October 9, 2024 • 12 mins
It’s coming full circle for Malcolm Gladwell.
Twenty-five years after the success of his first book ‘The Tipping Point’, he returns with a brand-new volume, reframing those original lessons.
‘Revenge of the Tipping Point’ returns to the topic of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of exploring the dark side of contagious phenomena.
Gladwell told Mike Hosking that his success came from a “healthy dollop of luck”.
“I read lots and lots and lots of books which I think are first class and that sell vanishingly small amounts of copies, so I don't think that writing a brilliant book is a guarantee of success.”
In the years since that first publication, Gladwell has written a number of best selling books, and he believes the secret to his continued success is writing the things he’s interested in.
“You have to have confidence, in other words, that your interests are shared by others.”
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Malcolm Gladwill. He writes an article for a magazine, gets attention,
and he gets a book deal. Off the back of that,
he writes The Tipping Point. It goes off from there.
It's tours at six more best selling books, and we
got up with them last time in twenty seventeen, as
latest as Revenge of the Tipping Point. It explores old
and new tipping points. Twenty five years on and Malcolm
Gladwell is, whether it's from New York, good morning, good morning,
(00:20):
the twenty five years? Are you celebrating the twenty five
years since the very start of this wonderment that is
your life?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I am? I am, yes it is. Which one is
that twenty five years?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Is?
Speaker 2 (00:32):
What is that silver? I've forgotten what that anniversary is.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I think it is silver. It's not golden, but silver.
You'll take silver twenty five It takes silver. Here's the funny.
Here's a funny thing about it. When I read the
book when it came out originally, I for whatever reason,
had no concept of how old you might have been.
Comparatively speaking, you were young. How was it dealing with
that level of what I'm assuming was life changing success?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah? Well, you know it was. It had no I
expected to have a much greater impact on my life
than it did. Nothing, you know, nothing changes Like my
friends were still the same. I lived in the same apartment.
I you know, it was. It was surprising, a surprisingly
kind of I mean, I suppose it it it it
(01:17):
it it changed. People would return my phone calls and
I wanted to interview them for stories. So that was big.
But and uh, it freed me up because I began
to I lost my anxiety about whether my writing would
would would please an audience, you know. So that made
(01:38):
that That made that allowed me to be a bit
more adventurous. But it didn't otherwise have much of It
didn't create the change that one would have thought.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Although that will be down in some way to you
because presumably you could have bought a bigger apartment and
changed your friends and your life.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
I eventually did. But no, the change, the friends part.
It's funny. You know, you look at you know, writers,
successful writer are not true celebrities. So all of us
look at true celebrities and we assume that on the
occasion of their celebrity, their life turned upside down. But
I think as a general rule that's not what happens.
(02:16):
I think you you know, I was talking to some
friend about of mine about he knew a guy who
was one of the has become one of those tech billionaires.
And I said, well, who is friends? And my friend said, oh,
just guys you knew in high school. Wow. It's like, oh,
(02:36):
he's like the rest of you know. I don't think
that's normal. It's like totally normal, Like, well, well, who
else would his friends be? Right? You know, they don't
cease to be his friends because he is a billion
and they only have, you know, a very modest amount.
There's he still has the same things in common with him.
I's just I guess he's picking up the check for dinner.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I guess so, But and take it would be different.
I'm suspecting because the reason these guys got successful in
TICK is because, like followed their passion. The fact that
money came along is of no consequence to them, because
what they were doing was being geeky and techy, and
that's what that truly dried the which I suppose applies
to you as well. Do you think if it hadn't
been tipping point, it would have been something else? You
(03:15):
would have got there anyway.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Probably not. I don't know. I mean, it's an impossible
question to answer. I'm powerfully convinced of the randomness of success.
So I don't think there's anything inevitable about anyone's success.
I think, if you're you know, so, my best guess
is that I got spectacularly lucky. I mean, I read
(03:39):
lots and lots and lots of books which I think
are first class and that sell vanishingly small amounts of copies.
So I don't think that writing a brilliant book is
is a guarantee of success. I think, you know, to
be successful, you must have some healthy doll up of luck,
and I had a healthy doll up of luck for
I I don't particularly understand and so and after that
(04:03):
it becomes in writing books has becomes a self fulfilling
prophecy after a while, right, I mean, you know your
publisher promotes your book because you've sold a lot of books,
and your books you saw, you let's set a lot
of books. So it's like you no longer used to
you know, am I deserving of all this? You know?
I've lost track of that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Do you second guess yourself? Though, because once you got success,
do you think, well, it's the sophomore album discussion, isn't
it Like you know, everyone gets a hit and then
hang on sophomore album. So when you get to the
sophomore are you thinking I'm genuinely telling that this is
bound to go well or you just don't have a clue.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
I did have anxiety by my second book, yes, along
those lines, but no, my perspective has been that what
the last thing you should do is change. What you
should do is what you've always done, and you should
continue to write the things that make you happy, and
that if you're lucky, you know some number of people
(04:59):
will be interesting in the same things you're interested in.
You have to have confidence, in other words, that your
interests are shared by others. And I think that one
of the things I've always tried to do, even more
so as I've gotten older, is that I do a
lot of I do all my own reporting, and I
get out of my comfort zone as much as I can.
(05:19):
I try to talk to as many people as I
can and spend time with people, and I think guards
against the kind of of narrowness that ends a That's
what ends at creative person's career is when they start
to be to live inside their own little bubble and
never leave it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
You must always be inquisitive. But I've always argued that
being inquisitive is a God given gift. You are born
with it.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah. I also think you can develop habits and disciplines
that encourage your curiosity that you you know that there
are routines you can have. So for example, I've been
doing this podcast Vision's History for ten years and I
(06:08):
do ten some of between ten and twenty episodes a year. Now,
that's a routine that forces me to be curious. I
have to come up with ideas for fifteen or twenty episodes,
and that's a discipline that there's no way to do
that just by interrogating my own thoughts, right, yeah, exactly,
I have to go out in the world if you've
(06:29):
got that kind of a obligation. So that's a structural
part of my life that forces me to be curious.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Okay, these podcasts smell confessonate me, because what do you
reckon podcasts are doing or have done, or will do
to books.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I think enhance in some sense, enhance them because there
are another mechanism by which people can build audiences and
develop material. So if you think about it, historically, what
magazines did was a they were away for authors to
develop their abilities, to test ideas and to develop audiences.
(07:06):
That's what they did. They were like a farm system
for books. And then when you had when you had
an idea that made sense to you and an audience
that knew who you were, and you developed as a writer,
you went out and you wrote books. Well, the magazine
world has kind of dried up and something had to
take its place, and I think it's a podcasts that
taken its place. So I find a lot of ideas
(07:27):
that are found in my latest book, Revenge the Tipping Point.
Some of those ideas were developed as a podcasts first,
or inspired by work I did in the podcast, and
I was able to test out concept, theory and idea
a story and see whether it made sense, see whether
people were interested in it, see whether it it had legs,
(07:50):
and then I was able to take what I learned
and use that in a book. So I think that
there's a there's a very there's a wonderful kind of
synergy between those two four.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
The stories from Tipping Point to Revenge of the Tipping Point.
In a why you can argue, are the same stories. Therefore,
nothing's happened in the ensuing twenty five years. Weird stuff, tiles,
stories made up, It still all happens. We're exactly the
same as we were twenty five years ago. Is that
fair or not fair?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Well, we live as we did twenty five years ago
in a world that is rife with epidemic change. I
think that we're quicker to recognize it today, and I
think the nature of the epidemics around us has They've
grown more frequent and more complex, But fundamentally we are
(08:47):
still you know, it's not like the Internet invented contagious
social phenomenon, right, Some people act as if it did,
and they forget that, Oh no, no, that was happening before
the Internet. It's just the Internet maybe was an accelerant
to those kinds of things, or it made them appear,
(09:11):
move faster and be bigger than they might have otherwise,
but it didn't fundamentally change the way human beings interact
with each other. And you know, contagion is the idea
that we would be influenced by others, catch behaviors and
ideas from others in the way that we catch a
cold from them is something that's fundamental to who we are.
(09:33):
What is new is how profoundly kind of a historical
some of our perspectives on our world are. And one
of the advantages of being an old guy like I am,
and you're kind of I don't I don't think you're
my age, but I think you're kind of an old guy.
With those of us who are old guys, you know,
we have some perspective we can tell our children. You know,
(09:54):
it was ever Thus.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
That's a funny guess. So how old are you?
Speaker 2 (09:59):
I got you at fifty, I'm sixty.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
One, sixty one, I'm fifty nine. Let me just ask
you this because I got to wind this up, But
let me ask what I listened to your thing with
Paul Simon, who I've been endlessly fascinated with my entire life.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Me too.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
And you started off with the question about critics. He
doesn't read the reviews, he's not interested. You started off
with your question saying you do you get a lot
of difficult Do the critics bother you in any way,
shape or form, now, given what you've managed to achieve normally?
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Do they not bother me? I don't think they matter.
I mean I actually weirdly think they did matter when
I was starting out. I think your review in the
New York Times in nineteen ninety nine or two thousand matter.
It was a essentral But now the kind of the
media world has been chopped into a thousand pieces, so
any one bit of criticism makes no more than a ripple.
(10:53):
So it's not something I spend a lifetime on.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Fun game. I think about this all the time. Paul
Simon or Bob Dylan, greatest writers of our age, not
even close.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Paul Simon, Yeah, Al Simon, I agree, it's not. I mean,
the longevity is career. It's funny. I was just talking
to a Kiwi about this. Why I believe Nick Willis
is the greatest miler of his generation. Why because because
Nick Willis ran sub formulate miles for twenty semi consecutive years,
and at some point you have to understand that longevity
(11:24):
is a greater achievement than peak performance. He was never
the fastest in the world, but he ver close to
being the fastest girl. But he was. He managed to
sustain world class level performance through his late teens, twenties, thirties,
and early forties. You must at a certain point, understand
what an accomplishment that is.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I would as Paul Simon, I would also argue with Simon,
not just with Willis, not just middle distance, but he
went long to Simon went Graceland, Africa, different genres over
a long period of time as well.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, yeah, Nick. The idea somewhere Nick Willis should be
very plea that we are comparing him to Paul Simon.
I reason Paul Simon of middle distance running.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Tell you what, Given we're both aging so brilliantly on
the fiftieth anniversary of Tipping Point, we'll get back together
and talk some more.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
How's that from our nursing homes?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Exactly? All right? Might go, well, appreciate it. Welcome, glad,
we'll the Revenge of the Tipping Point.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to
news talks. It'd be from six am weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.
Malcolm Gladwill. He writes an article for a magazine, gets attention,
and he gets a book deal. Off the back of that,
he writes The Tipping Point. It goes off from there.
It's tours at six more best selling books, and we
got up with them last time in twenty seventeen, as
latest as Revenge of the Tipping Point. It explores old
and new tipping points. Twenty five years on and Malcolm
Gladwell is, whether it's from New York, good morning, good morning,
(00:20):
the twenty five years? Are you celebrating the twenty five
years since the very start of this wonderment that is
your life?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I am? I am, yes it is. Which one is
that twenty five years?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Is?
Speaker 2 (00:32):
What is that silver? I've forgotten what that anniversary is.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I think it is silver. It's not golden, but silver.
You'll take silver twenty five It takes silver. Here's the funny.
Here's a funny thing about it. When I read the
book when it came out originally, I for whatever reason,
had no concept of how old you might have been.
Comparatively speaking, you were young. How was it dealing with
that level of what I'm assuming was life changing success?
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah? Well, you know it was. It had no I
expected to have a much greater impact on my life
than it did. Nothing, you know, nothing changes Like my
friends were still the same. I lived in the same apartment.
I you know, it was. It was surprising, a surprisingly
kind of I mean, I suppose it it it it
(01:17):
it it changed. People would return my phone calls and
I wanted to interview them for stories. So that was big.
But and uh, it freed me up because I began
to I lost my anxiety about whether my writing would
would would please an audience, you know. So that made
(01:38):
that That made that allowed me to be a bit
more adventurous. But it didn't otherwise have much of It
didn't create the change that one would have thought.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Although that will be down in some way to you
because presumably you could have bought a bigger apartment and
changed your friends and your life.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
I eventually did. But no, the change, the friends part.
It's funny. You know, you look at you know, writers,
successful writer are not true celebrities. So all of us
look at true celebrities and we assume that on the
occasion of their celebrity, their life turned upside down. But
I think as a general rule that's not what happens.
(02:16):
I think you you know, I was talking to some
friend about of mine about he knew a guy who
was one of the has become one of those tech billionaires.
And I said, well, who is friends? And my friend said, oh,
just guys you knew in high school. Wow. It's like, oh,
(02:36):
he's like the rest of you know. I don't think
that's normal. It's like totally normal, Like, well, well, who
else would his friends be? Right? You know, they don't
cease to be his friends because he is a billion
and they only have, you know, a very modest amount.
There's he still has the same things in common with him.
I's just I guess he's picking up the check for dinner.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I guess so, But and take it would be different.
I'm suspecting because the reason these guys got successful in
TICK is because, like followed their passion. The fact that
money came along is of no consequence to them, because
what they were doing was being geeky and techy, and
that's what that truly dried the which I suppose applies
to you as well. Do you think if it hadn't
been tipping point, it would have been something else? You
(03:15):
would have got there anyway.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Probably not. I don't know. I mean, it's an impossible
question to answer. I'm powerfully convinced of the randomness of success.
So I don't think there's anything inevitable about anyone's success.
I think, if you're you know, so, my best guess
is that I got spectacularly lucky. I mean, I read
(03:39):
lots and lots and lots of books which I think
are first class and that sell vanishingly small amounts of copies.
So I don't think that writing a brilliant book is
is a guarantee of success. I think, you know, to
be successful, you must have some healthy doll up of luck,
and I had a healthy doll up of luck for
I I don't particularly understand and so and after that
(04:03):
it becomes in writing books has becomes a self fulfilling
prophecy after a while, right, I mean, you know your
publisher promotes your book because you've sold a lot of books,
and your books you saw, you let's set a lot
of books. So it's like you no longer used to
you know, am I deserving of all this? You know?
I've lost track of that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Do you second guess yourself? Though, because once you got success,
do you think, well, it's the sophomore album discussion, isn't
it Like you know, everyone gets a hit and then
hang on sophomore album. So when you get to the
sophomore are you thinking I'm genuinely telling that this is
bound to go well or you just don't have a clue.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
I did have anxiety by my second book, yes, along
those lines, but no, my perspective has been that what
the last thing you should do is change. What you
should do is what you've always done, and you should
continue to write the things that make you happy, and
that if you're lucky, you know some number of people
(04:59):
will be interesting in the same things you're interested in.
You have to have confidence, in other words, that your
interests are shared by others. And I think that one
of the things I've always tried to do, even more
so as I've gotten older, is that I do a
lot of I do all my own reporting, and I
get out of my comfort zone as much as I can.
(05:19):
I try to talk to as many people as I
can and spend time with people, and I think guards
against the kind of of narrowness that ends a That's
what ends at creative person's career is when they start
to be to live inside their own little bubble and
never leave it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
You must always be inquisitive. But I've always argued that
being inquisitive is a God given gift. You are born
with it.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah. I also think you can develop habits and disciplines
that encourage your curiosity that you you know that there
are routines you can have. So for example, I've been
doing this podcast Vision's History for ten years and I
(06:08):
do ten some of between ten and twenty episodes a year. Now,
that's a routine that forces me to be curious. I
have to come up with ideas for fifteen or twenty episodes,
and that's a discipline that there's no way to do
that just by interrogating my own thoughts, right, yeah, exactly,
I have to go out in the world if you've
(06:29):
got that kind of a obligation. So that's a structural
part of my life that forces me to be curious.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Okay, these podcasts smell confessonate me, because what do you
reckon podcasts are doing or have done, or will do
to books.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I think enhance in some sense, enhance them because there
are another mechanism by which people can build audiences and
develop material. So if you think about it, historically, what
magazines did was a they were away for authors to
develop their abilities, to test ideas and to develop audiences.
(07:06):
That's what they did. They were like a farm system
for books. And then when you had when you had
an idea that made sense to you and an audience
that knew who you were, and you developed as a writer,
you went out and you wrote books. Well, the magazine
world has kind of dried up and something had to
take its place, and I think it's a podcasts that
taken its place. So I find a lot of ideas
(07:27):
that are found in my latest book, Revenge the Tipping Point.
Some of those ideas were developed as a podcasts first,
or inspired by work I did in the podcast, and
I was able to test out concept, theory and idea
a story and see whether it made sense, see whether
people were interested in it, see whether it it had legs,
(07:50):
and then I was able to take what I learned
and use that in a book. So I think that
there's a there's a very there's a wonderful kind of
synergy between those two four.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
The stories from Tipping Point to Revenge of the Tipping Point.
In a why you can argue, are the same stories. Therefore,
nothing's happened in the ensuing twenty five years. Weird stuff, tiles,
stories made up, It still all happens. We're exactly the
same as we were twenty five years ago. Is that
fair or not fair?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Well, we live as we did twenty five years ago
in a world that is rife with epidemic change. I
think that we're quicker to recognize it today, and I
think the nature of the epidemics around us has They've
grown more frequent and more complex, But fundamentally we are
(08:47):
still you know, it's not like the Internet invented contagious
social phenomenon, right, Some people act as if it did,
and they forget that, Oh no, no, that was happening before
the Internet. It's just the Internet maybe was an accelerant
to those kinds of things, or it made them appear,
(09:11):
move faster and be bigger than they might have otherwise,
but it didn't fundamentally change the way human beings interact
with each other. And you know, contagion is the idea
that we would be influenced by others, catch behaviors and
ideas from others in the way that we catch a
cold from them is something that's fundamental to who we are.
(09:33):
What is new is how profoundly kind of a historical
some of our perspectives on our world are. And one
of the advantages of being an old guy like I am,
and you're kind of I don't I don't think you're
my age, but I think you're kind of an old guy.
With those of us who are old guys, you know,
we have some perspective we can tell our children. You know,
(09:54):
it was ever Thus.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
That's a funny guess. So how old are you?
Speaker 2 (09:59):
I got you at fifty, I'm sixty.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
One, sixty one, I'm fifty nine. Let me just ask
you this because I got to wind this up, But
let me ask what I listened to your thing with
Paul Simon, who I've been endlessly fascinated with my entire life.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Me too.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
And you started off with the question about critics. He
doesn't read the reviews, he's not interested. You started off
with your question saying you do you get a lot
of difficult Do the critics bother you in any way,
shape or form, now, given what you've managed to achieve normally?
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Do they not bother me? I don't think they matter.
I mean I actually weirdly think they did matter when
I was starting out. I think your review in the
New York Times in nineteen ninety nine or two thousand matter.
It was a essentral But now the kind of the
media world has been chopped into a thousand pieces, so
any one bit of criticism makes no more than a ripple.
(10:53):
So it's not something I spend a lifetime on.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Fun game. I think about this all the time. Paul
Simon or Bob Dylan, greatest writers of our age, not
even close.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Paul Simon, Yeah, Al Simon, I agree, it's not. I mean,
the longevity is career. It's funny. I was just talking
to a Kiwi about this. Why I believe Nick Willis
is the greatest miler of his generation. Why because because
Nick Willis ran sub formulate miles for twenty semi consecutive years,
and at some point you have to understand that longevity
(11:24):
is a greater achievement than peak performance. He was never
the fastest in the world, but he ver close to
being the fastest girl. But he was. He managed to
sustain world class level performance through his late teens, twenties, thirties,
and early forties. You must at a certain point, understand
what an accomplishment that is.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I would as Paul Simon, I would also argue with Simon,
not just with Willis, not just middle distance, but he
went long to Simon went Graceland, Africa, different genres over
a long period of time as well.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, yeah, Nick. The idea somewhere Nick Willis should be
very plea that we are comparing him to Paul Simon.
I reason Paul Simon of middle distance running.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Tell you what, Given we're both aging so brilliantly on
the fiftieth anniversary of Tipping Point, we'll get back together
and talk some more.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
How's that from our nursing homes?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Exactly? All right? Might go, well, appreciate it. Welcome, glad,
we'll the Revenge of the Tipping Point.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to
news talks. It'd be from six am weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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