Malcolm Gladwell Revisits “The Tipping Point” in New Book

PAULA NEWTON, ANCHOR: Now, from ending racial segregation to the spread of pandemics, tectonic shifts in social norms can often be traced back to multiple small actions. Understanding the how and why of this has become the life’s work of our next guest. 25 years now after his groundbreaking publication, “The Tipping Point,” social thinker and New York Times bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell, speaks with Walter Isaacson, revisiting, in fact, the subject in his latest book.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Paula. And, Malcolm Gladwell, welcome to the show.

MALCOLM GLADWELL, AUTHOR, “THE REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT”: Thank you, Walter.

ISAACSON: Your book, “The Tipping Point,” which came out about 25 years ago, spent eight years on the bestseller list. I mean, that’s huge. Why did you decide to revisit it now?

GLADWELL: Well, it was the 25th anniversary, and I thought — we thought it’d be fun to just do a revised edition. And I went back — and I hadn’t read it in 25 years. And I went back and I read it and I said, actually, I think it would be silly to revise it. It’s a time capsule. You know, it’s – – it was written in 1999. If I really want to revisit this, I should write a whole new book. And so, I reversed course in midstream and just started from the beginning again.

ISAACSON: You talk about midstream, was there a tipping point, so to speak, that you — when you said wait, wait, I got to do a whole new book?

GLADWELL: Well, I wanted to — you know, there were so many things I wanted to kind of — I wanted to talk about COVID, I wanted to talk about the opioid epidemic, I wanted to talk about — I was — you know, I had my ongoing obsession with elite schools that I — you know, I sort of made a list of all the things that I wanted to talk about and I realized there was none of the original book left. So, it was kind of — you know, there was — that was — I think the crucial point was the opioid stuff. I really, really, really did want to try to — the book begins and ends with the opioid crisis and I — that was the thing that got me started and I had a lot that I wanted to say about that and I couldn’t find a way to fit that into the architecture of the old book. And so, I thought I would start afresh.

ISAACSON: So, you talk about the opioid crisis and then, of course, the COVID epidemic. And the framing device for the whole concept of a tipping point, both in your original book and now, is that sometimes social movements or ideas become a tipping point like an epidemic, as if a virus attacks and they spread virally. So, how did that apply to things like opioid and for that matter, COVID?

GLADWELL: Well, COVID is super interesting because, you know, one of the things we did not realize until very late in the pandemic was that the COVID pandemic had a feature that is often distinctive of epidemics, which is that it was profoundly asymmetrical. It was being spread by a very small number of people. So, we had this assumption going in that everyone who was infected with COVID pose some risk to others and that is spreads, sort of, from person to person to person to person. And then, what we began to understand near the end of the pandemic was that sort of a very small fraction of individuals, 4, 5 percent, probably at most, for some reason we don’t entirely understand something to do with their genetic makeup, were producing hundreds, if not thousands more viral particles, or exhaling them in their breath and in their speech than everybody else. And that those people were probably the ones who were doing the majority of the damage in the pandemic.

ISAACSON: That idea of a super spreader takes me back to the original book, because sometimes you talk about people who are the super spreaders of ideas, that small percentage.

GLADWELL: Yes. So, that was that — that becomes — I talked about that in the original book, but the idea of the super spreader becomes a very big part of this book, because it’s also what makes — helps us make sense of the opioid crisis, that when you — the stage one of the opioid crisis was driven by doctors prescribing OxyContin. And the question was, you know, how do we make sense of that behavior? Was this evidence of some kind of fundamental failing of the medical profession? And when you look closely at how Purdue fomented the spread of OxyContin, you realize they weren’t relying on a flaw in the medical profession, they weren’t even relying on the efforts of the majority of doctors. What they were doing was exploiting a very, very tiny number of highly problematic, highly susceptible doctors who they realized that they only needed a couple thousand doctors to start a national epidemic around OxyContin. In other words, one doctor who — there were doctors — one doctor who could be convinced to prescribe thousands and thousands of pills of OxyContin was sufficient. You didn’t need to convince 100 to prescribe it 10 times, right? Then it was this exact same principle that drove the COVID pandemic, it was being driven by this very — a small core. And if you want to understand why the OxyContin spread as quickly as it did, you have to understand the behaviors of a very selective group of doctors who were deliberately targeted by Purdue.

ISAACSON: And yet, when you frame these things as epidemics, there seems to be a major distinction, to me at least, between opioids and, say, COVID. COVID is an epidemic that hits us from the outside. A virus, it comes and gets us. Opioid is something we did to ourselves. Why do you mush those two together? And I know at the end, you say we have to take responsibility for the ideas and themes that surround us. So, to what extent is this tipping point idea, this epidemic idea, one in which we have power to control?

GLADWELL: I think we have power to control. I mean, what links those two examples, one is obviously a biological phenomenon. The other is a behavioral phenomenon. But they — first of all, they resemble each other in the pattern of their — of the phenomenon. In other words, they follow an epidemic curve. These are not problems that rose slowly and steadily over time, they exploded at a certain critical moment in exactly the way that nonlinear phenomenon like epidemics do. Secondly, there is this dynamic of asymmetry, which is a powerful indicator of epidemics, that small numbers of people were moving them forward. But there’s also — there is a contagious element in both. You know, in one case, it’s contagion that we understand biological contagion, but with OxyContin, there was a behavioral contagion that this was something that spread within communities where there was, you know, the exposure to someone who was an OxyContin user dramatically increased your chance of becoming an OxyContin user yourself. I think we have to understand that our biological model of contagion is too narrow, that this is — these are phenomenon that apply very broadly to behaviors.

ISAACSON: You call it “The Revenge of the Tipping Point.” Why revenge?

GLADWELL: Because I was struck in the book by how often I thought institutions or individuals were deliberately using the epidemic principles to further their own ends. So, Purdue would be the classic example, that’s why I spent so much time on that case. But, you know, I have a chapter on Harvard University. I think that elite universities are playing a similar – – you know, it’s not as egregious a game, but they’re playing a game around it. They’re using epidemic rules to try and manage their culture, their institutional culture. So, how do you — if you’re someone who — you know, that chapter is all about the way sports are used by Harvard and schools like Harvard, essentially, to maintain a kind of culture, upper middle class privilege culture in their school the way Harvard looks at a school like Caltech that has had dramatic shifts in ethnic proportions over the last 25 years, and I think makes a very deliberate decision that’s not what they want to be. That’s what the whole court case last year was about, right? It was about why is Harvard suppressing the number of Asians? So, my chapter is all about, well, how did they go about suppressing the number of Asians in their school? And the answer is in part that they used athletics. They use the backdoor that they — they use an — they have more varsity sports than anybody else and they create a backdoor for student — for athletes to get in a much lower — with much lower test scores. And that’s how they maintain what they think of as Harvard. Now, those — that is, in a certain sense, using epidemic principles to control the culture of institution.

ISAACSON: Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, just signed a law sort of stopping legacy admissions, giving favor — favored status to people whose parents went to a certain college or university. What do you think of that?

GLADWELL: Oh, my God. So, happy about this. This is the best thing ever. I would have gone further. This not my idea. It’s Adam Grant, the psychologist’s idea. Adam Grant says, it shouldn’t be that schools are neutral, it should be they should penalize you if your parents went to that — to the same institution because you’ve already received the child of someone who’s attended Harvard, has already received the benefits that Harvard bestowed on their parents, right? So, they should — so they’ve already got their leg up. So, they should be penalized if they want to attend the same institution. Now, that’s slightly tongue in cheek. But I think that legacy institute — legacy admissions in elite schools were — I think, it’s safe to say, were a stain on American meritocracy. And I am astonished it has taken us this long for someone like Gavin Newsom to take action against it. And if this time next year, the schools of, you know, the northeast have not followed suit, I will be appalled.

ISAACSON: When I was growing up, the term the tipping point often referred to racial tipping in a particular neighborhood. I grew up in Broadmoor in the central City of New Orleans, which was a mixed neighborhood. And there was conscious efforts because Broadmoor Association came together to make sure that real estate agents weren’t allowed to tip the neighborhood, to make it all black or all white, and it remains and still is a mixed racial neighborhood. How does that notion of a tipping point tie into our race and neighborhood discussions?

GLADWELL: So, the phrase, the tipping point, you’re right, actually originates from the 1950s, during the era of white flight. Realtors — in fact, it’s a — we know exactly where the — if you look in the kind of the history of that term, it was first used by realtors to describe this very thing, the point at which there were so many blacks in a neighborhood that white population would leave en masse. And you’re absolutely right as well that in the ’50s and ’60s, there were some unscrupulous realtors who sought to reach the tipping point because they wanted the turnover. That — you know, that there were landlords who would — who welcomed the influx of — who thought they could exploit the newcomers in a way that — so, that’s where the term originates. And many of our ideas about behavioral contagion and the applicability of epidemics to social behavior come from that era, right? It was — you know, the famous economist Thomas Schelling who writes about — who did — produced all kinds of literature on tipping points, spoke — wrote explicitly about this, is the same phenomenon. And one of the things we learned — when we learn — and I have — I talk about this in one of my chapters, one of the things that we learned from that era was where the tipping point was, that it is not the case that one black family moving into a white neighborhood is sufficient to make the white — all the white people leave. There is — it is a — there’s a number. It’s somewhere around 25 — between 25 percent and a third, where – – when the outsiders reach that — the newcomers reach that number, the existing population leaves en masse. And I describe in the book this fascinating experiment done in Palo Alto, in a community called the Lawrence Tract, where they noted that fact and they said, we’re going to make community rules that say that no ethnicity, white, Asian or black can ever be above a third. So, we’re going to try and police — we explicitly use the principles behind epidemics to make sure we can maintain racial diversity in our neighborhood. And what you’re describing in Broadmoor sounds like an informal version of the same thing. The people realize that through collective action, they could keep the fear of white people in check by telling them, we’re not going to let this process be taken over by unscrupulous real estate agents or landlords. We’re going to have a — in the midst of this kind of upheaval, keep a steadying hand on the way that the change works, right? And that to me is — I love that. I know it’s complicated and I know it raises all kinds of questions, but I think the idea of thoughtfully intervening in these kinds of processes, because you understand the way contagion works is the solution to many of these kinds of social problems.

ISAACSON: I want to apply some of this to immigration. There seems to be a certain point, it’s kind of close to the tipping point you talk about, about neighborhoods, a 15 to 20 percent, where throughout American history or the history of almost any other country, if the number of immigrants is more than 15 or 20 percent, you have the big backlashes of the 1840s against the Irish or the Italians or Jews or blacks or Haitians now. Tell me about how — what you write about applies to our current debate on immigration?

GLADWELL: Yes. So, that’s a really interesting question. And I do think there is something to be learned from the literature on tipping points and apply to immigration. So, if I had — if I was to wave a magic wand and redo American immigration policies from scratch, what I would rather have seen, rather than have these surges followed by backlashes, followed by surges, followed by backlashes, a smarter thing to do would be to have a steady state at somewhere below what we believe to be the tipping point for a kind of — for social unrest. So, never have — and then what — so you would — so you could sort of avoid — you could engineer your way out of these very socially unproductive and problematic backlashes. Because, very often, the backlash what’s going on right now with, you know, Haitians in Springfield, it’s just appalling. I mean, people who come to this country or working, who are here legally, who have revived the community. But — so, backlashes are things that we desperately need to figure out ways to avoid. And I think something, you know, lowering the — be careful not to exceed the kind of public threshold for — is it — would be a very wise strategy. That being said, you know, I’m a Canadian. Canada has been a country that, over the last 30 years, has quite happily, until very recently, sustained a much higher level of annual immigration than many other western nations. So, I wonder — I would couple that advice with saying, it would be useful to go to countries like Canada and Australia and find out why they have managed to do maintain higher levels of immigration without that kind of public backlash. That’s a very — I’ve — the Canada puzzle, as someone who grew up there and was an immigrant to Canada, myself, has always fascinated me. Canada takes way more refugees, and the public support for taking refugees is much higher than almost anywhere else. It’s really a — that has something to do with the story Canadians tell themselves about who they are, that that story includes a kind of — that that they’re a — you know, a big empty country that wants to be filled up with people from around the world, like that’s a very powerful story that’s been told for 250 years in Canada, and how they’ve kept that story alive would be a very interesting thing to investigate.

ISAACSON: One of the big differences between 25 years ago when you wrote “The Tipping Point,” now when you write “The Revenge of the Tipping Point,” is you’ve had two kids. How does having a couple of kids change the way you look at this and how does the way you look at this new book change the way you raise your two young kids now?

GLADWELL: Well, having kids means that I will never give parenting advice again. I’m out of that game. I now realize how futile it is to tell anyone how to raise their kids, since I have no clue myself. You just — every day confronted with — I try and track the percentage of times my three-year- old agrees with me or obeys some command I make. It’s now — I’m now down at like 25 percent and she’s only three. So, where will I be when she’s 16? So, that — and also, I don’t know, I’ve — I’m — I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at how little all of my theorizing about the world is, how little of it I use in my own day-to-day parenting. I think all bets are off when you’re raising small children. So, it has been a powerfully humbling experience.

ISAACSON: Malcolm Gladwell, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

GLADWELL: Thank you, Walter.