Former Vice President Mike Pence breaking out from Trump by backing incumbent Governor Brian Kemp against Trump-endorsed David Perdue who was pushing the big lie on the 2020 elections. Former secretary of Labor explaining the economy by appearing as a cartoon character. Neil deGrasse Tyson joins THE BEAT to talk about the Pentagon saying some UFO videos are just unexplainable and chatting about the multiverse theory. Rudy Giuliani faces Congress and puts the heat on Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro to talk.
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC HOST: Still not been questioned but for now, little R and R for him. It's the most important thing.
Thank you so much letting us into your homes on this Monday. We are grateful. THE BEAT WITH ARI MELBER starts right now.
ARI MELBER, MSNBC HOST: Hi, Nicolle. Thank you so much. Welcome to THE BEAT, everyone. Happy Monday. I am Ari Melber.
We are tacking another big state in this primary season right now. You hear the music. It's Georgia, a once red bastion that gave Democrats two Senate seats and thus control of the Senate, partly from shifting demographics and partly, as we all remember from Donald Trump's extremism leaving office, which boomeranged on him in that once red state.
Well, Georgia is back voting tomorrow in the governor's race, in a place where Trump remains under criminal investigation for his attempt to shake down a top election official to commit voter fraud and steal that race for him. A plot that failed. And then Trump recruited candidates to run against the Republicans who defied him, a sort of authoritarian revenge tour.
But here's the news tonight as we approach tomorrow's primary. Fresh signs that tour may fail. Trump's handpicked challenger to the governor backing the big lie by claiming that the actual winner Joe Biden stole the race.
DAVID PERDUE (R), GEORGIA CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR: First off, folks, let me be very clear tonight, the election in 2020 was rigged and stolen. All that started right here in Georgia when our governor caved and allowed radical Democrats to steal our election.
MELBER: So that's what Trump's candidate Perdue is selling, and Trump's using his mega phone to brand the incumbent governor, Kemp, as a turncoat or a coward. But Trump's not exactly pulling out all the stops to campaign for him, instead offering a tele-rally for Perdue tonight, and that bring us to the facts portion of this little inter-scene Republican primary brawl.
How is this actually playing in Republican primary where we've heard from politicos and D.C. elites so much about Donald Trump's sway over the conservative base? Well, these numbers tell the story. Kemp up by a whopping 30 plus points among likely Republican voters, and that's in a new FOX News poll. And Republicans who are eyeing the party's future like Trump's former Vice President Pence are actually rejecting Trump's pick and openly backing the incumbent Kemp.
Pence is actually out stumping on ground in Georgia today, which is a complete rejection of Donald Trump's position in the race and of course Pence could have played it safe. Nobody was demanding that he do anything in Georgia. He's going out of his way to reject Trump's attempt to punish someone who wouldn't steal an election.
And let's be clear, if you remember anything about the four years of the Trump-Pence administration I bet you remember this is a kind of independence that Mr. Pence never showed while in office, and yet how Trump and his rabid fans treated Pence on the way out is etched in history, and perhaps etched in Mike Pence's mind because those people who stormed the Capitol, some of whom have been indicted and convicted, were part of mobs that made public heinous calls to assassinate Mike Pence.
That's led to the indictments, that's led to the insurrection probe, it led to an impeachment, of course, and it's also led to what we're seeing now. They have Mike Pence spending his own political capital and influence to stop Trump in Georgia, to stop efforts to incentivize the big lie and the mechanisms to steal future elections which could look even worse than what you see on your screen.
Well, depending on what happens tomorrow when the voters decide, Mike Pence might just do that. He might just, along with some other people, stop Donald Trump in his tracks in Georgia again.
Let's get into the big preview of the big primary with "Washington Post" columnist EJ Dionne, author of "100 Percent Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting," and the "Daily Beast's" Margaret Carlson.
EJ, what you do see here in Georgia?
EJ DIONNE, THE WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST: You know, we were talking -- you were talking about Trump's revenge tour. Clearly this is Mike Pence's revenge tour, and he has clearly made a decision, as have some other Republicans, that the next election is open, that Trump is by no means the automatic nominee. There was a straw poll in Wisconsin over the weekend, where Trump didn't do very well and Governor DeSantis did quite well, and the irony here is that Governor Kemp is no liberal.
Governor Kemp signed a voter security bill which many see as a voter suppression bill. I see it as a voter suppression bill. But he has been turned into a kind of moderate by Trump's attack. But I think the key thing here -- and after he lose -- after David Perdue loses, I am sure we will hear this a lot from Donald Trump.
David Perdue is a lousy candidate. He doesn't like to campaign. He doesn't like much about the process. He lost that Senate seat, and by every indication he's going to get clobbered tomorrow.
MELBER: Yes, Margaret, we see this playing out again and again. Trump's demands that the Republican Party relive what for them was the nightmare of 2020, not only losing of course the presidential race, but losing Georgia in a way that many people who followed it didn't think was inevitable by any means. And now they're back in Georgia reliving the big lie and reliving another loss. I'm just curious what you think this says about Trump's political acumen.
MARGARET CARLSON, THE DAILY BEAST COLUMNIST: Well, the only beef that Trump has with Kemp is that he wouldn't commit treason for him and overturn the Georgia election, which was counted, audited, recounted, re-audited, and was won fair and square by Joe Biden. That's the only beef. OK.
Where the Republicans have gone from fearing they can't win without Trump to fearing they can't win with him in November because some of his candidates that he's endorsed don't look good in the general at all. You know, if Dr. Oz pulls it out in Pennsylvania, I mean, this is a guy who lives in New Jersey, votes in Turkey, running in Pennsylvania, pushes nutritional supplements. And he's unlikely to win against John Fetterman, who just got out of the hospital. Cheers for that. Who's comfortable on the factory floor, not on the faculty lounge.
He's the guy in khakis who's of the people, who makes a point of it. So I don't know about Pennsylvania. And then the governor -- the governor's candidate, who's a pro-insurrectionist, Doug Mastriano, how can he win? I mean, he was in Washington on January 6th. He was there. And Ginni Thomas, I mean, she wasn't actually there, even though she pushed it.
So I think Republicans are having a moment where even their governors' association is trying to, you know, get some of their people to win primaries and then go on in a general rather than have Trump's candidates do that.
MELBER: Yes. And Margaret, you mentioned Dr. Oz, you know, those nutritional supplement ads, they sound great, I mean, what they offer. You know, there's only one problem.
CARLSON: They don't work. Not that I've tried them, but in general, I think the FDA tells us that nutritional supplements don't work, so it's not a good post for him. You know, the interesting thing about these candidates is that they're Groundhog Day in reverse. They keep saying the same thing and doing the same thing over and over about the big lie and January 6th. And they never get better.
Unlike Bill Murray, they don't. There's no self-improvement. They don't get better. They just become more Trumpian. And by the way, Trump is so disloyal. Look at Mo Brooks. He didn't think he was doing well so he kind of dropped him, and now Mo Brooks is doing OK again.
MELBER: Is doing better, yes.
DIONNE: Yes -- no, he's doing better since Trump dropped him. You know, I agree with Margaret's analysis about Republicans thinking they can't win with a lot of these Trumpist candidates, but they are in a bit of a box because they can't win with some of these extreme Trump candidates, and yet they can't win the general election if Trump voters don't turn out.
One of the reasons Democrats won those Senate races in Georgia after the general election is that a lot of Trump voters stayed home. Trump wasn't on the ballot. So the Republicans have to knock out bad Trumpist candidates, and they failed to in Pennsylvania. Trump, by the way, that guy is so radical that Trump waited until the end to endorse him, you know, and when it was clear he was going to win.
The other thing I'm starting to wonder about is, if there isn't a peculiar pragmatism in Republican electorates in these governor's races. They think the Senate and the House are about bombast so they'll elect really bombastic, they'll nominate really bombastic Trumpists for those jobs, but in some of these governor's races like Nebraska, like Idaho, it looks like in Georgia, they worry about schools and roads and bridges and parks, and they want stuff out of their state government, so maybe they're not as eager to nominate these kind of crazy people to be their governors.
MELBER: Yes, I mean, we're definitely watching something on two tracks where there's the real economy and the real concerns in America at a time when there's a ton of problems. People know them. They're living through rising prices. Worried about market jitters. We have some more on that later tonight. It's actually pretty interesting. And then you have this political programming, Margaret, this content farm that has just moved further and further to the right, which is why they're embracing also reality-style candidates.
And then there's people's reality. The Democrats are seizing on the Mastriano nominee in Pennsylvania that you mentioned. They think that whatever Supreme Court Justice Alito and others do, they're betting the pledges here to completely ban abortion linked to that expected ruling, would turn off swing voters there. They're dropping six mill to brand him immediately. And I'm curious, Margaret, what you think about that?
On the one hand, there's a human rights, women's rights substantive policy question there. We've been covering that. We took THE BEAT down to the court for a couple of days and we're keenly watching what comes out of the court. And then there's what politicians have to do which is deal with the reality, we're in a nation that's a rule of law. The Supreme Court says states now can ban what they otherwise couldn't. Then the politicians are trying to make that a clear choice in contrast in the next election, right, Margaret?
CARLSON: Well, it's a bad thing for women, but it gets the Democrats in the way because the color counties around the cities where the suburban women - - I guess they used to be called soccer moms -- will come out on this basis. It's always been a one-issue vote for the right, and now it could become one for the left, and that will help in these close races.
MELBER: Yes. And then, EJ, before I lose both of you, the other thing hanging over all of Georgia, which is unusual, but like many whacky and bad things has become somewhat normalized is Georgia race with Trump and Pence on opposite sides is playing out while there's an open investigation into the documented effort to commit massive voter fraud by Republicans and steal Georgia, which they failed to do.
"The New York Times" saying Georgia's got a jury now considering whether Trump committed crimes there. They have up to a year to recommend whether prosecutors should pursue criminal charges against Trump.
I just got to say, we haven't seen that play out in any race in the modern era, including post-Nixon for the technical reason that he took a pardon. But should that be normalize and how does that affect Georgia as well?
DIONNE: Well, what Trump did obviously should never be normalized, and I would love to be the DA trying that case because all you need to say, is let's go to the tape. Because Trump is on the record asking the secretary of state to find him exactly the number of votes, Biden's margin plus one, that he would need to win the state. If that isn't an invitation to voter fraud, I don't know what is, you know?
And so I think a lot of the lawyers I have talked to said that of all of the legal cases against Trump, this is the one that is truly dangerous because the evidence is overwhelming. What I hear is the case may not go -- be tried until after the November election. I know I'm sure Democrats would love this case to be tried somewhere around October of this year. But I think he's really vulnerable in this one.
MELBER: Yes, and it raises a question that we're going to return to in the program which is, with what you just said and the evidence what they have on tape, what exactly are the prosecutors doing? I mean, you can use grand juries all sorts of ways, but at the end of day, either the prosecutors is going for it or not. Running out the clock this long when the evidence if anything is getting older is curious to say the least.
EJ and Margaret, thanks for kicking us off. We will be watching and MSNBC will be covering this tomorrow.
Later tonight, speaking of Georgia, Stacey Abrams herself joins Joy Reid on "THE REIDOUT." She is of course the other side of the Republican primary we have been discussing. That's going to be a very interesting interview I bet.
Coming up on THE BEAT, Rudy Giuliani folded. There was debating, there was clashing but ultimately the January 6th Committee won. Nine hours of testimony from Giuliani. We'll get into that. Robert Reich is here on what you need to know about inflation, the economy, and these market jitters that are affecting so many people.
And as if that wasn't enough, (INAUDIBLE), I'm thrilled to tell you, our friend astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, back on THE BEAT tonight. We're getting into the UFOs, alternative realities, it's different than alternative facts, and a whole lot more. Shout-out to the multiverse. Big show. Stay with us.
LEONARDO DICAPRIO, ACTOR, "THE WOLF OF WALL STREET": Exxon at 86.25 six months ago. Today it is running 36.5. Mister --
They called it Black Monday. No (EXPLETIVE DELETED). By 4:00 p.m. the market had dropped 508 points. The biggest plummet since the crash of '29.
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, ACTOR, "THE WOLF OF WALL STREET": Holy. (EXPLETIVE DELETED). (EXPLETIVE DELETED).
MELBER: Now that's a rough Monday. That was the notorious market crash of 1987 as depicted in "The Wolf of Wall Street." Stocks actually dropped over 20 percent in a single day, which is a ton to lose that fast. But consider that over this year, American stocks are also now down about that same figure, 20 percent. They ticked up a bit today after major plummeting last week.
ZAIN ASHER, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: The Dow has tumbled over 1,000 points. The S&P and the Nasdaq are off about 4 percent or more.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We turn to Wall Streets where stocks had their worst day in nearly two years yesterday. There was a huge sell-off after major retailers announced a drop in their profits.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The markets tanking today. The Dow on pace for its biggest loss in two years.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Dow transports index, that economic bellwether down nearly 7 percent, hitting its lowest levels of the year. Good for its worst day since June of 2020.
MELBER: These are major problems in the markets, and if there is a wider financial collapse or recession, that triggers a lot of pain. Most people remember the 2008 crash, which not only rocked Wall Street but it led to that great recession which hurt so many Americans, drove so many job losses and bankruptcies, many of which had nothing to do with the conduct of workers, and then sparked corporate bailouts that riled American politics for over a decade.
BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: Meltdown. The American financial system is rocked to its foundation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: With California house prices falling by 50 percent or more, those who bought during the bubble are in big trouble.
ANDREA MITCHELL, MSNBC ANCHOR: Stocks plunge after the opening bell as wary investors digest yet another blow to the economy.
WILLIAMS: It was perhaps the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We begin with breaking financial news in what's being called the biggest reshaping of the financial industry since the Great Depression.
BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT: The news from Wall Street has shaken the American people's faith in our economy. We are in the most serious financial crisis in generations.
MELBER: You'll notice every time there's a big one, people mention the last one. And the last ones were 2008, which was long and painful, and the COVID crash, which turned out to be somewhat short because there was major rebound, but that may be why things are overheated right now.
If there is a big crash, bigger even than the 20 percent we've seen over this year, which is just official bear market territory, well, that can upend everything. It changes of course how people live, what they can afford to buy, whether they can own or keep a home, when they're able to retire, and of course who they want to be president.
Obama was elected in the 2008, and people remember his historic election for many reasons, but the crash and his perceived calm on the campaign trail as well as promising a sober plan to bring back the economy was certainly a big part of his first election.
Economists now are eyeing a potential recession. They look at inflation hitting this four-decade high. The Fed raising interest rates to deal with that, which could also slow the economy or have other effects. There's a problem with supply chains, there's a problem with tech valuations running away from the actual market value. There are these Wall Street gyrations.
President Biden has tried to calm matters, and his allies point to the ongoing jobs boom coming out of, as I mentioned, the relatively short COVID slump.
So how do you make sense of any of this? Well, you have to be an economist or someone in the market who understands how it works, and you might have to have some experience on the government side because this is one of those times where the government interventions in the economy are big, which brings us to someone you may recognize, Robert Reich. He was a labor secretary in the Clinton administration.
He also likes to explain things with graphics and numbers that are allegedly digestible if you're willing to do some math. And just last night, he actually had a cameo along with Hugh Jackman on the beloved "Simpsons" where they broke it all down.
HUGH JACKMAN, ACTOR: Factories closed, unemployment with strike. Here to explain it is Robert B. Reich.
ROBERT REICH, FORMER SECRETARY OF LABOR: The decline of unions, rampant corporate greed, Wall Street malfeasance and the rise of short-sighted politics all contributed to increased economic inequality, widespread real unemployment, wage stagnation, and a lower standard of living for millions of Americans.
JACKMAN: (Singing) The job salaries to raised stock prices.
REICH: Cut up the pie and kept all the slices.
JACKMAN: (Singing) Tax breaks went to CEOs. Never trickling down to average Joes. And so it came to pass --
REICH: Greedy rich man kicked our (EXPLETIVE DELETED).
JACKMAN: (Singing) Fiddling while they burned our middle class.
MELBER: Now we tried to book the cartoon of Robert Reich to appear in a special metaverse episode. We didn't get him. We're going to have to settle for the real deal. He's here when we're back in 60 seconds.
MELBER: We're back with former labor secretary and sometimes "Simpsons" character Robert Reich.
MELBER: Before we get to what might be done, let's start with what at least the "Simpsons" thinks you're good at, which is what the heck is going on? In a nutshell, I went through some of the recent events. Why is this happening right now? What exactly is happening in English?
REICH: Well, it feels like we're in a cartoon a lot of the time, but we're not in a cartoon. The first thing I think is very important to focus on is that the stock market is not the economy. There is a connection between the two, but there's also a disconnect. The economy can be very hard on a lot of people and the stock market can be doing very well, which is actually what happened over the last two years.
The stock market now is doing badly, it's hitting a very rough patch, but job growth seems to be on the right schedule. We'll know much more. But I don't want people to suddenly think that because the stock market is doing badly everything else is kind of going in the wrong direction. There are some real problems. The basic problem is inflation, obviously, and the biggest cause of inflation, the biggest cause we know is the COVID scare, the COVID experience being mostly over, the pandemic mostly over, we hope.
And that -- unleashing that great deal of pent-up demand and also a lot of supply shocks, right, hard to get the entire global economy running again. And then on top of that you've got Ukraine and on top of that you've got China shutting down, closing down. I mean, there are a lot of things going on, but the biggest worry and the worry I have is the Fed may be overreacting and raising interest rates may have nothing to do with all of the above.
MELBER: Hmm. When you look at all of this, how much of it relates to a global pandemic the likes of which the modern economy hasn't seen? I mean, the economy looks very different now than it did with the influenza 100 years ago or so, and how much of it relates to other factors including something you mentioned in the clip we showed, which is the decline of organized labor, although there's been some resurgence, and some of the apparent greed and self-dealing by millionaires and their companies at the top?
REICH: Well, the biggest factor is, in terms of inflation, we're talking about inflation. The biggest factor is the pandemic. I mean, that's really -- if you go back just -- you know, people forget. Go back to January, February, March 2020, and the economy went into a tail spin. Now it's, you know, coming out and we're seeing the reverse of what happened two years ago. So it's not surprising that we do see inflation as the kind of converse of the recession that we had two years ago.
But that gets me back to the point about the Fed. The Fed is treating this as if it's sort of a standard wage push inflation. Well, it's not wage push inflation. In fact, wages are not even keeping up with inflation. That's why I worry about the Fed overreacting.
MELBER: We did show viewers the great timing of what you did last night. I want to ask you about it. We're going to just show a little bit more of Robert Reich on the "Simpsons."
REICH: The decline of unions, rampant corporate greed, Wall Street malfeasance and the rise of short-sighted politics all contributed to increased economic inequality, widespread real unemployment, wage stagnation and a lower standard of living for millions of Americans.
MELBER: Something I've never -- I don't think I've ever asked anyone in journalism before, what's the best part of being a cartoon and how did this come together?
REICH: That's a good question. The people who are very, very clever, a producer of the "Simpsons," Tim Cook and others, they contacted me and they said, we would like you to do a duet with Hugh Jackman. And I said, look it, I can't sing, for one thing, and I really don't really have much practice being a cartoon character. They said don't worry about a thing. I went into a little studio, and I did what they told me, and all of the credit -- or blame -- is on their shoulders.
MELBER: Well, we love that. We love the timing, and there's multiple ways to learn and process everything we're going through, so a tip of the hat there. Professor, secretary, good to see you.
REICH: Good to see you too, Ari.
MELBER: Appreciate it. Coming up. The January 6 committee wins. Rudy Giuliani loses after the squabble. He testifies. We're going to get into that. But first, the Pentagon now saying some UFO videos are just unexplainable. And we have Neil deGrasse Tyson joining us next. Here we go.
MELBER: And we're back with one of our BEAT favorites acclaimed Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hi Neil, how you doing?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON, ASTROPHYSICIST, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: Hi, I like that sound a BEAT favorite. I like that.
MELBER: Hey, you know, if you earn it, you get it. So, I got more than one thing to get into with you. I wanted to show viewers of course you're right here. But we've covered something that I haven't come back to you -- yes. I haven't come back to on yet, which is -- we've got these congressional hearings on UFOs first in over 50 years.
So, at a minimum, U.S. government relating to this a little differently. A little more out in the open, the U.S. Navy, has declassified this new video that shows the spherical object whizzing by a fighter jet taken by the pilot, and we can slow it down. Here's what one Pentagon official -- here you see some of it and then here's what an official said.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is this one of the phenomena that we can't explain?
SCOTT BRAY, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, NAVAL INTELLIGENCE: I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is.
MELBER: No explanation there, your reaction writ large?
TYSON: That's what UFO stands for, unexplained flying object. So why are we surprised that a video of an unexplained flying object is described as something that they can't explain? I don't have a problem with that. The issue is when you take this leap to go from unexplained to -- because I can't explain it, therefore, I know what it is. It must be visiting aliens from another galaxy, that happens to be particularly intrigued with restricted Navy airspace.
OK, that's just something that didn't show up on Google images of satellite images of Earth, or in any of the million views that people take outside of airplane windows every day, as everyone is equipped with their high- resolution cameras and videos. Just consider that we have crowdsourced, any possible alien invasion, simply because last I checked six billion smartphones scattered across Earth's surface. So, we got this, if we're visited by aliens, I'm pretty sure you won't need congressional hearings to establish that fact.
MELBER: Well, let me -- A., I read your skepticism, which is always interesting. B. what about the sort of presentation of science, which is technical, and government panic management, which is a sort of a different enterprise because I'm sure you've also noticed a shift from the almost hyper secrecy of past decades, worried that people would say anything inexplicable is evidence of, to now they seem to be opening it up a little bit. What do you think about that as an approach?
TYSON: Yes, I don't -- I mean, it was always there. The Project Blue Book goes back decades, for example. And as was noted, it's not the first time there's been hearings on such objects. We -- the military has a huge budget. You know, last I looked, it was six or $700 billion, I would hope and expect some of that is going to monitor stuff in the sky that we cannot explain. So, the fact that everyone is somehow shocked or surprised that the government has thought about this problem over the decades, I'm surprised that people are surprised. And so, the real -- the real -- where the rubber --
MELBER: But I'm surprised, you're surprised. The people are surprised.
TYSON: That I'm surprised. Where the rubber hits the road is whether it's just at what point are you just -- are you going to believe that what you can explain are just aliens. That's all I'm saying. And or believe that if -- I'm putting this out there, that if the government were actually stockpiling aliens, that they would somehow manage to keep that a secret. Just think that through. Even the janitor, OK, sneak in a smartphone, get a picture of a gooey alien. And the janitor would lose his job overnight, and be the most famous, richest janitor the next day when that video hits social media.
And I'm -- yes, I maybe I just have a higher standard of requirement for evidence that we've been visited by aliens, otherwise was fine. By the way, I was delighted to see Republicans and Democrats together. It was like, oh my gosh, you know, the prospect of aliens brought to two halves of Congress together, asking similar questions. I was delighted by that.
MELBER: Yes, that's what it takes. And I think it's I hadn't thought about it that way but you're right. Some of this stuff getting off Earth and out of the normal conflict allows for a different investigative process at the very least. So that's UFOs, I promised folks Tyson on more than one thing. There's the talk of the multiverse. And if folks don't know what that even means, that's OK, that's why we have Neil here conceptually. You may have heard about this in Marvel films like Spiderman or Dr. Strange. Take a look.
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH, ACTOR: What do you know about the multiverse?
ELIZABETH OLSEN, ACTRESS: This had these theories. He believed it was dangerous.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You opened doorway between universes. We don't know who or what will go through it.
JAKE GYLLENHAAL, ACTOR: There are multiple realities, Peter. This is Earth dimension 616, I'm from Earth 833.
TOM HOLLAND, ACTOR: I'm sorry, you're saying there's a multiverse? Because I thought that was just theoretical.
MELBER: Reporting live from -- reporting live from Earth one, best as I know, but I could be wrong. Explained to us, I don't know if you heard about this, Neil. But sometimes science fiction can be more popular than the original science. Walk us through what this means is a theory or hearing more about it and is there any relevance to this in people's reality?
TYSON: But just to be clear, Dr. Strange, appearing in comics long before he got his own feature, high budget film, was passing through these portals, you know, from early on. So that's not a new addition to his powers. He's had that for a while. If I were to just talk, as much as I love Superman, and Wonder Woman, if I were to tip my hat, it would be to the Marvel community of superheroes except for Thor in this particular example, because nearly all of them either obtained their powers or explored and developed their powers through science.
Just think them through every single one of them, from the Hulk to, of course, Iron Man, to -- you just look through. And they're invoking some edge of our understanding of science to -- for that storytelling. So, I like the persistent appearance of science in the Marvel Universe. So, with regard to the multiverse, it's -- we've been -- by the way, Marvel is about 18 months or more behind the moving frontier of science. So, I'm -- somebody's reading the science journals, and putting infusing the stories. We've had ideas of the multiverse for a while, for someone in the script to say, you mean, it's real, I thought it was just theoretical.
That's not how are we talking science. Is there -- we don't have evidence for it. But it is deeply connected to ideas that are successful in our current universe, right? When we merge quantum physics and general relativity and go to the early universe, multiverses just pop out of that for free. OK? We didn't have to separately invent that. And so, once you have that, they're available to us, theoretically, and they could exist, we don't know how to get from one to the other. That's where you throw in the science fiction frontier. But until then, let him have it. Let him have run with it. I don't have a problem.
MELBER: Far out. I want to turn to one more item. It is.
TYSON: By the way, quick thing --
MELBER: We're learning about -- and I got to tell you, Neil, I don't know what people say to you, and they come to you on the street. But people talk to me about world politics, their views of the press, press is imperfect, press bias. One of the biggest biases of the press is the coverage of Earth at the exclusion of the rest of the entire galaxy. I mean, we're in this big space, and we're talking about Earth a lot and so with that in mind, we have you hear news on black holes.
Apparently, you'll explain but there's an image here of a massive black hole which is in the Milky Way galaxy, the ring of light that surrounds with The Times calls quote, a trapdoor in time and space, and they have they say audio of what a black hole sounds like. Scientist producing sounds of this is from a different black hole that's in a galaxy 55 million light- years away. Hit it. Neil, explain.
TYSON: Well, it clearly there's a monster there. With those sounds. So, it's -- I'm not as much a fan as other people are assigning musical notes to cosmic phenomena. It's -- I don't have anything against it. I'm just not a big fan of it. Only because there -- anytime you have a pressure wave, that's a wave that's pressing back and forth. As it moves through a medium it is technically sound.
Whether or not that frequency lands within the low to high range of the human sensory system, those sounds existed 48 -- what I read 48 octaves lower than anything audible to the human air. So, in order to turn it into sound that we would care about, you have to basically shift it artificially so that it lands in our acoustic range. And then -- then say it sound is a little bit misleading.
MELBER: Does it -- last question. Does it matter that today, science is at a place where it can observe more directly about black holes this far away, than in history?
TYSON: Yes, what we are seeing is a brand-new portal of access to what's going on in the universe, and anytime we have new capacities such as that. New discoveries just flow like rivers through that portal. So, I'm just delighted that we can image. So, what we're seeing is really the shadow of the black hole, and light distorted around it. So, but that, that's great. This is -- let's keep going.
And by the way, we always knew our galaxy had a black hole. We had other indirect means, but now you have a direct measurement. So, we're all there. So now be ready for the next Marvel story to go through that black hole, and come out the other side.
MELBER: Well, as you said, they're -- they know what to steal from. I got to tell you, Neil, Lil Wayne used to say, I feel big, not in the sense of gaining weight. After listening to your area edition. I always feel a little smaller in this giant universe.
TYSON: But don't, I think you feel small because you we're trained to that -- to feel special is to be different. But your atoms are traceable to stars in the galaxy that exploded and scattered the nitrogen, the oxygen, the carbon. And so rather than look up and say I'm small and separate. Say it to yourself, I'm large because the universe is alive within me. And it gives you a sense of participation -- a sense of participation in the great unfolding of cosmic events. And that's how I feel every time I go out and look up at night.
MELBER: Respect. Amazing. We love having you. I hope you come back, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
MELBER: Great, respect. When we come back, we have that Giuliani story. The January 6 committee winning again with a tough witness. And by the end of the hour, the great Gayle King, she's known for so many big interviews and a wonderful personality. We'll explain what you see here, coming up.
MELBER: The mask is off and he's really singing now. Donald Trump's former attorney Rudy Giuliani, who led a fraud and electors plot and made it sound like maybe he would defy Congress at one point has folded. Testifying before the January 6 committee for nine hours. He was hit with a subpoena back in January reported on that and the assertions that he was promoting election fraud on behalf of Trump and had strategies cooking to quote overturn the election.
RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER DONALD TRUMP ATTORNEY: This election was stolen by mail-in ballots. Those are the ballots that were stuck in the machine eight times, nine times, 10 times.
Our vote is owned by two Venezuelans who were allies of Chavez.
Let's have trial by combat.
MELBER: And combat there was on January 6, the panel reportedly wanting Giuliani to go under oath about that line, as well as his other plots and things that he did that are not covered by attorney-client privilege, which would certainly include any illegal coup plotting. Meanwhile, the fact that Donald Trump's really most visible advocate for this stuff who was in the foxhole to the end, he's testifying, he's not claiming privilege over everything.
And that puts new heat on Bannon who's now under indictment about this and Peter Navarro, who we both covered and interviewed on this program held in contempt over their claims that they think they have an executive privilege that even Giuliani isn't using, at least for all his testimony. Now, when we come back as promised, we explain why the one and only Gayle King actually crashed on MSNBC.
GAYLE KING, HOST, CBS NEWS: When your daughter becomes first lady of the United States and your son-in-law is a president, how do you wrap your brain around that?
MARIAN SHIELDS ROBINSON, MICHELLE OBAMA'S MOTHER: I felt like this was going to be a very hard life.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not really a business plan.
KING: You're not a businessman. No. What are you?
MELBER: What are you? Gayle King is known for her both probing and personable interviews as well as her fun-loving personality over at CBS, which is really the only reason we don't have her on MSNBC regularly she works somewhere else, we get it. But that didn't stop her from joyously crashing our most recent BEAT "FALLBACK FRIDAY" segment with music mogul Kevin Liles and D.J. D-Nice out in Baltimore. She happened to be in the room with them and then decided to surprise us.
KEVIN LILES, CEO AND CHAIRMAN, 300 ENTERTAINMENT AND ELEKTRA MUSIC GROUP: Preakness -- we got another friend too, Ari.
MELBER: How are you doing, Gayle?
KING: This is (INAUDIBLE) Preakness and I'm here because of Kevin Liles. So, we're here today kindness counts. Everybody feels united. The spirit is really great. when I walked in, I saw these two sitting here and I said, what are you guys doing this? We're waiting for Ari -- I want to say hi to Ari. Ari, I know you love me, I got to go. Send some love.
MELBER: Could she -- I love you crashing interview. You can crash the interviews any time.
KING: Hey, Ari, don't tell CBS.
MELBER: Shout out. shout out and some -- oh, she's --
KING: (INAUDIBLE) might lose a job. I say nice to another's. I'm very, very good girl and very, very kind. I'll see -- I'll see you back home.
MELBER: I'll say this, Gayle, you have my word. This stays between us. Whether anyone else saw it on Friday or -- well right now I can't speak to that. But please come back anytime, anywhere. Thanks for spending time with us here on THE BEAT with Ari. You can always find me on social media @AriMelber. Tell me who you think should crash THE BEAT next. And keep it locked right here because as I mentioned "THE REIDOUT" with Joy Reid has a very special guest live from Georgia starting now.