In this episode, Susan Honea and I dug into Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Revenge of the Tipping Point“.
You can find and connect with Susan over and SusanHonea.com.
You can listen to the episode here:
Full Transcript:
Mickey Mellen
If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using? In the world of law enforcement, the word forensic refers to an investigation of origins and scope of a criminal act, reasons, culprits, and consequences. Revenge at the tipping point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics.
That’s a long mouthful getting into Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, and here to discuss today is Susan Honea. So Susan, welcome.
Susan Honea (00:37.102)
Thank you. Thank you, Mickey. Thanks for letting me come on your podcast today. I really appreciate the opportunity. And this is such an interesting book. You know, I think one of the things that I was talking with a friend of mine about this a couple of weeks ago, this book was really timely about two years ago. And now it’s kind of being, it’s timely again for different reasons. when, when, you know, the whole, the,
Mickey Mellen (00:57.659)
Okay, yeah.
Susan Honea (01:07.176)
overarching message in this book really is about the idea of unintended consequences. What happens when and then fill in the blank, right? And so you know we talk a lot about things like the butterfly effect or the consequence that happens halfway around the world when something happens here in in the east coast of America or we talk about the unintended consequence of somebody speeding down the road and not thinking about that.
But what Gladwell’s really doing here, think, is talking about how quickly things get out of control. So it becomes more of a spiral out of control.
Mickey Mellen (01:49.444)
Yep, yeah we certainly saw some stories there. So you mentioned though that this was relevant two years ago and became re-relevant now. So what made it relevant then and what makes it relevant today?
Susan Honea (01:57.74)
Yeah, two years ago we were coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic and that’s one of the stories, one of the over stories that Gladwell uses to illustrate his points in this book. And so it was relevant to us at that point simply because we were still reeling from…
the idea that we went through a pandemic. People said, you know, it’ll never happen again. From, you know, we had Spanish flu or whatever, and then we have COVID-19 and it’ll never happen again. Well, clearly the possibility that pandemics or epidemics are going to happen is there. The opioid crisis, I think, was the story, the overstory that Gladwell used that really struck home most for me. And it was also particularly timely in
2022 and that was before this book was released. He didn’t release this book until late 2023, but the we were really sort of in the throes of We have to do something about this opioid crisis in 2022 early 2023 and so I get the sense that that was his way of acknowledging that we needed to talk about those issues and we needed to talk about them more and what we could learn from those
epidemics, pandemics can be applied in other contexts. So for example, how long has Taylor Swift been on tour this go-round? What is the ripple effect or the halo if you will from her tour?
Mickey Mellen (03:26.331)
good question. I’m gonna say three years. I don’t really know.
Mickey Mellen (03:36.538)
in terms of economic growth for the cities like impact. Okay, yeah. Right, yep.
Susan Honea (03:40.586)
Exactly. And, and, and. Right? So, and things like artificial intelligence right now have a huge halo effect and we don’t know yet what the consequences might be.
Mickey Mellen (03:56.807)
For sure.
Susan Honea (03:59.182)
I’m an AI user. use it all the time for a variety of things. I use it to help me analyze data. I use it to help me find data when it’s hard to track it down. I use it to summarize things for me from time to time. But, you know, do we know what the real consequences of the shift to AI are going to be?
Mickey Mellen (04:21.956)
Yeah, I think that one’s tricky too because most other shifts that we look at like should we vaccinate everyone? Should we overturn Roe v Wade like the impacts can happen because of that event with AI the AI today I don’t think is gonna really shift things much but it’s knowing that it’s gonna get better tomorrow and better the next week and next year and those are where bigger shifts are gonna happen knowing it’s any idea what that looks like. So yeah, that’s very true.
Susan Honea (04:40.662)
Right? You know, but we could also look at the, at another angle of that. AI helps us do things better, faster, et cetera. Right? How does it affect education? How does it affect how we teach our children? Do they still learn to write the way that you and I learned to write? Will they ever really learn all the parts of speech, how to form a complete sentence? Do they actually need to? Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (04:51.462)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Mickey Mellen (05:06.147)
That’s the big question. It feels like of course they do, but do they? Like I think so, but I’m not sure. Yeah.
Susan Honea (05:12.098)
Yeah, so that and that really is a big question. And you know, there are other things like the idea of misinformation that can be AI generated and then spreads like wildfire because the platforms that we have available to us.
Mickey Mellen (05:21.926)
Mm-hmm.
Mickey Mellen (05:26.094)
Yep. yeah. Yeah, even misinformation intentionally without AI and then of course AI doing its own thing where I check the answer and it said what it is and yeah, hallucinations are a big problem there that can’t easily be fixed because at least what I use AI for and probably you to a large degree relies on hallucinations. I want to make stuff up. I want to get ideas for social media posts and things like that so please just make stuff up. When you’re asking for real answers, making up the answers is a much bigger problem. So yeah, education will be an interesting one. I’m Gladwell writes maybe more about that in the coming years. I’d be curious his take but
Susan Honea (05:34.004)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (05:47.351)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (05:56.231)
I mean, I see two sides to education. I met today with a student in high school that I mentor in the school. I’ve asked him periodically, what’s the school’s taken AI? And every time it’s like, no, we don’t talk about it. We don’t look at it. We pretend it doesn’t exist, which is I understand that take from the school, but that’s not really the right answer. But then the other side is the cool things you could do with like chat bots or you can say, I’m struggling with my homework. You can get an AI to kind of walk you through the steps of solving the math problem and really get like one-on-one tutoring, especially if can’t afford a one-on-one tutor to get it essentially for free. Like there’s huge opportunity there. So yeah, seeing how that all shakes out.
No one has any idea, us especially, and it’ll be interesting to see.
Susan Honea (06:29.772)
Wow, that you know, that’s, I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective of we don’t talk about it. We’re not allowed to talk about it, that sort of thing. But it reminds me of when I was in high school, the graphing calculator had just become a thing. And there was a point in time where we weren’t allowed to have calculators in the room. And I think, I think there’s still some value to that. But was that really the 1980s version of AI, the graphing calculator, which helped us kind of get
Mickey Mellen (06:43.003)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (06:59.688)
there faster, right? We still had to understand how to input the information, but the same is true with AI. If we don’t input the information correctly into the platform, whether it’s chat or Gemini or Copilot or Pick your whichever,
Mickey Mellen (07:11.557)
Right.
Susan Honea (07:13.01)
we get junk results, right? So I think that’s an interesting sort of thing. And my brain immediately went to when Khan Academy first became a thing. And the founder of Khan Academy was basically creating YouTube videos to help his niece or nephew do math more easily, understand it more easily. so how is AI different from the graphing calculator in the 80s and
Mickey Mellen (07:32.377)
Right, yeah.
Susan Honea (07:42.864)
Academy when it was born. I don’t really see a true distinction there. How might we benefit by teaching our young people how to use AI ethically instead?
Mickey Mellen (07:54.619)
Yeah, I see the calculator is interesting because it reminds me of I’ve always been a big proponent of common core math and a lot of people are against it because it does it so different but I think it does it different because we have calculators. You we had when we were younger you and I we had to learn how to do long division and stuff because that’s how you had to do it. We didn’t have a calculator with us. Now that you have a calculator to do the hard problems common core at least in theory teaches you better ways to do short math in your head so you can kind of do stuff on the go and when you need long division just use a calculator you’re not gonna need to do it by hand and so I wonder where AI fits there too where
Susan Honea (08:04.206)
you
Susan Honea (08:08.652)
Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (08:22.872)
AI can handle these problems, so we need to learn to think differently to handle the other problems that it can’t solve. And what are those problems and what do we learn? And yeah, we’ll see where that shakes out in coming years too.
Susan Honea (08:32.022)
And that’s actually…
I think part of the bigger message from Gladwell’s perspective in this book too is how environmental conditions are shifting and how those environmental conditions change how we think or influence how we think. you know, if we’re not willing to think, if we’re not willing to hear multiple perspectives about an issue, why should we have a conversation about the issue? And
Mickey Mellen (08:49.99)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (09:03.74)
When we’re thinking about the evolution of education, whether it’s from algorithmic long division to common core with lattice work and boxes and things like that, that give students visual reference to do things more quickly, more easily, that make things accessible to more students.
Mickey Mellen (09:23.75)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (09:24.874)
the environmental condition changed. We understood that students needed more than just old-fashioned long division. We understood that they didn’t get it and so we adapted to make sure that they get it. And now we have environmental conditions that say we need to do we need to make change in order to bring people along with us. Whether and again you made a point about vaccinations that’s that’s kind of a hot issue right now especially with
Mickey Mellen (09:53.679)
It is, yeah.
Susan Honea (09:54.77)
the current political climate that we’re in and how the Department of Health and Human Services is changing or how we think it might change. And I think as we evolve and as we learn more about as information evolves and we have access to more data more quickly I think we’re able to make better informed decisions and in my opinion AI plays a huge role in that.
Mickey Mellen (10:21.922)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I could see that I think the problem with vaccinations is a similar one to have with self-driving cars where when there’s an injury after someone’s been vaccinated Did that come from the vaccine or not when you give it to hundreds of millions of people? People are going to die the next day after taking a vaccine and you know things like that happen But a few may get killed from it and it’s so hard to distinguish them and self-driving cars I think will be the same way where we’ll save tens of thousands of lives that leave a few that are killed by the car And you know who those few are, but you don’t know who was saved, you know for all I know
Susan Honea (10:48.364)
Yeah, exactly.
Mickey Mellen (10:49.649)
the COVID vaccine might have saved my life. I mean, I was never sick with COVID. Maybe it’s because of that, maybe not. Who knows? You know, we don’t know the million people that were saved from it, but we do know the people that were hurt by it. it’s so tricky to distinguish the two in a lot of areas.
Susan Honea (11:02.582)
Well, and I think too, and this is kind of a risky discussion, maybe, I don’t know. I’m going to go there. When we look at things statistically, which is my preference as someone who has a background in public health from a while ago,
Mickey Mellen (11:10.142)
Yeah, we’ll give it a try.
Mickey Mellen (11:16.793)
Mm-hmm, for sure.
Susan Honea (11:21.642)
we see that the numbers of injuries from whether it’s vaccinations or self-driving cars is actually substantially lower substantially lower than the numbers of non-injuries from the same kinds of things, right? We don’t know if there’s human error involved in any of it. We don’t know a lot of the information related to the numbers of injuries. And so we’re moving along based on the statistics that we have available to us.
Mickey Mellen (11:34.628)
Right. For sure.
Susan Honea (11:51.608)
And I think we have historically made decisions in that way. you know, we also the interesting thing about the the opioid crisis in my mind that Gladwell uses as an overstory here is that no one was from the company that started the whole thing in his opinion ever took responsibility for it.
Mickey Mellen (11:56.966)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (12:18.444)
where we see, we’ll see a company with self-driving car take responsibility for technology that goes sideways. We will see a pharmaceutical company take responsibility for a medication that has side effects that weren’t predicted or weren’t noticed during the original trials. This opioid crisis, this organization never took responsibility. Where do we go with something like that? That’s a bigger conversation. Where does that responsibility really lie?
Mickey Mellen (12:18.629)
Yes.
Mickey Mellen (12:46.319)
Right. And I think like for self-driving cars, I think the bright solution is going to cause more of that. Cause I’d love to see the technology behind it become more like open source where Tesla is sharing with others and they all have this one suite of software, which will make it better and safer and better for everyone. But then if something does go sideways, it wasn’t my fault. You know, it must’ve been someone else’s code that get in there and it’d be impossible to track down there too. So sometimes the best solutions again will yield better results, but kind of hide the source of things, which is always super fun. So yeah.
Susan Honea (13:03.405)
Yeah.
Susan Honea (13:14.07)
Yeah, funny side note there. I happen to be a control freak and we have a Tesla that has self-driving capability and can’t stand it. I will not use it.
Mickey Mellen (13:21.325)
Yeah, Yeah, I don’t have one yet. My wife is adamant she will never get in a self-driving car, but I also told her like you’re not gonna notice when you do because we already have cruise control and then adaptive cruise control and then a little lane assist. It’s gonna be a gradual move. We’re not gonna be tomorrow walk out to a car with no steering wheel. It’s gonna be such a gradual shift that we’ll never really notice, but you have a more abrupt shift in your driveway it sounds like which yeah you can avoid that for now.
Susan Honea (13:42.849)
it.
Well, I mean, it just it just does it all of a sudden one day the technology was available to the car and so we installed it we tried it I was like, no, I don’t like this and so maybe I’ll change my tune I don’t know you make a really good point about the fact that we do have cruise control I actually used it today earlier today now that I think about it Adaptive cruise control all those kinds of things that the car the car beeps at us when we’re gonna turn into something that we shouldn’t you know, so how really truly your point
Mickey Mellen (13:47.206)
Yeah.
Yep.
Mickey Mellen (14:02.64)
Mm-hmm.
Mickey Mellen (14:11.173)
Right.
Susan Honea (14:14.1)
that is valid? How different is it? And I think that’s also part of this environmental shift here and sometimes we don’t notice until things are out of control. And that’s the idea of the tipping point. Is the tipping point when it’s out of control or is it when it’s heading out of control?
Mickey Mellen (14:17.541)
Right.
Mickey Mellen (14:26.374)
Yes, yep
Mickey Mellen (14:34.927)
Right, and what is the tipping point in a self-driving car? Like at what point is it self-driving? Again, at the very end you have a car with no steering wheel, you just get in and bark directions and it does it all. In the other end we have cruise control and there’s a thousand little points along the way. At which point is it self-driving? And you know, I everyone disagrees and that’s kind of fun but also makes it interesting to have conversations about. what other…
Susan Honea (14:39.352)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (14:48.866)
Yeah.
Susan Honea (14:54.318)
Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (14:55.825)
We talked about the opioid and a few other pieces of him. What is the most impactful story? Because he went through like 10 different stories that were all kind of unique, know, so largely separate. What impacted you the most?
Susan Honea (15:05.87)
Probably the opioid crisis story just because it hits fairly close to home. I’ve known several people with
who have struggled with opioid and similar addictions. It’s hard to say opioid multiple times. I just want to note that. So I think from an emotional point of view, that one hit home the closest. I actually, this idea of all the corruption that he discusses also was very interesting to me because I think those are conversations that can continue forever. We’re always going to have people in society who don’t
Mickey Mellen (15:23.535)
Yeah, it is, yes.
Mickey Mellen (15:43.662)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Susan Honea (15:47.238)
behave ethically. So from a logical point of view that one was probably the one that that I appreciated the most. And there were you know there’s some political overtones in in all of what he was talking about. Yeah so but I would say the opioid crisis from an emotional standpoint and the Miami corruption situation from a logical standpoint. Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (16:01.936)
Yeah, pretty much all of them, I think, yeah.
Mickey Mellen (16:14.832)
Gotcha, yeah, like pretty much every one of them opened my eyes in some way, some helpful, some less, but like the rugby one. Yeah, I’ll read a little quote from here. The game that Harvard is playing with rugby and Georgetown is playing with tennis, of course, is affirmative action, except that instead of admitting underprivileged students with lower academic credentials, athletic affirmative action admits privileged students with lower academic credentials. It’s only the first kind of affirmative action, however, that universities were unwilling to defend. And so yeah, they’ll defend that affirmative action saying, yeah, we wanna get.
Susan Honea (16:23.223)
Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (16:44.006)
high-income people so we’ll bring them in via tennis and rugby, you know, which is just an interesting way to look at things. And again, I’ve never seen that before. I don’t really know how it impacts me directly, but it opened my eyes to things just like most of the chapters did.
Susan Honea (16:46.819)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (16:54.51)
Yeah, I mean I’ve seen that happen since I was a kid. I remember being in high school and knowing someone locally who was admitted to a prestigious institution because they could play a sport.
Mickey Mellen (17:12.464)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (17:13.6)
and they had never passed a class in high school. And I think for me, because I have seen that happen on multiple occasions, that one wasn’t as, it didn’t resonate as much with me just because I already knew it was happening. worked in.
Mickey Mellen (17:26.394)
Gotcha. Well, I knew it was happening too, but yeah, we see football players all the time. We talk about these dumb football players, these big schools. I never related it to affirmative action though, saying it’s just a different way to get different kinds of students and like, interesting angle that I hadn’t considered.
Susan Honea (17:35.82)
Yeah.
Well, gets it. So it’s it’s affirmative action. It’s also capitalism in the private schools, right? Because they’re they’re increasing their donor base when they bring in so and so’s child to play whatever sport. And so it’s it’s an influence thing. It’s an affirmative action thing. It’s we want to win thing. It’s an all kinds of thing. And then what do they do when it affects graduation rates? I have a lot of respect for Mike Shashevsky, former Duke basketball coach.
Mickey Mellen (17:44.175)
Right, yes.
Mickey Mellen (18:05.381)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (18:09.044)
because for many many years he had a very high graduation rate amongst his players. Yep. And there’s not really been anybody who’s met that kind of standard other than him. And so one of the things that he would talk about when he was out recruiting with the players was
Mickey Mellen (18:12.994)
He was fantastic with that for sure, yeah.
Mickey Mellen (18:21.35)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (18:32.03)
is basketball your life or are you willing to sacrifice some of your practice time to make sure that you are academically well-rounded and all of those kinds of things and I really appreciate that and I wish that we could see more of that because you know if if Harvard wants a rugby player who’s a high-performing rugby player and a high-achieving academic student that person exists it’s a matter of finding the right student it’s a matter of opening the door to the right student so I mean we’ll see if the
things change we now that we’ve effectively gotten rid of affirmative action in higher education so we’ll see
Mickey Mellen (19:09.35)
Right, well then NIL of course changes everything for college where now you can just pay to keep kids longer at school again not helping graduation rates per se but I think one thing that helps you so much is he wouldn’t get the best players necessary because they would want to go in for a year or two and go to the NBA but his players would stick around for four years and when you have a good player that sticks around for four years they become a very good player and so that’s why he would win so much because he had that that routine going.
Susan Honea (19:22.883)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (19:28.716)
Yes.
Susan Honea (19:32.078)
And that’s that environmental element that Gladwell really is focusing on here is the environment at Duke was one that stressed academic performance, collaboration and teamwork. So you weren’t an individual on that court. You were part of a team. You might be a standout at a particular thing, whether you were a three point shooter or whatever, a great defender, but you were part of a team and that was the expectation for the team. you know, I, I, I’d like
to see us return to something more in that line but we’ll see.
Mickey Mellen (20:06.682)
Yeah, again, NIL is getting people to stay in college sports long, but I don’t think it’s fixing that problem you’ve addressed really at all. It’s making that worse, if anything. So yeah.
Susan Honea (20:11.694)
It is not. Yeah, we’ve seen a couple of recent recent examples of that here in Georgia.
Mickey Mellen (20:17.274)
where kids are now just jumping from team to team, whoever can pay them the most. And so I’ve heard of some legislation maybe to say you can only switch so many times and some of that may help, but can you force that and will that, will forcing it create actual teamwork or will it just make people upset? Like, I don’t know, we’ll see what happens.
Susan Honea (20:24.044)
Yeah.
Susan Honea (20:30.854)
I saw a news story the other day about a 32 year old college player or something like I’m like, huh? Okay.
Mickey Mellen (20:34.79)
Nice. All right, yeah, cool. Good for him or her. Yeah, awesome. All right, well as we’re wrapping up here, so yeah, again, there’s lots of different pieces in this book, know, 10 different stories and stuff. They all have kind of similar threads, but why should someone pick it up? What’s the value someone would get from picking up and reading this book?
Susan Honea (20:52.632)
That’s such a good question. think it is it’s just a different way of exploring the current issues that we have right now. It’s if you read the tipping point, the original book, it was cast in a much more positive light. And this is much more critical. And I like that because it forces us to acknowledge that not everything is always good. Not all change is good. Not all things are good. And we need
Mickey Mellen (21:09.402)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Susan Honea (21:22.636)
to be willing to pick some of it apart and and and improve. So I would say it’s a it’s it’s an easy read it’s also a fairly quick read in my opinion and it’s it’s eye-opening on issues that you might not have been aware of.
Mickey Mellen (21:34.758)
Mm-hmm.
Mickey Mellen (21:41.927)
Yeah, that was the best part for me. Just things I didn’t really think of before. Either issues I hadn’t heard of or just different twists on issues I had heard of and hadn’t realized that angle on it. yeah, it’s about an eight and a half hour audible if people listen to it. And I don’t do audible generally, but I kind of look at that as a metric for like how big is this book? And eight and a half, yeah, not short, but certainly not long. mean, it’s an enjoyable read. You know, the stories he weaves in and stuff, it’s fantastic. So Susan, this has been great. How can people track you down online if they want to connect with you or learn more?
Susan Honea (21:49.112)
Mm-hmm.
Susan Honea (22:07.83)
Yeah, you can find me on my website, SusanHoney.com, and I’m also on Instagram and Facebook at at Coach Susan Honey. And would love to chat with anybody further about this book or any other.
Mickey Mellen (22:20.378)
Cool, yeah, I’ll put those links in the show notes so you can track it down. Thanks, Susan, this has been fantastic, I appreciate it.
Susan Honea (22:25.474)
Thank you.
Leave a Reply