Good evening and welcome, both newcomers and repeat offenders, if you look around here, you notice the great many ponderous and intangible books out there in the world. That being the case, its always refreshing to find whose impact in the portion to the Tipping Point is one of those books, from time to time, usually its quite unexpected, work appears that acts as a decongestant for the brain, one strong spray with a passages to clean up, suddenly we can finally grasp things around us that weve always been looking at, we drop the enter gp and more sharply, it can be rather intoxicating, once again this is that kind of book. One of the delights i find of the Tipping Point is that malcolm asked the kind of question that a child might ask, the kind of question that is on the tip of her brain like the name on the tip of the tongue. Often we find it hard to focus on, not despite a bit but because of it. In the question he asks to hear is that one once weve heard asked, why didnt anybody think of this before, what makes things catch on. , what makes things take off, ideas, products, fads, trends, cultural phenomenon. I think you might find with the simplest questions often require the most difficult answers, the answers that are most difficult for an author to articulate. And i think it is malcolms credit that he has given us an answer in a book a very modest size as you can see but are rather in modest elegance if you read it if you know what i mean. , it tastes great and good for you at the same time like the phenomenon that malcolm talks about, the Tipping Point itself has caught on and i dont know if the sales figures for Daytona Beach but here in cambridge with the life of the mind is second in importance only to the red sox, this is a hot book. Tonight malcolm will talk about the book, do some reading perhaps and will open up to your questions and his answers in general discussion, those of you who would like to buy a copy of the book and i should say as the Tipping Point is on the National Campus and bestselling list is available for 40 off it could come up at the end of the presentation and we will sign a copy for you. With that it is my honor and my great pleasure to turn the floor over to malcolm. Thank you very much, those are very generous introduction. As of gone around the country, i sometimes ask the sellers for tips of a passage to reading and one person tells me what not to do and she said somebody who has written and read done it come to the bookstore and had read the last three pages and they wonder why nobody bought the book. So i will not be reading the last three pages of my book. , im going to read a couple of short segments and give you a flavor for some of the things im trying to do here. And then ill take questions, this is a book about applying the lessons of disease epidemics to social change, and to discuss a number of weird and interesting provocative examples of epidemics. The first section im going to read about is about an epidemic that took place in the South Pacific that i think really allows us to permit the disease and to think about epidemics in our society a little different. Not long ago in the South Pacific island, the 17yearold boy got into an argument with his father, he was staying with his family at his grandFathers House when his father stirred and demanding more from man ordered him out of bed early one morningth and told him to find a bamboo pole knife to harvest, he spent hours in the village looking without success for a pole knife, when he returned home and they handed, his father was. , the family would now go hungry he told his son waving a machete, get out of here and go find somewhere else to live. He left his grand Fathers House and walked back to his home village, along the way he ran into his 14yearold brother to borrow a pin, two hours later curious about where he had gone his brother went looking for h him, he returned to the empty family house and appeared in the window, in the middle of a dark room hanging from a noose with sema, he was dead, his suicide note read, my life is coming to an end atg this time, now is a day of sorrow and a day of suffering for me, its a day of celebration, today poppa sent me away, thank you for loving me so little sema. In the early 1960s suicide was almost unknown, but for reasons no one quite understood began to rise deeply and dramatically by leaps and bounds every year until the end of the 1980s there were more suicides per capita than anywhere else in the world for males between 15 24 the suicide rate in the United States is about 22 per hundred thousand. In the arms and neck under micronesia, there is 160 per 100,000, more seven times higher, at that level suicide is triggered by the smallest of incidents. He took his own life because his father yelled at him, in the midst of the micronesia academic, was hardly unusual, teams committed suicide because they saw their girlfriends or because their parents refused to give them a few extra dollars for beers, 119 on hung himself because his parents did not buy him a graduation gown, 117yearold hank himself because he been previewed by his older brother by making too much noise. In western culture is something rare and deeply pathological has become an a micronesia average about a lessons, his own particular rules and symbols. Virtually all suicides on the island are identical variation with his story, the victim is always almost always male, late teens, unmarried and living at home. That event is domestic in his dispute with carpenter parents and three quarters of the cases the victim has never tried or attempted suicide before, the suicide note tend to express not depression but a wounded pride in a protest against mistreatment, that occurs on a weekend night usually about drinking with friends in a few cases the victim observes the same procedures if they were stripped unwritten protocols to take ones own life. He finds a remote start eating soroka makes a noose but does not suspend himself in a typical western hanging, he ties the news to a low branch or window or door knob and leans forward to the weight of his body is tightly around his neck cutting off the flow of blood. Entry to his brain. In micronesia, these rituals have become embedded in the cucal culture, as a number of suicides have grown, the ideas set upon itself infecting younger and younger boys and transforming itself to the unthinkable that is somehow been wondering thinkable. Suicide images are widespread in micronesian communities and improperly expressed in recent songs proposed locally and aired on micronesian radio stations, number of young boys who attempted suicide reported that they are heard about eight or ten years old. As suicide grows more frequent, the idea itself requires a certain familiarity if not fascination to young men, and the act seems to be trivialized. Especially among some younger boys, the suicide acts appear to have required an experimental almost recreational element. , there is something very chilling about this package, suicide is not supposed to be trivialized like i this. But the truly chilling thing about it, how familiar, here we have a contagious epidemic of selfdestruction, engaged by youth in this. Of spree mentation imitation and rebellion. Here we have an mind this action that somehow among teenagers has become an apartment selfexpression, and a strange way the micronesian epidemic sounds like the epidemic of teenage smoking in the west. The rest of the chapter is an attempt to look at her problem with teenage smoking which is also epidemic and rising in recent years, heres the lens of the micronesian, these are both expressions of the same fundamental impulsive and adolescent cultures, they both have selfdestructive behavior, obviously played out in different ways, i think if you can understand the ways in which every dramatic selfdestruction has become among teens and micronesia, you can help us to better appreciate what is going on with the Lester Maddox but equally problematic epidemic in her own country. I always think this model is very useful way of thinking about columbine in the way of school violence, its another example of an epidemic of selfdestructive behavior which is come to take on a certain ritualized significance for teens, the really interesting thing about the micronesian, you get into it, the extent to which the act itself is come to be surrounded by all of these layers of symbolism and meaning in ritual and the fact that they all do it in the same way is incredibly important, smoking obviously is among them, part of the reason smoking is so powerful, so seductive for teens incomes of the whole culture attached to it, the thing that worries me most about the epidemic of School Shootings and the way the School Shootings in this country is the extent which the acts have taken on the element and is not just teens going in shooting, columbine was scary precisely because they were all these layers of ritual culture attached, the trenchcoat, the particular Computer Culture that these kids came out of, it also makes you wonder about the role of the media and all of that in this in fact a contagious columbine represents a contagious epidemic of selfdestructive behavior, does that mean that we ought to be talking about in a different way, and should we be mindful to the extent of those in the med media. The way in which you represent the act, are we aiding in the bedding and the ritualization process if you think about it. Anyway, that is one chapter, it is fairly heavy subject, much of this is on a much lighter tone, i assure you. I just thought, as i thought about this, as i wrote this before columbine enough that part it is resonated with me because i thought if you read into these accounts of what is happening and micronesia the parallels are so eerie and striking with whats going on in this country. The next thing im going to be is i have a whole chapter and what i call is stickiness, for an idea to become contagious, to beat up adamic is nothing more to be contagious in the cold virus is highly contagious, it does not stay around, comes and goes, we talk about epidemic ofun the flu because youre homesick and youre on your back and the difference between the flu in the cold is the flu is sticky, i think i will succeed succeed for the same reason, david is quality that makes it memorable. , that is not a by observation, what is interesting, if you look at the epidemic and try to figure out what made them sticky, you get into cool areas, the chapter that i talked about is a chapter that is concerned Childrens Television in particular. And the idea behind this chapter is that sesame street interestrate has created, they exterminate attention to stickiness, they were obsessed with stickiness, they wanted to find a way, not just to hold the attention but to hold the attention away that they remembered what they were seeing and learning, and some profound way, an incredible attempt at the time, much of the work that is done here by an nothing of people the harmony with evidence of superiority. , much of this nigerian Education School and a bunch of other people. In the brain of how three yearolds were, how the brains work, you can design information which makes an impact. They would do, they describe in the chapter, although the really cool things that they do to engineer every second of that show is engineered, so it made an extreme your impact, what im about to read is a little section by ed palmer and he just died you may have read, he just died a couple weeks ago and if you talk to people involved you with here hes the real hero of the show, he was a Research Guide the device all the ways to make the show sticky. What im going to read, little section where you talk about ed palmers big idea, i will mention in the course of this, i will also quote tom jerry lester just so you know. His innovation was something he called the distractor, he would play an episode of sesame street on the television monitor, when the slideshow showing a new slide every half second, we have the most slides we can imagine, we had a boy running down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, leafl with a picture taken on a microscope, anything to be novel, that was the idea, preschoolers would be rotting and told to watch Television Show, palmer and his assistants with sit to the side with pencil and paper quietly noting when the children were watching sesame street and they lost interest and looked at the slideshow, every time a slide changed, him and assistants were making a rotation so they had almost second by second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers attention and what part did not, the distractor was stickiness, we take that big size chart paper two by three and tape several together he said, we had data points remember for every se halfandf second which comes to 400 data points for a Single Program and we connect all the dots to the redline so it looks a stock Market Report from wall street. If it would decline we would say what was going on, other times it might hug the chart and we would say while that segment is grabbing the attention of the kids. With those distractor scores ends percentages, we have to 100 sometimes, its about 85 90 . But the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around 50, they would go back to the drawingng board. After the third or fourth season, i would say it was rare if we had a segment below 85 . We would never see anything 50 e would fix it. You know the survival of the fittest, window mechanism and decide what should survive. Not only were they doing this, the distraction was firmly on television but itil was invented by sesame street, one of the cool things about this incredible amount of researcher and television is how to make television work, start to sesame street and move into the mainstream from there. You could argue that legitimately sesame street was the most appoint Television Show ever in terms of its impact on the Way Television is structured. I will continue on. The most important thing that he ever found out was the distractor came at the beginning before sesame street was on the air, it was the summer of 1969 and we were a month and a half, we decided lets go, but put in five full shows one hour each before we go to air and see what we got, to test the shows they took them to philadelphia and it showed them two groups of preschoolers and 60 different homes out the city. What we found, almost destroyed us. The problem when it was conceived, the decision was made the all fantasy elements of the show be separated from the real elements. This was done with the assistance of many child psychologist who thought it was a mixed fantasy and misleading to children, they were only seen with other muppets and in sesame street involved only real adults and children. But in philadelphia as soon as they switch the streets, the kid lost all interest. The street was supposed to be the glue, it would always come back to the street, pull the show together but it was adults doing things and the kids were not interested. We were getting incredibly lowered tension levels, the kids were leaving the shelf, that was a pop back up that the muppets came up, we cannot lose them like that, that is because it was a turning point in the history of sesame street. We knew if we kept the street that way, the show is going to die, everything is happening so fast, weve been testing and we had to go on the air in the fall, we had to figure out what to do, he decided to defy the opinion of his scientific advisors, we decided to let the psychologist say we know how you guyswr feel about reality over going to do it anyway. , will be dead in the water. So the producers went back, jim hansen to coworker who could walk and talk and live alongside the other street. And thats a big bird was born, now we think of the essence of w sesame street, the blend of monsters not result its a wonderful illustration and Little Things can make a big difference, big words save sesame street, without big bird, all the revolution in television esthat we seem and it was until the added element and they desperately need to be interesteded in. To meet in such a wonderful illustration as well, how you dont know what will make something work and its another one of the somethings of the book that the little extra critical element is something that you can out off anticipate. Sometimes the difference between something being a complete failure in arranging success is something incredibly subtle and seemingly insignificant. You would not have thought that big bird is all that stands between a failure in a dramatic success, the turnout it is big bird, when i received big bird, the last section going to read is from the first section of the book devoted to a discussion and what wordofmouth is, the idea thbehind this is borrowed from epidemiology, and epidemiology one of the driving principles is that epidemics turn out to be created and generated and sustained an incredibly small a member of people. I give a couple of case studies to demonstrate this. We think of epidemics as a function of the behavior of a large group of people, it is not true, for example hiv, was commonly supposed in the 1980s with the tips among the gay communities of San Francisco and new york because of the high levels ofhe Sexual Activity amog many members of the Gay Community of those cities, that was the assumption. It tips because of the extraordinary high levels among a tiny fraction of the Gay Community. That is very consistent with the way epidemics work, all epidemics have that weird function. So i took that idea and i said wordofmouth is an epidemic, its a social epidemic involving some piece of information of the virus. Lets examine and supposes same principle is true and there are very small number of people who aret out there and driving is epidemics. I create three, i called them connectors and salesmen indigo and i find people who demonstrated and they have these long profiles, there are wild and hilarious weird people in the idea that weird people build the world. What im about to read is a little section with a third of these categories. , why is it that makes 70 persuasive, highly persuasive people pl