Revenge of The Tipping Point with Malcolm Gladwell

Chuck, love me some Malcolm Gladwell.

Absolutely.

And he once again delivered.

Covered it all.

Covered all, sharing with us deep insights.

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

We got it all.

Coming up on StarTalk.

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

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

You’re a personal astrophysicist.

I’m here with Chuck Nice.

Chuck it, baby.

Hey, Neil.

Yeah.

What’s happening?

We got a really cool guest today.

Oh, one of the coolest.

The coolest ever.

Yeah, I mean, for our nerd audience.

For our nerd audience, Malcolm Gladwell.

Welcome back to StarTalk.

Thank you, thank you.

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

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

We had you on one of our live StarTalk Lives on stage as well.

Yeah, very good.

Very cool.

And this man can’t stop writing bestselling books.

What’s your problem?

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 best seller’s on the bed.

How did this happen?

Oh, I wish.

Not again.

I wish.

It’s quality vomit, that’s what you’re saying.

I’m looking at the list here, Blink, we all remember Blink.

Of course.

What The Dog Saw, I think I missed that one.

Goliath, Outliers, and The Tipping Point, those were big ones.

Tipping Point’s a big, big one.

And of course, right now, you’ve got Revenge of The Tipping Point, and this like, Tipping Point, the sequel, is this the?

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

Is Marvel, the Marvel Universe getting to you?

Okay.

Well, the question is, which revenge am I referring to?

There’s a number of revenges.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

And I think I was, I think I was thinking of Revenge of The Pink Panther, which dates me.

Terribly dates me.

Okay, Revenge of The Pink Panther.

And you’re not even old enough.

Revenge of The Nerds, I would have gone with.

Revenge of The Nerds is a good one.

Yeah, that’s a big revenge.

Pink Panther is a little before.

So if we characterize you, I’ve got some notes here, say that you unravel strange human phenomena and reveal the science and the psychology that underpins that conduct.

So Malcolm, remind us, it’s been a few years since the original Tipping Point, remind us of the thesis of that book.

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.

Oh, so you come to this as a journalist, that’s your fundamental chops.

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

Let me just remind people, epidemiology, the study of-

Of how epidemics behave.

Yeah, epidemics and how they spread and how they are contained or even-

How we infect each other.

How we infect each other.

That’s basically epidemic.

In like so many scientific professions, there are certain moments when epidemiologists matter and there are certain moments when we forget about them and they have conversations among themselves.

And HIV was one of those occasions when suddenly they seemed, you know, they were part of the cultural conversation.

COVID was another, all of a sudden we heard from these people who we don’t 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, Bobes Library one day.

I used to go there and hang out in the stacks and read academic journals at random.

That is so geeky of you.

It’s so geeky.

It is very geeky.

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

And one day, I remember this moment, I was in the HM1 aisle and I was reading back issues.

As one would be.

As one would be.

Neil, don’t tell me you haven’t done this, because you have.

Go on, keep going.

By the way, I’m a HM2 guy myself.

And I was reading 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.

Do they spread in the same way?

What date was that article?

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

Oh, okay, so it was, it was, it was a modern article.

Modern, it wasn’t like the 1800s or anything.

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

Yeah, revolutionary.

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

As a social overlay.

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

And how you might track that and understand it.

So if it began there, I’m very impressed by that.

Well, what did it, I mean, it’s interesting.

Did it begin there?

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

These would be mathematical techniques, wouldn’t they?

Yes, mathematical techniques.

And one of the things he showed, for example, was that when the percentage of professionals, so people with higher education, some fell below a certain critical threshold, social problems exploded.

I thought it was incredibly interesting.

Yes.

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

A tipping point.

A tipping point.

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

Precipitously.

Precipitously in the 90s.

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

Of course.

Everyone wants to take credit.

And it wasn’t just New York City, it was the whole country.

Although later it was just New York City.

This is interesting because there’s two New York City crime declines.

Keep going here.

But no one can explain why, and I wanted to understand it conceptually, and it struck me when I read that article that this was the conceptual explanation, that crime was a contagious phenomenon, and it had just tipped in the way that epidemics often tip, and that was the genesis of that book, The Tipping Point.

Wow, that’s fascinating.

It all begins in the stacks of an academic library.

I’m just playing to you right now, Neil.

Okay, no, we’re good, we’re good.

Now, one of your stories, if I remember the book, you talk about Big Bird.

I have a long thing on Sesame Street, too long in retrospect, but I went back to reread that, and I was like, what was I doing?

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

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

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

We need that.

Who’s thinking this?

Right?

Because everybody who wrote Sesame Street was high as hell.

They were smoking some good stuff.

So am I remembering that correctly with Big Bird?

Well, there I was interested in the dimension of, an important dimension in understanding contagion is the duration of your kind of contagious window.

That, you know, if COVID had basically a 48-hour window when we were highly contagious before the antibody response kicked in.

If that infectious window is 24 hours, the virus could be exactly the same in every other dimension and its ability to spread would be cut in half.

Greatly diminished, even more than half.

The longer the incubation period, the more effect of the virus will be.

Exactly.

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?

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.

Interesting.

The super spreaders.

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-

Particles in the air.

Yeah, the droplets that come out of your mouth when you speak that, and when you have COVID, is it virus particles in each aerosol?

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.

Absolutely.

Because the virus is microscopic.

The virus is much smaller, but the virus is still carried, not only by the air but by the…

But the virus can’t fly by itself.

No, that’s what I’m saying.

It’s carried and that’s what the…

It’s carried in the…

In the droplet.

But when you examine on large groups of people, what you discover is that 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.

In fact, you almost certainly don’t.

And do we have a physiological reason why the people’s production of aerosols was so high?

Like are they big mouth people?

Do they have large lungs?

Is it that they talk loud or they…

We’re still figuring this out.

The hypotheses on the table now, there’s one guy, a guy named Edwards at Harvard, who thinks that it’s correlated with obesity and age.

Interesting.

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 was a small group of people who study the production of aerosols across a variety of, you know, like they’re really interested in automobile emissions or they’re really interested in air pollution or they’re interested in when you fry bacon, what comes off the bacon, you know, when you smell it, what are you smelling, 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.

Right.

They’re not involved 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 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.

It is very difficult.

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

But also, there’s a disciplinary thing here.

It’s very hard to get the attention of a public health or a biologist in a time of crisis to what a chemist is saying.

They’re not, at the dawn of COVID, you’re not reading, you’re not saying, oh, the chemists have the answer.

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

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

Because we call that hindsight.

Yes.

So this is the law of the few, and you have a third law.

What is that?

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 and 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.

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

What’s interesting about this.

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

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.

It’s just different.

So there are ways in which Buffalo is better than Boulder and the ways in which Boulder is better than Buffalo.

And it has nothing to do with, it may be the case, this can be true even if the cardiologists of Boulder and Buffalo attended the same medical schools.

Interesting.

This is quite, this is apart from differences in training.

You know, when you go and they put up, when they’re doing a catheter in America, when you have a cardiac catheter, for the longest time, we put in catheters in your thigh.

Right.

Thigh was the standard.

In Buffalo, To the artery, the veins that go up.

In Buffalo, they put it in through the wrist.

Okay.

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.

So he was closer to the source.

He’s in the hood.

It’s spread from Montreal to Toronto, and then Toronto down to Buffalo, because there’s a lot of back and forth between cardiologists.

I cannot sit here 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 the awareness of doctors.

That’s the future of civilization.

It’s gonna be a uniform protocol that is established.

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 gonna put it in through your wrist, not sure.

And the delay is only partially caused by a lack of knowledge.

It requires a doctor, the person putting in the catheter to get extra training.

And if everyone around you in Buffalo is doing the wrist, you do the wrist, otherwise, you’re like a fool, right?

But in Boulder, if they’re all doing the thigh, you do the thigh.

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

Wow, you just don’t want doctors.

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 gonna do, we’re gonna actually go in through the thigh.

And by that, I mean the artery that will let doctors bleed out.

What’s that line from Shakespeare, first kill all the lawyers, now first kill all the doctors?

That’s the Tyson description.

That’s not what I said.

The AI is not gonna develop the new method.

Somebody has to do that, and then it’s disseminated instantly and performed possibly by robotic surgeons.

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

That’s well put.

When he said there’s an obesity epidemic, I said, no, you can’t catch fat from people, so why are you calling it an epidemic?

I was very resistant at the time.

I’m much more relaxed about it.

I was gonna say that because based on what we’ve just been discussing, you can actually catch fat from people because what happens is the sociological, I’ll say, pressures that lead to obesity that are resident in a particular sub-society, people will actually join in that behavior.

That behavior then in turn leads to obesity, so you have indeed caught fat.

Caught fat.

If you want to go to a private girl school on the upper east side of Manhattan, and then go to a rural high school in Alabama, and tell me there isn’t a profound difference in the cultural circumstances that drive obesity.

Right, in what?

Yeah, I’m just saying, I warmed up to it.

When I first heard it, I was thinking biologically, not culturally, and so I was resistant to using it every in that way.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But I’ve softened up over time.

So take me into the new book.

What are the new perspectives you’re bringing to the table?

The, I was much more taken by the dynamics of epidemics.

In other words, the law of the few, for example.

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 big group of us.

And now I realize, oh, no, no, no.

It’s super specific.

And it’s really the number of people who drive epidemics are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the population.

And we need to, our expectation that all of us are somehow all lumped in the middle and we all sort of equally contribute to these things is just wrong.

I’m much more fascinated and mystified by patterns of environmental contagion than I was in the first book.

I just, I don’t really understand.

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 these super.

Oh, aerosol.

Oh, aerosol.

Yeah, they call them super emitters.

Super emitters.

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

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.

It was like, it was a disease just in male homosexuals.

So therefore, people don’t react rationally to that kind of information.

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

Well, this is, you’re putting your finger on an extremely important point.

I would say that you’re absolutely right, that there are as many troubling outcomes from this as there are positive outcomes.

And the simple answer is, we have to start the conversation now.

Exactly.

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

Not a good track record.

The track record is so bad, right on up through eugenics and Nazism.

It is so bad, it may be that we just have to treat everybody equally, knowing that that treatment is excessive for some but just right for others.

But then no one gets differently treated.

That may be the only solution.

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.

I think we need that.

I got it.

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

You see, that was the whole problem, is that the people were like, I don’t wanna 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.

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

I’m just making this simple point, that in a society where we want everyone to be treated equally under the law, to have a law that applies only to some people, you must wear a mask and the rest of you don’t have to.

My experience with our species tells me that will not work.

And so you just make the rule for everyone.

And that’s it.

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

Okay.

One of the things that criminologists have observed is that these same patterns of extreme variation happen in violent crime.

Yes.

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

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 various, or there’s a-

There are 10 hotspots.

Yeah, there’s a street corner on the, you know, on York and 91st, that’s problematic.

So the rational response to that is to say, oh, we don’t need police, the same distribution of police in every precinct in the city.

What we should be doing, and this is what the NYPD did, and that caused the second great decline, crime decline in New York, which was they said, okay, we’re just 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 am sure that people anticipated the very argument that you’re making, saying people are going to object to that.

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, what people were, I think, were able to realize was that bringing the overall crime rate in the city down was a, made that price worth paying.

That you could convince them by showing them, oh, this is going to make the whole city a better place for all of us.

You can give up your 10 cops.

Why didn’t the crime just move to another block?

It was like pornography in Times Square.

You know, you knock it out here, then it went to Seventh Avenue to Eighth Avenue to Tenth Avenue.

Then it went on the internet, and then everybody’s gone.

Yeah, right.

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

No, this was, so this is a fascinating area of criminology.

This is one of the great insights of the last generation of criminological work.

After they made this observation, they then went to this very question, displacement as it’s called in criminology, which is, okay, if I send 10 cops to the corner of York Avenue in 91st, do the bad guys just move to 93rd?

93rd, 95th.

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.

Criminals are lazy.

It’s out there.

Or they’re both lazy.

A block away, bring it here.

You keep your wallet.

God, dude, there’s cops.

Let’s do it again tomorrow.

No, you’re right.

The word they would use is that criminology is rooted in place.

In other words, what?

More than the individual.

Oh, absolutely.

So the famous work on this was done, I think, for the first time in Seattle.

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 who did it is a guy named Wisebird, David Wisebird.

What they discovered is this pattern that like, there’s like, look at the map, I started in Seattle, you look at the map of Seattle, there’s like 15 hotspots in Seattle, where a huge proportion, a hotspot is a block, a huge proportion of violent crime is happening at any given moment.

So then they say, okay, what happens when we look at next year’s data?

Do the spots move?

They don’t move.

What happens if we 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, 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 drive through the worst neighborhoods in West Baltimore, and she would say, this block, no crime.

This block, no crime.

This block, the crime here for 15 years.

Next block, no crime.

Next block, it’s the strangest thing.

Wow.

It really is the strangest thing.

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 going on there?

I have confidence that there will always be problems for me to write about, Neil.

It’s just a question.

And you fix it in one place and then you move and then it goes bad again.

Those spots move.

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, I mean, that’s another reason I wanted to write this book is that writing about crime in the 1990s, compared with writing about crime today, it is literally, it’s like writing about physics before Einstein and writing about physics afterwards.

Okay.

Hence, you’re-

Don’t you see it?

Don’t you like the way I’m constantly appealing to you?

Yes, constantly appealing to you.

Not necessary, but I welcome it.

No, you like it.

Just improving his comfort level.

Yeah, it’s just us.

His councilman softened.

I just think everything is just being, it’s really coming through the prism of physics, so I have to kind of…

So, this is part of what leads you to this update or this sequel, because the analysis is renewed in ways that-

Is really, you have to, I had originally thought I was just going to do a revised edition of the original Tipping Point on its anniversary, and I realized you can’t revise something that’s rooted in our understanding from 25 years ago.

You just can’t, you gotta start over again.

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

Yeah.

I mean, think about it.

Oh, do you?

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, of tipping phenomena?

Because it’s not, what use is it to just know everything about it after the fact, you know, if you can’t prevent it from happening again.

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 do another version of that and say that we have vastly improved surveillance, where somebody is regularly sampling, you know, the spread of the 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, you know, an advanced algorithm and say, absent some intervention, this thing blows up in March of.

That would be a tipping point.

That’s great, yeah.

I think you’d have to.

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

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.

The entire budget of NIH is like $40 billion.

Not for long.

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 no one knows.

See if it happens.

$400 billion in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah.

It’s like, and 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.

It’s called budget dust.

That’s what we call it.

Really?

Small enough to barely be noticed.

You put it in a budget dust.

Nice.

You’ve played that game?

We say a lot with NASA.

There are programs you want to put in.

NASA has a budget right now.

NIH used to be less than NASA if memory serves, and now they’re higher than NASA.

NASA is between $25 and $30 billion.

But NASA does very visible things for that, with the Space Station and the James Webb Space Telescope and rovers and very visible.

And we’re going back to the moon.

A lot of public recognition with NASA, too.

That’s right, but you’re absolutely right.

When you look at the full budget of the country, we’re talking about nothing.

It is.

So you want to be the champion of the epidemiologist.

This is cool.

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 they, we’re talking about in trillions of dollars, right?

So like, it seems like a really, really, really-

Insurance policy.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It’s a minor insurance policy.

And someone told me that the total amount of money would cost every year to permanently protect us, prepare us for any future viral outbreak is something like 25 billion a year.

In other words, they could do it.

They could have vaccines at the ready for anything.

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.

They see where it is.

And they identify our seasons.

Absolutely.

Do you know where they make them just across the river?

Have you ever been there?

In near Nyack.

Like we could drive 20 minutes from here and they don’t let you in.

But they have, you know, it’s this totally crazy thing.

They’re like growing them in like…

Growing what?

They grow the virus.

They find the flu virus.

They pick a strain, right?

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 Rockville.

Where are you going, honey?

I’m going strain picking.

They find me some viruses that will show up later.

Years ago, when I was at the Washington Post, I think I went to one of those meetings where it’s a big, they huddle and they have all of, everyone makes the case for one strain over another.

Which one do we think is going to win out?

And then they, that’s the one, because you need 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?

And they grade themselves after it’s all over.

How well do we do?

Or can we shrink the, if we could shrink the time it takes to make the vaccine, then we can pick later and our accuracy will go up.

But I mean, hundreds of thousands of lives lie in the balance.

These are the same the consequential decision.

If you don’t realize that just the flu itself, just regular flu, influenza.

Oh, forget about it.

Still, somewhere around 45,000 people a year, just popping off because, and COVID, believe it or not, even higher.

Even higher, still, to this day, and people don’t think about it.

Is it nasty?

Yeah, it’s nasty.

It is a nasty bug.

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.

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 see enormous numbers of amounts of virus coming from very, very, very specific locations.

It wasn’t uniformly spread.

It was like, I’ve forgotten.

There’s some incredible story.

One of these aerosols told me about that kind of analysis.

But no, I think people need to get over it.

I don’t understand why there’s 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?

Well, I think we should stop calling vaccines, vaccines.

Very good.

A name facelift?

Jennifer.

Call it Jennifer.

No, think about-

I’m going to give me some Jennifer.

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

Could be nasal.

Yes.

And if, and suppose we just said, and we didn’t call it a vaccine, we just called it a-

Cocaine.

Cocaine.

He says something, you sniff.

I figure people like cocaine.

Something, yeah, that would appeal.

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

You say, just sniff this to ward off COVID.

How hard is that?

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.

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 a 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.

So many of our kind of myths about things that are scary are about something getting inside of us.

And that’s why the original alien movie was so potent.

Right.

Yeah, the little snake man that popped out of your stomach.

The beast in me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

Well, so this is a really interesting, broader question, which is, what is the right amount of any kind of specialist in society?

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

An epidemiological experiment.

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

That’s very meta, right?

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-

Post-Second World War.

Post-Second World War, yeah.

Where we, what do we do?

We increased the number of English professors by some extraordinary number, right?

Didn’t know that.

We’ve done this experiment.

Didn’t know that.

We’ve increased the number of plastic surgeons in America over the last.

So periodically we do radically, you know, so the number of soldiers in the First World War was, you know, ratcheted up overnight.

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.

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.

So it might be that the future is not the absence of a devastating virus.

It’s our capacity to handle it when it comes up.

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

That’s the dream.

That’s the, yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

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

By far.

Smelling?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sense of smell.

I went, I did this episode of my podcast, we went out to Alabama where they train COVID sniffing dogs.

The dogs outperform every other test of COVID.

Cause dogs, we’ve known for a long time that dogs are better than, they can detect colon cancer better than a colonoscopy.

They can detect prostate cancer better than that antigen test.

They’re just really good.

There is something distinctive about-

They see smell.

They see smell.

So a good state capacity preparation for the next pandemic is to breed tons and tons and tons of dogs.

It’s my favorite thing.

It’s like just a giant, like a kind of a strategic canine, you know, unit, reserve.

Okay.

We’ll put it out in Oklahoma.

We’ll have like 10,000 German shepherds and then the next-

They’re all sniffing your butt and your crotch.

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

How do they find prostate cancer?

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

The dogs are like amazing.

They’re smelling the prostate cancer just by you walking by them.

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-

We get that actually every morning.

There’s a line every morning.

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

Goes down the line.

He just runs down the line.

And if you have COVID, he stops.

When he barks at you and you’re just like, man, that’s a racist dog, man.

The dog is racist.

I don’t have COVID.

They’re astonishingly good at this.

Wow.

State capacity.

I want the Strategic Puppy Reserve is the thing that I think this country needs to do.

Strategic Puppy Reserve.

Now that would work.

That would get funded like that.

That would get funded in a second.

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

There was one, they sadly stopped doing it, but in Alabama, they had the brilliant idea of having prisoners breed dogs for testing purposes.

And it turned out to be the most extraordinary, it transformed the prison community in a way that they completely, I mean, it turns out bringing dogs into that kind of, if you think about it, it makes sense, but into that environment just transformed the, it was a sort of means for rehabilitation of the prisoners.

They were able to identify COVID very easily.

In the prison population.

But somehow there were a lot of dog robberies that started happening.

No, no, no, think about it.

No, I’m joking.

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

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

Well, they’re trying, they’re actually using, they’re doing exactly that.

They’re moving from the dogs back to the machine now.

Yes, that’s right.

That’s how I want to add that.

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?

You can’t grab a machine by the ears and go, who’s a goozy goo, who’s a goozy goo.

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

You can put ears on the machine.

Oh, okay.

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

I would take that in a second.

That’s such an upgrade.

It literally should be a dog.

You should walk in to your whatever the, and there should be a German Shepherd there or a lab, and you walk in, he sniffs you and then you go home.

I don’t know about German Shepherd though.

They’re a little intimidating.

Just like, you will let me sniff you now.

Plus German Shepherds never liked black people.

Exactly.

Where are your papers?

We can use.

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

That’s right.

So we need a different species.

Yeah, we can get something more congenial.

Labrador.

Or Pomeranian.

Exactly.

So Malcolm, your podcast, this is Pushkin Industries, I think it’s called, and you’re co-founder of that?

Yeah.

Cool.

And I’ve enjoyed those that I’ve listened to.

I’m just way behind on the total.

They’re not weekly, because they’re very highly produced.

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?

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

And the podcast is called?

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

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

Exactly.

That’s the premise.

Journalistically.

That’s the premise.

That’s great.

And what’s your favorite episode?

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

Oh, I love it.

With the movie?

Yes.

Or with the Disney movie.

Disney movie, not the original fairy tale.

No, with the Disney version.

Oh, I love it.

Can’t wait to listen to that.

It went on forever.

Four episodes.

So your episode lasted longer than the movie itself.

We broke it down, we broke it down.

We pulled in experts from all sides.

Why do you do these to me, Malcolm?

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

And plus Ursula was like this.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Ursula.

My daughter was like a social justice warrior, studied.

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

Was he lobster or was he a hermit crab?

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

Yeah, exactly.

Like we’re everywhere.

Come on.

We’re like, this is not like, not that hard.

You’re gonna have someone faking a Jamaican accent?

That’s so true.

It’s just, it was embarrassing.

Yeah, you could have at least got Shaggy.

But here’s the question, I will end with this.

When did that post, those four episodes?

Like, it was a couple years ago now.

Okay, 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?

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

Because otherwise it’s presentism, right?

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 this-

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

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.

I’m sorry, 20 years ago, that’s as egregious as it is today.

Right, but nor is that though, nor is that uniquely applied to the little mermaid.

That’s a recurring-

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

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

No, it wasn’t doing it.

No, but even if, I’m just saying-

No, I know what you’re saying.

I know what you’re saying.

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?

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

There is a regressive force.

There’s a regressive force in the nation, right?

I’m just saying-

I don’t know, Neil.

I can’t think of anything that’s happened in the last month.

Stop.

I’m racking my brains right now.

Nothing’s coming to mind.

What about you, Chuck?

So I just got one for you.

I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind again, recently.

And it’s 50 years old.

I’m looking at the greeting plaza for the aliens.

One hundred percent of-

there’s two hundred people there.

One hundred percent 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.

They were just sort of there.

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

So my only point is when I saw the film, I had no place to stand to even make that observation.

And now it’s just plain fully obvious.

And so it’s a celebration of progressive change in our understanding of the world and of each other, how we treat each other.

And so I try not to go back and criticize at a time when I know I would have just been in the mix.

I try not to do that.

This is a whole new show you just bought up.

Stuff that I just took for granted.

Yeah, yeah, man.

Malcolm, this has been delightful.

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.

No, I can’t.

Malcolm is all about perspective on life, on the past, on the future, on the role science plays in informing those perspectives.

So Malcolm, I have nothing to add.

This is 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.

You’re a personal astrophysicist.

Chuck, always good to have you.

Always a pleasure.

Malcolm, you come back again, all right?

I will.

All right.

As always, I bid you to keep looking up.