Trump shut down by 2 judges HE APPOINTED

20:18Brian Tyler Cohen: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.

20:28Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 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.

21:05Brian Tyler Cohen:You had an interesting part of the book where you explain how I think 98 % of our DNA is shared with a banana.

21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. Identical genes, yes. With a banana. 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. Right. And so it's evidence of how non-creative we are in the aliens we've conjured for our films. 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.

21:56Brian Tyler Cohen:We granted them pointy ears

21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:to really show our imagination. Exactly. Spock had pointy ears, so he's the alien. Yeah. 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 physiologically, nearly all of them are humanoid. So that would surprise me the most. I'd be shocked by that. And 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.

22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:Are you gray yet? Yeah, gray enough.

22:42Brian Tyler Cohen:Trust me, I hear in the comments every day. Oh, okay.

22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson:So was it the 90s? Fox had a documentary called Alien Autopsy. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. And it was a film, grainy, black and white from 1947. And 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 crashed saucer in Roswell. That's how it was described in the headline newspaper article. Crashed saucer. Okay. So, and there's the alien. And with big eyes, a big old head. The aliens never have hair. That concerns me. Because if you're humanoid, give them some hair.

23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 Autopsy, Fact or Fiction. Why would you have to say that if it was a real autopsy?

23:48Brian Tyler Cohen:If it's a fact, yeah.

23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 had taken a film course.

24:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:And I knew when certain film genres came in, and one of them is cinema verite, where you follow a character around with a camera so you have the point of view of that character. 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? They're tripod mounted. Yeah, monstrosities. Monstrosities, all right. Whereas that autopsy was the POV of the, the doctor and it was, they can't, it went over the shoulder. It came in this way. That what I said, that was not a thing until the 1960s, the cinema of Verite.

25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. Maybe even as late as the mid sixties. 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. 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. Operation, yeah. Where you just go in and pull out, you know, just pull it out. You're not severing nerves or arteries or any connectivity. So those three things made me suspicious.

25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson: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.

26:08Brian Tyler Cohen:That's sad. 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, we're going to 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.

26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson: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.

27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 Epstein? We got a walking, talking alien here sitting on the bench with his legs crossed, ready to be interrogated or tested upon. so uh but like i said the files we already had testimonies from insiders i don't there's nothing

28:04Brian Tyler Cohen:there that surprises me yeah so when we have for example going going back to the topic of aliens you know most of these um sightings for example have happened over the united states of sightings of of ufos yeah have happened over either the united states or other english-speaking countries predominantly and i make that point and you make the point in the book yes it's not simply most

28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:It is like 90... Virtually all. 96%. Now, if you just have a map of all the sightings in the world, it's all clustered. North America, the UK, the five I's they're called. Five E-Y-E-S. 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. Many people live within a 20 mile radius of my home in Manhattan than live in all of Australia. So just to put that in context. It could be that we just know who to call. We have organizations, MUFON, Mutual UFO Network, where, and there are a couple of others that do this.

29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. I said, it's amusing, but no one is distracted by them. It's not a thing. Yeah. The way it is. So, so.

29:47Brian Tyler Cohen:Well, it's also a luxury to be able to be distracted by them. You know the biggest luxury?

29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:Remember crop circles?

29:54Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah.

29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay, crop circles.

29:56Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah.

29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:Look at the countries where crop circles have occurred. These are countries that do not have a food shortage. Right, right. These are wheat fields where people are trammeling them, or aliens, trammeling them. 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 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.

30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:Benjamin Franklin, like 1785, something. So my boy knew that humans are not good at keeping secrets. So going into its third decade, History Channel's... What is this? Ancient Aliens. Oh, Ancient Aliens. Okay, yes, you knew. It's in its third decade. Talk about getting mileage on...

31:08Brian Tyler Cohen:Oh, yeah, they're dining off that thing until the end of time.

31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:Oh, man. And so you go back to these cave drawings or hieroglyphics or go to something old, found somewhere in the world, and they're drawings that you can't really explain. Like bubble-headed creatures with ray beams coming out of fingertips, they're levitating, you know, the stuff that's just, wait, what? What? And so if you are alien adjacent, okay, 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. 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.

32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:For example, could these drawings have been by a kindergarten class of those ancient peoples? They were just drawing stuff. Yeah. 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. You know, Zeus is wielding a lightning bolt, okay?

32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:And you have other creatures, you know, Poseidon rising up out of the ocean with powers, you know, making waves. And then you have, like I said, you had the centaur and the minotaur and the, you know, 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 times, look at frescoes where Jesus is floating with beams of light coming out of him. Yeah. You know, in a halo. Yeah, what do you call this thing? I forgot. A halo. Yeah. 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?

33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, you're not saying that. Right. 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, 2020, three, four, and five, we had all the testimonies in Congress. He was head of a committee, and I forgot who appointed it, either NASA or Congress.

34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. What is the metadata? It's where are you on earth, longitude and latitude, what compass heading, what the elevation, the lighting conditions, the time of day.

35:08And so that if something's glowing there and other people captured it, you can triangulate on it.

35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 disk that's nearby that's small or a disk 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. We'll 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.

36:00So what point was I make?

36:02Neil deGrasse Tyson: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.

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37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, no. Let me clarify that. Sure. Okay. Yeah, you might be able to find one or two cases, but it's not a thing. Okay? When science is 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. 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 that was like this glowing blob in a portico.

38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:And the believer says, 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 a scientist's 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 we'll never fly.

39:34Brian Tyler Cohen:Yes, exactly. Hold on.

39:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:Just, excuse me. Birds fly, okay? Birds fly. Yeah. 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? Well, 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 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.

40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 run of stupid quotes that people have made over the years describing something being impossible. In all cases, it was a technological short-sightedness of them. And that's why when I'm contemplating how aliens might visit us, I'm going to give them any technology they can 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.

41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:But I will limit it by the laws of physics and the two different categories. So on that topic,

41:09Brian Tyler Cohen:if you have people who are saying that certain things are impossible, just like they did in the early 1900s and those things have proven to be possible. Technologically possible. Technologically possible. Is there anything that people are saying right now that you think 50, 100, 200 years from now, we will have in fact found out do exist in very much the same way that those idiots were saying that we can't fly, cut to, we obviously have planes.

41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson: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.

42:01Brian Tyler Cohen:Right, so you're saying everything has to be contained within our laws of physics.

42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, you said our laws, but I said earlier, the laws of physics, yes. These laws apply everywhere. across the universe. 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 gonna 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.

42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:In 100 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.

43:05Brian Tyler Cohen:There is questions as to whether AI or robots could become sentient. What do you think about that?

43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, so from an alien point of view, I'm still 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.

43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:Aren't you impressed? That's what that would look like to an alien.

43:56Brian Tyler Cohen:Do you think, though, in a vacuum we could still have sentient AI that even just within the U.S.? Not from the perspective of aliens. What do you mean by sentient? Like AI that... Why isn't it already sentient?

44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:What do you mean by sentient? that isn't currently manifest when you have a complete conversation with a chatbot. You have a complete conversation and they become your friend and this is already being studied psychologically. There are people like this guy's girlfriend is a chatbot, all right? What do you mean by sentience if it's not what's already going on?

44:29Brian Tyler Cohen:Well, I guess something that we have as humans is a desire to survive. And so there's already -

44:37Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's all life forms, by the way, not just humans. Right.

44:39Brian Tyler Cohen:Just a survival instinct. And so there's some talk about when folks want to delete programming behind AI, that AI will figure out a way to back itself up. So do you think that there will be a point where there is a broadly understood and appreciated survival instinct among AI?

44:59Neil deGrasse Tyson: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, 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.

45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:It is undergoing that as we speak. But I mean, that's also the result of programming. I saw, sure. So, so what? Who cares? we're talking about not who programmed it we're talking about the product I saw an ad it's an ad for an AI agent that is specially 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 it the fees the paralegal you get rid of half your paralegal staff because they're the ones that do all the homework that the chatbot does and 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?

46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'll say, do this one. And someone else has one that doesn't have good experience and they don't use it. That company goes out of business. 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.

46:50Brian Tyler Cohen:No, I think, I mean, I think you answered it. I think that that that does explain. I mean, when I think of like sentient, I think of survival instinct. I think of that. That's that pretty much covers it.

47:00Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. Yeah. Yes. 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 it had that tenor to it, right? And he finished the conversation kind of smug. It was like, yeah, I got it to admit that it has the seeds of the ending of civilization and that's bad, okay?

47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:And that exchange was between a strong-willed, strongly opinionated politician and a chat bot. And that left a positive impact on Bernie Sanders. He's going to come back to this. This is survival of the fittest. Yeah. Yeah.

48:06Brian Tyler Cohen:And by the way, you can -

48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:And if I misremembered a detail about his conversation, you can watch it for yourself. Totally, totally. 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. Yeah.

48:33Brian Tyler Cohen:Thereby kind of entrenching the survival of the chatbot in and of itself. Correct. OK, so I have a political question since we're jumping into into politics here. But, you know, on on the topic of 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 in their political agenda. So, for example, you'll see a reliance on fossil fuels and and and not focusing on renewable energy to the point where you're even 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.

49:31Brian Tyler Cohen: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 science, will deny the existence of of climate change for these political ends or financial ends, even as we see, you know, incontrovertible evidence of climate change existing now?

49:51Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 presidents.

50:37Neil deGrasse Tyson: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?

51:23Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 image. They're in denial of climate change because they're in the pockets of Exxon and whatever. Any other anti-science that you see? Well, hold on. I'm recreating this conversation. Well, 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 devout Christians, among all the Christians in the Christian right who are in denial of biological evolution.

52:05Neil deGrasse Tyson: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

52:19Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 um align your chakras uh we can just keep going anti-gmo uh what else we have uh anti big pharma uh i can go down the list it's almost endless at oh 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.

53:32Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. 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.

54:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:We protect belief systems in this country. Don't claim you have the science high road, period. Now, liberals were the OG anti-vaxxers because they were basically anti-pharma, and 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 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.

55:09Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 of freedom. You can't put the, it's different reasons, but neither of them are getting vaxxed 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.

56:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Ever since then, but more specifically where 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? Has that ever crossed your mind? You know what I'm interested in? Dimmed objects in the night sky with multispectral imaging of them moving across. Okay, you know who else is interested in that? The Pentagon.

56:44Neil deGrasse Tyson: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're 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 networks and 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.

57:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:Who was the first in space? It wasn't us. Who was it? Sputnik. Sputnik. Okay. Then we lost our shit. All right, within a year we founded NASA, okay? 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. Ended 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.

58:05Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 did we just all of a sudden invent Artemis? and go, oh, it's time. Park the curtains, people. In the 20-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 and kicking over our flag or planting a flag bigger than...

58:54Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 it 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.

59:38Neil deGrasse Tyson: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.

1:00:26Neil deGrasse Tyson: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, then 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.

1:01:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:But when China starts eating our lunch, I think we'll wake up and sit up straight in the chair.

1:01:12Brian Tyler Cohen: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 rocket programs. With all of the issues that we have here, talk about - Here, Earth? Here on Earth. Is it worth it to invest in space travel to the extent that we are when our resources are finite? Funding is finite. And in theory, with all of the money that's going toward what seems, at least on its face, from my vantage as a layman, like recreational space travel. I mean, that's real money that could go toward 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.

1:02:00Brian Tyler Cohen: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?

1:02:08Neil deGrasse Tyson: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?

1:02:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:Let's go back 20 ,000 years and we're in a cave and you're a 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.

1:03:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:Exactly what you sound like. Okay? Here's this tiny cave, and here's the whole Earth. Solve the cave problems first. Okay. So, plus, how much money is NASA getting? Four tenths of 1 % of your tax dollar. 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 now 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 yes all right so um A quick thing, you didn't ask it, but you were adjacent to it.

1:04:16Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 would 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. Okay, how about an asteroid? Fine. What you're telling me is, well, 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. I'm thinking, I'm just thinking, oh, there might be a killer virus.

1:05:09Neil deGrasse Tyson: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, 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, you're just gonna say goodbye? Like, really? You're gonna let four billion people die? Really? That's how that's going to play out. So I'm an astrophysicist. I love planets. Go there as a vacation to enjoy, but don't pretend like that's an escape plan.

1:05:54Neil deGrasse Tyson: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.

1:06:07Brian Tyler Cohen: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?

1:06:17Neil deGrasse Tyson: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?

1:07:19Neil deGrasse Tyson: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.

1:07:56Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 achieve such towering heights. Yeah. So I'm basing this on everything that I've seen and read about and know about the Egyptian culture.

1:08:27Brian Tyler Cohen: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?

1:08:36Neil deGrasse Tyson: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.

1:08:52Brian Tyler Cohen:For eight hours a day, yeah.

1:08:54Neil deGrasse Tyson: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? 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.

1:09:38And so, a dream might mean something to you,

1:09:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:but for it to mean something in a bigger picture, It's not clear whether it does. And, 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 are seeing the future. Tell me more because I want to know. Well, I dream that the ships will come to the, tell me more.

1:10:28Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. Those don't make it into the final cut. 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?

1:11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 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. 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.

1:11:53Brian Tyler Cohen:Look, I could sit here all day and ask you every question I have. The book is Take Me to Your Leader. It's available anywhere. Books are sold. I'm gonna put the link right here on the screen and also in the post description.

1:12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:And whoever's interested, I narrated the audio book. So I will read right now the first sentence and just to put you in the mood. Are you ready? It is, it's a short sentence. Ever since childhood, I've wanted to be abducted by aliens.

1:12:26Brian Tyler Cohen:Perfect place to leave us. Neil, thank you so much for taking your time. All right, yeah, good.

1:12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:Thanks for having me.

1:12:31Brian Tyler Cohen: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 Graber, 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 as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to briantylercohen.com to learn more.

1:13:01Thank you.