Malcolm Gladwell on the 'Revenge of the Tipping Point'

When Malcolm Gladwell's first book, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference," came out in 2000, readers learned about his description of a tipping point.

"The Tipping Point is that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire," he wrote.

Twenty-five years and many books later, Gladwell, 61, is still teaching us. In his latest, "Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering," the author, New Yorker staff writer and host of the podcast "Revisionist History," covers many stories, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the world's most successful bank robbers, to illustrate how various kinds of epidemics spread.

The following is our interview, edited for length and clarity.

Next Avenue: Why did you write this sequel now?

Malcolm Gladwell: It's the 25th anniversary of "The Tipping Point," and originally I was just going to mark the occasion by doing a revised edition, reissuing the original with some updates. Then I just sort of started that process, got so wrapped up in it, and realized I had so many more things to say that I just ended up writing a new book. It wasn't planned. I realized I've been thinking about a lot of these questions for the last quarter-century, and I had stored up all these thoughts, arguments and stories and it just sort of tumbled out of me.

How did you go about choosing the particular examples you decided to cite in here? What ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor?

The story I really wanted to tell was the story of the opioid crisis. So, I began with that, and then I realized that there were certain themes that come out of that story that I wanted to explain so people could make sense of opioids.

The idea of this very, very small number of people being at the core of the epidemic — which is so important in understanding the opioid crisis — or this idea like the narratives that we tell each other in communities or societies really have an impact on how other people behave.

I started with the opioid crisis, and then I said, well, how can I make some of these broader ideas come alive? I started trying to find stories that illustrated that.

What was left on the cutting room floor? Hard question. I had a whole thing in my COVID chapter about what was the safest place to be indoors during COVID in New York City. I had a whole section, which I just love. But I had no place for it. The safest place to be indoors in New York City during COVID was a gallery in MoMA [Museum of Modern Art] because they have the best air quality mechanism (HVAC) in New York City.

I don't leave huge chunks on the floor. If I find a story that sounds interesting, I keep coming back to it and developing it more and more.

When doing your research, do you have research assistants helping you? Do you do it all yourself and how do you find this stuff?

I do it almost all myself. I have an assistant who helps me. I'll tell him or her to find me a paper, or I give them discrete assignments, but 90% of the research is done by me. I think it's important to do your own research because that's where the stories come from.

If you have someone else do it, then you're losing access to the story and that's deadly.

And where do I find them? I've been in this business so long. When I started in journalism, I always had an anxiety about where I would find story ideas. Now all those anxieties are gone and I think it's the easiest thing in the world. It's just a matter of how much patience you have with something that seems promising.

Once you understand what a story is about, fundamentally, and what the themes are, then it's very easy to do your research because you have some sense of direction.

What do you hope that readers get out of your book? What do you want them to come away with?

Well, I wanted to encourage them. I mean, it's the same thing that I've been interested in in all my books, which is, I want to encourage people to think about, take a problem and kind of rotate it in their minds.

You know how you can look at a chair from one perspective and if you turn it upside down, and you walk around it, and you stand on top of it, and you sit on it, you kind of get a better sense of what the chair is? I'm trying to do that with ideas. It's for people to look at ideas through a slightly different lens. I'm not interested in them necessarily agreeing with me, but I want to deepen their understanding of a problem.

In the COVID story, for example, just that idea that this is the virus spread by a very small number of people — the more you think about it, the more it changes your understanding of what we just went through. Now, it could lead you in a million different directions. But my contribution is to say to you, you might have had a model in your head of how the disease spread and the model is wrong. Here's the model that we think is more accurate. What do you make of it? Use this new model and play with it. That's sort of what I'm trying to get people to do.

Do you think that you're finished with the concept of the tipping point? Or do you think there's more for you to discover and tell others about in the future?

It's not a question of whether I'm finished. It's a question of whether my readers are finished.  [Laughs.]

I have many, many other things that I want to write about. All of my books have connected. They all come out of each other. You know, there's always a little germ that I discovered writing a book that leads to the next one. So, I'm not finished with it. I'm sure something will come of it, but I doubt that I would write another book with the word 'Tipping Point' in the title. I think two books on tipping points, for one person, is probably enough, right?

When you think about talking heads or pundits, how have some of them misinterpreted your work? And what do you think they misinterpreted about it?

I don't know whether I would say people misinterpret it. I think my books are not difficult to interpret. I think people — not everyone — shares the same delight I have in telling stories this way. Or some people are just not interested in the enterprise, which is fine. It never bothers me.

You have to have a certain kind of curiosity, you have to have a certain level of playfulness, you have to have a certain amount of patience with the way the story is being told. Those are all things that not everybody has.

My readers are people who are down for that, who are up for that kind of adventure. And some people aren't, which is just fine.

Like a friend of mine said, that's why there are menus. Not everyone likes everything.

I love that. I should use that.

Why do you think that subjects, such as the tipping point and its revenge, captivate readers?

I've always said that people are experience rich and theory poor. All of us lived through COVID, but it's very hard for if you just live through COVID to make sense of it. Most of us are not epidemiologists. We're not virologists. We don't read the latest medical journals. All we know is that we got sick three times. The first was nastier than the second. We know what it was like to have our kids at home instead of in school. That's all we know.

I think what I've tried to do in my book is provide the theory to make sense of that kind of experience. So the chapter on Harvard and sports — I'm sure many people have wondered and found it weird that elite schools, schools that are supposed to be academically elite, are so obsessed with sports. Why would that be? That seems like a paradox. But if you're a normal working person with tons of things going on your life, you don't have the leisure to try and get to the bottom of that puzzle. It's just the kind of thing that you file away in the back of your head.

My job is to take all of those things that we file away — the unanswered puzzles — and come up with a plausible explanation for some of them. That's the appeal. 

Has your approach to writing, or even the research that you do, changed as you've gotten older? And if so, how?

My ambitions have gone a little smaller as I've gotten older. I'm much more interested in telling people stories and touching on emotional subjects. I think my early work was quite ambitious. I'm a little older and wiser, and humbled by life. I no longer think that I can make grand theories about things. I think it's more appropriate to kind of make smaller observations.

I do think my writing is a little more cautious with the way I use science than I used to. In my 20s and 30s, I wrote about science with the kind of enthusiasm of the convert. I wasn't someone who's studied science before, and I had a kind of fan's worship of scientists and the things they learned.

Now I have a little more perspective on the scientific process. Scientists put ideas out there and then they debate them. There is an ongoing process of making arguments and correcting them, and withdrawing them, and expanding on them.

Since we're talking about getting older…There is this really wonderful thing that comes with getting older, which is your own personal history gives you perspective that you just don't have when you're a kid.

We have a lot of younger employees who were very freaked out by economic ups and downs, and I don't freak out. Why don't I? Because I lived through the '70s. My dad had a mortgage in Canada that was 19%. I remember what that was like; it was brutal. What we're going through now seems like a cake walk.

I feel a certain kind of calm. You get a kind of calm and understanding with age and that's very welcome. It's one of the great things about getting older.

What are some of the biggest takeaways that you learned from writing your book?

I kind of think that between writing the first book 25 years ago and this book, I see signs of epidemic phenomenon in far more places that I did back then. Back then, I thought I was describing something quite specific, and now I feel like I'm describing virtually everything.

Maybe that's an overstatement, but I just think understanding epidemics has become an even more important way of making sense in a way that just wasn't true 25 years ago. Much of the world around us now is constructed along kind of an epidemic line.

What would readers be surprised to know about you, and not just that you have a cat named Biggie Smalls?

Oh, dear. I'm a huge track and field fan. And I'm a huge car nut. I love cars.

Huge parts of my day are taken up with either like looking at track and field websites, or talking, texting or reading endlessly about cars.

You're kidding me.

Basically, it's what I spend my life doing. Those are my passions.

Michele Wojciechowski Michele "Wojo" Wojciechowski is an award-winning writer who lives in Baltimore, Md. She's the author of the humor book Next Time I Move, They'll Carry Me Out in a Box. Reach her at www.WojosWorld.com. Read More