Malcolm Gladwell, Social Engineering, And The Magic Third

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:

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• 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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A full transcript follows the video.

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This video was recorded on Feb. 22, 2025

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?

Malcolm Gladwell: Well, I think when I wrote The Tipping Point originally, which was in the late '90s, we were in an unusually optimistic moment. Every major social problem was in steep decline. When the '90s began, if you asked Americans what the biggest problems in the country would have been, they would have said crime, teenage pregnancy, youth smoking. By the end of the '90s, those are all vanishing, teen pregnancy drops precipitously. Teenage smoking used to be this thing that everyone was like fretting about. Teens just stopped smoking. Then crime in New York City was a tiny fraction by the early odds of what it had been in the early '90s. Then at the end of the Cold War, the Clinton presidency in retrospect, was in America a unbelievably calm, unruffled moment where the single biggest scandal was the president had fooled around with one of his interns. That was it. Today, that just seems ridiculous. I don't even know whether that would even get a headline today. That was the context in which I was writing the book, and I couldn't help to have been swept up in that euphoria about the future.

Dylan Lewis: What do you think that outlook is now?

Malcolm Gladwell: Well, I think simply that there is an absence. If in the '90s, we were all agreed on the fact that things were going well, I think today we're not agreed on anything. That you can, as you just said, as plausibly make a case that things are going well as you can make a case that things are going disastrous. Either AI is going to save us or it'll doom us. Either Trump is going to fix the federal government or he's going to destroy it. I could just go on. It seems we're either on the verge of a golden age of medicine or we're going to get swamped by another virus coming down the pike. It's just really hard to get a handle. There's so much uncertainty, I guess, it's hard to get a handle on what happens next.

Dylan Lewis: I read the book, and I also listened to the audiobook for portions. When I was listening to the audiobook, there was a line I heard you deliver. I paused and I went back and really sat with it for a second. It was, "if you don't think social engineering has quietly become one of the central activities of the American Establishment, you haven't been paying attention." I think that line was talking about the Ivy League admissions. But I can't help but sit with that line and that feeling of unease that we were just talking about, and wondering if those are related, if that's part of it.

Malcolm Gladwell: I think it has occurred to a sector of American society that they have more power than they realized, or at least more ability to shape their own destinies. If you're a super rich person, you actually can go to Washington and just get everyone to do what you want them to do by doling out large sums of money or if you're an elite school and you would like to protect the interest of a certain cultural group, you can actually do that, and you can work the system in a way or if you're Purdue Pharmaceutical and you would like to peddle a very dangerous drug, you can actually buy a clever use of databases of doctors prescribing behavior and clever deployment of your sales staff, you can do that, and create a monster best seller and become billionaires and even after you've got caught, not go to jail.

I think what the last generation has done has emboldened those at the top, that they can get what they want. It seems to me there was a little more modesty in the top tier a generation before. Maybe it didn't occur to them they could spread their wings in this way. That goes hand in glove with the money those at the top have been able to accumulate in the last 10 years, which has been extraordinary.

Dylan Lewis: Staggering. The key term, I guess, in that line was social engineering, it's part of the book. It feels like that social engineering in 2000 more positive view. Social engineering now, you mentioned the Purdue Pharma example. That's a very large part of the book. That is McKinsey consultants going out and trying to inflect for a very specific reason. Is it that social engineering is not necessarily good or bad? It's just a means at this point, and it's whoever can grasp it and sees it?

Malcolm Gladwell: It is simply the understanding that through intentional and deliberate means, you can affect a broad social outcome. We always hold that that happens unintentionally, accidentally, coincidentally, in a side effect of some other thing. But social engineering is where you think, I can pull the strings myself. When we talk about social engineering, historically, we have to talk about failed attempts, the failure of eugenics in the '20s. It's an idea that gets bandied about, it doesn't actually go anywhere. They run up against all. Then Hitler comes and the whole enterprise gets fatally compromised.

But now I feel like to the point I was making earlier, there is a feeling that you can manipulate. If you look at the way the social media algorithms have been built, they've been astonishingly successful, and they've been built deliberately that people thought, can I engineer people's attention on things like Facebook or TikTok or whatever you have. The initial internal answer was, absolutely, here's how you do it. I was like, OK.

Dylan Lewis: There's no veil here.[laughs]

Malcolm Gladwell: That's not Lifetime magazine in 1965, sending out a little card that fell out of your magazine that told you to subscribe, we're talking about a whole different level of intentionality.

Dylan Lewis: I wanted to ask you about the digital element of things because a lot of the examples you go through in the book are rooted in a physical space. There's a look at cities, there's a look at specific states, the way that medical treatment differs or local attitudes shape the way that people act. In what ways are the rules similar or different when we start going to these borderless online spaces?

Malcolm Gladwell: I'm not sure I know the answer to that question. I'm not terribly interested in the book in bootless online spaces. In fact, I spend no time on them whatsoever, partly because I feel like that's all we talk about these days. We're in this weird situation where we've come to venerate the digital world and forget about the physical world. Whereas I think the physical world still is an extraordinarily powerful mediator of who we are and how we behave, and that maybe what we're doing with our digital worlds is simply reconstructing versions of our physical world. I don't know. When I look at my Twitter feed, my Twitter feed is made up of people who would have been interested in the absence of Twitter. In a previous world, I would have checked the books of those people I follow out of a library or read articles that they had written in magazines.

Now I get a Twitter post alerting me to their Substack. I'm replicating my experience, not challenging it. I'm not following tons of people who live in Egypt or South Africa or Venezuela. I'm following a few people who live in Ukraine, but that's about it. There has to be a war going on there, which I would have been doing regardless. I don't know. Am I typical? I don't know. I can see how my intellectual life has been rendered more efficient in the digital age, but I'm not convinced it has been qualitatively changed.

Dylan Lewis: I think there are a lot of people who are excited to get back to a more in-person life. They're happy to hear you say that.

Malcolm Gladwell: I was reading someone writing an article about AI's impact on education, and the article said, if you're in education, you need to justify immediately or prove immediately whether what you do cannot be done better by an AI. If you can't prove that, then you're going to be out of a job soon. Nowhere in this entire article did it mention the fact that someone might prefer to learn from another human being, or that there might be some value in that. I'm not being a Luddite when I say that because I do believe there's many opportunities where you don't need another human being to learn. But what struck me was the absence of the idea that there was anything particularly important about face-to-face interaction when it comes to learning.

If the AI can give me a more comprehensive and up to date and thoughtful history of Germany between the World Wars, does that mean I should always rather value the AI version of it over going to a lecture or a seminar with a professor who talks to me about Germany between the two worlds? I find it weird that you would judge the in-person interaction purely on the basis of the intellectual weight of the content, and not on the importance of the social interaction that takes place underneath that learning. No one talked about, do I retain ideas more when they're attached to a person? Maybe I do. Retention is a huge issue. The value of any learning experience is hugely wound up in how long that experience persists with you, if it goes away the next day, well, what's the point? I don't care how good it was. When I think about my college experience, what I remember is learning in its social context. Then my professor said this. Then the TA rebuked me and said this. That's what I remember. Now, will I remember that if I was taught by an AI? I'm not sure.

Dylan Lewis: There's a sense of community and campus life to that too. I'm curious, did the loneliness epidemic, was that something that you would have wanted to dive into more with this book or thought about bringing into the conversation? Because it's not surprising that it's such a large topic with COVID. I think 2020-2022, no one's surprised to be hearing that that's something that a lot of people were really struggling with. But I don't know how much progress we've really made in helping write that for people in the years where we've been a little bit more back.

Malcolm Gladwell: When I was starting to write this book at the tail end of COVID, I wasn't sure I understood entirely what that meant. It seemed to me very specific. The experiences of people during COVID seemed to me to be highly idiosyncratic and specific to their position in the world, and that the experience of a 14-year-old who couldn't go to high school or a 20-year-old who lost their sophomore year in college was profoundly different from the experience of a 60-year-old who got to work out of their home office for a year and a half and was insanely productive, and saw a lot of their wife and was very happy. I think I resisted the temptation to generalize. When I hear the phrase loneliness epidemic, I feel there's a generalization lurking in there, and I wasn't sure the generalization was warranted.

Dylan Lewis: I think you're probably one of the first people to reflect on COVID in a book where people really felt like there was enough time and distance for it to make sense. Five years since early cases. I think is a healthy enough distance that people are ready for that message again. We're going to be seeing a ton of stories, articles, coverage as we pass all of these anniversaries, and I'm sure for the next 5, 10, 100 years, it'll probably be something that people spend a lot of time studying. Where would you like to see more of that discussion and more of that focus as we look back and do these retrospectives on this crazy unprecedented period in a lot of ways?

Malcolm Gladwell: Well, understanding you are the key to a lot of policy, I think, is understanding the diversity of human responses to COVID. I touch on one piece of that in my chapter on COVID in the book where I talk about the fact that the assumption we had that everybody was bearing an equal risk of passing on the virus to others is completely false and that a tiny portion of people are really the ones who do all the job of spreading, and if you know who that tiny portion is, then you simplify your attack on COVID. But I would generalize from that and say that an enormous amount of the political and social dislocation from the epidemic was caused by the assumption that children were at risk or equally at risk for the virus. That's why so many schools were shut down in so many places. It was the shutting down of the schools that was so incredibly divisive. In fact, if we better understood how at risk children were for a viral epidemic like this, we could have had a lot smarter policy on school. If we kept schools open far more, I think the fallout from the political reaction to the virus would have been a lot less. That's one area where I feel like, if we can sort that out for next time, we'll be doing well. This language we had that we are all equally at risk, we are all equally to blame. We all need to equally take precautions. Just doesn't work. It doesn't ring true to people, and correctly, because it isn't true. I don't think you will be able to pull that off a second time.

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Dylan Lewis: You touched on the idea of the law of the few and the superspreader concepts that come up in the book. I felt personally seen by a line that you had in there. You said, moving from a position that a problem belongs to all of us to the position that a problem is caused by a few is a very difficult thing to do. This is going to sound like a non-sequitur, but I promise I'm going to bring it around. I have a rat problem on my block in Washington, DC. The city has a program where if you petition your neighbors, you can get the city to come out and do treatment if people sign on for the block. that happened recently. Everyone's complaining about this at problem on the block. The city comes, they check for burrows. The five properties that have the most burrows account for 90% of the burrows on this block that have 40 or 50 houses on it. They are driving or they're hosting a lot of the rat activity on this block. I know this, and I now know the hotspots on our block, and I am left with this quandary here of, do I tell my neighbors that it's these five addresses, or does it continue to be this blockwide problem? I don't have the answer. I'm trying to work through.

Malcolm Gladwell: Tell your neighbours. Why do those five houses have so many rat burrows?

Dylan Lewis: I think it's a variety of things. I think some of it is unfortunate luck because some of them are near places that don't have a lot of activity and are very welcoming to rats. I think some of them are because they've left some things that rats enjoy hanging out with out in their backyard or they don't move a car very often, there's a shed for them to hide under, things like that.

Malcolm Gladwell: What block is this?

Dylan Lewis: [laughs] It's in Columbia Heights in DC.

Malcolm Gladwell: I lived 10 years in DC, so this is all not far from Columbia Heights. I also lived in Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan.

Dylan Lewis: I was just in Adams Morgan earlier today.

Malcolm Gladwell: I want to avoid this block that size [inaudible].

Dylan Lewis: Don't park your car over near me. You'll wind up with rats in your engine bay. But I'm left with this uncomfortable tension. What we all want here is for the rats to go away. We can be aware of that on some level by everyone trying to do the best they can. But we know, at this point, that there are five properties where most of them are hanging out, and that's really where we need to zero in on treatment for this thing.

Malcolm Gladwell: The burden shouldn't be on you. The city should say the rat problem is centered on five properties. You guys got to clean it up. The problem is that if you make that statement, then you're fraying the social fabric of the block. This is a crucial part of the, why it's so hard for us to identify these bad apple problems? Because if the wrong person is left with the responsibility of labeling the bad apple, then it backfires. You're the bad guy. You got to pick the right bad guy to share the news that it's 176.

Dylan Lewis: I'm going to reach out to Washington DC.

Malcolm Gladwell: Eleventh Street.

Dylan Lewis: Tell them, Malcolm Gladwell told me that they need to be the bad guy for this one.

Malcolm Gladwell: The city should be the bad guy. It's obvious. You can't be left to the neighbor to say, you guys got a rap problem.

Dylan Lewis: [laughs] That's the role of government, is to step in and intervene. There are some other concepts that pop up that I want to touch on because I think they're very relevant to our audience. The Magic Third is one of them. This need for a critical mass for minority groups to exist in order to feel comfortable to be able to participate and to really have input on a group. For our audience, we spent a lot of time thinking about things like corporate boards and whether we're getting good independent thought, whether there's pushback for management. What does something like The Magic Third look like when you're thinking about a group of maybe five or seven or nine people that are working with a management team?

Malcolm Gladwell: Well, the whole point of the idea of The Magic Third is, as you know, that true diversity requires critical mass. You can't have a group of nine people on a corporate board, bring in one woman and expect that woman to be heard and for her perspective to be widely respected and for her to feel comfortable. Our experience with the integration of boards is that you need three, at least on a board of, say, nine before that group can be themselves and can really bring their different perspective to bear on the overall perspective of the board. This has been observed across many different contexts that there's a huge difference between a token, one different person in a group, and a group of outsiders whose numbers have reached the point where they no longer feel to themselves and to others as outsiders. I think this is super crucial because what you want is who's keeping the corporate boards in focus here.

Their crucial function is to provide a, not necessarily countervailing, but to provide a level of judgment and consideration and counsel to the company management that the company manager would not otherwise be able to access. You defeat the purpose of a corporate board if the breadth of your intellectual diversity is stunted. What the Magic Third tells us is how to avoid that token representation of meaningless diversity. I think it's also true, by the way, if you think about diversity in the context of schools and their admissions. I'm not just talking in racial terms, but broadly speaking, I think it'll be really useful educationally for the students in my school to be exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints. Well, if you want to do that, you can't just bring in one black kid and one poor kid and one right wing kid and call it a day. You have to pay really close attention to what the numbers are. That's something that schools, for example, have been very reluctant to do. I would argue, I've deliberately avoided doing because they don't actually want to disrupt the culture in that way. But I think it's hugely necessary. 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 geodiversity, that was the '60s, so all of those was going to be white men. But everybody thought the same. The one guy who didn't think like everybody else was just one guy and couldn't speak up. As a result, they march in lockstep off a cliff. That's not what you want from your National Security Council. In the room, when you're deciding whether to invade Iran, you would like to have more than one person who raises their hand and says, I want you guys to think about this and this and this.

Dylan Lewis: Even if it doesn't change the trajectory of the decision, it changes the way you approach the decision and what you prepare for.

Malcolm Gladwell: It changes the nature, the characteristics of the decision. Maybe we do this, but we do this later. Maybe we do this other thing first. Maybe we think through this part blah. In other words, creating an intellectually diverse group requires a degree of deliberate social engineering that I think we are underestimating.

Dylan Lewis: We were talking a little about overstories before, and we're a show focused on business and the stock market. I'm curious, I know it's not a place, but it's a community, and it's a space in a way. What do you see as the overstory right now in the financial markets and investing here in the US?

Malcolm Gladwell: Oh, wow, I'm the wrong guys to answer.

Dylan Lewis: Or do you see one?

Malcolm Gladwell: My problem is I wouldn't know even if one existed. I'm always amused by people who speak about the markets as if there are a person sitting in an office somewhere who you can call up. Markets decline today on anxiety about General Motors earnings. Really, you know that? You asked the market, and the market said, oh, I'm nervous about general motors. It always struck me, as opposed to saying the markets declined today for reasons we can only guess at, maybe it was General Motors earnings. That seems the degree to which the market is over narrativized has always seen to be very problematic. I think one of the first characteristics of a good investor is that they understand that those narratives are made up, and that leads them to either ignore them or exploit them. There's two things you can do when you realize that something is phony. You could exploit the phoniness, or you can ignore it. I think that's what smart investors do. They understand, oh, so there's this crazy narrative out there that says this. Well, that means that this must be overpriced, or this must be underpriced. The other version is to be Warren Buffett and just say, F it, I'm investing for the next 30 years.

Dylan Lewis: Has the way that you invested changed over the last 25 years?

Malcolm Gladwell: Well, for a long time, I had a Schwab account where I would make highly speculative, very small investments for fun. After almost without exception, losing money in those trades for 15 years, I finally gave it up. Now I'm Mr. Index Fund. I have turned my back on that game.

Dylan Lewis: I bet you sleep a little bit better.

Malcolm Gladwell: Well, I also do a thing where I only check my balances once a year.

Dylan Lewis: That's a system you've put in place, knowing yourself?

Malcolm Gladwell: It's, what's the point? When I retire, I'll check them brother. I'm not using the money yet. I'm not retiring, so why would I bother checking it until I'm retired? Does it make any difference? I will only boast about one thing.

Dylan Lewis: Oh, I'd love to hear you boast.

Malcolm Gladwell: I have two moments of extraordinary market operations. Immediately prior to the 2008 meltdown, I went 100% cash. I sold every single equity I owned.

Dylan Lewis: What told you to do that at the time?

Malcolm Gladwell: I don't know. I just thought things seemed frothy. Then in December of 2019, two months before COVID, I bought a very large short on a stock market, which I cashed in to great effect several months later.

Dylan Lewis: I think you would like to tell us about the future.

Malcolm Gladwell: Thank you very much. I could retire on those two things alone.

Dylan Lewis: If you make any big moves anytime soon, just give us a heads up.

Malcolm Gladwell: Well, it's because I've been writing about bio viruses for years. I knew a bunch of virologists, and I was chatting with one at the end of 2019, and I was, how serious is this SARS thing in China? They're, oh, it's serious. I said, oh, OK. I bought the short. Then I called him up next, I was, now that we know what this thing is, is it a hard target? No, it's totally easy. We'll have a vaccine in no time, oh, OK. Then I made sure I cashed it before. But that lightning, that's like a stop clock is right once a day. It's never happening again.

Dylan Lewis: I think that's a great track record to end it on, right there. I think if you stay indexed after that, I think you're golden. I don't spend nearly as much time looking at things like epidemics as you do, obviously. But I've followed folks like John Oliver and other folks talking a little bit about the next epidemic and the next viral epidemic, a more health oriented epidemic. This idea that it's possible, maybe even likely that they will become more likely because of a lot of the conditions around how humans and animals live a little bit closer together. We're treading into areas that have traditionally been wildlife areas. What do you think of that?

Malcolm Gladwell: Probably true. But at the same time, our ability to respond quickly to them has gone up by several orders of magnitude. In some ways, I think we'll see a greater frequency of pandemics with smaller impacts. That's how I would characterize it. There's a version of where we really get good at rapid response to these things. When I say rapid response, I mean, everything from identifying the new target to more importantly, being able to ramp up manufacture of a vaccine that it's possible to conceive of the manufacturing capacity sitting at idle waiting to be turned on when we find something. I suspect that's where it will end up. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me. A very good business to have would be someone to develop a boutique mRNA vaccine manufacturer where you have that response on idle, something new comes in, and for an extraordinary sum of money, you crank out the first wave of vaccines. Someone's going to do that.

Dylan Lewis: You might have just given away your next best idea. I don't know.

Malcolm Gladwell: Why would you not do that? Basically, people invest in you as next pandemic insurance. You say the premiums 100 grand. Every billionaire says, oh, for 100 grand, I can insure myself against the next. You get 1,000 billionaires to give you 100 grand, and you create a factory's just sitting there on idle, and every time something pops up, you just crank out of vaccine waiting. You give your subscription list access to it. Then if the thing's real, then you prototype the mass application. Then you license what you developed to some mask manufacturer who makes it for everybody else. That's a great business. Insurance. Why is insurance only paying off money? The idea of insurance is so intellectually impoverished. These guys have no imagination. No, insurance should be all about a whole bunch of things. You should be able to buy vaccine insurance. It's just not that hard.

Dylan Lewis: It's risk mitigation, period, not financial risk mitigation.

Malcolm Gladwell: Exactly. It is biological risk mitigation. You buy a policy, and those guys, they're constantly pinging you. We've seen this new variant of avian flu in China, you want a vaccine? We'll FedEx it to you.

Dylan Lewis: I love how you went from, we have this boutique product, ultra-high net worth individuals to go to mass market product in a matter of about 60 seconds. It was a relatively tight business plan.

Malcolm Gladwell: No, but that's the whole idea. You're prototyping. If the government is not going to do it and they're who are systematically gutting every government capacity, then some bright-eyed, because there's a universe of people in the world that's very large who have too much money. Just shake them down for a premium, and you could fund the whole operation. They want to live forever, all those Silicon Valley guys. Pony up, buddy. I'll help you live forever.

Dylan Lewis: That might be how we get ahead of the next pandemic. We'll worry about that when it hits. But every time I have an author on the show, I have to ask. Do you have something in the works? Is there a next book planned or a new topic that you're interested in focusing on?

Malcolm Gladwell: Just a bunch of podcasts. I'm doing a George Floyd retrospective. I'm doing a little thing about RFK junior about how crazy he is. I'm doing then a big thing about a capital case, a murder case in Alabama that'll be coming out this summer.

Dylan Lewis: I can't wait to listen to it. Malcolm Gladwell, thanks for joining me.

Malcolm Gladwell: Thank you, Dylan.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. Don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Our personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. The Motley Fool only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey, thanks for listening. We will be back on Monday.

Charles Schwab is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Dylan Lewis has positions in The Trade Desk. Ricky Mulvey has positions in Charles Schwab, Meta Platforms, and The Trade Desk. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms and The Trade Desk. The Motley Fool recommends Charles Schwab and General Motors and recommends the following options: short March 2025 $80 calls on Charles Schwab. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.