please welcome malcolm gladwell.eers and applause) malcolm, good to see you again, thanks for coming back. old home week, haven't had you on in a while. good to have you on again. >> good to be back. >> stephen: you are here because you're a renown author already. you have your "blink" "outliars" all that good stuff. you have a new book that you've written the forward by and have a couple stories in here of your own called "the big new yorker book of dogs." i'll get straight to my problem with this. (laughter) okay? you know i've got a problem with this, right? >> i'm sure you do. >> stephen: that can't come as a surprise to you. the "new yorker," okay? you think pieces -- you write think pieces. why do you want to make me think about my dog? (laughter) i feel about my dog and my dog loves me back unconditionbly, why ruin that with thinking about it? (laughter) >> well, these are exceptions, i think, to the typical "new yorker" story. when it comes to writing about our dogs we let our hair down a little bit. >> steph

(laughter) plus, my guest, author malcolm gladwell wrote the forward the new yorker's "big book of dogsdwells." (laughter) it's now legal to carry a concealed weapon in all 50 states. so if you are in one of them, be careful. (laughter) this is "the colbert report" (cheers and applause) (cheers and applause) >> stephen: welcome, ladies and gentlemen! (audience chanting "stephen")

. >> one final point, you know folks like malcolm gladwell and others say this is great, but to be trulyexpert, to be worldworld class that notion of 10,000 hours you say what to that? is that bogus? or are you selling snake oil. >> we're both selling snake oil. no i think the 10,000 hour rule can be observed. it's very important not to confusion causation to correlation. i would simply say from everything that i've seen, for everything that i think i've demonstrated pretty well, if we define world class as top 5% in the world there are very few skills i've come across that i think with six months of concerted effort you cannot reach that point. with deliberate practice using feedback like video, skype training with people across the world which can cost $20, you can dramatically accelerate your progress. i think that will increasingly become the case with increasing technology. i think the 10,000 rule may apply to many things, but the exceptions are worth studying for. >> gavin: congratulations. a remarkable accomplishment to follow up on two world class best sellers. i imagine this wil

excellent book about factors that determine a person's success, you should check out outliers by malcolm gladwellh of other things he talks about how until just a few decades ago race was a pretty big factor and in jamaica, people were actually classified by shades of their skin. how light, how dark. it is a country of people who 90% of whom would be considered black. but officially jamaicans broke down in color into the shades white, olive, then light brown, then dark brown. then black. this was -- it was official. and if you guessed that it was better to be on the lighter end of that scale, you would be right. it made a huge difference in their potential for success even today. decades later. if you think that color test in jamaica didn't exist here in the united states, you would be dead wrong. there was something called the brown paper bag test. yes. in the u.s. it was started in the early 1900s. the african-american community. it was considered that if you were darker than a brown paper bag you weren't allowed to join certain social groups, fraternities, churches. 22-year-old teacher kiara l