Malcolm Gladwell revisits ‘The Tipping Point’

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Twenty-five years after the success of “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell is back with new insights. The author and co-founder of Pushkin Industries joins host Krys Boyd to discuss new anecdotes from social science that help explain the world around us – and to update the theory of contagion for our modern world. His book is “Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	One of the joys of hosting this show is that I get to talk with very smart people about some of life's big questions.
0:16.0	And while those questions each center around some specific topic or idea, in the end they usually
0:21.7	boil down to a fairly simple idea I'm trying to get at, why are things the way they are?
0:28.1	From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. Author Malcolm Gladwell has spent his
0:34.3	entire career on a similar kind of quest. I've been fortunate to speak with him on a few occasions, and I can assure you his eyes absolutely light up at the thought of reading through a research paper or sociology study. And as someone who's maybe similarly wired in that regard, I have to say, it doesn't surprise me that he's still at it, nearly 25 years after his book,
0:55.2	The Tipping Point, made him a household name.
0:57.9	Gladwell's newest book is written in a similar vein.
1:00.3	In fact, it's called Revenge of the Tipping Point, Overstories, Super Spreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.
1:07.4	He joined me recently in front of a live audience to talk about his latest theories and discoveries, and today we're going to hear that conversation.
1:17.5	Welcome to Dallas.
1:19.2	Thank you. Thank you.
1:21.5	So the original tipping point was published in 2000, and since then, it's been such a touchstone that everybody
1:28.3	uses that expression, which is not to say we're using it the way you intended it. So let's
1:33.2	start with that. When you talk about a tipping point, what do you mean? Well, it's, you know,
1:38.5	it's the term that describes the moment when an epidemic changes shape
1:45.6	or explodes.
1:47.6	So if you remember in December of 2019,
1:55.4	COVID was this mysterious thing somewhere in China
1:59.2	and there was like one story on NPR about whether we should be concerned about it.
2:04.6	And then there was a day, I forgot, was it March 13th, there was a day in March when suddenly everything shut down.
2:12.6	Remember that? Well, that was a tipping point. That was like this thing that we kind of heard about
2:18.2	that was like somewhere off in another corner of the world becomes very real and relevant and
	...

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