Freakonomics, with Stephen J. Dubner

Private vs public space exploration, asteroid mining, artificial intelligence, universal healthcare, and more – Neil Tyson explores the stochastic world of economics with Stephen J. Dubner, author of Freakonomics and host of Freakonomics Radio, and first-time comic co-host James Altucher. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/freakonomics-with-stephen-j-dubner/ Photo Credit: StarTalk.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a personal astrophysicist, coming to you from my office at the Hayden Planetarium, right here at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Today is a cosmic queries edition of StarTalk, and we will focus on economics, not just any kind of economics, Freakonomics. We have a special guest, Stephen Dubner. Stephen, welcome.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me first introduce my co-host.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Please.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First-time co-host.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  First time.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James Altucher. And so, James, you are host of a podcast.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 1:00Speaker 02

  One you've been on.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, when I asked you the name of the podcast, I learned it's the James Altucher Podcast.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm very egotistical. I need my name everywhere.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everywhere.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Or I forget it. I think I'm getting older now, and I start to forget things.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone is getting older at all times. So Stephen, so Freakonomics, you have a podcast yourself.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  I do. It's called Freakonomics Radio.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Freakonomics Radio. And so the book just took over your life, huh?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  It did, yeah. I liked writing books a great deal.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  But, but I, you know, interviewing people, which is, I mean, I'm a writer. I've been interviewing people forever. I always felt bad about wasting the 95% of the conversation, you know? When you interview someone for a magazine article or for a book, you'd use the choicest bits. So I really wanted to have an interview show, so Freakonomics Radio is kind of a blend.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He did this show to put in all the stuff that is not choice.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what he just said.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, but here's the thing, here's the thing. Let me ask you this, when you get written about-

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're not, remember, you're not the interviewer here.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But go on, I'll let this one slide, go on.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  This is a tick.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go on.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I like to ask the question, but when you get written about, let's say the New York Times writes an article about your vanity fair or something, and you read the things that you say, does that feel like a good representation of you? That's my question for you.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course not.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say two profiles out of a hundred that I've read accurately capture-

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -who and what I am.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  So I would argue that mathematically, there's a very obvious reason for that verity, which is that most articles have a little bit of the talker and a lot of the writer. So there's a bunch of narrative around a little quote. A podcast, or radio show, or interview show, whatever style it is-

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's done well.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  -can flip that.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And then, the listener, or the reader, whatever, the listener actually has what I feel is a truer experience of what the smart person you're interviewing has to say, and I like that.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just call himself the smart person on that.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Right, right. No, I'm being the opposite, I'm the dumb person.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  He is the smart person. But, but you bring up an interesting point, which is that if you, the subject you know best is yourself, and if most of the articles written about you, you see are 98% wrong, that does suggest that every other article that we assume is correct is probably 98% wrong.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's that famous adage, every article is correct, except the one that you know something about.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. So fake news is actually probably the average news story.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, James, we've solicited questions from our fanbase-

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've got them, I've never seen them.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  You've never seen them.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think Steven's ever seen them.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  He's definitely not.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  I know I haven't, I'm not sure you have it, but I'm gonna believe you, because I believe everything else you've told me earlier.

• 3:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you have?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  All right, I'm gonna ask a question.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James, give it to me.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  So, this is related probably to a tweet you did recently, but Daniel J. Saltzman on Instagram says, "What is the economics of meteor slash asteroid mining? If you're able to bring back a huge meteor of diamonds, for example, wouldn't that immediately devalue the commodity?"

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Which is interesting.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so-

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Well, that's a particularly interesting, so the-

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me quantify this.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Please.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we have, there's, there's more gold on an average metallic asteroid than has ever been mined in the history of the world.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's more water on a comet, on a typical comet, than all humans who have ever been born have ever drank. So, the resources of the universe, of our own backyard, our solar system, are extraordinary given what we're fighting over here on Earth-

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -to gain access to. So, so, it's wrong, I presume?

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We know it's wrong to say here's the value of that resource using today's dollars on earth. Because you're right, if you make a significant change in the quantity of a freely traded resource that is made available, that changes the economics of it. So what would you see as the future if I bring down scads of gold to earth?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  So it's interesting.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there a freakonomical angle to that?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  So you change it to gold. So yeah, I would say.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, gold, just to take a benchmark.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  No, well, gold is a. There's an actual market for gold. Gold is a good example because there's an actual market for it.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A free market for it, unlike diamonds, which is a controlled market, yeah.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Well, not only is diamonds a controlled market, but diamonds are not particularly rare. And they're not, I mean, there are those who argue that they are more beautiful, that their that their value is somehow intrinsic, but most people would say that that's not the case. There was a market that was created by a kind of very, very well-done monopolistic endeavor. So really, I would love to see the asteroid full of diamonds brought down just to break up the diamond cartel, which has convinced every. Why are you so mean? Like, why do you?

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He doesn't like cartel.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  I don't like, I don't like cartel.

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Diamonds have a cartel, so that they don't represent a free market. By the way, we, there are places in the universe that also have scads of diamonds, but not large pre-cut.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're very tiny, or some of them are almost microscopic. They serve the industrial marketplace for diamonds. But tell me about gold. I bring, I bring Barnes' worth of gold to earth. What happens?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it changes, it changes a lot in ways that I can't even begin to imagine. Anyone that's even kind of pretending to work off a gold reserve idea, which we don't work off an actual gold reserve.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We used to, I guess.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  We used to, but now we work kind of off the idea a bit. No, it's a precious metal that would change the, I, so I could be.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it precious because it's rare, rare, or is it precious because it's, it's useful?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. Gold historically, yeah, it's pretty useful. It's soft, it's beautiful, etc. But silver has all the same uses, right?

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, well, gold is softer than silver.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Silver is also, is silver not antimicrobial too, or can it be? It is, that's why it's silverware.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think you make compounds that would be antimicrobial.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  But I would be more interested in water personally because gold, you know, gold has functions and uses and it's beautiful and functional. Diamonds, you know, mostly a decorative thing, but water supply, so that's awesome. So I would be, so if we're starting to talk about asteroid mining or resource mining, then yes, I am, it would.

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're going for the water.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I would go for any resource that is necessarily consumed by everybody on Earth way ahead of gold and diamonds. So for instance, I've learned recently, you probably know about this, I don't know anything about it, other than that satellite imagery now allows us to map out global water supply in aquifers that we never used to be able to do. So that's really useful because.

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's multi-spectral imagery, you get different.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  That's what I was gonna say, multi-spectral imagery.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  So the, the notion of asteroid mining or resource mining, I think is revolutionary, generally fantastic. And most so because it would help put resources in the power of the global citizenry as opposed to the cartels or whatever that have done a pretty good job of monopolizing resources.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James, he's pretty socialistic there.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's not, it's not quite, it's not quite so obvious because first off, there would be an enormous amount of resources required to get to the asteroid mine.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And bring it back for sure. And take them down to the atmosphere.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Second, gold's primary use was because it was rare, it became a currency because it was hard to mine. But, so it will in, in the long run, you know, affect the price downwards, supply and demand. But I think the resources would be so difficult to get it, it would be a long time.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is why what all the space resource people are talking about, if you're gonna get it in space, it's to deliver to some other location in space.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where there's a colony or there is a station getting built. Because if you're building something in space and you don't have to launch it from Earth. Then just build factories in space and take all of your raw materials and you can give them bottles of water.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  This would be like, this would be like Trump Hotel on Mars. If it's like, if he finds gold and then they make like a whole.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He can move that gold to his hotel and gild everything in his hotel.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Right, like Trump Mars would be amazing.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trump Mars would have gilded toilet seats.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  What kind of resources are most easily moved from out there to here? Any?

• 9:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it doesn't matter. All that matters is weight. To accelerate it, to slow it down, to move it from one point in space to another. So, it could be a pound of gold or a pound of water. It'll cost you the same to move the thing around the solar system. And depending on where it is in the asteroid, the mining effort would be the same. Right? If it's, you know, a few feet down or half a mile down in the asteroid, that's effort.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  So liquid, solid gas, none of that matters, just weight.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's not gonna be liquid out there, but it'll just be the weight. Yeah, the state of the matter doesn't. Yeah, you'd be bringing down ice.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  You can't have liquid gold like in the center of an asteroid?

• 9:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. You'd want to, you'd need high pressure temperature and you're not getting that in the center of an asteroid. So, here's the thing. So, gold, here's the problem. Yeah, gold is very heavy. It's one of the densest known things. When we think of, when we joke about dense things, we talk about lead, right? You got a lead foot, you're driving fast on the highway. Lead is nothing compared with the platinum group elements. Osmium, platinum, gold, right? These, so, so osmium is the densest of all metals. And so one cubic foot of that weighs, last I checked, I calculated this in middle school, I remember, 1,800 pounds. Gold, just slightly less than that. Might come in maybe 1,600, 1,700 pounds. So let me add something that I think you left out here.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That just because there's a lot of it, doesn't mean it would become as devalued as you think. Because there are uses. That previously are un- are not economically tenable. Right. That then become economically tenable and the demand for that use goes up. Fair enough. What's a use? A use. Uh, gold is one of the highest, um, conducting metals. Conduct electricity like better than copper. Hmm. Okay, so in terms of electrical conductivity. And, uh, another use is it can, is highly malleable. So that's why you have gilt, gold gilded statues and, and so there might be some need

• 11:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to hammer gold thin and layer it onto something out there that could benefit from that fact. Gold hardly ever corrodes. If you need highly non-corrosive material. The famous Voyager record that was sent into space that contained messages and sounds from Earth. That was a gold record. Gold record. It would last a billion years. So what do you have, um, that's optimal? Someone could invent a new rea- a new reason to use gold. Right. And that would completely transform the marketplace. So what about, um, battery storage or energy storage? Here's one. So, uh, aluminum is a modern element. It was not known to the ancients. As common as it is today, you think they've always not, no. It was locked up in bauxite. The, the ore that, who knew that aluminum was a thing to take out of it.

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When aluminum was extracted, you know what the first person said after that? That's the end of the silver market. Hmm. Because you can make silver out of it. Wow. For, for less and there's more of it, right? Although the, the, the, the cost, economic as well as environmental cost of extracting it is high. But not anymore. But anyhow, uh, we, we've gotten better at it. My point is, once aluminum rose up, it was like, oh, it's light and it's strong. We can make airplanes out of it. All of a sudden you can do things that you never thought you could do before. Do you remember, uh, do you remember, uh, Howard Hughes's famous airplane? It was on display in Los Angeles. Something. This is Bruce Goose. You know why it's called Bruce Goose? Made of wood, I think. It's made of wood. Cause wood is light. Right.

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, before a lot of aluminum was available. And I always wonder if we never discovered aluminum, what would we be making planes out of? Would we be making them out of wood? I don't know. Would we have made so many planes?

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'd all be flying a lot less if, uh...

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably is my guess. Yeah. Yeah, so the existence of a single element and its properties, unique on the periodic table.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Birthed entire economic industries that then created a demand far above what you would ever declare to be its value as a cherished object to put on your shelf.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  It makes me want to ask you if you know anything about, I know nothing about this. So there's silicon chips, right? So we've been doing, doing well with it, but what about organic semiconductors? You know anything about that and the stuff that's used in those and whether, is that a difficult problem to solve, you know?

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if it's organic, it's made of the most common ingredients in the universe.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm not worried about rarity there.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Right, but, but apparently they're, apparently we haven't yet found the ones that are cheap and pliable enough, that conduct well enough.

• 13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so then, that either we will, and then that'll transform the industry, or we won't, and it's just a failed.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  But we don't need any asteroids for that.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All the elements on asteroids are on Earth. It's just in greater abundance.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  So what should we be?

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the rare Earth elements, they're on asteroids.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  But they're rare here. Except in China.

• 13:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except in China. They're common in China. China has most of the rare Earth elements within their borders.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Which, by the way, is used heavily by the semiconductor industry.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, indeed.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  All right, another question.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another question. Give it to me.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  It's from Aric Subramaniam on Instagram. Are there ways to notice the onset of another recession? Is recession an inevitable event happening in cycles?

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  And actually, I'm curious about your answer first.

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not going to get the answer to that until we return on StarTalk.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. Cosmic queries, economics, not just any kind of economics. The Stephen Dubner kind. Freakonomics. And I got James Altucher.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Altucher.

• 15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Altucher.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  I can't even say it.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James, first timer.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. When he speaks, you're just listening. You're supposed to interrupt him and tell him why he's...

• 15:26Speaker 02

  He's very hard to interrupt. I feel he's been interrupting. We've been doing podcasts for 20 years. I can't interrupt this guy.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we entered the commercial break with a question about... Read the question again, so we can have it.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  "Are there ways to notice the onset of another recession? Is recession an inevitable event happening in cycles?"

• 15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me broaden... Who asked that question?

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Arik Suranyam from Instagram. I feel, by the way, I get my cadence... Your cadence all of a sudden when I'm talking, like, you know, "Are there ways to notice the onset of another recession?"

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that how I speak? I don't even think...

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Well, I don't speak like that.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Somebody in the house is speaking that way. All right. So, let me broaden that by saying, why should economics have cycles at all? Why isn't it just a straight line? Why there's boom and bust? Why? Why?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Well, by the way, does... Is there such a thing as cycles? I don't necessarily believe cycles is a thing in reality.

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me not even use that word. Why do things go up and down?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, the shortest answer I could give is because...

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me a Freakonomics answer.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Because the world is stochastic. It just is, right? Um, and then if you look at the economy... So, to answer the question...

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't the point of the Federal Reserve to modulate?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The stochasticity?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Well, imagine how less modulated it would be if there was no effect.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, stochastic to define for those who... Not everyone knows the definition of that word.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Uh, random-ish, I would say.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yes.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Right?

• 16:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If something's stochastic, it's, uh... It can be sort of predictably random and analytically random.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Well, it's not completely, it's not, the reason economics is a science, it's not completely random. There's some things you can predict. You guys do it in Freakonomics.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  It's nice of you to say that economics is a science, because there are those who'd argue that it's not. It's a social science, technically.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  But in answer to the, so the-

• 17:18Speaker 02

  People are friendlier.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  The question specifically about can a recession be predicted, so like, you know, there's, there's one saying that economists have predicted like eighteen of the last three recessions, right?

• 17:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a great line.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  So, there is such a thing, there's a technical definition of a recession, which has to do with, you know, a decrease in, is it employment? Is it, you would know that too. But the National Bureau of Economic Research declares a recession.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  It's a decline in GDP.

• 17:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But James would know that because he has prior history.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  He does have prior history.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  We all have prior history of recessions.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fess up. No, fess up. You're kind of, so, before you became a comedian-

• 17:55Speaker 02

  I was a hedge fund manager.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hedge fund manager.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  And I was a hedge fund manager through two recessions.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you weren't making enough money, so you said, "I'm going to be a-"

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I made enough money. That's why I could be a comedian.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was gonna make a joke about that. You totally messed up my whole joke.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  I get it, I get it now.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you see the joke coming?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  I, I didn't.

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't make enough money as a hedge fund manager, so you decided to take up comedy?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Right, because, because performing in front of twelve people on a Monday night-

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, at cocktail tables.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Is so lucrative.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So lucrative. So, isn't it true that if everyone is right about what will happen, they will bet in such a way that prevents it from happening? That, that their behavior will be such that it won't happen?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  But that's the problem, is that they're very bad at predicting.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're bad at predicting. We're, there's also arbitrage, so when there's an obvious opportunity for some people to profit from a downturn, right, that gets baked into the, and maybe pulled out of the markets. But bottom line, we have gotten much better at, "we," like I have something to do with it, the modern world has gotten better at modelate, moderating or modulating the way the economy works. So what you're left with, in fact, right when the Great Recession happened-

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is when?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Which was eleven years ago now, right? It began twelve years ago, 2007.

• 19:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, 1929 was not the Great Recession?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Uh, sorry, the Great Recession, the Great Depression, right.

• 19:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, I get my greats.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's the Great War, the Great Recession, the Great Depression.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Great Generation.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Great, oh, yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Great big gobs of

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great gatsby, yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Grimy gopher guts, but um.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, tell me, the Great Recession.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  The Great Recession.

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From 2008, yes.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  2000, yeah, 2007, 2008. There were most economists who watched the macroeconomy at the time. In the long run, they were talking about the period that we were in right then, 2007, 2008, as what they called the Great Moderation. They were trying to name our era then, the Great Moderation. What they meant by that is, there will be no more big recessions. So that's how good macroeconomists are at predicting the future.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  And it's the same in 1999, right before.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  In 99, yeah.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right before the 2000s.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Although that one was in some ways, I don't want to say easier to see, but the proximate cause was staring us in the face more, whereas the.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if it was that obvious, people would have bet the other way and it wouldn't have.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Well, there were people who bet the other way in the markets.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There would have been more people who would have bet the other way to have buoyed that effect.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  But fear and greed sort of comes to place in maximums right before a recession starts. So this blinds everyone. Maximum fear and greed happens right before a cycle change. And so that's what happened in 1999 and 2006.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what good is that for you to say it after the fact?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  All right, so. All right, so let's.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you don't know when you are maximally blinded by fear and greed, to say it after the fact doesn't help anyone do anything.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  All right, so let's put skin in the game right now and say, here we are in 2019. On a scale of, let's say, 1 to 10, how vulnerable do we feel the American economy is in, let's say, a five-year time window?

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, five years.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Let's say five years. 10 being catastrophic and 1 being everything kind of great, okay?

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd say.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  On the scale, on account of three, we say our number. Ready? 1, 2, 3, 4.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  5.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Okay, interesting. 8, okay, so 8, why?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  But I will say. It's gonna be great for the next two years.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  And then it's gonna be potentially horrible.

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would you bet on that?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would?

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're gonna short every stock in two years?

• 21:21Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I would just make sure.

• 21:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's betting on it?

• 21:22Speaker 02

  No, being in cash is betting on it, because I think it's gonna be so bad.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not betting on it.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  I'm a conservative guy.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not betting on it.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  It is, because I think the value of cash will go up.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's fine, but if you can, if you really think everything's gonna tank, you will short everything and you'll make even more money, as we all learned in The Big Short. So, you're not actually betting on it, you're wimping out by pulling out your cash and waiting for things to happen before you jump back in.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Thanks for announcing to the world I'm an omega male instead of an alpha male.

• 21:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steven, am I correct that he's not actually betting?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  I love that you're encouraging him to engage in the most reckless behavior possible.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Right, you could go broke shorting. Who's your financial advisor? You could go broke that way.

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question, what do you have?

• 22:08Speaker 02

  As well as economics.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, creative investments in science and technology

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  are reliable engines of tomorrow's economic growth. So, if you wanna talk about boom and bust, the busting is usually gonna happen when you don't have some meaningful return on your, or no investments at all.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Well, this is related to our next question.

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Industries that could actually keep you buoyant. What do you have?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  So, this is from The Muzial Studio from Instagram.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Do you feel that investing more in space exploration can help boost our economy?

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  God, yeah, why not?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And by the way, I'm gonna ask also, public versus private. Should the government be investing, or should billionaires be investing?

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I wrote an entire book on this called Space Chronicles, and I write books so that I never have to talk about that subject again.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  So, everybody just stays private. No, don't listen to the podcast anymore.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Can you write a book about politics then, please?

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I never have to. So, I have an unorthodox answer to that, and I'd like to get your, Steven, your feedback on it. So...

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People think of spin offs. If you value all the spin offs, direct spin offs from NASA relative to what we're spending on NASA, they do not pay for NASA. So the spin off argument is-

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Hey, what's a spin off from NASA?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Tang.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Sorry, very funny.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do we sell eighteen billion dollars a year in Tang? So, we're talking about technology inspired by the work, technology derivative of research done to put people and maintain their lives in space. Okay, people and, and robots. Space endeavors. And creative people have to invent something to solve a problem? Hey, this works on Earth. One such example is Tempur-Pedic mattresses, Tempur Foam. That was invented for space travel, for space exploration. Yet it's an entire industry of mattresses now. It's not an eighteen billion dollar a year industry, which is approximately NASA's budget. So that's not the argument.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  But wait, let me just ask you, what about, let's say, the computing effort that we're put into early space? So there are a lot of people who say that that computing environment accelerated the development of computing generally, which led to things like the development of the internet, et cetera, et cetera.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It made it happen faster, but it didn't create computers that wouldn't have been created already.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting you make that argument, because you've made a sort of opposite argument with like, bringing in a bunch of gold, let's say. In other words, we find uses for and grow, right, our, we change our world based on the resources available. I mean, how do you know that?

• 24:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The computers that were used for NASA were not usable in your room. Somebody has to step up and say, let's make this a home computer.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  But the internet was initially funded by DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which you could argue was affiliated with the space development.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it was very useful in space, and plus the connecting computers was invented by physicists at a particle accelerator in Europe at CERN. So, so this is, again, the engine of tomorrow's economic growth. My point is very different from all of these. It's-

• 25:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we agree that innovations in science and technology are tomorrow's engines of growth economies, I don't think that's a controversial statement.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  For the sake of argument, I'll agree with you.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't think it's a controversial statement. Then, if you have an active space exploration program, which would require government investment, private industry can't do what I'm about to describe. You want to advance a space frontier, and companies will fail at this, because there's no marketplace for advancing a space frontier. It's too expensive, it's too costly, it's too dangerous. It's too expensive, it's too dangerous, and the return on that investment is indeterminate until it becomes routine.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Except for the last question, where we did feel, oh, okay, let's get gold from the asteroids and water from the asteroids, and that will feed the world forever.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's an engineering frontier. We've already been to asteroids. That's not advancing a space frontier. We've already landed on asteroids. So now you just have to land and dig and bring it back. So, the government landed on an asteroid before private enterprise did. That's the only point I'm making here. Private enterprise is not going to do anything first in space, because to do something first in space has no obvious next return on that investment. But a government can do it, because a government has a much longer time horizon than your quarterly report or your annual report, required of investors, be they public or private, in private enterprise. So, point is, watch what happens. We go into space in a big way. We say, we're going to put people on Mars. We're going to go there in 15 years. Well, who are those astronauts going to be?

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, they're in middle school now. Let's go find them. And have like the Mercury Seven, but now they're like 14 years old. And they'll be in Teen Beat, they'll be in all these magazines, and we'll all be watching, are they eating well? Are they not doing drugs? What's their social life? Do the teachers like them? And we follow them into adulthood, and they are heroes that we send. And everybody gets jazzed about going into space. And to do that requires advances, because no one's sent people to Mars before, requires advances in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, in physics, chemistry, biology. The entire portfolio of STEM fields is stoked.

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By an entire generation of students who have as their hero, people whose journey is enabled by creativity in those fields. That would transform our economy like no other force exists. You know what we're doing now? We gotta go to Congress. We need money to have a program to tell people that they should study science. If you have kids selected who are gonna be the first ones going to Mars, people will be jumping over each other to try to learn science, and you don't need a special program to make it happen.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  So your answer to that question is yes?

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the way I described, yes.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  What's the point of sending people to Mars?

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no point.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Alright. That's the other question. That might be the answer.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, um, Stephen, let me ask you. Does...

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How nimble is the investment community in seeing opportunity that could open up new opportunities?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Nimble is an interesting word. They're super nimble, but they're also fairly cowardly.

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're well, okay. That's an...

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Well, you have Jeff, you have Amazon trying to put us...

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jack be nimble, Jack be slow. Jack walk around the candlestick.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  No, not even slow.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's nimble, but he's walking around the stick.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Here's an argument that some people make and that I find has some truth in it, which is that venture capital and private equity have built a great reputation for funding, um, a lot of innovations.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the Silicon Valley sort?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Of the Silicon Valley sort.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  But also space, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  That's a little bit different, because a lot of those are more vanity projects. Not all, but some are, which is a little bit different.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  I think they wanna make money.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but they're funded...

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As Elon Musk said...

• 29:24Speaker 01

  They're just funded differently at this point.

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As Elon Musk, if you wanna make a small fortune in space?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, start with a big fortune.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Start with a big fortune.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, um, the, the argument is that the story that we tell ourselves about venture capital and private equity is these are unbelievably brave pioneers who seek out, right?

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that's the...

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Whereas in fact, what they are, are smart, motivated people who take pension funds primarily, that have been earned by California schoolteachers, and find a place to park it in a, in something like an Uber or a Lyft. And that's great, and there is some upside to that, but... There is an argument to be said that government funding of science, basic R and D, bench science, over the years in pharmaceuticals, in space and computing, et cetera, are wildly, wildly, wildly underappreciated and undervalued in part because it's the government's own fault for not getting a return on those investments.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  But when's the last time you took a drug that was made by the government?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Yesterday. Every drug that's for sale now was basically funded by always the institute of...

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first round is no return on the first round. You have to know the thing exists first, and that requires huge investment. And often it happens in collaborations with universities, this sort of thing. So, yeah, so, great point. And here's something we all use. Touchscreen monitors, touchscreens, that was invented on an NSF grant.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Oh, is that right?

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the Library of Congress to have people interact with a screen that didn't have to require a mouse. And so some innovative people invented the touchscreen. So the government doesn't toot its horn, but what the government does do is release the patents so that you make a boatload of money and then you pay taxes back to the government.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Right, which, absolutely. But I'm very intrigued by your proposal that if you had the teen dream mercury team, Mars team, what it would do. I think that's really an interesting scenario to consider. Do you...

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They would come back heroes as people who have been explorers in the history of civilization have been.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Well, I'm also just interested in what you're saying.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one's ever had a ticker tape parade for a robot.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Right. But what their existence would do to the next generations of people, because you're right, we tell people, learn STEM because it's good for you and it's good for us.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we've got, and they're looking, why, because there's no, there's no landscape out there for them to arrive on after they've actually gone through that exercise.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  But could you imagine how annoying these kids would be, though? Like, if you're 13, we're going to set up your Instagram account also. Boom. Like, you know, it's like quantum mechanics. Once you start observing something, the behavior changes. Now you're going to start observing, the whole world's going to be observing the new right stuff. They're going to be like all Lindsay Lohan or whatever.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  I don't want those kids.

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On that note, we got to take a break. When we come back, more economics, specifically Freakonomics on StarTalk.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  This is StarTalk.

• 32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk, we're back. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I've got Stephen Dubner here. I've got James Altucher. Each of them has a podcast. Only one of them named the podcast after himself, and that would be James, wouldn't it?

• 33:03Speaker 02

  I feel like I have to apologize now. I should have just called it like, I don't know, Freak-a-Freakonomy. The word freak is good.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics, best-selling book, internationally best-selling book. Just congratulations on that.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For that to fly. That's really good.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Can I tell him one story, Stephen, about the book?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yes, please.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Okay, so this is almost 18 years, 17 years ago, whenever it was. The day before the book comes out, Stephen and I are having lunch. You were worried, I'm not gonna say what you said, but you were worried you didn't know how the book would do, and you were scared. And I said, I was lying, I was just being nice. I said, "Don't worry, it's gonna be a big hit," because I read the galley, but I just was being nice. I didn't know. And then you called me a few days later. You said, "Check out Amazon's rankings." And I figured, oh, it'll be like number 1,000, number 2,000. And you're like, "No, no, just check out the rankings." Okay, number one was Harry Potter. Number two, Freakonomics. For the next year and a half, it was number two was Freakonomics. I was really jealous. But you were wrong.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. That's a story.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  That's a story. He was nervous.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  It's really a story about Harry Potter, really.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Unfortunately.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we got more questions.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's do it. See, we've only been through three questions today. Let's see if we can get some more.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Well, okay, this is from Launchpad Cat on Instagram. What is the most important thing to look for when determining if studies/statistics

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Are trustworthy.

• 34:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Great question. Um, depends if you're a scientist or not, if you know how to read the scientific paper. Um, I think there's anything a layperson can say, which is how big is the sample size? Um, what are the confounding factors? What are the alternate explanations? And what is your degree of confidence in your conclusion? Those are some basic questions.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say in physics, we have it easy. In economics, they have it hard. Because in physics, if we find a new law of the universe, it will repeat every single time. Whereas in economics, if you discover a new pattern and then you invest knowing that pattern, the act of investing changes what that pattern becomes.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you become, as, as, as, James, you had mentioned earlier, you become sort of a quantum participant in the experiment itself.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and also I feel with economics.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The observer effect.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Most, right. But most things are like bell curve statistics, but there's also the power law of earthquakes involved. And you can never predict that as the problem, which is why it's a social science.

• 35:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would not say we can never predict earthquakes. We just don't know how now.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  We don't know how now, true. But it's a different kind of statistics, as far as we know. And, but in physics, okay, you're an observational physicist. In theoretical physics, I don't know if you can say that about theoretical physics papers.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say what?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Like, let's say you have a-

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the frontier, most are wrong. But once everything agrees and it matches observations, we, we have a new understanding of the universe. It's why we have modern civilization.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  All right.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, economics has about one law that's like a physics law. And it's basically supply and demand and how price works within that. But even that gets violated sometimes. So, yeah, it's a very different kind of science.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question, go.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James, you're, you're picking them.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  I'm gonna pre-answer yes.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Okay. Private versus public healthcare, what's, what's better for the economy? And what's better, what's more moral?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  There's, I don't know, I don't do moral.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't do moral?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  I think it's a mistake to do moral as a, I think it's good to do moral as a first step, but then when you get into analysis and descriptive policy and so on, you gotta turn off, put away the moral compass.

• 36:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but moral compass could deeply influence, for example, in my field with regard to possible future contact with alien intelligence. If an alien shows up on Earth and it's smarter than us and you kill it, is it murder? If it's not itself human, right? So our laws only talk about humans, but something more intelligent than you. So, so, so these are things I think are worth folding into how you think about the problem.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  I think morality is hugely important, but when it comes to doing analytical.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Okay, here's a counter example of that.

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think morality is really, really important, but what kind of sentence is that?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Let me finish the sentence.

• 37:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Morality is important and, okay.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, if you wanna be an and guy instead of a but guy, you're welcome to be an and guy, but it's incredibly important to put aside your personal moral compass when you're trying to analyze like a particularly social issue because, and this is why we see so much bad policy, you see people making policy decisions based on what they hope or wish will happen or fear may happen, and we humans are just smart enough to find confirmatory evidence of what we believe and ignore evidence that would negate it. And so I just go into situations trying to think, you know what, whatever I feel about this particular issue, gun control, climate change, whatever, whatever I feel about it, move it to the side and let's try to look at the data first. So that's what I mean by putting morality aside.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  But the problem is there's never any data. Like, so like, let's say the government says in 1965, oh, we're gonna back all student loans. Nobody's ever done it in the US, so there's no data. And now tuitions go up 10x faster than inflation and college is a scandal as a result.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Well, but you can't say that, cuz I mean, a lot of European governments do actually guaran, I mean, they guarantee universal education through college, like healthcare.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Use universal differently.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Uh, sorry, sorry, sorry.

• 38:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earthwide education.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  For everyone. Thank you.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Universe is like bigger than Earth.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Noted.

• 38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars is totally different.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Alright, so for Earthwise-

• 38:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Miss Universe is like the prettiest person on Earth, not in the whole universe, okay?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  So, so Earthwise, getting back to the healthcare question, the question, what's better? I think the answer is, I'm not gonna say what's better or worse, I think the answer is, it is bizarre that the United States is the only rich country in the world, that A, doesn't have a national healthcare system. I say bizarre, not terrible, bizarre, and it's also bizarre that we traditionally have had a healthcare system that's been tied to employment, which is basically an accident of history going back to the Second World War.

• 39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you think if people knew all of this, they would all think and vote differently about healthcare?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Not really, honestly. But, but, here's where I think the, the conversation needs to happen. I think if people want to talk about socialism being wonderful or terrible, they need to understand what socialism is, and most of the people who are promoting socialism as wonderful, and terrible for that matter, don't know what socialism is. So what they admire are socialist democracies, like Scandinavia. But that doesn't mean that the state owns the-

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Owns the oil companies.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So, um, when we look at like Scandinavia and other countries that have good, Earthwide healthcare-

• 39:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  I gotta get used to that one.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's hard, it's really hard.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  It's, it's, um, it's worth noting that that is not, um, uh, socialist in the way that it's used as an epithet. And so, would it be better for the economy for there to be some kind of, uh, a reform system where costs could be controlled? Then the answer is a gigantic, huge yes. The problem is, I mean, you, I'm guessing you see this in your science a lot more than we see it in our science, when a sys- when there's a lot of, um, entropy or inertia or whatever, how do you undo that? The healthcare lobbies are really rich and really strong, and why would they want to undo it? So that's a big, that's a big, big, big barrier.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  And also, look where government, like- Does the FDA really help the drug approval process? And this is even related to the scientific studies question. How many drugs get recalled even after they've been through all the studies?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I mean, some would say that the FDA, for thalidomide per se, was one of the best uses of public science in the history of the world. I mean, that was actually, that was an FDA, you know, thalidomide was widely used around in Europe and other places in the world. The reason it wasn't here was because of, I think it was a single FDA officer, and she just said, "I think we haven't seen enough data to make a call on this." So, but even that really set the stage for the next 45 years of maybe some reluctance or whatnot.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  All right, another question.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another question, give it to me.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  This question is from Ari Moody at Patreon. How is AI gonna change statistics in economics?

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Yeah, where's AI landing right now?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  How is AI going to change statistics?

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  AI will become the richest thing there ever was.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  I just want-

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Define thing.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know what AI is. If it's, it's not animal, vegetable, or mineral. It's mineral, right, I guess? So, so if I have an AI computer and it's smarter than I am, and it figures out the market, and it becomes a trillionaire overnight.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we'll just stare at it. And there it is, it goes off on its private jet.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  And wonder, and wonder if it's gonna kill us?

• 41:53Speaker 02

  You know, they have AI, though, that plays chess, that flies planes, but not a single AI can tell me if an apple tastes good. So, can they really replace humans?

• 42:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say not yet. Not yet, it's to come.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  I like to-

• 42:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, but, get back to AI in economics.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't, isn't that kinda what these complex trading programs are doing?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. The-

• 42:17Speaker 02

  But they're using hardcore statistics rather than AI.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, they're making decisions on the fly.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Based on information it had never seen before.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but-

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Just like any statistics program is.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Primed by, primed by what has happened in the past.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what any of us do, right? So, I'm not gonna say that's not AI. There's, there's like strong AI, weak AI, and general AI. Okay, we can slice and dice. But, if you have a computer making buying and trading decisions based on information that it is getting on its own- That it has the potential to be the richest thing in the world.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know if that's true, and we really do all pretty much have that now.

• 42:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds like you know it's not true when you say you don't know that it is true.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Are you being skeptical?

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's your skepticism?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Um, the problem is in the markets, there's, uh, one of the biggest factors in the markets is human psychology. So AI, I mean, we're always going to be better at that, the machines, not producing it, not necessarily analyzing it. Uh, sorry, yeah, we won't be better analyzing, we'll always be better at producing it because we introduce that chaos into the system. But to me, the biggest gain, I think about AI the way you were describing, let's say, uh, we bring back boatloads, boatloads full of gold. What does AI do for the human experience? We don't know yet. Will it expand it and augment it, make it awesome? I'm sure on some dimensions. Will it make it very constricting? I'm sure on other dimensions, that's true. I think, you know, dogs used to be animals of labor.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  They did a lot of pulling stuff and they did, they did a lot of labor for us. And then we found better things to do that, including machines, and then we turned them into pets. So we actually have more dogs around now than we did when they were workers. So I like to think that we humans, we could be lovely pets for the robots. Absolutely. I think we'd be, you know.

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the wealthy AI that's trading, you know.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Here's the problem that happens is that once you have AI that is making money, everybody else sees it and then they make AI to model that. And so it gets, you mentioned it earlier in another question, it gets arbitrage the way. So advantages change very quickly and, and you always have to have the next AI very fast to, to change, to take advantage of that.

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So just, it's, it's, it's second generation AI.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That kicks the ass of the first generation AI. And then in the future, there'd be the hundredth generation AI that then controls the universe. Let me get one last question and we'll do it. Let me see if you're good at sound bites. Go.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Okay, do you think that the economy would react better to a moon base or a long-term mission to Mars?

• 44:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good question.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  A moon base or a long-term mission to Mars? How would the economy react better? Moon base.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Moon base because of what you said earlier, rare earth minerals on the moon.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want a waystation for bringing back the...

• 44:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I said on asteroids. No, moon asteroids have hardly any.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  No, but you want a, you want a close place to process stuff, don't you? Don't you want a...

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That has value, but it has less ambition.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's like an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey. I don't need to come all the way from Seattle. I need my coffee tomorrow.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're right. The moon is, is, is three days away.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  So, moon prime, if we want...

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A moon prime!

• 45:22Speaker 02

  If we want our lunar rocks yesterday, better for our moon base.

• 45:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Delivered on a, but by space drone. Right, right, okay.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Well, if you could go...

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You make a good point, and I, I, I retract my statement about Mars being cooler because the moon will be much more practical.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  We can disagree. That's okay. I'm comfortable with that.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no. If you have good arguments, I'd...

• 45:42Speaker 02

  What's, what's more interesting to you? Somebody landing on a passing asteroid or someone landing on Mars?

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars will take more, more innovation to pull that off, and as a scientist that likes seeing the moving frontier of our knowledge, a Mars landing.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  But what if someone's gonna use the asteroid as their rocket to get to Mars? Boom!

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's, it's better to just use your own rocket. Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Really? Than an entire planet?

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the asteroid has to be headed straight for Mars, and if it is, you're gonna be dead when it hits. So, yeah, it's just not a wise thing.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  How worried are you about an Earth-ending asteroid strike generally?

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A life-on-Earth-ending asteroid. Earth will be here longer.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  A life-on-Earth-ending asteroid strike.

• 46:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you should, we should all invest some amount of money and to mitigate that risk. So, for all of our guests, we give them a chance to ask me a question, if they've been harboring any sort of unanswered thoughts about the universe.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  I've been harboring. I, I do have a question for you. I think this is a really minor thing, but it's something that I wonder about. Which is contamination. So I know that-

• 46:42Speaker 02

  I'm sorry if I smell.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  So I know that at JPL, Jet Propulsion Labs, in Pasadena, California, which is, which does a lot of NASA research-

• 46:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a branch of NASA, yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  They, um, they and others are concerned that our, uh, everything that we spend, send us into space doesn't spread our microbes around, and that things that come back from wherever don't. Is that, um, a major concern?

• 47:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes. It's an entire office of NASA called the Office of Planetary Protection.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it protects other planets from our microbes, and it protects our planet from whatever microbes might come back if we have what we call a sample return mission. Or if we send astronauts, and they might come back contaminated. The original Apollo 11 astronauts were put in a, in a, what do you call that?

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Containment, whatever, a quarantine?

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they were in quarantine, but I keep saying Winnebago, but it's, what's, what's, it was not a Winnebago.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  A pint-

• 47:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gulfstream, the, you know, the, the metal-

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Silver airstream.

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Airstream, thank you. Uh, the, so the astronauts were put in like an airstream, and you can only talk to them through the window and through a telephone.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was to make sure that they didn't bring any bugs back from the moon. We'd learned that they didn't, because life can't, as we know, it can't survive on the moon. But, but it was still, the gesture was an important fact, that, "Look, people, we don't want to cross-contaminate." When that has happened in the history of exploration on Earth, it has never boded well for typically the people who got visited by the-

• 48:08Speaker 01

  It would be so interesting to know, however, if there were antibodies, or, uh, whatever, any kind of microbes that would be useful in our Earth science here, right?

• 48:16Speaker 02

  But we certainly never evolved it in our bodies, though.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know that. I mean, you know a little bit more about the Big Bang than I do, but isn't there a chance that there's a, a piece of that in all of us, yes?

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A piece of what?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Uh, what, whatever's in us is out there.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the atoms.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  So theoretically, um, there may be some underlying principles of cancer that we haven't yet understood well, because we haven't seen it modeled in a way that we can-

• 48:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we would do is get, do a download on the brilliance of the aliens who have come to visit us. They will know more about practically everything. We gotta end it there. Guys, thanks for coming on.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 48:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Throw a little economic twist to all of this. Because, as they say, freshly minted graduates, scientist, engineer, and economist.

• 49:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they pose a question to the life they're about to lead. The scientist asks, "Why does it work?" The engineer asks, "How does it work?" The economist asks, "How much does it cost?" And that is the civilization we have come to know. You've been listening to, possibly even watching, StarTalk. I want to thank Freakonomics' Stephen Dubner. Stephen, thank you for being on.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  My pleasure. I enjoy it.

• 49:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James Altucher, recently married. Congratulations.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And thanks for coming on.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

• 49:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. I've been Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I still will be, even after we finish this podcast. And I want to thank you for listening to, possibly even watching, StarTalk. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.