This episode features Malcolm Gladwell in conversation about his newest book, Revenge of The Tipping Point. He spoke with Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor in front of a live audience in downtown Portland in October 2024.

The Tipping Point hit shelves in 2000 and became a true cultural phenomenon, spending a whopping 334 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and turning everyone—from your priest to your barista—into budding social scientists. Multiple New York Times bestsellers followed, including Blink and Outliers, and in 2018, Gladwell co-founded Pushkin Industries, which that seeks to “expand the possibilities of spoken word audio,” and launched his wildly popular podcast, Revisionist History.

In both his books and his podcasts, Gladwell reveals a world of hidden connections, everyday illusions, and overlooked details. He illuminates patterns in our policy and culture, and identifies the tiny tics that drive group behavior, introducing terms like, the Law of the Few, and the 10,000-hour rule into the larger cultural lexicon.

Now, twenty-five years after The Tipping Point, Gladwell has returned to the ideas that first made him a household name. His new book, Revenge of The Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, finds him once again exploring epidemics and viral behavior. This time, he is driven by a somewhat darker inquiry. We see the consequences of contagious phenomena and rethink the two most significant epidemics of our time: the opioid crises and Covid. Don’t worry, we are still treated Gladwell’s tremendous curiosity and humor, delving into such topics such as cheetah reproduction and the world’s most successful bank robbers.

It is his most serious and personal book to date. With Revenge of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell again proves himself one our finest storytellers. But more importantly: He helps us reimagine the stories that we tell about ourselves.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.