Part Two: Are We Smart Enough to Understand the Universe? Could Humans be Alien Pets? Neil deGrasse Tyson on Simulation Theory, Why Your God is too Small and How Science Will Guide Us into the Future

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why Your God Is Too Small & The Truth About Alien “Pets” What if humanity is just a 1% DNA shift away from being an alien science project? In this earth-shattering episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, world-renowned astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (Director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of StarTalk) joins us to deconstruct the greatest mysteries of existence. From simulation theory and the multiverse to near-death experiences (NDEs) and the Atheist vs. Spiritual debate, Neil goes unfiltered on why our current understanding of reality might be fundamentally limited by our own biology. Are we smart enough to understand the universe? We might be smarter after this conversation. In this episode, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson breaks down: - The Big Bang Theory Reunion: Neil shares behind-the-scenes stories from his cameos, his “beef” with Raj Koothrappali, and what it was like seeing “his people” represented on a hit sitcom - Alien “Zoo Hypothesis”: Why advanced civilizations might view humans as “toddlers” or keep us in a galactic aquarium - Simulation Theory: Why it is mathematically difficult to argue against the idea that we live in a computer-generated reality - “Small God” Problem: Why Neil believes modern religion doesn’t account for the true scale of the cosmos - 95% of Reality is Missing: Understanding the dark matter and dark energy mysteries that drive the universe - Can We Explain the Soul? Why physics is actually “easier” to solve than the human mind, body, and spirit - Limits of Intelligence: Neil’s fear that humans may not be “neurologically smart enough” to ever truly figure out the universe - NDEs & Psychedelics: A scientific look at what happens to the brain during mystical encounters - Quantum Physics & The Multiverse: Why parallel universes with different laws of physics are scientifically plausible and where we fit in the “Many-Worlds” theory - Spirituality vs. Science: Why Neil refuses to deny anyone’s spiritual experiences, even while offering a different scientific explanation for them - The Ultimate Mysteries: Specific questions about the cosmos that Neil deGrasse Tyson most wants to solve before he dies Are we alone? Are we simulated? Or are we just too small to see the truth? Watch this masterclass in the cosmic perspective and decide for yourself. Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:07Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with astrophysicist and the best science communicator in the universe, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. If you missed part one of our conversation, you're gonna want to check it out. He talks all about his appearances in The Big Bang Theory, including the scenes that he and I were not in together. He talks about spirituality, he talks about simulation theory, and we start to talk about ways to approach the universe from a scientific perspective that is also curious and skeptically open. We can't wait to share part two with you: near-death experiences, psychedelics, the multiverse, nonlinear nature of time, a little bit about the history of physics. We even ask him to weigh in on the Akashic records, mystical proof of a collective consciousness.

• 0:49Mayim Bialik?

  And also, he's gonna talk about the things that he most wants the answers to in the universe. We can't wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Break it down. There absolutely are people who... And I'm not just talking about sort of like, "Let's talk about aliens." I'm not talking about those people who I have a lot of respect for as well. But when we speak to, you know, people who study exoplanets, when we speak to people who study signatures and things like these things...

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Life signatures, yeah.

• 1:21Mayim Bialik?

  Correct. You know, is there... Is there a world, literally, in which...

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Say it right: "in a world."

• 1:30Mayim Bialik?

  In a world. Is there a world where there is a set of beings that have a tremendous amount more sophistication than we have already?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  I have no reason to doubt that. In fact, I lose sleep. People say, "What questions do you..." No, no. I lose sleep, not on what the next question might be. I lose sleep wondering, are we physiologically, neurologically, smart enough to ever actually figure out the universe? And my best example there is, okay, genetically, a close genetic relative, chimpanzee.

• 2:11Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  We're within 1, 1.5% identical DNA to a chimpanzee.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Now, if you are very human centric, you'll say, "What a difference that 1% makes." That 1%, we have philosophy and music and art and the James Webb Telescope. And all a chimp can do is stack boxes and reach a banana. Okay, or they can also choose a stick to extract termites, okay?

• 2:37Mayim Bialik?

  Well, they can also survive in the wild and raise babies and do many amazing, important things, but...

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Okay, but that would be survival as any animal would have the ability to survive.

• 2:48Mayim Bialik?

  They're very sophisticated.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  We're taking another level here and talking about intellect.

• 2:52Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, I'm partial to primates here.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Okay, being one ourselves, yeah?

• 2:56Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I don't even like you saying intellect. I think it's...

• 2:58Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, that's important.

• 3:00Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  I have to say intellect because it's fun. You asked me a question about beings that would make us, okay?

• 3:07Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  So I have to go there.

• 3:08Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  So, so, what a difference that 1% makes. Look what we have and look at the chimps. All right. By the way, every animal knows how to survive in the wild. So that, that is, I'm not going to use that to distinguish chimps.

• 3:20Mayim Bialik?

  No, but primates are sophisticated, besides Homo sapiens.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Okay, but that's...

• 3:24Mayim Bialik?

  So I'm like defending chimpanzees who are gonna be like, "Neil deGrasse Tyson didn't give us enough respect." You're right, we don't need to talk about it.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  That's not even the point.

• 3:31Mayim Bialik?

  Chimpanzees are awesome.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna, that's not where I'm even gonna land.

• 3:34Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  What I'm saying is, if our toddlers can do what that chimp can do, basically, not the survival part, but just the task part. All right? And by the way, you can have a conversation with a chimp and say, "Oh, bozo," whatever the chimp's name is, "I'm going into town, there are bananas on sale. If they're ripe, I'll bring some back." Okay, I assume you want some. What is the chimp here? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, bananas, blah, blah, blah. Okay, I gave the simplest human sentence that has a place, a time, a destination, and it's not, it's not gonna work with a chimp.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  And no matter how hard you try, I'm asserting this, I don't think it's a, it's a controversial claim. No matter how hard you try, you will never teach long division to a chimpanzee. Okay.

• 4:26Mayim Bialik?

  They won't write the Bible if you just give them a bunch of typewriters.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  There's enough chimps in it, yeah, yeah. Uh, okay. Eventually, yes. So, let's ask the question. Imagine a life form, be it on another planet, and who has 1.5% DNA in that vector beyond us that we have beyond the chimp. What would we look like to them? They, they're, they're, they're humanologists. So the people who study. They would like exhume Stephen Hawking, roll him forward and say, this human was slightly smarter than the rest because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head like little alien Timmy from preschool. Oh, Timmy, what are you?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Oh, mommy, daddy, I just composed a sonnet and I derived the principles of calculus. Isn't that cute? Let's put it with a magnet on the refrigerator door. So I lose sleep over this prospect. Where the most brilliant chimp does what our toddlers can do, the most brilliant human would do what us, and that's only 1.5%. Make them 5%, 10%. If they were 10%, Earth could be a, a literal aquarium terrarium that they constructed for their own amusement. And we would be their simulation in their snot-nosed kid's basement.

• 5:54Jonathan Cohen?

  It goes to the zoo hypothesis.

• 5:56Mayim Bialik?

  Well, the zoo hypothesis also presumes that whatever is more sophisticated than us, right? Like, as a lot of astrophysicists that we speak to about these things say, if there are aliens, they've been around for a lot. No, but I'm saying, I was.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  I thought I was special. Oh, okay. I'll get, I'll get over it, okay?

• 6:16Mayim Bialik?

  We can get you a plaque.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  You're my favorite neuroscientist. No, you're my second favorite. I know several neuroscientists.

• 6:21Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, I'm sure. We're a dime a dozen. No, but, but what, what many people say that we have spoken to about this, when, again, trying to speak from sort of a clinical perspective, is that if there are beings that have evolved, they've done so a long, long time ago in that they are likely.

• 6:45Mayim Bialik?

  Basically AI. Or they're utilizing AI, or they are essentially, I mean, I'm picturing like a room of computers because I was raised in the 80s, right? I'm picturing like, that's the level of activity we're up against.

• 7:01Jonathan Cohen?

  It's been described that they would have used technology to augment failing body parts or figured out ways to make material body parts last a lot longer.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. We would, we, we're toddlers to them. So, our most brilliant, so consider this. The, if the chimp, the chimp can't understand our simplest sentence. It means our most brilliant sentence might not be understandable to this next species because it is too trivial for them to consider having any value to them at all. And we are so into ourselves that such thinking is anathema to our egos. So, I'm perf, I'm all in on the, on smart aliens being out there somewhere. But there's still the laws of physics that matter.

• 7:51Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  You can't get around the universal, quote, "laws of physics."

• 7:55Mayim Bialik?

  The next place I'd like you to take us, I want to talk about, I don't just want to talk about the multiverse in the Marvel sense, which I personally love to talk about it in the Marvel sense. But I want you to walk us through, kind of from a quantum perspective. What does it mean to imagine that this reality, right? For lack of a better word. This reality is not the only reality.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Is it harder to think that way than what must have confronted people in the age of Copernicus? Who says, "Earth is just a planet among others."

• 8:42Speaker 01

  We are not the object of the creation. We orbit this other thing, just like Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn. And how devastating might that have been to you back then? To say there's another reality. In fact, in the year 1600, we're now 45 years, 50 years after Copernicus wrote. There's a monk. He's a monk, so he's religious. His name is Giordano Bruno, who had read Copernicus. And he said, wait a minute. If Earth is just a planet orbiting the sun,

• 9:23Speaker 01

  maybe the sun is just a star, just like these stars in the night sky. If that's the case, then these stars in the night sky would also have planets. If they have planets, they might also have life. For that, he was burned at the stake, upside down, naked, with a block hammered into his mouth, so that even in the afterlife, he could not utter such heresies. Now, you know what was his last words reportedly?

• 9:55Mayim Bialik?

  I don't like this story, Mr. Tuck.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  And one of his last words were, "Your god is too small." If your god is the god of Earth and life on Earth, and there's life elsewhere out there, and he's just proposing this, "Your god is too small." That's badass when they're about to prosecute you and burn you at the stake. So, to say, if, to have any trepidation at all about there being other universes, that's just in a long tradition of the understandings of astrophysics, taking you to the next level, of the next level to demote your ego.

• 10:38Mayim Bialik?

  Great, so I'm going to use an example.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Please.

• 10:41Mayim Bialik?

  We speak to a lot of very fascinating individuals who have had clinically cataloged near-death experiences. And we've, there are many, many features of these that I would love to ask you about. But in the time that we have, I want to focus in particular on this notion of there being... Many versions, right, of our lives and the ability to sort of slice through time, right? That there's some sort of quantum grid, right? And that we have the ability to, you know, time travel, right? In our experiences.

• 11:22Mayim Bialik?

  Can you speak a little bit to what that aspect of this adds to a conversation about the multiverse? Is time something that is progressing and that we are experiencing? Are there multiple timelines happening at the same time? Or is it some sort of loop where you can, as we've had people describe, as if you can slice through time like it's a seven-layer cake?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, a couple of things. And you started with near-death experiences. I just want to make one point about that. There's some experiments you can do that have never been fulfilled in their expectations. There are people who say they rise up out of their body and they see themselves down there, and they'll either rejoin it or whatever.

• 12:04Mayim Bialik?

  Well, it's a very common dissociative experience.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's dissociative, that's the word. Thank you. So, so what you do is, you have a truss over your deathbed, and you get someone to just write a simple phrase on the top facing upwards, like roses are red, something simple that doesn't require much. The person has an out-of-body experience, looks down and they say, "What's written up on that thing?" And if they can tell you what's there, then you've got some good evidence. I mean, these are the kinds of things we should be doing experiments on, rather than just taking people's testimonies about their personal experience.

• 12:40Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  So, that's the role of science in bringing eyewitness testimony to task.

• 12:46Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Knowing the frailty.

• 12:48Mayim Bialik?

  You don't always know when someone's gonna have an NDE, that's the thing.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Knowing the susceptibility of the human mind to interfere with objective reality in your recounting. So, so that's one aspect of this. The, uh...

• 13:06Speaker 01

  There's one story, I'm gonna retell this back, I grew up in New York City. There was some guy who had committed some crime and he was running away, he'd shot people. He was running away from the police and the police shot him.

• 13:17Mayim Bialik?

  Hmm.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Okay. And he fell to the ground, they rushed him to the hospital. And apparently, his brother was killed. Uh, in committing crimes, okay? So, they're trying to bring him back to life and then he's like near death. And he does come back to life and he recovers. And he remembered, and he remembers what happened while he was in this near-death experience. He saw his brother. And his brother said, "No, it's not your time yet." And his brother pushed him back to earth, he saw his brother up in heaven, pushed him back to earth. And then he recovered, okay?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  First of all. Why would he think either he or his brother were headed to heaven? That's my, that's my first comment, okay? They were both criminals, okay?

• 14:09Mayim Bialik?

  You don't know the rules of heaven, Neil deGrasse Tyson?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  I'm just, I'm just-

• 14:13Mayim Bialik?

  You don't know God!

• 14:15Speaker 01

  You're right, I, I'm just, I'm just putting it out there, okay?

• 14:18Mayim Bialik?

  This is your problem with this story?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  No, no, it was not.

• 14:22Mayim Bialik?

  Is that they use the word heaven?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 14:24Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, next.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Then, uh, and plus there was like bright lights there and everything. He's describing the operating room table with doctors trying to resuscitate him. Pushing down on his chest with bright lights above him. But his brain puts that into heaven and we hear his account. And especially for religious, you want that to be real. Because there's so much invested in the reality of that. Yet, the brain is, is a fungible place. So, when I just heard that whole explanation, these are doctors pumping on his chest and he's seeing operating room lights and that's what his heaven is, okay? So, with the near-death experiences, I want more science experiments to be done. Than just compiling people's accounts.

• 15:11Mayim Bialik?

  The thing that I do think is interesting, and I want you to bring it back to the multiverse also,

• 15:14Speaker 01

  That's next, yeah.

• 15:15Mayim Bialik?

  is when you have, you know, thousands of accounts, and I'm not saying this is proof of God, I'm not saying it's proof of heaven, nothing like that, but when you have thousands of accounts of people independently, who are all using very similar imagery, very similar experiences, similar notions, of course I have physiological explanations for why you would feel a narrowing, right, when you're near death, right, and you're having a cardiac event, right? But there's something interesting to me about what is in common with these stories and a lot of mystical traditions, and a lot of the early physicists who developed quantum theory, right, who identified that there is something still outside of the realm of what we are describing

• 15:58Mayim Bialik?

  that has a certain quality to it, and you know, Bohr, all these men, they had a phenomenal understanding of what we would describe as a mystical quantum dimension.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so, let me see what I can pick up, the pieces of what all that just you put on the table.

• 16:20Mayim Bialik?

  That's what my therapist says every week.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I mean, disentangle this spaghetti.

• 16:28Mayim Bialik?

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• 17:57Mayim Bialik?

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• 18:03Speaker 01

  So when we speak of a quantum realm, it is our realm. We just don't have immediate access to it because our senses don't take us there. But our particle accelerators do. And before that, our microscopes and then our particle accelerators. And other methods and tools of probing the reality in which we live. And it's not just the small, but also the large. There's the scale of the universe. That's no different in terms of a scientific frontier. Entering a realm that's outside of your own than seeing what's in the small. The small and the large. So that's not the same thing as a multiverse.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  No, multiverse is a whole other universe, not different realms within our universe. We experience this other realm, other realmness when we visit other cultures where they think and do things as we've never done them before. That's what, that's what makes fish out of water stories so compelling in movies. There's somebody, their world is different from the world they're immersed in. And, you know, I think of a fish who's only ever known water. And then they're fished out and then there's a hook in their lip. And they're looking around and there's like, they feel sunlight, like what the hell is that? Who's this creature holding me? And then the hook gets undone because they don't weigh enough to be kept. They get tossed back in the water.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  And now, they have to describe that experience to other fish. You gotta believe me, I was taken out of this dimension. And I was put in a whole other dimension. And it wasn't even wet. I didn't even know what not being wet means. And I felt this fire in the sky. And I don't even know what fire is. And it's an alien abduction story being communicated.

• 19:53Mayim Bialik?

  It's also a psychedelic or transcendental story you're telling.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Sure, except...

• 19:57Mayim Bialik?

  Where does that fit in?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Except psychedelic stories, your brain makes it all up. It's not... I had an argument with Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan so badly wanted me to take drugs.

• 20:11Mayim Bialik?

  You shouldn't feel so special, he wants everybody to take drugs.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  I said to him, "The human brain barely works as it is."

• 20:18Mayim Bialik?

  True.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Why is it that we have these books called optical illusions? Simple line drawings. Is it in the page? Is it out of... Is it longer? I don't know! Simple drawings are stumping your human mind. Our brain barely works. You now want to stir in chemicals of any kind? And assert that you now have a closer awareness of objective reality? I am yet to be convinced of that. You'll have an awareness of other things your brain is capable of? But as a scientist that cares about what is objectively true? And objectively true means you can do the experiment, you can do the experiment, and we all get the same answer. That's what objective truth is to me.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Your trip that you took in your mind is no less real to you than anything else you've experienced? But science is what allows us to disentangle what you experience and think is true from what actually happens and is true.

• 21:16Mayim Bialik?

  So take away the drugs, take away the drugs. Yogis, mystics, for thousands of years have placed themselves in a state where we actually know the science behind what's happening. And there's phenomenal studies on meditation, right? What is happening in... Who's it? The Tibetan monks? You can image them, right? What's happening? When you are able to lower your brainwaves, right? Right to a theta state and you are accessing.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  A theta state?

• 21:43Mayim Bialik?

  Well, yeah, like it's like, you know, you're getting to like theta state.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  You've got to have the Greek alphabet going there. I like my alpha beta state, but I'm not getting to theta.

• 21:50Mayim Bialik?

  No, but the notion is when you place your nervous system in such a way, right?

• 21:55Speaker 01

  In a state?

• 21:56Mayim Bialik?

  Correct. Your parasympathetic nerves, right? You are getting your vagus nerve on that. We know this is all like the vagus nerve is touching every organ system and lowering heart rate. It's doing all these amazing things.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Love me the vagus nerves.

• 22:09Mayim Bialik?

  When you get into this state, there are for thousands of years accounts and even now, people who describe with all due respect to Joe Rogan, pretty much the same kind of trippy, next level access to a higher consciousness, right? They're in touch with something bigger than themselves. Many people do experience a notion of love as this universal language, which yes, many people call God, but even in the absence of drugs, this is the chemistry of our brain. This is endogenous, right? So what is that mystical experience? And what can it tell us about? I mean, many people would say there's a universal consciousness and I've experienced it in meditation.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  It can tell us nothing about the objective reality in which that human being is embedded, because it's all happening inside their head. And now is that a narrow minded statement, like perhaps? But I have yet to see evidence. So for example, if, if entering that trance, the yogi says, the next law of quantum physics is, and they write it down and then we experiment, oh my gosh. Then I would be going into those trances.

• 23:18Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  I would say, show me, let's do that. But that has not happened.

• 23:23Mayim Bialik?

  No, what happens is other things about God and connection and purpose and right.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  They enter a spiritual realm.

• 23:29Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and for people who have trauma or people who are experiencing PTSD, it's very, apparently it's helpful.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  I'm not denying people their spiritual experiences, ever. I will not, I'm not that guy. But the, but the multiverse are actual other universes. And there are different varieties of multiverse. When the general relativity and quantum physics marry, it's, it's really a shotgun marriage because they don't know how to behave in the sandbox. Because quantum physics is the, the science of the small and relativity is the science of the large. And at the big bang, the large was small. So, does quantum phenomenon affect the entire universe? When it would otherwise just be affecting particles? That's, that's the fun, interesting frontier that is being explored there. So the two kinds of multiverse, well, there's more, but two basic kinds.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  One of them is, we're in an expanding universe. We're in this bubble, this, this, this, this horizon. In this spacetime, there could be, likely are other bubbles also expanding within this spacetime. Okay? But spacetime is expanding faster than these bubbles will overlap. We think. If they overlapped, who knows what that would look like? But the pockets of universes expanding within a one contingent spacetime. All of those universes would have the same laws of physics. Whereas, another kind of, as I've come to understand it, because I'm not the researcher on the frontier here. I give you the names of three or four trustworthy sources here. So, another kind is,

• 25:04Speaker 01

  quantum physics in that state pumps out an entire new universe. One this way, one that way. And quantum physics has quantum variations in physical properties. And so this one, the charge on the electron is slightly different. And this one, antimatter behaves a little differently. And maybe this universe, there are more planets than this. Or maybe there's no matter in that universe. And there's a more, so, so these variations would make it hard to imagine other life that we would have any kind of real relationship with. It's this other kind of multiverse where people think about, in that universe, I have a goatee and I'm evil. Or I married my childhood sweetheart rather than this, this deadbeat that I didn't know.

• 25:46Mayim Bialik?

  We don't need to get personal.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  So, so those are actual other realities and I don't want to confuse that with whatever might be going on in your head.

• 25:56Mayim Bialik?

  Correct.

• 25:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Just a button on this because some people use the simulation theory to describe an internal filtering that is impacting our external reality whereby in those meditative states you're dropping your filters, you're dropping some of the early childhood programming and you know how much is objective reality that we are all experiencing and how much is subjective based on the fact that you and I will look at something and no matter how similar we think it is, it will never be similar.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  My understanding of this, and I can confirm or deny it, is that at all times it's a mixture of the two. No matter what you've done with the state of your brain, it is a combination of your senses bringing reality to your mind, your mind receiving it, interpreting it, and giving you an understanding of that reality, and that understanding will not necessarily match the understanding provided by others. And that's why we needed science in the first place.

• 26:49Jonathan Cohen?

  100%. And what's interesting is that when people are meditating like that, the similarity of that experience seems to be universal in some way that is intriguing.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  You mean earthwide, not universal. You're talking to an astrophysicist. Okay, like Miss Universe was Miss Earth all along. Let's be clear about that.

• 27:10Jonathan Cohen?

  Fair enough.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so if meditative states are reproducible to some common experience, that signals to us the, the common origin of the human mind among us all. I mean, that, that, that has interesting biophysiological conclusions you might be able to draw, gaining access to these deeper, these deeper evolutionary states that we evolved past, but maybe they're still there lurking, either for our benefit or for our...

• 27:41Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I, I like to think of it more as a parallel evolution, right?

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:45Mayim Bialik?

  Meaning I don't think of it as having sort of a beginning, middle, end, but...

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Okay. Oh, no, oh, let me get back to the time element here.

• 27:51Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yes.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Love me some time.

• 27:53Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Okay. One of my favorite books, I'm not a big reader of novels, I read mostly nonfiction, so... Maybe there are plenty of other books that would enchant me the way this one did. I just have never read them.

• 28:05Mayim Bialik?

  Let's see, what is he gonna say?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  No, it's Slaughterhouse Five.

• 28:07Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, of course.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  By Kurt Vonnegut. Okay, yes, it was, it's partly, partly autobiographical. It was his time serving in the Second World War. In Dresden after it had been bombed by the Allied forces. So that's a, that's a backdrop, but what I, my takeaway was, he was abducted by aliens. I loved it. And he was put in a zoo, which, in a closed room, but, and that sounds like, I don't want that. But the aliens gave him access to the timeline of his life. So at any point, he could just rejoin his life and live that moment.

• 28:42Mayim Bialik?

  Shout out to Kurt Vonnegut.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Particularly that early. People weren't thinking, thinking storytelling in that way. And it was a brilliant mechanism for storytelling, rather than jumping back and forth, just as a-

• 28:55Mayim Bialik?

  I thought you were gonna say The Time Traveler's Wife, which is also excellent.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Oh. So, yeah, he could have just did it as a storytelling motif. You know, you go forward and backwards and then you confuse the reader and it's, it's passed off as brilliant writing. Uh, he just made it a literal timeline that you have access to. Our problem is that we are prisoners of the present. Forever transitioning between our inaccessible past and our unknowable future. If we had access to our timeline, that's, that'd be a fun game changer. The real, the real question would be, if you go back in time, can you, can you do a, an offshoot? And change what would have happened in that future? Or do you have to live it exactly the way it happened? And then you could just get bored with your life.

• 29:43Mayim Bialik?

  This is just a, a fun bonus question. Have you heard of the Akashic Records?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  I might have. It's, it's, it's ringing a bell, but give me more.

• 29:52Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know that I, that I subscribe to it, but there is a notion, and it's in many, many mystical traditions by various names. Indian traditions, there's several traditions for a very, very long time. Hundreds, if not thousands of years.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Indian means subcontinent?

• 30:07Mayim Bialik?

  Uh, like South Asia.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  South Asia, yeah.

• 30:10Mayim Bialik?

  I would never.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Excuse me.

• 30:13Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Excuse me.

• 30:14Mayim Bialik?

  The, the notion, and many in communities that you may not intersect with, but many in holistic, alternative, spiritual, mystical, yogic circles, believe that there, there is an accessible record of everyone that can be tapped into. It is everything that you have ever done.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  So it's a communal consciousness?

• 30:41Mayim Bialik?

  It is literally a collective consciousness. And there's a, an elaborate meditation that you go into to access it. And there are people who do readings for other people. You give them your information and they pull out things. I've, I mean, you have more experience with this because you've heard more about this than I have. But it's just interesting that these are places where I wish we had more information, right? About what are we actually accessing? And many people don't need the proof and they just say, I believe that it exists. And so it does. Those people are not scientists and God bless them.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Let me pose a challenge for you. There are four forces of nature.

• 31:20Mayim Bialik?

  Okay. I'm one of them, Neil.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that would make you be the fifth force of nature. Okay. So almost every part of our life experience unfolds from the electromagnetic force. It's what holds our molecules together, our thoughts, our interaction with light. Yes, of course, there's gravity. It holds us on earth. And there's the strong nuclear force that keeps our atoms as they are. But we don't experience atoms so much as we experience molecules. And molecules come together from the electromagnetic force. The, the charge on the electron. All right.

• 31:54Mayim Bialik?

  It's what holds us all together.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 31:57Mayim Bialik?

  Literally.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Correct. When LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, measured this gravitational wave created by the collision of two black holes in a galaxy long ago.

• 32:14Mayim Bialik?

  Far, far away.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Far, far away. This washed over the experiment specifically, exquisitely designed to detect a ripple in the fabric of space and time. It had to be so sensitive. It could detect a, a, a change in the position equal to a hundredth the diameter of an atomic nucleus.

• 32:42Mayim Bialik?

  It's not even a number.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. If you have powers of telepathy, of mind reading, of whatever, that's gonna show up in that experiment. Because we are monitoring the behavior of all matter, energy, uh, that is interacting with other matter and energy. So, if we don't see that.

• 33:14Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  I'm giving very low confidence that you're actually doing anything.

• 33:19Mayim Bialik?

  Interesting. It's very interesting.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Let me tell you how, how sensitive it is. If someone is walking a half a mile down the street, it'll send a vibration into the earth that they could detect. So they, they, everybody's on shutdown when they're doing the experiment. And there's some things they can't avoid, like the gurgling of the earth or the clouds. So they model that and then they subtract it out from, from the data. So that's how precise science is. And earlier on, you said, "Science is cocky. They just think they understand it." What we do understand, we're justifiably cocky. But on the frontier where we don't understand, we better be humble. Otherwise, you're just an asshole. Okay? And I will tell you, we don't know, I'll humbly say, we don't know dark matter, dark energy.

• 34:02Mayim Bialik?

  Kendrick said, "Sit down, be humble."

• 34:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Tell us some of the things that you don't know, that are on the frontier, that are, are baffling.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Oh, it's not just what I don't know, it's what is not known.

• 34:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  If it's just me, then I'll just research it and I'm, alright? No, for me, the top, the four biggest questions are, what is dark matter? We can measure it, we don't know what's causing it. What is dark energy? We can measure it, we don't, so it's real. It's no, we didn't just make this up. It's a measurement. Dark energy, we don't know what that is. Combine those together, it is 95% of what is driving the universe. Everything we know, love about chemistry, biology, physics, engineering. It's in four or five percent of what is happening in the universe. I want to know how we got from organic molecules, which nature makes freely and easily, to self-replicating life.

• 34:52Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best. It's the best question.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 34:54Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  I want to know what was around before the Big Bang.

• 34:57Mayim Bialik?

  I know.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  I want to know, I want to know,

• 35:02Speaker 01

  are humans smart enough to figure out the universe? Or are we clever enough to just step on the rung in the ladder put there by people that came before us? And we slowly ascend the wall. No one person had that brilliance. I can't invent calculus. I'm not smart enough. But Isaac Newton did. I'm stepping on his shoulders, using the calculus to make another advance. Maybe we can increment our ways to something that the alien toddler could have just done trivially.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  So, so maybe that is how we would figure out the universe. I don't know, but that's, for me, that's a big question. For me, those are my big, five biggest questions.

• 35:44Mayim Bialik?

  So I want to, I want to ask something about what was before the Big Bang? Because the answer to this, and I am a person who comes from a religious and spiritual tradition, where we talk a lot about this, and our Kabbalistic text delves into things that even the Old Testament does not. And many of them relate to physics, and many of them relate to...

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Are you a Kabbalist? Is that...

• 36:06Mayim Bialik?

  I'm not a Kabbalist, but I, I value our text. Yes.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Wasn't, uh, who else, uh, Madonna was a Kabbalist, wasn't she?

• 36:13Mayim Bialik?

  Madonna studied at a, at a facility that teaches Kabbalah. But in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in our tradition, it's not something...

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Our is Jewish tradition.

• 36:23Mayim Bialik?

  Correct. In the Jewish tradition, it's not something that is studied lightly. It's an intellectual and kind of, um, specific religious pursuit. But, one of the things that is talked about is that what was...

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Plus, being named Madonna kind of disqualifies her.

• 36:37Mayim Bialik?

  No, it's, it's fine. We have rules.

• 36:41Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that many of us talk about in terms of... What came before is what came before is something that we don't get to quantify. And we don't get to know it. And we don't get to calculate it. And it doesn't mean that it didn't exist. And doesn't mean that we don't believe in it. But it's something that is beyond the realms of the understanding we have. That is a scientific approach.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 37:10Mayim Bialik?

  Are you comfortable with that kind of uncertainty in general?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  As a scientist.

• 37:15Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  In fact, there's a poem by the the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Wrote a book called Letters to a Young. Oh, oh, give me some love there. All right. Letters to a Young Poet.

• 37:29Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  And there's a short poem, and I'm embarrassed that it's short enough, I should have just memorized it. But I was never that guy, though, to who memorized poems. But there's a line that says, be at peace with all that stirs within your heart.

• 37:46Mayim Bialik?

  That's right.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Learn to love the questions themselves. So a scientist on the frontier has to be in that state. Otherwise, you will force answers before their time, before you have sufficient data. And you will derail the pure curiosity that is what got you to be a scientist in the first place. So I'm completely comfortable saying, I don't know, it was around before the Big Bang. And like I said, we have top people working on it. And it's when you say, it's gotta be something, it was God, okay. But I'm not, I'm still in the unknown part.

• 38:24Mayim Bialik?

  That's not your business, meaning it's you're not in the business of that.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  I'm in the business of figuring out the unknown.

• 38:32Mayim Bialik?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  And as a result, the unknown does not bring me discomfort, it brings me excitement.

• 38:38Mayim Bialik?

  I love that.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  It is, it is the unknown that has me jump out of bed each day and say, what's the next unknown that needs my attention?

• 38:46Jonathan Cohen?

  You mentioned that what does keep you up at night is that potentially there's a civilization that could be, if they are out there, 1%, 5% more than.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Not specifically, that's surely the case. What keeps me up at night is, are we smart enough to figure out the universe? Because that affects my profession.

• 39:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Am I, are we just? You know, bounding along, touching the toenail of an elephant with no hope of ever seeing the elephant. And here we are coming up with hypotheses of what the larger truth is. And that's what keeps me up at night. Not if there's smarter aliens. I'm good with that. And if they find us and they want to make us their pet, I'm okay with that, too. No, because the thing about it, how do you treat your pet? Better than you're treating the homeless person who you just stepped over to get to your office.

• 39:32Mayim Bialik?

  That's kind of judging.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but am I wrong?

• 39:36Mayim Bialik?

  I bought a homeless man a food meal the other day.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yes, but you'd invite him into your home and feed him and shower him the way you would take a stray pet. So we treat our pets better than we treat stranger humans who are strangers to us.

• 39:48Jonathan Cohen?

  The title for this episode is, hopefully humanity will become the pets of aliens.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  That's the best we might be able to hope for. Otherwise, it won't bode well for us.

• 39:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Is the universe going to end and should we be concerned that it is slowly imploding?

• 40:02Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, if it does end, we won't know about it.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Well, all of our data, all of our data tell us that we're on a one-way expansion trip. And just deal with it. It's not going to recycle. You know, it's philosophically unsettling because if it was a recycling universe, that gets rid of the origin question. It's just always been recycling.

• 40:23Mayim Bialik?

  It was, is, and always will be.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 40:25Mayim Bialik?

  But Earth, we're not doing so great with our planet, but she'll be fine. We won't.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Oh, right, right.

• 40:31Mayim Bialik?

  We'll kill ourselves off.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  People, I hadn't heard Earth genderized in quite some time. So I had to get through that sentence. Sorry. Yes, she will do just fine.

• 40:42Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Mother Earth, if we're going to go there, Mother Earth. When people say, save Earth, no. Earth is going to be here before, during, and after anything we do to it. It's save life on Earth. And not even save humans, save life on Earth. Our survival depends on the survival of the biosphere in which we're embedded.

• 41:02Mayim Bialik?

  Which we're already destroying.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 41:04Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 41:06Mayim Bialik?

  That was uplifting.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Okay, you want me to leave you uplifting though?

• 41:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's get a little hope for the end. What do you want people to take away and implement into their daily lives about all the topics that we talked about, but particularly our place in the universe and having excitement about the unknown?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm biased here, but I'm not ashamed of this bias.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  That of anything humans have ever invented. Science may be uniquely capable. Uniquely capable of giving us access to our understanding of our place in the universe and secure pathways into our future to assure our health, our wealth, and our security. The extent to which people either are in denial of science or reject it, that will be the unraveling of an informed civilization. And we might as well just turn around and march straight back into the caves because that's where we're gonna end up without it.

• 42:12Mayim Bialik?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson, such an honor to have you here and such a pleasure to to talk about all these things and we hope we get more time with you in the future.

• 42:24Jonathan Cohen?

  Your god is too small.

• 42:27Mayim Bialik?

  My universe is too small, but at least it's expanding.

• 42:30Jonathan Cohen?

  That was probably one of my favorite stories, also terrifying.

• 42:33Mayim Bialik?

  There's also things that he says that it's like it sounds like they're poems that he's got. Like, does he rehearse them in front of a mirror?

• 42:40Jonathan Cohen?

  I would like to see inside of his brain how many folds he has.

• 42:44Mayim Bialik?

  Please.

• 42:46Jonathan Cohen?

  They said that Einstein had a lot of folds.

• 42:48Mayim Bialik?

  You think he's got a lot of folds?

• 42:49Jonathan Cohen?

  Where is he keeping all that information?

• 42:53Jonathan Cohen?

  Does he not have any song lyrics in there?

• 42:55Mayim Bialik?

  I don't think he's got, he doesn't have one song lyric.

• 42:58Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't know that that's true.

• 42:59Mayim Bialik?

  Did anyone notice the pattern on his shirt? It looks like he's a rock and roller, but I don't think he's got any song lyrics in there.

• 43:04Jonathan Cohen?

  You should have seen him walk in. He walked in with his hat and his skulls on his shirt.

• 43:08Mayim Bialik?

  Yep, he didn't know that he had skulls on his shirt when he purchased it. So it's like a little bit of a deep cut if you're watching this episode. Can you? Pick up the fact that those are skulls.

• 43:17Jonathan Cohen?

  He's such a fan of the Big Bang Theory, it's unbelievable.

• 43:20Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I think what he said is very true, that, you know, that that was so special to have a show about this aspect of, you know, culture and our society. You know, I had never seen it when I auditioned for it, and so I remember when I, when I kind of learned about it, I said, oh, these are the kind of people that I go to grad school with. These are all the people that I hang out with on the daily when you're in grad school.

• 43:40Jonathan Cohen?

  I feel like my point about the mind-body connection was slightly misset up. Meaning, I wasn't attacking science, I was just trying to acknowledge that there are places, while the scientific method is our best way at understanding things, there are certain aspects that we cannot study and/or that have fallen short, and when we've questioned people, they're so quick to dismiss any type of questioning in defense of what has been said to be true, and what he said, which I appreciated, is that many of the things that have been said to be true were not tested. But then they're still defended as, this is what the science says, and there's no reason to disbelieve that.

• 44:23Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I think there's a couple of things, like, truth be told, if I knew you wanted to bring that angle up, I would have presented a more cohesive, we could have talked about Neil Theist, like, I would have, I just, I couldn't, I couldn't pick it out of the air. The Gabor Maté one, I think, is significant because, you know, no one would have thought there's a profile for people who get cancer, right? Like, it was sacrilege to think something like that, right? Or to talk about immune properties and how they relate to environmental stressors, you know. He's not in the realm of talking about intergenerational trauma, right? It's not what I would go to him for.

• 44:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Or medicine per se, he's not, and he acknowledges the complexity of trying to study both psychology and physiology.

• 45:06Mayim Bialik?

  There's a couple of issues I have with the fact that we are, let's say, 1% different from chimps, and what would someone 1% more, you know, than us look like? Because that's assuming that it's on some sort of like linear and like exponential, like, the scale doesn't have to be the same, but anyway, I didn't want to get into that with him, but I understand. The point, and I actually, I thought he'd be like, there's no aliens, that's not a thing. And I was pleasantly surprised that what he said was the simulation is kind of stacked like that in fractals. And, you know, Valerie mentioned, there's literally a couple Black Mirror episodes specifically about that. But also this notion that, yeah, there's gotta be something a lot more intelligent than us to be observing us.

• 45:50Mayim Bialik?

  And that's why he doesn't entertain this notion of like, they're visiting us and like, laser lights and like, abductions. That's a different conversation.

• 45:57Jonathan Cohen?

  The other thing that I had an issue with was somewhat of an oversimplification of the caveman's lifespan.

• 46:08Mayim Bialik?

  I thought of that too. Like, we're not gonna live forever, there's a ceiling effect to how long we're gonna live.

• 46:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, and...

• 46:14Mayim Bialik?

  Or not.

• 46:15Jonathan Cohen?

  The idea that it was clean water and everything was organic.

• 46:19Mayim Bialik?

  I didn't like that.

• 46:20Jonathan Cohen?

  We didn't have enough access to food, so farming, of course, increased the proliferation of food and increased the fact that we could have access to food regularly.

• 46:30Mayim Bialik?

  Also, like, no one knew about nutrition, also.

• 46:34Jonathan Cohen?

  We didn't have shelter, so, like, I think there's, you know, when we say that science has extended our lifespan, no one is arguing that whatsoever. Of course, medical interventions, the fact that we have sanitation, the fact that we have indoor plumbing.

• 46:47Mayim Bialik?

  Wash your hands before you stick them in a body.

• 46:49Jonathan Cohen?

  The fact that we have shelters now, that we're not living in caves, like...

• 46:53Mayim Bialik?

  Caves can be very protected.

• 46:55Jonathan Cohen?

  There are so many advancements in modern civilization that, of course, have...

• 46:59Mayim Bialik?

  Correct.

• 47:00Jonathan Cohen?

  So I feel like it's a mixed metaphor.

• 47:02Mayim Bialik?

  I agree.

• 47:03Jonathan Cohen?

  It's like, oh, it's not that, oh, we should eat organic.

• 47:05Mayim Bialik?

  I agree. I also, and I really don't know why I'm defending chimpanzees this way.

• 47:09Jonathan Cohen?

  You're getting really...

• 47:10Mayim Bialik?

  I got really fired up. Because the notion that if you put a chimpanzee in a human laboratory and you're like, "Do you understand what I'm saying?", and the chimpanzee will not, that doesn't mean they're not int... It doesn't mean they don't have intelligence or capacity. It's not a measurable intellectual capability, but chimpanzees are incredibly sophisticated. Also, they live in very, very elaborate social groups with very, you know, intricate rules. They use tools, they pass down information. I mean, like, that's a very, very... Highly evolved, beautiful. But yes, that's true. They don't speak.

• 47:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Besides the people who are on the TV show Naked and Afraid, who get sent out into the wilderness to try and survive.

• 47:54Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 47:55Jonathan Cohen?

  You know, he says, "Oh, we can all survive." No, we can't. If I sent 99% of city dwellers out into the wilderness and said...

• 48:04Mayim Bialik?

  They'd be dead in an hour.

• 48:05Jonathan Cohen?

  "Good luck. You're not faring so well."

• 48:08Mayim Bialik?

  That's true.

• 48:09Jonathan Cohen?

  That's been bred out of us. We've lost that.

• 48:11Mayim Bialik?

  Well, but, but, you know, he's talking about ingenuity and, and look, I also don't think that spoken language is the only measure of intelligence. We know that there are a lot of different kinds of intelligence. We know that... I mean, even Stephen Hawking, the example that he used, right? Used a computer to communicate, you know, coupled with eye movements and all these, you know. So I, I don't think he was speaking with such, you know, he wasn't painting with such a broad brush, but just, again, I don't know why I'm defending the chimpanzees, but I am.

• 48:37Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm always struck by the dark matter, dark energy conversation.

• 48:40Mayim Bialik?

  I wish we had more time to get to it with him.

• 48:43Jonathan Cohen?

  Like, the biggest problem in science is that 95% of what makes up our universe is unknown? Is no one else troubled by that?

• 48:52Mayim Bialik?

  I think it's a lot more troubling than people let on. I mean, even the fact that when you look at something, you think you're seeing the thing. I'm gonna just use this glass. I think when I look at this, like, I see a glass. And if you were to ask me to describe this glass, I'd be like, "Oh, well, it looks like this, and here's the diameter, and oh, there's this beveling, and here's the color, right? This is the fluid that's in it that I can perceive and all these things." That's actually, if you pull, if you either pull back or zoom in, that's not what this is, right? This is the representation that's been presented upside down on the back of my eye, on the retina, which...

• 49:33Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't even know what you've, what you see there. I could be seeing something totally different.

• 49:38Mayim Bialik?

  We would probably describe this glass similarly.

• 49:41Jonathan Cohen?

  But our words could be used to be different, but you could actually be seeing something fairly...

• 49:47Mayim Bialik?

  That's a different point about the limits of human language, but I'm even talking about individual perception.

• 49:52Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Mayim Bialik?

  This is an object, right, that is made up of molecules, and it's absorbing everything from the color spectrum, except what I'm seeing, right? So if you were to be an alien from another planet, if you were to be an outside observer, that's... this is actually not what things look like. This is what our brains compute from the data that we can perceive that is processed by the brain that we have. That's what we see. That's why when people talk about that this is just a projection, right? It's projected onto a screen. The world is wearing a mask, right? That's what all this is.

• 50:37Jonathan Cohen?

  You don't actually exist.

• 50:39Mayim Bialik?

  None of us exist.

• 50:40Jonathan Cohen?

  You are a figment of my imagination sitting in the chair across from me?

• 50:45Mayim Bialik?

  Does my hair look better than I perceive it?

• 50:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Put here by an alien toddler in his terrarium in the simulation that I was created in.

• 50:56Mayim Bialik?

  And we'll tap into the Akashic records to have access to it all.

• 51:00Jonathan Cohen?

  Seems about right. If you want more of this type of fun, follow us on Substack. MyMBAlex Breakdown on Substack, where we release content exploring these topics in depth and answer listeners and community members' questions. So come on over and check it out.

• 51:15Mayim Bialik?

  From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.