This Past Weekend - E420 Neil deGrasse Tyson

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. He is the host of the weekly show “Star Talk” on National Geographic and the head of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. He has a new book “Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization” out now. Neil deGrasse Tyson joins the show to chat with Theo about cosmic musings, the new space race, facts vs. feelings, flat-earthers, climate change and much more.  ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com Podcastville mugs and prints available now at https://theovon.pixels.com ------------------------------------------------- Support our Sponsors: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit   https://www.amazon.com/stores/CELSIUS... ShipStation: Visit https://shipstation.com to get a 60 day free trial with code THEO. BetterHelp: Visit https://betterhelp.com/theo to save 10% off your first month. ------------------------------------------------- Music: "Shine" by Bishop Gunn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3A_coTcUek ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: [e-mail] Hit the Hotline: [phone] Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: http://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers/ Producer: Colin https://instagram.com/colin_reinerSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You know, holiday time, people put off the shopping to the end, to the end of the time, the end of the spectrum. People rambling at the last minute, get their cousin a batch of rose water, get somebody, get a toupee for someone who's losing their hair or something. But the tough thing for business is getting the orders out. If you run a small business or if you have to ship a lot of things, you know this. That's why ShipStation works with all your favorite places to sell online, including Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, eBay, etc. You'll save time, money, and stress during the holiday rush. And when you sign up using my promo code, you'll even get two months to try ShipStation for free.

That's right. Use promo code Theo today at ShipStation.com to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com, promo code Theo. This holiday season, give yourself the gift of stress free holiday shipping. Make ship happen. Some tour dates to announce. If you want to come see the Return of the Rat tour, we'll be in Louisville, Kentucky, January 25th and 26th, Indianapolis, Indiana, January 27th and 28th, Shrevport, Louisiana, February 1 and 2, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 3 through 5, Corpus Christi, Texas, March 24, Houston, Houston, sorry, Texas, March 25, Phoenix, Arizona, April 26 through 29, New York City at the Beacon Theater, May 13 and Austin, Texas, June 1 through 3. Some of those dates are getting sold out.

Some of those dates, we will be adding new shows to, I know specifically Austin, Phoenix and possibly Houston. You can get tickets at TheoVon.com slash T-O-U-R. Make sure to access tickets through there to get accurately priced ticketing. Thank you guys so much. If you do come out to a show and you want to leave something for us, a gift or an item or something, you can always leave it with the merch people at the merch table just so you know that. Thank you guys so much for all your love and support. I'm excited to come and see you. You know, it's hunting season. It's hunting. People are out there setting traps, snares, put a taffy. Some people put a damn taffy out there

and they'll catch a pigeon on that bitch. People do all kind of thing. If you like to hunt, then check out the Hitter Hunting Club collection, new merch now available at TheoVonStore.com. We've got hoodies in orange and maroon. We got a raccoon on one of them because you know, my brother's out there killing raccoons out there, out in Southern Utah. He's out there. We're just really getting those little damn criminals they are. We got camo hats, traditional in orange. We got it all. Elmer fud yourself up. Elmer fud your cousin, man. Fud your cousin. A bunch of cousin fudders. Get that hitter and more at TheoVonStore.com. Today's guest is an astrophysicist. He's an author. He has a new book called Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on

Civilization. We're going to chat a little bit about it. And he's just that, you know, he's that galactic bad boy. He's that, you know, he's that outer space Joe Montana. You know, he's going deep with the facts, baby. You know what he is. He's science. He's a science man. He's a mannequin for science. He likes the facts and he wears them and he wears them well. We're happy to have him here today. Mr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. There's an old joke. There's a guy. His name is Tex. And people said, why do they call you Tex? Are you from Texas? And he said, no, I'm from Louisiana. And he said, well, why do they call you Tex? He said, because I don't want anyone calling me Louise.

I can see that. That was just a cute something from the 1960s, old, old sort of old timer, old timey joke. Yeah. That's one of one of my favorite jokes is they have this guy, Chris DeLee. He's a comedian and he has a joke. It says, oh, I saw the first 48. It's a TV show where they have 48 hours to solve a crime, but really they have as much time as they want. That's one of my favorite ones. And then this one's a little edgier, but it's, what's the last thing you want to hear when you're given a blow job to Willie Nelson? What? I'm not Willie Nelson. Oh, okay. I heard that somewhere. Yeah, it's not my joke, but it's my favorite joke. And you know, the George Carlin has a blow job joke. He said,

here's a sentence that's never been uttered in the history of the world. Stop giving me a blow job or I'll call the police. Ever since I heard that, I said, there are sentences in the world that just have never been uttered in the history of the world. Well, that's funny because Joe Rogan, which he says that everything has been, he says like everything has been done, like you. No, no, no, I'll give an example. Okay. Okay. We, in New York 20 years ago, we opened a new facility to the universe and we have models of planets and molecules and things that are dangling. So you get the size, the relative sizes of things. I gave a tour of the facility to Martha Stewart.

Wow. Okay. She's all that, by the way, because as we walking around and there was like a display surface, she's like, oh, tidy up. She was taking the fingerprints off the, off the, off the. She's probably taking her fingerprints off. She's been guilty of something. So watch what happens. So we're walking around and, and we have these orbs and she says, Dr. Tyson, you have dust on your molecules. And I thought I said, wow, that sentence has never been spoken in the history of the universe. That's right. See, I think that's it. I agree with that kind of stuff. Right. Right. Yeah. One time I was on his show and the first thing he said, he's like, you know, there's been another Theovon. There's been another and like there's

just. Oh, he wants the multiverse to be another one of you. Oh, we can go there. We can go there. That's what he goes into. But you actually in your, in the new post. Wait, did we begin yet? We're all up and beginning. I think we're rolling. We're rolling. Yeah. Yeah, we're good. Let it go. I love what you've done with the place, by the way. Oh, thank you. We're just about to get a, we're, we're getting a new studio. So we're, we're getting close to the end of the time. Don't make it too impersonal. I mean, make sure the studio is still intimate. Just feels intimate. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It's important, right? Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, what are you doing? You know, you're on stage, you know, and that's not the point of a podcast. Dude, that's a great

point because we've been looking at places and I'm like, I don't want something that's too corporate or something. No, no. It doesn't feel right. It ain't right. It ain't right. Yeah. It feels like, boy, you want to. And when you're on stage, that's, you'll be on stage. That's different, right? Yeah. Here we're chilling. Yeah. Yeah. We're chilling. You want it to feel that way. Yeah. Exactly. That's a great point. I'm glad you, I'm really glad you said that because I needed some affirmation there. But in your book in Starring Messengers, so this is your new book, right? And thanks for, for checking it out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. No, I tried to check out as much as I, just as much as like I had time to kind of enjoy. Here's what you do.

You're here in LA. You're in LA. Okay. You get the audio book. And then when you're stuck in traffic, you just, three days of traffic, get through the book just fine. All right. That's how they should market them. Yeah. How many days of four or five traffic, you know. Four days of traffic. But one thing you said about it was individual that the end of their, you, you kind of almost did it a little bit of an equation on the individual. It's kind of towards the later in the book. You talked about, it was just like that each person is unique and you kind of went into. Oh, you went straight there. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That's the life and death chapter. So there's, so just tell me about that. I just want people to hear how unique they are.

Oh yeah. Okay. So just the book is a cosmic perspectives on civilization. And it's what the world looks like if you're scientifically literate and you have a, and, and you're thinking about earth from space, and the world looks really different. Not just the world physically, but people's interactions are different. You have some strongly held opinion. And I'd say, no, you don't. You think you, you think you've deeply thought this through, but you haven't. There is this part of it. And have you thought about this and have you thought about that? I'm not here to hand you an opinion. I just want to make sure that whatever opinion you do have have is deeply, is, is rationally formed that you, that you've folded all the information

together. Then I walk away and think how the hell you want. I don't care. Yeah. I think, yeah, it definitely helps like adjust maybe the scope of stuff. Like if you're looking at some from this angle, what about look at it from this angle? Exactly. Or what about look at it from the inside? Or what about look at it from the history of its beginning? Like, exactly. And a quick one before I get to that, the, uh, how unique we are, uh, just a quick one. You know, I don't know if you, you buy tuna. Uh, now when you buy tuna, it's very clear whether it's line caught tuna line caught. Okay. That's a big selling point because when it's not line caught, it's net caught. Oh, you know what happens when they drag a net? Occasionally they drag a dolphin

into the net. Dolphins are air breathing. So if they're caught in a net, they suffocate and die. Oh. Okay. You don't want that. So you get line caught tuna. And I'm just thinking, so for people who just care about that, I'm just, I wonder, what about the tuna? Who just cares about the tuna? Do you just not give a rat's ass about the tuna? Like, what, what? And it's, and, and, and then they say, well, do it kills the dolphin unnecessarily. So then I said, well, then make dolphin burgers. Okay. You said, you can't have that. And I said, well, why not? You go to the deli. Yeah. Okay. If a deli made dolphin salad sandwiches, they'd be picketing out front, wouldn't there? Okay. I'd have a cut of it. Okay. You're the Ovan. I'd love it. We had owl one

time at Thanksgiving. Oh, Thanksgiving. Oh, man. Okay. So my point is, if you, if you go to a deli and there'd be picketers out front, if you're serving dolphin meat. Yeah. You're slinging dolphin in there. Okay. No, watch, but what else does the deli serve? They sell dead chicken, dead turkey, dead salmon, dead pig, dead cow with, with roast beef, dead vegetables. You all get to that in a minute. But they sell all kinds of dead animals in a sandwich. And this is just another dead animal. But somehow we culturally, philosophically, we, we've divided up all the kingdoms of life and we do carve outs for what we want to protect and what we don't. And often that carve out is arbitrary at some level. Yeah. And just be self

aware of that. Are you high and noble because you're saving the dolphin, but you're eating the tuna? Right. I don't know that you entirely are. So a dolphin is a mammal. Well, so are pigs and cows. All right. Last I checked. Yeah. Okay. They're just, I think people, they're not as graceful. They don't, they can't do as many. Well, some of them, they admit that. Say, I will not eat graceful animals. I'll only eat clumsy animals that are ugly. So it's a, it's an attempt to just make you more honest with yourself about the opinions you carry. There's another one. Let's say you're a vegetarian. This is from the chapter, meat eaters and vegetarians. I go there because they, you know, you know, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

Each chapter is a, is a point of conflict in civilization. I'm trying to illuminate places where people could think differently or maybe not have to think that way at all. Because in fact, what they felt would deep, was deeply held argument really just evaporates in the face of a cosmic perspective. So here's one. You're a vegetarian because you just don't want to kill animals. Okay. You, you don't want to kill a, a fine. So in your basement, you have a humane mousetrap. Okay. Oh yeah. I've seen those. You've seen those. Yeah. They, some of them, it's like a little, it goes in there and it gets hard on the walls inside of it. It's like, it's like a mouse condominium. All right. So they go in and you got to check them every few days, every few days,

because they'll, they'll dry out. All right. So anyhow, so you check it and then you, and what do they do with the mouse? Once they capture, let it free, let it free into the wild. All right. Because they don't want to kill animals. All right. I get that. But do you realize that a mouse in the wild lives between nine and 18 months because it's highly likely to be swallowed whole by an owl or pecked apart by all manner of woodland predators. Okay. Carnivores. And so, so what you've done is doom. You've doomed the mouse to be eaten prematurely in its life. So the best thing you can do for the mouse is leave it in your basement where it will live sex up to six years of a full fat life in your basement, but you're not doing that. No, because yeah. So I guess it

makes us feel some type of noble if we transfer it. I'm just saying, but you're really putting it into a harder life. In a harder life. Correct. So if, so if you want to say, well, that's just nature's loop and circle. Well, all right. So you're saying it's nature's circle to have an owl eat it, then feed. By the way, if you crawled into the domicile of any animal, they'll kill you if they could. They'll kill you. They will kill your ass. Yeah, they don't care, bro. If you, if you lay down into an ant nest, they will bite you. So, so, but we have the intellect and the power to capture something and remove it from your home. And I'm just saying, if you cared about the mouse, you'd leave it in your basement. That's, that's, that's, that's my only point. Yeah. I think, well, that's

a good point. A lot of, a lot of this book is like that. And it's kind of, I thought it was nice about the book that you can kind of pick it up whenever you can kind of almost start in on any chapter. Yeah. Cause the chapters are independent of each other. And, but in each one is a, is a, is a way, in a way, a chapter on the things we all argue about. Yeah. The chapter on, there's a one on politics, you know, left wing, right wing, what are you arguing about and why? And if you really thought it through, there's the vegetarians and meat eaters. There's, there's a chapter on life and death, risk and reward. That one, there's a gap in the human mind. I have no other way to account for this where we do, it is not natural to think about

statistics and probability. Oh yeah. That's me. It's, it's, it's not natural. And did you know that that doesn't feel as much fun sometimes? That's true. It ruins something, what you want to be true or what you feel to be true. Yeah. Or the mystery. It takes away the mystery. And, but I'm, but it's a triumph of human intellect that we even went, could figure it out in the first place. Here's what you have. You go to, you go to Vegas and, and there's someone puts money on a seven on the roulette and I'll say, why are you sticking with the seven? They'll say, it's due. And they're looking at, and, and the roulette table, they have a list of all the previous numbers. Yeah. And they say, it hasn't shown up. It's due. No, it's not. It's not due. Every role has

the same probability. Every time. Every time. It's not due. All right. So what is that feeling then that we get? What is that feeling? I'm telling you, I'm telling other things that people rolling dice and they need a low number, like a three or four. So they roll the dice gently. And if they need a high number, they'll throw it hard. No. And so, so do you know who exploits this about us? Casinos. Casinos know we suck at math and probability and statistics. So they exist. Other human beings learn this about human beings and created an entire industry to exploit it. It's sad. My people, my people, the American physical society, physicists, this is back in the 80s. They were going to have their annual meeting in, in San Diego and there was a snafu

with the hotel reservations. Vegas said, we'll take you. You got 4,000 people. We'll do it. The MGM said, we'll take you. So all the physicists went to Vegas and we know probability and statistics. We understand the fact that basically you don't win relative to the, you know, at the end of the week, there was a news headline. Physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. So it's just, it's sad. It was like almost the saddest chapter that I wrote. But why do we feel that? So what is that feeling that makes us feel like, is it a feeling that we create? Is it a, where does that come from that makes us feel like this is it? It's because we don't have the brain wiring to know otherwise. I have no other accounting for

it. We just don't think, by the way, that branch of math was one of the last to be discovered. Do you realize probability and statistics was developed and discovered after calculus? Wow. Why? I think it's because the brain kid doesn't even know how to go there. I have a, I have a research paper from the mid 1700s, which feels like a long ago, but a lot of math had been developed before that, including calculus. And in that paper, it says, I've just discovered how helpful it is to take an average of numbers. Right. That's pretty normal. That's normal stuff. And somebody had to discover this. Wow. About the world. And so,

so we, yeah, I guess we don't want, because do you think also at that time there was a lot, there's also back then there's more sorcery. There's more wizard. Yeah. There's more less than eat than the middle ages and stuff, but right. There's still a few milling around. Yeah, a few. And so, and so I think people, there's a little bit more mysticism then. So probability probably is something that probably would be the last thing you think about if somebody over here is, you know, Hester Prennan, somebody at a damn. That, that's a perceptive point. What you're saying, I think is because we had sorcerers and wizards and people with mysterious powers and shamans and things, they could live in the mystery of the probability and statistics,

and you think it's a power that they wield. And so there's no urge to try to decode it because it's their powers. Right. Yeah. So I agree with you. I think. Right. They hadn't really debunked all those powers and religion was really at the, at the, on everyone's breath. So there was a lot more, I think, mystery. And what, it's not just probably even physiology. So for example, you go back, you know, three, 400 years, if you fell on the ground, writhing and frothing at the mouth, people would think you went in something from God. No, no, no, no, no, no, you, and you're doing this and you're shaking the devil just occupied your body. That's what the devil looks like and feels like. So, oh my gosh, the devil there, let me go to get the priest.

So you're in a small town. How far away is the church? It's two blocks away. Okay. So you go down to, you know, but you could be choking on the damn muffin. Okay. You know what I'm saying? It could be, but I'm specifically referring to that condition. Okay. You're frothing at the mouth. Okay. So they get the priest, the priest gets the robe, the holy water, the crucifix, they go down location, they bless them, put the, and then the symptoms go away. Oh, now you're healed by the priest. That is the exact. And it was a seizure. And it was a seizure. It was an epileptic seizure. Epileptic seizure matches the time scale of you going to get a priest down the block in a small town. Yeah. Okay. And so bum, why think it's

anything but the devil? This episode is sponsored by better help. That's right. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with a user manual. You won't find when you can check your pockets, check your pants, check your crevasses, check your, check it, check, go ahead, check, feel around, feel yourself. There's no user manual. So when life isn't working for you, it's normal that you can feel stuck. Hell, I felt so damn stuck. I've done, feel like I'm got glue on me. I'm glued out. Well, navigating life's challenges can be challenging. That's why better help is here to help. Better help therapists are trained to help you figure out the cause of challenging emotions and learn productive coping skills, which makes therapy the closest thing to a guided tour of

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that really fits. Try a couple out before you land somewhere. As the world's largest therapy service, better help has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists available 100% online. Plus it's affordable. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to match with a therapist. If things aren't clicking switch, no waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist. Learn more and save 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com slash T H E O. That's better H E L P betterhelp.com slash Theo. We are so, so I don't blame people for this. It's just the reality of discovery. And, and if you question what you see and, and find ways to, to experiment with it and you realize,

no, it is not the devil. It is epilepsy that's uncontrolled firing of your, the synapses of your brain. It's still a, you know, a tragic affliction that's not entirely cured. We can control it with drugs and things. But that's an example of the mystery that existed back then. Do you believe in a devil? I remain unconvinced that such a thing exists. Dang, you're challenging him. By the way, Jews don't think of hell. Jews, there's, to Jews there's heaven, but no hell and therefore there's no devil.

Oh, wow. That's taking the easy way out. Well, no, because, well, yeah, right. That's fine. Thought about it that way. Yeah. And it's better real estate too. If you're, if you're, I feel like if you're advertising it like that, like there's a heaven. Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry about the hell. Right. Right. Right. Right. Maybe they needed less forces of control over their conduct than the Christians later did. I don't know. Yeah. That's one thing about Christianity, man. It's too, sometimes it's like too much pressure. Well, yeah. And no one could fulfill that. No one can live up to that. Which is why here's another one in the spirit of your earlier comment. Here's another one.

Oh, you got sick and this person didn't. God is punishing you. You did something than against God in the last two weeks. Yeah. You were touching your privates. All right. Whatever. I mean, we all do stuff. Oh, I do. And it's, and it's easy to find it and say, oh my gosh, I must be punished for that. And, and when that happens, then you, blame starts getting handed out. So here, I got another one. Consider, consider that Muslims, the, it's part of the rituals of being a Muslim is you're cleaning your hands and your feet and your, and your ears and your nose. And there's, there's an ablution, whatever the word is, where you, there's a cleansing daily. Wow. Daily. Okay. That's a good idea. My grandmother,

I think, was Muslim then. Well, well, just think, but just think about this. Back then, nobody's showering every day. Nobody, people's, but some funky times. Okay. All right. There's some people don't shower every day today, but you could. And United States, we probably take more showers than anybody else in the world from the research I've done on that. But point is, if a disease comes through and it comes from contact or, or some other thing, because you're dirty, you get sick and the Muslims don't. Oh, so they seem powerful. Oh my gosh. And you're Christian and they're Muslims. You're saying they put a, a hex on me. These heathens, these Don Jesus following. Okay. Wow. This is how this can happen. I got another one. You ready?

This, this one. I don't know. I'm still riding the last one. Yeah. I don't want you ready? You got a lot of them. Okay. Here it goes. All right. So we would later learn that many of the plagues were from a flea. Okay. Like from a, um, like a little fly. Oh yeah. There's a flea. Just a regular flea that the house flea that you get on pets. Okay. So now watch. So the flea would get infected and would bite you and you'd get the plague. Okay. Plagues have killed more people than practically any more than wars. Okay. All right. So, so plague is like a blight on you. All right. So now watch what happens. Where did the fleas come from? We would later learn they came from rats and mice. Yeah. Okay. That were infected with the plague. So if your house had rats or

mice and mice were common, look at old Renaissance paintings. There's mice in the corners of the paintings. It's really funny just to see this. All right. So now watch. Maybe they were good luck, huh? If you owned a cat, you didn't have mice. So you didn't get the plague. You didn't get the plague. No, wait a minute. Who owned cats? Well, there are many women that owned cats. So women didn't get the plague and they were therefore sorcerers. They were witches. Damn. Witches. And some more. And you still associate a cat with a witch. Yeah. To this day. To this day. I mean, when you're, when you're, you know, story telling about it. Yeah, crazy. Broom, witch. Those are the items. These are the two. A catraments. Those are them. So these are,

this is what happens when you live in a pre-scientific era. Wow. The blame game begins. But that's fun as hell. Well, for a movie, but I don't want to live in those times. Yeah. So this book is an attempt to unravel this blame game when you see things happening. It's not my fault. It's your fault. But did you really look through your opinions and your thoughts and, and, and. Yeah, it was neat. Someone made me mad. Ah, good. Good. Someone made me mad. I'm like, fuck, I don't want to know this. I don't want to, I want to believe what I want to believe. No, no, it's bad because you knew it. You knew it's true and it's against your urges. Yeah. It was like, damn me. Oh, I want to believe what I want to believe. You know, that's what it felt like

sometimes. No, but I'm not, I don't think I'm heavy-handed. I think they're offerings, right? Have you thought about it this way? Yeah, no, I don't think it came off like, I'm trying to think, no, I don't think it came off as like, no at all. I think it was like. I don't, that wasn't my intent if it ever felt that way. That was, it's just. Well, you're a fact guy. You're a factual man, you know? And I, you know, I battle, you know, like, I think I've always kind of battled the dark arts overall. So it's like, I've never really looked at a ton of the facts, you know, it's always been this more ethereal sort of. Well, what you feel want, what you want to be true rather than what is true. And by the way, that's a, that, that's, that's coming a long way

in life to realize the world, this is the difference between the different kinds of truths. I spent a chapter in the truth and beauty chapter. I just talk about, I'll just say spend a minute on it now. So there's something called, I call personal truths. This is something no one's going to take in a free society, no one's going to take it from you. If Jesus is your savior and you know, true to your bones, that's a personal truth in a free society and especially in the United States where it's constitutionally protected, your freedom of religion, no one should take that from you. Okay. You'd have a legal case if they try. All right. Other personal truths. Well, Muhammad is my last savior on earth, my last prophet on earth. Okay. That this would be a

Muslim personal truth. Other truths are, Beyonce is your queen, right? Or whatever. The things you feel. Okay. Personal truths are the foundation of our strongest held opinions. And in a pluralistic world, society, we should cherish that. This is why people are different from each other. All right. You don't want everybody to be the same. Oh, that's called a dictatorship. Yeah. If everybody aligns with exactly the same. They don't want it. The problem with your opinion, if it's in a personal truth, if you try to have someone else agree with you, you have to have an active persuasion, so what? But in the limit, that becomes all-out conflict and war. People fight over personal truths, kill each other because their personal truths don't

agree with your personal truth. So personal truths, when they go outside of yourself, risk bloodshed. Right. In the history of civilization has demonstrated this. All right. Then there's a political truth, which is just something that becomes true just because you heard it often enough. And that's a weakness we have. Not a weakness. Evolutionarily, it made sense. If you see something repeat 100 times, that's reality. Oh, yeah. Okay. But you know what happens now? People have hijacked that urge to recognize that something that repeats must be true. They've hijacked it. Now they just find something that they want to be true and they repeat it to you. You hear it enough, it must be true. Yeah. There it is. Yeah. Especially

well, nowadays also we have, since we have technology and we have this advancement with the internet, social media, it's so, it's easy to get things in front of people so many times. Yes. It's easy to, I mean, our attention span has been hijacked. Hijacked. It's been hijacked completely. That's the word. There's no other word but hijacked. And in the old days, we called it brainwashing where you repeat something and then it becomes true. That's hijacking this feature of our evolutionary brain that it's trying to create order out of chaos. It's like Stockholm syndrome. We almost are slowly developing almost some variants seem like of a Stockholm syndrome or something. Like we're like all like Elizabeth's smart,

you know, without the, or Elizabeth dumb. That's who we're becoming. You know what I'm saying? We're all like, you know, we don't, we're just bearing with what we have to deal with all the time. Right. Exactly. And so you try to sift through what is true and it must be that which was repeated often enough. So that's a political truth. Wow. Then there's an objective truth. Okay. What is objective? And the methods and tools of science are exquisitely tuned to establish objective truth. So these are truths that have been demonstrated by observation and experiment and repeated experiment. What is the word objective? Objective means it's true whether or not you believe in it. Okay. So it's no doubt true.

Yeah. Because I can show that it's true and it's not my bias that thinks it's true. Here's the data. Now you say, you know, I don't believe you. I think you had a bias. I think your wall current affected this. So I'm going to do it on 240 volts while you did yours on 125 volts, 120 volts. You do a different experiment of your own design. You get the same result. So that's objective. That's a fact. So when you do it enough times and they're all experiments are great. This is, this is why science, it wasn't really developed as we now practice it until around 1600. All right. I know that feels like a long time ago, but a lot of the world unfolded before then. All right. And so once we learn, if you say something is true, let me test it.

Let me, let me find out. Let me devise an experiment. And if I can verify your statement with this experiment and someone else can in a third person, we're good here. That's an objective truth. And what objective truths have going for them is that they're true whether or not you believe in them. I don't like them. Well, because the actual nature can't be fooled. Nature is the ultimate judge, jury and executioner. Yeah. If you overeat this week and you gain three pounds, next week you can't protest with placards saying, I protest the law of gravity because it made me heavier. No, you don't have that option. So it seems to me if you're going to base laws on things, but there's a whole chapter in here on, on law and order, right? If you're going to create laws

in a pluralistic world, you base the laws on the objective truths. Right. Because that applies to everyone. Don't base a law on your personal truth because that's forcing it on me. And I have a different personal truth. Is climate change an objective truth? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So what happens is you believe in climate change. It's not a belief. It's not a belief. Right. When it's objectively true, you don't have to believe it. It just is true. Yeah. I believe in it. When it's really hot, I believe in it. If it's like a hot day, I'm like, damn, they're right. I'm serious, dude. I'm like, we got to fight this. So here's the thing. So if it was only determined that way, then another person that was in a cold snap would say, no, I don't believe it. Right. And

everybody's making up their own theories about it because it's their own life experience. But an experiment takes the information out of yourself. Okay. It's not your perspective. It's not your bias. It's not your worldview. And you get all the data available. And then you establish the objective truth. So in climate change, and I give an example here in the probability in the risk and reward chapter, you probably heard the number 97 scientists say it's happening at 3%. It's in the last 20 years. There are basically no scientists left denying it. So it's basically 100%. Damn, there ain't one hold out there. But let's go back to when it was 3% because that's a fun number. Okay. All right. Let's do an experiment. Some engineers,

there's a bridge that's there. You don't know where it came from, but it's a bridge, but it's brand new and it's about to open. And you say, I want to drive my truck across the bridge. And 97 engineers come up to you and say, by the way, I don't know any of the other engineers. So we're not in cahoots or anything. Yeah. If you drive your truck, that's going to collapse and you're going to die. You will likely die plunging into the ravine. So 97 of them say that. Three say, Oh, Theo, go take your F 150 drive across. You're some good old boys. You never mean it. No, go on. You'll be fine. What are you going to do? Make it in the way. He's feeling it. He's feeling it. I'll just say it, man. I take the generally all that

matter. That's what I'm saying. But no, I feel you. So, so you would probably listen to the 97 engineers, especially if you're not an engineer yourself. Yeah. Especially if you got to look the engineers in the eyes. Now, no, I've got nothing to do with this. That's you trying to be human about this. Don't be human. That mess you up. Let me feel what you're saying. No, they'll show you the research papers. There's no eyeballs in the research paper. There's no emoticons in the research paper. So then what is that that makes me want to look them in the eyes and see? What is that? Oh, I'll tell you. I'll tell you. It's a good one. It's a good one. We, and again, I think it's understandable evolutionarily. If you look someone in the eye and they tell you something that just

happened, that is more true to you than a statistical table with charts and bar charts. Then a pie graph. Then a pie graph that says the same fucking thing. So that and advertisers know that they hijacked this. Okay. Testimonials. But no, watch, they could just show a bar chart and say this detergent is better than all the others and here's the data. They could show that, but no. They show some parent and a kid and they put it in the machine. They pull it out and look how clean and the eye witness testimony has huge value to our emotions because another human being is communicating it right. And so you, so, so I give another example. You could be, that's a little more obscure, but you, you read in like consumer reports or whatever

that this one car is like a vacuum, a vacuum. Sure. It's the best one and it's working every time. You walk into the vacuum store because you saw the data and someone's walking out saying, I will never buy one of these again. It's stuck. Oh, you can't say a vacuum sucks. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. No, this vacuum was awful. Oh, it reversed and it made my home place. I would never do that. And you, you, you hear this? The person, you don't even know them, but they're another human and they're speaking with emotion defect on me and there's, there's fire in their gaze. Okay. You, you got to back out and walk out of that store and get mad. You ain't getting, ain't getting, ain't not gonna happen. I'd rather use a fucking broom. Okay. So I think

it's natural to trust another human. Right. In that context, but that's why we have to train ourselves to trust the data. And in science, when you become a scientist, I'm taking statistics and data analysis and probability essentially every year I'm in school. It's not just one class and you move on. There are different nuances over there, different ways you think about it, different ways you ask questions. You know what science is? It's a professional way of querying nature so that you can not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not or that something is not true that is. Did I say that right? Whatever, the opposite. You might have. I don't know. I was following it too. No, no, I'll say that you don't want to be fooled

because nature can't be fooled. Ultimately, nature can't be fooled. Right. And we have biases where so you don't want do whatever it takes. I'm going to give you the scientific method. Do whatever it takes and I'm going to repeat that. Do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not or that something is not true that is. Does it mean getting a video of it? Does it mean getting someone else to check on you? Did you have your coffee this morning or not? Is that the measure? Were you more alert? Did you miss something? Do whatever it takes. And when you do that, it ain't got nothing to do with the passion in their eyes. Okay, now, so let's take this into something that is a realm that doesn't

have as much probability probably. Go for it. So let's take it into the realm of love, right? Love it. Or affection, things like that. So whenever you met, are you married? Yes, I'm married 34 years. Oh, wow. Congratulations, man. Wow, that is a damn record almost. Well, you should win a Nobel Prize for that. I met her in relativity class. She has a degree in mathematical physics in graduate school. So that was fun. Yeah, I met her in relativity. That's wild. So you're talking about love. Okay, love. So do you, I mean, do you take these same concepts into like whenever you were falling in love and stuff like that? Or was it more like a normal thing? You saw her in class. So the answer is yes, I do. Wow. I don't often talk about this. You

want to hear it? You want to hear it? Yeah, well, I'm just curious, because I don't have a wife or anything yet. Well, it's mathematical. Okay, then this could be helpful to you. Okay. Okay. It could be helpful. Okay. At this point, I'll take on anything. It's a little bit of mathematical. Okay. How much math have you had in school? I took a couple of them. You took a couple. I took at least, yeah. A couple of them. I was good. I did all right. You did all right. You did all right. Okay. I took one of them at high altitude. I took one class out in Arizona at pretty high altitude. You know what they say? That if you learn something under certain psychomotor conditions, that you recover it better under those same conditions. Oh, wow. Like if you get high

and you learn something, if you get high again later, you'll learn, you'll remember that better because you match the mental states. Oh, dang it. Yeah. I've read that. I haven't read it lately, but a few decades ago. I think I wrote that. Okay. So here it is. All right. Here it is. You got to follow me with some math here. Okay. It's not complicated. By the way, I don't know any dumb professional comedians. You all are smart people. You're perceptive. You know what's going on. You have to know deeper what's going on to come at it from the other side and show why it's hilarious. Okay. That takes insight. You guys are the keepers of the soul, of the social and cultural mores of civilization. Yeah. I think a lot of us try to be Jesus. I

don't know what I'm doing, but I think a lot of us try to do our best. Yeah. You're holding up windows, not windows, mirrors to what we think, say, and do. And so it's a fundamental part, I think, of modern existence because without it, my gosh, how unpleasant the world would be without these perspectives. So that's my, I'm not just blowing smoke. I'm just saying, and you especially have a certain authentic honesty that is palpable. And it's like, whatever you say, I'm with you on it. I feel you. This is what you were saying. Do you feel what the person, if I can't feel what you're saying, go home. Right. What are you doing? You just, just, just type it up and send, you know, text it to me. If I, if I'm not looking and you're in

the eyes, you know, so, okay. Yeah. Well, it's helping me because it's like, you know, I think I have a tough, I'm not like a naysayer of science. I love, you know, I'm grateful for science because I exist and I'm grateful that the world exists and that we're able to have all types of different experiences of like caring about each other and getting to travel and see different things and that my eyes work. Like I'm super grateful for science. I think sometimes I get a fr, like I have a fear sometimes of like, if anything's out of like the, like out of like right here, everything else can seem a little bit questionable, you know? So I think it's just, you know, it's just probably a questionable part is because you, you create your own worldview.

Yeah. And your, and you, everything makes sense to you in your worldview and something's trying to poke it from the outside. You're understandably skeptical of it. Yeah, I'm probably skeptical a lot. Or rejecting it because no, I got my thing, my situation, it works for me. Yeah. And I like to just, I like to daydream and stuff, you know? So science, sometimes they want to really, hey, bro, you know, we need you to pull these daydreams over here and we got to tag them, you know? We just, we need to get the weight and the density of these daydreams so we can have them on file. So I respect it. And I'm really, really grateful that you're here. But yeah. So tell me about that when you went into love. So here it is. And this is a little geeky. Yeah.

It's a geeky thing. So, all right. You can have a line and you can measure the length of the line. All right. It's whatever. Okay. That's the only thing you can measure about it. There's no area, there's no volume. It's just a length. All right. Now I can add another line at like right angles to it. And when I do that, I can actually trace out a square. Okay. So now a square has more than just a length. It has area. Okay. There's area inside the square. And that area is defined by both, both axes. You need both to get an area. Okay. All right. Let's add a third axis. Oh, now. X, Y, now Z. Now you don't have a line. You don't have a square. What do you have? You have a cube. Now I'm on mushrooms. You have a cube that's full. Each of these is a dimension. Okay.

So now watch. Now, I can take that to higher dimensions, but I won't. I'm going to stick to three. Okay. We can go to four and five dimensions. Let's stick to three. So now you ask yourself, what do you care about in a relationship? Okay. You want the person to look hot? Nothing wrong with that. Make a note of that. Okay. You want the person to be good in bed? Okay. That's fine. Be honest with yourself. That's another. By the way, you can be hot and not good in bed. Oh, yeah. Or vice versa. Okay. So these are separate coordinates. Okay. Okay. So all right. Now watch. Let's get a third one. You want the person to be kind. Let's say kind. You don't want an evil person. No. No. No. So each of these is completely separate

from the other. You can be beautiful and evil. You can be ugly and kind. But you care about those three. Right. So now rate this person from zero to 10 in those three categories. Just go ahead and do that. So you say a person's really kind and that great in bed, I'll only give them a five. Okay. In looks. The great in bed and they're kind. All right. Here's what you do. You know how you get the volume of a cube? You multiply x by y by z. Okay. The area of a square is x times y. The area of a, the volume of a cube is you multiply all three. I'm telling you to take those three numbers, multiply them together. You will get the volume of your love. The volume of what you care about. Okay. So now watch. Now here's my point. What you

need to do is because presumably if you're in the field, the different people out there get each person's volume and go after the person that has the largest volume because they might be higher in one than the other. But if you really care about them, it's the total, the totality of that package that matters. Especially in a relationship, those features don't always stay the same. They could vary. Yeah. Sometimes they grow better looking as they get older, or they might, you might get more attracted to them or less attracted or less attracted. So there's various that might learn different skills, but often some of them get less, you know. Yeah. It's a mix. It's a mix. So let's say they get a little less attracted, but the other bits were strong. So you

have a volume, a strength of a larger volume to work against. Okay. If things start shifting in this. Okay. I'm telling you, you can take that to higher dimensions. So whether they're bad, what, are they hot? Or they have a, maybe a good sense of humor, something you might value. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Are they curious? Do they want to keep learning? Okay. That's important. Do you, of course, why wouldn't it be? All right. Because I want them to keep learning about me because, no, that's just no, that's selfish. If they're curious, you're part of what they want to keep learning about. Okay, that's fair. Don't focus on that. No, dude, come on. You're right. Okay. So I went around with a five-dimensional,

so in math, we call it a five-dimensional vector space. And this is what you took into your love life. Yes. So that's what I did. Okay. So what I'm saying is, there could be someone who's the hottest person you've ever seen. And you could be distracted by that and say, I'm marrying that person. And then they're not so hot 10 years from now, or they get a little chubby, whatever you're valuing or not valuing. And then all of a sudden, everything you marry the person for isn't there anymore. And then you divorce seven years later. So you got to look at that volume. Got to look at the volume. And by the way, be crass if you want to be crass. Do you want to marry someone who's wealthy? Put that in there,

too. Put it in there. Okay. Don't be ashamed of that. Because any one of these can change. People say, oh, I want just, that's shallow. You need a personality. People's personalities can change. Why are we sometimes ashamed to look at the criteria we honestly want to look at? I got through that. I'm matured out of that because society wants you to not want that. And if someone is honest, I'd like your wealth. I'd enjoy it. And by the wealth can go away, too. In the same way you're looking. All the things can. But if it matters, too, then it's one of the coordinates in this volume. By the way, if any of those go to zero, because the volume is a product, you're multiplying these numbers. If any of them goes to zero,

the volume goes to zero. Oh, really? Yes. Oh, because you're not adding them. You're multiplying them. So try to make sure that the likelihood of it going to zero is, or if it does go to zero, if you don't matter, then it shouldn't have been in the. Right. It has to be things that nothing could go to zero. So then if you do that, then you're probably going to be picking things that have some real value to you. Correct. Or overall value. Correct. Or just be honest, I just want money. And if you went out of money, I'll divorce you. But the person could be fun and happy the whole other time. Oh yeah, they're buying sandwiches for everybody. Y'all are having a good time or whatever. You know, that's people or their own individuals. So what happened though,

Neil? What happened when you got the lady, you invite her out? Where'd you take her? Where do you? Oh, well, we, you know, we were graduate students at the time, you know, very poor, you know. So a big meal is like a $12, you know, dish. And so, oh, I have to say this if I'm airing all the thing. So I took her for granted initially. Oh. And we broke up initially. And then I, and then like six months later, I said, what the hell did I just do? Oh my gosh. I went back to that volume and I said, all these other people are not filling that volume the way she did. And I was really sad. Did you go back to her? I was, I could, because I broke up. I can't, what are you going to do? You can't do that. She knocked on my door. She came back to me. And what

she say? And I don't remember because I was distracted by the fact that, oh my gosh, I have a second chance here. Wow. And so on that second chance, that's when we moved in together and got married three years later. And you didn't mess it up the second time? No, no, no. And the strength of a marriage is, is how big is that volume? Because yes, they will vary and people will get crabby and people, you know, you, there are things that will test it, of course. What's something that you and your wife like to do together? Is there anything like that you feel like helps keep a marriage together over time? Does there any? You do things together. Yeah. You just add, do new things together so that you have a new memory to add to the portfolio.

If you always do the same old things, it can get, you know, you see the person every day of your life, right? And so, so just make sure it grows. Have you take, do you guys take like classes or is there stuff like, do you just take walks? Like what are some fun stuff? Yeah, we do take walks, in fact. I just take walks with my ex-girlfriend. I liked it. You know, walks are simple, they're low budget. Oh, yeah. Like honey, I'm about to take you on this walk. Every step sounds like I'm saving money. Let's go another block. It's an incidental fact about it, not the, not the instrumental fact. Okay. Hey baby, I love you because every step is cheap. No, that's not, that's not going to fly. That's going to fly. Is that why you're not married yet? Yeah, it could be probably. I gotta

start investing more. Here's the thing, we, all our fairy tales, you see the courtship, which is over romantic and beautiful and, and how do those fairy tales end? What's the final word? The final phrase. The end. No, before that. Oh, happily ever after. They live happily ever after. Wait a minute. Why don't you show me some of that? Give me some hints. How do you pull that one off? Yeah, like Rapunzel, they don't show you that she's selling her hair in China. You know what I'm saying? They don't show you the odds and ends of it. Just leave that one out. So we're trained in the courtship and they don't say that Snow White has an opioid injection. They don't show you some of the truth behind this stuff, man. Dealing with actual life problems and challenges. Yeah,

or that, uh, Goldilocks is in the bestiality. They don't show you some of the truth out there, Neil. Damn, you're right, bro. That's what I'm saying. They just gave us this. Goldilocks is sleeping with the bears, you know? It's whatever. I know. They don't tell you that she has a crush on Gale Sayers, you know? They don't tell you she's out there running around with Jim McMahon. They don't tell you all of that. Right. So we have no literary life experience, even thinking about what happens beyond they live happily ever after. So you have to sort of discover that on your own. Is that Ben? Do you feel like, is it hard for you to let, is it just your, was it just the brain you were given that made you more scientific? Or was it like, do you feel like it

was a nature or nurture, like that you developed that as, because it was a skill that you needed to help process your own like life and childhood? That's an important and perceptive question. And I have to unpack that because you put a lot in that one question. Can we talk about that kind of stuff a lot on this show? Excellent. I'll go there. Let me go there right now. So everyone wants the secret to things. What's the secret to intelligence, the secret to this? That implies it's only one thing and not something more complex. And so I remember when I was a kid, this is a slight off ramp, but I hope it's worth it. When I was a kid, it was in seventh grade, I did a book report on Ponce de Leon. And he's the guy, the Spanish explorer, who went into

South America searching for the fountain of youth. Okay. You drink from it and you have eternal life. And I remembered reading that and then I say, that idiot, why would he even think that exists? He's going to commit an entire voyage to believe that there's just some elixir coming out of the ground and he lives forever. Really? A full grown human being believe this? I was thinking to my, I was already, I was a geeky kid. Okay. I'm 12, I think at this point. But I did the book report on him and then I noticed as I got older, this is something deep within us. Nobody actually wants to do the hard work to improve their health, to live longer, healthier lives. They want the instant fix. Yeah. And realizing that Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of

youth allowed me to see what people were doing. I'm old enough to remember yogurt, eat yogurt, that you live forever. Dan had a commercial with Centagenarians eating yogurt. Oh yeah. I remember mom would eat the yogurt. I'd be like, damn, mom's going to be around. But that's what I'm saying. So we want there to be quick fixes for things and quick answers and quick solutions. What's the latest? Kale. Did you eat your kale today? No. If not, you would die, you would die a miserable death. Okay. You'll be dead by noon. Yeah. There's definitely, and kale is trash, but kale is so hard to eat. Kale feels like it does not want you eating it. I like kale again, bacon too. Yeah. Well, hello. I ain't saying nothing, but it is what it is, baby. They knew that with

collard greens to put in the ham hop. You want to eat leaves? Put some dead animal in that stuff. Dude, you can put bacon under a damn corpse and I'll fucking have a little. Actually, you know what? Cannibals called humans? Long pig. Really? Yeah. Because of all the animals that you would eat, humans and pigs come closest. Man, I could see it. But it tastes like bacon, you have to cure it and do the things, whatever. But anyhow. I'd have some cured human a little. Yeah, I'm just saying. Would you have any? If I were starving, I mean, I have, you know, I have. I'll see you, dog. No, no, no, I'm starving. Hey, bro. No, wait, wait. If I'm in a mountain and help is not coming and people died in the plane wreck, otherwise we will starve to death,

I'm eating me some dead humans. That is the, that is the, I'm not thinking. What are you eating first? What part you think? Muscle tissue. I would say, you know, the bicep maybe or, or I would, I would take my cue from, from just what you get in the store. Ribs are some good eating. I love ribs. Yeah. Yeah. So no, I wouldn't hesitate. So it's not about morals, it's about survival. So, so, but by the way, if there's a pig over there, I'm eating a pig. I'm not eating the dead human. Yeah, that'd be weird if you're like, I'm going to have Randy. Instead of Pumba, I'm eating Pumba. Okay. Puma ain't surviving the day. Okay. So, that'd be crazy. There's one dude at the plane crash and he just wants to keep eating the people. Like, what do we have? Pigs

and cows and turkeys and chickens. What are you doing? It crashed on a farm, right? Yeah, it crashed in a 7-Eleven and he's still over there cutting up an old lady. He got some creeps out there, man. So now I'm completely distracted. What the hell was I talking about? Were we talking about that? Um, I, I don't, we kind of went out, you were talking about, you know, I don't know, you started about bacon. It's been a long road. No, no, no, it has, uh, just, no, we were talking about love. Love. No, we got off. We, okay. We, we evolved. Evolved. Okay. Oh, I remember. How do I, how did I become me? That's what it was. Okay. Oh, yeah. So did this, did you, do you think you developed a sense for science out of nature or nurture?

So watch. So I'm walking through life, watching people want to believe that simple things will fix everything. Those are the YouTube ads that get your attention. You've been doing too many sit-ups. Just do this and you'll have ripped abs. Just eat this, drink this, and it'll be, and you don't have to do any of that work. And I thought to myself, there must be something deep within us that just wants to be lazy about what our accomplishments, our accomplishments. Okay. Yep. But that's a kind of an off-ramp just to say, I'm not, I don't care about nature or nurture. What I care about is that whatever you are, you know you can improve it. You know this. In practically everything we do, you get better at it from trying, from practicing,

in practically everything we do. So I'm not going to say nature, nurture. People say, oh, well, Michael Phelps, he's got really flexible, big feet that flap for swimming and he can flap, he's got webbed fingers. I don't know. Oh, he's a long pig. Okay. He's a long pig. I don't know, but they'll say whatever they will about his body, but wait a minute. He's in the water 30 hours a week. Yeah. Did you factor that in? Is that, where's that in your equation for him succeeding? How about that? Okay. So generally you part the curtains, someone is working really hard at what might look easy to them that they have accomplished. Right. So I, and I don't think that about you. I feel like you've obviously put in the, what is it, the hours that it takes to have

your credibility. So let me get back to your point. So when you were a kid, I'm wondering. It's very simple. It's very simple. All kids are curious about everything. They overturn rocks and, you know, poke things and generally create chaos at home. And most of what parents do is they spend the first years of the kid's life teaching them to walk and talk, then the rest of their life telling them to shut up and sit down because wherever they go, they make a mess. But that mess, the parents think they're making a mess, but no, they're not. These are the results of experiments they've been doing to discover the operations of nature. If you happen to leave an egg up on the counter and a little toddler because you're making breakfast and a toddler is reaching up, you say,

no, don't touch that. And I'm saying, no, let him grab it. Let him. What did the egg cost you? Last I checked, 40 cents at most. Watch. You know the egg is going to end up breaking, but so what? What's the kid starts playing with the egg? Yeah. And then they do something with it and then it breaks. That's interesting. Something can be hard yet fragile. How many things in life are that? Most of life. Eggs are hard. No, most things are solid. This is hard and not fragile. But a lot of experiences in the world and stuff, I mean. Well, no, that's you thinking emotional. I'm talking about physical objects now at this point. The egg is hard, but fragile. Okay. And so that's the learn about that. Fascinating. And it's brittle.

Well, it doesn't bend. It breaks. Yeah. Okay. So these are structural properties of organic substances. All right. And then what's inside? There's this transparent goopy stuff and there's a yellow thing. What is that? And then you tell them that might have been a chicken. Oh my gosh. Blow their mind. Blow their minds. And by the way, you see that colorless stuff? If I heat it, it turns white. You can watch it change color in front of your eyes. There's seven science experiments to do with the kid reaching for the egg that you didn't want them to touch and you just squashed that because you don't want to use the 40 cents. Yeah, because you want to have a damn quiche for yourself. Okay. The president of Harvard once said,

when people complained, why are you charging so much for education? He said, if you think the cost of education is high, you should try the cost of ignorance. Yeah. That's even higher. Yeah. Okay. So all I'm saying is that curiosity is beaten out of us by the time we're in middle school. If you retain that curiosity, that rampant curiosity, you're a scientist. A scientist is a kid who grew up physically, but not emotionally, not mentally. If I see some, hey, what is that? Let me poke that. Let me see what's behind it. And it doesn't have to be a physical object. It could be like fictional objects. I watched the Thor movie and I'm saying, gee, I want to know how much is that hammer weigh? I'm still curious.

Oh, interesting. Okay. What is that hammer weigh? And I heard a sentence in the movie that enabled me to calculate how much is hammer weighed. Wow. They say hammer forged in the heart of a dying star. Oh my gosh, I'm an astrophysicist. We deal in dying stars. I got this. Hide some dense stuff going on in a dying star. I filled out the density and I tweeted it. And I said, if Thor's hammer is made in the way the movie says, it has the weight of a herd of 300 million elephants. That's why nobody could pick it up. The Hulk couldn't pick it up. You need the magical powers of Thor to do it. So now. I saw Lou Frigno at the post office one time. Lou Frigno. Oh, the original TV. Yeah. And his wife was making him move boxes around. He was

all pissed and I'm like, you're the frickin' Hulk, man. Move a couple of boxes. You know, he's got to be green to do that. Dude, get with the program. He was with that as paint. But watch what happened. Okay. Cause I'm in the Geekiverse. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking, yeah. I'm carrying that. I'm like nerd alert. I tweeted that out. That was a total nerd alert. And then I got out nerded. Oh, somebody said, uh, Dr. Tyson is wrong about this calculation. Okay. So yeah, I got totally smoked on this one. So what happened was, in 1991 Marvel issued a Thor's hammer trading card where they said Thor's hammer is made of a fictional material and it weighs precisely 42.3 pounds. So they kind of cheated.

Well, yeah. They cheated. Yeah. Yeah. But, but I'm getting to your earlier point. I wanted my answer to be true. Right. I think it's a way better answer than 42.3 pounds, but it's wrong. It's in the canon, in the Marvel canon, it's just simply wrong. And you got to know when to hold them, when to, uh, when to fold them and when to, what's the third one and when to walk? Uh, when to walk away, when to run, I think. Yeah. And that's, I think, usually around alimony or something. Yeah, yeah. Hold them, fold them, run. So, so that's an example of still being curious into adulthood. And all scientists are like that. So, so no, it's not nurture nature. It's did, did you protect your curiosity in childhood? If not, you'll ossify,

I love that word. You'll harden in your own beliefs. You won't even seek out things that might conflict with what you think is true. Because you're comfortable where you are. Right. You know what it is? We want to be where we are. We want to be. So I hear this. Well, yeah, you get, you want to, yeah, you get from a place of like, I'm right. And it's funny because I don't really like being in that place. Even there's part of me that does like it because it feels like I'm winning. But there's another part of me that knows it's not helpful to me as a evolving human. Which wins. Sometimes one wins sometimes the other. I think sometimes some win, one wins some of the other, but I'm grateful that, that I have, that I have awareness of both. And

I do find my way. That's half the effort, by the way. If you know that this is going on, you're there. And I'm grateful that the one does, does battle a lot of times and say, you know, I know you want to sit right here with this, but there's, you, it's only fair if you look at more to the story. I think I quoted myself too. There's a guy named Walter Badge Holt. I think it's his name. I quote him in the book. And I think this is the right quote where he said, there's no greater pain of the human existence than the prospect of having a new idea because it would just conflict with what you, who you are and how you've defined yourself. Yeah. So why do we want to be, why do we want to stay? Why do we want to have that definition? I think I know why. It's comfortable.

Here it is. Here it is. You ready? You must have been the worst person in class. You must have been like every time the teacher's like, does anybody have an idea? You must have brought a fake hand put it on your desk straight up. Every time, every time. So no, I'm, so here's what I think is going on. You know, the Alice Cooper song, I don't know the title of it, but I know the lyric, schools out for summer, schools out for ever. Okay. This is a celebration of not learning. And we know people, if not ourselves on at the end of the school day, we can't wait for the alarm to go off at the end of the day or the Friday comes or more likely the last day of school and the summer say schools out and you toss your books in the air and you run down the steps.

And I, I'm thinking to myself, your only job was to learn about this beautiful world, about this majestic universe and you're celebrating not learning. And so I'm not going to blame the people. I'm going to blame the school because if I have you for six hours a day and you come out and you'd rather not be there, I have failed, not in a little great sense. As a teacher, I have failed the system. You know what should be happening in school? I shouldn't be loading you with textbooks with, with, with bold face vocabulary words that you memorize once for the exam before you move on. No, no, no. I should figure out a way to make you excited about everything you learn. So that at the end of the school day, you're sad to walk out of school. Imagine the

world that would be. And you know what schools should do? It's not, let me load you with knowledge. It's let me prepare you to be a lifelong learner so that this curiosity that we have infused in you in kindergarten through 12 or kindergarten through 16, if you're in college there, whatever, when you come out, that is just the beginning of the flame that will course within you for the rest of your life because you will spend much more time not in school than you ever did in school. And once again, I'll use the wording. If you ossify in your knowledge by getting out of college, getting out of high school, if that's, if that's where you are, you will never grow. The world will leave you behind and you'll just be the grumpiest person on the porch saying get off my

lawn. What, what do these young'uns know? I know because you are comfortable in your ignorance and you don't even know your ignorance because you came to it from, from having learned but only up to a point. And without the curiosity, you don't keep learning. It's, it's all about the curiosity and the ambition you have attached to it. It's, don't tell me about nature, nurture. I'm not even, I'm not even thinking that way. Yeah, I think, well, I grew up in a place, you know, I grew up in a place in Louisiana. We had, you know, I've talked about this before like the primate testing facility where they created the polio vaccine was in our town. So Tulane University didn't know that. Interesting. Their primate testing facility in St. Tammany, Paris,

Louisiana. And I remember one time a bunch of the monkeys had gotten out, right? And they came and got us out of YMCA summer camp. The police did the tallest kids to help them. And so we're out there by like, the monkeys are on the trees and you got to reach for them or how do you going to get them? The monkeys are just out and they wanted like a chain of people, I guess. Oh, okay. And so, by the way, when the monkeys get out, there's no, that's, that's a scary fact, right? Oh, in hindsight, knowing now what I know about monkeys and chimpanzees, I think it was a bad idea. Okay. But at the time, we didn't know. So, you know, it was a smaller town then. And so we're out there just wrangling chimps out by this Kenny Rogers roasters. He used to have like a,

Kenny Rogers had a chicken establishment for a while and they had like kind of rotisserie chicken. It's pretty good. They had like this cornbread thing. It was pretty good. But, but anyway, and also in our area, they had a thing called LIGO, LIGO. It was the, it's still there. It's, you know what I'm talking about? Laser interferometer gravitational observatory. Yeah. There's only two of them in the, well, in the United States and Louisiana and I visited that Louisiana and up in Oregon or Washington, Washington. Yeah. So, that was another thing in our area. So, you know, there was, by the way, just to be clear, that is discovering colliding black holes in other galaxies across the universe. Damn. It's a new kind of telescope and you got

it there in your home state. I knew they were up to something. Yeah. And by the way, the monkeys are running. Escape monkeys achieved consciousness and intelligence. I wouldn't be shocked, bro. That's a supplanted of the ape shit going on. I would not be shocked. And I've seen some people there that work at some of the gas stations. They have a banana for lunch. I'll say that, dude. There's some interesting folks there. You know, chimpanzees peel the banana from the bottom. Do you know that? Yeah. Yeah. You know what my friend does? He breaks the banana in half. Like if it's, if it's unripe, yeah, that'll work. Yes. That's true. Otherwise you got some mashed banana right there. But we used to hear about, um, because they were over there hunting

grass. All we heard was that they had gravity hunters out there. That's a good way. That's a poetic way to put it. So that's what we heard. And so there would be people like, if you saw somebody that could dance real good, you'd say they were like one of those gravity babies or whatever. Or sometimes people would have parties and people would say, oh, you know, we're going to get so, and they would live near there by the, in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, where that LIGO center is. And they'd say, we're going to get so fucked up, we can't even feel the gravity. Yeah. Yeah. There it is. Yeah. Wow. Zoom in on that. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So what's going on there, if your listeners have access to this, the viewers,

so those are two long tubes and they send a beam of light from that central building simultaneously the full length of both tubes. And then there are mirrors at the end of those both tubes and it reflects back and they recombine the light. And if the light recombines perfectly, then nothing happened between those two reflections. But if a gravitational wave washes over earth and goes through this facility, one of those beams will be slightly delayed compared to the other. They're doing that out there? And they can measure it. I know people that can't read out there. They delay. And so they're looking for a variation in a fraction of the diameter of a proton. And that is a completely evacuated tube that goes up and

back. So tell me this. So say they find out, say there's some variation. What does that tell them that there's some pull on the earth? Of course, it tells you that the thing actually happened. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves. This discovered them 60, 70 years later. Wow. Okay. No, no, more than that. This was 2000. When was that? This century. Einstein made the prediction in 1916. So you're talking basically 100 years. A century, there's a prediction and then a discovery. And this is ground truth that our ideas actually match objective reality. Okay. And you want to say, well, how does that put food on your plate? It doesn't, but it advanced technology in a way that will surely have applications later on.

Einstein wrote down the first equation in a paper called On the Stimulated Emission of Radiation, Obscure Quantum Physics Paper in the 1920s. Okay. Late teens. And why are you doing that? You're a smart guy. Why don't you help put food on people's plates? Do you know what that's the foundation of? The laser, which would not be built until the 1950s. And lasers back then were like cost tens of thousands of dollars in their room size. Now they're impulse items at Walmart for laser pointers, right? But lasers are now barcode. Now photos can do it. But in their day, barcode reading, laser surgery, laser surgery for your eyes, laser cosmetics removal. So who oh lasers, you put a laser on anything. I do think Einstein is saying, yes, we're going to have

laser surgery with this equation that I wrote. No, you're not, nobody's thinking that. So the people say, why are we doing this with smart people when the smart people could be solving the homeless problem? We don't know what the future is. You don't know what the future is. Somebody might invent a laser that makes homeless people happy. Okay. So you don't know. What about this though? So say that thing picks up some sort of gravitational wave. What does it mean? It means that there's a black hole that's kind of sucking on earth a little? No, it meant two black holes collided and the collision is quite catastrophic. And it sends a ripple. It's like tossing a pebble in a pond. Okay. And you see the ripple go out in all directions. Because the pond surface is only

two, it's flat. In space, this is a ripple that goes through full three dimensions of space. And it's moving at the speed of light and it washes over earth at the speed of light. And by the way, remember I said, make sure you don't think something that's true that's not or that or isn't true that it. Okay. So suppose you're just a mischievous graduate student and you're in that facility. See, I'm going to tweak this. And all everyone else is going to think they actually discovered something. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Suppose you did. Suppose you're diabolical. You're just a prankster. Oh, I would do that easy. You're just a prankster. All right. All right. We have built-in protections against that. Oh, damn. We have another one.

But they got a rain camera or whatever. We have an entire other LIGO in Washington. Oh, making sure. Yes. Okay. So you would have to coordinate with another prankster. Yeah. To do it at the exact moment. Okay. Whatever. Now. Okay. They both made the measurement but separated by a fraction of a second. Just what you'd expect if the wave came from one direction, continues to wash over earth and goes across and comes out Seattle on the other side of the earth. Okay. That 1500 miles, whatever that distance is, takes like time to do that. They were able to measure that precisely. It was good. So tell me about this. So let's talk about outer space for a second. Yeah. So I'm your guy. I don't know who's been in

the seat, but there aren't that many astrophysicists out there. You know, we did have a guy who was a science man recently and he was in charge of the chronic freezing. You know, there's a chronic sensitive where they freeze people. On the possibility that they bring them back to life. On the possibility that one day they'll be able to bring them back to life. Do you think that that's possible or no? I'm not. So I think what'll happen is we'll figure out what ages us and we'll nip tuck, fix that. And then who cares about the frozen people at that point? We can all just keep living. Oh, I mean, I don't. Right. Right. Are we going to need them? As I'm saying, I don't know. You know, people that want to live forever in the life and death

chapter here, I comment on that. Do you really want to live forever? It's a whole thing. Because if you live forever, what motivation do you have to do anything today? Nothing. Nothing. But that's what I kind of like about reincarnation. It's like when people are doing reincarnation, they're like, I'll get to it. You know, when you believe in reincarnation. Yeah. But you, you don't know what you'll be reincarnated as. And so you could be reincarnated as a roach or ant or something. Yeah. You're hard to fix a shelf as an ant. So that's a risky, risky business there. But let me lay a little bit of mathematical thinking on you. Okay. For me, there's nothing more motivating than the knowledge I'm going to die. Think of the prisoner in the cell and they're

putting an X through everyone because every X is one day closer to getting out. Well, let's do that for your life. Every X, you spend doing nothing. That's a day you could have done something and you're going to die one day and it's there on the calendar. Okay. This would so motivate me as it does to be as productive as I can, as helpful as I can, try to make a better world for your privilege of having lived in it. So if knowing you're going to die brings meaning to your life, then living forever is a life of no meaning at all. Damn. That's how I think about it. So no, I don't want to live forever. Yeah, I think if I could live forever, I'd probably go swim more honestly or do something like, you know, that I don't really love doing, but I kind of wish

I did more. That's a weird wish. If I live forever, I would swim more even though I don't like it. Who's, what do you, I'll give you another chance to answer that again. If I could live forever. That was the lamest. If I could live forever, I would do stuff I didn't really feel like doing. Well, yeah. You know, so much time, you know, I don't know if I could live forever. I don't know what I would do. That's a great question. What would you do if you could live forever? No, I would say that is the sentence. You have to do it. I don't know. I don't know, because so much of how I organize my life is knowing I'm going to die. Right. And I'd have to think about it and get back to you on that. Okay, I'll get back to you on it too,

then. Fair. I hope it's not, I'll swim even though I don't like it. That's the lamest, no. Okay, I'll try and do better, but I just, that's what I think I would do. I know you are cleverer than that. You're going to give me an answer that's better than that. Something. Do we, what culture or ethnicity on earth, say they're, say aliens show up, right? Is there a society or culture or ethnicity that's best evolved, you think, to handle it? Scientists. Really? Scientists. If an alien came here, go ahead, Theo, if an alien landed right in front of us and said to you, Theo, take me to your leader. Are you going to take him to the White House? No. No, of course not. Are you going to take him to Congress? No. No.

That's a great question. That's my point. You would take him to, well, I'm not going to speak for you, but I happen to be a scientist, but if I were not a scientist, I would take him to a scientist. You would? Yes. A biologist or a physicist. Somebody who's, by the way. Say scientists closed that day. Come back out to lunch. Come back tomorrow. Open at nine in the morning. Even science has a sandwich, bro. Who, where would you take him? You speak of science like it's the one dude behind the counter. Where would you take him then? No, wait, let me, let me finish what happens if you're trying to talk to him. Okay. My point is mathematics. I'd give him a treat first. I think you'd have to treat. They're not a pet. They just flew here

in a ship way more advanced than anything we've ever conceived. You're going, here, here's a chew toy. You'll be the first human zapped by an alien laser. You hit him with that snicker. Then your friend forever. You could forever, bro. He'd be pulling on you. This is not E.T. Steven Spielberg where they're eating, what are they, the Reese's pieces? No. Oh yeah, dude, Reese's. Bro, he'd bring his friends next week. Now you give a Reese's to an alien? It's going to get diabetes. How do you know it can handle it? That's a good point, bro. Now he's stuck. What if he becomes all lazy and stuff when you start getting them acclimated? That's fat and lazy on earth. That has to be a movie,

right? What's a movie like that? I don't know. Okay, so he's here. What do you do? What I'm saying is that I have a periodic table of elements that are elements across the universe. I know mathematics and laws of physics that apply across the universe. They got here from across the universe. So those laws would be totally the same on their planet? Totally the same. So if you're going to start with a language, like, well, this is a cup and this is a fork and this is like, this is our elements and this is what we call this aluminum. We call this and they will know and they start to develop a common vocabulary so that you can communicate with them because they're not going to speak English nor French nor Mandarin, none of the above. That being said,

if they send radio signals here, the largest radio telescope is going to pick it up first. And you know where that is? Hold on. Let me think. Arizona. It was once in on American soil in Puerto Rico, the the Artis Cebo telescope. But that collapsed out of disuse and okay, the largest radio telescope in the world is in China. Wow. So the first humans that will hear hear the signal sent by aliens will be Chinese astrophysicists. But we're talking about if they visit. So if they visit, I'm saying bring them to a scientist. The scientists will know how to think about and pose questions to them for this, for this reason. And I got a little dust up when I saw the movie Arrival and aliens visit and they park these pods floating over there. And so the

government gets two people. They get a a a linguist and a physicist to decode their and I'm thinking, no, no, you get a cryptographer and an astrobiologist. That's what you want to do. I don't know if you saw the movie. The alien is like a septipod. It looks like an octopus, but it's only seven things. And it's squid inking messages on a on a glass. It's underwater or wherever it medium it's in. And so there it goes. Okay. Your boy brought it up on the on the on the screen. You got it right here. Okay. Arrival. Yeah. Yes. Arrival. Diplomacy scene. Yeah. So we're trying to find out what are they trying to say to us and why. And so I would have brought a cryptographer and an astrobiologist. But they brought a was it a linguist, a cultural linguist

and a not an English linguist. Could you look that up real quick? The the profession of the woman. Was she hot too? I don't remember. You got to bring a hottie out of an alien show. I think you got to show up with some real time. She was a what? Yeah, she was a linguist. Okay. So so they have a linguist and a physicist. Physicists are good, but not as good as a cryptographer who's trying to figure out what the hell they're saying. So I posted that and I shouldn't have. That should have been my forbidden Twitter file because no, because my people are in movies all the time. Right. We have astrophysicists all how often is a linguist in a movie? Yeah. All right. And I was there one chance and I felt bad. I burned them. I throwed some shade on

there on there. But now what about this? So tell me this. So the Chinese would be the first people to know that, right? No, no, to hear a signal. Okay. That's comes. Do you think that they would tell the rest of us or not? Probably not initially, but but eventually. No, no, the thing is, why should they? They built their own damn telescope. That telescope is a mile in circumference, by the way. I want to get a sense of how big it is. It's called the fast telescope. 500 meter aperture spherical telescope. That's an acronym fast. But if they know and they don't tell us, man, then they get to they can they can have a whole pack. They say we are the chosen ones and everyone else on earth isn't send your rate ray beams to, you know, I don't know what they're

going to do. But there it is. We have another image. We're looking at the image on the screen. I was that visited that we filmed there for cosmos. Oh, my gosh. Oh, you got to hold on to that foot. Oh, my gosh. We got to make this. Why are we? Why don't we have anything like that? Because we are not. We'd like to think of ourselves that we're Americans and we're over history. We've been reactive to challenges from other countries, not proactive. And what are we now as far as when it comes to challenges from outer space? We have we have nothing that rivals that. Wow. At all. So when it comes to space, we're not really the number one. No, no, no, no. In space, in access to space, plus you have the billionaires boys race that's up there, you know.

And by the way, there's a whole chapter in here called earth and moon, where I just talk about the relationship between earth and the moon and going to the moon, how we went to the moon to explore the moon. And we looked over our shoulder and we discovered earth for the first time. And it changed us between 1968 and 1972. Do you know what happened when we saw the picture of earth rise over the moon? And I claim that there was a firmware upgrade to our awareness in this universe. Because what happened immediately? By 1970, we founded the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that monitors climate and weather. We had the Comprehensive Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, we banned leaded gas,

we banned DDT. The first Earth Day was 1970. Earth Day was pretty chill. Okay, it's chill. But if you ask any of them, why you have Earth Day now? Well, because it's the right thing to do. This is the firmware upgrade. They're not thinking space. Right. They're just thinking, obviously we should. No, you know what else was going on in 1970? We were at war, hot war, cold war, campus unrest, civil rights movement. In 1968, two leaders were assassinated. 1971, was it? Was the shootings on Kent State campus? We had issues here on earth. Don't tell me, oh, it felt like the right time to protect earth. We had other issues. Something else was operating in your brainstem that you weren't even aware of. That's the firmware upgrade. Do you remember?

You would have seen videos of it. The crying Indian. Yeah. Okay. People throw trash out the window and he turns around and he tears and he's in headdress. Of course, that dude was Italian. He was an Italian actor. Yeah, he was Italian. Italian heritage. So back then, you could do that, right? Right. You could do that back then. But my point is, when did that public service announcement come? 1970. People would throw trash out the window for decades. So something at that point upgrade made us think we got to start looking at this place that we're on. You know what that's called? A cosmic perspective. Now, what about this? Do you think we are due for other firmware upgrades?

I would like to think so. A firmware upgrade where we stop killing each other. Yeah. You think, you know, there's no greater argument someone gives for killing someone else than what they believe in rather than what is actually true. It's almost like the less evidence you have for something, the more you're willing to give your own life or to take someone's else's life for it. And that's some weird stuff for a species, weird behavior pattern for... Now, the world is a much safer place than ever before. Here's a number to sleep on. You ready? Yeah. Probably. We live in a time where if a bus drives into a crowd of protesters, yeah, kills 10 people, that's world headlines for a day. It's national headlines for a week.

It's local headlines for a month. Okay. Kills 10 people. Between 1939 and 1945, 1000 humans were killed per hour of every hour between 1939 and 1945. That doesn't happen today. When, yes, we have war, we have conflict, people are dying. It's not like that. Not like that. He does not like that. And not long before that, there was another world war, plus a pandemic on top of it that ultimately killed more people than the world war did. So less people are dying. Yes. We have more people and fewer people are dying and fewer people are living in poverty than ever before. Okay. And so, yeah, so we have about 8 billion people in the world. We'll level off at 10 billion. There are very good reasons to think

that, that it won't go above 10 billion. It's not, it's not going to keep growing. Yeah, because people aren't having as many children. They're not having as many children. We're living longer. So that mitigates that, but then not having as many children and the developed worlds, developing worlds that used to have the most babies, the women are getting educated and educated women have fewer children. Shutting down that bag. Shutting down. Yeah. It's true, man. They were just running around. Is that how you say that? I didn't know that was a way to say that. That's a new way I never thought of saying it. Look, man, this black hole is closed. Shutting down the bag. No more kids. When the day you'd have many, you'd have many kids because

kids would, kids would die. Right. You didn't, you'd want to run the farm or whatever you're doing. Right. So now they don't die. We keep them alive. And so you, so the birth rates are dropping, even in the developing comes, and in some countries, the birth rate is below replacement level. So this all averages out and you will, we'll settle out at about 10 billion. But what, my point is we live in sort of safer times than ever before, even if it doesn't feel that way. Interesting. You were talking about feeling before. Was it Gallup or, or, or one of the polling agencies for the last 30 years, they asked people, is your community and your, is it, are you safer this year than you were last year? No, it's more dangerous. It's fear.

For 27 out of 30 years, people have said it's more dangerous than the previous year. And in, in those years, the crime rate has dropped precipitously the entire time. So they're slaying in fear. That's what sells evening news. Really does. Evening news. And I have an example on this. When I grew up, every night, I grew up in New York city, every night, the evening news would lead off with a fire in some home. Usually it's a space heater. There's little space heater. No, back then people smoked in bed. Oh, damn boy. And it was before. That's crazy. And it was before. It's fun to do, but it's. Smoke alarms. Yeah.

Okay. And by the way, I got something funny for you. I'll just take, just in a quick minute. But the point is, I was certain I would die in a fire. I would never live to adulthood because I saw that every single day. And so now there are fewer fires because we have some. Yeah, there's a few and they make big news, but the rate compared back then, then New York has fewer firehouses. We've been closed in firehouses. More boring. You just don't need them. But it's more boring though. And by the way, what really saved things are smoke detectors because I'm old enough to remember, you might be a little too young for

this, where before smoke detectors, you had to buy flame retardant things in your home. Your curtains were flame retardant. Your kid, your child had flame retardant onesies. Yeah, really? Okay. And, but if you think that through, if they're in the crib and the flame is strong enough. It's not going to help. To burn their onesies. You don't want the onesies to ignite. Your kid is dead. Oh yeah. Long dead. It's almost like when you get the hash round, but it's in that little thing, you know? I don't know if it's exactly like that, but I know exactly what you're talking about. You're like, do I need this? Oh, where's the potato? If the whole thing is brown, is hash brown, okay?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I need this little holster for like, I just, you know. Okay. So, my point is this flame, and we later learned some of them caused cancer, that's not what kept people alive. Ultimately, it's the smoke detector. Wow. But where was I going with that? I had some bigger point I was making. Well, I think things like that take the fun out of everything. You know, they used to have these. Oh, we were talking about crime rates. So, everyone thought the crime rate was going up and it's been going down the whole time. Your perception is not reality. Oh yeah. And that's a lot of what this book is about.

The whole book is that. Oh, I remember we had these underwears that had a buzzer in them, right? Because I went to bed, right? So, it was probably late 20s. And we had these underwear when I was a child that had got a buzzer right in the... Didn't know that. So, the pee would... Any liquid hit it, they'd go off. And you'd wake up and you'd go to the bathroom. Yeah. Didn't know they had that. It was... Interesting. It helped. I mean, it was embarrassing because you had to lie to people what the buzzer was. Like, are the cops coming? And then you'd have to run off and pee. But like... Did it work?

It's something in the oven. It'd be like 4 a.m. You tell your friends, like, I think something's in the oven. Yeah, sleepovers are awkward. Right. So, does it... Did it work for you? It worked pretty good, I think. And then a pill came out and that really... Yeah, I think the pill was it. Yeah. I mean... That shut me off. Better living through chemistry. We are sacks of chemicals. Yeah. And the evidence of that is you ever seen the book of medicines to treat your ailments. It's all chemicals. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm just saying, we're sacks of chemicals. Yeah, that's what helped.

Wait, so you went to bed until you were 20s? Oh, yeah, man. That's late, dude. Oh, I was late. I'm late. You gotta set up a hose or something. Oh, dude. My whole life, I've been a late bloomer. Wait, so in your... Not to get all TMI here, but when you were peeing in the bed, were you dreaming that you were peeing in a bathroom? Sometimes I would be dreaming that I was peeing. Sometimes I would even be dreaming that I was peeing in a bed. You know, it was like my brain couldn't give me...

Well, that's an authentic reality. My brain couldn't give me any more clues. Okay. But sometimes, yeah, I would just be just deep asleep. I don't know. But yeah, I just wet the bed, man. I wet it as a child and I wet it as an adult. You turned out okay, though. Yeah, I think I'm just a late bloomer, man. Everything has been about 10 years. Okay, you're all first one. We're okay with that.

Why does it feel... Sometimes when I look at space, right? I'm standing there. I'm looking out at space. Oh, by the way, if you're in space and your jet pack stopped working, if you pee forward, you'll move backwards. That much propulsion will help? Well, in space, any propulsion works, because there's no friction anywhere. So if you send any liquid out for it, you could fart the other direction and you'll propel backwards. So don't pee and fart at the same time. That's like a gang bang.

No, you lose your net momentum. You just stay there. So choose. Are you going to fart or are you going to pee and we're good. You're like, damn, I wasted all my fuel sitting there. What if... No, that's advice. I'm pretty sure you didn't think you'd be getting today. I didn't at all. But I'm glad to know that, dude. Take a can of beans if you're headed out on a beach. By the way, you know the Swamis that they always show pictures of who are levitated with their cross legs? So you can't do that unless he is actively

expelling gas out of his butthole. So you'd have to like eat a lot of beans and sew up the butthole to get very high pressure and then pop it open and then he can levitate. Wow. So yeah, so that's definitely advertising then. They're using that. They're obviously... Well, I'll say they are completely defying known laws of physics. So nobody can really levitate like that. No one has ever done that in a controlled laboratory. So if they can do it, there's some magic that they do

and okay, it's just not useful if I can't reproduce it in the lab under control conditions with cameras and everything. It's just not useful. Yeah. So magic isn't real? No. Well, you know, the Arthur C. Clark edict, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. That's a good one. Okay. So if an alien comes up and waves their hand and something happens, you'll say it's magic, but to them it's science. It's just super science.

Correct. In fact, I tell you, I don't mean to brag or anything. You do magic? No, I did when I was a kid actually. I can see that. I did physics magic. I'd pull the tablecloth out from under. Oh yeah, I still do that in time. Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, and I did some hard tricks. Yeah, I have large hands so I can palm a card pretty easily.

Oh, dang it. So I did that as a kid. I made money at kids' birthday parties. I think I was 12 or something doing it for six year olds. What was your first job? Oh, I was a camp counselor and I worked whole summer and I made $150. For YMCA? It was a version of that. Yes. It was some other thing, but it was through a church thing.

Yeah. Yeah, I went to YMCA camp. It was fun. Yeah, yeah. And then I went to, well, before then I went to camp. I was in a YMCA camp several years in a row. Camp was fun, huh? No, it's good. It was good. It was good. But let me tell you, the job I hated the most, just the whole optics of it. I got to college and I'm on a work study program, but the work part was like whatever

job you can get and that was contributed to your tuition. Yeah, same. I had to be in the bookstore. Well, no, fine if it was a bookstore, but not the job I got. Okay. I cleaned the bathrooms in the dorms of other students. Probably just all semen in there. I mean, not, you know. So I'm just saying, just the, out of my cleaning bathrooms, you know, but I'm doing it for fellow students who I'm going to see in my physics class

or in my art class, right? And it was, it was just, I did it, but I just thought they'd need a different way to work this out. Yeah. Okay. And so, yeah, but it puts you through college and you can get through college. And that was that. You earned your stripes, man. I'll say you went through, I mean, you, but, but, but you know what I regret? I've never had a job

where I had to tolerate the behavior of someone else, like a checkout counter or a server at a restaurant or a flight attendant. I've never had to tolerate someone being a complete asshole and smile while you're doing it because corporate policy says the customer is always right. I've never had to do that. Oh, that's everybody at a CVS now, I feel like they have to put up with everything now. Yeah. So I, so I try to be empathetic, even though I've never seen that. You recognize that. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

That's, it usually is kind of an important job to have. Yeah. Um, is outer space like, is outer space gay or straight? So there's an entire chapter here called gender and identity. Okay. I'm just putting it out there. Okay. Gender. It's an entire chapter. What that looks like through a scientific lens. And what I will tell you is, Oh yeah. I remember you talking about the facial structure. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of things. Okay. So I'm going to give you an answer.

Are you ready? Yeah. Is outer space gay or straight? Practically everything we see and measure in space, not only objects, but temperature, size, density is on a spectrum. So for you to say, is the universe gay or straight? I'm going to tell you whatever the universe is, it's on a spectrum. Okay.

In fact, the very word spectrum comes from what happens when you take light and break it up into its colors. We just happened to assign names to the seven colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, but it's a, it's a continuum. We're just being lazy by assigning seven colors. Our brain doesn't want to see nuance because it's easier for us to think in binary. So it's, are you with me or are you against me? Well, maybe you're somewhere in between. Are you a boy? Are you a girl? Maybe they're expressing themselves somewhere in between.

And your brain has a difficult time recognizing a spectrum. And so you're requiring it be into a bin. So there you are, forcing other people to match how you see the world. And that's wrong. That's not, let me not say it's wrong. I'm going to say, the world is not going to change to fit your inability to recognize how it's actually manifesting. It's not going to do that. So, so it's bi. No, it's on a continuum. So whatever it is, you can say is, is, is the universe sweet or salty? Is the universe,

whatever it is, you're asking me, is it this or is it that? That's the binary brain trying to force a continuum into two categories. So it's like checks mix. Except with more objects, more kinds of objects than what you find in check. Check mix has like five things in it. Yeah, that's true. Okay. Imagine if checks mix had everything in a continuum. That it kept changing. Now, look at how our brain works. We have hurricane strengths, right?

Oh, yeah. They measure the wind speed. Do you realize it's a continuum, but we, we divided it into five categories, right? But it's a continuum. Do you realize you can go from low category three to high category three? And it's, and the, the, the, they'll just talk about, uh, or her kidney, Irma is still a category three one mile an hour faster. And it's category four. It's breaking news. Oh, yeah.

Hurricane Irma is now category four. Excuse me. It's one mile an hour faster than it was yesterday. Yeah. People lie to say the winds broke in. Okay. So I'm just, I saw the winds making a bowl of cereal some guys said. Like what? That's funny. That's funny. So my point is even with hurricane speed strengths,

we force them into categories when it's actually a continuum. I see. So it's a continuum out there. So, so, because it looks kind of gay, I feel like, but then sometimes it does things that seem really straight, but those are also my definitions of those. Correct. You're forcing the universe into your two categories. Right. I think what's tough, I think for people just in layman's terms is when you have a template of society over time and the,

and things start to come in and make it evolve or adjust. It's hard sometimes to get those things all the way to the grassroots level. I would claim that the template was always people forcing a natural variation into categories. Ah. Do you know Joan of Arc? You remember she was, remember, you read, she was burned at the stake. Yeah, yeah. 1400. Was she doing witchery?

Okay. Well, okay. That would be one way you would burn people at the stake, but they couldn't burn her at the stake for not being religious. She was very religious. She was trying to kick the British out of France, her mother country. She led soldiers into battle. Wow.

Do you know half, I don't know if it was half precisely, but a big reason why they indicted her and burned her at the stake was for cross-dressing. Damn. And I have to look at you. There's a passage in the Bible in Deuteronomy. You ready? It's, if a woman dons the clothes, this is very close to precise.

If the woman dons the clothes of a man, she is an abomination unto the Lord thy God. Oh man. And so they said, we can get her on that. They're like looking, trying to throw the book at her, right? We got her on this because you can't lead soldiers into battle with a skirt riding side saddle. Yeah.

That does not work. No, you got to put on at least a strong hat at the earth. So is she an early person who's just a tomboy, who's expressing herself in male, though she's biologically female. Oh, she'd have been in a league of their own, probably. Okay. So we know, we've grown up in classes where there was the tomboy girl and the slightly effeminate boy.

We, if not ourselves, this has been with us forever. Yeah. It's in literature and it's in the thing. And the difference between then and now is we have a raised social consciousness so that those folks on the continuum are less so the object of mockery in storytelling. They're just other characters now. Hmm. And there's still more room to improve that.

But I'm saying that people who are trans, people who are full up trans are just simply wearing clothes that are not what you want them to wear based on what you think they should be. Yeah. Is that a free country? This is what concerns me a bit. A lot of the resistance to this comes from the conservative side of the voting public. And they're trying to control the freedoms of peoples expressing themselves. It's somewhere I read that the pursuit of happiness, did we read this somewhere in the founding documents?

Yeah. And if my pursuit of happiness is wearing a skirt and putting on makeup and lipstick, no matter whether or not I have a penis, you want to take that away from me. Why? In a way, that's a violation of what it means to live in a free country. Yeah. I think people just accuse you of gay or whatever. They accuse you of like queering around.

The fact that it would be an accusation at all rather than a recognition that there are people different from you who live in this free country. Well, look, I'll tell you this. A lot of times I've been around a lot of, like sometimes there's a lot of drunk men, you know, and I don't drink. But I'll get around them sometimes and you could see they start wanting to, you know, they start, you know, their lips get a little wet and you see them wanting to be. You know, you see their guards are melting down. You see the guards on lunch break. And some of the guy's wife would be like, what the fuck? What is even going on?

But you see him with the eyeballs starting to get a little wandering. So I think, you know, if we were honest with ourselves, it wouldn't even be a problem. If we were honest with it centuries ago. Yeah, there's probably just old and also some of it is template, some of it is tradition and people want to like people worry. I think it's too much. If you lose, like, and I'm not saying they're correct traditions, but I think a lot of people worry if you lose tradition, then what does that mean? I think, you know, I think we're still evolving in a way that we want to look at at at existence in a larger scale and not just in the scope of our own lives. I'm a big fan of traditions and let's call them rituals for the moment.

Okay. A Thanksgiving dinner is a ritual. The traditions and rituals in and of themselves, I greatly value them. They become, they're some of the greatest binding forces in a culture are traditions. Yeah. Okay. In Passover, the observant Jews of the world are all doing the same thing basically at the same time relative to the sunset. Okay.

And so that's a binding force. But if your tradition is not the celebration, but what you look like, what you sound like, what you say, how would you think, then that's that those are traditions trying to remove freedoms that your country might otherwise be giving you. Yeah. And so come from traditions. Yeah. They kept tribes together. Oh, my gosh. Where does the other stuff to come from like you're the jet like where does it, but I think it maybe it feels like I'm trying to decide what that feels like to people.

That makes them so commonly that those are things that are hung on to, you know. Well, if they, it's one thing because you have your own ritual. Okay. I used to always have candles for dinner. Okay. I blow through yards of candles. Oh, I bet you did. It's a romantic and I'd like a bottle of wine and my wife.

Yeah, boy. No, no. And so, but so for me, that was a little bit ritual. My mother burned candles and she was Catholic and candles are a thing and a Catholic church. Oh, yeah. And a candle up in there. Yeah. So I, and the candles are burning during the mass.

So I, a little bit of candle worked into me, but I'm not. That's nice. I'm not forcing someone to do something with the candle. Right. Okay. I'm not forcing someone else to pray to the candle. I'm not trying to change the behavior of someone else. It's just something I do and I do it.

All right. It's when you cross over and require other people recognize this. Yeah. Or you require other people abandon it. Just because you don't want it. That's not a free country. That's all I'm saying. You can imagine a country where everyone is homogenized in whatever way you want.

Those countries exist. I didn't think that was America. Yeah. I didn't say that right. I didn't think it was America. I think it was America. Yeah. Well, it's just, it's really attention.

Dude, I spent six years in Texas. I don't know how to pronounce America. Did you? Damn. I met my wife in Texas. Oh, okay. Austin, Texas. Oh, are you Austin?

Austin. Are you a Texas fan? So the funny thing is, I don't know if I've ever told anybody this. So I'm a New Yorker in Texas, which was a little bit mind blowing. You know, just the Confederate flag is everywhere and the gun, the gun rack on the back of the pickup. Yeah. And it's just a really, I was almost anthropological for me to observe the Texas tribe.

That's what I was thinking. What does anthropological mean? It means I'm, I don't know that I'll ever assimilate, but this is something interesting to observe and take notes on. Okay, got it. Okay. I'd be an anthropologist. Okay, got it.

Okay. Studying the culture. Okay, got it. So I did that. And are you really wearing that hat? Really? And those boots? Like, really?

Yeah. And this is a woman you're talking about. And your belt buckle is that big? Really? And so it's all weird, but again, I'm recognizing it's another place. Right. I don't want to homogenize him to be New Yorkers. This is Texas.

A good point. It's got its own history. Six flags over Texas. Yeah. Texas was six different countries. All right. I don't know anybody else that can say that. You know the six countries, right?

Mexico, Spain, I think France, the Confederacy, the United States itself, and the Republic of Texas. Oh, damn. Did I leave one out? That's six. But that's where you get six flags. The amusement park. You didn't know this dude.

You didn't know this. Finally, some stats I can use. Oh my gosh. Finally, some information I can use. That's how you get six flags. Dang, bro. That didn't come out of nowhere? Yeah, I didn't know.

I never thought about it. You go into the state capitol and you see the flags. Yeah, I've actually been to the state capitol. I didn't know that at all. They're awesome. Yeah. So I'm there. So here's what happened.

When I left Texas, it was six years later, I get back to New York and say, you know, I want to wear some of those boots. So the next time I visited, I picked up some boots. Yeah. And then I kind of liked that hat. Not the full up, you know, seven inch brim, but the smaller brim. Yeah, yeah. So I own six cowboy hats, five pairs of boots, and one of them is like ostrich.

I got some stretch. Digging out. Digging out the animal. I don't have the lizard or whatever that one is. No, the alligator. I don't have the alligator. But so. I got some stretch at the house, dude.

And I'll wear that on Fifth Avenue in New York. I'll do that. Yeah. So people, it turns heads, but I'm comfortable in that because I felt it. It took, it was a time delay. Yeah. All right. It was, I feel it now.

And now I can appreciate a Texas movie or a Texas culture, Texas music, which is not, it's not country Western really. It's not, it's not national, I should say. No, it's not. It's a lot more. It's a lot more like red clay kind of country. Yeah. Yeah.

And I didn't know a sad song till I heard a sad Texas song. Yeah. I'm a big fan of the blues, you know, blues all up the coast, you know, Mississippi, on up to Chicago blues, but up the river, I guess I should say, but Texas, you know, some singing in the, you know, in my dog. Oh, this is sadness over there. Sadness. Okay.

Parker McCollum, you got to listen to him. He's kind of a sad young fella. I'll pick some up. I'm a blues guy. I'll do it. Yeah. You know what? Here's a little bit of blues in a way.

So, you know, I often theorize, we talk about a lot of this show like beige. The future is going to be beige. Like eventually everything's kind of merging. We mean skin color? Yeah. That eventually everything is just kind of merging. And I wonder if it'll be like that with sexuality as well, that everything will just, will everyone be like kind of this beige trans kind of like, you know, gang bang, you know, or like everybody

just like, you know, will everybody just be like a beige trans graffiti artist? That's what I feel like. I feel like we're all just kind of. I think there are enough people in the world that value individuality that we will never be so homogenized. Really? Yeah. That's what I think.

So let's take this to a scientific limit. Okay. We can now control the genome. What is it? You know, so I got your genes and I can see you in the uterus. And I can nip and tuck and snip and think and you'll come out six feet tall with this color skin, this gender with this thing and this that and I can make you. And that's not outlawed?

We don't the the ethics of this. We don't know how to do that yet, but I don't see why we'll net that wouldn't one day happen. Our ethics are not really quite keeping up with it, not from what I've read yet. But there are people thinking about it. Okay. The first thing we're going to do is cure diseases for sure. All right. You'll go in and stop people from having different kind of down syndrome.

Exactly. Exactly. So obvious ones. And we all have to agree which what to cure because even that has ethical issues. That's true. For example, it was not until 1987. I report on that here in the gender and gender and identity chapter. It was not until 1987 with the American Psychological Psychiatric Association, whatever their acronym

is, the American Association of Psychiatrists. It wasn't until 1987 where they removed homosexuality from the encyclopedia of mental disorders. Oh, it used to be in there? Yes. So you asked the question, it was before 1987 or even earlier, and you had the medical capacity to quote, fix someone whose genetic profile, if that's where it's found, it makes them gay. Would you do that?

Back then they probably would because that's a disorder. They thought it was a mental disorder. They found out that at least 15% of the one out of six is this. At what point is it a disorder and what point is it just the natural variation of who we are as a species? Damn, that's crazy. So the guy who's writing the disorders obviously was a straight guy. Perceptive right on.

And there was the guy, what's his neuroscientist? I always forget his name. But I guess if you're super straight, say you're super straight. You wander out of a cave or whatever, right? You're a straight guy. You see enough. I know that I'm straight. Can I tell you how I know I'm straight?

How? I know I'm straight because I wrestled for eight years the muscled, sinewy, sweaty bodies of other men. And at no time did I even have a tingle in my body. It's like I'm going to pin your ass to the mat and get up and walk away. That's what I'm good at. I was captain of my high school wrestling team. I'm just thinking my hands are all over men's bodies.

If I had any erds, I would have felt it then. If they do one, two, three, four, and you still... Oh, the tapping out. The longer you stay there. Oh, was it counting the thing? But I think you have to stay there and don't tap because it feels good. I think that's crazy, baby. Yeah, so I'm cisgender heterosexual.

Do you ever wonder if you could ever... Because some people think you could evolve into it. I would wonder if one day I could be when I'm 70 years old, be a homosexual. I don't know all the drivers and causes and what's genetic and what's cultural. I don't know. I don't even care. It's just whatever people want to be in a free country, let them be that. Yeah.

Right? So to even argue it, it's like arguing should someone wear their hair one way or the other wear the part. It's how you express yourself. But I wouldn't say I'm a straight guy. You got your mullet and you rocking that. You've been rocking the mullet from day one. That's your thing.

If you came out with an afro, you're somebody else at that point. Yeah. But this country allows that. I don't know if your fans would allow it, but the country would allow it. They would. They'd be impressed. What about this? So I think, yeah, I could see if you're a straight guy.

You're writing the book right on what the rules are. Yeah. You're a straight psychiatrist. Right. Writing the book. You see a guy, you know, you're hanging out with your buddies. One of them reaches for another guy's wiener or whatever. I could see you being like, oh, this is a...

This is... But do you think he thought it was wrong or he just thought... Oh, just as simply, I don't know that they value judge. They're just saying it's a disorder. Right. In need of repair. So, but it was a disorder based on that things are just supposed to be this way. Because they had whatever bias is.

They had whatever inability to embrace the spectrum of humanity presented to him. Right. Does nature is nature just or does nature gay also? Oh, okay. There are books on this. Rainbows. Can we look this up real quick? Rainbows.

Just look at rainbow and sex and there's a book that will come up. Just real quick. Evolution's Rainbow. Okay. So, there's a book called Evolution's Rainbow. Okay. Which explores what species out there actually have full spectrum sex. Okay.

Gay sex, bank sex. There's some, there's rape in some. There's dolphins. There's some, there's no other way to understand it. Okay. So, there's a full range of what's out there. And I don't care if those are line caught or... So, here's my point.

That I don't know that we should care what the rest of the animal kingdom is doing. Do you know there's a mole rat? There's called, there's something called a mole rat where one variant on it, they made for life and the other one there is promiscuous as go all get out. Damn. And they're both mole rats. I got both variants. So, they're both, they're both mole rats.

So, and then people say, oh, eagles mate forever and they want that to be, we want to emulate that. And then you find out that Bonobo chimps, they're fucking all the time. Oh. To resolve differences, to fight each other. They just look at this video. Yeah. It's behind the wall.

You gotta go behind the wall on the video. And so, and Bonobos are very close to us genetically. My point is we're human. I don't care what the animal is doing. You can find an animal that'll support or deny whatever claim you're trying to make about us. So, forget them. We're our own species.

Yeah. And we have the capacity to grant freedoms in some governments to your, to support your happiness. We value that. Yeah. That's cool. It's crazy to think that some countries don't, right? That's why I'm glad I'm an American.

Yeah. Am I good at that, right? I get like a B plus. So, what about this? So, do you think we'll ever really be able to travel like into another galaxy like interstellarly? Do you think? You need a wormhole. We're not doing that without wormholes.

We don't have like diesel or whatever. We don't have anything that'll push us. There is no rocket. No, there's a rocket that will get there eventually, like in a few million years, but you don't live that long. Yeah. We, we have rockets powerful enough to get you around the solar system in your lifetime, but to the nearest stars, at those speeds, it would take 50,000 years.

That's why they're talking about generational ships where you go and you have babies. They grow up and they have babies. So people, we might do that. It's called a generational ship. Wow. It's a little weird because you're, it's a little weird because you're, we're, we're obligating the unborn to continue a mission that you're starting, that they didn't have freedom to reject.

That's an ethical thing right there. Damn. I don't know. Are you for it? I'll just wait around for the wormhole. Just say, yeah, dude, stop cutting corners. Let's send a boat. Okay.

Come on. Um, so, so yeah, so then we don't have anything right now that'll ever get us there. So we're almost kind of stranded here. Stranded in the solar system. It's not so bad. A lot of good stuff going on here. No, it's cool. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, when I look up at the, like the sky, by the way, just to be clear, we got to the moon, hung out on the moon and came back in less time than it took Columbus to cross the Atlantic. Wow. So we're, we're doing, I mean, I'm okay, I'm okay. We get to Mars and send people, but we can send hardware to Mars in nine months, a little less.

That's good. The wormhole, what would it look, how big would it be? Would you have to, would you be able to walk into it or do you have to kind of step into it? Okay. No, it's like, let me step across it like it's a threshold. Yeah. You've seen Marvel and, and Doctor Strange or Rick and Morty, these are, these are literal,

they call them portals to other dimensions, whatever, but a wormhole would just be that. You would just go through on one side, come out the other, and you would not see the fabric of the wormhole, it would just be a hole in space. And it's a hole every direction you look at. When we think of a hole in a floor, you fall through, this is a hole in full three-dimensional space. So in which direction you go in, you're entering the hole and you'll come out in another place. And in some places, if you take space-time and curve it, in one of the illustrations

we have up on the wall now, it's curved. So if you were to travel that whole distance around the curve, that could take you a long time. You bend this, imagine it's a piece of paper, you bend it, cut a hole through the two edges. You didn't have to take that long route and you bypass it and you get to the other side of the galaxy before the end of the TV commercial. And that's how the warp drive people do it. Is that mathematically possible?

Yes. Really? You promise? Oh, yes. On paper, we can do that. But you need some matter that's the opposite of gravity. So it's negative energy stuff. Are we building that?

That can pry open. I'm not authorized to say if we're building it. Are you really not? I'm just kidding. Because that's what I would say if I wasn't authorized. I'm just kidding. That's exactly what I would say. That's like asking someone if they're a spy.

No, I'm not a spy. That's what a spy would say. There's no way out of that one. Dang, man. No, no. So could you take stuff with you or would you have to not have any carry-ons or whatever? How would you? Do you remember Terminator?

When he came through time, he had to come through naked. Because clothing couldn't go through the portal. Any living tissue could go through the portal. But here's a problem that I think they forgot. Hair is not alive. So he went through bald. He should have gone through complete bald ass, bare-ass bald. Plus, he has living tissue, but it's on top of his metallic skeleton.

So the skeleton shouldn't have made it through. He would have just been a pile of flesh, slithering on the glass. Or along the ground. They weren't entirely consistent with their own rules. Would you be brave enough to go if they offered it to go? No, I'd send a gerbil first. Through first. I'm not going through first.

Damn, bro. People ask me, do you want to ride on Elon's rocket? They say only after he sends his mother brings her back safely, then I'll go. Until then, I'm sitting right here. Wow. Yeah. You wouldn't go, huh? Until I know it's safe.

All right, two gerbils go. Then they come back and they're not weird or anything. One of them's doing the hamster wheel backwards. Doing the hamster dance, right? The smooth criminal. On the wheel? Yeah. Yeah.

So, did he do that in smooth criminal? Maybe he might have. I think it was. Yeah. But he did a lean on it. Yeah. What was the first concert you ever went to? Thanks for asking.

I don't go to many concerts for not noble reasons. One of them is I prefer the quality of a studio album to people screaming in the background. Oh, yeah. The occasional song is good, like Free Bird Live. That's the only way I'm consuming that song, because it's longer than the album, it's like three minutes longer or something, and Leonard Skinner, it's jammin', and every of the instruments. So, occasionally, you get the extra stuff going on in the live, but mostly I like the

acoustic quality of studio albums. So therefore, I'm not going to see you in concert, I'm going to buy your album and just listen to you at home. Yeah. Okay. That's one. Two, concerts are expensive, dude. I didn't have that money growing up.

It's expensive. So, I just didn't go. And plus, I didn't have a car because I grew up in the city. So, concerts were not just, when you're in the city, it's less of a thing. Most of the people went to concerts in Madison Square Garden, we're out of town or it's coming in, from Jersey and Long Island and things, so, but I think my very first concert was Earthwind and Fire. I saw them in Austin, Texas, and then I saw the Commodores.

Oh, yeah. Then my sister worked for PepsiCo, which had retained Michael Jackson for things, and I saw Michael Jackson. It made pretty good seats, too, in Madison Square Garden. No way. So, these are some good stuff. I'm not, yeah, that's good. How was that?

That was good. He did stuff all the way back from ABC. It was a full retrospective. Shake it, shake it, baby. Wow. Yeah, it was a full retrospective, and so, I saw him. I saw Simon and Garfunkel, but my favorite, they're my people. Let us be loved.

Is that them? No, that's the Beatles, huh? Wait, so we're saying that again? I've got some real estate here in my pack. Oh, yeah, that's him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's him. That's one of the songs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And so, just a balladier, is that a word? A balladier of the era. Yeah. And Paul Simon and Garfunkel. And a couple of other concerts, oh, oh, this one was good. I saw the 15th anniversary concert of the Who, oh my gosh, and then, you know who opened for him?

Joan Jett, oh, oh, this was good, oh man, and I recorded, I was allowed to do this, but I recorded Roger Daltry singing the line, because he's 70 now, singing the line, I hope I die before I'm old, that was his lyric, right, his dude's lyric. That's research. Yeah, that was totally, I was totally, I went to dinner the other night, I went to dinner the other night with David Spade, actually, we were both doing shows somewhere in San Diego. Oh, cool, cool.

And I'm name dropping there, but he's my friend, and we had, and anyway, Roger Daltry came and he sat at the table next to us, and he and David knew each other, so I just got to watch them talk to each other for a second. Very cool. So that to me was pretty cool. Cool, yeah. You know, I do cities too, do you know that? You go perform.

Yeah. Oh, and speak. Yeah. And to answer questions. And they're in theaters, dude. Yeah, I believe that. Right, right, and the numbers that they get for stand-up comedians, they, because we're not Broadway, right, we're not, you know, you're one person show on the stage.

Right. With very little overhead to produce your show, right? And so that's the same with me, but there's a screen and I show the universe, but I always interesting to see what comedians came before me or after me, because I'm a big fan of your trade. So. Thanks, yeah. I think a lot of guys, obviously, well, it's interesting thing about Joe Rogan is he introduces

people to a lot of other people that they may not have been introduced. From his audience, yeah. Yeah. Audience base, yeah. It's pretty fascinating. Yeah, yeah. And he's done it all. He's the stand-up and TV host and everything, you know?

Yeah. I think this is so, he is one of the most curious people I've ever met in my life. Yeah. He's a consummate researcher. That's an example of it. And the difference is he's curious in the moment and he's got an expert and he fills it up and then the expert goes away and then he fills in the blanks with his own thoughts. Yeah.

So, so if you want to do that right, you have the curiosity, your guests stimulate that curiosity and then you go take out books and finish the gaps. Yeah. And, you know, look at the documentaries and then your curiosity isn't just satisfied in the moment. It's something that goes beyond the moment so that you get the broader, deeper understanding of what's going on. That would have helped him when he got that dust up with the vaccines.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. They got onto him, huh? Yeah, yeah. Totally got on him. And people pulling out of Stitcher and things, you know, was it Stitcher or Soundhound? I forget. Whatever is his...

Spotify. Spotify. Spotify. Yeah, and people were pulling out of Spotify, you know, out of solidarity. So it's... So he got in his dust up. It's because he's curious in the moment, but in an ADD sort of way, right? Because the next shiny object, he wants to know about that, right?

And then he knows just enough about that and you get into that zone where, you know, just enough to think you're right, but not enough to know you're wrong. That's a zone that many people get into. Yeah, I think a lot... From what I remember, and I don't know all of it, I think a lot of his stuff was that the bio companies were really pushing the vaccines on people a ton, you know? You'll be, yeah, but is that a reason to not protect yourself against COVID? What you have to do is, yeah, some of that can happen, all right?

I don't know how much it happened during COVID, but we're honest with ourselves about profit motives, right? Yeah. So now you watch. Now you look at who's dying in the hospitals, okay? It's people who are unvaccinated with comorbidities primarily, and then other people who are sort of unvaccinated and older, who are just sort of at risk, but being old is not itself of more comorbidity, like being obese.

Right, but it's... These are factors, and they're people who were not getting vaccinated. And so do you want to stay out of the hospital and do you want to not die? And you look at the death toll, the excess death because of COVID, you can see the bump in the mortality statistics over those two years. There's whatever it is that's level, because the same amount of approximately, same amount of people, number of people die every year in the United States. And then in 2020, it went up, and then when the vaccine came in, you saw it coming down

a little, and then the people were... So yes, it's a free country, but you can catch it and spread it to somebody else who needs the protection or can't get vaccinated because they have an immune problem. So at that level, you're being selfish, that's all. Do you think in hindsight that I always felt like herd immunity would have been the best thing for that? I'm not a scientist. That's sure, but herd immunity, it depends on the lethality of the drug and how quickly

it spreads. That'll determine the exact herd immunity, but you got to typically be up around 90% vaccination, so that 10% would not have to be vaccinated and they won't catch it. But the herd immunity in a rational society that cares about its citizens, the 9%, 10%, they don't get immunized, it's because they can't be immunized. You want the herd immunity to protect the weak, the people who are immune compromised, the people who have some genetic disorder where they rely on you to be vaccinated so I don't catch...

So they don't catch the disease. That's how we should be using herd immunity, not because you're... By the way, the liberals in conservative has met each other on the other side of the fence for this. I know. I've never seen that in this book. The OG anti-vaxxers were liberals who don't trust the farmer and don't trust the big business and all the rest of this.

And then the freedom angle came in from the right. You can't... You can't... I don't wanna... Yeah. Don't put this in my body. Right, right. It's dangerous that vaccines cause...

Yeah, so they cherry-picked things and they go to websites and they spend an hour or more but researching it and then they will claim to know more than the medical professionals. So sure, if you don't wanna get vaccinated, go live alone until the virus goes away. But stay out of the zones of people who could catch it from you if you caught it. Do you feel like if we would have not done a vaccine and just let the virus go through us, it would have just went through us? It would have killed five times as many people. Really?

Oh, easily. Easily. Wow. You don't remember. Hospitals were overrun. People were in the corridors. They had mass burials. Oh my gosh.

How quickly people forget? Well, I remember they put people on ventilators but then they realized that they shouldn't have put people on ventilators. Well, yeah. So on the moving frontier of a new thing, yeah, it's easy to say how you shouldn't have done that. Right, right. No, at the time, it's like you're having trouble breathing, there's a ventilator.

And then people do experiments, this is the value of experiments, say, well, if you tip this way or you breathe through a hole in the table or whatever, and there's a better chance and that gets published, gets disseminated and then you have a new best practice in that moment. And the public saw this happening in real, normally it happens, you don't even see it. Because it's a controlled study on some corner of the world or in some country, you don't even see it until it's already tested out, but you don't want to hold the vaccine longer than necessary if you could be saving lives with it, hence the emergency provisions that

were put into place. So the problem was, I think, people don't know what science is or how and why it works. And if you taught that in school, you'd say, okay, this is the mask, but we also need to clean the things because we know viruses transmit on the surfaces. It turns out this virus was less a surface virus and more of an airborne virus. Oh yeah, I remember I had a buddy who was wearing a hazmat suit to get his Instacart deliveries and he was pressure washing boxes of trisks in his front yard. Yeah, because at the time that we know that to be successful against variants of a virus,

but not that one. We didn't know yet. Yeah. But are you going to say, well, we don't know yet, so therefore I'm not going to do anything? No, you do what has worked in other, you do that until we refine it. People were not allowing science to run its course. Do you think that during the pandemic that the vaccine and the pharmaceutical companies that they hijacked science or hijacked the media?

Well, their studies get reviewed by panels of scientists. This is what the FDA does, this is the whole point, one of the main points of the FDA is to do this. So they study the efficacy of the virus, of the vaccine, and they study how effective is it against children, also things like it can be effective, but at what dose? There's more than one moving part here in the studies. They did the studies and they found it was like 95% effective against that variant. So they said, let's roll it out.

No need to do further experiments on this, on the effectiveness of the vaccine. Now, here's an interesting challenge. If your vaccine is so perfect that it knocks out this variant perfectly, it might not be effective against another variant of that same virus. Right. Oh, it could be too perfect. It could be too perfect, correct. And so we need research, this may be going, I'm not on that frontier, of a viral serum

that's more sort of a cocktail of antiviral elements so that whenever the thing tries to morph or mutate, we got you. You can't mutate out of this group of. And so what they do now with the flu vaccine is they have the specific recipes and they do cocktail together for the seasonal flu virus because they see different flus showing up and they put them together. But I foresee a day when you take one antiviral serum, it takes out all viruses. That'd be a fun day.

Do you think that, yeah, because a lot of, we had Bobby Kennedy on and he was talking about like, he was really against Dr. Fauci and a lot of like. Yeah, he has a book, The Truth About Dr. Fauci, right. So he's. He's an environmentalist, so he was always grew up like about the environment, right? So then he's like about the environment inside of your body. He believes that a lot of vaccines and stuff like can cause more damage over time. Yeah, except when you look at the people who don't die for having had the vaccine.

So there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of cherry picking of data. I think he came to this vaccine argument, this vaccine world because he sees the abuses of corporate greed, all right, and in the environment, a corporation will do something regardless of its effect on the environment or its effect on people. So I think that, not that he's an expert on vaccines and virology or anything, but that he sees big corporations, he sees governments, he sees people, yeah, and he sees people and he wants to protect people. So that's a noble cause, a legacy of his entire family, of course, in multi generations.

So but what happens is, people can get, they get onto something that they think is true. And but there's a larger statistical truth that negates what you think if you see three cases because the testimony is strong, because or someone coincidentally gets some other thing after they get an injection and they stand up and give a talk, you say, oh my gosh, this is what I'm telling you. You look into the person's eyes and you feel their emotions and you see the fire and that becomes more real to you than a pie chart. Yeah.

So it's interesting. You can get caught up in that and. But do you think that these days like that, because you're from the science community that like big pharma, that they have enough money and power that they could alter? Because that's what I feel like a lot of people that they could alter the data or cherry picket enough and present it to humans in a way that would just support what they want. Well, so so that's what I think in the end, a lot of people probably, that's the thing that I think people think that big pharma hijacked a lot of the information or adjusted

it to make people believe and think, okay, except we have people dying in the hospital who are not vaccinated and people alive were right. So you can keep talking, okay? You can keep saying whatever you want, but we have evidence that conflicts with your conspiratorial views and evidence matters in the end. And so, you know, could they have faked, could they have put their entire 100-year reputation, Pfizer or whatever, how old they are, but I think it's around there, 100-year reputation on the line by faking data so that we would all think their vaccine will keep us out of

the hospital just to sell it. We would know within weeks, if not days, if that was all a lie. We would know because there would be as many people in the hospital who'd been dying, who'd been vaccinated, who were not. And those are two samples you want to compare with each other. Yeah. And when you compare that, no, it's effective. It's effective.

Now, what took people by surprise people is, yeah, you vaccinate me against the measles. I'm not getting the measles. You can breathe on me. I'm not getting the measles. All right. So why do people still get COVID after they got vaccinated against COVID? Yeah. They got a lighter case of COVID than they would have otherwise gotten.

Yeah. Okay. You surely know people who got COVID who were vaccinated. It was a five-day vacation at home. Okay. Use a box of tissues in your back a few days later. Were they on ventilators? Were they even admitted to a hospital?

No. No. No. When people get it now, I'm like, I almost think they're bullshit. No. People are like, I got COVID, I'm like, fucking get in here. Yeah. Do your work, dude.

I'll take it. Do you worry about the, like, so science is information, right? And objective information are things that can't change. If it's been verified by multiple experiments and there's a result that comes out of it, that's not tomorrow going to be different from today. Do you worry about the way that we share information now because that's almost scarier? That's, you know, just like news channels and outlets and clips, the way we see things. It's adjusting people's, the way we think all the time.

It's taking over the value of the information. That's insightful and perceptive and correct that they're not only controlling the information you receive, they're shaping how you receive it, which has an effect on how you then behave and act on that information. So as a scientist, we're trained, not always successfully, we're trained to detach from the emotions of a testimony. We're trained to be skeptical of a claim that's made that's opposite other claims that have been made before.

If someone says, we've seen the YouTube videos, who's the dude hanging on his arm and he said- Oh, uh, Andrew LaClart now. No, no, no, no. Who wants you to do his diet, his muscle growth, he wants you to grow muscles. He's a muscle guy. Oh, Sylvester Stallone? No, no, no. He's just some guy.

He's just some guy. Okay. Like a fitness expert. Okay. But he's got something he's selling you and he's saying, you know, the best way to get ripped muscles, it's not by going to the gym every day, it's by doing my thing. Oh, I see. Okay.

So it's, we respond to that. Once again, it's the easy way out. We respond to a testimony that's saying everybody else is wrong, but this is right. As a scientist, we are trained to be skeptical of that claim. The person that says, all these scientists and all the, they're all wrong and they're all in conspiracy, but I'm correct. Listen to me. We're trained to be, and then not to just be skeptical and go on with life.

I'm going to find out if what you're saying is true. Why is conspiracy, because conspiracies and the idea of conspiracy theories have grown more in the past 10 years. I think so. I think so. It seems like- Sadly, but yes. Do you, what do you attribute that to?

The, the urge to be comfortable in your own belief system. We started the conversation that way. Yeah. You were saying, this is what I am. And if something's poking at the side, I don't want it. I don't want to know about it. So now you create a worldview. You create an understanding of how things are, either because someone convinced you

or you convinced yourself. Okay. Now there's a gap or there's some information that conflicts with it. So you're going to say, if you cherish this worldview. That information that conflicts with it was falsified or that was wrong. They don't know what they're doing. Or if there's a gap in the information, you'll say someone's hiding the, and that, so you say by saying someone hiding it, that bridges you from one bit of information to another

and you can maintain your worldview. As a scientist, it is our duty to disturb our worldview every day. The headline that says, scientists have to go back to the drawing board because their cherished theories might be put in jeopardy. This is bullshit. We're at the drawing board every single day of our lives. That's what we do. It's what we live for.

A new discovery. Who is the... We're not in our office with our feet up on the desk. Masters of all the knowledge of the universe. That's not us. Who is the final say so of something from science that it can go into society? Well, in my field, there's none of that because the patient doesn't die. I can be spectacularly wrong about how a galaxy is rotating and there's no product that's

going to be made based on it. As what you do gets closer and closer to the human condition, then you need sort of regulations and careful scrutiny. That's why the FDA exists and there's no counterpart to the FDA for astrophysics. Can the FDA be compromised or not? In principle, I think anything can be compromised, but what it comes down to is you would say, the FDA is saying this, does any other agency say something completely different? I'm not talking about a YouTube page, a little bit agency.

If it doesn't complete, then let's take a closer look. It's a reason to look closer, not a reason to reject or accept. That's all. Here's one, I got one. The food pyramid. Oh, yeah. I remember that. This is completely.

Bread. Interesting. I'm even going to say honest, let me not use the word honest. It's an interesting sequence of events. Here it is. There's a study in Europe, tens of thousands of people. It's a diet study. They find out that the Mediterranean diet is healthier for you.

Low in saturated fats, low buttered, not so much meat. Grains are in there, so beans and wheat and this sort of thing. Saturated fats, that's bad for you, it'll reduce your. This study came out. Here we are. Okay. This study came out and it was, it took the world by storm because it was so many people and Europe is, is, is, is westernized, right?

And we all live a Western life. So this was, oh my gosh, we all got to do this. So drop the saturated fats, drop the cholesterol, drop all this stuff that'll kill you fast and eat the breads and things and that, okay? That's what contributed to, to in part the, the, the, just the diet, the carb diet, okay? And when we did that, everybody started getting fat. Everybody started getting fat. You know what happens?

Something else happens. Right. There's, there's the other side of it. There's another, carbon, your diet puts your metabolism on a roller coaster and you end up with food cravings that you didn't previously have because you got your calories from sources other than carbohydrates. So there was a secondary effect that was not folded in, but more important, that European study of how, I forgot how many countries was missing France.

How do you have a European study that doesn't have France in it? I don't know. People don't like them. Okay. Okay. No other explanation. We hate the French. Maybe they didn't call, maybe they didn't answer when you called.

Okay. You have a study. You gotta have everybody. Well, not just you have to have everybody, which is true. You have a study telling people that cholesterol is bad for you and you're missing a country that is steeped in animal fat, the foreground, the butter, the croissant, the duck fat, all of this. Ducks are fucking all mostly fat.

Do you know that the life expectancy in France is like 35, no, it's like six months shorter than Italy, which has the Mediterranean, France has also got a Mediterranean thing, but their diet, you don't think it was the Mediterranean diet. So they had no, not significantly less life expectancy than other countries that didn't eat any of that. That was not in the study. So the study had a built in bias that people were not thinking of at the time the study was, so this is the bias you have to watch out for.

Here we are doing an experiment believing something that's not true. And that's why lately they say, put in some cholesterol back in your diet. And because we're learning that what we thought was true out of that, from that one study, that's the point. One study doesn't make the truth, you need other study that tested and re-verify it. Yeah, because I saw, I was watching, well, I was just watching that show Dope Sick and it was about like the opioid crisis or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was crazy, man. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy sometimes that, why do we let bad things into our society that seems so bad, you know? It would seem like sometimes we would be able to stop them. Well, we have addiction problems, and that's a problem. Yeah. That's a good point.

Yeah. Right, if we didn't have addiction problems, then- You need none of that, right? Right. Yeah, let me get high today and then I'm fine tomorrow. Right? I'm not, you know, so that's a susceptibility we have in our physiology, but you can be a gambling addict, and there are many addictions.

Oh yeah, we got a lot of addicts listening to this. Okay. We do. Okay. No, I've been an addict, so that's why I talk about it. I don't mean to laugh, right. Oh, no, it's fine. We laugh about it.

Yeah, yeah. We laugh about it. You know, these are that weakness, and when you have other people that exploit that weakness, like the casinos and the drug dealers. Anything. Yeah, anything. Yeah. Anything.

Someone's there to make money, offer you your inability to stop what you're doing. Yeah, that's what I worry about, like even with the drug dealers at, like, big levels, it's like, are we, is our FDA compromisable sometimes, I worry, you know? Or if we've gotten to that point as a country where everything's, like, we're just, it's more- If you lose all the confidence in the agencies and the entire system, then where are you going to put your confidence? Is it the YouTube channel you were looking at?

Is it the, yeah, is it the guy on the YouTube channel saying, the FDA is wrong about everything. Right. I'm right by what I'm selling you. Right. So- It's a good question, I think, but that's what I think you see, I don't know if you see a lot of that happening, but I think there's people who don't know where to put their confidence anymore.

I feel like we used to all know where to put our confidence. Does that make any sense? Yes, but I'm saying there are people who are sowing doubt in places where there's no need to do so. People who are indicting the entire scientific community. Oh, by the way, while they're still using their smartphone, okay? I sent out a tweet, should I have left it in my forbidden file? I don't know.

It was a letter. It was like, dear flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, homeopaths, homeopaths, and on a whole list of like pseudoscience, okay, dear. You found each other and communicate with one another using a device that, using a sophisticated device that uses frontier advanced discoveries in engineering science, technology, and math. Just thought I'd alert you of this fact, sign your smartphone, okay? This is the letter your smartphone should be telling you every day. Yeah, it's true.

I don't trust science. Science is this. Oh, wait, what's the best way to route the round of traffic to get to grandma's house? Which is using GPS satellites, and what do you think we do with scientists? And by the way, do people think that scientists are somehow conspiring? You ever been to a scientific conference? We're arguing all the time. Yeah.

We don't agree. That's a great point. No, it's just. That's a great point. It's really. You're living twice as long as your great-grandparent because of science. Yeah. Oh, I don't trust science.

Science, too. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, I wonder where all this distrust, where the distrust started to really come from. I feel like 20 years ago it wasn't here. Well, I think. Maybe it was.

There was some distrust that began with Nixon and Watergate, where can we trust our government and institutions? We knew there were corrupt politicians every now and then, but the system for it to be embedded and the papers, Pentagon papers, this is stuff that was released out of the Vietnam War, smuggled out, New York Times reported on it, you learned of the shaky stuff, shady stuff we're doing. Are we the noble freedom fighters to the world or are we sleazy corporate? So I think it began then.

So it means, yes, skepticism is fine, but skepticism is not the same thing as everything you tell me is wrong. Right. So skepticism says, let me double check that. Yeah. That's a really, really great thing to say, man, and that's a great thing to remember. And I think it's interesting because that's what some of your book, a lot of your book is interesting things to think about, different ways to think about them.

And like I said, if you're going to read it at all, read it before Thanksgiving dinner, so that you can know how to argue with all the crazy uncle and the aunts come over and you just calmly say, well, have you thought of this? I thought of this. You'll be the calmest arguer there ever was. And that's what I will say. There's a lot of great, have you thought of this? And it's, it was, some parts were like, I don't know if I want to think about that,

but it's nice. My one last question for you. What do you got? Sometimes I look up at the sky, right? And I'll look up and I feel like, especially if there's stars out there, I'll feel like, it's kind of like, like something's looking back at me. Does that make any sense to you at all? I, I once tweeted something like that.

I said, sometimes I wonder as I gaze into the night sky, whether the stars themselves are gazing back at me. Oh, damn. I didn't realize I sounded so damn bi about it. And that's when people said, are you high, Neil? Put down the joint. Are you, there's, there's, there's a reliable influx of people who are, who are certain I look up, I feel, there's like a thing.

I don't know what it is, bro. I don't think it's gay or anything. I think it just feel like the space is looking back at me. Well, maybe I'm gay for space, bro. Well, so we're not likely the only life forms in the universe. There's probably very many, some vastly more intelligent than we are. Here we're sitting here, looking up into the night sky, countless thousands of stars. With binoculars, it rises into the millions of stars.

With telescopes, it rises into the billions. There are surely civilizations there looking up at their night sky and they see our star, the sun, as part of some constellation that they identify in their night sky. And there's a theovon there looking up, asking, is anyone up there looking down at me? And we get to say, yes, we have your counterpart. We got a theovon in this galaxy too. No, no, I'm just saying, it's fun to think about we being in the night sky of some children's diagram as seen by another place in the galaxy.

You got to answer the question. What do you tell me about the individuals? Whatever. Would you say? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. I'll take you out with that. Do you know how precious life is?

Most people don't. I didn't know. I think because look at the risks we take. Oh, let me jump out of an airplane, you know, and maybe the shoot will open. Oh, all right. That's a whole kind of person we got out there. Just look at YouTube videos. Oh, yeah.

All right. With the GoPro. Red Bull. Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right. There's been about 100 billion people who have ever lived. Wow, really? Yes.

And there's only 8 billion now. No, about 100 billion if you add it up over all time. Damn. All right. So now, do you know how many people can exist? You take a look at the genes, find out how many combinations of genes can make an authentic human being. And you do that.

You can do the math on this. And it is stupendously larger number than the 100 billion. It is, I give a number in here, but that even that's a low estimate. That could have existed over time or that could exist total. Same difference. Okay. Okay. So I give a low end number of a million trillion trillion total possible numbers of plausible

human beings that could exist. What it means is you are alive against stupendous odds. You are breathing air, observing sunsets, gazing into the night sky. Most people who could exist will never experience that. Wow. In fact, as Richard Dawkins has said brilliantly, you get to die and you say, I don't want to die. I'm dying.

Most people who could exist will never even be born. And you're going to complain about the life you have? Yes. Not all lives are equally, I get that. And you could get the wrong hand dealt to you. Your birth defects or your family, whatever it is, oh my God, whatever it is, that's what you've got. Use it, develop it to all you can within your power and the power of others who love you

to maximize what you can be, what you can think, what you can learn, how you can love all of this. It's your gift. It's the gift. Because as you, most people, most people that could exist mathematically will never exist. Wow. So, right there you are a. You are as special a living entity as there ever was.

Amen. So, in the end of this chapter, and what I do as an epitaph, there's a quote from an educator, Horace Mann, you might have heard the name, he was 200 years ago, brilliant guy, head of universities. He gave a commencement speech and he said, I beseech you, love that word, nobody uses it anymore. Yeah, you get, I mean. You feel it.

Girls hang up immediately. Is that right? Is that right? I haven't tested it. I don't know. I'll try to bring it back and maybe it'll stay on with you. I beseech you, yeah, if you say I beseech you to go on a date with me, right, that's the end of that call.

You're done. I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts, these, my parting words, be ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for humanity. And if you got one time on earth, there it is. There it is. Neil LaGrasse Tyson, thank you so much for your time, man, it really. It's a delight to meet you. Of course, I know your work and it's as authentically honest.

It's, you know, it's unpretentious. You just feel in it out there on stage and people know you're feeling it and they feel it too. And I think it's some potent humor, which gives you some power that you know you have power, but it's even more power than that because you can bring people with you. I'm starting to realize that more, you know, I want to be able to be as creative as I can in work. And also I want to be able to question things and think about stuff as much as I can.

So I'm really grateful for this conversation right now in my life and to stay relevant as a comedian. You got to stay on that frontier. Right. You can't relax for a minute. Oh man. Plus a joke you told last week, you can't tell next week. Yeah, we're scientists.

Well, I'll tell a few, but you'll hear the groan in the audience reaction evolves, right? So part of the groan is deep inside of myself because it knows it's not, I'm not maximizing my potential. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But thank you so much for your time, man. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. You're a, you're a value to humanity and we appreciate you. Thank you. You got it. Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this piece of mind. And I found I can feel it in my bones, but it's going to take a little bit of time.