Smart Girl Dumb Questions: Neil DeGrasse Tyson on “Are We Living in a Simulation?”
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The NBC Nightly News. Legacy isn't handed down. We're NBC News. I'm Tom Brokaw. We hope to see you back here. I'm Lester Holt. It's carried forward. Tom Yarmouth is there for us. Firefighters are still working around the clock. As the world changes, we look for what endures. We are coming on the air with breaking news right now. We look for a constant. And from one era to the next, trust in the future.

is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas. Evenings on NBC. Hey everybody, I'm Joe McCormick of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Today, we want to play you an episode of a new show called Smart Girl, Dumb Questions, hosted by journalist Naima Raza.

Each Friday, she unpacks complex ideas by asking simple questions to big thinkers. This one is with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. They talk about dimensions, wormholes, time travel, and Rick and Morty. So enjoy the episode, and you can find more episodes of Smart Girl, Dumb Questions, wherever you get your podcasts. There was an asteroid.

set to meet the Earth in the year 2032. But that's put very politely. Yes. To meet the Earth. Generally, they collide, but we can say meet and greet the Earth. The press ran with the fact that the likelihood of it hitting Earth went up briefly from like 1% to 3%. That was it? Yeah.

Oh, you know, I didn't clickbait in the news. But 1% is not that different from 3%, so you're saying it still might happen. Well, it's one-third, and then it went. Yeah. I feel like it's a very binary situation, this meeting of Earth and the asteroid. Well, the value of that news cycle is people were trained to follow the scientific progress on the number. Okay. And that's an important thing.

that the public should be interacting with the moving frontier of science. I'm happy that we went through that episode. Right. Because that will happen more frequently going forward. Okay. We have better data, better telescopes to see asteroids of that size in that way. Yeah. Previously, we wouldn't have even known the difference between the zero and the 1%, kind of, right? We wouldn't have even known it was there. We might have known it was there, but when it was much closer. Like Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck close. Well, don't get me started on Armageddon. That movie...

more laws of physics per minute than any other science fiction movie ever. Plus, an asteroid the size of Texas we would have discovered 200 years ago. That's the good thing about asteroids that might kill us. Right. If I may, they are the largest and easiest to detect. Smart girl. Dumb questions.

Hi, welcome to Smart Girl Dumb Questions. I'm Naeem Araza, your smart girl with the dumb questions. And that, telling me the good thing about the asteroids that might kill us, that they're larger and easier to detect, is Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's an astrophysicist, a science communicator, an educator, the director of Hayden Planetarium here in New York, and he's also the director of the Hayden Planetarium here in New York.

and someone whose job it is to help make sense of the universe, really, for people like me who just don't get it all the time. Neil has written several bestselling books, including Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and Merlin's Tour of the Universe. And I was so excited to talk to Neil because of all the things that I'm dumb about, science really tops the list. Like,

I took biology in school, but I couldn't look when the frog got dissected. And I took chemistry, but all I remember is kind of honk, like hydrogen bonds once and oxygen bonds twice and nitrogen bonds three times. And oh my God, I cannot believe I am even telling you this on a podcast. So my dumb question for Neil deGrasse Tyson was, are we living in a simulation? Like

is this whole universe a simulation? But before we got there, I had to understand what the universe was. And we started small, like twinkle, twinkle, little star small. And we worked our way up into galaxies and universes and multiverses and aliens and this idea of wormholes, which maybe allow you to cross through space-time. That blew my mind. Here's my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. ♪

So I want to start with the building blocks, the stars. I'm your servant in this interview. You're not anyone's servant, Neil. I'm a servant of your curiosity. And by the way, it's not for you to judge whether you're asking a dumb question. Okay. Oh, you want to challenge the whole premise of my show? Wait, what? It's whether I give a dumb answer. The dumbness is in the eye of the answer? Yes. Because an educator should be sensitive to how...

a person's tangled mental pathways might be interpreting the world. And then that one gurgles up as a question, then I deeply care about how you thought about the world. And that puts the onus on me to figure out a way to respond to

such that what I share with you is received by your learning receptors. - Are you untangling me or are you just sending it down the tangled pipes? - Both. - Oh, excellent. - I don't mind navigating a tangled path. Sometimes I'm a badly tangled from life, right? And so you gotta navigate that. - At the end of this, I would like an assessment of how tangled I am compared to the most tangled person you've come across. - In fact, when I post on social media and I see the comment thread, I take that as a neurosynaptic snapshot

of how people think

About words I've used, phrases I've offered, content I've delivered. If I think I post a tweet, let's say, and if I think it's funny and no one laughs, it's not funny. It's not funny. It's like your own personal fMRI of all of America or all of the world. Very good. Yeah. It's a social media fMRI. Okay, twinkle, twinkle, little star. I was at a roller skating rink the other day, Neil. That's a thing? That's a thing. Okay. It was a roller skating disco. I was...

Told by somebody there that when you see a star, you look at the star, that star is so far away, both in distance and time, that the light I am seeing from that star means that the star may not even be there anymore. Is that correct? Oh, I can tell by your eyes that this person is incorrect. So you learned this at a disco roller skating rink. Yes, where all great scientists assumed. Great wisdom of the world is dispersed. It's completely correct.

but misleading, all right? So because it takes light time to travel between any two points, the world you see is not as it is, but as it once was when the light from that object left.

en route to your retina. I see you right now, not as you are, but as you were four billionths of a second ago. Now, I'm not going to then say, I wonder if she's still alive, because four billionths of a second is small compared with your life expectancy. So too it is with stars. There's stars that are thousands of light years away. Yes, it could have died, but stars live

billions, and in some cases, trillions of years. So a thousand-year delay, you're not going to catch it in the last thousand years of its life. Now, of course, some stars do explode and die, but at a rate of maybe...

per century per galaxy. How long does it take us to know with the telescopes and whatnot? The information about the death of the star is en route through space. So let's take the sun. Right. If someone plucked the sun out of the middle of the solar system, you wouldn't know for 8 minutes and 20 seconds. Because that's how far? Correct.

Correct. We'd still feel the gravity. We'd still orbit, even though there's nothing there. Right. We'd still do it. Well, you wouldn't know there's nothing there. So eight minutes and 20 seconds go by, and then we plunge into darkness. The temperature of the Earth descends, and we fly off at a tangent, lost in interstellar space. That's the first page of your book. This is like what happens if the Earth were to stop rotating. And your answer is to pin yourself down unless you want to go at, what is it, 800 miles per hour or something.

I mean, my mind is broken by your book. That's a good thing. Then you reassemble it into the long story.

Laws of physics that guide the universe. At the roller skating rink. Apparently. Back to the building blocks. Okay. You want to start at the beginning of the universe. No, I don't want to start at the universe because the universe is expanding. So if we start at the beginning, by the time we finish, it will be even bigger than we could get to. Okay. You can look in telescopes. You can see what's happening out there. We cannot see the Big Bang. That's correct. But for reasons that are not obvious. But yeah. Yeah. We see the afterglow of the Big Bang.

We see the afterglow, correct. So what are the reasons that are not obvious? Because the afterglow is a barrier. The light can't pass through that afterglow. It's opaque to light. And there's no technology that we're developing to try to see? It's not using light. Before the universe had this opaque barrier, it was active in ways that we have some telescopes that can see through the barrier to those early times.

And so one of them is gravitational waves. Do we know what happened before the Big Bang? No, but we have ideas. Do we know that something for sure happened before the Big Bang? Is it possible that the Big Bang was— We don't know for sure, but we have ideas. What are the ideas? Our universe is a natural expression of a larger entity called a multiverse that's making universes forever.

And there could be an infinite number of multiverses. All that does is move the question earlier. Right. Where do we get the multiverse from? Right. Where did that start? Right. So this is a big challenge with origins questions. Mm-hmm. Because the origin of something typically, if it's singular, you can't compare it to the origin of something else. However, let's look back in time. The origin of the Earth. Mm-hmm.

People say, "Oh, we'll never know the origin of the Earth because you can't go back in time." This was lobbed against astronomers centuries ago. Until we have telescopes that look at other star systems being born, and you can see them making planets. So now I have comparisons. And I say, "Oh, that must be how our planet got made. These are planets around a star that looks just like ours." And when it's not singular, you can compare and contrast. We found galaxies being born. So now our galaxy is not the whole thing.

We only have one universe. We don't know how it was formed, but maybe there are other universes that we can compare it to. Do you have a hunch? Or is that not a thing? I'm going with the multiverse. It feels right and it looks good coming out of the equations. We're not just pulling it out of our ass. The equations give us the multiverse. Okay. Yeah. And all of this is

of this is like rooted in math. Yeah. Well, it's served by math, I should say. It's rooted in what the universe really is, whatever that is. And we invent math, and it's one of the great miracles of science that this invention we call math has anything at all to do with the universe that we didn't invent. It's like our language for trying to understand the universe is math, is that? Math is the language of the universe. The way

Spanish is the language of Spain. Well, this is great because I interviewed two 11-year-olds recently, and they said they feel everything they learn is not useful. The problem is when we're in school, the expectation is that what you learn is what will be useful to you later. That implies that the only way we function is by applying discrete knowledge to discrete problems. But no, most of the ways you function are

is you're applying wisdom and insight to a problem you've never seen before. And where does that wisdom and insight come from? The collection of all of the things you learned, yes, but also all the ways you learned. You wrote a term paper on Julius Caesar. Well, you had to research that. These are methods, tools, and tactics. Didn't even matter that it was about Julius Caesar, that you had to go through that exercise to arrive at that term paper. Right.

And that is the exercise that you carry forth. Math and physics are the embodiment of a new kind of brain wiring that teaches you not just what to know about the universe, but how to think. How to think about knowing it, even. Correct. Yeah. And that's good news. I did tell them that the process by which they were learning was going to be invaluable. But I didn't get to wisdom and insight. But I like that distinction. Yeah, there's knowledge, wisdom, and insight. Yeah. And they're more refined versions of themselves. Yeah.

And also, you can learn this and learn that and learn this, and then later on in life see a connection that no one else did. One could define genius in just that way. A genius is a person who sees what everyone else sees and thinks what no one else has thought. Do you think you're a genius? Other than in that phrase, I never use the word. It's a label. And when you start labeling people, it's...

shorthand for I don't need to know anything more about you. Because I've given you this label, I know everything I need to know about you, so I don't even have to have a conversation. So I'm just anti-label. So big bang happens.

Before the Big Bang, it's possible. We don't know exactly what happened, but it's possible that there are these multiverses. No, a multiverse. A multiverse, sorry. Cranking out universes such as ours. Yes. And so there could be infinite universes. Yeah. Do we exist in other universes? Well, it depends on what you mean by that. There would likely, if this model is accurate, then there are enough universes so that there's an entire universe.

universe where all events are playing out exactly as they are in this universe. Or, you know, we're having this conversation except I'm the interviewer and you're the subject. But if all variations are possible, that means a duplicate of what's happening here exists in at least one of those universes. So now to say, do we exist in those universes?

It's tempting to write a sci-fi novel about that. We've already done the experiments with clones. Do you know what that experiment is? No. They're called twins. Oh, twins, yes. Genetically identical, but you're not the same person. So put your twin in another universe. Yeah. They're not you. Yeah. So get over yourself. So if we know all of this, we can see...

We can see stars. We can see the afterglow of the Big Bang. Why can we not travel to that? It's long gone. It's long gone, but we can time travel. You have to travel backwards in time. You'd put the future that created you at risk. You'd muddle the whole creation. Yeah, if you went back in time and accidentally prevented your parents from meeting each other... Yes, you would not exist. You would not exist to go back in time and prevent your parents from meeting each other. Or, as was indicated in at least one sci-fi story...

If you disrupt their act of lovemaking by 10 minutes, not disrupt, if you delay by 10 minutes, some other gammy would have been made, not the one that made you. It'll probably be the same egg, but definitely a different sperm. So the risks, now Stephen Hawking, concerned about these very same risks, proposed what he calls the time travel conjecture, which is we will one day discover a law of physics that prevents backwards time travel.

because of all of these problems.

that are inherent in doing so. What is time? In the sequel to this Merlin book, Merlin answers that with a, so I can say just wait till the book comes out. So Einstein suggested that time is defined to make motion look simple. So that's an interesting- So time is defined to make motion, so time is designed to make sense of space? Yes, that's a good way to think about it. But beyond that, there is no measurement of time without an event that repeats itself.

By the way, Astro Folk, we're the time people. Yeah. Just...

All your fundamental measures of time come from us. There's the day. Yeah. There's the moons. Then there's the time. Time it takes to orbit. To orbit. That's a year. I'm excited for the sequel to your book, Merlin's Tour of the Universe, which is a great book. It's called Just Visiting This Planet. Just Visiting This Planet. Okay. I'm very excited. It's not going to come out until the fall. Read very few physicists. But the other one is Carlo Rovelli. Do you know Carlo Rovelli? Mm-hmm. Very accessible. Very accessible. He wrote the seven brief lessons on physics in his Guardian articles. You guys, that's not like Kanye Drake.

There's like strama, right? I've had people write to me and say, because I have the book Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Yeah. And when I titled it, I said, I'm not going to use the word brief. It's too, it's out there. Yeah. And many books that have the word brief are very successful. Yeah. A Brief History of Time is Stephen Hawking. Yes, of course. The number one selling science book of all time. So I said, I'm not going to use brief. Someone wrote to me and said, this is...

I think you owe Rovelli an apology for copying it. I was like, what, what? Then I said, do you have any idea how long it takes to produce a book? To call it brief would be ridiculous. It's not a brief book because it's,

The brevity is in the eye of the reader. And I think that actually a lot of these books, yours included, take time to read. Yeah. Because they require you, require me in my experience. To think and then to go back and think about all the things that I have to unthink to think this thing. That can happen sometimes. Right. Deal with it. Yeah. I mean, I'm glad to. There's one of the chapters in it and he talks about

In the Rovellis book. In the Rovelli book. And he talks about twins. The twin paradox? The twin paradox, exactly. There's one twin living on a beach and one twin living in a mountain at altitude. And those twins will age differently. They're in different fields of gravity. The one on the mountain will see the one in the valley age more slowly and vice versa. And the one in the valley will see the one in the mountain age more quickly. That is because of the way that time bends. Yes. Exactly.

Explain it, though. I mean, is this a wickable? Is this a dumb question? I don't know. No, no, no, no, no. It's time and space are conjoined. Yeah. And gravity is the distortion of time and space. And the way it distorts time is that it slows down time as you get near it. And time speeds up as you get far away. Okay. So...

We have equations that guide you in understanding that. You can calculate how much time you would lose or gain. Is this an anti-aging method that you could go to a valley and time would move slower? Yeah, except if you did this, in the limit you go near a black hole and time really slows down for you. This was portrayed in the movie Interstellar where they're gone for 20 minutes and the guy was 20 years older, had gray hair and everything. So he was waiting for them to come back off of their...

time-distorted coordinate system. I saw this conversation you were having with your friend Brian Green. Friend and colleague. And your mind was blown by something he had said to you over lunch, which was around whether or not wormholes

were a structure kind of for space-time. - Yeah, yeah, you remember that correctly. - Yeah, and then there's a viral clip on TikTok and it ends with your other colleague saying, you know, it's time for some weed. - I need some weed. That was my co-host. - Your co-host, exactly. - Chuck Rice. - I just need a joint for this conversation or something like that. - Yeah, because it was entangled particles in the vacuum of space

If they're connected by wormholes, then wormholes may be the actual stitches in the fabric of space-time itself. Explain what a wormhole is. It's what you think it is. We're here in the now. Yeah. And then a wormhole opens up, you step through, and you're in a different time in a different place. So it is a mode of time travel a little bit. Yes, it would be. So I want to put research on wormholes, not rocket drives. So is there— I'll take a quick anecdote. Yeah. I was in the Charlotte airport. Okay.

and I have to go from a big plane to a little plane. And I swear I walked three miles. I hate that airport. It might have been only a half mile, but it felt like three miles. So I get to my destination and I thought I'd be clever geek. And I tweeted, can't wait until there's wormholes. That way all gates will be adjacent. So I thought that was good. Yeah, that's great. I like that. That's a quality geek tweet. And in this, by the way,

wherever you are on the geek spectrum, they're geekier people than you. Okay. And you can find them without wormholes, just on Twitter. It's infinite. In the thread, it says, Dr. Tyson, the day we have

wormholes, you won't need airports. - Whoa! - Yeah. - Just got out-geeked. - And you were just like, how would you move through a wormhole? Would you have to find that specific space-time moment to do it? - So I'm imagining, imagine a wormhole where you connect your wormhole between the back of your refrigerator and the grocer. It's all you need, more milk, and they just put the milk in. - But could you just create wormholes? - Ideally, we would make one. And you need a negative gravity force to prop it open, 'cause this naturally wants to collapse on itself.

And we don't know what would happen if you were in there and it collapsed while you were there. That would be weird. Yeah. Is your mind still blown by this wormhole idea? Yes, I would say. Less so than in the moment, but yeah. So a year later. Oh, yeah. I'm still thinking about it. You're still thinking about it. And you still think, we need to have research on wormholes for this reason. And is there a budget for wormhole research? No, no. We need...

We need negative gravity matter. And we don't have it. We don't have it. And are we close to having it? I don't think so. And is there, who writes the budgets for things like find, is there a line item in our government like find negative gravity matter? Right.

X billion dollars. We don't even know what it would be like or if it exists. Okay. Very quickly on horoscopes because to the point of people's tangled minds, I'm in the intersection of Venn diagram of people who have multiple degrees and read the Cosmo astrology page. Does that worry you about me? Only if you want it to become head of NASA. Okay. Otherwise, there are plenty of jobs for you in the world where you can read your horoscope and it

It won't matter at all. But when I read your book, I saw that you have taken my entire, my stars. I'm a Scorpio. Oh, you got to that part of the book. And you have taken away, Scorpio is no longer a month. It's like a week in your book and it doesn't include. Yeah, the universe did that, not me. Not you. Yeah. So how did that happen? Is that about time? It's about Earth on its axis. Earth is spinning, as we know. Yes. But it's also tipped. And if you ever played with tops, you might remember that they precess.

So they spin, but then they wobble. Wobble. Okay. So the earth wobbles. And that wobbling over 26,000 years shifts the correspondence of the constellation and the month associated with it. Yeah. And it shifts it through completely, a full 12 months. So every 2,000 years or so, the sun passes through a different constellation than the astrological charts would have you imagine.

So horoscopes are not real. There are many reasons for them not being real. That's among them. That's among them. Right. It's a hoax perpetrated on adults. So I shouldn't say hoax. Hoax implies that the people perpetrating it know that it's... Yeah, know that it's... Yeah, they're believers. I think they're believers. I think there are people who propagate this

who fully believe it. Yeah. And so then there's no real guilt there. And so there's no explanation for the fact that I, as a Scorpio, connect more, I believe, with cancer people. So I've seen descriptions of the Zodiac. Yes. Where it says these are 12 prominent constellations in the sky. You said you were what? Scorpio. You were Scorpio. And you connect with cancer people? Okay. I like to date cancer. Okay. Or sometimes Aries. Is that better or worse than any other dating app we might have? I don't know. But...

I just did the calculation before I came today. Oh. That the four brightest stars in the constellation Cancer are actually quite dim. And there may be as many as 500 stars brighter than the brightest star in the constellation Cancer, which makes it a dull, boring, and uninteresting constellation. So I should stop dating Cancer. You've just expanded my dating pool, Neil. That's great. Thank you for that service.

When it comes to dating, are my expectations keeping me single? I'm Naeem Araza, host of Smart Girl Dumb Questions, and this is the sponsored dumb question, brought to you by Tinder. So 40% of people who find dating difficult say that they can't meet someone who meets their expectations. But is the problem supply or demand? It's easy to build a checklist for what we want.

6'5", blue eyes, maybe some kind of specific zodiac sign. But researchers have found that people are really bad at knowing what they want or need. In fact, the science kind of sucks at it too. In one study, for example, researchers asked daters to identify their own traits and also identify the traits they were looking for in other people, i.e. their dating expectations. And then they ran it through this machine learning algorithm.

It turned out they could predict one-way attraction at around 20%. That is, who would be liked or who would like somebody. But when it came to two-way attraction, the algorithm was not good. Its success rate was less than 1%. Because it turns out the actual best predictor of compatibility is not your expectations, but your experiences. Now, of course, that doesn't mean you should throw all your expectations out the window.

Of course you deserve to date somebody that treats you well, that makes you feel safe. Yet a graduate degree may not be the best predictor of that. And it could be a good time to slide over that location filter or give that short king a second glance. Because when it comes to dating, our experiences are more important than our expectations. So the important thing is to actually start going on dates. And a great place to start dating is Tinder. It starts with a swipe. You can explore all the possibilities for yourself. Get Tinder today and start dating.

And wormholes. Would wormholes allow us... Did I finish explaining wormholes? No, I think we should go back a little bit. Yeah, yeah. So wormholes, yeah. You figure out a way to pry a pathway through space-time that connects two otherwise very distant parts. And when you do that, you just step through and you're in another place in time. The two most famous current ways that's done is...

In Doctor Strange in the Marvel universe. Yeah. And Rick and Morty in the cartoon universe. I'm not familiar with Rick and Morty. That means your audience is not geekified. Okay. It's a geek show. I mean, my audience might be. I might not be the best leading indicator of my audience. Didn't they want to be listening to you? You just lost. The Rick and Morty audience? You just lost the Rick and Morty faction. Rick has...

through space-time. Okay. And he goes to other universes, other galaxies, and half of those shows or more, he's interacting with other life forms that are brilliantly conceived to be different from us in ways that Hollywood couldn't

perennially fails at doing. All the aliens in Hollywood, it's got a head, two eyes, a nose, mouth, arms, legs. The ear is different or something like that. It's like a tweak. There's a little thing on the forehead. It's like, really? Really? Most life on Earth...

Looks nothing like humans. Yes. And we have DNA in common. Now you're going to bring something from another planet and it's going to walk and with a mouth, you know, come on. Such limited imagination. Exactly. So Rick and Morty have figured this out. Rick and Morty is unlimited imagination as it conceives of life forms. So these wormholes though, so these two conceptions of it. So he has a wormhole gun. Yeah. He shoots it and opens up a hole. Oh, so that's, okay, so you could find...

But it's not like a wormhole identifier. No, wormholes, they're not going to be naturally in the universe, no. Okay. They want to collapse on themselves. So you need negative gravity to pry them open, which we don't have. So wormholes, they wouldn't exist. We need negative gravity to create a worm. Negative gravity substance, right. Yeah, negative gravity substance to create and stabilize a wormhole. Because gravity brings space-time together. Yes. In a wormhole, you're prying it apart. Right. So you need the opposite of what gravity is to make that happen. That makes sense.

That was a very clarifying sentence, Neil. I'm tracking your tangled mental balance. That really helped me. Okay, so gravity brings it together. Okay, we just untangled one little bit there in your head. Okay. Okay. And negative gravity will suspend that and then allow you to pass. And then through a wormhole, you could go to other universes? In principle, but that could be dangerous because another universe might have slightly different laws of physics. Okay. And stepping into it, you'd collapse in a pile of goo because the forces—

The molecular forces might not comport. I could go to other galaxies? Oh, definitely. Definitely, galaxies are easier. Oh, yeah. Okay, and other dimensions. Other dimensions, we don't know how to go to other dimensions. And what is a dimension? It's interesting how we have such an intuitive understanding of dimensions, we never think about them. Have you imagined a future with flying cars?

Of course. Everybody does. Why would you want a flying car? Less traffic. Okay, good. Yeah. When you're out on the open road driving 70 miles an hour, are you saying, gee, I wish I had a flying car? No. No. You're only thinking about it near cities when you're in traffic and you've got a place to be. You just want to lift up and go. In the car, on the road, you are stuck in...

In two dimensions. Yeah. You can change lanes left and right. That's one dimension. And the other dimension is just forward and back. Right. So driving is a two-dimensional exercise. In a flying car, you enter a third dimension and bypass these hapless souls who don't have a flying car. Yeah. Okay. Are we together on that? We're together. Okay. So that's three dimensions. So let's remove the idea of a flying car and just say, when you want to bypass the traffic,

you want to go to another dimension to do so. In that regard, the New York City subway is a flying car. You're stuck in traffic. - It's a different dimension. - You go into another dimension, in this case it's down, not up, and there's all, there's-- - A whole other layer. - The whole entire transportation system that does not get stuck in that traffic.

That's a flying car. But I think the difference is I can see those dimensions, like the dimensions you're talking about. I'm warming you up. Okay, okay, good. Because you read horoscopes. I'm not that tangled. You read horoscopes. If I went straight there, this wouldn't have happened. Okay? I got to make sure we're on the same page. Okay, good, good. I don't believe they're real. I just read them. So this is easy to understand, correct? Uh-huh, yeah. We are on the same page. Mm-hmm. Okay. Let's go back to two dimensions.

I have a desk. Yeah. And I still have paper. Okay. So I lay paper out on the desk. Yeah. And then I run out of desk surface. So what do you do? Put it on the floor. I could. Yeah. Or. You can stack them on top of each other. Stack. That's a third dimension. Stacking is a third dimension. That's what you. Okay. Okay. Got it. So now watch. On my desk, I fit 16 sheets of paper, let's say. Yes. Let's say 20. Four by five. Now I can stack. Okay.

How many pages can I stack into the third dimension? As many as you want. Oh, bajillions! Yeah. Until I hit the ceiling. Right. Okay? Oh my gosh! Look at how much more room there is in three dimensions than there is in two dimensions. Of course. You got me? Yeah. Okay, so now we're in a room. The room is a three-dimensional room. And I put boxes in this room. Mm-hmm. Now the room is full. And someone, a hyper-dimensional being, says, just go into the fourth dimension.

And you can fit millions of boxes there. And I say, "Where is the fourth dimension?" It is at a perpendicular line to you. I already have my perpendicular lines. They trace the three dimensions of this space. We cannot conceive of what direction that fourth dimension is.

Any more than the ant can know what up is. Okay, so we're just ants. We're 3D ants. 3D ants. They're 2D ants. And there's some... Is there a 4D ant? Is it possible that people in the fourth dimension don't know? Or people, aliens, creatures? Here's what's really interesting, right? Yeah. If you're actually two dimensions, you have no thickness. So you would be this...

Flat. Flat membrane. And so anyone who sees you would only see your outer contours. Right. They'd have to cut you open and peel back your outer contour to see what's inside. So let's seal that back. We are three-dimensional people who are completely transparent to four-dimensional beings. You have an outer perimeter. We call it skin. Yes. Okay? Yeah. I would love to write a sci-fi story where the hospital is...

The surgery is a four-dimensional room. And you go in there, and the doctors remove the tumor. Yeah. They never cut you open to do so. Because it's just your flat. You're like a... They're accessing you through the fourth dimension. Ah.

So surgery, they just go in and pluck it out. Pluck it out. And there's no evidence of any. That would be good. When you start thinking about dimensions, it's a fascinating world. And you think there are infinite dimensions. There could be. Cosmologists say there might be 10 dimensions in which to embed everything they need to account for in the Big Bang and what follows it. But we can't see the other dimensions because they're

tightly curled up. The idea with the higher dimensions is that they might be there, but not entirely accessible to us. And it's possible that there's life on those other dimensions. I don't see why not. Yeah, why not? We can conceive of it. My last guest, Cleo Abram. Do you know Cleo Abram? She has a show called Huge If True on YouTube. And anyways, I end every show asking what the guest doesn't know about, what the guest is quote unquote dumb about.

And she asked, where are the aliens? I want to ask you about this because I feel every time I've seen you asked about aliens, this happens, what's happening in front of me right now. What? I'm listening for the question. What? What?

You're interpreting my face. I'm interpreting your face billionths of a second ago. I'm interpreting that, actually. Four billionths of a second. Four billionths of a second ago. But you seem to be skeptical about alien sightings, about UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena, or UFO sightings. I'm not skeptical of the sightings. I'm skeptical of how people interpret them. How do you think people interpret them? They think they're visiting aliens from outer space. And...

An account of people seeing aliens is more often than not an account of some lights in the sky behaving badly. It's the fact that 50 years ago, there was no end of accounts typically extracted via

hypnosis, no end of accounts of people having been abducted by aliens. In the era of the smartphone, those accounts have gone to zero. Really? Because you can film an encounter with aliens. Yes. It would go viral instantly. We have the ability to have proof now. Correct. So my skepticism is people's accounts. That's all. Are aliens real? Do aliens exist? We don't have evidence yet of them, but there's no reason to doubt it. If they were to visit, what would you be most embarrassed about?

them seeing on Earth. Well, I don't know what they would do. I can't think like a million. But there's a comic, I think it was in The New Yorker, which showed two cavemen facing each other in a cave. And one says to the other, I don't get it. My water is pure. The air is clear. All of our food is organic. Yet none of us lives past 30. Those are cavemen. Now let's go to 1840. Everything they ate was organic. Right.

The water ran pure. Half of everyone born was dead by 35. Fast forward to today. If you die before 90, your obituary is going to have to account for that somehow. Uh-huh. Not just old age. Not just old age. You're like, how did he die? Explain yourself. Explain yourself. Explain yourself. Explain yourself. And in the New York Times, for example, in the obituaries, I marked when they said,

started giving the cause of death for people over 80. So that meant we understood aging, we understood the death of someone who's old, and it's a reportable bit of information. Like I said, if you die before 80, people want to know why. 80? When 150, 170 years ago, it was half the people were dead by 35. So point is, today we live in a world where we have overvalued

the significance of the food we eat relative to what role science has played to increase our longevity. And what is the technology that has enabled us mostly to live longer? Sanitation, vaccines, preventive medicine, knowing what role exercise plays in your cardiovascular health. We have still a long way to go. When I was in seventh grade, I wrote a book report on Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth. So it was a Spanish explorer.

And I'm looking at it and I say, this is a full-grown adult. I was a geek kid since age nine. Yes. That's why I can have this thought. This is a full-grown adult. Were you non-geek before nine? I was just regular. Okay. Yeah. After nine, I got my geek groove. I'm reading it and I said, this is a full-grown adult who sails across an ocean believing that there's a fountain of

from which you drink and then you will live forever. And I thought to myself, what the fuck? How could, he's a grown man. Right. It's not a fairy tale. He's a grown man. How could he think this? And everybody thought that. Yeah. And so I was so disappointed.

In adults. Yeah, in grown-ups. But then I said, oh, that was 500 years ago. And now today, this one food is all you need to eat. Here's the miracle food. Here's a miracle drink. Don't do any of this. Do this one thing. And I said, this is Ponce de Leon all over again.

This is the secret to longevity. It wouldn't have to just be food. Do this. In fact, any ad on YouTube that has the word this in it, I don't click on it. Because they want to leave you dangling at the this. Right. You were missing this. The thing you're missing out on. This is irresistible clickbait. What I'm saying is maybe all of that will ultimately be shown to have an important impact.

on the edges. Yeah. But that's not what got us living two and three times longer than our great, great grandparents. Okay, aliens. Back to aliens. Back to aliens. Back to aliens. So here's my thing. Is it possible that the aliens are in a different dimension? Well, that would be a way for you to still say they're aliens with no possible evidence of their existence. Okay. Sure. By the way, do you think aliens speak math? Yeah.

- Yes. - Yes? - Yes. That's how you'd have to communicate with them. - That caveman New Yorker cartoon that you're talking about, you and meet Alien, Alien comes here, and you would say-- - Yeah, I would find ways to show symbol. If they see, you have to check what their retinue of senses are. If they hear but don't see, you need other ways to do this. And maybe they've seen a different wavelength of light. They could see infrared rather than visible. So you'd have to assess this. Then you work within their senses.

But it's definitely math. It's not English, no Espanol. It's definitely not any language on Earth. And now I feel bad about this. When the movie Arrival came, the government chose a physicist and a linguist to communicate with the alien. And I said, no, you want a cryptographer and an astrobiologist, not a linguist and a physicist. And then when I posted, I just felt bad. People thought you were anti-linguist. Literally.

linguists are hardly ever in movies. I know. I was like, why are you taking away? I have no shortage of astrophysicists in movies. Every space movie has an astrophysicist in there somewhere. And so then I felt bad casting shade. Yeah. It was their day in the sun. We got to send the right people in this circumstance. You don't want to send, I'm sorry linguists, but like we don't want to send the wrong person. Yeah, I don't need your culture. No. No. In 2020, I produced an interview with Elon Musk and he talked about how we needed to be a multi-

planetary space-faring civilization. Do we need to be a multi-planetary space-faring civilization? That makes very good newspaper headlines. Yeah. You'd expect that spoken of someone who's in the business of making rockets and launching things and sending people places. Yeah. So I'm not surprised by that. And that idea goes back some ways. Carl Sagan was a big fan of becoming a multi-planet species. So why would you do that?

Because you believe that there is some scarcity on this earth or some abundance to be had outside or some expansion of our population that requires it? Or more likely in those scenarios that...

It could put our species at risk if all our eggs were in one basket. Okay. And a killer asteroid comes or a virus or whatever. Okay. That's the main motivation. Other than just the exploration part of it. But you can go there, explore, and then come back. Right. You can go there and stay. A big driver there is that way we protect the species. Species, yeah. I have a way more practical view of the world.

Which is? I don't mind people thinking that. I just think it's a solution to a non-problem. Every scenario you come up with that can put life on Earth at risk, to solve it seems to me to be easier than terraforming Mars and shipping a billion people. Now, suppose we trash our environment. Yeah. And we need Earth 2.0. That's not an asteroid. Yeah, that's us doing it to ourselves. We're peeing in our own bathtub, right? Okay. Yeah.

This time pooping in their bathtub, right? Yeah. Okay. So why not that? If we have the power of geoengineering to turn Mars into Earth, then we have the power to turn Earth back into Earth. I can't think of a reason why we would have to do that. I can think of a hundred reasons why we would want to do it. But every reason that people give for...

having to do it, I don't find convincing. I want to do it because I like exploring. One of the reasons why we want to do it, and it feels sometimes imperative, is competition. Competition not just amongst species, but within our own species. We want to be in the moon before other countries are at the moon. We want to be at Mars before other countries are at Mars. We want to take up as much of Mars as we can. Territorial domination. It's a driver. It's a driver. Especially among men, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, yeah. I mean, it'd be interesting if we had more female leaders to see if they, too, would have those same incentives, actually, to do that. Yeah, a few really big ones in the past century have been just like men. Yeah, I was going to say, I think a lot of the things that we think are just male and female— Was it Margaret Thatcher? Right. Indira Gandhi? There's that book that's like, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, or whatever. It turns out that it's like power. Yeah.

I think those women succeeded because they were succeeding in a man's world and they have to be like a man to do so. Let's say you're in a traffic and someone cuts someone else off.

and then a person jumps out of the car and yells at the other person, there's a 99% chance that's a man. Not 100, but not New York necessarily, because it's a man's world in New York City. The funny thing is, to me, men like complaining about women's emotions and their hormones. We've spent centuries doing that without actually looking at ourselves and saying, how does testosterone manifest?

as a hormone on our behavior. How many bar fights break out between women versus men? Is that socialization or is it hormones? - Yeah. - We could say it's societal, I suppose. But this territorial thing? - Yeah. - This is not genderized, but just the idea that if aliens exist anywhere in the universe, how come they haven't visited? - Right. - Okay. You can do a calculation that if you visit other star systems, you figure out how to make rockets that can visit other star systems.

Even if it takes 100 years to get there, then you get there and you build a factory and you build two more ships and they go to two other sources and then they go to four. Give yourself a very relaxing time to make that happen. You could do it in 100 million years. The universe is billions of years old. Okay.

So if you run that calculation, you can say if aliens did it at all, they should have occupied every planet in the galaxy. Where are they? This is the famous Fermi paradox. An argument against the Fermi paradox is whatever urge you have to want to take control of a planet is self-limiting, as we say in physics.

Because you reach a point where, okay, now half the planets are going to... But now this urge is so strong, I want your planet. It self-destructs over time. It implodes. I want your planet, okay? And then they fight each other and the entire system implodes. And that actually already happened on Earth with the age of colonization. Lots of talk about Russia and China and outer space and the space competition with Russia and China. I think that India... India's got this big space...

program right now. Yes, they do. Israel. And I've been impressed by the strides that the Indians are making in outer space. Are you impressed by that? What impresses me is not that they've made the strides. Yeah. But that the strides were unthinkable even just a few decades ago. They're accomplishing what other spacefaring nations are accomplishing. Yeah. So we're all human. So I'm not differently impressed. Yeah.

for what they've done relative to anybody else doing it. What impresses me when I'm impressed is where were you 20 years ago, 30 years ago?

And where are you now? India was the first to land safely, softly, on the south pole of the moon. The Indian headlines were, India is the fourth country to land on the moon. That's not the headline. India is the first country to land softly at the south pole. And what's up with India in outer space? Because of the speed with which they have gotten here, are they going to get elsewhere faster, you think? Or are you ready? You know, there's national pride. Never underestimate the value of national pride. Yeah. And...

national security. Security is a code word for protecting yourself, but also if you feel like being an aggressor, you have the power to do so. So I say security because I'd rather we were secure rather than aggressive. That's the peacenik in me. In India, a few years before, they tomahawked out one of their satellites from orbit.

It's called a kinetic kill. You would do that if the satellite is failing or you don't want to. And so India did that after the United States did it, after Russia did it, and after China did it. And so the prime minister gets on and says, we do this for peaceful reasons. You know, there's the peace argument. This is the beginnings of people's access to space. One thing that

concerned me deeply. When India landed on the South Pole, I don't know if you know, it had a rover. I saw. I don't know what it is. Yeah, okay, so it's a rover. And so there's the rover. Yes. The emblem in the Indian flag, who's the central emblem. Yeah, that star-ish kind of thing, yeah. And one of the icons of the space agency were embedded in the rover's wheels so that as it rolled on the dusty soil...

these imprints could be seen. But they came in peace. But wait, but wait. And the sad part of my concern is it's something Americans would say.

I know we would say it. So how can I get mad if somebody else is going to say it? So on the internet, because people were dancing in the streets when this happened. Yeah, it was huge. Oh, yes, it was huge. Okay. There it was on Twitter or wherever it first landed on X. Because as you know, the Pakistani flag has the Muslim crescent and the star. This posting said, in India...

We have our flag on the moon. In Pakistan, they have the moon on their flag. Really? Did you have to go there? You know, it'd be something different if Pakistan were as big as India and they had active. Then it would be kind of a fun, it would be trash talk in the locker room. They're punching down. You're punching down. They're punching down. That's what I'm doing. And I was saddened by that. I want to talk to you about how technology changes what you do.

How do AI and quantum change astrophysics? Well, there's certain problems that become tractable that were previously only things we could approximate. If I'm going to model what happens to a rotating galaxy that has

hundreds of billions of stars. My computers in the 1970s couldn't do that. Well, let me model a galaxy using 100 stars. Maybe there's something about 100 stars that will give me insight to a billion stars. Maybe, maybe not. So much of our effort over the years is approximating the reality because the computing power can't match the reality. With quantum computing, I can model all the stars. By the way, every star, every time every star moves,

the gravitational configuration of everything is different. Yeah, it can calculate that instantaneously. Yeah, it can calculate that. And there's gas clouds. How do you calculate a gas cloud? It's not a discrete object. They're bits and pieces of molecules moving around, subjected to radiation forces and magnetic forces and rotational forces and shear forces. Oh my gosh, we love it. Okay. Bring it on. Is it possible that we live in a simulation? Yes.

And my best evidence for that is just when things are kind of stable, let's have the leader of the free world be a New York City real estate developer. There's got to be someone simulating us throwing that in just for their entertainment.

That's your best evidence for assimilation is Donald Trump. Wait, wait, wait. It wouldn't have to just be that. And then, so now he's not in office. Yeah. And then he comes back. And then we have Biden. Things are pretty stable. We need a pandemic. Yeah. We need a pandemic. Well, yeah. I think. And then Biden becomes a little less stable. I think one argument for assimilation is how periodically people

something extraordinary happens in the world. The world doesn't just stay in a stable... Chaos. Chaos. And if you ever played these simulation games, that's what you want because that's where it's more interesting. That's where it gets interesting. Yeah. I used to play SimCity and every now and then Godzilla would walk across the city. There'd be fires and everything would be broken. And Godzilla...

It's not real, but it's metaphor for an assault on the city, which is exactly what 9-11 was. It was an assault. It's not Godzilla, but when you're simulating, the fire department, the police department, what is tax money doing? Are people unhappy? My friend Ian has a list of reasons why he believes the world is a simulation. They include things like wells. Wells? What's wrong with wells? Just the idea that you put down and there's water or something.

broadcast system. Just like things, observable phenomenon that seem odd and simulation-like. For me, like all things drilling are that. It's like, it reminds me of being in a video game where like

Mario Kart, like, you know, Mario hits the thing and then a mushroom comes out and he gets bigger. That seems like we're living in a simulation, just the natural. I see. So he's saying there's no law in the universe that says if you dig, you get water. So when you dig, you get water. Clearly somebody put it there. Oh, I need some energy. Let's put oil there. Yeah, exactly. Like, oh, let's put the sludge into a car. It will power a car. I mean, it's kind of odd. Like the whole thing is odd. Okay. So it's like Minecraft where you just do stuff there and you do it and you

build a little world. See Chuck, we don't even need weed. Okay. But how would we find out if we are in a simulation? How would we know? There are ways. Okay. One has been suggested. So gamma ray bursts, these are pulses of gamma rays from the universe. Some are higher energy than others. Yeah. And if you find it's the highest energy of anything we've ever measured of anything. Yeah.

If we find an edge to that, where above that there's no more, that could be the edge of the simulation. Because you can't simulate something to infinity. You have to put some edges on it. Right. Like the Truman Show. It looks like a sky and clouds, but he goes out there and then it's a wall. Right. It's the wall. Up until then, it was fine. Right. But if you explore, this is what exploration does. It probably annoys the programmers. Yeah. Because we're...

reaching for the edge of what you thought we would ever acquire. So then Mars could be good. Good as what? Good because it pushes the edge. Sure. Or it could just be fall into the line of the simulation. They want us to go there. The simulation would not need, you would not want it

if you are the simulator, to simulate everything if no one was looking at it. If I'm digging, you only simulate what I'm digging to in the spot where I'm digging. I don't have to simulate it over there because you're not digging over there. So that greatly improves the computing power of the simulation when you localize it to only places where people are granting it attention. Here's a way to consider this. When we look in the universe in the search for intelligent life, that comes with a big assumption that whatever we find

would agree that we are intelligent. But who declared that we're intelligent? - Ourselves. - We did! - Yeah. - What? Okay, and what's the closest species to humans? - Monkeys. - Chimpanzees. - Chimpanzees, yeah. - Yeah. How smart is a chimp? It's 1% DNA difference between us. We have the James Webb Space Telescope and philosophy and art and music. They have none of it. - Right. - You can stack boxes and reach a banana. Now, if you're religious, you might say, "What a difference that 1% make!"

Manx, we're special. Yeah. Or you take another view. Maybe the difference between stacking boxes and reaching a banana and the James Webb Space Telescope is as small. Yeah, it's like a one to three percent. As that one percent. You say, oh, come on, Tyson. Well, imagine, because our toddlers can stack boxes and reach a banana. So now imagine a life form.

that's 1% beyond us in the universe. Yeah. On that same intelligence scale. What would we look like to them? We look like chimpanzees. We would look like chimpanzees. Yes. Our most brilliant achievements would be accomplished by their toddlers. Little alien Timmy comes, oh, what did you do today from school? Oh, I composed a sonnet and derived the principles of calculus. Oh, that's so cute. Put it on the refrigerator door. That's so sad. So my point is, they could have created

created Earth as a literal Aquarian terrarium for their own amusement

with us as life forms upon it, and we would never know. Until we hit the edge. Until we hit the edge. And then maybe we would find out. Unless they're so smart, they know we're not even going to look for the edge. Okay. You've been so generous with your time, so I'm going to try to get you out of here. We're going to do a lightning round. I love lightning rounds. Okay. And I'll keep the questions lightning-ish, too. My favorite color is purple. Okay, great. Why are you so good at communicating, or actually better, why do other scientists suck at communicating? They do. I'm sorry, not all of them, but some of them. No, it's not valued in the field. No.

There's no test for it in the PhD. Yeah. That's like saying, why do construction workers suck at communicating? It's not part of the job. Okay.

And so, and I would say some fraction of my colleagues, maybe higher than in the population, are on the spectrum. And when you're on the spectrum, I don't care about you. Yeah. I have my own thoughts and I care about my lab equipment. And so you can't put a camera in front of that person and expect them to be cheery-eyed and smiley and with eyebrows. You can't expect that. Yeah. And while I'd rather be in the lab...

Ouch, thanks. Thanks, Dr. Tyson. No offense. I'd rather be in the lab, but I'd be irresponsible if I never left it. As an educator and having this value of being able to communicate.

How do you assess our relationship to fact and the skepticism around science and expertise right now? Yeah, it'll just implode society. And then we'll recover from it eventually. I think the United States is good at reacting to perceived threats. There are other countries that do not have this problem of the mistrust of science. And we'll just watch them ascend.

economically because innovations in science and technology are the engines of tomorrow's economy in every sector, including things like farming. We make more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before. It's because of science. So we'll just watch other countries rise up. And I think we have more to fall before we realize that. And it's sad, but I'm trying to do all I can to prevent it. It's hard. The communication helps, I

I think. Yeah. So here's how I protect my ego. I say to myself, as bad as it is, maybe it would be much worse if I were not

doing my thing. That's what I say. That's why we can't let you time travel and undo yourself, because then you wouldn't be able to be here and teach us. You updated and re-released your book, Merlin's Tour of the Universe. Yes, Merlin's Tour of the Universe. Merlin's Tour of the Universe. It brought it to the 21st century. 35 years between its publication and its update. In that time, we discovered a lot of things, the Hubble telescope. What in the next 35 years are we going to discover? What are you likely to discover? Well, in astrophysics, we have a good handle on that, because budgets...

get allocated, space probes get designed. We have a decadal survey that we invoke and that guides us in the decades that follow. So I'd like to know if there's life anywhere on Mars, even below the surface. I wanna know if there's life swimming in Jupiter's moon Europa, which has a frozen outer shell and an ocean of liquid water that's been liquid for billions of years. There's more water there than all the water in Earth's oceans. So I think the question about life in the universe

microbial or otherwise, will be answered in the next 30 years by NASA. All right. Last question for every guest I have on the show is, what do you not know? What are you, what is Neil deGrasse Tyson dumb about, if anything? Oh, anytime I'm in the company of someone who knows anything that I don't know, that's all I want to talk about. Yeah. Yeah, I have a curiosity of everything that I don't know. And if they're an expert on like,

or they're a chef, or they're, I'm all there. - Must be very frustrating for you to be a guest then. - Yeah, yes it is, because then everyone asks me questions. And I don't mind that, 'cause I'm an educator, but that's not my preferred dinner party.

I prefer to sit me next to someone who's got, I don't care. They could be a preacher. They could be an oil driller. Yeah. I've got questions. Okay. Give me a question. Something you want to know that you wish that you could go to a dinner party tonight and sit next to someone who could answer. What's a specific question? Oh, let's say it's a construction worker. Okay. How did they get the crane to the top of the building? Yeah.

How did they get the cranes? I didn't see them put it up there. It's 50 stories up. There's a crane there. There's probably a crane left or something. I don't know. I've never seen it. I would ask them. Do you think that in another universe somewhere out there, there's a Neil deGrasse Tyson that knows this and the infinite universe? Possibly. I mean, it's just...

These are things. There could be a construction worker, Neil deGrasse Tyson, in another planet. Sure. That, that, that, Neil would certainly know the answer to that question. That Neil would know. Because the curiosity would be all up in it. Thank you so much, Neil, for doing this. I so appreciate it. Oh, sure. I feel less tangled now, thanks to you. Your mental roadways have been unraveled. Thank you. Thank you for that service. You have it. Anytime.

All right. That conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson just definitely untangled my mind a little bit, or it totally bent it out of shape. I'm not sure. I have a lot of processing to do, but three quick reflections on that. One, on this question of if we're living in a simulation,

I found Neil's answer to that to be beautifully scientific and mathematical in some way. Like, there's no evidence against it, and there's potentially some evidence for it, so it's possible. And I found even more compelling his answer to the second question of how would we know this kind of testing of the edges of the simulation to see if it breaks. It is hugely destabilizing for me to think about. Second, and on the subject of destabilizing...

I was really sad by Neil's answer about our growing distrust and skepticism about the science. I had hoped for something more hopeful, but he instead was like, well, we might implode as a society. We have a lot further to fall. That just sucks because if you think about, you know, other parts of that conversation, the great leaps we've made as a society, our ability to kind of double or triple our lifespan, our ability to detect and deflect asteroids. I mean, these are huge.

huge innovations that relied on a belief in science and investment in science. It's hard to think that we're going to let those things go. Thirdly, and on a much lighter note, I want to make a plea to the negative gravity matter funders around the world, whatever universities or researchers are doing this.

I mean, the idea of wormholes like these Rick and Morty guys have to just like avoid airports entirely and to have food delivered into my refrigerator sounds like the best thing ever. It also is really,

really kind of trippy, really trippy. And if we get there, I'm going to know for sure that we're in a simulation. That's it for this week of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. I'm going to go find a wormhole and I hope you'll be back with me next Friday. Today's show was produced with Sick Bird Productions, Jade Watson, Deanna DaCosta, and Kes Agnew with additional editing by... Today's episode is brought to you by Avis. Let's face it,

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There are places where science and mystery collide, and Skinwalker Ranch might be the most compelling. In the new season of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch on the History Channel, a team of scientists and engineers uncovers a mysterious material buried inside the mesa, one that doesn't occur naturally. This isn't just legend. It's real data, physical evidence that challenges everything we know about geology, physics, and maybe even reality itself.

How deep does the truth go? Find out on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. New episode Tuesday at 8, 7 central. Only on the History Channel. Today's episode is brought to you by USPS. I know, I know, you've got your shipping game on lock. But did you know, with USPS Ground Advantage service, it's like your shipment has a direct line to you.

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This is an iHeart Podcast.