Name: Joe Rogan Experience #610 - Brian Cox
Uploaded: 2015-02-10T06:21:57.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #610 - Brian Cox' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-02-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #610 - Brian Cox' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-02-10. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #610 - Brian Cox

All right. We're live. We can't hear ourselves because Brian Cox, even though
he's a musician,
he goes no headphone. But we can still hear ourselves. I can hear you. You're
right. We
just can't hear whether or not. But we wouldn't know anyway. What would we do?
He knows. He's
got headphones on. You're right. This is revolutionary. From now on, no more
headphones.
It's ridiculous. What would you use them for? Well, it's like watching
television while
you're on television. It's like if you were on TV and you were watching a video
monitor.
It seems weird. Yeah. It's a little redundant. I think we should cast them
aside in a revolutionary
act. Push them away. Not just put them down. Push them away. We reject you.
Oh, headphones. We reject you. Amazing technology. Infinite Monkey Cage. Yeah.
What's going on,
man? What is this? First of all, I'm a huge fan of your work. I said that when
you came in,
but I have to tell people online. This is a huge treat for me. I'm very excited.
Space has
been my all-time adult freak out pleasure. I love watching space documentaries.
I love watching
television shows on space. So having you in here is a huge treat. Thank you.
What's Infinite Monkey Cage? It's a long-running now BBC radio show. So the
idea initially was to get
scientists to talk about their science, whatever it may be. As you say, cosmology
or archaeology,
human origins, mathematics, anything. And then I do it with a stand-up comedian
called Robin Ince.
He's a very good friend of mine. And we always also invite another guest who
will be a comedian
sometimes or an actor or someone who will kind of ask those questions that come
in from left field.
And, but it always goes off into some, as, as your podcasts do, it just, you
don't, you never know
where it's going to go. So we're recording in front of a live audience, usually
in London. And we record
for about two hours, usually in broadcasting for about 30 minutes. And there's
a podcast as well,
which is a bit longer, but we decided to bring it to the States because there
are lots of scientists in
the States, lots of comedians and people like yourself that are going to do it
with us in three
weeks, isn't it? Yeah, three weeks. The 12th of, Thursday, the 12th in LA. Yes.
And so we just
wanted, so we're going to record them for the BBC and they're going to be on
the podcast and broadcast
in the UK, but also in front of a live audience. So it's a, someone asked me
this morning, actually,
and I said, it's kind of like a variety show. Do you have, and I said, do you
have those in the States?
He said, yeah, we used to have them. We used to have them. Dean Martin used to
do one. So I said, well,
it's kind of like if Dean Martin had a PhD, he would have been that in black
and white, a bit of singing,
a bit of dancing, a bit of quantum mechanics, basically. That's one of the
things that's so
important about what you do, what Neil deGrasse Tyson does is that you guys,
you, you, you're
entertaining as well as having a genuine passion and a deep knowledge of
science. So it's, it's not
just like, here's the cold, hard facts, which are amazing and fascinating on
their own, but you guys
both have this way of sort of germinating these ideas into people's minds that
might not ordinarily
accept them because they, there's a lot of people in America, especially, that
associate learning
with boring. Well, I think the, the important point, the serious point is that
science is too important
not to be part of popular culture. So if we, popular culture is the thing that
people discuss.
So if we seed that to, you know, talent shows or, or sports or whatever it is,
then we're removing the
most important area of human endeavor out of general conversation. So I think
there's a very, there's a
responsibility on scientists to say, well, I accept that, of course, I can't
talk at, you know, the level
that I lecture at as an undergraduate lecture course at university or even a
postgrad lecture course at the
level of my thesis or my research. I can't do that. But it's extremely
important that we don't just seed all
the ground. We don't want people in, in, in bars tonight or wherever in
restaurants to only talk, to be
talking about the Grammys last night.
Right.
We would like them to be talking about the fact that the universe may be
infinite in extent.
They're asking questions such as how many civilizations are there in the Milky
Way galaxy?
The question, the answer might be, not very many. If that's true, then what
does that mean for the
way that we behave? These are important questions, but they will never be
debated,
unless we take the time and, and make the effort to, to, to make the science
and the ideas and the
debate around them part of popular culture.
The internet has also opened up a lot of people's ideas about what science can
be. And also it opened
up a lot of people's ideas about the actual popularity of science, because
there's, until, you know, maybe
10, 20 years ago, with the notable exception, like maybe Carl Sagan and a few
other famous people that
became famous for, you know, uh, either cosmologists or mathematicians. It's,
it's very, very rare.
But now you're seeing guys like yourself, guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's
like more and more Richard
Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens while he's alive. These interesting intellectuals
become much more
mainstream. They become, uh, because people realize it wasn't that folks weren't
interested in these
subjects before. It's just they really weren't being presented them. If you don't
get enough ratings,
if you put your show on Thursday night at 8:00 p.m., and you don't get X amount
of number of people
watching, the, the, the studio loses interest. The, the people that produce it
start looking at other
jobs. Oh, well, this one isn't going to work. And they start moving on. And
that's just the reality of
television. And I think that with the internet, people are able to look at some
of these subjects and,
and, and, you know, someone will send out a tweet or a Facebook link or
something like that. And then
you'll say, well, this got a million people to look at it over the last 12
weeks. And the, the,
this has sort of, instead of having this immediate timeframe where everybody
has to pay attention or
the show dies now, ideas are allowed to sort of grow. Yeah. I think you're
absolutely right about
that. I, I, I think we as a culture underestimate people. I think this is what
you found with your
podcast. I think there are millions of people out there who are interested in
ideas, interested in
the latest things we found out about the universe and nature and the way that
it works. And they'll,
they'll come to it. You can, you build an audience, I suppose. Yeah. And it's
very important for the
reasons that I outlined. Our civilization, Carl Sagan always used to say this,
our civilization is based on
science and technology. And so in democracies, if your democracy is going to
function properly,
then people need to know about the, the cutting edge discoveries and the things
that we found out,
which form the basis of our civilization. Otherwise, how can your democracy
function properly?
So that's partly the responsibility of the education system, of course, but I
see actually the media on
the internet and actually on television and radio as part of the education
system. Now, I know that the
media doesn't see itself as that often, it sees itself as a corporate effort to
generate money for
shareholders. But I criticise that quite strongly, actually. And we're
fortunate in Britain that we've
got the BBC, whose job it is to be part of the education system and part, it's
a, it is a national
institution. So having a strong public service broadcaster, I think is, is one
of the best things
you can do as a country. I mean, imagine America, I know it would be anathema
to the big corporations
who run the TV channels. But imagine you had a channel, which, which really had
a lot of money,
the BBC is well funded, that everybody contributed to in the States, whose job
it was to act in the
interests of the nation, whose job it was to say, well, we're going to put
these, we're going to make
these big science documentaries and put them on. And yeah, we'll make
entertainment shows and drama
shows as well. We're going to make them because we think people need to know
this stuff. We want
to enthuse the next generation of scientists and engineers. That's, that's
important, actually.
It's important not to expose people continually to, to, you know, dribble,
basically, populist dribble,
because people, I think you're right, people want to think. I really believe
that people are
interested. I rarely go into, you know, a bar or a restaurant or a party and
people say,
what do you do? And if I say, well, I, I work at the large Hadron Collider at CERN
in Geneva,
we recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second
after the big bang.
It's very rare that someone just says, yeah, whatever, and then goes and talks
to somebody else.
They're interested. Sure. So, so I, yeah, I think the, and maybe you're right,
the optimistic view,
as you say, is that the, the, the internet will remove this corporate layer of
middle management
in a way that this kind of the television executive, that maybe if you can
remove that, that filter,
which is like a sort of a malfunctioning kidney in the flow of information,
then maybe it's a,
it's a good thing. In a way it is. Uh, it's, it's really kind of an archaic
idea. The idea that,
you know, at, you know, Thursday night at eight o'clock, that's when the show
airs. It airs for an hour.
Well, now you could, of course, DVR things, and you can, of course, there's a
lot of
television shows have things on demand, so you can download them, you know,
later. But I think
that that's the model. The model is the distribution through the internet. And
this idea of sending
things through the satellites and all the way they're doing it now with
television networks,
it's like, it's, it's not going to work. It's not going to last. As soon as
companies like Netflix,
and now Amazon is creating their own television shows as well, they're, those
are internet-based
companies. And they truly understand what the internet is all about. And when
Amazon, or rather,
when Netflix releases a series, they release the entire series. You can
download like all 10 episodes.
You can binge watch them, which is a great way to get people hooked on shows as
well. Yeah.
It's like this idea that, you know, the only way you're going to watch
something is if it's on NBC
or CBS or ABC. And then those people that run those networks, they're in a
panic because they got to get
people to watch. So they'll throw on some reality show about housewives that
are fighting to the death,
and people tune in. I mean, this is like, I hosted Fear Factor. You know, I, I
understand what they're
doing. I, I was a part of the problem or part of the solution, if that's what
you wanted to watch on
television. Yeah. You know, they're just trying to get by. Like, they're just
trying to figure out,
what's the next American Idol? What's the next, you know, whatever show, The
Voice? Like, what do I
have to do to get 18 million people to sit in front and watch a ball being
passed from one man to the
other, and they're trying to get across the line? Everybody goes crazy. This,
this idea that that's
the only way we can get our information, the only way you're going to get
entertainment or any,
anything that's coming at you that's being produced and created, that's, that's
dead.
The, what I find interesting about this debate though, is that the media is
obviously tremendously
powerful. It's obviously the, the interface between most people and ideas. Um,
and so I worry about,
uh, the, the increase of choice in a sense. So it's a very good thing in some
respects, but in other
respects, the, what, what happens, you can get to wise audiences or audiences
will become ghettoi