Making Sense with Sam Harris - #37 — Thinking in Public

Episode Date: May 31, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about the public understanding of science, his career as an educator, political atheism, racism, artificial intelligence, alien life, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with Neil deGrasse Tyson, who probably needs no introduction to most of you. He's an astrophysicist and cosmologist and author and a very prominent communicator of science to the public. He recently hosted the Cosmos series, the reboot of Carl Sagan's very famous series. And I think I originally met Neil at those Salk Institute Beyond Belief conferences about 10 years ago. Some of you have seen the videos of those online. But we haven't seen much of each other since then. He occasionally sends me an email, which he did prior to this podcast. But in good podcast form,

we barely cover the topic that occasioned his coming on the podcast. There was so much more to talk about. And we barely scratched the surface of our mutual interests. And I think this podcast may leave you wanting more. It left me wanting more. And hopefully there'll be more to come. But here's the first two hours of me talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson. Enjoy. Okay, well, I have Neil deGrasse Tyson on the line. Neil, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sam, it's great, great to be on. Like, you don't call, you don't write. Well, I occasionally write. To me. Well, I occasionally write. To me. Well, listen, this happened quite organically.

This was great because I was obviously, maybe not obvious to you, but obvious to me. And I think obvious to all of my listeners who requested it. I was obviously planning to invite you on the podcast. But then you just emailed me out of the blue reacting to something you heard on one of my least successful podcasts. And you offered some advice by email and it was just a natural segue into twisting your arm and having you on. So thanks for coming on. And I look forward to getting into everything that we are mutually obsessed by. Yeah, I mean, and I'm impressed you had the time to read at least what I had to send your way. I guess I was noticing just how

frequently you're being raked over the coals by people who are chapter and verse, you know, Talmudically analyzing your words, but some words and not others. And the balance of the message gets altered. And it seemed like at times everyone is speaking past one another. And I just thought I might be able to throw in some suggestions. Yeah, that would be awesome. If we could live part of our lives in the public eye, then we could have something to share. Yeah, well, but before we get into that, I think that's going to be fascinating and useful. This is almost certainly unnecessary.

I think most of my listeners are as aware of you as they are of me at this point. But for those few who aren't, how do you describe what you do? And just to give us a brief sense of how you spend your time in the world. Yeah, that's a great question, because I don't even know if I can answer that with any coherence of late. But I'm fundamentally an astrophysicist. It's how I think. It's how my brain is wired. And I have this delusional thought that after I write all the books that I want to write and do the TV that I can do, that I'm going to go back to the lab and just escape back to the lab and publish papers again. But in the meantime, I've spent a good fraction of my professional life bringing the universe down to Earth, in a sense.

And one of the ways that has been most successful, I have found, is if I lace science onto this scaffold that we might call pop culture. And because you don't have to build that scaffold, it's already there, ready to be clad. And once you find a place to insert science, then the science can be immediately absorbed because people care deeply about their pop culture icons and ideas and thoughts. And just the simplest example I can give is during the Super Bowl, you can't get more pop culture than that. Everybody's watching the Super Bowl. I'll just take the time to tweet any bit of physics that comes to my mind as I'm watching the game. Physics of the momentum of linebackers, the spiral stabilized throw of a quarterback. And in one particular

playoff game, there was a kick, an overtime field goal winning kick that hit the left upright of the goalposts and went in for the win. And I said, wait a minute, what's the orientation of that stadium? I checked quickly and I ran a quick calculation and I felt confident enough to tweet that that score was enabled by a third of an inch deflection to the right due to Earth's rotation, just the Coriolis force of Earth's rotation rotation and so that was fun to calculate and but people like lost their minds like wow i didn't know that okay and then went on to the the websites and and it's it's it's reaction functions such as that that remind me that people can care about science in ways you might not have imagined provided provided it's properly or playfully folded into the pop culture they already care about. Yeah. And obviously we're going to get into areas of

science affecting the public interest that are far more consequential than field goals, but a little bit more on your place in the world at the moment. What are you currently working on? You have your own podcast, and if I'm not mistaken, you're taking that on television in the fall? Do I have that right? Yeah, so thanks for mentioning that. So we've had a podcast called, well, it was a radio show called Star Talk, and it began about five or six years ago on a grant from the National Science Foundation, and the experiment was can we make a viable product, radio product, bringing science to the public, to people who

either don't know that they like science or know that they don't like science? Is that even possible? And that's what started this pathway into pop culture. So we inverted the normal Science Friday model, where you have a journalist interviewing a scientist. And in this particular case, I am the interviewer, I'm the scientist, and my guest is hardly ever a scientist. It's a famous actor, actress, an inventor, an explorer, a singer, a performer. And the conversation explores any science that may have touched that person's life. If not, then do they have a secret geek underbelly that we can rub? Often people, you know, maybe they're science fiction fanatics or they love superheroes or any of the topics that would be fair game at a Comic-Con.

Do any of them have these kinds of leanings? And what happens is, since they are hewn from pop culture, they bring a fan base to this conversation, a fan base that wouldn't otherwise have an excuse to listen to science. And then in that conversation, they get fed science as it matters to the person they care about. And we started this out. It became very successful very quickly. And over several years, the grant money ran out, but then we became commercially viable. And that was the intent.

And then we got noticed by National Geographic Channel, and then we jumped species, and now we're also on television. And so we're going to our second season this fall. Well, that's great. I like that model. Oh, and by the way, the model is a little more subtle than that. If we get an act, you know, typically an actor might have an interest that touches science, but of course they don't have the expertise necessarily in that topic. They could be pro-environment or anti-this or pro-that. And that comes out in the interview.

But what we then do in studio, that's the base interview. Then we cut that into a show where in studio we bring in an academic expert on that topic. So the best example here was I interviewed President Jimmy Carter. And, you know, he's got this, he's working heavily by ridding sub-Saharan Africa of certain diseases that are peculiar to humans. And once you remove it from the last human, it'll never come back again because it doesn't have the contagious vector. So he's speaking about this, but he's not an expert in that disease.

We got someone who's an expert in transmittable diseases to supplement comments that he made about the mission statement of his causes. So it turns out this has been working. And we even got an Emmy nomination for Best Informational Programming this past season. So we're all quite proud of it because it was crafted and molded and assembled.

But other than that, we're in conversation about whether we're going to do another Cosmos because I hosted that 21st century. Yeah, that was huge. Yeah, yeah. It was very big. And I aired on Fox in prime time and then scattered around the world on the National Geographic channel. So science, I'd like to think that science is trending in some way, at least among some demographics.

How much did Cosmos bump up your profile? I mean, you were already quite famous before that, but has it changed your day-to-day interaction with the public? So that's a great question. So there are numerical ways to assess this. One of them is how many times a day does a complete stranger come up to me and say, aren't you the guy? Aren't you? There's that. That's a number and that changes, right? Another number is just purely how many Twitter followers do you have? That's sort of a monotonically increasing function for anyone because rarely do you unfollow someone on Twitter. And so during Cosmos, the Twitter numbers bumped up, but by maybe 10% or so, not like 50% or 100%. And so it was, I think a lot of people who watch Cosmos already

knew me and already followed. So, and I think that's a stronger statement than if it was just some spontaneous spike, because it means it was kind of sort of earned. People are coming on, they see retweets and they, and, and it's kind of the slow build, I think is a stronger number at the end of the day. By contrast, when Charlie Sheen announced he would be on Twitter, 24 hours later, he had a million followers. They're not following him because of the tweets he had posted. They're following him because they're fans of his or they want to see him crash and burn, whichever. And so my Twitter following, however, has been very slow but real. And I like that

because it meant that people are responding to the tweets themselves. Well, it's great to see your platform grow by whatever metric because you are so good at publicly communicating science. And I think there are people who are cynical about that role when a scientist assumes it. I think undoubtedly there are scientists who attack you as a mere popularizer of science. I mean, they did the same thing to Sagan. They do the same thing to Steven Pinker. Let me just put that to you. How much does that noise even show up on your radar?

That's a great question and an important question. And I can say, let me just say, I benefit from the fact that Carl Sagan sort of did this first and he sort of cleared the brush and bramble. And, you know, there's blood on the tracks from him having done this in a way that no one had even approximated before. So now here I am on a partially, if not mostly cleared field, And I get to operate without what I'm doing surprising people. That's the first point. The second point, and this is I take this very seriously, how do I retain this respect of my colleagues? Let me assume for the moment that the respect is still there. Would they tell me directly? I don't know if they no longer respect me. But what I do know is that I live in New York City, which is the news gathering headquarters

of the United States. And even CNN opened an office here, having only ever been in Atlanta. So everybody's here. Whenever there's a late breaking news story, let's say the gravity wave was discovered a few months ago or the Higgs boson, my phone rings off the hook. And what I say to the press is, especially the TV media, I say, have you spoken to the people who actually did this work yet? No, no, no, no. We just want you to tell us what was discovered and why. I said, no, speak to them first. These people worked for

decades, finally getting a result. It's their time in the sun. Talk to them, no, speak to them first. These people worked for decades, finally getting a result. It's their time in the sun. Talk to them, then come back to me, and I'll be happy to tie a bow on it. Okay. And I've actually cultivated this relationship with the national media based here in New York. And that's precisely what they do. So if you look at news stories of major, major scientific discoveries that overlap my interest and my expertise. If I come in, it's at the end and I say what the discovery means or its significance. And in that way, I think all boats rise in the tidewaters. And I can't be criticized for that if by my being a part of that story brings more attention to their work. And so I've been very careful about that.

And as a result, I still every now and then get invitations to do a year sabbatical at prestigious institutions. And I don't think that would happen if somehow people felt that I was a loose cannon out there. Right. I don't think people are aware of how much heat Sagan took for this. I might not even be aware of most of the details, but I just know in the abstract that he got fairly hammered by his colleagues for his role as a communicator of science. Is that correct? Yeah. So it happens on many dimensions. I mean, some of it is just what is the state of social maturity of the academic field? And even his closest collaborator for the original Cosmos, Steve Soder, who was also co-writer of the Cosmos that I,

co-writer with Andrewian of the Cosmos that I hosted, he, at the time, back in the 70s, when Carl Sagan was invited to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, he thought it would be a mistake. How could you do this? This is entertainment. This is not news. He's a comedian. You'll be destroying science. And once that got unfolded and Johnny Carson turned out to be a fan of science and of skepticism, and all of a sudden, members of Congress would hear from their constituents, oh, I think maybe we should do more science. Wait, is that the science that I saw on TV last night? Good, let's do that. And all of a

sudden, funding streams would increase. And so my field, the astrophysics field, we were kind of early out of the box on this. And we did recognize ultimately, even in spite of the blood on the tracks, that it's a good thing for science, for people who in the end paid for the science through the national tax monies that fund NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other sort of government agencies that serve this in the biology field. Of course, it's the National Institutes of Health, this sort of thing. If they're paying for it, at some point, they ought to know what you're doing. And if you can be good at that, then everybody benefits. So my field, I think we've matured past that. And now we can celebrate one another who have given some of their lives to, again, like, as I said, bring the universe down to earth. And resistance to this seems to me to be short-sighted and confused on at least two levels, a resistance to the public communication of science or the stigma that attaches to a scientist

who spends a lot of time or even most of his time doing this. Because one, as you say, we want a scientifically informed public. And I think it's pretty easy to see the price we pay for people's scientific ignorance on climate change or any other topic that is socially and politically divisive at the moment. But also, there's just this idea that there's some kind of clear boundary between the context in which you can make original and useful contributions to scientific thought. It's though in the covers of a 300-page book, all you could possibly be doing as a scientist is selling out, whereas in the context of a journal article that only 300 people are going to read, there you're doing real

science. And I mean, this demarcation may make a little sense in pure mathematics, for instance, because no one's going to publish your theorem proof widely, and you're not going to put it on PBS or your next show. But for most of science, you have people like, as I mentioned, Steven Pinker, who in the context of a book, is saying scientifically edgy and original things. And it's not mere, I mean, the boundary between communicating science to the public and doing science in the act of, you know, just thinking out loud about data. I mean, there is no clear boundary between those things. Yeah, there shouldn't be, I think. And in my field, we have the, it's just a fact, I don't know, do I judge it as a positive or negative, it just is, that when we make discoveries, there's huge public interest in them. If we discover a

new black hole, a new exoplanet, a new, you know, organic molecules in space, the edge of the universe, the multiverse, our topics tend to be more ripe for public absorption than what I have found to be true in other fields, except, say, for perhaps medicine, where people's health and well-being are directly affected by discoveries. And also, our content feeds very smoothly into movie making and the storytelling of science fiction. And our vocabulary is actually, we shouldn't underestimate the value of attractable vocabulary as part of formal lexicon. Consider that the official name, the official term for the beginning of the universe is Big Bang. It's the official term. And how about this region of space you fall in and you don't black hole, right? Light doesn't come out, black hole. We have this trove of single syllable words

that are actually official in our field that are just fun for the public to follow. So that when I'm describing new discoveries, there isn't this smokereen of lexicon that you have to get through just to even hear the idea that I'm trying to put on the table. The idea becomes, the idea is laid bare immediately because the words don't get in the way. So, and many of those topics, as you point out, are not, I mean, they're certainly not politicized. I guess the Big Bang, if you reach back far enough into our confusion, that the Big Bang becomes politicized, or you could just say it happened 6,000 years ago. But you communicate, I think you communicate on some more highly charged issues as well. I mean, so is climate science something you're touching or have touched in recent years?

Thanks for bringing that up. I don't present myself as a climate expert. There are plenty of climate experts out there. So when the press calls to me and said, what do you think of that storm brewing in the Caribbean? And I'll say, call a climate expert. You're calling me. And yes, I could comment on it, but I won't because you have, what I'm trying to do is spread the Rolodex base of who they would call when they need commentary. Now, when you take a step back from that and they ask, tell us about our responsibility as citizens on planet earth, then there's the larger stratospheric, the cosmic perspective on it that I'm delighted to bring to the dialogue.

And so, but people, I'm a visible target and people know how to find my Twitter stream. And so people who are climate deniers will try to fight that. But I try to always take the high road. I'm not interested in fighting you in the trenches. So, for example, I had a tweet recently that did very well if you measure it by retweets. And it was, I just had to put it out there. I said, if you, a skeptic is someone who doubts the claim and is convinced by evidence. And a denier is someone who doubts the claim and doubts the evidence. So something like, I think my tweet was better constructed than that. And I put that out there because in the trenches is let's fight about climate change. No, I think as an educator,

I can help train your mind how to think about information and how to process information and how to arrive at conclusions because this this is the ways and means of what science is and how and why it works then you're empowered and then you you you can make whatever politically leaning decisions you must but have them anchor on objectively verifiable science that's my goal but that's why you don't see me debating people i just i don't see me debating people. I just, I don't have the time or the patience. I'd rather just educate you in the first place so that the debate isn't even necessary. So how political do you view your job in this sense? Because I'm hearing that there are certain things you don't want to talk about, not because you

don't have a position on them or that you're not that you don't feel yourself qualified to be the one talking about it necessarily. I take your point about climate science, but if I push hard enough, you have a view on it that you don't feel unqualified to express, all the while admitting that you are not the one doing original work in climate science. Yes, that's correct. And I will gladly state that when asked. It's just not, I don't have a climate change platform that I occupy. So in fact, I don't occupy any platform at all, as far as I can tell. And this frustrates some people because they want to attack me based on platform versus platform. And I'll just give you an example. After Cosmos, some months after Cosmos, I was like the cover story of the National Review. There was a caricature of me on there. And by the way,

I didn't think I had gained that much weight. Between what I actually look like. The cartoonist's hand adds 20 pounds. I know, you know, I'm not the buff guy I once was, but okay. Fine. In there, I became really the effigy to be burned, the liberal effigy to be burned, the liberal effigy to be burned by the article, by the cover story article. And on my vest, because that's my trademark vest with the moons and planets, they had buttons representing every single liberal cause that's out there.

So there's the gay rights button and the women's lib button and the anti-GMO button. And I'm looking and I say, wow, like I've hardly ever said anything about most of those subjects. And in fact, the little bit that I have said about GMO, I was telling people to chill out because every organ, practically everything you eat that you acquire from a grocery store is a genetically modified version of something that sometime long ago was natural. And so, you know, everything's been genetic, milk cows, you know, everything, big plump strawberries, oranges, and somehow people have drawn what they think is a genuine, yet it's arbitrary line between food that is natural and food that is not. I just made this point. By the way, that point is not even pro-GMO or anti-GMO.

I'm teaching people that we as a culture have been genetically modifying organisms for tens of thousands of years. Period. Now, you still want to be against scientists genetically modifying organisms? Go ahead. But understand what the foundation is or isn't of that argument. And then I go't feel, or certainly someone like Richard Dawkins doesn't apparently feel, to preserve a kind of political neutrality on certain questions because you serve in a role that is... I've noticed you've been on presidential commissions, science commissions over the years. Do you feel that you need to kind of walk a razor's edge between political passions and polls on questions of religion or, you know, hot button issues of

kind of culture war, science, evolution, et cetera, because you're trying to preserve a kind of trust from both sides insofar as that's possible? So that's a great, very pointed question. So I have, I'm going to unpack it into several variables. And if I get distracted in myself, just get me back on track. So, so initially I thought I was walking a razor's edge because I'm not out here to just offend anybody. I just want to enlighten people as an educator. That's, I have no other objective in this. And I thought that was a razor's edge initially.

And then I realized, no, it's not, actually. It's a rather strong position. And that position is there are objective truths out there that you ought to know about. And I, as an educator, have some, I don't want to call it an obligation, let me say a duty to alert you of those objective truths. What you do politically in the face of those objective truths is your business, not my business. I have opinions on many things, but they're not the kind of opinions where I give a rat's ass if you agree with my opinion. That's why it's my opinion. And that's the difference. That's the difference between me, I think, and many others who are scientifically astute or the scientists themselves,

and then take on a platform that involves trying to get people to see the world the way they do, even politically. I have no such interest in doing that. Let me just apply a little pressure on that one point, though, because it seems to me that there's, I mean, if the stakes are high enough, if the facts are clear enough, and the consequences of maintaining one's ignorance in the face of those facts are dire dire enough. Let's say climate change rises to that point. Let's say human-caused climate change is as disastrous as Al Gore thinks it is. I don't feel especially close to the science here. The Al Gore index, yes.

Yes. Let's just say that it's as scary as the most scared person thinks it is, and we had good reason to believe that that was true. And now we're in the current environment of climate change denial that really has a... correlates almost perfectly with where you are in the political spectrum. And you have a candidate like Trump who just gave a... I don't know if you heard his energy speech the other day or heard about it. No, I didn't. I was traveling and I didn't hear it.

So he apparently thinks that... I don't think he said this in his speech, he said this in a tweet, but his speech was quite in harmony with his tweet. He said at one point that climate change was a hoax cooked up by the Chinese to destroy our manufacturing base. And then he, you know, in his speech, he says he's going to get out of the Paris Accords and just ramp up coal production and bring back all the coal jobs. And he's a denier of climate change or human-caused climate change. And so let's just say that the jury was not out on this question at all. And again, I think it's probably not out or is virtually not out, but let's just say it was even clearer than it is now to 100% of those qualified to judge the facts. So then this position you've just sketched out of, I don't

give a rat's ass what sort of opinions you have and what sort of public policies you want to enact on the basis of the science, doesn't that collapse? Wouldn't you then have a duty to say that, in this case, Trump is a dangerous ignoramus who's not qualified to be president? So, uh, again, there are a couple of variables there. One of them is, um, uh, you're conflating two, two forces. One of them is that, um, uh, let me back up. So I've never said anything against a politician. Why? Because politicians have electorates that support them. And in a free democracy, that is their right. I, as an educator, could go around hitting politicians on the head,

but then there's the matter of all the people who wanted to vote for them. politicians on the head, but then there's the matter of all the people who wanted to vote for them. So for me, my target is not the politician. My target is the population who is following statements that are objectively false. I see it as my duty to train the electorate how to think about this information, period. And then once they're trained, they can vote for who they want. And so what is that? This is like the people who said, oh, get George W. out of office. He's an idiot. He's this. And then he's finally out of office. And then Sarah Palin rises up. Oh, Sarah Palin, she's an idiot. I mean, how many times can you start saying that a leader is an idiot without looking at fellow members of your country who are voting for them?

And as an educator, it is a task to educate people so that they can judge what is true and what is not. That's my role here. The easiest way to make the point, though, in many cases is to push back its most egregious violation, right? So if Trump gives this speech on the cusp of becoming elected president, the easiest way to talk about the consequences of the public's ignorance about climate change is to just push back against the speech itself. I mean, that's so, for instance, itself. No, no, no. Then you're attacking him. No, I know.

You're not attacking the idea. You're not attacking the fact that people don't understand the facts. That's the thing. Otherwise, you're attacking their favorite person. You're attacking the fact that, in this case, a person who could well become president doesn't understand the facts, and that's by virtue of the fact that millions of people who support him either don't know or don't care that they're wrong on this point. And for me, the longer term solution is training the electorate.

For me, it's just that simple. And by the way, it's not like I haven't, I've tweeted some pointed things. I mean, pointed for me, I suppose. For example, I said, there was my Jesus tweet, where I said, who would Jesus vote for? Right? And this is back when we had, you know, a dozen Republican candidates in the running. So who would Jesus vote for? And I said, walls and torture are non starters. So he'd probably vote for the Jewish New Yorker from Vermont. And I think that's probably an objectively accurate, theologically defensible statement. But what happened when I did that, because people are itching to get me to commit, the Sanders campaign started calling, oh, we just learned you're a pro-Sanders. Can you go

public on that so we can? It's like, no. I said Jesus was pro Sanders. I didn't say I was pro Sanders. Jesus was pro Sanders. And so people will react as they do, but I want to train the electorate. That's my goal. So I guess what I was fishing for exists here, but it has a slightly different focus.

When I asked you about the political imperatives of your role and your wanting to preserve your neutrality for both sides of the spectrum, I was thinking more in terms of the kinds of people you have to work with or at least talk to in government from time to time. But actually, it's more that you want to preserve your trusted neutrality as an educator to everyone in the country insofar as that's possible. Well, yeah, it's not so much that I want to preserve it. I just, in the sense that it's my for self-preservation, it's not how I think about it. I just think about it as, it's not, I guess I'm not being deeper than the simple statement that I'm an educator. And the moment you start choosing sides against things that are political, which is people's right to do in a free pluralistic society, the moment you start doing that, then anyone who is not in the political leaning is not going to listen to you. You'll be an asshole to them. And you just shut off half the people who you could be educating. Yeah, no, no, no. When I said you're preserving

your, your neutrality, I wasn't thinking you're preserving your reputation in their eyes. You're, you're just preserving your effectiveness as a communicator insofar as that's possible. Yes, I think that's an accurate statement. And, and let's, let's take, let's take religion, for example. So here's something, I haven't written this yet, but I've said it multiple times in ways. People want me to sort of side up with the whole atheist movement and rid the world of religion and all of this. And you're the front of that train right there with your writings and your speeches. And I take a slightly different view. And I'm not as extreme. I mean, you are on the frontier with terrorism and comparing one religion with another.

And that's way out there for me. And that's way out there for me. Where I go and where I stop is I say, it does not matter to me what religion you are. Just know that your religion is a belief system and does not cue off of objective truths. Otherwise, we would call it science. And if you have a belief system, that belief system is constitutionally protected, and I don't have any problems with you holding that belief system. But the moment you hold office, where now you are making decisions that affect a pluralistic electorate, any laws you pass need to be based in objective reality. Otherwise, you are bringing a personal truth to bear on other people who do not share your personal truths. And that is a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for revolution. And so I'm trying to, it's my way of saying that governmental decisions, policy, laws, need to be secular in a country that preserves religious freedoms. Yeah, so I'm glad you brought this up because I went out on Twitter yesterday, I think,

just saying that I was looking forward to speaking with you and asking my Twitter followers what we should talk about. And this was probably, probably no surprise to you, probably the most common question they raised, this lack of endorsement of the label atheist, that you're not happily wearing this label. I actually have a talk I gave some years ago, I think entitled The Problem with Atheism, that I gave at an atheist conference. And as I've said before, it was the only talk I've ever given, certainly. I think it's the only talk I know about that started with a standing ovation and ended with booze and people leaving the room. And the point of the talk was for me pushing back against the label

atheist. I said, there's no reason why we have to meet in bad hotels around this variable of political atheism and call ourselves atheists. And we don't call ourselves non-astrologers. If astrology ever became ascendant in this country and people were making decisions on the basis of the position of the planets, well, then we would talk about reason and evidence and common sense and science to neutralize those claims without ever defining ourselves in opposition to astrology. And I think the same thing can be done with religion. And it's just as chance had it, you know, in my first book, which inducted me into the small club of the new atheist, the end of faith, I never even used the term atheist or atheism. And it's not that I withheld use of that term. I simply never, it never occurred to me to used the term atheist or atheism. And it's not that I withheld use of that term.

I simply never, it never occurred to me to use the term. I was just talking about the problems of religion, the opposition, as I see it, between reason and faith and science and untestable, unverifiable claims. And so the political variable of atheism, I find, it may have its moment historically. variable of atheism, I find it may have its moment historically. It may be necessary to some degree to shine a light on the fact that you have a, by and large, the smartest and most educated people in this society, politically anathematized and marginalized. But I think there's a real weakness in the term. But there is a difference. I think there's a difference between the two of us, at least in our public persona, which is, I don't do anything to dodge the term, because if someone asks me if

I'm an atheist, I will go on to say, very likely, I will say how empty that term is. I mean, it has no philosophical content, and it doesn't capture any of what interests me about, you know, quote, spiritual experience and things like meditation, etc. But I won't dodge the term because from the view of most religious people, I am an atheist. I think these books were merely written by people. And that's really all you need to be sure about, to be an atheist from the Christian or Jewish or Muslim perspective. And so I'm wondering, based on this Twitter storm I got, I think somewhere you have called yourself an agnostic as opposed to an atheist. So I just want to ping you about that. How do you relate to those terms?

It's not even that I called myself an agnostic versus an atheist. It's that if you require that I give myself a label, then the closest word I can come up with is agnostic, not atheist. But I would rather have no label at all. So that greatly resonates with you, but perhaps for different reasons. The only ist I am is a scientist. Beyond that, a label is an intellectually lazy way to assert you know more about a person than you actually do, and therefore don't have to engage them in a conversation. Oh, you're an atheist. Bam. Out in comes a whole portfolio of expectations of what you'll say, what your behavior is, what your attitudes are, and what I have found. By the way, hold aside dictionary definition of atheist, because that's

actually irrelevant to me. It's irrelevant because the dictionary does not define words. The dictionary describes words as they have come into meaning, at least in the English language, less so in French, I'm told, because they have like word bureaus that see your usage. So words are living things. And I have seen the conduct of outspoken atheists, and there is conduct they exhibit that I do not. atheists, and there is conduct they exhibit that I do not. And so if there's an emergent sense of what an atheist is, and that sense is being defined by those who are most visible, then I have to say there's got to be some other word for me, but not that word. For example, for example, this happened some time ago on my Facebook feed. There was a shuttle mission that went back when we went into space with our own spacecraft. There was a shuttle mission that went up to repair the Hubble.

I was friends with several of the astronauts on board. So I posted STS. I forgot what it was, 125 or I forgot the number. STS launches today. And I said, Godspeed astronauts. Okay. That's what I said. People in the comment thread said, Godspeed, I thought you were an atheist. Okay. The very fact that I get that phrase often in people responding to something I say or do, tells me that I'm not behaving in the way they expect an atheist to behave. Forgetting, again, the formal dictionary definition, we are talking about what is

happening to that word today. And so, yeah, I use the word Godspeed because that's historical with the space program. And John Glenn went up, it use the word Godspeed because that's historical with the space program. And John Glenn went up, it was headlines, Godspeed John Glenn. And Godspeed is not fundamentally different from goodbye. What was goodbye? You'd leave the city walls, God be with you, because it was dangerous out there. And God be with you got contracted over the years and it just says goodbye. I was at an atheist conference and I asked people in the room, who here uses the word, after I was raked over the coals for saying Godspeed, I said, who here uses the word goodbye? Everybody raised their hand. I said, did you know it meant God be with

you? Oh, I didn't know that. So now we have astronauts putting their lives at risk by going high speed. And then you have this corresponding term, Godspeed. I'm perfectly happy to use that term, and I'll use it again. Not only that, I use AD and BC when I'm referring to years, all right? The Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar were amazing works of timekeeping, and credit should go where credit is due. And with the Vatican Observatory, which was founded around the time that Pope Gregory made the measurements to establish the Gregorian calendar, give it to him, give it up to him.

I have no problems. Oh, I thought you were an atheist. I should use BCE. And, you know, so until there's a word that applies to me that doesn't then have people saying, I thought you were an atheist, I'm happy to have no label at all. That's what's at the bottom of this. And that is for much shallower philosophical reasons than how much you thought about the word. Mine are just very plum practical.

You've actually thought really deeply about the word as applied to you. I think about the negative consequences of the label very much in the terms you do, but kind of from the other side. So if you would admit to being an atheist, what you have admitted to most religious people, I mean, this is a term that's given its meaning mostly within the echo chamber of religious dogmatists. They think they know a lot about you based on your admission that you're an atheist. And I think in this talk, the analogy I drew is that it's almost like you're in a debate with someone and they draw the outline of a body, like from the

police crime scene outline of a dead body on the sidewalk, and you just kind of walk up and lie down in it, right? It's like, it's just, you conform perfectly to their expectations of just how clueless you must be of all the values and richness of experience that they know so much about in a religious context, which is not at all true, depending on the atheist. You know, I'm an atheist who spent a lot of time exploring changes in my consciousness that most religious people think only religious people know about, right? Classically, mystical states of consciousness with psychedelics or a long time spent on silent meditation retreats. There's different ways to change your mind and your brain. And it just so happens that only

religious language has been applied to this historically. And if you say you're an atheist, you are almost by definition from the religious side, not necessarily from the atheist side, you are disavowing all of that as either just frank psychopathology or conscious fraud or something that just doesn't bear looking into. That's just, again, it's a failure of communication, ultimately. But the price you are paying that I'm not paying, I think, in the atheist community is you begin to either look kind of shifty or not altogether honest if you keep dancing around the term or using a term like, I'm an agnostic as opposed to an atheist,

whereas you would never say you're agnostic about Poseidon in the same way that you're tempted to say you're agnostic about the God of Abraham. That's why I don't even use the word agnostic. It's been, I say if you had to pick a word, then pick that word, but I wouldn't. I don't know that I would. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

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