Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMVG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to to where they are today. The educational system should stop teaching science as just a satchel of facts, where if some fact shows up later that's different, you say, see, I don't have to believe any of it because it was wrong.

No. Science is a way of querying nature. Science is a way of thinking about nature. So if that's what it is, then you're not susceptible to some announcement about the moving frontier of science that got overthrown by another announcement a week later. You say that's the moving frontier.

On this episode of the Puck, I have the distinct honor of sitting down with Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Tyson has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates as well as the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the organization's highest civilian honor. He shares his perspective on the real definition of science, the origins of a global consciousness, and the way our minds struggle with probability and statistics, and how embracing the unknowable often advances us towards a greater understanding of our universe. Neil deGrasse Tyson, welcome to the Puck. Now before we jump in to discuss your recent book, Starry Messenger, and your career as an astrophysicist, can you tell our listeners just a little bit about your background and also how you developed an interest in astrophysics?

So I'm born and raised in New York City in The Bronx, if I gotta say that right, The Bronx. And educated in the public schools kindergarten through twelfth grade, and majored in physics in college and have a PhD in astrophysics. I would spend three years as a post doc, very typical once you get your PhD, and thereafter here at the American Museum of Natural History, where I'm speaking to you from right now, they wanted to do something new with the Hayden Planetarium, which was looking a little bit tired relative to the rest of the museum and the attendance had been dropping. And this was odd because it was dropping at a time where interest was surging because of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, now speaking back in the nineteen nineties. So, my I forgot how my they caught my name from my writings perhaps and they asked if I have any thoughts about it.

I said sure, it was my first night sky. It was the Hayden Planetarium. I certainly have ideas that I wrote them out and they liked them and then they made me head of the place. Okay. And I've been that ever since.

The ideal for me an ideal combination of effort would be maybe half reaching the public and half maintaining my research. But that's not the ratio that has emerged. It's been 90% reaching the public, 10% research, which for me is not ideal, but the public part of me is engaged that way more out of a duty is because I can and I'm based here in New York City where all the major news gathering headquarters are located. So when the universe flinches and they need a sound bite, they'll come to me and I'm happy to provide that. But if I didn't, then I think I'd be irresponsible, not only to my field, but also to the public who pays tax money for so much of the work that my profession engages in.

So, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the like. So, that's kind of my origin story, if you will. Could I say that I I was interested since I was nine? No, you did not say that since you were Yeah. So, it was the first trip to the Hayden Planetarium, a family trip.

I was nine years old. I looked up at the night sky that they created for me and my initial thought was that it was a hoax because I had seen the night sky from The Bronx and it didn't match. And I saw, this is a nice hoax but this can't be real. And I would, of course, later learn that and I still think to myself to this day, I visit beautiful mountain tops where we have some of the world's most powerful telescopes and I look up at the night sky and I say, That's so beautiful. It reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium.

I saw it, miss. I know it's a sort of a bit of urban sadness there that my my reference frame is not even real. But so that's why I think my interest being that deep and that long, I kinda sometimes feel the universe chose me. That's a beautiful way to look at it. So speaking of that, I love Starry Messenger, but it's a little different in a departure from some of the other stuff you've done.

What is it that drew you to writing the book and and what's the message you'd like our listeners to take away? Yes. Starry Messenger, I mean it's all in the subtitle, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. In some ways, it's the most science y book I've ever written in the following sense. Yes, there's a branch of science called astrophysics.

If you pick up most of my other books, it's about astrophysics or space exploration. But of course science is way more than just the universe or launching a rocket. Science is a way of thinking, it's a way of querying nature. It's about how your brain is wired to ask questions. And what Starry Messenger does is it explores elements of society about which we all have strong opinions.

And it says, well, what would happen if I viewed this through the lens of science literacy? What happens to your opinion then? Then you realize many of these battles that we are fighting are artificially constructed based on tropes you think are true, but are not always true. And not only not always, most of the time have carry no real weight at all. Yet you think it does because you feel it emotionally.

And so it's understandable perhaps, but not justified when you're trying to advance the state of civilization. So, this book is applying the methods and tools of science to topics that have preoccupied the circles of debate especially at Thanksgiving dinner. When all of your crazy relatives come in and there it is. So I produced an excerpt from the book, from one of the chapters in the book. It was called, how to navigate arguments during holiday dinners.

That was just a subset. I excerpted the part about it that would serve your needs over those moments, those trying moments at the table. One of the things I love that you do is you approach things from the scientific perspective, but you also somehow magically capture the sense of awe and wonder. And in your book, you talk about the beginning looking down from the moon, for instance, looking at the Earth for the first time from space. Could you elaborate on the significance of that perspective and and how it relates to, you know, our understanding of the universe?

Yes. So that was in the chapter called Earth and Moon, where I explore how our perspective changed. Remember, the subtitle of the book is Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. So at every turn, you're getting a dose of that. So in the Earth and Moon chapter, there we have the Apollo era from the '9 the nineteen sixties into the early seventies.

And you can ask the question, was it worth it? What did we learn? And we tend to have a rather narrow view of the value of something. You're gonna say, well, what product did it came out of it? Or what did we learn about the moon?

But wait, there's something else that happened. There was a shift in our understanding of our place in the universe, a shift that changed us. The book leads off with a quote from Edgar Mitchell, Apollo fourteen astronaut, and I'll recite it here. This is when he came back from the moon, he was interviewed by Time magazine in 1971. He said, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.

From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty, you want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, look at that, you son of a bitch. It was like, Oh. He was feeling it. He was He was feeling it, absolutely. But, it's not just that, the modern conservation movement is traceable to while we were landing on the moon.

This is a remarkable fact because who thinks that? Nobody thinks that. Why would we go to the moon and help us here on earth? What's driving that? And you learn that upon seeing Earth from the Moon, we changed.

The photo of Earthrise over the lunar landscape, we all know that photo, it's Apollo eight, 1968, December. And given that, what happened to us? So we went to the moon to explore the moon, looked over our shoulder, and we discovered Earth for the first time between 1968 and 1973. Within those years, we traveled to the moon. Never before and never since.

And by the way, we had other issues at hand here on Earth. We had a cold war with the Russians, a hot war in Southeast Asia, there was campus unrest, assassinations, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, protests in the Street. We were living through turbulent times, yet we found the time in 1970 to have the world's first Earth Day. Oh, why don't we do that in 1960 or 1980? No.

It happened while we were going to the moon. What else? Oh, the Environmental Protection Agency was founded in 1970. The NOAA was founded in nineteen seventy and seventy one. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it was founded then.

A comprehensive Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, the banning of leaded gas, that famous public service announcement with the crying Indian where somebody throws trash out the window and a Indian turns and you see him crying. K. Back then, that actor turned out to have Italian ancestry, which you could never get away with today, but that was back then and this is today. And so, all of that was inspired by the moon, even if you don't think it was. By the way, before though, people cared about whether you polluted a river or polluted a lake, of course.

But you you only thought locally about it. The moment we saw Earth adrift, alone, in the darkness of space, with no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves, only then did we say, woah, let's protect Earth, mother Earth. That's how I look at it. And that's beautiful. And I think, as you point out, there were a lot of turbulent things going on, and yet, this travel to the moon created this wonderful time where we came together and and started to appreciate things and say, hey, this is our home.

We need to take care of it. When you look at the whole controversy over Anthony Fauci and you look at what went on with vaccines and you looked at this incredible opportunity to come together over a global pandemic, and yet it didn't, Do you see any differences in terms of what's going on today and kind of this polarization that's come out of things like Twitter? Is there anything we can learn from kind of the sixties and seventies that we can apply today? So it's not just Twitter, it's social media more broadly, where the algorithms feed you things that enrage you and make you even more polarized than you ever thought you would be. Your enemy is disgusting to you.

They're not just somebody with a different opinion, they're someone who you wish no longer existed and that's pretty severe. So, any lessons I was hoping or expecting that the Coronavirus when it first arrived would be viewed as an enemy of the species, and the enemy of the species kind of has to force that as a force on us, makes us all friends with each other, because we want to fight the common enemy of the species. I thought the whole world would come together and that's not what happened, and I was astonished by this. So, similarities, I would say, yeah we were divided in the sixties, but wasn't so much well, the best way to say this, in the nineteen sixties the unrest was generational. There was war and then people didn't want to go to war.

So, the divisive elements were quite blunt. Now, it's people hate you because of who you thought about voting for in a free and open democracy. That's scary. Whereas back then, you could say, oh, what's your opinion? Oh, here's my opinion.

Well, here's my opinion. Okay, that's cool. It differs from my own. Let's go have a beer. That would not be a completely unusual exchange between two people on opposite sides of the aisle back then.

Now, that's unheard of. So I worry about the future of America because of that. When you talk about worrying about America because of that, and you talk about science and these algorithms, it's almost like if technology is neutral, but depending on how you apply it, it can be negative or positive. We're using these scientific algorithms to create more money, because we know people will spend more time on social media when they're made angry or afraid. But it's almost like we're using science to divide us.

If that's true with that awareness with people like you, how do we then recognize what's being done to us and retake control of our lives, so to speak? Yeah. And so, more precisely, it's mathematical algorithms that are dividing us. But I think power, when wielded in the hands of a few, that's never a good thing. So, I would say the history of advances in science, engineering, technology, math have always had accompanying nefarious ways that they came to be used by nefarious people.

Equals MC squared is not inherently a bad thing, but when you're waging war and you wanna make a weapon, and then it becomes everything. It becomes the the currency of geopolitics. So, today, we have to fix the people, not the science. And in that regard, in order to fix the people, is there a way to use mathematical algorithms and science in a way to help fix the people? Yeah.

I mean, that's you're looking for, like, a silver bullet there. And so my answer is no. Right. That's fair. No.

I think it goes deeper. You gotta go back to the educational system, which sounds like a cop out, you know, typical answer. But the educational system should stop teaching science as just a satchel of facts. Where if some fact shows up later that's different, you say, see, I don't have to believe any of it because it was wrong. No.

Science is a way of querying nature. Science is a way of thinking about nature. So, if that's what it is, then you're not susceptible to some announcement about the moving frontier of science that got overthrown by another announcement a week later. You'll say that's the moving frontier. Of course, it's unsettled.

But the settled science, that's something that you need to embrace. But let's stay with this thought of education we're saying, because I've been thinking about this recently. When you look at the history of our country, there was a period where we didn't have high school education. Right. It's it's crazy.

And it's not that long ago. Right. Right. But so then we create public education. But then let's shift a little and also talk about the role of values in our society.

And for instance, looking back for a long time, the church, the synagogue did a lot of the teaching of values. And in your life, I've heard you talk about your parents for instance. That's part of your education to make you who you are. When you talk about educating people and fixing people, when you look at the state of our institutions and the state of our families, based on your own experience, what would you say would be a way to help educate people and sharing your story to help kind of make us more thoughtful? Well, you said values.

Values are regional, they're cultural, and they change over time. So, I don't know that you can just declare values as a thing that everyone just agrees to at all times. Morality has a similar sort of complexity to it. You know, what are we taught in school? That's really, maybe that's what it comes down to.

When I was in fifth grade, there was a very big emphasis put on your civic duties to each other and to civilization. And we even had a civic button I remember wearing to show that we cared about this. And I don't know that civics is taught anymore. Or what might you learn in civics? The fact that public health requires that we all buy into a means that would reduce the spread of disease.

And that sometimes means you have to behave differently to accommodate that. If you don't, then you are rejecting the social contract that civilization needs to function coherently. So, I mean these are the challenges. And like I said, I don't have a silver bullet, but I do know that science needs to be taught in a more broad spectrum. And I would agree with that.

I mean as somebody that did not study science a lot in school, it wasn't something that came naturally to me, but when when I hear you talking about it, and I think you also make science more fun. When you look at things like vaccines, for instance. I mean, even if you look at the recent entry into the political race and Kennedy, for instance, who's really been fighting about vaccines and talking about early childhood autism and these different things. As a society, when there is disagreement over scientific things, we still have to have an ability to have discussions and debate in a way that's healthy as opposed to just, you know, pulling us apart where we wanna kill each other. How do we take things like vaccines, which are obviously more complicated than the average person's ability to understand, and have fruitful discussions about them without blowing ourselves apart?

Yeah. That's the most important question of the day right there. You have to consider that because something makes good clickbait does not mean it makes good access to the truth. So, the press, let's go back a ways, let's go back to when the press was giving equal coverage to climate change deniers as they were to climate change researchers. Equal coverage, because that was their journalistic ethos.

We have to cover all sides. If we didn't, then we would show that we'd be biased, and that would be bad for your journalistic imprimatur. Meanwhile, you knew the numbers, 97%, it's now 100% of the past ten or fifteen years, of climate scientists agree what's going on. And then there's some fringe ones, I say fringe because statistically they are fringe, okay? Let's say there aren't.

So that is the nature of any new scientific result. You get agreement for the majority of research and there are always statistical variance in the outer edges. Okay. That's always the case. Now you're the press and you hear someone say, I don't like global warming.

It conflicts with my economic plan, and then they find the scientist who's the fringe and they put them up against the rest. This is not how that works. Or the press takes that one person and gives them half the column space. This is not how this works. And again, I I don't blame people because you you were not taught the methods and tools of science and how science gets invoked to find an objectively true answer in this world.

It is objectively true that human beings are warming this Earth by the increase in carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. That is an objective truth established by the methods and tools of science over many decades across multiple branches of science. From the biology of infestation of insects that would normally be taken out in a cold winter. Now they resurge in the spring with much greater virulence than they ever had before. That's insects telling you this and you just go down the list for all of these branches of science that have invested the core samples of ice sheets.

And what happens there? You take a cookie cut through the ice sheet and you have thousands of years, because ice sheets have very slow accumulation of snow, basically over the centuries, and that's how you get a really big glacier. You do this and you have evidence with very clever ways to measure it. This is what science is. That's all it is, is measuring things and deducing what was going on for that time, for that place, to give us an understanding of our own place today and the future.

So, vaccines have saved more lives than anything else medicine has ever done for us. Okay? Alright, so now you have, once again, you have mainstream, which apparently lately has gotten a bad term. Are you mainstream? Yes.

Oh, well, let me hear the person Here's an example, right? Go to any many YouTube postings, alright? Where someone's trying to sell you something. I don't have a problem with that, but watch how they sell it. It's, Everyone thinks this is true, but I have the actual truth, if you click here.

Okay? Mainstream science doesn't want you to know about this, but I have the secret. Okay? This way of getting people to click has undermined what it is to be mainstream. You know what mainstream is?

The most number of experiments and observations align with those results. There it is. If mainstream engineers say, you know, there's a 97% chance this bridge is gonna fall if you drive your truck across it, and 3% say, nah, you'll be fine. You're gonna go with the mainstream? What are you gonna pick?

What are you gonna pick? There's a reason why the mainstream exists. It's not because we all gather and say, let's make sure we agree with each other so that we show a common face. Okay? That's not how you get a mainstream scientific result.

By the way, we are in competition with each other scientifically. Alright? But if I want to prove you wrong, and I do an experiment and it shows that you're right, I publish that. There it is. That's extra evidence that you're right because your opponent got a result that agreed with yours.

So, to call vaccines controversial is to do what the magazine the journalists were doing, say, it's controversial whether there's global warming. No, it's not. It's not controversial. You like to call it controversial because you'll sell more newspapers. Back then, and today there's more clickbait.

It's not controversial. And it's funny, I as I use the word controversial, I'm giving credibility as you would say to the French. It's a word that is politically correct to use the word controversial, and yet when I use a word like that, I'm almost stopping my own critical thinking. Yeah. You are.

Right. And there are people who think it's controversial Right. But it's not. That's my point. Okay?

Now, let's get back to the role so I was giving the global warming analog. Now let's fast forward to COVID. Alright? And with the Monday morning quarterback hindsight, there are many different ways I would have advised the CDC to roll out information. Right?

We have to keep in mind by the way, what's our training on this? Well, a hundred years ago there was a Right. Alright. That's when the last pandemic was. So, there's no training sample each decade to work this.

But, there are some examples. So, for example, if there's a disease passing through a population, and if there's a disease, you will say, Alright, let's try to cure it. Okay. So, in your effort to cure it, you have labs, you get research money, someone has a result. In science, when a research lab gets a result, it is not the truth.

It is a stab at the truth. Only when other labs agree with it is it the truth because there could be something weird happening in that lab. Maybe a disgruntled graduate student messed with the data, Maybe your wall current glitched. Maybe somebody spilled coffee into your petri dish. You know, presumably all those same weird things won't happen in precisely that way in another experiment.

This is the verification process that's so fundamental to science. So here's the thing, if lives are at stake, you might not have the luxury of time to wait for another study. So, I think that I don't the government has some emergency authorization act or some there's some way the government can say, this is earlier than we would ordinarily approve this, but there's hopeful results in this study that we've just looked at. So we will release this right now, because we don't want anyone to die unnecessarily, but it comes with risks. Okay.

So now another study comes and says, oh, that dose was too high. You can get the same result I have to do. Then they should update it in this sort of weak ly accounting of what we know. Then the people who like making their own decisions rather than listening to medical professionals, they could decide what part of the statistical curve they wanna live in. Do you wanna live in the 3%, the 20%, the 50%, the 90%?

Are you gonna believe the three engineers who said the bridge is safe? In a free country, I guess maybe you should have that right. But I know how science works, I'm going with the 97. Me too. So what would have been interesting is that the CDC weekly, not daily because that's unrealistic, but not monthly, weekly said, here's the latest results.

These point to this, these point to that. Here's our summary. A week goes by. That was unnecessary, it turns out, because you just have to do this. So abandon that, now do and people say, but if there's a science, it's supposed to be settled.

The frontier of science is changing every minute. That's what the frontier is, and not enough people knew and understood that. They think science is some answer because of how they learn science. It's an answer in a book. It's not a way of thinking, a way of querying nature.

So I think had people been trained differently in school about the frontier of science versus what science has been settled, they would see the emergent research about how to resist COVID as a work in progress. And CDC, I think part of it would say, we need to give a definitive answer to the press so people know exactly what to do. So they they were victims of this thinking that we have to give the the the no. You don't. You know why you don't?

Because it's not. Let the research manifest in real time in front of our eyes. I think they were worried that people were not mature enough to interpret the data Right. The way they needed to or should have, and maybe they were right. But they weren't mature enough to be honest with the public.

It's so funny as you were explaining that, it reminded me early on to the discussion over the use of masks. There was a fear that there was gonna be a run on masks, and that there wouldn't be enough protective gear for the essential workers. And I remember that they came out and said, we have no evidence that masks work because they were really trying to avoid a run on masks. And And I remember thinking at the time, just what you said, which was they don't think people can hear the truth. Right?

That we're not mature enough. And so they lied. And then they came back and said, oh, well, no, no. We're just kidding. Masks really do work.

And you can't have it both ways. Right? You have to treat people like adults, raise people so they can be adults. Right? So that we can think like adults.

That's the other half of that equation. Right? Right. So we're in this kind of in between period now where we've got this, you know, more people involved in politics than ever before. We've got instant access to news constantly.

And so everyone is an expert. Right? And yet, we're not. And we need people like you who are experts so we can listen to you. Right.

So in the chapter of the book called Risk and Reward, I go over our inability to think probabilistically and statistically about the world. You didn't mention it, but in those results, the scientists will always give their answers, their results couched in a statistical uncertainty. And do we have any capacity to think about statistical uncertainty? Generally not, because as I detail in that chapter, I think one of the worst things our brains are capable of doing of is thinking statistically or probabilistically about anything. And I have several bits of evidence for that.

One of them is, there's an entire industry that has arisen to exploit the fact that you don't know how to think probabilistically about things. They're called casinos. Casinos. Why are you betting so many times on seven in the roulette wheel? It's due.

Well, how do you know it's due? Look at the previous rolls. They haven't rolled a seven in 10 roll. It's due. I said, no.

It's not due. It's the same probability. Okay? But I feel it. People rolling dice and they wanted high numbers, they'll roll the dice hard.

And they want low numbers, they'll roll them soft. Will you grant me one conspiracy theory, will you? Sure. I need your permission to say I grant you I need explicit. I grant you explicit authority.

Okay. Thank you. Do you know what the money for state lotteries primarily goes towards? No. Education.

Okay. It makes you feel better about voting for gambling in the state elections, right? Because money goes to education. Alright. Now let's look at this K through 12 education of course.

Look at the curriculum, K through 12. Is there statistics in there? No, it's not anywhere to be found. It's probability statistics, it's an elective maybe in high school, but it's not in the core of what you're learning. So it is in the state's interest to never teach you statistics because if they did, you wouldn't play the state lottery and they'd lose a revenue stream.

That's my one conspiracy theory. I had a friend when we were 21, we we went to Vegas and he actually lives Now we always he caught the bug, but I love to play craps and we gambled and so forth for a while. But I became smart enough to realize that I was always gonna lose. Right? And so I realized the numbers were against me, as you said, on the probability.

And even I couldn't talk myself into it anymore because you really have to turn off your brain. Correct. Correct. The brain cannot function in that way. And by the way, I've had maybe a total of eight years worth of statistics.

Just it's not just something you learn one semester and move on. There are different layers, different nuances, different understandings, different mathematical tools, and the power of those tools ascends as you keep learning the field. I tell a story in the book about my community of professional physicists, the American Physical Society. We were going to have our annual conference, 4,000, 3,000 physicists descending on your town. Was gonna be in San Diego and there was a hotel snafu and the MGM Marina, now the MGM Grand, rose up in Vegas and said, We'll take you.

We're like the biggest hotel in the world and we got 4,000 rooms three months from now, whatever. So, they said, Fine. So the American Physical Society met in Vegas. One week later there was a newspaper headline, Physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. Okay?

That's funny. Anyhow, so the point is, getting back to the CDC reporting, they'd have to report, in this example, this solution worked in 80% of the time or 30% of the time, 10%. So you have to think about what those percentages mean. And I work hard to communicate the statistics of risk in the risk and reward chapter just to help you get through that. But otherwise, yeah.

Other things, you're in a foreign city, you've never been there before and walking down the street is an old childhood friend. What are the odds? Oh my gosh, this has got to be it's preordained, it's fate. What a small world. So here's what I invite you to do, I say this in the book.

Next time you're in a town you've never been in, walk up to every single person in the street, grab them by the lapel and say, do I know you? And they'll say, no, and then I want you to say, large world. Right. And then find out how many times you say large world before the one time that you say small world. The thing about coincidences like that is a world without coincidences would be odd.

That's what would be unusual. So you have to learn to accept things you think are rare because they're more common than you think. So here's where I wanna push back with this in this What's that? I love it. This is gonna get back into the realm of paradox.

Okay? So I'm a lawyer by training, and did very well in law school, and I'm very good at logic, and rational western thinking. But I've made it a hobby to try to develop my right brain. And, you know, we can talk a little bit about music because I know you're you've had some interesting experience with music as well. But music was something that was very hard for me to wrap my arms around because from my perspective, it wasn't logical so to speak.

One of the things I grapple with is that in my mind, everything has a beginning and an end. Right? That's how my mind works. And even with this the universe, which we can talk about which is expanding and there's their beginning and an end, I came to the logical conclusion that there is a paradox. Meaning, if there is no beginning, that means something has always existed.

And if there was no beginning, that means something can come out of, nothing, or you have something that always existed, and whether or not you call that God or paradox or the unknown. Is there a place in science in the universe, where we don't have an answer, where there is this kind of dimension outside of time and space? There's a lot going on there, so let me unpack it. Okay. So the frontier of science is by definition unknown.

That's what makes it a frontier. So, you have to be you should be I recommend you be cautious about running to that frontier, peering out into sheer ignorance, into total oblivion, mental oblivion and say, something has to be there, it's God. Okay? This is a God of the gaps argument. It's well known in philosophical circles where you don't know what something is, you can't explain it, you don't understand it, therefore God did it.

The problem is, if that is how you invoke the existence of God, then given the pace that science has moved over the millennia, especially in the last couple of hundred years, if that's your measure for God, then God for you is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance. So, it's a caution if you are religious and that's how you want to define your religiosity. Now, was there a beginning? I don't know. Maybe the universe always was.

By the way, there are people who are uncomfortable with that and say, it had to have a beginning. Then I say, okay, then how did it begin? So then they say, well, God made it. Then I'll say, well, who made God? They say, well, God always was.

Well, I just said the universe always was, and you were not happy with that. Now you invoke God. I ask you what started God. You say, God always was, and somehow you're content with that. Right.

So I'm not content with either. I don't know. I'm happy to say I don't know. We have top people working on it. Yeah.

And I think that that humility that you just pointed out that we don't know is the truth because there is no way to know from a rational perspective as you said. No. No. I didn't say there's no way to know. I never said that.

I just say we don't know now. Okay. I never said there's no way to know. In fact, I'll never say that because why would I say that? Unless you come up with something that you are sure will never know.

Okay. And I will address that point. Look, I have no problem saying we we won't know. Here's an example. Here's an example.

In monotheistic tradition, the three major religions that come out of modern well, the two thousand year, three thousand year monotheism, share the Old Testament. And in is it in the Old Testament, yeah. There's a conversation between God and Job. Alright? Job is challenged by his health.

God is just messing with him, okay? Totally meddling in his life. And, Job is wondering like, why is he doing this? What's going on here? And then, at the end, God gives his resume, basically.

And in his resume, he speaks of the things in the world that he does. Nothing in the none of those things in the list at the time did anyone have any clue how it happened. I bring the tides in and out and I make the sun rise and I do all of these things and it's an impressive list for three thousand years ago or whenever the book of Job was written. Today, we have nearly all of them answered. Okay?

If that book were written today, God would put in a different list for sure. So I'm not gonna sit here and say there's something beyond the reach of science. I'm not I can't do that because of how far science has come and how rapidly it continues to advance. When you talk about science and spirituality and religion, do you think there are ways in which we can have discussions about it that don't lead to such polarization? I mean, the g word in so many circles, and I live in California, we're we're definitely a blue state.

If you look at the blue red state divide, the g word is one example where we we just can't talk about it. People have such strong feelings about it. Is there a way where people can talk about the role of wonder and spirituality and religion in a more cohesive manner? Not if the religion requires certain things to be true about this world that science has shown to be objectively false. Right.

No. There's no middle ground there. So these these would be fundamentalists. Right. Who are certain the universe was created in six days and that Earth well, they don't say this anymore, but there's no contrary evidence to this in the Bible.

The Earth is the center of all motion. And in fact, all references to Earth in the Bible, Old and New Testament, have it as a flat disk. Okay? So, no one drew a spherical Earth until, you know, fifteen hundred years later. Alright?

Or a thousand years later. So, there's certain objectively false things that appear in the Bible. And if you require that the Bible be the word of God and unerring, yeah, then there's no I can't even call it a debate. It's a worldview that you have that the constitution protects, but the constitution doesn't protect you only based on whether or not it's objectively true. It protects you no matter what.

Okay? So, basically, your expression free expression of religion. So, the loudest among those who are highly who are religious are tend to be the fundamentalists. Most of the religious community is completely enlightened and are perfectly happy with science and they use their holy books as sources of inspiration, sources of spiritual fulfillment, and they don't use the Bible as a science textbook. Yeah.

I I love the way you explain that. I mean, I think when you talk about fundamentalism, whether or not it's on the left or the right, I don't think you can have a discussion with any fundamentalist because by definition, they see the world as very black and white in a non scientific manner. And so, like you were saying, the vast majority of people are able to let both coexist. The vast majority of religious people. That's correct.

Yes. Right. Yeah. That's why I don't generally jump in the middle of those things. Right.

I will if you wanna put something from your religious book into the science classroom. I'll stand up and say, I don't think you should do that because you don't have scientists, not even atheists, picketing outside Sunday school saying that might not necessarily be true. You should switch the curriculum. But no, that's not what they're doing. I don't know if you've spoken about this because I I haven't heard you speak about it before, but there's a huge movement coming out of John Hopkins, for instance, using psychedelics in the treatment of PTSD and also people that have cancer and using it as a way to help them deal with their fear of death because some of the feelings of dissolution of the ego and a certain sense of oneness that comes about.

And there's a lot of discussion about the Macilian network and so forth. Any thoughts about the use of psychedelics in a responsible manner like in the way John Hopkins is going about their research now? Yeah. Everything I've read on this topic tells me that the micro dosing, especially, I think is what I've read most about, has had and can continue to have a therapeutic benefit for people with some certain kinds of mental challenges. Be it PTSD trauma, pain management, this sort of thing.

So, I don't have any problems with those kinds of experiments and those kinds of, I'm delighted to see some people benefit from it. The otherwise, I happen to know that the brain barely works at all. Barely works. You look at a book of of optical illusions, is the line bigger or shorter? I can't tell.

I don't know. Is it in the page or out of the page? I don't know. Is the fill uphill or down? That's the brain with not on anything.

Alright? Looking at simple line drawings. And so now, we have an assortment of chemicals that people want to add to the brain and stir it in and have some belief that they're better connected with reality, I'm not convinced. So I don't do drugs, like illicit drugs for that reason. I've heard you speak about different things that do move you for instance.

When you think about your brain and emotionality, what are the types of things that move you and bring you to tears, and and what significance do those moments hold for you in your life? I hate to sound like the old guy on the porch in a rocking chair, but in my day, we would go on pilgrimages to telescopes. To get your data, you had to be at the telescope. Telescopes are not in populated areas. So, trains, planes, automobile, mule train, and then you live nocturnally, and it would just be you and the telescope in the night sky.

And often, typically, you're on a mountain high enough so that clouds, when they build, are below you. So you're on a mountaintop looking at clouds. It's like being on Mount Olympus, and then you commune with the cosmos through your telescope. And this isn't that's a for me a spiritual act. Spiritual act of wonder.

That's beautiful. What about your relationship to music? I love music. So, yeah, when I was in college I took a design class, a year long design class. And coming out of high school I had a very mathematical brain.

Very geeky, science y, physics y brain. I went to the Bronx High School of Science, which counts eight Nobel Laureates among its graduates. Public high school, by the way. So, I I was totally geeked out. I'd take this design class where there were different units, you know, one was charcoal you draw, one you had to make furniture, another one was photography unit, there was another one you had to design a home on the rocky cliffs of, there's architecture, right?

On the rocky cliffs of Maine. So, it was a highly influential class on me, but in part for various reasons, like you said, that train your your right brain. So one of them was simply that they played some music, jazz music, and they said, draw the music. I said, no, this is not a thing. I can listen to the music.

I'll do that. No, no, no, draw the music. And I said no. So that was stubborn of me, because he wanted to take me to a new place, but he ultimately would. And, most recently, it was well, let me give the part that tipped me, because it wasn't just music, it was also illustration.

Okay? Okay. For a while, October, they shipped in a bunch of pumpkins. Gnarly pumpkins. This must be the rejects from the grocery store.

And they were piled up in front of this art studio, and once again, we had charcoal, and I had to draw pumpkins. I'm one of the best pumpkin drawers you ever met. Wow. Because of that. Can't draw anything else, but I can draw a damn pumpkin.

We did this for, like, what seemed like forever, like weeks and weeks and weeks. And then after Halloween, we came back and the pumpkins are still there. They said, alright, we have a different task for you today. Do not draw the pumpkins. Draw the space between the pumpkins.

Oh. At that moment, my brain snapped because all of a sudden, I now had to draw something that does not exist, bounded by the thing that existed for weeks on end prior to that. So this totally messed with my head, And thereafter, I crossed over, crossed the River Jordan or whatever, and there I was in a position to have meaningful conversations with artists about what music or visual art feels like, what it sounds, you know, what the music should be drawn like. Right? I now have that fluency, and I did not before that time in my life.

So, on my smartphone, I have skin that is a segment from Van Gogh's The Starry Night, and people say it was what did it tell me about why you're interested in that? That's not like a photograph. I said, no, it's not. And I said, I don't know what he saw that night. I know he didn't see this because what he painted is not what the sky has ever looked like.

So then why do I care? I care that he drew not what he saw but what he felt, and I value that perspective among artists. So that's getting back to your point about music and how I feel do I feel the music? The answer is now I do, yes. And I can draw how I feel.

And this is a very abstract language, very, very not precise scientific language, but so much of art pivots on the imprecision of words or illustrations, and that imprecision is what is where your personality can be expressed. You know, it's funny. When you talk about being this geek in high school and college, you had this incredible scientific ability in using terminology, you know, a strong left brain. And then you talk about now, later in life developing more of the right brain in this kind of feeling aspect. It's hard enough for most people to get through the day.

But for those of us fortunate enough to have these kind of conversations and have the time to think about this, what's amazing and it's so experiential is this ability for the two to coexist. Right? You've you've got the logical part of your brain. You've got the feeling part of your brain. And then the question is how do you integrate the two.

Right? So that you become this balanced human being that's going through life and you can essentially coexist in both realities. And it it sounds like that that's something that you've leaned leaned into. I would say balance, not to get all up in your face about this, but a balanced life, I think, is overrated. People ask me, how do you balance your home life and your work life and your public life?

They're not balanced. It's always teetering on collapse. Okay. And, as a result, I have to be continually innovative about how I spend my time, who I spend my time with, what I'm doing when I'm not spending time with people, and that is the challenge of all this. So, I can tell you this, during September 11, I was eyewitness four blocks away from the collapsing towers, that deeply affected us all of course.

And the way in which it affected me was the divider between my left brain and my right brain, my logical self and my emotional self dissolved completely. Wow. And I became, for some set of months, an empath, where I'd see people and I'd feel their emotions at a distance, and that was a weird feeling to have because I never much cared Right. About your feelings and I found that my writing became much deeper and more introspective. So, yeah, I just became a more whole human being when that boundary line dissolved and the rational self blended with the emotional self.

I think that's beautiful. The way I like to think about it is moving away from the word balance is circumcising or opening our hearts. Okay. You know, and the notion of, you know, early in life we start out as a narcissist, so to speak, and we we realize, oh, you mean other people matter and that, you know, there there are other people out there and you start to develop that empathy because you do start to realize we all are connected on this level. We're all going to the same place.

We all came from the same place. And by that, I've I've heard you talk about this a little. If you had the opportunity to write your own epitaph and thinking back on your legacy, what what would you like your legacy to be? Oh, my epitaph is in the book, in the final chapter called Life and Death, and it's a quote from Horace Mann. I'll give you the full quote, but I think only the last sentence is necessary for the epitaph.

So, here's the full quote. It's from the nineteenth century educator Horace Mann, and so this little bit has some flowery language befitting the nineteenth century. So here it is. I beseech you. See that's how you know it's older.

That's right. Nobody beseeches anymore. I think we should bring that word back because I love it. But I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words, be ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for humanity. That's beautiful.

That's it. That's beautiful. I would say that the, in terms of the audience who's listening, if I were to rank the chapters of relevance, I would say the risk and reward chapter. There's a chapter on exploration and discovery that quantifies the rate at which society is progressing. And I also make a prediction in there that by 2050 everyone will be driving electric self driving cars.

You say, no, how could you say that? For example, and, here's how I can say it. Do you realize in nineteen o five you visit the major cities, there's nothing but horse drawn carriages. In 1915, there's nothing but Model T Fords. So, somewhere in between there, we lost horses.

After thousands of years of building civilization literally and physically on its back. So, if you could go from horses to cars in ten years, you can go from self driving semi automatic cars, So you can go from cars humans drive that are semi automatic in in their responses to fully automatic. I don't see why not. In that regard, in terms of all these discussions now going on about AI, do you worry about AI and our ability to use it? No.

I I don't worry about that. But you shouldn't get advice from me. The AI experts that describe it as an existential threat. Right. Personally, I don't see it that way.

My people have been using AI for decades. Neural nets analyzing our data, finding interesting objects for us to review, and I see AI as manifesting in very specific needs necessary for that moment. So, AI can make your coffee, it can drive your car, it can run your refrigerator. I see it on all those levels. Are you a Star Trek fan?

Yes, I am. Well, not a crazy fan, but the original series. Less so in later series, but I know a little bit about them. Yeah. Dolores and I brought us during the pandemic.

I hadn't I watched it a little as a kid, but during the pandemic it was one of the things I went back and I I watched. And when you look at kind of the exploration and you talk about where the world is going, I I really do think Gene Roddenberry was was ahead of his time in terms of some of the things he was thinking about. Yeah. I agree. And in fact, at a Comic Con, there's a one of the final sessions of Comic Con is called the Starship SmackDown.

I think they're still called that. Where people argue their case for the best Starship that they know. And, the Enterprise has done well in this regard. So, how? It's because it's think about it, it was the first ship conceived in a science fiction story that did not have a destination.

Look at every other spaceship in every other sci fi storytelling. They have destinations. So, to boldly go where no man has gone before, that's a statement of exploration and curiosity, and I value that. Plus, Captain Kirk would, engage his own fights, where who Jean Luc Picard does not. So, I'm leaning Captain Kirk.

Yeah. I mean, in some of the later stuff, when they've got the computers that they can talk to, and when they have the holograms, and just some of the technology in terms of where it's going, it it really seems to be a step ahead of where us mere mortals live in terms of kind of and and even talking about how people are not gonna have to work in the traditional sense that they can be explorers because a lot of the routine things are done by machines. But instead of seeing it as a negative, it creates this opportunity to really, you know, explore and study and and enjoy the stars. Right. But you have to watch out because early in the industrial revolution, people were saying, now that machines can do it, your five day work week is now only three days.

Right. You know, two days of vacation. That's not what happened. Right. What happened was people used those extra two days to develop something more.

Yeah. Well, hopefully people can learn from what you said, which is when you're thinking back at your life, let's take some of our time and figure out how we can make the place just a little better Right. Than it was before. Just a little. Yeah.

And I I think that's a wonderful optimistic way to end this today. And Neil, like, you brighten up my day. You're the universe. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, listen. You have a wonderful a wonderful story to tell people. You you tell it beautifully. We're lucky to have you as a national treasure. So thank you for this time.

Well, thank you. Thanks for that interest. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. The POC Venture Capital Beyond is produced by CMPG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

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