00:00:00
Surveys find that roughly 80% of Gen Z believe in astrology and many allow it to influence major life decisions.
00:00:06
But what would be sad is if that number got to 100%. Then the civilization just goes back to the cave where everything
00:00:12
that happened in the natural world was created by forces beyond our knowledge and understanding. So if you want to
00:00:18
think you're not in control of your fate because the sun, moon, and planets are. It's a free country. But I'm creating
00:00:23
meaning in my life cuz I can control that. But is there anything that the universe does to influence us?
00:00:30
Yes. Really? Yeah. And I'll tell you how. You ready? Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the most
00:00:35
recognizable voices in modern science who turns the mysteries of the universe into simple truths and simple truths into life lessons.
00:00:42
As a scientist, it's disturbing how easily people divide each other based on skin color, religion, what food you eat,
00:00:48
what language they speak, and then they find some other philosophy that differs, and then they go to war. But when I step back with a cosmic perspective, you
00:00:54
realize how ridiculous it is. Give me the cosmic perspective. Well, there's nothing that we can put on the table that can rival the
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measurements of the universe. And we are literally composed of stardust. So when people think they're different, they have DNA in common with all of the life
00:01:07
forms on Earth. Like you have 20% identical genes to a banana. Excuse me.
00:01:13
Okay, we all do, not just you. And that's not there are molecules that went in and out of your lungs that are in China being breathed by people there.
00:01:19
And go further back. Jesus inhaled them. So, how's that the oneness with others? That can't be true. And that's the next problem. People
00:01:26
value what they think is true more than what is true. That's a recipe for the unraveling of civilization as we know
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it. But as a scientist, show me the data. And as someone that knows so much about the universe and objective truth, I've
00:01:38
got a lot of questions. So, what do you think is the probability of me getting to another planet in my lifetime? And then, could you make the case that the
00:01:44
universe is simulated by some sort of advanced life form? And also, did humans evolve at some point to believe? And you
00:01:50
think you would be happier if you believed in God. Oh, so you're going to spice us up a bit. Okay. So,
00:01:58
I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you
00:02:03
could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing
00:02:09
that anybody that watches the show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do
00:02:16
double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history
00:02:22
and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you.
00:02:27
[Music] I've been watching a lot of videos of yours I think because I've reached the stage in my life where I've become
00:02:34
really existentially curious. I think we all do at some point and especially the
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more you've lived the more it all sort of you ask what does it all mean? How
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does it all come together? What will it mean in to me in 5 years 10 years?
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Uh I don't know if you're old enough to think about your mortality. Uh but that's a thing when you have
00:02:58
fewer years left than the years you've lived and and you can I think the way
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they say it is there's you can have a good expectation to live as long as your parents did. I lost both of them in the
00:03:11
last 5 years. So so that's my horizon.
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And the fact that we die has a capacity to bring focus into the
00:03:26
remaining time you're alive. Cuz think about it. If knowing you're going to die
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brings focus and purpose and resolve
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and action, then if you lived forever, what's your hurry? For me, knowing I'm going to die
00:03:47
gives meaning to my remaining life. Whereas, if I'm never going to die, then mathematically
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that would mean I'd lead a life of no meaning at all because there's no way to
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focus an infinity amount of time into anything and have it be meaningful. So,
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I'm taking mortality as a very serious force operating on happiness,
00:04:11
productivity. Can you do something for the world? And on my tombstone,
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what I want to say, what I want it to say is a quote from Horus man. Be
00:04:23
ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. I want to have
00:04:29
made a difference in the world. I want the world to have been better off because I lived in it.
00:04:34
Is that too much to ask of any of us? Really, we're all capable of good deeds.
00:04:40
So if the world is better off, I'm I've
00:04:45
played my part as a citizen of planet Earth. And this all sort of dovetales into this
00:04:52
new book that you've written. Um it's I call it a new book, but it's really a revision of a very successful book that
00:04:58
uh I think the first copy was published in 1998 called Just Visiting the Planet. Further scientific adventures of Merlin from
00:05:06
Amnesia. Amnissia. Yeah. When I think about these bigger questions about the universe,
00:05:12
meaning purpose, death, why am I here, religion, all these things, so often I
00:05:18
think about them through the context and information that I find in your work because when I think of like the world
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being so big, as you talk about in this book and so infinite and all these stars, I feel meaningless in a nice way.
00:05:31
Sometimes I feel like the that I that I worry about no longer matters. But then when you talk about
00:05:37
you feel meaningless in a happy way. Yeah. I feel like the things that cause me uh suffering don't matter as much as
00:05:44
I thought they did. And then you talked about shortening time by realizing that you're going to live for 90 years or or
00:05:50
80 years creating great amounts of meaning. And it feels somewhat like a I don't know.
00:05:56
Yes. The universe is huge in size, in age, in contents. There's nothing we can
00:06:04
put on the table that can rival those measurements that we make of the
00:06:10
universe. However, how big? Well, there's the light from the most
00:06:17
distant galaxies has been traveling for nearly 14 billion years. 10 billion
00:06:23
years more than Earth has even existed if you want to get a sense of that. And
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so but think about it a whole other way that if you look at the ingredients of
00:06:37
life not just human life but life on earth and you can rank the elements what's the
00:06:44
number one element in life we could mention the human body number one element is hydrogen
00:06:50
that's contained in the H2O of the water content of your body which
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depending on how chubby you are can anywhere from a half to 3/4 of your body
00:07:01
weight is water and all right what's the next most
00:07:06
abundant element in your body it's oxygen attached to the water okay H2O
00:07:13
and both the H and the O appear in many many other molecules in our body in the DNA and in your muscle tissue all of
00:07:20
this and in the blood okay what's third
00:07:25
carbon which you would have thought had to be somewhere in the just because you know we're carbon based life. Fourth is
00:07:32
nitrogen. Okay. Fifth, I'll put them all together and just say other. Okay. So that's the
00:07:38
sequence of elements. And now you say, what are the sequence of elements in the universe? The number one is hydrogen.
00:07:46
The number two is helium, but that's chemically inert. You might remember from high school chemistry. You can't do
00:07:51
anything with it anyway. Helium. Next in the universe, oxygen. Next, carbon. Next
00:07:57
nitrogen. Next other. Okay. So we are one for one
00:08:04
matched to the ingredients of the universe. And one of the gifts of 20th
00:08:10
century astrophysics is gifts to civilization is where those
00:08:16
ingredients came from. We trace those ingredients, the hydrogen
00:08:22
to the big bang itself and all these heavier elements to stars that manufactured those elements in their
00:08:29
core and the crucible that is their core. They lived out their lives. They exploded, scattered that enrichment into
00:08:36
gas clouds so that the next generation of stars would have planets and at least
00:08:42
one of them have life as we know it, life on Earth.
00:08:48
So that we you you can think of us not just
00:08:53
figuratively but literally composed of stardust.
00:08:59
And so so that it's not that we are alive in the universe. Yes, that's true.
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But the universe is alive within us. So we're special because we're the same as
00:09:12
the universe. often when people think they're special, I want to be different from No, we're saying because we have
00:09:20
human DNA on an earth where we have DNA in common with all other animals, all
00:09:27
other life forms on Earth. Do you realize we we and mushrooms have more in
00:09:34
common with each other than either we or mushrooms have with green plants? The
00:09:41
common ancestor between fungus and animals split later in the tree of life.
00:09:46
Then its common ancestor split with green plants. You You have 20% identical genes to a
00:09:54
banana. Excuse me. We all do. Not just you. Not just you. Okay.
00:10:01
You have it. So when you consider all of this,
00:10:08
it's it's not just that we're alive in the universe. The universe is alive within us.
00:10:15
And that that discovery borders on the spiritual. Yeah. And it's a scientific result. So when I
00:10:23
look up at night, I never feel small. I feel large. I feel as large as the
00:10:31
universe itself because that's where we came from. We're a participant in a great unfolding story of cosmic
00:10:39
evolution. The minute you said that, I thought of all these Eastern traditions and religions that say we are one. And from
00:10:47
a scientific perspective, as you say, we very much are one.
00:10:52
Yeah. It's what's interesting is one of my deep concerns about the world is many
00:10:59
philosophies or religions that say we are one. They find some other philosophy that differs and then they go to war.
00:11:05
Yeah. I don't mean to laugh at that, but it's we're not good at feeling oneness with
00:11:11
everyone. It's easy to feel oneness with our tribe. Our tribe could be skin
00:11:17
color, religion, who you sleep with, who you don't sleep with, what food you eat, what rituals you perform. And so those
00:11:25
people choose sides based on so many factors that
00:11:32
I I it's actually to me just as a scientist it's disturbing how easily and
00:11:38
quickly we will divide each other without and make that the reason for how
00:11:44
you interact rather than see what we have in common and make that the reason for why we would come together. This has
00:11:51
been really front of mind for me for the last 24 hours. There's been a lot of things that have happened in the news that have thrown the conversation around
00:11:58
division to the very front of my mind and that you know in the UK we've got all these people that are marching next week I believe um through London because
00:12:05
of you know various political things and I was saying to my friends last night I said I think actually that the root
00:12:10
cause isn't this or that it's the division itself and it's yeah you can overanalyze I mean if you
00:12:17
look deeper than whatever people are saying is the reason they are marching or arguing If you just, you know, part
00:12:25
the curtains and unpack it all, at the bottom of that is
00:12:30
there's a tribe here and a tribe here and they think this way and they think that way and never the twain meet unless
00:12:38
we rethink how we interact with one another. It's it's I mean, think about
00:12:45
it, you know, with the race the race friction that existed around
00:12:53
the world, but especially in in colonial Europe and the slave trade and all of
00:12:59
this and and okay, that's not good. It's
00:13:04
bad. Uh, and all right, but then you look at World War I and World War II,
00:13:11
that's white people fighting white people, slaughtering them in great numbers. So, you can divide by skin color, but
00:13:18
apparently people find plenty of reasons to divide and conquer, to divide and
00:13:23
kill, to divide and oppress. and and skin color is one in a long list of all
00:13:29
the reasons people have given to the religious wars to worshiping the
00:13:35
different god or worshiping the god differently. These are human beings. And you know, I wrote a whole book, one of I
00:13:40
think one of those books in your stash there, that one. Yeah. Cosmic perspectives on civilization. The one in
00:13:48
your left hand there, that one is is what conflict in the world looks like
00:13:55
when you are scientifically literate and you have a dose of cosmic perspective on
00:14:00
top of it. Give me the cosmic perspective, please. It's
00:14:06
you're fighting over that line in the sand. When I'm out here at the moon looking at Earth, this fragile
00:14:13
ecosystem, do you realize Earth's atmosphere is to Earth what the skin of
00:14:19
an apple is to an apple in terms of thickness. So, I see people trashing the
00:14:26
planet, fighting one another. again just based on who's on what side of the line in the sand or who they worship or who
00:14:32
they don't worship or what their skin color is or where they were born, what language they speak, what accent they have. And I step back and from orbit
00:14:41
it's ocean, land, clouds.
00:14:48
From the moon, there's Earth suspended there in space.
00:14:53
I almost don't want to zoom in on it because people value what they think is
00:15:01
true more than what is true. There are objective truths out
00:15:07
there, but it's almost as though people
00:15:13
fight and argue more vehematly the less evidence there is to support what it is they think is true.
00:15:21
There's an old saying, if an argument lasts more than five minutes, then both sides are wrong.
00:15:28
This it's true probably 80 90% of the time, but it's something definitely something to think about.
00:15:34
How have your spiritual and religious beliefs evolved throughout the course of your career based on all that you've
00:15:40
come to know about the objective nature of the universe? Has there been an evolution? It depends on what you mean by
00:15:46
evolution. I was raised Catholic. Yeah. But we were raised basically in a secular household even though we would
00:15:52
go to church every weekend. What I mean by that is we come home at no time do either of my parents say, "Don't do
00:15:59
that. Jesus is watching. You keep that up, you'll go to hell. Do this cuz it'll please God."
00:16:05
Never was there such a conversation as that in the household. So the household
00:16:11
was driven by objective truths or or life experience
00:16:16
as would be brought from elders to the next generation. Something that was more common in that generation than in the
00:16:23
current generation because now elders don't know anything about anything. You know your kid comes up to you and say
00:16:28
mommy daddy I want to be a a YouTube influencer. And you're saying what? Go back to school. No. And then they become
00:16:35
a YouTube influencer and they out earn you. So this the the the divide is greater than ever before between one
00:16:42
generation and the next for sure. But by the time I turned eight, I found the
00:16:48
religious teachings less and less convincing. And so by the time I I was nine when I discovered the universe or
00:16:55
really the universe discovered me, a first visit to my local planetarium. So yeah, I I wouldn't call it an evolution,
00:17:02
but I will say this. You didn't ask this, but it relates.
00:17:07
Before I was more recognized, you know, you'd be on an airplane. What do you do? What do you do? Okay. They find out I do
00:17:13
astrophysics. Then out come the questions. Okay. Oh, tell me about black holes, relativity, the big bang. Uh,
00:17:20
aliens. Okay. And would always land on God. And I used to give pretty straight
00:17:29
unforgiving answers to that question, to that inquiry. But then I thought that's not fair. There are people whose lives
00:17:36
pivot around their religious beliefs and their spirituality. And just cuz I've been discounting it
00:17:42
since I was eight. I shouldn't use that as a force against them. I should at
00:17:49
least understand where they're coming from. So
00:17:55
I systematically acquired religious books of all kinds. So I have the Torah. I
00:18:02
have multiple copies of the Quran, Joseph Smith's account that led to the
00:18:07
Mormons. I have uh multiple uh bits of literature from Jehovah's
00:18:14
Witnesses because they'll come to your door and they want to hand you. So I acquired all these books and I mostly
00:18:19
read them. I've skimmed all of them and read some of them with a little more intensity than others. All right.
00:18:27
On doing so, that enabled me, empowered me to have more meaningful conversations
00:18:34
with people who were religious, much more meaningful and more informed.
00:18:40
That's the key. I don't want to speak about a religion unless I know as much as I can about it. As an academic, that
00:18:47
should be what would be true of any subject. You're an academic. You care what's true, not what you think is true,
00:18:53
what is true or what people think. All right? And there's no doubt that
00:18:59
religion has been one of the greatest forces operating on civilization ever since civilization.
00:19:05
When you look at as a source of people's behavior, what they eat, like I said,
00:19:10
who they sleep with, where they sleep, where they worship, who they worship, all around the world, from animistic
00:19:17
native peoples where there's a spirit energy imbued in the in the mountain, in
00:19:23
the brook, in the wind to uh the monotheistic religions to the
00:19:29
polytheistic religions. We don't call them that to put distance between us. But the Greek gods were it
00:19:38
was their religion. We call it mythology. It was their religion. The Greek gods,
00:19:43
the Roman gods. So I'm I'm conversational in all of this. So that
00:19:49
when someone says, "How do I feel? What do I think?" I can do that without just
00:19:55
being obnoxious. And so and and it's a have a meaningful
00:20:01
conversation. I haven't done that. You haven't? No, I haven't. I haven't. But it's such a good idea to do that, especially as
00:20:07
someone in my position that does a lot of talking with people and asking questions. But my the first thing that sprung to mind was there was actually
00:20:13
two questions that sprung to mind. The first was how did that change you reading all
00:20:18
those books outside of you being able to relate um with those well being able to talk to them in a different way? And the
00:20:24
second question cuz I've watched Cosmos. I've watched it several times. It's my one of my me and my partner's favorite
00:20:30
things to watch is you you going from the very beginnings of time through the universe into where we are.
00:20:35
You gotta love that calendar too. That's my favorite thing and I try and persuade everybody to watch that. My
00:20:40
question was about because I watched that and I watched um how the universe has evolved over time or at least our understanding of it and and how it came
00:20:47
to be is did humans evolve at some point to believe? Are we
00:20:52
meant to believe? Well, so the best way to ask that is let's go back to the
00:20:59
earliest humans we have fossil records of and we can go back to Neanderthal.
00:21:04
For example, Neanderthal is is a branch of homminids that went extinct.
00:21:10
Basically, there's some crossbreeding and there's Neanderthal DNA in many
00:21:16
humans today, but as a as a branch of of the homminids, they they went extinct.
00:21:22
So the Neanderthal then there's Cromagnon uh we are you know Homo sapiens
00:21:28
coming after Cromagnon and so when you look at burial grounds
00:21:35
the Neanderthal bury their dead with things with parts of their life of the
00:21:42
person who died. Now, why would you do that unless you had some belief
00:21:50
that there was something more to come for that person? I mean that probably the people who took
00:21:56
it to the limit were the Egyptians. All right. For the Egyptian royalty. I mean, they bury you with all kinds of stuff.
00:22:03
Yeah. And in fact, in Greece, I I read this, it's not that I researched it, and I'm
00:22:09
not a scholar in this, but that when they buried you, they put a coin in your
00:22:16
mouth or in your hand somewhere on your body so that when you got into Hades,
00:22:21
you can tip the ferryboat driver to cross the river sticks to get into
00:22:26
Hades. You might even say that's the beginning of what it was to be human when people started thinking that way
00:22:32
about dying. I mean, you might even re invert the question and say it's not when did we
00:22:41
start. It's we existed in all the ways we know oursel know what
00:22:47
ourselves to be when that ritual came upon
00:22:52
our ancestors and the survival benefit in believing. I I don't know really.
00:22:58
Yeah. I I don't know. We We're pretty sure there's a survival benefit of group
00:23:05
think and religion is group think. If there ever
00:23:11
was. It was we will all believe this in this way and we will behave in that
00:23:17
way on those occasions and you will not deviate from it. Yes. And part of that package of beliefs
00:23:25
includes statements about the afterlife and how you should behave in this life.
00:23:30
Otherwise, you don't go to heaven. You go to hell. I don't think Judaism has a hell, but you you're not as rewarded as
00:23:37
you'd otherwise be. Now that forms a a corpus of beliefs that can be highly
00:23:44
binding of a peoples and especially if some other peoples
00:23:50
come up and they do other things and you don't understand it, you don't know what it is and they're they're a threat and
00:23:56
so you keep them out. You you do whatever you can to preserve your traditions relative to theirs.
00:24:03
Ultimately the worst that in its worst manifestation is all out war. we just
00:24:09
kill people who don't believe the way you do. So, so maybe
00:24:15
religion is kind of what defined humans in the fossil record. I mean, like I
00:24:21
said, that's an interesting inversion of that question. Not when did humans begin being religious?
00:24:26
You define who we are as humans as when religion showed up in the in the burial grounds
00:24:33
of of cavemen. you just talked about as being bound there by certain shared
00:24:39
beliefs and ideas. And I think in I think I I think ritual is one of the strongest binding forces of society that
00:24:45
we have. And I I think that people are maybe unbinding. You can if you look at the
00:24:51
narrative in society, it's about be your own boss, stand on your own two feet. More people are lonely, living alone, um
00:24:56
having less kids, are working freelance and remotely. So it feels like in a weird way we're becoming more
00:25:04
independent and there's a somewhat of a cost to that and actually my friends that are struggling the most in their
00:25:09
lives are those that have the least dependence on a village. So I always wonder if
00:25:15
people we need to ladder up to the universe i.e. me, my family, maybe my village, maybe my country, the planet,
00:25:23
the universe in God the metaverse. Yeah. And like God the multiverse. Yeah. So let me just
00:25:29
react to that. There have been studies about the psychological effects of this kind of
00:25:35
life. Basically the the social media too early in one's life
00:25:40
uh force that operates. But I so I don't know. I don't want to be the
00:25:47
person who says in my day we did it right and you you youngans don't know what you're doing and you're all going
00:25:52
to I mean I've seen the films of people of officials smashing pinball machines
00:25:58
with sledgehammers saying it will be the death of the next generation because
00:26:04
it's they're not studying. They're they're it's gambling. They I've seen you've seen see people burning rock and
00:26:10
roll records you know. We've seen We've seen this and
00:26:16
I I'm I don't want to be that guy. I'd rather be the person that says
00:26:21
they're going to create a whole other reality that was not my reality growing up. And
00:26:28
I don't know that I can or should value judge that. When they come up in the ranks, they'll be mature adults. They'll figure out
00:26:36
what the rhythms are of that world. And I will say, however, that if you go far
00:26:41
enough back, no one ever traveled anywhere, you you you'd spend your whole life not going more than 30 miles from
00:26:48
your hometown. Two, a couple hundred years back. So now people do actually
00:26:53
communicate with countless thousands of people around the world. So that's it's
00:26:59
different. I'm again, I'm not value judging it, but it's different. And you're exposed to different ideas. think
00:27:06
maybe it tribalizes you more or maybe it softens you. It has the power to do
00:27:11
both. What concerns me is because when I post to social media, I've learned the art of
00:27:18
not expressing an opinion because I don't care what your opinion is. I don't
00:27:23
care that you have my opinion. What I care about as an educator and as especially as a scientist is that your
00:27:30
opinion is based on objective reality, objective truths. If you have an opinion
00:27:36
where the foundation of it is what do you what what then you're just floating. There's no and then if you rise to power
00:27:44
of laws and legislation and then you shape a society based on what you think is true or want to be true rather than
00:27:51
what is objectively true. That's a recipe for the unraveling of civilization as we know it. So this
00:27:59
loneliness bit I I don't know how to comment on that. I I don't have the expertise, but I do know that I don't
00:28:06
want to be the person on the rocking chair. Get off my lawn. You
00:28:13
and I I I guess I I've been trying to figure out if we if I need to make try and make sure my life ladders upwards.
00:28:19
Oh. Oh, let me get back to that. So it may be that the most important role of
00:28:25
church wasn't to give a specific recipe for how
00:28:31
you pray or again who you pray to or when you pray. Maybe that's maybe that wasn't its greatest value. Maybe its
00:28:37
greatest value was the community that it created. Mhm. Everyone comes together and they're all
00:28:44
in one room at the same time. That's not happening today. Like you said, there's a people
00:28:51
are less religious today than ever before. Uh there many people who were once religious would today statistically
00:28:57
would today say they're spiritual, which means they're separated from the rules and regulations that that typically
00:29:06
um dictate how you behave within a religion. But the fact is you're talking about going upwards. So you have your
00:29:13
your city, your community, your neighbors and your church, your synagogue, your mosque, your your your
00:29:20
temple, whatever is the the the place where you gather with some frequency. Uh
00:29:27
that surely has value because we need each other.
00:29:35
I'm jealous when I, you know, you drive down the country road and there's a deer just walking around and I'm thinking,
00:29:42
you know, society collapsed. That deer is just fine. The deer was born in the
00:29:47
woods, is finding food, is grown up, whereas I need other people to survive
00:29:55
in this world. I don't know how to hunt. I don't know how to skin game. I don't know. You know, I'd like knowing that
00:30:01
there's a quart of milk waiting for me on the grocery store and and you know,
00:30:06
ready to eat cereals. That's we have an interdependence as never
00:30:12
before. And how do we maintain that without scattering to the winds?
00:30:19
You said you lost both your parents in the last 5 years. Yeah. as someone that knows so much about the
00:30:24
universe and objective truth and reality, how do you how do you contend with grief in that scenario, but also
00:30:30
how does that does that change you in any way? It did a little bit. Not as much as I
00:30:35
thought it might have. Uh my father was 89 when he died. That was 5 years ago. My mother was 2 days shy of her 95th
00:30:43
birthday. So that's what So I'm putting myself like right between them in my life expectancy. I think I'll get to 92.
00:30:49
It's it's the average of those two, you know. So
00:30:54
when you die at that age, it's sad, but it's not tragic.
00:31:00
So I that's an important distinction for me. A tragic life is a life that could have been lived, but through act of war
00:31:09
or negligence or or negligence of the person or of others, the life is cut
00:31:16
short. Then that's tragic.
00:31:21
It's a life not fully lived, but if you lived a full life, they were married 50 something years.
00:31:29
Uh it's sad, but it's not tragic. In fact, it's not even sad. It's something to
00:31:34
celebrate. And so I miss them.
00:31:40
I miss them more than I thought I would because they carried quite a bit of wisdom with them. My father was active
00:31:45
in the civil rights movement. My mother uh was a gerontologist. So they both
00:31:51
cared very deeply about the plight of others and I'm their son, the astrophysicist, but so I go off with my
00:31:57
head in the sky. But I was anchored into the human condition and anchored to
00:32:04
think about it, to care about it. And when I encounter
00:32:11
things in modern life is I wonder what my mother would say about that. I wonder what insights my
00:32:18
father and they're not there. I don't have them for that. So the way it's changed me is it has put a greater
00:32:25
expectation of me on myself to make sure I have wisdom that I can
00:32:32
share with my kids my two kids. the kind of wisdom that I gleaned from my
00:32:37
parents. So that again this is not wisdom of what
00:32:43
car to buy or what job to have because they have other values they have other expectations of society but in terms of
00:32:54
humanto human interaction in terms of love terms of challenges in life and
00:33:00
overcoming them. Some of those are timeless. Some of those are, you know, how to how to navigate difficult people,
00:33:08
how to appreciate nature so you don't take it for granted.
00:33:15
Uh, one of the things I liked about Joyce Kilmer's poem on a tree,
00:33:22
uh, is about a tree. And we've all seen trees. So, why does this matter? Because it
00:33:30
takes an artist, a poet, a writer, a sculptor, a painter.
00:33:36
For me, the artist job is to encourage us, stimulate us
00:33:45
to pay attention to things we might otherwise take for granted. Because so much of life
00:33:53
is what you might just walk by and not even give it any thought.
00:33:59
And so I don't walk by trees without thinking something about that poem. What is the poem?
00:34:05
I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry
00:34:12
mouth is pressed against the earth's sweet flowering breast. A tree that
00:34:18
looks at God all day and lifts her leafy arms to pray. A tree that may in summer
00:34:26
wear a nest of robins in her hair. Upon whose bosom snow has lain, who
00:34:34
ultimately lives with rain? Poems are made by fools like me.
00:34:42
But only God can make a tree.
00:34:49
But only God can make a tree. I spend so long these days thinking and talking to
00:34:54
people about what all of this means and uh I've got more and more I saw you talking about the simulation theory once
00:35:00
or twice and I I started to fall into that that hole of thinking. Oh yes it's No, you got to you know
00:35:09
step outside every now and then and you know smell the roses. But you said you wouldn't be surprised
00:35:16
if people found out the universe is simulated by some sort of advanced life form. Yeah. Given what we can now compute,
00:35:23
throw in quantum computing on top of that, we we don't have this power yet. But to
00:35:28
make a world in our computer where the characters that in that world believe they have free will
00:35:34
and then they conduct themselves and then they invent computers and then they make a world inside of their computer
00:35:41
and where their characters think they have free will and then they so then it's this simulated universes all the
00:35:47
way down and close your eyes and throw a dart. Which
00:35:52
of these are you going to get the first universe that invented the simulated universe or the zillion ones that
00:35:58
followed? The dart's likely to hit one of the others. But my my escape hatch
00:36:05
from that is since we do not yet know or have the
00:36:11
power to make a perfectly simulated world, it means we are either the first
00:36:17
universe that's real that hasn't created one yet or we're the last universe
00:36:24
that hasn't evolved yet to have created one of its own cuz all the middles have the power to create one. So that takes
00:36:31
it, you know, a zillion to one against us to maybe 50/50. Oh, interesting. Never heard that
00:36:38
before. So I'm a little I'm a little more comfortable that way. Comfortable?
00:36:43
Yeah, I sleep a little better at night. But I guess it wouldn't matter anyway if we It actually it wouldn't matter if we're
00:36:49
completely simulated. What do you care? You're living your life. You I know we don't want to believe that there are
00:36:55
puppet strings on us. Um, part of me thinks that though,
00:37:03
you know, just when Earth is kind of everything on Earth is kind of stable. Oh, CO shows up. Oh, so this this is the
00:37:10
programmer saying, you know, the earth is too boring now. We got to spice it up a bit. They throw in a pandemic. Okay. A
00:37:17
once in a century pandemic. Now, now we're entertaining for them. What do we do? Who gets vaccinated? Who doesn't?
00:37:24
Who's going to fight? Who dies? Who lives? Okay. So then we kind of get through that. We get the vaccine.
00:37:31
Okay. Just calming down off of that and they said, "Oh, let's make a billionaire
00:37:37
real estate developer from New York City the most powerful person in the world. Let's stir the pot again." And so now
00:37:43
there's a whole other set of stir pot stirring that's going on. So that's kind of consistent with
00:37:50
a snot-nosed alien kid in their parents' basement
00:37:56
programming our existence. That's what I would do. I would throw in
00:38:02
interest. There's a game Sim Sim City. Yeah, I played that. That's how old I am. Sim
00:38:07
City. So you were mayor of this city and people can vote you out of office. Uh,
00:38:13
so you have to do things that make them happy and there's an opinion poll that's there. And if you spend too much money
00:38:19
here, you're not spending money on the schools. That's bad. But then there's crime goes up and you're realizing, oh
00:38:24
my gosh, in even this simple simulation, so many interdependent phenomenon are taking place. Then
00:38:33
then you things that happen then Godzilla steps through and plows through
00:38:38
the city. Okay. Now, Godzilla is not real, but it kind of is because that
00:38:44
would be a disaster. That is it a flood? Is it fires? It's it's a thing that
00:38:49
nobody saw coming. Okay, we are recording this interview on September
00:38:55
11th. I live four blocks from ground zero. That's Godzilla walking through
00:39:01
the city. How do you respond to that? What's You know, you didn't know that was going to happen the day before. So
00:39:08
realizing that in this game it's only interesting to play when disastrous
00:39:14
things happen, not too many in a row because you have to be able to recover. So when I look at our world, I'm
00:39:20
thinking the best argument I have for being in a simulation is how often some big disaster takes place. When it was
00:39:27
the first world war and then after that the peace, oh pandemic. Okay, the the
00:39:33
1918 flu pandemic. Hey, now we get out of that. Oh, no. Second World War. Okay,
00:39:41
we get out of that. The Cold War, nuclear holocaust. Okay, so that's my
00:39:49
that's me looking over the shoulder of the programmer. Oh god. I think I prefer the world where
00:39:57
I feel like I have free will and there's not. Does it make a difference if you believe
00:40:02
you have free will even if you don't? No, because I'll never know. And you know the fun the fun answer to that uh ask me say uh do you have free
00:40:12
will? Ask me that. Do you have do do we have free will? Do you have free will? What choice do I have?
00:40:22
No. If you don't have free will, then you don't even have an option to say you don't. So I So you just live life. Just
00:40:29
live your life so that the world is better off for you having lived in it.
00:40:35
And what does that mean for you? Like it means people are better off. The the institutions are better off. People are
00:40:43
happier, healthier, wealthier,
00:40:48
safer, better fed. That rationality matters in politics, in
00:40:57
law makingaking. And that helps to will help to ensure
00:41:03
stability of anything you build going forward. But yeah, that's all. I mean,
00:41:08
it's not it's not complicated. And you were talking about meaning before. I stopped looking for meaning decades ago
00:41:15
because I realize I we any of us has the power to make
00:41:22
meaning in life. If you're going to look for meaning, are you looking under a rock, behind a tree? What? It's as
00:41:30
though meaning is sitting there waiting for you to find it. Oh, I found meaning. There it is. Now my life is complete.
00:41:37
That feels so so powerless
00:41:42
on your own destiny. Whereas
00:41:48
I I make meaning I want to learn something today that I didn't know yesterday. I want to lessen the suffering of someone today
00:41:57
compared with however that person was living yesterday. I want to
00:42:03
I want to use what I learn to well up within me and manifest as
00:42:11
wisdom because information is not really useful until it becomes knowledge. And then
00:42:18
knowledge is good. You can show off if you have a lot of knowledge. That's what these game shows do. But in the end,
00:42:25
the best use of knowledge is when it becomes wisdom.
00:42:30
And wisdom, people say, "I don't like getting older. I want to be young again. I don't want to be young again." When I was 30, I was
00:42:37
an idiot. Even when I was 30, I thought I was brilliant. Right? So,
00:42:44
don't get older unless you have wisdom to show for it.
00:42:49
It's when you don't have something to show for your age, you want to be younger.
00:42:54
You're just getting old with nothing to show for it. But I continue to learn things every day, passively and
00:43:01
actively. Passively is you just notice, you know, open your eyes sometimes and
00:43:07
see what's happening, where things are headed, what they're doing. You learn. Not all things you learn are good. And
00:43:14
if they're bad or need adjustment or need help, do something about it if you can. So
00:43:21
that's how I derive meaning. Hence my tombstone. Be ashamed to die unless you've scored some victory for humanity.
00:43:28
There's the meaning for you. There's a whole class of billionaires that are trying to live forever now. And
00:43:34
I think we are on the verge of being able to extend life potentially indefinitely. Yeah. We're looking for the date. It's
00:43:40
called escape velocity. You know about that phrase? It exists in astrophysics of course but the escape velocity for
00:43:47
earth for example is seven miles per second. So escape velocity in astrophysics is the speed that you
00:43:55
launch something so that it never comes back no matter how hard the gravity tries. Okay. So every object has an
00:44:02
escape velocity. The scape philosophy in aging is the idea is there is a generation yet to
00:44:12
be born but in the very near future who
00:44:17
will not not only live longer than the previous generation. So so here here's a a cleaner way to say
00:44:25
this. Every year you can expect to live one month longer
00:44:33
because knowledge about human physiology has gotten better. Okay. Okay. Just think about it that way. Yeah.
00:44:39
And so we know what to eat, what not to eat, how to exercise, how to not over exercise, how to how to maintain your
00:44:45
health, well, your health and physiology. All right. There will come a day where
00:44:52
every year that you're alive, medicine has figured out a way for you to live an
00:44:58
extra year. That's the escape velocity.
00:45:03
So every year you live another year and after that it could be every year you live two years. So that's the escape
00:45:10
velocity. So it's not just everybody lives forever today. it sort of works its way into the
00:45:16
population and yeah I don't I don't want to live forever.
00:45:22
I don't take me off this earth
00:45:28
provided I mean I want I still have more to give more books to write that in my judgment would make the world better
00:45:36
than it currently is. So, I don't want to die before I get as
00:45:42
much of that done as I can. But are you scared of death? No. Although that's easy to say cuz I'm
00:45:49
not at death's door. And I had someone
00:45:55
rationalize with me, which is they made a potent argument. It's I can say now with another 20 years life expectancy,
00:46:03
15 20 years that I don't fear death. But if I'm on my deathbed and someone says,
00:46:10
"If I can wave my hand and you could live another year, would you?" The answer is probably going to be yes and
00:46:16
at the end of that year if they So I I don't know if my sentiments about
00:46:23
life and death will change on my deathbed.
00:46:28
I know my mother there's a point where she couldn't swallow and she didn't want a feed tube and she said my time has
00:46:35
come put me in in paliotative care and then hospice and she was dead 10 days later.
00:46:43
So she was was in charge of her. They could have fed her with a tube and she
00:46:50
would have been completely healthy for another, you know, 5 years perhaps, but nope. She raised two kids, three kids,
00:46:58
you know, 50-year marriage, happy life, stable life,
00:47:04
and yeah, I'm good with that. So the billionaires, you know, that that's ego
00:47:09
for sure. If you live forever, there are other people who you're taking resources from who
00:47:16
would come behind you. That's one. But two, uh are you still contributing to the
00:47:22
world? Should you give another person a chance who's in school now who might be the next genius that'll figure out the
00:47:29
energy problem, the poverty problem, the the pollution problem, the the Are you figuring that out? No. You're in the
00:47:35
last You're You're 90 years old and you're just living on your yacht.
00:47:41
So there's the pro there's the problem that the last years of your life
00:47:48
are not the most creative, the most ambitious, the most irreverent. It's a
00:47:54
reverence that where new ideas come. You know, you've perhaps seen episodes of Shark Shark Tank. You know, half or more
00:48:02
of those people are 30 and under. They got ideas, fresh ideas. Everyone else is entrenched. So if people start living
00:48:11
forever, they're living forever in the part of their life that is least useful to the
00:48:18
progress in advance of culture and civilization. And so all of civilization
00:48:25
will stagnate. Do do you think um in your lifetime you said you've got a 20-year life expectancy?
00:48:30
Well, 15 to 20. 15 to 20 year life expectancy based on my age now and the age my parents died. Yeah,
00:48:36
but I mean you've done a lot of neurological work and laid down a lot of good foundations with all these books you've written. So maybe it'll be the
00:48:43
upper end of that. It's food for AI. Food for chat GPT. True. What do you make of AI? What's your What
00:48:49
do you think? I love it. Yeah, I love it. But I I'm It's It's by the way, it's been here for
00:48:55
a while. It really spooked people when it started writing your term paper and composing your your painting and your
00:49:02
set design. All right, that the whole other category of people got spooked by that. Meanwhile, AI has been harnessed
00:49:09
and being fully used in my field and in most of the physical sciences. Uh, it's
00:49:14
doing work. If you can do the work and and I can go to the Bahamas, let it do the work. We have telescopes coming
00:49:20
online that could not exist without the intervention of AI to access the data, reduce the data, analyze the data, make
00:49:26
a decision about whether it should go back to the thing that had just observed because that was weird compared the last
00:49:32
compared to the last time it was observed. This is the Ver Rubin telescope that I'm literally describing
00:49:37
now. And so we're we're we're living with it. What it means is it ups it'll
00:49:43
have to up the game of people who say they are creative. And what I mean by that is I can say chat GPT take this
00:49:50
picture of us and say Chappie GPT paint this scene in the style of Van Go.
00:49:58
It'll come back. The colors will be just right. It'll have the swirly lines. It'll be perfect. If Van Go were
00:50:04
standing, that's what Van Go would have painted. If I say, "Chad GPT, paint us in the style of no artist who has ever
00:50:10
lived." I don't know what it's going to give us, but it'll probably suck. Okay. And so
00:50:16
true creativity is not aping what has happened before
00:50:22
and making adjustments. True creativity, yes, you always build on others. I'm not
00:50:28
in denial of that. But true creativity takes leaps
00:50:33
that most people don't even know can be taken. Mhm.
00:50:38
And so the artist So that gap I think is what what AI in the arts world is going
00:50:45
to force creative people to reach for. Otherwise, you're replaced by
00:50:52
you're replaced by a a simple request in the in the input line of of a large
00:51:00
language model or or of an art. I was just wondering then if I watch Cosmos in
00:51:06
30 40 years time let's say 100 years time I was wondering if this is the moment where humans and computers in the
00:51:14
story of humanity become one and intertwine if you think about things like Neuralink which Elon's working on
00:51:19
to make when he first made that company all of the narrative that he put out there was about us being able to interface with AI so we'd need like a
00:51:25
brain chip computer interface more recently it's been about people that are parapolgic and disabled and helping
00:51:31
blind people see but I think that's a socially acceptable way to advance the technology. But in his early work, he said
00:51:38
super intelligence is going to arrive and we're going to need a way to basically keep up where we have better sort of latency with um with the
00:51:45
technology. And I'm wondering if that's like what we're seeing now. Yeah. Super intelligence,
00:51:52
you know, if that happens, then it becomes our overlord and we
00:51:57
become its pet. Okay. Now, that sounds pretty scary, but don't
00:52:05
we treat our pets better than we treat other humans in the world? Think about
00:52:11
it. The pet is kept warm and fed and happy and and would you do that for a
00:52:17
homeless person in the street? A person of your own species? Probably not. So, if we're the pet for the super
00:52:24
intelligence, what about the chicken? How bad could it be? We used to have chickens when we were younger and I watched my Nigerian mother chase that
00:52:29
chicken around the garden, grab it, pull its head off, and cook it. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Oh. Oh, you worried
00:52:35
that it's going to do that for us, so we're going to run around. Not all my pets made it and snap. Not all the pets survive. Uh,
00:52:42
yeah. Depends on whether it needs us to be alive or dead. We have to be relevant to it in some way. Maybe we'll be
00:52:49
courtesters. We have to be entertainment. Until then,
00:52:54
I I don't know that this is some special moment. Uh I do a lot of reading of history and throughout history.
00:53:02
Most occasions, especially in the era of the industrial revolution, people think they're living in a special moment.
00:53:08
And so I'm not going to be that guy who says today is special because everyone has thought they were in a special
00:53:13
moment. And what do you think is the probability of me getting to another planet in my lifetime? Zero.
00:53:20
Zero. Really? Yeah. You want to know why?
00:53:27
Yes, please. Yeah, it's just zero. I thought SpaceX going to go to Mars.
00:53:33
I have an unorthodox view on this. So, you don't have to you don't have to believe me,
00:53:38
you know. But my read of history tells me that we only do big expensive things if there's a
00:53:46
geopolitical reason for it. either an economic reason or a defense reason.
00:53:53
Uh not just cuz it's the next thing to do. And when we went to the moon, realize in
00:54:00
1961, May 25th, President Kennedy, just 6 weeks after Yuri Gagarin flew around the
00:54:08
Earth in orbit, and we didn't have a a ship that wouldn't blow up on the launch pad that could carry humans yet.
00:54:16
He calls a joint session of Congress and says, "If the events of recent weeks
00:54:21
couldn't even utter the man's name, the events of recent weeks, and I paraphrase, are any indication of the
00:54:28
impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path
00:54:34
of tyranny." It's a battlecry against communism, the godless Russians,
00:54:40
everyone in the whole Soviet Union. We were losing a technological race.
00:54:48
And that was the battlecry that prompted Congress to write the check. Oh, later on he says, "Oh, it'll be put a man on
00:54:56
the moon and before return him to safely Earth and oh, that's so be let's hold hand. That's so beautiful."
00:55:04
No one ever spent scads of money just because it was a cool thing to do. That has never happened ever. So,
00:55:12
we go to the moon. People forgetting why we went to the moon.
00:55:19
Say while we're on the moon, at this rate, we'll be on Mars by 1985.
00:55:26
That'll be the next ambitious goal we'll take on. No,
00:55:32
because we didn't just go to the moon because that was the next thing to do. We went to the moon to beat the Russians. And when we got to the moon
00:55:39
and we looked over our shoulder and the Russians weren't there, we canled the Apollo program.
00:55:44
197 We haven't been back to the moon in 53 years. We canled it. Apollo 18 was ready to
00:55:51
fly. It's now in captivity in Huntsville, Alabama in a museum on its
00:55:57
side. It's fascinating to walk the full length of it. All rocket flight ready parts. It never flew. We ended at Apollo
00:56:04
17. No, we didn't go to Mars because we didn't have geopolitical reasons to do
00:56:10
so. Neither economic nor for defense reasons. Historically, people explored,
00:56:17
did expensive things for the glory of God and royalty,
00:56:23
very expensive. The pyramids, the honor of royalty. Okay. the church building,
00:56:29
cathedral building, all of these activities. We're in the glory of power,
00:56:36
deity, and royalty. There's none of that happens today. We're past that. The
00:56:42
power of kings and gods, that doesn't happen. Nobody dislodges major
00:56:48
resources, capital resources of a nation in the interest of a god or a king
00:56:54
anymore. Okay? It's secular. And secular means it's money or it's war because you
00:57:00
feel threatened. Okay. So, you know, we're going back to the moon now.
00:57:05
Yeah. Project Artemis. Did you ever think to stop and ask why? Why didn't we stay on the moon in 1972?
00:57:12
Why don't we go back in 1980 or 1990, 2000, 2010? Oh, all of a sudden, let's
00:57:18
go back to the moon. Wouldn't that be cool? Do you know when Artemis began in the late teens?
00:57:25
Right about when China says, "We're going to put Tykenauts on the moon."
00:57:31
Tyos. No. Yeah. Chinese astronaut. Tyonaut. All right. That's when we say, "Let's go
00:57:37
back to the moon." What a good idea. Let's do that. Really? Cuz we because it's just a good
00:57:43
idea. because we're a little bit spooked by a friendly foe across the around the
00:57:50
world might get the glory of that exercise.
00:57:56
And once again, it's a godless country. Okay,
00:58:01
communism is godless by design, by construct. So, here we are going back to
00:58:08
the moon. All right. What motivation do we have to go to
00:58:13
Mars? Are there oil wells there? Is there, you know, diamond mines?
00:58:20
We're not going to Mars. We're just not. Unless
00:58:26
China says they want to put military bases on Mars. We're going to be in Mars in 10 months.
00:58:32
One month to design, build, and fund the thing, and nine months to get to Mars. A geopolitical force operating. Oh, by the
00:58:40
way, NASA doesn't have a rocket that'll get us to Mars. They think they do, but they don't really have one yet. Time to
00:58:46
do that. And say, "Well, does anybody have a rocket?" Elon says, "I have a rocket." So, if Elon rocket goes to
00:58:51
Mars, it's not cuz he sends it there. It's cuz taxpayers sent it there.
00:58:57
By the way, he could go there on a vanity project, but there's no business case.
00:59:03
He He could fly to Mars, team up with Jeff Bezos, they can send people to Mars.
00:59:09
It's not a business case. And if you are an investor in his company, you would not agree to do that. You wouldn't. But
00:59:17
he doesn't need investors because he's very wealthy. He could do it on his own. Are you going to Mars as a tourist? Is
00:59:24
that Is that a business case? It'll It's a trillion dollars to get to Mars. First, second will be a little less.
00:59:33
I don't see that happening. A trillion dollars about that. Yeah.
00:59:38
If Earth were a school room globe, with your fist, show me where you think
00:59:44
the moon is. This is Earth. Take your fist and put it at the distance the moon is. Your fist is about
00:59:51
the right size compared. Okay. Put I mean, right there. Yeah.
00:59:57
Okay. Not too bad. It's 30t away. It's in the next room. Okay.
01:00:02
Okay. 30t away. Okay. That's the moon. Let's keep going.
01:00:08
How far away from Earth did the Bezos Branson uh rockets go?
01:00:13
Oh, not far. The thickness of two dimes above the surface of the Earth.
01:00:20
How far away is Mars? It's a mile away from here. Yes. From this Earth. It's a mile away.
01:00:28
It's in the Central Park. The moon 30t away. Mars a mile away. Yeah. It's a trillion dollars to Mars.
01:00:33
Yes. How long? 9 months. if and you have to wait till the planets are configured so that when
01:00:41
you travel you arrive where Mars will be when you get there and that's a minimum
01:00:47
energy orbit. If you had filling stations along the way you can just fill up with fuel and get there as fast as you want but minimum energy orbit takes
01:00:54
about 9 months and then to come back you have to wait till it it's configured again a few years later so round trip to
01:01:01
Mars is 3 to 5 years easily. though there's not an economic case. I'm not
01:01:07
saying we don't know how to get to Mars. We have a SUVsized rover there now. All right, discovering potential life from a
01:01:13
billion years ago. It's not about we don't know how to get to Mars. This is not a technological statement I'm making. I'm talking about a practical
01:01:19
statement. So, no, my read of history tells me no.
01:01:24
I I thought you were going to also add to that that even if Elon wanted to do it as a vanity project because he makes all this money and manages to use
01:01:30
Starink as a way to fund it, whatever, that the problem is Elon's going to die.
01:01:35
He's going to die in the, you know, the next couple of decades, which means the vanity element that comes from his childhood situation where he wanted to
01:01:42
get out there and explore the stars cuz he read that book has got 30 years, 40, 50 years left on it.
01:01:48
Well, that would make him want to hurry, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And plus, he said, "I don't want
01:01:54
to die on Earth. I want to die on Mars." Mhm. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the idea.
01:02:00
So, that's a goal. Sure. But don't tell me it's a it's it's a it's a business
01:02:05
case. I can see a tourist case going into orbit and even possibly visiting the moon. It's 3 days there, 3 days
01:02:11
back. That's a week's vacation that you would take. And I would save up 5 years,
01:02:18
10 years of vacation money if that was the amount that it would take to go to the moon in for one week. That would be
01:02:24
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01:03:30
You know, you've written this, you've revised this book. Oh, yeah. Just visiting this planet. Yeah. I wrote a a column, a question and
01:03:37
answer column for like 10 years, 15 years. where people just ask me questions from the public and I had a
01:03:43
pen name called Merlin and Merlin was friends with with Newton and Galileo and
01:03:48
Marie Cury and all these people. So if you ask Merlin, "Dear Merlin, I don't quite understand gravity." Merlin say,
01:03:54
"Oh, Merlin had a conversation with Isaac Newton in his backyard." And here's how he answers that.
01:04:00
I think in the book you talk about a golf ball sized black hole would weigh more than Earth and swallow it whole,
01:04:05
leaving behind something the size of a lime. Yeah. Slightly bigger. Right.
01:04:11
What is You've been asked this so many times, but I still don't know the answer. What is a black hole? And how do
01:04:16
we even know if they're real if no one's ever been to one? Well, you can know things without visiting them. I mean, that's the
01:04:23
methods and tools and machines of science are remarkable in their ability to learn something without actually
01:04:30
having to see it with your eyes or hear it with your ears or to touch it with your fingers. We have
01:04:37
in fact science didn't take off until these machines became a fundamental part
01:04:43
of how we investigated the world replacing our five senses because there's nothing more feeble in
01:04:49
this world than you thinking you understand reality through your five senses that that I don't want to call it
01:04:56
feeble I would call it errorprone errorrone remember I told you about
01:05:01
escape velocity of earth you remember what I the value I said it 7 miles
01:05:07
paying attention per minute per second. Per second. That's very fast. Seven miles per. So the adage what goes up must come down.
01:05:13
Mhm. That's not true. It's true for almost anything you would experience. But you
01:05:19
can launch something at 7 miles per second. It'll never ever come back. That's the escape velocity for Earth.
01:05:25
Okay. If Earth had more mass and the gravity
01:05:31
were stronger, the escape velocity is higher. That would make sense because there's
01:05:36
more gravity that you have to escape. Let's keep up that exercise.
01:05:43
Cram in more and more mass. Just keep doing that. Escape velocity keeps going
01:05:49
up. Eventually, the escape velocity hits the speed of light.
01:05:55
At that point, light can't even escape. Light is the fastest thing in the universe. If light can't escape, if you
01:06:01
fall in, you don't escape either. There's no better description of a hole
01:06:06
than that. And worse yet, it's a hole in any direction you approach it. Not just a
01:06:13
hole in the street or in the floor. It's a three-dimensional hole.
01:06:20
And how do we know it's there? Because it distorts the fabric of space and time around it. We see galaxies behind
01:06:28
concentrations of matter black holes and the shape of the galaxy is distorted
01:06:33
because Einstein tells us tells us that gravity distorts the fabric of space and time. So that's one way we discover
01:06:39
black holes. Another way is most stars in the night sky are binary and multiple star systems. Most of them
01:06:46
you can't see it because you just have human vision. You whip out a telescope,
01:06:51
you see, oh my gosh, there are two stars, not just one. If there's a pair of stars and one of them becomes a black
01:06:57
hole and this one ages, it expands and some of its material spills onto and
01:07:03
orbits around the event horizon of the black hole. This swirling material,
01:07:09
gets hotter and hotter and hotter and it radiates x-rays and ultraviolet.
01:07:15
We have x-ray and ultraviolet telescopes that see every one of these in the night sky. They're all black holes. And it's
01:07:23
created from an explosion. Uh there's a a star that wants to explode, but it has so much mass the
01:07:30
explosion doesn't overcome the gravity and the star collapses down on itself to
01:07:35
make a black hole. That's one way to make a black hole. So our sun when that run it's not going to become black. It's
01:07:41
pretty wimpy in that department. It'll still kill us but for different reasons.
01:07:48
So the mass of the object is so big that it can't actually explode because the gravitational pull inwards is so strong.
01:07:53
Correct. That's above a certain threshold. Within there there's the stars that the explosion is greater than
01:08:00
what the gravity can contain and it makes a supernova. And those are the stars that spread heavy elements across
01:08:06
the galaxy enabling us to even exist. So I'm going to read this again. A golf
01:08:12
ball-sized black hole would weigh more than Earth and swallow it whole, leaving behind something the size of a lime.
01:08:18
Yeah. So, when black holes eat, they get bigger. So, a lime is bigger than a golf ball, but not by very much.
01:08:25
We can calculate what the size is. Where would everything go? It's in there. It's compressed down
01:08:31
inside the hole. And if I was And everything near's going to get pulled in there as well.
01:08:37
If it comes too close, right? If it comes too close. Yeah. You can stay, you can keep your distance. Black holes don't they're not
01:08:42
giant sucking devices. I mean, if you keep your distance, your if the sun became a black hole right now, we would
01:08:48
still orbit it. The gravity we feel at our distance is no different. You say that if the sun suddenly shut
01:08:54
off, we'd freeze at -462 F, which is the background temperature
01:09:00
of the universe. Yes. Once the stored energy ran out. Yeah. Once the stored energy where ran out. Well, in this in the Well, so there's
01:09:07
the sun's energy. the sun blotted out. But Earth has energy inside
01:09:13
of itself as well. This is what gives us volcanoes and continental drift and all the rest of this. So if you don't have a
01:09:19
sun, you want to live near a volcano or something that is a source of energy for you. And then you'll live on Earth until
01:09:27
the Earth's energy died out. Ideally by then you just go to another planet. I
01:09:32
mean why not? How long has our our sun got left? About another 5 billion years. How would we know? It's a good question.
01:09:38
That's a the product of 20th century modern astrophysics. Then it was modern. I think of it as
01:09:44
modern where you say, "What kind of star is this?" You look around the universe for other stars that are just like it.
01:09:51
And then you see those stars in their stages of evolution, stars being born,
01:09:58
living out their lives, and dying. And the star changes its properties from
01:10:03
birth to death. And so you can line up what where the sun is in that chart and
01:10:09
then plus we know how old earth is. So we can directly measure the age of the earth.
01:10:15
And so there's no reason to think that earth
01:10:20
did not form at the same time the sun did. Another really um fascinating one was
01:10:26
every breath you take contains molecules once inhaled by every human in history.
01:10:31
Yep. That can't be true. Chat GPT it.
01:10:38
No. So, here it is. You ready? Yeah. There are more molecules of air
01:10:45
in a single breath of air than there are breaths of air
01:10:53
in Earth's entire atmosphere. So if you breathe in and then breathe
01:11:00
out, there's enough molecules that you breathe out to populate every breath
01:11:07
that anyone will ever again take on this earth and air mixes rather quickly.
01:11:15
Okay? So you it has to mix. It's not immediately. Give it some time, but you
01:11:20
give it some time. There are molecules that went in and out of your lungs that are in China being breathed by people
01:11:26
there uh when enough time is elapsed. You can calculate that might is years 10
01:11:32
years something like that. There's tremendous mixing of air. So how's that
01:11:37
for feeling kinship with others? Same with water. You drink a water there more
01:11:43
molecules of water in a glass of water. This is a mug of water than there are mugs of water in all the world's oceans.
01:11:52
So you drink a mug of water and then it comes out of you in any one of a half dozen different ways.
01:11:59
There's enough molecules to scatter into every other mug of water in the world.
01:12:04
So if someone gets a mug of your molecules and be plenty more plenty of molecules to go.
01:12:11
So if I do a big big inhale, I'm also I'm inhaling air that contains molecules
01:12:16
that all of my living relatives once inhaled. Yes. and go further back. Jesus inhaled
01:12:23
him. Muhammad and with every breath. Yes. Every breath. This is the the the
01:12:29
the oneness of it all. That's why it's a beautiful thing. Astrophysics.
01:12:36
I wouldn't live without it. Do you think it's makes us kinder learning about the universe or do you
01:12:41
think it makes us more nihilistic and narcissistic? And no. If you learn about it as you should, you shouldn't be nihilistic. There's no
01:12:48
force of nihilism in the knowledge, wisdom, and insight you get by studying the universe.
01:12:55
You you will never find marching armies led by astrophysicists to go slaughter one another.
01:13:01
We the cosmic perspective prevents that.
01:13:08
The cosmic perspective. Yeah. By the way, if you look at the chapter titles in there, they're each
01:13:14
pairs of words that we've all used and but we've argued over many of them over
01:13:20
our Thanksgiving dinner. I don't know if there's a version of Thanksgiving in the UK. Every it's maybe it's just Christmas. Everybody gathers and the
01:13:26
crazy uncles and aunts come in and you got to argue with them about, you know, and you then you you're reminded why you
01:13:33
only see them once a year because No, there topics in there. Color and race is in there. Law and Order, Body and Mind,
01:13:42
Meatarians and Vegetarians, Life and Death. A lot of reflective moments in there.
01:13:49
So, this book though it's all these topics that people fight about. Its goal is to say you think that and you think
01:13:55
that, you got to look at it this way. It's not meat in the middle. No, it's
01:14:02
meat on a plane of existence above what you're arguing. and you'll look down on what you're arguing and realize how
01:14:08
ridiculous it is. That's the goal of that book. Chapter 10 of the book says, "Human
01:14:14
physiology may be overrated." What do you mean by that?
01:14:19
Well, you know, we like to think of ourselves at the top of
01:14:25
evolutionary uh properties, but it's really your mind
01:14:30
surely, but not much else. You know, we
01:14:37
It's odd because we always imagine aliens having humanoid bodies. Yeah. And there's no reason for that if they
01:14:44
come from another planet. Most life on Earth doesn't have a humanoid body. The banana doesn't have a humanoid body and
01:14:50
you have DNA in common with it. You don't have any DNA in common with an alien from another planet. Yet, it's walking around with a neck, eyes, nose,
01:14:57
mouth, head, ears, shoulders, arms, fingers, kneecaps, feet. Really? Is that
01:15:05
is that is that your best imagination that you can come up with? Alien from another planet.
01:15:12
Is the Is the universe infinite? I've often wondered that. Does it just go on forever or is there a
01:15:17
We're not given reason to think it doesn't. But our horizon has a edge. What we can see?
01:15:23
Yeah. But there's no reason to think. So you're you're a ship at sea. Mhm.
01:15:28
And you have a horizon. Are you saying that's the extent of the ocean? No,
01:15:34
because if you sail towards the horizon, more horizon shows up and you keep that up until you hit land.
01:15:42
So in the universe, we have our horizon
01:15:47
and if we went to that horizon, we'd have a whole other horizon beyond that. If we traveled to that horizon, be a
01:15:54
whole other horizon there. The question is how how far does that go? We don't
01:16:00
know. We have no idea.
01:16:05
It's simpler mathematically to think it goes forever. It's curious how there's some equations
01:16:10
where infinities work just fine in the equation. Uh so we
01:16:16
don't know. We can talk about to our own horizon. That's it. There's so many people saying that
01:16:21
they've seen aliens. We had someone on this podcast actually that said they'd seen aliens. Not they'd seen aliens, but
01:16:27
they had evidence that aliens existed and they worked in the military and said that they'd uh you know some of these
01:16:33
spacecraft footage that you see from the Navy. Did they show you the alien?
01:16:38
No, but you see the videos of the things bouncing around in the sky. Oh, fuzzy videos. Fuzzy videos. So those are UFOs. They're not aliens.
01:16:45
UFOs. Yeah. There's a difference. Oh, yeah. Many people equate the two, but if you see something in the sky and you don't
01:16:51
know what it is, it's a UFO. And what does the U stand for? unidentified.
01:16:58
Until you can identify it, it's a UFO. And because it does things that you
01:17:03
don't understand, you cannot equate that with it being an
01:17:08
alien. You just said you don't know what it is. Wow, that's amazing. I don't know what
01:17:14
it is. Therefore, it must be a alien. If once you just said you don't know
01:17:19
what it is, that's the end of the sentence. You can't go on and say therefore it must be anything. You can be impressed
01:17:26
with videos that have no explanation. I don't have a problem with that. But
01:17:32
you want to turn around and say aliens. You want to say it's a government cover up. Do you really think the government
01:17:37
is that competent? Often the same people who say there's a masterminded government. They're the
01:17:42
same people who complain that the government is a bloated bureaucracy, inefficient bureaucracy that should be
01:17:48
replaced by private enterprise. They're the same people making those same statements.
01:17:54
So I I I love the aliens. I want to meet them, too. My My people, the astrophysics community has been
01:18:00
searching for aliens for decades. And you've never found evidence of any? Not.
01:18:07
So the community of amateur astronomers in the world, okay, amateur astronomy is
01:18:14
that's a badge of honor because you mean you know the night sky and you own a telescope, but it's not like amateur
01:18:19
neurosurgeon, okay? You don't want to go to an amateur neurosurgeon, but you want to know the
01:18:24
night sky, go to an amateur astronomer. Amateur astronomers know the night sky. They know what the sun, moon, and stars
01:18:30
are doing every night. They know. They're very good at climate and weather because that affects whether things are
01:18:36
visible. So, they know when weather systems come in and go out and what things look like.
01:18:42
You would think if aliens were about up and about that amateur astronomers would
01:18:49
have seen more of them than anyone else. But they've seen less
01:18:54
because we know what we're looking at. It's kind of that simple. The moment you
01:19:00
know what you're looking at, it's an IFO, isn't it? Yeah. It's not a UFO. And so, yeah, I want to
01:19:07
meet the aliens, but you're gonna show me fuzzy video, or you're going to say you have an alien, but it's in a locked
01:19:13
box and you're not going to show it. If you have an alien in a lock box and you're not going to show it, that's the
01:19:19
same thing to a scientist as not having an alien at all. Could you make the case for why aliens
01:19:26
probably do exist and also the case for why they probably don't exist? No. No, they surely exist in this
01:19:33
universe. The universe is 14 billion years old and the ingredients of life on Earth are the most common ingredients in
01:19:39
the universe and life began on Earth almost as quickly as it possibly could have.
01:19:45
When Earth finally cooled down after it being formed, it was about 200 million years first signs of single cellled
01:19:52
life. So even though we can't duplicate that yet, we don't know how. That's a
01:19:57
frontier of biology. Earth didn't seem to have problems getting the job done within 200 million years. That's Earth.
01:20:05
Now you have exoplanets everywhere across the galaxy to suggest that life on Earth is alone in the universe. You'd
01:20:13
have to have some point of philosophy that requires you believe that because it's not derived from actual uh evidence
01:20:20
or observations of the universe itself. So uh aliens usually people mean
01:20:27
intelligent aliens, but we're happy to find any kind of life at all. bacterial life that would be that would transform
01:20:34
biology. What about in our galaxy in the Milky Way galaxy? Yeah, the galaxy is the most sensible place to So, we've looked we've looked
01:20:40
for exoplanets. So, a planet orbiting another star cuz you're going to look for life. We want we presume it's going
01:20:47
to be on a planet. So, if this table is the galaxy Mhm. and the solar system would be about
01:20:53
right there. We've searched a circle about this big for exoplanets. And what's the solar
01:20:59
system versus the It's just the sun and its planets. Oh, okay. Yeah. Solar system.
01:21:04
And then that's our solar system there. And we are part of several hundred billion stars in the galaxy.
01:21:12
Mhm. And this galaxy is one of perhaps as many as a trillion galaxies in the
01:21:19
observable universe. So to say that we're alone, that's just you're being you're being philosophically
01:21:25
irresponsible. So this table is the the galaxy. Yeah. If it were the galaxy
01:21:30
and we've searched a coin coin. Yes, that's a good word to use. A coin sized volume of this galaxy. We've
01:21:36
searched for exoplanets and by association life. So folks at the SETI
01:21:43
Institute, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Uh they come up with an analogy. But there
01:21:49
people have said, "Well, we haven't found life yet, so maybe there's no life anywhere." And we say, "No, take a cup
01:21:55
and scoop it into the ocean." That's like saying, "Hm,
01:22:02
the ocean has no whales in it." Is that the equivalent? Yeah, it's equivalent in terms of the
01:22:08
space of of searching because it's not only in in physical space, but it's in
01:22:14
time. Suppose aliens sent radio signals to us and they arrived 2,000 years ago.
01:22:22
Do the Romans have radio telescopes? No. But we would all count them as intelligent.
01:22:28
So, communication requires intelligence and technology. How long have we had technology to do
01:22:34
that? 80 years. On the chance of probability, do you think there are aliens in the Milky Way
01:22:40
galaxy? Yeah. Oh, sure. You think there are? I don't see why not. It's a calculation you can do. I did it with two colleagues
01:22:47
of mine. We have about a hundred civilizations in the galaxy alive. Now,
01:22:53
that's not many out of the total number of stars, but again, a civilization has to evolve out of whatever it was, and
01:22:59
it's a tiny little slice of time relative to how long the planet has been there.
01:23:05
100 different living civilizations on the word living because living can mean many things.
01:23:11
Well, I mean, Mars might have had life, but it would be dead today on the
01:23:16
surface. So, we're looking for living civilizations. And does that excite you?
01:23:21
Yes, completely. But you want to now tell me it has visited
01:23:27
you in with fuzzy lights in the sky and no one has like brought forth an
01:23:34
alien. I I need better evidence because you're making an extraordinary claim. Humans fascination with meeting these
01:23:40
aliens when we've got crazy species we've never met on our own planet. That's a good point. And plus, what do
01:23:46
we need real aliens for when we have Hollywood? The funny part to me is we have no
01:23:53
knowledge that aliens want to harm us. But we do have knowledge that humans
01:24:00
want to harm humans. And any encounter between an advanced civilization and one
01:24:06
that was less advanced in the history of exploration has never boded well for the
01:24:12
less advanced civilization. So for me, we are describing aliens
01:24:20
not as we think they would be, but as we
01:24:25
know we are. Mhm. To one another. It's a mirror.
01:24:31
And we've only got to play out what we would do as well if we found an alien civilization. What would humans do? I
01:24:37
mean, I think we'd go and try and steal some of them and bring them here. Yeah. Well, no.
01:24:42
They're probably smarter than us. That's like that's like worms saying,
01:24:48
"Oh, we found some humans. What should we do with them? Should we corral them?" No.
01:24:53
If if aliens came here, they clearly are more advanced than we are cuz we haven't left low Earth orbit in 53 years. So, if
01:25:02
they cross the galaxy to visit us, oh, we're going to take shoot a gun at them. Don't laugh at us,
01:25:10
you know. In all the movies though, we beat them. That's so funny. I've never thought
01:25:15
about that before that. Yeah, we just shoot guns at them. You shoot guns at them and did it really make a difference? You know,
01:25:21
we put like Brad Pitt or whoever in like a Tom Cruz and a What's your favorite space movie?
01:25:26
Space movie. Well, sci-fi is The Matrix.
01:25:32
Why? I love everything about it. The story is tight. It's one physics error in it, but
01:25:38
without it, they don't have a movie. So you got to give it I can write him a hall pass which I feel
01:25:44
that I have the power to do. What was the error? Everyone's going to be wondering what the error was in the Oh, it's not an error. It's just they
01:25:51
got it's bad physics in it. Okay. So if you if you remember the AI
01:26:00
computer that's running everything needs an energy source. And so they're growing
01:26:06
humans in these pods knowing that each human radiates at about 80 watts. They
01:26:13
didn't give that number, but it's a true fact. Uh 80 watts, like an 80 watt bulb. That's how much energy you are consuming
01:26:20
and using. That's a energy rate. Okay. So they and that's one of the writers
01:26:26
must have known that and said that's kind of cool. Let's use humans as an energy source for the machines. All right. So they're these pods of humans
01:26:33
and they grow the humans from childhood to adulthood and they put in their head
01:26:39
a world that they're living in which is just in their head and they think it's real but it's not. That's the matrix.
01:26:47
Okay. But wait a minute, how do the humans get their energy?
01:26:53
They feed the humans food. Well, why are you feeding food to humans
01:27:00
and then using the energy from the humans for the machine? Bypass the middleman and just feed the machine.
01:27:07
Something called the second law of thermody first or second law of thermodynamics. Anytime energy changes
01:27:12
from one form to another, it's not 100% efficient. You drive a
01:27:18
car, if you drive a combustion engine car, you drive it 50 miles, get out, the engine's hot.
01:27:25
Where' the heat come from? That's wasted energy converting chemical energy of the
01:27:30
gasoline to kinetic energy of your car. It is never 100% perfect. So they are
01:27:37
losing energy in with this middleman and they should just feed themselves whatever the food they're feeding the
01:27:43
humans. And if they're smart, they would not have humans at all. But then there's no
01:27:50
movie. So that's my point. Rode him a hall pass. You're okay with that. Are you an easy person to watch movies like
01:27:56
this? Yeah, I'm not I'm not that I'm not the guy you think I am. I will watch it and silently Yes, I'll I'll gather a list of
01:28:04
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Express. That's adobe. Stephven. What's the one outstanding question, if
01:30:14
there is one, that you're desperate to know the answer to? I don't live life that way.
01:30:20
Really? Yeah. It's a sensible question that you're asking me. I don't want to diminish the sensibility of it, but I
01:30:26
want to say that that's not how I view the world. The world is not there's the
01:30:33
one question I need answered. the world is what do I need to learn
01:30:40
so that I'm standing in a place I can yet imagine asking a question I have yet to think of
01:30:50
in other words as the area of our knowledge grows so too does the perimeter of our
01:30:56
ignorance and so you say what one question no there'll be a bunch of questions the
01:31:03
area grows some more. I'm standing in a new place now. There's a question I didn't even think could be asked before
01:31:10
and that's the question that matters there and then. But then there's another question later on as this frontier
01:31:17
continues to advance. So I don't think about the one question or the two questions that matter. I think about
01:31:24
questions yet to be dreamt of that we don't even see because we haven't taken
01:31:31
the frontier to that vista yet. And so yeah, it's some of that that's unknowable, but I kind of like that
01:31:39
there's the German poet Rainor Maria Rilkkey. One of the poems, I don't remember all the lines, but the one that
01:31:45
matters to me most is learn to love the questions themselves.
01:31:51
You're trying to find answers and I'm trying to find the questions. Learn to love the questions themselves.
01:31:58
This kind of brings me back to the top of the conversation where I was talking about I've got a lot more questions these days.
01:32:04
That's good. Love it. Sometimes it's difficult and not all questions can be answered
01:32:09
given the state of knowledge. Some questions are illegitimate questions. Not all questions are legit questions.
01:32:15
For example, at what temperature does the number seven melt? What kind of
01:32:21
cheese is the moon made out of? These are just because the nouns and
01:32:27
verbs are lined up and there's a question mark doesn't mean the and by the way when you're in the facing the
01:32:33
unknown you don't know if your question later on would look that ridiculous.
01:32:39
What separates the great scientist from the average scientist is that they queued into what questions to ask.
01:32:45
Do you think we hurt ourselves by asking these invalid questions? No. No. You need you don't know if it's
01:32:52
invalid. like the I know the moon is not made out of cheese today.
01:32:57
I know that because we've been there. We brought back moon rocks. So today that question is invalid. But if you never
01:33:04
imagine ever going to the moon and you don't know anything about physics or rocks and you look up and it looks like
01:33:09
a hunk of cheese you're eating, it's a completely legit question. There's a bit of a there is a bit of a conversation
01:33:15
raging in my friendship circle at the moment about religion and meaning and what's the point. Should we be arguing
01:33:21
about these these things about meaning religion? Is there any is there any benefit? I think meaning is a very personal thing
01:33:27
to people. So why should you jump in the middle of their attempt to establish meaning in their life? We're all very
01:33:34
different people. And so meaning ought to be different. If meaning was the same for everyone, you just publish it,
01:33:40
everyone reads it, and we all have meaning. No, you got to make it yourself. Some people want to
01:33:46
search for it. Fine. I don't have a problem with that. I'm not searching for meaning. I'm creating meaning in my life
01:33:52
because I can control that. Not that it's important to control everything. Uh, you know, I I like magic as an adult
01:34:00
because it reminds me I can still be fooled. Okay. That's so I don't I don't
01:34:06
need to know everything. I just need to maintain curiosity. And you've got kids, so
01:34:13
29 and 25. Is that the most meaningful thing you've done in your life? raising kids.
01:34:18
Yeah. Uh it's among the more meaningful things that I would say they did a lot of their own raising because they're highly
01:34:24
independent and so there's a limit to how much I should take credit for who
01:34:30
and what they have become. They're a lot of what they did themselves. But my wife
01:34:36
who's a science scientist, she's a mathematical physicist. We we made sure
01:34:42
that both our kids were scientifically literate at an early age. by age 13
01:34:48
certified. So at that point I said I don't care what grade you get from now on. I don't care. I know no one will
01:34:55
exploit you for your lack of curiosity and knowledge about the the objective
01:35:02
universe. And you know we'd be at a a dinner party and they're like they're in middle
01:35:09
school, right? and someone says, "Oh, I had a bad day cuz Mercury was in retrograde." And and and my son would
01:35:16
say, "What actually happened to you today?" Has that happened on days when there was they know how to ask
01:35:22
questions? Okay. By the way, if you just reject what someone says outright,
01:35:28
that's as intellectually lazy as it is to accept what they say outright. Mhm.
01:35:34
What's harder, but I think more fun is lining up a series of questions to probe
01:35:40
the statement to explore what is going on in the thoughts and in
01:35:46
the claims of the person with whom you're conversing. So if someone says, I have these
01:35:52
crystals, you rub them together, it'll heal you. My kids would say, what are the crystals made of? And what tests
01:35:59
have you made for this? and could be could the healing have been explained in another way and in what way are the and
01:36:07
they start asking these questions and then the person will probably just walk away because they would not have the
01:36:12
answers to all of them and then you know that's remember I said if an argument lasts more than 5 minutes then both sides are wrong the person would there's
01:36:19
nothing there's no place for that to go to the truly curious person here's
01:36:24
another interesting fact crystals represent the lowest energy state of the
01:36:29
atomic or molecular configuration that it's comprised of the lowest energy state. So people say I have crystal
01:36:36
energy. No, you don't. You have the lowest energy state of that of that silicon dioxide that you're calling
01:36:42
quartz. There is no there's no energy you're going to take out of it. It is in its lowest energy state. These are
01:36:49
people who have never had chemistry. And and as an educator, I I don't want to make fun of this, but when people think
01:36:56
they know something and are audacious about it, when in fact they don't, that
01:37:01
makes it much harder for an educator to break through. Horoscopes.
01:37:09
Yeah. Well, I've got some stats for you here. Sure, Neil. Surveys find that roughly
01:37:14
80% of Gen Z believe in astrology to some degree. Mhm. 72% of those Gen Z and millennials
01:37:21
allowed astrology to influence major life decisions like romance, health, work, and education. And many Gen Z's now are
01:37:29
checking their horoscopes weekly. Yeah. I we live in a free country. So I
01:37:34
don't I'm not going to try to stop them. Uh what would be sad is if that number
01:37:40
got to 100%. And then then you wouldn't be generating scientists or engineers or
01:37:45
people who the objective truths of the world matter. And then the civilization
01:37:52
just goes back to the cave where everything that happened in the natural world was mysterious
01:37:58
created by forces beyond our knowledge and understanding. And
01:38:03
uh this is the the title of one of Carl Sean's books, The Demon Haunted World.
01:38:09
Science as a candle in the dark. That was the subtitle of that book. So if you
01:38:16
want to think you're not in control of your fate because the sun, moon, and planets are. It's like I said, it's a
01:38:22
free country. Is there anything that you've learned that the universe does to influence us?
01:38:29
Yeah. The sun rises and I wake up because I want to be awake during the day. Yes. That people aren't.
01:38:34
Yeah. The tide comes in and I move my my my my beach chair back because the tide
01:38:40
came in. Yeah. There are things that influence my behavior. Yes.
01:38:48
But it's not much more than that. Uh earth is tipped on its axis. So we have seasons. I buy coats and wear them
01:38:55
in the winter. That influences my behavior. What's your star sign?
01:39:01
Well, I once had someone take a class of mine at the Hayden Planetarium that I taught on astrophysics. And at the end,
01:39:08
she like the second to last class, she came to say, "Oh, thank you. Thank you for the class. I enjoy I'm enjoying the
01:39:14
class, but I want you to know I'm an astrologer and I'm taking the class so I can cast horoscopes better." So, I said,
01:39:21
"It's really working for you?" She said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." She said, "For example, what's your horoscope sign?"
01:39:26
And I said, "Shouldn't you be able to figure that out?
01:39:33
If all this works and you cast horoscopes, you ought to tell me what my sign is." She said, "Okay, okay." And
01:39:40
she said, "Are you Gemini?" I said, "No." "Cancer?" That's I said, "No." "Uh, it
01:39:47
must be Leo." I said, "No." Eight horoscopes later,
01:39:52
she gets the correct answer and says, "I knew it. So, I'm simply saying that
01:40:01
her ninth guess out of 12 was correct and she declares, "I knew it."
01:40:08
Why do people want to believe in things like this? I I think they want the world to still
01:40:15
have mysteries because mysteries are beautiful things. However, the world still has mysteries. They're
01:40:21
just different mysteries from whatever there used to be. And so follow the
01:40:27
mysteries where they take you. And there's another branch of all of us who must have answers to every question
01:40:34
because they're not learning to love the questions. They only want to love the answer. So they say, "What was around
01:40:40
before the big bang?" I said, "I don't know. We got top people. Something had to be around." I said, "I don't know. Must have been God." So there's their
01:40:46
answer that then they're happy. What happens after death? Well, it looks like you rot in the ground, but
01:40:53
otherwise, and that's what physics, it's got to be something your soul. I said, there's got to be the go heaven. Okay,
01:40:59
that's their answer. They've got their answer. And if that's your answer, at every turn, you you make a you're not as
01:41:06
good an investigator of the unknown because you just invented the answer to the unknown. You're content. What is
01:41:13
dark matter? Dark? I don't know. We got top people working. Is that the the spirit of God?
01:41:19
Okay. then that person won't walk into a lab to continue to study what dark matter
01:41:25
and dark energy is. I don't mind if you want to say it's God, but don't let that stop your curiosity. But if you say it's
01:41:31
God and then you're done, then you're not very useful in the lab.
01:41:36
Those people seem to be happier and healthier, though, which is the surprising thing. Religious people. Well, again, so it it could be because
01:41:43
they believe there's a God that tells them who to sleep with and where to eat and how to pray, or because they have a
01:41:49
regular dose of community. I don't know that those are completely separable variables. There are people
01:41:57
who they love and care about that they see every week, which is not happening with so many people today. Do you think you would be happier if you
01:42:03
believed in God? I'm a pretty happy guy. Do you think you'd be happier?
01:42:09
I don't know. I see people I've seen very happy people in uh celebrating
01:42:15
their version of God. But then there are other people who really happy in their version of God. And here's the problem.
01:42:23
Deeply religious people typically find other religions
01:42:31
deeply religious people will declare for themselves and others in that religion that all the other religions are false.
01:42:37
False. And if not false, just make preposterous claims. It is so obvious to
01:42:43
them how false all the other religions are. Now you go to this religion. It is
01:42:49
obvious how preposterous the rest of the religions are. You go around religion to religion.
01:42:55
And so what's really going on here is devout
01:43:00
people in so many of these religions are atheists to every religion but their own.
01:43:08
every religion but their own. Okay. How can a mountain have moved to Muhammad?
01:43:13
That can't be. Okay. Oh, but yes, the creator of the universe impregnated a
01:43:18
woman in the Middle East 2,000 years ago. That's more believable than
01:43:23
anything in the Quran for this person. Okay. And then the Jews are saying, "You're Jesus is the son of God. What?
01:43:30
You are you crazy? Where'd you get that from? He's a good Jew, nice prophet, but son of God, you're going too far." So
01:43:37
everybody's saying what's not true. So they're atheist for every other they
01:43:42
just don't believe any other religion. Whereas an actual atheist just has one more religion to that category.
01:43:50
It's your religion. The atheist agrees with you that all the other religions are preposterous in
01:43:56
their claims. But they also believe they also think your religion is preposterous. And
01:44:03
people don't accept that. they don't it doesn't land well. So I don't have any problems with people being religious. I
01:44:09
don't have any issues with that. It's um I don't try to impose my I other people
01:44:16
try to do it. I've seen them do this. I have a quote where I'm misqued just
01:44:23
because they want me on their side. Okay, you ready? It's a simple quote.
01:44:31
If every time I tell you science doesn't understand it and you say well God must be that God made the universe because we
01:44:39
don't God made life because we don't know how to make life yet. God. If that's if that is your definition and
01:44:45
understanding of God, then as science progresses, it will
01:44:51
solve these questions, pushing the God back outward
01:44:59
to places that have yet to be discovered. And so the quote is, "If to
01:45:05
you God is where science has yet to tread, then God is an ever receding pocket of
01:45:13
scientific ignorance." That's that that references what
01:45:19
philosophers have called God of the Gaps. It goes way back thousands of years. We don't understand it. There's a
01:45:25
God. The storm is Poseidon. Okay? Lightning bolt struck. It's Zeus. All
01:45:30
right? That's God of the Gaps. God of the gaps is a timehonored exercise in
01:45:36
human civilization. And all I'm saying is that statement
01:45:42
is objectively true because it's an if statement. If to you God is where science has yet
01:45:49
to tread, then as science continues to tread, you're a pocket, a shrinking pocket of scientific. That's your God.
01:45:57
Okay? It's not an opinion. There's a statement of an if statement. The consequences of an if statement. I've
01:46:03
had people take the second half and put it on a t-shirt. God is an ever receding pocket of
01:46:09
scientific uh ignorance. Neil deGrasse Tyson is not what I said.
01:46:15
That's half of what I said. And that's only true if to you God is where science
01:46:20
has yet to tread. But to pull that out and make that the truth, no. I would never make such a statement ever. You're
01:46:28
66, right? Hang on. Hang on. I will be 67 in a month. In a month.
01:46:37
Okay. So, you're a month from this recording. So, I'm 33. Okay. Half my age. Exactly half. I I was wondering, you're
01:46:44
a very wise man. What is the advice that you wish someone had said to you at 33
01:46:52
that you could give to me now? I have no such advice, and I'll tell you why.
01:46:59
If you're alert and you're smart, alert meaning you notice things and you're you're smart and you you learn
01:47:14
living life itself is the lesson.
01:47:20
So if so a version of what you just asked is what given what you know today what would you tell yourself if you met
01:47:27
yourself when you were 15 20 25 30 whatever and I said I wouldn't tell him anything
01:47:34
because if I gave a bit of wisdom to I say you're about to do that but
01:47:40
don't do that. Okay. There's no better lesson than doing
01:47:45
something and learning that you shouldn't do it. That's the best lesson.
01:47:51
We don't live life because there's a list of things that other people said don't do. You're going to explore your
01:47:56
life. That's what you're going to do. And some things are great and some things you don't want to do again. Some
01:48:02
things you're bad. That's where the wisdom comes from.
01:48:08
You earn it. It's the most It's the most It's the
01:48:14
strongest kind of wisdom you can have, provided you learn from a mistake. If you're just an idiot and you just keep
01:48:20
making the mistake, my advice for you is don't make the same mistake twice. But that's you don't need me for that.
01:48:28
So, you'll make a decision about this podcast or some business decision. And no, it didn't turn out right. Here's a
01:48:34
better example of this. You ready? This is a very American kind of story I'm about to tell. immigrant comes over
01:48:41
back when that was a thing you could do. Comes to the United States and they work
01:48:46
hard, very hardworking. They first sweep the the street in front
01:48:52
of a store up front and then they're in the store and they learn the trade and then the owner dies and they take over
01:48:58
the trade and they're working hard and they're scrapping and they and then they buys the adjacent store and they build
01:49:04
the thing and becomes and then he moves and he lives in a big house and he has kids. Okay.
01:49:11
And he says to himself, "When I was your age, I had to like
01:49:19
scrge for food and I had to like sweep things and I want to make sure my kids
01:49:25
don't have to do that. I want to make sure they don't have to do that." Okay? So, you provide
01:49:33
things for them so they don't have to do this. And now they grow up and they're
01:49:38
adults and they're dead beats. They have no motivation. They have no
01:49:45
ambition. They have no vision statement because everything got handed to them.
01:49:51
And what what does the adult say to the kids? Where did I go wrong? I gave you
01:49:57
everything I didn't have. That's where they went wrong. Because
01:50:02
they gave the kids everything he didn't have. And what made that person was what they struggled, the the decisions they
01:50:09
had to make, the decisions they got right, the decisions they got wrong, who they met, how they treated people. This
01:50:15
is life experience. And it doesn't come on a bumper sticker. Doesn't come on a what's the secret?
01:50:23
Just like going to someone's home and one of the one of the hosts is a is
01:50:28
actually a trained chef, right? and maybe worked in a restaurant and they prepare this exquisite meal and you said
01:50:34
this is delicious. What's your secret? Oh, the secret? I went to chef school
01:50:42
for six years. That's the secret. You're thinking this is one sentence I could
01:50:47
tell you and then you that'll make everything better. No. No.
01:50:53
Just stay alert. Learn new stuff every day and learn from your mistakes because
01:51:00
those lessons are greater than someone just telling you to not do it.
01:51:06
Then you have no such life experience to build into the wisdom that you want to acquire in the years to come.
01:51:14
My last question for you is and I I hear it the I didn't think you'd ever have a last question.
01:51:20
No. Yeah. I mean for now I should say my last question for now but um my last question for now and I kind of hear it
01:51:25
in between some of the things you say is and I've just moved here so I've just moved to Los Angeles. How do you feel
01:51:30
about America right now? Well, you know, it's a free country and we vote in our leaders and right now
01:51:38
there's a whole set of people in charge that are doing different things from what had happened in previous
01:51:45
uh years, previous leaderships, even previous leaders of that same political party. The what's going on is very
01:51:52
different from anything that I think people would have predicted. A lot of people like
01:51:58
complaining about leadership, but we live in a country where we choose our leaders. So, we're going to complain
01:52:04
about the leadership. You should be complaining about the people about the electorate. I'm an educator. I I've
01:52:11
never I I've never
01:52:17
complained about politicians. They represent people. I was once in the
01:52:23
Rayburn office building, Washington DC, in the science committee's room,
01:52:29
beautifully decorated with science um art and sculptures and things. One of
01:52:34
the members of the science committee back then was a young earth creationist.
01:52:41
Young earth creationists. Universe created in six days, earth created in 6,000 years. At most, 10,000 years. And
01:52:48
I knew he was going to be there. And I thought to myself, do I grab him by the lapels and say, "What are you thinking
01:52:54
on his science comm?" And then I thought, "No, no.
01:53:00
If he thinks that, presumably, so does his electorate.
01:53:05
They voted him in. And this electorate of fellow citizens,
01:53:10
as am I in this country, so I can't indict him. Let me go have a
01:53:15
conversation with the folks who voted for him." I said, "Why do you think this?" and you would consider this and
01:53:21
that's my duty as an educator not to hit anybody on the head who's in Washington. So, do we blame the educators and the
01:53:27
media people like you know people like me that No, I that's the blame game is I don't
01:53:34
feel that way. My parents when we they showed us the images
01:53:40
of the dogs and the water hoses on the protesters and in the south American
01:53:45
South they were never bitter. They said these people don't know any better. They don't
01:53:53
know any differently. you have to talk to them and you know teach them. That's very
01:53:59
different from saying holding up your fist saying I'm going to fight them because they're my enemy.
01:54:06
It's I want to teach them because they're my fellow citizens. And that's how I feel. So my worry is
01:54:14
that there are decisions made that are not in the best interest of the people who voted for those decisions. the
01:54:20
longer term implications are um could be devastating if you cut basic science.
01:54:27
Basic science feeds engineering. Engineering feeds economies. And so if
01:54:32
you don't think basic science matters because you don't either understand the title of the research or the scientists
01:54:38
didn't communicate it interestingly enough, whatever, and you say this is a waste of money, take it all out. Let's
01:54:44
just do the engineering. You'll be oified in place. And is that what's happened? We are on
01:54:50
the brink of that happening right now. That's correct. The average person has no idea about this. I've tried to, you know, illuminate the
01:54:57
public about it. It's easy to say that basic science doesn't matter or can't matter or will never matter because we
01:55:05
don't know yet. Right now is the centennial decade. So let's go back to the 1920s where quantum
01:55:12
physics was developed. If you were around back then, what would you have said? Why are you studying
01:55:18
atoms? who can't even see atoms. Don't waste your time. You're a brilliant person. Go work on this other problem
01:55:23
that we have in society. And it would take decades.
01:55:30
But the information technology revolution
01:55:39
has as its core the creation, storage, and retrieval of
01:55:44
digital information. that can only happen with the exploitation of the
01:55:49
quantum. So this decade of science physics that was discovered by the 1950s it was like
01:55:57
whoa this is some important physics here. No one would have known that at the time.
01:56:03
Why? Let me keep going. Was it 1876 uh
01:56:08
Philadelphia Expo? Alexander Graham Bell showcases his new
01:56:14
contraption, the telephone. And people say, "Wow, this is kind of
01:56:20
cool. You should read what people wrote about it. This is a great invention. I can imagine there might be one in every
01:56:26
city in the future.
01:56:31
in this book uh the uh that one. Yeah. There's a whole chapter called science and technology
01:56:38
where I chronicle I chronicle how people think about the technology of
01:56:45
their day and how they always get it wrong when they predict the future
01:56:51
because foundational science comes in at the bottom and you don't see that coming and it gurgles its way up. Clever
01:56:57
engineers apply it and then You have an iPad.
01:57:05
Neil, thank you so much. Well, thanks for for having me back. This is our second time together. It You bought out the bookstore here. What
01:57:11
did you do? Yes. We wanted to to come prepared. I mean, you have you write the most incredible books. Um, and you talk in
01:57:18
the most incredible ways. I said this to you last time, but you're one of the most incredible storytellers I've ever heard. you make something which is I
01:57:24
really didn't have a huge amount of interest in in school suddenly interesting to us as adults which is a remarkable thing.
01:57:30
So thank you for doing what you do. We do have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. Oh, is that right? Yes. Okay.
01:57:36
And they don't know who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is how good are you at knowing
01:57:42
what you will regret and is there anything you do regret? Yeah, I think
01:57:48
regrets are things that you only realize when it's too late. Otherwise, you would
01:57:53
have preempted it and not have to regret it. So,
01:57:58
uh I don't know that I'm any better than anyone else at it. Cuz if you're good at it, you'll never be in a position to
01:58:05
have to do something that you would regret. The fact is you went past something that you did and say, "Damn, I
01:58:11
shouldn't have I got to regret that." So I to be good at knowing in advance that
01:58:16
you're going to regret something. That's almost an impossible scenario. If I'm
01:58:21
good at seeing it, then I would never have to regret anything because I would have preempted it. So for all of us, the
01:58:27
fact that we have regrets is we move past something that we did. It was like, damn, I I regret that after the fact.
01:58:34
Do you have any regrets? Uh I was a a
01:58:40
uh in college I majoring in physics and I think I was a junior. There were students that came
01:58:47
in from other schools for a summer program. Mhm. Okay. High school seniors. I think they
01:58:54
were uh they might have been freshmen in their college but I think they were high school students. And I was a men not a
01:59:00
mentor but I would guide them in these research projects. Then at the end we had to write an evaluation of them.
01:59:08
And there's one student I wrote an evaluation that was accurate
01:59:15
but unnecessary.
01:59:22
I said he pretends he knows things that he doesn't and he's, you know, he's
01:59:30
faking this and he's and I didn't yet know
01:59:36
how to speak encouragingly about someone
01:59:41
separate from just speaking factually about someone. So, is that an art? Is it a science to
01:59:49
do that? I don't know, but I know I didn't have it at the time. I just simply described what I saw and I said
01:59:56
he, you know, he this is not going to work. He this this it was very deflating
02:00:04
to him. Mhm. And uh considering that at the time I'm
02:00:11
majoring in physics at Harvard, he's coming from some high school somewhere and I'm a Harvard
02:00:19
student telling him that, you know, he ain't and I should not have done
02:00:24
that. Did he contact you later? No. He might have taken up another
02:00:30
field. I don't know. But so I I regret that. But it would take me four years to even realize that that was a regrettable
02:00:36
thing because I didn't know how to, you know, as an educator, you want to
02:00:42
encourage people. You see where the weaknesses are and figure out ways to have that person eradicate them, improve
02:00:49
upon them, rather than just say, "This is not working. Go home."
02:00:54
Why? Why? I regret that. And that's probably the thing I regret most in life. Really? Yeah. because it was who knows what
02:01:03
consequences that has on that person's life. And you remembered that. Oh yes. Oh my gosh. Yes.
02:01:10
What how how do you remember that? Cuz you wrote you write it down in his report card or whatever on this assessment.
02:01:15
Time goes on. Does something happen for you to think back to what you wrote?
02:01:21
Uh well, I've written many letters of reference for people, more than I can count. Mhm.
02:01:26
So I think every time I write a letter of reference, I think about how I could have written that letter back then.
02:01:32
That's a regret and I live with that. I can see you live with it. Yeah. So I think I made up for it
02:01:41
just in how many people and there are other people who needed help and so you find out how they can improve it and
02:01:47
advise on that so that everybody lifts up. That's how you make a better world.
02:01:53
And it goes back to what you said at the start. You wanted on your tombstone, which is certainly something you've already done in droves more so than I
02:02:00
think anybody. So you tell me I can die now. Is that is that what you just you just said that? Or you can go on holiday or
02:02:06
it's up to you. Um but thank you so much for being who you are. You're a huge inspiration to me. I know Jack is a mega
02:02:12
mega fan of yours as well and has um loves your work and you're the both the reason that I
02:02:18
well I I I let go of my religious belief at 18 years old and I don't blame me for that. I don't
02:02:24
want you to lose your religion because of me. No, but I just said I let go of my religious belief at 18 years old and I became atheist agnostic. Then I became
02:02:31
really agnostic. But then I kind of fell in love with the universe and I fell in love in the universe because of you and
02:02:36
because of Cosmos, which is one of my favorite things ever to watch. and I found all the curiosity and awe and
02:02:41
magic that I needed to find by by reading your work and watching the the wonderful movies that you've made. So,
02:02:47
thank you so much for that. Well, the universe is a rich repository of
02:02:54
spiritual fulfillment. Yeah. If I may. Yes. To say the least. Yeah. Wow. And
02:02:59
your book is exactly that. I highly recommend everybody goes and checks it out. It's out on I think it's the 21st of October.
02:03:04
Oh, yeah. Yeah. The the the next installment in Merlin. Yeah. In October. Yeah. I'll link it on the screen. I'll
02:03:10
link it below. Highly recommend. It's called just visiting this planet. So, so I'd lied before. I can give you
02:03:15
some advice. Please. Ready? Yeah. This is 67y old advice. Yeah. At no time
02:03:23
should you overvalue
02:03:29
your own thoughts.
02:03:34
You should you should you should allow yourself to be humbled
02:03:41
daily with new ideas that challenge any or everything that you currently think.
02:03:51
That's wisdom. I think how do I know who I am if if I don't hang on to
02:03:56
maybe you're not maybe you only are who you are on your deathbed because then you would have completed your life.
02:04:02
You're still in your work in progress. You're 33. So last year when you were 31
02:04:09
you would have lived your billionth second. Okay. And if you if you lead a a healthy
02:04:14
life you should get three billion seconds out of it. You get to 93 at least that. So time passes. If you learn
02:04:23
something new every day, that forces extra context for extra perspective, new
02:04:28
perspective on whatever you knew yesterday. You have to stay open to that. And I read old science books
02:04:36
because I watch people's confidence that they had in what they thought they knew. It can be embarrassing in some cases.
02:04:43
And it's very humbling to look back at people writing about their own world.
02:04:48
There's a book from 1899 the guy said on the sun and it says we've learned so much about the sun in the last three
02:04:55
years I had to up the edition of the book I wrote three years ago and I'm saying you don't know about the sun
02:05:02
okay uh in 19 in 1899 but he's feeling it he's feeling that joy and so I it
02:05:11
it keeps me humble on the frontier on this perimeter of ignorance
02:05:17
because there's way more to discover than anything you've already learned.
02:05:22
Maybe that's the antidote in medicine that society needs right now, too. I think so, cuz everybody is running
02:05:29
things thinking they know better than everybody else. [Music]
02:05:44
Happy birthday.