The Jordan Harbinger Show - 521: Neil deGrasse Tyson | Cosmic Queries for the Acutely Curious

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, host of StarTalk Radio, and author. He rejoins us to discuss his latest book, Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going. What We Discuss with Neil deGrasse Tyson: How Neil learned to explain scientific complexities in layman's terms. Why you should always take advantage of an opportunity to engage with an expert. How opportunity comes from embracing the unknown rather than shying away from it. Why, when it comes to learning something new, understanding is far more important than memorizing facts. How Neil has mastered the art of ending any Q&A with the perfect answer -- no matter the question. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/521 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. First, when full-grown adult says Earth is flat and they don't want to have a vaccine and they don't trust science, I might tell them you're probably alive today because of discoveries of science. Take a walk through a stroll through any cemetery that goes back at least 100 years. And just look at how old people were when they died. What's particularly tragic is you don't have to walk far to find this. You'd find a double grave where there is, you know, and you do the math, on the birth and death, and there's a 30-year-old woman and a three-day-old child buried together.

They both died in childbirth. This doesn't happen anyone. Not we're both. You can have complications, sure, an occasional death, but not one where every, you know, 30th tombstone is a record of the trauma that we went through as a civilization just trying to stay alive in this world. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional Russian spy, billionaire investor, or former cult member.

Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we created episode starter packs. These are on the website at Jordanharbinger.com slash start. They're collections of your favorite episodes organized by topic. They'll help new listeners or you get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Again, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started with us here on the show. Now, today, back on the show, one of everyone's favorite scientists, Neil deGrasse Tyson, we discuss how he deconstructs complex scientific concepts for the layman and makes it easy for us to wrap our heads around some of the more abstract,

astrophysics concepts such as black holes in multiple dimensions. We'll also get some insight into how he constructs his soundbites for the media and how he goes about educating others, which is very useful if you ever want to teach anyone anything, for that matter. Of course, I wanted to ask Neil some questions about space travel, aliens, quantum physics, and it seems like I managed to keep him from rolling his eyes at me like maybe we caught on camera last time. You guys know I love smart folks and that's why this show is always packed full of them. Scientific literacy. It's like a superpower right now that helps you know when people are full of crap, and that's a superpower I want all of you to have. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these amazing folks for the show,

the authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free, not just for booking podcast guests, of course, for your business, for work, getting those negotiations going for your raise, personal life, whatever you might need, your network has it, and you know, you only go as high as your five closest friends, right? Check out Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The course is free, and most of the guests you hear on the show, subscribe to the course and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. All right, let's get to it with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Sorry, I'm a little late. I came off. I was talking to a high school class.

I mean, you can't really, I get it. It's funny. I'll be late for like Time magazine. But if I'm talking to like a high school class, I'm not going to say, hey, I got to go. I have something more important to do. Yeah, yeah. It's the other way around. It's the other way around. Exactly. Exactly. Otherwise, what are you about? What are you trying to do here? Yeah, it would say something about somebody if they said, I'm leaving for a taped appearance, so I have to go now. But thanks for showing up. Like, my life's all about educating people. Oh, sorry, chumps. I got something more important to do that makes me look cool to adults. No thanks. Yeah, yeah. As an educator, you got your priorities in the right place. And that's good. Do you consider

yourself primarily education at the top of the pyramid? I don't consider myself anything, really. Okay. The answer would have to be yes. But let me just offer. a different perspective on that. I'm only an educator because people have reached for me to educate them. Let me put it that way. I write my books. Those are my own initiatives. But the fact that people come to my tweets, for example, or they come to my public talks, I'm not twisting their arm. This is not some, you have to be in the class and you'll get a test on this. No, it's more of a shared celebration in learning. And if I can play some role in your life to take you to a new place, I'm delighted to do so, honored to do so, privileged to do so. And if I ever stopped succeeding at that, I'll take on

something else. I'm not going to still say, I'm an educator, damn it, and you're going to listen. So for me, it's a fact of circumstances rather than a fact of ambition. I can appreciate that. I think there's probably a lot to unpack there as well, but maybe on a different show. I'm excited to have you back on the show. You were here pre-pandemic. here, you're in your own probably house right now. Such a year exists that does that even? Right, yes. There was a thing where we used to be able to leave the house. It's called BC, but before coronavirus.

BC, exactly. We used to have this huge gong in the studio that I recorded it. And you walked in, he said, I just got off on New York Red Eye and I was like, oh, great. He's like, wants coffee and not this. And you go, can I hit this? And you whack the gong and then started telling us about, and I'm going to get it wrong, unfortunately, which is embarrassing. But the sound waves from the gong technically having kind of like infinite range out into the universe or something like that? Am I close? No, but... No, I didn't think so.

No, there are some, I don't remember exactly what I might have said. Yeah. But sound waves would move when it has a medium through which to propagate. In that case, it would have just been air. Okay. But sound waves can also enter walls and things, but there's an energy loss for the propagation of all such signals. and there's a point where you can't distinguish it from the background noise.

So basically at that point it disappears. But no, it's not a forever thing. That makes more sense because I wondered how possibly sound waves could go through space. And I just sort of assumed, there's some quantum thing going on here, which is what... Yeah, no, no. And you might see an article, a journalistic article, is saying, oh, we heard sounds from Saturn. No, we didn't. No, there's electromagnetic signals that you put into a box that converted it into a sound.

But those aren't sounds from Saturn. That's electromagnetic, usually radio waves from Saturn. And it happens historically that in the whole electromagnetic spectrum, we use the very long wavelength light waves. You can't see these, but we happen to call them radio waves. That happened to be the part of the spectrum that we used for communication. So we created a device that can receive a radio wave, converted into sound so that you can hear it because you can't see radio waves.

Right. And these boxes, we call those radios. because we're using radio waves. And TV uses radio waves, and so do microwaves. Your cell phone uses microwaves. Micro means small. Those are small radio waves. Microwaves are bigger than all the other wavelengths that are the other side of it,

which includes infrared, visible, gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet. So I'm just saying people want there to be sounds in space. But no. Yes, if you're in the star, you're going to hear the gurgling. Right. go into the vacuum of space, you're not hearing Jack. That makes a lot of sense to me. It'd be like sitting outside and hearing CNN in one ear and Fox News in the other ear

and 98.7 FM coming in front of me. I don't hear those things, even though the radio waves are going through my skull, right? So it's kind of the same thing. If you could hear them. But what we do is we put it through a device and that device converts it into an audio signal that one of your five senses then detects. Yeah. That's all.

Yeah. I wondered if people come up to you in public and ask you random questions, you know how, like, when you find out someone's a doctor, or if you're an annoying person and you find out someone's a doctor and you go, yeah, I got this thing on my leg. Does that look infected to you? Do people do that? And they're like, hey, look, so if a black hole has infinite gravity, can I transport to another dimension? Do people kind of do that to you? Yes, of course. And the most hazardous occasion for that is in the airplane because then they talk for you the whole flight. Oh, yeah. You can't escape. There was a day when I had the energy to sustain that, but less so today. You know, so I do the

Hollywood thing with the hat and the dark glasses. But people still must recognize you. Well, so there's a subset of people who recognize my voice. I don't even hear my voice. So I don't even, I don't think about it. So when someone just swings around and say, I recognize it, it was like, okay, there goes the hat and the glasses, you know, and I guess the full disguise would be a hat, glasses, and a mustache, but I already wear a mustache.

So I can't step out of that. But the kind of questions people ask, I can tell you what the rank is. of what the first questions are. So right up there, the top two or three are, is there life out there in the universe? That's up there. Another one, the black holes show up, what was around before the Big Bang, what's outside of the universe? And if not the top five, then the sixth question I get asked is, is there God? You know, studying the universe, do you see the face of God imprinted in the... So God typically shows up if the person has any historical religious affiliation at all. But generally it's not the first question that comes in a little later.

Can you sort of tell where somebody's level of, maybe not intelligence, but at least understanding of things are just based on that first question? I can tell it based on how they ask the question. Really? Yeah. What are you looking for? Or what are you seeing? No, it's not that I'm looking for. It's what I notice. Yeah, what are you noticing? So it's just how, what facility do they have with the vocabulary? All right? So they might confuse the solar system with the galaxy in a sentence. So that tells me, okay, maybe they've never had Astro 101 where that's like the first day of class. You learn the relative sizes of things and what's embedded in what. That means they didn't have that. If they say something about

that's mystical, like, oh, there's no such thing as coincidences. Everything happens for a reason. It starts saying things. These are thoughts and sentences that come from an entire other place in the world that is very untouched by the methods and tools of science. So what that does is I have gears going on my head all the time when I'm interacting with people and they rotate into place such that by the time I hear the question, my answer is shaped to best intersect their receptors for the information I'm sharing with them. And it was decades in the honing of this, but it's what has led to the following. thing. I have a conversation with someone and they say, oh, wow, that's great. I understood that

completely. Could you tell that exact same thing to my kids? It's like, no, I'm not, because they're not you. They're kids and they have other things going on in their head. So different gears rotate in my head. How old are they? Are they eight? Are they 12? Are they 16? Or are they five, right? They rotate into place. And I tap on my exposure to pop culture, which is an embarrassing large fraction of how I spend my daily time, but I think it makes me a more potent educator because it allows me to take things that matter to you and shape them into the information that I'm delivering so that it can maximally impact your capacity to think about it and to remember it. And so, yeah, there's not a one-cut fits all.

I'm just kind of imagining you using Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana to explain why Pluto's no longer a planet or something like that. After you're done, you're just like, I hate myself a little, but I think they understood me. Yeah, it was Hannah Montana all along. It was never really. Yeah, she was never a pop star. Yeah. It was a false identity for Pluto.

Yeah, so, but I think it's, that's the difference, I think, between being an educator and being a communicator, all right? I think if you know something, you can be an educator by teaching it. But how are you teaching it? Are you facing the chalkboard or whatever they use today? And just writing on the board, never looking back, never thinking about are they paying attention? Are they falling asleep? Are they reading the newspaper?

Or are you facing them? By the way, so in that first scenario, you're requiring that they meet you 90% of the way. They've got to do all the work to get to where you are. But suppose you put a little bit of effort from your own energies into reaching them where they are, then you're bound to be much more effective, not only communicating, but in impacting, having some influence on people's capacity to think, which is what has to happen in a science class. It's not just a satchel of facts. It's a way of querying nature, and it's a new way of understanding and thinking about how this world works and why the world works the way it does.

Last time we talked, we talked a little bit about Flat Earth, which still makes me kind of like roll my eyes to a point where I'm not sure if they're ever going to come back. There must be a part of you that's looking at flat earth anti-vax. And I don't just mean people going, oh, no, new vaccines, I'm a little scared. I mean like anti-vax. It's all a microchip conspiracy looking at Bigfoot. You must be at some point thinking, like, do I really have to explain this shit to you guys? Because it seems like we're advancing in so many areas, but we're also just, it's almost

like we're regressing. Like the internet is bringing some elements of the population somewhat willingly into just another dark ages. Yeah, so I don't, I'm less perturbed by this than others are. First, when full-grown adult says Earth is flat and they don't want to have a vaccine and they don't trust science, I might tell them you're probably alive today because of discoveries of science. Take a walk through a stroll through any cemetery that goes back at least 100 years and just look at how old people were when they died. What's particularly tragic is you don't have to walk far to find this. you find a double grave where there is, you know, and you do the math on the birth and death,

and there's a 30-year-old woman and a three-day-old child buried together. They both died in childbirth. This doesn't happen anyone. Not we're both. You can have complications, sure, an occasional death, but not one where every, you know, 30th tombstone is a record of the trauma that we went through as a civilization just trying to stay alive in this world. So I can say that, but it probably won't stick. What I rather do is look at the root source of how and why people think that way, and it happens

in the classroom. It's because people think science is just a body of knowledge. I can take it or leave it. I don't even have to agree with it. It's just like any other body of knowledge. No. Science is a fundamentally different activity undertaken by this human species. It is different from everything else that has ever happened before.

And it is a way of decoding what is objectively true in this world. And when we find what is objectively true, it is not susceptible to your opinion, to your politics, to your religion, to your culture, to your economics. It exists as a truth outside of anything you then think. That is not taught in school. And so people come out thinking, oh, I can just be skeptical. You think skeptical means doubting everything. No, skeptical is asking more questions.

and knowing when the answers are sufficient so that you really wasting your time continuing with that line of inquiry, time to question something else. I know you've got a couple kids, and I assume that scientific literacy was probably at the top of your list of things to teach them. And for me, with a two-year-old boy, I'm thinking of ways to make sure that he's always curious, but also knows how to investigate the claims that he hears from people. And you've talked about this a little bit. No, wait, wait.

It's a two-year-old. Your two-year-old is not going to investigate people's claims. No, no, no, no. I just mean in the future. Not right now. Right now I'm just trying to get him to like stop crying when he has a diaper change. Exactly. I have a two-year-old. I want to make sure they investigate people to claim. No, yeah, all right, fine. Yeah. So the question was... The question was essentially, well, one, do people ask you about horoscopes and confuse that stuff with actual science? And I'm wondering what the best way is to handle that. For me, I find it really difficult communicating with people who are averse to logic slash science, evidence-based things. But I also know I'm in the past been guilty, you're doing the wrong thing. Like, I'm almost like, oh, come on. I've got a... It's like a smug elitism that I really have recently stopped doing. doing because it doesn't, as you know, it doesn't help at all. It's irresistible to the educated to just be smug in the presence of those who don't know as much as you do.

So it's irresistible and it's created, I think, an unfortunate riff in society between people who are sort of, you know, as they say, Joe Sixpack and the academic elite, where the academic elite are summarily rejected for anything they might contribute to society. That's unfortunate. I put some of that burden, if not most of that burden, on the academic elite for not having an awareness and a sensitivity to how people think in this world. So, no, I don't beat people over the head about this. I might give them an experiment to do. So, for example, you find some widely read source of horoscopes and pick one. If you happen to be in a room of, let's say,

100 people or more, to say, I'm going to read a horoscope and you tell me if it's your horoscope. So this is the inverse of what people normally do. You go to the horoscope that's written, you think, for just you. And you say, oh, wow, that's really, they've got some insight into my life today. They nailed it, right. So let's just perform the inverse experiment. Pick one at random and read it to a room of 100 people. And I do this.

And when I do that, about 60, between three-fifths and two-thirds of the people, say it's their horoscope. And then I say, okay, fine. And then for those who are certain it's not, can you tell me why? And then we find out that the horoscope is, it applies to some of the people who said it was certainly not theirs. And it doesn't ever really do much better than random in each of those cases. So the point is, a person has to be primed to accept evidence that opposes what they want to be true. And if you're not primed to do that, then no amount of conversation you offer is going to change that.

And so that's why it's something deeper. It's something deeper in the educational system. So I can't hold people accountable for that, and I don't. Now, that being said, you're commenting on the absurdity of a flat earth and all the rest of that because it just defies logic and common sense and science and all the rest of this. By the way, the founding claims of most religions defy science in ways that are not fundamentally different in how sort of exotic the claims are relative to any of the same. else that people are believing. You want to think Mars affects you, and then you want to laugh at

them. And someone says, well, Jesus is in the sky and it's affecting me. Or Muhammad or Krishna, whatever. And I don't see you running after all of the religious communities of the world telling them that, no, you're crazy for thinking this way. So in a free society, I'm not going to stop people from thinking whatever they want. Where I draw the line, not that you ask, but where I draw the line is, If you have a belief system, and I count flat earthers as embracing a belief system, in a free country that's protected. I would draw the line, suppose you now run for office and you have power over laws or legislation that affect everyone.

Well, you're taking your belief system and now imposing it on other people. That's dangerous. That is a recipe for the unraveling of an informed democracy. Whereas objectively established truths, established by the methods and tools of science, apply to everyone whether or not they believe in it. And that is a wholly different way to construct civilization. You base civilization on what is objectively true and then give people the freedom to think what they want, provided they don't make a law requiring that you believe something that conflicts with your own beliefs. We have words for that. They're dictatorships, their autocracies,

whatever. There's an O-C-R-A-Y-O-R-A-C-Y-O-R-A-R-C-E that applies to what that is. And we should be happy we live in a country that celebrates free speech. And I am. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We'll be right back. Now back to Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Jordan Harbinger show. I would love to know how you developed your skills to be able to explain and communicate complex ideas effectively to the everyday person or any suggestions for people struggling in this area because you must have worked really, really hard to be able to go, okay, your level of understanding is right here because you're 16, 12, or 41, and you just don't have a good science background. I'm going to now make this digestible for you. And you do that seemingly on the fly,

on talk shows, like on the daily show or on TV, possibly even live. So it's not like, oh, hey, Neil, we're going to ask you all this stuff. Come up with a clever sounding sound by. Like, you got really, really good at that through a lot of hard work, I assume. Well, first, thank you for not saying, oh, you're so good at it, it must be natural. I know it's not, no one's that good at that, naturally. So thank you for granting me the expectation that it's the product of hard work. So that's my first, thank you. Yeah.

Second, I remembered, you know, I'd go back, I'm an old man now, so let me go back many decades, and I'd start explaining things to people because they'd ask, they, oh, you're an astrophysicist, I have this question. And I would monitor their attention span, their eyebrows. Would they lean in to the conversation or would they, are they easily distracted? At what word did I utter did they then lose interest? By the way, any writer thinks this way all the time, because the moment you lose someone in that sentence, they're gone. They're never coming back to your novel.

Hence is the important review of a novel. It was a page turner, right, where you kept wanting to hear more. So somehow the author has gotten under your skin in a good one. way and keeps you coming sentence by sentence, idea by idea. So there I am explaining things and not everything is working. There are words I'm using that they're not understanding. So I'm taking mental note of this because I say to myself, if this happens again, I'm going to avoid those pitfalls.

I mean, why not? If it's done incrementally, how much effort is that, right? But you also have to pay attention to body language. You have to monitor, are they interested or not? And if you're not, this is like the professor facing the chalkboard or the class. If you're not even looking or paying attention, you will fail because you're not going to be reading what works with them. So I make note, oh, this works for a person of this age group, but not this age group, or this kind of background, or if they're from this part of the country, okay, or this part of the world. All of this is an assembled encyclopedia.

That sounds so antiseptic. An assembled toolbox for me to reach it. Utility belt. There you go. There you go, yeah. I'm Batman. Everybody wants to be Batman. It's my utility belt. And I find out what their interests are. And I clad the science that I'm describing on what they came to me with. Are they fluent in pop culture? Are they religious? Are they ambitious? Are they not ambitious? All of these things shaped what words I choose. And hardly anything I ever say, do I say without having first written it down? Really? Like even the sound bites on a, like a show, you'll have written that in the past and used it before? Yes, but I'll word it differently. I'll say, I've written so much about all of these topics that when the topic comes up, I just access a carefully worded sentence that I spent time composing. So if science writing were just communicating information, you could just staple together wiki pages on all the science topics. But well-written books don't read like wiki pages as useful as wiki pages are. You're not reading them to be page turners, right?

You're reading them to get specific information. But if you're going to write a book or give a lecture, you want the words to matter, to flow, to attract someone's interest. And so I'm going, oh, I have a better word that's shorter and less complicated. Let me use that. Yeah, that works. But now the next idea that follows it, these become templates within me. And I have a good random access memory.

Because if you spent that much time composing a sentence, you're going to remember that sentence. You're going to remember what that machinery was that went through your head. And I've written about basically every single science topic that I talk about publicly. So that helps. So whole sentences can come out fully composed primarily because I already went through that same thought process. Unless you ask me a question that's so out of far left field. But then I can sort of assemble. I have words with me.

and I have, I can do this on the fly. I don't fear that. In fact, I welcome it. It gives me a new pocket in my utility belt to field questions of one nature versus another. On the flip side, if you encounter a topic in your life that you're not familiar with, which I assume happens, you know, just from anybody who reads, what's your process to then understand that topic? Are you using something similar that you would use to teach other people to remember things yourself or wrap your mind around topics? No, no. It's not about memory. Memory is good to have. It's Good to have a good memory, but you know it's even better to have a good understanding. Understanding, yeah.

When you have an understanding of something, you don't have to remember it because you just understand it. So I'll give it, I think is a good example. So if you walk into a bookstore and you say, okay, where are your cookbooks? Okay, oh, they're over here. And it's an entire section of cookbooks. Regional. They, this, fast, cook, slow cook.

By the way, there are more cookbooks than there are elements on the periodic table. So what's going on there? recipes are things you kind of memorize. Whereas, if I say, we're the books on all the known physics in the universe. Well, it's one corner of one shelf. There's like electromagnetism, there's gravity, there's life. And it's that.

And so I can come to you with a deep understanding of all manner of things that go on in the universe that derive from these four books. That's an understanding. I didn't memorize the books. It's not about memorization. It's about understanding how and why things work so that when you encounter something you've never seen before, you can invoke the principles of how and why things work to fully understand what's happening.

And it empowers you to evaluate situations that you've never been in before. Let me take a quick side ramp here. Imagine two people in the workplace. All right? So the boss comes up and hands the worker some task. And the worker says, I've never done. done this before, this is not in my job description. And the person declines the task. And there's another person. Wow, I've never seen this before. This is outside my job description.

Let me go home and learn about it. This is great. Okay. There's two completely different employees. All right. One of them embraces the unknown and wants to learn about it. By the way, having done so, makes them more valuable to the company. All right. And then the other person gets a task because they think, and this surely happens in some cases, but stay with me on this. They think that doing extra work that's not in their job description is exploiting them. And yes, that's true. But if you're in the kind of job where they care about how you contribute to the company, if you show you did something great, that was not in your job description, there's a new job description awaiting of you. Okay? If the workplace is fair in any sense, there are other jobs for you. They will grow your

responsibility and accountability into that position. So to get back to your question, when I encounter something I don't understand, I will totally dig it up. And I'll try to think of interesting things I'd want to know about it and start there because that feeds your curiosity and your interest. So let's pick a topic I don't know much about. How about grasshoppers? So I would first say, well, how do they make that noise? I heard it's their legs, but really? What's rubbing against what to make the noise? And they have these big, beady eyes. What do they need antenna for? I would ask questions about it. Because what is science, if not a method? of querying nature.

And then I'd use those as ways to pull me in. And while I'm on that journey, I might see other things. Oh, here's why the grasshopper wants to jump so far, or why it's that size. Or suppose I want to eat a grasshopper, right? Where's all the protein? Because the whole cultures that thrive on grasshoppers. And so I would ask things that interest me, and that gets me deep into it in such a way that I can now celebrate the subject and be conversant with somebody, not an expert at

but I'd be conversant with someone who is an expert and possibly even learn more. Oh, and I never lose the occasion to ask questions of an expert in the room, no matter what that person is an expert in. If you have just a little bit of knowledge of a lot of things, just enough to crack open a door so that you can engage an expert in a conversation. I'm all in on that. There's an old saying. If you look around and you're the expert in the room, change rooms. What's the last thing you did a deep dive on, just out of sheer curiosity? Let me think. I do this so often that I don't have one that stands out. So I did a deep dive on Woodrow Wilson, the president, and his relationship to the economy of the United States. and more importantly, his racist charge policies regarding the federal government, how he basically

segregated the federal government and reversed trends that had been rather progressive leading up to that point. Something I'd never known about him. I spent time at Princeton University, where the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy, and all the while I just never knew that about him. So I just dug up more about that chapter in American history, I will add that in the emphasis is part of the deep dive, right? You know, we can start blaming individuals for things, you know, because we like doing that. We say it's your fault, let's punish you, let's cancel you. So I get that. But sometimes it's a little more complex than that. So over that time, especially in the United States, the eugenics movement was rising high in priorities and actions and politics and policy. So there's the

Statue of Liberty saying, bring me your weak and your help, whatever is the poem there. And people started saying, no, these immigrants are diluting the stock of the white European stock and we must protect it. And there's an entire eugenics movement feeding that. And it is pervasive. in the culture among those in power. And so there's were Joe Wilson, a man of his time, who's sure that eugenics is on to the right thing. And then there's someone with power who makes very unfortunate, non-progressive,

regressive decisions in this world. So for me to even have any fluency there at all, I had to have some open door to say, oh, that's an interesting thing. Let me ask that. Let me find this out. Now what else was going on? So I have in my books,

I have a shelf probably four feet across that has books on just eugenics. And then you learn that the American eugenics movement fed Hitler's thinking about how he was going to take care of business in Germany. You know, we've, quote, whitewashed that from our role in his thinking. He's not a scientist. He's getting his ideas from anthropologists who were totally bought into this eugenics. movement. So that's been sort of ongoing with me for many months now, actually years, but since George Floyd and this past summer, I've been doing deeper dives into race relations in the history of the country going farther back than just the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.

Is it frustrating for you to look at how science was used as a cudgel with eugenics and all this other bullshit? And then having people go, see, science is political. So how do I know that what you're telling me right now isn't just eugenics 2.0 and that it's real science and it's not just politically motivated gobbledygook. Yeah, that's an honestly posed question. And I think I have a good reply to that. And I wrote this. You can Google it. I wrote a perspective piece. I originally posted it to Facebook as a note, but Facebook got rid of their notes for some reason. It was my main means of communicating with people. It's long form entries rather than punchy things that you'd put in several times a day.

But anyhow, it's not there. So it's on my own website. The title of it is, what science is and how and why it works. We'll link to that in the show notes. Yeah. So here's the point. The physical sciences are less susceptible than sciences that involve human beings as subject. But one of the most important things you have to carry with you is the capacity to judge

whether what you end up thinking is true, what you think it's true, but it's actually not, or something you think is not true that actually is. And when human beings are the subjects, it is some of the most susceptible science to the influence of bias. Not some of the most, it is the most susceptible science with regard to bias. And so if you have a study that is going there, you need extra attention. given to it. And almost always, when you have those kinds of studies, the people doing the study, whoever they are end up at the top of their list. If they're men, then men are better than women. If they're white, then white is better than other colors. If they're European, then the European cultures

are better. And the anthropologists are ground zero for that level of bias in their scientific thinking. And there they are carrying the titles of scientists. So I'm happy to report that my fields, collectively the physical sciences, we're susceptible to other kinds of biases. Like, you really want this to be true because you invested 10 years of your life. And so you don't even see that it's false. And so you keep cherry picking the data to support your own views. But I'm not you, and I don't have your biases, and look, it's not holding up. So many a scientific career have ended or faded because people wouldn't relinquish

some long earlier held thought that was not yet about. verified. So, yeah, it's unfortunate that science has been used in that way, and I suspect will continue to be used in the fields that involve human beings as subjects. It makes sense, and I think it's hard for us to shake our concept. I mean, it takes generations, if not longer, for people to, I mean, even when you look at things that are physical sciences, I mean, didn't we string up, we, didn't they string up Galileo? Like, you know, you see these scientists getting killed, or was it Aristotle? I forget now. Like, hey, you can't Can't say that. This is wrong. There's Galileo, right, who got executed for saying, hey, maybe the Earth is in the center of our...

He was imprisoned. Imprined. Yeah, yeah. Giordano Bruno got executed, burned upside down at the stake in Italy for suggesting, many things, but suggesting that there might be other worlds out there, not just Earth, and Earth might not be the only object of God's creation. One of his famous quotes is, your God is too small. That might have been what got him hung upside down. I'm just saying. Yeah, yeah. So if you look at that article, by the way, it takes about four minutes to read. It's a fast read. But you will see that the methods and tools of science, as we now practice them, have only been in widespread use since about the year 1600. So since Galileo onward. So it's about only 400 years. And that's nothing in the history of civilization. So to go back before Galileo, you have the whole world. thinking, or many people thinking, Earth is flat, or that there's all manner of thinking. And by the way, on the frontier of research, most results will be wrong. What matters is not what any scientist tells you, or any one research project suggests. What matters is, has that been verified? Has it been duplicated? Not by just your friends in your own lab. Has it duplicated by one of your competitors? All right? Only then, if you have some interesting result, will we then say, yep, you have

arrived at a new objective truth about this world, then you put it in the books. Those objective truths are not later shown to be false. Hence, my comment, science is true whether or not you believe in it. People want to sort of caricatured and say, listen to any scientists no matter what. No, no. It's the methods and tools of science, when invoked, to their fullest, will establish what is objectively true, and that is not later shown to be false. So when people say, well, scientists once thought Earth was flat, well, that was before 1600. Okay?

Well, how about this? Scientists used to have leeches and bleed you. Go back to that time and look at the research literature. It was not yet settled. That was a contested idea. Will this work? Will we not? Do we need the blood?

Blood is in essence. We got this. So in that case, you're taking something that is on the, no pun intended, bleeding edge of medical research. and something sort of catch on to people's fancies, that doesn't make it the objective truth. So it's only when it's established, and how do we know when it's objective truth? When multiple studies demonstrate it. That's all.

It's that simple. And on the bleeding edge, most will turn out to be wrong. Interesting. I can now see people twisting that and going, well, then don't use anything new vaccines. Don't use it. No, no, no. No, no. Something could be new, but if it's tested, go for it.

Yeah. Okay. I'm just saying I don't want people to twist it. Well, of course. Well, they will no matter what we say. True. The twisters out there will do it no matter what we say. What I'm saying is.

Twister's gone twist. For someone to say, I'm not going to take the vaccine because it's not tested. Yes, it has been tested. Yes, you can read the test results. These are people who have already made up their mind and are inventing reasons to justify the mind that they've already made up. And the reasons they're invoking are false because there are the studies you can read them. And you can find out what the side effects are.

if any, or how severe they are, who was most susceptible to those side effects? You can then ask yourself, do I have those conditions that would make me susceptible? You can do this rather than say, I'm going to wait until it's tested. That's just you've been misinformed by whatever are your sources, your news sources have, sometimes don't have your own enlightenment in their interest. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Neil deGrasse Tyson. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening to and supporting the show.

I love making it for you. To learn more and get links to all the deals on everything you hear during the ad spots here, all those sponsors, we put all the codes, all the deals, all the URLs, they're all in one place. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please do consider supporting those who support us.

And don't forget, we have worksheets for many episodes. If you want some of the drills, exercises that we talk about here during the show, those are all in one easy place as well. The link to the worksheets is at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. They're in the show notes for every episode. And now for the conclusion of my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. If light takes so long to travel from one solar system to another, what is it again? Like 186,000 miles per second. Am I even close? Yes. Yes? Very close. Okay. I'll take it. If light takes so long to travel from one solar system to another,

is it possible with a high enough resolution telescope that we could look at another planet and see an extinct civilization just going about their daily lives? And, and suddenly, or maybe not so suddenly, just ending. But that's like a million years ago. Yeah, of course. That this happened. So let's take the number of million years. Let's say we have a really good telescope and we find a planet and it's a million

light years away. Let's be a little more realistic, 10,000 light years away. That would be within our own galaxy. A million, you're out in intergalactic space. Okay. So 10,000 years ago, and we said, oh, there's a civilization. Oh, my gosh, look, they invented nuclear power. Oh, look.

They just rendered themselves extinct. everything you just witnessed happened 10,000 years ago. And it's that wave of light emanating from the planet, moving through space at the speed of light, informing every next civilization that it washes over what has happened to that civilization in your past. And to get DC Comics on you, I got a call from DC Comics once. They wanted to know if I wouldn't mind meeting Superman. And I said, sure. So, and the typical question is,

Well, which one? Was it? Yeah, which one? Was there this? No, no, no. It's actually meeting Superman. So this is how it worked. They were writing a story for their comics,

where Superman wanted to come to the Hayden Planetarium, my day job, and look through whatever telescopes they believed we had, but we don't keep telescopes there, but that's fine. It's the comics. It's a comic. So look through there and look back at his home planet and observe it getting destroyed. Depressing. And you just have to be there for that and give him a hug.

Okay. And so I said, well, we got to give this some ground. truth, right? If he is on Earth and sees the planet getting destroyed, because the light is only now just reaching us, how old is Superman? And they said, oh, he's eternally in his late 20s. So I said, okay, so Krypton, or the Krypton system will have to be in the late 20s light years away. Because that's how long it's taken to get here. Okay, so I said, I'll find you a star that has the right criteria for that. Okay, so that's great. And it has to be a red star because it's a red star that his home planet orbit it. So then I said, well, how did he really get here? If he traveled

at the speed of light, he won't age. And clearly, since he was launched Moses' style, the baby, and you know from month to month, if a baby has matured, right, months matter, you can see. This baby basically didn't age at all, going from Krypton to Earth. So had it traveled at the speed of light, it would not have aged, according to relativity. But then it would have arrived when the light from the exploding planet would have arrived. So he wouldn't be able to see it 27 years later. So I said, Superman would have to have to travel through a wormhole. That way, he beats the light, gets here instantly. Age grows up to be in his late 20s, and then he can see the light. So they all agreed to do this. So in Action Comics 14, you can look this up, Superman visits the

Hayden Planetarium, and I greet him, my comic form, that's why I can say I actually met Superman. I greet him, and he asks about it. I tell him how we got the equipment to work to do this. And then he sees the destruction. And it's a sad moment. He actually looks sad in that illustration because he watches the destruction of his home. He knew intellectually what had happened, but to feel it and to see it. So that was a 27-year delay on an event that happened 27 years ago.

They must have been pretty thankful that you were, or were they just like, ah, man, now we got to rewrite stuff. Can we keep the old illustrations? Well, it's been part of the canon. I mean, it's, I think the good comic strips that have superheroes where there's some kind of science involved, they've been very responsive. I've been quite impressed by that because their fan base cares. Yeah, they do. I mean, the Geekosphere or their primary fan base, that's like ground zero of their fan base.

And they're going to hold you to it. So if I'm sitting in front of you, let's say I'm across a, we're at a large conference room table talking about action comics number 14 and your licensing deal. I'm actually not seeing you as you currently are. you as you were a few, I don't know, like nanoseconds prior, because the light is reaching me with some delay? The answer is yes, but let me give you some tools to work with. You ready? So, nano is a metric prefix for one billionth.

So a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. The robotics community borrowed it, and they call them nanobots, but they're not a billionth of anything. They're just little robots, okay? So I'm a little upset about that. I can't reverse that. Okay.

They're just mini-bots. They're not nanobots. It turns out at 186,000 miles per second, light takes one nanosecond to travel one foot. Okay. So if you're three feet away from me at a conference table, I see you not as you are, but as you once were, three billionths of a second to go. Right. We don't make a big deal of it because you live for much longer than a billionth of a second. So you haven't changed much over that time.

But if I start putting you farther and farther away from, I put you on the moon, I see you as you were one and a half seconds ago. Put you on the sun eight minutes ago. The nearest star to the sun, four years ago. And I can keep putting you farther and farther away. And eventually, you will be very different from the light in any given moment than the light that I receive from you. Because the time it takes light to travel is large,

compared with your lifespan. So there's stars out there that have long died, but we don't know it yet. Yeah, we just don't know. We don't know. Every night, there's stars observed to explode, and they exploded hundreds, thousands, and in some cases, millions of years ago. That stuff is so interesting, and it makes, it's good for making your sort of bad day go away when you go, well, first of all, I'm really small, but also they're having a bad day.

If there was anybody near that. It's a cosmic perspective. Works every time. Yeah. When we hear about major physics discoveries, I guess these are major physics discoveries, I really don't know the scale, but they tell us more about space and physics and matter, and we hear about particle accelerators. What are we actually accelerating?

Particles, fine, I get it. But why accelerate them? Are we smashing them into each other? Are we measuring them at high speeds? That's a great question. And I like that question, especially just for how bluntly simple and honest it is. What's all wide accelerator? I am simple, if nothing.

And so if you go back hundreds of years and you go to a tabletop, you could do things on the tabletop that we wouldn't understand. So you say, well, let's find out. You can build a machine that creates energy that passes through your skin and leaves the shadow of your bones on a thing. What is that? How does that work? Did that on a tabletop? I can take a wire and pass it through a magnetic field and then an electrical current meter tips. So I do this over here and something happens over there.

How did that happen? What is that? Okay, I can have a bar magnet and sprinkle iron filings on it and it takes the shape outside of the magnet. What's there? There's just air? I can do it in a vacuum and the same thing would happen. So there were mysteries on the tabletop that remained undefiased. discovered or not well understood. Right now, there's nothing on a tabletop that we don't understand.

Cool. So where do we have to go? What you want to do is you want to push the limits of energy on your tabletop, right? Why was x-rays so interesting? They're an extreme form of electromagnetic energy that we hadn't reached yet. And it was doing interesting things that we had never seen before. And so we later discover gamma rays, which are even more energetic than x-rays. So what we have found in physics and astronomy as well is that if you want to make the next discovery, you've got to hang out in an energy regime that no one has reached before. Well, when do you generate these energies? If you take two particles, accelerate them, and then slam them into a target, the energy of that impact is huge.

If something interesting happens in the universe only under those conditions of energy, it will manifest there and then. And that's what we've done. That's how you discover quarks and all these exotic subatomic particles and how new elements were created. The element plutonium, named after Pluto, falsely, by the way, because they thought it was a planet, was discovered in 1940. So recent.

Within five years, we had developed it and weaponized it and turned into the bomb we dropped over Nagasaki. These are discoveries made at the energetic limits of our understanding of the universe. And if you create a particle accelerator that lives in an energy regime that no other accelerator can touch, then whole new frontiers of discovery await you.

The equivalent in my field to that of the particle physicist is how big is your telescope? A big telescope sees farther and dimmer than any previous telescope has. So if there's something close that's really dim, it'll catch it. If there's something far,

and it's dim because it's far, even if it's inherently bright, intrinsically bright, it'll catch it. So we always expect any new telescope when it comes online to be on the frontier of cosmic discovery, simply because it has gone where it needs to away from the desktop, the laboratory, the slab in the lab, where previous discoveries could be made. You're not making those discoveries anymore. Thank you. Brilliant explanation. I know you got to go. It's kind of a bummer that it's already over, but we'll have you back when you write the next book, which seems to be like every other year. I don't know how you do it. I'm not going to ask for all your secrets.

It's ever more efficient use of one's own time. That's really where that comes down to. I think so. You don't want to be too efficient because then your life becomes regimented in its efficiency. And I think creativity comes from a different place. It comes from when everything is a mess. and then you have to make sense of the mess, metaphorically, physically, literally, artistically, and then you innovate with a solution to that.

I think a balanced life is overrated for that reason. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for endeavoring to make us a more enlightened country and world. I think it's so important. And by the way, with these questions in the latest book, Cosmic Queries, it's all about a celebration of questions. And it's not, these are questions we have answers to. It's these are questions that have preoccupied us in civilization for millennia.

And so we address those questions in the book whether or not we have an answer for them. So because in the end, you need to learn to love the questions themselves because therein are the doorways to learning and understanding and enlightenment. I knew you were going to leave us with an awesome sort of end sounds. Do you plan those or are you just like, I'm going to do you this one now? Does it come out of there? It's got to be second nature at this point. You know, yeah, you don't want to say an ending thing at the beginning. A quick anecdote, I gave a public talk. I forgot where I was, somewhere in Indiana. And there's a Q&A session that was being managed by someone else. And someone says,

we only have time for one more question. So then a question gets asked of me. And so I answer it in a way, knowing it's the last question. Right. Afterwards, someone came up to me and said, you lucked out on that last question. Right. I said, what do you mean? He said, oh, because it was such a perfect question to end on. I said, you have no fucking idea what I just did.

It was, I took the question and made it an ending question. So again, they were just assuming it was just luck and it's natural and all the rest of it. You're so gifted, Neil. No, no, no. It was, I think there are summative reflections one can offer unpractically any question that gets asked so that if it happens to be the last question, you can still exit the building on a pensive, reflective note. And on that note? Anyhow, happy to be back on your show. Keep it going. You're a good voice out there. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Good luck with the bagillion other interviews that you may have to do today.

Okay. We've got a trailer of our interview with Jack Barski, former KGB spy, who posed as an American in a truer-than-life version of a Hollywood movie. This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union, secretly becoming a real American. We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture. Coming right up. I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport control. So a young person that really feels good because I never liked rules.

How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that? They called me back as an emergency departure. They've done this in the past. They've called back an agent. And as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed or even executed. I was stalling the Soviets. And then one day they said, Then one of their resident agents, and he said to me, you've got to come home or else you're dead, it was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell them that I'm not returning. I will not betray any secrets, and please give the money on my account to my German family. Wow.

Tell us how you got caught, because the story is just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past. I was stopped on the other side of a toll gate. It was a state trooper. Just like to check your license and registration. And could you step out of the car? I step out of the car. I still not having a clue what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, somebody approaching me from the back.

The fellow introduced himself. He says, Joe Riley, FBI, and he showed me this badge. We would like to talk with you. The first question I asked, am I under arrest? And the answer was no. Then I said, what took you so long? For more from Jack Barski, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened after that, check out episode 285 of the Jordan Harbinger

Show. Always loved Neil deGrasse Tyson. Fun fact, he met his wife in relativity class, and they later became relatives. I guess that's how that works. In one of his earlier books, he was answering a lot of questions from fans and also from haters, and I thought that was a hilarious concept for a book. We actually do that a lot here on the show as well, as you know. And he's really good about giving people full attention and respect, which I can appreciate.

I think it would be very tempting if I were a scientist to look at and regard anti-science people or people who believe absolutely ridiculous things as morons or people who should know better. But he doesn't seem to do that. And I want to take a page out of that book for myself, a little bit of intellectual humility, but also humility in the face of things that you know are incorrect. Like when people write in and tell me that Bigfoot exists and Bill Gates is microchipping us with vaccines, I just want to scream in their face that they're not worth microchipping in the first place and that they're already essentially microship

because they carry a frickin' phone everywhere and post photos of all their meals on Instagram and Facebook. But it seems like now, look, there could be an alien civilization, right? We're obsessed with this lately because of the UFO stuff and the news cycle that we can't seem to escape from.

There are obviously other plausible explanations for all of those things. It is fascinating, though, that even if there are aliens and they don't have to be visiting us here on Earth, but if they're looking at us, they're actually looking at us through the genesis of humanity, or even the genesis of our entire planet, because they are so far away.

So there could be aliens looking at what's going on in the Roman Empire right now with their super crazy optical technology. And that's a fascinating thought. And one I think is worth thinking about, even if we don't believe in all of the UFO stuff that we have seen lately in the news and elsewhere. Now, Neil, his major goal, along with mine, frankly, but his major goal is a more enlightened country. I think we do share this, especially never telling people what to think, but instead training them how to think. He does it with science. I like to do it by presenting brilliant people like him to the audience. That's you listening, and I appreciate you doing that. So thank you for listening and for being self-motivated, come in here, empowering yourselves with scientific knowledge

and better thinking. We had a brilliant guest today. I think he's made us all smarter, but don't get too cocky, because as Neil says, as our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance. Of course, when he says it, it's all bassy and, you know, kind of mysterious. I can't really follow that. Big thanks to Neil deGrasse Tyson. The book, the newest one anyway, is called Cosmic Queries Star Talks Guide to Who We Are, how we got here, and where we're going. Always fascinating with him.

Links to his stuff, including the book, will be in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy the book because it does help support the show. Yes, the Audible Links work. Yes, they work in other countries. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes as well. Transcripts are in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel, by the way, at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube.

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