Neil deGrasse Tyson: America's Astrophysicist

going after the Environmental Protection Agency. You have the top regulators in the country denying that humans are contributing to climate change, or at least questioning it. You have a big movement in this country of people who are denying the things that scientists are telling us based on the research that they're doing. And Neil Degrass Tyson wants to fight back against all of that and to do it through education and information. And he's a great person to

do that, Brian. He breaks things out and makes them very accessible. In fact, he's been called a cross between Mr Rogers and Carl Sagan. He makes science fun and if you don't believe us, just listen to the way Neil begins his podcast from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and time is starting where science and pop culture such a Hey, Brian, how can you not enjoy learning about the universe to the strains of sexy back? Come on now, well, I think sexy

Back was actually written for me. It's a it's a little known fact, but that's true. I don't want to think about that. Meanwhile, did you notice how malef lewis Neil's voices? I mean, he's got such a great speaking voice. We're not saying he doesn't have a face for television, but he also has a voice for audio. Absolutely, So we learned so much when we talked to Neil de grass Tyson. And here he is, Hi, Katie, how are you in a few years? I know we were together on TV? I know and uh, and we have so

much to talk about us. It is vast and Brian is joining us from Los Angeles, and I first want to talk to you about your childhood and how you became so excited by science. You know what it is. I think as a kid, we're all excited about everything. I mean, just remember that. So how did I keep

my curiosity? Is really? What what ignited it to to to delve into science in particular, right, because you can be curious about anything obviously, So so it was you know, I grew up in New York City, and my parents fully understood the role in the value of the cultural institutions of the city, the museums, the zoo, and my When I was nine, we happened to go to the Hayden Planetarium and I said this before I sat down, and like they dimmed the lights and the stars came out,

and I was certain it was a hoax. I was so because I grew up in the Bronx and I knew how many stars there were in the night sky. There's like a dozen stars, so this can't be right that there are these countless thousands of stars on the dome. Of course, later I would learn that that was closer to reality than anything I've ever seen or experienced in the Bronx. But I can say without hesitation that that day I was star struck and I never left the

Hayden Planetarium since then, Right, Yeah, I'm kind of still there. Yeah, And then an adulthood I would become director of the planetarium. That's right. That is such a cool story. Honestly, I think it makes a better story in a small town, you know, hometown kid goes away and comes back and does good in New York, nobody cares. I don't think that's okay. Yeah, I think that is. I think it

is really cool. And you know, I think the idea that you were filled almost immediately with this sense of wonder. I mean, I think you're so lucky neal, because I think many people don't have a calling that way, that nothing really strikes them as something they are really passionate about. I here's something, here's a bit of delusion for me. Ready. So when I was eleven, I said to myself, maybe I shouldn't study the universe because it's so amazing. Everyone

clearly will want to study it. Everyone's going to want to be an astro physinesist. That was a thought I actually actually went through my head because it would take a two years until age eleven where I would have the answer to that annoying question that adults always ask kids, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? Age eleven onward? My answer was astrophysicist and usually,

oh god, that sounds so obnoxious. It was completely obnoxious, and in the following world I think I'd smack you just kidding everyone, I don't I love it. I'd be lovingly smacked by Katie. But Katie, you are absolutely right. I did not know until I got to college how many people did not have a calling that was still trying to figure it out, and they were thumbing through what to major in in the book, And so I

would never thenceforth take it for granted. Well, it's interesting is we were preparing for this show, we learned that, you know, both your parents were intellectuals. Your mom was a gerontologist, which apparently has something to do with the study of aging, and your dad was a sociologist and worked for the City of New York. And so did your parents encourage you to to get a PhD? To travel this hard road to actually becoming uh Dr Tyson. So let me add some some nuances to to what

you've said. So, my mother was a housewife while raising the three of us, and she only went to college age after we were empty nest. So she married and started a family out of high school, while my father went on for further education. Uh And he became a practicing sociologist in the sense that he was hired into the city under Mayor Lindsay at the time, and this is in the nineteen sixties, so the civil rights era was fully underway, and so there he was being deeply

concerned about the plight of the human condition. And later on my mother would turn her energies to the plight of the aging. And here's their son, the astrost. So that was a little weird. It was a little weird. But they never told me what to study. All they did was encouraged the interest that they saw manifest on its own. But clearly you know from your story about how they would take you all different places and exploring really the world in the microcosm of New York, that

must have kind of stimulated you. And and I'm wondering that's the right word, the world explore? Right? Who who thinks about it that way? But that's exactly what it was. You go to a different institution each weekend. That's exploration, urban exploration is what that was. But at no time where my parents saying I want you to do what I what I did. That would be and I we all know people where that was the case, right, What would you tell parents about instilling this intellectual curiosity and

their children. I would say, expose them to as many kinds of things they can be when they grow up as is possible given your resources and given your geography, and I think they'll find they'll find their way, So expose them and let them decide. There you go. And as you were trying to figure out what to be, I read that you had some reservations about becoming an astrophysicist because as an African American you worried that it wouldn't do enough to help your fellow African Americans. But

you change your mind to about that. Can you describe what happened? Oh? Yeah, I briefly. Um, there's a little bit about this in my memoir which I wrote some years ago, midlife Memoir. I guess I was going to say, you're prettily on to write a memoir. Several years ago. We publisher approached me this is this is basically twenty years ago and said we want to hear your story. And I said, do you know something about my life expectancy that I don't? So they said, oh, this one

could be just the first installment. I said fine, So so in there I just tell the story. When I was in college, I was on the wrestling. I wrestled, and I had a fellow wrestler who's my weight class, and he's black, majored in economics. And we're walking home one day. This was at Harvard. At Harvard, yeah, that school, and came too ready with the Harvard bashing. Never had Brian went to Harvard to I basically have an inferiority complex.

Oh no, I think she actually has a superiority complex about U v A. All right, moving on, go ahead and me up, and let the record show that both of you mentioned this on your own. I did not mention it myself. And so he would later go on to be a Rhodes scholar and study in Oxford. And so he's an accomplished guy. But we're walking home and he says, oh, so, how how how studies? And I said, I barely have time for anything. You know, my problem sets are killing me. So remind me what you're studying.

I said, physics. Ultimately want to get a PhD in astrophysics. And he said, quote, the black community does not have the luxury of you studying astrophysics. Ouch. Oh oh, are you channeling very white all? So what did you say to that? Well? So I was very conflicted because of course my father was in the service of helping the black community or anyone disenfranchised more generally, and so I

knew where where that argument comes from. And I also knew that here I am in one of the finest institutions of the land, and I'm studying the Big Bang and black holes and planets. Oh my gosh, And I said, so, So what he did was he he dug me into a hole and left me there. And I didn't know how to get out of the hole. But so, so I was conflicted for many years. I would say, I can quantify it was I was conflicted for like twelve years.

I still went on to get a PhD and studied astrophysics, but I was conflicted the whole time because of that one thing he said to me. And you know how I finally got out of it, Yeah, because it's it involved like your your people, right, your your species. So so I'm in graduate school and a phone call comes to the department and it was Channel five news, local news in New York. Apparently there were explosions on the Sun and they called the astrophysics department at Columbia to

get somebody to calm meant on these explosions. So I got on the phone with the guy. It was the weather guy, because the weather Guy is the science the token science person on all the shows. And they said, uh, can you tell us about this? I said, yes, it's just solar flares. This happens every now and then part charged particles head towards Earth. Earth magnetic field deflects them. We're safe from it. This use this as an excuse this weekend to go north and enjoy the northern lights.

That's what he said, Oh, could you say that on camera? So I said sure, Okay. So I went into the studio, sat down in front of these fake books because my first time like in your space, you're kind of space Katie. So we're sitting for it was when we were sitting for these sawed off books, glued fake you know, edge side into the thing, and so we recreate this conversation and then I So that was and for airing later that night. So I went home and I called everybody. Mom,

Dad says, I'll be on TV tonight, right right. So, and I'm I'm watching TV and I'm watching me interviewed, and I had a kind of out of body experience. At the end of that conversation, I realized, Oh my gosh, the reporter did not ask me, how do black people feel about the sun exploding? What do you you know? What what is does? Does that? Does this radiation affect black skin differently from white skin? There was not a single mention of the color of my skin in that interview.

And then I realized I had never seen an interview ever of a black person on TV that had nothing to do with being black, not including athletes and entertainers with nine Okay, then I realized what I just did there maybe the most potent force, of the most potent equalizing force there is. You see an expert as a black person telling you whether Earth is going to survive, Earth is gonna survive. So now you see an educated black person on TV, no mention of their skin color.

Now you see a homeless black person in the street. Now you're gonna think twice. You're gonna say, oh my gosh, is this for law? Lack of opportunity to have we done something wrong? Is there can to society? And no longer can you just stereotype and entire group of people who would just be your entertainers or your athletes. And I've realized at that point this is the ticket out of this hole that I've been standing in for thirteen years.

It's not that the black community can't afford to have me study astrophysics, is that the world cannot afford to have me not study astrophysics. That's what I can call and the world can cannot afford not seeing you explain astrophysics. And that's why with this interview as an exception, if someone wants to interview me, and I know in advance it's because I'm black and they want to ask me black stuff, I say, no, that's not I'm not the

right person for that. But you did have to have this epiphany, and you thought, why aren't there more African American experts having nothing to do with their race on television? Correct? Correct? So beginning in the early nineties, you started having black attorneys commenting on, you know, civil cases. So attorneys were the first out of the box. Then you'd have others. You would have authors and poets and and and newscasters, and so now it's not even a thing. And I'm

delighted to announce that. You know, it's interesting. I was thinking when I read this as well. Preparing for this interview, I was thinking about when I had my colonoscopy. When I got my colonoscopy on television, I used a doctor who was highly recommended, named ken Ford, because he was recommended by a friend of mine, and I didn't want my friend, who was also a gastro orologist, to get that close to me, if you know what I'm saying.

So I a friend of mine came up to me Neil after that colonoscopy and said, thank you so much for using an African American doctor to give you your colonoscopy. And I said, I didn't even think of that. There you go, that's it. But but it was so important. It's so important to your point to continue to show really diversity of all kinds exactly in a number of television general case. It's a general statement. It's the diversity of gender, race, of the nationality. If once you see that,

it makes it harder for you to stereotype. We have a caller question which I think is actually perfect for this moment, so let's listen. I'm Brian, Hi Katie. I first only thank Neil because a few years ago he gave me the best advice for being a physicist applying to grad school, which is the double the amount of schools you're applying to, because if you're dumb enough to go to grad school on any stone field, I don't remember using the word dumb. One's going to be dumb

enough to take you. You just gotta find them. But a question for Neil is how did you go from being an academic researcher to becoming one of the leading scientific communicators today? Okay, great question. So uh so this trajectory is not what you think. So because I'm not entirely what I seem. If you tell me rank what it is you would want to do today, probably engaging the public would not make the top fifty. I would just stay home, or I'd write, or I'd go to

the lab. That's what I really want to do in a day. But what has happened is I live in New York City. This is the news gathering headquarters of the country and possibly the world, And so when the universe flinches, the press calls me because I give them a sound bite that they can embrace, that they like, and then they want more. And by the way, I worked at that. All right, if you give me a minute. I'll tell you my very first time on national news.

Because that the case with the with the fake books. That was local news, but my first time on nationals. I'll tell you national news budget has anyone cracked, any of them know, But they make a more authentic They make a beauty of wallpaper, like three D wallpaper. So here's what happened. I'm freshly hired at the Hayden Planetarium. I'm interim director actually okay, and the first Excel planet is discovered, a planet orbiting another star, banner headlines. The

call comes into the planetarium. They said, can we interview the director? They don't know me from anything, but I'm the director, all right, So they said, fine, we'll set you up with Tyson, who's tight. It's fine, he's the interim director. So this is Tom Brokaw's NBC Nightly News. Okay. Now they just send up an action camp to get to get this interview. An action was called back then, his Action News. But I don't think that NBC at nightly news with action whatever the local news had the

action can absolutely right. Um so, but this was going to air on the NBC Nightly News, and so I'm there and they send up a correspondent and they asked me, how is this planet discovered? And I I go on for ten minutes with my best profisoil reply. Hopefully this wasn't live. It was not live, it was prerecorded. And so then I commented that that the way you can know that there's an orbiting planet is that the star

responds to the gravity of the planet. We think planets orbit stars know they both orbit their common center of gravity. So the star is actually doing a kind of jiggle around with the center of mass, right, And so I said all of this. The only thing that ended up in the evening news that night was me jiggling my hips, the imitating, imitating the host star and all the rest of that got sound bitten. And I said, oh, now, I understand. They didn't come to hear me give a

professorial reply. They want something they can use in their mode, even though they're in my house, right in my in my planetarium. So I went home and I practiced sound bites because I don't want them sound biting me. I'll gonna hand you a sound bite that way, you don't have to cut it, give me any word in the entire universe object, idea thing just right now? Do it? You want to do that single word Pluto, Pluto, Get

over it. Earth's moon is five times the mass of Pluto, and many Pluto lovers don't know that, and when you tell it to them, only then do they begin to understand the controversy that surrounded it. So, yes, Pluto got demoted. Get over it. That's the sound bite I would give you if you came to melt So, so I worked at that. So my only point of this is to say, from that moment onward, I said, if I'm going to serve the press, serve television, I want to give them

what they want and what they need. So so a sound bite is like two or three sentences that are informative, tasty, and maybe make you smile and make you smile so that you might want to tell someone else. So that's what I started working on, and they kept coming back, but also accessible. If I were interviewing you now, I would say, this explanation has to be for the non scientists in the audience who need to understand in very

simple and accessible terms complicated concepts. And you became an expert at that, you know, Tom Friedman explained complicated concepts, and he said, to explain something simply, you have to understand it deeply. Yes, that is definitely the case. You have to You have to know twenty ways to come at that idea so that you can find the key to the mind of the person you're communicating with in

that moment. So what I what happened to me is when I started giving soundbites, the press couldn't get enough of it, and so I became more and more and better and better known simply from showing up on the news commenting on the universe. To this day, people say, who's your agent? I see you and all the talk shows and all the news, and I say, my I don't have an agent. My agent is the universe itself. Because the universe flinches and people call. Of course, when I have a book, the book has a has a

marketing person and they try to get you on. But I would say, three quarters of the time you ever see me on TV, I'm not hawking a book. I got called because the universe flinched and they want to know about it. It's like dial and astrophysics, like the bat signal. You know, okay, we need the astro physicists. Now you know. So I'm a servant of the cosmic curiosity that burns in the belly of of us all,

and I'm the I'm a servant. I'm the servant of the cosmic curiosity, a servant of the cosmic curiosity that burns burn in the belly. Where do you come up with this? Have you used that before? I don't know. Maybe pieces of it, I don't know. But my point is that that the question, the caller's question. They wanted to know how I became this, But it was not because I wake up in the morning saying how can I bring the universe to the public today. It's if I'm being asked, let me do the best job I

can and then go back to my work. Well, I have a lot more questions to ask you, and so does Brian. We're going to take a break, and I want to talk to you, Neil about the current universe we're living in the political universe and what it means

for science in America. We can go there, all right, that's right after this, We're back with Neil Degrass Tyson, America's personal astrophysicist, as you say on your TV show and your podcast, and we want to ask you about President Trump and the political universe in which we're living now. You've been very outspoken about the administration's budget cuts. You tweeted, the fastest way to make America Week again is to

cut science funds. Can you describe the consequences of some of the policy sees that Trump is proposing, particularly with respect to science. Yeah, by the way, so thanks for noticing that. My tweets, I try to keep them general enough so that they would apply in any administration. In fact, I don't think I even mentioned Trump once in any of the tweets. Well, make America Week again. That's pretty that's pretty clear. I'm just because at the end of

the day, it's not actually about Trump. It just isn't. It's about what kind of country the electorate wants. And I'm not into politician bashing. You just won't see me shouting down duly elected officials. They are elected because there's an electorate that elected them. I look at it as here's the president, here's President Trump. Sixty million people voted for him. He is doing basically exactly what he said he was gonna do, or exactly what we all figured

he would do. So people are surprised by this. I'm not surprised at all. So here's the challenge the challenges What about the sixty million people that voted for him. I'm an educator. It's my duty to edge, that's to educate. That's I wrote. I wrote an op ed a several months ago titled what Science is and How and Why it works? And in it I share with people that science is an exploration. It's not a matter of here's a fact, not regurgitate that later. It's here's here is data.

What does the data mean? How does data turn into knowledge? How does knowledge turn into wisdom and insight? How do you judge whether something is true or not? And the methods and tools of science, when applied sensibly, they're designed to empower you to know when something is true when you otherwise think it's not, and when something is not

true when you otherwise think it is. That it's in an noculation against Charlotte's of the world, who would exploit your ignorance of the laws of nature for their gain or or maybe they don't know themselves, but they've risen to power and just simply don't know. So this anti science, anti intellectualism that seems to be pervasive not only in this country, but in other countries as well, Australia as well.

It's the result of a lack of education, lack of a kind of education that that enables you to confront information skeptically. So when Americans hear from commentators on cable news shows or even from senior government officials that we don't know what's causing climate change, we don't know the extent to which humans are impacting it, how are they supposed to assess that information and confront it. So, now you're an adult, and you've already been sort of ossified

from however you are educated in school. How do you fix adults? That's the hardest thing. That's really hard because you you weren't trained how to think freshly about new ideas. And what you can say is, well, um, are you in denial of equals mc squared? That's the founding formula for all of the Cold War? Are you in denial of the GPS instructions on your smartphone that tells you to turn left to get to Grandma's house? You know, there's the famous apocryphal quote where you know, what do

I need a space program. For I have the Weather Channel, and of course every image we have of hurricanes is from a satellite. Okay, unless there's a plane that flew over it, but that's you don't you don't get the best images from that. So you get people who don't fully know and understand and appreciate the magnitude of the

impact of science on their lives. But that seems to be translating into antipathy towards science and towards intellectual Yes, it's it's a it's a complacency with the science that has made their lives so comfortable and so healthy. So is it a complacency or is it an ideology that leads them to that conclusion, because it's the only conclusion

that validates their politics. So if you're against government intervention in the economy, and confirming climate change requires government intervention in the economy, you can't be for confirming climate change, right, So yeah, that's the ossification of your mind. So so people need to realize, and I've said I've said this many times that when when a new truth emerges through scientific research, it is true whether or not you believe

in it. And so the sooner you come to realize that the sooner you will recognize what a scientific truth is, and then you should have the politics conversation on the about those truths. Okay, So in other words, rather than deny that humans are warming the earth, you recognize that humans are warming the earth because that's what the science shows. Now, go in the back room and duke it out with your opponents across the aisle. Do you have carbon tax?

Do you? Yeah? Exactly? The politics you don't have to explore that if you just say it's not happening, right. So what I thought of doing was taking everyone who denies the climate chase and put them on a low lying island. So I have to ask them, will you buy real estate on coastal communities and just see if they'll put their money where their mouth is. Do you know who is fully aware of this and who is listening to scientists, the military and insurance companies, because an

urban planners and urban planners. So it's it's embarrassing that in this the twenty one century, the United States of America, a country that went to the moon in a decade that was itself rather turbulent. We had a hot war, a cold worth, civil rights movement, campus unrest. But at no time where people saying, I don't that science, that's not for me. Nobody said it. Back then. We were celebrating what science could do for us. What do you think this will do to our standing in the world.

How can we invest? How can we start training this next generation of scientists because we can't keep going the way we're going. So I have some glimmer of hope. Here's the reality. Historically, throughout the entire twentieth century, immigrants came to the United States from many countries who had an interest in science. In fact, a third of all the science Nobel prizes that went to Americans went to

first generation immigrants a third a third. Okay, so I don't mind if American born citizens are not going into science. If we have others from around the world. We're getting the best and brightest from around the world if they're interested in science, and they can exploit our institutions and stay here and bring their intellectual capital to our land

and our economy and our health. But well, and staying here is the key point, because what we want to do, what we're doing now in many cases, is they come here, they're educated here, and then we kick them out, so we don't get the benefits of the education. And now HTB visas are being reconsidered, right, those important visas for people who are working in tech, especially in science. Yes, so either we kick them out or we didn't let

them in in the first place. So in that case, you it is double disaster because now we're not training the next generation of native born Americans, nor are we allowing in international people who have an interest in science. And meanwhile, countries that were previously developing countries or countries we never thought would be science powerhouses are building their own infrastructure for this, like Singapore, which dedicates a percentage of its GDP to medical research. There you go, there

you go. And as that rises up in China and Singapore and India, no longer will people want to come here, even if we wanted them to, because they will have opportunities in their motherland and there and we will be sort of orphaned in place, and we will our stature will decrease. That was my very next sentence. We will fade from significance on the world stage. It's not a cliff that you fall over, which which maybe would be better if it were, because then you get injured at

the bottom and pick yourself up and fix it. It's this slow glide, and in fact, I think it's already happening, because, as I mentioned, I spent last night talking to a lot of the pre eminent cancer researchers in the country, and one said that when she was at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, they said, you know, somebody said to her, we used to look up to the United States as the pinnacle of scientific exploration, scientific investigation, and

now justifiably, we don't feel that way. Yeah. Yeah, And that's the beginning of the end of America's greatness. And so so I've made this point many times with Trump as president. I said, you cannot make America great again until you make America smart again. It's that simple. And we all want to make America great again. And I

don't think anyone wants to make America dumb. So let's try to make America smart again, because it's that investment in who, in what we are, in our creativity and in our innovations that enables the greatness that we all remember, especially when you think of the future. You were talking about that earlier about science being the key to our future.

Brian and I both talked about, uh, this study we read recently that said of almost foreign tent American jobs could be reassigned to automated bots by their early twenty thirties, according to a new I have no doubt. So if you know, if we're going to adjust to this new economy, if we're going to thrive in this new economy, we have to teach science. Yes, well, and and it used to it used to feel like scientific and technological progress was our friend, that it was helping us to experience

better products and services. Now it seems like it's stealing our jobs and crushing our incomes. So how do we run around that exception? No, it's always been taking jobs. It's always been doing that, especially automation. You know, look at any automotive factory. You know, their their bots welding

your cars. By the way, when cars were handmade rather than bought made, that was an error where I mean, we're old enough on this call to remember there was a very there was a very real chance in the morning that your car would not start for some mysterious reason. My son, who was at the time fourteen, we're watching a movie and there's a chase scene and the person runs to the car, gets in the car and tries to start the car. And he said, he said, why

isn't the car started? He had never seen this as a thing in his entire life. The car just always started. His only thought was is it out of gas? I said, no, no, no, there's a chance cards didn't used to start it. Give it a chance. He'll get it started eventually, you know, unless he floods. Unless he floods it. But then I have to explain what that is. Right, And so my point is that you want to be prepared for the future, and there's a limit to how many jobs bots can take.

You know why, because if robots take all of our jobs, then none of us will have any money to buy the products that the robots make. So it's a self limiting issue. What do you say to people who are very concerned about this, who work maybe even an advance manufacturing or accounting or architects, whose jobs weren't vulnerable to

technological disruption before, but now they seem to be. That's why it's always important to stay on the leading edge of innovation, because you're not going to have a bot on the leading edge. You know you're gonna have your body. The body is after you have invented something, and then the bot can do it for cheaper than the labor would otherwise be to pay to have it made. You

move jobs forward with that innovation frontier. If you stagnate, then you'll spend your entire life wine winding that the rest of the world is taking your jobs and why they say this is not fair. Then you gotta put on a tariff, and then it becomes a whole political thing. So I cannot over emphasize the importance of fostering innovation in a country. As long as you innovate, you will always have a place to work that the bots haven't figured out how to catch up with. You stay ahead

of the bots. And speaking of innovating, UM, I just want to quickly ask you about STEM because it's something I think about a lot, especially for girls. We need more women involved in I T. We need more women scientists, we need more women researchers. Um, how can we get girls more engaged in science? Neil? Yeah, I don't have the silver bullet here. And it's not just girls, it's underrepresented groups in general. What is going on African Americans,

for example. So I don't have a silver bullet. I don't interact with the public differently if the audience is female, male, or ethnically. I'm I try to bring the same messaging anytime I'm exposed in the public. So I don't have an answer here, and I'm still thinking about it. What what might be interesting innovative ways educationally um to to stimulate a broader baseline of interest. Meanwhile, we've seemed to have a run on ignorance lately, with four NBA stars

since February publicly saying that the Earth is flat. You got into a Twitter feud with a rapper who believes that as well. How do you explain this regression that seems to be happening around scientific knowledge? You know, there is shock Shack saying well, I don't see how I'm paraphrasing. How could the Chinese people be upside down? They'd fall off, so Earth must be flat. So that someone played that quote back to me on the radio station, and I was trying to think, how am I going to respond

to this? So I said, we live in a free country. You ought to be able to think whatever you want. You want to think the world is flat. Go right ahead, just try to make sure you never become head of NASA. Well, we will find jobs for you where you can think the world is flat and they'll still pay you for what you're doing. So in a free country, I don't beat people over the head to say whatever they want.

But if you rise to positions of power and influence and influence and you do not understand what science is and how and why it works, that's just the beginning of the end of an informed democracy, and that's what we should fear. Let me ask you about space exploration. UM. Last week, Elon Musk's company SpaceX reused a rocket to launch a satellite into space. UM, what do you think about the future of space exploration? Because it was interesting to me that NASA's budget, compared to a lot of

other places, wasn't cut nearly as much. It was good to cut just by a tiny little bit, that's correct. And so that's a little bit of of of a wolf in sheep's clothing there, because from from statements that I've seen and heard, a tandem goal is yes, NASA keep exploring the universe. Meanwhile, we will remove all obligation

we have previously given you to study Earth. So they's been talking about removing Earth research from the portfolio of NASA, and that and and that would that's that's that's a recipe for disaster, because the Earth is a planet, and you want to study planets in context. We have a planet to our left that has a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus, it's nine degrees fahrenheit. We have a planet to our right, Mars, that once had running liquid water coursing over its surface,

bone dry today. Something bad happened on each of those planets. And one is to our left and one is to our right. And the context of this study is what gives you insights into what knobs are we turning. I don't want to look like Venus, and I don't want to look like Mars. Is there insights I can get to how I should then treat my own planet. Why do you think people wouldn't want to learn those insights? Oh, because it would give you further information about how much

human intervention in the environment is warming the planet. It's it's it's a way to undermine studies that would find scientific results that conflict with your political philosophy. A quick footnote Shack did say he was kidding when he made that statement, but Kyrie Irving from the Cleveland Cavaliers says

he was not joking. So maybe they should have a debate, or we we take everyone who thinks Earth is flat and just put him into orbit and leave him there and put them only bring him back after they confess that they were wrong all along. So Elon Musk is trying to do this on the cheap, and occasionally you'll see a rocket explode and people say, oh, what was this? Does this? Is this a bad Is this a setback for Elon Musk? The fact that has exploding rockets is

evidence he's on the frontier. You are only on the frontier when you are making mistakes him. Yes, oh you need somebody now Now. I'm also as big as critic. The people, the press especially is thinking he's gonna lead us into space, not NASA. That's not gonna happen. That's not how this works. Okay. Oh, because just imagine that I mentioned the venture capitalist meeting. All right, So here I'm Elon Musk, and then I got five venture capitalists.

What's up, Elon? You need some cash? What four? Well? I want to put the first humans on Mars. Okay, how much will it cost? Hundreds of billions of dollars? Probably more? Uh okay, um will it be dangerous? Yes, people will probably die. What's the return on our investment? I have no idea. Probably nothing. It's a five minute meeting. Okay. Governments do these things because governments have time horizons much

longer than quarterly and annual reports. So what will happen is the first humans on Mars will likely be Chinese humans or American humans paid by the government. We may do it on Elon's rocket. That could happen. I don't have a problem with that, but it's not him doing

it as a business case, not initially. But this brings us back to what we were talking about at the outside of our conversation, which is, if you cut the e p a s Office of Research and Development in half, if you cut the National Institutes of Health by and your argument as well, private industry and drug companies should do this research, not taxpayers. What you're really doing is cutting off this research entirely that the private industry won't

do it. So what you're cutting off I think people don't understand R and D. So R and D when conducted by a company, is money invested on the premise that it will bring a return on that investment in their near future in the same year, in a couple

of years, at most five years. Okay, that's what people think of as R and D. But there's another kind of R and D. Well, there's just are the R that goes on in universities where there is no yet known return on that investment because they are on a frontier that has a greater distance from the applicability of that research. That is the seed corn of tomorrow's innovations,

technological innovations. If you take that away and require that all research has to be directed towards a thing, we would have never had the I T Revolution in the first place. And that's when all the scientists go to another country because they can get funding there exactly. And then America America. There's another excuse for how and why America will fade. Let's end on a more positive note, Chille declining America. So tell us what you're excited about

when you look to the future. Is there anything please you? Well? So yes, I am okay, So the next generation call them thirty and under. I think by my sort of empirical observations. Uh, they're more scientifically literate than any previous demographic. Ever, they grew up with a smartphone. They know whether or not they understand it. They know that the smartphone which they embrace was created by this summation of physics and

engineering and space. So they're not the ones statistically telling you I will choose to believe this science and not that science. I don't trust scientists scientists, No, these are not those people. They have an agenda, write agenda. Yeah, we all all. That's what we do. All scientists get together just to put on a hoax. Yeah, that's what

we that's really what we do. So that next generation is is embracing films like the Martian films like like The Imitation Game, films like The Theory of Everything, biopics about scientists, and first run dramas that features science as a character unto itself. There's Matt Damon's character trying to not die by the invocation of his formidable knowledge of stem fields. Okay, so let's do the man. I have enough food to last for fifty days. He's going to

starve to death long before we can open. I'm gonna have the science that was the suspense in the film, with a marquee director which was Ridley Scott, and and five starring actors, each who have started their own film come together for a movie that was anchored in science. I think, if you're under thirty, you're just not old enough yet to be senator or president, or head of state or head of agency or head of corporation. I

give him a few more years. I think they'll straighten it all out, and then I can go to the Bahamas and they they can fix everything that we broke for them. I understand you have a new book coming out, by the way about it. So it comes out in just a couple of weeks, the beginning of May. And it's titled Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, And so it is a it is my it's a short book.

It's an adorable little book. My intent is to take all this fragments of astrophysics headlines that have come your way, Exo Planets, big Bank, black Hole spaces, all of these fragments of headlines that are sort of dangling there in front of you, and this book brings it together, enabling you to consummate your relationship with the cosmos. I like that consummate your relationship with the cosmos. That's that's sort of sounds sort of dirty, but you're so poetic when

you speak. It's it's I'm I'm kind of annoyed. I'm jealous because don't you wish you could be this eloquent Brian? I mean you are, Brian, but no, I never I never will be. I feel like I could really use the universe for dummies, which is what I'm calling your new book, Neil. So I'm very excited about that. It's not for dummies, it's for people in a herb. Yeah, people in a hurry. That's a little euphemistic, isn't it Those of us who aren't educating. It is so not

dumbed down. All the language is real for non deep thinkers, and all the language is real. Well, this has been really fun, really enlightening, and I think really important. So god speed, Thank you, and that's what we say to anyone go into space. God speed, and I take that

very warmly and dearly from you. As always, we want to thank our fantastic producer, Gianna Palmer for putting together the show, to Ryan Connor and Eric krupkey for engineer officer crucky, you've done it again, and then the end of the song, I like g officer crupkey, crup you. And to Jared O'Connell for mixing the show and sadly there's no song about Jared. Thanks also to our social come up with something Maybe. Thanks also to our social media maven Alison bres Nick, and to Emily Beena for

her part in producing the show. We also want to thank Nora Richie for additional editorial assistance. Mark Phillips, thank you so much for our theme music. Katie Currik, Mitch Simil and I are the executive producers of this show. We love hearing from you, We truly do, so. Don't forget to call us with questions for Eina Garden. I love Eena Garten and my daughters are absolutely obsessed with her.

You can call us at nine to nine to four four six three seven, or you can email us at comments at correct podcast dot com, or you can find me on social media. I'm Katie Currik on Twitter and Instagram, Katie dot correct on Snapchat, Brian is Goldsmith B on Twitter, and if you haven't already, please subscribe to our show, so you get every episode right when it drops hot off the presses. God, how old I sound. And we'd love if you'd rate and review us on iTunes. H