A Conversation with Edward Norton

Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with actor Edward Norton to explore his fascination with the universe, his new film “Motherless Brooklyn,” his work with the UN promoting biodiversity, his data company, his cosmic curiosities, and more. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Thanks to this week’s Patrons for supporting us: Ray Sousa, Kiki Stirling, Paul Schroeder, John Gallagher, Ástþór Sigurvinsson Photo Credit: StarTalk.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide. This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we have a special edition of StarTalk, featuring my conversation with actor, producer, writer, filmmaker, entrepreneur, Edward Norton. Edward Norton, welcome to StarTalk, dude.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  This is like, this is the only StarTalk I would ever go on.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because we're talking about actual stars in the universe.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would have a different sobriquet,

• 0:49Speaker 01

  it'd be like Star Maps or something.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there you go.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I don't want to be in that.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what we'd like to do with our guest is just get some background understanding of what might have been some early science or math influences in your life, if any. Just curious, just in school, where'd you grow up?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Grew up in Columbia, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington. Baltimore family.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Orioles fan?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Lifelong.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Season ticket holder, kinda.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So any teachers from that time?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went to public school my whole life. I had many good, many terrific teachers in our little public school, and I...

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very encouraging, by the way.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I was ecumenical in my academics. And then I liked everything, kind of. I hated high school, didn't like, didn't like, I wasn't popular, or, so I was very isolated, so I enjoyed school.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  No, school was my, like, the...

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll just let those two things go together.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, learning things, music and science and history and reading books and going to the theater. Fortunately, my parents and my family were really intellectual and active, and so they were like, I didn't like being at school, but I liked what I was learning in school. And then...

• 2:18Speaker 01

  I was really lucky and I got I got into Yale, which for me was like being lifted off of a desolate planet and put on Earth. It was like it was very rich and um and you know, the people were amazing and diverse and intellectually ferocious, so and when I got there, Carl Sagan was like a hero of mine and I originally.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Sagan was at Cornell.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  He was at Cornell, yes, but I but I you know, the original Cosmos and um, his books with Android were in my grandparents' shelf. I remember going through those books like fascinated and I went to Yale and thought that I was gonna be an astronomy major.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  I know.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Am I just learning this now?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  And I actually, the battery of my early classes was overweight, um, physics and astronomy.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And and inspired by the influences, basically, of the Carl Sagan.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Enterprise.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I I it's funny the way when you're young, you laugh at it now, but like I was, you know, I was really interested in Japan, too, and martial arts, not from something, but just because of like the James Clavell series Shogun with, you know, Richard Chamberlain and then going and finding the book and reading Clavell's Shogun. It just seemed very exotic to me, you know? And I like I was very drawn to things that seemed exotic and Carl Sagan's like those books and that series made it seem extremely like narratively exotic and um and it hooked me. I was really hooked by all that.

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so then what happened?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. It all went south.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Off-ramp there somewhere.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  It all went south. Um. The funny thing is, I was doing theater in my life, in my young life, I was very into theater as well. My my mother taught Shakespeare and.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  High school plays kind of thing?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and I I went to a theater arts school outside of my high school, which was kind of my happy spot and um, but I didn't have, you know, I I liked make I wrote little plays and I made little films with my video cam and I um, but it didn't, it didn't, it wasn't like in me like that's what I want to do, because I didn't have a ser- I didn't have a very developed sense. Of of the actuality of doing that, whereas in a funny way, I felt like I really did feel like the Sagan, the thing he did made it look like now that's a that's an enter that's a thing to do. That's like, you know, and and I really, I really did go to school thinking that's what I want to study.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  I didn't know if I wanted to do that, but I that's what I wanted to study.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean to do it professionally versus?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't I wasn't I didn't have I wasn't like an 18 year old with a directed sense of a career I at all. I just was like, this seems like cool.

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  To learn about.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're at Yale, you're thinking of astronomy, physics, math has to be in there. So then what happened?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Well, I have a couple of memories.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need to say that in a different way. I don't I didn't mean to sound disappointingly.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. What what transpired? Yeah, exactly. Well, I remember one very funny thing was that one of my freshman year astronomy professors, I believe she was Dutch, was a woman named, I want to say Patricia Vader.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  But her name was Vader and this is in 1987 and she entered the first day of the lecture. You know, class in astronomy, wearing all black, including like a long black sweater and black boots. And as she walked down to this stage, like people started to laugh and someone goes dun dun dun dun da dun da da. And everyone's like, this is great. She's leaning into it. This is gonna be fun. And she got up and gave this look like, what's all this? Like she clearly didn't wasn't in on the joke at all. And then it was sort of like, oh,

• 6:23Speaker 01

  this is not going to be a lighthearted romp through like through astrophysics and and it wasn't I it was I I I remember thinking it was a bit of a grind.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you didn't you didn't survive the baptism?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  No, no, I did. But I what actually happened was I was taking some physics classes and things like that and and I had a roommate who was not from some moneyed family with, you know, alumni at the school.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  But showed no evident like talent for any academics whatsoever. Was inebriated a lot of the time. Came from sort of a Western Pennsylvania public school or whatever and uh. And none of us could figure out how he was at Yale or what he was doing there and.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  One day toward the end of, I don't know, the first year or something like that. He was very affable, but he really seemed pretty dysfunctional to me and um. He was bothering me about like, let's go watch football and drink beer and I was like, I have work to do. And I, he was like, well, what's the problem? And I was showing him like I had been diligently working on my problem sets all week and I was still.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your math and physics.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and underneath and he was like, let me see and I showed it to him and he starts laughing at me. And proceeds to say, what's the problem here? And then just basically schools me like takes me through a week's worth of work. Corrects it, fixes it, shows me how easy it really was. And I looked at him like, what the F? And he goes, yeah, that's my thing. And I said, what's your thing? I said, I've never once seen you out there. And he goes, I'm in the graduate school. And he, this is, he was 18 and he was taking like, I don't even know what the number on it was, math and physics. Basically at a graduate level. And I had this real light bulb moment, like a real epiphany, like a window into. Like this guy has a gift, like a gift that.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A gift that you don't have.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  That I do not have and I am not going to catch up with this. And it wasn't a competitive thing. It was more like. This, it's, this is like a gift, a talent. And I meditated on a lot in the rest of that year. Cause I was really struggling and I, other things I was excelling at. I, they, like, I leaned into them and they like. Carved like butter for me and uh. I redirected at that point.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this roommate was a pivotal moment for you.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Very.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  But I stayed, you know, I stayed, um, I stayed lay fascinated.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which fortunately in my field, it's possible to be because there's a lot of popular level books.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  There is, yeah.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Documentaries, you can just hang on to.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  But I, you know, I would read Feynman and read all, you know, everything that I ever came out in sort of a popular matrix. I've always kept up with and been fascinated by it and uh, I think I mentioned when I um. Literally like the first film I made with where I ever made like more money than I needed, which was maybe three or four films in, I think the first like check I ever wrote to any institution for over $10,000 was to the planetarium here to fund a astrophysics departmental role for like two years or something like that.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Well, thank you.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  And I don't even, I don't, I came in, I talked, it was before the renovation.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Uh, well before, because I would say this was in 97 or 98.

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  And um, um, that was sort of my like nod to my past interest.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Yeah. Because the, the, the, those early monies were tap roots for a lot of what would come here. Because we ultimately created a brand new department of astrophysics and hired faculty and.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  I know. And my friend Jonathan Rose and his family were very involved.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jonathan Rose is the Rose family. I am the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  I know. His, his dad.

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His dad. That's his dad.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  And Jonathan is one of, is and has been one of my friends and mentors for many years.

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's been very active in city.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Planning.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  City planning.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Sustainability.

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's another Rose brother who's also active in that.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yes. Jonathan is one of the great thinkers and doers in what I would call progressive urban planning, applications of ideas of sustainability.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fabulously wealthy, but he cares about people, he cares about the full functionality of a city.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And interestingly, it sort of takes it around to the subject of my film, but um.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have to, I can take you to your film.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  No, but my grandfather was sort of a mentor of his.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can take you to your film.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, you take me to your film.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can take you to your film. That reminds me of your film.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Exactly.

• 11:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, a film that you wrote, directed, stars in Motherless Brooklyn, which I didn't know anything about until I saw a screening of it. And I'm a native New Yorker. And it's deep in.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the urban.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Conflicts of planning and design and housing and and and construction. What what a journey into that it was. So so did your sensitivity, your friendship with Jonathan Rose? Did this give you some awareness of the book from which that's derived?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  No, um, well, and actually, interesting, I know Jonathan because my grandfather.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this Jonathan Latham, the author.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  No, I'm sorry, I know Jonathan Rose because he, my grandfather was a sort of a mentor and inspiration to him. My grandfather was a very famous urban planner, progressive urban planner and thinker named Jim Rouse. Um, and Jonathan, uh, when I, when I first moved to New York, I worked for him in affordable housing development in New York. Um, and my first exposure to New York was going around and interviewing people who had been homeless and gotten stabilized through affordable housing. And that's what opened up this interest in all this stuff, but but lest it sound like a documentary. My my real, what drew me into it was, uh, the book.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  The book is Jonathan Latham's late 90s novel about a Tourette's detective with.

• 12:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tourette's Syndrome.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Tourette's Syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder who has to solve the murder of his boss and only friend, basically, and it's this great character. It's like.

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you read the book and resonated with the character?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yes, but there was nothing about New York in the 50s. It's it's a contemporary book about a guy who has this affliction of Tourette's or condition, I should say, but but who has many gifts within, has a photographic memory and an ability to puzzle out, you know, complex things. Um, but it's Jonathan's book, which is beloved, is it's really a character study. It's a character study of this mind, you're inside his head. And the plot, um, is Byzantine and and sort of a frame for this character. But when I became interested in adapting it, I said to Jonathan that.

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the author?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jonathan, yeah, sorry, Jonathan Lethem. He, he's from Brooklyn, born and raised. And I said, look, you know, if this is a, this is a greatest character and the greatest like interior, mental landscape and, but the, a film, a film is a, is a tableau. It's a bigger tableau. And I, I knew Jonathan loved noir films and I sort of proposed to him. I said, this is a little radical, but what if we take the core of this book? This guy with this condition, but we set it in a moment when if we open it up into New York social history, instead of sort of dispense with the plot of the book and let it be, let this Tourette's detective take us into a, a more Chinatown scale canvas of, of what.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chinatown is in the film.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, the film, like what, which I love as a film because it, it's a great atmospheric, sensual.

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's very atmospheric, right? You're in, you're in, you're in the streets with them.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's, it's about the crimes underneath the veneer of LA. You know, it's, it's about, it's about what's the shadow narrative under a place that has a sunny American narrative, literally. But I think that.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but as, as an actor, you read this, you read this character and said, I want to play this character?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Tourette's Syndrome?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And obsessive compulsive disorder?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With these, you just said, this is me.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Well, I thought, this is a great challenge. This is hard.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, it's like, you know, maybe in.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We do things because they're hard, not because they're easy.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think in, in your field, what is any, what draws anybody if not the things that are hard, right?

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Hard to figure out.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You step right up to the plate.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you say, ooh, let, let me get into that because if you cracked that, wouldn't that be very satisfying, right?

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did you have to, did you speak with Tourette's Syndrome experts? How did you prepare for this role?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there's not, uh.

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a cliche question, but.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  No, no, but, but you know, it's, it's a.

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The mind is a, is a crazy place.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  It is, it's well documented. Oliver Sacks wrote about Tourette's Syndrome.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The late Oliver Sacks.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A friend of StarTalk's too, he's been on a couple of times.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, an amazing clinician and writer.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  There's at least two very good documentaries about it in which you the condition in which you get to meet many people and see the broad spectrum and diversity

• 15:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of how it manifests?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  How it manifests in people because in no two people is it the same.

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How often does it come with obsessive compulsive disorder?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  It's an overlay that's not uncommon, but not at all ubiquitous.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how often does it come with the this sort of very sharp memory which you aptly portrayed in the film?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  That um that is I met people who said that the their word compulsion made them very, very uh have very excellent memory for things that people had said.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it not to stretch an analogy, but your character in the film is very concerned about detail remembers detail, but also wants things to make sense.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As he says, multiple times you reference puzzles.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  And he says puzzles and he says that an unfinished puzzle is like glass in the brain. Pieces that he has not yet resolved into making sense to him feel like glass in the brain and and I that I related to that a lot. I I I relate to that even on a a story level, even when I was working on trying to write the script and make it all make sense. Once you were at the end of it, that that you know I

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what any good scientist attempts to do with nature. You get a bit a bit a piece over here and another bit over there. You don't know if they're connectable at all.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe they are connectable, but you need other pieces between them to know that they're part of the same puzzle.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, it's really funny is literally it's Tuesday, Sunday, this Sunday night I was in Palo Alto. I presented one of the breakthrough prizes for science.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  It's this new thing that's

• 17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very very high lucrative prize.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, it's I think it's one of the largest cash prizes for scientific achievement in science and math.

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bigger than the Nobel, yes.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Three million dollars.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  So it's like three times bigger than the Nobel, right?

• 17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Nobel's like one and a half, yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Oh, is it now? So so anyway, very substantial.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They've invested wisely over the years.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. But they also, you know, you know.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who did you give it to? Who did you present?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  So that's what's interesting, the the. Uh, I, the person I awarded to is named Jeffrey Friedman. He's a doc, a clinical doctor. He created a drug called leptin that basically, um, it, he figured out what the gene is that, that controls the body's digestion of fat. Um, and in figuring out the gene, they were able to come up with, um, a thing. And so people, people whose bodies essentially were making them morbidly obese, no matter what they ate, literally he, he, and, and having all kinds of terrible.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Side effects.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Heart and side effects. It, he, he literally created a cure. That doesn't mean everyone who's overweight takes this pill and things, but, but some people who had a genetic disorder that was really substantial. He, he discovered the gene that controls the regulation of, of fat in the body. And, and in the little film they had about him, to your exact point, he had worked on this for a long time. And I, and he, he describes the moment that he looked at the slide that he knew revealed what the gene was. And it's, it, people in the room had tears in their eyes, like, because he said he knew at the moment that he looked at it, that it had all fallen into place. He knew what he was looking at and he knew that in short order, there were going to be people whose lives were going to be saved.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Transformed.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Trans, literally saved, who were, who were on death's door. And then they brought this woman out who is built like an athlete, who was dying and, and things, and was saved by the drug. It was, it was unbelievable.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Like, it was just unbelievable. It was like, and then everything about that whole evening, I was really liking because they, essentially they've got a lot of Hollywood people coming up and saying, hey, stop paying attention so much to what, this is like, great work. And it, it's needed. We, we, we need, we need the elevation of, of the heroism of those kinds of careers, you know?

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you for participating.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was great.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To bring that, to bring sort of, uh, actor celebrity.

• 20:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spotlight to the rest of this is part of that, part of that, that's that visibility that these kinds of events need and I think require.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sustain.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  The funny thing is, is I think I worked, I was on President Obama's Committee for the Arts and Humanities, right? So we, we did a lot of work on.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been on, you've been on the UN too?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get to that in a minute. Wait, okay.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  We, we, we did a lot of work on, on looking at actual, the actual measurable effect of arts, education, programming on overall educational efficacy, performance rates and stuff. And it's really, it's not even fuzzy. It's, it's like where arts education is a component, kids do better at all STEM.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At everything.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Things, everything. And our argument was it should be called STEAM because you should have arts in there and that arts, and, and that makes, you know, it makes complete sense to me, having an interest in both, that, that visual arts and think about visual arts and their role in astronomy. Think about like, think about the importance of being able to understand narrative to talk about things in ways that open it up for people. If you, if you don't have arts, I, I think like, uh, you know, science without a, uh, some of the dimensions of the arts in them are much more, uh, I don't even want to say boring. They're less activated for people. You know what I mean?

• 21:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good word, activated. Right, right. You need the active, the activation provided by the imagination that art requires of you.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And training the imagination. I think, I mean, this, you know, it's not like Einstein wasn't saying this all the time. It's like, you have to have artistic imagination to, to do good science.

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's his quote, right? Imagination is more important than knowledge, I think is an Einsteinian.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quote, which is right up that alley.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Edward, hold that thought. We got to take a break. When we come back, more of my interview.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Bringing space and science down to earth. You're listening to StarTalk.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. So Edward, so did you think about your brain more, having played this role and studied the symptoms of Tourette's?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yes, um, yes, and I think, I don't know if you, I could, I imagine many people could relate to this, but I, I think that it's, you know, we see, we see it in many forms of disorder or condition or whatever you want to call it, that, that the difference, the difference between someone who presents as, let's call it, stable, and someone who's dealing with an instability can be a matter of like a gene, or a few neurons, or, you know, a little bit of a chemical imbalance, and that idea that we, you know, so Tourette's to me, as an actor, one of the things that, you know, there's a, there's something called

• 23:43Speaker 01

  a Meisner exercise, there was a famous teacher named Sanford Meisner, Sandy Meisner, who, who would have actors do, take a sentence and say it over and over and over again with emphasis like, um, you know, "I don't want you to do that," it's like, "I don't want you to do that," like, "I don't want you to do that," like, he, he showed how much you can change intention just by, by playing with emphasis on, and how there's almost limitless adaptability of intention that you can express.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is what the actor brings to a script.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the script doesn't do that.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  No, and you have to, you have to, you have to understand the intention will change the emphasis, the way you use words, right? But it's almost like, it becomes almost like an incantation when you do Meisner exercises, right? And to me, Tourette's, if you're, if you, if you are someone who compulsively mimics other people's voices, or, which I always did as a kid, or if you get obsessed with wordplay, the rhythm of words, or the intention that's in different things. Then Tourette's, it looks like you're like looking across a gulf that's like only a foot wide. Because you're saying to yourself, as an actor, I've walked down the street in New York muttering to myself

• 24:56Speaker 01

  many times, probably looking like, you know, in the early 90s, it was like, that kid looks like he's probably schizophrenic. Now they're like, oh, it's Edward, he's probably rehearsing something, you know what I mean? It's like New York is very tolerant, in a way, of people muttering to themselves. But I think that you, the idea of Tourette's that's in the book, which is a voice in the head that you're doing battle with, a part of your brain that is trying to suppress another part of the brain from doing something unrestrained or anarchic. Everybody's having that conversation, all the time.

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just a matter of whether it spills out of your head.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Is it literal? Yeah, is it made vocal? You know, and I think the idea, the idea of being in battle with your own head is something, like, I'm not sure if there's anybody who can't relate to that. You know, and so I think, I like that idea, like that he as a character with Tourette's, it's exotic because it's so extreme in him, but it's not actually unrelatable. It's like, it's easy to get fairly instant empathy in the beginning of the film when he tells you, I have something wrong with my head.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And this is why, this is what it does. There's a lot about it that almost right away, you're going, I can sympathize with that.

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what got my empathy? And I don't know if it was intended to hit the audience as much as it hit me, but it's when your character says,

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, if I, if I get high, or if I do these other things.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, it, it diminishes the effect. But then, my thoughts start getting fuzzy.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Fuzzy, yeah.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And up until then, we are respecting you, and we're valuing you because you have such a sharp brain.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You remember things. And now, I'm saying, oh my gosh. In order for him to not have the manifest, manifested symptoms, now he's gonna be fuzzy brained.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now he can't be what you, what we value in him when he's fully expressing.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The affliction. And so, I, to me, I, I felt that, because my brain matters to me.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wanna be sharp.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wanna remember things.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  And also, I mean, when you think about stories, I, there's many, there's, there's, there's actually, I think, a genre of films that doesn't get tagged as a genre, but if you, Motherless Brooklyn, uh, Forrest Gump, Rain Man, but in the sense of being underdog characters who carry us through a story, and we're rooting for them because of their affliction, not despite their affliction, right?

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  But I, I cite a lot, um, the, the film about John Nash, right?

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, Beautiful Mind.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Because he, he, I, if I'm, if I remember the book right, and not the film.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nash won the Nobel Prize for, in economics, he's a.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Mathematician.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, he was a mathematician at Princeton University at the time, yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Who had probably schizophrenia, most likely, right? Um, but, but, if I'm not mistaken, if I remember right, in the book, there was a lot they left out of the movie, but he tried different drug paradigms, but basically went through that, like, it, it ruined his capacity to think.

• 28:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Um, and, you know.

• 28:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a great dilemma, it's a moral dilemma.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw a lecture by Oliver Sacks, where he talked about his own neurological peculiarities. And I said, Oliver, if you, if we found a cure to, to one of your afflictions, I forgot which one we were talking about in the moment, and we can go back and correct that in your childhood, would you do that?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then relive your life? And he said, no, he wouldn't, because the affliction.

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was the foundation of who he became as an adult. It's why he got interested in neuroscience in the first place.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you go around and start snipping and nipping and tucking jeans to get rid of a symptom.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When that symptom may be fundamental to the rest of who and what that person is. That's a scary territory to be on.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, of course.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you be on an ethics panel going forward?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  The deeper we get.

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will recommend you.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Like CRISPR and stuff like that. It's becomes like, this is becoming like not futuristically relevant. It's becoming very relevant right now.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  CRISPR, I always forget the acronym, but it's where you edit genes basically at home.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, and, and just the idea that you actually can do gene editing that is transferable, that, that is.

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inheritable.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Permanent and inheritable. And the idea of sort of designer babies and all that becomes, but, but what if you don't know what the salutary effects of a thing are?

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what happens if you, if you design a baby that has no ailments of any kind? And maybe our life efforts to overcome our physical, mental challenges is the very foundation of the character that we end up carving as adults. And without it, what, what do you become?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  I mean, did you know Stephen Hawking?

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yes, we met. In fact, one of his last interviews was on StarTalk.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Well, did he, I, I wonder, I, I don't know.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, we weren't beer drinking buddies.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We met several times.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  I wonder, I always wondered if, if, um, one thing I never particularly gleaned out of reading his stuff was whether he specifically ever said that, that his condition of, you know, the constraints that were on him let, because I, obviously he did very significant work before his.

• 30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, so that's why I don't think.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That argument.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  It doesn't really hold up.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wouldn't hold. Before he was afflicted, he was already brilliant.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was manifested unimpeachably good at what he was doing.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, um, but I think, I think that.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  The thing that I tried to inject in the film, there's a character played by Michael K. Williams, who is a trumpet player, a star trumpet player in a jazz band and...

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, jazz was quite prevalent in the film.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a lot written about the jazz notes in the mind and...

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you study any of that before you...

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was...

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You went there?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was into that music and um, I think if there's any music that's Touretteic in its expression, it's like pop jazz, you know, uh, it's very, it taking melodies, deconstructing them, looping them, trying them out multiple times, different refrains, it's all...

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And different, different, different bits of jazz performance affected your characters.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The manifestation of the Tourette's.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Well, well...

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a fascinating scene.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  They open up, they, they, they allow him a moment where he's not trying to suppress it, where he can kind of find like um...

• 31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A resonance.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  A, a alignment and play with it um, and not feel like anybody's looking at him um, because like the other character says, "You can't really disturb the peace in a, in a small club with a hot band", you know what I mean? Um, and I think that, but I think that the, the conversation they end up having where the trumpet player says like, "I, you've, your head is like mine, you're, you're twisting things over and boiling around" and some people call it a gift, but it's a brain affliction.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Just the same, he's talking about music.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he said, "At least he has a trumpet to blow it through."

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Exactly, like my character sort of envies that he's got, that the trumpet player has a mode to put it in that makes it productive, which he doesn't feel that he has. And I think, I do think, I mean, I think, you know, I feel lucky all the time that I've got like an outlet for my compulsions, you know, that's healthy. Cause I'm sure lots of people who just don't get introduced to, they don't get shown a vector down which they can apply the, the like...

• 32:52Speaker 01

  You know, the high speed, you know, if you have a brain that's working in a very high gear, but you don't have an outlet for it, it can take you in all kinds of addictions and all kinds of other, you know, terrible places. So I think it's like when, when people talk-

• 33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying addiction is just a misdirected compulsion?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  I'm not saying that generally, but I'm saying, but I'm saying, if you think about people, when we talk about like, why do kids, why do we want to cultivate, like, think about how many kids, you know, have hyperactive minds and stressful situations and the, you know, the pleasure and relaxation they can get from being given a framework into which to put their, their, their thinking. I mean, if you-

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That happened to me in sixth grade.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was mostly disruptive in school, not in an evil way, just I had this social energy that was uncontained. And the teacher saw that all my book reports were on the universe. This is in sixth grade. They said, "Here, here are classes you can take at the Hayden Planetarium." So, so midweek, I'd get on a bus and come all the way down into, into Manhattan and take advanced classes in astronomy and physics and math. And then I was calm in class. The, the teacher figured it out.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, because partly because you were looking at the other like sixth graders going, "You fools, you have no idea what's going on around you." It's like sort of the Woody Allen thing of like, it's all expanding.

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, that conversation was in Brooklyn-

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the movie. How could you be calm when the whole universe is expanding?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's expanding and the grand, the mother says, you know, "What is that? Your business? You are here in Brooklyn."

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brooklyn is not expanding, right. So you, you have other interests, I noticed. Investments in a data company? What is that about?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  No, uh, that, uh, not an investment. I started that company. Yeah, no, no, it's my company.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, your company?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, we, we do-

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A data company? What is, what's going on there?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  We-

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This gives you serious street geek cred, just so you know. If you do whatever you already had, it adds to it.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, our company, we do, we, we do very sophisticated kinds of, um-

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Machine learning, uh, applications to media data. We, we, we create original data signal around whether things like television advertising is actually driving people to take actions that correlate with buying things.

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so companies buy your consultation services?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  We, we, yeah, we're like Nielsen.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  But Nielsen, Nielsen is like, Nielsen is like, uh, a Stone Age axe and we are, we are like a Gamma knife. Uh, we really are.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it's just, are you watching it or are you not? Right, that's, that's the Nielsen rating.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Well, no, not yet, or notionally, can we come up with like a proxy? Can we come up with a credible proxy for how many people might be watching this? Which is not, in the world we're in, that's not such a valuable insight anymore. Especially when there are actions that people take lined up within seconds of having seen a thing that have a pretty high grade, like, relationship to whether they're intending to do something.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're just acting on the side.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  No, it's, uh, no, I'm not. I've spent, I've spent.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think I'll.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  I ping pong, I ping pong.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me star, direct and write a movie just on the side.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  No, I, I go back and forth. Um, I could, I.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is good.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, my film, my film has taken up the last two years of my life. Like, I saw something saying, oh, he hardly does movies anymore. I was like, I just spent the last two years solidly writing and directing and acting in a film. How am I not in the movie business anymore?

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you need your three movies a year and the summer blockbuster and the.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like Orson Welles puts out Citizen Kane and they say, oh, he's a dilettante. It's like, what? It's like my 40th film. I've got my, I've got my Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours.

• 36:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. You got it. Um, so what's this about United Nations Goodwill Ambassador? By the way, the idea that there are any Goodwill ambassadors at all is just a great concept. And, but you've got, you're the Goodwill Ambassador for biodiversity?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where did that come in?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Hmm, well, my dad is a career conservation, uh, um, litigator and organization builder and.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  We kind of, my brother, sister and I grew up in the, in the conservation, environmental sustainability, uh, trade.

• 37:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Um, and I, I've been involved in.

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got the interest and the pedigree to be exactly that.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  I've been, I've been involved in, uh, a lot of work on, uh, community-based conservation, um, and sustainable economic development. And, um, they needed a bio, they, biodiversity is of, uh, biodiversity is a very, um,

• 37:51Speaker 01

  it's, it's poorly understood. I think that we're moving.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what they should call it? Bio-interdependence.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, this is Edwin O. Wilson, right?

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Concilience, that idea that of, I think that he does, he's done in that field, I think what you've done with astrophysics and cosmology. He, he, um,

• 38:14Speaker 01

  he's helped people understand that interdependence, but the problem is like, I think in our modern, in, let's call it in the last century, between when Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot kind of essentially started and John Muir. That's the, that's the, that's the fountainhead of the American conservation movement, right? It went through all these phases of sort of like preservationist moves because of the spiritual, the intrinsic spiritual value of wild places and nature. And we've definitely gone through this like seventies, eighties version of like the panda, the elephant, like these iconic, you know, fauna and saying, we need to save these animals because,

• 38:55Speaker 01

  not because, not so reduction that they're cute, but because they're important, they're iconic, right? And the problem is, is that bio, biodiversity.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We tend to want to save fuzzy animals.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, macro fauna thing. And we don't realize that like, like, like with $10 trillion, we couldn't replace what bees and butterflies do to our economy, right? We cannot manu, we cannot. Replicate what beehives do in our agricultural economy.

• 39:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you seen the series Dark Mirror?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Netflix? So Black Mirror.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Black Mirror, yeah.

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the episodes, they have artificial bees.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Running out of bees has made bee robots.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's not happening anytime soon. No one should kid themselves. And yet, you know, we're having this huge collapse of pollinator diversity and all of it. And the ramifications, the idea that we, you know, we have to understand biodiversity within our economic framework. We have to realize that like fisheries are collapsing globally and the ramifications of this are almost unquantifiable.

• 40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not just animals, but plant diversity too? The corals and all the rest of that. So the fact that you have this, this sort of genetic lineage of biology, biodiversity, and conservation, and you have the luminosity being an actor, that's, I guess, the ideal combination to be an ambassador.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it needs a narrative too.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you, and the narrative which you have training in constructing. Because I'm just trying to think, who makes a good ambassador? You gotta be able to answer somebody's question about this. You can't just be a pretty face.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta have some teeth behind the...

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Stage accessories is not, doesn't persuade anybody. By the way, I think, you know, no joke, I think what Jim Cameron did with Avatar is to me, when people say like, whoa, what's the role of... Jim has all the money in the world. He doesn't need to make more Avatar films. He is making more Avatar films.

• 40:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three more coming out, right?

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Specifically, specifically because his conviction is that we need a mythology, young people need to get invested in a mythology that puts alignment with natural systems in a heroic... You know, presentation and extractive, non-sustainable villainy into a villainous construct. And Avatar is the most popular, it's the most seen piece of filmed entertainment ever made. And it has, the central emotional event is a tree falling, you know?

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  I mean, this is very significant. Like, it's like, that's how you build cultural values. It really is. You get a generation of kids feeling like, this is awful. I don't want to be like, a part of that destructiveness, you know?

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they get it from early on.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So that means, really, you should be ambassador for many things.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. I need to be an ambassador to sleep for the next few months, and then I'll consider my other ambassadorships.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take a break. When we come back, more of my interview with writer, producer, director, actor, Edward Norton.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Hey, we'd like to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons, John Gallagher and Ausborg Sigurvinsen. Nice Icelandic name there. Hey, if you'd like to get your very own shout out, go to patreon.com/stargtorkradio and support us.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  The future of space and the secrets of our planet revealed.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  This is StarTalk.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. So, Edward Norton. Well, just congratulations on two years, the movie.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's great, and I was particularly attached to it because of how embedded it is in New York City. I'm hoping that would have an appeal to other municipalities. New York was a complicated place.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  It was, yeah.

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's some good historical, really accurate referencing to the value of Central Park in Manhattan. Who was there before? There were squatters and there were farms. There's still a region of grass called Sheep's Meadow.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Sheep's Meadow, yeah.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where did that name come from, you know, you can ask yourself? And so I was delighted to see that bit of sort of a history kissing.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, along the timeline.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Weave. You want to weave, weave interesting tendrils through.

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of reality, of real history through it.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Because I think, um, look, first and foremost, to me, the challenge is make a film that's like the films I love, like, like L.A. Confidential or Chinatown. First and foremost, you gotta like work that hypnosis of great photography and a sense, you know, music and a sense that you've gone through the frame and into a big world, a big romantic sensual experience of another time and interesting characters and characters who, like we've been saying, you can root for.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  And I, and I think you, you first and foremost have to create sort of movie magic and, and give people the experience that we all go to the movies for, like The Godfather or Out of Africa or L.A. Confidential or any of these types of films that transport us, you know? But once you've done that, I think layering in, layering in enough that when people come out of it, they, they at the very least are saying, "Wow, did that really happen? Is that, wait, how much of that is true? Is that based in truth?" So that, that like we were talking about.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Curiosity gets dilated, yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, activating people into a sense of like, is that, was there actually a person in New York who was an authoritarian?

• 45:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Named Moses.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Power boss like that, you know what I mean?

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Robert Moses.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and that's, that's, that, that's sort of this, hopefully the second level that you can achieve, you know?

• 45:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Edward.

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I like to do for our StarTalk guests is it's not often, you can run the numbers on this, that you are ever in the same room with an astrophysicist. So I want you to take this moment to ask me any question you may have been harboring your entire life about the universe.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  I have many, that's the problem. Since there's a lot in the popular press recently about the first photograph of a black hole. I think, and Hawking talks about this, in the thesis of wormholes, or this idea that black holes with their super density are bending spacetime so much that they could make parts of it touch with each other, or something like that. In serious thought, is there, is there any, is there real serious thought around the idea that there's conductivity dimensionally through black holes?

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me answer what I think that question was. All right? If you look at Einstein's general theory of relativity, which gives us our understanding of black hole physics, and you follow that through, okay? First, it breaks down at the singularity.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we need some other theories there, and that's why we have string theorists. But if you don't hit the singularity, you just sort of move through the black hole. Einstein's relativity prescribes that an entire other spacetime emerges on the other side of the black hole. And you leave the one behind you once you came. And so when you talk about dimensions, you talk about what does the black hole do? So there is the likelihood that a whole other universe pops out on the other side of a black hole, contained within the black hole, but dimensionally, it's an entire other universe. And but it's, we don't know how to test that.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to be the guy who goes in and comes out and tries to tell them? No, of course. Right. So it, right now, it's a fascinating hypothesis.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Right. But it's not a function of...

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Thinking of spacetime fabric of being almost like bent around to being like in Madeleine L'Engle's old like pop sci-fi things about the tesseract, right? The idea that you're actually going from one place to another

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, so

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Within the same continuum.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that would be like a wormhole to get from one part of the universe to the other efficiently.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it's not clear that it's a wormhole.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we don't see other places in the universe that could be the exit for that.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just don't see that.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, uh, so it's not clear whether we can exploit it in that way anytime soon.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Okay, I have a much more practical one.

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  In the work that's being done to look at, um, you know, like viable exoplanets and stuff like that. I understand kind of, you know, radio astronomy and stuff like that. But when they talk about the signature, you know, the atmospheric signature of life, et cetera. How, what are we actually looking at? What are we looking at that we have the capacity to be so granular? That at these distances and everything, when, what is literally the atmospheric signature? And how are we measuring it?

• 48:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great question. So this is a new cottage industry in the field and it's, it's the search for biomarkers.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And these, this is evidence in the atmosphere of a planet that could indicate that the surface of that planet has active life while you're observing it. You can't see the surface of the planet, it's too small, it's too dim.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what you can do is if the planet passes in front of the host star, light from the host star moves through the atmosphere, comes out the other side en route to you, the observer. And the act of passing through the atmosphere gives the atmosphere a chance to wreak havoc on the spectrum of that star.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  And the component?

• 49:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  In the component parts of the atmosphere?

• 49:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes!

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Would differentiate it that much?

• 49:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, you know what?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  So an atmosphere without oxygen is differentiable.

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You will see the oxygen signature in the atmosphere of, in the spectrum of the star when the planet is passing in front of it. And it wouldn't otherwise be there when the planet is not passing in front of it, so, so.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  And is oxygen even the primary signature?

• 50:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oxygen is unstable. We have oxygen, if you got rid of all life on Earth, the oxygen would slowly disappear.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 50:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, something has to keep churning it out, like our plant, our plant life. There, there's a whole portfolio of unstable molecules, which if you find them in an atmosphere, something is active, something's generating it. And so you can look at the kinds of things that make, that, that life does.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  It's either oxygen or carbon or.

• 50:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, or, uh, methane is another example.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Methane, termites give off methane.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do cows, through their flatulence, right? If you just find methane, there are other ways you can make it, but if you find it, it's tantalizing and it makes you look more closely.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  And so, what is the instrument that's got that level of granular ability to look at the light spectrum and see the distortions of specifically those elemental.

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very powerful telescopes with very highly resolved spectrographs.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Spectrograph.

• 51:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's what's going on here. You split up the light into its component colors, and when you do that, you see the signatures of elements, molecules, depending on what it is that the light passed.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  And we have not been able to do that until we put telescopes outside our own atmosphere.

• 51:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, the, telescopes outside the atmosphere are best for that.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you get a really honking telescope on Earth, there are ways to correct for the atmosphere where you can make some headway on that.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  But it must be, I mean, I'm saying, this is an argument for having telescopes outside the atmosphere.

• 51:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, or on the far side of the moon.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, great question, dude.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Are we putting one on the far side of the moon?

• 51:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so China landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon for the first time. So, there are more players in this right now, but the problem is.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Has there been talk about a telescope on the dark side, right?

• 51:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's dark and it's, it's not always dark there, but it's, it's shielded from Earth's contamination. And, but you need a way to communicate around the, the bend of the moon.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you need like.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  You need satellites.

• 51:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Satellites or transmitters along the edges, this sort of thing. But, yeah, that's the future. That's the future. Dude.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Final thing, prediction on affirmation, timeline to affirmation of, uh, planet that's producing biological signal.

• 52:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd give it 10 years. If not Mars itself, right in our backyard, I'd give it 10 years. At the rate at which we're at it, yeah, our lifetime, definitely.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  My son, who's six, when we were talking about this one time, he said, he said, "Oh Dad, they already know there is life." And I said, "Really? How do you know that?" And he said, "I saw it on my Magic Bus series."

• 52:42Speaker 01

  So, you know.

• 52:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he got it first. Yeah, there's an early, early, early signals to the front. Great. So Edward, thank you for being on StarTalk.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Pleasure, it was great.

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And next time you do another movie, we'd totally want to get your back.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Great.

• 52:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And only if you like really created the movie, not just, not just acted.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's, I don't need that.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Dilatantish.

• 53:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've been listening to StarTalk and I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, with my special guest Edward Norton. And he promised he'll come back for his next movie project.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Only if I see receipts from listeners that they actually bought tickets to Motherless Brooklyn and won.

• 53:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Motherless Brooklyn, another important contribution to film noir. Motherless Brooklyn, starring Edward Norton. So you've been listening to StarTalk and I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and as always, I bid you to keep looking up.