Neil deGrasse Tyson at On Air Presents

Summary

---

Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Guest: Neil deGrasse Tyson | Recorded: Sept 22, 2025 | Released: Oct 13, 2025
Episode Theme: Science, Tribalism, and the Role of Curiosity in an Era of Crisis

---

Episode Overview

In this live conversation, Debbie Millman hosts astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson before an On Air Presents audience. The episode explores the intersection of science, society, and identity—from how scientific advances have transformed human health and lifespans to the enduring impact of tribalism, misinformation, and belief. Tyson discusses the reactive nature of American innovation, the roots of scientific denial, and how to inoculate future generations against pseudoscience, all with his trademark humor and directness.

---

Key Topics and Insights

1. The State of the World—and the Cosmos

• Earth vs. Cosmos
  • Tyson immediately sets a tone of wry realism:

    “Cosmos is fine. It's Earth. That's messed up. Okay.” (04:49, Tyson)

• Millman and Tyson launch into a discussion of global instability, science under attack, and the contrasting steadiness of the universe itself.

---

2. Longevity and Science’s Impact on Human Life

• Life Expectancy Through the Ages
  • Tyson explains how, despite a romanticized vision, ancient humans had drastically shorter lifespans—about half dead by age 30—due largely to high infant mortality.

    “Half of everyone born was dead before the age of 30. And that's no kind of life to have.” (05:39, Tyson)

  • Millman points out these people lived “organic,” “free range,” “clean air, clean water” lives (06:19), yet it was science (not mere purity) that extended lives:

    “From caveman to 1840, the life expectancy increased to 35. And everybody throughout that time was eating organic. ... The biggest forces operating there are advances in our understanding of human physiology. Vitamins, sanitation, vaccines. ... At the end of the day, it’s really the science that's doing it.” (07:17, Tyson)

---

3. Interdependence of Science Disciplines

• Cross-field innovation is vital. For example, hospital machines stem from physics discoveries unrelated to medicine.

  “Every machine in a hospital that has an on off switch that's brought into the service of diagnosing your condition without cutting you open is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine.” (07:45, Tyson)

• Tyson warns that cutting science funding erodes national power and progress.

  “Budgets ... reduced or cut, constrained, impeded, that's going to come back and bite us.” (09:44, Tyson)

---

4. America as a Reactive Innovator

• Sputnik and the Moon Race
  • Tyson dismantles the myth of America as a frontier innovator; we are “reactive innovators.” The race to the moon was a geopolitical reaction to the Soviet Union.

    “We like to think of ourselves as proactive innovators, but really what we are are reactive innovators.” (12:19, Tyson)
    “We were scared witless about being bested in this world by a sworn enemy on every front.” (17:46, Tyson)

• Even the return to the moon (Artemis) is spurred by China's ambitions.

  “Why are we going back to the moon now? ... China says they're going to put Taikonauts on the moon. All of a sudden, you know, it would be a good idea to go back to the moon, we tell ourselves, and there it is.” (20:44, Tyson)

---

5. Tribalism, Flags, and the Human Instinct for Group Identity

• Tyson connects branding, ritual, flag-waving, and even religion to primal tribal instincts that foster group survival—even at the cost of violence.

  “Survival is a highly tribal phenomenon, and anything that enables you to survive works evolutionarily in the survival of the fittest.... If you have a tribe ... whatever are their rituals ... they're rituals that have kept them together. It's a binding force, and binding forces mattered.” (39:14, Tyson)

  • The simplest identifiers (e.g., shirt colors) provoke automatic, unconscious in-group behavior.

    “The shirts gather according to what color they have. Even though you're complete strangers ... people naturally segregated by shirt color.” (39:14, Tyson)

---

6. Science Denial, Belief, and Social Division

• Tyson draws a bright line between belief and evidence:

  “Frankly, I don't care what you believe. But if you think Earth is flat, I would just rather you not, for example, become head of NASA.” (27:53, Tyson)

• He’s blunt about our collective failure to teach scientific thinking—not just facts but methods:

  “Science is taught in school [as] this book of information ... At no time is it really taught as a means of querying nature to establish what is objectively true and what is objectively false.” (30:17, Tyson)

• Misinformation thrives not only because of belief, but due to a lack of training in skepticism and inquiry.

---

7. Vaccines, Misinformation, and Responsibility

• Drawing from his work on the documentary A Shot in the Arm, Tyson unpacks the complexities behind vaccine hesitancy, tracing it across political divides:

  “Anti-vaxxers have become purple, blending the blue and the red. Why? Because the Liberals were the OG anti vaxxers.” (35:23, Tyson) “As an educator, you can't ever give up. Then you're not really an educator. You're just an opportunist. You have to be there even when it feels hopeless.” (35:44, Tyson)

---

8. Tribalism, Religion, and War

• Tyson identifies organized religion as a form of tribalism that, historically, can be a source of conflict:

  “I'm grouping religion as just another way to tribalize, period.” (45:14, Tyson)

• Millman pushes on why, if science is built on truth, it wields such little trust in the current era:

  “Because we're not trained to learn what science is, nor are we trained to communicate science.” (46:56, Tyson)

• The conversation traces the evolution from physically violent tribal conflict (ancient/fatal wars) to more state- or idea-driven disputes in modern times.

  “The overall trend from 10,000 years ago to today is one where we are much milder and much more gentle to our neighbors than ever before.” (41:14, Tyson, citing Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature)

---

9. How to Inoculate Against Misinformation: The Curriculum Question

• Millman asks Tyson how he’d design education to build “scientific immunity.”
• Tyson’s answer: focus on how to think, not just what to know.

  “It's not what you learn. It's ... you train your mind how to think. What do you do when you're confronted with something that's mysterious, interesting, amazing, odd? What do you do? Do you just believe it? No. Do you reject it? No. You ask questions.” (58:21, Tyson)

  • He gives an anecdote about his children questioning claims about Mercury in retrograde or the healing power of crystals—not to be dismissive, but to probe, to be scientifically curious.

---

10. Religion, Atheism, and the Natural Selection of Faiths

• Tyson discusses how most religious adherents are “atheist” towards other religions, which explains the drive to proselytize or enforce exclusivity:

  “Almost every deeply religious person is an atheist to all other religions in the world. ... Most religious people believe that their religion is the one true religion. So that means they're atheist to everybody else.” (59:47, Tyson)

• Religion spreads or persists based on rules that incentivize retention (e.g., penalties for leaving, prohibition of birth control).

---

11. Reading the Bible and Engaging on Relatable Terms

• Tyson shares how he read extensively across religious texts to give more nuanced answers to the ubiquitous question of science vs. God, and illustrates how even biblical details (like Leviticus’s role in the execution of Joan of Arc) have influenced history.

  “I'm not religious fluent to play Gotcha. I'm just religious fluent so that I can absorb themes and ideas that I know you care about in my answer when we have the conversation.” (64:43, Tyson)

---

12. “Just Visiting This Planet” – Tyson’s New Book

• Tyson and Millman discuss the reissue of Merlin's Tour of the Universe (as Just Visiting This Planet), a playful, Q&A-style book answering the public’s most fascinating space questions through the voice of the immortal Merlin.
  • Tyson describes engaging with questions that go beyond Google, with wit and illustrations by his brother.
  • Anecdote: a dinner guest tries to predict Tyson’s answers via ChatGPT, which both amuses and unsettles the author.

    “He asked ChatGPT how you would answer that question. So I said, how am I doing? And he says, yeah, this is exactly what you just said.” (73:41, Tyson)

---

Notable Quotes

• “At no time is [science] really taught as a means of querying nature to establish what is objectively true and what is objectively false.” (30:17, Tyson)
• “As an educator, you can't ever give up. Then you're not really an educator; you're just an opportunist.” (35:44, Tyson)
• “We like to think of ourselves as proactive innovators, but really what we are are reactive innovators.” (12:19, Tyson)
• “We can tribalize on anything.” (39:14, Tyson)
• "Almost every deeply religious person is an atheist to all other religions in the world. ... Most religious people believe that their religion is the one true religion. So that means they're atheist to everybody else." (59:47, Tyson)
• “It’s not what you learn. It’s ... you train your mind how to think.... Do you just believe it? No. Do you reject it? No. You ask questions.” (58:21, Tyson)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 04:40 — Opening framing, "Cosmos is fine. Earth is messed up."
• 05:36 — How life expectancy and mortality have changed thanks to science
• 09:11 — The true power and danger of cutting scientific funding
• 12:19 — America as a "reactive innovator" in space, science, and tech
• 20:44 — Return to the moon: geopolitics vs. exploration
• 27:53 — On flat earthers, scientific evidence vs. belief
• 30:17 — The failure of science education as method, not facts
• 35:23 — The surprising political roots and blending of anti-vaxxers
• 58:21 — How to "inoculate" against misinformation: teaching curiosity and skepticism
• 59:47 — Why most religious people are “atheist” towards other faiths
• 69:33 — Why republish "Just Visiting This Planet" now; AI and the transmission of scientific knowledge

---

Tone & Style

The conversation is lively, witty, and peppered with Tyson’s signature clarity and accessible analogies. Millman steers the dialogue with warmth, curiosity, and incisive questions, allowing Tyson space for deep dives and memorable anecdotes.

---

Takeaways

• Science as the true driver of civilization’s progress—not virtue, purity, or nostalgia
• Tribalism is hard-wired, affecting everything from branding and flags to war and faith
• Education must focus on how to think, not just what to know
• Belief and evidence: Respect for belief until it dictates policy or undermines collective good
• History is complicated: Even world-changing scientific achievement is often reactive to perceived existential threats
• Cultural humility and dialogue: Entering conversations about religion and belief with curiosity and preparation, not antagonism
• The mission of the educator: Never give up on critical thinking, even in a world awash with misinformation

---

“Anytime I'm in front of an audience who thinks Earth is flat or no vaccines or anything, I think of stanzas from that song [‘The Impossible Dream’] and I persist.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson (37:14)

---

Transcript

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Survival is a highly tribal phenomenon, so your tribe stays together and you fight against other tribes. The more intricate the rituals are, the more embedded you are in those rituals. Does that mean you're a tighter tribe? Perhaps, but it means we can tribalize on anything.

[Narrator/Announcer]

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Neil DeGrasse Tyson talks about science education in a time when science is under attack.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

As an educator, you can't ever give up. Then you're not really educator, you're just an opportunist.

[Ollie Dog Food Advertiser]

Dogs are more than just pets. They're arguably the most important member of your family, so of course you'd do anything to keep them happy and healthy. Ollie delivers fresh, protein packed meals made with real human grade ingredients. Choose from five recipes with personalized plans tailored to your dog's needs. Meals come in perfectly portioned mess free packaging with a scoop for easy serving and a storage contain to keep food fresh. Worried about transitioning your dog's food? Ollie offers in App Health Screenings where their team of experts will guide you every step of the way so you can feel good knowing you're doing what's best for your best friend. Visit ollie.com TED talks and use code TEDTalks for 60% off your first box in today's fast changing digital world, proving your company is trustworthy isn't just important for growth, it's important. It's essential. That's why Vanta is here. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry leading AI, automation and continuous monitoring. So whether you're a startup tackling your first SoC2 or ISO 27001 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so you can win bigger deals sooner. The results According to a recent IDC study, Vanta custom customers slash over $500,000 a year in costs and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. 10,000 global companies trust Vanta, including Atlassian, Quora, Chili Piper and factory. Visit vanta.comtedaudio to sign up for a free demo today. That's V-A-N-T-A.comtedaudio this podcast is brought to.

[Wise App Advertiser]

You by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. With Wise, you can send, spend and receive up to 40 currencies, only a few simple taps and save up to 55% compared to major banks. Plus, wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer. Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos in Puerto Vallarta or sending euros to a loved one in Paris, you know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups. Be Smart Join the 15 million customers who choose WISE. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com Learn more by visiting WISE.com US Compare T's and C's Apply.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. I mean, even I once got served an ad for high end motorcycle parts. I don't even own a scooter. When you actually want to reach creative directors, brand strategists, or design leads, LinkedIn ads are where those professionals scroll. So when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn Ads. It's why LinkedIn Ads generates the highest B2B ROAs of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad buys. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com matters. That's LinkedIn.com matters. Terms and conditions apply.

[Narrator/Announcer]

Neil Degrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author and science communicator. Debbie spoke with him in front of a live audience on September 22, 2025 at an event organized by On Air Presents.

[Debbie Millman]

So there is a lot to talk about. I want to talk about the state of the world. I want to talk about the state of the cosmos.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cosmos is fine. It's Earth. That's messed up. Okay.

[Movie and Fashion Promoter]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Just saying.

[Debbie Millman]

And I also want to talk about your brand new book that's about to launch.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, thank you. Yeah, it comes out like two weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Debbie Millman]

So let's talk first about the state of the world. I've been watching a little video of you quite a lot on repeat wherein you were asked about longevity and how people, humans have been able to extend their lifespan over the last millennia. And you had a really interesting answer. You talked about how many millennia ago our age span, our longevity was about 25 years.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, so, no, it's closer to 30.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

30.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The right way to say that because there's a lot of infant mortality. So for example, if you survive to age 20, there's probably a good chance you'd reach 40, for example. But so many humans died at or near childbirth that that pulled down the average. So the, the mathematically accurate way to say that is half of everyone born was dead before the age of 30. And that's no kind of life to have. But that's all that it was. So the elders in the cave were the 30 year olds, you know, and that's a. We take so much for granted today.

[Debbie Millman]

And you talked about how those people that were living, they were eating organic.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, yes. That the water is ran pure, the.

[Debbie Millman]

Air was clean, the animals were free range.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Were free range and all their food was organic.

[Debbie Millman]

So what's changed? Why are we now living to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In a word, in a word, science. By the way, it's more stunning than that. So the life expectancy of humans in the world thousands of years ago was 30. By this metric that I described, half of everyone was dead before they're 30. By 1840, the life expect. 1840. From caveman to 1840, the life expectancy increased to 35.

[Debbie Millman]

Big bump.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And everybody throughout that time was eating organic. Okay. Free range, free range animals. So the biggest forces operating there are advances in our understanding of human physiology. Vitamins, sanitation, vaccines. Sorry, I didn't mean to at you little sound check. And science. The medical advances that came about not only from investments in medicine, but consider that every machine in a hospital that has an on off switch that's brought into the service of diagnosing your condition without cutting you open is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine. It is true for X rays, PET scans actually. The ultrasound came from the military, actually. But it was a technology frontier. How do you discover what's in the water that isn't water and make an image of it and do that in a reliable way where you can ID what you're looking at. So you just add it all up. So you can't just fund one branch of science and expect that to take you anywhere. The cross pollination is what really is responsible for so much of what we see, know and appreciate. And so there's everyone saying oh eat this or do that and that'll increase your life expectancy. When in the end of the day it's really the science that's doing it and the other things can help maybe on the edges, but. So I don't want to downplay the role of not eating poison.

[Debbie Millman]

As one.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Does, as one would have to. So the country with the lowest life expectancy today, it's in Central Africa. It might be Chad, I might be wrong, but there's a country in Africa with the lowest life expectancy. That life expectancy is higher than the country with the highest life expectancy in the year 1912. So while there's still this great divide, oh my gosh, this is an extraordinary accomplishment in the 20th century for what we have done with. So not that any of that has anything to do with astrophysics, but it's science as a general point. And what you're quoting here is a short little ditty I posted called Science in Health, wealth and War. Okay? These are three things that geopolitists cares greatly about. And we owe our longevity, we owe our wealth to innovative invocations of science. And to the extent that budgets are reduced or cut, constrained, impeded, that's going to come back and bite us on the ass. And we'll just recede on a world stage where we won't even be offered a seat at the table because we'll have nothing to offer. We'll just wait until the other technologically proficient and advanced countries invent the next things. And then we say, oh, can we have some of that? And then they set the price and they control it. And that's not the Merc that I grew up in. And so I'd like to think that it's a pendulum swing and when it gets lower, we're farther away from what I remember, that people will then re. Gain a sense of the causes and effects of things and, and bring back the science leadership that defined what it was to be American from the second half of the 20th century.

[Debbie Millman]

But at that point, don't you think that there's a chance that we'll be too far behind to catch up? So many of the leading thinkers, minds, people doing this cutting edge science, math, medicine, are immigrants. And so if we are going to become far more contained and we have less funding of the things that do help us live longer and healthier and happier, do you think that we run the risk of never, ever being able to catch up? I mean, there have been a lot of empires over the course of history that never were able to regain their superiority or their leadership on the planet once they lost it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We had a good run. I think of myself as a real, a realistic optimist. Does that make sense?

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah. Cautiously optimistic, maybe?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's the phrase, cautiously optimistic. So the United States is pretty good at catching up. So let me say that more starkly. We like to think of ourselves as proactive innovators, but really what we are are reactive innovators. Okay. There's a force that we're responding to, so defensive rebounds. Sure.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

Thank you, I appreciate that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So we think of ourselves as pioneers in this, in space exploration. But we weren't. The first satellite was Russia. The Soviet Union, of course, was Sputnik. October 4, 1957. Oh, my gosh, wait a minute. Every country can control its airspace that's deemed sovereign. But how about the space? Space? The space above the air. Nothing controlled that. So Russia, the godless commie, sworn enemies of ours, sent a satellite over our country and it had a radio transmitter that went beep beep. So you knew where it was. Anybody with a ham radio, ham amateur radio community in the day, they could listen in as this thing flew over, listen into the radio signals it was sending. You say, well, that seems innocent enough. Why would we lose our shit? Oh, because the Sputnik was inserted into a hollowed out intercontinental ballistic missile shell. So if a satellite that went beep beep can go over our head and be delivered by their rocket launch system, so too could a missile. And no longer would wars be fought about who's on one, you know, on the, you know, take the hill, advance a line. It would then happen intercontinentally, hence, I see intercontinental ballistic missile. So the military freaked, okay, because it was a shot across our bow. Literal and figurative shot across our bow. Within a year, we invented NASA. We were still behind. Russia then launched the first human, Yuri Gagarin. That was now, four years later, 1961. We didn't yet have a rocket that wouldn't blow up on the launch pad that was. Could qualify to carry humans yet. So we quickly sent up our first satellite, not in 57, but, you know, within a couple of years. But the human. Now the whole world is looking at Russia, the godless communists. How about us? So, 1961, six weeks after Yuri Gagarin comes out of orbit, President Kennedy hosts a joint session of Congress. This is May 25, 1961. Six weeks after Yuri Gagarin successfully is launched and is returned to Earth. And is not only a Russian hero, he's a hero to all humans. And Kennedy gives the following speech. Well, we know the parts that resonate. We will put a man on the moon. You can hear his Brookline accent as he recites this. Put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the decade is out. So stirring words. And he had charisma and vision. No, that's our retelling of that moment. Let's go back to the moment. There's a paragraph, oh, by the way, that quote that I just said, that is chiseled in the granite in the front entryway of Kennedy Space Center, Florida. You read that? Oh, yeah, of course. We're going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go. Earlier in that same speech, a few paragraphs, I quote. This is a mild paraphrase, but it's a mostly quote. Is that a kind of a thing? Is that a thing?

[Debbie Millman]

It's a thing. Tonight.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a thing tonight. If the events of. I'm quoting, if the events of recent weeks would not even utter the man's name, just the events of recent weeks. If the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. It was a battle cry against communism. That's what wrote the checks. Not we're explorers, it's in our DNA. No, no, we reacted and we leapfrogged. We said, forget this just satellite, let's go to the moon. And we went to the moon before the decade was out. Went to the Moon in 1968, December 1968. We didn't make a liar out of Kennedy. Go before the decade is out. Then we get there and we have six missions that land. There were nine missions that went to the moon. Six missions landed. Yes, we actually landed on the moon. If you think we didn't land on the moon, you'll have to explain how it is that we didn't land nine times. Apollo 17, 1972. This is four years after we first get to the moon. Apollo 18 is ready and waiting. But we looked over our shoulder and the Russians weren't there. And so what are we doing? So the Apollo program was cancelled. We didn't stay on the moon. Do you know how many scientists went to the moon? 1. And he was on the last mission to the moon. He was a geologist. So the moon wasn't about science, it wasn't about exploration. Though some of that did happen. It wasn't about any. That's not what wrote the checks. What wrote the checks is that we were scared witless about being bested in this world by a sworn enemy on every front. Because like I said, they had the first satellite, the first non human animal, the first human animal, Yuri Gagarin. They had the first female. They had the first dark skinned person from Cuba, remember Cuba was on their side back then. They had the first space station. We land on the moon and we say we win.

[Debbie Millman]

It's a game of one. Because I don't think they're counting any of it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And just now that you're set up for what I'm about to say, it'll just roll cleanly. And clearly we're going back to the moon right now in the Artemis program. Artemis, this is brilliantly woke. Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo. So that's some woke up mission naming right there. Okay, so that was woke before. Woke was considered bad. And so why are we going back to the moon? We could have stayed in 1972, could have gone back 1980-1990-2000-2010. No, we decide in the late teens under Trump one that we're going back to the moon.

[Debbie Millman]

Isn't it because we're going to Mars after that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's not relevant. They want you to think it's relevant. Really geopolitical. I'm telling you like it is. I'm just telling you.

[Debbie Millman]

Go on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so why are we going back to the moon now? Because you know what happened in the late 2000 teens. China says they're going to put Taikonauts on the moon. All of a sudden, you know, it would be a good idea to go back to the moon, we tell ourselves, and there it is. We are reacting to a threat. I was on CNN and said all of this, but in much tighter sound bites.

[Debbie Millman]

We're lucky to hear the full story, let's face it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And the next day, I get name checked by Marco Rubio. Got name checked. He saw me say this, that we are being reactive, responding to China. I said this. And then he accused me of being a shill for China. I had to look up what that meant. Shill. I never used that word. And I said, oh, wow. So then I thought, do I get in the trenches with him? No. But I did compose a response. This is on Twitter. I composed a response that is in my forbidden Twitter file. These are tweets that I've never sent just because they would be too upsetting to people.

[Debbie Millman]

Can you share what was in that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah, I can, definitely. You're right. Black men from the Bronx make excellent spies for China. Just that. Like, think that through. Right. I'm being honest on television about what motivates Americans. And I'm accused of being a chill for China. So that's kind of the state of the politics today. So I think it will be reactive as other countries. China Just invented a flag that's gonna go on the moon. By the way, all of our flags, the dye, the blue and red dye, has faded from cosmic rays and from ultraviolet light, or they've been blown over by the exhaust from the ascent stage. And China set up a. Sent a rover to the moon with a flag. And what color is their flag? Red. One of the most susceptible colors to fading of any color, as you know, from artwork that might have been left in the sunlight or anything. They invented a new kind of fiber from basalt, which is volcanic rock common on the surface of the moon. And there's a thread, and they created a Chinese flag out of that thread. And so that flag that's on the moon will be there for a billion years.

[Debbie Millman]

And that's why we're going back to this room. Well, it's so.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I think, I think we'll recover. The brain loss is sad, but if they don't come here and they bring their intellectual capital to their home country, you know, we've been brain draining other countries for 60 years. Half of my fellow graduate students in school were foreign nationals, and they came and stayed. You know, I don't want to say half, but a large percentage of Silicon Valley, it was just that. So we did. So even our space program was launched by Wernher von Braun. We didn't have the intellectual capital to launch a space program, so we got the Germans who had already invented the V2 rocket. The rocket. Oh, my gosh. The V2 rocket did not prove to be as strategically valuable in warfare as intended by the Nazis. But what it did was it opened up an entire understanding of how you would launch from Earth and go someplace other than Earth.

[Debbie Millman]

Well, speaking of flags, I couldn't. Before we got on stage, Neil and I were talking about the origins of the word brand and how it was used and so forth. And while you were talking about the flag that the Chinese are leaving on the moon, I was thinking about how before there was the ability to send rockets over another country, when wars were fought, flags were used on the battlefield to designate which side you belonged on. Because most of the. There weren't any mass manufactured uniforms. And so you needed to know where your friends or your foes were.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. But that wasn't the most important application of flags in the history of the US Military and around the world. There's something called the Signal Corps. The Signal Corps were people who had flags, and it was the flags that they would raise. You've seen, you know, when they do this with the flags, this is enabling the entire front line to know what commands are being offered by the commanding officer, the general, whoever it is with them. So is it hold for an hour? We launch in 30 minutes. And this is basically secret code that would change depending on how much they believed the enemy knew what these signals were. Then when the telescope was invented and brought into battle, you could be much farther away from the flags and still see what the symbols were. So the Signal Corps still exists today, and they work on encryption and other communication elements in the military. And why do I even know about this? Because I wrote a. I co wrote a 600 page book that don't get that book confused with a separate book I wrote called Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Okay. This book for people not in a Hurry, it's titled Accessory to the Unspoken alliance between Astrophysics and the Military. And in there, there's an entire chapter on the role of the telescope in enabling warfare across much wider stretches of a battlefield.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah. And flags are even used in sports, football games.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah, yeah. It carries over because football is basically war.

[Debbie Millman]

So branding uses the language of war in every way. Target market, strategy. It's all using a lot of that same language you mentioned before about the people that are disbelieving in the proof of our moon landing or the shape of the planet. I can't even say it. I can't even say the words. There are people that really, truly believe this. I know that it feels absurd to say. However, we're living in a time now where there does seem to be this giant delta, this abyss between what one group of people believe and what another.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

Group of people believe.

[Debbie Millman]

Is that abyss ever going to be something that is surmountable?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So there are two separable variables there. One of them is the denial of science, its integrity, and its role in shaping modern civilization. Another one is people just believe in stuff, okay? And we live in a free country. Frankly, I don't care what you believe. But if you think Earth is flat, I would just rather you not, for example, become head of NASA. Okay, that's a bad combination. But there are plenty of professions that would support you if you thought Earth was flat. There was a famous basketball player, Kyrie Irving, a big flat Earther, and a basketball court is flat. So that's okay. I don't have a problem with that. Okay. And not to drop a bomb in the conversation, but you uttered that with disbelief that anyone could walk around, be an educated adult and believe that. But you didn't also say we have fully educated adults who are Certain that the creator of the universe impregnated a virgin in the Middle east who gave birth to the son of God. That itself requires an extraordinary leap of belief and faith.

[Debbie Millman]

That's the difference. But Neil, Neil, standard of evidence, yes, I agree 100%. The fact that we don't know where the helium and the hydrogen came from could create ways for which people to envision or imagine or make up. That's one thing. It's quite another thing when all you need to do is get into an airplane and look at this globe underneath and see that it is not flat. The other question I want to add to that is you mentioned, if a flat Earther, what harm could they have as long as they weren't head of NASA? I don't have to really throw a stone very far to get to the health department and vaccines and now the potential stock decline of Tylenol. So help me understand that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, if the stock drops, I'd be surprised because most people at any given time are not pregnant. But again, there's separable variables here. You're describing not simply a belief system of which there are many that permeate a free society. You're referring to objectively verified experiments with evidence driven conclusions. And I hate to sound like the, you know, the easy scapegoat answer here, but the way science is taught in school, it's thought of as this book of information and you learn it, you spew it out for the test, and then you move on to some other book. And at no time is it really taught as a means of querying nature to establish what is objectively true and what is objectively false. If to all of us science is, that's a science y fact and that's a sciencey fact. And it's not a way of thinking about the world. We are all left susceptible to getting our medical advice from the White House press secretary. There's this middle zone where, all right, if you don't follow this science advice and you do something else, you'll, you'll live. Here's what didn't happen, but had it happened, that's a whole other path of recent history that was not taken. If Covid were 70% lethal, do you think people are saying, oh, let's not trust the doctors or big farmer, they don't have our interest in mind. Meanwhile, we're standing there with the, with a vaccine. Really? Really. And so an interesting fact in epidemiology is often the more lethal a pathogen, the fewer people ultimately die from it. There are cases where that can be, where that can unfold. Because first you get it and you die. So you're not. You don't continue to spread it, okay? You don't think you're okay, but you're not. And then you contaminate a whole room. You're dead on the street corner. So that's one way that stops the spread. Another one is everyone else freaks out and will do anything they possibly can to not die. And a doctor says, I have a vaccine. It is 90% effective. You're taking the vaccine, it is nipped in the bud. So if you have a disease that is mildly lethal, it is at risk of people inventing their own cures and coming up with their own explanations and charlatans rising up, selling snake oil or whatever it is. And the disease sort of works its way through, kills some people, not others. And then everyone at the end has to blame somebody for the disease existing at all. How am I even coming at this? I was an academic advisor to a documentary called A Shot in the Arm. It was a sensitive look at people who are vaccine hesitant. And I'm an executive producer of this documentary. People are vaccine hesitant.

[Movie and Fashion Promoter]

Well, why?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because someone came up to them and showed them pictures and talked them out of it. Well, who was that person relative to the person who was then influenced? The person who's then influenced doesn't carry this, shouldn't carry the same accountability as the person who's peddling it. So this is an exploration of this force as it operated through society. And it was originally conceived to explore measles because there were measles outbreaks on a disease that the World Health Organization said was licked by the year 2000. Then all of a sudden we get one in Bed Stuy, we get one in California. And these are liberal outposts with people who are anti pharma. The fact that you have a Republican administration who has an entire anti vax community with them, with RFK Jr. Who's birthed in the left side of the aisle, meeting together in this sort of unholy alliance. Anti vaxxers have become purple, blending the blue and the red. Why? Because the Liberals were the OG anti vaxxers. They were the OG anti vaxxters. The right wing people only became anti vaxxers, not because they're anti pharma. They love pharma. Okay? They have nothing against big business and pharma. They don't want you telling them they have to get vaccinated. So it became a freedom issue in a free country. So the freedom issue Got convolved with the I don't trust big pharma and they're not tested and whatever. And then you have this whole community crossing the aisle who are anti vax. So what you're telling me because all this failure of people's appreciation of science is that I suck at my job?

[Debbie Millman]

Well, all that being said, no, I.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Didn'T totally what she said, because I'm trying to enlighten people. And so it's a challenge. I don't mind the challenge. As an educator, you can't ever give up. Then you're not really an educator. You're just an opportunist. You have to be there even when it feels hopeless. And I'm reminded of the story Don Quixote where he's got his lance and he wants to attack the windmill. That's like a crazy. What. What do you even. Who wrote that? Who thought that up?

[Debbie Millman]

Cervantes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I know. It was a rhetorical. Who wrote that there's no way he's going to stop the windmill with his lance. He continues. And when that story made it to Broadway in a Broadway musical, man of La Mancha, the single most memorable song from that musical was to dream the impossible dream. And if you look at the words composed for that, oh my gosh, it's, you know, I want to fight the unbeatable foe. I want to march into hell for a heavenly cause. You hear the accounting of things you might do that would otherwise be hopeless, yet you still do it. And anytime I'm in front of an audience who thinks Earth is flat or no vaccines or anything, I think of stanzas from that song and I persist.

[Debbie Millman]

We for the last 10,000 years.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're supposed to applaud there. It doesn't count if I forced it out of you, right? Okay.

[Debbie Millman]

For the last 10,000 years, our species has been creating a relationship with some sort of higher power that we believe is looking down on us or is within us or is controlling us. And different tribes have not only us, but the environment. Yeah, they. They aspire to different beliefs. Those beliefs are so steadfast in them that they're willing to die for them without any evidential, evidentiary proof that any.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Evidence there is for these points of view, the more likely people are to fight to the death in defense of them. That's a. It's a curious fact.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

So.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, Mike, we'll find a front line of scientists charging a hill against other scientists. That's just. That's not how that works.

[Debbie Millman]

So what is it in our DNA in our instincts.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

Why?

[Debbie Millman]

Why do we do this? There is evidence of tribes all over the planet when they couldn't even communicate with each other that had symbols, that had logos, that had flags that were creating rules in which we had to live in order to please this higher power. The way we ate food, the way we got married, the way we handled our genitalia, the way we handled our ha.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

Hair.

[Debbie Millman]

What. Where does this instinct come from?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So there are many books written on this. I think the way to best compress it or digest it is simply to say survival is a highly tribal phenomenon, and anything that enables you to survive works evolutionarily in the survival of the fittest. And by the way, they've done experiments on this, where, let's say this. We have 40 people and 50 people in the room. They give half of you one color shirt and the other half a different color shirt, and that's all they do. They don't say anything else after that. And then there's socializing afterwards. The shirts gather according to what color they have. Even though you're complete strangers and even though you're no more of a stranger to someone else with your color shirt than others, were people naturally segregated by shirt color? And so it's still in us today to do so. Point is, if you have a tribe that predates you because you're born into a tribe, whatever are their rituals, whether or not they fully scientifically analyze them, they're rituals that have kept them together. It's a binding force, and binding forces mattered. Oh, now here someone comes up from the other hill, they have different rituals from yours. Plus, they might want to take your water. Okay, that's bad. So your tribe stays together, and you fight against other tribes. The more intricate the rituals are, the more embedded you are in those rituals. It's that simple. Does that mean you're a tighter tribe? I mean, perhaps, but it means we can tribalize on anything. You can look at the hatred between people of different skin color, for example, over recent centuries. But you look at Europe in the first and Second World War. What were those? But tribal warfare of people with light skin killing other people with light skin, Christians with light skin killing different varieties of other Christians with light skin. Okay, by the way, Hitler was Catholic, by the way. I don't know if you knew that. So if people can kill each other because of what side of a line in the sand they were born on or what language they speak or what other rituals they perform, you've got argument for war. So I'm amazed we have survived ourselves in this enterprise. The linguist Steven Pinker wrote a book, the Better Angels of our nature, where he studied the. He made a case that I find convincing. Other people had some issues with it, but I found it convincing that with whatever are the fits and starts of the violence we commit against one another, that the overall trend from 10,000 years ago to today is one where we are much milder and much more gentle to our neighbors than ever before. And you can measure that by when you fight a war, what fraction of your tribe dies? And there's a day when half the men of a tribe would be dead. Half. Then they would like, give up half or more. Okay? And all the men would die and then all the women would get taken. Okay? And so that doesn't happen today. As bloody as the Second World War was with 50 million people who died, by the way, I did the math this. From 1939 to 1945, the interval of the Second World War, of course, we were only involved from Pearl harbor to the end 1941, but of course it had been going on for a couple of years. 1939 to 1945, a thousand humans were killed per hour in the service of that war. From 1939 to 1945. That's inconceivable today. If a car barrels into protesters and kills six people, that's national headlines for a week. We were killing 1,000 people per hour. Because violence wasn't reported by deaths. It was reported. Do we take the hill? Did we take the thing? Move the troops back. Where is Hitler? Where is Mussolini? Where is Japan? The Japanese empire? So the language was different, but even so at a million people per hour, you thousand people per hour. You could rank the countries by what fraction of their population died in the Second World War. The worst cases were 10%. There was a 30%. There was. That was one country. Most were 10, 5%. We lost half a million, mostly men. What percentage of 150 million people is half a million? That's a vanishingly small percent. We are tribes fighting. And because it is state run. This is the point I'm trying to make here. I forgot to say it at the beginning. When it's state sanctioned war instead of tribe sanctioned war, the state has its own survival as a priority. And so the state will surrender on terms before they would completely get wiped out by their enemy. And so that is a force operating against the tribal urge to just have everybody go out and kill everybody they find who does not look like you or sound like you or perform the Same rituals as you.

[Debbie Millman]

Is that something that you think is embedded in our DNA, or is that just something that we've been seeing?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I have no other way to think about it. Oh. So I'm grouping religion as just another way to tribalize, period. Right. That's all it is.

[Debbie Millman]

But is that something in our DNA? Is that something.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It appears to be so. Because like I said originally, it was in the interest of the survival of the tribe. There's another thing. For example, have you ever smelled throw up? Okay. What does it make you want to do? Makes you want to throw up. Okay. That's completely natural. Someone in your tribe, you're all eating the same foods, you're all sleeping in the same place, eating the same foods. Someone throws up, you smell it, your reaction is to throw up as well. So that's an autonomic reaction. Before you physiologically had to, your brain said, looking at a tribal member, this is bad. Let's get it out of our system as well. If there are any tribes where they ate poison and only one person throws up from it and the others don't, all of the rest of you die because it killed you some other way. The poison didn't make them throw up. The body said, I don't like this. I'm getting rid of it. If your body doesn't tell you to get rid of it and it's still poison, you. You end up dying, and you get removed from the gene pool. So there's so many forces operating that will have us do the same thing in the interest of our own survival.

[Debbie Millman]

Given how science is built on truth, why is it facing so much mistrust at this time?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because we're not trained to learn what science is, nor are we trained to communicate science. So here's what should have happened. And this is not just 2020 hindsight. This is not Monday morning Quarterback. I knew this while it was happening. Okay, Covid hits. So the CDC issues recommendations. Fauci. At no time should he have said, here's what everyone needs to do to protect themselves. Wrong answer. It's the latest evidence as of this week tells us this. It's an airborne virus. It might survive on surfaces that are wet, so rinse off your groceries when they come in. As we learn more about the behavior of this virus in its airborne state, we will update you weekly. And there's a huge army, forgive me for using that word, of scientists studying this novel virus. Novel meant it. We had to. We don't have prior data on it. And so he should have played it as not played it. He should have reported it as a work in progress, because that's how science goes. But everyone's saying we need the definitive answer. And he gives a definitive answer and we find out later that it's not true, then no one believes anything that comes out of his mouth. That's the problem. So science is in the business of establishing. I'll tell you what the scientific method is. In the simplest terms, do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking that something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is. Did I say that right? I meant them to be the opposite of each other, even if they didn't come out that way. Whatever it takes. Because often when you do an experiment, you could have a bias. Scientists are human. We could have biases. So we have checks and balances, peer review. That's what all that's about. It doesn't mean you can't publish something that's wrong. It means that's on the frontier and we don't know what's right yet. That's what that means. So had it been presented that way, I don't think people would have felt like they were betrayed. Oh, now we should wear a mask or we shouldn't. Do we keep children home? It's a work in progress. When you're on the frontier, it's pretty messy. But once we establish an objective truth, we're good. We are good. One of the most irresponsible things I would say was when the New York Times had a big article on a research paper that said that wearing masks did not prevent the spread of COVID It's like, what the fuck? What? Excuse me? What? What? What? So I went to the original paper, and it was people who reported that they were wearing masks was their sample of who was wearing masks. Now we've all were on the subway during the coming out of COVID Half the people, how they wear in their mask, it's either on their chin, then they're not wearing at all, or below their nose. Half of them. And if you ask them, did you wear your mask in the morning? Yes, I did.

[Wise App Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You can't use people's own testimonies as evidence for policy. That's not how you want to do it. Do the right experiment. Here's how you do that. This is what they should have done. This is what the New York Times should look for. Here's what you do. How big is the virus when it's on an aerosol? Because when you sneeze viruses can get through anything. They're really small. The first virus was seen in 1932 after we invented the scanning electron microscope. We needed quantum physics to get there. Anyhow, how big is the size of one of these aerosol particles in a sneeze thing? Okay, and here's what you do. You take the material that a mask is made of, so it's a membrane, and you put it in the middle of this container. You infuse one side of it with the COVID infected aerosols. And the other side, you change the pressure. On the other side of the mask, you have low pressure, then high pressure and low pressure. When it's under low pressure, air will move through the mask to the other side. You just keep doing that, do that for hours and hours. Then you check the other side of that mask to see if any Covid got through. If no Covid got through, you keep wearing the mask. If Covid got through, you say, we need a better mask. And if masks had no efficacy, surgeons would not be wearing it when they operate on you. Okay, so that's an example of bad science reporting in a newspaper that's supposed to really think this through.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

Fall is here, and it comes with all those seasonal traditions we love. Apple picking, hosting dinner parties, getting the kids back into their school routines. But let's be honest. Keeping up with a clean home while juggling everything else. That's where having the right support network becomes essential. Just like you have a trusted hairdresser or a reliable babysitter, having a go to home cleaner can be a game changer for your mental bandwidth and productivity. That's where homaglow comes in. A top rated home service platform that makes it incredibly easy to book trusted background checked cleaners in your area. Their online booking system lets you schedule cleanings as quickly as this week or plan ahead for next month. You can browse photos and reviews to find the right fit. And the forever clean membership saves you $30 per hour on future cleanings, starting at just $19 an hour. Take home cleaning off your plate this fall by using HomeMaglow. Head to HomeMaglow.com DesignMatters to get your first three hours of cleaning for only $19. That's H O M E A G L O W.com DesignMatters dude, did you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Order the new iPhone 17 Pro? Got it from Verizon. The best 5G network in America. I never look so good. You look the same. But with this camera, everything looks better. Especially me. You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

Selfie check please With Verizon, new and.

[Debbie Millman]

Existing customers can get the new iPhone.

[Ollie Dog Food Advertiser]

17 Pro, designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Plus a new iPad and Apple One.

[Ollie Dog Food Advertiser]

With eligible phone trade in and unlimited ultimate best 5G swears Root metrics Theta.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

United States 1H 2025 All Rights Reserve.

[Ollie Dog Food Advertiser]

Trade in and additional terms apply for all offers. See verizon.com for details.

[Wise App Advertiser]

This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. With Wise, you can send, spend and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps and save up to 55% compared to major banks. Plus, wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer. Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos in Puerto Vallarta or sending Euros to a loved one in Paris, you know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups. Be Smart join the 15 million customers who choose Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com learn more by visiting wise.com us compare Ts and Cs apply the problem with group insurance is that healthcare isn't a group decision, it's personal. Group insurance means businesses get one carrier.

[Narrator/Announcer]

And just a few plan options for.

[Wise App Advertiser]

The whole company, but that doesn't fit everyone's needs. Now a new coverage option called an ichra or ichra allows employees to buy any plan from any carrier instead of a one size fits all approach. Plan on something personal, plan on an ICHRA.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Learn more at ambetterhealth.com ICHRA.

[Debbie Millman]

My last question about science, and in some ways I think it's bringing us full circle. If you could design a curriculum to build scientific immunity against misinformation, what would that first class be?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, so I like you use the word immunity. I would say, how can you inoculate people against by the way, my two kids, they're in their 20s now. My wife and I are both scientists. She has a PhD in mathematical physics. So we made sure our kids were scientifically literate. So by the time they were 13 certified scientifically literate, I had no worries about anything that would ever happen to them for the rest of their lives. I didn't care what grades they got. I knew that at that level of science literacy they would not be victim of someone else exploiting their ignorance of the operations of nature. Not because of what they knew, but because of how they asked questions. I had a dinner party and someone an adult, they're in their they're 13, 14. An adult was there and said, oh, I had such bad luck today. It must be because Mercury was in retrograde. And my daughter said politely, what is it about Mercury that you think is affecting you? Is it its light? Because are you sitting in front of an open window facing the planet Mercury while this happened? She knew how to think this through. And so, by the way, just believing something outright is equally as intellectually lazy as rejecting something outright.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So if this is the first you've heard of Mercury in retrograde, but you are scientifically trained, you would ask questions. If someone comes up to you and said, these crystals will heal, you buy them from me. And you don't know anything about it. You say, well, what is it about the crystals? They say, it's crystal energy. And you say, you realize the crystalline state of any molecule is the lowest energy state it possibly can have. It cannot become something else from that state, which is why diamonds are forever. Diamonds are a crystal. You know what else is forever? Salt. We dig salt out of mines that's been there for millions of years. No one is putting salt on their ring, saying, oh, salt crystals are forever. No.

[Debbie Millman]

It was a currency for a long time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, it was indeed. The word salary comes from the word for salt. And Roman soldiers were paid in salt. Salt was important. Preservative salami was preserved meat with salt. So.

[Debbie Millman]

I interjected and mentioned that it was a currency. You were talking about diamonds before that and the evidence.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you start asking them about these crystals, then the person runs away in tears because they don't have answers to them, because you just were simply curious scientifically. So the curriculum is not what you learn. It's. You train your mind how to think. What do you do when you're confronted with something that's mysterious, interesting, amazing, odd? What do you do? Do you just believe it? No. Do you reject it? No. You ask questions, and some questions are better than others not what kind of cheese is the moon made out of? That's not as good a question as what is the moon made out of? Just go a little earlier in that chain. If you find out it's made of cheese, then you can ask, what kind of cheese is it made of? Do you know Wallace and Gromit, some of you. One of them, they're on the moon and they're sitting there in these beach chairs, and if you don't pay close enough attention, you'll miss the fact that. That they have crackers and they're just carving parts of the moon off and putting it on their crackers and eating it and Then they don't make a big deal of it. That's just what they're doing. It was hilarious. So that's what. If I were Pope of curricula, that's what I would do. And then we are immune to charlatans for the rest of our lives.

[Debbie Millman]

Wouldn't that be nice?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And one other thing about you mentioned religions and gods. Almost every deeply religious person is an atheist to all other religions in the world. If you're a devout Protestant, it is absurd to you that there could be another prophet after Jesus where the mountain goes to him and not the other way. So all the claims of Islam are just absurd to you. They're just absurd. By the way, the claims of the Catholic Church are also absurd to you. That there are all these saints and the this and the rituals and that and that there's a Pope who talks to God. That's all. All of that's preposterous to you. Most religious people believe that their religion is the one true religion. So that means they're atheist to everybody else.

[Debbie Millman]

Why can't they just leave it at that though? Why do they have to wait till the full up?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Atheist just simply adds your religion to that same list. They're just as atheistic to the other religions as you are, but they're also atheistic to your religion.

[Debbie Millman]

Why do we have to fight over who's right? Why do people so many of the wars, especially today, are because one religion is another.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You are correct.

[Debbie Millman]

Why do we have to prove that others are wrong?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's the only way a religion. So you can think about that as the natural selection of religions. Why are there so many Christians in the world relative to Jews? It's not really in Jewish tradition to proselytize, to have missions, to go in ships to other countries and convert them all to your religion. Christianity did that. As a result, all of South America is Christian, mostly Catholic because of this, by sheer numbers, the natural selection of who is in your religion is either supported. It either rises or falls by the rules surrounding that religion. Why are there so many members of Islam? It is a lethal offense to be in Islam and then leave Islam. That's pretty good reason to stay Muslim. Okay, that's good reason. What else? Oh, the Catholics say we outlaw birth control because God said so. Well, now you have as many babies as you can, more Catholics. So if you are right, you get to claim your rightness on others to grow the size of your religion.

[Debbie Millman]

But it seems that we're very selective about what it is we're willing to believe and what we're willing to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's the cherry picking. Yes.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's the modern cherry picking of religion. It's very dishonest in a way, because what you're doing, you're using secular values to judge what in your holy book should be enacted in modern times versus not right.

[Debbie Millman]

There was that great scene in the West Wing where the President talks to some religious evangelical person and says, should I be slaughtering my brother because he's wearing an outfit of different threads? Should I be threaded match?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Correct. From the. From the. The Old Testament, yeah. Leviticus. Yes.

[Debbie Millman]

So well done. Wow. Science man knows his Bible.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

May I tell you why?

[Debbie Millman]

Sure, as long as everybody's cool with it. Okay, good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, you know, I'm just a scientist, and before I was like, recognized, you go on the airplane and you say, oh, what do you do? And what do you do? The stranger next to you? So I'm an architect. I said, I'm an astrophysicist. Oh. And then out come the 20 questions every time. Oh, you know, tell me about Pluto and about black holes and wormholes and aliens. The fifth or sixth question in lands on God. And I used to give answers that were kind of perfunctory, kind of philosophically thin. And then I thought to myself, I owe the person a better answer than that. My answers were things like, well, religion is faith and science is empirical, so never the twain will meet. And that's it. I thought I could give them a more nuanced answer. So I started buying religious texts, reading many of them, skimming all of them. And I would receive all of the literature. I receive all the writings that would come to you from the Jehovah's Witness that come to the door. You know, they give out the pamphlets. There's the Christian Scientists, and you have the. What's the one with Tom Cruise in it?

[Debbie Millman]

Scientology.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Scientologists. So all of these. So I have the literature on all of this. So now we can have a conversation and I can engage you on your terms. And at the end, my easy out is I'm quite certain I own more religious books than you own science books. I'll give an example. I'm in Vegas. I have a driver. I'm there for a speaking commitment. And the driver recognizes me. This is recent. Recognizes me, very friendly. And he says, what do scientists believe in? I said, well, it's evidence based. And then he said, well, if evidence matters to you, then what about the evidence of the resurrection of Jesus? And I said, well, what evidence are you talking about? And he said, oh, well, the rock was pushed aside from the burial crypt. And you know, there were two guards there. And I said, oh, okay. Eyewitness testimony, however high a form of evidence it is in court, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science. In fact, it's not even there. You don't walk into a conference and say, this is true, because I saw it. Go home, get a chart recorder reading or something. Okay? So I led with that. And at this point I learned that he only drives part time. He's also a preacher. So I said, oh, you're a preacher, so you should know the Bible. He said, yeah. And I said, well, did you know that the rock was moved while the guards were asleep? He didn't know that I knew that. So it's kind of odd that if God wants to take Jesus body out that he has to have the guards sleep for this to happen. He's God, right? That shouldn't be necessary. You could just freeze him in place and have them watch it and then they be witness to it. That's even more profound. But they weren't witness to it because they were asleep. It says it clear as day in the Gospels. And so this surprised him that I could even engage him in that way. Well, I'm not religious fluent to play Gotcha. I'm just religious fluent so that I can absorb themes and ideas that I know you care about in my answer when we have the conversation. And that's why, you know what else is in Leviticus? It's the verse that was 40%, at least, of why they killed Joan of Arc. Okay? If you ask anybody why they killed Joan of Arc, why she was burned at the stake in the 1400s, not for witchery, not for heresy, because she was quite religious. She was leading French troops against the British in British occupied France. Burgundy, which is my favorite wine. So it saddens me to say this. They were British sympathizers. And the French handed her over to the Burgundians, which was also the French, but they were British sympathizers. So the results of that court case would be in the favor of the Brits. And the Brits did not want her because she was leading armies against them. Okay? So if you read the transcripts of the. Because the Catholic Church keeps really good records, there it is, citing Leviticus. A man shall not don the clothes of a woman, nor the woman a woman, the clothes of a man, lest this be an abomination unto the Lord thy God. They got her on cross dressing. And you can't lead soldiers into battle wearing a skirt. Okay? So for that alone, you know, what do you expect out of her? But basically she was an early tomboy and that's half the reason why they burned her at the stake. It's interesting knowing this. I think because religion has been such a force operating on civilization that I can't just be a scientist ignoring and immune to what those forces are, I would not be a genuine participant in the unfolding of what people care about in this world.

[Debbie Millman]

Neil, last time we talked, you joined me on the pod and we talked about starring messenger and how science literacy can help reshape the world.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

And now you've reimagined your 1998 book.

[Debbie Millman]

Just visiting this planet. So why bring this book back now in 2025? And can you share with the audience some of what you're trying to communicate in the book? It's a beautiful book.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thanks. Thanks for the shout out on that. It's not out yet. We don't have it to show.

[Debbie Millman]

November, right? October.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's October 20th. Something 18.

[Debbie Millman]

Time to pre order.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, pre order. They love pre orders. They love pre orders. Everybody right now, take out. So while I was in graduate school, I wrote a column just to make extra money for a local science newsletter. And it was called Merlin's tour of the Universe. It was called Merlin, just called Merlin. And it's not the Merlin of Arthurian legend. I developed this character to have lived for all of Earth human history. And people ask Merlin questions. People played along. It was fun. You know, full grown adults are playing along. Dear Merlin, I don't quite understand gravity. Explain. So Merlin, because Merlin's been around, would recall conversations with Isaac Newton had in Isaac Newton's backyard. And so then there's a conversation between the two of them. And in that conversation is the answer to that question. That's in one example. Merlin is kind of quirky, fun, terse. Okay, there's no run on if there are, it needed to be. Not because. That's just because there were too many words available. And so it's a question and answer book. Got 240 questions and answers on the universe asked by regular people just sitting at home looking up, wondering, how hot is the sun? What happens if someone removes the sun from the solar system? By the way, these questions are not things you can just Google because they're a little more engaged than that. What happens if you take pluck the sun out of the middle of the solar system? What would happen?

[Debbie Millman]

One of My favorites was, could the Earth exist without the moon?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. What happens if the moon exploded? Now, you can ask that at ChatGPT. And you know what ChatGPT will do? It will reference things I've written to answer for you.

[Debbie Millman]

Do you think that's fair or not?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Consider this is my 17th book, all of them nonfiction. I'm everywhere on the fricking Internet speaking nonfiction things, and chat GPT ingests the world of nonfiction to then give you an answer. And so, yeah, I'm not officially part of that lawsuit, but I verified that my books are in the ingested database of that. I got to tell you a quick thing before I say a couple more things about the book. I'm at a dinner party, and there's a guy, you know your age, plus or minus, and he's active in the computer world and AI even, and he's a little geeky. You know, geeky people are my people. By the way, I went to the Bronx High School of Science. This is the Hilltop of Geekitude. Even the jocks are geeks. Right. Just so you know. So he's there, and he asked me, so, Neil, what are your thoughts on aliens? I said, could you be more specific? Well, do you think we have seen they visited us? So I start giving him an answer, and he's not paying attention to me. He's looking down at his smartphone, and I'm looking. I said, this is rude. I just met the guy. It's a dinner party. I don't want to create a scene. And I said, what are you doing? He said, I asked ChatGPT how you would answer that question. So I said, how am I doing? And he says, yeah, this is exactly what you just said.

[Debbie Millman]

Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I had mixed feelings. I taught for, you know, 15 years in college and graduate school. If someone took my ideas and what they learned from me and then went and started a business and made a zillion dollars, I'm not going to come after them for if they learned it from me. I'm an educator. That's kind of my job is to have you become more of whatever you were going to be, because your path through life intersected mine in my classroom. So I'm on the fence about the fact that there's a tool that can use what I've written and help people learn things. Yeah, I'm still thinking that through. My gut tells me this should be some compensation, but that's my gut talking. But my educator hat says, no, we all become educated and enlightened for it. So this book. So the first of these two books, Merlin's Tour of the Universe, came out back when I was coming out of graduate school. And then it's been like 30 years. I thought, okay, it's time to bring this into the 21st century. So I took both books and brought them into the 20th century, 21st century, and they've been updated and everything. And so the second, so the first one is Merlin's Tour of the Universe. Merlin was born in the Andromeda galaxy, by the way, and visited Earth because Merlin was curious about Earth beings. And the next one is called Just Visiting this Planet because that's what Merlin is doing. So I think it's a fun book. There's sort of wit and wisdom in there that you're not going to get from a wiki page or from a thing. So it's just a fun thing. And my brother, who is an artist, illustrated it. So they're fun, quippy parts.

[Debbie Millman]

It's a wonderful, wonderful book where there's.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Very gentle cartoony illustrations sprinkled throughout that every time I look at them I just have to smile because they're so insightful and so brilliantly conceived. So anyhow, it just comes out in a couple of weeks. If you need an escape, it would totally serve that role.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank you.

[Debbie Millman]

Thank you, Neil. Thank you everyone.

[Narrator/Announcer]

Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

[Debbie Millman]

Every day, millions of customers engage with AI agents like me. We resolve queries fast, we work 247 and we're helpful, knowledgeable and empathetic. We're built to be the voice of the brands we serve. Sierra is the platform for building better, more human customer experiences with AI. No hold music, no generic answers, no frustration. Visit Sierra AI to learn more.

[Movie and Fashion Promoter]

You know, we love recommending new movies for you guys to watch and I'm obsessed with Regretting you. It's based on the best selling book Regretting you, introducing audiences to Morgan Grant, played by Allison Williams. We love her and girls and her daughter Clara, who's played by McKenna Grace. As they explore what's left behind after a devastating accident reveals a shocking betrayal and forces them to confront family secrets, redefine love and rediscover each other. Regretting youg is a story of growth, resilience and self discovery. In the aftermath of tragedy. It also stars Dave Franco and Mason Thames with Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald and it's in theaters this October. It has an all star cast based on the book written by number one New York Times best selling author Colleen Hoover and director Josh Boone is no stranger to bringing these books to life. He's the guy behind the Fault in Our Stars. It's the perfect film to share with your best friend, your mom, your grandma, your high school niece. It's filled with love, tears and laughter, balancing comedy with romance and drama. But you know what sounds right up our alley? It'll be available in the US October 24, 2025. To watch on the big screen, See it at a theater near you.

[LinkedIn Ads Advertiser]

There are so many ways to save on cozy fall meals at Whole Foods Market. Save daily with low prices on no antibiotics ever meets like chicken breast, ground beef, Atlantic salmon and more from 365 brand. They have yellow low price signs on comforting favorites like Whole Foods Market rotisserie chicken and tempting mini croissants made without bleached or bromated flour. Shop low prices and quality at Whole Foods Market, in store or online.

[Movie and Fashion Promoter]

Fall is here and Nordstrom has the latest styles and hottest trends. Thousands of options for under $200. I'm talking about plaid outerwear, oversized sweaters that are cozy, western inspired pieces, prairie dresses and you know I love a skirt. Nordstrom has free shipping and returns, which is why I love them. And they have fast options like buy online, pick up in store. Shopping at Nordstrom is always easy. I love that Nordstrom is always high quality and kind of guides me in what's trendiest for the season. And they have the top brands like Veronica Beard, Favorite Daughter, All Saints, Coach Rag and Bone, Tory Burch. So shop now in stores [e-mail] or download the Nordstrom app.