

Malcolm Gladwell Is Lord Of All Things Overlooked and Misunderstood
Reimagine Youth Sports
- Restructure youth sports scoring to emphasize participation over individual performance.
- Prioritize broader team involvement, making every member's contribution valuable.
Prioritizing the Base
- Sports organizations often prioritize elite athletes over expanding the sport's base.
- We need to consider who sports truly serve and prioritize the ordinary athlete.
LeBron's Endurance
- Malcolm Gladwell challenged LeBron James to a mile race to prove basketball's evolution into an aerobic sport.
- Gladwell believed LeBron's endurance was underestimated and a race would highlight this.

























What are the limits of human performance? How can we reimagine sport to boost lifelong adoption? And what is the athlete’s role in moving culture forward?
Today we explore these questions and tons more with the lord of all things overlooked and misunderstood, Malcolm Gladwell.
I suspect most of you are very familiar with Malcolm. Perhaps you’ve listened to his sensational podcast Revisionist History, where every episode re-examines something from the past—an event, a person, an idea, even a song—and asks whether our collective stories got it right the first time.
Or maybe you’ve read one of his six New York Times best sellers, such as The Tipping Point,Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and Talking to Strangers.
Today’s conversation begins with running, extends to sport, broadens into a conversation about the role of athletes in moving society forward, and (of course) unearths other topics overlooked and misunderstood—all in true Gladwellian style.
We talk about his latest podcast, Legacy of Speed, and why this terrain just might be his most Gladwellian project to date.
Malcolm also shares several of his orthogonal ideas around education, publishing, the future of audio, creativity, and many more fascinating topics.
Today’s episode is also viewable on YouTube.
More about Malcom + show notes: https://bit.ly/richroll692a
Malcolm is someone I’ve wanted on the show since day one, and I am thrilled to finally have made it happen.
I hope you enjoy this exchange as much as I was thrilled to host it.
Peace + Plants,
Rich