The Chris Cuomo Project - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

In this week’s episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, Chris is joined by Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and author of “Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.” In a lively and expansive conversation, the “StarTalk” podcast host speaks with Chris about why science needs to be taught differently, why politicians should be thought of as followers instead of leaders, how to get people to change their own beliefs in spite of their feelings, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday. Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/chris. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We should think of our politicians not as our leaders, but as our followers. And so the more educated we are, the more enlightened we are, that puts a mandate on our, quote, leaders to do exactly what we say. Not for them to make statements to require what we do. Hey, I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to another episode of the Chris Cuomo Project. This is a big one. You're gonna wanna subscribe and follow because this one is gonna get you. The free agent merch. I got the ultimate free agent on the show today. If you check it out,

the money that you use to pay for free agent merch, that I use to pay for free agent merch, is gonna help us to do some cooperative giving to others. All right, that's why I'm pushing it the way I am. Now, the ultimate free agent, Neil deGrasse Tyson, physicist, science guy, understands things so well. I've known him forever, and he is finally doing something that I had always hoped he would. He's applying his understanding of critical thinking, or science if you want, to what's happening around us and the issues that are dividing us.

Very interesting. He's not going to tell you what to think, but he is showing us how we should think as critical thinkers, which is what should matter most. It's the one thing we need. Critical thinkers, free agents. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Starry Messenger is his new book. It is such a good read. And if this plays like a love letter, it's because it is. I believe that we need to put more emphasis on our thinkers,

our philosophers, our scientists, our poets, our people who create things and think about who we are. And he is one of our best. You know who he is, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And other societies, other cultures, they look to men like him and women like him, thinkers, writers, philosophers, scientists. What do they think about the issues of the day?

What matters? What doesn't? Why wouldn't you want your best put to the test of what matters in the public square? Now, here I get it. They stay out of it because it's too dangerous. It's a brave move by the professor. And I was so happy that he came and sat on the couch. It's so good. The man has a lot to say, but most importantly, it's so much brain food for us to be better critical thinkers. Neil deGrasse Tyson with a must-read book and a must-watch and listen conversation.

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Restrictions apply. You see the website. You'll get details and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. Professor, what a pleasure. Thank you for being my friend. and subscription plan. Professor. What a pleasure.

Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for being here. Good to see you again. Now, what I have just said in the introduction, I will redouble on, which is this is a love letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson because for over 20 years, I have been saying we need our best and our brightest to talk about what's happening in the public square.

And you are one of our best and brightest in our country. And this book, which you must read, and you know me, I don't tell you to read a lot of books. This book is so smart. If you want to think, if you want to care, and I know I just said this to you, but when you repeat things, it helps. We have someone who knows how to think, thinking about what is going on with our dynamic on the issues that matter. This is what we need. Yeah. I was pregnant with the book. The book is actually, again, forgive the uterine analogy, but I've been gestating that book for decades. Ever since you told me that, and even earlier, I was observing the world around me, and I'm saying, no, that's not, they didn't think this through. This whole community is making a decision, and don't they

realize that the statistics don't, and I kept my distance because I'm an astrophysicist and I'm telling you about the Hubble telescope and all the things you want to hear from me, but I'm collecting these observations throughout my life. In fact, I remember the first moment was I was 14 and I'm certainly scientifically literate. I was early science geek. All right. And there I am. There was a comet that was coming by, Comet Kahootek. Wait, I'm old. I'm older than you. I got 10 years on you, dude. This is the early 70s. And Comet Kahootek is coming by. We discovered it really far away. So people said, if we discover it that far out, by the time it gets here, it's going to be bright. And it was going to come around in December, like it would be a Christmas comet.

And like in October, before it was visible to the naked eye, I saw full-grown adults holding signs saying, repent, the comet is coming. The end of the world is near. And I said, no. And I'm 14 years old and I know that's bullshit. And you're a full grown adult. What's wrong with you? How, how, and it's one thing to just not know. I'm an educator. We, we're attracted to people who don't know stuff because that's our friendship. We teach, that's what we do. But if you think you know something and don't, that's dangerous. Now, that person was of no societal consequence, right? They didn't have their own TV show. So being pregnant with this, this past year, I said, it's ready to be birthed. I'm looking for the page in the book. So sayeth the professor that there is a rule that one of the aphorisms you have in here is that never thinking something is true if you know it's false. Oh, yeah.

No, no. And never saying that something is false if you know that it is true. Well, no. So it's slightly different from that. Tell me. It is the methods and tools of science have only really one objective. All right? I'm going to restate this scientific method.

All right? Typically, when you hear it described, whoa, experiment, induction, deduction. No. Yes, but no. Okay? Here it is. Do whatever it takes to ensure that you're not fooled into thinking something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is. Period. And if it means your eyewitness

testimony is insufficient because you didn't have your coffee this morning, or because you have some delusions, or because you have some social, emotional pains that filter what you're seeing and reporting, find another way to get the data. Because these would be forces operating on your bias that puts a gap between what you think or want to be true and what is objectively true in the world. And science is all about that.

That's the back on which civilization has been built. That's why planes don't fall out of the sky. That's why we can land spacecraft on comets, okay? That's why we can collide with an asteroid. We can park a telescope a million miles from Earth and observe the edge of the universe. That's why. It's why your smartphone

can tell you the shortest route to grandma's house in traffic without any human intervention. That's called science, technology, engineering. First footnote, Neil deGrasse Tyson does not get heated up about things ordinarily because he's a thinker. He's very emotionally sensitive. But what we are doing to ourselves is so preposterous that someone who bases his life on objectivity can't handle it. I can't. I can't. I'm losing it. Cut to, we're finally allowed to go out and eat again at some point during the pandemic. I go to a restaurant near where I live. Neil's there with some friends. I have none, so I'm alone. And I walk up and I say, hello. Neil is in the middle of conversation with people where he is clearly

what we used to call vexed. Okay. And he says to me, I've been watching what you're doing, brother. This is crazy. He says to me, he's like, this is crazy. Nobody believes anything that you're saying. I said, I know there's an attack on science. And he said to me, he was like, no, no, you can't attack science. Science is knowledge. Science is wisdom, which means we've already done the vetting. You have to show people what vetting is. And I was like, yup.

And I left. And easy to say, hard to do. What did it mean to you? It doesn't matter if it was Fauci or who it was, although I did believe you shouldn't have had a scientist making political arguments to people. You put him in a bad position because people want certainty.

They want you to give them hope and aspiration. And that's what politicians do. They tell you things that are maybe a step or two beyond what we know because of what we want to believe. That's not what you do. I tweeted recently. I said, politicians lie to us because we want them to. It's like, don't tell me the truth.

Tell me what I want to hear, and I'll vote for you. My father once said, may he rest in peace, you'll never hear a politician say, you don't like your taxes? Make more money. Be more useful to society so that people pay you more so you don't care about having to pay taxes. No one's going to tell you that because it doesn't give you an agency for your animus. Agency for your animus? Whoa. Oh, you can have it. I'm here, Donald.

Wait, what SAT test? Did you get 800 on your verbal SAT? How quickly? Agency for your animus. How quickly my friends are astonished by anything that comes out of my mouth larger than the word mayonnaise. I know those two words. i just don't use them because i don't i'm trying to actually communicate with people that's why i have you here okay i just say because it's alliterative if it rhymes i feel like i love alliterative yeah and i think that would be assonance that is assonance right as opposed to civil yeah yes thank you yeah there he is. So you watch the world, and people are saying, I refuse to do X because I don't like it.

And even if you tell me that there is a basis in scientific understanding for this thing, I will just accuse you of trying to make me do what I don't want to do. There is no objective basis. What did it mean to you? So what you just did there is an amalgam of different attitudinal postures that are out there. So one of them is, I don't care what you say.

I have my freedoms and I declare that my freedoms is, I don't want to do anything you tell me. On some level, that's defensible, right? They're not saying the science is right or wrong. They're just saying, I don't want to do what you want to tell me to do. What I mean by defensible is you cannot use science to argue that person out of that position. So what do you then do? You say, well, by you doing that or not doing this, you're putting someone else in jeopardy. So your freedom is now encroaching on the health and security of others. So now the person has to, if they still feel that way, they have to say, I don't care about others. Well, that's another kind of conversation. And where's the humanity? Is this, what have we lost in society where you don't care that you could get someone sick who then ends up

having their grandparents die, right? If you looked at the numbers, the excess deaths from COVID are real, right? They're not just people who would have died anyway. They're people who would not have died anyway, not at least in that year or the year that followed. And so there's a real bump. We all know people who died of COVID personally, right? So it's not like it's some other thing, obscure statistic that affects other people and not you. So that's one kind of concern I have, the concern that people are losing their sense of caring. But people say to them, what they asked you to do wouldn't have made it any better, may have made it worse. Lockdowns were a mistake. Masks aren't necessary. People get sick. You get your immunity. A lot of these people had comorbidities. You know, look at the popularity

of DeSantis. That's the run of arguments. That's the run of arguments where people have cherry picked the information to satisfy what they already want to be true. Again, I'm an educator, so I don't beat people on the head. I ask myself, why do they think this way? Why do they think they have this kind of latitude to choose this information and not that information? And then I realize that science needs to be taught differently. This is almost too easy to give this as an excuse.

Because people say, well, isn't the answer more complex than that? Is it a social cultural budget? No, I think it's just how did you learn science? Was it, here's a book, textbook. Oh, by the way, there are words that are bullface. Better memorize those, okay? Because there's going gonna be a test all right and um and you study the chapter take the test and then you move on and then at the end of the class you're done and you move on to something else so you learned a body of knowledge maybe retained it probably not many people lose what they learned uh can i give a quick off ramp i thought he was gonna quiz me for a second i was like this, this is going to go very badly. I was just hoping I could spell science. A quick off-ramp. Do you remember the comedian Father Guido Sarducci? Okay. He had one bit,

okay? One bit I just, it stuck with me my entire life. He said, he's going to start a new university, a 10-minute university. You can get a degree in 10 minutes. They said, no, you can't. How are you going to do that? How? Okay, here's how. He will teach you only the things you would have remembered five years later. Okay, so economics, supply and demand. Buy it, sell it for more. Boom, that's your A plus, Okay. Spanish class. Como esta usted? Muy bien, gracias. Boom. So this was deep to me because I said, when I teach classes,

what does it mean to give this nuanced syllabus with all this detail that, yeah, in the subject, it matters if you're going to be an expert in the subject, but if it's your one pass through the content, let me teach you things that you're going to want to remember, that you will remember. So after that Guido Sarducci bit, okay, I saw that while in high school so i didn't teach until later i shaped my university classes based on what i thought people would remember the most so much of what you're taught in the science class gets regurgitated and forgotten somewhere in there you need to learn you need to be taught science is a way of querying nature it is it is a want to wait for the siren no no no because this is New York City now.

I hear sirens every five seconds. We keep it real here. We're keeping it real. I can't tell you how many times over the years doing interviews, people have been saying something and a producer has stopped it and been like,

if we could just wait for sound. I was like, he's saying why he knew his mother was going to die. You really want to go back? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So don't worry about it. It'll all make sense to the people listening. So what I think should happen is in every science class, some fraction of the syllabus needs to be devoted to what science is and how and

why it works. And what is it about science that empowers you to have confidence in its results? And what about science enables you to say, I'm not sure about these results, but it's the best available. Let me keep doing research. That was the part that I- That's missing. That's missing- I believe it's missing. In people's understanding of science. It usually doesn't matter. I can get a result from a telescope and I say, these were the first results. This is what we think is happening.

And a month later we say another telescope found something else and you're kind of fun. It's like, oh, this is like the bleeding edge of discovery. All cool. But if it's a new virus and we know this much, but not that much about it, is it your task to make stuff up? I mean, what I did the entire time is I followed the guidance of medical professionals at any given moment. And once you realize that that is science on a moving frontier, you have to say to yourself, this could change. And if it does does change it doesn't mean there was something nefarious about what happened last week or a month ago it doesn't mean that at all it means we have better data to have more nuanced guidance on how you were going to in the case of covid to resist the virus early in the days we were scrubbing everything. There's some viruses

that transmit that way. And so, no, it wasn't crazy to suggest that. We learn more that COVID is more airborne than on surfaces. You learn this, and then the advice gets updated. What the CDC could have done better is been honest about the state of the knowledge at the time it came in. So, for example, Paul Offit, who was one of the visible people interviewed for how we should deal with COVID, was interviewed, I think it was by Christiane Amanpour, and he said, look, this virus is not going to be bad. It'll be contained within a few weeks and maybe a few thousand cases, that's it. Yeah, he was wrong.

Very wrong. Here's the problem. Here we have a scientist, he's a medical professional, who's not trained how to communicate to the public. All right? What should he have said? Here's what he should have said. Right now, there are measures taken in these countries that have contained the virus in these ways.

He had presumed the United States would respond as swiftly and as efficiently as these other countries, and had we done so, it would have been contained, but we did not, and therefore it wasn't. But since he didn't present his information couched that way, this is a declaration of a medical professional. And then three months later, it's wrong, and then you say, well, therefore I will not listen to anything else he says. This is bypassing an entire understanding of what's going on and how and why you can and should interact with that information.

So that's what's unfortunate. Context. That is fine in the classroom, in the boardroom, at a conference. In politics, doubt is death. If you are explaining a position, you are losing. And that was their mistake, is that they fell into that game. No, no, you can't say it's fine in the classroom but not here, because if it's fine in the classroom and an entire generation of people is trained this way, they won't vote for people who carry on that way. But they did. No, no, we don't have this generation yet trained to know what science is and how and why it works.

The entire first chapter of that book explains what is an objective truth and how you arrive at it. And if someone has an answer, if someone has a result, you know what the press does? I'm going to indict you and your people. Go ahead. I'm coming for you too. Oh, I'm right here. Don't worry about it. I'm just letting you go through your ammo. All right. I think I got some reserves in the back. Go ahead. What about my people? What do we do? What you do is you find some research result that's intriguing or conflicting

with prevailing wisdom and you lead with it because you want to be the first to break that story. Because if it's true, it's amazing. But most stories like that are not true.

Yes, the research result of that one study was what it was, but it needs to be verified. I devote pages in this to try to get people to understand one scientific result is not, yeah, science is a path to truth, but one researcher's result is not the truth. That has to be skeptically assessed by colleagues doing other experiments to see if their result holds up because they might have been biased. They might have used a wall current that was different from what they

should have used. There might have been a spike in the day. Anything could happen. They could have had a disgruntled graduate student who turned the knob the wrong way. This happens in science. It happens all the time in science. We verify, you get a confirmation of it, then you have a new objective truth in the world. But the press jumps on it. And then when you get a different result, so is cholesterol good for you this week or is it bad for you this week? Because you jumped on the early studies that said one thing versus another. Remember, when was it? 15 years ago about the Mediterranean diet and that was going to be the best way, keep down on the animal fats. Do you realize that was a European

study, had a gazillion people in it? Great. Look how big the study is. You realize that study, European study, did not include France? France was not part of the data. They mainline duck fat in France, okay? And do you realize their life expectancy is like six months less than Italy, okay? There's no really big difference there. It was absent from the study. So the researchers themselves were not biased in their interpretation. The foundations of the data were biased. And if you don't see that, you're going to lead to conclusions that are not true, which is why you need other studies. I'm with you. I'm with you about it. But again, we need this type of intelligence and rational thought applied to politics. The problem is the rules of the game don't really allow it. And that's what happened during the pandemic was,

yes, you didn't have the generation in place who knew how to be objectively skeptical. But also in politics, it's about certainty. If I raise taxes, this will happen. If I lower taxes, this will happen. If I do this, this will happen. And then I sell you on it and it's messaging and people want to believe that or not. And that's where it is. What happened with the pandemic, and I lived it in real time as part of the problem in the media, was they would come out, Fauci, anybody in a white coat, and say, here's what we think. One, they didn't know. It's what they, this is what we think right now. Okay. In politics, that is weakness. Okay. Because people crave certainty from their leaders. Then what happened was those people, clinicians, all of them got caught up in the political measurements

of what to say and what not to say. So that they can be effective. Yes. And they started to shorthand some of the things. For instance, we were all cleaning our vegetables. Then it went to being an aerosolized virus. They didn't come out and say, we were wrong about the cleaning thing. Stop that.

When I said we didn't need masks, it's because we thought it was that kind of virus. Now we know it isn't. I was wrong. We need to do this. By the way, it's not even the statement that you were wrong. Because at the time... You were right.

Right. So it's not about right or wrong. It's at any given moment, what does the best evidence tell you? But in politics, a change of position is a weakness. And I'm going to tell you, we need to breed, train, whatever word you want to use, a generation of people who are not susceptible to that in politicians. Not only that, I'll say it here, but I haven't tweeted it yet, okay? It's maybe in this democracy, it's a republic, I get it, but representative democracy, we should think of our politicians not as our leaders, but as our followers.

We are. That puts a mandate on our, quote, leaders to do exactly what we say. Not for them to make statements to require what we do. They should really be viewed as our followers. People like to be led. They like it easy. That's. They like people to make their choices and then they can criticize.

There's a, I quote, Walter Badshot in there, 19th century essayist, where he says, there's no greater pain to the human spirit than the prospect of a new idea. He's indicting. So, you know, you just rather be told what to do and you do it. You don't have to think. And you get somebody to blame. So one step backwards. Yeah. You had been careful about getting involved with things that were political. I mean,

historically. Yes. No, no. I would say that differently. Go ahead. Yes, but there's a nuance that misses. I will say anything that has scientific objectivity to it, regardless of how you then interpret it politically. And I had a boatload of these observations, some of which I shared, most of which are in this book today. By the way, I don't take sides, all right? I do privately. I have my own opinions, but I don't view my platform,

if you want to call it that, as a platform to impart my opinions on others. You should have your own opinions. But if you formulate an opinion, why not make sure it's as deeply informed as it could possibly be? Otherwise, your opinion is dangling there on some house of cards that has no foundation to it. There's a point where we wade through the objective truths, get to the edge, and now we have political differences about what to do about it. I have no problems with that. So behind closed

doors in Congress, you should not be arguing about whether humans are warming the earth. That is an objectively established scientific truth. Multiple branches of study, many, many different scientists over decades, all right? There's no greater way to establish an objective truth than that. Once you agree to that, now you say, what are we going to do about it? Carbon tax? Do we subsidize electric cars or solar panels? That's a political conversation. I have no problems with that.

Go argue that. Go give your best pitch, you know, stump speech on why carbon tax is or is not good. If that's what was going on out there, I'd sit back and say, you know, God bless America. But that's not what's happening. And that's what scares me as a scientist. If people are arguing something that is objectively known, we're not only wasting time in a ticking time bomb in our climate, but we are delaying progress in a country which where I grew up, where you grew up, mostly in the 20th century, we led the world in everything.

So there's a tweet that people accused of being political when it was objectively true. You ready? It was, and by the way, this may have influenced the recent midterms. and by the way, this may have influenced the recent midterms. I simply said, mid-COVID, Republican voters are currently dying at five times the rate of Democratic voters because of the great difference in vaccine hesitancy between these two groups. That's what I said. Deal with it. People said, unfollow. I'd follow you not to have politics. I didn't, since when are you getting political? The fact that people even viewed that as a political tweet and not a statement of facts. And I thought, naive that I was, that the Republicans say,

you know, we should get more vaccines so we have more voters for the midterms coming up. I thought this would be a call to action for Republicans. But no, people criticized it for being political. And the fact that a person would think of it that way deeply concerned me because they could not distinguish between an objective truth and something they thought had political leanings. Also, they're playing a game where saying you're being political takes away the objective relevancy of what you said. I can just cast you as being a lefty and it's over. The problem on global warming and change and what to do about it is time. You are asking people to do something today about something that is not real to them today.

I tried to address that in one of the chapters here, where there's a chapter, Risk and Reward, where you're smoking a cigarette. Why? Oh, well, okay, I like smoking, and maybe I won't die. Okay, fine. Well, what is your chance of dying? All right, we know the numbers. What percent of heavy smokers will die of lung cancer

and other heart disease-related illnesses? All right, we know that number. I have the correct number in the book. So I said, let's recast that. Let's say next Tuesday, all chain smokers, in the first cigarette they light up, they walk out into the street, light a cigarette. 10% of them, their head will explode in a pile of goo and they'll fall down bloody on the pavement. The rest of everyone can smoke cigarettes for the rest of their lives and with no concern. Okay?

Now, this is like gratuitously gory as an example, but there's some interesting facts about it. First, in that example, they died instantly. So there isn't a burden to the healthcare system of trying to keep you alive when you first got diagnosed with lung cancer, with a lung transplant or a lung removal or the rehab. All of this is a cost to the system. Your head explodes. It's clean. You just sweep it up and move on. Would you take that chance? I'm thinking not. One in 10 chance, your head will explode just by lighting up, puffing that first puff on this cigarette. And the chapter risk and reward is a total exploration on how our sense of probability

and statistics is warped. And I think I know why. It's not taught in school. Mm-hmm. Probability and statistics is warped. And I think I know why. It's not taught in school. Did you take probability before you graduated high school? No, it wasn't there at all. And here's something else. But surely in your life, you have found the occasion to take an average of numbers. Have you ever done that? Of course you have.

We all have. Right. You add them up, divide by the number. That's an average. It's obvious what it means. Do you know the first time anyone ever took an average in the history of civilization? It was 50 years after calculus was invented, after trigonometry, after logarithms,

after algebra and geometry. In 1753, somebody said, on the benefits of taking the mean, which is the average, of a series of astronomical observations. On the benefits. And it was like, oh, my God, that's a pretty good idea. Why don't we all do that? And I said to myself, it must not be natural for our brain to think statistically. Field beats fact, professor. Field beats fact.

So one fact is this is red or blue. Another fact is the statistics on this tell you A, B, or C. But politics is about how you feel about the statistics. How you feel. So all I'm saying is, given that we surely have neurological gaps that prevent us from thinking statistically and probabilistically about this world, I'm not surprised that we live in a world where your feelings matter more than data. There's an entire industry that exists to exploit that neurological weakness within us. It's called casinos. You go in and there's a roulette table.

Somebody's betting on seven. And you say, why are you betting on seven? Well, it's due. How do you know it's due? Oh, look at the previous rolls, because they show you the previous rolls on a roulette table. It hasn't shown up in like 20 minutes. And I say, no, it's not due. It's the same likelihood of every single roll. No, I feel it. This is our basal reptilian brain overriding the absence of our ability to think probabilistically. There are people who have a pair of dice and they have to roll a low number

so they throw the dice softly. Or a high number, they'll throw it hard. Why are they doing this? What's going on? We're simple animals, Doc. Completely. And casino owners know this. Oh, yeah.

They know this and they exploit it. So here's an interesting fact. That's why they keep it cold with lots of oxygen and lots of free drinks. The free drinks especially come out if you're winning. That's right. Okay? Because let's stir in some extra chemicals in this brain that already only barely works. Okay?

To help you separate you from your money. So you know this, the state lottery, do you know where most, or if not all of that tax money goes to? Education. Education. So I think too much. So I have this conspiracy theory in my head, not real conspiracy, but it's like, it would be an amazing storyline if someone wanted to turn it into a movie plot. If the lottery relies on you to bet with a million to one odds on the likelihood that you're going to win, when you wouldn't otherwise bet if you completely understood probability and statistics, it's in the lottery's best interest

to never fund probability and statistics in the school. So you went through 12 years of school funded by lottery tickets and nowhere did you learn that you shouldn't play the lottery. People will say, okay, I hear it's a million, a hundred million to one. So you're saying I got a chance and feel beats fact. People want to believe, you know, my father hit me with this one also, but I've decided to make it mine. The Greeks gave us the word demagogue, somebody who creates consensus and followers through the persuasion based on fear, prejudice, self-interest. They gave us no positive opposite. There is no positive opposite to the word demagogue.

And that's because the negative works. Fear, the feeling of what will be good for you, the feeling of what justifies what you're upset about. However, I think we can be trained out of that, and I have some evidence. The American Physical Society, which is my community of physicists, there's an astrophysics group, the physics group, and I have a foot in both camps. It's not a workout group. No. Right. So the APS, American Physical Society. They have an annual meeting. All the physicists of the country show up. Must be a blast.

Physics jokes, it's great. It's great. It's great. I might share one with you. I got one for you, okay? This is like for third graders, but it's still a physics joke. What is the chance any of us is going to get this joke? No, you're going to totally get this joke because it's for third graders.

Ready? Okay. Never trust atoms because they make up everything. You see what I'm saying? Look how much he likes it. That's funny. You got to admit, that's a total G-rated physics joke. Oh, it's certainly G-rated.

It would be better if it were X-rated. You don't even know anything about jokes. All right. So they were scheduled to have a meeting, 4, certainly G-rated. It would be better if it were X-rated. Don't you know anything about jokes? All right. So they were scheduled to have a meeting, 4,000 or so physicists in San Diego. And there was a hotel snafu. And like, what do you do? Everybody's like primed and ready. Vegas stepped up.

And the MGM Marina, now the MGM Grand, said, we'll take you. We're the largest hotel in the world. So sure enough, physicists went to the MGM Grand said, we'll take you. We're the largest hotel in the world. So sure enough, physicists went to the MGM Grand. And a week later, there was a news headline. Physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. The APS was said to never come back to the city. They were like disinvited forever. So it wasn't that they played blackjack

and won. It's that they simply didn't play because they know and understand. And by the way, as a, as a PhD, I, every year of my life in school, I was trained in some nuance, some aspect of probability and statistics. It has to be there at all times. I agree, but that is a lousy proof of concept that we can get to a better place. Here's one. If you have to be a member of the physicist society. No, no, okay, no, here it is.

Okay, let me give a softer analogy. My two kids are totally scientifically literate, okay? They were scientifically literate. Certified them at age like 13. Be a much better story if they weren't, by the way. If you had a flat earther kid, I would be very impressed with your freedom of expression in your family. So total, my wife is a physicist also, but you don't need that background for what I'm

about to describe. So my daughter came home. This was like in third grade. She's in a school that has, it was a public school, but innovative new math is getting taught. The kind of math that the parents don't understand. And they say, where's the times table? You know, memorize the times table. All right.

So I was really intrigued by this new math. So there's one where they're given dice. And they play a game called racing dice. So they set up a chart, right? Two through 12, all right? Because you can't roll two dice and get a one. So it's two through 12. And they each root for one of these numbers, okay?

Because every time you throw a dice, you put a little box at the number. And she comes home and said, Daddy, Mommy, I kept trying to get nines, but sevens kept beating it. And so I, what? And so if you lay this out, seven is the most common roll with two dice.

And the least common roll is the two and the 12. Which is why you lose in craps when you roll a seven, because it's the best chance of what happens. Snake eyes and double sixes are equally as rare to each other. So this is a curve, like a bell curve, and it peaks at seven. She learned this intuitively by rolling dice on a chart, rooting for one number that was losing every time. And every time she did this experiment, essentially, sometimes it was six, sometimes it was eight, but seven was the winner. I bet that was not sanctioned

by the state lottery commission. So just have experiments like that every year of school. Oh my gosh, that would transform civilization. And hence my proposition of what you must defend in the book. Here's why I like the book. I like to think it is very important for me in trying to understand how to communicate things to people, what to tee up for them. I have to actually do the work of going through how different permutations of thought and different angles on different stories.

Yeah, that's what a good educator does, because you're trying to communicate. So that's what I'm trying to do. You don't want to just lecture. You want to. And it's harder than me trying to figure out what to tell them. That, I believe, is much easier. Oh, by the way, as a man who spent most of his professional career in front of a camera, you don't always have instant awareness of how an audience is receiving you.

That is true. But I, as professor, I can see. Right. Are they glazed over? Are they getting it? Are they not getting it? Are they reading their phone? I'll tell you, it is easier to say, Tyson wants us not to worry about X. Don't trust Tyson. It is easier for me to say that and compel an audience. And simpler. Than it is to say, look, here's what's going on with what he's saying. You got to figure it out for yourself, how you feel about it, but here's what it is. That's much harder. It's much more work. You're going to be less famous. You're going to be less successful on television because that's where we are. And here is what you have to defend about the book. This is a thinker's book

and it justifies why it is worth thinking about things and how we have always thought about things. And if you apply a little bit of thought that everyone is capable of to so many of the things, and I especially encourage people to read the book on identity. Oh, okay. Gender and identity. Is a really, really a good one for the way your approach is to this book. But you will lose a campaign 10 times out of 10 if you run against me selling what you're selling in this book. I will beat you on any issue.

Except. Name any issue, I'll beat you. Except since I'm not running for office, the way that would come out is I don't face you. I face the electorate and I tell the electorate, I want to empower you to see the world as it is rather than as others tell you it is, or even how you think it is. There's how it is. But I will take you out.

Hold on, hold on. You're a threat to me now. I have to take you out. There's an objective reality. And so in an enlightened world, you would never ascend to that platform because you would have to take positions that are counter to objective reality. And your voters would know that. You can only rise to that position with the posture you declared if you can sway voters to think in ways that are not consistent with what their analysis of reality is. So in this book, because people know I'm an academic, so of course I lean left as most academics do, but this book is not about leaning left or right. This is, if you lean right, have you thought about it this way? If you lean left, have you thought about it that way? And I'll give an example.

It's liberal trope to say conservatives are anti-science. Okay? You get that? Okay, anti-science. All right. You can look a little closer at that. All right. Yeah, there's some climate denial going on in there, and that poses an existential threat. That counts as anti-science. Yes. There's some people who feel pretty sure the universe was created in six days, 6,000 years ago. That has nothing to do with science, okay? And those tend to be deeper in conservative circles. The rest, there's less to point to. And in fact, you know, one of the best measures, and you would know this, of course, of whether a political party supports something or not, is how they allocate budget. Under Republican leadership since the end of the

Second World War, the science budget has increased more than it has under Democrat leadership. And in some cases, the budgets have dropped. Under President Clinton, for example, NASA's budget dropped by 20% over those eight years, just as an example. So you can accuse conservatives of being anti-science, but it's not that simple. Yes, there's some things that are anti-science. There are other things. They're more supportive of science. It has to be simple, though.

This is politics. I know. Right. Now, with the liberals, go back to liberals. Oh, liberals with the OG. Did you already know OG? Sure. Original gangster. You know.

That's me. Gangsta. Right. Liberals with the OG vaccine deniers. They started that. All right? They only met on the other side of the fence when the Trumpist freedom, actually Trump would later say

everyone should get vaccinated. That's underreported in the liberal press that he actually said that later. But you had people say, I don't want to get vaccinated because I'm American and I'm free. So they met on the other side of the fence, shaking hands because they had a common cause

to not get vaccinated. Big Brother started as a lefty here and now it's a righty here. That's right. Exactly. where to embrace them requires that you reject some or all mainstream science that applies to it. And it includes crystal healing, feather energy, homeopathy. The list is long, and they're all deep within liberal circles. And they involve some level of the rejection of mainstream science. So to lob

the accusation when in your own, what do you call it? Your own circles, your own corral are all these other things that are anti-science. You can't do that. So, so that's exactly what you do. So that's why hypocrisy is so common. Of course. So whatever it is, they're lob lobbying, they cannot claim the high road in doing so. The Chris Cuomo Project is supported by Cozy Earth. Why? Because I like their sheets. That's why. A lot of people don't get a good night's sleep for a lot of reasons. One of the ones that you can control is bedding. One out of three of us report being sleep deprived. Okay, well, what is it? Well, it stresses all kinds of things. But the wrong sheets can make you hot, can make you cold.

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Restrictions apply. You see the website. You'll get details and important safety information. You see the website, you'll get details and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, the price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. Listen to this quote. I shall never claim to have moral standards or beliefs to which my own behavior does not conform. I love that. As a student of stoicism.

You saw what I called it. Yes. It's called the Hippocratic Oath. The Hippocratic. Get it? Hippocrite. Hippocrite. Yeah, yeah.

You have a smart audience. They got it. They're good. So I love that. But here again. And this is why I love that you decided to write the book. But also as a friend, I was always worried about you exposing yourself to politics. That's exactly what we do is assert moral standards to which people don't conform.

I got stopped on the street this morning, okay? And I'm not somebody you're going to just stop on the street. I get you may see me and know who I am, but I'm like a big dude. I'm not somebody that you're going to just like run up to and be like, hey, I got a problem with you. So this guy runs up to me and says, hey, I got a problem with you. Watched your show last night. I was like, there's almost no chance that's true. I was like, you know, I was like, so there you are. You're the person who's watching News Nation. And he says, you told me last night. I and your mother were watching the show. And her, she could go at 50-50. So he says to me, you accused me.

You said what's going on with the homeless situation in New York City and helping homeless, that I am a hypocrite because I am a conservative, and I am a believer that they are committing all the crime, and that not helping them, you said, is no Christian could sell that. And I think that's really rude and really offensive. I said, okay, it's rude. It's offensive. Am I wrong?

And he said, yeah, you're wrong because I do care. I said, you care. That wasn't the question. I said, yeah, but you say you care. I understand. I said, I don't know what kind of Christian you are, but there's a huge cut of Christians who believe that if it's in the book, it must be true. And he said, you're going

to be judged by how you treat the least among you. That's what he said. You watch TV, I said, because I know you're a Fox guy and I know you're sampling News Nation because you're hoping it's the next one. You watch a guy who routinely shows you homeless people as if they were rats and scares you with them as if they were vermin and use them as proof of why Democrats think. And you watch it. You are not supposed to be doing that as a Christian. You're supposed to be helping them. And if you hear about ways to help them,

you should be embracing it, but you don't. That's why I said it. And I said, and by the way, I am a Christian. I said, so you may not like my kind. You may not, you know, because I'm not a Protestant. I get it, but I'm certainly not an evangelical. Italian Catholic. That's right. But after all of that conversation, and by the way, at the end of it, he was like, you know, he kind of liked me.

We went to the same place to get coffee. Well, you engaged him. He said at the end of it, you know, I still don't agree with you, but I said, no, you don't feel good about it. But your arguments are all pathetic. You have to know that. You are wrong. But you feel a certain way. And you know what?

I never get that guy's vote. I probably don't get him as a viewer. And you would be crazy to do it the way I did it if you want to be elected in politics. And that's the problem, but it is also the solution. And it's proof of concept of what we're trying to do with free agents, which is don't be a Democrat, don't be a Republican.

Be a thinker and be pragmatic and be reasonable and demand decency and demand dynamics that echo the rest of your life. That's who this book is for. I quote a line in Sir Joseph Porter's song from HMS Pinafore, Gilbert and Sullivan. This is the person who becomes, I think he becomes leader of the Navy, the Queen's Navy. But before then, he says, I've always voted at my party's call, and I've never thought of thinking for myself at all. And I said, yep, that happens. So with free agent, why free agent?

I like the concept from a philosophical standpoint. I think people will, it will resonate because they know it from sports. And I don't like independent because it has a suggestion of being out for yourself and I believe in interdependence. Well, some people are, but yeah. But right,

but I'm trying to encourage something else. And on the back of the shirt, it says, or on whatever you get that goes with free agent, it says, are you free? And the reason I love the question

is because everybody's going to say, of course I'm free. Examine it though. Are you? Or are you following what Ted Cruz says just because he's on your team? Even though you know he's only saying things

that benefit him and his party that he would never say about his own, only about the other side. Does that make you free? Or is it just that you're free to make a bad choice? I'm just trying to connect people to an objective reality. And without that, by the way, there's some ways to do this.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how people can be empowered. And without that, by the way, there's some ways to do this. You know, I spent a lot of time thinking about how people can be empowered. And you were saying, well, Tyson said this. And if it comes down to that, I have failed. I don't ever want someone to say, I think this because Tyson said so. It has to be in the end, I think this for these reasons. Because if I succeed, this for these reasons. Because if I succeed, I've empowered you to know and understand what went into what it is you're saying. And if I am never referenced by anyone evermore, I would have succeeded. People say, how do you want to be remembered? I don't need to be remembered. That is not a goal. I don't want a statue. I don't want a monument. Because if that's the case, that means that's cult building. It's like, oh, he's the person.

No. Ideas matter more than people. Ideas transcend life expectancies. And people have to participate in the ideas that work the best, that are based in some kind of objective reality. How do you get people to want to look into why they could be wrong? Here's one. You ready? Yes. Okay. This is one of many examples in the book. This is a clean, easy one to give. People today who eat tuna, they'll typically buy line-caught tuna. It is

clearly stated on the label when it is. So why would they do this? Tell me. Lying caught tuna means that it was caught in a traditional way of one fish at a time. But why do you care? It's seen as being more sustainable to the fishery. Okay. That's the least of the reasons. It's true. It's the least of the reasons. I'm also a tuna fisherman, by the way, for what it's worth. Okay. But please continue. I won't be insulting. So what happens is if you catch tuna by net, occasionally drag a dolphin. Yeah, you get other stuff in there. You get an air-breathing dolphin. Can't ascend to the top of the net. It suffocates and dies. So. You kill a lot of other stuff that you don't mean to just to get the tuna. Yes, but the one people care about most is the dolphin. There's no movement to protect the carp

that happen to end up in the net. Yeah, they care about dolphins, but they swim with them even though they're the only animals that only get to eat when they perform. Okay, so wait, so watch. So I'm not here to sway opinions. I'm here to just alert you

of elements of your decision. So here it is. So, oh, you don't want to kill the dolphin, but you're completely fine killing the tuna. What about the tuna? Where's the lobby to save the tuna? Oh, oh, oh, the dolphin is a mammal. Okay. Okay. So what you've done is you have a carve out in the tree of life where you'll kill this animal, but not that animal. Kill and eat, but protect this one because it's a mammal. But wait a minute, right? You're eating tuna, which means you're not a vegetarian. You're protecting the dolphins while you're eating the hamburger? Last I checked, cows, pigs, lambbs are all mammals. So it can't be that you don't want to kill mammals.

That can't be the reason. Because you're eating a hamburger while you're telling me this story. Oh, well, it has a big brain. The brain. Okay. So now it's not just where you've carved out a certain branch of animals. Now you're carving out a subset of those that have a large brain because you value brains. Okay. Well, why do you value brains? Well, because we have brains.

So you want to protect things in the tree of life that come closest to us and you don't care about anything else. Is that your reasoning? Really? Okay, so let's follow through. You like big brains. Well, their brain's bigger than ours, right? Elephants, whales, brain's bigger than ours. So that's interesting. Oh, no, no. Well, what are we the top of? Well, all right, we don't have the biggest brains. We're the same age enough so we would have learned this the same way in school. How do we put ourselves at the top? We have the biggest brain-to-body weight ratio, okay? Biggest brain relative to body weight.

Now we're at the top, okay? There we are. I said, okay, well, that's good. I can justify that. And fine. But wait, do you realize it's not the highest brain to body weight among all animals, only among mammals? Do you realize mid-sized birds like magpies, crows, eagles, hawks, they have a higher brain to body weight ratio than humans do? Significantly.

Because birds don't weigh much because they fly, okay? All right? You can't be heavy and fly, all right? So their bones are hollow. So they have a higher brain-to-body weight ratio than we do. So we're not at the top of that scale. What else? You know who has the highest brain-to-body weight of all animals?

Certain species of ants. And in retrospect, yeah, you can see that. A whole section of their body is their head. Have you seen that? certain species of ants. And in retrospect, yeah, you can see that. A whole section of their body is their head. That's one of the sections is just head. All right? Ants top out at 15% body weight in their brain. And ants are pretty complicated under a microscope, and they're really busy with doing what they do.

We don't know what they're doing, but they're talking to each other. They're building colonies. They're having a whole life and they don't care about you. But you'll kill them without a thought. You'll step on them without a thought, but you're going to save the dolphin and eat. And so all I'm telling you is, I don't care if you want to save the dolphin, but understand that your reasons are completely arbitrary for doing so. And let's take it another step. Let's say you don't want to kill any animals at all. You're vegetarian for that reason. Forget the environmental reasons. Don't forget them. Those are very real and important reasons why one might choose to be vegetarian. But a subset of vegetarians are so because they don't want to kill animals.

They might even have a humane mouse trap in their basement. You trap the mouse, got to check on it every few days because they dry out quickly. Okay, so you got to really monitor that. Can't go away for a week. They'll be dead in your humane mouse trap. Okay, so when you trap it, what do you do with it next? What do you do? You let him go.

Let him go. Take him, take him back out into the woods and let him go. Where it is guaranteed to be swallowed whole by an owl, pecked to death by all manner of woodland predators between nine months and one and a half years of its life. So the best thing you could do for that mouse. Let it live in the house. Let it live in your house, okay?

It'll live up to six years in your house. If you really cared, leave it in your basement if you cared. But apparently you don't. Not at that level. You say, not in my basement. Get eaten by somebody else. Oh, but I love animals. Okay.

Meanwhile, if you have a basement, you're probably living in a home made from the wood of 50 trees. Each tree probably would have lived 100 years, but it was cut down to make the floorboards, the studs that hold the two-by-fours, the wall panels, the sidings, the structural members. the wall panels, the sidings, the structural members. Each tree, 50 of them, when alive, was producing 15 times the mass of that mouse in breathable oxygen every day? Each tree was home to birds and insects and fungus and squirrels. Who do you think nature cares more about? Your one-ounce chubby mouse or the tree that you cut down to build your home? What does nature care more about?

Oh, well, the mouse has a beating heart. The tree does not. Well, wait a minute. If you cloak a tree, does not. But wait a minute. If you cloak a tree, does it not suffocate? If you cut a tree, does it not bleed? If you cut off its nutrients at its roots, does it not wither and die? The topmost leaf knows if you've cut communicating roots to leaves daily. It has a circulation. No, it doesn't have a beating heart, not for want of one, but for the absence of the need of one. You're going to say, I want to cut down a tree because it doesn't have a beating heart. What kind of heart bigot are you in the tree of life?

This is very speciesist. We have a heart. We kind of heart bigot are you in the tree of life? This is very speciesist. We have a heart. We have a brain. I'm going to protect those other animals that also do, but not the tree. And I'm not telling you to cut down trees or not cut down trees. I have my own opinions. I don't care if you share my opinions on this. What I'm telling you is you're saving the mouse and thought nothing of buying a home with a wood of 50 trees. Thought nothing of it. Of course it's made out of wood. Know what's behind your choices. Yes. But what if the answer is, I do. I like how I feel when I choose to believe these things or these people. No, no, no, no, no. It's not a choose. It's, it's as long as you are self-aware of what the trees would have been doing that made your home and are no longer.

As long as you're self-aware that the mouse is going to live a very short life in the wild because of you. As long as you're aware of that, fine. My issue is people make decisions without fully seeing all the parameters that relate to it. You have the conservative left that asserts that it's the family values party. Conservative right. I'm sorry, conservative right. Thank you. And the liberals are the ones with the loose morals and all the rest of it.

They pause and say, wait a minute. Okay, I hear you, but I'm going to just look at the data because I'm a scientist, but I shouldn't have to be a scientist to look at the data. That should be a natural thing anybody does. So let's look at the data because I'm a scientist, but I shouldn't have to be a scientist to look at the data. That should be a natural thing anybody does. So let's look at data. How about divorce? That's not family values. That's a mark against family values. Any presidents of the United States have been divorced? Yes. Two of them, both Republicans, okay? Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. And Donald Trump was married in his third marriage to the woman with whom he was cheating on his second wife. Family values. Okay. No democratic president has ever been divorced. Let's keep going. How about teen pregnancies, teen births? Nine out of the 10 states with the highest teen pregnancy rates have voted red in every election this century.

Nine out of 10. Highest teen pregnancy rates. Okay? Let's keep going. How about, oh, just divorce rates among states. Do you know the state with the lowest divorce rate by far? No. Massachusetts.

It's a fraction of the divorce rate of many red states scattered throughout the South. The point is, the conservative right does not have the high road on family values. But no one is saying that. No one is challenging them on this. Because it's how you define it. So the left says there's no such thing as gender. You can be whatever you want to be. And the right says that is offensive to common sense and to morality and to science because there's male and there's female. So the left is contrary to the values that we should be thinking about. Okay. Long before the gender spectrum was even on the table as a political football, the conservative right was still saying this and all the data that I

was still saying was true. So we can add that and unpack that as I do in the gender and identity chapter, because I bring up freedom there in a way that I don't like bringing up freedom because it's so, freedom! It's so, what's that movie where he says freedom at the end? Braveheart. It's so Braveheart. You know, it's like, freedom! And I don't want to be that guy, you know, but I was that guy in this. I was that guy, you know, but I was that guy in this. I was that guy, you know, somewhere I read,

somewhere I heard that one of the founding principles of this nation is the pursuit of happiness. And if I want to don a dress one morning and put on a full face of makeup, even if I have a penis, and that makes me happy, why do you want to stop that? Unless you want to homogenize this country so that everyone is just like you. To accomplish that would have to constrain freedoms of others that I thought this country's founding principles pivoted on. They say, you're going to force me to call you a woman, even when you're Neil, just because you have a dress on and you've decided that you're a woman,

and that is offensive to my rights. So there's a whole other conversation, which I didn't get into in the book, about laws put into place so that you're not offended. I'm still thinking that through through just for my own principles. My urge is to say that you being offended is not an argument in a debate. In fact, in college, that should be the place where you are offended daily by all the ideas of the world that could possibly offend you.

That's how civilization advances. What does it mean to you that the left seems to be leading the way on collective consequences that result in suppression of ideas and sometimes even censorship? Yes, that's a problem. Universities are an easy one, but I see it in a more troubling place, which is because you've got a choice where you go to school. You can be on social media or not, but it's hard not to be in this society. If I don't like what you're saying, absolutely I should be able to come at you a hundred different ways.

But the new avenue of attack is the ban, what we call canceling. That it's not enough that what you say offends me it's not enough that what you say is actually demonstrably wrong but you should not be able to exist in the form that you are now in right ever again that's the left what's happening there is you have two people with bows and arrows pointed at each other and each one is pulling tighter and saying, only when I pull tighter do I feel safer, right? And there they are pointed at each other. So the concern about you being offended by who I am and getting platform for doing so, we live in a world where people are violent. There are people who will respond to your hate of me. Maybe you're

not the one who's going to pull the trigger, but someone else just might. Someone else already has multiple times because they're part of a mindset of hatred sown by your attitude towards who I am. As Whoopi Goldberg said in the early 80s, you don't like gay marriage when that was an issue, okay? In some ways, you can say we've advanced. We're talking about trans rights, not gay rights in the way that it was an issue. How quickly we forget that under Clinton, the big issue was gays in the military, don't ask, don't tell. That was considered progressive. That was the liberal posture about how to deal with gays. Just don't tell.

That's the posture in Qatar right now. Okay, you can be gay in the stadium, just don't show it. Right. And we're saying, oh my gosh, you guys are so backwards. That's how we were 30 years ago. Yeah, not everybody's at the same place at the same time in this world. But when it becomes an issue of safety, of someone who is different from you, when it becomes an issue of safety of someone who is different from you, then what recourse do I have but to ban your speech? If your speech sows hatred and I get shot up in a bar, I don't have

a good solution to that other than the fact that you thinking that way is bad for my security and my health. So what Whoopi Goldberg says is, if you don't like gay marriage, then don't get gay married. Yeah, don't marry a gay person. Don't marry a gay person. It's kind of simple, right? We're done. It's not enough here.

On to the next problem. Because of demagoguery, because of the work off of fear as persuasion. And we don't want others. I'm not arguing against anything you have said. What I'm saying is I recognize everything you say is correct about politicians and how they gain votes and how they sow fear and hatred in people and they get more votes when they do that, okay? The Mexicans, they're climbing over the wall

and they're going to rape your daughters, okay? I'm voting for you because I don't want that to happen, even if there was never a chance of that happening, All right? So I get you. I hear you. All I can do as an educator, especially as a scientist, is offer pathways of reason that you can explore to try to get some rational discourse going in this world so that when people do disagree, it's on things that are genuinely a matter of opinion. So let's get back to the gender spectrum.

Yeah, there's X, X or XY chromosomes and there's intersex among those. So biologically, we can say if it's male, female or intersex, it's clear and distinct. When you see someone on the street, are their chromosomes visible to you? You see their chromosomes? No, you actually don't. You know what you see? You see layer upon layer of socially constructed elements that have the person declare what their gender is. For example, okay, your man who goes to the gym.

If you didn't go to the gym, where's this arm here? Come here. Look at this arm. Look at it. Strong. Okay? This, because you go to the gym. Yes.

If you didn't go to the gym, you'd have wimp arms, and how manly would you be without the wimp arms? I want to be more manly. So you go to the gym. You go to the men's section of the department store because they know how to dress you to look like a man. We have forces operating to boost you looking like a man. And we especially have forces that boost looking like a woman. A little hair on the upper lip, get rid of it.

Women are not supposed to have mustaches. Hair between the eyebrows, get rid of it, okay? Hair on other parts of the body, shave it, get rid of it. Breasts not large enough, get them boosted as a decision made by 300,000 women a year, okay? Breast augmentation surgery, because it was not feminine enough you want rosy cheeks put it put the rouge on of course men could do all of this but if they do

then they start drifting away from the man part of the binarity of many how people want to see the world oh god those guys like their wigs, they like their rouges, they like their powder. That's true, but in that age, it was even more so for the women. They had even bigger wigs, and even more powder, and even more makeup, and even more bustle, or the... Corsets. The corsets, that's the word I was reaching for there. So, look at what we do to announce our genders to people. If the XY chromosomes were sufficient, you wouldn't have to do any of that. A woman could come up to you with a mustache and a unibrow, and it wouldn't be a thing. But it is a thing. In our world, apparently, it's a thing. So all I'm telling you is if someone feels neither male or female, then they walk out androgynously, you're going to somehow

reject them because you are incapable of thinking about gender on a spectrum when people who live on the gender spectrum have no hesitation doing so, have no problems. So I claim I spend too many pages in this book indicting the human brain for wanting to categorize things that are not themselves fundamentally categorizable. Like hurricanes. You've probably reported on hurricanes in your life. Okay? You're not the weather guy,

but you know, it's in the news. Okay? It is a continuum of wind speeds of a rotating storm system, but we divide into five categories. Hurricane Irma, category three. All right, that's all the news is today. Meanwhile, it's gaining in strength, but you don't report that. It's just category three. One mile an hour, it crosses over. It's breaking news. News update,

Hurricane Irma, category three, just upgraded to category three. It went up one mile an hour faster. But we react to the category because we can't think on a spectrum. That is a shortcoming of the human mind. And what's happening is we know objectively that there are people out there who express themselves on a gender spectrum. We grew up with children in our class. We had words for them. The tomboy, which was the girl who wasn't quite as feminine. She didn't want to play with the dolls. Okay. We had a word for her. All right. Rejecting her femininity and rejecting her masculinity. There's a character in West Side Story. The girl who wants to be on the Jets. Her name is Anybody's. What a name to give a character, but it's a fictional story.

We'll deal with it. She wants, she's got a dirty face. She's got short hair. She runs. She wears pants. She can fight. She wants to be a Jet. She's a better fighter than other Jets.

But no, she's a girl. Period. We grew up, there were guys in our classes that were more effeminate than other guys. They were probably ridiculed for it. Did they start the day saying, I want to be ridiculed today, so let me behave effeminately? I am sure that is not what was going on in their head. They just came out according to how they felt and what they were that day. And we take our binary lenses on the world and force people into it.

And if they're not, we're going to ostracize them. We're going to make them the brunt of a joke. We're going to criticize them, pass laws about them, because you can't think on a spectrum. That's an abomination of the intelligence the human species has been endowed with. One other example of not thinking on a spectrum, a crime gets committed. Cops go interview the victim. They say, can you describe the perpetrator? Was he white or black or Asian or brown, whatever?

You only get four choices there. Really? Four choices. So if they say, oh, black person mugged them, then I'm walking down the street and immediately become a suspect, even though there's a thousand shades of what it is to be, quote, black in America. But no, if you're not white, you're black. If you're not a boy, you're a girl. If you're not this, you're that.

You know how I know we have the capacity to think on a continuum? Go look at the hair color aisle of the pharmacy. There's 200 hair colors for women, each with a name and every box has a different model modeling that hair color. Is it autumn mist and desert wheat and the 25 shades of blonde? We've thought about how to distinguish nuances and categories, do an interior decoration of a room,

talk to an interior decorator. What color, what shade of white would you like for the paint on your walls? I just want white walls. No. Look in the Benjamin catalog, 100 shades of white, 50 shades. They're literally 50 shades of gray. So these are colors that have the word white modified by another word. I know we can do it. We do it for, for the pockets of civilization. So I, so what the

cops should have is a color wheel and say, show me the color that comes, even though I hate eyewitness testimony because it's rife with bias and things, as a first cut, say, here's a color wheel. Point to the, don't name them with a single word that lumps everybody together and gets me picked up when I had nothing to do with the crime because the person that did it, their skin was either much lighter or much darker than mine, being a little more precise about this. So this is just my diatribe here to say, and all that's in the book, okay? I'm just trying to say that I don't want your inability to think on a spectrum to create a law that constrains my freedoms or gets me arrested just because you're too lazy

to think on a spectrum. My very simple version of that for people, because I've now seen this raise its head when it comes to all these videos online of people almost exclusively on the right in the cottage industry of developing their own followings. They're like fighting with mostly college kids where they say, so you want me to call you a boy or male, even though you're female, I'm not going to do that. It's offensive to science. My follow-up, yours is better, but mine is the primary step is, so you want to apply an objective scientific standard to this, but only this. You don't want to do it to global this. You don't want to do it to global warming. You don't want to do it when we're in the pandemic. You don't want to do it anywhere else. But here, because it works for you. That's good. That we know we have male and female.

Because it fulfills your political bias. You want to stay on it because it works for you. And what I love about this book is if you really take yourself seriously, if you really do, you need to read the book because it does, when I was going through it, there is a little bit of an embarrassment when you're reading the book, but it's a good thing. We need to think about why we think the way we do. That's right. More than one person has told me. And that's good. In the comment thread I've seen, someone said, you know, I was reading the book

and there's a part that made me angry. And then I realized, oh my gosh, there's a reason. I felt this way and I thought this way, but I don't have any foundations for it. And I was angry because now I have to unthink that. But then, quote, he attacked the other side

with his equal as vigor, so he couldn't brand the book as a political trope, as a political tract. It's definitely not that. Right, it's definitely not. Speaking of just one last thing about gender. Please. Get back to your, you said earlier,

your religious Italian Catholic, Joan of Arc. We all know Joan of Arc. Sure. Burned at the stake. Couldn't burn her at the stake for not being religious, because this is half of what she was trying to be, was religious. Okay? She was defending France against the incursions of British occupation.

Do you know why she was burned at the stake? One of the major reasons, which is all throughout her trial? Being a woman. Cross-dressing. Impersonating a Being a woman. Cross-dressing. Impersonating man. Correct. Cross-dressing. 1435, whatever the date was. 15th century. Cross-dressing. So I looked and I say, damn, that's pretty severe. I wonder if there's a passage in the Bible that references this. Sure enough, Deuteronomy, there it is. The woman donned the

clothes of a man. It is an abomination to the Lord thy God, an abomination. They would cite that and say, you're wearing clothes of... By the way, she's leading soldiers into battle. She's not going to wear a skirt and ride side saddle into battle, okay? The woman's going to wear some pants, okay? And so, to me, she's like the hero of tomboys, all right, of the day. But society at the time, religious authorities couldn't handle it. They didn't know what to do with it. They saw it as an abomination, just as the creator of the universe did, because apparently the creator of the universe cares about your wardrobe. Well, there's a twisted biblical reference about that, too, about when women are offensive to the Lord by wearing things that are meant for men. But look, all this is a construct of what people

wanted to believe at a time. I will leave you guys with this. Starry Messenger, which I think is the translation of a Galileo work. Starry Messenger, which I think is the translation of a Galileo work. Yeah, so just to be clear, I'm not the Starry Messenger. Right. I borrowed the title from, I think, without his permission, with Galileo. Galileo wrote a book in 1610, I think. Sidereus.

Sidereus Nuncius. Nuncius, which I thought was a Harry Potter incantation. Totally. There's a spell that happens. That was the title he gave the book where he reported his very first observations of the night sky with a perfected telescope. Telescope was invented two years earlier. He heard about it, made a better version of it,

looked at the night sky, and discovered spots on the sun, craters on the moon. Jupiter had moons. He didn't call them moons. He called them Jupiter stars. Because why, the idea that a planet would have, you have to remember, no one has any prior notion

of what it should be other than just what they think it is. So he's bringing this, Venus is going through phases like the moon does. How does that happen if Venus is going around Earth? There's things you can't explain in the old Earth is in the middle of the universe idea. How does that happen if Venus is going around Earth? There's things you can't explain in the old Earth is in the middle of the universe idea. Solipsism. And so he's got these observations that he's sharing with you, the reader, and these are messages from the stars. And so I, as an astrophysicist, as a trained scientist, the world looks different to me.

I'm referencing what's happening on Earth by what I've learned in the universe. In the universe, we've contended with information that lands on a spectrum. Spectra themselves are what comes from light, okay? We're the OG spectra people, okay? The sun's spectrum is a rainbow, all right? We got this. We've had this from very early. So throughout, I tell you why my knowledge of the universe gives me insight into the problem that I'm addressing here on Earth. And that's where that perspective comes from. And it's subtitled Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. So my wife…

Who I don't think I've met. If you had, you would probably never talk to me again because she is a far more interesting person. Okay. Christina runs, she's a fan as everybody is, but she runs a company called The Purist, which is about wellness as an ethos. So it's that every, in Tyson-esque fashion, it's every decision you should make, if you care about this, should reflect what you say you care about. So it's not just about drinking green juice or matcha tea. It's who made this couch? How did they make it?

What kind of company are they? It should be more holistic. Yeah, so it's an ethos. So she sees the book. And I was like, yeah, I got to make sure people get this because I'm always afraid that Neil's going to go over their heads, even though he's so relatable. And I care about him. I want to protect him. But people really want it. And she goes, well, no, this is easy. She read it before you did. Well, I had it. So she, you know, she's

a reader. You know what I mean? I was like, that's a nice cover. So she says, well, no, no, this is your one thing thing. I said, what do you mean? And she heard me once say, someone was like, if people could do one thing, what would you have them do? Which I always feel like I would never ask that question. It's like a ridiculous thing. But if there were one thing, I take it from George Carlin. George Carlin, be a critical thinker. If everybody were a critical thinker, we'd be in a better place. And it's everything that we all say we want to be anyway. We just don't do it because we're lazy, we're conditioned. If you want to be a critical thinker, read the book. If you want to know how to be a critical thinker, read the book. If you don't want it to be

abstruse, you're not a philosopher, you're not a physicist, you want to know how to deal with the fact that you can't seem to convince people around you of why you're right or why you're wrong, read the book. Especially before holiday dinners with crazy relatives. But they should come with a big black warning label on it. And here is the black box warning on this. You have to be willing to think about why people disagree with you and why you may be wrong. You have to do that. We don't do it.

We don't want to do it. I understand. Yeah, yeah. That's what the book does. And I love you for writing it. Dude, can I close this out? Please. With the opening quote that I chose from an Apollo astronaut.

Oh, yes. Edgar Mitchell. Part of a cosmic perspective is you see the world differently, not from a point of compromise, which can work politically, of course, but from another perch where maybe what you were arguing about had no justification to begin with at all, right? If you start when you're positioned and I'm fighting you and you had to meet somewhere in the middle, maybe there's some other place you can meet. We realize what the hell were we fighting about? So the quote, and I've committed it to memory, so I don't even have to read it. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, quoted in Time Magazine, 1971.

You develop an instant global, well, it looks better if I read it, even if I'm not. He didn't know. That was just a good, he's got some politician in him. Go ahead. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty, you want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, look at that, you son of a bitch.

Let me just say on the front, this is earth at night. It's like the Western hemisphere, but on the back, the other hemisphere. Both sides. Eastern hemisphere. You're a both sides at the end of the day. No, it's all, I'm not a both sides-er, I'm an all sides-er. I love it. Listen, I've been saying for a long time, and if we were a different society, if we were France mainlining duck fat, our thinkers like you, our scientists, would be part of our everyday mainstream understanding of our dialogue. They weigh in.

They're artists. They're poets. They're scientists. They are valued for perspective on what's happening. They're at the table. And you are one of our best. I am worried about keeping you safe from the rest of us

because we need you to be above us. But I appreciate you writing Story Messenger. It's going to be helpful for people. It was helpful for me. Thank you. Thank you, dude. Again. Oh, please.

Are you kidding me? Man, Neil deGrasse Tyson is so nice. We need to rely on our great minds more. Think about it. Why do we have like just people who can survive the system in our politics? I'm not saying that he should run for office. I don't know if his wife's come after me or his kids or him.

But I do think we should engage our best thinkers on the things that we should be thinking about best. And that's Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thank you so much for watching and listening to another episode of The Chris Cuomo Project. Please subscribe. Please follow. Please comment. And check out the free agent merch because it's all about us doing for others.

And I'm so happy to be in it with you. I'll see you next time.