Revenge of the Tipping Point

First, an INVITATION:

We’re hosting a live taping of this show in New York City next week, on Thursday, October 10th. Our beloved curator, Daniel Pink , will be in conversation with Adam Moss, the legendary former editor of New York Magazine, about Adam’s new book The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing. It’s sure to be a lively, inspiring conversation. Hope to share a cocktail with you.? RSVP here, and use promo code NEWSLETTER50 for 50% off.?

This week on the Next Big Idea podcast, I have the great pleasure of talking with Malcolm Gladwell about his latest book — just out this week! — Revenge of The Tipping Point, in which Malcolm revisits the science of social contagion 25 years later. Listen on Apple or Spotify and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Twenty-five years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wasn't Malcolm Gladwell. I mean, he was. But he wasn’t the household name he is today. He was known mostly by the cognoscenti as the guy who wrote clever essays in The New Yorker about things like neurosurgery and Reeboks. But then he wrote a book. And everything changed.?

That book was The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. It was packed with gripping stories — about Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, about Broken Windows policing and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood — and it contained a tantalizing promise: Small changes, in the right place at the right moment, could domino into colossal movements. In some cases a “social epidemic” could generate tens of millions of profits for a streetwear company … in another, it could spark a contagion of teen smoking.

The take-home message of The Tipping Point was decidedly optimistic. The world around you, Malcolm concluded, “might seem like an immovable, implacable place.” But, as he put it in the book’s final line, it isn’t. “With the slightest push,” he wrote, “in just the right place — it can be tipped.”

The Tipping Point was a phenomenon. It sold more than 5 million copies — unprecedented for a science-based work of non-fiction — and found a spot on the New York Times bestseller list where it remained for 8 years. This book — and those that followed: Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath — spawned a whole genre of bestselling nonfiction. You might even say that The Tipping Point ... was itself a tipping point. It was the beginning of a contagion of storytelling meets social psychology.?

That passion for storytelling has sometimes gotten Malcolm into trouble. His critics argue that he privileges a good yarn over hard science. As The Guardian summarized it recently, “Critics have been saying the same things about Gladwell for 25 years: that he relies too heavily on cherrypicked anecdotes, that his arguments are simplistic or obvious or both.”

Such criticisms, in my mind, misunderstand Malcolm’s broader project. He shares with us, in his books, not just a new take on something we thought we understood, but a delight in the detective work of trying to figure out what is true. We encounter, again and again in Malcolm’s books, the curious, unexpected phenomena that refuse to comply with our worldviews … leading us to suspect that some of our long-held beliefs may — perish the thought — be wrong. Malcolm Gladwell, I would argue, teaches us something important: updating the models we use to understand the world can be a source of joy. As Malcolm put it in our conversation, “I've never gotten over the kind of particular pleasure that comes from reversing your understanding.”

This is exactly what Malcolm did when he sat down to update The Tipping Point on the occasion of its 25th birthday. He writes in the introduction to his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point:

“When I sat down to reread The Tipping Point, in preparation for this project, I found myself stopping every few pages to ask, What about this? How could I have left out that? In some far corner of my mind, I discovered, I had never stopped arguing with myself about how best to explain and understand tipping points and their many mysteries.”

Like its predecessor, Revenge is full of hysterical and nail biting stories, which we talk about in this conversation: How the city of Miami turned an upstanding citizen into the largest medicare fraudster in history. How, in the 1950s, a small community in Northern California found an unusual way to prevent white flight. And how most Americans — and Germans — didn’t really know what the Holocaust was until they saw a schmaltzy TV miniseries.?

Classic Gladwell, right? But Revenge of the Tipping Point isn’t just an excuse for Malcolm to tell stories. It’s a chance for him to weave those stories into a broader argument about how the world works. In Revenge, he gives us three new principles for how social contagions spread: the “magic third,” “superspreaders,” and perhaps most importantly “the overstory.” What is the overstory?

“Communities have their own stories. And those stories are contagious. Actually, the word story isn't quite right. A better word is overstory.?

An overstory is the upper layer of foliage in a forest, and the size and density and height of the overstory affect the behavior and development of every species far below on the forest floor. ... The overstory is made up of things way up in the air, in many cases outside our awareness. We tend to forget about the overstory because we’re so focused on the life going on in front of and around us. But overstories turn out to be really, really powerful."

So Malcolm’s exploration of social contagions continues, a quarter century later, with a new cast of colorful characters, and a new set of mysteries to solve … and a new set of tools with which to solve them. Listen to our conversation on Apple or Spotify and let us know what you think in the comments below.?

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Check it out, and let me know what you think.?