You understand the source for that "this American life" airing was the Moth, which is basically a journalist interview version of the Onion, no? Even the host where you took that quote from, refers to it as a place for journalists to tell both true stories and tall tales" at the end of the episode.This is all verifiable because the conference was actually held in Amsterdam, not Sydney. He did make a reference to it potentially being in Sydney. But only after two other publications had already published that.
Indeed, Nexis confirms that Gladwell included Sydney as a contender in his Aug. 17, 1991, Post piece about the upcoming conference. (His Post article actually names London, Madrid, and Montreal as the other contenders—which they were. The 1992 conference ultimately went to Amsterdam.)...At least two publications mentioned Sydney as a possible AIDS conference site before Gladwell did.
For more context, the story came from the Moth.
At its conclusion, This American Life host Ira Glass identifies The Moth as a place where “people come to tell both true stories and occasional tall tales.”
Which is Gladwell telling?
Though he plays his material for laughs, Gladwell encourages listeners to believe him by filling the talk with verisimilitude-building detail...But the talk isn’t verifiable. It’s mostly bunk.
When I interviewed him, Gladwell protested that nobody who knows anything about The Moth would ever take literally a story told there.
“No one fact checks Moth stories, or expects them to stand up to skeptical scrutiny,” he e-mails. His story, while based on real events, “is not supposed to be ‘true,’ in the sense that a story in the New York Times is supposed to be ‘true.’ ” He continues, “It’s a yarn. In this case, it’s an elaborate joke: it’s a send-up of the seriousness with which journalists take themselves.”