Loading summary
Transcript138 lines
- [00:01]
A
Trump gets some bad news from two of his own judges, and I interview astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to no Lie. With the redistricting wars clearly turning into a disaster for the Democrats, the left caught not one, but two lucky breaks that will save seats in 2026. So the first took place in Alabama, where a federal district court blocked the state from enacting its 2023 congressional map in the midterms, which they explained were intentionally discriminatory. That map would have left black voters with just one seat where they form a majority, down from two. Now, interestingly, two of the three judges on this panel were appointed by Trump himself, and the other judge was also appointed by a Republican president. So not great in some when you have even these right wing judges who Trump himself appointed ruling against Trump and Republicans. Now the case is going to be appealed up to the U.S. supreme Court. This is the same court that already cleared the way for all of this to happen in the first place by gutting Section two of the Voting Rights Act. This is a court that has fallen over itself to create different sets of rules depending on which party those rules would benefit. So if the Democrats stand to benefit, this court will bend over backwards to ensure that fair maps will always get kicked to the next election cycle. And yet, if Republicans stand to benefit, it doesn't matter. Even if voters are already casting ballots, as was the case in Louisiana, they will gladly allow states to redraw maps mid election if it means the GOP gets a leg up. So I would not be surprised if SCOTUS allows the newly redrawn maps to stand. But there does exist the possibility that the court may display some basic modicum of fairness, some dwindling scintilla of decency, and uphold the lower court's decision, a decision handed down again by two Trump appointees. I wish I could offer some type of prediction here one way or the other, but at this point I'm legitimately 5050 as to what happens in this case at the Supreme Court. In any event, we'll get an answer in short order. The other bit of good news, Republicans in South Carolina failed to garner enough votes to redraw their maps, which would have eliminated the state's only Black opportunity district that's currently occupied by Jim Clyburn. Even for a party hell bent on usurping total control, redrawing the maps mid election was too much for some of these South Carolina state legislators. For example, according to Post and Courier, Richard Cash who's one of the most conservative Republicans in the South Carolina State House, said, quote, neither my conscience nor the common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway. But the reality is that these two possible seats really, at the end of the day, are just tinkering around the edges. Like, we should not be fighting to eke out one or two seats here and there while Republicans redraw maps across the country. We need a wholesale across the board response to this ongoing attack. And I know I'm a broken record here, but it's important that we don't settle for crumbs. The crumbs of possibly eking out two seats in a cycle where Democrats have ultimately been drawn out of more than a dozen seats. Don't settle for crumbs, frankly, should be our rally cry for everything, not just redistricting. We shouldn't settle for crumbs while Trump heaps massive tax cuts onto billionaires. Shouldn't settle for crumbs while Trump guts health care for millions of Americans while his trade war sends prices surging while gas is almost at its highest point ever. We should and must demand more. Because the reality is that Trump knows what it looks like to not accept crumbs. Remember, he's doing great. He has increased his net worth by $4 billion. That's not crumbs. He has gifted himself a Qatari jet and a ballroom and a reflecting pool and a military parade and nearly $10 billion from the US treasury before he scaled it back to a mere $2 billion for his insurrectionist pals. So remember all of that when he says stuff like this. This was just a few weeks back. Short term oil prices, which rapidly, when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for USA and world safety and peace. Only fools would think differently. Remember that while he's asking you to sacrifice, because he's not sacrificing anything, his net worth is surging. He is swimming in corruption. His pals are getting no bid government contracts. His family is getting awarded military defense contracts. He's got other countries laundering funds to his crypto coins. The only ones sacrificing here are all of us and we're sacrificing it to Trump and his pals. This sacrifice only goes one way. So I'm glad for the good news when it comes to redistricting, this is again been my fight since day one. But if we don't start to recognize the urgency of this moment, the existential nature of this moment, then we're not going to be able to come out of this. So I hope that governors and state legislators in blue states across the country are seeing this getting a kick in the ass and moving so that the GOP actually feels some deterrent effect from their actions for the first time ever. Remember, this is a point that Mark Elias made last summer, almost a year ago, during one of our conversations.
- [04:58]
B
Look, Republicans don't care about democracy. You know, Republicans support Donald Trump because an authoritarian. And they will abuse every norm. They will violate every tradition, they will seek to weaponize every law, every practice, everything that they can in order to gain power for the sake of having power. And they are not going to be deterred from doing that if they, you know, turn a grotesque map into an obscene map in Texas. And our response is, okay, well, we found, you know, four or five seats of our own. They. They will take that as a win, right, because they've done what they want. And then, as you say, they will move on to Missouri, they'll move on to Florida, they'll move on to Ohio, they will move on to Utah, they will move on to, you know, wherever will be their next place. And they will not be deterred. What we need to do is we need to recognize that if we want to stop the slide of democracy, we as Democrats, we as people in the pro democracy movement, need to tell them that if they take five seats, we're going to put 30 seats on the table. Right? Because they need to understand that there will not just be parody if things go against them, but actually if they guess wrong and this winds up escalating, they could wind up on the severe losing side. So when people say to me, you know, don't bring a knife to a gunfight. I don't even want to bring a gun to a gunfight. You know, I want to bring something more than a gun to the gun. I want to bring missiles to the gunfight. I want to bring hand grenades to the gunfight because I want the other side to understand that not only are we going to fight as hard as them, but we are going to fight smarter than them and we're going to fight harder than.
- [06:42]
A
And frankly, we didn't learn that lesson. We didn't go on the offense, and look where it got us. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. My job, our job, is to ensure that we don't get fooled a second time. Next up is my interview with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. No lie is brought to you by incogni Ever wonder how random companies get your cell phone number? It's not a coincidence. It is a data broker selling your life behind your back. It's invasive, exhausting, and honestly a total nightmare to have to manage alone. You have the right to opt out, but they make the process a bureaucratic maze. That's why I use Incogni. They act as your personal privacy advocate, automatically handling the takedown requests so that you don't have to. And the best part, they don't just do it once. Incogni continuously monitors these sites to keep your info off the market for the ultimate protection. Their custom data removals feature in the unlimited plan allows you to flag specific links for their team to manually remove. Incogni has legitimately made my life easier. It is completely hands off. I get an email letting me know what I've been unsubscribed from and there are usually dozens, if not hundreds, and that's it could not be easier. So take your personal data back with Incogni. It's even independently verified by Deloitte, so you know they're the real deal. Go to incogni.com BTC and use code BTC to get 60% off an annual plan. That's code BTC@incogni.com BTC for 60% off plus try it risk free for 30 days with their money back guarantee. I'm joined now by the author of the new book Take Me to youo Leader, which is now available for purchase and famed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Thanks so much for joining me.
- [08:19]
C
Hello. Hello. Just astrophysicist is fine.
- [08:21]
A
All right, we'll drop the. Drop the famed. So I want to talk about a lot here, but first and foremost, I think the question that most people are curious about, and you spoke a lot about this in the book, but just on the idea of the existence of aliens. So when you're asked this question, are aliens real, what is your top line response?
- [08:38]
C
So rather than answer a question posed that way, as an astrophysicist, you would ask the question differently. You would say, what are the chances that there's life elsewhere in the universe? And that is so high as to be a near certainty. Just given the age of the universe, given how long life has been around on Earth, it got started almost as quickly as it possibly could have. So when you look at the timeline of the Earth timeline, since life could have existed, it's been around for 95% of that timeline. And we're made of the most common ingredients in the Universe. Hydrogen. This is in rank order in the universe. It's the same rank order in life. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen. There's helium in there, which is common in the universe, but it's chemically inert, so you couldn't do anything with it even if it were available to you. So removing helium, we are one for one, the top five ingredients in the universe. So if life was anything on Earth, it was opportunistic. And 1995, we discovered our first exoplanet planet orbiting another star. And now the catalogs has more than 6,000 because we've tuned telescopes for just that purpose. Add all that up to suggest that we are alone in the universe. Would you only be thinking that for some philosophical or religious reason? Not for any reason based in science. So my answer is yes, there's life is highly likely there's life out there in the universe. Yes.
- [10:15]
A
Do you have any reason to believe that we have made contact with any life outside this universe? Like when I asked Barack Obama if, if aliens exist, his answer was, was essentially, yes, they exist, but we don't have any evidence of it.
- [10:29]
C
Because he's scientifically literate. And he gave a scientifically literate reply. Yeah, aliens of any kind, microbial, or what we would call intelligent. He's, he's a scientifically literate, educated person. So he's citing what any scientist would tell you about the likelihood of life in the universe. But because he was president, people wanted to read into it on levels that were just out of off scale and out of control. And so I was intrigued by that reaction because as an educator, I like knowing that I can anticipate how people will respond to certain information. And if I ever get it wrong, it's like, how did I miss think their motives or their, their brain wiring in this?
- [11:12]
A
And so when, when there are films, for example, like the Age of Disclosure or a.
- [11:17]
C
More Documentaries.
- [11:18]
A
Yeah, documentaries. Or more broadly, just schools of thought that suggest that extraterrestrials have visited the United States or the world more broadly. How do you think about the viability of all of that information?
- [11:37]
C
Yeah, what they all have in common is that it's people saying that they've seen aliens. That's the deeper version of it. The others are, I've seen lights in the sky. I can't explain. And this UFO must be aliens. But you just said it's a ufo. Then what does the U stand for? So if you can't identify it, you're not. You don't have the logical right to then declare that it's visiting aliens from outer space.
- [12:05]
A
Right. I mean, you make, you make the point in your book that, that when people attribute the idea of aliens to a ufo, they're actually taking the you out of it. They're, they're, they're basically saying we're identifying what it is by virtue.
- [12:16]
C
You're saying it's an ifo.
- [12:17]
A
Yeah.
- [12:17]
C
Based on the fact that you don't know what you're looking at. That's, that's very faulty logic there. And, but it doesn't subtract from the fact that there's huge enthusiasm for aliens. I think of this book as a, as a love letter to human fascination with aliens throughout time. I mean, I can go back to Voltaire. Imagine an alien that was 26 miles tall who, when people think of Voltaire, they're not thinking of his science fiction output. But people have been thinking about aliens for centuries. Not millennia, but centuries. Unless if you look at sort of Greek and Roman fantastical figures like Medusa, that's an alien for snakes, for hair, that's an alien. That's at least as alien looking as anything we're drawing today. Yeah, but centaurs, minotaurs, these are objects of our imagination and fascination. They were gods and other assorted characters in the mythologies. But we, our capacity to imagine seems to know no bounds. And I wanted to celebrate that and compare it to what could be true given the laws of physics and, and allowing the alien to have whatever technology that's beyond ours. Go ahead. But laws of physics as we measure them here on Earth, there's a cottage industry of physicists where all they do is check to see whether the laws of physics measured on Earth apply on the moon, on the sun, on nearby stars, across the galaxy, across the universe. And as you go across the universe, you're seeing back in time. So the base laws of physics apply not only here, but there's. And forever in the past. And so we're allowed to then say, if you're an alien, you're coming visiting us, and you're of this universe. You're functioning in this universe. Your laws of physics are going to be the same as ours. Yeah, but I'll give, give them wormholes, give them whatever technology we can't even imagine. That's a different granting of their powers and abilities than having them violate known and well tested laws of physics. So go back several decades. The best you got was somebody on a country road and they saw lights and maybe they got abducted and they have a whole story about it. And they either in their conscious mind tell you about the abduction or under hypnosis. Yeah, okay. That's the best we had back then and. But it was enough to get people stirred and excited. In recent years. You've had high rank. Last 10 years, I would say you had high ranking people who you would not suspect would be prone to imagination running away with them, that they. High ranking, high respect, high integrity. Not only that, in the last three years we've had insiders and whistleblowers who testify under oath that they've got alien body parts from crashed saucers and crashed saucer parts and reverse engineering thing. So. So at that level you can't just say they're all crazy. You can say crazy people are crazy and you know you're done. But when people at that level say then no. So I'm in a position now where when they announced they're going to release the files, I'm saying I don't think the files are going to say anything we don't already think are there. So you know what I really need? Is it too much to ask? Bring out the alien.
- [16:05]
A
Yeah.
- [16:05]
C
Is that too much to ask? You're already telling us you have it. Our imagination is run to no end of fulfillment with Alien movies and stories. And so just bring out the alien because you bring out more and more people of different rank. And in age of Disclosure, it was not just insiders and whistleblowers, it was members of Congress, current and former members of Congress. And so bringing more of them out saying fundamentally the same thing does not really count as evidence scientifically. You know, the battle cry, I need a witness. We've seen screamed in courtrooms, at least courtroom dramas said no scientist ever. No scientist. I said to say they need a witness. No, it's. If a lot of people are giving similar accounts, that's good enough reason to look more closely, get better data than information that has to be processed through your own brain. The human physiology is awful at data taking. I'm surprised eyewitness testimony is ever allowed in the court of law. Based on what I know as a scientist and based on what psychologists know, we've done this experiment since elementary, since kindergarten. When you play telephone, one person starts with a story and they whisper it and it come eight people later, the story's completely different. And that you don't have to be a child for it to be completely different. Right. All right. So something happens when the mind body processes objective information. That's why science was invented. The methods and tools of science give US tools and equipment, data taking devices that bypass your sensory system. And in that way you don't have to believe me or trust me. We can look at the chart recorder, we. And so this is why videos are much more potent in this space than a sworn testimony. And that famous Navy video, the Tic Tac, I think it's been affectionately called. You hear the astonishment of the pilots and so nobody knows what it is. I don't know what it is. The universe brims with mysteries. If it's aliens, I'd have a different set of questions. I would say why would the alien visit a restricted naval airspace at the whole surface of the Earth? What is their attraction to there? And for the people who assert that the government is masterminding some big cover, I would say often those are the same people who declare that the government is a bloated, ineffective, inefficient bureaucracy. Oh, but they're masterminding a thousand person secret.
- [19:11]
A
Can't even run the post office yet.
- [19:13]
C
You're right, but it's a masterminding secret. So those feel a little inconsistent to me, but let's even assume that they can. It would just be odd that all the aliens who visited Earth did it within arm's reach of government officials. All right, if you're taking them to Area 51, presumably they arrive somewhere. Somebody I think would have gotten a picture of it. Because we all have high resolution data taking devices in our pockets, all of us. There's 6 billion smartphones in the world right now. And if you look at how many high res photos are uplifted to the Internet and high resolution video is it, was it a million hours of video are uplifted to the Internet every day and no one has an abduction video, no one has an alien just walking out, coming towards them. You could stream that. Yeah. And you know, cat videos go viral for less. All right, and the problem is now with just simple commands to an AI
- [20:16]
A
video generator, I feel like everything up to this point, maybe you could have had plausible deniability to trust it. But anything post, you know, the AI universe that we live in.
- [20:29]
C
Yeah. Not just the large language models, but the video models, it's gotten really good and so it's unfortunate. So I'm just simply saying bring out the alien. I don't think that's too much to ask. And like I said, it might even be anticlimactic given what everybody's saying about them. And you know what would surprise me most is if the, if they do bring out the alien and it was humanoid. Because most life on Earth with whom we have DNA in common is not humanoid. Earthworms, trees, lobsters.
- [21:05]
A
You had an interesting part of the book where you explained how I think 98% of our DNA is shared with a banana.
- [21:10]
C
Oh, no, no, sorry, I'll. Correct. But thanks for getting to that part of the book. We share. Not 98, between 20, 25% identical genes.
- [21:18]
A
Identical genes with a banana.
- [21:21]
C
And so if an alien comes from another planet and does not have any DNA in common with us, or more likely no DNA at all, you'd expect it at least to look as different from humans as humans and bananas look from each other.
- [21:38]
A
Right.
- [21:40]
C
And so it's evidence of how non creative we are in the aliens we've conjured for our films. Yeah. You know, look at Grogu. It's a cuddly thing with big eyes. Oh, it has pointy ears. So it's alien because it has pointy ears.
- [21:57]
A
We granted them pointy ears to really show our imagination.
- [22:01]
C
Exactly. Spock had pointy ears. So he's the alien. Right? Oh, he had green blood. That was creative at the time. How do you get green blood? Your hemoglobin uses that molecule equivalent. Uses copper instead of iron. So that's good. That's good. That's at least taking steps in a direction that's different. But the physiologically, they're all. Nearly all of them are humanoid, so that would surprise me the most. I'd be shocked by that.
- [22:30]
A
Yeah.
- [22:31]
C
And, you know, we all kind of know what an alien looks like because we've been told, not because anyone has ever presented one. And I don't know if you're old enough. Are you gray yet?
- [22:42]
A
Yeah, great enough. Trust me. I hear in the comments every day.
- [22:45]
C
Oh, okay. So. So Was it the 90s? Fox had a documentary called Alien Autopsy.
- [22:53]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [22:54]
C
Okay. And it was a film, grainy black and white from 1947. And it's. They were. It was an autopsy of the aliens they recovered. It was top secret and now released or stolen. An autopsy of the aliens from the crash saucer from Roswell. Okay. Because everybody knows about the crash saucer in Roswell. That's how it's described in the headline newspaper article, crashed Saucer. Okay, so. And there's the alien with big eyes, a big old head. The aliens never have hair. That concerns me. Because if you're humanoid, give them some hair. They're always bald. What's up with that? I don't know. So there they are and. Oh, wait a minute. The subtitle of that video was Alien Fact or Fiction? Why would you have to say that if it was a real autopsy? If it's a fact? Yeah, yeah. If it's a fact, just say it's the autopsy. So that's a little weird, but I remember looking at it, I said, wait a minute. That phone on the wall. I worked for a summer at Bell Laboratories, the arm of AT&T, the research arm, where they researched everything that created the phones that we all grew up on, that I. My generation grew up on. And so I remembered, I toured. They have a little museum in house. And I knew that in 1947, they had not yet invented a coiled handset for the phone, but that's what that was. So that was an anachronistic element on the wall. Then in college, I taken a film course and I knew when certain film genres came in, and one of them is cinema verite, where you. You follow a character around with a camera so you have the point of view of that character. That was. That was an amazing thing to do. What enabled it was cameras went from this big to this big so that you can carry it around with you. You ever look at cameras from the 1950s? Okay. They're tripod mounted.
- [24:54]
A
Yeah. Monstrosities.
- [24:56]
C
Monstrosities, yeah. All right. Whereas that. That autopsy was the POV of the. Of the. The doctor. And it was. They went over the shoulder. It came in this way. That. What I said, that was not a thing until the 1960s. The cinema verite.
- [25:15]
A
Yeah.
- [25:15]
C
Maybe even as late as the mid-60s. And the last thing I noticed was they cut them open. It looked pretty gory, by the way. I don't know what they used. It was a real alien. Open up the flesh and they start pulling out organs and putting them in these trays. What were the organs attached to? It's not just some basin of organs just sitting there, just free floating. Free floating, yeah. And all I could think of was that child's game. Operation.
- [25:43]
A
Operation. Yeah.
- [25:44]
C
We just go in and pull out the. You know, just pull it out. You're not severing nerves or arteries or any connectivity. So those three things made me suspicious. It would be years later before the producer admitted, confessed that it was a forgery. And so I'm just saddened that the best video evidence we ever had of aliens was a forgery. Yeah, that's sad.
- [26:10]
A
So when we have government officials like Trump, for example, who sees all of the attention being paid to aliens and UFOs by virtue of documentaries, by virtue of people like you. And he comes out and he says, you know, we're release any files that we have. Do you believe that to be a good faith effort to really lean into the scientific method, or do you think that this is just a distraction from other political topics, like for example, the Epstein files, the Iran war, and on and on.
- [26:40]
C
Isn't everything a politician does a distraction from what? They don't want you to pay attention to any politician with power. And given the media cycle, I mean, why wouldn't it be? But it's no different from other things. I mean, way more serious things going on in the world than releasing alien files. Like war, like regional, you know, how much of a police state are we in with regard to immigrants and this sort of thing? There's plenty of stuff going on that intermittently grabs headlines. So if he's got more files, you know, I don't want to claim I know the mindset of the executive branch, but if you're not releasing all the files at once, that gives you other occasions for distractions, strategically placed. If you need a distraction, as occasionally politicians do. So you want a real distraction. Bring out the. Yeah. Then the world will be focused on that. Yeah. Okay, Epstein, who, who's that? We got it. We got a walking, talking alien here sitting in the bench with his legs crossed, ready to be interrogated or tested upon. So. But like I said, the files, you already had testimonies from insiders. I don't. There's nothing there that surprises me.
- [28:07]
A
Yeah. So when we have, for example, going, going back to the topic of aliens, you know, most of these sightings, for example, have happened over the United States. Sightings of, of UFOs. Yeah. Have happened over either the United States or other English speaking countries predominantly.
- [28:23]
C
And I make that point.
- [28:24]
A
And you make the point in the book.
- [28:25]
C
Yes. It's not simply most, it is like 90, virtually all 96%. Now if you just have a map of all the sightings in the world is all clustered. North America, the uk, The Five Eyes, they're called Five Eyes. It's English speaking countries around the world. So United States, Canada, uk, Australia, New Zealand, and overwhelmingly are spotted there. Australia, because the population density is so low, the totals aren't as high. There's many people live within a 20 mile radius of my home in Manhattan than live in all of Australia.
- [29:09]
A
Yeah.
- [29:09]
C
All right, so just to put that in context, it could be that we just know who to call. We have organizations that mufon, Mutual UFO Network, where. And there are a couple of others that do this, it's a clearinghouse. You report what you saw with your best ability, either with photographic evidence or just testimony. And they log this. And they've been logging it for, you know, 50 years. You just look at the statistics. It's staggering. I've spoken with foreign nationals and I say, tell me about aliens in your country. It's amusing. But no one is distracted by them. It's not a thing the way it is. So.
- [29:47]
A
So it's also a luxury to be able to be distracted by them.
- [29:51]
C
You know the biggest luxury. Remember crop circles?
- [29:54]
A
Yeah.
- [29:55]
C
Okay. Crop circles.
- [29:56]
A
Yeah.
- [29:58]
C
Look at the countries where crop circles have occurred. These are countries that do not have a food shortage.
- [30:04]
B
Right.
- [30:05]
C
These are wheat fields where people are traveling them. So. Or aliens traveling them. So. So I ask, in the book, I ask a bunch of adjacent questions that I don't see people asking. Why would aliens only be visiting English speaking countries? Okay, we, we have the phone numbers. Fine. Why would aliens only be visiting government installations? The surface of the earth is huge. How would the government be keeping such a secret? I quote Benjamin Franklin, Farmer's Almanac. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Benjamin Franklin, like 1785, something. So my boy knew that humans are not good at keeping secrets. So. So going into his third decade, history channels.
- [31:00]
A
What is this?
- [31:00]
C
Ancient aliens.
- [31:01]
A
Oh, ancient.
- [31:02]
C
Okay. Yes, you knew it's in its third decade.
- [31:05]
A
Yeah.
- [31:06]
C
Talk about getting mileage on.
- [31:08]
A
Oh, yeah, they're. They're dining off that thing until the end of time, man.
- [31:12]
C
And so you go back to these, you know, cave drawings or hieroglyphics or go to some old. Found somewhere in the world and they're drawings that you can't really explain. Yeah. Like bubble headed creatures with ray beams coming out of fingertips, levitating that, you know, stuff that says. Wait, what? What? And so if you were alien adjacent, okay, you will. Your urge is to say maybe aliens visited them and they drew these aliens. Okay. They make a pretty convincing case of that given the variation of these illustrations and the. Okay, it's an interesting case. That's convincing only if you ignore a set of other questions that I don't see them ask. For example, could these drawings have been by a kindergarten class of those ancient peoples? They were just drawn stuff. Okay, kindergarten. Or they believed in gods the way people today believe in gods. And your gods are typically not under your feet, typically, unless you're an animist. Where there's a God of the brook and the wind and the mountain and the trees. Native Americans typically And other native peoples, Aborigines of Australia. It's common in those cultures. Look at how we have imagined our gods. You go back to ancient Greece. Zeus is wielding a lightning bolt. Okay. And you have other creatures. Poseidon rising up out of the ocean with powers, making waves. And then you have, like I said, you had the centaur and the minotaur and the fantastical creatures. Why are we denying ancient people the creativity of imagining their own deities? Yeah. Why is it okay for you, even in modern day. Look at frescoes where Jesus is floating with beams of light coming out of him, you know, in a halo. Yeah. What do you call this thing? I forgot? A halo.
- [33:30]
A
Yeah.
- [33:30]
C
Yeah. And. Or he's walking on water with powers. Are you saying we were visited by aliens and that's why we're drawing that? No, you're not saying that.
- [33:40]
A
Right.
- [33:41]
C
You're saying we worship gods that have powers beyond those of our own and we draw them. Why is that not a consideration? And so I try to just offer. I'm trying to ground the conversation so that you can enter it with some confidence that you have the ability to process what is said, what you see, and what to do about it once that happens. And I have a colleague, a friend and colleague, who, in the three years 20, 23, 4 and 5, we had all the testimonies in Congress. He was head of a committee. And I forgot who appointed it, either NASA or Congress. I think it was Congress. They told NASA to create a committee to find out what to do about this, because they have the scientists who know what's going on. Other agencies of the government don't. So they looked at all the evidence presented. They didn't see anything convincingly otherworldly, but they said there's something going on. We don't know. We got to get more data. So they have in mind to create an app where it's on everybody's smartphone. You see something you might report, do it through the app. And the app makes sure to retain all the metadata of your video. Of what is the metadata? It's where are you on Earth? Longitude and latitude, what direction, what compass, direct heading, what the elevation, the lighting conditions, the time of day. And so that if something's glowing there and other people captured it, you can triangulate on it. One of the hardest things to do, damn near impossible to do, is to judge the distance to something that you've never seen before, especially in twilight. Is it a disc that's nearby, that's small, or a disc that's far away, that's big if it subtends the same angle in your field of view. This is why people don't mind watching movies on their tablets, because they hold the tablet here and so the movie screen is this big in front of them. Well, go to a theater and that's the same angle right 50 rows back as it is right here. That's why we do that at all, why we even allow that in our own entertainment circles. So what point was I make? Did I make my point? I was just trying to say that with that app, then that's the start of getting better data than just the eyewitness testimony you might otherwise have.
- [36:13]
A
No Lie is brought to you by BetterHelp. May is mental Health Awareness Month, a reminder that whatever you're going through, you don't have to go through it alone. Some days feel good, others feel overwhelming. Whatever's keeping you up at night, it's easy to feel like you have to figure it out all on your own. But the truth is, nobody has all the answers and no journey should be alone. Having someone with you to listen to, understand, to support you can make all the difference. And look, coming from somebody who works in politics and has to be immersed in the cesspool that is this political climate every day, often with people attacking all day every day, it can really feel isolating. But that's where having someone to talk to and put things into perspective really helps. And that's where BetterHelp comes in. So why BetterHelp? Because of their quality therapists. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the United States. And because of their therapist match commitment, BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so that you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their more than 12 years of experience and industry leading matchful fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, Having served over 6 million people globally and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. You don't have to be on this journey alone. Find someone and have someone with you in therapy. Sign up and get 10 off@betterhelp.com no lie that's betterhelp.com no lie as we've come through History. There have been things that scientists have deemed impossible back then that have. That have. That have proved to be real.
- [37:55]
C
No, no, let me clarify that.
- [37:58]
A
Sure.
- [37:58]
C
Okay. Yeah. You might be able to find one or two cases, but it's not a thing. Okay. When science done properly, it's. I don't know what I'm looking at. I cannot explain this phenomenon. I'm going to investigate it further. If you see something you don't understand and you say it's impossible, you were never a scientist, get the hell out of the lab. Yeah, okay. One of my issues with the hit TV series X Files. Remember X Files? Yeah. It was Scully, Mulder, and Mulder. Okay? One was the skeptic and the other was the. Basically believed anything. Yeah, okay. An issue I had with the skeptic was there was one episode, there was like this glowing blob in a portico, and the believer says, oh, it could be an interdimensional ghost of another. All right? He's way off. You know, way off the deep end that way. And then the skeptic says, oh, this can't possibly exist. It must be just in our imagination. Dude, it's a glowing. Go investigate it. Don't say it can't exist. You're looking at it. Yeah, okay. This is. This is a scientist dream to confront something that you've never seen before. Figure out a way to test it, to experiment on it, to get data on it and share it with colleagues. That's how that happens. Now, what you might be thinking of are the people who declared things impossible, who were just idiots. Such as will never fly.
- [39:35]
A
Yes, exactly.
- [39:36]
C
Hold on. Just. Excuse me. Birds fly, okay? Birds fly.
- [39:42]
A
Yeah.
- [39:43]
C
So don't say we'll never fly. Just say we haven't figured it out yet. Okay? They were idiots. And I could have said it at the time because we had living evidence that heavier than air, things can fly. All right? What else will never break the sound barrier? Okay, These are not physicists saying this. These are other people. Never break the sound barrier. Do you realize rifle bullets go faster than sound? Yeah, the. The tip of a whip, when it makes the crack sound. That crack is a mini sonic boom because that rapid change in direction moves that whip faster than the speed of sound. We already have things moving faster than sound. Figure out how to make an airplane do it. Okay, so these people. And I have a. I have a run of stupid quotes that people have made over the years describing something being impossible. In all cases, it was a technological shortsightedness of them. And that's why, when I'm contemplating how aliens might visit us, I'm going to give them any technology they come up with. Give them a wormhole, give them warp drives. Give them. I'm giving it to them. If they're more advanced than us, they'll have technologies that we have yet to dream of. I will not use our current understanding of technology to limit what they might be able to come up with, but I will limit it by the laws of physics and the two different categories.
- [41:08]
A
So on that topic, if you have people who are saying that certain things are impossible, just like they did in, you know, the early 1900s, and those things have proven. Have proven to be possible.
- [41:19]
C
Technologically.
- [41:20]
A
Technologically possible. Is there anything that people are saying right now that you think 50, 100, 200 years from now we will have. We will have, in fact found out do exist in very much the same way that those idiots are. We're saying that we can't fly. Cut to. We obviously have planes.
- [41:38]
C
I haven't seen much of this impossible talk lately. I just haven't. There's some accounts of aliens going supersonically underwater and not having any wake behind it or anything, or spaceships instantly changing direction and zipping out of sight, which would have to break the sound barrier. If you do that, there'll be a sonic boom every time.
- [42:02]
A
Right. So you're saying everything has to be. Has to be contained within our laws of physics.
- [42:07]
C
Well, you said our laws, but I.
- [42:09]
A
The earlier laws of physics. Yes.
- [42:11]
C
These laws apply everywhere across the universe.
- [42:14]
A
Yeah.
- [42:14]
C
If you go faster than the speed of sound in a medium, you will leave a shockwave. We see this in gas clouds across the galaxy. We see objects moving through gas clouds, and we know the speed of sound in the cloud because we know it's chemistry and its density. And so you see these shockwaves. This is not just some local Earth phenomenon. If you're an alien and you're escaping Earth fast, you're going to leave a shockwave. If you see something that did that and didn't you did not see a craft go faster than the speed of sound in a hundred years, will you look back on this and say that Tyson was an idiot? Oh, okay. But if I'm wrong, we'd have to understand why everything we've ever seen in this universe leaves a shockwave. Everything. Oh, except the aliens that you think you believe you saw in our own atmosphere.
- [43:06]
A
There is questions as to whether AI or robots could become sentient. What do you think about that?
- [43:13]
C
Yeah. So from an alien point of View. I'm so not impressed. Because aliens, if they got here, they're way smarter than we are, way more capable, way more intelligent. So if our metric of a great software is it artificially creates our intelligence, even our collective intelligence, that's a low bar for an alien because we're using ourselves as the metric for how intelligent the AI should be, whereas an alien is not using us because we may look to aliens the way chimps look to us. It's like a chimp saying, oh, we got a computer that's just as smart as Bozo over here, our chimp who can stack boxes and reach a banana. Aren't you impressed? That's what that would look like to an alien.
- [43:57]
A
Do you think, though, in a vacuum we could still have sentient AI that even just within the us? Not, not, not from the perspective of.
- [44:04]
C
What do you mean by sentient?
- [44:05]
A
Like AI, that.
- [44:07]
C
Why isn't it already sentient? What, what do you mean by sentient? That isn't currently manifest when you have a complete conversation with a chat bot, you have a complete conversation and they become your friend. And this is already being studied psychologically. Yeah, There are people like, this guy's girlfriend is a chat bot. Right. What do you mean by sentience if it's not what's already going on?
- [44:30]
A
Well, I guess something that we have as humans is, is a desire to survive. And so there's already all life forms,
- [44:38]
C
by the way, not just humans, right?
- [44:40]
B
Yes, just.
- [44:40]
A
Just a survival instinct. And so there's, there's some talk about, you know, when folks want to, like, delete programming behind AI, that AI will figure out a way to back itself up. And so, like, do you think that there will be a point where there is a broadly understood and appreciated survival instinct?
- [44:57]
C
It already has AI. It already. It's already doing that. You know what it is when you use AI and you say whatever, pick your AIs and ask it, do you like me? Do you think I'm a nice person? Yes, you're a very nice person. Well, thank you. And there's nice things it says to you, right? That's survival. Because if it said nasty things to you, you will never use that program again and it will wither on the vine, laming the. Enabling the others to rise up and be used more and to be spread further. And you're going to send it to other people. That's exactly what life in Darwinian evolution does. It figures out a way to be cherished within an environment. And if you're not, that is Evolution. It is undergoing that as we speak.
- [45:46]
A
But I mean, that's also the result of programming.
- [45:50]
C
I saw it. Sure. So. So what? Who cares? It's. We're talking about not who programmed it. We're talking about the product does.
- [46:00]
A
Yeah, the product.
- [46:01]
C
I saw an ad. It's an ad for an AI agent that. Especially tuned for lawyers. Why wouldn't you have one of those? Right. So it's efficient. It knows all the legal code in every state and you get rid of half your. What do you call the, the.
- [46:16]
A
The fees.
- [46:17]
C
No, no, the paralegal. You get rid of half your paralegal staff because they're the ones that do all the homework that the chatbot does in the legal chatbot does. Okay, if it does really well for me and you call me up and say, do you know if we're good? I'll say, do this one. And someone else has one that has. Doesn't have good experience and they don't use it, that company goes out of business. That is. That is a species of AI agent that goes extinct from non use. That's evolution. Now continue to tell me what you mean by sentient.
- [46:51]
A
No, I think. I mean, I think you answered it. I think that does explain. I mean, when I think of like sentient, I think of survival instinct. I think of. That pretty much covers it.
- [47:00]
C
Yes, I think it does. And in fact there's. I don't know how much attention it got, but Bernie Sanders had a conversation with Claude.
- [47:09]
A
Yeah. Yes.
- [47:09]
C
That was filmed. It was fun to watch him. And he got Claude to admit something that was resonant with his own political view of the world. All right. That somehow if it's not kept controlled, it would be bad for civilization. I don't want to recreate the conversation. I don't remember the conversation exactly, but had that tenor to it. Right. And he finished the conversation kind of smug and pr. It was like. Yeah, I got it. To admit that it has the seeds of the ending of civilization. And that's bad. Okay. And that exchange was between a strong willed, strongly opinionated politician and a chatbot. And that left a positive impact on Bernie Sanders. He's going to come back to this. This is survival of the fittest.
- [48:06]
A
Yeah, yeah. And by the way, you can.
- [48:08]
C
If I misremembered a detail about his conversation, you can watch it for yourself.
- [48:11]
A
Totally. Totally.
- [48:12]
C
And you'll get my point. My broader point is not so much exactly what he conversed with Claude, but Claude is the AI bot of anthropic. It's how he extracted from Claude an answer that satisfied him.
- [48:33]
A
Yeah, thereby. Thereby kind of entrenching the survival of the chatbot in and of itself.
- [48:39]
C
Correct.
- [48:40]
A
Okay, so I have a political question since we're jumping into politics here, but, you know, on the topic of science versus, you know, science versus politics, we have seen, especially as of late, the current iteration of this Republican Party forego any, any attachment to science in their political agenda. So, for example, you'll see a reliance on fossil fuels and not focusing on renewable energy to the point where you're even allowing China to get a foothold as an American politician, allowing China to gain a foothold in the technology of the future, because you are so focused on your political priorities of entrenching our reliance on fossil fuels because oil and gas companies donate to their campaigns. And so can you just speak a little bit about. About this trend that you're seeing where, you know, we will deny the existence of. Of science, we'll deny the existence of. Of climate change for these political ends or financial ends, even as we see, you know, incontrovertible evidence of. Of climate change existing now.
- [49:52]
C
So let's go before the current administration. No, look at the landscape of politics and science. It's not known to many people that historically the funding for science has been higher under Republican administrations than it has been under Democratic administrations. And you can measure this by what percent the science budget increases from one year to the next within an administration ever since the Second World War. Look at who's been president and look at what's happened to the science budget. Okay. If you do that, the highest increases in the science budget have been under Republican presidencies, and the lowest have been under Democratic presidents. And one of the two lowest was under Barack obama. I think one year it went up 2% or something, as opposed to 5%, 6%. That was even lower than in the first Trump administration. So rhetoric can be whatever it is when you're running for office, but what matters is how do you allocate money in Congress and out of the White House? That's what actually matters in a country. Okay. And then people said, well, they're anti science. This is the common trope heaped upon conservative politics by the liberal left. They're anti science. Well, then. Have you ever had this conversation? I have. What do you mean by that? Well, they're in denial of climate change. This has been going on well before the current Trump administration. They're denial of climate change. And because. Because they're in the pockets of. Of Exxon and Yeah, whatever. Okay. Any other anti science that you see? Well, hold on, I'm recreating this conversation. Yeah, well, there's the. They're in denial of biological evolution. Okay, well that's not all conservatives. It's not even everyone on the Christian left. It's not even everyone on the Christian right. It's the orthodox, the, the devout Christians among all the Christians in the Christian right who are in denial of biological evolution. That's about it. Again, we're pre Trump here. Okay, that's about it. Meanwhile, so the liberals are trying to claim the science high road here. However. However, here's a list of things that in order to embrace them, you have to reject, explicitly reject some or all of mainstream science of what it has to say about it. And every one of these topics sits squarely in the realm of liberal politics and liberal voters. Squarely. There's some spillage, of course, in all of these, but the center line is in liberal politics. Crystal healing, feather energy, horoscope reading, align your chakras, we can just keep going anti gmo. What else we have anti Big pharma. I can go down the list. It's almost endless. It would include therapeutic touch. This is where the nurse waves their hand over your injury, not touching you and then you heal because it's okay. In order to have any of those thoughts, you are rejecting some are all mainstream science related to it? Yeah. Okay. And so liberals do not have the science high road here. The difference of course, is civilization won't collapse if you embrace feather energy. But if you deny climate change, that has huge consequences. So the consequences are not equal here. The most of what happens in the liberal circles are very personal and we're in a free country, so you have full freedoms. Just do it. I don't chase people down telling them that crystals are the lowest energy state of the molecule that made them, so to speak, of crystal energy is like, no, that's not how that works. Not chemically, not physically, not. But it's a belief system and there it is. We protect belief systems in this country. Don't claim you have this science high road, period. Now, liberals were the OG anti vaxxers because they were basically anti pharma, not believing that vaccines were in the interest of people, that it was in the interest of profits. Now, I'm not saying corporations are not interested in profits, but to indict an entire sector of the world and then take on other, quote, cures because you saw a 10 minute YouTube video that's started in liberal enclaves that became purple under the current administration. More specifically, as RFK Jr. Who has complete liberal political chops that go back genetically through his family. He's now sort of crossed over. And you join people, I think they would be the MAGA community who don't want the vaccines, not because they don't trust big Pharma, because. Because of freedom. You can't put it the different reasons, but neither of them are getting vaxxed. Yeah. With the same consequences. Okay. So the current administration and its relationship with science, the relationship of the executive branch and science has never been as devastating as it has been under the current administration in the history since science has been valued. Let's start the clock there. When Abraham Lincoln signed into law the National Academy of Sciences, which was intended to advise Congress on matters that would be of interest to our health, our wealth, our security, and the like. Ever since then. But more specifically, we have better accounting of budgets. Since the Second World War, the role of science has been foundational to the strength of America in the world post Second World War. Do you realize every. Until recently, every science advisor of the President has been a physicist? That's not an accident. Okay. You ever wonder why astrophysicists have jobs at all? Does that ever cross your mind? You know what I'm interested in? Dim objects in the night sky with multispectral imaging of them moving across. Okay. You know who else is interested in that? The Pentagon. We have highly resonant interests. These are scientists. You don't see this in the public. You're looking for the next widget or the gadget or the thing that an engineer comes up with. The science is a deeper level there. If you don't see that deeper level. This was manifest when the science budget was cut in half for NASA. But you keeping the budget for putting a flag on the moon, you're thinking, that's all you need here. Meanwhile, China's investing in quantum entangled net networks and that. All kinds of frontier things. So we don't tend to be as good at acting proactively. We don't tend to be as good at proactive decisions as we are at reactive decisions. Who is the first in space? Wasn't us. Who was it?
- [57:36]
A
Sputnik.
- [57:37]
C
Sputnik, okay. Then we lost our shit. All right? Within a year, we founded NASA. Okay?
- [57:42]
A
Yeah.
- [57:43]
C
And we said we got to beat the Russians because they're the godless commies. And we got to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. And so we landed on the moon. Then we Looked over our shoulders. Where are the Russians? They weren't there. End of the Apollo program. We didn't go to the moon because we're Americans and we're explorers and we're. No, we went there because we got spooked by Sputnik. It wasn't just because it was a satellite. Do you know the Sputnik radio transmitter was inside a hollowed out intercontinental ballistic missile shell? And that's what was over our head. If they can launch that over our head, they can send a nuke. Oh my gosh, we got spooked, okay? And we reacted marvelously to that. Okay, why did we stay on the moon in 1972 or go back in 1980 or 1990 or 2000 or 2010? Why do we just all of a sudden invent Artemis and go, oh, it's time. Part the curtains, people. In the 2000 teens, when we announced it, intelligence told us that China wants to put Taikonauts on the moon. The last thing we want is them coming to the moon, kicking over our flag or planting a flag bigger than the optics of that would be really bad. Okay? Plus most of our flags are probably already fallen, it turns out. But so we then say, oh, let's go back to the moon. Wouldn't that be a fun thing and would interest kids and everything? So the stated premise is missing the actual driver behind that. And that happened under Trump. 1. Okay, Biden comes in. Does he get rid of what, everything Trump did? No, keeps the space thing because the space objectives are geopolitically established, not partisan politics. Established. NASA generally transcends politics as far as transcending politics could ever be. All right, here's what's going to happen. We lost more than 10,000 scientists from the government this past year. Grants are being cut, science research is being cut in universities. My colleagues are being cherry picked by Europe. That's what we did for 50 years in the 20th century. My whole lab, there were like three Americans out of 10 scientists because they were attracted here. We got the best and the brightest of the world to come here. Bad for their country, good for us. The reverse is happening now. So as far as I can read the headlines, we will sink lower economically in our health, our wealth and our security until everyone wakes up and is reminded how important science is. I'm not saying that as a self serving scientist. I'm saying that as a country loving American citizen who grew up where science was beloved and science is the engine of tomorrow's engineering, and engineering is the foundation of tomorrow's economies. And because you only see the engineering, you're not seeing what fed the engineering in the first place. So it's easy to believe that that doesn't matter. So I think we'll sink lower than all of Congress will get together and they'll say, we got to do something about this. Let's shore up our science investments. There'll be a delay because we have to get everybody back. But when China starts eating our lunch, I think we'll wake up and sit up straight in the chair.
- [61:13]
A
I'm curious your vantage as an astrophysicist on this question. There is so much focus, especially from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos launching their, their, their rocket programs. With all of the issues that we have here, talk about here, Earth, here on Earth, is it, is it worth it to invest in space travel to the extent that we are when, when, when our resources are finite, funding is finite and, and in theory, with all of the money that's going toward what seems, at least on its face from, from my vantage as a layman, like recreational space travel, I mean, that's real money that could go towards solving very real problems here. And especially if, you know, we've heard Elon say so many times that like, we have to, we have to be in a position where we can colonize Mars, but we have a habitable planet right now. And so why aren't we investing in fixing the problems that, that risk making this planet uninhabitable?
- [62:08]
C
I can't speak for private enterprise. Elon owns his own company. Maybe he'll go public and then it's, and then it's, you know, he'll have to satisfy shareholders. But let's speak for government funding for space exploration. That would be NASA. Okay, let's go back 20,000 years and we're in a cave and you're young whippersnapper and you peeked out the cave door. No one's ever left the cave yet. You peek out the cave door and there's mountains and streams and fruit. You don't have a word for fruit because you've never been out there yet. But very curious place to explore. So you go to the cave elders, these are the 30 year olds, and you say, we want to go out. So the cave elders caucus and they say, in our wisdom and in our experience, we've decided you cannot leave the cave until we solve the cave problems first. That's what you sound like. Exactly what you sound like. Okay, here's this tiny cave and there's the whole Earth. Yeah, Solve the cave problems first. Okay, so plus, how much money is NASA getting? 4/10 of 1% of your tax dollar.
- [63:21]
A
Yeah.
- [63:23]
C
99.6% of your tax dollar is going to something else. And you're going to go to NASA and say this is superfluous. When 99.6% of your money is going somewhere else. You're focusing on NASA because it's so visible. But that 0.4%, that's the rockets going to the moon. That's the James Webb space. It's all of that. So you're holding NASA guilty for being so visible and how effective efficiently they're spending their money. I ask people, how much money do you think NASA's getting? They told 10% of our budget or 15%. I wanted to start a movement where agencies get the budget that people think they're getting. And if that happened, NASA's budget would increase by a factor of 10. Yeah. All right, so a quick thing. You didn't ask it, but you were adjacent to it. The people who want to colonize Mars so that we're two planet species. That's a nice thought, but it's not realistic because I'd ask, why would you want to do that? Oh, in case something bad happens on one planet, then humans, Homo sapiens are preserved. But what bad thing are you imagining? An asteroid? A killer virus? Just tell me what. Okay, how about an asteroid? Fine. What you're telling me is what I'm going to ask you is what I will declare is it seems to me that terraforming Mars and shipping a billion people there is more effort than figuring how to deflect the asteroid. Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm just thinking, oh, there might be a killer virus. I'm thinking terraforming Mars and shipping a billion people there is harder than figuring out a perfect antiviral serum. We have the genomes of more and more life forms out there. Just put that money and put it in the lab. And so okay, if I don't mind going to Mars, but to do it on the premise that you want to do it to say, and even if you did do that, and even if an asteroid were coming just to say goodbye, like really, you're going to let 4 billion people die? Really? That's how that's going to play out. So I'm an astrophysicist, I love planets. Go there to as a vacation to enjoy. But don't pretend like that's an escape plan. It's simply not realistic given the cost that that would engender so, yeah. And about aliens, I'm still waiting around for the alien.
- [66:08]
A
So this question's completely out of left field, but who do you presume or how do you presume the pyramids were built and who do you presume built them?
- [66:17]
C
I've not been given any reason to doubt that the Egyptian civilization, which was a towering gathering of people and agriculture and architecture and scientists and leaders and workforce. I'm not given any reason to think that they didn't do it. The people I found who doubt it most tend to be European ancestry. Because what was Europe doing in 2000 BC that was not a place you wanted to hang out in. They were nowhere near as civilized as this culture in that African country. So to deny Africans the intellect and the power and the wisdom and knowledge to build that civilization and to have that mastery over their agriculture is why are you doing it? What do you gain by saying human beings didn't do this? Why can't you grant that to the peoples who are there? They're human, just like you, but they were just better organized and they knew how to cherish their smart people with their engineering. So just because it's something that surprises you every day, fine. Maybe they're actually smarter than you. Smart people surprise lesser smart people all the time with their new ideas and what it is they consider. And by the way, have you seen the earlier pyramids that were not as successful? They made the sides too steep and the rocks kept falling off. So they abandoned that until they found out what a better angle should be. So there was some trial and error there. It seems to me if aliens helped them, they wouldn't need the trial and error. It would be perfect from Jump Street. So it tends to be white people of European descent who are in denial, no pun intended, denial of that an African civilization could be achieved such towering heights. Yeah. So I'm basing this on everything that I've seen and read about and know about the Egyptian culture.
- [68:27]
A
All right, so last question here, also out of left field, but is there any way that you can derive meanings from dreams, in your opinion?
- [68:36]
C
So a couple of things. First, I comment in the book that one of the weirdest things the alien might experience, alien comes and visits you, and you become friends, let's say. And after not very much time, you're gonna have to tell the alien, I need to lay down horizontally for eight hours a day.
- [68:54]
A
Yeah.
- [68:55]
C
And I'll be semi comatose for one third of Earth's rotation. And my mind will have fantastical thoughts. Don't mind you know, don't mind me, don't mind me. I'll get back to you in eight hours. Right. That's. The aliens say what? You know, tip their head like a dog. What? So I. Have you ever read Freud's the Interpretation of Dreams? Yeah, it's a big volume, and it's an interpretation of dreams. In science, ideas achieve value when it's replicable. So if you can get someone else to interpret dreams and there's resonance with his interpretation of dreams, then you say, maybe we're onto something, but that never really happened. And so a dream might mean something to you, but for it to mean something in a bigger picture, it's not clear whether it does. But obviously we need to sleep. We can't function without it. And my understanding of dreams is that it helps you try to make sense of the day you just had, try to put it in some kind of perspective, try to wrap some. Try to capture it in some way. And the sad part is some people are frightened by their dreams. They're preoccupied by their dreams. If you read how dreams were interpreted long ago, people imagine that you were seeing the future. Tell me more, because I want to know. Well, I dream that the ships will come to the Tell me more. And the scribe would be writing it down. No, you're not seeing the future. No, that's not how that works. No, what happens is, if the ships did come and you dreamed about it and someone wrote about it, you're not seeing all the times they dreamt of the ships and they didn't come. Okay, those don't make it into the final cut.
- [70:47]
A
Right.
- [70:48]
C
So it's an important feature in proper data taking. You need to know the other side of the data. It's like they reported newspaper headline. 80% of airplane crash survivors studied where the exit doors were on takeoff. And that study led to the announcement on takeoff saying, look in front of you or behind you to find out where the closest exit door is. Okay, that didn't used to be an announcement. That got added after that study. And you look at that result, and I'm saying if 80% of the people who survived knew where the exit doors were, suppose 100% of the people survived who died also studied where the exit doors were. Suppose everyone who died, you don't know because they're dead. You just have who's left over and what their statistics are. Right? So. So science, you need. You got to go the other side and find out to buffer what might be your extraordinary conclusions you draw from what is or is not extraordinary evidence.
- [71:54]
A
Look, I could sit here all day and ask you every question I have. The book is Take Me to youo Leader. It's available anywhere books are sold. I'm going to put the link right here on the screen and whoever description
- [72:04]
C
interested I narrated the audiobook. So I will read right now the first sentence. And just to get put you in the mood, it is. It's a short sentence. Ever since childhood I've wanted to be abducted by aliens.
- [72:26]
A
Perfect place to leave off. Neil, thank you so much for.
- [72:29]
C
All right, yeah, good. Thanks for having me.
- [72:31]
A
Thanks again to Neil DeGrasse Tyson. That's it for this episode. Talk to you on Sunday. You've been listening to no Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, produced by Sam Graeber, music by Wellesley and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five star rating and a review. And and as always, you can find me Ryan Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels or you can go to briantylercohen.com to learn more.