The Chris Cuomo Project - Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Curiosity is Key to Overcoming Division

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist, “StarTalk” podcast host, and author, “Merlin’s Tour of the Universe, Revised and Updated for the Twenty-First Century”) joins Chris Cuomo to discuss how science and critical thinking can help us navigate today’s divided world. Tyson delves into the promise and challenges of self-driving cars, the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, and how misinformation thrives in a world dominated by social media. From the history of technological innovation to questions about whether humanity is losing its sense of wonder, Tyson emphasizes the importance of rational thought in solving today’s most pressing problems and building a better future. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Support our sponsors: AG1 Every week of November, AG1 will be running a special Black Friday over for a free gift with your first subscription, in addition to the Welcome Kit with Vitamin D3+K2. So make sure to check out. DrinkAG1.com/ccp to see what gift you can get this week!   Select Quote Get the right life insurance for YOU, for LESS, at SELECT QUOTE DOT COM SLASH CHRISC to get started RadioActive Media  TEXT CHRIS TO 511511 OR ON THE WEB AT RADIOACTIVEMEDIA.COM. TEXT RATES MAY APPLY. Ground News  Go to http://groundnews.com/chris to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example. You want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you. The Canadian Armed Forces. A message from the Government of Canada. Hey, I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project.

You know, post-election, how do we get our head back? How do we get to rational? How do we get out of left-right mode and get back to reasonable? We got to remember our critical thinking skills. And who better to remind and instruct and really enlighten us about the scientific method and real critical thought and how we know what we know, where knowledge comes from. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Boy, his Merlin book was such a beautiful instruction. And there's a new one out for you to look at.

Merlin taking us through the universe. It's not Merlin the Wizard, it's Neil's own version of Merlin from his own childhood and his own reckoning. And it is such a great reminder that there is still truth. There is a methodology of assessing information, fact from Fugazi. And Neil and I talk about why he wrote this book

But more importantly how he sees life and how he examines a lot of the questions that we're all Dealing with and when it comes to how to be smart you don't get better than this guy Support for the Chris Cuomo project comes from Cozy Earth. Let me tell you something. When it comes to what to wear when you go to bed and what to be in when you go to bed, two words, Cozy Earth. Why? I love how it feels. It helps me stay warm when it's cold.

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You get it for free if you go to www.drinkag1.com. Check it out. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from www.getmainlobster.com. I gotta tell you, it's the holidays. Check it out. They sent it, it was fresh, it was delicious, it was easy. Okay, and look, let's be honest. You can get a lot of things a lot of places. When you're thinking lobster, here I am in New York, we have a robust lobster game, but it ain't Maine. Use the promo code, QUOMO, C-U-O-M-O. You'll get 15% off all orders store-wide.

That's right, 15% off to help you create those unforgettable holiday moments with joy and taste. So why wait? Treat yourself, treat your loved ones, get that taste of Maine in your mouth. Make new memories, celebrate the beauty of togetherness, GetMaineLobster.com. If you go to GetMaineLobster.com, don't forget to use the promo code promo and you will get 15% off all orders store-wide Professor always a pleasure. It's great to see you. So it's been too long. It has it has I call you know, right?

No, well, first of all, I'm seeing you all the time. You are one of the people that even the people who Care about you and like you and I consider you a friend of mine, I don't want to bother you. You're talking about important things all the time. And you have become, and I'm happy to see it, by the way, because we first worked together in 1999. You are a voice of reason in society, well beyond science. What does that mean to you? It's an ob, it's, it's, it's a, I mean, it, it's a responsibility. Mm hmm. And I, I don't want to be a voice of reason that people listen to. I'd rather be a voice of reason that helps to influence other people's capacity to reason.

So that they can think something not because I said so, but because they were able to generate the rational thought on their own, and then they can take ownership of their thoughts and decisions. You want to seed critical thinking. That's the simpler way to do it. In a time. Well, I'm trying to communicate. Seed critical thinking.

In a time of sheeple, though. We are not in a period of critical thinking. We are in a period of bubble thinking. That's a good word if it's not. Sheeple. Lemmings. People who are in bubbles, the algorithms serve the bubble, keep you in the bubble. Yes, they do. And you don't even know you're in the bubble. That's right. You think this is just what it is. Yeah, yeah.

And I deal with it all the time, where I say, six months ago, Democrats weren't talking about Kamala Harris. A year ago, they let Joe Biden say he's going to run again when he shouldn't have, because in part, they didn't have confidence in Kamala Harris. But now she's perfect. I get attacked as red-pilled. I criticize Trump every 15 minutes for what he says and does and why I believe he's a disservice to the people who are motivated by him. I'm red-pilled because I said that thing,

and the clip goes around. Look, he's criticizing Harris. He's red-pilled. He's a Trumper now. And with Trump, forget it. If you don't duck your eyes in obeisance every time his name is mentioned, they think you hate America. That's where we are. Is it all social media's fault? Yes.

Next question. No, I'm kidding. Why? I mean, it's become a cesspool. I mean, I remember not long ago when social media was fun videos, you have idle arguments about what team you like best, or did you prefer Beyonce or Taylor Swift. There was a time when it was just an innocent town hall where people could share ideas an innocent town hall where people could share ideas rather than fight. I learned this early on my Twitter stream where I realized I can't express an opinion because then people will attack it. Rather than say, oh, that's interesting. Here's my opinion.

Let's discuss. That doesn't happen anymore. If your opinion doesn't agree with the person who's attacking you, then there's something wrong with you. And then I thought, do they want every person out there to have their exact opinion? What kind of world would that be? The richness and diversity of opinions is what makes an interesting place to live. If everyone has exactly the same views on all matters, that's a dictatorship. Do we really want that? Let's pause and reflect on that. So, I've... Yes, the algorithm is going to be the death of us all.

Plus, now you have AI putting in deep fakes. So, I've- They're good, by the way. I've predicted that AI will become so good at this that people who normally believe fake news as true will no longer believe their fake news is true because they'll think their fake news is faked. Wow, the double fake. Yes. And if the people who believe fake news think their fake news is fake, then that's the bottom falling out of the internet. Then there's no value to objective information on the internet because no one knows what the objective information is, and the internet will implode upon itself, and there'll be an RIP tombstone. The internet,

1992 to 2026, rest in peace. And we go back to books and physically talking to people when we want to have a conversation. I like part of that. But AI, here's one of the things that scared me about it early on. It wasn't seeing me, I haven't seen you yet, me pitching a product that I've never heard of in my life. And it wasn't bad at matching my voice and my words and my face, that was pretty good. That was a little spooky. My son, who's a beautiful kid, just started college, he would show me images that he knows,

this is the key phrase, knows are AI generated, knows they're AI generated, and say, look at the legs on this woman, look at the back on this guy. And I would say to him, but it's AI generated. And he's like, yeah, but look at his quads. I'm like, but they're fake. Yeah, but I mean, look at, look how like this,

the generation is so weaned on to gaming, virtual, not really knowing if you exist, that they're very susceptible in a way that I never imagined. That's scary. Well, I don't know, right. So I don't know if it's susceptibility or they're just carrying a different kind of torch forward. There are things that we were first exposed to, we're plus or minus the same age,

that were different. By the way, just have to slip this in, don't forget, I was giving a public talk and I was talking about the old days. In the early 1990s, there was the movie, You've Got Mail, back when we anticipated getting mail. It was like, that was a fun thing to happen to you, to get mail. And now it's like, what? No, I don't want any mail ever again, ever. So, I mean, each generation will see the technology as something that baptizes them into it and some will get rejected, others will get embraced, but it'll become the new emergent reality leaving others behind. And so, I've stopped criticizing and now I only observe. I observe

generational shifts. I'm an observer of it, not a criticizer of it. How does that work for you? So as an educator, I observe it and navigate it. Okay, this is why Twitter was so valuable to me when I was sort of honing my methods and tools of how I would communicate on Twitter. I would learn if you post an opinion, doesn't get you

anywhere. People choose sides. So, I would post comments that were perspectives. And even so, people thought I was posting opinions. I'll give an example. During one of the horrific school shootings afterwards, of which there were many of these, I posted, this is the exact tweet, at Walmart, the nation's largest gun seller, you can buy an AR-15 rifle, yet company policy bans the sale of pop music with curse words. That's all I posted, okay? There's actually no opinion there. Other than that, these are kind of, if you like guns, why do you care about curse words? And if you care about curse words,

why are you selling guns? So I'm not actually leaning in one direction or another. I'm posing a hypocrisy, a policy hypocrisy. This was so illuminating to me. a hypocrisy, a policy hypocrisy. This was so illuminating to me. The comment thread divided evenly between people, First Amendment, we can, speech is better, but they're private companies, and the Second Amendment, you don't want them to have guns, they can have guns.

And it divided, assuming I was making one point or another. And that's what told me that people are just as they say, aren't for bear where they just want to fight. Even if there's nothing there to fight about that, they don't even know to pause and reflect on that, on that tweet. And so I'm navigating this as an educator, not trying to change it because I'm not, I'm not going to change it. Malcolm Gladwell sat where you are and gave me such a good tip that I used immediately and it worked perfectly, but then I moved away from it because I am an asshole who likes to fight also.

But he said, I said, how do you deal with people saying stuff to you about some of your theories and mad at you about not letting them, telling them about their son being held back so he could be a professional hockey player or whatever it is. And he says, oh, I don't think they're bad people. I just think that they don't know how to make the point they want to make. So what I would suggest you do is no matter what the insult is, I say to them, look, I understand why you're saying what you're saying, but I really

have a question about where it's coming from. He said, and then conversations just open up because all they want is attention. They don't know how to seek it without being provocative. That takes infinite patience. That takes a lot of patience I know you don't have. None. But it works. So like somebody will say, you know, the red pilfer, and I'll say, I'm a pretty outspoken critic of Trump, but what did I say? And how could I have said it better? And they absolutely flip the switch and start treating you like a human being again. But there is something about social media. Right. But that's a conversation that does not, that social media, it can happen at social

media, but generally doesn't. Doesn't. And it will only happen binary. It's just if it's you and them. Once it's the we, it's all gotchas. You know, coming from my perspective of what people are looking for. They're just looking for gotchas and coming at you. So let me ask you something. Does our future resemble, in your opinion, are we on track with AI and technology and the development of all these things to be like the Matrix? Did the Wachowski brothers get it right? brothers get it right? I think AI will take over many, many duties that previously people were paid to do. And I don't know that that's a new fact compared with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution where machines could walk into any factory in Detroit. It's not an assembly line of men,

it's robots building cars. And you and I are old enough to remember there was a day where in the morning there was a very real chance your car might not start. Nowadays my son sees an old movie, it's a getaway car, they get in the car and the car doesn't start. Didn't they remember to put gas in their car? No, the car's just not starting because that was a thing. You could script that into a movie. He can't wrap his head around this.

Cars are better made than ever before because they're made consistently and with higher precision than humans could do. And Detroit would take a while to warm up to this fact, but there it is. And so, yeah, there's a whole job. Plus, what is some number? is it one out of three men? There's some, I have to recheck this number,

but it's bigger than you think. One out of three men or so earn their living driving. Think about it. So from forklifts, taxis, car services, buses, trucks. It's huge. taxis, car services, buses, trucks. It's huge, it's huge. The day all that becomes self-driving, what do you do? How close you think we are to that? I think self-driving within 10 years.

I think all cars- Just will get comfortable with the occasional catastrophic occurrence? Oh no, so I got this, I got this, I got this. You ready? Okay, so I got this. I got this. I got this. You ready? Okay. So, do you realize, have you seen the photo

of 1905 Fifth Avenue? Yeah. 1905. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Easter Sunday. There's 49 horse-drawn carriages and one Model T.

Yeah. 10 years later. No horses. No horses. Okay? There's 49 cars and one horse. Ten years. We figuratively and literally built civilization on the backs of horses, and you couldn't give away a horse within that 10 year period. Today, a car that you drive

versus an electric self-driving car is not that much of a switch. It's not like going from horses to cars. Right. It's going from cars to cars. And you first set up the HOV lane, can only be a self-driving car there. If you have a self-driving car,

it can go 120 miles an hour with two car lengths different distance and it'll never be drunk or tired or distracted or texting. It could probably text and it wouldn't matter because it's a computer. And if it wants to change lanes, it tells the other cars, I'm changing lanes now. They part because all the cars can talk to each other and you can drive 120 miles an hour. So we do that and say, hey, I want to do that. I want to get to work in a 10th of the time or whatever.

I don't want to waste my half my life in fricking traffic. Sorry. So watch. So this will roll fast, fast. And the interesting thing about cars is unlike homes, we cycle through cars every five or 10 years, okay? Look how many electric cars are on the road today compared with 10 years ago. You'll cycle through.

And that's where the culture of revulsion, right? Because a big part of the Trump movement is anti-EV. Yeah, that's, I don't know how long that'll last. I think it'll, you know, when the EVs perform better and do, you know, that's what it takes, not just. The market decides. Do it because it's green. You know, because it's better. Right. Okay.

People, in my experience, you surely know this from your news desk, people don't change their views. The masses don't change their views on philosophy or principle. Change it because it affects their pocketbook. Yep. Primarily. And the early adopters will do it their views on philosophy or principle, change it because it affects their pocketbook primarily. And the early adopters will do it because they're wealthy and they can do it and they can show off that they're driving green because that's a badge of courage, a badge of honor. But otherwise,

to get everybody, you just make it clearly worth your while. All right. Then suppose you have a Ferrari, you just you have a Ferrari. You just love driving your Ferrari. You can't drive on the road anymore because it's all self-driving electric. So there'll be a car park for you to, you leave it there and you go there and then you drive your car around the car.

That's not, is that any different from horse stables today? That's true. That people still want to ride horses? That's a cool point. So it'll be like a go-kart track. Yeah. You'll have to go to the track. That's a cool point. So it'll be like a go-kart track. Yeah. You'll have to go to the track.

Yeah. Play with your car. And you play with your car. And you can race. There'll be time for the Ferraris, time for the Porsches. And it can be fun. It'll be a culture. But it'll be clearly a specialty avocation of car lovers.

And I don't see why that wouldn't swoop in as quickly as cars did replacing horses. So the difference between modality and operator. Oh, you're talking about death. So now? Yes. Okay. So here's what's interesting. We are old enough to remember, growing up, there would be like one or two plane crashes a year, killing 200 people per crash. It was terrible and tragic, but we kind of live with that. Then the FAA said, we're going to do better than this. And here's what happened.

They knew, and I knew this because I saw it firsthand. I was on a commission from the White House to study the future of aerospace, which in America, which includes the airplane manufacturers, many of who also make space vehicles. All right, so what happens there? They knew that emplacements would go up. If the accident rates rate stayed the same and more people were flying, then more people would be dying from accidents, even though it's the same percentage. But we don't think that way.

We just see numbers. We don't think percentages. And so they knew that if more people were gonna fly, they have to tamp down the accident rate. So every single plane accident that ever happens gets thoroughly investigated. There was one UPS plane where a lithium battery caught fire, the plane crashed, you can't take a lithium battery

in the luggage. It created that rule. Okay, when was the last plane crash you remember? Not recently. Not recently, okay. It might have been the 737 MAX, was that three years ago or something, and you gotta think hard to remember it, right? And so what'll happen with self-driving cars is,

there'll be some driving condition that no one had thought of before, where somebody dies. Then there's be an FAA equivalent for cars, and say what caused it, why, okay, upload new software to all cars so that'll never happen again. And slowly, the car deaths will drop

from whatever they would be out of the box, essentially to zero, essentially to zero. And what are they now? They're 35,000 a year. Somehow we're all okay with that. 35,000 people dying on the road. There's no special legislation to drop that. You know what happened? We go to self-driving cars. I'm making these numbers up, but think about it. Suppose self-driving cars go in and now it's 10,000 deaths a year cars go in and now it's 10,000 deaths a year from software errors. There are 25,000 people not dead because of the electric self-driving cars. No one writes about the people who didn't die. Okay? So that's a thing in our society and in our culture. You know, because now there's someone you're going to blame. You, that was software. You're a manufacturer.

So the government is going to need some way to help us transition from 35,000 deaths a year To some out-of-the-box number from all these other cars and how to get that down to zero Because every car can be uploaded with new software so that will never happen again the software so that it will never happen again. Can software capture the ability that a human has to be driving, look to your right, see that somebody has picked up their phone and that the car is starting to move or that it may, and it's time for you to get away from that person.

You start to drift, yeah. Without the drift, we both know, you make adjustments all the time in the car based on what you just observe in the people around you. Will the machine be able to do that? So not only will it be able to do it and do it better, because it will have complete awareness of the cars that are around it, complete awareness.

Not only that, it'll be able to to drive in fog because it doesn't have to use visible light. There are other wavelengths of light if it's equipped to do so. It could just drive 100 miles an hour in total fog. You can't. Nope. Because it's gonna use like radar type. Exactly, exactly. So I look forward to this and is it that weird? You know, today we don't think twice by going to the airport and getting on a tram, which has no conductor, no pilot,

the doors open and close, no one's been cut in half. No, you know, whatever with fears. No, we just get on a thing and it goes automatically, we're cool with that. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Factor. Notice how the days are shorter, but the to-do lists keep getting longer. What are you supposed to do? Factor's no prep, no mess meals.

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have already upgraded to OCI including MGM resorts, specialized bikes, and fireworks AI. So why am I talking to Neil deGrasse site? Because here's why. This idea of how we can understand that things are bigger than where we are right now. That's why I believe that you're such a beautiful resource. On my lap is a book that I wrote, no I'm kidding, is Neil's book called Merlin's Tour of the Universe. And it is a very cool narrative of what we're looking at, what could be there and what lies beyond. With everything that's going on in the world right now,

what do you want this, what is the purpose that you want people to attach to this? All right, so particularly this season, this election season, so much media attention given to candidates and the, is it red or blue and who, you know, why not slip in something you can learn something for a change? I'm an educator, you know, can we pry open

a little bit of your news cycle and maybe just learn something about our place in the universe in a fun way? This is Merlin is a character that I, it was a pen name that I developed 35 years ago for a column that I wrote. My very first book was Merlin's Tour of the Universe. My very first, 17 books ago.

Are you suing you? For copyright infringement. And so now I said it's time to resurrect, to exhume Merlin. Ooh, that's good. Exhuming is good. And doing so to re-inhabit that character. Because Merlin, as I've developed, it's not the Arthurian Merlin.

You know, there's more than one. Like King Arthur, Merlin. There's more than one… Like King Arthur, Merlin the wizard. Go ahead. There's more than one Chris in the world, more than one Joe in the world. It's another Merlin who's lived for four and a half billion years, come from another galaxy. Merlin is an alien on earth, come from the Andromeda galaxy, but studied earth culture and history and science. So when a person asks, this is from the column, I don't quite understand gravity. Then Merlin recalls a conversation with Isaac Newton and Isaac Newton's backyard. And then you get that. And the fun part was studying how these people would have spoken back then, what words they would have used, what style. And I was delight

use, what style. And I was delight to do that back then. And I only now realize that all of the tools that I developed for Merlin to communicate with the reader, they have infused my modern, all of my modern posts that go to social media and the like, because these are short snippets. And it's got to be, in order to work, it's got to be interesting, it's got to be tasty, make you want to smile, and you want to say, hey, that was interesting to learn. This is a, that's a tall task for only a couple of sentences to communicate. Many of the answers in this book are short, somewhat longer, of course, but most are short. Some are longer, of course, but most are short. And so for me, that was the proving ground, the baptism for what would become my utility belt from when I'm communicating with

the public. And so I get all beclempt. Is that the right word? Sure. Beclempt. I get emotional thinking about what role Merlin played in my life and now what role can play in the life of others. I love that you're engaging people's curiosity at a time that people are so incurious. And to my early point about leaving you alone, when I was doing the wave of UAP reporting, that News Nation did, I am not about little green men, though I do take your suggestion, which is I have nowhere near the level of arrogance to believe that only this planet

and in the universe that is only bigger every time we figure out how to measure anything, that we're the only ones. I don't have that level of arrogance. I just don't know any differently. But I covered it from the perspective of transparency in government. Because if there's nothing to know, they sure are spending a hell of a lot of money on something, right? It's like 150 million in just their first

three public programs. Why are they spending this if those people in those programs aren't doing anything? And I thought of you at the time, and I was like, I should ask Neil to come on and talk about this, but I was dealing with if should ask Neil to come on and talk about this, but I was dealing with it when the government needs to tell us what it know and what it doesn't know.

How do you think people should look at that issue of unexplained aerial phenomena? So let me back up for a moment and address the government. I'm shocked by how much credit people are giving the government for keeping secrets. I know. Everyone I know who has ever worked for the government testifies how incompetent such a task would be.

Let me just start with that. That's my opening salvo. One. Two. Let's ask a different set of questions. Why would visiting aliens only show up in restricted Navy airspace of the United States? We've got 6 billion smartphones in the world, each capable of high resolution photo and video.

We can crowdsource an alien invasion. All those videos would go viral. Cat videos go viral for less. And where is it? It's nowhere. Right. Okay. There's a million people, million airborne at any given moment with a window sitting next to them. Don't you think if there's a mothership outside the window, somebody would get a picture of that? Yes, I do. Okay, so either the aliens are inherently fuzzy and only visit restricted airspace, or people are just don't know the difference

between what is true and what they want to be true. Yes, I agree with you. And so why am I interested? I'm interested because I believe it's about industrial espionage, it's about other countries, it's about who's sending what around and what we're taking from them.

I think for whatever $700 billion military budget, some fraction of that should go to investigating UAPs, for sure, unidentified aerial phenomena, which is of course just the rebranding of UFOs, right? And of course, if we don't know what it is, somebody should be looking into it. Right, and look. But just because you don't know what it is,

it doesn't mean you know what it is. Yes, and. You can't say, I don't know what this is, therefore it's alien. There's no therefore in that sentence. So that's what has changed, my handsome friend, is you and I grew up at a time that the unknown was a hash mark.

Well, we just said we don't know. With social media, the unknown is now just opportunity, and it is a starting place for a whole wave of Alex Jones. Alex Jones, we know the name, and fortunately, I believe, the Newtown shooting wound up being an almost permanent check on him, but there are so many in the business of weaponizing the unknown. That really is the first wave of success in digital media. Weaponizing the unknown. That really is the first wave of success in digital media.

That's a sharp way to say weaponizing the unknown. And it draws in the gullible at that point. And gullible, yes. Incurious, yes. But the fearful. No, they would claim they are curious. I'm just asking questions. Why is the government not talking about this? That's right. How come they're not allowing me into Area 51? What are they hiding? By the way, a lot of government secrets are not because there's something that exists that, not secret, yeah, top secret.

It's not that something exists that they don't want you to know. Most of it has to do with the specs on something that is a military device. Right, that they don't want other certain people to know because then they could deal with it. Enemies, right. So what is the top speed on the SR-71? What is the radar capability of the... So those tend to be kept secret.

That's generally what goes on in the military. Oh, listen, I'm with it. I'm just saying, if you're gonna spend $150 million and you're gonna to use special forces You got to tell me a little bit more than it ain't little green men. I believe you I believe I don't believe you have a little green man in the basement. I believe you I don't believe you're rebuilding a spaceship that you believe came from a different solar system But I do believe that you have found lots of stuff that we may want to know

Not what the stuff is, I get national security. Let's say they're concerned for national security. Yeah, national security, I get it, but man do they stretch that shit when it serves their purposes. And do you remember, or you will remember, but if you recall, so the yellow cake, weapons of mass destruction stuff happens.

We go to war, we go into the wrong country after 9-11 and kill everybody in a way that people who are protesting what's happening in the Middle East right now seem to have forgotten. Not that it's okay, but that we did a lot more. So we're there. The yellow cake thing winds up being empty. Okay? It's not true. Ruins Colin Powell's political career. They make him a fall guy and he had the, in my opinion, misplaced honor because he was an honorable guy to take one for the team. Which-

By the way, just to refresh my own memory, he didn't say, we think they're WNDs. He was like, we know they're a double. He left no uncertainty there. No, because the intel was we got the yellow cake uranium and we know it's there. Now then the spies came forward, the husband and wife team and blew it all up as saying, no, they made this up to justify being in the wrong country. The point is, the point is that when we did that, the government says the media is compromising operational security on the ground in Iraq

and putting our fighting men and women in risk, and people stopped watching the news. And that was a lesson that I have never forgotten about national security, which is is it still matters to people. We're seeing it being cheapened right now, where everything is a risk to national security. But that is the most powerful thing that we still have in our collective vocabulary of concern. If something's of national security, you'll give the government a little bit of space The problem is they used it for the Russian investigation with Trump

They used it with Bo with hunter Biden now. It's getting cheapened with everything else Yeah, and so I Don't know where that will land right because it's still in the air how that's I don't know where that will land, right? Because it's still in the air how that's being used. Land in the air. Are you giving a coded message right now to my UAP brothers and sisters? Land in the air?

I mean, what are you trying to say? You with an odd antenna popping out behind your ear? No, they don't draw aliens with antennas anymore. Only the generation that had rabbit ear TVs drew aliens with antennas. Now it the generation that had rabbit ear TVs drew aliens with antennas. Now it's all wifi. I'm just saying it's a fascinating fact that how we represent aliens comes, emerges from whatever's

the cultural norm of the time. Rabbiteers. Do you remember that? How you would mess with those things and lift your leg, lifting your leg, the hangers. You know, I love watching all the Generation X stuff about, it's so true about us. Every generation complains about the next. I get it, I get it.

Just like one genre of music about the next. But our kids as a collective do not know what we know. They don't know the experiences that we had. We are the last generation pre-cell phone. Yes. How crazy is that? No, they're going to say they're the last generation pre-something that's yet to be invented.

Ooh. What do you think it is? What's the next scary thing? Is it implanted in us? You think you're one of those? So mean, so I don't ever want to over assess the uniqueness of wherever I am on that timeline relative to what could happen later. That's all I'm saying. Because technology, it comes at you and you'll even, I'll give an example. 1989, the movie Back to the Future Part II, it was filmed in 1989, took place in 1989,

and they went forward to 2015, the future. Okay. By the way, in that, they had a headline, the Cubs sweep the World Series. Because they hadn't won in the future. Turns out the Cubs would win the World Series in 2016. It missed it by just a year. But in it, Marty, the main character, gets fired from his job. And this is the home of the future, 2015. Well, in 1989, you were badass if your home had a fax machine. You were- That was high. Send a fax. That was high. Send a fax, okay? So they're extrapolating to this future home. Marty gets fired and he is fired simultaneously

on the four fax machines that are in his home. He says, you're fired, you're fired, you're fired, because the future home will have four fax machines, not one. That's something that's better than a fax. Exactly because no one's thinking that. You know email attachment, nobody had email okay. The public didn't have email. I had email in the sciences. Of course you did. So I'm just saying developments can come from places you don't see. Oh, there's another one. AT&T had a series of commercials, you may remember, right around that time. It was called You Will.

Have you ever wanted to da-di-da-di-da-di-da-di-da? You Will. AT&T will bring it to you. Okay. Well, one of them, they showed somebody doing something I never wanted to do, never thought of doing, never did do, didn't even dream of doing. There's somebody on a beach, in a beach chair, and he's tapping on a tablet. They got that right. People have tablets. And he taps and then he puts it down and he gets up, have you ever wanted to send a fax from the beach? You will. AT&T will

bring it. I said, no, I've never wanted this set of facts on the beach. So this is the linear thinking that goes on with people. So I'm just saying we can think of ourselves as the last of a generation who knows things or thinks things, but they will be the last of their generation who have whatever is invented in their lifetime to then talk to their kids about. How do you balance the openness to development, science, and marketplace adaptation of the same with fear of impact? So I think we don't know what, is it a morality or... We need a set of people who are the moral conscience of technology,

that have technological expertise, but may have studied philosophy or ethics. And every new technology that comes out, they assess it. Look at the risks, look at the benefits, do a cost benefit analysis, and then advise the government on how to possibly regulate if you need to, or don't regulate it if not. We don't have that right now, really. It happens a little too late. And so we might've foreseen the problems with the suicide rates of kids who, you know,

the FOMO, fear of missing out. Fear of missing out, FOMO. Yeah, FOMO, fear of missing out, where everyone else's life is better than mine, because everyone else's life is curated online. We should have been able to see that coming, just that this panel would have psychologists on it, of course, child psychologists, adult psychologists,

people who are experts in depression. And so, for all of our advances, I think we should have that, just to advise, not to themselves legislate, but get us to think in ways we might not have been thinking. Advisory would be the key, because you have a resistance movement, not just to what we used to call the nanny state, but to government. Any kind of collective exercise of power. Oh, by the way, many of the same people who are anti-government,

because they think government is inefficient, and I don't want to pay taxes, get rid of all these agencies, many of those same people are certain that the government is masterminding alien cover-ups. You can't have it both ways. You can't have a perfectly efficient machine holding aliens from you, and on the other breath say, government sucks.

They don't know what they're doing. But you are requiring consistency, where there is no need. Consistency is not a thing. And look, but again, just to keep circling it back, I believe that such a value you provide is you bring things back to what's known. You bring things back to what's known, what's not known, how we know, what we can do with what we know, and that there's plenty of mystery.

Thank you for noticing that, because that's how you can turn ideas into action or ideas into tangible elements within how you think about your world and decisions you make about your loved ones and your fate. And you are anti-feel. He's a very sensitive guy, don't get me wrong. But you are, here's how we know. Here's what you would ask. Here's what we know about this.

This is what they used to think it was, but now we know that it's this. And whether you're doing it through your Virgil, who is Merlin, or with your discursives, or your social media content, you are reminding us that you don't have to just guess. You don't have to just conform. You don't have to just conform, you don't just have to go with what you feel or you are suggested, that there is a method of proof

that has served us well in the past. The methods and tools of science are exquisitely tuned to distinguish... Let me define the scientific method in a way you might not have ever heard it. I'm going to reduce it to two sentence fragments. Ready? The scientific method is simply do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is. Did I say that right?

Sure. Okay. I meant to say that in the opposite way. That's the scientific method. So if you want something to be true, how do you know it's true? Test it. This is what we developed over the past 400 years. And it's responsible for all the advances in civilization that you know, care about, and love. That is what health, wealth, and security to us all. The implementation of the scientific method, and we have yet to discover another pathway of inquiry that is as successful as what science brings to the table. So don't resist that. Why not celebrate it? Put it everywhere. Put it everywhere. Put it everywhere.

The empiricism of it is fundamental. And look, the lack of it is killing us. In school, you take a class and you say, well, I don't want to take science now. Let me take these other, let me take art, let me take music, let me take whatever. And you're thinking of science like it's the separate thing that you can take it or leave it, or that it's just a body of knowledge that comes and goes. No, it's a way of querying nature. And without it, we might as well just move back to the cave, because that's where we'd still be if no one had done that.

Now we're in digital caves. We are. We are in digital caves. Well, I talk to people all the time that aren't as populous in the professional circles that you travel in, where they believe things that they have no good reason to believe except preference. For example, Or it makes them feel good, yeah.

Any of the litigations surrounding the former president, any of it, okay? Or what was known and not known about the last election. Well, you know, there was so much proof of rigging and unconventional things. Like what? Well, I heard that someone had this basket of affidavits and these people said, it's all over, but do you know any of that? Or did you hear it?

And well, but I'm Chris, what am I gonna believe? Well, if I were to accuse you of something right now, that's not the end of the process, right? It's the beginning. Right. And- That's a very good point. We are really steeped in it right now.

You wouldn't wanna be that person where the jury is just simply arriving at a conclusion without evidence. That's exactly right. Right. In fact, you know, as flawed as we are, and I always say, you know, yeah, America is the worst country until you compare it to any other one. The jury system, beyond a reasonable doubt, is informally referred to as 95% plus, that you are 95% plus sure that no decision makes better sense than the prosecution's version of it.

But mathematically, 95% is two sigma, mathematically. Really? I have no idea what that means. Sorry. Just saying. Does that mean that sigma is like 47 and a half or something like that? No, in a bell curve, you can ask, there's like one standard deviation, the width of the curve.

The standard deviation is like the, that's what they give you now when they report polls. Right. The plus or minus three percentage points, whatever. Yes, that's the margin of error. That's the basic margin of error, okay? So if you take two of those, then your result is true 95% of the time. So sigma would be one standard deviation removed from certainty. Correct. Or no, one standard deviation from what you think the result should be. Okay.

Okay? Two standard deviations, you have that much more confidence in it. So anyway, 95% is a perfectly clean number to use. So that is what it is as opposed to an indictment, which is probable cause, which is known as 50 plus 1%, which is it's half and half. And remember, in an indictment, you only hear my side of the story as the prosecution. The defense isn't there, they're not represented, and I'm allowed to use evidence

that wouldn't be admissible in court. Here's say another way. So that's why they say you can indict a ham sandwich. Because if you give me a day with 16 people where only half of them have to agree with me, and I'm allowed to say whatever I want about you, it's gonna be hard for you to walk away. Um, so that's right.

Our, so our system is pretty good. We do not employ that system in our public life. It's not even close. And look again, what's happening with what happened with Harris and Trump was a perfect example of it. You know, nobody goes based with what happened with Harris and Trump was a perfect example of it. You know, nobody goes based off what they know anymore. They go off what they feel.

And that's always been somewhat true in politics. I'm saying I used to be angered by that. And then I realized it's just politics. It's like someone going to Washington, working in Washington, say, I love Washington, but it's just too much politics. That is the point. I know. That is the currency of life in Washington, say I love Washington, but it's just too much politics. That is the point. I know.

That is the currency of life in Washington. Then I hear like this voice from the beyond that is the anthropomorphized dead father and he says, hey, don't call all politics bad. It's not the way I did it. And that is true. There are a lot of honorable people. I'm just saying it's not the place you explore rationality of thought or decisions. Yeah.

I didn't value judge it. I just said- Well, I'm value judging. I did that. That's why I got the voice, not you, although he was a big fan of yours. So look, I mean, we see it all the time and I don't know what to do with it,

but I am observing it, which is, when somebody gives the right kind of answer to a question, do you believe that we should close the border? Look, close the border. What does that mean? You'd have to figure out who you come in, how you process it, what you do. Oh, you're given a political answer right now. And the refreshing nature of Trump and co is they just say it how it is.

But there's a reason that the acumen developed and it wasn't just deception. Cicero on down of the political science, right? Which now we see as an oxymoron, was that there is a way to message where you don't create division. There is a way to message where you leave things open ended because you don't know how it's gonna go.

And- That's not the most efficient way to rise to power leave things open-ended because you don't know how it's going to go. And that's not the most efficient way to rise to power. That absolutely is not. I mean, look, maybe you'll know it. I don't. What is the Greek positive opposite term to demagogue? I don't know. Is that Greek what you just said? Oh, you said don't know. No, I said I don't know. Oh, I don't know either. I'm saying I know demagogue. I don't know. So demagogue is somebody who uses anger and

prejudice to develop support. Well, demagogue is also the first step towards, I mean... Toward nothing good has ever followed. Nothing good has ever followed. I'm confusing demigod and demigog. No, demigog. Demigog, that's the one. Now we confuse with a demigod. Right. But a demigog, I don't know the positive opposite. So here's what I like to do. I like to say, OK, there's this anti-immigrant sentiment

that permeates the land. And I would just say Trump's biggest supporter, the richest man in the world, is an immigrant. And a man of science. And people thought about that. He's an immigrant. And one-third of all Nobel prizes that the United States has won in the sciences have gone to immigrants. I calculate that every year, by the way. It's not, you can't just Google that. Right. It's a, I do it, people have a research team, because it's not as easy as it sounds,

because how did someone get here? Did they get citizenship? You have to like do the homework. No, I totally get it. And it makes sense. I mean, look. So I don't feel this way about immigrants. They, you know, some hardworking folks. Trump would say the same way, as long as they're from Norway. He would say, he would say, I'm not anti-immigrant either. I'm just anti-illegal entry by immigrants

and countries sending us their garbage in the form of humans that get in here illegally and they don't tell us about it. That's what I'm against. And the lefties who let them all in because of the great replacement theory of creating a new generation of voters for them. That's what I'm against.

I'm not against immigrants. Because look, even in a hypocritical culture, how many people are at this point in our generation, let's just say, even the next one, are more than three generations removed from an immigrant? Hardly any, correct. You know what I mean? So you can't be that hypocritical.

Right. And what they'll say is, but mine came the right way. Ah, mine were good, my people were good. Yeah, mine came the right way, which was in my family's case, two generations ago, I'm second generation, broke, dumb, and without skills. And they just made their way onto a boat, met in a village, agreed to get married

because he would take her to America, that's love, and he dug ditches and eventually worked in a grocery store. They would have never passed muster today. One generation, one kid governor of the state of New York. So nothing special about us. Um, and that's the dream. That's the dream. And that's why he went into public service.

Uh, his brother went into the military. They said, you know, you're gonna go into service because we owe the country. We have, that's what we've moved away from though. You see an unsophisticated person, someone who's got to clean a house, someone who's got to do manual labor. You see someone who's unworthy. What have we learned about our greatest thinkers

and what their lineage is? In the United States? Yeah. I'm just saying that the likelihood of being an immigrant is sufficiently high. So that- And an immigrant who came from geniuses or an immigrant? No, no, no. Off the boat.

Just to stereotype, off the boat immigrants. Um, and it's well known that if you have enough drive to leave home forever, they go to a new place, there's something inside you. Do you think how scary that is? I know. Can you imagine if you got offered the offer from wherever, and your wife, who's also a scientist, was... You remembered, yeah.

...also given the same things, and you had to move to Holland. Not the scariest place in the world, pretty cool place to visit. Think about what that would require of you. And I'm saying they're going to pay you $10 million a year. They're going to pay your wife $10 million a year. And you can fly back and forth whenever you want.

Just think of the conversations you would need to have to make that move, let alone leave everyone you know, your buck ass broke, figure your way in, and nobody likes you there. I mean, think about it. That's right. That's right. And our attitudes changed so frequently. Back then, there was the eugenics movement. Oh, yeah. It was embedded, the immigration was embedded within this philosophy of who were

the desirables and who weren't. And look, you know, all of this, this, to me, there's continuity in the conversation because what's the difference between my father, who was absolutely not considered in politics a white man, okay? He was a swarthy ethnic, Mercurial Mario, the hot-blooded Italian. He was constantly... Mediterranean. Yeah, bothered by being a mafiosi. He must be, he must be.

It plagued him his whole career. One generation, I'm a white guy. I'm white privileged. Last joke my father ever told, may he rest in peace, was he was hearing a piece about me as another white male in the media, you know, operation of privilege, and he said, hold on.

Hot damn, we made it. Christopher's a white guy. Exactly. One generation, what's the difference? Mm-hmm. Objective scrutiny. You know what my father said? He said, I'll know we've made it, as black people in America

when we get to be indicted for embezzling money. A white collar crime. Yeah, yeah, then you know, there you go, you're one of the clubs. And the difference is, we started to apply standards and rationales to things. Okay, that's who he was, this guy's different. We have a culture of adoption and adaptation of thought. And the more we lean into it about what the basis of the thinking process is, the better we'll be served. The fears is the farther we get from NGT, you know, Neil deGrasse, NDT, Neil deGrasse Tyson, as the farther you get away from, wait, let me think about it, let me think about it, let me think about it, the more danger we get into. Yeah, because then you just slide with your own emotions and it never ends well, in my

experience. You can have them, have them, have them flavor your thoughts and behaviors, but if all of your important life decisions pivot on your emotional state, I don't think that bodes well for, there's tremendous room to apply rationality to important decisions, but not enough people do it, and I'm saddened by that. But I'm just trying to help people think rationally

about it. So in there, someone asked about the far side of the moon. They said, is there really a dark side of the moon? And so Merlin says, well, ever since Pink Floyd's 1973 album, we've been working day and night to undo this crime. Because there's no such thing as a dark side of the moon. There's a far side. And that's how people sometimes confuse it.

All sides of the moon get sunlight. So it's trying to get into what you think is true, but empower you to understand. I don't want anybody ever saying, this is true because Tyson said so. I say that shit all the time. I would just say this is true because I've learned why it's true. Yes. And I can make the defense of that case.

Last thing, did you believe 15 years ago that with all of the technology and all of the ability to globalize communication and reach and be in contact, that we would actually 15 years later, be less in touch with one another and less technologically sophisticated in terms of using technology to better ourselves. Yeah, well, I think we're still figuring out how to tame AI, so we don't know where,

I don't think we know where that's gonna land, especially AI is applied to the liberal arts, so writing and art and this sort of thing. We've been using AI for decades in science. If AI can do it, fine, I'll find something else to do that it can't yet do. So, I think we're, what? I think we're, again, I don't value judge change. I just observe it.

And like I said, I try to navigate it as an educator so that I can be as good as I can be in whatever is the state of mind of the person who's in the moment and whoever's being touched by it. I don't think it's entirely true that we are more farther apart than ever before. There are groups, Facebook groups among them, but that's for the older generation.

There are people who gather who find like-minded people on the internet, and they gather. People you would have never known even existed. The problem is if I say, I think Earth is hollow, let me type in hollow Earth, it'll show me everyone other person who thinks that. And so there's no checks and balances on the veracity of what it is you're searching. But, where I was, oh, I was in Vegas, a whole table of women sitting there. And one of them recognized me and they wanted to take,

I said, fine. So I came over, sat down briefly and I said, well, what brings you all together? Oh, we are the pound cake chicks. It was like, what? What? Okay, there's a Facebook group where they make pound cakes and other recipes.

And once a year they go on a Vegas trip and they're from all over the country. I love it. So I don't know if that makes up for the fact that somehow we feel more isolated in many cases, but that didn't used to happen at all. I just feel like we keep... A shout out to the pound cake chicks. Yeah, listen, and that is a noble pursuit, by the way. I'm a big fan of pound cake.

Shout out to the pound cake chicks. Yeah, listen, and that is a noble pursuit, by the way. I'm a big fan of pound cake. But I feel like we keep forgetting to remember that nothing is all one way, that nothing is all good, nothing is going to be all bad, nothing, that there's always varied, not just expectation going into it, but varied outcomes. And you get your pound cake chicks, but then you also get your white nationalists, you know, and we don't think through any of these things because we've told ourselves, well,

don't think it through because we just want freedom. So just let it happen. Because that's what we're supposed to do. I don't want any advisory board telling me whether or not this technology of doing medicine of myself. Yeah, freedom was the battle cry of COVID, right? That's what. Now you have, you had competing campaigns

in the last election that were both about securing freedom. If you vote for Trump, he will destroy the democracy, secure your freedom. If you vote for Harris, she will destroy the democracy, secure your freedom. If you vote for Harris, she will destroy gender, secure your freedom. That's where we were. And in both cases, it is a lack of critical thinking. And it's all on you, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

In your book... People say, you know, world is pretty bad right now. What do you have to say about that? And I say, you're telling me I suck at my job? Getting rid of... And then I... But here telling me I suck at my job? Like, kidding me the fucker. And then I, but here's how I get out of that. Okay, I say, imagine how much worse it would be if I were not on the landscape.

That's what I tell myself. Oh no, that's good. Hey, when was it ever better before you? Yeah, right, for example. When was life ever better before, as I say every morning when I wake up, today is a little better because Neil deGrasse Tyson is here. Merlin's tour of the universe. It is a great

reminder of how he started and how far we all have yet to go. Thank you for coming to talk about the book. I love you. I appreciate you. Love you. I told you, Neil deGrasse Tyson, he knows how to know. And that is something that's really worth reminding ourselves about now. Critical thought and how we parse and how we look at things and how we look at questions and how we postulate different ideas and theories and how you have to love it. You have to embrace that grind. And the book is, of course, a beautiful discursive to take us through it.

So our thanks to Neil and thanks to you for subscribing. You don't like the ads? Subscribe on Substack. You get all the long COVID stuff. You get the podcast without ads and you're going to get exclusive material from me. I'll see you on News Nation, and I'll see you here. Let's get after it.