Habits and Hustle - Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why Embracing Wonder is Critical For Personal Growth

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Do you consider yourself to be curious enough? In this episode of Habits and Hustle, Neil deGrasse Tyson and I explore the importance of retaining our childhood curiosity and how it plays a crucial role in our lives as adults. Neil shares his insights on nurturing curiosity and how fear of failure can hinder our progress in maintaining that innate sense of wonder. During our conversation, Neil also shares his unique perspective on using pop culture in education, the future of AI, and the complexities of quantum physics and philosophy. As an astrophysicist, Neil brings a cosmic perspective to our discussion, offering wisdom and knowledge that will surely spark your curiosity and ignite your passion for learning. Finally, we touch on the challenges and opportunities in transforming the school system, the role of religion, and even ponder hypothetical conversations with interesting historical figures. Don't miss this captivating episode with the one and only Neil deGrasse Tyson as we explore the universe and beyond together. Neil deGrasse Tyson earned his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia. In 2001, Tyson was appointed by President Bush to serve on a twelve-member commission that studied the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry. The final report was published in 2002 and contained recommendations (for Congress and for the major agencies of the government) that would promote a thriving future of transportation, space exploration, and national security. What we discuss: (0:00:01) - How important is it to retaining childhood curiosity and exploration in adulthood? (0:13:08) - What role does pop culture have in education? (0:17:09) - How Neil used Twitter to spark curiosity (0:29:25) - What does Neil think of AI's Future and implicated ethics? (0:38:50) - What do we know to be true in quantum physics and philosophy? (0:54:19) - How can we transforming the school system? (1:04:19) - A discussion about religion, gender, and continuums (1:19:13) - Who would Neil like to have a conversation with if given the opportunity? (1:27:36) - Why you should be Ashamed to die Key Takeaways: Living forever comes with its own set of challenges, including resource conservation, terraforming Mars, and the lack of urgency in life. We explore the concept of 'escape velocity of aging,' where the number of years that passes equals the increase in the average life expectancy of civilization, and how it could lead to humanity living forever. However, living forever comes with a bigger existential problem. See, knowing our mortality gives us meaning to our lives and how living forever could potentially lead to a life with no meaning.   Curiosity and exploration are important. However, most parents have a natural instinct to protect their child may prevent them from learning important lessons in life. Think of how a seemingly mundane event such as a child playing with an egg can become an entire conversation about the natural world, and how the cost of ignorance can be more expensive than the cost of education.  There are three categories of truth: personal truth, objective truth, and truth that is repeated. We acknowledge personal truths can invoke powerful emotions and even lead to armed conflict. Each one of these truths have their own characteristics that make it true in its own definition.  To learn more about Neil: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neildegrassetyson/ Website: https://neildegrassetyson.com/ My links: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Vitamin water is a registered trademark of glass O. I guys is Tony Robbins, you're listening to Habitson Hussle, fresh it. Neil, I gotta tell you, I'm like really kind of nervous with you and I'll tell you why. And I've interviewed like everyone on the planet and I'll tell you, I'm like really kind of nervous with you and I'll tell you why. And I've interviewed like everyone on the planet and I'll tell you why I'm so nervous with you because you're literally like the smartest human I think I've ever like encountered.

I've seen so many interviews with you and tried so many things and watched you so often. And like you're like, it's not like even though you're an astrophysicist, I feel like you're having such a elaborate, unique perspective on like everything in life. Well, I think as an astrophysicist, you come back to earth with a cosmic perspective, right? You're not limited to what things look like as you turn your head around. So it adds an extra dose of sensibility, I think, that we might lose track of on earth, trying to find reasons to argue with one another. Well, you make things also like the very complex,

like, I mean, like, that's not a kid ourselves, like, you're, you're topic, it's not so easy. It could be complicated to understand to the best of us, you're right. But in all fairness, I, in all honesty, I cherry pick stuff from the universe that I share with you. So this stuff, I don't tap because no, that's too complicated.

No one will understand that. Leave that one behind. And I find the cool wacky fun things that gets you excited. Yes. Then you say, now I want to learn more so that the flame getting ignited under you doesn't have to be the complete syllabus. It just has to be things enough to spark your interest or maybe to reignite the embers that might have once been a flame when you were kid. Oh my gosh, the moon, the stars, heaven, oh my gosh.

And now you're an adult, right? And so it's not there. And maybe it can light a fuse that could do wonders for you as for your adult curiosity. So that's what I focus on. Yeah, and you do a really good job at it. That's the number. That's the number.

No, you're very welcome. We always like this as a kid, though. We're always super curious and interested and thoughtful with how you think? Like, was it your brain always activated in this way or did you work on it? So, yeah, there's a lot in that question. Let me unpack it.

So, when we're all kids, we're all curious. That's a, it seems to be a fundamental part of what it is to be human and maybe more broadly, what it is to be human and maybe more broadly what it is to be mammal All right, you ever look at infant mammals. They're running around. They're doing mischievous stuff just the way we do and Mischievous that that that gives a bad spin on it. Let me say they're curious about their environment in just the way we are and On a level where it could put your own health

and survival at risk when you're a toddler. So that's why parents always have to go running behind the toddlers so they don't kill themselves. But we think of them as being at risk of killing themselves, but what they're really doing is, they're experimenting and exploring with their environment. Yeah, that's true. They're explorers.

Yeah, it happened. They want to explore the knife blade. Okay. Or the ledge. So yeah, so you have to like stay close. I'm not saying to not stay close, but I'm betting you that there are a lot of things you prevent your kids from doing that could have been a lesson something they learned about the natural world if you let them continue. For example, if there's an uncooked egg, like you just pulled it out of the fridge and it's like on the ledge, and your toddler's reaching up to try to grab the egg, essentially every parent is saying, no, you can't do that because everybody knows if the toddler takes the egg, the egg is going to break.

Everybody knows this, okay? However, let's look at it differently. Let the toddler grab the egg. Then they'll start playing with it. And then eventually the egg breaks. We know it will break. Well, they just learn that something can be hard yet fragile. Yes, true. Think about that combination of features. Most things that are hard, tables, chairs, wall are not fragile. This was solid yet fragile. Okay, now what comes out,

there's this transparent liquid in there. What is that, right? That liquid when heated turns white. What's that about? How often when you heat something, does it completely change color? When you heat water, it doesn't turn white. It starts out transparent. All right, then there's this yellow goopy stuff.

And then you tell them that yellow plus the transparent stuff, one day would make a chicken. Yeah. So this is an entire conversation you could have with your toddler that you're not having if you prevent them from grabbing the egg. And you might say, well grabbing the egg and you might Say, well the egg costs money today. What it might even be 50 cents. I don't know. It's like $50 for one egg.

So the eggs have risen in price. However, let's say 50 cents. That would be $6. It doesn't possibly. So 50 cents and you say, All right, the toddler learned something that cost 50 cents. The president of Harvard, when someone complained saying, why is education so much? And he said, if you think the cost of education is high, try the cost of ignorance. That's a great line. Totally great line. Totally great line. So, to get back to your question, there's a long detour here.

I like the detours. I think the devil is in these detours, actually. Okay, okay. All right. Or God is in the detours. Yes, that's a whole other part we're going to talk of. Yes. Both of those work as metaphor.

So if you retain your childhood curiosity into adulthood, so you basically become a grown up kid, you're a scientist, because that's all that scientists do. Oh, what is that? Let me poke that. Let me rearrange it. Let me see what happens. Let me, that's all we do.

I still have my childhood curiosity. And that's a great way to like get back to that. So do you believe that as we get older, we lose our curiosities. Is it because we're scared of like failing? It's scared of all these other nonsense things that we don't try. Interesting point. I hadn't thought about that, but that's, you know, based in your world and what you talk about and the lessons you give people,

let me think more deeply about fear of failure because fear of failure is probably one of the greatest forces operating against success, right? And so fear of failure, I had a mentor in graduate school. Actually, I was in my years as a postdoc. His name is Martin Schwarzschild. And he said, the day he spoke of science and research and lab said, the day you stop making mistakes is the day you know you're no longer on the frontier. And I said, oh, that's good. That's good.

So, fear of making mistakes because somebody's out there about to judge you because of it and you might have some emotional investment in being right. right? And so yes, you have forced me to agree, not that you called me, convinced me to agree with you that fear of failure is a force operating against retaining curiosity into adulthood. But also, you know, life kicks in, right? I mean, you have relationships, you got to get a job, you might have kids, and the freedom to just explore the latitude that you once had as a child is no longer there. So I would say it's not that people are born curious and others aren't. We're all born curious. You have to find ways to retain it, to nurture it through years where you might otherwise be susceptible to it getting squashed. So you're a smart guy. How did we retain it? Because most of us don't. And we lose it as we go for all those reasons.

What is it? You know, when you had a gentleman, if you have kids, you have kids. Two kids. 10 and eight. OK, yes. So you're recent enough on the early childhood scale there. So think about it. We spend the first couple of years teaching our kids

with great investment of energy to walk and talk. And then we spend the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit. So what? So find, no, don't tell them to shut up and sit out. That's right. What do kids do? They are, as we would say in physics,

very high centers of entropy. Okay? Entropy is disorder. Now think about it. Every mess that's in your house, made by your kids, one or both of them, is the consequence of an experiment they conducted. You don't think of it that way,

but that's what it is. Oh, let me take the Legos and build this and we see what that makes. Then you just kind of leave it there. Okay. But that was an exploration. Now, if you want to teach them to clean up after themselves, what might happen is they make such a mess,

they might not want to make the mess again. And therefore not do the experiment. So what I would recommend is you say, okay, time for cleanup and everybody cleans up together. That way the prospect of making a big mess again does not fear that. Yes, that's a great point. I agree with that.

So it really, the onus is actually on the parents to make sure that we put on this. Yeah, entirely. Our kids are the, our kids are the age where the TV show Barney was big. Yes, of course. I remember that Barney with human teeth,, of course. I remember that. Barney with human teeth. Yeah, there was no shark. I remember. Barney is a completely new to T-Rex. That's so true. That's exactly

the way they had a song. It was a cleanup song. Clean, clap, clean up. Everybody does their share. Clean up, clean up. Over here and everywhere, something like that. And so we would clean up with the kids. So cleaning up was a fun thing to do, just as making the mess was fun. But that might be one of these little things that slowly erodes your curiosity.

100% true. And I got one other example. Again, I don't want to fill our time together with just anecdotes. But you're good at the anecdotes. You're very good with this. This is what you're kind of known for. Okay, and then I want to get back to it because you're asking about me and what where I am today versus yesterday. So I'm in Central Park in Newark City where I live and I was actually waiting in line to, there's a Shakespeare in the park, festival that they have there. So I'm waiting in line there.

It had rained that afternoon. So there were certain puddles at the bottoms of walkways in Central Park, and there's a mother and daughter. I assume they're mother and daughter, the right age to be that, walking down the path, and the kid has on full raincoat and goashes. Okay. The mother is holding an umbrella. They're walking down the path.

Oh my gosh, I wish my thoughts were screaming out loud, but they were just in my head. And I was saying that the girl, she couldn't be more than five. Okay. I said, the girl wants to jump in the puddle. Let her jump in the puddle. That's exactly what the girl wants to do. She's a kid kids love jumping in puddles as they got close to the puddle The little girl is walking straight towards it. And what does the mother do pull her around to not jump in the puddle

Yes, and I said to myself this is a lost Opportunity why because for example, it was a nice muddy puddle. This is an experiment in cratering. This is what meteors do. When they hit the ground, they make a crater, they make a splash. You prevented that, mommy. Why did you do that? Oh, because you didn't want the galoshes to get dirty. Oh, is that it? Really? Did you have kids so that you would maintain a clean house? Really? With that on your list? That's not how that works.

That's true. Everything that does that gets dirty and breaks things and messes things up is what it is to be a kid. I maintain. I will submit to you that had she let her daughter smash up that puddle and make everything dirty, maybe they later could have cleaned the goshes together. That could have been fun.

All right, then what things you can do with this. So okay. No, this is done in anyhow. I think these are like what you're good at. And this is what I've seen and have heard everything and people say it all the time. You're really good, like you give life lessons by these anecdotes and these analogies.

This is what, so even though you're this astrophysicist who's obviously very, very intelligent at a space and the world, you have this perspective and this wisdom in so many ways that someone who's not interested in aliens or UFOs or the world or cosmic or whatever, big bang, they'll still find and glean information that's pertinent to their life. You do a great job.

Well, first of all, everybody's interested in aliens. That's true. A lot of people are. A lot of people are. Yes. Everybody's, I've never met anybody's. I don't want to meet anybody. No, everybody wants to alien.

So just more broadly, I count myself among the ranks of old men right now. I'm old, okay. And anything that you don't think is old is just Hollywood. You know, I go and I visit Hollywood every three months and I come back and they, how old are you? I was born in 1958.

68, 70, oh really? 50. So wait, but that hair, you don't color your hair. You don't line me. No, no, no, so so so here's the thing So my hair it is tinted But for only one reason because the gray was coming in in Patches and it looked like I had some kind of main G skin disease because it wasn't coming in uniformly

And so I give a public talk and my head people would would be distracted by my hair. Like what's wrong with his hair? Does he have some fungared skin disease? So I'm tending it until it's more uniformly gray, then I'll come out and I'll be like, you know, more defeated and we have the gray afro. And the end, come out and do it. But I'm not trying to completely hide the guy. I'm great here and here and I got a great, great musta. So I'm not, I'm not ashamed of the gray.

I just, I'm as an educator, I don't want to, it's distracting. I don't want what I look like to distract you. So that's, it's so it's tactical. It's not, it's not vanity. No, no, no, no, not in the least, not in the least. But this is all my hair. I mean, I, you know, it's thinning now.

So, so there's some, you know, but my, this my, my real hair line. That's great. That's amazing. Yeah, it's just, is that. But, but anyhow, so, but here's a broader point I want to make. I've always been embedded in society as we all are, but it's easy to go to the lab and, and separate.

Yeah. Okay, the proverb to the lab and separate. Yeah. Okay, the proverbial science lab and separate. I've always tried to keep at least one and a half feet in pop culture because I learn as an educate, when I put on my educator hat, that if I know the pop culture that you know, the scaffold, call it a scaffold, the pop culture, and I look at it from different angle, I say, hey, if I'm going to teach you something about science, I can clad it to the outer surface of this pop culture, scaffold that you already have. I don't have to explain to you who Beyonce is or what a football touchdown is.

You already know that. And so now I can come at it and I say, I can attach the science to it. And you say, Hey, I never knew that. And all I found is that the more I do that, the more potent is the educational moment to bear with the more the more potent is not the right way, just the more thoroughly you will receive the fundamentals of what I'm trying to tell you. And this was long earned. I mean, before I was recognized, I just would be on the airplane and sit next to,

so what do you do? What do you do? I say, I'm an astrophysicist. Then the questions start coming. Okay? Tell me black holes in quasars and expanding universe. God!

All right, it all comes out. And while I'm replying to them, I am paying attention to their eyebrows, to what they're focusing on. And I notice that when I describe some things, they'll drift a little. And other things they're like intense. And I say, all right, not everything I'm explaining is landing equally on this listener. And so I've kept basically a lifetime of interpersonal data of my teaching people things about the universe or about anything else I know.

And so this has been cold, tuned, trimmed, fed, reduced, all of this so that I have a pretty good idea, I think, if you're going to enjoy what I tell you or if you're not. And sadly, what has helped me with this is Twitter. I guess. Sadly, why? Because I'll post a tweet that I let me back up when I'm an early Twitter adopter. And people say, you got to have a Twitter account. I said, why? Oh, because you're, you know, I said, no, I don't want, no, no. I said, all right, I did it just to get my name in there. All right, then I started tweeting what everybody else was tweeting. I'm going to have an hamburger now.

And you know, you have it here in burger too. And I said, this is, I can't, I'm an educator. I'm a scientist. Then here's what happened. Okay. All right. I'm in loss. This is a long story.

I'm sorry. You haven't asked me any questions. It's okay. I want this is this is actually more interesting. Go ahead. We're okay. Okay. Okay. But I don't want to be just the only talker. No, no, I find you I find you fascinating in so many ways. You know, I forgot that it was 2009 something like this. Maybe 2010. And I a year before I'd written a book on Pluto, it's called the Pluto Fox, the rise and fall of America's favorite planet.

Okay. I'd written that book. Anyhow, that was out. All right. And so now I'm visiting Las Vegas to do some filming for Nova. We're filming some magicians to learn how they trick your mind in this movie. Okay. All right. So I'm in Vegas. I landed McCarran Airport. And there's a border's book back when they were still in business. So they're bigger than just a small Hudson books. They had categories of books on shelves, all right? So I go in there and and I do the vein thing that authors do you check to see if your book is there on sale and I didn't see my book then I asked the the person at the counter. Do you have a science section? Okay and they said, no I'm sorry we don't have a science section at this branch. And I had a thought in that moment, I said,

wouldn't want any rational thinking to go on before you gamble? Because it's a waste. That's right. Okay. So I said, oh my gosh, that's a tweet. So I tweeted at an airport in Vegas, look for this, there's no science section.

Wouldn't want rational thinking to go on before you gamble and people lost their minds. All right, and I said, that's the kind of stuff I'm going to tweet. Thoughts I'm having as I interact with life. All right, and but when I see people's reactions, if I think it's funny and nobody's laughing, it's not funny. If I think it's enlightening and people complain, it's not enlightening. If I think it's enlightening and people think it's enlightening, that's a hit. That's so true. So I have an ongoing record, a neurosynaptic snapshot.

Words I use, concepts I try to convey. If I dip my toe in any kind of political world, how is that reacted to? How do people respond and that deeply informs any next encounter I have with other people? That's what I mean. So you are pretty methodical then. Like you are paying attention. The system and system and okay, systematic in that. Is that how you became so well known as through Twitter? Because you have like a crazy following. Is that how you became so well known as through Twitter? Because you have like a crazy following. Is it like 14 million now on third?

Yeah, it's 14, 15 million. It was a slow build. It wasn't even though I did Cosmos, which was very hosted Cosmos, which was very visible. You can look at the social media following, for example. It's been a very steady increase, and which makes it much

more sensible to handle. Yeah. You know, I would be recognized by total strangers once a month, then it was once a week, then it was once a day, then it was ten times a day, then it was fifty times a day, and it was a hundred times a day. And I take these steps, react in accommodating ways that my life doesn't collapse or become weird and where I can still be respectful of people's interest.

So it was a slow build. So I know this because I've asked people, how do you know about, oh, I saw you on John Stewart. Yeah, of course. I saw a public talk. I saw you on Cosmos. Well, I listened to your podcast. I have a podcast too.

It's called Star Talk. And unfortunately, hardly ever is it because someone read one of my books. Because many more people watch media than read books on social. 100%. But books are another force that's out there. And I had a couple of best sellers.

So it's all, it's an amalgam. So everything. So between the Twitter and between John Stewart or between Nova or not of Cosmon. Nova was a, that was big back then. I mean, that was big. Well, there was a spin-off from Nova called Nova Science Now, which I delighted and hosting.

Nova never had a host before. It was just a disembodied narrative voice. It was a host, so I'm your lens into all these cool sciencey things that are happening in the world. So I delight in, they went about three years, four years, and then we all move on. Yeah.

But anyhow, so mine, just back to like who I am and what drives me, a Carl Sagan once said that when you're in love, you wanna tell the world. And my first love is the universe. And it's, yes, I love my wife and kids, and the universe is right after that. What are equal, equal, equal? No, I can't not, we're not saying that, probably.

But so, no, the universe is up there. And if I delight in something that I just learned, I find it hard keeping it to myself. It's, I just can't. I wanna share it. And it could be annoying sometimes to people, you know, who, all right, here he goes again, you know, but what you want to make sure, here's an interesting fact, when you're in college, you attend lectures. Yeah. Right. This is a fundamental

part of what it is to be educated. After college, lecture is a bad word. If someone starts talking to you and you don't want to hear what they stop lecturing True, it's exactly true rendered lecture become bad all right if you're lecturing me with cool stuff He's a keep lecturing me. I want to learn more so something made it bad over in there So I have to I have I think about it's true is there a limit to how much I should be educator if I'm just hanging out? Should I just shut up and and by the way very important point if I'm in a group I will only talk about the universe if I'm asked really yes Yes, now it never feels that way because someone always asked me about the universe and I end up talking right but Here's just something to remember you will never learn anything while you're talking.

That's true. Okay. So if I'm in a company of someone who's an expert in something I don't know anything about, I am all questions. Oh, but tell me about this and how about, it doesn't matter what it is. Let's go.

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What are you? I'm most interested in that, which I know nothing about. What would it name me one topic? That is an art thing. What don't you know anything? What is like the one thing that you may not know as much about as something else? Sanitation disposal.

Oh, waste, waste management. It goes off to the horizon. Like, where does it go? You can figure that out in an article or two. That's what made me, but I don't carry not, if I met an expert who I'd be all, I'd spend two hours asking them questions. Other things, what is the training regimen for a soprano singer? Okay, or opera? What's going

through your head when you compose music? All right, I don't know any of them. I'm not a musician. I don't know, but I would be asking such people questions. Right. I get it. And what else? If I was with a politician, I would ask things like, when do you decide that you're gonna lead your electorate versus when you Will follow them. That's a good. Are you a leader? Are you a follower of your electorate? Right? So there were questions I have that are in me and my point is that's just childhood curiosity and this book I wrote seven months ago now is all about taking my scientific insights and applying them to everyday things we do, where your awareness of a decision you've made

can be deepened by learning what it looks like through a scientific point. I really like your book, by the way. I was nervous. I told you because I was like, oh God, am I going to get through this thing? And I will tell you something. It's very easy. It's not as hard as I thought because you can put it down, you can pick it up again. Everything has a different chapter, like a truth and beauty, man eaters versus vegetarians.

It was like the gender and identity. There's a bunch of them. And it was very, like death was a great one. Yeah. Risk and reward, law and order. These are things that we've all heard. We've all used these phrases. Totally. And one thing about just because I'm an old part

is I don't either regret or fear getting old. I have no reason to long, I haven't given myself reason to wish I were younger because one of my personal mission statements is every day I want to learn something that I didn't know yesterday. Really? So what was it today? Well, I say I want to.

I don't know. I don't know. Okay. I'm thinking about it today. Oh, I learned that in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, graffiti is not only there, but celebrated and encouraged. Oh. On all buildings, on all the sides of all buildings, and they give tours of graffiti through

that section. I did not know that until this afternoon. Wow. So you did learn something today? Yes. My brother, when he was younger, he painted graffiti and he had a tag and I'm fascinated by that fact. So I did learn something about life

and about what people, and it has art in it and personal expression and how something that can initially be viewed as renegade and you put them in jail. And it turns it to something that becomes celebrated as an outdoor art project. So what I found was that if you continue to learn, become a lifelong learner, and you process that information,

you don't just become an encyclopedia, that's, you know, what good is that? What I want to happen within me is that I can take data, turn data into information, then turn the information into knowledge, turn the knowledge into wisdom, and ultimately turn the wisdom into insight. This is an arc that will stagnate if you don't keep learning things. Well, you might rearrange some ideas you had, but there's a limit to how you would ever break out of whatever box contained those ideas.

As you continue to learn, the box continues to grow. As the box continues to grow, there are more pathways of thought that are now available to you because you have more things to think about. And so, as I get older, I can definitely say that I'm wiser. And that book, I could not have written it 10 years ago. There's wisdom in there that only really came to the surface. In the last 10 years of my life, evaluating all of my previous life, I'm not reincarnated here. Oh, the life I had led previous to that and all of what society looks like to me since then. And so yeah, this, no, I don't want to be 30 years old. and all of what society looks like to me since then.

And so, yeah, no, I don't want to be 30 years old. And when I was 30, I was like, yeah, I'm bad ass. I'm 30. No, you didn't know shit about anything. But I was 30. Totally true. I agree. That's why it's interesting.

In social media, you have these 30-year-old life coaches. I mean, what do you know about life? You're like 30. You're 25 years old, right? Like, it's like a whole other world. But you said to me, I want to touch upon which is like aging and all this other stuff. Like in time right now, everybody is a living so much longer than they used to, right? By 20 years or so. So definitely, right? Is it 20 years more? How what is it? Like, what's the? No, no, so you go back. Well, let's go back 150 years, which is small compared with civilization.

150 years ago, the life expectancy in the world was about 35. When you add infant mortality and all other ways of dying was about 35. And now it's up pushing mid 80s and 90s. And it's increasing everywhere in the world. Everywhere in the world. Yeah, so it's not as high in some places as others, but everywhere it's increasing everywhere in the world. Everywhere in the world. Yeah, so it's not as high in some places as others, but everywhere it's increasing. And you have every right to think you'll live to 90,

provided you stay free of disease, or for dying of old age, you have every right to think you'll live to 90. And I've asked, how old are you now? About? Well, do you think? Oh, I don't know. I've been my 40s, 46.

46? Okay. I was going to say somewhere between 30 and 40. Well, you're my new best friend. Oh, I'm telling you, I want to get your number now. We're going to be friends for life. All right. So if you're 31 in your 31st year of life, you've lived your 1,000,000 second.

Oh, I, of course, this is Graham Bell. Hold on, no, Graham, some, invest, some investment guy put this, I don't know. I just, oh, you did. Okay. I'm talking to exactly. You're thinking I'm making calculations only after hearing an investment person. Excuse me. Let's put it another way.

When I was 31, I celebrated my billionth second, okay? Before they were podcast. What if I was social media? I calculated. Yeah, I figured you can do that probably on your own. Okay, the calculation is not trivial because you add up seconds in an hour, hours in a day, days in a year but

then you have to track leap days all right and you have to trap leap seconds and I will bet you whoever you are quoting here did not know I bet you all right okay no I don't done mad at them so my point here is, so by the time you're 63, that's two billion seconds, by the time you're 95, it's three billion. So we should all strive to live three billion seconds in our lives. When I, am I billion second, I had a very small, quick glass of champagne.

Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. It's only in that second, that is that second, right? But my broader point is we are living longer It's only in that second that is that second, right? But my broader point is we are living longer and in the final chapter of the book, it's called Life and Death, I explore the consequences of what happens if we were to live forever

because we might be on the heels of that. You know, there's something called the escape velocity of aging. No, tell me about it. Tell me about it. All right. So, right now, as you know, we're living longer. Every year, we're living longer. So I'm making up these numbers, but they give the sense of what matters here. So let's say 20 years from now, we, the life expectancy has increased by five years. Let's just say, okay? So that's

pretty good. 20 years after that, life expectancy increases by 10 years. 20 years after that, life expectancy increases by 15 years. 20 years after that, life expectancy increases by 20 years. That's escape velocity for civilization. When the number of years that passes equals the increase in the average life expectancy of civilization, at that point, we live forever. It's something that's unbelievable. And what do you think about this whole concept, though? At that point, we live forever. It's something. That's unbelievable.

And what do you think about this whole concept, though? People now are striving and trying to live forever, like anti-aging. I have fragmented thought out thoughts on this. I think it's selfish to be so into yourself that you want to live forever, using resources that someone who's new and born might want to use. If we live forever, we cannot stay on earth because the population without the strip, the supply of what is supporting us. So we'd have to like terraform Mars. I don't have a problem with that in and of itself. Just keep that in mind. The day we hit escape velocity. Third, one

of the things that motivates me most when I wake up in the morning is the knowledge that I'm going to die. That creates a sense of urgency in what I want to accomplish, what I want to do for other people, the people I want to love and to share time with, and problems I'm trying to solve in my head, astrophysical problems. I don't want to die before I have a chance to solve those or attempt to solve them. So, and I can give a kind of an obscure analogy to this. Let's go back to a time when you were dating, let's say,

and then someone brings you flowers, all right? And that's a nice gesture, flowers. Suppose they brought you plastic flowers. You would think much less of that person, I'm thinking. I don't want to speak for you, but I'm guessing. Okay, so why? Because plastic flowers, they would last forever. So if that affection of love is now a forever affection of love,

but somehow it doesn't work for you, I'll tell you why. Because when they buy real flowers, they don't last forever. They last maybe a week, and you have to care for them. You have to freshen their water, but while you're doing this, you watch the buds open and responding to sunlight. You smell the flowers. You guide them and nurture them through their senescence

until the stem can no longer hold the bulb. And then at the end of a week, you discard them. It is because you know they're going to die that you will give them attention every day of, every day they are alive. It is brought focus to your relationship with those flowers. And I submit to you that if the knowledge you're going to die brings meaning to your life, then to live a life forever is to live a life with no meaning at all. See, this is exactly what I'm saying about you. I love when you

speak like this. It's exactly that's perspective. It's 100% like it resonates. I agree with that. But now, of course, you could live forever and still have meaning. So that's a little bit of an exaggeration. But mathematically, it's true that if knowing that I'm going to die gives meaning to every day, my life never dying. Will you wake up tomorrow? Why do I do anything? So it breeds laziness. It breeds complete laziness. Yes.

And also complacency, laziness and complacency. Also, you'll, you'll be very careful crossing the street because if you live forever, you don't want to die by getting hit by a bus. Exactly. You're gonna write for this. That's absolutely true. You're right. That's not... Do you believe, like, what's your theory on AI then?

I had... Do you know Norea Robini? He was on the podcast before. He's an economist. And he was saying very soon, Noria, or Beeney, he was on the podcast before. He's an economist. And he was saying very soon, actually much sooner than we all think, but machine and humans are going to merge together and be one. What do you believe? Like, what's your whole, like, what's your whole take on AI and human race as we know it? Okay. So let me preface this in two ways. One of them is, I don't present myself as an AI expert.

All people who do that I've met want all of us to fear the consequences of AI running a mock. Okay. That's one fact I just want to lead with. Another fact I've lead with is I programmed computers since the early 1970s and I've written probably 50,000 lines of code so I think a lot about computers and what their abilities are what they can or can't do when computers

became powerful enough and inexpensive enough to do long division for you. The scientists didn't run for the hill, say, we're out of a job. Oh my gosh, this is terrible. We said, oh my gosh, let us apply the computer to our hardest problems and let it solve them instead of us cranking away on paper. We totally embraced all the computing brought to our field. Okay, and that's the way it was for decades

and the computers have keep getting more and more powerful in my field So now computers start doing language models and things and now we have people seeing computers in your face Composing your term paper and now the teachers are afraid that everybody is afraid and I'm saying to myself Is this really any different from the first computer doing my long division? saying to myself, is this really any different from the first computer doing my long division? Do we still teach long division? Are there still rooms of people calculating with pen and paper? No, they're out of jobs because we have computers doing it. All right? We have been so comfortable with this, I'm surprised and a little bit shocked to watch people fear AI reaching into the world of language.

By the way, I don't want to call it AI, but early, highly intelligent computers controlling robots, they build our cars. They build our cars. You're not quite old enough. I don't think just barely on the cuss, I remember when there was a real chance in the morning that your car would not start. No matter what condition the car was in. It was a chance it would not start. And you drive down the road and every now and then you see a car with its hood open and someone sort of pacing in front of it wondering why the car isn't running. You know when all that went away?

When robots started building cars. That's true. That's why people are fearful though. That's why they fear they fear their job. They fear that there's like smart enough. And they should fear their jobs, but this has been going on since the industrial revolution. There's no there's no yes fear your job. If you were in the business of making horse-drawn carriages in 1910, fear your job. Yes, because auto-obiles came in. Oh, by the way, I now need somebody to fix the automobile. I now need someone to build roads that cars can drive on. I now need someone to obtain the oil and gas to put in the car.

Whole industries rise up as these new developments occur. So in the 1920s, we are in the centennial anniversary of the major discoveries in quantum physics. It happened in the 1920s. All right. If you are around back then and you're worried about budgets, you might say, why are you worrying about this? They're atoms. We can't even see atoms. What do you keep molecules? What? I just care that my wood atoms That's all I care about it would take 40 to 50 years before quantum physics would become the foundation of Information technology. There is no creation storage or retrieval of information without the exploitation of the quantum That was 50 years in the making.

Okay. I used to do this back when phone books existed. The yellow pages. I used to keep a yellow page every few years. And I watched what industries would rise and fall at taking out ads in the yellow pages. And I watched from the 1970s into the 80s into the 90s. Computer ads just started taking over the book. First, the big expense of clunky ones And I watched from the 1970s into the 80s into the 90s computer ads Just started taking over the book first the the big expense of clunky ones and then the first of the desktops And then the laptops and I said to myself there are people working in these industries getting salaries

What were they doing 20 years ago? Not that I don't know what they were doing. So yeah, we're gonna lose jobs, but don't think that's some unique challenge that we were confronted. Right, that's part, it's always been that way basically. It is as perennial as the grass in the era of the technological revolution. So let's talk then about truth and beauty

and like the, you know, objective truth, personal truth, all that. Sure. To be very. Yes. What are the chapters of the book? Exactly, that's why, to your point, I have like a billion things we have. I haven't asked you any of my real

questions yet, which is ironic. Oh, yeah, I'm saying, I'm going to get going. No, I, this is actually great. In fact, I want to have a conversation. I don't want to be like, no, my next question, that's not how I do it anyway. But I like to have like certain things that really kind of stuck out with your book was this whole truth and beauty, because your objective truth, to purse all the different truths, like, when I found interesting when you were saying about like observations, like, like seeing something, that's your highest

sense, right? Like, it could be, it doesn't even have to be true, but people believe it if they see it. Like, if someone says to them, can you talk about it? Like, not why am I saying it? You're here. Guys, I would be remiss if I did not tell you about my new favorite find. And that is the Therasage Portable Sonna, which I literally am obsessed with. I have a huge sauna in my backyard that I just literally just don't use anymore, because I love this thing so much. There is no EMFs. It's a full spectrum infrared soda with red light. So you get so many amazing benefits.

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or your eyelashes. Like every other big sauna does. I'm telling you, game changer. You have to have to check it out. Go to Therasars.com and use code hustle and you'll get 15% off and check out all the other amazing products that they are involved with on their site And they'll also give you 15% off. So it's site wide check it out. T-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E. You're gonna love it Well, just to shape your question precisely, I'm happy to hear you put it to the airwaves here. But what I did in writing that chapter, the truth and beauty.

So the first half is about truth, the second half is about beauty. Beauty is, of course, something that has been talked about and debated for millennia by philosophers and beauticians and just people in general and artists of course. So I just offer a scientist lens on that. It's not meant to settle it once and for all, but I'd like to think I've offered some insights that you might not otherwise have gleaned if you hadn't heard a scientist talk about beauty. So with the truth part, I looked around and I noticed there are people who use the word truth in ways that I don't as a scientist.

Preamment among them is religion. If you look at religious websites, you see the word truth. Often, they'll say, and Christian websites, they'll say, Jesus is truth or God is truth. And They'll say, and Christian reps advice, they'll say, Jesus is truth or God is truth. And this invocation, I said to myself, I'm not going to take this away from them. I don't want to redefine it and tell them, no, you're all, no, there's no point to that. So what I ended up doing was saying,

recognizing that there are three categories of truth. So one of them is a personal truth. This is where something is true to your bones. It is true and no one can shake you of it. All right, that's a personal truth. An example of a personal truth is Jesus is your savior. Well, in a free country, no one can take that from you. No, in a free country. You're good to go. Jesus or Muhammad is your last prophet on earth or Beyonce is your queen, right? No one is gonna take these from you.

But keep in mind, if you want to convince another person of your personal truth, it will require often an extraordinary act of persuasion. In the limit, it has invoked all-out armed conflict. This is the crusades, you know, Christians and Muslims at war with each other because they have different personal truths. A comment I make in that half of the chapter is, it seems that the less evidence that is available for something to be true, the more strenuously a person ends up believing in it. I find

it's fascinating. Okay, it's so your personal truth. This is your own relationship with God. All right, and it's your own. Is it external evidence? Well, not really. I just feel it. Okay, I feel it, and I will go to war over it. And I will kill you if you know, it's okay, I feel it and I will go to war over it and I will kill you if you know it's okay this has happened. Yeah. So I'm intrigued by the anthropologically intrigued by this, okay? Because when I have actual objective evidence for something, I'm not going to die for how I talk. I don't need to. It speaks for itself. I'd just, you know, it's just it's a fascinating reality

we live in as humans. All right. So another truth I call, this is a truth that becomes true because it gets repeated so often. What it's doing is hijacking something that we evolved with, which is if you see something repeat, it's probably true and you should either do it or not do it in the future depending on whether it helps you or hurts you. If you see your loved ones try to pet a lion and they get eaten, by the fourth time you're saying, I'm not gonna pet that lion. So you establish your interactions with the world around you

based on repeated things that are surely true because they were repeated. That has been hijacked, basically by politicians and others who are very much into propaganda. Propaganda is the very essence of repeating something until you think it's true. Then you end up believing it. And in the limit, you might even lay down your life for it, as Nazis did in the 1930s and 40s. They really believe that Aryans were some kind of superior form of human being and others were not, especially not the Jews and not the Gypsies and not all manner of other people who had birth defects or other things they

considered not worthy of being alive and they believe this and act it on it, okay? Propaganda makes that happen all the way. We had propaganda against the Japanese. Okay, just look at propaganda. I get the book on this. Yeah, it's up to the book. Yes, we made a... This propaganda, find the group that you're not supposed to like and look at the propaganda that your own culture and your own society created about them. And that dehumanizes them so that you can go kill them and not feel bad about it. It's pretty clear that this is what's going on. All right, a third kind of truth is just what I call objective truth. This is the kind of truth that the methods and tools of science are exquisitely tuned to establish.

I perform an experiment. I get a result. Someone else verifies the experiment or not. But they don't verify, they can't verify my experiment. Maybe I was biased in that result. They caught my bias. This is what peer review is about. No one scientist can run away with the truth that nobody else can verify. We're built in error-checking mechanisms

because scientists are human too. We can't have biases. Ideally, it's a neutral bias that doesn't affect your results, but if it's a bias that can affect your results and you don't know it, that's why we have peer review. Just to diminish the chances of you declaring something that's true that isn't or declaring something that isn't true that is. That in a nutshell is the scientific method. So I get to say at the end of the day,

the good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. Do you believe in coincidences or no? I mean, do I believe coincidences or not coincidences? Do you believe that exactly? Because that's what you meant to say. Do you believe that there's no such thing as a coincidence? That's what, thank you.. Do you believe that there's no such thing as a coincidence?

Right. Thank you. So the power of coincidences is extraordinary. And you know where it comes from? It comes from our abject failure of our brain wiring to think natively about probability and statistics. Flat out. Flat out. Flat out.

Yes. Okay. It sounds blunt and I'm sorry. No, I love it. In a way that's insensitive, but probability and statistics is the foundation of understanding coincidences. All right.

So let's say you're traveling in Europe and you're in a town you've never been in and you see a high school trend. But it's coincidence. You see, what are the odds? Oh, this can't be just coincidence. You might say to yourself, and I would say to you,

yes it is. But it's hard to convince you because your brain is not wired to see it, but here's my attempt. All right. Next time you're traveling in Europe, go up to a random person in the street and say, oh, by the way, when you see the person, say, small world. Yeah, no, I don't think it's a small world. Yeah.

Small world. All right. So here we go. Go up to a random person in the street, grab them by the lapels and say, do I know you? And they'll say, but no, you know, whatever language they're going to be a street, grab them by the lapels and say, do I know you? And they'll say, but no, you know, whatever language they're going to say,

no, do that to every single person in the street. How many people will you pass before you just give up and say, large words. Okay. Okay. You're passing

thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people in the airport, on the airplane through the day, in the taxi, in the bus, in the street, in the thing. And you take on 10 vacations, and one of them you meet someone, and you say, oh, this was preordained. This is, no, it's because you really just don't understand. That's right.

Well, you also talk, that's why like in Vegas, you were talking about like, I heard you talk what was in the book too, but the lowest, but like when all the visit, was it the, the physicists or whatever, and the, you know, so my people, your people, your people. The American, not my people, the American physical society. Is the nation's community of physicists?

Oh, there is. And we get together, you know, I don't go to as many as I want to or should, but we meet once a year in a big meeting. And this thousands of physicists believe it or not, walking them, looking among you. And they blend in. Not all wear a pocket protector. So they were scheduled to have a meeting in San Diego and

For some snafu of hotel reservations something happened and the hotel need cannot be fulfilled The MGM on pun learning about this the MGM Marina today the MGM grand said we'll take you We're one of the biggest hotels in the world. They were in Vegas and you can have a good time and just come. So thousands of physicists descended on Las Vegas. Now, let me preamble this by saying there is no required probability or statistics class between kindergarten and 12th grade. Nor is there one in college. Meanwhile, I have taken some form of probability and statistics

for every year of high school, college, and graduate school. I'm telling you, it's not native to think this way. Otherwise, it would be everyone's easiest subject and you wouldn't even have to teach it. But it's not taught, and when you do learn it, the scientists learn it. Okay, so physicists are there, in Vegas. The week is over, There's a headline.

Physicists in town lowest casino take ever. The physicists were told to never return to their city. It's not because we were counting cards or cleverly figured out the slot machines. We were not betting. Period. Because we understand what's happening at the craft table and at the roulette table and at you know, people you have people throwing dice hard so that they get high numbers and they throw gently so that they get low numbers. You have people blowing my dice, okay? Stand a little further away from all this superstition. If there's anything we are, it's superstitious

and non-analytical. And those two do not go together. And what saddens me is that an entire industry has risen to exploit our inability to think probabilistically and they're called casinos. That's true. That's why on a roulette table, you have people betting, let's say, the number seven multiple times, say, why are you betting on seven? Well, it's due. I said, how do you know it's due? Well, they show the previous 10 numbers that came up and there's no seven there. So they show therefore it's due. I say, no, it's not due. It's exactly the same probability every single time. But it doesn't do that way. It doesn't. Even if you know what intellectually, doesn't it something more just human nature or propel someone to do it anyway, right?

Right. Correct. And by the way, this manifests on simple levels. For example, if I have a very good product and I want to take out an ad and sell it, I could just show a bar chart to say, look, we're at the top end of this bar chart. But no, advertisers know that that just doesn't work. You have to get a human being on another person of your species to extoll the virtues of the product. I bought one the other day and my life is changed.

And you say, boy, I want my life to change just like you. And I'm saying, no, I need data. I don't want the one person. No, I need, give me all the data personally because I'm trained to reject I wouldn't assess why do we do it? Why do we like it? Because we we trust because the math is not native to us But our relationship to other humans are so this has been hijacked so true by the advertising industry It's not will you allow me one conspiracy series? Yeah, you ready? I am. I'm serious. Okay.

All right. Do you know what state lottery money goes to? That's raised by that? No. It goes to education. Really? Did you know that? Yeah.

In most states, it goes to education, which it makes it easier for people to agree to vote to have a lottery, because they said the revenue is going to education. All right, well, I just told you that K-12, hardly anywhere in the country, teaches probability and statistics. That way, when you graduate, you have no idea that you shouldn't play the lottery.

You're the 100% true. So I think they're intentionally keeping it out of the schools so that they can take your money later and then claim that it's for education. Because if they actually talk probability and statistics, not a fraction of the people who play it would, that is for certain. Just like... It's Jeep 4x4 season. Make your next adventure epic with Jeep Wrangler 4xE.

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competitive vehicles exclude all other FCA vehicles. Contact dealer for details, take retail delivery by 531-23. Jeep is a registered trademark. No, 100% and that's true. And that also goes into a whole other area of the school system here, because you talk about the school system here

and how you feel, I heard this a bunch of times about you, about the fact that we hate school for a reason, because that kind of just people, you're just learning in one way, which again, talks about the curiosity, we talked about earlier. What would be your take of how we can make the school system,

the educational system better? Yeah, I don't have, that's a great, an important question. I don't have a silver bullet, but I'm gonna cite something, I'm gonna cite a problem with the school system that people hardly ever cite. And maybe that will respond to solutions

in ways that others won't. People said, we need to pay teachers more. We need to do, by the way, what they don't tell you about paying teachers more, they don't tell you this. I'm going to tell you, all right? That implies that if you pay teachers more, they will do a better job. But that's not how the economics of that works.

The way it works is you pay teachers a much higher salary. Now people who would be better teachers than you want your job because they want the high salary. And you lose your job because you suck at your job. Right. And now we get much better people talented at it. That's how that plays out. It's not going now we get much better people talented at it. And that's how that plays out. It's not going to be the same teacher's getting more money. Okay. You're going to make

that clear. Okay. That's all right. So that's the economics of raising a salary in a particular job. By the way, a version of that happened back in the 1970s. Think about it. Again, I'm that old. I get to speak about it first and in 1970s and 1960s. Essentially, all school teachers were female. I had one male teacher and that was just kind of me. I remember that, right? That's fun. School teachers were women, typically unmarried women, okay? Really? Well, because if you got married, then you went and had been talking about it. Exactly. We're talking about a whole other era here, okay? They were either married or they were much older and never married or older and not raising

kids anymore. Yeah. So you had this sort of, but that's not what's important here for what my example. So if you are a brilliant woman who graduated college with a specialty, you majored in geology or physics or math or art All right, and you were good you were among the best and you had enthusiasm. All right. There were four jobs You could have in life in America. It was a nurse a school teacher a flight attendant then known as stewardess and I'm surely left with a secretary. That was basically it. Anybody who was not that was an extraordinary exception to that. Okay. Oh, so I fifth one you could

be a housewife. Okay. By the way, just as a reminder, the Sunday newspaper back then, which is that and had many sections, the sports section, the arts and entertainment. One of the sections was the women's section. Oh wow. That's what it was called, the women's section. Why? Oh, because that had the recipes for you to go out and buy food to feed your husband and your kids. All right. This is the world we came out. So people say it's worse ever for when it no it's not okay Just go back okay if you had a time machine no no Stay in the present or go in the future don't tell me stuff was better in the past all right So now watch if you were a brilliant woman you did not become a lawyer a doctor a

Scientist the most brilliant women became school teachers. They had no, that's, you're not gonna be brilliant, it would become a secretary. That's not how that plays out. We'll become a flight attendant. No, you're becoming the school teacher. So what happens? The 1970s, the second wave women's live movement,

women marching in the streets, their anthems from Helen Ready and Jane Fonda and is a new found power of control of your body and of your career in society. And so professions that were not previously open to women, all of a sudden the doors opened and sometimes opened reluctantly by those who control the lock, but they opened. And so now the most brilliant women would not become a schoolteachers. They would become a corporate executives

and entrepreneurs and medical doctors and attorneys. If, and who fills this gap? Idiot men who can't. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so ask yourself, when did people start complaining about the school system? Not in the 1950s, not in the 1960s. That all began in the 1970s. Where the schools are going to help, they can't with the,

how come Johnny can't learn because Johnny's teacher can't teach or whatever, that all happened in the 1970 and beyond and continues to this day. That so it's a fascinating consequence to liberation. Yeah. Right? Because it's evidence that the women were way underpaid for what they were doing because they could have been doing much greater things. So, but the opportunities were not given unto them.

So you raised the price back. Now now the most brilliant of the man and women will want to go back to teach and then their enthusiasm will become contagious bad word in this climate. Sorry. Yeah. Contagious. two. And that's a bad word to these days. Yeah, you never know what word is next. But especially me, I'm old and tired and slow. Please. So yeah. So anyhow, it's these are the things I see. And did I finish the truth part in your question? Yeah, you did finish it. And what I was going to say, is that mean now we're still? Yeah, my recipe for education. Here's here's what happens at the end of the work of the school day. People are looking at the clock. Can't wait until the buzzer sounds and then

they run and we all know you all enough now to remember Alice Cooper's song. School's out for the summer. School's out for everyone. This is an anthem that students would sing as they ran down the steps on the last day of school in the spring and they tossed their books in the ran down the steps on the last step school in this spring, and they tossed their books in the air, the notes in the air, and you can feel that emotion. You know what that's like, and I ask you, what is going on in that building for you to be glad you're no longer in it when your only job was to learn. Learn something new today, you didn't know yesterday. It's your only job.

So I'm not gonna blame you for celebrating the end of school. I'm gonna blame the school for creating a learning environment that people want to escape. Something's wrong, not only in what's taught, but how it's taught. And I want a school where the end of the school day comes, the kids are sad that they can no longer learn because it's the end of the school day. I want a school where summer comes and I say, I don't want to go to camp.

I want to stay in school. Imagine what kind of society that would be. Oh my gosh, it would be transformed. But how do we do that? The question is still, how do we change it? You're like, I don't know. It would be. Oh my gosh, you'll be transformed. But how do we do that? The question still, how do we, how do we change it? You're like, I don't know, it would be nice. I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it. Tell me, tell me.

I don't know how to do it. And I've done this experiment. I gave a lecture to a big room. And I, I say that because I've repeated this question, not to get the same answer every time. I put my hands behind my back and I extend some number of fingers. Okay. I'll tell you right now with that number the number is three. Okay. But the audience doesn't know this. And I say of all the teachers you had in life, kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school, if you went, how many of those teachers had like a singular effect on you as a person or you as a student?

How many? Well, because what's the total number? For some people, it's 100 teachers. In college, easily you'd knock down 50 teachers in high school, maybe another 20 or 300 teachers. For everybody. How many? And I say, for how many is it 10? One person of a thousand raises their hand? 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, then there's like 10 people raise their hand.

4, 20 people raise their hand. 3, 300 people raise their hand, okay? 2, 1. So it peaks in the low single digits. So I tell teachers, school teachers, they say, what can I do differently? And I say, become the teacher that Singularly influenced your life become that teacher aspire to be that teacher and we will all be transformed overnight Easier said than done though, right? Well, they exist. It's not some magic thing so we get all are just get all their super teachers

Exactly that would be great I'm gonna line up first thing. So we get all or just get all the super teachers and totally exactly that would be great. I'm going to first. That's right. Which is going to happen pretty soon too, right? I want to know actually what your what is the most popular or the most asked question that people ask you? Have we been visited by aliens? Well, closely by do I think God exists? Can you answer both of those?

Yeah, sure. Anyone who studied the size and scale and age of the universe and what it's made of, it would be inexcusably egocentric to declare that we alone here on earth is the only life in the universe. So anyone who studied the problem, say life is going to be plentiful. I just haven't found it yet, but we're looking and we haven't looked very far. It's like scooping a cup of water into the ocean and looking at it. Oh, the ocean has no fish.

Or work, take a bucket. So the ocean has no whales, right? That we've only looked the tiniest bit in the universe for it. And so we look forward to discovery any kind of alien like microbial, okay? Thumbel or some other kind of life that we don't even have a word for, that would be good. I wanna know if there's actual aliens like living in Mars or Jupiter, like,

what you see like, you know, ET looking things. Is that really something that we see? So what you're asking for is what we would call intelligent life. That's what Stetty does, the search for extra travel. Exactly, not just aliens. And we have people listening for radio waves to detect radio waves that might be sent to us. Plus occasionally we'll send out some

purposeful signals to be received by aliens. But beyond that, there are TV waves that have been emanating ever since the dawn of television that were not contained within our atmosphere. And so there's this radio bubble extending 90 light years out, 80 light years out. So, and there are exoplanets orbiting stars within that bubble. Any aliens on those planets was sufficiently precise technology and sensitive technology. In principle, could decode our civilization based on that first wave of

television signals. So that would include they might learn how men and women interact by looking at the honeymooners. Okay. By the way, there was a line in the honeymooners that people at the time laughed at and today it's like We're Ralph Cramden gestures to his wife with a moving fist bang zoom to the moon Alice He where he lovely lovingly threatens to punch her to the moon on a level where she lands on the moon and everyone Left right this is like the sensitivities of society are Ever increasing Scale okay, do you think that's gonna change, by the way, as another question I have for you? No, no, I think there'll be more things

that'll come up that no one is paying attention to now, right? Does Hollywood give best director to women separately from men? No. No, of course not. Why would you? Well, why are they giving best actor to women separate from best actor to men?

Ah, no one as anyone thought. Okay. Different roles, you're right. So in 20 years, you will look very unwoke for talking about best actor in a female role, best actor in a male role. As the gender spectrum manifests as a spectrum, that that'll look increasingly at best quaint and at worst incomplete denial of the full gender

expression that we know exists among us. These are things that we today just do and don't even think about. And I think about this all the time. Well, that's because if you can I ask you a question and can we talk I want to talk to both gent in your gender and identity. You're I do I have. I'm like getting nervous. Okay, well sorry, because I made only, I'll go quick. I'll go quick. So what do I think of God? There's a website.

We type God into it. It lists all the gods that humans have ever worshipped. And it's basically this practically continuous scroll. So God worship has been with us ever since we've been human, which fascinates me that people Want or need or require some power beyond themselves to account for things that they cannot otherwise account for would to make sense in their lives We live in a country that gives Total freedom to that provided it doesn't take away the freedoms of others, total freedom to express religion in whatever

way you need or want or feel. When you say, here's my religion, and this religion requires that you cut off the tip of the penis after eight days, and you have to eat this animal, but not that animal, on this day, but not that day, that's a God that's in your life rather than a God about the universe. So Einstein would say, do you believe in God? Well, if there's any God, I believe in it's Spinoza's God, the God of the laws of the universe. That'd be a whole other kind of God, rather than the one that cares about who you sleep with. Right. Right. And so if there's a God of the universe that creates the laws, I would say, why do we need a God? Why can't the universe just exist with laws?

Right? So I'm an agnostic skeptic in these matters, but I'm not so ardent as to chase after you to talk to your complain about whatever religion you might embrace. I don't... So wait, but you don't believe in God, I'm not convinced. But by the... What people cite as their evidence for God,

I find not convinced. Right. Because you're all about the science and facts and data. So, well, just evidence, I would say, yeah, yeah, if there's no evidence for it, I know I'm not going to jump on it and say it's true. I mean, if there's intriguing evidence, I'll say let's investigate it further. That's cool. So, where did this whole idea of like, you know, Adam and Eve and like the eating of the apple and this and the Noah's Ark and the Ten Commandments and all the Ten Plagues and I'm talking about a lot of the Jewish stuff obviously. Yeah, of course, yeah.

Because I'm obviously Jewish and we have a lot of, we have a lot of laws and orthodox people who are very committed to the, you know, eating kosher in itself is about 70,000 laws. And so in your opinion, then there's real no proof of this stuff. And yeah, so what's the point? Well, I mean, if you look at it anthropologically, there's in group out group that seems to have mattered ever since we've come out of the caves. So if you're having a Passover Seder and you know every other Jew in the world is also having a Passover Seder, there's a certain community to that. That is a

binding force among cultures. Is that really any different in this respect from watching the Super Bowl on Sunday? There's a binding force. In America, we're watching the Super Bowl together. As a community. As a community, precisely. And the more laws and rules there are in the community, the more ways they are to test, to check your loyalty to the community. And so this in-group out-group, on many levels, it's innocent, but taken to an extreme,

it's all out warfare. Mm-hmm. It is. Violent warfare. Do you own an AR-15? Or you don't, well, you're not in the club. Yeah. All right, I own an AR-15

and I have something in common with this group of people. So it's important for order and a sense of purpose or placement or control. Or control. There's a quote, I forgot. It was at Seneca, one of the people from thousands of years ago, said, to the common man, religion is true said to the common man religion is true, to the

philosopher, religion is false, but to the politician religion is convenient. And so, yeah, I mean, just let's be honest with ourselves about how religion has been invoked over history in exactly those ways. So, yeah, that's my response to you about God. Yeah, not question about gender, did you? I did. Yeah, like binary, you know, I mean, what's my response to you about God. So does that mean? Yeah, another question about gender, did you? I did, yeah, like binary, you know, I mean, what's happening now? Where does your whole take? You have a whole chapter on, and I don't want you to go, I don't need you to go through everything, but you think that people in gender and identity, you say people are more

the same than different, right? Well, that's an easy one, that's an easy thing, right? But I would be curious to understand in a deeper way about what you believe with Bionary, non-bionary, transgender, everything fluid, like the whole fluidity of what's happening. Yeah, so it's not a matter of belief, you know. I know. Yeah, I just, the point of the vote is to share with you what it looks like, whatever it is you're doing, it's what it looks like through a scientific lens. And maybe you'll rethink what you're doing,

maybe you'll think more deeply about it, or you'll, maybe it'll unravel what you're thinking. I don't know, but the book is not to hand you an opinion. The book is to reveal to you aspects and nuances of your thoughts that you might not have realized. All right. So for example, we, once again, another limitation of the human brain is not only that we can't know how to do statistics, we, and leading us to say things like there's no such thing as coincidences. There's no better evidence that we don't know about statistics than that comment. But, so here we are, there are things that exist on a continuum that we force into boxes, because it's easier for us to think about it that way.

All right, I think one of the best examples is hurricane strength. Hercane Strengths is a smooth scale. One mile an hour at a time, a scale from low strength to high strength hurricanes, in the speed and the barometric pressure, yet we have compartmentalized it into five categories. I don't have a problem with that, but the five categories have forced a way of thinking about these hurricanes that's not true.

What is it? Okay, Hurricane Irma. We'll go from low category three to high category three, and okay, it's still just category three. Then it goes up one mile per hour, crosses the threshold, and it's now category four. That's breaking news. It's not breaking news that it went from low three to high three. It's breaking news when it crossed over that border that we have artificially created.

This is, let's be honest with ourselves, that this is, we are trying to accommodate a weakness of our capacity to think and try to not put that weakness and impart it on reality, because reality in most cases is on a continuum. So let's keep going. All right, you know about computer bits.

So a bit is either a zero or one. And that's a bit. It is literally and mathematically binary. All right, do you know the future of computing will be in quantum computing and there's something analogous to a bit in quantum computing. It's called the quantum bit or a qubit. But what is a qubit? It is either a zero or a one or any combination of the two. It could be 90% zero, 10% one, 30% one, 70% any statistical comp, there's that problem with statistics again. Any statistical mixture of those two, that bit has that value. And you say, that doesn't make any sense. The universe doesn't have to make sense. If it's real, it doesn't have to, I said that in one of my

books, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. Persons is forged on the plains of the Serengeti, just to know to not get eaten by a lion are not tuned to understand probability and statistics or quantum physics. Here's my point. Chromosomally, are you XX or XY? I can say unambiguously whether you are chromosomeally male or female, okay? Period. All right, now, what do you look like? That's an interesting question.

Does your XX and XY chromosomes do they manifest outwardly? Well, let's think about this and I did this experiment. I sat in the subway in the winter. Your XX and XY chromosomes do they manifest outwardly? Well, let's think about this, and I did this experiment. I sat in the subway in the winter, everyone's wearing a heavy coat. You can't really see the bodies much under heavy coat. I looked at people's faces, and I say, can I unambiguously identify who's girl, who's boy?

Yes, 100% I was able to do this in what way. Okay, well, the girls on average have longer hair, more likely to wear lipstick, more like this is a statistical statement now. And you add up the statistics, it becomes practically a certainty, more likely to wear nail polish, to have longer nails, to wear dangly earlings that like I said to have long hair to wear blush or rouge to have tweezed eyebrows All right to to all of this and I about the boys. Oh the boys I'm there if they were then they might have that go to the gym so that you have muscles All right, people are born with muscles. You got to go to gym and get those so they're too thin and thin Now I got a muscle shirt on. You know what clothes to wear,

because you went to a store that told you how to look like a boy, and you as a girl went to a store, and they told you what the section of the store is to buy clothes. Everything I was queuing on, queuing on, not queuing on. Yeah.

Everything I was queuing on, to put people in the boy or girl bin what secondary and tertiary trained factors everything. And what happens if the woman's breast is not large enough go get it get it in large as 300,000 women do every year because apparently the chromosomes are not showing it enough. Okay? So if all of these factors I'm using to decide if you're male and female and all of them are products of the beauty industrial complex and of the fashion industrial complex, then it's never been about the XX or the XY chromosomes. It's been about your expression of your gender.

And if your expression of your gender is fluid, I feel half girl and half boy today. I'm going to dress that way. I feel 90% girl and 10% I'm going to dress that way. So, I don't know if my perfect assignments matched chromosomes, but I know they matched expression. And so, so in that group that didn't happen to be and androgyny, all right, but we get some of that too. I don't know over the boy or girl, because they're not buying into the industrial complex that requires you look one way or another. Let us be honest with ourselves about people's interest and energy to express themselves on a gender spectrum. Oh, but you have to ask, not you, you.

You, the person has to ask, I don't care, are you a boy or you a girl? I have to, well, hold on. You want me to comply with your inability to think on a spectrum? I'm not gonna do that. You're gonna have to adapt. Adapt your primitive mind that can only think in binary.

Put it on a spectrum. Oh, you know something? That'll be hard for you, maybe, because you'll probably have friends that are not as macho as you and they express a little femininity that may make you uncomfortable. And there's a whole spectrum that'll track you to someone with male chromosomes looking

completely female. Should the society adapt to you in a free country? When they're acting where they're dressing somewhere on a gender spectrum has no impact on you at all. Really? You want me you want to force me because you can't think on a spectrum. That is not the land of the free. That is not, I read somewhere, are we pursuit of happiness? That, I think that's in one of our documents. Pursuit of happiness in the land of the free.

You're passionate about this one. Well, a science, so maybe we're not bits, maybe we're Cubits, maybe we're qubits. All of us. Do I get that from quantum physics? It's an analogy that I'm offering the world in that book. That's it. That's it.

That's it. That's all. Yeah. I want to leave with one question. If you could talk to one person you haven't met yet, that you haven spoken to that you're super interested in who would it be just one person? Well, I Think about that often and I always come up with Isaac Newton because he was so brilliant and he invented calculus and gravity and the laws of Motion and then I realized the conversation would not be interesting. It just wouldn't be

And then I realized the conversation would not be interesting. It just wouldn't be. I invited him to the table and he probably hasn't bathed in three weeks. This is in the 1600s. So I thought, toss him in the shower. He said, what are all over me? No, all right. So I get through that. And now he smells nice.

And now I wanted to help us solve our problems. And I'd say, we have this greenhouse problem with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It comes from fossil fuels. What's a fossil? What are fuels? Well, they drive our cars. What's a car? What's a horse drawn carriage without the horse? Well, then how does it move? Well, there has an engine. Well, what's an engine? All right, well, we use these fossil What were the fossil coming dead creatures pre-prehistoric? Advrage daily information that anybody carries walking down the street so Transcends the minds of the most brilliant people from centuries ago, that I spend the whole time just catching them up

with what we were. And I don't want, I'm not that patient. Stay, I stay in the 1600s, okay? I'm in the early 1700s. That's hilarious. I don't have that patient. So I'd want to get someone a little more recent, a little more modern.

So, like, I'm sure you've spoken to him many times, like Elon Musk. What do you think of Elon Musk? Yeah. Uh, he's a little bit on the spectrum. So people expect him to be the life of the party or to say things that are just right in the right time. No, it's not what's coming out of him. People, you know, it's the fashion to hate on him for whatever reasons, Twitter, especially, but I tweeted this recently.

So while you're hating on him, just occasionally, not every day, but occasionally reflect on the fact that he made conversations about electric cars routine that did not exist before him. And this is transformative. And before him, no one really actually took the reins of affordable space exploration, access to space.

He did that. No one else did that. So just while you're hating on him, just tip your hat, at least in those two categories. And so, but yes, who would I want to talk to? I got one. Have you had a hold on? Have you had a lot of conversations with him before? Yeah, yeah. No, we've just been on my podcast. I visited him. Yeah. We're not beer? Have you had a lot of conversations with him before? Yeah, yeah, no.

We've just been on my podcast. I visited him. Yeah, we're not beer drinking buddies, but no, we know each other. Yeah. We've exchanged emails and other matters as well. So, yeah. No, we're good. We good.

So, I'd like to meet Joan of Arc. Okay. I would like. Because I want to know the true meaning of courage. I want to know, you're of courage. I want to know you're this girl. What she 19 said. What a teenager? You're a girl. Yeah, young girl for sure. A young girl and you want to lead soldiers into battle against the British? What in the name of God and country, I wanna feel her passion.

I wanna know what that is. There are people today who have passion, but it's a passion about a TikTok video that they posted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. What's all measures of this? And do you know why she was burned at the stake? Why? Take a guess. Just guess why? Because she was burned at the stake? Why? Take a guess.

Just guess why. Because she fought against whatever the... Yeah, that's the obvious thing you would say, of course, of course. And it's not because she wasn't pious, she was very religious, okay? Right. Fully half the charges brought against her were for cross-dressing. Yes! Go weed the trial.

There is a sentence in, was it Deuteronomy, that says, a man has both versions of the sentence. A woman shall not dawn the clothes of a man unless she be an abomination to the Lord, die God. And they reverse it. A man shall not done. So this is just people who like invoking Bible passages for secular law, cite that as a reason why we shouldn't have, you know, RuPaul's Drag Race, right? So this is in the Bible, therefore it is an offensive count against her for dressing like

a man. By the way, how's she going to lead soldiers into battle in a skirt. Of course, we got to dress in man's clothes. And maybe she was, she was on this gender spectrum. There's been people who will have enough information to really know for sure. But maybe she was what any of us would have called a tomboy. All right, tomboy is not some unknown archetype. There's a tomboy in West Side Story, and her name was,

anybody's. She had a dirty face, wore pants, could fight like any of the boys she wanted to be in the jets, in the gang. And no, she couldn't be because she was a girl. That was their only argument against her. But she walked better than some of the other boys. You know, so there are people who just can't relate.

And it's, they're not recognizing that, yeah, your brain isn't wired for that. Just get over it and let's move on. But don't hold people in judgment because you can't think that way. So I want to, I would talk to, I have to learn French, of course. But then I'd talk to Joe. You're so cute. By the way, you've been very generous with your time. So thank you for... Well, I'd like speaking to audiences I don't normally speak to, and you got, you got a whole following that I don't know how often they know that I'd, what I do or what I exist. So I'm delighted to share my life's wisdom and insights, whatever I've been able to muster over my decades

of life with a very fresh audience for me. So thank you for this. I counted as an opportunity. Oh, well, thank you. I feel like you've been so wonderful. And in fact, I love doing these things in person. I'm not much of a virtual person. I think they're, if I may get lost in translation,

but you've been so delightful. I would love for you to come on if you're ever in LA soon. Are you ever in LA? Occasionally, you know, L.A. I can only do L.A. and doses. Yeah. Yeah. I can I understand that my. Yeah. It's in doses. I enjoy it when I'm there. I mean, the climate and the people, everyways friendly, right? So that's not it. It's just at some point. I need a real. I got to get back to reality. And L.A. never feels real to me. It's not, it's an alternate reality for me. Yeah, it's an alternate reality.

That's, yeah. So if you embrace that alternate reality, it's fine, but I never completely warmed up to it. So I'd take an endosis. No, I'm Canadian. So for me, it's very, very different. I thought I heard it about it there. Just one about you didn't hear more than that.

I just want, yeah, I'm losing my childhood. You're losing that, like, yeah, exactly. Like I said, I really appreciate you coming on and I really I'm happy to say I did the calculation. So in the book, I read the audiobook for it. Okay. Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, and I I use my cosmos voice. So I did other book, but so it would take you three morning commutes to listen to the whole book in Los Angeles. Really? Yeah.

Well, maybe three days, three or four days of a full of 405 parking lot morning commute. So if you want to measure it in those terms, that's more than what you're doing, that's easy for people. Like that, everyone should just basically download the book and listen to it. Sorry, sorry, messages, right? The story, messenger, the messenger, the messages from the stars, message, tell us, give us insight into who we are and what our place is in the universe. My book, I will tell you, I did read it. It's upstairs though. I keep on calling it. In my notes,

I keep on calling it messages, and I don on calling it messages and I don't know why so that's my bad. Well the stars are giving messages but they themselves are the messengers. The messengers. Exactly. You're so delightful thank you so much for coming on. Well I'm happy to serve and to do this and thanks for your interest in anything I do. Absolutely. I'm just here trying to make the world a little better off. Let me end with one of the final quotes in the book, in the life and death chapter, where, again, giving meaning to life,

knowing you're gonna die, a great educator from two centuries ago, Horace Mann, you surely heard that. Yeah, Horace Mann, my kids play soccer at this. Yeah, there's a score. We'll name Horace Mann, he was an educator two centuries ago. And in one of his final addresses to the graduating class at his university,

he said, I besieged you. Love that word. I want to bring it back. It's lost in the ages. But I besieged you to treasure up in your hearts, these, my parting words, be ashamed to die until you've won some victory for humanity. That's a good one.

I want that on my tombstone. Do you? There it is, yep. Yep. Well, you're working. And why wouldn't you have it? You're probably will have it now. Yeah, I hope so.

You've done a lot for humanity. So what do you will? What do you mean? You've another, you're very young and you're doing such great things and so and teaching people things that they otherwise would never know because you do it in a way that is interesting and not lecturing. Yeah, lecture was we agree that's a bad word. Well, I hope I have another billion seconds to give to the world. I hope so too. I'm ready for it. I'm going to thank you. You're going to come on again in person.

I'm going to hope to see you soon in LA. All right. Well, maybe another book. We do another. Oh, yeah, another book. Exactly. There you go. There you go. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye bye. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm Heather Monahan, host of Creating Confidence, a part of the YAP Media Network, the number one business and self-improvement podcast network. Okay, so I want to tell you a little bit about my show. We are all about elevating your confidence to its highest level ever, and taking your business right there with you.

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