Transcribed: If Only You Had Known

Love him or hate him, Malcolm Gladwell has a knack for defining issues in novel ways. So when he basically said breast cancer awareness was a crock, I sat up and listened. This is from TVO's Big Ideas podcast, a Canadian lecture series.

Here's what he has to say about our obsession about helping people become "aware" of issues:

"I think the tension between knowing and doing is an incredibly critical one, and that's what I want to focus on. Because I think that what has happened in recent years is we have come to fetishize the knowing part of that equation, and that's why we have created so much excitement and fuss around that word, awareness, and that's got us away from paying attention to the mechanics of doing, which is ultimately far more important."

TVO's Big Ideas, 11.1.08