Book blink the power of thinking without thinking which looks at how people make splitsecond decisions. Hello . If everyone can hear me my name is henry center, editorial director of the new yorker magazine i would like to welcome to you to the fifth annual new yorker festival. The message here to say please turn off any cell phones or pager devices. Malcolm will be speaking for about 40 minutes, we will have 20 to 30 minutes of q a after that. During the question period there will be microphones down the aisle and we request that you would speak into the microphone during that time. Malcolm gladwell has been a staff writer for the new yorker magazine since 1996, before that he was a new york bureau chief for the washington post. At the new yorker he very quickly made his mark establishing a new genre of story, the Malcolm Gladwell story. Theres very few people like that in the 80 years of this magazine stop editorial meetings the subjects abcome up and say thats been done to that. Someone else will say, yes but if we have a Malcolm Gladwell take on it. Its a great conversational trump card. Malcolm has really a peculiar genius for exploration. Sometimes very peculiar. Its tempting to try to explain what makes him such an important writer. I think a lot of it has to do with certain originality of mind a certain distinctiveness of voice and both of those qualities were on display in his bestselling book the Tipping Point which is a book thats been quoted by at least one u. S. President , by joint chief of staff, by ceos, philanthropists, also the title of new album by the hiphop band the roots which is an homage to the intellectual hero. [laughter] his new book is coming out in january its called blink the power of thinking without thinking. Ive never actually seen malcolm when he wasnt thinking so im curious to see how hes gonna pull it off. Please welcome Malcolm Gladwell. [applause] thank you henry. In nine years of editing me thats the kindest youve ever been. [laughter] im very happy to be here and happy to see all of you. Im guessing most of you are here because you couldnt get into the site hirsch evening last night. Think i got assigned to overflow. Which is fine although i should say if any of you are here expecting to get some major blockbuster earth shattering revelation on American Foreign policy are in the wrong place. It was sometimes into dinosaurs and cartoon dinosaurs and. I was told us posted talk about my new book which is blink, coming out in january. I hope all of you buy it in triplicate at that point. [laughter] its about the power of thinking about thinkinr of thin without thinking what happens the first two seconds and in the counter in a person at a person or person an idea or person and situation. So far the book has been reviewed twice one of which said was quite good and the other of which said it was utterly forgettable piece of juvenile you. The question of its merits is still up in the air. This is one of my favorite stories in the book. I think its a pretty good introduction to what this book is about and the kinds of questions trying to address in blink. Something that happened five years ago that i think something story all of us in new york remember but i think not all of us particularly at the time in new york absolutely understood. Its a story of amity diablo. Diablo was from guinea, a recent immigrant, 22 years old and he was short. About five foot five or five foot six. I tell you those facts because not because im warming up to tell a story but because these kinds of facts, the smallest details of the case are absolutely critical in understanding what happened that night and one of the faults i have with the way we came to learn about that story and understand that story is that it was interpreted as a story about grand themes, racism, Police Departments, status of the law a story about grand themes. Its a story about details. These Little Details i start with as i said absolutely essential to understanding what exactly happened that night. Diablo lived in a part of the bronx called soundview. Soundview is in the southeastern bronx and in the late 1990s it was a pretty bad neighborhood and major open air drug markets had just been shut down about two or three blocks over from one diablo lives. Wheeler avenue is one of the streets that comes down off the made thoroughfare which is western oliver. Its a very narrow street two story red burke road house built around the turnofthecentury and theyre very close to the street the sidewalk, there is no graph strip in the sidewalk, street, sidewalk, two quick stops and then you have these buildings, these two story building. He lived in one of the secondfloor on the night of february 3, 1999 he comes home from, he was a peddler he sold, one of those guys and 14th street he comes home around midnight and goes upstairs and talks to his roommate and the reasons we dont know he comes downstairs maybe he wanted to have a cigarette maybe he wanted to take in the night air, maybe he was feeling claustrophobic, we dont know. The vestibule of his building is very small, probably no more than this wide and no more than from the top of the stage back to about where i am now. He standing on the edge looking out in the street and as he standing there a car drives by down Wheeler Avenue, ford taurus unmarked for people in it, for Plainclothes Police officers part of the nypd street crime room unit which is a special unit set up in the late 1990s basically to break up open air drug markets. Who all in the mid20s and early 30s. They are green. These are not experienced Police Officers. All dressed in jeans and sweatshirts they got bulletproof vests and just kinda puffed out and they have baseball caps and regulation nine millimeters handgun. Cruising down Wheeler Avenue and they cruised by and they see diablo and carol says whos that guy what is he doing there . Carol says later he thought diablo was one of two things maybe he was racist they been looking for in that area for some time because thered been a racist very active about a year before they never caught them. The Second Thought was that he was a lookout for a pushing robber, pushing robbers of the guys to come to an apartment building, hit all the buttons, until someone lists them in and they go in and knock on the door and basically if someone answers, pushed in. They often had a lookout on the ground floor to alert them to the presence of other people coming in the building so he thinks its one of those two things. They drive by and stop the car and backup. In carol and mcmillan get out of the car and carol opens up and shows his id and says Police Officers, can we have a word. He doesnt speak much english. A very recent immigrant from america. He also has a very bad stutter. Hes inclined to never talk at all. Thirdly, one of his friends several months before had been robbed by a series of people by a group of people posing as a Police Officer. He is terrified by these guys. Hes on a dark street sitting there taking the night air in front of his house for big guys, way bigger than him with big puffed out chest, white guy in the middle of the south bronx. Speak in a language he may or may not completely understand. He standing in a small festival he sees these guys and turns around and goes back to go back into his house turns around put his hand on the door. Carol and mcmullen who were standing there say, show us your hands. Put your hands up. We dont know if he even understands what that means at this point but he turned his body away from them ever reaching for the door and seems to be doing something with his right hand. This starts to get carol and mcmillan a little bit nervous because they think, why is he turning his body because he wants to conceal what hes doing with his right hand . They start to run after him, their mo sidewalk and go up the steps to go out to see what he is doing. They are thinking this is getting a little strange. Then they looked closer and they see that what he is doing with his right hand is his pulling out an object out of his coat. They see the subtle thing coming out. They start to get even more and they see the top of this black object and its shiny and their thinking, my god, guns. Carol yells out, hes got a gun he just keeps going pulling it out. Until hes actually pointing towards them like this. Mcmillan says hes got a gun he panicked. He is on the top step of the vestibule and pushes back and jumps back and gets terrified he pulls out his gun and starts firing. Carol is standing right there any season flow backwards and thanks hes been hit. My well sweetie fall backwards. He sees the bullets ricocheting around is very small vestibule he thinks, diablos firing gun he pulls out his gun and starts firing. Back in the car you got boston murphy and Lacey Mcmillan flow backwards a they think hes been hit. In the end carol and mcmillan fire 15 to 16 bullets each. Is there firing at abhes in the corner of the vestibule is back straight and knees are bent there thinking classic shooters crotch. This guy has been trained, thats what theyre thinking. What hes trying to make himself a small as possible. Theyre all going bang, bang, with their backs up against the vestibule. How do they stop . Hes down. Can boss gets up and walks toward diablo he looks down at his right hand to find out and see the gun. Hes got the gun. Palms open he looks down and theres no gun just a wallet sitting on the ground. He screams, where is the gun he starts running up Wheeler Avenue because he completely forgot where they are hes got to call the ambulance. He is just running up and down Wheeler Avenue screaming out, where is the gun he looks down and sits down on the steps next to him and starts to cry. Thats what the ambulance finds when they arrive. What happened that night . I was attracted the story when i wanted to write this book because its an unusually complicated and ambiguous story and all the ways i think we have for explaining it at the time were deeply unsatisfactory. Think back to when that case was in the news, there were two sides to the story the way it was told one side said these cops are racist, see a black guy you see a criminal, bang, bang. 41 bullets. Bruce springsteen writes a song called 41 bullets how you can get shot for just for living in your american skin which was this reductive notion that that was all about this incident was all about same color. aball about skin color. To say this is about the open and shut case of racism is absurd. Everybody in the south bronx is black or hispanic. Theyre not shooting everybody. Didnt tell us why they single out the sky. Theres no evidence whatsoever that these four guys are bad eggs nothing in the past to suggest dervishes are angry. This isnt like the cop who attacks, throughout his name with the plunger. Nothing like that case. These are good kids, the people who knew them. There like good solid honest, not a blemish on their record. On the other side there was the whole line adopted by the jury which later acquitted these guys of all charges. The line adopted by nypd which was just one of those things. It just happens. Its called police work. Get a situation sometimes and its really sad but you make a mistake and theres nothing much we can do about it. Thats also deeply unsatisfactory. This isnt just some kind of routine thing. The guy goes up to take in the air maybe have a cigarette and gets shot 41 times by four cops cruising up and down the street. There is nothing normal about that particular event. Something actually went wrong. What we need is a kind of third understanding of what happened that night. The only way to get that understanding is to break down that little incident second by second and until we can see all the moments the decisions that went into that particular tragedy and try to understand how it came about. Think about that, this case for a moment. There are three particular moments in that instant i think our worthy of discussion. In that instance decides hes suspicious. State number one, hes innocent, you think you suspicious any backup and one of things carol said that was very interesting that when they backed up they saw that diallo was Still Standing there. Didnt move. Carol would say later that that amazed him. Why did the sky move. If youre standing out there on a Street Corner in the middle of the night four cops in an unmarked car backup toward you you run. Thats what everybody else did. Point number two they think, hes really brazen. This is hes completely undeterred by the side of four monstrous cops. Hes not a bad guy is not brazen, hes curious. Hes from africa. Hes only been in the country a couple months. He sees four white guys in the car backing up toward him and says what is this. Mistake number two, confusing curiosity with brazenness. Then Carolyn Murphy are put down standing on the vestibule and they watch diallo turn to his side and start to pull something black out of his coat in the instant they decide hes dangerous, but he is not dangerous. Hes terrified. Mistake number three, the mistake terrified for terrifying. Ordinarily in the normal course of our lives we have no problem with these distinctions. We are really really good as human beings at making a distinction between innocence and suspiciousness of making a distinction between brazenness and curiosity and most of all making a distinction between terrified and terrifying. He walked down the street the middle of the night you make those judgments every moment when you see somebody. Im scared of him, that person is scared of me. Nothing we are better at than doing that. We been good at that for millions and millions of years. Thats whats interesting about this case. In that moment on that Street Corner on that street that night they make three really basic errors they should have made. Three errors that most of us would make very rarely in our lifetime but they compound them. Why would they do that . What is it that happened that night that caused them to be somehow fundamentally incapable of reading diallos mind because thats the failure here. They did it correctly understand his intentions in that moment. As a result they completely misinterpret what that social situation is all about. They put their own construction on it about a crime and a criminal instead of being about the person outside getting some night air. I call this kind of failure momentary autism. The idea is that i use that phrase because the simplest definition of autism is that autism is a neurological condition that renders us incapable of reading someone elses mind. The british psychologist a refers to autism is simply my blind. People with autism can listen understand your words but they cannot understand any of your intentions. You will what im saying is there are certain situations when otherwise normal people become effectively autistic. Just in that particular moment. Not the chronic condition but acute condition and a handful of cyclists when there are moments of extreme stress. I think thats actually a surprisingly common kind of failure. If you look at the way the world works or more accurately does not work we see the pattern repeated over and over again that lots of mistakes happen because there are certain situations abto read other peoples minds into a temporary state we are incapable of doing. What i want to do is talk about this and then talk about what it takes to try to prevent these attacks of momentary autism. Theres a really wonderful researcher and yelled called a has done some really fascinating work in trying to explain what happens when someone has autism. He has this patient, a guy named peter and been seeing peter for many years and peter is 40s or 50s. Has a job thats on his own but he has autism. To try to demonstrate precisely how peter makes sense or does not make sense of social situations. He put a pair of goggles on him and these are the special goggles that trick who your eyes move. To show somebody something put the goggles on and actually their eyes will draw a line on the screen you can see precisely where their eyes have fallen and given time. They give peter these goggles and, whos afraid of Virginia Woolf, the movie with Elizabeth Taylor. He shows that will be for a reason which was at first of all its one of his favorite movies but more importantly its a movie about a very complex social situation. Its three people in the room, for i forgot who the other actress was. Thank you. [laughter] its for people in a room having this incredibly fraught interaction over the course of an evening, getting really drunk, getting upset at each other. Theres all kinds of complex dynamics. He said he was in a show terminator two where the actual gun was the hero. But this would be really interesting test and extraordinary sophisticated interaction among four people how to peter make sense of this . He shows in this movie peter said youre on the print of the movie we are seeing where peter eisen moving at any given time and he does the same thing with people who dont have autism and watches where their eyes go. The scene where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are kissing when you and i watch the scene where residue is heres burton, heres taylor, arise go back and forth between their eyes, thats what we do and watch people kissing in a movie. We look at their eyes because the truth is in the eyes. I want to know what kind of kisses this. Whats happening with the kids are they happy . Excited . All the information or much of the information is contained in the eyes. What did peter do . He looked at the light switch behind them. Why did he do that . Because for someone with autism there is no special meaning attached to eyes. He cant make sense of the information he finds in someones eyes. Because he cant read intentions. He cant mind read. As a result, theres no particular reason for him to look at the eyes in the given scene. The thing thats equally interesting for him to look at the light switch, turns out hes very mechanically minded. So it really interests him. He was looking the whole time at the light switch. Another scene george segal poinsettia painting on the wall and says, who did that painting . And Richard Burton hands it to them. When we watch that scene our eyes follow the line of george segals hand until we see the painting. Then arise go over to