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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Chaitin's Theorem, Ai, UFOs
July 13, 2023
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Okay, this is the wrong subject for you to justify your disagreement with me by suggesting I might be biased. Pick a different subject where I could be biased. Not this one. I'm not saying you're biased. I'm saying that- No. This is what I get when I'm in the public. I don't know what it is. Therefore, aliens- People do say that. They do say that. Very few people. No, not few people. How many people do you interact with?
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, an author, and a science communicator who is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. Neil also has a new book called The Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, which is in the description. Today we talk about UFOs, artificial intelligence, and whether there's more to this world than a mere
It's a tough conversation to bring to you, and it's tough for several reasons. Number one, the subject matter itself tends to be contentious. Number two, the style of my questions and remarks tended to clash with Neil's. And number three, there are just miscommunications all around. Most of that's my fault and I'll hopefully improve in the future as a result of this interview. Despite that, I absolutely
Loved the podcast. In fact, it's one of my favorites. I didn't want it to finish and at no time was Neil upset with me nor I with him. We clarified that twice. This is just how people disagree usually behind the closed doors of the university when attempting to discuss almost any topic in a scientific manner.
My name is Kurt J. Mungle, and I have a podcast here called Theories of Everything, where I use my background in mathematical physics to analyze theories of everything, predominantly from a theoretical physics perspective, though I'm interested in other approaches as to what's fundamental. Is presentism correct? What about holism over reductionism? What about consciousness? Where does experience come into play? What ontological status does mathematics have?
You can think of it as explorations of the largest mysteries of the universe without already having some defined position that I'm advocating for and trying to force the conversation in a contrived way toward it. At approximately the 20 to 30 minute mark, there will be a couple of ads. Those drastically helped tell as well as the patrons.
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Enjoy this podcast with the legendary Neil deGrasse
Firstly, you should know you're one of the people that got me interested in physics and science in general, along with Brian Green since I was a kid. So I have my career to thank you for. Wow. Okay, good. My degree to thank you for. You turned out okay. Yeah. And my predilections as well. I wanted to firstly thank you for helping shape me. And secondly, welcome you to this podcast that in a sense you've helped
What are you working on these days and how is your day today, man?
I was just down there and I learned that they have a floor, it's called a sushi floor. So you go there and you have sushi and then another floor they have hamburgers, another floor they have milkshakes. And during their lunch hour, you just choose the floor where you're going to hang out and then that's the food. I said, I want to work here.
Why don't they mix it? Why don't they just have one floor? There's too many options of sushi and hamburgers. Maybe. Yeah, the different kitchen needs, of course. And so it's not just one cafeteria. It's food segregated. I see. I see. But that's what restaurants are. They're food segregated zones, right? So you don't go to a pizza shop and say, I'd like
sushi or you know go into an Indian restaurant and say I'd like the bratwurst right or you just or pastrami sandwich we we we know already know they're segregated it's just cafeterias historically have been completely mixed or just have bad food in general so these this was all very well done. What fundamental aspect of our universe let's say of our current understanding of our universe do you think is most likely to change or be overturned in
the near future and why. If it's fundamental, I don't think it will change. So that's not how I think about what is fundamental. There's the boundary between what we know and we don't know and that'll change daily. As our observations and experiments affirm what we thought was true and or what we've concluded is true by repeated experiment and it becomes part of our foundations
of physics, even of science in general, I don't see those changing. That's why they're foundations. They might be enclosed in a deeper understanding of the world, as Newton's laws were when Einstein came along. With Newton, of course, we had our law of motion and law of gravity, back when we called them laws. And of course, you put low speeds and low gravity into Einstein's equations, they become Newton's equations.
So we didn't discard Newton, we just learned it was a part of a larger, deeper objective truth in the universe. So no, I don't see, if something is overthrown that somebody thought is fundamental, it wasn't fundamental to begin with. So that's how I see the universe.
Okay, I'll give you an instance. An example would be locality. So I would like to talk about the recent Nobel Prizes with regard to entanglement and I want to hear, can you explain the recent Nobel Prize and then what does it say about fundamental reality or our understanding of it?
Well, if I remember the Nobel Prize, I remember I folded it into a talk I gave back this past January, but I haven't thought about it since then. I think they got it based on their research of entanglement, but wasn't it in circuits or was it, um, I'm trying to remember the details, but it was, it did involve entanglement and with entanglement, you have what is effectively, uh, instantaneous action at a distance. If you want to even use the word action.
uh although it's probably shouldn't because action is associated with fields the invocation of fields but um if you have two particles created together with complementary uh quantum states then you observe one the other the wave function collapses instantaneously for both of them what i'd like in recent
I learned just a few months ago from Brian Green, good friend up at Columbia. Uh, he told me, he updated me cause I don't track this daily the way he would, or it's certainly the way you would that the virtual particles in the vacuum, which people like to think of as the vacuum energy are of course popping in and out of existence and they are surely entangled. Okay.
Because they're created together and then they get destroyed together. And there was some thinking that these are wormholes of some kind. And these wormholes are therefore everywhere because the vacuum is everywhere. And if that's the case, why not then think of the very fabric of space and time as woven
by the threads of wormholes of all these entangled particles and I thought that was that was kind of cool because otherwise no one's been talking about what is space time made of right and it's not even who thinks about that like some people do but it's not it's not in the books we just describe what it is rather than what it's made of so I thought that was cool I enjoyed that but otherwise I don't have a strong thoughts or opinions on it the idea that
that something can happen in two places. Um, that's happened simultaneously. I don't, it just is, I don't judge the universe. I, if that's what it is, that's what it is. And that is then the reality. I don't, I don't lose sleep over it. Have you heard of Chaitin's incompleteness theorem? No. Okay. My question was going to be, who is, who is, who is this person? Chaitin is one of the founders
Or at least popularizers of algorithmic information theory. There's this guy named Kalmagorov for complexity theory, if you know about complexity theory. From long ago. Kalmagorov, yeah. Yeah. I often invoked, there's a Kalmagorov statistical test on data that I, it's got some other name hyphenated with it.
Is somebody call McGarra? Wow, it's very sure. It's been like 30 years since I've I can pull out one of my books when I. Well, anyway. Yeah. So tell it to me. I'm happy to hear.
Sure, Kalmogorov complexity means if you take a string, so just zeros and ones, let's say you give... I know the Kalmogorov complexity. It's the other guy. Okay, great. I'll just quickly explain Kalmogorov complexity because it's required for this and just for the audience. So let's say you have a string of 50 zeros. There's not much information there because I can describe that to you right now. I say write 50 zeros. That's like say four words and then you get out 50 digits. You can compress data downward and then you could ask, well,
Are there strings for which you can't compress? The quickest way of compressing them is actually to just give you back the string itself. Yeah, very cool. The measure of the program length, the shortest program length required to produce a string is called the Kolmogorov complexity.
Okay. Okay. So we have that. So now you can classify strings in terms of a number of complexity. It's almost like some physical systems you can classify by entropy, but this is computer science. But it feels like it's a counterpart to it, right? Yeah. So Chase's incompleteness theorem says that if you have a formal system, there exists a number which is uncomputable though. So some extremely large number L
Okay, so what's the utility of that?
But my question is, or my question was going to be, hey, given that people like Dyson and even Penrose, I believe, think that Gödel's incompleteness says something about reality or physics or the possibility of us having a toe, whether or not a toe exists, given that, okay, is there any implication for physics for Chaiten's incompleteness theorem?
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Okay, interesting. This is the first I've learned of that incompleteness theorem, so I don't have a fresh idea. And you can think of it as a variation of Barry's paradox, like you've heard of this paradox that says, what is the shortest number that can't be described in 70 letters? It's that sentence. Yeah, that sentence alone is like 57 characters. So if you were to give that number, well, you could have described it with 57 characters right there. So it's like a variation of that. I'm just wondering, okay, does that have anything to do with physics? Oh, yeah. So, okay. So, so I'll tell you this.
I tend to be more practical-minded than that. Those kinds of questions, of course, occupy philosophers on the edge of the nature of knowledge and the knowledge of nature, but at some level I find them to be a distraction because
I want to just build the next telescope and I want to observe the next kind of object that we've never seen or heard of before. I want better data on the origin of the universe. So I have different, more practical questions that I want solved. And as my community of astrophysicists typically do, we pose questions that can be answered by the hardware of either the telescopes or the space probes. And this gives us our understanding of the universe.
So the discovery that our galaxy is not alone in the universe by Hubble 1926, that the universe is expanding 1929, that we are made of chemical elements forged in the centers of stars 1957, that quasars are
galaxies with with runaway black holes in their center that was long earned over decades of research that weird galaxies are colliding galaxies all of this are actual discoveries we can talk about and to say what is the implications of these i don't know what those implications would be but they're not stopping us from continually making discoveries and i can tell you had we been distracted by those kinds of questions over the past century none of what we know about the universe
Since maybe the 30s or 40s, there's been a split in the scientific community for shut up and calculate.
Like, forget about philosophy. Philosophy is for the philosophers. Let's just even have separate departments. There's just physics. If you want to know. In fact, I would I would I agree with you, but I would word it differently. I would say it's not shut up and calculate its philosophers who were hanging out in their armchair, deducing what they could about the world. We learned in the 20th century that most of the world does our senses
Do not have access to most of what we will discover in the world as the 20th century unfolded. We needed large telescopes. We needed particle accelerators. We needed probes of the universe that do not issue forth from your senses being invoked on the couch. Most of it. And so, so because quantum physics, modern physics, basically post classical physics is an era
that the philosopher in the couch has no access to because the philosopher couch does not have a laboratory and the laboratory became necessary in order to know the next thing that's going to happen you're not going to deduce quantum tunneling somebody's got to make that measurement okay so i claim not that it was shut up and calculate it was philosophers
you're not useful to us anymore. Sorry, we're going to keep going in our direction, find something else to do. And there's there's religious philosophy, there's ethical philosophy, there's political philosophy, there's no shortage of branches of philosophy, but philosophers in the driving seat with the physicists, where it had been for centuries, parted ways. That's how I see it.
I don't see it as some commandment that came down from on high. I see it as a practical reality of the philosopher no longer being as useful as they once were to the physicists asking questions on the scientific frontier. That's my view of this. If that's flawed, let me know, but that's how I see it. So I see it as since the forties or so.
Trying to wrap one's head around with what's going on in quantum mechanics. You can't, you can't wrap your head around it. So we just do it. That's my point. That's, that's my whole point. The world is that way. So we can say, let's try to deep. Is it a multi-world? Is it the thing is go ahead, but I'm still making experiments and I'm still deducing the nature of the world from those experiments. And those questions, a philosopher might ask.
I'm just saying have not been as useful. By the way, the physicists themselves can think philosophically, and we all do all the time. I mean, we embrace as deep a thought as we can muster. So I'm not I'm not making light of what it is to think philosophically about the world, but to go to school to be trained as a philosopher and then knock on the physicist's door. I haven't seen one contribute in the last century. I would go back to the 1920s, not even the 1940s.
Okay, firstly, there's Norton's dome, which is a philosophical experiment. What is that? What is that? What is that dome? It shows that indeterminism is there even in classical mechanics. Okay. So that's a philosophical, sorry, a thought experiment. That is extremely interesting. And also, in what way did it affect the progress of physics? Did it? And when did it come out? And it's from 2003. Oh, so recent.
Yeah, that's a recent thing. So did that get folded into some new science experiment and understanding? I mean, I'm just saying, go ahead. I'm going to stop you all from thinking that way. But I have planets to discover. I have moons to measure. I have ice geysers on, you know, there's stuff out there that I care about.
And I want to know about and it makes headlines in the, you know, the black holes colliding. All right. This is these are things that so by the way, in high school, we had I went to a geeky high school and we had various journals as a biology journal conducted and run by students, a biology journal, a math journal and a physics journal. There's also a poetry journal, but it was less. We were science geeks, not literary geeks.
And some of the funnest times I've had were sitting, you know, chewing the fat during study break, study hall, or was it a break or were we supposed to be actually doing coursework? We would just, we just talk about some of the deepest issues of our understanding of the universe that we possibly could. And it was fun. It was, but, but it didn't sum to anything.
such as learning new ways to compute differential equations, for example. But in Norton's Dome, I hadn't heard of this. Can you tell me more about it?
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As usual, I recommend you don't stop before four lessons. You just have to get wet. You have to try it out. And I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you can now comprehend subjects. You previously had a difficult time grokking. But in Norton's dome, I hadn't heard of this. Can you tell me more about it? Sure. So there's a way that you can set up a system such that a ball can roll to the top.
And then just stay there. OK, so it's an extremely fragile system, but it can roll from any direction and just stay there. And there's a way you can set up the initial conditions and the differential equation such that if you roll it backwards, so you run the time backward, if it's at the top, it will go in some direction. But which direction it goes is undetermined. So there's one way of getting around it where you say, OK, we have to have some lift. What are you talking about in classical physics? Why is it undetermined? Isn't it just just a very high number? I mean, what?
There's something called the Lipschitz continuity conditions, which forbids certain equations. But then it turns out that if you assume Lipschitz condition, it's akin to saying there is no indeterminacy to begin with. So you prove there is no indeterminacy by imposing that there is no indeterminacy. But if you remove that, you get configurations like Norton's Dome. So if I understand what you're saying, you can set up the system so that
It rolls to the top in this highly, highly improbable state, right? Because it's the top of every incremental movement in any direction will send it back down the hill, correct? So there it is delicately balanced. Now you want to, you say roll the video tape backwards. Why doesn't it just go back the way it came? Of course it would, because you just rolled the tape backwards.
No, because it could have gone up from any one of the directions. So that is to say that... Oh, you don't have information about how it got up there. No, no. Well, there are multiple ways you could have gotten up there. So in the same way, you just reverse time. You could say there are multiple paths you can go from this point forward. Okay. In other words, you have indeterminacy. So why isn't there indeterminacy about knowing how it got up there in the first place? So you have indeterminacy on both sides. What it says is that if you have a mass that's at the top of a dome and it's frictionless and the dome is characterized by a certain curve,
which needs to be defined specifically then it's at rest at the top of the dome but at any t that's non-negative any time that's greater than zero it can take off why is it why why is what you're describing to me asymmetric at all the point is that you just set up the system like that as a thought experiment in order to just put t equals minus t okay it's just useful to set up the experiment okay so in that
What is the okay, so fine is interesting thought experiment. I like nobody doesn't like thought experiments, then of what utility is that to the practicing scientists, even if it is of high interest to the philosopher, it then makes you say, hey, if there's a classical system that is determined, that's not the case. There's also another philosopher, another quantum physicist, we shouldn't say if that's really true about the Norton dome, then
We shouldn't say classical physics is deterministic, right? Correct. Okay. What does that change? I don't get it. It's fine. It's great, great result. Okay. So let's think about this in a couple of ways. So number one, what is physics? Like physics is understanding what reality is. So we have to put an asterisk on what reality is. Cause like who the heck knows what reality is, but physicists are trying to understand what that is. Someone like Tim modeling would say, Hey,
Which I agree with and I never put in these words before quantum theory is never talked about in university as a physicist. You'd learn quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, but he would say a theory tells you what the heck you're dealing with. It talks about ontology. So there needs to be that component as well. What does it need to be if what we're doing still works? It needs to be to you, the philosopher, but to me, the practicing scientists that's building circuit boards based on a complete understanding of how quantum physics works.
I don't need to know that. That doesn't mean I don't want to know it, but the search for that answer, if it distracts me from other progress I will make in this physical universe, and I'm a practicing scientist, that's how I'm going to choose my paths in that way. So yeah, quantum physics, who was it that said the day you understand quantum physics is the day you can be certain you don't because you it's not their variations on our native senses to interpret and yeah.
So that's one view. You can just take the view that, hey, whatever is useful, let me just build something with it. That's how I think of physics. That's how I think of physics. Physics is matter, motion, and energy, and every way that allows me to predict the future of those systems so that I can exploit it to the benefit of civilization and intellectual pursuit. That's how I think of physics.
Okay, so there's a couple of points there. Number one, there's a value in there, which isn't derivable from the physical facts. What do you mean a value? What do you mean? I like it. Because you want to do something that's good. You want to do something useful. So you're not just doing anything. No, no, I didn't say use. Did I say useful? Let me give a different word. Let me be more precise. Sure. And less precise at the same time. I'd like to know ever more about how the universe works.
so that I can invoke it in the progress of civilization. And by progress, I mean, new understandings, the history of this exercise often hardly ever doesn't convert to new inventions, new means of living to prolong our benefits, our health, our longevity, and just our enlightenment about how the universe works.
So that's how I think of physics and it adds the most fundamental level with chemistry layered on that and then biology layered on top of that.
I think that's an unfair characterization of how physics developed and even develops to this day. Now, as for modern examples, okay, let's put that aside. What makes it unfair? What makes it unfair? Einstein thought plenty about Mach's principle, and Einstein also thought about other philosophical positions. By the way, Mach's principle was a philosopher from the 19th century. So that's pre the era that I'm describing here.
in terms of the value and influence of philosophers in the thinking of a modern physicist who's doing actual, making actual discoveries. So, so you can mention mock and I'll give you a mock, but there's not much after mock that you can cite. Yeah, but go on. John Bell of the Bell's theorems that we just mentioned are the Bell's inequalities of Nobel prize. He was influenced. Yeah, but Sean Bell, great question to you. Um,
Was he trained as a philosopher or as a physicist? That's kind of my point here. I think he was trained as a physicist. And not to be pedantic about it, but it's the value of learning how the physical universe works with laboratories, relative to armchairs. That's really what I'm getting at here.
But sure, it's great. The Bell's inequality theorem is very important, very thought-provoking, as any good philosophical conclusion should be.
Yeah, so I think we're speaking past one another, so let me be precise because I don't want to get misconstrued. What I'm saying is that physics benefits from an understanding of philosophy and also physical statements by a physicist have embedded in them philosophical assumptions. So if we say something about material, there's like materialism is in there. What is that? What is a material? Can we define it specifically? Musings like actually sitting and thinking about what the heck exists.
What is the nature of this? What is space time? You mentioned that this is something we don't talk about much. Actually, there's several people who think that space time is something that's emergent. And so they deeply they think about, well, are we on the boundary? Are we in the bulk? Is it discrete? Is it not? What does that mean? Is it real? Does it have a variable associated with it like there before we measure? Yeah, I got you. A characteristic thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Does our consciousness have something to do with it? There's like 30 interpretations of quantum mechanics, maybe four of them have to do with consciousness, but still, those are all- By the way, since we actually really don't understand consciousness, and the evidence that we don't understand it is that people keep writing books on it, claiming they know it, that's the evidence that we don't know anything about it. To take consciousness, about which we know very little, to explain something in quantum physics, or to have quantum physics
And understanding a quantum fix that nobody has, co mingle with consciousness feels like very tentative land to stand on, to take two things that are not deeply understood and use one to explain the other. I'm disturbed when I see people do that. Not that that overstates it. I'm intrigued that people have the urge to do it, but I've
Make sure I do not ever have the urge to explain something I don't understand with something else I don't understand. I don't think that's the wisest path to be on. It's a fun path, like over beer, sure. But to commit your life to it, I don't I don't know, I would question that relative to having applying that same brain power in other ways. Now, you mentioned other things like materialism, OK, that, of course,
Physics, modern science, especially Western science is highly materialistic. I mean, in fact, almost entirely materialistic. I don't know any other. I don't think there's any dimension of spiritualism if we take that as the opposite of materialism. I don't know any dimension of spirit, spiritualism in traditional Western science. So you said, how do we define materialism?
Is that a problem? How to define that? Is this a challenge? Is this really something people are distracted by? I wouldn't put the term distracted with anything that's a philosophical investigation because of reasons like I mentioned before, physicists are steeped in philosophy even if they don't know it. And this is a point Carlo Rovelli, Lee Smolin,
Sure, you know them. I met Lee and I know Lee and I only know, of course, of Rovelli's books. Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin, as well as this guy named Abhay Ashtekar, are the founders of loop quantum gravity. This is also something that Abhay Ashtekar says. He makes a great analogy. So if you have a sphere, you have to cover it with two open sets. You can't just cover it with one, otherwise you distort it. So what if reality is like that, where you need multiple covers and the physical world, the material world is just one of these open sets, but it doesn't cover everything?
I love it.
Most of the philosophers of physics are trained in physics. This is my whole point. This is my entire point here. Okay. You mischaracterized it by thinking that I meant, I said, I thought I spent at least 90 seconds saying that we love thinking philosophically about things in our field.
But training yourself to get a PhD in philosophy in the 20th century has shown to be not so helpful to the moving frontier of physics. That doesn't mean the physicists are not thinking philosophically. So in the example you gave, yeah, they're thinking philosophically. Yeah, and they're physicists. This is my only point I was making when you brought up the subject.
Again, it's a bit unfair. For instance, there's Hugh Price, who doesn't have a single degree in physics and has made significant contributions to the philosophy of physics. Secondly, there's a quote from John Byas asking can philosophers contribute to reconciling general relativity and quantum field theory, which is this very topic we're talking about, Neil, and he concludes something like to dare to imagine a world more strange or
You're changing the subject. I told you that
Sorry. I agreed with you that philosophy and physics were, if you go far enough back, they were indistinguishable. All right. And they were neck and neck and they're each a seat at the table, each with a steering wheel together until modern physics. So if your best examples are from the classical era, I agree with you. That's the, that's where you're going to have to go to get the best examples.
My the schism that I'm describing, which you originally described as shut up and calculate, which I put some nuance on that. I didn't disagree so much as add, add, add some texture to that, that if you don't have modern examples, then that's the only point I'm making. Of course, there are classical examples, right from Leidenitz, you know, and he had he's trained in philosophy, not even in mathematics. OK, he's a philosopher.
and so i don't have any issues with you going before the era of modern it's modern physics that as far as i can read my read of history that changed everything you can't just sit down and think about anything anymore you can't you can't tell me the nature of quasars you can't because you don't know what they are you haven't seen the observations you don't know the spectra you don't know what black holes look like that enabled us to connect you don't know any of that that that that that occupied
Thousands of research papers from the 1960s into the 1970s and early 1980s just trying to understand what that phenomenon was. There was not a philosopher to be found. Would have been nice if it could have worked that way. A lot of brain power invested in modern philosophy. No doubt about it. Some of the smartest people that ever were became philosophers.
But I just don't see them at the table anymore. There's a seat there for you. I'm not rejecting you. But say something that will help me figure out the universe. And that I just have I don't see examples of it. And maybe I'm missing something. Okay. By the way, did you find out whether Bell was trained in physics? Bell is trained in physics. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm not making the case that people
I think you think that I'm making the case that I think that I think you're making a case that you're not. You think that I think that you think? Yeah, let's just clear the air. I'm not saying that a philosopher who's disembroiled from physics can make contributions to physics, though I'm not saying the opposite, because I do think that's the case. And I think that's historically the case. And I also think that many of what we think of as true is built on so much that's false. And we only realize it's false from the ill formed ambiguous statements that we try to make sense of.
We have a recent example, recent like the last 70 years of that. So the whole problem of the hard problem of consciousness, that's a philosophical question. Yes, and that's physiology and neuroscience. And the neuroscientists have philosophers right at their doorsteps as where they should be. That's a brand new nascent field. We still barely know anything about our brains. And so philosophers are there. Sure. That's where they belong, where they should be, as where philosophers were at the dawn of physics.
What problem has ever been solved by philosophy?
I didn't ask that, but go on. No, no, no, I'm just saying like, this is something to think about. Then you realize, okay, anytime anything's been solved by philosophy, it then moves into another field. And so all that remains are the hard problems in philosophy. And it looks like philosophy hasn't solved anything, but we don't realize that, okay, it started it in this direction. And then they just let it go. And it's no longer a part of philosophy. So that's number one. And number two, the primary reason for saying the hard problem exists is that the neuroscientists can just come up with neural correlates.
And it's not clear. How do you get from those correlates to the conscious experience? Of course, even though there's neuroscientists, what I'm saying is that spurred work and the work there's a whole field that's been developed because not a whole field, there's a flourish of enthusiasm for a field because of the heart problem of consciousness being explicated by a philosopher. I agree. I agree. It's just not physics.
I agree. I'm saying this, this good moral philosophy that's come out recently, good thinking, you know, that picks up somewhere, some earlier moral philosophers have left off plenty of stuff, including the mind. Yes, I got no issues there. That was never an argument for me.
By the way, I'm intrigued by this. What's the word? Not cladding of the sphere. What's the two parts of a sphere? What's it called? Covering. It's an open cover. An open cover, right. I just like that thought. That's a fun thought. What is it that is outside of our experience? Yeah, that's something else that that's fun to think about is what are the limitations of the scientific method? And this isn't to be anti-science at all. Can I respond to that? Sure.
The way the scientific method is typically explicated can lead to that very question. But I, when I think of the scientific method, I think of it differently in a way that wouldn't even lead to that question. Okay. Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson's definition of the scientific method. All right. Do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or that something
is not true that is. Did I say that the right way and the opposite? Whatever it takes. Oh, you know, I have delusions sometimes. So let me write down or get a video. I have certain biases. So let me have someone else check it. I saw this happen, but maybe I should get a video of it. So all of these are tactics, methods and tools to separate
the data you collect on the physical universe from its interaction with your senses to minimize what role your senses play in the data and science modern science as we know it did not take off until we had until we started to assemble take off as in accelerate until we assembled tool that replaced our senses with the near simultaneous
With the near-simultaneous invention of the microscope and the telescope, we were off and running in both directions. Leeuwenhoek sees animacules, little animals swimming a prettily, to quote him, in pond water. Whoa! Who ordered that? What's that? Galileo looks up and he sees spots on the sun and so the beginnings of rings of Saturn didn't know what he was looking at. Also, tools
assisting our senses and ideally replacing our senses. There it is. So to say, to now ask philosophically, what limits are there? I'm just trying to, the limit would be what's the limit? I'm unable to remove my bias from the data in any way at all, even by getting other people to review it. That would be a limit.
If every person I got to peer review my work has exactly the same bias as I do, then something slips through the system that I think is true that is not. That's a limit of the system, but that's not founded in a philosophical principle. That's just that's bad luck in that case. So no, I'm not the hypothesis. No, I'm not that precise about it. It's very blunt. Is there any hypothesis?
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I am not prepared
to say, how did you word it? Do I say yes to that or no? Repeat. Is there a statement? Is there a fact? A thing. Okay. Yeah. That cannot be shown to be true or a hypothesis that can't be tested by the scientific method. I am not prepared to declare that something cannot ultimately succumb to the methods and tools of science. I'm not prepared to do that only because the history of that exercise
Leads is is one of abject failure failure in the sense that science will never know this or science we can never know that we and science slowly marches along and then Checks those boxes. Okay as we move forward given the successful history of this enterprise I am NOT here to tell you
standing here flat-footed that, and I actually do have flat feet, that there's a boundary beyond which science cannot reach. I don't see evidence in the history of science sufficient enough for me to even make that claim today. What's your opinion on the recent UFO whistleblower David Grush? I'm sure you've heard some whispers or maybe you've watched it yourself. Yeah, I'm not interested in testimonies.
I mean, testimonies are the lowest form of evidence in science. I don't care what you said you saw. I mean, I care, but I'm not going to base an entire understanding of the universe based on what comes out of your mouth. And I don't care who you are or what your rank is. It doesn't matter. Are you human? That's all I care about. You're human? I need something better than that.
Like, bring an alien into the open square. How about that? We have six billion smartphones in the world. Give me some video of people getting abducted onto a flying saucer. That would go viral overnight. Cat videos go viral. You know that'll go viral. All right? I'm thinking if we're being invaded by aliens, we would not need congressional hearings to establish that fact.
really the aliens are coming and they're only going to restricted military airspace really that how that's working we have a million people airborne at any given moment with a window looking out into earth's atmosphere have you ever seen the crisscrossing of our commercial air flights in the world in a 24-hour period it seems to me if aliens are coming we could crowd source that oh yeah so i don't i can't be impressed by testimonies
Exactly. You're for investigating further.
Okay.
To the world as the eight billion residents do and the six billion smartphones so And by the way little facts like in the 1960s and 70s abduction stories were common Oh the aliens brought me on and they poked my gonads and things but now that we all have smartphones Those stories have gone away because you could record it. All right, you could live stream it
as the alien walked towards you or as they gathered. But we don't see any such footage of that. We're not relying on your eye, brain, memory, sensory interaction with the world. And as I said earlier, we didn't begin to truly understand this world until we could bring methods and tools and tactics and especially instruments of measurement to the natural world that transcended
our biological form our biological sensory system so whistleblower has you know we all turn heads when we hear about a whistleblower all right but i'm just saying if aliens visited why would the government be the only agency that has them like like why just why ask a whole other set of questions that no one's asking if we're being visited how come only the government knows about it
And have you ever neal okay work for the government do you realize how incompetent the government actually is that does anyone actually know this that they could actually stockpile aliens and no one would know.
Okay, I feel as if you're digging yourself into a hole and I love you, Neil. I love you and I'm reaching out. Firstly, you're an alien. That'd be great. I'm not anti who everybody wants to meet the aliens. I got nothing against aliens. I love me some aliens. Okay, go on. So firstly, there are several maybe even hundreds of commercial airline pilots who report seeing similar objects. And by the way, it's not the jump.
Like I've heard it explained, there's the jump, unidentified, therefore aliens. To me, that betrays that someone hasn't studied this much because the claim isn't that it's aliens. In day two investigations into this, people call it the phenomenon. Yeah, sure. And I don't have a problem. I told you, you're arguing about against something that I didn't even have an argument about.
yes if there's something in the sky that we don't know what it is and we have eyewitness testimony or any kind of testimony or it's on your chart recorder and we don't know what it is figure out what it is i don't have any problems with that and i said i'd allocate money to it if i would control pentagon already allocates money i don't have a problem with that so what are you saying back to me when i already said i don't have a problem with that let me figure out how to phrase this do you see
The sentiment in the public of people who take this phenomenon seriously, whatever that is, I don't know what to call it. Ufologists, people who are interested in UFOs, they don't have to be believers because what are they believing in? They don't, they don't know. It's just something extraordinary. Okay. They just, they like lights in the sky. Okay. It's fine. Do you get the sense that the sentiment is that you have a derisive, maybe even scornful attitude? No, I don't. I do. If you want to think they're aliens, but the fact that there's something that can't be explained, the universe brims with mysteries.
Sure. Go right ahead. Investigate it. No. The scorn is, I don't know what it is, therefore it's visiting aliens and it's a government cover-up. That's where I have scorn. Scorn is too harsh. That's where I don't have the patience for that. Because my sense of it is that if they were aliens,
they wouldn't be as elusive as people are saying they would just be in plain sight there they'd be and you wouldn't need to invoke a cover-up theory a what's the term not cover-up um conspiracy because you wouldn't need to invoke a conspiracy because what is a conspiracy theorist it's someone who's pretty sure they know what's true and where there's a gap in the data that would demonstrate it's true they say it's missing because it's a cover-up
That's a conspiracy theorist. So those people that you're describing, not the ones that just see stuff they can't explain, the ones that see stuff they can't explain are sure they aliens and sure the government knows about it and but they can't prove it because it's a cover up. Those are the ones I have issues with. Now, if you don't have issues with it, you're an educated person. If you don't have issues with those who are sure they're aliens, they need smart people on their side because I'm not among them.
Okay, let's disentangle this. Firstly, the government is incompetent. I think the government's incompetent is both underestimated and overestimated. That's a cog in a wheel. That's I'm saying. Let me not say the government is incompetent because we can land a spacecraft on a moving target on Mars in a crater, you know, 70 million miles away. So let me not say incompetent. Let me just say the capacity of the US government to keep a secret
which is particularly tasty is essentially zero. I don't think the claim is that they have kept the secret though. And so the government is not as competent as that in that, as you think they are. What do I base that on? What do I base them on? If there's a janitor, a janitor working in area 51 and they're stockpiling aliens there, the janitor could smuggle in a smartphone, get a picture uploaded to the internet. The general get fired the next day.
And it'd be the richest, most famous janitor there ever was. Okay. Okay. No one would firstly know. And if it's a coverup, hundreds and thousands of people would have to keep secrets that you who's who is it that said you're a philosopher, you know that somebody said, um, was it Mark Twain? I'm not a philosopher. No, no, no. It was, it was like thinking philosophically. It was with Benjamin Franklin. One of these thinkers of centuries ago said, uh, the only way two people can keep a secret is if one of them is dead.
Yeah, okay. So number one, I don't think the government has kept it a secret. I contest that because several millions of people believe that the government is hiding something. There are whistleblowers, like we just talked about, who've come out several of them, like Lou Elisondo, there's David Grush. I'm sure there's more than there are also other programs that the government has kept secret. I don't think it's as easy to sneak into smartphone as as you may think, like with the NSA.
back then, and it should be much easier now for information to come out. Existence of the NSA wasn't revealed until years later. And then the extent of which what they were doing wasn't revealed till decades later. And then there's MKUltra. Then there's also the fact that when you petition with FOIA requests, freedom of information act requests. So where are you going with here? I'm just saying, I'm not convinced they're aliens. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying they're not lights in the sky we can't explain. I'm saying
and i'm not i don't have the interest to spend my professional life investigating them on the premise that they're aliens i by the way nasa and my field
have been searching for aliens for decades. It's not that we don't care about aliens. We have the entire SETI program, for goodness sake, and it's been going strong with fits and starts since the 1970s. We sent signals in the 1960s out of the Arecibo telescope to a cluster of stars called the Hercules globular cluster M13. I think that was the cluster. So it's not like we're not interested in aliens. Of course we are. But
whistleblower testimony of what someone says they saw i don't count that as science not science enough to redirect my career to investigate it as aliens let somebody else investigate it for what it is is it a threat to us is it not is it a glitch in the detector is it anything else by all means check it out
so the proposition isn't neo please you must change your career now given this the proposition also isn't that testimony is the same as science the proposition is that there is no smoking gun and the smoking gun type of evidence isn't the only type of evidence it is if you're making an extraordinary claim
If you're making, oh, the sun, I saw the sunrise this morning, you know, I don't need that much evidence from you to, to agree with your statement. Okay. I don't, I really don't because I would expect that to be true based on everything I know of the natural world. So there are many cases where smoking gun is not important. We infer the existence of exoplanets without ever having seen one. All right. Of the 5,000 exoplanets.
What thirty five forty five hundred of them are inferred by the movement of the host star no half maybe i don't know the latest numbers is a mixture of how we discover them. At least half are discovered by their gravitational effect on the host star and we deduce the mass the period the thing that every even seeing them.
Let's say you encountered something that was extraordinary.
What do you do? I will try to get extraordinary evidence in support of it. Yes, instantly. That's what I would do. If I saw aliens walking, I'd pull out my smartphone, I'd find a video, I would try to steal something off their hip. So I'd have an artifact. I would, oh my gosh, I'd yell to other people, get images of the same thing.
That's what I would do. I wouldn't just say, this is interesting. Now let me go to Congress and tell everyone that I encounter with aliens. No, I wouldn't expect anybody, any of my colleagues to believe me. Even if it were true, I would be seeking the kind of evidence that extraordinary claims require and that's extraordinary evidence. Let's say you saw some orb.
Perhaps even you saw an alien, perhaps even it abducted you didn't let you take out you didn't even occur to you because by the way, this is a common experience with anyone it's not just related to aliens. Firstly, it's difficult to get a photo of anything that's in the sky with your cell phone when you don't know where it is. I was walking in the woods with my family and there was a porcupine.
I don't think porcupines climb trees.
And it didn't occur to any of us to take out our phones and further, like five seconds later, 10 seconds later, it's just gone. And that's a porcupine. Like try finding a non-professional photographer's photo of a porcupine online. I did a search for that. Same with lemurs. And there are many lemurs and porcupines. I think there's 20,000 times more lemurs and porcupines, maybe 100,000 times. Then there would be these anomalous objects, whatever they are. It was hard.
Yeah, the science is hard. Secondly, even when there are images, whatever it is, it's easier than detecting the gravitational wave from colliding black holes. And thirdly, there does exist while there doesn't exist
great photos and by the way that's contested because the government seems to have some photos that they won't release which is why that's called a conspiracy theory doesn't it that's what that sounds like but gone they come from for your request like you can ask the government what do you have and then they can tell you the reason why they're not gonna give it to you like this is classified this violates this law of course it's gonna have classified what are you trying to where do you get mad here with this conversation Neil this can get to such traumatic events that people go through like they get
You can imagine, I'm not even going to say it because it's on YouTube and maybe they'll get censored. They have no evidence that someone could just say, why didn't you record? Weren't you in the right state of mind? And then let's imagine they have people testifying for them, people. Then we say, hey, it's in crescent evidence. So it's evidence that increases your credence by a bit. No, no, it's not about credit. It's not a matter of credence. It's it's
I was testimony gathered. That's consistent says this is excellent. Now we need to bring the methods and tools of science to investigate this. Yes, I agree. I agree. So that's what include pulling your damn smartphone out and not being shocked at the porcupine in the tree, which might not have even been a porcupine because I didn't know porcupine climb trees. You might've been seeing something else. I thought it was a porcupine. Okay. But how would a porcupine climb? Really? Really? They got stubby little legs. How are they going to climb a tree?
Yes, they regularly climb trees and search for food. That's new to me. Yeah. OK, so take that. It's new to you. Like, oh, that's great. That's like, hey, I don't know it. Therefore, it's not true. I didn't say that. No, no. No, you keep putting words in my mouth. You're trying to characterize what I say to make your argument look good. And that's not what I've been saying. No, no. Quote me accurately before you criticize what I say rather than reshape it so that you can make a comment that sounds like
I don't know what I'm talking about. Okay. I was being a facetious and I thought that that was clear, but also the same as being done with you. I say you're straw manning people by saying, I don't know what it is. Therefore aliens, people do say that they do say that people, no, not few people. How many people do you interact with daily? I do. And I have, I have comment threads. There's a whole, what now? What percent half maybe I'm half we'll say,
That I saw a UFO. It did things that defy the laws of physics. It must have been an alien. That is one of the most common accounts for lights in the sky that they say and then it zipped away faster than any airplane. It must have been an alien. Do you realize how common that is? And I'm saying we don't know what it is. It's fascinating. Let's investigate further.
Go right ahead. What's the first part? That's my very loose statistics on that. It's not 1%, it's not 99%.
Yeah, sure. Sure. The issue is that we are supposed to deal with the strongest argument. We don't take the case of even if it's the majority of people. The strongest argument would be actual scientific data, not eyewitness testimony. I have some notes here. Sure. This comes from Kevin Knuth. So basically he's saying that, look, I have papers. Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics, by the way, in the editor in chief of entropy journal and MD. I actually don't care about people's pedigree.
If they're right, they're right, regardless of their pedigree. And if they're wrong, they're wrong, regardless of their pedigree. Thank you for telling me that. But don't invoke that as some measure of whether or not what he's saying is more true than someone else's account. Go. OK, I wouldn't invoke that ordinarily, except... Do you realize in my field, but just to be clear, in my field, when we publish papers, your degrees are not listed next to your name.
We do not rank people when you're making the publication because a great idea can come from anywhere and can be tested and experiment. Okay.
I wholeheartedly agree.
On the AI topic where you said, hey, people who aren't experts shouldn't talk about it, which to me sounds like an argument. Did I say that? I didn't say that. It's a couple of times that was the experts. And then you said, you're not an expert. Like you admitted that, like I'm not an expert. So, but well, that's why I'm saying it. All right. So now technology, let's count AI as among the rank among the fruits of technology. There are people who fear that AI will ruin. I'm not among those, but then I'm not an expert. Okay.
Hold aside that I've written 50,000 lines of computer code and I've been thinking about computers my whole life. I don't present myself as an expert and I won't. And I say that because people who do present themselves as experts, by the way, I don't count Elon Musk as an AI expert. Yeah, I don't remember saying non-experts shouldn't talk about it. I never, I don't think I would have ever said that. Um,
It was around the time you mentioned that.
as early as the 1970s in a computer science class. We've used AI in my field to analyze data, to find interesting things in data that we would not have otherwise been able to sift through. Okay, we've invoked neural nets. So we've been very active in this capacity. And then AI now crosses over into liberal arts and can write your term paper and people lose their shit. So that's intriguing to me that
It's so it is so thoroughly embedded elsewhere. And now it touches a place where it hadn't touched before. And people get now it's in every, you know, every day's newspaper has a scare article on AI. But go on. I just want to for this conversation, we don't need to rely on whatever other recordings were because you have me in person and I can tell you what I think. Okay. Anyhow, Kevin Knuth has articles as well as someone named I'm just citing their last names without
Wait, hold on. Hold on. I care. Just a sec. Just a sec. I wasn't clear enough.
I care that you're professionally trained. If someone is a professional physicist, medical, I care about that. So do give me that information. I don't care where you got your degree or where you're practicing. I don't care about the perceived prestige of one institution versus another.
Okay, that's really what I don't care about. But it's nice to know it. Was it a biologist who came up with this? Yes. So that's why it's the physicist and and the philosophers are parted ways. So that mattered to me there because the training is different. Again, I don't care about pedigree, the pedigree of which institution did the training. I don't care because you spend much more time not in such an institution than in an institution. And so the heights to which you can ascend are
What I'm saying is that they're saying, hey, we would just like more evidence with regard to this. We would like more funding. We would like people to not scorn this subject. So Avi Loeb created the Galileo project and he's getting funding and so he's off and running. So fine. Go ahead. So what point are you trying to make? I don't know what point you're trying to make.
I don't think that skepticism is motivated by rationality. I think skepticism is motivated by the fear of seeming foolish and that skepticism is associated with intellectualism and conspiracy theories are associated with being unintellectual. So it's a fairly clear cut case for someone who wants to be seen as intellectual. And there's something like a liberalism of ideas like, okay, let's test out different hypotheses. Let's hear what else could be the case. Or there's ostensible intellectualism. And I think that the skeptic will choose what appears highbrow most of the time.
That's what I think, because I think they should be encouraging. But how does that apply to all this? So what are you saying? I think we're in agreement. We may be using different words and because it's a charge subject, it sounds like we're arguing, but I don't care. Like I'll hug you if I was to be there in person. Yeah, air hug, air hug. Yeah. Like anyone who's watching may think like, oh, Neil's at Kurt's throat or Kurt's at Neil's throat. No, no, no, no, no. No, it's an animated conversation as any good conversation should be. Here's something I hear. Yeah. Where's the evidence for this?
I'm thinking, where's the evidence for string theory? Where's the evidence the space-time is discrete? There's zero evidence the space-time is discrete. There are whole programs, whole programs of people wanting it so bad to be discrete. Where's the evidence for the quantum gravity? Where's the evidence for virtually every single thing that the philosophy department outputs like we talked about earlier? Yet there's millions and millions of churns. Here it's more money. Here's more money. Here's more money. Take decades if you need to.
And then when we talk about this subject, like there seems to be something so strange going on, which is correlated by the way. It's not just a jump. This is another sticking point. I just want to make clear. I hear that, Hey, it's the jump from, I don't know what it is to aliens. Maybe it is in the straw man case, like I mentioned, but it's also that it's not straw man. If half the people say that it's not a straw man. It's an actual way people think about what they see.
And I'm going to assert because we only just met, but let me assert that I have more access to like people who think this way than you do in your daily life. And it's from that access to people. I give public talks in a year to let me say 40,000, 100,000 people a year. I will address in an audience.
And I know what they think. And we have Q&A. So it draws from that. So it's not straw man. It's an actual what people think that we can ignore them and go on to the other cases. I don't have a problem with that. And those other cases are investigated further. And you asked me about funding. And I said, Pentagon should spend money on this. So what is your argument with me? What is your I said, we should spend money, find out what it is. I want to be safe from weird stuff in the skies.
So go ahead. Yes. Spend money. I would allocate money. There is already is allocated money in the Pentagon. Probably the NSA as well. NASA's allocated money is this SETI in ways that they did not support it as much as they used to. But search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We're all there. We're all in on it. So what is your argument against me? I don't get it. What are you trying to say?
If there's something that's a derisive attitude that can also hold back such studying, by the way, because it places a stigma on it. So they're not disembroiled. They're intertwined.
Then that's also an issue. I don't think there's much of a place to be contemptuous toward anyone. I published a book a few years ago called letters from an astrophysicist and one of them was someone wrote to me from a skeptics organization said, what do you make of this? The Pentagon decided to allocate $30 million to study UFOs. That's crazy. And he expected me to just completely resonate.
With him and I just, but this is now 15 years ago. So some other program that was revealed to have received this money. And I said, pause $30 million out of 500 billion or whatever the budget was is vanishingly small. First of all, second, if there's something in the sky and we don't know what it is, I want the Pentagon to know about it. I want them to do this research.
They didn't say that they're aliens. They just said it's something they don't UFOs. So I chastise a fellow skeptic for his blind attitude towards the entire subject. And I think I've been pretty consistent about that over my years. I, and so, yeah, I guess I'm most visible in the straw man rebuttal. Yes. But the rest go for it. And like I said, Avi Loeb is fully funded.
He's looking for extraterrestrial asteroids in the Pacific right now. It was Galileo project, I think it's called. Correct. Correct. So, so yeah. Great. Great. Okay. You're trying to argue with me, but I don't have anything to argue with. I'm not trying to argue with you. I'm not trying to, Neil, I hope you don't feel that. Okay. Let's turn table. We can come back. I want to ask you about your ability to speak. I remember seeing an interview of you.
I don't know how long ago, maybe two years ago or so, but I don't know when the interview was from and you were saying, man, when I went on John Stewart, I prepped, I watched his show. I saw how long does he give people to speak? And I thought, okay, let me make sure I can plan my jokes if I'm going to even have jokes within that timeframe so that they land. And let me think about the cadence and how it plays well with John, something akin to that. So firstly, am I on the right track or am I misremembering?
Basically on the right track, but it's not that I plan my jokes because I'm there to be interviewed for the science. It's his jokes. So once I got the average time that he allows someone to speak before he comedically interrupts, I realized that that's how I should parcel my information so that the information doesn't end up dangling around a joke that I have to then resurrect in the next
moment I get to speak so that the timing would be smoother if I could parcel my information in those units and that's what I did and as it was and it's it's eight to fifteen eight to twelve seconds around there doesn't sound like much time but it is in a banter in a conversation where there's banter that's actually quite a bit of time so I did that yes and and people afterwards
This is one of the earliest interviews that I did with him because I seen people tried, especially politicians, try to give their stump speech and he's smart and he's clever and he's witty and he's funny. They try to give their stump speech and then he dances circles around them. And it's a bad, it's embarrassing. I said, I'm not going to be embarrassed that way. All right. And of all the ways I might be embarrassed, I'm going to make sure it's not that way. So I, I train myself in those time units. And after the interview, I had people say,
Oh, I saw you on John Stewart. You have such good chemistry with him. Oh, you're such a natural with him. And I said, Oh, I guess it was working. That means it was successful. Yeah. But people think it was natural. And I've heard people say, Oh, when you get your gift as though, okay, yeah, I was just standing there one day on the corner and someone handed it to me and then I opened it and there it was. No, it's a denial of, of
Um, energy, hard work, deliberate effort. Yeah. Yeah. It's a denial of that when people say it. I also get, there's a variant of that is, um, Neil, I just love your Twitter posts. Do you actually write them? Well, what's wrong with that one? What's wrong with that? Um, it says it's a simultaneous compliment and insult. They say,
they love them do i write them so there's some doubt that whether or not i write i see i see because they're so good could they have come from you correct okay i thought that maybe it's like they're so good but you're such a busy person i don't expect you to write your own tweets i thought it was that okay well anyway i don't want to take away your secrets but can you reveal what are some of the other techniques that you used like
I'll give you an instance for me. I did stand-up comedy. And when I was doing it, before I did it, I would watch comedians and I would sit there with a pen and paper, much like yourself, and think about timing, but also think about what types of jokes and look at the structure like it was a math formula. To the point where when I went on stage for the first time, almost every single person bombs their first time. And I did so well that the guy thought I was doing it for a few months. So that was this huge compliment. Ended up being horrible for me later because I got used to doing okay that when I bombed,
I bombed hard and then I just was like, I'm never doing this again. I wasn't prepared for it. But anyhow, I would sit there with a pen and paper and I treated it methodically. So I'm curious in your early days when you were cultivating this skill and that's not to say that you're not still sharpening it. What did you do and how did you think about it? Yeah, that's a good question. Thanks for it. I first it matters to me how you think the person who I'm communicating with. So
Pop culture awareness for me is paramount because that's a scaffold you walk into the conversation with and so I don't have to, I can start there. I can start with something you already care about because by definition if it's pop culture you care about it and so I start there and if I'm fluent in pop culture I can clad this scaffold
with science and it's attached to something you care about and you will walk away with a deeper understanding and concern for that and caring for it than you otherwise would if I just put it out there. This is what I have found. Also, I would speak with people in the old days before I was recognized, you still on an airplane, you say, Oh, what do you on long flights? You say, who are you? What do you do? I said, I do astrophysics and outcome the questions.
And what's a black hole? How big is the universe? Is there God? They usually save that for last. And I would answer, but monitor their eyebrows or their attention span or their body language. Are they facing me? Are they facing forward? Do they look away? And I'd make note, not so much with pen and paper, but just
Okay, intuitively, intuitively, I would make note of what words I used phrases I invoked, and ideas I conveyed that triggered the greatest interest in the person I was speaking to. And I put that away in my utility belt. All right. Also, I've always done writing, always like for 40 years, some form of writing.
What people generally don't know is practically everything I say publicly, even when interviewed on the news, I have written down previously. If you write it down, it forces you to think about verbs and nouns and sentence structure. And if you're writing in a way that's not a wiki page, if you're writing with some creativity, as you would if you're writing a book, then you're going to care about
how the sentence and the phrasing lands as you write it. So when I do this, I have a repository of entire phrases, even words I might use in very specific times and places to maximally communicate with my audience. And that forces me to not be the professor at the front of the room at the chalkboard or whatever it is, the whiteboard requiring that you meet me 90% of the way to the chalkboard.
Well, that's kind of your obligation because you're paying to go to college and I don't have to care whether or not you learn because you're paying for it. Right. So what I mean, that sounded really crass, but it's not the professor's obligation to make sure you get it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you got to meet them 90% of the way to the chalkboard. Whereas
I think what I do or what I do when I'm successful is I go 90% of the way to you. It's minimum energy, a minimum lift. You just maybe reach out half an arm's length to pull something in. And in that way, you know the ideas, you feel the ideas, and ideally you take ownership of the ideas so that you never have to reference me again.
It's not this is true because Tyson said so. It's this is true because here's why. This plugs into that and this turns that way. But and that's why. And so a big part of what I do is try to teach people how to think. And for those who want more of this, there's actually a master class that I taught for the master class company. And I forgot what it was called, but it was all about this.
The link will be on screen as well as in the description. Yeah, the masterclass is exclusively about this. The methods, tools and tactics of communication. I know that you've perhaps covered it in your masterclass. Is there anything about intonation? Yes, yes. The rhythm of speech? Yes, yes. So you can think about it. There's a day when letters were handwritten. And as a result, you could write a letter, you can write a word.
in a way that conveys emotions beyond just the word itself. So the word love means something, but maybe it has a little more flourish in it because you're feeling the word. So that's a way we used to communicate when handwriting was there. Then typewriters came in. And so now the way you put letters on the page no longer carried information because it was duplicated perfectly every time.
Then we have computers and now we have texting where we have emojis or emoticons and emojis specifically. And instead of saying, I love you in these seven ways, you just put a heart or something. And I think our capacity to communicate with emotional nuance has been systematically thinning over the recent years, especially, but definitely over the decades. When I speak,
yes intonation matters monochrome the person can fatigue on monochrome a monochromatic voice so yes there's voice modulation also i used to dance i was on three performing dance companies in my day but that sensitized me to what role my body can play in communicating so no i'm not just going to stand behind the podium i'm going to walk around on stage when it's a large space if the audience is well i'm going to walk around
How can I interact with you in the audience? I'm going to engage you. I'm going to use my arms and my legs and my facial expressions and tone and timbre to communicate in ways that you'll remember more because it's not just words on a page or monochromatic speech that's being delivered.
yes and that's also in the master class that's also there and before you go out do you psych yourself up by saying a phrase or going through a process prior to going on stage i am so comfortable with going on stage it's like let me tell you what my living room looks like yeah okay there's no there's no prepping there's no hyping there's no ritual nothing never even in the beginning never even because
If you're an expert enough at what you're talking about, there's no risk factor. You're not going to embarrass yourself. You're not, you just go out there. And so I see an audience as just someone in my living room and we're just hanging out, sharing notes about the night sky. So yeah, it's, it's, I use every, every part of my physiology that I can to help communicate and to teach.
Okay, so let's wrap the discussion on UFOs as much as we can. Now, I don't recall exactly where we were. I was chiding you for trying to declare that I was arguing with you. Okay, I will say, I think what was going on was the whole issue of straw man versus the strongest man. Some people call it the steel man. So I would say that when one is talking about a side or a lane or whatever people are in, and in this case, we're talking about the phenomenon in quotes,
that if one wants to be harmonious and fruitful, that it's useful to first, yeah, you can point out the weakest points, you can acknowledge them, but also to point out the strongest points. It's true. I agree. It's a weak point to say, I don't know what it is, therefore it's aliens. At the time, we weren't talking about how weak the point was. We were talking about how many people thought that way. And so when I say,
When I, when I, when I attack, attack is a harsh word. I don't care. I don't feel any, no, no, no. When I, when I, uh, when I comment comedically on those who are certain they saw aliens, you said, Oh, I'm attacking the straw man. And I'm saying, I'm addressing the possible majority of what people, of what they think. And as an educator, that matters to me now in a philosophical debate, we'll talk about the stronger case, the stronger cases.
someone says the government is stockpiling alien and alien technology and they've seen it and it worked to sworn not to talk about it and their whistleblower okay okay that's not extraordinary evidence that's no better evidence it's no better evidence than anybody else sitting in front of congress talking about what they saw yeah i don't know about that but i understand what you're saying so i would say you think it's you think it's
It's enough evidence for you to think that it's real? Really? No. Well, like I was saying, there's smoking gun evidence and then there's in crescent evidence. So evidence that moves a needle from zero point five to one percent. And so rather than having one large slide, evidence for what? Evidence that there's something going on in this. No, no. Yes. Of course, something's going on either in the detectors and yes, of course, something is going on. There's a hundred percent answer to that.
likelihood of that being true. Yes, the detector could be faulty. There could be actual aliens or sky phenomenon we've never seen before. But if you're going to rank them, if you put aliens at the top, I would question your how in touch with reality you are. If that is your best explanation for what's going on in a world where there's still many mysteries, especially in our detectors. Oh, but this person is high rank.
So,
i don't think that the people who are coming forward as whistleblowers are doing so because i saw an amorphous object in the sky move spasmonically therefore aliens they're saying like i've seen documents i've seen photos i've talked to other people who i trust in any other circumstance with my life and you would too because they're your military and you do trust them with your life if someone walks into a scientific conference and says believe this because i saw it excuse me we'll show you the back door wholeheartedly agree we have we have
we have stronger constraints on your reporting of evidence for much less of a claim than what's going on here. You cannot expect an authentic practicing scientist to see that as evidence of aliens.
This is what I mean by it needs to not be a straw man because the people at least that I've seen are not saying and because of this you should believe it's aliens nor are they saying that I believe I as in them sorry I'm quoting I don't believe it's aliens necessarily like they would say that and they would say I don't expect you to believe anything I'm just saying this is what I saw can we please
Get some congressional hearings on this. Can you please petition your government? Can you please look at the skies more? I don't know, fund Alvy Loeb. That's the only project for something that seems to be this, like the SETI as well, but it's not of the same sort. Then that's a bit odd because millions of people are interested in this. Go ahead and fund SETI. We're looking all the time. We have people with telescopes, the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California. I think it's in Northern California.
The strongest view on this subject is that there are some competent, diligent people who I would trust with my life and they could be mistaken
They could also be on to something when they say that there's something extraordinary. So please let's investigate. And furthermore, there are people like Kevin Knuth who can put accelerational bounds from the radar data, which is in journals published. So please let's investigate these anomalies. And I would conclude with that. Didn't I say let's investigate? Yes. Yes. Oh, so what's your point? My point is that that's not the impression that people have
of your commentary on this subject. Because they talk about aliens. That's what they ask me about. And that's what I referred to. We're not talking about just stuff we don't understand. They say it's aliens visiting because it's doing physics that we don't understand. It's got to be aliens. They're coming and the government is keeping it a secret because they think if they tell us the truth, we'll all freak out. This is what I get when I'm in the public. If you stepped out in the public speaking this way, you'll get that too.
Apparently, you don't have the same data I have about what interests people and what they're asking out of me. But in those interviews, I do say I want to meet the aliens. Yes. Okay, so there are a couple issues here. And I just want to wrap this up. Number one, I don't get that same sort of impression. I come with me to the hundred thousand people I speak to a year and you will. Okay, come with me. That could be I have a buy a set, or it could be you have a buy a set.
I'm saying like it could be a combination of both because maybe the interviewers who are setting you up want to set you up with people who are likely to elicit a certain response and so they it could be that it could also be you recall a certain type of people more because they stand out more rather than the more cogent kind who tends to go this is the wrong subject for you to justify your disagreement with me by suggesting I might be biased.
That is the pick a different subject where I could be biased, not this one. What I mean is that I'm not saying you're biased. I'm saying that there's I have, I have, I have 30 years of email correspondence with people who are coming. Okay. I wrote a book called letters from an after one entire chapter of it was people commenting on shit they saw in the sky. Okay. So, so.
So for you to feel comfortable thinking what you think is true by saying my data set is biased, this is the wrong example. It's the wrong ring to ring that bell in. I think I said it could be that. And if I didn't, then I apologize because it could be. And like you mentioned, like anyone should admit that there's bias in virtually whatever we do.
Yes, but it's not, it's not binary. There's shades of bias that go from full bias to near zero bias. Okay. And to say everyone has bias, therefore you can't believe anything. No, I didn't say that. I know you don't think I said that, but I understand. Okay. Again, I don't know if in that book with that chapter that it's of the sort, like I saw a blurry object that moved erratically thus aliens. I think that it would be more nuanced than that. They asked me, is it aliens? That's what they say every time.
Every time. It lands on aliens every time, but there's nothing wrong with asking a question like that. That's why I put it in the book and has a very respectful answer. Yes, it's in the book. I do this. Don't you don't you know what I do in a day? How many people I interact with who I interact with? OK, so the guy is the whistleblower. Like I said, that alone is a click bait. The whistleblower says these things fine.
let's investigate them. But that, if he would had much less of a thing to announce to the world, and he tried to bring that to a scientific conference, we wouldn't, that's not how you do it. And no, he doesn't have good enough scientific evidence to convince a scientific skeptic. He doesn't, because he's, it's basically eyewitness testimony at this point. And
So yeah, if he's on to something, yeah, investigate it. Yeah. Okay, great. I like that. I agree with that last part. Well, I've been saying that for an hour. I understand what I was talking about was that there's an impression. Then we talked about the impression. I agree. I agree. People get that impression. I agree. People can get that impression. And because it's more quotable to quote me saying,
Yeah, so to turn the tables on myself, I have a bias set and maybe the people who are listening have a bias set because only what is clickbait of you saying something negative gets shared. And when you say something that's neutral,
I have very precise views on philosophy. I had a hundred, maybe dozens of philosophers in a philosophy blog criticize
a comedic comment I made on a comedic podcast to a host who majored in philosophy and then switched and I made some comedic joke about it and then they all piled on me defending their field thinking I thought their field should not go away. Meanwhile, I gave a four-minute account of my more nuanced views of philosophy in a public forum with
With Richard Dawkins on stage in a university venue, which is also on the internet and none of those people reference that quote. None of them. Okay. It was like they had this little 32nd click bait and I'm a big target, right? So they all passed it among themselves. He said, look, Tyson is an idiot about philosophy. He doesn't know the foundations of philosophy. So, so you should be me for a day and you'll see what
What's going on here? And the more nuanced is, the nuanced point is, people trained in the 20th century in the era of modern physics, purely in philosophy, have not found themselves to be as relevant or as helpful to the point of being not helpful at all in the moving frontier of the physical sciences relative to what it was in all previous centuries, period.
I stick by that.
You can probably do better than Aristotle in the physical sciences. Yeah, it's a myth that Aristotle thought that heavier bodies fall faster. No, it's not. No, I read his writings. No, it's mistranslated. Oh, no, no, no. Excuse me. No, I have his writings. No, no. OK, it says. Well, I'll tell you, he's talking about terminal velocity versus another kind of velocity, and it just gets translated as all saying velocity. And then there's something else. That's not what I it's not what I read. What I read was
I'm paraphrasing, but the sense of it was heavier objects will fall faster than lighter objects in proportion to how heavy they are. That statement was made by Aristotle and that is not purely related to terminal velocity. That's somebody who never did the experiment. Yeah.
Well, I don't believe you that I don't understand what he meant in that sentence or in that in that part. Maybe he wrote different things in other places. OK, but I can't say I've read all of Aristotle. All right. But what I did read included that that phrase. You try to defend him and that just he's dead. Don't worry about it. Yeah, well, I will. And I gotta go. I can't. I gotta I gotta.
Oh, you want to do some AI right now? Yeah. Anyway, I'll send you a video about that because this is by Richard Borchards. A video about what? About Aristotle and the and the misquotes and the mistranslations that make him sound foolish when when he was no fool and he wouldn't make a simple mistake like that. And he also did experimental science and like a super early form of it. OK, if I'm wrong, I want to know that I'm wrong. Yeah. OK, so if you send me this video. Sure. And I'll compare it to the writings that I have of his.
I didn't read the original Greek. So I am reading a translation, but there's no way I can see terminal velocity being relevant to that translation. But if I'm wrong, I will correct it. And in any occasion where I might have said something about it, I will say that I was wrong. And I could be wrong and I'm likely wrong because I'm wrong about almost everything I say so.
But I just know that there's an Aristotle fan club where he can do no wrong in their eyes and that comes along with a certain bias manifests. I've seen that.
If we think Aristotle made a statement that an eight-year-old can see us wrong in three seconds, then just maybe Aristotle didn't actually make that statement or maybe we misunderstood or something. Not only is it stupid to believe that freely falling bodies fall at a speed proportional to their weight,
But it's also stupid to believe that Aristotle thought this. The idea that Aristotle made this claim is just nonsense. It's a problem of mistranslation. The words that Aristotle used, like speed or force, don't have exactly the same meanings to Aristotle as they do to us. I know this is an odd question, and I didn't have a specific one planned. I didn't actually think we would get this far, but I wanted to hear. I know that you believe that there is fear mongering over AI. I don't believe anything.
Do you believe you don't believe anything? I mean this in a nice way Neil.
I think that means that you don't have an understanding of, well, I don't know, that sounds mean. What I was going to say is that- Be mean. You could be mean. Everyone, including me and you, are irrational and act based on social cues and unconscious primers to the core to suggest that you don't have beliefs or that all of your information is rationally evaluated before being accepted as more a demonstration of a lack of self-awareness than deduction. And I mean that kind of- No, no, no, no. I didn't say I'd have- All I said was, what I think is true is measured by
the evidence and support of it. And to the extent that there's less evidence, I will have less confidence in it being true. I don't like using the word belief in that context because belief means something in our modern culture. Belief is often religious and there's a thing that you believe is true in the absence of evidence. I don't run around in the absence of evidence saying things are true, such as what is prevalent in
almost every religion in the world and some other and some cults and some other belief systems. So that's why I don't say what I believe. It's not a thing. It's not, I don't speak with that word. Or you say like, what is the word you use and replace in place of that? In place of what? Belief. Like I don't believe the earth. I've never said that. I don't, I don't construct sentences like that. That's not how I say the earth is.
Yes, if we know it, I'll say what it is. If we don't know it, we'll say we think it's this, but we're not sure. We have top people working on it. OK, is there a multiverse? Maybe we don't know. We don't have evidence. We have top people working on it. It's a natural consequence of general relativity and quantum physics applied in the early universe. So we'll see how that develops. That's an entire sentence without using the word believe. It's not about belief. Not in the way the word is
presently used in modern parlance. Do you believe that the current tenor about AI is fear-mongering and if so, what about it is? The phrase fear-mongering often means that it's overblown and so I
I think the people who are sounding the call deeply believe what they're saying. So they're not mongering in that sense, fear of mongering, if I understand the word mongering. So sure, I believe that they believe that. I don't agree with the extent to which they predict apocalypse from AI based on my own life experience, interacting with computers, thinking about the problem.
So my take on it is softer than theirs. But a warning about an apocalyptic future can never be bad if it sensitizes you to what could go wrong. Such as, did I say earlier? I don't remember the quote from Ray Bradbury when one of his fans came up and said, why do you write
future sci-fi stories that depict apocalypse. Is that what you think the future of civilization will be? And he says, no, I write about it so that you know, to avoid it. All right. I like that. So I'll warn you about an asteroid that has a one in a million chance of striking. And I'll give a very detailed description of what would happen to earth were that to occur.
Am I fear mongering? I'll say it's only one in a million chance, but what kind of chance do you want to take? You bet on the lottery with a lesser chance than that, that you'll win. You freely hand money to the state. So I'll make some comparisons of risks, but
It's my duty to tell people, because I know the parameters of the risk of asteroid strikes being an astrophysicist. So in that sense, yeah, I'd be warning people. Climate change people are giving the warnings. You give the most dire warnings. And one of the big problems there is what was originally considered dire are now becoming more mainstream in the pace at which climate is changing and not in our favor.
Yeah, I don't think they think they're mongering. But personally, I think we're not necessarily headed on that path. But it's a warning shot across our bow. And I think it should be heated. Okay, that's good to know. So you know how NASA or I think it's NASA, you could tell me it observes the sky to see to rule out asteroids of a certain size. There was a there's this there was an asteroid search program to catalog all asteroids
greater than a kilometer and then greater than a hundred meters. So it's much harder, the smaller they get, they're not as bright. And, but there are many more of them. So the total risk can even be higher from the smaller ones than from the larger ones. But yes. What I wanted to know is does that bound keep lowering every five years or so? You know, there's Moore's law for computing, like is there something similar for we're able to now detect half a kilometer?
And now 10 years later, we'll be able to detect half of that 10 years. So it's a little yes, but it's a little more subtle than that. It's it's we can already detect asteroids that small. The question is how complete is the catalog of them? And there are ways to make that estimate. But so it's not so much a detection limit as a completeness limit. And so, yeah, I don't know what we're down to now, but I do know that this latest telescope that comes online, I think
Later this year, if not already, the Vera Rubin Space Telescope, originally named the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, that is exquisitely conceived and designed to detect asteroids. Because it basically takes a movie of the night sky every night. And you need more than one image to see if something's moving.
so a movie you see anything that's moving and a big challenge there are all of these satellites that are getting launched especially starlink and others they're just completely contaminating the sky and you don't want things contaminating what could be the detection of an asteroid because you missed it because there is a can you just send out your satellite no this tells what is huge no no no it's on the earth is huge yeah it's on earth yeah it's huge it's it's it's going to image
I forgot the numbers, something like half the sky every night or something. And then repeat that. And then there's some AI that goes in and decides whether something is interesting, something has changed. It forms another telescope to follow up on it. So there's a lot of automation involved here that we've learned how to master over recent decades. But that's a telescope that could bring that limit lower.
OK, we'll end on a question of probability. What number do you assign that those blurry objects are indeed? Aliens or something out of this world, let's just say. That there's something extraterrestrial, yeah, I would say. Not a probability guy, but I would say.
Less than. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can grab last second movie tickets in 5D Premium Ultra with popcorn. Extra large popcorn.
I would say less than one one hundred thousandth of one percent. OK, so I'm OK. And where do I get that number? There's surely
a millions of sightings of these things and I don't I'm not convinced that any of them are aliens and so my percent has to be lower than that right so I'm actually coming up calculating what number this would be so I have to be lower than all the sightings that have been reported and all because I don't I don't think any of those are aliens I find it highly unlikely that they are I should say and so is it one hundred thousandth of one percent so that's
um, one out of 10 million chance. It's extraterrestrial. So what would convince you that it was extraterrestrial? You show aliens, bring out the alien, bring out the space, put it in town square. Okay. Have people high resolution. I could give a whole list. Okay. Okay. Okay. I can give an entire list. Oh, by the way, video, because, because AI can make deep fake video.
It's gonna video of aliens will be a starting point, but not an ending point as evidence for aliens, just because of the capacity to make a deep fake and that we have Hollywood, you know, over on the West Coast. So I would I would say artifacts of alien manufacture. Yes. Or the alien itself. Yeah. Yeah. So then that means that if I was to say, Hey, Neil, you put up
$100,000. I will put up $10 because then that means you have drastic, drastic, drastic odds in your favor. If it's one hundredth of one percent, then my $10 to your $100,000. Yeah, my numbers are. Yeah, it's still it's still steep. It's still you're in the right zone. Yes. OK. You're getting a 10 to one if not
1000 to one return. So if I was to put up $50, I'll say I'll put up $50 over the next 15 years to your $100,000. That should be a bet that you're like, I will sign it right now. Let's do it, brother. That would mean if we find alien if well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You want me to bet against future. I'm betting against what we've already seen that these are different things.
Okay, fine. Then what we've seen gets revealed to be aliens. Okay. Yeah. So that's where my statistic comes from. The chances that so now, so now you want 100,000 to 50,000 to 50. Sure. So that would mean that if it's aliens, I would say 100,000 to 50. But okay, that means if it's aliens, I give you $100,000. Yes. If it's not aliens, you give me $50. Yes.
And that should still be wildly wildly in your favor. Yeah, but I don't I don't bet money. I don't bet. It's not what I do. Do you know that the American Physical Society had a meeting in Las Vegas? Sorry, they were going to meet in San Diego, but there's a hotel snafu. This is the world's physicist, the country's physicist. So MGM Grand said, we'll take you the MGM Marina Hotel. It was at the time in the 80s. And so they all go to Vegas. Three thousand, four thousand physicists.
At the end of the week, there was a newspaper headline, physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. Just don't bet when you know statistics. But you're saying I should bet because it's in my favor. That's drastically a thousand times in your favor. Yeah, I don't put money on it. I'm not a money guy in that way.
All right, Neil, Neil, what are you working on next? Where can we find out? Why don't we make this if you want to do this officially? How about this? How about this? Just because it's it's all in fun, right? So we shouldn't change each other's lifestyles on the bed. So how about this? Is it within the next 10 years, something that has already been cited? Show turns out to be alien. OK, I'll give you one hundred dollars.
If it's not, you give me a penny. How about that? All right, but with inflation. It's a ratio. What are you talking about? It's a rate. It's a ratio. Okay, so my pennied with inflation then, and you're 100 with inflation. No, it's just a ratio. That's all which capturing here. Inflation keeps the same ratio. What's the difference? I mean, it's a ratio bet $100 to a penny. That's a ratio of 10,000. Correct? Yeah.
That's 10. No, no. Is that right? 100,000. No, that's 10,000. 100 times 100 is 10,000. Right. $100 is 10,000 times more than a penny. Yeah. Okay. I'll give you a penny if there's actual aliens and that knowledge would be way greater than a penny's worth. Of course. You mean you'll give me a hundred by. No, no. Sorry. Sorry. I give you a hundred. No, no. No, I give you a hundred. You give me a penny. Yes. I said it backwards. There you go. Okay. Within how much time?
Within 10 years and we have to allow like it has to be asterisked with that. Something new may be revealed and we can always bicker and say, yeah, but that's totally new. But then several people will be like, no, it has to be about something that's already been spotted. It has to be about the history of all observations of crazy things in the sky. All right, whatever. We'll work out the details. Our lawyers will speak to each other. The lawyers cost more than the value of this bet.
Right. All right, man. It was great talking with you. And again, where can people find out more about you and what are you working on next? And what are you excited about working on next? Just my website, Neil deGrasse Tyson dot com. And all my stuff is there in my postings and on and on and on on social media. It's Neil deGrasse Tyson everywhere except Twitter, where where space is a premium. So there's just Neil Tyson there on Twitter. I'm pretty I'm relatively active in that space. And my podcast Star Talk.
It brings the science down to earth. Whoever will listen, we have comedy. There's a comedic element to it. There's pop culture. She's one of fun learning science. It's a good place. What are you exploring next on that podcast that you're most excited about? Oh, no, no, it's just every episode is different. And it's not some theme thing that runs multiple episodes. It gets pretty random. We spoke with an AI person about
Okay, Neil, thank you. And I appreciate how cordial you were despite the contentious nature. I hope you detect that I come from a good place. And honestly, I'm having fun when you get angry.
I'm not angry. I'm just I'm emoting. I'm passionate is the word. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm having I'm never angry about any of this. I have my own fervor when you get passionate. So okay, I appreciate it. And all right, and we'll talk again. Take it like that. Thanks. Bye.
Thank you for watching this two hour or almost two and a half hour, maybe more length of a podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. I assume you have as you're watching all the way till the end. I always leave podcasts without commentary. I just post it up as is, but I thought I'd close with some clarification. It was a bit difficult because we both felt as if the other was putting words in the other's mouth. And that's my fault. Number one, because I should be more careful with the words that I speak.
Number two, and I have some notes here, I didn't get to state this,
as it's a bit tricky to do so you may not know this but Neil is a Titan and it's extremely arduous to get a word in because unless I'm gonna mute his microphone it's just extremely tough so the point I wanted to say that I don't think I got across is that there are people who come forward with claims of being a whistleblower and they have zero tangible evidence other than their word and perhaps the title that is their employment history but sometimes we believe them because it comports with what else we believe for instance if someone comes out
From facebook and says that there's some improprieties there for reasons x y and z and that they were a part of some committee where this was revealed but they have zero evidence we're more inclined to believe them because it's something that's ordinary we expect that from facebook it's not extraordinary and then there's this phrase that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
Which is actually somewhat debunkable because it's not as if there's a separate class of evidence called extraordinary evidence. Let me just get my extraordinary evidence now. Brian Keating talks about this. Regardless, the statement on Neil's part is that he wants people who are making large claims to come forward with evidence. And I'd like that as well. You would like that as well.
We don't imagine
Other people won't come forward, so it's a nurse crop issue. The people who are providing no evidence but plenty of claims, along with perhaps an employment record to go along with it, are doing so in part so that others can come forward and in doing so engendering the conditions where others can come forward with evidence or so that the body politic can petition for said evidence.
When people like Neil make some glib and disparaging remarks like, hey, why don't you film your abduction? They squash that nurse crop in the bud, making it less likely that people will come forward. And by the way, this isn't an exclusively UFO issue. It's an issue that characterizes grave situations in general, whether it's abuse or trafficking. So if Neil indeed wants to know about the evidence for UFOs, like I've heard him say that he'd be the first in line to want that evidence about aliens. Firstly, I don't believe that. I'm sorry.
Once you put a stake in the ground against some result, almost none of us are eager to contravene our former self, especially not publicly.
with regard to saying,
However, in Neil's defense, Neil has frequently said, go ahead, search for the evidence. In fact, I think way more money, way more money should be given to the search for extraterrestrial life. Whether it's the Galileo project, whether it's some other project, whether it's SETI, Neil is in favor of allocating money toward that issue. Those clips don't go viral. And this means it's my bias that I see those
Inimical clips of him with sarcasm and that needs to be known firstly I need to say it more to myself just to believe it because I haven't seen many of those clips but also to you because I'm sure you haven't seen them as the algorithm just doesn't feed them again to reiterate Neil is in favor of more money being given to uncover the truth about UAPs anyhow thank you for watching I hope you have a great day I hope you continue to have a great day and that you have a great sleep if this is near nighttime good day or good night whenever you're hearing this thank you take care
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toes.
Links to both are in the description. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well.
Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on every one of the audio platforms, just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from re-watching lectures and podcasts and I read that in the comments, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying, so how about instead re-listening on those platforms? iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use.
If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash curtjymungle and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well. For instance, this episode was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " Football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections."
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"text": " Florida and Georgia. Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe and secure. Download the PricePix app today and use co-Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's co-Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. PricePix, it's good to be right. Must be present in certain states. Visit PricePix.com for restrictions and details."
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"text": " Okay, this is the wrong subject for you to justify your disagreement with me by suggesting I might be biased. Pick a different subject where I could be biased. Not this one. I'm not saying you're biased. I'm saying that- No. This is what I get when I'm in the public. I don't know what it is. Therefore, aliens- People do say that. They do say that. Very few people. No, not few people. How many people do you interact with?"
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"text": " Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, an author, and a science communicator who is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. Neil also has a new book called The Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, which is in the description. Today we talk about UFOs, artificial intelligence, and whether there's more to this world than a mere"
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"text": " It's a tough conversation to bring to you, and it's tough for several reasons. Number one, the subject matter itself tends to be contentious. Number two, the style of my questions and remarks tended to clash with Neil's. And number three, there are just miscommunications all around. Most of that's my fault and I'll hopefully improve in the future as a result of this interview. Despite that, I absolutely"
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"text": " Loved the podcast. In fact, it's one of my favorites. I didn't want it to finish and at no time was Neil upset with me nor I with him. We clarified that twice. This is just how people disagree usually behind the closed doors of the university when attempting to discuss almost any topic in a scientific manner."
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"text": " My name is Kurt J. Mungle, and I have a podcast here called Theories of Everything, where I use my background in mathematical physics to analyze theories of everything, predominantly from a theoretical physics perspective, though I'm interested in other approaches as to what's fundamental. Is presentism correct? What about holism over reductionism? What about consciousness? Where does experience come into play? What ontological status does mathematics have?"
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"text": " You can think of it as explorations of the largest mysteries of the universe without already having some defined position that I'm advocating for and trying to force the conversation in a contrived way toward it. At approximately the 20 to 30 minute mark, there will be a couple of ads. Those drastically helped tell as well as the patrons."
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"text": " You'll also get audio episodes like this ad free and early. For instance, this episode was released a couple days ago prior to premiering on YouTube as a thank you to the patrons. So thank you to the sponsors and thank you to the patrons. If you'd like to support theories of everything this podcast and visit patreon.com"
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"text": " Enjoy this podcast with the legendary Neil deGrasse"
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"text": " Firstly, you should know you're one of the people that got me interested in physics and science in general, along with Brian Green since I was a kid. So I have my career to thank you for. Wow. Okay, good. My degree to thank you for. You turned out okay. Yeah. And my predilections as well. I wanted to firstly thank you for helping shape me. And secondly, welcome you to this podcast that in a sense you've helped"
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"text": " What are you working on these days and how is your day today, man?"
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"text": " I was just down there and I learned that they have a floor, it's called a sushi floor. So you go there and you have sushi and then another floor they have hamburgers, another floor they have milkshakes. And during their lunch hour, you just choose the floor where you're going to hang out and then that's the food. I said, I want to work here."
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"text": " Why don't they mix it? Why don't they just have one floor? There's too many options of sushi and hamburgers. Maybe. Yeah, the different kitchen needs, of course. And so it's not just one cafeteria. It's food segregated. I see. I see. But that's what restaurants are. They're food segregated zones, right? So you don't go to a pizza shop and say, I'd like"
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"text": " sushi or you know go into an Indian restaurant and say I'd like the bratwurst right or you just or pastrami sandwich we we we know already know they're segregated it's just cafeterias historically have been completely mixed or just have bad food in general so these this was all very well done. What fundamental aspect of our universe let's say of our current understanding of our universe do you think is most likely to change or be overturned in"
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"text": " the near future and why. If it's fundamental, I don't think it will change. So that's not how I think about what is fundamental. There's the boundary between what we know and we don't know and that'll change daily. As our observations and experiments affirm what we thought was true and or what we've concluded is true by repeated experiment and it becomes part of our foundations"
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"text": " of physics, even of science in general, I don't see those changing. That's why they're foundations. They might be enclosed in a deeper understanding of the world, as Newton's laws were when Einstein came along. With Newton, of course, we had our law of motion and law of gravity, back when we called them laws. And of course, you put low speeds and low gravity into Einstein's equations, they become Newton's equations."
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"text": " So we didn't discard Newton, we just learned it was a part of a larger, deeper objective truth in the universe. So no, I don't see, if something is overthrown that somebody thought is fundamental, it wasn't fundamental to begin with. So that's how I see the universe."
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"text": " Okay, I'll give you an instance. An example would be locality. So I would like to talk about the recent Nobel Prizes with regard to entanglement and I want to hear, can you explain the recent Nobel Prize and then what does it say about fundamental reality or our understanding of it?"
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"text": " Well, if I remember the Nobel Prize, I remember I folded it into a talk I gave back this past January, but I haven't thought about it since then. I think they got it based on their research of entanglement, but wasn't it in circuits or was it, um, I'm trying to remember the details, but it was, it did involve entanglement and with entanglement, you have what is effectively, uh, instantaneous action at a distance. If you want to even use the word action."
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"text": " uh although it's probably shouldn't because action is associated with fields the invocation of fields but um if you have two particles created together with complementary uh quantum states then you observe one the other the wave function collapses instantaneously for both of them what i'd like in recent"
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"text": " I learned just a few months ago from Brian Green, good friend up at Columbia. Uh, he told me, he updated me cause I don't track this daily the way he would, or it's certainly the way you would that the virtual particles in the vacuum, which people like to think of as the vacuum energy are of course popping in and out of existence and they are surely entangled. Okay."
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"text": " Because they're created together and then they get destroyed together. And there was some thinking that these are wormholes of some kind. And these wormholes are therefore everywhere because the vacuum is everywhere. And if that's the case, why not then think of the very fabric of space and time as woven"
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"text": " by the threads of wormholes of all these entangled particles and I thought that was that was kind of cool because otherwise no one's been talking about what is space time made of right and it's not even who thinks about that like some people do but it's not it's not in the books we just describe what it is rather than what it's made of so I thought that was cool I enjoyed that but otherwise I don't have a strong thoughts or opinions on it the idea that"
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"text": " that something can happen in two places. Um, that's happened simultaneously. I don't, it just is, I don't judge the universe. I, if that's what it is, that's what it is. And that is then the reality. I don't, I don't lose sleep over it. Have you heard of Chaitin's incompleteness theorem? No. Okay. My question was going to be, who is, who is, who is this person? Chaitin is one of the founders"
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"text": " Or at least popularizers of algorithmic information theory. There's this guy named Kalmagorov for complexity theory, if you know about complexity theory. From long ago. Kalmagorov, yeah. Yeah. I often invoked, there's a Kalmagorov statistical test on data that I, it's got some other name hyphenated with it."
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"text": " Is somebody call McGarra? Wow, it's very sure. It's been like 30 years since I've I can pull out one of my books when I. Well, anyway. Yeah. So tell it to me. I'm happy to hear."
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"text": " Sure, Kalmogorov complexity means if you take a string, so just zeros and ones, let's say you give... I know the Kalmogorov complexity. It's the other guy. Okay, great. I'll just quickly explain Kalmogorov complexity because it's required for this and just for the audience. So let's say you have a string of 50 zeros. There's not much information there because I can describe that to you right now. I say write 50 zeros. That's like say four words and then you get out 50 digits. You can compress data downward and then you could ask, well,"
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"text": " Are there strings for which you can't compress? The quickest way of compressing them is actually to just give you back the string itself. Yeah, very cool. The measure of the program length, the shortest program length required to produce a string is called the Kolmogorov complexity."
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"text": " Okay. Okay. So we have that. So now you can classify strings in terms of a number of complexity. It's almost like some physical systems you can classify by entropy, but this is computer science. But it feels like it's a counterpart to it, right? Yeah. So Chase's incompleteness theorem says that if you have a formal system, there exists a number which is uncomputable though. So some extremely large number L"
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"text": " Okay, so what's the utility of that?"
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"text": " But my question is, or my question was going to be, hey, given that people like Dyson and even Penrose, I believe, think that Gödel's incompleteness says something about reality or physics or the possibility of us having a toe, whether or not a toe exists, given that, okay, is there any implication for physics for Chaiten's incompleteness theorem?"
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"text": " This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way."
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"text": " Okay, interesting. This is the first I've learned of that incompleteness theorem, so I don't have a fresh idea. And you can think of it as a variation of Barry's paradox, like you've heard of this paradox that says, what is the shortest number that can't be described in 70 letters? It's that sentence. Yeah, that sentence alone is like 57 characters. So if you were to give that number, well, you could have described it with 57 characters right there. So it's like a variation of that. I'm just wondering, okay, does that have anything to do with physics? Oh, yeah. So, okay. So, so I'll tell you this."
},
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"text": " I tend to be more practical-minded than that. Those kinds of questions, of course, occupy philosophers on the edge of the nature of knowledge and the knowledge of nature, but at some level I find them to be a distraction because"
},
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"text": " I want to just build the next telescope and I want to observe the next kind of object that we've never seen or heard of before. I want better data on the origin of the universe. So I have different, more practical questions that I want solved. And as my community of astrophysicists typically do, we pose questions that can be answered by the hardware of either the telescopes or the space probes. And this gives us our understanding of the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 980.64,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 962.705,
"text": " So the discovery that our galaxy is not alone in the universe by Hubble 1926, that the universe is expanding 1929, that we are made of chemical elements forged in the centers of stars 1957, that quasars are"
},
{
"end_time": 1011.237,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 981.476,
"text": " galaxies with with runaway black holes in their center that was long earned over decades of research that weird galaxies are colliding galaxies all of this are actual discoveries we can talk about and to say what is the implications of these i don't know what those implications would be but they're not stopping us from continually making discoveries and i can tell you had we been distracted by those kinds of questions over the past century none of what we know about the universe"
},
{
"end_time": 1029.94,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1011.527,
"text": " Since maybe the 30s or 40s, there's been a split in the scientific community for shut up and calculate."
},
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"text": " Like, forget about philosophy. Philosophy is for the philosophers. Let's just even have separate departments. There's just physics. If you want to know. In fact, I would I would I agree with you, but I would word it differently. I would say it's not shut up and calculate its philosophers who were hanging out in their armchair, deducing what they could about the world. We learned in the 20th century that most of the world does our senses"
},
{
"end_time": 1088.814,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1060.401,
"text": " Do not have access to most of what we will discover in the world as the 20th century unfolded. We needed large telescopes. We needed particle accelerators. We needed probes of the universe that do not issue forth from your senses being invoked on the couch. Most of it. And so, so because quantum physics, modern physics, basically post classical physics is an era"
},
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"end_time": 1114.172,
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"start_time": 1089.36,
"text": " that the philosopher in the couch has no access to because the philosopher couch does not have a laboratory and the laboratory became necessary in order to know the next thing that's going to happen you're not going to deduce quantum tunneling somebody's got to make that measurement okay so i claim not that it was shut up and calculate it was philosophers"
},
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"end_time": 1138.797,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1114.497,
"text": " you're not useful to us anymore. Sorry, we're going to keep going in our direction, find something else to do. And there's there's religious philosophy, there's ethical philosophy, there's political philosophy, there's no shortage of branches of philosophy, but philosophers in the driving seat with the physicists, where it had been for centuries, parted ways. That's how I see it."
},
{
"end_time": 1162.671,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1139.172,
"text": " I don't see it as some commandment that came down from on high. I see it as a practical reality of the philosopher no longer being as useful as they once were to the physicists asking questions on the scientific frontier. That's my view of this. If that's flawed, let me know, but that's how I see it. So I see it as since the forties or so."
},
{
"end_time": 1189.701,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1162.995,
"text": " Trying to wrap one's head around with what's going on in quantum mechanics. You can't, you can't wrap your head around it. So we just do it. That's my point. That's, that's my whole point. The world is that way. So we can say, let's try to deep. Is it a multi-world? Is it the thing is go ahead, but I'm still making experiments and I'm still deducing the nature of the world from those experiments. And those questions, a philosopher might ask."
},
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"end_time": 1219.77,
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"text": " I'm just saying have not been as useful. By the way, the physicists themselves can think philosophically, and we all do all the time. I mean, we embrace as deep a thought as we can muster. So I'm not I'm not making light of what it is to think philosophically about the world, but to go to school to be trained as a philosopher and then knock on the physicist's door. I haven't seen one contribute in the last century. I would go back to the 1920s, not even the 1940s."
},
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"end_time": 1247.585,
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"text": " Okay, firstly, there's Norton's dome, which is a philosophical experiment. What is that? What is that? What is that dome? It shows that indeterminism is there even in classical mechanics. Okay. So that's a philosophical, sorry, a thought experiment. That is extremely interesting. And also, in what way did it affect the progress of physics? Did it? And when did it come out? And it's from 2003. Oh, so recent."
},
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"end_time": 1271.459,
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"start_time": 1248.183,
"text": " Yeah, that's a recent thing. So did that get folded into some new science experiment and understanding? I mean, I'm just saying, go ahead. I'm going to stop you all from thinking that way. But I have planets to discover. I have moons to measure. I have ice geysers on, you know, there's stuff out there that I care about."
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"text": " And I want to know about and it makes headlines in the, you know, the black holes colliding. All right. This is these are things that so by the way, in high school, we had I went to a geeky high school and we had various journals as a biology journal conducted and run by students, a biology journal, a math journal and a physics journal. There's also a poetry journal, but it was less. We were science geeks, not literary geeks."
},
{
"end_time": 1328.848,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1301.049,
"text": " And some of the funnest times I've had were sitting, you know, chewing the fat during study break, study hall, or was it a break or were we supposed to be actually doing coursework? We would just, we just talk about some of the deepest issues of our understanding of the universe that we possibly could. And it was fun. It was, but, but it didn't sum to anything."
},
{
"end_time": 1341.886,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1329.224,
"text": " such as learning new ways to compute differential equations, for example. But in Norton's Dome, I hadn't heard of this. Can you tell me more about it?"
},
{
"end_time": 1360.35,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1342.5,
"text": " Neil deGrasse Tyson has been instrumental in bringing the mysteries of the cosmos to the public eye. And it's not just for his own enjoyment. When you open access, everyone benefits. In fact, increasing access and learning about a new area can benefit more than just your mind. It can benefit your wallet."
},
{
"end_time": 1382.91,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1360.35,
"text": " Just ask today's sponsor, Masterworks, who've had over 750,000 users and over 750 million invested in more than 225 SEC qualified offerings. Masterworks is making the world of fine art investing accessible to everyone, democratizing an industry once guarded by the ultra wealthy."
},
{
"end_time": 1408.848,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1382.91,
"text": " They're offering the everyday investor a chance to own a piece of invaluable artwork without needing millions. I mean museum art like Warhol, Banksy, and Monet. Masterworks is that Higgs boson in your investment portfolio giving it mass. I mentioned potentially benefiting your wallet. Well, Masterworks has already handed back the net proceeds from over $45 million in sales."
},
{
"end_time": 1437.09,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1409.087,
"text": " That's 13 sales so far, with five of those sales happening just since we talked about them in December. In fact, every painting to date has delivered a profit back to their investors. Now I hear you, Kurt, I'm no art aficionado. Is it truly that simple? Well, Masterworks breaks these paintings into shares through a well architected process with the SEC. And if they're selling a painting you're invested in, you get a share of the profits."
},
{
"end_time": 1457.91,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1437.09,
"text": " Feel the brushstrokes of fortune as three of their recent sales have painted the canvas with 10, 13, and 35% net returns. Now here's the thing. Masterworks has a waitlist. However, because you're a theories of everything listener, you get to quantum leap over the waitlist. Just click the link in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 1483.677,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1459.599,
"text": " If you'd like to learn about the topics in this video, then a great place to start would be Brilliant. Brilliant has courses on gravitational physics, electricity and magnetism, quantum objects, even quantum mechanics with Sabine Hassenfelder. It's a place where even if you're entirely new to a subject, you can come to understand via bite-sized interactive learning experiences these esoteric topics that underlie modern physics."
},
{
"end_time": 1504.77,
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"start_time": 1483.677,
"text": " On the Theories of Everything channel, there's plenty of technical talk on extended supersymmetry and symplectic geometry, which underlies some attempts to unify gravity with other interactions. Also soon to come, spacetime metric engineering, symmetric teleparallel gravity turns Simon modifications to general relativity, and a great place to ascertain the fundamentals of what was just said is brilliant."
},
{
"end_time": 1525.043,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1504.77,
"text": " They even have courses on neural nets and statistics and sampling. Often when I want to learn about a subject, I'll take courses even on those I feel like I've mastered only for brilliant to show me new ways of thinking about it. This happened with their course on knowledge and uncertainty where information theory is taught and intuitive ways of thinking about the definition of entropy are shown to you."
},
{
"end_time": 1542.534,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1525.043,
"text": " It's fruitful for me to know where certain unification attempts with gravity work and don't work. And Brilliant is a great place for me to patch up gaps in my knowledge, helping me conduct better podcasts to make more informed assessments. Visit brilliant.org slash toe. That's T O E for 20% off your annual premium subscription."
},
{
"end_time": 1567.773,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1542.534,
"text": " As usual, I recommend you don't stop before four lessons. You just have to get wet. You have to try it out. And I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you can now comprehend subjects. You previously had a difficult time grokking. But in Norton's dome, I hadn't heard of this. Can you tell me more about it? Sure. So there's a way that you can set up a system such that a ball can roll to the top."
},
{
"end_time": 1597.551,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1568.268,
"text": " And then just stay there. OK, so it's an extremely fragile system, but it can roll from any direction and just stay there. And there's a way you can set up the initial conditions and the differential equation such that if you roll it backwards, so you run the time backward, if it's at the top, it will go in some direction. But which direction it goes is undetermined. So there's one way of getting around it where you say, OK, we have to have some lift. What are you talking about in classical physics? Why is it undetermined? Isn't it just just a very high number? I mean, what?"
},
{
"end_time": 1622.773,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1597.978,
"text": " There's something called the Lipschitz continuity conditions, which forbids certain equations. But then it turns out that if you assume Lipschitz condition, it's akin to saying there is no indeterminacy to begin with. So you prove there is no indeterminacy by imposing that there is no indeterminacy. But if you remove that, you get configurations like Norton's Dome. So if I understand what you're saying, you can set up the system so that"
},
{
"end_time": 1652.824,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1623.114,
"text": " It rolls to the top in this highly, highly improbable state, right? Because it's the top of every incremental movement in any direction will send it back down the hill, correct? So there it is delicately balanced. Now you want to, you say roll the video tape backwards. Why doesn't it just go back the way it came? Of course it would, because you just rolled the tape backwards."
},
{
"end_time": 1680.981,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1652.995,
"text": " No, because it could have gone up from any one of the directions. So that is to say that... Oh, you don't have information about how it got up there. No, no. Well, there are multiple ways you could have gotten up there. So in the same way, you just reverse time. You could say there are multiple paths you can go from this point forward. Okay. In other words, you have indeterminacy. So why isn't there indeterminacy about knowing how it got up there in the first place? So you have indeterminacy on both sides. What it says is that if you have a mass that's at the top of a dome and it's frictionless and the dome is characterized by a certain curve,"
},
{
"end_time": 1705.299,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1680.981,
"text": " which needs to be defined specifically then it's at rest at the top of the dome but at any t that's non-negative any time that's greater than zero it can take off why is it why why is what you're describing to me asymmetric at all the point is that you just set up the system like that as a thought experiment in order to just put t equals minus t okay it's just useful to set up the experiment okay so in that"
},
{
"end_time": 1734.087,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1705.725,
"text": " What is the okay, so fine is interesting thought experiment. I like nobody doesn't like thought experiments, then of what utility is that to the practicing scientists, even if it is of high interest to the philosopher, it then makes you say, hey, if there's a classical system that is determined, that's not the case. There's also another philosopher, another quantum physicist, we shouldn't say if that's really true about the Norton dome, then"
},
{
"end_time": 1763.882,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1734.701,
"text": " We shouldn't say classical physics is deterministic, right? Correct. Okay. What does that change? I don't get it. It's fine. It's great, great result. Okay. So let's think about this in a couple of ways. So number one, what is physics? Like physics is understanding what reality is. So we have to put an asterisk on what reality is. Cause like who the heck knows what reality is, but physicists are trying to understand what that is. Someone like Tim modeling would say, Hey,"
},
{
"end_time": 1794.428,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1764.497,
"text": " Which I agree with and I never put in these words before quantum theory is never talked about in university as a physicist. You'd learn quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, but he would say a theory tells you what the heck you're dealing with. It talks about ontology. So there needs to be that component as well. What does it need to be if what we're doing still works? It needs to be to you, the philosopher, but to me, the practicing scientists that's building circuit boards based on a complete understanding of how quantum physics works."
},
{
"end_time": 1824.684,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1794.804,
"text": " I don't need to know that. That doesn't mean I don't want to know it, but the search for that answer, if it distracts me from other progress I will make in this physical universe, and I'm a practicing scientist, that's how I'm going to choose my paths in that way. So yeah, quantum physics, who was it that said the day you understand quantum physics is the day you can be certain you don't because you it's not their variations on our native senses to interpret and yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 1851.101,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1825.657,
"text": " So that's one view. You can just take the view that, hey, whatever is useful, let me just build something with it. That's how I think of physics. That's how I think of physics. Physics is matter, motion, and energy, and every way that allows me to predict the future of those systems so that I can exploit it to the benefit of civilization and intellectual pursuit. That's how I think of physics."
},
{
"end_time": 1880.128,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1851.288,
"text": " Okay, so there's a couple of points there. Number one, there's a value in there, which isn't derivable from the physical facts. What do you mean a value? What do you mean? I like it. Because you want to do something that's good. You want to do something useful. So you're not just doing anything. No, no, I didn't say use. Did I say useful? Let me give a different word. Let me be more precise. Sure. And less precise at the same time. I'd like to know ever more about how the universe works."
},
{
"end_time": 1911.22,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1881.357,
"text": " so that I can invoke it in the progress of civilization. And by progress, I mean, new understandings, the history of this exercise often hardly ever doesn't convert to new inventions, new means of living to prolong our benefits, our health, our longevity, and just our enlightenment about how the universe works."
},
{
"end_time": 1919.172,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1911.869,
"text": " So that's how I think of physics and it adds the most fundamental level with chemistry layered on that and then biology layered on top of that."
},
{
"end_time": 1944.633,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1919.667,
"text": " I think that's an unfair characterization of how physics developed and even develops to this day. Now, as for modern examples, okay, let's put that aside. What makes it unfair? What makes it unfair? Einstein thought plenty about Mach's principle, and Einstein also thought about other philosophical positions. By the way, Mach's principle was a philosopher from the 19th century. So that's pre the era that I'm describing here."
},
{
"end_time": 1972.858,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1944.974,
"text": " in terms of the value and influence of philosophers in the thinking of a modern physicist who's doing actual, making actual discoveries. So, so you can mention mock and I'll give you a mock, but there's not much after mock that you can cite. Yeah, but go on. John Bell of the Bell's theorems that we just mentioned are the Bell's inequalities of Nobel prize. He was influenced. Yeah, but Sean Bell, great question to you. Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2001.51,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1973.387,
"text": " Was he trained as a philosopher or as a physicist? That's kind of my point here. I think he was trained as a physicist. And not to be pedantic about it, but it's the value of learning how the physical universe works with laboratories, relative to armchairs. That's really what I'm getting at here."
},
{
"end_time": 2009.462,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2001.971,
"text": " But sure, it's great. The Bell's inequality theorem is very important, very thought-provoking, as any good philosophical conclusion should be."
},
{
"end_time": 2038.746,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2010.128,
"text": " Yeah, so I think we're speaking past one another, so let me be precise because I don't want to get misconstrued. What I'm saying is that physics benefits from an understanding of philosophy and also physical statements by a physicist have embedded in them philosophical assumptions. So if we say something about material, there's like materialism is in there. What is that? What is a material? Can we define it specifically? Musings like actually sitting and thinking about what the heck exists."
},
{
"end_time": 2064.428,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2038.746,
"text": " What is the nature of this? What is space time? You mentioned that this is something we don't talk about much. Actually, there's several people who think that space time is something that's emergent. And so they deeply they think about, well, are we on the boundary? Are we in the bulk? Is it discrete? Is it not? What does that mean? Is it real? Does it have a variable associated with it like there before we measure? Yeah, I got you. A characteristic thing. Yeah. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 2091.015,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2064.735,
"text": " Does our consciousness have something to do with it? There's like 30 interpretations of quantum mechanics, maybe four of them have to do with consciousness, but still, those are all- By the way, since we actually really don't understand consciousness, and the evidence that we don't understand it is that people keep writing books on it, claiming they know it, that's the evidence that we don't know anything about it. To take consciousness, about which we know very little, to explain something in quantum physics, or to have quantum physics"
},
{
"end_time": 2118.643,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2091.715,
"text": " And understanding a quantum fix that nobody has, co mingle with consciousness feels like very tentative land to stand on, to take two things that are not deeply understood and use one to explain the other. I'm disturbed when I see people do that. Not that that overstates it. I'm intrigued that people have the urge to do it, but I've"
},
{
"end_time": 2146.783,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2119.019,
"text": " Make sure I do not ever have the urge to explain something I don't understand with something else I don't understand. I don't think that's the wisest path to be on. It's a fun path, like over beer, sure. But to commit your life to it, I don't I don't know, I would question that relative to having applying that same brain power in other ways. Now, you mentioned other things like materialism, OK, that, of course,"
},
{
"end_time": 2174.206,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2147.176,
"text": " Physics, modern science, especially Western science is highly materialistic. I mean, in fact, almost entirely materialistic. I don't know any other. I don't think there's any dimension of spiritualism if we take that as the opposite of materialism. I don't know any dimension of spirit, spiritualism in traditional Western science. So you said, how do we define materialism?"
},
{
"end_time": 2196.271,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2174.667,
"text": " Is that a problem? How to define that? Is this a challenge? Is this really something people are distracted by? I wouldn't put the term distracted with anything that's a philosophical investigation because of reasons like I mentioned before, physicists are steeped in philosophy even if they don't know it. And this is a point Carlo Rovelli, Lee Smolin,"
},
{
"end_time": 2226.254,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2196.698,
"text": " Sure, you know them. I met Lee and I know Lee and I only know, of course, of Rovelli's books. Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin, as well as this guy named Abhay Ashtekar, are the founders of loop quantum gravity. This is also something that Abhay Ashtekar says. He makes a great analogy. So if you have a sphere, you have to cover it with two open sets. You can't just cover it with one, otherwise you distort it. So what if reality is like that, where you need multiple covers and the physical world, the material world is just one of these open sets, but it doesn't cover everything?"
},
{
"end_time": 2254.821,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2226.391,
"text": " I love it."
},
{
"end_time": 2282.824,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2255.299,
"text": " Most of the philosophers of physics are trained in physics. This is my whole point. This is my entire point here. Okay. You mischaracterized it by thinking that I meant, I said, I thought I spent at least 90 seconds saying that we love thinking philosophically about things in our field."
},
{
"end_time": 2306.203,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2283.558,
"text": " But training yourself to get a PhD in philosophy in the 20th century has shown to be not so helpful to the moving frontier of physics. That doesn't mean the physicists are not thinking philosophically. So in the example you gave, yeah, they're thinking philosophically. Yeah, and they're physicists. This is my only point I was making when you brought up the subject."
},
{
"end_time": 2329.889,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2306.92,
"text": " Again, it's a bit unfair. For instance, there's Hugh Price, who doesn't have a single degree in physics and has made significant contributions to the philosophy of physics. Secondly, there's a quote from John Byas asking can philosophers contribute to reconciling general relativity and quantum field theory, which is this very topic we're talking about, Neil, and he concludes something like to dare to imagine a world more strange or"
},
{
"end_time": 2353.387,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2329.889,
"text": " You're changing the subject. I told you that"
},
{
"end_time": 2377.79,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2353.626,
"text": " Sorry. I agreed with you that philosophy and physics were, if you go far enough back, they were indistinguishable. All right. And they were neck and neck and they're each a seat at the table, each with a steering wheel together until modern physics. So if your best examples are from the classical era, I agree with you. That's the, that's where you're going to have to go to get the best examples."
},
{
"end_time": 2406.988,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2378.148,
"text": " My the schism that I'm describing, which you originally described as shut up and calculate, which I put some nuance on that. I didn't disagree so much as add, add, add some texture to that, that if you don't have modern examples, then that's the only point I'm making. Of course, there are classical examples, right from Leidenitz, you know, and he had he's trained in philosophy, not even in mathematics. OK, he's a philosopher."
},
{
"end_time": 2436.664,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2407.363,
"text": " and so i don't have any issues with you going before the era of modern it's modern physics that as far as i can read my read of history that changed everything you can't just sit down and think about anything anymore you can't you can't tell me the nature of quasars you can't because you don't know what they are you haven't seen the observations you don't know the spectra you don't know what black holes look like that enabled us to connect you don't know any of that that that that that occupied"
},
{
"end_time": 2461.305,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2437.568,
"text": " Thousands of research papers from the 1960s into the 1970s and early 1980s just trying to understand what that phenomenon was. There was not a philosopher to be found. Would have been nice if it could have worked that way. A lot of brain power invested in modern philosophy. No doubt about it. Some of the smartest people that ever were became philosophers."
},
{
"end_time": 2487.995,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2462.756,
"text": " But I just don't see them at the table anymore. There's a seat there for you. I'm not rejecting you. But say something that will help me figure out the universe. And that I just have I don't see examples of it. And maybe I'm missing something. Okay. By the way, did you find out whether Bell was trained in physics? Bell is trained in physics. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm not making the case that people"
},
{
"end_time": 2517.329,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2488.439,
"text": " I think you think that I'm making the case that I think that I think you're making a case that you're not. You think that I think that you think? Yeah, let's just clear the air. I'm not saying that a philosopher who's disembroiled from physics can make contributions to physics, though I'm not saying the opposite, because I do think that's the case. And I think that's historically the case. And I also think that many of what we think of as true is built on so much that's false. And we only realize it's false from the ill formed ambiguous statements that we try to make sense of."
},
{
"end_time": 2546.544,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2517.329,
"text": " We have a recent example, recent like the last 70 years of that. So the whole problem of the hard problem of consciousness, that's a philosophical question. Yes, and that's physiology and neuroscience. And the neuroscientists have philosophers right at their doorsteps as where they should be. That's a brand new nascent field. We still barely know anything about our brains. And so philosophers are there. Sure. That's where they belong, where they should be, as where philosophers were at the dawn of physics."
},
{
"end_time": 2558.217,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2546.834,
"text": " What problem has ever been solved by philosophy?"
},
{
"end_time": 2587.022,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2558.507,
"text": " I didn't ask that, but go on. No, no, no, I'm just saying like, this is something to think about. Then you realize, okay, anytime anything's been solved by philosophy, it then moves into another field. And so all that remains are the hard problems in philosophy. And it looks like philosophy hasn't solved anything, but we don't realize that, okay, it started it in this direction. And then they just let it go. And it's no longer a part of philosophy. So that's number one. And number two, the primary reason for saying the hard problem exists is that the neuroscientists can just come up with neural correlates."
},
{
"end_time": 2609.65,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2587.483,
"text": " And it's not clear. How do you get from those correlates to the conscious experience? Of course, even though there's neuroscientists, what I'm saying is that spurred work and the work there's a whole field that's been developed because not a whole field, there's a flourish of enthusiasm for a field because of the heart problem of consciousness being explicated by a philosopher. I agree. I agree. It's just not physics."
},
{
"end_time": 2632.295,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2612.073,
"text": " I agree. I'm saying this, this good moral philosophy that's come out recently, good thinking, you know, that picks up somewhere, some earlier moral philosophers have left off plenty of stuff, including the mind. Yes, I got no issues there. That was never an argument for me."
},
{
"end_time": 2661.817,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2632.773,
"text": " By the way, I'm intrigued by this. What's the word? Not cladding of the sphere. What's the two parts of a sphere? What's it called? Covering. It's an open cover. An open cover, right. I just like that thought. That's a fun thought. What is it that is outside of our experience? Yeah, that's something else that that's fun to think about is what are the limitations of the scientific method? And this isn't to be anti-science at all. Can I respond to that? Sure."
},
{
"end_time": 2695.503,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2665.606,
"text": " The way the scientific method is typically explicated can lead to that very question. But I, when I think of the scientific method, I think of it differently in a way that wouldn't even lead to that question. Okay. Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson's definition of the scientific method. All right. Do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or that something"
},
{
"end_time": 2722.585,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2696.084,
"text": " is not true that is. Did I say that the right way and the opposite? Whatever it takes. Oh, you know, I have delusions sometimes. So let me write down or get a video. I have certain biases. So let me have someone else check it. I saw this happen, but maybe I should get a video of it. So all of these are tactics, methods and tools to separate"
},
{
"end_time": 2749.224,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2723.353,
"text": " the data you collect on the physical universe from its interaction with your senses to minimize what role your senses play in the data and science modern science as we know it did not take off until we had until we started to assemble take off as in accelerate until we assembled tool that replaced our senses with the near simultaneous"
},
{
"end_time": 2778.626,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2749.77,
"text": " With the near-simultaneous invention of the microscope and the telescope, we were off and running in both directions. Leeuwenhoek sees animacules, little animals swimming a prettily, to quote him, in pond water. Whoa! Who ordered that? What's that? Galileo looks up and he sees spots on the sun and so the beginnings of rings of Saturn didn't know what he was looking at. Also, tools"
},
{
"end_time": 2803.456,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2779.343,
"text": " assisting our senses and ideally replacing our senses. There it is. So to say, to now ask philosophically, what limits are there? I'm just trying to, the limit would be what's the limit? I'm unable to remove my bias from the data in any way at all, even by getting other people to review it. That would be a limit."
},
{
"end_time": 2832.944,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2803.916,
"text": " If every person I got to peer review my work has exactly the same bias as I do, then something slips through the system that I think is true that is not. That's a limit of the system, but that's not founded in a philosophical principle. That's just that's bad luck in that case. So no, I'm not the hypothesis. No, I'm not that precise about it. It's very blunt. Is there any hypothesis?"
},
{
"end_time": 2845.043,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2833.268,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store."
},
{
"end_time": 2873.985,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2849.974,
"text": " I am not prepared"
},
{
"end_time": 2905.213,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2875.998,
"text": " to say, how did you word it? Do I say yes to that or no? Repeat. Is there a statement? Is there a fact? A thing. Okay. Yeah. That cannot be shown to be true or a hypothesis that can't be tested by the scientific method. I am not prepared to declare that something cannot ultimately succumb to the methods and tools of science. I'm not prepared to do that only because the history of that exercise"
},
{
"end_time": 2926.63,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2905.794,
"text": " Leads is is one of abject failure failure in the sense that science will never know this or science we can never know that we and science slowly marches along and then Checks those boxes. Okay as we move forward given the successful history of this enterprise I am NOT here to tell you"
},
{
"end_time": 2955.333,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2927.056,
"text": " standing here flat-footed that, and I actually do have flat feet, that there's a boundary beyond which science cannot reach. I don't see evidence in the history of science sufficient enough for me to even make that claim today. What's your opinion on the recent UFO whistleblower David Grush? I'm sure you've heard some whispers or maybe you've watched it yourself. Yeah, I'm not interested in testimonies."
},
{
"end_time": 2979.155,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2956.015,
"text": " I mean, testimonies are the lowest form of evidence in science. I don't care what you said you saw. I mean, I care, but I'm not going to base an entire understanding of the universe based on what comes out of your mouth. And I don't care who you are or what your rank is. It doesn't matter. Are you human? That's all I care about. You're human? I need something better than that."
},
{
"end_time": 3005.469,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2979.497,
"text": " Like, bring an alien into the open square. How about that? We have six billion smartphones in the world. Give me some video of people getting abducted onto a flying saucer. That would go viral overnight. Cat videos go viral. You know that'll go viral. All right? I'm thinking if we're being invaded by aliens, we would not need congressional hearings to establish that fact."
},
{
"end_time": 3035.964,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3006.578,
"text": " really the aliens are coming and they're only going to restricted military airspace really that how that's working we have a million people airborne at any given moment with a window looking out into earth's atmosphere have you ever seen the crisscrossing of our commercial air flights in the world in a 24-hour period it seems to me if aliens are coming we could crowd source that oh yeah so i don't i can't be impressed by testimonies"
},
{
"end_time": 3053.643,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3036.305,
"text": " Exactly. You're for investigating further."
},
{
"end_time": 3083.882,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3053.933,
"text": " Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 3107.637,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3084.394,
"text": " To the world as the eight billion residents do and the six billion smartphones so And by the way little facts like in the 1960s and 70s abduction stories were common Oh the aliens brought me on and they poked my gonads and things but now that we all have smartphones Those stories have gone away because you could record it. All right, you could live stream it"
},
{
"end_time": 3136.374,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3108.029,
"text": " as the alien walked towards you or as they gathered. But we don't see any such footage of that. We're not relying on your eye, brain, memory, sensory interaction with the world. And as I said earlier, we didn't begin to truly understand this world until we could bring methods and tools and tactics and especially instruments of measurement to the natural world that transcended"
},
{
"end_time": 3159.684,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3136.852,
"text": " our biological form our biological sensory system so whistleblower has you know we all turn heads when we hear about a whistleblower all right but i'm just saying if aliens visited why would the government be the only agency that has them like like why just why ask a whole other set of questions that no one's asking if we're being visited how come only the government knows about it"
},
{
"end_time": 3173.148,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3160.094,
"text": " And have you ever neal okay work for the government do you realize how incompetent the government actually is that does anyone actually know this that they could actually stockpile aliens and no one would know."
},
{
"end_time": 3201.254,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3173.797,
"text": " Okay, I feel as if you're digging yourself into a hole and I love you, Neil. I love you and I'm reaching out. Firstly, you're an alien. That'd be great. I'm not anti who everybody wants to meet the aliens. I got nothing against aliens. I love me some aliens. Okay, go on. So firstly, there are several maybe even hundreds of commercial airline pilots who report seeing similar objects. And by the way, it's not the jump."
},
{
"end_time": 3223.2,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3201.425,
"text": " Like I've heard it explained, there's the jump, unidentified, therefore aliens. To me, that betrays that someone hasn't studied this much because the claim isn't that it's aliens. In day two investigations into this, people call it the phenomenon. Yeah, sure. And I don't have a problem. I told you, you're arguing about against something that I didn't even have an argument about."
},
{
"end_time": 3252.517,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3223.609,
"text": " yes if there's something in the sky that we don't know what it is and we have eyewitness testimony or any kind of testimony or it's on your chart recorder and we don't know what it is figure out what it is i don't have any problems with that and i said i'd allocate money to it if i would control pentagon already allocates money i don't have a problem with that so what are you saying back to me when i already said i don't have a problem with that let me figure out how to phrase this do you see"
},
{
"end_time": 3282.568,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3252.756,
"text": " The sentiment in the public of people who take this phenomenon seriously, whatever that is, I don't know what to call it. Ufologists, people who are interested in UFOs, they don't have to be believers because what are they believing in? They don't, they don't know. It's just something extraordinary. Okay. They just, they like lights in the sky. Okay. It's fine. Do you get the sense that the sentiment is that you have a derisive, maybe even scornful attitude? No, I don't. I do. If you want to think they're aliens, but the fact that there's something that can't be explained, the universe brims with mysteries."
},
{
"end_time": 3309.633,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3282.91,
"text": " Sure. Go right ahead. Investigate it. No. The scorn is, I don't know what it is, therefore it's visiting aliens and it's a government cover-up. That's where I have scorn. Scorn is too harsh. That's where I don't have the patience for that. Because my sense of it is that if they were aliens,"
},
{
"end_time": 3339.65,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3310.435,
"text": " they wouldn't be as elusive as people are saying they would just be in plain sight there they'd be and you wouldn't need to invoke a cover-up theory a what's the term not cover-up um conspiracy because you wouldn't need to invoke a conspiracy because what is a conspiracy theorist it's someone who's pretty sure they know what's true and where there's a gap in the data that would demonstrate it's true they say it's missing because it's a cover-up"
},
{
"end_time": 3367.415,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3340.469,
"text": " That's a conspiracy theorist. So those people that you're describing, not the ones that just see stuff they can't explain, the ones that see stuff they can't explain are sure they aliens and sure the government knows about it and but they can't prove it because it's a cover up. Those are the ones I have issues with. Now, if you don't have issues with it, you're an educated person. If you don't have issues with those who are sure they're aliens, they need smart people on their side because I'm not among them."
},
{
"end_time": 3395.64,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3368.148,
"text": " Okay, let's disentangle this. Firstly, the government is incompetent. I think the government's incompetent is both underestimated and overestimated. That's a cog in a wheel. That's I'm saying. Let me not say the government is incompetent because we can land a spacecraft on a moving target on Mars in a crater, you know, 70 million miles away. So let me not say incompetent. Let me just say the capacity of the US government to keep a secret"
},
{
"end_time": 3424.599,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3396.476,
"text": " which is particularly tasty is essentially zero. I don't think the claim is that they have kept the secret though. And so the government is not as competent as that in that, as you think they are. What do I base that on? What do I base them on? If there's a janitor, a janitor working in area 51 and they're stockpiling aliens there, the janitor could smuggle in a smartphone, get a picture uploaded to the internet. The general get fired the next day."
},
{
"end_time": 3454.548,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3425.111,
"text": " And it'd be the richest, most famous janitor there ever was. Okay. Okay. No one would firstly know. And if it's a coverup, hundreds and thousands of people would have to keep secrets that you who's who is it that said you're a philosopher, you know that somebody said, um, was it Mark Twain? I'm not a philosopher. No, no, no. It was, it was like thinking philosophically. It was with Benjamin Franklin. One of these thinkers of centuries ago said, uh, the only way two people can keep a secret is if one of them is dead."
},
{
"end_time": 3485.742,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3457.125,
"text": " Yeah, okay. So number one, I don't think the government has kept it a secret. I contest that because several millions of people believe that the government is hiding something. There are whistleblowers, like we just talked about, who've come out several of them, like Lou Elisondo, there's David Grush. I'm sure there's more than there are also other programs that the government has kept secret. I don't think it's as easy to sneak into smartphone as as you may think, like with the NSA."
},
{
"end_time": 3515.93,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3486.374,
"text": " back then, and it should be much easier now for information to come out. Existence of the NSA wasn't revealed until years later. And then the extent of which what they were doing wasn't revealed till decades later. And then there's MKUltra. Then there's also the fact that when you petition with FOIA requests, freedom of information act requests. So where are you going with here? I'm just saying, I'm not convinced they're aliens. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying they're not lights in the sky we can't explain. I'm saying"
},
{
"end_time": 3527.637,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3516.596,
"text": " and i'm not i don't have the interest to spend my professional life investigating them on the premise that they're aliens i by the way nasa and my field"
},
{
"end_time": 3554.548,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3527.892,
"text": " have been searching for aliens for decades. It's not that we don't care about aliens. We have the entire SETI program, for goodness sake, and it's been going strong with fits and starts since the 1970s. We sent signals in the 1960s out of the Arecibo telescope to a cluster of stars called the Hercules globular cluster M13. I think that was the cluster. So it's not like we're not interested in aliens. Of course we are. But"
},
{
"end_time": 3575.486,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3555.367,
"text": " whistleblower testimony of what someone says they saw i don't count that as science not science enough to redirect my career to investigate it as aliens let somebody else investigate it for what it is is it a threat to us is it not is it a glitch in the detector is it anything else by all means check it out"
},
{
"end_time": 3594.394,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3576.323,
"text": " so the proposition isn't neo please you must change your career now given this the proposition also isn't that testimony is the same as science the proposition is that there is no smoking gun and the smoking gun type of evidence isn't the only type of evidence it is if you're making an extraordinary claim"
},
{
"end_time": 3621.442,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3595.196,
"text": " If you're making, oh, the sun, I saw the sunrise this morning, you know, I don't need that much evidence from you to, to agree with your statement. Okay. I don't, I really don't because I would expect that to be true based on everything I know of the natural world. So there are many cases where smoking gun is not important. We infer the existence of exoplanets without ever having seen one. All right. Of the 5,000 exoplanets."
},
{
"end_time": 3643.148,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3621.903,
"text": " What thirty five forty five hundred of them are inferred by the movement of the host star no half maybe i don't know the latest numbers is a mixture of how we discover them. At least half are discovered by their gravitational effect on the host star and we deduce the mass the period the thing that every even seeing them."
},
{
"end_time": 3662.91,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3643.541,
"text": " Let's say you encountered something that was extraordinary."
},
{
"end_time": 3688.046,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3664.804,
"text": " What do you do? I will try to get extraordinary evidence in support of it. Yes, instantly. That's what I would do. If I saw aliens walking, I'd pull out my smartphone, I'd find a video, I would try to steal something off their hip. So I'd have an artifact. I would, oh my gosh, I'd yell to other people, get images of the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 3710.35,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3688.439,
"text": " That's what I would do. I wouldn't just say, this is interesting. Now let me go to Congress and tell everyone that I encounter with aliens. No, I wouldn't expect anybody, any of my colleagues to believe me. Even if it were true, I would be seeking the kind of evidence that extraordinary claims require and that's extraordinary evidence. Let's say you saw some orb."
},
{
"end_time": 3728.933,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3710.776,
"text": " Perhaps even you saw an alien, perhaps even it abducted you didn't let you take out you didn't even occur to you because by the way, this is a common experience with anyone it's not just related to aliens. Firstly, it's difficult to get a photo of anything that's in the sky with your cell phone when you don't know where it is. I was walking in the woods with my family and there was a porcupine."
},
{
"end_time": 3745.93,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3729.991,
"text": " I don't think porcupines climb trees."
},
{
"end_time": 3771.903,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3747.773,
"text": " And it didn't occur to any of us to take out our phones and further, like five seconds later, 10 seconds later, it's just gone. And that's a porcupine. Like try finding a non-professional photographer's photo of a porcupine online. I did a search for that. Same with lemurs. And there are many lemurs and porcupines. I think there's 20,000 times more lemurs and porcupines, maybe 100,000 times. Then there would be these anomalous objects, whatever they are. It was hard."
},
{
"end_time": 3783.695,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3772.21,
"text": " Yeah, the science is hard. Secondly, even when there are images, whatever it is, it's easier than detecting the gravitational wave from colliding black holes. And thirdly, there does exist while there doesn't exist"
},
{
"end_time": 3811.374,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3784.087,
"text": " great photos and by the way that's contested because the government seems to have some photos that they won't release which is why that's called a conspiracy theory doesn't it that's what that sounds like but gone they come from for your request like you can ask the government what do you have and then they can tell you the reason why they're not gonna give it to you like this is classified this violates this law of course it's gonna have classified what are you trying to where do you get mad here with this conversation Neil this can get to such traumatic events that people go through like they get"
},
{
"end_time": 3833.933,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3812.329,
"text": " You can imagine, I'm not even going to say it because it's on YouTube and maybe they'll get censored. They have no evidence that someone could just say, why didn't you record? Weren't you in the right state of mind? And then let's imagine they have people testifying for them, people. Then we say, hey, it's in crescent evidence. So it's evidence that increases your credence by a bit. No, no, it's not about credit. It's not a matter of credence. It's it's"
},
{
"end_time": 3864.206,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3834.599,
"text": " I was testimony gathered. That's consistent says this is excellent. Now we need to bring the methods and tools of science to investigate this. Yes, I agree. I agree. So that's what include pulling your damn smartphone out and not being shocked at the porcupine in the tree, which might not have even been a porcupine because I didn't know porcupine climb trees. You might've been seeing something else. I thought it was a porcupine. Okay. But how would a porcupine climb? Really? Really? They got stubby little legs. How are they going to climb a tree?"
},
{
"end_time": 3893.507,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3864.599,
"text": " Yes, they regularly climb trees and search for food. That's new to me. Yeah. OK, so take that. It's new to you. Like, oh, that's great. That's like, hey, I don't know it. Therefore, it's not true. I didn't say that. No, no. No, you keep putting words in my mouth. You're trying to characterize what I say to make your argument look good. And that's not what I've been saying. No, no. Quote me accurately before you criticize what I say rather than reshape it so that you can make a comment that sounds like"
},
{
"end_time": 3922.875,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3894.087,
"text": " I don't know what I'm talking about. Okay. I was being a facetious and I thought that that was clear, but also the same as being done with you. I say you're straw manning people by saying, I don't know what it is. Therefore aliens, people do say that they do say that people, no, not few people. How many people do you interact with daily? I do. And I have, I have comment threads. There's a whole, what now? What percent half maybe I'm half we'll say,"
},
{
"end_time": 3949.94,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3923.763,
"text": " That I saw a UFO. It did things that defy the laws of physics. It must have been an alien. That is one of the most common accounts for lights in the sky that they say and then it zipped away faster than any airplane. It must have been an alien. Do you realize how common that is? And I'm saying we don't know what it is. It's fascinating. Let's investigate further."
},
{
"end_time": 3970.145,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3950.299,
"text": " Go right ahead. What's the first part? That's my very loose statistics on that. It's not 1%, it's not 99%."
},
{
"end_time": 3997.688,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3970.145,
"text": " Yeah, sure. Sure. The issue is that we are supposed to deal with the strongest argument. We don't take the case of even if it's the majority of people. The strongest argument would be actual scientific data, not eyewitness testimony. I have some notes here. Sure. This comes from Kevin Knuth. So basically he's saying that, look, I have papers. Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics, by the way, in the editor in chief of entropy journal and MD. I actually don't care about people's pedigree."
},
{
"end_time": 4026.51,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3998.729,
"text": " If they're right, they're right, regardless of their pedigree. And if they're wrong, they're wrong, regardless of their pedigree. Thank you for telling me that. But don't invoke that as some measure of whether or not what he's saying is more true than someone else's account. Go. OK, I wouldn't invoke that ordinarily, except... Do you realize in my field, but just to be clear, in my field, when we publish papers, your degrees are not listed next to your name."
},
{
"end_time": 4043.49,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4026.937,
"text": " We do not rank people when you're making the publication because a great idea can come from anywhere and can be tested and experiment. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 4061.732,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4044.087,
"text": " I wholeheartedly agree."
},
{
"end_time": 4091.118,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4062.398,
"text": " On the AI topic where you said, hey, people who aren't experts shouldn't talk about it, which to me sounds like an argument. Did I say that? I didn't say that. It's a couple of times that was the experts. And then you said, you're not an expert. Like you admitted that, like I'm not an expert. So, but well, that's why I'm saying it. All right. So now technology, let's count AI as among the rank among the fruits of technology. There are people who fear that AI will ruin. I'm not among those, but then I'm not an expert. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 4116.596,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4091.425,
"text": " Hold aside that I've written 50,000 lines of computer code and I've been thinking about computers my whole life. I don't present myself as an expert and I won't. And I say that because people who do present themselves as experts, by the way, I don't count Elon Musk as an AI expert. Yeah, I don't remember saying non-experts shouldn't talk about it. I never, I don't think I would have ever said that. Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 4133.865,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4117.108,
"text": " It was around the time you mentioned that."
},
{
"end_time": 4163.677,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4133.865,
"text": " as early as the 1970s in a computer science class. We've used AI in my field to analyze data, to find interesting things in data that we would not have otherwise been able to sift through. Okay, we've invoked neural nets. So we've been very active in this capacity. And then AI now crosses over into liberal arts and can write your term paper and people lose their shit. So that's intriguing to me that"
},
{
"end_time": 4194.411,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4164.428,
"text": " It's so it is so thoroughly embedded elsewhere. And now it touches a place where it hadn't touched before. And people get now it's in every, you know, every day's newspaper has a scare article on AI. But go on. I just want to for this conversation, we don't need to rely on whatever other recordings were because you have me in person and I can tell you what I think. Okay. Anyhow, Kevin Knuth has articles as well as someone named I'm just citing their last names without"
},
{
"end_time": 4222.142,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4194.701,
"text": " Wait, hold on. Hold on. I care. Just a sec. Just a sec. I wasn't clear enough."
},
{
"end_time": 4246.135,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4224.753,
"text": " I care that you're professionally trained. If someone is a professional physicist, medical, I care about that. So do give me that information. I don't care where you got your degree or where you're practicing. I don't care about the perceived prestige of one institution versus another."
},
{
"end_time": 4276.169,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4246.715,
"text": " Okay, that's really what I don't care about. But it's nice to know it. Was it a biologist who came up with this? Yes. So that's why it's the physicist and and the philosophers are parted ways. So that mattered to me there because the training is different. Again, I don't care about pedigree, the pedigree of which institution did the training. I don't care because you spend much more time not in such an institution than in an institution. And so the heights to which you can ascend are"
},
{
"end_time": 4304.497,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4277.466,
"text": " What I'm saying is that they're saying, hey, we would just like more evidence with regard to this. We would like more funding. We would like people to not scorn this subject. So Avi Loeb created the Galileo project and he's getting funding and so he's off and running. So fine. Go ahead. So what point are you trying to make? I don't know what point you're trying to make."
},
{
"end_time": 4333.814,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4305.213,
"text": " I don't think that skepticism is motivated by rationality. I think skepticism is motivated by the fear of seeming foolish and that skepticism is associated with intellectualism and conspiracy theories are associated with being unintellectual. So it's a fairly clear cut case for someone who wants to be seen as intellectual. And there's something like a liberalism of ideas like, okay, let's test out different hypotheses. Let's hear what else could be the case. Or there's ostensible intellectualism. And I think that the skeptic will choose what appears highbrow most of the time."
},
{
"end_time": 4363.882,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4334.701,
"text": " That's what I think, because I think they should be encouraging. But how does that apply to all this? So what are you saying? I think we're in agreement. We may be using different words and because it's a charge subject, it sounds like we're arguing, but I don't care. Like I'll hug you if I was to be there in person. Yeah, air hug, air hug. Yeah. Like anyone who's watching may think like, oh, Neil's at Kurt's throat or Kurt's at Neil's throat. No, no, no, no, no. No, it's an animated conversation as any good conversation should be. Here's something I hear. Yeah. Where's the evidence for this?"
},
{
"end_time": 4392.142,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4364.309,
"text": " I'm thinking, where's the evidence for string theory? Where's the evidence the space-time is discrete? There's zero evidence the space-time is discrete. There are whole programs, whole programs of people wanting it so bad to be discrete. Where's the evidence for the quantum gravity? Where's the evidence for virtually every single thing that the philosophy department outputs like we talked about earlier? Yet there's millions and millions of churns. Here it's more money. Here's more money. Here's more money. Take decades if you need to."
},
{
"end_time": 4415.862,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4392.483,
"text": " And then when we talk about this subject, like there seems to be something so strange going on, which is correlated by the way. It's not just a jump. This is another sticking point. I just want to make clear. I hear that, Hey, it's the jump from, I don't know what it is to aliens. Maybe it is in the straw man case, like I mentioned, but it's also that it's not straw man. If half the people say that it's not a straw man. It's an actual way people think about what they see."
},
{
"end_time": 4443.933,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4416.305,
"text": " And I'm going to assert because we only just met, but let me assert that I have more access to like people who think this way than you do in your daily life. And it's from that access to people. I give public talks in a year to let me say 40,000, 100,000 people a year. I will address in an audience."
},
{
"end_time": 4473.234,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4444.326,
"text": " And I know what they think. And we have Q&A. So it draws from that. So it's not straw man. It's an actual what people think that we can ignore them and go on to the other cases. I don't have a problem with that. And those other cases are investigated further. And you asked me about funding. And I said, Pentagon should spend money on this. So what is your argument with me? What is your I said, we should spend money, find out what it is. I want to be safe from weird stuff in the skies."
},
{
"end_time": 4499.309,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4473.66,
"text": " So go ahead. Yes. Spend money. I would allocate money. There is already is allocated money in the Pentagon. Probably the NSA as well. NASA's allocated money is this SETI in ways that they did not support it as much as they used to. But search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We're all there. We're all in on it. So what is your argument against me? I don't get it. What are you trying to say?"
},
{
"end_time": 4519.531,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4500.572,
"text": " If there's something that's a derisive attitude that can also hold back such studying, by the way, because it places a stigma on it. So they're not disembroiled. They're intertwined."
},
{
"end_time": 4545.384,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4520.708,
"text": " Then that's also an issue. I don't think there's much of a place to be contemptuous toward anyone. I published a book a few years ago called letters from an astrophysicist and one of them was someone wrote to me from a skeptics organization said, what do you make of this? The Pentagon decided to allocate $30 million to study UFOs. That's crazy. And he expected me to just completely resonate."
},
{
"end_time": 4571.92,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4545.828,
"text": " With him and I just, but this is now 15 years ago. So some other program that was revealed to have received this money. And I said, pause $30 million out of 500 billion or whatever the budget was is vanishingly small. First of all, second, if there's something in the sky and we don't know what it is, I want the Pentagon to know about it. I want them to do this research."
},
{
"end_time": 4600.162,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4572.517,
"text": " They didn't say that they're aliens. They just said it's something they don't UFOs. So I chastise a fellow skeptic for his blind attitude towards the entire subject. And I think I've been pretty consistent about that over my years. I, and so, yeah, I guess I'm most visible in the straw man rebuttal. Yes. But the rest go for it. And like I said, Avi Loeb is fully funded."
},
{
"end_time": 4629.65,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4600.708,
"text": " He's looking for extraterrestrial asteroids in the Pacific right now. It was Galileo project, I think it's called. Correct. Correct. So, so yeah. Great. Great. Okay. You're trying to argue with me, but I don't have anything to argue with. I'm not trying to argue with you. I'm not trying to, Neil, I hope you don't feel that. Okay. Let's turn table. We can come back. I want to ask you about your ability to speak. I remember seeing an interview of you."
},
{
"end_time": 4655.077,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4630.316,
"text": " I don't know how long ago, maybe two years ago or so, but I don't know when the interview was from and you were saying, man, when I went on John Stewart, I prepped, I watched his show. I saw how long does he give people to speak? And I thought, okay, let me make sure I can plan my jokes if I'm going to even have jokes within that timeframe so that they land. And let me think about the cadence and how it plays well with John, something akin to that. So firstly, am I on the right track or am I misremembering?"
},
{
"end_time": 4679.633,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4655.964,
"text": " Basically on the right track, but it's not that I plan my jokes because I'm there to be interviewed for the science. It's his jokes. So once I got the average time that he allows someone to speak before he comedically interrupts, I realized that that's how I should parcel my information so that the information doesn't end up dangling around a joke that I have to then resurrect in the next"
},
{
"end_time": 4704.65,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4680.162,
"text": " moment I get to speak so that the timing would be smoother if I could parcel my information in those units and that's what I did and as it was and it's it's eight to fifteen eight to twelve seconds around there doesn't sound like much time but it is in a banter in a conversation where there's banter that's actually quite a bit of time so I did that yes and and people afterwards"
},
{
"end_time": 4735.094,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4705.162,
"text": " This is one of the earliest interviews that I did with him because I seen people tried, especially politicians, try to give their stump speech and he's smart and he's clever and he's witty and he's funny. They try to give their stump speech and then he dances circles around them. And it's a bad, it's embarrassing. I said, I'm not going to be embarrassed that way. All right. And of all the ways I might be embarrassed, I'm going to make sure it's not that way. So I, I train myself in those time units. And after the interview, I had people say,"
},
{
"end_time": 4764.923,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4735.452,
"text": " Oh, I saw you on John Stewart. You have such good chemistry with him. Oh, you're such a natural with him. And I said, Oh, I guess it was working. That means it was successful. Yeah. But people think it was natural. And I've heard people say, Oh, when you get your gift as though, okay, yeah, I was just standing there one day on the corner and someone handed it to me and then I opened it and there it was. No, it's a denial of, of"
},
{
"end_time": 4794.428,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4765.998,
"text": " Um, energy, hard work, deliberate effort. Yeah. Yeah. It's a denial of that when people say it. I also get, there's a variant of that is, um, Neil, I just love your Twitter posts. Do you actually write them? Well, what's wrong with that one? What's wrong with that? Um, it says it's a simultaneous compliment and insult. They say,"
},
{
"end_time": 4822.466,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4794.701,
"text": " they love them do i write them so there's some doubt that whether or not i write i see i see because they're so good could they have come from you correct okay i thought that maybe it's like they're so good but you're such a busy person i don't expect you to write your own tweets i thought it was that okay well anyway i don't want to take away your secrets but can you reveal what are some of the other techniques that you used like"
},
{
"end_time": 4852.244,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4822.722,
"text": " I'll give you an instance for me. I did stand-up comedy. And when I was doing it, before I did it, I would watch comedians and I would sit there with a pen and paper, much like yourself, and think about timing, but also think about what types of jokes and look at the structure like it was a math formula. To the point where when I went on stage for the first time, almost every single person bombs their first time. And I did so well that the guy thought I was doing it for a few months. So that was this huge compliment. Ended up being horrible for me later because I got used to doing okay that when I bombed,"
},
{
"end_time": 4881.271,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4852.91,
"text": " I bombed hard and then I just was like, I'm never doing this again. I wasn't prepared for it. But anyhow, I would sit there with a pen and paper and I treated it methodically. So I'm curious in your early days when you were cultivating this skill and that's not to say that you're not still sharpening it. What did you do and how did you think about it? Yeah, that's a good question. Thanks for it. I first it matters to me how you think the person who I'm communicating with. So"
},
{
"end_time": 4907.261,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4881.971,
"text": " Pop culture awareness for me is paramount because that's a scaffold you walk into the conversation with and so I don't have to, I can start there. I can start with something you already care about because by definition if it's pop culture you care about it and so I start there and if I'm fluent in pop culture I can clad this scaffold"
},
{
"end_time": 4932.892,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4907.654,
"text": " with science and it's attached to something you care about and you will walk away with a deeper understanding and concern for that and caring for it than you otherwise would if I just put it out there. This is what I have found. Also, I would speak with people in the old days before I was recognized, you still on an airplane, you say, Oh, what do you on long flights? You say, who are you? What do you do? I said, I do astrophysics and outcome the questions."
},
{
"end_time": 4953.456,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4933.643,
"text": " And what's a black hole? How big is the universe? Is there God? They usually save that for last. And I would answer, but monitor their eyebrows or their attention span or their body language. Are they facing me? Are they facing forward? Do they look away? And I'd make note, not so much with pen and paper, but just"
},
{
"end_time": 4978.217,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4953.933,
"text": " Okay, intuitively, intuitively, I would make note of what words I used phrases I invoked, and ideas I conveyed that triggered the greatest interest in the person I was speaking to. And I put that away in my utility belt. All right. Also, I've always done writing, always like for 40 years, some form of writing."
},
{
"end_time": 5007.534,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4979.514,
"text": " What people generally don't know is practically everything I say publicly, even when interviewed on the news, I have written down previously. If you write it down, it forces you to think about verbs and nouns and sentence structure. And if you're writing in a way that's not a wiki page, if you're writing with some creativity, as you would if you're writing a book, then you're going to care about"
},
{
"end_time": 5038.387,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5008.439,
"text": " how the sentence and the phrasing lands as you write it. So when I do this, I have a repository of entire phrases, even words I might use in very specific times and places to maximally communicate with my audience. And that forces me to not be the professor at the front of the room at the chalkboard or whatever it is, the whiteboard requiring that you meet me 90% of the way to the chalkboard."
},
{
"end_time": 5064.138,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5038.848,
"text": " Well, that's kind of your obligation because you're paying to go to college and I don't have to care whether or not you learn because you're paying for it. Right. So what I mean, that sounded really crass, but it's not the professor's obligation to make sure you get it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you got to meet them 90% of the way to the chalkboard. Whereas"
},
{
"end_time": 5092.79,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5065.009,
"text": " I think what I do or what I do when I'm successful is I go 90% of the way to you. It's minimum energy, a minimum lift. You just maybe reach out half an arm's length to pull something in. And in that way, you know the ideas, you feel the ideas, and ideally you take ownership of the ideas so that you never have to reference me again."
},
{
"end_time": 5116.578,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5093.456,
"text": " It's not this is true because Tyson said so. It's this is true because here's why. This plugs into that and this turns that way. But and that's why. And so a big part of what I do is try to teach people how to think. And for those who want more of this, there's actually a master class that I taught for the master class company. And I forgot what it was called, but it was all about this."
},
{
"end_time": 5146.596,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5117.056,
"text": " The link will be on screen as well as in the description. Yeah, the masterclass is exclusively about this. The methods, tools and tactics of communication. I know that you've perhaps covered it in your masterclass. Is there anything about intonation? Yes, yes. The rhythm of speech? Yes, yes. So you can think about it. There's a day when letters were handwritten. And as a result, you could write a letter, you can write a word."
},
{
"end_time": 5174.701,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5147.261,
"text": " in a way that conveys emotions beyond just the word itself. So the word love means something, but maybe it has a little more flourish in it because you're feeling the word. So that's a way we used to communicate when handwriting was there. Then typewriters came in. And so now the way you put letters on the page no longer carried information because it was duplicated perfectly every time."
},
{
"end_time": 5206.084,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5176.135,
"text": " Then we have computers and now we have texting where we have emojis or emoticons and emojis specifically. And instead of saying, I love you in these seven ways, you just put a heart or something. And I think our capacity to communicate with emotional nuance has been systematically thinning over the recent years, especially, but definitely over the decades. When I speak,"
},
{
"end_time": 5236.374,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5206.596,
"text": " yes intonation matters monochrome the person can fatigue on monochrome a monochromatic voice so yes there's voice modulation also i used to dance i was on three performing dance companies in my day but that sensitized me to what role my body can play in communicating so no i'm not just going to stand behind the podium i'm going to walk around on stage when it's a large space if the audience is well i'm going to walk around"
},
{
"end_time": 5258.626,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5237.09,
"text": " How can I interact with you in the audience? I'm going to engage you. I'm going to use my arms and my legs and my facial expressions and tone and timbre to communicate in ways that you'll remember more because it's not just words on a page or monochromatic speech that's being delivered."
},
{
"end_time": 5284.753,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5259.497,
"text": " yes and that's also in the master class that's also there and before you go out do you psych yourself up by saying a phrase or going through a process prior to going on stage i am so comfortable with going on stage it's like let me tell you what my living room looks like yeah okay there's no there's no prepping there's no hyping there's no ritual nothing never even in the beginning never even because"
},
{
"end_time": 5314.36,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5285.794,
"text": " If you're an expert enough at what you're talking about, there's no risk factor. You're not going to embarrass yourself. You're not, you just go out there. And so I see an audience as just someone in my living room and we're just hanging out, sharing notes about the night sky. So yeah, it's, it's, I use every, every part of my physiology that I can to help communicate and to teach."
},
{
"end_time": 5344.343,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5315.418,
"text": " Okay, so let's wrap the discussion on UFOs as much as we can. Now, I don't recall exactly where we were. I was chiding you for trying to declare that I was arguing with you. Okay, I will say, I think what was going on was the whole issue of straw man versus the strongest man. Some people call it the steel man. So I would say that when one is talking about a side or a lane or whatever people are in, and in this case, we're talking about the phenomenon in quotes,"
},
{
"end_time": 5370.299,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5344.957,
"text": " that if one wants to be harmonious and fruitful, that it's useful to first, yeah, you can point out the weakest points, you can acknowledge them, but also to point out the strongest points. It's true. I agree. It's a weak point to say, I don't know what it is, therefore it's aliens. At the time, we weren't talking about how weak the point was. We were talking about how many people thought that way. And so when I say,"
},
{
"end_time": 5399.531,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5371.084,
"text": " When I, when I, when I attack, attack is a harsh word. I don't care. I don't feel any, no, no, no. When I, when I, uh, when I comment comedically on those who are certain they saw aliens, you said, Oh, I'm attacking the straw man. And I'm saying, I'm addressing the possible majority of what people, of what they think. And as an educator, that matters to me now in a philosophical debate, we'll talk about the stronger case, the stronger cases."
},
{
"end_time": 5429.497,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5399.787,
"text": " someone says the government is stockpiling alien and alien technology and they've seen it and it worked to sworn not to talk about it and their whistleblower okay okay that's not extraordinary evidence that's no better evidence it's no better evidence than anybody else sitting in front of congress talking about what they saw yeah i don't know about that but i understand what you're saying so i would say you think it's you think it's"
},
{
"end_time": 5456.63,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5430.213,
"text": " It's enough evidence for you to think that it's real? Really? No. Well, like I was saying, there's smoking gun evidence and then there's in crescent evidence. So evidence that moves a needle from zero point five to one percent. And so rather than having one large slide, evidence for what? Evidence that there's something going on in this. No, no. Yes. Of course, something's going on either in the detectors and yes, of course, something is going on. There's a hundred percent answer to that."
},
{
"end_time": 5486.937,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5457.261,
"text": " likelihood of that being true. Yes, the detector could be faulty. There could be actual aliens or sky phenomenon we've never seen before. But if you're going to rank them, if you put aliens at the top, I would question your how in touch with reality you are. If that is your best explanation for what's going on in a world where there's still many mysteries, especially in our detectors. Oh, but this person is high rank."
},
{
"end_time": 5507.551,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5487.193,
"text": " So,"
},
{
"end_time": 5534.138,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5507.995,
"text": " i don't think that the people who are coming forward as whistleblowers are doing so because i saw an amorphous object in the sky move spasmonically therefore aliens they're saying like i've seen documents i've seen photos i've talked to other people who i trust in any other circumstance with my life and you would too because they're your military and you do trust them with your life if someone walks into a scientific conference and says believe this because i saw it excuse me we'll show you the back door wholeheartedly agree we have we have"
},
{
"end_time": 5560.06,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5534.684,
"text": " we have stronger constraints on your reporting of evidence for much less of a claim than what's going on here. You cannot expect an authentic practicing scientist to see that as evidence of aliens."
},
{
"end_time": 5589.036,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5560.265,
"text": " This is what I mean by it needs to not be a straw man because the people at least that I've seen are not saying and because of this you should believe it's aliens nor are they saying that I believe I as in them sorry I'm quoting I don't believe it's aliens necessarily like they would say that and they would say I don't expect you to believe anything I'm just saying this is what I saw can we please"
},
{
"end_time": 5614.445,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5589.343,
"text": " Get some congressional hearings on this. Can you please petition your government? Can you please look at the skies more? I don't know, fund Alvy Loeb. That's the only project for something that seems to be this, like the SETI as well, but it's not of the same sort. Then that's a bit odd because millions of people are interested in this. Go ahead and fund SETI. We're looking all the time. We have people with telescopes, the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California. I think it's in Northern California."
},
{
"end_time": 5629.326,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5614.838,
"text": " The strongest view on this subject is that there are some competent, diligent people who I would trust with my life and they could be mistaken"
},
{
"end_time": 5654.94,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5629.889,
"text": " They could also be on to something when they say that there's something extraordinary. So please let's investigate. And furthermore, there are people like Kevin Knuth who can put accelerational bounds from the radar data, which is in journals published. So please let's investigate these anomalies. And I would conclude with that. Didn't I say let's investigate? Yes. Yes. Oh, so what's your point? My point is that that's not the impression that people have"
},
{
"end_time": 5685.145,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5655.333,
"text": " of your commentary on this subject. Because they talk about aliens. That's what they ask me about. And that's what I referred to. We're not talking about just stuff we don't understand. They say it's aliens visiting because it's doing physics that we don't understand. It's got to be aliens. They're coming and the government is keeping it a secret because they think if they tell us the truth, we'll all freak out. This is what I get when I'm in the public. If you stepped out in the public speaking this way, you'll get that too."
},
{
"end_time": 5711.647,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5685.555,
"text": " Apparently, you don't have the same data I have about what interests people and what they're asking out of me. But in those interviews, I do say I want to meet the aliens. Yes. Okay, so there are a couple issues here. And I just want to wrap this up. Number one, I don't get that same sort of impression. I come with me to the hundred thousand people I speak to a year and you will. Okay, come with me. That could be I have a buy a set, or it could be you have a buy a set."
},
{
"end_time": 5738.729,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5712.022,
"text": " I'm saying like it could be a combination of both because maybe the interviewers who are setting you up want to set you up with people who are likely to elicit a certain response and so they it could be that it could also be you recall a certain type of people more because they stand out more rather than the more cogent kind who tends to go this is the wrong subject for you to justify your disagreement with me by suggesting I might be biased."
},
{
"end_time": 5764.224,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5739.497,
"text": " That is the pick a different subject where I could be biased, not this one. What I mean is that I'm not saying you're biased. I'm saying that there's I have, I have, I have 30 years of email correspondence with people who are coming. Okay. I wrote a book called letters from an after one entire chapter of it was people commenting on shit they saw in the sky. Okay. So, so."
},
{
"end_time": 5791.971,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5764.531,
"text": " So for you to feel comfortable thinking what you think is true by saying my data set is biased, this is the wrong example. It's the wrong ring to ring that bell in. I think I said it could be that. And if I didn't, then I apologize because it could be. And like you mentioned, like anyone should admit that there's bias in virtually whatever we do."
},
{
"end_time": 5821.664,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5792.278,
"text": " Yes, but it's not, it's not binary. There's shades of bias that go from full bias to near zero bias. Okay. And to say everyone has bias, therefore you can't believe anything. No, I didn't say that. I know you don't think I said that, but I understand. Okay. Again, I don't know if in that book with that chapter that it's of the sort, like I saw a blurry object that moved erratically thus aliens. I think that it would be more nuanced than that. They asked me, is it aliens? That's what they say every time."
},
{
"end_time": 5852.039,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5822.363,
"text": " Every time. It lands on aliens every time, but there's nothing wrong with asking a question like that. That's why I put it in the book and has a very respectful answer. Yes, it's in the book. I do this. Don't you don't you know what I do in a day? How many people I interact with who I interact with? OK, so the guy is the whistleblower. Like I said, that alone is a click bait. The whistleblower says these things fine."
},
{
"end_time": 5879.616,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5852.432,
"text": " let's investigate them. But that, if he would had much less of a thing to announce to the world, and he tried to bring that to a scientific conference, we wouldn't, that's not how you do it. And no, he doesn't have good enough scientific evidence to convince a scientific skeptic. He doesn't, because he's, it's basically eyewitness testimony at this point. And"
},
{
"end_time": 5911.084,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5882.005,
"text": " So yeah, if he's on to something, yeah, investigate it. Yeah. Okay, great. I like that. I agree with that last part. Well, I've been saying that for an hour. I understand what I was talking about was that there's an impression. Then we talked about the impression. I agree. I agree. People get that impression. I agree. People can get that impression. And because it's more quotable to quote me saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 5941.34,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5911.357,
"text": " Yeah, so to turn the tables on myself, I have a bias set and maybe the people who are listening have a bias set because only what is clickbait of you saying something negative gets shared. And when you say something that's neutral,"
},
{
"end_time": 5963.831,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5941.852,
"text": " I have very precise views on philosophy. I had a hundred, maybe dozens of philosophers in a philosophy blog criticize"
},
{
"end_time": 5991.459,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5964.531,
"text": " a comedic comment I made on a comedic podcast to a host who majored in philosophy and then switched and I made some comedic joke about it and then they all piled on me defending their field thinking I thought their field should not go away. Meanwhile, I gave a four-minute account of my more nuanced views of philosophy in a public forum with"
},
{
"end_time": 6020.026,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5991.732,
"text": " With Richard Dawkins on stage in a university venue, which is also on the internet and none of those people reference that quote. None of them. Okay. It was like they had this little 32nd click bait and I'm a big target, right? So they all passed it among themselves. He said, look, Tyson is an idiot about philosophy. He doesn't know the foundations of philosophy. So, so you should be me for a day and you'll see what"
},
{
"end_time": 6048.592,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6020.213,
"text": " What's going on here? And the more nuanced is, the nuanced point is, people trained in the 20th century in the era of modern physics, purely in philosophy, have not found themselves to be as relevant or as helpful to the point of being not helpful at all in the moving frontier of the physical sciences relative to what it was in all previous centuries, period."
},
{
"end_time": 6066.425,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6049.906,
"text": " I stick by that."
},
{
"end_time": 6096.749,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6067.21,
"text": " You can probably do better than Aristotle in the physical sciences. Yeah, it's a myth that Aristotle thought that heavier bodies fall faster. No, it's not. No, I read his writings. No, it's mistranslated. Oh, no, no, no. Excuse me. No, I have his writings. No, no. OK, it says. Well, I'll tell you, he's talking about terminal velocity versus another kind of velocity, and it just gets translated as all saying velocity. And then there's something else. That's not what I it's not what I read. What I read was"
},
{
"end_time": 6123.814,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6097.585,
"text": " I'm paraphrasing, but the sense of it was heavier objects will fall faster than lighter objects in proportion to how heavy they are. That statement was made by Aristotle and that is not purely related to terminal velocity. That's somebody who never did the experiment. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 6152.21,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6124.445,
"text": " Well, I don't believe you that I don't understand what he meant in that sentence or in that in that part. Maybe he wrote different things in other places. OK, but I can't say I've read all of Aristotle. All right. But what I did read included that that phrase. You try to defend him and that just he's dead. Don't worry about it. Yeah, well, I will. And I gotta go. I can't. I gotta I gotta."
},
{
"end_time": 6180.077,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6152.79,
"text": " Oh, you want to do some AI right now? Yeah. Anyway, I'll send you a video about that because this is by Richard Borchards. A video about what? About Aristotle and the and the misquotes and the mistranslations that make him sound foolish when when he was no fool and he wouldn't make a simple mistake like that. And he also did experimental science and like a super early form of it. OK, if I'm wrong, I want to know that I'm wrong. Yeah. OK, so if you send me this video. Sure. And I'll compare it to the writings that I have of his."
},
{
"end_time": 6208.677,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6180.452,
"text": " I didn't read the original Greek. So I am reading a translation, but there's no way I can see terminal velocity being relevant to that translation. But if I'm wrong, I will correct it. And in any occasion where I might have said something about it, I will say that I was wrong. And I could be wrong and I'm likely wrong because I'm wrong about almost everything I say so."
},
{
"end_time": 6218.951,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6209.582,
"text": " But I just know that there's an Aristotle fan club where he can do no wrong in their eyes and that comes along with a certain bias manifests. I've seen that."
},
{
"end_time": 6240.145,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6219.411,
"text": " If we think Aristotle made a statement that an eight-year-old can see us wrong in three seconds, then just maybe Aristotle didn't actually make that statement or maybe we misunderstood or something. Not only is it stupid to believe that freely falling bodies fall at a speed proportional to their weight,"
},
{
"end_time": 6269.224,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6240.674,
"text": " But it's also stupid to believe that Aristotle thought this. The idea that Aristotle made this claim is just nonsense. It's a problem of mistranslation. The words that Aristotle used, like speed or force, don't have exactly the same meanings to Aristotle as they do to us. I know this is an odd question, and I didn't have a specific one planned. I didn't actually think we would get this far, but I wanted to hear. I know that you believe that there is fear mongering over AI. I don't believe anything."
},
{
"end_time": 6294.121,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6269.718,
"text": " Do you believe you don't believe anything? I mean this in a nice way Neil."
},
{
"end_time": 6323.353,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6294.326,
"text": " I think that means that you don't have an understanding of, well, I don't know, that sounds mean. What I was going to say is that- Be mean. You could be mean. Everyone, including me and you, are irrational and act based on social cues and unconscious primers to the core to suggest that you don't have beliefs or that all of your information is rationally evaluated before being accepted as more a demonstration of a lack of self-awareness than deduction. And I mean that kind of- No, no, no, no. I didn't say I'd have- All I said was, what I think is true is measured by"
},
{
"end_time": 6352.295,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6323.643,
"text": " the evidence and support of it. And to the extent that there's less evidence, I will have less confidence in it being true. I don't like using the word belief in that context because belief means something in our modern culture. Belief is often religious and there's a thing that you believe is true in the absence of evidence. I don't run around in the absence of evidence saying things are true, such as what is prevalent in"
},
{
"end_time": 6376.357,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6352.432,
"text": " almost every religion in the world and some other and some cults and some other belief systems. So that's why I don't say what I believe. It's not a thing. It's not, I don't speak with that word. Or you say like, what is the word you use and replace in place of that? In place of what? Belief. Like I don't believe the earth. I've never said that. I don't, I don't construct sentences like that. That's not how I say the earth is."
},
{
"end_time": 6406.288,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6376.63,
"text": " Yes, if we know it, I'll say what it is. If we don't know it, we'll say we think it's this, but we're not sure. We have top people working on it. OK, is there a multiverse? Maybe we don't know. We don't have evidence. We have top people working on it. It's a natural consequence of general relativity and quantum physics applied in the early universe. So we'll see how that develops. That's an entire sentence without using the word believe. It's not about belief. Not in the way the word is"
},
{
"end_time": 6435.469,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6406.732,
"text": " presently used in modern parlance. Do you believe that the current tenor about AI is fear-mongering and if so, what about it is? The phrase fear-mongering often means that it's overblown and so I"
},
{
"end_time": 6465.538,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6435.657,
"text": " I think the people who are sounding the call deeply believe what they're saying. So they're not mongering in that sense, fear of mongering, if I understand the word mongering. So sure, I believe that they believe that. I don't agree with the extent to which they predict apocalypse from AI based on my own life experience, interacting with computers, thinking about the problem."
},
{
"end_time": 6493.848,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6466.169,
"text": " So my take on it is softer than theirs. But a warning about an apocalyptic future can never be bad if it sensitizes you to what could go wrong. Such as, did I say earlier? I don't remember the quote from Ray Bradbury when one of his fans came up and said, why do you write"
},
{
"end_time": 6519.94,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6494.582,
"text": " future sci-fi stories that depict apocalypse. Is that what you think the future of civilization will be? And he says, no, I write about it so that you know, to avoid it. All right. I like that. So I'll warn you about an asteroid that has a one in a million chance of striking. And I'll give a very detailed description of what would happen to earth were that to occur."
},
{
"end_time": 6537.142,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6520.623,
"text": " Am I fear mongering? I'll say it's only one in a million chance, but what kind of chance do you want to take? You bet on the lottery with a lesser chance than that, that you'll win. You freely hand money to the state. So I'll make some comparisons of risks, but"
},
{
"end_time": 6567.739,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6538.029,
"text": " It's my duty to tell people, because I know the parameters of the risk of asteroid strikes being an astrophysicist. So in that sense, yeah, I'd be warning people. Climate change people are giving the warnings. You give the most dire warnings. And one of the big problems there is what was originally considered dire are now becoming more mainstream in the pace at which climate is changing and not in our favor."
},
{
"end_time": 6594.241,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6568.695,
"text": " Yeah, I don't think they think they're mongering. But personally, I think we're not necessarily headed on that path. But it's a warning shot across our bow. And I think it should be heated. Okay, that's good to know. So you know how NASA or I think it's NASA, you could tell me it observes the sky to see to rule out asteroids of a certain size. There was a there's this there was an asteroid search program to catalog all asteroids"
},
{
"end_time": 6621.783,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6594.684,
"text": " greater than a kilometer and then greater than a hundred meters. So it's much harder, the smaller they get, they're not as bright. And, but there are many more of them. So the total risk can even be higher from the smaller ones than from the larger ones. But yes. What I wanted to know is does that bound keep lowering every five years or so? You know, there's Moore's law for computing, like is there something similar for we're able to now detect half a kilometer?"
},
{
"end_time": 6651.374,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6622.329,
"text": " And now 10 years later, we'll be able to detect half of that 10 years. So it's a little yes, but it's a little more subtle than that. It's it's we can already detect asteroids that small. The question is how complete is the catalog of them? And there are ways to make that estimate. But so it's not so much a detection limit as a completeness limit. And so, yeah, I don't know what we're down to now, but I do know that this latest telescope that comes online, I think"
},
{
"end_time": 6673.029,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6651.613,
"text": " Later this year, if not already, the Vera Rubin Space Telescope, originally named the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, that is exquisitely conceived and designed to detect asteroids. Because it basically takes a movie of the night sky every night. And you need more than one image to see if something's moving."
},
{
"end_time": 6699.94,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6673.66,
"text": " so a movie you see anything that's moving and a big challenge there are all of these satellites that are getting launched especially starlink and others they're just completely contaminating the sky and you don't want things contaminating what could be the detection of an asteroid because you missed it because there is a can you just send out your satellite no this tells what is huge no no no it's on the earth is huge yeah it's on earth yeah it's huge it's it's it's going to image"
},
{
"end_time": 6725.418,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6700.538,
"text": " I forgot the numbers, something like half the sky every night or something. And then repeat that. And then there's some AI that goes in and decides whether something is interesting, something has changed. It forms another telescope to follow up on it. So there's a lot of automation involved here that we've learned how to master over recent decades. But that's a telescope that could bring that limit lower."
},
{
"end_time": 6747.858,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6726.442,
"text": " OK, we'll end on a question of probability. What number do you assign that those blurry objects are indeed? Aliens or something out of this world, let's just say. That there's something extraterrestrial, yeah, I would say. Not a probability guy, but I would say."
},
{
"end_time": 6768.78,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6750.913,
"text": " Less than. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can grab last second movie tickets in 5D Premium Ultra with popcorn. Extra large popcorn."
},
{
"end_time": 6800.452,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6772.381,
"text": " I would say less than one one hundred thousandth of one percent. OK, so I'm OK. And where do I get that number? There's surely"
},
{
"end_time": 6831.032,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6801.101,
"text": " a millions of sightings of these things and I don't I'm not convinced that any of them are aliens and so my percent has to be lower than that right so I'm actually coming up calculating what number this would be so I have to be lower than all the sightings that have been reported and all because I don't I don't think any of those are aliens I find it highly unlikely that they are I should say and so is it one hundred thousandth of one percent so that's"
},
{
"end_time": 6859.855,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6831.51,
"text": " um, one out of 10 million chance. It's extraterrestrial. So what would convince you that it was extraterrestrial? You show aliens, bring out the alien, bring out the space, put it in town square. Okay. Have people high resolution. I could give a whole list. Okay. Okay. Okay. I can give an entire list. Oh, by the way, video, because, because AI can make deep fake video."
},
{
"end_time": 6885.896,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6860.299,
"text": " It's gonna video of aliens will be a starting point, but not an ending point as evidence for aliens, just because of the capacity to make a deep fake and that we have Hollywood, you know, over on the West Coast. So I would I would say artifacts of alien manufacture. Yes. Or the alien itself. Yeah. Yeah. So then that means that if I was to say, Hey, Neil, you put up"
},
{
"end_time": 6913.251,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6886.681,
"text": " $100,000. I will put up $10 because then that means you have drastic, drastic, drastic odds in your favor. If it's one hundredth of one percent, then my $10 to your $100,000. Yeah, my numbers are. Yeah, it's still it's still steep. It's still you're in the right zone. Yes. OK. You're getting a 10 to one if not"
},
{
"end_time": 6941.561,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6913.899,
"text": " 1000 to one return. So if I was to put up $50, I'll say I'll put up $50 over the next 15 years to your $100,000. That should be a bet that you're like, I will sign it right now. Let's do it, brother. That would mean if we find alien if well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You want me to bet against future. I'm betting against what we've already seen that these are different things."
},
{
"end_time": 6969.292,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6942.227,
"text": " Okay, fine. Then what we've seen gets revealed to be aliens. Okay. Yeah. So that's where my statistic comes from. The chances that so now, so now you want 100,000 to 50,000 to 50. Sure. So that would mean that if it's aliens, I would say 100,000 to 50. But okay, that means if it's aliens, I give you $100,000. Yes. If it's not aliens, you give me $50. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 6997.79,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6970.043,
"text": " And that should still be wildly wildly in your favor. Yeah, but I don't I don't bet money. I don't bet. It's not what I do. Do you know that the American Physical Society had a meeting in Las Vegas? Sorry, they were going to meet in San Diego, but there's a hotel snafu. This is the world's physicist, the country's physicist. So MGM Grand said, we'll take you the MGM Marina Hotel. It was at the time in the 80s. And so they all go to Vegas. Three thousand, four thousand physicists."
},
{
"end_time": 7024.497,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6998.131,
"text": " At the end of the week, there was a newspaper headline, physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. Just don't bet when you know statistics. But you're saying I should bet because it's in my favor. That's drastically a thousand times in your favor. Yeah, I don't put money on it. I'm not a money guy in that way."
},
{
"end_time": 7055.486,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7025.657,
"text": " All right, Neil, Neil, what are you working on next? Where can we find out? Why don't we make this if you want to do this officially? How about this? How about this? Just because it's it's all in fun, right? So we shouldn't change each other's lifestyles on the bed. So how about this? Is it within the next 10 years, something that has already been cited? Show turns out to be alien. OK, I'll give you one hundred dollars."
},
{
"end_time": 7085.794,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7056.476,
"text": " If it's not, you give me a penny. How about that? All right, but with inflation. It's a ratio. What are you talking about? It's a rate. It's a ratio. Okay, so my pennied with inflation then, and you're 100 with inflation. No, it's just a ratio. That's all which capturing here. Inflation keeps the same ratio. What's the difference? I mean, it's a ratio bet $100 to a penny. That's a ratio of 10,000. Correct? Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7115.196,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7086.067,
"text": " That's 10. No, no. Is that right? 100,000. No, that's 10,000. 100 times 100 is 10,000. Right. $100 is 10,000 times more than a penny. Yeah. Okay. I'll give you a penny if there's actual aliens and that knowledge would be way greater than a penny's worth. Of course. You mean you'll give me a hundred by. No, no. Sorry. Sorry. I give you a hundred. No, no. No, I give you a hundred. You give me a penny. Yes. I said it backwards. There you go. Okay. Within how much time?"
},
{
"end_time": 7145.828,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7116.032,
"text": " Within 10 years and we have to allow like it has to be asterisked with that. Something new may be revealed and we can always bicker and say, yeah, but that's totally new. But then several people will be like, no, it has to be about something that's already been spotted. It has to be about the history of all observations of crazy things in the sky. All right, whatever. We'll work out the details. Our lawyers will speak to each other. The lawyers cost more than the value of this bet."
},
{
"end_time": 7175.828,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7146.237,
"text": " Right. All right, man. It was great talking with you. And again, where can people find out more about you and what are you working on next? And what are you excited about working on next? Just my website, Neil deGrasse Tyson dot com. And all my stuff is there in my postings and on and on and on on social media. It's Neil deGrasse Tyson everywhere except Twitter, where where space is a premium. So there's just Neil Tyson there on Twitter. I'm pretty I'm relatively active in that space. And my podcast Star Talk."
},
{
"end_time": 7204.445,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7176.34,
"text": " It brings the science down to earth. Whoever will listen, we have comedy. There's a comedic element to it. There's pop culture. She's one of fun learning science. It's a good place. What are you exploring next on that podcast that you're most excited about? Oh, no, no, it's just every episode is different. And it's not some theme thing that runs multiple episodes. It gets pretty random. We spoke with an AI person about"
},
{
"end_time": 7233.08,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7205.23,
"text": " Okay, Neil, thank you. And I appreciate how cordial you were despite the contentious nature. I hope you detect that I come from a good place. And honestly, I'm having fun when you get angry."
},
{
"end_time": 7247.995,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7233.319,
"text": " I'm not angry. I'm just I'm emoting. I'm passionate is the word. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm having I'm never angry about any of this. I have my own fervor when you get passionate. So okay, I appreciate it. And all right, and we'll talk again. Take it like that. Thanks. Bye."
},
{
"end_time": 7274.36,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7248.251,
"text": " Thank you for watching this two hour or almost two and a half hour, maybe more length of a podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. I assume you have as you're watching all the way till the end. I always leave podcasts without commentary. I just post it up as is, but I thought I'd close with some clarification. It was a bit difficult because we both felt as if the other was putting words in the other's mouth. And that's my fault. Number one, because I should be more careful with the words that I speak."
},
{
"end_time": 7292.415,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7274.36,
"text": " Number two, and I have some notes here, I didn't get to state this,"
},
{
"end_time": 7321.254,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7292.415,
"text": " as it's a bit tricky to do so you may not know this but Neil is a Titan and it's extremely arduous to get a word in because unless I'm gonna mute his microphone it's just extremely tough so the point I wanted to say that I don't think I got across is that there are people who come forward with claims of being a whistleblower and they have zero tangible evidence other than their word and perhaps the title that is their employment history but sometimes we believe them because it comports with what else we believe for instance if someone comes out"
},
{
"end_time": 7341.323,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7321.254,
"text": " From facebook and says that there's some improprieties there for reasons x y and z and that they were a part of some committee where this was revealed but they have zero evidence we're more inclined to believe them because it's something that's ordinary we expect that from facebook it's not extraordinary and then there's this phrase that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
},
{
"end_time": 7359.087,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7341.323,
"text": " Which is actually somewhat debunkable because it's not as if there's a separate class of evidence called extraordinary evidence. Let me just get my extraordinary evidence now. Brian Keating talks about this. Regardless, the statement on Neil's part is that he wants people who are making large claims to come forward with evidence. And I'd like that as well. You would like that as well."
},
{
"end_time": 7379.497,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7359.087,
"text": " We don't imagine"
},
{
"end_time": 7400.282,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7379.497,
"text": " Other people won't come forward, so it's a nurse crop issue. The people who are providing no evidence but plenty of claims, along with perhaps an employment record to go along with it, are doing so in part so that others can come forward and in doing so engendering the conditions where others can come forward with evidence or so that the body politic can petition for said evidence."
},
{
"end_time": 7429.531,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7400.282,
"text": " When people like Neil make some glib and disparaging remarks like, hey, why don't you film your abduction? They squash that nurse crop in the bud, making it less likely that people will come forward. And by the way, this isn't an exclusively UFO issue. It's an issue that characterizes grave situations in general, whether it's abuse or trafficking. So if Neil indeed wants to know about the evidence for UFOs, like I've heard him say that he'd be the first in line to want that evidence about aliens. Firstly, I don't believe that. I'm sorry."
},
{
"end_time": 7444.65,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7429.531,
"text": " Once you put a stake in the ground against some result, almost none of us are eager to contravene our former self, especially not publicly."
},
{
"end_time": 7459.667,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7444.65,
"text": " with regard to saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 7483.456,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7459.667,
"text": " However, in Neil's defense, Neil has frequently said, go ahead, search for the evidence. In fact, I think way more money, way more money should be given to the search for extraterrestrial life. Whether it's the Galileo project, whether it's some other project, whether it's SETI, Neil is in favor of allocating money toward that issue. Those clips don't go viral. And this means it's my bias that I see those"
},
{
"end_time": 7513.37,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7483.456,
"text": " Inimical clips of him with sarcasm and that needs to be known firstly I need to say it more to myself just to believe it because I haven't seen many of those clips but also to you because I'm sure you haven't seen them as the algorithm just doesn't feed them again to reiterate Neil is in favor of more money being given to uncover the truth about UAPs anyhow thank you for watching I hope you have a great day I hope you continue to have a great day and that you have a great sleep if this is near nighttime good day or good night whenever you're hearing this thank you take care"
},
{
"end_time": 7538.763,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7514.377,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toes."
},
{
"end_time": 7556.647,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7538.763,
"text": " Links to both are in the description. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well."
},
{
"end_time": 7581.92,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7556.903,
"text": " Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on every one of the audio platforms, just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from re-watching lectures and podcasts and I read that in the comments, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying, so how about instead re-listening on those platforms? iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use."
},
{
"end_time": 7606.8,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7581.92,
"text": " If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash curtjymungle and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well. For instance, this episode was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough."
}
]
}No transcript available.