The Ben Shapiro Show - October 13, 2019


Neil deGrasse Tyson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 72

Topics
curiosity about the night sky Rationalia rationality and law-making values regulatory capture climate change issue climate change predictions uncertainty gender spectrum in sports rapid onset gender dysphoria freedom of inquiry abortion debate
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Guests
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Mentioned
Darwin Einstein Michael Shermer Sam Harris Caitlin Maynard Donovan Fowler Cynthia Angulo George Orwell Jeremy Boring Mike Coromina Jonathan Hay Alex Zingaro Jesua Olvera Colton Haas David Hume Gender Trump Brown Audio Marx
The Democrats’ LGBT Town Hall | Ep. 877 Fight Night III: Clown Car Chaos | Ep. 878

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 1 minute

Words per minute

160.94

Word count

9,914

Sentence count

831

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Neil DeGrasse Tyson joins me to talk about his new book, Letters from an Astrophysicist, and why he thinks the quest for meaning is something that runs deep in our DNA. He also talks about the importance of the night sky, and why we should all be looking up to the stars at night. Ben Shapiro is the host of the popular show, The Ben Shapiro Show, and host of Star Radio and Cosmos on National Geographic. He also hosts Star Radio, which is a podcast, and his famous show, Cosmos, on the National Geographic Channel. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times, and is one of the most well-known astrophysicists in the world. He has a PhD in physics and is a frequent guest host on the Tonight Show with Seth Meyers, who is also a regular guest on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Kimmel Live, and hosts The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. His new book is Letters From an Astronomer , which is out now, and available for purchase on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. If you haven t read it yet, you should do so before you listen to this episode. It's a must-listen, and it's worth your time. Thanks so much to Neil for stopping by to talk to me! and I hope you enjoy the episode. - Ben Shapiro - The Weekly Standard Subscribe to our newest podcast, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your favourite podcast platform - Subscribe, Like, Share, and subscribe to our podcasting app, and tell a friend about what you're listening to this podcast! or share it on social media and what you think about it on your favorite podcasting platform, what do you think of it? Thanks for listening and share it with your friends and what's your favorite thing you're doing in the podcast? and we'll be listening to it on Insta- or do you have a podcasting experience? or what you re listening to the podcast you're looking for the most beautiful thing you care about? in the next episode of The most important thing you can do in the latest episode of this week's episode of or your thoughts on this week s podcast is that's the best thing you've listened to so much of what you've heard so far? Subscribe?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 As an academic, I care that I learn something every day.
00:00:05.000 If a day goes by and I don't learn something, that's a wasted day.
00:00:08.000 And ideally, you should get your mind blown at least once a week.
00:00:13.000 By just something, whoa, I never knew that.
00:00:15.000 And so for me, that is how I establish and derive meaning in my life.
00:00:28.000 Hey, hey, and welcome.
00:00:29.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday's special.
00:00:31.000 I'm excited to be joined today by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
00:00:33.000 His brand new book is Letters from an Astrophysicist.
00:00:36.000 He, of course, also hosts Star Radio, which is a podcast, and his famous show, Cosmos, on National Geographic.
00:00:41.000 Neil, thanks so much for stopping by.
00:00:42.000 Thanks for having me.
00:00:43.000 So, why don't we start with, for folks who don't actually know your background before you became a famous science person who talks science, what exactly is your background?
00:00:52.000 How did you get from where you were to being who you are?
00:00:57.000 I just liked learning about the universe ever since I was nine years old.
00:01:01.000 A first visit to my local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium, I grew up in New York City, and I had the advantage of Well, the city offers the advantage that for many of the cultural institutions, if you do sort of the exhibits and the frontline things, you can do a deep dive.
00:01:21.000 And at the American Museum of Natural History, which is the overarching institution that has the Hayden Planetarium, there were courses I could take.
00:01:31.000 There were special sessions I could attend.
00:01:34.000 And so it wasn't just the space show and an exhibit, I could continue to probe The structure and nature of the universe, right from middle school on through high school, and that served my interests, like, really, really well.
00:01:50.000 I went to the Bronx High School of Science, which, if I may, counts eight Nobel laureates among its graduates, which equals the country of Spain.
00:02:00.000 Which is just crazy.
00:02:02.000 To look that one up, that's kind of crazy.
00:02:05.000 And I went on to college, majored in physics.
00:02:07.000 I have a PhD in astrophysics.
00:02:10.000 And this public stuff is really, it just happened to me.
00:02:16.000 It's not like I was seeking it out.
00:02:17.000 I'm still not seeking it out.
00:02:20.000 I still just want to stay in the lab.
00:02:22.000 But what happens is, I realize that there's a hunger, there's an appetite for There's an appetite for people who are in search of meaning in their lives, and religion has served that role for so many.
00:02:41.000 Others who are not religious, or even if you are, people look up and just wonder, you know, where do we fit in this?
00:02:48.000 Everyone's looked up, right?
00:02:50.000 Maybe if you live in the city, and you look up, you just see buildings, but between the buildings, there's sky, and it's part of what we are as humans.
00:03:00.000 You know, we're one of the few animals that's completely comfortable sleeping on our backs.
00:03:05.000 Just think about that.
00:03:07.000 Maybe your dog can do it, right?
00:03:08.000 But the dog is completely domesticated, so they're not worried that some other animal's gonna eat their guts out while they're asleep.
00:03:16.000 So I wondered whether, in the earliest times, And we sleep at night.
00:03:21.000 So we sleep on your back and at night.
00:03:23.000 And if you wake up in the middle of the night, the sky is there.
00:03:28.000 Think about it.
00:03:28.000 If you're only facing down and you're asleep, you have no relationship with the sky.
00:03:33.000 So one night you see and the planets are in one configuration and later on they're in a different configuration and the moon moves.
00:03:40.000 So I just wonder whether curiosity about the night sky is something that runs deep in our DNA.
00:03:45.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about the quest for meaning, particularly using science, because I think that there's a rich conversation, obviously, to be had, and you talk about it a lot in your book Letters from an Astrophysicist.
00:03:54.000 But first, ExpressVPN is an app I use to stay secure online.
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00:05:02.000 In your book, you deal a lot with the question of meaning.
00:05:05.000 And I have a lot of friends who are scientists ranging from the religious to the irreligious.
00:05:11.000 And I will say that my irreligious friends, agnostic or atheistic friends who are scientists, look for meaning in science itself.
00:05:20.000 And I've always found this a little bit puzzling on a materialistic level.
00:05:23.000 Why should there be meaning in agglomerations of atoms or in evolutionarily beneficial adaptations?
00:05:29.000 Well, where is the meaning to be found in that?
00:05:31.000 Yeah, so let me adjust something you said in your question.
00:05:36.000 You're saying that scientists are looking for meaning.
00:05:38.000 You're right.
00:05:38.000 On a personal level, on a personal level.
00:05:40.000 Sure, but it's the number of letters in this book, these are letters from people who wrote to me when...
00:05:49.000 Especially during a period of time when my email address was publicly accessible.
00:05:53.000 Not anymore.
00:05:56.000 But over that interval, people had access to me.
00:06:00.000 Typically in response to some appearance I made on TV or even in a public venue.
00:06:07.000 And I'm intrigued by how many people were in search of meaning.
00:06:12.000 And so it's not like I am putting that in this book.
00:06:16.000 No, not at all.
00:06:17.000 They are making that happen by their inquiries.
00:06:21.000 And personally, I don't look for meaning.
00:06:27.000 I think it's, maybe that's okay for some people, but those who look for meaning, typically it comes with some assumption.
00:06:36.000 That, oh, there's the meaning, it's behind the chair, okay, or under a rock, or behind a tree.
00:06:44.000 It implies that meaning is something out there that you search for and then may one day find.
00:06:54.000 And that's not, personally, it's not how I think of meaning.
00:06:59.000 And I capture this fact in my replies to so many of these letters.
00:07:05.000 For me, meaning is something you create.
00:07:09.000 You have the power to create meaning in your life and in the lives of others.
00:07:15.000 Can you lessen the suffering of another person?
00:07:18.000 That creates meaning.
00:07:20.000 It creates purpose.
00:07:22.000 It creates mission.
00:07:24.000 For who you are and what you might do in life.
00:07:27.000 So for me, meaning can involve other people.
00:07:30.000 Are you raising moral children?
00:07:34.000 Are you a good spouse?
00:07:37.000 This all creates meaning.
00:07:38.000 In addition, it's what you might do for yourself.
00:07:42.000 So for me, as an academic, I care that I learn something every day.
00:07:49.000 If a day goes by and I don't learn something, that's a wasted day.
00:07:52.000 I want to go back, recapture the day, and rummage through the books to find something.
00:07:57.000 And ideally, you should get your mind blown at least once a week.
00:08:02.000 By just something, whoa, I never knew that.
00:08:05.000 And so, for me, that is where I get, that is how I establish and derive meaning in my life.
00:08:12.000 So I mean, maybe I should redefine the term, meaning, I should be using the word purpose, which is a word I like to talk about a lot.
00:08:19.000 I mean, I totally agree.
00:08:21.000 In my book, I talk about the relationship between meaning and purpose, and I suggest that people do have to have purpose in order to find meaning.
00:08:27.000 I guess the question remains that when you look to finding a purpose, why should we be looking to the random assortment of guts or the evolutionarily beneficial firing of neurons for purpose?
00:08:40.000 And how does that relate to questions like morality or the moral good?
00:08:46.000 What's interesting about your set of questions there is that There in at least half a dozen letters right written to me there there there You are not alone in that sentiment, so I think it's not obvious in just a cursory Review of science you think to yourself.
00:09:05.000 This is dispassionate cold facts about the universe The world nature that is not where I'm turning if I got to find meaning in life however Consider that the atoms in your body were manufactured in the cores of stars billions of years ago.
00:09:30.000 Stars that exploded.
00:09:32.000 If they didn't, these atoms would be locked away forever.
00:09:35.000 They exploded, scattering that enrichment across the galaxy.
00:09:38.000 And out of that enrichment forms planets, life, people.
00:09:46.000 And so, when you look up, In the night sky, if you feel small and lonely, the knowledge that you're connected in this way to the stars, that we are not just figuratively, we're literally stardust, can give you a sense of belonging in what might otherwise come across to you as a cold and heartless universe.
00:10:11.000 It is a beautiful idea and a beautiful sentiment.
00:10:13.000 I know Michael Shermer's written a lot about this sort of belief as well in your book and in your other writings.
00:10:19.000 You've talked about the application of science to questions of morality.
00:10:24.000 And I guess the question that I have when I hear something like that is, that's a romantic way of putting the idea that we're meatballs in space.
00:10:34.000 We're romantic meatballs.
00:10:35.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:10:36.000 We're Spinoza's stone that's sort of thrown, and then we have this bizarre awareness that we've been thrown, but there's nothing we can do about it.
00:10:42.000 By the way, you are the first ever talk show host to mention Spinoza.
00:10:47.000 Oh, well, thank you, I guess.
00:10:49.000 Famous Jewish philosopher.
00:10:51.000 Right, exactly, exactly.
00:10:52.000 And probably, you know, pantheist, maybe the first open atheist.
00:10:56.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:10:58.000 First atheist Jew.
00:10:59.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:11:00.000 It started a great long tradition of atheist Jews.
00:11:03.000 Yeah, I mean, we can argue about how great it is, but Marx was in that tradition, too.
00:11:06.000 It didn't end great.
00:11:07.000 But in any case, when we talk about that particular moral question or the purpose-driven question in your book, you talk about how you think a moral system can be derived from science.
00:11:20.000 And you sort of assume that moral systems, the thriving of humans, the same way that Sam Harris or Michael Shermer talks about it, that that is sort of a given and that we all define thriving in the same way.
00:11:30.000 And you're very critical, obviously, of Judeo-Christian Well, I wouldn't put it that way. 0.99
00:11:36.000 I would say, if you're trying to fight me using Judeo-Christian religious texts, if you're trying to fight me about the nature of the physical universe, No, that's idiotic. 1.00
00:11:53.000 No, that's idiotic. 1.00
00:11:54.000 Right, right. 0.99
00:11:55.000 But otherwise, I'm not gonna, if Jesus is your savior, if Moses is your man, I'm not taking that away from you.
00:12:02.000 I have no intentions on taking that away from you.
00:12:06.000 There are letters in here from Jews, from Muslims, of this Buddhist wrote in, and the corpus of those where people like to sort of tussle, with religion, tend to be fundamentalist Christians.
00:12:20.000 So there's a chunk of letters in there as well.
00:12:23.000 But each of them have a different reason for coming to me.
00:12:25.000 And so the conversation is different.
00:12:28.000 One of them says, "Is there any way "the universe can be 6,000 years old?" Just please, help me out here.
00:12:38.000 I want to try to give it.
00:12:40.000 And as you know, 6,000 years is the canonical biblical age, if you run through the begets of Genesis.
00:12:48.000 And the begets in Genesis?
00:12:50.000 Yes, they are.
00:12:50.000 Thank you.
00:12:51.000 So, I don't think science hands you morality, but I think science informs morality.
00:13:00.000 And that's an important connection that I don't think people commonly make today.
00:13:07.000 There's a lot to know about life, about, you know, people debating abortion, people debating issues related to human physiology and health.
00:13:21.000 What do you know about the nervous system?
00:13:23.000 What do we know about consciousness?
00:13:26.000 What do we know about, you know, in the brain, the neurological, neurosynaptic connections?
00:13:34.000 If a part of this brain gets damaged, you don't even know who you are.
00:13:37.000 If another part gets damaged, you can't speak.
00:13:39.000 Another gets damaged, you can't recognize a face.
00:13:43.000 And that's kind of important information about how we're going to handle What happens to people, right?
00:13:52.000 Now you can have your morality panels, or whatever they're called, you know, the people who advise politicians or whatever.
00:14:02.000 Ethics panels, they're called.
00:14:05.000 But don't believe that a scientist shouldn't be in that room.
00:14:09.000 No, I certainly believe that scientists should be in the room to provide the additional information necessary to fill out the application of moral principles.
00:14:17.000 Yes, I agree.
00:14:18.000 I guess that my question becomes, when we're talking about the original initiation of moral principle, why should we believe that science can do that?
00:14:24.000 Oh, I've never said that.
00:14:26.000 And I think that there's a very strong David Hume is-ought problem.
00:14:30.000 Well, yeah, except if you look at what we consider to be moral principles today, It is, especially in communities where they say we have Judeo-Christian foundations for society, there's a lot of editing out of what went on in the Bible versus what we value and judge today.
00:14:51.000 And so you can ask, what is the foundation of the editing?
00:14:56.000 And this really is traceable to secular discussion about our understanding about civilization, about people, about how we treat each other, one another.
00:15:08.000 You know, when you look at Darwin and learn, of course, there are people, social Darwinists, which fed Nazism, right, and eugenics, but you part through those curtains. 0.81
00:15:22.000 At the bottom of Darwin is the fact that we are all genetically connected.
00:15:26.000 That's profound.
00:15:28.000 It means we have different skin color, but we are Fundamentally identical as a species, okay?
00:15:37.000 And, you know, to a jellyfish, they will not be able to tell us apart.
00:15:43.000 If you're a jellyfish.
00:15:46.000 So the commonality of DNA among all humans, the commonality of DNA among all life on Earth, that is stupefying.
00:15:58.000 That has value.
00:16:00.000 And the is and the ought question?
00:16:04.000 I don't have a problem with that as a starting place, but generally people who come at it from an is and an ought, in other words, science can tell you what is true, but they can't tell you what should be.
00:16:17.000 Just to paraphrase, to condense.
00:16:20.000 Clarify, in case I understand, yeah, exactly.
00:16:21.000 To condense.
00:16:24.000 I think they both still have to happen together.
00:16:28.000 So we're talking about how to construct a morality or how to live within a moral system, and you've suggested, I think rightly, that the effect of reason on religious principle, as inherited over time, has purified many of those principles, made those principles better, made for a better world.
00:16:40.000 I totally agree with that, obviously.
00:16:42.000 I believe that the way that I've put it with regard to civilization myself, is that civilization is a suspension bridge, basically, between a pole that is certain fundamental assumed premises that can't be proved by science, and then science, And reason and the fact is that Where I start to get a little afraid is if the pull of science and reason begins to believe that it is self-perpetuating, and we lose some of the fundamental principles.
00:17:08.000 So, the example that I would give is, you mentioned Darwinism before.
00:17:12.000 It is perfectly plausible and, in fact, fairly easy to read social Darwinism into Darwinism, and people did for several generations.
00:17:20.000 And so now we say... That's two generations.
00:17:23.000 Exactly.
00:17:24.000 So now we say, okay, That never should have happened, obviously.
00:17:27.000 That's wrong.
00:17:27.000 That's a bad read of Darwinism.
00:17:28.000 There's no reason you have to read evolution to suggest that we should benefit certain people at the expense of other people.
00:17:34.000 But that is a moral reading of Darwin, not a reading of Darwin that is inherent in Darwin itself.
00:17:41.000 That is bringing premises that actually pre-exist Darwin to bear on that, if properly read.
00:17:46.000 It's bringing bias, which humans are highly susceptible to, and especially in the social sciences.
00:17:54.000 So there's less bias in the sciences that don't involve human behavior.
00:18:01.000 You can still have bias, it's just less of it.
00:18:03.000 And it has, and the consequences are less dire if anything that happens becomes policy.
00:18:10.000 And so that's the digested analysis of what came out of Darwinism.
00:18:14.000 But yeah.
00:18:15.000 Yeah, so I think the reason that this comes up is, there was one tweet that you sent, and of course I'm sure you know where I'm going with this.
00:18:20.000 There's one tweet that you sent that drew an enormous amount of ire on, particularly the right, about rationalia.
00:18:27.000 That you were looking forward to the- Oh, I remember rationalia.
00:18:29.000 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:18:30.000 Yeah.
00:18:31.000 So, first of all, what would Rationalia—so this is the—for those who missed the tweet, the suggestion was— This was like four years, three years ago now.
00:18:37.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:18:38.000 But it was a fascinating conversation because it began this whole kind of discussion about what a well-governed system would look like or who would govern that system.
00:18:46.000 And so, I don't want to miss what exactly you were saying there.
00:18:49.000 Sure.
00:18:49.000 Why don't you suggest it so I don't misquote you?
00:18:52.000 To clarify, I was at a conference in the Canary Islands, and there was a conversation I walked into during the cocktail hour, and there was already buzz.
00:19:05.000 It involved a woman whose name I forgot, but I mentioned her name in my Facebook note.
00:19:11.000 That expands on the Rationalia tweet.
00:19:15.000 And she had the idea of having a place called Rational Land, OK?
00:19:18.000 And I said, no, we need a better name than Rational Land.
00:19:21.000 So Rationalia, right?
00:19:22.000 You have Somalia, Serbia, Rationalia.
00:19:26.000 And the premise in this room of people, this is a conference of scientists and artists, actually.
00:19:32.000 Was that, imagine a community, it could be virtual, doesn't have to have geographic boundaries, where all laws are created only on the strength of evidence in support of them.
00:19:52.000 Period.
00:19:54.000 All laws.
00:19:56.000 Now if you think about that, That has very sound principles, because, especially in America, Especially in America, we've got a diversity of cultures, religions, other kinds of belief systems, and we're technically supposed to celebrate that.
00:20:19.000 E pluribus unum, right?
00:20:21.000 Many is one, or one is many, right?
00:20:24.000 Out of many, one.
00:20:25.000 Thank you.
00:20:26.000 And so, you were polite to let me figure it out.
00:20:31.000 He's going to get it?
00:20:32.000 He's going to get it?
00:20:32.000 Okay, I'll help him out.
00:20:34.000 Very polite of you.
00:20:36.000 So, in such a place, if I had some belief system based on my religion or culture or whatever, and I rise to political power and I want to make a law, the laws apply to everyone in the land.
00:20:52.000 But if that law derives from my belief system, and now I force others into that law, that's a recipe for disaster.
00:21:01.000 That is how to guarantee an unstable culture, an unstable civilization, a destabilizing civilization.
00:21:09.000 So, the idea is, any law that applies to everybody needs to be based on some objective truths.
00:21:16.000 And how do you establish objective truths?
00:21:18.000 The best way we know is by the methods and tools of science.
00:21:22.000 And the strength of the law would be commensurate with the strength of the evidence to support it.
00:21:26.000 And if you don't have the evidence to support it, you have no business making a law for it.
00:21:30.000 So that would be the premise.
00:21:33.000 And then some people jumped in.
00:21:36.000 I don't read every one.
00:21:38.000 You probably don't either.
00:21:39.000 No.
00:21:42.000 Talk about pissing off the internet.
00:21:43.000 You're king of pissing off the internet.
00:21:46.000 You're trying to drag me into this!
00:21:49.000 Welcome to my lair!
00:21:50.000 You're trying to commiserate!
00:21:55.000 So how would this work?
00:21:57.000 So a lot of the debate centered on, well, who's going to decide what's true?
00:22:04.000 Enough to base a law on it.
00:22:05.000 And other people didn't see my actual words.
00:22:08.000 There's a lot of reading comprehension issues I've noticed.
00:22:11.000 I said, objective truth.
00:22:14.000 And people read that as absolute truth.
00:22:16.000 And that's not the word I used.
00:22:18.000 And people said, who's to decide what is absolute truth?
00:22:21.000 And there's no such thing as an absolute truth.
00:22:23.000 And I never said that.
00:22:25.000 Right.
00:22:25.000 And there's a difference.
00:22:26.000 I'm convinced there's an absolute truth.
00:22:29.000 Science establishes what is true based on evidence.
00:22:35.000 And that seems to work.
00:22:40.000 But there could be later evidence that gets to a deeper truth, and we're open to that.
00:22:43.000 That's how we went from Newton to Einstein.
00:22:45.000 Right.
00:22:45.000 Newton still works.
00:22:46.000 You took physics, for sure.
00:22:49.000 You still use Newton's equations, but there are situations where they don't apply.
00:22:53.000 They break down, and you need a bigger story.
00:22:55.000 So in comes Einstein, draws a bigger circle around the Newtonian physics, and so now Einstein has a deeper understanding of the universe, but it doesn't negate Newton in the regime in which it had previously applied, it still applies.
00:23:09.000 I was going to jump in and continue, but people, it got very angry.
00:23:13.000 Well, you have a life to live.
00:23:17.000 I got a wife, I got kids, I want to eat.
00:23:20.000 But I'm glad it introduced some kind of thinking about what role What kinds of forces should operate on laws that we all must obey?
00:23:33.000 So, I think that there were two well-founded criticisms.
00:23:36.000 There were a lot of poorly founded criticisms.
00:23:37.000 I think there were two well-founded critiques, I should say.
00:23:40.000 By the way, there are letters in this book that are asking about morality.
00:23:43.000 Right.
00:23:43.000 They come from a religious... They don't make a big deal of what religion they're from.
00:23:48.000 Generally, they're Christian.
00:23:50.000 They want to have a sort of secular conversation.
00:23:52.000 And they come to it from a religious background, but they just want to find out where science comes from.
00:24:00.000 And I want to hear the rest of your question, but I just want to say that these letters, these are people who want to have the conversation.
00:24:08.000 There are plenty who just don't.
00:24:10.000 I'd never see those letters.
00:24:11.000 Listen, as a religious person who is constantly discussing issues in the public eye, I won't cite the Bible as proof of positions.
00:24:17.000 I don't think that that is a valuable source in terms of being able to discuss with people.
00:24:21.000 It's an appeal to authority that a huge number of people don't accept.
00:24:25.000 I mean, it's no better than just citing any other random person on the street for a lot of folks.
00:24:29.000 What difference does that make?
00:24:30.000 But I think that when it came to the Rationalia tweet, there were two critiques that I saw that I thought were interesting.
00:24:37.000 So one was, That the question isn't should we bring the best data to bear when making a law.
00:24:42.000 Like everybody who has any shred of rationality should of course want the best data to be brought to bear.
00:24:47.000 The question when we make a law is one of competing values.
00:24:49.000 Meaning you're assuming that everybody has the same ends in mind and that isn't always the case.
00:24:54.000 So to take an obvious example, let's say that there were evidence that removing all guns in the United States would lower violent crime in the United States.
00:25:01.000 So do you remove all guns from people in the United States?
00:25:05.000 That is actually a question of values, not purely a question of whether a law would be effective in achieving a particular end, because the end itself is one of the questions.
00:25:15.000 Do you want a society where no one has the capacity to protect themselves against a tyrannical government, for example?
00:25:21.000 Right, so I would say that the... As posed, that makes complete sense.
00:25:28.000 That's not how I would have posed it.
00:25:31.000 The way you pose it is, Is there something you want, as a society, to turn into law?
00:25:41.000 What would that be?
00:25:42.000 Okay?
00:25:45.000 And then you would test to see whether that will fulfill your objectives.
00:25:53.000 If it will fulfill your objectives, then you put it into law.
00:25:57.000 That's how you do this.
00:25:58.000 You don't say, I want to get rid of all guns, let's make it a law.
00:26:04.000 No.
00:26:04.000 You ask, collectively, in a democracy, the republic in which we live, you ask, what are your goals?
00:26:12.000 Is your goal to have fewer people die from guns?
00:26:17.000 Is that the goal?
00:26:19.000 How would we accomplish this goal?
00:26:22.000 And then you do the research and you find out, oh, you can have biometric handles.
00:26:27.000 It reads my hand, my handprint, so my gun is my gun, you steal my gun, you can't use it.
00:26:34.000 That solves that problem, okay?
00:26:36.000 Unless you don't want that problem solved.
00:26:39.000 You have the right to do that as a citizen in a democracy.
00:26:41.000 You say, I don't want that, I don't think that's a problem, let's not bring that to a law.
00:26:46.000 That's the only point here.
00:26:48.000 The law is to capture To either support or deny something you want to put into effect as a law.
00:27:00.000 Okay, so then we're in agreement.
00:27:02.000 I think so.
00:27:04.000 The other question that I saw was the sort of application of this principle.
00:27:07.000 So this has been used over the course of the 20th century particularly to move the system of American government away from a legislative-led system of government toward a sort of bureaucratic system of government where an enormous amount of regulation and rulemaking is made by executive agencies purportedly by experts.
00:27:24.000 And one of the problems there is that A lot of these places become subject to regulatory capture.
00:27:28.000 There's an evolution. - What is regulatory capture? - Regulatory capture means that you have a lobbying group, for example, that get ahold of the EPA, and now the bureaucrats who are largely unassailable by the legislature and the executives pay attention to them.
00:27:42.000 - Yeah, so that sounds like it is things happening in the world that affect us all that are not derived from objectively researched conclusions.
00:27:50.000 Right.
00:27:51.000 I'm asking about the implementation of your principle on an actual particular level.
00:27:54.000 Meaning, were you just talking in a utopian world or is there a way to apply any of this sort of stuff?
00:27:57.000 No, no, no.
00:27:57.000 Actually, that's a great question then.
00:27:59.000 I didn't know where you were going to land on that.
00:28:01.000 Right?
00:28:02.000 So, we have agencies that are entirely tasked with finding out what is objectively true.
00:28:10.000 By the way, a lot of the cross-tweets were saying, yeah, this is the Department of Truth, or whatever, you know, in George Orwell or the... 1984.
00:28:21.000 Yeah, 1984, or in Nazi Germany.
00:28:24.000 Didn't they actually have a Bureau of Propaganda, literally called that?
00:28:28.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:28:29.000 I think they even called it.
00:28:31.000 So, the National Academy of Sciences.
00:28:34.000 Which was signed into law, created under the leadership of America's first Republican president.
00:28:44.000 Who you know that is.
00:28:45.000 Who was that?
00:28:46.000 America's first Republican president was Lincoln.
00:28:48.000 Lincoln, exactly.
00:28:50.000 When he clearly had other things he needed to worry about in 1863.
00:28:55.000 There he signed the National Academy of Sciences.
00:28:58.000 Because Europe was riding high economically.
00:29:04.000 Scientifically, from an engineering point of view, they were fully exploiting the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, and they were kind of slowly working their way across the pond back here to the United States.
00:29:14.000 He said, we have to get into that.
00:29:18.000 So, the National Academy of Sciences has one job, one job, and that is to report on what is objectively true In the scientific fields in ways that can inform policy at the executive branch and in the legislative branch.
00:29:37.000 That's their job.
00:29:38.000 So when they come out with a report, they have reviewed all the evidence.
00:29:43.000 And if they can't arrive at a conclusion, they'll tell you that.
00:29:47.000 The evidence is inconclusive.
00:29:49.000 Evidence is conclusive.
00:29:51.000 This is where these, now, you can do whatever you want with your policy 'cause it's not rationalia.
00:29:58.000 You still have lawmakers who are responsive to a constituency, to lobbyists, and the like.
00:30:05.000 But don't tell me you don't have the evidence there to base it on.
00:30:07.000 And so you would glorify, you would enhance the importance and significance of a National Academy of Sciences so that you wouldn't have small groups with Non-representative belief systems taking over the whole country's conduct.
00:30:27.000 So let's talk about the scientific process as it's currently carried out in the United States.
00:30:30.000 One of the things that I'm afraid of, and I see it from the right on certain issues and from the left on certain issues, is a fear of actually investigating certain areas of science.
00:30:38.000 So on the right, obviously, people typically cite climate change here and say, well, you know, the right refuses to acknowledge that climate change is even happening, or at least so large swaths of the right refuse to acknowledge that climate change is even happening.
00:30:51.000 Or anthropically.
00:30:52.000 generated climate change.
00:30:54.000 So most radicals will say it's not even happening at all, that this is just part of a general warming trend or that it has stopped or any of that.
00:31:02.000 But why don't we start with that and then we'll get to sort of areas on the left where science has been politicized or where maybe inquiry has been limited or attempted to be limited.
00:31:12.000 So on the climate change issue.
00:31:13.000 Or hijacked.
00:31:14.000 Or hijacked.
00:31:14.000 So let's talk about the climate change issue for a second.
00:31:17.000 So what do we know and what is uncertain?
00:31:19.000 Because this seems to be, there are, it seems to me, gray areas, but the gray areas are baked into the science, meaning that according to the IPCC report, the climate could warm anywhere from two degrees Celsius to six degrees Celsius over the course of the next century or so.
00:31:33.000 We're still not sure exactly of the level of climate sensitivity to human activity.
00:31:36.000 You can acknowledge that human activity is responsible for the majority to the vast majority of climate change that has happened on Earth for the past century or so.
00:31:44.000 Industrial age.
00:31:46.000 Right, exactly.
00:31:47.000 But what is the range of outcomes and does that suggest that If you have a different point of view on the solutions, that this amounts to climate denial.
00:31:56.000 That's the part that I start to get dicey about.
00:31:58.000 I mean, professionally, I'm an astrophysicist, not a climate scientist, but I do read and I do recognize When a scientific consensus emerges, and I want to make it clear what I mean by the word consensus.
00:32:13.000 A scientific consensus is one, it's not where everyone gets in a room and says, hey, let's vote.
00:32:18.000 That's not how truth is established.
00:32:20.000 It's established by looking at peer-reviewed research and asking, in what direction is that taking us?
00:32:30.000 What is it saying?
00:32:31.000 And not any one research paper has all answers in it.
00:32:35.000 They're like pieces of answers.
00:32:38.000 And I looked at this ice core in this section of Greenland.
00:32:43.000 Well, I looked at an ice core in Antarctica going back 100,000 years.
00:32:47.000 Well, I looked at the migration patterns of this insect.
00:32:54.000 And you start piecing together the biology, the chemistry, the geology, the atmospheric science, and it's all pointing in the same direction.
00:33:05.000 When that happens, it's time to sit up and take notice.
00:33:09.000 What the hell is going on?
00:33:12.000 Okay?
00:33:13.000 And when we speak of a climate consensus, what we're saying is that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community has produced research evidence Citing that humans are responsible for climate changing in this world, leading to the warming of temperatures in the atmosphere.
00:33:34.000 Period.
00:33:36.000 If you want to deny that, you are denying it because it conflicts with your cultural or political principles.
00:33:46.000 Okay, it's a free country.
00:33:47.000 Go ahead and do so.
00:33:48.000 But if you now rise to power over legislation, that's dangerous.
00:33:52.000 It's irresponsible and dangerous.
00:33:54.000 So the challenges are modeling climate.
00:33:58.000 Oh my gosh.
00:33:59.000 It's like there's the heating of the oceans from the sun, and then the oceans keep some of the heat, and they trap it and put it low.
00:34:06.000 So then when the atmosphere cools, the ocean releases some of that heat back, and then the trees and the ice caps reflect.
00:34:16.000 There's a hundred stuff.
00:34:21.000 So that's why there's variance in the predictions that come from it.
00:34:27.000 But the predictions all point in the same general direction.
00:34:32.000 You will never have 100% of all scientists agreeing.
00:34:36.000 That's not how progress in science works.
00:34:40.000 It's the—what you're looking for is the overwhelming—if only half the scientific papers showed this, and the other half didn't, you got no result.
00:34:48.000 I guess the question that I have about climate change, and at least its public-facing sort of presentation, is the level of uncertainty when it comes to its effect.
00:34:57.000 So you can acknowledge that climate change is happening.
00:35:01.000 There are people who talk about catastrophic climate change, millions of migrants suddenly running around the world, Miami underwater.
00:35:08.000 Yeah.
00:35:09.000 We're all dead within a century and a half.
00:35:11.000 A certain catastrophic level.
00:35:13.000 We will not all be dead in a century and a half.
00:35:13.000 That won't happen.
00:35:15.000 No.
00:35:15.000 We'll just flood all our coastlines.
00:35:17.000 Well, and by flooding all our coastlines, it's not going to be immediate.
00:35:20.000 You mean that there will be a gradual increase in sea level.
00:35:23.000 However.
00:35:23.000 Which can be mitigated in certain ways, presumably.
00:35:26.000 However.
00:35:29.000 Consider that most of the world's most important cities are on the water's edge.
00:35:34.000 Historically, for transportation, for commerce, and the like.
00:35:39.000 The most important cities in the world are on the water.
00:35:42.000 Okay.
00:35:44.000 Most of the most important cities in the world are found in that way.
00:35:47.000 All right, so it's not like the water levels start to rise.
00:35:52.000 If you're following my tweets, I said if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet, then all that water goes back into the ocean.
00:35:59.000 The ocean levels will rise.
00:36:00.000 It'll rise to the level of the Statue of Liberty's left elbow.
00:36:04.000 Yeah, what are the chances that the entire Greenland ice sheet or the entire Antarctic ice sheet will melt?
00:36:10.000 It's the limiting case.
00:36:11.000 Well, if an asteroid were to hit the Earth, we'd all be dead.
00:36:12.000 Yes, no, but if you want to ask how bad could it get, that's how bad it could get.
00:36:18.000 And just to get her elbows straight, she's holding the Declaration of Independence on the left hand.
00:36:24.000 It's that elbow.
00:36:24.000 Not this elbow.
00:36:25.000 Okay?
00:36:25.000 Not this elbow.
00:36:26.000 So if you're between them, you're good.
00:36:28.000 We're fine.
00:36:28.000 Get the elbows straight.
00:36:31.000 So, I mean, but this is one of the areas where I feel like, okay, so why are we talking about the limiting case as opposed to most likely case or the cases that are most likely to fall within the range of possibility?
00:36:43.000 And is that sort of alarmism generative of bad thinking about possible solutions?
00:36:49.000 Meaning that... During the dinosaurs, during periods of when the dinosaurs roamed, there was no ice on earth.
00:36:57.000 And so there was much less land.
00:37:00.000 When you enter an ice age, water evaporates from the oceans, it goes up to clouds, the clouds move over land, it snows.
00:37:09.000 But it's so cold the snow never melts.
00:37:12.000 It just stays there.
00:37:13.000 And this just keeps happening.
00:37:14.000 So you're systematically draining the ocean.
00:37:16.000 And you're building snow layers on the ground, on land masses.
00:37:20.000 These are glaciers.
00:37:22.000 Glaciers are slow moving, and they're very, they'll slowly go back to the ocean, but slower than the rate at which the oceans are being drained.
00:37:32.000 That's what revealed the Bering Strait land bridge to our nomadic ancestors.
00:37:38.000 Said, hey, let's keep walking.
00:37:40.000 They just keep walking, it's just land, let's keep walking.
00:37:42.000 And they walk into North America, the Ice Age ends, it melts, the water levels rise, the land bridge is broken, And never the twain would meet for tens of thousands of years, stranding an entire branch of the human species in North and South America.
00:38:02.000 By the way, which is why the Columbus voyage was, in my read of history, the single most important thing that ever happened in civilization.
00:38:10.000 If it wasn't him it would have been someone else, but it happened to be him.
00:38:14.000 He reconnected these two separate branches of the human species that had been separated for tens of thousands of years.
00:38:21.000 That's a profound fact for me.
00:38:24.000 So it's already been the case that the Earth had no ice, had a lot of ice.
00:38:29.000 Right.
00:38:32.000 We've already been hit by an asteroid.
00:38:34.000 Right.
00:38:35.000 You can say, oh, asteroid!
00:38:37.000 Tell that to the dinosaurs, right?
00:38:38.000 The dead dinosaurs who didn't have a space program or opposable thumbs.
00:38:42.000 You need both.
00:38:44.000 So the issue is not that the water level will rise and you can just walk away from it.
00:38:50.000 It rises this much and the next storm surge Combined with a high tide, which you almost always get with a hurricane, because it takes a long time for a hurricane to move up the coast.
00:39:03.000 It takes typically a couple of weeks.
00:39:05.000 Somewhere in there, there's going to be full moon or new moon high tide with a storm surge.
00:39:10.000 Suppose your jetties or levees or whatever it is that keeps your city safe from the water that's out right there in the river or in the bay or in the ocean, whatever that height is, is what you decided would protect the city.
00:39:25.000 Right.
00:39:26.000 The ocean goes up an inch.
00:39:29.000 That's all it takes.
00:39:30.000 One inch to breach your levees.
00:39:34.000 If you bleach it by one inch, your city is now connected to a semi-infinite amount of water for as long as that hurricane is sitting there.
00:39:43.000 And the water just pours in.
00:39:44.000 That's what happened here in Hurricane Sandy.
00:39:48.000 Katrina also breached all the levees.
00:39:51.000 The levees broke there.
00:39:53.000 Don't get me started.
00:39:54.000 That was like engineering.
00:39:55.000 I mean, Katrina was Category 3.
00:39:57.000 It already passed through New Orleans.
00:39:59.000 People were like sweeping up the branches.
00:40:01.000 Okay, we survived that.
00:40:03.000 Then the levees broke.
00:40:05.000 Okay?
00:40:06.000 So the broken levees flooded New Orleans, not Katrina.
00:40:09.000 We keep blaming Katrina without Putting the lens back on our own maintenance of our infrastructure and our anticipation of what could happen given certain forces of nature.
00:40:23.000 My point is, you're going to flood your city not because the water will slowly rise.
00:40:28.000 You're going to flood your city because the storm That has the benefit of that extra inch, plus a storm surge, plus a higher intensity of the storm.
00:40:39.000 Because if the atmosphere is warmer, it carries more moisture.
00:40:42.000 There's more heat driving the intensity of storms.
00:40:47.000 You'll breach that, you'll flood the city.
00:40:49.000 And there you have it.
00:40:50.000 Or you lose your beach house.
00:40:52.000 It happens in those storms.
00:40:54.000 That's your first indication that your coastline is at risk.
00:40:57.000 And not to mention those countries, island countries in the South Pacific, where the average elevation is a few feet above sea level.
00:41:07.000 So you talked about refugees.
00:41:09.000 You know who knows about global warming and who's preparing for it?
00:41:12.000 Insurance companies and the military.
00:41:16.000 The military cares.
00:41:17.000 Our military cares about where there is unrest in the world.
00:41:21.000 If people are displaced, that creates problems, because they've got to go somewhere.
00:41:25.000 And the borders are closed, unless you're near a nice country.
00:41:32.000 It affects more than just your beach house.
00:41:34.000 For sure.
00:41:34.000 I mean, the question becomes whether mitigation is the chief method of fighting this, or adaptation is the chief method of fighting this, or geoengineering.
00:41:43.000 Should we be building more levees?
00:41:45.000 I love geoengineering.
00:41:47.000 I mean, I'm a fan.
00:41:48.000 I like technology.
00:41:49.000 Technology is helpful.
00:41:50.000 It's in its infancy.
00:41:51.000 Geoengineering.
00:41:53.000 But for me, one pie in the sky thought I have is hurricanes coming and ready to destroy a city.
00:42:00.000 You put in some big anemometer.
00:42:03.000 inside the hurricane, right?
00:42:04.000 And it spins the anemometer.
00:42:06.000 But the anemometer is itself a turbine, right?
00:42:09.000 So it's sucking energy from the cyclonic motion of the hurricane, and you use that to drive the energy needs of the city that it might otherwise destroy.
00:42:17.000 You should propose that to President Trump.
00:42:19.000 He's going to nuke a hurricane then.
00:42:21.000 This sounds better than that.
00:42:23.000 So moving on from climate change, which is an area, as I said, where some people on the right are not particularly interested, to areas where it seems like the left is militating against the advent of science, one of those areas is the area of transgenderism, where the argument made— Curiously, there's no trans—I have no transgender letters.
00:42:43.000 It's true.
00:42:45.000 Nothing in the book.
00:42:46.000 We've strayed now far from the topic of your book, but since I have you here and you're a science person who knows science, I'm going to ask you to science for me a little bit.
00:42:53.000 Sure.
00:42:53.000 But when it comes to transgenderism, the argument that is typically made by gender theorists is that Gender is entirely separate from sex.
00:43:05.000 You've seen the argument made that it makes no difference on average if men are stronger than women are, and that if we were to allow transgender women to compete with non-transgender women, then this would somehow not disadvantage biological women.
00:43:20.000 And this seems to me Absolutely a scientific that if we're actually gonna have a discussion about gender and sex that that should be based in data Which suggests that mammals are in fact binary in terms of their sex unless you have intersex Birth defects typically or genetic defects.
00:43:37.000 I'm happy to opine on this This only matters Because today we segregate Most, nearly all sports by gender. 0.98
00:43:56.000 Otherwise, why do we even give a shit? 0.99
00:44:01.000 What someone identifies with. 0.98
00:44:03.000 We live in a free country, and with consenting adults, and people's free expression of who and what they are.
00:44:10.000 Yeah, on an adult level I agree with you.
00:44:12.000 I think it does matter what you teach your children.
00:44:13.000 That's what I'm saying.
00:44:14.000 And so there's the matrix of You know, what you are biologically, how you express yourself, who you choose as a sexual partner.
00:44:24.000 If we actually live in a free country, as we tell ourselves, people's freedom to behave in any of those ways should not concern you at all.
00:44:38.000 Nor are they requiring that you behave that way.
00:44:40.000 Okay?
00:44:41.000 This is for their own freedoms.
00:44:43.000 Because we live in a free country.
00:44:46.000 What is unresolved here is what do you do with sports?
00:44:50.000 It's unresolved.
00:44:52.000 And I follow that closely and I don't see any...
00:44:55.000 I don't see any meaningful solutions to come down off of that.
00:45:00.000 We know that hormones manifest differently in different people.
00:45:04.000 Just the whole thing with steroids.
00:45:05.000 Steroids are hormones, right?
00:45:06.000 And we rallied against steroids in professional sports because it gives you an undue advantage.
00:45:14.000 So I've tried to think of what the future of sports would be in the world of a gender spectrum.
00:45:20.000 And it may be, you don't specify whether it's a male or female sport.
00:45:24.000 You just take measurements of what your hormonal balances are.
00:45:28.000 And so you compete based on your hormonal balance.
00:45:31.000 I mean, this is fun I had.
00:45:32.000 I don't know.
00:45:33.000 I don't know where it's going to land.
00:45:35.000 The WNBA won't be in business for very long if that's the case. 1.00
00:45:37.000 It would just be, you'd have to find some way to compete people against each other.
00:45:45.000 If you still care that sports is an interesting activity.
00:45:48.000 I guess the area where it does come up in a non-sports area.
00:45:52.000 Yeah, tell me, because I don't know.
00:45:53.000 So it would be, you talk in your book about the education of children and teaching children about science.
00:45:57.000 And right now, children are being taught about the quote-unquote gender spectrum, which is not scientifically based.
00:46:03.000 That is a theory-based idea.
00:46:05.000 No, no, wait, wait, hold on.
00:46:08.000 People express themselves on a spectrum.
00:46:13.000 So you learn that.
00:46:14.000 That's a social point, not a scientific point.
00:46:20.000 Meaning we express ourselves based in different languages.
00:46:23.000 Is that something you teach in science class or is that something that you teach when you're teaching language?
00:46:27.000 So whether the fact that people want to express themselves on a spectrum, on a gender spectrum, whether that fact Is something you want to put in a sociology class or in a science class.
00:46:47.000 Maybe that remains to be determined.
00:46:49.000 But it is a real fact about real society.
00:46:54.000 Well, of course, nobody's denying that people identify how they want to identify.
00:46:58.000 The question is, what is the relationship of that to biology?
00:47:01.000 Meaning that the argument is made that trans women are women, for example.
00:47:05.000 And what that seems to mean is that trans women are identical to women. 0.84
00:47:08.000 Now, if people want to say trans women are not biological women, obviously that is the case. 1.00
00:47:13.000 But people don't seem to want to say that.
00:47:14.000 Although that is obviously scientifically true.
00:47:16.000 Trans women are not biological women. 0.52
00:47:17.000 Biological women are biological women. 1.00
00:47:19.000 But where are you going with this?
00:47:20.000 What are you trying to accomplish?
00:47:25.000 By asking yourself, is it science or is it not science?
00:47:29.000 It's people in society.
00:47:32.000 But this is a perfect example of an area where suddenly it doesn't matter to say things that are just true.
00:47:37.000 Why is it bad or wrong, to point out?
00:47:40.000 I have another way to approach this.
00:47:45.000 I care what is objectively true in the world, as a scientist.
00:47:50.000 But let me not say even as a scientist.
00:47:52.000 I just simply care what is objectively true.
00:47:54.000 And science happens to be a pretty potent path to invoke, to find out what is true.
00:48:04.000 And so, if people express themselves on a gender spectrum, and that is an actual thing in an actual society, If we have not fully explained that scientifically, that's an interesting frontier to study.
00:48:20.000 If you want to say it's only sociological, then it's the purview of the social sciences.
00:48:28.000 I don't care who studies it.
00:48:30.000 It's an interesting fact about society that's worth learning about.
00:48:35.000 To make it, to fight someone and say, it's not biological, it's just your this and It's real and it's there.
00:48:42.000 It's real because it manifests.
00:48:44.000 It is real because it manifests, but the question of how to classify manifestation is a scientific question.
00:48:51.000 Meaning that, for example, there was a woman over at Brown University, she came out with a study that suggested that there was a phenomenon called rapid onset gender dysphoria in which That's a different question.
00:49:00.000 of a particular group would suffer from gender dysphoria and this person's immediate peer group would suddenly have an onset of gender dysphoria.
00:49:07.000 This paper was so controversial that Brown tried to pull it and then was forced to reassign it later.
00:49:13.000 You see this sort of treatment-- - That's a different question.
00:49:16.000 What you're asking now is, are there some topics that should not be studied Right.
00:49:24.000 And is there some taboo?
00:49:26.000 Sam Harris speaks a lot about this.
00:49:28.000 Yes.
00:49:29.000 And I think the concern is if you study some topic that's a hot-button topic and you bring scientific methods and tools to it, we don't trust, I'm interpreting here, I think we as a society don't trust
00:49:50.000 That people in charge in a free country won't try to legislate something that will constrict people's freedoms in the face of that information.
00:50:02.000 I think that's the fear.
00:50:04.000 Well, isn't that... It's a fear.
00:50:05.000 I mean, and isn't that... We don't trust our own ability to govern ourselves in the face of what could be some information relative to other kinds of information.
00:50:15.000 Isn't that a bit of a problem?
00:50:16.000 Yes!
00:50:17.000 Yeah.
00:50:18.000 Yeah, it means it's not a free society.
00:50:20.000 It's not a society of free inquiry.
00:50:22.000 Which I think you need, ultimately.
00:50:25.000 But, yeah.
00:50:27.000 My general take on all of this stuff, from climate change to gender dysphoria to all these issues is bring out the science and then let's hash it out.
00:50:34.000 I think that the problem I'm seeing on a lot of sides is... Yeah, but the question is, what is your motivation?
00:50:37.000 Why?
00:50:38.000 Why does that matter?
00:50:38.000 It matters because if you have political power, you could end up creating legislation that subtracts freedoms from people who previously were enjoying the same freedoms as you.
00:50:50.000 The history of that exercise— Then make a better argument.
00:50:52.000 —doesn't end well.
00:50:53.000 But the history of which exercise?
00:50:55.000 Bring out all the science and let's hash it out?
00:50:57.000 I'm saying if you bring out all the science and the politicians hash it out, the history of that exercise is a recipe for disaster if it involves Discoveries that put people's freedom, as defined in our Constitution, at risk.
00:51:14.000 But now you're arguing for limitations on areas of particular study.
00:51:18.000 No, I'm arguing on, we need a way to shield, we need a way to protect people's freedoms in the face of whatever gets discovered scientifically.
00:51:29.000 I mean, I agree.
00:51:30.000 I think that's what the Constitution is for.
00:51:33.000 Of course.
00:51:33.000 It's to guard rights from... But we're always fighting... People who want rights are always fighting others who are saying they don't get the rights from the Constitution.
00:51:45.000 This is a daily challenge on the progressive left.
00:51:49.000 It is a daily challenge, right?
00:51:51.000 Here's an example.
00:51:52.000 I forgot how I ended up getting this phone call.
00:51:55.000 It was some magazine that serves the gay community.
00:51:59.000 I don't remember why, because they wanted my opinion on whether being gay was biological or mental.
00:52:09.000 Right, there's that new study that came out.
00:52:11.000 Or psychological.
00:52:12.000 Right, right, right.
00:52:14.000 And I said, I don't care which it is.
00:52:24.000 Find out what it is, fine.
00:52:26.000 But the answer to that question should have no consequence on legislations or laws.
00:52:36.000 Because, for example, suppose it said it's purely biological, okay?
00:52:42.000 Then you say, oh, that explains it.
00:52:43.000 Suppose it says it's purely psychological.
00:52:46.000 What are you going to do now?
00:52:47.000 You're going to go to the reorientation camps, or whatever those are called, where they realign you because they say it's psychological rather than biological.
00:52:56.000 All of a sudden, people start behaving in ways, in society, that want to constrict the freedom of expression of who and what people are.
00:53:05.000 And that is a danger.
00:53:07.000 So, maybe there needs to be a line in the sand.
00:53:10.000 Let science do what it does, but politicians keep us free.
00:53:16.000 Yet there's so many politicians that are doing the opposite of that.
00:53:19.000 So why aren't you a libertarian?
00:53:21.000 I'm a libertarian.
00:53:22.000 Come over here.
00:53:22.000 The line is right here.
00:53:24.000 Just join me over here.
00:53:29.000 I've read a lot about libertarianism.
00:53:30.000 There's some fascinating strong points within it, but I would say that I have too much of me wants to help others.
00:53:40.000 to possibly cross over the line to libertarians.
00:53:43.000 Libertarians, I got mine, you get yours, that's your problem.
00:53:46.000 You know, I'm paraphrasing, of course.
00:53:47.000 But my parents were, my father was active in the civil rights movement.
00:53:51.000 My mother went back to school when we were empty nest, and she became a gerontologist.
00:53:55.000 These are two fields that are deeply concerned with the health and well-being of fellow members of our society.
00:54:05.000 I grew up in that.
00:54:06.000 I'm their kid, the astrophysicist.
00:54:07.000 So I grew up in that, but my feet were grounded.
00:54:10.000 And in fact, how do you like this pivot?
00:54:15.000 You ready?
00:54:15.000 In fact, I wrote a letter to my parents for their 30th wedding anniversary, where I thanked them for keeping me grounded.
00:54:25.000 And I reproduced that letter.
00:54:27.000 Oh yeah, no, it's beautiful.
00:54:28.000 The book really is fantastic.
00:54:29.000 I'm not just saying that.
00:54:30.000 It really is a beautiful book.
00:54:31.000 So if you read that, you will know I could never be full-up libertarian.
00:54:36.000 See, just because my fans will murder me if I don't just point out, libertarians don't actually just want people to starve in the streets.
00:54:43.000 Really?
00:54:44.000 Yeah, we are big believers.
00:54:46.000 You do want to feed people.
00:54:48.000 Social fabric.
00:54:49.000 Very important.
00:54:50.000 Taking care of people.
00:54:50.000 Giving charity.
00:54:51.000 Very, very important.
00:54:53.000 So, final scientific question for you.
00:54:54.000 Obviously, we're doing hot buttons here.
00:54:57.000 We have to make sure that our click count is high, obviously.
00:54:59.000 Meanwhile, at the House, we're going to write a headline here and sell your book.
00:55:02.000 So let's talk about abortion for a second.
00:55:03.000 So when it comes to the scientific study of fetal development, there are people who are militating against, for example, the use of ultrasound techniques in pregnancy clinics.
00:55:15.000 So Planned Parenthood famously objects to People using or government-funded 3D ultrasounds before an abortion.
00:55:23.000 And their suggestion is that this is a violation of the freedom of women. 0.99
00:55:29.000 Now, on an abortion level, what pro-lifers say is the science is fairly clear that the inception of life happens at conception and then there's fetal development all the way Continuously from point A, basically, to death.
00:55:43.000 And so the attempts to draw particular lines, you can create... Fetal development until birth.
00:55:49.000 Fetal development, and then you continue to develop as a human until you die.
00:55:52.000 But it's not fetal.
00:55:52.000 Right, correct.
00:55:54.000 Fair enough.
00:55:54.000 So the question becomes, on the abortion case, how much of that do you think is values-driven, and how much of that debate do you think is scientifically driven?
00:56:03.000 So, let me... I think we would all welcome a world Where abortions are not necessary.
00:56:11.000 And so everyone's focusing on abortion and not focusing on contraception, for example.
00:56:18.000 And that, to me, that's an imbalanced debate.
00:56:21.000 I totally agree with this.
00:56:22.000 And you also know there are people who are anti-abortion and anti-contraception.
00:56:27.000 And that's, I don't think the history of our understanding of what it is to be human can ever be reconciled with that fact, right?
00:56:38.000 Sex is fundamental to sexual reproducing animals.
00:56:45.000 Sex predates humans by half a billion years.
00:56:49.000 So to try to legislate people to not have sex may be simply unrealistic.
00:56:59.000 So you want laws that reflect what is possible.
00:57:05.000 Rather than to force what may be impossible, culturally impossible.
00:57:10.000 So, if you want to have the abortion debate, I would ask, how many people who are anti-abortion are anti-abortion and are not simultaneously deeply religious?
00:57:27.000 Right?
00:57:27.000 So, if there's a strong religious component of those who want to ban abortion, That's an interesting fact about the demographics of what's going on out there.
00:57:40.000 And so, that's one interesting fact.
00:57:44.000 If you're concerned about what is alive...
00:57:47.000 Or what constitutes a human life?
00:57:48.000 I mean, that really is the question.
00:57:51.000 What constitutes a human life?
00:57:53.000 Because, obviously, if it's just what's alive, then save the flies, right?
00:57:57.000 Yeah, or sperm is alive.
00:57:59.000 It swims!
00:58:02.000 It swims with a mission, right?
00:58:05.000 So somebody has to say, Okay, I care when it's a human life, alright?
00:58:11.000 So then we have to, what makes it human?
00:58:13.000 Is it just genetically human, or is it, do you need a certain minimum neuron count to judge, well now it is... So, I think that can be debated, just debate that, and I don't have opinions that I require other people agree with, alright?
00:58:31.000 If you look carefully at my Twitter stream, Rarely is there an opinion.
00:58:37.000 The last time I remember posting an opinion, it was the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon, okay?
00:58:48.000 And I pointed to a video where we tussled it out.
00:58:51.000 What was the outcome of that video?
00:58:53.000 Oh, definitely Enterprise.
00:58:56.000 No question about it.
00:58:58.000 But also, I said, BB-8 is way cuter than R2-D2.
00:59:04.000 That is an objective fact.
00:59:05.000 I just want you to know.
00:59:06.000 I agree.
00:59:07.000 See?
00:59:08.000 He's designed to be cute.
00:59:09.000 Designed to be cute.
00:59:10.000 And R2-D2 was cute in 1975.
00:59:13.000 You need a modern, updated version of what cute is.
00:59:17.000 So is whether abortions are legal or not just a matter of majority vote in a society?
00:59:26.000 Is it, you know, these are questions that people Are debating.
00:59:30.000 I was content with whether a fetus is sustainable outside of the womb as a sort of a... Dividing line.
00:59:42.000 That made sense to me when that was put forth.
00:59:46.000 To say that it's a human when it's just a fertilized embryo, I think most people don't know, particularly if they're religious.
00:59:55.000 Most, last I checked these numbers, most fertilized eggs in a woman are spontaneously aborted. 0.98
01:00:04.000 The body rejects most of the times there is conception.
01:00:08.000 And so...
01:00:12.000 So what do you do about that?
01:00:14.000 Do you want to create an incubation chamber so that every spontaneously aborted fertilized egg gets put in there and grows to a human?
01:00:25.000 Otherwise, you'll get arrested for murder?
01:00:29.000 By the way, this is science informing the debate, right?
01:00:35.000 So I don't know where this is going to land, and I don't have opinions that I require other people agree with.
01:00:42.000 Okay, so I do have one final question for Neil deGrasse Tyson, and that is I'm going to ask him for his favorite science fiction movies and also the ones that are the worst when it comes to the science.
01:00:50.000 But if you actually want to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber, so we can make money off of you.
01:00:55.000 To subscribe, go to dailywire.com and click subscribe.
01:00:58.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson, his book is Letters from an Astrophysicist.
01:01:00.000 Go pick it up right now.
01:01:01.000 It really is fantastic.
01:01:02.000 Neil, thank you so much for your time.
01:01:03.000 I really appreciate it.
01:01:04.000 Delighted.
01:01:04.000 Thanks for having me.
01:01:05.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Hay.
01:01:16.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
01:01:18.000 Associate producer, Colton Haas.
01:01:21.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
01:01:22.000 Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingara.
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01:01:27.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Caromino.
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