TRIGGERnometry - Have We Lost Trust in Science? - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Tyson studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University and was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. Since 1996 he has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. He is the host of the podcast StarTalk and in 2014 hosted the popular television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. He is the author of many books, the latest of which is 'Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization', available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Q7Y4GL5/   SPONSORED BY: EasyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So now we have people in a once-in-a-century pandemic trying to communicate science to the public. Okay. I don't want to call it a total disaster, but there were parts that it was like, no, no. An establishment of you is not from authorities on high. No, it's the consensus of research conducted by hard-working scientists in a lab whose name you've never heard of. I'm wondering whether the future of those sports is you don't contest gender with gender. You contest hormone ratios. Well, hold on a second.

But the difference is physiologically between men and women are not just hormonal. They see an unfair playing field metaphorically and literally speaking. So fix the playing field, damn it? Don't say it's an unfair playing field. So all of a sudden the big issue is trans women taking the slot of a woman in an unfair playing field, fix the playing field. And you know something? The day you fix that playing field, this conversation will look completely ridiculous.

That's what I'm trying to tell you. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a prominent American astrophysicist. author of many books, the latest of which is called Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you. Thank you. I thought there'd be math on the show, but apparently not. We will see. We'll see how much math there is. That's the only reason why I agree to this, that we do some... All right, well, 2 plus 2 equals 4. I hope we can agree on that, although some people are dispute even that these days. Yeah. But anyway, welcome. It is a clever name for the show, triggerometry. That's good.

One of the greatest astrophysicists in the world likes the name of the show. I think we've done well. So Neil, welcome, first of all. I cannot wait to talk about your book because one of the things that whenever I'm having a particularly bad day or things are not going well in my life, I'll stick one of those YouTube videos on that shows you a zoom out from planet Earth into the solar system.

That'll do it every time. Into the Milky Way and on and on. And I think that cosmic perspective on life is really powerful. powerful thing. Before we get into that and some of the more controversial stuff that you've been saying lately, let's talk briefly about your career today. Who are you? How are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Did I say something controversial? I'm just... Well, we'll find out. I'm just offering points of view. Okay. That's controversial nowadays. I don't make you know this. Yeah, but it shouldn't be,

really, I'm thinking, but okay. So you open, your opening question is... Who are you? What's been a journey through life? Oh. Oh, okay. I've known I was interested in the universe from age nine, dating back to a first visit to my local planetarium. I grew up in New York City. So my local planetarium is the Hayden Planetarium, where I now happen to also serve as director. And going on now 27th year, I think, as director. So it's one of these hometown kid does good, but in New York City, the city's too large. No one cares. So that story doesn't resonate the way it might if it was actually a small town. One thing about a planetarium in a city is, and this is surely true for London, where the planetarium might be your only access to the night sky. Because big cities, in the old days, there was air pollution today, there was light pollution.

And so it blocks what would otherwise be your access to the cosmos. And so for me, my first encounter with the night. sky, I kind of thought it was a hoax, right? They're not this many stars in the night sky. I've seen all 12 of them from the Bronx, okay? So I would later learn, of course, that the sky displayed in the planetarium dome was the real sky, a version of the real sky. But to this day, when I'm on mountaintops or some of the finest observing locations in the world, I find myself thinking this is so beautiful.

It reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. That's a sad fact, but it's real. I feel it. So I've been thinking about the universe ever since. Early on, I'm just reading books, and then I align my academic career to fulfill that interest right on through a PhD. And so I did research mostly many years ago.

Lately, I've been mostly in the podcast. public eye, writing books, appearing in documentaries, among them Cosmos. I did the second and third versions of that. Carl Sagan did the first back in 1980, very honored to continue that tradition of bringing the universe down to earth to whoever will listen and as a servant of their curiosity. So that's who I am and what I've been about. And you've been communicating science to the public in very interesting and appealing ways for a long time. Why is that important, Neil? Why is it important that we as the public are informed about the science? Yeah, I will not tell you what you should think is important because I'm just offering content and I'm not going to hit you on the head

to require that you listen to me. I'm not going to do any of that because I'm much more passive about it. Even if it doesn't feel that way because my face is everywhere and videos are everywhere, of course, and I'm active on social media. And so the algorithms could possibly stick me in front of your device more often than you might want. But really, I feel more passive about it. These are offerings. And what's perhaps distinctive about it, and thanks for noticing, is that there are many different platforms on which I bring the universe to you. And these different platforms aren't simply because you're watching this and somebody else is watching that.

And I'm going to reach both of you. Sure. But I write a book, but they're people who don't read. Not that they're illiterate, but that's just not their main choice of how they learn. They might prefer documentary. So I appear in documentaries. Ones that I've hosted and those are where I'm a talking head within someone else's documentary. There are people whose lives pivot on their social media interfaces. So I have an

active Twitter account, X account, they would call it today. I even have an active TikTok account. And I have people advising me who are one third my age on what would fit today versus tomorrow on that TikTok account. So I'm on many different platforms. And I, and my podcast, which is called StarTalk, I have a professional comedian as my co-host. And I've had people and so, and the DNA of that podcast is there's science, humor, and pop culture. And the three of those threaded make a tapestry of, that you can snuggle in and embrace the universe as fed in with those elements. I've had people say to me, what do you need the comedian for? I just want to listen to you. Well, there are these other platforms where it's just me. Go ahead. All right. I have a masterclass.

It's just me. I have that. But there's some people who like to laugh while they're learning. And they like the references to pop culture because they care about pop culture. That's almost the definition of pop culture, stuff we all care about, whether or not we want to. You know who Beyonce is. You know that Taylor Swift. You know, you know, the Pope might have said something recently or Trump. This is all pop culture. And there's a scaffold.

You walk into my room, my, my, you know, platform. You walk in with a scaffold. And I know what's that's, what constructs that scaffold. And I find science that can attach to it. So I don't have to teach you the pop culture. You already know it. But did you know? that if you apply a little bit of astrophysics to the Barbie movie, Barbian finds itself in the Florida Keys.

Did you know that? Okay? I calculated that and posted that. That's pop culture. It's actually real science and a little bit of geography related to it. So my energy is shared on all these platforms. And if you don't want to listen, I'm not going to force you. It's just there for your taking.

No, no, no, keep watching. We need the algorithmic engagement. Keep watching. You must watch this. Neil, I think you do a hugely important job, which is essentially being the public face of your discipline. Post-pandemic, do you think that science has taken a battering in that people have lost a little bit of faith in scientists as a result of, you know, things that people said, for instance, you know, that people were saying, well, you know, if you take the vaccine, it means that you can't pass it. on the virus and then that turned out not to be true. Now, obviously I'm not asking you to comment on that, but just do you think that people are now just a little bit more skeptical of scientists, a little bit more untrusting? So there are a couple of loose edges there. So let me, let me explore that with you. All right. So first, no single scientist ever communicates the truth unless they are communicating a consensus of observations that have been made. And unfortunately,

I don't have a better word than consensus to use in that sentence. Because typically when we hear the word consensus, it relates to a shared opinion about something. In science, it's not about opinions. It's about the results of experiments. And if you have a set of experiments, most of which lean in this direction instead of that direction is like, hey, we're on to something here. and I'm going to go with the consensus of those observations and experiments. And they have nothing to do with the individual. Okay? So what's curious to me is we live in an era where you can channel surf on YouTube.

Is that what it's called? Just surf on YouTube. They're not channels, I guess. You surf on YouTube and you land on somebody who says, the mainstream thinks this is true. The establishment thinks this, but here's the actual truth. you're all in on that. Okay.

But why are you all in on that? And there's something about the lone genius that we want to snuggle up to them rather than the faceless establishment. Because that person is speaking passionately. And our response to fellow humans speaking passionately is well known in the advertising. industry. They could just show you a bar chart of why their product is better than everybody else's. But no, they have a person saying, I use this and it changes my life and it'll change your life too. That's what you listen to. We're blind to the statistical representation of reality. And I'm okay, we're human and do I complain about that or just try to navigate that?

I don't know. I do know we're not very good at thinking statistically. about the world, okay? And if we were better at it, no one would play the lottery, okay? Just let's understand that, all right? And we have people who exploit this ignorance exquisitely, and they're called casino owners, okay? They're exploiting the fact that humans fundamentally do not understand probability and statistics, okay? So that's an education problem, and that gap manifests in adulthood with our susceptibility to others who do know the statistics, who then exploit your ignorance of it. That's my first point.

Another loose edge is we have institutions and people representing institutions where science research is conducted, okay, or conducted under their auspices, the National Academy of Sciences, in the United States, the National Institutes of Health. And the UK surely has corresponding agencies to this. Here's a problem. How well do they know how to communicate? Okay. We're not, as scientists, we don't take graduate courses in communication and how people will misthink what you say or how they will, how you'll try to say something in a way that, no, no, none of them are trained in this. So now we have people in a once in a century pandemic trying to communicate science to the public. public. Okay. I don't want to call it a total disaster, but there were parts that it was like, no, no. So with the benefit of hindsight, let me say, how it should have happened, okay? The CDC, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, here's what they should have said. They should have said,

Here's what we know today based on a set of research results that have come in. Okay? And you don't focus on one researcher. There's the ensemble. Okay? Here's what we know. And based on this, we recommend that. Okay?

Based on this, we recommend that. We will update you weekly on what we have learned because this is a hot area of research. And as research comes in, if it continues to reinforce these results, we will continue to urge you do these things. If we find research that does not completely agree with that it might have, we will tell you that. And we will be honest about these uncertainties. Okay? And we will only make a, a federal level, requirement when we have the statistical confidence in the research that has been conducted. That's how it should have unfolded, but it didn't.

That sounds so good, Neil, but we were so, so far away from that, weren't we? We were, but to do that, it requires that you have some sense of what this, because if you're reporting science, you're reporting the statistics, all, no one, no scientists will ever say, this is a certainty and this is totally, they'll say this, we have a 98% and 95% because we have statistical measures of the results we get. That is the currency of our communication in any scientific journal. So the person reporting this should not say, we are certain of this, they should say our data show that is a 95% likelihood of this being true. Okay. Now you have to ask yourself, if you're about to cross a bridge that was just built, and 95% of random

engineers you come up to and say, tell me about this bridge, I'll say, it's going to collapse with the first truck that goes over it, and you'll be dead because there's a long drop. But 5% of the engineers say, no, no, you'll be fine. What are you going to do? I'm going with the 95% of the engineers, because there will always be outliers. Yeah. Always. Always.

That's why one person, one research result is not the thing. And you had people in the outlier part of this statistics posting YouTube statements that, no, I've done my research and this is all bullshit, you should listen to me. No, never do that. Never. Never? Haven't there been people? I'm screaming at you here. I'm just trying to get excited. Yeah, no, it's great. It's great.

But Neil, to engage you on that point. No one research result should be accepted as the truth. It has to have verification to, as a double check, was their bias? Did their wall current fluctuate when they got the result from their plug-in experiment? Were their data complete? Were it not? How did they do? I'll give an example.

Here's an example. There was a research paper that came out recently that said that mask wear. was no better than non-mask wearing, okay, for COVID. And I said, wow, that's interesting. How did they get these results? So they showed their studies and people who said whether they wore masks and those who didn't. Okay? And they compared those results.

And I said, wow, I wonder if the people who said they were wearing masks had it completely covering their mouth and nose, because we've seen mask wearers where the nose is sticking out above the thing. We know people out there like this, okay? There was no mention of the integrity of the claims of people wearing the mask. So then I thought to myself, if your result is that mask wearing does not prevent either the transmission or the, what's the other way, the, where you would receive COVID or you'd spread COVID. Yeah. That would be the result of the century. But the way you test that is not asking people where they wore the mask. Here's an experiment you would do. You'd get the N95 material. You'd set up a membrane of that between two sides of a container,

of a vessel. And you put COVID vaccine aerosol on one side and make sure it's not on the other side and then put a pressure difference between the two so that this air flows across. And test to see whether the COVID aerosols made it through. If they made it through, then you'd have an authentic scientific result that said the mask does not work. If they don't make it through, then you have a result that they do. So that's how that experiment should have been conducted, and it wasn't. So, but everyone jumped on it who didn't want masks to have mattered, and they accepted this one result because it fed their sense of the work.

But so, so what I'm, so, so that's my my overblown response to your very simple question about the, the COVID response and the scientific establishment. So, so yeah, there were issues in the communication. There's issues in how we receive information. There's our urge to believe the lone person, which has deep flaws completely built into it. And so I hope in a century we remember some of these lessons. as we go forward. I think it's a very profound point. I think also as well, I guess my problem with the way that the entire pandemic was communicated, there were people who were incredibly notable experts in their field with glowing reputations who proffered a different view.

And that's my point. It doesn't matter. Your reputation, your title, none of that. In science, none of that matters unless by their reputation, they have access to large-scale studies that they are reporting to you, okay? But not the lone person who says, I have this degree and I hail from this store-reed institution, and I'm telling you that all those people are wrong. That is the sure sign that you should not pay attention to them. Okay? Evening.

This spills over, this spills over into our UFO hearings here in the United States. there are people testifying that they have aliens stockpiled in the back room and they're the introduction of them there, there's a colonel or there's a this and they're a credible witness no such thing as a credible witness in science

are you human? That's all we care about then I will not count your I will not trust in your account more than someone else is what I will trust in is the data brought to you by means that do not flow through the biophysiology of human senses. And so, yeah, I don't care what the pedigree is, and that's a problem. Yes, it's a complete problem.

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So, Neil, I suppose the question would be in that situation, and I'm not talking about COVID specifically, but if you look at the history of science and you'll know this way better than I do, of course, Has there not been a historical role for people who are outliers who come in and go, I've got this crazy idea that perhaps people dismiss initially, but later it turns out to have actually been correct? Yeah, the press loves talking about those people. And yes, they exist. They're rare, but they exist.

What you don't hear about are the tens of thousands of other people who had crazy ideas who were just crazy. Right, right, right. There are no books about them. overcoming the resistance of the establishment. Nobody writes about them because they were just plumb wrong. Okay? So the one person who is right against an establishment is one, and I would say 10,000.

And that's not enough to put all your piggy bank on the YouTube video of that one person thinking they're the one in the 10,000. Completely agreed. So I guess the next question, logically, is what do we do with those people? who, to use your terminology, are plum wrong, because we saw during the pandemic, these people were demonetized, they had their channels cancelled, they were shadow banned and all of this kind of stuff.

Now, from a layman's point of view, I don't think that is a good way of dealing with that, because what you do is you give these people a glamour they perhaps don't deserve, or they don't deserve, because you effectively say, their voice is so dangerous. They can't be, you know, they must be silenced. So that's an extremely important point.

I just have a different answer than what you're looking for. I think it's a matter of free speech. And if there are risks in a world of free speech, that there could be people who are dangerous because they create instability in a system or because they lead people on a track that may be impossible to reverse. You look at Hitler in 1930s Germany. For example, it required all-out war to sort of

correct the attitudes and feelings that Germans had about themselves relative to the world at that time. So there's a risk when you have a free society. For me, as an educator, the antidote is the education of how to listen to people. So you nip that in the bud from the beginning. So if someone is speaking highly charismatic about something that's completely opposite what a mainstream view is, I will approach them with skepticism, no matter how charismatic they are. Because I will know that only one in 10,000 of them will ever be correct at this. And no, we don't give courses on the 10,000 people that were wrong. No, we don't. That's a waste of everybody's time. So for some reason over recent years, the word establishment has become a bad word.

I represent the establishment. Oh, well, you must be wrong then. No, that's not how it works. It's not how it's ever worked. So I'm not saying you should always believe the establishment. What I'm saying is if you want to believe someone who is against the establishment, you should do a little more homework before you go that way. And the homework isn't only listening to what they are telling you.

It's looking into the establishment and find out why there's an establishment view to begin with. And the establishment view is not from authorities on high. No, it's the consensus of research conducted by hardworking scientists in a lab whose name you've never heard of. It's a very profound point. But moving on, you must be really excited at the moment. For instance, when we look at things like space travel, when we're looking at the achievements of India landing on the moon, if we look at SpaceX, it's a really exciting time, isn't it,

to be an astrophysicist in particular? So I have two answers. The first answer is, yes. And I look forward to space becoming our backyard, which the space tourism, you know, we're witnessing the birth of an entire industry a new, you know, it'd be fun if it stayed healthy or continued, you know, there'll be fits and starts, of course. But I'd enjoy taking a space vacation one day.

And if you are concerned about its expense, maybe the expense will come down. It did with cell phones. For example, you may remember the film Wall Street, 1987, and there's Michael, Michael Douglas. Right. He's on the beach in the Hampton. a wealthy part of New York, and he has a shoulder-mounted cell phone. And I remember, just how old I am,

I remember looking at that and saying, wow, I wish I was rich, so I had a phone like that. And so industries become truly healthy and, and when, and the people who make the products become wealthy, when they commoditize it. If you only sell items to rich people,

okay, I guess you can make a living off of it, but you don't transform the world doing that. When that became a cell phone that we all carried, and then, of course, a smartphone, there's six billion smartphones in the world today. Now you have a commoditized item. So perhaps one day space travel will become that. I don't know.

But the day it does, I would look forward to that. So, my second answer to you is, and I devote an entire chapter on this idea in the book, it's called Exploration and Discovery. In the last 150 years or so, we have been experiencing an exponential growth in science and technology. So, I'll take your comment. I'll go back to the year 1900 and offer you a corresponding comment uttered by someone in that year. Okay? The head of the New York Central Railroad

when asked, what would life be like in the year 2000? Because people do that when you hit these time milestones, right? 1900, 2000. And he'd seen steamships cross the ocean, the railroads crossing the nation. Blimps!

And he says, I can scarcely imagine that advances in transportation in the 20th century will be as great as those were in the 19th. That has to be the most boneheaded comment ever made. He's thinking he's living in special times. When you're on an exponential growth curve,

the title of your show is trigonometry, so I'm going to put in some math. When you're on an exponential growth curve, it looks like all the greatest results happen just in your recent years. What you don't know is, everywhere on an exponential growth feels like that. If it was 1960, you'd be saying, what a time to be alive.

We broke the sound barrier. We have satellites in orbit around the earth. We left Earth. Oh, my gosh. That's what you'd be saying then. So no, I'm not going to say, what a time to be alive. Because any time in the last 150 years, I could say exactly the same damn thing. after a sentence that you would utter

after you shared with me what had just been discovered and why is it so important that we go out and we discover space why is that important to the human race I'm not telling you I said I'm not going to judge what you should think is important what I'll tell you is

don't you kind of want to know if an asteroid is coming just thinking you know I'm betting that if the dinosaurs had a space program they'd still be here because they would have deflected that asteroid that took them out 65 million years ago.

And haven't you ever walked out at night and looked up? I know the UK you have a lot of clouds and things, but in places that are perennially clear, the Middle East, any desert area, the outback of Australia, you look up and you wonder, what is all of that? Where did I come from? Where is it all going?

These are deep, profound questions. If you don't happen to have those questions, no one is going to force them on you. But those who do will push themselves into new realms of thought, into discoveries that would have previously been inaccessible because the answers to my questions require that I innovate in ways that bring new discoveries to civilization. So if you were around 30,000 years ago and were huddled in a cave, And the youngans say, oh, you're the wise elder, right? And you say, oh, we want to, the youngans come up to you say, we want to, we took a peek outside the cave door.

It was left ajar. The cave doors have hinges, probably not. But it was left a jar. And we see like hills and mountains and valleys and trees with these round things on it. You wouldn't have had a word for fruit yet. These round things are we want to go explore. But you're the wise elder of the cave. No, we have to solve the cave problems first before anyone leaves the cave.

That's what you sound like to me when you say, why are we looking out into space? I'm just delighted that you called me a wise elder, Neil. I'm going to be honest. You're a shitty wise elder, I think, was the point of that story. You were a very good one. You're a very dumb wise elder who restricts human growth and programs. I'll still take it. But, Neil, I'm curious, so we had Eric Weinstein on the show recently, and one of the things that he talked about, obviously, if Einstein is right, our ability to explore space is very, very limited, at least in physical capacity.

What do you see when you look into the future? Are we going to go to Mars? Are we going to try and go beyond? Is that on the menu for us? I don't see, what was his biggest objection to exploring space? Well, with chemical rockets, you can only go so far with us. Yeah, so with Chemical Rockies, you can get to the planets, surely. You can get to the outer planets. It would take a couple of decades. So if we start living a little longer, let's say we start living to 150, then that's not entirely out of reach, given the recent advances in medicine. You could, we would certainly visit the moon, Mars, and Venus is too hot, but the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, maybe.

You can do that in a lifetime. But beyond the solar system, no. It is hopelessly far away. Correct. It is the fastest spaceship we've ever launched, which didn't have humans on it, so you can really punch it, all right? If you aim that to the nearest star,

it would take 50,000 years to get there. Wow. So human physiology is hopelessly out of match with traveling among the stars unless we understand wormholes or is something that enables transportation that is beyond anybody's vision right now. And is there any progress being made towards that understanding of something like wormholes? No.

But for the, yeah, next question. For the time being, we're enjoying, you know, this is the dude's name who opens the portals through Dr. Strange, you know, Rick and Morty, Rick. these are wormholes through space and time. For the moment, we embrace them through our science fiction, but we are hopelessly. To master wormholes,

we would need some form of negative gravity, some negative matter that has the opposite of gravity to pry open a wormhole and keep it. So we don't, no, we're far away from that. It's not even on the drawing board. And you mentioned the question

that we all have when, well, not all, many of us have, when we look up at the night sky and start to get a glimpse of our place in the universe, which is an eye-opening experience for many people, even as a kid. And I'm curious what you think, obviously you talk about it in the book. What are some of the interesting and important messages that we can take from looking at the world with that cosmic perspective? Yeah, thanks for using the word message. is because Starry Messenger, that's the main title of the book, the subtitle is

cosmic perspectives on civilization. The first half of that title is taken directly from Galileo. His first book reporting on what he discovered when he took the freshly invented telescope and put it onto the sky. And to him, these were starry messages. So his first book is Starry Messenger. And so when you learn about what's going on in the universe, and then you look back at Earth, it changes you.

Right? Let's go back to the Apollo era. Yeah, we went to the moon to explore the moon, but the astronauts look back over their shoulder and they discovered Earth for the first time. You realize nearly all the most important legislation passed in the United States and a few years later around the world to protect Earth.

Okay. We had a clean air act, a clean water act, a clean, the first Earth day, all right, was in the United States, then it went around the world. All of that happened while we were going to the moon. Between 1968 and 1972, 73, all of that. Our environmental protection agency was founded. We banned leaded gas over that time. We banned DDT over that time.

All of that. Before then, people had concerns about their local environment. You know, if there was a factory polluting your river, you'd try to, you know, you'd try to fix that, the air. But it was local. No one took the step back to think about Earth as a holistic system. That did not happen until the Apollo era. So people say, why do we spend all that money? to send 12 astronauts to the moon, what price would you give to this firmware upgrade that we all felt

at that time changing our focus of concern from your neighborhood to the Earth at large? How much is that worth to you? And I say firmware upgrade because there are people around that time, yeah, it's time to fix Earth? Are they actively saying, oh, it's because I saw Earth from the moon? No, they're not going to tell you that. That's why I think it was a firmware upgrade, because everybody felt it at the same time. It's such a profound point, Neil, because when I talk to people who are alive during the moon landings, even if they didn't take that from it, they took from a sense that anything is possible. Ah, so that was one, well, so that's very important. Thanks for mentioning that.

So I don't know how old you guys are, but I remember an active rejoinder to the problems of the world was, if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to feed the population. Okay? So that was the measure of accomplishing something hard. Now, I have an unsatisfactory answer for you on that. Maybe going to the moon is easier. than solving poverty. Have you considered that?

Just because it involves learning that takes place in classes that you didn't take that other people took that maybe you judged was hard, maybe social problems are harder than physics problems to solve. Just maybe. Let me put that out there. Well, that's a very interesting point

on which to come on to the issues that I said you'd made controversial remarks on. We'll find out how controversial they are. But we recently had Richard Dawkins on the show. And everyone now is obsessed with the trans issue. Everyone's talking about it. Everyone gets asked questions about it. And I know you and Richard have spard.

I remember watching a debate between the two of you for 20 years ago. You're a professor of the public understanding of science, not professor of delivering truth to the public. And these are two different exercises. One of them is you put the truth out. and like you said, they either buy your book or they don't. Well, that's not being an educator, that's just putting it out there. Being an educator is not only getting the truth right, but there's got to be an act of persuasion

in there as well. Persuasion isn't always, here's the facts, you're either an idiot or you're not. It's here are the facts and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind, and it's the facts plus the sensitivity when convolve together creates impact. And I worry that your methods and your your your how how how articulately barbed you can be ends up simply being ineffective when when you have much more power of influence than what is currently reflected in your output. I gratefully accept the rebuke. I just just one anecdote to show that I'm not the

worst in this thing. A former and highly successful editor of New Scientist magazine, who actually built up New Scientist to great new heights, was asked, what is your philosophy at New Scientist? And he said, our philosophy at New Scientist is this. Science is interesting, and if you don't agree, you can fuck off. You were rebuking him, actually, for not being gentle enough in the way that he communicates science.

Yeah, because he's, you know, he's Brit trained, and a well-trained Brit has full access to every word in the dictionary. And his sentences come out perfectly barbed when he needs them to be. And I chastised him for not having a gentler, kindler approach. I remember that. Yeah. I remember that. And I'm pleased to report that I think you would find that Richard is mellowed with age.

Okay, thank you. I could be just age. I don't know if I had any effect on him at all. By the way, when I rebuked him then, it was the first. first time I'd ever met him. So I was even a little nervous because he was a hero of mine and I've read his books. But I said, I got to put this out there. And that was the first time. Yeah, well, I remember that. And now, of course, Richard has become very, I don't consider outspoken, but he's spoken openly about his views on the trans issue, as have you. And I was a little bit

surprised. Well, I don't have views so much. Let me just clarify. I don't, I don't run around with an opinion that I then forced on other people. I have opinions and they're my opinions. And I don't care if you have my opinion. But if you have an opinion that you're carrying, I want, as an educator, I want it to be as informed as possible before you land on an opinion that you dig your heels in.

Absolutely. So this is my, I see that as my role as an educator. So continue. Quite. And the spirit of my question is very much in order to understand this, because one of your functions over time has been to communicate scientific knowledge to the public. And that's why I was quite surprised to hear you talk about the idea that we all exist on a spectrum where you wake up one day and you feel like you're more female and more male.

Apparently, the XXXY chromosomes are insufficient. because when we wake up in the morning, we exaggerate whatever feature we want to portray the gender of our choice. Suppose no matter my chromosomes, today I feel 80% female, 20% male. I'm going to put on makeup. I'm going to do that.

Tomorrow I might feel 80% male. I'll remove the makeup and I'll wear a muscle shirt. why do you care? Yeah. What what what what? What business is it of yours to require that I fulfill your inability to think of gender on a spectrum? I hope I'm not misquoting you there. If I am, please correct me.

Well, so, so let me say that it's not a misquote, but there's an entire setup before I even utter those words. Oh, I see, please. That setup exists in the book. by the way. But it's, as you know, it's very easy to clip something and then... Oh, we know. We know.

You turn up. You heard that this happens? From direct personal experience. Yeah. So I try my best to have everything I say so self-contained that it's hard to clip it or to misrepresent. You have to nowadays. Yeah.

So... So give us the full setup. What is... Because most people, growing through the education system 10, 15, 20 years from now, would have been taught in biology classes that there's males and females, men and women. And in very recent times, in the last five years, it feels like this understanding is being challenged by a different view. Explain that to us, if you would.

Well, so it's very simple, actually. And like I said, I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here. I'm just offering a perspective you might not have had, which I would like you to have so that when you assemble all of your thoughts and feelings and leanings, be they cultural, political, religious leanings, that you have all the information available to you before you land. I would claim that for many people strongly held opinions or views, that when they become more fully informed,

that the strength with which they were holding those views tends to fade or evaporate entirely. And these are cosmic perspectives that bring your view above all that divides us. This is the power of a cosmic perspective, all right? And, you know, there you are from space looking at Earth and you don't see any color-coded countries. Meanwhile, and throughout the book, I imagine what an alien would think who has no preconceived notion of who and what we are. They just observe. And they say, oh, what a beautiful planet.

I'll get to your point in a minute, but these are my lead-ups to it. What a beautiful planet. Let's get a closer look. Oh, there's land and oceans and clouds. And then they see one species sort of dominating everywhere on Earth. And it's, okay, fine, we got one species. And then they look closer. And then they see that one species killing one another because of who's born on what side of a line in the sand,

or who worships this God instead of that God or no gods, or how refined. their skin is to sunlight or whatever other reasons they come up with. And they're wondering what the fuck is wrong with this species? All the same species. And they'd rush back home until the rest of their fellow aliens, there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth. Okay? This is how I think about all of this.

Okay. So we look at this whole trans issue. I'm intrigued about how much attention it is getting, just intrigued by it. And I'm a scientist, but I'm also observer of people and pop culture and civilization. My father was a sociologist active during the civil rights movement of the 1960s into the 1970s. I don't know when this will air, when this will post. but August 28th, 20203

is the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech and that's one of the most popular speeches we know of in the United States and I bet it has currency elsewhere as well. Oh, massive. Yeah, absolutely. Just because of the message he was communicating

and the timing of it and all of the above. I'll have some. postings related to that in my media channels. Anyhow, so let's back up. So I don't know all the founding documents of the modern UK, but I do know the ones of the United States. And they include things like the preamble to our, sorry, in our Declaration of Independence, and the preamble to the Constitution and the Constitution itself. Okay. Let me remind you, this was a document to get the hell away from England, okay? Oh, we remember.

Okay, just, I don't know if you remember this. And let me just make it clear that the Constitution begins with the three words, we the people, okay? We give power to those who govern us, not the genetics of a royal line going back thousands of years. I feel like this is like a direct personal attack for absolutely. no reason. Okay. So now what? Okay. So. All we're asking for is

a little bit of gratitude for what we did. All right. Is that too much? We set up your country and this is how you repair us. We gave you the language. Oh, okay. Unbelievable. You ruined the language. You can't even spell properly and here you are lecturing us about your... Anyway, tell us about the transition. So here we go. Are you ready?

Okay. Okay. So let's look at humans physiologically. And then you have these chromosomes, all right? In most humans, high 90, you're either XX or XY, okay, chromosomes. And that defines your sex. Are you male or are you female? Okay. So that's a binary biological representation of your sex. Okay? I don't have a problem with that. That's binary. Okay. All right. So, well, let's ask ourselves some questions.

when you see another human being, do you see their chromosomes? It's just an interesting question. How visible are there chromosomes to you? No, you see the phenotype. You don't see their chromosomes. Well, sorry. Obviously, you don't literally see the chromosomes. But, okay, and let me not use the word phenotype

because half the people hear that word don't know what it means, and I'm an educator communicator. So I will say, you see the person. who presents themselves to you. That's what you see in the world. And I did an experiment in the New York City subway. It was winter, so everyone has on a coat. And I looked at everybody from the neck up.

Everybody's seated. And by the way, almost all of human height difference is in their legs, not in their torso. So when we're seated, we're all approximately the same height. That's why everyone could just sit at a big old, dinner table and only the children need phone books to sit up. Everybody else doesn't have to adjust their chair, their chair height. Okay?

So just a little fact. So everyone is about the same height, seated. And I asked myself, can I know who the boys are and who the girls are at a glance? And the answer was yes. And I got it 100% correct. Okay? And what do I mean by 100% correct? The girls had certain.

features manifest to me. On average, girls had longer hair. If they wore jewelry, there was more jewelry. The jewelry was more expressive. More earrings, more finger rings. Their facial hair was more likely to be tweezed. The eyebrows are trimmed. There's no hair between the eyebrows. Any mustache hair was removed. They're more likely to wear men. makeup, especially around the eyes, mascara, eyeliner, eye shadow. They were more likely to wear the reds, um, rouge, uh, or whatever, there's too, blush or whatever it's called. Yeah.

More likely to wear that. They were more likely to have fingernails painted. Okay. Okay. That's how I knew. By the way, there are some boys who have these features, but by and large, this was unmistakable that those were the girls. Now, how about the boys? Okay. Well, other than the male pattern baldness on older men, okay, or facial hair, the beard and the mustache, could I tell

that they were guys? Oh, oh, by the way, and all the girls? There was clothing that they wore that was clearly acquired in the women's section of the store. How about the guys? Yeah, oh, Oh, oh, oh, well, I get to it. So now with the guys, oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, the guys wore less jewelry. Their hair was on average short. Okay, they were less likely to wear facial makeup. Their clothing was completely different.

And for many of them, this very city to city, many of them had muscles. Well, those aren't natural. They had to go to a gym to get the muscles. Okay, here's my point. 100% of what I was queuing on was secondary and tertiary accoutrements to what you look like when you wake up in the morning. You chose to grow your hair long. You chose to tweez your eyebrows. You chose to go to the girls.

You chose to go to the gym so you have bigger muscles. If the women, the breasts are not large enough. Wear a push-up bra. Those are for sale for you. And that doesn't work. Go get surgery. as 200,000 women a year in the United States get breast augmentation surgery so that they can be female for you. Okay, so here's my point.

We have, oh, and like I said, the clothing, get your clothing in the girl's section because they know how to dress you. And get your clothing in the boys section because they know how to dress you, all right? And by the way, hair removal is way more efficient today than when I was growing up. It was not uncommon to see a woman with a mustache trying to bleach it or trying to tweeze it. Now it's gone. Because women are not supposed to have hair. We all know this. Guys are hairy and women are not hairy.

Okay? This understanding of gender has been built into the beauty industrial complex. So, my only point was that. that if who you decide is male and female in the street is a construct of style and trends and what the beauty industrial complex wants you to see, if that's how we establish gender, then maybe some people want to be fluid within that gender, identify. So they'll wear a skirt but maybe have a beard or they'll mix and match that in whatever

way you want. Hold on. Wait, I'm not, wait, wait, I'm almost done. I'm almost done. So if a person using the tools of the beauty industrial complex wants to mix and match this and they are expressing their freedom in a free country to do so, why is your job to tell them not to? Okay. That's my only point. And so I'm speaking of gender expression and the freedom to do so.

And if you want to restrict that, then what country are you reliving in? Hold on. So first of all, I don't know a single person, and we've talked to trans people on the show. We have trans employees at trigonometry. We've spoken to all sorts of people about this issue. I do not know a single person who wants to prevent people

from dressing how they want or behaving how they want or choosing any name that they want. However, the problem is... But you know such people are out there. I'm sure such people exist in the same way that there are people who believe that the earth is flat and so on, but they're a tiny minority. They exist.

I don't know how tiny they are, given the dialogue today. Fair point. Fair point. However, what I would say is that the conversation in the public consciousness has become prominent, not between people who want to defend the right of anyone to dress how they want and the people who want to prevent that. The reason the conversation has become an issue is that we assign and allow certain privileges to people based on their sex.

If you are female, you get to go to places that only other female. are in, like changing rooms and toilets and so on. If you are female, you get to compete only with people of your sex because females are at a disadvantage in physical competition to males in almost every sport. In other words, we carve out certain areas where your sex matters tremendously, even though we may respect your right everywhere else to believe that you are, whatever you are, to dress however you are, et cetera. So your class, that today you woke up and put lipstick on and grew your hair out long and tweezed out your moustache and whatever.

And therefore you are female has an impact on other people in certain contexts in which that is a problem. You gave only two contexts. Do you have others? Sorry, I wasn't finished. And in those contexts, it is essential, people would argue, to protect women from unfair competition and from various risks for which female only spaces already. exist. That's why people are having this conversation. It's not out of bigger. Do you have more than

those two examples? And I'll address each of those in turn. But do you have more than those two? Probably not. Okay. So, so let me address those two examples directly. I'll address them. Sports is very important. I said that. Female learning spaces. I remembered. So, so, but you don't seem to have a third example. So, and even if you do, we presume that would be a very distant third compared to those two cases. No, there's a third one I can give you. very easily in this country. For politics, we have female only shortlists for positions in in parliament. Therefore, if you claim that, that's interesting. Well, that's another example. I can give you more. So female only shortlists, there are certain targets within corporations

for diversity targets to have a certain number of women on the board. Therefore, when you make a claim that you are female, you are attempting, whether intentionally or not, to insert yourself into categories that are deliberately designed to protect women's interests. That is the concern that people have. So there's four examples for you there. Please address them. Sure. So interesting about the parliament, I have to look into that to find out what the, is it,

try to ensure the representation of women? Is that the goal? Yes, correct. Okay, fine. Perfectly noble cause there. So about personal changing spaces, okay? That's a solvable problem, of course. and we basically have accomplished that here in Manhattan, where I live,

practically all bathrooms are either multi-gender, or solo bathrooms, so only one person at a time, or you walk into a space and there's stalls that are closed off, but then you exit the stall and you come to a communal sink. Okay? So it's a solvable problem where everyone has a private space rather than for themselves, rather than having a gender private space.

Okay? That's, it's solvable. On a level, by the way, let me give an example. We have a school from the early 20th century in New York, and it's, and I just saw it the other day. There's an entrance here and an entrance there, and this entrance says girls,

and this entrance says boys. It's like, what the fuck? What? What? You separate them just to enter the school? I can look back on that and say that was ridiculous. You guys, what were you thinking? But back then, I'm sure it made complete sense that you're going to send the girls through that entrance

and there's an elementary school and the boys through that entrance, okay? So it is possible to look back on whatever you were doing and say, my gosh, that was really short-sighted and look at the solution that was proposed and implemented. That was a good idea. We moved on from that. Okay.

So I remember boys' rooms. where you come out and, you know, you whip it out and we'd all be peeing into a trough. Okay? We don't have those anymore. We do. We do because we're technologically very far behind. Yeah. Okay.

So it's a, and then we had urinals just lined up on a wall that was a little more private. And now those urinals have little small but real dividers. So you're not like looking over. So, so there are solutions to the privacy problem. And we've all but solved that here. I can't speak for every state in the United States. Definitely here in New York City. The bathrooms are, it's not, all right, there's that.

Second, with sports, very interesting. There was a case where a woman wanted to be disqual, they wanted to disqualify her from an event. She had very big muscles, and she had naturally high testosterone levels. Okay. And she was genetically female, but unusually high. testosterone levels. And so that weirded everybody out. So I'm wondering whether the future of those sports is you don't contest gender with gender. You contest hormone ratios. Well, hold on a

second. But what do you think of that? The difference is physiologically between men and women are not just hormonal. Women have a different hip angle. They have different heart capacity. They have different lung capacity. I mean, there are profound physiological differences, different bone density. We've had professional athletes on the show to talk about it. I don't have a problem with that. Then you find ways to slice the population so that whatever the event is is interestingly contested. So, for example, I wrestled in my life. I was captain of my high school wrestling team. I wasn't so good in college as I was in high school, but that's when I finally wrestled like corn-fed folks from Iowa people who hauled calves, you know, off the farm.

Okay. So in wrestling, it would be unfair for me at 190 pounds, which is what I was back then, to wrestle someone 120 pounds. Hold on. It would actually be unfair for you to wrestle someone who's also 190 pounds but female. Let me work my way there. Let me just work my way there. Okay.

Fine. You're, you are, I respect the, how. active your brain is, but I've thought about all this and just allow me to speak it at the rate that I do. Okay? So, so, um, it would be unfair. So they have a, in wrestling, they said, let's make weight categories. Okay. So we make weight categories. So I don't wrestle the 120. I wrestle 190 pounder. So a wrestling match is not just this one person against the other person, it's 10 matches. And each one is intensely interesting because they are matched. Okay. So what the trans conversation is foisting upon us is the need to find ways to slice the athletic universe such that we still have interesting fair matches.

And is it a combination of did you go through puberty as a male and then transition? Did you have puberty blockers? What is your hormone level now if you want to compete? So it requires more creative thought. Rather than saying no to it all, let's be creative about this as we were with wrestling, as we are with practically any other sport. In rowing, there's a heavyweight rowing and there's lightweight rowing. They don't compete against each other.

Somebody came up with that to resolve the problem because more than one category, of person wanted to compete. So I agree with you it's an unsolved problem, yes. But it's not unsolvable, given what we know about human physiology. So why not rise to that occasion and solve it rather than take your older view of the world and force modern, emergent conduct of people to fit that? Okay, well, can we just come back to the female shortlist and other, opportunities that women are afforded by virtue of being women, and them now being excluded from

that because males are entering that competition. Yeah, so another, a deeper problem, thank you for bringing that up. A deeper problem there is, why were women underrepresented to begin with? What kind of bias exists within parliament or among the voters, maybe even the female voters, that prevented the representation from being there in the first place? That's a whole other social question that maybe. can and should be answered at a deeper level than a quota coming in after the fact. Oh, I'm not a fan of quotas, but if they exist. That's how I would address that question.

Hold on a second. That's not addressing the question at all. The question is, female shortlist exists. Should biological males be allowed to enter those female shortlists? That's as simple as the question is. Yeah, I'm saying, I would ask why you have the shortlist in the first place. It's because there's something, there's something deep that's wrong with society that women are underrepresented in governance. So to say now, to protect that now and not try to get to the root of that problem, I think is the cart in front of the horse. So I would go deeper to that problem.

But there are women whose opportunities are being curtailed today because they are being forced to compete, whether in sports or elsewhere, against people who have some kind of advantage of. We're in a transitional period. So we have to figure that out. But the way to figure out things that requires solutions to progressive change is not to regress it to how things once were. If that were the case, I would still be drinking from a segregated water fountain.

Okay? Oh, let's merge the water fountains. And let's create the opportunities from below so that we don't. even need the short list. Okay? That's how I would approach this. That's, I'm, is that, okay, my father worked in the civil rights movement. So I think deeply. My book is dedicated to my father, who's, and the dedication is literally to, to my father, Cyril deGrasse Tyson. Cyril is a Brit name, by the way. It came from the British West Indies because you guys were everywhere in the new world in your day. As was all right. So is Cyril de Greene, to,

Cyril Lagras-Tyson, and all those who see a world that can be rather than the world that is. And so that's how I look at it. So, yeah, we're in the middle of solving that problem now. Let's figure it out together. I think a lot of people would have an issue with what you're saying, Neil, is because they see women being denied opportunities. They see an unfair playing field, metaphorically. and literally speaking.

So fix the playing field, damn it? Don't say it's an unfair playing field, so all of a sudden the big issue is trans women taking the slot of a woman in an unfair playing field. Fix the playing field. And you know something? The day you fix that playing field, this conversation will look completely ridiculous.

That's what I'm trying to tell you. So how do you fix the playing field? I'm curious. Well, that's hard. It's hard. We've been through it. Thank you for that question. I think it's a...

Look, if you're a... I don't have a solution. I think I have a right to ask you. No, it's great. I don't have a fast solution. But things we have accomplished in the United States, okay, how long it took us to get a black president. By the way, the black president was exactly half white, but the way our vocabulary works in our descriptions of people, we call him black. But genetically, we call him mixed race, actually. Yeah. What's that? You say? You guys do for some inexplicable reason. We call people mixed race if they're from different backgrounds. Yeah. And I would say, we could say. We call them mixed race. Why do you even care that there's a mix? I have a whole chapter in the book called

Color and Race. I personally don't even care what race people are. I sort of believed in the Martin Luther King idea that we should be judged on the content of our character. Thank you. I lean that way too, although it might not be realistic to implement in precisely the dream state that he imagined, where people will be judged by the content of the calendar, not by the color of their skin, because color skin includes culture and other things and to ignore someone's culture has other ramifications legally or interpersonally, internationally. So that's a whole other thing. So I don't have a good solution.

But what I do know is let's go back to 1980s, late 80s, American football. There was a quarterback, black, Douglas Johnson, I forgot, is Williams, Douglas Williams, who, black, the first black quarterback to start in our Super Bowl. Articles about this all over the place, okay? Can a black person, is a black person smart enough to take on such an important place because the quarterback calls all the plays? Not that they really do today because it comes from the sidelines, but there was all this articles about it.

Will he succeed in this place? And it's like, I'm thinking, what the fuck? Okay, because I'm getting a PhD in Astero. physics and they're talking about whether black people are smart enough to be a quarterback on a football team. Okay? Go back to that time and find those articles. All right.

So what happens? He sets a Super Bowl record for the most number of yards, a past year, received yards. Okay? End of that conversation and it ended forever more. Now when there's a black quarterback, it doesn't even get mentioned. That's the content of your character and not the color of your skin. The fact that you can have that and it doesn't even. go get commented upon is itself progress.

Here in the United States, I just, this morning I did some morning talk shows, okay? They're black reporters there, they're female reporters. I remember. People, I remember the first woman anchor and people saying, well, women, are they as believable as men? Do they have the authority? Do they have the confidence in their voice? This was debated and argued that why women should not be.

delivering the news because we had the voice of Walter Cronkite and others. Okay? Yeah, that was a progressive change and we had to adapt. All right. And of course we're adapting. And now we have twice as many people to choose from to put on, and we get the best who's out there. So you solve that from the,

from the base. So, so yeah, it took decades. But yeah, it was a while. But I think we're there on many fronts. And the fact that everybody's arguing about trans people and that argument is not about gay people is itself progress. Under President Clinton, nobody's talking about trans people. We're talking about gay people.

President Clinton, a progressive president. He says, oh, yeah, I have a progressive idea in the military. Don't ask, don't tell. So if you were gay, you had to withhold that information from everybody. Because if you told, then they'd kick you out. That was considered progressive. Today, if you say don't ask Don't tell, they kick you out of the room.

What the fuck? What era did you come up in? So, yeah, they're baby steps sometimes. But to quote, there's a Unitarian Minister in the early 1800s who spoke of the arc of progress of Martin Luther King would quote him in some of his speeches.

The guy's name is in my book. He said, the summary of that quote is I don't know how the arc of justice, the arc of progress, bends. I know it bends, but which way does it bend? I'm pretty sure it bends towards, is it progress? It's the arc of history bends towards progress. Yeah, there's something like that, and that's a variation, not exactly the wording that's in the book.

The book has it correct, all right? And so there it is. you just hope it doesn't regress so that we're living in yesterday's world rather than tomorrow's world. So that's the only points I'm making here. And yeah, well, let's fix the athletics. Put more categories in sports. Figure it out. Get the biologists together with the gender specialists.

Figure it out. Get the hormone specialists. It's not unfigure outable. Neil, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We spent half the time talking. about Jen. Was it something else we were going to talk about? We didn't actually. We didn't. So we are going to go

very well set up, Neil. You've done a fantastic job to get people to follow us over to locals where we will be asking you their questions. Before we do though, we have one final question for them. Oh, they got to pay to get to that. Oh, yeah, baby. See, we're learning from the Americans, Neil. This is America, baby. Give me your money. Now, Francis, do the last question for the main interview. Okay. Neil, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be. I'm guessing it's not trans. Are we smart enough to be proper shepherds of our own fate? Yeah. That worries me. When I see people making uninformed or just outright crazy or stupid decisions related to the health, welfare and safety of our species going forward, sometimes I question whether we are wise enough

to you know it's an old Native American saying I'll mangle it but the sense of it will be there that you want to behave such that

seven generations from now they can be proud of the decisions you made because we don't be quithed to them we how does it go we

we actually inherit the present from our future generations. Okay? You do a reverse time thing on it and you ask yourself, am I doing the right thing for them? And I don't, sometimes I wonder when I see the conduct of humans in the world. And I'm saddened every now and then. But I'm generally an optimist.

So then I say, when I see where there's some problems, I say, maybe I can help that and put in a little extra information there. So, yeah. Neil, thank you so much for coming on. Starry Messenger really recommend getting the book. Head on over to locals. And it exists in the UK. There's a UK version of it too.

Oh, it's a Sunday Times bestseller, actually. So yes. Was it really? Okay. Excellent. Thank you. It does exist and very successfully. So head on over to locals where we ask Neil your questions and continue the conversation.

Do you have any scientific opinions that run counter to the scientific consensus? And if so, what are they?