Transcription
Look, you've spent so much of your life explaining science to people. Yes.
Basically being a human "well, actually" meme. Okay.
Yeah. Although I've learned to not use the word "actually" because that annoys people.
Correct. So I go out of my way to not use that word.
I want to play a game with you that's going to involve you doing something you rarely get asked to do.
Okay. What's that?
Which is remain silent.
Okay. Okay.
This is a series of science questions that you're gonna ask me. Okay. I haven't seen these questions. I am going to do what eight billion people on planet Earth generally do when they interact with science. I'm going to just go off the top of my dome and you cannot correct me.
These are good questions.
[Music]
What causes high tide?
The tide is high and the tide is the ocean which is somehow connected to the moon. That also is connected to a woman's cycle. But in this case, the moon is making the ocean rise.
I can't say anything about your answer.
You can't. I know. I know this is like you being waterboarded, but this is not—
I'm going to explode. But that's the only question. Okay.
Yeah.
Why does the Earth not fall into the sun?
The sun is huge and the earth doesn't fall into the sun because the gravitational pole is making it circle the block but not careen into the sun. And I don't know why it hasn't yet, but I'm glad it hasn't. But it's gravity and orbit is my answer, sir. You can't correct me.
Explain the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat.
There was a German scientist named Schrödinger. Schrödinger. He had a cat and the cat, the cat jumped off a bookshelf. Schrödinger noticed, um, the speed that the cat jumped off and he came up with an equation, um, based on that, which became known as Schrödinger's cat. Schrödinger's cat.
Next question, please.
What is entropy?
Ent— I should know this. This is in Physics 1 in high school, 10th grade. Entropy is things happening. Things are happening and they will continue to happen. Entropy. Objects in motion stay in motion. Entropy. Maybe it could be. I only have so much time in the exam. Please, I have to finish the exam.
Why do you not fall over while riding a bike?
My mass has centrifugal force that keeps me upright. But I do fall over if I didn't have good centrifugal force. Next question, please.
What are the names of the base pairs that make up our DNA?
I don't know. Next question. You look really constipated. Let's just get— let's get through this.
Did humans walk on the moon?
I remember in school I saw the astronaut put the American flag on the moon, but I've also seen some YouTube videos that have said that that was photoshopped. Why are you doing that? It's so— Neil, based on the data set that I have seen, the answer is inconclusive. We don't know. Well—
Can I say something now?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Go for it.
All your answers are what an eighth grader would give who didn't do the homework and just take the words from the question and reassemble them and put them into some kind of answer that they think will get them credit. That would get—
D+, C- if it's a good day.
I mean, without studying, I think that's pretty good.
So—
C-. Like I did not study.
[Music]
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Neil Degrasse Tyson, thank you for joining us.
Man, I didn't know you have a little, little cheering section up there.
Oh, we got a whole— Yeah, we got a live studio audience of about four people.
Neil Degrasse Tyson is the most famous scientist in the world. Is he the best scientist? I have no idea. I got a C- in chemistry. But he is the best science communicator. And in this moment, science communication has become more important than science itself. Sad. We are drowning in an infinite scroll of misinformation. The country's leading scientific institutions are getting nuked by teenagers named Big Balls. And RFK Jr. is trying to replace measles vaccines with measles. Low key, we're doomed. So, in that context, Neil deGrasse Tyson's role as a communicator isn't just helpful, it's essential. He's not just explaining science, he is defending its place in our civic life. So, I sat down with Dr. Tyson to talk about the power of scientific literacy, the president's attack on scientific institutions, and the future of AI. Also, I may have briefly tried to convert him to Islam. I'm just saying. Love to have him. You're, you're probably one of the, the GOAT science communicators of our time. Okay. Your IMDb is stacked. You have 232 IMDb credits, which—
I never, I, I hardly ever look at IMDb. That's interesting. Thank you.
Yes. Now, now compare that to one of the great GOAT science communicators of my generation, Bill Nye the Science Guy, who only has a poultry 10069 interviews. You have unironically played yourself in dozens of television programs. When did you realize you were famous?
Great question. There are a couple of checkpoints here. Yes. One of them was, I, when my email was still available—
Okay.
—to people.
Yeah.
Okay. In fact, I published a book called *Letters from an Astrophysicist*, which was my correspondence with the random general public asking me stuff.
The way you said "random" is there's a deep distinct—
So, I came upon some chat room on the internet.
Uhhuh.
And people were arguing with each other about what I said and what I meant.
Oh, wow.
When they could have just emailed me. So when I became the subject of other people's arguments and debates and conversations, I, I realized, oh, okay, something else is going on. But the real threshold here—
Yes.
—is I made the cover of *Highlights* magazine. That's a big deal. That's big.
Wow. That's big.
Yeah. No. *Highlights*. *Highlights* and *Sports Illustrated for Kids* are too hot.
I made the cover. I said, "Okay, all right. I'm there."
That's a big deal.
I'm there. But I, I had no no aspirations to any of this.
Yeah. I mean, it must it must be—
Perfectly. Send me back to the lab. I'll be fine.
Well, as an astrophysicist and now that you're a famous astrophysicist, it's kind of wild seeing that you stand in front of more microphones than you do telescopes.
Yes, that is true.
Do you wish you could go back to being in front of— behind?
I, I want to do both.
Okay.
See, see, if I didn't do the microphone thing—
Yes.
—I would almost be irresponsible because I can do it.
Maybe one out of six of my colleagues, right, is on the spectrum, you know, and perfectly happy in the lab, but not deeply interacting with the public, right?
Put a camera in front of them. Are they even going to make eye contact with the lens or anything? So, so as best as I know of myself, I'm not on the spectrum. So, if we're both in the lab and the camera comes, I would be irresponsible if I didn't feel the the media inquiry.
Yeah.
And I don't know that anyone gains if you put someone in front of the media that's not where they're comfortable.
Yeah.
So, I, I see it as a duty.
Now, being a public figure myself, fame is one of the quickest ways to lose a sense of objective reality. How do you reckon with that as you interact with science?
Because I'm foundationally a scientist, with never a goal to have become famous. So the fame thing is not centered to to my being.
Yes.
Being a scientist is centered to my being. And being a scientist, you observe the world. You analyze the world. You take the laws of physics as the, as we understand them in in in the physical universe, and you use that to pass judgment on statements people make, claims they make, uh, uh, assertions they hold for what they say or think is true.
It is remarkably potent to be scientifically literate in a world. It, it empowers you to know when someone else is full of [ __ ]. Okay, it's that simple. And so, so no, it's there. I don't have a problem reestablishing some sense of objective reality.
That's great. Um—
Can I add something to that?
Yeah, go for it.
This is a little weird fact. I might have said this—
Once ever.
—in front of a microphone.
HMDK exclusive. Let's do it.
Okay, there you go. That's a K on the right hand side.
That's a K. Right there. Yeah. Yeah. With a little—
That's a K.
Looks like an I and a C. But I, but if you— Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, we can we can get into typeface and Yeah. Yeah. Kerning. I'm a—
Typeface guy.
Typeface and kerning is my love language.
Really?
Yes.
Oh my god.
Okay. But that's for another time.
Okay.
So talk to me. You said you're going to say something that you—
Did you know what's up?
—that in Saturday Night Live and 7-Eleven.
It's the same typeface.
No.
Okay.
Uh—
Same font family. Uh, Saturday Night Live, the N in Night is lowercase and all the other letters are uppercase.
Oh, wow.
And in 7-Eleven, the N is lowercase. Uh, in 11, and all the other letters are uppercase.
Oh, that's cool.
It's a little weird.
They just slip that in you.
You know, the FedEx, you see the arrow and the logo as well everywhere.
Yeah. Yeah. It's in the shadow in the in the negative.
Not to one up you. It's in the negative space. It's in the negative space.
Yeah. No, I'm thinking about this. Um—
Oh, where were we before I rudely interrupted?
You said you had, you had, you had something that you wanted to add.
Yeah. Yeah. So, the human mind—
Yes.
—is highly susceptible to misinterpreting an objective truth that's right in front of you.
And we celebrate that actually with books like, uh, uh, what do you call those? Optical illusion books. Nobody doesn't love a good optical illusion book. But it's weird when— But pause and think on this.
Yeah.
There's a page with two lines. Is one line longer or shorter? I don't know. I can't because there's some little, little fooling factor about the illustration. If something as simple as a line drawing can confound your understanding of what is real—
Yeah.
—then I just want you to know that I cherish the ability of our brains to work at all in the face of these possible delusions of reality—
Or illusions.
Yes.
—or illusions. So then what happens now? People say, "Oh, let me stir some chemicals into my brain and that'll be better." It's like, whatever it is doing for you—
It is not bringing you closer to an objective reality.
Oh, wow.
And so—
Are you talking about, let me stir some chemicals? You're talking about microdosing mushrooms, I have never—
Etc.
—done drugs ever in my life.
Okay. You Muslim?
No.
Okay.
No. I can arrive at such conclusions without being a part of a huge system of—
That's cool.
—religious philosophy. We'd love to have you.
Nor am I Mormon. You could ask that, right? So, yeah, I don't— I'm not into caffeine. None of these chemicals that you would stir into the brain. Now, maybe if you, you could be more artistic—
Right?
—I don't know.
Yeah.
But getting closer to how nature works, no, there's no evidence that that has ever happened with anybody.
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Let's talk about one one topic that is that people talk about on the internet a lot and it's a big part of public discourse, which is artificial intelligence.
But now there's a new topic, which is AGI.
Mhm.
Artificial General Intelligence. Can you explain that to our audience real quick, just as a general idea, and then we can we can get into it deeper.
Yeah. So AI, in, you have to contrast it to AI. So AI are computers that do things better than you, faster than you.
Yes.
Cheaper than you.
Yeah.
Cheaper. That is, you can replace people's employment with machines that can do this.
Essentially, ChatGPT, Grok 3. Hey, ingest this Microsoft Excel document.
Yeah.
Ingest it and write something. Write a summary of it that a person might have taken half a day to do and it'll do it in in 2 minutes.
Or or less. So this is what anyone today is referring to as AI. By the way, AI has been around long before ChatGPT. ChatGPT put it on the radar of creative people because all of a sudden now AI is doing creative things.
Right?
All right. It's writing your term paper. It's drawing and making an illustration.
Yes. And—
And the people who write headlines are the ones directly affected by that sort of thing.
Correct. So AI had a resurgence of public awareness of its role in our society, but it's always been there. So not always, decades.
Yeah.
Right. When, when, when computers beat us at chess—
Okay. I remembered how far away that goal felt and then it was conquered. Yeah.
—it was like, wow. Okay. Then they moved the goalpost. Well, how about Jeopardy? Jeopardy requires cultural awareness. That's not just logical, logical inference. It's think this through in a culturally aware, sensitive way.
It wiped the floor with our best Jeopardy player ever.
Well, what's funny is you talked about this on Colbert. Let's take a look. Here's what you did. This is what you said: AI beat us at chess. AI beat us in Jeopardy. No one freaked out and ran for the hills when that happened. It only made headlines when AI figured out how to write your term paper. Then all the liberal arts people, they pooped their pants.
That's— Thank you.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, why are you not as worried about AGI's impact on humanity, and what would make you poop your pants?
Okay. So AGI, it can learn anything.
Yes.
At all, on its own, and be self-motivated doing so.
So, so it has its own— Others would define that slightly differently on the edges, but foundationally it is general intelligence as our human brain functions. You walk into a room, it's a new situation. You walk into a different room and you analyze it, you assess it, you decide how you can add to what is needed in that moment. So AGI is not a specific computer with a specific task.
Got it.
Okay. I— So, and you put that into a robot, then oh my gosh. Okay. Because ChatGPT is not going to make your cup of coffee.
Right?
It's specifically task-oriented.
It's task-oriented. Write me an essay on Herman Melville's *Moby Dick*.
Correct. Correct.
In 10 paragraphs.
Right. Right. So AGI would look at your life and say, "Oh, he probably wants this tomorrow. Let me figure out how much and why." And they'll do it. Okay.
So, it's, it's really a whole person.
So, some people find that concerning. You don't find it concerning?
I don't think it's in the offing.
What, what do you mean by "in the offing"?
I don't, I don't see why we would value it. It sounds highly useful, right? Okay. However, we're humans and we're in charge. At least we still tell ourselves that.
Okay.
So, I have tasks in my life. I would love to have computers do it for me.
Yeah.
I don't want the computer to do everything. I want it to do that thing. Don't get a computer that can do that thing.
So, so why are the leading science and tech thought leaders talking about this in a very terrifying way?
So, let me clarify that for you.
Sure.
Some leading tech people talk about it in that way. Okay. And they're the ones that get all the clickbait. What you don't see are the far outnumbering the number of tech people who do not feel that way.
Okay.
But no one goes to interview them.
Got it.
Because it's not, it's not as fun.
They don't have a blue check presence. You're publishing PDFs.
It's not as fun.
Where's their YouTube channel?
Don't talk to any of the people in the big computer companies. Got it. They're all into it completely. It's, it's transformative because you can ask, what was the single most important thing in the 20th century that affected the 20th century? Give me any answer.
The nuclear weapons, the internet.
Okay. No.
Okay.
The computer.
Okay.
Duh.
Yeah, sure.
The computer.
Okay. Well, you asked me to do it quickly. I was going to— I would possibly get to that. My god. Nuclear weapons is big, too, man.
The computer. The computer completely transformed everything we do at all times.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
But it became so blended into our lives. We're not thinking of that of it as a singular thing.
Such is the future of AI in my vision. Such as it'll become so much a part of it, already is.
Um—
If you drive an electric car, it's making decisions for you faster than you. Yes. Even if it's not an electric car, automatic braking if someone walks in front of the thing. You don't call that AI, but somebody, something made that decision for you.
Well, one of the things that people talk about, and I was talking about with our producers, is human beings have this blind spot. And the specific blind spot is our inability to see things exponentially.
That's correct.
And and one of the things I—
I have a whole chapter on that in one of my books.
And and one of the things that we don't talk about in AGI is the exponential, the exponential step functions of how quickly it's getting good and getting better.
Uh—
But let me just make it clear.
Yeah.
Since the Industrial Revolution, basically—
Yeah.
—we've been living in an exponential world.
Has it been?
Yes. Yes. Oh my gosh.
It's felt linear. Human beings have this blind spot. The specific blind spot is our inability to see things exponentially.
That's correct.
It's felt linear in, in, in my opinion, or is that just a feeling?
Because it feels linear because you're occupying tiny bits of a much larger scale of change. All right. So look at 1905 New York City. Take a picture of Fifth Avenue.
There's 50 horsedrawn carriages for every one automobile.
Yeah.
10 years later, 1915, the same photo.
Yeah.
It's 50 automobiles and one horsedrawn carriage. You tell me that's not exponential. Within 10 years, we go from horses, which we figuratively and literally built civilization on the back of, and now you can't give away a horse. Whole industries supporting horses went away. Buggy whips, wheel changers, wooden wheel, all of that went away. Yeah. Within 10 years.
And so, and we just— There it is. We just accepted it. Oh. Oh. What else happened? Oh, cinema comes in. Oh, now we can see like storytelling and we don't have to go to the theater. Oh my god. That, that happened within a couple of decades. Right. Okay. In the, in the early part of the century. Um, Oh, take a look at a map of all the planes that are airborne at any given moment.
Yeah.
There's a million people airborne at any given moment of any given day. A million people. And I look back 100 years ago, the Wright brothers and all of this, just four people are airborne at any given moment. Now we have millions. Come on now. So—
So, so the, so these exponential step functions that you've seen even in my 39 years on planet Earth, you're not concerned about them vis-à-vis AGI?
It'll happen with AGI.
And and you're saying it's okay? It's going to be—
No, I'm saying I don't think AGI is what we're going to go for.
Got it.
I think you want to do things that are useful and practical. And that's how we've brought technology to our—
What does that mean? Useful and practical. Just, what do you—
Like I said, I, I, I want a computer to make my coffee.
Same.
Okay.
Same. And I have a question.
I want to know. I don't even like coffee, but that's the one everyone cares about, right? Cuz—
There's a lot of—
Mystique around how the coffee—
Nobody, I'm not even worried about coffee. I'm talking about will the machines help me live my life, fold laundry, do the dishes, uh, make my bed, all the things that labor, the labor.
You should make your own damn bed.
[Music]
Don't look at me like that. I'm just—
Don't be a lazy—
Clean up after yourself.
Wait, wait. Neil, I'm interviewing Neil Degrasse Tyson, not this hybrid between Jordan Peterson and my dad. What is this? Make your—
Chapter one of my rules for—
One of the rules for life. So—
So wait, can I— I'm going to ask you this. I, I come at science from a very humanistic perspective and and what, what scares me, me, and walk me through this. Scientific progress doesn't always equal human progress. I'll give you a prime example. Uh, nuclear weapons was a was a prime example of that huge scientific breakthrough, not necessarily good for humanity.
Just, just clarify.
Yes.
You can credit science for nuclear power. Yes.
They became weapons because countries can't get along.
Correct.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, I just want to clar— Now, yes. Countries paid scientists to build the bombs.
Yes.
But the scientific discovery, E=mc², from 1905, was a brilliant scientific discovery that gave us an understanding of the universe. So I, you should, you, you should put a line in the sand between—
What if the line is what the net, what the intention was, and then the net—
Okay, fine, fine. It's how it's how the sword gets used.
And how, precisely, precisely, uh, do you believe that AGI could be a net positive for humanity? Okay.
Yes.
So, let's extrapolate this further.
Okay.
So now the, the, the bad actors—
Yeah.
—who get access to AGI, where AGI has a low barrier of entry, lower than building airborne nuclear weapons, right? So, sure, the, the—
The risk factors would be higher.
Yes. So, I don't have problems putting guardrails on things and and checkpoints. I, I had a conver— brief conversation with with, um, Ray Bradbury. He told me of a time when a woman came up to him and says, he's a science fiction author, and she asks, "Why do you write these stories of such apocalyptic futures?"
Yeah.
"Is this where you think civilization is headed?"
And he replied, "No, I write those stories so you know to avoid them."
Ah, as a warning, guardrail.
Right. So, we see *Terminator* wreaking havoc, you know, in the cities from the film. And maybe that'll tell us, maybe let's not put it in a machine.
I hope so. You know, but there's always that, that dare I say, that late-stage capitalist interest that the biggest companies have. I'll give you an example. If you remember the Great Recession that we had, unemployment hit 10%. And it was extremely painful.
2008.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. And I was thinking about this. I go, just a matter when you look at the interest rates or even the unemployment rates, the ma— the, the margin of what one or two percentage points does to a society—
Rears havoc.
—what if that, you know, because of AGI and in the massing, the mass like wipeout of white collar jobs, what if that went to 15%? What if that went to 20%? What type of havoc would that ensue on our society and the world at large?
Yeah. I, I'm going to, I want to purposefully sound, uh, I want to sound naive here.
Okay.
Okay. Uh, I want to invoke nostalgia for the future. Okay.
Yeah.
Here it is. When we went from horses to cars, whole industries went belly up, but other industries rose because of these new needs that we had. Automobiles. We needed gas stations, auto repair, or, or factories that build cars. Sure. Okay. It's not the same job that you had with a buggy whip, but it's another job being put back into society. I collected phone books. People remember phone books.
Sure.
It was like when you printed out the internet.
You actually printed—
Phone numbers. Okay. And living in New York City, we took perverse pride in the fact that we had the fattest phone book in the world for Manhattan. Yes.
And I remembered as a kid, because I was a geek kid, looking at the pages given to computers.
Okay.
This goes back to the early '70s. Couple of pages in the yellow pages. Couple of, a computer repair, computer this way. And then by the late '70s, it was more. By the 1980s, after the PC came out, whole chunk of the yellow pages were given to advertising computers. Yeah.
These entire industries.
Got it.
Competing brands. So to say AI is going to take our jobs, the white collar jobs, therefore, no one will have any work left to do.
Yes.
Be creative and find something that AI can't do and create a whole industry out of that. Oh god, there's going to be more podcasting.
I'm just saying—
Neil, that's a net negative for society.
Haven't you heard AI do a podcast?
You haven't heard it yet?
No.
Oh my gosh. Producers, you got to get— get them.
I don't want it. Don't make me do what they do. That's going to be worse.
Here's what they do. They take a scientific paper.
AI ingests it.
Yes.
And then it gets discussed in a podcast with a host and a co-host and they've got all the, all the mannerisms, the mumbles—
The mumbles. Yeah.
—and the meandering of podcasting.
Exactly.
Let me, let me ask you this.
So, so podcast could go out of business.
You, you feel the, the feeling I'm getting from you, and this is again, just what I'm sensing, is you are a, a, a science optimist and a techno optimist. Is that, is that safe to say?
I would say I'm a, I'm an optimist realist. Is there one word for that?
Uh—
You, you have optimism and pragmatism.
Yes. Thank you. That's, yes. So I, I see the bright side of things.
Okay.
But with a reality check.
Here's something that I see a bright side too, and I'd love your, your insight on is you always hear—
By the way, quick thing. Not that you asked.
Yeah, sure.
But I just want to settle once and for all.
Okay.
Whether a glass is half empty or half full.
May I?
Yeah.
And what's yours?
Yeah.
What's your analysis?
Yeah.
Okay. So, if you are adding water to the glass—
Uhhuh.
—and it gets halfway—
Yeah.
—it's half full. If you were drinking from the glass and it's halfway, then it's half empty.
Okay. So, it's, it's based on actively what happened the moment.
The rate of change of what's in the glass.
Oh.
Half full, half empty. That makes—
To me, complete sense. Got it. If you come upon a glass—
Yeah.
—If you walk up to a table—
It's half empty. If you walk up to a table and it's—
It's evaporating.
Okay. That's a Neil Degrasse Tyson dad joke, ladies and gentlemen.
No, no, it's not a joke. It's a literal truth. It, if you left it there long enough, it'll just become less and less and less and then you'll have the mineral deposits at the bottom.
Sure.
Okay. Sure. Now, go on.
Um, you always hear, uh, in regards to AI and science.
AI will help cure diseases. AI will help cure cancer.
Yes.
And it's already in the process of doing—
And it will cure Alzheimer's and dementia.
How?
I don't know.
Specifically, how?
No. No. Let me, I, that not being my— I'm not attacking you as if you're the robot either.
Tell me, Chat—
NDT.
No, let me just give a broader statement here. There are certain frontiers in human physiology, the medical sciences that were beyond our reach because we didn't have either the computing power or the, uh, capacity for the analysis of possible outcomes either in the presence of a medication or in the presence of some other change you might impart within human physiology. And one of them is protein folding. For example, uh, proteins are these large molecules and their function relates to what shape they take.
Yeah.
When they're doing their business. And so if you don't have an understanding of all the possible shapes you can take or what the outcome would be, you're just throwing darts blind, right? But when you have proper guidance with high performance computing with a dose of AI, oh my gosh, you can localize that and figure out exactly what you need. Keep in mind, do you know when we were all in the caves, half of everyone born was dead before the age of 30?
Jesus.
Half.
Yeah.
Fast forward to 1840.
I thought it was going to be like 10.
Fast forward to 1840.
Sure.
That number went up to 35. Half of everyone born was dead by the time they were 35. So in the tens of thousands of years between living in caves—
Yeah.
—and the middle of the 19th century, we got five years on that. Okay. Since then, with advances in medicine, and by the way, everyone back then was eating organic.
Just saying.
And the water was clear, the air ran pure, the, the game was free range. Didn't make a damn bit of difference. Science matters here. Okay. All right. You can run around and eat all the organic you want.
Okay.
You'd be dead by the 30 unless some doctor came in and said, "We can, we can increase your life expectancy using science."
You, you're directing this at me as if I'm RFK Jr. I'm not. I'm not.
Okay.
Hold me back. Let me wait. So—
Yes.
So, uh, I greatly look forward to what advances those will bring. And even though you have bad actors—
Yes.
—involved and that can be bad, mean bad things.
Yeah.
Uh, I'd like to think that the positives at all times will outweigh the negatives. And when you lose your job, f— try to see it coming and then figure out what else you might be able to do.
Got it.
That involves the uniquely creative thing that is humans.
By the way, have you tried to say, tell Chappie, tell me, tell me a joke in the style.
It sucks. It [ __ ] sucks.
It's bad.
It's garbage. It's garbage.
Tell me a joke in the style of Hasan Minhaj. Okay. Have you— Have you done that?
Whack garbage, basura, trash.
It'll probably get better.
And it wouldn't give me when I would say, "Hey, give me riffs on this the way I went off the top of the dome yet." And I, I pay premium for Grok 3.
Okay. You pay. I'll do deep things. It won't even come up with it.
Okay. So here's my point.
But it'll be like, "Do you want to like a, a demented [ __ ] fever dream photo?"
Here's my point.
Yeah.
Here's my point.
Okay. Yeah.
I hardly ever point, but I'm pointing right now. I got you.
Well, you have to back up.
I know.
AI—
Yes.
—can only know what already exists on the internet.
Yeah. Which is terrifying.
So, if it ingests everything you've done—
Yes.
—and tries to be you. It can't be something about you that you invent for yourself tomorrow because that's not on the internet yet.
Yeah. So you can stay ahead of AI by continually innovating in ways that AI does not have access to. So you can say, "Paint me this scene in the style of Van Gogh," and it'll do it. And I say, "Paint me this scene in the style of no one who has ever been born." What, what's where's it going to go? Where's it going to take you?
Yeah. Okay.
Um, I want to, I want to jump ahead a little bit. That is continuing in this kind of, uh, idea island that we're on. Let's talk about quantum computing.
Okay. So, there's a lot of hype around how much more powerful they are than standard supercomputing.
Yeah, it's not hype. It's real. But yeah.
But what kind of complex calculations could they be used for that we're not even thinking of right now?
Yeah. So, uh, anytime. So just as a sample from my field—
Yeah.
—in my lifetime, computing power has grown exponentially.
Yeah.
And but in the early—
And especially probably for cosmology and—
All the right. So if I want to simulate what the stars in a galaxy are doing, just think about this.
Galaxy has 100 billion stars in it and they're all sort of in orbit around the center of the galaxy. How do I know what path they're going to take?
Well, they're going to respond to the gravity of every other star. But every other star is also in motion.
Yeah.
So every star is in motion at all times. And I want to calculate what the net force is on any one star and then move it in the direction that those forces indicate.
Yeah.
But I have to calculate that for 100 billion stars, right?
At all times, right?
Okay.
So in the old days, we didn't have the computing power. So we would make a galaxy of 100 stars.
Okay.
And hope that it's somehow—
That was somehow reflective of a larger data set.
Right. Right. Oh god.
Okay, so—
So at any given moment on the frontier of science, if it's, if it's an active science and a vibrant science, there's always something that is just beyond what the computers of the day can do.
Yeah. And what we're exploiting, AI, we have a new telescope coming online called the Vera Rubin telescope that is not going to take photos of the night sky. It's going to take a movie of the night sky. That is photos tight enough in in— Why do you want a movie of the night sky? Because if I just go there and take pictures and take them home, there's a zillion stars in the picture. The couple I'm interested in, but otherwise I don't know what's going on with the rest of what I'm— I don't care about. What this telescope will do, it'll find anything that goes bump in the night. Anything that's moving, anything that gets brighter and then dimmer again. Oh, wow. It's going to find the dynamic phenomena in the universe, and it's going to find asteroids that could be headed our way because from one image to the next, the asteroid moves.
So, this telescope is primarily a data project.
Wow.
There's no way we could have done that ourselves.
This is going to be huge for astrology. I mean, it's going to be pumping out—
If they cared about data, but they don't.
No, it's going to be pumping out millions of horoscopes a second. So many Britneys will be given the signs they need.
Uh, in fact, Mercury just went into retrograde. I let you know.
Oh god.
And and you know, it does that several times a year.
Just often enough to blame the universe on your bad decisions rather than yourself.
God damn.
Did you guys hear that X is suing the New York City Attorney General? Elon apparently wants to challenge the Stop Hiding Hate Act because it will require X to disclose how much they moderate sensitive speech, claiming it would violate the First Amendment. Now, at HMDK, we just started using a platform called Ground News, which shows a breakdown of publications reporting on a story in which way they tend to lean politically, right, left, or center. Now, this isn't about eliminating bias. We've all got biases. It's just trying to make you aware of potential biases of different publications so that you can factor that into your own analysis of the issue. For example, with that story about X, I was able to scroll between some of the 43 publications reporting on that lawsuit. And I noticed a right-leaning one included a photo of Elon Musk looking like a business class Seal Team 6, while the left and center chose photos that make him look like he's about to fire UNICEF. Huh. So, you should use the link in the description or go to groundnews.com/hassan minhaj to get 40% off their Vantage plan, the same one that I use here at HMDK. That breaks down to just five bucks a month for unlimited access. Visit groundnews.com/hassan minhaj and subscribe today.
Let's talk about Donald Trump's assault on academia. Right now, there's a proposal to cut the funding for medical research institutions. John Hopkins lost about $800 million in grants due to US aid cuts. They cut $400 million earmarked for Colombia. DHS deported a Lebanese assistant professor at Brown University even though she had a valid H-1B visa. Places are being investigated for their DEI policies. It is an all-out assault. Everyone that I have spoken to before this interview involved in academia is genuinely freaked out. What have you been thinking about as all of this has been going down? Because you work in, in, in both academia and media, and you're a public, you know, facing intellectual.
Yeah. Yeah. So, what I wonder—
Yeah.
—is if everyone who voted for Donald Trump imagined this is how it would play out.
Right?
And maybe people don't know or care much about academia, but there are other programs that are hit. Medicare, uh, or Medicaid, would one or both? Yes. Uh, uh, Social Security. Uh, these are these are sort of, sort of cherished elements of our modern society that maintain our health, our well-being, our security. And so I, I wonder how many of them saw this coming.
Well, um, let's—
Wait, wait, but so that's my first point.
Yeah.
And if they all saw it coming, then okay, this is a democracy.
And it's government by the people, for the people.
Right.
And as they say, you make the bed now you sleep in the bed.
Right.
So people will see the consequences of this and I wonder if when it all plays out, whether it's actually the country they wanted. And as pendulum balls swing—
Yeah. Yeah.
—there's a lot getting broken now that took many, many decades—
Right.
—to build.
Yeah.
And when I, I tweeted a few weeks ago when that asteroid, there was a one in 50 chance it might hit Earth.
Yeah.
And that's, I said, "There's an asteroid headed towards Earth with a one in 50 chance of striking."
Sure.
Right. Then I said—
Uh—
—"Seems like this is the wrong time to reduce science funding." That's all I did.
Right. And and what happened when you tweeted this?
No, no. Then there was the, you know, there's the normal cesspool of response. But I guess my only point is, decisions such as these have consequences. And if people don't know the consequences, they then have to experience it. If you're not going to vaccine against measles, people will get measles, children will die.
You have to see those consequences, right? And it's unfortunate when it affects our health as opposed to just something else that wouldn't matter to most people, but your health—
And it's avoidable and it could have been avoided. Uh, science and vaccines more broadly—
Yeah.
—are the victims of their own success, right? It's like saying, I, if I say to you, "Why are, if I see you're using a a dandruff shampoo?"
Yes.
"I say, why are you using a dandruff shampoo? You don't have dandruff."
Well, sometimes I wear darker jackets and it gets flaky here, so I need to handle that.
No, that's— You missed the point of what I'm saying.
Okay. What's the point?
When you say, "Why are you using a dandruff shampoo? You don't have dandruff." That's the whole point of this.
That's the whole point. Oh, got it. Okay. I got you. Okay. Sorry.
Why are you getting vaccinated when there are no communicable diseases out there?
Right.
That's why there's no communicable diseases.
Okay. Okay.
All right. Um, people say, "I, you know, why do I need space? I don't need space. I have Direct TV and I'm, you know, images of of hurricanes come. Why do I need space for—"
Right.
It is with us. It is in us. It is all around us.
What do you say to play devil's advocate when people look at academia, they go, "There's so much bureaucratic bloat. Uh, tenure professors never get questioned. There's all, there's a litany of things that have made this that is that have jammed up and clogged the systems of progress in academia. And we don't need any more gender studies majors. We need a whole lot more astrophysics majors." Uh, and and and and they go, "You know what? Maybe it's good that they tighten the belt and they cut this DEI [ __ ]." Do you think that's an unfair way to look at this?
Uh, it's just odd.
Okay.
It's just odd. There's all this talk about DEI as bad.
Yes.
And there's the assumption that if you see someone who's not white male, they can't possibly as be as qualified, right, as the white male who's not in that position, right? It's just odd that there'd be a four-star general fired from his position who's black and replaced with someone who is objectively less qualified with a white male. That's kind of weird. H— How is that some comeback on DEI?
Right?
If, if you're gonna do a comeback, get someone who's a white male who's a five-star general, which there aren't any. Only in major warfare is there ever a five-star general. But that would be a, that, if that's how it's— Not what I see happening.
Got it.
And so I'm, I'm just, I, I wonder just how it's gonna, why is everyone okay with that, that you replace someone, a woman or a black male or female, female with someone who's objectively less qualified? I don't, uh, I don't know how that's going to play out or why it isn't being analyzed in that way.
Um, so getting back to your point just about academia.
Yeah.
Is there anything that you would like to see that needs to change? I don't think people fully understand the conduit between research in academia and the rest of our lives. It's not just something behind a closed door in an ivory tower.
Yeah. There are people doing research on subjects, topics that do not have immediate obvious financial benefits.
But they're being done because the person is an expert in that subject, cares about it in a way no one else is going to care about it, right? Maybe later on you—
You can find, well, almost certainly later on, you can find a commercial application of it. But if you look at the sources of innovation in the country, it is not in the R&D departments of, yes, there's some in the R&D departments of big business, but there's a limit to what they're going to have them do because not everything they're going to do is going to make a buck. Okay. I mean, sorry, there's a limit to what they can have them do because everything they could do would not necessarily translate into the, the, the return on investment. So in academia, there are no such limits. So we can do research on a subject that you would not otherwise care about. Right? Just because there's not a P&L sheet on it, or there is not a financial return on it, does not mean that there's not value in and of itself. You know what came out of academia? My physics professor in college, who was an expert on nuclei in space. And out of this effort, he discovered a new physical phenomenon called magnetic resonance of nuclei. Won a Nobel Prize for it. Yeah. It's a new physics. Why do you care? It's just physics, and you don't, you can't even see molecules, much less care about anybody thinking about what the nucleus of it is doing. Oh my gosh. What came out of that? The MRI, the magnetic resonance imager, is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who himself had no direct interest in medicine, but was foundational to it. Got it. And so there are inadvertent positive consequences for humanity by researching things for the pursuit of researching themselves, in and of itself. Correct. And that happens in academia. Got it.
There are two great chunks I want to get into. I want to talk about the golden age of engineering. I was talking to my producer, Prashant, about this, and he said, you know, in our humble opinion, we are living in arguably the golden age of engineering breakthroughs. But when you look at robotics, batteries, self-driving cars, virtual reality, etc., it's incredible. But I don't know if the same thing can be said about scientific breakthroughs. The 20th century was the era where we saw these massive breakthrough after breakthrough that you had talked about. Now that all of that fruit has been picked, it feels like many of our scientific breakthroughs are limited by the precision of the instruments that we are using, and the precision of our instrumentation. What I mean by that is that before, you needed a microscope to discover germs, and now we need a large collider to prove the Higgs Boson. So it ultimately comes back to engineering breakthroughs. Do you think this is a fair way to look at the state of science and engineering at the moment, essentially that discoveries are limited by the instruments that we have?
By the way, we've been, like, when you're on an exponential growth curve, yeah, no matter where you place yourself on that curve, it looks like all the great inventions happened just recently. That's the nature of an exponential curve. So you show an exponential, we're here. Oh my gosh, look what happened. If you rescale that and cut it here and scale it, that will be the same downward curve to the past. Oh, got it. 20 years ago, 50 years ago, as you see today. Got it. That's what they, no. 50 years ago, no one was saying, "Oh, we're living in such backward times." Said, "No one ever in the history of..." So when you look at each subsection, it always looks like the y equals x curve. Correct. Curve. Got it. Correct. No matter what segment you plot, it'll, it'll look like most of the changes. You like that? I know. I still remember y. That was very good. Beautiful. Very good. Make up for some of that stuff earlier in the conversation. Sure. Sure.
So, uh, this thing about science not being where engineering is. Yeah. Uh, someone wrote that a hundred years ago. Said, you know, we've figured out most things in science, and now it's just a few more decimal places in the measurements, and then we discovered relativity and quantum physics. Yeah. And physics was transformed. Right. What I can tell you is, we know enough about the universe to quantify our ignorance. And everything we know, the physics, the chemistry, the biology, all of that, all of our understanding of what's going on in the universe is 5% of what is driving the universe. The 95% has dark matter and dark energy. We can measure it. We don't know what it is or what's causing it. Okay. I'm, I'm a religious person. That scares me when you say that. It just terrifies me. But I want to, wait, no. What I'm, my point is, my point is, that's a frontier. Oh, to say we haven't discovered anything lately. We are, we are on the doorstep of profound ignorance turning into possibly profound insight and wisdom on how the universe works. And so, so, so, and that's all the sciences. And in biology, they're still trying to figure out how you went from inorganic molecules, sorry, organic molecules to self-replicating life, right? That's still that's a frontier in biology. We're looking for life in the universe, aliens. Oh my gosh. If we find a biosphere on another planet that encodes identity that doesn't use DNA, or if it does have DNA but no DNA in common with us. Yeah. That's transformative of biology. Okay. So, yeah, science is indeed seemingly an endless frontier.
Do you know what deeply depresses me though, and I love this. I love the espresso. You're hitting me with this espresso of positivity. But what depresses me about when science meets the capital markets is that as soon as these scientific breakthroughs happen, they are taken advantage of or manipulated to not benefit the public at large. What I mean by that is this. Let's take robotics. For years, I grew up, if you remember that stupid Honda robot that would like walk up the stairs and fall down the stairs. And I'm like, this [ __ ] piece of [ __ ] it's never going to be T2000. It's never going to help me. And then we had these, you see these Twitter videos. I don't know if you've seen these Boston Dynamics robots that look like Velociraptors meets T2000, and they're karate chopping and doing back flips. My favorite one are the two dogs that open the door and they let each other through. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's totally Jurassic Park, the Raptors are in the kitchen type energy. But at no point have I seen, hey, those robots, why can't I get a Boston Dynamics robot butler? Why aren't they here to really have us humans enter the age of enlightenment? Every person I know that's in a relationship in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, this is women, families, children, couples, there are arguments about who's going to clean the dishes, who's folding the laundry, how do we have labor support and help at home. Okay, that's, why do we have, that's Rosie the maid in, in the Jetsons. In the Jetsons. But we, we don't have that. I have, I have this karate kicking.
I'm going to tell you why we don't have it. Why? Because creating a robot is not a thing. That's, yes. Yes. It's a thing. It is a thing. But, Kim Kardashian did a whole commercial where she's like, "But, yeah, you know what they didn't figure out in the Jetsons?" What's that? "Cuz he gets into his flying car cuz it's the future and of course they have flying cars." Yes. "He's still flying the car. They didn't figure out that maybe the car is the robot." Well, you mean the way a robot doesn't have to look like, doesn't have to have legs or arms or a head or eyes. A robot just has to be something that does the task better than anybody or any other thing. Right? So, you get into a self-driving car, the car is the robot. You don't get a butler then that drives your car. No one thought that through this decades ago. But this is the long, you don't put a robot in your car to drive your combustion engine car. The car is the robot. Well, so, so, so your coffee machine is the robot. All right. Now, we still have to figure out the dish thing. Okay. Yeah. Or the laundry thing. And, and I'll make my own bed. I promise. A machine did your laundry. You weren't at the creek side scrubbing with the thing. A machine did your laundry. But I just need one that will, so spoiled. That'll put it in the right, no, put it in the right thing. Put it in the right cupboard. That way I don't get in an argument. Save my relationship. Actually help my life. That used to take five hours, now takes three minutes, and you're still complaining. God damn, he's calling people lazy. Here we go. Fun final questions. These are sort of rapid fire. Okay. When you have time to wonder, what's a thought or idea you regularly find yourself coming back to because you find it so interesting? I, whenever I'm using my telescope at night, yeah, alone, and I look up, I want to be abducted by aliens. That's a fantasy. That's incredible. That, like a beam comes down and I just join them. Oh, like the movies. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't terrify you? Oh, no. Because in all those movies, you get, when you're a scientist, you cannot be terrified of the unknown. It is the unknown that seduces you. I got it. Well, in all the movies I've seen, you just get molested up there. You've obviously spent a lot of time debunking astrology, but why do you think it's been coming back with the kids lately? I think when people, by the way, young kids are not interested in astrology. It's only when their social lives get complicated, like middle school, and then high school, and money and social lives, dating. And so when they, I'm not sure that they're entirely in control, you have to blame something else. And they do. And I, I understand the urge, but I, and it can be entertaining, but to the, and I, and it's a free country, so I'm not going to stop people from being entertained by thinking this way. But if they start invoking astrology for decisions that impact their health, their wealth, or their security, then those won't, you advise you strongly, those won't end well. That's right. If you could snap your fingers and have everyone on planet Earth understand one scientific concept immediately, what would that concept be? That the universe is objectively knowable. Wow. Which, which, uh, removes most opinions from the tabletop. I'll tell you mine. You can't microwave aluminum. And I wish I would have learned that a week ago. Or most metals don't work well in a, in a microwave oven. Yes. Yeah. You have done countless interviews and answered thousands of questions. Yeah. What is one question that you wish people asked you more? I don't think that way. I'm a servant as an educator. Yes. But more importantly, I'm a servant of people's curiosity. As such, I don't come in telling you what question you should ask me. I'm there to celebrate the questions you have. That's beautiful. Life, the universe. Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you so much for being of service. It is a joy. You got it. To sit down and chat with you, and I can't wait to do your show at the Beacon Theater. I'm looking forward to that. Thank you. Yeah. Look at that. One hour, baby. Make your bed. Yeah. Hey, it's me, Hust. I am here to panhandle. Not for money, for subscribers. Apparently, 70% of you guys won't commit to me. You want to kick it and listen weekly, but you can't admit that we like each other. Just admit it. We're vibing. Now, if you're serious about this relationship, hit the follow or subscribe button wherever you watch or listen. And if you don't, well, okay. Message received. But just so you know, I will be seeing other audiences.