A COSMOS Conversation with Ann Druyan

Go behind the scenes of the Emmy® Award-winning science show COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey when Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews its creator, writer and executive producer Ann Druyan. Read more and listen to the full podcast at http://www.startalkradio.net/show/a-cosmos-conversation-with-ann-druyan/

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. My day job is as Director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. Today, we'll be listening to my interview with Anne Druyan. She was Carl Sagan's wife and collaborator on many of his works and projects, including the original Cosmos. She's also co-writer, director, and executive producer, and by many people's measure, the soul of the new Cosmos series. That's Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, that I have the privilege of serving as host and narrator. In this first interview clip, Anne tells me about her background and how she first met Carl Sagan.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  I was a college dropout, something of which I used to be ashamed of, and now I feel tremendous pride.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The awesomest people in the world were college dropouts.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  There's a growing list of the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs and...

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael Dell.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Are they all in the tech world, or are there other people?

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, maybe they're all tech people, yeah.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Well, it was the 60s, Neil, and the joint was jumping.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's usually the excuse for anything that happened in the 60s. It was the 60s.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  It was the 60s, Neil. Yeah. I had a great curiosity and interest in many subjects, which I pursued, but I was so restless, I couldn't sit still, and my attention wandered in every course that wasn't like advanced courses in Herman Melville, who I adored, or things like that. I didn't get that PhD, but I did have parents who were literate and who valued writing and literature very highly. And so I guess that's half the battle.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you had books at home?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Huge number of books.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I didn't realize the importance of that until my father pointed this out to me. He said, there are homes where there are just no books. And so what do you do as a child? You don't even know that there are books there to learn from.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  That was my mother's very snobby metric for going to people's homes. If she didn't see any books, she immediately became very hostile and aggressive. It was wonderful.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The snob metric?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it really was. If you didn't read the New York Times every single day, including the shipping notices, then she didn't want to talk to you.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you might have turned out differently without that kind of background, then?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  I'm sure I would have turned out completely differently. I wouldn't have turned out at all if my parents hadn't met on a subway train. I mean, think of it.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go again, putting the whole big context.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Well, that's the stochastic, crazy roulette wheel nature of life.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think you would have somehow emerged somewhere in the universe. The universe needed you.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  That's wonderfully romantic and non-scientific of you. But I'm honored that you would violate your own scientific standards.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To describe who the hell you are in this world?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  To give me that great compliment. It's really, I'm thrilled.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where does science come in? Because the hyper literate people often, to my disappointment, say, well, I was never good at science, I was never good at math, and use that as a reason to not learn more. Clearly, that wasn't the case with you. So what happened there?

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so as a child of the 60s, I was hungry for a way to understand the world that could cut through deceit and lies. And you know, if you think of the 60s as a moment when the great middle, including me, of the American people began to realize that they couldn't trust the government after years of, you know, during the Second World War, whose total faith and credit, the government was beyond reproach. And in the 60s, this edifice starts to crumble.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the first time, right, in America?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  See, I don't know what was happening 100 years before, but certainly in modern history. And so I was hungry for a way to know what's real.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  And I looked everywhere and I found it in the pre-Socratic philosophers, the ancient Greeks, who invented science. And I suddenly realized, oh, Jesus, I was such an idiot. I didn't really pay attention in science when it has this error correcting mechanism that nothing else has. And so that's what attracted me to science.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The urge to know the truth in anything.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Nothing absolute, but just give me some truth, is John Lennon famously saying.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you first met Carl when?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  I met him in 1974 at a dinner party given by Nora Ephron.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Nora Ephron. She always seemed to me like a busybody. Is that, is she? I don't know. She's always in someplace.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  She was bossy. She was really bossy, but I loved her. She was a great girlfriend.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is in, in New York?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  This is in New York when she lived in the East 50s and she worked for the New York Post.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carl by then was already Professor Cornell. So what's he doing in the city?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  He actually goes to one of those luncheons at the Washington Post for the editorial board where they have, I don't know if they were weekly or monthly in the 70s, but the flavor of the month, the most exciting person to emerge on the radar screen.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do they still do that? That's not a good idea.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  I don't know. So I remember Nora Ephron turning to me in her apartment. She's arranging some magazines in a basket and she said, oh, Annie, I met the most fascinating man last week at the Washington Post editorial board luncheon. And I've got to have him and his wife over for dinner and I'm going to invite you and some other friends for us. You've got to meet this guy. He's unbelievable. And for some reason, that was a memory that I kept, whereas there are an infinite number of moments that don't stay with you, you know? But that moment really stayed with me. I don't know why. And sure enough, Nora was

• 6:21Speaker 01

  a woman of her word in every way. She had this dinner a month later and I walked into this room and I saw this man lying on the rug in Nora Ephron's living room.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, lying on the rug, with clothes on. He said he was dressed like lying on a rug. Excuse me.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  No, he was completely naked. And that was the thing. That was the first thing I noticed. No, of course not. No, he was wearing a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It was a really hot, early autumn, late summer night. And he was lying on the rug and he was laughing uncontrollably, like a mental patient.

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember his guffaw. You know, some people laugh because they know they're being listened to.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And others laugh like...

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Naturally. Like they don't care if anyone's listening.

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  And they don't care if anyone thinks they're crazy. And that was Carl's laugh. It was from the heart, completely, from his toes. Anyway, we struck up a conversation about baseball and Trotsky and...

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's probably the first time Trotsky and baseball has ever been put in the same sentence.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Is that true? I wonder.

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure there must have been in the 40s or 30s. There must have been a young Trotskyite baseball team.

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Anyway, it was a terrific evening. I met a number of other people that evening who were very important to me. And that was the beginning. Worked together for three years, you know, in a totally platonic way as friends. And I really didn't fall in love or acknowledge that love until Voyager.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Voyager project.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  And Voyager should sometime in its distant future encounter beings from some other civilization in space. It bears a message, a phonographic, golden, delicate, with instructions for use.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. In this show, we're featuring my interview with Anne Druyan. And as she mentioned in the previous segment, Anne worked with Carl Sagan on the Voyager mission. The Voyager one and two spacecraft. were sent on a grand tour of the solar system back in the 70s and 80s. And they each carried with them a phonograph record containing not only songs like Johnny Be Good by Chuck Berry, but also a bird song and a whale song. Among its many other sounds, the record had the noise of trains, planes and automobiles, a lightning storm, and greetings in 55 different languages acquired one afternoon on the steps of the United Nations.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Andruyan was the creative director of that Voyager interstellar message. In this next clip, she shares her experience developing the golden record.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Frank Drake, John Cassani of NASA, and Carl and Carl's wife Linda Salzman had created the Pioneer plaque. So those were, at that point, the most distant objects we ever created. John Cassani came to them and said, both Voyagers are going to leave the solar system. They're going to get this gravitational assist from Jupiter that's going to send them at 40,000 miles an hour outward.

• 9:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're going to overtake the Pioneer?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  They'll overtake the Pioneers. And Carl thought, well, the Pioneer plaque was great, but it was like a license plate. But we could send something now that would be a complex message on a phonograph record. Not only could you send music, but you could also translate the imagery into data. So you could send pictures. And that's-

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But and that doesn't require they have a phonograph player?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  We sent it. Oh, we sent everything you need to play the record.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything you need?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  We sent a stylus and needles.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  We sent-

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The instruction manual.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And so if you are a spacefaring extraterrestrial of 100 or 1,000 million years from now, if you know how to get into space, then you have to speak science, speak physics, mathematics, and you can read the instruction manual, very simple.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you make an interesting and plausible assumption that an alien civilization that would have any measure of intelligence would be able to just figure out how to reproduce this?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Right. And boy, what a treat. They get the Easter egg of all times if they do that.

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's your favorite thing on the record?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Well, I have to say that the fact that my brainwaves- Two days after Carl and I fell madly in love with each other have been part of an hour-long meditation in which all of my neurological electrical impulses have been recorded and that data translated into sound on the record so that extraterrestrials of the distant future might be able to understand something.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll be so misled. They'll think that everyone on Earth is in love.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Well, that's kind of my dream of the world. You know, if that were true, I don't think people would go around hitting each other. Now, they've come to this planet with the highest expectations.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this next clip, I asked Anne about her writing and collaborations, and she shared her experience in creating both the Old and the New Cosmos series.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  The poetry is inherent in the material, I feel.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe reeks poetry.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  It does. I mean, if nature isn't beauty, then what is beauty? If the vastness, the immensity, doesn't make you choke up and make you feel something spiritual and uplifting, then, you know, you're missing a chip. That's what I think. And so, you know, people always say to me, you know, you really bring the passion and the emotion and the poetry. Yes, I really hope so. And I think Carl and I are the perfect combination to create these things because, for one thing, his knowledge was so vast. Once he'd explained the concept to me, we were like sea mammals swimming together, executing left turns at 90 miles an hour

• 12:49Speaker 01

  without any kind of words needed to pass between us. We would work day and night.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Every day of the week, there was no boundary between happiness and work, between fulfillment, love, and not only that, but supplying the right sentence, or giving the right trope, or the right word even, was a love offering. It was another way of making love. And it was the most fun thing. Thinking with him just was a feast of ideas, of traveling through the universe.

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So going back to the original series, there was three writers of record. So it was you, Carl, and Steve Soder.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Right. My admiration for Steve is boundless.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because for those who don't know, the two of you, you and Steve Soder, you were invited to write our first two inaugural space shows

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  for the planetarium in the reopened facility. So I've always known that you guys were kind of a writing dyad in that way.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Well, Carl also loved Steve. And our trio, creating the original series, there was a complementarity, mutual respect, and excitement of creating together. Everybody just sparks flying with new ideas.

• 14:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Steve has an extraordinary repository of historical.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  He's a historian of science. He's a scientist, and he's someone who is so curious and fascinating, and very sweet person. And after Carl's death, Steve and I continued to collaborate into the first drafts of the new series.

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What were the challenges of writing with commercials?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Well, actually, I kind of liked the commercials because you need a hook at every act break.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean, you liked the fact that there's a commercial break? Whether or not you liked the commercials themselves?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  People hate the commercials. It's a chronic complaint online. But it allows you to kind of take it in. I don't think there's been a more information-dense program on commercial television.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Primetime.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Ever. I mean, there's so much information coming at you. But for the writer, it's great because it was fun trying to think up that hook that would keep you from changing the channel through the commercials. That was the challenge.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you had to manipulate the suspense elements more deftly.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then you get to reset when people come back from the break. You know, you get to like, take a breath and then start it anew. And then also remind the audience of certain basic premises that are needed for the concept.

• 15:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Anne, when you're writing,

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there's a line between educating and preaching.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so where's that line in your head?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Well, I have to write it the way I think it, and then I have to look at it with fresh eyes the next day or a week later. And one of the things I love the most is editing, is crossing out things. Like, I hate the woman who wrote this. This is like so preachy. Who the hell does she think she is? What does she know? You know? And just taking out stuff. That's like being a sculptor and just carving out all that isn't the Pietra Dora, you know, the beautiful statue. That's editing. That's why I don't like to send anything out within 24 hours. I like to sit on it because my cooler head prevails.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I take it that you don't want to preach?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's a philosophical point you're making here that

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you can change someone's heart, not by hammering them on the head, but by offering them an educational path.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  That's why the global warming episode, I think, is so effective. Because it's a very Socratic series of questions. It's really examining each scientific argument by asking these questions, taking it apart, whether it's human caused, whether it's not a natural phenomenon that comes from the sun or comes from some other place. There are all these questions that people have. And I think by that point, I hope we've established our bona fides, that we're trying to be as honest as humanly possible. But what I'm most proud of in terms of favorite passage in the series, it's when you are in the ship and you're holding the manganese nodule.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember this line.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  You're talking about the fact that in the center of the manganese nodule is evidence of an incredibly minute nature that stars were exploding not terribly far away and creating this layer, which, when looked at by scientists in our time, you could determine the date of those explosions because we know the rate of the crystallization that's going on inside the manganese nodule. And the line I'm most proud of is when you say, "The difference between looking at a pebble and seeing just a little dark stone and reading the history of the cosmos

• 17:48Speaker 01

  inscribed within, that's science."

• 17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Anne, I can tell you that only the projects you've ever been involved in have there been words drawn from it that ended up tattooed on people's bodies.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  I'm sure.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know any other science documentary where people are

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  plucking phrases and etching them on their skin indelibly.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  It's because there's this yearning for that spiritual uplift that Carl was a pioneer in creating and that Steve and I have had a great time adding to, and that's unbelievably gratifying.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. We've been featuring my interview with Anne Druyan, who developed the new Cosmos series. That's Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. As Anne said in the previous segment, she worked with Carl Sagan and Steven Soder on the original Cosmos in the late 1970s, and it aired on PBS in 1980. Now, more than 30 years later, it was due for an update. In this next clip, Anne and I talk about the long quest to make the new Cosmos series. So Anne, I remember burning some shoe leather, knocking on doors with you and Steve Soder and Mitch Cantald. We were sort of a core four at some point, trying to shop around the idea for Cosmos.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  For three years.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we had interested parties.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Everyone wanted.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they were. You know, the usual cast, like Discovery Channel and Science Channel and National Geographic production entities and PBS, of course.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the original was on PBS, KCET.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  KCET, absolutely.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all right, so we're knocking on all those doors, and you just kept saying, "No." What's wrong with this woman?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  What is wrong with me?

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they want to do it. So what were you concerned about?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Well, two things. One is I wanted creative control over it.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody likes giving up creative control.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're being stubborn. You realize this?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  No, because I was protecting a legacy, a global legacy of Cosmos. If we had come out with a Cosmos that had been trimmed to fit the sponsor or the network's fears and insecurities, then that wouldn't be Cosmos. We didn't have to do that in the first one, and I wasn't going to do it on this one.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In spite of the original having big bankrolls from Arco?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An oil company?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. Arco, the Atlantic Ridgeville Corporation, gave us all the money we needed for Cosmos. And when Carl and I needed more money for Cosmos, we went back and got more. And we told Robert O. Anderson, who was the CEO at the time. We said, "We need all this money, but we want you to know that in episode four, we really take the oil companies to task and we talk about global warming."

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is 1980?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  This is 1979.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seventy-nine.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  He said, "Fine, don't worry. That's very good of you." He looked at us like the fools that we were. Because of course, he knew people would like the show or they wouldn't like the show. But his job on the 70th floor, whatever it was of the Arco building in Los Angeles, was secure. This was a time of hand over fist, record oil company profits, as it is now. And they were like, "Here, take your money and, you know, make your show. You're very nice people." And we were a tiny nut, and they were a giant elephant, being very generous. Now, the other problem with all those places that you and I and Mitchell and Steve slept to in trying to find a platform,

• 21:47Speaker 01

  the new Cosmos, was they wouldn't give me enough money to produce it. And I knew without the greatest VFX that you could possibly get on television, which was why Rayner Gombos and Addie Manis and Natasha Francis were so critical to the outcome.

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are visual effects supervisors.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  The visual effects supers and producers. Without them and without that kind of dazzling, eye-popping glory, we wouldn't be able to attract the broadest possible global audience. So they kept saying, yes, yes, we'll do it, but we'll control it and we'll give you a dollar and a half for each episode. It wasn't quite that bad, but for what we needed, it was too far away. And of course, until you introduced Seth MacFarlane to us, nothing really went forward, except we unfortunately acquired larger and larger legal bills. And that was it. And everybody was thinking I was a nut.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Legal bills, because every time you're almost in a conversation with someone.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  You're negotiating.

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're negotiating, you get the negotiating lawyer in.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And then we get to that point where that's as much money as they're going to spend, they're not going to give us control, forget it.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Did you have any apprehensions about going to Fox?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  I never had any apprehension about going to Fox. I must say, when Seth first suggested it to us, I had a little flicker of skepticism of like, you know, can he really pull this off? He was already a hero in my household. My kids loved Family Guy. I had the ones that I watched, I thought were terrific. So I figured, here's a man with a lot of clout. And remember, Seth was willing to bankroll one-half the cost of the pilot.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. In that meeting with the executives at Fox, he doesn't know what the reaction is going to be, so he has to sort of sweeten the table. And he says, you know, how about we can make a pilot? I'll put in a million, you put in a million.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. And Peter Rice said, "Not so fast with the checkbook. Hold on." And I had come with a copy of the original Cosmos series. And he said, "I'm gonna watch it with my kids." I missed it the first time it came around. I was just the wrong age for it. And weeks-

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I didn't really believe him. I thought, "They took this meeting just because Seth called for it." And Seth is a major product, so you gotta say, "All right, we'll do the meeting." What did the cat drag in? You know?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. And who could blame you? We had been through three years of schlepping around and thinking that it was a done deal. It's gonna happen.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he says, "I'm gonna watch it. Okay."

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna watch it. And weeks later, he called us back. And he said he'd like to order 13 episodes. And I was like, "Don't you want a pilot?" And he pointed to the original DVD and he said, "That's your pilot." And he gave me this big, wonderful hug. And he said, "I just can't wait for the head snap when people hear that Cosmos is on Fox."

• 24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And heads did snap.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Heads did snap. And four years later, here we are, Neil. We did it.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back, StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. In my interview with Cosmos creator, Anne Druyan, I had to ask her, "What makes Cosmos Cosmos?" In other words, what is unique about this series? What makes it so different from all the other science documentaries out there? I think it's unique because it reaches for more than just teaching you what is. It also conveys a sense of why science matters and a sense of what you can do, armed with the knowledge and the methods and tools of science to make a better world. But let's find out what Anne had to say.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Cosmos is that intersection where your brain, your heart, your eye, your ear, your soul can all be operating at full tilt. It is not any one important human component at the expense of the other. So in other words, no fantasy which breaks the laws of science, no science that is denuded of its awe-inspiring impact. You're allowed to feel. You're not allowed to lie. You're not allowed to distort.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or deceive yourself or others.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Or deceive yourself or others. No. You've got to be straight about how the universe is put together. You've got to be honest. But to me, it's the greatest source of that soaring feeling there is. And cosmos is the history, it's the struggle of the orphan in Bavaria with no prospects. So often, I found myself writing in the episodes of whom nothing was expected. The orphan in the glass factory, struggling, the drudgery and the hopelessness of that life.

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heroes of each of these episodes.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. What does he do? Oh, he grows up to become Fraunhofer, and he essentially invents astrophysics, your field. Or Michael Faraday, who's, you know, born into such poverty in a society that is so brutally class-conscious and rises to the top of the scientific world purely by this very hard work, this genius, this brilliance. Or the women in our story. The men rode off with such arrogance, like Cecilia Payne and Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan-Levitt.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  These were geniuses who are about to really change things, and nobody knows it but them. So it's society, it's feeling, it's science, it's history, it's the warp and the weave.

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science in its many branches.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  And its many different fields.

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the 13 episodes, what would you say was the most potent passage?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Well, that's a little unfair because of course the pale blue dot is in episode thirteen. And in terms of audience testing and global interest, that is on a level of its own. But I'm extremely proud of the end of episode thirteen. That's the episode I directed. And I'm really proud of that because for me, that was a cry from the heart. I felt that at that point, if you stayed with us for those twelve hours, then we had earned the right to actually draw some conclusions.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is we spent thirteen episodes teaching you about the universe and why it matters and what it feels like and what it means. And then you give us a little space at the end to emote.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, there's some passages I couldn't keep a dry eye while I was reading them.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  I know, I was choking up. Every time I would be sitting in the editing room, and the editors too, and the assistant editors.

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is a place where you hear the same damn passage a hundred times in a row.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  A hundred times. People start welling up. Someone asks someone a question, there's no answer. Well, the guy sitting in there in the dark with you, what's up? And didn't you hear me? And it's like, I can't talk, I'm just gonna cry. So I feel like the case for science, which was at the nucleus of the dream of Cosmos, is being made. And finally, we get to tie it all together with your amazing performance and astonishing visual effects and the script. You know, what really gets me and why we all cried, like thirty of us in the screening room who had worked on it for years, was when you let that ship go and the chair is empty.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  People in a hundred and eighty countries around the world have seen this case for science, have seen what we have to show about the universe.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  The dream that all of us could be changed sufficiently so that we could awaken from our stupor and act in defense of the planet and science and demand our governments to be more scientifically aware of the needs and challenges of our planet, but also of the promise of the cosmos.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. As you may have read, Cosmos won many Emmy Awards. This is an affirmation that we were all doing the right thing at the right time in the right place. I want to thank everyone for their support of the series and Fox for putting it on the air in prime time, National Geographic for spreading the love around the world. And in this final part of my interview with Cosmos creator Andrew Yen, we talked about what I wore while I guided the ship of the imagination, that sleek silver spacecraft that transported me through the cosmos. We also talked about the concept for the ship itself, and also whether she'd be willing

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to develop another Cosmos series in the future. When we were discussing my outfit, I mean, my costume for the ship, so many of us were saying, well, maybe we should put a little lapel pin or that. And you kept saying, no, because that would mean you would be of some special fleet and no one else would be invited or they're not in it. And so there's no accoutrements on me. There's no epaulets, there's no chevrons. No, that's a deep thought.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Well, that's so that the audience in the very last shot can become the captain of their own ship. That's the meaning of the ending is really, it's your ship now. You're turning it over, just as it was turned over to you. You're turning it over to the next one.

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a badass ship.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes, Riot Church, brilliant.

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In reading the original scripts, there were so many changes from the original, but one of the things that's there is... Your description of what the ship of the imagination needed to be. And I don't know if you remember the line, it just said simply, impossibly minimalist.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that phrase. And the ship of the imagination is exactly that. There are no knobs, there's no buttons.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Because everything gets old. Everything is such a short shelf life. Our fantasies of the extraterrestrials, our fantasies of the ships that will take us to the stars. All of them. For 10 years, they might look good at best. The wisdom is in not showing those things. Because like Jules Verne, you know, putting gas lights in your submarine. Putting heavy red velvet curtains with flounces in your submarine, you know, is a failure of the imagination. But it's not, I mean, Jules Verne was one of the most imaginative people who ever lived. But even he.

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Velvet curtains.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the problem we always are up against.

• 33:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why we didn't have curtains on. I wanted curtains, I want to sleep at night.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I wanted Venetian blinds, but they were like, no, no, no, no. My architectural standard are the pyramids. You look at them and you think, that is the oldest thing.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  And the newest. Nothing ever gets old about a geometric solid. It's true. It's just like, just look at it. I mean, it's not festooned with any crap or anything like that.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No ornaments.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  No fringe, nothing. It's beautiful forever. It has its own perfect natural beauty. The reason I wanted it to be so simple was what we had out our window. As Brandon said, nature is the star. Not the ship, not anything else, nature. And that was the idea.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I think it accomplished that, and I would not have been able to project that in advance. Because looking at the ship alone, it's a work of beauty. And then you wonder, will it somehow compete with anything?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  What's out there?

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it doesn't.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  No, it reflects it.

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's there, and then when there's something else to look at, the ship disappears. I mean, intellectually, emotionally, when something is happening, you're not distracted.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Not at all. I'm very happy with the way it turned out, I have to say.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when people ask me, okay, you ready to do another Cosmos? And I'm thinking, that must be like asking a woman right when she gives birth, do you want another kid? You've had kids.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've just done Cosmos, so you're the only person I can ask this of. If Fox comes, knocks on your door and said, let's do this next year, what are you gonna do?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  I would like to think about it. I would like to give it some serious thought. I think one of the reasons that Cosmos has been so cherished by the audience is that it's kind of an event that comes once every thirty-five years.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Once a generation.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Once a generation. I have way more stories I'd like to tell.

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You show me your file cabinet in your home, just, just stories in progress that are not yet realized.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm so thrilled. I mean, if you see Jan Ort and Edmund Halley trending in the top three subjects on Twitter, you know that you have struck a chord. And there are so many other stories. I mean, why not make heroes of the people who've brought us knowledge instead of heroes of the people who have the best dialists, or the people who spend the most money, or the people who have a mask.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who drive the fanciest car.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, why, I mean, do we want our kids to be scientists, or want them to be clothes hangers? That's the question.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, not to put words in your mouth, but you have enough creative spirit and enough ideas that you could easily just stay in business for the next several years without having to make another Cosmos. You can still keep the spirit going.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I have a lot of things I want to do. I'm working on two other projects. And I think that they're always the same values, consonant with the ones in Cosmos and in everything else I've ever had the privilege to work on. I know that every single person engaged in the whole multi-year project would want to work with you and me again, as we would want to work with them. And so, who knows what the future will be.

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was such goodwill on set that I had not, not that I've done this often, but they've all told me other sets, they're just...

• 36:42Speaker 01

  No, this was a great experience.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do hugs sound like on the radio? You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, brought to you in part by a grant from the Sloan Foundation. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, urging you, as always, until next time, to keep looking up.