into these spiral dives, you don’t know you’re in a fatal dive, because the weird physics of a plane is that when a plane starts going in that rotation, it feels fine. It feels like normal. It’s not. It’s hard to describe unless been in a plane. CHARLIE ROSE: And the difference of choking and panic? MALCOLM GLADWELL: That was panicking. Panicking is when a novice is in a situation that requires expertise and they don’t have the expertise. John F. Kennedy Jr. was over his head at dusk. He couldn’t do intrument flying. He wasn’t an experienced. Choking is the disease of an expert. It is when an expert is in a situation where they lose control of their access to their expertise. And I did Greg Norman’s famous meltdown at the ‘96 Masters. CHARLIE ROSE: I was there. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Were you there? CHARLIE ROSE: I was there. I was on the 12th green watching. MALCOLM GLADWELL: So you saw it. CHARLIE ROSE: I did. But I still don’t know how he choked. He had a six-stroke lead. MALCOLM GLADWELL: He had a six stoke lead. So if you talk to golf experts, he misses the hole. Fine. I sat down with the tape of that, and I sat down with people who really know their golf, and we went through and we went through shot by shot what happened. What happens to -- when you choke is that you -- things that were unconscious and automatic become conscious and deliberate. So his expertise is entirely unconscious. When he hits a beautiful golf shot, he’s not thinking about it anymore. He’s done it so many times that he’s in this rarefied world. But now all of a sudden when the pressure’s on he starts to think about things and to deliberate about things that he’s never deliberated about for 25 years on the golf course. And he becomes a novice again. So what happens when you look at him in the final day on round four in the back nine when he just completely falls apart, what you’re seeing is Greg Norman as a 12-year-old again. He’s playing golf the way he did when he was learning the game, in that kind of deliberate, novice... CHARLIE ROSE: And he’s lost his swing and he’s lost his instinctive motion. MALCOLM GLADWELL: It’s Shaquille O’Neal on the free-throw line, the same kind of thing. CHARLIE ROSE: I’m not sure he’s ever hit good free-throws though. MALCOLM GLADWELL: He’s not retreating. He never was, yes, that’s right. That’s different. CHARLIE ROSE: You and -- there’s this notion of Gladwellian, as you know. And this what I’m interested in. No one does what you do. It’s like you are Heinz 57. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, these are pieces that I sweated over. They’re not -- I don’t sit down it and it flows out. The first eight drafts are terrible. CHARLIE ROSE: That’s my point. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes. There’s no. CHARLIE ROSE: It’s a craft. MALCOLM GLADWELL: It has never come easy. But what has changed over the years is not -- the amount of struggle hasn’t changed, but the struggle’s become really fun. I actually enjoy now the eight drafts in a way that I didn’t when I started out. CHARLIE ROSE: In the same way I enjoy the preparation almost as much as doing it, the getting ready. And I don’t know whether athletes like to practice. In the end I think being at bat in the World Series is a whole lot more fun, I suspect, then all the batting practice you take for all of your life. And people will say you take batting practice because you envision that one moment in which you are there and it’s the bottom of the ninth and have you a chance to win the World Series. As a kid that’s what you dream of. But it is the notion for me that how much -- and you’re right about those outliers. This is the theme of the outliers, isn’t it. MALCOLM GLADWELL: "Outliers" is a book of many themes. CHARLIE ROSE: Practice, practice, practice, practice and it’s studied practice. MALCOLM GLADWELL: It’s this idea that outsiders always underestimate the amount of work that goes into expertise. What is interesting about the 10,000 hour rule which I talk about in Outliers is not that you need to practice to be good. We knew that. It’s that you need to practice that much. Who would have said it was ten years of practice to get good? We would have said maybe five or four or three. It’s that ten that’s so, it’s just the sheer vastness of the preparation and that’s what’s amazing to the outsider. But that shouldn’t be scary or kind of off-putting. I think it gives -- it makes me respect and appreciate genius so much more when I know how much preparation goes into it. CHARLIE ROSE: Everyone always has this question when I tell them your story and hand your book out to people, and they say what does that say about gift and superb talent? MALCOLM GLADWELL: I remain -- I’m uninterested in that topic. CHARLIE ROSE: Which one? The relation between gift and practice? MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, I’m not interested in natural gifts. I know they exist and I know there is such a thing as natural talent, but I just feel so what, right? Because there are people -- I always think of -- you’re a basketball fan. I always think of Derek Coleman. I remember chatting with a guy who worked with the Sixers, and he said you have to understand that Derek Coleman was the most gifted man ever to set foot on a basketball court. You’ve heard a million other names -- nobody was a good as Derek. And who has heard today, who puts Derek Coleman up there in the pantheon? No one. He didn’t want to work. He had bad habit. He had a bad attitude. I mean, so what. Give me somebody who wants to go to practice in the morning and who wants to try in games, and I want to celebrate him, you know? CHARLIE ROSE: I’m with you. "What the Dog Saw and other Adventures," Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author of "The Tipping Point" and "Blink" and "Outliers." Thank you. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you, Charlie. CHARLIE ROSE: Pleasure to see you. END 10