today it is decision time and we have to make sure we know longer -- we have to help iran free itself. thank you. >> to watch this program in its entirety go to booktv.org. type the title or the author's name at the top left of the screen and click search. ..

>> and what was probably the most fascinating thing about doing this book for the two of you? >> that our original goal when we had our first conversation about doing the book, we had a goal about what kind of book we wanted it to be and what we thought might succeed, and we executed exactly what we wanted to do which is pretty rewarding in any aspect of life. >> host: had you two worked together before? >> guest: we had not written so much as a shopping list. we'd had a few meals and tries together but had never written anything together. i have to say, there are always challenges with all good partnerships, but within the possible spectrum of how rewarding and enjoyable it was, it was way off the charts for both of us. we had a great time doing it, and the writing of it was shockingly much easier than either one of us expected it would be. >> malcolm gladwell, author of "what the dog saw," and david grann discuss their respective collections of of essays and

their writing careers at the new yorker. barnes & noble in new york city hosted the 45-minute event. [applause] >> thank you all for coming. thank the two of you for coming. barnes & noble tries to give me difficult assignments, i think, of two writers who are very different from one another, and you have to look at what their connections are. last summer i interviewed pat conroy and rick russo, and it turned out pat conroy had given rick russo a blurb for one of his earliest books which pat conroy, frankly, didn't remember. [laughter] but they were very, you know, warm with each other. and so i was -- and i know you two both work for the new yorker, but i was looking for a kind of deeper connection to ask you about your writing, and i noticed in david's new book, "the devil and sherlock holmes," in the piece about the obsessive conan doyle and scholar who is

mysteriously found dead that in writing about sherlock holmes, you say that arthur conan doyle, the author of it, in 1906 began to turn his powers of observation to solve real world mysteries, including the case of a serial killer. and it seems to me what both of you do and perhaps all reporters in general, then, that's something you have in common with detectives. that you turn your powers of observation on the world to solve real world mysteries. so, i guess, david, if you could talk about that large task and then, malcolm, i'll ask you about that too. >> i think that's very much the case. many of these stories are about the art of of detest, and the protag fists are often sleuths themselves, even if they're not professional sleuths. there's a story about a con man who suddenly suspects he may be being conned.

there is a story about scientists trying to unravel the mystery of this semimythological creature, the giant squid. there's a story about a working class detective who is investigating whether a post-modern polish novelist may have planted clues to a real murder in his novel. and in the sherlock holmes story the main character who's this great scholar is found dead under mysterious circumstances. and he had become obsessed himself by trying to write a biography, by trying to tell the story and piece together the narrative of conan doyle and in the process it has driven him slightly mad. so in that story you have both the story of the protagonist trying to unravel the mystery of conan doyle and who he was and kind of be his sleuth and his narrator, and to some extent i am the narrator and the sleuth, the watson and the holmes, for

richard greene as i try to tell his story and figure out what he was after, what he was searching for to try to unravel the mystery of his character and also to find out why he was garretted under mysterious circumstances. >> how do you go about researching a story like that? when you come to it, the story is called mysterious circumstances where nothing is really clear in how things work out. how do you map your way through, mentally, physically through the research, the writing and come to your conclusions to -- [inaudible] >> yeah. i mean, in that case and in almost all the reporting cases the stories often begin with just almost a clue, a tantalizing clue. and i'm sure this is probably true of malcolm, too, where you hear somebody say something, and the case of the sherlock holmes somebody had mentioned just in passing that this great scholar had been found dead in

mysterious circumstances, and that alone was just sort of tantalizing. so at that point i begin to try, first, to read what there is in available literature about richard doreen, but then it's kind of like a treasure map to go from one person to another person or one document to another document. so you're trying to first penetrate richard greene's inner circle who knew him, who could tell me about him. the case had been taken up by all these amateur sleuths who saw this case as a real life mystery that was greater than anything which conan doyle had invented. so they were all working the case in their own way. and that allowed me both to try to follow them and make sense of their discoveries as they investigated, and it also allowed me -- which i try to do in these stories -- is to try to go into a world that you wouldn't ordinarily see. a subculture, a hidden world.

and in this case who knew there were these people who were utterly obsessed and fanatical about sherlock holmes and conan doyle. >> there's no sense -- [inaudible] finish can you explain? >> yes. again, who knew there were two clubs, one who pretend that conan doyle does not exist, and, therefore, will never refer to him by name. and sherlock holmes is a real character. in fact, they produce more scholarship than probably all these books in this bookstore. one person said never had so much been written for so few. [laughter] and the level of this scholarship is to try to look at the stories and, basically, prove any inconsistencies to show that they're true stories as opposed to fiction. and then the conan doyle scholars are those who recognize conan doyle as the author and creator of the sherlock holmes cannon as well as other books and are his scholars. the thing that was interesting about rich ard greene who was

found dead in mysterious circumstances, he was one of the few that went back and forth between both groups. >> [inaudible] he writes about the search for this lost in the amazon, and he talks about one person he met in the '90s, i think, whose name is james. and what he says is that he was drawn into intellectual as well as -- [inaudible] in order to remain a little know asset to the world. so there seemed to be a difference, but the similarities -- [inaudible] and yours is on the physical trail and -- [inaudible] what do you think of that, and how do you think it will result -- [inaudible] >> [inaudible] [laughter] my message means i can write

from my apartment. david has to go to the amazon. [laughter] >> i've always said malcolm is much smarter than me. >> so, yeah, i think that's absolutely right. [laughter] no, no, i meant -- i didn't mean -- [laughter] i'm sorry, i was referring, i was referring to your comment. i wouldn't say i was -- >> what would you say if you read that exchange? [laughter] >> i, no, i'm -- [laughter] did i answer the question? many. [laughter] or did i just humiliate myself? >> no. i guess the way david was talking about coming up with there's a tip or something. >> yeah. >> you said you came up with your ideas because you sort of become obsessed with something, or you want to figure something out. >> yeah. >> it's the intellectual quest you're on to sort of figure out

how people work. >> yeah. you know, it's funny, you know, i grew up on -- speaking of. [inaudible] i grew up on that kind of steady diet of british murder mysteries. that's all i read for, in fact, that may still be all i read really. [laughter] i mean, you go go into the hudsn booksellers at laguardia and see all those paperbacks, i've read every one of those. some of my oldest memories are my father reading sherlock holmes stories to us and father brown, dorothy say yers, ag that christy. so that's sort of my home form. but i can't write fiction. so, you know, what do you do if you love mystery stories and you can't write fiction? well, you write some kind of facsimile. which is, which is what -- you know, nonfiction mysteries. but the minute i think i can

write dialogue, i'm gone. [laughter] >> so was that a struggle in writing outliars where you say that you made a conscious effort to concentrate more on people as opposed to the experiments that, or the social experiments, psychological experiments that are in blink and the tipping point? was that harder then? >> yeah. i mean, it -- i did not -- i wanted to stop being -- i wanted my writing to be kind of a little less chilly. and so i was, i had made a very conscious effort. partly, actually, from reading people like david and being so taken by his writing and thinking that i should go in that direction as well. made a conscious effort to write more about, about people and their stories as opposed to kind of theories and theoreticians. >> well, and your book is divided in very similar ways to david's book, "the devil and sherlock holmes," into sections

so it opens with profiles, or it has a number of profiles. what do you do when you come to the dialogue there? how do you make it sound real? >> well, you could read them, and you might say ha i don't. [laughter] but the reason a lot of -- my profiles typically don't involve a lot of time spent with the person i'm profiling. you may notice them if you read them. we quickly move on to other things. in fact, once -- >> [inaudible] what they are. >> yes. the profile begins -- [inaudible] and i am so accustomed when to probe filing -- profiling someone to really just talk to them for a couple of hours. he proved so chatty, that i ran out of -- it was back in the day of tape, cassettes. i ran out of tape. and it was so embarrassing to say to him i thought you'd only be good for two hours. [laughter] but, in fact, you were good for more than that. i had to make up the excuse that i had a doctor's appointment, and i got in my car.

i was in l.a. drove all the way down the hill, because you have to drive 5 miles to get to any place, and bought cassette tapes and came back and resumed the interview. >> you would think he would have had a gadget on hand that would have worked. >> yes. you would have thought he would have had a tape-o-matic of some kind. [laughter] >> david, i guess actually, malcolm, i wanted to ask you you were saying i might not or people might not find the dialogue convincing. i read, and i forget exactly where it was that you made a distinction between persuading the reader and engaging them. you want to engage the reader rather than -- >> oh, it's persuasion and convincing. so this is a distinction not that i made up, but rather it's a very famous distinction in sociology. of course, the name of the sociologist who came out with it i've forgotten. who wrote this wonderful essay where he talks about these are

two very different modes that when you convince someone of something, you martial a series of logical facts and assemble them and present an argument that ought to be persuasive to anyone who is of sound mind, right? it's a kind of very general -- to persuade someone is not about martialing of facts to a broad general audience. it is about using emotion and stories for a specific audience, for a narrow, carefully-selected audience. and i started out in journalism wanting to convince people of things, and can now all i want to do is persuade them of things. >> well, what's interesting is that in the story "trial by fire" that's also in this book which is about a man in texas, cameron willingham, who is executed but seems innocent of the crime that he committed, that you quote a lawyer who is saying about his, who he

represents that a lawyer doesn't really believe that his client is innocent. i mean, but -- so he's working to persuade, i mean, in the way that you were talking about rather than convince. so a lawyer in a trial is sort of what you're talking about, i think. and then i just remembered that you said that you first wanted to be a lawyer. so it sort of works perfectly. >> i think in the, in both of our work i think we both believe in telling stories. i mean, malcolm's stories were often engaging an intellectual idea. they really are built around stories and narratives and character and have kind of an arc, and you go on this journey. and that's what makes them much more satisfying than picking up a scientific journal. and in my stories, similarly, i really want to tell a story. i want to take the reader on a journey. and i really see my job as a nonfiction writer as gathering the facts and presenting them and showing them. and i try to have faith that the

reader can interpret them. and, clearly, i make judgments and i'm organizing things, but i was a terrible op-ed writer. i just don't think that way. i don't think in that kind of convincing way. the way i see the world is in stories and characters moving through these stories. and really my job is to show the reader what i've seen or what these characters have seen. and i also grew up on lit tear fiction, and -- literary fiction, and be i loved reading sherlock holmes when i was young. but the thing that draws me to these stories is that they are not -- while the characters aspear to be sherlockian, we are inevitably mortal, and we don't always see the picture perfectly. you write a lot about this in your stories about misinterpreting data or too much information. we can't see as clearly as we wish we could or as what we want to pretend to be. so these stories are not fairy

tales and they, therefore, end without that kind of sense of qed. >> so much of what you write about is about observation. i mean, certainly that's a link. and so how do you sort of balance as a writer that sense of, you know, an immediate grasp of a story when you're obsessed, both of you in, in this writing in your introductions. you both talk about stories you've become obsessed with. david in his book talks about ryder haggard who loves the stories with grit. he becomes obsessed with it, and you don't wash, you don't shave, etc. and you seem to say the same thing, i mean, that when you have an idea it just becomes obsessive to you. you became obsessed with the ideas. so how does that obsession work, that long-term obsession versus i the kind of observational powers we've talked about at length that are just immediately grasping something? does it always prove over the

long term that you were right at the core? >> no, the reason obsession is necessary, i think, is that to tell the kinds of stories that i would like to tell, and i think david would like to tell as well, takes a lot of time. it takes a lot of time because most of what is interesting about the story you don't figure out for a long time. you discover it at the end, or it's because of some serendipitous certain in the middle. so i very often start a story thinking i'm going to say x and end up saying y, right? in fact, i expect to end up saying y. i don't expect to end up where i started. and, but you only get those kinds of twists and turns if you're willing to wrestle and play with something for a long time. and some of the stories that i write have been in the back of my head for years before i actually put them on -- i mean, they're things i've been thinking about. of all of the stories in what the dog saw, i think in at least one case there was about six or

seven years between having the idea and actually writing the story. >> and in the case of, there's a story in here about the world's greatest prison escape artist, certainly of the 20th century. broke out of pretty much every prison including alcatraz although he had a little bit of a roose ruse to get off the island. he robbed his last bank when he was 78 years old which turned out to be a police wire wired up to his ear. when i initially read about that, just in terms of length of the time, it was several years before i did the story. and he would never agree to speak. and i wrote him a letter every month in prison, and i just said if you ever change your mind, i'm here. it became a form letter, and i would just write in, and i'd sign it, maybe change one word. [laughter] and eventually after two years he said come on down, and he had decided he was willing --

>> he finally found the time. [laughter] >> he finally found the time. i think at that point he was about 80, and i think he didn't think he was going to get out although he had aspirations. but just to go to the other point of not knowing where you're going to go with these stories. these stories are journeys. and, for example, there's a story in the collection about the search for the giant squid. and i found out there were these great giant squid hunters who had spent their lives obsessively trying to find this creature which had never been seen alive or documented alive by a scientist. there were dead carcasses 30 feet long with tentacles and eyes the size of heads that were seen floating on the surface of the sea, but no one had enp countered -- encountered these things alive. eventually, i tracked down this wonderful squid hunter down in new zealand, and i convinced our boss, david rem nick, at the new yorker that this it was worthwhe sending me down to new zealand

on this story to try to capture. he had this theory of trying to capture a baby and trying to grow it in cabtivity. so i went out with him, and i had spent months on the story and weeks in be new zealand with him under really arduous circumstances. going out in this a cyclone with this guy trying to catch this baby giant squid. and there came a point in the story where i was with him where it looked like we captured this baby giant squid this man had been searching his whole life for. and that i had that moment of ecstasy, and i said, thank good, this trip wasn't for god. we're going to take it home, and we're going to grow it, and i'm going to watch it, and this is going to be huge literally and metaphorically. [laughter] and then just like that, it slipped away. and we both were looking at the container where we thought we had it. we'd been up for nights straight working in extreme conditions, and it was there, and we lost it. and it was gone like an illusion. and i remember thinking to myself, oh, my god, my story is,

like, i just -- it's over. what am i going to do? i've been here, i've done this journey, and, in other words, i had hoped for x, and suddenly i was looking at y, and y didn't look very good. and then i went back that night, and i thought about it, and y was the way the story was supposed to be. because here was this man who had obsessively tried to find this thing. nobody could ever get it. and it was right there, and it had slipped through his grasp. and the pathos and the emotion of that moment was so much more true than the artificial construct i had conceived in my mind. >> and, i mean, that seems like a very similar -- did that lead you to the lost city in the story of fossett? having recorded an adventure and explorer who went in search of the lost city and had, if not exactly the same experience, but came close, or seemed to come close in looking for this thing and it was a mirage in the end? >> certainly. i think many of these characters

are chasing something that is elusive. and to me what is interesting about these characters is both their obsession because it makes good story telling. they're fascinating characters, there's a reason why ahab is one of the greatest characters in literature. >> right there behind you. >> oh, good. [laughter] but what also intrigues me about many of these stories is what they're obsessed. i don't just say, oh, this person's obsessed, i'm gone to do it. the object of their obsession is often equally fascinating. if it was the case of the giant squid, here was this incredible creature, and it really opened up to how unexplored the sea was. and in the case of fossett, i had grown up reading all these books saying, well, there could not be a complex society in the amazon. it had to be a very poor, prim tuf tribe, it was just too inhumane an environment to sustain a large civilization. so the question he was after,

that object of his obsession, was also equally fascinating. >> and, malcolm, a lot of -- i mean, your stories are much more about actual experiments. i mean, do you feel, do you wish that -- they seem to be less open-ended than the stories david tells. do you, how do you work that? i mean, how do you work through the sort of uncertainty in a lot of the science in your books? how do you make that sort of work as a story? >> uh, that's a good question. um, you, i mean, you -- the -- what you try and do is find a principle or an idea in science and then illustrate it with a story. keeping in mind that the science -- there's always a level of uncertainty in science, and so you are kind of choosing a particular past, both interesting and

thought-provoking path to take. and you necessarily have to kind of simplify things along the way sometimes just for the -- which is, i mean, but i think readers are sophisticated enough to understand that. what i tend to be doing in my stories is posing a question what if we thought about something this way, right? and then kind of, and 90% of people are, i think, are sophisticated enough to understand that you can hit the pause button in your own train of thought, and you can go in another direction for a while. it actually can be a lot of fun to do that even if you don't ultimately agree with the conclusion. like i say, i think i say in the introduction to what the dogs saw that i'm not interested in winning converts to my way of seeing the world. i'm simply interested in provoking people to think about things differently even if they ultimately go back to their old way of thinking.

>> i mean, not only the titles, but in the narrative arcs of your books, you have that way of crystallizing an idea that people do take away. [inaudible] now a catch phrase where people have a sense of what it is as a cultural phenomenon. i remember as i read your books as they came out that they're the kind of books that as your reading them -- you're reading them, you're sort of surprised, amazed. you want to read aloud to someone. did you ever think of this? i mean, you have that ability to, i guess, just sort of make people think in a certain way at least for a little while until they come back to their senses, i don't know. [laughter] i mean, the thing that, your ideas about blake, i mean, that is so compelling. so -- >> yeah. >> obviously, you're successful. you don't need me to tell you that. what i am interested in, david, you are talking about a kind of doggedness in reporting.

you say how you i to get this bank robber to speak to you, you trailed after him for years. and similarly, in the lost city you are in search of this very old document in a brazilian national library. and it hasn't been seen in decades or a century or something like that. and somehow you're able to persuade the librarian, actually, to let you see it. so if you could just tell us about that. what leads you to do things like that? take that risk? >> to take that risk. usually it's not so planned or preconceived. usually i get, i kind of just bore in, and if there's some clue or piece of information, i'm just very focused in on getting it. and i don't know, you know, where -- i guess part of it is

like a lot of the characters in the story i really want to make sense of things. i want to understand what i have been investigating. and it's very, always very tantalizing or very frustrating to me to have some clue that's locked up in this a vault that i can't see. and i really want to, want to get that. and so, you know, in the case with this document which was in the brazilian library because it was deteriorating so much and fossett, who was the main character of the lost city of z, had looked at it and used it as his clue to come up with this theory there might be an ancient civilization in the middle of the jungle. and usually, i guess, you know, doggedness i find often pays off. if you just kind of hang around long enough without being -- i really don't fit any of the stereotypes of being the abrasive reporter. i really don't. i don't ever, i don't, you know, grill people. i just try to observe them and let them be. but i kind of hang around.

and if you hang around enough, the bank robber will, ultimate ultimately, maybe say come on down, you're the only one left. [laughter] >> well, in this case, he had been refused access to this from new york. you were in rio or something like that. >> right. >> and he just went to rio even though they refused. and so you meet the librarian, it's just a funny story. he goes there and starts to make his case, and she basically after he finished says, well, i already had it laid out for you. i figured if you were willing to come here, you were -- [laughter] she's sort of a hero in the book. i was wondering, malcolm, you now have such a famous name for doing what you do. do the people that you want to study, be with, write about their work, are they more receptive? less receptive? are you less the fly on the wall than you could have been ten years ago? >> i don't think.

i don't know whether i have detected any difference. you know, because my stories have always been -- i very rarely write things about someone that that person isn't happy with, right? so my stories are rarely confrontational. i'm usually interested in finding what is interesting about someone's work and celebrating it on some level. and so i've never really -- because that's always been my approach, it's never difficult to get people to talk to you. and because i've always -- particularly with academics -- tried to take care to be familiar with their work so i could have an intelligent conversation with them and be careful in the how i tribe it. in how i describe it. so when i started at the new yorker, things were very much similar to the way they are now. there's been surprisingly little difference in how i do my job. >> so you don't have any

academics who want to share in the profits of what you're writing about their studies? >> it's just funny, not at all. not in the slightest. mine, as the child of an academic i sort of know something about the psychology of those who go into academia. i mean, the reason you go into academia is that you're not motivated -- [laughter] you know, if you wanted to make a quick buck, you could get a ph.d. in sociology, right? >> well, no. i just got a ph.d. in english this week, and it's not worth anything. [applause] [laughter] >> the nice way of saying it is that you are intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically motivated. i said trinsically is a far more meaningful way to look at the world, so good for you. [laughter] finish. >> [inaudible] i think about your father who was a mathematician, and then you were always so intrigued as

a child that he could spend the day working inside his head, and then that led to other kinds of thoughts. but that, i mean, how much as a writer, and you say you stay in his p apartment. he goes to new zealand and the amazon, etc. how much in both cases are you working in your head and trying to make it come out right? even though your spending a -- you're spending a lot more time, you know, on the trail? >> well, i think like malcolm said, i often have preconceived ideas or some intuition of what a story might be. but you often find yourself in different places. and i think some of my doggedness probably comes from insecurity. a feeling like if i just work harder and get the information, i can get a better story. but for the case like the cameron todd willingham story which was about this man who was executed for setting a fire that killed these three children and may, in fact, been innocent.

and when i began that story, i called his defense attorney. and you mentioned this. and his defense attorney said to me, oh, yeah, he did it, he definitely did it. and i hung up the phone, and i said, well, he has to be guilty. his own defense attorney thinks he's guilty. so that was kind of where i began. and then i went on a journey that began to really raise serious questions about the reliability of the evidence in the case. >> well, in so many of the, well, i mean, that story in the particular is about crime. and there's another story not about a murder, but about identity. i don't even know if it's identity theft. it's a frenchman, and it's just so haunting about this man, frenchman who poses as the lost son of an american family and convinces them, i mean, against the evidence, it's just chilling how he burrows in and dupes

these people. but i'm just wondering especially with the story about willingham, are you at all conscious of forebearers at the new yorker like truman capote, lillian ross, i mean, the names could go on, obviously. truman capote, even malcolm gladwell more recently. but david remnick himself. i mean, what is that legacy as you go into the new yorker where it's, there's such a rich history? >> i think in, it's an asset in the sense that i look at a lot of these people, i read "in cold blood" while i was working on the willingham story. i read "the executioner's song" which didn't come out in the new yorker, but another great crime nonfiction story.

or at least based on nonfiction. and so these help me as templates, but then when i'm working on a story, i really try not to think about those things. because if i had in my head i'm truman capote when i'm trying to write my story, i don't think i'd ever get a word out. so i use it as inspiration, and i often for each one of my stories i will look to certain stories, and i will read them and say, okay, these provide -- sometimes inspiration is not so linear. it's about a different subject. but perhaps it's about trying to portray a character, getting inside a character or a more or essayistic type of piece. so i look at these, and they help me. once i'm working on the story, though, i try to forget all that stuff. i'd be paralyzed if i was, you know, thinking too much truman capote. >> so there are writers who inspire you. >> yes. >> malcolm, do you have writers who inspire you? >> oh, yeah.

i mean, like i said -- >> other than ag that christy. that's pretty large. >> yes. i mean, like i said, i think david -- [inaudible] i've been reading ever since -- david's stuff. i've been reading ever since i started at the new yorker. i've been very influenced by it. maybe i should leave my apartment. [laughter] also adam has had a huge impact on my writing. i regard adam as the absolute quintessential practitioner of the new yorker story. because those stories he does -- and maybe you have to be a writer to understand this -- the degree of difficulty is so high, so it's not like he's often taking something which is -- there's nothing there, right? [laughter] i mean, it's just kind of prosaic, some sort of prosaic saying that he has turned into

gold. and to do that i'm just in awe of that. and i read some of those stories. i'll read one paragraph four times in a row to figure out how did he do that, you know? and there's an incredible level of -- that idea of, that difficulty idea is something i always thought was the missing component in critical analysis. critics look at something, and they make a passive judgment. and they'll say is this good or is this bad. but that's only the first question you have to ask. the second question you have to ask was, how hard was it? and if you're trying to, if you're telling an extraordinary story out of something that is incredibly ordinary, you get points. [laughter] right? and i feel like with adam he has sort of opened the possibilities as a writer. you can write, you can take just by be virtue of your own ingenuity -- i mean, i don't have his ingenuity or his writing ability, but he allows me to believe it is possible to do extraordinary things with ordinary material.

and that is, that's been incredibly powerful lesson as a writer. >> and there are stories that i find i read joseph mitchell periodically. and when i find them, i could never imitate them, and i just kind of know that. i still never have quite figured out how he constructs a story that they maintain their power because they're not chronological, they don't anytime. it's kind of like you're saying. how he managed to put all these facts in this very idiosyncratic order that comes together with such powerful. and i read them periodically, and i'm hoping at some point i'll find that buried secret. oh, that's the key, that's exactly what he did. but yeefnt deconstruct them as -- i can't even deconstruct them as a writer. some of them i just tip my hat. [laughter] >> you can really torture yourself trying to learn from. i was with reading some a.j. peopling recently and had that same thing.

just was struck dumb by just -- he's cruising around paris. and there are these turns of phrase that are just fantastic. but i could never write like that. >> i mean, in fact, you know, in a weird way part of the thing is what motivates me in finding the stories i find is a belief that if i can find a great story, if i can find the gold, then i can tell you a great story. and so part of my motivation when you asked me of getting these things is that i just want to get the gold because it's a lot easier if i can find the gold in the treasure and open it up. >> it must be quite an obsession with you because you explained in the lostty of z that you're actually a lot more like malcolm and don't really like leaving your apartment at all. >> so not true. all you do is leave your apartment. i read that in the lost city of z, i rolled my eyes. [laughter] yeah, right. >> you know, it really is true

though. other than when i report, and i think -- >> other than when you report? that's a massive caveat, right? [laughter] >> i would have a very, very boring existence if it weren't for these reporting chases. >> well, i'm curious, too, about both of you. what is your confidence in the future of the publishing industry, the magazine industry to be able to support the kind of long stories you're talking about, the six years between the having of an idea and then seizing on it and writing on it. the reporting that you do going around the world that the new yorker and other magazines have funded? what does the future hold for that kind of reporting? you're talking about a.j. which goes back to world war ii and before. i mean, so -- >> i, you know, i'm very

optimistic. because all that's gone away, all that has appeared to go away is the kind of, is the viability of the existing business model for supporting a certain kind of journalist. that's all that's gone away. the need for that journalism hasn't gone away at all. so when i was talking about adam, some of that -- if you read, for example, adam's story which is one of the most incredible magazine stories i've ever read, at the end of that story you cry. everyone cries. the need of a human being to be moved by something that they read is, is a cop instant. constant. we needed to be moved by literary experience a thousand years ago, and we'll need to be moved a thousand years from now, right? so so long as -- all we're doing is surveying very fundamental human needs, the need to be engaged by a story.

it's fundamental. it's never going away. so you can't have a world. i mean, sometimes you think we're going to have a world, well, just of tweets and log entries -- blog entries and, you know, 300-word web site entries but you can't have that because none of those satisfy the need to be moved or engaged in a story or the need to be -- so we'll just find a new model to support, that's all. i mean, people are very, are assiduously working on this problem right now, and they'll solve it. and when they solve it, we'll all be fine. [laughter] >> so i finally figured out the essential difference between malcolm and me, i'm a fundamental pessimist, and he's an optimist. [laughter] i actually agree with him on this notion which i think in many ways both what we do and also what our stories are about and many of what my stories are about are people, i'm piecing together their narratives, but they're piecing together narratives. they're trying to tell stories, they're trying to make sense of

their lives and arrange the facts in a particular order that has a certain lodgic and meaning and emotional meaning whether it be the fireman from 9/11 who suffered amnesia and was the only survivor from his group that went down. they all perished, and he'd -- he's trying to make sense of what happened to him but also this larger calamity. and i do think that is something that is wired into our dna, and it goes back whether you look at why the bible is powerful, if you look at any kinds of forms of literature. and i don't think that is going to go away. i do worry about the economics of it, but that's why he's a smart guy, and hopefully he'll come up with a business plan. because there is, there is a cost to this stuff, there really is. i mean, that willingham story, you know, i spent six months at least on that story, you know, whether trying to get government records, tracking down a jailhouse informant who didn't have an address or a phone, and

i could not have done that without the new new yorker's bag and financing. so that does concern me because right now we are in this moment of chaos. but i do think that desire and need doesn't go away. and so, hopefully, malcolm's mission that the paradigm can support this will come into play at a moment of crisis. >> what's so haunting about what you're saying is in the lost city of z you sort of finally get to the middle of amazon or talking to the people that have studied this that a lot of people whether erroneously or not had believed that the amazon was so inhospitable to human life that there was no civilization which is the need for story telling that you're talking about, about the art that you describe as a human need. and you come to that city and then leave at the end having an open question about whether they were capable of that. us