Neil & Malcolm Gladwell Explore What Shapes Our Society

so this is a fascinating area of criminology this is one of the great insights of the last generation of criminological work if I send 10 cops to the corner do the bad guys just move and the answer is they don't criminals are lazy BR you keep your wallet god dude there's cops let's do it again tomorrow criminology is rooted in place more than the individual oh absolutely cuz you would think that this would be random right it's not random this block no crime this block no crime this block the crime here for like 15 years

it's the strangest thing this is Star Talk Neil degrass Tyson your personal astrophysicist I'm here with Chuck KN Chucky baby hey Neil yeah what's happening we got a really cool guest today one of the coolest the coolest like ever yeah I mean for our nerd audience our nerd audience malcol Gladwell welcome back to start talk 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 we had you on one of our live Stark talk lives on stage as

well yeah very good very cool and this man can't stop writing bestselling books I what's your problem it's an El it's a serious Affliction isn't it huh you just wake up and you're just like oh you vomit and the bestsell on the bed how did this happen I wish not again it's quality vomit that's what you're saying I'm looking at the list here blink we all remember blink What the Dog Saw I think I missed that one uh Goliath outliers Tipping Point those were big ones tipping points a big big on and of course uh

right now uh you've got revenge of the Tipping Point and uh this like Tipping Point the sequel is this the this is yeah this is this is part two is 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 I think I was I think I was thinking of Revenge of the Pink Panther which dates me terribly okay revenge of the Pink Panther Revenge of the Nerds I would have gone with the Nerds is a good one that's a

big Revenge Pink Panthers a little before so let's 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 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 uh covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post oh so you come to this as a journalist that journal chops who

had just been immersed in epidemiology for like a good six years let me just remind people epidemiology you know the study of how epidemics behave yeah yeah epidemics and what how they spread and how they are contained or even how we infect each other how we infect each other how we infect each other that's basically epidemic I mean and like so many um 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 Co 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 epidemiologist 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 uh academic journals at randoms that is so geeky of you it's so geeky it is

very geeky it erect a statue to you for this okay and I one day I remember this moment I was in the uh hm. one aisle okay and I was reading back issues as as one don't tell me you haven't done this because you have go keep going by the way I'm a hm. two guy myself you know um 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 um epidemiological models to to examine um social pathology crime delinquency teenage pregnancy it do they spread in the same way was that article I think it was from the uh uh the article was from the 1980s oh so so it was it was it was a modern article was like the 1800s but at the time he wrote that that was a very novel idea yeah he was literally taking he was L taking the formal principles of disease epidemiology and laying them over as soci that's how I think of the term not specifically

disease but human behavior and how you might track that and understand it so if it began there I'm very impressed by that well what did it I mean it's interesting did it begin there it's 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 um used would be mathematical techniques wouldn't yes mathematical techniques and

one of the things he showed for example was that when the percentage of uh professionals so people with higher education some fell below a certain uh critical threshold social problems exploded I thought 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 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 TI a Tipping Point okay I had just

been this was I I was in the library in New York in 19 this is in 1996 and I just been living through the beginnings of that 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 iously precipitously in the 90s and everyone of course wants to take credit for that everyone want to take credit yeah 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 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 and it had just tipped in the way that epidemics often tip and that was the Genesis of that book Tipping Point wow wow okay that's fascinating it all begins in the stacks of an academic Library this is am I 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 yeah uh you talk about Big Bird 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 what was I doing and then 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 yeah and if I remember correctly you suggested that big bird

which is an absurd element in in Sesame Street when you think about it right you're not walking around say Gee let's get a seven foot yellow bird bird right we need that who's thinking this right right and so because everybody on who wrote Sesame Street was high as hell wo they were smoking some good stuff so so am I am I remembering that correctly with with big bird 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

um contagious window right okay that uh you know if covid had a had a basically a 48h hour window when we were highly contagious before the anybody responds if that if that infectious window is uh 24 hours the ability of the the the the the virus could be exactly the same in every other dimension and its ability to spread would be cut in half or dimin even more than half more than the longer the incubation period the more effective the virus will be exactly so Malcolm this concept of stickiness yeah 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 uh what I call 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 um in the epidemiological community with many people saying that when we look at uh uh contagious um uh viruses you

know we don't see this and now but then Co happened and Co is the kind of er example of uh of asymmetry in an epidemic it is like in a in a room I the most to me the most interesting part of fascinating part to write of my new book was I was talking to all these aerosol experts so these are the guys who study aerosols are the particles in the air yeah the droplets that come out of your mouth when you speak that and when you have covid there virus particles inh aerosol I think

that's the only reason why a mask can work at all because it's it's attached to an aerosol and it stops the aerosol absolutely virus partic the virus is much much smaller but the virus is still carried not only by the airus can't fly by itself no that's what I'm saying it's carried and that's what carried in the in the droplet but when you when you examine on large groups of people what you discover is that the the um there's a a very small number of people whose level of aerosol production is like 10 20 30

40 times greater than the mean the thing about super spreading being a super spreader is you probably don't know that you are right in fact you almost and 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 that they talk loud or they we're still figuring this out the hypotheses on the table now there's one guy guy named Edwards at Harvard who is who thinks that it's correlated with obesity and age interesting but then another a 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 um saliva moves through your um uh throat Canal there's a 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 feel of they're chemists right they're not involved with with um with uh medicine or human biology at all very early on in the pandemic in one of these incredibly obscure aerosol journals a bunch of Aeros solists wrote an an editorial this is like in March of 2020 when they said first of all this thing is Airborne it has to be because it's coming up through aerosols and two you're going to see a really really really asymmetrical distribution of aerosol

production so be aware that 1% of the population is doing all the damage they they told us they gave us a road map in March 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 there's a there's a dis 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 that's dawn of Co you're not reading you're not saying oh the chemists have the answer but even so all I'm saying is we don't have an inventory of every other possible paper that was written that only now we go back and say hey they had Insight we should have listened to them when 99 others that that you didn't listen to you shouldn't have listened to because we call that hindsight hey Star Talk fans I don't know if you know this but the audio version of the podcast actually posts a

week in advance of the video version and you can get that in Spotify and apple podcast and most other podcast Outlets that are out there multiple ways to ingest all that is Cosmic on Star talk so this is the law of the few and then 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 I'm I I I talk about what I call the overstory which is just the idea that the narratives of any Community uh powerfully inform the be the

behavior of the members of that community in a way that we may not be aware of and I 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 um the develop world I mean I mean I give the example of the way that your cardiologist treats you in Buffalo is radically different from the way your cardiologist treats you in Boulder the fact that you might be a better doctor if you went to a better medical school that there

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 treating you and they don't and that's a problem but this this 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 bming in Boulder and buffalo that's not to say that one is worse than the other right it's just different so there are ways in which uh Buffalo is better than Boulder and ways in which Boulder is better

better than Buffalo and it has nothing to do with it may be the this this can be true even if the doc the cardiologist 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 uh and they put a when they're doing a a catheter uh in America when you're a cardiac cath catheter uh for the longest time we put in catheters in your thigh right thigh was the standard in Buffalo to the 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 it's faster it's safer it has better outcome but you have to be 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 in through the wrist through wrist is from Montreal so it's was closer to the source in the hood it's spread from Montreal to Toronto

right and then Toronto down to Buffalo because there's a lot of back and forth between cardiologists I I 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 yeah that's the future of civiliz be a uniform protocol that is established but you but you have to that I mean eventually what happens is bowler eventually catches up and now if you go in if you have a heart attack they're gonna put it in through

your wrist no sure and the the the the the delay is only partially caused by a lack of knowledge it requires a doctor the person putting in the catheter to get extra training and if everyone around you in Buffalo is doing the wrist you do the wrist otherwise you look like a like a fool right interesting but in Boulder if they're all doing the they're all doing the um the th 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 you going doctors going doctor 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 what's that line from Shakespeare I first kill all the lawyers now first kill all the doctors the that's Theon Tyson prescrition 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 right and performed possibly by robotic uh surgeons so it sounds to me like what you're saying is that our influence upon one another is in itself an epidemiological phenomena uh that's well well put yeah when it said there's an obesity epidemic I said no you can't catch fat from people so why are you calling it epidemic I was very resistant at the time I'm much more relaxed about I was going to say because based on what we just been discussing you can actually catch fat from people because what happens is the sociological um I'll

say pressures that lead to obesity that are resident in a particular Subs 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 uh girl school in the upper 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 right yeah I'm just saying I 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' I've softened up over time no so take into the new book what what what is what are the New Perspectives you're bringing to the table the I was much more um uh taken by uh the the the Dynamics of 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 8020 rule there's a you know big group of us and now I realize oh no no no it's super specific specific and it's really the 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 um I'm much more fascinated

and mystified by patterns of environmental um contagion than I was in the first book I just I don't really understand so You' 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 yeah they call them um 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 remember well old enough to remember we are

old enough to remember that it was like it was a disease just in homo male homosexuals so therefore ban you know all 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 that's this is a this you 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 exactly

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 races and track record 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 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 got so for so so I an example here might be if 90 out of 100 people don't need to wear masks because they're not spewing thing it still make everybody wear mask 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 different that's a the freedom call that came later and that was different I'm just making the 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 yeah and so you just make the rule for everyone and that's it well let me give you another example the same phenomenon okay uh one of the things that criminologists have observed is that these same patterns of extreme variation um happen in uh violent crime yes so I look at a map of New York City and 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 Crim

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 spe or there's a there are 10 hotpots 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 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 blah 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 going to make the whole city a better place for all of us you can give up your 10 why didn't the crime just move to another block it was like pornography Time Square you know you you knock it out here then it went to 7th

Avenue to eth Avenue to 10th Avenue right then it went on the internet and everybody's right this is 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 you know York Avenue in 91st do the bad guys just

mooved 93 93rd 95th and the answer is they don't they do in a little bit I mean do you see some displacement but to a remarkable extent criminals are lazy or they're both lazy walk away you keep your wallet God dud there's cops let's do it again tomorrow no you're right uh the word they would use is that criminology is rooted in place in other words more than more than the individual oh absolutely so the famous work on this was done I think for the first time in Seattle and they and it took it's a

very simple thing but no one did it for the longest time which was to Overlay crime data on a map right no one had ever done it in a systematic way and when they finally started doing this the guy did is a guy named Weis bird David Weis bird what they discover is this pattern that like there's like look at the B he I started in Seattle you look at the map of Seattle there's like 15 hotpots in Seattle where a huge proportion a hot spot is a block a huge proportion of violent crime is

happening at any given moment so then they say okay what happens when we look at next year's data did the spots move they don't move what happens if you look five years later do the spots move they don't move spots aren't moving it's and I don't no one can no one has a kind of ultimately satisfactory answer for this because you would think that this would be random right right it's not random it is and they can take you I actually I have been someone took me on a tour of Baltimore a guy who worked

with Weisberg a woman who work with Weisberg we drove around Baltimore for a day and she did this exact thing we we drive through like the worst neighborhoods in West Baltimore and she would say uh this block no crime this block no crime this block been crime here for like 15 years next block no crime next SC 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 cuz 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 I have confidence that there will always be problems for me to write about NE just a question and you fix it in one place and then you move and then it gets go goes goes back those spots move those spots move those SP but no what's interesting about if I can can I rant

about criminology my favorite I love criminology so much it's such a fascinating field so much has happened in the last generation in terms of our understanding of crime it's just like that's another reason I wanted to write this book is that writing about crime in the 19 excuse me in the 1990s compared with writing about crime today it's it is literally it's like writing about physics before Einstein and writing about physics afterwards okay hence you're you see it don't you like the way I constantly did there constant not necessary but I welcome it you like

it just improving his comfort level his count softened every now I just think everything is just being fra it's really coming through a the prism of physics so I have to kind of uh so this is part of what leads you to this update or this this sequel yeah 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 for on its anniversary and I realized you can't revise something that's rooted in the our understandings from

25 years ago you just can't you got to 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 when you see it coming it's too late ah okay so the anticipation a Tipping Point where are we in that world of Anis of phenomena tipping phenomena CU 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 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 IND 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 a you know an advanced algorithm and say absence some intervention this thing blows up in March of that would be a typing Point great yeah yeah I think

you I you'd have to that's what epidemiologists are supposed to be able to do do but they never ever have the resources we only give them the resources after the fact after the fact if you were to build a really effective surveillance system I mean we should be doing this right now with this whole Avan 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 you just say what do you want it's 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 nhh is like 40 billion not for long not for long like I If if somebody if they you could slip it past Cong they could add a zero and slip it past Congress and no one would notice no one know they should just add a zero and see if any know see if it happens 4 a billion in the grand scheme of things yeah it's like and like that's what they're arguing

over so the epidemiologist if you added up everything they wanted it literally it would be in the millions I'm sure we call Budget dust that's what we call it really small enough to barely be noticed oh put in their budget dust nice you played that game we said a lot with with NASA there programs you want to put in NASA has a budget right now yeah NIH used to be less than NASA if memory serves and now they're higher than NASA uh NASA is between 25 and 30 billion right but Ness has does very visible

things for that with space station and the James webace telescope and Rovers and very visible and we're going back to the moon so lot of public recognition with NASA too 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 it is so 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 we're talking about in trillions of dollars

trillions so like it seems like a really really really insurance policy yeah yeah take it's a minor insurance policy and someone told me that the total amount of money would cost every year to permanently predict protect us prepare us for any future uh viral outbreak is um something like 25 billion a year in other words they could do it they could have vaccines at the ready anything isn't that what we're already trying to do with the anticipated flu vaccines each year they go understand you go to Southern Hemisphere or Australia they see where it is

and our Seasons absolutely you know where they they make them just across the river have you ever been there in in um near niyak like we could drive 20 minutes from here and they don't let you in but they have you know it's this CRA it's this totally crazy thing because you they're like growing them in like um we're growing what they're growing they grow the virus they they find the flu virus they they pick a strain right this and it's a big strain picking conference every year in like I it's more than once a

year I think it's in rock where you going honey I'm going strain picking me find me some viruses that that'll show up later years ago when I was at the was 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 train or other 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 um does it a improve our accuracy does an you know and they they grade themselves after it's all over 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 I mean hundreds of thousands of lives lie in the balance these are insanely consequential decisions people don't realize that just the flu itself

just regular flu influen still somewhere around 45,000 people a year yeah just popping off because and Co believe it or not even higher yeah even higher still to this day you know and people don't think about it it's a nasty yeah it's nasty it is a nasty yeah I want to ask something about epidemiologist 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 in these in these sewers and and they were amazing at predict what community was going to have an outbreak by studying poop but when people heard they studying poop they were like oh get get the hell out get out of here yeah the poop stuff is actually really fascinating because the poop stuff is uh it it was one of the first places we began to see these radical asymmetries you could you could see enormous numbers of amounts of virus coming from very very very specific locations it wasn't uniformly spread

it was like um I 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 a span of a generation from eagerly lining up to get our shot to somehow being afraid of the needle I mean I just I Hon how do we solve that well uh I think we should stop call calling vaccines

vaccines very good name facelift Jennifer call it Jennifer no think about I'm go give me some Jennifer imagine if it was it could easily be uh something that you sniff right could be nasal yes um and if and suppose we just said and we didn't call it a vaccine we just called it a cocaine cocaine he said something you sniff I figure people like cocaine 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 eonia to

ward off a cold you say just sniff this to ward off Co how hard is that right so I actually think an awful lot of way more vaccine skepticism was just fear of needles than we acknowled I think a lot of people are would would rather make a pretend to make a principled ideological case against science than admit that they're scared of needles absolutely I I agree 100% because there are a c certain amount of people every year in this country who take an aspirin or an nid or a cenin 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 reason the needle just seems so invasive 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 May that's why the original alien movie was so potent right where the yeah the little snake man that popped out your yeah your stomach yeah that's yeah the beast in me yeah yeah you ever wanted one of your questions on the universe answered we all have questions about the universe black holes to quazars quantum entanglement wormholes there is no end to the depths of cosmic curiosity well the entry level of

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earth as always keep looking up 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 uh 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 find out is to conduct an experiment like an epidemiological exp an epidemiological experiment which is this double the number matter right let's double the number and

see what happens double the amount of money we give them let's make more of them and just observe are we better off or worse off we effectively did this in the postwar years in America where we post second world war post second world war yeah where we what do we do you know we increased the number of English professors by some extraordinary number right done this 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 uh so the number of

soldiers in the first world war was R you know ratcheted up overnight and so then they would make better predictions they would make better an anticipations of what the next virus will be they'll turn up they're not necessarily the the virus makers but you'd fund the rep 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 viral virus right that's the dream yeah the dream 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 like The Economist you know talk endlessly about State capacity which is something distinct from knowledge or resources which is your ability to act on information information and what you I think if we focused heavily on state capacity my favorite state capacity example would

be the in Co the best Detectors of covid were dogs by by far H by far smelling yeah yeah yeah sense of smell you could 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 um 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 uh one that

antigen test they're just really good there is something to distinctive about um they see smell 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 it's my favorite thing just a a giant like a kind of a a strategic canine you know uh unit uh Reserve right okay we'll put it out in Oklahoma we'll have like 10,000 German Shepherds and then the next they're all sniffer your butt in your crot they're all yeah but imagine no because you can roll these

guys out how do they find prostate cancer but oh this this is actually F 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 they're smelling the prostate cancer cancer yes 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 Co and imagine a there's a line out on Saturday morning there's a line of get that

actually every morning line every morning so the you take the dog the dog literally you just line goes down the line he just runs down the line and if you have he stops when he barks at you and you just like man that's a racist dog man a dog is racist I don't have Co it's they're astonishingly good at this WOW State capacity I want the Strategic puppy Reserve is the thing that I think this country needs to strategic puppy Reserve puy that would work that would get funded like that that would get funded in

a second if the puppy looks your face you don't have Co and and there was one they sadly stopped doing it but in Alabama they had the brilliant idea of having um prisoners uh breed dogs for uh testing purposes and it turned out to be the most extraordinary it transformed the uh prison community in a way that they completely unti 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 this sort of um means for rehabilitation of the

prisoners they were able to identify Co very easily there were a lot of dog robberies that started happening no no no think think about it it's like I'm joking we need um anyway I'm I I I want to go in the puppy Crusade at some point before the next uh 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 why that's why I

want 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 Mach you can't grab a machine by the ears and go who a go also wouldn't you rather be sniffed by a dog we could put ears on the machine if okay NE 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

it should 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 like black people exactly there are your there are your papers there a long we can use all those all those dogs in in the Civil Rights Movement they were all German right that's right okay so we need a difference for that yeah we can get something more more congenial yeah

lab dooodle or or Pomeranian exactly so Malcolm uh your your podcast yeah uh you this is Pushkin Industries I think it's called and you're co-founder of that yes cool and i' I've enjoyed those that I've listened to I'm I'm way behind on the total they're not weakly because they're very highly produced yeah they're very highly produced and that's I think a very strong point for for them and so this has become your M main advocation now right yeah that's what I spent most of my ATT and it's called and the podcast is called uh revisionist

history is my podcast and we have many others at pushin but that's that's the one I 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 yeah that a su premise that's great and what's your favorite episode um we did an episode uh four episodes on what was wrong with The Little Mermaid and how to fix it oh I love it with with the movie Yes or with the with the

Disney movie oh the Disney movie not the original fairy tale no with the Disney version Oh I love it and uh can't wait to listen to that it was it went on forever four episodes four episodes so your episodes lasted longer than the movie itself yeah we broke it down we broke it down we had we pulled in experts from all sides why you do this to me Malcolm we it was you know because it was um among the many problems is that uh and plus Ursula was like this oh yeah D I forgot about

Ur yeah my daughter was my daughter was like a social justice Warrior studied I forgot about the whole controversy around Ursa and the lobster dude who was really like this very was he Lobster or was he a hermit crab the idea that you can find someone a Jamaican to play that role was just offends me exactly like we're everywhere come on we're like this is not like not that hard you going to have someone faking a Jamaican accent that's so true it's just it was embarrassing yeah you could you could have at least got Shaggy

but but here's the question I will end with this you when did that post your those four episodes like was a couple years ago now years ago nonetheless that's is that 20 years after the movie came out would you have had and others had the mindset MH 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 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 uh 20 years ago as was today and secondly we had an issue with the idea that this but she's giving up her voice for the exchange of yeah becom human yes and then the other idea we had a problem with that a brilliant effervescent energetic self-directed mermaid should uh need to be saved by a prince that I'm sorry 20 years ago that's as egregious as it is today right but nor is

that though nor is that uniquely uh 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 all I'm saying is that podcast did not come out then and no I wasn't doing it no but even I'm just saying no I know what you're saying I know 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 for 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 that which I'm racking my brains right now nothing coming to mine what about what about you Chuck so here here I just got one for you all right um I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind okay again yeah okay recently yeah and it's 50 years old I'm looking at the greeting Plaza for the aliens 100% of there's 200 people there yeah okay 100% of

them are white men at the time I did did not take notice of that these are just the engineers and scientists greeting the aliens MH and I look closer it turns out I don't know if I had a different addition they added footage but then I found three black people okay they were just sort of there all three of them had a broom and a mop in their so my only point is when I saw the film didn't agree I had no right place to stand to even make that observation yeah and now it's just

plain fly 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 right stuff that I just took for granted yeah yeah man Malcolm this has been delightful we we should have we need you more often than just three times in 15 years i' I've

enjoyed myself thank you guys let me see if I can top this off with a cosmic perspective uh 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 Ed those words and I'm pleased it was in my presence this has been Star Talk Neil the grass Tyson here you're a 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 [Music] [Music] [Music]