Introducing The Gray Area
54:14 Share

Hey, it's Noam. Unexplainable is off this week, but we wanted to give you a bonus episode to tide you over till we're back on Wednesday. It's a new podcast from Vox called The Gray Area, and it's a philosophical take on culture, politics, science, and more. And it dives right into all those tricky, ambiguous spaces that are anything but certain. So if you're like us and you're into questions without perfect answers, I think you're going to love it.

The first episode of The Gray Area just dropped this week, so go subscribe or follow in their feed. It's a conversation between host Sean Illing and Neil deGrasse Tyson. They talk about scientific literacy, democracy, and whether facts are ultimately the answer. Okay, here's The Gray Area. As a kid, I loved Carl Sagan. The cosmos is all that is or ever was.

He helped me appreciate the bigness of the universe. Everything we had come to know about it, all the questions that remained unanswered, and he was able to find poetry in science. That's what his PBS series, Cosmos, was all about. Sagan really wanted you to feel that sense of awe and wonder.

but he always wanted to emphasize science as a way of thinking about the world. As we moved into an age of increased technology in computing, genetics, medicine, and media, he saw the ways in which there might be a problem brewing. Science was also this engine of immense technological production.

And without any guardrails, he worried that it would not only threaten our environment, it would also lead to the concentration of power in the hands of those who understood it.

And this was something that Sagan preached up until his death in 1996. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along. So how do we create a society that not only promotes science as a mode of thought,

but protects it from power and politics. I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area. My guest today is the one and only Neil deGrasse Tyson. You know him. Everybody knows him. In so many ways, Tyson is the Carl Sagan of our time. He even revived Sagan's Cosmos TV show.

Neil is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and is the author of the brand new book, "Stary Messenger." In it, he takes on many of society's biggest problems and argues, like Sagan did, that we should adopt a more scientific perspective to tackle them. Tyson really believes that we'd see, in many cases, that the causes of our problems are actually quite simple and the things that divide us are often silly.

He calls it the cosmic perspective. We talk about whether applying it can fix our politics. And I tell him why I think he might be a little naive about how all this works. Neil deGrasse Tyson, welcome to the show. Hey, Sean. Thanks for having me on. You know, you were one of the very first interviews I ever did as a professional journalist person back then.

In 2015 at salon.com, actually. Oh my gosh. Thanks for reminding me of that. Yeah. I was going to ask you if you remembered that, but I didn't want to make you lie to me right at the beginning of this thing. Was that back when you had hair? Uh, ish.

The enemy had advanced past the perimeter, I think, at that point. The male pattern arsenal was moving through the airline. No, thanks for remembering that for me because I do remember that salon interview. And I remarked to myself how sort of rationally in-depth we were able to discuss topics without being rushed and going wherever we needed to go. So I'm very happy to be back in your circle. You've been out there?

As a very public figure for a long while now, this book of yours feels like a shift in your mission. But you're kind of leaning a little bit into politics, which is more my world. Am I right to see it that way, or do you see it as a little less significant? Yeah, the book is very different from my other books in that regard. So, of course, all my other books are directly about cosmic discovery and science, right?

But in a way, this book has more science in it than anything I've ever written because it is what the world looks like. Society, culture, politics, love, hate, life, death, all the things that

Matter to us. This book is what those look like when you have available to you a lens of reason, a lens of science literacy, a lens of cosmic perspective. So it is in a sense, the book has more science in it than anything I've ever done.

Because I'm revealing to people the value of scientific reasoning as it applies to so many walks of life, so many occasions in your life where you dig in your heels with a strongly held opinion to fight someone else who's digging in their heels with a strongly held other opinion. And the book is an attempt to get warring factions to realize, forget whether or not there's a compromise position in the middle, which there may be,

But more important, often there are places to stand to look back on what you were arguing and say, oh my gosh, I wasn't arguing about anything at all. Or I thought this was a strongly held view, but look at all the holes in the view that I didn't even know were there because my bias blinded me to them.

So this book is an exercise in how to live in this world with a scientific outlook. My hope is that if anyone's going to buy it at all, buy the book at all, that they get it before Thanksgiving dinner because that's what all. Oh, you are so naive. I love it. But you are so naive.

I want them to do it before all the arguments, before the crazy uncle and the weird aunt come in and share their views of the world. This will totally equip you to have those exchanges. But you know, in this crazy social media climate,

It's impossible to say anything about politics, no matter how sane or lukewarm or reasonable it is, without kind of finding yourself in the middle of it, as it were. Do you sort of feel like we are on some kind of tipping point? Maybe that's a little dramatic, but do you feel like we're at a place where our political dysfunction, our social dysfunction, our scientific illiteracy,

illiteracy combined with all this technological power that we have, that these things are now, I don't know, existential threats for our civilization? It's not that warring political factions is a new thing. That's as old as democracy and elections. Even when there's not elections, there are kings and queens that were killed for the sake of power of those who wanted to rise up. So if that's not the ultimate expression of political conflict, I don't know what is. What is different, I think,

Is I remember a day when I would express an opinion and you would calmly listen and you say, oh, that's interesting. Or here's what I think about that. And then we would discuss the differences. And then when we were finished discussing, we'd go out and have a beer. Now, if you post any opinion at all on social media, it gets attacked by people who don't want you to have an opinion that differs from their own.

If that's the world you seek, then what you're really after is a world where everyone has exactly the same opinion you do. Last I checked, this is what dictators create in their circles. And that is not the foundation of a pluralistic democracy. So that's first. Second, what I have learned in my social media postings is if I'm going to say anything social cultural, I have to do it in a way where it's not an opinion.

And even when you do it that way, there are people who will think it's an opinion. That's what fascinates me. I once posted after one of the horrific school shootings, I posted a very simple fact. At Walmart, you can buy an AR-15 automatic rifle, but company policy says

prevents them from selling pop albums with curse words. Okay. Sounds about right. That's all I posted. There's actually no opinion expressed in that. It's contrasting two different things that may be inconsistent at some level. And I was fascinated by what unfolded.

the comments split between those who believed I was offering an indictment against guns in America and those who believed I had an indictment against free speech. And so it became Second Amendment versus First Amendment in what people thought I was trying to say when I wasn't trying to express any opinion at all other than to say, isn't this interesting?

that under the same roof, they have these two seemingly conflicting policies. And so that told me that people will argue facts simply if they believe the facts conflict with their opinions. And that, as an educator, is the beginning of the unraveling of an informed democracy.

There's a thought experiment you pose in the book that sets the table a little bit for the different way I think you and I look at the political world and the people who make it up. The experiment in the book is you imagine if there was some hyper-rational alien life form that was secretly surveilling our species. If that happened, what do you think that alien life form would conclude about us? I mean, I think they would see us as what we are.

pretty clever primates that have done quite a bit with our limited intelligence. But as Darwin famously said, we still bear the stamp of our lowly origins. Do you think that we are rational creatures for the most part? Yeah, I don't know that I would give us the credit that you just did in that previous sentence. I overstated it. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So what's the most intelligent species there ever was on Earth? What's your answer to that question?

Oh, God, you're setting me up. Well, since you're asking, I feel like it can't be people. So I don't know. No, no, it's people. It's people. It's humans. Okay. They're not trick questions, right? It's people. So now I ask, who declared that humans are the smartest animals there ever were? People. Humans did. So that's why you're in a position to say, look how clever we are. Whereas a cosmic perspective would say,

Imagine a life form smarter than we are. Is there anything we have ever done in the history of civilization that they would judge to be clever? And it's a simple thought experiment when we compare ourselves to chimpanzees, our closest relative, genetic relative. We have 98, 99% identical DNA to a chimp.

Now, if you're really into Homo sapiens, you would say, well, what a difference that 2% makes. We have philosophy and the Hubble telescope and art and civilization. And all the chimp can do is maybe extract termites from a mound and the smartest of them will stack boxes to reach hanging bananas from the ceiling. But I pose you the question, suppose the intelligence difference between chimps and humans is

was actually as small as that 2% might indicate. What would we look like to some other species that's 2% beyond us in intelligence? Just the 2% that we are beyond the chimps. Just continue on that line. The smartest chimps do what our toddlers can do. By that analogy, the smartest humans...

would do what the toddlers of this species can do. Putting all that in context, all I'm saying is that for you to say we're pretty clever for how basal evolutionarily we are, and I'm saying another species 2% beyond us, there's nothing we would do that would impress them. So that species visiting Earth on the rumor that intelligent life had surfaced

After seeing our rampant irrationalities, the wars we fight against our own species because you live on a different line in the sand, because resources are unequally distributed in the land and in the oceans, because you worship a different god, because you sleep with different people and we slaughter each other, enslave people, those aliens will run home and say there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.

It's a cosmic perspective offered for your consideration. So this cosmic perspective, right? And this is sort of the central plea of your book, that we take a more cosmic perspective on things. On everything. On everything and achieve some clarity about what really matters and what doesn't and how stupid so many of the things that we think are.

are important, really are. I wouldn't say stupid so much as also just kind of irrelevant. Yes. You think it's important and it's actually not. That's, I think, a more significant value of a cosmic perspective. It forces you to rebalance your portfolio of concerns in the world.

And yet it's so difficult to do, right? It's such a simple and obvious thing to do, to pause, find some emotional distance from the things that seem important or the things that are worrying us, upsetting us and achieve a little perspective, realize in the scheme of things, it's not that important. And yet most of us seem to fail pretty miserably at that. Why do you think it's so hard for people to take a broader view of things, to take a cosmic perspective? I,

I don't think we're wired for it. I'm coming from a cosmic perspective as a professional astrophysicist and as just a plain old scientist. There are aspects of the book that don't require a cosmic perspective, but just a rational scientific perspective. If it were natural to think scientifically, science as we now practice it would have been invented millennia ago.

but it's only really a few hundred years old in terms of how it's widely practiced. There are some hints of it, not only in ancient Greece, but through the golden age of Islam. But in terms of widespread practice of this thing we call science with the methods and tools to filter out the bias that you may be introducing to your results, to establish what is objectively true in the world, an objective truth is not subject to your opinion.

It's true whether or not you believe in it, that methods and tools of science are exquisitely designed to establish objective truths. And had that been natural,

We would have been doing it since the days of cavemen, and we haven't. And so that's why it has to be taught. You have to learn what your susceptibilities are to your own bias, to the bias of others, to propaganda, to belief systems, rather than the power of evidence. You have to see how all of this plugs together.

And tragically, I think what we're least wired to do is think statistically and probabilistically about the world. One of the saddest sentences I wrote in the book was that there's someone at a roulette table betting on the number seven, let's say. And I say, why are you betting on seven? Well, it's due. I can see the past 12 spins and it hasn't come up. It's due. It's due.

No, it's not due. This is someone who's never had a course in probability and statistics. So we have an entire industry created by members of our own species to exploit the failures of our own brain wiring and make money off of you because of it. That is one of the most tragic facts about modern civilization that I can reveal to you in this book. And so, yeah, it takes some training.

Well, let me see if I can get to the rub of maybe where we diverge a little bit. We diverge? I didn't say anything divergible. Oh, I think we did. What did I say to diverge on? We're going to get to it, sir. Get to it. I totally want to hear where anything I said forced you to diverge. Go. All right, let me try it this way. If I have a conservative instinct, it's that I think...

It's generally wise to be very humble about human nature and the limits of politics, which is to say, I think we have to accept, as I think you just did,

that human beings are not rational creatures, that human life can never be made entirely or even mostly rational, and that any attempt to do so will probably fail and go disastrously. And I think that you think that with the help of science or the scientific perspective, we can maybe grow out a little bit of our stupid primitive impulses. And I think the entire span of human history suggests otherwise. I don't know if it's possible.

that we completely grow out of it in the sense that the species evolves so that our irrational conduct is in the past. But we can mature and widespread enlightenment can happen and does happen.

Though there is surely slavery still in the world, there is no government that matters in this world that supports slavery, explicitly supports it in their doctrines. But that was widespread.

just a few centuries ago. One and a half centuries ago, the world was figuring out that maybe slavery is not a good thing, that a human being should not own another human being. There was rampant in the Bible, up through the Roman Empire, up through Islam, and so slaves was just a thing. I would say we have matured culturally and socially to recognize that this is not how we should behave.

So I think it is possible to progress with whatever fits and starts it involves that overall society can have a more progressive, rational outlook on its present and on its future for having learned from our mistakes in the past.

100%. I would definitely distinguish between progress and perfection. To say that we can never be perfect is not to say that we can't improve. You're right. I agree. Exactly. And improvement is, oh my gosh, if you improve a little bit. No, look, I'm with you. All right, let me try it this way. You're still trying to pick a fight. That's what you're trying to do. No, I'm not trying to pick a fight.

You think I would pick a fight with America's favorite astrophysicist? Are you crazy? America's personal astrophysicist. I don't know if I'm anybody's favorite. You're on my turf now, baby. This is politics, right? I'm ready for you. You're going to have to get down in the dirt with me. But seriously, so you write, and now I'm quoting, when people disagree in our complex world of politics, religion, and culture, the causes are simple even if the resolutions are not.

I think I know what you mean that, you know, so many of our differences are irrelevant and needless, whatever, but I don't think the causes are simple at all. I think human beings are remarkably primitive and impossibly complicated at the same time. Protons and electrons by comparison are so much simpler. That's why we can predict things.

the way they're going to behave. But people are weird and convoluted and contradictory and a puzzle for us, even for scientists. I would say for individuals, yes, but collectively, not so much.

If you look at the causes of wars, sure, you can say this king, this queen, this line in the sand. But at the end of the day, it's about power. It's about access to resources. There aren't a hundred reasons why humans have engaged organized warfare. The details are distinct. Yes, of course. We have Hitler rising up in the 1930s Germany, and he was in jail, and he was elected, and he was charismatic. And yes, the details are

But at the end of the day, it was a charismatic, power-hungry person who managed to create an enemy and bring his people against what he perceived as an enemy. That's pretty simple to me, okay? Now, how you resolve that, given the complexities of culture and society and how you end it and how you create longer-lasting peace, those have very complicated elements to it. Coming up after a quick break...

Is the task of creating a well-functioning society a scientific problem or a political problem? So my sense reading your book is you're someone who thinks we have a knowledge problem, right? There's a lot of ignorance and there's a perspective problem. We don't have the cosmic perspective. We see things through our very narrow provincial lens.

And the question for me, this is me thinking as a political theorist, not necessarily as a scientist, is what is getting in the way of us solving these problems? And for me, it's

We have a political problem. Our inability to tackle climate change is not a knowledge problem. The issue is that power is concentrated in ways that not only make it difficult for us to do what we know we have to do, it also finds new ways to undermine our ability to mobilize against it. I don't pretend to have the answers. I just know more data ain't it.

I see it differently. How so? I see it as people do not understand what an objective truth is. I actually think it's that simple. They see various published scientific research. One in a hundred of them denies human-caused climate change, and 99 of them show that we are the cause. They cherry-pick it because it fulfills a...

worldview that they have and they're not self-aware of the bias that is infused within that worldview and they happen to also be in power either political power or financial power and then they act on it. So you're right. It's not a matter of knowledge of knowledge sake. It's a matter of a self-awareness of how it is you're arriving at what you think is true and what is not. You need to know what science is and how and why it works and

And the scientific community is the least capable of some kind of mass conspiracy. All right? Because if you've ever attended a scientific conference, we're arguing with each other all the time. We are the least agreeable people you've ever met. Maybe second to Congress. But the difference is we have an unwritten contract.

Among us, the scientist. It's if I'm going to argue with you, either I'm right and you're wrong, you're right and I'm wrong, or we're both wrong. That's the contract. And it's a problem that the people in power know what's objectively true and false. They just don't care. They are invested in things as they are for all kinds of reasons. And you're going to hate me for saying this. I know it. And I annoy myself when I say it. But

I really think we overstate how important objective truth is for many people. It's not that a lot of people have lost sight of what distinguishes facts from opinions. I think the problem is worse than that. I think a lot of people don't care about that distinction at all. I think people become attached to certain beliefs, values, certain cultural poses, and these things seem small from a cosmic perspective, and they aren't.

They're nevertheless the things that anchor our identities and our social lives. That's the stuff that drives us. And it's beyond truth and falsehood. It's beyond facts and opinions. It's deeper than that. And that's the thing I don't know how to get around. I thought you were more optimistic than that.

Whoa. I'm trying. I'm trying. That's pretty defeatist right there. You're supposed to help me with this. You're the most optimistic person I know. Okay. Let me see what I can do with what you just said. So in the book, I give actual platform language for the Texas Republican Party recently in recent years. And in there, there is an explicit sentence that

that actively denies the scientific claims of human-caused climate change. Actively denies it. And then two years later, because they update the platform every couple of years, two years later, that sentence was softened. It no longer said we actively deny the scientific claims. It said we reject climate... What do we call them? Oh, here it is. We support the defunding of climate justice initiatives.

Climate justice. So that's actually progress because it's not coming at the scientists and their consensus of research results. It is possible for the truth, objective truths to get through among people who actually didn't think it was objectively true.

So now, getting back to your point, there are things that people, it looks like they just want to believe, no matter the evidence, such as those who think Earth is flat. I don't chase them down. We live in a free society with free ideas, free expression, we tell ourselves at least. And you want to think Earth is flat?

Go right ahead. There are plenty of jobs for you, including NBA professional basketball player, one of whom was a big exponent of the flat earth. Kyrie Irving. There are plenty of jobs for you where you don't have to know or understand that earth is spherically round. You just don't want that person rising to power, bringing their belief system into governance.

You don't want that person head of NASA or controlling funding that would guide the future of scientific research. Otherwise, that would be the collapse of your civilization that you built. So, yeah, maybe there's some people that are immovable in their belief system thinking that their truths are objective truths. I claim that your susceptibility to thinking this way

is enabled by how science is taught. You're taught that it's just some facts that happen to be true today, but might not be true tomorrow. And then there are these boldface words in the chapter that you memorize and you recite them back for the final exam.

At no time is science really taught as a process, as a means of querying nature, as a way to know what is and is not true in this world. And if you have power, your power and money, it will be more likely sustained if you make decisions based on objective truths than in anything that you wish were true without the benefit of evidence to support it. It has never been easier to be...

It's never been easier to learn about the world. Why do you think so many people persist in their delusions? I mean, delusions may be too strong a word. No, it's a perfect word. Okay, I was going to maybe say, why do we cling to our biases? I mean, you have a chapter on race, for instance, and I love what you do there. You kind of show how dumb and arbitrary it is to divide ourselves along these lines. And I'm with you. It's incredibly dumb and dangerous and destructive. The problem is that so much...

power is invested in preserving these divisions. And again, I agree with you 100%. Seeing through that trap should be easy. And yet the entire species seems utterly incapable of doing it. So there must be something deep and fundamental or something powerful preventing it. No, it's not as bad as you say. Okay. No, we have progressed over the centuries. The greatest of the racist writings are

are 19th century anthropologists who went in and out of Africa, comparing themselves to Europeans and outcome these

And it persisted and it justified slavery. And he brought in some religion there too, to help justify it. All right. Depending on what religion you were, you would find some passage in the Bible. Who's a descendant of ham, whose skin was darkened as punishment. There's all ways you can get in there, but we have slowly climbed out of it so that whatever racist elements you see today, uh,

As a dark-skinned man, I would much rather be alive today than any previous time in the history of this country or the world. That is the arc of progress. I'm not going back into the past, and you cannot say that we're just this way and it's unchangeable. It is an objectively false statement. It's not just true for people with dark skin. It's true for women, for people on the gender spectrum.

Whatever problems any of us are having today, if you're not white male, it was worse yesterday and the day before and the day before that. And yes, there are fits and starts. Yes, I get that. But overall, that arc is real. Even the George Floyd murder.

that triggered so much response, not only in the streets, but in the office place, in human resources departments. When I grew up, that happened frequently in my hometown, New York City. Frequently, unarmed Black person dies in the hands of the police. And I would occasionally make the news. The fact that that happened in Minnesota and it was national news and caused protests,

In a warped sort of way, that's progress. So you cannot say we haven't changed as a culture or as a species. We have learned. Oh, I'm certainly not saying that. You kind of sounded like you were. Oh, wait, whoa, whoa. Settle down. No, no, no. The question for me is,

Has human nature changed much? Have individuals changed much? Or have we gotten better at building institutions and structures that are better capable of channeling our instincts and guiding us in more constructive directions? But if those trappings slip away, melt away, we revert very quickly back to our barbarian ways.

That's a very important and perceptive comment. So let me just agree and further reflect on it. Earlier, you said we've never been exposed to more access to knowledge. That's correct. But there's nothing more bias feeding than typing a crazy idea into Google.

And Google will find every other crazy person who thinks exactly the way you do, giving you a false sense of authenticity or a false sense of truth about your crazy idea. You can type in hollow earth and up will come websites of people who are all into the idea that earth is hollow and that there's an inner earth and that there's civilizations within that.

So our system of access to knowledge does not have a tandem set of filters to allow you, unless you have other kind of training, to judge what is more likely to be true than what. And you need ways to have your belief system unraveled in the face of some truths versus others.

If you're not ready to have that happen, you don't have the tools to receive conflicting information and change your mind, you become ossified. And that tribalizes people.

So yeah, in the old days, your tribe were people who looked like you and lived in around a few blocks. Now, it's not so much that. It's I have an idea. Let me find everybody else in the world with that idea. And that is the new tribe. And we're going to fight everybody else who resists us. Yes. And that's the thing I've been kind of getting at throughout this conversation. It's what interest me.

me, why certain ideas matter more than others, that it's not about truth very often. It is about tribe and community and purpose and all these things. No one has ever, that I'm aware of, blown themselves up in defense of string theory. Correct. I don't think anyone's killed anyone in a dispute over thermodynamics or whatever. Never, ever. Correct. But people have always died and killed over their ideas about freedom or God or whatever. Right.

And I don't know if enough scientists think really seriously about why that is and what it says about us. I imagine a lot of scientist types would say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. We just, we got to give people more facts and data so their ideas about freedom are coherent. But I don't think that's... It's not, it's more complicated than that. I would say, if I were to sort of generalize, and of course there are very important exceptions here, but let me generalize and say,

The less data the individual has available to them to support their belief system, the more strenuously they will defend their belief system. Of course, there are exceptions to that, but that's an extraordinary fact. Because if you came out to me and said, you know, Neil,

I think we're not really breathing air. It's really a vacuum. And I'm not even going to have that conversation with you. There's an old adage. If an argument lasts more than five minutes, then both sides are wrong. So, but if that's part of your belief system, then it's important to you that you believe it and that other people believe it alongside you. That's how you gain adherence. And in the limit,

This is how you have religions. It's matters to a religion that the rituals you perform are the same as that of others in the religion. That's the sign that you are participant in a belief system.

In this country, that freedom is protected, provided your belief system does not override the freedoms of others who might have a different belief system. So I spend a fair amount of time distinguishing these various truths. I would call those personal truths. Is Jesus your savior? In a free, open country where religion is protected, no one is going to take that from you.

But if you want to require that others think the same way, that requires an act of

persuasion and in the limit an act of violence. And so once you recognize those are your personal truths, that's kind of interesting. And then you have political truths. The truths that just exist because they're repeated so often, the weakness of the brain is that, wow, I heard it a lot. It must be true without any reference to evidence or repeated evidence. Again, we had to learn that evidence mattered. The objective truths is what really matter here.

And once people understand what role they play in establishing something that applies to everyone, because an objective truth is true whether or not you believe in it, if you're going to create laws and legislation, let them be founded in objective truths. That way, your personal truths don't collide with it. But if you have strong personal truths and you rise to power, that's dangerous for a pluralistic democracy.

Yeah. And you imagine in the book, this perfect, rational, virtual country called Rationalia, where there's

A constitution that just has one line, that all policy shall be based on the weight of evidence. And I think you know that this, you know, it's kind of tongue-in-cheek utopian stuff. But seriously, it's an interesting thought experiment. The problem for me is that the public will never agree about what constitutes evidence or more fundamentally, will never agree on the core value questions about evidence.

Justice. That's because they don't know what science is and how and why it works. You fly in an airplane because evidence mattered in all the experiments ever done in fluid dynamics. You live twice as long as people did 150 years ago, just 150 years ago, because of evidence-based medicine. This matters. Yes, you can be convinced of this.

It's possible it's slow because it's not, like I said, everything tells me it's not native to our brain wiring to think in an evidentiary way. You'll say no one will ever agree on evidence. You can because that's what science does. That's what it is.

Is there an evidence-based resolution to the question of how should power and resources be distributed in society? What is just, what is not, who deserves what, et cetera? Yeah, so I didn't make it clear enough in retrospect that this virtual country rationalia that you sort of opt into once you agree to this one-line constitution, it doesn't establish the values of

of that virtual country. That's not the point. The point is if you are going to create a law, the law presumably has some objective. You cannot pass that law unless that objective has evidence in support of being fulfilled.

And it doesn't value judge that objective. It just says you can't just start making laws just for the hell of it. They have to have some anchor in experiment and observation where enough experiment as observation has been conducted so that you can establish it as an objective truth. And by the way, there's no sharp line in the sand for that. It's a little bit of a fuzzy line, but you know it when you cross it.

And you know it when you cross it where, yeah, Earth goes around the fucking sun, okay? Not the other way around.

So we're not going to sit here and say, well, I don't believe that evidence. Sorry, then you don't know what evidence is. Go back to school where you should have learned it. We do know what evidence is. We do know how machines work, how energy works, what equals MC squared is, how you can find the best route to grandma's house using GPS from satellites that correct the time for Einstein's general theory of relativity, for goodness sake. Yes, there are objective truths in this world, and those

have become the foundations of everything we value in what makes civilization today. Would most of our political problems be solved if our politicians were all scientists? That's what I'll ask Neil deGrasse Tyson after one last quick break.

Do you think a lot of our political problems would go away if we replaced all the members of Congress and all the state politicians, just replace them all with scientists? I don't think you need everyone in there to be a scientist. If they're lawmakers, all you need is someone who knows how to listen to a scientist. Scientists are not

famous for their charisma to get elected, right? So I think that's unrealistic. You just need politicians with an ear to scientists and you know what would happen in that future?

you won't have arguments in Congress about whether objectively true science is true. I think we would, though, Neil. I think we would. Because a lot of times we have arguments that appear to be arguments about facts, and they're really not. They're arguments about values masquerading as facts. So let's just look at climate change. Had the conservative right...

recognized now decades ago what scientists have been saying. Multiple species of scientists, such as the biologists, are noticing that parasitic insects, normally dying during cold winters or having their population tamped, it is no longer being tamped down and they're coming back ferociously. Migratory patterns that are changing. There's many different kinds of science coming together to arrive at a common conclusion here.

Had that been recognized decades ago, then the arguments in Congress would

would have been political arguments and not politicians masquerading as experts in science to debate the science. So what would a political discussion be? It would be, do we have carbon tax or not? Do we subsidize solar panels? Do we buy them from China? How do we address this? Are the cities capable of withstanding flood surges? We lost decades in

in those conversations, and those have political solutions. Because a conservative solution might be different from a liberal solution to how to address those problems. And that's where people vote in a democracy for how you might address the problems to climate change. But one of those solutions is not to not do anything because you're in denial that it's real. Yeah, and part of what is so maddening is that a lot of these people in Congress that say incredibly stupid things

are not actually stupid people. They're actually very often quite intelligent, but they're pretending to believe stupid things because they have to, because they're hostage to their voters or special interests or whatever the hell it is, you know? That's very perceptive.

I so don't want to agree with you there. But? Because I don't want that to be true. But the more I see politics and the system, I have to agree with you. These are smart people. But if you come across as too smart, then your electorate might not think they can relate to you.

And unfortunately, I agree with you that that is a force operating in their posturing. And I'm not going to complain about that because that's just politics. Let politics be politics. But just don't let the politics weigh more than the objective truths that matter in this civilization. And Abraham Lincoln in 1863, when he had better things to worry about than what scientists were doing,

in that year signed into law the creation of the National Academy of Sciences. Realizing the value of science and science advice in enlightened governance in this new country of ours. Maybe the Industrial Revolution, which had already moved through Europe, maybe we could get a taste of that. It wasn't just engineering and inventions, it's science as well. That august body has as its objective advising Congress

in the most wise way, looking at what objective truths have emerged from the scientific community. By the way, there's a caveat in there. The most racist era in the most racist branch of science were 19th century anthropologists.

Some of them work their way into the National Academy of Sciences and advise on things such as immigration, you know, who are the lesser peoples that you don't want to admit into this country. So, yes, science has gone astray in the past. And in every occasion it has done so, it has been when its own biases were not held in check.

That happens with everybody at all times. Science has less of it because the system is designed to ferret it out. But if you have an entire system that ranks people by who's better or who they want, and they can't see the bias, that can be dangerous. So you need extra checks and balances anytime an anthropologist is telling you something about the tribes of the world.

Look, I'm pretty confident that if you and I got together, the kind of world we want to build and live in would be almost identical. I think part of the frustration for me as someone who just observes the political world is that when we're having all these conversations about what to do and what's a problem and what to prioritize, people never agree about what constitutes evidence. Even scientists sometimes disagree about what constitutes evidence. Not for anything that's objectively true. The disagreements of scientists are on the frontier.

Yeah, go to a science conference. Everybody's arguing in every minute, in every coffee lounge, and in every talk. Of course, we never agree on the frontier. That's the whole point of the frontier. But once we do agree, oh my gosh, back up. E does not equal MC cubed. It equals MC squared. And it's not subject to your feelings about whether or not that's true.

Well, I think that's one difference with science and the scientific enterprise is that it gets things wrong, but it will course correct. In science, something is often seen as an anomaly, say, and then a new theory comes around with a new fundamental objective truth, and that explains things, and then people change their view, right? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. No, no.

What's wrong there? It's not like, oh, we have a new fundamental truth that gets rid of the old fundamental objective truth. No. Since the era of experimental science, the last 400 years, there is no experimentally generated objective truth.

that is later found to be false. It can be embedded in a deeper truth. That happens all the time. That was Newton's laws of motion, and they actually fail at high speeds and high gravity. And so out came Einstein's new laws of motion and gravity. That's a special and general theory of relativity. But you know something? If you put low speeds and low gravity, plug them into his equations, they become Newton's equations.

We went to the moon in Apollo 11 with no relativity at all, all on Newton's equations. So the objective truth of Newton remains so, and now it's embedded as a localized truth within an even deeper truth. That happens. But there's not something we're all saying is true, and then tomorrow we all say it's not true. That is not how this works. And that's a misconception that many people have, apparently you included, so I'm happy to be here.

We may be fiddling around the edges here with language. I think maybe what I was saying is

What we have often are theories that purport to explain reality. And then those theories get overturned when they collide with new evidence that dismantles them. Yeah, hypotheses, I would call them. Yes. And they overturn all the time. A hypothesis is, I have an idea. It might be true. Let me test it. And the press loves it, so they write all about it. And then someone else comes out with a different hypothesis that shows my hypothesis to be wrong. And then you, you are shown...

science flip-flopping. And then you're left with the impression that even things that we know are objectively true, that they're susceptible and that's not the case.

Look, I think science is our best attempt to kind of grope in the dark for what is true or what is knowable about the world. I just think we go through long periods where human beings are deeply misinformed about the world and they think they know what's true. And then we later realize that we didn't. And science is a process of forcing us to reckon with those misunderstanding. Correct. Science is a process to temper how much confidence you're going to put in whether something is true or not. And it's tempered by the proportion of evidence that supports it.

And I wish, like you, more people gave a damn about evidence and truth. I worry that they don't. But anyway, look, I just want to say Carl Sagan was a hero of mine, and I think you knew him personally, and you...

more than anyone else have kind of carried on that mantle. And what I love about you is that you find a way of unleashing the poetry in science and you deliver it with such passion and enthusiasm that it really is infectious. And

Neil, you are a national treasure. And even when we disagree, however slightly, it is an absolute pleasure to chat with you. Thank you. I don't think we act. What did we disagree on? I don't think we disagree. We didn't disagree. I think we disagree about maybe what's possible. Okay. I think we disagree about. About our end state.

The pathways to the end state. Okay. Yeah. As someone a little bit closer to politics, I've been a little bit more humbled by the power of evidence and truth to move and persuade people. I guess, you know what? Maybe I'm a little too skeptical. Maybe I'm a little too pessimistic about that. I've just seen it and watched it long enough to be perpetually disappointed. And so the bar for me has been

Lowered a bit. Maybe too low. Yeah. And maybe it's conversations like this that will help me. And I'll also say, don't ever think that scientists don't think about politics. We think about it all the time. It's just not our job to do so. We think about politics all the time, but just no one asks us. That's what's interesting to me.

To believe that only people who are political commentators should ever comment on politics is highly restrictive of deep thoughts that are going on all the time with people who care about politics and democracy and the electorate and the future of civilization.

I wish more scientists cared more about politics and were more politically involved. Plato and Aristotle thought politics was the master science, not because it was a more supreme science than biology or physics or something like that, but because politics is what determined how well-ordered a society was. And if you don't have an ordered society, nothing, including science, is possible. If you don't get that right, everything else goes to hell. And I would say science can help you order society.

There's some things you can learn from science. I agree. I agree. The book is Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you so much for coming in. Delighted to be on. Thanks for having me. Eric Janikas is our producer. Amy Drozdowska is our editor. Patrick Boyd is our engineer. Alex Overington wrote our theme music. And A.M. Hall is the boss. So what'd you think of the new show?

Is Neil right? Did I say another stupid thing? Let us know. Shoot us an email at thegrayareaatvox.com. We're so pumped to finally bring the first show to you. We hope you dug it. Please share it with all your friends. Leave a review. That stuff really helps. Episodes drop Mondays and Thursdays. Listen and subscribe.