Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Part Two: Are We Smart Enough to Understand the Universe? Could Humans be Alien Pets? Neil deGrasse Tyson on Simulation Theory, Why Your God is too Small and How Science Will Guide Us into the Future

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why Your God Is Too Small & The Truth About Alien “Pets” What if humanity is just a 1% DNA shift away from being an alien science project? In this earth-shattering episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, world-renowned astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (Director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of StarTalk) joins us to deconstruct the greatest mysteries of existence. From simulation theory and the multiverse to near-death experiences (NDEs) and the Atheist vs. Spiritual debate, Neil goes unfiltered on why our current understanding of reality might be fundamentally limited by our own biology. Are we smart enough to understand the universe? We might be smarter after this conversation. In this episode, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson breaks down: - The Big Bang Theory Reunion: Neil shares behind-the-scenes stories from his cameos, his “beef” with Raj Koothrappali, and what it was like seeing “his people” represented on a hit sitcom - Alien “Zoo Hypothesis”: Why advanced civilizations might view humans as “toddlers” or keep us in a galactic aquarium - Simulation Theory: Why it is mathematically difficult to argue against the idea that we live in a computer-generated reality - “Small God” Problem: Why Neil believes modern religion doesn’t account for the true scale of the cosmos - 95% of Reality is Missing: Understanding the dark matter and dark energy mysteries that drive the universe - Can We Explain the Soul? Why physics is actually “easier” to solve than the human mind, body, and spirit - Limits of Intelligence: Neil’s fear that humans may not be “neurologically smart enough” to ever truly figure out the universe - NDEs & Psychedelics: A scientific look at what happens to the brain during mystical encounters - Quantum Physics & The Multiverse: Why parallel universes with different laws of physics are scientifically plausible and where we fit in the “Many-Worlds” theory - Spirituality vs. Science: Why Neil refuses to deny anyone’s spiritual experiences, even while offering a different scientific explanation for them - The Ultimate Mysteries: Specific questions about the cosmos that Neil deGrasse Tyson most wants to solve before he dies Are we alone? Are we simulated? Or are we just too small to see the truth? Watch this masterclass in the cosmic perspective and decide for yourself. Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm I'm Biolic. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with astrophysicist and the best science communicator in the universe, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. If you miss part one of our conversation, you're going to want to check it out. He talks all about his appearances in the Big Bang Theory, including the scenes that he and I were not in together. He talks about spirituality. He talks about simulation theory. And we start to talk about ways to approach the universe from a scientific perspective that is also curious and skeptical.

open. We can't wait to share part two with you. Near Death experiences, psychedelics, the multiverse, nonlinear nature of time, a little bit about the history of physics. We even ask him to weigh in on the Akashic records, mystical proof of a collective consciousness. And also he's going to talk about the things that he most wants the answers to in the universe. We can't wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Break it down. There absolutely are people who, and I'm not just talking about sort of like, let's talk about aliens. I'm not talking about those people who I have a lot of respect for as well. But when we speak to, you know, people who study exoplanets, when we speak to

people who study signatures and things like these things. Life signatures, yeah. Correct. You know, is there, is there a world, literally, in which... Say it right, in a world. In a world. Is there a world where there is a set of beings that have a tremendous amount more sophistication than we have already. I have no reason to doubt that. In fact, I lose sleep. People say, what questions do you know? No, no. I lose sleep, not on what the next question might be. I lose sleep wondering, are we physiologically, neurologically, neurologically smart enough to ever actually figure out the universe? And my best example there is, okay, genetically, our closest genetic relative, the chimpanzee. Yes.

We're within one, one and a half percent identical DNA to a chimpanzee. Now, if you are very human-centric, you'll say, what a difference that one percent makes. That one percent, we have philosophy and music and art and the James Webb Telescope. And all a chimp can do is stack boxes and reach a banana. Okay? Or they can also choose a stick to extract termites, okay? Well, they can also survive in the wild and raise babies and do many amazing, important things. Okay, but that would be survival as any animal would have the ability to survive.

They're very sophisticated. We're taking another level here and talking about intellect. Sorry, I'm partial to primates here. Okay. Being one ourselves. Well, I don't even like you're saying intellect. I think it's... No, no, no, no, no, that's important.

Right. I have to say intellect because it's fun. You asked me a question about beings that would make us look, okay? Sure. So I have to go there. Yeah, yeah. So what a difference that 1% makes. Look what we have.

Look at the chimps. All right. By the way, every animal knows how to survive in the wild. So that, that is... I'm not going to use that to distinguish... No, but primates are sophisticated besides homo sapiens. Okay, but that's... I'm like defending chimpanzees.

Yes, you are. But it's not even my point. didn't give us enough respect. You're right. We don't need to talk about it. That's not even the point. Chimpanzees are awesome. I'm not going to, that's not where I'm even going to land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I'm saying is if our toddlers can do what that chimp can do, basically, not the survival part, but just the task part. All right. And by the way, you can have a conversation with a chimp and say, oh, Bozo, whatever the chimp's name is, I'm going into town. They're bananas on sale. If they're ripe, I'll bring some. back.

Yeah. Okay. I assume you want some. What is the chimp here? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah. Okay? I gave the simplest human sentence.

Sure. That has a place, a time, a destination, and it's not going to work with a chimp. And no matter how hard you try, I'm asserting this, I don't think it's a controversial claim. No matter how hard you try, you will never teach long division to a chimpanzee. Okay.

They won't write the Bible if you just give them a bunch of typewriters. There's enough chimps, yeah. Okay. Eventually, yes. So, let's ask the question. Imagine a life form, be it on another planet. And who has one and a half percent DNA in that vector beyond us that we have beyond

the chimp. What would we look like to them? They, their, they're, they're human. So the people who study, they would like exhumed Stephen Hawking, roll him forward and say, this human was slightly smarter than the rest because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head like little alien Timmy from preschool. Oh, mommy, daddy, I just composed a sonnet and I derived the principles of calculus. Isn't that cute? Let's put it with a magnet on the refrigerator door. So I lose sleep over this prospect.

where the most brilliant chimp does what our toddlers can do, the most brilliant human would do what us, and that's only one and a half percent. Make them five percent, ten percent. If they were ten percent, Earth could be a literal aquarium terrarium that they constructed for their own amusement. And we would be their simulation in their snot-nose kids' basement.

It goes to the zoo hypothesis. Well, the zoo hypothesis also presumes that whatever is more sophisticated than us, right? Like, as a lot of astrophysicists that we speak to about these things say, if there are aliens, they've been around for a lot. No, but I'm saying, I was... I thought I was special... Oh, you're... Oh, okay.

I'll get over it, okay. We can get you a plaque. You're my favorite. No, you're my second favorite. I know several neuroscientists. Oh, I'm sure. We're a dime it doesn't. Okay.

No, but what many people say that we have spoken to about this, when, again, trying to speak from sort of a clinical perspective, is that if there are beings that have evolved, they've done so a long, long time ago, in that they are likely basically AI, or they're utilizing AI, or they are essentially, I mean, I'm picturing like a room of computers because I was raised in the 80s, right?

I'm picturing like that's the level of activity we're up against. It's been described that they would have used technology to augment failing body parts or figured out ways to make material body parts last a while longer. Exactly. We're toddlers to them. So our most brilliant, so consider this. If the chimp can't understand our simplest sentence,

It means our most brilliant sentence might not be understandable to this next species because it is too trivial for them to consider having any value to them at all. And we are so into ourselves that such thinking is anathema to our egos. So I'm all in on smart aliens being out there somewhere. But there's still the laws of physics that matter. Sure. You can't get around the universal, quote, laws of physics. The next place I'd like you to take us, I want to talk about, I don't just want to talk about the multiverse in the Marvel sense,

which I personally love to talk about it in the Marvel sense. But I want you to walk us through kind of from a quantum perspective. What does it mean to imagine that this reality, right, for lack of a better word, this reality is not the only reality. Is it harder to think that way than what must have confronted people in the age of Copernicus who says Earth is just a planet among others? we are not the object of the creation. We orbit this other thing, just like Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn. And how devastating might that have been to you back then to say there's another reality?

In fact, in the year's 1600, we're now 45 years, 50 years after Copernicus wrote, there's a monk. He's monks, so he's religious. His name is Giordano Bruno, who had read Copernicus. And he said, wait a minute, if Earth is just a planet orbiting the sun, maybe the sun is just a star, just like these stars in the night sky. If that's the case, then these stars in the night sky would also have planets. If they have planets, they might also have life. for that he was burned at the stake upside down naked

with a block hammered into his mouth so that even in the afterlife he could not utter such heresies now you know what it was his last words reportedly I don't like this story Mr. Tyson and one of his last words were your God is too small if your God is the God of Earth and life on Earth and there's life elsewhere out there and he's just proposing this

your god is too small. That's badass when they're about to, you know, prosecute you and burn you at the stake. So to say if, to have any trepidation at all about there being other universes, that's just in a long tradition of the understandings of astrophysics taking you to the next level

of the next level to demote your ego. Great. So I'm going to use an example. Please. We speak to a lot of very fascinating individuals who have had clinically cataloged near-death experiences. And there are many, many features of these that I would love to ask you about. But in the time that we have, I want to focus in particular on this notion of there being many versions, right, of our lives. and the ability to sort of slice through time, right? That there's some sort of quantum grid, right?

And that we have the ability to, you know, time travel, right? In our experiences. Can you speak a little bit to what that aspect of this adds to a conversation about the multiverse? Is time something that is progressing and that we are experiencing? Are there multiple timelines happening at the same time, or is it some sort of loop where you can, as we've had people describe, as if you can slice through time like it's a seven-layer cake?

Yeah. So, a couple of things. And you started with near-death experiences. I just want to make one point about that. There's some experiments you can do that have never been fulfilled in their expectations. There are people who say they rise up out of their body and they see themselves down there. And they'll either rejoin it or whatever. Well, it's a very common dissociative experience.

That's the word. Yes. Thank you. So what you do is you have a truss over your deathbed, and you get someone to just write a simple phrase on the top facing upwards, like roses are red, something simple that doesn't require much. The person has an outer body experience looks down and they say, what's written up on that thing? And if they can tell you what's there, then you've got some good evidence. I mean, these are the kinds of things we should be doing experiments on rather than just taking people's testimonies about their personal experience. Sure.

So that's the role of science in bringing eyewitness testimony to task. Sure. Knowing the frailty. You don't always know when someone's going to have an NDE. That's the thing. Knowing the susceptibility of the human mind to interfere with objective reality in your recounting. So that's one aspect of this. The

There's one story I'm going to retell this back I grew up in New York City There was some guy who had committed some crime And he was running away He'd shot people He was running away from the police And the police shot him

Okay And he fell to the ground They rushed him to the hospital And apparently his brother was killed In committing crimes Okay So they're trying to bring him back to life And then he's like

near death, and he does come back to life, and he recovers. And he remembers what happened while he was in this near-death experience. He saw his brother, and his brother said, no, it's not your time yet. And his brother pushed him back to earth. He saw his brother up in heaven, pushed him back to earth, and then he recovered. Okay. First of all, why would he think either he or his brother were headed to heaven. That's my first comment. Okay. They were both criminals. Okay. You don't know the rules of

heaven Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm just, I'm just, you don't know God. You're right. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just put it out there. Okay. That's my, this is your problem with this story? No, no, no. Okay. So then, uh, and plus it was like bright lights there and anything. He's describing the operating room table with doctors trying to resuscitate him, pushing down on his chest with bright lights above him. But his brain puts that into heaven. And we hear his account, and especially for religious, you want that to be real because there's so much invested in the reality of that.

Yet the brain is a fungible place. So when I just heard that whole explanation, these are doctors pumping on his chest, and he's seeing operating room lights, and that's what his heaven is. Okay? So with the near-death experiences, I want more science experiments to be done than just compiling people's accounts. The thing that I do think is interesting, and I want you to bring it back to the multiverse, also, is when you have thousands of accounts, and I'm not saying this is proof of God,

I'm not saying it's proof of heaven, nothing like that. But when you have thousands of accounts of people independently, who are all using very similar imagery, very similar experiences, similar notions. Of course, I have physiological explanations for why you would feel a narrowing, right? When you're near death, right? And you're having a cardiac event, right?

But there's something interesting to me about what is in common with these stories and a lot of mystical traditions and a lot of the early physicists who developed quantum theory, right? Who identified that there is something still outside of the realm of what we are describing that has a certain quality to it.

And you know, bore, all these men, they had a phenomenal understanding of what we would describe as a mystical quantum dimension. Okay, so, let me see what I can pick up the pieces of what all that just you put on the table. That's what my therapist says every week. Let me, disentangle, the spaghetti,

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Make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. So when we speak of a quantum realm, it is our realm. We just don't have immediate access to it because our senses don't take us there, but our particle accelerators do. And before that, our microscopes and then our particle accelerators. And other methods and tools are probing the reality in which we live. And it's not just the small, but also the large. There's the scale of the universe. That's no different in terms of a scientific frontier entering a realm that's outside of your own

than seeing what's in the small, the small and the large. So that's not the same thing as a multiverse. Now multiverse is a whole other universe, not different realms within our universe. We experience this other realmness when we visit other cultures, where they think and do things as we've never done them before. That's what makes fish out of water stories

so compelling in movies. That somebody, their world is different from the world they're immersed in. And, you know, I think of a fish who's only ever known water, and then they're fished out, and then there's a hook in their lip, and they're looking around, and there's like, they feel sunlight. Like, what the hell is that? Who's this creature holding me? And then the hook gets undone because they don't weigh enough to be kept.

They get tossed back in the water, and now they have to describe that experience to other fish. You got to believe me. I was taken out of this dimension, and I was put in a whole other dimension, and it wasn't even wet. I didn't even know what not being wet means. And I felt this fire in the sky, and I don't even know what fire is. And it's an alien abduction story being communicated. It's also a psychedelic or transcendental story you're telling.

Sure, except... Where does that fit in? Except psychedelic stories, your brain makes it all up. It's not... I had an argument with... With Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan so badly wanted me to take drugs. You shouldn't feel so special he wants everybody to take drugs. I said to him, the human brain barely works as it is.

True. Why is it that we have these books called optical illusions, simple line drawings? Is it in the page? Is it out of it longer? I don't know. Simple drawings are stumping your human mind. Our brain barely works. You now want to stir in chemicals.

of any kind and assert that you now have a closer awareness of objective reality, I am yet to be convinced of that. You'll have an awareness of other things your brain is capable of, but as a scientist that cares about what is objectively true, and objectively true means you can do the experiment, you can do the experiment, and we all get the same answer. That's what objective truth is to me. Your trip that you took in your mind is no less real to you than anything else you've experienced,

But science is what allows us to disentangle what you experience and think is true from what actually happens and is true. So take away the drugs. Take away the drugs. Yogis, mystics for thousands of years have placed themselves in a state where we actually know the science behind what's happening. And there's phenomenal studies on meditation, right? What is happening in, in, who is it, the Tibetan monks? You can image them, right? What's happening? When you are able to lower your brainwaves, right, to a theta state and you are accessing.

Is it a theta state? Well, yeah. Oh, my gosh. You're getting to let's state. Okay. Got the Greek alphabet going there. I like my alpha beta state, but I'm not getting the theta. No, but the notion is when you place your nervous system in such a way, right?

In a state. Correct. Your parasympathetic nerves. Right. You are getting your vagus nerve on that. We know this is all. Like the vagus nerve is touching every organ system and lowering heart rate. It's doing all these amazing.

Me and the Vegas nervous. When you get into this state, there are, for thousands of years accounts, and even now, people who describe, with all due respect to Joe Rogan, pretty much the same kind of trippy, next level, access to a higher consciousness, right? They're in touch with something bigger than themselves. Many people do experience a notion of love as this universal language, which, yes, many people call God. But even in the absence of drugs, this is the kind of.

of our brain. This is endogenous, right? So what is that mystical experience and what can it tell us about? I mean, many people would say there's a universal consciousness and I've experienced it in meditation. It can tell us nothing about the objective reality in which that human being is embedded because it's all happening inside their head. And now, is that a narrow-minded statement, like, perhaps? But I have yet to see evidence. So, for example, if, if, if, if, entering that trance, the yogi says, the next law of quantum physics is, and they write it down, and then we experiment, oh, my gosh. Then I would be going into those trances.

Right. I would say, show me, let's do that. But that has not happened. No, what happens is other things about God and connection and purpose. Spirituality. Right. They enter spiritual realm. Well, and for people who have trauma or people who are experiencing PTSD, it's very, apparently

it's helpful. I'm not denying people their spiritual experience. ever. I will not, I'm not that guy. But the multiverse are actual other universes. And there are different varieties of multiverse when the general relativity and quantum physics marry, it's really a shotgun marriage because they don't know how to behave in the sandbox. Because quantum physics is the science of the small, and relativity is the science of the large. And at the big bang, the large was small. So does quantum phenomenon affect the entire universe when it would otherwise just be affecting particles. That's the fun, interesting frontier that is being explored there.

So the two kinds of multiverse, well, there's more, but two basic kinds. One of them is we're in an expanding universe, we're in this bubble, this, this, this, this, this, this horizon. In this space time, there could be likely are other bubbles also expanding within this space time. Okay. But space time is expanding faster than these bubbles will overlap, we think. If they overlap, who knows what that would look like. But the pockets of universes expanding within a one contingent space time. All of those universes would have the same laws of physics. Whereas another kind of, as I've come to understand it, because I'm not the researcher on the frontier here, I give you the names of three or four trustworthy sources here. So another kind is quantum physics in that state pumps out of

an entire new universe. One this way, one that way. And quantum physics has quantum variations in physical properties. And so this one, the charge on the electron, is slightly different. And this one, antimatter behaves a little differently. And maybe this universe, there are more planets than this.

Or maybe there's no matter in that universe. And there's more... So these variations would make it hard to imagine other life that we would have any kind of real relationship with. It's this other kind of multiverse where people think about in that universe, I have a goatee and I'm evil, or I married my childhood sweetheart rather than this deadbeat that I didn't know. We don't need to get personal.

So those are actual other realities, and I don't want to confuse that with whatever might be going on in your head. Correct. Just a button on this, because some people use the simulation theory to describe an internal filtering that is impacting our external reality whereby in those meditative states, you're dropping your filters, you're dropping some of the early childhood programming, and how much is objective reality that we are all experiencing,

and how much is subjective based on the fact that you and I will look at something, and no matter how similar we think it is, it will never be similar. My understanding of this, and my can confirm or deny it, is that at all times it's a mixture of the two. No matter what you've done with the state of your brain, It is a combination of your senses bringing reality to your mind, your mind receiving it, interpreting it, and giving you an understanding of that reality. And that understanding will not necessarily match the understanding provided by others.

And that's why we needed science in the first place. 100%. And what's interesting is that when people are meditating like that, the similarity of that experience seems to be universal in some way that is intriguing. You mean earthwide, not universal. You're talking to an astrophysicist. Okay. Like Miss Universe was Miss Earth all along.

Okay. Let's be clear about that. Fair enough. Yeah. So if meditative states are reproducible to some common experience, that signals to us to us to us the common origin of the human mind among us all. I mean, that has interesting biophysiological conclusions you might be able to draw, gaining access to these deeper, these deeper evolutionary states that we evolve past,

but maybe they're still there looking, either for our benefit or for our... I mean, I like to think of it more as a parallel evolution, right? Okay. Meaning I don't think of it as having sort of a beginning, middle end, but... Okay. Oh, no, let me get back to the time element here. Oh, yes. Love me some time.

Yeah. Okay. One of my favorite books, I'm not a big reader of novels. I read mostly nonfiction. so maybe there are plenty of other books that would enchant me the way this one did. I just have never read them. Let's see. What is he going to say?

No, no, it's Slaughterhouse Five. Oh, of course. Vonnegut. Okay. Yes, it's partly autobiographical as his time serving in the Second World War in Dresden after it had been bombed by the Allied forces. So that's a backdrop. But my takeaway was he was abducted by aliens.

I loved it. And he was put in a zoo. in a closed room, but, and that sounds like, I don't want that, but the aliens gave him access to the timeline of his life. So at any point, he could just rejoin his life and live that moment. Shout out to Kurt Vonnegut. Yes. Yes.

Particularly that early. People weren't thinking storytelling in that way. And it was a brilliant mechanism for storytelling, rather than jumping back and forth just as... I thought you were going to say the time traveler's white. which is also excellent. Oh, so yeah, he could have just did it as a storytelling motif. You know, you go forward and backwards and then you confuse the reader and it's passed off as brilliant writing.

He just made it a literal timeline that you have access to. Our problem is that we are prisoners of the present forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future. if we had access to our timeline, that'd be a fun game changer. The real question would be, if you go back in time, can you do an offshoot and change what would have happened in that future? Would you have to live it exactly the way it happened? And then you could just get bored with your life.

This is just a fun bonus question. Have you heard of the Akashik Records? I might have. It's ringing a bell, but give me more. I don't know that I subscribe to it, but there is a notion, and it's in many, many mystical traditions by various names. Indian traditions, there's several traditions for a very, very long time, hundreds, if not thousands of years. Indy, mean subcontinent, India, or South Asia. South Asia, yeah.

I would never. Excuse me. Excuse me. The notion and many in communities that you may not intersect with, but many in holistic, all-timore. alternative spiritual, mystical, yogic circles, believe that there is an accessible record of everyone that can be tapped into. It is everything that you have ever done. So it's a communal consciousness.

It is literally a collective consciousness. And there's an elaborate meditation that you go into to access it. And there are people who do readings for other people. You give them your information and they pull out things. I mean, you have more experience with this because you've heard more about this than I have, but it's just interesting that these are places where I wish we had more information, right, about what are we actually accessing?

And many people don't need the proof, and they just say, I believe that it exists, and so it does. Those people are not scientists and God bless them. Let me pose a challenge for you. There are four forces of nature, okay? I'm one of them. Neil. That would be the fifth force of nature.

Okay. So almost every part of our life experience unfolds from the electromagnetic force. It's what holds our molecules together, our thoughts, our interaction with light. Yes, of course, there's gravity. It holds us on Earth. And there's the strong nuclear force that keeps our atoms as they are. But we don't experience atoms so much as we experience molecules. And molecules come together from the electromagnetic force, the charge on the electron.

All right. It's what holds us all together. Correct. Literally. Correct. When LIGO, the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory, measured this gravitational wave created by the collision of two black holes in a galaxy long ago. Far far away.

Far far away. This washed over the experiment specifically exquisitely designed. to detect a ripple in the fabric of space and time. It had to be so sensitive. It could detect a change in the position equal to a hundredth the diameter of an atomic nucleus. It's not even a number. Okay.

Okay. If you have powers of telepathy, of mind reading, of whatever, that's going to show up in that experiment, because we are monitoring the behavior of all matter, energy, that is interacting with other matter and energy. So, if we don't see that, I'm giving very low confidence that you're actually doing anything. Interesting.

That's very interesting. Let me tell you how sensitive it is. If someone is walking a half a mile down the street, it'll send a vibration into the earth that they could detect. So everybody's on shutdown when they're doing the experiment. And there's some things they can't avoid, like the gurgling of the earth or the cloud. So they model that and then they subtract it out from the data. So that's how precise science is. And earlier on, you said science is cocky.

They understand it. What we do understand, we're justifiably cocky. But on the frontier where we don't understand, we better be humble, otherwise you're just an asshole. Okay? And I will tell you, we don't know, humbly say, we don't know dark matter, dark. I can list it for you. Sit down, be humble. Tell us some of the things that you don't know that are on the frontier that are baffling.

Oh, it's not just what I don't know. It's what is not known. Yes. If it's just me, then I'll just research it. And I'm all right. No, for me to top the four biggest questions are what is dark matter? We can measure it. We don't know what's causing it.

What is dark energy? We can measure it. So it's real. We didn't just make this up. It's a measurement. Dark energy, we don't know what that is. Combine those together, it is 95% of what is driving the universe. Everything we know, love about chemistry, biology, physics, engineering,

it's in four or five percent of what is happening in the universe. I want to know how we got from organic molecules, which nature makes freely and easily, to self-replicating life. It's the best. It's the best question. I love it. It's the best. I want to know what's around before the Big Bang.

I know. I want to know, are humans smarter enough to figure out the universe? Or are we clever enough to just step on the rung in the ladder put there by people that came before us? And we slowly ascend the wall. No one person had that brilliance. I can't invent calculus. I'm not smart enough, but Isaac Newton did. I'm stepping on his shoulders, using the calculus to make another advance.

Maybe we can increment our ways to something that the alien toddler could have just done trivially. So maybe that is how we would figure out the universe. I don't know, but for me, that's a big question. For me, those are my five biggest questions. So I want to ask something about what was before the Big Bing. because the answer to this, and I am a person who comes from a religious and spiritual tradition where we talk a lot about this and our Kabbalistic text delves into things that even the Old Testament

does not. And many of them relate to physics and many of them relate to... Are you a Kabbalist? Is that... I'm not a Kabbalist, but I value our text. What wasn't, who else? Madonna was it Kabbalist. Was it she? Madonna studied at a facility that teaches Kabbalah. But in our tradition, it's not something... Our is Jewish tradition. Correct. In the Jewish tradition, it's not something that is studied lightly.

It's an intellectual and kind of specific religious pursuit. But one of the things that is talked about is that what was... Plus, being named Madonna kind of disqualifies her. It's fine. We have rules. One of the things that many of us talk about in terms of... what came before is what came before is something that we don't get to quantify and we don't get to know it and we don't get to calculate it. And it doesn't mean that it didn't exist and doesn't mean that we don't believe in it. But it's something that is beyond the realms of the understanding we have that is a

scientific approach. Yeah. Are you comfortable with that kind of uncertainty in general? As a scientist. Yeah. In fact, there's a poem by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Wrote a book called Letters to a Young. Ooh! Give me some love there. All right. Letters to a young poet.

And there's a short poem, and I'm embarrassed that it's short enough I should have just memorized it. But I was never that guy, though, who memorized poems. But there's a line that says, be at peace with all that stirs within your own. heart. That's right. Learn to love the questions themselves. So a scientist on the frontier has to be in that state. Otherwise, you will force answers before their time, before you have sufficient data, and you will derail the pure curiosity that is what got you to be a scientist in the first place. So I'm completely comfortable saying, I don't know what was around before the Big Bang. And like you said, we have top people working on it.

And it's when you say, it's got to be something. It was God. Okay. But I'm not, I'm still in the unknown part. That's not your business. Meaning you're not in the business of that. I'm in the business of figuring out the unknown. And as a result, the unknown does not bring me discomfort.

It brings me excitement. I love that. It is the unknown that has me jump out of bed each day and say, what's the next unknown that needs my attention? You mentioned that what does keep you up at night is that potentially there's a civilization that could be, if they are out there, one percent, five percent more dead. Not specifically. That's surely the case. What keeps me up at night is, are we smart enough to figure out the universe?

Because that affects my profession. Yeah. Am I, are we just, you know, bounding along touching the toenail of an elephant with no hope of ever seeing the elephant? And here we are coming up with hypotheses of what the larger truth is and that's what keeps me up in night. Not if there's smarter aliens. I'm good with that.

And if they find us and they want to make us their pet, I'm okay with that too. No, because think about it. How do you treat your pet? Better than you're treating the homeless person who you just stepped over to get to your office. She was kind of judging. But am I wrong?

I bought a homeless man a meal the other day. Yes. But you'd invite him into your home and feed him and shower him the way you would take a stray pet. So we treat our pets better than we treat stranger humans who are strangers to us. The title for this episode is,

hopefully humanity will become the pets of aliens. That's the best we might be able to hope for. Otherwise, it won't bode well for us. Is the universe going to end and should we be concerned that it is slowly imploding? I mean, if it does end, we won't know about it. Well, all of our data tell us that we're on a one-way expansion trip

and just deal with it. It's not going to recycle. It's philosophically unsettling. Because if it was a recycling universe, that gets rid of the origin question. It's just always been cycling. It was, is and always will be. Exactly. But Earth, we're not doing so great with our planet, but she'll be fine.

We won't. Oh, right, right. We'll kill ourselves off before. I hadn't heard Earth genderized in quite some time. So I had to get through that sentence. Sorry. Yes, she will do just fine. Yeah.

Mother Earth, if we're going to go there. Mother Earth, when people say save Earth, no. Earth is going to be here before, during, and after anything we do to it. It's save life on Earth. And not even save humans, save life on Earth. Our survival depends on the survival of the biosphere in which we're embedded. Which we're already destroying. Correct.

That was uplifting. Okay, okay, you want me to leave you an uplift? Let's get a little hope for the end. What do you want people to take away and implement into their daily lives about all the topics that we talked about, but particularly our place in the universe and having excitement about the unknown? Yes, I'm biased here, but I'm not ashamed of this bias. That of anything humans have ever invented, science may be uniquely capable, uniquely capable of of giving us access to our understanding or our place in the universe and secure pathways into our future to assure our health, our wealth, and our security.

The extent to which people either are in denial of science or reject it, that will be the unraveling of an informed civilization. And we might as well just turn around and march straight back into the caves because that's where we're going to end up without it. Neil deGrasse Tyson, such an honor to have you here and such a pleasure to talk about all these things. And we hope we get more time with you in the future.

Your God is too small. My universe is too small, but at least it's expanding. That was probably one of my favorite stories. Also terrifying. There's also things that he says that it's like it sounds like there are poems that he's got. Like, does he rehearse them in front of a mirror? I would like to see inside of his brain how many folds he has. Please.

They said that Einstein had a lot of folds. You think he's got a lot of folds? Where is he keeping all that information? Does he not have any song lyrics in there? I don't think he's got, he doesn't have one song lyric. I don't know that that's true. Did anyone notice the pattern on his shirt?

It looks like he's a rock and roller, but I don't think he's got any song lyrics in there. You should have seen him walk in. He walked in with his hat and his skulls on his shirt. Adorable. Yep, he had, he didn't know that he had skulls on his shirt when he purchased it. So it's like a little bit of a deep cut if you're watching this episode. Can you pick up the fact that those are skulls? He's such a fan of the Big Bang theory.

It's unbelievable. Well, I think what he said is very true, that, you know, that was so special to have a show about this aspect of, you know, culture and our society. You know, I had never seen it when I auditioned for it. And so I remember when I kind of learned about it, I said, oh, these are the kind of people that I go to grad school with. These are all the people that I hang out with on the daily when you're in grad school.

I feel like my point about the mind-body connection was slightly mis-setset up. meaning I wasn't attacking science. I was just trying to acknowledge that there are places while the scientific method is our best way at understanding things. There are certain aspects that we cannot study and or that have fallen short. And when we've questioned people, they're so quick to dismiss any type of questioning in defense of what has been said to be true. And what he said, which I appreciated, is that many of the things that have been said to be true were not tested, but then they're still defended as this is what the science says and there's no reason to disbelieve that.

I mean, I think there's a couple things. Like, truth be told, if I knew you wanted to bring that angle up, I would have presented a more cohesive we could have talked about Neil Thist. Like, I would have, I just, I couldn't pick it out of the air. The Gabormante one, I think, is significant because, you know, no one would have thought there's a profile for people who get cancer, right? Like it was sacrilege to think something like that, right? Or to talk about immune properties and how they relate to environmental stressors.

You know, he's not in the realm of talking about intergenerational trauma, right? It's not what I would go to him for. Or medicine per se. He's not, and he acknowledges the complexity of trying to study both psychology and physiology. There's a couple issues I have with the fact that we are, let's say, 1% different from chimps. and what would someone 1% more, you know, than us look like? Because that's assuming that it's on some sort of like linear and like exponential. Like the scale doesn't have to be the same.

But anyway, I didn't want to get into that with him. But I understand the point. And I actually, I thought he'd be like, there's no alien. That's not a thing. And I was pleasantly surprised that what he said was the simulation is kind of stacked like that in fractals. And, you know, Valerie mentioned there's literally a couple black mirror episodes specifically about that. But also this notion that, yeah,

there's got to be something a lot more intelligent than us to be observing us. And that's why he doesn't entertain this notion of like, they're visiting us and like laser lights and like abductions. That's a different conversation. The other thing that I had an issue with was somewhat of an oversimplification

of the caveman's lifespan. Because... I thought of that too. Because... Like, we're not going to live forever. There's a ceiling effect to how long we're going to live. Yes, and... Or not.

The idea that it was clean water and everything was organic. I didn't like that. We didn't have enough access to food. So farming, of course, increased the proliferation of food and increased the fact that we could have access to food regularly. No one is knocking... No one knew about nutrition also. We didn't have shelter.

So, like, I think there's... You know, when we say that science has extended our lifespan, And no one is arguing that whatsoever. Of course, medical interventions, the fact that we have sanitation, the fact that we have indoor plumbing. Just wash your hands before you stick them in a body. The fact that we have shelters now that we're not living in caves. The caves can be very protected. There are so many advancements in modern civilization that, of course, have.

So I feel like it's a mixed metaphor. I agree. It's not that, oh, we should eat organic. I agree. I also, and I really don't know why I'm defending chimpanzees this way. I got really fired up because the notion that if you put a chimpanzee in a human laboratory and you're like,

do you understand what I'm saying and the chimpanzee will not? It doesn't mean they're not in, it doesn't mean they don't have intelligence or capacity. It's not a measurable intellectual capability, but chimpanzees are incredibly sophisticated. Also, they live in very, very elaborate social groups with very, you know, intricate rules.

They use tools. They pass down information. I mean, like, that's a very, very highly evolved, beautiful. But yes, that's true they don't speak. Besides the people who are on the TV show, naked and afraid, who get sent out into the wilderness to try and survive. Yes. You know, he says, oh, we can all survive?

No, we can't. If I sent 99% of city dwellers out into the wilderness and said, they'd be dead in an hour. Good luck. You're not faring. so well. That's been bred out of us. We've lost that. Well, but, but, you know, he's talking about ingenuity and, and look, I also don't think that spoken language is the only measure of intelligence. We know that there are a lot of different kinds of intelligence. We know that, I mean, even Stephen

Hawking, the example that he used, right, used a computer to communicate, you know, coupled with eye movements and all these, you know, so I, I don't think he was speaking with such, you know, he wasn't painting with such a broad brush, but just, again, I don't know why I'm defending the chimpanzees, but I am. I'm always struck. by the dark matter, dark energy conversation. I wish we had more time to get to it with him. Like, the biggest problem in science is that 95% of what makes up our universe is unknown? Is no one else troubled by that?

I think it's a lot more troubling than people let on. I mean, even the fact that when you look at something, you think you're seeing the thing. I'm going to just use this class. I think when I look at this, like, I see a glass. and if you were to ask me to describe this glass, I'd be like, oh, well, it looks like this, and here's the diameter, and oh, there's this beveling, and here's the color, right?

There's the fluid that's in it that I can perceive and all these things. That's actually, if you pull, if you either pull back or zoom in, that's not what this is, right? This is the representation that's been presented upside down on the back of my eye, on the retina.

I don't even know what you see there. I could be seeing something totally different. We would probably describe this glass similarly. But our words could be used to be different, but you could actually be seeing something fairly... That's a different point about the limits of human language, but I'm even talking about individual perception. Yeah.

This is an object, right, that is made up of molecules, and it's absorbing everything from the color spectrum except what I'm seeing, right? So if you were to be an alien from another planet, if you were to be an outside observer, this is actually not what things look like. This is what our brains compute from the data that we can perceive that is processed by the brain that we have. That's what we see. That's why when people talk about that this is just a projection, right? It's projected onto a screen.

The world is wearing a mask, right? That's what all this is. You don't actually exist. None of us exist. You are a figment of my imagination sitting in the chair across from me. Does my hair look better than I perceive it? Put here by an alien toddler in his terrarium in the simulation that I was created in. And we'll tap into the Akashic records to have access to it all.

Seems about right. If you want more of this type of fun, follow us on Substack. Miami-Bi-Lx breakdown on Substack, where we release content exploring these topics in depth and answer listeners and community members' questions. So come on over and check it out. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's Miami-Bi-Lex breakdown.

She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down. down she's gonna break it down