Racism, UFOs, and Cultural Appropriation with Neil deGrasse Tyson [S4 Ep.11]

Hip-hop is always called out to any qualities in America, but even within it, nothing's ever been equal. This season, Lauda the Narayat Podcast is tackling sexism, homophobia, and all the unwritten rules that hold the entire culture back. Listen to the Lauda the Narayat Podcast from NPR Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. So if you don't mind, let me say it like this. When I try to picture my man's face, I see your eyes. 18 years old, put my mom in the moy, and ever since my heart has had a hole at the corn. And I've been searching for someone to feel that void, and ask you. That's you, baby girl, that's you. That's you, that's you. The track you just heard is an excerpt from my brand new album Amor Fatih. You may remember the music video as I put out last year, Blasphemy, Straight A's, and Forward. This new album features all three of those singles, plus seven brand new songs. Now I put my all into this project, and it's a real representation of my passion for music. So if you want to listen to the whole thing, click in the description, or search cold X-man on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to music. Now back to the podcast. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today needs no introduction, but I'll give him one anyway. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. He's the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. He's also hosted and co-hosted numerous science-related TV and radio programs, including Nova Science Now and Cosmos, a space-time Odyssey. Neil has written several books, including the Pluto Files, AstroPhysics for People in a Hurry, and his new book, Starry Messenger. This is Neil's second time on the podcast, and this time we discuss many issues, including Declining Public Trust in Science. We talk about UFOs or UAPs, as they're now called. We discuss the history of scientific racism. We talk about the art of communicating science to the general public. We talk about the issue of cultural appropriation. We talk about the generational gap between Neil and myself and how that may lead us to interpret our experiences differently as black men in predominantly white, intellectual spaces. And we talk about much more. So without further ado, Neil deGrasse Tyson. All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thanks so much for coming back on the show. Yeah, good to see you again. So last time we spoke, I think it was 2020. So it's been probably almost. It's 20 years ago, because COVID adds time. It's like dog years. Exactly. Yeah. So a lot has changed, and it's really good to get you back on the show again. You released a book a few months ago called Starry Messenger, where you tackled a lot of bigger and wider topics than just physics or astrophysics. And that was, I feel like that's a pretty landmark event in your life, considering all your books prior had been more narrowly focused. So there's a lot of topics you've now dealt with that you hadn't really spoken too much about publicly, and we're going to get into some of those. I want to start by talking about science broadly. You open that. By the way, just to be clear. Yeah, go ahead. The book and the breadth of topics that it addresses is not me just jumping into spaces where I don't belong. It's me taking the lens of science and observing civilization with it. And since science is largely responsible for shaping civilization as we know it, this became quite a fertile exercise and reassessing, taking a fresh look at what people do, what people say, but from a scientific perspective. Really, I think the metaphor of the lens works very well here. You do whatever you do. Now hold up a scientifically literate lens and now what does it look like? And from afar, people say, what's the stratospheric view? That has value when thinking about arguments or ideas, but you can go even higher than a stratospheric view. Yes, you can go to an orbital view, which gets you that overview effect that astronauts have spoken about. But you can even go farther. That overview effect, you're still attached to the earth there. You can go to a cosmic perspective, and everything looks different. So the book is an offering to the public in case they're interested in what it looks like to a scientist. So let's talk about what the scientific lens is. What makes the lens of science different, unique, more valuable relative to the lens of, say, gut intuitions and other common lenses that we generally use to apply the world? I'm not here so much to say that it's better. I'm going to say that it's different in a way that you might value. That's how I'd rather but it. I'm not going to sit here and rank lenses. Different lenses offer the individual and society and the world different features of what it is to be human. The irrational lens, let me not say irrational, let's say the creative lens that is not bound to the laws of physics in any traditional sense, can be responsible for some of our greatest works of art. So no, I'm not going to value judge it. And so I will say that if you think you are making sense, however you want to think about that word, making sense, if you think you're making sense, if you think you've thought it through, the job of a scientist is to look at ideas, phenomenon, objects in every possible angle before you draw a conclusion about that thing. And if I don't look at it at every angle and I missed the whole point of a peer review is that, you get a colleague points it out to you. It's their job to show where you messed up, okay? Where you forgot to consider a factor where you didn't double check something that maybe should have been double check. Where you might have had some bias that leaked into your questions or your experiments or your conclusions. And so the what distinguishes science is it aims to remove as far as possible, ideally, remove completely any possible bias you could have on your thoughts and conclusions that you draw from your observations of the world. So the scientist, when brought into a conversation and hearing you make a statement about the world, they'll say, well, have you considered this? Or, well, what about that? And what happens if you reverse it, then what do you still think about it the same way? And it's a way to challenge what you might have imagined to be a fully thought out idea that you carry with you. And so that science brought to society. Science in the lab, it's doing this every minute of every day at all times. It's ingrained in how you ask questions, how you conduct the experiments, and how you draw conclusions that I'm actually disappointed that the success of science is not sort of shared with the rest of civilization, the methods and tools. Oh my gosh. Oh, so what we do in the lab, how we think about the problem, is not really how it's taught in school. It's, well, here's a book, a science book, and there are words that are ball-faced, and those are vocabulary words, you better memorize what those mean. And then you'd get an exam. And at the end, the science is a satchel of facts to you. Not an understanding of how we query nature. That and the methods and tools required to be successful at that. I claim that if more people understood how and why science works, you could apply it to other walks of life, and the world would be less error-prone than it has been, certainly in recent decades. So what you're describing is science in theory. Like most things, there's a distance between what it is in theory and what it is in practice, in the law. No, no, no, no, this human world, right? It's not in theory, it's practice. In practice, we do all we can to not fool ourselves into thinking something is true that isn't, or that something is not true that is. Did I say that right? Yes. Yes. Yes. All right. And so we do as much as is possible to accomplish that. And like I said, the peer review is a very important cog in that wheel. And occasionally, something will still slip through that missed everybody's analysis. And so you don't know that until somebody else finds it, but that's how it works. I didn't describe anything in theory to you. I described exactly how it unfolds in practice. So I think there's a problem with public trust in science having declined over the past few years. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we should examine the reasons for that. Public trust in institutions. In institutions in general. Deeper issue. Yes. Yeah. One observation I've made is that science works excellently when the topic is not politicized. So for instance, astrophysics. It's just not a red team, blue team, cable news. People aren't arguing about outside the flatter society. People aren't arguing in the Republican Democrats fear over physics facts or astrophysics facts. But when you had something like COVID, right, that quickly became a politicized topic. And in my experience, the moment something becomes politicized, the quality of science and scientific communications in practice tends to suffer. So I'll give you one example that disturbed me during COVID. So this came out in the New York Times, I think a little over a year ago. When the CDC released data about the efficacy of the boosters, the first booster shot. And a spokesperson for the CDC admitted to the New York Times that they had all this data about efficacy of the booster between different age populations. But they only released it for older populations. Because that's where the data looked pretty impressive for the booster. For people my age, it didn't look so impressive. So they just didn't release that data. Right. And so that comes out and I'm shocked. By the release, the data would mean making it public. It was surely already existed in journals that would not otherwise have access. That the CDC doesn't control what gets published. They will, what matters is, we're all relying on these agencies to do the reading of the journals. Right. So they can choose what they make public that all the cameras are there on them and whatnot. But so continue. Yeah. Anyway, so the, and one of the reasons the CDC spoke person cited is because they didn't want to give the impression that any aspect of the vaccine might not be useful to any aspect of the population. And this seemed to me to be side effect of the politicization of the issue because we split into this pro-vax, anti-vax thing which hijacked all of our political tribal impulses. Right. So now if you're on one team, you don't want to give any perceived win to the other side. Even if one aspect lends itself perhaps to that narrative. Yeah. That's fair. So the issue is not the science. It's the conduit between the moving frontier of science and people's access to what that means. And so that requires interlocutors and some of whom are political appointees, others of whom, like you said, don't want to look like they're carrying some kind of political bias. And these are people with much less experience communicating science to the public than perhaps they should have, especially in those situations. So yeah, by the way, as when you get degrees in science, only recently has there been any attention given to communicating science to the public as a professional scientist. There's a few organizations. In fact, Alan Alda, spearheaded actor, Alan Alda, spearheaded an entire school at Stony Brook, the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island, that is committed to taking graduate students in the sciences as well as faculty and training them how to communicate with the public. And because it was not previously, it was an unvalued feature of what it is to be. You go to the lab and you work 15 hours a day and they patch on the back for that. And whether or not you can communicate it was irrelevant. So it matters. If you had 30 seconds or a minute to tell scientists, give them some the most important wise lessons about how to communicate to the public. In 30 seconds. Or a minute. It comes at a cost of their productivity. You have to spend time learning how people think what they care about, what they do. Here's an example. I got an award. I think it was National Science Teachers Association or an organization like that. I got an award and I gave a little acceptance speech. And I asked people, I said, this is back now in the 90s. So I said, these are all science teachers, not only high school, but community college and colleges. Not so much the research scientists, but the teaching faculty. And I said, how many of you do not own a television? Half the hands went up. Half. Half. I said, of those who own a television, how many use it just for playing, just for DVDs? You rent a movie and you play it. So it's a screen to watch a DVD, back when DVDs were still in. DVD, do you remember? B DVDs? Okay, fine. And half the hands, okay, went up. So who's left here? So some, by the time I started slicing this, this Venn diagram, uh, about 15% of the audience actively watched any number of hours of TV in a week. Four, was it? Okay. At that time, the average person in society watched 30 hours of TV a week. I said, how could you possibly claim that you know and understand who you're teaching? We have no idea of the influences of what's going on in the mind of the person who you're trying to teach physics to. Like what? And so I challenged them to, at least metaphorically, stop facing the chalkboard and not looking at the audience. Okay, occasionally turn around and move at least halfway to them. All right, I professionally as an educator, I try to reach them. I try to make, I try to gap 90% of the distance to the mental pathways of who I'm communicating with, minimizing what is their effort to learn what it is I'm trying to tell them. And so yeah, in order for me to be pop culture fluent, I'm spending a time, spending time becoming pop culture fluent, which means I'm not in the lab publishing my next research paper, which is the currency of tenure and respect in the field and all these things we are trained to want as you ascend the ranks in graduate school and into post doc assistant associate and full professor elevations. So yeah, my one minute pitch is in order to be a better communica. I think you're going to have to give up some of the time you would have spent in the lab. And if they don't want to do that, then yeah, it comes back and bites you in the ass. You have people trying to communicate the value of science to the public and they're bungling the task. And that's unfortunate. And I think yes, that has, I don't think that's the entire reason for the collapse of trust in institutions, but it's a factor for sure. Met an important podcast often on the Defrias puts some clacks. Then the swing state, Mila Akushtabzogar triflexa ix why? Met him schlocken digital efficiency motor is their best. Akushtabzogar das Akushtabzogar test. I got a tapish fleas in order pocket. The extra brighter electro burst past the automata schjiedenbodenbelachan. And that gets the test zigar daschtabzogar test metrisigtabzogar getsuraganti on todia ale en force of Mila DE slash triflex. When it comes to hiring, you need to trust your gut. But what if you could give your gut some help? When you want to find quality talent fast, you need indeed. Indeed is a hiring platform where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Don't spend hours on multiple job sites looking for candidates with the right skills. 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It's not the first time the government has invested money, time and energy thinking about this problem. So, and of course, there's no shortage of films portraying it. So the accurate, the search for data, data, images, whatever, has been an ongoing thing since the 40s. So I don't know that it was more of a tinfoil hat thing recently than it had ever been, nor do I think the government ever thought of it as, let me separate the variables here. Okay. There are objects in the sky that occasionally we don't know what they are. They're unidentified, so they're UFOs. Fine. I'd want the government to investigate them. There's only flying over my head, especially go back to the Cold War, where you don't know what the quote, enemy is doing over our airspace, especially when Sputnik got launched. Okay. And it's flying over our head without our consent. You can't fly in our airspace without our consent, but when you're in space space, there's no treaty governing at the time. Who can fly over what country? In fact, they can't maneuver. It's just an orbital pass. So my point is, I'd want them to look at it. The tinfoil hat part of it is not that you're seeing glowing objects in the sky that you can't identify. The tinfoil hat is the entire community of people that are sure that aliens are visiting. You have conflated those two and they're fine, as many people do, but they're separable variables here and they should be kept separate. So my question was more a couple years ago, you could have reasonably assumed that all those videos of strange objects going through the air and suddenly tilting. So you could have assumed, well, I'm sure the government has some secret explanation. I'm sure they know what that was. Maybe it was one of our aircrafts. I don't know why anyone has that much confidence in the US government knowing anything. A reasonable person could have believed that there was some because we have state secrets, etc. Right. But now what I'm saying is has changed in the past few years. Just to be clear. Yeah, there's state secrets. Usually the ones that are best kept or the ones no one cares about knowing. Just keep that in mind. Maybe so. Look at what we knew about President Clinton's genitals on national television. If they're ever going to be a state secret, it might have been that. So I don't, I have no confidence in the competence of the government to pull off anything remotely resembling the level of secrecy that people are crediting it with accomplishing. But I just have to slip that in there. So I interrupted you going. So in any sense, it seemed to me significant, maybe, maybe less to you. But it seemed to be significant when you had government officials in Congress saying, actually, we know that these are indeed objects. They're not camera malfunctioning. They're not American military aircrafts. We're pretty sure they're not Chinese or Russian. And we don't know what they are. So that seemed to be significant in terms of closing the door to a lot of potential explanations of what these videos were. You're trusting that the government gave correct answers to that. They gave the best available. I mean, right. So I don't trust, it's not a matter of trust. I think the government is way less competent than people are crediting it with being in those situations. But let's assume, fine, they say, it's not us. We don't, and they, in the end, it's the, they give the list of what it's not. And then they say, we don't know what it is. Boom, there is the you in UFO. Boom, we're done with that conversation. It doesn't automatically mean it's anything when you just said you don't know what it is. Right, so what I'm saying is I'm completely incompetent as some random idiot with a laptop, right? So when someone that probably has much more access to information from the military says, also, we don't know what it is. That was significant to me because I assumed it may not have been a mystery in the past, but it really is, is a mystery. So I'm curious as someone that, I'm sure you thought a lot about the Fermi paradox and about, I know you thought a lot about the potential of extraterrestrial life and all of that. Oh, yeah. And it's very likely out there in the universe. If you look at the numbers and the biology and the chemistry and the physics of the universe, you'd have to be inexcusably egocentric to presume we're alone in the universe, for sure. So what probability do you sign if at all? Or how do you think about the possibility that these UAPs have something to do with extraterrestrial life near zero? How come? Because you have to ask other sets of questions, okay? A point I've made in multiple platforms, look at the images we're obtaining from the edge of the universe in a telescope parked a million miles from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope, the high resolution images of stars being born in gas clouds nearby and galaxies forming in the early universe. Look at the satellite photos we have of practically every square inch of Earth's surface. Look at the fact that one million people in any moment are airborne with a window and a high resolution camera and video in their pocket. Look at the fact that there are six billion smartphones in the world with basically crowdsourcing any possible alien invasion. Because when I grew up to have a camera on your body was a rare thing. What if it's not an alien invasion but like anything? A single unmanned probe like we might send to Mars. Mars, we sure. And all I'm saying is if your best image of an invading alien, excuse me, and visiting alien is a monochromatic fuzzy tic-tac in restricted naval airspace taken by a fighter pilot, that's your best data? We have to do better. Really, we have to, and it's doing some things you don't understand, you have to do better than that to convince someone that we're being visited by aliens. Excuse me, to convince a skeptic, a genuine skeptic, not a crazy skeptic out there that don't believe anything. And that's not what a true skeptic is. A true skeptic is, okay, that's interesting. Have you thought about this? Have you considered that? What about this? And an authentic skeptic ultimately lands at a conclusion supported by data. And they don't land at an inclusion that requires that they fill the gap in data with something that they want to be true, which is the foundation of conspiracy theorists. The foundation of all conspiracy theorists is there's a point where they're missing data. And in order to continue to believe what they want to be true, they gap that, they gap it with a declaration that the thing that would be completely convincing is being withheld from them. That's not an authentic investigation. What do you feel is a likelier explanation of? I don't know. I don't have to have an answer for everything. Science is not about always having answers. It's about when you don't know something. Let's try to devise experiments to figure it out. We consider it speculate, I suppose. But that's not what you do is you say, if I think it's aliens, what else would be true if it were aliens? It seems to me we'd have a better image of it than a monochromatic because everybody's got a smartphone. If aliens landed anywhere, hovered anywhere, if the mothership showed up, all the stuff that stokes our imagination in sci-fi films, we'd have high resolution images of it. And by the way, in all the sci-fi films, what if it's just like a super high-tech probe that they sent to take some measures of an aerospace and then there's no alien, there's no, you know, I'm not we wouldn't necessarily have all this other stuff, right? If you can't show that it's a probe, that's not my first thought. If you can't show that it's an alien probe, it's not my first explanation for it. What would be first? I don't have a, it's just not my first. It would be close to my last. It wouldn't be my first either. I mean, all my first would be that it's, you know, man-made here on earth and the fact that there's been- Orchard's optical effect. Oh yeah. There's a hundred things that could be- The fact that the government and military has ruled those out, not that they are infallible, I agree, the government's fairly incompetent. But the fact that people who are scientifically rigorous and have access to high-tech have ruled those out seems significant to me. So, I don't know that I would put it- So it's a mystery. I don't know that I put it near zero. Can't you live with a mystery? Sure, sure. Yeah, but- I don't have to have an answer to everything- I'm not saying there's an answer to have an answer to. I don't think, I don't know if I would put it near zero. Oh, what would you put it at? I don't know. Give me a number. Any number. Five or ten. Five or ten, okay. So that could mean, if they take liberties with the statistic, that one out of ten of them is an authentic visiting alien. One out of ten of the unexplained phenomenon. If you think there's a ten percent chance, that's- I'm playing loose with the statistics, but that's kind of what you- that's the consequence. There's a ten percent chance that's what the alien is- That we're living in a world where- Aliens have visited. I'm thinking there'd be other more compelling evidence. Or have sent a light in the sky to the drone. That has sent a drone. I'm thinking to be more compelling evidence than an unresolved light in the sky that you cannot- whose behavior you cannot explain. I'm just thinking there'd be. It's easier for me to think that there's some other atmospheric phenomenon that's not well understood that's making it, for example. That put that as a much higher. Some other thing we don't understand that remains to be fully described. The universe prims with mysteries. Embrace that. And so- and like a point I've made on Twitter, I said, it seems to me if aliens are coming, we would not need congressional hearings to establish that fact. People would have it on their smartphones and it would already be viral. Kittens go viral jumping from table to chair. You know a high resolution image of a mothership floating outside of an airplane. Have you seen the crossing of airplanes on Earth's surface in a 24-hour period? Have you seen the map? Okay. It's a complete coverage. You're imagining like grand scenarios from sci-fi movies. I've never imagined that. I've only imagined the the narrowest case, which is like a drone. An unmanned drone that kind of like goes to planets and takes some broad measurements because some sign alien scientists from a civilization along the way. I would only show up in restricted naval airspace and not to anyone else's smartphone. That's a question I have not had an answer to. They're only showing up for the military really. It may have only happened very few times. Maybe you know less than three times. Sure. And there are eight billion people in the world. I'm thinking somebody would have caught it. That's all. It's six billion of them with smartphones. I'm just thinking somebody would have caught it. I have a higher standard of required evidence in support of an extraordinary claim than perhaps many of the alien enthusiasts in the UFO world. So one of the craziest newspaper headlines was you at the government admits UFOs are real. Like what? That sentence makes no sense. It makes no sense. Unless you've completely conflated the fact that here's something you don't know what it is. Let's figure it out. Oh, you don't know what it is. Therefore, it's visiting aliens. So I'm disappointed with the reporting on this. Well, couldn't that just mean it's not camera flicker, which a lot of people thought these were just camera malfunctions. So to say it is a flying object that's unidentified. Sure, they are. It admits something they all are. Yes, I don't have a problem with that. Yeah, I wasn't sure of that though. Right. Many people. Some fraction of them would surely be interior reflections in the camera. I've seen it. I've done photography my entire life. So there's certain phenomena that goes on inside a camera that newbies to that would not know. And they say, well, I just dislike the ghosts. People who like photographing ghosts, their reflections inside of a camera that will easily give you most, if not all of what they're claiming is evidence for it. And if there's something else that shows up in a camera that their eyes don't see that funny, maybe there are ghosts, you know, try to capture one one time like the Ghostbusters and then release them. I just have higher thresholds of acceptance for a claim than what's going on. And by the way, I'm not weirdly. If you look at how scientists address other scientists data, it is the same standards that we're applying to each other for much less extraordinary things. Someone says, I found this planet orbiting this star at this rate. Well, how do you know it's that rate? Because it could be a different rate. Did you correct? I'm analyzing it on a level where, and it has nothing to do with aliens. My point is this level of attention given to, you know, as the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We often require extraordinary evidence even for a non-extraordinary claim. And you don't see that because it happens in the coffee lounges and the conferences and in the peer reviews of scientific journals. And so I'm applying that same standard to these claims. There's nothing different about what I'm doing here. And I just need better data. Give me a high resolution image of the alien walking towards you, of the mothership, where you can see things that are not just a flash. It'd be unlikely though that they would come physically, right? Like, so we're intelligent life. We send probes out to, you know, we send the Mars rover out there, et cetera. You say that it's egoistic to assume we're the only ones in the universe. Presumably intelligent life would maybe similar to us in having curiosity and in certain ways. And smart Martian smartphones could take pictures of our rovers and they can go viral in the Martian internet. And there you have it. There it is. Right. But I mean, if we had just sent one that was. That was very high land air space lands. They can walk up to it. Right. But what if it doesn't land? And it's just it's it's up in higher than they have insufficient data to demonstrate that it was an alien hour alien. They have insufficient data. It could be that, but if the data are insufficient, that's all I'm saying. I'm not saying they're not aliens. I'm saying I need better evidence to support that contention. That's really what I'm saying. Okay. Let's pivot to artificial intelligence. I assume that you've been paying attention to the developments that have been happening in the past. Let's say for let's say six to nine months with regard to. I've been paying attention over the last 50 years. 50 years. Yes. Okay. I didn't mean to say only the last nine months, obviously. The latest salvo in the AI assault. I'm speaking of chat GPT in the realm of texts. I'm talking about mid journey and Dali two in the realm of image generation. More recently, music LM in the realm of music generation, which is in my view quite a bit far behind the others. But I don't I think we'll catch up quite soon. What do you make of these technologies? Do you I mean, I think one of the big debates right now is to what degree they represent true intelligence. I know I'm Chomsky just released a New York Times article where he argues that chat GPT is not a true intelligence and there's all kinds of things humans can do that it can't. Frankly, I found that to be a weak argument because someone went in just asked chat GPT all the kinds of things that Chomsky said it couldn't answer and it it answered them pretty handily. In any event, where do you stand on this? What do you think? Do you think chat GPT represents a true artificial intelligence or do you think it's just a glorified kind of copy paste machine? First of all, I don't ever take stances on things. You've never taken a stance on anything? Not in the way you're using the term. No, people take this is what I do and I'm going to defend. That is not me. The stance is a point of view that you will defend to death, right? No matter who's coming at you. And typically to take a stance is to be blind to arguments that might unravel the stance you're taking. But it won't unravel it because you're taking a stance. The very statement a stance means you're digging your heels in. But if you're open to anything, you can't ever possibly take a stance. You're just offering information, receiving information with the power should I call it that to change your view at any moment based on new information that can come. So no, I don't have a stance on anything. I have a I can share an observation with you about it. I think people are needlessly distracted by the definitions of words. Is it really intelligence? Is it really this? Is it really that? Who cares? I don't why even care? Does it get a task done that you'd rather not have spent time doing? Great. Let it happen. Let me go back to 1975, that year between 74 and 76 was the transition from four function calculators going from $200 down to the price of a textbook $40 $30 around there, which meant it then became accessible to a school system. And in the face of that, do you still teach long division? Do you well, maybe so, because not everyone would have a calculator, even though they were as cheap as $40. And even if you did own one, it wasn't on your body. Everybody has a calculator now at all times, 24 seven. So certain things you no longer have to remember to do. Yeah, I'd like calculating a tip after dinner without pulling out a calculator, but you have a calculator. You can get a precise tip if you want it. Okay, the calculator replaced an entire category of mental tasks that we used to have to do and memorize the times table for goodness sake. You know, so as someone say, Oh my gosh, this artificial intelligence is this no, it's a task that is replacing things that otherwise occupied our time. And we're now using that time to do other things. What happens when the task is writing a full book? Who cares if it's a book, if it's an instruction manual on something, I don't want to write the damn manual. Let it write the manual. Boom. And it writes it in 20 minutes. I do some error checking on it and put it out there. I'll be fine me in the Bahamas soaking in sun rather than writing that instruction manual. So personally, I don't see it as fundamentally different from every encroachment of science and technology on tasks that were previously conducted by humans from machines, machine labor, replacing human labor. Robots build your cars. And I offer one reason why it seems different to me, or seems more significant other than that you're living in it now. Go on. Yes. I think because it's closer to you. Yeah, other things are very distant. That's one reason. Built into your understanding of the world. The rest of this is new to you. I'm telling you that when robots came in and built cars and they built cars better than a assembly line of humans did, by the way, there was a day when there was a finite chance, a real chance that in the morning, your car would not start. A very real chance. See, you're looking at me like, what? Yes. And you wouldn't know why. There would be some reason. The starter would be wrong. They feel like I was old enough to remember that. Okay. And that's even in movies, they'll show a car. They're they're scape and they can't start the car. And anyone today is like, what? Why won't the car start? Is it out of gas? No, there's something else going on there. Robots made the cars. They all work. And they all work. Okay. So, and a whole category of jobs went out the window because of that. All right. And you keep going. Oh, what happens? Oh, we have this game called chess. Oh, now the computer beats us. All right. Did the world end? No, it didn't. Define. I'm glad it beat us in chess. Okay. And for me, the real transition there was when it beat us in jeopardy. That's cultural information, right? But oh, that information has to be on the internet. Has to be on the internet in order for the AI to know it. Okay. Can't be something that didn't land on the internet. We're kind of putting everything on the internet. So that's a moot point, but it remains a fact. I think. All right. So did the world come to an end? No. All right. Let's keep going. We got something that can fully write someone's essay in college. Okay. So that would be cheating. All right. There are other ways to cheat. I could bring a book into a closed book exam that would be cheating. So we have rules against that. Yeah. So the one reason that I it seems to me, especially significant is because I think many people felt that artistic creativity was maybe the one human thing that the machines could never do. That maybe you could be better than me at math. Maybe you could be even better at a fairly calculating game like chess, but you will never write a symphony like Beethoven. You'll never write a play like Shakespeare, right? People felt this way, rightly or wrongly, I think. Yeah, I never felt that way. I thought it was inevitable. Yeah. But that doesn't mean it's now it's intelligent when previously it wasn't. The fact that computers fly airplanes, the pilot is practically in the cockpit just for show. Okay. Computers fly and stabilize airplanes. And so I guess in the tech world, the scientific world, it has been replacing our brain labor ever since we've had access to them. And we've done that on purpose. We didn't fear this. We sought it out so that our brains could be devoted to other things. Okay. So now it touches the arts. So welcome to the club. And now the what's going to be left 50 years from now, what's going to be left for us to devote our time? Are we all just like sitting on the beach as AI creates all the wealth and content in the world because it's better than us at everything? Why not? If I were to say that there's a limit to AI, and I'm happy to be shown to be wrong on this, which is why it's not a stance. It's I can think something up that no one has thought before or more more precisely. I can have think up an idea that does not currently exist on the internet and develop it and build something based on it. I don't see how AI would have access to that. So can AI that's why you said it can write like Shakespeare? Shakespeare already exists. If there were no Shakespeare, could you tell AI to be Shakespeare? I don't think so because it's basing its creativity on human creativity that predates it, that pre-existed and that exists on the internet. I would argue that very creative people often subconsciously are creating based on combinations and permutations of things they've consumed. Of course, all the time. Right. So this is the thing. If you if you ask chat GPT, obviously it won't come up with something brand new. But if you say combine Shakespeare's style with something else really different and it does that, it may end up creating something that really seems novel even though it's a combination of two other things. Sure. And a lot of creativity is like that. Yeah. I would say Einstein's general theory of relativity is not based on anything that came before it. It is invented out of whole cloth out of his hand. And so I don't know how good AI can ever be in inventing something that doesn't otherwise exist. Yes. You can tell it that but is it going to do it on its own? Is it whole cloth though? Is Einstein whole cloth? No, not as special to the general relativity just to have to be precise there. The curvature of space time in the presence of gravity that was that came out of nowhere that that was that came out of his head. But I don't see that as having been derived from some other person. So you do think there's that's the frontier between human and machine is that machines will never be able to be truly creative come up with truly new ideas. If I were to put a line in the sand, I would say that's where it is. And again, it can only be creative based on priors that exist that it has access to on the internet. And so relevant to that related to it is if I upload my consciousness, which people love talking about, you upload your consciousness to some box and then it says, well, is that you? You ask questions and it'll give you all the answers you would have given because it has all your neurosynaptic connections. All right. In that moment, I go to the Bahamas and I meet new people and I taste new foods and I then I come back. I have a life experience that that no longer does. So my life has split at that point between the consciousness up to 10 days ago and my consciousness that now has a 10 day vacation in the Bahamas that have met new people and Sam Bankman freed and joined his polycule in the Bahamas. So there's no and I didn't put that on the internet. So it cannot deduce my new experiences. And from those experiences, I have an idea. I'm going to write a short story based on that. It can't write that short story because it doesn't have that experience that I have now layered on top of my entire consciousness that was uploaded 10 days ago. So I still think this room to be creative, but look at how much stuff we have to write that is not creative. You know, wiki pages are not creative. They're just informational. Let let let it bot do that. And don't be upset by it. Find something else to do that it can't. Hey folks, Coleman here. 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My suspicion is that there's actually nothing humans can do that machines won't be able to, including that truly novel idea generation. My suspicion is that as they get more powerful, the ideas they come up with will increasingly approach and ultimately reach that level of true novelty. That's my suspicion. I can't really justify it. Let's go back to 18, when was it 30, 1840? Could AI have invented the process of photography? I don't think so. AI doesn't build things. It just has ideas. I do something inventive in my home that solves a problem. Is AI going to do that? I don't know. Maybe, but if it does, I think that's very late in the AI development. Yeah, you're right. Artificial intelligence imitates us in some way. But again, it's internet based. Think about that. It can only do what it has access to be able to do. It can't do things that a human, unless the AI makes bots that go on vacations to the beach, and then they experience what I would experience. I don't see that anytime soon. Plus, AI is not really in the direction of making humanoid robots. That's how everyone has thought about it. I don't think the economic drivers will send it in that direction. Of the humanoid robot direction, because it won't make sense. It doesn't make sense. Why would you need that? Older things, if you look at the Jetsons, there was a maid robot who wore a little maid outfit, and the maid did the laundry. But why? In other words, I see AI, yes, replacing tasks one by one. But I don't see one thing doing everything. What's the point of that? Why would someone do that? I don't need my car that drives me to my work, which is its own version of AI, because it's no human intervention, and it is following all traffic signals and calculating the best route based on what the traffic is. People have already existed with us, so no one is thinking of that as AI. Oh my gosh, if you show that to someone in the 1970s, they say, there it is. That's AI. It's making decisions for you. It knows your name. It can... Okay? So as we move forward, everyone is pocketing what would have previously been considered amazing achievements of AI. It's it. We're not there yet. And so that's evidence that we're just absorbing the things that are changing in society. And I think that'll just continue. And yes, we have to readjust the work place to make this happen, because a lot of people will be out of jobs, especially drivers. There's some... I read some number, and I didn't believe it, and then I ran some numbers on it. It's something like, what is it? 40 percent? Some high number? 30 percent of all men? Are employed in a driving capacity? I think there's about a million truckers alone in America. So you know, truckers, taxis, car services, forklifts, include bus drivers, and train conductors, you know, folks like that? Yes. And by the way, you're born into an era, I'm older than you, where you're not wanting... Here's the conductor when you're taking the tram between terminals at an airport. That's open... Oh, that's not AI. It knows when to come, when to stop, when to open the doors, it tells you the doors are about to open, it knows when to leave. All that's happening, and no people are involved. Okay? Oh my gosh. There was a day when there would have been a person there. They've been replaced by a machine, plus some computing. So I don't fear this going forward. And one point about kids cheating on essays. You know why people cheat? They cheat because schools value grades more than students value learning. If that were not the case, no one would ever cheat, ever. It would never even be a thought. You wouldn't have to take an oath. You wouldn't have to promise, no, it would just be, I want to learn. I'm here to learn. I want to learn. No, you have to get the high grade. Oh, now I got to cheat so I can get the high grade. So schools will have to shift in what they're, how they emphasize what they're doing with students, so that no one even wants to cheat, because they'll value what they learn. And if you value what you learn, you will never have chat GBT write your essay. It'd be an unthinkable act. So you're not recommending to get rid of grades entirely. I am passing judgment on the weight given to grades for people in school. You can test someone and say, Oh, you need to do better. Let's do better. And you test them again, you test them again. And now they've learned it. And now we're good. You've learned it. No grades. The grades are tools, not imprimaturs on how do you incentivize? We all get branded by the grades. I was an A student. I've heard people say, you know, I should know that I got an A in that class. That very sentence itself is absurd, because they're using their grade as their measure of what they should know, rather than knowing the thing that they should know. If I put myself back into my shoes, I took a class on this. I know it. Not I got an A in the class. Therefore, I should know it. How come I don't remember it? Yeah, if I put myself back in my high school shoes in a class that maybe I wasn't so interested in, like maybe, I don't know, some class that was not my favorite. To me, the incentive to do any work really was I don't want to get a bad grade. Whereas the classes I really loved, I didn't really need that incentive. But I was also probably in the higher percentile of like interested in for its own sake, kind of a kid, especially in science and like philosophy, for example, the great teacher. I have an answer for you. The great teachers on any campus, everyone knows who they are. There's all the buzz of who it is. And sometimes there's a separate document or a webpage given to the best, but you know, unofficial university would never sanction it, of course. So you all know who the best teachers are. Often you are told what class to take. You are, it is recommended you take the class because it's so great. And you know something? They can make you interested, even if you were not interested going in at the beginning. So it is a failure of the professor for you to say, I'm not really interested in this class anyway. I have to take it. I just need a good grade. You know, 50% of teachers are below average. So what do you do? What do you do with? On average. On average 50% or below average. No, but they're a threshold. No, I'm not talking about what's average here. I'm talking about the threshold of engagement. There are teachers who have the power to make their subject the most interesting thing you've ever heard of and done while you're in their class. You know them. These teachers exist. Okay. Make every teacher that way. And then they can all be above average. Because it's a threshold. Oh, you know they can't. It's a threat. Well, no, it's a thresholding. They can all be above a certain threshold. Yes. You're saying. And then you can spread them of who's better at that. Fine. But the minimum requirement is if I'm not interested in your subject and you teach me the subject and I'm even less interested in it or I'm the same, get a different teacher. Well, this goes back to what your superpower is and has been throughout your career, which is, as you said in the beginning, bridging that gap. I think I would call it cognitive empathy bridging the gap between what you know and what you know is in the minds of a classroom of either possibly disinterested students initially. It's like, how do you bridge that gap? I would call it getting to know your audience. You can call it cognitive empathy. Because, okay, those two words together are less transparent than getting to know your audience. So the fact that you felt the urge to rebrand it. That's how it's branded in my mind to be guy wasn't trying to make it sound like what I'm saying is for you to say, today, we're going to go over cognitive empathy. It's like, what? Today, I want to learn how you're thinking. Okay. That's an example of putting a distance between you and your audience. The fact that you wanted to call it something. I didn't want to call it that. That's what you did. That's just what it is in my mind. I get it. I respect that. But don't think that that makes it don't think that calling it that is a step forward in having people understand what you're talking about. It's a step back. No, no, I don't think it is. I mean, I just, I call things what it occurs to me to call them is, I'm not as good as an educator as you. You know, you're just realized. No, no, you have to realize you are one of the greatest of all time at this skill. The reason why I don't think about it that way, thank you. But I don't think about it that way, because I'm dealing with really good material, black holes, you know, the edge of the universe. I got a, I got a first of Hubble and now the James Webb tells all astrophysicists have that same source material to communicate. Yes, we do. And I would say on, on average, we are more out there than many other professions are that have many more members in their groups. Okay. There's got to be a hundred times as many, no, probably a thousand times as many engineers in the world as there are astrophysicists. JWST is an engineering marvel. How come people don't want to learn about the engineering? Can you name an engineer who has a household name? I don't think so. Yet you go, but going through the decades, you can name highly visible scientists and many of them. In fact, I would say most of them have been, they got famous for the astrophysics part of what they've done. Stephen Hawking is a physicist. People got to know him because he wrote a book on the universe, not specifically on the laws of physics and the physics he worked on. But brief history of time is the, that's where he went. That's how he got, no, Carl Sagan. You can keep doing Albernite's night. Of course, he did great things in many areas. So if you look at YouTube, if you look at YouTube, not YouTube, just general social media influencers who have platforms in science and look at their followings, those who do astronomy related topics of higher followings than everybody else. That's a good point. So we naturally find something more fascinating about astrophysics and then chemistry, say. I think so. And why is that? Because we all look up and wonder and ponder our existence in this world. Plus looking up, you know, most gods are up above us in the sky, in the clouds, on mountains. And so I think that deep sense of curiosity. And let me take an evolutionary leap and declare that, you know, humans among mammals are one of the few species that are perfectly comfortable sleeping on our back. Think about it. I'm more of a side sleeper. But if you're on your back, you're not, oh, this is awful. Let me turn over. You'll carry on your back and we sleep at night. If you ever wake up at night on your back, you're looking up. Has a beetle ever seen the night sky? Beedles don't like going on their backs, right? The legs just flam. Turtles, you know. So it may be that we evolved to sustain some curiosity. You know, oh, what is that star over there? Well, the moon was here, but now it's there. You know, there's, there's, I think it happened natively within our evolutionary past. But anyhow, that's, I'm overstepping there. It's just, it's fun to imagine that as a driver. The way that manifests today is increased interest in the cosmos among all. And what goes on in the universe. And it also has, you know, there's an origin story in there that's how it all and the chemist doesn't have the origin story or the how it all ends. Or how it all began. Yeah, right. That's the origin story. Right. Right. I see it. So, okay, let's pivot completely and talk about race. You have a chapter in your book about, about race and color and race. Color and race. Yes. Which follows the chapter on gender and identity. Yes. We could talk about both. Let's start with color and race. What moved you to want to talk about this topic? What did you, what did you want to say in this chapter? Yeah, I wanted to highlight. I want to explore the biases people bring to their lives. Some are just sort of in group out group that may be ingrained within us evolutionarily. So I want to be sensitive to that. The urge to say, are you with me or you're against me? I don't think that's necessarily learned. It could just be urges that we have just being human. So now, well, what constitutes in group out group? And then you just look at the history of it. Well, it used to be, are you from this country or that country? I'm going to fight you or not. And that actually changed to, well, it's not which country you are. It's what your skin color is that I'm going to cite. And skin color crosses national boundaries. So then the concept of race becomes an organizing principle of how people think about other people. And so that I'm fascinated that this was the past. I'm also fascinated that who ever does this sort of thing. And it's not just race. Anyone typically who classifies people does so not just to see and celebrate the differences, but to rank people, to rank them by some metric. And this is the difference between recognizing that everyone is different and then deciding that you're better because you're different. That's what I address in that chapter. And and then I look at what is cited as evidence for especially from 19th century anthropologist, which is arguably the most racist branch of science embedded in a time that there ever was before or since. Okay, they go around the world and they see people are different. And then they find out in the past judgment that saying that they're inferior, whatever. Okay, so growing up as black man in America, I experience people's attitudes towards me and how they pass judgment without even knowing me how they just give an example of freshman in college. And I'm eating at a local breakfast place. And there were two of us eating. And the bill came, they gave one bill to the table. And it was an odd number of cents. Okay, in the pennies column. And that can't be if you have two people. Okay, so we ordered the same thing. Okay, so twice any number is an even number twice and even numbers, even twice an odd numbers, even if we have two of these, it can't be odd unless there were some rounding going on. Okay, so I looked at it and I said, okay, had they given us two separate checks, the sum would be one penny less than them adding because you have to the tax is a factor that leaves you with fractions of pennies that require a rounding error. Okay, so I get that and I understand that. So I said to the server, can you make those two separate checks, please? And to say, everyone said, yeah, it was a principle, the matter of print. Okay, make this two separate checks. Plus, I'm assuming I don't have any money. I'm a student, right? pennies matter. So they said, no, I can't do that. You have to do that up at the cash register. I said, okay, so I get up to the cash register. I'm a black man now age 18 in a place where the black people are not common. Okay, so I said, I'd like to pay this as two separate checks. It will come out less if you do that. They say, no, it won't. This is it's a math on that. And I said, if you do this, it will come out one penny less if you charge them separately. And the then the guy gets on the microphone at the cash register. Can you come up here? We have a problem at the cash register. Okay, problem. So then the manager comes out and says, what's the problem? And me, I'm holding up the line because you don't pay at the table. You pay at the front. There's a long story to make a quick point that while we're going through this, as petty as it was for me to do this, the person behind me in line murmurs to the person he's with. Referencing my this dust up, he says, obviously doesn't know the distributor property of multiplication. Oh, he fuck with the wrong person. It was like, wow, you just mess with the wrong black man. So what that told me was they don't have any idea at what level I'm having this conversation with the cash register. They have no idea. And they're assuming I'm an idiot. So I spent my life people with people assuming I'm an idiot. No, because it's you it's one factor that's distributed across two terms is a multiplicative factor across two terms. And so. So you felt underestimated your whole life? Yeah, the whole my whole life. Oh, of course. Oh, yeah, just as black male. Yeah, I was at a wedding, a wedding. Okay, I was called a white wedding. I was just everybody there was white. Okay, and I'm the only black person there. And it's my wife's father. It was a family in laws wedding. My wife's father was a physicist. Okay, he knows me. We know each other. Someone paid to have a crop duster drop popcorn on the yard, which I thought was cute. Okay, in the reception, the wedding reception. And I'm just wondering, uh, popcorn. So when you release the popcorn, I just wondered if the propeller would how far backwards from the plane it would send it before the I'm just thinking this out loud, right? And then I'm just asked I'm having this conversation with someone and somebody overhears that it comes up to me doesn't know me and says, Oh, you got it all wrong. It's the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I said, Oh, no, because I was considering the back draft of the engine on this in the trajectory of the corn, knowing that it would achieve terminal velocity instantly, because it's very low density. I say this and but the guy is sure that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Okay, my wife's father overhearing this comes up to me and says, Oh, Neil, are you still teaching astrophysics at Princeton? He just calmly says that. Okay, I was I was finishing a postdoc there and entering becoming part of the teaching faculty. And the guy overhears this. And then he was no longer, let me help this ignorant person. Then he turned it into a conversation about the aerodynamics of floating popcorn and his entire attitude changed upon learning this relative to his assumptions. I could give hundreds of these examples. My point is this is having lived this. I say, Well, what's behind this? Do they must they believe that they are superior to someone else in whatever way, especially intellectually? But do they need this for their survival? What's going on here? That chapter is an exploration in that zone. So interestingly, especially that second example, I think if something like that were to happen to me and it's actually it happens quite often, my first thought would it wouldn't necessarily be he's doing this because I'm black. I would I would think he's doing this because he has done in Kruger's and he like thinks he like there's a lot of just like ego in the world, especially among men and like overconfidence where people will just put their foot down and claim to no shit that they just do not know. You're in another time where you have the luxury to think that my stories come from a time where that includes both these stories are from decades many decades ago. Yeah, the popcorn story is from the 90s, but that's now 25 years ago. So it has happened less. You know, I've met tricks for the reduction in this, which is why there is no time in the past. I'd rather visit. Okay, no anyone of color, anyone on the gender spectrum, the women, there is no time in the past where you can honestly say I was better off. The world was better off for this community back then. Let's go back. No, however, slow and secure it is the arc of progress is or has been it does indeed bend towards justice ultimately. And so this is not an edict. This is an observation over time. And so yes, and there are fits and starts in there. But overall, I think that's an accurate state. It's these stories mixed in with other stories. For example, when I was a kid, I was into timekeeping time devices, wristwatches that were complicated dials on it and pre digital watch, you know, there is like, did have a day and a date or the year or a tachometer. So I had a watch. I bought a watch from Macy's with some money I'd saved up. And then the sweep second hand had fallen off. So I go to my local jeweler and I so I need to have this return and I am 15 black kid, okay, and I walk into the jeweler and he looks at it looks at me and says, no, I don't have the key to the back of this to open it. He's a jeweler. I don't know why is that so. I said, oh, okay. But then he said, plus this is stolen. And here I am again, I don't see myself as a black person. I see myself as a scientist as a kid. I was very sciencey as a kid. And then I have to realize, oh, when I step outside, everyone sees me as the as a black person and they're interacting with me that way. And so there I am thinking, wow, I wonder how Macy's could have obtained stolen watches and how he would know that Macy's obtained or so. And I'm working through this on the assumption that I'm just another person walking into the jewelry store. And then I realized, oh, I'm black. He's white. He thinks I'm a criminal. And he accuses me of stealing it. That's why he doesn't want to take possession of it to fix it. Because then he'd be in possession of stolen goods, okay, to the extent that that does not happen to you, you have the luxury of thinking, oh, they're treating me this way just because they're an asshole, not because they're white and I'm black. And that's fine. I'm telling you that some percentage of those cases, if not 100% of them, you have misread based on my life experience as a black man in America. I would the one thing I would say is I've had, I think, way fewer experiences like that, but not nine. Thankfully, yes, because we grew up in different times. Different times. Well, let me add, I probably outweigh you by 130 pounds or so. I'm a larger person. Back then I was very physically fit. So who am I? If I'm a black person, you must be an athlete, okay? In my early days, this is early days of my public visibility. So let's go back to the 90s. People would recognize me but wouldn't know where. All right, well, were you at a conference? Did you? Did I know you did we meet? Okay. And then it would move on. I'd seen you on TV. Are you a sports caster? All right. Their first thoughts is athletics, okay? Now granted, I was physically fit, but their first thought was athletics, even though the only times they ever actually saw me was commenting on the universe. These are the biases that are deep within our culture. And so I address those. I just bring a scientific lens to it. And I talk about things they listed for why black people were inferior to white people. And by inferior, they make closer to apes because the evolutionary, you know, hilarious section of your book where you turn this on its head and you inhabit what a black supremacist scientist in the 19th century might cite as evidence equally compelling or uncompelling evidence for the supremacy of black people. So maybe list some of it's kind of like, it's kind of a funny exercise to reverse this. Yeah, what I did was I said, suppose they were black anthropologists in the 19th century, and they were just as racist as the white anthropologist. What would they come up with as evidence that white people were closer to apes than black people? And I just made a whole list. Just and it's a it was a it's one of my proudest sections of the book because it's very clever. And it's very but it's making a serious point, which is that these scientists, they had all of these things that seemed like good evidence of white superiority, but you can find equally compelling evidence of the reverse. They had to sweep under the rug and not notice because their bias prevented it. They weren't looking for it. They weren't looking for it, correct. Little things like chimpanzees who are closest genetic relative are their hairy as are all the great apes. And the hairiest people you have ever seen on this planet have been white people. Okay, with hair on their chest, you know, especially white men, hair growing up their neck coming out of their shirt collars, white people, okay? If you really wanted to say white people were closer to apes, start with that. White people have hair all over the body just like chimpanzees, okay? Also, aside from the palms of the hands and the face, for many, if not most, chimpanzees, if you park the hair, the skin under the hair is pure white. It's not any shade of brown. So they have white skin like white people. You can keep going. Chimpanzees have really big ears. The biggest ears you will have ever seen on any human being are on white people. Well, sorry. The way I put it is, I've been ear watching for decades, and this is my conclusion, but I didn't go with a caliper up to yours. Just, I invite you to make the observation. I look at ears all the time. Do I trust you? It's just never something I've registered. Right, right. So now start looking at ears. You will see the smallest ears you'll see will be on, and of course there's overlap. But annual might cite, wait a minute, how about Obama? He had big ears. Well, Obama was exactly half European white, exactly half. But we call him black, right? But he's exactly half white. So maybe that's where he got his biggest ears. The point you and I both made, I think, many times is we, you know, these, the way these categories manifest in our society today, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, etc. There is a social and political history to how these categories came to be that has little, if anything, to do with deep scientific concepts. And we take for granted that Obama was the quote unquote first black president, on what basis was he black rather than mixed race or rather than white. It's pretty much an arbitrary fact of how we categorize things today, and it'll be different in 100 years, and it was different 100 years ago. It's logically no different to call him white than it is to call him black, right? But people don't really take that to its conclusion. People, I think many people might, they would agree in the abstract with this point, but go around acting as if race is this very real, very important thing. And one point that I've made and that is compelling to me is if you believe race is a social construct, which I do, that suggests you should take the rules and norms around it less and less seriously, right? The hallmark of believing something is socially constructed is to not be as obsessed with it, right? What I've seen in our culture over the past 10 years is people getting more and more obsessed with it, right? Well, oh, you're a white person, so you can't open a Mexican restaurant in Portland, and we're gonna publish an article about how that's not okay. People of this race can say this particular word, but these people can't under any circumstance, even if you're alone rapping to do saying your favorite. Yeah, people have been taking these rules more and more seriously in my observation over roughly the past 10 years. And I think if we are to really live by the idea that race is a social construct, we should be slowly relaxing our attachment to these social rules of race that we create. Yeah, I agree, but I think you can't fully say that without recognizing the causes of it. The causes of it was that people were continuing to pass judgment on people because of this race, ethnicity identity. So it's almost a defense of, okay? You are Mexican and you ignored me, you ignore everything I did, and you denigrated me, and you're okay? Oh, now you want to take my culture and make money off of it? Get the fuck out of here? No, okay? It's a response. It didn't come out of nowhere. Those attitudes and those feelings are in defense of a culture that was previously rejected, but now is being absorbed by people who are then exploiting it. And so I think the hard edge on that will soften in the coming years because it's a rearing of anger, really. I think that's how I view it. That I think will soften, and we will emerge on the other side of that with respect for all cultures and all traditions and all of this. And then you might be happy that someone wants to imitate your, imitations the greatest form of flattery. You'll be imitating it, but by you imitating it, you're not simultaneously saying that what I was was lesser than you, and now you make a million dollars doing what I was doing from before. By the way, this goes back to the 1970s, late 70s. When did the movie 10 come out? Okay, that has Bo Derek, and she's a fashion model at the time, and White, and she's a 10. The whole movie is about a guy's obsession with her as a 10, okay, on an attractiveness scale. The poster of her has her with braids coming down like the kind you get on the beach in the Caribbean, okay? And at the time, if you're black and you had that hair saw, you couldn't go into the workplace. They say you can't do that with your hair, do something else. It was corn road hair down that came off the head, and it dangled. Very attractive on her and on people who wear this. But all of a sudden, everyone said, oh, look at this new hairstyle of Bo Derek, and now it's a runaway success movie, and it was completely taken, all right, without any real respect given to its origins. And so this is blind. It's blind and unfair, and would otherwise be a society that recognizes the diversity of who's there. So, once you see the origin of the anger, I think it's more understandable that it is emerging that way, percolating that way in our culture. But by the way, it's- So I totally agree with everything you just said, and especially examples like that where that the thing is actually still largely denigrated in society. And then now it's high fashion, but if you were to wear it on the street, you would get pulled over like that. Those examples, I really agree with. But there are these, I mean, so for instance, one other thing, a quick one, black people have famously larger lips than white people, okay, thicker lips. Have you ever looked at the lips of a chimpanzee? Are they thin? They're really thin. They have hardly any lips at all, hardly any. So that you can look at a chimpanzee and think black person when they have large ears and thin lips, it's an extraordinary exercise in bias, that that's the case. I say this only because if you're going to make fun of large lips, historically, and then today, there's all these collagen injections into lips to make small lips larger, now you want the lips, right? That's just a little weird, okay? It's interesting how that happens historically, you know, things ebb and flow and- Yeah, and so by the way, I don't mind any of it provided, you don't rank people because of it. That's all. You're going to say you're better than someone because of one feature or another. That's where the problems arise. If you're just different, oh, that's interesting, it's different. Yeah, so there are those really hardcore cases of cultural appropriation, where like we've talked about, the movie 10 and so forth, that's like one class of case in my mind where I agree with the outrage. Then there's this other class of cases. But you're sure he's been going on that long? Oh, sure, absolutely. So there's other class of cases where- so I had Meg's Maker on the show a couple months ago. Meg's Maker is a woman happens to be white American woman. When 9-11 happened, she got on a plane, went to Afghanistan, spent years in the Middle East, learned Arabic, fluently developed all kinds of contacts there. And in the mid 2010s got access to a program where former jihadis that has spent 15 years in solitary in Guantanamo Bay went to Saudi Arabia and did a rehab rehabilitation program, like a really nice rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia and reintegrated back into society. Somehow she got access to befriend and film them at this rehab. So again, we're talking about she spent years and years in the Middle East learning Arabic and legitimately befriends these men and gets permission to do this amazing documentary showing them in all their complexity, not just as terrorists, but as human beings. Anyway, it makes this brilliant documentary, goes to Sundance. She gets like a standing ovation. And then some people attack her because she's white. And then they take the movie out of Sundance and now you can't even see it all because she happens to be the wrong color despite having all the legitimate, despite it being so clear that she was not denigrating or stealing in any kind of way that is similar to these other cases. And yet still, it just doesn't matter. I think that force of resistance will soften, based on my read of the arc of conduct in culture. And consider for example, I grew up in an era where there were no black performers on Broadway, but how do they get a job? You can make a musical that was an all black cast. So for a period of years, not many, but a period of years was all black cast. My first Hello Dolly was with Pearl Bailey in an all black cast. Same story with a little bit of soul flavoring to it. And I remember thinking, well, why are they all black cast? I'm young, some naive, and then I learned, oh, there were no opportunities. The others were not advertisers all white cast. That's just what they were, right? They weren't even ever looking for a black person because they were going to cast a black person. It has to be because they needed a black person in the plot line, not because you're just an actor who wants to perform. So this was an important transitionary period there. By the way, if cinema went through that earlier, okay, if you were a black person in a movie, it's because you were the black person, where you were the bellhop, or you were the Pullman Porter. It's not because you were just another actor with nuanced character elements in your, in the development of who you were. So, so then you have all black films, and then you have the cross-pollination. And now you see black actors in films, and it's not even a newsworthy thing. They're just another actor. Yeah, like think of John David Washington in Tenet, Christopher Nolan's last, last movies. Like the protagonist is just a black actor, but it's completely irrelevant that he's black. It's it could have been anyone, and he's just awesome. And that's, I think that's a true sign of progress when that can happen. And no one thinks it's weird. Correct. And again, I'm old enough when Doug Williams started as quarterback in the Super Bowl. This is in the 1990s, first black quarterback in the Super Bowl. There were articles, get a black person should this, you know, the quarterback, that's the smartest position on the field. And that's why there haven't been black quarterbacks because they have lower IQ. And so that's why, and then he set a Super Bowl record for passing. And so that, boom, now they're black players and you're not, it's not a thing. So, yes, we have to crawl before we can walk and walk before we can run. And I think, like I said, this resistance, I think will, it'll soften. And I don't see that people can have the energy to sustain that. But it's a reminder that, yeah, you were the oppressor. I can't have you claiming that you're, you know, you're my friend now. You have to earn it a little more, I think. So last question in your book on in the race chapter, you Oh, but one of the last points of comparison between white people saying black people are under fall DNA. This is another one. Yeah, I just want to give another one. The you probably never ever saw black children look at a tree and say, I want to live in that tree. Yet tree houses are like a major feature of suburban living in the backyard of white children. And so, so you get this 19th century black racist anthropologist saying, these are just white people wanting to get returned to their roots in the trees. Yeah, it's a pretty, it's a fun sort of stupid list of comparisons. Just if you want to be racist, and then I midway the list, I say, look how easy it is to be racist. Let's continue. It's very easy by the standards of the 19th century anthropology, which were basically no standards at all. And then there's Neanderthal DNA, which is only possessed by basically descendants of Europeans. Right. And that's of course, an emergent recent discovery. When I grew up, Neanderthal was like the backwards. For saying someone is dumb. For, yeah, it don't be a Neanderthal. Right. They were like the dumbest things because they didn't survive and chromagnet survived. So it was easy to treat them and think of them that way. And if that had turned out the other way that black people had in the Neanderthal DNA and white people didn't. It would have been a trivia. It would have been, in a lot of people's minds, they would have, well, in some people's minds, they would say, well, there you go. That's part of why black people are dumber. But then it would also be whatever scientists discover that and publicize that might be tarred as a racist too on the other side, when they were just publishing a fact. So it's like, there's so many dynamics that are unhealthy and vestiges of the history of racism and also overreactions, also overreactions too. Just looking the baggage behind us and it's still there. Occasionally, some of it is shed, but there's still, it's still there as you know. So the point about the Neanderthal DNA is we now find out that is really exclusively a European. Some Europeans have 3% or low single digit percent Neanderthal DNA. And we now see research articles saying, well, we need to revisit the creativity of Neanderthal. They're not as dumb as, and all of a sudden the whole set of research papers are coming out, rehabilitating the image of Neanderthals. And you can't help but notice the coincidence of that with the results that Europeans have Neanderthal DNA. So ultimately, I think we want to get to a place where people really feel that there is only one race, the human race. That's at least what I want to. I want more than the diversity it contains. Yes. Yeah, you celebrate, you don't rank it. But there is, there are people now that don't like that phrase. That I was in 2015, it's a little old now, but the University of California released a document saying, there is only one race, the human race is a microaggression in Ibram X. Kendi's book, How to Be an Antiracist, he says, there's only one race to human race. That's an incorrect sentiment, which is bound to fail because it has failed in the past. How do you feel about the ethos? Yeah, what is your stance on, there is one race, the human race as an ethos. Yeah, I use that phrase in the book only because it comes off of everyone's thinking of multiple races. So it works in that context. You want to see the world has six races? No, we won race. So because I'm using the same vocabulary, but I'd rather just say we're one species and then we're done. So don't say one race. The human race is a phrase, so that's why it's used. If you want to micro analyze that phrase and say that these words affect people, fine, then get rid of it. But the idea is that we are one, we are homo sapiens, one species. And I don't think you can unpack that in any way that offends anybody. So don't overthink human race, it's proxy for human species. And that's what we're trying to talk about here. We're one species, interbreeding single species. That's what we are with all the beautiful variants that exist within it. On that note, Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you so much for coming on our show again. Yeah, keep it going. All right. We love your work. We love your writings. The nice thought provoking. People get angry with me to read some of your stuff, but they at the they still have to respect it because your arguments are tight, or at least they don't so much come from an emotional place, they come from an academic place. And that always forces a higher level of attention. It commands a higher level of attention that people just scream in. Yeah. We're running up and down the street. I try to. I try to. Okay. Thanks, Neil. All right. Thank you. All right. Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you enjoyed it, be sure to follow me on social media and subscribe to my podcast to stay up to date on all my latest content. If you really want to support me, consider becoming a member of Coleman unfiltered for exclusive access to subscriber only content. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.