Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, Author, and Podcast Host

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of America’s best-known astrophysicists and a huge advocate for the sciences and scientific thinking. Neil has a great talent for presenting complex concepts in a clear and accessible manner, a critical aspect of his role as an educator and director of the Hayden Planetarium. In this episode, Kevin talks with Neil about his interest in the sciences and innate curiosity, how he stays up to date in pop culture, topics he explores in his book Starry Messenger, and so much more!  Neil deGrasse Tyson | StarTalk  Kevin Scott   Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott   Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts.     

. At some point, you have to say, my role model is someone I have never met and I may never meet, but I know enough about them that I want to emulate what happened in their life. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm your host, Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft.

In this podcast, we're going to get behind the tech. We'll talk with some of the people who have made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated them to create what they did. Join me to maybe learn a little bit about the history of computing and get a few behind the scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around. .

Hello and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm co-host Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub. And I'm Kevin Scott. And today we have a truly, truly exciting guest with us, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is probably the best-known astrophysicist in the world. For sure. I would challenge anyone to name an astrophysicist more famous than Neil and maybe even more important than his role as an astrophysicist. I think he's doing this unbelievably important thing that maybe has

never been more important than it is right now, which is advocating for the sciences and for scientific thinking. You know, you know, and I would argue the reason that that is so important is the world has never been more complicated. It has never been more shaped by the forces of science and engineering. And so just to be a human being in this world, like in 2023, you really do need to have some grasp of what all of this complexity is about and what it means. And having the scientific method and rationalism as a framework for helping you reason about all of this complexity, I think, is one of the most, maybe the most useful tool that we have in our arsenal to just sort of move forward as a society and as individuals. No, I couldn't agree more.

And I'm really looking forward to this conversation because as you say, I think what he does is so important, but also like he's a fun, personable guy. And I think that's why he's so successful and why it's so great that someone like him is kind of the face of a lot of these things. I think we're very lucky to have him. So I cannot wait to check out your conversation with Neil. Let's do it. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of America's best known astrophysicists and a beloved educator and advocate for the sciences. He has a great talent for presenting complex concepts in a clear and accessible manner. He's the head of the Hayden Planetarium and has been the director there since 1996. He's hosted numerous space-related TV and

radio programs, published several books, and hosts the podcast StarTalk Radio. I am thrilled to have you on the podcast today, Neal. Neal Ruffin, Jr.: Well, thanks for having me. Thank you. Why did it take you this long to invite me? I just wanted to- Neal Ruffin, Jr.: I don to know. Shame, shame, shame on me. I'm not hidden. Right. You aren't. And I will say when I started this podcast and when I wrote my book and I started doing this very uncomfortable thing for me, which is trying to talk more about technology in the public, you were literally my role model. I said, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson

does such a wonderful job communicating about the importance and the value of science to the public. We don't have people doing that about software and technology related things. No, you don't. That's right. Very good point, yeah. And I took you as a role model software and technology related thing that's right very good point yeah and i uh i i took

you as a role model and i uh granted i'm nowhere near as uh charming and uh as effective a communicator as you are uh but i'm trying to do my best okay i don't think of myself as charming i think of uh i got really good material. You know, the universe is good material. So I think the joy that people feel when they learn about the universe and take ownership of what they now understand, I think that can be confused with the messenger. And so I'm just really a conduit to the cosmos. That's how I think about it.

But which I love the humility there, but like, I do think you also have a really special talent for taking these very complex ideas and presenting them in a very flexible way, like depending on what context you're in and to whom you're talking in ways that people not just understand them, but are a little bit awe-inspired. I'm curious, I watch a bunch of YouTube videos and short-form video things about comedians and you go on, like with Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan and a bunch of these folks.

Like, you go on their podcast and I watched this thing where you were on Theo Vaughn's podcast and you were talking to him about the combinatorics of the human genome. And it just blew his mind. And it was like a beautiful way of talking about this very complicated thing, but also just sort of the specialness of human life, like, how do you decide who to talk to and what to talk about? So that's a great question.

Thanks for that. I have a very low bar. Let's just start there. No, it's, let me be a little more precise. When I get solicited to appear on people's shows or their podcast, what's common in the solicitation email is they'll tell me sort of other famous people that have been on or what their following is, and on the expectation that I would really give a shit about it, I don't care who else you've had. What I care about is, are you trying to make a difference in the world with whatever is the mission statement of your program? And if you're trying to make a difference in the world with whatever is the mission statement of your program. And if you're trying to make a difference in the world and I can help you make a

difference, I will do so. So I, I got this handwritten note from some middle schoolers in a small town in Canada, and they said they started a school science podcast and they wanted to know if I'd be a guest on it. And I said, sure. And so it was just fun. And there's two of the kids and they asked me about black holes and NASA and life in the universe.

And then that it became headlines the next day in the local paper. And I was just delighted that I could serve the cosmic curiosity in that way. And so that's just one example. In terms of the comedians or others who have podcasts, and there's more than a million podcasts in the world that are actively produced. That's a huge number. And so, if a comedian comes to me and I'm a huge fan of the comedic arts, in fact, on my podcast, StarTalk, my co-host is always a professional standup comedian. And the idea there is you are likely, based on my experience,

and I think research shows this as well, you are likely to be, you're more likely to remember what you learned if you were smiling and enjoying the moment that you learned it. Because the dopamines, I don't know, but it's some, it's some chemical emotional reaction. And then you say, I want to come back for more. And so what we've done is we've taken this sort of trinity of forces that operate on society. There's the science, there's pop culture, and there's humor. And we stitch those three together into a delivery where while you're listening, you don't have to cross the desert to hear what I'm telling you because I'm doing most of that gapping. I'm saying, what is going on in pop culture today? And yes, I spend a crazy amount of time

that I'd rather just be at the beach, but I spend a lot of time familiarizing myself with pop culture. Yes, I saw White Lotus. Yes, I saw episodes of Succession. Yes, I saw episodes of what's that show where you split your day from your your work day from your oh yeah yeah no i know exactly what you're talking about i

forget the name yes another one word thing severance severance all right succession and severance there i confused them but anyhow um so when you walk in the door you are you you are surrounded by a pop culture scaffold that I don't have to teach you because you already know it by definition. That's what pop culture is. And now I look at it and I say, all right, I got some science that could fit right there. And in that way, I'm enhancing your scientific appreciation for something you might not have even known had science in it. And so when people say, oh, I like listening to because I've done some homework there, there's nothing natural about it. I mean, I am exploring ways. I'm exploring receptors

that you have, and you're different from the next person and the next person and the next person. So I walk into the room with this utility belt of tools, of educational tools, and depending on who you are and what you say and what you sound like to me, that will shape what I tell you. It won't shape the substance of it, but it'll shape the framing of it because the framing is how you end up receiving that knowledge or wisdom or insight. And that's what I do. And it's a, it's a big effort. And like I said, I'd much rather just be in the Bahamas, but I feel, I feel like it's a duty. If I can do it, I should, because I think the nation needs more of it right now. Yeah. I could not agree with you more. And, more. And I want to dig into it a little bit because not only is it a difficult thing, and I think building that toolkit that you've built and deciding that you want to work on relatability so that, you know, you can get this message carried.

Like it's hard and time consuming. It's also not a thing that's necessarily appreciated in the scientific community and in the academy. I mean, so I remember like I was an academic computer scientist for a while, you know, and I have many, many, many academic researchers who work for me at Microsoft Research. And I think you're not taught, at least as a computer scientist, that a core part of your mission is to, like, broadly communicate these complicated ideas to a large audience. And,

and like, even, you know, to a certain extent, when I was a academic at the turn of the millennium, way back in the arts, way, way, way back in the arts, man. You know, even even this idea that the teaching part of your job was the most important thing was rare, it was like often the research part and like the complexity or the interestingness of these very hard ideas were there. So, I mean, it's sort of an unusual thing that a very serious scientist like you has decided to. Yeah, I'll go out on a limb and say, you know, sort of buck the culture of the scientific establishment and choose to spend your time on what you spend your time on. Well, that's insightful. Any scientist's effort to share their joy for their subject with the public at best is neutral, but more typically it subtracts from your standing.

Because how come you're doing that and you're not in the lab? You just wrote a book for the public and to your progress as a competitive academic scientist. like Carl Sagan, who was active in this way as early as the late 1960s, definitely into the 1970s, and 1980 was Cosmos, right? So he basically redefined how the public thinks about a professional scientist, not someone who's, quote, only an educator, but someone who's active on the frontier thinking about the big questions. And so I'm coming on his heels, all right? Or let me say that more pictographically.

I think he cleared a field of brush and bramble. And yeah, he got chewed up a little bit in there. He was not warmly received by his colleagues in ways that his actual research output would have deserved. He was criticized, for example, for appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Criticized. That's one thing to be on a documentary, but you go to a comedic talk show? How dare you? And now we look back on that. Of course he should do that.

In fact, the very stereotype we have of Carl Sagan uttering the phrase billions and billions, he never said that. You know who said that? Johnny Carson imitating. I did not know that. What was happening there is this was science working its way into pop culture. And what we found in my field is the more visible Sagan was, the more responsive members of Congress were to voting budgets into place that would have more of the science that Carl Sagan was talking about. So the tidewaters lifted all boats when that was happening. And so I saw that.

And to the extent that I was able, I'm on the field that he has cleared. And other people are there too, by the way. I'm delighted to announce. There are people with YouTube channels and Instagram things. And what's that other one where you do it live? Stitch, is it? Whatever. There are people, educators, scientists, not just in my field, but others, who have given

parts of their lives onto this exercise. And so I'd like to think the tidewaters are changing. In addition, something the public wouldn't have known is 15 years ago or so, the National Science Foundation and NASA, within a few years of each other, said, for this grant that you're applying for, this research grant,

you have to allocate 10% or 15, I forgot the number, but it's around there. You have to, in your proposal, describe how you're going to use that percentage of the monies for public exposure of what it is you're doing for some other good. Is there a business interest that could earn money from it? Is there school talks you can give? Is there a website you can create? And initially, that was not taken seriously. And there are folks who had this great grant-getting record that was cut short because they didn't believe that the institutions were taking it seriously, and they have. And it's in my field. So I think other fields, physics is not

quite there yet, but they see our successes and I'd like to think that we set a model for them. Yeah. It's really, really fantastic. So I want to- I want to mention Theo Vaughn, who's a very unusual comedian, very sort of unpretentious and very self-effacing. He seems disarmingly smart. Well, yes. So, yes. So, yes.

Yes. It's the way I think of it is there are people who I used to call them blue collar intellectuals. Okay. And I don't know if Theo went to college or not, but he doesn't give off that vibe, right? Even if he did. I wrote a little bit on this. You can type blue-collar intellectual. There are people who never went to college for whatever reason, okay? Couldn't afford it, didn't have the discipline, didn't, you know, too far, had to stay home, whatever, got somebody

pregnant, whatever. Okay. Yet they're eternally curious. So they would stay, and they might not even be readers, but they're watching every single Discover Channel documentary on science. And so they stay curious their entire life. And so there's a clip of me, again, this is now long lost in the YouTube archives. This was done back in the early 2000s. When was YouTube born? 2005, I think is when people bought YouTube. Yeah, I don't know why I was thinking 2003. It was a couple of years before that, yeah. Yeah, so early YouTube, basically. A pre-smartphone, but early YouTube.

So this is, you know, it's not... Back then, things were moving fast, as you know. Yeah. There was... I hosted a spinoff for Nova, PBS Nova. It was called Nova Science Now. And unlike the classic Nova, where there's a disembodied narrator, and it's very staid and very classical in its construct, this was much

more fun. I was host, and I'd have correspondents, and they'd bring in stories, and I'd stitch them together. And so one of the bits I did was just Neil Tyson in the neighborhood. All right. And as I became more known, as I'd walk my kids to school or walk to the subway, I live in New York City. There were people like shopkeepers. Hey, Neil, how's the universe today? Right. They would they would wave and there's a street sweeper.

How's the universe today? So it's titled How's the Universe Today? And what they would do is if they had a moment and I was there, they would ask me a question. They would say, I saw this news story about black holes or what happened to Pluto? Did it really deserve that? And so there was this real curiosity that permeated an entire stratum of people in society that society doesn't normally think of as deep thinkers, right? They typically go to the academic person. And so this was a beautiful thing for me to discover, this stratum. So I am never surprised now when I find someone who's otherwise just sort of regular Jane and Joe coming out with deep questions.

Because it means when they go home, they don't always go out for a beer with the townspeople. They'll stay home and watch a documentary. So I began all this with Theo because he asked me a question. And only because I hang with comedians, do I even have a place to stand to respond in the ways that I do sometimes? He said to me, so, Neil, is outer space gay? I mean, the question makes no freaking sense.

But let's try to have it make sense. So I said, everything we measure in the universe from mass, temperature, distance, size, practically anything that matters for objects in the universe, they come to us on a spectrum of values from very small to very large, very hot to very cold, very this to very that, very dense to very rarefied. And so I said, if the universe has a gender or gender preference, it is surely going to appear on a spectrum. That's what he said. And so then he said, oh, so the universe is bi, he says.

So that was a, it was a, it was a moment, I think. It was a scientific, I got to throw a little science in there, but still, but not say, no, that's a ridiculous question. Let me answer a real question. I was able to sort of stay with the flow of him, his comedic style, and throw in a little bit of science with it. So that, for me, was a proud moment for me by working with him in his question to me so that everybody gets served at the end of that. Yeah. And I think, you know, that is one of the things that I really appreciate about what you do. And I don't know how many people tell you this. So I grew up in rural central Virginia and I'm the first person in my family who went to college. My dad was a construction worker.

My granddad was a construction worker. My great granddad was a construction worker. My mom- What a failure you are in the family life. Well, look, and so you sort of joke and laugh, but the thing that I appreciate having done what I do is there's an enormous amount of value and dignity in what my dad and my grandfather and my great grandfather did. There's nothing wrong. And I could have chosen that path and like i would have had a like a a wonderful but very different life and my dad was you know just as smart as i am and he was just as curious as i

was and he just sort of focused that uh you know that that intelligence and that curiosity on a different dimension and i think the thing that you do by talking to sixth graders and talking to comedians and talking to people who may not share exactly the same ideological view of the world that you do and like not saying, well, you know, you didn't study nonlinear differential equations at Harvard. So like, you're not worth me talking to. Like, I think it's a real special thing that you do. And I appreciate it. Like it's a, well, that you do and I appreciate it. Well, thank you. The key word there is dignity, I think. There's dignity in anything where someone takes pride of what they do, they care that they're good at it. I think that can be found in the entire job spectrum. If so, yeah.

So, yeah, that and I might count your your family lineages as among the sort of blue collar intellectuals, the people who who will spend time just contemplating our place in the universe without being prompted to do so. And then I just feed that, right? I've got the smorgasbord here. If you want more, here's some more. Come back for it. And, you know, I probably, I'm more an engineer than I am a scientist. And that's probably influenced by the fact that the curiosity of my family was mostly focused on tinkering and invention and making things. And, you know, like that's how they tried to explore the universe and

understand, you know, how things worked. Uh, things work. Yeah. Yeah. And it is, um, you know, it's a thing I very much appreciate and, and respect. And, anyway like i will say it again like i think it is uh it's an unusual and a great thing that you uh you know like you have a a science degree from harvard a phd from uh columbia like you have this very distinguished uh you know academic track record and like you you could choose not to go on theo vaughn's podcast and like try to you know help him and his listeners better understand science and i think the world would be poorer for it and well thank you thank you for noticing that um and i said it half jokingly that i have a low bar that what's really going on there is if by the way i i'll show you how low the bar goes in a moment, but the, if someone from pop culture reaches to me to add science to what it is they're doing, especially artists of any kind, so writers, producers, set designers, sculptors, then I'm kind of there for them. And so let me tell you how low the bar goes.

I have a cameo in the feature-length film Sharknado 6. Nice! Oh, my God, that's the best thing I've heard today. So in Sharknado 6, just to catch you up on the series, they're full movies, right? I think they only aired on the sci-fi channel but it's actual tornadoes made of sharks so just don't question that just accept it all right in sharknado 6 it opens a portal through the space-time continuum and they go back 700 years or whatever long it was 800 years and they the sharks cross fertilize with dragons and so you get a shark dragon nato and in that sort of medieval time i play merlin and i'm doing actual science, but people think it's magic.

That is excellent. So I said, I'm in. Okay. How could you possibly refuse that? I know. I'm in. I was all in for that. So I just think to myself more selfishly that if science can piggyback the efforts of artists, because in a lot of ways, artists define pop culture and sports as well, but combined, they're what everyone talks about over the office cooler and thinks about, that to the extent that science can piggyback that, then science becomes mainstreamed as it should have been all along and is not. And so to the extent that I could do that, I think all of science benefits and that's sort of

the selfish part of it. So the, the sense that I have, um, over the past hundred years is that we had more celebrity scientists, and maybe this is wrong with social media, but if you sort of think about the early 20th century with, you know, the Einsteins and Heisenbergs and Schrodinger and Teller and Dirac, I mean, Fermi, we had, you know, particularly at the beginning of the atomic age, like a bunch of like very, very publicly well-known scientists. And then, you know, even through the, you know, the middle of the 20th century, like we had, you know, we had Carl Sagan you know, like your inspiration.

We had Richard Feynman for sure. Like one of my absolute heroes. And it feels to me we have relatively less of that public recognition of famous scientists. And it wasn't that all of these folks were seeking the attention. It's just the attention was sort of focused on them. And I don't know whether you've ever thought about what might be different now versus then. Well, yes, I have thought about that. And by the way, I'm not ever the first in line to say

it's different now than it was. That's a trap that people fall in because you think it's different because you're experiencing it firsthand and anything else is just in a textbook. So how could they possibly know what you're going through? Right. That kind of thing. So I have a special, special analysis vectors within me that say, no, don't go in that direction because it's delusional. All right.

So it is true that there's a spate of scientists that were household names at a time when their expertise had geopolitical consequences. So the atomic era, you knew all the scientists who were involved in the atomic era because a bomb was made out of it. And then it became the very instrument that kept the world hostage during the Cold War. So the list that you recited, we knew all of these people right from Einstein on forward. By the way, some of them, Einstein included, did write popular level books. He wrote one out of my later years, which was a compilation. He co-wrote a book, which was basically, they didn't have this title back then, but Relativity for Idiots or whatever that series is. Not idiots.

What's it called? Yeah, it's for idiots, right? Or dummies, maybe. Dummies, dummies, dummies. Today it might even be called Relativity for Dummies, but it was Relativity for the Common Man, right? Yeah. And so, yes.

Keep in mind, though, you are integrating over 70 years of history there to say they were known integrating over 70 years of history there to say they were known over these 70 years. Recently, I can name scientists that did become household names, like Richard Dawkins. Yeah. He continues to be. Like Stephen Hawking, okay? Who lived way longer than anyone thought he would, all right?

And he wrote best-selling books. In fact, he has the single best-selling science book of all time, which is, of course, A Brief History of Time. So Richard Dawkins, and by the way, Richard Dawkins was not even in the physical sciences. All the scientists you referenced were well-known, and you knew them not just because you're a techie head person, but they were actually well-known. But people did know, for example, Jonas Salk, all right?

There's some biologists in there who were known. Earlier, people knew Louis Pasteur. So I'm not going to agree with you that it's not known. Now, there was someone who was not a scientist, but he spoke very strongly on certain issues that touched upon science, and that was Christopher Hitchens. And so there's a few. There's a few. Carl Sagan, you know, died now, I guess, 25 years ago. It feels like just yesterday that he was around and with us. But Bill Nye was a household name. Everyone saw him in their classroom.

He's trained as an engineer, but his moniker was Bill Nye the Science Guy. Of course, any engineer is fluent in science, so that's not a stretch. So these are people with very large platforms. And so I would say that the day science matters as much as it once did geopolitically, that you'll be fluent in all the scientists' names at that time. This sort of happened with COVID. We all know who Anthony Fauci is.

My regret there, it's a broad regret, is how come we don't know the name of the president's science advisor? Why isn't that person in the news every day? Yeah. Okay. And you're almost my age. One day you'll be my age, but not yet. We're old enough to remember the Surgeon General.

What was his name? He was in the news all the time during the AIDS epidemic in the 80s. Coop. C. Everett Coop. C. Everett Coop. C. Everett Coop, yep. Do you remember him? Okay, household name. Medical professional.

And he was giving us advice, and some of it was controversial, but in the end we knew it should be followed for the greater interest of public health. So I'm disappointed that no one knows who this Surgeon General is today, not the way we knew back then, that they're not propped up on platforms where they can be listened to and they can spread the scientific insights and wisdom that have been so hard earned in the laboratory in ways that they can benefit society. of the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health or especially the National Academy of Sciences. All of them should have Twitter followers, okay? Yeah.

And I think back to your original point, none of this, let's reach the public, is in their genetics. Yeah. All right? They were not trained to think that way. They may not even have the personality for it. I think the reason that I chose to be a computer scientist is for most of the years of my life, computers were more comfortable to deal with. Were your friends.

Yeah. It was an easier thing to interact with than my fellow people are complicated. Computers are easy. Yeah. And, and it, it took a lot of work to change that. Uh, and it was not natural. Um, um, and now we're learning in the sort of neurodiversity movement that, you know, many of my colleagues, surely yours as well, are actually on the autism spectrum. At some place, of course, high functioning, but nonetheless, you stick them in front of a camera, you know, are they even going to make eye contact? Or do they even know that that's a thing to do? Or do they even know that that's a thing to do? Or do they have facial expressions? There are things that as a scientist, no, we're not trained to cultivate.

Yeah. And so I think we're feeling the consequences of that today because there are many high level science leaders who could and should be helping to shape public policy. And they're just mute on the horizon. And I don't want to carry the whole slack. I mean, you know, I really just want to go to the Bahamas. All right?

Yeah, that much is coming through very clearly. Am I making myself clear? So, yeah. And, you know, I delight in talking about the universe, but I'm dragged into other conversations about, you know, vaccines and about GMOs and about, and we should have very visible scientists in each of these categories. I should not be the one called for these. Yeah. And I do think there's a really interesting thing happening right you alluded to it a minute ago which is the you know these platforms like youtube and tick tock

and instagram and um you know twitch and either like pick your uh pick your thing um where we have an unprecedented amount of material for the curious that's good stuff that is very, very broadly distributed. I mean, I'll give you a weird example. I am subscribed to this YouTube channel called Numberphile, which is largely a bunch. I know that. Yeah. It's for number geeks.

It's like, it's a hundred percent. And so there was no video channel, no, no TV program when I was a kid where you could go to learn more from distinguished mathematicians about number theory, but there is now. And it's like great and awesome. And moreover, lots of people watch that channel. So, you know, it's not just them howling into the void. It's like people listening.

And I think that's great. So... Yeah, so, but it comes down to the obvious problem that, I mean, it's less of an issue with Numberphile. I think there's another one, Math Nation or something. There's several math places to go visit, but those rarely show up in controversial feeds. Yeah. Yes. controversial feeds. Yeah. So the question is, where does someone get the information that they need for the best

interest of their health, their wealth, or security where they don't otherwise know where to even begin? How do you judge the integrity of an outlet? And, you know, like I said, that's obviously less of an issue with your math excursions, but the rest of it, and that's of course where the rubber hits the road today. Yeah. Well, and I think there's also, in addition to getting that information that you need to live like a reasonable and prosperous and healthy life, There's also how do you find your role model? In this, I really do want to get back to your origin story, like how you became

interested in what you are interested in. But I think part of it, for me, at least, is role models. One of the great things that you're doing is, you know, you show up on, you know, these unusual places and sort of people look at and they say, well, Neil deGrasse Tyson seems like a reasonable human being. Like maybe being a scientist isn't that bad. And like, and you need lots of kids thinking that, right? Right. Right. Well, actually, so I think much less about kids than I do about adults. Yeah. Because kids are born curious and they retain that curiosity at least into middle school.

So I'm not so worried about them as I am about adults who think they're thinking rationally and are not. And adults are in charge of the world. They wield resources. They vote. They lead. They're captains of industry. They're all the things that shape this world. So my, I, yeah, we can target children, but I'm too impatient. I don't want to wait 30 years until they're old enough to then

make a difference. Whereas adults can make a difference with the signet, with a pen at the bottom of a document that puts a new legislation into effect or a new educational directives or new mission statements so so that's been my my goal now in terms of role model I think the term is a little overplayed overvalued I should say for the following reason I grew up in the Bronx, New York, and if I needed another black person who grew up in the Bronx before me, who then became an astrophysicist, to have preceded me, I would have never become an astrophysicist. So role models, as they're generally thought of, inherently require that you are not the first to do something. But suppose you have interest where you would be the first to do something, either first out of your town, like you said, you're the first.

Your role model can't have been people in your town because none of them went to college or in your family. All right. So at some point you have to say, my role model is someone I have never met and I may never meet, but I know enough about them that I want to emulate what happened in their life. And so I knew this from very early. So I had an athletic role model of baseball.

Of course, I grew up in the Bronx where the Yankees play. So there's a Yankee that was a role model. I don't want to be him. This is it. If I play baseball, I wanted to play baseball as well as he did. All right. That's all. And I visited my local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium, took extra classes there that educators and scientists

and that educators that had such a way with words and storytelling. I said, if I'm ever an educator, that's the kind of educator I want to be. And the scientists had such command. And they just knew so much. And the weird thing is, I remember thinking, I will never know this much about the universe as much as they do. Meanwhile, they're twice my age at least. And I'm 15 when I'm having these thoughts. Okay.

And not realizing that when you get a PhD, you spend a whole five, six years studying that one subject. All right. And six years before that, I was nine. So I had to get the time scales understood within me. So for me, a role model at its best is assembled a la carte from different people. And that's why, if you're visible, you should always in the back of your head ask yourself, am I being something that someone else might want to emulate? Because that chance is very real, whether or not you ever meet

the person. And so when I see little children coming through the Hayden Planetarium as part of the American Museum of Natural History, there's school groups that come through, many international tourists, but also camp groups. I see little kids and they're looking bright-eyed. And all I've committed is that whatever I help create there will have the impact on that next generation the way the educators and scientists had an impact on me. Then I've given back to this world. Yeah. Yeah, which is an amazing thing. I mean, the way that I've thought about some of this for a while,

and I think I had roughly the same experience that you do. I remember the first time that I picked up an academic computer science journal when I was a teenager. It was the ACM's Transaction on Programming Language and Systems. Like this. Was it a bestseller? I think I saw that on The New York Times. Absolutely. And I opened this thing, I picked it off of the shelf

of a library and I was like, there's I don't understand a single bit of this. And like, I can't even imagine a world. That's quite literal too a single bit i see your double joke there whether or not that was on purpose yeah but i but i took bites all right excellent you you're you're eight times more advanced than i am very good i you know i i had a hard time imagining a world where I would be able to understand it, much less be able to write.

And so there's this process I think you go through where you sort of conquer this intimidation of not knowing. And if you can get past that, then you can get to this miraculous state where not only do you understand these things, but you can write these papers yourself. And you even get to a point where people ask you to be a reviewer for these things, where you can sort of read a whole stack of papers, like 15 at a time and give critical feedback about what's good and what's bad about them. That's very educationally insightful. And I think what stops people is the idea where they open up something

and they don't understand it, and then I don't know where they get this idea that you're supposed to understand something immediately if you're ever going to be good at it. I think there's some misdirection going on in our lives where how many people, because they didn't catch it the first time they saw it, could have been great at it and just never even took the first steps. And I remembered, I had maybe the same or slightly different motivation in high school when I was ready to take calculus and I opened up the calculus book before I had enrolled for the course. And I'd looked at the, back then, I don't know if they still do, the jacket,

you'd open up the front and back jacket and and there would be, on the front were all these derivatives, and on the back were all these integrals. And I looked at it, and I say, what the, what the squiggly lines that I've never seen before? There's half the Greek alphabet. And I remembered saying, I will never understand this ever. However, I was interested in the universe from very early on. And I knew that math was the language of the universe. So my motivation wasn't, gee, I want to know calculus for the sake of calculus. It was, I want to know calculus so that I can be good at knowing the universe. And so that was my motivation, but it was daunting. And then after a month, we'd learned some things and I reopened the jacket and

I say, hey, I know what that is. And as every week went by, a little bit more of this front and back flap became transparent. So it was like this dense fog that first got thin and then completely dissipated. And then those pages became my best friends because those were the tools for solving problems that were presented in the book. So I'm saying exactly what you just told me, but slightly to the side of your first encounter with this tech journal. Yeah. And I have a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old kid, and they both, when they're doing their homework, they're like, oh, I'm struggling with this. This is hard. And I'm like, yeah, like that is almost certainly a sign that what you are doing is interesting and valuable because hard things are hard and easy things sometimes aren't worth doing. And if it's easy, then everybody can do it. And if you want to distinguish yourself,

do the hard things. And this is of course, Kennedy's famous comment about going to the moon. We choose to do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard. And then you got to stop and think about that. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Let's do the hard things. And then when you're done, the reward is that much sweeter for having accomplished it. Yes.

Because, I mean, this is a thing that Arthur Clark wrote about in Profiles of the Future in like 68, 69, I think is when he published that book. And one of the things that he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, is that you can't get to a new frontier unless you push past the boundary of what's impossible just a little bit. Like everything that needs to be discovered looks impossible. And, like, you have to figure out how to, like, push that boundary of impossible to possible. And an aspect, a corollary to that was some advice I received in graduate school from a professor named Martin Schwarzschild, who's actually related to Carl Schwarzschild, who he himself died on the field in the First World War. But that's part of the Schwarzschild, who's actually related to Carl Schwarzschild, who he himself died

on the field in the First World War, but that's part of the Schwarzschild family. Anyways, he was an astrophysicist, Martin Schwarzschild. He said something profoundly simple. He said, the day you stop making mistakes is the evidence that you are no longer on the frontier. Yeah. It's like, what? Wow. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because on the frontier, you don't know what you're doing next.

You're poking, right? You're prodding. You're overcoming bias of what is possible and what is not. And you're bound to falter. And that's not a sign that you're failing. It's the sign that you're succeeding in a way. So that helped to soften the struggles that one might encounter. Yeah, or just even to normalize the idea that the struggle is normal. Everybody goes through it. There's no way to do anything useful to advance that frontier without the struggle. Like there's no shortcut. Right. Right. But also you've seen practically every YouTube self-help commercial, right? That you have to, like, sit through or at least sit through the first 10 seconds of it.

It's, by the way, so the keyword, modern keyword, you're surely close to this. The keyword for clickbait is this. That word is the new keyword, you know, right? Because here it is. Do this one thing each day to get to lose five pounds a week. Eat this, eat this one food and it's, oh, I want to know. And then you, then you dig in, what is this thing that you're doing? And so the, we're in a culture now where the marketing

for things that would help your lives leave you with the impression that everyone's been doing it wrong all this time and that it's and the struggles that they're doing is unnecessary and you just have to do this one thing and that takes care of it. I once I took this to the to the dimension of the culinary arts where I tweeted this. I said, how often is it that you go to someone's house and it's a brilliant food you taste and you're prompted to ask, I tried to make

this and it never turns out right. What's your secret? Yeah. The answer is, I went to chef school for six years and I worked at this. That's the secret. All right? Deal with it's it's funny you went there because the whole time you were saying that i was thinking about uh kung fu panda which

is one of my favorite movies of all time i remember it i didn't see the sequels but i know kung fu panda yeah so there's this one point where the whole premise of the first movie is uh there's this thing called the dragon scroll and if you like get the dragon scroll it will sort of unlock uh unlimited power um and the you know the villain at the end of the movie like gets the dragon scroll and pops it open um and there's nothing on it uh and the kung fu panda uh who had already seen the Dragon Scroll, tells him it's like, yeah, it's like there is no secret ingredient. It's all you, buddy. So maybe a couple of things before we run out of time. So I would love to talk about your book, Starry Messenger, which everyone should go buy right now.

It is a wonderful book. What is the most interesting thing that you learned writing that book? You know, odd that you're the first person to ask me that. So thank you for recognizing that when anytime you write a book, even when it's within your expertise, that you learn things that come together in a way for the book that previously there was no urge to see or to feel or to glean. This book, Starry Messenger, which is a title from Galileo's, I think it was his first book, called Sidereus Nuncius, Starry Messenger, where he reported his very first telescopic observations of the night sky and revealed messages from the stars. Messages,

oh my gosh, the Milky Way is composed of stars. Oh my gosh, that's a little weird. We just thought it was a band of smoke across the sky. Oh, the sun has spots. But wait a minute, but the sun is supposed to be a perfect object, a perfect orb. The moon has blemishes. It's got mountains, craters. There's stuff that goes around the planet Jupiter. Jupiter has moons. He didn't think of them as moons because we only have our moon. They were called the Jovian stars that traveled with Jupiter across the sky. So these were discoveries he made that helped change how we think of ourselves in this world. It decentralized Earth. Because until then,

people were still content thinking Earth was the center of all motion. But he found observational evidence to support Copernicus, who a century earlier had sort of put the sun back in the middle of the known universe. What I've done for Starry Messenger, subtitled Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, is I say, people, this is stuff you've dug your heels in or fighting about. I don't care what your political stripe is. You're having a fight over something that if you take a step back and look at this sort of cosmically, you will learn that either you're not fighting about anything or what you thought was a strongly held posture

is actually only thinly supported by objective truths in the world. And so it's an attempt to thread and navigate all the ways people are currently divided by holding up a scientifically literate lens then you look through the lens at that same problem and it looks completely different and so there are chapter titles that are all these things we've all had arguments about over thanksgiving dinner so one of them is is gender and identity, meatarians and vegetarians, truth and beauty, color and race, law and order, body and mind, life and death. And there's some others more classically titled Earth and Moon, exploration and discovery.

So these are chapters. And so it was quite the exercise in revealing to people things that they've thought about, but maybe didn't think about as deeply as they could have, or as deeply as a scientist would be expected to. Because it's not just those things that fulfill your biases. What does it look like from every angle, even angles that I don't want to give it? All right? Because objective truths don't care about how you feel. They're separate and distinct from that. And hence this quote I put in one of my earlier books. The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. So if we're going to have legislation and laws, let it be based on objective truths rather than on things you wish

were true or just simply wanted to be true. Yeah. Oh, so what did I learn? So in researching the gender and identity chapter, that was fun. Of course, there's the chromosomal gender, which is XXXY. So that's unambiguous. Are you male or are you female? And there are variations on that that are very rare where you can be intersex. But let's hold that aside for a moment. So you can be biologically male or female. That's clear.

All right. So now, if you look at people, do these chromosomes manifest? That's an interesting question. Okay. So I did this exercise and I was in the subway. It was in the winter and I was having a big heavy coat on. So just people's heads have popped out from the collar. And I look down and I say, do I know who's male or female just by looking at their face?

And the answer is, yes, I do. Okay. The answer is, yes, I do. Okay? The answer is completely yes. On average, women or girls, okay, their hair on average was longer. If they had earrings, the earrings were more dangly. Eyebrows were tweezed. If there was any hair on the upper lip, it's removed. There is eyeliner and mascara. And plus, if you want to

be a girl, go to the department store to the girls, and they will know how to put girl clothes on you. And if you're a boy, you know how to dress like a boy because they tell you how, right? And if you're a boy and your muscles are a little thin, go to the gym so you get big muscles if you want to be a boy. And if you want to be a boy and your muscles are a little thin, go to the gym. So you get big muscle. You want to be a boy. And if you want to be a girl and your chest isn't big enough, go get breast augmentation surgery as 300,000 women a year do. And when I was done with this exercise, it was clear

that everything I was queuing on are secondary and tertiary. Yeah. Efforts that we put in ourselves to display the gender of our choice. And realizing this, you're not looking at the chromosomes. We're looking at the beauty industrial complex. We're looking at the fashion industry telling you what you would look like if you followed their rules. So it occurred to me that if that's all secondary and tertiary and you're not looking at my chromosomes and I feel like being a half boy, half girl today, then I'm going to dress accordingly. I might have, you know, wear boy clothing but paint my nails.

All right. That's because I feel that way today. If I feel 90, regardless of my chromosomes, I can make you think I'm whatever I want you to think because the industry empowers me to do so. where somewhere I read about pursuit of happiness, was it? Somewhere in one of those documents, without subtracting from your freedoms. And if my pursuit of happiness, I feel 10% male and 90% female today and dress as such, why should you care at all? You're a whole other person. If you don't want to do it, no one's making you do it.

But my sense of happiness is fulfilled by this. So, by the way, this is not because, and the people say, well, you're a boy or you're a girl. No, I'm some combination of the two. And the reason why you don't like it, because the human brain prefers to compartmentalize. Yeah. Even when we know things are on a spectrum, like hurricane strengths. That is a continuum of wind speeds, okay? A continuum.

Yet we made five categories. It's better than two categories, but we made five categories. But that has affected our thinking. Yeah. So Hurricane Irma goes from low Category 3 to high Category 3, and it's not much talked about it. It goes one mile an hour faster, crosses into Category 4. It is breaking news.

Hurricane Irma, now Category 4. Oh. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So, the fact that we bin things this way actually influences how we think about it, even though it has no business being binned in the first place. Yeah. So, my point is, we know, we grew up with kids who did not, were not either boy or, What's the term? Tom, tomboys. There's a term for girls who were dressing like boys and were fighting in the dirt with the boys who wore short hair.

Like we have words for them. They existed. They didn't have some late latter day invention. And getting back to your question, what's the something I learned? Here it is. In researching that chapter took me to Joan of Arc, early 1400s burned at the stake.

Do you know why she was burned at the stake? Do you know? You're an educated man. I think I know. Tell me. Tell me. I think she was burned at the stake because she was like in a religious power struggle. All right. That's

part of it. All right. There was political religious conflict with France, England, and the like. Okay. But I don't know the exact reason. I don't know what the sentence was. Half the reason cited. Half was cross-dressing. was cross-dressing.

Half. Really? Cross-dressing. Now, of course, you can't lead soldiers into battle wearing a skirt riding side saddle. That doesn't work. So you got to wear some pants, okay? So here's Joan of Arc leading soldiers into battle. And, all right, so they cite there's a line in Deuteronomy. It's very clear.

It's a man shall not don the clothes of a woman, nor a woman don the clothes of a man, lest this be an abomination unto the Lord thy God. That's an almost exact quote. So clear. There it is. So it's in the court cases against her. And so we say cross-dressing, but maybe she really was on the gender spectrum. She has female chromosomes, but she was 100% male on the outside. There it is. And that's 600 years ago. 600 years ago.

One of the most famous examples. And now, okay, burned at the stake, but now she's a saint. A Catholic church says, okay, we fucked up. All right, let's undo this, okay? Statue of her in France, all right? Golden statue with a spear and a thing on a horse. So this idea that you're either a boy or a girl, tell me, which is it? You can't be, no, you're just in a free country? Every fact that there are people who are expressing themselves on a gender spectrum should tell us that we should not constrain the freedoms of others for the convenience of you thinking

in only two categories. An analogy I gave is a computer bit is a zero or a one, and it's literally binary, okay? That's, okay. But a qubit, a quantum bit, can be a zero or a one or any statistical combination of the two. It could be 90% zero, 10% one, or 10% zero, or 50-50. At any given moment, you don't know what it is. It is the juxtaposition of those two values. Yeah. Maybe we are not bits.

We are qubits. Yeah. Here's another thought, too. So if you look at these binary systems, you still, like electrons behave quantum mechanically, no matter what you would prefer that they do. And like we do an extraordinary amount of work in the design of digital circuitry to make things binary. They're not naturally binary. You have threshold voltages on comparators that drift with temperature, that have electromagnetic interference. You could have a cosmic ray come in and knock something around.

So what I did in the book throughout the book was take examples from science, and especially from the universe, how we think about these challenges and then bring them to Earth. So that's why I left our, maybe we're all qubits. Take our cue from quantum physics and not from the limitations of the human brain to think on a continuum so that one the joan of arc story and uh in researching for this there's actually a french uh docudrama they didn't have that term back when this film was made i think was made in the 50s um that was very true to the trial of joan of arc i think it's actually called the trial of joan of arc it might be you might be able to find it archivally on YouTube because I don't know, no one's probably streaming it.

But the text of it and the dialogue are recreations from the authentic. And it's just remarkable to watch that. Anyhow, that's what I learned. I learned more about Joan of Arc than I ever thought I didn't know. That's very, very interesting. So one last question for you that I ask everyone. So you have a fascinating job and a varied amount of cool things that you do, but I ask everyone, like, what do you do in your copious free time for fun. That's not your job. Oh, thank you for asking. Yeah. Well, so that implies my job is not fun.

Well, no, no, no. And I don't even mean to imply that because for most people that I talk to, their job is very fun. Yeah. So they say, when are you going to take a vacation from your job? No, my job is my vacation. When I say the Bahamas, it's the rest of this public stuff that I'm referencing, not thinking about the universe. But I like reading very old books. Mm-hmm. Non-fiction books. By the way, I hate the word non-fiction.

I don't like what it is I write to be referenced to the negation of something else. Yeah. So I want to introduce the word. There's fiction and you have faction. How about that? I want to start that like here and now. All right. The genre of nonfiction shall henceforth be called faction. So I read just what scientists and, and popularizers have written about the state of their knowledge of the world at that time. Yeah.

And it helps me navigate any writings I do or that I read on the state of our knowledge today. It makes you humble in even in the knowledge that you feel secure about. Yeah. And it may show you doors that are there and you didn't even know were there that need to be opened to see what's on the other side. So I have books that go back several centuries on this. One of them was, I have a book on the sun. It was written in 1890. And then I have another version of it written in 1895, the second edition. And in the second edition, it says in the preface, it says, we've learned so much about

the sun in the last five years, I had to come out with a new edition. And I want to say, you have no idea what you still don't know about the sun. That's before they had any idea about nuclear fusion in the core, how it's foreign energy, how old the sun was. And so just to see the joy that they'd learned some things about the magnetic fields of sunspots, that's what was a new, a new thing. And it was just so quaint and so beautiful. And so I do that. I'm I, and I like watching a, a good blockbuster sci-fi movie,

uh, with while eating butter with slightly too much eating popcorn was slightly too much butter. Yeah. Do you have a, uh, do you have a recent, uh, favorite? No, I saw Moonfall, and until I saw Moonfall, I was sure that Armageddon led the list for violating the most laws of physics per minute of any movie. so but i so i saw a moonfall i had some fun actors in it and it's i don't i i i allow more than it sounds like i allow uh in a film um but so i just like when they put some effort into the science and in the display and how they're going to do the zero G and, and how are they going to survive the environment? I'm a little fatigued now of superhero films. I think, did we forget how to tell stories that we run out of stories? So I got to ask,

like, what did you think? Did you watch the expanse? No. So, so, so there's a lot of hours of watching of the expanse and so many of my friends told me i should i watched the first episode and i it didn't click for me

but they said no you got to keep watching i said okay so i have a task coming up i have a book coming out in the fall and they want me to pre-sign a bunch of uh you know uh pre-sign a bunch of them the way they do it is you get the signature page and then before it gets bound at the bindery and then they put that page in. That way I don't have a stack of a thousand books in my room. It's just a stack of a thousand sheets of paper. And I do the math on this.

How long does it take me to sign? And it's pretty brainless, obviously. So that's when I do all my binging. So my next binge is going to be with The Expanse, and that's going to probably be in August. Excellent. No, July, because the book comes out in September, my next book. Awesome. Well, I mean, congratulations on the book, and I will have to check back with you sometime in the early fall to see what you thought of The Expanse.

Okay. So thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat. Thanks for having me. Just a shout out to the Geek Set out there. I think we spent so much of our history just being abused and beaten up by the football quarterbacks and getting wedgied, and I always wanted to be a superhero who defended the geeks because I was bigger than other students, a little bit bigger. And I was athletic and strong, but I was a geek.

So when I saw some abuses, I could, like, jump in and kick some ass because I was captain of my high school's wrestling team. I could kick some ass. So I always wanted there to be, like, you know, the bat signal, but there'd be the geek in danger signal, and it'd be like digits of pi on the clouds, right? And the more digits, the more serious the problem was, and I'd fly there and then kick some ass.

That was my fantasy as a kid. But I think geeks and nerds in general gained pop currency when everyone else realized that we're the only ones who know how to fix their computer back in the 80s and 90s. So they needed a geek friend. They could not just throw us. And then the richest people in the world, you know, Bill Gates is a patron saint of geeks. So this was people, oh, my gosh, they're wealthy and they can fix my computer. So I think we didn't really achieve parity until that era came upon us. And so just a shout out to the entire community, especially those who in the early days were wedgied.

I think I say in my book, I forgot, in Body and Mind, there's a Body and Mind chapter, I say that in the Venn diagram of, who is it? What did I say? The Venn diagram of geeks and people who have ever been wedgied. I think that the geeks completely encloses the who have ever been wedgied. So there's not an intersection. It's a complete enclosure.

That's awesome. So I appreciate you, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Maybe your title should be Defender of Geeks and Servant of Curiosity. Like, it's a great calling. One last thing. It's easy to be humble when you're geek because there's always someone who's geekier than you, no matter how geeky you think you are. So I remembered calculating and posting my calculated measurement for the weight of Thor's hammer. Uh-huh. Okay? In the first Thor movie, they said, the hammer is forged in the heart of a dying star.

And I said, hey, I'm an astrophysicist. I know the densities of dying stars. All right? So I got the density of a neutron star, and I got the measurements of the thing, and I calculated it up. And so Thor's hammer, based on that calculation, would weigh as much as a herd of 300 million elephants, okay? Which is why the Hulk couldn't even pick it up. So I said, that was good, and I'm proud of that. So I posted that.

And so then within 18 hours, there was some comic book site that said, Dr. Tyson, you're wrong about Thor's hammer. And it goes on and on. And there's two, there's like engineers, material science engineers, who just, I just got out geeked in this. So one of them said you assumed that the hammer was made of the material of a dying star but it was actually

that's the funniest word in the whole, actually this fictitious hammer of this fictitious guy was actually just forged not of it but in the heart of a dying star, which meant it was not of the same material. And apparently in 1991, there was a Thor's hammer trading card, which said that Thor's hammer is made of the fictional material Uru, fine, and it weighs precisely 42.3 pounds. Okay. I pounds. Okay. I don't know. I like your, I mean, like, look, I, I,

my answer I think was way funner than that, but I gotta get, you gotta tip. I got out geeked. I got totally out geeked. And then I had a fan who said, Neil, they didn't specify on what planet it weighs 42.3 pounds. And I said, oh. That's excellent. It's so good. Your answer is more fun.

It's way more fun. You do have to respect comic book geeks. The attention to detail is real. So, yeah, you can't get too big-headed because somebody's going to out-geek you. Awesome. Another quick one, just in the minute, then I really have to go. So I was in Charlotte, North Carolina's airport, and I had to go from a big plane to a little plane, all right?

And I felt like I walked three miles. Maybe it was only one mile, but it felt like three miles. My luggage was heavy. I didn't have wheels. It was just a garment bag and my backpack. And so I finally get there and I said, all right, let me, I, let me tweet something clever. So I tweeted, I can't wait till we have wormholes that way all gates would be adjacent to one another. And I said, that's pretty, that's pretty gates would be adjacent to one another.

And I said, that's pretty good, right? Yeah. Okay, that's good. Give me some credit. Well, in the comment thread, someone replied, Dr. Tyson, the day we have wormholes,

you won't need airports. It was like, oh! That's a good point.'s a good point out geeked here i am in my finest geek form and it just i'm unworthy so it's fun to just hang out with fun smart people who know the difference between yeah they can fantasize but also know the difference between real science and non-real science yeah and that's the interesting feature of the entire comic-con community basically what that is yeah yes but anyway dude thanks for having me on and congratulations on your whole career with microsoft and all that you've contributed

to them and shaping not just microsoft as a company but but the culture of computing in this world. I mean, it has tap roots. And so you are one of the threads of those tap roots. So that doesn't go unnoticed by me. Thank you. That is very, very kind of you to say. And again, I really, really appreciate what you do and for you taking the time to talk with us today. All right.

All right. Be well. Thank you. appreciate what you do and for you taking the time to talk with us today all right all right be well thank you all right what a great great conversation with mr neil degrasse tyson so um before i get into some questions that i want to ask you this is probably the only time in my life i will ever be able to do this but i can actually fact check something that you and Neil were talking about when you're talking about Theo Vaughn and questioning whether or not he went to college. Because I was 14 years old when Theo Vaughn was on Road Rules Maximum Velocity Tour in 2000, I can tell you definitively that yes, he did. He did go to college. i don't know if he graduated but he absolutely did so he went to uh louisiana state right i think so i think so it was because he's from louisiana so it was either university of louisiana or louisiana state was one of those but yeah i but

i remember this very distinctly because i watched him on road rules and then the the challenge after that so yeah yeah and you know again i i think one of the things Neil and I chatted about is, so Theo says a bunch of goofy things, a bunch of offensive things. But I think if you watch his comedy and you watch his podcast, like you can tell how smart he is. And like, he's a super curious guy. Oh no, he's, he's, he's very intelligent. And I think that it's actually interesting. I think he and Neil do similar things in that they're able to disarm people and, and make them not be intimidated by some of the things they think about, you know, Theo, I think leans into his

Southerness and, and, and, and kind of his persona. And so people don't know what they're getting. And Neil, who is obviously one of those brilliant, you know, scientists and astrophysicists we have, because of his own curiosity and just his demeanor and the fact that he cares about pop culture and will do Sharknado 6, you know, I think can bring people who might be otherwise like less likely to care or want to engage or might even want to, frankly, tune out when sometimes faced with some of these things. I think that he's able to bring them in and to get a lot more accomplished because of that. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the really special things about Neil is for someone who is as accomplished as he is and who, you know, is as a scientist and like has been in this system where,

you know, like there's a whole process and there's rigor and like you have to the big parts of your job where like you have to like adhere to these notions of rigor just because like it's technically the only way that you can make progress in your in your field. Like, you know, just pounding away at some of these scientific discoveries is just hard work and requires very, very disciplined thinking. And, and, but despite all of that and, and I think he's unusual as a, like a serious scientist, like he, you know, he has no pretense about himself or his field or what he knows or where he went to, went to school. And like, he, he's willing to engage with, you know, I engage with you heard it over and over again in our conversation with anyone. Yes.

As long as they're curious and they're willing to share their lives, their interests, their platform in the service of science, he's there. Just sort of authentically engaging with people and with respect and affording them the dignity that they deserve, whatever it is, however old they are, whatever they do. I think

that also is a great thing. I totally agree. I think that's, that also is a great thing. No, I totally agree. And I think that it really, especially because like he has those, those, those two parts, right? Like I think that empathy, that curiosity, that willingness to engage, but he is a very serious scientist. And I think that if we're wanting to get people to engage with science and to try to be more

curious and to understand these very complicated things that are going on and to take more of these things seriously, I think that we need people like Neil in our world because otherwise it is just too easy to tune out. And it is, I think, sometimes for people who are in their bubble, whether it's academia or, you know, tech and research or whatever the case may be, to forget that the vast majority of the world is not in that bubble. And yet, all of these things impact everyone. Correct. And smart people are everywhere. Curiosity is everywhere. Yes. It is a good thing to help anyone get some little new nugget of information. Like it's, it's a beautiful thing. Like one of the best things about being human is like discovering something new and like playing a part in that is awesome.

It absolutely is. And, and, and I think it's, it's great to great, too, because of Neil, he was mentioning Carl Sagan earlier, but seeing when Cosmos, when he had his version of Cosmos on, and when we have in primetime this sort of content, that's revolutionary, especially in this day and age, that people will actually actually from all over the world and from all walks of life and all backgrounds will tune into those things. There's something powerful about that. And, and, and I love it. And I, I'm glad that to hear, you know, two smart people like, like the two of you talking, because that's what we need more of. I think just people who are willing to engage and stay curious. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

For sure. That's the trick. And one of the themes, I think, across all of our guests, like everybody who's been on this show, I think to a person, everyone has intense curiosity. And the only variation is from that seed of intense curiosity, what do you go do with it? No, I think you go do with it?

No, I think you're exactly right. I mean, honestly, we've been doing this for however many years now. I think that that's struck out to me, too, is people are intensely curious, and that's what we need, and I think that it's what you do with it. And I think sometimes it's also what does your curiosity maybe spur in others, make them curious about things. And that's how things continue to be building and evolving, which is really exciting. Yeah. Awesome.

All right. Well, a big thank you to Neil deGrasse Tyson for joining us. If you have anything that you'd like to share with us, you can email us anytime at behindthetech at microsoft.com. And you can follow Behind the Tech on your favorite podcast platform, or you can check out our full video episodes on YouTube. Thanks for tuning in. See you next time.