Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1347 - Neil deGrasse Tyson
Uploaded: 2019-09-06T04:30:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1347 - Neil deGrasse Tyson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-09-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1347 - Neil deGrasse Tyson' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-09-06. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1347 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Hello Joe it's going on man man good to see you thanks thanks I feel a little
overdressed sorry
about this good you know oh look at that a little bit of starry night there
yeah you're really into
that huh oh yeah I got I got is that yeah so you remembered yeah yes yeah yeah
it's on the phone
starry night what you like about starry night it's not what Van Gogh saw that
night it's what
he felt how do you know what he felt because this is not an a representation of
reality and anything
that deviates from reality is reality that has filtered through your senses and
I think art at
its highest is exactly that if this was an exact depiction of reality it would
be a photograph and
I don't need the artist hmm okay so even photographs that take you to a
slightly other kind of dimension
as you gaze upon them it's more than what was actually going on at the time and
that's that's
art taken to the craft of photography that's why you like it this it's one of
the reasons why plus I
think it was the very first painting where its title is the background think
about that this could have
been called you know in the full painting obviously this is a snippet yeah yeah
so there's a town there
there's a cypress tree there's a church steeple it could have been called the
cypress tree it could
have been called sleepy village it could have been called rolling hills but no
it's called starry night
and everything in front of it everything in front of it is just in the way and
how often do you paint
something where the title is the background that that's my point and in this
particular case the
background is the universe and so so for me this was a pivot point in art and
it's 1889 which is
recent given the history of paintings and you know they go all the way back so
yeah there there it is your
favorite painting ever I have to say yes it has to be you have a vest and a
phone if it's not what are
you doing yeah I have four or five ties that have this painting on them in
different ways yeah so
I'm all in I'm all in what's interesting is that the town is wait have you seen
starry night in bacon
somebody did look dig it up on the screen somebody did it in bacon it was just
great oh god how weird
yeah so yeah how weird go back to the original one please what's interesting
about the original one
is that the town is realistically depicted the trees are recognizable as trees
if you ever saw a sky that
looked like that the end would be here yeah exactly plus that swirling is not
wind and it's not clouds
because it was if it was clouds you wouldn't see the stars right what is it it's
how he felt that's
all I can tell you by the way that is a real evening so that's sorry it's not
even it's early morning
the crescent moon when it's that orientation means this is before sunrise and
that white object lower
on the horizon that's sort of glowy that's very likely Venus and that enables
us to trace what's
over what set of weeks this painting was actually uh painted so it's it's kind
of like uh forensic
astronomy has anyone done an analysis of like where he must have been yeah yeah
that's well known
yeah he was he was in a real place and so that he didn't pull this out of his
ass right I mean it
was he he painted what he saw folded into what he felt yeah heavy that's how
art should be I think
yeah otherwise what what do you need artists for uh make cool shit the cool
stuff is something that
they felt and it came out of them yeah and they feel stuff they artists feel
feel the the natural
world in ways different from the rest of us and that's why they're artists do
they or do they just
express it with oh sorry yes they not only yes we all can feel it but to be
able to express it
that that's a whole other talent right just to you know what I think about
often um why do you why do
we all know who Paul Revere is all right we all we we it's a household name yet
is there any other war
ever fought in the history of the world where a household name is the name of
the person who told
other people the enemy was coming we we can mention his name but we can't list
the generals that all
fought in that war why it's because a poem was written about him and he had
this mundane job let me tell
people the enemy is coming and so the artist in this case the poet elevated the
mundane to something
that forces you to to reckon it with your understanding of this world what's
Joyce uh Joyce
Kilmer's most famous poem it's about a tree dogs piss on trees you drive by
trees you don't even know
they're there yet a poem about a tree I'll never see something as lovely as a
tree oh my gosh this
so the art forces you to pause and just reflect on things that you took for
granted
things that became ordinary in your life and they were elevated to to to they
get beatified
by the talents of artists that's a word oh beatify you never know beatify yeah
I'm using it loosely
it's the intermediate step between being an ordinary person and being a saint
the beatification of
someone in the catholic church I would have thought it's making something more
beautiful
uh oh maybe okay I don't it could have similar roots be at be be yeah yeah it
could it could come from that but
to be it be beatified is the first steps on route to sainthood yeah that's if I
remember the word correctly here
there it goes oh you got it pulled it up the definition to make supremely happy
christianity
declare to have attained blessedness of heaven and authorized the title blessed
and limited public
religious honor she was beatified six years after her death yeah so I think you
can't become a saint
unless you previously been beatified I think that's the rule but I'm looking at
the number one definition
there to make supremely happy so that's that's interesting yeah that that that
moved ahead of
it definition of beatify yeah so to beatify the verb was up there uh you had on
the screen roman
catholic church uh he beatified juan diego and indian believed to have a vision
of a virgin mary
uh synonyms canonize sanctify hollow consecrate so I think if you take
something ordinary and you
subject it to the interpretation of an artist it can be beatified and elevated
on a level where it
becomes a household recognition of its importance in this world so my brother's
an artist my brother's
an artist so what kind of art uh fine art but also uh he paints and he teaches
history of art so I I
I've had this sort of baptism my whole life being exposed to him I'm the you
know the the sibling
scientist but the they have an artist in the family I think everyone should
have an artist
in the family I've got an uncle and of course the the whole steam movement
science technology
engineering and math uh the artist got in there say wait no stem the stem
movement science they want
to throw in the a to get art as part of that movement science technology
engineering art and math
change it from stem to steam it's a steam so you get full steam ahead steam is
a better word in that
well they're both good words for what they need but that just sounds like a
bunch of awesome stuff
like it does and yeah why not throw in comedy and building houses you know it
seems like you're
getting very it's like the lbgtqai like things get really squirrely when you
start adding more
letters yeah you can add letters but if it doesn't spell anything then the
memorization has to kick
in but steam you don't have to memorize that it's already there for you right
yeah so it's cleverly
conceived I think it the abbreviation was it's tacit recognition that these are
elements in society that
advanced civilization and and grow the economy actually so in fact there's
hardly any growth
economy in the world that isn't growing because it has been for not having been
touched by science or
technology everything just think about it so if you're around running you don't
have them on your
show but if you run around saying I don't like science science is bad science
is evil okay well then you will
die in poverty if you elect officials who believe that as well who the fuck
thinks science is bad in
2019 and how did they express this they express it through science okay so you
know i'm saying like
are they saying it online i have a book coming out in a month called letters
from an astrophysicist
okay yeah it's it's not it's not out yet but i've got it it's not how did you
get a copy but i don't even
have my copy yet okay what i'm saying in there i there's a whole chapter on
just angry people who
don't like anything including science and one of them it's a it's a it's a riff
he just says i hate
that science and that science has bring some of the worst things that's ever
happened to humanity and
pollution and this he goes on and on and on and on and so i reply his letters
from a national
physicist and i and i reply as as calmly and as rationally as is possible when
you get attacked
that way but what i'm saying is um not everyone embraces everything that
science does and some
will cherry pick it you have the science deniers for global warming of science
deniers with vaccines
you have science deniers with gmos you know there's there's all manner of
science denying going on in
modern society and you know we in a free society what are you going to do right
that people can think
what they want but if thinking what they want influences policy which then
affects everybody
then your science denial has consequences to the economic health of the nation
and by the way it's not
only economics it's your the economic health it's your physical health because
medicine flows through
advances in science as well as our security well there's people that deny some
aspects of science
while conveniently using other that's where it gets weird right you're driving
a car that's relying on gps
you're using a phone to complain about the global warming hoax you know you're
correct one one of my
more uh more uh more sort of popular tweets was you remember when they we had
the photo of the black
hole from a distant galaxy and it was banner headlines maybe a year ago less
than a year ago banner headlines
and uh first photo ever of a black hole and it was an astounding engineering
achievement to accomplish
that it was multiple telescopes all around the world pooling the data to get it
right and it was one of the
the greatest collaborative efforts we've ever undertaken in my field of astrophysics
okay
and everybody was loving the results so all i tweeted was scientists report
first photo of a black hole
public ooh ah scientists report humans are warming the earth oh you brought it
up okay
scientists we produced the first ever image of a supermassive black hole 55
million light
years away the response ooh scientist we've concluded that humans are
catastrophically warming the earth
response that conflicts with what i want to be true so it must be false well
that is the cherry
picking of science it is the cherry picking assignments but the global warming
thing is very much connected
to a certain type of ideology a certain type of person who thinks of themselves
it doesn't matter to me
no nonsense person what i'm saying what what yes it does matter what i'm what i'm
trying to say is
that is a demographic that has cherry picked science to deny human cause global
warming there are other
demographic demographics that have cherry picked other science to deny other
things and it it's not all
located in one political spectrum i mean one political branch right so you tend
to find liberal folk
complaining that the conservatives who have embraced no the no global warming
platform are denying science
and they need science on their side and many of those same people are rubbing
crystals together to be
healed by the crystal energy or they're denying vaccines thinking that they're
somehow bad for you and so
so all of this requires some or total rejection of mainstream science and we we're
living in that
world now and i don't know i don't think it'll stop the progress of
civilization but it can certainly
slow it dow