If you haven’t changed your mind on anything in the past two decades, you should reconsider your beliefs.
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book is Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, and he is the host of the podcast Revisionist History.
Motley Fool host Dylan Lewis caught up with Gladwell for a conversation about:
- How social engineering affects your life.
- Why real diversity can prevent leaders from doing stupid things.
- The demand to return to more in-person experiences.
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Malcolm Gladwell: There’s some great work done in military decision-making, like the famous study of the Bay of Pigs. Why did Kennedy do something so unbelievably stupid in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962, I guess it was ’61. The answer is that he had no diversity whatsoever in his group of advisors. Not ethnic or general diversity. That was the ’60s, so all of it was going to be white men. But everybody thought the same.
Ricky Mulvey: I’m Ricky Mulvey, and that’s Malcolm Gladwell. He’s the best-selling author of Outliers and Blank and host of the podcast Revisionist History. His latest book is Revenge of the Tipping Point, over stories, Super Spreaders and The Rise of Social Engineering. My co-host, Dylan Lewis caught up with Gladwell for a conversation about the book, why the 1990s were more optimistic time than today, how entrepreneurs could rethink insurance and why Gladwell only checks his investments once a year.
Dylan Lewis: I think when I originally read The Tipping Point and when I went back to it in prep for this conversation, was struck by this idea that the book is very optimistic in its outlook, and it’s very much about small ways to create larger change. Revenge in the title here has a bit of a different connotation to it. On the one hand, I think it’s a little bit of the era we’re in. We have so many reasons to be very optimistic. We have AI as this magic type technology. We have just addressed a worldwide pandemic in record time. That’s incredible. But it feels like even underneath some of those more reasons to be optimistic, there’s a lot of distrust, there’s a lot of differing public opinions. You get into this idea of the overstory in the book. It’s meta-narrative. What do you feel like that is right now, and what do you think is versus what it was when you wrote The Tipping Point originally?
