Pro Athlete Cosmic Queries

Neil deGrasse Tyson, alongside co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice, answer Cosmic Queries from professional athletes including Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn, rugby player Nicole Heavirland, skateboarder Joey Brezinski, and boxer Cam F. Awesome.

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.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, Sports Edition. And a Cosmic Queries version of Sports Edition that we're calling Exercise Your Mind. And in this, what we do is we got questions solicited from professional star athletes. And they're cosmic questions. I mean, they got questions too, just like the rest of us. So this episode is devoted to them. And of course, I got my co-host Chuck Nice.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening, Neil?

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck and Gary, Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Hi, Neil.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, the only one of the three of us that has professional street cred for sports.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck is in good shape, but I don't think he ever did anything athletic. I saw him try to swing the bat at a softball. It's like he had never been on a field before.

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, that's because I had never been on a field before.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why.

• 1:12Chuck Nice?

  And that is a testament to my natural athletic ability. And I was able to pick that game up in five minutes and actually play.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's what, I should have been impressed.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By how bad you were.

• 1:25Chuck Nice?

  That's right. That's right. You know how, you know how good you gotta be to be that bad?

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, you know, we've been around each other a long time, but I never actually bluntly asked you this question. How many years did you play professional soccer in the UK?

• 1:48Gary O'Reilly?

  14 years.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 1:51Gary O'Reilly?

  But you're in the system long before that. Yeah. You sort of join now, you would join a top soccer teams academy at the age of maybe seven.

• 2:04Gary O'Reilly?

  And you would transit through the age groups, transit through into what they called development squads now, which are under twenty-three. Back in the day, they were called a reserve team, a second team squad. And I would be playing, if you showed talent, you would be playing in that development squad, that reserve team at the age of sixteen, seventeen years of age.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, one other thing about the UK. So obviously soccer is big there as it is in all of Europe and most of the world.

• 2:34Chuck Nice?

  And the whole world.

• 2:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But also rugby is a pretty big sport there, right?

• 2:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, man. Rugby is football. The first, the first iteration, it is known as rugby football. So football started off as men carrying a ball in their hands. Some clever person decided to introduce kicking it.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. Okay. So I've seen a few rugby matches. That's some, that's some, that's some raw stuff going on there.

• 3:03Chuck Nice?

  It's nothing but a bar fight with a ball.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's what it is.

• 3:08Chuck Nice?

  That's what rugby is.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a bar fight.

• 3:11Chuck Nice?

  It's a bar fight with a ball. That's all.

• 3:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. So here's, here's the way that gets described, the two sports, soccer and rugby football, or football if you want to call it that. Soccer is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans. And rugby is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very good.

• 3:32Gary O'Reilly?

  And when you see the way rugby players behave on the field, once the umpire or the referee says, no, they stand, they pay attention. If they have to move back, they move back.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're very polite.

• 3:45Gary O'Reilly?

  They are well mannered. And then they go and knock the snot out of each other.

• 3:50Gary O'Reilly?

  It's just the way it goes. It is, yeah. And I mean, there's no shoulder pads. Here's the one, here's the law of the rugby that gets most people. You can only move forward by passing the ball backwards.

• 4:01Chuck Nice?

  Backwards, yeah.

• 4:04Chuck Nice?

  That DNA is still resident in. American football in that you can forward pass the ball, but you can only lateral the ball either in the plane or behind you. That's it.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 4:20Chuck Nice?

  You lateral the ball forward, it is, it's, it's a penalty.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So another point there is I've seen rugby players like dragged along the field like face first. And there's no helmet, there is no knee pads, there's no anything. Whereas of course, in American football, they're fully protected in every important joint and vital organ. The brain. So, so Gary, you have boy rugby, there's also like girl rugby. When, when, when did it become a, a double, a, a two sex thing?

• 4:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Um, it's been, women's rugby has been around for some time. Um, and it's organized to the extent they have women's rugby world cups. So the tournaments that the men play and the women are a mirror image of that. I remember interviewing international women's rugby players back in the early nineties. So this, this has been organized to a sufficient level. So going back probably into the eighties where women rugby, women's rugby was sophisticated enough for there to be a high enough level to be international games. Uh, I think the US women's rugby side, I'm not sure of when that became a thing. But they've, uh, they've entered into the international stage.

• 5:35Gary O'Reilly?

  And as you can imagine, they leave a footprint because, uh, the, the girls are every bit as predisposed as the boys when it comes to playing rugby.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. And so, cause I, I'd lead into that because our first question is from a US women's rugby star. And I, I get her name, but Nicole Hevill.

• 5:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Heavirland.

• 5:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He, he, Heavirland.

• 5:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Right. So if we've mispronounced it, Nicole, please don't come and see Neil or I, go and see Chuck.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you have it. Why be any different than anybody else, Nicole?

• 6:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Just so, just so as people understand who Nicole Heavirland is, she is captain of the US Women's Sevens Team. Now, the Sevens Team is a much faster game. So, there's only seven players on each team, whereas on the full team, there's 15. So, she is captain of the Women's Sevens Team. So, it's a much faster, much more exciting game, and both the men and the women play it. But Nicole, just to give her her proper credence, in the, in the real game, the 15 aside game, she was part of the US International Team in the 2017 World Cup in Ireland, where the US got to the semifinals, or semifinals, if semifinal is too painful for your ears.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. No, we're good with either pronunciation of semifinals. Right. Well, let's hear Nicole, let's hear Nicole's question.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Hey Neil, how's it going? Do you think we will see interplanetary colonization within our lifetime?

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, excellent question. And very hopeful, too. I like questions that kind of want things to happen, not ever, but now.

• 7:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, before I die, will this happen? And so, it turns out that rocket propulsion, we're still based, is still based on sort of chemical fuels, which means you have some molecule and you break it apart and energy gets released, and you, then you exploit that energy. That's how gasoline works. These are huge molecules that are chock full of energy. When you burn it, you break apart the molecule and energy is released. This is our rocket fuel, okay? Not gasoline, but other, other varieties. And turns out, we can accelerate and get to speeds high enough to go pretty much anywhere in the solar system before we die.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the solar system technically is within reach of astronaut travel, even out to, you know, Neptune, let's say, the edge of the planetary system. Get over it.

• 8:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, there is, there is somebody out there past Neptune.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get over it.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  There's one little person out there past Neptune.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it's possible. And so the only thing restricting it is, what is the motivation to do so? It's one thing to explore when you get on your space suit and you go hop, hop around some kind of planetary surface that's not Earth. But if you want to colonize, that means one of two things. You have terraformed the object, which my favorite word of the past 50 years, terraform, where you take something that's not Earth and then you seed the atmosphere and the soils and introduce water or lasu a comet and melt it and then you turn it into Earth. So then you can just get off your spaceship and just breathe the air. All right, that's kind of ideal.

• 9:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, you'd have to do that if you want to pursue the analogy of space exploration as the next generation of the, the age of ocean-going explorers in the 15th and 16th century, right? They go out into the wide ocean blue, not knowing where the destination is. Will they come back alive? We don't know. And they want to analogize space exploration to that, but here was the problem. The problem is, you knew that wherever Columbus was gonna land, he could step off the ship and breathe the air. It was no, okay? In fact, there were other people there to greet him.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that is not the case on Mars or on Venus or anywhere else. So it's, it's manifest. Fold harder to go to a place that's not Earth and then claim you want to pitch tent. So either you we figure out a way to terraform, which we don't know how to do yet. Or you set up a hab module, right? Just some, you know, some big tent, right? Some big bubble, put vending machines or whatever. You need a supply chain of ships to bring you food and natural resources. But then that's that's not a colony. I I wouldn't mind a vacation there. That'd be just kind of fun to talk about when you get back.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But to permanently live in a place where walking out the front door will kill you. I I don't see that as a high priority in our lifetime.

• 10:39Chuck Nice?

  Probably clearly you have never lived in Chicago.

• 10:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Walking out the front door. You put your life at risk.

• 10:49Chuck Nice?

  Saying, and please do not write me if you're from Chicago. It's called a joke. Get over it.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, New York used to be like that in the seventies and early eighties.

• 10:58Gary O'Reilly?

  There's a lot of places around the planet that have been like that and may still be like that.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or or may become that if you keep going. So anyhow, so I don't think in our lifetime we'll colonize, but certainly places to visit. Now, what places we might visit? No, you can't land on Saturn or on Jupiter. They're all gashes, but their moons have hard surfaces. That would be cool. You just imagine landing on Europa, all right? And there'd be these geysers because there's water deep below the frozen sheets. And then you look, look up, and then there's Jupiter. Massive Jupiter sitting there in the sky or Saturn with its ring system. So so when you think of.

• 11:39Chuck Nice?

  We have already landed on Europa.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, probes. Yeah, I'm talking about you.

• 11:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm I'm sorry. I'm I'm that's Europe. That's Europe. I'm sorry.

• 11:50Chuck Nice?

  I was just I was just thinking of white people. That's all. I'm sorry. Stop it.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you think of interplanetary travel, you need to widen your concept of that and embrace not simply the eight planets, but also the countless dozens of moons in orbit around all of these planets that themselves would make fascinating destinations.

• 12:20Chuck Nice?

  All right, and so now to end it all, which one are you going to? Which would be your choice?

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, first, give me two choices. First, I'd want to go to the moon and look back at Earth. I want to do what the astronauts did.

• 12:38Chuck Nice?

  That's kind of cool.

• 12:41Chuck Nice?

  It's romantic.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's romantic, and I'd get to look back at our own home. Beyond that, I think I would go to Mars, for sure. And then from there, I'd go to maybe Titan, that's Saturn's largest moon. And I want to look up. And Titan has a thick atmosphere, so it's not very transparent. But before I landed on Titan, I just want to see the ring system of Saturn and just bask in its glory and in its majesty.

• 13:13Chuck Nice?

  Very nice, very nice.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'd brush up on my ability to write poetry, because maybe that is the only way to capture what that looks like and what that feels like.

• 13:25Chuck Nice?

  Very nice, okay.

• 13:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Interplanetary prose.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good, Gary, interplanetary prose. Well, we got to take a break. When we come back, more Cosmic Queries, Exercise Your Mind edition of StarTalk's Sports Edition when we come back.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition, Cosmic Queries, Exercising Your Mind. See what we did there? We solicited questions from professional athletes. They have questions too. And so Gary, who do we have next?

• 14:29Gary O'Reilly?

  We have an interesting character, Joey Brezinski. He's a professional skateboarder. It sounds like I'm introducing him for a quiz show. He's an entrepreneur. He has a whole raft of companies he's founded. He's co-producer of the movie Concrete Kids, which I haven't seen, but I'm sure it's brilliant. He's also a skater with more tricks than David Copperfield. And I can tell you, more sponsors than a NASCAR team. He's very, very interesting, got a massive following. He's got a dog, which is a pug called Pizza, that has probably as many Twitter followers as you, Neil. So he's a very interesting person.

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does the dog ride a skateboard as well?

• 15:14Gary O'Reilly?

  I think the dog has more than that. The dog surfs. He surfs.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the dog has a yacht.

• 15:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Why not?

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me just ask, I did not know you could be a professional skateboarder. How does that, how does that work?

• 15:30Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, you, you enter competitions and I mean, one of the, one of the competitions Joey has won is the Manny Mania, which is a Red Bull sponsored tournament. And then you just accrue lots and lots. It's like esports. You don't think it can be monetized and all of a sudden, there's a teenager in his bedroom sitting on $10 million that he won last night gaming. It's like, that's the way it goes.

• 15:56Chuck Nice?

  That's why, that's why I think all of this is nothing but a front for mob money. You know what I mean? All of this sponsorship crap, it's like, seriously, who has the money to sponsor, you know, people playing video games and skateboarding, but it's true, there's, you know what it is? There's, there's big audiences for it, that's what it is.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:16Chuck Nice?

  To the point where the NFL is actually worried, the NFL and the NBA are worried because all these young kids coming up, they're not interested in football and basketball, they're interested in BMX biking and skateboarding and video games, so.

• 16:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so what you're saying is, they're making money, um, not so much prize money, but sponsorship money.

• 16:41Chuck Nice?

  That's really what it is, it's really about the audience that's watching these sports are so large that sponsors to get to that audience, they wanna be behind the sport and these athletes.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's why the analogy to NASCAR, right, because every car that's in motion, whether or not it wins, they're making money off of all of the, the, the ads.

• 17:03Chuck Nice?

  Right, and at one point NASCAR fans were the most active, engaging, uh, active when it comes to engaging sponsorship, they would go out and consciously support the people who put their logo on the car, knowing that they were in turn supporting their driver that they like.

• 17:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh man, what a demonstration of brand loyalty.

• 17:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. It's true, yeah.

• 17:33Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, these guy, I mean, guys like Joey, I suppose now you would call them YouTube influencers, but the original kind of rock stars of skateboarding back in the eighties, they were the, I mean, some of the biggest influencers around.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's funny, because, uh, I, often I, I tour the country giving public talks, and I'm in theaters, like. Theaters that have seat one, two, three thousand people. And I have a conversation with the organizer and I say, well, what other things come through here? And they'll mention some, some rock groups that you've heard of and maybe a Broadway show comes through town on the touring group. And then they say, you know, they mentioned Arnold Schmednik or something, something you've never heard of, right? I said, who's that? That's a YouTuber. And, and they talk about the fact that there are these people that nobody else has heard of, except everyone who cares about that thing, and they are immensely loyal. And they fill the house every single time. It's like, whoa, this is like some underbelly of things going on.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They could take over the world and the rest of us old fogies would never know it.

• 18:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow, yeah. Do you remember the guy we had on Dr. Skateboard? Dr. Skateboard, yeah. Bill, Bill, Bill Robertson, who, who, who uses skateboarding to actually. Teach physics to young people. Exact, brilliant. And, and so it's, it, we, we actually covered it because it is one of those crossover points between sports and science. So, yeah.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let me hear what Joey's got to say. Joey? And, and you gotta love anybody named Joey.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  Yo, what's up Neil? Since the COVID-19 put us all on lockdown, the earth has seemed to really benefit from it. I mean, the skies over here in Los Angeles are cleaner than they've ever been. So my question to you is, how do we maintain this positive reaction as we come out of quarantine and open our cities?

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, very good. A, a, a COVID-19 question. All right. So he raises a very good and important point. I don't know how this will all settle. Uh, we're recording this now at the end of April, all right, 2020. I don't know how this will all settle. But what I can tell you is anytime a system that has been built up uh, in bits and pieces, some on purpose, some by accident, and then this is thing you're living in. If there's a shock to the system, then what gets rebuilt after that?

• 20:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has the capacity to be done a little more intelligently, or a little more wisely, okay? A little, with a little more foresight, so that what happens in the future, if you have another encounter with a virus, that you would not, you would not be so adversely affected as you were today. And to take a very parallel example, in 1929, the stock market crashed. Oh my gosh, what was it? A third of the workforce was unemployed and the country said, "We can never have this again." It broke the system. And so they went in and they, they put in social security and built things from scratch to get us out of that, so that when we came out the other side,

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we would be better off as a nation. So with regard to clean air, yeah, we're driving the car less. Maybe when this is all done, we're not going to say, "Gee, I gotta drive my car 500 miles just to make up." You'll say, "No, I was pretty comfortable at home. I was, got business done on my computer." You know, there are a lot of rethought solutions to problems you never had the occasion, you were never forced to think of before. And I bet now, for me, many more meetings are going to happen on, you know, on, on a Zoom meeting or a, a Google Hangout. I'm gonna probably schedule more meetings that way. That way, doesn't, you don't care where people are.

• 21:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have to show up in the same place at the same time. You can be at the same time, but at different places. That's hugely more versatile in connecting people. So this, after this, we, it may redefine what anybody means by having a meeting. And again, back to the clear skies, a lot of that's going to return, I fear, you know, plane travel and cars, but maybe just a little less. Maybe a little less. Do you think we're at that watershed? Yes. And so when you say it's a watershed moment, it means you, you're getting to that crossover point where you say, "Okay, time to be in a whole other new place." So yes, I think it's a watershed moment. I'm just not, I'm not clairvoyant enough

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to say, to detail how everything will change, but I know how, how I've changed.

• 22:19Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'm gonna tell you, Joey, I got a different answer. We're doomed.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're all gonna die.

• 22:26Chuck Nice?

  Enjoy your life. Enjoy your life is what I'm telling you. We're doomed. Okay, I'm not sure if you saw the original Alien, the Alien movie. It wasn't called Aliens. It was Alien is the first Ridley Scott movie that Sigourney Weaver is the lead in. And there's one scene where I believe, I don't know the actor's name, but he looks like Bill Pullman. Everybody confuses him with Bill Pullman, but he's not. And he just, he keeps saying, we're all gonna die, man. We're all gonna die. This is it, man. This is it. We're all gonna die. And Joey, that, enjoy that skateboard, brother.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. Every good movie's got to have all the, we're all gonna die person in it.

• 23:12Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 23:15Gary O'Reilly?

  So you've, you've become Dr. Smith from Lost in Space.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, I remember him.

• 23:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. So that's, we're all doomed.

• 23:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh dear. Oh dear.

• 23:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So you just, I mean, you know how astrophysically untrained I am. This sort of the Zoom thing, we've now become able to be in more than one place at the same time. We've, we've kind of challenging that. So the pre-model was, I have to be in Los Angeles. I can't stay in New York to meet this person. Now we are balancing ourselves. I mean, I was on a Zoom call yesterday with over 200 people.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I think certain challenges, certain solutions have arisen to problems we didn't even know held us back.

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so these, these virtual talks and you, there's a way to raise your hand in some of these video interfaces. So, but again, Joey's real concern was the air was very clear and clean in Los Angeles. And here's the thing, everyone who remembers it will know what caused the clean air. What happens is there's always a new generation of people born that did not experience what you experienced. And you become the old fogey. You say, I remember back in 2020. There's a, we had a virus. Yeah, grandpa. Okay.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we forget so easily. We we we we either we choose not to remember or we just we think our time in which we live is the only time there ever was. And it reminds me of a line in West Side Story where the cop is lecturing the the hooligans, right? And the cop says, when I was your age? And the reply was, you were never our age. I thought that was a great.

• 25:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That so encapsulates the the the the attitude that can drive people's behavior, not always for the greater good of society.

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do we have another question?

• 25:32Gary O'Reilly?

  We do, and you're gonna like who has posed this question.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's that?

• 25:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, Lindsey Vonn.

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The wait, no, the the Lindsey Vonn.

• 25:43Gary O'Reilly?

  OK, I missed out the the bit, so.

• 25:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Just for dramatic effect. For those of you listening who are not familiar with the Lindsey Vonn, USA Alpine skier. Now, this is gonna take me a minute or two just to go through. Olympic gold medalist, world champion and multiple World Cup winner. Now, if you don't realize what that entails, this is more being in Alpine skiing is there's there's the slalom, there's a giant slalom, there's a super gene, there's a whole raft of events that you have to compete in. Lindsey Vonn is quite simply one of the greatest Alpine skiers of all time. With her records and her her tallies and her the the sort of credits that come with her, she is in the conversation of being the greatest of all time.

• 26:33Gary O'Reilly?

  So having said all of that, let's hear what Lindsey's thought is.

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But but but Gary, what does it mean for a skier to win a World Cup? I think a World Cup, I think of soccer.

• 26:44Gary O'Reilly?

  OK, so as far as I'm aware, this is where they get into uh, they do the slalom, they do the giant slalom, they do the super Gs, and they have a an individual tournament, and I believe it comes in. So generally, it's a a World Cup would be of uh, an international perspective. So so that was, I mean, if I'm if I'm incorrect, I held my hand up and I apologize. Skiing skiing isn't or was never has been my thing. Was never has been is a new phrase I've just invented.

• 27:15Chuck Nice?

  For the World Cup, I'm pretty sure the defining factor for taking the cup home is how well you make a Monte Cristo sandwich. So.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 27:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so just to, for the etymology of this, Alpine derives from, I guess, the Alps. The Alps, so the Alps defines the, the origin of it, but you can have Alpine skiing in any mountain range, provided you can set up the course properly.

• 27:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, you've got, you've got.

• 27:48Chuck Nice?

  At least for the next 10 years, he can.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Grandpa, what's snow?

• 27:57Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Why are these pictures of these mountains all white at the top? What is that?

• 28:07Gary O'Reilly?

  The sad thing is, we're laughing, but it's gonna happen.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, you spent so much time introducing Lindsay that we ran out of time in this segment.

• 28:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, really? My bad.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so we'll get to her question right after the break. This is StarTalk Sports Edition, Cosmic Queries, Exercising Your Mind.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. Gary.

• 28:56Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the house. Chuck. Hey. In the house.

• 29:01Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Well, in my, in my house.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry. Yeah, we're all in our house.

• 29:07Chuck Nice?

  We're all in our own houses, homes, houses.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's get to that question from Alpine skier extraordinaire Lindsay Vaughn. Let's hear it.

• 29:19Speaker 06

  A lot of people I know are super into astrology, and I'm wondering if planetary and star alignment has anything to do with people's behavior.

• 29:30Chuck Nice?

  Well, okay, I don't know, Neil, I think I'll take this one, okay?

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:34Chuck Nice?

  Here's the answer: no. All right, let's move on.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, if you're gonna say no, you gotta say it with a little more, like, no.

• 29:45Chuck Nice?

  A little more emphasis, right?

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little more punch it in there. The one-word answer is no, but let's unpack what's going on there, right? In a pre-scientific era, where no one had any clue what were the causes and effects of phenomenon experienced in nature. What would happen is, and most people back then were agrarian, so you would have your crops, and then the crops would come to bloom when the stars were in a particular configuration in the sky. And other things would bring about the rhythms of the months of the year. And they seemed to match up with things you cared about. And the human ego knows no bounds.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the audacity of anyone to say to themselves, "This whole universe revolving above my head knows that I exist, and it is sending me signals about my life." That's an extraordinary claim to be making, if you think about that.

• 30:57Chuck Nice?

  Makes perfect sense to me.

• 31:00Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, I'm a Cancer!

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the origins of thinking that the sun, moon, stars, and planets matter to you in your life are deep and, on some levels, understandable, okay? Now, the... so, I get that.

• 31:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we are in a scientific era. The era, basically, since 1600, when Galileo and Francis Bacon started introducing the idea that if you think something is true, test it. And a test becomes the measure of what is or is not true in the world. So, but if you don't test things, you can be left believing whatever you want as long as it makes you feel good. And in my experience, speaking to astrologers, they, they will use astrology, the reading of the positions of the sun, moon, and planets, and stars, to account for things in their

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  life they do not control, or do not believe they control. But, by the way, Shakespeare, who was a contemporary of Galileo, penned, "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves."

• 32:27Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So astrology becomes a very clean way to absolve yourself of stuff that goes wrong, or even to remove credit that you might or should take for something that goes right. So what you've done is you've surrendered your life's fate.

• 32:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I gotta tell you the truth. I'm sure that was a beautiful explanation, but you lost me at Francis Bacon. All I've been thinking about is a BLT from that point forward. I am so hungry right now. Oh, my gosh. I am just so hungry. Chuck, you're always thinking about food. I know. Don't bring it up, man. No, but that makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. It reminds me of one of my favorite, I don't know if you actually, no, you turned me on to this, but I forgot who was the progenitor, but the god of the gaps is kind of like what you, it's what you just kind of talked about there, but from an astrological, astrology

• 33:28Chuck Nice?

  standpoint, it's that same type of deal.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so if there's something you don't understand... And either don't want to understand it, or would rather it be mysterious to you. Then it becomes a force that you believe operates on you, and how do you account for it? So you might say the god you worship was responsible for it. But if you're not particularly religious, then it's your astrological sign was responsible for it. And it turns out that astrology anti-correlates with your religiosity. So in other words, the more religious you are, the less likely you are to follow astrology. You already have an accounting system for what happens in your life.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So all I'm saying is that, no, the constellations set up by ancient peoples two, three thousand years ago, and put their own mythological figures on the sky, Aquarius, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, you just go right on down the zodiac to today, believe that being born when the sun was aligned with that constellation and that character profile of the mythological creature, element, or person that's in the sky, you are seeding your own control of your life's fate

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to forces outside of yourself. And they're forces that don't even exist outside of yourself. Now, how do we know they don't exist? Because if they were there, we would be able to measure them. And they don't. We measure all kinds of other forces. You can measure the light from the planets and the gravity from the planets. We know how much that is and what effect it would have. I got one other element here. People like to think about the full moon and its effect on the tides. And we're mostly water.

• 35:28Chuck Nice?

  Well, we're 70% water, so it's gotta have an effect on me.

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only on you, Chuck, not on anybody else. So first of all, tidal forces affect everything, not just water. So in fact, the solid earth rises and falls in the tides. Not as, doesn't move as much as the fluids do, like the water does. But tides affect everything first. Second, the tidal effect of the full moon on you is actually no greater than any other phase of the moon.

• 36:00Chuck Nice?

  Because the moon is still there.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still there. It's just the same damn distance, you know? So, so the reason why tides are higher during full moon has nothing to do with the moon. It has to do with the fact that the sun is aligned with the moon during full moon. And the sun's tides add to the moon's tides. So you get extra high tides because the sun plus the moon are giving you those tides, not just the moon itself.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  And which one of those tides do you eat to get rid of COVID-19?

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Tide Pods, yes. So Gary, I think we have time for one more question.

• 36:39Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. So he's a friend of the show. Chuck and I took to him immediately when we were doing a show with him. Cam F. Awesome. Now, if you're not familiar with Cam, he's an amateur boxer, but he is a super heavyweight Golden Globe boxer and a man that was on the fringes of qualifying.

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hold on, Golden Gloves.

• 36:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Golden Gloves. Golden Gloves. Yes, I'm thinking of the film and TV award. Golden Glove. He may be an actor about to get a Golden Glove.

• 37:05Chuck Nice?

  But he has also beat the hell out of the Hollywood foreign press.

• 37:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, absolutely. So he's in there with the Golden Gloves. And he is a vegan athlete because we did a show, Chuck and I, on plant-based athletes. And we fell upon.

• 37:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plant-based athletes. I made a plant.

• 37:25Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no. So this is the kicker for me because it wasn't something we thought about before we spoke to Cam. But then all of a sudden I said, how did you find yourself becoming a vegan? And Cam said, well, it was for a bet.

• 37:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he lost a bet.

• 37:42Gary O'Reilly?

  He became vegan for a bit and he's actually not turned back. So it's an interest, he's a really interesting character because he does a lot of youth talks and things Chuck, very, very right.

• 37:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so he's, he's not just a guy that hits people in the ring. He's, he's out there trying to educate and bring thought processes to young people that are positive.

• 38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So let's hear his question.

• 38:07Chuck Nice?

  When I'm not punching people, I'm a youth speaker and going back into schools made me realize how boring science is. What advice would you give to teachers to make science as sexy as you've made it?

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 38:21Chuck Nice?

  Good question.

• 38:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really good question. Ooh.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna say fishnets and heels.

• 38:31Chuck Nice?

  He said, how do you make it sexy?

• 38:34Chuck Nice?

  Just saying.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, I would say it's not just science. There are many subjects that the teacher does not do justice to because they're teaching either as a satchel of facts that you have to memorize for an exam. Let me, let me back up for a minute and pose the following question to both of you. Okay. In your life, how many teachers have you had that have left a singular sort of impact or impression on you as a student? We've all had dozens of teachers, possibly scores of teachers, if you've been to graduate school, and I'm betting it's not more than just a few on the fingers of one hand. Chuck, how many for you?

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I could tell you easily. Mrs. Smallwood, Mrs. Singer, Mr. Raitano, Mr. McNeil, Dr. Haran, Dr. Barsky, Dr. Reed.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you're already up to like seven. Oh, my gosh.

• 39:33Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man, I had a pretty, pretty fucking awesome education.

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, excuse me. Chuck breaks, breaks the mold.

• 39:41Chuck Nice?

  Nah, yeah, I had, I had some great teachers, but I mean, in comparison to the seven, and there's probably three more that I could roll off the top of my head, I can't remember the names of the rest.

• 39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:54Chuck Nice?

  I mean, I can't even remember their names.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's 10 out of all the rest of the teachers?

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  10 out of however many teachers I've had.

• 40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Gary, how about you?

• 40:01Gary O'Reilly?

  I, I'm nowhere near as many as Chuck. I, I mean, I was blessed with a good education, although it's public school education, it wasn't private. I had one geography teacher who was a former police officer. And she brought a sense of reality to the things that she would educate us with. And her name, Mrs. Thorwell, had another teacher, a history teacher, Mr. Newton, who would bring history to life on a chalkboard because he was a member of the RA, the Royal Academy of Arts, and he would start to draw a Roman gladiator in a fight or he'd bring some 16th century battle to life on the chalkboard.

• 40:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Things like that, just an ability to connect and make things real to a young impressionable mind.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many teachers were there?

• 40:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Maybe two or three, maybe five.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If only Mr. Newton was your science teacher. Well, that's what I'm getting at. So for me, there's three teachers. My point here is, I bet all those teachers that you remember, you remember their names, you remember sitting in the class, listening to them, that I bet they're from all different subjects, correct? Oh, yeah, yeah. So star teachers don't all collect into one academic subject relative to another. So all I'm saying is, it's not that science is inherently boring. It's that any more than any other subject is inherently boring. It's going to depend on how engaged the teacher is. And the more engaged the teacher is, the more you know it as a student.

• 41:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you'll take a class and it's the favorite class you've ever had in your life, and you would have never believed that would have been the case, walking in on day one, until the teacher opens their mouth and they engage you just the way Gary described. So what I'm saying is, that the cloning machine for humans, when we finally figure it out, first people you put in there are, is everybody's favorite teacher. And by the way, they're probably not only your favorite teachers, they're probably the favorite teachers of many other people as well. Wow. So, so the engagement level, I think, is important. But also, I think science more generally needs to be taught,

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  again, not as a barrel of facts, but as a way of querying nature, and a way of understanding the operations of things. It's so, so when you come up to something you've never seen before, you don't say, I've never seen this before, so I don't know anything about it. You'll say, I've never seen this before, but I know how, but I know how matter, forces and energy interplay. And I can figure out what I'm looking at based on what I learned, on the fundamentals of what I learned in my science class. That is an empowering place to be. And I, in my experience, not all teachers even know to take you there. And even, and even if they do, they might not succeed at that.

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's why star teachers are so rare and so precious.

• 43:13Chuck Nice?

  Wow. That's, uh, yeah. I don't, I don't know how, I mean, you know, I don't, I don't know what you do in terms of getting, I don't think there are, I think there are bad teachers.

• 43:26Chuck Nice?

  I'm trying, I'm trying to be polite. I don't know, but I think there are bad teachers and they're, they're very knowledgeable about the subject and they want to teach, but they don't know, I think we need better training for some of the people who are teaching.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, or, or only select teachers who are enthusiastic on a level where it's infectious to whoever it is they're talking to.

• 43:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And I mean, yeah, I mean, teaching is communication. I mean, there's a lot of people who are, they really know what they're talking about, but they don't know how to talk about it.

• 44:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And Chuck, one of my most controversial tweets ever was the following. Ready? Those students who earn straight A's do so not because of good teachers, but in spite of bad teachers.

• 44:17Chuck Nice?

  Yes, that makes perfect sense. You know why? Cause if you have straight A's, you clearly have a bad teacher in that bunch.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 44:27Chuck Nice?

  It's not every one of those teachers has to be an aces across the board teacher. Okay. It's, it would, it would be almost impossible, even at the best school there is, to have every single teacher be at the exact same level of competence, but yet you have A's in every one of your classes consistently year after year after year. So really it's you and your excitement for learning and achieving that is driving your straight A performance, not the teacher.

• 44:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, so you can break it into three broad categories, and then we gotta wrap it up real quick. So, that's with the straight A students. Then there's like the bad students. They'll get low grades, no matter how good the teacher is, okay? Right. Now, there is the middle. These are the students where the, where the quality of the teacher will matter to their ability to learn, okay? And if you're a teacher, and you call me up, and I say, "Oh, I wanna show you my A students", I say, "We have nothing to talk about." But if you say, "Instead, I wanna show you my students that started as a C, and they're now making a B+, I'll say, "Bring 'em on." Because now, that is the handiwork of the teacher, getting, getting manifested.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and so, you're, I don't measure how good a teacher you are by how many of your students got As. I'm not doing that, no. No, tell, show me this student who was about to drop out, and is now getting Cs, and is, has some enthusiasm that they didn't have before. Show me the student getting Cs, now getting Bs. Show me the student getting Bs, now getting As. Show me the student that's getting Cs, and is now President of the United States.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That. And you know what's more, I, I, we gotta end on this last, but what's more important than everything I've just said, is the ability of the teacher to stimulate your urge to wanna continue learning. Cause you'll spend many, many more hours not in school than in school, and if you're a lifelong learner, the body of knowledge and wisdom and insight, you will glean on your own energy, will dwarf whatever it is you acquired in school. And these are the people that continue to be productive throughout their lives. That's what we should strive for. That's it.

• 46:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, what were you gonna say, before we, before we end?

• 46:41Gary O'Reilly?

  It's funny, you're talking about academia, but the same is, is actually true in the world of sports. You can, you get a great coach, he'll take an average player and make him a good player. And we have that maxim and it's and they spin it around and you're always looking for that great coach because that coach will understand you on a human level, will understand where you are on your timeline, will understand your ability level, will be able to bring more out of you through the combination of different things, have an energy that they transmit to you in a positive way, all of those things. And now and again, those coaches appear and when they do, they generally provide special, special performance.

• 47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Dudes, we ran out of time.

• 47:29Gary O'Reilly?

  We did.

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Gary, it's always good to have you doing this. I love it.

• 47:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, man, we've got some more questions lined up, so.

• 47:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, we've got to do some more of these. Right. This is the inauguration, the inaugural exercise your mind episode of.

• 47:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely.

• 47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sports edition for Cosmic Queries. So we will keep doing this again. All right, Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. All right, Gary. Thank you, my friend. All right, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, bidding you to keep looking up.