Why AI is Overrated - with Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Why AI is Overrated - with Neil DeGrasse Tyson"

Host: Hasan Minhaj
Guest: Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Release Date: July 23, 2025

---

In this engaging episode of Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know, Hasan sits down with renowned astrophysicist and science communicator Neil DeGrasse Tyson to discuss the intricate dynamics of artificial intelligence (AI), its perceived overhype, and its real implications for society. The conversation weaves through the realms of AI's current capabilities, future prospects, the intersection of science and technology, and the pressing challenges facing academic institutions.

1. Opening Game: Testing Scientific Knowledge

The episode kicks off with a playful yet revealing segment where Hasan challenges Neil to answer a series of science questions without providing corrections. This segment underscores the common misconceptions surrounding scientific concepts:

• High Tides:
  Hasan Minhaj [00:46]: “The tide is high and the tide is the ocean, which is somehow connected to the moon. That also is connected to a woman's cycle. But in this case, the moon is making the ocean rise.”

• Earth's Orbit:
  Hasan Minhaj [01:19]: “The sun is huge, and the Earth doesn't fall into the sun because the gravitational pull is making it circle the block but not careen into the sun. And I don't know why it hasn't yet, but I'm glad it hasn't. But it's gravity in orbit is my answer, sir.”

• Schrödinger's Cat:
  Hasan Minhaj [01:48]: “There was a German scientist named Schrödinger. He had a cat. And the cat, the cat jumped off a bookshelf. Schrödinger noticed the speed that the cat jumped off, and he came up with an equation based on that. She became known as Schrödinger's cat.”

Despite the humorous mishaps, this segment sets the stage for a deeper exploration of scientific literacy and communication.

2. The Role of Science Communicators

Transitioning from the game, Hasan praises Neil's unparalleled ability to communicate complex scientific ideas to the public, emphasizing the critical role of scientific literacy in combating misinformation.

• On Scientific Literacy:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [07:00]: “It is remarkably potent to be scientifically literate in a world. It empowers you to know when someone else is full of shit.”

Hasan reflects on the current societal challenges, such as misinformation and the undermining of scientific institutions, highlighting the necessity of figures like Tyson in defending the place of science in civic life.

3. Artificial Intelligence: Hype vs. Reality

A significant portion of the discussion centers on AI, dissecting its current state and future trajectory.

• AI vs. AGI:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [13:47]: “AI are computers that do things better than you, faster than you, cheaper than you. That is, you can replace people's employment with machines that can do this, essentially.”

• Capabilities of AI:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [14:03]: “ChatGPT is not going to make your cup of coffee.”

Tyson differentiates between narrow AI and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), expressing a balanced perspective on the transformative potential of AI while addressing common fears about job displacement and societal impact.

• Exponential Growth in Technology:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [19:25]: “We've been living in an exponential world.”

He illustrates the exponential advancements in technology, likening them to historical innovations like the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, emphasizing that while certain industries may wane, new ones emerge to fulfill evolving societal needs.

4. Quantum Computing and Scientific Frontiers

The conversation delves into quantum computing, highlighting its groundbreaking potential in fields like cosmology and natural physics.

• Quantum Computing Applications:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [34:08]: “If I want to simulate what the stars in a galaxy are doing... I have to calculate that for 100 billion stars at all times.”

Tyson underscores how quantum computing can revolutionize our understanding of the universe by enabling simulations previously impossible with classical computers.

5. The Assault on Academia

Addressing recent political developments, Hasan raises concerns about funding cuts and policy changes adversely affecting academic research.

• Impact of Funding Cuts:
  Hasan Minhaj [37:40]: “Places are being investigated for their DEI policies. It is an all out assault.”

• Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Perspective:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [38:24]: “When we were all in the caves... With advances in medicine... Science and vaccines more broadly are the victims of their own success.”

Tyson discusses the broader implications of undermining academic funding, emphasizing the indispensable role of unbiased, curiosity-driven research in fostering innovation and societal progress.

6. The Golden Age of Engineering vs. Scientific Breakthroughs

Hasan touches upon the perception that while engineering is soaring with breakthroughs in robotics and virtual reality, scientific discoveries seem stymied by the limitations of current instrumentation.

• Exponential Progress in Science:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [46:25]: “When you're on an exponential growth curve, no matter where you place yourself on that curve, it looks like all the great inventions happened just recently.”

Tyson counters the notion that scientific discoveries are waning, highlighting ongoing frontiers like dark matter, dark energy, and the origins of life, which continue to push the boundaries of human knowledge.

7. Robotics and Practical Applications

The duo discusses the evolution of robotics, contrasting early failures with modern advancements, while humorously addressing the gap between pop culture expectations and actual technological progress.

• Practical Robotics:
  Hasan Minhaj [49:50]: “It's going to be pumping out millions of horoscopes a second.”

• Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Reflection:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [50:37]: “Because creating a robot is not a thing.”

Despite advancements, Tyson emphasizes that practical, household robotics akin to those in The Jetsons remain elusive, attributing this to the complexity of replicating versatile human tasks.

8. Rapid-Fire Questions: Personal Insights from Tyson

Wrapping up the episode, Hasan poses rapid-fire questions to Neil, eliciting personal reflections and additional insights:

• Dream of Alien Abduction:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [52:11]: “Whenever I'm using my telescope at night alone and I look up, I want to be abducted by aliens.”

• Understanding a Scientific Concept:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [53:36]: “That the universe is objectively knowable.”

• Unasked Questions:
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson [54:07]: “I don't think that way. I'm a servant of people's curiosity.”

These exchanges humanize Tyson, showcasing his whimsical side and reinforcing his commitment to fostering curiosity and scientific understanding.

Conclusion

Throughout the episode, Hasan Minhaj masterfully balances humor with profound discussions, while Neil DeGrasse Tyson provides a thoughtful, optimistic perspective on the future of AI and science. Together, they illuminate the importance of scientific literacy, the potential and pitfalls of technological advancements, and the indispensable value of unfettered academic research in shaping a better future.

Notable Quotes:

• Neil DeGrasse Tyson [07:00]: “It empowers you to know when someone else is full of shit.”

• Neil DeGrasse Tyson [19:25]: “We've been living in an exponential world.”

• Neil DeGrasse Tyson [53:36]: “That the universe is objectively knowable.”

---

This episode serves as a compelling exploration of AI's role in modern society, advocating for a balanced understanding of technological advancements and their broader implications.

Transcript

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Lemonade.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Look, you've spent so much of your life explaining science to people.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Basically being a human. Well, actually, meme. Okay, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Although I've learned to not use the word actually, because that annoys people.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Correct.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I go out of my way to not use that word.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I want to play a game with you that's going to involve you doing something you rarely get asked to do.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. What's that?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Which is remain silent?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

This is a series of science questions that you're gonna ask me. Okay. I haven't seen these questions. I am going to do what 8 billion people on planet Earth generally do when they interact with science. I'm going to just go off the top of my dome and you cannot correct me.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

These are good questions. What causes high tide?

[Hasan Minhaj]

The tide is high and the tide is the ocean, which is somehow connected to the moon. That also is connected to a woman's cycle. But in this case, the moon is making the ocean rise.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I can't say anything about your answer.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You can't. I know this is like you being waterboarded, but this is not.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm gonna explode. That's the only question. Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Why does the Earth not fall into the sun?

[Hasan Minhaj]

The sun is huge, and the Earth doesn't fall. Fall into the sun because the gravitational pull is making it circle the block but not careen into the sun. And I don't know why it hasn't yet, but I'm glad it hasn't. But it's gravity in orbit is my answer, sir. You can't correct me.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Explain the thought experiment known as Schrodinger's cat.

[Hasan Minhaj]

There was a German scientist named Schrodinger. Schrodinger. He had a cat. And the cat, the cat jumped off a bookshelf. Schrodinger noticed the speed that the cat jumped off, and he came up with an equation based on that. She became known as Schrodinger's cat. Schrodinger's cat.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All your answers are what an 8th grader would give who didn't do the homework. They just take the words from the question and reassemble them and put them into some kind of answer that they think will get them credit. That would get D plus C minus. If it's a good day, I mean.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Without studying, I think that's pretty good.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So C minus.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I did not study. Hurry.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right away.

[Hasan Minhaj]

No delays are. Make your daddy glad you have had such a laugh. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Neil Degrasse Tyson. Thank you for joining us.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Man, I didn't know you have little cheering section up there.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, we got a live studio audience of about four people. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the most famous scientist in the world. Is he the best scientist? I have no idea. I got a C minus in chemistry. But he is the best science communicator. And in this moment, science communication has become more important than science itself. Sad. We are drowning in an infinite scroll of misinformation. The country's leading scientific institutions are getting nuked by teenagers named big balls. And RFK Jr. Is trying to replace measles vaccines with measles Low key. We're doomed. So in that context, Neil DeGrasse Tyson's role as a communicator isn't just helpful, it's essential. He's not just explaining science, he is defending its place in our civic life. So I sat down with Dr. Tyson to talk about the power of scientific literacy, the president's attack on scientific institutions, and the future of AI. Also, I may have briefly tried to convert him to Islam. I'm just saying love to have him. You're probably one of the goat science communicators of our time. Okay, your IMDb is stacked. You have 232 IMDb credits, which I.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Hardly ever look at IMDb. That's interesting.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Thank you. Yes. Now compare that to. To one of the great goat science communicators of my generation, Bill Nye, the science guy who only has a paltry 169 interviews. You have unironically played yourself in dozens of television programs. When did you realize you were famous?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Great question. There are a couple of checkpoints here.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So one of them was I, when my email was still available to people. In fact, I published a book called Letters from an Astrophysicist, which was my correspondence with the random general public asking me stuff.

[Hasan Minhaj]

The way you said random. There's a deep disdain.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I came upon some chat room on the Internet and people were arguing with each other about what I said and what I meant.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

When they could have just emailed me. So when I became the subject of other people's arguments and debates and conversations, I. I realized, oh, okay, something else is going on. But the real threshold here.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is I made the COVID of Highlights magazine.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's a big deal.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's big.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's big. Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

No Highlights. Highlights in Sports Illustrated for Kids are two hot magazines.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, all right, I'm there.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's a big deal.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm there. But I. I had no, no aspirations to any of this.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, I mean, it Must. It must.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm just perfectly. Send me back to the lab. I'll be fine.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, as an astrophysicist and now that you're a famous astrophysicist, it's kind of wild seeing that you stand in front of more micro microphones than you do telescopes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, that is true.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do you wish you could go back to being in front of behind?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I want to do both.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

See, See, if I didn't do the microphone thing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I would almost be irresponsible because I can do it. Maybe one out of six of my colleagues. Right. Is on the spectrum. You know, and they're perfectly happy in the lab, but not deeply interacting with the public.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Put a camera in front of them. Are they even going to make eye contact with the lens or anything? So. So as best as I know of myself, I'm not on the spectrum. So if we're both in the lab and the camera comes, I would be irresponsible if I didn't field the media inquiry.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I don't know that anyone gains if you put someone in front of the media. That's not where they're comfortable.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I see it as a duty.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Now, being a public figure myself. Fame is one of the quickest ways to lose a sense of objective reality. How do you reckon with that as you interact with science?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because I'm foundationally a scientist with never a goal to have become famous. So the fame thing is not centered to my being. Being a scientist is centered to my being. And being a scientist, you observe the world, you analyze the world, you take the laws of physics as we understand them in the physical universe, and you use that to pass judgment on statements. People make claims, they make assertions. They hold for what they say or think is true. It is remarkably potent to be scientifically literate in a world. It empowers you to know when someone else is full of shit. Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's that simple. And so. So, no, it's this. I don't have a problem reestablishing some sense of objective reality.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's great.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Or can I add something to that?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, go. Go for it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is a little weird fact.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Might have said this once ever.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In front of a microphone.

[Hasan Minhaj]

HMDK exclusive. Let's do it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. There you go. That's a K on the right hand.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's a K right there. Yeah, yeah. With a little. That's a K. Looks like an I and a C. But I. But if you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, all right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, we can. We can get into typeface. Yeah, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm a typeface guy.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Typeface and kerning is my love language.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Really?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my gosh.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay. But that's for another time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So talk to me. You're going to say something that you did. You know what's up?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That in Saturday night live and 7 11.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It'S the same typeface.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay. Same font family.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Saturday Night Live, the N in night is lowercase and all the other letters are uppercase.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And in 7 11, the N is lowercase. In 11 and all the other letters are uppercase.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, that's cool.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's a little weird.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They just slip that in you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You know, the FedEx. You see the arrow and the logo as well.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. It's in the shadow.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In the. In the.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Not to one up you. I just wanted it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Negative space.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes, it's in the negative space.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, no, I'm thinking about that. Oh, where were we before I rudely.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You said you had. You had. You had something that you wanted.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the human mind is highly susceptible to misinterpreting an objective truth that's right in front of you. And we celebrate that, actually, with books like. What do you call those? Optical illusion books. Nobody doesn't love a good optical illusion book, but it's weird. But pause and think on this. There's a page with two lines. I don't know. Is one line longer or shorter? I don't know. Because there's some little. Little fooling factor about the illustration. If something as simple as a line drawing can confound your understanding of what is real.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Then I just want you to know that I cherish the ability of our brains to work at all in the face of these possible delusions of reality or illusions.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So then what happens now? People say, oh, let me stir some chemicals into my brain, and that'll be better. It's like whatever it is doing for you, it is not bringing you closer to an objective reality.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so are you talking about, let.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Me stir some chemicals. You're talking about microdosing mushrooms?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. I have never, etcetera, done drugs ever in my life.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay. You Muslim? No. Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No. I can arrive at such conclusions without being a part of a huge system of religious philosophy.

[Hasan Minhaj]

We'd love to have you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Nor am I Mormon? You could ask that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. So, yeah, I'm not into caffeine. None of this. These chemicals that you would stir into the brain. Now, maybe you could be more artistic I don't know. But getting closer to how nature works? No, there's no evidence that that has ever happened with anybody.

[Hasan Minhaj]

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[C]

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[Hasan Minhaj]

Let's talk about one. One topic that is that people talk about on the Internet a lot, and it's a big part of public discourse, which is artificial intelligence. But now there's a new topic, which is AGI, Artificial General intelligence. Can you explain that to our audience real quick, just as a general idea, and then we can get into it deeper?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So AI, you have to contrast it to AI. So AI are computers that do things better than you, faster than you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Cheaper than you. Yeah, cheaper. That is, you can replace people's employment with machines that can do this, essentially.

[Hasan Minhaj]

ChatGPT, Grok3. Hey, ingest this Microsoft Excel document.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, ingest it and write something. Write a summary of it that a person might have taken half a day to do, and it'll do it in two minutes or less. So this is what anyone today is referring to as AI. By the way, AI has been around long before ChatGPT. Chatbot put it on the radar of creative people. Because all of a sudden now AI is doing creative things.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right. It's writing your term paper. It's drawing and making an illustration.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so. And the people who write headlines are the ones directly affected by that sort of thing. Correct. So AI had a resurgence of public awareness of its role in our society, but it's always been there. Always decades. Yeah, right. When. When. When computers beat us at chess. Okay. I remembered how far away that goal felt. And then it was conquered.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It was like, wow, okay. Then they moved the goalpost. Well, how about Jeopardy? Jeopardy requires cultural awareness. That's not just logical. Logical inference.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's think this through.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In a cultural, culturally aware, sensitive way. It wiped the floor with our best Jeopardy player ever.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, what's funny is you talked about this on Colbert. Let's take a look. Here's what this is, what you said. AI beat us at chess. AI beat us in jeopardy. No one freaked out and ran for the hills when that happened. It only made headlines When AI figured out how to write your term paper, then all the liberal arts people, they pooped their pants.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's. Thank you. Okay, that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, now, why are you not as worried about AGI's impact on humanity and what would make you poop your pants?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so AGI, it can learn anything at all on its own and be self motivated doing so.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So it has its own.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There might be others who would define it slightly differently on the edges, but foundationally. It is general intelligence as our human brain functions. You walk into a room It's a new situation. You work in a different room and you analyze it, you assess it, you decide how you can add to what is needed in that moment. So AGI is not a specific computer with a specific task.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So. And you put that into a robot, then. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Because ChatGPT is not going to make your cup of coffee.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right. It's specifically task oriented.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's task oriented.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Write me an essay on Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Correct. Correct.

[Hasan Minhaj]

In 10 paragraphs.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. So in this style, AGI would look at your life and say, oh, he probably wants this tomorrow. Let me figure out how much and why, and they'll do it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So it's really a whole person.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So some people find that concerning. You don't find it concerning?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't think it's in the offing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What do you mean by in the off?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't. I don't see why we would value. Sounds highly useful.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. However, we're humans and we're in charge. At least we still tell ourselves that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I have tasks in my life. I would love to have computers do it for me.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't want the computer to do everything. I want it to do that thing. Don't get a computer that can do that thing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So. So why are the leading science and tech thought leaders talking about this in a very terrifying way?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So let me clarify that for you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Some leading tech people talk about it in that way and they're the ones that get all the clickbait. What you don't see are the far out. The number of tech people who do not feel that way.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But no one goes to interview them.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because it's not as fun.

[Hasan Minhaj]

They don't have a blue check Presence. You're publishing PDFs.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's not as fun.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Where's their YouTube channel?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Don't talk to any of the people in the big computer companies.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They're all into it completely. It's transformative. Cause you can ask, what was the single most important thing in the 20th century that affected the 20th century? Give me any answer.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Nuclear weapons. The Internet.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. No.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The computer.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, Duh.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, sure, the computer.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, well, you asked me to do it quickly. I was gonna. I would possibly get to that. My God. Nuclear weapons is big too, man.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The computer. The computer completely transformed everything we do at all times.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes. Okay, okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But it became so blended into our lives. We're not thinking of it as a singular thing. Such Is the future of AI in my vision, such as it'll become so much a part of it. It already is. If you drive an electric car, it's making decisions for you faster than you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Even if it's not an electric car. Automatic braking. If someone walks in front of the thing, you don't call that AI, but somebody, something made that decision for you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, one of the things that people talk about, and I was talking about with our producers is human beings have this blind spot. And the specific blind spot is our inability to see things exponentially.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's correct.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And one of the things I wrote.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A chapter on that in one of my books.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And one of the things that we don't talk about in AGI is the exponential step functions of how quickly it's getting good and getting better.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let me just make it clear.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Since the Industrial revolution, basically.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We've been living in an exponential world.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Has it been.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, yes. Oh my gosh.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It's felt linear. Human beings have this blind spot. In the specific blind spot is our inability to see things exponentially.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's correct.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It's felt linear. In, in my opinion, is that just.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A feeling because it feels linear? Because you're occupying tiny bits of a much larger scale of change. All right, so look at 1905, New York City. Take a picture of Fifth Avenue. There's 50 horse drawn carriages for every one automobile.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Ten years later, 1915, the same photo.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's 50 automobiles and one horse drawn carriage. You tell me that's not exponential. Within 10 years we go from horses, which we figuratively and literally built civilization on the back of. And now you can't give away a horse. Whole industries supporting horses went away. Buggy, whips, wheelchanger, wooden wheel, all of that went away within 10 years. And so. And we just. There it is. We just accepted it. Oh, oh. What else happened? Oh, cinema comes in. Oh, now we can see, like storytelling. And we don't have to go to the theater. Oh my God. That happened within a couple of decades.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. In the, in the early part of the century. Oh, take a look at a map of all the planes that are airborne at any given moment.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's a million people airborne at any given moment of any given day. A million people. And I look back 100 years ago, the Wright brothers and all of this.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Four people are airborne at any given moment. Now we have millions. Come on now.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So these exponential step functions that you've seen Even in my 39 years on planet Earth, you're not concerned about them vis a vis AGI.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It'll happen with AGI.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And you're saying it's okay? It's gonna be.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, I'm saying I don't think AGI is what we're gonna go for.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I think you wanna do things that are useful and practical and that's how we've brought technology to our.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What does that mean, useful and practical? Just what do you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Like I said, I want a computer to make my coffee.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Same.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, same.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And I have a question.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't even like coffee. But that's the one everyone cares about because there's a lot of mystique around how the coffee comes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I'm not even worried about coffee. I'm talking about will the machines help me live my life? Fold laundry, do the dishes, make my bed. All the things that labor the labor.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You should make your own damn bed. Look at me like that. Don't be a lazy clean up after yourself.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wait, wait. I'm interviewing Neil Degrasse Tyson, not this hybrid between Jordan Peterson and my dad.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What is this?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Make your chapter one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that's right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

My rules for life. That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

One of the rules for life.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So wait, can I. I'm going to ask you this. I. I come at science from a very humanistic perspective. And, and what. What scares me. Me. And walk me through this. Scientific progress doesn't always equal human progress. I'll give you a prime example. Nuclear weapons was a. Was a prime example of that huge scientific breakthrough. Not necessarily good for humanity.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just. Just clarify.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You can credit science for nuclear power.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They became weapons because countries can't get along.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Correct.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, yeah. So I just want to clap now. Yes. Countries paid scientists to build the bombs.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But the scientific discovery equals MC squared from 1905 was a brilliant scientific discovery that gave us an understanding of the universe. So I, you should. You should put a line in the sand between what if the line is what the net.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What the intention was and then the net.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, fine, fine. It's how, it's how the sword gets used.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And how precisely, precisely do you believe that AGI could be a net positive for humanity? Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So let's extrapolate this further.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so now the, the, the. The. The bad actors.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Who get access to AGI. Where AGI is, of course, has a low barrier of entry. Lower than building airborne nuclear weapons. Right. So the risk factors would be higher. Yes. So I don't have problems putting guardrails on things and checkpoints. I Had a brief conversation with Ray Bradbury. He told me of a time when a woman came up to him and said, he's a science fiction author. And she asks, why do you write these stories of such apocalyptic futures? Is this where you think civilization is headed? And he replied, no, I write those stories so, you know, to avoid them.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Ah, as a warning guardrail.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. So we see Terminator wreaking havoc, you know, in the cities from the film. And maybe that'll tell us. Maybe let's not put it in a machine.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I hope so. You know, but there's always that, that, dare I say, that late stage capitalist interest that the biggest companies have. I'll give an example if you remember the Great Recession that we had. Unemployment hit 10% and it was extremely painful.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

2008. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And I was thinking about this. I go, just a matter. When you look at the interest rates or even the unemployment rates, the, the, the, the margin of what 1 or 2 percentage points does to a society wreaks havoc.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What if that, you know, because of AGI and, and the massing, the mass, like wipeout of white collar jobs. What if that went to 15%? What if that went to 20%? What type of havoc would that ensue on our society and the world at large?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I, I'm going to, I want to purposefully sound, I want to sound naive here.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. I want to invoke nostalgia for the future. Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Here it is. When we went from horses to cars, whole industries went belly up. But other industries rose because of these new needs that we had. Automobiles we needed, gas stations, auto repair factories that build cars. Okay. It's not the same job that you had with a buggy whip, but it's another job being put back into society. I collected phone books. People didn't remember phone books.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure. It was like when you printed out the Internet. You actually printed and then you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Phone numbers. Okay. And living in New York City, we took perverse pride in the fact that we had the fattest phone book in the world for Manhattan.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I remembered as a kid, because I was a geek kid looking at the pages given to computers. Okay. This goes back to the early 70s, a couple of pages in the old pages. A computer repair computer. This. Right. And then by the late 70s, it was more. By the 1980s, after the PC came out, whole chunk of the yellow pages were given to advertising computers.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

These are entire industries.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Competing brands. So to say AI is going to take our jobs, the white collar jobs, Therefore, no One will have any work left to do.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Be creative and find something that AI can't do and create a whole industry out of that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, God. There's going to be more podcasting. I'm just saying, Neil, that's a net negative for society.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Haven't you heard AI do a podcast? You haven't heard it yet?

[Hasan Minhaj]

No.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my gosh. Producers, you gotta get them.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I don't want it. Don't make me do it. Here's what they do that's gonna be worse.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What they do, they take a scientific paper, AI ingests it, and then it gets discussed in a podcast with a host and a co host, and they've got all the.

[Hasan Minhaj]

All the mannerisms, the mumbles. The mumbles, yeah. And the meandering of podcasting.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exactly.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Let me ask you this.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So podcast could go out of business.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You feel the feeling I'm getting from you? And this is, again, just what I'm sensing is you are a science optimist and a techno optimist. Is that safe to say?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I would say I'm a. I'm a optimist. Realist. Is there one word for that?

[Hasan Minhaj]

You have optimism and pragmatism.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, thank you. That's. Yes. So I see the bright side of things, but with a reality check, here's.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Something that I see, a bright side too, and I'd love your insight on, is you always hear, oh, by the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Way, quick thing, not that you asked.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But I just want to settle once and for all whether a glass is half empty or half full. May I?

[Hasan Minhaj]

And what's yours?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What's your analysis? Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so if you are adding water to the glass and it gets halfway. Yeah, it's half full. If you were drinking from the glass and it's halfway, then it's half empty.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, so it's. It's based on actively what happened the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Moment, the rate of change of what's in the glass. Oh, half full, half empty. Okay, that makes to me complete sense.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

If you come upon a glass.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. Yes. If you've kind of. If you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You walk up to a table, it's half empty. If you walk up to a table and there's a.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's evaporating. Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's a Neil DeGrasse Tyson dad joke, ladies and gentlemen.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, no, but it's not a joke. It's a literal truth. If you left it there long enough, it'll just become less and less and less, and then you'll have the mineral deposits at the bottom. Sure. Okay, sure. Now go on.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You always hear in regards to AI and science, AI will help cure diseases, AI will help cure cancer.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. And already in the process of doing it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And it will cure Alzheimer's and dementia. How? I don't know specifically how.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, no, let me. I. That not being my.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I'm not attacking you as if you're the robot. Tell me, Chat mdt.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let me just give a broader statement here. There are certain frontiers, yes. In human physiology, the medical sciences, that were beyond our reach because we didn't have either the computing power or the capacity for the analysis of possible outcomes, either in the presence of a medication or in the presence of some other change you might impart within human physiology. And one of them is protein folding, for example. Proteins are these large molecules and their function relates to what shape they take when they're doing their business. And so if you don't have an understanding of all the possible shapes you can take or what the outcome would be, you're just throwing darts blind. Right. But when you have proper guidance with high performance computing, with a dose of AI, oh, my gosh, you can localize that and figure out exactly what you need. Keep in mind that, you know, when we were all in the caves, half of everyone born was dead before the age of 30.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Jesus.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Half?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Fast forward to 1840.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I thought it was going to be like 10.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Fast forward to 1840.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That number went up to 35. Half of everyone born was dead by the time they were 35. So in the tens of thousands of years between living in caves and. And the middle of the 19th century.

[Hasan Minhaj]

We only got five more years.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We got five years.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Jesus.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Since then, with advances in medicine, and by the way, everyone back then was eating organic. Just saying. And the water was clear, the air ran pure, the game was free range didn't make a damn bit of difference. Science matters here, okay? All right, you can run around and eat all the organic you want, you'd be dead by the 30. Unless some doctor came in and. And said, we can increase your life expectancy using science.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You're directing this at me as if I'm RFK Jr. I'm not. I'm just telling you I'm not.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Hold me back.

[C]

All right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I greatly look forward to what advances those will bring. And even though you have bad actors involved, and that can be bad, mean, bad things.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'd like to think that the positives at all times will outweigh the negatives. And when you lose your job, try to See it coming and then figure out what else you might be able to do that involves the uniquely creative thing that is humans. By the way, have you tried to say tell chat pg? Tell me a joke in the style of. Oh, it sucks.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It fucking sucks.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's bad.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It's garbage. Garbage.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Tell me joke in the style of Hassan Minhaj. Okay. Have you. Have you done that?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Whack. Garbage. Basura. Trash.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It'll probably get better.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And it wouldn't give me when I would say, hey, give me riffs on this the way I went off the top of the dome yet. And I. I Pay premium for Grock 3.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, you pay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I'll do deep things. It won't even come up with it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so here's. Here's my point.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But it'll be like. Do you want to. Like a demented fucking fever dream photo.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Here's my.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Here's a photo.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Here's my point. Yeah, here's my point.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I hardly ever point. Yeah, I'm pointing right now.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I got you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You have to back up.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

AI.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Can only know what already exists on the Internet.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. Which is terrifying.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So if it ingests everything you've done.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And tries to be you, it can't be something about you that you invent for yourself tomorrow, because that's not on the Internet yet.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you can stay ahead of AI by continually innovating in ways that AI does not have access to. So you can say, paint me this scene in the style of Van Gogh and it'll do it. And I say, paint me this scene in the style of no one who has ever been born. What? What?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Where's it going to go?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Where's it going to take you?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. Okay. I want to. I want to jump ahead a little bit. That is continuing in this kind of idea island that we're on. Let's talk about quantum computing. Okay. So there's a lot of hype around how much more powerful they are than standard supercomputers.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's not hype. It's real. But.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, but what kind of complex calculations could they be used for that we're not even thinking of right now?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So anytime. So just as a sample from my field, in my lifetime, computing power has grown exponentially, but in the Earth, and.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Especially probably for cosmology and natural physics.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. So if I want to simulate what the stars in a galaxy are doing, just think about. This galaxy has 100 billion stars in it, and they're all sort of in orbit. Around the center of the galaxy. How do I know what path they're going to take? Well, they're going to respond to the gravity. Every other star. But every other star is also in motion.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So every star is in motion at all times. And I want to calculate what the net force is on any one star and then move it in the direction that those forces indicate.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But I have to calculate that for 100 billion stars.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

At all times.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So in the old days we didn't have the computing power, so we would make a galaxy of 100 stars. Okay. And hopefully.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That it's somehow.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That was somehow reflective of a larger data set.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right, right, right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, God. Okay, so this sounds like political polling. Oh my God. We talked to five people in New Hampshire. Here's how the election is going to break down.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so at any given moment, on the frontier of science, if it's, if it's an active science and a vibrant science, there's always something that is just beyond what the computers of the day can do.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And what we exploiting AI we have a new telescope coming online called the Vera Rubin telescope that is not going to take photos of the night sky. It's going to take a movie of the night sky. That is photos close enough in interval that you stitch them all together, you get to move. Why do you want a movie of the night sky? Because if I just go there and take pictures and take them home, there's a zillion stars in the picture. The couple I'm interested in. But otherwise I don't know what's going on with the rest of what I'm. I don't care about what this telescope will do. It'll find anything that goes bump in the night, anything that's moving, anything that gets brighter and then dimmer again.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's going to find the dynamic phenomena in the universe and it's going to find asteroids that could be headed our way because from one image to the next, the asteroid moves. So this telescope is primarily a data project.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's no way we could have done that ourselves.

[Hasan Minhaj]

This is gonna be huge for astrology. I mean, it's gonna be pumping out.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not if they cared about data, but they don't.

[Hasan Minhaj]

No, it's gonna be pumping out millions of horoscopes a second. So many Brittanys will be given the signs they need.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In fact, Mercury just went into retrograde. I'll let you know.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, God.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And you know, it does that several times a year, just often enough to Blame the universe on your bad decisions rather than yourself.

[Hasan Minhaj]

God damn. Let's talk about Donald Trump's assault on academia. Right now there's a proposal to cut the funding for medical research institutions. John Hopkins lost about $800 million in grants due to USAID cuts. They cut $400 million earmarked for Columbia DHS, deported a Lebanese assistant professor at Brown University even though she had a valid H1B visa. Places are being investigated for their DEI policies. It is an all out assault. Everyone that I have spoken to before this interview involved in academia is genuinely freaked out. What have you been thinking about as all of this has been going down because you work in, in both academia and media and you're a public, you know, facing intellectual.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Yeah. So what I wonder.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is if everyone who voted for Donald Trump imagine this is how it would play out. And maybe people don't know or care much about academia, but there are other programs that are hit Medicare or Medicaid, one or both. Social Security. These are sort of cherished elements of our modern society that maintain our health, our well being, our security. And so I wonder how many of them saw this coming.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, let's.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that's my first point.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And if they all saw it coming, then okay, this is a democracy and it's government by the people, for the people.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And as they say, you make the bed now you sleep in the bed. Right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So people will see the consequences of this. And I wonder if when it all plays out, whether it's actually the country they wanted and as pendulum balls swing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's a lot getting broken now that took many, many decades.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

To build.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And when I tweeted a few weeks ago, when that asteroid, there was a 1 in 50 chance it might hit Earth.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And as I said, there's an asteroid headed towards earth with a 1 in 50 chance of striking.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. Then I said, seems like this is the wrong time to reduce science funding. That's all I did.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right. And what happened when you tweeted this?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Then there was the, you know, there's the normal cesspool of response.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But I guess, but my only point is decisions such as these have consequences. And if people don't know the consequences, they then have to experience it. If you're not going to vaccine against measles, people will get measles, children will die. You have to see those consequences. And it's unfortunate when it affects our health as opposed to just something else that wouldn't matter to most people. But your Health. And it's avoidable and it could have been avoided. Science and vaccines more broadly.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Are the victims of their own success. Right. It's like saying, if I say to you, why? If I, if I see you're using a dandruff shampoo.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I say, why are you using a dandruff shampoo? You don't have dandruff.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, sometimes I wear darker jackets and it gets flaky here. So I need to handle that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, you missed the point of what I'm saying.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What's the point when you say, why are you using a dandruff shampoo? You don't have dandruff. That's the whole point.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's the whole point. Oh, God. Okay, I got you. Okay, Sorry.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Why are you getting vaccinated when there are no communicable diseases out there?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's why there's no communicable diseases. Okay, okay. All right. People say, you know, why do I need space? I don't need space. I have DirecTV. And you know, images of hurricanes come. Why do I need space for? Yeah, right. It's with us, it is in us, it is all around us.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What do you say? To play devil's advocate, when people look at academia, they go, there's so much bureaucratic bloat, tenure professors never get questioned. There's all, there's a litany of things that have made this, that is, that have jammed up and clogged the systems of progress in academia. And we don't need any more gender studies majors, we need a whole lot more astrophysics majors. And they go, you know what, maybe it's good that they tighten the belt and they cut this DEI bullshit. Do you think that's an unfair way to look at this?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's just odd, okay? That it's just odd. There's all this talk about DEI is bad.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And there's the assumption that if you see someone who's not white male, they can't possibly be as qualified as the white male who's not in that position. Right. It's just odd that there'd be a four star general fired from his position who's black and replaced with someone who is objectively less qualified with a white male. That's kind of weird. How is that some comeback on dei? If you're going to do a comeback, get someone who's a white male who's a five star general, which there aren't any. Only in major warfare is there ever a five star general. But that would be a. That. That. If that's how. It's not what I see happening.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so I'm. I'm just. I wonder just how it's going to. Why is everyone okay with that? That you replace some woman or a black male or female female with someone who's objectively less qualified? I don't. I don't know how that's going to play out or why it isn't being analyzed in that way. So getting back to your point, just about academia.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. Is there anything that you would like to see that needs to change?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't think people fully understand the conduit between research in academia and the rest of our lives. It's not just something behind a closed door and an ivory tower.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There are people doing research on subjects, topics that do not have immediate, obvious financial benefits, but they're being done because the person is an expert in that subject, cares about it in a way no one else is going to care about it. Maybe later on you can find. Well, almost certainly later on you can find a commercial application of it. But if you look at the sources of innovation in the country, it is not in the R and D departments of. Yes, there's some in the R and D departments of big business, but there's a limit to what they're going to have them do because not everything they're going to do is going to make a buck. Okay, I'm sorry. There's a limit to what they're going to have to do because everything they could do would not necessarily translate to the return on investment. So in academia, there's no such limits. So we can do research on a subject that you would not otherwise care about. Right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Just because there's not a P and L sheet on it or there's not a financial return on it does not mean that there's not value for it in and of itself.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You know, it came out of academia. My physics professor in college who was an expert on nuclei in space, and out of this effort, he discovered a new physical phenomena called magnetic resonance of nuclei. Won a Nobel Prize for it. Yeah, it's a new physics phenomena. Why do you care? It's just physics. You can't even see molecules, much less care about anybody thinking about what the nucleus of it is doing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my gosh. What came out of that? The mri. The Magnetic Resonance imager is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who himself had no direct interest in medicine, but was foundational to it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it. And so there are inadvertent positive consequences for humanity by researching things for the pursuit of researching themselves in and of itself.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Correct. And that happens in academia.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it. There's two great chunks I want to get into. I want to talk about the golden age of engineering. I was talking to by producer Prashant about this and he said, you know, in our humble opinion, we are living in arguably the golden age of engineering breakthroughs. But when you look at robotics, batteries, self driving cars, virtual reality, et cetera, it's incredible. But I don't know if the same thing can be said about scientific breakthroughs. The 20th century was the era where we saw these massive breakthrough after breakthrough that you had talked about. Now that all of that fruit has been picked, it feels like many of our scientific breakthroughs are limited by the precision of the instruments that we are using and the precision of our instrumentation. What I mean by that is that before you needed a microscope to discover germs, and now we need a large hadron collider to prove the Higgs boson. So it ultimately comes back to engineering breakthroughs. Do you think this is a fair way to look at the state of science and engineering at the moment? Essentially that discoveries are limited by the instruments that we have?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

By the way, we've been. Like I said, when you're on an exponential growth curve.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No matter where you place yourself on that curve, it looks like all the great inventions happened just recently. That's the nature of an exponential curve. So you show an expansion. We're here. Oh my gosh, look what happened. If you re. Scale that and cut it here and scale it, that will be the same downward curve to the past.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, got it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

20 years ago, 50 years ago. As you see today.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Got it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's what they know. Fifty years ago, no one say, oh, we're living in such backwards time. Said no one ever. In the history of. I got you in the.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So when you look at each subsection, it always looks like the Y equals x.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Correct.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Curve.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Correct. No matter which segment you plot, it'll. It'll look like most of the changes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do you like that? I know. I still remember.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That was very good. Beautiful. Very good. Make up for some of that stuff earlier in the conversation.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure, sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So this thing about science not being where engineering is.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Someone wrote that 100 years ago, said, you know, we've figured out most things in science and now it's just a few more decimal places in the measurements. And then we discovered relativity and quantum physics.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And physics was transformed. What I can tell you is we know enough about the universe to quantify our ignorance. And everything we know, the physics, the chemistry, the biology, all of that, all of our understanding of what's going on in the universe is 5% of what is driving the universe. The 95% has dark matter and dark energy. We can measure it. We don't know what it is or what's causing it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, I'm a religious person. That scares me when you say that. It just terrifies me. But I want to.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What I'm saying, my point is. Yeah, my point is that's a frontier.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, to research.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you're saying we haven't discovered anything lately. We are on the doorstep of profound ignorance, turning into possibly profound insight and wisdom on how the universe works. And that's all the sciences. And in biology, they're still trying to figure out how you went from inorganic molecules, organic molecules, to self replicating life. That's a frontier in biology. We're looking for life in the universe. Aliens. Oh my gosh. If we find a biosphere on another planet that encodes identity, that doesn't use DNA, or if it does have DNA but no DNA in common with us, that's transformative of biology. So science is indeed seemingly an endless frontier.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do you know what deeply depresses me though? And I love this, I love the espresso. You're hitting me with this espresso of positivity. But what depresses me about when science meets the capital markets is that as soon as these scientific breakthroughs happen, they are taken advantage of or manipulated to not benefit the public at large. What I mean by that is this. Let's take robotics. For years, I grew up, if you remember that stupid Honda robot that would like walk up the stairs and fall down the stairs and I'm like, this fucking piece of shit. It's never going to be T2000. It's never going to help me. And then we had these, you see these Twitter videos. I don't know if you've seen these Boston Dynamics robots that look like velociraptors meets T2000 and they're karate chopping and doing backflips.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

My favorite one are the two dogs that opened the door and they let each other through.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's totally Jurassic Park. The raptors are in the kitchen type energy. But at no point have I seen, hey, those robots. Why can't I get a Boston Dynamics robot butler? Why aren't they here to really have us humans enter the age of enlightenment, Every person I know that's. In a relationship in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. This is women, families, children, couples. There are arguments about who's going to clean the dishes, who's folding the laundry, how do we have labor support and help at home? Okay, why do we have.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's Rosie the maid in the Jetsons. The Jetsons.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But we don't have that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'll tell you why.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Karate kicking.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm going to tell you why we don't have it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Why?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because creating a robot is not a thing. That's. Yes, yes, it's a thing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It is a thing. But Kim Kardashian did a whole commercial where she's like.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But yeah, you know what they didn't figure out in the Jetsons?

[Hasan Minhaj]

What's that?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because he gets into his flying car. Because it's the future. And of course they have flying cars.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He's still flying the car. They didn't figure out that maybe the car is the robot.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, well, you mean the way it doesn't have to look like the Waymo.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Jet legs or arms or a head or eyes. A robot just has to be something that does the task better than anybody or any other thing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you get into a self driving car, the car is the robot. You don't get a butler then that drives your car. No one thought that through.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, this is decades ago, but this is the long.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You don't put a robot in your car to drive your combustion engine car. The car is the robot. Well, so, so, so your coffee machine is the robot. All right, now we still have to figure out the dish thing. Okay.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. Or the laundry thing. And I'll make my own bed, I promise.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A machine did your laundry. You weren't at the creekside scrubbing with a thing. A machine did your laundry.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But I just need one that will so spoiled. That'll put it in the right. No, put it in the right thing. Put it in the right cupboard.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Put a shelf.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. That way I don't get in an argument, save my relationship. Relationship actually helped my life.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Something that used to take five hours now takes three minutes and you're still complaining.

[Hasan Minhaj]

God damn, he's calling people lazy. Here we go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Fun.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Final questions. These are sort of rapid fire. Okay. When you have time to wonder what's a thought or idea you regularly find yourself coming back to because you find it so interesting.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I. Whenever I'm using my telescope at night alone and I look up, I want to be abducted by aliens. That's a fantasy.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's incredible.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Like a Beam comes down and I just join them.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, like the movies.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, yeah, yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That doesn't terrify you?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, no.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Because in all those movies you get.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

When you're a scientist, you cannot be terrified of the unknown because it is the unknown that seduces you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I got it. Well, in all the movies I've seen you just get molested up there. You've obviously spent a lot of time debunking astrology. But why do you think it's been coming back with the kids lately?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I think when people, by the way, young kids, are not interested in astrology, it's only when their social lives get complicated. Like middle school and then high school. High school and 20s and socializing. Right. Dating. And so when they are not sure that they're entirely in control, you have to blame something else. And they do. And I understand the urge, but I. And it can be entertaining. But to the. And it's a free country. So I'm not going to stop people from being entertained by thinking this way. But if they start invoking astrology for decisions that impact their health, their wealth or their security, then those won't you advise you strongly. Those won't end well. That's right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

If you could snap your fingers and have everyone on planet Earth understand one scientific concept immediately, what would that concept be?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That the universe is objectively knowable.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Which. Which removes most opinions from the tabletop.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I'll tell you mine. You can't microwave aluminum. And I wish I would have learned that a week ago.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Or most metals don't work well in a microwave oven.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You have done countless interviews and answered thousands of questions.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What is one question that you wish people asked you more?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't think that way. I'm a servant. I. As an educator, yes. But more importantly, I'm a servant of people's curiosity. As such, I don't come in telling you what question you should ask me. I'm there to celebrate the questions you have.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's beautiful.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Life, the universe.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Neil Degrasse Tyson, thank you so much for being of service. It is a joy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You got it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

To sit down and chat with you. And I can't wait to do your show at the Beacon Theater.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm looking forward to that. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Look at that. One hour. Baby, make your bad. Hey, it's me, Hassan. I am here to panhandle. Not for money, for subscribers. Apparently 70% of you guys won't commit to me. You want to kick it and listen weekly, but you can't admit that we like each other. Just admit it. We're vibing now. If you're serious about this relationship, hit the Follow or subscribe button wherever you watch or listen. And if you don't, well, okay, message received. But just so you know, I will be seeing other audiences.