Revenge of The Tipping Point with Malcolm Gladwell

0:00Chuck, 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.

0:33this is star talk neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist i'm here with chuck knight chuck it baby hey neil yeah what's happening we got a really cool guest today oh one of the coolest the coolest like ever yeah i mean for our nerd audience our nerd audience welcome gladwell welcome back to star talk thank you this may be your third time i'm checking my numbers here i was last year in 20 did i did you hear you say i was here in 2015 we had you on one of our live star talk lives on stage as well yeah very good very cool and this man can't stop writing best-selling books yeah what's your problem it's an element serious affliction isn't it you just wake up and you're just like oh you vomit and a bestseller's on the bed how did this happen i wish not again it's quality vomit right 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 uh goliath outliers and The Tipping Point.

1:28Those 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 - Yeah, 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. And I think I was thinking of Revenge of the Pink Panther, Which dates me. Terribly dates me. Okay. Revenge of the Pink Panther. You don't even know that. Revenge of the Nerds, I would have gone with. Yeah, Revenge of the Nerds is a good one. Yeah, that's a big revenge.

2:06Pink Panther is a little before. So if we characterize you, I've got some notes here. 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, you know, the study of...

2:50Of how epidemics behave. Yeah, yeah, epidemics and 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. And like so many scientific professions, there are certain moments when epidemiologists matter and there are certain moments when we forget about them and they have conversations among themselves. And HIV was one of those occasions when suddenly they 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.

3:24And so I had been immersed in the world of epidemiologists. And I was so fascinated by the peculiar way in which epidemics of disease behave. I was in the library at NYU, Bob's Library one day. I used to go there and hang out in the stacks and read academic journals at random. That is so geeky of you. It's so geeky. It is very geeky. Gotta love it. erect a statue to you. And one day, I remember this moment, I was in the HM.1 aisle and I was reading back issues. 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 HM.2 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.

4:20And it was the whole premise of the paper was, let's use epidemiological models to examine social pathology. Crime, delinquency, teenage pregnancy. Love it. 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, so it was a modern article. 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 the formal principles of disease epidemiology and laying them over as a social overlay. That's what I think of the term. Not specifically disease, but human behavior.

5:03Yeah. 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... 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, people with higher education, some fell below a certain critical threshold, social problems exploded.

5:46which 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 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. Ooh. 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?

6:27Precipitously. 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. And 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.

6:56Wow. Wow. Okay. 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. When I went back to reread that, I was like, whoops, I do it. No, but that chapter, 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. And if I remember correctly, you suggested that Big Bird, which is an absurd element in Sesame Street when you think about it.

7:43You're not walking around saying, gee, let's get a seven-foot yellow bird. Bird, right. We need that. Who's thinking this? Yeah. Right? Because everybody who wrote Sesame Street was hot as hell. Woo, they were smoking some good stuff. So am I remembering that correctly with Big Bird? Well, there I was interested in the dimension of, you know, an important dimension in understanding contagion is the duration of your kind of contagious window, right? Okay. 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 ability of the...

8:35The 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. More than half, yeah. The longer the incubation period, the more effective 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.

9:11Interesting. 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 example of asymmetry in an epidemic. It is like, in a room, 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.

9:53And when you have COVID, there's 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 a virus is microscopic. It's the particle. 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 droplet. But when you examine large groups of people, what you discover is that there is a very small number of people whose level of aerosol production is like 10, 20, 30, 40 times greater than the mean.

10:30The thing about super-spreading, being a super-spreader, is you probably don't know that you are. Right. 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 they talk loud? 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.

11:15There was a small group of people who studied 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.

11:55This 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. There's a disciplinary thing here. It's very hard to get the attention of a public health or a biologist at a time of crisis to what a chemist is saying.

12:41They're not, at the dawn of COVID, 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 there are 99 others that you didn't listen to or you shouldn't have listened to. Because we call that hindsight. Yes.

13:17I'm Jasmine Wilson, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

13:34So 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 that the way doctors practice differs in completely inexplicable and bizarre ways from one community to the next across the developed world. I mean, I give the example of the way that your cardiologist treats you in Buffalo is radically different from the way your cardiologist treats you in Boulder.

14:21The 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. right it's just different so there are ways in which uh 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 uh and they put a when they're doing a catheter uh in america when you're a cardiac catheter uh for the longest time, we put in catheters in your thigh.

15:21Right. Thigh was the standard. In buffalo... To the artery, the things 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 spread from Montreal to Toronto. Right. And then Toronto down to Buffalo because there's a lot of back and forth between cardiologists.

16:05I 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. The future of civilization - It's got to 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 going to 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.

16:45And 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 don't want doctors. You just threw doctors under the bus. That's what you did. You were just like, I'll 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?

17:17First kill all the lawyers. First kill all the doctors. No, no, no. That's the Tyson prescription. That's not what I said. The AI is not going to 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 phenomenon. That's well put. Yeah. When they said there's an obesity epidemic, I said, no, you can't catch fat from people, so why are you calling it an epidemic? I was very resistant at the time. I'm much more relaxed about it.

17:58I was going to say, 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.

18:28If you want to go to a private girls' 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? 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 ever in that way. 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? I was much more taken by the dynamics of epidemics. In other words, the law of the few, for example, 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.

19:26I 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 raised an issue that could become social culturals. For example, if you find out that a certain types of people are these super...

20:10Oh, aerosol. Oh, aerosol. 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. Yeah. 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, ban, you know, 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're putting your finger on an extremely important point.

20:57I 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.

21:39That 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 things, it'd still make everybody wear a mask. See, 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.

22:28We know that for a fact. And people were like, I don't care. It's my freedom. That's a different—the freedom call, that came later and that was different. Okay. I'm just making this simple point. Right. 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 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.

23:10Yes. So I look at a map of New York City, and it's 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. No, no, no. This is saying, no, no, no. Most of the South Bronx is totally safe. Safe. But there are various, or there's a - There are 10 hotspots. Yeah, there's a street corner on York and 91st. That's problematic. So the rational response to that is to say, oh, we don't need police.

23:56The 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 crime decline in New York, which was they said, okay, we're just going to shift huge numbers of resources from 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?

24:31Why? That's unfair. As it turns out, what people were, I think, were able to realize was that bringing the overall crime rate in a city down 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 tech cops. Why didn't the crime just move to another block? It was like pornography in Times Square. You knock it out here, then it went to 7th Avenue, to 8th Avenue, to 10th Avenue. Then it went on the internet. And everybody's got it. You're not going to get rid of something that kind of built into the system.

25:09So 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 and 91st, do the bad guys just move to 93rd? 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. They're both lazy. Walk away. You keep your wallet. God. There's cops. Let's do it again tomorrow.

25:51No, you're right. The word they would use is that criminology is rooted in place. In other words, more than the individual. Oh, absolutely. So the famous work on this was done, I think, for the first time in Seattle. And 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 this is a guy named Weisberg, David Weisberg. What they discover is this pattern that is like, look at the map. I started in Seattle. You look at a map of Seattle.

26:28There'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? Did 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. 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.

27:08We drove around Baltimore for a day and she did this exact thing. We drive through like the worst neighborhoods in West Baltimore. And she would say, this block, no crime. This block, no crime. This block, the crime here for like 15 years. Next block, no crime. Next block. It's the strangest thing. Wow. It really is the strangest thing. 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.