00:01:55.040Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, let me explain to our guests who you are, and then I'm going to get it wrong, and you're going to correct me. Moya is a delightful person who is also an astrophysicist and also has a degree in storytelling, myth-making, mythology.
00:02:59.560So, Moya is also a science communicator and podcast host, host of Pale Blue Pod, which is also a member of Multitude Productions, and the author of The Milky Way.
00:03:14.980The Milky Way, yes. An autobiography of our galaxy.
00:03:18.160Yes. And also the author of the upcoming book.
00:03:23.720Mothers of Invention, A History of Creativity from the Greek Muses.
00:04:26.820We're like, oh, biology. Let's just take that. It's astrobiology now.
00:04:31.040Exactly. Yes. So I want to talk with you a little bit about history because, yeah, a field that neither of us have any professional qualifications in.
00:04:42.980But I swear it's going to come back around to mythology and folklore.
00:04:46.400Because I remember I was talking with you maybe a couple years back about your upcoming book when you were in the early stages of working on it, and you said something that has stuck with me ever since you—I know, I know, I haven't told you this.
00:05:04.320Again, the whole point of this episode of the podcast is to make Moya uncomfortable.
00:05:09.480Awesome. I'll give you a measurement of how much I sweat at the end.0.93
00:05:13.260Yes, yeah, and then we'll invite you back.
00:05:16.400But yeah, awesome. We're friends. No, you said that genius used to be seen as this sort of
00:05:28.840impersonal, well, not impersonal, but an external force. People were touched by genius
00:05:36.340or inspired by genius. Yeah. Or the genius whispered in their ear.
00:05:41.680Exactly. Whereas now we more commonly use the word to describe a person to say that a person is a genius. And I kept thinking about this while I was in like the later stages of working on my most recent book, More Everything Forever, because one of the sort of subtextual, not really subtextual themes of that book is that I hate the great man theory of history.
00:07:53.500OK, so for our listeners who don't know, Jeff Marcy was a is an astronomer who is also like a notorious like serial sexual abuser and drummed out of the field.
00:08:35.940And that leads to so many issues in society.
00:08:39.200And I think we really can trace it back to putting that pressure on ourselves and getting rid of the external genius.
00:08:46.360This is something that I see as really closely connected to how we think about the future.
00:08:51.620If we believe in something like a great man theory of history and the lone genius theory of inspiration and artistic and scientific accomplishment, which I see is like just two sides of the same coin, again, parachuting into history and saying that we know what we're talking about.
00:09:06.520But if you believe in that, then you believe that the future has to be shaped by these, you know, great men.
00:09:18.680But yeah, if you believe that, then you believe that you really have to let these powerful dudes in society today do what they want to do and guide us into the future.
00:09:33.420And it's very clear when you look at, oh, just to pick a person at random, Elon Musk.
00:09:42.340someone neither of us has ever thought about oh yeah no neither of us ever think about him
00:09:48.580that's true yeah yeah and then the issue with lifting people up putting them on this pedestal
00:09:55.480is that eventually you forget why you put them up there in the first place so you just start
00:10:00.020going along with whatever they say they no longer have to be a genius because now they've reached
00:10:04.640celebrity status and that has bled into other aspects of society as well where we are now
00:10:11.040treating celebrities like they are geniuses and listening to them in domains that they have no
00:10:18.020business being in, even less business than we have being in history. I would rather hear you
00:10:26.860talk about history than hear Nicki Minaj talk about epidemiology. And yet, there are plenty
00:10:34.700of people out there who in practice disagree with us yeah no that's true i mean
00:10:40.220i just i didn't expect us to be talking about nikki minaj talking about epidemiology on this
00:10:47.280episode i'm yeah i'm here to make you uncomfortable now no this is great no i i know about her stuff
00:10:53.680i just it hadn't occurred to me that this was going to come up this is great yes and yeah making
00:10:57.940me uncomfortable i mean that's one of the running themes of the entire show is making me uncomfortable
00:11:03.080uh so yeah good um but yeah no i think that's right i mean we we treat business leaders like
00:11:11.520their geniuses we treat celebrities of various kinds like their geniuses and we don't actually
00:11:17.660remember that they have no qualifications and the things that they're talking about
00:11:20.800uh like the trend of ceo said something journalism and like yeah okay sam altman really wants
00:12:22.860And I'm curious, I mean, I really know very little about the history of mythology and folklore. Yeah, and you've got a huge smile on your face and are, like, rubbing your hands together in anticipation.
00:12:36.980Yes, raccoon hands. Exactly. That's what it is.
00:12:39.480yeah i mean it's mythology is fascinating because it is truth that we make and it's truth with a
00:12:50.500capital t that even if it's not lowercase t true the fact that so many people believe in it
00:12:55.740makes it still hold that power over us um there are a lot of different reasons why people make
00:13:05.100folklore and tell these these sacred stories that eventually become myths. Some of it is for fun,
00:13:10.380of course, like we wanted to be entertained as a species for thousands of years. But a lot of it
00:13:15.180is a lot more practical. A lot of the especially foundational myths in creation myths, in myths
00:13:23.600about the changing of the seasons or anything having to do with nature. Those myths were meant
00:13:28.660to be earlier attempts at the scientific method, really, like they're observing the world around
00:13:34.280them and then figuring out a hypothesis for how it works. And the explanations just happen to have
00:13:40.020gods or spirits or something. And so you can really look at the myths that people have,
00:13:46.040the myths that have endured, and get an understanding of what people who told those
00:13:50.440stories knew about the world around them. But there are other reasons for myth as well. A lot of
00:13:57.080what's it called? Like social control. You use myths to establish social norms,
00:14:04.320teach kids that you respect your elders and you don't stray off the path, but also teach adults
00:14:09.640that if you are too proud and you're too boastful and you put yourself above your station, that
00:14:15.260something bad is going to come your way. I'm trying to cycle doubt into a point here. And so
00:14:20.580So one thing that we often see, and that ties back to people being elevated to celebrity or genius status today, is that there would be kings who wanted their legacy to last or wanted to artificially increase their power.
00:14:38.860And so they would have almost like a propaganda campaign to elevate them to kinghood, maybe not in their lifetime, but afterwards for sure.
00:14:48.220We see this with Shango, the Orisha of Thunder in Yoruba religion, who we think was once a human king who was then deified as Shango, the Orisha.
00:15:01.040Um, Hercules probably wasn't a single individual, but was a person or a class of people who did some heroic deeds, not actually fighting a river monster, but perhaps just like diverting a stream with clever geomechanics and engineering.
00:15:19.040and so that that is often how folklore and mythology get made it's taking real things
00:15:24.920that happen and it's exaggerating them and and magicifying them until they become larger than
00:15:30.700life because those are the types of stories that we remember that all makes sense but i'm i'm
00:15:35.360wondering about like sort of the modern myth making that we're doing in sort of the same way
00:15:40.680around some of these celebrities who we give the power of telling us what the future is going to
00:15:47.920be. Yes, that's a very particular type of power and influence. Yeah. There's a whole branch of
00:15:55.060tech bro called futurists who claim that they can imagine what is coming. And we've always been
00:16:01.340obsessed with being able to predict what's coming next. We've loved prophecies. We've loved oracles.
00:16:07.560We love seers. And so any person with enough influence who comes along and can even demonstrate
00:16:15.020like a modicum of success with their predictions will like the opposite of Cassandra be ballooned
00:16:23.320to to these these heights of worship sometimes isn't that so sad though you don't even have to
00:16:32.420be right all of the time Elon Musk is not right most of the time and yet because he did like a
00:16:37.720couple things that people now know of and like people will just believe whatever he says go along
00:16:44.380with it i have so much trouble understanding why people would put someone alive or like any real
00:16:54.380person on a pedestal like that and certainly not a billionaire but there's a lot of things that
00:16:59.100people do that i don't understand i mean in a way well actually okay no this is i i'm gonna get weird
00:17:06.620for a second this is in a way reminding me of the fan fiction that people write about real people
00:17:25.900One thing I argue in my upcoming book, Mothers of Invention, is that part of the reason people are desperate to believe in the celebrity is because of the power vacuum that was left when we moved a little bit away from God, starting in the Enlightenment.
00:17:42.780era. And we still wanted something that we could not just believe in, but rely on. We wanted to be
00:17:52.700able to put our faith and trust in someone else and say, it's okay, they've got it. And the
00:17:58.000geniuses and the celebrities became that. For a while, we were very good at trusting someone's
00:18:05.260expertise and respecting someone's expertise. And then it's almost like we took that just a little
00:18:09.800bit too far where now we trust the person and we don't even test that they have the expertise
00:18:13.560anymore. Yeah. Although I'm not to say that fake news and and, you know, doing your own research
00:18:20.500and all that hasn't gotten worse recently. But there's always been a lot of misinformation and
00:18:24.700disinformation out there. But now it's easier to spread that than ever on on the platforms that
00:18:30.600will pick up not necessarily what's true, but just what will get the biggest reaction.
00:18:35.460Yes, indeed. The idea that it's something sort of being done in place of God has me—oh, God, it's putting terrible memes into my head, first of all, right? It's like those youth pastor memes of, like, God was the original influencer.
00:18:52.840Oh, no. It's going to be in Drewski's next skit.
00:18:58.860Yeah. Now I don't know what you're talking about.
00:20:00.680I just didn't know that they were like...
00:20:02.920making them levitate um that's i have to ascend yeah i but no but isn't that
00:20:10.140again i don't know enough about christianity but isn't that like blasphemy of some kind like i
00:20:15.140don't know uh well apparently you can post yourself as jesus healing the sick and it's okay you just
00:20:20.420meant to post yourself as a doctor oh my god okay yeah uh so i don't know when this podcast is going
00:20:26.720up, but we're recording this podcast like a day after Trump did that. Oh, God. Actually,
00:20:34.300we're recording this podcast the day that the first episode of this podcast goes live.
00:20:40.600So welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine. But yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, Trump does seem
00:20:48.540to be getting some backlash against that. There's got to be a line for some people.
00:20:52.380I mean, oh, God, now I'm thinking of things that I really can't say on air. But let's stop talking about Donald Trump. But yeah. Oh, my God. No, telling me things about the human condition that I didn't know about is actually, I think, one of the running themes of this show.
00:21:14.760Oh, good. Okay. Well, this time it was Drewski and megachurches.
00:21:20.680Yeah, awesome. That's awesome. Now I know things I didn't want to know.
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00:21:53.260Multitude is a podcast company made up of passionate people
00:22:10.340Astro-physicist Dr. Moya McTeer and her best friend, ConStar, demystify space one topic at a time with open eyes, open arms, and open mouths from so much laughing and jaw-dropping.
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00:22:31.080New episodes every Monday, wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:23:34.600garnishes and aromatics. And so you can try the drinks without going off and buying full bottles
00:23:40.300of niche ingredients that you'll never use again. It's a great idea for date nights or hosting a
00:23:45.780party or bringing a gift to someone else's party. And you can always skip or swap boxes or even just
00:23:53.080buy individual kits or ingredients without subscribing. So you can try this stuff out
00:23:58.160at their website shakerandspoon.com going back to this idea of celebrity influence
00:24:06.720and people being seen as geniuses as a as a replacement for god i mean this goes back to
00:24:14.600stuff that i talked about in my recent book more everything forever uh where where i said that
00:24:21.420that even though i don't know very much about christianity it certainly seems like
00:24:25.380uh the ideas about the future that are common in the tech industry of going to space and living
00:24:31.720forever really seem like a sort of warmed over version of christianity oh yeah the idea of myths
00:24:38.640for being used as a form of social control i mean that actually also goes back to an earlier episode
00:24:44.120that we did here with rio evalith where we were talking about like who gets to be a futurist
00:24:48.420But it also has me thinking about the role that our ideas about the past and about how the world is play in both shaping what we think the future can be and also just how we choose to live our lives.
00:25:08.180Like, these myths were and are, like, these modern myths are ways of, like, finding sense and order in our lives to, you know, be able to live in a world that feels scary and confusing, right?
00:25:24.040And before these myths were written down, when it was oral transmission, you could adapt the stories to the needs of the time.
00:25:32.460And I know that there are some living religious traditions where Judaism, for example, where the point is to update it and to stay modern with the interpretation of the lessons in the stories.
00:25:52.440We know in science that it's important to go back, revisit and retest your results.
00:25:57.200in order to have a sustainable structure it's important for you to like revisit the myths
00:26:02.980yeah and the lessons in okay i'm gonna ask you a question that is like a running
00:26:09.420concern of mine that i've asked at least a couple of other guests already on this show
00:26:15.780um there's a modern myth that i am sort of obsessed with and i i want to understand why
00:26:23.900it's been so durable and it is you know because this is streaming against the machine is an idea
00:26:29.200about the future um and it's this sort of 1950s american sci-fi vision of what the future is
00:26:39.580something plated in chrome with rocket ships and robots and you know this idea that the future
00:26:45.960is in space that that's like the location of the future that there's going to be robots that
00:26:52.960there's going to be unimaginably advanced technology that lets us go to space and live
00:26:58.560forever. You know, some of that is, like I said, has to do with like weird Christian movements.0.98
00:27:05.440But some of that is like really specific 1950s astounding science fiction stuff.
00:27:11.040And it's very weird to me how durable that idea has been in the American psyche about like what
00:27:19.980the future is uh to give you i'm gonna i'm gonna tell you a story and i'm gonna change the names
00:27:28.060to protect the not so innocent uh there was a podcast that i was on a few months ago and i'm
00:27:32.260not gonna say which podcast um but they brought me on uh as a bunch of places have recently
00:27:38.220to be the guy arguing that space is not the place and that the future is not in space
00:27:44.700okay i you know made this case against mars and against space colonization in general
00:27:50.580and the host who is a you know good podcast host pointed out that they had started this series by
00:27:58.720asking like doing a bunch of like person on the street interviews and asking people like hey you
00:28:04.540know if you could move to mars would you and a bunch of people said yes and uh yeah yeah because
00:28:11.720of what we're doing. It's not Earth's fault. Exactly. Yeah. But also, I think that they
00:28:17.520don't have an appreciation of how much Mars sucks. But that is Mars's fault.0.95
00:28:21.260That is Mars's fault. And Mars is a bad place and it should feel bad. That's true. But I said
00:28:26.860that to this podcast host, not the part about Mars feeling bad, but the rest of it. And he said,
00:28:32.360don't we need it as a first step for the day when we find a planet?
00:28:41.720That's, you know, looks a lot like Earth orbiting a sun, a lot like the star, a lot like the orbiting a star, a lot like the sun in some distant galaxy.
00:29:04.020i'm laughing because people really don't understand how precious and special and
00:29:14.340fine-tuned this pale blue dot of ours really is they don't understand how unimaginably
00:29:21.220far away the nearest earth analog planet is going to be they don't understand a distant galaxy
00:29:28.300Galaxy. We've barely sent anything out of our solar system. Are you kidding me? That's crazy.
00:29:35.380But like I think the reason that this is so appealing to people is because it's exactly the mentality that America has always had and that America was founded on.
00:29:46.480It's the it's the colonialism mindset. It's the expand into whatever we can possibly expand into and do that using free labor.
00:29:56.740You know, the robots are just like we want slavery again. And let's do that with as much extraction and as little sustainability and forethought as possible. It's amazing to me that the future that these people envision is actually just the past, but in a way that makes it harder for there to be a future in that future. They don't envision sustainability. They don't envision cooperation. They just envision take, take, take.
00:30:23.860yeah it's not surprising to me that they do that because it's just what they've always done
00:30:27.600no and i think that that's you know like again connected to uh this idea of like the the great
00:30:33.940man of history you know the the dude striding out of the spaceship across the surface of some
00:30:41.080other planet trailed in some distant galaxy yeah in some distant galaxy a long time ago in a galaxy
00:34:49.580Um, um, except I, I, I'm sure that you get this question a lot, but I, I want to hear you explain it. Um, why did you study both folklore and astronomy?
00:35:03.560Hmm. The true answer is that I'm very stubborn and people told me that I couldn't. And, um, I wanted the free food that both departments would give me often. So I, I decided to study both.
00:35:19.580Okay, that's like a peak grad student answer, is what that is.
00:35:26.700I was already thinking like a grad student in college.
00:35:30.320The joke answer, Adam, is that I figured that if there ever was a Stargate program,
00:35:38.280I would be the perfect combination of Daniel and Sam,
00:35:41.960and they would have no choice but to put me on a team.
00:37:31.560Yeah, thank you. I mean, the official reason for it was that I knew that people would ask me, but Adam, you know, how could you dare to say what Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Sam Altman is saying about the world without asking them if that's what they believe?
00:37:46.080And like, look, I tried and they wouldn't talk to me.
00:37:49.680But but also in my heart, the real reason was that I'm petty.
00:37:55.020And in the same way that the true name of the book is not more everything forever.0.99
00:40:15.640And I think that maybe we can actually help people here for a minute if we talk about this.
00:40:21.180Because, like, I think that it's important to point out that, you know, we all suffer from imposter syndrome. And then if you don't suffer from some form of imposter syndrome, you're probably Elon Musk or someone like that.
00:40:38.880I have had so many people say so many nice things to me about both of my books, especially the new
00:40:43.520book. And I was suffering from like world-class soul-crushing imposter syndrome when I was
00:40:50.340writing it. Because, oh yeah, no, I was writing this thing and I was thinking, oh my God, this
00:40:56.720is a job for a tech journalist. I'm not a tech journalist. I'm a science journalist. I'm barely
00:41:02.240even a journalist. I have a PhD in physics. How did I become a writer for a living? I have no
00:41:07.620formal training in journalism or writing. Uh, now I'm writing books. What the fuck am I doing
00:41:12.780with that? My first book was about physics. This one isn't really about physics. What am I doing?0.99
00:41:18.360Um, oh yeah. Also like I'm, I'm covering all of these academic areas that I don't have any real
00:41:24.080training in. Like this is a book that should be written by an anthropologist or a sociologist or
00:41:28.300historian um you know and and then it was fine okay and then it was fine and your cortisol levels
00:41:41.700are back to normal baseline for you definitely they're lower than they were okay um sometimes
00:41:47.940it still feels like the drama knob has been super glued at 11 yeah but um which is not where i want
00:41:55.460it to be but you want that writing around six right decent five to six i don't even know if i
00:42:01.200want i'd like i'd be fine with three or four honestly oh i'm nosy i need the tea i mean oh
00:42:08.240no no this is why we have to start the podcast of of justifying other people's existence i want
00:42:13.960other people's drama knobs at five or six that's yes yes i just don't need mine there it's been
00:42:19.340stuck at 11 for long enough good point anyway i think that is as good a place of closing out
00:42:25.940this podcast as we're going to get to i i will say for the imposter stuff uh i i too recently
00:42:33.100talked to chanda prescott weinstein and we talked about something similar to this and the advice
00:42:39.140that that she gave me that really helped was she said that she knows that she grew as a writer in
00:42:45.600in her second book. And so I'm focusing more on that. I know that I grew as a writer. And so I'm
00:42:50.640just shifting what success for this book means as opposed to what success for my first book meant.
00:42:55.620That's so interesting. I also feel like I grew as a writer when I was writing my second book.
00:42:59.820And in a lot of ways, it was because it was outside of this area of my expertise.
00:43:05.260And that was terrifying. And I was working without a net. But then it was fine. And I'm
00:43:12.380actually happy with it and i feel like more talking about redefining success i'm realizing
00:43:17.640that the thing that i am terrified of more than bad reviews more than people telling me that they
00:43:23.540don't like it more than like hate mail or abuse online or anything is that i won't like my work
00:43:29.240yeah and no i think that is where we're going to end it um and because you got to go right yes
00:44:40.500Thanks again to this week's guest, Moya McTeer.
00:44:43.460Next week, we've got historian Susanna Glickman.
00:44:46.420She and I had a great conversation where we talked about the sort of 1950s rocket ships and chrome style of the future and why that's been such a persistent vision in the American psyche.
00:44:58.960To submit questions for future guests and to suggest other guests, and to see more pictures of Babka, join the conversation on Patreon.
00:45:09.740You can also find us on YouTube, on Instagram at DATMPod, on the web, and on Blue Sky at DreamingAgainstTheMachine.com, or just find us wherever you get your podcasts.
00:45:21.380Dreaming Against the Machine is a proud member of Multitude Productions.
00:45:24.920Our executive producer is Nick Carissimi.
00:45:28.100Our associate producer is Rosie Thomas.
00:45:30.660Our theme music is by Jared Emerson Johnson.