SR StarTalk Radio

Podcast

StarTalk Radio

Science, pop culture, and comedy collide on StarTalk Radio! Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and Director of New York's Hayden Planetarium, and his comic co-hosts, guest celebrities, and scientific experts explore astronomy, physics, and everything else there is to know about life in the universe. New episodes premiere Tuesdays. Keep Looking Up! Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

Website ↗ Last published 3 November 2026 1,143 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on StarTalk Radio

“I'm not asking, is there life on Mars? I'm asking, is there life on 6,000 exoplanets orbiting the galaxy? So I don't even know if I can come up with a question that we might be asking 10 years from now. … I lose sleep wondering what questions I do not even yet know to ask.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk Radio
Neil deGrasse Tyson · 3 Nov 2026 Listen →
“In some sense, the fundamental question we need to answer as a species about whether this episode is the season finale or the series finale of our species is whether we can escape game theory. Do we do the thing that game theory says? And what is game theory? It's sort of like the ability to know what is the strategically right move.” — Aza Raskin, StarTalk Radio
Aza Raskin · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“We sort of think of social media as a kind of baby AI. All it could do is rearrange human posts and human content, decide what we see, and a tiny little misalignment, where it wasn't optimizing for our well-being or our health or for truth or for knowledge, but optimizing for getting our attention, that was enough to have destroyed much of the world we love the most and the highest rates of teen suicide, things like that. And the question to ask is, Charlie Munger famously said, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. Have we changed the incentive as we move from baby AI to mammoth AI? And the answer is, of course, no, we haven't. So why would we expect any different outcome?” — Aza Raskin, StarTalk Radio
Aza Raskin · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“There should be a penalty. The longer that, say, a company like OpenAI doesn't disclose or doesn't find something that their rogue AIs do, the higher their penalty should be. And it shouldn't just be in money. It's sort of like, if you're a soccer team and you're doing bad behavior, you get a red card. You have to go down a player or you have to go down two players. Well, what's the penalty in AI? Well, it's like take away some of the compute. You get a red card… You just can't go as fast anymore because you're not doing it safely.” — Aza Raskin, StarTalk Radio
Aza Raskin · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Imagine a chimpanzee being like, okay, so there's going to be a new version of me that's like a bit smarter. What is the risk? Well, is it going to like eat more of the bananas? Like, well, what are they really going to do? Chimps could not conceptualize the atomic bomb and like roads. And this is the same thing. We cannot conceptualize the actual risks of smarter than human intelligence… because it is just beyond our comprehension.” — Aza Raskin, StarTalk Radio
Aza Raskin · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“It's just as bad to have, like the ghost hunters, to have an agenda. They start with a belief in ghosts and then they're just using confirmation bias, just trying to confirm that. So any anomaly is considered evidence for a ghost. And the opposite of that, the dismissive debunking approach, is equally bad because both of those are starting with the answer and working backwards to the evidence.” — Joe Nickell, StarTalk Radio
Joe Nickell · 23 Oct 2026 Listen →
“If we imagine the universe is born and it is not infinite, or it is infinite, and we ask, is nature trying every possibility? As it happens mathematically, there are an infinite number of ways for the universe to be finite, but there are very few ways for the universe to be infinite. So, where are we? Where do we live?” — Janna Levin, StarTalk Radio
Janna Levin · 20 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Brains made of very simple cells produce extraordinary thoughts, whereas human societies, kind of made of extraordinary individual thoughts, produces a total shit show in the aggregate. … If you have very smart parts, you don't necessarily have a smart whole.” — David Krakauer, StarTalk Radio
David Krakauer · 2 Oct 2026 Listen →
“You could eat a bowl of soup with a fork. Slowly. … Enough time, enough energy. You can solve math problem with language. Enough time, enough energy. And human intelligence is based on a tough world where you don't have enough time and you don't have enough energy.” — David Krakauer, StarTalk Radio
David Krakauer · 2 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The catastrophe that we're seeing, we created and we're kind of keeping it going.” — Jessica Ware, StarTalk Radio
Jessica Ware · 18 Aug 2026 Listen →
“…insects we think are declining at a rate that we've never seen before.” — Jessica Ware, StarTalk Radio
Jessica Ware · 18 Aug 2026 Listen →

Hosts

StarTalk Radio is hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson , Chuck Nice , Gary O'Reilly , Eugene Mirman , Charles Liu , Matt Kirshen , Paul Mecurio , Leighann Lord , Negin Farsad , Maeve Higgins , Sasheer Zamata and Carolyn Porco .

Recent Episodes

  1. 3 Nov 2026

    The Habitable Worlds Observatory with Evgenya Shkolnik

    With Evgenya Shkolnik

  2. 30 Oct 2026

    The Game Theory of AI with Aza Raskin

    With Aza Raskin

  3. 27 Oct 2026

    Bose-Einstein Condensate, Collisions, The Physics of Fire –TYTYK

  4. 23 Oct 2026

    Spooky Science with Mary Roach

    With Joe Nickell

  5. 20 Oct 2026

    In Theory with Janna Levin

    With Janna Levin

  6. 16 Oct 2026

    The Science of Lookmaxxing with Dr. Noc

    With Morgan McSweeney

  7. 13 Oct 2026

    The Chemistry of Life with Kate the Chemist

    With Kate Biberdorf

  8. 6 Oct 2026

    Cosmic Queries – Light Sails & Quantum Scales

  9. 2 Oct 2026

    What Is Intelligence? With David Krakauer

    With David Krakauer

  10. 29 Sep 2026

    Quantum Anomalies with Lara Anderson

    With Lara Anderson

  11. 25 Sep 2026

    Cosmic Queries – Space Junk! with Moriba Jah

    With moriba jah

  12. 22 Sep 2026

    Lost in Space Game Night

    With Lindsey Walker

Guests

Bill Nye (52 episodes), Heather Berlin (31 episodes), Janna Levin (26 episodes), John Eric Goff (23 episodes), David Grinspoon (16 episodes), Brian Greene (12 episodes), Natalie Starkey (9 episodes), Scott Adsit (8 episodes), Michael Shermer (8 episodes), Michael Ian Black (8 episodes), Mary Roach (8 episodes), Adam Savage (7 episodes), and 636 more.