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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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Revenge of the Tipping Point summary
Malcolm Gladwell
Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering
18 mins
Brief summary
Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell examines the unseen social mechanisms that incite drastic changes in society, revealing how small actions, ideas, or trends transform into significant cultural phenomena that redefine the world.
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Revenge of the Tipping Point
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Stick-up fever
On November 29, 1983, the FBI’s Los Angeles field office received six phone calls reporting 2-11s, the Bureau’s code for bank robberies. The suspect in each holdup was a slim white male with a Southern accent wearing a Yankees baseball cap. Agents recognized the description: it was one of L.A.’s most prolific robbers, a man they called the “Yankee Bandit.” He knocked over six banks in four hours that afternoon – a new world record.
Criminals like the Yankee Bandit weren’t supposed to exist anymore. Robbing banks, a definitive 1968 study of the subject concluded, was a thing of the past akin to cattle rustling. Banks were more secure than ever and few crimes had higher arrest-and-conviction rates. Only a desperado with “nothing to lose” – that was the study’s title – would contemplate trying to rob a bank: it was too much risk for too little reward.
The study couldn’t have been more wrong. By the 1980s, there were five times more bank robberies than there had been in the 1960s. Some years, the FBI registered close to ten thousand 2-11s. One city in particular was at the center of this extraordinary crime wave. In the mid-1990s, when that wave crested, a quarter of all bank robberies in the U.S. were carried out in L.A.
The longer it lasted, the worse it got. In the early days, robbers stood in line waiting to pass the teller a note saying they had a gun and then grabbed whatever cash was on hand. Second-generation Angeleno robbers didn’t say “please” or “thank you” like the Yankee Bandit – they came in hard, assault rifles blazing, ignoring the tellers’ drawers up front and forcing their way into the high value vaults in the back. Heists were more violent – and more lucrative. Suddenly, crews were netting millions.
That got people’s attention. The most enterprising second-generation bandit was a twenty-three-year-old named Robert Sheldon Brown, also known as Caspar. In just four years, Caspar hit 175 banks – a new world record. Caspar inspired dozens of copycats. By 1992, the city was averaging a robbery every 45 minutes during banking hours.
Robbing banks was a social epidemic, but it wasn’t a mass-participation event: it was driven by a small number of atypical individuals who did one job, and then another, and then another. Bank-robbing was like a disease, but it only needed to infect a few people to tip Los Angeles into mayhem. Epidemiologists have a good word for contagious individuals like the Yankee Bandit and Caspar: they’re “superspreaders.”
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What is Revenge of the Tipping Point about?
Revenge of the Tipping Point (2024) is the long-anticipated follow-up to Malcolm Gladwell’s debut, The Tipping Point. A study of virality and contagion, it interweaves startling case studies and perplexing puzzles to illuminate our age of social upheaval.
Who should read Revenge of the Tipping Point?
- Enthusiasts of social psychology and behavioral economics
- Readers interested in societal trends and transformations
- Fans of Malcolm Gladwell’s narrative style and insights
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