Thanks, everybody. This been an amazing few days. This is our last big battle, and im taking the prerogative of introducing it because people i admire more than almost anybody ive had the pleasure to spend a career with, but before i do, dont worry im not going to give thank you to all the sponsors, im going to tell you youve got to go outside right after this at 4 00. We have music and whole lot of things, but in particular we have charlie gabriel. Mitch will tell you how amazing is. The 89yearold come when of the originals. You can be there with the presentation hall jazz band. So unlike most book festival we with our party afterwards. So come hear the band, come, come dance, whatever the one of the things i teach it to link is a transmission that happened in media and the great transformation that is happening now is how books have survived but also they survived as audiobooks and podcasts. The three people on stage along with Michael Lewis whose podcast, billy podcast i think ive done, but have been at the forefront of the world of creating audiobooks, podcasts, and helping not just poor desha poor old white in this debacle but to create some new medium. Jacob weisberg, i i knew backn used at the new republic in the 1920s or 30s, right . [laughing] you hired marty back in. But anyway, Jacob Weisberg is been in many different incarnations of media including helping to found slate, and now worked with pushkin industries, thats the other two on stage for creating this new form of media. Michael lynton, together we go way back but from the days of penguin press, aol, you made it through a whole lot of mediate incarnation. Sony and now youre part of this. Everybody of course knows Malcolm Gladwell. Perhaps [applause] but Malcolm Gladwell, if you want to know what this new world is like, read obama mafia. The bomber mafia. Let me introduce Jake WeisbergMichael Litten and Malcolm Gladwell and ill see you out there afterwards. Thank you. About 15 years ago steve jobs fgave us this and seven years ago apple gave us this and we now have the dawn of what everybodys describing as the golden age of audio. The question i have is with hymy amazon prime podcast . Why are there so manyprime podcast . You go first. Thanks malcolm. I think in any new medium things that are familiar, genres get a foothold and crime novels in terms of paperback novels and inexpensive literature a lot of them are mystery,crime, thrillers. Its a genre that has key aspects of storytelling, the cliffhanger endings, the suspense, obviously violence. There are subjects thatpeople are inherently fascinated with. We dont just turn up our nose even though were sometimes known as a highbrow podcast. We dont turn up our nose and things that are entertaining trying to figure out how to do things with real value. The e thing that worries me about True Crime Podcast genre and just as a side note if any of you watch only murders in the building the steve martin show is fantastic satire of True Crime Podcasts but their true stories they have to be journalism. They have to follow thebasic rules of journalism. They have to follow the e procedures around information a gathering and just having a sick integrity and theres a been a real problem with alot of these shows in that they dont. Like some of them have been plagiarized and people think if i got this story on the internet i can retell it, its just audio and one of the things were trying to do a lot of things with pushpins but one of the things were trying to do is bring some kind of common standard to the storytelling so weve done a couple of podcasts i have been great. We had one call will still which is been two seasons about murder stories in malibu taking down the locations of this done by new yorker writer Dana Goodyear has been show for years, really good true crime storytelling butit has literary value. So malcolm, how many books on revisionist history have you done . Where now on season seven. So barely existed and the whole podcast, the idea of podcasts barely existed. What attracted you in the first place. Jacob told me it wouldbe really easy. Which was a lie. And he told me i would make a lot of money. So no, i was deceived. So you just kept going for seven years until you saw the light . It turned out to be really fun. It is more lucrative now than it was in the beginning but its just the longer i do it the more i realize its different kinds of storytelling. I thought it was just another version of book writing and then i realized its like ive got a completely different career. That was what exhilarated ome is i was in need of additional storytelling. How tostorytelling different from what youre doing . In a certain sense the stakes are higher so if i have off on conversation with someone, if both parties are enjoying themselves and if theres something funny or unusual or weird about the way things are expressed, as a listener your game, youre all their. A fun conversation represented in print, why would you read that . In that sense the bar is lower because audio evokes emotion so you can get much morepolitical stuff. But i think it pushes you in a different direction but theres an episode of it now for season seven which is all about i become obsessed with magic wand experiments. Its an experiment youcould do if i gave you a magic wand , you could wave laway all practical ethical financial laws of nature. Zoology is i call up a bunch of people and said what do you want and it turns out every person and its just a series of me avhaving these increasingly preposterous conversations with people about the things they coulddo if they could wave a magic wwand. So i call this woman who studies child psychology and i want to take any boys, cut off their. [bleep] and tax them to 1000 newborn babygirls and i want to have the kids , the boys without a. [bleep] everyone thinks its a girl so the parents raise it as a girl and the boys think its asheet for the first five years. We will settle once and for all whether parents have any impact whatsoever onthe gender identity of the child. [laughter] great idea, put that way. Its weird on the page. Its a little weird as you say. But i feel like it works. Its more that missingone. But then it got even more ridiculous. If you have other ,magic ones, shes just one offive. Because then you get then you get in and what i call next . I called one of the worlds leading experts on twins. Everyone does the twins study but then whats the twins study you could do if you could wave a magic want . So i call up this woman whos one of the worlds greatest, dont tell me the twins study youve done, tell me the one i could you would do if igave you a magic wand and her answer is cool. So i had to go through with her for different iterations of weird twin studies and you know when people talk you quickly get lost because you cant use it on audio because youre talking about forceps and fraternal twins and forceps of identical twins. So finally i got a study which was like she got interested in mixed race parents who have fraternal twins. One of whom is white and one of whom is black and she would have been in her class and by accident she would talk to them and she realized they have different lives. Theres a case where you have same parents, same environments, sameupbringing. Near skin color and theyve already got divergent problems but we havent kept gene standard, have we so her magic one is identical twins where one is white and one is black. L but then they wouldnt be identical. Identical except for skin color. Thats a magic wand. Shes like, that is amazing. Thats an experiment t. This is an example of something where if we had 1 million twins. I know where youregoing with this. We can stand up and say is racism over, if not so the Supreme Court for example thinks its over. This is widely throughout the voting alrights act. Lots of people Walking Around think its over, a lot of think its people think its a not over, is it over i have no idea. I know its less that was 20 years ago but how much, we have no idea. If we have 1 million twins in this condition may be the way to america when everything is income, we can have success fighting. That works, it works because women the one talking to, shessuper serious and im like what . She thought about this. On the page but yes, they captured the spirit of it. It just hit me when you are talking about this america amazing audience. No one uses hand gestures in modern storytelling more than you do. You cover your eyes, you cant hear that much on the podcast. But the thing, i think a lot about what makes a good podcast, what makes a Good Television documentary, what makes a good book and one of the things thats fundamentally different but easy to miss about tv versus podcasts tis the role of the imagination. When you watch film and entertainment of any kind, someones imagination has already determined how every scene looks and if you were talking about a magic wand experiment theres only one way to visualize it. Maybe you would dramatize it and you do some errands. If you would receive that as someone else maybe brilliant idea, maybe not so brilliant idea but when youre just listening your own imagination personalizing the story visually inside your head and every time on the album show if hes any of these episodes. Youre driving a car around the track. You are you know, running around a golf club taking the steps of a couple of favorite episodes of your show. Everyone listening see that picture and creates that picture in their heads a little differently. And i think that the way podcasts and audiobooks sas we try to make them imactivate and trigger the llimagination. Its really a key to why there having a moment right now. The thing you did with god that is inside your head is really a big difference. Even a small difference, whats the difference, your listening through headphones when youre listening with headphones, your isolated in a certain way. And youre not listening with other people, its not like having the radio on. Youre intensely engaged, imaginatively even if youre doing Something Else at the same time which most people are the thing i like about the audio renaissance for the moment is it is curbing video overreach. So video overreach would be any medium once it gets fat and happy and super profitable tends to expand beyond the legitimate borders of its creative brief. So youre doing film starts with telling really amazing stories. In movies you bring the wild west to life. But then they start creeping and they start like colonizing whole areas of storytellingwhere we dont need the image. Like, half of, dont get me started on documentaries but half of all documentaries dont need to be documentaries. Youve nothing to show me. One still picture. This is london, 1938. Do i need the image . Tell me the story about london 1938. If youre not going to show, bring it to life than youre wasting my time. Youve just spent 10million doing the video portion of something im really only listening to. What audio is, what were doing is reframing the r stories that are truly test told through the ear. And im asking this question. So for both of you, you in particular jacob. Before you even do that youve been podcasting forhow long . We started at slate in 2004 so the right at the beginning and as with a lot of Newer Technology the initial wave of enthusiasm which there was about podcasting in 2003 2004 little trivia quiz item ill give you, twitter was founded as a podcast. It was supposed to be a podcast directory. Podcasts they thought would be so big that they were going to need something, we still kind of needed to sort out what podcasts were good and like a lot of the things bill gates released some version of this and people overestimate the amount of change that happens in two or threeyears but underestimate the amount of change for 10 years. Podcasts didnt take off in a lot of ways, 10 years later they came roaring back rent a lot of people tied to serious but at slate weve been making them the whole time because they were fun, we werent making for the most part of revisionist history type podcasts that you know, are a narrative and do a lot of sonically rich parts, we were doing more conversational stuff which was still a huge part of podcasting but i felt it was a medium because whatyou could use creatively, what you could do emotionally , you kind of relationships had with listeners which is very different than what wyou have in journalism and for one think its a lot more positive but anyway, just to you my friends involved its a wealth of audio to. In malcolms story is a slightexaggeration but its basically true. Its not that hard but of course it is if you take it seriously and do itwell it is our. But i went to the writers i most admire including Michael Lewis and a few others, some ofwhom come to mind. And i think my thing was pretty much all of them are fast that this new medium m challenged them, challenged the writers, opens up opportunities, let them do something thats different from what they as masters of their craft as writers have been doing in print. Maybe getting it back overto malcolm. I wonder if you would say a few words on how your writing this change and how writing for the year is different from writing for the page. It is different. It encourages you to think a lot more about character and things that audio does well. It makes you look in different places for stories. Its kind of gotten the reporter, what happens over the life of our recorder i think or this place, if you met me in 2020 five talked to tons of people more than i needed to and i talked, i got more into this issue and then with podcasts you have to talk to people. You cant just read a book and then say whats in the book, youve igot to call a person and go to a lot of trouble and it reminds you about how much fun recording is and how you learn all of this like, the thing in i wish Michael Lewis was here, he is here up here, but the thing ive always liked is the hardest thing as a writer is you know that you want to find out about gaps so you know what the minimum number you need to do to find out. And you know what the maximum number that you need to do is. As any person who is confused could that lets say its 20 so the question is if its between ads arrange 3 yoto 20 how far you go. As you get or adapt as a writer you tend to minimize the number of, you stop three. Because you think i can make it work. And podcasts you cant do that so in podcasts your fourth and youre telling audio stories, you find yourself doing 10 and what you learn is i forgotten how much amazing stuff there was between three. So to give you an example, i got down things that are to come and get it to go into. And the tv show. Is an audience i want to talk to, a creator, the actors, but i really wanted to talk to the nbc guys Warren Littlefield. So i tracked down Warren Littlefield and again i was writing about it but never would have called Warren Littlefield what and that voice he seemed to be interesting and i called him up im talking about halfway through the interview he starts to tell this fantastic story about they, backup. They all hes done all my or so the guy who was a lot in dc was a guy named donald meyer who was inthe ojs best friend. The two guys are talking about the early days and one of the staff, donald meyer and he just starts talking again. Te he really hated don. Who cares about don question then they came to me and said i love the idea but i knew god, problem. I tried to get this idea in the show about a gay man on television in america in 1997 , living with a straight woman and don is having none of it. He spends like a year trying to strategize this path to don and start by lying to don. Don doesnt really catch on but finally the pilot finishes and the air the pilot and don thinks thats his moment to kill it and he makes don downplay it but all these executives are in the room and theyre going to watch the pilot episode of will and grace and bob wright is the head of the whole Company Comes down from new york city to watch the pilot. Don, the big chief looks nervous. Play the first episode, dead silence. And don oldmeyer was like. And with a serious face he says thats the finest piece oftelevision ive seen in my life. Like, mthats what you get when you go to the tent. That just reminded me. So the whole industry now is 15, 18 years old, whatever it is. Are we in second inning, fourth inning, is it silent movies, black oand white, technicolor, where does this go and are our audiobooks art of that trajectory or is it a whole separate thing and where do you think the podcasting industry format will go creatively and how does audiobooks fit into that . Those are interesting questions that we think about all the time. Its constantly the development of the medium. I remember we got michael to kind of help us when we restarting the Country Company iswith Book Publishing and film and music and is like a deeper range of experiences in the media and you started listening to a lot of podcasts. And i remember you saying i cant find anything else good wto listen to. You were like ive been through everything and ive out of stuff. Thats surprised me because the story people kept doing the story there now 750,000 podcasts, now 1 million podcasts but in a way i think it was right, there were a large number of podcasts. There were a lot of folks at esthe library of congress but it doesnt mean theres something you want to immerse yourself in. There is a lot of high quality Audio Content being created and distributed by podcast for which to me just means its supported by advertising so sold for key but i think were still relatively early. There hasnt been a kind of standardization in industries. There have been a standardization around the number of whats the season. There will be more than one genre and more than one way to work but part of whats wonderful about the movement in the industry now is it is where listening a little bit and things can be quirky or weird or really different from however they work and there are nobles that yet. Thats the most fun. To work in any medium abefore the rules get set and at the same time i think we crave the rules because it will make the industry more mature and more viableand i think thats coming but id say creatively , were still in the relatively early phase. With audiobooks, were not even in the, the pictures are still warming up because theres all this, there are all these techniques that