Going Deeper with Joseph Gordon-Levitt

What do you dream of while working on Inception? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt to explore time travel, dreams, and the science and philosophy behind his projects.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have an encounter with your future self. And this seems to break some, some time travel, uh, rules. I'm, I'm thinking to myself. Are there time travel rules? Okay, go, go ahead, Stan. You got me.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And for this episode, we're featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Oh my gosh. If, if you, if you, if you were to make a list of actors that like did really cool, mind bending movie roles, there he is at the top of that list. Joe, welcome to StarTalk, dude. I don't know if the listeners can see the smile on my face, but hearing that come out of you is very flattering, sir. Thank you.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I mean, generally people are best known as actors, but you're also a director, producer, writer, and you enter a bunch of other stuff we're going to get to in a few minutes. Great. But just recently, in recent years, you were, uh, in the trial of the Chicago Seven. I remember that. Well, my gosh, what a, that was an intense film that was. Yeah. And, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you were, you were a Gotham police detective in Dark Knight. Yes, sir. Many people think that was the best Batman movie of them all. I mean, it's among mine, definitely. Chris Nolan is hard to beat. It's true. Yeah, it is. It totally is.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And most recently, you are in the Pinocchio animated feature as Tell Me Who You Are. I'm Jiminy Cricket, man. That's gotta be the coolest role if you had to pick one. Nobody wants to be Pinocchio. Totally.

• 1:57Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I'm the conscience of Pinocchio. I know I couldn't. That was one of those moments when, when the director, Robert Zemeckis, who you know, he directed like Back to the Future.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, of course. Oh, my gosh.

• 2:07Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I did another movie with him a few years ago called The Walk. And when he called me and, and told me about thinking of me to play Jiminy Cricket, that was one of those life moments.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You jump at it. You jump at it.

• 2:19Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  It must have been, you know, whatever mistakes I've made, it's all good if I'm here and he's offering me this. So thank, thank the Lord.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I'm also tickled because I didn't even know this would be ever be something we could declare. But you have portrayed two famous people in movies, each of whom we have had as guests on StarTalk.

• 2:44Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Okay, wait. So it's probably not Robert Tad Lincoln, because he's dead. See, that would be Philippe Petit and Edward Snowden, I would guess.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally. We had Philippe Petit and talked all about his famous walk between the Twin Towers. And also Ed Snowden. We had an interview with him in his, in his moving bot. There's some, he's on a computer.

• 3:07Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  The snowbot.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The snowbot. Oh, it's on Snowbot. There it is. Yeah. He was totally in my office. I get to say he was in my office. His spirit energy was there. So it's a little freaky to have you here who played both of those characters. One other point is you, especially for our listeners who are strong on the geek spectrum.

• 3:26Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Sure. Sure. Me too.

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To have been in two movies that just kind of leave your brain a little scrambled, or a lot scrambled. Inception, Christopher Nolan again. Oh, by the way, we've had Christopher Nolan as a guest.

• 3:39Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Oh, you have?

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. That was fun. That was totally fun. And of course, Looper as a time travel assassin. And so, so I just wanted to lay out that landscape before we sort of take this one by one. And I just want to thank you for coming on to the program.

• 3:55Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Oh, thank you. I'm feeling great about myself right now. I needed that, Neil. Thanks.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Um, let's start out with, with Looper. It seems to me, by the way, who, tell me who directed and wrote that?

• 4:07Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That's Ryan Johnson, who, who are, for those on the geek spectrum that you're talking about, made the most controversial and in my opinion, best, yeah, I'm going to say it, the best Star Wars film, The Last Jedi. Um, Ryan Johnson, who who also made Knives Out and Glass Onion that just came out. I was in his first movie called Brick and then his third movie called Looper.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got you. So you're in his, you're on his list is what that sounds like.

• 4:31Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I'm actually technically in all of his movies. I, in the ones that I'm not in with a bigger part, I have like tiny cameos.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, um, in Looper, it doesn't seem to so much concern itself with, and it, it, how do I characterize it? So let me just give the, the plot line. You are an assassin who kills bad guys who was sent into the past, thereby disappearing from the future. And then you kill them and dispose of their bodies. So they're basically wiped off the face of the earth. Yeah. Anyone in the future would know or concern. And then you confront yourself as someone you're supposed to kill, uh, brilliantly played by Bruce Willis. And then there's an issue there about whether you kill your future self or not. And that's all I'll say about it in case anyone hasn't seen it.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But my point is you have an encounter with your future self. And this seems to break some, some time travel, uh, rules. I'm, I'm thinking to myself.

• 5:34Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Are there time travel rules?

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, okay, go, go ahead, stop. You got me.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joe, I thought I could pass that through you, but I couldn't.

• 5:44Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  No, but I'm actually, I'm curious to ask you. Cause I'm a fan of time travel movies. So, you know, like I mentioned Back to the Future or, you know, whatever you wanna talk about Quantum Leap. I was in an episode of Quantum Leap when I was 10 years old. The old ones got back. Um, but.

• 6:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And wait a minute, wait, wait, wait. And weren't you, forgive me, weren't you in, in Third Rock?

• 6:06Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my God, yes, that's right.

• 6:09Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Speaking of a cosmic perspective, right? That's.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Third Rock from the Sun with.

• 6:13Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That's right.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I just, just remember that, right? It's not in my notes here. So I, I, I just remembered that. So you've been at this for a while.

• 6:21Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Oh, I've been doing this a long time.

• 6:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Feeling good about this. Okay. So, so, uh, I don't know if there's a rule. We'll have to ask some of our time travel.

• 6:30Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Would, would that kind of thing be possible? I mean, is there any, any indication in any serious science to say that a human could travel from one? Place in the time continuum and end up in a different place intact with their same human body and brain and.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think there's not, that itself is not the problem. The, the problem comes about with, as they say, the grandfather paradox. Right? Where you go back and you prevent your grandfather from meeting your grandmother, or in a Terminator version of that, you kill your grandfather. So that you're never born to be sent back in time.

• 7:06Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yep.

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To meet your grandfather. Okay. Or, or some, so there's a paradoxical loop problem.

• 7:14Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yes.

• 7:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, uh, that Stephen Hawking thinks there was not, there is no solution to it at all, that we will discover a new time travel conjecture that will prevent backwards time travel in that way. And there are a couple of scenarios and there's another one.

• 7:29Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Wait, when you say a conjecture, you mean that there'll be some kind of evidence or kind of mathematically backed, uh, statement that says this is actually impossible, it'll never happen?

• 7:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stephen Hawking believed that we would one day derive either mathematically or experimentally that conjecture. Just so as to prevent the grandfather paradox from unfolding.

• 7:53Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Right.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, but what was, what's, what intrigues me is in Looper, you met your future self thirty years hence.

• 8:03Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yes.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And had conversations with that person. And that's just, I don't, I don't know if that's allowed. That's all I'm saying.

• 8:11Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't know what to say.

• 8:14Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely not allowed. And look at that, we did it anyway.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we, we got.

• 8:20Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  No, but I mean, there's, there, there was actually, there was a scene, there's a great scene, one of my favorite scenes in the movie, where my character and Bruce Willis's character, who, like you're saying, are supposed to be the same man, just younger and older version of the same man, they sit down at a diner together and talk. And there was a version of the script. Where the older man explains some of the mechanics of the time travel. Probably in a, you know, in, in terms that Stephen Hawking would deem serious. But at least in terms that felt necessary to the story in that draft of the script.

• 9:06Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  But later, Ryan, in what I think is a wise move, decided to cut all of that out. And there's just a line now where Bruce Willis kind of gets prickly and angry and says, we're not going to talk about time travel. Oh, okay. So, all right. So you leave it more to us to try to think about it. I mean, it's interesting, you know, this gets into sort of the, the theory of what is science fiction? And what's the purpose of science fiction? And is Looper even a science fiction story? Certainly it gets categorized as sci-fi. And I think in, in Hollywood entertainment, anything that involves a kind of quote unquote future gets categorized as sci-fi. I mean, Star Wars gets categorized as sci-fi.

• 9:51Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  There's no science to any of the kind of magical fantastical things that happen in Star Wars. It just gets categorized as sci-fi. When I say that, when I say that, I get crucified when I say there's no science in Star Wars. So I'm glad someone, a full up actor gets to declare that as well. Yeah, but it's a, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's an aesthetic of, it should be called like, you know, futuristic fantasy. Yeah, yeah, some other genre. I mean, some people call it science fantasy, even like they call, they call, you know, the Lord of the Rings or the Sword of Shannara. Or, you know, these kinds of fantasy, these D and D magic gathering books that I used to read when I was a teenager. They call them science fantasy, but there's certainly no science to Gandalf. They're like, it's just sort of words that entertainment, this is the world of entertainment.

• 10:36Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And this is why I'm like so thrilled to talk to you because like I live in this world of entertainment where words don't mean a damn thing. They're just like words. Yeah, strung together, strung together in lines, right? Okay. And so, I mean, look, I think Looper is a brilliant story and it has a lot of very true things to say about, about age, about what it means to get older, about what it means to reckon with your past, the moral decisions that you've made. And whether you think you've been a good person, a bad person, whether you think you've done the right thing or done the wrong thing? And what can be done to try to rectify that? Um, I think there's a lot of very true things to say about that.

• 11:17Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Time travel is a, a fun and um, really cinematic device to tell that story. But I don't think it has anything to do with how time physically works.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I think the, the out that the movie gives itself is the whole concept of the loop is there's a point where they send back you

• 11:44Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Uh huh.

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For you to kill your future self. And at that point, you have thirty years until you're gonna die and then you're released from this assassin's crowd. And, and that closes it off, right? It so that's

• 11:58Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Close the loop.

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a tidy knot placed

• 12:01Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  It's very tidy. That's the thing. It's like if you, if you leave aside the science part of the science fiction, it's an impeccable work of fiction.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it is.

• 12:10Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're tied off from the timeline and then, then, and you get to live thirty years with a bunch of money for having killed the people you did. So

• 12:18Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Of course, that's not exactly how it turns out.

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no.

• 12:21Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Spoiler alert. Yeah, I won't tell you what does happen.

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 12:25Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  It's a great ending, actually.

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, so we're all, uh, I wanna say my people are proud of you for participating in films like that and just

• 12:32Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Okay.

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  at least, uh, grocking the concepts of it.

• 12:37Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And understanding that it's, that it's nonsense. Well, in terms of the science, that there's absolutely none there.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the idea that they cut out the pedantic explanation for how the time works. Uh huh. I actually applaud that. I would have enjoyed it if I saw, seen it, but without it, I don't miss it. And I'll tell you why.

• 12:58Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, I was watching The Blues Brothers Director's Cut.

• 13:01Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Okay.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a scene that was, did not make the original release.

• 13:06Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Uh huh.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's where they park their car.

• 13:09Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Okay.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the car that just is, the car does weird, magical things until the very end when it completely collapses outside of the, the tax assessor's office. So that this is, this is like Only for Blues Brothers fans, you're gonna care about what I'm about to say.

• 13:27Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I know the car you're talking about, yeah.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, it's a car and they park it near a nuclear power plant. That's just where they park it, alright, and then they go into their apartment. And so, they, they, they thought that that would allow you to give it some cause, some mechanism for having the powers that it did. But, but in the end, when they took it out, all he had to say was, "We're on a mission from God." Boom. You don't need anymore, you don't need physics, you're on a mission from God. So, no, I just thought that-

• 14:04Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That feels more honest, actually.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It feels more honest, exactly. And, you know, just let it be, let the story be what it is. And if you try to over explain it, you can end up derailing the, the magic of what is trying to be conveyed. So, I, I, I'm, I'm a, I embrace the fact that they removed that scene for, for what that's worth.

• 14:23Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I appreciate it. As, as an authoritative scientist, that's a good seal of approval for Luper to have.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to take a quick break, but when we come back, more of my conversation with Joseph Gordon-Levitt on StarTalk.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We now return to my one-on-one conversation with actor, producer, director- Joseph Gordon-Levitt. So now on to, on to inception. Oh my gosh. We, I was, I was with it until you went into the head of the dream of the person in the head.

• 15:30Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you go too deep? How many, how many deep did you go at one point?

• 15:34Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Oh, man, it's been a while since I've reviewed this, but uh.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was like two or three deep.

• 15:39Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, I think there are three layers.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, and each layer, they just made something up. Each layer, time passes at one tenth the speed of the previous layer.

• 15:49Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're two layers in, it's one one hundredth.

• 15:51Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 15:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a fun invented thing that's will become part of canon now.

• 15:55Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do it, why not let that be the case?

• 15:58Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Sure.

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 15:59Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  There's something to it, right? Like, I mean, I've definitely found this is far from scientific, but when I'm having a dream, I could be asleep on the couch and in real life, only a few minutes goes by. But in my dream, it seemed like I just had a whole adventure.

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right, right, right, right. So because your brain just goes whatever pace it wants to go, right?

• 16:24Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  My hunch is that it's very plastic. And obviously this is anecdotal, so I'd be curious to hear what an expert has to say. And I, I'd imagine that the expert will say, well, we don't know exactly yet. You know, there's still a lot to learn about the human brain, but, um, but my, my experience, whether with dreams, I also had an experience, not to get too tangential, but I, I once did a psychedelic drug called DMT.

• 16:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:52Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And uh, my experience was in objective life, I know something like five minutes.

• 17:02Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  But my subjective experience.

• 17:06Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Was completely outside of time and space and felt like I was experiencing something like infinite time, if, you know, or eons, or like I, and, and so my hunch is that the brain's subjective experience of time can be pretty, uh, wonky, can be pretty plastic.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I guess an interesting question was, does anyone ever go to sleep in their dreams and then have a dream? Has that, has that ever, because that's exactly kind of what your story is of inception, right?

• 17:42Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, I feel like I have had a dream like that.

• 17:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't ever remember going to sleep in my dreams. I don't remember doing that.

• 17:48Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Wait, I'm trying to remember, because I have, I've, I, when I was in the middle of doing inception, I was obviously focused a lot more on this, but I, I, I remember two different times in my life where I've had a lucid dream.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  My understanding, definition of a lucid dream is.

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't know the difference.

• 18:05Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  You can know you're dreaming while you're dreaming.

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's, oh, okay.

• 18:09Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And that almost never happens to me.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay.

• 18:12Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  There's two different times where I believe it has happened. One of the times was, um, while I was shooting inception. They say that it's more prone to happen if you have it on your mind a lot. If you're spending a lot of your waking time thinking about dreams, it makes sense that it'll be, you'll be more likely, uh, it'll be more likely to occur to you while you're dreaming, like, oh, hey, maybe I'm dreaming. And I do, I remember something, my memory is, is patchy of the dream, but it had to do with waking up and a bed, like, the most vivid, uh, visual memory I have of the dream was like the bed that I was just sleeping in. And so I had some kind of notion that I was

• 18:53Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  dreaming and it had to do with sleeping and I, so there was that. And then the other lucid dream I had, I didn't go to sleep in it, but I, um, It also was very inception related. Again, when it's on your mind, you're more prone to think of it. It was when inception was just coming out. So everyone was talking about it. I was talking about it a lot, etc. And I was, it was during a nap. I was working on something else. I was napping in between shots. And I had a dream that it literally started very similarly to a scene of that is in inception. I was like running down a hallway.

• 19:32Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And, and I realized, oh, wait, I'm dreaming. I can control this. And, and, and I had that realization. And the first thing I thought was like, okay, if I'm dreaming, I can do anything. Let's have incredible sex right now. And that, that just didn't work. And I started to wake up. And I was like, okay, no, wait, no, don't, don't wake up, don't wake up. Okay. I give up the sex. It's fine. And then I remember, I was like, maybe I don't, I can't control it, but I still just want to see what happens in this dream. And I got to the end of the hallway and then I was in like a bit, it was, it turned really mundane. I was in some kind of big mattress store. And like shopping for mattresses.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, what a waste.

• 20:14Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I know, I know. But there was one weird thing about it was like, there was some kind of weird, we could like float and like do the kind of like flips and somersaults you do when you're in a pool. We were just doing that in the air at the mattress store.

• 20:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 20:29Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  But then I was like, yeah, see, we're dreaming. Here I am dreaming. This is happening. Wow. Crazy.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So I think the lesson here is Joe, you're not supposed to get that much into the character.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's my motivation? That dream I just had?

• 20:46Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Mattresses.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have to explain something to me because I just didn't understand it and I didn't see the movie twice, but I probably should have.

• 20:56Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Okay, I'll try.

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was the point of the little dreidel top thing? What was that? The meaning of this?

• 21:02Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, it's, I like that you called it a dreidel. You're talking to a nice Jewish boy here.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 21:07Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, the top, the spinning top. Well, so they call it a totem in the movie and everyone kind of has their own. And it's a, a device that you have that you try to use to tell whether or not you're dreaming.

• 21:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how does, why would the top know this?

• 21:25Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Uh, it's, I don't think it's so much that the top knows. It's that if, if the top just spins and spins and spins and spins and never falls. That's, that's sort of you doing that. You must be dreaming, you know, they're, they're like, there are other, there are other um, more normal or uh, I guess, traditional ways that people try to determine that they're dreaming. Like, one is try to pick up a book or read something. If, if you're in a dream and you're wondering, am I dreaming? If you can manage to pick up a book and look at the pages, uh, it'll, it'll indicate whether you're dreaming or not because it's very difficult for a dreaming brain to actually produce the text that would be in a book.

• 22:08Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  So the, the, the book will be just kind of gibberish and that's a sign that you're dreaming. Another one is like, just to look at a, a clock or a watch. It usually, it's, it's, it's mumbo jumbo if you're dreaming.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, it's interesting. So you're trying to create tangible realities that reality does trivially and your brain would have to work hard at it.

• 22:31Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah. And for, and, and so in inception, everybody has a certain personal device that they use to try to trust.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 22:38Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  If you're losing track of, wait, am I dreaming or is this reality? You have your totem that you've kind of trained yourself to know. I spin this top and if it falls, I know I'm in reality. And if it doesn't fall, I know I'm dreaming.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 22:52Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That's why there's the spinning top.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were testing the laws of physics that, okay.

• 22:56Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But basically, dream, dream physics would be different from real physics.

• 23:00Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That's right.

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it comes down to.

• 23:01Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That's right, yes. Because in dream physics, your mind is the one that's making it happen, not the actual laws of physics.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly, exactly. All right, so one, one other movie, just I want to bring to the front here. You are the voice of Jiminy Cricket.

• 23:16Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yes, sir.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's gotta be the dream role of them all. So now, I, I gotta level with you. I read the original Pinocchio.

• 23:25Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  The original Pinocchio.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The original by Collodi.

• 23:28Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  From like a hundred years ago or something.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, correct.

• 23:32Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  In Italian, right?

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was. I've read an English translation.

• 23:36Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Okay, alright. I was gonna be impressed, but.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I don't know how many people know that Jiminy Cricket like dies in the second chapter of the book.

• 23:49Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, the cricket. Yeah, in, in the original, he's not, and he's not Jiminy Cricket, I don't think. He's just a cricket.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's cricket. And, and he is, he is Pinocchio's conscience, because Pinocchio is this bad boy, and he doesn't do anything right, doesn't listen to any adult advice, and Jiminy Cricket is trying to guide him along. And what I read there was, in the, in the story, Pinocchio gets so angry with him, he throws his shoe, the cricket's on the wall, throws his shoe at it, and smears the cricket on the wall. End of Jiminy Cricket. And the whole rest of the story continues. So Disney is so lying to us with that original movie. Now, forgive me, I've yet to see your current project with, with, with Pinocchio. So how close to the original story is it?

• 24:37Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  There are no boots thrown. No, it's, it's, it's an adaptation of the Disney version of, of Pinocchio, not the original, you know. I mean, but it's true, like, this is something I like to think about a lot, is what, what's really original? You know, because Cinderella, that's also not originated with Disney, or Aladdin, or, you know, some Beauty and the Beast, these all go back. And, uh, and Shakespeare didn't write the first version of Romeo and Juliet.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I didn't know that. Okay.

• 25:07Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And Judy Garland wasn't in the original version of The Wizard of Oz. It's, there were, there were earlier versions, you know. And so, I don't know, I, to me, originality is almost a myth. Like, everything that any artist creates is.

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Came from something else.

• 25:25Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Drawing so heavily on so many influences that, uh, and, and to me, there's nothing wrong with that. That doesn't make it any less valuable. And to me, what I look for more is. Is the artist saying something honest? Are they doing it in a heartfelt way? Are they saying something, you know, clever or funny or whatever? These things. Original is just, it's really hard to say what exactly is original.

• 25:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I may echo that in the world of science, there are many in technology. There are many things, oh, this is the first this done by this person burning the midnight oil overnight and it's eureka. And it's like never that. It's like hardly ever that. And I think we want that to be true. And so we force narratives to match it. But yeah, there's always something that came before the something else. And I don't think we give enough credit for that.

• 26:19Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, that's, that's really true.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I agree with you entirely.

• 26:22Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Well, it makes a better story if there's a singular hero at the center of the story that you can valorize, right?

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 26:29Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  In fact, any given great invention or any given movie that's, you know, we, we talk about, like we were talking about Christopher Nolan and Inception. Obviously, he was amazing, but he'll be the first to say he had a whole great, enormous team of people that all helped to make that movie and those collaborators get, you know.

• 26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, when, when we interviewed him, he spent 10 minutes talking about 2001 A Space Odyssey.

• 26:53Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how influential that was on him when he was a kid.

• 26:56Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Exactly.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so yeah, that's very, I, I like you say it's honest and our urge to valorize makes maybe a better story, but it's not the better truth. Right? So this is a fascinating reality.

• 27:08Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I really, I admire the scientific community for, at least in principle, and I'm sure this doesn't always happen in practice, being less about the, the ego of, look at me, look at me and more about, hey, we're trying to drive the truth. It might take lots of us, you know, someone's going to conduct a study and their findings are gonna, you know, not necessarily be the bullseye, but the fact that they covered that ground then helps the next person find the bullseye maybe a generation later or whatever. I, I just think that's really admirable, that kind of team playership.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not enough people even know to think that way. So I'm glad to, it counts you among those who, who appreciate that moving frontier of science.

• 27:53Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Hmm.

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take our second and final break, but when we return, more of my conversation with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, continuing my conversation with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. So dude, you've done other things. Tell me about what is HitRecordMedia? What is that?

• 28:23Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  So HitRecord is an online community that I started with my brother many, many years ago. It started as just because I, well, I've been acting ever since I was six years old. When I was 19, I quit acting and go to college. And when I wanted to get back into it, I couldn't get a part. No one would cast me in any roles. And that was painful as hell.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I had any power, I would have cast you, just knowing you were in Third Rock From The Sun. That would have been sufficient.

• 28:54Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Well, that's part of it is I, so I mean, I loved being on Third Rock From The Sun. But I also like, what I wanted to do was, you know, a movie that would play at Sundance. I wanted to do something different than what I'd been doing, you know? And the thing is Hollywood isn't great, I mean, look, the human race isn't great, at thinking outside the box and thinking people can do something different than what they've done before. And, and so it was very difficult to convince anybody to cast me in a movie that would play at Sundance. Ryan Johnson, who we've talked about, was one of the first ones to do it. And his movie, Brick, went to Sundance. But, um, but the pain and kind of humiliation of wanting so badly

• 29:38Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  to make my art, to express myself, to do my thing, and not getting to do it, sent me into this sort of introspective journey. And I came out thinking, okay, I can't wait around for someone else to cast me. I've got to take responsibility for my own creativity. And that's when I came up with this little turn of phrase, which at the time was just my own kind of self motivational mantra to hit record. Like, I'm gonna be the one to push the button. And, you know, like pushing that record button on a, on a camcorder or on a, you know, on any kind of recording device. And it was, of course, a bit of wordplay,

• 30:18Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  too, with hit record and hit record. Because I also, you know, felt like, you know, the media was and continues to change. And a hit record is sort of something from the old media, back when media was an object that people would buy. And I saw then, and some of this has come to pass, and some of it hasn't, I saw then, like, the media's gonna change. Instead of it being objects that people buy, it's gonna be more of an activity that people do. And so changing hit record to hit record, like, you be the one, you be the one to push a button. And, uh, and so that's, that's how it started.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is brilliant. I, I can't tell you, and I'm not even in your world, except for some very brief cameos. Um, I don't want to brag, but I have a cameo in Sharknado six. Okay. I think, I think the Academy overlooked my performance that year.

• 31:17Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That was quite a flex.

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, people in the, can you tell that?

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I think about this all the time, Joe, that you can have, you can be a talented actor, but you're passively waiting around for some opportunity that could be the opportunity of a lifetime, or it could go to somebody else. And so you're not in control of the access the public has to your talent. And so that explained to me why so many actors are also becoming producers and directors. And, and I add more power to them. It shouldn't just be a one guild, um, universe.

• 31:54Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, that's usually when, whenever anybody asks me, hey, I want to be an actor. I, I love it. I want to do it. What, what's your advice? Sort of my first piece of advice is don't just act. Don't wait around for someone to cast you and, and say like, oh, I'm, I'm only an actor. Like, learn how to write, learn how to shoot, learn how to edit. Make friends, make things, make stuff yourself. Don't, don't just wait around.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. That's, that's it. That's entirely it.

• 32:21Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And that, that's what HitRecord was. So I, I just started making a bunch of my, uh, my own little things, videos and songs and stories and stuff. And I put them on a website that my brother helped me set up called HitRecord. And, uh,

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your brother is, your brother?

• 32:35Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  My brother Dan.

• 32:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dan, okay.

• 32:37Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, who, who sadly is, is, uh, died 12 years ago.

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.

• 32:42Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  So, so HitRecord continues for me to be a way that I, I get to feel connected with him too.

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, very good.

• 32:47Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And there's still a lot of his, um, dare I say, spirit in HitRecord community. Because what, what happened was this community started.

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could also say there's some of his DNA in the.

• 32:59Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, well, there's definitely, there's some of his code.

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's like the spiritual side and the scientific side, right?

• 33:04Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can say his spirit energy or his DNA.

• 33:06Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Both of them mean exactly the same thing.

• 33:09Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the listener.

• 33:10Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Oh, that's interesting. Do you think spirit and DNA mean exactly the same thing?

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the way you were using it, I think it does.

• 33:15Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  But does, what, is there really his DNA in, in HitRecord?

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no.

• 33:18Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Like I said, it's me. I, I, I share some of his DNA with my brothers.

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Literally then, yes, we're, we're totally correct.

• 33:24Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but you have this interest in, um, education as well.

• 33:29Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we have met in this way because you got involved with MasterClass.

• 33:36Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That's exactly right.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did a MasterClass, which that, that's, that's some high-profile teaching I was doing there. Because they, with the budget they put at the production values and, and the talent that they acquire for it and, and how they package it, it's a real professional outfit. And then I learned that you're engaged with them. Tell, tell me how that happened. What, what's your role?

• 33:58Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, so the, the mission of HitRecord was, and I'll, I'll kind of connect the dots here, was always, you know, it, it started as a way for me to find my own creativity. It evolved into this community where lots of people were helping each other find their creativity. And that's what we were always sort of trying to stimulate. And we would do these various collaborative projects and be like, hey, we're gonna make a show or we're gonna make a book or we're gonna make a record and we can all do it together. And we made all kinds of things that way. Um, and, uh, and then a couple of years ago, we realized, hey, if, if our goal is to try to help people find their creative selves, maybe the most direct way to accomplish the goal is to just teach. Let's teach the creative skills that people need. And so we started working on that and using our platform to teach. And we launched, uh, like a learning thing called Class Projects last year.

• 34:44Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And meanwhile, I was friends with David Roget, who's the CEO of MasterClass. And he saw what we were doing and he was like, wow, this is really great what you're doing. Maybe we could join forces. And so that's, that's what we've done. And so now a bunch of us, you know, the HitRecord team, we, we work under MasterClass. And, and we're sort of bringing our experience in, in community and online interactivity and creativity and content creation to MasterClass and doing some fun stuff.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, by magnifying the entire enterprise, which is, which is a brilliant concept.

• 35:15Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Well, I mean, and it goes back to my brother, because the thing that he always talked about on HitRecord was you don't have to consider yourself the type of person who makes art in order to make art. Like, he was a shy guy growing up. He was a software engineer. He never considered himself the type of guy to make art. And he made a conscious decision at some point in his life, said, I don't want to be like that. I could, I could make art. And he got into photography and he got into fire spinning and he became this like really extroverted, swashbuckling, adventurous guy. And, and so on HitRecord, what he would always do before he died, and this is the early days

• 35:56Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  of the community, was he was always looking for people not like the, the accomplished artists, but the people who weren't yet accomplished artists, the people who wanted to do it but didn't feel like they could, who he identified with because he had that moment of being like, I, you know.

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This, this was the life goal of any good teacher. Oh my gosh.

• 36:16Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  There you go.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're describing, you know, I, I can't tell you how, I don't want to say I'm annoyed by it, but I'm not enchanted and I get a phone call from a parent, said, oh, could you meet my kid? There, there's straight A's in school. I'm saying, I don't need, bring the person who's about to fail or the person who's struggling who needs some encouragement. That's who I want to see, not the person who's already floating through, through everything. So the people who are not yet discovered. Uh, that's who I I value as my contribution to what I can put out there. Sounds like exactly what you're doing. But you also write, produce and star in a movie where you play a schoolteacher.

• 36:53Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That's right. Yes, yes. In the show, Mr. Corman.

• 36:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who is Mr. Corman?

• 36:58Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Well, Mr. Corman was a show that I made um where I was sort of imagining. I was sort of imagining my life if if certain things had gone differently. Uh, just it came from honestly arriving at at kind of a place of adulthood where I I'm a dad now and I've found my life partner and I love her so much and I'm so grateful for so many things of getting to have my my family and my work and things like that. And and thinking, man, so much of that could have gone differently. And it wouldn't have even been my fault, like just luck could have gone differently. And um and Mr. Corman was sort of an expansion of that thought experiment of what if I hadn't

• 37:43Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  been lucky to the point of finding my life partner? Or what if I hadn't, you know, what if I was my my work as an artist hadn't yielded a professional career? It could just easily have not. I mean, I really think making money as an artist, earning a living that way, a lot of it comes down to luck. And, you know, have I worked hard? Sure, but a lot of people work hard and they don't end up, you know, earning their living as an artist. It's it's a it's a crap shoot. And and so I I just came up with uh started coming up with this character of like, okay, what would I do then if if luck hadn't gone towards me making a living as an actor and an entertainer? What would I have done?

• 38:26Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  One of the things I admire the most in the world is uh is teaching and teachers. I've had I've had a lot of teachers in my life who've made such an impact on me. And I I feel like teachers are just super undervalued. I if I if I could wave a magic wand and try to make the world a better place, one of the things I would do would be like, cool, teachers all make quarter million dollars basement yearly. And and it goes up from there. And you know, what if that was what we rewarded in our society instead of rewarding, you know, investment banking and, you know, speculative blah, blah, blah? Why couldn't we do that?

• 39:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:06Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  And so I wanted to do something about that. And I ended up writing a show about a teacher.

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, where can we find that? Because I'd not heard of it until I dug it up.

• 39:16Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Oh, yeah, it's on it's on Apple TV plus.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apple TV plus, OK, excellent. Well, thanks for thanks for that tip.

• 39:22Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So any particular school influences you had? If you were an actor as early as age six?

• 39:29Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you were you in a special school for actors? Or were you like a regular kid who just stepped out to, you know, to do your thing?

• 39:37Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I was some of both. So and this is a big credit to my parents. Because it is more convenient and it's it's easier for a working kid to just work and do kind of homeschool. But you can go to a normal school and then work. But it just takes the logistical coordination of making sure that your your teacher at work is in communication with your teacher at school. And you get all your homework and all your tests and all of that. And so my my mom, you know, God bless her, would would did all that for me. And I'm so grateful that she did that I did get to go to a normal school throughout.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So was your art teacher and was your art teacher and acting teacher better than your science teacher?

• 40:29Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  That's funny.

• 40:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you one that got away from us?

• 40:32Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I.

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just put it out there, no obligation.

• 40:35Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  It's a good question. I remember I remember one good science teacher. I remember her name was Ms. Antosian. She taught biology in like 10th grade. But even I mean, I felt like her hands are a little tied because you have to learn in this way where you're just looking at a textbook and you're memorizing the bold terms.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The bold faced terms, yeah.

• 40:57Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, it doesn't feel like I think it wasn't till later in life, kind of through my own curiosity, that I came to understand what science really is. And by the way, largely through, you know, efforts of.

• 41:13Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  You and and other communicators like you who take it upon themselves to try to step outside of the scientific community and not just speak insularly, but share the the process and the knowledge with the wider world. If not for communicators like you, I think I would understand science a lot less. So I'm I'm grateful to you for that.

• 41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I'd like to what I would infuse in what you just said is whether or not I actually taught you anything. My a bigger goal than that for me is reigniting flames of curiosity that we've all had as young children. And somehow it gets sort of worn out of us or beaten out of us through middle school. And so for you to say, when you were older, only then did you that, you know, this curiosity was still with you and you would then explore the science that when curiosity is a part of who and what you are, you become a self learner, right? You can't go to class anymore, right? You're out, you're you're an adult, you're married, you have kids, whatever.

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I'm delighted to hear that you retained a level of curiosity. Whatever role I played in that, I'm delighted to know.

• 42:31Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Well, thank you. Thank you. And that that circles back to MasterClass. That's what MasterClass is all about is like trying to help people be lifelong learners. Your MasterClass is awesome. Anybody who listens to StarTalk, I would really recommend, you know, check out the Neil deGrasse Tyson MasterClass.

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's the man who's VP of their of their.

• 42:51Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Well, you know, I'm not saying it's an unbiased perspective, but you know.

• 42:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Joe, I do this with all my guests, all my celebrity guests, and I want to ask you, is there any question you have harbored about the universe that you just never got answered? And now you are face to face with an astrophysicist. Here's your chance. I'm just saying.

• 43:14Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About anything. It could be like God, or aliens, or the Big Bang, or Pluto, wherever whatever is your fancy.

• 43:22Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Yeah, OK. I want to ask about, I mean, I think astrophysics plays into this in a way.

• 43:29Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  But it's one of those big questions. I like to get everyone's perspective on this one. And it's an old question, the whole free will question. Do we really have any actual agency? Or is it already all determined? And I don't know, my understanding when I talk to many folks who are who lean into science is, hey, it's all a chain reaction. You know, equal and opposite reaction, etc. It's all physics. One thing leads to another, leads to another, leads to another. And so all the way back to the Big Bang. It's all predetermined. And any sort of feeling you have that you're controlling your life or making decisions

• 44:14Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  is just an illusion. And of course, that's a sort of confusing or frustrating prospect. Is that what you believe, knowing what you know about how the universe works?

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not authorized to comment further.

• 44:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I can tell you this. All the neuroscientists I speak with will tell you that you have no free will, in the sense that your brain has already decided what you will do next before you have any conscious awareness of it. So it's your conscious awareness that makes you think you are deciding. But in fact, the neurochemistry of your brain is taking in all the information and making the next decision for you. So I have no reason to doubt what they're saying. But what I would say is, if we feel like we have free will, why even care about whether we don't? If the sensation is the same as having free will.

• 45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, something that might get us out of that dilemma is quantum physics. Because quantum physics is not deterministic.

• 45:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This whole thing where there's a chain of events with cause and effect that goes back to the big bang, that goes out the window with quantum physics.

• 45:33Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  The double slit.

• 45:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For example, right, yeah, the, the, the construct of reality is altered by interaction with the reality as well as the fact that the world unfold at that level probabilistically, not deterministically. So there's only a chance you're going to appear over here instead of over there. And it's been suggested that our very origin of consciousness, the very concept of a new thought is this probabilistic triggering of your neurochemistry that is a, is a, is a wonderland of, of thoughts that have no precursors at all. And so that's what I think is true and I'm sticking with it.

• 46:19Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  I like that, that I, I read once, uh, Richard Feynman said, um, if you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't understand it or something.

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, correct. That's exactly right. It's not there to understand. It's just there to be. And, and by the way, this decade is the centennial anniversary of the discovery of many of the tenets of quantum physics.

• 46:41Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

  Oh, really?

• 46:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm going to try to, try to get that out, um, into the public a little more just so they can appreciate. Cause there is no creation, storage or retrieval of information in the modern IT world without exploiting the quantum. So the quantum is with us to stay and it took decades to, to, to commercialize it, to turn it into a, something that civilization knows about and cares about. But nonetheless, that could be our out and that could be our escape clause for what we think of as free will. Free will is what goes on when quantum physics is deciding what next to happen through no cause at all. But it's not me deciding still.

• 47:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want it to be me. I want to do it. Okay, you keep thinking that. Keep thinking that. I won't stop you. Well, Joe, it's been a delight having you on. Likewise. Likewise. Thank you for having me. I'm gonna show up on a podcast you're doing with the masterclass folk. I'd look forward to that. Yes, yeah. And what a repository of folks you're gonna draw from there. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, and you're gonna be the first one. Of the first one, all right, all right. Really, really excited. Thank you. I'll try to set the bar in the right place. Good, good. And if you have any other new projects that have some fun science in it, just give us a holler. Okay. We're delighted to put you on and talk about it. And like I said, we have, we live in the geekiverse.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's a whole, as we've come to learn with Comic Con and other sort of places of organized geekdom, that this is an important force operating within our culture. The fact that, you know, hundreds of thousands of people care about this sort of thing in the same way. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah. And great to have you a part of that. Thank you so much. I'm glad to be a part of it. Really glad to meet you. All right. You've been listening to my exclusive conversation with actor, writer, producer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Hope you enjoyed it. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.