298. Neil deGrasse Tyson — Starry Messenger (5)
2 (47m 59s):
That's why the NFL does not play high school or college teams. Okay. They're way better than those teams. So you're not paying to see who's good. Otherwise, no one would watch college sports. You're paying for the competition and you want the competition to be balanced in some way, create laws. That balance the competition that are not regressive that go back to the way people binary thinking. Would've forced it, you invent some new rule and I don't know what all those rules will be. But in wrestling, we had 10 categories in boxing. There's three or four categories. This is not something new. We've done it before we can do it again.
1 (48m 37s):
Right. But am I sitting in the rocking chair as an old baby boomer? If I say I'm, I'm glad there's in MMA fighting that there's a men's division and a women's division because I don't, I would want to see one of these women get killed by one of these guys. And that's a good thing. It protects the women's rights.
2 (48m 56s):
Right. So, right. So you do it by, by weight class and by hormone category. Mm. That should even that out. Okay.
1 (49m 3s):
What about some of these other conflicting rights? Like, you know, women's spaces they want, they don't want men coming in the locker room or the gym or the spa. There's some examples of, of this or, or women's bathrooms. We don't want men in here. This is our space where we can change, not be, you know, looked at by a guy. So, you know, in the exceptions again, they're rare, but they happen where, you know, the male, the female trans goes into the, you know, the locker room, but he still has a penis and he's exposing himself. And the women are like, we don't like this. This happened at that. We spawn LA and this erupted into a huge controversy. Police were called the women's like, we don't want this guy in here. And the trans activists were there saying no, no, you know, he's a, she and you're misgendering her.
1 (49m 45s):
And so on she's to be free to do what she wants again and a free society. Like we, we could do whatever you want, but whether there's conflict, that's where the rubber.
2 (49m 53s):
Right. So again, I'm sort of making this up as I go along because I we're, we're trying to leave you on the porch.
1 (50m 2s):
I've become my dad. Oh my God. I can't believe it.
2 (50m 8s):
Exactly. So this challenge has been brilliant partially, but brilliantly solved. Okay. That is, has been brilliantly solved in a subset of cases. So you have single stall bathrooms, right? New establishments are designing bathrooms that way so that you don't pre segregate boy and girl bathrooms. It's just, it's just a toilet and a sink. Men don't need urinals. Okay. And we hope we have better aim going forward, but men don't need urinals. You just need the private space and you can have a locker.
2 (50m 49s):
By the way, when I went to college, they had co-ed bathrooms. And this was like really freaky. Cause I'm old enough that this was like the seventies. It was a little bit freaky, but it took you about two weeks and everyone got used to it. It's one big room, but all the toilets are stalls. Okay. And there were no urinals. And so by the way, this was a bathroom that used to be in an all girls college in all women's college. So that's why there were no urinals. So there were just stalls, you go in the stall, but we saw everyone wash their face or put on makeup or whatever. So really nothing in principle, wrong with that. But you still had the privacy of your stall. And that was weird, but that was 45 years ago.
2 (51m 30s):
Okay. So if you could do that 45 years ago, it took, like I said, it was an adjustment period, but now you look at segregated bath and say, what's going on here? So going forward the design of baths and thin and all of this, you just do it so that you have the privacy, you have your, your, your gender privacy, boom, that's solved. Then we move on to the next problem rather than say, let's go back to binary so that we can still change naked in front of each other, in the showers,
1 (52m 2s):
Technological solutions. I like that. You mentioned Pinker earlier. I like his principle of interchangeable perspectives. You know, how would you feel if a law was designed this way that affected you? I like it cuz it helps me, but how would I feel if it helps you and doesn't help me? Well, I want, I want a fair law. Okay. So that's the, you know, the golden rule
2 (52m 21s):
That's you want to, others have others.
1 (52m 24s):
It works. And I think in a it's the
2 (52m 26s):
Modern, modern rewording of that. Yeah. Yeah.
1 (52m 28s):
So I think there is progress that moral progress made in the same way that there is scientific progress. That is, that is we discover things about human nature in which we, we prefer to be treated equally rather than not equally. We prefer to be satiated rather than hungry and not, and not poor. And so on. We, all of us would prefer that. Not just me, but if I put myself in your position, as Pinker likes to say, there's nothing special about the piece of land I'm standing on, just because I happen to be standing on it. And I should expect you to have the same respect just because it's it's me. Right. There's nothing special about that interchange and be interchange
2 (53m 9s):
To Sam Harris's point
1 (53m 10s):
With you.
2 (53m 12s):
Yeah. And to Sam Harris's point, there's the, the idea that you, if you're wealthy are probably, you prefer the world Where you're wealthy and you don't have a homeless person on the street. Okay. You prefer that the homeless person is not homeless in the world. You're living in. Even if you're not gonna pay for it, you just prefer that the outcome that you don't have homeless people. And so I thought, because I don't know anyone, at least in the United States that delights in the fact that there's poverty. I don't believe, I don't wanna believe that such people exist.
2 (53m 54s):
I don't think they do. So you would, if, if there was solution to get rid of the poverty, that's something you'd debate in the halls of parliament or in Congress. And, and is there evidence that this will get rid of poverty or not? And what if you're wealthy and it takes away some of your wealth, is there an amount of that wealth that would get rid of all of this poverty that would make you happier even in the presence of that loss of wealth and how much is that? If not zero, right? These are conversations. One can have informed by rational thinking,
1 (54m 27s):
Right.
2 (54m 28s):
And
1 (54m 28s):
To achieve an outcome. And also I think
2 (54m 30s):
Empirical, basic recurring outcomes,
1 (54m 32s):
Empirical discoveries of what people prefer and how they vote and act, and behave and so on. So here in Northern European country and you have a slightly higher tax rate and yet still a robust economy like Germany does, and you still take care of your poor people and you have a tight social safety. That that's a good thing. Why is that a good thing? I'm claiming it's not just some arbitrary cultural thing that we just happen to be going through. You look at the last century and a half or so, more and more nations are having more and more social safety net programs and wealth transfers and so on because we've decided that this is a good thing, that more and more people are pulled out of poverty and so forth.
1 (55m 14s):
And that we're probably moving toward universal healthcare in all Western countries. This is a good thing. Not randomly, this isn't just some cultural quirkiness of the 21st century. There's a directionality to it because how would I feel if I don't know if I'm gonna be born poor or female or black or Jewish, or, you know, in an inner city versus a, you know, wealthy suburb, I don't know where I'm gonna be born. So the, I want a society where it doesn't matter where you're born. You know, you're not gonna fall into some trap, right. That I think we've moved in that direction because we've discovered it's almost like a cultural thing. Like I've, I'm better able now to put myself in your shoes and imagine how I would feel if I were you.
1 (55m 55s):
And you're better at able to do that, maybe because of the internet travel, you know, TV reading and so on movies.
2 (56m 3s):
Yeah. I mean, storytellers, storytellers. Yeah. Broadly. I mean, you know, the grapes of wrath as an important bit of storytelling there with, you know, basically homeless and we would have the term at the time, but I think the family there was basically homeless, you know, migrant, homeless family, white. Right. And so, oh, that made that plight a little more real to those who would otherwise just completely accept it among black people or, or Hispanics or whoever were the migrant population of, of the day. So yeah. So storytelling, I think can help communicate that. Yeah.
1 (56m 39s):
Now the hard, some of the harder problems I struggle with, like on abortion I'm pro-choice but you know, I think the pro-lifers, they do have some good arguments, but it overall, if you have conflicting rights between the rights of the Fe is to live the rights of the mother to choose woman to choose, then, you know, something has to give. And fortunately, I feel that we've kind of regressed in that direction with the overturning a row. The overall trend is toward giving more rights to more adult people in more places, more of the time. And that seems to be a part of that. But why do you think it is that half the country doesn't agree with me?
2 (57m 14s):
Oh, because, so you park the curtains and there is very powerful religious thinking behind it. Right. As, as you know, the, the states that were lined up to have laws dropped the moment, Roe V. Wade was overturned of those states, what is it? 10 out of the 15 are among the most religious states in the country measured by, you know, pew poll standard metrics for that. And so they're not being bad citizens. They're being good. Christians. If we recognize that Christian Christianity values the sanctity of life in all ways that we are told.
2 (57m 58s):
And, and, and, but then you have to confront the fact that nine out of those 10 states also embrace the death penalty. Yeah. So whatever is your cherishing of life, it, you somehow are not consistently applying it in all cases, but not only that, the, if you look at the abortion rates and I ran through these numbers for the book in the chapter, life and death in that chapter, the United States in a year has 5 million pregnancies. And in the most recent years, these numbers are, are pretty stable. So we can just mention them as, as a general yearly fact, 5 million pregnancies, 13% of those pregnancies were medically aborted.
2 (58m 49s):
Okay. And these are what people want to outlaw. Okay. Those in those states. All right. So now they want to outlaw it because you, you value life. Okay. In the way you say you do, even though you have the death penalty. Okay. So add to this, the fact that 15% of pregnancies and in spontaneous abortion. So this is the body just simply rejecting the, the, the fetus or the, or the egg, I mean, the Determining before it's a fetus, it's a, yeah, yeah.
