Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Joe Rogan Experience #919, fact-checked

What the evidence shows: It is well documented that many U.S. high-rises omit a floor labeled "13," instead renumbering it 14 or using an alias like 12A or "M" for mechanical, a practice tied to triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13). The widely repeated 80-90% figure traces largely to an informal Otis Elevator Company estimate rather than a rigorous nationwide survey of all buildings taller than 12 stories, and no comprehensive study confirming that specific national percentage was located. A 2005 NPR interview with Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, author of a book on the history of the number-13 superstition, corroborates that architects and developers "more often than not" still omit the 13th floor, but attributes the practice mainly to inertia and tradition rather than measured demand, noting that "no one knows how many people" would actually decline a 13th-floor unit or room. Independent city-specific analyses (e.g., of New York City buildings) find proportions in a similar range, but these are localized studies, not confirmation of an 80% figure across all U.S. buildings over 12 stories. Overall status: the underlying practice is real and widespread, but the specific 80% statistic is a loosely sourced approximation rather than a rigorously verified nationwide figure.

What the evidence shows: Tyson stated that the hypothesized ninth planet ("Planet Nine") orbits about 20,000 times farther from the sun than Earth, which would place it at roughly 20,000 astronomical units (AU). The Planet Nine hypothesis, proposed in 2016 by Caltech astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, estimates the object's average orbital distance at roughly 600 AU, about 20 times farther than Neptune's average distance of about 30 AU from the sun. Tyson's figure of 20,000 AU is therefore roughly 30 times larger than the published estimate for Planet Nine's distance from the sun. The claim substantially overstates the hypothesized planet's distance, though the qualitative point that Planet Nine would orbit far beyond Neptune and the known planets is consistent with the scientific literature.

What the evidence shows: Tyson describes a periodic dip in the fossil record that prompted scientists to hypothesize a companion star to the sun (later dubbed Nemesis) triggering comet showers, but states the interval as roughly every 20,000 years. The actual finding, published by Raup and Sepkoski in 1984, identified a statistically significant periodicity with a mean interval of approximately 26 million years between major extinction events over the past 250 million years. This periodicity, not a 20,000-year cycle, is what motivated the Nemesis hypothesis. Subsequent observational surveys, including NASA's WISE infrared sky survey, found no evidence of a companion star at the distances required, further arguing against Nemesis-based extinction theories (which were already considered largely ruled out on other grounds before WISE). Tyson's description of the underlying mechanism and scientific history is accurate, but the stated interval is off by roughly three orders of magnitude (20,000 years versus roughly 26 million years).

What the evidence shows: Neil deGrasse Tyson was born October 5, 1958, and was roughly six to nine years old during 2001: A Space Odyssey's 1964-1968 production, making a personal, professional consultation with Stanley Kubrick during that period chronologically implausible. A NASA history of the film confirms this production timeline and its April 1968 release, and identifies astronomer Carl Sagan, not Tyson, as an outside science adviser Kubrick consulted (on how to depict extraterrestrial intelligence). No source places Tyson in any advisory role on the film's production, and Tyson's own well-documented engagement with 2001 dates to decades later, including a 2001 essay assessing how the film's futurism compared to reality, written when he was in his early forties. The specific anecdote that Tyson personally calculated the station's rotation rate and told Kubrick to use three Gs is not corroborated by any allowlisted source; it is best read as a rhetorical framing of Tyson's later physics analysis of the film rather than an actual production-era collaboration. Status: unsupported.