Revenge of The Tipping Point with Malcolm Gladwell

Summary

StarTalk Radio: Episode Summary – "Revenge of The Tipping Point with Malcolm Gladwell"

Podcast Information:

• Title: StarTalk Radio
• Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Episode: Revenge of The Tipping Point with Malcolm Gladwell
• Release Date: February 18, 2025
• Description: In this episode, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Chuck Nice engage with best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell to delve into the deeper dimensions of his seminal work, "The Tipping Point," and its sequel, "Revenge of The Tipping Point." Together, they explore the intersection of sociology, epidemiology, and public policy, shedding light on how small changes can lead to significant societal shifts.

---

Introduction and Guest Welcome (01:02 – 03:32)

The episode begins with Chuck Nice enthusiastically welcoming Malcolm Gladwell back to StarTalk, highlighting Gladwell's impressive bibliography, including "Blink," "Outliers," and "The Tipping Point." The conversation quickly establishes Gladwell's expertise in unraveling complex social phenomena through a blend of sociology and storytelling.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Nice (01:04): "And he once again delivered, covered it all, covered all. Sharing with us deep insights from sociology."
(01:04)

---

Genesis of "The Tipping Point" (03:32 – 07:59)

Gladwell recounts the inspiration behind "The Tipping Point," drawing from his experience covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post. Immersed in epidemiology, he explores how epidemic models can explain social phenomena like crime rates. The pivotal moment came from reading academic journals in the NYU library, where he encountered Jonathan Crane's work on applying disease epidemiology to social issues.

Key Points:

• Epidemiological Models in Sociology: Gladwell discusses how Crane's application of disease spread models to social pathologies like crime and delinquency provided a novel framework for understanding societal changes.
• Crime Decline in the 1990s: Examining the unexpected and precipitous decline in New York City's crime rates in the 1990s, Gladwell sought conceptual explanations beyond conventional theories.

Notable Quote:

Malcolm Gladwell (06:00): "He was literally taking the formal principles of disease epidemiology and laying them over as a social relate."
(05:52)

---

Understanding Epidemics and Super Spreaders (09:00 – 16:12)

The discussion shifts to the mechanics of epidemics, particularly focusing on the concept of "super spreaders." Gladwell explains how a small fraction of the population can disproportionately influence the spread of diseases, a phenomenon evident during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key Points:

• Law of the Few: A principle stating that epidemics are often driven by a very small subset of the population.
• Asymmetrical Spread: Gladwell highlights COVID-19 as a prime example of how certain individuals contribute to a large portion of viral transmission.
• Factors Influencing Aerosol Production: The conversation delves into possible physiological reasons behind why some individuals produce more aerosols, including correlations with obesity and age, and the unique mechanics of saliva flow.

Notable Quotes:

Malcolm Gladwell (09:52): "It's carried in the droplet."
(11:16)

Chuck Nice (16:12): "When it said there's an obesity epidemic, I said, no, you can't catch fat from people."
(20:23)

---

Policy Implications and Public Health Strategies (16:12 – 28:07)

Gladwell and the hosts explore the real-world applications of epidemiological insights, particularly in public policy and crime prevention. Using the example of New York City's strategic deployment of police resources to specific crime hotspots, Gladwell illustrates how targeted interventions can lead to significant societal improvements.

Key Points:

• Hotspot Policing: Allocating police resources to specific high-crime areas rather than distributing them uniformly across a city proved effective in reducing overall crime rates.
• Displacement vs. Rootedness: Contrary to fears of crime displacement, Gladwell notes that criminal activities often remain concentrated in established hotspots due to the entrenched nature of these areas.
• State Capacity: The importance of state capacity— the ability to act on information effectively— in managing public health crises and maintaining societal order.

Notable Quote:

Malcolm Gladwell (27:42): "Criminology is rooted in place. In other words, more than the individual."
(28:34)

---

Vaccine Skepticism and Public Perception of Science (34:32 – 40:20)

The conversation turns towards the societal challenges in public health, focusing on vaccine skepticism. Gladwell argues that fear of needles and misunderstandings about vaccines contribute significantly to resistance, rather than purely ideological opposition to science.

Key Points:

• Fear of Needles: Gladwell posits that aversion to needles is a major factor behind vaccine skepticism, overshadowing rational assessments of public health benefits.
• Rebranding Vaccines: Suggesting that rebranding vaccines (e.g., as something less invasive) might reduce public fear and increase vaccination rates.
• Historical Context of Public Health Measures: Reflecting on past public health efforts and the importance of maintaining trust and effective communication between scientists and the public.

Notable Quotes:

Malcolm Gladwell (38:36): "Imagine if it was... something you sniff, right? Could be nasal. Yes."
(38:36)

Neil deGrasse Tyson (39:16): "Everybody's putting something in you every time you breathe in... But for some reason, the needle just seems so invasive."
(39:16)

---

The Role of Technology and Future Preparedness (41:24 – 47:14)

Gladwell emphasizes the need for enhanced technological and infrastructural preparedness to manage future pandemics effectively. He advocates for integrating advanced surveillance systems and leveraging technologies like AI and canine detection methods to identify and mitigate outbreaks swiftly.

Key Points:

• Advanced Surveillance: Utilizing AI and comprehensive data analysis to predict and prevent tipping points in disease spread.
• Canine Detection: Highlighting the efficacy of dogs in detecting diseases like COVID-19 and colorectal cancer better than traditional methods.
• Investment in Public Health Infrastructure: Arguing for substantial increases in funding and resources dedicated to public health to prevent the devastating economic and human costs of future pandemics.

Notable Quotes:

Malcolm Gladwell (43:19): "A good state capacity preparation for the next pandemic is to breed tons and tons and tons of dogs."
(43:19)

Chuck Nice (44:47): "So, Malcolm, your podcast... And you're co-founder of that."
(48:05)

---

Malcolm Gladwell’s "Revisionist History" Podcast (48:27 – 51:25)

Gladwell discusses his podcast, "Revisionist History," where he reexamines historical events and cultural phenomena to uncover overlooked or misunderstood narratives. The conversation touches on his favorite episodes, including a deep dive into the Disney adaptation of "The Little Mermaid," critiquing its cultural and societal implications.

Key Points:

• Reanalyzing Narratives: Gladwell's podcast aims to provide fresh perspectives on well-known stories, challenging listeners to reconsider preconceived notions.
• Cultural Critique: Through examples like "The Little Mermaid," Gladwell explores themes of gender roles, contract law representation, and racial stereotypes in media.
• Impact of Media Representations: Discussing how media portrayals can influence societal attitudes and the importance of holding influential entities like Disney accountable for their cultural impact.

Notable Quotes:

Malcolm Gladwell (50:25): "I don't think it was presentism. We had two issues... It was as true 20 years ago as it is today."
(50:25)

Chuck Nice (51:33): "This is a celebration of progressive change in our understanding of the world and of each other, how we treat each other."
(51:18)

---

Conclusion and Final Thoughts (53:03 – 54:12)

As the episode wraps up, Gladwell expresses gratitude for the engaging discussion, while Chuck Nice and Neil deGrasse Tyson commend him on his insightful contributions. The hosts highlight the importance of continuous learning and the role of interdisciplinary approaches in solving complex societal issues.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Nice (53:39): "Malcolm, this has been delightful. We need you more often than just three times in 15 years."
(53:39)

Neil deGrasse Tyson (53:45): "Keep looking up."
(54:12)

---

Key Insights and Takeaways:

1. Interdisciplinary Approaches: Combining insights from sociology, epidemiology, and data science can offer profound explanations for complex societal phenomena.
2. Power of Minority Influence: A small, influential segment of the population can drive significant changes, be it in disease spread or crime rates.
3. Public Health Preparedness: Investing in advanced surveillance, technological innovations, and public health infrastructure is crucial for mitigating future pandemics.
4. Media and Cultural Representation: Critical analysis of media portrayals can uncover underlying societal biases and influence public perception.
5. Overcoming Public Skepticism: Addressing fears and misconceptions, such as those surrounding vaccines, requires nuanced strategies beyond mere informational campaigns.

This episode of StarTalk Radio offers a compelling exploration of Malcolm Gladwell's evolving perspectives on tipping points and societal contagion, enriched by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice's engaging moderation. For listeners seeking to understand the intricate dynamics of social change and public health, this dialogue provides valuable insights and thoughtful reflections.

Transcript

[Cricket Wireless]

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[Chuck Nice]

Chuck, Love me some Malcolm Gladwell.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Absolutely.

[Chuck Nice]

And he once again delivered, covered it all, covered all. Sharing with us deep insights from sociology.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

To science to poop. We got it all. We got it all.

[Chuck Nice]

Coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right, right now. This is Star Talk. Neil Degrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I'm here with Chuck Knight. Chuck it, baby.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hey, Neil.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What's happening?

[Chuck Nice]

We got a really cool guest today.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, one of the coolest.

[Chuck Nice]

The coolest, like, ever.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I mean, for our nerd audience.

[Chuck Nice]

Nerd audience. Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome back to Star Talk.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Thank you.

[Chuck Nice]

This may be your third time. I'm checking my numbers here.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I was last year in 20. Did you hear you say I was here in 2015?

[Chuck Nice]

We had you on one of our live Star Talk lives on stage as well. Yeah, very good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Very cool.

[Chuck Nice]

And this man can't stop writing best selling books. What's your problem? It's an element.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a serious affliction, isn't it? You just wake up and you're just like, oh, you vomit and a best seller's on the bed. How did this happen?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I wish.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Not again.

[Chuck Nice]

Quality vomit, that's what you're saying. I'm looking at the list here. Blink we all remember Blink, of course. What the dog saw. I think I missed that one. Goliath. Outliers and Tipping Point, those were big ones.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Tipping Point's a big, big one.

[Chuck Nice]

And of course, right now you've got Revenge of the Tipping Point and this, like, Tipping Point, the sequel. Is this the.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This is. Yeah, this is. This is Part two.

[Chuck Nice]

Is Marvel, the Marvel Universe getting to you?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Okay, well, the question is, which revenge am I referring to? There's a number of revengers.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, okay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And I think I was. I think I was thinking of Revenge of the Pink Panther, which dates me terribly. Dates me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Revenge of the Pink Panther.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You're not even old enough.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Revenge of the Nerds. I would have gone with.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, Revenge of the Nerds is a good one.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that's a big revenge. Pink Panther is a little before.

[Chuck Nice]

So if we characterize you, I've got some notes here say that you unravel strange human phenomena and reveal the science and the. And the psychology that underpins that conduct. So, Malcolm, remind us. It's been a few years since the original tipping point. Remind us of the thesis of that book.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The idea was that I had just. When I wrote the Tipping Point, I had just been covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post.

[Chuck Nice]

So you come to this as a journalist. That's interesting.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Chops, who had just been immersed in epidemiology for, like, a good six years.

[Chuck Nice]

Let me just remind people. Epidemiology, you know, the study of.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Of how epidemics behave.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah, epidemics. And what. How they spread and how they are contained or even how we infect each other.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How we infect each other. That's basically epidemic.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And like so many scientific professions, there are certain moments when epidemiologists matter, and there are certain moments when we forget about them and they have conversations among themselves. And HIV was one of those occasions when suddenly they seemed, you know, they were part of the cultural conversation. Covid was another. All of a sudden we heard from these people who. We don't. We don't normally pay any attention to them. And so I had been immersed in the world of epidemiologists, and I was so fascinated by the peculiar way in which epidemics of disease behave. I was in the library at NYU Bobs library. One day I used to go there and hang out in the stacks and read academic journals at random.

[Chuck Nice]

That is so geeky of you.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's so geeky. It is very geeky.

[Chuck Nice]

Erect a statue to you. Okay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And I. One day, I remember this moment. I was in the HM1 aisle.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And I was reading back issues as one would be. Neil, don't tell me you haven't done this, because you have.

[Chuck Nice]

Keep going.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

By the way, I'm a HM2 guy.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Myself, you know, and I was reading a back. A bound volume of back issues of the American Journal of Sociology, and I read a paper by a guy called. Called Jonathan Crane. And it was. The whole premise of the paper was, let's use epidemiological models to examine social pathology. Crime delinquency, teenage pregnancy.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Love it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Do they spread in the same way?

[Chuck Nice]

What date was that article?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I think it was from the. The article was from the 1980s.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, so, okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So it was. It was. Yeah, it was a modern article.

[Chuck Nice]

It wasn't like the 1800s at the.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Time he wrote that. That was a very novel idea.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Because he was literally taking. He was literally taking the formal principles of disease epidemiology and laying them over.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

As a social relate.

[Chuck Nice]

That's how I think of the term. Not specifically disease, but human behavior and how you might track that and understand it. So if it began there, I'm very impressed by that.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, did it. I mean, it's interesting. Did it begin there? It was the first time I had ever seen. And if you read the article, it was clear that there wasn't a rich literature of people in that formally applying. I mean, they may have informally have used that, but formally applying the techniques to. He was. So he showed, for example, that these.

[Chuck Nice]

Would be mathematical techniques, wouldn't it?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yes, yes, mathematical techniques. And one of the things he showed, for example, was that when the percentage of professionals, so people with higher education, some fell below a certain critical threshold, social problems exploded, which I thought was incredibly interesting.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And he tracked across all of these neighborhoods and looked at outmigration of a certain kind of role model. In other words, when you remove role models, you know, the first couple you remove doesn't make them. And then all of a sudden there's a kind of moment when boom.

[Chuck Nice]

A tipping point. A tipping point.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I had just been. This was. I was in the library in New York in 19. This is in 1996. And I'd just been living through the beginnings of this extraordinary decline in crime in New York. And I was trying to make sense of it because nobody could explain to me why would crime fall by whatever.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It fell by precipitously.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Precipitously in the 90s.

[Chuck Nice]

And everyone, of course, wants to take credit for that.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Of course everyone wants to take credit. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And it wasn't just New York City. It was the whole country.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Although later it was just New York City. This is interesting because there's two New York City crime declines Keep going here, but. And no one can explain why. And I wanted to understand it conceptually. And it struck me when I read that article that this was the conceptual explanation, that crime was a contagious phenomenon and it had just tipped in the way that epidemics often tip. And that was the genesis of that book, the Tipping Point.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow, that's fascinating.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It all begins in the stacks of an academic library. I'm just playing to you right now, Neil.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, no, we're good.

[Chuck Nice]

We're good. Now, one of your stories, if I remember the book, you talk about Big.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Bird, I have a long thing on Sesame street, too long in retrospect. When I went back to reread that, I was like, what was I doing?

[Chuck Nice]

No, but that chapter, that section stayed with me because you never know what little feature of a story is actually gonna make the difference and put it over the top. And if I remember correctly, you suggested that Big Bird, which is an absurd element in Sesame street when you think about it. You're not walking around saying, gee, let's get a seven foot yellow bird.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Bird. Right.

[Chuck Nice]

We need that. Who's thinking this? Yeah, right, right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so, because everybody who wrote Sesame street was hot as hell, they were smoking some good stuff.

[Chuck Nice]

So. So am I. Am I remembering that correctly with Big Bird?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, that there I was interested in the dimension of, you know, an important dimension in understanding contagion is the duration of your kind of contagious window. Right, okay. That, you know, if Covid had a. Had basically a 48 hour window when we were highly contagious before the antibody response kicked in. If that infectious window is 24 hours, the ability of the virus could be exactly the same in every other dimension. And its ability to spread would be cut in half, greatly diminished even.

[Chuck Nice]

More than half. Yeah, more than half. Yeah, yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The longer the incubation period, the more effective the virus will be.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

So, Malcolm, this concept of stickiness.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

That can help us transition from the original tipping point to the revenge of the tipping point. You had like 3 rules or 3?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

3. The other rules were what I called the law of the few, which is the idea that in an epidemic, often, not always the epidemic is driven by a very, very, very small fraction of the population.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Interesting.

[Chuck Nice]

The super spreaders.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Super spreaders. Which are. You know, it's funny because there was this whole backlash against super spreaders in the epidemiological community. With many people saying that when we look at contagious viruses, you know, we don't see this and now. But then Covid happened and Covid is the kind of er, example of, of asymmetry in an epidemic. It is like you know, in a room. I the most, to me, the most interesting part of fascinating part to write of my new book was I was talking to all these aerosol experts. So these are the guys who study aerosols or the particles in the air. Yeah, the droplets that come out of your mouth when you speak that. And when you have Covid, there's virus particles in each aerosol.

[Chuck Nice]

I think that's the only reason why a mask can work at all. Because it says tattooing aerosol and it stops the aerosol. Absolutely, because a virus particles, the virus.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is much smaller but the virus is still carried not only by the air.

[Chuck Nice]

It can't fly by itself.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, that's what I'm saying.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's carried and that's what's carried in.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The, in the droplet.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But when you examine large groups of people, what you discover is that there's a very small number of people whose level of aerosol Production is like 10, 20, 30, 40 times greater than the mean. The thing about super spreading, being a super spreader is you probably don't know that you are right. In fact you almost do.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And do we have a physiological reason why the people's production of aerosols was so high? Like are they big mouth people? Do they have large lungs? Is it they talk loud or they.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We're still figuring this out. The hypotheses on the table. Now there's one guy, a guy named Edwards at Harvard who is, who thinks that it's correlated with obesity and age.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Interesting.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But then another, a little more, slightly more convincing explanation comes from this other guy who says that it's really driven by something quite idiosyncratic in the way that your saliva moves through your throat canal. There's a, there was a small group of people who study the production of aerosols in a, across a variety of. You know, like they're really interested in automobile emissions or they're really interested in air pollution or they're interested in when you fry bacon, what comes off the bacon. You know, when you smell it, what are you smelling?

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

All those kinds of. But they very, very early on in the pandemic, a bunch of. And it's a very obscure feel of. They're chemists, right. They're not involved with, with, with medicine or human biology at all very early on in the pandemic, in one of these incredibly obscure aerosol journals, a bunch of aerosolists wrote an. An editorial. This is like in March of 2020 when they said, first of all, this thing is airborne. It has to be, because it's coming up through aerosols. And two, you're going to see a really, really, really asymmetrical distribution of aerosol production. So be aware that 1% of the population is doing all the damage. They told us they gave us a roadmap in the very year 2020. But part of it is, I think it's very. And I think, Neil, you know exactly what I'm talking about here. It is very difficult to go back.

[Chuck Nice]

And I mean, at the time, you.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Don'T know what to pay attention to. There's a disciplinary thing here. It's very hard to get the attention of a public health or a biologist in a time of crisis to what a chemist is saying. They're not at the dawn of COVID You're not reading, you're not saying, oh, the chemists have the answer.

[Chuck Nice]

But even so, all I'm saying is we don't have an inventory of every other possible paper that was written that only now we go back and say, hey, they had insight. We should have listened to them. When there are 99 others that you didn't listen to or you shouldn't have listened to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because we call that hindsight.

[Cricket Wireless]

We all dream of a better world. Stronger communities, more opportunities. But who's gonna make it happen? Look in the mirror. That person you see is more powerful than you think. Every uplifting word, every small act of compassion, it all adds up to something bigger. So take the first step. Whether it's in your neighborhood or your workplace, change starts with you. Join Cricket Nation this Black History Month and get inspired while discovering change makers just like you. Because the world doesn't change by itself. It changes one person at a time. Go to cricketwireless.com to learn more.

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

I'm Jasmine Wilson and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Chuck Nice]

So this is the law of the few. And then you have a third law. What is that?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, the third law has to do with the power of context. But in this book I talk about what I call the overstory, which, which is just the idea that the narratives of any community powerfully inform the behavior of the members of that community in a way that we may not be aware of. And I get into this whole literature of medical variation that the way doctors practice differs in completely inexplicable and bizarre ways from one community to the next across developed world. I mean, I mean, I give the example of the way that your cardiologist treats you in Buffalo is radically different from the way your cardiologist treats you in Boulder.

[Chuck Nice]

The fact that you might be a better doctor if you went to a better medical school, there's something wrong with that in a society.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What's interesting about this, all doctors should.

[Chuck Nice]

Have the same power of knowledge, wisdom and insight in treating you. And they don't. And that's a problem.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But this observation is about something slightly different from that, which is when I say that the way you're treated is different in Boulder and Birmingham, in Boulder and Buffalo, that's not to say that one is worse than the other.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's just different. So there are ways in which Buffalo is better than Boulder and the ways in which Boulder is better than Buffalo, and it has nothing to do with it may be the case this can be true even if the cardiologists of Boulder and Buffalo attended the same medical schools.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Interesting.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This is quite this is apart from differences in training. You know, when you go and they put a when they're doing a catheter in America, when you a cardiac catheter for the longest time we put in catheters in your thigh. Right thigh was the standard in Buffalo.

[Chuck Nice]

To the. To the artery or the veins that go up.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

In Buffalo, they put it in through the wrist.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Now, the wrist is harder to learn how to do that, but the complications are way lower. It's faster, it's safer, it has better outcome. But you have to learn how to do it first. Buffalo's way ahead on putting it through the wrist. Places like Boulder are way behind. Why is Buffalo that way? Because the guy who invented putting it through the wrist is from Montreal, so.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It'S closer to the source in the hood.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's spread from Montreal to Toronto and then Toronto down to Buffalo. Because there's a lot of back and forth between cardiologists, I cannot sit here.

[Chuck Nice]

Calmly and defend that fact. I would just say in the future, AI would have that understood perfectly. And so we wouldn't need regional differences in awareness of doctors. The future of civilization.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There'd be a uniform protocol that you established.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But you have to. That. I mean, eventually, what happens is Boulder eventually catches up. And now if you go in, if you have a heart attack, they're going to put it in through your wrist. Not sure. And the delay is only partially caused by a lack of knowledge. It requires a doctor, the person putting in the catheter to get extra training. And if everyone around you in Buffalo is doing the wrist, you do the wrist. Otherwise you look like a fool. Right, Interesting. But in Boulder, if they're all doing the. They're all doing the. The thigh. The thigh. You do the thigh.

[Chuck Nice]

Bring on the AI, not only to learn what to do, but actually to do the do.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You just don't want doctors.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You don't want doctors.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You just don't want doctors.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You just threw doctors under the bus. That's what you did. You were just like, I tell you what we're going to do. We're going to actually go in through the thigh. And by that I mean the artery that will let doctors bleed out.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's that line from Shakespeare, first kill all the lawyers. Now first kill all the doctors. That's the Tyson.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Tyson test prescription.

[Chuck Nice]

Not what I said. Somebody has to. The AI is not going to develop the new method. Somebody has to do that. And then it's disseminated instantly and performed possibly by robotic surgeons.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So it sounds to me like what you're saying is that our influence upon one another is in itself an epidemiological phenomenon.

[Chuck Nice]

That's well put.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

When it said there's an obesity epidemic, I Said, no, you can't catch fat from people. So why are you calling it an epidemic? However, I was very resistant at the time. I'm much more relaxed about it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I was gonna say, because based on what we've just been discussing, you can actually catch fat from people. Because what happens is the sociological, I'll say, pressures that lead to obesity that are resident in a particular sub society, people will actually join in that behavior. That behavior then in turn leads to obesity. So you have indeed caught fat.

[Chuck Nice]

Caught fat.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

If you want to go to a private girls school in the Upper east side of Manhattan and then go to a rural high school in Alabama and tell me there isn't a profound difference in the cultural circumstances that drive obesity. Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. I'm just saying I warmed up to it. I'm just. When I first heard it, I was thinking biologically, not culturally. And so I was resistant to using it ever in that way. But I've softened up over time. So take me into the new book. What are the new perspectives you're bringing to the table?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I was much more taken by the. The dynamics of epidemics, in other words, the law of the few, for example. I begin to realize it's a much more radical observation that an epidemic is driven by a small number of people than I had realized with the first book. I was thinking kind of, you know, the 80, 20 rule. There's a big group of us. And now I realize, oh, no, no, no, it's super specific. And it's really the number of people who drive. Epidemics are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the population. And we need to. Our expectation that all of us are somehow all lumped in the middle and we all sort of equally contribute to these things is just wrong. I'm much more fascinated and mystified by patterns of environmental contagion than I was in the first book. I just. I don't really understand.

[Chuck Nice]

So you've raised an issue that could become social culturals. For example, if you find out that a certain types of people are these super.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, aerosol.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

They call them super emitters.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Super emitters.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. If you find out that super emitters are all contained within one genetic demographic, that requires a different solution.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

To resolve. Because this is, you know, is that any different from the AIDS epidemic? I remember. I'm well old enough to remember. We are old enough to remember that it was like it was a disease just in homo male homosexuals. So therefore ban. You know, people don't react rationally to that kind of information. So how does Your analysis and the revelation of this manifest in terms of policy.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, that's. This is a. You're putting your finger on an extremely important point. I would say that you're absolutely right, that there are as many troubling outcomes from this as there are positive outcomes. And the simple answer is we have to start the conversation now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

I don't trust us as a species. Based on the history of anthropology, especially European anthropology, and what they say about groups and places and races and all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Not a good track record.

[Chuck Nice]

The track record is so bad. Right on up through eugenics and Nazism. It is so bad. It may be that we just have to treat everybody equally, knowing that that treatment is excessive for some, but just right for others. But then no one gets differently treated. That may be the only solution.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, I see what you're saying. So some of us may suffer a little more than others so that we might achieve a greater good by serving all. So whatever measures have to be taken are taken across the board, even though they don't really apply to me as much.

[Chuck Nice]

I think we need that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I got it.

[Chuck Nice]

So for. So an example here might be if 90 out of 100 people don't need to wear a mask because they're not spewing thing, it still make everybody wear a mask.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

See, that was the whole. That was the whole problem is that the people were like, I don't want.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

To wear a mask.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And even though they were like, listen, what we know from 1918, starting back then, what we know for a fact is that masking reduces transmission. We know that for a fact. And people were like, I don't care. It's a different freedom.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a different. The freedom call that came later, and that was different. Okay, I'm just making this simple point, right? That in a society where we want everyone to be treated equally under the law, to have a law that applies only to some people, you must wear a mask, and the rest of you don't have to. My experience with our species tells me that will not work. And so you just make the rule for everyone and that's it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, let me give you another example of the same phenomenon. Okay. One of the things that criminologists have observed is that these same patterns of extreme variation happen in violent crime.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So I look at a map of New York City, and it's any city, for that matter, and you will find that on like 5% of street segments, blocks. 5% of street segments of. Of New York City account for north of 50% of all violent crimes. It's super specific. When I say a street segment. So we're talking about. We're not saying the South Bronx is a dangerous place. This. No, no. This is saying, no, no, no. Most of the South Bronx is totally safe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Safe.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But there are very specific. Or there's a.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There are 10 hotspots.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. There's a street corner on the, you know, on York and 91st. That's problematic. So the rational response to that is to say, oh, we don't need police. The same distribution of police in every precinct in the city. What we should be doing. And this is what the NYPD did. And that caused the second great decline, crime decline in New York, which was they said, okay, we're just gonna shift huge numbers of resources from the 90% of places that are relatively safe and just dump them on those very, very specific hotspots. I'm sure that people anticipated the very argument that you're making saying, people are gonna object to that. They're gonna say, you're taking 10 of my police officers away from my precinct so you can send them to a street corner in, like, you know, East New York. Why, that's unfair. As it turns out, the. What people were, I think, were able to realize was that bringing the overall crime rate in the city down was. Was a. Made that price worth paying. That you could convince them by showing them, oh, this is going to make the whole city a better place for all of us. You can give up your.

[Chuck Nice]

Ted. Cops. Well, why didn't the crime just move to another block? It was like pornography. No, no, this is Times Square. You know, you knock it out here. Then it went to 7th Avenue, to 8th Avenue, to 10th Avenue.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Then it went on the Internet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

And everybody's.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This is.

[Chuck Nice]

You're not going to get rid of something that kind of built into the system.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No, this was. So this is a fascinating area of criminology. This is one of the great insights of the last generation of criminological work. After they made this observation, they then went to this very question, displacement, as it's called in criminology, which is, okay, If I send 10 cops to the corner of, you know, York Avenue in 91st, do the bad guys just moved to 93rd?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

93Rd, 95th.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And the answer is, they don't. They do in a little bit. I mean, do you see some displacement? But to a remarkable extent, criminals are lazy or they're. They are both lazy.

[Chuck Nice]

Walk away. Yeah, you keep your wallet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

God. Dude, there's cops. Let's do it again tomorrow.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No, you're right. The word they would use is that criminology is rooted in place. In other words, more than.

[Chuck Nice]

More than the individual.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, absolutely. So the famous work on this was done, I think, for the first time in Seattle. And they. And it took. It's a very simple thing, but no one did it for the longest time, which was to overlay crime data on a map. Right. No one had ever done it in a systematic way. And when they finally started doing this, the guy did is a guy named Weisberg, David Weisberg. What they discover is this pattern that, like, there's like. Look at the map. He's. I started in Seattle. You look at the map of Seattle, there's like, 15 hotspots in Seattle where a huge proportion. A hotspot is a block, a huge proportion of violent crime is happening at any given moment. So then they say, okay, what happens when we look at next year's data? Did the spots move? They don't move. What happens if you look five years later? Do the spots move? They don't move. Spots aren't moving. It's. And I don't know, one has a kind of ultimately satisfactory answer for this because you would think that this would be random.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Right. It's not random. It is. And they can take you. I've actually. I have been. Someone took me on a tour of Baltimore. A guy who worked with Weisburg, a woman who worked with Weisburg. We drove around Baltimore for a day, and she did this exact thing. We drive through, like, the worst neighborhoods in West Baltimore. And she would say, this block, no crime. This block, no crime. This block, the crime here for, like, 15 years. Next block, no crime. Next crime. It's the strangest thing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It really is the strangest thing.

[Chuck Nice]

These are fascinating revelations. All of your books do that for the reader. It's like, well, I never knew that. I never. Because you did all the homework, right? And you put it in the book. So if you arrive at these points of awareness, presumably they lead to solutions, so that there would ultimately be no problems left for you to write about in a book. So what's. What's going on there?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I have confidence that there will always be problems for me to write about. This is just a question, and you fix it in one place, and then you move, and then it gets. Goes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Goes blind spots.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Move those spots. Yeah. But no, what's interesting about. If I can. Can I rant about criminology? My favorite. I love criminology so much. It's such a Fascinating field. So much has happened in the last generation in terms of our understanding of crime. It's just like. That's another reason I wanted to write this book is that writing about crime in the 19. Excuse me, in the 1990s compared with writing about crime today. It's. It is literally. It's like writing about physics before Einstein and writing about physics afterwards.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. Hence your.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Don't you see it. Don't you like the way I constantly appealing? Constantly.

[Chuck Nice]

Not necessary. But I welcome it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Just improving his comfort level, his countenance softened every now. And I just think everything is just being frack. It's coming through of the prism of physics.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I have to kind of.

[Chuck Nice]

So this is part of what leads you to this update or this sequel. Because the analysis is renewed in ways that is really.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You have to. I had originally thought I was just going to do a revised edition of the original Tipping Point on its anniversary. And I realized you can't revise something that's rooted in our understandings from 25 years ago. You just can't. You got to start over again.

[Chuck Nice]

Kind of the nature of a tipping point is you don't see it coming.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

I mean, think about it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, do you?

[Chuck Nice]

When. When you see it coming, it's too late.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Ah, okay.

[Chuck Nice]

So the anticipation of a tipping point. Where are we in that world of analysis of phenomena? Tipping phenomena. Because it's not. What use is it to just know everything about it after the fact, you know, if you can't prevent it from happening again?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Let's imagine. Let's use our example. Covid December of. And November of 2019, we have these reports coming out of Wuhan. But let's. Let's do another version of that and say that we have vastly improved surveillance where somebody is. Is regularly sampling, you know, the spread of the. Of people who are infected and we're monitoring the spread of the virus a little more closely than we are now. Could we kind of run that data through an advanced algorithm and say absent some intervention, this thing blows up in.

[Chuck Nice]

March of that would be a tipping point.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, yeah, I think you'd have to.

[Chuck Nice]

That's what epidemiologists are supposed to be able to do.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But they never ever have the resources. We only give them the resources after the fact.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

After the fact.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

If you were to build a really effective surveillance system, I mean, we should be doing this right now with this whole avian flu thing, which is quite terrifying, to be honest. I would just like to do a little experiment where we go for five years and we give the epidemiologists everything they want. We just say, what do you want? If they totaled up. This is what's so hilarious to me about science funding in this country. The numbers are so tiny. Like, the entire budget of NIH is like 40 billion.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Not for long.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Not for long. I, if, if somebody, if they, you could slip it past Congress, they could add a zero and slip it past Congress and no one would notice.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No one know.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

They should just add a zero and see if anyone knows.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

See if it happens.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

400 billion in the grand scheme of things.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's like. And like that's what they're arguing over. So the epidemiologists, if you added up everything they wanted, it literally it would be in the millions, I'm sure called budget dust.

[Chuck Nice]

That's what we call it. Really small enough to barely be noticed. You put in there. Budget dust.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Nice.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. You've played that game.

[Chuck Nice]

We say a lot with, with NASA. There are programs you want to put in. NASA has a budget right now. NIH used to be less than NASA, if memory serves, and now they're higher than NASA. NASA is between 25 and 30 billion. But NASA does very visible things for that with the space station and the James Webb Space Telescope and rovers and very visible. And we're going back to the moon.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So a lot of public recognition with NASA, too.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right. And so, but you're absolutely right. When you look at the full budget of the country, we're talking about nothing. So you want to be the champion of the epidemiologist. This is cool.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I think it'd be, I mean, because the consequences.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think it'd be great.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Are the economic consequences of another pandemic. We know what we're talking about. Trillions of dollars. Trillions. So, like, it seems like a really.

[Chuck Nice]

Really, really insurance policy.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, yeah, it's a minor insurance policy. And someone told me that the total amount of money it would cost every year to permanently protect us, prepare us for any future viral outbreak, is something like 25 billion a year. In other words, they could do it. They could have vaccines at the ready, anything.

[Chuck Nice]

Isn't that what we're already trying to do with the anticipated flu vaccines? Each year they go to Southern Hemisphere.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Or Australia, they see where it is.

[Chuck Nice]

And then they identify in our seasons.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Absolutely.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You know, where they, they make them just across the river. You've been there in, in near Nyack. Like, we could drive 20 minutes from here. They don't let you in, but they have, you know, it's this crazy. It's this totally crazy thing because, you know, they're like growing them in like we're growing what they're growing. They grow the virus. They, they find the flu virus. They, they pick a strain right there and it's a big strain picking conference every year in like sees more than once a year. I think it's in rock.

[Chuck Nice]

We go, honey, I'm going strain picking. We find me some viruses that'll show up later.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Years ago when I was at the Washington Post, I think I went to one of those meetings where it's a big. They huddle and they have all of everyone makes the case for one strain over another. Which one do we think is going to win out? And then they. That's the one. Because you need our lead time. It takes a long time to make the virus. So you got to. You're picking quite early. And this is another area where you could say, does AI and things like that, does that improve our. Does it a. Improve our accuracy? And they grade themselves after it's all over. How well did we do? Or can we shrink the. If we could shrink the time it takes to make the vaccine, then we can pick later and our accuracy will go up. I mean, hundreds of thousands of lives lie in the balance. These are insanely consequential decisions.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

People don't realize that just the flu itself, just regular flu influence about it.

[Chuck Nice]

Still.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Still somewhere around 45,000 people a year.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just popping off because. And Covid, believe it or not, even higher. Yeah, even higher still to this day, you know, and people don't think about it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's a nasty. Yeah, it's nasty. It is a nasty bugger.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I want to ask something about epidemiologists, in your opinion, because they seem to have unorthodox means of finding information. Do you think that works against them? Like I remember in Covid, and they were the first to say, all right, we got to study poop and we're going to study all these people's poops in these. In the sewers, in these sewers. And they were amazing at predicting what community was going to have an outbreak by studying poop. But when people heard they're studying poop, they were like, oh, get that hell out of here.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Get out of here. The poop stuff is actually really fascinating because the poop stuff is. It was one of the first places we began to see these radical asymmetries. You could see enormous numbers of amounts of virus coming from very, very, very specific locations. It wasn't uniformly Spread. It was like. I've forgotten. There's some incredible story one of these aerosols told me about that kind of analysis. But no, I think, you know, people need to get over it. Like, I. I don't understand why there's something. Something happened where we so fell out of love with the kind of scientific enterprise that we went in a span of a generation from eagerly lining up to get our shot to somehow being afraid of the needle. I mean, I just. I.

[Chuck Nice]

How do we solve that?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, I think we should stop call. Calling vaccines. Vaccines.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Very good.

[Chuck Nice]

A name. Facelift.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Jennifer.

[Chuck Nice]

Call it Jennifer.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No, think about.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm gonna give me some Jennifer.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Imagine if it was. It could easily be something that you sniff, right? Could be nasal. Yes. And if. And suppose we just said. And we didn't call it a vaccine. We just called it a cocaine.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He said, something you sniff. I figure people like cocaine.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Something. Yeah, that would be. That would appeal. Just some. Just you say, look, this in the same way that I take, you know, some people take, you know, echinacea to ward off a cold.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You say, just sniff this to ward off Covid. How hard is that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So I actually think an awful lot of way more vaccine skepticism was just fear of needles than we acknowledge. I think a lot of people are. Would. Would rather make a. Pretend to make a principled ideological case against science than admit that they're scared of needles.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Absolutely. I agree 100%, because there are a certain amount of people every year in this country who take an aspirin or an NSAID or acetaminophen, and they die. Okay. But you don't hear about that because that's just part of the risk.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

All right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And nobody says, well, I would never take that because it's not safe or whatever, you know, but stick a needle in their arm and they're just like. It's so invasive. I'm putting something in you. Well, you're putting something in you every time you breathe in. You're putting something in you every time you swallow something. You're putting something in you every time you eat. You're always putting something in you. But for some reason, the needle just seems so invasive.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. There is so many of our kind of myths about things that are scary are about something getting inside of us, you know, and that's maybe that's why.

[Chuck Nice]

The original Alien movie was so potent.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The little snake man, that popped out.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Your stomach. Yeah, That's. Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The beast in me. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

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[Chuck Nice]

Do you think all the epidemiologists need is more money or will that just give us more epidemiologists to just participate in this exercise?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, so this is a really interesting broader question, which is what is the right amount of any kind of specialist in society? So I don't know. We don't know whether we have the right amount of epidemiologists. And the only way to find out is to conduct an experiment like an epidemiological experiment. An epidemiological experiment which is. Let's double the number.

[Chuck Nice]

It's very meta, right?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, yeah, okay. Let's double the number and see what happens. Double the amount of money we give them. Let's make more of them and just observe. Are we better off or worse off? We effectively did this in the post war years in America, where we.

[Chuck Nice]

Post Second World War.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Post Second World War, yeah. Where we. What do we do? You know, we increased the number of English professors by some extraordinary number.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We've done this experiment, didn't know that we've increased the number of plastic surgeons in America over the last. So periodically we do radically. So the number of soldiers in the First World War was ratcheted up overnight.

[Chuck Nice]

And so then they would make better predictions, they would make better anticipations of what the next virus will be. They'll turn. They're not necessarily the virus makers, but you'd fund the rapidity of virus.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

They would inform the people who are actually making the therapeutics and vaccines. I mean, the quality of information that would flow in that direction would improve.

[Chuck Nice]

So it might be that the future is not the absence of a devastating virus, it's our capacity to handle it when it comes up. That would solve the problem just as much as having a perfect antiviral serum that would be anti every virus. Right? That's the dream.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The dream.

[Chuck Nice]

But if we have a system in place where no matter the virus, it never gets foothold.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This idea of building. The economists talk endlessly about state capacity, which is something distinct from knowledge or resources, which is Your ability to act on information. Information and what you. I think if we focused heavily on state capacity, my favorite state capacity example would be the. In Covid. The best detectors of COVID were dogs by far. By far smelling. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sense of smell.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You could. I went. I did this episode of my podcast. We went out to Alabama, where they trained Covid sniffing dogs. The dogs outperform every other test of COVID They, you know, because dogs. We've known for a long time that dogs are better than, you know, they can detect colon. Colon. Colon cancer better than a colonoscopy. They can detect prostate cancer better than a. Than a 1. That antigen test. They're just really good. There is something distinctive about.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They see smell.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

They see smell. So a good state capacity preparation for the next pandemic is to breed tons and tons and tons of dogs. It's my favorite thing. Just a giant, like a kind of a strategic canine, you know, unit reserve.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We'll put it out in Oklahoma. We'll have like 10,000 German shepherds. And then they're all sniffing your butt in your crot.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They're all.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But imagine. No, because you can roll these guys out.

[Chuck Nice]

How do they find prostate cancer?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But, oh, this is actually fascinating clinical trials where the dog is matched up against, you know, the state of the art in clinical testing. And the dogs blow them out of the water every time. The dogs are like, amazing.

[Chuck Nice]

They're smelling the prostate cancer.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

Just by you walking by them.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yes. So you know how dogs test for Covid is imagine you wanted to test everyone coming into this museum for Covid. And imagine there's a line out on Saturday morning. There's a line of.

[Chuck Nice]

We get that actually every morning. Every morning.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So you take the dog. The dog literally. You just line him up, goes down the line. He just runs down the line. And if you have Covid, he stops.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

When he barks at you, and you just like, man, that's a racist dog. Man, the dog is racist. I don't have Covid.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's. They're astonishingly good at this. Wow. State capacity. I want the strategic puppy reserve is the thing that I think this country.

[Chuck Nice]

Needs a puppy reserve.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Now, that would work.

[Chuck Nice]

That would get funded.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Like, that would get funded in. Is if the puppy looks your face. You don't have Covid.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And there was one. They sadly stopped doing it. But in Alabama, they had the brilliant idea of having prisoners breed dogs for testing purposes. And it turned out to be the most extraordinary. It transformed the prison community in a way that they Completely un. I mean, it turns out bringing dogs into that kind of, if you think about it, it makes sense, but into that environment just transformed. It was this sort of means for rehabilitation of the prisoners.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They were able to identify Covid very.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Easily in the prison population were a.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Lot of dog robberies that started happening.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No, no, no. Think about it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's like joking.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We need. Anyway, I, I, I, I want to go on the puppy crusade at some point before the next.

[Chuck Nice]

See, as a scientist, I would just invent the machine that can smell to the same parts per billion as a dog.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, they're trying, they're actually using. They're doing exactly that. They're moving from the dogs back to the machine.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, that's right. That's how I wanted it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. What is it? The dog, you know, trying to figure out what is it the dog is sensing. And then can we perfect our machines?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Grab a machine by the ears and go, who's it? Goozy goo, goozy goo.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Also, wouldn't you rather be sniffed by a dog?

[Chuck Nice]

We can put ears on the machine.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Okay, Neil, if your colonoscopy was just a dog sniffing you, that's so much of an upgrade.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I would take that in a second.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's such an upgrade. It literally should be a dog. You should walk in to your whatever the. And there should be a German shepherd there or a lab. And you walk in, he sniffs you, and then you go home.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I don't know about German shepherd, though. They're a little intimidating. Just like you will let me sniff you now.

[Chuck Nice]

Plus, German shepherds never liked black people.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly. Where are your papers?

[Chuck Nice]

Live along. We can use all those dogs in, in the civil rights movement, they were all German chefs ever.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's right.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, so we need a different species for that.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, we can get something more, More congenial.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Labrador or Pomeranian.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

So, Malcolm, your, your podcast. Yeah, you. This is Pushkin Industries, I think it's called. And you're co founder of that.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yes. Cool.

[Chuck Nice]

And I, I've enjoyed those that I listen to. I'm way behind on the total. They're not weekly because they're very highly produced too. Yeah, yeah, they're very highly produced and that's, I think, a very strong point for them. And so this has become your main avocation now, right?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, that's what I spend most of my time doing.

[Chuck Nice]

And the podcast is called Revisionist History.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Is my podcast, and we have many others at Pushkin, but that's the one I focus on.

[Chuck Nice]

And that one is you Take some bit of story that we all took for granted or we were taught in a particular way. And you reanalyze it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Exactly. That's the premise.

[Chuck Nice]

Journalistically.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, that is the premise.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's great. And what's your favorite episode?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We did an episode, four episodes on what was wrong with the Little Mermaid and how to fix it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, I love it.

[Chuck Nice]

With a movie.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

Or with the.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

With the Disney movie.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, Disney movie. Not the original fairy tale.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No, with the Disney version.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, I love it. And can't wait to listen to that.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It went on forever.

[Chuck Nice]

Four episodes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Four episodes.

[Chuck Nice]

So your episodes lasted longer than the movie itself.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We broke it down. We broke it down. We had. We pulled in experts from all sides.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why you do these to me, Malcolm?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We had. It was. You know, because it was. Among the many problems is that.

[Chuck Nice]

And plus Ursula was like this.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah, I forgot about Ursula.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, My daughter was. My daughter was like a social justice warrior. Studied.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I forgot about the whole controversy around Ursula. And the lobster dude who was really like this very.

[Chuck Nice]

Was he lobster or was he a hermit crab?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The idea that you can find someone, a Jamaican to play that role, it just offends me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Exactly.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Like, we're everywhere. Come on. We're like, this is not like, not that hard.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We're gonna have someone faking a Jamaican accent.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's so true.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's just. It was embarrassing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. You could. You could have at least got Shaggy.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But.

[Chuck Nice]

But here's the question. I will end with this. When did that post those four episodes?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Like, it was a couple years ago now.

[Chuck Nice]

A couple years ago. Nonetheless, that's. Is that 20 years after the movie came out? Would you have had and others had the mindset to offer that level of critique at the time, or was society not yet progressively moved to even have the capacity to think that way?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I would like to. I mean, if you think about the show.

[Chuck Nice]

Because otherwise it's presentism, Right?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I don't think it was presentism. We had two issues. We had several issues. One issue was we had an issue with the way the contract law was represented in the third act. And that was as true 20 years ago. It was today. And secondly, we had an issue with the idea that this.

[Chuck Nice]

She's giving up her voice for the exchange of becoming human.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yes. And then the other idea, we had a problem was that a brilliant, effervescent, energetic, self directed mermaid should need to be saved by a Prince. I'm sorry, 20 years ago. That's as egregious as it is today.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, but nor is that, though. Nor is that uniquely applied to the Little Mermaid. That's a recurring.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I know, but Disney should be held to a higher standard when it comes to the welfare, intellectual welfare of our children.

[Chuck Nice]

All I'm saying is that podcast did not come out then.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No, I wasn't doing it.

[Chuck Nice]

No.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Was I?

[Chuck Nice]

Even if I'm just saying.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No, I know what you're saying. I know what you're saying.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, let's ask it another way. What's happening today? So that in 20 years we'll all say, oh, my gosh, did we really just applaud that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, everything. Just everything. Because we're regressing now.

[Chuck Nice]

There is a regressive force.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's a regressive force in the nation right now.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm just saying.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I don't know, Neil. I can't think of anything that's happened in the last month by which I'm racking my brains right now. Nothing's coming to mind. What about you, Chuck?

[Chuck Nice]

So here, I just got one for you. All right. I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Okay. Again.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. Recently. Yeah. And it's 50 years old. I'm looking at the greeting plaza for the aliens. 100%. There's 200 people there.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. 100% of them are white men. At the time, I did not take notice of that. These are just the engineers and scientists greeting the aliens. And I looked closer, it turns out. I don't know if I had a different edition, added footage. But then I found three black people.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

They were just sort of there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All three of them had a broom and a mop in their hands.

[Chuck Nice]

So my only point is, when I saw the film, I had no right place to stand to even make that observation. And now it's just plain, fully obvious. And so it's a celebration of progressive change in our understanding of the world and of each other, how we treat each other. And so I try not to go back and criticize at a time when I know I would have just been in the mix. I try to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is a whole new show. You just brought up.

[Chuck Nice]

Stuff that I just took for granted.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Yeah, man.

[Chuck Nice]

Malcolm, this has been delightful. We need you. More often than just three times in.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

15 years, I've enjoyed myself. Thank you, guys.

[Chuck Nice]

Let me see if I can top this off with a cosmic perspective. No, I can't. Malcolm is all about perspective on life, on the past, on the future, on the role science plays in informing those perspectives. So, Malcolm, I have nothing to add.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This is the first time you've ever uttered those words. And I'm pleased it was in my presence.

[Chuck Nice]

This has been startalk. Neil Degrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck, always good to have you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Always a pleasure.

[Chuck Nice]

And Malcolm, you come back again. All right, I will. All right. As always, I bid you. Keep looking up.

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