Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian journalist and the author of five New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants. His latest book is Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know.

He has been named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by Time magazine and one of Foreign Policy magazine’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, producers of the podcast Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood,

Gladwell has explored how ideas spread in the Tipping Point, decision making in Blink and the roots of success in Outliers. With David and Goliath he examines our understanding of the advantages of disadvantages, arguing that we have underestimated the value of adversity and over-estimated the value of privilege.

Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has won a national magazine award and been honoured by the American Psychological Society and the American Sociological Society. He was previously a reporter for The Washington Post.

“The idea that because things have gotten better in the past they will continue to do so in the future is a fallacy I would have thought confined to the lower reaches of Wall Street.”