Neil Degrasse Tyson

in the entire Milky Way. We discuss a lot of things, but we talk about the responsibility of using your platform to champion causes you care about. We go through how to keep your head above water when pursuing a passion until it pays the bills, and why the hell it's taken so long for space tourism to become an industry. Hint takes a couple of billionaires. Now let's get into it. Welcome to another episode. I genuinely cannot believe who I

convinced to come on the show today. He is easily one of the most recognizable personalities in the world and by far one of the smartest people out there, and will definitely be the smartest person whoever comes on this podcast. From now through history, you can mark those words. He's an astrophysicist, a host of bestselling author, and the director of the Hayden Planetarium. And he's also, as we just

found out, a New Yorker. And if that wasn't enough, in two thousand he was voted the sexiest Astrophysicist Alive by People Magazine. And I think that is a ranking we should never ever forget. So here to discuss how he makes it happen and all the insane things he's working on. Please welcome Neil the grass Tyson. Thank you for the introduction, But I need to clarify something in in two thousand when I received that designation by People magazine.

You just have to consider the category that I was saying. There are categories way more competitive than sexiest Astrophysicist. In the People magazine issue Sexiest Man Alive, first, there's a sexiest Man Alive who transcends category that's on the cover, and that year it was Brad pitt okay got that one. And then other categories where there's just no contest if you're outside of that category, like sexiest action star, sexiest news anchor, sexiest professional athlete, sex and you don't you

don't have to apologize for being sexies. See what you're doing here. You're trying to clarify. I'm a real estate broker. You know. My whole life is ranking. I don't clarify my sales volume is only x because of this. You know, you know, it's just disclosure. I just want to make sure people plus that that was forty pounds ago. So you're New York born and Brad Yeah, yeah, born in the Bronx. Did the Bronx? Gotta say it right? If you always lived in New York? Did you ever leave?

You go elsewhere? No? No, I look for college and part of graduate school. So if you added up those years, I've probably gone for ten years. And then I came back to finish graduate school at Columbia, and and then I left. I did post pH d work post doc at Princeton, so we moved to Princeton for a bit, but then came back. It is hard to define exactly what you do. Can you tell us all if you were to say, hey, this this is what my day looks like, this is my career, this is what I do.

What you would say? What's your answer to that? The challenge? There is no day looks like any other day. So it's hard to characterize what I do. So if I step back and I can say what kind of things happened to me in a month over a month, so over a month, I will write more for whatever it might be my next book. I will have conducted probably uh ten interviews for national media, another ten teen interviews for just people who are interested in what I do.

I have a very soft spot for fledgling podcasts, people who are trying to bring science through their own lens. Uh. In fact, I recently agreed to do There are two kids who are new in high school. So one is like a ninth grader, I other one was an eighth grader, and they have a podcast in high school because they love science. So it's their science podcast. And so they wrote to me to see if I'd be a guest on their podcast, and I said sure, and then they

just freaked out so that we did the podcast. And and this was in Canada. Small town in Canada was only one high school, and that made like local headlines, right, and and I'm I was delighted to do that. And and I chuckle any time I get invited to be on a podcast, and they feel compelled to list famous guests they've already had, as though I would say, oh, you had this famous guest, therefore I want to be on your podcast. I don't give a rats ass who

was on your cup podcast before? I really don't care. Just is your mission, um, noble? Do you want to do the right thing? Is it something? And and so? I have a soft spot for that. So so anyway, so it's another ten or fifteen podcast, um. And also I oversee programs at the American Museum of Natural History that relate to the universe. I also read from books. I have a collection of very old books on science.

I read them because they tell me how we used to think about the universe and how what we learned later may have pivoted off of some correct assessment of the nature of the universe or incorrect assessment, and I tracked that. I also spend time reading books that are completely opposite anything I think or believe in, just so I can understand how people think who are very different

from myself. You've successfully been able to take this passion for for knowing more and turn it into a very robust, diverse career that I think it's very hard for a lot of people to do. Do you have any advice for anybody who is struggling with the idea of I. You know, I've got this passion, but it doesn't pay my bills, so I've got to go and get a job and maybe i can come back to it later. Yeah,

that's a really important question and an insightful question. And I've gone in and out of different understandings and explanations for this to myself. Let me just share one of them with you, and let me buy analogy. Mentioned a library, all right, a physical library like the old days. So you walk into a library, and so what is a library? A library is at place where they don't know in advance what book you're going to look for, and so one else who comes in five minutes after you was

gonna look for. So they attempt to stalk everything that you could possibly look for on the expectation that you will find what you are looking for. All right, Well, for library to be successful, they need enough books in enough fields with enough depth, so that I'm picking number nine out of ten people find what they're looking for, picking a number, but it's got to be the majority. Otherwise the library is not really serving the needs of

a reading community. Okay, so what are we as human beings? As pliable, flexible human beings, We often don't know what our first love will be. So what you can do is turn yourself into a kind of a library. Anything that interests you, pursue it, at least on the side that's not that hard. You do that for hobbies. If you have a hobby, you do an other side. You have no expectation you're gonna be paid for the attention you give to your hobby. All right, So think of

your life as a library, and as was my life. Okay, so watch this happen. As a child, I'm criticized by my teachers for my social energy. I still have my report cards. One of them said, it's succinctly less social involvement and more academic diligence is in order three exclamation points. That was in fifth grade. Okay, My grades were not high,

they would kind of average. And in school, the metrics for your evaluation as a student art pivot strongly on your grades and whether you shut up when you're told to shut up and pay attention in class. All right, So the perfect student is one who does not disrupt class, does all their homework, assignments on time, and gets high grades, and the entire system we have built educational system says

that's the successful student. Meanwhile, look at practically every entrepreneur there ever was every successful person by most measures of a free society's metrics of success, and ask were they that perfect student? The answer is no, no, most of them if not a D, and then we're not that okay, So there's something else going on in successful people that are not cued, that are not indexed off of your

exams and your behavior as a school child. So what I'm saying is, yeah, there are things that I got good at that no one cares about and no one is paying any attention at all. But that's the library problem. The library will have books that no one will ever check out again, but you don't know that in advance. So so there's no harm in building the portfolio of all the things you like and are good at. Then

have that rise up. And I can tell you this, Everything I'm doing that is valued never appeared in anybody's job description that I replied to when I became director of the planting We need you to do this and run the program. And fine, okay, did it say host a series for for Cosmos. No to say, oh, by the way, the person who has this, we want you to host PBS series. Until that's not in the job description. No, most of what I'm doing is not in the job description.

But when people see it, they they come to value it, and then everything I cared about and loved becomes the very job description itself. It's harder, and it's challenging. And by the way, I did not have a job where I made more than six thousand dollars a year until I was thirty three. Wow. Okay, So if you're distracted by money, then you can't rely on all of your

inner passions to be compensated earlier in life. So yeah, go find a pre existing job with a pre existing job description that is a pre existing salary listed to it, and tune your training to fit that. Then they'll hire you. Then you'll have a nice salary coming right out of college. I did not were you worried about job prospects because after my PhD almost didn't matter what happened to me in my life. That was my life's goal as a child. Everything else would just be gravy. Plus it helped that

I married someone who worked for the financial industry. That's not what I'm like, I'm looking for the secret. No, no, yeah, that helped. It just meant we lived, you know, we a nice place I could have lived. I mean I was living the way a student lived most of those years, right, so I could have kept living that way. The trappings of having more money, eating a nicer restaurant, drink a nicer bottle of wine, this sort of thing, um and so. But but anyhow, all of this sort of a cruise

is what I'm saying. And I also started liking wine early on. We had wine regularly at home, mostly Gallo and Paul Masson when I was growing up. But the fact that wine was something associated with meals was a very early thing for me. And I then took an academic interest in wine and uh at at some point

one of the wine magazines noticed me. Okay, Wine Spectator magazine, big magazine for the wine industry, and they did a profile on me and it says, um, uh astrophysicist with stars in his eyes sees wine, and that they tried there was I'm you know, clever title. And so you realize that these pockets of society that will find you if your interests have a sufficient depth of passion, and then it builds the entire profile of who you are

and what you represent. Now, the fact that I'm visible in public, none of that was a goal, and I don't care if anybody knew anything about me. I just kept giving good sound bites to the news and then they kept coming back, and then people said, oh, you're a natural at that. No, they have no idea what I did to train for those sound bites. I stood in front of a mirror because the first time you didn't ask this, but I'm telling you, um, it's important.

The the first time I was on national news for a cosmic event was a new planet around another star. Was the first exo planet was discovered, and so um NBC was NBC News sent a camera up to the Hayden Planetarium. By the way, they didn't know about me from Adam. They just knew I had title direct director of the Hayden Planetarium. So so they're interviewing the director of the Hayden Planetarium. I give them my best profitsial reply alright, because I'm an academic, and I say, here's

how we found it. We my colleagues here's how it works. Here's the Doppler shift. There's a and and I said, you're looking at the response of the host star to the gravity of the of the planet in orbit around it. And that evening when they finally cut the piece. Basically the only part of that interview that made it in was me shifting my hips like this. And I thought, I said, oh, even though they came to me, they don't want my profits soil reply. They want to reply

that will work in their format. The whole story last three minutes. They want sound bites. That was a revelation and for me and the and they will always tell you, oh no, don't sound by, just give us your thing. We'll fix it up later. Then I realized, no, if you're gonna use one sentence for me or three sentences and they're gonna be cut together, I'm gonna hand you those sentences so that you don't have to cut it,

and then arm in control of that content. So I went home, looked in the mirror, had my wife just say random things from the universe to me, black holes, quasars, big bang, and with each word I came out with a three sentence sound bite, which has got to be interesting, tasty, informative, and and enticings enough to want to tell someone else, and you get it all. So test me on that, say anything in the universe. Test me black hole black Avoid them. If one comes near, you go the other direction.

It's a region of space where the gravity is so intense that the speed of light is not even sufficient to escape. It is a whole in the fabric of ace and time, and we're still learning about what's going on inside of them. Boom about. You're taking that whole thing and putting that in just as I handed it to you, whereas there was a day when that same information would have been scattered across and they'd have to plug it together. So when people say, are you such

a natural at that? No, I fucking worked at it. Please can we understand this? Please? All right? Sorry dropping f bomb on you. You're too welcome. I think it's it's so important to be listening to this. The man here is in a in a highly pressed shirt and a Wall Street tie, and I'm I'm in my morning pajamas. Just so weird over here. Okay, very nice pajamas though I didn't even ask you a lot of that. It's Uh, it's so important because I think people don't don't realize

the work. But what I think it's so curious about you is you knew to do that work to build a career as a well known astrophysicist without anyone having to tell you to do that. No, because I didn't build it on purpose. It just oh, so I didn't finish the thought. So once I started giving them sound

bites they like, they kept coming back for more. Then documentarians noticed it, and so then they came to me for an interview, and then people who wanted to do TV series Nova came to me to host a spinoff Nova Science Now. And so I'm not seeking any of this out. No it and so I so why am I doing it. I'm doing it because I judged that I would be irresponsible if I didn't. So there's responsibility, Yes, if if if I have a way I can communicate science to the public that is unique or has had

flavors to it that people appreciate. And if I didn't do it in a society and in a culture that that depends on science literacy just for even its own governance, if I didn't do it, I don't know that I could feel like I was responsible participant in our society. What I long for. I fantasize about this, that we get enough others doing this, and there's more. It's a growing number of science sort of educator, sort of pop educator, science folk. You get enough of them on the landscape.

I will just slowly step backwards and then exit the rear door, just slowly, and then when I exit, no one will notice because it's so full of others fully engaged in fun, interesting ways. And then I'll go right to the Bahamas and the Bahamas totally the Bahamas. And because I don't need to do this, I'm happy to do it, but I don't seek it out. Do you believe in fate? Well, so you can look at the statistics of it, all right, So there's very good reason

for the saying fate uh favors the well prepared. Okay, so uh, if you unpack that statistically, it means put as many books in your personal library as you can so that when an opportunity arises, you say I can do that, and someone will other else will say, oh, you're the lucky person. Was it really luck or did you just recognize the opportunity because you had the receptors to do so. So no, I don't. I don't think fate as in it would happen to you no matter

what I think. It's you've got to be ready for it and recognize it when it arrives. If you just look at how the numbers work out, um. If you say that there's no such thing as as coincidence, is all meant to be? Um, that is the product of a failure of the human cognitive system. It's it's why statistics as a branch of math, it was very late in the coming. I mean, calculus was practically fully fleshed

out and developed long before statistics was formulated. And so that's evidence that statistics is just not a natural way for us to think about our life experience. We want to think that we're special, that the whole world is aligning for us. This is the source of so many religions, right if you're if you're in a heartless world, but someone in your religion cares about you, then you retain your sense of personal value, uh, in the face of that.

And so yeah, I don't know if knowing statistics helps you or hurt you in that state of mind, but I prefer to be plugged into an objective reality as often as I can. What are your thoughts on Elon Musk and what he's doing with with SpaceX. It should have happened decades ago. We should have had space entrepreneurs decades ago. Why do you think it's only happening now between Blue Origin. Well, it's expensive just because it costs. You need rich people to think to do it, because

there's no initial return on investment. Really, um it's and Elon Musk famously said, how to make a small fortune in space industry, start with a big fortune. I think that's Elon Musk, and so it's really you need the passion of a rich person to try to make it happen.

And that way they can plow through the years of no r O I that would have bankrupted anybody else, and they just keep pumping in their money until you get over that hump where oh, now I can send you up in space for just a million dollars, And there plenty of billionaires out there now that will spend a million dollars on a joy ride, and that becomes a business model for space tourism. But you have to get there first. You have to build the rockets that

failed first. You have to can't just send anyone into thank you, thank you. Do you want to go up into space as a space tourist. Most people's definition of space does not coincide with my definition of space. I'm sure. So Earth orbit is typically what people think of when they think of space. But that's the distance from New York to Washington, d C. But straight up, all right, And in fact, in lower th orbit, you are closer to Earth's surface than San Francisco is from Los Angeles, right,

So that's that's to me, that's not space. That's just a really really really high airplane. Yes, thank you for a lot. It's the most expensive airplane ticket ever, perfectly worded. The differences. You'll be waitless and you'll see stars in the daytime, that sort of thing, because you're above most of the scattering of light and Earth's atmosphere. So that's that has an attraction to it. But yeah, if you're gonna go to the Moon or Mars or beyond, yeah

I'll sign up for it. But I joke, and I say, Elan, if you're gonna put me in your rocket, um let it be a rocket. You've already sent your mother on and brought her back safely, then I'll go on the rocket. So like interstellar like that, that would be your idea space exploration go that far? What what about interstelling? I mean going to other planets? Yeah, like if that's not a routine thing. These were pioneers um trying to find

a new place to move. But if you have that much technology to fly to another planet through black holes and things, it seems to me you have enough technology to fix the blight on the crops on Earth. That'd mean that'd be way cheaper exercise in your science and engineering portfolio. You think so, But Michael Caine couldn't figure it out, so everyone had to leave. Everyone had to leave. What do you think about everybody moving to and setting

up life on Mars? Do you think it's an exciting experiment or a kind of a fruitless waste of time and money? Yeah? I know, judge how people spend money and decide whether it's a waste or not. Just not. People should spend money however the hell they want if they earn it. So that's my first comments. Second I can give you, since some factual observation, Antarctica is ball mirror and whether that any place on the surface of Mars. But you don't see people lined up to build condominiums

there and move. So the idea that you're gonna set up habitats on Mars on the expectation that people will live there permanently. If you needed evidence that that would happen, you would need to look to Antarctica to see if they're housing um tracks that have been set up, and there haven't been. So it's a little unrealistic for me to think that Mars would be a destination for people

to live. Now, if you can create a hab module, they're like a domed city where you can control the environment and the temperature and all the rest of this, so you're not always having to wear a spacesuit. That could work, But then you're just living on Earth on Mars, right, I mean, so it's not really Mars. You're not having to navigate the hostile conditions of a different planet. So I can imagine that such a place would be like

Disney World. You would go and visit it. It would be a vacation and you have rides in g You know, if your hundred um, you know, two hundred pounds on Earth, you are what is it a hundred and that so um eighty pounds, you'd weigh eighty pounds on Mars. That's kind of fun. You have all manner of fun sports and amusement park rides and things that exploit that fact. But then you'd come back to Earth and you'd be

glad you came back to Earth when that happened. So the only meaningful way we become a multiplanet species is if we figured out how to terraform another planet. My favorite word of recent decades. When you take a planet that is not like Earth, steed them soils or the clouds with bacteria that create oxygen, this sort of thing, microbes, and then create an Earth and then you move there. Okay, so I don't have a problem with that, but I would ask what's your motivation? And this is where I

part ways with Stephen Hawking. And there's even Carl Sagan who said we need to become a multiplanet species so that if if a disaster happens on one planet, the species survives. So then I asked, for what disaster are you imagining? Could be an asteroid strike? Okay, that's one, A killer virus, right, that's basically the plot of planet or the apes um and all right, or something we

haven't thought of. All right, well, how about this. I'm betting that the effort, that's the cost and time involved in terraforming Mars and then shipping a billion people there, I'm betting that effort is more than deflecting an asteroid than funding viral research such that there will never be a virus that will harm us again. I'm kind of betting. I would bet that it would take less money and less time to accomplish that. That's the iron man cutting

the cable. That's me on the on the on the trolley car um fixing the brakes, figuring out what's wrong in that instant with the brakes overcoming it and having the cable car stop. It's I don't I don't mind living on multiple planets if you think that's just a fun thing to do. But and then there people say, oh, we're gonna be trashing Earth. We have to move to

another planet because we're polluting Earth or global warming. If you terraformed Mars, if you turn Mars into Earth, then you have the geo engineering ability to turn Earth back into Earth. Let's get real here, My last question for you, and I really really appreciate you taking the time to to speak with me today. How optimistic about the future

are you right now? My source of optimism comes from the fact that the next generation is way more woke, almost to a fault, but regardless, the way more woke and progressive minded and environmentally concerned than any previous generation. So for example, okay, let's go back to the beat nick piece, nick hippie era. What's not widely written about is that that was a fringe movement among highly privileged,

young white students. Okay, highly that's what that was. These were kids who didn't really have to work, they could take time out and protest and and uh so, by the way it worked, largely we did exit the Vietnam War um, and peace as part of a cultural urge has remained ever since. And I don't think peace as a cultural urge predates the sixties. Really, Okay, make love not war, these kinds of slogan. No one really said that.

In the Second World War, the people might have wanted peace, but not they didn't package it that way, all right, So whereas now the next generation, it's practically a dent of them. You just look at the voting trends by age in the demographics. So and they they understand environment, they understand science. They were not the ones duped by

intern aunt rabbit holes that older folks. You know, that young generation is not the one who believed that pizza gate, that they were selling and eating babies in the basement. It's not that generation. So perhaps for the first time in the history of the world, I, as an adult, say, I can't wait till the next generation takes over so they can fix the world. Big Money Energy is hosted by me Ryan Sirhant. It's produced by Mike Coscarelli and

Joe Lorresca and executive produced by Lindsay Haw. Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.