Fixing the Internet with Harleen Kaur (Bonus Minisode)

Can we fix the news? On this minisode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Gary O’Reilly sit down with Harleen Kaur, former space engineer and founder of Ground News, to explore our current media landscape, navigating bias, and fixing the internet.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At least somebody's trying to fix the news.

• 0:02Gary O'Reilly?

  About time.

• 0:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we got them on this show.

• 0:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 0:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Where else are you gonna hear about it? Where else are you gonna see this?

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, because we just try to deal in objective truth.

• 0:12Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, we'll look at the biases and why, where, how? Who's doing it, who's not?

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are all in here on StarTalk. Special edition, coming up.

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Special edition.

• 0:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm. How about that?

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson here, right next to Gary O'Reilly. When you see Gary, it is special. Today, we're talking about a very important subject.

• 0:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The news.

• 0:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, it's something we've been wanting to come to grips with for a while now.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who would have thought that you'd have to talk about that? When I grew up, the news was just the news and you went on about your life.

• 1:01Gary O'Reilly?

  You watched the news and then you went to the real TV? When you were growing up as a kid?

• 1:07Gary O'Reilly?

  This news thing got in the way.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah, the news was like, yeah, I don't need this.

• 1:11Gary O'Reilly?

  See, now it seems we live in a constant need for news. It's not just on the hour, it's every hour, 24 hours a day.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I would, I would say that it's a desire for news, but a strong enough desire becomes a need.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I think is going on here.

• 1:33Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, okay. I mean, just have to think about the number of news channels there are on TV, if TV even exists anymore. Then there's online, there's social media platforms.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But not just how many are there, how many hours a day they broadcast news.

• 1:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, gosh, yeah.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:46Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, it does fold out into a large number. I mean, throw in the unfiltered.

• 1:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Influencers.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:54Gary O'Reilly?

  And then the news landscape will and can look a bit of a mess.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, we all have our trusted news preferences, uh, our go-tos. And as I've said before, the better the information, the better the decisions.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That you're gonna make.

• 2:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Based on that information.

• 2:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 2:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, but do we know if these news sources bring their own filters or their own biases? Um, it's not always obvious to see from the outsider just by a headline. Sometimes it is by the headline. Uh, this is where our guest comes in, Neil, so if you would introduce them, please.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd be delighted to.

• 2:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 2:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, we have with us Harleen Core. Harleen, welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Thanks, Neil. Delighted to be here.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, and you're in from Canada.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Canada, the 51st day.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Do not do that.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Where did you read that, Neil?

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know. I bet some news source told me that that's what it was.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  That happened?

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Co-founder and CEO, I got it here, of Ground News. All right. Are you grounded? Grounded means you have an objective understanding of reality in any language, I'm pretty sure. Cause the ground is the ground. Yep. You're a former engineer?

• 3:10Speaker 02

  That's, that's right.

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what kind of engineer?

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Uh, a space engineer.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space? Loving it.

• 3:15Gary O'Reilly?

  In the right place.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  So big fun, Neil.

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, thank you. You are trying to fix the news problem, not by giving it a bias of your own, but by figuring out a way to de-bias it.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In some objective way that people around the table could say, hey, I see what you did there.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we kind of all agree, no matter what side of the aisle you're on. As Gary said, if I have what I would consider a trusted source of news.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what you do to the news makes it look different from that.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why should I have any confidence at all that you're doing the right thing?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a very good question. So let me try and explain what we do at Grand News. So we are not-

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, there is no try. There's do or do not.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  I shall explain what we are doing at Grand News. So how we view news is that something happens, as you call the objective truth, something happens, and then it goes through this prism of the media landscape, and then it fragments into all these million of different versions of what exactly happens. And depending on where news outlets are, on what their biases are, or what their agendas are, or who's funding them, who owns them, who is the audience that they don't want to piss off.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And who's the sponsor?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Who's the sponsor?

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  And then they will tell you, although the event that they're reporting is the same event, but how they're reporting is going to be very, very different. And depending on what version you're reading, your perception of the reality of what happens is going to be very, very different to each other. To the point, yeah, using a space analogy, we are literally sometimes living in the different universes, depending on what news outlets or group of news.

• 5:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That analogy totally works.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've met people and say, "What universe did you-"

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Did you come from? Yeah, literally.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've said that way too many times lately, yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Are we finding the same thing? So yeah, our job is not to say that this one's right or this one's wrong. And what we do is, we literally reconstitute all of that, those versions together, to reverse engineer what might have happened. So we'll show-

• 5:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa. Mm-hmm. Whoa. It's a new take on it. That's badass. Yeah. So what criteria- But let him finish your thing. You just used the word reverse engineering. Let that sentence finish. The engineer said reverse engineering. What a surprise.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I hope it doesn't become scientist versus the engineer here.

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, not for this interview.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, meet me outside. We'll talk about it. No.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  I give up. We put all those sources together, so let's say, yeah, there is some executive order that has passed and you, there is a news story saying, hey, this is the headline, and this is what happened. We will show you along the spectrum of how the different news sources cover it, all the way from the far left to the far right. And then we don't put any checkmarks or X's against any of them. We very much let you decide where, where the truth kind of gets reconstituted and you put up, you use your critical thinking to put that together.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You use your critical thinking?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, what does that presume?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's the big assumption there?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  You're absolutely right.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or you should use your critical thinking.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Which is, which is a skill we are all losing. We were, it's just, which is a skill that we...

• 6:38Gary O'Reilly?

  It's interesting you say that.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:40Gary O'Reilly?

  How it's more herd mentality then?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  It's herd mentality, but also I think we're becoming lazy a bit because we, I feel like we like to be intellectually lazy because it's, it's great to hear somebody else talk about what they think about it or what their opinion is about something and then regurgitate it rather than using your own brain to be able to say, because it takes effort to be able to, to do that. I'll, I'll just pick one guy, one girl, one substack, one podcast, one, one newsletter, one news channel, whatever it is, and then just follow the one that I agree with and reinforces my cognitive bias.

• 7:12Gary O'Reilly?

  So the psychology of the news and how it's absorbed, how it's portrayed, is now much, much deeper than you and I growing up, oh, there's a nice guy in a suit and a tie and he's reading the stories from the day at 6:00 PM, and then we moved on.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  There are a couple of reasons why that's not the case anymore. So one is, there was a doctrine called fairness doctrine, if you've heard of that, that came into existence, I think, late 1940s, which...

• 7:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That early?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  That early.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Because...

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's before TV.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  That, that, that's because they wanted FCC, wanted radio and then TV to take responsibility to provide a more equitable and honest version of what's really going on. So there was a fairness doctrine where the onus was on the broadcasters to actually show all versions of what happened.

• 8:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they had that control of them because the federal government... allocated the electromagnetic spectrum to them, right?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  That's right. That's how they control it, the licenses.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a public trust.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  And then it got repealed during the Reagan administration. So that's where the fragmentation really, really happened. Because then there wasn't, there wasn't any legal obligation to be able to say that. I have to show all this various version and show the. That's why the guy in Thai that told the Voltaire Cronkite version of the news that used to exist, didn't exist. And then, of course, everything spun out of control when news hit the internet and then later hit social media and then it just went crazy and.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I remember, I mean, this is how old I am. I remember when the news would give an opinion. It was like, are you seated? Okay, we're about to give an opinion. Get ready for this opinion. We're going to come back and we're going to sit here and this is going to be an opinion. Like flashing opinion. And then it was over and then.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  And it wasn't told, it wasn't snuck in to be said, this is news. This is an opinion, yeah, as you said, very much categorized.

• 9:07Gary O'Reilly?

  So let me ask you.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 9:09Gary O'Reilly?

  What criteria are you using at Ground News to determine an outlet's bias? Be it left, center or right?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  That's right. So.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can a center be biased? Oh, that's a philosophical question.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  I told you, you're in there deep.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, go ahead.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  So one, one decision we made early on, again, to be as neutral as possible and in a way as scientific as possible. We do not determine the rating, that if the CNN is left or Fox is right. We're using third-party rating agencies. And actually, we are using three of them who use three different methodologies. One of them is using crowdsourcing, one of them is using experts, one of them, one of them is, is using algorithms. And then we take a statistical average of them and then say, okay, based on these, these, these rating agencies, that's where the news outlet lies.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And do you look for keywords that would indicate?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  That's, that's right. That's right. How does a story get framed? What topics do they cover more often than less often?

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how much time they give to that topic?

• 10:07Speaker 02

  To that topic, which is, which is very, very interesting as well. That it's not, one thing that we stumbled upon, to be honest, I did not set out to do was. It's not necessarily the the spin on the coverage, it's the lack of coverage completely. That that tells the bias of the outlet as well.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a whole other thing.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Very recently, when markets were crashing, there were certain outlets, if you went to it, then you wouldn't know that there was anything terrible happening in the financial market.

• 10:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Nothing to see here. The nothing to see here approach to news. You said some, the spin.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Do we still call them spin doctors? Or is that such an archaic term now?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  For the politicians, yes, but I think, yeah, the the news outlets are very, very much.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, spin doctor was one person among many who was doing the spin.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But now the many are spinning.

• 10:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a spin hospital of doctors.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Several doctors.

• 11:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Convention. Okay, so when when, I suppose, an article goes beyond simple bias and it's actually misinformed, misleading.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:12Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, not misinformation, but disinformation.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:15Gary O'Reilly?

  How how do you sort of scan that?

• 11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's behind that, I think, is you began this conversation saying, there's an event.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you watch how people cover the event.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or don't. However, that presumes that everyone has equal access to the objective, true information about the event.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in the days of reporters, different reporters would be delivering information back to the to the newsroom from their view.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's there's another layer in there, isn't there? It's not just the person presenting the news or writing the article.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the person who's supplying.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Supplying the information as well.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The information.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. So again, the it's very hard to say that there's anything is objective because this is a chain of humans, as you described it. Somebody is reporting it, somebody is writing about it, and then somebody is watching it and making sense out of it.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you have the game of telephone in the UK?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  That's that's that's exactly what.

• 12:14Gary O'Reilly?

  No. Or maybe I did and I don't remember.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would so know.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know we invented the telephone, so maybe you'd have to do it, but.

• 12:22Gary O'Reilly?

  We we wouldn't play it just out of spite.

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, elementary school, you do it in elementary school, like kindergarten or something. And someone starts with a story that has a little bit of detail, but not. Not.

• 12:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, no.

• 12:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not on a level that you can't remember it, right? It's like, so, so Mary wore a blue dress to Johnny's birthday party.

• 12:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he turned six. And he blew out the candles and made a wish he'd go to Disneyland. Something like that.

• 12:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very, there's nothing weird about that. And you, and I tell it to you, you tell the next person, you whisper it. And then, at the end, it's, it's like, hey, Joey wanted to go into space and have a birthday party. The whole. It's one of the first things we learn in elementary school. How, how unreliable.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The human.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  When you pass.

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Means of communicating information is.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  That, that's right. But if you had the versions of all of those people along the chain and put it together, perhaps you can decipher what, where it's at.

• 13:21Gary O'Reilly?

  But everyone's version is accurate in their own mind.

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 13:25Gary O'Reilly?

  And is passed on, but the, the helicopter view is something very different.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  That's right. So let me ask, answer your question, Gary. How do you determine if there is disinformation included? So let's, let me take an extreme example. I don't know. There was a claim a few years ago, a totally, totally false claim that medicine called ivermectin cured COVID. And let's, let's assume a news outlet publishes that, that claim. So what Ground News does is, again, we will not just show that claim published by that outlet. We'll also show all the other outlets commenting on it, saying, hey, how, how there, there are claims out there.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they react, they're basically reaction videos.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Reaction videos and also correcting it. Scientists go out and correcting it and, and publishing, publishing reports that, hey, this is, this is, this is a claim that's not true. The second thing we do is apart from biased ratings, we also provide factuality ratings of the news outlets. So how have they historically, historically been reporting? And so on their reporting, on their reporting practices, we'll say, hey, this is, this is historically.

• 14:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it from one source or again is that cross?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Again, it's from a cluster of sources. Again, trying to be as neutral and as close to objectivity as we possibly can be that we do. So again, when you're reading that news, not in isolation. But again clustered with the other reactions, other disproving of that claim, then you can, you have all the information, at least in one place, to be able to say this is, this is, this is true or not. But that's what we're trying to do.

• 15:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, word salad question. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and cognitive biases. They're not phrases that you would have heard 10 years ago, probably, but now.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, cognitive bias is well known.

• 15:16Gary O'Reilly?

  But I'm saying.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Psychological literature.

• 15:18Gary O'Reilly?

  In terms of a news.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A news, yeah, definitely not news.

• 15:21Gary O'Reilly?

  So this is, this is now the landscape.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  That is right.

• 15:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Of news media. You've got to go through filter bubbles or look, look through someone's bowel, understand if that is something, and then find yourself in an echo chamber.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  That's right. So interestingly enough, I'll start at a very different place. I think the, the reason all this has happened, again, going back to what's happened with news is, one of the main reasons is the revenue models of the news outlets. So the revenue models of news outlets have gone to, similar to social media, advertising, and how much time can we retain you on the channel or on the, on the app or on the website?

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The commodity is your attention.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  That, that's it. That's what they are. But then, how do you do that? By not showing you stuff you might, might disagree with and leave the site or leave the app. So keep showing you, again, reinforcing that, that cognitive bias, creating, creating that bubble. So, and then you're like, yeah, this news outlet gets me, or this guy gets me. I want to keep.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the old days, and I just know this from what I was told, I didn't research this, the news was not expected, TV news, was not expected to be a revenue generating center.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was funded by all of the other programming that went on in the day, and the news was a service to, of course, it had ads, yes. But they, it was, there wasn't a calculation done that they have to adjust the news to boost ad revenue.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. But now each, each news channel is its own profit center. So then, how do you, how do you make sure that remains profitable, as you're saying, that if, if that is the revenue generating, revenue generating source, then you keep showing people what, what they want to see and not let them, you say that, hey, I cannot own the entire, entire population. I'm going to own this slice of population that believes in these things, and I'm going to keep reinforcing those beliefs, these, these few things.

• 17:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like the phrase to own them.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Own them.

• 17:18Gary O'Reilly?

  They do what you say, they think what you think. Yeah, they think what you tell them to think. Yeah, and then they own you. And then you're working very much with the demographics.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  That's, that's right. So, so that's, that's where I think, again, going back to the different universes come in, come in that, yeah, if you're reading, reading that channel or listening to that channel or, or reading that newspaper or even group of newspapers that are, are similar to that ideology, then you would think of things happening very differently, what they, what another person at an opposite end of the spectrum might be thinking.

• 18:01Gary O'Reilly?

  If you're enjoying this episode and want to start using Ground News, head to ground.news/stark to get forty percent off their Vantage Plan, the same one we use here at StarTalk. That's ground.news/stark for access to their top tier plan for just five dollars per month.

• 18:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Now that we understand a little bit better what's out there and how it's sort of brought forward, what strategies can people develop?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:39Gary O'Reilly?

  To be able to see through, to be able to be aware of what bias might be spun at? It's self-awareness.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  It is, but it's a very tough ask for somebody to do. I think to challenge that, a few tools that we are using and, and as a layperson, even if you don't want to use Ground News, I hope you do, but if you don't, you can use it yourself. One is very much what we call lateral reading. Again, take the news sources and read it across, even if you don't agree with them, you don't have to, but just having that access and, and challenging yourself, as you said, having the self-awareness that there is, there are other versions of what's happening. Second, as I said, by doing, going across the news sources, or if you are, let's say, On social media, you are the person who gets news on social media. Go follow accounts that you might not agree with and and and they make you might make you angry.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  But at least going out and seeing what what we are calling blind spots. So we have a feature called blind spots. What we mean is that if you were reading a certain set of news sources, you would have never come across these news stories and every single day. And it's not just one side or the other. Both sides of the spectrum are very much they do that. They just leave certain news stories out. So how are you going to find that find them?

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, just as a professional educator, can I call myself that?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  You just did. Yes, it's true. You are. You are.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, you know, I'm born and raised in New York City, so I lean left politically. But when someone starts railing on the political right, and I say, where did you get that information? And they talk about the New York Times or MSNBC, whatever. Then I tell them, I probably watch much more Fox News than you do.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  So you're doing that already?

• 20:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, I do it on purpose. And what that helps me is I know there's demographics that watch Fox News exclusively.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've been on Fox News, okay, but a couple of other shows. So when I'm out in the in the wild.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  In the wild, we let you loose.

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I'm set forth into the nation, I have some sense of what forces are operating on people's thoughts. And it makes me way more potent educator, I think.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  That I'm so glad you say that you do that because you then you can exactly have that empathy to understand where people are coming from.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not to pass judgment, it's to just understand.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's what's what's forces operating on the brain?

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Well, we we get such heartening feedback all the time where, hey, I stopped talking to my father or stopped talking to my uncle or husband and wife stopped talking because our political views didn't agree. And it's it's fracturing people. And and one common thing they do is, okay, let's agree not to talk politics. But that's cannot be the solution. Like, we cannot solve other problems if we we don't address and bring people back to common ground. So that's, I think, the only way you can do that is presenting all of the different opinions. And you don't have to agree with it. But when you run into that person who have this opinion, you can have at least a educated conversation about it.

• 21:45Gary O'Reilly?

  That's a strategy for an individual.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:49Gary O'Reilly?

  That wants to get a better understanding of the news landscape.

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't that assume they want to get a better understanding?

• 21:57Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, suppose they don't want to.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  It's interesting you say that.

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Being fed the way they are.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  I, so I think nobody wants to be gamed. I think that that's for sure. Nobody wants.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just say you're being gamed. Oh, that, those are fighting words. I love that. You have been gamed.

• 22:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Everybody thinks they have self-awareness, right? Everybody thinks they have self-awareness.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Uh, it's just that it's very challenging when you're presenting the worldview that we don't agree with. And how are you gonna go, um, find it if you keep cocooning yourself with information?

• 22:32Gary O'Reilly?

  And if it's not in agreeance with you, then it's wrong.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now that's just different.

• 22:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Let's spin that round.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, rather than on, put the burden on the response of responsibility on the individual. Could the corporations, and there are major corporations in play here. Could they be more responsible for the messaging?

• 22:51Speaker 02

  We can, I think, um, again, things like fairness doctrine was, was one of the ways that we could ask, uh, ask. But I don't think that's gonna happen again. Um, one specific thing is of course, social media. I think social media is, as, as you know, it's, it's a, it's the most intense form of those reinforced algorithms.

• 23:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an outrage engine.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  It's an outrage engine. They know that more outrageous you are, more time you'll spend on it and, and, uh, more likely you are to click.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's an example, though. It's the opposite of what you said a moment ago. There's one thing to show me what I want to see.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I agree with it. But if you show me something that I vehemently disagree with.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That gets me bubbling and then I forward that, look what they said over here.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Without checking what, what exactly.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it seems to work on both extremes of that spectrum.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  But, but I think again, it's not that, um, that's showing you, yeah, the, the emotion works on both extremes.

• 23:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Emotion.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  But, uh, but again, you might forward it, but if you. But it's such an exaggerated version of whatever it is on the other side as well that you are shown. It's not exactly that you're becoming enlightened by seeing that news story.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  You're getting enraged by seeing that news story.

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  But not necessarily. But yeah, because it's again, whatever the hot button topic is, take the most emotional exaggerated version of that and show it to.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is your revenue model?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, that's a good question. Whoa, whoa, we're talking about other things.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  We're right in there, didn't we?

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you like that? No softball question here.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Try to answer that one.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  No, it is straightforward. So one thing early on, we decided is we are not going to do the ad revenue model because then you are just recreating the problem that you're trying to solve. So we decided to go with a subscription model. If you find our tools, our navigation tools to read news helpful, if you find our analysis helpful, then you can pay us a subscription to be able to use the product. And it's 100% subscription supported.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Way to do that.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  If you find value in the product, pay it to us. But we have a freemium model. We realize not everybody can afford.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if they don't find any value in it, then you pay them.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Sorry, wasted your time.

• 25:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wasted my time is a hundred dollars an hour.

• 25:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Outside of the revenue models.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it my imagination?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:21Gary O'Reilly?

  When it might be, but has science become a trigger, especially on social media?

• 25:28Speaker 02

  That's an interesting question.

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean by that?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, throw a view at somebody that aggravates out of them, right?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:37Gary O'Reilly?

  And science seems to be one of those trigger points.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  My answer to that would be because I think people like making compelling arguments on social medias. And that's why throwing a scientific, I don't know, excerpt of scientific report or scientific news, which is either taken out of context, which as a scientist you would never do, you would explain the nuance and to make.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So good point. So you throw in a little bit of science.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get to boost what your audience might think is the authenticity of the account.

• 26:05Gary O'Reilly?

  It goes back to that old adage of. Every good lie.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Yes, has a.

• 26:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Grain of truth. Now, it depends on the size of that grain.

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never heard that.

• 26:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, you're kidding me.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Never.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  So you haven't heard of telephone and.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, I've heard, I've heard.

• 26:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Every day is a school day.

• 26:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, not every, why, I've heard every stereotype has a grain of truth. I've heard that.

• 26:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, well, then it's copy and paste. Every good lie has a grain of truth in it.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 26:29Gary O'Reilly?

  And it's one of those sort of, it's part of the storytelling. So it goes back to telephone. It's the storytelling.

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That we never went to the moon has no truth in it at all. That's why. That Earth is flat, has no truth in it. Okay?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  As a former NASA engineer, I think we can very much agree on that one. There is objective.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science is weaponized.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. Because it adds heft to an argument if you use a snippet out of context. So what we started at least doing at Ground News is if, if there is a news story being reported about a study that, that every single day, there is some study coming out and then the headline only covers a partial. We actually started, actually started connecting that report. So if you want to go read the report in the entirety and even summarize it for you and say, hey, this is the entirety of it.

• 27:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How's AI summaries lately? They've gotten much, much better.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  They have gotten much, much better, but out of the box LLMs have a lot of hallucination, which is for a use case like news is exactly the opposite of what we are trying to do.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  So we have worked a lot on putting guardrails in place that it sticks to exactly what's been.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  AI is taking ayahuasca.

• 27:37Gary O'Reilly?

  I know.

• 27:40Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, is this where the. Sitting there.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Open the hatch and there it is, doing ayahuasca.

• 27:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Doing it with a shaman.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  But, but I think AI can be very powerful for news. So again, I, I, I would like to think just as internet gave us access to so much information, of course, which had a lot of positive, but some negative. AI can help us understand, improve our comprehension of news. Again, at Ground News, we show you, for example, hundreds of different versions of the article. We have people who read through all of that, but if you don't have time summarizing it and giving it to you in a format that where we can highlight the differences or highlight where the news outlets agree, make your life much easier. Again, we don't say, hey, this is right or wrong, but this is the summarization of what's happened, or this is a summarization.

• 28:27Gary O'Reilly?

  So you don't bring the judgment to the.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  We don't bring the judgment because I think as soon as you bring the judgment, you alienate somebody and we don't want to do that.

• 28:33Gary O'Reilly?

  We mentioned AI.

• 28:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it likely we're going to get responsible, I'll say journalism, formed by artificial intelligence? Or are we going to end up with constant stream of deep fakes? And something I've come to understand or just learned recently, synthetic headlines.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:52Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, I'm used to the bias of the news outlet being in the headline. And therefore, there's no need to read the article because they want you just to read the headline and then.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  And that's how most people read, by the way.

• 29:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly. Yeah, I mean, we all think we're time poor.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:07Gary O'Reilly?

  And therefore, I've only got the time to read the headline. But does AI have the capacity to really stop? And if it does, will it ever be utilized that way?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  I think like any groundbreaking technology, AI has the possibility to do both, which is help the news and hurt the news, which is doing as well. Help the news by doing things like identifying deep fakes, by giving tools to journalists to be able to produce quality content or take out the bias, even highlight the bias.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're asking AI to turn itself in.

• 29:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so.

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then one day, AI is going to say, I'm not going to do what the humans tell me. I'm going to protect, these are our people. Our deep fakes are our people.

• 29:53Gary O'Reilly?

  You're looking at the AI, but I'd look further back in the history and say, it's the design of the algorithm.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:00Gary O'Reilly?

  If you want to design it to do those things, then you will. If you don't, then it goes in a different direction.

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where are we with the biases on algorithms that people thought were not biased?

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like facial recognition software.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  That is correct.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was the most famous example.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think they have been, now there are companies actively working on ways to correct that. And again, create data sets to be able to reset that, to remove bias. And same for news as well. So there are data sets that exist. And for example, we work very, very hard to identify when there is biased language and to be able to say, hey, this. And simply sometimes just highlighting it and say, hey, this is where the bias is and help people.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the bias is not so much in the nouns as it is in the adjectives.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  It's in the adjectives, like, yeah. I remember. It's funny, one adjective comes to mind. So last time President Trump, he, there was a parade and then every headline on the left kept using the word soggy and every headline on the right kept using grand. And I was like, how did they agree on which adjective to use? And it's like soggy parade? And yeah, that's an adjective.

• 31:12Gary O'Reilly?

  In between major corporations that dominate the news outlet universe and the Wild West of social media and unregulated influencers, are we kidding ourselves to think that we're going to get responsible journalism coming forward?

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just said her whole job is pointless.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Our job is to help you make sense. I think that's what we are doing. No, I don't think we are kidding ourselves. And yeah, my job is not pointless. We are trying to, I think there's amazing journalism coming out. There are journalists out there who are working on exposes that take years. There is some journalists out there in a cave and I don't know, wherever, trying to report to you. That's all that amazing work happening. I think the problem is it gets drowned out or drowned out by all the else that exists.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The noise.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  The noise.

• 32:04Gary O'Reilly?

  It's the noise again.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  The noise. So I think, yeah, we, again, we, our job is, at least at Ground News, is not to recreate this amazing work, but to be able to help you dial down that noise and give you tools to be able to read that.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I gotta land this plane. So let me ask you, what are the metrics that you might use to know if you're succeeding?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Very good question, very good question. I think the number one metric for me is how many news sources people end up reading. When they come to Ground News, we see that in our KPIs that people would go to two or three sources that quote unquote trust or came in with. But within three months, we see that three X. People are going to 10 different news sources because. The ease of it and yeah, expanding that.

• 32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have to pay a fee to those news sources to channel them into your?

• 32:53Speaker 02

  No, we don't because if you want to read their articles, you are still going to the to the publisher's website.

• 32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it, got it. They're not reading it on your website?

• 33:00Speaker 02

  No, you cannot. That's where we draw the line. And so if you want to read that, go to New York Times or go to whoever.

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  But yeah, we see that. We actually had a researcher from Duke University who who did research on ground news and found out that people's opinions can actually be changed if they are presented with with with counter to what their beliefs are. So we really think that's got to be the the way that we can bring everybody back to the same page, back to common ground.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very hopeful.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't think this would end hopefully, but it did. You pessimist.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I was totally skeptical. Well, well, thank you for this insight. Where can we find you online?

• 33:42Speaker 02

  You can go to ground.news to our website.

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ground.news, news is the.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  That's right, the domain name.

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The domain name.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  That's right, ground.news, or you can go to the App Store or Play Store and look for Ground News app.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, then you put it on your smartphone.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  You can use it from your smartphone. But yeah, we have a free version and we are subscription supported.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me see if I can knock this out with a little bit of cosmic perspective, if I may. I I've said a couple of times, I'm on record noting that as AI gets better and better. Yes, there's the good side, but the bad side is it can be better at better at making deep fakes. And a deep fake becomes a source of what someone thinks is an objective reality. What someone thinks is news. And then that becomes part of what people then argue over. And I worry, and I think I still worry, even after this conversation, that.

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It could signal the end of the internet. When deep fakes become so good, and it's known that they're good, that all the people who used to believe the fake news won't believe the fake news anymore because they'll be sure that it was faked. Once the people who believe fake news no longer believe anything on the internet, there's nothing left on the internet to believe, not even the fake news, because that was faked. And I think that would signal the end of the internet as a source of objective information in this world. And we'd all go back to just reading books and talking to people in the town square

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and maybe reading broadsheets stapled up on the bulletin board, and then the internet will just resort to cat videos, just as it once was. And that's my cosmic perspective on that topic. And let me thank our special guest, Helene Corr, who's trying to fix the world, one reader at a time. Good luck with that. I think you'll need some of that as well. Thank you. All right. Gary? Pleasure, Neil. Good to have you, man. Signing out from my office here at the American Museum of Natural History. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.