I logged every book that came up on StarTalk over the first six months of the year, across about 45 episodes. Alien contact and black holes were the recurring threads, and Neil kept plugging his own new one.

The two he singled out:

• The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, which Neil called one of his favorite books, controversy and all.
• The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. A guest said the dark forest idea raised the bar for every first-contact story since.

The rest, roughly grouped:

• Neil's own shelf: Take Me to Your Leader (his 2026 alien-encounter book, the most name-checked by far), Starry Messenger, Cosmic Queries, and StarTalk.
• First contact and hard sci-fi: Contact by Carl Sagan, Project Hail Mary and The Martian by Andy Weir, The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park by Crichton.
• Physics for the rest of us: The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, The God Particle by Leon Lederman, and two Janna Levin black hole books.
• Old-school science: Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius and Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, plus Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Take Me to Your Leader showing up 16 times tells you how the alien episodes went.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/startalk-radio. Free, no signup.

His jokes weee mid, Brian seemed to not like him LOL

Short list this month, and Neil's new one dominated it.

Take Me to Your Leader, Neil deGrasse Tyson's book on how we might handle a first alien encounter, came up in nearly every episode. To Infinity and Beyond got airtime too.

The most interesting guest thread was Donald Hoffman: The Case Against Reality and Visual Intelligence, on why evolution might hide the truth from our eyes.

Classic sci-fi rounded it out, War of the Worlds and Voltaire's Micromegas, which basically predates science fiction.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/startalk-radio/2026/06 tracks every book from the show, free, no signup.

Is Hoffman's "reality is a user interface" idea compelling or a stretch?

I loved the show but now I regret it. In fact, I was subscribed to StarTalk Signature.

NDT is literally a source of misinformation, and StarTalk is no longer a science show, they keep making unscientific jokes and it is really annoying. I am embarrassed I subscribed and became a member. I thought I would listen to a science show, now it's more of a comedic show with tons of misinformation.

In fact, he doesn't even understand complex topics. Like he doesn't even know Newton's law of cooling, ! He once even said "We don't use the term 'Law' in physics"; that's 100% false.

NDT is literally an egoist, arrogant person nowadays. He's good for wannabe learners who don't even have a wide-range area of knowledge, but the clown NDT literally acts like he's an expert in every field. He makes statements about artificial intelligence and biology, is that his field?

The rudest part of NDT is how he keeps talking over people!! Let the guests talk, Terence Tao was on the show and with Mercurio they kept talking over him like that's extremely rude to the guests. He did the same to Brian Greene and Charles Liu!

Why did I give $25 every month in a year to this clown who keeps bringing up Michio Kaku. He does a great disservice to physics and education by miscommunicating ideas and making people think "Physics is like a video game" while it's not!

The entire goal of NDT is to make listeners feel empowered that they know science, while in reality he ditches the complex topics like path integrals, wavefunctions, quantum gates, etc. He secretly uses the Dunning-Kruger effect and uses it fraudulently, by feeding individuals up with nonsensical content that tricks them into thinking their curiosity has increased, while in reality all he does is talk about elementary things and simplify huge topics into a small, packaged, neat and delicate format that isn't science, it makes listeners overconfident and falsely believe they are smart.

If you took a real test on the topics he talks about, 99.99% of people would fail it. For example, I'll give everybody on this sub a basic quantum computing problem, apply the Pauli-X gate to 1. Did anybody know the answer? Maybe some of you do, but of the millions of people watching the show, probably 1%. You see, science is very complex, it isn't that simple as he constantly says.

Anyone who is watching or listening to him should wake up and realize how complex and advanced science is. He's doing a great disservice to the field. Science isn't a circus. Don't subscribe or become a Patreon.

They're years into this. I wish they'd get a little deeper into some things. It's the same thing over and over. Chuck probably knows everything by heart by now.

Every. Single. Episode. One of the hosts has to rehash a tired joke about weed/acid in response to a questioner or the guests.

I promise I am not clutching my pearls. It's just SO unfunny, and it derails the conversation because the guests never laugh at it.

Does anyone else love her? She’s my favorite guest on the podcast.

Short list this month. Tracked everything Neil and the crew brought up.

Neil's own new one, Take Me to Your Leader, dominated (came up a lot), with To Infinity and Beyond also getting airtime.

The rest:

• How to Make White People Laugh by Negin Farsad (co-host).
• Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier.
• The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener, the cybernetics classic.
• Gulliver's Travels got a science-fiction-before-science-fiction mention.

I track every book from the show at https://podshelf.io. It is free, no login.

What's the best pop-science book for someone just getting into astrophysics?

I've compiled a list of some of Neil's wrong claims Fact checking Neil Degrasse Tyson There is more I could add.

Most of his misinformation is harmless. For example who cares if Neil tells his pseudo nerd fans there are more transcendental numbers than irrationals?

His wrong history is another matter.

When it comes to history Neil brings to the table a strong bias. Combine that with Neil's lively imagination and abysmal scholarship and you have Neil fabricating history to push his religion vs science narrative.

Items 2, 3, 4, 6 and 22 are examples of Neil's false history. I have yet to add Neil's false accusation against St. Augustine.

The three celebrity skeptics in the cartoon attended the 2006 Beyond Belief conference as well the 2010 TAM6 meeting.

In this video you can see Richard Dawkins in the audience seemingly very entertained by Tyson's performance at Beyond Belief. Neil and Richard met at this conference.

At both Beyond Belief and TAM6 Neil fed three steaming piles to the self proclaimed skeptics in attendance:

Neil's Bush and Star Names story.

Neil's story that Newton just stops when he cedes his brilliance to God.

Neil's story that Ghazali ends the Islamic Golden Age he he proclaims math is the work of The Devil

Most "skeptics" in this clique seem to endorse Neil Tyson and his impressive portfolio of misinformation. In 2022 Dawkins gave Neil the Dawkins award for his good work.

An actual skeptic habitually checks claims to see if they are supported by evidence. Any so called skeptic that swallows Neil's fictions have shown themselves to be as credulous AF.

Neil is greatest gift to apologetics in the 21st century. His Nagasaki class bull shit bombs have obliterated the credibility of his clique of pseudo skeptics.

Suffice to say... I. Am. Stoked.

And became Lord Nice?

Who do you guys like more?

..and maybe now, when watching a sporting event, there was the "play-by-play" announcer ("Gain of five yards. First down") and the "color" announcer ("I haven't seen a pass like that since John Smith broke his ankle in the blizzard of '94.") ....I say all this so I won't be misunderstood when I say: I like listening to Tyson, but I can't stand the color guy. As soon as be opens his mouth, I close the tab. Just my 2 cents.

S17E28 saw Neil illuminate Chuck (and us all) on things light!

Towards the end, they touched on the story of William Herschel.

William Herschel didn’t start out as a scientist. But he ended up discovering that infrared and light are ultimately the same thing. An he discovered uranus too!

Read about his remarkable story (with the sources) at our Project Credo StarTalk Board! Thanks all.

She has a brilliant mind, gorgeous, and is very quick witted. The interplay of knowledge between our past, microbiology, chemistry, and relation to Neil’s expertise made for a very fascinating episode.

Please check it out if you haven’t already.

A lot of times you never know with comedians how much is an act of persona they're putting on to dumb themselves down, but it is amazing how knowledgeable and well spoken Chuck is. Gary is not bad either, Paul maybe less so.

"Simulation Theory" comes up on StarTalk every so often.

It came up recently on S17E12 ("Cosmic Queries: Is the Universe a Math Problem?"), where a listener asks: Do we live in a simulation?

Neil and co. discuss the idea for a few minutes – but as always with these “cosmic queries” discussions, there isn’t much time to go into detail.

So, what exactly is simulation theory and why do so many people seem to believe it? Let’s dig in.

Bostrom’s Paper

The modern form of the simulation hypothesis comes from a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom.

First, he argues that it should be possible to simulate consciousness.

Bostrom is talking sci-fi more than “real life,” rooted in known science but pushed to the extreme. If we had a computer the size of a planet, he concludes that we could simulate “the entire mental history of mankind.”

In other words, we could simulate every human brain to ever exist.

The Three Possibilities

This leads to three possibilities:

1. No human-level civilizations reach this technological level. Either large-scale disaster (man-made or not) or technological stagnation could prevent this from happening.
2. No human-level civilization at this tech level is interested in making such simulations. After developing to this level, human-level civilizations could simply lose interest in making these simulations. Maybe they’re too advanced to benefit, or think it’s cruel to simulate human-like minds.
3. We are almost certainly living in a simulation. If 1) and 2) aren’t true, then it’s likely there are many simulations. If there are simulations within simulations, the number becomes truly huge (see image below). At this point, a simple count of “real” vs. simulated realities makes it almost certain we’re in a simulation.

Improving the Estimate

Bostrom basically compares numbers (real vs. simulated) to make his famous argument.

But there’s a slightly improved, Bayesian calculation that just puts us at just over 50% odds of living in a true reality. One key difference is assuming some limit to simulations within simulations – eventually, computing power runs out.

So toss a coin. If you call it right, maybe we’re real.

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If you're keen to delve deeper into the actual source material, check out our post on Project Credo: https://projectcredo.com/posts/424

We're building Project Credo a space for "evidence-grounded" discussion – and StarTalk is our first community. If you have any feedback, we'd love to hear it!

https://www.instagram.com/saawan/

Let me start by saying that I oddly really like the intermission, it gives me asmr vibes idk. That being said why do you think they’ve never updated the clip. Neil is talking to the camera man and does multiple claps at the beginning which just makes it looks kinda odd (not sure what word to put here). Again I find it kind of endearing but from a production standpoint I would think they would want to tidy it up. What are y’all’s thoughts?lol