Neil deGrasse Tyson: DO THIS Every Morning To Find Happiness & Meaning In Your Life

For a lot of people black holes and string theory were topics that were filed in the mental box labelled ‘things I will never be able to get my head around”. However, all changed when Neil deGrasse Tyson began appearing on TV screens. Neil’s passion and energy for science is infectious and the reason why he is one of the world’s greatest science communicators. This fascination has lasted ever since childhood where he felt the universe reach out to him at the same planetarium he is now the director of. But while Neil was obsessed with the cosmos he was often brought back to earth, having to deal with racial prejudice and stereotyping as he followed his passion. In this conversation Neil discusses his quest in raising the global knowledge of space, the universe and the world’s beyond our own. Neil: Twitter - https://bit.ly/3V8MWaY Instagram - https://bit.ly/3HIpGO3 Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just spent half hour talking about this and I hardly ever talk about it.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  Why is that wrong?

• 0:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't say it was wrong. I don't give a rat's ass.

• 0:05Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, I'm with you.

• 0:08Speaker 02

  World-renowned astrophysicist turned TV host.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a man with the answers to the toughest questions on the planet.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  And, of course, bestselling author.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the last 50 years, we've increased life expectancy 20 years. There will be a time where Homo sapiens have achieved escape velocity from death. That generation will never die unless you're hit by a bus. That brings you the question, if you could live forever, would you? How different the world would be.

• 0:36Steven Bartlett?

  What are the things that you are most concerned about with the direction of travel of the human race?

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot of things.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there's some delusional force operating on people's understanding of the world in which they live. If you post an opinion on anything, it gets attacked. Did you see what happened with Neil deGrasse Tyson?

• 0:56Speaker 02

  He tweeted something that many people took great offense to.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Part of what it is to be a scientist is figure out all the ways you could bias yourself and remove them as far as possible. Don't let it interfere with objective truths.

• 1:08Steven Bartlett?

  But what's the personal toll on you?

• 1:10Speaker 03

  I don't know why he tweeted that.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stupid and awful. He's just a weird Twitter lunatic. This is a...

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How long can I keep talking about?

• 1:34Steven Bartlett?

  Neil, I have always believed that to fully understand a person, you have to understand their origin story. Maybe that's a similar sort of analogy for the universe. So, the place I wanted to start with you is by understanding the most important context from your earliest years that are responsible for the person that is sat in front of me today.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, this is very Marvel Comics of you. What's the origin story of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man? Your question is very well placed because everyone's been touched by some series of events. Unfortunately, for some people traumatic events, but for all people, some series of events that shaped who they are. And I'd like to say that there was a series of events that planted the seeds of who I would become, but I wouldn't say that they were responsible.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, it requires a lot of continual investment of time, energy, and focus to shape a career, rather than say, "Oh, it happened then, and I've just been coasting ever since." No, that's not how that works. So, I grew up in the Bronx, and in New York City, surely as is true in London, you don't have a relationship with the night sky. In a busy city, you, at least certainly in New York City, there were tall buildings. If you look up to see the sky, there's a building in the way. There's light pollution, and back then, there was air pollution. So, since no one has a relationship with the night sky, then one can ask, "What is your access to it?"

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, it's our local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium. And my family, my parents, my brother and sister, there was a tactical, strategic thing my parents did. I didn't know it at the time, but every weekend or every other weekend, we went places. We were exposed to all manner of things that talented adults do, beyond just the doctor, lawyer, you know, engineer, beyond those standard professions. So, first, it was entertaining, but it also meant we had exposure to other ways of thinking about what you might do with your life.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of those trips, when I was nine years old, was to the Hayden Planetarium. And I was starstruck. You sit in a big chair and the lights dim and the stars come out. More stars than you can count. And I thought it was a hoax. I said, aren't that many stars? I've seen the night sky from the Bronx. You're lying to me. And only later would I learn upon going deep into the rural areas of the country. We have relatives in the Caribbean. We visited there. I'd see the night sky as nature intended. And to this day, when I have access to great telescopes on mountain tops

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and I look up at this crystalline clear night skies, I still say to myself, oh, that is so beautiful. It reminds me of the Hayden planetary. So it's a, I know that's kind of a sad commentary on what it is to grow up in a city, but it's, I feel like the universe chose me. And since I was nine years old onward, I have committed my life to learning more and more about the universe. And that, that's the, the most important seed that was planted.

• 5:20Steven Bartlett?

  Cyril and Sunchita, is that your parents' names?

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cyril is my father and Sunchita is my mother, correct.

• 5:25Steven Bartlett?

  What was the influence that they individually had on you? From the, from almost vicariously learning from them, but also the direct influence they had on you?

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were a moral influence, a cultural influence. And I will add, not that you explicitly ask this, but I think it fits right in this moment. Consider the period, the 1960s. You could go one of two ways if you're an angry black man. It's like you can raise your fist. And threaten violence as a retaliation of the violence against you? Or you can find some other way that doesn't involve violence, that involves some kind of peace, some kind of understanding.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my father, and while he grew up in the thirties and forties, he served in a segregated army. Okay, so the stuff he lived through, and while I have my own stories, none of them compare to his average story. Yet, at the end of the day, he was never bitter. I remembered him saying, when you look at the images of angry white people screaming at black children entering a school, who are protected by the National Guard because an edict had to be delivered to grant them access to education, he would say, "They simply don't know any better.

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were raised that way."

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to hate them. And...

• 7:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My father never hated.

• 7:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Never.

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I go through life, and at least several times a week, every week of my life, growing up, I have stories. Today, they would call them microaggressions, but then it was just same shit, different day. But I never got bitter, because you asked, what influence did they have on me? It was the non-bitter influence. You say, "That's, they don't know any better. They think they're doing the right thing.

• 7:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe we can make a difference going forward."

• 7:52Steven Bartlett?

  I saw the emotion in your face when you talked about your father.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's...

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think we need that today.

• 8:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The world...

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I reached a point where, okay.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How long can I keep talking about

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the universe?

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not bring it down to earth?

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not bring some science principles to people's thinkings? They want to tribalize. They want to hate. They want to choose. Want to create laws to restrict your freedoms just because of who you worship or don't worship, or who you sleep with, or what you look like, or what, you know, how reflective to light your skin color is, right? What side of a line in the sand you

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  were born on?

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like invoking an alien trope. Aliens, they don't know anything about us. They just see this beautiful planet with water on it and continents and clouds and they visit. And they say, oh, this is cool. Oh, this is one species that's everywhere. Oh, they're very successful. They're humans and Homo sapiens. And heck, that's cool. And then they get a little closer look. And they say, oh, my gosh. What are they? There's a war over here? Why? Oh, because there's some resource on this side that's not over there and they want it. There's a coastline, there's oil, there's this, there's a, uh, elements in a mine. They, they, they, they worship a different god. They look at the violence and hatred that we commit upon each other.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they'll run back home and tell their fellow alien brethren. There's no sign of intelligent life on earth.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyhow, so I've, I've, yeah, my head has been in the stars, but my feet have been on earth my entire life.

• 10:06Steven Bartlett?

  Why, why, why does that connect so deeply? Because it's so obvious it connects so deeply with you. Is that linked to what the resilience to bitterness that your father demonstrated when he was abused and was attacked with racial abuse? Is that, is that the, the reason why it's so linked so closely to your heart?

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I, I don't know.

• 10:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't, he didn't burden us with his stories unless we asked or unless it came up in a moment. It was, it wasn't that way. It was, I saw his integrity in the face of what was going on in the world. And it's,

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you can, a person can be a mentor even if they don't say anything. Because you can observe them, observe their conduct, their, their behavior, their, how they respond to adversity. Do they fight back? Do they want to commit violence?

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do they want to have a conversation to explore the differences?

• 11:16Steven Bartlett?

  You know, I, I am, I'm a, my mother's from Nigeria, my dad's from England. So I'm of, I guess, dual ethnicity or whatever the politically correct term is.

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called human.

• 11:25Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, I'm human.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called, just say it, repeat after me. What race are you? You're the human race.

• 11:31Steven Bartlett?

  I'm the human race.

• 11:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you just spent 10 seconds telling me how anthropologists liked to divide up the world and force us to then agree with their categories. Line everybody up from ghost white to coal black and you will have a human being of every single skin color in between. Okay? Or did you happen to be born over there? So you're a human. Tell me what mixture you are. I don't give a rat's ass.

• 12:00Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a human being sitting across the table from me. Now, continue. Sorry, it's your podcast.

• 12:07Steven Bartlett?

  It's fine, I don't mind.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't mean to jump all in your face.

• 12:09Steven Bartlett?

  It's fine, I'm good, I'm fine with it.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 12:12Steven Bartlett?

  And I've, I've come to learn about what it was to be black in the nineteen sixty, seventies from my guest, and it's helped me to understand my mother better. Because I have to, I have, my mother didn't react like your father did. And you talked about-

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your mother was Nigerian.

• 12:30Steven Bartlett?

  Nigerian, she came to the UK, we lived in an all white area. She didn't react like your father did. And so it skewed my perspective on, on race relations. But then from doing this podcast and meeting people like you, hearing some of those very specific stories of abuse, I almost can't believe it. And now I have this huge amount of empathy for my mother because I've sat here with the guests. And one of the stories I heard you tell was about your father competing in athletics and how people would scream the N-word at him while he was running.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, so that, this was, for me, one of the most insightful lessons that I got from all the stories from him. Yeah, so he, he was an athlete, actually world-class, a track. That's its own story because he, he was kind of muscular, all right? Certainly in his day, not Charles Atlas muscular, but relative to other kids in his class in high school, he was muscular. And they were in their gym class and you line up and getting ready for the next unit. All right, there was gymnastics and then there was like track and field.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they had the track unit and the gym teacher pointed to my father on the line and said, "We're about to do the running unit and just so you know, do you see Cyril Tyson over there?" And they would turn, he said, "He has the kind of body that would not make a good runner."

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he said to himself, "No one is gonna tell me what I can't do in this world." And he started running. And he became world-class. And at one point, he had the fifth fastest time in the world in his special event. So that's an important lesson, career lesson. Why are there people running around telling you what you can't accomplish? In a free society? I can get it if we're not a free society, but why should anyone tell you what you can't or shouldn't do? So that was lesson number one for me. But then, his best friend, also a runner,

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Johnny Johnson is his name.

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a race. Johnny Johnson is running around on the last turn of the track. And there's a runner from the New York Athletic Club, several paces behind him. The coach of that runner goes up the side of the track and screams to his runner as he points to Johnny Johnson ahead of him, "Catch that nigger." Johnny Johnson overheard this, okay? And all Johnny Johnson said to himself was,

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "This is one nigger. He ain't gonna catch that just and increase the distance, okay?" So that comment from the coach could have done one of two things. It could have demotivated you because then you wallow in the racism of the world, or it could motivate you to succeed.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ever since I heard that story, every racist encounter I have ever had simply motivates me to succeed all the more. Period.

• 16:00Steven Bartlett?

  And I see that throughout your story as you go through college, university, and you go into your post grad, there's moments over and over again where people or circumstance encourage you away from what's clearly your passion, the thing you're clearly pursuing.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, people didn't, yeah, and again, this is not the kind of racism that the 1950s or 40s, you know, I wasn't lynched, you know, so, so again, I don't want to claim equal trauma to what earlier generations had experienced, but you can get, let's call it institutional racism where you don't even-

• 16:33Steven Bartlett?

  Not even racism, I'm talking about people trying to put you off your passion, telling you it's not-

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm calling that racism. What I'm saying is, they see that I'm athletic, I've been athletic most of my life, and they can't wrap their head around me being something other than an athlete that they watch on television. When I say, well, I actually like astrophysics, but you're so good at this other sport. No, I want to be in the physics club. No, we, we need you on the, the basketball team. And they think they're doing me a favor. They think they're saying nice things to me.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But every one of those is a force operating against my ambitions. And so in a way, just that my skin color in my life's arc was a path of most resistance compared to where I wanted to land. And by the way, I don't, we're, we're, we just spent a half hour talking about this and I hardly ever talk about it. I don't talk about it because I don't, you know, I don't need to, maybe if, if it's a counselling session, but I'm perfectly fine. I'm a happy guy, happily married, got two kids, and I hardly ever talk about skin color. Because I, I want to make it

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  irrelevant as quickly as I possibly can in every context I'm possibly in. So if you're going to invite me to give a public talk in February, Black History Month, I will decline that invitation. If you only think of me as a black scientist, then I have failed as a scientist. Period. Period.

• 18:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, you want me to, uh, oh, what do, bl- uh, you know how I realized this? Okay, so I will tell you the moment after which I was a different person interacting with the public. Okay, I'm in graduate school. There's an explosion on the sun and the press, it's over the wires, press hears about this. So they want to get a comment on it, an explosion on the sun. So they called Columbia, the Department of Astronomy, and they're looking for some, it was lunchtime. They were all out to lunch. I'm a, I'm a grad, I'm a doctoral candidate, I'm there for my PhD, and so the department

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  admin is going through the roster and they get to me, say, Neil, no one is here, can you take this call? So I said, sure. And they said, oh, hello, uh, who are you? I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, doctoral candidate in astrophysics. They say, you know, there's an explosion on the sun, should we be worried? I said, oh, it's a solar flare, they happen with some frequency, it's a wave of particles coming towards Earth. And they said, you mean the Earth is fine? I said, the Earth is fine. And they said, can you tell us that on camera? I, uh, sure, okay, we'll send up a limo to pick you up in a half hour. And so the whole conversation, there it was. And it was pre-taped.

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I get home, I put on the TV and I watched this interview. And I had an out-of-body experience. I just witnessed something I've never seen before in my life. And you know what that was? It was the news interviewing a black person, me, who was not an entertainer or athlete, okay, interviewing a black person for expertise that had nothing to do with being black.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The interview didn't say at the end, "Well, how do black people feel about solar flares? Oh, does this affect dark skin differently?" None of that! It was, "Will Earth be safe?" And he's getting that expertise from a black person. I had never seen that. Then I thought, "Well, is it just because I'm on TV and I'm a little more aware?" So, I watched for the next two years, every time there was a black person brought onto the news for expertise. It was someone who's a member of Congress representing a community and they want enterprise zones for the economics. There is someone who is worried about the poverty in the inner city.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Never had an audience seen a black person as an expert. "Oh, they would have attorneys, but it's talking about a court case about a black person." Would they ever bring a black attorney to talk about a court case about a white person? No.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I said to myself, "That is the answer." That's how we turn an entire world of people who think black people are just dumb and stupid, lazy, shiftless, and all they can do is shine my shoes and entertain me and sing and be the athlete on the field, if there was ever a force to change that. It's not people telling them they should think differently. It's me being visible in a way where they have no other choice but to say, "Oh, my gosh, this person knows more about this subject than I do, and he has dark skin." So, the next time they see a homeless black person, they're not saying, "Oh, black people are just..."

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have to confront the fact that they just saw a black person tell them that Earth was safe. So, it's just quite simple. The next time you're driving your car and somebody comes up with a squeegee to wash your window at the red light and begs for money, and if that person is black...

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe you'll think twice about the causes and effects of poverty, of the forces that operate that discriminate against one community of people versus another. So, ever since that moment, I have declined interviews that want me because I'm black. And even in this interview, I'm not entirely comfortable spending a half hour talking about it. Because it, it turns this interview into something about me being black. Which then is, someone hears or hears me for the first time, oh, let's get him. He has all these stories about being black.

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get him to talk to this group about in this racial, in this race conference. No, I will decline that invitation.

• 23:08Steven Bartlett?

  So let's talk about a separate point. What advice would you give me on how you pursue the thing that sets your heart on fire, your passion, whatever you want to call it, without falling into the, or conforming to the like, external pressure to become a doctor or lawyer? Like, I'm thinking about the people that are watching this that have a passion, but they don't consider it to be a job, as many people didn't consider what you do now to be a job back then, and they're being forced by the external words, parents, expectations, social media, to go and do something else they don't want to do. What would you say to those people?

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can tell you this, that if you don't have a, I didn't realize when I was nine, how unusual it was to be that passionate, that young. Not until I got to college, half the people, my freshman year, didn't yet know what they wanted to major in. And I said, I'm majoring in astrophysics. They say, was that because it was early in the catalog, alphabetically, of things you might major? No, I felt this and known this half my life. And so, I, I, in college, I was sensitized to people who were still looking, still searching.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we have the benefit of longer life expectancy today than fifty years ago. I mention this only because if you don't know what to be, if you don't know what you want to be when you grow up and you're thirty, that's just fine. But I don't want to have to blame you for not exposing yourself to what you can be when you grow up. If you're sitting home watching football and say, I don't know what I want to do with my life. Why don't you do what my parents did? Visit a new thing every weekend, go on a trip, talk to experts in all manner of tasks and, you know, visit a chef's school, visit a geology expedition, do, just do things.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you like it, you'll probably be better at that than anything else you choose to do. Because you, you will invest even your downtime doing it. And as the saying goes, pick something you would do for free. And make that your career. And you'll never live a sad day in your life. So that's one variant on a pick something that you love.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And all the time when other people say, you know, I need a vacation from this job, you're going to say vacation, what's that? And people say that to me. Do you want a vacation from, from what? From the astrophysics you're doing, but I like what I'm doing. If I'm on vacation, I love being on the beach, but if I'm the beach, I'm thinking about the universe. It's not to get away from the universe, all right? Not that that could literally happen anyway. So that's what I would say. You want to be independent minded, listen to people's comments, people have life experience, don't ignore it. But what you want to do is fold it in to your own sensibilities. Provided you have sensibilities to begin with.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise you become this ping pong ball, batted back and forth between one person's suggestion and another.

• 26:25Steven Bartlett?

  In the cover of your book, it talks about the polarization that we're, we're seeing in the world at the moment. What is, you know, what is, what are the things that you are most concerned about when you think about the direction of travel of the human race and life here on earth? And what's going on? What are the things that trouble you at a very deep level in terms of our direction of travel?

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot of things.

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me put this in context. In science, if I put a conclusion forward, it's not, you're not gonna ask me, "Did you look at both sides of that?" No, that's not the question. It's, "Did you look at all sides of it?"

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have this binary mind where we think, "Are you for me, or are you for us or against us? Is it black or white? Are you a boy, or are you a girl? Is it up, or is it down?" This is intellectually lazy, because practically everything that exists in this universe manifests on a spectrum. So, here's a, here's a thought, and you're gonna say, "Well, did you look at both sides?" No, I looked at all sides. Did you realize that if this changes, that could change this, and did you, did you figure out how sensitive it is to that? If I didn't, I'm not doing my job as a scientist, okay? So, we live in a time, especially fractured by the forces of social media. I say this only because, if you post an opinion on anything

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in social media, it gets attacked. You'll be people who agree with it, fine, but the noise and the fireworks are when you get attacked.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think it used to be that way. I think there was a time when

• 28:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would express an opinion, and you say, "Oh, that's interesting. Here's my opinion." "Oh, so why do you think that way?" And here's why I think that. "Well, that's interesting. I'd never thought about it that way." Cool. You spend 15 minutes talking, comparing and contrasting opinions, then you go out for a beer at the pub.

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is how I remembered it? Am I misremembering? I, I don't think so. To be attacked? Now, what are the consequences? What are you actually after by attacking someone with a different opinion? "Oh, I know what it is." You want everyone to have exactly the same opinion you do.

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's not this country either. No. You know what's on our currency?

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On our currency, e pluribus unum, okay? Out of the many, we have one. Not out of the one, we have one. It is the many, it is the plurality, pluribus, plur, it's Latin, okay? A plurality means people coexist who think differently about the world. And we celebrate that, or at least we ought to. Otherwise, we're all the same. And we can make a country where everybody's the same, and that's called a dictatorship. Is that really, what, it really? Think through fully the consequences of that. Now, let me get back to the violence part.

• 29:37Steven Bartlett?

  I wanted to, on the, on the point of social media, you had a, you had a tweet that you did that went viral, that got attacked, right? I mean, there, there was one in particular that I think was, was attacked more than the others, I can't even remember it off the top of my head.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's never my intent.

• 29:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To post a tweet that gets attacked.

• 29:53Steven Bartlett?

  Of course.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If, if it gets attacked, it's like, I didn't see that coming. I, I, I count myself as an educator, among the ranks of educators. And my goal is to enlighten and educate, not to anger people. So I still maintain a forbidden Twitter file.

• 30:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On my computer. These are tweets that, no, I'm not gonna post it, even though it's true, objectively true, it would be too upsetting to people, is there another way? So anytime that happens, like, oh my gosh, okay, let me see if I can tune that differently next time.

• 30:24Steven Bartlett?

  But if you know it's true, and you believe it's important, you still might not post it because it might upset people?

• 30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In ways that are not productive.

• 30:34Steven Bartlett?

  Give me an example.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I, I will quote my father.

• 30:36Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not good enough to be right. You also have to be effective. If you're not effective, go home. Doesn't matter if you are in the right. So if I post something that just creates more... Divisiveness, I need to find another way to achieve the same goal without the conflict. So, no, I'm not just about put the truth out there and if it, if it, if it triggers landmines, so what is the truth? No, that's not being an educator.

• 31:12Steven Bartlett?

  I'm really, there's a point here I really want to answer for my, for my own, something I've been thinking a lot about. As we see this polarization in every facet of conversation and public discourse, I've started to think that maybe the antidote is the very few amongst us that have the guts to stand by the truth regardless of the arrows they take. And I'm seeing that a little bit with, with some big commentators. I shan't name names because that'll be a headline. But I'm thinking, actually, they're like, they're, they're braver, I guess, in their courage to say the truth regardless of the fact they're going to get piled on because it doesn't fit the narrative, is actually helping us. It's helping us almost, um, yeah, it's, it's helping.

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It moves the needle a little.

• 31:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I, I see that. I'm just saying, I believe, however delusionally, that you can achieve the same goal without angering people. And part of the goal of that book is to offer ways to think about points of conflict in fresh ways that do not trigger people to dig their heels in and fight more ferociously to defend their opinions. Now, I want to put this in context, because I started out by describing an idea, and you're

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  going to say, did you consider both sides? No, I considered all sides. Um, people want to think we're in the most violent times. Okay, we look at the violence against trans, the trans community. First, there was always violence against trans people. Nobody was talking about it. Because there was violence against other people, there were violence against black people, there was violence against women, there's, there's a whole list of people who were more represented statistically in the world than trans people, where we went through periods of our social justice arc to try to rectify those problems.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so.

• 33:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fact that trans rights are on the table now is itself a measure of progress. Because we're not talking about gay marriage anymore. We're not talking under President Clinton, one of our more progressive liberal presidents. Do you know what the thing was? It was gays in the military, don't ask, don't tell. That was considered a progressive stance in the 1990s, under a liberal president. Don't ask, don't tell.

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now in Qatar, with the, they say, we will welcome gay people, but don't exhibit the gayness in the stands. And everyone is jumping all over them for that regressive posture. It's exactly what we were 30 years ago. Don't ask, don't tell. I don't mind if you're gay, just don't kiss another man in front of me, if you're a man. I'm otherwise okay with it, alright? So what I'm saying is, look at the other things that preceded it, and you can declare progress having led up to it. That's my point.

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not that it's still, you don't still have to worry about it, and it still needs solutions. And you still have to somehow change people's sense of what equality is, and equal access, and opportunity, and equity, and inclusion. That all still needs to happen. But that is not happening now, or less so with black people. So there are measures of progress that are kind of perverse, but real. You know what my father used to say? He said, "I'll know we've achieved equality when a black person can be indicted for embezzlement of funds."

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When a black person can be sent to jail for embezzling $500 million, I know we've made it, okay? Like I said, it's a perverse measure, but it's it's another way to think about the progress that has actually happened in this world. All I'm saying is,

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we may be living in some of the safest times there ever was in the history of civilization.

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think we should lose sight of that. People are afraid to say it, I think, because the worry, and it's a legitimate worry, that you might just get complacent and sit back and say, see, everything is fine. It requires no more work and no more effort. I'm saying,

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  maybe we should take, in addition to worrying about the violence that persists to this day, we should look at the successes and say, well, what did we do right? Let's do more of that.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's not much of people saying, look how far we've come. Let's list how we achieved this.

• 36:38Steven Bartlett?

  Why don't people do that? I saw a poll on Twitter two days ago, and the question was, do you, it was essentially, do you feel optimistic about the future? I clicked yes. And I was in the tiny minority, and 78, roughly 70% of people, I think it was slightly more, felt pessimistic about the future. Either they were worried and fearful about the future.

• 36:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and here's another statistic, which is in the spirit of that, but it's a little more thorough. It was Gallup poll, one of the, I forgot which one, it might have been a different one, but one of the official polling agencies, for the past 30 years, have asked people each year in the United States,

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  are things more dangerous for you just in your community and in your, this year than last year?

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twenty-seven of those years, people said it's more dangerous this year than last year. I don't feel as safe as I did last year. Okay? Now, let's plot the crime rate over the past thirty years. It has been a precipitous drop.

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just drop. There's some bumps in there, but basically, it has dropped for thirty years, since the, basically, the nineteen eighties, nineties, up until today. So there's some delusional force operating on people's understanding of the world in which they live. And then people wanted to blame it, I think, in part correctly, on local news? What's the first thing you see? You put on, not the national, the local news. Um, there's a crime committed and now we have video? You know, we didn't used to have surveillance video. Now you see the person beating up on the old person, or the person breaking into the jewelry. Now you see it. You say, oh, my gosh.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, you know, clutch your loved, your loved ones and your valuables. Our ability to show you violence is greater than ever before, and it affects us emotionally. Part of what it is to be a scientist is to figure out all the ways you could bias yourself and remove them as far as possible, as much as you can. What is the scientific method? If not, I give my own wording of the scientific method. It's simply, do whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is.

• 39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, so that poll would have told me, I'm gonna look at the actual data. And I'm gonna look at, and I'm gonna react to the actual data, not to my feelings about an objective truth. Nothing wrong with feelings. It's the source of the greatest art in the world. Then it's our emotions, how we feel for people. But if you're gonna make legislation, if you're gonna act on your feelings, and there's an objective truth that informs those feelings?

• 39:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the path you should take. Otherwise, we're a house of cards that could collapse at any moment because somebody feels like you're gonna harm them, or they feel like it's dangerous, or they feel like you're... Excuse me? I love human feelings, but don't let it interfere with objective truths. Don't let it interfere with legislation, laws, that would have to affect us all.

• 40:04Steven Bartlett?

  Your documentary, Cosmos. I don't know if I'm saying that right. Cosmos, Cosmos? I think it's a... might be an English thing.

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a Brit. I don't know or care how you pronounce anything.

• 40:13Steven Bartlett?

  It's our language, so Cosmos, Cosmos.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You will never find an American correcting British pronunciation.

• 40:19Steven Bartlett?

  Well, it happens sometimes.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we just don't know. Okay?

• 40:22Steven Bartlett?

  Um, so objective truth and reality and feelings. One of the things I learned from that documentary, which was honestly, I remember the day I found it. I shouldn't say this, but I didn't have a lot of money, so I found it on some like dodgy, like pirated website. And I just, I watched, I think it was eight episodes.

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Security?

• 40:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. I watched them all that night. And I, and then I went back and watched the previous one with Carl Sagan. Um, it just captivated me. And it has ever since. I actually would cite that as my, as the start of my fascination with the universe. And one of the really profound things I took from it, when we're talking about objective truth and feelings, is there's a scene in, in the documentary where you kind of like zoom out, and it keeps going and going and going and going and going and going. And it made me, talking about objective truth and feelings, it made me feel so insignificant. I realized that I am objectively irrelevant. And that was a wonderful feeling, because with that, it strips away the, the burden of your own self-importance and ego. Um, do we matter?

• 41:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the cosmic perspective is incompatible with your ego.

• 41:27Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 41:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I should say, your ego is incompatible with the cosmic perspective. That's the proper way to order that sentence. The cosmic perspective shows you how small we are in size, in time, in space. And if you go in with a high ego, you might resist that. You might say, no, I'm important. But I think of it differently.

• 41:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, we know, one of the greatest gifts of modern astrophysics to civilization, dare I call it a gift, is the knowledge that the atoms of your body are traceable, not only to the Big Bang origin of the universe itself, but especially to stars that have manufactured those elements and later in their lives, on death, exploded, scattering that enrichment across gas clouds so that their next generation of stars would have planets and on at least one of those planets, life.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we are not just figuratively, we are literally stardust. So when you go out and look up at the night sky, yeah, your urge is, "I'm small and that's large." And yes, you're alive in this universe, but there's another way to look at it. The universe is alive within you. You have kinship with the cosmos. That feeling, to me, is greater than any ego you could have possibly walked into the room with.

• 43:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First, that feeling borders on spiritual. Second. Third, we have trained ourselves to equate being special with being different. You're special. You do something, think some way that no one else does. So I'm special. Well, let me turn that on its head and say, maybe we're special, not because we're different, but because we're the same. All humans are stardust.

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All humans share a chemistry with all, a biology with all other life on earth. There's one genesis on this earth. We have DNA and you have DNA in common with a banana.

• 44:23Steven Bartlett?

  I beg your pardon.

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can ask, well, we're the arms and legs. No, DNA goes deeper than that. DNA controls chemistry. It controls metabolism. It controls all kinds of things that are prescribed in the DNA and that's where we have commonality with other life forms on earth. So why not look around and say, I'm not special because I'm a different, I'm special because I'm the same as you, as others, as the tree, as the brook, as the animals, you know, the woodland creatures. And we can all sit here and look up at the night sky and say, yes, we have kinship with the cosmos.

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I feel large because of that, not small.

• 45:12Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned the pursuit of happiness earlier when you were talking about one of the central sort of like doctrine doctrines of the American dream, that pursuit of of happiness and um, in what you've just said about the universe, I was, I was pondering where meaning is derived from. So I kind of asked the question at the same time, this happiness and meaning, where does, where does that come from in, in your perspective?

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I have found is, is an urge people have to search for meaning.

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it under this rock? Metaphorically, right? Is it under a rock? I'm gonna search on, is there meaning there? Is it behind a tree? If I join this group, will I find meaning with them? If I, and I think, okay, go ahead. But what you're doing is relegating meaning in your life to a search. Suppose you don't find meaning. That'd be a force of disappointment in your life. You're setting yourself up to be disappointed if you don't find meaning. So I have another idea. I use this for myself. It may or may not work for others.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I recognized long ago that in a free society, where I'm not enslaved and I'm not, you know, an indentured servant, and I have some freedom of choice,

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that I have the power to manufacture meaning in my life.

• 46:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can make decisions about my own life that create the meaning.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For me, a meaningful life is learning something new tomorrow that I didn't know yesterday.

• 47:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, it's a wasted day.

• 47:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know the prisoner who puts X's in the boxes on the wall for the day they get out? I have that in my head, and the day that I get out is the day I die. All right? And what these boxes remind you of is every day you're alive, you're one day closer to death. So there's one fewer days in there to accomplish something that you might have wanted to accomplish.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I want to keep learning about our world, about each other, about things I don't otherwise know about.

• 47:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there are people who only read things that they agree with or that they already know about. Or they're feeding some urge to be, what's the word? To be validated.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have books on my shelf. At my bedside. Every book is a subject that I either know nothing about, or I completely disagree with. Going into the book. I said, well, maybe it'll change my mind.

• 48:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Learn new ideas. Okay, I once presented that list to the New York Times when they said, because I, my book was doing well at one point and they tried to get authors to talk about other books to keep the, the book wheel turning, because fewer people are reading today. So what books are you reading? So I, on your shelves, I listed the books. One of them was

• 48:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  a book in his, in his 30th printing or something, was originally written back in the early 60s, I think. Maybe even the 50s, a book by Barry Goldwater, it's called The Conscious of a Conservative. And so I'm reading this and people wrote to me after they saw this list, they said, I didn't know you're a closet conservative. I didn't know you're really a Republican. Did you vote for Trump? And all of a sudden, people were presuming that if I'm reading a book on something, that book must be what my whole life is about. Rather than it's a portal to another place of how people think and what people do. So that shocked me, actually.

• 49:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, because that tells me that most people must have just books that continue to feed their own interests. And that is the best way to not grow in this world. So one of my measures of meaning is how much more do I know about the world tomorrow than I did yesterday? Because almost any path you take, take will make you wiser as a person. So I value wisdom that gives meaning to my life, a new perspective. It's not just knowledge. No. What is the arc? It's, it's, there's, there's data. Data can become information. Information on further study becomes knowledge. And after enough time,

• 50:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  when you see how the knowledge plugs in and applies, it can become wisdom. Wisdom is the distilled essence of all the details.

• 50:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The wisest statements ever spoken to you

• 50:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  generally have no detail in them at all, do they?

• 50:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, I've heard it said this way, wisdom is what's left over after you've forgotten all the details. It's the distilled essence of it all. So I want to be wiser on the porch, on my rocking chair. I don't want to be the old curmudgeon. In my day, we did it best. No, I don't want to be that guy. No. So that's one source of meaning. Another, and it's directly traceable to my parents, but I'd like to also think it's traceable to common sense, is spend a little bit of your life

• 51:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  lessening the suffering of others.

• 51:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't mean redirect your life. Some people do. They work in soup kitchens and start not for profits to serve. Yes. I, I, I'm not that person. No, because my, the universe is what calls me. But in my day, in a week, do something that lessens the suffering of someone else. However trifling that gesture is. And

• 51:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that's an infusion

• 51:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of good. Yeah, I'm value judging it. I'm saying, yes, it's a good thing to lessen the suffering of others. I'm, yeah, I'm declaring that. I try not to ever put opinions out there, but it's my opinion that if you lessen the suffering of others,

• 52:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you make a better world. And don't we all want to live in a better world?

• 52:10Steven Bartlett?

  If your happiness were a recipe, right? Consisting of various ingredients that needed to be present in certain quantities for you to be a happy person. And under the assumption that, you know, no one is perfectly happy under any kind of vague sense of the word. What, what is missing from your list of ingredients at the moment?

• 52:31Steven Bartlett?

  Or what could you have more of?

• 52:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think of life that way.

• 52:34Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, how do you think of life? Why is that wrong, that question?

• 52:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't say it was wrong. I don't value judge. Okay, it's not what's right or wrong here. It's, um.

• 52:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't live life that way. Because

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it means you carry with you the emotions. I could be happier if I were doing this and how come I'm not? And all of a sudden, well, then I must be miserable if I'm not as happy as I could be. No, I don't measure day to day. Am I happy or not?

• 53:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I, it's not the measure.

• 53:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it's, it's in there. But that's not the metric. The metric is, am I successful? At what, at what I'm doing?

• 53:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Am I? No, no.

• 53:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not even that. It's, am I as good at this as I can be?

• 53:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're not gonna try to improve, go home. Find something else.

• 53:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I remember in my first interview on national television.

• 53:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A new planet had just been discovered. Around another star. An exoplanet. It was banner headline. We now have 5,000 in the catalog, but back then, 1995. It was banner headline. Another planet. And we kind of always knew they'd be out there. We just didn't have the tools to figure it out. Uh, NBC News sent an action cam up to the planetarium. I was freshly appointed as director. They didn't know me as a person, but I carry title. And so the Chiron on the TV image gets to say Neil deGrasse Tyson, director, Hayden Planetarium. Okay. They came up and interviewed me. Tell us about this new planet. How was it discovered? Right? So I gave my best professorial reply.

• 54:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Best. Oh my gosh. It was, it was a Doppler shift that the orbiting planet influences the position of the star in space? It's not just the star sits there fixed in the universe and planets orbit it. They both orbit their common center of gravity. And so the star, you can't see the planet, it's too dim, but you look at the star and the star is jiggling back and forth. And I motioned that with my body and I said, and you measure this movement back and forth with the Doppler shift. You calculate it and you can infer the existence of this planet and bada bing, it's a planet. And I went on, I went on for like probably four times that length with my and then I go home, it's national news. I get to call everybody. Hey, everybody, my friends in California, I'll be on TV, check it out.

• 55:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so when the segment aired,

• 55:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  all they showed was me jiggling my hips like this and saying, it's a planet. And I said, oh, they don't want my professor reply. They want a reply that fits in their medium. A soundbite medium. So let me practice that. So I went home and stared in the mirror and had people just shout out objects, names, places, people, things. And I assembled soundbites for each one of them. It's like three sentences. It's got to be informative. Makes you smile a little bit. And the information has to be tasty so that you want to tell someone else. That's a soundbite. Okay?

• 55:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we could do that now. Mention anything in the universe. Just, just not a question, just a word, just anything. Mars. Mars. Ooh. Do you know Mars is red because it's rust? It's a rusted planet. And rust has the color of red. The whole planet, because there's a lot of iron on Mars. And red is the color of blood. Hence Mars, the god of war.

• 56:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It might have life there, we're still looking. Boom, soundbite.

• 56:31Steven Bartlett?

  Venus.

• 56:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. And Venus, as an object in the night sky, is stupefyingly brilliant. Until you learn it has a runaway greenhouse effect and it's nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit, five hundred degrees Celsius on its surface. It would vaporize you. So much for the love and beauty of Venus. So it's the least explored planet because of how hostile it is to our space probes. Boom, we got this. I'm not giving you a ten minute lecture on the thermodynamics of Venus.

• 57:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my point is, when I saw that what I did did not serve the needs, I invested a lot of energy so that I could be exactly what they needed. So that their task is simplified and I'd be get better at something that could serve a greater good. I'm not, I don't want to say that's happiness, I'm going to say that's fulfillment of an objective where I improved in what it is I was doing.

• 57:42Steven Bartlett?

  I have to say, when I knew I was going to meet you, this question which was so front of mind for me is, there are so many people that talk about the stars and the universe, but there's only one you. And what I mean by that is-

• 57:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't know what you mean by that.

• 57:53Steven Bartlett?

  So I'll tell you. What, what, so would I have had anyone else on this podcast that talks about the stars in the universe? No. The reason why you are a dream guest is because you create a bridge through exactly what you've described, making it engaging and interesting and

• 58:13Steven Bartlett?

  fun and exciting because of the way that you communicate. And like, people don't often think about this, whether they're computer programmers or they are archaeologists or whatever, that it's great to know stuff, but like, I think Ricky Gervais makes the joke with the daddy long legs where he says, you can have all the venom in the world, but if you don't have the teeth to inject the venom, if you don't have the skill of like, communication and storytelling and engagement, the venom is pointless.

• 58:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what I will say is, I will give one other example and I'll tie a bow on it.

• 58:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first time I was invited to appear on The Daily Show, which is a very popular comedic news program in the United States, hosted by Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart is a comedian. He's brilliant. He's very into current events. We all know him. He's sharp. And I've seen politicians get interviewed by him, and they want to deliver their stump speech, and they're a deer in the headlights because he's just dancing circles around them. And on my first interview, I said, "I am not going to be the deer in the headlights." Okay? So I studied his show with a stopwatch. And I said, "How many seconds does he, on average, does he give his guests to speak

• 59:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  before he comedically interrupts them?" Okay? I write that down. It was anywhere between nine and 12 seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but it's, it, it works comedically, all right? Then I said, "How far back in time does he reference a current event to put in a joke that he might give?" Because you can't go too far back because no one remembers it. The joke has to work without you reminding people what they're supposed to know. So, very intensely the, the previous day, little less the second day. By the time of the third day in the past, there's hardly any reference to it. Okay? So, I studied the last two or three days of current events. I practiced my soundbites even more to fit them into this timeframe.

• 1:00:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I get on the show, and I deliver the lines, I mean, the soundbites. Oh, but I come preloaded with anything he could possibly ask me. So I'm like, I'm, I'm, I, I waddle into the studio with a utility belt's worth of thoughts and ideas that he could be asking me. Okay? So I'm there, and if you see me on these shows, I'm a little manic because the, it's coursing through me, all this knowledge and information that I need a response to, just in case he asks me. So, we do this, and I get the point, and he makes the comedic point, and now my thought is not dangling in the middle of a joke because I completed the thought. The joke tightens that up, and then we move on. Right?

• 1:01:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we go through this whole interview. And he mentions the current event, and I have a little soundbite-y thing about that. After the interview, people come up to me, you know what they said? They said, "Neil."

• 1:01:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're such a natural and you have such good chemistry with Jon Stewart. My.

• 1:01:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have no fucking idea. How much time I invested.

• 1:01:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To look natural.

• 1:01:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pardon my expletive there, but.

• 1:01:31Steven Bartlett?

  We smile all the time, yeah.

• 1:01:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I'm saying is.

• 1:01:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wanted to be as good as I possibly could have been in that interview. Knowing his audience, because each host has their own audience. You want to serve their audience. I don't want to just give the stump speech. So everything that I imagined for myself was for him and his audience. I would communicate differently on a different talk. Daytime talk shows are different than the evening comedic news. On a documentary, it's different. So my only point of this with these examples are.

• 1:02:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I pay attention to whether people are paying attention to me. If I'm giving you an explanation and you're drifting, that's not working. Let me pull that out of the utility belt. Let me try something else. If I talk about black holes in a particular, oh, you're leaning in in the conversation. Your eyebrows are raised. That worked. So I have a database. Of people's expressions. While I'm talking to them. And I sift that.

• 1:02:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that I pick and choose what is most impactful in the few minutes we have together. Otherwise, I'm dragging you through a syllabus that who the hell cares?

• 1:02:50Steven Bartlett?

  What are the devices that you you probably don't do even do it in.

• 1:02:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're saying it's natural.

• 1:02:57Steven Bartlett?

  I didn't say I'm gonna edit.

• 1:02:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, don't edit that out. Don't edit that out. Okay?

• 1:03:03Steven Bartlett?

  But okay, so what are the what are the devices that you intentionally work very, very hard on to employ that that I might take from you and become a as good a speaker? As you are as engaging and as like captivating, despite the fact that you're delivering such complex subject matter at times. But it still seems accessible to someone like me that is just simply a chimp.

• 1:03:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not everything that excites me as a professional in the field. Will excite you. You need to know, you need to sort them into those categories. And maybe there's something that will excite me and you'll see me get all excited and you'll get giddy because you like watching me get excited. That's a different dynamic in that moment. Mm-hmm. All right, it is kind of fun. I like watching, uh, you know, I have a colleague who's like all into leeches, right? He specializes in invertebrates and leeches among them. Just to hear him talk about, I, I don't care about leeches, but he does. It's like, wow, I didn't know anyone could care that much about a blood sucking invertebrate, but it was just, I'm delighted to watch that, all right? Hmm.

• 1:04:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, but, so you sort, things that excite you from things that could excite someone else. Well, how do you know? You have to practice that, okay? Uh, strike up conversations. Watch if people care about what you say. Is there some other conversation that distracts them from your conversation with them? Well, go back to the drawing board on that one. Okay? And I also be a good listener. Watch what excites other people when they're in conversations with other people. And that's what I've done. So in that way, I'm, I'm fully socialized.

• 1:04:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My parents were social creatures and we held dinner parties often, uh, hosting conversations and I'd watch that. Uh, I'm a kid, so I'm not, for their dinner parties, I didn't have a seat at the table. But, um, the idea of being able to communicate, and my father's a sociologist, that's all he ever did, uh, that I think mattered within me. And you have to be able to read people's facial, you know what we did with my kids? Uh, it was first evidence that they were not autistic, but also I think it's good practice. Get a, when they're old enough to start thinking about human emotion, maybe eight,

• 1:05:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  nine, to early, between years, between eight and 12, where they can actively think about what someone else thinks and feels, okay? Is the person angry? Is the person happy? Is they sad? Are they jealous? Are they whatever? Okay. So what I did was, or what you can do is find a romantic comedy that is well acted. All right? Where, where you have stars that really do it right. And sit down and watch the movie with the sound off.

• 1:06:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And have your kids.

• 1:06:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ask them, what do you think they're thinking now? What do you think she's feeling? What do you think she's saying? What do you think she's gonna do next? And you just watch it. And the actors are not only delivering lines, they're feeling their roles. And you might have to wait if your kid is a little slower that way. Maybe they have to be 13 or 14, middle school. Where your social standing begins, matters more than in elementary school. We're not even, even care. Right? So maybe it's a middle school thing more than an elementary school thing. And that way you can say, you thought she said, well, let's check. And you go back and it turns out, yes, she was jealous in that moment. And so it trains you to read a facial expression and a good actor will do this. That's what makes them good actors.

• 1:06:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you, and you don't rely on the sound, just the visual. And it's an exercise in reading faces, reading people, reading emotions. And so you wanna do this. And in the limit, you become a full up empath, right? I think that's a noun. Yeah. Uh, an empath. Uh, that has shaped some people's careers. This is real. We're human, we're social creatures. So, yeah, I fold that in. Because I wanna reach you. Oh, and what things do you care about? In my podcast, it's called Star Talk.

• 1:07:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have a co-host who's a comedian, a professional stand-up comedian. And the anatomy of the podcast is, there's sort of the trinity. There's the science content, there's the humor, and there's pop culture.

• 1:07:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do I care about pop culture? Because you walk into the room already framed in a scaffold of pop culture. If I know that in advance, I don't have to start from scratch. When I'm teaching you something, I want to say, oh, I have a bit of science that I can clad onto this part of your scaffold, your pop culture scaffold. And you know something? It fits, it sticks. And you say, whoa, I never knew that about this. There was an American football game that ended in a tie. And but we don't end in ties, right? So there's an overtime. And you reach a point where it's sudden death overtime, sudden death, where the next person that scores wins the game.

• 1:08:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this person was was ready to kick for, it's called a field goal. And it's 50 yards out, 50 yards. Oh, my gosh. Okay, that's hard. So they kick it and no one breathes for the three or four seconds. The ball is so the ball tumbles in the air and there it goes. And everybody just follows it and look it up. And the ball hit the left upright and careened in for the win. And I said, whoa, wait a minute. What's the orientation of this stadium? It's north, south. This is a round ball hitting a round post and going in.

• 1:09:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you realize round things hitting other round things? Fractions of an inch make a difference? So I did a fast calculation and then I tweeted. The Cincinnati Bengals for the for the sudden death field goal was that careened off the upright was aided by a one centimeter shift to the right given to it by the rotation of the earth.

• 1:10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People lost their minds, okay, people. Okay, the Cincinnati Bengals, the local newspaper said, God helped them win the game. And so everybody, so I didn't have to say what football is, who the Cincinnati Bengals are, what a sudden death goal is, what a field goal is, or explain that the goalposts have a left and a right goalpost. I didn't have to introduce any of that. That's an example of the pop culture that someone walks into the room with, and I found a bit of science that I know they're gonna care about because it touches something that's pop culture that they already care about. And I would follow that up with it's a Coriolis force and it's

• 1:10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  why storms rotate clockwise, counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere. I followed up with the lesson plan, but I got your interest.

• 1:10:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay?

• 1:10:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't start out that way. There's such a thing as a Coriolis force. No, no, go where they care.

• 1:10:59Steven Bartlett?

  Go where they care.

• 1:10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, and that's what I do professionally.

• 1:11:04Steven Bartlett?

  If I spoke to Alice and I said, your wife, and I said, Alice, what does Neil struggle with? What would she say to me?

• 1:11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Struggle with? Oh.

• 1:11:13Steven Bartlett?

  Personally?

• 1:11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I, I don't know entirely, but I know I like to eat more than I like to exercise. And I used to be very high, high, highly tuned athlete. So I remember what it's like to be in complete shape. I, I also used to dance, so I could, could do a full split. I was doing, you know, I could, I was like totally in shape. So I have that memory, which in a way is worse than never having been in shape. So she'll say, I, I wouldn't call it struggling, but I would say, she would say that I need to carve out more time to exercise just to stay healthy, I think is, so that, that's one

• 1:11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of them. Another thing, we, we talk a lot, we've been married 34 years, and people say, well, what's the secret? You know, anytime someone asks you what the secret is, they're being lazy, because it assumes, just know this one thing and everything will be better. How much of life actually works that way?

• 1:12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When someone said, what's your secret to knowing astrophysics? It's like, you know, working at it 60 hours a week, that's the secret. Somebody asks a chef, what's your secret in this recipe? It's because I went to chef's school for six years. That's the secret. So I've never asked someone, what's your secret? Because I, that's disrespect for the actual work that could go into what it is to gain the expertise or the state of existence that someone has achieved. I think in a marriage, it's, you know, most or half end in divorce within some number of years. So what's, what's going on with the institution?

• 1:13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think we're not trained how to communicate. You're living with a person every day of your life. It's really easy to take that person for granted. It's really easy to, to, to enter states of boredom because you've already talked about. So what you do? You do new things with each other as often as you can. You go on a trip, explore new hobbies. You go, you know, you take up a new sport. You play tennis or whatever. Just do something new as you would with any other new person. Right? Why does the other new person look really good?

• 1:13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they're new. Okay? So you could, you can always be new in your marriage if you do new things. Why not travel? Travel together. Then every day is a new experience you both share. So when you get back home, you have something new to talk about, new to share, new to places to grow. And this thing where I want to go on a dating app where I can find someone who's just like me. I don't want anyone just like me. I already have me. I want someone different. I want someone I can learn from, someone with different interests that I could grow into. So, not that I've ever used a dating app, but if I had a dating app,

• 1:14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  uh, that's, I would look for someone who is just really different. It's odd because so many of the apps are finding someone just like you. All right. There's now like a Christian app and a Jewish app and a this app and a, and a find someone who has this category. It's like, wow. Why not just have some fun with somebody who's just different?

• 1:14:56Steven Bartlett?

  One of the themes we talk about a lot in this podcast is mental health and the, the conversation around mental health is, is really developed over the last 10 years from a time when we didn't.

• 1:15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely. Oh my gosh.

• 1:15:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's a, it's complete, the, the perception of it has completely changed in terms of being destigmatized. But then our awareness and our understanding of concept of physical health and mental health is now more present than ever. Was there an event that put your mental health in focus for your, for you, like really made you cognizant of the fact that you have mental health and it's something that you have to,

• 1:15:27Steven Bartlett?

  I was gonna say protect, but just, yeah, keep healthy, I guess. It often.

• 1:15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, you know, okay. I don't have a simple, I have an answer, but it's not simple. How much time you got left here?

• 1:15:39Steven Bartlett?

  Couple of minutes.

• 1:15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a friend, I told you it's a long story, but you asked it.

• 1:15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was someone my age, maybe one year older, when I was in high school, who died, who was the son of a very close family friend of my parents. We might have played together as very small children, but I didn't know him as a teenager. Okay?

• 1:16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He died of brain cancer. Very tragic. You're 17 years old and you die of brain cancer, ready to go off to college and all the rest. They bust in school kids from the school.

• 1:16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And they unloaded and they filled this chapel. And there's a closed casket because it was, it was brain cancer. So, you know, there's a picture of him on the casket.

• 1:16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm watching this. And that, you know, that his classmates are like holding each other as they walk up the aisle. And there's the organ playing. No, it's not a New Orleans song where you sort of celebrate the life of the person who just died. It was the kind of organ music where you want to be sad that the person died. And I'm watching this. Then I start getting emotional. And like a tear shows up in my eye and I said, wait a minute. I don't know this kid. I don't even remember him.

• 1:17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd be crying because the organ is making me cry. I'd be crying because I'm seeing other people who did know him cry. And I did a fast calculation. How many people are dying in this hour? In the city or in the country or in the world? Am I crying for them? Who I equally don't know? I rationalized an emotional state out of this, this pain and misery. And I said, if I'm not tearing for everybody else who dies who I don't know, I should not be tearing for this person.

• 1:18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I sucked the tears back up and just observed it anthropologically that there's a funeral going on right in front of me. That was an expression of control over my emotions. That is basically how I lived for the first.

• 1:18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nineteen years of my life.

• 1:18:26Steven Bartlett?

  What was the cost?

• 1:18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The cost?

• 1:18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No cost. Why would there be a cost? Why should there be a cost? To not having forced emotions by other to to to. No, there's. What what cost? I'm I'm a geek kid. Okay? And emotions are something that interfere with rational thought.

• 1:18:50Steven Bartlett?

  But this changed.

• 1:18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what I could say to you is you're emotional. What's the cost for not being rational? Okay? I could totally put the question back on you. What's the cost? You slammed the door. You hung up the phone back when we had phones to hung up. You slammed it down. You cried when you didn't even know the person. Okay? That's your cost. So we we maybe we're simply different people. I'm not saying they shouldn't have cried. They knew him. Of course they're gonna cry. I didn't. Organist. Stop making me cry. And so I didn't. Okay? So.

• 1:19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How did that change?

• 1:19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, my freshman year of college. It all changed.

• 1:19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It all changed. First semester. I take a class in art and design. They play music and they say, draw the music.

• 1:19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's like. Uh, I don't know what you're talking about. What do you feel the music and draw how it makes you feel? I say, it's just music I'm listening to. I I'm like, it's like. Two ships passing in the night. I don't know what the hell this person is talking about. I don't know what he means. I don't know. You know, should I still stay in this class? Was is it a waste of time? What's going on here? And he says, okay, here's what you do. Draw the energy. In the music. And. Excuse me, I. Like. I'm a physicist, right? Energy is equals mc squared. There's kinetic energy. There's mechanical energy. There's chemical energy. Energy is not what you draw out of music.

• 1:20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Okay.

• 1:20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I said, alright, I don't know what he's saying, but I'll try something. And then he criticizes it, okay? So I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Why am I in this class? Should I drop the class? Okay, then they roll in the pumpkins. They say, draw the pumpkins. Okay, now I can, I can do this. It's, it's, it's a task. There's a pumpkin in front of me, I'm gonna draw it. So I draw pumpkins. And it takes me a few tries to get the hang of it. But I'm, I'm one of the world's best pumpkin drawers to this day because of that. We spent weeks drawing pumpkins. And they're all sort of leaning on each other. And they have these sort of seams in them and the, not all of them have the same size handle, the neck that comes out.

• 1:21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's some have bruises and there's like thirty of them up in the front of them. So I'm drawing them.

• 1:21:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, okay. Uh, is this, is this all we're gonna do with this? Okay.

• 1:21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After pumpkins became the entire meaning of my life for two or three weeks. We returned to the studio, the pumpkins are still there. And then they said, now, draw the space between the pumpkins.

• 1:21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just snapped.

• 1:22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was like, wait a minute. You're telling me that I give object and meaning, objective meaning, to these things that we call pumpkins? And now, these pumpkins are just the boundaries

• 1:22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to something else that I'm giving meaning to? And that's the space between the pumpkins? It was like, whoa. So,

• 1:22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I started drawing the space between the pumpkins. And the pumpkins were now the edges of things, not the object of what I'm drawing.

• 1:22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my brain turned inside out.

• 1:22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I started looking around, I say, are these lights, or is it a shadow that makes the shape? Am I in a space? Is the space what's real? Or is it the boundary of the space? If the boundary weren't there, would I still be in this space? I still be breathing this air, but we wouldn't call it a space, because that boundary isn't there. So the bound, so my, I, everything looked different. After then,

• 1:23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  everything. And from that moment onward, I could talk to artists

• 1:23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  with abstract vocabulary.

• 1:23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How does this painting feel? What does it do for you? What are, what are your, what are your emotions? It's, it, it, it opened up a box,

• 1:23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  an emotional state that was previously non-communicative with the rest of my mind. It was kept there. I could act, it's not that I didn't know how to cry. It's just that the crying had nothing to do with anything else that was objectively real. So what it did, it, it, it found the place where pride had opened. And there was spillage, there was cross-spillage. So I can tell you this now. There's no way this sentence could have come out of my head. On my iPhone, I have skin, it's not a casing, it's just, it's called a skin. And it is a section of Van Gogh's Starry Night. The actual name of the painting is The Starry Night, okay?

• 1:24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's got these swirly, beautiful colors, and, alright. It's my favorite painting.

• 1:24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why? Because it's certainly not what he saw. The sky has never looked this way.

• 1:24:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's definitely what he felt.

• 1:24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And for me, an artist's task, their duty in this world, not to prescribe this, but for me, their duty is to show me the world as I do not see it.

• 1:25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take me someplace, give me a perspective that will broaden my interpretation of reality.

• 1:25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a thought, an idea, a sentence that could have never come out of my mouth until that moment where I drew the space between the pumpkins. And that access to abstract thinking, to now, in the early days, I'd watch a Broadway musical and two people walk up to each other speaking, "Uh-oh, a song is about to happen," and then they'd sing about their love for each other. I say, "Why don't you just cut the song, just say you love each other, move on to the next scene." That's how I felt as a child.

• 1:25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After college, after that course.

• 1:25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see the two people walk up to each other and they're speaking their emotions and I'm saying, "You know, when you sing your emotions, it reaches a deeper part, not only within yourself, but within the listeners. Because there's more of your emotion expressed when you sing."

• 1:26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so now, I long for the song in a Broadway musical. The simplicity of expressed emotion. So I don't want to quite say I'm the opposite of what I was when I sucked back the tears in that funeral. But I'm going to say that,

• 1:26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  dare I suggest, a well-developed...

• 1:26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Access to both your emotions and your rational self with some control over the two. You don't want rampant contamination, but just be able to close the door every now and then between the two and then open it, I think can serve us greatly as a civilization. If I were to offer perspective and advice, there are times where you need your rational self, otherwise you will not make a decision that's in the best interest of your health, your wealth, or your security. But don't let that hide what emotions you might have, because the world's greatest art,

• 1:27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  as far as I can tell, issues forth from rampant emotion that we're capable of as human beings.

• 1:27:28Steven Bartlett?

  Neil, thank you. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest without knowing who they're going to ask it for, and they write it in this book and I don't get to see it till I open it, which is fun for me.

• 1:27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you get to see it now.

• 1:27:40Steven Bartlett?

  I get to see it now.

• 1:27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:27:42Steven Bartlett?

  Jack always looks, but I never look.

• 1:27:45Steven Bartlett?

  When was the last time you cried and why?

• 1:27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I cry often now that the door to my emotions has been found and pried open. So I cry often. I cry at very simple things. I cry at, at simple emotional moments in, in, in a play, resident of New York City. So we consume, as many Londoners surely you consume, the theater scene. I'll cry even in a moment in a musical. A musical is supposed to make you happy, but there might be a tender moment.

• 1:28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I tear up if I see acts of, of sensitivity and kindness in a situation where you would not expect it. Okay? If you see a war-torn scene and a soldier picks up a doll and hands it to a child.

• 1:29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A soldier who's brandishing a weapon for killing people and they take a moment to do that. I'll tear up, I'm tearing up now just thinking of such a scene when that happens.

• 1:29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I tear up in unexpected acts of kindness.

• 1:29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause it's hope for the world.

• 1:29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll tear up in a movie. Uh, usually in a theater, cause it's a big immersive experience, less so at home on, on a TV. Even the same movie, I, I might feel a little more in a theater. Immersiveness matters, cause it's it's coming at you for more, in more ways. With, with greater strength. The sound is greater, the visual effects are greater. Uh, you're there as a participant in the film, so.

• 1:29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, I probably will tear up once or twice a week.

• 1:30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, for those reasons and more, but those are the more common sort of reasons that arise.

• 1:30:10Steven Bartlett?

  Neil, thank you. Thank you for the inspiration over the last decade. Thank you for um, being the starry messenger in my life, which is the name of your new book because you are. It's funny, I was, I was thinking about it as, as we started this conversation, that that was actually the moment that I became obsessed with the universe when I first watched you present Cosmos all those years ago. Um, and this book is just a continuation of that, but it's a very current book in the sense that it speaks to some of the profound issues that are happening in the world. The inside cover, I think, presents a really great explanation of that. In a time when our political and cultural views feel more polarized than ever, Tyson provides a much needed antidote to so much of what divides us while making a passionate case for the twin chariots of enlightenment, a cosmic perspective. Oh, and the rationality of science.

• 1:30:55Steven Bartlett?

  And that's exactly what this book is. It's a necessary antidote to the modern times we're living in.

• 1:30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you for your support of that. I will say that Starry Messenger comes from Galileo, where he first perfects the telescope. After only just having heard that a telescope was invented in the Netherlands, he said, "Oh, my gosh, that's right. Let me make my own version of it." He makes the best version that exists in the world, observes the night sky, notices that Venus goes through phases, which can only happen if Venus is going around the sun and not around Earth. It could, he notices that the sun has spots, the moon has craters, the Jupiter has moons that orbit it. He didn't call them moons, they're called Jupiter's stars, because why would you think they were moons? Who knows? And he reports this with the first evidence that Earth is not the center of all motion.

• 1:31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he called it Sidereus Nuncius, Starry Messenger. The Starry Messenger wasn't him. The Starry Messenger was these messages themselves from the sky that are conflicting with prevailing belief systems about humans and about Earth.

• 1:32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he got into big trouble with the church. So what I, as an astrophysicist, I found all the starry messages I could and applied them to our plight here on Earth. And that's the summary of what's going on in that book.

• 1:32:18Steven Bartlett?

  Death is a topic you mention in this book.

• 1:32:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, life and death.

• 1:32:22Steven Bartlett?

  Life and death. I'm more compelled by death.

• 1:32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As should we all be. Yeah.

• 1:32:29Steven Bartlett?

  I was a Christian growing up until the age of about 18. And then when I discovered atheism or agnosticism, or whatever they want to call it, my perspective of death changed and I actually became really comfortable with death, the prospect of death. Where do you think, and where are you at in your perspective and thoughts on death?

• 1:32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For myself or just in general?

• 1:32:48Steven Bartlett?

  In general and yourself. Probably quite inseparable, I imagine. I don't know.

• 1:32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Death.

• 1:32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Death comes up as a topic of conversation commonly when we talk about prolonging life. And now that we're into the genome and into human physiology, might there be a day where you can live forever? Okay? And there's something called the generation that will have escape velocity. Do you know what that is? Okay, I'll tell you what it is. So, in the last 50 years, we've increased life expectancy 20 years. In the last 10 years, we've increased life expectancy by five years.

• 1:33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there will be a time where in the last year, we increased life expectancy by a year. At that moment, Homo sapiens have achieved escape velocity from death. Okay? That generation will never die unless you're hit by a bus. Okay? So, that brings you the question, if you could live forever, would you? And my reply to that, and I don't want to answer for other people. So, this is my... I want to be very clear that, yes, I have my opinions, but I don't care if you share my opinions. You should have your own opinions. Okay?

• 1:34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My outlook on this is... Well, let's take, for example, a bouquet of flowers. If you buy a bouquet of flowers and hand them to your loved one, and the bouquet... the flowers are made of plastic, how would your loved one reply to that? They probably think you don't love them. But you say, "But darling, they'll last forever."

• 1:34:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's not the variable here. That's not what matters.

• 1:34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fact that flowers die is the very reason why they have meaning as a gift.

• 1:35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your handed flowers, they're gonna be dead in seven days. That means, you know, you better pay attention to them. You're gonna smell them. You're gonna take care of them. You're gonna make sure you change the water and trim the stems. And you're gonna put it in a central place, so that not only you see them, but so does everybody else. You're going to celebrate those flowers while they are alive. Because the day is gonna come very quickly where they're gonna die. And in their senescence, you're gonna nurse them through. As the neck gets a little weak on the stem, you might try to prop them up.

• 1:35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until they're gone.

• 1:35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is the fact that they're gonna die that gives them meaning as a gift. And dare I say, that my knowledge that I'm gonna die

• 1:36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  gives not only meaning to my being alive. It gives urgency to it. On my deathbed, I do not want to regret

• 1:36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  having the interest and ability to have solved the problem that I did not solve. To have an experience that I could have had, but then I did not.

• 1:36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Knowing I'm gonna die means I'm gonna wake up in the morning.

• 1:36:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm gonna be all about action. Action.

• 1:36:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will tell people I love them, if I love them. I will accomplish things. I will learn this thing I wanted to learn. I will do all I can.

• 1:36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you know what I want on my tombstone? It's a quote from a famous American educator of two centuries ago. His name is Horace Mann.

• 1:37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was also a university president, I think it was. He gave a commencement speech, one of his last. And he says to the graduates, "I beseech you," love that word, nobody uses that word anymore, beseech. Shakespeare loved it. "I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for humanity."

• 1:37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want that on my tombstone. I don't want any other monument but that on my tombstone.

• 1:37:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If everyone lived to that goal, how different the world would be, how enriched it would be with people's energy to improve the lot. Not only of others as individuals, but of your neighborhood, your society, civilization itself.

• 1:38:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's what I think of when I think of death.

• 1:38:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, in there I referenced dogs.

• 1:38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a dog over there for anyone. There's a dog over there called Leica. In the corner of this room. Leica, where have I heard that name before? Leica. Sixty-five years ago, Leica orbits Earth. The first dog to orbit Earth? Uh, the first animal to orbit Earth. Then there's some guinea pigs, and then there were some chimps. And then Yuri Gagarin orbits the Earth, the first human. I think he was the seventh mammal to orbit the Earth. I have to check my notes on this, but it was, uh, if you add up mammals, humans were very late in the, in the space achievement scale. So...

• 1:39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you come home for having been away, if you own a dog, you will know exactly what I'm describing. By the way, this does not happen with cats. So with a dog, the dog is happy to see you. Not just happy, "Hey, glad you're home." It's they jump up and down and they want to lick your face and they want to jump into your lap if it's a lap dog. And if it's a, if it's an Irish wolfhound, they'll want to knock you over and lick you in the face. They're excited by you. First, I would ask, "Did you do anything that day that deserved that praise?" All right? So one famous quote is, "Be the person that your dog thinks you are." Okay?

• 1:39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a high bar, let me say. But there's the, and by the way, if you go out to just check the mail and come back, the dog is happy to see you. So now, wait a minute. Why? Let me just make up a reason, okay? I'm just pulling this out of my ass. You ready? Okay. Dogs don't live as long as we do. The famous dog year calculation. There's some nuances to it, but the blunt calculation is one dog year is seven human years, okay? So when a dog is 10, they're like 70. All right?

• 1:40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When a dog is 12, they're 84. They're getting ready to die. Okay, dogs die between age, basically 12 and 16. Okay? All right. Wait a minute, if it's a factor of seven difference, it means we live an entire week of our lives.

• 1:41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For every single day, a dog lives.

• 1:41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So maybe the dog knows it won't live as long as we will. Maybe it knows it's got a truncated life expectancy relative to humans. Maybe it knows it's gotta make every day count.

• 1:41:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We could languish away, five days out of the week, you still have the other two days to watch football with your friends. The dog doesn't have that luxury. So I'm making this up. I'm going to declare that dogs know that every day of their lives matter. And therefore, they're going to make it count. And they're going to be happy every day. You ever wake up to a dog that's depressed? Never. Uh, no.

• 1:42:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I'll walk myself today, don't worry about it. I'll feed my, I'm, I'm, I don't want to, yeah, I'm, no, they've been sick. All right, that's how you know they're sick. They're not licking you in the face. That's a sad day for the dog. But then they pop back. Dogs don't stay sick for long. Because they live seven times faster than we do. Have you ever taken a dog to the vet? And they perform surgery on the dog? Okay. You know where I'm going here? They perform surgery. The next day, the dog is out running around in the park. I've seen dog with the leg amputated. Amputated leg.

• 1:42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the next day, they're a little slower, but they're kind of walking around and they still want to lick you in the face. And they're as good as new after three days. If we had one of our legs amputated? Oh, my gosh. I'm still in the hospital a month later. Dogs live in the fast lane.

• 1:43:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And maybe they know it. And so I want to think to myself, no, I'm not licking people in the face, but I want to experience the joy and the urgency that dogs do. Simply by being alive.

• 1:43:22Steven Bartlett?

  Neil, thank you. Thank you for the generosity of your time. Thank you for all of the inspiration. Thank you for schooling me in the most unintentional way on how to be a wonderful, engaging communicator and how to make very complex subject matter fun and accessible for every bit of us.

• 1:43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you. And can I end with the beginning quote of the book?

• 1:43:40Steven Bartlett?

  Please.

• 1:43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  May I? At the beginning of the book, I wanted to set the mood because Earth from space is very different than Earth from Earth's surface.

• 1:43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, dedicated to the memory of Cyril deGrasse Tyson and all others who want to see the world as it could be rather than as it is. That was my father. Okay, so here's the quote. Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14, he went to the moon and saw Earth because that's kind of what happened. We went to the moon to discover the moon, to explore the moon, and we looked back over our shoulders and we kind of discovered Earth for the first time.

• 1:44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The birth of the modern conservation and environmental movement began while we were walking on the moon because there was Earth adrift alone in the darkness of space with no hint that help would come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. That very line is in Carl Sagan penned in his book A Pale Blue Dot. So here's Edgar Mitchell.

• 1:44:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."