AI, Autonomous Vehicles, and Race – Oh my! with Malcolm Gladwell

How do self-driving cars change our psychology? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice philosophize about science’s role in society with prolific author Malcolm Gladwell.

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. This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we haven't figured out a title for this. Chuck, you want to call it Mafia Malcolm?

• 0:26Chuck Nice?

  Mafia Malcolm, yes!

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's where you're going, and we're sticking with that.

• 0:29Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God, how catchy is that? I should get... Some advertising company should be recruiting me right now.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Nice, my co-host. Chuck, always good to have you here.

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Malcolm of which you speak is, I gotta call him a special guest because this guy is out and about. I'm afraid to put him on my show because that means he's not otherwise writing his next book. Like I'm in the way of this man's productive career in progress. Malcolm Gladwell, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's a real honor.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. We had you onstage live. It might have been five or six years ago.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  I remember that. Back when those things happened, yeah.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09Chuck Nice?

  And just one quick correction, Neil. Malcolm is so prolific, he's actually writing a book right now. While we're talking, Malcolm is in the midst of composing his next work.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because like, I'm very serious. I don't like taking time away from people that could be doing some productive. But you've... A whole string of bestsellers. Blink? Forgive me, I haven't read all of them, but I've read many of them. Blink, Outliers, The Tipping Point. There's some very famous books in here. David and Goliath, checking the list here. What the Dog Saw.

• 1:48Chuck Nice?

  Why don't we just start with the stuff Malcolm hasn't written? And then...

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back into whatever...

• 1:56Chuck Nice?

  Right, it might take a less time.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have one of my favorite podcasts online right now, Revisionist History, and now in its sixth season, ooh. And this is where you sort of dissect a commonly held truth and figure out, well, maybe it's not as true as people think. It's a brilliant format and you're going strong. And you've got a new book, The Bomber Mafia. Okay, there's your, now I see your connection.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  See?

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation, and The Longest Night in the Second World War. Man. And we'll get into that in a bit. So, let me ask you, Malcolm. You, last time you were on, we discussed sociology and the human condition, about which you've written quite a bit. And what I've found is that you, instead of just teaching people textbook style, instead of only telling stories, you've, you've found a way to stitch together first-person narrative, or a narrative that directly relates to another human being,

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  who we can think about their existence, and the science related to it. And that's an art, the way you've, that's an art. So, would you suggest that if scientists want to communicate, they should adopt your methods here?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 3:26Chuck Nice?

  All right, I'm gonna handle this one for you, Malcolm. Yes.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:31Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Well, I don't, you know, I would only say that the, if you're a scientist, I mean, you were saying earlier jokingly that you didn't, you were worried that if you interviewed me, I wouldn't have time to write. I don't want my scientists spending all their time writing popular books. I want them doing science, right? I mean, I want people to specialize in what they do best. We're not...

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Selecting out our astrophysicists and our chemists and our biologists for their ability to explain their ideas to the public. We're selecting them for their ability to push the boundaries of science. And it may well be that the thing that makes them good at pushing the boundaries of science makes them bad at explaining their ideas to the general public. I'm fine with that trade-off. You know, the reason God invented journalists is that we can come along and do that job for them.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was wondering where journalists came from. God invented them.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  God, in his infinite wisdom, said there was a role for someone to play, to be intermediary between the genius and the public, right? That's what we're doing. You know, I'm not pushing the boundaries of science. I'm just telling stories and standing between the public and the science. And that's what we're supposed to do.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but you have to boost your science literacy so that you don't fumble over the content, right?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, although, you know, what I have discovered is that, first of all, I steer clear of those areas where I don't feel... You'll find that I don't write about the most complicated corners of medicine or biology. I stick pretty much to those areas of science that I find personally accessible. So I do think it's tricky. Not everything can be explained to a general public. You know, it's like the... Remember when Stephen Hawking's A Short History of Time was a bestseller? And there was a kind of an open joke about whether anyone who was buying it was reading it? Because like, that is not a...

• 5:43Speaker 02

  You know, the idea that some, a standard, normally-educated human being could read that book and make sense of it is a little bit of a stretch. I didn't have a... I got like 10 pages in. I was like, you know what, this is just... So far above my pay grade. So, you know, there is a, there are real limits to whether, to certain parts, whether certain parts of science can be made accessible. Not sure they should be. You know, the-

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Malcolm, you're, you're, you're deep in the publishing world. Was it true or was it just a story? I heard that the publishers wanted to actually find out if people were reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. So for, in some set of books, they put in like a coupon and said, mail this in and get a hundred dollars. And like, nobody mailed it in because they never got that far in the book.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  No, yeah, no, it's like, that was, there's a famous story about the guy who in, Ron Popeil, remember him, the pitch man on TV?

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  His dad invented the pocket fisherman. And when his father, who was, his name was S.J. S.J. was once asked, was what someone once said to him, the pocket fisherman, you know, it doesn't work. And S.J. said very wisely, it's not for using, it's for giving.

• 6:55Chuck Nice?

  Ah, whoa. That's an excellent quote.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  And that, you know, I feel that-

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's honest.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  I feel like the Stephen Hawking book was for, was for giving, not for reading.

• 7:04Chuck Nice?

  Do you think that as a society, we are pulling away from scientific literacy? And if so, why would that be?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Well, I wonder about this. So this, this, this question comes up a lot about is there something distinctive about the moment we're living in and our, and popular attitudes towards expertise of one kind or another?

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I would say, Malcolm, your books, they bring people into the science and they show how the science manifests. So, so I think you are a force of good-

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -in this, in this, on this landscape, but go on.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  But I, I was gonna say, I think the people who say that we're living in a uniquely anti-scientific moment have a short memory. So let me give you two stories from my mom. My mom grows up in Jamaica, gets a scholarship to a boarding school in the 1930s. And she's reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. And she learns to her, reading some section on, I don't know what the section was, on race or something. She learns to her horror that the Encyclopedia Britannica considers black people to be genetically inferior to white people. Right? So this is 1930, whatever it is, '07, in Jamaica. Then she tries to marry my father, who is white, and discovers to her horror

• 8:22Speaker 02

  that a good majority of people think that it is, not just kind of casually a bad idea for white people to marry black people, but like, something that is, you know, a profound problem for the future of civilization. Right? Because they believe that the mixing of the races represents... Those are two pretty firmly held views of that period.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And eugenics was flying high.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  And eugenics was flying high. Like, first of all, that's 70 years ago, not that long ago. And those are two crazy notions that were held by, among other things, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Right? So are we, have we made progress? I kind of think so. Like, no one's saying stuff that crazy today. At least not on that level of... The Encyclopedia Britannica today does not have those kind of whoppers in it.

• 9:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, but just to be fair to Chuck's question. There were scientists saying that at the time. So the fact that the Encyclopedia Britannica echoes this is not being anti-science. They're just promulgating the science of the anthropologists of the day.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. All right, all right.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so this brings, this opens up some categories here because this concept of skin color and race, as we know in the history of this country, is quite colorful, as to put it mildly. And that is a very deep... Deeply endemic feature of society, as so many other topics are, that you have addressed in your books. So do you have a certain priority order with which you say, I want to do this topic because it's the most inflammatory? Or because you have the best stories to tell? And that then shapes your books?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  I think it starts from what question is meaningful to me. Not sort of globally meaningful, but meaningful at the moment. So, for example, since we're on the subject of race, which is meaningful for me for personal reasons. You know, because I come from a mixed race background. In this current season of revisionist history, I have a whole thing about HBCUs.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Historically, black colleges and universities.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  And about the particular role they play in American education that's largely unrecognized. And it was super interesting to me, both because, you know, for personal reasons, that's near and dear to my heart. But also, I've always been interested in kind of managing or learning to understand the relationship between the kind of, the dominant community in the United States and minorities. And when I think about my mother's evolution for a moment. So she grows up in a world where any Jamaican would, or any West Indian would, where people in positions of authority

• 11:18Speaker 02

  are as likely to be, almost more likely to be black as white. So she grew up in a world where the doctors were black, where the teachers were black, where the politicians were black, where the lawyers were black. And so it never occurred to her that these were opportunities that weren't open to black people or that black people couldn't do those jobs. And then she comes to North America and suddenly... She doesn't see any black doctors or black lawyers or black politicians, at least in the 70s. And that transition is super interesting, right? And I was, you know, I'm a kid and I'm observing this. I'm observing my mother go through this transition and trying and struggling with it. I mean, we lived in a town where there were two black people.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  My mom and actually three. And these twin adopted girls of the local Lutheran minister, the Goosey Twins. That's it, three people, a town of 7,000 people, right? Then my mother has to navigate that fact. All of a sudden, she's the only person who looks like her. And it's weird. And it's also strange for the other people who've never seen a well spoken, well educated, you know, a black person before, right?

• 12:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I touch her hair?

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, no. It wasn't, you know what it was, Neil? I wonder whether you've forgotten this. When my mom was in England going to school in the 50s, what she got was people wanting to touch her skin to see whether it, quote, "it would come off."

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would rub off.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was the...

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so there's a whole hierarchy there.

• 12:46Chuck Nice?

  I would just tell them that it's pink. I tell them it does, it does come off. But quite frankly, you need a special solution. So, and I can't share that with you, unfortunately. So let me just, not as a pushback, but as an addendum on what you just said about inequality, being able to exist anywhere among anybody. It may be an eight universally, but it's like a 12 for black people in America. That's the only difference.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:16Chuck Nice?

  You know, that's the difference is that...

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, there's an extra, it's an extra...

• 13:20Chuck Nice?

  It goes extra. It's extra in America. And like you said about your mom, you know, here she is, seeing a society where black people do hold authority and positions of authority. I mean, that was anathema in America and subsequently North America. And, you know, it's, in my childhood growing up, I had a pediatrician and my mother's doctor were black. And they were both West Indian. See? So how funny is that?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  This, this, this is part of my, every American child, school child should be required to spend at least one year of their life attending a school in Atlanta. Why? Because that's the American city where they are most likely to see black people in positions of authority. Lots of them, right? A really good experience.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up and down the spectrum.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Up and down the spectrum. You go to a restaurant in Atlanta, you will see, you know, 50% of the seats in a restaurant will be occupied by black people, chances are. You go to the doctor, chances are, your doctor will be a black person. You need to be exposed, people should be exposed to that, to understand that their little world is not representative of the world out there. You know, I think internal, years abroad, would be a really good idea for America.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that, "internal years abroad." No, you don't have to go to Africa to see black people, go to Atlanta.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  I was just in Atlanta, I love Atlanta, for that very reason. I just think Atlanta, like, you know, it's just, it's a different place. Same thing with Washington DC, by the way. Same, very similar kind of worlds where you just get a, that's to me, a much more realistic picture.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, more of our exclusive interview with Malcolm Gladwell and all that makes his brain tick on StarTalk.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. I got Malcolm Gladwell in the house and Chuck Nice, my co-host here. Chuck, you're tweeting Chuck Nice Comics still.

• 15:40Chuck Nice?

  Well, thank you, sir, yes. And the more you say it, the more I have to keep that handle.

• 15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 15:46Chuck Nice?

  Not that I care, I love that you say it.

• 15:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Malcolm, tell me your social media handles.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Do I know them? Hold on, I think I'm @Gladwell on Twitter. I'm really bad on social media. You know, I'm, I'm an old dude.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you want people to like, read your books? What the hell's wrong with you?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  I, I, yeah, I think it's, I think it's @gladwell, that's it, that's it, it's @gladwell. I'm the only Gladwell on Twitter, as far as I can tell.

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gladwell, okay, all right, cool, all right. So, let's get back into this. We left off with the recommendation that everyone take a staycation in the United States and just visit Atlanta.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  No, they gotta go to school in Atlanta, you gotta live in Atlanta, you can't just visit. You need to stay there, you need to stay there for a while, move around. If you're, you know, I was, I was on this trip when I was in Atlanta, I was going for a run, and I, a guy-

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, you're, you're an avid runner, correct?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  I am an avid runner. And I'm running around, and this guy starts right next to me, we start chatting, and he's a white guy, and I said, "Oh, what do you do?" He goes, "I'm a, uh, he's a medical resident." I was like, "Oh, where'd you go to med school?" He goes, "Morehouse." And I said, "Wait a second, how many white people go to Morehouse Medical School?" He goes, "Well, it's a small number." But I, I love that fact. And he wanted, he got interested in medicine because he went to Africa, spent 10 years in Nigeria and Kenya, came back and said, "Uh, I need, you know, I'd like to become a doctor to help people." But it seemed, at that point, after 10 years in Africa, it was natural for him to want to go to a place like Morehouse Medical School, right? He was comfortable around people who didn't look like him.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  And that just tells me that, that, that's the advantage of people who live a cosmopolitan life, who get out of their own little worlds, that they think they don't think twice about.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Malcolm, there's gotta be a lot of unmind stories about going out, fish out of water, or really, they're in water, it's just a different, different water, right? I mean, I remembered my, at my elementary school, and I don't want this to be about me here, because we don't have much, you know, how often do we have Malcolm Gladwell in the house? But in elementary school, by whatever measures of exams that were administered, I was not put in the special, the, the, the advanced class. The advanced class got to take a foreign language, they got special teachers, that all this was going on, and, and I knew, I wanted to do that, but the system prevented it. I was one of three black people in my elementary school.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, in middle school- I go to Lexington, Massachusetts, because my father has an appointment up at Harvard, a one-year fellowship. And so, I'm living in Lexington, Massachusetts, and I go to the regional middle school. There are three black people in that school, once again. I get the highest grades in the school, in four semesters. And I graduate getting accolades and awards, and I got pins, and I'm thinking to myself, "Okay, I don't know what's going on here, okay? Why in one place, they say I'm not deserving, and in another place, I'm at the top of the class?"

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I was not thinking, and I should have, you know, "This is good for the white people to see this." Right, right. Because there's a black kid, one of three black children, in this middle school, and untouchable. Plus, I was on all the sports, so I could outrun them. And so, I think maybe every white kid who's been told, like, from the Encyclopedia Britannica and its derivatives, over the decades, that they somehow represent some platform of superiority, you need stories like this, perhaps.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  They need to get their clock cleaned by you in middle school.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, there's another one. And I don't want to rub it in, but I grew up, my time up until then was in the Bronx, right? And so, there's a basketball court. And so, I'm there, and I go to take a pickup game of basketball, and someone is ready to shoot, and I jump to block the shot, and I end up blocking his shot with my elbow, because I jumped 18 inches higher than was necessary.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Wait. That's funny.

• 20:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You expect to block it with your hand. But I kept rising and he didn't jump higher with me. And my elbow blocked the shot. And I said, where am I?

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Neil, wait, I have a question for you, Neil. How tall are you?

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm 6'2".

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Okay. Because I was reading, this is a sobering note in this discussion. I was reading just the other day, this big discussion of school suspensions. For some reason, for long reasons, which I can get into or not, I've become really fascinated by school suspensions. And as you know, the data says that

• 21:00Speaker 02

  black kids, particularly black males, are way more likely to be suspended for the same offense than their white equivalents, right? But there is a nuance to this that broke my heart, which is when you look at all of the variables that most predict being suspended, being black is one, being a black male is two, being a tall black male is the overwhelming predictor. There is something about, so I can equalize everything. And if you're, if you're tall and black and male, you are getting singled out for punishment in a way that outstrips every other conceivable variable. Well, it's hard to miss you.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  It's hard, but there's something. You're tall and black. But it's triggering something. And like, and the reason it's important for a million different reasons, but this is the kind of thing that in a million years, the teachers or principals making those decisions would never think. They might think, am I singling out a kid because he's black? Or am I singling out a kid because he's a black boy? They would never think they were singling out someone unfairly because they were tall.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I was typically the second tallest kid in my class. And so, but I wasn't oddly tall. And, but I had very gentle demeanor. So I was never at risk of sort of a truant conduct. I was, I'd never got into fights. Other people, I'd never got into fights.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Were you also a good student?

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the principal treated me by good.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Well, I'm saying.

• 22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very average grades. I had very average grades for most of my life.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Well, when you're black, the expectations are lower, so.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I was a great student.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  You were a really good student.

• 22:51Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, I had to do that. That's a joke, people. That's a joke. Okay.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Malcolm, let's talk about your current book.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has many more words in the title than any of your other books.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Lot of words.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, please, please defend yourself there.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  It has an unwieldy subtitle.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  A Dream of Temptation: The Longest Night of the Second World War. It is... And it's a different book than any I've ever written. It's not a... It doesn't go in a million directions. It's not a... It's a... It's a not a pure history book, but very close to it. It's a story about this weird little bit of history in the Second World War, which was a group of pilots down in Alabama who thought they had solved one of the most difficult physics problems in modern war, which is how to drop a plane... A bomb from a plane with with a high degree of accuracy, which if you think about it is... That's an insanely hard problem, right?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  You've got... You're six miles up, you're going 250 miles an hour. You're dropping a large, heavy object through constantly changing air pressure, weather, blown by winds, different temperatures, to a small target on the ground that might be obscured by clouds. I mean, it's insanely difficult, right?

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And most people don't know. I'd say, correct me if I'm wrong, Malcolm, because surely you researched this. Was it something like 80% of bombs dropped in the Second World War missed their target?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And not just by a little bit, by an enormous amount. The British do a study early in the war called the Hull Report, and they think they're doing a really good job of hitting German targets, and they discover they're like off by as much as seven miles. That's how bad it is.

• 24:47Chuck Nice?

  Gentlemen, I'm sorry to report, we're actually bombing ourselves.

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you want to be high enough so that anti-aircraft can't get you.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this, they're competing forces on your accuracy.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  So they, these guys think they've solved this problem. And they then go to the next stage and say, if we've solved this problem, we can solve the problem of war. Right? Because we, we want, we can wage war in a way that doesn't result in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. We can bring a city to its knees without destroying it. We can take on our enemy without having to use armies and infantry and navy. And we can just use bombers that just precisely take out the thing we want to take out. The aqueducts, the power plant, the bridges. And they're, they'll, they'll surrender, right? And this incredible dream, which is hatched in Montgomery of Alabama. And they take it into the Second World War.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  And they, they, they ascend the ranks of the Air Force in the Second World War with this incredibly ambitious disruptive idea that the only thing that matters is the bomber, because the bomber can drop bombs with perfect accuracy wherever they want. And they run into the reality of warfare. And this dream and its confrontation with reality ends in spectacular fashion over the skies of Tokyo in 1945. And my book is about that journey from the hatching of the dream in Montgomery in the mid 30s to its kind of cataclysmic failure in, in, over Japan in the summer of 1945.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, that's the dream. What's the temptation? But you don't mean the firebombing of Tokyo, do you?

• 26:28Speaker 02

  No. Well, the firebombing is what results from the failure of their dream. So the temptation is, the dream is, we can clean up modern warfare and use these perfectly aimed bombs. The temptation is, when that strategy doesn't work, is just to say, you know, F it. Let's just, let's just firebomb everything down and burn everything down. And my dreamers won't take up the temptation, but somebody else does. And that's the darkest chapter of the Second World War.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I interrupted you. What did you put your?

• 26:58Chuck Nice?

  No, he answered my question. I said, if that's the dream, what is the temptation? But now I'm intrigued to know, who is this Darth Vader figure? Who comes in and creates the dark, this chapter in the Second World War? Which, God, I mean, that's such a bloody war. How, I mean, to say that this person is the author of the darkest chapter, wow, wow.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Darkest chapter of the darkest war.

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, the darkest chapter of the darkest war. Who is this Darth Vader-like creature?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  A man named General Curtis LeMay. One of the most infamous or famous, depending on your perspective, military aviators of the 20th century. Who's just an extraordinary character. I mean, the most kind of brutal, ruthless, unsentimental, brilliant. If you remember, he's, he was, I lost count, I think at nine or 10, the number of Hollywood movies that had Curtis LeMay, a villain based on Curtis LeMay in there. I mean, Dr. Strangelove, there's a Curtis LeMay figurine Dr. Strangelove.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see. So he's influenced a, what do you call it, a character type?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Yes, he is, he stands for.

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's become, he's become a trope.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Yes, he stands for the crazy cold warrior. The nuclear finger on the button. He's the guy, so LeMay is the guy who, napalm is invented in the Second World War, not Vietnam, for the express purposes of burning down Japanese cities. Because they were made of wood and they were highly flammable. And the first person to really.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wood and paper, a lot of walls are paper.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  And paper, yes, exactly. And the first person to use napalm to its fullest extent was this man Curtis LeMay. The first person with the kind of gumption.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  To say, "I'm gonna give up on all traditional forms of warfare, and I'm just gonna drop so many firebombs on these flammable cities that I will literally burn my enemy out." And that's what he does, and he kills, in the summer of 45, he firebombs, he burns to the ground 66 Japanese cities, and maybe kills close to a million civilians. I mean, it's...

• 29:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  It's astonishing. If you list the people in the 20th century who were responsible for the most civilian deaths, Mao's one, Stalin's two, Hitler's three, Pol Pot's four, and Curtis LeMay is five, and American is number five.

• 29:20Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'm certainly adding him to my list of people I'd like to have at a cocktail party.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just one thing I'll add, just to end the segment on a completely down note. Napalm, at least of the variety they used in Vietnam, maybe the early versions weren't quite this potent. The napalm doesn't just simply burn, it burns at an extremely high temperature, like thousands of degrees. And so what happens is, where napalm is dropped, it sucks all of the oxygen out of that region. So even if you were not burned by the flames and the temperatures, you suffocated from the absence of oxygen. And in firebombing tactics in Tokyo, I don't know if you've ever done this, this is... I've done this, I used to do it when I still put

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  as many candles in a birthday cake as my age, which of course I've stopped. But if you put candles around the rim of a cake, all right, you know, get at least 10, but ideally like 20, just do that, and then ignite them, and just watch what happens. All candles point directly, radially, into the center of the cake.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Are you serious?

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because what you've... You've heated the air, not only outside the cake, but inside the middle of the cake, but there's more heat in the inside of the cake than outside, right? Because they're all sort of focused there. And so if you heat the air there, that air rises, other air comes in from outside to replace it, pushing the candle flames inward. So, while they were firebombing these cities, you don't have to ignite every square inch, you just have to make a circle. And then, all the, the air will come in and push the flames and completely incinerate everything in the center of the circle.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Is that what they call a firestorm or a conflagration? It is that physical effect?

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, those are elements of it, yes. But what I'm describing is you're using the forces of physics and chemistry to reduce how many actual bombs you would have to drop. And these are people like think this stuff up.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Neil, I'm very grateful that you didn't use your formidable gifts for ill. If you, if you decide to become a bad guy, this world will be over.

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. It's about time we had a black supervillain. I'm going for Neil deGrasse Tyson. That's true, a black supervillain, there's not a... Doesn't happen. One thing, again, just to end it on a completely down note, I have more than once, and it's never received well. I don't know why. Malcolm, maybe you have the answer to this before we go to our third segment. But people talk about sort of violence in the cities, or violence during wars, or terrorist attacks, and there doesn't appear to be bandwidth to hear the following fact, that from 1939

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to 1945, so that the duration of the Second World War, 1,000 people per hour were killed in the name of that war.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's terrible. Per hour. And there is nothing today where people are dying at that rate. And so much lower things get people's, you know, astonishment. And I'm just thinking, you know, people alive today, were alive at a time where that went every hour from 1939 to 1945. And, and so, yes, the world used to be worse than it is today. I'm just, you know, put that out there. God, we gotta take a quick break. When we come back, we'll try to land this plane. It might be hard, because Malcolm is a, is a, is a fount of enlightened insight.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  You're the one who just told the birthday cake story. I don't know why you're, why you're telling, why you're pointing at me.

• 33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's supplemental to your...

• 33:09Speaker 02

  You just, you just taught a generation of listeners how to like create a firestorm on their birthday cake.

• 33:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess I did.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  You're telling, you're telling me that.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just very observant if I see stuff, that's all. And so you could, you could, you could actually put candles adjacent to those candles inward, and they would each light their way into the center. I mean, you could do that experiment. Anyhow, we're gonna take a break. When we come back, more with the one and only Malcolm Gladwell, on StarTalk.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. So, it was Chuck Knight, Chuck it, baby.

• 34:17Chuck Nice?

  Hey.

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and Malcolm Gladwell. And Malcolm, I feel like I know you, even though we've only met a couple of times, only because your books are so accessible. It's like you're a friend of mine, sitting next to me. And that's a talent that you've honed since your days at The New Yorker. And I just want to-

• 34:35Chuck Nice?

  That's a dangerous talent.

• 34:39Chuck Nice?

  That's a very dangerous talent, man.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only in the hands of the wrong person, okay.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  That's the theme, that's the theme of this conversation.

• 34:46Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  We all turn evil, it's an issue.

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in Revisionist History, like I said, it's one of my favorite podcasts out there, you open your season with a discussion of self-driving cars. And you, and this is a little weird, and I don't know if, you know, you need to be checked out on this, where you try to get a self-driving car to hit somebody. What did you try, what, tell me what happened in this episode?

• 35:09Chuck Nice?

  First of all, let me just say, bravo!

• 35:14Speaker 02

  I read, I, for some reason, I stumbled across this paper. By a guy who said, he was like an urban planner. And he writes this brilliant paper where he says, now, wait a minute. If all the cars on the road are self-driving, then that changes the psychological dynamic between cars and pedestrians. The reason you don't jaywalk now, or you jaywalk, we do jaywalk, but we jaywalk pretty sparingly, right? The reason everyone doesn't jaywalk all the time is that we're really worried that someone who's driving a car is either crazy and will hit us, or distracted and will hit us. We know, we don't jaywalk all the time because we know

• 35:57Speaker 02

  that the human drivers of cars are imperfect. Self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, are, they're not absolutely perfect, but they're really close, right? So this guy says, well, if the fear of an imperfect driver is removed, what do you do if you're a pedestrian? You jaywalk all the time.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could walk out into the middle of a freeway.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  You, you absolutely. A hundred percent, and they will all stop. They will all stop. So I thought this was such a hilarious observation.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you need to program in.

• 36:30Chuck Nice?

  Some psychopathy. You need some psychopathy programmed into that car.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  You guys, wait a second, wait a second. You guys are absolutely right. Wait, you've jumped ahead of me.

• 36:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry, sorry.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  You've jumped ahead of me. Wait, we're getting there. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So right now, so I go to Phoenix, where Waymo operates, Google's Waymo. And that is the only place in the country where you can hail, like a Uber, you can hail a self-driving car. It'll come pick you up and you drive around. So we got ourselves a Waymo, and we drove around in it for a while. And it was, it is clear, the driver, the AI that's driving Waymo's is the nicest, kindest, most patient, most long-suffering driver in the history of drivers. This is a driver who never gets angry, who will never flip you the bird, who will never lean on the horn, who will never speed up when he should be slowing down. It's a perfect driver. So then I said, oh.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They actually slow down when they're approaching a yellow transition between a green and a red.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Never run, they'll never do anything. They're perfect. So I said, oh, this means that I can do whatever I want. So I got out of the car. We were in a, we were in a parking lot of a Alamo Drafthouse in Chandler, Arizona. And I got out and I started to mess with the Waymo. And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna give it away. But I was like running next to the Waymo. And I was trying to see whether if I behave like an idiot, what would the Waymo do? Right now, I know what I, what a driver would do, a human driver, if I, that hit me. But what about, what would happen if, you know? So it was this great reminder, first of all, that the people who come up with new technologies

• 38:13Speaker 02

  don't always think through all of the implications. No one thought when it came up with the idea for autonomous vehicles that what they were really doing was liberating pedestrians to do whatever the hell they want. That wasn't on their mind. That wasn't on their mind. They were like...

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was not there.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  And I realized, you know, if you, if you make every car in Manhattan self-driving, you realize that you'll, no car will be able to make it down the street.

• 38:38Chuck Nice?

  Right. That's true.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  I mean, it'd be impossible. My track club meets on the Lower East Side. And we're all, we're competing for space on one little, lousy little track with all of the walkers and, you know, whatever. If every car in the road was self-driving, we would get on the, the FDR Drive and do our workouts at rush hour on the FDR Drive. And every car would stop and wait until we were finished. Right? So it's like, I found this idea so fantastic. It's like amazing. It makes, it means the really, really, really cool thing is that it means, and the good thing is it means you'll be able to ride your bicycle through any American city without fear. And that means you will always ride your bicycle.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Right? The only thing that's preventing us from riding our bicycles everywhere is that we're legitimately scared of getting hit and killed. Now, I've removed that possibility. What will you do?

• 39:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, all right, so just, just to be clear. Okay. Um, you know, when, as they say, when they invented American football and people were cracking their heads open, this is a joke from Jerry Seinfeld, right? People, not a joke, it's a comedic observation of reality. cracking a head zone. So rather than say, maybe we shouldn't play this sport. They said, let's still play the sport, but now wear a helmet. Okay, so, so maybe you just have to add extra rules that constrain pedestrians so that the traffic can continue. And that's, that's a solvable problem, right? Yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  I thought you were gonna say, I thought you were gonna say what you guys said before.

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Which is maybe the response is you program the AI into being crazy. Just a little bit crazy. So you don't know.

• 40:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a little bit. That could be the one that doesn't stop at the red light.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Yes, 95% certainty, they're not gonna hit you. But that, the minute it's 5%,

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  then you're like, you're back to...

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody's thinking now. Everybody's reconsidering. Right. Malcolm, let me ask you something I don't have an answer to, and I've thought deeply about it. And you're exactly the kind of guy to think about it and write about it. So right now, we lose at least 30,000 people a year to traffic deaths. That includes pedestrians, I think, 35,000 a year. So that's 100 a day, and it's been that way for decades. Okay, you introduce self-driving cars, and that number drops to near zero. But initially, it won't be near zero. It might be thousands, okay, of deaths. And these are deaths from errors in the software. Right. Or the, the, the, the pattern recognition software thinks it's a clear road, but there's a truck in the way. That's actually happened. And it has actually happened.

• 41:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how do you convince people that 2,000 deaths are better than 35,000 deaths? If those 2,000 deaths are from the errors of a machine built by somebody in Detroit?

• 41:35Speaker 02

  It's, you're right, it requires some persuasion. But I don't think it's framed properly. I don't think it's a difficult proposition for people. I mean, I am 100% in favor of the autonomous driving revolution, even as I recognize it creates a strain... An interesting world where you can't actually drive a car in a city anymore, which I'm fine with, get rid of them as far as I'm concerned. But I do, and also, I think the transition, you said eventually we'll get to zero. I think we'll get to zero really quickly because I think these AI systems learn really quickly. They're fast.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what has essentially gone to zero are airplane deaths. It's essentially zero.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  They're essentially zero. And if you, I was talking to the engineers at Google who have created Waymo. And if you will tell, if you ask them, they'll say, you know, just in the last two years, Waymo has gotten like so better. The experience of driving, of sitting in the back of a Waymo in Arizona is you can perceive the difference between now and two years ago.

• 42:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  The car is just driving a lot more. The AI is driving it a lot more smoothly. It's, it's, there are fewer situations where it seems to be confused. It, I was stunned driving in the back of this Waymo. It's amazing. I mean, it's, and I think that's the other thing, that once people experience the, what it feels like to be in these vehicles, what you quickly realizes how much better it is than you are.

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  And you're much less likely, I think, to be concerned about the occasional mistake.

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, they don't consume ethanol.

• 43:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, right, exactly. But the other thing.

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Active ingredient in your, in your, in your highball drink.

• 43:22Chuck Nice?

  The other thing is the insurance companies are such a benefit from this so much that what they'll be able to do is put together and make a fund where you pay people a lot more if they are harmed, either, either in an accident or if they're killed.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Waymo, Waymo will run you down. Like, there was the, the initial accident that happened. Remember, there was a fatality involving an autonomous vehicle in, in Arizona, in Phoenix, I think, two or three years ago. And it was because a woman crossed, was jaywalking, and she had a bicycle. And what happened is the autonomous vehicle approached, and the AI had a category for bicycle and a category for jaywalker, for human jaywalker, but no category for human and bicycle. And it was confused. It'd never seen this before, and it didn't know what to do. And it was going back and forth between, is it a bicycle? Is it a human? Is it a bicycle? Is it a human? And while it was undergoing this. This moment of indecision.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's AI, artificial idiocy.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because any human would know that differently.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it hits the woman. Now, the point is, that only happens once, right? That if your system is set up properly, the next time you have a category for that. And that's what's going on now.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like building codes. It's like building codes.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  It's like that.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every code in there is because something happened that where people died for construction and fire.

• 44:42Chuck Nice?

  Now, I'm wondering why there's a warning to not put my cat in the microwave.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Somebody did it.

• 44:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so I agree. So this would rapidly converge on something being completely safe. So what about the case, you know, there are these trolley quest problems, right? In sort of moral philosophy. So if it goes left, it kills one person. If it goes right, it kills two people. But it will have to kill somebody. So it goes left and kills one person. Is this the kind of decisions it's going to have to make? Or is it going to be so good it never has to have a trolley problem?

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Well, the, it's interesting. The trolley problem assumes out the possibility the trolley can just stop. Right, so the third strategy is you avoid having to make the decision at all by sacrificing the efficiency of the journey. And what I think AI, these are called in AI parlance, in autonomous driving parlance, these are called corner cases. A corner case is this difficult, tricky, to decipher kind of case. And my understanding is that in most of these corner cases, what the car does is it just stops. So.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it, okay.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  And I think it just.

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's always safer. It's always safer to just stop.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  It will always take the, it will do what we're reluctant to do as human drivers, which is to compromise the efficiency of the journey. The AI will always do that. That's one of its great advantages, by the way. It's never in a hurry, right?

• 46:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  Somebody should, I would imagine that if somebody figured out what percentage of fatal accidents happen because someone is in a hurry, it would be an enormous number. An enormous number.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hundred and ten percent of them, yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  But if you have a car.

• 46:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They changed the warnings on signs. They say, "Traffic in, you know, 20-minute delay. Plan for being late."

• 46:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because once you plan for it, then you don't have to rush anymore, because now everyone expects you to be late. I mean, it's a psychological dimension of the helpful sign information on the freeways.

• 46:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so, let me ask you, Malcolm, humans are programming these AI, and then they sort of continue to program themselves, perhaps. So what about the possibility of bias introduced? And let me just give a fast example. You surely read the news articles in the last year or so, where they had racist sinks at airports.

• 47:13Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 47:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because, so you go to the sink, and I always wondered, I put my hand there, and I said, "Well, I guess it doesn't work." And then a white person comes behind me, and then the water dispenses, once they put their hand on there. So it's checking the reflectivity of the skin. If I have dark skin, the signal does not get back to the sensor.

• 47:32Chuck Nice?

  It's absorbed.

• 47:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it thinks nobody's there, right? So I always thought it was just...

• 47:36Chuck Nice?

  Sorry, black man!

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 47:38Chuck Nice?

  You're gonna have to have dirty hands!

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dirty hands. So this made the news, all right?

• 47:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm just wondering, if I'm a black man crossing the street at night, is the AI gonna know I'm there? Or is it gonna think, "Clear street ahead, keep going"?

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay, now, let me ask this.

• 47:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm a dead black man in the street.

• 47:57Chuck Nice?

  Here's the caveat to that, Neil. Are you Malcolm Gladwell black? Are you Neil deGrasse Tyson black? Are you Miles Davis black? Guess what? One of y'all is dying!

• 48:11Speaker 02

  You know, this is real... I always tell my girlfriend, who is a lot darker than I am, she's black, I was like, I always tell her, "If you... you're out at... she's out at night in Manhattan, like, I was like, "You can't wear black. I'm sorry, you cannot wear black. Don't. Are you nuts? Like, wear a bright color, for God's sake." And she always looks at me like I'm a madman. But I, you know, anyone who's driven at night knows, when, if someone, now, this is not just black people, but when some, a person dressed... All in black crosses a street that's badly lit at night. It's a problem, right?

• 48:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a problem. Correct.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Where, why do people, I, my fellow runners, we would run at night and, you know, on a winter's night in the, on the streets. And they would be wearing all black outfits. I'm like, you're, you're crazy. What are you doing? Where, I always wear a yellow jacket for a reason. I don't want to get killed by some car that can't see me.

• 49:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So these are humans making that mistake. But when your machine makes the mistake, or you don't know to put in, as a programmer, to put in some, or if you tested only on white people and think that it's good for all humans, then this is, this is a bias. Even if the person themselves, or if they themselves are not racist or in any way, they have, it was sort of unintended consequences of only thinking that white people are, who's.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  You know, you know, it's a great example of this, Neil. I was listening to something on these AI systems and they were developing an AI system for dermatologists to diagnose, to figure out whether something on your skin was cancerous or not. And they went to all this work and they thought it worked really well. And then they realized that what the AI was doing was looking for the presence of a ruler. Because in all of the images it was using to learn from, they were textbook images where there was a little ruler next to the spot to measure how long it was.

• 50:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If there's a ruler, it's cancerous, clearly. Oh, my goodness.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  But like, but no, but that, I do think that's a transition problem, right? That's the thing about, I totally, it is 100% true that AI systems, when you're starting out, reflect the biases of the people who are.

• 50:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we gotta kill a few black people first and then we're on cue.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  But you don't, but you know, over time, I think it's reasonable to assume. By the way, here I am on a podcast with Neil Tyson, and I'm the one defending science.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  What is going on here?

• 50:41Speaker 02

  I'm like, guys, no, scientists know what we're doing. And Neil's like, these guys are crazy. I can't wash my hands in the airport.

• 50:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Chuck. If I spend too much time around Chuck, I become angry black man. It is true. It is true. I will do that to you.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  You have, this is, this is, yeah, it's nuts.

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I want to end, we got to again land this plane. Could you retell the story that I first heard you tell us on stage? What happened when you first started wearing the Afro?

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Oh, growing hair out.

• 51:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you grew your hair out and you got that sort of Art Garfunkel kind of Afro there. Tell me, just could you please retell that story?

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Well, it's, I mean, I always felt sheepish telling this story because, but...

• 51:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in a safe space here, go on.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  I'm in a safe space. So my hair used to be, my hair reflects the fashion of the times. So whenever a black person's wearing their hair real short, I was wearing my hair real short. And then there was a moment, you know, when everyone started to grow their hair long again. So my hair can grow, can be quite considerable. So when I, in the kind of, about 15 years ago or so, I grew my hair out a lot and discovered, of course, that I was getting stopped left and right by cops on the most trumped up of, like, the most absurd, you know, no, I wasn't even, I wasn't even speeding half the time.

• 52:09Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, sir, I'm gonna have to ask you to step out of the car. Sir, I'm in the back of a cab.

• 52:17Chuck Nice?

  Excuse me, officer, but you're talking to the wrong guy.

• 52:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Afro on a Sunday morning, that's, that's, it's in the rulebook.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  And then, and also after 9/11 in airport security lines, I was getting pulled out. And I realized that the part of the informal algorithm used by cops and security officers was, you know, big Afro, codes for something questionable, right? This is just a, I was just, I don't think it was a kind of active malignant racism. It was just like, there are things...

• 52:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lazy, actually.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  It's laziness. There are certain things that trigger. So you're a cop and someone goes past you at 55 miles an hour, okay, maybe I was going a little bit faster. But um, and you know, you're not getting, it's not like you're focused on the individual. You're picking up a few key things. Is the person driving a sports car? Are they, is the car shiny and new or old and ratty? In my case, they see me drive by and they see a big Afro and they're like, oh, all right. Let's go get that dude. I think that's what was going on. But it was just like, I didn't, the last time I'd had a big Afro was before I had my driver's license. So I'd never been through, it's a very American rite of passage, which is if you resemble something even remotely black, you get pulled over a lot. So I just was introduced to driving while black, you know?

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's okay.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  My first.

• 53:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the club.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Welcome to the club. I was like.

• 53:39Chuck Nice?

  Well, I, I have always been able to alleviate that problem personally because I drive with a driver's cap on all the time.

• 53:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there you go, Mr. Butler.

• 53:47Chuck Nice?

  It just makes me look like I'm somebody's chauffeur.

• 53:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're driving Miss Daisy. That's who you are.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  That is, that is quite a defense.

• 53:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good. Yeah, I gotta, I need one of those hats on my dashboard.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  That's like a, that's like a throwback. It's a throwback defense.

• 54:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 54:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, take it back to the day.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  You're like a porter in the airport.

• 54:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, we gotta, we gotta call it quits there. Malcolm, it's always a delight to chat with you. You're such, we love your perspectives on the world and your capacity to share those perspectives is unmatched. In all of your media now with podcasts and books, even books with long titles.

• 54:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good luck on, on that book. Thanks for bringing that story to the front. I think the world needs it. And anyone thinking of the future of war needs it. So Chuck, always good to have you as co-host.

• 54:41Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 54:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Malcolm, I want to put, if it's possible, you know how some people have a standing,

• 54:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  a table at a restaurant, you know, once a month? I want a standing invitation with you for every next project you do, you come on the show.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  Oh, I'd love that. Thank you. This is so much fun.

• 54:57Chuck Nice?

  In that case, we'll be seeing you once a week.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Be careful what you wish for, though.

• 55:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, I know. Oh my gosh.

• 55:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we're gonna call it quits there. This has been StarTalk, the Malcolm Gladwell edition of StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal natural physicist.