The Current - Malcolm Gladwell on what The Tipping Point got wrong

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Malcolm Gladwell says he got some things wrong in The Tipping Point, his 25-year-old bestseller about what drives social change — so he’s written a follow-up, Revenge of the Tipping Point. He talks to Matt Galloway about revising some of those theories for a different time, the power of a compelling narrative and the weirdness of Miami.

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts, and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at ROM,

Tickets at ROM.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. In the year 2000, Canadian journalist and author, Malcolm Gladwell published his first book, The Tipping Point. It looked at what drives social change when an idea, trend, or behavior hits a certain threshold and tips into something much bigger. The book seemed to reach its own tipping point. It ended up on the New York Times bestseller list for an astonishing eight years. And wherever you turned, it seemed like people were talking about tipping points.

It happened in Detroit, 67. It happened to Harlem riots. This, when people get to a point, to that tipping point, they can't take it anymore. And I'm not saying... Give me one of those stories from the past four years that maybe in some ways represented a tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell might say, where you thought, geez, you know, we're on to somebody. It could become a thing of the past. Apparently, GPs are at a tipping point when it comes to staffing levels and more patients, etc.

You bet. I mean, the question is, what's the tipping point here that would make Gaddafi go once and for all? They're going to continue to tighten the screws. They're going to continue the bombing campaign. Almost 25 years on, Malcolm Gladwell is revisiting his ideas in a book called Revenge of the tipping point. Malcolm Gladwell spoke to Matt Galloway last fall.

here's their conversation. You don't seem to be somebody who is short of ideas and obsessions. Why in the face of that would you want to go back 25 years and look at this book? Well, our original idea was that we would just reissue the tipping point and I would update it. And then I started on that project and realized I didn't want to update it. I wanted to write a whole new book. I just thought so much has happened. You know, I wrote the first book before the Internet, before COVID.

before we had a really good understanding of a lot of kind of contagious phenomenon. I mean, this whole field has exploded, and I've changed. I mean, I was 36 or 7 when I wrote that book, and I don't resemble my 36-year-old self, that's for sure. What was the experience, like, of rereading the book? I don't know whether you go back and reread what you've written. I never do. I have never reread any of my other books.

So I went back and reread it, and it was, you know, there was. There were chapters that were like rediscovering an old friend, you know, you hadn't seen in many years. There were chapters when I just said, what was I, why would I, why did I write an entire chapter on Sesame Street and blues clues? It just, in retrospect, seems weird. And then there are other chapters where I was just horrified. I was like, I wrote that. It was sort of like looking at a photo album, looking at your high school yearbook. It's that it was exactly that emotional experience.

What do you think you got wrong in that book? I remember listening to an episode of your podcast in which it's not so much about getting wrong, but it's about failure and what's interesting about failure when you kind of missed the mark. What do you think you got wrong in that book? Well, I've done a whole episode of my podcast, Revision's History, on the crime chapter. You know, I had a chapter on why did New York City's crime fall so dramatically in the 90s? And I had a theory. I was very interested in the broken windows idea, but I realized in retrospect that I misinterpreted.

what broken windows was. This is this idea that if you tackle small kind of visible signs of disorder, like a broken window or graffiti, that that can help deter or be an intervention to more serious crime. Exactly. And what I misunderstood was there is nothing wrong. In fact, I think it is important to maintain some degree of civility in society. But that's not what causes murder rates to drop.

So the two separate questions, the line that was being, being paddled by the New York City Police Department in Rudy Giuliani, he was the mayor of New York in those years, was that there was a direct connection between stopping people from, you know, urinating on the streets and running red lights and the murder rate. And we subsequently learned that that was not true. And I sort of wrote my book too soon. Had I written the tipping point in 2010 or 2015, I would have told a completely different story about crime. And it's a very instructive lesson for journalists that you have to keep reminding yourself and your audience that you're telling a story in midstream and there is a chance that the way you're making sense of

things today will not be the way you make sense of it tomorrow what do you make of the fact that some of the ideas that were floated in that chapter in particular and the concept of broken windows were used by police forces i mean it led people see a direct line between that and stop and frisk and carding and civic violations because the belief was, well, we could, if we're interrupting what we think is a flow of crime, we're going to stop, you know, more serious crimes. The impact of that was particularly black men were being stopped and frisked on the streets, not just of New York, but elsewhere. And people will draw a line between that action and what you wrote about in the book.

How do you see that now? Well, we learned, I mean, this is the thing that I get into in the kind of Mioculpa I did on my podcast. They stopped Stop and Frisk in 2012. It was a lawsuit. And it was effectively went from stopping hundreds of thousands of young people to almost zero. And everyone, you know, even opponents of Stop and Frisk, assumed the crime would go back up. And the opposite happened. The biggest drop came after they stopped Stop and Frisk. By 2019, the New York City crime rate is the same as Paris's. So, you know, none of do we realize that Stop and Frisk was deeply problematic for kind of moral and social reasons, we realized that it had nothing to do with

curtailing violent crime. It was a complete misdirection. So in retrospect, I'm, you know, I am mortified. I mean, that's, there's no other way to. Do you regret writing that chapter? Oh, 100%. I don't regret asking the question. And I don't regret trying to explore answers. But I, in retrospect, of course, if you're a writer or anyone and you get something wrong, I think you have to hold yourself accountable and say, you know, I fundamentally misinterpret. And many other people that do, but I fundamentally misinterpreted what that was about. In this new book, one of the things that comes up is that social change or some social change seems to take place in some areas but not in others. And one of the places that you focus on is Miami and the issue in particular of Medicare fraud in Miami.

Florida is a fascinating place for any number of reasons. What's going on in Miami that caught your eye? Well, I got very interested in this idea that is very well described in the medical literature. It's called Small Area Variation, which is that doctors don't behave the same way across the country. Weird, for reasons we don't entirely understand, the way you get treated for heart disease in one town can be totally different from the town down the road. In other words, it's something incredibly local about the way health care is provided. And I love this idea because it suggested to me, clearly there's a, one, there's a contagious phenomenon that causes doctors in a given community to behave the same way. But that contagion stops at the border.

You know, we're used to the idea of a virus is something that spreads easily everywhere, but this was a virus that didn't spread. And so I got fascinated by this idea, well, that there must be. He's, you know, what's the weirdest city in North America then? And it turns out Miami is. And the one I chose to look at was Medicare fraud, which is the biggest criminal activity in the United States by far. The biggest criminal activity in the United States. Well, actually, let me take a step back.

It depends how you define illegal drug market. If you define it as one big market, it'll be bigger. Yeah, Medicare fraud is, we're talking about tens of billions of dollars a year. But it turns out that Miami is so far, in terms of how much Medicare fraud goes on, is on a planet by itself. I took this tour of Miami over these guys, these investigators, federal investigators, part of the strike force that investigates Medicare fraud. And we went to this office building, normal looking office building in the middle of Miami. You walk in a front door and you realize it has hundreds of offices, each the size of a broom closet, in which there's one desk. typically there's a phone that's not connected and a computer that's not plugged in.

And on the door, there's a nameplate which says, you know, Miami Medical Center. And they're all fronts because to get money from Medicare, you need a mailing address. So my chapter was all about a guy who moves from kind of an upstanding citizen who ran a nursing home chain in Chicago, moves to Miami and gets involved in one of the biggest Medicare frauds in history, billions of dollars of fraud. And the argument, his rabbi at his sentencing hearing said, you know, my friend Philip, who's been accused of his crime, he was a great guy in Chicago. Fine, upstanding citizen. Miami ruined him. And I was like, you know what? I think there's something to that.

So what is it about Miami? Well, so many things. There's a theory from a guy named Griffin who writes this great book about Miami, who says that it's 1979. So Miami is this sleepy dying. not very successful, kind of forgotten southern city in the 70s. The tourists have all gone elsewhere. Miami Beach is just a broken down series of hotels that are all largely abandoned. And what happens in the late 1970s is that three things happen within the space of a couple of months,

this is Griffin's argument, that dramatically transform the city. One is the Mario Boat Lift, so hundreds of thousands of Cuban migrants, basically land in Miami. And then there's the dramatic sudden rise of the cocaine trade where billions of dollars are flooding into Miami overnight. And then there's a race riot, a very, very big, serious race riot that causes an enormous number of sort of middle class Miamians to leave the city. This all happens in a concentrated period of a couple months, and it shakes the city's institutions to the core. I don't know that there's a single explanation for why Miami is so strange, but, I think that's as good as we can get.

And I talk in the book about this idea called the overstory that communities have these kind of shared set of beliefs and values that have an influence on those who live there. Remember Toronto in the 70s when Mayor Cromby was the mayor, and it was Toronto the good. New York run by the Swiss. Yes, exactly. That's an overstory. The idea was that Toronto was clean and tidy and well-behaved and polite. and everyone loved the mayor, and, you know, it was, everything worked.

You know, you could find an equivalent American city in the 70s. That was the same size. That was just as wealthy. That had the same industries. And it did not have the same overstory. Well, this same thing happens in Miami. And I think you get a feeling that sort of anything goes. In the 70s of Miami, during the height of the cocaine trade, drug dealers were taking

suitcases full of cash, and they were wheeling them into banks on a, daily basis, pulling up every day, and the bank guard would come out and help the drug dealers move their cash into the bank vault every day. Now, if you see that, that has to matter, right? Those kinds of symbols of disorder. And I think that infects the city. And then you have like, do you remember Miami Vice, the television show? It's a television show that says, this is the most corrupt city in the country, that police officers are driving. Lamborghinis. Now, that's not a red flag. And it's fantastic, right? As opposed to every other TV show would say, and it's a terrible thing. Miami Vice said, no, no, no, no, this is why it's

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You say, I mean, when it comes to overstories, maybe a Miami Vice is an example of that, that storytelling can change the overstory. yeah this is very different and it's one of the most powerful chapters in this book what is it that the holocaust could tell us about overstories and about tipping points yeah there are times when you write something where you know a little bit of the story and then what you're doing is you're filling in the blanks and there are times when you everything you learn is a surprise and the holocaust story is one of the chapter i have in the book is one of those things where i didn't know any of it

And no one I knew knew any of it. Basically, if you look at history textbooks of the sort that you would read in your first-year college university history class, you're studying the Second World War in the 70s, right? So, and I went back and I found the big textbooks. If you read them and you come to the account of the Second World War, you will find almost no discussion of the Holocaust. It won't be called the Holocaust, first of all. It'll just say that the Nazis had concentration camps where they interned gypsies, communists, and Jews. And there'll be a paragraph that'll describe this. And then they'll move on.

Now, this sounds totally unbelievable, but I did this with countless textbooks. There's one textbook written by two of the most prominent historians in the United States about the Second World War. And they talk about Anna Frank, a German whose, you know, sad story moved to audiences when You know, to call her a German, they get her name wrong, she's German, but she's Jewish. That's the whole point of the story of Van Frank, right? They don't even mention that. Like, it's weird. And then you realize that there is only one Holocaust museum or memorial in the entire North America until the early 80s.

Nothing except there's a little one in, I talk about the one in L.A. It starts in the 1960s, which is really just a... a bunch of Holocaust survivors in LA wanted a place to put their stuff that they couldn't bear to keep in their home, but realized they couldn't throw out. You know, the uniforms they had to wear in Auschwitz, the identity card they were given, you know, that kind of stuff. They didn't talk about it to their kids,

or they didn't talk about their, they thought they weren't supposed to. And then I, so, Doug, the more you dig into it, you realize there is a kind of, it's not denial of the Holocaust. Everyone knows it exists, but no one wants to talk about it for any number of reasons. They don't know how to talk about it. It's too much. The survivors want to move on with their lives. And the dam breaks in the late 1970s after a television show airs called Holocaust,

which is a mini-series around NBC. And 50% of the television viewership of the United States tuned in to watch that show. And almost overnight, people, they start to give what has. happened in Germany a name, the Holocaust. That was a word that just had not been used to describe what happened. And then you start to get, by the hundreds, you start to get Holocaust memorials and museums spring up around the world. How do we know that it's the TV show that does that? So many historians have written about this. And there is no one who doesn't give the television show central billing. But just because of how many people watched it. How much? How

many people watched it. But it's important to say that the reason the television show happens is that the ground is shifting. You have a number of things happening into 70s where the Jewish community for the first time is starting to open up and to talk about what happened and to feel more secure. You have the big immigration from Russia in the late 70s. A whole series of things happen that make the Jewish community in North America feel like finally they have. have a, they're in a position to talk openly about what happened. So I think that the ground is shifting, but it's the, the big catalyst is this multi-part mini-series, which exposes Americans, many of them for the first time to the, to what happened in Germany, joined a war.

It speaks to, I mean, in the first book, in the tipping point, there's that idea of stickiness. And it speaks in some ways to that idea of stickiness. Can you, I mean, it's impossible to imagine 50% of anyone of any population watching anything now can you have that concept of stickiness at a time when we're drowning in information and and people are just trying to keep up let alone be gathered around the same source of information yeah because i have two chapters in the book that talk about the power of television shows in the kind of network era of network dominance and the implicit lesson of both of those is it really can't happen anymore you know when you have three or two or whatever major networks that people are watching, and when even ordinary television shows

are commanding massive audiences, it's possible to have a common narrative in society. And what happened, what we did in the internet age, in the digital age, is we said there's a way to make better television, and that's to have many more voices and many more platforms and many more, and that was absolutely true. Television's way better today than it was in the 70s. But what we gave up was power. So we traded power for quality. Writing about epidemics is different than living through one. We all just lived through or perhaps are still living through this pandemic.

And I'm wondering, in doing this, you write about the surprising things that you learned about how COVID spreads. What did you take from that? People are constantly concerned about how what we live through may inform the next pandemic. How could that influence how we deal with whatever's coming down there? road that we don't know about whatever gnarly awful thing is going to approach us well the thing that i wrote a chapter i have a chapter on covid and that it's all about a super spreader event that happened in boston and in the course of that i talk about this thing that we learned late in the epidemic but which i think many people still don't realize or have taken to heart which is we learned that

there was a very very small number of super spreaders who represent a tiny fraction of the population who really kind of did all the work in spreading the virus. So you look at a room of 100 people, they're all infected with COVID. 95 of them are not going to spread the virus very far or to too many people. Five of those people will. They will, for any number of complicated genetic reasons, they are capable of, in the way that they breathe and talk, they produce way more viral particles inside little aerosol. than the rest of us. And I say way more. I'm talking about orders of magnitude more. And what that means

for the next time we have a respiratory virus that behaves like COVID does, we're going to figure out who those people are, and I don't know what we'll do with them. I was going to say, if we know who those five people are, what do we do then? Well, in the worst case scenario, we locked them up, or we discriminate against them, or we refuse to let them go out of their house, or we won't sit next to them on a bus or, I mean, that's the worst case scenario. The best case scenario is we find them, help them, keep close tabs on them, make sure they're not stigmatized, but realize it's a route towards having a much healthier society. I don't have a lot of confidence. We'll do the good version. But I do, it's one of those things that, you know, epidemiologists,

I think, have been shy about talking about the implications of this because they are rightly concerned about what we'll do with that knowledge it's a little bit worrisome how good do you think we are i mean part of what you do and in this kicked off with with the tipping point 25 years ago is is kind of translating social science ideas to a mass audience um how good are we at accepting uncertainty do you think uh well bad um to put it politely but i think you know And I think people's journalists, we share a good deal of the blame for this. And I put myself in this camp. I mean, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to return to this book,

The Tipping Point, after 25 years is that one of the things I have, I think I have a good deal more humility in the way that I write about ideas today than I did 25 years ago. And it's, I have a firmer grasp on the uncertainty of what we know. And it's because I'm older. I mean, I think one of the few good things that come out of getting older, if you've been writing, as I have for 40 years, you've been schooled in how often you've been wrong, and you learn that, like I said, before, knowledge is a fluid thing. And we never know anything for a certain. And the best thing you can do is to say, this is the best case for what we know now. This is what I think now. If we tacked that phrase onto every expression of an idea or belief, we would be doing a lot. better. I said in the introduction that this book comes appropriately given the dark times that we're in right now. There was an optimism that ran through the tipping point 25 years ago. And one of the things that's different from 25 years ago is you have kids now. You have two

young kids. And I just wonder, is it hard for you to find, I mean, kids are like the definition of optimism. You see little kids and there's no cynicism. They're full of joy and wonder and delight. Is it hard for you now to find that optimism, or how do you find that optimism? Well, I'm all this, I mean, I'm a fairly optimistic person. And I would say the kids teach you optimism, but they mostly teach you humility. They teach you that I've been keeping track of what percentage of requests I make of my toddler are accepted or denied. And I'm batting about, you know, 30% right now. So, and I see no route to getting that higher. And I see no route to getting that higher, it's only going to go down, right? Now, I can see as well that, you know,

you're giving them, you're feeding them lots of stuff, and because you're the one who's feeding them the most, you have more power than many other people. But I'm also aware of like, you know, they're their own person and they make up their own mind, which is kind of, to me, that's the root for optimism. I'm glad they're not just clones of me. They need to kind of figure out their own way. They're kind of indifference to my authority, makes me very optimistic about their prospects. Malcolm, it's great to talk to you, as always. What do you, I was asking you at the end of our conversations, what are you obsessed

with now? What's the thing, aside from trying to get your kids to maybe do what you want them to do, what is your current obsession right now? My current obsession is, well, getting through the book tour in one piece, that would be a, no, no, no, I'm, right now I have a stress fracture and I can't run, and all I want to do is get healthy again, so I'm trying to get a whole. Soon enough. Thanks again. That was Malcolm Gladwell, author of Revenge of the Tipping Point,

Overstories, Super Spreaders, and the rise of social engineering. He spoke with Matt Galloway in October. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.