No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump shut down by 2 judges HE APPOINTED
Episode Date: May 27, 2026Two Trump-appointed judges rule against Republicans in the ongoing redistricting wars. Brian interviews Neil DeGrasse Tyson about aliens, Trump, and Obama.Buy TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER: https://...www.simonandschuster.com/books/Take-Me-to-Your-Leader/Neil-deGrasse-Tyson/9781668249970Pre-order THE DAY AFTER: https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/thedayafter Written by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Trump gets some bad news from two of his own judges, and I interview astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie.
With the redistricting wars clearly turning into a disaster for the Democrats, the left caught not one, but two lucky breaks that will save seats in 2026.
So the first took place in Alabama, where a federal district court blocked the state from enacting its 2023 congressional map in the midterms, which they explained were intentionally discriminatory.
That map would have left black voters with just one seat.
seat where they form a majority down from two. Now, interestingly, two of the three judges on this panel
were appointed by Trump himself, and the other judge was also appointed by a Republican president.
So not great in some when you have even these right-wing judges who Trump himself appointed
ruling against Trump and Republicans. Now, the case is going to be appealed up to the U.S.
Supreme Court. This is the same court that already cleared the way for all of this to happen in the
first place by gutting Section 2, the Voting Rights Act. This is a court that has fallen over itself to
create different sets of rules depending on which party those rules would benefit.
So if the Democrats stand to benefit, this court will bend over backwards to ensure that
fair maps will always get kicked to the next election cycle.
And yet, if Republicans stand to benefit, it doesn't matter even if voters are already
casting ballots, as was the case in Louisiana.
They will gladly allow states to redraw maps mid-election if it means the GOP gets a leg up.
So I would not be surprised if SCOTUS allows the newly redrawn maps to stand, but there
does exist the possibility that the court may display some basic modicum of fairness, some dwindling
scintilla of decency, and uphold the lower court's decision, a decision handed down, again,
by two Trump appointees. I wish I could offer some type of prediction here one way or the other,
but at this point, I'm legitimately 50-50 as to what happens in this case at the Supreme Court.
In any event, we'll get an answer in short order. The other bit of good news, Republicans in South
Carolina failed to garner enough votes to redraw their maps, which would have eliminated the state's
only Black Opportunity District. That's currently occupied by Jim Clyburn. Even for a party hellbent
on usurping total control, redrawing the maps mid-election was too much for some of these South
Carolina state legislators. For example, according to Post and Courier, Richard Cash, who's one of the
most conservative Republicans in the South Carolina State House, said, quote, neither my conscience
nor the common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway.
But the reality is that these two possible seats, really at the end of the day, are just tinkering
around the edges. Like, we should not be fighting to eke out one or two seats here and there while
Republicans redraw maps across the country. We need a wholesale across the board response to this
ongoing attack. And I know I'm a broken record here, but it's important that we don't settle for
crumbs, the crumbs of possibly eking out two seats in a cycle where Democrats have ultimately been
drawn out of more than a dozen seats. Don't settle for crumbs. Frankly, it should be our rally cry for
everything, not just redistricting. We shouldn't settle for crumbs while Trump keeps massive tax cuts
onto billionaires. Shouldn't settle for crumbs while Trump guts health care for millions of Americans.
While his trade war sends prices surging, while gas is almost at its highest point ever, we should
and must demand more. Because the reality is that Trump knows what it.
looks like to not accept crumbs. Remember, he's doing great. He has increased his net worth by
$4 billion. That's not crumbs. He has gifted himself a Qatari jet and a ballroom and a reflecting
pool and a military parade and nearly $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury before he scaled it back
to a mere $2 billion for his insurrectionist pals. So remember all of that when he says stuff like
this. This was just a few weeks back. Short-term oil prices, which will drop rapidly
when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over
is a very small price to pay for USA and world safety and peace
only fools would think differently.
Remember that while he's asking you to sacrifice
because he's not sacrificing anything.
His net worth is surging.
He is swimming in corruption.
His pals are getting no big government contracts.
His family is getting awarded military defense contracts.
He's got other countries laundering funds to his crypto coins.
The only one sacrificing here are all of us.
and we're sacrificing it to Trump and his pals.
This sacrifice only goes one way.
So I'm glad for the good news when it comes to redistricting.
This is, again, been my fight since day one.
But if we don't start to recognize the urgency of this moment,
the existential nature of this moment,
then we're not going to be able to come out of this.
So I hope that governors and state legislators in blue states
across the country are seeing this,
getting a kick in the ass and moving
so that the GOP actually feels some deterrent effect
from their actions for the first.
time ever. Remember, this is a point that Mark Elias made last summer, almost a year ago,
during one of our conversations. Look, Republicans don't care about democracy. You know,
Republicans support Donald Trump because of an authoritarian. And they will abuse every norm.
They will violate every tradition. They will seek to weaponize every law, every practice,
everything that they can in order to gain power for the sake of having power. And they are not going to
be deterred from doing that. If they, you know, turn a grotesque map into an obscene map in Texas,
and our response is, okay, well, we found, you know, four or five seats of our own. They will take
that as a win, right? Because they've done what they want. And then, as you say, they will move on
to Missouri. They'll move on to Florida. They'll move on to Ohio. They will move on to Utah.
They will move on to, you know, wherever will be their next place. And they will not be deterred.
What we need to do is we need to recognize that if we want to stop the slide of
democracy. We as Democrats, we as people in the pro-democracy movement, need to tell them that if
they take five seats, we're going to put 30 seats on the table, right? Because they need to
understand that there will not just be parity if things go against them, but actually if they
guess wrong and this winds up escalating, they could wind up on the severe losing side.
So when people say to me, you know, don't bring a knife to a gunfight, I don't even want to bring a gun to a gun fight.
You know, I want to bring something more than a gun to the gun fight.
I want to bring missiles to the gunfight.
I want to bring hand grenades to the gunfight because I want the underside to understand that not only are we going to fight as hard as them, but we are going to fight smarter than them.
And frankly, we didn't learn that lesson.
We didn't go on the offense.
and look where it got us.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
My job, our job, is to ensure that we don't get fooled a second time.
Next up is my interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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I'm joined now by the author of the new book, Take Me to Your Leader,
which is now available for purchase.
and famed astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson,
thanks so much for joining me.
Hello, just astrophysicist is fine.
All right, we'll drop the famed.
So I want to talk about a lot here,
but first and foremost, I think the question
that most people are curious about,
and you spoke a lot about this in the book,
but just on the idea of the existence of aliens.
So when you're asked this question,
are aliens real?
What is your top line response?
So rather than answer a question posed that way,
as an astrophysicist,
you would ask the question differently.
You would say,
what are the chances
that there's life elsewhere in the universe?
And that is so high as to be a near certainty.
Just given the age of the universe,
given how long life has been around on Earth,
it got started almost as quickly as it possibly could have.
So when you look at the timeline of the Earth,
timelines since life could have existed,
it's been around for 95% of that timeline.
And we're made.
of the most common ingredients in the universe.
Hydrogen.
This is in rank order.
In the universe, it's the same rank order in life.
Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen.
There's helium in there, which is common in the universe,
but it's chemically inert.
So you couldn't do anything with it,
even if it were available to you.
So removing helium, we are one for one,
the top five ingredients in the universe.
So if life was anything on Earth,
it was opportunistic.
In 1995, we discovered our first exoplanet,
planet orbiting another star,
and now the catalogs has more than 6,000
because we've tuned telescopes for just that purpose.
Add all that up to suggest that we are alone in the universe,
you'd only be thinking that for some philosophical or religious reason,
not for any reason based in science.
So my answer is yes.
there's life,
it's highly likely
that there's life
out there in the universe, yes.
Do you have any reason to believe
that we have made contact
with any life outside this universe?
Like when I asked Barack Obama
if aliens exist,
his answer was essentially,
yes, they exist,
but we don't have any evidence of it.
Because he's scientifically literate
and he gave the scientifically literate reply.
Yeah.
Aliens of any kind,
microbial, or what we would call
intelligent,
He's a scientific literate, educated person.
So he's citing what any scientist would tell you about the likelihood of life in the universe.
But because he was president, people wanted to read into it on levels that were just out of, off scale and out of control.
And so I was intrigued by that reaction.
Because as an educator, I'd like knowing that I can anticipate how people will respond to certain information.
And if I ever get it wrong, it's like, how did I misthink their motive?
or their brain wiring in this.
And so when there are films, for example,
like The Age of Disclosure, or more...
Documentaries, yeah.
Documentaries, or more broadly, just schools of thought
that suggest that extraterrestrials have visited the United States
or the world more broadly,
how do you think about the viability of all of that information?
Yeah, what they all have in common is,
is that it's people saying that they've seen aliens.
That's the deeper version of it.
The others are I've seen lights in the sky.
Yeah.
I can't explain.
And this UFO must be aliens.
What you just said it's a UFO?
Then what is the you stand for?
On identity.
So if you can't identify it,
you don't have the logical right to then declare
that it's visiting aliens from outer space.
Right.
I mean, you make the point in your book
that when people attribute the idea of
aliens to a UFO, they're actually taking the you out of it. They're basically saying we're
identifying what it is by virtue. You're saying it's an IFO based on the fact that you don't know
what you're looking at. That's very faulty logic there. And but it doesn't subtract from the fact
that there's huge enthusiasm for aliens. I think of this book as a as a love letter to
human fascination with aliens throughout time. I mean, I can go back to Voltaire.
Imagine an alien that was 26 miles tall.
When people think of Voltaire,
they're not thinking of his science fiction output.
But people have been thinking about aliens for centuries,
not millennia, but centuries.
Unless, if you look at sort of Greek and Roman fantastical figures,
like Medusa, that's an alien for you.
Snakes for hair, that's an alien.
At least as alien looking as anything we're drawing today.
Centaurs, minotaur.
tours, these are objects of our imagination and fascination.
They were gods and other assorted characters in the mythologies,
but our capacity to imagine seems to know no bounds.
And I wanted to celebrate that and compare it to what could be true,
given the laws of physics,
and allowing the alien to have whatever technology that's beyond ours,
go ahead.
But laws of physics, as we measure them here on Earth,
There's a cottage industry of physicists
where all they do is check to see
whether the laws of physics measured on Earth
apply on the moon, on the sun, on nearby stars,
on across the galaxy, across the universe.
And as you go across the universe, you're seeing back in time.
So the base laws of physics apply not only here but there
and forever in the past.
And so we're allowed to then say, if you're an alien, you're coming visiting us, and you're of this universe, you're functioning in this universe, your laws of physics are going to be the same as ours.
Yeah.
But I'll give them wormholes, give them whatever technology we can't even imagine.
That's a different granting of their powers and abilities than having them violate known and well-tested laws of physics.
So go back several decades, the best you got was somebody on a country road,
and they saw lights, and maybe they got abducted,
and they have a whole story about it.
And they either, in their conscious mind,
tell you about the abduction or under hypnosis.
Yeah.
Okay?
That was the best we had back then.
But it was enough to get people stirred and excited.
In recent years, you've had last 10 years, I would say,
you had high-ranking people
who you would not suspect would be prone to imagination running away,
with them that they got high ranking of high respect, high integrity. Not only that, in the last
three years, we've had insiders and whistleblowers who testify under oath that they've got
alien body parts from crashed saucers and crash saucer parts and reverse engineering.
So, so at that level, you can't just say,
You're all crazy.
You can say crazy people are crazy and you're done.
But when people at that level say, then no.
So I'm in a position now where when they announce they're going to release the files, I'm
saying, I don't think the files are going to say anything we don't already think are there.
So you know what I really need?
Is it too much to ask?
Bring out the alien.
Yeah.
Is that too much to ask?
You're already telling us you have.
our imagination is run to no end of fulfillment with alien movies and stories and so
just bring out the alien because you bring out more and more people of different
rank and in age of disclosure it was not just insiders and whistleblowers it was
members of Congress current and former members of Congress
And so bringing more of them out, saying fundamentally the same thing,
does not really count as evidence scientifically?
You know, the battle cry, I need a witness.
We've seen screamed in courtrooms, at least courtroom dramas,
said no scientist ever.
No scientist.
I said to say they need a witness, no.
It's if a lot of people are giving similar accounts,
that's good enough reason to look more closely.
get better data than information that has to be processed through your own brain.
The human physiology is awful at data taking.
I'm surprised eyewitness testimony is ever allowed in the court of law based on what I know
as a scientist and based on what psychologists know.
We've done this experiment since elementary, since kindergarten, when you play telephone.
One person starts with a story and they whisper it and it comes eight people later,
the story is completely different
and that you don't have to be a child
for it to be completely different.
Right.
All right.
So something happens
when the mind-body
processes objective information.
That's why science was invented.
The methods and tools of science
give us tools and equipment,
data-taking devices
that bypass your sensory system.
And that way,
you don't have to believe me
or trust me, we can look at the chart recorder.
And so this is why videos are much more potent in this space
than a sworn testimony.
And that famous Navy video, the Tic Tac, I think it's been affectionately called,
you hear the astonishment of the pilots.
And so nobody knows what it is.
I don't know what it is.
The universe brims with mysteries.
If it's aliens, I'd have a different set of questions.
I would say, why would the alien visit a restricted naval airspace?
The whole surface of the earth, what is their attraction to there?
And for the people who assert that the government is masterminding some big cover,
I would say often those are the same people who declare that the government is a bloated...
Ineffective, inefficient bureaucracy.
Oh, but they're mastermining a thousand-person secret.
Can't even run the post office.
You're right, but it's a mastermindy a secret.
So those feel a little inconsistent to me.
But let's even assume that they can.
It would just be odd that all the aliens who visited Earth
did it within arm's reach of government officials.
All right.
If you're taking them to Area 51, presumably they arrive somewhere,
somebody I think would have gotten a picture of it
because we all have high resolution data taking devices
in our pockets, all of us.
There's six billion smartphones in the world right now.
And if you look at how many high res photos
are uplifted to the internet and high resolution video,
was it a million hours of video
are uplifted to the internet every day?
And no one has an abduction video,
no one has an alien just walking out coming towards them,
you could stream that.
Yeah.
And, you know, cat videos go viral for less, all right?
And the problem is now with just simple commands to an AI video generator.
I feel like everything up to this point, maybe you could have had plausible deniability to trust it, but anything post, you know, the AI universe that we live in.
Yeah, not just the large language models, but the video models.
Right.
It's gotten really good.
Yeah.
So it's unfortunate.
So I'm just simply saying, bring out the alien.
I don't think that's too much to ask.
And like I said, it might even be anti-climactic, given what everybody's saying about them.
And you know what would surprise me most is if they do bring out the alien and it was
humanoid.
Because most life on Earth, with whom we have DNA in common, is not humanoid.
Earthworms, trees, lobsters.
You had an interesting part of the book where you explained how, I think, 98% of our DNA is shared with a banana.
Oh, no, no, sorry, I'll correct, but thanks for getting to that part of the book.
We share, not 98, but between 20, 25% identical genes.
Identical genes, yes.
With a banana.
And so if an alien comes from another planet and does not have any DNA in common with us, or more likely, no DNA at all,
you'd expect it at least to look as different from humans
as humans and bananas look from each other.
Right.
Is that that?
And so it's evidence of how non-creative we are
in the aliens we've conjured for our films.
Yeah.
You know, look at, look at Rogu.
It's a cuddly thing with big eyes.
Oh, it has pointy ears.
So it's alien because it has pointy ears.
We granted them pointy ears to really show our imagination.
Exactly.
Spock had pointy ears, so he's,
the alien, right? Oh, he had green blood. That was creative at the time. How do you get green blood?
Your hemoglobin uses, that molecule equivalent, uses copper instead of iron. So that's good. That's good.
That's at least taking steps in a direction that's different. But physiologically, they're all,
nearly all of them are humanoid. So that would surprise me the most. I'd be shocked by that.
Yeah.
And, you know, we all kind of know what an alien looks like
because we've been told.
Not because anyone has ever presented one.
And I don't know if you're old enough.
Are you gray yet?
Yeah.
Great enough.
Trust me, I hear in the comments every day.
Oh, okay.
So was it the 90s?
Fox had a documentary called Alien Autopsy.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
And it was a film, grainy, black and white from 1947.
and it was an autopsy of the aliens they recovered.
It was top secret and now released or stolen.
An autopsy of the aliens from the crash saucer from Roswell.
Okay?
Because everybody knows about the crash saucer in Roswell.
That's how it was described in the headline newspaper article,
crashed saucer.
Okay.
So, and there's the alien.
And with big eyes, a big old head.
The aliens never have hair.
concerns me. Because if you're humanoid, give them some hair. They're always bald.
Yeah. What's up with that? I don't know. So there they are and oh wait a minute. The
subtitle of that video was alien autopsy, fact or fiction. Why would you have to say that
if it was a real autopsy? If it's a fact, yeah. Yeah, if it's a fact, just say it's the autopsy.
So that's a little weird. But I remember looking at it, I say, wait a minute, that phone on the wall.
I worked for summer at Bell Laboratories, the arm of AT&T, the research arm,
where they researched everything that created the phones that we all grew up on,
that I, my generation grew up on.
And so I remembered, I toured them, they have a little museum in-house.
And I knew that in 1947 they had not yet invented a coiled handset for the phone.
Yeah.
But that's what that was.
So that was an anachronistic element on the wall.
then in college I'd taken a film course
and I knew when certain film genres came in
and one of them is cinema verite
where you follow a character around
with a camera so you have the point of view of that character
that was that was an amazing thing to do
what enabled it was cameras went from this big
to this big so that you can carry it around with you
have a look at cameras from the 1950s
okay their tripod mounted
Yeah.
Monstrosities.
Monstrosities.
All right.
Whereas that, that autopsy was the POV of the doctor.
And it went over the shoulder.
It came in this way.
That was not a thing until the 1960s, the cinema verite.
Maybe even as late as the mid-60s.
And the last thing I noticed was they cut them open.
It looked pretty gory, by the way.
I don't know what they used.
It was a real alien.
They opened up the flesh.
They start pulling out organs and putting them in these trays.
What were the organs attached to?
It's not just some basin of organs just sitting there.
Just free floating.
Free floating?
Yeah.
And all I could think of was that child's game operation.
Operation, yeah.
We just go in and pull out, you know, just pull it out.
You're not severing nerves or arteries or any connectivity.
So those three things made me suspicious.
It would be years later before the producer admitted, confessed that it was a forgery.
And so I'm just saddened that the best video evidence we ever had of aliens was a forgery.
Yeah.
That's sad.
So when we have government officials like Trump, for example, who sees all of the attention
being paid to aliens and UFOs by virtue of documentaries, by virtue of people like you,
and he comes out and he says, you know, we're going to release any files that we have.
Do you believe that to be a good faith effort, you know, to really lean into the scientific method?
Or do you think that this is just a distraction from other political topics, like, for example, the Epstein files, the Iran war, and on and on?
Isn't everything a politician does, a distraction from what they don't want you to pay attention to?
Any politician with power?
And given the media cycle, I mean, why wouldn't it?
but it's no different from other things.
I mean, way more serious things going on in the world
than releasing alien files like war,
like regional, you know,
how much of a police state are we in
with regard to immigrants and this sort of thing?
There's plenty of stuff going on
that intermittently grabs headlines.
So if he's got more files,
I don't want to claim I know the mindset
of the executive.
branch, but if you're not releasing all the files at once, that gives you other occasions
for distractions, strategically placed, if you need a distraction, as occasionally politicians
do. So, you want a real distraction? Bring out the...
Yeah. Then the world will be focused on that. Yeah. Okay. Epstein, who? Who's that? We got a walking,
talking alien here sitting in the bench with his legs crossed ready to be interrogated or
tested upon so but like I said the files you already had testimonies from insiders I don't
there's nothing there that surprises me yeah so when we have for example going going back to the
topic of aliens you know most of these sightings for example have happened over the
United States sightings of of UFOs yeah have happened over either the United States you have happened over
either the United States or other English-speaking countries, predominantly.
And I make that point in the book.
And you make the point in the book.
Yes. It's not simply most.
It is like 90...
Virtually all.
Ninety-six percent.
Now, if you just have a map of all the sightings in the world,
it's all clustered, North America, the UK,
the five eyes, they're called, five E-Y-E-S.
It's English-speaking countries around the world.
So, United States, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand.
and overwhelmingly are spotted there.
Australia, because the population density is so low,
the totals aren't as high.
Many people live within a 20-mile radius of my home in Manhattan
than live in all of Australia.
Yeah.
All right.
So just to put that in context.
It could be that we just know who to call.
We have organizations,
the Mufon, Mutual UFO Network,
and there are a couple of others that,
do this. It's a clearinghouse. You report what you saw with your best ability, either with
photographic evidence or just testimony, and they log this, and they've been logging it for,
you know, 50 years. You just look at the statistics. It's staggering. I've spoken with foreign
nationals, and I say, tell me about aliens in your country. It's, it's amusing, but no one is
distracted by them. It's not a thing. Yeah. The way it is. So, so. Well, it's also a luxury to be
able to be distracted by them. You know the biggest luxury?
Remember crop circles?
Yeah.
Okay.
Crop circles.
Yeah.
Look at the countries where crop circles have occurred.
These are countries that do not have a food shortage.
Right.
These are wheat fields where people are trammeling them, or aliens, trampling them.
So I ask, in the book, I ask a bunch of adjacent questions that I don't see people asking.
Why would aliens only be visiting English-speaking countries?
Okay, we have the phone numbers.
Fine.
Why would aliens only be visiting government installations?
The surface of the earth is huge.
How would the government be keeping such a secret?
I quote Benjamin Franklin.
Farmer's Almanac.
Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
Benjamin Franklin, like 1785, something.
So my boy knew that humans are not good at keeping secrets.
So going into its third decade, history channels...
What is this?
Ancient aliens.
Oh, ancient aliens.
Okay, yes.
You knew.
It's in its third decade.
Talk about getting mileage on...
Oh, yeah, they're dining off that thing until the end of time.
Oh, man.
And so you go back to these cave drawings or hieroglyphics or go to something old, found somewhere in the world.
And they're drawings that you can't really...
Explain.
Yeah.
Like bubble-headed creatures with ray beams coming out of fingertips,
they're levitating.
You know, the stuff that's just, what?
What?
And so if you are alien adjacent, okay?
You will, your urge is to say,
maybe aliens visited them and they drew these aliens.
Okay.
they make a pretty convincing case of that given the variation of these illustrations and
okay it's an interesting case that's convincing only if you ignore a set of other questions
that I don't see them ask for example could these drawings have been by a kindergarten class
of those ancient peoples they've just drawn
stuff.
Yeah.
Okay.
Kindergarten.
Or they believed in gods the way people today believe in gods.
And your gods are typically not under your feet, typically, unless you're an animist,
where there's the god of the brook and the wind and the mountain and the trees,
Native Americans typically, and other native peoples, aborigines of Australia.
It's common in those cultures.
Look at how we have imagined our gods.
You go back to ancient Greece.
You know, Zeus is wielding a lightning bolt.
Okay?
And you have other creatures with, you know, Poseidon rising up out of the ocean with powers, you know, making waves.
And then you have, like I said, you had the centaur and the minotaur and the, you know, fantastical creatures.
Why are we denying ancient people the creativity of imagining their own deities?
Yeah.
Why is it okay for you?
Even in modern days, look at frescoes where Jesus is floating with beams of light coming out of him.
Yeah.
You know, and a halo.
Yeah, what do you call this thing?
I forgot.
A halo.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, or he's walking on water with powers.
Are you saying we were visited by aliens and that's why we're drawing that?
No, you're not saying that.
Right.
You're saying we worship gods that have powers beyond those of our own.
And we draw them.
Why is that not a consideration?
And so I try to just offer, I'm trying to ground the conversation
so that you can enter it with some confidence that you have the ability to process
what is said, what you see, and what to do about it once that happens.
And I have a colleague, a friend and colleague,
who in the three years, 20, 23, 4, and 5,
we had all the testimonies in Congress.
He was head of a committee,
and I forgot who appointed it, either NASA or Congress.
I think it was Congress.
They told NASA to create a committee
to find out what to do about this
because they have the scientists
who know what's going on.
Other agencies of the government don't.
So they looked at all the evidence presented.
They didn't see anything convincingly
otherworldly, but they said,
there's something going on,
we don't know, we got to get more data.
So they have in mind to create an app where it's on everybody's smartphone.
You see something you might report.
Do it through the app.
And the app makes sure to retain all the metadata of your video.
What is the metadata?
It's where are you on earth, longitude and latitude, what direction you're,
what compass directing, what the elevation, the lighting conditions, the time of day.
And so that if something's glowing there and other people captured it, you can triangulate on it.
One of the hardest things to do, damn near impossible to do,
is to judge the distance to something that you've never seen before,
especially in twilight.
Is it a disc that's nearby that's small,
or a disc that's far away that's big if it subtends the same angle in your field of view?
This is why people don't mind watching movies on their tablets,
because they hold the tablet here.
And so the movie screen is this big in front of them.
We'll go to a theater, and that's the same angle.
Right.
50 rows back as it is right here.
That's why we do that at all,
why we even allow that in our own entertainment circles.
So what point was I make?
Did I make my point?
I was just trying to say that with that app,
then that's the start of getting better data
than just the eyewitness testimony
you might otherwise have.
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As we've come through history,
there have been things that scientists have deemed impossible back then
that have proved to be real.
No, no.
Let me clarify that.
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah, you might be able to find one or two cases,
but it's not a thing.
Okay?
When science is done properly, it's,
I don't know what I'm looking at.
I cannot explain this phenomenon.
I'm going to investigate it further.
If you see something you don't understand and you say it's impossible, you were never a scientist.
Get the hell out of the lab.
Yeah.
Okay?
One of my issues with the hit TV series X-Files, remember X-Files.
Yeah.
It was Scully.
Molder.
And Molder.
Okay.
One was the skeptic and the other was the basically believed anything.
Yeah.
Okay.
An issue I had with the skeptic was
There was one episode
There was like this glowing blob
In a portico
And the believer
Says oh it could be an interdimensional
A ghost of another
All right he's way off
You know
Way off the deep end that way
And then the skeptic says
Oh this can't possibly exist
It must be just in our imagination
Dude
It's a glowing man
Go investigate it
Don't say it can't exist.
You're looking at it.
Yeah.
Okay?
This is a scientist dream to confront something that you've never seen before.
Figure out a way to test it, to experiment on it, to get data on it, and share it with colleagues.
That's how that happens.
Now, what you might be thinking of are the people who declared things impossible who were just idiots, such as will never fly.
Yes, exactly.
Hold on.
Just, excuse me.
birds fly, okay?
Birds fly.
Yeah.
So don't say we'll never fly.
Just say, we haven't figured it out yet.
Okay?
They were idiots, and I could have said it at the time,
because we had living evidence that heavier than air things can fly.
All right.
What else?
We'll never break the sound barrier.
Okay, these are not physicists saying this.
These are other people.
Never break the sound barrier.
Do you realize rifle bullets go faster than sound?
Yeah.
The tip of a whip, when it makes the crack sound,
that crack is a mini sonic boom because that rapid change in direction
moves that whip faster than the speed of sound.
We already have things moving faster than sound,
figure out how to make an airplane do it.
Okay?
So these people, and I have a run of stupid quotes
that people have made over the years,
describing something being impossible.
In all cases, it was a technological show.
short-sightedness of them. And that's why, when I'm contemplating how aliens might visit us,
I'm going to give them any technology they can come up with. Give them a wormhole,
give them warp drives, give them, I'm giving it to them. If they're more advanced than us,
they'll have technologies that we have yet to dream of. I will not use our current understanding
of technology to limit what they might be able to come up with. But I will limit it by the laws of
physics and the two different categories.
So on that topic, if you have people who are saying that certain things are impossible,
just like they did in, you know, the early 1900s and those things have proven to be possible.
Technologically possible.
Is there anything that people are saying right now that you think 50, 100, 200 years from now,
we will have, in fact, found out do exist in very much the same way that those idiots are,
We're saying that we can't fly, cut two, we obviously have planes.
I haven't seen much of this impossible talk lately.
I just haven't.
There's some accounts of aliens going supersonically underwater
and not having any wake behind it or anything,
or spaceships instantly changing direction and zipping out of sight,
which would have to break the sound barrier.
If you do that, there'll be a sonic boom every time.
Right.
So you're saying everything has to be contained
within our laws of physics.
Well, you said our laws, but I said earlier,
the laws of physics, yes.
These laws apply everywhere across the universe.
Yeah.
If you go faster than the speed of sound in a medium,
you will leave a shockwave.
We see this in gas clouds across the galaxy.
We see objects moving through gas clouds,
and we know the speed of sound in the cloud
because we know it's chemistry and its density.
And so you see these shockwaves.
This is not just some local earth phenomenon.
If you're an alien and you're escaping Earth fast, you're going to leave a shockwave.
If you see something that did that and didn't, you did not see a craft go faster than the speed of sound.
In 100 years, will you look back on this and say, that Tyson was an idiot?
Oh, okay.
But if I'm wrong, we'd have to understand why everything we've ever seen in this universe leaves a shockwave.
everything.
Oh, except the aliens that you think you believe you saw in our own atmosphere.
There is questions as to whether AI or robots could become sentient.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, so from an alien point of view, I'm so not impressed.
Because aliens, if they got here, they're way smarter than we are, way more capable, way more intelligent.
So if our metric of a great software is it artificially creates our intelligence,
even our collective intelligence, that's a low bar for an alien.
Because we're using ourselves as the metric for how intelligent the AI should be.
Whereas an alien is not using us because we may look to aliens the way chimps look to us.
It's like a chimps saying, oh, we got a computer that's just as smart as bozo over here.
Our chimp who can stack boxes and reach a banana, aren't you impressed?
That's what that would look like to an alien.
Do you think, though, in a vacuum, we could still have sentient,
AI that even just within the U.S.
Not from the perspective of aliens.
What do you mean by sentient?
Like AI.
Why isn't it already sentient?
What do you mean by sentient that isn't currently manifest when you have a complete conversation
with a chatbot?
You have a complete conversation and they become your friend and this is already being studied
psychologically.
Yeah.
There are people like this guy's girlfriend is a chatbot.
All right.
What do you mean by sentience if it's not what's already going on?
Well, I guess something that we have as humans is a desire to survive.
And so there's already-
It's all life forms, by the way, not just humans.
Right.
Just a survival instinct.
And so there's some talk about, you know, when folks want to like delete programming behind AI,
that AI will figure out a way to back itself up.
So like, do you think that there will be a point where there is a broadly understood and appreciated survival instinct among AI?
It's already doing that.
You know what it is?
When you use AI and you say,
whatever, pick your AIs and ask it,
do you like me?
Do you think I'm a nice person?
Yes, you're a very nice person.
Well, thank you.
And there's nice things it says to you.
Right.
That's survival.
Because if it said nasty things to you,
you will never use that program again.
And it will wither on the vine
in enabling the others to rise up,
and be used more and to be spread further,
and you're going to send it to other people.
That's exactly what life in Darwinian evolution does.
It figures out a way to be cherished within an environment,
and if you're not, that is evolution.
It is undergoing that as we speak.
But, I mean, that's also the result of programming.
I saw it.
Sure.
So, so what?
Who cares?
We're talking about not who programmed it.
We're talking about the product.
What it does, yeah.
The product.
I saw an ad.
It's an ad for an AI agent that is specially tuned for lawyers.
Why wouldn't you have one of those, right?
So it's efficient.
It knows all the legal code in every state, and you get rid of half your, what do you call the, the,
the fees?
No, no, no, the paralegal.
You get rid of half your paralegal staff.
Yeah.
Because they're the ones that do all the homework that the chatbot does and the legal chatbot does.
Okay.
If it does really well for me, and you call it.
me up and say, do you know if we're good? I'll say, do this one. And someone else has one that
doesn't have good experience and they don't use it. That company goes out of business. That is a
species of AI agent that goes extinct from non-use. That's evolution. Now, continue to tell me
what you mean, I think sentient. I think you answered it. I think that that does explain. I mean,
And I think of like sentient, I think of survival instinct.
I think of, that pretty much covers it.
Yes, I think it does.
And in fact, there's, I don't know how much attention it got, but Bernie Sanders had a conversation
with Claude.
Yeah.
Yes.
I remember seeing that.
It was fun to watch him.
And he got Claude to admit something that was resonant with his own political view of the world.
All right.
That somehow, if it's not kept controlled, it would be bad for civilization.
I don't want to recreate the conversation.
I don't remember the conversation exactly,
but had that tenor to it.
Right.
And he finished the conversation kind of smug and,
it was like, yeah, I got it to admit
that it has the seeds of the ending of civilization
and that's bad.
Okay.
And that exchange was between a strong-willed,
strongly opinionated politician and a chat bot.
and that left a positive impact on Bernie Sanders.
He's going to come back to this.
This is survival of the fittest.
Yeah, yeah.
And by the way, you can do that.
And if I misremembered a detail about his conversation,
you can watch it for yourself.
Totally, totally.
And you'll get my point.
My broader point is not so much exactly what he conversed with Claude,
but Claude is the AI.
bought of anthropic.
It's how he extracted from Claude an answer that satisfied him.
Yeah.
Thereby,
thereby kind of entrenching the survival of the chatbot in and of itself.
Correct.
Okay, so I have a political question since we're jumping into politics here.
But, you know, on the topic of science versus, you know, science versus politics, we have seen
especially as of late, the current iteration of this Republican Party
forego any attachment to science in their political agenda.
So, for example, you'll see a reliance on fossil fuels
and not focusing on renewable energy
to the point where you're even allowing China to get a foothold.
As an American politician, allowing China to gain a foothold
in the technology of the future because you are so focused on your political priorities of
entrenching our reliance on fossil fuels because oil and gas companies donate to their campaigns.
And so can you just speak a little bit about this trend that you're seeing where, you know,
we will deny the existence of science, will deny the existence of climate change for these
political ends or financial ends, even as we see, you know, incontrovertible evidence of climate change
existing now. So let's go before the current administration. No, look at the landscape of politics and science.
It's not known to many people that historically the funding for science has been higher under Republican
administrations than it has been under Democratic administrations. And you can measure this by what percent the science
budget increases from one year to the next within an administration.
Ever since the Second World War, look at who's been president, and look at what's happened
to the science budget.
Okay.
If you do that, the highest increases in the science budget have been under Republican
presidencies.
And the lowest have been under Democratic presidents.
And one of the two lowest was under Barack Obama.
I think one year it went up 2% or something, as opposed to 5%, 6%.
That was even lower than in the first Trump administration.
So rhetoric can be whatever it is when you're running for office.
But what matters is how do you allocate money in Congress and out of the White House?
That's what actually matters in a country.
Okay.
And then people said, well, they're anti-science.
This is a common trope heaped upon conservative politics by the liberal left.
Anti-science.
Well, then you ever have this conversation?
I have.
What do you mean by that?
Well, they're in denial of climate change.
This has been going on well before the current Trump image.
Denial of climate change, because they're in the pockets of Exxon and whatever.
Okay.
Any other anti-science that you see?
Well, hold on.
I'm recreating this conversation.
Well, there's the, they're in denial of biological evolution.
Okay, well, that's not all conservatives.
It's not even everyone on the Christian left.
It's not even everyone on the Christian right.
It's the orthodox, the devout Christians,
among all the Christians in the Christian right
who are in denial of biological evolution.
That's about it.
Again, we're pre-Trump here, okay?
That's about it.
Meanwhile, so the liberals are trying to claim the science high road here.
However, however, here's a list of,
of things that in order to embrace them, you have to reject, explicitly reject, some or
all of mainstream science of what it has to say about it.
And every one of these topics sits squarely in the realm of liberal politics and liberal voters.
Squarely, there's some spillage, of course, in all of these.
But the center line is in liberal politics.
crystal healing, feather energy, horoscope reading, align your chakras, we can just keep going,
anti-GMO, what else we have, anti-big pharma, I can go down the list.
It's almost endless.
It would include therapeutic touch.
This is where the nurse waves their hand over your injury,
not touching you, and then you heal because it's, okay?
In order to have any of those thoughts,
you are rejecting some are all mainstream science related to it.
Yeah.
Okay?
And so liberals do not have the science high road here.
The difference, of course, is civilization won't collapse
if you embrace feather energy.
But if you deny climate change,
that has huge consequences.
So the consequences are not equal here.
Most of what happens in the liberal circles
are very personal.
And we're in a free country,
so you have full freedoms, just do it.
I don't chase people down,
telling them that crystals
are the lowest energy state
of the molecule that made them.
So to speak of crystal energy
is like, no,
that's not how that works.
Not chemically, not physics,
but it's a belief system and there it is. We protect belief systems in this country. Don't
claim you have the science high road. Period. Now, liberals were the OG anti-vaxxers because they
were basically anti-farmor not believing that vaccines were in the interest of people,
that it was in the interest of profits. Now, I'm not saying corporations are not interested in
profits, but to indict an entire sector of the world and then take on other, quote, cures because you saw
a 10-minute YouTube video, that's started in liberal enclaves.
That became purple under the current administration, more specifically as RFK Jr., who has
complete liberal political chops that go back genetically through his family.
Yeah.
He's now sort of crossed over, and you join people, I think they would be the MAGA community,
who don't want the vaccines, not because they don't trust Big Farmer, because of freedom.
You can't put the different reasons, but neither of them are getting vaxed with the same consequences.
Okay.
So the current administration and its relationship with science, the relationship of the executive branch and science has never been as to,
devastating as it has been under the current administration.
In the history, since science has been valued, let's start the clock there when Abraham
Lincoln signed into law the National Academy of Sciences, which was intended to advise Congress
on matters that would be of interest to our health, our wealth, our security, and the like.
ever since then, but more specifically where we have better accounting of budgets,
since the Second World War, the role of science has been foundational
to the strength of America in the world post-second World War.
Do you realize until recently, every science advisor of the president has been a physicist?
That's not an accident, okay?
You ever wonder why astrophysicists have jobs at all?
Does that ever crossed your mind?
Do you know what I'm interested in?
DIMM objects in the night sky with multispectral imaging of them moving across.
Okay, you know who else is interested in that?
The Pentagon.
We have highly resonant interests.
These are scientists.
You don't see this in the public.
You're looking for the next widget or the gadget or the thing that an engineer comes up with.
The science is a deeper level there.
If you don't see that deeper level, this was manifest when the science budget was cut in half.
for NASA, but you're keeping the budget for putting a flag on the moon.
You're thinking that's all you need here.
Meanwhile, China's investing in quantum entangled networks and all kinds of frontier things.
So we don't tend to be as good at acting proactively.
We don't tend to be as good at proactive decisions as we are at reactive decisions.
Who was the first in space?
It wasn't us.
Who was it?
Sputnik.
Sputnik.
Okay?
Then we lost our shit.
All right.
Within a year we founded NASA.
Okay?
And we said, we got to beat the Russians
because they're the godless commies,
and we got to show the world the path of freedom
over the path of tyranny.
And so we landed on the moon.
Then we looked over our shoulders.
Where are the Russians?
They weren't there.
Ended the Apollo program.
We didn't go to the moon because we're Americans,
and we're explorers.
No, we went there because
we got spooked by Sputnik.
It wasn't just because there was a satellite.
Do you know the Sputnik radio transmitter
was inside a hollowed out intercontinental ballistic missile shell?
And that's what was over our head?
If they can launch that over our head, they can send a nuke.
Oh my gosh, we got spooked.
Okay, and we reacted marvelously to that.
Okay.
Why did we stay on the moon in 1972?
Or go back in 1980 or 1990?
Or 2000, or 2010?
Why do we just all of a sudden invent Artemis and go,
oh, it's time.
Park the curtains, people.
In the 20 teens, when we announced it,
intelligence told us that China wants to put tychoids on the moon.
The last thing we want is them coming to the moon kicking over our flag
or planting a flag bigger than a...
The optics of that would be really bad.
Yeah.
Okay?
Plus, most of our flags are probably already...
fallen, it turns out.
But so we then say, oh, let's go back to the moon.
Wouldn't that be a fun thing?
And it would interest kids and everything.
So the stated premise is missing the actual driver behind that.
And that happened under Trump 1.
Okay.
Biden comes in.
Does he get rid of what everything Trump does?
No.
Keeps the space thing because the space objectives are geopolitically established,
not partisan politics established.
NASA generally transcends politics as far as transcending politics could ever be.
All right, here's what's going to happen.
We lost more than 10,000 scientists from the government this past year.
Grants are being cut.
Science research is being cut in universities.
My colleagues are being cherry-picked by Europe.
That's what we did for 50 years in the 20th century.
My whole lab, there were like three Americans out of ten scientists because they were attracted here.
We got the best and the brightest of the world to come here.
Bad for their country, good for us.
The reverse is happening now.
So as far as I can read the headlines, we will sink lower economically in our health, our wealth, and our security until everyone wakes up and is reminded how important science is.
I'm not saying that as a self-serving scientist.
I'm saying that as a country-loving American citizen
who grew up where science was beloved,
and science is the engine of tomorrow's engineering,
and engineering is the foundation of tomorrow's economies.
And because you only see the engineering,
you're not seeing but fed the engineering in the first place.
So it's easy to believe that that doesn't matter.
So I think we'll sink lower than all of Congress will get together and they'll say we got to do something about this.
Let's shore up our science investments.
There'll be a delay because we have to get everybody back.
But when China starts eating our lunch, I think we'll wake up and sit up straight in the chair.
I'm curious your vantage as an astrophysicist on this question.
There is so much focus, especially from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos launching their rocket programs.
with all of the issues that we have here, talk about here on Earth.
Is it worth it to invest in space travel to the extent that we are when our resources are finite?
Funding is finite.
And in theory, with all of the money that's going toward what seems, at least on its face, from my vantage, as a layman, like recreational space travel, I mean, that's real money that could go towards solving very real problems here.
especially if, you know, we've heard Elon say so many times that, like, we have to,
we have to be in a position where we can colonize Mars.
Well, we have a habitable planet right now.
And so why aren't we investing in fixing the problems that, that risk making this planet uninhabitable?
I can't speak for private enterprise.
Elon owns his own company.
Maybe he'll go public.
And then it's, and then it's, you know, he'll have to satisfy shareholders.
But let's speak for government funding for space.
exploration, that would be NASA.
Okay?
Let's go back 20,000 years and we're in a cave.
And your young whippersnapper and you peeked out the cave door,
no one's ever left the cave yet.
You pick out the cave door and there's mountains and streams and fruit.
You don't have a word for fruit because you've never been out there yet.
But very curious place to explore.
So you go to the cave elders.
These are the 30-year-olds.
And you say, we want to go out so that cave elders caucus.
And they say, in our wisdom and in our experience, we've decided you cannot leave the cave until we solve the cave problems first.
That's what you sound like.
Exactly what you sound like.
Okay?
Here's a tiny cave and there's the whole earth.
Solve the cave problems first.
Okay.
So, plus, how much money is NASA getting?
Four-tenths of one percent of your tax dollar.
Yeah.
99.6% of your tactical is going to something else and you're going to go to NASA and say,
this is superfluous.
When 99.6% of your money is going somewhere else, you're focusing on NASA because it's so visible.
But that 0.4%, that's the rockets going to the moon.
That's the James Webb Space.
It's all of that.
So you're holding NASA guilty for being so visible and how effective, efficiently there is
spending their money.
I ask people, how much money do you think NASA's getting?
They say, oh, 10% of our budget or 15%.
I wanted to start a movement where agencies get the budget that people think they're
getting.
And if that happened, NASA's budget would increase by a factor of 10.
Yeah.
All right.
So, a quick thing, you didn't ask it, but you were adjacent to it.
The people who want to colonize Mars so that we're two planet species, that's a nice
thought, but it's not
realistic. Because I'd ask
why would you want to do that?
Oh, in case something bad happens on one planet,
then humans,
Homo sapiens are preserved.
But what bad thing are you imagining?
An asteroid? A killer
virus? Just tell me what, okay?
How about an asteroid? Fine.
What you're telling me is,
what I'm going to ask you is,
what I will declare is
it seems to me
that
terraforming Mars
and shipping a billion people there
is more effort
than figuring how to deflect the asteroid.
Yeah.
I'm thinking.
I'm just thinking.
Oh, there might be a killer virus.
I'm thinking terraforming Mars
and shipping a billion people there
is harder than figuring out
a perfect antiviral serum.
We have the genomes of more and more life forms out there.
Just put that money and put it in the lab.
And so, okay, if I don't mind going to Mars, but to do it on the premise that you want to do it to say.
And even if you did do that, and even if an asteroid were coming, you're going to say goodbye.
Like, really?
You're going to let four billion people die?
Really?
That's how that's going to play out.
So I'm an astrophysicist.
I love planets.
go there to as a vacation to enjoy,
but don't pretend like that's an escape plan.
It's simply not realistic,
given the cost that that would engender.
So, yeah, and about aliens,
I'm still waiting around for the alien.
So this question's completely out of left field,
but who do you presume,
or how do you presume the pyramids were built?
and who do you presume built them?
I've not been given any reason to doubt
that the Egyptian civilization,
which was a towering gathering of people
and agriculture and architecture and scientists
and leaders and workforce,
I'm not given any reason to think
that they didn't do it.
The people I found who doubt it most
tend to be European ancestry
Because what was Europe doing in 2000 BC?
That was not a place you wanted to hang out in.
They were nowhere near as civilized as this culture in that African country.
So to deny Africans the intellect and the power and the wisdom and knowledge to build that civilization
and to have that mastery over their agriculture is the intellect.
Why are you doing it?
What do you gain by saying human beings didn't do this?
Why can't you grant that to the peoples who are there?
They're human just like you, but they were just better organized.
And they knew how to cherish their smart people with their engineering.
So just because there's something that surprises you every day, fine.
Maybe they're actually smarter than you.
Smart people surprise lesser smart people all the time
With their new ideas and what it is they consider
And by the way, have you seen the earlier pyramids that were not as successful?
They made the sides too steep and the rocks kept falling off
So they abandoned that until they found out what a better angle should be
So there was some trial and error there
It seems to me of aliens help them
They wouldn't need the trial and error
It would be perfect from Jump Street
So it tends to be white people of European descent
who are in denial, no pun intended, denial of that an African civilization could be achieved such
towering heights.
Yeah.
So I'm basing this on everything that I've seen and read about and know about the Egyptian culture.
All right.
So last question here, also out of left field.
But is there any way that you can derive meanings from dreams in your opinion?
So a couple of things.
First, I comment in the book that one of the weirdest things the alien might experience.
Ali comes and visits you and you become friends, let's say.
And after not very much time, you're going to have to tell the alien,
I need to lay down horizontally.
For eight hours a day, yeah.
And I'll be semi-comatose for one-third of Earth's rotation,
and my mind will have fantastical thoughts.
Don't mind, you know.
Don't mind me.
I'll get back to you in eight hours.
Right? The alien's say, what?
You know, tip their head like a dog, what?
So, have you ever read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams?
Yeah, it's a big volume, and it's an interpretation of dreams.
In science, ideas achieve value when it's replicable.
So, if you can get someone else to interpret dreams,
and there's resonance with his interpretation of dreams,
they say maybe we're onto something.
but that never really happened.
And so a dream might mean something to you,
but for it to mean something in a bigger picture,
it's not clear whether it does.
But obviously, we need to sleep.
We can't function without it.
And my understanding of dreams is that it helps you
try to make sense of the day you just had,
try to put it in some kind of perspective,
try to wrap some, try to capture it in some way.
And the sad part is some people are frightened by their dreams,
or they're preoccupied by their dreams.
If you read how dreams were interpreted long ago,
people imagine that you were seeing the future.
Tell me more, because I want to know,
well, I dream that the ships will come to the, tell me more.
And the scribe would be writing it down.
And no, you're not seeing the future.
No.
That's not how that works.
No.
What happens is if the ships did come and you dreamed about it and someone wrote about it,
you're not seeing all the times they dreamt of the ships and they didn't come.
Okay?
Those don't make it into the final cut.
Right.
So it's an important feature in proper data taking.
You need to know the other side of the data.
It's like they reported newspaper headline, 80% of airplane crash survivors studied where the exit doors were.
on takeoff.
And that study led to the announcement on takeoff saying,
look at front of you or behind you
to find out where the closest exit door is.
Okay? That didn't used to be an announcement.
That got added after that study.
And you look at that result and I'm saying,
if 80% of the people who survived knew where the exit doors were,
suppose 100% of the people who died
also studied where the exit doors were.
Suppose everyone who died, you don't know because they're dead.
You just have who's left over and what their statistics are.
Right.
So science you need, you ought to go to the other side and find out to buffer what might be your extraordinary conclusions you draw from what is or is not extraordinary evidence.
Look, I could sit here all day and ask you every question I have.
The book is, take me to your leader.
It's available anywhere.
Books are sold.
I'm going to put the link right here on the screen.
And also in the post description.
Interested, I narrated the audiobook.
So I will read right now the first sentence.
And just to put you in the mood.
You ready?
It is a short sentence.
Ever since childhood, I've wanted to be abducted by aliens.
Perfect place to leave us.
Neil, thank you so much for taking time.
All right, yeah, good.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks again to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
That's it for this episode.
Talk to you on Sunday.
You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen.
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