When we can pay the bills Well that's all she wrote it's called capitalism. But in the meantime you can help us you definitely can't we're out of time thank you for all of those of you who have called and for those that haven't do it do it you're listening to k p f a k p f b in Berkeley K.F.C.'s in Fresno 88 point one f.m. And all the time at Cape b.f.a. Dot org Stay tuned for a rebroadcast of upfront. That's what he said this is a friend time sleep mom or anything with Mrs Jesser and. So today we have a really special treat for me buddy I got to interview Neil de Grasse Tyson How did you get that I think I stole it from me and my crew and he has a new book out called astrophysics for people in a hurry and he uses it to describe all of the big discoveries about the universe from the Big Bang to the future expansion to how even understood all of this in the 1st place and it's just a wonderful little book about how to understand astrophysics looking forward to that one that's right up after the news I'm Eileen out in Derry with campaign news headlines President Donald Trump is warning has fired as director that he'd better hope there are no tapes of their conversations before James Comey quote starts leaking to the press the threat to call me as part of a tweet storm by Trump this morning 6 at the last count Trump also responds to criticisms of the constantly shifting narrative about why he's fired call me tweeting as a very active president with lots of things happening it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy and tweeting quote Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future press briefings and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy in an interview with n.b.c. Trump gave more ammunition to critics who say he fired Komi to impede the f.b.i. Investigation into possible collusion between his presidential campaign and Russian officials but regardless of recommendation I was going to fire knowing there was no good time to do it and in fact when I decided to just do it I said to myself I said you know. This rusher thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story in the interview Trump called Call me a showboat and I grandstander He also asserted Comey told him 3 times he was. Under f.b.i. Investigation Comey has not confirmed Trump's account the New York Times has cited 2 unnamed Komi associates who recounted his version of a January dinner with the president in which Trump asked for a pledge of loyalty to call me declined instead offering honest one Trump then present for honest loyalty Cami told him you will have that the associate said aides were scrambling to get their story straight not even Vice President Mike Pence was spared the embarrassment of having told a version of events that was later discredited by Trump on Capitol Hill acting f.b.i. Director Andrew McCabe strongly disputed the White House assertion that Komi was fired in part because he had lost the confidence of the F.B.I.'s rank and file the statement came in response to a question from New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich and those are that is not accurate I can tell you also that director Komi enjoyed broad support within the f.b.i. And still does have his day make a may not hold his position for a long Attorney General Jeff Sessions and doubt but he rides Rosenstein are interviewing replacements for the position of interim f.b.i. Director until a permanent director is put in place sessions and Baldwin appears to be at odds with his pledge to recuse himself from the probe of the Trump presidential campaigns possible collusion with Russia California Governor Jerry Brown says he's withholding 50000000 dollars from the University of California's budget to quote Hold Their Feet to the fire Brown says his revised budget was holds the money until the u.c. System except changes in a recent critical state audit Christopher Martinez has more details from the governor's revised proposed $124000000000.00 budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1st Gov Jerry Brown's new budget proposal box back some of its earlier proposed cuts such as cuts to child care in the light of increasing tax revenues. But the governor is still wary of ramping up spending given uncertainties about federal funding from the company ministration. Cuts are coming. Few years and will be one of the biggest question marks as they were a public and controlled Congress and the trumpet ministration will do about health care and their plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. But punch a $4000000000.00 hole in the state budget cutting $18000000000.00 by the year 2028 Brown says he thinks it's unlikely the Senate will pass the Obamacare very pale start of the house but he says it would be imprudent to spend it if there's no risk around $124000000000.00 budget proposal includes money to fund to child care increases that is January proposal had planned to cut $1.00 area around increases spending the office of the Attorney General Brown proposes $6500000.00 to fund lawsuits challenging the top administration on issues like immigration health care and the environment and there are some real legal issues which are true of. His deputies the war should. Have to defend their rights advocates are concerned about what they're not seeing and the budget a clear use with Californians for s.s.i. He says he's disappointed the budget does not increase funding for low income as a blind and people with disabilities This is the last of the of the. You know Schwarzenegger era cuts that has not been very unstable reporting from the state capitol Christopher Martinez the head of Mother's Day advocates raised more than 400000 dollars nationally to release black mothers who are in jail simply because they can't afford to Dale it wasn't immediately clear how many mothers would be bailed out the as you just described is also pointing to the need to reform the money bail system just in gold reports from Oprah. And activists want to give the women time to spin Mother's Day with their families Carol Disney and innocent black mother who was detained for 10 months shares her experience in criticisms of the money Bill system I'm here today and others like me who cannot make them be here today to let you know how devastating the events of the film. You. Think maybe I am sometimes because they can make me. Happy some believe in me believe me to be very deep according to the American Civil Liberties Union black women comprise 30 percent of all incarcerated women in the us that make up only 13 percent of the total female population for if a Pacifica Radio News I'm just a late night host Stephen cold there reacted gleefully last night after Donald Trump attacked him in an interview with Time magazine in that interview Trump called cold air I had no talent guy and said his show was dying until called there started attacking him called Bear responded he's been trying to get Trump to say its name for a year called there said I one making jokes about you has been good for ratings it's almost as if the majority of Americans didn't want you to be president. With the you know who is really bad ratings these days huge. Approval numbers I hear the thinking about pushing your timeslot with my pets with . The with the sense of my success is clearly based on talking about you if you really want to take me down there's an obvious way to resign with Stephen Cole there I am I lean out the dairy You're listening to up front I'm sorry Mom Ronnie. And the realm of planets supernovas and galaxies Neil de Grasse Tyson is a star is an American astrophysicist who's also a writer a t.v. Host he has a podcast called Star talk and he directs the planetarium and me most famous recently finale reading cosmos and you're just as likely to find him buried in a math book as you are to find him walking about a studio set his quest as an astrophysicist is to explain how the universe works especially for those of us like myself who can understand the equations behind all of it is most recent book astrophysics for people in a hurry continues this quest and in less than 200 pages he lays out the grandest the scientific discovery so that the lay non-scientist going to scan them well sort of joining us from American Public Media studios is Neil de Grasse Tyson to discuss his new book astrophysics for people and a hearty So welcome Ok thank you thank you I mean it's sort of like and I can guarantee you that if you read the book you will be inspired to just keep reaching for the universe and it's so in that sense it's a primmer which is loaded with sort of mind blowing for the moment and the universe just serves as a reminder that the universe is is if I could it's an extraordinary intellectual frontier that remains vibrant and it should be part of the fluency of us all right it's kind of a jest as to that I don't understand the mathematics so I know a little bit I can I can understand a little bit of what this is all about but perhaps without the math not all of it also may have to as Oh of course there's no math in this book but they have added to the book you could go much deeper fact there's a whole other book I wrote with 2 colleagues last fall called Welcome to the universe that book if but I'd like to think is when you're no longer in a hurry. And you have time then you go to vet book that will take you to the depths of all the ways that mass and hamsters you're in like minute appreciation of the field but until then and. Even if perhaps never than my goal here was to take the fragments of bits of the universe that you might have seen crossing in headlines like exoplanet or multi-verse or dark matter dark energy coal lighting black holes these are terms you might have seen just dangling in front of you at a documentary or a news headline and you never really had an occasion to put them together so I think of astrophysics for people to Harry as a as a way for a person to consummate this relationship with the universe so your other book which is sort of like astrophysics for people on vacation but a lot of time kind of goes on for the now but this one that went to that other one and that was from last fall right this one is is there I mean it's ready for you it took you to read while you wait for the bus especially at the airport or people on the go it's designed for you and and it's real astrophysics so I want to ask me oh it did you damage that because astrophysics for Dummies was taken. As it's real astrophysics and and there's I don't know that anyone has ever accused me of dumbing anything down and because there are ways to explain complex topics but in completely accessible terms without feeling like you're getting talked down to or that because people know when they're talked down to and nobody likes that and so this book is sort of a way to increase scientific literacy I would say it really is to appreciate the universe and the science literacy you get a lot of that just by by the exposure but if I were to say that there were a point to the book it would be culminating in the last of the dozen chapters that it contains. Chapters called Reflections on the cosmic perspective and these are you take the sum ation of what we've learned about our place in the universe and ask what does it mean and how do we take it to heart and. And it often involves some ego busting facts about what our place is in the universe you say that sometimes when you're gazing out of the universe wondering at the galaxies and the stars you sometimes lose track of the earth and that's not something that you ever want to do you lose track of people in the things and politics of what's here right in front of us so that was one point you making talk about that 1st. Yeah you know I'm I think a disproportion of my life is spent thinking about the universe and if I get too embedded then I and I just forget that I'm living in a world where there's suffering and poor people suffer people displaced by changes in climate and by strife political cultural religious strife so so yeah Ok so I need to just remind myself of that I don't have to do that forcibly because otherwise I'll just float away so in one of those phrases I just I'm being candid that's why it's called Reflections on the cosmic perspective and be candid with the reader that there are times I'm just in another zone. And then on the other hand you also talk about this cosmic perspective as being a way to understand our place in the universe so that there's less of that suffering and maybe less of that stress can you explain what that means Yeah a lot of strike can play a sort of softball suffering force but there's a there are categories of suffering that come about because people express an unjustifiably high ego either for themselves or for their nation for their culture for their religion and for their political philosophy if you think you are right and everyone else is wrong and you're ready to kill people because of it that is the opposite of the cosmic perspective the concert perspective shows how how compact shows how how much we all are the same more than it will show how much we are all different. And it's been a lot. But more about the cosmic perspective cause I feel like that is changed so much that the centuries may become smaller and smaller and smaller on a kind enough to you know every every I feel like becomes more of an ant in that you just change in the consistent direction right it doesn't change waffling back and forth it is persistently alerting us that wherever our ego was previously. Distributed it isn't no it doesn't belong there it's there take it back leave it at home and some people might find it depressing that there's. You not the special into t. That you thought you were for example are chemical ingredients and we have the atoms of our body include hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and nitrogen. These elements are the most common in the universe and if they're among the most common in the universe then you can't run around saying I made a special stuff. If you want to say you're made of special stuff the premise would be you're made of stuff that other life forms are not made it so we have this delusion I want to call it illusion we have this this hubris that we're special if we're different. But these elements are traceable to stars they're scattered these elements across the galaxy and so therefore I think we're special because we're the same we haven't gradients that are found in stars. And for me that's an almost spiritual. Reveal of modern national physics but when you talk about your experience of the causing a logical perspective you do talk about it as being. Like humbling but also calming almost like a spiritual thing yes and the calming part is you. You realize Ok no you're not special in time or space or ingredients. But you're part of an unfolding cosmic story. And a point made for many decades and I will reaffirm here I 1st heard this explicated with Carl Sagan and his collaborators back in the original Cosmos but it continues on that once you realize that the atoms in your body are traceable to stars they gave their lives 5000000000 years ago in an explosion. And then you learn that not only are we in the universe the universe is in us that is. That's a gift of modern national physics to civilization and that is the opposite of high ego Well you can think you're special Now that's fine but then we're all that special because we are all made of stardust when I want to get into some of the particulars but I did also find that strangely calming because the other thing that becomes more more clear as you read this book is that the universe is much bigger and filled with much more mysterious things and we had ever imagined. That it continues to be so that's correct yeah and that can produce some anxiety I mean we end up talking about dark energy matter and verses and you know it becomes a very scary place in some ways but yet you if they give you insight it's because you are you you have discomfort in states of ignorance not knowing makes you. The stabilisers the ground on which you stand whereas that an active research scientist. The not knowing is the seduction It is what attracts us to the frontier and so no there is no anx there is no it is a yes let's go jump with 2 feet into it and so. What you have to do is assess. What you're thinking before you enter the room because that will help you understand what your reaction is upon exiting an astrophysicist goes in with no ego and a scientist enters a room with no expectation of having the answers to everything. And that combination you are primed to receive the cosmic perspective as the universe intended for you mention is part of this book is to bring this intrigue to the public who might not know about the science and add some think about math and science as being a little bit like music that there is a beauty in it but that beauty is often inaccessible because we're scared of math and science so tell me what it about what it's like translating modern physics and modern mathematics into the kind of metaphor that makes sense to a non-scientist. That's an excellent question I'll 1st say that the math phobia that so many people have I think is artificial in the following way. Math happens to be the language of the universe so let's think about it that way you want to visit the universe learn its language that language is mass. Next year you want to go to China. Well and you're American you got to learn a new alphabet it's not even really an alphabet it's their characters in a book of representations of abstracted representations and I learned that and find out how they communicate and how long will that take you years to become fluent at least 3 years then you got to live there so but meanwhile you take a couple of classes in math and you say I'm good at math so I submit to you that if you took math for the same number of years you would need to take Mandarin to become fluent in Chinese you'd be fluent in math too but people are quick to give up on it because it doesn't come naturally to them Well neither does Chinese and neither would Russian or any other language that uses an alternative alphabet. So I'm not convinced that it's impossible to to get headway in that for some aspects of the field yes but. Not not most of the ones we can talk about and enjoy in a newspaper headline How closely does the matter for the language just English how close is it to the actual mathematics. I use it only to say if you want to talk to the universe because language you have to do it and. If you want to make a discovery in the universe yeah you've got you got to know the math but you want to appreciate the discovery you have to know any man fit all. One appreciates a discovery I can tell you there's a region of space there's so much gravity nothing comes out not even light black hole we're done they're all right I don't do we don't need to write that equation on a chalkboard and this is why I think the universe has been such good material for storytellers look at the movie Avatar which takes place on an exoplanet look at the movie Marsh the Martian which takes place on Mars all these 1st run movies with marquee actors and marquee directors are getting sort of 1st run audiences. And I had nothing to do with them this is going on without me. So this is an awakening and a curiosity refresh. Urge to want to learn how the universe works you know listening to have fun and sleep time or any sitting here with messages or only goodness Lemus is awesome and it's a great interview yeah yeah his book is just so fascinating I mean it goes into all of the big ideas about astrophysics and black holes the expanding universe the origin of all matter also what in the next clip I think we're going to talk about Dash matter and dark energy to Fascinating new discoveries of physics for a and actually this is one of ou