Joe Rogan Experience #1904 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Joe Rogan and Neil deGrasse Tyson open with the James Webb Space Telescope, explaining how its folding hexagonal mirror and infrared tuning let it see the birth of galaxies that Hubble never could. The conversation roams through psychedelics versus objective reality, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, and how poorly the human brain handles probability and statistics. Tyson uses material from his book Starry Messenger to argue for a 'cosmic perspective' that decentralizes humans, covering animal intelligence, gut microbes, and human diversity. The back half tackles genetic engineering, autism as a driver of innovation, self-driving cars and AI, and a long takedown of scientific racism by inverting the bias to imagine a 'black racist anthropologist' describing white people. It closes on Tyson reading aspirational quotes about curiosity and shepherding civilization.

• The James Webb telescope's mirror is folded into hexagonal segments because the telescope is bigger than the rocket fairing that launches it.
  00:03:15
• JWST is tuned for infrared because the universe's expansion has redshifted the ultraviolet light of the earliest galaxies into the infrared.
  00:08:30
• The common ancestor of animals and fungi split off later than plants did, meaning humans and mushrooms are more closely related to each other than either is to green plants.
  00:37:07
• One centimeter slice of your colon contains more living microbes than the total number of humans who have ever lived.
  01:30:51
• On a schoolroom-globe scale, Bezos and Branson rose only the thickness of two dimes, so they never actually saw the curvature of the Earth.
  01:33:28
• The rule that humans have the highest brain-to-body-weight ratio applies only among mammals; magpies, crows, owls and eagles all beat us.
  01:39:13
• Because our species began in Africa, genetic diversity within Africa is greater than between any two peoples anywhere else on Earth.
  02:36:03
• Tyson's 2050 predictions: self-driving cars fully replace all vehicles, cancer is cured, mental illness is cured, and humans resist merging brains with computers.
  02:28:51

• The mosquito is the greatest enemy of human life, responsible for more than a billion human deaths in the history of civilization.
  00:30:21
• In 1895, after X-rays were discovered, people set up X-ray machines at the bedsides of the dying to try to see a soul leave the body.
  00:42:53
• Since male reindeer drop their antlers before winter and females keep theirs, all eight of Santa's antlered reindeer must be female, meaning Rudolph was misgendered.
  01:22:03
• Domesticated caribou are so drawn to the Amanita muscaria compounds in human urine that they will knock people over to get to it.
  01:23:04
• A magpie was filmed dropping stones into a water bottle to raise the level so its beak could reach the water, an Archimedean feat.
  01:26:11
• Only two national borders are visible from space: Israel's by day (irrigation makes it green) and the North/South Korea border at night (lights).
  01:40:17
• Jim Abbott pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees in 1993 despite being born without a right hand.
  01:55:23
• The American Psychiatric Association did not remove homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1987.
  02:04:48
• Genetic research found Europeans are between one and three percent Neanderthal while Africans are zero percent.
  02:47:01
• Tani Adewumi, a 10-year-old son of Nigerian refugees who briefly lived in a homeless shelter, became a U.S. chess National Master in 2021.
  02:42:53