Neil deGrasse Tyson Delivers a Harsh Reality Check on Elon Musk’s Mars Plan [Ep. 472]

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Is Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars realistic? How does cosmic insignificance shape our understanding of humanity? And why do science and astrology clash so fundamentally? Here to dive deep into some of humanity's most profound questions is none other than Neil deGrasse Tyson! Tyson, of course, needs no introduction. He’s a renowned astrophysicist, author, and science communicator who frequently appears in the media to discuss topics ranging from the universe to the intersection of science and culture. His charismatic style and passion for education have made him one of the most recognizable figures in the scientific community. In this in-depth interview, we explore cosmic insignificance, Elon Musk’s Mars ambitions, astrology, our obsession with politics, social media, AI, journalistic integrity, and much more. Tune in to discover what Neil really thinks about some of the most pressing questions of our time! — Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:16:38 Cosmic insignificance therapy 00:27:39 Judging a book by its cover 00:49:04 Debunking astrology 00:55:15 Life on Mars and panspermia 01:02:55 The giant-impact hypothesis 01:09:04 Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars 01:23:45 Journalism, social media, and our obsession with politics 01:40:10 Audience questions 01:45:02 The impact of AI on education 01:51:02 Fusion ignition and its implications 01:56:25 The great filter 02:02:03 Outro Additional resources: ➡️ VVisit Consensus.app and Enter code KEATING at checkout for 40% off Consensus Premium for 2 Years or visit this link https://bit.ly/ConsensusApp ➡️ Learn more about Neil deGrasse Tyson: 📱 Website: https://neildegrassetyson.com/ 🔔 StarTalk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@StarTalk 📚 Merlin’s Tour of the Universe Revised: https://a.co/d/3cBz3m8 ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:55Brian Keating?

  Today's conversation is with the world's most famous scientist, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. From the mysteries of black holes to the challenge of Mars colonization, we dive deep into the frontiers of human knowledge and ambition, drawing inspiration from his new book, Merlin's Tour of the Universe. Neil's no stranger to controversy, and he recently got into it with none other than Elon Musk on Musk's plans to colonize the solar system in order to save human consciousness forever.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  What happens is people come to me and ask what I think of them. I wrote a whole book on this, originally titled Failure to Launch: The Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts, chronicling the mismatch of where people thought we'd be in space versus where we were in space.

• 1:43Brian Keating?

  His candid discussion reveals the complex realities behind our space exploration dreams and the cutting edge of technology and the motivations behind it all. We also probe into the depths of modern physics, including the mysterious and sometimes dangerous world of black holes and quantum mechanics.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  And at the singularity, it's a singularity. Oh, by the way, it's been said that a singularity is where God divides by zero. Remember, you're not supposed to do that in math class.

• 2:11Brian Keating?

  So join us for the most illuminating journey through cosmic mysteries you've ever encountered. Let's go. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson back for his second appearance on the Into the Impossible podcast. Hello, Neil. How is my kid's favorite astrophysicist?

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Not you? I

• 2:30Brian Keating?

  I'm not even in the top Brian, Neil. There's Brian Cox, there's Brian Green, there's Brian May. I don't even make the top.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Oh, man, not even the top Brian. Wow, that's tough. That's tough. You're doing well, thank you. Well, the universe is good, so I'm good. It's Earth that's messed up and that's needs some attention, of course.

• 2:47Brian Keating?

  Have you ever heard of something called cosmic insignificance? Therapy? Have you ever heard that term?

• 2:53Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:54Brian Keating?

  Okay, there's an author called Oliver Birkman. He's a, he's a productivity expert. He's a British, British guy. And he talks about this book called 4,000 Weeks. He wrote this book called 4,000 Weeks. It's kind of like your life. And it's supposed to make you, you know, kind of at peace with the fact that we're basically here for insignificant blip on the cosmic calendar, as you know so well.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Just to be clear, if you had to make peace with that, it meant your understanding of the world was distorted to begin with. But if you, if you started out realizing we are insignificant blip, then there's no emotional trauma to it. It's just, that's the state of our existence. And so one doesn't need therapy or anything else. It just is. It's only if you're coming off of this ego mountain that so many of us find ourselves to realize that we're not significant in time or space or size or, or anything that we've come to cherish.

• 3:52Brian Keating?

  Yeah, although I always point out, you know, we're a lot bigger than viruses and they seem to have played a significant role in our recent history, right? So, or, or, you know, anthrax or something like that. But, but I, I agree with you. It's, it's the, the sensation that we're nothing compared to Jupiter's size and Jupiter's nothing compared to the sun and the sun's nothing compared to, you know, some, some gargantua black hole. But, you know, we're the only matter we know about that really matters in the sense that we can contemplate our own existence, at least for now.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Well, so we tell ourselves, we don't really know what other animals have that ability. Let's just presuming plants don't do that. Let's assume that for this conversation. I think the more we study the intellect, dare I call it that. Other animals, the more impressed we are by what they accomplish. So it's been a journey from declaring that we alone have consciousness and we are, we alone use tools and we alone, and then you find out birds use tools and there's, oh, we have big brains. Well, there are four mammal species that have bigger brains. Oh, well, we have a big brain ratio to our body weight. You know, you gotta start adjusting the data to make you feel good.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Big brain, okay, that's true, but if you wanna ratio brain weight to body weight, but we're only slightly better, if that's a scale of what's good, only slightly above mice. Okay? Mice have a relatively big head to their bodies and they don't weigh very much. So that, so that ratio, they do very well in that ratio. And we are both pretty sure that they will outlive the human species. They and rats will just take over. So who's, who's the smartest mammal on the block then?

• 5:36Brian Keating?

  That's right. And then eventually, I don't know where you stand on panpsychism, you know, that this, that this meteorite, which I give away to people on my website over here, you, you got a slightly bigger version downstairs from you on the Hayden.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Just a little bigger, yeah.

• 5:50Brian Keating?

  But I give these, and there are people that credibly speak about this as having consciousness via this theory of panpsychism and, and that perhaps even inanimate objects participate in the consciousness project and.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, since, uh, consider that if you go to the shelf of the library, does anyone go to the library anymore? If you did and you looked up books on, you know, the physics of gravity, there'd be like one third of one shelf and there'd be like five books there. And you wanna look up the human mind and consciousness, it is shelf after shelf after shelf after shelf, which is the surest indication that nobody knows what consciousness is because people keep writing books on it. If we really knew what it was, you wouldn't keep writing books on it. So it's the opposite of what you might think. The volume of literature is the measure of how much we don't know, rather than the measure of how much we do. And so to take consciousness, which we're still trying to figure out,

• 6:49Speaker 03

  and then declare that inanimate objects have consciousness, when you don't even know what consciousness is in an animate object, it to me is overstepping in your base of knowledge. And so, you know, maybe rocks are conscious, but I don't really know what that means, since we don't agree on what human consciousness is, or any other kind of animal consciousness. Speaking of consciousness, have you seen the YouTube video of the magpie bird? And there's a little, you know, half-liter plastic, you know, drinking bottles of water. You know, 500 milliliter. And it's just sitting there in the middle of this park. And, you know, on, on cement. It's some park that people play in.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  And it's sitting there, and it's filled to the top with water. So the magpie goes up and drinks from it. Okay, it's a bird feeder. All right. We still get to declare that the bird has a bird brain, because it's a bird and we're human. Until you see that the bird can no longer sip the water from the container, because his beak isn't long enough. Because it, the water level had dropped. So it leaves the scene for a moment, and then comes back, just for a moment, for seconds, and comes back with a pebble that fits through the neck of the bottle. It drops the pebble in, the water level rises, and it drinks some more. And it repeats this Bernoulliian fact, the Archimedes, who was Archimedes? Repeates this Archimedesian feat multiple times.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  And this is something, I wonder if most humans would figure out.

• 8:22Brian Keating?

  Actually, that's a very incisive that you say that, Neil, because they did a similar experiment. They didn't do a drinking water, but they asked, have you seen the YouTube video of the Stanford professor taking a glass, you know, Pyrex container, and putting some big boulders in it, or big rocks in it? And they says, is it full? And the students at Stanford nod their heads, say, yes, it's full. And then he goes, oh, how about now he pours in some BBs? Does it fall now? No. Has it fall, he pours in some, you know, anyway, it's the same principle, but.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Pouring sand, sand will be more volume filling. And then, of course, lastly, you can. Pour in a liquid. Yeah. And you can hold tons of liquid after you've filled it up. I'm not quick to say that we alone are masters of intellect or intelligence or anything. I'm much more open in recent years. You know, I was indoctrinated like everybody else, thinking how special humans are. And you realize how, how we've stacked the deck in such a way that we came to value the things that we have that other animals do not and declare that to be special. And by the way, astrophysically, being special is, when you look at how people think about what it is to be special,

• 9:33Speaker 03

  generally, they want to list things that are true for you, but not for anyone else. That would make you special or make us special as a species. But astrophysically, since we came to learn in 20th century astrophysics, of course, that the ingredients of life, ingredients in our bodies, are forged not only in the big bang, but in stars that gave their lives and exploded as supernovae to enrich gas clouds so that subsequent generations of star systems would have ingredients that can make planets and on at least one planet, life, and on that same planet, human life.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  So for me, being special is being the same, not being different. We share common ingredients with each other and with the universe. That's extraordinary. So when I go up and look up, go out and look up at night, I don't think to myself that I'm different from the universe and special for that reason. I think of myself as the same as the universe and special for that reason. So it's just a, it's a cosmic, it's a flip of a perspective from earth-based to a cosmic perspective. Something that, of course, Carl Sagan tried to hammer into people for his whole life.

• 10:55Brian Keating?

  That's right, yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  That's your finger puppet. I have one finger puppet on my shelf. I think it's Isaac Newton.

• 11:00Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah, I've got one of those. I've got Einstein, who we're going to talk about next, and then, of course, Galileo, who we have to talk about for Starry Night.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  You know, it's interesting, when they show Einstein and Darwin, for example, it shows them as gray and old, when they did all their best work, you know, before they were thirty.

• 11:17Brian Keating?

  They were twenty-five.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, twenty-six. So, they should, they should show them as dapper, young men. And, but no, I guess we, we want to believe that their greatest work came when they were aged and wise, when it really came when they were young and senseless.

• 11:34Brian Keating?

  Yeah, thinking about that, I do think about that, and I always tell my students, you know, Einstein, first of all, for every quote, there's an equal and opposite quote, right? So, for Einstein, he would say, "We should explain things in a way as to be so simple, you know, your grandmother could understand it," right? And then he would say, when he was asked about the nineteen-nineteen solar eclipse results, he said, as you know, "If it was wrong, I would feel sorry for God, because my equations were right." So, you've got this mixture of chutzpah, and, and also, you know, and just complete humility. And I think we need that, right? Because otherwise, it's pretty terrifying to do what we do.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Well, so, I, you know, I don't, I didn't know Einstein, but that comment is so chutzpified.

• 12:16Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  It had to be a joke. I don't believe that he really had some theological philosophy.

• 12:23Brian Keating?

  Oh, no, definitely not. You're right there. But Feynman is another one. Feynman would say, you know, "This is so simple." Again, you know, you should be able to, if you don't explain it simply to a high schooler, you don't understand it. And then, the day he won his Nobel Prize, Pasadena Star News asks him, "What'd you win it for?" And he said, "Bub, if I could explain it to you, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize." Again, the chutzpah and the humility, but not the same time.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  He's just being an asshole there. Right, right, that's just.

• 12:50Brian Keating?

  Feynman an asshole, or he wasn't sleeping with his graduate?

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Let's just call it what it was. You know, my favorite, one of those sort of flip back-and-forth comments, has to do with the human mind, and I just heard this quote recently. I think it was from this fellow who just came out, is a neuroscientist, came out with a book on music, on consciousness and music, and I know the title of the book, it's called, "I Heard There Was A Secret Chord," and you can look him up. But anyhow, he, I think he told me, he said, "Someone said..." It wasn't him, but someone said that if our brain, the human mind were easy enough to understand, then we wouldn't underst- we wouldn't be smart enough to understand it.

• 13:37Brian Keating?

  Groucho Marx like.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good line. That's, that's good.

• 13:43Brian Keating?

  That's solid. That is solid.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  If it was simple enough to understand, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand it.

• 13:49Brian Keating?

  So Neil, this book has come out.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  Oh Merlin, Merlin's.

• 13:53Brian Keating?

  A reprint. Your old friend Merlin is back.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  I assume some people will be ingesting this podcast by audio only. So I get to describe that you just held up my latest book. Thank you.

• 14:04Brian Keating?

  Although they'll, they'll never miss the, um, the, the segment that we're about to do. It's one of my greatest catechisms in the history of podcasting, which is, uh, the judge books by its cover. So this book came out, I'm reading the original came out in 1989? Is that possible?

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. 35 years ago. That's correct.

• 14:21Brian Keating?

  Incredible.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Based on material that I'd written throughout the 1980s. So while I was in graduate.

• 14:26Brian Keating?

  Long before you were Neil deGrasse Tyson, right?

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Uh huh. While, while I was in graduate school. By the way, there's a, a brief backstory behind the deGrasse. I don't think I've ever said this on anybody's show because it never, it never, it never came up. As I was finishing graduate school, getting the PhD, and then I did my postdoc at Princeton, I thought to myself, if I do public things, I'm going to assign them Neil deGrasse Tyson. But anything with colleagues, it'll be Neil D. Tyson. That way, when anyone comes back to me via email, by a phone call, and they ID me as Neil deGrasse Tyson, I'll know that coming from the public sector rather than from among my colleagues. But what happened over the years is that my visibility became so much more in the public

• 15:13Speaker 03

  domain than in the scientific, than in the pure research, scientific domain. And so people only know me and think of me as Neil deGrasse Tyson. But my published papers are all Neil D. Tyson.

• 15:24Brian Keating?

  Right, yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Or Andy Tyson, right?

• 15:26Brian Keating?

  Mm-hmm. We've looked at those, I think in our previous conversation. So this has incredible, you know, the first thing that shocks me is when I see Isaac Asimov, you know, endorsing a book. That's a trick. You got him from beyond the year after, shall we say?

• 15:43Brian Keating?

  And he did say, and he was the man who got me most interested, besides Carl Sagan perhaps, in science. People don't know, but Isaac Asimov wrote most, you know, 300, 400 books, I think, and many of them were not on science fiction. They were science fact. They were, you know, the history of chemistry, that history of physics, the element. Incredible.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  I think that, I think that the number is 600 plus. And it is rumored, I didn't verify this, and is it even verifiable? But it is rumored that he wrote a book that lands in every category of the Dewey Decimal System for libraries. So no matter where you are, look for the Isaac Asimov book, and it's there. He's got so on the Bible, of course, he's got some novels, there'd be sci-fi novels. So, I was 14 when I met him on a, on a ship to the coast of Northwest Africa to view a total solar eclipse. And I was just a kid, right? Why would he know me or care about me? When that book became a manuscript, I just sent him a note.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  And within five days, a blurb came back for the book. And it was like, this guy is all class, right? To take time out from writing his other 1,600 books to do so. Anyhow, so that project, which led to a book in 1989, I just felt it was long overdue to resurrect this character Merlin and bring him into the, bring this entity into the 21st century. And so that's what that is. And I'm very proud of it. And reading through it and updating it, I was reminded, I didn't know it at the time, but many of my pedagogical, educational tap roots

• 17:24Speaker 03

  were set in the replies and in the, in the literary machinations, the humor, the, the... The setups, the where you go with information, how you select information, how you compose a sentence, um, do you ever rhyme? Does that help? Does it give the reader something fresh? All of that's in that book. And I realize I owe almost everything that I am today to the efforts that I put in to communicate with the public at that time. Because it's a question and answer book.

• 17:58Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it sure is. And in fact, it starts off with a question from a gentleman in San Diego where I am right now, Jonathan Swan. And we've got Mr. Swan here. John, come on over. You can, you're, no, I'm just kidding. I don't even know if he's alive.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, he might, you know, that was 35 years ago. Half the people are dead. Just so you know. Okay.

• 18:17Brian Keating?

  So John starts off by asking Merlin, and we'll describe a little bit about who Merlin is. I kind of suspect he's your alter ego in some ways. He asked a very simple question. What would happen if Earth suddenly stopped rotating? And there are these wonderful illustrations here to illustrate that. So this is not one of those things that would have been updated in the, you know, 21st century from what we knew back then. But at the same token, there is a lot. I mean, we went through, the funniest chapter for me is when you talk about Pluto and you're describing it as a planet. I want to like, reach through the mic because I listened to the, reach through the audio and Neil, do you hear what you're saying? Like, this could be used against you to compromise you, Neil. Neil deGrasse Tyson recants his killing and of Pluto. Anyway.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  I was an accessory to the demotion of Pluto.

• 19:02Brian Keating?

  I know. I'm having Mike Brown on the show in a couple of weeks.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Oh, good. Good. He's a good guy.

• 19:06Brian Keating?

  So when you look at these books, uh, you know, and the questions in this book, I guess first we should really describe.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  By the way, by the way, just to your earlier point, I tried to, when I write a book, you want to put in science of high shelf life. And I would say, half of the questions did not require updating because there was fundamental physics, like what would happen if Earth stopped rotating. But there are other cases where Merlin makes a pop culture reference, or this phrasing that just is a little old, and it needs to be, it needs a little sort of freshening up. So there's some literary elements that needed to be refreshed to go into the 21st century. Also, but maybe we're going to get to it, but it's

• 19:57Speaker 03

  in my head right now. Someone asked, what's the latest count for the number of moons among the planets? And in the original book, I, the total might have been eighty-nine or something. And now it's, it's pushing three hundred. Based on space missions that have been to the outer planets. You get good close-up looks. And so the original was a rhyme that rhymed all of the planet numbers, all of the moon numbers with each planet. And I said, I gotta keep the rhyme going. And so that was hard. Rhyming out how many moons each planet has up to, I think, two hundred and eighty-nine. So there's rhymes in there. Like I said, turns a phrase.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  And it was just a fun literary exercise in bringing the universe down to earth.

• 20:46Brian Keating?

  It's a unique book. There's, there's really nothing that's come online since, since this time, which is either depressing or inspiring that no one has taken the mantle of, of kind of Oprah of the masses. So let's do what you're never supposed to do. This is forbidden to do, but on this podcast, we do the impossible, right? So I want you to walk through the title, the subtitle and the beautiful cover art, which is also a holographic or, you know, look at that, look at that beautiful rainbow-like essence. So Neil, take us through there.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  I give a wide berth to artists when they try to reach for science. You know, I might toss a couple of comments back at them, but those are, those are really just for fine tuning, not for the fundamental idea that they want to bring to the table. So in my conversation with the designer, the, the cover, they wanted it to have a little bit of a Harry Potter feel to it. And it kind of evokes that. The, plus you have this, the, the text goes into a circle and a spiral that goes down. You, you feel like you may be getting pulled into a black hole. One of the questions in there is what happens if?

• 21:58Speaker 03

  You fall into a black hole. And so Merlin rhymed that answer as well. I only remember three of the stanzas. The last one always, I always have to look it up again. In a feet first dive to this cosmic abyss, you will not survive because you will not miss. The tidal forces of gravity will create quite a calamity as your stretched head to toe. Are you sure you want to go? It's so again, it was just fun with real science, but making it a little more literarily artistic. But the the subtitle Merlin's tour of the universe, the subtitle is just the I forgot is Mars and blue moons and stars. And it's just

• 22:41Speaker 03

  it's a it's a short list of the kinds of topics you'll encounter. And the subtitle is sort of loosely rhymed, just to put some of the mood into what you're thinking as you pick up the book. And it is silver holographic type onto a black background. We want it to be a little mysterious, but fun at the same time.

• 23:03Brian Keating?

  I think it might be your most ornate of all your book covers. And of course, you know, it's requisite to have a book about astronomy be have a black colored title, but a cover on the on it. But yeah, I tried to try to dissuade my publishers from from that in recent. It's just too too overdone to have that, you know, really, people can't understand about astronomy unless it's dark like the night sky. Kind of silly. But in the the some of the most, you know, fascinating things is to see how not just, you know, maybe your perspective has has, you know, enlarged over over the decades, but but how science as a whole, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with this. I don't know if you visit a place called X anymore, but there's a place on the internet called X

• 23:45Brian Keating?

  dot com. And on X, people speculate about all sorts of crazy stuff, including politics and and crazy, crazy things we'll talk about. But the thing that's up there lately that most, you know, annoys me is physics has not progressed. Science has not progressed. Science is static. There's been no real progress, you know, because of things like string theory and other things. And You know, most of the the progress in in in technology, if you were to teleport somebody from nineteen, you know, eighty nine to here to today in two thousand twenty four, at the end of December, they would say, wow, your TVs sure got flat. And that's about it, you know. So in the last, you know, thirty five, forty years, not much. And then you look at this book,

• 24:27Brian Keating?

  and every chapter, there's been radical discoveries, Nobel worthy discoveries, ranging from exoplanet. I mean, you talk about is there life on other planets? And at the time, you didn't know. I mean, we we hadn't discovered.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  In nineteen eighty nine, the the exoplanet count was zero.

• 24:41Brian Keating?

  Zero.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  And now it's rising through six thousand. These people who say this, they've overvalued the interval of time over which they're living. Because they they're thinking to themselves, they look throughout history, and they sample, let's say, one hundred and fifty years since the second wave industrial revolution, and they want all that to be happening in their lifetime. Well, it sort of is, but it happens smoothly and at a rate that you're not even paying close attention to. So if you go back, is it, is it ten fifteen years? Yeah, go back fifteen years. Now, go back to two thousand and six, okay? There is no smartphone. YouTube doesn't exist yet, okay?

• 25:26Speaker 03

  There are people who are YouTube influencers that are making more money than their parents ever dreamt of, and their parents surely would have said, when they asked the kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? And they say, I want to be a YouTube influencer. They would have been slapped.

• 25:40Brian Keating?

  Podcaster.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  A pod. Pod? What's a pod? Oh, it's an iPod. What? That's where it comes from, of course. What? That's going to be a thing? What? There are going to be eight million of those actively produced ever? What? What? And by the way, we have an SUV sized rover on Mars right now that brought a helicopter with it. Excuse me? We we sent a spacecraft to Pluto. We landed on one of Saturn's moons. First time anybody's landed on a moon outside of the our moon, okay? You could walk down the street. With your smartphone and talk to someone in Europe and think nothing of it and not ride

• 26:22Speaker 03

  home. Guess what I did today? I talked to them. Meanwhile, it's in living memory, this shoulder mounted cellphone that was wielded in nineteen eighty seven by Gecko in the movie Wall Street as he was walking the beaches of the Hamptons. And I remembered, I remembered in nineteen eighty seven, gee, I wish I was as rich as he was so that I could have a phone like that and I could walk down the beach and talk to people with this brick sized, the cinder block sized shoulder mounted phone. And now you look at that and say, geez, people actually use that? And so I don't know what they're paying attention to. Their

• 27:04Speaker 03

  head is in the sand. I don't know what. Um, we have a telescope that can see the birth of galaxies? Come on now. What more? Maybe they're worried that they want a new equals MC squared or some new formula like that, that you can write on a small sheet of paper. And is that what they're after? You know, I don't know. Is that what they would count as a discovery? We're on the heels of quantum computing, for goodness sake. All right? And AI, you know, you're in your car, you push a button and the car tells you, turn left here to avoid traffic and save ten minutes on your trip. Who's the person inside the car who's calculating that? Nobody. It's a computer. It's a fucking eye. Okay? That

• 27:46Speaker 03

  is in our lives on a level that we're not even thinking about. Because the goalposts for AI have been moved. They're always getting moved ever since like the nineteen sixties, when the Turing test was defeated with Eliza, the program, the computer therapist, where you have a conversation with it and you don't know if it's a real person or it's a, you just didn't know. And that fulfilled the Turing test. Well, we keep moving the goalposts and now AI can compose your term paper. And then all the liberal artist folks freaked out. Meanwhile, automated robots replaced factory line workers and the liberal arts folks, I didn't see any outpouring of sympathy from them at that time. Oh, you just got

• 28:29Speaker 03

  to get used to it. It's technology moving along. And now, all of a sudden, AI is in everybody's lap and people are free.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Picking out? It's like, come on now. And whoever is not paying attention to any of this? I don't know. Are they on an island? Are they like, what? In fact, in the other book, which you haven't mentioned yet, I spent an entire chapter exploring the rate and pace of technology and what happens in 30-year increments from 1850 through 2020. And I just review them and they're mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. You bring someone from 1990 into the present and you say, I gotta send this file to someone. Do you have a fax machine? No, I don't have a fax machine. No. Okay.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Where's your CD player? CDs? I don't even know what a CD. And just, they would not know how to function in our world. They'll get in the car and they won't know what button to push.

• 29:55Brian Keating?

  Yeah. The backup camera. Where's the backup camera? Can't put it into reverse. Like, it doesn't have a gear if it doesn't have a backup camera. In the world of scientific research, finding reliable information can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. But what if there was a tool that could revolutionize the way we access and understand scientific knowledge? Powered by AI and grounded in science, Consensus brings you evidence-based insights from over 200 million research papers. It's like Google Scholar and ChatGPT had a brilliant baby, but without the clunky interface and the hallucinations. It's completely transformed how my students and I approach our work. I've been using Consensus

• 30:37Brian Keating?

  long before they became an advertiser on the Into the Impossible podcast. It's like having a brilliant, tireless research assistant who's available 24/7. Here's how You enter in a search query, is the Big Bang a widely accepted scientific theory? And Consensus's AI models go to work instantly assessing quality and showing the consensus on their novel consensus meter, which quickly sees if research leans yes, possibly, or no to your question. The consensus meter analyzes up to 20 papers simultaneously, instantly revealing the trends in your research topic. Imagine you're a cosmologist studying the origins of the universe. Hmm, who does that sound like? With Consensus, you can instantly access the latest findings in the Big Bang theory from over 200 million research papers.

• 31:22Brian Keating?

  Now, look here. Consensus reveals that the Big Bang theory is, of course, widely accepted among scientists as the best explanation for our cosmic origins. Key observations like the cosmic microwave background radiation, which blutters the bread around the Keating household, and light element abundance support the Big Bang theory. But that's not all. Consensus doesn't only show you the consensus view. It also highlights challenges and criticisms, such as the unexplained phenomena like dark matter and dark energy, and even suggests related searches for follow-up research. By providing a comprehensive overview of current research, Consensus empowers you to explore new avenues and push the boundaries of your understanding of all the universe's mysteries.

• 32:03Brian Keating?

  Try Consensus now. Visit consensus.app and enter code KEATING at checkout for 40% off Consensus premium for two years, or visit the link in the description below. I really wish I had this deal when I started using Consensus over a year ago. Now, back to the episode. Maybe it's the converse of what you said earlier. It's kind of the chauvinism, right? That we focus is recency bias, whatever you want to say. The aliens are going to look like us. Life has to be like us in order to matter, to give us cosmic significance. But yeah, maybe technology has to be exactly what we have now, no problems with our current tech, but it has to be that much better. Or we'll say that it's stagnant. And as an experimentalist, look, I have sympathy for some of the complaints about theorists that

• 32:48Brian Keating?

  that, you know, there has been a sort of, there tends to be a type of group thing that does occur. It's normal. I think it's natural. Fields have it and some fields sure as hell do not have it because some fields of theory are incredibly active. And um, and we just have to look at observations and experiment to see how active and how many discoveries. I mean, basically every single, you know, four or five year period has seen the Nobel worthy discoveries that weren't even conceivable 50 years ago. Detection of gravitational waves, imaging of a black hole's event horizon, I mean incredible discoveries. And I think

• 33:22Speaker 03

  By the way, I only just learned this because I hung out with Kip Thorne just recently for my own podcast. I had a long interview with him about his life. I did not know that in order to stabilize the detector system. Because they're trying to measure very small length changes between the two beams. On the order of a fraction of the diameter of a proton. So you have to characterize the thermal movement of everything so that you know what is a gravitational wave and what isn't.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  And apparently, he described this to me and I was in disbelief so that my brain wasn't clicked in to even understand what he says, but I'll repeat it. But I don't claim to understand it. What he said was they took steps to bypass the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to more precisely isolate the movement of the proton.

• 34:29Brian Keating?

  Yes, it's all the squeeze states, right?

• 34:31Speaker 03

  It's a Yeah, is that what it was? Okay, okay. Thank you.

• 34:34Brian Keating?

  Exactly. Quantum squeezing, yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, okay. It was like, it was like magic to me, but oh my gosh. And then you look at

• 34:45Brian Keating?

  And they they invented active noise cancellation.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and everyone just accepts that and presumes it was always there. Yeah, just get out of my face. You go back to 1990 and we'll see how easy life is for you.

• 34:58Brian Keating?

  With your Walkman cassette player. I couldn't afford one back then. I couldn't afford it. I had to get one of these knockoffs.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  And that was they had the CD Walkman, which was bump resistant. I don't know if you remember that.

• 35:09Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah. Speaking of lasers and sound. Yeah. The problem with that one. Yeah, exactly. That was bulkier. Usually things when the technology improves, it gets smaller. But the CD player was bigger than the tape deck. I remember the skinniest one I had my eyes on, I could not afford until I was a postdoc probably. But when we, when we think about these things, yeah, it's, it's, it's always surprising to me that people are so pessimism bias. You know, they say that, you know, optimist, you know, builds the airplane, the pessimist builds the parachute. But it's because I think people think they think they sound smart if they're pessimistic, like if they're jaded, you know, it's the jaded tortured genie. But I think you're a beautiful counter example of that. I think you have.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Well, no, I'm not an optimist. I think I'm a realist. No, I'm a positive realist. So I look at the fun things that can happen that can happen realistically. And

• 35:59Brian Keating?

  Pragmatist, yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  That's the word I meant to say. Pragmatist. That's the only other is I'll admit to being other than a scientist. I'd rather say I'm pragmatic. Pragmatist implies there's some philosophy and a doctrine and a leader and a cult.

• 36:17Brian Keating?

  Well, Neil, if the shoe fits, wear it. I think you have a nice, a nice cold fall. You had a tweet recently that, you know, something playing, I've been playing with similar ideas. I actually talked about this with Stephen Bartlett on his podcast Diary of a CEO, where at the very end, he gives me the highest compliment. He says, you and Neil deGrasse Tyson are very good at explaining things to, to laypeople. So I took that as a great compliment. At least for one of us. But the tweet that you had that referenced what he, he asked me to basically, you know, see if I can debunk astrology. And you put out this tweet, you know, basically, which I've been saying, you know, to some of my friends and my students, you know, if you were born in late November, you're actually

• 36:58Brian Keating?

  And Ophiuchus, which sounds dirty, you know, it's like panspermia. It's it sounds dirty, but it's it's not. It's it's actually fine. It's it's a perfectly legitimate scientific term. And so Ophiuchus would have been the so how

• 37:10Speaker 03

  You'd be Ophiuchin.

• 37:11Brian Keating?

  You'd be Ophi, you well, you know, would you Libra? I'm a I'm a Virgo.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  Libra, Libra, Libran, you know, just if you properly do the word in the way like, you know, Ophiuchus is the constellation. And if you're of Ophiuchus, you'd be Ophiuchin. That's all.

• 37:27Brian Keating?

  Now, doesn't that just obliterate astrology right then? And I mean, they never knew about it, right? They never talked about it, and they never knew about it. And if you tell them about it, they'll deny it. They'll say it doesn't matter. These are just arbitrary. Aha, oh, so it's just an arbitrary distinction. What what constellations the astronomers draw? So why isn't it arbitrary what you astrologers draw from the place of the sun on my mother's day of giving birth to me? And and I

• 37:54Speaker 03

  No, but it's worse than that. So let's let's assume that Ophiuchus was just ignored from the original assessment of the 12 constellations of the zodiac. I'm just highlighting it as a reality. But if that reality doesn't matter, there's another reality that should. And that's, of course, that Earth processes on its axis. And the alignment of the sun with the zodiacal constellation is shifted by an entire month. So and you can look this up yourself at any star chart, which shows where the sun is, at what time of year, and it does not match up. It just doesn't matter to astrologers. So I've had people say astrology can give

• 38:39Speaker 03

  you insight into a person's personality and their traits and all these. And I and then they'll say, Well, what's your sign? They ask of me. And I said, Well, if astrology is that potent, you should be able to figure it out. Why should I have to tell you? All right? You should just go walk down the street and pick out everybody's star sign. And I once I taught a class at the Hayden Planetarium long ago. And one woman afterwards came up to me and said she was a professional astrologer, and she thought she could get some tips on astronomy to help her do her task. And that's when she had before there was an internet. And before I was, you know, this information would have been publicly known. She said, Well, what's your sign? And I said, That's when I

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Engage this exercise. I said, shouldn't you be able to figure it out? She said, oh, okay. You're a Gemini. And I said, no. Oh, the Taurus. I said, no. And she goes through eight constellations. Okay, the ninth one is correct. And when she guesses that correctly, she says, I knew it. So it's like, so what's going on here is people, I think, have no clue how and why statistics work. And I don't blame people for that. I make, I make this point in the, in the Cosmic Perspectives book, that the human brain doesn't seem to be wired to think statistically or probabilistically about anything,

• 40:05Speaker 03

  leaving us susceptible to that weakness being exploited by entities such as casinos, who rely on your false intuition about probability and statistics for them to even stay in business.

• 40:21Brian Keating?

  And look at their, how ornate they are. I mean, you're literally walking into a place that screams out, I am going to rob you.

• 40:29Brian Keating?

  But yeah, to your point about statistics, when you got on the ninth one, I used to say to my innumerate friends, I'd say, when I meet them or whatever, I'd say, I can guess your birth month with 50% accuracy from just one statement about you. So I can guess, you know, within plus or minus of your birthday by one month, but I can only get it 50% of the time. Of course, it's like, yeah, I'm guessing. You're giving me three months leeway, basically. So I should be able to do that half the time or three quarters of it. Anyway, in the book, you actually, and in Merlin's book, you have a quip that I will forever love, which is, there's nothing logical about things astrological.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the, that's why I end that question. Yeah. That's Merlin talking there. That's Merlin.

• 41:11Brian Keating?

  I know it's Merlin.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Merlin has all the wit. I've just, whatever wit I have is borrowed from Merlin. Merlin has the fully developed wit.

• 41:18Brian Keating?

  Here's one for Merlin. Was, is there any question he wouldn't answer because it's too stupid?

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Okay, so first of all, I, I was early woke, so Merlin actually has no gender. There's no reference to the gender of Merlin in that or its sequel. And any illustration of Merlin is illustrated by my brother, by the way. You only see Merlin from behind and you just see long hair coming out from under the hat. So there's a couple of other representations. When Merlin is having a conversation with Isaac Newton, learning about the apple and did it fall on his head? There's a conversation between Merlin and Isaac Newton about that, how Newton came up with his law of gravity. But your question was what, do you ask?

• 41:57Brian Keating?

  Is there any question?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, no, no, Merlin would, would, by the way, that's a, that's a, a culling of a thousand questions that Merlin had fielded over the years. So those are just the more, the good ones that, the ones that are more fun. So that's, that's, that's cherry picked. There's some ones that are just more boring or, or less, less, they, they have less wide appeal. You, you don't want a question that you just apply to the person who asks the question. That's no fun for the reader. So I think some questions can sound completely stupid, but then you can almost treat them seriously and then you get a really fun answer out of it. Someone once asked, uh, dear Merlin, uh, d- does space make beer taste better or worse?

• 42:42Speaker 03

  In fact, you know, that's kind of like, really, that's which, you use this moment with Merlin to ask that question? And for reasons still mysterious, your taste buds get a little deadened in zero G and it's not clear why. It could be not just zero G, but lower air pressure because the space station is under pressured. It has less pressure than what you're familiar with on, just so you don't have to over-design the, the space, the craft. Same with airplanes. You know, if airplanes were pressurized to sea level, uh, they would be much heavier and require much higher uh, design standards to maintain the higher sea level pressure that you might want to, uh, put in.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  It's just fun because if you have lower air pressure, then the bubbles. will come out faster because the partial pressure over the surface of the liquid is not tamping down the bubble. So the beer will go flat faster. So if that were the question that I put in the book, I would talk about, do you like drinking flat beer? Are you from England?

• 43:45Brian Keating?

  Yeah, right. How do you like your Guinness?

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 43:49Brian Keating?

  Warm or lukewarm? Now, if you were to write the triquel, or, you know, the third version of this in another 35 years, is there any, you know, particular topic that you think would be ripe for revolutionary, you know, undoing of your current answer?

• 44:06Speaker 03

  That's a great question. By the way, there is a sequel to that coming out in a year.

• 44:09Brian Keating?

  Oh, awesome.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  It's called Just Visiting This Planet. Because Merlin is an alien.

• 44:13Brian Keating?

  Yeah, he's from Andromeda.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Merlin, it came from Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest large galaxy, and studied the solar system because Merlin was born around the same time the sun and its planets were born. So there's a sort of a resonance there of interest. And so Merlin came to Earth and knows all the famous historical characters. So when you ask Merlin about, you know, Dear Merlin, I don't quite understand some phenomenon, Merlin will recall a conversation with the person who discovered the phenomenon and get them to explain it, which is the fun part because then I get to research what words were common at the time, how would they have composed a sentence, what was the personality of the person, you know, that sort of thing.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  So that that kind of made it fun. But if you fast forward, I'd like to think that in 34 years, if this got resurrected a second time, maybe we would have discovered microbial life in the solar system. That's a whole thing. I mean, that's, that would transform biology. And especially if it has no DNA, or if it has DNA that has nothing in common with us, that would be evidence of another genesis in another place.

• 45:22Brian Keating?

  I want to ask you, yeah, that, thank you for bringing that up. I have a theory on that. It's actually a no-go theory. I've always wanted to run it by you.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  Don't you mean you have a hypothesis? Einstein had a theory. In this moment, I think you have a hypothesis.

• 45:34Brian Keating?

  I have a, I have a theory too.

• 45:38Brian Keating?

  It's actually not neither, to be honest with you. It's it's the following claim. I got this meteorite, you know, the old fashioned way. It was delivered by the United States Post Office. And again, you can you can get these if you go to my website, briankeating.com. And I give them out. I give them out to anyone who's got a dot E D U email address who lives in the U.S. Because my university won't ship overseas. But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is this came from the early solar system, floating around an asteroid that exploded many, many years before our Earth formed. And and material has been coming. In fact, I have a I have a shard of Mars. I actually have a fragment of a Martian meteorite.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Thousands of tons of Martian meteorites. If you do the math, Mars and Moon meteorites. Earth has no shortage of them.

• 46:21Brian Keating?

  Yeah. These materials have come from Mars. Now, what does that tell you? That stuff from Earth has gotten to Mars guaranteed. Stuff, there's material from the Earth that's been blasted off by Chick-fil-A or whatever you like, right? Carrying your favorite animal. My my middle son asked me to ask you about tardigrades. He loves tardigrades, hashtag tardigrades. And he said, you know, if some of that material blasted off on a meteorite, it's probably floating around in space and eventually it'll get to the surface of Mars. And in fact, when the astronauts do their business in space, there's biological material that goes on and eventually some of that ends up on Mars. And they they actually think that that has already occurred.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 47:26Brian Keating?

  But I want to ask you the following question. The fact that we don't see life or obvious signs of life on Mars. Yes, it's not proof there's no life on Mars. But does it set some kind of probability, you know, small probability on at least this panspermia, this way of spreading genetic material throughout the universe as it's very difficult. I mean, it's not like you can spray down a bunch of Walla bears and eventually Mars will start to be fassoned with life, right? So what do you think about this, this, what I call it a postulate? The fact that we don't see life on Mars is evidence that it's very, very hard for life to grab hold, even when you start off with life. The initial conditions are life on Earth. Why is there no life on Mars? I'm saying maybe this is a proof that it's our evidence. It's very hard to do.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Why would you use a sample of one to then generalize about the galaxy and the universe?

• 48:14Brian Keating?

  Well, that's true. You can't, you can't, you can't generalize, but it says something.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  But you just did, didn't you just generalize?

• 48:19Brian Keating?

  Well, I'm using it in a Bayesian sense. I'm saying there's, you have to be able to say something from that one example, right? You can't say categorically, but would it not tell you? Because this has been going on for four billion years, right? When did life start on Earth roughly?

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Four.

• 48:32Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, between three and a half and four, yeah.

• 48:34Brian Keating?

  So for four billion years, these planets are very similar. They share the habitable zone for, you know, some, some of the time. Mars has, you know, all the ingredients that Earth has. I'm not saying it's conclusive. I'm saying, can you use this to constrain the probability of panspermic life? You know, spreading in origin in our, in our, in our.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Okay, a couple of things. So what we don't know is whether the formation of life at all in a genesis is easier than a panspermic spread of life. We don't really have the answer to that. We don't know. And so life on Earth, having been formed so quickly after Earth was formed,

• 49:17Speaker 03

  is good evidence that it probably didn't come from somewhere else. I would suspect that if life came from somewhere else, maybe it arrived, you know,

• 49:29Speaker 03

  later, a billion years later. So we'd have like a sterile Earth for half its history. Then all of a sudden life shows up, pops into a, into a sedimentary layer of the fossil record. But also we haven't really looked in the aquifers, the, the subsurface repositories of water on Mars where we might find microbial life. We haven't really analyzed the water anywhere other than on Earth. And everywhere we see water on Earth, we find life, of course, including the Dead Sea. Thus named is evidence that they had no access to microscopes. So it's got no macroscopic fishes. All right.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  So just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's there. It isn't there. So. I would say if we go to Mars, look at the aquifers, the the permafrost in some places that might be liquefied, we don't know. And there's no life there, no microbial life, and no microbial life in Europa, which is an ocean, liquid ocean's been liquid for billions of years. Then I'd start talking the way you do.

• 50:35Brian Keating?

  Okay.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  I'd say, well, maybe life is not carried from one place to another, because it would have, we've had plenty of occasions for that to happen. Oh, by the way, of course, space is supremely hostile to life as we know it. The UV and and the absence of air or any kind of gas. For a life form to survive that, it would have to have an extraordinary diversity in itself to for the one life form in a litter to be able to survive that transition from the surface of Mars to the surface of the Earth. By the way, most assaults on Earth's environment ended up with mass extinction.

• 51:15Brian Keating?

  That's right. That was my next thought.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  So so it's not a given that even if panspermia is a starter idea, it's not a given that it would finish the job at the end of the day.

• 51:27Brian Keating?

  Hey there, I know you're enjoying this phenomenal conversation with the inimitable Neil deGrasse Tyson. I just wanted to take a short pause to ask you to do something for me in this holiday season, which is actually a gift to you, and that's to subscribe to the channel or follow it on audio podcast player apps of your choice. It is really the best way you can show support for me and the channel and keep getting great guests, controversial guests and outstanding intellects on this channel. So I know you're going to not want to miss some of the upcoming episodes we have on the channel. 2025 is going to be phenomenal. You don't want to miss it. So make sure you hit that subscribe button or follow on your audio podcast player. And for extra bonus credit, leave a rating or a review. Thanks very much. Now back to the conversation.

• 52:11Brian Keating?

  Yeah, you talk in the book early on about the moon's formation. And it's funny, some of the topics in the book, you know, are curious because they were known at the time you Wrote the book, say, or there was a scientific consensus, say, and then they went through a period of maybe some controversy. And then they came back to the, you know, kind of gone through a few pendulum cycles here. One of them was a giant impact hypothesis, you know, talk about it obliquely in Merlin's book. That's the, you know, the belief that perhaps over, you know, four and a half billion years ago, there was some giant object that crashed into the early Earth called Thea or Theia. How do you pronounce it?

• 52:51Speaker 03

  Thea. Thea.

• 52:53Brian Keating?

  Yeah, Thea. And then that formed this debris disk. And then later on, you know, the moon coalesced out of it just at the right position, just in the right, you know, dynamical orbit to possibly play a role in life's origin on Earth, right? The, or at least the development of stromatolites and things that some people have.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  But no, there's nothing magical about where the moon would have formed. So in this collision with this protoplanet Thea, by the way, it's all hypothesis, but it's very strongly support. I don't know anyone who denies the likelihood of this scenario. Because the moon, our moon is one of the biggest moons of the solar system. It's the top six, top seven out of hundreds of moons. And if you are that size coalescing out of the solar nebula, the solar nebula, which we presume was well mixed in its chemical ingredients, you would expect our moon to have way more iron in it than it currently does.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Earth has iron, mercury, everybody who forms out of the solar nebula has iron in it. The moon does not. In fact, the moon is remarkably similar to Earth's crust. So to have no iron and to be similar to Earth's crust strongly hints that, and to be oddly large compared with the size of the Earth, strongly hints to an impact hypothesis where we get sideswiped by this protoplanet, which has a name. We named this thing that we don't know existed and we named it Thea. It sideswipes us, destroys Thea, but there's a debris field that then coalesces to form the moon. The moon would form just outside of the Roche lobe of the Earth.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Anything that formed inside would fall to Earth. So just outside of it, that's 20 times closer than the moon is right now. Which means when you run the math for tidal forces, the moon would have had 8,000 times stronger tides back then than today. That's kind of interesting. And then there's tidal frictions where the moon spirals away. And right now, of course, the moon is still spiraling away at the rate that your fingernails grow. You want a good one for that? That's a true fact. My only point is, there's nothing magical about where it formed or what it's still doing today.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  And it was long hypothesized that maybe strong tides would strand oceanic life forms on land, putting them through the wringer, through the test of who can breathe air and who can't. And then you get the lungfish or some of these earlier forms of fish. That might speed along the transition of life from the ocean to the land. But it's not clear whether that had anything to do with the formation of life in the ocean, which is where all evidence points as the origin.

• 55:54Brian Keating?

  The connection I'm trying to draw is between, you know, there were at least three different major impacts or impact periods that are suggested. Again, these are hypotheses, as you say, ranging from what we just talked about, the Thea collision with the proto-Earth, which occurred first, and then many perhaps billion, millions, or maybe hundreds of billions of years later, the late heavy bombardment where

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Hundreds of millions.

• 56:19Brian Keating?

  Hundreds of millions, yeah, where people think that, I say billions, yeah, I meant millions. The Earth's only.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  What's billions and millions between friends?

• 56:26Brian Keating?

  I mean, come on, your friend Carl. I, you know, trademark trillions, just in case. Just trillions is a big thing. The question of, you know, then the delivery of water, which came, you know, some, many people have some proposals that it came from delivery by comets, right? And then eventually the chicks will, you know.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  By the way, it wouldn't have had to have come from comets. Plenty of water. Water is not a rare ingredient in the universe, and tons of water comes out of every volcanic eruption. So it's not clear how much, you know, you're right, there's a lot of back and forth about where our water came from. It may still be an unsolved problem. It could be because there are multiple ways we can get the water and we just haven't settled on which one. It's not a mystery that there's water out there.

• 57:09Brian Keating?

  Yes, and it is believed from zircons, as you talk about in Cosmos, that these form in water and therefore it formed very early on. We can date the zircons. But then there's the meteorite impact 66 million years ago. I'm informed by my, by my six-year-olds that this occurred to take away the dinosaurs who, as you have noted many times, did not have a robust space program.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:31Brian Keating?

  And were not able to deflect or destroy the incoming progenitor of the Chicxulup crater. So, but the interesting thing is that if any of those three major collisions took place in a different order, right? Maybe life would be very different, or maybe life would be-

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 57:46Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  Of course. Everything is contingent. Everything.

• 57:49Brian Keating?

  So, does that, I mean, when you think about those, you know, probabilities and so forth, I mean, are you in a sort of alien life, not, not aliens with giant prosthetic foreheads? Where do you come down in, I mean, in the, in the, in this discussion? Are you in the camp that says life must be there because otherwise it's an awful waste of space, as Carl and Anne said, or as I say, probability is not possibility? I've been to Antarctica twice. I've been to the South Pole twice. Yeah, it's awful lot of space down there, too. Ain't a whole lot of life. So, where do you, where do you come down in the, in the, in this? Is it a matter of belief, or are we getting closer to actual hard scientific evidence that, yes, life is not only exists off the earth, but it might be even abundant?

• 58:32Speaker 03

  It's just a matter of numbers here. It's not a matter of belief. It's, life got underway almost as soon as it possibly could have on Earth, within 100 million years or so. You don't start the clock at the formation of the Earth. You start the clock after the period of heavy bombardment, when Earth's surface has cooled enough to sustain complex molecules that are the foundations for life as we know it. So, when you do that, it's between 1 and 200 million years. Small compared with the life, the, the years that Earth has, has existed. All right. So, it happened fast. And it's made of the most common ingredients in the universe. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, the most common ingredients

• 59:17Speaker 03

  in the universe. So, life was highly opportunistic. In forming here on Earth. And so then you look at how old the universe is and how vast it is. To run around and say, we're alone in the universe, there's no room for that. Just statistically, there's no room. Now, yes, if the clock ran slightly in a different order, life as we know it wouldn't exist. But there's no reason to think life in some other mode. Maybe life forms would have arisen that were vastly smarter than us. We're not some the measure of what is possible biologically.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  These contingencies, oh, without it, then we wouldn't be here. Maybe something better would be here. Maybe something that took better care of its environment.

• 1:00:08Brian Keating?

  Pivoting to more recent events, there's of course, a great interest in not only discovering life on Mars, but putting life on Mars. A man by the name of Elon Musk, who you once called Elon Musk is more important than Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Wow, that's pretty awesome. And then recently, however, responding to some skepticism that you.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  More important? I don't think I would have used the word important. I might have said he's more productive or more, there might have been a different word there.

• 1:00:38Brian Keating?

  You said, well, yeah, it's a long article. He said, as important as Steve Jobs was, no doubt about it.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Article?

• 1:00:43Brian Keating?

  It's an NBC, yeah, article on NBC.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Wow, okay.

• 1:00:48Brian Keating?

  You talk about this. Anyway, recently you were on Bill Maher's show, I think, and you talked about, you know, what, what your thoughts were on it. Maybe you can recapitulate those.

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  Well, it's hard to get all my thoughts in there because he doesn't really give you room. If he doesn't agree with you, he'll, he gives you less room to talk, but.

• 1:01:08Brian Keating?

  What are your thoughts? I mean, because.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  My thoughts on what?

• 1:01:11Brian Keating?

  Your thoughts on Musk's desire to put Mars, fill Mars with life forms, including humans and himself potentially. He said he wants to die on Mars. I hope it's not on impact. Clarify what you, what you feel is the, you know, is the relevance or the importance of his mission to extend consciousness to Mars.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  I never want to get in the way of people's dreams, especially if they're fed by. Advances and innovations in science and technology. I have no need to do that, especially since a dream, when executed, even if the dream is not realistic or even impossible, it can take you a long path that produce fascinating or other interesting developments in science and technology that we benefit from. So I don't have any problems with dreams at all. So I don't run around volunteering commentary on his dreams. What happens is people come to me and ask what I think of them. And so I wrote a whole book on this,

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  originally titled Failure to Launch: The Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts, chronicling the mismatch of where people thought we'd be in space versus where we were in space. And so it has every thought I've ever had on the past, present, and future of space. Now, you can say, well, you have different thoughts, so you, okay. But these thoughts are not just opinions that I'm expressing. These, this is a very careful read of the history of human engagement in major advances in science and technology. That's what I'm basing it on.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Not on my desires, not on what I wish or hope. It had nothing to do with that. And all I'm saying is, to go to Mars is expensive. Likely the most expensive thing we would ever do as a species outside of the waging of World War. The history of very expensive things sits squarely in the realm of geopolitics and the praise of deity and royalty, which is less of a driving force today than it once was. So these are the three big drivers. So there's praise of royalty and deity. That's what gets you the cathedrals and the pyramids and, and this sort of thing. Huge investments of human capital,

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  uh, human and financial capital. Then there's the promise of economic return. That's a good one. You want to do it because you want to get rich. That's a, talk about a motivator. There's a good one right there. And a third one is the I don't want to die motivator. Someone has somehow threatened you. By saying they're going to achieve the new high ground, or they're going to look better than you in front of people you're trying to attract. So I arrived at these three drivers in an essay I wrote for the Columbia History of the 20th Century. That's the title of the book, and it's in there. It's called Paths to Discovery.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  And what I wanted to do, what I did was, the motivation was, I asked myself, what does it take to motivate a civilization or a culture to do something really, really expensive? And if I want to go to Mars, and that's really, really expensive, let me look at what has motivated people in the past? And maybe we can recreate that in the present, and then we all just march to Mars, okay? And I was ready, I had a grid. Make a whole grid. Here's the expense of the project, and here are all the possible causes, possible drivers. Just because we want to, or it's in our, because we love it, or it's in our DNA, or it's just, we're just curious, or we're humans, or we're Americans.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  I was ready for this, and at the end of the day, only three drivers emerged for the expensive things. You have other drivers for less expensive things, or non-expensive things. The most expensive things have only three drivers. Like I said, it's the praise of royalty or deity, the quest for economic return, and the fact that you don't want to die. So the "I don't want to die" driver, "I don't want to die poor" driver. And, all right. So Musk says he wants to put people on Mars, and I put it through this filter, and I ask, is it in praise of a deity? Or royalty, well, I said, those are no longer drivers, okay? Is there

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  an economic return on it? Well, clearly no. Okay, not in putting the first people on Mars. Do we feel threatened so that we have to do this? Well, not at the moment, but maybe one day we will. If, like I said, if China says, because China's all the buzz in Washington lately, what do we do with our frenemy around the world? And if China says they want to put military bases on Mars? We'll be in Mars in 10 months. Except NASA doesn't have a spacecraft that'll get us there. Guess who does? Elon does. So Elon rolls out his starship and then we go to Mars on Elon's ship. You know something? If we do that, it's tax money that sent it there.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  Not money out of Elon's pocket or out of his profits, margins, or anything. So all I'm saying is that I don't foresee us going to Mars unless we believe it is in our geopolitical interest. And if it is, it's not private enterprise that's going to do it. It's governments. And he could go to Mars as a vanity project. I don't mean that in any pejorative sense. It's just that he could choose to go to Mars with no expectation of a return on that investment because he's either will one day be wealthy enough to do that, or he can band together money from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  and put together the 800 billion or a trillion dollars and then send astronauts there. That would be fun. I don't have a problem with that. But don't tell me that it's part of your business model. Because that would be without precedent in the history of civilization. That you would spend that much money and somehow figure out how to make money off of it. No. The way this typically happens, especially if it's never been done before. The first Europeans to the New World were not the Dutch East India Trading Company. It was Columbus, sent by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. By the way, there was some private investment in that, but the full motivation and the full driver was geopolitical.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  Find a shorter way to the Far East. Look for India. When he gets to the New World and he calls them all Indians, okay? That's kind of weird. All right. And then, but he gets to write down where the trade winds are and where the hostels are and the friendlies and where the food is. And he can characterize that voyage such that a private enterprise who didn't have to take those risks, whereas geopolitics will take those risks in a heartbeat. Businesses can't do that because they're usually using other people's money, or even if it's your own money. This is what I'm saying. It has nothing to do with whether we're technologically able to do it. We have a SUV-sized rover on Mars. Of course, we can get to Mars. Of course. That's not the issue here.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  This is my point. But I don't want to stop him. But people keep asking me, what do I think of it? And I'll say, I don't think it's realistic. Not because we don't know how to do it, but because at some point, somebody's got to write the check. And it's not because it's next thing to explore. That has never been the reason.

• 1:09:01Brian Keating?

  I think I'd add one thing that maybe dovetails to the deity, but not really, and it's eschatological. Effectively, you know, worrying about existential risks. And basically-

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  That's the I don't want to die driver. That's fine. That would not have to invoke deity. The deity is, I fear this entity more powerful than I am, and I better do things to appease them. And so you build pyramids, you build cathedrals, you do things for God, because you want to be treated well in death or even in life. So that as a motivator, because religions don't control societies as much today, certainly not technologically able societies as they once did. That's all.

• 1:09:42Brian Keating?

  But there's still the, yeah, the Ernest Becker denial of death, and we do things in part to stave off these horrific fears that otherwise would drive us crazy.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  Then it's the I don't want to die driver, and that's a really big driver. But why does that have to do with Mars?

• 1:09:56Brian Keating?

  I always point out, how much of the ocean have we really explored? And isn't it a little bit more practical to build underwater cities and backup drive of the ocean?

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  Those are all false comparisons. I don't, yes, it's more practical, but so? Just do both. NASA's budget is 0.4%. Four tenths of one penny on your tax dollar. And you're saying, don't spend a lot of it there, put it in the ocean. Do both. I'm not going to stop you.

• 1:10:20Brian Keating?

  Yeah, and I think even what you say in your, you know, and his response to you, it's-

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  I didn't see his response. But he's defensive, of course, because he's got a whole business there. And I don't have a problem with him jumping in and getting angry. I'm not saying this because I'm decreeing it. I'm saying it because that's how people have behaved. That's all. Don't shoot the messenger.

• 1:10:43Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  I'm not even going to get in arguments with people. By the way, I put it all in this book, not even any of the books you've mentioned thus far.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  There's this other book, which the publisher renamed because they didn't like the word "failure" in the title because it was "Failure to Launch: Dreams and Delusions." The word "failure" and "delusion" was in the title. So we can't have that. We renamed it "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." And in there, all of this is detailed.

• 1:11:37Brian Keating?

  Well, I want to turn to your other book, which is named after my intellectual hero, Galileo's Starry Messenger, the Sidereus Nuncius, which is written in Latin. And most people don't realize that the reason he got in trouble at the end of his life for the dialogo is the dialogo is written in Italian.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  Indeed, it is.

• 1:11:57Brian Keating?

  And he was forbidden to do that. I had the honor of being, making the first ever audiobook of that book, or any of Galileo's books with Carlo Raveli and Frank Wilczek and Fabiola Gianati and Stefano.

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  Where was my phone call for that? I don't know. Where was my?

• 1:12:11Brian Keating?

  I should have.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  I was sitting by my phone the whole time. You know this.

• 1:12:15Brian Keating?

  I know you would have loved 22 hours of, you know, hearing your own voice, Neil, but.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  I want to be Simplicio. Make me Simplicio. Which one of you was Simplicio? Somebody had to.

• 1:12:25Brian Keating?

  My friend Lucio, Lucio Piccirillo, who's a professor, friend of mine. And Carlo Raveli was Salvati, the Salvation. I was Segredo. I was the intermediary. But yeah, that book got him into trouble. And I love that book. And I love the fact that he got in trouble. People say, oh, he was imprisoned and tortured. No, no, no. I've been to his house. I've had a conference.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  For house arrest? Yeah.

• 1:12:45Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it was house arrest. He's got a vineyard there. He's near his daughter. Pretty resplendent place. You know, Sam Bankman-Fried would love to be in Galileo's villa in Archetri, Italy. But the reason I bring this up is, you know, you're no stranger to controversy, but people really don't understand where you sit.

• 1:13:03Brian Keating?

  Politically, I think I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions about you. And in this book, Starry Messenger, you say, I lean liberal on almost all relevant opinions that I hold. Yet it was President George W. Bush who twice appointed me to serve on White House commissions. He saw my scientific expertise and my politics didn't seem to matter. Lately, there seems to be this obsession with your politics. And I I wonder, what is, what is the driver of that? And how do you handle?

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  I don't know what obsession you're talking about. I don't always, I've distanced myself a little bit from the cesspool that is social media. What's been happening is I'm on some show where we have a very opinionated host. And like I said, if I don't get my full views in, then it becomes a fight and that becomes the clickbait. And so, so I would rather anyone who has thoughts base it on my calmly presented, measured views, not views that in the middle of a mudslinging fight in the gutter, because that's not how you can convey information. I'm not surprised that people are curious about my politics, but I don't care

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  about my politics as an educator. I care about what's objectively true. I've never mentioned the man, Donald Trump, in any social media posting, ever. And people with my visibility typically are trying to get you to participate in their political leanings, trying to tell you who to vote. I don't care who you vote for. What I care about is when you vote, I want you to be as informed as you can possibly be and not be voting inside of some delusional bubble. Because only when people vote from an informed posture, do you have democracy working at its best.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  But if democracy has people voting in ways that that what people think ought to be true, even though if it violates known laws of physics, that's dangerous. It's not just bad, it's dangerous. And it's dangerous to the survival of an informed democracy. So no one knows who I voted for. I said, I, that's the only time, that's the most political statement I've ever made. In the Starry Messenger book, I said I leaned left.

• 1:15:18Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  The point of saying that was, I was actually three times appointed by George W. Bush, knowing that I leaned left, because in the interview, they say, are you registered with any political party? I said, yes, I'm a registered Democrat. And then they kept asking questions. They valued my expertise. I was on two White House commissions, and I don't remember if I said it in the book, it might not have been relevant, so I might have left it out. And I was on an NSF committee, approved by the White House to select the Presidential Medal of Science winners, which is a ceremony every year. It's less covered by the press because the press thinks it's political, because it's a White House-run thing, but

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  it's not. In fact, the year I was there, and there was a dozen of us, I forgot exactly, around that number, 10, I think, and there are these candidates who are proposed, and we evaluate them, we take the packages home, read them, come back, we put out the candidates we think would best serve this role. One of them studied ice cores in tropical glaciers and showed the impacts of climate change even in those places, not only in places such as Greenland or Antarctica. I didn't even know they were tropical glaciers. That's like, oh, my gosh, such a thing exists. And there is President George W. Bush, a Republican,

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  Republicans famously known for climate denial, this sort of thing. There is Bush in the White House in a ceremony, because I'm there watching, he puts the medal around the person who made these discoveries, this early data on climate change. All I'm saying is, to say that I'm getting political, no, I'm not at all. I care about objective truths. And by the way, if you're part of a political party that doesn't care anything about objective truths, don't call me political for saying that you are objectively wrong. I'm just being a scientist and an educator, and that's my job.

• 1:17:20Brian Keating?

  As a scientist, you're expressing a scientific fact, you know, about genetic differences. And men and women and sport and then you're being argued with how do you handle that internally as a scientist knowing arguing a scientific point? When they're obviously there's a mixture of desire for clickbait as you say and controversy.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm a little disappointed in myself for because I count myself among the ranks of media savvy. Right? And but normally that would be a journalist who ostensibly is asking you questions. As a because they're a journalist and they want to hear what you have to say. But if the person be the journalist or anyone else has very strong views of their own. Then it's no longer a question and answer session. It's it's the octagon and it's combat. And normally I get through that with a little more elegance than I did with Bill Maher.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  So because Bill Maher was very he's a testy, especially lately, he's gotten very testy. And normally I don't fight that I navigate it and I think I could next time I could do a better job. Navigating that sort of landscape that we were placed on. But what I say to people is rather than quote me from some other interview, I'm here with you. Get the full thing what you want from me and then you have your own version of it. Okay. Rather than comment on what other people were commenting about the comments. That's this is this is the maelstrom cesspool that social media has become and advertisers love it.

• 1:19:02Brian Keating?

  Yes, they do. Yeah, enragement leads to engagement and then you have more ads for, you know, Toyotas, right? More placement there.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  Oh, by the way, just that this whole thing with the trans thing. It was I was speaking sort of objective truths, right? And but they wanted me to. Place an opinion onto it and I'm I don't give opinions because I don't care that you agree with my opinion. It's my opinion. Like I said, I'm an educator. I care that however you formulate your opinion. It's as informed as it could possibly be. Again, I don't see there are different edits and clips and I don't know what landed online, but I can tell you because I'm here with you now. Okay, I made it clear that I I looked at the world records of every running event in the Olympics.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  And in every event, on average, the male world record was 10% faster than the female world record. In the events that require speed. I also checked the speed of a serve in tennis. And of course, when you're setting something into motion, you can talk about the speeds, but really you want to talk about the kinetic energy. Because there's an energy that needs to be invoked to do that. And so there's something like a 30 mile an hour difference between the fastest serves of the best male tennis players versus the best female.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  It also happens to be true that the fastest marathon time, oh, sorry, the fastest triathlon time for men is only 6% faster than the fastest triathlon time for women. And I said this on Bill Maher, I don't know if it landed in anybody's clip. So it may be that the events are not arduous enough to have the two curves meet. So I said, yes, that's all true. And so then here's the transition that somehow everyone decided to, I don't know, their heads explode. I don't know, but it turned into into viral clickbait. It's very simple. If we have a future where we are no longer contesting,

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  where we no longer segregate sports by gender. If that future comes, one way that could happen, and like I said, I'm just making this up, is you contest by hormone levels.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Okay, there might be a better way than that, but just picture this hormone levels. So what is your, what are your hormones? By the way, this allows women who happen to have unnaturally high testosterone levels to compete with people who have similar testosterone levels. Or whatever, sometimes it's the ratio of hormones, you know, I'm not as hormone fluent as I would need to be to solve that problem, but it's an idea. Okay, and yeah, so it means it's not the men's hundred, it's the, you have maybe five.

• 1:21:58Brian Keating?

  One hundred deciliters of testosterone.

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. And you'd have.

• 1:22:02Brian Keating?

  Doesn't roll off the tongue as much, but.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  And the point I tried to make with Pierce Morgan is if you have multiple categories and you say, well, that's weird to have 10 different or five different hundred yard dashes. When you only previously had two, that's weird. Well, no, it's not weird because I used to wrestle and we have people that are 125 pounds and 240 pounds. They don't wrestle each other. That's not interesting. They wrestle other people their own weight class. So you see weight class as a way that's divided so that you have interesting contest. The entire spectrum. That's when Pierce Morgan jumped in and says, well, you can't have a trans woman fighting a man at the same weight. The man will pummel her to death. That's not what I was talking about.

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  And that's frustrating when you have someone who has an active journalistic opinions. Because I, I was saying something more subtle than that. I was saying, I gave wrestling as an example of there being categories. And we just accept that, of course, because you want an interesting contest. And if you have categories, that won't be so, it's not such a hard sell. So now you have categories of hormone. And if that can't work, and we can't find any other solution, we'll just keep working at it. I don't have a problem. I offered no opinion in the last five minutes of what I just described to you. It was an if then statement, if we're gonna go, because you want the contest to be.

• 1:23:29Brian Keating?

  Close.

• 1:23:30Speaker 03

  Close. Otherwise, it's not interesting.

• 1:23:32Brian Keating?

  Point spread, it's possible. Right. Exactly.

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  It's otherwise, it's not interesting. And we know this. That's why the NFL doesn't play college teams. Because that's not interesting. Yet colleges playing colleges is interesting. High schools playing high schools are interesting. Friday Night Lights is a pastime in the United States or Texas. It's perhaps only, but Friday Night Lights High School Football. Oh, my gosh. People eat it up. And you're not saying they're not as good as college or the college. You're not saying that. That's not even a thought. So you match everybody up in some way. That makes it fair.

• 1:24:06Brian Keating?

  I think they wanted to, or he wanted to say the woke, you know, anti-woke, the woke this. I think they want to say body parts. And that's what determines everything. And, and you, to your credit, were saying possibly. But here's some other ways that we could do it that perhaps don't involve, you know, the same level of, you know, maybe embarrassment or something like that. But, you know, am I wrong? You were proposing, you know, a metric, basically a rubric, rather, that you could do it, but you weren't saying this was what we must do. And we cannot do.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  Correct. I was not, I was not presenting an edict. I was offering it as a suggestion of how and what the future of sports might look like. That's all.

• 1:24:43Brian Keating?

  All right, Neil, I've got two more questions if you have.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  Okay, what do you have? And thank you for allowing me to explain it. And so that without mudslinging or trying to, like I said, I'm not here to give opinions. I don't care that you know any of my opinions at all.

• 1:24:57Brian Keating?

  If you listen to people, like I always say, you know, it's, well, do you want your, your, your son to be like Donald Trump or, no, I don't want it to be like anybody. I don't want him to be like me necessarily, right? I want them to be their own person, but it means they have to think for yourself. And I think that's, that's the thing that's in short supply because people want to hack. They want to heuristic. They want to say, oh, you know, Neil's woke.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  It's not good enough to think for yourself unless you have a self-awareness of the foundations of what lead to the thoughts you have. Without it, you end up in the Dunning Kruger Valley. You know, there's lots of ways that can fail.

• 1:25:30Brian Keating?

  I'm one of the world's experts in the Dunning Kruger.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  By the way, I, I independently discovered the Dunning Kruger Effect. I'd never heard of it until I did my masterclass. And in the trailer.

• 1:25:42Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  For the masterclass, I say, one of the greatest challenges is knowing enough about something to think you're right, but not enough about that to know that you're wrong. And I came up with that on my own and someone said, well, that's the done. I said, done. What? And I'm looking at the paper. I dug it up. Is it? There it is. They did it 20 years ago, whenever. And so perfectly happy to give credit where it's due.

• 1:26:05Brian Keating?

  There's another effect called the Badger Whitstein effect, or something like that, which is when you see something that maybe you hadn't encountered before, and then you become aware of it, suddenly you see it everywhere. So like, uh, someone who becomes bald or someone who's pregnant, they, they notice pregnant women all the time.

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  Especially if you buy a new kind of car.

• 1:26:22Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:26:22Speaker 03

  Everybody's driving that car on the road.

• 1:26:24Brian Keating?

  So I, I tweeted out recently, yeah, I just became aware of this effect and now I'm seeing it everywhere.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  Good one.

• 1:26:29Brian Keating?

  Most people.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's very, that's a smart one right there. Yeah. That's another, there's another one like that is, uh, there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don't.

• 1:26:42Brian Keating?

  Hey there. I know if you're enjoying this conversation, you're gonna love my Monday magic mailing list where I write about the conversations I have with intellects like Neil, Sam Harris, many, many other intellects that I've encountered over my exploration of the multiverse of minds. It's free. If you go to briankeating.com/list, you'll join. And best of all, you'll be entered to win a real piece of the early solar system that Neil and I are talking about in this episode. Yes, a meteorite. I give away one of these genuine samples to one lucky viewer or listener each month. And if you have a dot edu email address, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties. If you go to briankeating.com/edu and you have a dot edu email address in Lebanon, United States. So do it now.

• 1:27:24Brian Keating?

  I know you're gonna love it. It's free. Click over there and I'll see you on the other side. Now back to the conversation. Getting back to Merlin for the very last or penultimate question. You always say you're famous, one of your many, many quips, you're very quip worthy. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you, but.

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  No, you didn't say it right here. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. That's how you gotta say it.

• 1:27:48Brian Keating?

  We're getting all your greatest hits.

• 1:27:51Brian Keating?

  You either don't want to do another podcast with me, you want to leave it all on the table, or you know, we're just getting the gold today. What question may always be unanswerable?

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  I don't think any question. I think there are people, the people who say that. And I'm stepping into their space, maybe uninvited.

• 1:28:12Speaker 03

  When I see people say that, "Science will never understand love," or whatever, I think it's because they don't want science to ever understand it. Rather than feel confident that science never will. Now, there's certain things that don't respond to reductive investigations. All right, you can't, that we know of, you can't analyze an organism of any kind, and from that organism deduce the theory of evolution. There's no code in there to tell you that. You need other animals to do that. Okay, so it's not, it's not reductive right down to the cellular level of animals.

• 1:28:56Speaker 03

  It's not obvious that, maybe because neuroscience is still in its infancy, that you can study a bird that's just pecking around on the ground, and learn from studying the bird that it can flock with other birds. Okay, these are emergent features, where it's not obvious how visible they would be in the organism itself. So, but, those examples aside, the universe has been remarkably reductive, and highly successful in the exercise of figuring out how things work. So, I, rather than say, "There's nothing science will ever know," I'm gonna say, "Some things are harder than others."

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  What I'd rather put it is, it may be that the human mind is too stupid to figure things out scientifically, to figure everything out scientifically. And that's not the same thing as saying, "Science will never figure it out."

• 1:29:50Brian Keating?

  Okay, the last question, in the spirit of this wonderful new and old book, this is Schrodinger's book, it's both new and old. I want to take a question from a listener.

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  We've got to take more than one question from your people, come on. Give me a couple. We've got to take more than one question from your people.

• 1:30:05Brian Keating?

  All right, here we go.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  In all fairness to, they support you, right? Let's do it.

• 1:30:09Brian Keating?

  They do, yeah, okay. So, PsychoNot17, which I was gonna call my third child, anyway, he or she or it asks, "How much of space is warped at the singularity of Sagittarius A star?"

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  All of space. Is shaped by the presence of matter and energy. This is foundational to general relativity. Space is warped in the vicinity of the earth, of the sun, of the moon. The moon is in orbit around earth because it's following a trajectory in response to the curvature of space, appropriate for its own speed. Okay, but if you want to know actually how space is warping, you send out a beam of light and look at what it does. Whatever the light does, that's what space is doing. And so how much of space? All of space around it is warped towards it. Sagittarius A star, the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  And that, and we have black hole envy because Andromeda has a way bigger black hole in its center than we do.

• 1:31:09Brian Keating?

  And M7 has even more.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it may be that the size of the black hole correlates, well, is driven by the mass of the galaxy in which it's embedded for reasons that are still being explored. And I think the jury is still out, but there are a lot of very good ideas for how you build a big black hole from a big galaxy. The question is not worded commensurate with the meaning of relativity. In relativity, all of spacetime is curved wherever you find matter and energy. And at the singularity, it's a singularity. Oh, by the way, it's been said that a singularity is where God divides by zero. Remember, you're not supposed to do that in math class. That's almost accurate in the sense that general relativity, you know this, of course,

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  the general relativity fails at the singularity. We know its limits. As successful as that theory of the universe is, we already know its mathematical limits. Bring in the string theorists and others to try to resolve that.

• 1:32:09Brian Keating?

  That's exactly concordant or consonant with your famous quip that you voiced for us, right? We know enough to know where the limitation, that's what a scientist does.

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We know enough about the universe.

• 1:32:22Brian Keating?

  All right, here's a human interest question from John Van Iman. What does Neil think his mentor and hero Carl Sagan would say to him if he was alive today? And what would Neil say or tell Carl if he only had one moment to speak to?

• 1:32:38Speaker 03

  You mean if Carl was resurrected from the dead and showed up? Okay, so a couple of things. First, Carl Sagan is widely described as my mentor, but I was probably in his presence three times in my life.

• 1:32:54Brian Keating?

  And you turned him down. You didn't go to Cornell.

• 1:32:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't go to Cornell. Right, so in the traditional meaning of the word mentor, he was not a mentor. However, you can be visible in what you do. And when you're visible in what you do, people can emulate it if they choose. So in that sense, Carl was a mentor because I said, that was effective. That analogy really worked. That way of describing and thinking about the problem, that was potent. So in my life, as I honed my skills as or methods, tools and tactics as educator, I drew upon many of the methods, tools and tactics invoked by Carl Sagan. But he's not alone in that.

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  There's probably a half dozen educators in my life who I've drawn from to fold into my life. And then there's stuff that I'm experiencing that they never did, like the internet and social media and and rapid fire interviews and comedic interviews. So I have a very strong, I have a high valuation of comedy in communicating anything but science in particular. On my podcast, my co-host is a professional comedian. That's different from the molds that others have honed. And so that's where I'm bringing my life experience into that equation. What I would say, if Carl rose from the dead and I had five minutes with him, I'd say,

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  Carl, look what you started. That's what I would say.

• 1:34:31Speaker 03

  Okay, look what you started and the struggle continues. Now get back in the grave while we try to fix this.

• 1:34:39Brian Keating?

  Exactly. It might be safer in the other side of.

• 1:34:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43Brian Keating?

  So this question comes from Brian Keating. How much do you think AI will influence what you and I, I do professionally, I call it the second oldest profession, uh, which is being a professor, but you're, you're an educator and mentor to many more.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  No, astronomy is the second oldest profession, not being a professor, just so you know.

• 1:35:02Brian Keating?

  Now, there's another one. We, we, we obliquely can hint at it, but I want to keep it PG. How will education change? I mean, a thousand years ago in Bologna, Italy, was the first Western university, the University of Bologna. There was a guy, usually a guy, and he would have a piece of rock and he would scrape on another piece of rock, you know, some, some wisdom, some knowledge, what have you. And, you know, today we, we now have this amazing invention called PowerPoint. Really not much has changed, you know, and I'm wondering, do you see a threat from AI innovation, um, perhaps at the pace at which it's accelerating to my profession? Will my profession of being a professor, uh, exist?

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I think it'll happen in ways that you're not thinking. So, uh, especially in liberal arts classes, write a term paper on this subject and then they go home and chat GPT produces it in 2.5 minutes. And then they hand it in and you have no idea how much they learn. So what's going to have to happen is assessment of student abilities will have to take place verbally, not in any written capacity. This will require more teachers and maybe we should, while we're at it, pay them more. But if you make your, your term paper with written by chat GPT, fine. Then learn what's in the chat GPT. And by the way, I might ask you things

• 1:36:24Speaker 03

  that your chat GPT didn't tell you because you didn't think to ask it. All right. And that would be further evidence that your knowledge is limited to what AI told you and not what you could have learned had you done it on your own. So the learning process is going to have to change because no longer can you trust a submitted.

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  Term paper. You know, there's some teachers you would swap out in a minute for an AI bot to do the teaching. Okay, not all teachers are created equal. This is one of the great tragedies of the modern world. It's a tragedy because we all knew who the bad teachers were. You're in high school, you're in college, there is general agreement who the great teachers are and who the sucky teachers are. And why no one ever really does anything about that is one of the great tragedies of education, I think. And teach the bad teacher so they can teach better. All right. Why languish that way for decades until retirement? There's gotta be some, or fire them. Get fired in any other job if you're bad.

• 1:37:24Brian Keating?

  Right, tenure.

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  Or you don't give tenure unless they can demonstrate. It's not a matter of how many years you put in, it's how good are you? Okay, so, so it'll change how you teach, for sure. But will a teaching bot? You know, here's what an AI will not be able to do. You went to, uh, Galileo's birthplace and you communed with Galileo in all spiritual ways that you know how, and then you come back and now you give a class on that. And the class that you teach will be infused with your emotions and your feelings for a period of time for Galileo the man, for his family, for his daughter Celeste, I guess was her name, and the vineyards and the prosecution and the church and

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  the fact that you voiced one of the characters in his books makes it closer to you than it could possibly be to AI. Cause all AI knows is what other people have put on the internet. And you and your life experience have just created something new that AI doesn't know about yet, unless you write about it and put it on the internet. But you took this trip over spring break and you're coming back to your school and you're in front of your class and you have the power to mesmerize them in a way that no AI can because you are sharing your life experience with them. And as long as AI stays inside a computer, it's not some robot that did the touring alongside you, you will have that advantage.

• 1:38:53Speaker 03

  AI now and forever.

• 1:38:55Brian Keating?

  Yeah, and actually, I always say that, you know, we don't, we don't take advantage of the storytelling. I don't think AI can tell stories the way humans can and.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  No, no, yes, it can. It'll tell.

• 1:39:04Brian Keating?

  Well, it can, but it's.

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  Well, it'll tell it the way other humans have told stories.

• 1:39:07Brian Keating?

  That's right. So it's, it's, it's degenerate. You know, it's mad. I call it mad bot disease. You remember mad cow disease? The cows would eat the other cows' brains and then they would go crazy.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  They were fed the other cows.

• 1:39:19Brian Keating?

  In the hamburger.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  What kind of diabolical cows are you imagining?

• 1:39:23Brian Keating?

  I know. That's right. Well, they, yeah, I always say I don't.

• 1:39:25Speaker 03

  Eating other cows. No, we fed them other cows' brains, but go on.

• 1:39:29Brian Keating?

  I always say I don't eat fish and people say, why? I say, I love fish, you know, I don't want to hurt them. I did go to Galileo's house, I said a couple of times, and I think we do a disservice when we teach freshman physics and, and we talk about inclined planes and we talk about pendulum.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  Frictionless inclined planes.

• 1:39:43Brian Keating?

  We should talk about how he derived that without a clock. I mean, they didn't have a clock and, and he was doing it under house arrest in the dialogo and the discourse. I mean, this is incredibly gripping human interest stories. We never.

• 1:39:54Speaker 03

  Didn't he use his pulse to?

• 1:39:55Brian Keating?

  Yeah, he used his pulse.

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56Brian Keating?

  He used that swing, yeah, of the pendulum. He used the clock. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so I have a question.

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  And that was in church when he wasn't paying attention.

• 1:40:03Brian Keating?

  He was bored as a three-year-old. I mean, can you imagine? I have a question now, um, from Merlin to you. Okay, how about that? How do you think I got that? Uh, so Merlin wants to know your thoughts on recently discovered achievement and breakthrough from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is fusion ignition in a laboratory setting. It's widely celebrated. And this is quite astonishing, Merlin asks, and what he wants to know is what you think.

• 1:40:30Speaker 03

  What Merlin wants to know.

• 1:40:32Brian Keating?

  What Merlin wants to know of Neil deGrasse Tyson, not the other way around, is how do you think this will impact our lives on Earth? Um, bringing the sun's processes down to Earth?

• 1:40:42Speaker 03

  First, I'm reminded of a bumper sticker, uh, I saw on a VW Beetle that said, no nukes. Okay, so this is very liberal posture, no nukes. And the O in the no was an image of the sun. And it was, okay, this someone's never had physics, so they don't know the sun is all it's all it is is a nuke. Okay, so.

• 1:41:08Brian Keating?

  You go to see Berkeley, it's a nuclear free zone. I don't know if you've ever seen that.

• 1:41:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I haven't seen that. Yeah, so to say nukes in that way uses a very broad stroke. And the farther you are in any given political leaning or philosophical leaning, the more other things look monolithic to you. And so this is one of the things I tried to correct in Starry Messenger. This ignition where more energy came out than was put in in that one experiment. By the way, that energy budget used for that calculation doesn't include the energy for the whole machine and everything, you know. When you really do the math, it's

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  it ate more energy than it generated. But when you localize it to the phenomenon itself, which we think is something that may be scalable and maybe you just redesign the rest of the cavity with some clever engineers, because that's how that always happens. There's a scientific breakthrough and clever engineers come in after and they make it commercially viable. So I, if that is the case, I can imagine a future where no one is complaining about dead birds at windmills. No one is complaining about, quote, unsightly, uh, uh, solar farms. No one is complaining about dams up top rivers as a source of hydroelectric. There's just one of these little nuclear plants in every town.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  And it's nuclear fusion, which has no radioactive, it's just hydrogen and helium for goodness sake. So there's no, there's no radioactive evil elements like plutonium or anything else that is associated with atomic fission, which were, of course, the weapons of mass destruction in the Second World War and shortly after. So that would be interesting. It would completely transform. Let me give a weird. Tangential example, manure in the streets was a very big problem in New York City at the turn of the century.

• 1:43:11Brian Keating?

  I thought it would triple Wall Street, right?

• 1:43:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's so much manure and if you, how's the city gonna grow? If the horses gotta poop everywhere and you can't. And so how do you solve this? Do you have better scooping laws? Do you have better barges to take it out? And the solution was the car. That was the solution. And so no one studying manure is inventing the car. Somebody else is. So if this becomes, and by the way, what you really want is what was shown in Back to the Future, at the end of Back to the Future. Where Doc comes back from the future into 1985 with the DeLorean and rather than hook

• 1:43:54Speaker 03

  it up to lightning bolts, he just has Mr. Fusion, a home fusion engine in the back of his car. You put in anything organic, it'll fuse the hydrogen out of it, because all organic materials has hydrogen. So, so that would be kinda cool. And by the way, that would be the future that everyone imagined in the 1950s. You know what they got wrong? The tomorrow imagined in the 1950s and 60s is everyone thought energy would cost nothing. So all those futures, there were people in jet packs and flying cars and everything they showed required energy. And no one imagined that the real future would be the dropping cost of information.

• 1:44:38Speaker 03

  So we live in a computing age rather than an energy age. But imagine a future where we live in the age of both. Then nothing's stopping us.

• 1:44:46Brian Keating?

  Never trust a futurist who didn't predict the internet. I mean, that, that is a tough pill to swallow. Okay, last question from a man by the name of Nestor. Get one question of an alien.

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  How do you know the man?

• 1:44:59Brian Keating?

  One question to ask an alien, upon first contact, what would you say? From Nestor here on the internet somewhere.

• 1:45:06Speaker 03

  What I would do is I would lay out some of our science and figure out a way to show this to the alien, because the alien presumably doesn't know English, unless it's really smart and it can figure it out quickly. I would say, what are we missing? You know, I wouldn't know, he's got some fancy spaceship, that's fine. What are we missing in our understanding of the universe? That's what I want to show them the periodic table, show them the Pythagorean theorem, show them some devices that we've made and built, and just, I want to know what they know, because if they got here, they're more advanced than we are, because we haven't left low Earth orbit in 52 years. So, that's what I'd ask.

• 1:45:47Brian Keating?

  What do you think we're missing? I mean, just, is it technology?

• 1:45:50Speaker 03

  Well, we're missing, we don't know what went on before the Big Bang. We don't know how you went from organic molecules to self-replicating life. We don't know what dark energy is. We don't know what dark matter is. We don't know if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. Of course, if an alien visits, that's answered in that moment. But, plenty of questions we don't know.

• 1:46:07Brian Keating?

  That's not what I meant. I meant, what are we missing from ourselves as a species? I mean, right now, there's nuclear, potential nuclear conflicts, there's sectarian violence, there's all sorts of crazy stuff going on inside and outside of America. Is it possible that we can get to that future? Is there a great filter, but that great filter is us and are the way that we treat each other?

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  It might be, however, there's a little bit of a generational delusion that afflicts many people. I'm baby boomer.

• 1:46:36Brian Keating?

  Yep.

• 1:46:37Speaker 03

  And before me, what do they call them? I guess that was the greatest generation, maybe. The greatest generation, I don't know who named that, but they, they're citing the fact that they defeated fascism, okay?

• 1:46:50Brian Keating?

  Yep.

• 1:46:51Speaker 03

  So that takes a lot of resources to do so. I get that. So I don't want to take that away. However, in that generation was the rise of Jim Crow. My father fought in a segregated army. Oh, because people with light skin didn't want to kill Germans standing next to people with dark skin. That's weird, okay? So it's hard for me, as a-

• 1:47:16Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18+

• 1:47:42Speaker 03

  A black man in America to view that period and the people who were in charge at the time as the greatest generation. It's just hard. Okay. It doesn't mean I don't don't know how to respect and value the good things that came of it.

• 1:47:58Brian Keating?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:47:59Speaker 03

  Okay, all right. So, but that's not even my point. My point is if there are protesters, let's say, and a van, an angry van plows into them and kills a dozen people, let's say. That's headlines for a month in the country in which it occurs. Headlines for, no, no, it's headlines for a month in the in the state where it occurs. It headline for a week in the country, headlines for a day worldwide. It's my gosh, how are we treating each other? Will we ever survive ourselves? One might ask. However, if you go back to the greatest generation from 1939 to 1945,

• 1:48:42Speaker 03

  1,000 people were killed per hour in the service of that war. We are reacting to a dozen people dying from a hate crime. A thousand people died per hour. And no one talks about that because the war wasn't reported that way. It was, well, we've taken this beachfront or this island or this town. We've liberated France. We've that's it's in conquering terms. It's not in the toll of human life. So when I look at the history of the world and the amount of bloodshed that precedes us,

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  we don't hold a candle to how much bloodshed there was in the Second World War, in the First World War, all the European wars that preceded that, all the war, just. You know, take a look at how many people were guillotined. Tens of thousands of people beheaded and guillotined over short periods of time. It's like, what? What are you doing? Like, what? And so I am glad I'm living in the present for how peaceful it is relative to how violent we've been as a species in the past. Not to diminish the very real tragic violence that's going on today. It's senseless violence, right? Just, you know, I'm, I'm pro civilian.

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  Okay, people just trying to live and feed and raise a family caught up in whatever is the political unrest of people who don't have their safety in mind when you end up putting them at risk in the ways that you do. So, yeah, I think we can survive ourselves, especially compared to what we've already been through.

• 1:50:31Brian Keating?

  I sure hope so. And in this holiday season, nothing makes a greater companion to the mysteries of the cosmos than this.

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  I think it's a fun book, but that's just me.

• 1:50:41Brian Keating?

  It's super fun. It's super fun.

• 1:50:43Speaker 03

  I, I. I want to reset one more poem and then we'll call it, call it a day.

• 1:50:46Brian Keating?

  Yeah, let's do it. I won't turn that down.

• 1:50:49Speaker 03

  All right, someone wanted to know if red stars are red because they're hotter than blue stars or other color stars because we think of red hot. And I could have just said, no, but it's Merlin answering, so Merlin's got to have fun. So here it goes. On canvas with paint in the artist's school, it is red that is hot and blue that is cool. But in science, we show as the heat gets higher, a star will glow red like the coals of a fire. Raise the heat some more and what is in sight? Behold, the star has turned bright white.

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  But the hottest of all Merlin says unto you is neither red nor white when a star has turned blue.

• 1:51:35Brian Keating?

  Very, very nice.

• 1:51:36Speaker 03

  There's nothing like scientifically accurate poetry.

• 1:51:40Brian Keating?

  Poetry, right. Yes, I would have loved to have Paul Dirac read that poem. He hated poetry and he famously said, "In science," and you have to imagine his British accent, "in science, one tries to tell people in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." Neil deGrasse Tyson, I'll let you ruminate on that one. He was a deeply closeted poet, as I understand it.

• 1:52:11Brian Keating?

  Thank you so much for sharing your time, your thoughts, and giving my audience another bite at the Tyson apple to understand a little bit better about how this universe is put together, how it works.

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  Well, thanks for your interest. This is my second time on your show. And keep it going, keep it strong, keep growing that following. For me, those are the metrics that people care about science. When actual scientists get followings such as that, that's a good sign.

• 1:52:40Brian Keating?

  I want to put any fears that Neil does things on a venal basis. We invited you to the San Diego Air and Space Museum. We wanted to induct you into the into the Hall of Fame and it's a great honor. There's someone named Sally Ride there, Neil Armstrong is there, the Wright brothers, and a man named Brian Keating is there. But we're not going to get into that right now. And we said, Neil, we'll even get a pilot friend of ours to fly you out in a private jet. And this is true. Jim Kidrick, the CEO of the Air and Space Museum here in San Diego would have charted. And you said, in a very lovely email, you said, "I appreciate the honor. It's a great, it's a great privilege. And, you know, thanks for the offer of the private jet. However, you know, the reason you're inviting me out

• 1:53:23Brian Keating?

  is because of my writing, my thoughts, my, my, you know, contributions to education. And that very thing will be compromised if I accept the honor for which you're bestowed." So it was one of the greatest declinations of a, next, when I asked Freeman Dyson to endorse my first book, blurb my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, he said, "I have a policy of never endorsing any books. So I will not endorse your book because it would violate my policy." So Neil, thank you for your candor. Thank you for your contribution. To human understanding and championship of science. I always tell people you are, I mean, like it or not, you're the most famous scientist, you know, by virtue of of of this this, you know,

• 1:54:06Brian Keating?

  following that we call social media, which which I have noticed, by the way, I did notice that you mainly are posting about Merlin and I salute that actually for your mental health and mine and

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  Just in the last few weeks, yeah.

• 1:54:16Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I think I think that's wise, but you do communicate to millions. You're the you're certainly not shy about your your passions, but I think what you do is inspire people and your storytelling ability, your knowledge, your depth, but also your addition and how much you care about science. I appreciate you, Neil. Have a happy new year.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  For recognizing that it takes hard work. Some will say, oh, you're such a natural. They have no idea how much effort.

• 1:54:42Brian Keating?

  Okay, Neil, have a great holiday.

• 1:54:43Speaker 03

  All right, good. And to you as well.

• 1:54:45Brian Keating?

  I know if you love this conversation, you're gonna enjoy my conversation with Sam Harris from earlier this year. We got into a very, very passionate discussion of artificial intelligence, politics, and yes, even Elon Musk. So click here for that and click here for a playlist of my most popular episodes from recent weeks. And don't forget to subscribe.

• 1:55:06Speaker 04

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 1:55:21Speaker 05

  Sam's Club is the club for every holiday club. Guess who's joining the club this season? Walmart Plus. Yep. Sam's Club Plus membership now comes with Walmart Plus at no extra cost. Two memberships, one great price. Just 120 bucks a year can save you time and over $700. Want to get in on the membership duo of the century? Visit sam'sclub.com. Come join us. Sam's Club.