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SAMPLE TITLE: #1904 Neil deGrasse Tyson
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
universe, people, put, point, human, day, telescope, deer, fact, animals, called, world, earth, recognize, high, years, thought, understanding, brain, big
SPEAKERS
Joe Rogan, Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson 00:03
The Joe Rogan experience join my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. I don’t want to every one of my senses to sound like Barry White.
Joe Rogan 00:15
Is that what it sounds like in your ears? They do. Like, oh, hey, baby. Whereas without the headphones, I’m just regular. Alright, ready? Already? Good to see you. Hey, what’s happening? So I’m excited to talk to you. I’m excited to talk to you about a bunch of things. But I’ve been paying attention to all the Webb telescope. Oh, my gosh, fascinates all that. Could you please explain the difference in the ability of the capabilities of this telescope versus what we’ve had previously?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 00:44
Yeah. So first of all, it’s all that and the excitement was in part, because so much could have gone wrong with this thing. And the fact that nothing went wrong. We were ecstatic.
Joe Rogan 00:58
Could you explain how complicated it is to get some?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 01:02
Here’s so one of the great challenges that we face is, how do you put a telescope in orbit that’s bigger than the rocket that’s gonna launch it? Is that even possible. And the Hubble telescope, you know what set the size of that 94 inch diameter mirror. That’s the biggest mirror, you could fit in the payload of the space shuttle. That’s what set the size of that telescope, big as it was, we would have made it bigger if the space shuttle were bigger. Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Hubble telescope. There’s a replica of it at the Aerospace Museum. And let’s take a photo of it. And it’ll just it’s there hanging from the ceiling. But if you want to know how about the size of a Greyhound bus, so the space shuttle deployed a Greyhound bus into orbit, which is the Hubble Space Telescope, and the the value of the Hubble was that you could update it by with servicing missions, and it was service many times. And as a result, it lived within our culture for three decades. There are people who came of age, only ever knowing the majesty of the universe, as delivered to you by the Hubble telescope. 30 years worth of this think about it. Most other telescopes, they put into orbit, and they have a five year mission, and then they come down. So they don’t have a chance to get to get inside you to become something that you that you. Oh, you got a nice visual there says the Hubble telescope on the left, which every year, every year, I post a tweet. At the end of the Stanley Cup, and I say the Stanley Cup and the Hubble telescope had the same designer. No, I’m just kidding. Now just look at the thing. It looks like the Stanley Cup a little bit. A lot.
Joe Rogan 02:50
I wouldn’t confuse the two if they were in a room together.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 02:54
So here’s the thing. So notice the Hubble telescope. Its diameter is the spherical shape that fits in the spherical payload of the space shuttle. So now we want to put a bigger telescope into orbit. How do you do that? And so this is where you need engineers, clever engineers. We say, here’s a rocket, one of the most powerful rockets we can use. But the fairing that’s the place where you hold the payload can only be so big. And they say Alright, why don’t we fold the telescope? Now how are you going to fold the mirror? Oh, you turn the mirror into segments, hexagons, hexagons, one of only three shapes that can tile a surface, a square, a triangle, and a hexagon. No other shape can do this. So well. You can have other irregular shapes that can match up that you can tessellate what it’s called, but if you have a right what’s called a regular polygon, so here in the image there what you can see, it’s all of the mirror segments. Those fold into a narrow structure along with the the unfurling solar panels, as well as the heat shields. Notice has made it Northrop Grumman. By the way, Grumman has a long history in helping NASA put stuff in space, the LEM Lunar Excursion Module, remember that the thing that landed on the moon that was designed and built in Bethpage Long Island at Grumman Aerospace. And so this is an you go to Bethpage today, people still stand tall, because they had aunts and uncles who worked on that project space is is a force of nature unto itself, in our sense of pride, in our sense of achievement, and our sense of what operates on civilization to take us into the future. Lest we continue to regress and move back into the cave, which we came there it is all folded up in the image we now see for those who are watching This, and you slip that into a fairing. And then you launch it a million miles from Earth, opposite the sun from Earth, and it unfurls like petals of a flower.
Joe Rogan 05:15
Is there an animation of how Oh, yeah,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 05:17
slo mo animation? Sure he can find it. And it’s the deployment, how it deployed as it was on its way to its location, which is one of the Lagrangian points in orbit. For every two objects that orbit each other. There are five Lagrangian points. So here we are unfolding. So there, we have solar panels coming out the side. And there’s the communication antenna. And it has a unique set of baffles that shield it from sunlight. So that the mirror and the detector can be very, very cold. Because it’s designed, it’s specially tuned to observe infrared, that comes to us from space. And infrared, as you may know, we normally associated with heat, well, how am I going to detect something that’s very, very cold in space, if my detector is hotter than what I’m trying to detect? You can’t there’s no way to see something that is warmer than the temperature of your detector. So you detect has to be very cold, extremely cold. So these are the baffles. And there are many, many layers, so that when sunlight hits one layer, that layer absorbs it, and re radiates it in both directions forward and back. So there’s less that goes to the next layer. And then the next layer radiates it and by the time it gets the fourth layer, hardly anything goes towards the telescope. And so it’s insulated, and it drops to deep space, cold temperatures. And it’s literally where the sun don’t shine right now.
Joe Rogan 07:00
So the solar panels are getting the solar energy from the bottom. Yeah, because that’s the direction the sun is correct radiates off the bottom. And those are the things that protect it. And you see how all those layers, all the
Neil deGrasse Tyson 07:12
layers? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it’s specifically tuned for the infrared part of the spectrum, you remember the spectrum. So you have like, visible light, right? ROY G BIV. Right, if you want to remember it, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, those are the parts of the spectrum we can see. But there’s light outside of this, there’s like, beyond the violet, there’s ultra violet. That’s why you get that and below the red is infra red, not visible to the human eye. By the way, insects can see ultraviolet we can, that’s why bug zappers work, you put a UV light in a bug zapper, that the the bugs say, oh my gosh, I love ultraviolet, and then they get zapped. And we’re old enough to remember before there were bugs appers, you’d had a picnic bulb for for Twilight picnics. And it’s like a yellow bulb, kind of yellow Amber bulb, it was a bug bulb. It was sold as bug bulbs. It’s not that they repelled bugs is that the bugs couldn’t even see it. Because their whole vision is shifted towards the ultraviolet. Ah, and it leaves out the deep red. Yeah, so it’s, that’s evidence we’re smarter than bugs.
Joe Rogan 08:25
Luckily, that’s
Neil deGrasse Tyson 08:28
one piece of evidence that we’re smarter than bugs. So just to bring that to closure, the earliest forming galaxies in the universe radiated a lot of ultraviolet. So you might say, well, let’s get an ultraviolet telescope. No, because 14 billion years later, the expansion of the Universe has redshifted, the ultraviolet, into the infrared. So if you want to see the birth of galaxies, you got to know what they look like, in the here in the now and in the here in the now it’s in the infrared. So this is a telescope specifically tuned to see galaxies born at the edge of the universe. And infrared also allows you to see deep into gas
Joe Rogan 09:12
clouds. Now when they’re showing you an image. So right
Neil deGrasse Tyson 09:15
here, this are the pillars of creation, which were so named at the time Hubble first attempted this, we were gaga over the Hubble image of this, and now like the JW S T, oh my gosh, for those who are more prone to religion, some have called this the hand of God. Because if you look at the pillars, you can kind of picture like a you know, a thumb fingers. Yeah. So, but regardless, this is nearby. This is the telescope peering deep into gas clouds that otherwise wouldn’t shroud what’s going on, and you get to see stars being born, planets being born. And so what’s remarkable about Jay Z JW s t you Is that to be tuned for the edge of the universe. And the birth of galaxies is the same properties, you would want to see the birth of stars. A star is born right in front of your nose that would otherwise be cloaked by gas. And infrared penetrates those clouds, and enables you to see it as though the cloud isn’t even there. And you already know this. Because when if you’re driving through fog, okay, you put on your fog lights, the fog lights are not blue. They’re like reddish Amber. Okay, that improves your ability to see through the fog. If we could see infrared, that’s the kind of light you’d use, then you wouldn’t even know the fog was there. That’s why self driving cars will be amazing. It won’t matter if it’s foggy, they’ll be able to see everything just given infrared sensors, the fog is irrelevant can drive 100 miles an hour in dense fog, and all the cars will see each other. And they want to change lanes, they tell other cars, I’m going to change lanes, but part for them open up. And we wouldn’t get 40,000 deaths a year, as we currently do from automobile accidents.
Joe Rogan 11:10
Now, how much bigger is this telescope?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 11:13
So it’s about so you want to think about collecting area and I forgot the exact number. Something like eight times around they’re more powerful in the sense of it can see things eight times dimmer. There you go. So that’s two is about two and a half squared is about eight times the area.
Joe Rogan 11:33
And the technology obviously is improved as well. So like the ability that
Neil deGrasse Tyson 11:39
well, our detectors are better. And let me remind you that when the Hubble was designed, it was designed to like the 1980s, it was scheduled to go up. And then we had the Challenger accident. And that delayed the shuttle program. So this Hubble’s sitting there in mothballs with a with an old Microsoft chip. And by the time it launched, it was already not as fast as it could have been. And so the very first servicing missions, swapped all that out and put in better methods and tools for measuring what it is we always needed to do. So this is so one sad part about this is that it’s not serviceable. We have no access to that point in space a million miles from the moon. We haven’t left low Earth orbit since 1972. We’re not going out a million miles from Earth to fix a telescope. So that’s unfortunate may be a robotic fix. I don’t know what to refill some of the the fuel it needs fuel to station keep
Joe Rogan 12:38
didn’t it get hit by a micro Meteor?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 12:40
Yeah, well, that’s that’s the brakes when you’re in space. Yeah, but it’s not. It doesn’t affect the overall performance. That’s amazing. Yeah, well, it’s huge and micrometers will do small damage. But why don’t you don’t want to in the middle of a meteor storm? That would be right. Totally bad.
Joe Rogan 12:58
And do they? I mean, they obviously know, like, where some of the asteroid belts are and where some of the Earth Objects are.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 13:08
Yeah, so in this context, we have so first most asteroids are in the asteroid belt. So that’s between Mars and Jupiter. So I have an asteroid named after me. And I don’t mean to brag or anything.
Joe Rogan 13:22
Can you like get a star named after you online? Not
Neil deGrasse Tyson 13:24
leaked, not authentically,
13:26
you just get robbed?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 13:28
To send you a map with your with your name drawn in the maps you pay for a piece of paper? Yeah, they claim that it goes gets registered with the astrophysicist but it doesn’t know there’s only one way we named stars and that’s by committee and by traditions and this sort of thing. It’s they’re fascinating traditions. So planets are named after Roman gods. And planet moons are named after Greek characters in the life of the Greek god, who is the counterpart to that Roman god. So Jupiter, for example, one of its moons is Ganymede. Ganymede was the manservant of Zeus. And Zeus and Jupiter were corresponding gods in Greek and Roman, and not only that tooth, what’s the number is it about half somewhere around there of all the stars in the night sky that have names have Arabic names. So in my field, we have deep respect for people who made great inroads into understanding the natural universe. And the golden age of Islam from 1000 years ago, made material contributions in this regard. And of course, the Greek and Roman legends and this sort of thing. So there they are, in its influence on western culture. So, ya know, the universe is a fun place.
Joe Rogan 14:45
Pretty fun place. Oh, yeah. So this James Webb telescope in terms of its ability to recognize things like what magnitude of improvement are we talking about from
Neil deGrasse Tyson 14:56
the factor of 10? Yeah, factor. 10. Yeah, easily. That’s right. Well, factor of 10 for the things Hubble could see, but it’s incalculable when it sees things that Hubble could have never seen, because Hubble was not tuned for the infrared. So then you can’t even compare it. It’s a complete other window opened up to the universe for you.
Joe Rogan 15:16
So what has changed in terms of our understanding? The web has been in the Million Mile orbiter how far away it is for how long now?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 15:29
Well, it got there. And then we did some engineering. So I guess a year year and a half.
Joe Rogan 15:33
Yeah. And what has changed in our understanding? So
Neil deGrasse Tyson 15:37
that’s, that’s been people’s first question. And what I want to do is temper that, to say something a little different. So yes, we expect James Webb to make great discoveries, we expect that. But the first order of business is hardly ever, let’s discover something new today. It’s, here’s something that we have limited understanding of, let’s improve on that. And in so doing, we deepen our understanding of how things work in the universe, that doesn’t always involve overturning a previous idea, or discovering something that nobody ordered. Alright, that will happen. We fully expect that to happen. But we targeted parts of the sky, initially, because we know other telescopes have gone there before. And we’re gonna say how can we further advance and deepen our understanding? One thing it’s going to be able to do and it has already done. We have nominee exoplanets. There are it I don’t know how many of your audience was born. After 1995? How many 27 year olds and young probably quite a few, quite a few. Okay, so I will take this opportunity to night to them. Generation X. So planet. Five, was the first exoplanet discovered planet orbiting another star. And I’ll never forget that because it was my first time on national television. I was freshly minted as director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, and NBC Center. In New York City. There’s the media news headquarters, right of all the networks. So NBC sent an action cam, they interviewed me because of my title, not because they knew they were gave a crap who I was at my title was director of the planetarium. And so I gave my best professorial reply, I suppose the Doppler shift, this is how it’s discovered and what we do and how we measure it. And I was describing the fact that when you discover these planets, you don’t actually see the planet. You see the effect of the planets gravity on the host star. And so if you’d watch the host star, the host star like jiggles, okay, just a little bit in response to the planet going back and forth around it. So you’re measuring the star so I motion that like with my hips, and that evening on the evening news. That’s all they showed was me jiggling my hips. Okay, that’s how you got to do this. Okay. You don’t want me to be Professor Neil, you want me to be soundbite meal. Alright, so from then on, I practice my sound bites. And a sound bites like three sentences.
Joe Rogan 18:19
I’ll say recognize that this is the format now. Correct.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 18:23
And I said, I can’t just give them my stump speech as professor of astrophysics. It has to work in their medium. And, and so I went home and stood in front of the mirror. And had people just shout out things to me. Anything in the universe, any idea, object, person, place or thing? And I would come up with like three sentences that are interesting, make you smile? It’d be tasty enough to want to tell someone else the anatomy of a sound bite to try it. Say anything in the whole universe?
Joe Rogan 18:52
How do we know
Neil deGrasse Tyson 18:53
how much just one word just say anything?
Joe Rogan 18:56
The Big Bang? Big Bang?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 18:57
Ooh, the birth of space time, energy. And everything we know and love about this universe occurred 14 billion years ago. And we have no idea what happened before it. And we’re still expanding, as we will forever. I read an article that’s my sound bite.
Joe Rogan 19:20
Let’s get back to good sound bite. Yeah, I read an article about the Webb telescope and that what they were taking into consideration is the possibility that the Big Bang may be incorrect, and that the universe might be larger and older than we think.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 19:36
So I hesitate to ask what pages on the internet you hang out.
Joe Rogan 19:43
It was legit. It wasn’t saying the universe is older. It’s saying as more data and new information comes in. There is a distinct possibility that the Big Bang might just be the it just might explain the reach of the technology. and not the actual scale of the universe itself. Okay, so
Neil deGrasse Tyson 20:02
the way to think about this is, and this is the way science has worked since basically the year 1600, where Galileo sort of starts codifying what people knew probably should be happening, but no one really did it. In large scale. If you have an idea about something, then you test it multiple ways and get other people to test it. And if the tests give you consistent results, you have a new understanding of the universe. When that happens, that knowledge of the universe doesn’t go away, it doesn’t get undone. What happens typically, is you have a deeper understanding of the universe in which that understanding gets embedded. And you realize that you only understood a small part of a larger hole. But the small parts you did understand, when you had multiple experiments that confirmed it, that doesn’t change. So the cleanest example of this and I’ll get back to your question is Newton’s laws of motion and gravity. He, you know, did anyone see anything move faster than a galloping horse in his day? Probably not. And so, the news laws of motion and gravity worked. They worked not only for galloping horses, it worked for the moon in orbit around the Earth, and the Earth in orbit around the sun, and Jupiter’s moons in orbit around Jupiter. Alright, and for the planets. So, okay, but wait a minute, it doesn’t work for mercury. Mercury’s orbit is not following Newton’s laws, is something wrong with the data? Let’s check it. Data’s Correct. Oh, my gosh, what’s happening? Einstein comes along and says I have a new understanding of gravity and a new understanding of motion. And it accounts for this weirdness in Mercury’s orbit. What
Joe Rogan 21:54
was the weirdness?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 21:55
It does its shape was not exactly what Newton’s laws of gravity would give you. Its shape could only be accounted for when you throw in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Why? Because the sun’s gravity is so monstrous, and Mercury’s orbiting close enough to it, that it’s being influenced by extra phenomenon going on in the universe. That’s the product of very high and significant gravity. And so, so then, do we throw Newton out the window? No, actually, you know, what Newton’s laws are there, what they’re what Einstein’s laws look like, when you put in low speeds and low gravity. You put it last resort, they become Newton’s laws. In that limit, Newton’s laws don’t stop working, where they used to work we, the Apollo, to the moon, use only Newton’s laws. Because Einstein didn’t matter at those scales, the moon and earth and, and rockets, we’re not going fast enough for any of that to matter. But when you start going fast enough, you cannot use Newton’s laws, you have to use a deeper understanding. Now, where does Einstein take us? You go into the center of a black hole, you get black holes from Einstein, center, black hole, there’s a singularity. All the theories say the matter occupies zero volume, thereby having infinite density. And that’s kind of weird. What? No, you can’t have infinite No, that’s a limit of Einstein’s theory. That’s where it breaks down. It’s somewhat of joke. That’s where God divides by zero number in math class, you can’t divide by zero, right? It’s not not defined or not allowed. So in Einstein’s equations, we’re dividing by zero at the singularity. So we all know, that is brilliant as Einstein was, and as successful as his general theory of relativity has been, it has limits. And one limit is the center of a black hole. And another limit is the very birth of the universe itself. But getting back to your question, the Big Bang. So we have top people working on trying to resolve the singularity problem. And in so doing, you get to some ideas that will maybe our Big Bang, because the big man is not going to go away all the data support this. So now I’ve got this big bang thing. Okay. And, well, is this embedded in something bigger? Ooh, oh. So when you put like quantum physics and general relativity, and you try to come up with some bigger understanding deeper understanding, string theorists had been all into this. You get a multiverse. We didn’t pull that out of our ass that came out of the equations. So how old is the multiverse? I don’t know. It’s definitely older than our universe, because it birthed our universe and it births other universes and it bursts. The way the equations drive it and infinity of the universe. Horses. This is the idea that maybe there’s a version of us and another year where I’m bald and you got the Afro and was, but everything else is the same,
Joe Rogan 25:08
and also a version where everything’s the same where everything would be the same. Yes, everything you’ve ever said has been said before, exactly in the same order, correct? There’s no
Neil deGrasse Tyson 25:17
reason to presume that everything in this universe isn’t or hasn’t already played out, in the exact way, in another one of these infinite universe,
Joe Rogan 25:28
an infinite number of different ways. Correct.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 25:31
And so that that is what comes out of the equations. So that makes the Big Bang, a kind of a small part of a much larger hole. And so yeah, we’re ready for that. But the fact that the universe had a beginning 14 billion years ago, and there’s the cosmic microwave background, all of these features are intact, they’re not going to all of a sudden not apply. That’s my point. That’s my long answer to your
Joe Rogan 25:56
so this clean question that happened 14 billion years ago, what is the predominant theory of why?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 26:05
So this multiverse concept gives us a reason why. Okay, so it’s like, imagine you’re rolling around in a basin, okay? And you’re stable there, you’re just fine. But then something kicks you out of the basin, and you didn’t know that there’s a huge hill to roll down after you come out of that basin. But you didn’t know that you thought you Everything was just fine, you roll down that hill, you’re gaining energy at the bottom of the hill, something stops you. And then where does all that energy go. One of the hypotheses, and I’m highly simplifying here is that the energy gained by rolling down a hill. And these are energy hills that would exist in this sort of higher dimensional space that we’re talking about. At that energy has to manifest in that object somehow, and it becomes an explosion, and gives birth enough energy gives birth to matter, everything that we know and love. And it expands. Because when you concentrate that much energy in a small spot, that’s the only thing you can do.
Joe Rogan 27:16
I understand you’re simplifying it. But I don’t unsimplified it in the sense
Neil deGrasse Tyson 27:19
that by using this basin analogy and rolling by a hill, that they’re they’re equations of the energetics of a system. And this is called this is called a well, a false vacuum. So you can be in a place. That’s not the true bottom energy state of the system. But you think everything is fine. And but it’s not. And so if you move around in among these hills and valleys, you end up birthing universes out the other side. And this multiverse concept actually delivers this for you simply for free.
Joe Rogan 27:59
That that thought would be that the Big Bang is just one of many events that happen in the multiverse correct.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 28:08
And not only that, it could be that other big bang events might have a different, slightly different laws of physics in it. So you want to watch out for that. If you cross over from one universe to the other. And the charge on the electron is slightly different. You could like all your atoms could just scatter scatter or depress compress into a pile of goo yet so take a take something to test first.
Joe Rogan 28:39
Yes and the chicken.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 28:43
chickens get no respect. What have happened to guinea pigs. guinea pigs are cute. Cute and furry. Yeah. Oh my gosh, chickens are way easier. I spent a whole section in this in this book, talking about people who love animals and want to care for them and don’t want to eat them. But the only loved ones that are cuddly. Oh yeah, for sure. A plush toy out of it.
Joe Rogan 29:06
My agent said that she knows I hunt. She’s like you should hunt pigs because they’re ugly. I’m Mike, how dare you. First of all domesticated pigs are adorable.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 29:17
They are Yeah,
Joe Rogan 29:18
domesticated dogs are ugly too, because they’re desperate. In fact, I
Neil deGrasse Tyson 29:22
have a I have a voice cameo of a pig. In a Disney XD cartoon called Gravity Falls. It’s a farm house and there’s a pig that lives with everybody. And the pig eats some slop that the kids are told makes you smarter. And so they bought it at a fair something. So they went to sleep putting the slop on their forehead, thinking it would get into their head and make them smart but the pig sees it on their forehead and licks it off of their forehead. And then overnight the pig becomes a supreme genius. Build an atom smasher builds a voice translator and while the pig is smart Diamonds voice. It’s cute. It’s a cute. And so, but what was I talking about
Joe Rogan 30:08
before the Big Bang? Multiverse is different laws of physics are
Neil deGrasse Tyson 30:12
different, slightly different laws of physics are fascinating prospect, how that they might vary and how you might want to avoid it. Oh, when I was talking about you want to save animals? I never seen, I’ve never seen anyone say, Save the leeches.
Joe Rogan 30:26
No one cares about bugs save the
Neil deGrasse Tyson 30:29
ticks, in particular, parasites save the mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, you know, the biggest enemy of humans, as big an enemy as we are to each other through warfare. In the history of civilization, the greatest enemy to human life has been the mosquito responsible for more than a billion human deaths in the history of civilization. And so, here we have mosquitoes, ticks, tapeworms, you know, go down the list. And you can ask if you really into animals and don’t want to kill them. If you heard that ticks were endangered, would you start a movement to protect ticks? Would you do that? And if you would have more power to you, but I’m thinking you’re not.
Joe Rogan 31:20
Why would you if you know about Lyme disease? This is
Neil deGrasse Tyson 31:23
my point. Yeah. Or is this my point, by the way the Lyme virus wants to live to, right. These are all creatures on God’s green earth, right. And so, so you end up being a species bigot that in the chapter meet Aryans and vegetarians. There’s the the philosophies that are that each of those camps will embrace. And the question is how thoroughly thought through are those philosophies? Like in one example, let’s say you don’t want to kill animals, but you? So you, you have a humane mousetrap in your basement? Okay, why not? You don’t want to snap the neck of the mouse. That’s, that’s cool. You can you like animals, right? So you save the mouse, you got to check on it every few days, because they dry out quickly, if you trap it, so and so what do you do when you catch it, but what do they do release it release it back into the wild. guaranteeing the mouse gets eaten hauled by an owl or picked apart by all manner of woodland predators, between nine and 18 months of its life. So the safest thing to do with your mouse is to leave it in your basement, if that’s if you really care about animal life, and the mouse managed to get into your basement. Leave it there. It’ll live up to six years in your basement.
Joe Rogan 32:48
I lived in Colorado for a while next to an ashram. And I was visiting the ashram and talking to the woman who runs it and she sprayed raid all over these ants. And I go what are you doing? And she’s like, well, it’s unfortunate, but you know, we have to address the fact that we have an infestation of insects. I’m like you just mass killed all these living beings. Poison from the sky. And you did it in front of me aerial assaults, while you espousing the benefits of Buddhism and meditation. And yeah,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 33:27
so people kind of cherry pick. Yeah, and I understand it. But, and I don’t, I don’t mind if someone cherry picks as long as they’re completely self aware. Most of them are and by the way, the home that where you’re saving the mouse, I did a rough calculation. It’s it’s probably made from the woods of about 50 trees. Each tree could have lived 100 years but didn’t because it was cut down to make your home the to buy the you know the studs, two by fours the floorboards the the wall panels, the you know, the the siding. And each of those trees was home to birds and insects and fungus and squirrels and and every day of that tree’s life via photosynthesis. It created 15 times the mass of the mouse in breathable oxygen. So I asked you who do you think nature cares more about? The tree? Or your one ounce mouse?
Joe Rogan 34:35
Probably tree?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 34:36
I’m thinking and some trees live 1000 years?
Joe Rogan 34:40
Well have you paid attention to some of the new research that’s being done about how trees communicate
Neil deGrasse Tyson 34:44
with each other? Yeah, get to that that’s, that’s in that chapter, the materials and vegetarian chapter. So trees are fascinating. I’ve heard people say, well, the mouse has a beating heart. And the tree does not or plants do not and animals do. And I said to my well Think this through. If you cloak a tree, does it not suffocate? If you cut a tree, does it not bleed? If you cut off its nutrients at the base. Does it not wither and die?
Joe Rogan 35:17
Well, when they’re aware they’re being eaten they released plant defense. Yeah, man.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 35:21
Get in there. All I’m saying is, the tree gets nutrients from the soil to the top most leaf. It does it not for want of a beating heart. It does it in spite of not having one. It has a circulation. It just has a dip. It’s where I get my life. It’s where I get my maple syrup from tree blood. So let us so to fault a tree or plant life for not having a beating heart. When it’s not that they need one and don’t have one, it’s that they don’t need one and never wanted one. Now you talked about that you’re talking about the mycelium. So this is a interconnected network. It’s a fungal fungal network, under foot in a forest, where it connects multiple kingdoms of life, their four kingdoms, you might have learned that there were two, we’ve upped it since then, those two kingdoms are still intact. But like I said, there now there’s more. It’s embedded in a larger truth. There’s the plant kingdom, animal kingdom, fungal kingdom. And then we have a kingdom that includes all of the bacteria, and archaea and other other microscopic life forms. And so, here’s an interesting fact. I lost sleep for a week over this already. If you look at the common ancestor, between fungus and animals, because the Tree of Life has ultimately has one, tap root, okay, and as it splits it speciate and you get all these things. So the diversity of life on Earth is is enabled by the fact that life can speciate okay, you look at the common ancestor between animals and fungus. The common ancestor between humans and mushrooms split later. Them the common ancestor than its common ancestor split with green plants. What that means is, we and mushrooms are more alike than either we are mushrooms are two green plants.
Joe Rogan 37:35
Well, mushrooms, breathe oxygen.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 37:38
All I’m saying is you grow a portabella mushroom. What’s the first word people use to describe it?
Joe Rogan 37:44
Vegetarian.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 37:47
You know, he talks about mushrooms tasting meaty, yeah. meaty, meaty mushroom. No one has last I checked no one has ever accused kale of tasting meaty. No. So in a way we’re kind of biting into ourselves. Plus mushrooms, you know? shrooms you know that people have whole relationships with mushrooms? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. And mushrooms, a fungus fungus thrives on our body.
Joe Rogan 38:18
Have you ever done psychedelic mushrooms?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 38:19
I’ve never done anything psychedelic. I’ll tell you why. Yeah, please do. So I don’t know if it’s a good reason. I don’t know if it’s the best reason that can exist. But for me, it’s a really good reason. The human mind barely works, as it is. Barely. You ever see a book of of optical illusions? With no one doesn’t love a good book of optical illusions and you turn the PAL what is that? Was it in the page out of the page? Is the line longer? Is it shorter, and you’re scratching your head? These are simple line drawings that confound the human minds ability to interpret. Our brain barely works as an accurate decoder of the natural world around you. You not want to stir and chemicals. I recognize it’ll take you on a ride. But I have always valued objective reality. I don’t want anything interfering with my understanding of what is actually happening in front of me. And there are people who would claim that under the influence, they’re accessing some actual other reality. All I can say is if in that other reality, you can, you know, invent the James Webb Space Telescope. Tell me if you can figure out how to fly. You know, and, and if you can do that, tell us about it. And then people say, Oh, I visited Venus. When I was on a head trip. Did you bring back evidence? Evidence matters? Do you bring it? No. But it was in their head? Well,
Joe Rogan 40:08
the material world, we’re talking about actual physical objects, right? It’s like if you could present a physical universe, the physical, what they’re experiencing is something akin to you could call it a hallucination. You could call it a portal where physical reality doesn’t exist. And you only exist as consciousness. Here’s
Neil deGrasse Tyson 40:32
my skepticism. I don’t mind people saying that they visited another planet, or whatever, wherever they visiting or astral plane. Okay, I don’t. Okay, um, you know, write a travelogue and share it with people, as some have done. I guess, I would ask whether what you experienced is part of an objective reality that we can all recognize. Because if it’s not, then it’s completely in your head. And if it’s completely in your head, when it is less useful,
Joe Rogan 41:07
what do you mean by that part of it objective reality
Neil deGrasse Tyson 41:09
reality. So here’s an example. The when people have these near death experiences, okay, or one where they’re dying on a table, and they have a common lead, describe, they leave their body, and they look back on themselves. Okay, that’s a thing going, that’s something Okay, right. Let’s investigate this. Okay. So the test for whether you really left your body, or whether you were hallucinating it is get some writing that faces the ceiling, up above your body. Okay, and they’ve done this experiment. And if you floating above your body, above that piece of paper, when you come back to life, you should be able to say what’s written on that piece of paper? And that has yet to happen. If you get above it. Yeah, if you get above it, correct. That is yet to happen. That’s a really good piece of paper be suspended, or you have to put it up on a shelf or something. You’d be able to put it in a way that it would be clearly
Joe Rogan 42:08
then the person would have to die knowing that piece of paper was there and then be brought back.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 42:14
Possibly if the if Yeah, I mean, the
Joe Rogan 42:18
to tell them hey, I know you’re gonna die. You’re gonna
Neil deGrasse Tyson 42:21
die. We’re gonna come back. Yeah, I have a piece of paper up here.
Joe Rogan 42:24
That’s a pretty ridiculous experiment. Don’t try it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 42:28
If you can. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, pause, pause from dip. Ridiculous experiment. Hey,
Joe Rogan 42:33
I know this guy is about to die. But instead of concentrating, bringing him back to life, let’s write down on a piece of paper. Who the fuck is gonna do though?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 42:42
You know what they did? Well, in 1895, after real hemorrhage in discovers X rays, and they find out it penetrates your body. And you can see bones inside your body. You don’t they did. Let’s set up X ray machines at the bedside of dying people to see if they can see a soul leaves the body.
Joe Rogan 43:01
Hmm. And everybody just got cancer from radiation.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 43:05
They died from cancer. I thought that was an admirable attack. Yes. To make a measurement. Yeah, that’s
Joe Rogan 43:13
interesting. But yes, but they never saw possibly know that someone is going to die and or have a near death experiment. What would you experience rather? And then put a piece of paper if you want on a shelf? You What
Neil deGrasse Tyson 43:26
do you want to do? You’d have to be really organized about that. Yeah, if you want to do this on mass,
Joe Rogan 43:30
you’d have to just like have shelves and every, every in every room, every car every art Correct? Or? Yeah. How often does that happen? Where people have above their body experiences very
Neil deGrasse Tyson 43:41
frequently, proponent very frequently Yeah, I’m just saying that the brain is capable of so much extraordinary thought within itself, of course, that what I care about for the world is what is objectively true. And what’s objectively true can be verified by multiple people. And if it’s only true within your head, it’s not useful, is all I’m saying?
Joe Rogan 44:09
How could it not be useful to other people to you, if useful, hold on, if it’s useful to you. And then that usefulness to you, actually manifests itself in something that gets created because of this experience, like Kary Mullis, created the PCR method, because he had an acid trip and during the acid trip came up with this idea.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 44:31
So I, what we’d have to ask is, how frequent is that? So you get everybody who takes trips of any kind, be it mushrooms or acid or and look at the body of their new thoughts that have come from them. For them having when they credited, okay, and Carl Sagan was a big pothead. Yeah, okay, and highly productive scientist. So, um, So the question is, does it give you some insight which which when you are not under the influence gets you closer to an objective reality? That’s an interesting question. Carl
Joe Rogan 45:08
Sagan actually believe that there was the way he described what was his description the way he described it. But he said he believed that there are thoughts that were only available that will you when you were under the influence
Neil deGrasse Tyson 45:20
of marijuana, that is certainly the case for any drug. Right?
Joe Rogan 45:23
He felt like those thoughts were beneficial. Well, I
Neil deGrasse Tyson 45:25
can ask, are those thoughts more connected to reality than if you were not? So influenced? I did an experiment with myself. Okay. Okay. When I first started writing, in graduate school, at a monthly column, I, you know, there’s that stereotype of Hemingway with a drink, you know, and you do the writing. And that’s the creative moment. I said, I don’t really like hard liquor, but I like wine. So let me get a bottle of wine and drink wine while I write. And I said, Yeah, this is good. This is good that I’m doing. And then I did it without wine. This is an experiment I conducted on myself. And it was not as fun composing, it was just some, you know, a smooth sort of low level, sort of wine buzz. But I’d looked at the two, there was no contest. My completely sober writing was vastly better than what I was writing under the influence of several glasses, even though I believed
Joe Rogan 46:28
it was really good, but hold on a second. What kind of writing are you talking about? If you’re talking about fiction know the pros. Okay, pros. greatest examples of fiction enhancing, being enhanced rather by under the influence of drugs and chemicals is Stephen King. If you go and read Stephen King’s early work versus the stuff after he got sober, and I’m a gigantic Stephen King fan.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 46:52
That was just alcohol in his case. Other drugs,
Joe Rogan 46:54
a lot of cocaine, lot of alcohol, cigarettes, lot of cigarettes. It was way better. It’s vastly superior darker, deeper stranger. More bizarre more shocking in the day. You’re seeing the day read it today. Read care.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 47:08
You’re saying what he created in the day under that
Joe Rogan 47:11
way the stuff under the influence and stuff he created areas? Deeply dark, dark? Oh, yeah. So that’s cemetery all they’re almost all Shawshank Redemption, because I think all of them were when he was fucked up. He wrote some good stuff after he was fucked up. But like Cujo, he doesn’t even remember writing it. Okay, so, tasks.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 47:31
So is this something you would recommend? For create,
Joe Rogan 47:35
I recommended Stephen King get back on coke. Stay off Twitter, get back on coke. I’m kidding.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 47:42
So what might one day experiment with glasses of wine? Yeah, that’s
Joe Rogan 47:45
not enough. That experiment is not enough. Like I personally feel that under the influence of marijuana, I come up with some of my best ideas for comedy. For stand up comedy writing, I like to I do the joy, are
Neil deGrasse Tyson 47:57
you gonna show ready to drop? Yeah. I love your work very much.
Joe Rogan 48:01
I do the George Carlin method. I write sober. And then I punch it up. Hi. Okay. And sometimes. George Carlin had a great point. He’s like, You should write about things that you’re thinking about, or things that are like, important, or things that are on your mind. And then he would like let it sit, and then he would smoke pot and go back to it. And then he would come up all the funny, interesting, ridiculous aspects of it. And he would interject them into Yeah,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 48:28
yeah. So so I’m just saying, to the extent I’d like to know how reliable that is.
Joe Rogan 48:34
Well, here’s the other point that I should say. There’s many people that don’t do any drugs that write fantastic stuff. And there’s many comedians that are completely clean and sober, that have done their best work once they got clean and sober. That’s true to both those things are true, right. But they’re, I think their tool was lost
Neil deGrasse Tyson 48:53
some comedians. I mean, you know, Mitch Hedberg, for example,
Joe Rogan 48:57
which is genius, but he had a really bad drug, his injectable heroin thing, which is one of the worst. But the point is, it’s like, their tools. And I used to have a joke about it like the marijuana is like any other tool, it’s like a hammer. You can build a house with a hammer or you can hit yourself in the deck if you’re fucking crazy. And that’s, that’s the problem with all sorts of things they need to be managed responsibly, and people need to understand what the effects are with the dosages and that’s where science comes in.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 49:29
Here’s what I’ll do here’s what I’ll do I still have some writing projects then I’m going to finish mushrooms know when I’m done with what I know I wanted to write before I died. Okay, then I will consider this and come to daddy. I’ll come to Come to Papa. Papa. I’ll see if some new creative thing comes out of me at that time.
Joe Rogan 49:52
Well, I don’t know if new creative things will come out of you but I think I already got stuff will come out that probably Probably wouldn’t exist without them. And when you’re talking about like, really breakthrough psychedelic moments, like DMT, or mushrooms, psilocybin, one of the really fascinating things is they mimic neuro chemistry, like DMT is in the brain, and it’s in all the organs. And it’s a part of natural human neuro chemistry,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 50:23
except, of course, so it was fentanyl. So fentanyl is a part of the receptors for it.
Joe Rogan 50:28
So right, but DMT is produced by the human body. It’s actually a thing that the body makes. We don’t know why. And the really heavy duty psychedelic people think that in large doses, when you take it and have these breakthrough experiences, what you’re doing is you’re you’re going through some sort of chemical portal. And this chemical portal is only available to people in these Near Death Experiences under extreme moments of stress, where they have like these moments where they go through the tunnel and like the bright light and they meet God.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 51:00
I mean, how many of these? What I have to see to be convinced that it’s a reliable consequence of it?
Joe Rogan 51:06
Do it? Yeah, I think it’s what when this conversation is like talking to a person who’s lived in an underground tunnel their whole life who’s dismissing sunlight? They’re like, what’s the big deal with sunlight? I’m fine down here with light bulbs. You and your sunlight. Oh, yeah, photosynthesis. I’ve got hydroponics.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 51:29
So you’re being a very effective drug pusher.
Joe Rogan 51:34
But the drugs that I’m interested in are not dangerous. They’re not ones that kill you like I’ve never done cocaine. I’ve never done heroin I’ve never done and feta means I’m not interested in cocaine. It can
Neil deGrasse Tyson 51:45
can if you’re rich enough.
Joe Rogan 51:49
Well, it certainly can kill you today because so much of it is laced with fentanyl. Oh, yeah, that’s just one of the number one killers of young people unfortunately, is fentanyl contamination of drugs. But I I’m I’m interested in pharmacology. I’m interested in what what happens to the mind when it’s under the influence of different substances?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 52:08
Yeah, I guess I’m less interested because I don’t have to think more about what you said. But look at how people misinterpret reality when they’re not on anything.
Joe Rogan 52:23
It’s a good point. And it’s another good point is there’s many people that failure eyewitness
Neil deGrasse Tyson 52:26
testimony just to say what actually happened or duress that will end up in jail? Yeah. Because of that for the rest
Joe Rogan 52:34
of their lives. Yes, Wilson. I’ve had many, many conversations with people on this podcast about that, because I’ve worked with my friend Josh Dubin, who was originally an ambassador for the Innocence Project and a bunch of stuff on his own, where he’s gotten many, many, many people
Neil deGrasse Tyson 52:50
Innocence Project even has to exist in this world is itself a Travis a travesty?
Joe Rogan 52:56
Well, I’m hoping that was science, there’s gonna come a time where we can actually read the contents of people’s minds. And that this will no longer be I remember episode
Neil deGrasse Tyson 53:08
of Black Mirror. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yes. But the I think, maybe, yes, that would be interesting. The
Joe Rogan 53:15
problem is that false memories are a real thing. So
Neil deGrasse Tyson 53:17
there are people who believe something. And if you read their mind, you’ll just see what it is that they believe.
Joe Rogan 53:23
But I wonder if you could sort of back engineer that belief. I wonder if it could get to the point where you could say, oh, you believe this, because this is a memory of the way you’ve described to in memory, Black
Neil deGrasse Tyson 53:36
Mirror style, and you have a chip that records everything that you see, there’s probably there’s a chapter in here called law and order where I get into the role of science in deciding whether someone is guilty or innocent. And it’s the idea that in a courtroom, someone says, I need a witness. This is like, in the court of science. That’s the last thing you were ever asking for. Yeah. Because we know, the psychologist knew this first. The rest of us, you know, figured it out after the fact that eyewitness testimony is one of the least reliable forms. i The third time, I was rejected from jury duty. I show up dutifully, okay. And then the third time they said there was a woman who was robbed on the street, have her groceries in her in her purse, and had the person who she accuses positively identifies and she and her and it’s a literal, he said, she said, Okay, we read the particulars of the case. She said he robbed her the groceries, took it and then ran off. When they the cops found the guy. He was not in possession of anything. She said he took the look in the area if anything stashed in dumpsters, I think he couldn’t find anything. Okay, So that’s that’s the state of the case. And the judge reads the particulars and goes to the up down, like down to the last 15. I’m almost on a jury. For the first time, I’m almost there and said, Do you have any? Does anyone have any think they would not be able to convict based on the kind of information, then evidence that’s been presented? And, and there’s a juror 14, whatever you numbered, right, until you’re selected, and said, Would you have any more I said, Yes, I’d have a problem. If the only evidence available is eyewitness testimony, that everything I know about it tells me I should not trust it on the level where you end up putting someone in jail. So I could not convict if that’s the only evidence you have what the judge said next. was, Are there any other jurors like juror 14? Who said, who needs more than one witness before they would be able to convict? And I said, Should I jump in now and say, That’s not what I said, What should I do? I think the person in front of me said, Your Honor, that’s not what he said, Ah, okay. And I said, Oh, thank you. Thank you, Jesus. He said, That’s not what he said. And I resisted with all my mind to say, Your Honor. You were I witnessed to what I said 20 seconds ago and got it wrong. But I resisted, but I was nonetheless on the street. 20 minutes later, I
Joe Rogan 56:39
think you should have said that just for his own
Neil deGrasse Tyson 56:41
edification was a chic by the way. Sorry, I’m sexy. You’re totally sexist. We’ve all known that forever. myself on the wrist, right. So I’m just saying it’s clear that the legal system, the precision of deeply flawed, it’s deeply flawed, and that it was the best we have. Well, then fix it. Yeah. I mean, if that’s what needs to dunk people, and if you died face up, you were innocent and die facedown. You were guilty. That was the best they had then, but we improved on it.
Joe Rogan 57:11
Right? If they drowned you, you weren’t a witch. Congratulations. You weren’t guilty? Well,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 57:15
it depends it Yeah, if that’s right, how you died. Yeah. And you would otherwise go to heaven, where you were right. So plus, there’s the in Columbus voyage. There’s a lot. We talked about Columbus last time. I’m
Joe Rogan 57:30
talking about Columbus, man. Yeah, yeah, yes, horrific. So,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 57:33
in one of the voyages, they went on some stretch of time, and they didn’t have food and, and they had Indians from there, that they brought on board as well as some of their own crew. And people were dying. And so it see what do you do with a dead body? You throw it overboard? Of course. Okay. So a person who’s keeping notes, sad, all the Indians, they threw overboard. floated facedown. It only Christians. That’s it. Okay. I guess that could happen, statistically, perhaps. I don’t know. But now we have his handwritten notes, eyewitness testimony have something that is completely fulfilling his own world views, expectations of how things should be. So that’s so in the whole sort of Law and Order Chapter I just take, pick all that apart? And just try to say, you know, why not have jurors that are really good at data analysis? How about that?
Joe Rogan 58:39
That would be nice. But that’s really hard to find. And then on top of that, if you are dealing with eyewitness testimony, what do you do? Do you just throw everything out completely? Or do you try to assess whether or not that person is capable of objective thought and reason? No,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 58:53
you just know, because even people who are better at it are still flawed
Joe Rogan 58:57
at it. Right? Especially under experiences under extreme duress.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 59:01
Correct. As they’ve done many times in psychology class. Yeah, they have, you know, the classes unfolding. And they staged some violent thing with an explosion, and then say, right, what you just saw, right? And nothing agrees. Right. Okay. So, yeah, it’s, it’s a, it’s a challenge, which is the
Joe Rogan 59:19
problem of conspiracy theories after big events like 911. Like all the people that say they saw this, and they saw that and I remember this, and I remember that and these little sound bites of all these people, and you piece them together, like, oh my god, they planted bombs,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 59:32
and they’re also there are people who say before, before in an earthquake, they knew it was gonna do they say they see all the animals running, right. And it’s like, okay, you reported that after the earthquake happened, not like before,
Joe Rogan 59:47
but doesn’t that happen during tsunamis? Don’t Don’t animals actually do go to higher ground? I think that is actually been document I.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 59:54
Okay, so that halfpipe highly suspicious of whether that’s true Because tsunami, there’s there’s no way to know that tsunami typically occurs from an earthquake way offshore. Right? Okay. And it’s a very low amplitude wave in deep water that continues to gain amplitude as the water gets shallower and shallower. So that’s why waves get bigger when they crash on the shores. So as it comes to the shore, so if there’s just an animal in the woods, if you’re not on the shoreline, there’s no way to know that
Joe Rogan 1:00:31
I think they were talking about animals on islands, and animals that do live closer to the shore. And maybe there’s an indication because the water pulls back before us. I’m not sure I
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:00:41
can, I can recognize that. But if you’re just an animal somewhere, you know, onshore, away from the coast, I don’t really see that I need to see very good evidence for that. And not just someone’s account. Yeah, I don’t know if they’re taught this my whole point. Yeah, that people have accounts of all kinds of things. But you know, in the, there’s a whole chapter called Risk and reward. All right, here’s something. Surely in your life, you’d have taken an average of numbers before. Okay, tell me Yes. Sure. Lie to me, even if it’s not you. Okay. Do you realize that the first time anyone ever did that, to realize that maybe there’s some interesting result here was after the invention of algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus? Really, statistics is just something that the human brain, it’s just not natural. It is completely foreign to us. We we don’t know how to interpret simple random events, because we want to give meaning to them. You know, the thing where you’re in a some other country in some other city, and you meet someone like a childhood friend, yeah, he’s a small world. Yeah, that’s your first thought, right? Small world. Okay, here’s, here’s how to cure that. Okay, next time you’re in a foreign city, go up to every single person you walk by and say, Do I know you? And they’ll probably say, No, I mean, no, you personally don’t know you, because your dude, but they know you personally know, just keep doing this. And if they say, No, I don’t know you then say, big world. Just do that. You’ll do that millions of times. Okay, before you meet someone who you once knew. And the proper statistics will then get recorded. for that. To know it’s not a small world, it’s a fucking big world. And then a lot of people in it who you don’t know,
Joe Rogan 1:02:46
it’s just very unusual. When you meet someone in another country.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:02:49
There’s a point where, well, if you do the math, there a lot of things that people say are unusual, where it would be unusual if you didn’t?
Joe Rogan 1:02:59
Well, if you fly to England, and you don’t tell anybody, you’re flying to England, and you run into a friend from back home, that’s pretty unusual.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:03:09
Look how often people say that say that it happens?
Joe Rogan 1:03:11
Well, we live in a strange point.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:03:15
Okay, everybody, you know, has that story. Run the statistics on it. It would be odd if you went your life presuming you have a normal life and you know, people and your school was big, and all of this, okay, you didn’t grow up in a farm with, you know, with with nobody, you didn’t know anybody, it requires some basic number of people. There’s a lot of errors of statistics that we make of probability and statistics. The sad part of it is there’s an entire industry that has risen to exploit that fact. And they call casinos, the fact that you could go to a roulette table, and somebody got a lot of money on seven. So why do you have money on so it’s do what it means do well look at the previous roles, because I’ll show you the previous roles, and seven hasn’t appeared in 20 roles or whatever the number is they put so it’s do No, it’s not do this is a failure of the human brain to understand and interpret probability and statistics. They are people who are going to roll dice. Okay, if they need a low number, they’ll take the dice and like gently throw them hard. This is This is nonsense. This is crazy. And but those people are suckers cuz
Joe Rogan 1:04:30
there’s other people understand statistics and they kicked them out of casinos because they count car
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:04:36
only only for those that are not purely random like a roulette table. Okay, we’re
Joe Rogan 1:04:40
dice right? Okay. Things like blackjack.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:04:43
Correct. You can tilt the odds in your favor a little bit and be systematic about it. But I’m talking about pure probabilities. The fact that someone thinks that a number is due right is itself Do you realize the American Physical Society This is my physics P because that’s our Physics Society 1986 They were going to have their annual meeting in San Diego and there was a hotel snafu. So they had to reschedule. And so Vegas said, We’ll take you the MGM Marina, which became the MGM Grand will take you 4000, physicists said, Okay. 4000, physicists had their annual meeting in Las Vegas and let me tell you, okay. K through 12. Is there even a course offered in probability and statistics? You learn reading, writing and arithmetic, not reading, writing, and probability and statistics, right? It’s kind of not there. And if it’s there, it’s an elective. Okay. So, as a scientist, especially as a physical scientist, I take some form of probability in statistics, every single year, I am in school, different nuances and how data can be looked at and analyzed and put together an average and the average that I told you about, yeah, numbers divided by that. That’s one of a dozen kind of ways you can average numbers. There are other ways you can have a statistically weighted average, it depends on the needs depends on the situation. Point is, the physicist came to Vegas. One week later, there was a news headline. Physicists in town, lowest casino take ever were told to never return
Joe Rogan 1:06:26
to Vegas. Really? Yes. They were told to never return.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:06:29
They were told well, that might be apocryphal, but it was it was in the headline. So that’s fun. So these are people these are my peeps. This is what we do. We just mark we think about stuff it’s not because we took advantage of the crap state of the of the blackjack table. It’s because they just simply didn’t gamble.
Joe Rogan 1:06:47
Well, I’m the same way I don’t gamble either. I just see. I look how big the place is. So Mike, how was this made by selling tickets to the buffet? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Now this is made from suckers. Not me. My wife went months ago.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:07:02
Let’s say your your your winning. Yeah. In something you’re in the in the One Armed Bandit and you had a jackpot jackpot. What did they do with you? At that point? They see this is happening. What is the house? Do
Joe Rogan 1:07:13
they check the machine? No, no, no, no, no. They give you free drinks and free
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:07:18
drinks? Yeah, they gotta come the server to come over to you and say would you like a free cocktail? Yes to stir chemicals into your brain to disrupt the little bit of objective reality. Experiences,
Joe Rogan 1:07:32
innovations and you feeling lucky? Lucky. Feeling lucky. Yeah, I’m not. I don’t feel lucky at all. Because he knows I feel stupid.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:07:41
Oh, and another thing with the state lotteries. This is all in the in the the risk and reward chapter state lotteries. Do you know what most of the revenue, you know to state money goes into the coffers? Right tax coffers? Do you know where most of that money is allocated for in most states? No, it goes to education. Oh, that’s good. You did? No, no, that’s great. It’s so that can make you feel a little better. Like you’re helping out your own state. Right. And you buy your state lottery. Here’s the thing. I part of me wonders. Okay, let me join you in a conspiracy thing here. Okay. That’s my conspiracy. Okay. Am I allowed? Yes. play loud one, one per year,
Joe Rogan 1:08:20
give you all the ones you want. I love conspiracy conspiracy
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:08:23
is they have to make sure that the school curriculum does not teach probability statistics. That’s why it’s because if they didn’t wait a minute, wait a minute, they did the no one would play the lottery. So
Joe Rogan 1:08:36
they allocate money to education with a specific mandate.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:08:43
I’m not saying that. What are you saying? I’m Yes, I’m saying? No, no, no, he
1:08:50
was like a law.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:08:51
No, no. No, I’m just saying it’s a little suspicious. That that knowledge of math that would undermine the ability of the state lottery to make money is not a required part of the math curriculum in kindergarten through 12.
Joe Rogan 1:09:14
So you think, but you don’t think that’s why I’m just
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:09:17
playing with it? No, I don’t really think that’s why right. Okay, so I see what you were doing there, you are assuming that I was totally in on this conspiracy theory. And I have charts on my wall, and websites devoted to know, it just crossed my mind how odd it is. That when you know enough about probability and statistics, you bet less. And when you bet less, the revenue to the state would drop, and that’s the revenue that would go to education. So it has the power to plant the seeds of its own undoing. And it doesn’t do that. So tricked by that fact,
Joe Rogan 1:09:57
just removing ourselves from the conspiracy theories. aspect of it, do you think that it would be beneficial to teach probability and statistics to people?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:10:05
Oh my gosh, a log in how many bad decisions we make? Because we think we have an understanding of what is random and what is not. Right. What is it? There’s the one, they did this, but actually, their analysis was flawed, but the basis was Whelk was, was well placed. So the idea is you’re playing a basketball game, and somebody hits a few shots in a row, there’s got a hot hand given to them. Yeah, they don’t have a hot hand. It is the natural cotton consequence. If you’re shooting 50% in a game, or 40%, yes, and you take, I don’t know how many shots, you take 30 shots, you can look at the probability that you’ll have multiple shots in a row that are made. And it’s very high, and it’s very real. But do you discount? It’s not something special happening? It is the randomness of the statistics that’s
Joe Rogan 1:11:01
happening. Okay. But this is talking about statistics. But from an individual basis, do you discount the idea that sometimes people feel really good? And they have a very good sense of where the balls going, where they’re more loose or relaxed or more more practiced, whatever it may be? And they’re more accurate because of that?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:11:21
If that’s the case, no. So people, so people have good days. Right? Right. Clearly, so this is why that original analysis was slightly flawed. Because a person can have more than what is typical shots in a row. Right? Okay. And for that game, you could look at their data, and they would make 60% of the shots instead of 40% of the shots. And if you make 60% of the shots, you then expect three in a row here, six in a row, they’re five in a row here, in the in the random expression of having a 60% success rate in a basket, you expect intervals where you make multiple shots in a row. That’s my only point. And that could be a good day for you. Because you’re shooting 60%, right? And I want to I want to recognize that I’m going to hand you the ball. If you haven’t a good day, you totally have a good day. But at the end of the day, you’re not you’re not syncing 20 here and none before it No, in the statistics, maintain themselves in the game unless you get injured or something, of course. So but my point is, we have such an I don’t want to blame people for this. If it was natural to think statistically about the world, it would have been the first branches of math we would have ever discovered. But it wasn’t, was like 1753 Sounds like a long time ago. But it’s 50 years after calculus was invented after calculus, which is not even taught and so long ago, okay, really correct. There is a simple paper on the benefits of taking the mean mean is average of of observations in astronomical data is what astronomer did it first to take a mean. And this is just so that tells me we are victims of our own brain wiring. And so and it takes many years to undo that wiring or to see through it so that you are not you know, and it prevents you from seeing other things. Okay, how so? You realize last year, we lost as many people in the United States to traffic accidents. As we did in all the years we fought in Vietnam. Look at the effort we put up as a country beginning maybe 1967, certainly 68 to stop the carnage. And that’s just the American deaths not to mention the millions of deaths of the Vietnamese themselves north and south. Point is our reactions to statistics are very different depending on what caused it. Yes. And that’s I’m intrigued by that. I don’t have a good understanding of it. Any laws that treat it are going to have to fold in people’s emotions. Here’s an example. You shoot deer with your bow and arrow. There’s a certain number of deer deaths and human deaths by cars hitting deer in the roads, especially in suburban rural places. Okay. Well, what do you do about this? What are you going to do
Joe Rogan 1:14:30
get a truck with a big ass bumper? That’s what they do a Joe Rogan solution? Have you ever seen those guys work on ranch and make
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:14:41
sure your ranch has significantly more mass than than the deer? No,
Joe Rogan 1:14:44
they have specific bumpers that they they build to save people’s lives.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:14:50
Right. And of course, this is what the old locomotives had if they were cattle on the you ever see that pointy front on locomotive? Yes, yes, that was the pride catalog. So it wouldn’t roll over the cow and derail the right. So. So what do you do? Do you accept the 100 deaths a year in your county? Whatever human deaths? Counting deer deaths here, right? Or, or do you find something big as big as killer bumpers
Joe Rogan 1:15:18
like those suckers
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:15:20
like Ford F 250? Right there. That’s
Joe Rogan 1:15:22
what I’m saying. Look at that one, the Ford F 250. That red one. That’s what I’m talking about. Problem
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:15:26
is if the center of mass of the deer is above the level of that bumper, but it’s well for elk, it would be for moose, it would be up in Alaska. No, yes.
Joe Rogan 1:15:38
No, not a 250 ft. 50. Center of mass of an elk. Or moose moose is a different
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:15:46
I saw moose, my wife,
Joe Rogan 1:15:50
the first time you like. The first time I saw how did that happen? I was in British Columbia. And I saw it it was like the scene in Jurassic Park with Jeff Goldblum gets out of the Jeep is like,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:16:02
yeah, it’s like, who invented that? Right? Right, the size of that. So if you’re under the center of mass, that it will just roll up and crush your windshield. So
Joe Rogan 1:16:12
go through your windshield. Yeah, that’s terrific.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:16:15
So here’s my point, there was a group I forgot where it’s somewhere in New England who did a study. And the study was if you have 100 deaths a year, we can drop that to maybe 30 deaths a year. How, by introducing the natural cat predator to the deer. So it would be like the Puma or bobcat, one of these sort of mid sized cats that hold the deer as their quarry, okay. And they ran some models of how this would go. And you could drop the number of human deaths by a factor of three. Okay? Because still, some deer would wander onto the road. But you’ll lose about 10 children a year. They’ll just snatch your kid out of the backyard and eat your child. So look at these numbers. You killed 100 people in their cars, or, or the deer killed 30 people plus 10 children? No, no, the deer killed 30 people, the bobcat kills 10 and bucket might not kill an adult, not bucket but whatever. Not next mountain life, whatever was native in the region long ago, okay. And so they did a study. And the point is, you could not bring that suggestion forward. Right? Because the government would be introducing an animal that killed your children. But no one’s looking at the 100 people that were up whatever the numbers were, it was a factor of three or so I know. There’s another so the numbers are in the book. No, I’m just giving this as an example. I understand of, of, we don’t, we’re not equipped to fold our emotions with the data to arrive at a solution that would save the most lives.
Joe Rogan 1:18:10
I see what you’re saying. There is a technological solution that they’ve come up with, there’s a device that they put at the front of the car that makes a very certain sound, that alert
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:18:20
about that it’s right on the presence on the edges of the I’ve heard about that, but I haven’t read about it like 20 years ago. So I haven’t heard much about it. I don’t know how effective it is. It runs the air going through it makes a kind of a siren effect is that whenever last remembered it?
Joe Rogan 1:18:37
Yeah, well, whatever it is, it developed some sort of a sound that the deer can hear and they avoid it. But they have a problem.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:18:45
I was I was in Alaska, and there was a deer and a grizzly bear must have been 300 yards away, must weigh down in the valley. And the deer noticed it. And it was eating but he’s eating very cautiously, always looking to the bear. And I’m saying if he could notice a bear 300 yards and be cautious of it. Why can’t it no afford 250 barreling down the road because it’s
Joe Rogan 1:19:14
not natural? To figure it
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:19:16
out? It’s a mammal. It’s got a brain that takes let me get let me let me get angry with it. How come we haven’t killed all the stupid deer by now. So the ones that are left are the ones that recognize that cars kill them
Joe Rogan 1:19:29
because they’re all stupid. They just have really good senses. And I heard some senses that are designed to avoid predation with us now, you know, they don’t do that.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:19:39
But how long have I said Rat life figured out how to coexist with human rats. They’re very, they’re very they figured this out.
Joe Rogan 1:19:46
Deer don’t know what to do with headlights and cars. It’s a completely unnatural so every one
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:19:51
that doesn’t they die and the ones that have a little bit of genetic variation that figures it out. They’ll survive
Joe Rogan 1:19:57
sort of because then they get horny the problem Your dears. If you look at the sex life of deer, I do. Okay, one of the things that happened tell me how you tick well to the right, when deer rot is when you hunt them. And one of the things that happens during the rut is they get ridiculous. And they just run out to the candy Lake and goes into the street. That’s oftentimes a male, female there because they’re just chasing them. The females are just trying to get away and they just run out into traffic that happens or the male is trying to chase the female and all he’s got on his mind is got tunnel vision, and they just boom, gets hit by that. f2 50
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:20:34
Speaking of dear brother, my sister drives an F 250. I worked at a forfeit is there for 5350 Excuse me. Oh, she has a dually Yes, she’s got one where the tires can do separate things. Okay, up with his site. Yeah,
Joe Rogan 1:20:49
she Yeah, she’s serious. She’s
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:20:50
She did them. They’ll mess up my system. Okay. She
Joe Rogan 1:20:53
says they’re out there off road. With that crazy truck,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:20:57
she just she’d like being badass when it comes. I like
Joe Rogan 1:21:01
the way she thinks.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:21:03
So but she doesn’t hunt. So it’s missing half the equation there. So on the subject of deer in the chapter on gender, and identity. So I go there gender and identity because it’s very hot topic. Yeah. And I just apply some rational thinking to it. Do you know about Santas reindeer? Do you know about
Joe Rogan 1:21:22
them? Sure. I know very much about them. You do? Yeah. Okay.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:21:25
So do you know that terrible? Yes. Caribou? Correct? Yeah. And well, you can domesticate the caribou. And when you do, then both the the boys and the girls have antlers?
Joe Rogan 1:21:40
Okay, well, that’s just the fact of all caribou.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:21:43
Okay? But sorry, the domesticated ones are called reindeer. But they’re, they’re derived from the caribou. Correct. So watch what happens. So, as you may know, the male deer lose their antlers in late October, early November,
Joe Rogan 1:22:02
depending upon what were those you castrated. They don’t don’t
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:22:05
castrate him. They’ll keep their damn Yeah, but otherwise they drop their hammers right before winter begins.
Joe Rogan 1:22:11
Generally not no. Depends on the animal. But a lot of them keep it until almost spring and they dropped when they grow back very quick. That’s
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:22:21
nothing of what I’ve read or learned of this animal.
Joe Rogan 1:22:25
Or this just
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:22:26
caribou caribou just specifically, okay, the ones that became Santas reindeer. We’re not talking about the deer on the, you know, in central Texas. No, they dropped them in the winter. They dropped them before they dropped them November. Okay. The female don’t, the female don’t. So all that means is all eight of Santa’s reindeer are female. Which means Rudolph has been misgendered
Joe Rogan 1:22:52
Interesting. Well, do you know where the myth of Santas reindeer flying comes from? I think it’s from mushrooms, isn’t it? Yeah. Anita muscaria mushroom, which looks like Santa Claus. Yeah, that’s it with red and red. And they love those things they love the Amanita muscaria mushroom to the fact that to the point where when people are doing mushroom ceremonies, and they go outside to urinate or they drink, the caribou will knock you over to get to your urine. Yeah, that’s if you have domesticated caribou, they will knock you over to get to the urine, because they smell the Amanita muscaria. And whatever the it’s not psilocybin has
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:23:28
to be such a major I I’m trying to imagine how high I want to get to drink someone else’s pee.
Joe Rogan 1:23:36
Well, that’s terrible. It’s not that wise, nor are they educated. Or they even understand the concept of urine. The whatever the liquid compound, yeah, it’s there. Well, their sense of smell is preposterously intense. I mean, we can’t even imagine what a deer can smell. They can smell you hundreds of yards away. I mean, I’ve seen deer go like this 100 yards away, and then they bolt because they smell you they catch you and yeah, they’re amazing.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:24:03
Here’s a mystery that I’ve always had to this day. Because dogs have very acute sense of smell as well. Yeah, that’s how you say that if you just say, dog smell good. You don’t know what that means, right? Do they smell better than we do? Right? It’s an it’s an ambiguous sentence. That’s so acute sense of smell. So if they smell so acutely, why do they get within like a half inch of each other’s butt?
Joe Rogan 1:24:30
Because they want to smell each other. But you could, you could smell that 100 yards away, but they want to smell everything they want to smell the hormones, they want to know. Well, they’re, they’re
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:24:40
good. Yeah. Let me get up on it. Yeah, they want okay.
Joe Rogan 1:24:43
They want to know if you’re feeling aggressive, okay, or in heat. They want to know all those things.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:24:49
Yeah. I’ve never fast had that urge to do that with other humans. You
Joe Rogan 1:24:53
know, there could smell somewhere in the neighborhood of nine times greater than a bloodhound.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:24:58
Hmm. So we should domesticate bears and you Back, though. Good luck with that. By the way, have you seen a bear? You gotta be able to find this. It’s on. I just wanted social media. There’s a bear walking down a highway. And there’s a tipped over traffic cone. And it looks at it, and then writes it back up and keeps walking by it. Wow. And I say to myself, because I have a chapter in here called body and mind. There it is what check this out this watch. It’s a black bear. He’s clearly wrong. Yeah, it looks wrong. Okay, by the way, you found this video really fast. Thank you for this.
Joe Rogan 1:25:35
I think that’s a grizzly bear.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:25:37
He’s got the the lump on the neck.
Joe Rogan 1:25:39
Yeah. That’s pretty crazy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:25:44
That’s Yes, grizzly bear total grizzly bear and keep going. He didn’t even look back. Right. So. So I don’t want to Thanksgiving. I don’t want to say this evidence of intelligence so much as it’s evidence of more going on inside the animal’s head than any of us would have previously ever credited. Credited. Yeah, in another example. And to get this example in body and mind again, there is a magpie bird. Oh, yah hoo. There’s a a bottle of water in some grant playground area, Park area, and it goes up to the ball of water and it dips its beacon to drink from it. Okay, here it is. See that? Okay, it goes in and drinks from it to watch, it’s going to drink. But the problem is, there’s a limit to how far its beak can reach inside of it. And so it gets a stone that fits inside the bottle, which raises the water level so that its beak can continue to drink from it. Yeah, this is some Archimedean crazy stuff going on, really is the magpie by those in the know, is ranked among the smartest of birds. And this is doing something I think humans wouldn’t even think to do probably many humans, right? And so So do you remember? How did they teach you? Where humans we’re in the tree of life when you were in school? Like we were the smartest or the biggest brain? Well, how do they describe it to you know, at the top of the food chain, and okay, and what did they say about our brains? Just tell me in your
Joe Rogan 1:27:17
What’s the size of our brains? It makes us so superior. Okay, by looking at a magpie?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:27:21
Yeah, but dolphins brains are bigger.
Joe Rogan 1:27:23
So 40% larger,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:27:24
okay, so then, so then therefore, what is, you know, well, brains are bigger. So yeah, so So then how do they? If if there are other animals with bigger brains, and we want to stay at the top? What did they say about those other animals?
Joe Rogan 1:27:38
I don’t know. What do they say?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:27:39
No, I’m saying okay, so you know, what they did? They
Joe Rogan 1:27:41
say they’re inferior.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:27:41
So no, so what they did was say, they say, oh, no, we don’t have the biggest brain. Oh, but brain to body weight ratio, then we’re the highest. Okay,
Joe Rogan 1:27:51
is that accurate with dolphins? Yes.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:27:53
So our because they’re, they’re bigger, much bigger creatures than we are. And the brain when you divide the weight of the brain by the weight of the body, we win, right? We beat up whales, we beat our dolphins, we beat out elephants, then there are those who are fans of their say, Well, you want to do it lean weight, because those the dolphins and the whales have a lot of blubber. And that’s not the brain is not having to control the blubber. So cut away the blubber that boosts them, but they still not as high as us. So we walk away saying we’re at the top, however, but they did not say which I had to 40 years later, I learned this that we do not have the highest brain to body weight ratio among animals only among mammals. The Magpie has a higher brain to body weight ratio than humans do. As do all other mid sized birds, like crows, owls, eagles, these these folks, okay? All have a higher brain to body weight ratio than humans do. So that rule that put us at the top was specifically for mammals. And I’m angry that I didn’t think to hear how specific that was, when I was taught that in eighth grade, okay,
Joe Rogan 1:29:16
is our understanding of like crows using tools, very recent, like within the last 100 years,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:29:21
all I can tell you is any animal that we have ever got to study in more detail than we previously did, has shown to be more intelligent than we ever gave it credit shore for being and you know, has the biggest brain to body weight ratio of any creature on Earth. Some species of ants, rarely 15% of their body weight is their brain. And it’s kind of obvious. Some of them like the whole front section is their head, right? It’s kind of in retrospect, it’s kind of obvious. And ants are very busy doing some complicated things and we don’t know what they’re doing especially leafcutter ants. They’re busy. Carpenter ants, leaf cutting ants and crossover into termite land. I don’t know how big their brains are, but they’re busy doing building stuff.
Joe Rogan 1:30:05
And they work in communication with each other. They
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:30:07
communicate. Yeah. One of my favorite cartoons was two dolphins swimming together. And there’s a human. You know, it’s like one of these water parks, right. And when dolphin says to the other, they speaking of the humans that are up on dry land, they face each other and make noises, but it’s not clear they’re actually communicating. So I’m just saying,
1:30:32
we have exterminator that are
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:30:34
close up of an ant. Yeah, that just recently released this image, I think. Yeah. So with
Joe Rogan 1:30:41
a red demon, that would be
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:30:42
insects with so much detail on their bodies? And to say, well, we’re at the top, really? I got one for you. How much of the top? Are you? Do you realize one slice of your lower intestine your calling? Once one centimeter slice, lives and works. More microbes, then all than the total number of humans who ever lived? Hmm. So what you ask yourself, What are you to those microbes? Are you Joe Rogan? No, you are an anaerobic vessel of fecal matter in which they thrive.
Joe Rogan 1:31:29
And without them, you don’t exist? Well, you
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:31:31
don’t digest your food first of all, second, you want to keep them happy. Because if they’re not happy, that they’re in charge, they send you to the nearest toilet as fast as can be. So part of a cosmic perspective on this world is looking at things in a way that decentralizes Who and what you are relative to everything else. And you get a much more honest account of how things work, how they’re put together. That’s very
Joe Rogan 1:32:01
hard for people to really grasp. You’re actually an ecosystem.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:32:05
Yes. Yes. And what is the number that some? Some percent of your total body weight is the weight of other living things, especially what’s alive and thriving in your gut? You’re just carrying them along? Well, I
Joe Rogan 1:32:17
just that’s the case with all organisms that we like to think of organisms as being individuals, but there are actually a
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:32:22
lot I don’t think,
Joe Rogan 1:32:25
an amoeba not.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:32:27
Not single cells, but others. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of symbiotic relationships going on. Oh, yeah. And so you can have a cosmic perspective. That’s not just the cosmos. Yes. cosmic perspective, just here life on Earth. And, you know, they talked about the overview effect where the astronauts, you probably had a few astronauts. Guest. Looking down. Yeah, you look, you look down. I prefer the view from the moon. I’ll take it from orbit.
Joe Rogan 1:32:54
Are you going to do any of those? Like, would you if they let you up on the Jeff Bezos spaceship? They send people up there all the time. Yeah.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:33:00
So it’s fairly regular. I’m an astrophysicist. You’re not interested normally. Let me let me hear me out. Hear me out. So take Earth and shrink it down to like a schoolroom globe. So now we can think of distances relative to that and ask how high up did Bezos in Branson go? Okay, so here’s the scoop. I’m gonna how far away would you say? quarter inch? You say quarter inch. Okay, they went the thickness of two dimes. Oh. And our boy who jumped out of a balloon some years ago. Yeah. What’s his name? Felix Baumgartner? Thickness of one dime. So this idea that they’re going away see the curvature of the earth and there’s no you don’t, you know?
Joe Rogan 1:33:44
Sorry, did Jeff Bezos doesn’t see the curvature here you will,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:33:47
you will see the edge of the earth. But ask how far away is your horizon? When you’re only that high up? You can just look at that. Go to the schoolroom globe, go to dime thicknesses up and then draw a line to have to ask how much of earth do you see? You’ll see a circle that’s a circle cookie cut out of the larger sphere. It’s always a prospective issue. It’s a prospective issue. And by the way, the images when they showed Phyllis Bumgardner where he’s prepared to jump. You see this curved Earth? That’s a fisheye lens, dude. Okay. fisheye lenses, take horizontal lines and bend them convex when you’re above the mid plane
Joe Rogan 1:34:35
of the of the photo in order to gather more of the image
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:34:39
Correct. That’s the only way you can distort it to fit it onto a flat plane because it’s looking at a full sort of 360 Well 180 Alright, and it’s trying to get it in. But what happens if you take that horizontal line the horizon and put it below the mid plane of the camera? It then bends the other way, bends the other way. In fact I have a I have a tweet that did this look for Felix and throw some keywords in there with my Twitter handle. And I have an example of the photos. So, no, he didn’t see the curvature of the earth, but you think he did and he’s high up. And what do we need NASA for? Right? He’s 1.1 Dime thickness. Elon Musk authentically goes into work because they didn’t go into orbit, they went up and fell back to Earth. authentically goes into orbit. So he is a centimeter. Not even, let me save you a little less than a centimeter above Earth’s surface. The folks who really saw Earth with that the folks that went to the moon, we went to the moon nine times three astronauts a pop 27 astronauts have seen Earth from the moon. And that’ll change you that do you know, Apollo 14, astronaut Edgar Mitchell. I have a quote from him. That opens this book. And that’s all you have to read. Because the whole book issues forth from that quote, you. Here it is. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation and intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty, you want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, look at that you son of a bitch.
Joe Rogan 1:36:44
Edgar Mitchell also believes some wacky stuff. Did you know that?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:36:47
Yeah, I spoken with him about it. And he, he was one of the was the co founder of the noetic Institute. He was he was a big fan of the possibility that there was a deeper level of consciousness. And I don’t think it involves drugs, but just that there’s a deeper level of consciousness that the brain might be capable of, if subjected to the proper influences. And he told me how he came across this, okay, I’ll tell you, they’re on their way back from the moon, and then the capsule, and the capsule rotates, it helps to stabilize it among other reasons for that happening. And he happened to be positioned in the capsule for three days, where the windows to the capsule were aligned with the plane of the solar system. Which means every time the capsule rotated, what came in and out of view was the sun, the moon, earth, and all the planets. And so he’s there for three days, watching this drift by. And he felt like he had descended or ascended into a trance state that was beyond what he had ever experienced here on earth, by normal things you encounter, just being a human on Earth. And that led him to wonder whether this was an achievable state, by some other means, by some other forces that you could emulate, here on Earth. And because he experienced that, and I didn’t, what am I? Who am I to say? I’m not I’m not going to judge that.
Joe Rogan 1:38:44
He believed in psycho kinetics, you believe people can do things with their mind? I he had a lot of like, very strange things.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:38:51
I think he’s, I think that the the cleanest way to say that is he believed there was much more capacity of our mind than we had previously tapped. Yeah, and that opens up the gates to all these other things. But I was just sharing with you the, the cycle, the, the, the experiential origins of why he thought that way. Yeah. But the point is, that, that can change you. And in the chapter Earth and Moon, I talk about cosmic perspectives. As as you ascend, that the Earth does not look like the schoolroom globe, right? Color Coded countries. You know, I only as an adult that I look back on that, and I say, You trained me from elementary school, to know who my enemies are and who my friends are, by color coding. Contiguous landmasses on a globe to teach me about the planet
Joe Rogan 1:39:50
Earth, but they weren’t trying to do that. They were trying to it’s a consequence of it geography.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:39:54
I knew who is evil, evil, godless Russia, the Soviet Union was right. Okay, Nick Country was painted red. All right, not ours. I knew this even if it was not on purpose, it had a subliminal effect. And when you go to space, the country borders go away, except for two places. There are two places, you can still see two borders from space. One of them in the daytime, you can see the border of Israel with surrounding deserts. Because Israel irrigates. And so it’s green. And the surrounding areas are brown. You can see that from space. Another border, which you can see from space at night is of course, North and South Korea, right there. Yeah. And that’s punched up. I mean, if you’re in the dead of night, you don’t know the difference between the ocean and the land. As the as you your sight line crosses North and South Korea. And so so what you if you look at the GDP per capita differences between Israel and surrounding nations and South Korea and North Korea, it’s, you know, factors of eight 910 12. So, space can reveal economic inequities in at least those two places, which is itself kind of a stunning fact. So, I want to tell Ilan, you know, neighbors with him, right, get him back here. It’s Hey, Ilan, build a bus, a space bus. We have an Airbus went out of space bus, a space bus, we put all the warring leaders and having said send them to the moon haven’t looked back on Earth. So you know, we’re fighting over that border.
Joe Rogan 1:41:45
We are once they came back down. I think they just go right back to work. You think so? I just went to the Keck Observatory on Wednesday. Nice.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:41:53
It was Hawaii. Yeah. Big Island. Very nice. Do you have the base camp, we’re already at the top to
Joe Rogan 1:41:57
base camp. Yeah, I went specifically there because I had an experience there. About I was 617 years ago, I went there. And I caught it on a perfect night, where the moon wasn’t out. And it was phenomenal. And the view is so astounding. There’s so many stars, you see the Milky Way in such clear detail, that you have a totally different perspective of the cosmos. And if you feel safe flying through space with a windshield over your head, like you’re in a spaceship, you know,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:42:31
there’s some other my entire PhD thesis involved mountain going. It’s a lost ritual, because now we would have what’s called service observing, you just write in what things you want to observe them, what nights for how many hours, and then they send you back the data that used to be a pilgrimage to the top of a mountain and you live nocturnally. And you go to them and be up all night with the telescope and the universe. Yeah, there’s a certain almost spiritual connectivity that that brings upon you when it’s just you alone. And there are moments that mountains are high up enough so that if clouds roll in, you’re above the cloud. We were above the clouds above the clouds. This is what makes it especially spooky, magical mystical, Mount Olympus, like, because you’re on the top. There’s no other land. It’s just clouds. So it’s you. The tops of clouds. And the universe. Yeah, communing with the cosmos
Joe Rogan 1:43:34
view of it is so astounding.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:43:36
And many people go to go to Australia. So you got to see the southern skies. What they’re what they don’t know when they say that is any clear sky anywhere in the world, we’ll get you that. Yeah. In the southern hemisphere, only 15% of humans live there. So there’s essentially no light pollution. Anywhere there. 85% of all humans in the north, you’re hard pressed to find a completely dark sky in the north, leaving you to think that there’s something magically beautiful and different about the southern sky, you’re observing the northern sky. Hawaii is like 15 degrees north, but so it’s a lot of the southern sky as well, point is you have the best observing site in the world, which is why they wanted to put a 30 meter telescope there and there’s some conflict with the indigenous groups regarding that, and whether the mountain is sacred and in what ways it’s sacred, and the like. And so that’s still going on. Last I checked, but I’m not surprised and I’m delighted that you had that experience. And now you know how I feel when I look up. Yeah, I was baptized in emotionally psychologically baptized with the night sky in New York City’s Hayden Planetarium because as a city kid, I grew up in the Bronx. We don’t have a relationship with the night sky. You know, we might see them loon and an occasional planet. The setting sun, that’s it. Look up dots. You see the tall buildings. Back then there was air pollution, light pollution. So my first night sky was the Hayden Planetarium to this day to this was I was nine years old, to this day when I go to mountain talks just as you experience and I look up. I said, this is so beautiful. It reminds me the hate and that’s fine. It’s I know it’s messed up. But but that’s how I feel. And you’re Scott huge. You got to sky here with media and loving it man stars. I’m loving it.
Joe Rogan 1:45:37
Yeah. The the view that I saw on Wednesday was not as good as the view that I saw whatever it was 16 Seven, laid out the stars. Oh, it’s just, there’s a really deep pan on me. You think now they’re not accurate. They’re just
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:45:50
dots, dude. All right. At least you have stars. In my
Joe Rogan 1:45:54
old California. I had the star system of were like, you know, I was born in August. So is the constellation when you go? Yeah, when I was born, okay, embedded into the ground of the pool.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:46:10
All right. Yeah. There you go. Allegedly.
Joe Rogan 1:46:13
You know, you’re asking me to verify the mic. Wow, looks like stars. But that view of the Keck Observatory just even from the base station, it’s so stunning, that it does reset your understanding of where we are. And it makes you angry, that we have so much light pollution, that people are denied that because I think it changes the way people view our relationship with the cosmos.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:46:39
It’s it goes even deeper than that. But let me quickly comment that the there is an entire indigenous community in the world that is very concerned about the loss of very dark night skies, because so much of the culture relates to that night sky as part of what it values and what it passes down from one generation to the next. And it goes beyond just the light pollution. Because now, folks, like your boy, Elon is launching. And I don’t like the fact that they use the word constellation to refer to satellites, because that’s my word. That’s my peoples word, constellations, their actual stars, not moving hardware I got we got people talking to people, we gotta click Connect. No, no, no, we’re saying, No, we’re
Joe Rogan 1:47:33
using the wrong words.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:47:36
I feel completely at home speaking, he’s on the spectrum a bit, I’d say one out of six of my colleagues is probably on the autism spectrum. In retrospect, now that I look at, in what you’ve learned, what the spectrum is, that used to be Asperger’s, and then they folded that in, you know, their colleagues who just would not relate to another person or a camera, but they’re graded in their lab and other things. And so, you say you’re just not socialized? No, there’s no scope. And I asked you
Joe Rogan 1:48:05
a question about that. Oh, sure. Do you think that that is an evolutionary advantage, that in some way people are developing in this manner so that they can concentrate on things like technology, like astrophysics, like these, like very specific things that require immense amounts of concentration? And extreme focus? Do you think there’s possibly that human beings are developing in that way, specifically to accentuate our ability to innovate?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:48:38
So it would be very hard to draw that conclusion as some kind of modern force of evolution. Because for that to be the case, what would have to happen is those who had this sort of artistic level of focus, so high functioning autism, they would have to be making more babies than other people.
Joe Rogan 1:48:58
Well, Elon is
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:49:02
out there. So they’d have to be making more babies. Yeah, relative to everyone else, to affect the the evolutionary path of modern civilization. Yeah. And it’s not clear that that’s what’s actually happening. So we have to ask, Did that have any value historically, in the history of the evolution of our species? So in the in the chapter, body and mind, I go over the variations that we that exist within our species, huge variations in every in height and weight, in, in speed and in all kinds of things? And you can ask, well, then what is normal? The day that we control the genome, is there going to be some place somewhere where there’s a normal human and you’re going to take your genome and that you’re about to control in your unborn child and say let He adjusted so that it matches this so that all your senses are working as they’re supposed to. And all that proportion. Is that is that the future we should ask that? Because if that’s what you’re going to do, you’re going to homogenize the species. Yes. Okay. You realize, I have a run here of content. I have a run of descriptions of what people have accomplished. Okay. All right. So for example, there’s a guy, there’s a guy growing up, he wanted to play basketball, okay. And he wanted to be a professional basketball player. Alright, so he worked really hard at it. And he was just wasn’t tall enough. So says you should give it up. Take on it, but he stayed with it. stayed with it. They said no, this is best was for tall people. You’re not tall. Okay. He now plays for the Harlem Globetrotters. His name is hotshot. What’s his last name? Swatch?
Joe Rogan 1:51:06
Well, Mugsy Bogues is a great example.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:51:09
This guy is four feet five. Whoa, yes, he’s genetic. He’s a genetic dwarf. People told him he can’t play basketball, and now he’s one of the most popular basketball players. There he goes, Wow. Okay. Swanson, hotshot Swanson. Okay.
Joe Rogan 1:51:28
Well, will there be an advantage of malls you can move around? I
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:51:33
all I’m making a different point. Yes. The best part of the point, right. The point is, when you look at someone and they’re not quote, normal, and then you start listing what you think they should not do in life. Constraints constraining the options that maybe they haven’t ambitions that are greater than anything you imagined, right? And so there’s a letter, there’s a letter beautifully written of it, someone took a voyage on a on a steamship in 1915. And I reproduced the letter in here, beautifully written and this passenger get was given a tour of their steamship, okay, by the captain. And this letter, I can’t find it in here, but it’s beautifully. I mean, they’re tough for me to read something short. Can
Joe Rogan 1:52:24
I do plenty? I gotta read it all the time of the word
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:52:27
me a second here. And talk among yourselves. H and J. G. Okay, there goes, Okay. Here’s a letter. Okay. Again, this isn’t the body and mind chapter, where we explore. Here it is. I had the wrong year. How about a letter written on April 10 1932. Captain Vaughn Beck, of the US lines SS President Roosevelt. That’s Teddy Roosevelt. Of course, the captain had given a tour of the bridge to a passenger, who later that day waxed poetic about the experience. Again, I stood with the captain on the bridge, and he was quiet and composed in the presence of a million universes. A man with the power of a god. In imagination, I saw the captain standing on the bridge, gazing into the wide canopied heavens and seeing the darkness sprinkled with stars, systems and galaxies. That passenger was Helen Keller, a 1904 graduate of Radcliffe College. Okay. So what my point is that I have other there’s a whole run of pages of think that and there’s a whole description of hotshot here, okay, from the Harlem Globetrotters, my point is the moment you homogenize a quote normalize who and what human should be. You have cut off so much of what has enrich civilization, simply because people were different. Yes. Simply because, and so if everybody’s the same, what kind of world I don’t want to live in that world. Give me Give me a different world.
Joe Rogan 1:54:39
Do you worry that I got another one
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:54:41
here? Okay, okay. You probably know this, but those who don’t know the name, hold off on the hold off on it. Okay, here it is. Jim Abbott. You know, Jim Abbott ashore, okay. Some people won’t, but here it goes. Jim Abbott wanted his whole life to be a professional baseball player. The Dream shared by many American boys. Jim wanted to be a pitcher in the major leagues. He succeeded and played for many teams chalking up a mixed record of wins and losses. But on September 4 1993, while playing for the storied I don’t remember New York Yankees, dude,
Joe Rogan 1:55:21
I thought it was the Mets know.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:55:24
He pitched a no hitter. That’s when no batter gets a hit in the entire game. There have been about 320 no hitters in Major League history. out of 220,000 games played due to a congenital birth defect, Jim Abbott was born without a right hand. Is Jim Abbott disabled? Is he he pitched a fucking no hitter for the New York Yankees. What I’m saying is, obviously not everyone who has a disability will achieve this way. Yes, I don’t want to don’t go wrong here. But what I want to say is look at what people would have told. And I have six other examples here, one right after another, what people would have told them coming up, and Temple Grandin among them. But probably the most famous autistic person there ever was. She’s professor of farming at was at the University of Colorado somewhere in the in the West. Where, because she sees the world the way animals do. She could advise farmers in ways they can handle in herd cows. That does not create stress in them. She figured stuff out. She has research papers, yes. But you’re gonna say oh, she’s not the life of the party. Get her out of here. What are you? What are we doing? Can I give you an example? To hell? And so I was angry writing that chapter. I was angry, huh? One more? I gotta let me keep okay.
Joe Rogan 1:56:56
Let me give you a personal example. My jujitsu instructor Yes. John Jacques Machado, yes, was born with on his left hand, he only has a thumb. He is a genetic defect where he has no fingers on his left hand, call it a genetic feature, genetic feature. Well, in a value judgment. It is a feature because he’s a multiple time world champion. Because of the fact that he was born with his one hand that didn’t have fingers. He developed a style of jujitsu that enabled him you see his hand there. He’s one of the absolute best that’s ever done it. And he developed a style jujitsu where he utilizes that left hand to get under chins, because it’s not encumbered by the fingers. Fingers and he slides it in there and sinks rear naked chokes on people. And he also developed a style that didn’t rely on grips. On over he developed a style that’s over hooks and under hooks, which became modern NoGi jujitsu, which is incorporated in mixed martial arts because it mixed martial arts they don’t wear the kimono,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:57:55
and people who have fingers probably would have never even thought to think that
Joe Rogan 1:57:59
way. And people who saw John Jacques Machado is a child said, Oh, this poor child will never reach his full potential and turned out to be one of the greatest ever
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:58:07
got one here. So Oliver Sacks was a noted neurologist, pioneering entire subfields within his profession, he was also a best selling author, describing the human brain as the most incredible thing in the universe. He led a remarkably varied life, while suffering from a neurological affliction called Pruss. Bo Pang agnosia. More commonly known as face blindness, this condition contributed to his severe shyness, since he could, since he couldn’t recognize faces, even if he recognized everything else about you. At times, he would not recognize even recognize his own face in the mirror. Whoa. And he’s shy, because if he’s interested in how does that if he has a love interest. If he has a love interest, he doesn’t know the next time he sees that person, whether that was we had the conversation with? Okay. In 2008 2012, after a lecture on hallucination at Cooper Union College in New York City, I asked him, if he could go back in time, would you take a magic pill in your youth to cure your neurological disorder? Without hesitation? He replied, No. His entire professional interest in the human mind was inspired by the very disorders in his own brain. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
Joe Rogan 1:59:43
How does that work? Where they can’t see faces, but they can read you can see
Neil deGrasse Tyson 1:59:47
faces, they just don’t land in any place that you recognize. Every face, even if you’ve seen it before, is like a brand new face. Wow. So he’d have to recognize your your voice your You know, your vocabulary, your your, your, your accents, your body gestures, this sort of thing. Wow. So
Joe Rogan 2:00:09
doesn’t Brad Pitt supposedly have That? That? I
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:00:11
don’t know? I don’t know. Brian Pressburg knows. Yeah. Yeah, I see. That’s
Joe Rogan 2:00:18
true. I felt like he said he has some form of that.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:00:22
Is that what he told one girlfriend when he saw the next one? Do you say How
Joe Rogan 2:00:26
dare you? Yeah, he does
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:00:29
have some some variant on that. What is
2:00:31
it? That comment says that, yeah, he explained that he has officially been diagnosed with it is extremely, extremely difficult to recognize people’s faces.
Joe Rogan 2:00:38
Wow. So maybe there’s varying spectrum being anything? Yeah, there it is. Yeah. face blindness. Nobody. That’s a very recent article, and especially how crazy is got one of the best faces ever. can’t recognize faces.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:00:53
Yeah. So. So it’s the eye. So all of this you’d expect to happen on some kind of spectrum? Yes, severity, let’s call it or feet surety. And, and depending on where you are on that spectrum, you will have certain access to ways people have never thought before ways people have never done things before. Have you seen the video of the woman somewhere in East Asia? Who has no arms? And she gets out of bed folds up or takes care of her child? puts on her makeup with their feet with their feet? Yeah, with their feet? Yeah. And so yeah, she puts on her makeup and puts on her coat puts on there’s a whole video about this. And so I don’t know what else to tell you. Oh, you must know. This my other guy here. You must you must know him. If not get them on. Okay. Get the dude on your show. Hang on.
2:02:00
Studies show 150 People may have developed that face blindness. It could be genetic, but they just doesn’t
Joe Rogan 2:02:06
develop mental.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:02:08
Huh? Yeah, there’s it’s it’s
Joe Rogan 2:02:11
interesting. But how is it the always fought winds up with hot women?
2:02:17
Leaving because he’s like, they think it’s self self absorbed ness and stuff.
Joe Rogan 2:02:20
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, that’s interesting.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:02:24
Here’s another one. You ready? Yes. Matt Stutzman?
Joe Rogan 2:02:29
I recognize the name. What
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:02:31
is a championship? Archer? Oh, yes. Okay, now shoot most people who have ever wielded a bow and arrow. He’s actually coached by
Joe Rogan 2:02:40
my friend John Dudley in competition. Yeah.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:02:44
By bone hour in competition. He’s also a car enthusiast. Oh, he was born without arms. Yes, he shoots his arrows and fixes his cars, using his uncommonly nimble legs, feet and toes. Is Matt Stutzman disabled? All I’m here to say is because you started this conversation asking me on the spectrum of, of autism, where at some point in that spectrum, you focus like no one has been focused before, right, possibly to the exclusion of personal hygiene and other concerns related to your health. And civilization has definitely benefited from those who have been able to focus in such a way. Yeah. So maybe our species and civil I’m just spitballing here, that our species and the advance of civilization itself has pivoted on the fact that in the variation of who, what and what we are, some of us can focus and solve a problem. Like it was the most important thing we would ever do in our lie. Yeah. And, and ended up doing so. Thereby, pivoting civilization into some future that would have not otherwise been realizable. So yeah, I’m, I’m all there.
Joe Rogan 2:04:13
Yeah, I mean, the diversity of human beings and their interests and what they look like and their sizes and the way they interact with the world is one of the reasons why we can create such an amazing world. But
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:04:26
consider also, and it goes it goes beyond just this, what we call these disabled features, right people with disabilities, it goes to other things, for example, that you must know that it was not until 1987 where the American Psychiatric Association with some names such as that, but the psychiatrist removed homosexuality as a mental disorder, from their records from their encyclopedia. 1987 Yeah, a disorder and so on. What does that even mean? If what whatever the number is 10 20% of people or higher are on a gender spectrum, as measured in the multiple dimensions that have had revealed, had been revealed in recent years. If you had control over the genome of your children 50 years ago, and if homosexuality has a genetic component, would you say I don’t want that that’s abnormal? Because you have to go through that list of what is normal? And you can say, I don’t want any abnormalities are my children? Not at all. So there’s an entire ethical frontier that is yet to be touched. yet to be resolved, I should say, certainly, there are people thinking about it. Yes. Where, what? What kind of child are you going to create?
Joe Rogan 2:05:55
Well, this is the question. When you have and this is what I wanted to get to when you have things like CRISPR. And you have what could be home hold, it should have been legitimate genetic engineering of fetuses and of embryos,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:06:11
legitimate. You mean authentic? Legitimate implies it’s Yeah, I mean,
Joe Rogan 2:06:16
like they can sanction. I mean, not sanctioned, but the fact that that is an emerging technology, and that, like all technologies, it will increase in its ability, with innovation with new versions. Where do you think this goes? Do you think it’s inevitable that human beings engineer ourselves into these super creatures that are homogenous? Do you think?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:06:39
I think we, as has almost always been the case, the science is advancing, advancing faster than our morality, yes. Or our our sensibility and
Joe Rogan 2:06:55
appreciations of humanity?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:06:57
You know, and often the scientific advance has very important, plus sides to it. Here’s what I want to see happen if we can control the genome. Let’s just start with what already exists in nature. Alright, we put ourselves at the top of the tree of life. But if newts could draw the tree of life, they put themselves at the top why? They can regenerate their limbs. And we can’t they would value that very highly. So would we let’s get whatever that is in the newts. splice it into us line up all the veterans who have you know, yeah, missing limbs put them first regenerate to have if they have dumpsters can do it. And, and and crabs can do it. And newts can do it.
Joe Rogan 2:07:43
They are doing research on that correct?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:07:45
I have to I don’t I haven’t checked it. I had. I believe I’ve read hope so. Yeah. But we’re doing research on region on growing organs. Yes, there’s a huge need for that. Yes, then you’ll have to wait for someone to die. Right? Right. Particularly the day we have self driving cars on the road dominating the population of cars. I see that happening within decades by the way, and I’ve good reason for thinking that but the day that happens, we lose is so no longer do 35,000 people a year die, right? in peak physical health, which has been a source of so many organs, organ donors, right? Yeah, you sign your card when you get your driver’s license so that when you die in a car accident, we can harvest your organs you’re young and all your organs work. We don’t hurt harness harness organs, harvest organs of 80 year olds because they’re 80 or 90 Right right so the day we lose the 35,000 deaths per year that I hope that happens at a time when we can start growing artificial organs
Joe Rogan 2:08:47
have you done any playing around with auto driving features on things like Tesla’s
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:08:53
I know it’s there, but I I’m not ready. I’m not mentally ready.
Joe Rogan 2:08:58
It’s pretty amazing. I did I have Jamie and I have the latest beta Tesla self driving Have you mess with it at all Jamie? Yeah,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:09:10
yeah, I put it what’s your take? Have someone drive me around with it in the beta?
2:09:14
It’s not comfortable yet. Is my best I would say like I’m
Joe Rogan 2:09:20
not keep your hands on the wheel. Yeah, me too. Yeah,
2:09:22
yeah. And I haven’t had to take over but there’s like one time I was like, Wow, I’m not doing this right now. I’ll test it another time.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:09:28
Here’s what I did do in a Catholic you put it on the on the SATA drives. It’s not not self driving. Oh, no. Just the simple. What’s it called? All the old cars. Yeah, cruise control. Cruise, but it’s it’s it’s managed cruise control? Yeah. Right. So I put it at 50 miles an hour the traffic slows to 30 it slows to 30. Yes. With a prescribed car distance in front of me. car comes to us. The traffic goes through standstill. The car stops. Alright, the traffic picks up. The old cars wouldn’t do that. Right? Right. It’s doing this So I experiment with that. And I noticed that when it starts from a stop, or when it slows down, it’s way harder on its brakes than I am. Yes, I’m way smoother driver than my cruise control. Yeah. So and I’ve seen cars come in from the side, and it abruptly stops when I saw it before it did. And so, so I don’t know. But we’re at the beginning. It’s dawn, Dawn of this. So you’re
Joe Rogan 2:10:29
recognizing patterns and judgment and whether or not someone’s paying attention whether or not it’s all
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:10:34
it has to happen is that it goes into an AI learning mode, and it gets the sum of all of these experiences of all drivers in these situations. Yeah, AI is gonna kill some people in self driving mode. But I guarantee you can tell a lot less it will kill fewer people. Yeah, than in them without it.
Joe Rogan 2:10:53
Have you seen Lex Friedman playing guitar while he’s driving around self driving car? Yeah, Lex drove around in a Tesla while playing guitar. Pretty fascinating.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:11:03
It’s nice. So there’s a headline here. And that I’m going to reach a very simple headline, but mirrors it here. T he Oh my gosh, where’s
Joe Rogan 2:11:18
there it is? There’s Lex.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:11:19
Oh
Joe Rogan 2:11:28
that’s pretty good. Lex can shred. Give me some of that. You got to listen to this. Listen to this
Joe Rogan 2:11:43
Oh, yeah, he was playing along here. It’s good. It’s good. Listen to hear. Have you done lessons podcast? You’d love him. He is an AI researcher. from MIT originally, now he’s mostly doing independent work and doing his own podcast and brilliant, brilliant guy. You would love him. And he’s got an amazing podcast too.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:12:15
Okay, so here it’s going to be in this section. If you’re
Joe Rogan 2:12:17
interested in Lexus podcast. Simply it’s not pay attention.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:12:21
Winning when I got this. Lex, thank you for the tip.
Joe Rogan 2:12:27
I’m trying to get them on buddy. Trying to get them in. Let’s actually is one of the most brilliant people I know. I think you’d love talking to him.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:12:41
Or an interesting quote here from Walter batuk. One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea
Joe Rogan 2:12:49
for healing. That guy’s an idiot. That’s not the greatest pain someone needs to kick him and
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:12:55
that’s human pain. He
Joe Rogan 2:12:57
is the pain of failure. There’s a lot more pain.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:13:01
Quote, I have here just in all fairness to the fellow is it is as common people say, so upsetting. It makes you think that after all, your favorite notions may be wrong. Your firmest beliefs ill founded naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea. And art disposed more or less to Ill treat the original man who brings it?
Joe Rogan 2:13:29
Oh boy. Now we’re in the common man.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:13:33
All right. That’s 19th century. I
Joe Rogan 2:13:35
like that even less.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:13:36
All right, here’s a headline ready? And it’s why our brain has not statistically prepared a headline. Okay. Tesla says auto pilots, autopilot makes its car safer. crash victims say it kills. Both of those are true.
Joe Rogan 2:14:00
Yeah. But less. It’s like introducing mountain lions into areas to kill Correct? Yeah.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:14:07
Both of those are true. And if you keep at it, yes, autopilot will kill. Ai self driving will kill people. But that number will drop every single year. And you know why? Because every way that someone dies, no other person will die that way again. Yeah. Because they’ll upload all the software. And that does not happen. Yeah. And that. This is what the airline industry did the FAA investigates every single crash. You know why you can’t take lithium ions onto a plane because there was a UPS plane that had lithium ion batteries in the cargo and it caught fire. And the there’s the audio of the pilots talking to each other and to the thing while the plane is on fire. Just before the thing crashes. Do
Joe Rogan 2:14:55
you remember when they used to make you take the batteries out of Samsung phones when he got on planes I never used a Samsung phone. Samsung phones had an issue there their Galaxy Note yet I remember burst into flames. I remember, they juiced up the battery capacity. I remember.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:15:09
Yeah.
Joe Rogan 2:15:10
Yeah. And they will do. Well, I’m crazy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:15:15
So are we are saying is that they fix that part of the diversity of who and what we are? Is who? Who you love. Yeah, who what you want to look like, you know that this resistance to the gender spectrum concerns me because it’s a it’s a force of restriction on people’s freedom. And Somewhere I read that America is like, pursuit of happiness, I read that somewhere, some document, right? And so if someone wants to dress in whatever way they want, and if it doesn’t conform with your, with your binaries it you’re going to create a law to prevent them from doing it. What does that does it? Are we any longer in a free country? If you have that power over me to express my happiness? And another thing we’re not good at? Love and I gotta go like soon? how long we’ve been talking here, dude, couple hours. Damn, dude,
Joe Rogan 2:16:23
come on. This is fun. But I love
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:16:24
you, man. I love you. I love you, man. I love you. Love you. People don’t know we went outside wrestling a few moves. I used to wrestle. You know, he’s the wrestling captain in my high school to have a little flashback.
2:16:37
Yeah.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:16:41
It was the third period. I was down 4.0.
Joe Rogan 2:16:44
Yeah, the buzzer.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:16:46
So was saying,
Joe Rogan 2:16:51
we’re talking about diversity?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:16:53
Yeah. So here’s something where another thing we’re bad at. We’re bad at recognizing a spectrum of things. When we confront it. Our urge is to categorize it. That urge is so great. We categorize things that are fundamentally not categorizable. For example, hurricane strength, hurricane strength is a continuum of miles per hour of wind speed. But we cut it into five categories. And you know what happens that affects us, right? So hurricane hurricane Irma goes from LOW category three to high category three, they just Oh, it’s just category three Irma, it goes up one mile an hour. It’s breaking news, hurricane, Irma strengthened to category four, just this past hour, and everybody crowds around the TV set. So our brain doesn’t allow a continuum. We can’t. And so what happens are your boy or your girl, you have to be one of maybe there’s a continuum. Okay. Oh, you want to talk X chromosome? Michael, we can do that? Fine. All right. So bio genetically, I can say that there’s a boy and a girl or some variant on that, which is in the rare case, where you have doubled up on the chromosomes. Yep, intersects? Sure we can have that conversation. But that’s not visible to me. In what you do when you wake up in the morning, I don’t see your chromosomes. You know what I do? I see what you do to make yourself look like a boy. You go to the gym, you’d have whip muscles if you didn’t work out, okay? That’s what you do. Because you’re a boy, you wear boy clothes so that everyone knows you’re a boy. If it was that obvious, you were boy, you wouldn’t have to do all of that. So, so much of what we do to split us into this binary it is artificially added on top of the chromosomes. So, like I said, if you’re a wimpy guy, and I you know, you go wear man clothes and you go to the gym, because you wanna look like a boy. If you’re a girl, you’re a woman and you have hair on your lip can’t have a mustache or a girl got hair between your eyebrows can’t have it. Gotta remove that. Okay? Your breasts are not large enough, get him enlarged as what happens to what is the number 300,000 breast augmentations a year in the United States. Okay, these are huge numbers to make us look more to fit into this binary. And suppose I don’t buy into that binary. I say, I like the spectrum someday I feel a little feminine. Sometimes if you don’t get to wear clothes that way, you’re going to come after me and say, I don’t like that I’m going to pass a law. Oh my gosh, that’s no longer a free country. Is
Joe Rogan 2:19:45
anybody saying that you should pass a law that men can’t wear whatever they want, or women can’t wear whatever they want. There’s really
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:19:52
forces of resistance in society that are strongly preventing it.
Joe Rogan 2:19:55
Yes. Well, I think that’s unfortunate. But
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:19:59
come on. But some solutions like which bathroom? Do you use your solutions? They’re just make unisex bathrooms. Yeah, every new restaurant in New York City is that. So that takes an entire category? Yeah, those worries and concerns off the table
Joe Rogan 2:20:12
when we’re talking about genetic engineering, but that’s in the chapter.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:20:15
gender and identity. And I didn’t even get to color and race. Oh my gosh. Just before I go, I want to read a quick thing from that section. Go ahead. No, no, no, no finish.
Joe Rogan 2:20:29
What’s your point? Mike? My wonder is like, where if you try to look at what human beings are capable of doing now in terms of genetic engineering, and what the hopes are? Where do you think this leads us? If this is allowed? It’s not whether or not it’s going to be allowed. It’s going to happen? Where do you think this leads us to? Do you think this when you look at this is when you look at the archetypal alien, what is it it’s got a large head and this no sex organs
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:21:00
and they never have hair? I want to help recently in one day, Harry with with a hairdo? Yeah, right. They’re always bald, big
Joe Rogan 2:21:08
70 afro. Yeah. What what do you think that leads us to? Do you think that leads us to like one uniform shape? Or do you think it leads us to everyone looking like Thor? Like, where does that lead us to?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:21:22
Yeah, but of course, Thor still had to go to the gym. But what if
Joe Rogan 2:21:25
there comes a point in time, so it’s not the place for? You had to go to the gym? Things like myostatin inhibitors, you’re aware of those? Yeah, yeah. So if they incorporate that into the human genome, then you’re going to have people that have incredible amounts of muscle mass, and they don’t even have to do anything to achieve it. But
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:21:43
what you would have done was, as a parent, or as someone in control, predetermined what they can or should be in life. Whereas in a free world in a free society, a person’s own ambitions should be what guides them is, in my opinion, I think that’s a controversial opinion.
Joe Rogan 2:22:03
Certainly, I agree with you. So But my concern is, yes, sir. The technology gets to the point where it’s a uniform strategy, and that people just start doing that to their children. We’re talking 100 years now 1000 years? Where? Where does this go
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:22:21
easily? 50 years? Yes. So you won’t have the muscle bound family. But suppose one of them wanted to be a ballet dancer and had to be a little more lanky, lanky and elegant, we
Joe Rogan 2:22:30
get to a point where genetic engineering could be utilized on fully formed adults. And you could change the shape of like, you know, there’s there’s people that are transgender, what if you could literally become a Double X chromosome human being, and you will literally have a vagina literally have breasts ovulate have to have
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:22:50
that we’ll have to think about how that would happen. Well, that’d be like an extreme limit. And evolutionary biology. Your genomes? Yeah. So that’s, that’s a really interesting, different world. It means you can be whoever you want, right? That’s what we are on Halloween, right? You’re wherever you want to
Joe Rogan 2:23:07
dots on human neural interfaces, like things like neural link and these technologies that are being proposed, that would allow human beings to integrate with technology in a physical way, symbiotically.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:23:21
Yeah. So I have a chapter in here called. Called exploration and discovery, where we talked about the rapid pace of technology and its impact on civilization, which is extraordinary. But I, most predictions are wrong. You get it right, in the first few years, and after a few decades, but
Joe Rogan 2:23:45
with new technology, new possibilities emerge that couldn’t even
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:23:49
it comes in from the side. Yeah, rather than like the internet, more of what Correct? Correct. It reminds me of, there was an ad in 19 9219, three, early 90s. From AT and T they had a relatively successful ad campaign, where they said, Have you ever wanted to shout it out? He doubted it. And they say some futuristic thing and they say you will, AT and T will bring it to you. Yeah, I’ve seen that. One of the things. One of the commercials was something I’ve never wanted to do. Never dreamed of doing. Never did. And never will do. They show a guy on a beach. Okay. And he’s working on a tablet, which was a good predictive thing tablets to come. If you’re going to tell me what have you. And there’s a surf coming in beautiful beach season. Have you ever wanted to send a fax from the beach? You do? It’s like, No, thank you. No one has ever in the history of the universe wanted to do that.
Joe Rogan 2:24:47
So but why wouldn’t they if that was all that existed? I’m just saying what now it’s email. You’re saying?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:24:53
email attachment? Correct? Sure. But no, you don’t see that coming? If you’re extolling the virtues of faxes, right that’s like in And Back To The Future Part Two, a film made in 1989 were writing high in faxes 89 to the early 90s. You know what year that took place was supposed to take place back the future too.
Joe Rogan 2:25:12
It’s like modern
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:25:14
2015 Yeah. Okay, so Marty pisses off his boss and he gets fired. Yeah. Alright, so the boss communicates this via fax to his residents. Okay, except this is the residents of the future. He has three fax machines, and it’s off in his home. So you see them, they come out on three different fax machines. And no matter what room he was in, he would see it because that’s the home of the future. Yeah, because a modern home in 1989 with one fax machine, many homes had no fax machines. So this is how we’re linear thinking people are five, three different fax four fax machines.
Joe Rogan 2:25:51
That’s the future. There it is. That’s what they thought and that funny. Oh, no.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:25:55
Future. Wow. And so I talked about here how we all have linear brains, which prevents us from seeing exponential change. Yes. And the best example of this is the is algae on a pond. Okay, so algae, you know, as it grows, and it floats on the pond. You see like one square foot of it. And you learn someone tells you the algae is doubling every day. And you have this huge pond. And you’re you’re told this Okay, you go away for a month and come back. The pond is half covered with algae. Is it oh my gosh. I was away for a month and this happened. When will it be completely covered? So what’s the answer? Took a month to get halfway. So how much more time? A week? No a day. What did I say? doubles. It doubles every day. Yes. That’s how I started this conversation. Yes. See the linear brain override even the stated facts
Joe Rogan 2:26:57
and you know how they deal with that. They introduced carp.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:27:01
Oh, good. I didn’t know that. And carp eat all the algae. I didn’t know that and but
Joe Rogan 2:27:04
then the problem is they eat all the outs all the vegetation. And you get like Lake Austin. Oh, there’s almost no vegetation. Last have no place to hide. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, Lake Austin looks like the bottom of a swimming pool now.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:27:17
Interesting. Yeah, that’s a mistake.
Joe Rogan 2:27:19
Well,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:27:20
yeah. It’s you think you know all the causes and effects of things? And then you don’t
Joe Rogan 2:27:24
well, when I was on the Big Island what I found out about Mongo in Hawaii. Yeah, they when I was there for the chemicals or monkey says that was so adorable. We saw one at the resort a mongoose a cute
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:27:35
little fella. Hawaii has no snakes. So what is what did the Mongoose see?
Joe Rogan 2:27:39
Unfortunately, they brought him in for rats. And they went after ground nesting birds. So they’ve devastated local wildlife. There it is. Yeah, so this
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:27:47
island in the middle of Pacific. That stuff is pretty tightly configured
Joe Rogan 2:27:52
a little fellas are so cute. Okay. The mongoose is found a wire native to India were introduced a while in islands in 1883 by the sugar industry to control rats and sugarcane fields.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:28:02
Any species in Hawaii is going to be invasive because it’s
Joe Rogan 2:28:06
locked down. It gets to a point where people are making the argument that wild pigs are no longer invasive because they’ve been there as long as the humans have.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:28:12
Yeah, so there’s so it’s only a problem when it’s a problem. Yeah, it’s really what it comes down to. Right. Right, right. I’m told that LA palm trees are not native, right? They’re not Yeah, they’ve been really well there and then overrun the city. Right? So they’re
Joe Rogan 2:28:26
like, symbolic Los Angeles. The palm tree.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:28:30
Yeah, you got it. They’re everywhere. Okay, so I make a prediction by the year 250. I have a bunch of predictions here. Okay, it’s here. And this is so that into 2050. You can say Tyson, you had your head up your ass. Okay, I’ve no hesitation because I go through a whole set of predictions that all didn’t come out, right? People predicting 30 years ahead. And so I just want to join the susceptibility, okay, radio. Now, if you neuroscience and our understanding of the human mind will become so advanced that mental illness will be cured, leaving psychologists and psychiatrists without jobs. In a shift that echoes the rapid conversion from horses to automobiles. In the early 20th century, self driving electric vehicles will fully replace all cars and trucks on the road. If you want to be nostalgic with your fancy combustion engine sports car, you can drive on specially designed tracks, akin to horse riding stables of today. very nostalgic. The human space program will fully transition to a space industry supported not by tax dollars, but by tourism, and anything else people dream of doing in space. We develop a perfect antiviral serum and cure cancer. Medicines will tell you to tailor to your own DNA leaving no adverse side effects. We and this is in response to your earlier question. We will resist the urge to merge the circuit Tree of computers with the circuitry of our brains. Have you ever seen? I’m happy to just dig it up here? No, I don’t need to surgically implant this. I’m seconds away from all the knowledge of the world that I could possibly want. I don’t have to surgically implant I’m not. I don’t have that urge, I’m sorry.
Joe Rogan 2:30:18
Right. But if they do increase the capacity for human knowledge and your access to information substantially to the point where someone with the neural interface has an enormous advantage Well, the answer perhaps but I know that not just faster but change based interface with information
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:30:35
that remains to be seen. And of course, a guy says that Yeah, Mr. Singularity. No, no. Oh, Ray Kurzweil right? Kurzweil Yeah, right. He’s a big fan of that is a new book, where it’s the, the Singularity is Near. First, because the singularity was Nealon a prediction, we will learn how to regrow lost limbs, and failing organs, bringing us up to the level of other regenerating animals on earth, like salamanders, starfish, and lobsters. Instead of becoming our overlord and enslaving us all, artificial intelligence will be just another helpful feature of the tech infrastructures that serve our daily lives. These are my predictions to be found
Joe Rogan 2:31:18
wrong. Do you have any fears of artificial general intelligence? No, not at all.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:31:22
I don’t think that’s where it’s going to head. You don’t need to just Kurtzweil by the way, do you? Do you believe you put intelligence in things that need to do things? Get the perfect cup of coffee, put it in your car, so it drives and doesn’t get into an accident? Put it in things? To have the one thing that does it all? I don’t
Joe Rogan 2:31:37
I would love to hear you talk to Elon about this because he has a deep fear of it. Yeah.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:31:40
I’m anomalous there. So don’t listen to me. Listen to others.
Joe Rogan 2:31:44
You’re anomalous in the fact that you’re not concerned. Yes. If you go to
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:31:48
AI experts, most of them are concerned that it poses an existential threat. I think it’ll just be more stuff. That’ll help us out. But
Joe Rogan 2:31:55
what about when it’s used in military applications?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:31:58
Well, that is an ethical, I mean, all military operations involve some ethical decision tree. Right. So it would be added to the ethical decisions, but
Joe Rogan 2:32:07
when you have unethical foreign countries that will use the sort of
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:32:12
artificially anti tank warfare. So you need ways to combat that. Illegal escalate?
Joe Rogan 2:32:18
Yeah, once once.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:32:20
Ministers of AI, we don’t yeah, we’re behind on that curve. I’m worried. Worried. Yeah,
Joe Rogan 2:32:25
that’s the concern, right, the concern is that someone else is going to implement it. Yeah. And they’re not going to have ethics or morals behind it, they’re just going to have this idea of control and dominance.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:32:34
Correct. And so there’s always the bad actor, you’ve got to. And the military, they’re paid to consider in
Joe Rogan 2:32:42
the real conduct of a bad actor is that we become them to beat them. That’s the fear.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:32:49
Yeah. It’s like, we’re not autocratic, or we don’t think we are. So we would have to get an entire Congress, an entire electorate to vote that way. Yeah. And that’s, if we do I don’t know what the future of the world will be at that point. It’s spooky, it’s
Joe Rogan 2:33:09
spooky because, again, that we don’t have the ability to sort of extrapolate and look at the future in terms of like, how all these things are implemented, and what the overall results gonna be. So you’re not worried about these human neural interfaces at all? You don’t? You know? You don’t see it happening at all.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:33:30
No, I think we’ll resist it. I think it’ll,
Joe Rogan 2:33:32
but didn’t we, there’s a lot of people that resist it. Email. We’re gonna even have email moon, those people all got on board. Y’all
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:33:40
remember that? And they print it and then read the printed email. I
Joe Rogan 2:33:43
mean, yeah, but a lot of people resisted this idea of cell phones, but now they’re everywhere.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:33:48
No, no, I’m the only resistance I’m referring that is the machine biology interface. Right? That’s what we’re gonna resist. We’re not gonna resist the continuing advance. So
Joe Rogan 2:33:57
if it creates a superior human being, it already has, it beats us
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:34:01
at chess at go at any intellectual task we give it but it’s already superior.
Joe Rogan 2:34:06
If if it’s a symbiotic thing, if it becomes integrated with the human biology, I
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:34:11
think will resist that. That’s all. It’s a prediction that you will hop on
Joe Rogan 2:34:15
board. I want to be one of the first people to drill a hole in my head boards go plant it, I don’t want to be left behind. Okay, well, the real concern is that it’s really going to separate the haves from the have nots because if it does give you an advantage economically and advantage in terms of your intellectual capacity, you’re going to have this advantage because it’s going to be prohibitively expensive I would assume initial
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:34:37
often things that are prohibitively expensive initially, don’t forever stay that right like cell phones, of course, but eventually become more flat panel TVs, sure, like impulse items. Kmart, I was just at Walmart for cheap. They aren’t DSTV nuts. Yes, it’s not. Yeah, crazy. They were so expensive to remember and heavy like 20 grand Yeah. 10s of 1000s of dollars. And they come in like wood crates. Yep, yep. And
Joe Rogan 2:35:03
yeah, when you needed power tools to do it yourself and mount them yourself on the wall,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:35:07
I gotta let me leave you with some thoughts here. Okay. There’s a section here on race and color, which is another thing with the variation of what we have in the world. Just a point I want to make, when European anthropologist started running through Africa, and started describing what they saw. The urge was to say, everyone in Africa is this thing. And they have a dark skin, wooly hair. And that is a thing. And they call it a race and they call it the negros. Okay. And this is our attempt to classify into few categories, something that might actually, in real life be on a spectrum. We know that the human species began in Africa. And everybody who populates everywhere else in the world came out of Africa to do that. What that tells you is that the genetic diversity within Africa, as the origin of our species, is greater than it is between any other two people anywhere else in the world. But because the anthropologists were not thinking genetic diversity, they’re thinking skin color. They put them all in one bin. But if you have the most genetic diversity, then in practically every way humans very, you would find the extreme of that, in the African continent. Where would you find the tallest people in the world? What to see tribe of Africa? How about this shortest people in the world? It means the pygmies not even that far away, right? Geographically, they have the same skin color. So the European said, these are one group of people one race, where might you find the slowest people in the world? But no one looks for them? Where would you find there’s no races to find the slowest? How about the fastest people? Africa? Okay, people of African descent have dominated the long distance as well as the sprint two completely different physical abilities. Oh, but they’re all dark skinned people. They’re all negros. Okay. Where would you likely find the dumbest person in the world? Africa? How about the smartest person in the world? Africa?
Joe Rogan 2:37:40
How about the Egyptians? The
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:37:42
Europeans did not look for people smarter than they were. Okay. And to this day, where they find evidence where that might have been the case, you have people saying aliens did it. Egypt is, of course, in Africa. Yeah. A brilliant civilization, oh my gosh, while Europeans were still either disemboweling heretics, or whatever the hell they were doing. I was like, even before that 1000s of years ago. So my point is, if you don’t look for it, and you don’t find it, and you’re going to create a map of humans of the world, you’re going to put yourself at the top. That’s what you’re going to do. And you’re going to write things like this. What do you want to hear from Thomas Jefferson or Francis Galton? Jefferson, Jefferson. 1785. Speaking of the negroes, comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason and imagination, it appears to me that in memory, they are equal to the whites in Reason, much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found, capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid. And in imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and Anoma. What
Joe Rogan 2:39:10
is Euclid?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:39:14
I honestly don’t know how many Euclid fluent white people Jefferson knew in the original American American colonies. Euclid invented a geometry. Okay, Euclidean geometry is Ancient Greece. And his books still exist to this day. So he’s saying the black slaves don’t know you can’t figure out.
Joe Rogan 2:39:35
Well, they haven’t been educated. Well, regardless.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:39:37
How many white farmers in 1785 USA also wouldn’t know Euclid. Yeah, no. Okay. But whatever were his observations and objections to black people. You had no hesitation continually meeting with at least one of them, producing six children. So you know what I did here. Then there’s a guy who wrote a whole book, comparing black people and white people, a book that was used into the 1960s. It was called the origin of races by Carlton Kuhn. He wrote, if Africa was the cradle of mankind, which he recognizes, it was only an indifferent kindergarten, Europe and Asia where our principal schools, so this is these are people putting themselves at the top, he’s white, so he had got to put white people at the top, then I thought, suppose anthropologist, were black racists, instead of white racist. What would they write? What would they come up with?
Joe Rogan 2:40:39
Well, also what he’s saying is ridiculous. Because if it’s kindergarten, how did they do the pyramids? It’s the most complex structures ever known to man. So we can’t reproduce. All of us with my
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:40:51
only point is when you have that mindset, and you have to put yourself at the top, and all people with dark skin are one entity. You’re not looking for people smarter than you. You’re not. There’s other evidence here. Do you realize that the people who get the highest scores on standardized tests in England, or are people immigrants from the Igbo tribe, in Nigeria, and these are their kids outscore all the, quote, native white people in the town? If you’re not looking for them, you’re not finding them? It just doesn’t. It’s, it’s a, it’s a thing. It’s all here in this chapter. And all I’m doing is bringing science to it. That’s all I’m doing here. And I was gonna say here, okay, so a black. Yeah. Here goes, then I gotta go. I can’t keep staying here, dude. It’s okay.
Joe Rogan 2:41:52
You can come back. There’s a lot of little stickies on that book. I’m sure you have many other things to talk about. What is the book by the way?
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:42:01
Oh, Starry Messenger. And cosmic perspectives it apparently civilization came out eight weeks ago.
Joe Rogan 2:42:11
Please tell me you did the audio version of it. I did. Thank you. I did I hate when people have other people do the over Yeah,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:42:19
I did the audio version. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. Of course you you’d have I couldn’t not do the Oh yeah. of an actor.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:42:28
I talked about the pyramids here. Even Elon Musk, by the way, tweeted. Pyramids. Aliens built the pyramids, obviously, that he was joking around. Well, possibly, but he said it and it’s in a.
Joe Rogan 2:42:46
You know, Elon likes to joke around about shit. Here’s one.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:42:49
On May 1 2021, a talented chess player reached the title of national master for having achieved a US Chess Federation rating above 2200. Landing among the top 4% of theater and 50,000 rated players in the world. A rating achieved that was 500 points higher than that of a chess coach. Just a few years after learning how to play the game, that prodigy is a 10 year old boy named Tunney to Lua. Odd OD. Od de Woombye, the son of Nigerian refugees to the USA in 2017. His family spent a brief time living in homeless shelters in New York City, before his parents established stable employment and permanent residence. I played a brief chess game against the little fellow in March 2021. On Grandmaster Maurice Ashley’s Twitch platform, a live streaming social media interface. The game was indeed brief. Yeah, he wiped the floor with me. Speaking of Nigerians, immigrants to the US. Three speak of Nigerians immigrants to the US enjoy an 8% Higher household income than the national average Nigerian immigrants the United States and ethnic Nigerian children in the United Kingdom, especially those from the Igbo tribe, considerable consistently attain higher test scores on average than their white UK counterparts. What is it about
Joe Rogan 2:44:17
Nigeria? Because
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:44:20
pause I’ve wonder what depths of intellect. These are occasions to pause. What depths of intellectual capital in math, science and engineering, or any field lay hidden deep within the African continent, or anywhere else on Earth, last for now, or last forever, for want of an opportunity to flourish. I’m going to leave you with a fast list. I want to tell you what my racist black anthropologist found. Let’s go back to the 19th century, little anthropologists be black racists instead of white racist. Okay, okay. What would they say? So, all right. Chimpanzees are humans closest genetic relative, we just need to find similarities between chimps and white people. And that would be surefire evidence of the less evolved state. Because that’s what people were saying, the blacks were still evolving. And they show a chimp, a black person and a white person. And so that’s you can enslave black people, and it was against them in a way to justify it, because of course, you’re gonna put yourself at the top. So now, hypothetical black, racist anthropologist, chimps and other apes. So this is a list. This is a book that was never written. Chimps and other apes grow hair all over their bodies. The hairiest people you’ve ever seen, have been white people with massive hair across their chest and ascending their backs. Their body hair can even reach upward and out of their shirt color. Black people do not remotely approximate this level of hairiness. There was no mention of this in any of those books. distinct from their face, hands and feet, Part the hair of most chimpanzees, the way they do to each other when checking for lice, and their skin color is white, not any shade of black or brown. Chimps tend to have big ears relative to their head size. After decades of ear watching, I can attest that the biggest ears I’ve ever seen on humans have been on white people. Have a look yourself. Next time you’re in a crowded public place. Doubtless the strong overlap, but the size of black people’s ears can be as little as half the size of white people’s ears. You might now ask about the famously large years of President Barack Obama. But he is precisely half white, just as much white as black. So maybe his big ears come from the white half of his family. For most of the 20th century, Neanderthals were portrayed as stupid and brutish. Turns out beginning in the 1990s, genetic research revealed that Europeans are between one and 3% Neanderthal Africans 0% That can’t be good for Europeans. Time to clean up that backward primitive image. Since then, publish references to Neanderthals. Instead, comment on what must have been their creative, artistic, inventive and articulate ways crafting sophisticated tools and technologies to shape their world. Look how easy it is to be racist. Let’s continue. Chimpanzees invest quality family time pruning each other’s hair. We’ve all watched them do this. Apparently the lights they find must be tasty because whoever plucks them from the other chimps head also eats them. Ever hear of a lice outbreak among black children? Probably not. White children are 30 times more susceptible to lice infestation, that our black children. The parasites simply likes to lay eggs in the hair of chimpanzees and white people more than on the hair of black people. This goes on this all this is over this could have been included. And they would have said well wait a minute, maybe all humans are together. And chimps are something completely different. But they didn’t go there. Their bias prevented their analysis of information that stares flat into their face. Okay. Here’s one. I’m gonna skip some here because I gotta go. We got a plane waiting for me. I’m skipping some here. Ready? Yeah. This is one more from the chimp vault. I have others that are not chimp related. Here’s one. Chimpanzees love to swing in trees. Apparently, so do suburban white children. They typically can’t wait to build and live in a backyard treehouse. You have not likely seen black children. even contemplate the idea that white people clearly want to return to their fully primitive state. This would be a racist black person. Okay, from the 19th century publishing, trying to find ways to enslave white people. That’s a cosmic perspective. That’s, that’s a look, dude. This is what we were doing as humans to each other, not recognizing authentic diversity and who and what we are trying to separate to Say I’m better, I’d make the rules and whatever rule I’m making, I’m gonna put myself at the top. And you’re not going to be at the top, because you’re different.
Joe Rogan 2:50:08
Do you anticipate that as people get more education, more information, and as we evolve, that will leave that stop doing that and we’ll start recognizing the importance of diversity. I want to believe that and that it’s our strength. I want to believe that I want to believe that I so,
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:50:29
want to believe that. Okay, here it is. Then I really gotta go.
Joe Rogan 2:50:35
Okay. Last one.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:50:37
There’s a quote, a short quote from Horace Mann 200 years ago. I want this on my tombstone. I beseech you, nobody uses beseech anymore. I love it. I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts. These are my parting words, be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another. If so, then human curiosity and wonder, the twin chariots of cosmic discovery will ensure that starry messengers these are messages from science from the sky, from the universe continue to arrive. These insights compel us for our short time on Earth to become better shepherds of our own civilization. Yes, life is better than death. Life is also better than having never been born. But each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We won the lottery only once. We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works. But we also get to smell the flowers. We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises the gaze deeply into the night sky, the cradle. We get to live and ultimately die in this glorious universe.
Joe Rogan 2:52:09
That’s a hell of a tombstone.
Neil deGrasse Tyson 2:52:11
Dude, I gotta run. Thanks. So, one day, I’ll come back and just chill. Lift weights together. Okay, wrestle a few rounds. Let’s do it, you know.
Joe Rogan 2:52:20
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Bye, buddy.