Girl on Guy with Aisha Tyler - girl on guy 219: neil degrasse tyson

Episode Date: November 1, 2016

join aisha and astrophysicist neil degrasse tyson as they talk about rejecting stereotype, destroying constraint, overcoming expectation, sprinting towards destiny and defying gravity. plus neil explains everything and aisha struggles to keep up. girl on guy is taking copious notes.

This episode of Girl on Guy is brought to you by Audible. With an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy, and more. You can get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial at audible.com slash girl on guy. This is Girl on Guy. Hey, everybody, welcome to Girl on Guy, 219. Welcome to the show. It is the beautiful, robust, thick, juicy center of fall. and I hope that your lives are going as well as you might hope and better than you expected. I'm cranking away on all the shows, the criminal minds and the talks and the archers and

girl and guy and access and trying actually to be a little bit more like a human being, finding holes in the midst of all that activity to, I don't know, rest, urinate, cry softly in a dark place, sometimes a closet, eat in secret, and drown all my feelings in alcohol. So none of those strategies, by the way, are going to solve anybody's problems. Do not emulate me. I am a hot sprawling mess, but I hope that you are taking care of yourself and having a great time and skipping joyfully through life, which is precious and short and should be, on the whole, filled with French fries, cake, and fun.

This episode of Girl and Guy is brought to you by Audible. With an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy, and more. You can get a free audiobook with a third. 30-day trial at audible.com slash girl on guy. And I recommend lots of books and lots of things and lots of stuff. But, and I'm, and I'm going to, here's the thing. I used to read a lot more because I have a lot more free time. So I always had new ideas. But I don't have a million new ideas, just a couple new ideas. And one old idea. I did a panel last month at New York Comic-Con for the TV show The Magicians, which is based on my, one of my favorite trilogies of books called

The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I think the first book is The Magician's King, and the third one is the magician's land. It might be Magicians Land and the magician king. I don't know. I have a terrible memory, and I'm clearly too lazy to look it up online. But it's a fun trilogy, and they adapted to a show that I would enjoy because it is both emulative of the book, but not identical to it. And that's what's been really nice. And the guy that they picked for the lead is really, really great, and a perfect casting choice. So you could watch that show, which is coming back out, and you could also read the books, and you could also enjoy them by going to all. audible.com slash girl on guy and finding any of those books, the magicians trilogy by Love Grossman, just by typing that information in. You will get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial by signing up at audible.com slash girl on guy. And if that doesn't strike your fancy, you can always get my book, self-inflicted wounds read by yours truly in just ongoing nasal drone of Aisha Tyler. But, you know, animated, I act things out, I make little voices, I danced. I might or might not have part of the entire thing in the nude. That's for you to imagine. I don't know why I suggest that you imagine that, but it's too late now to take it back. And also, our good friend, a friend of the show,

and friend of me, Dave Eggers, has a brand new book out, and you could get that book on there. And Dave Eggers is one of my favorite people. He was a guest way back in the very beginning of Girl on Guy. He's the founder of 826 Valencia, which has turned to the 826 Foundation that tutors young people and helps them get through school. He's also a foundation of Scholar Match, of which I'm on the board. This is a charity. I make no money. But it's a company that is like a Kickstarter for college students that helps college students with no resources go to school. Many of them, the first person in their family to ever attend college. So he's doing pretty amazing things out there in the world. And he has a brand new book, a brand new book out that just came out

called Heroes of the Frontier. And I don't know, he's one of my favorite writers. He's also one of my favorite people. The New York Times described Heroes of the Frontier as on the road crossed with Henderson and the Henderson the Rain King. Now, I have read on the road. I have not read Henderson the Rain King. I'm going to throw on maybe actually it's, there's a bit of the road in there. I don't know. Is it post-apocalyptic frontier fiction? I have no idea. All I know is I love Dave's writing and I think he's a pretty great guy. And you could check out his book on audible.com. So go to audible.com slash girl on guy for your free, free, three day trial. I've lost my capacity for English. And you'll get a free audiobook with that 30 day trial when you go to audible.com slash girl and guy.

When you avail yourself of these free offers, you are showing my advertisers that advertising on my show is meaningful for them and meaningful for you and it keeps them coming back. So go check it out. It's free. It's a free audio book. It's a free 30 day trial. Why wouldn't you go for it? Go to audible.com slash girl on guy and check it out. Okay, this episode of Girl on Guy is with the astrophysicist. I hope I got that right. I mean, I'm having him on this show. I should know. Yes.

He does so many things that I was worried I was going to draw too narrow of the description of him. But he's an astrophysicist, a cosmologist, an author and science communicator, Mr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. And he is also the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth in space in New York City. He has his own podcast called StarTalk, which has been adapted into a television show. He's a prolific writer about science and a general, thoughtful, outspoken, prolific, voluminous thinker and speaker on the topics of space, science, space travel, and our interaction with our place in the universe and beyond. He is such an interesting guy,

brilliant self-made. He's got 43 degrees. Well, maybe not 43, like 41 degrees. You know, is a consultant with NASA. He does lots of cool shit. He's cool, man. And he's on my show. You know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut, like really badly. I still want to be an astronaut. This is a bunch of bullshit. I'm never probably going to go to space, but I can talk about it and fantasize about it like I did when I was a kid and I read all kinds of cool science fiction books. And I loved science and I wanted to be an engineer, but I didn't have enough math, or maybe I just didn't want to have enough math, or maybe I just wanted to have beers instead of math.

But this is a guy who knows a lot about science, is that delightful combination of a grounded, thoughtful scientist and a dreamer and has done so much to make science cool and approachable and appealing to young people of every age, gender, and ethnic background. And he's a pretty neat guy. and this is a really great conversation. There's also something at the center of the conversation about travel and our place in the universe

and how we got here and who we are and where we're going. It also has to do with our existential sense of self. Why are we here? What does it mean? You know, we're not going to live forever. None of us are, but our works may. And by extension, when we expand outwards into the universe around us,

when we create, when we develop, when we invent, we are leaving lasting marks on our environment. and hopefully drawing a clearer map, a clearer more detailed map in relief of the human place in not in the center, because we're clearly not in the center, we're in their own center, but in the in the great map of everything that there is. And he's a great guy to talk about this stuff with. He is cool. It was great conversation. It was too short, but it was still super, super fun. And here it comes.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Girl on Guy 219 with astrophysicist. and science communicator extraordinaire Neil deGrasse Tyson coming at you straight out of the Girl on Guy bunker which I wish was the Girl on Guy Bridge

and ran into your face Neil deGrasse Tyson welcome to my show Thank you. It was about time you called. I know it took me forever, didn't that? I feel like we've been working on this on the fringes for a long time but I'm a busy woman and you are

literally like as busier than me by a factor of many, in a factor of N. So I'm just thrilled that's finally come together. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me on the show. Now, you do this for a living, and your podcast is obviously much more structured and value-driven than mine, but I'm thrilled to be able to talk to. Mission-driven.

Mission-driven. And I'm going to just start out with what I feel is going to be kind of the crux of the conversation between us, and then we'll start at the beginning with your life. Because I don't know how articulates. this in a way that's not going to be ham-handed or ham-fisted. And I think I'm just, I'm really interested in talking about the fact that you are probably the most well-known American scientist and today. You know what I mean?

And you're an active scientist. You're not somebody that people read about in a school book. You're actively pursuing and disseminating science on an everyday basis. And you're African-American. And I think that you have probably not a mission that you set for yourself, but there's still a very mission. and what you do because I think

whenever you're the first or the only of something, you have a secondary mantle that you carry, willingly or unwillingly, I guess. So, yeah,

there's the mantle that people put you on. Yes, and there's the mantle you might have brought to the table. And so your accountability exists

in all these places. So that's certainly the case. I tried not to adopt anybody's claim or anybody's assertion that I should be a role model, only because I think the role model concept is overrated in the following way. If I had required that there'd be someone who looked like me who came out of the Bronx, who was an astrophysicist, for me to have become an astrophysicist, I would have never

become an astrophysicist. So at some point, if you want to do something no one has done before, there are no role models. So should that now restrict, constrict people's ambitions coming up in the educational pipeline. No, it shouldn't. You should still be able to do what you want. And so what I did personally was construct my role models a la carte. So there are people who had a scientific command of the scientific, command of astrophysics that I really said, boy, if I'm ever a scientist, that's the kind of scientist I want to be. And then someone else who was an educator was brilliant and inspiring and made you smile and made you want to learn more. And I said, what is it that they've got?

I want to learn that. If I'm ever an educator, that's the kind of educator I want to be. And you just parcel people's talents, regardless of what they look like. And you piece it together. Oh, by the way, what you really need in the role model,

struggling role model dimension is find the person who actually had to struggle to get out from where they were to whatever they became. And you will find that so many of those stories have strong overlap with what could apply to your life no matter what you want to do. So these stories have common denominators, right?

And so, but what it enabled me to create goals for myself that were not linked to other baggage a person, an individual might otherwise have. Right. So I, of course, as a kid, as a boy growing up in the Bronx, I had role models, I had athletic role models, but I wanted to have, like with the Yankees, right? The Yankees are the Bronx. So there were players I didn't want to be the player I just wanted to have the talent that the player had So if the player was later busted for cocaine

People are not going to say oh are you now going to do No I don't can't know Don't you see what? No I don't need to have like the whole life's profile So so yes there are mantles I know that I've been placed on but I'm I reject ones where they They want my entire life story

To serve as a model for them I say no you're not getting it Right, right. And additionally, in that space of like, here's what we demand of you because we see you as special or in some way unique to your space, that you are obligated to behave these ways to satisfy us, right? Yeah, basically, that's right. It's an expectation to serve other people's needs, not my needs, necessarily. And so that, I've had people contact me and say, oh, we want you to donate to this cause, this charity cause. And I'd say, well, I feel for this need, but it's not how I've arranged my life. And then they want to make me feel bad for not using my platform to support a worthy cause. And because they had an idea for me that was not my idea for me.

And that's what's so interesting about someone like you, this path that you've chosen, is that a part of it, a part of it requires that you, that your goals be specifically and uniquely and kind of, what's the right word, impenetrably your own. Do you know what I'm saying? For you to get where you've gone, you had to hue to your own set of goals on your own path. Oh yeah, otherwise you just get scattered thin and nothing happens. Right, right. And so, yeah, and it means saying no a lot, which is uncomfortable, but you get used. to it after a while, not from thick skin, but you just rethink the priorities. And otherwise, you just become what everyone wants you to be or maybe needs you to be. I personally felt I had a deep vision for where I wanted to take my life.

And so that's the tune that I loved to play. I realize I didn't start my very high-tech fail-safe backup here, and I'm doing that now. was just riveted. And I said, I better get this going in case. You don't trust the rest of your technology. I don't know. I don't trust, and I trust, but verify, my friend. There you go. Very militaristic. So let's start back at the beginning of your life, because I'm just so curious about, I'm just serious about you. That's why you're here. So where are you born?

I was born in New York City. In Manhattan? A resident of the Bronx at the time, but I was born in a hospital in Manhattan. Oh, okay. Mount Sinai Hospital. And were your parents, what was your educational, what was their educational experience? My mother was a housewife, did not go to college, not uncommon in the day. And my father struggled through school, for graduate school. He went to Columbia Teachers College. But over that time, they're starting a family, and there's not much money around.

And so we lived in middle income housing projects in the East Bronx, Castle Hill Housing Projects. and went to PS36 in kindergarten. And then he graduated and got a better job, and we moved. In fact, you're kicked out because they're housing projects. Right. So there's an limit. There's an upper limit to income, right? There's income thresholding, which is completely sensible and the right thing.

So we moved to Riverdale, which is a fancy part of the Bronx. And so my formative years were spent in Riverdale. in spite of what people would want to be true about me, that somehow I was born a poor black child. It's not the, no, I was a middle class. We grew up in an apartment building that had a swimming pool and it's winter ice skating rink and a large playground. So, no, middle class life went to public schools,

which I'm proud of public schools. About that stereotype is different groups would apply the exact opposite stereotypes to your life. There'd be the people would be like, well, he came up from a poverty and poor black child, never had a book, and he's stare at stars. And then I think there were a group of people who would put the opposite on, which is like the only way he could have ended up at Harvard and with, you know, multiple degrees is if he had grown up, you know, he was a rich black kid. Oh, right. Okay. It's interesting because just whenever you're a part of an excluded class or a historically excluded class, everybody has a framework. They've got to come up with some way to they've got to fit their trope. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, the brain, the brain loves to organize.

to a fault. It's an extreme fault. It works up until a point and then like cut it there. The system is failing you now. Now actually think about what you're in. All of us. So you went to public schools growing up. And I guess

you know, looking back that was obviously instrumental in your educational development. Well, only in the sense that it was a nice cross-section of sort of people. and the community and classes were large, which meant that you cannot rely on,

classes had 30 to 35 people, 34 people, anywhere in there. And you couldn't rely on the personal attention you might get in a private school. That's not always a good thing, of course, but if you can survive that, then maybe you become a better independent learner, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. And we're self-driven.

Yeah, self-driven. if you survive it and not and of course not everyone gets through that. Maybe people really needed that special attention. But in my case that was not necessary. Was education what were the conversations that you have with your

parents about education? Were they... Oh, so education was everything. Oh my gosh. It was my grandparents, my parents. It was never, there was never, well, do you want to

Will you go? Are you thinking of going to college? It's like what college are you going to? Yeah. So there was never, it's a quick story here. My brother was a, this is how far back it goes. My brother, older brother,

was a member of the James Brown fan club. Okay? And he mailed in his $2 or whatever and you become a member of the James. And do you know the name of his fan club? No. It actually had official name. It's called the James Brown.

Brown, don't be a dropout fan club. That's sensational. And just to show you how out of it I was, I did not understand that phrase. Drop out of a window? Drop. What do you mean? Drop what? What does this mean?

Right. Because nowhere was there ever the thought that I would drop out of high school or drop out of school. So the phrase drop out used in that context was far into me. Right. And it took years for me to finally. understand what that was referring to. He was trying to boost the educational initiatives that perhaps the fan base that he was targeting

needed. Right, right. And it's so interesting because that kind of an attitude about school, I had a similar experience where it was never like if I was going. I was just, it was where was I going? Yeah, what school are you going to? Yeah. And I think as a result, because that is your end goal, and not even being an Apple

polish, just if that's your goal you have yourself, then it is about like, how am I going to excel? Right, you can strategize how you can do it and what, over what pace. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it can have a profound effect on your life when certain trajectories are already built into your life's expectations. And so that's the aim-high concept that. that I think is, there's some people,

what does that saying go? If you play to win by one run, you lose by two runs or something. There's some expression that the coach tells you. That would be a baseball analogy. But so, yeah, if you aim high, as they say, shoot for the stars, and if you miss, you can just hang out at the moon.

Kick it at the moon for a while. That's a very scientific. Yeah, exactly. When you were a young kid, because I know from, anyway, like, Apocry or, you know, public lore, folklore has you kind of having this eureka, this kind of, you know, this crystallization moment where you're like, I'm going to be a scientist. Was that really how it happened?

So it was a little softer than that. So there was my first encounter with an actual night sky. Actually, it was a... Because you grew up in the city. There's no night sky in the city. Yeah, and there's no mystery. There's nothing up there when you're in a city. nothing. There's not even...

Hayes. Yeah, and back then there was also a lot of air pollution. It's how old I am. Apartment buildings burned garbage as a means of disposal of trash. And so there would be soot coming out of, not only the smoke from the burning garbage, but soot. Soot and ash that would actually land on your clothing by the time I walked home from school and you would brush it off your shoulders

and then before you entered. And this was just life. You're not even thinking that there's, that just is. Yeah, yeah. It's not, is this bad? No, it just is. Exactly. Of the ash.

It's one of the ises of life. And so, so there was air pollution as well as, of course, light pollution. And so you can't see anything. You see the moon five stars, a dozen stars at most. So to go into the Hayden Planetarium, which is the local planetarium to New York, to me, in New York City, and the lights dim, the stars come out. And it's true. I just thought it was a hoax.

How can this possibly be real? I'll go along with the hoax, but clearly this is not any universe that ever existed. But to learn that that was real was the watershed moment of my life. And the in the sense that I didn't know anything about any, I wouldn't care about anything until then, and I cared about the universe. And as a kid, you do what feels good, you're not really strategizing yet. take a couple of years by age 11 before I would recognize that this is you can make a career

of this and become a professional scientist. So from age 11 onward, I would know. I would have the answer to that annoying question that adults ask children. What do you want to be when you grow up? And I'd say an astrophysicist. That pretty much shut them up. Yeah, that's good. That's good answer. Aunt Matilda is what, no, Aunt Matilda is not the astrophysicist. So it was, it really, it gave me certain peace, quiet time after I said it, because there was never a rebuttal. Right. And also, it's ambitious as hell. It's like, okay, kid, you got it.

I mean, I don't really even know what that is, but it sounds good. Sounds good. It sounds meaningful. Sounds good. And so this, and there was a friend of mine who owned a pair of binoculars. And in this time, he offered to show me the moon through the binoculars. Now, just to show you how siddified I was, I,

binoculars, you don't look up with them. You're like, you look in windows. Yeah, it's not for looking up, or you take it to a sporting event, and I just never incurred to me to look up. Yeah. Because there's nothing up there. Yeah.

Okay, the moon is there, but I can see the moon. Right, right. I don't need binoculars. I got my eyes. And so you look at the moon through binoculars, oh my gosh. Yeah. There are mountains and valleys and craters.

in hills. The moon wasn't just bigger, it was better. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I realized if binoculars can do that with the moon, imagine with these big telescopes that you read about can do for the universe. So, yeah, yeah, I was hooked. So now I can align my life to make that happen from age 11 onwards. When did you see an actual night sky without light pollution? Did you go on a field trip? Oh, yeah. So there was some trips to the Caribbean where we had relatives and a couple of other trips to upstate New York and across into Pennsylvania, just away.

from city lights. And then even to mountaintops where there are actual real observatories. But to this day, again, how city-fied I am, to this day, if I go to a mountaintop and look up at the star-studded, unimpeded

night sky, my first thought is, hey, that reminds me of the Hayden Planetary. So I swear it's an embarrassing fact, but I confess it. that my reference, my imprinted in this is the night sky projected on the dome.

And to later on come back and become director of it is a privilege and a huge responsibility. But that hometown kid comes back and is directed, it doesn't play as well in the city. No one cares.

I say that to the press, yeah, okay, go on, what else you got. But in small towns, it matters, you know, someone goes out and they comes back. They don't,

I think there's too many other stories people here in New York that that story doesn't I don't know. I think it's a life's right. I remember Well you're from where? Where'd you grow up? I'm from San Francisco. San Francisco. That's cool town. And it's a cool town. So lots of light pollution.

But thank you. But I used to go camping. And I, one thing I was just thinking about when you were talking about. See, if you grew up in New York City, no one is thinking of camping. No, right? Not even that all. It's not even, it's not what? You want to do what? I would you sleep outside. Outside. Try to be homeless. Exactly. We got homeless people.

Yeah, we could do that down to street, you don't have got to drive anywhere. But I do, I was just thinking about the fact that when you really go to a place where there's no light pollution, how much of the universe is visible to the, actually just to the naked eye without tools, like how you can see the streets of the Milky Way and you can see, I mean, like stars upon star, like, that, I guess I was going to ask you an existential question, which maybe you couldn't answer when you were 11, but you might be able to answer now, which is, did seeing all that make you, this is really hippy-dippy, It, like, reforms your sense of yourself, like your sense of yourself as a being when you realize how much stuff is up there.

No. No, it didn't. No, no, no. No, you know what did, though? And this is a little obscure, but I'm old enough to remember the assassination of John Kennedy, just coming into the portfolio of memories that I can retain in my life. and I remembered at the funeral and he lay to rest at Arlington Cemetery and the family is there and little John John

and there was this flame and the announcer said this is an eternal flame and I said eternal what? You mean that is going to burn forever? Now holding aside even at age five I knew they had to keep adding fuel to this.

Yeah, exactly. Like, wait a minute. So, so, so I'll give him that, though. Yeah. All right. I don't mind knowing that I, this is not going to burn forever eternally. I know you got to refill it. But it was the first time I'd heard the word eternal.

Mm-hmm. And that was difficult for me. Mm-hmm. Because that's an unmeasurable quantity of time into the unforeseeably distant future. Right, right. And then I had a little bit of existential angst.

Maybe not so much angst, but curiosity. Yeah. Will I ever come to understand this idea? By the way, it's not natural for humans to have any concept of eternity. Because we're really good at knowing whether something with teeth is going to eat us.

Just look at where we evolved, right? on the Serengeti, the plains of Africa, are we food or are we not? Right, right. How fast is it running? How fast can I run? We are constrained by the life experience necessary to not die. And eternity never shows up in this, okay?

So we have no life experience dealing with eternity. This may be why it took so long for calculus to be invented, because it involves infinities. and where you specify precisely what something infinitely large or infinitely small must be. We're not the first, modern time is not the first, well, you know, Isaac Newton and others and Liebnitz, we're not the first to think about this. There's the famous Zeno's paradox. Was it Zeno? Zeno's paradox.

Where, have you heard of it? No, I haven't. I want to get from here to there. Well, first you've got to go halfway. Right. And then it went, and the rat you've got to go another halfway. Definitely divisible. And you keep, yep, then you get another halfway.

So the paradox is, if you have to keep going halfway, there's clearly an unlimited number of halfways that you can establish here. And so, therefore, you will never reach your destination. But you do. And therein is the paradox. So back then, there was no mathematical tools to understand what it meant to have an infinity of anything. So I'm saying, back to your question, And my first thought outside of myself was, how am I going to deal with eternity?

Yeah. Yeah. You were a heady kid. But the night sky was like, wow, look at how much there is to know. Right. I want to be a part of that. Yeah. And, I mean, again, I think there are, like, minds that would see something like that and be, you know, engaged and see possibility.

And others that would see as crushing infinity, smashing me down to a tiny part. article of dust and I am nothing. Well, this is the source of so many religious inspirations. You look up and you see how small you are. You say to yourself, clearly there's something bigger that started this. So that's my answer and now I can go back to bed. Right. And you're not left dangling there in the uncertainty of the abyss.

Of the unknown, unknowable of the cosmos. So religion always had very tidy answers to so much of that. Well, God made it happen. and what happens after death, you would go to Valhalla or to heaven or to whatever is the tradition of your religious training. And so a religion would supply these answers and therefore people aren't walking around staring. With vertigo, do you know what I'm feeling as if they're falling all the time. Right, right, right. It tidied up the unknowns.

It didn't matter whether you were monotheistic, well, especially polytheistic. You'd go back to the religions of ancient Rome and ancient Greece. Today we call them mythology, but they were their religions. And you would look at a storm coming in from the ocean. Nobody knew anything about barometric pressure or relative humidity or Coriolis forces. And so it was Poseidon, who was angry. Which made sense when that storm jacked up all your stuff. Then you thought, okay, he's pissed and now my house is.

Messed up your stuff. Yeah, you mess up. And since everybody messes up at some time, it was, it was, It reminds me It reminds me of this joke about One of the quotes from the Bible Jesus, they're ready to To persecute Mary Magdalene

Or I forgot exactly what they were going to do to her But throw stones at her And Jesus says Whoever among you has never sin Be the first to throw a stone Okay I'm paraphrasing, of course. And then a stone whizzes by Jesus' head towards Mary Magdalene.

And he turns around and says, Ma! I told you not to show up. Maybe there are some people who have never sin so that you can't invoke the punishment for knowing that you sin all the time. So, yeah, I think astrophysics especially is the gate, we are the gatekeepers

of the cosmic perspective. And I don't want to call it a gate, that implies where it's in one place and not to be shared, but we are the holders of this awareness because it is our methods and tools that got us there. Right. And I think more of it needs to be shared, which I try to do in any occasion I have in books or lectures

or interviews. Yeah, yeah, and trying to make this understanding feel more accessible, maybe not more pedestrian, but less remote, less... Yeah, exactly, more accessible. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to come back to the topic of religion, but I wonder, you know,

you're starting to configure your life around being a scientist, and did you decide at a very early age kind of what that path would be? And not having, you know, you were kind of modeling your path. Oh, no, no, yeah, no. I looked at the people who I role modeled for me and looked at their trajectories, and they majored in physics or math.

And at the time, my mother was a, frequented bookstores. And back then, it's kind of a lost... Some bookstores might still have it, but I don't think it's as big as it used to be. The table of Remaindered Books. Oh, yes, Remaindered Books, and it was like a treasure trove.

The book costs a dollar. Yeah, yeah. A $1.50. They're just trying to get them the hell out of the store. And my mother would go to these bookstores and find any book she could on math or physics or the universe. and I had a freaking awesome library in middle school. Wow.

Middle school. And I would read about math and little brain teasers. And so she, my parents, served my interests without having to tell me what they wanted me to be interested in, which I think is a common force operating. I'm a medical doctor, so will my kids be. I'm an engineer. You're going to be, I'm a military. And so they, true with my brother and my sister,

we were allowed to search for our guiding star. Did you like science fiction? No, I didn't. No, no. I loved it in like movies. Oh, yeah. But I never read much science fiction. I think because I was lazy.

If I'm going to read, it's going to be nonfiction. And then I'm going to be entertained. I'm going to go to a movie. And rather than spend four hours or six hours reading the book, I can spend an hour and a half or two hours watching the movie. Yeah. And then it's over and done with, and I get back to my nonfiction reading. So, no, I love a good science fiction story talk, especially so much of the greatest science fiction takes place in space or in the future where technology has transformed civilization in ways that what I'm studying or the community of knowledge that I'm entering, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields will be making that future.

And a lot of my early form of years were in the 60s, were going to the moon, as turbulent as that decade was. with assassinations and campus unrest and the hot war and a cold war and the civil rights movement, we were going to the moon. And that was deeply known within our culture. And the World's Fair in New York was not, well, it was all about the future, but you can ask, what does it come of? It emanated from the dreams of that decade, the Great World's Fair of 1964 and 65. That's what people remember.

There are other pavilions there, but the ones people remembered most, the monorail, you know, the things that was, wow. Right. Yeah, the future is in reach. And science matters to enable that future. I think lately people have gotten a little complacent. Well, I was going to ask you, this is kind of off-peased, but I feel like, I mean, obviously, in a lot of... I'm sorry, I'm dancing around to a lot of different. No, it's good.

This is the show. That, you know, from what I understand, I might be getting this wrong. Like, you've been a science advisor to lots of different programs, and you've been involved in some way with the space program. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've had appointments. Yeah. Tours of duty in Washington.

In the service of our government. In the service of our governments, yes. What's interesting to me now is how deeply integrated sciences in our everyday lives. Like, in the sense of, like, I remember my first computer. It was a Mac Plus. If I was writing a paper, I had to cycle, I had to cycle my three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks, take the disc out that ran the software to put the disc in that would save my paper

and it would go to memory in order to do that. Yes, and I would kind of sit there cycling these things through like a juggling, like I was a juggler. For the younger members of your listening audience, that was before there was such a thing as a hard drive for the personal computer. And literally the computing power of my phone is like 17,000 of those computers now.

Yes, or more. I mean, more. Yes. Oh, by the way, just to be clear, those discs had a rigid cover to them. But the disc inside was actually flexible. Right. And the discs used for the IBM PCs were five and a quarter inch and they were flexible.

And so that's why we use the word hard for hard drive. Many people don't know. Because that's the only kind of drive you know. The hard drive. That's just the name. It's just a drive. You can call it a drive. Give you permission.

Just call it the drive now. It was distinguished from the flexible drives. the floppy disks in the day. Yeah. And so, like, we, like, you know, the idea now that, like, we're this kind of frog and slowly warming water where we're just so immersed in technology, it infuses so much of our lives now. And yet in some way, and, like, I think about, like, something like, you know, Elon Musk and

the Tesla and, you know, X-Space and all this stuff. SpaceX. Sorry, I got that wrong. That's what the dyslexic. Space. Exactly. X-Space. Yeah.

X-Space is a club downtown. been frequenting. That'd be a cool club, right? Yeah, super cool. But like, in a lot of ways, when you're, the time you're talking about travel to space was something

that was infusing everybody with this kind of concept of hope and of like these great kind of technologically leaps forward that we're going to advance the human race, whereas now we're so glim about technology, but it feels like we've almost abandoned the space program. I watched a documentary that was saying we spent like a tenth on NASA that we spent like,

let's say, you know, 10 or 15 years No, relative to the total budget. Okay. The fraction has dropped, right? So in the 1960s, it peaked a couple of years before we landed on the moon because NASA was still building the infrastructure that would enable it. And we were, the country was committing 4% of your tax dollar to it. So it's still only four pennies on the tax dollar.

Right now, it's less than one half of one penny. So, yeah, it's a fraction of the. nation's commitment to that enterprise. But just to be, let's be honest with ourselves back then, we'd like to remember it as being a time of exploration and discovery. But we went to the moon because we were lethal enemies with the Russians. Yeah, we're just trying to beat them and get, yes. Just trying to beat them.

And that's why nobody who went to the moon was a scientist until the last moon mission, and there was one scientist, and then we never went back to the moon again. Just to be clear, but what the priorities were. There's a new moon mission now, right? Is that still in play that we're going to go to the moon now and make that kind of a steep-based waste station? I don't know what has been settled on.

There are ideas that will set up a moon base, but you don't need to set up a moon base to go to Mars. Just go direct to Mars. But Obama has spoken of going to Mars in the 2030s, or maybe a little earlier. but my worry about that is we now live in an era where a president can commit a vision statement to be carried out by a president not yet elected, to be named later, on a budget not yet established. So what does that mean?

When Kennedy said, we'll put a man on the moon, put him safe food to earth, he did that in 1962, do that before the end of the decade. Had he gone two terms, that would have happened under his watch. Right, right. I'm still president and we're still making this happen, bet. Let's do it. Yeah, exactly.

So I don't know what it means for Obama to have said that. Right. Well, it means intention. Attention, but you've got to the political support and the political capital that you would invest.

But regardless, again, we should be honest if we're not at war, will we be as motivated to do that? I'm not convinced. I have some other ways to do it. I wrote a book on it. On how to get to

Mars? No, how to, why going into space matters. Yes, that's the core of what I'm Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And why it matters. And I don't want to force you to like space as much as I like space. That would be an unfair argument to invoke. But I think nobody wants to die. No. And especially, so you will invest money to defend yourself. So that's why War has essentially an unlimited budget for whatever the needs are, real or perceived. We spend money on war, the Defense Department. But also, what you don't want to die, you don't want to die poor. Right.

Certainly not in a capitalist society. So if I could direct you in a way that will assure the future economic health of your country, would you be interested? And I can say that audacious ambitions, audacious mission statements in space, will attract the best of all the stem fields that there are. If we're going to look for life on Mars, I need the biologists because I'm looking for life, I need the astrophysicist, I need the medical doctors because the health of astronauts on route, I need structural engineers because we're going to build stuff when we're going to build stuff

when we get there. I need the chem. The whole STEM portfolio is represented in NASA missions. And if they're big missions, now you have a dream that you can reach for. And you can turn a sleepy country into an innovation nation practically overnight by sending out a call for the best of the engineers and scientists. And even if you're not an engineer and scientist, they want to become an attorney, how about we need someone to write the space law for who's going to, own the mineral rights to asteroids.

The first trillionaire will be the person who exploits the minerals on asteroids that are going around the sun with nothing better to do except to put Earth at risk. Might as well mine the shit out of it, okay? And do something useful with it.

Just think about what that future might be. But it's interesting because... So my point is, I would say you go into space and assure... When you become an innovative nation, everybody is thinking invention, creating a new tomorrow, a new product, a new this. And those are the seeds of tomorrow's economies. And those innovations fall back to earth and transform people's life here on this planet as well.

It's not just whether it's a spin-off. I'm talking about a culture of innovation. It goes deeper than just, I'm waiting for the spinoff to happen from what you did en route to Mars. It's an entire culture of there is tomorrow that we are inventing right now. How can I be a part of that? Right. What I was going to say to was the interesting thing about all of that is like I loved science fiction when I was a kid. I was like a avid consumer.

Veterate reader. I read on the bus and I'd wake up at the turnaround and it was dark and I'd be in trouble. Child left on bus. Exactly. I was like my own kidnapper. And I would read Bradbury and Heinlein and I would, I love, you know, like the Mars trilogy. And I fantasized about living in space. And I guess, unfortunately, the way to drive a space program is to talk about a space program is to talk

about the financial benefits and the technological benefits, because the dream part of it, the part that might have, even though there was the space race with another country, there was also this fantastical kind of, this is not the right term, manifest destiny. Human beings are meant to travel the stars.

Our destiny lies off of this planet. There's a saying in the space community. If God had wanted us to have a space program, he would have given us a moon. Oh, we have a move. We have a move. Wait a minute. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. And the innate curiosity, the innate need of human animals to understand. All that innate stuff and all that lofty talk, that's why I spent the whole book in analyzing. That's why I spent the whole book analyzing this. This book a few years ago, Space Chronicles facing the ultimate frontier. So in there, I just simply, I make the simple case that if you, you, you know, if you, you You can gather enough money to send humans to Mars because everybody in that moment is feeling it.

Feeling that I want to explore. Okay, fine. Now watch what happens. It takes many years to assemble the total funding to go to Mars because you can't get all that in one budget cycle. And it takes many years to conduct the missions. Over that time, there are economic downturns. Over that time, shit happens. And so it is ripe for there to be some economic depression, some huge wave of layoffs,

and the press goes to the people in the unemployment line and say, how do you feel about unemployed, while we have astronauts going to Mars? And I'd say, I can't feed my family. Why the hell are we going to Mars? Right. So I study this, and I found that there are only three drivers that can survive. these up and downturns, cultural and economic ups and downturns.

One of them is the praise of royalty and deity, so the praise of gods. That worked every time historically. But now you don't have nations led by by the praise of gods or kings. It doesn't happen anymore. Nobody's building pyramids to anybody anymore.

Right, right. And there is no crusades in the name of God or your version of a God, right? That doesn't happen anymore. So that used to drive huge resources, but no longer. War has always driven resources, and that works whether or not you're in a depression. And we already mentioned that. The third one is the promise of economic return.

That works even when you're in a downturn. Yeah. Because we say, we need to do this so that we can re-boost the economy. This is going to pay. So I'm being very practical about that. this and saying, I think exploration of space is a force of nature in driving

our economy. And if you also want to do it for the reasons that I would do it, for exploration, why you read science fiction? Because it's a tomorrow that's being imagined. Welcome aboard. But at the end of the day, for it to survive the

the risks of the up and downs of life and society, you can't just say, let's do it because it's fun. Because it's cool. Because it's cool. You can't say it. It's not going to survive it. I want to come back to kind of

the concept of manifest destiny, human manifest destiny. It's not the right phrase. I get it, guys. Don't write in. But when you set this path for yourself, you know, you're looking at people that you want to emulate. A big meal is made about the fact that not only did you admire Carl Sagan,

but you met him and he he extended like these kindnesses to you that were really inspiring. Yeah, yeah, it was, oh my gosh, he was already famous. Though he had not yet done Cosmos, he was already famous. And on TV and written books, best-selling books, and he wrote me a personal letter inviting me to check out Cornell. How did he know who you were? Oh, so I'm guessing.

I never got this confirmed, but this is the only way it could have happened. My application to college, in particular, the one that went to Cornell, but they all would have smelled this way, was dripping with the universe because I'd known since age nine of this interest. And all of my life's activities had aligned in this way. A member of the Amateur Astronomy Club,

the math team, this sort of thing. I'm certain that, highly likely that the admissions office, after they admitted me, sent my application to him to get him to encourage me to attend. Okay, yeah. So I think he was on task,

but still he didn't have to do. do it. And the letter was heartfelt. Yeah. And so... And would have been, I imagine, dazzling when it arrived. Well, so here's what happened. So Seth McFarlane, the Seth McFarlane, bought Carl Sagan's papers, donated them to the Library of Congress. Oh, wow. And the Library of Congress had a display of his papers, which included correspondence between him and me. Wow.

When I wrote back to him and said, no, I didn't ultimately go to Cornell. the reason why I didn't choose Cornell in spite of this very warm invitation was I didn't want the primary reason for me to attend a college to be a single person. I wanted a greater baseline of who I could work with.

But suppose he leaves Cornell and then I'm left to Cornell and not there. They're stuck up in upstate New York. Stuck in Africa, traps. Not that they didn't have an excellent astronomy department in astrophysics department, But I chose a place with a much broader baseline of scientific talent that would give me more options. I wouldn't have to commit to one topic or another.

So, yeah, that happened. That actually happened in my life. And since then, I've had a sort of personal obligation, duty, to serve the curiosities of other students who have shown interest in my field the way Carl Sagan has shown to me. And a problem that was nobody, age 17. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, I mean, you know, it's a... I didn't write to him. Yeah, he wrote through it, that's okay.

It's an unbidden, like an unbidden letter from your hero. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, you know, it must have been like getting the golden, Willy Wonka chicken to the chocolate factory, Charlie. The golden ticket. Right, exactly. I'm trying to, like, sleep with it under your pillow, you know. You went to Harvard.

Yes, majored in physics at Harvard. And, you know, Harvard is in a city. It's in Boston, so it might not have felt. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm in Cambridge. Yeah, but, you know, for all intents and purposes. It's urban.

It's urban school. I imagine that might not have felt like a big culture shock to you. But because we had similar but not the same experiences and that I went to an Ivy League school, I went to Dartmouth, I do remember it feeling

still like feeling dramatic cultural differences. And I wonder if that, if when you went to Harvard, it felt familiar to you or it was disorienting at first because Ivy leagues have a very special culture, mainly because they're fed by

for the most part, like nine private schools on the East Coast. Correct. I didn't care about the Harvard culture. You know how I chose Harvard? I'd say how I did it. At the time in high school, and by the way, not many people know this little bit, but I'm going to lay it out right here. So I subscribed to Scientific American while a high school student, and I had several years of it. My favorite part was a section called About the Authors. And I would read their articles because,

Scientific American is written by scientists, not by journalists. So I'd read their articles. I'd read the articles on the topics that I was interested in, so the math and physics articles. And every article in the about the author write-up would list where they went to college, where they got their master's, where they got their PhD, and where they were on the faculty. So in principle, these are four different institutions that are touched by their experience.

Okay. So I gathered all those articles, and I made a checklist of all the schools that had admitted me, which of these authors went there as an undergraduate, graduate school, PhD, or was on the faculty? And when I made that list, Harvard blew away every other school that I had applied to and was admitted to. And I said, well, this is the decision right here. And that decision, by the way, had nothing to do with what people otherwise think of as the legacy of highly selective schools. I knew I wanted astrophysics, and I was going to pursue it at a place where astrophysics mattered. If my life was going to track the life of these accomplished scientists who were invited to write for Scientific American. So I get to Harvard, and there's the Center for Astrophysics, and I move to the dorm that's nearest the Center for Astrophysics, And I don't care about the Ivy. I don't care about the Harvard Yale game. I don't care what prep schools people went to.

None of that. And I had attended the Bronx High School of Science. So being immersed in geekdom was something that I cherished and celebrated. And so the culture shock for me at Harvard was being around such a consistently talented, talented set of people. So not that that was a culture shock, but I was enchanted by that. Yeah, yeah. And every next person was an expert, by the way, at age 18, was an expert in some thing.

And that was kind of fun. But at the end of the day, I was focused. And the rest, I don't wear a Harvard ring. I don't go to reunions. I don't. So, yeah, had I tried to assimilate this prep school life, I would have said, yeah, I don't think they ever had me in mind. I probably would have had some issues. Yeah. But that's not

why I went to that school. You were focused on one thing. All the way. So you talked about Oh, by the way, but there was a little bit of the prep school culture that I did uptake. I started rowing. I rode as well. So I see

your concept too. Fold it up in the corner. Let me see your hand. See if any remaining. They're not as callous. Oh, whoa, did you? No, you must have a manicure as take these away. Take those away every day. I got to still feel right here. there's still one right there. And when you're rowing with those wooden,

when you're, I'm that old, yeah. We rode with wooden oars. None of this, none of this wimpy, let's have foam cushion, foam carbon fiber.

Oh my gosh. You know, we were back when rowers were rowers. Roers were rowers, yes, and your hands were constantly split and bleeding. Split and bleeding. And so,

no, I was, so I enjoyed rowing as a sport, and I continued that in through graduate school. And I look for the rowing machine and fitness centers when I go to them. Yeah, and you never forget.

I mean, that's something that's in your blood because it is one of the most consuming sports. Yeah, yeah. Every muscle, every stroke. Yes, and I remember all I thought about was study eat bagel, row, study eat bagel, row. God, I mean, a dry bagel was like, I was like it was teething all through college.

I always had it in my mouth. We're going to run out of time. So I want to jump ahead. I want to quickly talk about your collegiate path and then I want to talk a little bit about how you you have been able to kind of navigate this space between popular culture and science, I think, in a really special kind of modern way. And I think obviously social media and technology probably have a lot to do with that. You're able to reach more people than maybe someone would have when, you know, in previous generations.

Meet people trivially, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But you went to a lot of colleges. You actually did, you went Harvard undergrad. Yeah. And then I began graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, got my master's, there with the intent of continuing the PhD,

didn't work out with my advisor. In graduate school, it's not just how well you do in a class. It's, are there people you can work with, who you can engage in research projects with? If that doesn't work out, it just doesn't work out. So it didn't work out for me. Were there creative differences?

Did you not feel like that? Mysterious. Yes, we parted for creative. I would say that they didn't, I didn't fit their mold or expectation of what a graduate student is or should have been. Interesting. Because you're so one pointed that when I read that about you, I did read a little bit about you, because you're a scientist, so I need to not sound totally stupid.

I thought, how can someone, not how can someone, it's interesting that someone this one pointed, this focus has accomplished, at some point, abandoned their PhD track at a school. You know what I mean? Like, you know, decided to do it somewhere else. Yeah, that's right. There was no, we had a disagreement about the, my, promise, my future promise and performance as a scientist. And so...

Well, they can suck it now. Well, no, well, stop. So, so I, so, I don't even blame them in the sense that they had an understanding of what, who should, they had an understanding of the profile of a graduate student who would then become successful. And in many ways, I did not fit that profile. So I transferred graduate studies to collect. Columbia in New York Columbia University got my PhD there and then one of my the highlights of my life was giving the the graduate commencement speech there were two graduations one for the whole the undergraduate schools and then

there was a separate ceremony for all PhDs in the school I was invited to give the the commencement speech and I got to tell a little bit of my background and my ambitions of becoming an astrophysicist and so for anyone to say, oh, it looks like you're not going to make it, so let's just, can you think of something else to do? You have no idea. The depths of my energy reserves for this, you know, do you know who you're fucking with? You know, I guess they just didn't know. They had no idea.

They had just no idea. So, so. Also, that is, to me, that is so anti-academic. I mean, to say to somebody, we just don't think this is. going to work out. Well, so even though, by the way, it's not like, it's not as though I was saying, you know, I'm a little lost, maybe I should do something else. Right.

No, no, I was the whole time. Yeah. I'm saying, I'm, I'm down. I'm here. I'm here. Yeah. I'm here. I'm ready to do it.

So what you need is a graduate program that was nimble enough to see what was different and not get distracted by that and find out what can work and work, just make it work. Yeah, exactly. And so that happened at Columbia. from their postdoc, postdoctoral research fellowship at Princeton. And a while at Princeton, I did that, and then I stayed on at Princeton as visiting faculty because right at that point, the American Museum of Natural History

was looking to do something with the astrophysics group, with the planetarium, the whole universe part of the American Museum of Natural History. So I came on as an advisor. and ultimately became director and the first chairman of a newly formed astrophysics department. This is back now 15 years ago.

And so now we have a whole vibrant research group there in our department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. Every league school, and then I had brown, I play tennis and then I had pen. I was teaching knitting.

Oh, right, sorry. There was a year there where I taught at the University of Maryland at College Park. So that was fun. But then everything collapsed to Texas, and so I had to regroup. But anyhow, but I don't dwell on that.

You know, people say, oh, if you could do anything different, how would you do it? Not to put a question in your mouth, but I think I have an unorthodox answer to that. I wouldn't do anything differently. Right. Because I am the sum of all of that life experience, which involved the struggles and the transfer of schools,

all of that creates who you, you are. Yeah. Yeah. And it reminds me of the, you know, the immigrant that comes here with $10 in their pocket and they work hard and they struggle and they get wealthy and they have kids and they say, I never want my kids to struggle the way I did. They will never know a hungry day in their life and they will provide for them. And so then you provide for them and they are deadbeat. Lise entitled. And they say, how come they're this way when I gave them everything I didn't have? That's why they're that. You've answered your own question.

You answered your own NAM question. Yeah, yeah. So a person's life experience provided you survive it and overcome it, I think represent a fundamental portfolio of who and what you have become. Yeah. So. And you talked about the fact that you looked at the, the paths of the people that you admired, and you wanted to emulate them, although you set your own path for yourself.

But I think what's also instructive is the through line for you was you had a goal and you were not going to be deterred. Oh, yeah, no matter. Yeah, there's nothing you could tell me. And people tried. Oh, you're really athletic. Why don't you go into, you know, have you ever thought of professional, you know, football or whatever? Because I was fast and I had some balance.

You know, I could have been a wide receiver, not a wide receiver, but certainly a running back, definitely at the college level. Maybe not pros, but definitely college level. And I said, no, no, I don't want to, I'm not interested. Oh, have you thought of this? And everyone was trying to suggest things that were not astrophysics because their expectations would not otherwise be fulfilled by it. But I didn't care. Right, right.

I didn't care. And then I wondered, here I am kind of a guy, all right, I'm as visible as you can get today, right? Yeah, yeah. And so I say, are there any others ready to sort of, because I don't want to do this forever. I'd rather go back to the lab. I don't need you doing this the rest of my life.

And so find me in the lab, all right? And so I just wonder how many people who had ambition, but whose ambition was squashed simply because their fuel tank had run dry, right at the point where that... Or been bled dry by the... By the ambivalence or the close-mindedness of others. Because I, you know, look, I'm sure that... they were people for whom you didn't look like any astrophysicists that they knew.

And so they thought, hey, this isn't going to work out for you because it's never worked out for anybody else. I mean, that's how we started this conversation. And I guess fortunately for me, I was in my own little world. And all of the naysayers and at the time, you know, there's, you know, what are they called, the microaggressions, which were continuous in the 60s. I liked fancy watches. I walked dogs for a living in the glory days of dog walking where you didn't have to clean up after they poop. Pre-pooper

scooper laws. You walk three dogs, they poop. You don't even have to stop, break gates. Exactly. And so, but I used that money to buy my first telescope and my first camera for astrophotography. And in there, I would buy these watches that had these multiple

dials on them. Well, I don't know why I cared that my watch had a tachometer and time in 17 countries. Sciencey. It was sciencey. It was machine, a tiny machine. And one time I bought one of these watches and the sweep secondhand had fallen off. I don't know if anyone knows what a sweep second hand is anymore. It's the thing that turns once a minute, okay?

And count seconds on an analog clock. So it had popped off inside the dial. So I went to a nearby jeweler. And I'm 15 or something at this time. Can you put this back on? And by the way, I bought this watch at Macy's, right? And a mall at Macy's. And the, and the jeweler says,

this watch is stolen. We're not going to touch it. I said, stolen, what? And I wonder, was there, how would he know that? Right. Was there a stolen shipment of watches that were taken to Macy's? Right, right. And then I realized, oh, he doesn't,

why would I own that watch? Yeah, yeah. Unless it was stolen in his mind. Right. Some black kid with a fancy watch. Yeah. And so I didn't realize until later that that, is what was going on in that conversation.

But if I let any of that affect me, I'd be dead today. So I was in my own cosmic world, thankfully. And the paths of the people that are coming behind you, whether scientific or not, I think, can be informed by that singular kind of perspective, which is microaggressions are no, obstacles are no, positive or negative perceptions are no. They cannot and should not inform your path.

And they will not. And they will not. Yes. That's correct. Yeah. And it takes, you know, you need some level of thick skin. But for me, it wasn't thick skin. It's just I didn't care. Is there a word for that?

I don't know. What kind of skin is it where you just don't care? Not give a fuck. Not give a fuck a too. We should trademark that. I'm going to lose you. So I want to ask you one last question. And then we'll do a little coda for the show.

It's a two-part question. we're trying to answer quickly, but the first thing is, are you, are you, how do you feel about the state of science right now? I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. Let me answer a slightly different question. What do I think is the future of science in America where fluency in science, literacy in science will make the difference between whether we are economically competitive or not, or whether we become good or bad shepherds of the earth that is sustaining us? So by my read, It's a little bit anecdotal, but I think there's enough evidence there for me to say it with confidence that the generation of people who are 30 and under, they grew up with the smartphone. They know that this device in their hand has given them information from around the world,

beaming off of GPS satellites, giving them directions. They know firsthand what role science and technology engineering and math are playing in their lives. And their heroes are geeks, not corporate magnets. not politicians, and our patron saint of geeks is Bill Gates, who's the richest man in the world. You put all this together, and you realize that the future of the United States,

I think, has a very different future than the one that you see percolating among those in charge. Because 30 and under, they're not yet old enough to run for the Senate or to become president, or to be CEO, or to be on corporate boards that actually define the future of a nation. But give him a few years, These are the people who go to Comic-Con in the droat.

Comic-Con used to have 10,000 people. Now, there are hundreds of thousands of people in multiple Comic-Con across the country. And every one of them knows the difference between fantasy and fact. Every last one of them. And there are no judgments. Excuse me.

There are judgments just whether your costume is accurate. But if you're a little overweight, you're stutter, you're a little awkward conversationally, there are no judgments. It is literally, I mean, having been the kid who played alone for most of my childhood, what is so amazing about Comic-Con is that. It's just a collection of all kids who played alone,

finally playing together. Because we found the internet enabled a community of people to rise up from the turf who were otherwise alone, and now they can play together. And like I said, there's no judgments. So it's not how beautiful you are or how socialized you are, how cool you are. How cool you are.

And so I think that is the future. And if that's the future, we will have a scientifically informed governance of this country, which is what we desperately need because that is the difference between surviving in the 21st century and not. Yes, also, or between surviving in the 21st century or drowning under melted ice caps. Yes, yes, exactly. We have people in government who deny science. Right. And I think, you know, I don't blame them explicitly.

I think there are failures in our educational system. such that that would even be an accepted thing. That would even be okay. They even get to that point. People, not enough people fully understand what science is and how and why it works. Right. And I wrote a, I wrote a little bit on that. I just, to Google what science is and Tyson.

And I don't think Mike Tyson has written on that subject, right? So you should go to my, to my little essay. That science is everything. You should go to my version of that, even if Mike Tyson did come through. But I think it's, it's, people should read that if you're otherwise wondering or you say, oh, it's just a theory or how, how, what a scientist know? If you, if you're thinking that way, I just invite you to, to explore this. And with regard to social media, that's where I learned that people will absorb science if you fold it into the, to the pop culture that they're already fluent in. And StarTalk is a, is an, is an experiment.

In you coming to me with your pop culture scaffold, and I clad it with science, and then you walk away with science enriched views on what you thought might have had no correspondence to science at all. Right, right. And we started with a grant from the National Science Foundation who believed in this experiment. And then it went to, so it started on radio, then it went to satellite radio, then podcasts, and then it jumped species, went to telemet, went to telemed, Television, National Geographic. I'm here in LA because of the Emmys. We didn't win, but we got nominated. You've been nominated before, because I feel like I see it.

Twice in a row. That means somebody's paying attention. Because StarTalk is the first ever, first ever talk show on television based on science. And the fact that we'd get noticed in its first year, we didn't have to win. We got noticed with the nomination. It told me that somebody's paying attention and someone values this

exercise. Science is important. Then it jumped species again, and then we made a book. StarTalk, the book. And I was skeptical how we could bring it all together and have it still sing with the pop culture science recipe that worked on radio and on television. But I think we succeeded. And these things all continue to dovetail, support,

and integrate and kind of structurally. Correct, correct. And every morning I wake up, I say, how many Twitter followers? Do they know that I'm an astrophysicist? They can still pull out. Yeah, exactly. You still unfollow?

Anytime. Any time. You can still unfollow. I was going to tell people they need to follow you because one of the most fun things, even if you're not a scientist, but you love popular culture, is to watch you, you know, savage science in film and television. It's always enjoyable. I think I misunderstood there. People brand me as a buzzkill. And my intent is to enhance your viewing going pleasure, moviegoing pleasure. And I think I've been misunderstood. understood. So I don't, if I'm, because so many people get pissed off and it's not my intent. No, your intent is just to say, look, these things are grounded. I mean, look, predictive science or science fiction, are, the science is actually like the core, you know, the critical word in those phrases.

It should be. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I mean, the science fiction, predictive science is the fancy word for science fiction. But if you're watching something like the Martianer, you're watching something like, uh, don't you want to know that. Is that real or not? that Sandra Bullock in the zero-g scenes of the movie Gravity, that her bangs always pointed downward. Yeah, yeah. Don't you want to know that... That wouldn't happen? That her hair would, like, freely float in space. I thought maybe people...

She had a lot of gel, a lot of gel in her hair. Space gel. Space gel, yeah, for zero-g gel. There you go. That's a new brand for you. No. So I'm... So I think if you want to call it a recipe, I don't like thinking of it that way because it happened a little more organically than this.

But retrospectively, the recipe is if I can find some way to attach science to the pop culture that you value, what I have found is that you will absorb that science like that. And you will want more of it because it enhances your life and the things you care about. And science is no longer this lesson. Okay, abandon everything you're doing, come into my class and I will lecture to you on science. That's not what it is. science is everywhere. You don't have to dumb it down. It just is the science that matters. And I was impressed with the reaction. It tweeted this. I was watching an overtime period in a

football game and a recent playoff season. And they went through the multiple chains of possessions and then there was like sudden death field goal kick. And I'm watching it. And there it goes. By the way, I was only channel surfing and landed on this, right? And there it goes. And the football hits the left upright and continues in for the win. And so I said, wait a minute. Ooh, let me check. I checked the orientation of the field and the latitude, and I did the calculation.

And I concluded that that field goal was aided by a third of an inch deflection to the right given to that ball because of the rotation of the earth. Ooh. So I tweeted that. I tweeted that. And people just ate it up. And I was really just trying to enhance your football watching pleasure, but it ended up in the, you know, the team that won said,

Oh, Earth, the headlines, the local papers had fun with it. Earth helped the team win, you know. The universe is on our side kind of thing. So I love doing that when I can, and I'll continue to do it as long as people will embrace it. And the day that people stop embracing, I'll just, like I said, I'll just go back to the lab. That story you told me reminded me of the quote, I'm actually not quite sure who did it. Bradbury, but I'm going to give it to him. The one that science sufficiently advances in the visible.

So that's Arthur C. Clark, one of his edicts. Indecurable from magic. Yeah, yeah. Any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Yeah, yeah. So that was something that looked magical to everybody. Right? This magical thing of the ball going in.

Oh, you know, it's a freak accident. And you know, you show. No, there's some forces. work there that matter to you in ways you might not have thought. And in that way, people won't think of science as this class that they would never good at or need to step around, that they will see it as a fundamental element of what it is to be alive and what it is to function in the 21st century. And in that way, I think that's a different country. That's a country where everyone knows and understands what science is. Would you go to space if you could? Only if I checked the

budget and money to bring me back? A, B, if I'm actually going to a destination. Like I said, lately NASA, for the last 40 years, NASA has been boldly going where hundreds have gone before. To me, that's not space. It's a couple hundred miles above the earth. Yeah, always...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you go to San Francisco from L.A., you are farther away from L.A., than the astronauts are from Earth's surface. Wow. So, we've somehow all agreed to call that space, but to an astrophysicist that is driving around the block. Going for the layoff. It's going for the layoff. It's going for the

a easy layup. Right, right. Space put a destination in there, and I'm all for it. Cool. Well, we're out of time. So I just want to be you. I was delighted to finally do you.

You didn't call, you don't write. I know, I know. I'm a terrible human being, but I remain a fan, and it was a thrill to see you at the Emmys last night, and I am confident I'm going to see a thing. And I announced an Emmy that you came up to get. Yeah, exactly. You announced my category.

There was, oh, you did the animated shows. The animated show. The animated show. Yeah, for the best animated show. Yeah. For Archer. Archer, yes. Which was a thrill.

And did not expect to win at all. And it was a delightful night. And it was great to see you up there in your space fest, in your signature space fest. You got to wear what you love. Exactly. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

Well, that was my cool conversation with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who I've been hoping to get on the show for a long time. And I finally did it. And, you know, I think he's doing some pretty cool work. I know I'm not the only person that thinks that. You know, I don't know, science and STEM studies need to be cool. And they were cool when I was a kid and they need to be made cool again. I think so much of what people are focused on now is minutiae, meaningless crap, the internet, some stupid fucking video where your face looks like a bunny rabbit.

We got to be making shit, man. We've got to be doing shit. Science, in my opinion, and I know I'm not, I'm not a Luddite here. I do think that science on the whole, for the most part, with some big, gaps, some big divvets has made our lives better in so many ways. And I know for me, because I get to make this show and I get to make movies and get to make music videos and I get to create, science has directly impacted my ability to be a better and more productive artist. So I love science. I believe in science. And I hope you do too, because global warming is real,

motherfucker. You better roll up your pants. This has been Girl and Guy. You guys are the greatest. You know what to do. Come say, how to me online. Come send me a question for the all listener question show. That is coming. And it is coming. soon. It is never too early, but it will soon be too late for you to ask me a question for the all listener question show. Ask me a question about science. Ask me a question about science fiction. Ask me a question about Star Trek. I can answer them all. Maybe not right. Maybe not properly, but with some Googling appropriately enough for you. Come say hi to me. Get your question on the show. There are only a few episodes left in this year. And now is the time for you to connect with the podcast

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