StarTalk Radio - Pro Athlete Cosmic Queries

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

Neil deGrasse Tyson, alongside co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice, answer Cosmic Queries from professional athletes including Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn, rugby player Nicole Heavirland, skateboarder Joey Brezinski, and boxer Cam F. Awesome. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here. Photo Credit: U.S. Ski Team / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) Special thanks to Uninterrupted. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

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

Hey, hey, what's happening, Neil? All right, Chuck, and Gary, Gary O'Reilly. Hi, Neil. Okay, the only one of the three of us that has professional street cred for sports. Yeah. Chuck is in good shape, but I don't think he ever did anything athletic. I saw him try to swing the bat at a softball. It's like he had never been on a field before.

Well, you know, that's because I had never been on a field before. That's why. And that is a testament to my natural athletic ability that I was able to pick that game up in five minutes and actually play. Oh, that's what, I should have been impressed.

That's right. By how bad you were. That's right. That's right. You know how good you got to be to be that bad? Gary, you know, we've been around each other a long time, but I never actually bluntly asked you this question. How many years did you play professional soccer in the UK?

14 years. Whoa. Wow. But you're in the system long before that. Yeah. You sort of join, now you would join a top soccer team's academy at the age of maybe seven. Ooh.

And you would transit through the age groups, transit through into what they call development squads now, which are under 23. Back in the day, they were called a reserve team, a second team squad. And I would be playing, if you showed talent, you would be playing in that development squad, that reserve team at the age of 16, 17 years of age. So Gary, one other thing about the UK. So obviously, soccer is big there as it is in all of Europe and most of the world. But also rugby is a pretty big sport there, right? Oh man, rugby is football. The first iteration. It is known as rugby football. So, football started off as men carrying a ball in their hands. Some clever person decided to introduce kicking it. Oh, okay. Okay, so I've seen a few rugby matches. That's some raw stuff going on there. It's nothing but a bar fight with a ball.

It's what it is. That's what rugby is. It's a bar fight. It's a bar fight with a ball. That's all. So here's the way it gets described, the two sports, soccer and rugby football, or football if you want to call it that. Soccer is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans,

and rugby is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen. Oh, very good. When you see the way rugby players behave on the field, once the umpire or the referee says no, they stand, they pay attention. If they have to move back, they move back. The very point. They are well-mannered. And they may go and knock the snot out of each other.

It's just the way it goes. Yeah, and I mean, there's no shoulder pads. Here's the law of rugby that gets most people. You can only move forward by passing the ball backwards. Backwards, yeah. That DNA is still resident in American football in that you can forward pass the ball, but you can only lateral the ball

either in the plane or behind you. That's it. If you lateral the ball forward, it's a penalty. So another point there is I've seen rugby players like dragged along the field, like face first, and there's no helmet, there's no knee pads, there's no anything. Whereas, of course, in American football,

they're fully protected in every important joint and vital organ, the brain. So Gary, boy rugby, Gary, you have boy rugby. There's also, like, girl rugby. When did it become a double, a two-sex thing? Women's rugby has been around for some time. And it's organized to the extent they have Women's Rugby World Cups. So the tournaments that the men play in, the women,

are a mirror image of that. I remember interviewing international women's rugby players back in the early 90s. So this has been organized to a sufficient level. So going back probably into the 80s, where women's rugby was sophisticated enough for there to be a high enough level to be international games I think the US women's rugby side I'm not sure of when that became a thing but they've they've entered into the international stage and as you can imagine they leave a footprint because the the girls are every bit as predisposed as the boys when it comes to playing rugby. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And so, because I lead into that because our first question is from a U.S. women's rugby star.

And I get her name right, Nicole Heverland. Heverland. Heverland, yes. Right, so if we've mispronounced it, Nicole, please don't come and see Neil or I, go and see Chuck. There you have it. Why be any different than anybody else, Nicole? Just so as people understand who Nicole Heverland is,

she is captain of the U.S. Women's Sevens team. Now, the Sevens team is a much faster game. So there's only seven players on each team, whereas on the full team, there's 15. So she is captain of the women's seven team. So it's a much faster, much more exciting game. And both the men and the women play it. But Nicole, just to give her her proper credence in the real game, the 15-a-side game,

she was part of the U.S. international team in the 2017 World Cup in Ireland, where the U.S. got to the semifinals or semifinals, if semifinal is too painful for your ears. Okay. No, we're good with either pronunciation of semifinals. All right. Right. Well, let's hear Nicole's question. Hey, Neil, how's it going? Do you think we will see interplanetary colonization within our lifetime? Ooh, excellent question. And very hopeful, too. I like questions that kind of want things to happen, not ever, but now. Right. Yeah, before I die, will this happen?

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

So the solar system technically is within reach of astronaut travel, even out to, you know, Neptune, let's say, the edge of the planetary system. Get over it. Yeah, I was going to say, there is somebody out there past Neptune. Get over it. There's one little person out there past Neptune.

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

That's kind of ideal. By the way, you'd have to do that if you want to pursue the analogy of space exploration as the next generation of the age of ocean-going explorers in the 15th and 16th century. Right. They go out into the wide open ocean blue, not knowing where the destination is. Will they come back alive? We don't know. And they want to analogize space exploration to that.

But here's the problem. The problem is you knew that wherever Columbus was going to land, he could step off the ship and breathe the air. There was no, okay? In fact, there were other people there to greet him. So that is not the case on Mars or on Venus or anywhere else. So it's manifold harder to go to a place that's not Earth

and then claim you want to pitch tent. So either we figure out a way to terraform, which we don't know how to do yet, or you set up a HAB module, right? Just some, you know, some big tent, right? Some big bubble. Put vending machines or whatever. You need a supply chain of ships

to bring you food and natural resources. But then that's not a colony. I wouldn't mind a vacation there. That'd be just kind of fun to bring you food and natural resources. But then that's not a colony. I wouldn't mind a vacation there. That'd be just kind of fun to talk about when you get back. But to permanently live in a place where walking out the front door will kill you, I don't see that as a high priority in our lifetime. Rob, clearly you have never lived in Chicago. Walking out the front door, you put your life at risk.

Just saying. And please do not write me if you're from Chicago. It's called a joke. Get over it. Well, New York used to be like that in the 70s and early 80s. There's a lot of places around the planet that have been like that and may still be like that. Or may become that if we keep going. So anyhow, so I don't think in our lifetime

we'll colonize, but certainly places to visit. Now, what places we might visit? No, you can't land on Saturn or on Jupiter. They're all gaseous. But their moons have hard surfaces. That would be cool. Just imagine landing on Europa, right? And there'd be these geysers

because there's water deep below the frozen sheets. And then you look, look up, and then there's Jupiter. Massive Jupiter sitting there in the sky. Or Saturn with its ring system. So when you think of... We have already landed on Europa. Probes? Yeah, I'm talking about you. Oh, I'm sorry. That's Europe about you. Oh, I'm sorry.

That's Europe. I'm sorry. I was just thinking of white people, that's all. I'm sorry. Stop it! When you think of interplanetary travel, you need to widen your

concept of that and embrace not simply the eight planets, but also the countless dozens of moons in orbit around all of these planets that themselves would make fascinating destinations. All right. And so now to end it all, which one are you going to? Which would be your choice? Okay, first, give me two choices.

First, I'd want to go to the moon and look back at Earth. I want to do what the astronauts did. That's kind of cool. It's romantic. It's romantic, and I'd get to look back at our own home. Beyond that, I think I would go to Mars, for sure. And then from there, I'd go to maybe Titan. That's Saturn's largest moon.

And I want to look up. Now, Titan has a thick atmosphere, so it's not very transparent. But before I landed on Titan, I just want to see the ring system of Saturn and just bask in its glory and in its majesty. Very nice. Very nice. And I'd brush up on my ability to write poetry because maybe that is the only way to capture what that looks like and what that feels like.

Very nice. Okay. Interplanetary pros. Pro. Very good, Gary. Interplanetary pros. Well, we got to take a break. When we come back, more Cosmic Queries, Exercise Your Mind edition of StarTalk's Sports Edition, when we come back star talk sports edition cosmic queries exercising your mind see what we did there we we solicited questions from professional athletes. They have questions too. And so, Gary, who do we have next? We have an interesting character, Joey Barzinski.

He's a professional skateboarder. I sound like I'm introducing him for a quiz show. He's an entrepreneur. He has a whole raft of companies he's founded. He's co-producer of the movie Concrete Kids, which I haven't seen, but I'm sure it's brilliant. He's also a skater with more tricks than David Copperfield. And I can tell you more sponsors than a NASCAR team.

He's very, very interesting. Got a massive following. He's got a dog, which is a pug called Pizza, that has probably as many Twitter followers as you, Neil. He's got a dog, which is a pug, called Pizza, that has probably as many Twitter followers as you, Neil. So he's a very interesting person. Does the dog ride a skateboard as well? I think the dog has more than that.

The dog surfs. He surfs. He's got everything. And the dog has a yacht. Why not? So let me just ask. I did not know you could be a professional skateboarder. How does that work? All right, you went to competitions, and I mean, one of the competitions Joey has won is the Manny Mania,

which is a Red Bull-sponsored tournament, and then you just accrue lots and lots. It's like esports. You don't think it can be monetized and all of a sudden there's a teenager in his bedroom sitting on $10 million that he won last night gaming. It's like, that's the way it goes. That's why I think all of this is nothing but a front for mob money. You know what I mean? All of this sponsorship crap, it's like, seriously, who has the money to sponsor people playing video games and skateboarding? But it's true.

You know what it is? There's big audiences for it. That's what it is. To the point where the NFL is actually worried. The NFL and the NBA are worried because all these young kids coming up, they're not interested in football and basketball. They're interested in BMX biking and skateboarding and video games. Well, so what you're saying is they're making money, not so much prize money, but sponsorship money. That's really what it is. It's really about the audience that's watching these sports

are so large that sponsors, to get to that audience, they want to be behind the sport and these athletes. So that's why the analogy to NASCAR, right? Because every car that's in motion, whether or not it wins, they're making money off of all of the ads. Right. And at one point, NASCAR fans were the most active, engaging, active when it comes to engaging sponsorship.

They would go out and consciously support the people who put their logo on the car, knowing that they were in turn supporting their driver that they like. Oh, man, what a demonstration of brand loyalty. Yeah. It's true, yeah. I mean, guys like Joey, I suppose now you would call them YouTube influencers,

but the original kind of rock stars of skateboarding back in the 80s, they were, I mean, some of the biggest influence around. It's funny because often I tour the country giving public talks and I'm in theaters, like theaters that have seat one, two, three thousand people. And I have a conversation with the organizer and I say, well, what other things come through here? And they'll mention some rock groups that you've heard of and maybe a Broadway show comes through town on the touring group. And then they say, you know,

they mentioned Arnold Schmednick or somebody you've never heard of, right? Who's that? That's a YouTuber. And they talk about the fact that there are these people that nobody else has heard of except everyone who cares about that thing, and they are immensely loyal. And they fill the house every single time. It's like, whoa, this is like some underbelly of things going on. They could take over the world, and the rest of us old fogies would never know it. Wow.

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

Let me hear what Joey's got to say. Joey? And you've got to love anybody named Joey. Yo, what's up, Neil? Since the COVID-19 put us all on lockdown, the Earth has seemed to really benefit from it. I mean, the skies over here in Los Angeles are cleaner than they've ever been.

So my question to you is, how do we maintain this positive reaction as we come out of quarantine and open our cities? Ooh, very good. A COVID-19 question. All right. So he raises a very good and important point. I don't know how this will all settle.

We're recording this now at the end of April, all right, 2020. I don't know how this will all settle. But what I can tell you is anytime a system that has been built up in bits and pieces, some on purpose, some by accident, and then there's this thing you're living in. If there's a shock to the system, then what gets rebuilt after that has the capacity to be done a little more intelligently or a little more wisely, okay, with a little more foresight so that what happens in the future, if you have another encounter with a virus, that you would not be so adversely affected as you were today. And to take a very parallel example, in 1929, the stock market crashed. Oh my gosh, what was it,

a third of the workforce was unemployed and the country said, we can never have this again. It broke the system. And so they went in and they put in social security and built things from scratch to get us out of that

so that when we came out the other side, we would be better off as a nation. So with regard to clean air, yeah, we're driving the car less. Maybe when this is all done, we're not going to say, gee, I got to drive my car 500 miles just to make up. You'll say, no, I was pretty comfortable at home.

I got business done on my computer. You know, there are a lot of rethought solutions to problems you never had the occasion, you were never forced to think of before. And I bet now, for me, many more meetings are going to happen on, you know, on a Zoom meeting or a Google Hangout. I'm going to probably schedule more meetings that way. That way, you don't care where people are. You don't have to show up in the same place at the same time. You can be at the same time, but at different places. That's hugely more versatile in connecting people.

So after this, it may redefine what anybody means by having a meeting. And again, back to the clear skies, a lot of that's going to return. I fear, you know, plane travel and cars, but maybe just a little less. Maybe a little less. Do you think we're at that watershed? Yes. And so when you say it's a watershed moment, it means you're getting to that crossover point where you say, okay, time to be in a whole other new place.

So, yes, I think it's a watershed moment. I'm just not – I'm not clairvoyant enough to say – to detail how everything will change. But I know how I've changed. Well, I'm going to tell you, Joey, I got a different answer. We're doomed. We're all going to die. a different answer. We're doomed. We're all going to die. Enjoy your life. Enjoy your life is what I'm

telling you. We're doomed. I'm not sure if you saw the original Alien, the Alien movie. It wasn't called Aliens. It was Alien. It's the first Ridley Scott movie that Sigourney Weaver is the lead in. And there's one scene where I believe,

I don't know the actor's name, but he looks like Bill Pullman. Everybody confuses him with Bill Pullman, but he's not. And he just, he keeps saying, we're all gonna die, man. We're all gonna die. This is it, man. This is it.

We're all gonna die. And Joey, enjoy that skateboard, brother. That's right. Every good movie's got to have the we're all going to die person in it. There you go. You've become Dr. Smith from Lost in Space. Yes, yes. I remember him.

Yeah. So we're all doomed. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. remember him yeah so that's uh we're all doomed oh dear oh dear so you just made i mean you know how astrophysically untrained i am um this sort of the zoom thing we've now become able to be in more than one place at the same time. We've kind of challenging that. So the pre-model was, I have to be in Los Angeles. I can't stay in New York to meet this person. Now we are balancing ourselves. I mean, I was on a Zoom call yesterday with over 200 people. So I think certain challenges, certain solutions have arisen to problems we didn't even know held us back.

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

Yeah, Grandpa, okay. And we forget so easily. Either we choose not to remember or we just, we think our time in which we live is the only time there ever was. And it reminds me of a line in West Side Story where the cop is lecturing

the hooligans, right? And the cop says, when I was your age, and the reply was, you were never our age. I thought that was a great reply. That so encapsulates the

attitude that can drive people's behavior, not always for the greater good of society. So do we have another question? We do, and you're going to like who has posed this question. Who's that? Lindsey Vonn. Wait, no, the, the Lindsey Vonn. Okay, I missed out the the bit.

Okay. Just for dramatic effect. For those of you listening who are not familiar with the Lindsey Vonn, USA alpine skier. Now, this is going to take me a minute or two just to go through. Olympic gold medalist, world champion, and multiple World Cup winner. Now, if you don't realize what that entails, this is more, being an alpine skiing is,

there's the slalom, there's a giant slalom, there's a super G, there's a whole raft of events that you have to compete in. Lindsay Vaughan is quite simply one of the greatest alpine skiers of all time. With her records and her tallies and the sort of credits that come with her, she is in the conversation of being the greatest of all time. So having said all of that, let's hear what Lindsay's thought is. But Gary, what does it mean for a skier to win

a World Cup? I think a World Cup, I think of soccer. Okay, so as far as I'm aware, this is where they get into, they do the slalom, they do the giant slalom, they do the super Gs, and they have an individual tournament and I believe it comes in. So generally it's a World Cup

would be of an international perspective. So that was, I mean, if I'm incorrect, I held my hand up and I apologize. Skiing isn't or was never has been my thing. Was never has been is a new phrase I've just invented. Was never has been. For the World Cup, I'm pretty sure the defining factor for taking the cup home is how well you make

a Monte Cristo sandwich. So just for the etymology of this, Alpine derives from, I guess, the Alps. So the Alps defines the origin of it, but you can have Alpine skiing in any mountain range, provided you can set up the course properly. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, you've got to be... At least for the next 10 years, you can. Grandpa, what's snow?

Exactly. Why are these pictures of these mountains all white at the top? What is that? The sad thing is we're laughing, but it's going to happen. So, Gary, you spent so much time introducing Lindsay that we ran out of time in this segment. Oh, really? My bad.

Okay. So, we'll get to her question right after the break. This is StarTalk Sports Edition, Cosmic Queries, exercising your mind. We're back. StarTalk. Gary. Yes. In the house. Chuck.

Hey. In the house. That's right. Well, in my house. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we're all in our house. That's right. In my house. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we're all in our houses. We're all in our own houses. Homes.

Houses. So let's get to that question from Alpine skier extraordinaire, Lindsay Vaughn. Let's hear it. A lot of people I know are super into astrology, and I'm wondering if planetary and star alignment has anything to do with people's behavior. Well, okay. I don't know. Neil, I think I'll take this one, okay?

Okay. Here's the answer. No. All right, let's move on. No, no. If you're going to say no, you've got to say it with a little more, like, no. Okay. A little more emphasis, right? a little more punch it in there the one word answer is no but let's unpack what's going on there right in a pre-scientific

era where no one had any clue what were the causes and effects of phenomenon experienced in nature. What would happen is, and most people back then were agrarian, so you would have your crops, and then the crops would come to bloom when the stars were in a particular configuration in the sky. And other things would bring about the rhythms of the months of the year, and they seemed to match up with things you cared about. And the human ego knows no bounds. So the audacity of anyone to say to themselves, this whole universe revolving above my head, knows that I exist, and it is sending me signals about my life.

That's an extraordinary claim to be making, if you think about that. Makes perfect sense to me. And by the way, I'm a cancer. And by the way, I'm a cancer. So the origins of thinking that the sun, moon, stars, and planets matter to you in your life are deep and on some levels understandable. Okay? Now, the... So, I get that. But we are in a scientific era. The era basically since 1600,

when Galileo and Francis Bacon started introducing the idea that if you think something is true, test it. And a test becomes the measure of what is or is not true in the world. But if you don't test things, you can be left believing whatever you want as long as it makes you feel good. They will use astrology, the reading of the positions of the sun, moon, and planets and stars, to account for things in their life they do not control or do not believe they control. But by the way, Shakespeare, who was a contemporary of Galileo, penned, The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. So astrology becomes a very clean way to absolve yourself of stuff that goes wrong, or even to remove credit that you might or should take for something that goes right.

So what you've done is you've surrendered your life's fate. Yeah, I got to tell you the truth. I'm sure that was a beautiful explanation, but you lost me at Francis Bacon. All I've been thinking about is a BLT from that point forward. I am so hungry right now. Oh my gosh. I am just so hungry.

Chuck, you're always thinking about food. I know. Don't bring it up, man. No, but that makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. It reminds me of one of my favorite, I don't know if you actually, no, you turned me on to this,

but I forgot who was the progenitor, but the God of the gaps is kind of like what you just kind of talked about there. But from an astrology standpoint, it's that same type of deal. Yeah. So if there's something you don't understand and either don't want to understand it or would rather it be mysterious to you, then it becomes a force that you believe operates on you.

And how do you account for it? So you might say the god you worship was responsible for it, but if you're not particularly religious, then it's your astrological sign was responsible for it. And it turns out that astrology anti-correlates with your religiosity. So in other words, the more religious you are, the less likely you are to follow astrology. You already have an accounting system

for what happens in your life. So all I'm saying is that, no, the constellations set up by ancient peoples 2,000, 3, thousand years ago and put their own mythological figures on the sky, Aquarius, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, you just go right on down the zodiac, to today believe that being born when the sun was aligned with that constellation, and that character profile of the mythological creature, element, or person that's in the sky, you are ceding your own control of your life's fate

to forces outside of yourself. And they're forces that don't even exist outside of yourself. Now, how do we know they don't exist? Because if they were there, we would be able to measure them. And they don't. We measure all kinds of other forces. We measure the light from the planets

and the gravity from the planets. We know how much that is and what effect it would have. I got one other element here. People like to think about the full moon and its effect on the tides, and we're mostly- Well, we're 70% water, so it's got to have an effect on me. Only on you, Chuck, not anybody else. So first of all, tidal forces affect everything,

not just water. So in fact, the solid earth rises and falls in the tides. It doesn't move as much as the fluids do, like the water does, but tides affect everything first. Second, the tidal effect of the full moon on you is actually no greater than any other phase of the moon. Because the moon is still there. It's still there. It's just the same damn distance. You know, so the reason why tides are higher

during full moon has nothing to do with the moon. It has to do with the fact that the sun is aligned with the moon during full moon and the sun's tides add to the moon's tides. So you get extra high tides because the sun plus the moon are giving you those tides, not just the moon's tides. So you get extra high tides because the sun plus the moon are giving you those tides, not just the moon itself.

And which one of those tides do you eat to get rid of COVID-19? The tide pods, yes. So Gary, I think we have time for one more question. All right, so he's a friend of the show. Chuck and I took to him immediately when we were doing a show with him. Cam F. Awesome.

Now, if you're not familiar with Cam, he's an amateur boxer, but he is a super heavyweight Golden Globe boxer and a man that was on the fringes of qualifying.

Hold on. Golden Gloves. Golden Gloves. Golden Gloves. Yes, I'm thinking of the film and TV awards. Golden Gloves.

He may be an actor about to get a Golden Glove. But he has also beat the hell out of the Hollywood foreign press. Yes, absolutely. So he's in there with Golden Gloves. And he is a vegan athlete. Because we did a show, Chuck and I, on

plant-based athletes. And we fell upon... Plant-based athletes. I made a plan. No, no, no. So this is the kicker for me because it wasn't something we thought about before we spoke to Cam,

but then all of a sudden I said, how did you find yourself becoming a vegan? And Cam said, well, it was for a bet. Yeah, he lost a bet. He became vegan for a bet and he's actually not turned back. So he's a really interesting character because he does a lot of youth talks

and things, Chuck, very many, right? Yeah. Yeah, so he's not just a guy that hits people in the ring. He's out there trying to educate and bring thought processes to young people that are positive. Excellent, excellent.

So let's hear his question. When I'm not punching people, I'm a youth speaker. And going back into schools made me realize how boring science is. What advice would you give to teachers to make science as sexy as you've made it? Wow. Good question. Really good question. I'm going to say fishnets and heels.

No, Chuck. He said, how do you make it sexy? Just saying. So I would say it's not just science. There are many subjects that the teacher does not do justice to because they're teaching either as a satchel of facts that you have to memorize for an exam. Let me back up for a minute and pose the following question to both of you. In your life, how many teachers have you had that have left a singular sort of impact or impression on you as a student? We've all had dozens of teachers, possibly scores of teachers, if you've been to graduate school.

And I'm betting it's not more than just a few on the fingers of one hand. Chuck, how many for you? Oh, I could tell you easily. for you? Oh, I could tell you easily. Mrs. Smallwood, Mrs. Singer, Mr. Ritano, Mr. McNeil, Dr. Horan, Dr. Barsky, Dr. Reed. Oh, you're already up to like seven. Oh my gosh. Hey man, I had a pretty, pretty f***ing awesome education. Oh, excuse me. Chuck breaks, breaks the mold. No, yeah. I had, I had some great teachers But, I mean, in comparison to Ed, the seven, and there's probably three more that I could roll off the top of my head,

I can't remember the names of the rest. Okay. I mean, I can't even remember their names. So it's ten out of all the rest of the teachers you had. Ten out of however many teachers I've had. And Gary, how about you? I'm nowhere near as many as Chuck. I mean, I was blessed with a good education, although it's public school education, it wasn't private.

I had one geography teacher who was a former police officer and she brought a sense of reality to the things that she would educate us with. And her name, Mrs. Thirlwell, had another teacher, a history teacher, Mr. Newton, who would bring history to life on a chalkboard because he was a member of the RA, the Royal Academy of Arts, and he would start to draw a Roman gladiator in a fight or he'd bring some 16th century battle to life on the chalkboard. Things like that, just an ability to connect

and make things real to a young, impressionable mind. How many teachers were there? Maybe two or three, maybe five. If only Mr. Newton was your science teacher. Well, that's what I'm getting at. So for me, there's three teachers. My point here is, I bet all those teachers that you remember, you remember their names, you remember sitting in the class listening to them, that I bet they're from all different subjects.

Correct? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So star teachers don't all collect into one academic subject relative to another. into one academic subject relative to another. So all I'm saying is, it's not that science is inherently boring. It's that any more than any other subject is inherently boring.

It's going to depend on how engaged the teacher is. And the more engaged the teacher is, the more you know it as a student. And you'll take a class, and it's the favorite class you've ever had in your life. And you would have never believed that would have been the case walking in on day one until the teacher opens their mouth and they engage you just the way Gary described. So what I'm saying is that the cloning machine for humans, when we finally

figure it out, first people you put in there is everybody's favorite teachers. And by the way, they're probably not only your favorite teachers, they're probably the favorite teachers of many other people as well. Wow. So the engagement level, I think, is important. But also, I think science more generally needs to be taught, again, not as a barrel of facts, but as a way of querying nature and a way of understanding the operations of things. So when you come up to something you've never seen before, you don't say, I've never seen this before, so I don't know anything about it.

You'll say, I've never seen this before, but I know how matter forces and energy interplay. And I can figure out what I'm looking at based on the fundamentals of what I learned in my science class. That is an empowering place to be. And in my experience, not all teachers even know to take you there. And even if they do, they might not succeed at that. And that's why star teachers are so rare and so precious. Wow. That's, yeah. I don't know how, I mean, you know, I don't know what you do in terms of getting, I don't think there are, I think there are bad teachers. I'm trying to be polite. I don't know, but I think there are bad teachers and they're very knowledgeable about the subject and they want to teach, but they don't know. I think we need better training for some of the

people who are teaching. Or only select teachers who are enthusiastic on a level where it's infectious to whoever it is they're talking to. Yeah, I mean, teaching is communication. I mean, there's a lot of people who are, they really know what they're talking about, but they don't know how to talk about it. Yeah, and Chuck, one of my most controversial tweets ever was the following. Ready? Those students who earn straight A's do so not because of good teachers, but in spite of bad teachers. Yes, that makes perfect sense. You know why? Because if you have straight A's, you clearly have a bad teacher in that bunch. Yes. Not every one of those teachers has to be an A's across the board teacher, okay? It would be

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

So you can break it into three broad categories and then we got to wrap it up real quick. So that's with the straight A students. Then there's like the bad students. They'll get low grades no matter how good the teacher is. Okay? Right.

Now there is the middle. These are the students where the quality of the teacher will matter to their ability to learn. Okay? And if you're a teacher and you call me up and say, oh, I want to show you my A students, I say, we have nothing to talk about. But if you say, instead, I want to show you my students that started as a C and they're now making a B plus, I'll say, bring them on. Because now that is the handiwork of the teacher getting manifested. And so I don't measure how good a teacher you are by how many of your students got A's. I'm not doing that.

No. No. Show me the student who was about to drop out and is now getting C's and has some enthusiasm that they didn't have before. Show me the student getting C's, now getting B's. Show me the student getting B's, now getting A's. Show me the student that's getting C's and is now president of the United States. That. And you know what's more important?

We've got to end on this last thought. What's more important than everything I've just said is the ability of the teacher to stimulate your urge to want to continue learning. Because you'll spend many, many more hours not in school than in school. And if you're a lifelong learner, the body of knowledge and wisdom and insight you will glean on your own energy will dwarf whatever it is you acquired in school. And these are the people that continue to be productive throughout their lives. That's what we should strive for. That's it. Yeah. Gary, what were you going to say before we, before we end? It's funny, you're talking about academia but the same is is actually true in the world of sports you can you get a great coach you'll take an average player

and make him a good player and we have that maxim and it's and it they spin it around and you're always looking for that great coach because that coach will understand you on a human level will understand where you are on your timeline, will understand your ability level, will be able to bring more out of you through the combination of different things, have an energy that they transmit to you in a positive way, all of those things.

And now and again, those coaches appear. And when they do, they generally provide special, special performance. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, they generally provide special, special performance. There you go. Dudes, we ran out of time. We did. Chuck, Gary, it's always good to have you doing this. I love it. Oh, man. We've got some more questions lined up.

Oh, we've got to do some more of these. This is the inauguration, the inaugural Exercise Your Mind episode of Sports Edition for Cosmic Queries. So we will keep doing this again. All right, Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure.

All right, Gary. Thank you, my friend. All right, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always bidding you to keep looking up.