It's the Brian Lerer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Malcolm Gladwell is back with us now.

The many times bestselling author and host of the podcast Revisionist History has a new

book that builds on the book from 25 years ago that really put them on the map as an ideas

person, including an ideas person about ideas and how they spread, fashion trends, best-selling

books, teenage smoking rates, Sesame Street, all kinds of things. As Malcolm reminds us in this sequel,

that book was The Tipping Point. The new book is Revenge of the Tipping Point, Overstories, Super Spreaders,

and the rise of social engineering. Malcolm always good to talk. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thank you. Good morning.

Going back to the original tipping point, that was 20 years before the pandemic,

but you framed up a way to think about what becomes popular in our culture as through the construct of an epidemic.

Can you remind us of that premise as you originally conceived of it? Yeah, it was the

core of the observation was if you look at the way that an idea spreads or a behavior spreads,

it looks exactly like the way a virus spreads. It is a tipping point, which is a classic thing that you see in an epidemic,

which is the epidemic, you know, remember back in March of 2020 when COVID went from

something we'd barely heard of to something that was everywhere, March of 2020 was a tipping

point. That's a very classic epidemic pattern. And I think you see that with ideas as well,

that when they are contagious, we pick them up from each other, and when an idea takes off,

it takes off in exactly the same way a virus does. You refer at the start of the new book

to the idea that maybe the original tipping point caught on so

much because it was a hopeful book in hopeful times. The Cold War was over. Crime was in freefall.

It was the dawning of a new millennium. We live in very different times today in that respect.

So would you say you've turned to a darker set of things that now go viral

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