The Joe Rogan Experience

It’s a different kind of StarTalk as Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience, about everything from science and sports to evolution and Kim Kardashian.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. In my day job, I'm an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History where I direct the Hayden Planetarium, right here in New York City. In the current show, we're featuring my interview with Joe Rogan. He's an actor and comedian, a mixed martial arts specialist, but perhaps he's best known as the powerhouse podcaster behind the Joe Rogan Experience. We start off by talking about why he often features science in his stand-up comedy.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Joe, you always talk about science. It infuses almost everything you do. Because all of it, the physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, there's gotta be some force operating. What is it?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  With me?

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  It's just curiosity. I just think we live in extraordinary times and the ability to access information is so unprecedented and because of social media, especially because of Twitter, and I have a message board that's very popular as well, the message board is even more comprehensive because they're not limited to links. They can actually post full articles with pictures, but there's so much interesting stuff out there. You're constantly being bombarded with new stories and new technological achievements and new discoveries. It's just, to me, it's just natural curiosity.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not anything special? It's something anybody could have?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, in this day and age, the amount of access to information we have allows the average person just to read peer-reviewed articles, to be wowed by incredible videos and photos that the Hubble takes. And it's just, we live in such crazy, crazy times that for me, it's, like I said, it's just a complete natural inclination to pay attention to this stuff.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's no teacher, there's no family member? Museum you visited as a kid, something must have kept that curiosity going beyond when other people would have lost it entirely.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  No, I think because of being a stand up comedian, um, I don't have the time constraints that a lot of folks have. My day is not my job. Yeah. And also part of my job is being curious and, and the more I read about things, the more I have stuff to talk about. Like I have a whole bit.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More material.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a whole bit about the Large Hadron Collider.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, let me hear something. Go, give me one.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Oh, it's not, it's like a long bit about human beings, about time travel. It's like, it's a huge bit. Gay marriage. It's like, it's 10 minutes long. It's really, it's not something.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got a routine that combines the CERN, Super Collider, finding the, the Higgs boson and gay marriage.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I will, I'll have to find that online. All right. I'm gonna look for that. So the broader question is, how often is science material for you?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  A lot. Yeah. Some of my best bits have involved science.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there any quick one? I know, I know, the mood isn't there or whatever.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  No, no, it's not even that. It's just my style of stand up is more like these long chunks.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Had you heard the one about that?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not like a one liner, you know, like one of them is the anti evolution of man, which explains like pyramids. And the idea is that we are the bastard children of the idiot stoneworkers of Egypt. And what happened was the dumb people just out fuck the smart people. And it just got to a point where there was no smart people left. And the bit was about like, how many of us really truly understand? How this world operates. And I would like tap on a microphone and go, why is that loud? I'm a stand up comedian. My whole life, it depends upon this, but I have no idea how this works. I just get up here and I do my job. And I'm like, how many of us understand how the power is on? And if the power went off, what would you do? For most of us, if the power goes out, we sit around and we wait.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Cause you figure somewhere out there, there's someone who knows how to turn that thing back on. But what if that guy died? Or do we know? Have that been monitored? I mean, one day we're gonna out fuck all the smart people and there's gonna be no smart people left. Cause women, they won't have sex with rappers and baseball players. I mean, maybe you, you're like a celebrity scientist. I'm sure you get a lot of hot college chicks that are knocking it your way. But like for the average dude involved in science, there's very few opportunities to breed.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're making an argument that for perhaps other comedians, there's a whole resource, a place to draw drugs or reflections on what role science can play in their comedy.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Sure, if that's what you're curious. I mean, I think for a lot of comedians, the most important thing is they give you an accurate representation of what they find funny and what they think is interesting. For me, it happens to be a lot of it is science. A lot of it is ancient history, a lot of it is speculation about our future. There's a lot of scientific inquiry for me, just in my daily life, so it has to make it into my comedy.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's the natural effort of a good comedian, I guess, right?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has to be, here's the world through your eyes.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And plus, a lot of science has made front-page headlines so that you can even reference science that people have some chance of having read about.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Sure, I mean, everyone kind of knows.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because comedy doesn't work if they don't know what you're talking about, right?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Well, you can explain some things, you know, I mean, like the large-

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but it's not a lecture, right?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got, there's a trade-off at some point.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Right. There has to be a certain amount of time in between the laughs. You can't, like, when you get to something like the Large Hadron Collider, you have to be able to explain it in a somewhat comedic form, and you have to have at least, somewhere along the line, you gotta throw some dick jokes in there. You gotta figure out a way to keep them occupied. But the idea of the Large Hadron Collider, I had a bit about a Big Bang machine, and the idea was that, like, scientists have never figured out what started out the Big Bang. And then I think that 14 billion years ago, there were some scientists, and they were probably autistic, and they were on anti-anxiety medication, and drinking Red Bulls, and nobody touched them ever. And one day, they made a Big Bang

• 6:08Speaker 01

  machine. And one guy sat around and go, I'll press it, and he hit the button, and the whole thing restarted. And that is the cycle of humanity. It goes from single-celled organism to multi-celled organism to conscious entity to autistic dude who figures out how to make a Big Bang machine to hitting the button. And it happens every 14 billion years. And that is the birth and the death of the universe in infinity.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So according to that theory, we're minutes away from that happening again.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Minute and a second now. I mean, when you look at what they've discovered with the Large Hadron Collider, whether it is- The Quark gluon plasma, which is, I believe it's one sugar cube, is some insane amount of weight that we can't even process, like where you would drop it, it would go straight through to the center of the earth. I mean, it exists in just tiny microscopic form, but the fact that's real, that's something that they have created. It begs the question, where does it all end? And does it? And where does it go? And is it sustainable? Is it controllable? What is the future? Is it a big bang machine? If it keeps going, someday, someone will figure out how to reset the universe with the press of a button, or a sequence of events

• 7:15Speaker 01

  that can be, you know, set off. It seems to me like it's inevitable. It seems to me like there's no way to stop that.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that your biggest fear? That technology and dorky autistic scientist might push the button?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  No. Yeah, I mean, I guess.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in the list, but it's not the top of the list.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I think that would be like a pretty cool way to go. If that is how it gets reset, there's very little suffering involved. The only suffering is doing it all over again. The cave people have to suffer, you know? That's the suffering.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And migrate around on the, on the ice floes of the, of the Bering Strait.

• 7:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. When we come back, we'll have much more of my interview with Joe Rogan.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. In this show, we're featuring my interview with Joe Rogan, a stand-up comedian and the voice behind the popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. In this segment, we talk about how he uses science as a touchstone to share his social commentary and perspective on the world.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for you, it's not enough, apparently, to just be curious, because anybody could pick up a book and read a headline and even chase down the original research papers. You also philosophize. You think about what it means, you think about whether it should be true, whether or not it is true, and so where do you get your philosophy?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Well, again, I think it really comes from just the access to time that I have, meaning that, you know, my days, literally, part of my job is researching things.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Part of your job as a professional stand-up comedian?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a professional stand-up comedian, you must be curious. And if you are curious and these articles stumble through your path, or you run into a documentary, you know, or I watch your show, The Cosmos, which I'm sure is going to set a lot of people down certain paths. I don't know what it is that started me down there, but, you know, in having this job as a stand-up comedian, it's just allowed me to explore so many different things, like really in-depth, to the point where most people, if they have, you know, a full-time job, they have to be concerned with whatever it is they do for an occupation.

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever the boss tells them.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're bossless.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm basically bossless. So I don't have those constraints. So that's where I get my philosophies from, that's where I get... I mean, obviously, it's an accumulation of other people's thoughts that's resonated with me as well, and different discoveries that people have had, whether they're psychological discoveries or philosophical discoveries that have also resonated with me, that I've adopted into my own point of view, but it just really all comes from being curious.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's your audience? Did you create your audience, or did your audience create you in the podcast?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  That's a good question. That's a really good way of putting it.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you got your stand-up, but there are other comedians, and they do their stand-up, but not all of them have the following that is represented in your podcast. So, did you create them, or did they create you?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  It's really...I don't...I'm not smart enough to answer that. But I think that, for sure, the podcast represents me in a better way than anything I've ever done before. It's easy to have a perception of someone, but how well... Do you really get to know someone unless you hear them talk for hours and hours and hours and end? And I think that anything else I've done, whether it's hosting the Ultimate Fighting Championship or Fear Factor or what, even stand-up comedy, it's gonna give you like a sort of a limited view into how a person functions. It's sort of like you're operating in a very specific bandwidth or very specific frequency, rather. Whereas with the podcast,

• 11:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Frequency.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  We, we talk about everything.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Frequency bandwidth, I like the words. Keep the vocabulary coming. Physics vocabulary, upgrade it at the end. See how you did on all your vocabulary.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  I'll be happy with a C. But with the podcast, it's really anything that I find curious. And that has resonated with a lot of folks that I think felt like they were unrepresented before. I think that for a lot of people, they feel like a lot of these subjects, they're not being necessarily indulged in mainstream media. They're, they're not being pursued in the average conversation that they have at lunch with their coworkers.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what it is, is obviously they can read the science section of the paper that's not you. They could go to a pure comedy club that's not you. There are pieces that are all contained within you so that when you start talking, you are drawing from this huge portfolio of identity. And out comes this, what should I call it? It's a, it's a smorgasbord that people dine upon.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  That's a good way to look at it.

• 12:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cornucopia. It's a cornucopia that people dine upon.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  That certainly is the podcast. It also represents, and it sounds, it's gonna sound really weird. It represents friends to people who don't have friends like that. There's a lot of folks out there that they might have curious thoughts or they might have ideas about things, but they don't have anybody to talk to about it. They don't have anybody that they know that's interested in these things. They don't have these conversations to be had at work or wherever they, you know, or at home or anywhere. And so what, what a podcast represents is a chance to sit in on a true, unedited, organic conversation for hours and hours at a time. And it allows you access to a lot of other different ways of thinking.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  And I think that is another thing that's really resonated with people.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, if it's unscripted, it goes wherever organically is right.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's not just.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can't hide, you can't hide anything.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It eventually comes out.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Right. No agenda and no one telling you where to go with things. I mean, if we had a producer, there's several things, especially Brian, my co-host. He says unbelievably ridiculous shit. You would say, stop, edit that out. Don't do that. But that doesn't happen on this podcast. And it's, and because of that, because of the randomness of it all, it kind of makes it a little bit more fun and it kind of makes you also realize like, this is just completely unscripted. Like this, this really is just a bunch of people sitting down and talking. And because of that, they get very comfortable and because of the honesty that we exhibit and the, you know, the true.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sincerity.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely sincere. It feels good. It feels like this is the type of people that I want to talk to.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love him or hate him, there is no doubt that Joe Rogan's podcast has a large and growing following. In addition to science and comedy, he often loves to talk about conspiracy theories. When I was a guest on his podcast, he grilled me at length about whether the Apollo moon landings actually happened. And over that time, we also discussed the Mayan apocalypse, or the non-apocalypse, and planetary alignment, and how some people were dejected when they discovered that the world was not going to end. We also discussed anti-intellectualism. He's a big philosopher in his own right. And so the idea that people are not thinking about what they're saying disturbs him greatly. We talked about exoplanets made of diamond and man-made versus natural diamonds and mining asteroids.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was just in the first hour of the show. We talked about supervolcanoes and earthquakes and impact craters and time scales of the universes and solar systems. We went on talking for another hour and a half. Apparently there was no time limits. I didn't know this when I was there. We just went on and on and on and on and on. You can find the entire video of that podcast online. It's episode 310. Or just Google Joe Rogan and Neil Tyson. It'll take you right there. Here's an excerpt from Joe Rogan's podcast. It's a snapshot of his unique style that has attracted legions of fans. In this clip, he talks about how scientists are testing the theory of the multiverse. Check it out.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  That multiple alternate universes exist inside their own bubbles making up the multiverse is for the first time being tested by physicists. Two research papers published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D are the first to detail how to search for signatures of other universes. Physicists are now searching for disk-like patterns in the cosmic microwave background, relic heat radiation left over from the Big Bang, which could provide telltale evidence of collisions between other universes and our own. Whoa, collisions. Evidence of collisions of universes. That's the alternative concept to the Big Bang as well.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  The idea that our universe, whether it's in a bubble like the multiverse, or the people that propose membranes, they propose like that the brains collide at certain points and that creates like a recycling of the world. We just can't wrap our head around something that's that far or that much longer a period of existence than our own life. The idea of this cycle that's billions and billions of years. We are so important in our own lives that the idea that that's how small a part we play for real. I'm gonna exist for eighty years inside some weird biological body and some crazy process that happens every sixteen, seventeen billion years, these things collide with each other and everything starts completely from new.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  No planets, man, no nothing, just particles and gas and heat and nuclear explosions and mass connects all these different objects together and they slowly form planets and then life grows on them and then life becomes complex, life becomes intelligent, self-aware, life creates technology, goes to war, blows up the universe, and then they collide again and more collide all around and it's a constant cycle of you, society, life, everything, universe complexity gets to a certain peak and then just, they just hit each other, boom. It just, to me, it was almost like a little message that everything is preposterous.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Do you ever stop and wonder how much of your life, how much of the things that you go through are real? And how much of it may be some sort of background noise going on in this weird play that you're creating for yourself that your imagination has put forth? And then someday you're gonna understand it all. But right now, it's all the people that are in front of you are the bit players and you're supposed to be trying to figure this thing out as you move along. All that stuff that's going on in the background, car accidents and war. It seems like there's too many pieces going together too. Like too much, too, too many times I'm like, that's just weird that that just happened like that, you know? Like, it just seems like it's just. Like you're manifesting things in your own mind. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, it's not foolproof, you know? It's not like you can prove it.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Right. But there's something going on.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. In this show, we're featuring my interview with Joe Rogan of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast. In addition to his podcast, Joe Rogan once hosted the television reality show Fear Factor, which dared contestants to perform stunts such as eating live bugs or being handcuffed underwater with a handful of keys in order to win the grand prize of $50,000. So, of course, Joe had a lot to say about the current TV landscape and how that taps into human psychology.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  I am obsessed lately with subsistence shows. Subsistence shows like the people that live in Alaska and live off the land and just hunt and fish all day. I am completely obsessed. Like, my wife constantly makes fun of me because the DVR is filled with all these shows of people living this, like, really primitive lifestyle.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're getting ready for something?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. I'm amazed, first of all, that people find great joy in this. I think that's fascinating because I think it speaks to the.

• 19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Primal.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Yes, the primal reward systems that. That's in our DNA. I mean, we have bodies essentially that are in this environment that has changed unbelievably radically in a short period of time. But the physical entity, the human being, is really not that different from the human being of a thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago. And the reality of our environment is incredibly different. And I think that those reward systems, they manifest themselves in weird ways. And for some people, that hunting and trapping and fishing and living off the land is like insanely rewarding on like a biochemical level.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Speaking of biochemical levels, you hosted Fear Factor. Have you thought much about the biopsychology of what drove that show?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I spent a lot of that show as an amateur scientist, just trying to figure out the human game show contestant. And what it is that causes the reality game show person to do what is required of them to win on these shows. The idea of needing attention is a trip. And the idea essentially comes from in the ancient days of human beings. The person who got the most respect was the one who was the most successful in the hunt, the most successful in battle, the one who was the most successful in breeding. That lead was to be followed because there was benefit in being the leader. There was benefit socially, there was benefit sexually.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they had more offspring as well, right?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  And as I said, we were talking about before about reward systems built into our genetics. Well, these reward systems are now hijacked in this weird way where you can kind of circumvent all regular reality, like all hierarchies. And all you have to do is get a camera on you where other people see that and you get some benefit. And it's really, really strange. It's a strange aberration, a strange sort of a blip in the matrix. Where you get like this Kim Kardashian type human, where you just get someone who's famous for having a lens put on them. And that is essentially it. There's not that much interesting going on, you know, there's prettier girls, they're certainly smarter.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  but because this lens is on there's a great amount of power and energy focused in this one really mundane spot.

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a perversion of evolutionary features that exist within us.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I think the human body is not designed to interpret the medium of television and film in a way that makes sense. I think that, you know, we're so designed to follow successful behavior that when we see a hero on a movie screen and his head is 60 feet tall and every time he talks, music plays and his words are perfect because a team of writers has labored on them for hours and hours. I think the impact of that is really confusing to a lot of folks. And that is why we have all these weird cultural misrepresentations of monogamy and of ideology and our view of the world is very childlike

• 22:43Speaker 01

  in a lot of ways, very much like, like a movie, you know, our perceptions of global economics, our perceptions of war. A lot of them are very much childlike and very movie-like in our good guys and bad guys and how things work out in the long run. I mean, they're all very much like a Sandra Bullock movie. And as we know in real life, you know, even her own life is not like a Sandra Bullock movie. So I think it's really interesting to watch this relatively new, over, you know, the past less than 100 years, item in human civilization and how it's impacted us.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is the evolutionary attraction that we have for people who are actually successful in protecting the tribe.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has been distorted into the awe and respect we give.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Snooki.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For someone who is big in front of us, no matter who they are.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, Snooki is the best example. I mean, there's no reason to pay attention to that. I mean, I guess there's a little amount of entertainment value you can get for their antics, but there are people that genuinely worship people that are on television for no reason other than that they're on television. It's a very, very odd thing.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I really enjoyed Joe Rogan's reflections on how television plays into our psychology, our culture, our politics, our world, our past, our future. The guy's thought a lot about a lot of things, and so that made my time with him quite enjoyable. It's, it's, so that made him a different kind of guest. He wasn't really, it was another sort of talk show host, talking to, and we're there just spilling all our guts onto the table, and a kind of free-for-all. When StarTalk Radio returns, more of my interview with controversial color commentator, Joe Rogan.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. You can find us online at stargtloradio.net, on Facebook at StarTalk Radio, and we also tweet, and what else? At StarTalk Radio. In this show, we're featuring my interview with Joe Rogan. He's a stand-up comedian and the voice behind the popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. A topic he often likes to discuss on his show is mixed martial arts. He's a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and he provides commentary for TV broadcasts of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In this segment, I talk with Joe about the physics of wrestling, something I know a little bit about.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I used to wrestle. I wrestled for eight years, so I think about the physics of balance and strength, and, and so, given your curiosity, you've got to do a lot of the same, you're, you're in that same club, right?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just an art form to you, it's gotta be a science as well.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Oh, most certainly, yeah. The, there is certainly a science to techniques. And I am a, I'm a big fan of technique. I mean, I am a mixed martial arts commentator. Um, you know, I'm the guy who breaks down what's happening. Essentially, most of it is for people at home that really don't understand the, the really intricacies of especially submissions and grappling. There is a, a real science to that. And that science is tried and tested over many, many years. And it has to do with leverage and it has to do especially today.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me a place to stand.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I can move the world.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  The measurement of the, the way techniques work and in what situations they work. And you're dealing with, especially in turn, in situations where we're dealing with leverage. You're dealing with like very small areas where something's effective. Where it's ineffective, just a few inches further. Or just up here or there. It's all about where it's applied. It's not about the amount of force it's applied. It's about how it's applied and what kind of leverage. And how the knowledge of these positions leads to getting someone tied up in a knot. That doesn't want to be tied up in a knot and then they have to get, they have to tap out and get submitted.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, it, it sounds logically that that would make you a better fighter. But presumably there are fighters that don't think about that.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Well, there's.

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They might also still be good.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  There's a bunch of variables. There's physical athleticism. There are some people that are just unbelievably strong. There's wrestlers who are just cock strong and they could just pick you up and dump you on your head. And until you run into someone who can counteract that unbelievable physical advantage with so much technique that they can sort of work around it, that guy will be successful. And that also makes people more scientific and more technical. Because then they have to figure out how to overcome these unbelievable physical advantages with better leverage, better technique and better knowledge of the positions. Because a big thing, especially in jujitsu is.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your specialty.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. I've been doing jujitsu since 1996. I wrestled in high school as well. I, I only wrestled for one. I was doing Taekwondo at the time, I was trying to do both of them. But the, the knowledge of grappling is incredibly intricate. Every year, there's new submissions and new positions. And I just had a phone conversation with a friend of mine, who's a black belt. He's been a black belt for, you know, 10 years. And he came up with a new triangle last night. He goes, I got this new variation, I can't wait to show it to you. And it's always about that, it's always about innovation. And if you're not paying attention to the, the jujitsu world, you will miss out on a lot of different techniques. And then when you're in those situations, you will be at a disadvantage because someone will be doing something you don't understand, and that's all it takes to tap you.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Do you think, science literacy, if every fighter had it, would improve their fighting? Yes, unquestionably. Because a lot of fighting is hindered by emotions. And I think science literacy would benefit fighters extremely. I think that, as I said before, technique is the most important aspect of martial arts. And technique, up to a point, allows you to overcome physical advantages. And that's very scientific. And I think that the ability to use leverage, and the ability to understand force and mass, all of that, applied with the understanding of the cardiovascular system,

• 29:18Speaker 01

  the understanding of the scientific principles of nutrition and rest and recuperation, all of that would unquestionably benefit not just fighters, but any athlete. Anyone involved in doing anything that's difficult, where you're competing against other people that are also trying to do their best. Science really changes the entire game. Because it has with athletes, if you look at any athletes in terms of, whether it's Olympic athletes, whether you look at NFL, or... Science and the science of applied understanding of the human body to physical training, has changed athletes. Football players are much larger, they run faster, they, they move better. And the techniques of mixed martial arts absolutely benefit from the use of science.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  And I believe the more scientific a fighter is, the more chance they have, not only to achieve victory, but to prolong their career and to avoid damage.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When StarTalk Radio returns, more of my interview with actor, comedian, podcaster, mixed martial arts extraordinaire, Joe Rogan.

• 30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're wrapping up my interview with the stand-up comedian, actor, and TV and internet commentator, Joe Rogan. In the previous segment, we talked about wrestling and mixed martial arts. And so, in this final segment, we address a fundamental question that many in the boxing world can spend hours debating.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who would win a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  I believe Mike Tyson was in a different era. And I believe Muhammad Ali was dealing with people who had never exhibited that type of athleticism, that type of ferocity. And he was incredibly successful in his era. I believe if Muhammad Ali grew up in Mike Tyson's era, he would be better than Mike Tyson. Because I believe his mind was incredibly strong. His will and his ability to, to not just overcome stardom, but transcend it and be a leader, was one of the reasons why he's still beloved to this day. And no one mocks him, even though he has horrible debilitation. You know, his Parkinson's is just unbelievably

• 31:53Speaker 01

  bad. It's still incredibly loved. Whereas Mike Tyson was just a completely different sort of a guy. He was an out-of-control train that could only go so far down the track. But man, when it was going down that track, the physical aspect of just watching him demolish people was really incredible. And I think unlike anybody who had ever existed before. And I think that if you took the Mike Tyson of like the, when he knocked out Larry Holmes, when he knocked out Spinks, I don't think anybody stacks. up with him. I think he destroys almost everybody in history, but he couldn't maintain that. It was an insane amount of RPMs that he was operating on. He was redlining his intensity for so long.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I would think of Muhammad Ali having extraordinary technique. I mean,

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you're coming in muscled. I mean, that's the George Foreman fight. You come in muscled and he avoids you. I was just analogizing that to your discussion of the martial arts.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  You can't compare Mike Tyson and George Foreman because what Tyson had that was really unbelievable was speed. True speed like a welterweight. He had unbelievable hand speed and he could move physically better than anybody I'd ever seen at over 200 pounds. When you look at his fights like-

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it true that he caught pigeons?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, he was a, um, yeah, he used to have carrier pigeons. He kept them company in Brooklyn. Like he kept a whole bunch of them. Yeah. He was an unbelievable physical athlete and his obsession with boxing was at a completely different level than I think anybody before him. I think his life, which was horribly tragic in his childhood, boxing represented to him this way out and he was just driven in a way by whether it's the demons of his childhood or, you know, the realities of his environment. But he was driven in this incredible, perfect storm of athleticism, mind, and obsession with technique and detail with an incredible coach in Customato,

• 33:52Speaker 01

  who literally raised him as a father figure. So I think in Mike Tyson, you have a very, very unique situation that I believe that for two or three years, he's the greatest heavyweight that ever lived. But Muhammad Ali, I believe was a greater champion and Muhammad Ali, I think, was a greater man. And I think Muhammad Ali, especially like to me, he's a greater hero. His insistence on not going to Vietnam, his stand, I think really sort of shocked a nation with debate and it really sort of defined him as this true, like, not just a fighter, not just an athlete, but a true leader in our culture. And I think that's really the difference between him and a Mike Tyson. I just think he was an incredibly strong person.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  And I think that if Ali lived in the Mike Tyson era, if they grew up together, if they came up together, he would have found a way to beat Tyson.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So-

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Can I ask you something?

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Do you like, because your name is Tyson, do you like more inclined to like lean towards his name?

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Towards like thinking that he No, no, no, no, no, no. I grew up with Muhammad Ali. So you think Muhammad Ali was the greatest? Yeah, yeah. Especially if you put him in another time, he would have become that person in that time. That's what I think. It's gotta be cool having a name that's the last name of one of the greatest dudes who's ever lived. When he's not in jail. Yeah, when he's not hurting people. I really enjoyed my time with Joe Rogan. We split the visit. I first was interviewed by him on his podcast. That went for more than two hours. Then I pulled him aside and pulled out my mobile microphone and recorded him for StarTalk Radio. Just want to publicly thank him for granting the time to do that, particularly after the long session we had together. It's interesting. I love deep thinkers of any stripe.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And here's a guy who just shatters anybody's stereotype of who should be an expert at what. He's a mixed martial arts expert and he philosophizes about the future of the universe. And he kind of dabbles in conspiracy theory, a little odd for me. But nonetheless, he comes back and hits the news hard. Anything that's in science and how it affects pop culture. So Joe Rogan is okay in my book. It's my first time ever meeting the guy. I think his strongest points have been just to be cautious of how the media is controlling what they want you to think and who they want you to vote for. We're both a big fan of just getting people to think for themselves.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's something that not enough people do, even educated people. People who like to think that they're the source of opinion. Often you part the curtains and there they are, just peddling back something they saw on television. So why don't we all just raise a toast to free speech, free thought, and all the freedom that brings us. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, bidding you until next time to keep looking up.