A Quantum Life with Hakeem Oluseyi

How do you beat the odds and become an astrophysicist? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice sit down with astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi to discuss his path to becoming an astrophysicist and his new book A Quantum Life.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to feature an exclusive conversation with a fellow astrophysicist of mine. Hmm. Ooh, I'll introduce him in just a moment. Let me get Chuck out of the way here. Chuck. Hey, yes, get Chuck out of the way. No, no, sorry. How many times have I heard that in my life? I didn't mean it that way. It just came. Now I just feel like I'm at Thanksgiving dinner.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just came out that way. Nah, I got it. Yeah, all right. So who we have with us today is Hakeem Oluseyi. I think I pronounced that right. Oluseyi. Did I get that right, Hakim?

• 0:59Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Everywhere but in Nigeria.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means I didn't get it right.

• 1:04Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, because the name is a statement, they demand it be stated like a statement. Oluseyi.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then how? Oluseyi. Oh, you gotta get in it. Okay, let me hear you say the whole name.

• 1:15Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Hakim Ouattara Oluseyi.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you gotta get in it. Okay. Oluseyi.

• 1:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, in Nigeria only. They, they, they let me know.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Right. All right, all right. Yeah, they don't care on Wakanda. Wakanda, no. They speak English in Wakanda, apparently. Right. So you are a fellow astrophysicist, and I don't think we've met before. So that's actually a good sign. That means, um, that means there are enough black people who do astrophysics that it's possible that two of them might have never met.

• 1:52Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, well, well, it turns out that very briefly in 2002, at the American Astronomical Society meeting, we did meet. I was standing in an empty poster hall. Monitoring the Snap posters, the Supernova Acceleration Probe, right? Which, you know, came W first, which is now named after a brilliant woman. Uh, and so what happens is you walk up and I'm like, who is this black asterisk business? I don't know. And I turned and looked around and saw your badge and I had just, you know, I was looking at who are the other black asterisk business in the world? And I just discovered you and I'm like, oh, Neil Tyson. And you're like, hi, how are you?

• 2:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I was fresh back from Silicon Valley, I kid you not. That was my first stop.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:43Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our world lines.

• 2:46Chuck Nice?

  So, okay, so here's the thing. Um, you met Neil, he just has never met you.

• 2:54Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right, that's right. Yeah. Until now, until now.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we got this.

• 3:00Chuck Nice?

  That's hilarious.

• 3:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  We got this.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Hakeem, you came out with a book.

• 3:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I did.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A book, let me get the title straight here, A Quantum Life. Damn, you don't waste any time just putting it right out. Quantum Life, uh, My Unlikely Journey From The Street To The Stars. We'll get to that in a minute, but just want to get the rest of your resume out here. So we've got you as, uh, an affiliated professor at George Mason University? Is that right?

• 3:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes, sir.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you are-

• 3:29Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, George Mason.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  President-elect of the National Society of Black Physicists?

• 3:33Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's correct.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and you used to, uh, be a space education lead at NASA?

• 3:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a chief science officer at Discovery Communications?

• 3:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is like, not only Discovery Channel, but like 10 other channels that they control, probably other stuff too, is that right?

• 3:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, mostly focused, those three focused on Science Channel, Discovery and Animal Planet. We're sort of the science, uh, realm of Discovery Communications.

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha, so if they got any science wrong, they send the letters to you?

• 4:02Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And but what intrigues me here is you're also an inventor?

• 4:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've got 11 patents?

• 4:11Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes, sir.

• 4:12Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  11 patents.

• 4:16Chuck Nice?

  What's your favorite invention that you have made?

• 4:18Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You know what? It's the one that I can brag and say it's in all your chips. And it's not because it's that amazing, it's just because-

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's guacamole is in my chips.

• 4:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I work more than- Not those chips, computer chips. But you know, I worked at a large Silicon Valley company that puts chips in all your computers. So if you develop a technology. But basically my work has made it more efficient and also help with Moore's Law to keep progressing.

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. All right. All right. So, so this is part of your, I mean, I'm calling you an astrophysicist, but as you list the rest of the stuff you've done, that gets us back to the subtitle of your book, My Unlikely Journey From This Street to the Stars. Now, now here's what I want to know. Is this book one of these, "I was a poor black child." Is it one of those kind of stories?

• 5:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You know what?

• 5:05Chuck Nice?

  Not really.

• 5:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Man, it is not because.

• 5:09Chuck Nice?

  It really isn't.

• 5:10Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, it isn't because my story is so unique and it's so epic that the reason why I wrote the book in the first place.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we'll decide whether it's epic. So don't you be putting that on your own stuff. We'll be the judge.

• 5:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's what they told me. Yeah, you know, I'm here discovering and everybody keeps telling me, "Oh man, you gotta write a book. You gotta write a book because my life story is so crazy." You know how you meet somebody and they throw out something, you're like, "Holy crap, what, what haven't you done? What haven't you been through?" Right? That was my life. And so I.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you actually obeyed them and decided to write this up. Okay. All right. So, so if it's not.

• 5:41Chuck Nice?

  It's a story worth.

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's not that.

• 5:43Chuck Nice?

  It's a story worth telling.

• 5:44Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a story worth telling.

• 5:46Chuck Nice?

  It's a story worth, I, I gotta tell you the truth. So I, you know, Lindsay sent me a copy of the book.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lindsay, one of our producers, yes.

• 5:53Chuck Nice?

  One of our producers.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Senior producers, yeah.

• 5:55Chuck Nice?

  Couple nights ago and I only had time for that night to read it that, because I knew what my schedule was. And I got through about, uh, at this, about 250, 275 pages of the book. Uh, and that's how good it was. I was reading it as homework because I just wanted to be prepared. But I ended up reading it for enjoyment, which is why I read 275 pages in one sitting.

• 6:23Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Okay. Now Lindsay didn't send me the book, so you should run the damn interview.

• 6:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I know she didn't. Oh, no.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 6:32Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I'll send you to the.

• 6:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll fumble through it. I will. No, I will fumble through this and then Chuck, you come in and make it better as I mess it up. Okay. No, no worries. Yeah. So tell me, so, so, so where are you born?

• 6:44Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right. So I lived in some like historic communities. I was born in New Orleans and my home community is New Orleans East. My father is from rural Mississippi, so I spent half of my, you know, pre eighteen life there. But also I have a foothold in South Central Los Angeles.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 7:02Chuck Nice?

  Where he has a bunch of cousins who are absolutely, uh, Crips.

• 7:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Chuck Nice?

  Or were they the floods?

• 7:07Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, they were Crips. OG Crips and they started.

• 7:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they were OGs. Yeah.

• 7:11Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You know, murders and went to prison for a couple of decades and.

• 7:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are the people you hung out with?

• 7:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely. Yeah, man, I've hung out with everybody like, you know, and that's the thing about, uh, the current life. Uh, you know, the current moment because in science we have this sort of conflict, you know? On the one hand, if somebody makes a mistake, let's cancel them. But on the other hand, yo, let's go into the prisons. Let's deal with the, um, you know, the people that are incarcerated and they help them up through education and science. So, you know, I, I believe in redemption and because so many people in my life I've seen be redeemed.

• 7:46Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'm gonna push back on you, Hakeem, just a little bit. I don't, I don't think that your story was one of redemption.

• 7:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, not mine.

• 7:54Chuck Nice?

  I think.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, not him. He's talking about the other people.

• 7:56Hakeem Oluseyi?

  The other people.

• 7:57Chuck Nice?

  Okay, good. Okay.

• 7:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I knew that, Chuck.

• 7:59Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Chuck Nice?

  Well, listen, I never said I was smart just because I could read two hundred and seventy-five pages in a night. Okay?

• 8:07Chuck Nice?

  It just means I can read.

• 8:08Hakeem Oluseyi?

  They're little pages.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is, not to put words in your mouth, but what you're, I think what you're saying is your environment and the people and the company you kept was quite an exposure, quite a baptism into the challenges of inner city life.

• 8:24Hakeem Oluseyi?

  In a way.

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the life of poverty.

• 8:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely. You know, I, it, it, it, look, everybody's ready to beat you up, including your own family. My family happened to have an entrepreneurial spirit.

• 8:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So, uh.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 8:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And, and, and very highly competitive. So I got into that life at the age of nine, very seriously. And it was something that I was drawn to. I was drawn.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, that life, which life, you're talking about?

• 8:49Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I call it my dark side, right? It was a life.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dark side.

• 8:52Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It was a life of crime.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay.

• 8:55Chuck Nice?

  Crime and lightsabers.

• 8:57Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, at the same time, right? That's the whole thing about it. That's what's quantum about it, right? You have this state of, uh, superposition between these two phases.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two quantum states. I get it.

• 9:08Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Quantum states. And I'm existing in both of them simultaneously. Nerd and gangster, right? Gangster nerd.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but you're a black nerd, so that makes you a blurred.

• 9:18Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Ah, yeah.

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just to be clear about that. Just, all right, so tell, tell, tell us about, how is it that you kept your compass direction throughout the crime, the violence, the muggings, the, you know, how does it? Because most people don't, and there's probably still in jail, in prison.

• 9:39Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, because I didn't want to stay that way, right? And for me, it was very simple. Tomorrow, I want to live indoors and eat, right? And so when I was finishing high school, I'm like, oh, what do I do? Oh, the military. So I joined the military. Then I get out of the military, and at that point, I'm aimless. And some friends convinced me to go to college. So now, in college, you know, you have your dorm, paid for by your, your financial plan, which for me, you know, one of the things people have been talking to me about all my life is this free education we get? That missed me somehow. So with my student loans, I was able to pay for my tuition, housing, food, but then college just come into an end, and I had no idea what to do. And luckily, a woman named Cynthia McIntyre,

• 10:21Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Claude Pooh and Aicoot Box showed up on campus and said, hey, we have this thing we're starting called the National Conference of Black Physics Students. So let me tell you why, uh, how you can become a physicist, which I really didn't see as my career. I became a physics major because physics is what was easy to me. And the reason why it was easy is because I fell in love with Albert Einstein when I was 10 years old and just studied it. But even before that, I fell in. Love with logic problems, right? And and so I would solve all these logic problems. So even though I was like grossly undereducated by the time I graduated high school, I was passionate about the universe and I had taught myself a lot of physics without knowing.

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you were incompletely educated. You still had passion for learning, which is a very important thing.

• 11:06Chuck Nice?

  And and and I think you're being a little humble because you are clearly an autodidact and have been your entire life.

• 11:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Whatever that means.

• 11:13Chuck Nice?

  And.

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't even know what that means, Chuck. What is that? What is an autodidact? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Did you just cuss him? Did you just?

• 11:21Chuck Nice?

  No, it means that you're able to teach yourself. It's like you are self. You are self didactic.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Chuck Nice?

  You tell yourself.

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So so so instead of saying he's self taught, you call him an autodidact. Didact.

• 11:33Chuck Nice?

  Didact, yes, yes.

• 11:34Hakeem Oluseyi?

  He must be a biologist.

• 11:38Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 11:40Chuck Nice?

  But seriously, I think the other thing that is a a bit under looked. I mean, I'm under appreciated. And I say this not just to you, but to everyone listening. What people see in you is the case. And you should, you know, people often look at you and see something. And because you are in your current situation, you can't see it. And so throughout your life, according to your book, there were always people who were like, hey, man, you should.

• 12:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely.

• 12:17Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man, you should.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They see a spark of something in there.

• 12:20Chuck Nice?

  Right, the reason why they do that is because they see it. And now look where you are. They saw it and it was there.

• 12:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But here's the thing, you didn't go quite far enough in the book.

• 12:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, he became a serial murderer.

• 12:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, no, I'm not, but that's what people saw. So I'll give you a funny, a story from the book. So in 2013, I was at UC Berkeley doing summer research and I ran into a grad student friend. And he said, Hakeem, remember that story you told me in grad school? And I had kind of forgotten about it. So basically what had happened is because of my life of crime and the way I was living wrong, I dropped out of college. Okay, and I didn't want to live the life I was living anymore. And to be honest, I continued after this relapse and relapse type thing. Um, so I got a job.

• 13:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And the only job I can get was as a janitor at a nearby hotel. I was making $4 an hour, getting something like 20 some odd bucks a week. I got a, a small apartment, deep in the hood, and I don't even have enough money to eat. So the way I eat most days is I eat people's leftovers from room service. That's how I was eating. Then I get my big break, or so I think. And that is the bellhop at the hotel.

• 13:35Chuck Nice?

  Bellhop.

• 13:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right? And I'm thinking, yeah, I get a hundred dollars in tips in a day. But guess what? According to the hotel, I wasn't bellhop material, right? I wasn't front door material. And so my friend who I was speaking to in 2013, he said, Hakeem, you know what? To me, that story encapsulates what it's like to be a black man in America. Because they didn't realize that the guy standing in front of them was a Stanford PhD physicist. All they could see was the janitor.

• 14:01Chuck Nice?

  Right. But that is because, uh, they, they were trying to hire a fricking bellhop. So you, you also got to consider the source, you know? So I won't belabor the point, but I'm right, Hakeem.

• 14:15Hakeem Oluseyi?

  As always.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, wait, wait. There's way more to this story. We got to take a break, but I, I want to know what branch of the service you, you went to.

• 14:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How did you end up in Stanford? How did you end up even in college in the first place?

• 14:32Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right.

• 14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, uh, I, I don't want to jump ahead too fast because I'm still in South Central LA with you right here in my, in my own head. So when we come back, more of Hakeem, and let me get his last name printed out. Hakeem Alusey, uh, and his story coming up from the depths of American poverty and crime to be a leading astrophysicist when StarTalk continues.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Bringing the universe down to earth. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back with an exclusive interview with Hakeem Oluseyi, who is a fellow astrophysicist. My first time really officially meeting the guy. And apparently Chuck got a copy of the book before this interview because he wrote a memoir and Chuck read the book and I haven't even seen the book. So Chuck, I think I should just go, you know, go have lunch now and you finish the interview.

• 15:55Chuck Nice?

  No, because I'm hungry too.

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's my Quantum Life, my unlikely journey from the street to the stars. And in a quanta are sort of states of existence of particles. And if you apply that to your life, Hakeem, you told us in the first segment that you were this sort of street kid, but you were also this nerd. And the two generally don't have bridges between them. And when you don't, there's separate quantum states, but they coexist in the same body. So it's a superposition of these two quantum states. If we're going to run with the physics of it. But so at what point did you say, maybe I'll go to the military? Was that to, to, to try to bring some order to your life and get a hot meal every day?

• 16:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, just like many other things, I had no direction. And someone came along and said, hey, how about you try this? So what happened is at our high school, now let me tell you about my high school. I grew up in Heidelberg High School in Jasper County, Mississippi. All black, a mile and a half down the road, Heidelberg Academy, all white, right? And so we were all told to go to the cafeteria.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It can't have just been a mile and a half down the road. There had to have been like railroad tracks or something or freeway.

• 17:07Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Nothing like that. No, no.

• 17:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could actually just walk from?

• 17:10Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 17:12Chuck Nice?

  They made it especially cruel.

• 17:15Chuck Nice?

  They were like, we're not even going to put any railroad tracks.

• 17:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not even across the tracks.

• 17:19Chuck Nice?

  Right. You can look, you can be able to look right down the street and see what you're missing.

• 17:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And what was the question?

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, sorry. So just how did, how did you land in the armed services and which, which branch was it?

• 17:37Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, so I was in the US Navy. So it was a very lucky thing for me. What happened was we were all ushered into the cafeteria and we were given the armed services vocational aptitude battery exam. And I would kill all standardized exams, everything but the math. And so, so what happened was a few weeks later, I get called to the principal's office, which was not an uncommon occurrence. But when I got there, he blew me away with what he said. He asked me, he said, what are you doing after high school? And I said, uh, I'm gonna go to college. And he goes, so I knew that's what you're supposed to do. And he said, how are you gonna pay for it? And I said, well, I'm a good musician. I'm a good student. I'll get a scholarship. And he's like, let me introduce you to someone. He takes me into his inner office.

• 18:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And in there, in his dress whites, is Senior Chief Gage, the Navy recruiter. He stands up, looks me in the eye, puts out his hand and goes, hi. Look, the most I can offer you is $20,000 a year. This is 1983. When he said that number, my mother's voice went off in my head. Because I, I remember her bragging about my brother-in-law earning $15,000 one year. And this guy just offered me 20?

• 18:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that $20,000 a year after you get out for you then to spend on college?

• 18:54Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, no, no, no, no, no. This is be, this is full-time Navy career, right? So I joined the Navy thinking that was gonna be my career forever.

• 19:02Chuck Nice?

  He, they were gonna put him in the nuclear program. He was gonna go nuke.

• 19:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, passed the nuke test, but then my recruiter was like, dude, you're so amazing. You know what? I think I can get you in the academy. But he had never done the process, so it was too late. But he did find this program designed to take enlisted people and convert them to officers. But it was people from backgrounds that were undereducated. So they gave you a year of education. And they had two math classes, the regular math class and the remedial math class. Now, we have a Facebook group for all of us that were in this boost 85, 86 class. They think it's hilarious that they were in a regular class and the astrophysicist to be was in a remedial class, right? But in that remedial class, we were taken from arithmetic through calculus in one year.

• 19:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Before arriving, I never heard the word calculus in my life. I did, luckily, I didn't get kicked out until I completed the algebra portion.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so just to recap, so this standardized exam you took, you did really well on all parts except the math part. And you did so poorly on the math part, but so well on the other part, that they said, they brought you in the back office, but then they put you in the remedial math class. Is that, did I get that right?

• 20:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's similar-ish to that. You, you had to take a placement exam, and that's what landed me in the, in the remedial class.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got it. Okay, all right. So then you became a fast study, and you pick it up, and then you go to the Navy, and what do they do with you in the Navy?

• 20:30Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh, man. So I started off in a nuclear program, and then I transferred to this program called Boost, and it's run by the Marines, and man, do they kick, do the Marines, do Marines kick your butt? So I, my discipline level, so you know, growing up-

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to remind people, the Marines are actually a branch of the Navy, in case anybody needed to remember that. But also, there, there are two kinds of nukes. There's the nuclear submarines, which is just an energy source, and then there are nuclear weapons. So which of those were you-

• 20:58Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Nuclear submarines. And yes, in fact, I befriended a former nuclear submarine captain, and I would sit around with him, talking about his, uh, he's retired and became an instructor at Boost, and I would, you know, just love to hear his war stories. So I thought I was gonna be the captain of my sub someday.

• 21:14Chuck Nice?

  Wow. So, but then you had to, you couldn't serve because you had a skin condition and you can't be, is that the deal?

• 21:21Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely. So you know how it is. If you don't have health, health insurance, you don't go to the doctor. So I had had this horrible skin condition my entire life, and I got diagnosed for it, properly, for the first time in the Navy, and they were like, oh, sorry, you can't be in the Navy with this, because it impacts your readiness. It really was horrific, I must say, and I didn't get proper treatment until almost a decade later when I was in graduate school.

• 21:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so this is like some kind of psoriasis or something?

• 21:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's atopic dermatitis, it's an incredibly severe case of atopic dermatitis. Like, have you seen me in my youth? I, I'd scratched so much, I was hairless, and I was several shades darker for breaking all the melanocytes, or whatever they're called, in my skin. Uh, yeah, it was, it was a mess, man, and I was in pain 100% of the time, of course, my torso. Yeah.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay, so that's, all right, damn. You know, you should write a book.

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so wait, so over all this time, you're you're you're reading Einstein and other sort of fun physics. And and the Bible's in there too. So how did the Bible show up in your life?

• 22:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, listen, I was in church every Sunday, you know, wherever we live, we moved every year and several times every year, right? Uh, several times in some years. And everywhere we went, my mother didn't care what the denomination was, we're always in the black community for the most part. And you were going to church, um, and you know, being a little scholarly dude, you know, you know how it is, I I became voracious with books. Uh, so when I was um, in Mississippi, my brother-in-law let me know that, dude, you're not sitting around while everybody else eight years of and older are going to work. At 12 years old, you're going out there, you're hauling pulpwood in those woods with my father and brothers. And if you don't know what hauling pulpwood is, you don't want to know.

• 23:10Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It is crazy, hard work, and it's and for a child, you know, it's criminal down there. But um, a few days out there, my skin erupts head to toe, right? And so I'm left at home every day and I'm looking, searching for reading material. And there's the big children's version of the King James Bible and the regular version. So I just spent day after day sitting there and I devoured the Bible from cover to cover. And the next year I was the adult Sunday school teacher.

• 23:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Teaching adults, teaching adults.

• 23:40Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So I started off with the kids and then I moved up to teaching the adults because, you know, I had I had so much insight. Uh, at that point, and you know, I you know how it is when you're a you have.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's one thing to have read the Bible.

• 23:52Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's one thing to have read the Bible and know what's in it. It's another thing to have digested it so that you can now teach lessons to people in Bible school. That's a whole other level, right?

• 24:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, it is, but it does. It happens automatically, right? You you start making connections and you start and for me, I don't know about you.

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't happen automatically. It happened automatically for you.

• 24:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Okay.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, just just think about it. I mean, I I, by the way, it's not unique to the Bible. Just because you got an A in your physics class doesn't mean the next day you can start teaching that very same class. Because teaching it requires some deeper insights that enable you to communicate what you just learned. And it's not just a recitation of a fact that just came off the page. So.

• 24:29Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right, that's right.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all right, so yeah, stop trying to think everyone is as smart as you.

• 24:34Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Humans are dope. Humans are dope. I'm a human. You're a human. Chuck's a human. We're dope.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not, not, the jury's still out. Jury's still out. I was with you until you said Chuck.

• 24:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we not sure yet.

• 24:50Chuck Nice?

  But I do think Neil was right in this, that people who are in your position feel as though, oh, well, everybody does this and it's not really the case, you know? And it's funny because I had a teacher who, that was how he taught us. He would say, alright, so you think you got it? And when you said yes, he would say, now teach it to me.

• 25:11Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right.

• 25:11Chuck Nice?

  And that's how you got your, that's how you got your grades.

• 25:15Hakeem Oluseyi?

  The thing though, were you interested in that? How about, how did you think when you were interested in things? Because the thing about.

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then it would come to you easier, it would come easier.

• 25:24Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely, and I was surrounded by people, like my good friend, Chris Morgan, right? He finished high school, he's been working a job ever since, didn't even consider going to college, right? And in fact, we were chatting and I was like, what are you doing after high school? He was like, nothing. And I was, and it was like, ah, so I thought, okay, you're supposed to go to college or the military, right? Uh, but look, that dude was brilliant, he was kicking my ass, we would play games, you know, he was just, Chris was dragging me and I was surrounded by brilliant people, even now. And one of the worst things that happens, you go home and you want to hear the wisdom of your homies? But because you got some fancy degree, they're like, oh, I can't talk to you, man. I'm like, no, man, I need the wisdom that's in your head too, right?

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right.

• 26:04Chuck Nice?

  You had some good friends.

• 26:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely.

• 26:06Chuck Nice?

  You had some good friends, because when I go home and I see my friends, I'm like, I don't want to hear nothing that you got to say. I've known you my whole life, you's a dumbass if I ever met one.

• 26:18Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, you know, I do, but listen now, when I start talking science, I had this one friend, he'd always go, then he go with that stuff again, like they didn't want to hear that, they didn't want to hear the science, yeah.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. Well, so what's this about daydreaming and why that was dangerous? Uh, did you, you daydreamed a lot as a kid?

• 26:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I still do, I still do, man, I still do, I just daydreamed up four Big Bangs last week. What do you mean by four Big Bangs? Because we think of it as one Big Bang, right? So to us physicists, you know, we know that, you know, matter and all this stuff is an illusion. And we live in this universe of fields. So imagine you got something like swimming pool of Jell-O, right? And you have several, one's green, one's blue, one's red, one's yellow. And you just merge them together in one, right? So that's like all these fields merged together. So we have the inflaton field goes from this high energy to low energy, boom, gives all this money to the space field. That's the first bang. Space expands rapidly as a result. Boom, second bang. But that rapid explosion of space causes it to fill with matter and energy suddenly.

• 27:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Pow, right? But it's equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which annihilate, boom, fourth bang.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Chuck, he's still on drugs, apparently.

• 27:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's the bangs. Come on now. They happen like that.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With all the authorities now.

• 27:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So it's four. The fermion field, right? It sends this energy into the electromagnetic field. It's like energy goes from inflaton field to space field to fermion field to electromagnetic field. And then what is happening? Space freshes it out, right?

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so is this something you day dreamed recently or when you?

• 27:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Last week.

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Last week?

• 27:56Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I may have been, I don't know.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was the transition between physics and astrophysics? When you finally, you know, when you find, sense finally descended upon you and you realize the universe is cooler than anything else?

• 28:11Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. So the thing about the universe, I've been attracted to it from day one. I've been attracted to nature, but I was also attracted to weirdness, right? So I learned, you know, my, my, my friend told me that, hey, you know, if you're under 18, you can't be held to a contract. So I used to order those time life books, you know, Yeti, the, the, you know, Bigfoot, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, I got into comics. My, my Mississippi cousins introduced me to Marvel and DC Comics and I loved it. So when I hit Einstein and relativity, I'm like, this is just like that stuff, like the miracles in the Bible, sci-fi, all that stuff, but it's real.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except it's real.

• 28:47Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, exactly. It's real. And then I was like, I gotta learn this. So I started teaching myself relativity at the age of 10 and I just struggled with it. And I didn't realize that I, how well I knew it until I won first place in physics in the Mississippi State Science Fair, right? These professors started coming at me and, you know, I didn't know anything else about physics. But I knew, I knew that. And so in college, what ends up happening is I take my first physics class, realize this has to be my major. And then I get accepted miraculously, though strategically, at Stanford for graduate school. And when I talk to all the professors, they have one African American professor. I wanted to do experimental astrophysics. Astrophysics, I felt, was where

• 29:30Hakeem Oluseyi?

  the natural world met weirdness. And whoo, let's do it.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's true. I gotta agree with that. So where did you go to college before Stanford?

• 29:40Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Tugulu College, yeah.

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tugulu in Mississippi?

• 29:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  In Mississippi, that's right.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:45Chuck Nice?

  That was their motto, Boogaloo at Tugulu.

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right?

• 29:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No.

• 29:49Chuck Nice?

  No, I just made that up.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we gotta take another break. But when we come back, I want to understand, Hakeem, what this obsession you had growing up with compulsively counting things. And a little more about your very unlikely quantum life on StarTalk.

• 30:16Chuck Nice?

  Time to shout out our Patreon patrons. Emily Rivera, Jocelyn Salias, and Nicholas Early. Guys, how would we do this show without you? Well, the truth is, we wouldn't do it as well. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. I got Chuck Nice with me, Chuck.

• 30:52Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Hey.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reading Chuck Nice comic. And I got my special exclusive guest for this interview, Hakeem Oluseyi. And Hakeem, you're on social media?

• 31:03Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I am, yes. I am.

• 31:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what do we call you? How do we find you on Twitter?

• 31:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  If you put Hakeem Oluseyi in Twitter, that is my handle there.

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And no one else has that Twitter name?

• 31:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It wasn't.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  O-L-U-S-E-Y-I. Again, there's a Facebook page as well, I presume?

• 31:20Hakeem Oluseyi?

  There is. I'm not there as much. I suck in that way.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and TikTok or?

• 31:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, but I do have Instagram. And I have my first initial, middle initial, H-M-O-L-U-S-E-Y.

• 31:33Hakeem Oluseyi?

  H M O U B Shady. Yes. Okay, all right, thanks for that, for that info. So, uh, we learned from your profile that you, you counted things as a child. And I still do. Obsessively, compulsively. And I still do. And is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, I went to see a psychologist because I thought it was a problem because of my eyes divert to count things in the room around me, right? And so if you're doing business negotiations, you should be looking the person in the eye. Are you counting like objects or any kind of objects? Patterns. In the same category? Patterns, like behind you, there is a picture frame. I like particular numbers like tens and twenties. So every frame is an easy twenty. So my mind will do it over and over as I'm talking to you, just like I have been doing the entire time we have been talking.

• 32:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So each inner corner is two four, the outer corners are six eight, the inner and- Wait, wait, pay attention to me. What? I'm showing you. Two, four, six, eight. Pay attention to me. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty. You're just doing it over and over and over and over and over. I just can't stop it. I don't know what's going on. Yeah, yeah. All right, that is, that's a little weird. Oh, you want to hear it even weirder? When I go up and down stairs, not only do I have to count them, I have to count them in such a way that when I go down them, my left foot lands at the bottom and lands on the number one. And when I go up them, my right foot must land at the top and land on the number one hundred, which means I have to guess what number and what foot to start on at the beginning of the stairs. And you- So, and you'd be counting by fives or sevens or tens?

• 33:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, no, just, just ones. Just by ones, just by ones. But I am so good at it. But you, yeah. Wait, wait, wait, your stairs, you might not have a hundred steps.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, suppose you have ten stairs.

• 33:10Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Below twenty, I'm nailing it. If it's ten stairs, I got it. Boom, it's just, I don't know what it is by my mind, but it's like, boop, boop, boop. Oh, it's up to a hundred is how you would be engaging this? Like, like, for example, if I see seventeen stairs or whatever, I have to start on my right foot on the number eighty-four at the bottom. And then go eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight, and so when I get to the top, my foot lands on a hundred. Yeah. Ah. Yeah, yeah, and I'm so good at it. It's nuts.

• 33:34Chuck Nice?

  See, we have that in common. I have to land on a prime number, which is why I always take the elevator.

• 33:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Hakeem, you know, do I even dare share this with you? So when I was a kid, I thought of all the numbers that were just living in my head. And I decided to write down every single number that had any meaning or significance to me at one sitting.

• 34:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Are you done yet?

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, at the time.

• 34:04Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, but I could take you forever.

• 34:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so I wrote down every zip code that had any meaning to me. I wrote down every phone number, seven-digit phone number that had any meaning. Every street address, every, the digits of pi. I also happen to know the fifth root of a hundred to 12 decimal places, that's down there.

• 34:23Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh my god.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so it's a whole page just filled with numbers. And but I don't, I didn't view that as, as compulsive. It was just, how many numbers am I carrying with me? And is that necessary?

• 34:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right.

• 34:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it was more of a practical exercise. And then I stepped back and looked at it. And I said, that's, I think that's a lot of numbers. But I, I tried to make sure it didn't grow so that I had room for other things in my brain. But, but this number thing, there's some resonance there between us. I just thought I'd put that out.

• 34:56Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You know, there's even more. I also had other kind of superpowers like you named that I no longer have, like rotary phones. I used to just amaze my family. So I was like, you dial this number. I could just tell from the sound of the phone, right? Or if a car pulled up in the yard and it was a family member, that so-and-so, just from the sound of the car, right? So the people around me were like, oh, this kid is a freaking, and you know.

• 35:16Chuck Nice?

  He has voodoo.

• 35:17Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely. And because my eyes are a weird color, when I moved to Mississippi, there were some, several elderly people that was like, that boy have devil eyes. He's evil. And they just treated me like crap. Yeah.

• 35:28Chuck Nice?

  What a shame.

• 35:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay. So let me ask you both this, it's so weird. Speaking of your childhood, all right. So like in your book, you have these moments where you look to the stars and it has. A profound effect on you where it causes you to go outside of yourself. You know, and I know Neil, when he was a kid, had the same experiences.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, in the planet Saturn, I was nine years old and the lights dimmed, the stars came out. And that's all, that's, that's it. I was starstruck ever since. And I'd go out into the real sky when I finally saw a real sky, because I grew up in New York City. And I'd look up at the stars and I just placed them in the full three dimensionality of the universe. And, and for my whole life, to this day, anytime I'm alone out under the stars, but I have to be alone. If I'm alone, I want to be abducted by aliens. I want a beam of light to come down and zap me back to some other planet and I want to meet the aliens.

• 36:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I'm with you on that.

• 36:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you should have told me that. I would have made a call.

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you got me.

• 36:30Chuck Nice?

  Is there something now with all of your experience, exposure and knowledge of the universe? Is there something now that gives you that same experience?

• 36:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 36:44Chuck Nice?

  In your work, in your work or in your admiration of the universe or anything? That puts you in that same wonder of, I see the night sky in 3D. Oh my God.

• 36:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Chuck Nice?

  Out of body kind of like this, this is why I'm, this is why I'm here, like.

• 37:04Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, you know.

• 37:05Chuck Nice?

  What is, is there something now that happens?

• 37:07Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely. Sometimes you have these insights, right? That, that aren't really insights, but just like, oh, that's really interesting. So for me, data doesn't. And so the data that did that for me a year ago was a visualization created from Sloan Digital Sky Survey data done by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. So we say things like, oh, there's two million or two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. And we show these slices of the universe. But when you see a 3D representation, you can look around the universe, you see what the galaxies are.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, when you project the full 3D universe on paper, you take slices through. These are slices you're referring to. When you go to a full visual 3D representation, no longer are slices necessary.

• 37:46Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely.

• 37:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just wanted to clarify that. Go on.

• 37:48Chuck Nice?

  Now, is that the, is that the barium oscillating stereos?

• 37:52Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Woo!

• 37:53Chuck Nice?

  You heard a lot of stuff.

• 37:55Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, no, this is before that. So Boss.

• 37:58Chuck Nice?

  This is before that. Okay. This is the precursor to that.

• 38:02Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Basically, in a way, yes.

• 38:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 38:03Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Slow dear to the sky survey. Um, but so here's what I thought about.

• 38:06Chuck Nice?

  But this is not your imagination.

• 38:07Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, it is.

• 38:08Chuck Nice?

  It's actually in 3D.

• 38:08Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's actually in 3D, but it triggered my imagination. Because what do we do when we teach students astronomy? In order for them to understand the universe, we say, well, you know, things like this, analogies. The universe is the basic building block of, the galaxy is the basic building block of the universe. In much the same way that the cell is the basic building block of your body. And I thought to myself, well, you know what? Let me take that to a, to the limit. Let me take that seriously. So what if I shrink myself down so small that the size of a human cell in, in respect to me is like the size of a galaxy with respect to me now, right? So that's like 20 orders of magnitude for the nerds out there. So I did that. Now I was like, what if I then study the universe from that perspective?

• 38:50Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So say I'm in an elephant and I'm like, oh, I see these types of galaxies. They're spirals. They behave this way. They're structured this way. Oh, I see these. They're ellipticals. They behave this way. They orient themselves this way. Now, let me do the same thing in my analogy. I'm in an elephant. Oh, I see a nerve cell. These things behave this way. They distribute this way. Blood cells, bone cells, muscle cells. Do you have any frickin' idea what an elephant is?

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So what you're saying is, uh, so, okay. So you, you are, um, who's the woman who drives the bus that can go any size and shape?

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  The magic school bus.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you're on the magic school bus.

• 39:28Hakeem Oluseyi?

  At all times, at all times, at all times. Yeah.

• 39:32Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's a pretty wild though, man. That's a, that's a great analogy. I love it.

• 39:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's a change of perspective.

• 39:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And let me give you another.

• 39:39Chuck Nice?

  It is a true change.

• 39:40Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Let me give you another change of perspective, right? Because us scientists, we always like to talk about like how everything's just all space. Like, oh, you know, how long does it take a light ray? You know that, you know that, uh, visualization on the internet where in real time, we're going to travel from the sun at the speed of light.

• 39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The travel of the beam of light. Yes. Brilliant.

• 39:56Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Brilliant.

• 39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely brilliant.

• 39:57Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, right.

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Visualization. I tweeted it. Anybody's wondering. So someone shows the actual beam of, an actual beam of light, well, I mean, the video of a beam of light moving from Earth. To the moon and it takes about one and a half seconds. So you see it take one and a half seconds. Then you see a beam of light go from like from the sun to the earth. That takes eight minutes and 20 seconds. So you wait there for the eight minutes and 20 seconds. So and what you say, damn, that light is slow.

• 40:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. So what was I talking?

• 40:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, so in your, in your PhD, you quote Ibn al Haytham.

• 40:33Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yes.

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We spent a bit of time on him in Cosmos.

• 40:36Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Is that right?

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why don't you remind everybody who he is?

• 40:38Hakeem Oluseyi?

  He is, I, I consider him the first practitioner of the scientific method. He's the guy who showed that the eye is a passive receptor. It does not send out a beam and bounce back. And when Isaac Newton, your favorite scientist I've heard, said,

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My boy.

• 40:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  If I, if I have seen farther than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants. Ibn al Haytham was one of the people he was speaking of because his book of optics as a scientific treatise and history. And around the turn of the century, 1000, just changed everything.

• 41:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So this is in the Golden Age of Islam.

• 41:09Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back between like 800 and 1100 AD. So, so there's a quote here, which is, it's, it's, it's got it all in it. Will you allow me to read it?

• 41:19Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Please, sir. Please. You know everyone loves to hear your, your voice.

• 41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So just a reminder, Ibn al Haytham was a mathematician and astronomer and, and basically credited with the first formulation of the scientific method, which would take probably another 600 years to become widespread use. But he landed there first and if learning the truth is the scientist's goal, then he must make himself an enemy of all that he reads. He should also suspect himself so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. There in two sentences is the fundamental seeds of the scientific method. Scientific method. Yeah, there, there you go.

• 42:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And his, his, uh, statement about Ptolemy is, is amazing as well. For a man to imagine an arrangement in the heavens does not make it exist.

• 42:10Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's good.

• 42:11Chuck Nice?

  I like the first one better.

• 42:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got like a couple of minutes left here. So, so, so, so tell me, you, you were born James Plummer Jr.

• 42:21Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now you're, now you pulled the African card.

• 42:24Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where did that come from and why?

• 42:26Hakeem Oluseyi?

  You know what? So the first thing, the seeds of it started when I read my very first novel, which happened to be The Book Roots. Uh, everybody was talking about it. I, you know, I didn't have any love for adult books at the age of nine, right? Uh, and so I'm sitting around the farm bored as I don't know what. I'm like, let me give this thing a read and I got stuck. I mean, I could not put it down. But when he got captured, that was the first thing that just got me in the heart.

• 42:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When Kunta Kinte got captured?

• 42:53Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Kunta Kinte got captured, right? Uh, then the second one was the, the, the, the middle passage.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've been a, wait, wait, and you've been a, a, a, um, S- Star Trek Next Generation fan ever since.

• 43:06Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Uh, right? I was thinking of him. I didn't know whether or not I should say so.

• 43:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no, no.

• 43:12Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind us who played Kunta Kinte?

• 43:16Hakeem Oluseyi?

  LeVar Burton, LeVar Burton.

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  LeVar Burton.

• 43:18Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Who, when I met him, was the, one of the very few times I've ever been star, starstruck. And he bought me my very first vodka tonic. So.

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 43:28Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So, so keep going. So now you're, you're in, in Roots now. So now what?

• 43:32Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah. So, uh, then the thing that just kills me, man, is when they force him to change his name. Right? And so that just planted a seed in my mind, right? And so as I'm developing, uh, you know, and believe it or not, this really isn't in the book. But so what happens is, you know how you make these connections? By the time I'm out of the Navy and I'm in college, I start making these connections about the society in which we live and all the way it works against, you know, the way it maintains a hierarchy, the socioeconomic hierarchy we have, right? The identity hierarchy.

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, implicitly and explicitly and legally and de facto and de jure is a hierarchy.

• 44:05Hakeem Oluseyi?

  So you know how you sit around your dorm room, listening to music and other things? So I would, uh, you know, start talking about this stuff. And the group of people grew and grew and grew till we had to take it to the dorm. And everybody's like, oh, you're a prophet. And then these cats from the nation of. Islam showed up and I was like, this is over. I am not doing this anymore. It's gotten too serious, but you know, I was just like making all these connections, you know, of what's going on. But that, did that answer your question?

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to remind people, the Nation of Islam is the branch of Islam that is based in the United States of America.

• 44:37Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And it's not.

• 44:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any more description of that that I have to give?

• 44:40Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, it's not really a, a, a branch of standard Islam. It's sort of a new religion that was founded by Elijah Muhammad where he combined.

• 44:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Elijah Muhammad, a coincidence with Muhammad. Right, okay, right. So go on.

• 44:52Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, so when I get to Stanford, right, I feel like there are certain things I need to know. Um, and the first.

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is Stanford, a graduate school in physics.

• 45:00Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Graduate school in physics, right, yeah. So I'd had this buddy, because I was, you know, what they called Afrocentric in a time, who always was encouraging me to read certain literature. And I never would. When I got to Stanford, I was like, Blackness, help, where are you? And then, you know, I found it in the library. And so I started devouring, and I had certain questions in my head. For one thing, I wanted to know the political structure. I wanted you to be able to tell me a year and I'll tell you where the major nations in the world were at that time and what was happening in Africa at that time. I wanted to understand African religions. I wanted to understand everything, right? And so historically, I'm a huge history buff, all the way back to the Big Bang. And so what happened is I realized, you know, okay, I'm doing well in school. Stuff like this matters. I feel like I've become a new person.

• 45:42Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I've let go the old guy, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm now the, the man. And I was reborn in a way. So I said, here's what I want. I want my middle name to express who I am. I want my first name to express who I, who, who I wish to become. And I want my last name to honor my African ancestors. And the reason, that's who I identified with, right? And so my middle name, Muata, is Swahili, and it means he seeks the truth. My first name, Hakim, most people know it from the Muslim connotation, but actually it's all over the east, near, near east and Africa. And it always means the same thing, some form of wise. And my last name, Oluseye, means God has done this. I want it, it is, it is Yoruba.

• 46:23Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Because on my mother's side of the family, our, uh, you know, we have family gatherings. They were proud of always saying, we were not slaves, we were not slaves. And frankly, until the actual research was done and put in my face in the nineties, I never believed that. I always liked them. How the hell did we get here then? We're black, right? Um, but it was true. Uh, and so, uh, my ancestors, this and.

• 46:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was the black settlers. It was the black settlers that came across the Bering Strait.

• 46:50Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, they went from Europe.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The lost tribe of the Bering Strait.

• 46:55Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, you know, I did, you know, you read Roger, what's his name, Roger A, somebody who's like, everybody in history was black. This guy was black, that guy was black, right? Beethoven's black, so, um. What was I saying? So, so, uh, O'Shea, they, they came from, he came from Urbaland, went to France, went to San to Domingo, had a son, my great grand, great, great grandfather, and then moved to, uh, New Orleans where, so this is my great, great, great grandfather. And my mother's great, great grandfather, right? Yeah, yeah. So, so, so.

• 47:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was an important rebirth.

• 47:27Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely.

• 47:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is this.

• 47:29Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is, so you are.

• 47:30Chuck Nice?

  See, now, I thought you changed your name because when you went to Stanford and in your book, none of the white people would help you with your projects. And you, after you had helped them, and so you're like, you know what? I'm gonna make these people as uncomfortable as possible. Yeah, my name is Hakeem now.

• 47:48Hakeem Oluseyi?

  No, it wasn't that. That was, I, I did do that in my early years. I was in one of the few research groups that had a stereo in there. And they would know for that being so cool, they have a stereo in the student offices. Dude, one day I went on there, I put on Ice Cube America's most, follow my Ice Cube, Kill It Will, follow my Ice Cube death certificate. But later, I learned that we are all individuals.

• 48:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sent it back to jail.

• 48:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  But, you know, I learned that we're all individuals. So I don't even say white people, black people like that anymore. Because, you know, I, I'll tell people, I'm lucky. I've been abused by white cops and black cops. I've been held at gunpoint by black thugs and white thugs. You know, I, I realized that, you know, there is a identity hierarchy in our country, right? And, and one of the things that happens is you leave America, you have this sense of, whoo. Right, because you don't feel it anymore. You don't feel that oppression anymore.

• 48:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, it's a weight lifted. It's a fascinating phenomenon.

• 48:41Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I don't have that. I don't have that problem. I look down on everyone, so.

• 48:47Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Well, you know what? So one of the psychological games I play, like when I'm drawing, going across, driving across the part of the country where it's worse than others, is I pretend I'm in another country. Because then I don't know what your assumptions and thoughts are, right? I don't know what your mores are in your countries, so I'm free.

• 49:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but they'll let you know real fast.

• 49:03Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Absolutely. Hey, I'll tell you a funny story like that. When I was in Berkeley.

• 49:07Chuck Nice?

  I see you ain't, you ain't from round here now, are you, boy?

• 49:12Hakeem Oluseyi?

  When I came back to astronomy, I was at UC Berkeley. And among the group of people I was in, we saw Pearl Mother in those cats. And, and, and, and what they, you know, my blackness for the first time wasn't this issue. So I was sitting in a talk and I was like, oh my God, I forgot I was black, right? And then.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right.

• 49:31Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I left that position and became a professor in Northern Alabama. And they were like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're black.

• 49:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So guys, we got to land this plane. So let me, uh, so, so this, this was quite the journey. Like I said, you, you should write a book. Oh, you did write a book.

• 49:52Hakeem Oluseyi?

  That's right.

• 49:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A Quantum Life, My Unlikely Journey From the Streets to the Stars. And it's published in the, the Random House Group, right? Who, it's a Penguin.

• 50:03Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It is. It's on the Valentine imprint on Penguin Random House.

• 50:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Valentine imprint.

• 50:07Hakeem Oluseyi?

  It's out this year.

• 50:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yes, so this sounds like a long overdue memoir, based on all the stuff you were talking about. Now I wonder, you know, if all this is happening to you, this is just your memoir, part one. Because the rest of your life, that's gotta be worth another memoir, I'm thinking.

• 50:22Hakeem Oluseyi?

  Oh, it's absolutely, it's even crazier. I'm not abused for the first half of it. Because now I have agency. Now I'm the guy who can make a difference in other people's lives, right?

• 50:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so that'll be how all that got turned into something where you do some good for the rest of the world and for the frontier, the moving frontier of physics. So I'm liking it. Dude, listen, thanks for being a guest on StarTalk. And will you invite us to the Hollywood premiere of the biopic on your life?

• 50:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because you know they're gonna make, they gotta make this into a movie.

• 51:01Hakeem Oluseyi?

  I guess you haven't heard. So after I got the book deal, I went to Hollywood. I met with several production companies. My last meeting was with a man named Chadwick Boseman and his partner Logan Coles. And he took this on. And he, when he passed away, he had 10 projects. And Logan told me that my, our project together was the only one where it wasn't resting on the fact that he was a actor in it. He was purely directing. And we met a week before he was giving the commencement address at Howard. And I was being awarded an honorary doctorate at Tugendhat, right?

• 51:43Hakeem Oluseyi?

  And so we talked about this and he championed my story and Universal signed it on the first pitch and we signed a movie deal two years ago.

• 51:52Chuck Nice?

  Already?

• 51:54Hakeem Oluseyi?

  However, Chadwick's death has changed things.

• 51:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Well, don't worry because it's a great story.

• 52:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody will pick it up. This should not need Chadwick Boseman to get made. I'm pretty sure about that.

• 52:06Chuck Nice?

  And just make sure Michael B. Jordan plays you, man, because then, you know, it's guaranteed success.

• 52:13Hakeem Oluseyi?

  There's a great similarity between my childhood abs and Michael's current abs.

• 52:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got six pack abs too, they're just under four inches of fat. But they're there, I promise you. All right, guys. So, listen, I'm, thank you, Hakim, for agreeing to this interview and good luck with the book tour. And you got good backing behind that if Random House is in the equation. So, hope to see you on the best seller list. And, uh, well, and I'm waiting for my ticket to your, the premiere. And, and Chuck agreed that, um, Michael Jordan's got to play, play you in this role. So that'll happen. All right, Chuck, always good to have you here. Always a pleasure. This has been StarTalk Radio. Exclusive interview with Hakeem Oluseyi, who is a fellow astrophysicist, a meeting really here for the first time.

• 53:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And who has a remarkable life captured in his memoir, uh, which comes out, uh, this June. Okay. So, uh, this has been StarTalk. I've been Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking up.