Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Curiosity is Key to Overcoming Division

Summary

The Chris Cuomo Project: Episode "Processing..." Summary

Release Date: November 19, 2024
Host: Chris Cuomo
Guest: Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Description: In this insightful episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, veteran journalist Chris Cuomo engages in a profound conversation with renowned astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. The discussion delves into the pressing issues of critical thinking, the pervasive influence of social media, the future of artificial intelligence (AI), government transparency regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), immigration policies, and the indispensable role of the scientific method in contemporary society.

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1. Revitalizing Critical Thinking and Rational Discourse

Timestamp: [00:34 - 01:44]

Chris Cuomo opens the conversation by emphasizing the urgent need to restore rationality and critical thinking in the post-election landscape. He posits that society has become entrenched in left-right dichotomies, moving away from reasoned debate.

Chris Cuomo [00:41]: "We got to remember our critical thinking skills."

Dr. Tyson concurs, highlighting the importance of educating the public to employ the scientific method in discerning truth from misinformation.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson [01:06]: "And it's such a great reminder that there is still truth."

2. The Detrimental Impact of Social Media on Public Discourse

Timestamp: [07:06 - 09:34]

The conversation shifts to the role of social media in exacerbating polarization. Both Cuomo and Tyson express concern over algorithms that trap users in echo chambers, limiting exposure to diverse viewpoints and fostering misinformation.

Chris Cuomo [07:15]: "The algorithms serve the bubble. Keep you in the bubble."

Neil DeGrasse Tyson [09:34]: "If your opinion doesn't agree with the person who's attacking you, then there's something wrong with you."

They discuss the alarming trend of people accepting fake news as true, thereby eroding trust in objective information.

3. Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Self-Driving Cars

Timestamp: [16:05 - 26:18]

A significant portion of the episode explores the advancements in AI, particularly focusing on self-driving cars. Dr. Tyson draws parallels between the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles and the impending shift to autonomous vehicles.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson [18:28]: "What you’re describing is akin to how cars replaced horses—except now we’re replacing cars with smarter, electric ones."

They debate the potential benefits, such as increased safety and efficiency, against the challenges of job displacement and the ethical considerations of AI decision-making in unpredictable scenarios.

Chris Cuomo [20:06]: "People don’t change their views. The masses don't change their views on philosophy or principle. They'll change it because it affects their pocketbook primarily."

4. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) and Government Transparency

Timestamp: [29:07 - 39:54]

Cuomo brings up the topic of UAPs, questioning the government's handling and transparency regarding unexplained aerial sightings. Dr. Tyson expresses skepticism about alien visitation, citing the improbability given the vast number of smartphone cameras that would capture such events if they were real.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson [33:53]: "If we can crowdsource an alien invasion, all those videos would go viral. Cat videos go viral for less. And where is it? It’s nowhere."

They critique the government's tendency to label unidentified phenomena as national security concerns without substantial evidence, arguing that much of what is deemed "secret" pertains to advanced military technologies rather than extraterrestrial entities.

Chris Cuomo [34:53]: "So if you don't know what it is, somebody should be looking into it."

5. Immigration, National Security, and Societal Perceptions

Timestamp: [43:42 - 58:53]

The discussion transitions to immigration policies and their intersection with national security. Both hosts examine the stereotypes surrounding immigrants and the significant contributions they make, particularly in the sciences and public service.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson [55:16]: "One third of all Nobel prizes that the United States has won in the sciences have gone to immigrants."

Cuomo shares personal anecdotes reflecting on his immigrant family's experiences, emphasizing the drive and resilience often inherent in immigrants, which contradicts prevalent negative stereotypes.

Chris Cuomo [56:21]: "I'm second generation, broke, dumb and without skills. They just made their way onto a boat, met in a village, agreed to get married because he would take her to America."

6. The Indispensable Role of the Scientific Method in Society

Timestamp: [46:18 - 67:10]

A cornerstone of the episode is the advocacy for the scientific method as the bedrock of rational decision-making and societal advancement. Dr. Tyson articulates the scientific method succinctly, emphasizing its role in preventing self-deception and fostering empirical understanding.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson [47:29]: "The scientific method is simply do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is."

Cuomo reinforces this by contrasting objective scrutiny with subjective feelings, underscoring the dangers of allowing emotions to dictate public opinion and policy.

Chris Cuomo [60:41]: "The empiricism of it is fundamental... you don't have to just guess, you don't have to just conform, you don't just have to go with what you feel."

They lament the societal shift towards valuing feelings over empirical evidence, advocating for a resurgence of scientifically informed discourse to navigate complex modern challenges.

7. Navigating Technological Advancements and Ethical Considerations

Timestamp: [62:28 - 65:38]

The hosts contemplate the rapid pace of technological innovation and its societal implications. Dr. Tyson discusses the unpredictable nature of AI applications, especially in the liberal arts, and the necessity for ethical oversight.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson [64:07]: "We just slide with your own emotions and it never ends well."

Cuomo echoes the need for balanced advancement, where technological progress is tempered with ethical considerations to prevent societal fragmentation and ensure equitable benefits.

8. Conclusion: Embracing Rationality and Scientific Inquiry

Timestamp: [66:04 - End]

As the episode wraps up, both Cuomo and Dr. Tyson emphasize the critical need for rationality, scientific inquiry, and empathy in fostering a cohesive and enlightened society. They advocate for education that prioritizes critical thinking and the scientific method as tools to navigate an increasingly complex and technologically driven world.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson [66:04]: "Imagine how much worse it would be if I were not on the landscape."

Chris Cuomo [67:10]: "You have to embrace that grind. And the book is, of course, a beautiful discursive to take us through it."

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Key Takeaways:

• Critical Thinking: Essential for navigating political polarization and misinformation.
• Social Media: Its algorithms contribute to societal echo chambers, hindering open discourse.
• Artificial Intelligence: While promising significant advancements, it poses challenges such as job displacement and ethical dilemmas.
• Government Transparency: Adequate scrutiny and openness are crucial, especially concerning unexplained phenomena like UAPs.
• Immigration: Immigrants play a pivotal role in societal advancement, particularly in scientific fields, countering prevalent stereotypes.
• Scientific Method: The cornerstone of rational decision-making and societal progress, deserving renewed emphasis in education and public discourse.
• Technological Ethics: As technology rapidly evolves, ethical considerations must guide its integration into society to ensure equitable and positive outcomes.

This episode serves as a compelling call to action for listeners to reinvigorate their commitment to reason, evidence-based thinking, and open-minded discourse in shaping a progressive and united future.

Transcript

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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[Chris Cuomo]

Thing Mint Mobile unlimited premium wireless.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

30. 30. Bid to get 30. Get 20. 20, 20. Better get 20. 20.

[Chris Cuomo]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Sold. Give it a [e-mail] Switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month.

[Chris Cuomo]

New customers on first three month plan only.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Taxes and fees. Extra Speed slower above 40G. Detailed.

[Chris Cuomo]

Hey, I'm Chris Cuomo.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project.

[Chris Cuomo]

You know, post election, how do we.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Get our head back?

[Chris Cuomo]

How do we get to rational?

[Ryan Reynolds]

How do we get out of left right mode and get back to reasonable?

[Chris Cuomo]

We got to remember our critical thinking skills.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And who better to remind and instruct.

[Chris Cuomo]

And really enlighten us about the scientific method and real critical thought and how we know what we know where knowledge comes from. Neil Degrasse Tyson. Boy, his Merlin book was such a beautiful instruction.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And there's a new one out for you to look at.

[Chris Cuomo]

Merlin taking us through the universe.

[Ryan Reynolds]

It's not Merlin the wizard.

[Chris Cuomo]

It's Neil's own version of Merlin from his own childhood and his own reckoning. And it is such a great reminder that there is still truth.

[Ryan Reynolds]

There is a methodology of assessing information fact from Fugazi.

[Chris Cuomo]

And Neil and I talk about why he wrote this book, but more importantly.

[Ryan Reynolds]

How he sees life and how he examines a lot of the questions that.

[Chris Cuomo]

We'Re all dealing with. And when it comes to how to be smart, you don't get better than this guy.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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You want and that's it. And that's my morning routine. All right?

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Chris Cuomo]

Big brains and more, all in a.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Scientifically blended to make sure that it gets absorbed formula that is AG1, which I've been taking for years. AG1 is daily self care for me.

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And it should be for you.

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Oh, yeah, they upped it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Chris Cuomo]

Check it out.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Select Quote. The older you get, the more you know that you have to provide for.

[Chris Cuomo]

What you don't control.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Life insurance when you're young, doesn't make sense. Life insurance, once you have a family, once you're an adult, once you own things, once you need to protect things, doesn't make sense if you don't have it. That's where Select Quote comes in. Selectquote is one of America's leading insurance brokers. They got 40 years of experience helping 2 million customers find over 700 billion in coverage since 1985. Now, other life insurance brokers, you know, they do it more. Kind of one size fits all, may cost more, may cover less. That's where Select Quote does better. They have licensed insurance agents working for you to tailor a policy that meets your needs. Get the right life insurance for you for [e-mail] Chris C. All you have to do is go to SelectQuote.com Chris C today and you'll get started. SelectQuote.com Chris Support for the Chris Cuomo project comes from AG1. So holidays, you know what happens? You fall off the grind, you fall off the routine. That's why AG1 has been with me for so many years.

[Chris Cuomo]

Why?

[Ryan Reynolds]

Because it's simple. You're one and done. It's just a scoop in some water for me. Warm water. But you can put it in anything you want. And just like that, you've absorbed all the nutrition that you need to keep you on track. And AG1 is running a special Black Friday offer for all of November. So this holiday season, try AG1 and think about giving it to somebody else. The holidays are a great time to get yourself into better shape, to focus on yourself, your family and doing what you can to do your best. And AG1 is part of that, certainly for me. And that's why they've been a partner for so long. And like I said, every week of November, AG1 will be running a special Black Friday offer. For a free gift with your first subscription in addition to the welcome kit with vitamin D3K2. So check it out. Drinkag1.com CCP for the Chris Cuomo project. See what gift you can get this week. That's drinkag1.com CCP professor, always a pleasure.

[Chris Cuomo]

It's great to see you so.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's been too long.

[Chris Cuomo]

It has, it has.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You don't call, you don't write?

[Chris Cuomo]

No. Well, first of all, I'm seeing you all the time. You are one of the people that even the people who care about you and like you and I consider you a friend of mine. I don't want to bother you. You're talking about important things all the time. And you have become. And I'm happy to see it, by the way, because we first worked together in 1999. You are a voice of reason in society well beyond science. What does that mean to you?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's an. It's, it's, it's a. I mean, it, it's a responsibility. And I, I don't want to be a voice of reason that people listen to. I'd rather be a voice of reason that helps to influence other people's capacity to reason so that they can think something. Not because I said so, but because they were able to generate the rational thought on their own and then they can take ownership of their thoughts and decisions.

[Chris Cuomo]

You want to seed critical thinking.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the simpler way to communicate. Seed critical thinking.

[Chris Cuomo]

In a time of sheeple, though, we are not in a period of critical thinking. We are in a period of.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is that a word? That's a good word.

[Chris Cuomo]

If it's not sheeple, man, lemmings. People who are in bubbles. The algorithms serve the bubble. Keep you in the bubble.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. And you don't even know you're in the bubble.

[Chris Cuomo]

That's right. You think this is just what it is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Cuomo]

And I deal with it all the time. Where I say, six months ago, Democrats weren't talking about Kamala Harris. A year ago, they let Joe Biden say he's going to run again when he shouldn't have because in part, they didn't have confidence in Kamala Harris. But now she's perfect. I get attacked as red pilled. I Criticize Trump every 15 minutes for what he says and does and why. I believe he's a disservice to the people who are motivated by him. I'm red pilled because I said that thing and the clip goes around. Look, he's criticizing Harris. He's Red pilled. He's a Trumper now. And with Trump, forget it. If you don't duck your eyes in obeisance every time his name is mentioned, they think you hate America. That's where we are. Is it all social media's fault?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chris Cuomo]

Next question. No, I'm kidding. Why?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I mean, it's become a cesspool. I mean, I remember not long ago when social media was fun videos. You have idle arguments about what team you like best, or did you prefer Beyonce or Taylor Swift? There was a time when it was just a. It was an innocent town hall where people could share ideas rather than fight. And I learned this early on my Twitter stream where I realized I can't express an opinion because then people will attack it. And rather than say, oh, that's interesting, here's my opinion, let's discuss that. Doesn't happen anymore. It's if your opinion doesn't agree with the person who's attacking you, then there's something wrong with you. And then I thought, do they want every person out there to have their exact opinion? What kind of world would that be? The richness and diversity of opinions is what makes an interesting place to live. If everyone has exactly the same views on all matters, that's a dictatorship. Do we really want that? Let's pause and reflect on that. So I've. Yes, the algorithm is going to be the death of us all. Plus, now you have AI putting in deepfakes. So I've predicted.

[Chris Cuomo]

Very good, by the way.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I've predicted that AI will become so good at this that people who normally believe fake news as true will no longer believe their fake news as true because they'll think their fake news is faked.

[Chris Cuomo]

Wow, the double fake.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. And if the people who believe fake news think their fake news is fake, then that's the bottom falling out of the Internet. Then there's no value to objective information on the Internet because no one knows what the objective information is. And the Internet will implode upon itself and there'll be an rip. Tombstone the Internet 1992-2026 Rest in Peace and we go back to books and physically talking to people when we want to have a conversation.

[Chris Cuomo]

I like part of that, but AI, here's one of the things that scared me about it early on. It wasn't seeing me. I haven't seen you yet. Me pitching a product that I've never heard of in my life. And it wasn't bad at matching my voice and my words in my face. That was pretty good. That was A little spooky. My son, who's a beautiful kid, just started college, he would show me images that he knows. This is the key phrase, knows are AI generated. Knows they're AI generated and say, look at the legs on this woman. Look at the back on this guy. And I would say to him, but it's AI generated. And he was like, yeah, but look at his quads. I'm like, but they're fake. Yeah, but I mean, look at. Look how. Like this, the generation is so weaned on to gaming, virtual, not really knowing if you exist, that they're very susceptible in a way that I never imagined. That's scary.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, I don't know, right? So I don't know if it's susceptibility or they're just carrying a different kind of torch forward. And there are things that we were first exposed to. We're plus or minus the same age, that were different. Okay. And, oh, by the way, just have to slip this in, not forget. I was giving a public talk, and I was talking about the old days. And in the early 1990s, there was the movie you've got mail. Back when we anticipated getting mail, it was like, that was a fun thing to happen to you to get mail. And now it's like, what? No, I don't want any mail ever again. Ever. So. So, I mean, each generation will see that, the technology as something that baptizes them into it. And some will get rejected, others will get embraced, but it'll become the new emergent reality, leaving others behind. And so I've stopped criticizing, and now I only observe. I observe generational shifts. I'm an observer of it, not a criticizer of it.

[Chris Cuomo]

How does that work for you?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So as an educator, I observe it and navigate it. Okay? This is what. This is why Twitter was so valuable to me. When I was sort of honing my methods and tools of how I would communicate on Twitter, I would learn. If you post an opinion doesn't get you anywhere, people choose sides. So I would post comments that were perspectives, and even so, people thought I was posting opinions. I'll give an example. During one of the horrific school shootings afterwards, of which there were many of these I posted. This is the exact tweet. At Walmart, the nation's largest gun seller, you can buy an AR15 rifle, yet company policy bans the sale of pop music with curse words. That's all I posted. Okay. There's actually no opinion there other than that these are kind of. If you like guns, why do you care about curse words, and if you care about curse words, why are you selling guns? So I'm not actually leaning in one direction or another. I'm posing a. A hypocrisy in a policy hypocrisy. This was so illuminating to me. The comment thread divided evenly between people. First Amendment, we can speech, but they're private companies and the Second Amendment, you don't want them to have guns. They can. And it divided, assuming I was making one point or another. And that's what told me that people are just, as they say, armed for bear, where they just want to fight, even if there's nothing there to fight about. They don't even know to pause and reflect on that, on that tweet. And so I'm navigating this as an educator, not trying to change it, because I'm not going to change it.

[Chris Cuomo]

Malcolm Gladwell sat where you are and gave me such a good tip that I used immediately and it worked perfectly. But then I moved away from it because I am an asshole who likes to fight also. But he, he said, I said, how do you deal with people saying stuff to you about some of your theories and mad at you about not letting. Telling them about their son being held back so he could be a professional hockey player or whatever it is? And he says, oh, I don't think they're bad people. I just think that they don't know how to make the point they want to make. So what I would suggest you do is no matter what the insult is, I say to them, look, I understand why you're saying what you're saying, but I really have a question about where it's coming from. He said, and then conversations just open up because all they want is attention. They don't know how to seek it without being provocative.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That takes infinite patience. That takes a lot of patience. I know you don't have none, but it works.

[Chris Cuomo]

So, like, somebody will say the red pill thing, and I'll say, I'm a pretty outspoken critic of Trump, but what did I say? And how could I have said it better? And they absolutely flip the switch and start treating you like a human being again. But there is something about social media, right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But that's a conversation that does not. Yes, that social media, it can happen at social media, but generally doesn't.

[Chris Cuomo]

Doesn't. And it will only happen binary. It's just if it's you and them, once it's the we, it's all gotchas, you know, coming from my perspective of what people are Looking for. They're just looking for gotchas and coming at you. So let me ask you something. Does our future resemble in your opinion, are we on track with AI and technology and the development of all these things to be like the Matrix? Did the Wachowski brothers get it right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I think AI will take over many, many duties that previously people were paid to do. And I don't know that that's a new fact compared with the dawn of the industrial revolution where machines go walk into any factory in Detroit. It's not an assembly line of men. It's robots building cars. And you and I are old enough to remember there was a day where in the morning there was a very real chance your car might not start. Nowadays, my son sees an old movie and is a getaway car. They get in the car and the car doesn't start. Didn't they remember to put gas in their car? No, the car's just not starting. Because that was a thing. You could script that into a movie and he can't wrap his head around this. Cars are better made than ever before because they're made consistently and with higher precision than humans could do. And Detroit would take a while to warm up to this fact. But there it is. And so yeah, there's whole job plus what is some number? Is it one out of three men? There's some. I have to recheck this number, but it's bigger than you think. 1 out of 3 men or so earn their living driving. Think about it. So from forklifts, taxis, trucking car services, buses, trucks. It's huge. It's huge. The day all that becomes self driving, what do you do?

[Chris Cuomo]

How close you think we are to that?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I think self driving within 10 years, I think all cars because we'll get.

[Chris Cuomo]

Comfortable with the occasional catastrophic occurrence.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh no. So I got this, I got this. I got this. You ready? Okay. So do you realize, have you seen the photo of 1905 Fifth Avenue?

[Chris Cuomo]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

1905.

[Chris Cuomo]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Easter Sunday, there's 49 horse drawn carriages and one Model T. Yeah. Ten years later, no horses. No horses. Okay. There's 49 cars and one horse. Ten years. We figuratively and literally built civilization on the backs of horses. And you couldn't give away a horse within that 10 year period. Today, a car that you drive versus an electric self driving car is not that much of a switch. It's not like going from horses to cars.

[Chris Cuomo]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's going from cars to cars. And you first set up the HOV lane. Can only Be a self driving car there. If you have a self driving car, it go 120 miles an hour with two car length, different distance. And it'll never be drunk or tired or distracted or text. It could probably text and it wouldn't matter because it's a computer. So. And if it wants to change lanes, it tells the other cars, I'm changing lanes now. They part because all the cars can talk to each other and you could drive 120 miles an hour. And so, so we do that and say, hey, I want to do that. I want to get to work in a tenth of the time or whatever. Or I don't want to waste my half my life in fricking traffic. All right? So watch. So this will roll fast. Fast. And the interesting thing about cars is unlike homes, we cycle through cars every five or ten years. Okay, look how many electric cars on the road today compared with 10 years ago.

[Chris Cuomo]

You'll cycle through and that's where the culture of revulsion. Right, Because a big part of the Trump movement is anti ev.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I don't know how long that'll last. I think it'll, you know, when the EVs perform better. And do you know that's what it takes, not just the market. Do it because it's green, you do, because it's better.

[Chris Cuomo]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, people, in my experience, you surely know this from your news desk, people don't change their views. The masses don't change their views on philosophy or principle. They'll change it because it affects their pocketbook primarily. And the early adopters will do it because they're wealthy and they can do it and they can show off that they're driving green because that's a point of a badge of courage, a badge of honor. But otherwise to get everybody, you just make it clearly worth your while. All right, then suppose you have a Ferrari. You just love driving your Ferrari. You can't drive on the road anymore because it's all self driving electric. So there'll be a car park for you to. You leave it there and you go there and then you drive your car around the car. That's not. Is that any different from horse stables today?

[Chris Cuomo]

That's true.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Do people still want ride horses?

[Chris Cuomo]

That's a cool point. So it'll be like a go kart track. Yeah. You'll have to go to the track.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Cuomo]

Play with your car and you play.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

With your car and you can race. There'll be time for the Ferraris, time for the Porsches. It can be fun. It'll be a culture, but it'll be clearly a specialty avocation of car lovers. And I don't see why that wouldn't swoop in as quickly as cars did replacing horses.

[Chris Cuomo]

So the difference between modality and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wait, you talk about death. So now.

[Chris Cuomo]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so here's what's interesting. We are old enough to remember growing up there would be like one or two plane crashes a year, killing 200 people per crash. It was terrible and tragic and. But we kind of live with that. Then the FAA said we're going to do better than this. And here's what happened. They knew. And I knew this because I saw it firsthand. I was on a commission from the White House to study the future of aerospace in America, which includes the airplane manufacturers, many of who also make space vehicles. All right, so what happens there? They knew that employments would go up if the accident rates rate stayed the same and more people were flying. Then more people would be dying from accidents, even though it's the same percentage. But we don't think that way. We just see numbers. We don't think percentages. And so they knew that if more people are going to fly, they have to tamp down the accident rate. So every single plane accident that ever happens gets thoroughly investigated. There was one UPS plane where a lithium battery caught fire. The plane crashed. You can't take a lithium battery in the luggage. It created that rule. Okay, what was the last plane crash you remember? Not recent, not recently. Okay, might have been the triple. It might have been the 737 Max. Was that three years ago or something? And you got to think hard to remember it. Right. And so what will happen with self driving cars is there'll be some driving condition that no one had thought of before where somebody dies. Then there'll be an FAA equivalent for cars to say what caused it. Why? Okay, upload new software to all cars so that'll never happen again. And slowly the death, the car deaths will drop from whatever they would be out of the box, essentially to zero. Essentially to zero. And what are they now? They're 35,000 a year. Somehow we're all okay with that. 35,000 people dying on the road. There's special legislation to drop that. You know what happened? We go to self driving cars. I'm making these numbers up, but let's think about it. Suppose self driving cars go in and now it's 10,000 deaths a year from software errors. There are 25,000 people not dead because of the electric car. The electric self driving cars no one writes about the people who didn't die. Okay? So that's a thing in our society and in our culture. Because now there's someone you're going to blame you. That software you're manufactured. So the government is going to need some way to help US transition from 35,000 deaths a year to some out of the box number from all these other cars. And how to get that down to zero. Because every car can be uploaded with new software. So that will never happen again.

[Chris Cuomo]

The software so that it will never happen again. Can software capture the ability that a human has to be driving? Look to your right, See that somebody has picked up their phone and that the car is starting to move or that it may and it's time for you to get away from that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Starting to drift.

[Chris Cuomo]

Yeah, without the drift. You. We both know you make adjustments all the time in the car based on what you just observe in the people around you. Will the machine be able to do that?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So not only will it be able to do it and do it better, because it will have complete awareness of the cars that are around it. Complete awareness. Not only that it'll be able to drive in fog because it doesn't have to use visible light. There are other wavelengths of light. If it's equipped to do so, it could just drive 100 miles an hour in total fog. You can't. Nope.

[Chris Cuomo]

Because it's going to use like radar type stuff.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exactly, exactly. So I look forward to this. And is it that weird? You know, today we don't think twice by going to the airport and getting on a tram which has no conductor, no pilot, the doors open and closed. No one's been cut in half. No, you know, whatever. With fears. No, we just get on a thing. It goes automatically. We're cool with that.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Chris Cuomo]

Where?

[Ryan Reynolds]

Shopify.com Chris C. Support for the Chris Cuomo project comes from getmainlobster.com I gotta tell you, it's the holidays. Nothing ups your. Nothing shows you care like surf and turf. And you cannot have surf and turf if you don't have the lobster in play. Now look, I wanted it, they sent it. It was fresh, it was delicious, it was easy. Okay?

[Chris Cuomo]

And look, let's be honest, you can.

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[Chris Cuomo]

So why am I talking to Neil DeGrasse? Because here's why. This idea of how we can understand that things are bigger than where we are right now. That's why I believe that you're such a beautiful resource. On my lap is a book that I wrote. No, I'm kidding. Is Neil's book called Merlin's Tour of the Universe. And it is a very cool narrative of what we're looking at, what could be there, and what lies beyond. With everything that's going on in the world right now, what do you want this? What is the purpose that you want people to attach to this?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so particularly this season. It's election season. So much media attention given to candidates and the. Is it red or blue? And who. You know, why not slip in something? You can learn something for a change. I'm an educator. You know, can we pry open a little bit of your news cycle and maybe just learn something about our place in the universe in a fun way? This is. Merlin is a character that I. It was a pen name that I developed 35 years ago for a column that I wrote. My very first book was Merlin's Tour of the Universe. My very first 17 books ago.

[Chris Cuomo]

Are you suing you for copyright infringement?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so now I said it's time to Resurrect to exhume Merlin.

[Chris Cuomo]

Ooh, that's good.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exhume is good. And doing so to reinhabit that character. Because Merlin, as I've developed, it's not the Arthurian Merlin. You know, there's more than one, like.

[Chris Cuomo]

King Arthur, Merlin the wizard. Go ahead.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's more than one Chris in the world. More than one Joe in the world. It's another Merlin who's lived for four and a half billion years. Come from another galaxy. Merlin's an alien on Earth, comes from the Andromeda galaxy, but studied Earth culture and history and science. So when a person asks, this is from the column I don't quite understand gravity. Then Merlin recalls a conversation with Isaac Newton and Isaac Newton's backyard. And then you get that. And the fun part was studying how these people would have spoken back then, what words they would have used, what style. And I was delight to do that back then. And I only now realize that all of the tools that I developed for Merlin to communicate with the reader, they have infused my modern. All of my modern posts that go to social media and the like, because these are short snippets. And it's got to be in order to work. It's got to be interesting, it's got to be tasty, make you want to smile and you want to say, hey, that was interesting to learn. This is a. That's a tall task for only a couple of sentences to communicate. Many of the answers in this book are short. Some of them longer, of course, but most are short. And so for me, that was the proving ground, the baptism for what would become my utility belt from when I'm communicating with the public. And so I get all. Veklempt. Is that the right word?

[Chris Cuomo]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Vechlempt. I get emotional thinking about what role Merlin played in my life and now what role can play in the life of others.

[Chris Cuomo]

I love that you're engaging people's curiosity at a time that people are so incurious. And to my early point about leaving you alone, when I was doing the wave of UAP reporting that News Nation did, I am not about little green men. Though I do take your suggestion, which is I have nowhere near the level of arrogance to believe that only this planet and in the universe that is only bigger every time we figure out how to measure anything, that we're the only ones. I don't have that level of arrogance. I just don't know any differently. But I covered it from the perspective of transparency in government, because if there's nothing to know, they sure are spending a hell of a lot of money on something, right? It's like 150 million in just their first three public programs. Why are they spending this if those people in those programs aren't doing anything? And I thought of you at the time and I was like, I should ask, you know, Neil to come on and talk about this. But I was dealing with the government needs to tell us what it know and what it doesn't know. How do you think people should look at that issue of unexplained aerial phenomena?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So let me back up for a moment and address the government. I'm shocked by how much credit people are giving the government for keeping secrets. Just everyone I know who's ever worked for the government testifies how incompetent such a task would be. Let me just start with that. That's my opening salvo. One, two. Let's ask a different set of questions. Why would visiting aliens only show up in restricted Navy airspace of the United states? We've got 6 billion smartphones in the world, each capable of high resolution photo and video. If we can crowdsource an alien invasion, all those videos would go viral. Cat videos go viral for less. And where is it? It's nowhere.

[Chris Cuomo]

Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. There's a million people. Million airborne at any given moment with a window sitting next to them. Don't you think it was a mothership outside the. Outside the window? Somebody would get a picture of that.

[Chris Cuomo]

Yes, I do.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so either the aliens are inherently fuzzy and only visit restricted airspace, or people are just don't know the difference between what is true and what they want to be true.

[Chris Cuomo]

Yes, I agree with you. And so why am I interested? I'm interested because I believe it's about industrial espionage. It's about other countries, it's about who's sending what around and what we're taking from them.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I think for whatever $700 billion federal military budget, some fraction of that should go to investigating UAPs for sure. UNIDENTIFIED Aerial Phenomena, which is of course, just the rebranding.

[Chris Cuomo]

UFOs.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

UFOs. Right. And of course, if you. If we don't know what it is, somebody should be looking into it.

[Chris Cuomo]

Right? And look, but just because you don't.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Know what it is, it doesn't mean you know what it is. Yes, I don't know what this is. Therefore. It's alien. There's no therefore in that sentence.

[Chris Cuomo]

So that's what has changed, my handsome friend, is you. And I grew up at a time that the unknown was a hash Mark. But we just said we don't know. With social media, the unknown is now just opportunity. And it is a starting place for a whole wave of. Alex Jones. Alex Jones. We know the name. And fortunately, I believe the New Town shooting wound up being an almost permanent check on him. But there are so many in the business of weaponizing the unknown. That really is the first wave of success in digital media.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Weaponizing the unknown, I mean, and it draws in the gullible at that point.

[Chris Cuomo]

And. Gullible, yes. Incurious, yes. But the fearful, no.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They would claim they are curious. I'm just asking questions. How come why is the government not talking about this?

[Chris Cuomo]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How come they're not allowing me into Area 51? What are they hiding, by the way? A lot of government secrets are not. Because there's something that exists that. Not secret. Yeah. Top secret. It's not that something exists that they don't want you to know. Most of it has to do with the specs on something that is a military device.

[Chris Cuomo]

Right. That they don't want other certain people to know because then they could deal with it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Enemies. Right. So what is the top speed on the SR71?

[Chris Cuomo]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What is the radar capability of the. So those tend to be kept secret. That's generally what goes on in the military.

[Chris Cuomo]

Oh, listen, I'm with it. I'm just saying if you're going to spend $150 million and you're going to use Special Forces, you got to tell me a little bit more than it ain't little green men. I believe you. I believe. I don't believe you have a little green man in the basement. I believe you. I don't believe you're rebuilding a spaceship that you believe came from a different solar system. But I do believe that you have found lots of stuff that we may want to know. Not what the stuff is. I get national security.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They're concerned for national security.

[Chris Cuomo]

Yeah, but national security, I get it. But man, do they stretch that shit when it serves their purposes. And do you remember? Well, you will remember, but if you rec. So the yellow cake weapons of mass destruction stuff happens. We go to war. We go into the wrong country after 9, 11 and kill everybody in a way that people who are protesting what's happening in the Middle east right now seem to have forgotten. Not that it's okay, but that we did a lot more. So we're there. The yellow cake thing winds up being empty. Okay. It's not true. Ruins Colin Powell's political career. They make him A fall guy. And he had the, in my opinion, misplaced honor because he was an honorable guy to take one for the team.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Which, by the way, just to refresh my own memory, he didn't say, we think they're WMDs. He was like, we know they're a double. It's what there was not. He didn't left no uncertainty.

[Chris Cuomo]

No. Because the intel was, we got the yellow cake uranium and we know it's there now. Then the spies came forward, the husband and wife team, and blew it all up as saying no. They made this up to justify being in the wrong country. The point is. The point is that when we did that, the government says the media is compromising operational security on the ground in Iraq and putting our fighting men and women in risk. And people stopped watching the news. And that was a lesson that I have never forgotten about national security, which is it still matters to people. We're seeing it being cheapened right now, where everything is a risk to national security. But that is the most powerful thing that we still have in our collective vocabulary of concern. If something's of national security, you'll give the government a little bit of space. The problem is they used it for the Russia investigation with Trump. They used it with Hunter Biden. Now it's getting cheapened with everything else.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. And so I don't know where that will land. Right. Because it's still in the air. How that's being used.

[Chris Cuomo]

Land in the air. Are you giving a coded message right now to my UAP brothers and sisters? Land in the air. I mean, what are you trying to say? You with an odd antenna popping up behind your ear.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, they don't draw aliens with antennas anymore. Only the generation that had rabbit ear TVs drew aliens with antennas.

[Chris Cuomo]

Now it's all wifi.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm just saying it's a fascinating fact that how we represent aliens comes. Emerges from whatever is the cultural norm of the time.

[Chris Cuomo]

Rabbit ears. Do you remember that? How you would mess with those. I know you lift your leg.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Aluminum foil or something.

[Chris Cuomo]

Lifting your leg. The hangers. You know, I. I love watching all the Generation X stuff about. It's so true about us. Every generation complains about the next. I get it. I get it. Just like one genre of music about the next. But our kids as a collective, do not know what we know. They don't know the experiences that we had. We are the last generation pre cell phone.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chris Cuomo]

How crazy is that?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, they're going to say they're the last generation pre something that's yet to be invented.

[Chris Cuomo]

Ooh, what do you think it is? What's the next scary thing? Is it implanted in us? You think it'll be one of those?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I don't ever want to over assess the uniqueness of wherever I am on that timeline relative to what could happen later. That's all I'm saying. Because technology, it comes at you and you'll even. I'll give an example. 1989, the movie Back to the Future Part 2. It was filmed in 1989, took place in 1989, and they went forward to 2015, the future. Okay. By the way, in that they had a headline, the cubs sweep the world series. And because they hadn't won. That's right, because of the future. Turns out the Cubs would win the World Series in 2016. Missed it by just a year. But in it, Marty, the main character, gets fired from his job. And this is the home of the future 2015. Well, in 1989, you were badass. If your home had a fax machine, you were.

[Chris Cuomo]

That was. That was.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Send a fax.

[Chris Cuomo]

That was high.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Send a fax. Okay, so they're extrapolating to this future home. Marty gets fired, and he is fired simultaneously on the four fax machines that are in his home. He says, you're fired, you're fired, you're fired. Because the future home will have four fax machines, not one.

[Chris Cuomo]

Not something that's better than a fax.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exactly. Because no one's thinking that. Email attachment. Nobody had email. Okay? The public didn't have email. I had email in the sciences, but of course you did. So I'm just saying developments can come from places you don't see. Oh, there's another one. AT&T had a series of commercials you may remember, right around that time, it was called you will, have you ever wanted to Da de da da da da da. You will at and T will bring it to you. Okay, well, one of them, they showed somebody doing something I never wanted to do, never thought of doing, never did do, didn't even dream of doing. There's somebody on a beach in a beach chair, and he's tapping on a tablet. They got that right. People have tablets. And he said, and he taps and then he puts it down and he gets up. Have you ever wanted to send a fax from the beach? You will at and T will breathe. I said, no, I've never wanted to send a fax on the beach. So this is the linear thinking that goes on with people. So I'm just Saying we can think of ourselves as the last of a generation who knows things or thinks things, but they will be the last of their generation who have whatever is invented in their lifetime to then talk to.

[Chris Cuomo]

Their kids about how do you balance the openness to development, science and marketplace adaptation of the same with fear of impact.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I think we don't have enough fear. What we need is, we need a tandem. I don't know what is it a morality or we need a set of people who are the moral conscience of technology that have technological expertise but may have studied philosophy or, or ethics. And every new technology that comes out, they assess it, look at the risks, look at the benefits, do a cost benefit analysis and then advise the government on how to possibly regulate if you need to or don't regulate it if not. We don't have that right now. Really, it happens a little too late. And so we might have foreseen the problems with the suicide rates of kids who, you know, the FOMO for fear of missing out.

[Chris Cuomo]

Fear of missing out.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, fomo, yeah, fomo. Fear of missing out. Where? Oh, everyone else's life is better than mine because everyone else's life is curated online. We should have been able to see that coming. Just that this panel would have psychologists on it, of course, child psychologists, adult psychologists, people who are experts in depression. And so for all of our advances, I think we should have that just to advise, not to themselves legislate, but get us to think in ways we might not have been thinking.

[Chris Cuomo]

Advisory would be the key because you have a resistance movement not just to what we used to call the nanny state, but to government. Any kind of collective exercise of power.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, by the way, many of the same people who are anti government because they think government is inefficient and I don't want to pay taxes, get rid of all these agencies. Many of those same people are certain that the government is masterminding alien cover ups. You can't have it both ways. You can't have a perfectly efficient machine holding aliens from you. And on the other breath say government sucks. They don't know what they're doing.

[Chris Cuomo]

But you are requiring consistency where there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is no consistency is not a thing.

[Chris Cuomo]

And that look. But again, you know, just to keep circling it back, I believe that such a value you provide is you bring things back to what's known. You bring things back to what's known, what's not known, how we know what we can do with what we know and that there's plenty of.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thank you for noticing that. Because that's how you can turn ideas into action or ideas into tangible elements within how you think about your world.

[Chris Cuomo]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And decisions you make about your loved ones and your fate.

[Chris Cuomo]

And you are anti feeling. He's a very sensitive guy, don't get me wrong. But you are. Here's how we know. Here's what you would ask. Here's what we know about this. This is what they used to think it was, but now we know that it's this. And whether you're doing it through your Virgil, who is Merlin, or with your discursives or your social media content, you are reminding us that you don't have to just guess, you don't have to just conform, you don't just have to go with what you feel. Or you are suggested that there is a method of proof that has served us well in the past.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The methods and tools of science are exquisitely tuned to distinguish. Let me define the scientific method in a way you might not have ever heard it. I'm going to reduce it to two sentence fragments. Ready? The scientific method is simply do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is. Did I say that right?

[Chris Cuomo]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. I meant to say that in the opposite way. That's the scientific method. So if you want something to be true, how do you know it's true? Test it. This is what we developed over the past 400 years. And it's responsible for all the advances in civilization that you know, care about and love that has brought health, wealth and security to us all. The implementation of the scientific method. And we have yet to discover another pathway of inquiry that is as successful as what science brings to the table. So don't resist that. Why not celebrate it?

[Chris Cuomo]

Put it everywhere.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Put it everywhere.

[Chris Cuomo]

The empiricism of it is fundamental. And look, the Latin is killing us.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In school you take a class and you say, well, I don't want to take science now, let me take these other, Let me take art, let me take music, let me take whatever. And you're thinking of science like it's the separate thing, that you can take it or leave it, or that it's just a body of knowledge that comes and goes. No, it's a way of querying nature. And without it, we might as well just move back to the cave because that's where we'd still be if no one had done that.

[Chris Cuomo]

Now we're in digital caves. We are. We are in digital caves. Well, I talk to people all the time that aren't as populous in the professional circles that you travel in, where they believe things that they have no good reason to believe except preference, for.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Example, where it makes them feel good. Yeah.

[Chris Cuomo]

Any of the litigation surrounding the former president. Any of it. Okay. Or what was known and not known about the last election? Well, you know, there was so much proof of rigging and unconventional things. Like what? Well, I heard that someone had this basket of affidavits, and these people said, it's all over. I said, but do you know any of that or did you hear it? And. Well, Chris, I mean, what am I going to believe? Well, if I were to accuse you of something right now, that's not the end of the process.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chris Cuomo]

It's the beginning.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. And that's a very good point.

[Chris Cuomo]

We are really steeped in.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You want. You wouldn't want to be that person where the jury is just simply arriving at a conclusion without evidence.

[Chris Cuomo]

That's exactly right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chris Cuomo]

In fact, you know, as flawed as we are, and I always say, you know, yeah, America is the worst country until you compare it to any other one. The jury system beyond a reasonable doubt is informally referred to as 95% plus that you are 95% plus sure that no decision makes better sense than the prosecution's version.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

By the way, mathematically, 95% is two sigma. Mathematically. Just.

[Chris Cuomo]

I have no idea what that means.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Sorry. Just saying.

[Chris Cuomo]

Does that mean that Sigma's like 47.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And a half or something like that Bell curve? You can ask. There's like one standard deviation, the width of the curve. The standard deviation is like the. That's what they give you now when they report polls.

[Chris Cuomo]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The plus or minus three percentage points, whatever. Yes.

[Chris Cuomo]

That's the margin of error, the basic margin of error.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So if you take two of those, then your result is true 95% of the time.

[Chris Cuomo]

So Sigma B would be one standard deviation removed from certainty.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Correct. Or no. One standard deviation from what you think the result should be. Okay. Two standard deviations. You have that much more confidence in it. So anyway, so 95% is a perfectly clean number to use.

[Chris Cuomo]

So that's what they. You know, that is what it is. As opposed to an indictment, which is probable cause, which is known as 50 plus 1%, which is its half and half. And remember, in an indictment, you only hear my side of the story as the prosecution. The defense isn't there, they're not represented, and I'm allowed to use evidence that wouldn't be admissible in Court hearsay and other ways. So if that's why they say you can indict a ham sandwich, because if you give me a day with 16 people where only half of them have to agree with me and I'm allowed to say whatever I want about you, yeah, it's going to be hard for you to walk away.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that's right.

[Chris Cuomo]

So our system is pretty good. We do not employ that system in our public life. It's not even close. And look again, what's happening with what happened with Harrison Trump was a perfect example of it. You know, nobody goes based off what they know anymore. They go off what they feel. And that's always been somewhat true in politics.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm saying I used to be angered by that and then I realized it's just politics. It's like someone going to Washington, work in Washington, said I love Washington, but it's just too much politics. That is the point. I know that is the currency of life in Washington.

[Chris Cuomo]

Then I hear like this voice from the beyond that is the anthropomorphized dead father. And he says, hey, don't call all politics bad. It's not the way I did it. And that is true.

[Ryan Reynolds]

There are a lot of honorable people.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm just saying it's not the place you explore rationality of thought or decisions. And I didn't value judge it, I.

[Chris Cuomo]

Just said, oh, I'm value judging it. I did that. That's why I got the voice, not you. Although he was a big fan of yours. So look, I mean, we see it all the time and I don't know what to do with it, but I am observing it, which is when somebody gives the right kind of answer to a question. Do you believe that we should close the border? Look, close the border, what does that mean? You'd have to figure out who you come in, how you process it, what you do. Oh, you're given a political answer right now. And the refreshing nature of Trump and company is they just say it how it is like. But there's a reason that the acumen developed and it wasn't just deception. Cicero on down of the political science right, which now we see as an oxymoron, was that there is a way to message where you don't create division. There is a way to message where you leave things open ended because you don't know how it's going to go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And that's not the most efficient way to rise to power.

[Chris Cuomo]

It absolutely is not. I mean, look, maybe you'll know it. I Don't. What is the Greek positive opposite term to demagogue?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Don't know.

[Chris Cuomo]

Is that Greek, what you just said? Oh, you said don't know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, I said I don't know.

[Chris Cuomo]

Oh, I don't know either. I'm saying I know. Demagogue. I don't know. So a demagogue, somebody who uses anger and prejudice to develop support.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, demagogue is also the first step towards, toward.

[Chris Cuomo]

I mean, toward nothing good has ever followed. Nothing good has ever followed.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm confusing demigod and demigod.

[Chris Cuomo]

No, demagogue, who now we confuse with a demigod.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Chris Cuomo]

But a demagogue. I don't know the positive opposite.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because here's what I like to do. I like to say, okay, there's this anti immigrant sentiment that permeates the land. And I would just say Trump's biggest supporter, the richest man in the world, is an immigrant and a man of science. People thought about that. He's an immigrant. And one third of all Nobel prizes that the United States has won in the sciences have gone to immigrants. I calculate that every year. By the way. It's not. You can't just Google that.

[Chris Cuomo]

Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's a. I do it. I have people, I have a research team. Because it's not as easy as it sounds. Because how did someone get here? Did they get citizenship? You have to, like, do the homework.

[Chris Cuomo]

I totally get it. And it makes sense. I mean, look, so I don't feel.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This way about immigrants that, you know, some hardworking folks.

[Chris Cuomo]

Trump would say the same way. As long as they're from Norway, he would say, I'm not anti immigrant either. I'm just anti illegal entry by immigrants and countries sending us their garbage in the form of humans that get in here illegally. And they don't tell us about it. That's what I'm against. And the lefties who let them all in because of the great replacement theory of creating a new generation of voters for them, that's what I'm against. I'm not against immigrants. Because, look, even in a hypocritical culture, how many people are at this point in our generation, let's just say even the next one are more than three generations removed from an immigrant.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Hardly any. Correct.

[Chris Cuomo]

You know what I mean? So you can't be that hypocritical.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right?

[Chris Cuomo]

And what they'll say is, but mine came the right way.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Mine were good, my people were good.

[Chris Cuomo]

Yeah, mine came the right way. Which was in my family's case two generations ago. I'm second generation, broke, dumb and without skills. And they just made their way onto a boat, met in a village, agreed to get married because he would take her to America. That's love. And he dug ditches and eventually worked in a grocery store. They would have never passed muster. Today, one generation, one kid, Governor of the state of New York. So nothing special about us. And that's the dream. That's the dream. And that's why he went into public service. His brother went into the military. They said, you're going to go into service because we owe the country. That's what we've moved away from, though. You see an unsophisticated person, someone who's got to clean a house, someone who's got to do manual labor. You see someone who's unworthy. What have we learned about our greatest thinkers and what their lineage is in the United States?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I'm just saying that the likelihood of being an immigrant is sufficiently high so that.

[Chris Cuomo]

And an immigrant who came from geniuses. Or an immigrant.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, no, no. Off the boat, just to stereotype off the boat immigrants. And it's well known that if you have enough drive to leave home forever and go to a new place, there's something inside you.

[Chris Cuomo]

You think how scary that is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I know.

[Chris Cuomo]

Can you imagine if you got offered the offer from wherever and your wife, who's also a scientist, was you remembered, also given the same things. And you had to move to Holland, not the scariest place in the world. Pretty cool place to visit. Think about what that would require of you. And I'm saying they're gonna pay you $10 million a year. They're gonna pay your wife $10 million a year. And you can fly back and forth whenever you want. Just think of the conversations you would need to have to make that move, let alone leave everyone. You know, your buck ass broke, figure your way in and nobody likes you there. I mean, think about it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's right. That's right. And our attitudes changed so frequently back then. There was the eugenics movement. Oh, yeah. It was embedded, the immigration was embedded within this philosophy of who were the desirables and who weren't.

[Chris Cuomo]

And look, you know, all of this to me, there's continuity in the conversation because what's the difference between my father, who was absolutely not considered in politics, a white man. Okay, he was a swarthy, ethnic, mercurial. Mario, the hot Bl. Italian. He was constantly Mediterranean. Yeah. Bothered by being a mafiosi. He must be. He must be. It plagued him his whole career. One generation I'm a white guy. I'm white. Privileged. Last joke my father ever told, may rest in peace, was he was hearing a piece about me as another white male in the media, you know, operation of privilege. And he said, hold on. Hot damn, we made it. Christopher's a white guy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exactly.

[Chris Cuomo]

One generation. What's the difference? Objective scrutiny.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You know what my father said? He said, I'll know we've made it as black people in America when we get to be indicted for embezzling money.

[Chris Cuomo]

A white collar crime.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. No, there you go. You're one of the clubs.

[Chris Cuomo]

And the difference is we started to apply standards and rationales to things, okay? That's who he was. This guy's different. We have a culture of adoption and adaptation of thought. And the more we lean into it about what the bases of the thinking process is, the better we'll be served. The fears is the farther we get from NGT Neil DeGrasse NDT Neil DeGrasse Tyson. The farther you get away from. Wait, let me think about it. Let me think about it. Let me think about it. The more danger we get into.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Because then you just slide with your own emotions and it never ends well. In my experience, you can have them, have them, have them flavor your thoughts and behaviors, but if all of your important life decisions are pivot on your emotional state, I don't think that bodes well for. There's tremendous room to apply rationality to important decisions, but not enough people do it. And I'm saddened by that, but I'm just trying to help people think rationally about it. So in there, someone asked about the far side of the moon. They said, is there really a dark side of the moon? And so Merlin says, well, ever Since Pink Floyd's 1973 album, we've been working day and night to undo this cr. Because there's no such thing as a dark side of the moon. There's a far side, and that's how people sometimes confuse it. There's all sides of the moon get sunlight. So it's. It's trying to get into what you think is true, but empower you to understand. I don't want anybody ever saying this is true because Tyson said so.

[Chris Cuomo]

I say that shit all the time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I want to say this is true because I've learned why it's true.

[Chris Cuomo]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I can make the defense of that case.

[Chris Cuomo]

Last thing. Did you believe 15 years ago that with all of the technology and all of the ability to globalize communication and reach and be in contact, that we would actually, 15 years later, be less in touch with one another and less technologically sophisticated in terms of using technology to better ourselves.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, well, I think we're still figuring out how to tame AI so we don't know where. I don't think we know where that's going to land. Especially AI is applied to the liberal arts, so writing and art and this sort of thing. We've been using AI for decades in science. If AI can do it, fine, I'll find something else to do that it can't yet do. So I think we're what I think we're. Again, I don't, I don't value judge change. I just observe it. And like I said, I try to navigate it as an educator so that can be as good as I can be in whatever's the state of mind of the person who's in the moment and whoever's being touched by it. The. I don't think it's entirely true that we are more farther apart than ever before. There are groups, Facebook groups among them, but that's for the older generation. There are people who gather, who find like minded people on the Internet and they gather and people you would have never known even existed. The problem is, if I say I think Earth is hollow, let me type in hollow earth. It'll show me everyone or the person who thinks that. And so there's no, there's no checks and balances on the veracity of what it is you're searching. But whereas, oh, I was in Vegas, a whole table of women sitting there and one of them recognized me and they wanted to take. I said, fine. So I came over, sat down briefly and I said, well, what brings you all together? Oh, we are the pound cake chicks. Like what? Like what? Okay, there's a Facebook group where they make pound cakes and other recipes and once a year they go on a Vegas trip and they're from all over the country.

[Chris Cuomo]

I love it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I don't know if that makes up for the fact that somehow we feel more isolated in many cases, but that didn't used to happen at all.

[Chris Cuomo]

I just feel like we keep a.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Shout out to the pound cake chicks.

[Chris Cuomo]

Yeah, listen, and that is a noble pursuit, by the way. I'm a big fan of pound cake, but I feel like we keep forgetting to remember that nothing is all one way, that nothing is all good, nothing is going to be all bad, nothing. You know, that, that there's always varied, not just expectation going into it, but varied outcomes. And you get your pound cake chicks but then you also get your white nationalists. And we don't think through any of these things because we've told ourselves, well, don't think it through because we just want freedom. So just let it happen, because that's what we're supposed to do. I don't want any advisory board telling me whether or not this technology of doing medicine on myself.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, freedom was the battle cry of COVID Right?

[Chris Cuomo]

That's what now you have. You had competing campaigns in the last election that were both about securing freedom. If you vote for Trump, he will destroy the democracy. Secure your freedom. If you vote for Harris, she will destroy gender. Secure your freedom. That's where we were. And in both cases, it is a lack of critical thinking. And it's all on you, Neil, the dad in your book, people say, you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Know, world is pretty bad right now. What do you have to say about that? And I say, you're telling me I suck at my job getting rid of. And then. But here's how I get out of that, okay? I say, imagine how much worse it would be if I were not on the landscape. That's what I tell myself.

[Chris Cuomo]

Oh, no, that's good. Hey, when was it ever better before you?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right?

[Chris Cuomo]

For example, when was life ever better before? As I say every morning when I wake up, today is a little better because Neil DeGrasse Tyson is here. Merlin's tour of the universe. It is a great reminder of how he started and how far we all have yet to go. Thank you for coming to talk about the book. I love you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I appreciate you. Love you.

[Chris Cuomo]

I told you, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he knows how to know. And that is something that's really worth.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Reminding ourselves about now.

[Chris Cuomo]

Critical thought and how we parse and how we look at things and how we look at questions and how we postulate different ideas and theories and how.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You have to love it.

[Chris Cuomo]

You have to embrace that grind. And the book is, of course, a.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Beautiful discursive to take us through it.

[Chris Cuomo]

So our thanks to Neil and thanks to you for subscribing. You don't like the ads? Subscribe on Substack. You get all the long Covid stuff. You get the podcast without ads, and you're going to get exclusive material from me. I'll see you on News Nation and.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I'll see you here. Let's get after it.