StarTalk Live! Sociology and the Human Condition

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Eugene Mirman investigate the human condition with the help of bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, sociologist Dr. Alondra Nelson and comedian Wyatt Cenac. Recorded live at NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is StarTalk. The topic is sociology. So, to anchor some of the academic foundation of this, I want to bring out the woman who is the first appointed dean of the Division of Social Sciences at Columbia University, Professor Alondra Nelson. Come on out.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 0:47Eugene Mirman?

  It is now my great pleasure to bring on a very funny man. He was the correspondent on The Daily Show, Wyatt Sinak.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And who else but the five-time New York Times bestselling author of all manner of sociological phenomena, Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm, come on out. So Malcolm, I love your storytelling. You highlight things that go on in our culture, in our society, you make us think, and this is always good. So, I don't think at any point you say you comment on sociology, so since we have someone who does that academically, Alondra, could you just tell us, what is sociology?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  So sociology is the study of social life, how a culture develops, how social communities evolve.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So not the individual?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Not the individual in sociology, although in the social sciences, there are people like social psychologists and psychologists who are very much interested in the individual. But sociologists, the scale of life we write about is the group, the family, institutions, organizations.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Malcolm, one of your most talked about books was titled Blink. It's an exploration of the effectiveness of decisions that people make on the spot, depending on what their life experience is that is behind it. And there's a story in there where you talk about your hair.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could you, because I think all we needed here is like Questlove and we'll have the three biggest afros in the entire United States.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then together we form Cornel West.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Most people don't know that Cornel West is a Voltron made of me, Malcolm Gladwell, and Questlove.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what happened, what happened with your hair?

• 2:46Speaker 04

  Well, through my mid 30s, I had my hair very short and then I grew it out until it was quite florid and I discovered what, of course, many, many others have discovered all along, when you start to appear blacker, the world changes, right? The way the world treats you changes quite dramatically.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you asking me that or telling me from your own?

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Well, I'm sure you know this already, but I'd been passing very successfully for quite a long time and then all of a sudden there was some hint of doubt.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As your afro got bigger and bigger?

• 3:17Speaker 04

  As it got bigger and bigger and then it culminated, I started getting speeding tickets and I got pulled over on 14th Street, the cop car drove up on the sidewalk, they jumped out, they surrounded me and there was one black female cop and two white male cops and they were convinced that I was this rapist that they were looking for. I said, "Well, let's see the sketch," because I had the sketch. I was like, "I don't look like that at all. The only thing we have in common is we have the same hair." And the black female cop is like laughing and she's finding this quite hilarious. The two white guys are like, "No, no, no, we think it's you." It was like this long thing and I thought that was, A, weird, but B, that it was something that got me thinking about that phenomenon, that people, we jump to conclusions about

• 4:00Speaker 04

  each other all the time without realizing that we're doing it and that's where the book came from.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Alondra, what do sociologists say about this? Obviously, police interaction with citizens has been much in the news lately. Yes. But other than just getting it from the news, is there some like experiments done or research where you can help out this situation so it doesn't happen again?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  So we have the implicit bias test that psychologists do, right?

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a fun test. I've taken it. It's online.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  You've taken the test. How racist are you?

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I took it eight years ago, and I did it for the sexist, not the racist.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Oh, OK.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  How biased are you? How, yes, prejudiced are you?

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was like mildly. It tests your reaction time

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to certain stimulus. And if you take a little longer, you're overcoming some mental block

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  against the expectation.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Sure. So it's easy to think these are kind of innate, almost like reflexes, you know, almost like someone hitting your knee in that right spot and your leg popping up. But these are learned behaviors. So even that quick reflex is learned over time through processes of socialization. So we can recognize as human beings that we look differently, but it takes process of socialization through religion, through family, through the media, to learn what we're supposed to think about that. So we could have imagined a scenario in which someone said to Malcolm, "You look familiar," without having a sort of set of associations that quickly link together about what that's supposed to mean, right? And those kinds of quick associations are what we sociologists are interested in.

• 5:23Eugene Mirman?

  So if we had policemen that were babies, they wouldn't have enough time to even develop any biases?

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they were police from very young.

• 5:31Eugene Mirman?

  No, if our police people were babies,

• 5:35Eugene Mirman?

  they would just treat every situation as new.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  That is the, I think it's-

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Well, on that, along those same lines, I have often been arguing for that. Juries should never see the person that they are judging.

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to give people less information.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Once you learn all this stuff about implicit bias and how strongly our decisions are conditioned by just the way the person looks, it strikes me that we'd all be better off if the person who's on trial would be in another room. They would answer questions on email. You would have-

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Text, texting.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Texting, whatever you want to do. Snapchat, so it'll just be gone the minute they- And then anything that identified their age, gender, or race would just be expunged from the record. Because we know, I mean, we look at the data and we see that a black defendant gets a very different treatment by the law than a white defendant accused of the exact same crime, right? So let's take it based out of the equation. I don't understand why there's such resistance to that notion.

• 6:28Eugene Mirman?

  So make it more like The Voice.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  I'm okay with that.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the jury are in these big overplussed chairs. Then they rotate around when it's time.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  And at least one of them is Blake Shelton.

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I remember maybe 10 years ago.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw this done with a classical music concert. Is this still in place?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  I read about this in Blink. So classical music had a problem with there were no women in major orchestras. And they would always say it's because they're not good at playing classical music. Women are inferior musicians.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're talking about the virtuoso lead musicians?

• 7:07Speaker 04

  So this is the high-end orchestras. And then for a completely random set of reasons, started to do blind auditions, like The Voice. You can't see the person auditioning.

• 7:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're just behind some kind of...

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Screen. And overnight, they started hiring women. And they realized that the reason they weren't hiring women was just because they had a set of associations about women in music that interfered with their ability to hear their music.

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why don't you say because men are idiots? I mean, isn't that just the answer?

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Well, people are more in the grip of their biases than they want to admit. You know, which raises this additional question, which is, why do we ever need to see the person who we are auditioning for any position or job?

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You talk about in your book in Blink, someone who claimed they could tell you within a few minutes, tell a married couple whether they would be divorced within 15 years.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they can do that in like a couple of minutes.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Less than that.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Less than a couple of minutes.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. But that's with an extraordinary amount of training. There is a language to the muscles of the face. Whenever we express an emotion, that emotion is represented in an incredibly subtle way.

• 8:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless you're autistic.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, then it would be less.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Or a cat.

• 8:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's funny because anytime in a Disney movie, when they need to represent the emotions in an animal that doesn't otherwise express emotions that we would read, they give them eyebrows and the eyebrows move up and down.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and so that's intriguing. The eyebrows apparently are a big cue. They're big enough for us to hand it to animals that don't have eyebrows.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  So the muscular positions your face takes are called action units. And action unit one, which is an unconscious signal of distress, is when the inner part of our eyebrows go up. Almost none of us can do this voluntarily. But if you watch a baby cry... The instant before they actually vocalize their cry, their eyebrows will go "doot", it's incredible. And once you notice that, once you realize that, you can watch someone, and if you ever hear someone absorb bad news, you will 99 times out of 100 see their eyebrows just go "whoop", and they have no idea they're doing that. But it makes you understand this is how- It's a fun game, do it to people. Give them terrible news. This is part of the arsenal that people use to tell when people are lying, right?

• 9:19Speaker 04

  If you say some horrible thing and your eyebrows are sitting like this, then that's a clue that the emotion may not be felt as deeply as they're claiming.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, some people can read this with great precision.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  This is the work of a guy named Paul Ekman, yeah.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. If that works, it seems to me we could exploit that in almost every aspect of life and of society, but there's some famous failed examples of snap judgments, aren't there?

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I mean, most of my book is about the failure of snap judgments. I'm much more impressed by how they mislead us than how they help us.

• 9:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so in sociology, we can think of what goes on inside the person in reaction to an environment, and we can say, "That's not how you're supposed to behave", "Change", or we can say, "Let's design the environment to be different, and thereby fix it by changing the environment rather than by a re-education program." There's an example from my community with the Challenger disaster. As you may remember, what we learned was that there, in the solid rocket boosters, each shuttle system has two of them, they're held together in three segments or four segments, and those segments connect with an O-ring. And inside there, it's very cold. The fuel is kept very cold before it ignites. And so, if you take something rubbery like an O-ring

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and you chill it down, its pliability and plasticity gets compromised. And so, it no longer would maintain a seal. So when these rockets launched, a leak broke out from where the fuel was being ignited, and then that ignited the main engine, and the whole thing exploded. And so, a tragic accident. But then they got to the bottom of it and said, "Okay..." Forget the failure. What was in the system that allowed the failure to come forward?

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what was the analysis of it?

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Well, this is one of my favorite pieces of sociology. There's a great sociologist called Charles Perrow, who wrote a book about what he called "normal accident theory." And the idea of normal accident theory is there are two kinds of disasters. There's a disaster that happens because people screw up. They make dumb or incompetent or corrupt decisions. And there's disasters that happen even though everyone is doing their job as their job is designed to be done. He calls those "normal accidents." And others argued, although he agreed with it, that the Challenger accident was an example of a normal accident. In other words, there wasn't something deeply screwed up in NASA that made that happen. That accident grew out of the culture of NASA.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  The way they thought about risk, the way different parts of the hundreds of different decisions that went into the Challenger rocket interacted in the moment.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're implicating a system in that case, not the individual?

• 12:06Speaker 04

  And when you think about the way we respond to a disaster, our first instinct is to-

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To blame somebody.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Blame somebody.

• 12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, point your finger.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  And what Perrow is saying is there's no one, there's no individual to blame.

• 12:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is frustrating for everybody else.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  Very frustrating.

• 12:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially when you have caskets going by in a parade.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Now, wait, when you say "the blame goes to the system," does that mean like the system that would say, "Oh, okay, we should use rubber O-rings," as opposed to some other type of material?

• 12:35Speaker 04

  I think the argument would be on a more abstract level than that, which is that each component in something like a rocket booster has to meet a certain level of specifications and operates within certain risk parameters. Use an acceptable level of risk and a certain number of redundant systems and-

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to point that in any system such as that, the risk is never zero. So you have to upfront say- This is an acceptable level of risk. And we're going to try to keep everything above that. And if you go to zero, you'd have to launch them in a tank. And you can't.

• 13:07Eugene Mirman?

  You would have to not go to space.

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you would not go to space.

• 13:09Eugene Mirman?

  You would have to trick them into thinking they're in space just as a goof.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Or invite space to come visit you.

• 13:16Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 13:18Eugene Mirman?

  Which comes with a bit of a risk.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Alondra, what do sociologists say about bureaucracies and systems? And the risk that some bureaucracies have to manage?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  So, there's the brilliant book that Malcolm in Part is referencing is by Diane Vaughn, who's a sociologist at Columbia. And part of what she's saying, to take it to one more level of abstraction, is that we create systems that are so complex that they become almost autonomous systems that we can't quite wrap our head fully around, right? So the technological systems themselves come to have a kind of agency of their own.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They've achieved consciousness.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Not quite, but close, right? And so, looking at one aspect of it, you have to look at the bigger system or organism or institution to understand. And that's why the blame doesn't lie with one person solely. The culture of the people working there, as well as the actual technological things happening.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so somebody's got to change it. Has any of that been happening?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  So this goes back to your question about whether or not we can change people or we change the environment. This is a pas de deux. This is a dance, right? And so...

• 14:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pas de deux?

• 14:13Eugene Mirman?

  It is. I was going to say kind of a bit of a pas de deux.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  So you change the environment and you create the different dynamic that we then again may not understand.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  So it sounds like what you're saying is that for those who didn't like the way Lost ended, it's an institutional problem.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  You can't just blame the writer.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. But I pose the question to both of you here. If there isn't an individual to point a finger at, and it's institutional, isn't that way harder to rectify? Because then there's no accountability. If there's no accountability, then how does anything change? If you've built systems that are so large, they transcend the comprehension of the people even working there?

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Well, I'd say the opposite. I would say that if you have a society which insists on pointing the finger of blame at individuals every time something goes wrong, you're going to create a behavior on the part of individuals that is risk averse, that is defensive. It's far easier, I think, to say, "Look, we're not going to shame you publicly or string you up. We're going to say, 'Let's fix the problem on a broader level. Let's make it easier for you to do your job.'" Because I think most people in the world want to do their job well.

• 15:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to have institutions been doing this.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, institutions change. I mean, there's some classic examples from the business literature about how in Japan, this would have been in the 80s, just in time production, right? So you didn't have all of these cars and parts sitting in factories. You were able to sort of do them as you needed them, and you didn't have this back slot. So organizational change happens all the time.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that was better for your cash flow because you didn't have this repository of inventory?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Exactly, right.

• 15:53Eugene Mirman?

  What was happening in Japan with cars?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Just they got better at selling and making cars than we did in the United States because they went to a form of production that changed the organizational structure.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  I have a simpler example. You know, you were talking about police behavior earlier. There's a significant body of research which says that police officers in single-man squad cars behave better than police officers in two-man squad cars, which is contrary to what everyone thought before. But what we've discovered is that if you're by yourself, you are less likely to do something risky, and you slow down. If you've got a buddy with you, you are more likely to feel invulnerable and charge in. We don't want you to charge in. We want you to stop, think, call for help, and calm everybody down. When you're by yourself, you're in an institutional situation, well, that's easier to do.

• 16:41Eugene Mirman?

  Is that why so many police are now on segways?

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just in the mall. I'm a mall cop.

• 16:48Eugene Mirman?

  So calm and non-threatening it feels.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  You really can't go faster than eight miles an hour. Yeah.

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it also perhaps accounts for why the buddy cop film is such a fertile genre, because they can each do crazy things with one another. That makes the story.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Is there a famous cop movie where the cop is driving by himself?

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, maybe Dirty Harry. Did he have a partner?

• 17:09Eugene Mirman?

  He probably shot him.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  Regardless of how talented you are, you can't be good at what you do unless you're willing to put in some work, right? So the interesting question is: What is the threshold level of work you have to put in to make the most of your talent? And that's, I think, where this idea that I talked about in one of my books, the notion of 10,000 hours, comes from.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  10,000 hours.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  So what they're saying is, it's not about you don't need to have talent. It is about expressing talent requires, we think, about this much work.

• 17:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So with or without talent, if you're not putting in 10,000 hours, you're not winning any contest.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  One of the foundational studies in this field was done of classical musicians. You look at the 30 greatest classical compositions of all time, and you ask the question: At the time the composer of that composition did their greatest work, how long had they been composing? And the answer is, in almost every case, they had been composing for at least 10 years, which is roughly 10,000 hours.

• 18:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you have to sleep and go to the bathroom.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  So even Mozart, he doesn't do his truly great stuff until he's been composing for 13 or 14 years. I think he's composing by 6 or 7.

• 18:32Eugene Mirman?

  Were those compositions at 6 or 7, meh? They're Dave Matthews-ish.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So at 6 or 7, he was composing. People like citing that about him.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  But it's not good stuff until he's 22 or 23. What we associate with Mozart's genius is stuff that he produces 14, 15 years into his life as a composer, which is a fascinating and sobering thought.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  It's the same with Beyoncé. Nobody talks about the Destiny's Child song. But now they love her. Oh, now she's the queen.

• 19:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we have the story of David and Goliath, which works on many levels. It's metaphor. But I guess you've thought about that story more than most people have.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Well, there's just all this fascinating historical and anthropological literature on reinterpreting that story. There's all kinds of interesting points, but the most interesting of which is there are many medical experts who suspect that Goliath had a medical condition called Akromegaly, which would result in him being largely blind. So acromegaly is-

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, wait, it primarily results in you being huge.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  Yes, so it's-

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then being blinded in some-

• 19:42Speaker 04

  It's a tumor on your pituitary gland which causes the pituitary gland to overexpress human growth hormone. So you're huge, but the side effect is that the tumor compresses your optical nerves so that you are profoundly nearsighted. So Goliath lumbering down the mountain to meet David is this terrifying figure, but he can't see David. He's a sitting duck. It's like, "Where are you?" In the biblical story, he keeps saying, "Come to me," which everyone always thinks is, "Come to me." It's not. It's like, "Come to me, I can't see you." I'm asking you. It's like, "Where are you?" Meanwhile, David's like lining him up with his sling, and the sling, by the way, is not a slingshot. It's a sling, which is one of the most devastating weapons of ancient times.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  You whip it around and around and around, and it has the stopping power of a 38 caliber handgun, a rock thrown from a sling.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just the angular speed you can get out of your arm, there's an extra amount.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  You've got a pouch on the end of a long leather string, and you swing it around and around and around, and then you let one of the strings go, and the rock goes boom, like, it's like-

• 20:47Eugene Mirman?

  And you probably practiced to get super good at it.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  And you've been practicing forever. I mean, this is-

• 20:51Eugene Mirman?

  10,000 hours, maybe.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 20:53Eugene Mirman?

  He was a serial killer. That's also left out from the Bible.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's the, that's the Hippocrypha, that's where they get to.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  David has superior technology, and he's up against a blind man. So, you know, let's just be clear about who the underdog is in this particular story.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know what intrigued me? You know, you go to, I guess it's in Florence, you see the famous statue of David, and there he is, rather muscled, and you say, "Yeah, he's ready to kick some biblical behind right there." But you see other renderings of David by other artists, and he's shown to be frail and kind of very non-threatening.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I was reminded that the story works.

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not because David is some muscle fighter, but because his advantage is not his body. His advantage is his mind and his tools.

• 21:48Speaker 04

  And his audacity. He changes the rules and doesn't tell his opponent. They're supposed to have a knife fight, a sword fight. That's what the convention is. And David's like, "Yeah, I don't think so." And doesn't he thought-

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With that high pitched voice too, yeah?

• 22:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. "Yeah, I don't think so." And does not disclose this to the other party in the conflict.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  So he brought a sling to a knife fight.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  He brought a sling to a knife fight.

• 22:11Eugene Mirman?

  But once he killed Goliath, everybody was like, "No, that's fine." I mean, not the fight we were expecting, but I guess we'll leave.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  That's right, yeah, no, no.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, did they cry foul?

• 22:19Speaker 04

  They cried, but they fled, is what they did. They were terrified.

• 22:23Eugene Mirman?

  Why were they terrified? Because he was-

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Technology!

• 22:25Speaker 04

  I mean, David's a bit of a badass. I mean, he comes at this giant, changes the rules at the last moment, and then cuts the giant's head off.

• 22:33Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, after he hits it, he cuts the head off?

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:35Eugene Mirman?

  But didn't the people on the giant's team know the giant's basically blind?

• 22:39Speaker 04

  It's an interesting question. The Philistines' theory would have been, he's so terrifyingly big, it doesn't matter that he's largely blind.

• 22:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'd agree with that.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  And also, I love the metaphorical thing about, the giant is so often blind, right? I mean, that's so incredible when you understand that dimension of it, because, of course, the big lumbering guy is so full of himself and his size that he discounts the fact that he can see this far.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Well, to me, what's incredible is that after he killed the dude, he was still like, "I'm gonna cut his head off." Like, that's incredibly rude and really time consuming. That's a special kind of crazy. Just sit there and, "Oh, all right." "You guys, you still wanna stick around?"

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bone!

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the metaphor here is the underdog, obviously.

• 23:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there's some inner support we want to give to the underdog. And I think some of that is what led to so much of the support that Pluto received. Because it's the littlest thing, you know?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Way to lose them, Neil. Way to lose them.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can be the underdog, yet have some kind of hidden talent that expresses itself. The team you didn't think would win, the person who you didn't think was strong enough, quick enough. When they manifest their victory, is it because they actually had the 10,000 hours talent and didn't tell anyone? Or because they did something really clever, like what David did?

• 24:18Speaker 04

  I think what it tells us is that our definitions of what an advantage is are really narrow and incomplete. Business is a story about how size and resources are overrated, and imagination and audacity are underrated as competitive advantages. And I think that's something that we're always making this mistake, like, how many times have very large countries gone into battle with small countries and overestimated the importance of their own size and resources? And underestimated imagination and audacity, right? Happens every single time.

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the time. So, Alondra, in society, the underdog has such value to us culturally.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We praise them, we worship them, but only after they've really succeeded.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many underdogs remain undiscovered?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  The underdogs usually get plowed over.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly. So the one that's not plowed over

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  becomes more famous than the people who they trumped.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Right, because it fits into this kind of larger mythos that we have about individual effort and innovation, being able to do great things in the world. I think what Malcolm's book captures, you know, what we might call standpoint theory in sociology, or even thinking about W.B. Du Bois, the famous sociologist, idea of double consciousness, that if you have to live in the world and you have a disadvantage, then it gives you a Kind of advantage in the sense that you have a perspective or a purview that other people don't have access to. So you're always looking for other angles and other ways to try to make do with less. And so you see it even in the political structure. So in political science or in sociology, when you think about

• 25:55Speaker 01

  social movements, whether we're talking about Ferguson or the suffragettes, is that these are people who are locked out of a kind of mainstream system of electoral politics, in the case of the suffragettes, because they weren't allowed to vote, right? But that you take to the streets or you lobby or use these other avenues that are available to you to get the advantage.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're saying that that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  Sometimes.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Or sometimes it plows you over.

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It actually kills you.

• 26:20Eugene Mirman?

  If you have a way to organize.

• 26:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it might kill most people.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it doesn't kill you, you're stronger and you have tactics, methods to have navigated that terrain to emerge with the talent or leadership that is expressed.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But are you going to go so far as to say that we should put people through a system of stress and try to make sure they don't die? So that they come out of it as more resourceful human beings? Is there some desirable defect or disadvantage that we should seek? Malcolm, you've thought about this?

• 26:57Speaker 04

  Well, there's a lovely phrase on this very point that psychologists talk about, this notion of desirable difficulties. So that's what you're asking. Are there certain difficulties that are desirable? And the answer is...

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that the act of overcoming them makes you a greater?

• 27:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. The answer is yes, there are. But I don't know that desirable difficulties are always desirable for everyone. So for example, I talk about in my book, this really fascinating fact about dyslexia, that some portion of dyslexics are incredibly successful, not in spite of their dyslexia, but it is argued, I think, very convincingly, because of their dyslexia, that the act of overcoming dyslexia... Teaches them all kinds of things that are incredibly useful if you want to become an entrepreneur, for example. But that's not true of all of them. Right, so you're in this weird situation where there's a group of people, probably the majority, who absolutely are worse off because of their difficulty, and another group, probably in the minority, who are better off.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  So the question I ask in the book is, knowing that some portion of dyslexics are better off, but a larger portion are not, would you wish dyslexia on your child? Would you roll the dice? In other words, that your kid was in the small group-

• 28:02Eugene Mirman?

  What's the percentage? Is it possible I have just like the tiniest bit of dyslexia? Just to give you that extra startup in life? Where you're like, "E's make no sense to me, but otherwise, I get it."

• 28:12Speaker 04

  I remember having a discussion with a general manager of a NBA team about Tracy McGrady. And he was saying, he had every talent you can possibly have as a basketball player. Who's Tracy McGrady?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  I'm like, I have to be the only one?

• 28:26Eugene Mirman?

  No, I think Wyatt's the only one who knows.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was like 6'8". He got like drafted out of high school, like at 18 years old. He could like move like nobody's business, and then went to the NBA and things just fizzled out.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  He had a very good career.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  He had like a good four years.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  And remember, the comment this guy made was, Tracy McGrady would have been better off if he'd been just a little bit less talented. In other words, the game came so easily to him, he never had to work at it in the same way as someone who had to-

• 28:53Eugene Mirman?

  But didn't he have to kind of work pretty hard at it for those four years he was in the NBA? Or no, not even that?

• 28:57Speaker 04

  No, that's the whole point.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Well, that it was just too easy. He became disinterested in trying hard.

• 29:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Because there wasn't difficulty.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  This is a great question, and it's at the core of- We do things because they are hard, not because they are easy. We do, yeah. A lot of what makes us draws us to things.

• 29:13Eugene Mirman?

  That's why I do surgery. I'm terrible at it, but I give it my all. But every now and then, you do pretty good. Thank you for my LASIK. He did it backstage with a candle and a flashlight. I need two light sources.

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, there the role of these disadvantages. I don't know that someone who has the disadvantage, if you said, if you could live your life over, would you want to remove the disadvantage? I'm wondering if most of them would say, "Yeah, no, take it away from me. I want a normal life."

• 29:48Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's an interesting, hard sociological question, right? Because people are what they are because they are what they are. I'm reminded of the person who might have come over as an immigrant and struggled in the street and did some clever things, started a business, became fabulously wealthy, but they were hungry for a lot of that time and then they have kids, and then they say, "I don't want my kids to struggle the way I did." And so they give the kids every advantage, and then the kids end up with no motivation at all. And they say, "Where did I go wrong? My kids had everything I didn't have." And the answer is, that's where they went wrong.

• 30:24Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, that's why you should always lock your kids up for most of their lives.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But how about the advantages? We live in a stratified society.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  You're talking like a sociologist.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, is that, these are the vocabulary coming out? So, we live in a stratified society, and that itself, I think, is not a problem. The problem would be if it's stratified and you can't move among strata. But to have strata, that's a normal feature of capitalist democracy. Okay, so, we know that Ivy League schools cost $60,000 and state schools cost $2,000 or $5,000.

• 31:00Eugene Mirman?

  Not anymore.

• 31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not anymore.

• 31:02Eugene Mirman?

  We know that the prices are different, but we don't know what those prices are. I think would be the accurate way to say it.

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you for reducing the precision to make a more accurate statement. That's good. So, my question for both of you, let me start with Alondra. What do sociologists make of this fact? Do the high privilege really make the difference that the price of it should indicate?

• 31:28Speaker 01

  So what we know in the sociological literature, there's been quite a lot on elite schools coming out in the last few years, is that it does make a difference. I mean, you create networks that are rich of people who are like you and also have access to other sorts of elite networks.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And are rich.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  And are rich, often. And if you're not rich, you're allowed into networks often of people who are richer than you, right? So that helps with the mobility that you're talking about in a stratified society.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  That's part of the way people go up. But then you also learn things that are kind of intangibles, right? What the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital. So you learn in elite institutions how to be comfortable in the world, right? How to know how to use the right fork, have the right wines, be cosmopolitan, speak lots of different languages, right?

• 32:12Eugene Mirman?

  That's my thing.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  And that's part of that, that's you. And so that actually also helps to build elite status and it eases, it's a sort of social lubrication in the world.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but it makes you-

• 32:21Speaker 01

  You can move about freely.

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It makes it easier for you, but plenty of people did not go to elite schools who have transformed this world. So-

• 32:28Eugene Mirman?

  Or did and haven't.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that's more likely the case. And we know about the ones, and we celebrate the underdogs who either didn't go to college or who didn't go to Ivies.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  It's funny, this morning I was sitting in a coffee shop and next to me, in the table next to me, there was a husband and wife. And they were arguing about their son, whether their son should go to college. They spent a good hour and a half on this subject.

• 32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you were in the coffee shop for an hour and a half.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Listening to them.

• 32:52Eugene Mirman?

  He's a sociologist, fearless person.

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, you were in the coffee shop for an hour and a half, listening to their conversation.

• 32:58Eugene Mirman?

  Studying.

• 33:00Speaker 04

  I was so-

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Studying.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  It's ethnography, it's called ethnography.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ethnography.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Basically, they were arguing about whether their child should go to the University of Colorado, which was the worst one on their list. And the best one on their list was the lesser Ivy, it was like Dartmouth, right?

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:16Eugene Mirman?

  Ooh, people.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 33:20Eugene Mirman?

  Fire.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not using their vocabulary.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Their term.

• 33:23Eugene Mirman?

  I mean, it's true.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  There's no difference. They're both elite, they're fine. What I object to is this sense that people start slicing these layers so fine that they will argue passionately with their husband for an hour and a half about the distinction between Dartmouth and Colorado. There's no distinction. Everyone at those schools is smart, the teachers are all great. The distinction is between that and something way down at the bottom. I mean, you don't see a bad school.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Or between not going to college or going to college.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or going to college.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  There's data that you'll be...

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those are the more blunt facts.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  We have data about income over time and these sorts of things, just by the fact of going the zero to one of college, no college.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to lead off with a physics. If you imagine a round marble and you have sort of the bottom of a hill and you place a marble at the bottom of the hill, it'll stay there, obviously. If you displace it in any direction, it will return to the bottom of the hill. So a marble at the bottom of the hill, it's an equilibrium and if you displace it, it returns to that state. So we call that stable equilibrium. Whereas if you're at the top of a hill, you could balance that marble, but any displacement in any direction will send it completely away from that point. So that's an unstable equilibrium.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in astrophysical systems, physical systems in general, there are points where any movement in one direction sends it off to that direction basically on its own. With only the forces operating, it's sufficient to take it forever away from that point. So when we think of tipping points, there are systems, I gave a very simple example, but there are complex systems that might have tipping points and you don't always know what knob to turn to know when it's going to happen so that you can protect your own life and property and country against it. So tipping points have interesting meaning and relevance in my field, but I want to

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  hear it more in terms of social systems and social customs. What's a really good example of a tipping point that you could share with us?

• 35:54Speaker 04

  Well, it's funny, when you were talking about unstable equilibrium, I was thinking about that the marble on top of a mountain is an extraordinary metaphor for the Middle East right now, isn't it?

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Right? I mean, relatively subtle changes have these completely unpredictable results.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And huge. Unpredictable and huge.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  And huge results, and also, there is zero chance that the Middle East will return to its previous equilibrium.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  Right? Whereas, we are, in this country, we are blessedly in a stable equilibrium. You can push the marble in all kinds of directions, and we, pretty reliably, will return to... I am as amazed by the disequilibrium of the Middle East as I am continually heartened by how stable our equilibrium is.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It may be even deeper than that. When I was younger, I played the game of Risk.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The board game. The goal of the game is total world domination. And you have a certain set of armies, and you challenge other armies across borders. Every time you play that game, the Middle East is the most conflicted part of the board.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's no religion in the game, there's no death box, it's just dice and army thingies.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It made me wonder whether the instability in the Middle East is geographic. That here we are, humans, fighting wars, when we are victims of the land plates of Earth's crust. Because here we are in America, we got an ocean on one side, an ocean on another, 12 people who live north of us, in Canada, and we talk about that we're blessed with stability, we're blessed with two fricking oceans on either side! I'm screaming out, I'm just...

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Are you suggesting that if the Earth were to tilt, where the Middle East then had, like, a climate more like Seattle, things would cool out?

• 37:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it's not a matter of where it is...

• 37:50Speaker 02

  We don't have any neighbors.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it's not a matter of where it is in longitude and latitude, it's a matter of what is the juxtaposition of land masses, near you or far away from you? So, if we could influence continental drift in such a way...

• 38:06Speaker 02

  This is how you turn into Doctor Doom, isn't it?

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, think about it. I foresee a day.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  If somehow, we could do, not saying I'm doing it, but if I were, would you guys be cool with it? And join my army?

• 38:30Speaker 02

  You all get cool tunics.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, I foresee a day where our technology becomes, achieves a level of power and influence over the Earth, so that geoengineering is just no different from building a dam, or...

• 38:46Speaker 04

  Well, you're already gonna see this with global warming, right? Global warming is essentially gonna do what you're talking about.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Thank god.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's gonna redraw the coastlines.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, more than that, it's gonna have implications for culture, economy, for everything. It's like a do-over.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Canada and Maine are gonna be the only two places to really hang out.

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but it gets me back to the point. If we are all fundamentally human beings, okay? As they say, "One bout of lost electricity away from behaving like cavemen", then is it futile to say that we can change the behavior of warring people when they could just simply be the victim of Earth's land masses?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  I think everything we know about the history of the world says that that's not true, right?

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except the game of Risk.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Well, here's the game.

• 39:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I play Risk. Go you try it. That wasn't just me every time, and I've been intrigued by this.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  I'm gonna suggest that the game of Risk example is about a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is a phrase that was created by Robert Merton, a Columbia sociologist, in the mid-20th century, and suggests that you don't know if it's gonna be true, but then it manifests itself as true, because you expect it to be true, because you change behaviors that make it true. So if we expect that the Middle East is always gonna be unstable, and you sit down with your popcorn and your beer and you play Risk, then your behavior is gonna be such, even if it's unconscious, that your Middle East is gonna be unstable, and you're game, game after game after game.

• 40:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm pretty sure, I didn't know anything about world politics at the time I was playing Risk. I was just trying to take over the world, but all the battles were... Don't be Doctor Doom in me again.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  I'm worried now.

• 40:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so notes from your book. You said a tipping point depends on three things. Could you highlight that?

• 40:32Speaker 04

  On the nature of the message, the context of the message, and the messenger.

• 40:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're gonna have all three to really have a good tipping point?

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Which is why it's hard. I mean, I think that a lot of things we think of as irreversible aren't. So, to go back to the Middle East for example. Twenty-five years ago, many of the countries in the Middle East that are now in the throes of religious fundamentalism were thought to be modernizing. And people would have said, "Modernization is something you can't go back." But actually, it's very easy for people to slip back into primal racist responses to things. It's like, "I would have thought we were past it, but we're not." So I think getting those three...

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're bumming us all out here, by the way.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  No, I am. Look, my point is that once you understand how hard it is to really have a permanent change in society, I think it changes your perspective on these sorts of things.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Is that why you're so... like, when earlier we were talking about court cases were like the voice. Is that why you say, like, you wish that we did have things like that, where you took the messenger out of it, and you just had to see it on the context?

• 41:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. And also, you would do that because you would understand that the battle against any sort of prejudice isn't over. You can't wake up one morning and say, "Okay, we settled that, and now we can go forward." No, actually, as long as there are human beings, you're gonna have to take steps to protect us against our worst...

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's interesting you say that, because in science, we are self-aware that as scientists, we are human and are subject to the biases and temptation toward misrepresentation. We know this about ourselves, and so we've built in sort of error-checking mechanisms against our data. The fact that I would have a competitor who would do another experiment to see if bias exists in my data. And if it's revealed that it is, that is not good for my career. So, in that case, we're not trying to change the person. We're recognizing that, but the system has the error-checking mechanisms in it.

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that's a way to not solve a problem, but to address it and minimize its impact. So, bringing all this together, if you could change something in society to make a better society tomorrow, Eugene?

• 42:49Eugene Mirman?

  Just to reiterate, just quickly, what could be made better about society?

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the question, yes. If you can control it.

• 42:57Eugene Mirman?

  If I can control it?

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:58Eugene Mirman?

  So we're assuming I don't.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, okay.

• 43:01Eugene Mirman?

  Not offended.

• 43:04Eugene Mirman?

  Well, I guess in terms of what Malcolm said, which is not necessarily listening to snap judgments, but I don't know how it works, but taking thought.

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So de-snappify people.

• 43:15Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but, meaning I think a lot of the snap judgments, people think that they're actually, they're making the right decision, and they're not. Like, meaning they're actually, like, wrong about the situation.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you want to undo that?

• 43:24Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, I want to do, yeah, I guess I would phrase it as undo the learned behavior that is inaccurate and makes them make the wrong decision.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  I think I would want to equalize the educational opportunities for everybody,

• 43:43Speaker 02

  regardless of where you are in the stratification, because it seems like, just what I've seen of, like, social science and stuff, they say that there's so many things that would be reduced, be it crime, be it, like, youth pregnancy, be it violence in society, by access to quality education, if everybody had that. So, I'd do that, maybe.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  And I'm saying that as somebody who barely got through college.

• 44:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright.

• 44:11Eugene Mirman?

  You don't mean, like, the very poor, you mean, like, the fairly?

• 44:14Speaker 02

  I'm saying make, make the best schools worse. I'm saying trend everything down.

• 44:21Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, good, good.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Just to make it short. Yeah, it'd be too expensive for everyone to have computers, no. Take away all of the computers.

• 44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's, that was your plan, okay, I didn't know. Alundra, what do you have?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  He took my answer, but I would add, let's care enough about each other that we all have healthcare.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Healthcare, okay.

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Healthcare. Malcolm?

• 44:46Speaker 04

  I'd like the rest of the world to adopt what is beautiful about science, which is, when the evidence changes, it's okay to change your mind. Whoa.