Oprah Talks To Malcolm Gladwell

Since the publication of The Tipping Point nearly two decades ago, Malcolm Gladwell has made a career of writing books that drive the cultural conversation. His latest offers a provocative take on what close encounters between strangers have to teach us, and how we can get better at reading each other’s signals. Oprah sat down with the author and creator of the popular podcast Revisionist History to talk about some of his surprising conclusions.

THE LAST TIME I spoke with Malcolm Gladwell was when he came onto the Oprah show to discuss his 2005 bestseller, Blink, a book about instinct and decisionmaking. He’d already achieved the kind of household-name success few authors ever earn, and each of his subsequent books— Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath—also became literary phenomenons that shifted our perspective on why humans behave the way they do. Then, as now, I found his ideas fascinating.

Gladwell’s new book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know , is another must-read. It investigates why we so often misconstrue others’ intentions and how those errors can have unfortunate, even catastrophic, consequences. One historical example: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s faulty interpretation of Hitler’s motives (after their meeting, Chamberlain wrote to his sister, “I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word”). More recently: the 2015 confrontation between a police officer and Sandra Bland, a newcomer to the Texas town of Prairie View. The officer stopped Bland for failure to use her turn signal and wound up arresting her; she was found dead in her jail cell three days later.

I invited Gladwell to my home in Santa Barbara to discuss why he spent the last four years trying to figure out not only what really led to the death of Sandra Bland in rural Texas, but also how revisiting our interpersonal miscues can help us avoid future tragedies.

Oprah: I have to tell you, I love this book. You’re touching on so many profound themes—themes that are especially urgent now when the world seems so topsy-turvy.

You have a way of turning over rocks and showing us that what’s underneath isn’t always what we’d expect.