that has sold its soul for corporate money that we might as well be mice squeaking against an apple but squeak we must. ever fascinating neil de grasse tyson joins us from norway i'm an educator so when i see people making decisions that seem under informed to me then i say that maybe they didn't learn this in school and so if you're going to pull out of the paris climate accord it must mean that you don't fully understand the long term consequences at every moment where you see anti-science sentiment or science denialism there is a resistance movement that rises to confront so it's not going on answer and i think that's hopeful going forward it's hard to argue against the possibility that all of us are not just the creation of some kid in a parent's basement programming up a world. for their own entertaining do you have

a secret town if. you could do that. a great fan of all next on larry king now. to larry king now we're in beautiful trondheim norway at the star most festival here in this fabulous city and for the third time we welcomed the inevitable neil de grasse tyson to the show astrophysicist off the great communicator of science and now the recipient of the stephen hawking medal his newest book a runaway bestseller is as still physics for people in a hurry he's surprised at how well books doing yeah i think so i'm delighted i should say anything had it showed up anywhere on the bestseller list that's just to try. for science whether or not i wrote it but for it to show up there and debut at

number one on the new york times was with it whoa among all of these sort of political memoirs and there's always typically a sports biography and there it's or or celebrity tell all and there it is it landed i say maybe there's more of an appetite for science out there than we've admitted to ourselves and we both have for the stormers festival i spoke a couple of panels you were on one of the panels honey explain this festival it's a combination of what the stars and jazz and rock we have to start star melissa as a word is the mash up of stars and music and the organizer of it garrick israelian he's a fellow astrophysicist by the way but it works in europe he he's good friends with brian may the lead guitarist of queen and i don't you know brian may has a ph d. in astrophysics and this festival is

a reminder that perhaps. creativity is not so divided between science and art and in fact i think you could argue strongly that science and art are the greatest expressions of human creativity that civilization has but for i'm amazed at the kind of people he is when the amazing thing and you you got the stephen hawking medal naive interviewed stephen three or four times when we mean to you to get that many well so we're reminded that stephen hawking is not only a brilliant scientist but he himself has committed so much of his life time and effort to bringing the universe down to earth we i guess we can start that time clock with a brief history of time a runaway bestseller from back i guess was at the eighty's or if not early ninety's and he's done t.v. shows he's written multiple books a.l.'s with a zero s. or whatever version he has that we can still live as. long as he does but obviously

he's a quadriplegic right now he he guides his communication through his eyes because he can still control what his eyes look at there's a screen in front of him and so it's just stunning that first he has the stamina for all that he creates and produces but also to be to receive a medal in his name i believe that i think the honor of any award is a stablished by the legacy of either who created it or others who have won it before you and so i don't i don't take this lightly i take it as a human as an affirmation that somebody was paying attention are you pushing against the tide isn't there a kind of large andy of the intellectual movement in america. and i wonder if it was always there but now with excellent search engines you can find everyone else who is just as anti-science as you and band together and have you end up

looking like you're larger than you actually are one thing that is promising is that almost every at every moment where you see anti-science sentiment or decides denialism there is a resistance movement that rises up to confront it so almost every place you see it so it's not going unanswered and i think that's hopeful going forward are you encouraged by the fact that the trumpet administration didn't cut the budget for nasa well there were some there was some weirdness in there yes the net the budget was not cut we were delighted to hear that he's a fan of space but there was talk at some point of we'll keep the budget there or are top it off but we have to remove earth science. from it and this is it had that actually had appeared in the s. as a regional charter back in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight that would study earth as well as the planets in the stars so if you take away earth and earth is the system that supports us our life on earth and our livelihood i don't know what

the consequences of that so so you have to watch the was that sheep in clothing had has that expression wolf and bulls will have city kit meters going i know that you know that one a wolf in sheep's clothing so my hope was always with the trumpet minister as he's a he's a businessman business people you expect them to make decisions that are sort of simple and blunt regarding money for example and any good business person knows that you need a healthy flow of money into the r. and d. part of your company to assure survival going and competitiveness going forward so it seems to me he ought to be responsive to an argument such as by the way investments in science technology engineering and math the stem fields as a nation will help. america inc to thrive and compete in

the out years when the fruits of these investments arrive and that's a business state forget the politics you can make that just as a simple business argument and my hope is that some part of him can listen to that you said recently if i and my advisers had never learned what science is or why it works i'd consider pulling out of the piracy climate accords too i was saying that it was ridiculous to polos of an educator that was a tweet that you reciting there that i'm an educator so when i see people making decisions that seem under informed to me and then i said maybe they didn't learn this in school or no one taught them after school and so if you're going to pull out of the paris climate accord. it must mean that you don't fully understand the long term consequences of that i'm thinking and if you don't why do we learn those

long term consequences from a fluency in science and technology and the causes and effects of things the consequences of your actions and the consequences of your interactions and people hardly ever talk about in action because what is what is a journalist or what did you do and what consequences came from it rarely do they say what didn't you do and what consequences came from it that's not a story people don't write about what didn't happen relative to what then happens later so so my sense was that maybe not enough people who were making that decision knew or understood how science works and what it is by the way if they did understand science and still made that decision for me that's actually a little more understandable to just how we choose not to care but at least be honest and say that because i tend to take the argument in a whole other regime you recently tweeted we all want to make america great again but that won't happen until we first make america smart again. are you saying the

trump isn't smart. i don't i don't i don't invest much energy criticizing politicians politicians are the duly elected representatives of a of an electorate that that put them there so you can say all you want about the politician but there's still the matter of all the people who voted for him and so what so the starter's now you look around in the last few years and you see the rise of peoples our earth is flat or there is no climate change or and i'm thinking something's not clicking out there there's some absence of knowledge and wisdom and insight that can come to you if you as a minimum understand for example what science is and how and why it works because that is shaping civilization before our eyes so it's so i said that but as an educator. if you're so smart i don't even like the word smart i prefer it made

a better tweet but my preferred word would be you can make america great again until until america. becomes curious again about what we don't know about the unknown when you're curious there's something that i've not quite why do investigate it and then you find the answer yourself you become a self driven learner that everyone rises up on their own on the wings of curiosity that we all had us children and we have to reinvigorate that as adults and then when someone says something to you that's a little off he said i want to check on that but investigated you don't get handed your opinions by others is religion your enemy no no i mean it's there are factions of most religions especially the the model theistic religions that that make statements about the physical world in particular you have genesis in the bible for example and if you want to take genesis as literal truth the. now that

we've got a problem with you you you don't understand the actual universe if you're referencing big political genesis as your understanding of nature but that's not the majority of religious people you have an entire in the white and class of religious people who for whom religion provides their spiritual fulfillment their spiritual enlightenment in the not referencing their bible the torah the court they're not going back to it to get an answer to their science quiz so that they're drawing a line in the sand. in fact what's the number it's sixty percent of scientists in the united states pray to god right nice excuse me forty percent of western scientists and that spread goes below that and above that obviously that's just the average but that's not zero that's my point if it's not zero and you're productive scientists then the answer is there does not have to be conflict

between the two because empirically there are people for whom there isn't so that's the answer either one must and stephen hawking have sounded the alarm on artificial intelligence and still most called super intelligence humanity's greatest threat you agree yeah i'm serious of ai and i'm an outlier and i recognize this and you might even say well if i studied the problem or deeply i would be as afraid as others perhaps but in my life i've probably written ten thousand lines of computer code i have just some street cred in the can just conducting the science that i've done in my life what i can tell you is when we imagine these ai's with thinking of some humanoid thing as though the human form is something to emulate. no no if you have a are you going to task ai in very specific ways if you go back to the era of the

jetsons here's what they would imagine oh instead of having you drive a car have your robot drive the car they're not thinking have the car drive the car . so the car then is an expression of ai at some level and so we we parcel the ai the hubble telescope is such an expression of ai we program it and it does it they're all worried about the general intelligence ai where it can deduce that make decisions that you never programmed it to make and i think that's a kind of cool thing if it can do that i don't have a problem with it but and if it gets out of line if it judges humans are a virus in this world in need of extra extermination in america you could just shoot it all out i get unplugged i mean. this bring it on i'm ready for and on top of that they're suing in some parts of it that ai will

achieve consciousness and thereby have be self-driven we don't even understand our own consciousness. you would tell me would create a machine that on its own achieves consciousness when we don't even understand it in ourselves i'm no stop making so much sense chill i'm totally chill with with that even still hip thing to say i will write back but guy from the bronx jewish guy from brooklyn sitting here trying to find a way to be right back. back

with the stars festival in trondheim norway if you ever get a chance to come here do so with neil de grasse tyson and the book is astrophysics for people in a hurry and he won the coveted stephen hawking medal a great honor and a great watch goes with oh yeah to him your watch your appetite after what time it is no one does that anymore because everyone has their own i still do what you got i got to watch it i look at the why are you surprised at your celebrity i mean i mean yes yes i'm surprised i'm more intrigued by it that's how i would say it happened slowly enough so that it wasn't one of these overnight things and so here's how you ended up measuring it not how many times you're in the paper or how big is your name in the i measured by how many strangers in a day want to come up and get your autograph in the old days today it would be a selfie it started out may be five a month. maybe twenty years ago five

a month and then it became. two or three a day and then ten a day and then it just so you just watch it go up now it's several hundred a day and for me yes so i was privacy with that but it's self-inflicted right i could just walk away tomorrow or never have done it so i can't sit here and complain about it but what i can say is there's a side effect where i now feel obligated to be a little better groomed before i leave in the morning so i shave a little more that my clothes are little more pressed i smell a little better because once you like hug for a selfie you know it's out of respect for the picture they're trying to get with you so it extra fifteen minutes a day has been subtracted from my life for this bit of vanity or part of the u.s. study of astrophysics did stephen hawking play a stephen hawking is

a physicist he's best known for his work concerning the universe there's a lot of physics that has nothing to do with the universe broadly speaking so i there is sure only people who have the interest and energy to do what i'm doing in whatever is their field. but maybe the press calls them a little less often because they don't feel that urge because i can say well the universe which the universe flinched yesterday was an eclipse to black holes collided we discovered exoplanets there might be microorganisms in the hidden oceans beneath the frozen surface of jupiter's moon europa these are new stories that cascade down from our telescopes and from our laboratories and from our computers and i don't know if i'm biased but it seems to me that the public has a deep curiosity for what's going on when they look up and hawking contributed and yes so he he made major discoveries related to black holes he basically broke black

holes into it into a next generation of understanding fact there's a whole there's a kind of energy that is a emanates from a black hole that bears his name as well hawking radiation and if you where in norway i guess they give the piece nobel prize here but the nobel prize it's he surely done enough work to get a nobel prize you would think yeah he does if he doesn't get i be disappointed but you know what i think i think he's transcended the nobel prize little bit same with einstein if you talk about einstein he did this relativity you don't then say did you know he want to nobel prize let me get a call matic he actually accomplished at that level so he may transcend all awards he could possibly be given we do a few a few only new questions inside of a little fun who is i enjoy can i i can look silly if i don't get he'll be anything you like ok who would you trade places with for a day oh in every way isaac newton i want to i want to feel how he thinks

about the world so i can write i can read what he's written about how he thinks but i want to get inside his head because he was plugged into the operations of nature like no one else do you have a secret talent. you could do that but. i had a great fan of calligraphy it's a guilty pleasure you have i hate i'm a foodie and my wife and i we go to restaurants slightly more expensive than we should be paying just to see if there's a dish that might reveal itself to us that we would then emulate and i but i buy the wine that's slightly more expensive than a week it should be because maybe it'll be something transcendent so the guilty pleasure is reaching a little further into the pleasures of life what should we all be paying more attention to the consequences of our action not only on others but on the fate of civilization itself august fan encounter someone came up to me and wanted me to

sign a frozen pig heart you ask us what the look at me like that us the straightest cow happens to me all the fun is so on use of us closer to god there's a million i'm not so it was it was a shrink wrap so i was to be signing the plastic casing of it and i think was a medical student that i don't know what they would do one but that was i think that was like one of the oddest their other odd things but that was they are as into you think there's a medical soon i think it was an inmate. something you wish you were better at zero i wish i was better it music i mean i'm a greeley great listener and i'm a very careful listener and i love music that if i could compose music perform using maybe as a first step km possibly compose it later in another life i would i would be the librettist for broadway musicals on strangers job you have to have to for

the full package of paying the college tuition they would be a work study program you get a grant and a loan and in there i cleaned dormitory bathrooms. for a year and a half and what was a little odd is and clean the bathrooms of fellow students and so that was just a school that was up there was at harvard and clean bathrooms ahead you know you have a scholarship yes i did well know this guy so i wasn't poor enough to be completely scholarship covered so if they judge how much money you have in your capacity to pay they say we'll take this much from you and we'll cobble together the rest of the tuition by the rest as i have later learned that they no longer have students cleaning the bathrooms of other students it just creates an awkward dynamic. in your social life and the bad of the town so that's so it's not odd but it was just for for what it was it was a little weird is there something you long believed to be true and then realize

wasn't you know did i tell you what was. i thought i could i calculated this i thought it would take nine seconds to cook a pizza on the window sill in the house if you're on the planet venus because when it was nine hundred degrees fahrenheit take a pizza put on will close the window up the cooks in one second i calculated that the temperature of venus the density of the air and then i find out i was off there's a physicist turned sheth who said you miss determine your calculation is the radiative energy from the air itself that just the radiative not just the touching of the pizza but the molecules but photons infrared photons coming in so that way it will heat the pizza in like two seconds instead of nine seconds. so i sit down myth that if i was i was so sure about and proud of my calculation and i just got out geek in

the moment we have many social media questions for you all to go for it. if you got the chance to fly away tomorrow with some aliens to explore the universe is father's corner without the chance of coming back would you go who if i bring my family will just bring the family not come back nope but if i could bring my family now i would stay i love trumps exploration at least for me yolanda go vandergrift what do you think is the best things we as humans can do to slow down climate change no better reverse it in up there's a sippy people who thought seriously about this because you're told so many different things paper or plastic electric or car pool or not and and some of that can just be confusing because if your if your heart is in the right place you want to do the right thing and so i don't i didn't have the expertise to compile this but they did forgive me i forgot the name of the book but it is a list a ranking of the things you can do in order so that you can have the maximum effect

based on what you or your habits are and from everything i've seen and heard and read. a change of diet can make a huge difference in and eating locally rather than what you know would you how far away does your food come from for example be great if we had farms on rooftops oh my gosh if buildings had their own built in farms. systems imagine. transportation would be not wouldn't be necessary that's one of the biggest consumers the biggest carbon footprints out there is transportation for commerce and half the congress is in on your roof. food you gotta have a go lindo why don't you run for congress we need people like you and thank you for that a for me the issue is not how scientifically literate your congress person is it's how scientifically literate is the electorate if you get

a scientifically literate electorate i think it would be impossible for them to put someone in congress who is not also that and once you do that you can transform a country overnight altos ninety nine like mr musk things are we living in simulation i find it hard to argue against that possibility meaning meaning if you look at our computing power today and you say i have the power to program a world inside of a computer well imagine in the future where you have even more power than that you can create characters that have for example freewill or their own perception of free will so this is a world and i program in the laws that govern that world that world will have its own laws of physics and chemistry and biology now you are a character in that world and you think you have free will and say i want to invent a computer so you do hey i want to create a world in my computer and then that world creates

a world in its computer and then you have simulations all the way down so now you lay out all these universes and throw a dart which of these universes are you most likely to hit the original one that started it or the countless simulations the daughter simulations that unfolded there after you're going to hit a sim you're going to hit one of the simulations. so statistically based on that argument which first appeared by a philosopher from oxford named nick both stream back in the one nine hundred ninety s. right we computers were coming real enough to think this through. it. it's hard to argue against the possibility that all of us are not just the creation of some kid in a parent's basement programming up a world for their own entertainment and then every time something weird happens in the world. some disruptive leader takes charge and i wonder if that

programmers just got bored and had to stir the pot so they throw somebody in there just to just to for their own entertainment for me that's some of the best evidence that we can live in a simulation because this happens every time there's peace and tranquility in the world but if it's true what can we do about it it's like the truman movie that was that it didn't we're in now well he can try to escape by go in the truman movie to go through the barrier but yeah if you're if you were programmed by somebody yeah you know there's nothing you can do what difference does it make if i'm programmed by someone i guess is i don't know what i guess it doesn't make any difference at all neal i would i would if i could go one place i would go in like to be in your mind for one day. just to think about the things you think about them one do about the nose ok i think your i'm flattered but before this interview we spent some time together you know last night over dinner and i'd never really spent that much quality time with you you are as curious

a person as there ever has been in this world and to be curious you have to also be open to learning something new which you have been and are and all i am is a curious kid who happens to occupy an adult body and when you do that you're a scientist so you're an honorary scientist based on your curiosity alone i have one file i asked stephen hawking what is something he doesn't know about and he said women. why this is the greatest question mankind has never answered that neil tyson can answer maybe why does peanut but it goes so well with jelly. yeah i think i think about the astrophysics you know know so i thought about this long sure you have long ago long ago and i think what we have found is that. in the traditional sense is that we think of a taste test or sweet sour salty and now we have the fifth one will mommy all right which is which transcends the other for you want to keep it simple brooklyn simple

writers who know each other goes so well with jail because peanut butter salty and jelly is sweet and each of those titillate us we need salt to live we need we need sweets which has high calorie content and it's a survival mechanism to be attracted to those two features. this is why we like peanut butter and joe that is the meaning of life. is astrophysics for people who. believe that thanks for joining.

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