The Science of Illusion with Penn & Teller

Learn the secret of magic when Penn & Teller sit down with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck Nice and neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde join Neil in studio, Michael Shermer calls in about skepticism, and Bill Nye explains why we want to believe.

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.

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the Hall of the Universe of the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. I am your personal astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. And tonight on StarTalk, we're featuring my interview with legendary magicians and illusionists, Penn and Teller. What you might not have known is that they are also passionate about science and skepticism. And so this conversation went everywhere to orbit those two subjects. So, let's do this. Yeah! Alright.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I've got with me my co-host Chuck Nice. Hey! Great to be here as usual. Professional comedian. Yes. And smart aleck. Uh, well, I'm probably a professional smart aleck and comedian. Oh, that's how that goes? That's how you work that? That's what your teachers told you? That's what, without a doubt. Oh, God. He just took me back to so many bad memories. So, I try not to ever do this alone. I always get backup. And so, tonight, we have Susana Martinez-Condeé. Welcome, Susana.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You specialize in, in sort of, the neurology of magic, I guess. Is that how, is that the right way to say that?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  I'm interested in the neural basis of behavior. What do we act? What do we think the way we do? And it turns out that magicians have taken some lead on neuroscientists to figure out how some things work in the brain.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're also a magician yourself. Are you really?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  I'm a retired magician.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does that mean? What, what?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  So I I took magic classes for a year and I actually I'm a member of a number of magic societies. And one of them, the Magic Castle of Hollywood, requires a test, sort of like a thesis defense. Do you have to perform in front of a...

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you passed this test?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Barely. I was I was...

• 2:18Chuck Nice?

  Barely? What what what do you mean? Is it like a algebra test? How can you barely pass?

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would you cut the lady only partly in half? And you couldn't... Like, what do you mean barely?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  I passed, but I was told in no uncertain terms that I should not quit my day job of being a scientist. That was my first and only performance.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, now you co-authored a book called Slights of Mind. You co-authored it with Stephen Mecknik, is that correct? In fact, why am I asking? Because I know you did that, because I actually blurbed your book. And I've got the actual blurb here. Just this will... Tell me if this doesn't summarize the book. I worked hard on this blurb, just so you know. Here it goes. Stephen and Susanna persistently remind us that the human mind is a bad data-taking device. And it's this fact that enables the science of magic to exist at all.

• 3:07Chuck Nice?

  That is awesome. He just said, you said, "We are stupid."

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're going to be joined deeply on your expertise for this. Because we're going to be going back and forth with many clips with Penn and Teller in my office. And we need you to help us understand, interpret, and make sense of it all. So Penn and Teller, they've had a show in Vegas for 14 years with a theater with their name on it. It's the Penn and Teller Theater. Now, that's badass.

• 3:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it is.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're there long enough, they named a damn theater after you. So...

• 3:42Chuck Nice?

  And and they and it's an awesome show.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Well, I saw their show here in New York on Broadway. And if you did not know, Penn is the bigger fellow and Teller is the littler fellow. But even as the littler fellow, he's still at least like 5'9" or 5'10". You'd think he's tiny, but Penn is like 6'6" or something, maybe even 6'7".

• 4:01Chuck Nice?

  It's kind of like, you know, like, where the black Penn and Teller?

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, Chuck.

• 4:06Chuck Nice?

  Because people see us in pictures and they're like, "Wow, Chuck, you are a little teeny guy." I'm like, "No, have you ever considered that Neil is giant?"

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Teller, they've got a shtick. Teller has a background in miming and in their magic act, Teller never speaks. He gestures what you need to know about what he's doing. And I saw the show and he doesn't need to speak. He doesn't need to speak at all. It's working. It's working. And so they came to my office, we sat him down. We put a camera on Teller, just in case he said something. Just in case. So, but anyhow, I put him down, we throw, we put him in the chair. And as I always typically do, I ask about their background in science. Was it good? Was it bad? Non-existent? Just let me know what your deepest influences may be. So let's check it out.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  I was rather good in science and rather good in, loved science. And I get to about ninth grade and on TV, there is a fake mentalist, which is of course redundant, Kreskin. And he had this ESP kit, which was a game, that little pendulum. I wanted to get that.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a kit you could buy.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, my little ESP kit. And it was, he was doing magic tricks, you know, I now believe. But he presented it as experiments. So I, I got the kit. My parents bought it for me because it was a science thing.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to clarify, this kit purported to test whether you have ESP?

• 5:42Speaker 03

  No, for you to help with the testing of ESP.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  You know, this was, I know, Duke University was cited and all these other things. So I would be there getting out in my small public library. The two books we had on juggling, because I was a juggler in that. And there were magic books. Next to the magic books, you know, coincidentally, was a book on mentalism, magic. And in there were tricks very similar to the tricks that he had done as experiments on TV. Now, some people might have reacted to that with a joy of being led in on the secret. I reacted to that with rage. I could not believe that an adult had lied to me. And forgive me for this. For a young child, I believed it was scientists who had lied to me.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  And I flew into such a rage that my parents had been ripped off and I was embarrassed in front of them and everything else, that my whole science stopped. I went from A's to failing, right there, overnight, just saying to my teachers, "You scientists just lie, I'm not interested." And my hatred for scientists and magicians was unbounded. And that stayed, and I went to rock and roll.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is because you had the impression that because this was an experimental kid...

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Because he claimed to be a scientist.

• 7:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It came out of the world and the culture of science.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and of course it doesn't. And for those of us...

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this messed with you.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  For those of us who fight the skeptical battles, this is the nightmare we're worried about, right? What if children think that these tricks are being done by real scientists, you know? And people say, "What the damage that could be done?" Now, I don't believe the damage done there was that the most brilliant scientist of the 21st century, who was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, stopped his career. I don't think there was any danger done there. But there was a hurt to a child, it's very, very real. And it wasn't until I really met Amazing Randy and Teller, that I realized that magic could be done morally and could be done honestly.

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you saved him?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Very, very clearly, yeah. And you know, and then it was people just going, "Patty, he wasn't a scientist." You know, that's the only sentence I needed, right?

• 8:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like chill out.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's the only sentence you need, right? After you've been scammed, you need that sentence. But there was nobody in my life, I mean, my parents tried to say, "No, no, because there's one bad guy, doesn't mean Carl Sagan is lying to you." But it was a hard thing for me. And I'm, you know, condensing that into a story, you know, it took twists and turns, but...

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't mean to oversimplify, but can we credit that experience for you becoming who you are today?

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Well, you know...

• 8:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leaves me to wonder if that didn't happen...

• 8:31Speaker 03

  I would certainly credit Randy and Teller.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd linebacker for the, you know, for the New England Patriots.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you're not even putting on the table that I would have actually been a scientist, are you?

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you already removed that. Okay.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Linebacker, yeah, we're trying to find something that's exactly suited to your intellectual. You might have been.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are six foot seven.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't pull that out of nowhere. Excuse me, I didn't pull that out of a hat.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  But, you know, so that kind of put me in, I was very much in rock and roll culture. Teller was very much in theater intellectual culture, but not particularly in the sciences. Not particularly, no. But, you know, you don't have to. You don't have to be able to play a sport to love it and cheer for it. You don't have to be funny to be a comedy fan. And you don't have to have the raw processing power to just think that science is the most important thing in the world.

• 9:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Susanna, is this, is this a common problem with people fearing magicians and scientists?

• 9:34Speaker 01

  I don't think it's a common problem in kids, but it is a challenge, I can see, for some young kids to be able to tell the difference between what's legitimate science and pseudoscience.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So ultimately, this came down to intellectual honesty about your craft, about your trade. And so I went back in there and I just asked about any, the formality of their code of ethics. And let's find out how that came out.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  The fact that you have all this unpleasant stuff built into magic. The fact that the word fool, I am fooling you. I am making you a fool. The fact that I'm tricking you. To make that a pleasant, consensual relationship is a difficult thing.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never thought about that.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  But I.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The word fool.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  I want someone.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one wants to be called a fool. But somehow it's okay for you to say you're fooling me.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Well, yes, but is it? I mean, you're someone, you're someone we respect tremendously. You're someone wicked smarter than us. You're gonna come and sit in a theater and we have to make a contract with you that says, you know, while you were studying astrophysics, we learned a little bit about what to do with the deck of cards. And we think we can share that that's interesting, the way you can share the stuff you found is interesting, and we are going to trick you. We're gonna use your mind against you, and we're gonna do that in the spirit of sharing and pleasantness. That's a difficult social contract.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is so intellectually honest. I don't even know how to think about that.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Other magicians don't wanna do that. We've had other magicians say, "No, no, no. You have to leave open that you really have powers." But if I come to you and say, "You know, we don't have any powers." "But you know, Neil, there's this way of handling books and talking to people that make it look like I could read what's in your mind. Isn't that kinda nutty? Let's give it a try." All of a sudden, we're on the same side.

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm still impressed with that.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely, because I don't know how to do it.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Sure, you don't know how to do it. And I would like to think, when you do know how to do it, you'll still be impressed.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Suzanna, why is it that I can still be impressed by a trick, even though I know I'm being fooled? And even if, maybe I even know how the trick is done, it still works? So what's up with that?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Well, just because you know about Copernicus' discoveries, as you know, it doesn't mean that you're not going to enjoy the sunset. And I think with magic, if you appreciate how magic works, and how magicians... Sometimes the manipulations that they do, if you know about them, it's so surprising that the method works, because it seems so crude. And that allows you to know both about what goes into the magic, how magicians may take months or even years to do something that takes a few minutes on stage, but also about how the human mind works. And especially as a neuroscientist, that's even more amazing that magic does this. And it lets us know so much about what's going on in our brain,

• 12:41Speaker 01

  not just in the magic show, but in general, in everyday life.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So while the mechanisms behind many of the tricks, magicians will never reveal them, I would expect. But you presumably can reveal...

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How the brain works in response to those tricks, is that right? That's not a secret. You published that.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. And, uh, well, the president of the magic circle in London said to us, "The door to magic is closed, but it's not locked." So that means that you can push a little and the door will open. And the fact is, is that if you wanna know how any trick works, just go to YouTube and you'll find out.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, one of the famous tricks of all time is the catching a bullet in the mouth.

• 13:25Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when we come back, we're gonna find out how Penn and Teller accomplished that.

• 13:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, I thought you were gonna say, "When we come back, you're gonna shoot Chuck in the face."

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On StarTalk.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where I serve as director. That's like my day job. Or shall I call it my night job?

• 13:57Chuck Nice?

  No, your night job is superhero. We know it.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're featuring my interview with legendary illusionists and magicians, Penn and Teller. And we, I have in studio, well, Chuck is here with me, of course. And, uh, Susanna, you're a neurologist. And so you, you, you should be, you're in a position to figure out what the brain is doing in ways that other people aren't, I suppose, right?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  We try.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there's a ringing endorsement. No, just for example. Neurologist, we try. You know, there's the traditional magic trick of pulling the rabbit out of a hat, and card tricks. And generally, we think of our attention being sort of misdirected, and rather than there being an illusion. And so, Susanna, tell me about the kinds of misdirection that exist.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Well, we tend to think that what magicians do is they distract us from the things that they don't want us to see. And, and this is not correct. What magicians, rather than distract you, what the magicians do is they're extremely good at directing your attention to the places and the moments in time where they want you to be paying attention to. And then, your brain, your brain is the magician's best accomplice, because whenever you're paying attention to something, your brain just suppresses everything else. So paying attention is not enhancing what you're paying attention to is blocking everything else that is not relevant.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's quite a show and of course Teller doesn't speak in my interview here, nor does he speak on stage. And so I, I just, I had to compliment the show that I saw. I was very impressed and I'd seen them on TV and this, but it's gotta be in real life to really believe the illusion, you know, to see what, what's really going down. So, so I, I, I gave them, you know, I complimented them on their work and, and let's just see their reaction. He is so good. You are, excuse me, you are, I can talk to him.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you are so good with your body language and your facial expressions. We all knew exactly what you were thinking and saying, or at least wanted us to think you were thinking and saying.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Well, Teller's fascinated with the idea of being able to lie without speaking, you know? And one of the things you learn most in magic, there's no better lie than the lie you tell yourselves. Now, in Vegas, we end the show with the bullet catch, which is a...

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've seen that done on a cruise ship.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, well.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You catch it in your teeth, right?

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, but not, no, you don't, but that's what it looks like. But our version is a little more complex and this is...

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to clarify, so there's a gun behind a glass and the magician on the other side of the...

• 16:40Speaker 03

  And the bullet is signed.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you scratch the bullet in a way.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  The audience member signs it.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and...

• 16:44Speaker 03

  And it is...

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Goes through the, breaks the glass and he re-calls his head and he pulls it out and there it is.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  And it has, uh, it's a, it's, it's an interesting trick because at least 15 people have died on stage doing it. It's the most dangerous trick i- in show business, really. And, uh, we do a version that we believe is safe, we would not do it because it would be immoral to do it if it were not safe. Um, but the bullet catch, now if I say to you, you know, we're gonna catch a bullet in our teeth, you say, "No, you're not."

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course, of course, right, right.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  So we never, ever say, "We're gonna catch a bullet in our teeth." We're gonna move the bullet from this side of the stage to that side of the stage using this magic wand, holding up a gun. Now, what you do is you don't give the audience a sentence that they can say no to, and let them fill in the blanks. So after the show, they say, "That trick where you caught the bullet in your teeth is great, but I never said it." So when you say something, so when Teller doesn't speak onstage, and he just allows you to make all these assumptions, he is functioning as he's fooling you with lies you're telling yourself.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is just downright diabolical. Susanna, you're a party to this conduct. How do you sleep at night?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  I'm innocent, but in my defense...

• 18:09Chuck Nice?

  See, I think you're lying to yourself right now.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  In my defense, we're all lying to ourselves and to each other all the time. Magicians are doing better. I would say that very rarely, if ever, we get the full picture of reality, so at least in part, what we are experiencing the vast majority of the time is an illusion.

• 18:29Chuck Nice?

  What you just said kind of has real-life, very serious consequences, like when it comes to eyewitness testimony.

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On which so much of our legal system is based.

• 18:39Chuck Nice?

  So much of our legal system is based, and it's the most unreliable testimony that there can be. And normally, the testimony ends up with somebody who looks like me committed the crime. You know, and that's a little rough, you know, which is why whenever I commit a crime, I'm just like, "I'm a white lady."

• 19:01Speaker 01

  The biggest problem is that when you give a testimony about a crime, you have witnessed a situation in which, almost by definition, there was high emotional content. You might have been angry, or scared, or a lot of things were happening, and we know, and magicians know very well, that you cannot pay attention when you're experiencing a strong emotion.

• 19:27Chuck Nice?

  Right. Now, the problem is, what you're remembering is very real to you, just like when you saw the illusion, that was very real to you.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get more of that in another segment, and when we come back after the break, we'll actually take your questions on the science of illusion when we return to Star Talk.

• 19:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. In the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. Got Chuck Nice.

• 20:00Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got Susana Martinez Conde, professional neuroscientist at State University of New York. Great to have you on the show, to have us come to understand what the world of magic is all about. And we have the part of the program called Cosmic Queries.

• 20:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmic Queries. So Chuck, you are deputized for this, where you have reached into this grab bag of questions on sort of the science of skepticism, and you have them, and it's the science of illusion, and you have them for me. I've not seen these questions.

• 20:33Chuck Nice?

  You never do. You never get a chance to see the questions.

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if I don't know the answer, I'll just say I have no clue.

• 20:37Chuck Nice?

  Still hasn't happened yet.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will say.

• 20:39Chuck Nice?

  Still has yet to happen.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So bring them on.

• 20:41Chuck Nice?

  Our first query comes from Mark Miller from Halifax, Nova Scotia. This is actually a two-parter. Mark wants to know, what would the world be like without skepticism, in your opinion? And then, the second part of the two-parter is from Adam Rammer from Toronto, Ontario. And Adam wants to know, how do you know if your standard of proof is too high? How do you know if you're not being too skeptical? So what is the world without skepticism? And what is the world with too much skepticism?

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's good. So a world without skepticism, we've experienced that in the history of civilization. It's called the Dark Ages.

• 21:22Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 21:24Chuck Nice?

  That is scary.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the Dark Ages, where no one is curious about how something works. They believe they have all the answers, and those answers are wrong. And so, society does not function in any way that is enlightened, or leads to solutions to the problems that confront people. And so they live in misery, affected by problems that they cannot solve and will never solve, which makes the afterlife all that much more attractive.

• 21:54Chuck Nice?

  True. Okay, so how about too much skepticism?

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is possible to be too skeptical. And here's a way to think about that. If you perform an experiment, you get a result, and you say, well, maybe if I perform that same experiment tomorrow, I'll get a different result. So then you perform it, but you get the same result. And to a scientist in the groove...

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do this enough times, you say, "I'm done, and I'm on to the next problem." But you can have a level of skepticism where you say, "Maybe if I did it in the next building, I'll get a different result. Let me try that." "Maybe if I do it in a garage, and maybe if I did it with a..." And then, you could stay with it, okay. But there's a point where you say, "Look, you got the right answer here, all right? Move on."

• 22:41Chuck Nice?

  Enough is enough.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Enough is enough, and you'll spend the rest of your life re-demonstrating something that you already showed was true in the first few experiments. Now, in all fairness, you could be biased in every one of those experiments. You get to get somebody else to do it. And somebody else who wants to prove you wrong, and then they end up showing that you're right. When that happens enough times, we're done. We're done.

• 23:05Chuck Nice?

  You didn't describe science this year, right there. You described a drug problem.

• 23:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what is it, there's a famous definition of insanity? Is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result? Isn't that the A definition of insanity?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  I think it works.

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't work?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  But I wanted to say also that in terms of when enough is enough, that something that I think is missed sometimes is that science is not out to demonstrate the truth. Science is out to find out what's false. And so you don't verify hypotheses, you set out to reject them. And when you think you have evidence, you say that you have validated the hypothesis, which means basically that it is true for now, until somebody finds something against it. But when you reject something, you reject it once, and that's good enough. You find evidence that there is a condition. I don't care if it's at dark, or at night, or when I'm jumping on one leg,

• 24:05Speaker 01

  where this phenomenon does not happen, and that can serve to reject a hypothesis.

• 24:10Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so, you know, really what you just said there is, "We never know what we're talking about." That's okay, that's all right.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, coming up after the break, we're gonna explore the dark side of illusion and magic on StarTalk.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Startalk. The Rose Center for Earth and Space, containing the Hayden Planetarium. Chuck, Susanna, thanks for being on the show. We've been talking about the science of illusion, featuring my interview with Penn and Teller. And for this segment, I want to talk about the dark side of illusion and magic. And, you know, magic and science has a long history, long overlap. And it turns out that magicians, I didn't know this until we did some homework on this, that magicians have been on the forefront of the application of technology to their trade. Okay, fine, if you've got a new toy, a new bit of technology, use it, exploit it.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't have a problem. But if you are diabolical, you are visiting the dark side of how technology not only can be used, but abused. I brought this up with Penn and Teller, let's check it out.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  There's some very, very unpleasant things with magicians using technology. There's the light-heavy box, which was the use of electromagnetism that was used to show that white man's magic was better than black man's magic during uprisings in Algeria. They sent down Robert Houdin, right? They sent down Robert Houdin, Houdini got his name from, the French magician, to keep the blacks down in Africa. The idea was, we're going to bring this box. And they brought a box onstage and said, "Bring up the strongest man from the tribe." And the strongest man from the tribe came up, and they said, "Lift that box." And he lifted the box, and they put it down. He said, "Now, you are as weak as a woman." Just in case the racism was enough, let's go for some sexism too, shall we? "You are now weak as a woman."

• 26:26Speaker 03

  And he reached over, and of course, because of the electromagnet being switched on, could no longer lift the box. And that was seen as the power of the French over the Algerians. And then, just because-

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now that pisses me off. Well, I'm asked every now and then, is there some point in time in the past that I want to go back to? It would be then. I would go back and kick some ass.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Then, just to make sure, they took the battery that they had in there and put a jolt through the handle that knocked the strongest, you know, just knocked the strongest man on the tribe back on his ass. They electrocuted him.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  So, yes, magicians have used emerging technology. You feel good about that, sir?

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Susanna, you can perform magic using neuroscience that we are all sort of victims of, the shortcomings of our mind, or you can use magic that exploits well-known laws of physics, knowing that who you're doing the trick on, where they don't know any physics at all.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 27:37Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'm so glad we cleared all this up. Thank you all for coming, and have a great evening.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  But I think that it's the same concern where the technology can be used for good and evil, and I think magic, as any other human enterprise, can misuse technology, but that's not a problem that specifically affects magic. It's just how technology is out there, and technology per se is neither good nor evil.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so, there's also like spiritualism, right? Which is another point of access, I guess we imagine, into how people think and feel, and certainly like what they believe. And you think of spiritualism, magic, and science, at one point, all being one and the same, because they all were some mystery that people didn't really know or understand. And I was curious about their connection, and I asked Penn and Teller about it. Let's check it out.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Spiritualism, which hits in the late 19th century, is really this very noble attempt. It's an attempt to use science to look into religion. It's a pretty noble attempt. And the guys who first started looking into this were really sincere, running real experiments. You want to see if there's ether that escapes at the time of death, that we want to see if it lives on. It was really noble stuff by very, very good men and women.

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I too am respectful of people honestly attempting to measure their religion with science. I remember back when, remember, I read, back when X-rays were discovered, it was, if this allows you to see inside the body, let's look inside the body of... Someone dying.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then at the moment they're dead, will there be a spirit that will manifest?

• 29:19Speaker 03

  And the weighing of the soul.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soul, yeah, all of this. And so, so I don't have a problem.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  No, that's, that's not to be ridiculed.

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  That is to be.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't, I don't even have a problem with the phrenologists. At least they were trying to measure something, the bumps and wiggles in the head.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fact that it, it was irrelevant, needs to be determined later.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So I give them slack.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As long as it's not, um, used for nefarious, evil, exploitative ways.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  And even when it was used for evil, exploitative ways, the people who first started it out might not have had that in their hearts. And, and we have to remember that, you know? It's when people start blaming Darwin for eugenics. Well, no.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another, another use of, of sort of illusion and, and pseudoscience is in the field of psychic mediums. People who talk to dead people. Yes. We'll hit that next when StarTalk returns.

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk, right here in the Coleman Hall of the Universe. I love saying that. Welcome to the Hall of the Universe.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  That sounds good.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So Chuck, uh, great, always great to have you. And Susanna, featuring my interview with Penn and Teller. Uh, they're magicians, illusionists, and they're also have deep respect for science and skepticism, and have used some of that energy and interest to explore claims that people make in the name of science, in the name of sort of spiritualism, that where they might actually be frauds, outright frauds. And one sort of branch of this are psychic mediums. These are the people who talk to dead people. Yes. Right? People, they're spirits of dead people, not the decomposing body, I presume. But more importantly, those spirits talk back.

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I asked Penn and Teller about this. Because I know they've thought about it. Let's see where they take us.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  The most valuable thing I have is the memory of my mom and dad. Now, if you come along and say you can communicate with my mom and dad after death, and I believe you even for a moment, and I am grieving and desperate, you can lie to yourself and tell yourself that you are giving me some solace by letting me communicate with my mom. But what you are also doing is you are giving me things that my mom and dad never said. You are taking the memories that I have, and you are polluting them in order for your money, or glory, or self-deception.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  And that is to me, and I didn't understand this until my mom died. I did not understand how horrific that is to take the most important thing in my heart and distort it. Your mom says now she has a dog. You know, whatever it's gonna be. Every moment that I had with my mom and dad is precious to me.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if I'm gullible, I'll say, "You know, when I was a kid, she said she liked dogs."

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Sure, of course. But no matter what...

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And all of a sudden, I start filling it in.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  So the memories that you have that are accurate are to be guarded very carefully.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Harry Houdini had a very similar way of thinking. I was reminded of. Harry Houdini started as a believer in communicating with the dead, and his mother had died. So he went to this famous medium, who was the wife of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. And she held this session. She started to contact with his mother. And then the mother spoke through the medium. And he said, "Harry, I'm so happy to talk to you. I love you so much." And Harry Houdini was enraged because his actual name was Eric, and his mother only ever spoke to him in German.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Medium didn't know German.

• 33:38Chuck Nice?

  And didn't know his name.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if there are people not as astute as Harry Houdini, who might have taken the medium's read and say, "Oh, I wonder when she learned to speak to me in English," and start filling in the memories and the rest of that story. Right? I mean, many people have that susceptibility in the face of even incorrect

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Recovered memories.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  If you need to believe, no amount of evidence is going to convince you of the contrary.

• 34:09Chuck Nice?

  And that's what it is. It's the want to believe. You know, my father passed just last year, and a funny thing happened. Right after him passing, I got a phone call from my father's cellphone two days after he died. So I know he's dead. And the phone rings with this, and I picked it up, and of course, it was a blank line. And a friend of mine was like, "Yo, man, that's cool, man. That's your father actually reaching out to you from beyond to let you know that he's OK." And I went, "You don't know my father. The roaming charges from beyond the grave."

• 34:48Chuck Nice?

  That man would never pay.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good to see you come to terms with that and recovered and kept some rationality in it all. So, Susanna, this need to believe, even to fill in, I assume this is a well-understood and well-studied phenomenon among neuroscientists.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Well, we are wired to find meaning. We try to connect cause and effect all the time, whether their cause and effect are connected in the real world.

• 35:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Causally or not.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Or not. And this is what happens in a magic show. The magician gives you a false cause. It's the magic wand makes the rabbit disappear, and the magic wand is the cause. In reality, the cause is something very different.

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they create the correlation without the cause and effect?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you go to a psychic, and they give you something that looks like a very tangible evidence if you don't stop and think about it. And you may not want to stop and think about it because you're missing that person, and you're in a vulnerable position, so you're not thinking clearly to begin with.

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a really important point, and that makes me much more exploitable in the hands of someone who knows the neuroscience of my grief.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So skepticism, when I think of it, It's more of a defense, an antidote to pseudoscience. And to all the charlatans who would try to fool you into thinking something is true that is not. And some of them exploit the weaknesses of our neurological wiring. Others use illusion. And but it's a good thing there are people out there fighting the good fight. One of them is Michael Shermer. Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine. He's also a monthly columnist for Scientific American. And guess what? I've got Michael Shermer standing by on a live video call. Ooh, yes.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, can you put on Michael Shermer?

• 36:47Michael Shermer?

  Hi Neil.

• 36:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, Michael. Hey, hey, wait. No, you're just showing off your backyard there, you know?

• 36:54Michael Shermer?

  Hey, you've been invited here, man. You have a standing invitation and we can hike right up that hill behind me, which is where they hauled the telescopes up for Mount Wilson originally back in the 1890s by mule.

• 37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he's right. I'm 0 for 2 in his invitations to his home to have dinner on that porch, just so you know.

• 37:10Chuck Nice?

  Well, I wouldn't go either if somebody was gonna make me haul some telescopes up a hill.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Michael, you've written many books. Most recently, The Moral Arc. But that's not why we called you. It's because in 2011, you wrote a book, The Believing Brain. And then you had a really long subtitle. I gotta look this one up. "From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies. How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths." This sounds like you're just out to ruin everybody's day. So, what is magical thinking and why is it bad? Isn't it just fun? I mean, why should anybody care?

• 37:49Michael Shermer?

  Well, first of all, our brains are incapable of not forming beliefs. So, the natural propensity is to find patterns. A is connected to B. It sure looks like it is. And sometimes it really is connected. Sometimes it's not. How can we really tell? Science is the answer to that. So, my thought experiment is imagine you're a hominid in the plains of Africa. Three and a half million years ago, you're a little three and a half foot tall primate called Lucy, let's say. And you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind? Well, if you think the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, that's a harmless type 1 error, a false positive. You thought there was a connection, there's no connection. But if you think that the rustle in the grass

• 38:31Michael Shermer?

  is just the wind and it turns out it's a predator, congratulations, you're lunch. You've just won a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early.

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:40Michael Shermer?

  So, basically what I'm arguing is that our brains are designed to assume all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators, just in case. The cost of that is that we tend to think things are real that aren't. So that's magical thinking, superstition, that's believing in homeopathy, or astrology, or tarot cards, or palm reading, or any of these kinds of things, because people get just enough hits, like the gambler, you only have to pay off the slot machine every 30 or 40 pulls or so, to keep the person sitting there. We just glom onto those patterns. You know, in a way, all science begins with the null hypothesis. We just assume your hypothesis is not true until you prove otherwise. You

• 39:23Michael Shermer?

  provide the evidence. And then when you do, we're willing to believe it. You know, show me the body. I'll believe in Bigfoot or Loch Ness monster. You know, aliens, where are they? Well, they're hidden in a, you know, a spacecraft area, Area 51. Okay, can we go there? No. Well, if we can't go there, if we can't ever see the evidence, then I just can't believe. You just have to show me the evidence.

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Michael, thanks. Thanks for being on StarTalk. Good to see you again.

• 39:46Michael Shermer?

  Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

• 39:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we're good. Thanks for Mike, Michael Turmer. So, up next, my friend Bill Nye the Science Guy explains why we want to believe in magic when StarTalk returns.

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk.

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've been talking about skepticism, the science of illusion, magic. And who else would I do that with, other than Penn and Teller? Penn and Teller. They had a Broadway show, came through town, I nabbed him, we did this. It's been beautiful. Beautiful.

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, in this segment, we always like to catch up with my good friend Bill Nye, formerly a resident of the West Coast, but he moved to, he's now a permanent resident of New York City. He's a New Yorker. And we catch up with him to see what he's got to say about the subject at hand. And let's find out what Bill Nye has to say about why we want to believe.

• 40:58Bill Nye?

  This is the original metamorphosis trunk from the 1890s. Harry Houdini would lock his wife Bess in a burlap sack in the trunk. A few minutes later, Bess would be on the outside, and Harry Houdini would be in a sack locked in the trunk. Was it the supernatural? Was it science? Or was it just plain trickery? You see, making observations and drawing conclusions, that's what we do. And until very recently in human history, everything that we couldn't explain, we explained with the paranormal. And the reason it works is because we want it to work. We want to believe that there's a supernatural force permeating the universe.

• 41:42Bill Nye?

  And if we could just access that force, we'd have supernatural powers too. We could escape from anything. We could move physical objects with our minds from one place to another. In fact, we could go anywhere we want to. We could move ourselves from one place to another, anywhere in the universe, just...

• 42:02Bill Nye?

  Like that.

• 42:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill. Nice. So, tell me a little bit about Houdini and what legacy of his we have kept from all that time.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Well, certainly in the skepticism movement, Houdini was perhaps the most important skeptic. A lot of people have followed in his footsteps.

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At a time when spiritual mediums were at a height.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So, we're at the moment where spiritualism develops. And they're trying, they start off with good intentions and trying to figure out whether one can measure the supernatural. But then, things don't work out as expected. And some magicians, Houdini, Mascaline as well, start providing evidence that these seances, they're basically theater shows with special effects.

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a magician would be best able to reveal any trickery in ways that someone who is naturally wants to believe would be incapable of noticing.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And Harry Houdini, for instance, he was part of a committee that was put together by Scientific American back in the day to try to debunk some of these paranormal claims. And that even in more-

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or find out if they're true. I mean, either, right? Experiment on them.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. And this is something that James Randi, for instance, is very careful about with the $1 million challenge. To say that, he's not taking the position that this is impossible, just highly improbable.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just prove it.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  But, yeah, keeping an open mind, an open-minded attitude that, you know, maybe there's something about it. We don't think this is very likely, but why not? Let's give it a try. The brain is going to try to make sense of things. We're always constantly trying to find order. And if there is no order, we impose our own order and we call it reality. So, we do this all the time. And especially if we are in an emotionally vulnerable situation. We know magicians use humor in their shows. One of the magicians that we wrote this article with, Johnny Thompson, he says, "When the audience laughs, time stops." The magician can do anything because nobody's going to figure it out.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  This is humor, but it works with any other powerful emotion.

• 44:31Chuck Nice?

  Okay, well, you're getting a little too close to home right now.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Penn and Teller are some of the best at it. And in my conversation with them, they revealed to me the one true secret of magic. One true secret. And I'm gonna share it with you. Right now, you ready? Check it out.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  You know, a lot of magicians make this stupid mistake of going, "Turn off your brain," and coming a little bit of a fantasy trip with me. "I had a dream last night where I was painting a picture." And you go, "Shut up." When you are watching Shakespeare, they say, "Let's pretend..." This is a... there's been a wreck. "Let's pretend there's a storm. And let's pretend that this guy you saw in a deodorant commercial is actually a king." And the whole audience goes, "Okay, we'll do that."

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're good with that.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  And then you play along. In magic, it is not magic unless you have the skepticism underneath it. So if we say during our show, "This is a perfectly ordinary deck of cards," we have to give you some evidence of that. Because if we say to you, "This is a perfectly ordinary deck of cards," you go, "Okay." And then you picked a card at random. "Okay." If you give us the willing suspension of disbelief, we can't work. We can only work with the unwilling suspension of disbelief. In other words, we have to take you there. You can't give it to us.

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, just so I make it clear to myself, because it's a very deep sentence. If...

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I actually believe that everything you did was real, then I don't think you're doing magic.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Right. We want the credit.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want the credit for actually doing magic.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  That's a really important point. Really important point. If I... If we tell you that there's really this power in the universe that lets me read your mind, we get no credit for anything. You know, everybody has this credit. We want the credit that we spent years memorizing stuff to be able to do tricks. We spent years and years and years learning stuff. I mean, there's only one secret in magic. One secret at all. And that is, we are willing to work harder than you think the tricks are worth.

• 46:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. There it is. You said earlier in this program, Susanna, that it could take them months or years to develop something that takes minutes to perform on a stage.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  And that's one of the tragedies of magic, I think, that you go to a concert and you see somebody playing violin beautifully and you think, wow, that's a lot of work that got into that. But if the magician is good, everything is going to seem so simple and so natural, not choreographed, that you have no inkling about how much work goes into it.

• 47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, Susanna, allow me to offer some concluding reflections on this topic. Well, now that you're standing, I'm sure they're gonna be very important.

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I think of a magician, what distinguishes them from people of antiquity who may have wielded a power that no one knew of, they didn't tell others that they knew something about how nature worked. I see people taken in by charlatans, people who exploit what they already know to be the shortcomings of human attention, human consciousness, human awareness. I'm angered by that. Rather than go out and beat them on the head, I, as an educator, want, and Susanna, no doubt as well, want to educate you upfront. And that level of education, that level of science literacy, that level of skepticism

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  becomes antidote. It becomes an inoculation against all those who would exploit you for their gain. You've been watching StarTalk, and I've been your personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And thanking Chuck and Susanna, I bid you, as always, to keep looking up.