Author Malcolm Gladwell has mixed feelings about being Conan O’Brien’s friend.Malcolm sits down with Conan once more to discuss his latest book Revenge of the Tipping Point, Malcolm’s observations as a new parent, the opioid epidemic, why Harvard has so many sports teams, and much more. For Conan videos, tour dates and more visit TeamCoco.com.Got a question for Conan? Call our voicemail: (669) 587-2847. Get access to all the podcasts you love, music channels and radio shows with the SiriusXM App! Get 3 months free using this show link: https://siriusxm.com/conan.
Chapter 1: What are Malcolm Gladwell's mixed feelings about friendship?
Hi, my name is Malcolm Gladwell. Well, I didn't think about this. Well, I have mixed feelings about being Conan O'Brien's friend. Now, wait a minute. Why would you say that? I'm a huge admirer of your work. Can I do a long explanation of why? Is it going to be another book? No, no, no, no.
Fall is here, hear the yell. Back to school, ring the bell. Brand new shoes, walking blues. Climb the fence, books and pens. I can tell that we are gonna be friends. I can tell that we are going to be friends.
Hi, and welcome to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend. I've got Matt Gourley with me right here. Hi. Scribbling away something. I don't know what he's doing. What are you writing? Last Will and Testament. And I've got Sona Movsesian here. Yes. You know, we're getting into the holiday seasons.
Yeah, we are.
And I have a question for you because this is something that hit me recently. I don't often reveal my interior life, my emotions, but I'm going to get vulnerable here for a moment, which is, as you guys know, I'm an empty nester now. Both my kids are in school.
You're also an empty soul guy too, aren't you?
Empty soul. Yeah, yeah. But that's been, you know, whole life. But I didn't expect to feel this way. But I remember feeling this way at Halloween. I walked by some houses and they were all decked out with, you know, skeletons and witches and things like that. And one of them had, there's this spider that plops down if it senses a presence. Have you seen that? Yeah. It just goes...
and it makes a little noise and its eyes light up a little bit. And I just had this really strong memory of... My kids watching me put all that stuff out and being really excited and saying, where's the spider? And me going and getting, you know, there's the, you can get the fake graves and you can get the skeleton hand that comes out of the ground.
My excitement came from their excitement of watching me do it. And, you know, they're not, they're in college now. And so we're not doing that to our house. And then I walked around and I had that pang of, it made me sad.
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Chapter 2: How does parenting change your perspective?
And it's big and springy and it shoots out. So moisture in the air is the Viagra for my pompadour.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. But I'm trying to use a medical terminology.
Are you insinuating that you have thousands upon thousands of tiny little erections growing out of your head?
You have to say little, but sure. But what I'm saying is today, it's been very dry and I'm noticing lately, I get up in the morning and my hands are like scales and my hair is just collapsed onto my head. And I could have done artificial things to pump up my hair this morning, but I didn't want to do that.
Artificial things? What do you mean?
Curious chemicals and bombs. But I didn't want to do that, Malcolm. I didn't want to be fake with you. So I come in and I could see your face.
Sense by disappointment.
Sense? You said, shit, I'm unhappy.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Malcolm share about the opioid epidemic?
Or this company, Purdue Pharma, that their family had started and created and run for two generations was a kind of third party off by the side that they had no connection to. I mean, I just find the whole, everything about the opioid crisis is astonishing to me.
I remember it being shocked. Very recently, one of my children came home from school. Someone came to their school and showed them how to use Narcan. That's how prevalent this is, that the way we were shown a fire exit Yeah. And had a fire alarm practice.
Now kids are being shown how to, you know, young adults are being shown how to use Narcan because, and thank God they are because that's saving a lot of lives. But that's where we are now. Yeah. It's just standard training for kids.
Yeah. One more welcome to the world of parenting. One more thing I have to worry about.
Chapter 4: What are the implications of the opioid crisis on society?
Well, it's, I mean, something I never thought about, obviously, when I was growing up and didn't have to worry about. And there's so many things that kids have to worry about today. It does make me profoundly sad that even fairly innocuous things that a kid may experiment with can have been tampered with and kill them. So, you know, that's the world we're in. And-
I'm going to end the podcast right there.
Oh no! Conan, you're just bringing us down. I know. What happened to your famous joie de vivre?
Guess what happened? Guess what happened? You came in and you shit on my hair.
Is your mood contingent on your hair?
Yes! Yes! And now I'm spiraling. My hair is flat against my big Irish skull, which is loaded with alcohol.
Jameson's.
Jameson's, and I'm primed for a fight. But you know what, there's so much, It's really funny, like there's, on an upbeat note, because there's so many fun puzzles in this book and intriguing things.
There's one thing that you brought up in the book, and I'm jumping around here because I don't know a better way to discuss it, but you talk about how we all know World War II ends, 1945, there's the revelation, Nuremberg trials about concentration camps. Sorry, upbeat note?
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Chapter 5: How do cultural perceptions impact parenting?
Chapter 6: What unique observations does Malcolm make about The Little Mermaid?
But understanding that there was this very, very deliberate Machiavellian, brilliant but evil strategy they followed, which was an epidemic strategy, which was all about... understanding that they did not need to convince the majority of doctors to prescribe opioids to start an epidemic.
They only needed, in fact, they end up, the statistic I was, is at the core of this was, they ended up, we ended up with a situation at the end of OxyContin's life where 1% of American doctors were prescribing 50% of the OxyContin. Yes. And that's the whole game. They understood, we don't even have to worry about, we can basically ignore 99% of doctors. Our concern is with the 1%.
A couple thousand doctors in the whole country will be sufficient to get this thing rolling because those guys at the fringes will prescribe so many prescriptions of OxyContin, that's all we need. And so they take... A sales apparatus, which typically if you're a drug company, you build a sales apparatus to reach the broad middle of doctors.
And they just deployed it towards these kind of like whack job doctors who were way out of, you know, the norm in, you know, in small town Tennessee and visited them hundreds of times. Wined and dined them. Wined and dined them and convinced them to write thousands of prescriptions for OxyContin. That is the distillation of an epidemic strategy.
Yeah, it's not the law of the few, it's the law of the very, very few. Very, very few. In analogous situation, you talk about how they did a COVID study involving hundreds of people and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people got sick and it was from two people.
Yeah.
In the study, it was two of them spread it. Yeah. And it's analogous. It's in the same way that with OxyContin, they had, you described, the tragedy of it is that the vast majority of doctors are responsible and there are laws and mechanisms in place to keep something like this happening. You describe how doctors...
There was a rule put in place that if you write someone a prescription for a drug this powerful, an opioid, it's on a triplicate form. So there's three copies. And because of that, it keeps everyone in line. There's three copies of it. there's a real record, a lot of dissemination of what I'm doing. Okay, so everyone is gonna be good.
But then these drug companies found out there are some places where that law doesn't apply.
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