Featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson

you guys enjoy it. Welcome to my podcast. I am so honored that you're here. You're my first astrophysicist on the show. And now I have to say, science is something that I've always been super fascinated by, but it's something I've always struggled with learning and understanding like many others. And I just want to simply start with what do you love about what you do? What do you love

about space in the universe? So much? Everything, And first of all, for you to say i'm your astro physicists on the show, there aren't many of us in the world, Okay, So basically everything, I like the immensity of it, I like that that the boundary between what is known and unknown, and you put one foot in what is known and one foot in the unknown, and you try to deduce

or invent or discover what lies beyond. And so so I think that the takeaway is as a scientist, you have to learn to love the questions themselves, because if you if you only think of science the way the media reports on it, because the media does a story when there's a discovery, right, and you think their discoveries are happening all the time. But you have to learn to love the journey. And in your whole life you

might make only one discovery or no discoveries. So the journey is what excites you every morning, the possibility of reaching into the unknown and pulling something back in and say, WHOA, I knew this before. Does that give you any comfort in knowing everything you know? Or does it make you a little bit more terrified of the beyond? I think you have to train yourself. I don't think it's natural to walk around in stupefied ignorance of what's going on.

You know, nobody wants that, all right, And I get it. I have sympathy for people who feel that way. And one way that that shows up is someone might ask me what was around before the Big Bang, and I'll say, I don't know. Go top people working on it, and they say, that had to be something. It must have been something, it must have been God, God did it. Yeah, that was it. And so once they say God, they

have their answer. And then you know, if you wanted to insert deity every place where we have yet to tread scientifically, then that's that's kind of a slippery slope, because science ever moves forward. So I empathize with the need to have an explanation for everything. But if that's how you are, you won't make a good scientist because most of what we think about every day has no answer yet yet, and we don't even know if we're

asking the right questions. Crazy, it's crazy, It's completely crazy. So, Storry Messenger, A Cosmic Perspective on Civilization. You said, the troll of insights, informed by the universe and brought to you by methods and tools of science. I love that sentence, and I was wondering if you can expand more upon that. Well, thank you, thank you. So this book, Starry Messenger Cosmic

Perspectives on civilization. Each chapter has a different title, as most chapters would, but in this case, the chapters address different sectors of society that have historically been rather combative, uh in social settings. So there's a chapter on truth and beauty, All right, that that might be good sort of bar conversations there, But let's get a little more intense a conflict and resolution where I go into political factions who are battling for who has access to, if

not control of the truth. Objective truths, which I'd like to distinguish from other kinds of truths. There is an objective truth, and there is opinion. Then those need to be right right right, Or there's there's like political truths. I'll call it that because the politicians think it's true, but it's what becomes true simply by them repeating it

often and with intensity. And our brain has a weakness in it where if you see something repeat he did it, or here's something repeated, the urge to think that it must be true, otherwise why would it be repeated so often? Exactly, So I applaud the fact that we have that urge to think that way, But that urge that evolutionary urs can be and has been hijacked by people who would want to exercise control over you and what you think. In the old days they called it brainwashing. Yeah, so

that would be a political truth. And then there's a personal truth, right. Personal truth is just stuff that you believe, and they don't require that other people have to believe. It is your own personal sense of the world. And all religions come under personal truths. So that's why I distinguish those truths from objective truths. And objective truths are true whether or not you believe in them, and high science.

And so getting back to the sentence that you extracted, Um, and thank you for looking for cool sentences, because I do spend a lot of effort composing sentences that go in the book, and if the fact that they sort of rise up off the page or in your because you listen to the audiobook, as you told me, I'd want those sentences to to live within you. You're very powerful.

The methods and tools of science are exquisitely tuned to find objective truths, and when you do, you then apply them to these sectors of society that are famous for not embracing objective truths. And because of such people, fight and so so, and other chapters are a gender and identity, race and color, risk and reward. People really don't understand risk and probability and statistics, and I don't want to blame people for that. Somehow, it's it's just not natural

to think statistically about the world, all right. I mean, here's't just in an example. Let's say you're ready to drive a car off the lot. You just it, and someone is driving into the lot saying, wanting to return the cars. There's the worst card had it broke the wheel fell off. I hate it. And you're just watching this and you begin questioning your decision. And it's amazing how impactful the testimony of one person can land within

you relative to the statistics of thousands. You mentioned a really interesting point in your book that scientists don't look for other scientists opinions but their data, which I think is a very important distinction. I don't care how you feel or think. I don't care. That has nothing to do with my research here, But I just have nothing to do with the data less. How you feel biases

your data. So we have methods and tools to establish objective truths, and it requires repeated, verified experiments on whatever the first thing is you said was true. So we're living in a world today where social media and misinformation is traveling so fast. I feel like as soon as you pull up a social media app, there's just new information you don't and it's hard to verify whether it's

true or not. I mean, I want to take away from this conversation is what advice do you have for like a go to way to shut down a flat earther. I'm not that aggressive. It may feel that way sometimes if you read my tweets. Uh So, I just tweeted yesterday last night there was a total lunar eclipse, and I said, here's a lunar eclipse flat earthers have never seen. It would be like the disc of Earth casting horizontal shadow, which would just be a skinny, little thin thing. And

that it went almost viral. I mean it was, it went pretty high up there. That's so good. Point is, in a free country, I'm not going to beat you on the head if you want to think Earth is flat. There are plenty of jobs for you where you and still think Earth is flight. Science isn't one of them. Science is not one of them. Here's here's one thing to do. You say, what would be the best evidence you would need to show that Earth was a sphere

in space? What what evidence would you seek? If you ask that of such people, typically there is none, There is none. Well, sorry, I did that once with someone who was sure we didn't go to the moon, okay, okay, And I said, well, what evidence? I went through this exercise. What evidence would you want? And he said, well, photographs of the landing sites? That would that would work. So I said, well, we do have photos of the landing site. You said really, I said, because there are satellites that

were put in orbit around the Moon. That's close enough and you could see the rover tracks. You can see the landing site. And so go to this web page. So he so the next day, but this is a full grown adult human being with with kids, always concerning right. So the next day, uh, he says, nil, I went to that website and sure enough I saw the tracks and I saw this. But then I looked at the bottom and it said that the web page was sponsored by NASA. So how am I going to know that

they didn't fake this? And I said, pause, hold up, rewind. You asked me what would convince you, and I provided that evidence, and now that evidence isn't working for you. So this is the end of our conversation. But anyhow, so a good test would be ask what would convince you otherwise if you don't really have a good answer for that then, or if your only answer is I know the truth, it's just be hidden from us by this organization. It's never going to be good enough, never

good enough. Correct. There's an old saying in the skeptics community which I think is correct. It's you can't use reason to argue someone out of a point of view that they didn't use reason to get into. So true. Something that I'm very interested in talking about is what are your thoughts on managing space trash and programs like starlink, especially with the impact of satellites in space imaging. Yeah,

so those are two separate issues. Starlink is you know, how many elon how many satellites do you need in space? How how many? How many do you need? And it it becomes a form of light pollution, where especially we have a telescope about to come online this coming year that will be taking basically snapshots of the entire sky every night and and stitching them together. It basedically in a movie, which will allow you to watch asteroids that

might be headed towards Earth. But if while we're trying to find an asteroid headed towards Earth, there's you know, hundred seventy eleven Starlink satellites coming through your field. If you I don't want to miss the asteroid, because you're contaminating my data with things that otherwise look like asteroids but they're not. So there's the how it will contaminate science, but there's also how it will change what the night sky will beat to you as you look up affect

the Earth. So there's fortunately, there are there's an organ there are people today who are thinking about this and trying to find ways to reduce the impact of this technological progress on what is otherwise the sanctity of the night sky. And as for trash, we've got nothing for you, okay. And I think people say, where the aliens? How come they haven't visited. I think they tried to visit and they saw all the trash around the Earth. We're going to pass on this one. Let's let's let's go to

the next planet. Okay. Yeah, these folks are just nasty. It's the trash that's in the higher orbits that will basically be there forever unless someone goes around and vacuums it up. And we have no such plans nor such ideas about how to make that happen. It's too trashy. We need to fix it, too trashy. Give it up.

We have to take a quick break. But when we come back, I'm going to talk about what types of research and that's going on in the world of science you're most excited about and what you love list about learning. We'll be right back and we're back. Are there any scientists work that you're really interested in that isn't very well known or talked about. I generally look at sort of consensus work. So uh, it's not whether one science just did one particular thing, because that's not what makes

an objective truth. As I said earlier, it hasn't been verified by someone else. So for me, one of the more interesting sub branches of astrophysics is one where we have people looking for bio markers in the atmospheres of exo planets. Well, so, can you explain what bio markers are for totally? Well, first, ex planet is so exo planets are planets orbiting other stars, and the first of these was discovered in all right, so what year were

you BORNO? Two two? So you count as someone who has been born since and so I now I will night you generation X planet. You've only known life in a world where we've had exo planets to talk about, all right, that is that is if you want to attach a generation to a scientific result, there you have it, all right. And when you were born, we might have known maybe a few dozen exoplanets, and now we know more than five thousand. That's how old you are. We're

up in the five thousands. A lot can happen in twenty years. A lot can happen in twenty years. So you're just an old fart now because we're up in the thousands. But will we ever know if they have life? Well, if the planet has an atmosphere, light from the star will pass through the atmosphere on the edges and continue on to us, so that whatever is the chemistry of

that atmosphere, it leaves its fingerprint on the starlight. Oh, this is this opened up an entire new field in the search for life in the universe, because if your planet has life. Life has certain gaseous consequences. Alright, Oxygen on Earth is only here because we have photosynthesizing life, trees and plankton. That's the only reason why we have oxygen.

And so if you find an exo planet and you let the light of the star pass through and you see oxygen in that atmosphere, oh yeah, I put that higher on your list of one of the first planets you might want to visit. So what am I following. I'm following the work of that group of researchers who are searching for bio markers in the atmospheres of exoplanets, and the James Web Space Telescope is helping with that. By the way, Sorry, I'm just processing all that you said.

That's incredible. Yeah, No, I'm totally I'm all in on it. Oh yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. So I'm assuming you love stars, don't we all? Actually, I'm sure I'm not alone there. You know, our star is pretty important. I think clouds are also very underrated. I love seeing them. They're so beautiful and I just see them. Gonna go shout out clouds because they don't get enough appreciation out there. Okay, So uh, in the book Starry Messenger. Um, I quote clouds.

I quote a line from Joni Mitchell her song both Sides. Now, that's so good. Wait wait, wait, we have to be very precise here. Okay, I just want to properly quote. Okay, I'm gonna pull up this quote. The glasses are coming on. That's when you know it's been serious. I've got to go there. Okay. Yes, So clouds are one of the things she looks at in one of the verses. But I get that's not the verse I chose. I'm really I'm remembering now, but I will get you that cloud

verse because you sound like a cloud person. I'm a cloud person because they're just not appreciated and they do so much. Okay, they make my day. So here we go rose and flows of angel hair, and I scream castles forgive Mike because I can't. I think you should become a singer and a rare path for you. Everywhere looked at clouds that way, but now they only block the sun. They rain, and they snow on everyone. So many things I would have done, but clouds got in

my way. I've looked at clouds from both sides, now from up and down and still somehow it's clouds illusions. I recall I really don't know cloud so any that that's all those singing I'm going to give you here because I was like, I do not expect a performance. I feel like this is a new career path for you. So here's the so for me, obviously, it's a song, it's a poem. It's it's metaphorical of course, and so um So she starts out by saying, clouds they rain

and snow on everyone. Yes, they do, but when they're not, they're not right. And most of the time they're not, They're just floating there. And if you look at it from both sides. And I really don't know clouds, and most people don't understand what clouds are. Why they up there and they're not down here? Well, sometimes they are down here. But we have a different word for them. You know what we call them? Am I totally missing? Yes, it's just it's a cloud that's in your face. So

so we just have a different word for it. But it's a cloud, all right. So all air in most parts of the Earth has some amount of moisture in it. Yeah, okay, And if the air gets heated, and then it rises. As you ascend, the temperature drops, so as you ascend in the atmosphere, it gets colder and colder and colder. You might notice that from the temperature if you see it on the video monitor of airplanes outside, it's forty degrees below zero outside the window. Okay, so it's because

the ground is what's heating the air. The sunda and heat the air. The sun heats the ground and the ground heats the air. So I watched it happens if a pocket of air with a little bit of moisture, as it ascends, it gets colder, and the colder is the pocket of air, the less capable it is of carrying that moisture. And so what happens is something called the relative humidity goes up because the air can it's

becoming less and less able to hold the moisture. And at a particular temperature at the dew point, which is a combination of how much humidity is in it and the temperature at that dew point, the the water molecules they coalesce and they become basically droplets. Okay, it's no longer water vapor, it's water droplets. And in that moment that that pocket of air is high above your head and bend, a cloud forms and there it is. You're making me love clouds even more. Okay, No, it's a

beautiful thing. That's why the clouds are high up and rarely on the ground. How do you know all this information? Just off the bat? What about learning do you love? I know that's a two parter, but you've just so much information. Here's what I here's my normal and we only just met, so I don't know, but it for most people, for many people in the United States, here's what I would tell them. They said, how does it you know all of this? How do you have time

to write these books? And how does you do this? And my answer is I bet I watched less football than you do. That's a great answer. That's my simplest answer. Okay, So whatever you do on the weekends or when you're otherwise doing nothing, are you binging? You know the Bachelor? Are you whatever else is going on or Jersey Shore or whatever whatever people do. I'm not doing that, and I'll do it a little bit just so I know

what interests people, because that I value that. But no, I spend a lot of time a lot of time that other people spend doing nothing, I spend learning. That's so awesome and so cool. I have always loved learning, but it's always been a struggle for me because I've grown up with learning differences, so being able to understand information has been a struggle. But when it's you're very good at visualizing it and just explaining it very complicated topics.

Thank you, Thank you for that. And I try to be a responsive to the what do they call it, the neurodiversity of us all? Uh, some people think in pictures, some in words, some in gestures, you know, hand gestures. So I try to fold all of that in. So thank you for noticing that. But what I would say is with all the learning differences that exist out there, and finally the education system is coming to terms with that,

figuring out slowly but surely slowly. Um My daughter was a special ed teacher and people ask her what's different about a special ed teacher? She said, She said, especially teachers are simply better teachers. I went to a special ed school, so I can vouch for that. Yeah, they're just better teachers. They know more about they know how to teach in different ways exactly exactly. Oh, I got in big trouble one time. What happened? I should have

left it to my forbidden Twitter file. Um, so I tweeted. I said, for the teachers who feel compelled to say, these students just don't want to learn, And I said, maybe they should consider the possibility that they suck at their job. I believe you're not wrong, but you know, I put it out there. I've had a maybe in front of it. I said possibly, like a possible. You know, people said, do you remember? Remember? And then of course

it's Twitter, so it's the cesspool of opinions. Yeah. So not every teacher is sainted, okay, and we all had bad teachers in our lives. Well maybe you didn't because you had speciales. I did before I moved to special at and then I went there. You go, and you know, and you can you can list not here, don't do it, but you can list bad teachers right who really should have never entered the profession. All right, we have to

take one more quick break. But when we come back, I want to talk about how you define success for yourself. We'll be right back and we're back. You've accomplished so many incredible things. Throughout your career, and everyone has a different definition of what success means to them, and I was wondering, how do you personally define success for yourself? Thank you? That's an excellent question. It's excellent on many levels. And I don't often get that because now it gives

me the opportunity to for me redefined success. All right, uh so let me take a slightly windy route to get there. So let's say you have someone who wants to be an actor, and then you say what kind of actor you want to be? Well, I want to be a famous actor. Oh so they don't want to be a good actor, they just want to be a famous actor. So that's a different goal, always the same thing as you want to be the best actor you can be. Sometimes I would even say often being the

best actor you can be will lead to that. But if your goal is simply to be famous, then all the times you're not famous, you're miserable. Right. You put so much like definition on one thing and you're not that right, right, right, and so much emphasis, and you're miserable. If you instead say I want to be the best actor I can be, then every performance you give on stage or in a uh, which is I'm from New York, so we entirely value stage performances in New York. Okay,

at the end of that performance, how'd you do? What would you have done differently? How can you And now that you've given that and you deliver that line that way, is there a better way to deliver that line? And then this is you constantly and persistently focusing on how much better you can be at your craft. The goal here to be as good as you possibly could be.

And what I've done in my life is whatever I've attempted, I tried to be as good at it as I could possibly be without regard to how people see it or receive it or value it. And well that that's not entirely true. So for example, let's go back to the first what was discovered? Shoot, what was discovered? A nineteen oh the uh space um a planet thing with my age twenty years Okay, you gotta be plus on that,

but you know is in it? Okay? Yeah, So the first exo planet was discovered, Okay, generation X planet, and so I was interviewed by I was then the interim director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, This was banner headlines that exo planet was discovered. So NBC News sent one of their action cams, you know, up to do an interview to air that evening. And they sent them up and and they said, and they didn't know me yet. I just they just wanted me for

my title. And I gave my best profess soil response. I talked about the Doppler shift and the physics of the movement of the stars and the center of mass of the system. And I did all of this, and I said, and once we discovered that there was the Doppler shift on that star, and you can make it very hard measurement. And because the star is kind of moving, it's like jiggling. Uh, And so that's what you're going to measure. And so I moved my body and in

the way the star would move. And all they used from that interview was me jiggling my That was it, okay, And maybe one sentence, you know, And so I said, oh, well, they don't want to hear my professor reply. They want to sound bite. So I went home and practiced sound bites, and so the next time I got asked, I just get handled them sound bites and they came back for more, and then other people came back, and this just continued to build. And I said, I'm a servant of their curiosity.

I want to be the best servant I can be. And one other example I'll give is the first time I was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, okay before Trevor Noah. John Stewart hosted that. And he's sharp, he's smart, and he's funny. And I've seen politicians deer in the headlights as he's dancing circles around them because they're trying to get their speech out and he's not letting them, and it's a disaster. I said, that is

not going to happen to me. So I studied him, and I said, with a stopwatch, and I said, how many seconds does he give you on average to speak before he comedically interrupts, Okay, it's like time back. He really studied this. I forgot the number like between eight and twelve seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but it's actually you can say a lot in ten seconds. So I got on the show. I also had to know three days of current events, I judged, because he's blending

it's a new show. He's blending current events with whatever he's talking about. Because I did this, and I get on the show and I deliver the ten seconds and he jokes and then I come back, so I complete the idea. He completes the joke, we go on to the next thing. So it's it's working like it's it's But was your dance, thank you, beautiful reference. It's a dance.

It's a dance. So in dancing in the interview and at the end of it, people came up to me and said, Neil, you and Johnston would have such good chemistry. That's it's so natural. Little do you know? You have no freaking idea? What kind of homework went into this? And that was trying to be the best I can be. So for me, I am successful if whatever I did it was the best I could do in that time for the research I was able to conduct. That's that's how I measure my success. And if that, if the

public happens to like that, that's just bonus. I'm glad. And that's all you can do at the end of the day is be the best version of yourself correct And if you're not that I think you are, how should I put this you. If you don't do that, I think this one time you have on life is under capitalized for all that you could do, think, accomplish, feel, and why waste any of it. So if a day goes by where I didn't learn something or improve something

about myself, that's a wasted day. And you can guarantee unless you happen to be the generation that will live forever. And I don't think they're born yet, that's another sort of generation where we increase life expectancy. So right now, increasing life expectancy by one year every five years something like that, okay for of the general population. So but what the day will come where we increase life expectancy by one year for every year of research that we do,

that generation will live forever. I think that's younger than you at this point, because we agreed you're an old part. That is going to be my new bio on Instagram. So I don't really want to live forever because I like a motivation knowing that I'm going to die. Because guaranteed, if a day goes by that you do not serve your own curiosities and your own enlightenment in your own wisdom, that's you've seen the calendars on the prison walls. It's an X in a day that you're never getting back,

and so my motivation correlates with that. Okay, the fewer days I have left, the more motivated I am to get stuff done. And so I don't envy the first generation who will live forever, because I wouldn't want to live forever. That sounds exhausting, Yeah, it can be exhausted. Why put why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? Well, thank you so much. This conversation has really been eye opening for me. I feel like I've learned a lot today and I've been really inspired, and

I would now want to learn a lot more. So I really appreciate why why not? Right? You know the people who graduate from school and throw their books in the air and say schools out? It's like, why are you be about that? What I know isn't you should always be curious and want to keep larring correct what school should teach? I granted school is a pain, I get that, But the least that should happen in school is when you do graduate, you you your curiosity is

stoked to continue to learn on your own. So my great regret in the system is that school doesn't teach us all to continue to be curious. It's kind of like you stop when it's done. If you stop it, and then you get ossified, which is a great s a t word. You get ossified in your thinking. Whatever was your last thoughts the last time you were in a classroom, that's it. And then you want to start life. You get married, have kids, and that's how you're going

to think about the world. And do you see these older folks that are just sort of crusty in their ways because they didn't keep learning. They didn't they didn't stay flexible, nimble, nimble in the mind. There's a quote in the book, second to last page of the entire book, which is from Horace and an educator, and there's school is named after him. He's a brilliant educated in New York City right in the Bronx, actually from two centuries ago.

And he was giving a commencement speech and he used the word beseech in his Nobody uses that word anymore, and it's very I feel like it's Shakespearean, but maybe we should bring it back. He says, I beseech you to treasure in your heart. These my parting words be ashamed to die until you have scored some victority for humanity that I want that on my tombstone and has nothing to do with being famous or rich. And it is the world a little better off for you having

lived in it. And here's what I'm gonna recommend. Because I don't like telling people what to do. I like compelling them to want to do something on their own, but not going to tell people what to do. I tell all your your viewers and listeners, I'm gonna say, if you're gonna get this book at all, do it be for Thanksgiving. So all of your arguments will be honed.

So that when the crazy and and the and the weird uncle will all come over and they want to talk about the flat earth they wanted to, you'll be equipped. You have answers for everything, for every comeback, and ways to help them think through what as they're thinking about, because a cosmic perspective is and always is transformative of whoever basks in its light. Well, thank you so much for coming on my podcast. I am truly honored to have had this conversation. It's truly also made my day.

I'm delighted sim Thanks for having me