PBD Podcast Episode 223. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Adam Sosnick.
FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on https://minnect.com/
Want to get clear on your next 5 business moves? https://valuetainment.com/academy/
Purchase Neil deGrasse Tyson's Book "Starry Messenger": https://bit.ly/3jX90Zn
See Neil deGrasse Tyson LIVE tonight at the Broward Center for "NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: AN ASTROPHYSICIST GOES TO THE MOVIES II": https://bit.ly/3W2r6q5
Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you bet on Goliath when we got pet taved?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hated.
Ideally run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
Okay, so today's podcast is a special one.
It's with the great Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has 22 honorary doctorates.
He has received NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal, the organization's highest civilian honor, written best-selling books, has had multiple shows, has worked under president's administration, done so many different things.
The man's lived an incredible life, and he agreed to come and be a guest on our podcast today, which we appreciate you for making the time.
Well, I happen to be driving by.
I love it.
It was great.
It was a long drive you made.
In a rocket shop, nonetheless.
So 22 doctors.
Is there a story?
Actually, no, well, this spring will be 22.
Okay.
In this instant, it's 21.
Got it.
But, you know, an honorary doctorate, you show up and then they hand it to you.
And there's always this question, it's not real.
You know, why is it even in a resume?
And then I was visiting the head of NASA a few years back, and I told him I was headed off to an honorary degree ceremony later that day.
And he said, you're probably discounting it in some way.
I said, yeah, a little bit, right?
And he said, no, here's what it is.
He said, your actual PhD, the one you earned through many years of graduate school, that's the promise that you will one day do something great.
But the honorary degree is the evidence you have.
Wow.
What an explanation.
Yeah.
That's a great story.
So that changed my perspective on honorary degrees.
But apart from that, what I want is sympathy from both of you that I sat through 21 graduation.
We sympathize with you.
Yes.
Okay.
Our deepest sympathies for you guys.
Which one was the best one?
Was there one that stuck out?
I was there on stage and people, everybody's name and all the parents had taken pictures and I did that 21 times.
Was there anyone that stuck out?
Was there a message you heard where you said that?
That one I still remember.
No, there are no messages, but I remember at the University of Pennsylvania.
Okay.
That took place in their stadium.
So it was outdoors and it felt festive because of that rather than in just some smaller hall.
Very cool.
Yeah.
So 22, soon to be 22.
I'm 21 right now.
How many do you have, Pat?
I'm working on my GED.
We're going to complete it.
Barely graduated high school with a 1.8 GP.
I started reading the first book I finished cover to cover.
I was 21 years old and then I read 2,000 business books.
So for me, my obsession came very late.
Okay, that matters.
We obsess with precocious children on the assumption that they will become amazing, great adults.
Whereas you just happen to be catching someone in a phase of their life where they read a lot or learn a lot or learn fast.
Yeah.
It doesn't mean you can't do exactly that later.
And it doesn't mean it's any less valuable to you or to society later.
That's a good point.
Don't you think that people should learn more after they graduate school than during school?
Like throughout the rest of their life?
Okay, so you're going to get me started?
Let's get this thing.
Hold me back.
Hold me back.
So think about it.
Just think about what's actually happening.
Graduation day, let's go back to high school, right?
Know there were people, if not yourself, on the last day of school.
What sorry.
Last day, in the spring, last day, you know, before summer, did people say, school's out for summer, schools out forever, great rock song.
So that's what you're going with, schools out for the summer, people cheer school's out forever.
They cheer even more and we have a, a rock.
So what's that?
Alice Cooper saying yes yeah okay, so so.
And people, you can picture this tossing their notes in the air as they descend, done with learning forever.
And then I think to myself, oh my gosh.
We have failed as educators to instill a sense of eternal curiosity within you so that you become a lifelong learner.
You will spend many more years of your life not in school than in school.
And if you're glad you're out of school, then your knowledge of the world, your wisdom, your insights have ossified in that moment.
And that then becomes your forever perspective on decisions you make in life.
Yet the world keeps changing.
And so the failure of the educational system is you think and you believe and you feel that learning is a chore rather than a delight.
And that's got to change.
Otherwise, what kind of world are we making for ourselves?
You know, there was a story about two different athletes.
I think it was Federer and Tiger, how they became the greatest of all time in their space, where Tiger was methodical with a disciplinarian mom and dad and was kind of intentional.
At two years old, this guy's going to learn how to golf and military, all this stuff.
And then Federer was kind of like he fell in love with the game himself.
It just kind of like organic.
And it was two different, one enjoyed it more than the other.
The way where Federer actually enjoyed the journey, where Tiger created a lot of unnecessary pressures.
It's like being an autodidact, which is like something you want to do yourself.
Yeah.
So I would also, yes, in addition to that, consider that what is the ceremony of graduation called?
It's called what?
Graduation.
But the thing, the event, it's commencement.
Oh, commencement speech, correct.
Yeah.
Commencement, commencement speech.
All right, right.
So commence means to begin.
It doesn't mean to end.
The beginning of your journey.
I would say the beginning of your journey being a lifelong learner.
And that's what I try to instill in people.
as adults if i'm with you i want to celebrate learning new stuff with you every moment we're together neil when when i think about i'm sorry when i think about you're not sorry It's your show.
And you knocked him out of the we brought him in when we realized there's more than an hour back.
When I think about teachers in my life that impacted my life, right?
Like Miss Sinclair.
By the way, before you tell me about her, I will tell you about her.
And I've never met you or her before today.
I think so.
Yes.
Are you ready?
Go for it.
You loved her class, not because she gave good exams or because the homework was enlightening.
You loved her class because she was passionate about the subject she was teaching.
Am I right or wrong?
No question about it.
She was a major in the Army, so I joined the Army.
Okay.
And, you know, yesterday I'm having a conversation with one of our guys at my house.
We're doing that.
That makes you kick your ass.
By the way, she was 4'10.
She was 4'10.
No joke.
She was 4'10.
Till today, we're pen pals, huh?
She was health and guidance.
Okay.
Yeah.
So till today, I went back and surprised her.
Now we're friends.
Every time she dates somebody, she introduced them to me.
And I'm playing a different role in our life today than I did before.
But it's more family.
Very, very different kind of a relationship.
No longer than that.
None of the, you know, just a very good relationship together.
But question for you is, how much of a person being good in a subject has to do with interest that the individual has versus the teacher that has a way of teaching that gets interest, gets excitement.
Like when I listen to you talk, I get excited because you're excited about a topic, right?
How much of it has to do, I'm interested in math, how much has to do, most math teachers suck.
Do you know what I'm saying?
I mean, because you know, sometimes people say, I hate math.
But the question I was going to ask was, you're such a math guy that could any teacher inspired you to learn more about math?
So I have several ways to approach that.
Please.
So I tweeted once that was needlessly controversial.
I think people didn't pause and think deeply enough about what I posted because I put way more thought into a tweet than most people put into their reaction to it.
And so that creates a sometimes ships are sailing in the night.
My comment was students who get straight A's do so not because of good teachers, but in spite of bad teachers.
And what that means is, if you get straight A's, that meant you got straight A's even when you had bad teachers.
That's what straight A's means.
So the quality of the teacher was irrelevant to your performance.
So you're an independent learner at that point.
Then there are people who get bad grades everywhere.
So good teachers didn't make any difference to them.
So they're bad students.
But for most people, a good teacher enables them to do better.
And a bad teacher, they don't do as well.
That's for most people.
And so all I'm saying is we need good teachers.
And bad teachers, there should be a way to filter them out.
Fire them.
No, really, though, because the 10-year.
So are you with the 10-year system?
We all know who the bad teachers are.
Sure.
Why don't we keep them, though?
Well, because we need a way to make that measurement, and it's difficult without worrying about some kind of bias.
I would say two years later, students assess who their worst teacher was.
That way their grade is not dependent and they're out and they don't, you know, they're not, they got nothing invested anymore in it.
And then let that sit on their record.
That'll filter teachers immediately.
I think great teachers are underpaid.
I think average teachers are getting paid what they're getting paid.
And I think bad teachers need to be filtered out and get fired.
Unfortunately, the system doesn't allow for it right now.
Right.
So that would need to be modified, first of all.
But second, getting back to your point, yes, I think they're people who are self-driven.
And if they do what they love, they will probably be better at that than anything else that they might be told to do.
Can I give you a perspective and you challenge me?
I'd love to.
No, I don't, if it's objectively verifiable, I won't challenge it.
So, you know, like the, I one time I asked that, I had a girl in my office with one of our guys.
His wife is sitting there and she's like, look, I'm not a big fan of rich people.
I'm like, okay, tell me why.
And we're having this guy.
I said, did you like math in school?
She says, no, I can't stand math.
So I started asking Democrats and Republicans both questions.
Are you a math person?
Are you a science person?
Are you in PE?
Are you more, what are you?
And one of the things I noticed is a lot of guys on the right were math people.
A lot of the guys on the left were more science, more journalism, more creative, more art is where they were at.
So do you think a part of like what you're saying is there are those that are going to get good grades no matter who the teacher is.
There are those that are going to get bad grades no matter who the teachers.
And then there are those in the middle, like an independent that's open to being, you know, persuaded to get better in math or science if the teacher's a good teacher.
Wait, so what's the question?
The question is, does somebody, are there those that no matter what you give them a great teacher or a bad teacher, they're going to get bad grades.
And no matter if you give them a good teacher or a bad, they're going to get great grades.
Okay, I have another response to that.
Please.
And another controversial tweet, which really shouldn't have been, all right?
The tweet was, how often do we hear teachers say the students just don't want to learn when that teacher should really be saying, I suck at my job.
As an educator, it is my duty to figure out what key works in your ability to learn.
And if I don't, am I going to run around and blame you or going to say to myself, I was too lazy to put in the extra effort to figure it out?
So I operate on the principle that if I'm not succeeding in the first few moments of my encounter with you, it's my duty and obligation as an educator to figure out what you care about so that I can teach you things in a way that matters to you and that you can continue in life continuing.
Powerful.
You can continue in life with a level of curiosity that, by the way, as children, we're all curious.
As adults, it's been beaten out of us or it's a flame, has dimmed.
And so what I want to do is fan those embers, reignite them in your adulthood so that you can have this childhood curiosity about things you don't know that we all once had.
How much of that analogy is essentially the scientific method that you're applying to teachers?
Meaning like, hey, you're going through this science project.
All right, cool.
It didn't work.
Let's keep going again.
Let's keep trying again.
I have a hypothesis.
Let's figure it out.
That sounds very similar.
It's never, unlike what many people think, it's never really about the answer.
Because at some point, you want to learn to love the questions themselves.
Damn.
Because the questions are the seeds of curiosity.
Questions are, I wonder, and I don't know.
So parents who have kids, I don't know if you guys have kids.
If you have kids, they can say, mommy, daddy, what's this?
What's that?
Or mommy, mommy, what's that?
Whatever is the modern blended family.
And so the parent then gets the answer or doesn't have the answer.
They find it.
Okay.
Maybe your reply should be, I don't know, let's figure it out.
And it's the figuring out of the answer that's deep within what a scientist does.
Who said the staying with problems longer?
Is that an Einstein quote?
Somebody said genius is staying with the problems longer, where you're not giving up right before it gets hard.
Somebody says staying with problems longer.
Yeah, I don't know who that might have been, but I'm all with it.
I'm all in on that.
So Neil, this is your world.
You know what else genius is?
Genius is seeing what everyone else has seen, but thinking what no one else has thought.
Seeing what everyone else has seen, but thinking what nobody else has thought.
That's correct.
And so those thought pathways are empowered by your life experience.
How many different ways have you seen problems or moments or incidences or people, places, things, so that now we all see the same thing, but I will make a connection that maybe you don't because I have the capacity to make these connections within my mind.
And so that's very important.
So I'm a big promoter of just a person's total life experience for you to draw upon for every next thought you might have.
Now, is there genius also for, by the way, that's the quote about Einstein.
It's not that I'm so smart.
It's just that I stay with problems longer.
That's a powerful quote.
But is genius also...
By the way, he really was smart.
No, he really was.
By the way, a lot of people call you the modern day Einstein.
No, no, no, no.
I'm saying maybe not yourself, but other people call you.
No, no.
And the one thing that I want to know, if it's mandatory as well, is it mandatory for somebody to be genius to be recognized as the sexiest astrophysicist alive by People Magazine and have the voice that you have?
You got like this Ghost 103.5.
Hey, so caller, who would you like to dedicate the song to?
You could have done that.
You know what I'm here at the Love Album with Neil DeGrass voices?
We're playing all your best hits.
Oh, yeah.
I'm spinning all your favorites.
That doesn't make any sense to have that voice.
You got it.
I don't even hear my own voice.
Yeah, but we do, and it's a great voice.
It's a very white type of a voice you got.
Okay.
What I really wanted when James O. Jones no longer was the voice for CNN, I wanted to do that.
I would say, this is CNN.
You have it.
That was, I totally wanted to jump in there.
But to be real, just to be very clear on this, ultimately, what you are doing, not an opinion.
I think it's universal fact.
You are making science sexy.
I said it, but that's kind of what you're doing.
Yeah, I would think of it a little differently.
I would say, but let me get back to the point about that designation from People Magazine, just to be clear, was 50 pounds ago.
Rob, you know what that means.
That was back in 2000.
And just to be clear, that issue, because every year People Magazine has its sexiest man alive issue, I was in a category.
So it's sexiest astrophysicist.
I don't know how competitive that category.
Really?
Beat out Stephen Hawking?
I don't know.
Jesus.
Classic.
Don't know.
Is what I'm saying.
Sexiest astrophysicist alive.
Much more competitive categories.
Yeah.
Sexiest action star, sexiest news anchor.
Yeah.
There's some hunky news anchors out there.
Sexiest meteorologist?
Sexiest model?
Yeah.
And then sexiest astrophysicist.
So the person on the cover, which is transcends category, was Brad Pitt.
Which makes sense.
Sexiest man alive.
2000.
Let's go back to the educational thing.
Let's go back to the school system.
So with what we have today, with what we have going on today with our current educational system, one, do you think it produces the best product?
Two, if you had influence over changing two, three, four, five things with our current educational, I'm talking purely public, not private, because private is different.
In the public side, what would you change about our current educational system?
A lot.
And one day I'm going to write a book on that because I have a lot of ideas.
Let's start it.
Let's start.
They're still in the oven.
So that literally means they're half-baked at this moment.
I'm still working on what ideas I can put forth that are fully supported by evidence, by rational thinking.
A lot of people just say what they think is right, and then it's subject to a lot of comments or criticisms.
And I want to make sure all the T's are crossing.
Give us one that you're pretty confident about.
Give us one that you were to say, if I were to change one thing about our educational system, this is the one thing I can confidently speak on.
Broadly, and the way I would change the science is another thing, but let me say broadly, I would say that I would de-emphasize the value the educational system places on what grades you got and figure out ways to assess or rather to promote or to nurture your enthusiasm for learning.
And because of this, what happened?
You know what happens?
There are people who get high grades.
These are the people who pay attention in class and all their homeworks are handed in on time and they might become valedictorian.
And however, if you look at the biggest shakers and movers in society in practically any field, none of them were valedictorians.
The most, if you've read a lot of business, you know, CEOs were never the top of their class or entrepreneurs were never the top of their class.
They were too distracted by other thoughts and ideas.
And look at Richard Branson, who his headmaster said, you'll either be in prison or be a millionaire.
That's right.
And he ended up a billionaire.
That's right.
Because he was not following these educational rules about what would enable a teacher to judge that you will go far.
And my grades in school were pretty average.
Because they were average, no teacher at any time in my life, K through 12, 16, and 20, okay, would have ever said, see that guy, Tyson?
Watch him.
He'll go far.
None of them.
Even though I was all into the universe.
No one said that.
No one would have said that had you asked.
Had you walked into the classroom and I'm in the class and asked the teacher, who's going to go far in this class?
I would have never shown up on the list.
I love them.
Any teacher yet?
It's not like I was a late bloomer.
I've known I was interested in the universe since I was nine.
And at age 11, you asked me what I want to be when I grow up, that annoying question adults always ask.
I said, I want to be an astrophysicist.
And I was in the astronomy club and I walked dogs and used that money, walked other people's dogs, used that money to buy my first telescope at age my first, at age 14.
And I had cameras.
I had a dark room.
Who knows what a dark room is anymore?
But that's why I produced all my photography.
All of this was going on and it doesn't show up on a grade in my school.
And so the teacher doesn't see that.
They don't know it.
They don't even care.
They just care what grades you've got.
And so here I am growing myself and had this whole library of books.
My parents would buy remaindered books.
They cost 50 cents.
They just, they didn't know any science, but if they saw a science book or a math book, they bought it for, I had the biggest library of any middle schooler there ever was.
Okay.
So all of this is going on.
And in high school, I went on an expedition to Scotland to view the stone monuments that are similar to Stonehenge, but many are not charted.
And I was on an expedition to chart them.
I was the local, I was the astronomer brought in with archaeologists and anthropologists.
All this is happening.
I spent a summer in an astronomy camp living nocturnally in the desert, in the Mojave Desert, while I was in high school.
None of that shows up as a grade.
And all I'm saying is a person is so much more than the numerics of their GPA that if you only focus on a GPA, you will lose people.
There'll be people who will go unrecognized, unsupported, unidentified in the school system.
How do we grade the other part, though?
How do we grade?
That's the challenge.
I don't know how you would now try to encode ambition or drive.
These are more passion, especially.
These are a little more abstract.
And maybe the school, rather than judging you whether you have passion, they should find ways to instill passion within you.
And then you're graded by how much more passion you had after the class than you did before, rather than how much you walked in there with.
Well, let me ask you this.
So here's the other question.
So for me, having ran a sales organization for 20-some years, I'll see somebody come in and I used to say, man, that guy's a great talker.
He's going to do great in sales.
One month later, he quits.
And he goes to the next and the next.
And you'll see another guy like, well, man, my intention.
That just means you suck at evaluating people.
But I did.
You're right.
But you're right.
No, I'm just.
No, no, but Neil, the point.
He's trying to clown you, but he's like, no, you're right.
I agree with you.
As a newer sales leader, I did.
Then when I learned, we build a 40,000 insurance agency company nationwide, and I'm the founder of it.
So I learned how to lock onto the right people.
Here's a question for you.
So what should be the key indicator, maybe two or three indicators to say this 16-year-old kid, this 14-year-old kid, this 17-year-old kid, could one day do something very big in their lives, or is it too early to tell?
It could surely be too early to tell, which is why you always want to present opportunities to people throughout their lives to see if they'll jump on them, modify them, make them fit their lives.
All I will say is when assessing the promise and performance of a student, you need to look at more than their GPA.
I don't mind standardized exams.
I don't mind, you want to give somebody an IQ test.
I don't have a problem with any test.
But the moment you administer a test and then use that against the person because they didn't score high enough on this test above some threshold that you have a cut off.
And only then do you give them opportunities.
This is using educational systems and tools against the progress of students rather than for them.
When I was in sixth grade, that was still contained in an elementary school.
I was not in what they called the smartest class because they were identified by the system and they took French.
They took a foreign language.
And I said, well, why can't I take a foreign language?
Well, you're not, you don't belong in that class.
Okay.
You got to go in the second class.
And they were given opportunities that I really wanted to have.
And I was denied it because some educational construct declared that I was unworthy of it.
And so that I've been thinking about that ever since because I was already ambitious as a kid.
This isn't a pushback, but it's like Pat was a 1.8 GPA student, and your subject was math, right?
Like if you could have just dedicated all your time to math, I would do math with you.
Made me do it or not.
I don't know what kind of grades you got.
Sometimes somebody tells me you did okay, but I got a mixture of A's, B's, and C's, which average to B.
I guess my point is like, but it all worked out okay.
Meaning like you're the most famous astrophysicist in the world.
It worked out.
Pat was horrible at everything else.
He's amazing at business, math.
It worked out.
I was always like an actor, thespian, here I am.
So it worked out.
No, It's not just it worked out.
No, somewhere in there, you are standing up after you've been knocked down multiple times.
That's not just it worked out.
That's where your drive is, your grit, your ambition, your capacity to recover from any forces operating against your all of this.
So it's not just it worked out.
I'm where I am, not because of my educational past, but in spite of it is my point.
So you're saying the school system should do a better job identifying what you're super, super, super passionate about?
I'll let you double down on that versus useless class.
No, no, that's being more specific than I'm prepared to land at this moment.
But what a school should say is don't reserve all your highest praises for the people who get the highest grades.
Do some other searching in the total life of the person.
Suppose there's someone who in middle school or high school is taking care of their younger kid, babysitting, walking dogs, doing this, shopping, and figured out a way to make that efficient and created a budget for the family because they couldn't.
Figure that.
Look what that is.
Oh my gosh.
The person is figuring out life and no one was there to train them.
That's ambition.
Some of it is the necessity, what do you call it?
The necessity is the mother of invention, or in order to survive, you got to be, get clever, okay?
But these are tests of us throughout our lives.
If you're a deadbeat sitting at home watching TV and you don't have good grades, I got nothing for you at that point.
But take a look at the total package because in life, the total package is what's going to matter.
Okay, so let me ask you a question.
I had teacher, I have teacher comment.
This is going to show up in this education book.
I have teacher comment.
I still have my report cards.
Neil is should less social involvement and more academic diligence is in order.
What they're saying is my social energy, my social energy was a negative in that classroom.
By the way, I wasn't purposefully disruptive.
It was more a gurgling of energy, you know, okay?
That was a negative.
And meaning you would socialize with our students, you were talkative, you were energy, competitive, I'd pass notes and things.
Yeah.
That was bad.
Rather than saying there could be some value to this later on, he might become a communicator because he's communicating with all these people at all these different times.
No one is thinking that.
All they can see is the grade in their class.
That's why none of the teachers would have said, look at him, he'll go far.
Neil, in your class, by the way, I asked this question about two months ago, and it was incredible hearing the answer.
What does the valedictorian of your high school do for work today?
Did they meet and exceed the expectation?
If I tell you 95% of the responses was no.
Yeah, of course.
It was no, no, no.
But going back to the- By the way, that's not true for my valedictorian.
Who was yours?
What did he do?
What did he or she do?
He was co-founded Regeneron.
Okay, that's right.
The biomed company?
Yeah, the biomed company.
He was my valedictorian my year from the Bronx High School.
That is insane.
What year?
What number did you finish?
This is the Bronx High School of Science.
They would bite 700 graduates.
They don't number it below 10, but I was probably 300th, 350th.
Got it.
Who else was very successful in your school?
Outside of him?
He and I have our names on the school wall.
I have to think about that.
Okay, so then that means you wouldn't.
So did you see any signs of genius or something different about him where you said this guy could do something in his life or no?
At the time?
Yeah.
He was very ambitious.
I mean, he did science fair projects, which again are extra curricular additional on top of the grade for the thing.
And here's something interesting he did because he competed, I think if I remember correctly, competed in the famous Westinghouse Science Talent Search and did very well in that.
When he became Regeneron, that science talent shirt has changed, quote, ownerships over the years.
And now there's the Regeneron prize out of the monies that they have invested in it.
So I'm just saying, if you're just looking at grades, that's the person who is trying to impress you.
Here's the measure I got it for you.
Ready?
If you got a 97 on your exam instead of 100, are you going to complain to your teacher?
Are you going to complain if it's like hand-graded?
And are you going to complain?
He's like, okay, 97 is just as good as 100.
I don't care.
If you're going to complain, that means you are after the grade more than you're after learning.
And at some level, valedictorians are after the grades.
And that ask, ask anyone who's 30 and older in this world, when was the last time someone wanted to know your GPA?
They won't even be able to remember.
It never comes up at work.
It's, are you honest?
Are you moral?
Are you a hard worker?
Do you solve problems?
Whole sets of qualifications that are not encoded in your GPA.
Or SAT score or AC score or anything like that.
Same difference.
So how important are extracurricular activities?
Meaning like you might have gotten a B student, but you're captain of the debate team or you're on the football team or the wrestling team.
I'm captain of my wrestling team.
Oh, were you really?
Yeah.
Okay.
And undefeated, by the way, in high school.
What?
But that's the height news.
I was not in Iowa, okay?
Just to be clear, there are places where people, where wrestling is a religion, and I was undefeated in a place where wrestling is not a religion.
So going back to that.
So I had these extra things.
That was the rest of my life.
I did fun thing.
I did things that not only were activities, they were activities that further grew my knowledge and awareness of fields.
So I interviewed a guy named Billy Bean.
I bought him three times.
And if you've seen the movie Moneyball with your friend Brad Pitt, who were both.
Yeah, me and Brad.
Hey, sexiest man alive in 2000.
You guys are in the same spectrum.
We did share that magazine.
So I brought him on board and I said, hey, Billy, this guy was supposed to be the greatest prospect in baseball the year he came out.
Literally, that's a story.
He comes out.
They're like number one pick.
This guy's going to crush it.
He's going to be a biggest flop.
And he's telling his own story.
And I said, so what are the indicators in baseball?
Because they were able to figure out what stat was the most important, which was on base percentage.
But then he said.
By the way, I think baseball has become overstatistified.
That's another conversation.
Yeah, it's probably because of him, by the way.
Well, yeah, maybe it had some taproots there.
But baseball, you know, has always been about statistics.
Big time.
Yeah, and they're trying to move against it by preventing the shift in the outfield or the infield.
What he's trying to say is maybe it's making it a little bit boring because, you know, the pitchers are pitching out pitching two wins and the next guy.
It's a very weird amount of Tampa base intent.
Anyways, I don't want to go to baseball, but I want to stay on this.
You could if you wanted to.
I'm sure you could handle it.
I got total.
Okay, but go on.
Maybe we could have this question.
I think if you get hit by the pitch on ball four, you should go to second base.
Interesting.
So not just the walk because it was intentional.
What sacrifice did the pitcher take anyway?
No, no, no.
I'm saying you would go to first base on ball four.
You would go to first base if you were hit by a pitch.
I actually like that idea.
If you're hit by a pitch on ball four, you should go to second base.
I actually like that idea.
Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts like that.
I actually like that idea a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what he said is, he said four things, character-like upbringing, actual body, attitude, discipline.
And then it was a whole different thing that he had there.
So and then that's how they judge whether they should invest in this guy or not, recruit him or not.
You know, I asked you earlier indicators.
Would you be able to give a couple indicators to say here could be some indicators of like, hey, this kid's extremely curious.
That's one of seven indicators of success.
Yes.
What are some things you would say?
Okay, so what I would say, to get mathematical on you, why don't we think of each of these features of a person as dimensions of a hypercube?
Okay.
Okay.
Oh, you're pulling out your notes here?
Take your notes.
We're both going to write down what a hypercube is.
Okay.
So, all right, so we can start.
What is the measure of a line?
Well, it's just its length, and there's no other metric.
Sure.
Most measures we have of people are just this one-dimensional thing.
Are you higher on that, or are you lower on that?
Okay.
Any exam is a one-dimensional measure of people who take the exam.
Let's add another coordinate.
So that's an X-axis.
Let's add a Y-axis.
And now the measure of two lines is a square.
There's no such thing as the length of two perpendicular lines.
But what the two perpendicular lines do is trace out an area, which would be the area of a square.
So now we can say, let's say there are two things about you.
How good are your grades and how sociable are you?
Those are otherwise not correlated.
So now I can calculate an area for you.
All right.
Well, maybe some other things matter, but maybe some other things.
How about ambition?
That would be a third coordinate.
Now I'm not measuring your length or your area.
I'm measuring your volume.
And now let's add a fourth coordinate.
So it's what we have.
What do we have?
We had linear.
The linear, your grades, your social skills, your ambition.
And how about, here's one, which wouldn't necessarily be the other three, your capacity to recover from failure.
Oh, okay.
So now I have four dimensions.
This could go higher, but I have four dimensions.
What's the quote, hyper volume of the four dimensions?
You multiply all four of those measures.
And then you have a volume.
And I would say that the success of somebody is not where they are on any one dimensional scale.
They're where they are in this hyper volume.
And they could be less on one and more on another, but all that volume is a dynamic place.
And what you'd want to do is maximize that volume before you hire somebody.
It would be a hyper volume.
I love that.
By the way, you can choose, choose your mate the same way.
Are they good looking?
Does it matter?
Okay.
But if you only choose them only because they're good looking, and then one day they get older and less good looking, does that mean you're going to love them less?
Yes, it will mean that if that's the only reason why you got together, which happens many times.
Which happens many times.
Okay.
Do you want them also for their money?
It sounds shallow, but that's not any more shallow than liking someone for their beauty.
It's just another thing.
So might they one day lose their money?
That's possible, unless it's deep family money.
But okay, but and how about they have a sense of humor?
Are they ambitious?
There's a volume.
And then you can put everybody and scale it from zero to 10 on each of those, right?
Multiply it out.
You have a volume.
Now you can take all your mates that were potential mates, scale them this way.
And what happens is, because you're multiplying this out, they end up spreading hugely on a scale.
And it becomes obvious who the best one is at that point.
Obvious.
We did this when we were looking for a home.
We was like, okay, well, is it affordable?
Is it nearby work?
Do I, is it, is it, or is all the appliances, are all the appliances new?
Do you like the neighborhood?
These are coordinates.
Judge it from zero to 10.
By the way, if any coordinate is zero, everything drops out because you're multiplying.
All right.
So if it's zero on any of these coordinates, walk, keep moving.
Nothing there, okay, no matter how good anything else looks to you.
All right.
Then give it a one.
Fine.
All right.
So there we are.
And then you can throw in a category called intangibles.
I just, it just feels right to me.
That's allowed.
Yeah, I'm writing it down.
This is allowed.
So let that be an extra coordinate there.
Then, okay, multiply it out as you go to each one.
That's how we chose the home to buy, my wife and I.
And by the way, it's also how I decided that my wife was like the right person for me.
I looked at all the coordinates of what I valued in a mate.
And we've been married 34 years.
Can I ask you specifically about your wife?
How did you judge her?
You're saying, obviously, first was like, okay, beauty, but like, are these, I'm literally taking notes here.
No, no, you shouldn't use mine.
Don't use my colour.
But I want to know from your category, though.
My category.
Am I attracted to her?
Yes.
You know, you can add things like sex and this sort of thing.
Or are they fun to be with?
You can add all of this.
Just go on.
For me, I valued, is she smart and clever?
I like that.
So hot and smart.
Done.
What else?
What?
I'm taking notes.
My mother graduates.
I met her in graduate school.
She was getting a PhD in mathematical physics.
What about caring and motherly?
So I didn't care at all about motherliness, but is the person kind?
That could be.
Kind.
Is she kind or compassionate?
And so once you do this, there was no one else that came close on the scale of anyone else I had dated, even historically dated, you know, because you might regret, oh, I should have could have did it, but I didn't.
no so looking back at so for me it's a mathematical exercise 35 years later.
34 years.
34 years.
Sorry.
I try to give you the plus one.
Like Pat tried to give you the one plus one of the pre-graduates.
You dated from when I proposed to her and when she said yes, because then that's when the decision mattered.
And that was probably 36 years ago.
Your hypothesis 34 years ago versus the actuality, what still remains the constant.
What remains the constant?
I can see other people, other women.
I see them and I say, yeah, I'm still glad about my decision.
Hell yeah.
35 years ago.
It's awesome.
Right.
I'm still glad.
Nothing's worse than buyer's remorse.
But buyer's remorse.
Exactly.
Got it.
Yeah.
How are you feeling?
Only you would ask a question like that.
Well, I think it's so like, I think where we started was like, you know, all these qualifications of a good student.
Yeah.
But even it's applying to buying a home, picking a mate.
Anything.
There's all these qualities.
Any decision you need to make that's multivariable, multivariate.
And you have to make sure that each coordinate is completely independent of the other coordinate.
And what I mean by that is if you're trying to choose your mate, you can't have as two separate categories, you know, she looks hot with clothing on and with clothing off.
Those are not two separate categories.
Ah, shit.
It's a general category.
It's a general hot category.
You don't want to overlap that because then there's cross-contamination of the coordinates and you don't want that.
Pat, I don't want to turn this into a SOSCAS, but I'm very confident that you did this exact same thing with Jen.
With what?
You must have, like, Jen was ambitious.
She was beautiful.
She was a model.
She was a worker.
That's a good book.
I went through 101 questions to ask before you get engaged.
Second day, that's what I did.
That gave me a, we went through six hours later.
I'm like, okay, I know about it.
And I went through that with four other people.
And three other people interviewed her.
Well, on the second day that we went to Borders and I bought the book.
Yeah, we had known each other for five years.
It sounds like an interview.
It is.
I don't disagree.
I think it is.
And I answered mine as well.
And one of the ones is if you say you have no baggage you bring to the table, run because that person's lying to you.
Everybody's got something they bring to the table.
I thought it was a very good exercise.
That book right there.
By the way, nine years after I read the book, I interviewed the guy.
Seven years later, I interviewed the guy just because I was curious about the questions.
Let's transition to another topic.
I got to say that.
Speaking of the honesty part, in the film The Big Short, one of my favorite lines ever was, who's the guy who was this slightly autistic guy?
Christian Michael Burry.
Michael Burry.
His character.
I reference him all the time here.
His character, he was describing the response of someone on a dating app to what he posted.
Okay.
And the person said, yes, I want to date you.
And, well, what did he put in the dating app?
He said, well, I have a glass eye and I'm a little not entirely socialized.
And I do that.
And I'm, you know, but I'm caring.
But I'm, I'm, you know, there's all these like negative things about him.
And the person wrote in and said, you're exactly who I'm looking for.
And he said, why?
Because you're honest.
Damn.
Powerful.
Whoa.
Powerful.
By the way, you know, he would be a very, you know, one of the reasons why he doesn't do a lot of interviews.
He doesn't do a lot of interviews.
That would be a very interesting conversation for the two of you guys to have.
I think that would be a fascinating conversation with Michael Burry.
But let's transition to a couple other topics.
There's a few topics.
I want to go through.
I assume you had like other stuff with the money.
I have nothing topics here.
So we'll go back to the next one.
One is open AI.
One is TikTok.
One is China.
One is, if we got time, astrology.
One is billionaires.
Anyway, so let me just pick one of them for us to get into here right now.
So first one's your opinion.
Okay.
And I'm curious to know what you're going to say to this.
Your answer may be very different than what I expected to be.
So what is tougher?
What is tougher to do and what is more worthier to do, in your opinion?
Okay.
I'm in high school.
I get out of high school.
I'm ambitious.
Okay.
Is it tougher to be a person who is at the level of intelligence to get 22 honorary doctorates, you know, these awards, et cetera, et cetera, knowing all of these different topics, being well-read, et cetera, et cetera, from zero to that?
Is it tougher to be a billionaire?
Is it tougher to become the best athlete in the world like a Tom Brady?
Is it tougher to make it to the highest level as an actor where you're like a, you know, Daniel Day-Lewis or at that level type of a person?
What's tougher or are all of them independent to the individual?
So that's a mathematically solvable problem.
You ask how many people are at that level and how many people are trying to be at that level, divide the two numbers.
Interesting.
And there you have it.
So it is tougher to be an MBA star than it is to be a medical professional, a medical doctor.
It's tougher.
Statistics.
Just statistics.
You can just do pure statistics.
But that alone should not stop you because what you'd then be saying to yourself is, I have these two roots and I'm more likely to succeed here than there.
So I'm not going to go where my true love is because I will probably not succeed.
Well, you've already kind of surrendered, didn't you?
And I would say that, you know, I used to wrestle.
You know, you don't choose wrestling because it's easy.
You choose wrestling because it's hard.
Kennedy said that about our space program.
We choose to go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's hard.
I can tell you this, by trying most hard things, even if you have to take an exit ramp, for having tried the hard thing, you are better off than having done something easy.
And anytime I'm asking her advice in school, what classes should I take?
What should I do?
I say, take the hardest possible classes you can.
But then what about my GPA?
Here it comes again.
What about my GPA?
Well, okay, you can take an easy class and get a high GPA that everyone will praise you for for three months after graduation.
But then because you took easy classes, everyone else took the same easy class.
That's the definition of easy, isn't it?
And so you will not distinguish yourself among others who have been in school.
So I've had people say, I should know this.
I had a 4.0 GPA.
No, you should know it because you studied it, not because you had a GPA that had anything to do with it.
Okay.
You should know it because you cared about it and you knew enough to absorb it and remember it.
But apparently you didn't because you only did it for the exam.
So you're still peddling your GPA about this.
So all I would say is you're kidding.
Who is that handsome guy right there?
Is that you as a wrestler?
What's that all about?
In high school?
That's college.
In college?
That guy looks like a bad person.
Dude, you were on beats.
I said that the sexiest astrophysics alive was 50 pounds ago.
Shit, nailed the grass, Tyson.
How much did you weigh then?
What did you wrestle at?
In that instant, 191 pounds.
Oh, you were, and you're 6'2, huh?
6'2.
6'2, yeah.
You were a monster right there.
Those biceps.
Yeah, I just came off the mat and they and the guy was like laying down on the mat and took it so it's up at that angle.
Do you talk about this often?
Because I've never heard you address this.
That's a chapter long gone.
When I was wrestling, I also danced, when I was doing those things, no one was publishing my books.
What kind of dancing were you doing?
I was a performing member of three different dance companies.
But the college troops, not the Bolshoi.
By the way, I think he needs to know, as much as you kind of were joking, at one point he considered being an exotic dancer.
I think I've read it somewhere.
Well, because I was in graduate school and there wasn't paid very much as a teaching assistant.
And I thought you were like, you read up on it or not.
No, no.
And so with my fellow dancers from the dance dance group, I was in desperate need of money and I didn't have any money.
And he says, hey, in the evenings, we dance at this male dancer review and women put money in your jock strap.
And so I said, he said, why don't you come down and take a look?
So I went down.
This would be a way to make money.
Back then, I was physically fit, and I could do a full split.
And I was graceful and strong and nimble.
So I totally could have rocked whatever was necessary for that, I'm thinking.
So I go there, and they come out with asbestos-lined jockstraps that had been infused with lighter fluid and ignited.
And they came out dancing to Jerry Lee Lewis's Great Balls of Fire.
And in that instant, I said, hmm, I think I'll be a math tutor.
And I'm deeply embarrassed and disappointed with myself that math tutor was not the first thing that came to my head.
That I considered.
So it took people's nuts on fire for me took nuts on fire for me to be slapped back into reality.
So I tutored math and physics.
I thought you were going to blow my mind with some astrophysicists.
Well, he hasn't asked me about astrophysics yet.
Okay.
By the way, what was your stage name at the time?
No, I didn't have a stage name.
I feel like I would have had a great stage name for you.
What?
The Black Hole.
Oh, yeah.
No.
Yeah.
No.
You know, Double Enchanter right there.
It was a better name, right?
Yeah.
Dark matter.
Pat, this should be a great segue for you to talk about what you're doing.
I'm not doing it.
Dark matter.
James Earl Jones.
Please help us bring that up.
Dark matter.
So anyway, what was the point we were making here about?
What do you tuffer to do?
What's Tuffer to do?
You do it because it's hard.
You don't do it because it's easy.
You know what I saw the other day?
You're, you're, I was, You're a sports guy.
I saw a guy making an argument why the goat of goats isn't Brady.
It's Messian.
The way the guy broke it down is there's 7 billion people fighting to be 8 billion people fighting to be the best soccer player, and it's a world sport.
And football's only 330 million.
So pure numbers.
He kind of took the angle you were taking.
Yeah, definitely.
Do you know how many billionaires there's in America?
Do you know the number?
At this moment, let me guess.
Don't pull it up.
I want to see what happens.
I'd like to guess, too.
Let me guess.
Don't pull it up.
I want to see what you're going to say as well.
I'm going to say somewhere between 1 and 200.
1 and 200?
What are you going to say?
I don't know.
I'm just thinking, if I do get this right, somehow I'm going to beat Neil Grass Heisene on a smartphone.
I'm going with 195.
195.
So you guys think out of 330 million people, there's only 195 billionaires?
Yeah, 200 billionaires.
The number is...
In the United States.
In the U.S., I'm not saying the world.
Because I come into that number because I've met like six of them, right?
And so.
Nice little humble bracket.
So given that, and I'm in New York City where a lot of billionaires are, I'm just extrapolating up, and I'm thinking there might be some states where no billionaires live.
Click on it.
Let's see how many it says.
The number I think is 740 or 900.
What?
740.
There you go.
In the United States?
In the United States, it's 740.
Oh, we were very low.
And they live in 42 out of the 50 states.
Okay.
Okay, something very wrong.
Very wrong.
Yeah, both 740.
Yeah, but that number is way higher than even just recently, right?
Well, no, a lot of them lost a lot of money this year.
So that's an updated number because a lot of people lost their status.
2022 and 2020.
Yeah, 2022 was not a good year for billionaires.
So there's trillions was lost.
A thousand billionaires.
Do you think that's a big deal, though?
For you to say 100 to 200, do you think you said that because you think it's hard to do?
Or do you think you said that because why'd you say 100 to 200?
I'm curious.
No, I extrapolated from the six that I know.
That's why there was no deep thought involved.
It was a guess based on those numbers.
Yeah.
And I know seven billionaires, so it's just so funny.
Well, he's in Miami.
He parties with most of them anyway.
So a lot of them are here.
Okay.
No, no, but you say, let me just push back on you a little, just emotionally push back.
Please.
If in life your goal is to be a billionaire, what kind of life is that?
I think your goal in life should be successful at something.
And if that happens to bring a lot of money, then that's great.
Because then you'd be happier.
And I think life, happiness should play an important role.
And I don't know how I got to be a billionaire.
Otherwise, I'm not going to be happy.
And then what will that force you to do?
What kind of decisions will you end up making to achieve that goal relative to just trying to be the best at something that you can?
Now, maybe it's going to be the best at making money.
Okay.
Good luck.
Okay.
But it reminds me of actors.
Okay.
If people say, I want to be a famous actor, really?
You don't want to be a really good actor?
You don't want to be a great actor?
You just want to be a famous actor?
Why don't you be the best actor you can be and let the fame follow that?
Then you'll get the fame organically with you having been ambitious in your trade.
Yeah, the reason why I asked the question is I got four kids, and we're having a conversation yesterday about football.
How old are they?
10, 9, 6, 18 months.
10, 9, 6, 6, 18 months.
Busy dude.
I would have 20 more if I could, but we're shutting it down.
So anyways, we're having this conversation about the nine-year-old.
Yes, it is.
Did I hear vasectomy there?
He's like, we're shutting it down now.
Nothing.
He's not getting one.
His beautiful wife is shutting it down.
So the whole idea is if we're going the route of if we're going the route of what these kids want to do.
And the conversation yesterday was the youngest son, nine-year-old, wants to play football.
My sister's like, well, you know, you sure you want to put him in football with the stats and all this other stuff.
We sat down and went out a conversation with the guy.
We said, listen, with the nine-year-old.
We showed him videos.
I interviewed Antonio Brown.
Here's what he said.
Here's what this person said.
Here's a clip.
Watch this clip.
Watch that clip.
Watch this clip.
The kid still wants to play football.
There it is.
So no matter how much you push him away, you're not going to be able to force the kid to do what you want him to do.
You could, but you may create resentment.
I would say you don't push them away.
You just expose them to information.
Exactly.
And of course, when you're nine, especially, your brain is not fully rationalized yet.
So I would revisit it every couple of years with your child.
But your kid could be the most famous football player there ever was.
And you don't want to be the one who interfered with that.
Plus, football is slowly getting safer relative to decades ago.
Take a look at the hits that Terry Bradshaw took.
You look at it.
It's like, why is he still alive?
All right.
And the laws were put into place since then.
So I'm just saying, as a parent, I think your goal should be not to require they study or interested in one thing or another, but that they're exposed to the joys and the sufferings of whatever it is they might choose to do.
And then let them make their own decision.
That would ensure that it's a more organically arrived at.
I agree.
No, we're on the same page with that.
Okay.
I thought you were going to have an argument on why you believe, you know, one is tougher to do than the other, but you took the statistical route, which makes sense.
I mean, you can really figure that out based on numbers.
Open AI.
Okay.
Open AI is a conversation.
I don't know how much you follow in ChatGPT or not.
No.
In six weeks, these guys have gone from zero in valuation to now being a $29 billion company, give or take.
In six weeks.
And so in two years, it took Facebook two years to get to a million users.
It took Instagram two years to get to a million users.
It took Pinterest five months to get to a million users.
It took Angry Birds 34 days to get to a million users.
It took ChatGPT five days to get to a million users.
Every other hour when you're on ChatGPT, the website's shut down because of the amount of activity.
So you haven't used the app yet, right?
You haven't looked at it.
No, I know about it.
The website.
So what are your thoughts about the direction we're going with AI and things like ChatGPT and what else you see this thing going to?
I know you made predictions on the Rogan show where you said, here's some of the predictions I heard, cancer, this, all that stuff.
It was designed to be shown that I would be wrong in 30 years.
They were not, here's my crystal ball.
It's all going to happen.
Right.
In my chapter of the book, I spent pages upon pages showing how people's predictions at the beginning of a 30-year period had no meaning at the end of a 30-year period, going from 1870 to 2020.
And so I said, so that you don't think I'm just being mean to other futurists, I will join this exercise so that in 30 years you can tell me how wrong I am.
That was where that came out.
But I would say that we can be impressed with what AI is doing, and we should be.
And so I don't have a problem with that.
But were you worried?
What point are you making about this?
No, no, because there's a debate right now.
I'm very neutral on this.
I love advancement.
I love innovation.
I'm excited about it.
But this morning, I'm having my CEO call with our C-suites, and I'm talking to our CTO, who is a guy that's done very well for himself.
He's sold companies.
He's been part of companies being acquired by IBM for $700 million.
He's done very well.
So I said, so what do you think about this whole concept of ChatGPT?
Because the other day, I don't know if you can go to it, see if it's working, the website's working right now or not.
Okay, so the connection is secure or not.
Proceeding.
Okay, it's down right now.
It's often down.
But yesterday, not yesterday, Saturday, we're here shooting a video.
And I said, write a 1,000-word paper on the Iranian revolution in Donald Trump's voice.
Okay.
It wrote the paper.
Sure.
I said, write a hip-hop song by Tupac on the subject of this.
If Tupac was alive today, it wrote the song.
If this was live right now, what I would want to do is to ask it, ask any question from, ask a unique question of Neil deGrasse Tyson.
What would you ask him to show?
So this is kind of like the best explanation is you go to a library.
Google is, I like to read books on the subject of the Big Bang Theory.
Here's 273 books.
Versus this one, you go to this library and say, I would like you to write a paper for me in seventh grade level, thousand words on the big bang theory.
No problem.
In 10 seconds, here's your paper.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what this thing does.
Yeah.
So copywriters gone.
This can write code.
This can write rap songs.
This can write lyrics.
This can write papers.
This can write anything to the point.
But just to be clear, I don't think it can write music yet.
It can write rhymes.
No, no, you can't write notes.
I didn't say notes.
Words.
Like if you want to do hip-hop or by the way, can you do me a favor?
Go to UK education and type in ChatGPT.
Okay.
So what's this going to eliminate?
But no, no, but what's creative?
What is your concern?
What is your concern?
I'm excited about it.
I'm not concerned about it.
What are other people's concerns?
A lot of people's concern is it's going to replace jobs for copywriters.
A lot of Silicon Valley people are like, for example, the story that came out with New York Times: type in New York Times, GBT, and I put code red.
New York Times, GBT, code read.
Okay, so this is a recent article right there.
A new chat bot is a code read for Google search business.
Okay.
A lot of people are talking about how this new wave of chat bot like Chat GBT using AI could reinvent or even replace traditional internet search engines.
Okay, so what's your point?
I'm excited.
Okay, that's what they're saying.
Okay, I think it's exciting.
I would say, by the way, and one time I tweeted this, I said, people who cheat on exams do so because the system values your grade more than the student values learning.
Okay.
So if we're worried that people will create a paper in whatever, oh, there it is.
Thank you.
You found it.
2013?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I've been at this.
It's about to be the 10-year anniversary of that thought.
Because our school system values grades more than students value learning.
Such a powerful tweet.
Yeah.
So the point is, why would you cheat at all?
Right.
If it's only to get a grade so that the school system thinks more highly of you.
When being in school is about learning.
And so if you have the AI bot create your papers, you didn't learn a thing, but you got the grade.
This is the problem we began with here in this conversation.
The value we put on a grade is out of proportion with who and what you actually are and become in life.
So, so yeah, you can submit papers like that.
Fine.
But you'll be an idiot at the end of your school.
You'll get a degree because you fooled the system, but did you fool yourself?
Did you fool your life?
No, you don't.
You didn't.
And here's another point: guessing on an exam, okay?
Yeah, that works sometimes, okay?
Because you might be right.
But guessing in real life just shows your ignorance.
Period.
If you don't know something, say, you know, I don't know.
I want to go find out.
I've asked people questions.
Who knows what they're thinking?
And they'll say, well, let me guess.
It was.
No, no, if you know it or you don't.
The urge to guess was because of school multiple choice tests.
If you don't know the answer, then guess.
And then maybe you'll be right and then we'll think highly of you for guessing the right answer.
No, no.
I'm an educator.
I care that you learn stuff.
And yeah, if the chat bot makes people think you're smart, even though you're not, who benefits from that?
I don't know.
Question for you.
Here's a question for you.
So let's just say you're playing in this playground in Venice Beach, basketball.
You're the sickest basketball player in Venice Beach.
And everybody has to watch you.
You have COVID.
This is during COVID.
You're killing it.
Nobody is there.
You're playing by the sickest.
Sickest.
I was just trying to be funny.
Well, we go to COVID right afterwards.
So you're the best basketball player at Venice Beach.
Everybody comes to watch you on Sundays.
And Joe, girls are like, oh my gosh, you know, Joe, you're great.
And they're fantastic.
And then all of a sudden, these five guys show up and they play in the NBA.
And they show up and you play against them and they embarrass you.
You don't score a single point.
They dunk on you.
All of a sudden, those same girls that were like, oh my God, Joe, they forgot what your name is.
You're replaced by five guys that can do it better than you.
So the only thing is about Chad GBT, can it replace that Joe, who's been fantastic?
Now he is being replaced by AI that he used to be important.
Now he's just a guy that was very smart and famous 15 years ago.
Yeah, so you take on something else.
Stay flexible enough to shift what your job ambitions are in the possibility that you could be replaced by a machine.
I have an example.
I personally knew a calligrapher who drew the letters in a dictionary, the opening letter, because the dictionary, you start out, you get to like the letter G.
Well, the first entry in a dictionary in the Gs is the letter G. All right.
And so that was a calligraphy thing.
That was hand done for many, many years.
And the company said, we need you to make a template of this, okay?
Which she did because she was on staff.
She was on payroll.
And then they scanned it and then she was laid off.
So, okay, yeah, that's sad.
But, you know, I mean, look for other jobs that are arising.
There are more jobs.
Think about it.
There are 330 million people in this country.
And 20 years ago, there were 200 million or whatever the numbers were.
The point is, all these new people who didn't exist back then have jobs today.
The job market has grown in all kinds of dimensions, in all kinds of ways.
Be aware of that.
That's why you should never take job advice from your parents.
Why?
They're stuck in the old days?
They don't have any idea what's coming around.
Yeah, in the old days, you could take job advice from them because things didn't change on a time scale that would matter between high school and college.
But right now, no, it's like getting car advice from your father.
You would never do that.
Did you hear that, mom?
What's your calligraphy friend calligrapher?
What's she doing now?
I haven't caught up with her.
Best guess.
What do you think she's doing?
She'd be retired now, but I don't know.
So are you making the case for or against Andrew Yang's famous UBI experiment?
So UBI is an interesting solution to this.
If AI is making all the money, then put it into the system.
I would say that there might still be things humans figure out to do that AI doesn't really know how to do yet and has to be trained or get better at it or whatever.
So I don't know that UBI, it's an intriguing idea.
It's completely intriguing.
And you know what I think?
AI can't build the bridge, okay?
Or erect a, that's a long time coming before that happens.
What I think we should do is we should redouble, double down on the maintenance and modernization of our infrastructure.
Those are actual human jobs with tractors and, you know, yeah, maybe AI can build a prefab home with construction bots, but unique structures that are on a hillside, those are human beings.
Those are actual construction workers.
Is an AI bot going to come in and fix your plumbing?
I don't see that happening yet.
But if you do, you got to give them a butt crack.
Tape it onto the back.
Did we not learn during COVID and all the stimulus and the free money that maybe printing money and free money isn't the best solution for people?
Like using UBI as an example?
Allow me to comment on that.
Yes, sir.
Feel free.
Okay.
What you're not considering is, okay.
So we have this inflation, all right?
This past year is 8% or whatever.
It'd probably be lower this year, but still 8%.
Well, yeah, we were printing money.
And so that there was some inevitability to that.
So people who don't like the politics of that argue against that and saying we shouldn't have printed money.
What was the fucking alternative?
You don't have money and you get kicked out of your home and you don't have a job?
Ask yourself, suppose we didn't do that.
And the entire industry that required people to leave their homes and pay money at a restaurant, at a shopping mall, at every place that required people's presence, they would be out of a job and homeless.
Oh, let's do that because that's a better solution than having a little bit of inflation two years after you have a stimulus package.
People don't do enough thinking about what other consequences would have taken place had decisions been different.
It's not just simply don't do the package.
That way we won't have a little bit of inflation a few years later.
That's not really the metric that's going on at that time.
Think it through.
Now, if you can say, I'd rather not have the inflation and I don't mind millions of people kicked out of their residence homeless with no job, then that's a decision as long as it's an informed decision.
You can prefer that.
It's a free country.
You can prefer that and vote that way.
For me, we have the power to print the money, keeping people in a job through the crisis.
I think that was one of the wisest decisions, economic decisions that could have been made at the time.
I guess that's my opinion.
No, and that's perfectly fine.
When you say think it through, who would disagree with that?
You know how like they do like in South Korea, with the help of U.S. forces, they do war games.
Okay, well, if China does this and we're going to do this and they do a thousand different ways of seeing what happens.
Military.
Yeah, these war games, all these things that happen and then different methodologies, different, why don't they do stuff like that with like COVID?
It's like, okay, cool.
If we're going to lock down the world and we can't have money, we don't have jobs and everyone losing their jobs.
All right, we're going to print money.
Why doesn't the government do something like that in terms of war games?
So like the next time COVID happens, it'll probably happen.
The problem is you don't have to print all this money.
It was a once in a century.
We hope, knock on wood.
Well, statistically, it was once in a century.
The previous one was 100.
Black Swan event.
The previous one was 100 years earlier.
And so we went a century without a pandemic.
So I don't know that solutions we put into place today would be the solutions we would choose 100 years from now in a next pandemic.
So, yes, the scenarios are good to explore.
Yes, you can ask how much money was pulled out of the stock market when society closed down.
That was that V drop that we took.
And by the way, the market went back up within 18 months.
It was higher than it was the day before it dropped.
Six months.
Yeah.
Was it that quick?
I forgot it was even that quick.
Thank you.
Yeah, six months.
The V recovery, they call it.
Yeah, exactly.
Are you a fan of debate?
No.
Tell me why.
Because debate implies that a person, the person who wins a debate is often the person who is more charismatic or is a better communicator.
Wow.
That typically happens, especially in politics.
And if it's a pure matter of opinion, then a person should just simply have their opinion.
If it's a matter of objective truths, there should be no debate about it at all.
It's not about debate.
It's here's the evidence.
Now let's make the decision.
So for me, debating is all about grandstanding an idea rather than arriving at an actual solution.
So to be fair, you should win 100% of the debates.
No, I don't enter debates.
But what I'm saying is, if the argument is a person who is better at presenting arguments could validate a point better than somebody that you're an incredible It should not depend on that talent of a person to decide what is or is not true in a debate.
Really?
No, of course not.
Oh my gosh.
No, no, I'm not.
If I'm really good at saying, you know, the sky is green.
Now let me debate that with you.
And I have a charisma and everyone votes and they say, and I win the debate, that doesn't make the sky green.
Even if I won the debate, that's an exaggeration.
I get what you're saying.
But I mean, if that would have been the case, then the last election, Biden shouldn't have won because he's horrible.
He's maybe won the worst on the history of debates on national television.
All I'm saying is that often a debate is one on charisma more than it is on the continent.
Fair enough.
That A, B, if a subject can be objectively analyzed, then it does not benefit from a debate.
C, if it's a matter of opinions, who you want to vote for because you prefer one policy or another, have the debate.
Go ahead.
That's the only kind of debate I would enter, but I don't care if anyone else has my opinions.
Yeah, I would say.
So I'm not going to try to convince you of my opinions.
I got you.
Well, opinion is one thing.
But for example, like Nixon to me and Biden are the same.
The moment Nixon had to debate on the national, you know this story.
Yeah, with Kennedy.
Yeah, with Kennedy.
It was like a bad situation because Kennedy looked good.
He was tan.
He slept, all this stuff.
No, he had makeup on.
He had makeup on all this stuff and the other.
He didn't shape.
Anyways, but here's where I'm kind of going with this.
During COVID.
By the way, we forget that that was one of the closest elections in American history.
Yeah, that's what it is.
Well, anyone watching on TV, I wasn't alive then, but I've studied it.
Anyone watching on TV thought that JFK won.
No.
But anyone watching on radio thought Nixon won.
Correct.
Because you're static.
Should get away from it.
I don't want to spend some time together.
Therefore, where I want to.
But the fact that that happened at all tells you the debate construct is like, what are you doing here?
Okay.
I mean, that's the American system.
When it comes down to that, there's a part of me that agrees with that.
I don't mind debating opinions.
I'm just not going to do it because I don't care if anyone else has opinions.
Okay, so let me ask.
I'm not against it.
I'm just saying, and my school had a really good debate team.
I'm embarrassingly old.
Am I 30?
At the point I learn that competitive debate teams, it's when you enter the debate tournament, you do not know in advance what side you're going to argue.
And you're handed a side to argue.
And I thought to myself, really?
Oh my gosh.
So you're just a trained arguer.
That's what you are.
And then these are people become attorneys and attorneys become the greatest source of presence in Congress.
So we have people who are trained arguers trying to arrive at an agreement on anything.
I'm surprised anything ever works in Congress at all.
Are you for scientific debate?
So in a scientific debate, here's how that unfolds.
I'm in conversation with you.
Let's call it a debate.
We know, you and I know, walking into that room, either I'm right and you're wrong.
Okay.
You're right and I'm wrong, or we're both wrong.
We know that in advance.
So we start having the conversation.
Well, what about these data?
What about these data?
I think those data are flawed, and here's why.
Well, how about this?
Yes, that's a debate.
But you know how that debate ends?
It depends where, you know, we need this new data set to resolve this difference.
Now let's go have a beer.
I have never seen that happen in a political debate.
I've never seen, nor with two lawyers in a courtroom.
You know, I never thought about it that way.
Good idea.
I concede.
Has that ever happened?
I think the answer to that is no.
And so, because one lawyer says, wow, you convinced me of that.
No.
If you see a debate on television, will one ever just concede to the other?
Wow, I've never thought about it that way.
No.
They're in it for the win, whether or not they're right.
And I can't go there.
I'm saying that.
So then how can we choose?
Okay, so for example, let me ask you, from what we knew at the beginning of COVID to what we know today, what do we know about the vaccine today that we didn't know while we were all testing it on America taking it?
What have we learned now?
What do you mean testing it on America?
There were tests before it was released.
Nine months is not a long time to test.
No, but it was tested.
Yeah, but the average is five to 10 years.
I mean, nine months is not enough.
So you have to say, no, you have to ask.
Hold on.
It was tested in trials.
Okay.
By the way, I'm not claiming to be the expert on all this.
I read all the same things you have, but I'm a scientist, so I read it as a scientist, okay?
There were trials.
That's what the point of phase one, two, three trials are all about.
They are tested enough to get data on how to then advise the larger population.
Yes, it was tested.
For you to say it wasn't tested is a gap between your awareness and understanding how things work and what actually happened.
It was tested.
If you want it to be tested on millions of people instead of thousands, you can put in for that.
You can say, I don't want this unless it's millions.
That's okay.
Totally fine with me.
I'm okay with that.
But the so based on that, do you say, let's keep testing it while the virus keeps spreading?
Okay?
Right.
So this is the contest between the information you have available to you at that moment and what's going on outside the lab.
People are dying.
Hospitals are becoming overloaded.
So do you say we have good data on the thousand?
It's not yet at a million in case you wanted a million.
Are you going to say, let's still do it on another, let's wait another six months so we get another million in here?
Will you do that as a public health professional?
No, I would have said allow the individual to still have a choice that's okay with a thousand instead of a few million.
Leave the person have the choice.
Not force him to take it or else you're going to get out of the Marines and you've been doing this for 14 years.
Not force him to take it or else you have to quit your job as a nurse.
There's a public health force versus a public health contract that you have signed implicitly as a citizen of a country where in part we depend on each other for health, our wealth, our security and the like.
And that contract is in the best scientific evidence available at the time.
If you do not get vaccinated, you will put other people in this organization at risk and that organization does not want to take that risk.
So you do not have this job anymore if you decline it.
So With any public health decision, there has to be a consequence to you not participating in that social contract.
Is it your job?
In some cases, it was.
But no, we're not going to have the army bust into your home and force a needle into your shoulder.
That's not going to happen.
We pretty much did that.
Well, only put your job at risk.
Yes.
Yeah, 67% of Americans took to COVID.
That's force.
That's not a choice.
That's a lot of force and coercing and pushing going on.
But that's the, yeah, you can't go to the school unless you're vaccinated against bullshit.
I think that's bullshit.
That's a different country.
Yeah.
Okay.
Would you want a country?
No, America is supposed to be the one that offers the most freedom.
That's what America's supposed to be.
Okay, so watch.
So for example, so for example, if you use that argument, so somebody may say, well, freedom of choice, I want to choose what I want to do with the body.
You're right.
What, buddy?
If you want to get an abortion.
It's your own.
Oh, your own body.
Your own body.
If you want to get an abortion, get an abortion.
If I want to get the vaccine, I get to choose.
So you can't force.
If I can't force you to get an abortion, you shouldn't be able to force yourself.
Because it's not about you.
It's about people you interact with.
And that's the social contract of public.
We don't even know if the vaccine worked or not at the time.
That's what the trials are dude.
That's why these trials.
Are you missing data?
But let me ask you a question.
Are we saying only one type of scientists are right?
No, we're saying that the system in place.
The 16,000 that signed up.
No, no, no.
The system in place to test vaccines.
There's an entire system that's in place with review boards and all of it.
And the average.
That's in place.
Now you can say, what you can say is, I have a better idea than all these review boards and all these agencies and the CDC.
I have a better idea.
Here's what you should do.
And that would have made everything better.
Okay.
You can put forth that idea.
But what I'm saying is, in a case where you can contaminate someone else, it's not about you.
It's about the collective health.
You're assuming.
You're assuming because somebody can take the vaccine won't get COVID, which, by the way, I don't need to play the clips for you to see it where everybody said, hey, if you get it, you're not going to get it.
If you take the vaccine, you're not going to get a Rachel Maddow, Joe Biden.
I can give you Fauci.
I can give you Fit.
And you've seen these clips before.
It's not like you've never seen it before.
They were wrong.
Hold on.
So, the strain evolved, okay, so that the vaccine that prevented you from catching COVID was tuned to the variant of COVID at the time the vaccine was denied, what was designed.
Okay.
Over time, there were variants that arose.
The vaccine provided partial protection against the new variants, enough to keep you from dying statistically and to basically keep you out of the hospital, allowing other people with more severe problems to get the hospital attention they required.
And so then they would develop a subsequent, the booster and a subsequent mixture of the vaccine.
This is what happens every year with a flu shot.
They look at how the flu has evolved from one season to the next.
And what's fortunate is Australia tends to get the variant of flu before we do because they get their winter in our summer.
And then so we study that, have a forward projection for it.
So these annual flu shots are precisely out of the same idea of how this occurred.
How long have those been tested, though?
For years.
COVID vaccine hasn't been tested for it.
It was something we just came out.
I don't know what point you're making other than it was tested.
You might prefer.
No, it's not a matter of time.
It's a matter of, it's a matter of how many.
Yes, time matters, but the number of people is paramount.
That's the most important thing.
Okay.
You don't test it on 10 people.
You test it on as many people as you can.
I think it was thousands, but is it fair to say that some of the side effects we may not know for five, 10, 15, 20 years?
You can't like, they can't say, we know 100% the side effects 10 years from now.
How are you going to know that?
Yeah, okay.
So, no, of course, we can't know.
So, then all I'm saying is.
No, but watch, watch.
We can't know that.
Okay.
But watch.
So I have a whole chapter called Risk and Reward in the book, which tries to sensitize people to when they make a decision, what kind of risk are they absorbing relative to what they're rejecting?
Okay.
And we're not very good at that, at probability and statistics or analyzing.
That's why TV commercials trying to sell you a product don't just show you data, they show a person speaking of the effectiveness of the product, a single person.
I lost 50 pounds.
The testimony of an individual should be irrelevant to you relative to the entire set of people who have done it.
And you want to look at those statistics, but we're not good at that.
And advertisers know that.
So they show the testimony of an individual, which is hugely potent in a civilization where we don't think statistically, we think about eyewitness testimony on something.
And somehow that is raised to a very high level of influence on our decisions.
What I'm saying is, you're not confronted.
Your decision point is not, I'm not going to take the virus because five years, 10 years, I don't know what effect it's going to have.
Some may, though, some may not be comfortable.
Let me finish the sentence.
You, you, okay?
So you can say, I don't want to take the virus because five or 10 years from now, there could be a side effect that we don't see.
Which is a possibility.
Hold on.
I'm trying to make a statistical point here.
Okay.
If you say, I don't want to take the virus because it hasn't been tested for five years and there could be some long-term side effect that worries me, okay?
In that same moment, there's the risk factor of you getting COVID.
Sure.
Okay.
Unvaccinated.
At one point, 87% of everyone dying in the hospital of COVID was unvaccinated.
Okay.
So your risk choice is: I'm not going to take it because maybe somewhere down the line, something will happen and we don't know what that is, or I will risk getting COVID.
And if I get COVID, depending on your age and other things, there's a 3% chance of me dying in the hospital.
That's your choice.
Yes.
Yes.
But what I see people doing is they focus on one thing, and that's the foundation of their decision.
Rather than the other chance, what happens if you get COVID?
Now you get long COVID.
Now you don't have a taste buds for two years or whatever it is for long COVID?
you're on a ventilator in the hospital possibly dying like what where is the so i looked every day Once a week, I looked at the statistics.
How many people are getting COVID?
What's the rate?
What's the rate of hospitalization?
What's the rate of deaths?
Where is it by stake?
I had to look at it.
My board force me to like, we're in the business.
They should.
Of course.
Because it's data.
Yeah.
I agree.
On risk factors.
The risk of people's lives.
Okay, for sure.
So nothing is ever zero risk.
Yeah, there's a risk that you'll grow a third arm in 10 years because the virus mutates within you.
Should the individual not have the right to say, I don't want to take it because that's the same thing.
You don't have the right to contaminate someone else.
So if you don't want to get shot.
Who says that though?
But who says that?
It's a social contract in a modern civilization.
I don't have public health.
I don't have the right to contaminate someone else.
What do you mean?
Like, so what do I do?
Stay home all day?
Yeah.
Or it's go to the beach.
Yeah.
You stay away from other old people who stay away from people who are immune compromised.
So, Neil, so for me, I'm asking you because I want to know how you process this as a guy that's well-read, smart.
I process the data and the data.
We didn't have enough data, though.
No, no.
We didn't have enough data.
At any given moment, there's data for you to make a decision.
At any given moment, the data is constantly getting better and better.
Yeah.
All right.
So, all right, at any given moment, you say to yourself, okay, what happens to me if I get COVID?
There's a chance I'll get long COVID.
I'm certainly out for at least a week.
And there's a chance I'll be hospitalized, and there's a chance I'll die.
I take the vaccine, it mitigates this, basically entirely removing the chance that I'm going to die, essentially, at my age group.
And I will accept the risk that in five years I'll grow a third arm.
That's the kind of decision-making that I make.
Now, that's just for me, but on top of that, if my workplace says, we don't want you coming in unless you are vaccinated and you might lose your job, I would say, why?
Oh, because you could contaminate someone else, introducing a problem in their own health profile.
That's the public contract.
That's why workers wash their hands in the restaurant bathrooms by law.
Yes, they're required to do so because you don't want poop germs in your dinner that they're preparing.
Because our evidence showed that that's one of the greatest places you can spread disease is in a restaurant with a central kitchen.
So these are, these are the, this is the now, you want a world where you can do whatever you want and have it influence other people.
I'm not saying that.
You kind of are.
I'm not saying that, though.
All I'm saying is the following.
Okay, for example, statistics.
You know, have you seen the documentary died suddenly?
Have you looked at it?
No, no, I haven't.
Okay.
Well, it's an interesting one.
It's on, I don't know where it's said.
You can find it somewhere online.
It's got 30 million views.
I think it's worth watching.
Actually, I would be curious to know what you say about it once you watch it.
The statistic then showed like pre-COVID, you know, 29 people, athletes in Europe died suddenly from heart failure, pre-COVID, pre-taking the mRNA vaccine.
Okay.
Post-taking the mRNA vaccine last year, 1,500 people suddenly had heart failures in Europe and two-thirds died.
That's documented.
That's not like it's a hypothetical, right?
Okay.
You read statistics like that, then one has the right to say.
Just to be careful, just to be careful.
You have to be careful how you speak information.
So you are describing two events, okay?
You're describing events that had a temporal relationship, okay?
Before you've established a causal relationship.
Just be clear that that's the problem.
100%.
I'm not doing that.
All I'm doing is the following.
Here's all I'm doing.
If somebody all of a sudden starts having a breakout, a breakout or woman.
Meaning their skin starts breaking out.
You're 26 years old.
You never had a breakout.
All of a sudden you start breaking out.
And the doctor says, listen, man, what have you been doing differently?
Well, listen, for the first time in my life, six weeks ago, I started doing DECA, steroids.
Well, okay.
That's why you're...
It implicates it.
It implicates it, right?
Okay.
Okay.
Hey, if somebody all of a sudden, you know, is having a hard time sleeping at night, man, I'm having a very hard time.
Let's watch your diet.
Well, then they notice at 10.30 at night, you're having iced tea and lemonade, and you add it with this.
Well, listen, if we've been doing it for six weeks, that's why you're having a hard time.
Just drop that.
Don't drink that after 2 o'clock.
I'm just making, you know, saying, but all I'm saying is, what I want to know is I want to put everything on the table versus saying, no, no, no, there's one thing we can't put on the table, and that's the cause of the vaccine.
There is no way there could be any negative impact because of vaccine.
That's ludicrous.
Has ever said that ever about any vaccine?
If you say that, then the question then becomes back for you to say, when COVID first got started, I invited so many doctors to come in to talk about COVID.
And I invited people from both sides.
I want both sides.
I invited people from both sides.
You know which side would never come?
The side that was for vaccine would never, ever come because they thought they were above the average person that they know and the rest of us are dumb.
So because of that, they're not willing to come and sit down with scientists.
I think that's arrogant.
So to me, when I ask you scientific debate, I'm not telling you, I'm a scientist.
Hey, let me debate with you because I'm smarter than you.
I'm not a scientist.
I'm a business person.
Let's do a hypothetical scenario.
Hypothetics are, let's assume an actual cause and effect has been established in these cases.
Sure.
Which it's not.
I have to see this film to know.
I don't know that it's a cause and effect other than a coincidence in time relative to other things that people might have been doing.
By the way, alcohol consumption went up during COVID significantly.
And alcohol is implicated in heart disease.
Depression, anxiety, people staying at home.
Oh, kids.
Opioids, panics, addiction.
So staying at home wasn't the best decision either.
What I'm saying is if after the vaccine is available, more people die of heart failure over a time where alcohol consumption went up, as did depression.
That could be an option.
That's right.
That's all I'm saying here.
But let's give it to you that the vaccine caused this.
Let's just say that, okay?
Yeah.
And add it all up, and you get, what was it, 1,500 post-vaccine?
29 to 1,500.
20, 20, 29, deaths.
29.
4,000.
Thousands of deaths.
Okay.
Let's say 10,000 even.
Let's just do that.
Okay.
All right.
You can estimate how many deaths the vaccine saved during COVID.
Okay?
Because you can look at the death numbers drop off as people got vaccinated.
It's in the tens of millions.
Again, you make a decision.
Do I not want to die from COVID at this rate that occurred in this world?
Or do I not want to die from this complication from the vaccine itself?
The heart failure.
So make your decision.
And so you'll say, I might be in that 1500, so I'm not going to take.
Then you get COVID and die from COVID, right?
So you just make the decision.
Do you know what I would say to that?
You know what I would say to that?
What would you say?
Here's what I would say to that.
I would say, perfect.
Let me take the risk.
And thank you for giving it to me that way versus telling me it's one or the other, which is how it's presented.
I'm not going to be informed fully about what the risks are.
But like I said, as a species, we're not very good at thinking statistically about it.
We're just not.
And when we want to, we believe we're going to be the exception.
And look at the people betting on lotteries.
You know, they think they're going to win.
But for me, but for me, like, you know, the moment they started saying you have to put on cigarettes, this, the risk of this, the risk of heart failure, cancer, this, this, that.
And if you still want to smoke cigarettes, guess what?
You got a risk if you smoke cigarettes, you may get lung cancer, right?
Hey, if you eat this, if you do this, if you do that.
We've denied your admission to the bar.
There's a cost to that because it's a public health issue.
And so, right.
You are free to smoke the cigarette, but not in my establishment by law.
Not in your establishment.
By law.
By law.
Correct.
No problem.
Right.
Totally fine.
But that's an example.
But if you want to smoke cigarettes outside, you can live on the beach unvaccinated.
That's fine.
Neil, let me ask you this.
So what state would you say was the most responsible during COVID?
State?
I don't know.
State.
I don't know.
Okay.
I never looked.
So if you're a statistic.
No idea.
Okay, I'm a stats guy as well.
I like stats, but I'm more financial.
I'm not like, you know, but I understand what you're saying.
I'm a baseball guy, so I like stats.
I'm all about stats.
I love baseball.
So if we look at the stats, the media made Florida seem the most irresponsible state.
That's what the media made it look.
Okay.
We're in Florida right now.
You guys do have kind of a bad rap, bad reputation on a lot of stuff.
Okay, sure.
So by the way, I've lived in California 24 years, five years in Texas, two years in Florida.
Just so you know my background.
That's right.
10 years in Iran, two years in Germany.
That's kind of my background.
A couple years in the military.
But if we say, hey, if we look at the data, the most irresponsible state was Florida.
You would have heard many times news telling you that.
When I'd go to California and I would say, I'm in Florida.
I'm just like, oh my God, you're in Florida.
Oh, my God.
It's horrible.
But you know what I realized?
Here's what I realized.
If the state of Florida is so bad, why did the NBA during Black Lives Matter host the playoffs in Florida?
I thought they created a bubble for themselves.
But why did they come here?
They could have done it in Texas.
Texas got plenty of places they could do it.
And why did they do it here?
I don't know.
But the point is, they felt safest.
I'm not going to use the NBA as a measure of what is happening.
I also did the Super Bowl here.
I did a lot of Super Bowl with shared.
I'll give you another one.
Pro-vaccine AOC for vacation.
She came to Miami.
People from New York and California were partying for Miami.
During COVID, when everybody was looking for a home during Christmas, where to go to, you couldn't go to Colorado.
You couldn't go to Lake Tahoe because it sucked.
You had all these other choices.
Everybody came to Florida.
I'm not going to statistically though.
I can't use that as a statistics of safety.
I can't.
I don't care who chooses where to vacation.
I care what your death rates are, what your vaccination rates are, what your hospitalization rates are.
That would be an objective measure from state to state.
What state are you most likely to die in from COVID?
That's a statistic I would pay attention to.
What state has the least hospital beds to accommodate those who are sick from COVID, even if they're not going to die from COVID?
I would want to know that.
I'm not going to base a decision on whether the NBA chose to put their bubble in the state.
Well, statistically, New York and California does not look good, statistically.
New York and California, and they're supposed to be the most responsible ones.
Those two states didn't look good.
All I'm saying is from my end, in a space where I sit there and I listen to you and I learn, I say, oh my gosh.
Okay, I had no clue about that.
That was brilliant.
That's interesting.
Let me go research.
Let me go look at this.
I'm a guy that likes debate of experts in two different sides and let them make the argument.
And I'm mature enough to know the better salesman doesn't necessarily have the better argument.
Let me just say that there's nothing I've said in the last half hour that is a debating point.
All I'm telling you, well, you can debate whether you should still be able to work and put other workers at risk for not having vaccinated.
You can debate that.
In the context of public health, that's a risk factor that we don't want to introduce to other people because of your decisions.
That's a public health issue.
It's been going on basically for 100 and something years since who's the woman who some famous medical case, a person who spread, what is that case recently?
No, no, 100 years ago.
It created a whole wave of sanitation rules and things for public health sake.
But anyway, the point is, I want to make sure you know you can focus on the 1,500 people who died after the vaccine.
Mary Mallon?
Talking about the history of typhoid fever?
Yeah, Typhoid Mary.
Yes.
Okay.
I didn't know her last name.
I thought Typhoid was her first name.
Typhoid Mary.
So It's simply a matter of if you're saying you don't want to be in the 2,000, whatever the number is, who died after the vaccine from heart failure at the peak of your physical career, not totally necessarily factoring in all the other abuses that went on over that time that may have contributed to it.
Instead, you want to take the risk of COVID and not be one of the 20 million people who would have died and didn't, right?
So I just want you to have the statistics in front of you.
And it seems to me most people would, in most cases, choose the path that reduces their chance of death.
But by the way, I don't disagree.
That's why I'm not debating.
I'm just putting it out there.
But this part of what you're saying, I'm 100% with you.
It's not a matter of being with me.
It's just, are you with decision making of what is rational statistical analysis?
But this position is not an arrogant position.
This position is kind of like when you're sitting there and a doctor and you tell the doctor, Sadak, what do I do?
Do I get the surgery?
Like, we have one of my good friends right now that's getting a brain surgery in the next couple of weeks.
She's afraid.
Now, she believes in God, so faith is kind of calming her down, but she's afraid, okay?
The doctor says there's a 10% chance you're not going to make it.
Do you want to, for the rest of your life, live having to take that medication with the side effects, or do you want to do the surgery?
The individual is making a decision to get the surgery.
She knows the chances is what?
10%.
You know what I say to that?
Hey, at least I know the risk versus, no, if you take this, you won't get anything.
Propaganda, selling me this.
What's the three things that you say?
There's three different types of truth, right?
Subjective truth, personal truth, and political truth.
Exactly.
That's the one I have a problem with.
And I agree with you.
And that's the part I have a problem with.
Personal truth, let's debate, have fun with it.
Let the audience know.
Yeah, you want to debate, debate personal fear.
Exactly.
That's cool.
Kirk or Picard, you know, whatever.
Yes.
But that Star Trek reference.
Dude, who let him in?
I'm sorry.
Who let him in?
They've been asking that question for years.
The political truth is what brought a lot of division in households and companies different places.
Of course.
I think that's what happened last two and a half years.
Specifically with that.
And you know this.
Like you took it, you didn't take it.
You're part of a political party.
Like you may be positioning me right now.
Statistically, that was a correct statement.
Yeah, statistically it was.
But what was interesting is that people with no college degrees took the vaccine less than those with bachelor's degrees, but then MBA was the least.
Which is kind of funny.
MBA people took the least amount of vaccine.
Interesting.
Sociological.
Yeah, interesting sociology statistics.
Can I ask a follow-up on this?
Because I think this is the question that you're really asking, but we're using COVID as like as an example, as a case example, because I think what you're asking ultimately is the question of power versus choice, right?
Or force versus choice.
So like on one hand, on one end of the spectrum, what you're talking about is the social contract, the collectivism, the greater good on one hand, doing the right thing, protect your neighbor.
But on the other hand, one would argue like sort of the woven in fabric of America is this rugged individualism, being able to make your own choices and being self-reliant.
All go move to a cabin in the woods and don't get vaccinated.
No one will stop you from doing that.
But is that what rugged individualism means?
Individualism means that.
To me, individualism means you matter more than anyone else around you in the decisions you make about your life.
And so to me, that's what individualism is.
And so how do we juxtapose that with the rest of society that doesn't want the disease you might carry and give to them?
Like I said, just move into a log cabin until the disease washes over and then wait till the rest of us have herd immunity and then you won't get it and you'll be just fine.
Let us get the herd immunity for you.
We'd rather do that for the person who is immune compromised, who can't get the vaccine, but in Merca, in a freedom woven into our identity, MERC, apostrophe M, Merka.
I'm right there with you.
So I don't have any problem thinking that way, but I'm not going to let you in the room with my immune compromised nephew who can't get the vaccine because his immune system won't allow it, because he has some other condition.
So he's relying on the, I don't have such a nephew, but they exist.
I was going to say, give them my best.
No, no, thank you even for thinking that way.
That the herd immunity is you get enough vaccinations within that even if the virus shows up, it can't propagate.
Yeah.
Because the next person it hits is resistant to it.
Neil, what's the most unattractive and attractive quality to you?
If you were to say the most attractive quality in a human being versus unattractive, what would you say to that?
I don't have an opinion.
Okay.
I think I have a pretty good sense of humor, and I noticed a lot of people.
I know you do.
Like humor.
So I'd like you to like making people smile.
Yeah.
Especially if I can have them smile while they're learning.
Then you'll learn that much more.
It's called valutainment.
You're bringing value and entertainment.
It's called valutainment.
No, but you can see what you did there.
Yeah.
It's not for me to judge.
You know why I asked that question?
You know why I asked that question?
The reason why I asked that question is, you know, because it's very annoying when somebody just thinks they know everything 100% certainty and you're dumb and you don't know it.
And because of that, you better or else you don't care about other people.
And that's the part about the force versus the choice thing we're talking about here.
And that was felt a lot from some of the people in the world.
It was a weaver as they mentality.
Which, by the way, I've taken probably more vaccines than 99% of people.
I was in the military.
We took, God knows how many vaccines I've taken.
It was more, if you would have taken me and said, here's your options, here's what you got, I may have entertained it more than another way of forcing it down my throat.
Last topic before we wrap up.
Or into your arm.
Yeah.
That's true.
It's a bad way to take the shot on your throat.
It's probably not a good idea.
That visualization is not a good visualization.
Last topic before we wrap up.
How much, I've seen you say you were talking to somebody from some China media company, and you were talking about us and China are frenemies, right?
You know, friends and enemies and all that stuff.
And you said, you know, the competition to go back to the moon, we're not winning it.
China's winning it, right?
You were talking about how on the way it's going to be.
No, I don't think that's what I said, but I can see how one can think that based on.
They're winning it.
I can see how that, but go on.
Okay.
Yeah.
So what.
But I think what I said was the only reason why we're going back to the moon now is upon seeing China's plans to go to the moon.
Because otherwise we could have done this 30, 40 years ago.
We could have stayed on the moon.
There's a lot of things we could have done and didn't.
And all of a sudden, we're going back to the moon and it's the right, and everyone feels good about it.
And you part the curtains and move the pages, look behind the beads, and there is the motivation for it.
As Americans, in spite of our own memory of ourselves, we are much better reacting to threats than we are being proactive.
Let me not say threats.
Competition is the way you put it.
I think you were presenting.
Let me just be really specific.
We remember ourselves as being space pioneers.
And we're here in Florida where all the launches were.
But really, we were reactive to the progress made in the Soviet Union rather than proactive.
They had the first satellite, the first non-human animal, the first human.
They had the first woman.
They had the first dark-skinned person, a Cuban communist.
They had the first space station.
They beat us at practically everything.
And we said, well, what can we do?
And we said, let's go to the moon.
All right.
So we went to the moon.
And then we say, we win.
Even though they had beaten us in every other metric, we got to say, we win.
And then we saw they're not going to the moon.
So we abandoned the program.
So we like to think we're explorers.
We're Americans.
That's why we did it.
No, we did it because we were scared witless.
So here's China saying, we're going to put some folks on the moon.
And they've made good on every space promise they have made.
And all of a sudden, we have renewed interest in going to the moon.
Got to love it.
I don't want to be so naive as to think we just decided it just on a lark.
That's the point I was making.
No, and again, if anybody wants to watch a clip, you can go find it.
Just type in Neil deGrasse Tyson.
You can put Friendemy, China, and you'll see.
It's a great clip.
It's like 30 minutes.
I highly recommend people watching it.
No, I haven't re-seen it, so thanks for bringing it up.
I think it's really insightful the way you're explaining the fact that competition, even amongst governments, is good because it makes us do – it was a very interesting point being made about it.
It can accelerate progress.
I agree.
How much, and maybe your answer to this may be different than some of the rest of us.
You know the question about what keeps you up at night?
Yeah.
What keeps you up at night?
For a mother with a newborn, it's the baby.
For a guy with a startup.
It's really true.
It's the startup.
For a guy who's a podcaster, has got a big interview the next day, and it's the best guess he's ever had in five years, and he's thinking this is going to be the interview.
For the guy that's about to raise capital, and it's the guy he's raising capital with.
What keeps you up at night in regards, not personal life, where it's like my daughters, my wife, my family, my this.
In regards to enemies America may have, what keeps you up at night?
Oh, yeah, I don't, those aren't the kind of thoughts I have.
You look around the world, there are always warring factions.
But I try to put it on a scale.
And on that scale, you know, today, there's conflict in the world.
And sometimes if it's armed conflict, people die, this sort of thing.
Of course, in Ukraine and Russia and this sort of thing.
When I look back to the Second World War, between 1939 and 1945, 1,000 people were killed per hour of every hour between 1939 and 1945.
You want to talk about a time of violence.
There is no comparison to that period.
We look back on it.
It's, oh, we won the war and we had the technology and it's remembered differently from the carnage that that caused.
And so when I look around and I see carnage in the world and I index it to that, I say to myself, we're in a relatively safe world, which is hard.
It's a hard sell if you're the country being invaded and bombed, you know.
No question.
So that's why it's a hard conversation to have.
But I think it matters.
People say, we're in the most racist time ever.
No, we're not.
Objectively.
I have stories from my parents.
I have stories from my life.
I have metrics for this.
Yeah, there's still problems.
But you know how to measure this?
Here's how you do it.
Let's say You're on the gender spectrum, or you're a person of color, or you're a woman, and you have a time machine.
And someone says, and I talk about this in the book, I say, here's a time machine.
You can have access to any time in the history of civilization.
Where would you go?
And choose a time where you'll be better off than you are today.
There is no time.
You're going nowhere.
You're going nowhere.
Send me to the future.
Because the arc of progress, the arc of morality bends towards progress.
And nowhere.
Nowhere at all.
If you're gay, you can say, let me go back.
Clinton was a good person.
Oh, wait a minute.
That was the don't ask, don't tell era.
That was AIDS pervasive killing everyone era.
Okay, right.
Right.
Right.
So our media has a tendency, news media has a tendency to focus on all that is bad and leave you with the impression that everything is bad without the metric of, well, some things are better.
Many, most things are better.
Why don't we focus on that and do more of that rather than become sad over the things that are bad?
Did that sentence come out?
Such a powerful point, right?
Right, right, right.
Everything you're saying.
We are doing some things that are good.
That's why there is progress.
What you're saying is we're living in the best time humanity has ever seen, ever.
Ever, ever.
That's such a necessary message.
Ever.
And even with the violence, especially in these days, the violence against trans people, okay?
All right.
Yes.
Go back in time.
The existence of trans people was even denied.
Okay.
Oh, you have a mental condition.
It was 1987 before the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a mental disorder from their catalog.
87, that's not for old folks, that's not all that long ago.
We remember those times.
So, yeah, there's problems today.
I'm not going back to any time in the past.
You know, there's a lot of like younger folks that don't remember that.
You know, I see a lot of these Gen Z types.
Right.
Right.
What would your message be to young people, even Adam?
Adam, sorry, let's stay on this topic.
That's what we're saying.
No, no, I'm staying on this topic here.
I'm staying on the topic of what's keeping you up at night.
We're not going to younger people.
We're on the topic of what's keeping you up at night.
You want me to think about sort of the violence in the world.
And when I reflect on the world, I think of how we are not killing a thousand people per hour in warfare with the world at war.
I think about that.
I think about the fact that, yes, a taxi does pick me up today, even though I'm going north in Manhattan, where Harlem is.
And whereas 15 years ago, they would not, or at least two and four would not.
I can always wait for one to pick me up.
I think about the occasions when I was coming up where I would just simply be ignored.
This is something that women experience all the time with men.
It's something that the black community was experienced with white community.
If you have expertise, you're just ignored.
That has changed.
Now you have black experts on television talking about things that have nothing to do with being black.
We need an expert on this international relationship.
How many often do you talk about this?
I know it's a new one.
Never.
No, how often do you think?
Never.
Hardly ever.
Why don't you, though?
Because then I become the person who talks about black things.
And I don't want to be that person to you.
I want to be the astrophysicist who tells you about the universe and the James Webb Space Telescope and all the rest of this.
Is sometimes I think we have a life experience that we have been granted with to use as a way to give a different perspective to people at a time that's necessary to unify plenty of other black people to give exactly that same thing.
But they don't have your voices.
They don't have you.
But by the way, what I want to say is I appreciate you saying that.
I got an example.
I was in South Africa in 1992.
Yeah.
Okay.
Barely the vote.
South Africa.
South Africa.
And I'm walking the street.
I'm not a small person.
I'm walking and there are two, a couple coming towards me.
It's South Africa.
They're white.
They did not even look up.
They're just looking down, talking to each other.
It was fully expected that I would part around them for them to keep walking forward.
Yeah.
It wasn't even, oh, let's just both take a slight half step to the side as you pass one another.
No, that is not what happened.
And another time I'm in a convenience store and I put the money down, the cougarans and the gum or whatever I was buying.
While I'm there in that little open section of the heavily overstuffed purchase area, someone comes up behind me, puts something down, fully expecting that they're going to be taken next when I am standing there.
Like I said, I'm not a small person.
This was South Africa.
And I realized, okay, they still have a way to go because they haven't even graduated to the point of noticing me and then calling me names.
They were still in a state where I did not exist and I was irrelevant.
And then I look at those images from the 1950s of the police dogs and the people when the little school children are trying to go into the high school.
And I say, wow, that's an advance over being completely ignored.
All right.
We look at the arc of what it takes for people to achieve equality and equity and all the things that the promised land should give us all.
I said to myself, okay, South Africa has a long way to go because they were not even calling me the N-word.
And I began to look at the N-word as, oh, okay, you at least know I'm here.
That would have been progress is what you're saying.
Progress.
Progress.
You know what?
So to answer your question, I don't think about that.
But by the way, you don't come across as a person that does think about that.
Yeah, well, thank you.
And I mean it in the most positive way because I feel you're optimistic about the future and grateful that you come.
You come that way and it kind of your energy, you feel that energy from you.
Some people are concerned about TikTok and the influence over TikTok and how China's using that.
You've seen some articles, Forbes, you've seen it.
Maybe this is not a topic that you study yourself.
Because I was on a board of the Pentagon that advised the president on that.
Fantastic.
And then it became a news story.
Should TikTok be banned or should we leave it in America?
Should it be banned?
So with whatever other reason one might object to TikTok, the fact that it's a Chinese company and the history of this exercise is that China has typically has backed doors into access and who you are and what you're doing.
That is a natural state of their government to have that kind of access to their people.
By the way, our companies and our own government has kind of that same access to us, except it's our own government.
Yeah, exactly.
So don't look at this as some special actors.
Sure.
All right.
Facebook knows everything there is to know about you.
I'm not derating that.
So I would be in favor, and I haven't followed this lately, the latest after we first advised Trump on this.
This was back a few years ago.
It was a brand new board of the Pentagon, the Defense Innovation Board, where innovative things that were happening in the world to keep you to keep you to keep the military at the forefront of what they need to know and do so you can have a military that is ready for the 21st century and whatever it delivers.
So the point is, I could imagine just if they maybe they've already done this.
I don't know.
To split the company and just have a TikTok America that has no ties back to China.
They try to do that.
They try to force them to sell, right?
Other than maybe an annual board meeting or something, make sure the mission statements are aligned.
I wouldn't have any problem with that.
Yeah.
But that way we would control the back end.
Yeah.
And then the question becomes, it's kind of like saying to follow, which is kind of weird.
Imagine if TikTok USA was allowed to be bought by Elon Musk.
Holy shit.
Now that's a crazy situation, right?
If that were to happen.
If they allowed somebody like him, like him to buy.
Because the first thing he's going to do is, you want to talk about Twitter files?
It becomes TikTok files times 1,000 every day.
Yeah.
I want you to see this.
So this is make the video bigger.
So this is a guy.
It doesn't matter because you're not going to see his face.
This guy, Neil Shen, is a first go to his Wikipedia who Neil Shen is.
He's a $4 billion guy.
And Neil Shen is being interviewed here by Go to his Wikipedia.
He sits on Sequoia.
Yep.
Go to right there.
Zoom into his profile.
Neil Shen is a member of the 10th CPPCC National Committee, Vice President of Professional Committee of Venture Capital Fund of Asset Management, Association of China, member of Hong Kong, SAR Chief Executive Advisory Panel in Manchester.
Anyways, he's with Sequoia.
He's a very connected guy and he's a $4 billion guy.
Now, watch, this interviewer asks a very basic question, but watch how he defines AI and why China is better than us in AI.
I just want to get your reaction on this.
Go for it.
So it's a minute and a half click.
In fact, fundamentally, what is AI in the whole science field?
It's mathematics and statistics.
And China has a very strong talent in these two areas.
You've got a smile on your face as if to say, we can do that.
I'm a plymass major when I was underwear in China.
And there are many of my talented alums and colleagues.
I'm pretty sure they could do well.
So you've got the talent and you've got the data.
Is the environment for getting hold of that data easier in China?
Is the regulatory environment?
Does that make life easier?
Because in Europe, for example, we have quite strict rules about privacy and so forth.
Well, I think privacies and protections is always a issue, whether it's in UK or whether in US or in China.
I think there are different sectors in China that have different regulations.
It's coming right.
Reducing those regulations are very important and relevant.
But in China, I think there is just more data point.
But there is surely a danger that AI can be used as a tool of suppression and surveillance.
And I'm going to stick my neck out here and say in an authoritarian country such as China, does that worry you at all?
I don't think so.
Why not?
Could you just engage with the question a bit?
Because it is clearly to say we collect data everywhere, but you're not prepared to talk about that?
It could make the censorship of the internet easier, couldn't it?
No.
Silence.
I mean, is it broadly true, Mr. Chen, that you just don't want to talk about the implications for a more authoritarian society?
Awkward.
Just need a little bit of a hole around that.
Well, we'll move on.
So he went from very talkative to silent island.
I just had to go off script there.
Yeah.
There you go.
I agree with you.
Or ruffle a little bit of feathers.
We know what he's saying.
No, no.
I think it's what he's saying.
go off script and off script is it's a question that wasn't scripted that sounds like Yeah.
Yeah.
But he's right that the AI can process information manifold faster than any other kind of way you would ever analyze information.
And yeah, you can do whatever you wanted with it.
You can suppress.
You can enhance.
You can cause people to get elected or not elected by influencing what they see, what they think, what they feel.
And so, yeah, that's a possible future of AI in the hands of people who are nefarious in their intent.
That's the part about AI that, you know, sometimes like we were talking about earlier, like, what are you worried about?
What do you think is going to happen with this other?
You know, we're like, oh, we're thinking about, oh, my God, we may lose our jobs, right?
I mean, that's the original.
It's like, ah, no.
The real biggest problem.
That's not your biggest problem.
Because if the enemy, like a China, knows how to use AI, they can completely reshape the way of thinking for your nation.
By the way, by the way, China has a minister of AI.
The United Arab Emirates has a minister of AI.
Rob, can you pull this up?
So this is our equivalent of a cabinet member.
We do not have a minister of AI.
Why do we not have one?
This is America.
I don't know.
Man.
Yeah, no, I mean, if you visit other countries, they see, know, and care about the future of AI on a level.
Now, of course, the military has an AI group that are thinking deeply about how that would be invoked.
On my board, we put because AI would come under the innovation umbrella.
In our board, we put parameters about how the military would ever use AI in what would be a lethal decision.
And what kind of, should there be a human in the loop?
The AI would not be making that decision autonomously.
So we put in a system of ethics related to it.
So it's not like no one in our government is thinking about it.
But imagine if there was a cabinet post, a secretary of AI.
That would change people's awareness of its value to the governance of this nation and what it might be doing in other nations.
But we haven't, and we're not.
We're arguing about whether humans are warming the earth.
Okay.
This is what's going on in America.
Are we?
Sorry, I laughed at him.
Yes.
Okay.
Wouldn't be the first or last nail to graduate.
Very interesting what you just said, though.
Very interesting what you just said.
So you're saying if we had to create a priority of what to study as a nation to create security and safety for its people, you're saying the climate change wouldn't be in your top five.
You would put AI.
It sounds like you're saying AI studying something of the space.
No, no, no, no.
I wouldn't rank them.
I just do them all.
You don't have to rank things.
But you got a kind of budget.
Like, you know how you said one time, you know, our budget for space is 0.4% of 1%, which is, let me break this.
Remember the one you broke that down?
I thought I was like the, so out of whatever budget, we got 0.4% of every dollar.
If you cut a dollar bill, 0.4% of it doesn't even get you into the ink.
It's just the border of the edge.
Yeah, so a form of where we put our money is a form of saying what is the priority.
Yes, of course.
I'm just saying, I don't need to put it in one place and not another place if you can put it in both places.
Well, if you could put more resources in one place, what would it be?
If you could put it in the middle of the system.
In this portry right now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
On sources of energy that are renewable, which would include fusion, nuclear fusion, as we had the ignition test just a couple of weeks ago, successful at the Lawrence Livermore lab.
That's basically clean energy.
We just have to figure out how to contain it and throttle it and use it in ways we need.
So I would do that.
I would also consider turning the solar system into our backyard because rare earth elements, for example, that are causing some geopolitical tension and conflict, access to them for all of our modern day electronics.
They're asteroids that have nothing but rare earth elements in them.
In fact, they're common asteroid elements.
So the asteroids have pre-sifted these ingredients out there in space when they all formed.
And so, yeah, there's the breakthrough you have up there on the chart.
So, so, yeah, I would do that because that has a much longer value time to civilization than anything else we're debating today.
And I'd throw in, I'd redouble, I'd double down on whether quantum entanglement can matter in any important way and quantum computing, for sure.
Quantum entanglement?
Is that something Jado Pinkin knows?
What kind of entanglement?
Well, Smith.
I thought you said entanglement.
What is quantum entanglement?
Quantum entanglement.
It's a whole thing.
Yeah, it's you have two particles created together, then you separate them.
You make a measurement on one that instantaneously manifests in the other at faster than the speed of light.
So it's very spooky action at a distance.
Quantum entanglement is.
So it's a frontier of quantum physics, and it will be exploited in quantum computing.
So I would say quantum computing, these are frontiers that can transform how we live and what we do.
There you go.
So do that until we go into the book and the show tonight, then we'll wrap it up.
I just had a question.
It was more space-related.
Yeah, relational.
Oh, really?
Can you ask me a space question?
Yes.
Space question.
I don't know if you like talking about space.
Really?
But I do like the fact that you both got three letters in, you know, PBD, NDG, right?
NDT.
NDT.
It's my bad.
Neil deGrasse Tyson.
How many, I've heard you talk about this before about how many universes there are and that we exist in multiple universes.
How many Neil deGrasse Tysons?
How many Patrick Bett Davids?
How many Adam Sosniks are there in the entire universe?
Well, no, so there's the multiverse and the multiverse concept, which has very strong theoretical reasons to think it's real, even though we've not measured one yet.
But it comes out of equations that are otherwise working splendidly for us in this universe.
You go back to the beginning of time, the Big Bang, and the equations that generate our universe give us multiple universes.
So it's a fascinating frontier in physics.
It would give so many universes that every combination of atoms will be realized in those universes, including combinations of atoms that would exactly duplicate this universe.
Or maybe I'm the host and you're the guest, or you have an evil mustache or something, whatever.
He did have a goatee last night.
It was a goatee.
One week.
Oh, so you did have an - that was your other person in this universe.
I'm the only Middle Eastern that can't grow a full-on beard.
I don't have a lot of facial hair.
It doesn't have it.
It is.
My dad is like stacked.
And you got hair growing up out of your shirt, but you can't grow it on your face.
Okay.
For the fifth grader and me, explain what that means.
How many Neil deGrasse is?
Okay, no, no.
So you'd have all these other universes with all planets, stars playing out.
There might be one that looks like Earth that has life like that, that evolved just the way we did, with an asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.
That could happen in duplicate.
That doesn't mean it's you, because we've already done that experiment.
They're called twins.
Your twin is genetically identical to you, but it's not you.
So just because there's someone else who's genetically identical to you in the universe doesn't make it you.
So the people who want this as some form of eternal life no, there's no evidence to think that.
That's what's how that would actually play out.
Wow, So there's no evil, there might be an evil, PBD with a fake mustache, but there's only one PBD.
And it's an interesting indie film called Another Earth, which I recommend, where we discover another Earth exactly opposite our orbit, and everything is identical until the two Earths communicated with each other.
He was hoping to be a twin.
He's kind of disappointed.
Anyways, it's like that signal episode.
Tell us about your new book, new book that came out, Starry Messenger.
Starry Messenger, yeah, that's a few months ago.
It's my attempt to show everyone what the world looks like when you're scientifically literate and you have a cosmic perspective on it.
So it's called Cosmic Perspectives.
It's Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.
And so there are chapters in there that, yeah, there's one on risk and reward.
It reminds you us that we are really bad at statistics.
And there's an entire industry that exists knowing this fact, and they're called casinos.
You have people trying to roll dice and they need high numbers.
So they roll the dice harder to try to get high numbers or they roll it softer if they want a low number.
They're betting on seven on the roulette table.
And I say, well, why are you betting on it like six times in a row?
It's due.
I say, why do you think it's due?
Well, because look at the previous roles.
No, it's not due.
This is an inability to understand probability and statistics.
And I think it's a failure of the wiring of the human species brain.
Do you realize the first time anyone ever took an average of numbers, realizing that would be a good idea, that was not until like the late 1700s?
Calculus had already been developed.
Geometry, algebra, all of that.
And it was the late 18th, when our country was being born, someone said, you know, maybe I'll take an average and see if that's good.
That's statistics.
Yes, late.
Late.
Late.
And so that tells me that statistics is not a natural thing.
This is even post-Newton, post-surrent.
Yes, post-Newton.
And he's the guy that started calculating.
He's the whole calculus.
Correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The man birth calculus.
And taking an average happens later.
Crazy.
It's completely crazy.
So that tells me, it hints to me that statistics is not a native way we ever think about anything.
And so it's a struggle to then replace your emotional interpretation of what's going on with a statistical one.
Again, that gets back to the early point about advertisers.
They will give an emotional case rather than just simply show a bar chart.
I want to see a bar chart.
Is this the best product?
And then there's the data.
Then fine.
I don't need someone tearing up in the screen, telling me how much they love the product.
Just give me the data.
But they know that doesn't work.
And so here's what's interesting.
Do you know where lottery money goes to?
It funds schools.
It funds schools.
So let's look at the school curriculum.
Oh, there is no statistics taught.
Jesus.
It's like a digital.
It's an elective or something, but it's not part of the reading, writing, arithmetic.
So I wonder why there's no statistics.
Because if they taught statistics, you would know not to play the logo.
They would tell you not to play the lottery.
So this is my only conspiracy theory I've ever had that the states intentionally don't teach you statistics so that you become an adult lottery player so they can still get the money.
You know, there's a lot more conspiracy theories to follow, except that one.
No, it is what it is.
That one actually has some validity.
That's the only one I'm sticking to.
All right.
That's my only.
You give me one conspiracy theory.
That's the one.
So there's a whole chapter on that.
There's a chapter on color and race.
So I go there in there.
There's one on meat eaters and vegetarians.
These are warring factions in society where people dig their heels in with strongly held opinions.
And I just say, look, here's what that looks like to a scientist.
And here's what it would look like coming from above.
And often the opinions just evaporate.
They just – I'll give an example in the vegetarian meat eater chapter.
Okay.
We all know vegetarians.
And one of them, some might be vegetarians because they just don't want to kill animals.
Okay?
All right, fine.
So they have a humane mouse trap in their basement.
You trap the mouse.
And then what do you do after you capture it?
Eat it.
What do they do after they capture the mouse?
They let it go.
They take it back out to the woods to let it go.
And then it comes back in.
Wait, wait.
Out to the woods, where it is basically guaranteed to be swallowed whole by an owl or picked apart by a predator bird or eaten by a fox or any manner of woodland predators.
The average life expectancy of a mouse in the wild is about 18 months.
So the safest thing for the mouse is to leave it in your basement where it could live up to six years, a full natural life.
But that's not what happens.
So the idea that you want to preserve life and you don't want to kill it, and you take it out and put it in a wild where it's guaranteed to be killed, that person possibly hasn't fully thought that through.
Continuing, they're living in a house made of the wood from 50 trees, typically.
Trees that would have lived 100 years.
Each of those trees was home to birds, to squirrels, to insects, to mushrooms.
All manner of life forms are being sustained on each one of those trees.
And each one of those 50 trees that was cut down to build your house to make the floorboards, the two by fours, the structural members, the siding, each one of those trees produces 15 times the mass of the mouse in oxygen every day.
So what do you think nature cares more about?
The tree or the one ounce mouse?
Think about that.
What has greater value to the ecosystem?
The mouse you saved or the 50 tree?
I would think so.
Of course.
But I don't want to force that opinion on people.
But just when you analyze it, that's a cosmic perspective on decisions that you're making.
I don't see you not buying a wooden house because you're worried about the trees that were made from it.
So what it comes down to at some level, and how about the people who buy line-caught tuna?
Do you know why they do that?
Because if it's not line-caught, it's probably caught in a net.
And net dragging sometimes brings in a dolphin, which are air-breathing, and then they suffocate and die.
All right.
So they want to kill dolphins.
So they buy line-caught.
So I'm thinking, all right, you saved the dolphin, but what about the tuna?
You're eating the tuna.
All right.
Who cares about the tuna?
They only care about the dolphin.
They only care about the dolphin.
Well, why do you only care about the dolphin?
Because they've got a good personality.
Okay, wait, because they're cute and they're minimal.
But wait a minute.
If you're eating meat, you're probably also eating cow and pig and lamb that are also mammals.
Okay, so what I try to do in the book is expose your opinion to other ways of looking at what it is you're doing.
When you're done, I don't want to stop you from doing what you're doing, but if you do it, I want it to be fully informed.
And it's a whole other chapter on conflict and resolution, where there are these tropes that liberals lob onto right-wingers.
You know, they say, oh, everyone on the right is anti-science and they're this.
And they cite the denial of climate change, which is an existential threat.
That's definitely a denial of some or all mainstream science.
Also, occasionally there's denial of evolution.
That typically is the extreme religious group.
Okay, so the liberals want to feel like they have the high road, but they don't.
Because let's look for who is taking homeopathic medicine that is deeply within the liberal community.
This is medicine that has no curative molecules in it at all, having been diluted into that state.
So there's like feather energy and chakra realignment and all manner of thinking and philosophies that are deeply embedded in the liberal worldview.
And to embrace them requires you reject some or all mainstream science associated with it.
It requires that.
And so therefore, the liberal cannot claim the high ground.
This includes attitudes towards GMOs, for example.
If you look at scientists, the percentage of scientists who are all in for GMOs, it closely matches the percentage of Republicans who are all in for GMOs and the percentage of liberals who are in for GMOs is way less.
So what's happening here?
They'll cite, well, because of big pharma and this and that, whatever, but they're not aligned with the science on it.
That's my point.
If you want to say you're with the scientists, then you be with the scientist on GMOs and they're not.
All right.
So it requires rejection of some or all mainstream science.
So the trope, they're anti-science and we're not, is false, objectively false, statistically in the communities.
How about the one about being family values?
That's a common trope lobbed against liberals by conservatives.
Well, wait a minute.
What would be a measure of family value?
How about staying married?
How about that?
Do you know the state with the lowest divorce rate in the country?
It's Massachusetts.
By far the lowest divorce rate.
Do you know the highest divorce rate?
It's in the book.
Something like eight out of the 10 highest divorce rate states voted red in the last elections.
How about teenage pregnancies out of wedlock and teenage pregnancies?
Red states lead the pack in those numbers.
The only presidents of the United States to have ever been divorced have been Republican presidents.
And that's, of course, Trump and Ronald Reagan.
So who are you to say and claim the high road of family values here when certain objective measures argue against it?
And so what I'm saying is you can cherry pick it and say, oh, the liberals, they're into like loose sex or whatever.
You cherry pick that because liberals are staying married longer than you are.
Okay.
So in there, I'm just approaching all these as a scientist would.
Look at the data.
Look at the evidence you might have bias against.
And now let me show it to you, reveal it to you.
So there's a chapter on gender and identity, a chapter on life and death, body and mind, truth and beauty.
Is all this that you're saying?
I'm looking at the website right now, by the way.
Divorce rates, who's at the top, who's at the lowest.
Yeah, look at the highest divorce rate state.
It's a red state.
It's been red for every major election this year.
It's Arkansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nevada, New Mexico, and the lowest one is Maine, D.C., Dakota, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois.
No, Massachusetts should be in there.
Massachusetts is on that list as well.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
So it's contradictions of both sides.
Correct.
Say relax.
Correct.
Because they repeat it and want you to then think it's true.
Is it cognitive dissonance or is it hypocrisy?
It's cognitive bias.
I don't want to say dissonance.
It's just bias.
You want something to be true, so you repeat it often enough until people who follow you think it's true.
It's like saying we live in a Christian nation.
That's actually an objectively false statement.
Repeat it enough that you get enough people saying it on political platforms and talk shows and all manner of things.
Well, don't say Reza Aslam.
I don't know if you know Reza Aslam.
Yes, I do.
He believes the U.S. is a Judeo-Christian nation.
That's a joke between us.
If he's watching this right now, he's saluting.
Patrick, it's my dad on you.
He can say it, but there's no mention of Jesus in our Constitution.
There's not even mention of God in the document that forms our country.
You would think if we knew we were self-aware as a Christian nation, there'd be some references to Jesus, who's the foundation of Christianity, but there isn't.
There's one mention of God in the Constitution, but it's a very minor one.
It's extremely minor.
What was it?
At the very end.
Anno Domini, 1789.
That's the only mention, which is the tradition of AD.
That's the year.
So you put it in.
So, and there's other evidence.
So in other words, buy the book.
Okay.
Buy the book is what it is.
No, really.
Put the link in chat.
Put the link in the description as well.
And Neil, your show tonight.
Why don't you talk about your show tonight on your podcast?
I've got to put in a plug for it.
I did the audiobook.
I'm buying the audio.
No, if you get stuck in traffic, that's the way I calculated how long it would take to hear the audio book in Los Angeles.
Yeah.
Stuck in traffic.
One day.
It's a three-day audiobook.
405 freeway.
In L.A. traffic.
Black matter.
Yeah, yeah.
Dark matter.
Dark matter.
So tell us about tonight's show Broward.
You're thinking that he presents right now.
Yeah, tonight I'm in Fort Lauderdale at the Broward Center.
Nice.
Giving a public talk to like thousands of people on one of my favorite subjects, which is titled An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies.
I love that.
The sequel.
And there's like dozens of movie clips, all kinds of movie clips.
Well, I highlight the science they got right, if they got it right, and the science they got wrong.
Movies like, there's movies like Harry Potter is in there.
There's The Wizard of Oz.
there's love story, there's...
Where do I begin?
To tell a story of how.
Where do I begin?
I would sing it, but I don't have your voice.
You've got that, BBD.
So it's one of my funnest subjects to talk about.
And the audiences also love it because they've all seen these movies typically.
Top gun.
So, oh, the Top Gun movie, I tweeted about that.
That's not in tonight.
might mention it yeah the top tom gunn ejects at mock 10.5 and and just walks back to base with a slightly dirty face i He would have been squashed by the shockwaves at Mach 10.5, the way a bug hits a windshield.
Wow.
Yeah, he wouldn't have survived a fraction of a second ejecting from.
By the way, do you know why airplanes have pointy noses that go faster than sound?
Because you need to, because the air does not part for you.
You have to cleave the air because you're moving faster through the air than the air can tell other air molecules that you're doing that.
Because the air molecules communicate with each other at the speed of sound.
If you're moving through it faster than the speed of sound, you have to cleave the air to make that happen.
And so all your front surfaces have to be pointy.
If he ejects, he is in no such shape or vehicle, and he basically is blown apart.
He's going 7,000 miles an hour.
He doesn't survive this.
What a movie, though.
Okay.
What a movie that was.
By the way, did you like Avatar?
So I saw it.
It felt a little long.
Okay.
I thought it was 40 minutes long.
I'm being serious with you.
Yeah.
Seriously.
Three hours and 12 minutes.
You could have done it in 2.5 hours.
Yeah.
So here's my issue with it.
I preferred the first avatar only because there was much more discussion about the culture of the peoples.
And I like learning about the little USB ponytail that connects to the plants and the animals.
I thought maybe a follow-on movie would get deeper into that rather than just be about warfare.
You know the Volody Shot 3 and 4?
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, it all happened at the same time.
Oh, really?
Anyways, gang, this was a blast.
The book below, order it, read it.
Contradictions on both sides.
If you're in the middle of the day.
It doesn't lean.
You think it's leaning one way or not?
It doesn't.
I felt that it's not.
I felt like it's going one way.
Which is great.
That's what we need in America.
Yeah, as it should be.
Oh, yeah.
Not red, not blue, red, white, and blue.
No, no, the purple.
Yay!
You're in the state.
It used to be purple.
Now it's red.
Anyways, Neil.
Oh, by the way, this anti-vax thing?
Yeah.
The liberals were the OG anti-vaxxers because they all didn't trust Big Pharma and all the rest of it.
That's why it's confusing what happened to them.
And then under Trump, there was this freedom.
I don't know.
I don't think they did.
And then the right wing started, and then they met between the fence.
You know what happened to them?
And then they both together because they shared a mission statement.
Yeah, so the right was labeled anti-vax.
The left wasn't pro-vax.
It was anti-Trump.
They're both anti-so whatever Trump was against, they were for.
So, you know, anyways, appreciate you for coming out.
This was a blast.
I think we've been together for nearly three hours and it felt like five minutes.
Literally, it feels like you got to take me down.
I got to do this.
He probably thought you guys ate me or something.
You're locked in a ball.
You can't get it.
This is my fault.
This is a vault.
If you enjoyed, just give it a thumbs up, subscribe, and we'll see you again tomorrow.
