Conquering Fear with Alex Honnold

Is the fear of heights innate or learned? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O'Reilly explore taking risks, the neuroscience of fear, and how to overcome it with freestyle rock climber and subject of the film Free Solo, Alex Honnold, and neuroscientist Heather Berlin.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About time we revisited neuroscience.

• 0:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of fear.

• 0:04Chuck Nice?

  Fear is the mind killer.

• 0:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we got the guy who was featured in Free Solo.

• 0:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not dying, ascending that cliff face.

• 0:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, special edition.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist, and when it's special edition, it is Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey man. Chuck, how you doing, professional comedian?

• 0:42Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, dude.

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  Feeling good, man.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Gary, you cook these topics up.

• 0:47Chuck Nice?

  Got a good one.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm impressed every time.

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 0:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, thank you.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell us what you brought us.

• 0:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Got to give a shout out to Lain Unsworth over in LA. All right, so getting to the top, reaching the summit, they are goals for millions, maybe if not billions of people daily around the world, right?

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Either literal or figurative summits.

• 1:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Totally, yes. But not all of us can get over our fears to reach it, but then there are some of us who can. So we've got to think about that. Today, we're going to talk about the science of fear. Yes, the science of fear. And how we can change.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neuroscience of fear.

• 1:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Of course, and change our brains to overcome it. And who better to discuss that with a neuroscientist and a freestyle rock climber?

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, I want to find out about his podcast, what's it called, Planet Visionaries?

• 1:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, it's with Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiatives.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we'll find out more about that.

• 1:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. So Neil, please introduce our first guest.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will be delighted to. We have in our midst, sitting right here in my office at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, we have world-renowned freestyle climber, oh my gosh, Alex. Alex Honnold, Alex, welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Thanks, thanks for having me.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, everyone learned about you through the, the indelible film Free Solo. On a climb that you did of El Capitan.

• 2:13Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a mountain in Yosemite.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could you just explain what Free Solo means?

• 2:19Chuck Nice?

  So before you do that, let me just say, cause I don't think we gave Alex the, uh, the proper reverence. This guy is the best climber in the world that we have sitting here. Like, there is no one better. You understand what I'm saying? Like, he's a rock star. And what I love is, he's like, yeah, whatever. You know, I just, I just like to climb.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, he's a rock star?

• 2:39Chuck Nice?

  Ah, did you see what I did there?

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see what you did there, okay.

• 2:42Chuck Nice?

  You weren't supposed to point it out.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so explain what it means.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Free Solo climbing is climbing without a rope or harness, just climb with your hands and feet up a, up a cliff.

• 2:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So no extra tools or?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, no gear.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clips or hammers or, or safety net?

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  Which means, if we think things through just a little bit.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you fall, you die.

• 3:06Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, thank you. I didn't want to say it, cause I didn't want to be my car.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause if Free Solo equals, you fall, you die.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically.

• 3:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Actually, you know, honestly.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Approximately. Unless you trip in the first five feet.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Well, that's exactly, well, I was actually, cause if you fall and you don't die, then you were bouldering. Cause that actually is another discipline of climbing is going bouldering, which is what most people do in gyms and, which I'm actually gonna do in the gym here in New York as soon as we're done chatting. Go to the gym and go bouldering, to like, train. And so that's when you climb without a rope and everything as well, but you're climbing, you know, 10 or 15 feet, you fall onto pads, it's all safe.

• 3:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  But basically, if you go much beyond that, then you're looking at serious consequences.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The laws of physics will kill you.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, then, then you're Free Soloing.

• 3:43Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Free Soloing is kinda defined, once you cross that line where you have serious consequences.

• 3:47Chuck Nice?

  Can't play with that guy.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I've had a few rock climber friends in my life, one of whom is dead.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  In a climbing accident, or just?

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, in a climbing accident, back in college. What impressed me was the things they could do. They were kinda lean and lanky. So just like you can do one arm pushups and and finger pullups. Just tell me the kinds of things you can do that most of us can't or none of us can.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  I mean, nothing that crazy. I can do one arm pullups, obviously. That's not crazy. Yeah. Okay. Everybody does that. Really?

• 4:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, but you hang out with rock climbers.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. All my friends are rock climbers. But I can't do like one arm pushups. That's because basically I have good pulling muscles, not that. Not great pushing muscles. Yeah, pushing. I never pushed the rock.

• 4:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need to push this very.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Toward me.

• 4:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I hadn't thought about it. In a pushup, you you're pushing things away, which is not something you would ever do as a climber typically.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  I mean, you do a little bit of pushing as a climber because you have to like press onto things like pressing over the top of it. Like imagine getting out of a pool if you're trying to get onto the top of a cliff.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  But that's pretty minimal compared to how much you're pulling. You're pulling all the time as you're pulling yourself.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got good biceps relative to your body weight?

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you guess?

• 5:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, not a discipline specific muscle group.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I I'm enchanted by.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Well, that's kind of.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Discipline specific muscles.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Well, but that's kind of the thing is that people assume that because you're a good rock climber, you must be very strong in different ways. And and really climbing is so much around technique and weighting your feet and like having open hips and balancing on your toes and doing all these things. That, you know, I'm sure some random CrossFit bro can probably pull stronger than I can.

• 5:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Then you don't want to be muscle bound because you'll need an amazing amount of flexibility.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like a gymnast is almost certainly more flexible and stronger than me, but it doesn't mean.

• 5:33Gary O'Reilly?

  But you're not doing a backflip off the rock.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, exactly. I'm just saying that it's like you train for what you need.

• 5:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, that's.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  You know, so I'm able to climb, you know, as well as I can, but I don't know, but by any metric of strength, it's not that acceptable.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is where we transition because if we get line up five people with similar strength to weight ratios and similar agility. Not everyone makes it to the top. There's a certain mental state that you have to enter, I'm presuming, that might distinguish you from other rock climbers who are equally as physically fit and capable of lifting their own weight.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's actually probably a more apt transition than you might have even have thought because, yeah, if you line up five of my friends who are all professional climbers and we're all relatively the same strength and weight and size and build and everything. You know, why are some of us more successful than others? And yeah, that starts to come down to the sort of indelible factors like mental things. Is there a?

• 6:31Chuck Nice?

  I'll say prototypical physiology attached to climbing, or can any body type do it?

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Any body type can do it, but strength to weight matters. So I mean, there are some really big climbers. Um, you know, because if you're strong enough, you can be big, but in general, people are relatively live.

• 6:50Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Like, I'm kind of a big climber.

• 6:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, interesting.

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  I'm kind of big for a climber.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in that movie.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Which movie?

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Sylvester Stallone.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Oh, cliffhanger.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but he, to me, he looked almost too muscular.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I think Sylvester Stallone would argue that you can never be too muscular.

• 7:10Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly. Plus, he can always just, you know, grunt at the rocks to get them to cooperate.

• 7:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true. I had not.

• 7:18Chuck Nice?

  And, you know.

• 7:22Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so enough about fly. So when you're planning a major ascent, are you physically training for that particular climb? Or have you got all of your toolkit ready? You just need to polish it up and get going?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Well, always a little bit about, so you're, so you're always trying to stay fit.

• 7:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Like, base level fitness, like, to be capable of doing a climb. Then you do the specific training on that, that route. So like in the film Free Solo, you see a ton of practice on the actual wall, memorizing the specific moves of that route. Because it's one thing to have the physical capability, where like, my muscles are strong enough. But it's another thing to actually remember how to use your muscles the right way, you know, like left hand or right hand? Or should I raise my left foot? Or, you know, like, remembering how to do it? And then beyond that, then there's the whole mental side of it of like, do I believe I can do it? Do I want to do it? Is it too scary? Like, you know?

• 8:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so you landed on that button. How are you working with the development mentally? You're looking at the bottom up at this climb. How do you then configure how you address that with your own thoughts?

• 8:22Speaker 03

  At, you know, at the, at the base level, there's the confidence that comes from knowing that you're physically able to do something. So it's like, if you've done the physical preparation, if you're trained for it, then obviously it's much easier to have the self-confidence required.

• 8:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Standard any elite athlete would have. They'd have, the confidence comes from all the work they've done in their history.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, they've done the work. And particularly with rock climbing, you know, like, the medium is unchanging. Like, the rock is always there and it's always the same. So if you climb it with a rope a bunch of times, you know that that's how it feels. That's how it always feels. And so if you can do that in a variety of conditions and in a variety of personal conditions, like when you feel tired, when you feel strong, like, whatever, and you know that you can always do it. Then you kind of know that you can do it.

• 8:58Chuck Nice?

  And is that the process that you climb with a rope multiple times as kind of a means of solidifying your path and your technique in your brain? And then you go without the rope?

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the ideal. I mean, I've certainly done a lot of things without prep beforehand, but that's typically because you've looked at a map, like you kind of know that the route is supposed to be a certain grade, that you can do it, and you're just like, oh, I'll go up and figure it out. And then you also typically freestalling far enough within your comfort zone that if it starts to get weird, you can just downclimb or bail.

• 9:28Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, you just escape.

• 9:30Chuck Nice?

  And is that more exciting? If you're kind of, because that seems to require a bit more improvisation.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the word.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  There are a few things in the world probably quite as stimulating as being like alone on a cliff that you've never climbed, just questing. I mean, that's like real.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, suppose, you know, I have pretty long arms, but for anyone, if you're climbing, if a grip is like a few inches out of reach, can that happen? You say, I gotta give up because I have no place to ascend from here.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Well, typically you would raise your feet and you'd get closer to it.

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean, raise your feet?

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Climb it. Yeah, it's funny because so most people when they're climbing in the gym, they're like, I can't reach the next hold. And you're like, well, raise your feet. Basically, if you raise your center mass, like if you lift, if you put your feet on the next level up, then you're like, oh, suddenly I can reach the next hole.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, because your hands already got past that level. So wherever your feet are standing, your hands used to be there.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so there's got to be something above where your current feet are if you're trying to reach a higher point above that.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  In theory, or you can always just paste your feet against the wall. You're wearing these rubber shoes, so they kind of stick to rock a little bit. And so with enough body tension, you can just push and lever your body higher. The general idea that you're saying, like, what if there's a gap that you can't surmount? And then it's like, yeah, I mean, if there's a gap, gap, and you can't surmount it, then you bail.

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a gap, gap.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, or you have to jump. Well, most people though, like, well, yeah, I mean, sometimes you jump from one hole to another.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jump?

• 10:49Speaker 03

  But without a rope, you prefer not to do that.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  While you're ascending, there's a point where you are not in contact with the rocks at all.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  But typically, you only do that when you're, when you have a rope on and things.

• 10:58Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  But when you're roped up, though, that's relatively common, whereas like you run out of holes and you jump or you fly.

• 11:04Chuck Nice?

  However, if I remember the movie correctly, the impasse for every other climber was this one particular point.

• 11:13Chuck Nice?

  Where it did, it wasn't necessarily a jump, but it required something like that.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  A big kick out of the side.

• 11:19Chuck Nice?

  It was a big kick out and you, and.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  And that's actually something that I had solved with a jump in the past. Like you could jump that part, but the idea of freestyling it that way seemed totally out of the question.

• 11:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Because you just don't wanna, you don't wanna get up to a point and be like, now my whole life has come down to this moment.

• 11:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Jump for a hold. I was like, no.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But let's get back to your, your brain.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Or lack thereof.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you now, or have you ever been afraid of heights?

• 11:45Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  No, well, so I actually, most people who say they're afraid of heights, I don't think they're actually afraid of heights. I think they're afraid of falling to their death, which I think is totally fair. And that's what, like, I'm afraid of falling to my death.

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The comedian Stephen Wright said, I'm not afraid of heights, I'm afraid of widths.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I said, that's very insightful, because if you're very high up, but you're walking on a broad swath of.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Well, that's exactly, yeah, you're afraid of falling to your death.

• 12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but if something's narrow, that's when you're afraid of the height.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the higher you are, isn't that more scary than if you're not as high?

• 12:22Speaker 03

  I mean, once you're more than 40 or 50 feet off the ground, you're basically gonna die either way.

• 12:26Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  So what's the difference between being a thousand feet or two thousand feet?

• 12:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  I mean, in general, I like being really high because.

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't be so calm about that sentence.

• 12:32Gary O'Reilly?

  No, that's so pragmatic.

• 12:34Chuck Nice?

  I know.

• 12:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Because it makes sense.

• 12:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're dead anyway, so what's the difference?

• 12:38Chuck Nice?

  You know what? I used to be afraid for a very short period of time, I used to be afraid of flying. And I would get in the plane and I'd be white knuckling and I'd be like, oh my God, oh my God. I don't remember the exact flight, but I remember when the plane took off and we were no longer on the ground. Something said to me, it's over, so relax. If the plane crashed right now, you're gonna die, most likely you're going to die. So what difference does it make if it crashes from 30,000 feet? Cause here you are not even 100 feet off the ground and if this plane went down, you would die. So it's the same thing.

• 13:14Gary O'Reilly?

  So the psychology is, he's taken away, you, he, you have taken away this issue and minimized it. Because you've said, it doesn't matter if it's a thousand or 50, the death is the outcome. So you've just taken, you've just made something that could be big and dramatic like Chuck's fear of flying.

• 13:29Chuck Nice?

  And put it in its own box.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, or you've just kept it. Basically, I have a fear of death. I have a fear of falling to my death, just like anybody.

• 13:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  I try my absolute best to not fall.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't believe you.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, because if I honestly didn't care, then I wouldn't do any practice. I wouldn't prep. I wouldn't train. I would just show up and be like, screw it. You know, if it works out, it works out.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You actually don't want to die. Want to die.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Well, so like if you've seen the foam free solo, I mean, that documents two years of direct training and prep for this one climb.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  But before that, I'd spent another six to seven years sort of building up to it. So I'm like, oh, I spent, you know, eight or nine years building up to this one climb. And then people are like, you have a death wish. And I'm like, well, if I had a death wish, I would have just gone and done it. I wouldn't have spent nine years training for it.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  It's like.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so is it fair to say?

• 14:08Chuck Nice?

  Getting drunk and saying yee-haw.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 14:10Chuck Nice?

  That's.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I was like, hold my beer. I'm going for it.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This one time, yeah. Is it fair to say that your level of preparation systematically reduced your fear factor?

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I mean, if you take risk as a sort of the, the likelihood of something bad happening.

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I changed my risk.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Consequence of it, you know, with the free soloing, if you look at the risk is, you know, the consequences are basically always death, but the likelihood of falling off is determined by how much you've practiced, how well trained you are, the weather, you know, like all kinds of factors.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You tell me, you were so prepared for this climb, we should be less impressed than we all were for having watched you accomplish it.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Well, I think that the impressive part is the amount of effort that goes in to the preparation.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which the film captured.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, which I think does a good job of.

• 14:52Chuck Nice?

  No, I think the impressive part, but also is the doing, because let's be honest, are you still the only one who's done it?

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 14:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. Look at him. This guy, I swear to God, I don't know what's wrong with you. All this climberdom, it's up your brain because I ain't never seen nobody who has summited achievement like you have. And he's like, yeah, I guess. I mean, you know, whatever.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  I kind of did it.

• 15:14Chuck Nice?

  Very, very Mike Tyson about it, like, well, whatever.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are we alone in the universe? Or just early to the party? In my latest book, Take Me To Your Leader, I explore how aliens might find us, what they'd be like, and what we should do next. Curious? You should be. Take Me To Your Leader is available now in print and in audiobook, which I narrated. Don't wait until after you've had your first alien encounter to grab a copy of Take Me To Your Leader, because then it would be too late.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it possible to be overconfident? And then you sort of let down your cautions? And is that a part of your brain that you access and think about actively?

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Hmm. Yeah, I was definitely trying to avoid being... I don't think I've ever been too overconfident. I don't know, other people might say differently. I don't know. But yeah, that's certainly something to avoid. I mean, the thing with free soloing is you definitely never want to overstate your... or like over... You don't want to exceed your capabilities.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  So you have to keep a pretty clear-eyed view.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have to match your expectations with your abilities at all times.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:41Gary O'Reilly?

  That's cool.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 16:42Gary O'Reilly?

  So your planning, I'm guessing, is pretty much meticulous?

• 16:46Speaker 03

  For hard free solos, for sure.

• 16:48Gary O'Reilly?

  So what point is there when you think, "I've overthought this", and all of a sudden, these things start to spiral around in your mind? Do you get to that point? Or are you disciplined enough just to keep it meticulous?

• 16:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's about discipline, I guess.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  I don't know if I've ever been accused of overthinking anything.

• 17:01Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  No, I don't know. So it was interesting. So part of my process with free soloing at CAP was I knew that it would be the most consequential climb in my life. I knew that it would be the most important thing I'd ever done. I knew that the film, you know, had the potential to be great and whatever. You know, I knew it would be a big deal. But I didn't want it to... I didn't want to put it on too much of a pedestal in my mind, because I already knew that there was a big mental challenge involved in believing that I could do it and whatever else. And so by building it up even higher, being like, "This will be the most important thing you ever do", it's like, I don't really need added pressure. Because there was already... Just the fact that it's a 3,000-foot face and it hasn't been done. It's really hard. And, you know, I felt like that was enough. And so I was kind of like, well, I don't want to... When so actually, so part of my planning was that, you know, I had a couple of months in Yosemite in the springtime, which is kind of like the time to do the free solo.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  But right after that, I'd agreed to go on this expedition to Alaska to climb some walls. And that was kind of training for this expedition to Antarctica later in the year to climb some other walls. And so I was kind of looking at.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Antarctica has walls?

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, some insane like granite.

• 17:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Ice face?

• 17:59Speaker 03

  I know, like granite teeth, like just giant jagged faces sticking out of the glaciers.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I was in Antarctica a year and a half ago. I must have been a long part of.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Were you on the coast during the?

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, coast, coast.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, in the interior, there are giant mountains sticking up all over.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  It's totally amazing.

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, 40 below zero. Yeah, okay.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Well, actually, in the sun, I mean, it's chilly, but it's not that chilly.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  You can climb barehanded in the sun sometimes.

• 18:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Unpleasant, but it's fun. But anyway, the point being that I'd sort of planned these other expeditions with the intention of making my Yosemite season feel like training for these other trips. And so obviously, I was intending to free solo cap. I wanted to climb El Cap. I knew that'd be so important to me. But at the same time, I'm kind of like, well, this is just practice for these other trips. And, you know, it's all part of my year.

• 18:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Gotcha.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Because I didn't want to put undue pressure. I didn't need to put extra pressure onto something that already felt like a lot.

• 18:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you have that point where you're mid-climb and you think, shit, I left the light on in the bathroom? And you've lost your concentration? Or are you able to discipline yourself? And it goes back to that point of discipline.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have a better example than leaving a light on in the bathroom?

• 18:59Gary O'Reilly?

  No, you know, something comes.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  I left the stove on. I've left the lights on in the van. You look down and you see your van parked down at the bottom in El Cap Meadow and you're like, god damn it, I left the lights on on the inside.

• 19:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  I've done that a bunch of times where your headlights are on and you're like, oh, man. But then if you get down fast enough, you haven't killed your battery. So it's fun.

• 19:14Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're able to shut that down in your own mentality quickly?

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Well, it's not even that. So, I mean, with free soloing El Cap, it took almost four hours. And so, you know, realistically, unless you're a highly trained monk or something, everybody's mind wanders all the time for four hours.

• 19:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So how do you, remember the Ironman?

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Interview? And it wasn't until later in his career.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:36Gary O'Reilly?

  That he was able to get out of his own head and finish the race in first place. But it took that time to not listen to the sort of things about whatever it was going on in his head. So are you able to shut that down?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think it's a matter of discipline. I think that with hard free soul-ing, when you have, when you're doing something hard, you're just focused. You're just doing the thing. Actually, it's kind of akin to running. I'm sure you've spent a lot of time running in your life.

• 20:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Too long, yes.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  You know, it's like if you're, if you're doing some casual jogging, you're thinking about all kinds of things. You're thinking about your life and your friends. But if you're sprinting all out, you know, if you're chasing the ball towards a goal, you're not thinking about anything.

• 20:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Good point, good point.

• 20:12Chuck Nice?

  Very good point. Can I ask you this? Does this ever happen where your brain somewhat bifurcates into two distinct consciousness? Where one is totally locked in on what you're doing, so much so that it opens up another part of your brain where you're kind of thinking about other things, not like I left the lights on, but like deep philosophical issues that are running through your brain. Me like, why am I doing this? Existential questions.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very funny.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  No, no, I mean, I think for me, the closest thing to a bifurcation like that is occasionally when I'm really doing something like I'm performing, then you're like so on autopilot that it's almost like your body's just doing a thing.

• 20:58Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  And you're not really, you're like along for the ride.

• 21:00Chuck Nice?

  It's almost like you're there for the ride.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  But, but I've never really experienced the other part where it's like, but the, some part of my mind is thinking about other things. It's just that you're just doing it and you're not thinking about things. It's like, I mean, I've always assumed that's kind of like what a gymnast must feel like when they're executing their routine or something. They're just like, their body is moving and they're doing a thing, they're not thinking about it, they're not.

• 21:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. For me, the closest thing is like riding a motorcycle. I ride motorcycles. And so when you're traveling at, you know, 90, 110 miles an hour.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  You're focused.

• 21:29Chuck Nice?

  You're very focused. And the deal is, if I'm not focused, I'm going to die. But the longer you stay focused, because you can't, the longer you stay focused, your mind starts to not wonder, but it starts to think about other things in a different level of consciousness. That's all I was asking. Well, so evolutionarily.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fear is a very important feature in in the history of our species. Because that preserves our species. It's like, no, I'm not gonna do that. And where does that come from? Because everyone who said, that's that's a cuddly lion. I want to go pet it. If you didn't fear the lion, you were summarily removed from the gene pool.

• 22:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, by the way, I love those videos.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are you, however, the subset of people who are fearless and manage to not die actually have outsized impact on the advance of civilization. Otherwise, we'd all still be in the cave. So are you one of these people in our species that retain the level of fear that was genetically removed by other forces? But you're still there helping our species.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I think that's overstating. I think that, I mean, I experienced fears just like anybody else.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I put you up on an evolutionary pedestal.

• 22:58Chuck Nice?

  He was like this, no, let's not get crazy. I'm still scared of the dark.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that if anything, I've just had so much practice being scared that I've gotten good differentiating, you know, what's.

• 23:12Chuck Nice?

  I love that.

• 23:15Gary O'Reilly?

  It's become a muscle memory almost.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, we just get used to. I mean, I think that most people who are really crippled by fear it's because they don't experience that much fear. Like, they're not scared enough in a way. They haven't had to manage their fear enough.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have a fear appetite so that you gotta go see scary movies all the time as well? Or jump out of airplanes?

• 23:32Speaker 03

  I have jumped out of airplanes. But no, I hate horror because I actually think that the whole genre is stupid. Because like, like, jump cuts and startling moves and weird things like that's always gonna startle you. That's designed to scare you. And like, I don't really want to feel fear like as a.

• 23:46Chuck Nice?

  I'm with you on that.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Like, I wouldn't intentionally go, oh my God, I just think that whole thing is stupid.

• 23:52Chuck Nice?

  As a black man, my life is scary enough. I don't need to sit and watch things.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you don't climb a rock face risking death after a certain amount of time, do you get antsy?

• 24:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go back and put your life at risk.

• 24:07Chuck Nice?

  Is he the climb?

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you know, we call that an adrenaline junkie.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  No, it's so hard to say. I mean, I get itchy to climb, but like I'll go climbing this afternoon, but it'll be in a gym and it'll be totally safe.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  But I'll still be.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're still, yeah, you're getting, you're excited. Yeah.

• 24:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, but that's, that's tapping into something there. Motivation. The motivation to do El Capitan, the motivation to do, then we haven't discussed it, the Taipei 101, which you streamed live on Netflix. So what's the motivation? Because it's, for, for me, I'm in competition with opponents. Or, you know, the tennis pro or soccer player. Are you just in competition with yourself?

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like a journey of self, I mean, I hate to say self mastery or whatever, but I mean, you're basically just, you know, I spend most of my year climbing the gym, doing like what I'm going to do this afternoon and just go, you train, you work out, you climb. And then every once in a while, you kind of want to test yourself or, or see if you're capable of the things that you, that you wish you were capable of, or that you want to be capable of.

• 25:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're competing against yourself.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, basically.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we only just met, but as best as I can judge, you don't look like a publicity hound.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Well, some would say streaming a building climb live on Netflix is about as public facing as it gets.

• 25:21Chuck Nice?

  That is a very good point, I have to say. However.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  To be fair, I would have done it for free.

• 25:26Chuck Nice?

  That's what I was gonna say. I was gonna say, however, you're not the guy with the camera.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:31Chuck Nice?

  As everybody else.

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Who's, who's riding your pie there.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  What's, what's it? I'm trying to remember the, the documentary. If I recall correctly, they were showing you as a little kid climbing everything, everything in the house, no matter what it was, you were up on it. You were never down on the ground.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm seeing that with my kids a little bit now.

• 25:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really?

• 25:51Speaker 03

  If that's nature or nurture.

• 25:52Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 25:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got something wrong with the ground? You got a problem with the ground?

• 25:55Speaker 03

  I just, well, actually, I, I love, I love the view. Honestly, I love being up high. I love seeing lots of things. I like, you know, like getting on top.

• 26:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me just throw in a little bit of physics here, if I may.

• 26:03Chuck Nice?

  Please.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. As you ascend, the, you're putting energy into that ascent, obviously, muscle energy. 100% of that energy is what kills you when you hit the ground if you fall.

• 26:17Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. So you're

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an exact match.

• 26:21Chuck Nice?

  You're storing up potential energy.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 26:23Chuck Nice?

  So that if you were to fall, it's that energy that hits the ground.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You basically killed yourself with the energy that you use to ascend.

• 26:31Chuck Nice?

  That's kind of wild.

• 26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I remember that if I ever fall. I'd be like, I was saving for this.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  On the way down.

• 26:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And on Earth, we have a surface gravity that gives you your current weight. What, you had 160 pounds? Yeah, 160. Yeah, okay.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those were the days.

• 26:51Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, I remember those.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. He doesn't want to carry up any more fat than is necessary.

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  I got it.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Yeah. So, so on Earth, you weigh 160 pounds, but on a pulsar, the gravity is, it's like a dense ball of neutrons. The gravity is so severe that the energy to ascend the thickness of a sheet of paper equals what it would take to climb a thousand-foot rock face. Just to step onto that sheet of paper.

• 27:23Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, rock climbing would be very different on different surfaces, planetary surfaces. Pretty hard on pulsars. And a little easier on the moon and even on Mars. Yeah. On Mars, you'd weigh 100 pounds, or no, 46, 4, you weigh 60 pounds on Mars. That would really help. That'd be tremendously beneficial to my gravity.

• 27:42Chuck Nice?

  That's excellent.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A long time ago, I was in a mild car accident. You know, nobody, no blood, but I found it hard to get back into a car for weeks after that. Just, it was such an assault on my concept of safety. I guess, they say the same thing about if you fall off a horse, get back on the horse to just. So, does this happen in, among rock climbers? If you made a mistake or you fall, is there a barrier that prevents you from recovering?

• 28:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I believe it's how fast you can clean your underwear.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  I think there's probably two different scale sets. So there's if something happens like say you're freestyling something and you break a handhold, like a very quick immediate thing that sort of jolts the panic system, you know, where you're suddenly like, oh, I'm flooded with adrenaline. I just had a near death experience. There's recovering from that, which there's no real trick to, I don't think. I mean, you take some deep breaths, you can pose yourself, you try to pull it together and you just carry on. But then what you're describing, if you have an actual accident of some kind, though a small fender is maybe not a real accident. But you know, if somebody actually has real trauma, like they have a horrendous, like something happens to them, they need a surgery. I mean, that's kind of a different level of coming back from it. I've thankfully never really experienced.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm saying I felt it with no physical trauma. It was just emotional for me. So you're drawing a line between

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Well, I'm trying, I'm

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A recovery from something that had no real consequences to something that did.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like emotional sort of mental recovery is different between like acute small scale things and then big picture giant things. I don't, I don't know. But I just think that the small scale things, at least for me, I've just gotten better at with practice because you just have so many little things happen while you're climbing. Well, I'm really scared. And then you're like, well, what am I going to do other than just pull myself back together, take some breath?

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you voluntarily had your brain scanned, is that right?

• 29:36Speaker 03

  I did. Yeah, actually a journalist had approached me for a, for a science magazine about doing a, a profile basically around this, this brain scan. And it was with a woman that was doing research on high sensations seeking individuals, which I think in her case was more around drug addicts and things and people like struggling with addiction. But it's kind of the same personality traits, I guess. And anyway, so yeah, I had an FMRI and they looked at my brain a bit.

• 29:59Gary O'Reilly?

  They'd have been looking at the amygdala, so that sort of fear factor. And from, from memory, you kind of registered less than the control during the test. So are you putting that down to nature? Or is this something you've nurtured?

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in the film Free Solo, there's this very short scene where they kind of show the brain scan and it's like, oh, it's less than normal. And so I think most people watch that scene and they come away from it being like, there's something wrong with this brain. But with the long form version in the, in the magazine article and all that, it was kind of exactly that. It's like, is this nature versus nurture or whatever? And I think that the, to me, the obvious thing is that it was more nurture, not so much that was nurture, that was basically just practice.

• 30:38Chuck Nice?

  I think what you're saying is that the repetition of what you do over a very long period of time blunted your amygdala response.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so the FMRI scan, you know, you're in this like safe metal tube, you lie there and then you see black and white photos that are range, they're just like random black and white photos. And they light up different parts of your brain depending what you're seeing. And so some of them, you know, there'll be like a black and white photo of like a handgun or something. That's like triggers fear in people or like the fear response. But I was kind of like, oh, I've spent my whole life getting deeply afraid for my life on cliffs. I'm kind of like, lying in this little tube looking at photos is just not scary. You know, it's like, had they thrown a snake into the tube, it would have been freaking scary. Why did it have to be snakes? Yeah, or even like a rat, you know, had they thrown like a rat or like a big spider or like, you know, there are plenty of things that could have lit up my fear response for sure. But looking at black and white photos, not one of them. And to me, that's nurture. It's like, if you spend your whole life getting scared, you just require a higher threshold.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  That's a good answer there.

• 31:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 31:35Chuck Nice?

  Makes sense.

• 31:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, let's jump into your foundation, the Honnold Foundation. You like, remember the surfer Kai Lenny?

• 31:42Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 31:43Gary O'Reilly?

  He's well into environmental projects, just like you are, with solar energy projects. So please expand on this whole foundation that you formed. And does it have its roots in the fact that you spend so much of your time in the great outdoors?

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly it. I mean, I was, I founded the Honnold Foundation in 2012, I think. And I was living in my van at the time and I started earning more than I needed.

• 32:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Living in your van?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  I lived in my van.

• 32:06Chuck Nice?

  Down by the river.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Well, down by the cliff. So you're living in a van, which is pretty inexpensive life. Yeah, I was living on 10, 12 K a year. It's a pretty easy lifestyle because you're literally only spending money on food and gas and you're just driving around climbing full time. And the thing is that I was living exactly the life that I wanted. You know, I was super happy. I was pursuing all these climbing goals. I was, you know, basically I was living my best life. And did you stank? Well, I mean, there was nobody around to know.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Money on a van.

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't say on shower or bathing or soap.

• 32:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but listen, they kept the bears away.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  But so, you know, I started earning more than I needed and I felt like I should give what I didn't need to things that mattered. And so, you know, I obviously cared about the environment because I was living in nature quite a bit. And then basically came down to what could have the most benefit for environmental causes, but also help human population in some way. Basically, I traveled enough through climbing that I was like, nobody cares about the environment unless their basic needs are met. Like, you know, when you travel to rural communities. That's always the case.

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Such a great point.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I was kind of like, well, if you're going to try to protect. It's a luxury to compare. Well, that's exactly. The environment. I mean, yeah, basically. And so it's kind of like, if you're going to support environmental projects, they have to improve standard of living. Like, they have to help human communities in those places. And so that's why we've been supporting Community Solar ever since then. Another quote from my father, "It's not good enough to be right, you also have to be effective." And your foundation. Yeah, I mean, I think energy access is the base of so many different things.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, worldwide too. Yeah, globally, we're talking.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's still going strong? Yeah, this year we'll pass 20 million in total giving.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 33:50Chuck Nice?

  Congratulations. Way to go, man.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  It's crazy because when I started the foundation, I donated 50K the first year. It's sort of like went from me giving 50K a year to now, yeah, we've passed 20 million.

• 34:01Chuck Nice?

  20 million.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  It's pretty cool.

• 34:02Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, once again, whenever this comes up, I feel it incumbent upon me to remind all of you watching that solar energy is still the cheapest energy on the planet. Okay?

• 34:15Speaker 03

  And in space.

• 34:18Chuck Nice?

  And his face. That's right. So I don't care what you've been told, you know, drill, baby, drill is not the way to go.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel the exact same way. You know, since 2012, I was like, this is obviously the future. Like this is, this is where energy should be coming from.

• 34:33Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 34:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've got a podcast gives you some platform there.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I host a podcast called Planet Visionaries.

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Planet Visionaries. Yeah, good. Yeah. There's others of like mind and soul.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Well, it's about Rolex. And so I'm mostly interviewing Rolex ambassadors and, and basically conservationists, people who are working a lot of like marine biologists and divers and, you know, sort of, I don't know, like marine photographers and things like that. Yeah, they've definitely been supporting conservation and exploration type efforts for, you know, I don't know, 80 years or more.

• 35:03Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Super cool, man.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Maybe a hundred years.

• 35:05Chuck Nice?

  Way to go Rolex. Who knew?

• 35:06Speaker 03

  I know. It is surprising, but actually it's been a real pleasure hosting the podcast because just like you guys, I mean, you get to meet all these interesting people who are doing incredible things. And so it's, it was pretty inspiring because people who have devoted themselves to one niche, like, you know, we're like restoring coral in certain places. And you're like, who knew that you could restore, you know?

• 35:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And what platform do they possibly have to tell people?

• 35:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without what you're providing.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you ain't going on the Tonight Show restoring coral.

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, good to, good to hear about this. And it's not just you climbing mountains. As you're making a difference in the world. Not enough people think or feel this way.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  It's the classic, I mean, I love climbing mountains, but at a certain point you're like, maybe I should try to do something useful as well.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, make something in your life.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Alex, thanks for sharing some of your day with us.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  It's a pleasure.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you climb up the side of the Rose Center?

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the fifth floor.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  You give me permission, I will for sure. I got all my climbing stuff with me.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta never, never leave home without it. All right, this, we gotta wrap. Well, we got to wrap this segment. This segment. Oh, yes. Yes. That's right. We gotta get inside the man's brain. You're not going home just yet. Okay, okay. Coming up.

• 36:12Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're going to reach out to our neuroscientist at large, Dr. Professor Heather Berlin.

• 36:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, right.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We come back on StarTalk Special Edition.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  I'm Joel Cherico and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, time to bring in our next guest.

• 36:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is one of my faves.

• 36:56Gary O'Reilly?

  And she is without a doubt one of our favorites. Fascinating guest, Alex Honnold. Fascinating because all of the achievement and the modesty was just, the humility was amazing.

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta get inside his brain.

• 37:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's do it.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's what Heather is here for.

• 37:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heather Berlin.

• 37:12Heather Berlin?

  Hello.

• 37:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, clinical psychologist, that's your, that's your, is that your day job? Clinical psychologist?

• 37:18Heather Berlin?

  Neuroscientist, clinical psychologist.

• 37:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And crime fighter at night.

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're at the icon School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, New York. I was born in that hospital, Mount Sinai.

• 37:29Heather Berlin?

  Most people, most amazing people are born at Mount Sinai.

• 37:33Heather Berlin?

  You guys born there?

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't have that in Philly. You don't have, you were born there? They don't have Mount Sinai. Alright, alright. So, tell us, how does fear manifest in the brain? And, and I've heard the amygdala, blah, blah, blah, blah. What is that, what is that?

• 37:49Heather Berlin?

  Yeah.

• 37:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which I've surely mispronounced.

• 37:51Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm just.

• 37:53Heather Berlin?

  The amygdala is, is a key brain region involved in fear, but it's this, I think a lot of people think that fear lives in the amygdala and that's, that's not quite how it works. The amygdala is more like the smoke alarm. It detects something happening in the environment, it says, danger, danger, something, you know, could be happening, we need to gear up. So then it activates other parts of the brain, which then decide whether we need to sort of act on this.

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a trigger?

• 38:21Heather Berlin?

  It's a trigger, it's sort of an alarm response that can be trained to either sort of be louder? Or to kind of dampen down, depending on our experience.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what, I'm curious, because we just take it for granted, that a lion with big teeth that's chasing you is something that you should fear. But is that evolutionary?

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The the the portfolio of things that scare us. That's not learned, is it?

• 38:52Heather Berlin?

  So it's a bit of both. We are actually born, our research has shown that we're born with certain predispositions, evolutionarily, sort of programmed, that that we're more likely to be fearful of certain things like spiders or heights, right, because of our history and our interaction with them, than we are to say of, you know, electrical sockets.

• 39:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, because electrical sockets are modern and we didn't have a chance to evolve.

• 39:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Being afraid, oh, okay, so what.

• 39:17Chuck Nice?

  That's why all my kids have afros.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so that's an interesting point. If we wanted evolution to continue to work, you would just let kids put stuff in the in the socket and they would die and the what those who did would die, they were removed from the gene pool.

• 39:38Chuck Nice?

  Those who watched the others die would learn.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would learn. And that would be whatever, we would be feeding the amygdala of what you should be afraid of.

• 39:48Heather Berlin?

  Right, so I mean, there's but there's a bit of both, though, because you can also learn fears, right, by either watching something happen to someone else or having an experience yourself, let's say you get into a bad car accident, you will might start to fear that, right, so you have lived experience, which can program, and then you also have kind of pre-installed predispositions to be more likely to be fearful of these things that we've learned from our past.

• 40:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 40:10Gary O'Reilly?

  But do you get a point where fear can almost paralyze or does paralyze?

• 40:14Heather Berlin?

  Yes, I mean, fear can be maladaptive.

• 40:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not not literally paralyzed, even just just prevents you from reacting.

• 40:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Heather Berlin?

  So there's a healthy amount of fear and you don't want too little, you don't want too much, right, too much and you if you if you freeze and you can't respond or run, let's say, from the tiger, you're dead, right? But if you're not afraid enough, you're dead. So it's this middle ground that is really the healthy fear and then we get into psychological disorders, sometimes it's too little or too much, and that's where the problems start to arise.

• 40:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much do we need people in modern society who are fear resistant?

• 40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there are people who might don't fear getting arrested, I mean, there's the bad side of this curve, people who don't fear repercussions for wrongdoings.

• 41:00Chuck Nice?

  That's right, and that's because, quite frankly, I'm made of Teflon.

• 41:06Heather Berlin?

  Well, I mean, when you look at it, like, if you look at population genetics, like, there's things that remain in the population because it's an adaptive niche, right? So if everyone's playing by the rules, it's actually adaptive for those to be outside that, to be more risk-taking, risk-takers. So we find that genetically speaking, there's a certain gene that codes for people who are more risk averse, but also who take more risks. And there's niches within the population for both those people to have an advantage. Now, if everyone, like, once you get past a certain amount, you know, percentage of the population, then it becomes maladaptive. So it kind of like, we work together as a whole organism, if you think of us as a population, to keep a certain amount of risk-takers, because that's adaptive for us as a society.

• 41:51Heather Berlin?

  They're the ones who are going to look and go a little further and explore.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because I said in the first segment, because it made sense to me, not because I researched it the way you have, that we need some risk-takers that remain among us, lest we all still be living in the cave.

• 42:05Heather Berlin?

  Absolutely, exactly. So it's actually adaptive for there to be certain people out there who are more likely to take risks.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. For the benefit of us all.

• 42:14Heather Berlin?

  For the benefit of us all, exactly. They're the ones who are going to taste that fruit and see if it's, you know, poison or not, and... Right, exactly.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As the head swells up.

• 42:23Gary O'Reilly?

  If you're not already this person that would go and do something adventurous, how do you sort of push your own envelope when it comes to fear? Are there techniques and skills?

• 42:34Heather Berlin?

  Absolutely. You know, so something that I kind of prescribe to patients, especially people who are risk averse as well, so they kind of are avoiding things too much, is to kind of take these micro-risks, where your brain is just, is making predictions all the time about what it expects. And you have to kind of change this, this algorithm. And you do that by training it, by actually being a little uncomfortable, letting yourself, you know, do it in a, not where it's not overwhelming, where you're flooding, it's called flooding, where it's just too much. But you feel a little uncomfortable and your brain start, and then nothing bad happens. Your brain starts to learn, okay, you know, discomfort isn't, isn't, doesn't mean danger.

• 43:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that case, it's not justified.

• 43:12Heather Berlin?

  Right. Like, let's say you're afraid of taking elevators, you know, maybe you just, I say, okay, you're gonna take just the elevator to one floor and get off. I know it's gonna be uncomfortable, you're gonna feel, but after that, you're like, oh, nothing bad happened. The brain starts to change its prediction, and that alarm response, the amygdala, it starts to go down. And that's how you gradually train yourself. And if you take someone like, you know, like, like rock climbing or free soloing, where, you know, you don't just start out climbing El Capitan.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 43:38Heather Berlin?

  You're doing it, little micro risks over and over, where every time you do it, you feel a little bit safer and a little bit safer, and then you build up to these things where, you know,

• 43:46Chuck Nice?

  So you expand the comfort zone.

• 43:47Heather Berlin?

  Yes.

• 43:48Chuck Nice?

  What happens in the brain when the fear becomes irrational? And then, what do you do to deal with that?

• 43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean like fear of the number 13?

• 43:59Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tricks of dephobia.

• 44:01Heather Berlin?

  That's a phobia, a phobia in general. So it becomes irrational, you have to kind of attack it from both ends, like top-down, bottom-up. So the bottom-up is you kind of have to train, you have to embody it, you have to actually do the things, like, let the number 13 sit there, and, you know, you still do the thing you're afraid to do because the number 13 is there, or whatever it may be, and then nothing bad happens, it starts to train the brain at a sort of unconscious level. But then there's the top-down, where you can, it's called cognitive reframing. So you think of things in a slightly different way. So let's say you're afraid of something, the heart is racing, you're thinking, oh my god, I'm panicking, something bad's gonna happen. You reframe it and say, you know what, my body is preparing for action. You know, this isn't such a bad thing. I can, I can still do things even if I'm feeling afraid,

• 44:46Heather Berlin?

  if you reframe it in that way. So there's a cognitive aspect to it, and then there's the sort of just behaviorally, you have to keep doing it over and over again to teach your brain not to fear it. And over time, the fear goes down.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This sounds like what a psychologist would help a person to achieve, but in the future, the future of neuroscience, seems to me, you just go in there and nip-tuck a few neurons, and then the symptoms go away like this. Is that the future of your field?

• 45:10Heather Berlin?

  They're actually, you know, there are some, and even with, with drugs, that you can sort of unlearn, so fear is about association. You associate something, a stimulus, with it's fearful. You can pull apart that association with certain drugs. So you train someone to fear, you know, like Pavlov's dogs can be trained to hear the bell and, and, and, you know, saliva starts coming. You can train people to fear something, let's say a white rabbit, right? And then you, you can unpair that with certain drugs. You know, I don't think it's dramatic as you have to go in with certain neural implants. Ultimately, though, the fear circuits, we understand so well that we could potentially go in there.

• 45:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Admit it, that's what you really want to do.

• 45:48Heather Berlin?

  I do like, I do like manipulating people's brains.

• 45:51Gary O'Reilly?

  So when Alex was talking about, you know what, if I fall from 50 feet, it's the same as falling from a thousand feet. How is he dealing with that fear aspect? And how does he cognitively arrange himself?

• 46:02Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, that's, that's a really good question. So that's something that I call controlled surrender. So basically, and I used to actually also, you had mentioned a fear of, I used to have a fear of flying. And the way that I got over it, it's not like knowing the statistics cognitively and all that, none of that, it's, it's a feeling, right? Yeah, and it comes up from, so when I found it, it's acceptance. Okay, when I get in the plane, I have no control, it's letting go. I don't have control. And if this plane goes down, I'm gonna die. And once you fully accept that, the fear starts to go down. Because it's the, the holding on of control that actually is creating the anxiety. But once you just accept it, and you know Buddhists and, you know, mystics and all, Stoics have said this.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's that Christian prayer, which is, God give me the power to change the things I can and to accept the things I can't.

• 46:48Heather Berlin?

  Exactly.

• 46:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's the soul of this.

• 46:51Chuck Nice?

  Yes, which is, which is why I'm drunk on every flight.

• 46:55Heather Berlin?

  But this is, I mean, with, with Alex, like, he, he, um, you know, once he passes, let's say whatever it was, 50 feet, there's an acceptance. No matter what, if I fall, I'm gonna die. And once you accept it, it kind of calms the, the fear circuit.

• 47:08Gary O'Reilly?

  I said, it kind of made it smaller, less of a threat.

• 47:12Heather Berlin?

  Yes.

• 47:12Gary O'Reilly?

  To allow it to just be in your head and start to eat away at you.

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I was a geek kid and I would always have data override my feelings. I could do it like that. The plane is shaking. I said, no, I know how many planes fall out of the sky and it's this little and it had this many flights. And so.

• 47:31Heather Berlin?

  So you were able to like cognit it.

• 47:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 47:33Heather Berlin?

  Your way out. Well, that's the top down. You must have very strong top down processing that you can. Yeah, yeah. Very good prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the brain that's involved in that.

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:41Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, right in front above the eyes that you could but and sometimes control like that is really good. Like we need that, right? To override. But other times like with with Alex, once he's trained so well. And his kind of body and brain know what to do.

• 47:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:56Heather Berlin?

  When you start putting in that top down, you start becoming too consciously aware and thinking too much. It messes you up.

• 48:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 48:01Heather Berlin?

  Because the training it's and then you actually, once you've trained like to perform at your best, you actually have to stop trying so hard. You have to let go.

• 48:08Chuck Nice?

  It's almost like your body knows better than your thought process.

• 48:12Heather Berlin?

  Conscious brain. Yes.

• 48:13Chuck Nice?

  So how is that what's going on in like professional athletes?

• 48:18Heather Berlin?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, it's it's, you know, not even just athletes, musicians.

• 48:22Chuck Nice?

  Musicians.

• 48:23Heather Berlin?

  Surgeons.

• 48:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 48:24Heather Berlin?

  Right. They've trained to the level that they don't have to think about it. And in fact, if they start to think about it, because consciousness is is very good at certain things, but has a limited capacity.

• 48:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 48:34Heather Berlin?

  The unconscious and like it has so it's so large. If you start to consciously think about it, it kind of messes up the flow of things.

• 48:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Heather Berlin?

  Like if you had to think about how am I walking and balancing at the same time and all that, it wouldn't work as well. Or when you're, you know, a professional athlete, right? If how what angle am I going to hit that ball? It will mess you up. So when you're in, once you've trained, the training lives in your neural circuits. And what your job is.

• 48:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's what people call muscle memory.

• 48:58Heather Berlin?

  Muscle memory. Yeah.

• 48:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely.

• 48:59Heather Berlin?

  And it let it so letting go isn't isn't chaos. It's actually trusting the control you've already built in.

• 49:05Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 49:05Heather Berlin?

  And once you have, your whole job is to not think about it because when you when you start to infuse that top down processing, it will all it's good in some cases. In those particular cases, it's it can be detrimental.

• 49:16Chuck Nice?

  So you is it is it kind of like you've actually trained this these neurological pathways to fire in a certain way? And then if you just let them do it, then they'll just do it?

• 49:28Heather Berlin?

  Pretty much, yeah, pretty much. And you know, we've seen that even just with patients with brain damage. Um, you know, this one patient, he actually had his hippocampus, the part of the brain having to do with long-term memories, was completely damaged. And so, he couldn't even hold consciousness from one minute to the next. He would forget. So every minute, he felt like, I'm just waking up now. I'm just, he had a diary, just that I'm waking up now, I'm just waking up now. And so, he was, you know, in an institution, he couldn't function. But he was a pianist. And if they could get him to start playing the music, he could play an entire beautiful piece through, all the way to the end. Because it was, it was a different part of his brain. And once you activated that part of the brain, or with Alzheimer's patients, if you get them to start, they can't even speak at some certain

• 50:09Heather Berlin?

  point. You get them to start singing a song from their era of their childhood, or happy birthday, they can suddenly sing the whole thing to completion.

• 50:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that reminds me, we interviewed Daniel Levitin, who, he was a musician and a neuroscientist. And he wrote a whole book on how music just manifests differently in your brain, and how anything sort of rhythmic changes what would otherwise be manifesting if it was not rhythmic, or was not serenaded by music. And fascinating.

• 50:41Heather Berlin?

  Music is really powerful, and it's related to language as well. And it's how we remember things, right? With rhythm and dance. And so, it goes very, you know, deep to our evolutionary roots as well. But the, but the thing about-

• 50:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially since every culture has some musical tradition.

• 50:55Heather Berlin?

  Yes. Yeah. And, and before we could write things down, you know, we remember things with song, right? Song and rhyme and rhythm. And so, you know, I, I think it's deep in sort of our subcortical parts of our brain. And like I said, the prefrontal cortex is important for certain things. And some people who are too under controlled, they need more control. They need more prefrontal cortex function. And others need less to actually do their best.

• 51:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, our, our guy, Alex, would you say, because he was very comfortable in himself, it was balanced for whatever his desires and needs were. But for someone else, it could put their life at risk?

• 51:29Heather Berlin?

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you're too much of a risk taker, without the training, you know, that's dangerous. If you overthink too much, though, on the other end of the spectrum, that can be dangerous too. And that also leads to anxiety. So, you know, the difference between fear is that something is in your present moment, and it triggers this whole neurological response.

• 51:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually happening.

• 51:49Heather Berlin?

  It's actually happening. Anxiety is just- Anticipation of a future threat.

• 51:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:54Heather Berlin?

  It's fully cognitive.

• 51:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 51:56Heather Berlin?

  And certain people who are just obsessing and thinking and worrying all the time, that's not adaptive. You gotta train them to actually turn that, that part of their brain down.

• 52:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, do you put all this, did you put all this, I heard rumor, I heard tell, you put all this together in a TED Talk?

• 52:11Heather Berlin?

  I, yes.

• 52:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what was the title of the TED Talk?

• 52:13Heather Berlin?

  The TED Talk is related to, it's similar, the book I'm working on as well. It's The Fine Art of Losing Control.

• 52:19Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 52:20Heather Berlin?

  And it's about how to control the dial, how to turn it up when you need it and turn it down.

• 52:26Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 52:26Heather Berlin?

  So gaining control by letting go in a controlled way.

• 52:30Chuck Nice?

  See, my book would be called The Hot Mess of Losing Control.

• 52:37Gary O'Reilly?

  When you say about dialing up, dialing down, if you have certain areas of the brain, you were talking about the hippocampus that was damaged in one patient, is there a way to circumnavigate that you as a person can control yourself with a dial up, dial down sort of scenario?

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you need professional help. That's why you have to book time with her on her couch.

• 52:55Gary O'Reilly?

  He wasn't talking about me.

• 52:57Chuck Nice?

  I'm asking for a friend.

• 52:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, exactly.

• 53:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Someone I know, I've heard of.

• 53:01Gary O'Reilly?

  He looks a lot like.

• 53:04Heather Berlin?

  There, there are techniques to, that you can, you can learn how to basically control your brain. Once you understand how it works, then we can figure out ways to control it. And everybody's brain is slightly different, right? So it's like everyone's brain is like a thumbprint. So some people need more of one thing, some people need more of another. Some people, like I said, need more control that, so we have to turn up the prefrontal cortex and there are techniques to do that. Some people need less and we have to train them how to turn it down. So they have, it can be less fearful and less anxious.

• 53:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, in terms of up and down, I, I was once at a funeral of a 17-year-old kid who died of brain cancer. And I played with him once when I was just a child, but he was a family, there was a family friend. So I went to the funeral in a, in a, in a church with an organ playing and then they brought the busloads of kids from the high school and they were weeping as they're holding each other, very, very sad. And I started welling up and I said, I don't know this, I don't, I don't know this kid. I played with him when I was three. So why am I crying? I'm crying because everybody else is crying, but I don't know him. And then I did the math on how many people die every day in the city versus how many people are born. And I just sucked back up the tears and I watched it anthropologically.

• 54:11Chuck Nice?

  Damn, that's cold-blooded.

• 54:14Heather Berlin?

  It's interesting getting insight into how your mind.

• 54:17Gary O'Reilly?

  We're not gonna get in Alex's brain, now we're in yours.

• 54:20Chuck Nice?

  Hey, you should've just cried.

• 54:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I just, I rationalize, I don't mind crying, but I want a reason for it, not just because everybody else is.

• 54:29Heather Berlin?

  Everybody has different defense mechanisms, and one of them is rationalization. I mean, not that this is a bad thing, I mean, it could be very adaptive.

• 54:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 54:38Heather Berlin?

  It's adaptive, you know, in certain contexts, that's why the brain evolved these mechanisms, right? To be able to sort of, you know, rationalize your way out of it, or intellectualize your way out of certain trauma, let's say.

• 54:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know how this manifested? September 11th, I'm four blocks from the collapsed buildings, there are people, adults, weeping, carrying their kids to safety, and I'm completely in control. And I go, I gotta get my kid, he's there, let's load up the supplies, come out, and so...

• 55:05Heather Berlin?

  It's adaptive to be able to be in control when emotions are heightened, and to train yourself, I mean, I don't, you know, maybe there were things that you've done in the past that allow you to have gotten to that place.

• 55:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Chuck Nice?

  And what about this, because I'm just the opposite? I am very, I am great in a crisis, but I think it's because I've actually experienced a lot of trauma.

• 55:29Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 55:30Chuck Nice?

  I'm serious.

• 55:31Heather Berlin?

  Right. No, no, but you've trained yourself that it's a situation in which you, it's almost like this, you know, micro risks or micro fear, like, micro, over trauma, over time, you start to habituate.

• 55:42Gary O'Reilly?

  You've expanded your comfort zone, so normally what might stress you 10 years ago, you've had that much experience now, when it falls within that space, that's your comfort zone.

• 55:50Heather Berlin?

  This is to say, though, I'm not, I'm not saying trauma is a good thing.

• 55:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody get traumatized.

• 55:55Heather Berlin?

  Too much trauma is not good, and that can lead to PTSD and all sorts of things.

• 55:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, believe me.

• 56:00Heather Berlin?

  But the opposite of that, you know, coddling, you know, there's, if you protect your children too much from any kind of feeling of being uncomfortable, that's actually not a good thing, and that can lead to more anxiety and inability to be able to cope in a, you know, a threatening situation.

• 56:13Chuck Nice?

  It also leads to your kids saying stuff like, "F you, Carol," you know.

• 56:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we gotta land this plane. Do you have just some final reflective thoughts on what power we have over our own risk-taking?

• 56:29Heather Berlin?

  We all have much more control than we think we have. And I think it's really powerful to imbue yourself with that knowledge that you can actually make changes and you can improve, let's say, if you're afraid of things. Like, there's science behind it, and it works. People can overcome fears. That being said, as much as, you know, being able to control your brain and yourself is can be really important and empowering, it's also just as important to be able to let go sometimes and stop thinking and just be.

• 57:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 57:03Heather Berlin?

  And just have acceptance and be present and let go of control.

• 57:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Party! Time to party!

• 57:08Heather Berlin?

  I don't think that was Heather's message.

• 57:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. I'm sorry. Maybe I heard something I wasn't saying.

• 57:14Heather Berlin?

  I don't know. I'd say "party," but just, like, don't overdo it.

• 57:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Heather, will you come back when your book comes out?

• 57:18Heather Berlin?

  Absolutely.

• 57:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Excellent. You're our conduit to the neuroscience universe.

• 57:23Heather Berlin?

  I love that.

• 57:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 57:25Heather Berlin?

  Put that on my business card.

• 57:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for coming back to StarTalk.

• 57:29Heather Berlin?

  Thanks for having me.

• 57:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Gary. Always a pleasure. That's another wrap for StarTalk's special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking up.