Revenge of The Tipping Point with Malcolm Gladwell

What do crime waves, contagious diseases, and social trends have in common? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Chuck Nice welcome best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell to explore the hidden forces that drive human behavior.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, love me some Malcolm Gladwell.

• 0:01Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he, once again, delivered.

• 0:05Chuck Nice?

  Covered it all.

• 0:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Covered it all, sharing with us deep insights.

• 0:07Chuck Nice?

  From sociology to science to poop, we got it all. We got it all.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I'm here with Chuck Knight, Chuck it, baby.

• 0:40Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 0:42Chuck Nice?

  What's happening?

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got a really cool guest today.

• 0:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, one of the coolest.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The coolest, like, ever.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, for our nerd audience.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our nerd audience, Malcolm Gladwell, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:54Speaker 02

  I was last year in 20, did you hear you say I was here in 2015?

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this man can't stop writing bestselling books. What's your problem?

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

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

• 1:16Speaker 02

  I wish.

• 1:17Chuck Nice?

  Not again.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's quality vomit, that's what you're saying. I'm looking at the list here, Blink, we all remember Blink.

• 1:22Chuck Nice?

  Of course.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What the Dogg Saw, I think I missed that one. Goliath, Outliers, and Tipping Point, those were big ones.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  Tipping Point's a big, big one.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:38Speaker 02

  This is, yeah, this is, this is part two.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is Marvel, the Marvel Universe getting to you?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Well, the question is, which revenge am I referring to? There's a number of revenges.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay, Revenge of the Pink Panther.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  You don't even, you're not even old enough.

• 2:00Chuck Nice?

  Revenge of the Nerds, I would have gone with.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Revenge of the Nerds is a good one.

• 2:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's, that's a big revenge.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Chuck Nice?

  Pink Panther is a little before.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 2:29Speaker 02

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

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. So you come to this as a journalist, that's your fundamental chops.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Who had just been immersed in epidemiology for like a good six years.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we just remind people epidemiology, you know, the study of?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Of how epidemics behave.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, epidemics and what, how they spread and how they are contained or even?

• 2:56Chuck Nice?

  How we infect each other.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  How we infect each other.

• 2:58Chuck Nice?

  How we infect each other, that's basically epidemic.

• 3:01Speaker 02

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

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is so geeky of you.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  It's so geeky, it is very geeky.

• 3:48Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We will erect a statue to you for this, okay?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  And I, one day, I remember this moment, I was in the HM dot one aisle.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  And I was reading back issues.

• 3:59Chuck Nice?

  As one would be.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Neil, don't tell me you haven't done one, because you have.

• 4:04Chuck Nice?

  All right, go on, keep going. By the way, I'm a HM dot two guy myself.

• 4:10Speaker 02

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

• 4:33Chuck Nice?

  Love it.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Do they spread in the same way?

• 4:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What date was that article?

• 4:36Speaker 02

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

• 4:41Chuck Nice?

  Oh, so even that recent, okay.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  It was, it was a modern article.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Modern, it was like the 1800s or anything.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  But at the time he wrote that, that was a very novel idea.

• 4:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, revolutionary.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Because he was literally taking, he was literally taking the formal principles of disease epidemiology and laying them over as a social problems.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I think of the term, not specifically disease, but human behavior.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how you might track that and understand it. So if it began there, I'm very impressed by that.

• 5:08Speaker 02

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

• 5:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These would be mathematical techniques, wouldn't they?

• 5:30Speaker 02

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

• 5:48Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 5:49Speaker 02

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

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tipping point.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tipping point.

• 6:09Speaker 02

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

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Precipitously.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Precipitously, in the 90s.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone wants to take credit. Yeah. And it wasn't just New York City, it was the whole country.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Although later it was just New York City. This is interesting because there's two New York City crime declines.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep going here.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  But, um, and no one could explain why, and I wanted to understand it conceptually, and it struck me when I read that article, that this was the conceptual explanation, that crime was a contagious phenomenon.

• 6:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  And it had just tipped in the way that epidemics often tip. And that was the genesis of that book, Tipping.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Wow. Okay. That's fascinating.

• 6:58Speaker 02

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

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no, we're good, we're good. Now, one of your stories, if I remember the book.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, you, you talk about Big Bird.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  I have a long thing on Sesame Street, too long in retrospect. When I went back, when I went back to reread that, I was like, whoops.

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but I, that, that chapter, that, that section stayed with me because you never know what little feature of a story is actually going to make the difference and put it over the top.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if I remember correctly, you suggested that Big Bird, which is an absurd element in, in Sesame Street, when you think about it.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not walking around saying, gee, let's get a seven-foot yellow bird.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Bird, right.

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We need that. Who's thinking this?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, and so. Because everybody who wrote Sesame Street was high as hell. Woo, they were smoking some good stuff. So, so, am I, am I remembering that correctly?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Big Bird?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Well, that, there I was interested in the dimension of, you know, an important dimension in understanding contagion is the duration of the, of your, of your kind of contagious window, right?

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  That, uh, you know, if COVID had a, had a, basically a 48-hour window when we were highly contagious, before the antibody response kicked in. If that, if that infectious window is 24 hours, the ability of the

• 8:34Speaker 02

  The virus could be exactly the same in every other dimension and its ability to spread would be cut in half.

• 8:40Chuck Nice?

  Greatly diminished.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even more than half.

• 8:43Chuck Nice?

  Even more than half. The longer the incubation period, the more effective the virus will be. Exactly.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Malcolm, this concept of stickiness, that can help us transition from the original tipping point to the revenge of the tipping point. You had like three rules or three?

• 8:57Speaker 02

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

• 9:11Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 9:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The super spreaders.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Super spreaders, which are, you know, it's funny because there was this whole backlash against super spreaders in the epidemiological community with many people saying that when we look at contagious viruses, you know, we don't see this. And now, but then COVID happened and COVID is the kind of er example of asymmetry in an epidemic. It is like, you know, in a room, the most, to me, the most interesting part of, fascinating part to write of my new book was I was talking to all these aerosol experts. So these are the guys who study aerosols or the

• 9:49Chuck Nice?

  Particles in the air.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. The droplets that come out of your mouth when you speak that, and when you have COVID, there's virus particles in aerosol.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that's the only reason why a mask can work at all, because it's attached to an aerosol and it stops the aerosol.

• 10:03Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. It's the particle. The virus is much smaller, but the virus is still carried, not only by the air, but by the

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the virus can't fly by itself.

• 10:11Chuck Nice?

  No, that's what I'm saying. It's carried and that's what

• 10:13Speaker 02

  It's carried in the

• 10:14Chuck Nice?

  In the droplet.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Well, when you, when you examine large groups of people, what you discover is that the, the, um, there was a very small number of people whose level of aerosol production is like 10, 20, 30, 40 times greater than the mean. The thing about super-spreading, being a super-spreader is you probably don't know that you are.

• 10:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  In fact, you almost certainly don't.

• 10:35Chuck Nice?

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

• 10:45Speaker 02

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

• 10:57Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  But then another, a little more, slightly more convincing explanation comes from this other guy, who says that it's really driven by something quite idiosyncratic in the way that your saliva moves through your throat canal. There's this, there was a small group of people who studied the production of aerosols in a, across a variety of, you know, like, they're really interested in automobile emissions. Or they're really interested in air pollution, or they're interested in when you fry bacon, what comes off, off the bacon, you know, when you smell it, what are you smelling, right? All those kinds of, but they, very, very early on in the pandemic, a bunch of, and it's a very obscure field of, they're chemists.

• 11:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:41Speaker 02

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

• 12:26Speaker 02

  It is very difficult.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To go back and, I mean, at the time, you don't know what to pay attention to.

• 12:31Speaker 02

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

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But even so, all I'm saying is, we don't have an inventory of every other possible paper that was written. That only now we go back and say, hey, they had insight. We should have listened to them.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When there are 99 others that you didn't listen to, or you shouldn't have listened to.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Because we call that hindsight.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  I'm Jasmine Wilson, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is Law of the Few, and then you have a third law. What is that?

• 13:36Speaker 02

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

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 14:28Speaker 02

  What's interesting about this-

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 14:35Speaker 02

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

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 14:49Speaker 02

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

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 15:04Speaker 02

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

• 15:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Thigh was the standard. In Buffalo.

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the artery, the veins that go up.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  In Buffalo, they put it in through the wrist.

• 15:28Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 15:28Speaker 02

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

• 15:53Chuck Nice?

  So it's closer to the source.

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's in the hood.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  It spread from Montreal to Toronto.

• 15:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  And then Toronto down to Buffalo, because there's a lot of back and forth between cardiologists.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The future of civilization.

• 16:21Chuck Nice?

  There'd be a uniform protocol that is established.

• 16:24Speaker 02

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

• 16:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Wow, you just don't want doctors.

• 17:03Chuck Nice?

  You don't want doctors. You just threw doctors under the bus. That's what you did. You were just like, I tell you what we're going to do. We're going to actually go in through the thigh. And by that, I mean the artery that will let doctors bleed out.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  What's that line from Shakespeare? First kill all the lawyers. Now, first kill all the doctors.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no.

• 17:23Chuck Nice?

  I said. Tyson. Tyson asked.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not what I said. Somebody has to, the AI is not going to develop the new method. Somebody has to do that and then it's disseminated instantly.

• 17:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And performed possibly by robotic.

• 17:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Surgeons.

• 17:36Chuck Nice?

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

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's well, well put.

• 17:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When they said there's an obesity epidemic, I said, no, you can't catch fat from people. So why are you calling it an epidemic?

• 17:54Chuck Nice?

  However.

• 17:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was very resistant at the time. I'm much more relaxed about it.

• 17:57Chuck Nice?

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

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Caught fat.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  If you want to go to a private girl's school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and then go to a, uh, you know, rural high school in Alabama and, uh, tell me there isn't a, a, there isn't a, a, uh, a profound difference in the, um, cultural circumstances that drive obesity.

• 18:49Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Right?

• 18:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm just saying, I warmed up to it. I'm just, when I first heard it, I was thinking biologically, not culturally. And so I was resistant to using it ever in that way. But I've softened up over time.

• 19:01Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so take me into the new book. What, what is, what are the new perspectives you're bringing to the table?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was much more, um, uh, taken by, uh, the, the, the dynamics of, of, of epidemics. In other words, the law of the few, for example, the, this, I begin to realize it's a much more radical observation that an epidemic is driven by a small number of people than I had realized with the first book. I was thinking kind of, you know, the 80 20 rule. There's a, you know, a big group of us. And now I realize, oh, no, no, no, it's super specific and it's really, the number of people who drive epidemics are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the population and we need to, our expectation that all of us are somehow all lumped in the middle and we all sort of equally contribute to these things is just wrong.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  I'm much more. Fascinated and mystified by patterns of environmental contagion than I was in the first book. I just, I don't really understa-

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Oh aerosol, aerosol.

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  They call them, um, uh, super emitters.

• 20:14Chuck Nice?

  Super emitters.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. If you find out that super emitters-

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are all contained within one genetic demographic, that requires-

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Problematic.

• 20:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A different solution-

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To resolve.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because this is, you know, is that any different from the AIDS epidemic? I remember, I'm old enough to remember, we are old enough to remember that.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was like, it was a disease just in homo- male homosexuals, so therefore ban, you know, all, people don't react rationally to that kind of information.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  No, they don't.

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how does your analysis and the revelation of this manifest in terms of policy?

• 20:52Speaker 02

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

• 21:08Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 21:18Chuck Nice?

  Not, not a good track record.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That may be the only solution.

• 21:41Chuck Nice?

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

• 21:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think we need that.

• 22:00Chuck Nice?

  I got it.

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for, so, so I, an example here might be if nine D out of a hundred people don't need to wear masks because they're not spewing thing, it- Still make everybody wear a mask.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  See, that was the whole, that was the whole problem. Is that the people were like, I don't want to wear a mask. And even though they were like, listen, what we know from 1918, starting back then, what we know for a fact is that masking reduces transmission. We know that for a fact. And people were like, I don't care. It's my freedom.

• 22:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a diff, the freedom call. That came later and that was different.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just making this simple point.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That in a society where we want everyone to be treated equally under the law, to have a law that applies only to some people, you must wear a mask and the rest of you don't have to. My experience with our species tells me that will not work.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you just make the rule for everyone. And that's it.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Well, let me give you another example, the same phenomenon.

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Uh, one of the things that criminologists have observed is that these same patterns of extreme variation um, happen in uh, violent crime.

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  So I look at a map of New York City and it's chart for any city for that matter. And you will find that on like 5% of street segments, blocks, uh, 5% of street segments of, of New York City account for north of 50% of all violent crime.

• 23:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  It's super specific. When I say a street segment, so we're talking about, we're not saying the South Bronx is a dangerous place. This, no, no, this is saying, no, no, no, most of the South Bronx is totally safe. But there are very specific, or there's a.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are 10 hotspots.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a street corner on the, you know, on, on York and uh, 91st, that's problematic. So the rational response to that is to say, oh, we don't need police. The same distribution of police in every precinct in the city. What we should be doing, and this is what the NYPD did, and that caused the second great decline, crime decline in New York, which was they said, okay, we're just going to shift huge numbers of resources from, you know, the 90% of places that are relatively safe and just dump them on those very, very specific hotspots. I'm sure that people anticipated the very argument that you're making, saying, people are going to object to that.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  They're going to say, you're taking 10 of my police officers away from my precinct so you can send them to a street corner in like. You know, East New York? Why? That's unfair. As it turns out, the, what people were, I think, were able to realize was that bringing the overall crime rate in the city down was, uh, was a, um, made that price worth paying. That you could convince them by showing them, oh, this is gonna make the whole city a better place for all of us. You can give up your ten cops.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why didn't the crime just move to another block? It was like pornography in Times Square. You know, you're not gonna out here, then it went to Seventh Avenue to Eighth Avenue to Tenth Avenue, then it went on the internet, and everybody's gone.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 25:10Speaker 02

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

• 25:31Chuck Nice?

  93rd, 95th.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  And the answer is, they don't. They do it a little bit. I mean, do you see some displacement? But to a remarkable extent.

• 25:40Chuck Nice?

  Criminals are lazy.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Or, they're both lazy.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Block away, forget it. You keep your wallet.

• 25:47Chuck Nice?

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

• 25:50Speaker 02

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

• 25:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More than, more than the individual.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. So, the famous work on this was done, I think, for the first time in Seattle. And they, and it took, it's a very simple thing, but no one did it for the longest time, which was to overlay crime data on a map, right? No one had ever done it in a systematic way. And when they finally started doing this, the guy did this, a guy named Weisberg, David Weisberg, what they discovered is this pattern that like, there's like, look at the map, he's, I started in Seattle, you look at the map of Seattle, there's like... Fifteen hotspots in Seattle where a huge proportion, a hotspot is a block, a huge proportion of violent crime is happening at any given moment. So then they say, okay, what happens when we look at next year's data? Do the spots move? They don't move.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  What happens if you look five years later? Do the spots move? They don't move. Spots aren't moving. It's, and I don't, no one can, no one has a kind of ultimately satisfactory answer for this because you would think that this would be random.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 26:58Speaker 02

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

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 27:51Speaker 02

  I have confidence that there will always be problems for me to write about and you'll always just question. And you fix it in one place and then you move and then it gets, it goes, goes bad again.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those spots move.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Those, those spots move. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, what's interesting about, if I can, can I rant about criminology? My favorite, I love criminology so much. It's such a fascinating field. So much has happened in the last generation in terms of our understanding of crime. It's just like, and that's another reason I wanted to write this book is that writing about crime. In the nineteen, excuse me, in the nineteen nineties compared with writing about crime today, it's, it is literally, it's like writing about physics before Einstein and writing about physics afterwards.

• 28:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 28:33Speaker 02

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

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Constantly.

• 28:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not necessary, but I welcome it. Oh, you like it.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Just improving his comfort level.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His house has been softened.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Every now and then, I just think everything is just being frack, it's been coming through of the prism of physics. So I have to kind of.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is part of what leads you to this update or this, this sequel.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the analysis is renewed in ways that.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Is really, you have to, I had originally thought I was just going to do a revised edition of the original tipping point for, on its anniversary. And I realized you can't revise something that's rooted in the, our understanding from 25 years ago. You just can't, you gotta start over again.

• 29:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, think about it. Oh, do you? When, when you see it coming, it's too late. Ah, there you go. So the anticipation of a tipping point, where are we in that world of analysis of phenomena, tipping phenomena? Cause it's not, what use is it to just know everything about it after the fact, you know?

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you can't prevent it from happening again.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Let's imagine, let's use as our example, COVID, December of, and November of 2019. We have these reports coming out of Wuhan. But let's, let's do another version of that and say that we have vastly improved surveillance where somebody is, is regularly sampling, um, you know, the spread of the, of, uh, people who are infected. And we're monitoring the spread of the virus a little more closely than we are now. Could we kind of run that data through of, you know, a, an advanced algorithm and say?

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Absence some intervention, this thing blows up in March of.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a tipping point.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  That's great. Yeah, yeah. I think you you'd have to.

• 30:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 30:29Speaker 02

  But they never ever have the resources. We only give them the resources after the fact. After the fact, right. If you were to build a really effective surveillance system, I mean, we should be doing this right now with this whole avian flu thing, which is quite terrifying, to be honest. I would just like to do a little experiment where we go for five years and we give the epidemiologists everything they want. We just say, what do you want? If they totaled up, this is what's so hilarious to me about science funding in this country. The numbers are so tiny. Like, the entire budget of NIH is like forty billion. Not for long. Yeah, not for long.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  I if if somebody, if they you could slip it past Congress, they could add a zero and slip it past Congress and no one would notice. No one would know. They should just add a zero and see if anyone knows. See if it happens. Forty billion in the grand scheme of things. Yeah. It's like, and like, that's what they're arguing over. So the epidemiologists, if you added up everything they wanted, it literally, it would be in the millions, I'm sure.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We call it budget dust. That's what we call it.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Really?

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Small enough to barely be noticed. You'd put it in there, budget dust.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Nice. You've played that game?

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We say a lot with with NASA, there are programs you want to put in. NASA has a budget right now.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But NIH used to be less than NASA, if memory serves, and now they're higher than NASA. Uh, NASA is between twenty five and thirty billion.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But NASA does very visible things for that, with the space station and the James Webb Space Telescope and rovers and very visible, and we're going back to the moon, so.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  A lot of public recognition with NASA, too.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. And so, but you're absolutely right. When you look at the full budget of the country, we're talking about nothing.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  It is.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So so you want to be the champion of the epidemiologists. This is cool.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  I think it'd be, I mean, because the consequences. I think it'd be great. Are the economic consequences of another pandemic. We know what we're talking about, trillions of dollars.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trillions.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  So like, it seems like a really, really, really.

• 32:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An insurance policy, if you have to take.

• 32:23Speaker 02

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

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't that what we're already trying to do with the anticipated flu vaccines each year? They go to the southern hemisphere or Australia.

• 32:52Chuck Nice?

  They see where it is.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  They identify.

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our seasons.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You know where they they make them? Just across the river. You ever been there?

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In

• 33:01Speaker 02

  In near Nyack. Like, we could drive 20 minutes from here. They don't let you in, but they have, you know, it's this cra- it's this totally crazy thing. Because they're like growing them in like

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're growing what?

• 33:12Speaker 02

  They're growing, they grow the virus. They they find the flu virus. They they pick a strain. And it's a big strain picking conference every year and like, I think it's more than once a year. I think it's in Rock

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Years ago, when I was at the Washington Post, I think I went, I went to one of those meetings where it's a big, they they huddle and they have all of, everyone makes the case for one strain over another. Which one do we think is going to win out? And then they, that's the one, because you need a lead time. It takes a long time to make the virus. So you got to, you're picking quite early. And this is another area where you could say, does AI and things like that, does that improve our, does it, A, improve our accuracy? There's an, you know, and they they grade themselves after it's all over. How well did we do? Or can we shrink the, if if we could shrink the time it takes to make the vaccine, then we can pick later and our accuracy will go up.

• 34:12Chuck Nice?

  Go up.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  I mean, hundreds of thousands of lives lie in the balance. These are insanely consequential decisions.

• 34:18Chuck Nice?

  People don't realize that. Just the flu itself, just regular flu influenza.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forget about it.

• 34:22Chuck Nice?

  Still, still somewhere around 45,000 people a year.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Chuck Nice?

  Just popping off because, and COVID, believe it or not, even higher.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:32Chuck Nice?

  Even higher still to this day, you know, and people don't think about it.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  It's nasty, yeah.

• 34:37Chuck Nice?

  It's nasty.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  It is a nasty, but yeah.

• 34:39Chuck Nice?

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

• 35:11Speaker 02

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

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Well, I think we should stop calling vaccines vaccines.

• 36:00Chuck Nice?

  Very good.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  A name facelift?

• 36:02Chuck Nice?

  Jennifer.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Call it Jennifer.

• 36:04Chuck Nice?

  No, think about, I'll go get me some Jennifer.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Imagine if it was, it could easily be something that you sniff, right? Could be nasal.

• 36:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  And if, and suppose we just said, and we didn't call it a vaccine, we just called it a.

• 36:21Chuck Nice?

  Cocaine. He says something, you sniff. I figure people like cocaine.

• 36:26Speaker 02

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

• 36:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:36Speaker 02

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

• 36:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:40Speaker 02

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

• 36:58Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. I agree 100% because there are a certain amount of people every year in this country who take an aspirin, or an NSAID, or acetaminophen, and they die. Okay? But you don't hear about that because that's just part of the risk. All right? And nobody says, "Well, I would never take that because it's not safe," or whatever, you know? But stick a needle in their arm and they're just like, "It's so invasive. I'm putting something in you." Well, you're putting something in you every time you breathe in. You're putting something in you every time you swallow something. You're putting something in you every time you eat. You're always putting something in you, but for some reason, the needle just seems so invasive.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is. So many of our, our, our kind of myths about things that are scary are about some, something getting inside of us, you know? And that's...

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe that's why the original Alien movie was so potent.

• 37:46Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yeah, the little snake man that popped out your, yeah, your stomach. Yeah, that's, yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  The beast in me, yeah.

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Well, so this is a really interesting broader question, which is, what is the right amount of any kind of...

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Specialist in society. So I don't know, we don't know whether we have the right amount of epidemiologists, and the only way to find out is to conduct an experiment like

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An epidemiological experiment.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  An epidemiological experiment, which is, let's double the number.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very meta, right, okay.

• 38:49Speaker 02

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

• 39:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Post-Second World War?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Post-Second World War, yeah. Where we, what do we do? You know, we increase the number of English professors by some extraordinary number, right?

• 39:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't know that.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  We've done this experiment.

• 39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't know that.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  We've increased the number of plastic surgeons in America over the last. So periodically we do radically, you know, so the number of soldiers in the First World War was, you know, ratcheted up overnight.

• 39:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 39:42Speaker 02

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

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it might be that the future is not the absence of a devastating virus, it's our capacity to handle it when it comes up.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would solve the problem just as much as having a perfect antiviral serum that would be anti every virus, right? That's the dream.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  That's the, yeah.

• 40:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, this is, this idea of building, the economists, you know, talk endlessly about state capacity, which is something distinct from knowledge or resources, which is your ability to act on

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Information.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Information and what you, I think if we focused heavily on state capacity, my favorite state capacity example would be, in COVID, the best detectors of COVID were dogs by far, by far.

• 40:43Chuck Nice?

  Smelling?

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:45Chuck Nice?

  Sense of smell?

• 40:45Speaker 02

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

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They see smell.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  They see smell. So a good state capacity, uh, preparation for the next pandemic is to, uh, breed tons and tons and tons of talks. My favorite thing, just a giant, like a kind of a strategic canine, you know, uh,

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unit.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Uh, reserve.

• 41:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  We'll put it out in Oklahoma. We'll have like 10,000 German Shepherds and then the next.

• 41:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're all sniffing your butt in your crotch.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  But imagine, no, because you can roll these guys out instantly.

• 41:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do they find prostate cancer?

• 41:47Speaker 02

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

• 42:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're smelling the prostate cancer.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  The cancer. Yes.

• 42:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just by you walking by them.

• 42:05Speaker 02

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

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We get that actually every morning. There's a line every morning.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  So the, you take the dog, the dog literally, you just line them up.

• 42:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Goes down the line.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  He just runs down the line. And if you have COVID, he stops.

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When he barks at you and you're just like, man, that's a racist dog, man. That dog is racist. I don't have COVID.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  It's, they're astonishingly good at this.

• 42:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  State capacity. I want the strategic puppy reserve is a thing that I think this country needs.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Strategic puppy reserve.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Strategic puppy.

• 42:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now that would work. That would get funded like that.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  That would get funded in a second.

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the puppy looks your face, you don't have COVID.

• 42:48Speaker 02

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

• 43:18Chuck Nice?

  They were able to identify COVID very easily.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  In the prison population.

• 43:22Chuck Nice?

  There were a lot of dog robberies that started happening.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  No, no, think about it.

• 43:26Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm joking.

• 43:27Speaker 02

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

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 43:40Speaker 02

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

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's right. That's how I want to have that.

• 43:48Speaker 02

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

• 43:53Chuck Nice?

  You can't grab a machine by the ears and go, who's it?

• 43:58Speaker 02

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

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can put ears on the machine.

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 44:03Speaker 02

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

• 44:07Chuck Nice?

  I would take that in a second.

• 44:09Speaker 02

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

• 44:20Chuck Nice?

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

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, German shepherds never like black people.

• 44:28Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  We can use.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All those dogs in, in the civil rights movement, they were all German shepherds.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we need a different species for that.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, we can get something more congenial.

• 44:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, labradoodle.

• 44:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or pomeranian.

• 44:49Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Malcolm, your podcast.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, this is Pushkin Industries, I think it's called.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're a co-founder of that?

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool. And I've enjoyed those that I've listened to. I'm way behind on the total. They're not weekly, because they're very highly produced.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's two, yeah.

• 45:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they're very highly produced. And that's, I think, a very strong point for them. And so this has become your main avocation now, right?

• 45:16Speaker 02

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

• 45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's called, and the podcast is called?

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Revisionist History is my podcast, and we have many others at Pushkin, but that's still what I focus on.

• 45:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you reanalyze it.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's the premise.

• 45:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Journalistically.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is the premise.

• 45:37Chuck Nice?

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

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Hmm, we did an episode, uh, four episodes on what was wrong with The Little Mermaid and how to fix it.

• 45:46Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I love it.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the movie?

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or with the?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  With the Disney movie.

• 45:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Disney movie, not the original fairy tale?

• 45:54Speaker 02

  No, with the Disney version.

• 45:55Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I love it.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  And, uh.

• 45:58Chuck Nice?

  Can't wait to listen to that.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  It was, it went on forever.

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Four episodes.

• 46:01Chuck Nice?

  Four episodes.

• 46:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So your episodes lasted longer than the movie itself?

• 46:04Speaker 02

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

• 46:08Chuck Nice?

  Malcolm, why do you do these to me, Malcolm?

• 46:11Speaker 02

  We had, it was, you know, because it was, um, among the many problems is that, uh.

• 46:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And plus Ursula was like this.

• 46:19Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah, I forgot about Ursula.

• 46:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, my daughter was, my daughter was like a social justice warrior, studied.

• 46:25Chuck Nice?

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

• 46:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was he lobster or was he a hermit crab?

• 46:35Speaker 02

  The idea that you can't find someone, a Jamaican, to play that role, it just offends me.

• 46:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 46:38Speaker 02

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

• 46:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  We're gonna have someone faking a Jamaican accent?

• 46:44Chuck Nice?

  That's so true.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  It's just, it was embarrassing.

• 46:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you could, you could have at least got Shaggy.

• 46:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Like, it was a couple of years ago now, three, four years ago.

• 46:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nonetheless, that's, is that 20 years after the movie came out? Would you have had? And others had the mindset to offer that level of critique at the time? Or was society not yet progressively moved to even have the capacity to think that way?

• 47:18Speaker 02

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

• 47:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because otherwise it's presentism, right?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  No, I don't think it was presentism. We had two issues, we had several issues. One issue was, we had an issue with the way the contract law was represented in the third act. And that was as true 20 years ago as it was today. And secondly, we had an issue with the idea that.

• 47:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 47:42Speaker 02

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

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 48:05Speaker 02

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

• 48:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 48:14Speaker 02

  No, I wasn't doing it.

• 48:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but even, I'm just saying.

• 48:18Speaker 02

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

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 48:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh, everything, just everything, because we're regressing now.

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is a regressive force.

• 48:32Chuck Nice?

  There's a regressive force in the nation.

• 48:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying.

• 48:34Speaker 02

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

• 48:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I just got one for you, alright? I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 48:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again, okay? Recently. And it's 50 years old. I'm looking at the greeting plaza for the aliens. 100% of, there's 200 people there.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 49:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were just sort of there.

• 49:25Chuck Nice?

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

• 49:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my only point is when I saw the film, Didn't occur. I had no Right. place to stand to even make that observation. Yeah. And now it's just plainfully obvious. And so it's a celebration of progressive change in our understanding of the world and of each other, how we treat each other. And so I try not to go back and criticize at a time when I know I would have just been in the mix. This is a whole new shell you just bought up.

• 49:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuff that I just took for granted. Yeah, yeah, man. Malcolm, this has been delightful. We should, we need you more often than just three times in 15 years. I've enjoyed myself. Thank you, guys. Let me see if I can top this off with a cosmic perspective.

• 50:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I can't.

• 50:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Malcolm is all about perspective. On life, on the past, on the future, on the role science plays in informing those perspectives. So Malcolm, I have nothing to add. The first time you've ever uttered those words and I'm pleased it was in my presence. This has been StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. And Malcolm, you come back again, all right? I will. All right, as always, I bid you to keep looking up.