Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 594: Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Why Having a “Cosmic Perspective” Will Help You Do Life Better

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Today’s guest is the legendary astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, the host of the Emmy nominated podcast, Star Talk, and the recipient of 21 honorary doctorates. He also has an asteroid named in his honor.Tyson’s latest book is right up our alley on the show. It's called Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization and it’s basically about how taking a scientific perspective can improve your life—and the world.  In this episode we talk about:Applying a scientific lens to our emotionsThe importance of intellectual humilityHow the knowledge of death brings meaning to life Neil’s long view of social mediaWhether we are living in a simulationNeil's personal mental health regimeAnd whether there is intelligent life in the universeFull Shownotes:https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/neil-degrasse-tyson-594 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast, I'm Dan Harris. Hey, we've got a legend on the show today. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, the host of the Emmy nominated podcast Star Talk, and the recipient of 21 honorary doctorates. He also has an asteroid named in his honor, which is amazing. His latest book is right up our alley on this show. It's called Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives

on Civilization. It's basically about how taking a scientific perspective can improve your life. And by the way, improve the world. In this conversation, we talk about applying a scientific lens to your emotions, the importance of intellectual humility, a big theme on this show,

how the knowledge of death brings meaning to life. We talk about Neil's personal mental health regime, and then we ask some big picture questions like, does he think there's intelligent life in the universe? Are we living in a simulation? And his very long view of social media, just to say this is the second, you know, our boldface series, which we're running in May, where we talk to famous people who have something to teach us about how to do life better. All month long, we're doing celebs on Mondays and then Dharma teachers on Wednesdays for a breakdown of the great Buddhist list, the noble eightfold path.

So let us know what you think of this little weave we're doing. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford

psychologist, Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kikiiki Palmer I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast baby this is Kiki Palmer I'm asking friends family and experts the questions that are in my head like it's only fans only bad where the memes come from and where's Tom from my space listen to baby this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcast.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this. So Stari Messenger is such an interesting book and I'm curious, how would you describe the thesis of this book? Well, I just remember as a kid, I was a geeky kid. You know, I knew that I like science from very early, beginning age nine, I would say. By age 11, the universe was so compelling to me and then I learned you could do it professionally.

So from that age, onward, I had an answer for that annoying question adults always ask kids. Which is, what do you want to be when you go up? And so I'd say astrophysicist. And they would typically end the conversation right there. There was no comeback. Oh, Ant Matilda isn't. No, no, it's not the case. But what that meant was I was able to see the world through sort of a scientific rationalist lens as a child rather than waiting until I'm an adult. And in so doing, I began to notice that so many forces operating in our civilization

put into play by adults, defied any kind of rational sense, or any kind of like, why? What are you doing that for? Don't you understand? And I was very frustrated by this, in one particular case, there was a comet that was very frustrated by this. In one particular case, there was a comet that was headed towards the sun. We discovered hundreds of comets a year. Back then, maybe five comets, ten comets a year. This one had great promise that as it got closer to the sun and get very bright and everyone would see it. But it was still only a telescopic

object at the time, but it had already made headlines. I'm in the street. I'm 14 years old, and there's a full grown adult holding a placard saying the comet is coming, repent, the end of the world is near. And I'm thinking, this is a grown-up person. Like, what, don't they understand what comets are and how frequent they are and how many there are and to see this I said oh my gosh society needs some kind of a calibration on what we think is true versus what is objectively true and ever since then I've been observing civilization. My father is a sociologist, so he observed civilization and people's interpersonal relations, cultural, political, economic. So that was kind of my baptism into thinking about society. But this book is basically a lifetime of insights and observations on the conduct of civilization in the face of objective truths that would have it take other tracks.

That's a very long answer, I'm sorry, but that's the origin of this book. With each chapter focusing on something that typically we dig our heels in and hold very strongly held opinions about, and I think we've lost sight of what it is to have an opinion versus what has no right being an opinion because we have objective truths that say that you can't wish this world if it involves objectively false realities. Find something else in which to invest your opinions. And so it's an attempt to, like I said, to calibrate the arguments people tend to have over holiday dinners. And possibly soften the strongly held opinion that you had, not realizing that it really had no foundation at

all. The foundation wasn't as strong as you thought it was. And in other cases, you find that sure you can have an opinion, but that doesn't mean you're right. It means someone else's opinion might one day be shown to be right as well. So have a conversation about it, rather than invoke declarations that whatever does not agree with you must be wrong. And so to tie a bow on what I just said wordily, is when two scientists argue, there's an implicit contract.

Either I'm right and you're wrong, you're right and I'm wrong, or we're both wrong. We know that going in. Now how often do you see that when two people are set up for a formal debate? They will go to the end to their grave defending the position that they went in there to defend. I've never seen a debate where someone says, you know, I never thought about it that way. I agree with you. Let's go have a beer. that said no one ever in the history of debates. So that means

they have a lot invested in their point of view being right, rather than instead being invested in what is objectively true. And therein may be the source of most conflict, not only societally, but around the world geopolitically. So would it be safe to say that what you're arguing for is intellectual humility? I think that's as a minimum, as a minimum. I would say emotional humility as well, because often arguments are presented with a passion. And passion is good. It motivates us. It keeps us going when you might otherwise give up.

I don't have any problem with passion, but when you start attaching passion to something that can be objectively resolved, then you might not be as receptive to learning that you're wrong. So yes, it's intellectual humility, but it's also emotional humility. And maybe they work together in this regard. So, yes, yes. In my field, we know enough about the universe to quantify how much we don't know.

And there are two things we don't have to get into the details of this. Just take it. There's dark matter, dark energy, two things that are driving 96% of the phenomenon of the universe, and we have no idea what's causing it. You can't be an astrophysicist walking around with your shoulders popped saying, yes, we are masters of the universe. No, no, we know that there's more we don't know than we do. And we can quantify it. Not only that, if we ended up learning those new things, we might put us on a vista where we can see farther than we can right now, and realize there's that much more we don't know. That can still happen. As the saying goes, as the area of your knowledge grows,

so too does the perimeter of your ignorance that edge between what is known and unknown in the universe, that grows right alongside it. So yeah, yeah, how to soften arguments. That could be another title for the book, rather than cosmic perspectives on civilization. I think most people will agree at least in theory with the call for this intellectual slash emotional humility.

I read recently that somebody asked St. Augustine the great Christian theologian for some in life advice. And he said three things, humility, humility and humility. I believe St. Augustine is also the guy who advanced the theory of original sin, which seems to me, if not fully provably wrong, just kind of obviously wrong and harmful. And so he might have benefited from taking his own advice.

But I think most people will agree with the call for this humility. And yet, most people are not scientists. You're a scientist. You knew it early on. You have, I would imagine, we don't know each other, but I would imagine you have the character of a scientist, the rationality of a scientist.

I do not. And the rest of us are not all, and I'm not calling you this, but Dr. Spock, you know, the rest of us do run hot on occasion. So how scalable is your advice really given human nature? Yeah, I'd love that line of inquiry. I think it's fully scalable, right? So let me first say that though I'm a fully trained scientist, I'm still a human being and human beings collectively have certain susceptibilities to over-investing in what we want to be true. The difference is as a scientist, I have extra checks and balances on that. So I'll come up with an idea,

and I'll say, you know, I wonder if there's a bias that leads me to think this idea. So I'll go to a colleague. This is a mini version of peer review. And I say, what do you think of this idea? And it's their job. It is their job to attack my idea at any weak point that they can see.

There's a huge misconception. I think it's fed by journalists who might lead off an article saying, a new result might have to send scientists back to the drawing board who have to revisit their cherished theories. Like we're all sitting there at a shrine, all worshiping the same idol, and then some new thing shows up at the door, and all of a sudden we're flustered. All right, I have to go back to the joint, we're always at the drawing board. And the most fertile scientific conferences are the ones where there is vibrant disagreement on the frontier of discovery. The best thing you can do for me as my colleague

is point out my errors. You're doing no favors by saying, well no, he's sensitive and he's emotional and he's this, so let's not tell him that he's wrong. No. So collectively, we know we are susceptible to our own bias and we take active measures to either remove it or diminishing it to as small as possible. The reason why I think that scalable is yes I'll do that with any thought that I have but in principle you can invoke that on single thoughts you might have in a day Okay, just one one argument you're having with someone, just pause and say, hmm, how sure am I of this? Even if it's not an argument, how complete is this idea that I'm now adopting as part of my life or as part of my routine and I might behave you're going forward? Okay,

I'll give an example, this directly from the book, a little bit obscure, but it touches on a lot of these points. This chapter called, meetarians and vegetarians, or a contrasting the two dietary pathways that generally people split and divide themselves along those lines. So suppose you're a vegetarian

and one of the reasons is you just don't want to kill animals. Okay, that's your reason. And animals to you are something special or precious or sacred relative to plants. So all right, that person probably has a humane mouse trap in their basement, if they live in a house with a basement where mice might come in. And if you main mouse trap, it traps them, doesn't kill them. But you got to check on them every few days because they can dry out very quickly. They have a high metabolism. So you got to check on them.

And then what do you do? You take the box and you open the lid and they escape back into the wild where they came from. And you feel good about this. Okay. Have you thought that through? Is in my point. As a scientist, I'm saying, all right,

you like the mouse, you wanted to live a long healthy life, instead of snapping its neck in a mouse trap, okay. Well, you realize a mouse in the wild, the life expectancy is anywhere from 9 to 18 months. Topps two years. Why? Because they get eaten.

They're tasty snacks for owls and hawks and crows and foxes and all manner of woodland predators. Delight in mice as a snack. So the best thing you could do for the mouse is let it live in your basement. It's where it's warm and dry. In fact, a mouse in captivity lives up to six years. So do you really have the health and well-being

for the mouse in mind when you do this. Not only that, you're probably living in a house made of wood, right? Two by fours and wallboards and floor planks and structural members and by my count. Your house is probably made from the wood of 50 trees. Each probably would live a hundred years. Each tree living longer than you'll ever live. And those trees, when they were alive, were home to insects and fungus and squirrels and birds, and through their natural process and photosynthesis, they produce 15 times the mass of that mouse, impreatable oxygen every day. Yet you cut down all those trees to build a house for

you to live in so that you can save at one ounce of mouse. So for me, if I'm going to create a life pass given my faculties as a scientist, I'm going to think through all elements of it. And it's not hard. Just ask yourself, who do I think nature cares more about? The 50 trees, each living a hundred years, providing homes for countless insects, or the one ounce mouse. insects or the one ounce mouse, but you've judged the life of that mouse to be greater than the life of trees that outlive mice by 50 to one every time. So this is an example of bringing sort of a rationalist thought with objective truths as their foundation to decisions you might be making in this world. And the entire book is full of them, cosmic perspectives on civilization.

So, yeah, I think it's scalable, at least start with some arguments you might have had at Thanksgiving dinner and take it up from there. How optimistic are you that we can move the whole culture, the whole society, especially right now, given how we are at each other's throats, we're structurally incentivized to have beef, right, and not in the vegetarian way. And given the social media-fueled tribalism that we're seeing sort of abroad in the land. How optimistic are you that we can inject or scale up this rationalist or cosmic perspective? Yeah, I don't need the whole world to be rationalist. That would be a pretty boring place.

I think so much of human emotion fuels our creativity. So it makes people and institutions and life interesting. It's where conflict comes in, which of course also involves emotion. So I just want to make it clear that I'm distinguishing these elements here. This tribalism that's created this division, we can quantify that. Okay, let's quantify it. If there's protesters, this isn't not a story, unfortunately, that we're making up. This has actually happened.

The protesters in the street, someone gets a car and drives full speed into them, kills eight or a dozen protesters. Okay. This is a month's headlines in the local papers. It's a week's headlines in the nation, and it's maybe a day's headlines internationally. Okay? This is tragic, and it came about from hate and intolerance. All right. 80 years ago, we were in the Second World War. Now, you can do the math between September 1939 and September 1945, 1,000 people were killed per hour for every hour of that war. So I ask you are we better off today or in 1943? So yeah, if the worst is some angry people on Twitter and then they get canceled,

if that's the worst we can report for disagreements today relative to 80 years ago or even the first World War, which was nearly as bloody as the Second World War? We're doing better. It's hard to admit that, but we're doing better, by almost every objective measure related to health and longevity and cooperation. And basically, all of Europe is at peace with itself. Has that ever happened? Yes, we have this in Russia, Ukraine,

but Russia I'm not including is Europe. Europe is at peace with itself. Name a time in the last thousand years where that was true. You can't. So, yes, when you're living in the moment, everything feels worse than ever. But I do a fair amount of reading of the history

of people and cultures and civilizations and how we treated one another and what Roll science played and either bringing peace or bringing war, all right, and so that's one view I have on your point Back to the fact that we have systems in place that foster disagreement my hope is that that's a temporary state. Social media is still in its infancy. It's still being shaped by who we are and legislation that surrounds it. And we're still learning its power over us, over opinions, over politics, over the geopolitics of the world, was still learning. When the printing press was invented, it would be at least a century. Maybe two, when the first broadsheet was printed, before someone realized you can report

news this way. News paper. Not just printed paper., took a century, right? Before someone thought that up, how long have we had social media, you know, 10, 15 years in its current form? That's yesterday. So maybe we will mature out of these incendiary conflicts, as we learn to interact with the very thing that we thought would save us, yet is dismantling the peace and tranquility, and more importantly, the

civility that I think existed before it. Another point is, however hopeless it seems, I'm never dissuade by hopelessness. I don't say never, but if you have hope in some outcome, it's only because you have admitted you have no control over the outcome. Because if you had control, you would control it, okay? You would be actively controlling it. But what is hope? And it's the same side of a coin with prayer. It's hope and prayer. That's why you hear them together. Hope and prayer are like, I'm not in control. So all I can do is hope or pray for this outcome. Here's an obscure example. The picture in a baseball game does not bless himself before he throws a strike because a picture

can throw a strike on command on command they can throw a strike a batter the best batters there ever were in the history of baseball bat at a 30% average 70% of the time all right they're not getting a hit. So the entire statistics of their presence at home plate is against them. They're hoping and praying that they're going to get a hit. And so there's the batter blessing themselves at home. They hit a home run. They bless themselves twice.

Okay. So they were not in as much control of the outcome as they wanted, so they rely on hope and prayer. But what I'm saying is I'm reminded of some of the lyrics of this song to dream the impossible dream. I forgot who wrote that forgive me, but it appeared in the Broadway musical Man of Lamontia about Donkey Hote. It's a story of Donkey Hote and there he is with joust or whatever the stick is and there's a windmill And he wants to defeat the windmill. Well, that's stupid. The windmill is not even another night on a horn What are you doing? What what's this? And then you realize this is metaphor for

confronting a challenge that may seem impossible to overcome and that song Contains juxtaposed phrases, the non-exacliric, but it's in the spirit of the verse, and we're strong enough to move the immovable object to stop the irresistible force. And one of my favorite lines is, I want to march into hell for heavenly cause, right? Just because something is presented to you as impossible or insurmountable is not reason enough to not attempt to conquer it. And that is a bit of sort of social, cultural wisdom

I keep within me. Because otherwise, you know, just go home. Just go leave Earth, go somewhere else. If you don't believe you can change things that need to be changed, then nothing changes. Because maybe there's a solution you'll think of tomorrow that you never imagined was there yesterday. Give yourself some credit for ingenuity. And there are very real changes over the centuries. And no sanctioned country in the world is slavery endorsed.

It was not long ago you couldn't say that. That's a real shift in how people interact with other people. Yeah, we're still killing each other. But other people say, yes, you should be my slave. But I will own you. No, that doesn't have... No, not in any legit country in the world. So yes, we can change as a species, as a culture.

And so, yeah, I'm good for it. So just to say, much of what you just said was actually quite a beautiful delivery of perspective on what ails us currently. And I'm wondering we spent quite a bit of time at the beginning of this conversation talking about taking a rationalist approach to things. You also talk about having a cosmic perspective. And I think the overarching point you're making here is we should have a cosmic perspective. Is being rational just a part of that? Yes. And again, I don't want to overstate the value of being rational. Some of the most fun people I've ever hung out with were just simply not rational. They're spontaneous, they do things that might even be a little dangerous, but at the end, they have a whole story about it the next day.

dangerous, but at the end, they have a whole story about it the next day. Rationality has great value. I don't think it should be people's goal. Again, I don't want to tell people, people make decisions about their own life. What I want to do is display the causes and effects of thinking one way versus another, and then you decide. So the book, Starry Investengers, or Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, if it's anything, it's what the world looks like when you peer through a lens of science, okay? Science, literacy, and nearly everything looks different.

And science is one of the great triumphs of civilization that it exists at all. It shapes the very world we live in. So much of what we care about and value in how we live comes to us from science. Not only from our health, we are living twice as long on average as people did in the year 1900. Okay, and do you go back to the 1850s? The life expectancy was like in the 30s. It didn't improve much since caveman. So the advances in medicine and in sanitation, health in general and communication, this is all engineering and science. So now realizing what it is done for us. Take that lens, now look through it at things you're doing in your day. Yeah, you're saving the mouse, but you're cutting down 50 trees to live in the home

that the mouse walks into. Have you thought about that? What else are you doing? Oh, our brain is badly wired to think statistically about things. Unfortunately, it's just, we're stuck with it. That's the hand we're dealt as humans. We are bad at thinking probabilistically and statistically about everything. Oh, by the way, an entire industry has arisen to exploit that fact. They're called casinos.

Oh my gosh. There you are at the roulette table betting on seven. I say, why are you betting on seven so many times in a row? Well, it's due. Well, so how do you know? Well, look at the previous roles, which they will show you at the roulette table. And the last 20 roles, the seven hasn't come up. It's due. No, it's not. It's not due. Every role has the same probability of rolling seven is any of it, but you don't know that because you're operating on your feelings of what should be true, not on the reality of it. That's a scientific lens that if you're not equipped with, others will exploit the absence

of your scientific lens. Now, you have to be a scientist, just be scientifically literate. Now ascend from that and now you see earth as this ball in space, a drift in darkness, with as Carl Sagan said, with no hint of help from elsewhere coming to save us from ourselves. All right? That's a cosmic perspective that rises up beyond your dinner table and your Thanksgiving arguments, then you go geopolitical on that one. It's like, oh my gosh. Here's birth as only nature intends you to see it. With ocean, land, and clouds.

Does it look like that schoolroom globe we grew up with? Color-coded with countries? It wasn't until I was an adult, a cynical adult. at school room globe we grew up with, color coded with countries. It wasn't until I was an adult, a cynical adult, I looked back on those years and I said, why do they color code the ball? Oh, I know why. So they can point to who our enemies are.

And they were setting me up for geopolitical conflicts, all right, and I'm angry that this was a part of that indoctrination because Earth and all this beauty has no national boundaries and we are all one species. And if you come at it from that point of view, everything looks different. And that book is, it was my attempt to have you join in the celebration of how and why all that looks different. Are you able to apply a cosmic perspective to the daily annoyances of life? Yeah, I mean, it's like I said, it's a combination of a science literate outlook and a cosmic

perspective. A cosmic perspective allows you to make a more accurate measurement of things that might bring you down emotionally. You just step back and say, well, what else is happening? And I'm getting upset at this, but why am I not getting upset at that? All right. And by the way, we live in a free country. People should do whatever they want. But if you do what you want, at least be informed about it. Okay? Are you really stepping over a homeless person in the street to go to a pet shelter to rescue a puppy, to bring in until the warmth of your home and feed it

for 13 years until it dies? Are you self-aware that you stepped over other members of your own species to do this for a puppy? Okay, if you're self-aware, fine, like I said, it's a free country. And so maybe you simply don't care about other humans or you think they're the source of their own, their own misfortune. Okay?

There's an actual twist on that religious quote, where you see someone in pauvres to the street or someone down on their lock or down on everything. And there's there but for the grace of God, go I. Okay, we've all heard that phrase. And it has a little bit of literary complexity, so it's not as easy to understand when you're a child, but when you get a little older, sure. The formal equivalent of that is here, but for the wrath of God, goes him.

That is logically the same construction. Okay? And so when I take that view, okay, I ask myself, maybe I can do more for this person in the street than I am currently doing. It opens your eyes when you have these other perspectives. Just invert it. Take a look at it from a distance. Put yourself in the situation that you are attacking. My father was active in the civil rights movement, and there was some ugly moments over those years, the 1950s and 60s, and he was never bitter, never. And my brother's sister and I, I think, learned, if not explicitly, but implicitly from this, because you end up

recognizing their people, you know, the ones who open the hoses on the protesters or the ones screaming racial epithets at the school children in Alabama just trying to go to school. And it required the National Guard to escort them into a school to learn because Others didn't want them in the same classroom Okay, you look at this my father would say they were raised that way They don't even know any better the tribalism That we know is deep in us in some way I shouldn't use the word tribalism because there are many tribes that are just nations or are tribal nations and native states of the United States.

So we're giving the word tribe a bad name, using it in that context. Why don't I say this in group out group, all right, sense of the world, can rear its ugly head, but if you knew nothing else, then how else do you expect them to behave? Of course, they're going to behave that way. So that means you have to open it up for conversation.

No, you don't bring weapons and shoot them. You say, come into this room, let's have a conversation. That's where it starts. Without that, it's weapons. And then we get war because one side is different from the other side. I'd like to think we're matured beyond world wars. As Einstein said, I don't know how world war three will be fought, but world war four will be fought with sticks and stones. Coming up

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about applying a cosmic perspective to life and death, and how death brings focus and intensity to your life. [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions.

What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fring her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which sets its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. Let me just go back to you for a second. I'm really curious about your state of mind on a moment-to-moment basis. When some annoying shit happens for you, can you view it from the perspective of some other galaxy where it's like, okay, well, maybe not that big of a deal? Yeah, so there's a subtle point to you. I don't think I made clear. So thanks for asking that very precise question. When I encounter issues in society, be they cultural, ethnic, you know, you see a bit of regressive behavior in people, I don't say well in the big picture, it's not,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But nor do I say, oh my gosh, this is affecting me emotionally, I need a quiet moment as an educator, but also as a general observer, a cute observer of everything I can. This is a scientist. The world is this laboratory, right? And you observe it. Oh, it's the bird on this branch, but not the other. And it's flying this way, but not this way. Oh, the worms come out after the rain. I wonder why that happened. You think about your environment. I think good scientists never turn off their sense of curiosity. It's a scientist who's just a kid who never really grew up. There's still curious about everything. They have more powerful and expensive tools to probe them, telescopes, microscopes, laboratories,

and this sort of thing. There's a difference, I would say, between having it affect you emotionally and eyes and observer, I make note of it. And I say, okay, in this situation, this person behaved in that way. Can I fold that into a lesson that I bring to others? Will it become anecdote? Will it shape the next post that I make on social media? Because there are people out there that think this way? Should I address them? Should I ignore them? So I'm strategizing as I observe conduct that is exhibited by people, especially if it's regressive conduct. And so I folded into the next things I do when I interact with the public. But no, I don't, I don't wanna call it an emotional shield

because that implies it would otherwise penetrate me, but it doesn't. I'm saying that it's more valuable to me to log it as something that humans are capable of doing and saying and thinking and using that to navigate future interactions with humans. So in that sense, no, I'm not preventing it from reaching inside me. It was never headed that way to begin with. I was never that susceptible.

Tell me if this is an appropriate connection I'm making here, but Buddhists, I mean, I count myself as one, think about everything, including people as being governed by the law of cause and effect. This happened, therefore that happens over and over and over again, oceans of causes and subsequent effects. And so when you're looking at people and their behavior, you can understand just as your father did about the people turning on the hoses, that maybe if I came out of that womb

and had that upbringing, I'd be doing the same abominable things. Yeah, so what concerns me about anyone who says, Buddhist believe this, or anything believes that. Okay, the sentence will never come out of my mouth. Scientists believe that, no, okay. Science only works at all because we don't all believe the same thing on the frontier. We're thinking different things and only one of them or or some variant of the one

thing is going to beat the right path as supported by evidence. And so what I'm saying to you is we have discovered not to get all modern physics on you. We have discovered that quantum physics. They're a phenomena that take place that have no known cause. If you invoke as a prerequisite that everything must have a cause, then you could end up trying to find solutions that don't apply in situations where there's no obvious cause to it at all. Okay? So there's certain human behaviors that are not triggered by some event that happened in their lives. They're just deeper than us.

So we can say what the cause is, a billion years of evolution, okay, we can say that, and there's a cause, okay, but that's not a cause accessible to your actions in the way you were making that claim. If it's a cause, then they did this because this happened to them, or no, the things that can happen without any obvious cause. It is not a law of the universe, cause and effect.

Let me just put it that way. So therefore, no, I don't want around thinking that way. But yes, it applies in so many cases that we do have control over. So I'm only speaking to you in the absolute terms, not in the individual occasions where it is actually the true thing that you have power to influence. In your book, you talk about applying the cosmic perspective to life and death. Can you talk about that here?

Yeah, sure. So one of the chapters of this life and death, right, how could that not be something that I address in this book, which preoccupies us all in profound ways? So what I do there is take what science can say about it, what a cosmic perspective can say about it, and offer it to you. And it'll either bring value to your life or insights or not, but it's nonetheless objectively true. And so you can receive that in whatever way matters in your life. What's objectively true is, well, apart from your body decomposing in the earth, if you're

buried, I want to be buried, by the way, when I die. I don't need my burial ground, the location remembered, because I don't care. But I want to be buried because my whole life, I have consumed flora and fauna. These are living things in the tree of life, the flora and fauna, that I have consumed, that it brought nourishment to my body. And if I'm buried, that nourishment, what's left of that nourishment on my deathbed, gets returned to the environment as worms and microbes and other subterranean creatures, dying upon my flesh, as I have dined upon their flesh my entire life

So for me that's what I want to give back to all the life that I have consumed plant life animal life Microbial life all of the above so now That's just a personal thing if you want to Creme aces fine note that when you're cremated, the energy content of your molecules gets released. We have complex molecules that comprise life. And embedded in those molecules is stored chemical energy, a lot of which we were running on when we were alive. When you die, the molecules just sitting there are doing nothing. You introduce it to heat, molecules just sitting there doing nothing, you introduce it to heat, the molecules break open and release more heat. This is how a fire can start and then keep itself going. There are molecules that are broken and the heat gets released. Your body and cremation

will heat the air in the smoke stack, however they it. And that will go to the atmosphere, heating the atmosphere, and then the energy of that heat in the form of infrared photons to be specific will be radiated out to space. So the energy of your content ultimately ends up traveling through space at the speed of light. And no, it's not going to recollect and form you again, but if you wanted to tour the universe in death, that's how you do it.

You go, walk right into a crematorium, and you will ascend into the sky, and into the vacuum of space, moving at the speed of light. But for me, a more interesting revelation that science brings to us is to recognize that the human genome, and I credit the first thoughts on this to Richard Dawkins, and I've appended to it in my book here, but he's the originator of this outlook that when you look at the human genome and you say, okay, how many possible ways can I configure the human genome and get a whole brand new other person?

That's an interesting question. How many total humans are possible given the genetic variations in the genome? Well, there have been approximately 100 billion people who have ever been born. Now, you run the numbers on the genome, and there's several ways you can do this calculation. All of them get different numbers, but all the numbers are vastly greater than the 100 billion who have ever been born. They're in the quadrillions. The number of people who have been born is a minuscule fraction of all they could be born. So wait a minute.

If that's the case, then the fact that you and I are alive at all is against the stupendous odds against us. The way Richard Dawkins put it is, we're the lucky ones because we get to die. You say, what do you mean by that? Oh, come on. Nobody wants to die. Most people who could exist will never even be born. So for me, knowing that, that's a cosmic perspective that comes to us from biology. And so knowing that, I'm alive when the chances are I would have never been born, which is true for all the other people who will never be born. Oh my gosh, I should cherish every moment I'm alive, no matter what hand I'm dealt, no

matter what afflictions or ailments I confront. No matter how shortened my life is or will be from any disease I might encounter or might have, you're alive. You get to smell the roses, you get to see the sunsets, you get to experience all the discoveries about the natural world in ways that most combinations that genome will never even contemplate because they will never even exist. And so in that line of reasoning, I have come to recognize that my knowledge that I'm going to die is the greatest force that gives meaning to my life. Because how much time do I have left? You know, you look at the actual aerial tables. If you don't get hit by a bus, at least give yourself to the actual real table. So I've got stuff I need to do

before I die. And I'm actively engaged in it. Because I worry that if we find the fountain of youth and we live forever, if knowing you're going to die is what gives meaning and purpose to your life, then knowing that you'll never die mathematically would mean you'd live a life of no meaning at all. Because why do today, which you can just put off until tomorrow? So the knowledge of death brings focus and intensity, which is I think how we should all live our lives. You have one chance through this. And then if you think this way, would you ever take up arms against another person prematurely ending their one chance to embrace this world? Are you going to give guns to people and say, shoot those people over there? If the whole world thought this way, life would be the most cherished thing there is. Yet there's entire institutions that view life as cheap. Well, a cosmic perspective says, no, it's not.

It's the most valuable thing we own, and we should cherish it. Coming up, Neil talks about his personal mental health regime, and whether he thinks intelligent life exists in the universe. I could not resist asking him that. To quote you back to you, you say in the book, being alive is the time to celebrate being alive every waking moment. I'm curious how good are you at applying your own advice here?

Do you have times where you distractedly scroll through Twitter or get really impatient or overlook important events that are unfolding in front of your nose? Yeah, I try not to, so you do your best. You can overlook something, but if it happens to me, it's by accident, because I forgot it, or I wasn't as sensitive to the needs of others as I should have been.

Once you realize that, then you've corrected, or you put in reminders, or whatever that is required. So it doesn't mean living a perfect life, but it shouldn't prevent you from trying to. Right? That's back to the old, no one's perfect, but you can try to be perfect. And that has great benefits. And when you succeed, in that one moment where everything goes just right. And also, if I build into my life, occasions where

I'm doing nothing, I'm just staring out in the night sky and thinking, something that I think is less and less of, because the next generation is the screen in front of them at all times. I don't know what we'll learn from this, what the counselors and psychologists are saying about it. From what I've read thus far, it's not good that people have access to everyone and are more isolated than ever before. And what the mental health consequences of that will be as they move through life, or will they just arrive at some other equilibrium with those media? As we did with the invention of writing, and there's criticism when writing was invented,

oh, this is gonna be the, I forgot who said it, some famous philosopher of antiquity, said writing, this is gonna be the end of memory. What reason would you ever have to remember anything if you could just write everything down? And this whole thing with storytelling, remember and passing it from one generation to the next. You can write something down,

it could skip a generation and it'll still be there. But no one was thinking that way at the time. So I don't know what the social media and these devices, what the long-term impact of that is, and maybe we're overreacting to it. The way that anti-writing people are overreacting to, to the writing would somehow be the death of civilization. So I think that still remains to be fully researched and concluded, and to see where that will

land. So for me, no, I don't mind reading Twitter. Entertainment has value too. I watch a stupid movie. I'll do that. I don't see it as waste of time. If it's fun, things that bring joy to life. So when I say I'm going to die soon and I need to bring some intensity to my life, that doesn't mean everything I got to get just done. Oh my gosh, no, no, it means not wasting time. You know, you're going to spend time doing nothing, at least have deep thoughts while you're doing nothing, okay? And if you're having no thoughts at all, at least spend those time doing something fun, like on a roller coaster. No one has deep thoughts on roller coaster.

You just, you just don't want to die, you know, depending on the speed of the thing. So there, that's why we have things that entertain us. It serves needs of what it is to be human and what it is to be alive. But to sit on a couch and do nothing, serving neither your body nor your mind. No, remind yourself that one day you're going to be dead and there are people who might have wanted to have been born that might have been more productive than you in your slot. But you got that slot. so do something with it. Be more today than you were yesterday,

and whatever metric you invoke to make that happen. I'm curious for you, are there one, two, three, four, non-negotiables when it comes to your recipe for positive mental health, things that you do in your life that are really important for keeping you sane. The picture to me by non-negotiables, for me everything is negotiable.

Non-negotiable, all of a sudden, you confront something that's different from it, and now there's an argument, right? So nothing, for me, I'll hear any argument about anything. Okay? So maybe that's not what you meant. Maybe there's anything that's a fundamental part of my search for happiness, that I make sure to include in my life at all times.

I have very deep roots looking up into the night sky as a child with a telescope. So in my adulthood, if I need to sort of re-commun with the cosmos, I'll pull out my telescope from the closet. I have a backyard cosmos, I'll pull out my telescope from the closet. I have a backyard telescope and I'll pull it out and I'll, you know, go somewhere, quiet. And it's just me, my telescope, and the universe. And I'm not in front of any large audiences, giving a public talk. I'm not Professor Neil in a classroom. I'm not Cosmos Neil on a TV program. It's just Neil and the universe. And this telescope, which is sort of a conduit to the cosmos. When I do that, this might comfort food, if you will. I'm reminded of when I was a child first discovering these things

through my backyard telescope at the time, and it's a way to reset what might be the complexities of life, the problems that I needed to solve by now, but I haven't yet, and the other people that need me to help them, and family, or friends, or loved ones. So that's something I return to, because I haven't available to me.

I also like reading old books written by people centuries ago to just watch how they were thinking about the world. And compare how they're thinking about the world to how I think today, in this, the 21st century, they have ideas that they thought were true, that didn't turn out to be true, but look at how much they invested in it or how much they wanted it to be true. So how much today are we saying on the frontier of science that in a century from now, two centuries from now, we'll look back on and say, you know, no, that was quaint. What they thought way back in 2023, but no, no. So it's a way to embrace thinkers of the past and Bring a sense of pride for what they got right, but a sense of humility for what you might have wrong

as we go forward. So those two are very important for me. I also like curling up on a couch with family and watching a movie That we're overdue for having seen. Any kind could be comedy or drama, science fiction, something that's a little bit escapist, but it helps you step into the lives of others and see the world through their lenses. That can always be helpful. Any good novel that becomes a good movie will do that. And I'm more likely to watch a movie of a novel

than to read the novel before the movie. So I mean, the big part of my exposure to the human condition and how people feel and how they love and how they hate and why they do these things comes from storytelling, which I greatly value. Me too. Have you seen any space or sci-fi movies or TV shows of late that you recommend? Well, oh, that I recommend. That's different. So... Or not, actually, I'd be curious to hear what you don't recommend. The movie Armageddon, which Bruce Willis saves the world, came out in the 1990s.

That movie violated more laws of physics per minute than any other movie I'd ever seen until the movie moonfall. All right, that's when we learned that the moon is actually a hollow alien vessel and it's falling towards her. I just, wow, I didn't think anything could be Armageddon. And there it was. You know, this is the plot line to any space movies. People go into space and something bad happens. That's the plot of every one. And for every different astronaut movie,

begins with a scientist, warning the authorities and the scientists being ignored. Every disaster movie is that. So this is summarized them all in that one sentence. We had all these stories recently about UFOs and Chinese spy balloons and the like. What is your personal take given your vast amount of knowledge and study

about whether we're alone in the universe or not. Yeah, so those are two completely different questions. What are these things people can't identify that are floating around in our skies? And are we alone in the universe? Those are two completely different questions. But what's happened is those two questions, it's not your fault. Those two questions have been conflated to the point where you can have a newspaper article that says, government confesses that UFOs are real. That headline makes no sense.

Addle in the following way. If you see a floating object up there, a UFO, and by the way, they rebranded it as UAPs, an identified aerial phenomenon. Who are they fooling, right? They mean UFOs. Let's just get that straight. So if you see something you don't understand, and you don't know what it is, so the word you is there or an identified and a some object and it's flying. You've just admitted You don't know what it is. You cannot then say because I don't know what it is Therefore, I know what it is It's intelligent aliens visiting from another planet. You can't go from I don't know to I know

from another planet. You can't go from, I don't know to I know. All right, that's not, no, that's not how reasoning works. You can say, I don't know what it is, let's investigate it further and see what it actually is as we've done with this Chinese spy balloon and some others. Others we didn't know what it was and we're still looking for the remains or whatever. Fine. But the idea that we don't know something, therefore it's aliens, is an extraordinary leap that any sane skeptic is not going to take. They're not going to go there. I need better evidence. The most common atoms in the universe are the atoms that comprise life. You would have to be inexcusably egocentric to suggest that we are alone in the universe.

So anyone who studied the problem is perfectly fine, accepting the likelihood of life elsewhere. If not in our own solar system, certainly elsewhere in the galaxy. Do you reckon it's intelligent life? Most life on Earth we would not rate as intelligent intelligent yet it's perfectly thriving, you know, four billion years after its genetic ancestors. So intelligence is not the measure of the success of a life form in any ecosystem. And intelligence, as we have come to know it, could contain the seeds of our own extinction. And the ecosphere would say, so how intelligent were you when the

rats and roaches are taking over your slot? So now I'm going to turn the question around on you and say, well, who defined us as intelligent? Was the answer to that? We defined it. So would we be considered intelligent on the scale of other intelligent creatures in the universe? That's a cosmic perspective of high rank. And I basically address that in the chapter mind and body where our ego prevents us from even imagining that there are intelligent species out there who would not rank us in their club

that might see us as so backwards and so insignificant as to not even be interested in communicating with us. The next closest genetic species to us on earth, chimpanzees, cannot understand our simplest thoughts. And so could it be that some intelligent life form out there that the smartest among us cannot comprehend their simplest thoughts? If that's the case, if they didn't want us to find it, we would never find them.

So there's no reason to think there isn't life of all forms out there, possibly life vastly more intelligent than we are. What's your take on this popular idea that we're living in a simulation? Yeah, it's hard to argue against it. I do offer an argument against it in the book. Well, for those who don't know, the argument in support of a simulation is imagine a civilization

that's smart enough and figures out how to make computers. And then for entertainment, they create worlds within the computers that are so complex that the characters in the world don't know that their characters in the world. And they have what they perceive as free will. So those characters, over time, build computers. They invent computers as we did. Okay. And then the characters in those computers create a world, a universe, if you will.

And then it's that all the way down. Let's say this repeats a hundred times. Now, close your eyes, throw it dark. Which universe are you likely to hit? The 99 that are simulations or the one that started them all. Statistically, you're going to be in the simulated universe. And this is a simple and powerful argument that we're in a simulated universe. And this is a simple and powerful argument that we're in a simulated universe. But the argument I give in the book, which I think is the strongest among them,

is when you program a computer, it only knows logical decisions. The computers don't have the baggage that our brain has, where, oh, I have emotions, and I feel this, and I don't know if I should do this, because I don't know because I've it that the computer that has no such limitations. So I'm thinking every world it creates will have rational things going on, the likes of which we do not see in our own world. So I call it the inanity defense. The inanity defense is if this were a simulated world, there wouldn't be so much irrational behavior Exhibited by its residents, and so that's my best evidence that we are not a simulation I'm gonna use that next time I get into this discussion, but just a couple other questions. I before Referred to the universe as being infinite or seemingly infinite and is that actually true? Is the universe infinite to the best of our knowledge?

There's a horizon Beyond which we cannot see But the universe continues beyond that horizon. It's like it's a literal horizon If you're a ship at sea and you see to your horizon are you saying to yourself? Well, that's the edge of the earth That's all there is no the ocean the ocean goes beyond that. And if you, if you sail towards your horizon, you see more horizon show up until you get to land. So in the universe, there's a horizon. What the universe does beyond that, we may never know. Could it be infinite? Possibly. We don't know. And in science, at some level, you need to learn to love the questions themselves. we may never know. Could it be infinite possibly? We don't know. And in science, at some level,

you need to learn to love the questions themselves. What is that, US though? I don't know. Let's investigate. Where is the edge of the infinity? I don't know. The top people we're gonna, that's what it is to be a scientist.

You said a while ago, and I didn't follow up on it. I was talking about this Buddhist concept of cause and effect. Sometimes referred to as karma. You said before cause and effect is not a law of the universe. It's helpful and it gets you pretty far, but I'm just saying, if you're staring at a particle that's unstable. It will decay on its own terms without any cause triggering it. It's a purely statistical manifestation of nature. That's what quantum physics is.

Things happen statistically. It just happens. Einstein went to his grave thinking quantum physics was incomplete in need of some anchoring and objective cause and effect reality. The famous Schrodinger's cat is a cat in a box. It is simultaneously alive and dead until you make the measurement of whether it's alive or dead.

But while it's in the box, and before you looked at it, before you made the measurement of it, it is both alive and dead. And there are ways to show this experimentally. So I'm just saying, you can make a statement that's been true so far, maybe. But what we've learned in science is for every next frontier that we step upon, there are new things that might

violate some previously held law that you thought was a law, law of conservation of matter. No, it's a law of conservation of matter and energy at both. And so I'm not going to look to Buddhism and say, you're right about this in the universe. This is not how that works. It's possible that sometimes things happen for no reason with no cause. It happens all the time that way, correct, in the quantum realm. Now, we can say, I can get you out of this and say, no, no cause. Maybe one day we'll find a cause, but right now we don't know the cause.

I'm telling you, you can sit there bare there bear asked the particle sitting in front of you and you're looking at it and spontaneously it decays into two other particles boom and not on your clock on its own clock and you didn't do anything you didn't blow on it you didn't do anything no cost Neil de Graztais it's such a pleasure to talk to my final question is can you just please It's such a pleasure to talk to. My final question is, can you just please remind us again of the name of your book and any other things you've written or resources you've created that you want to just remind this audience? Sure. If anyone's interested, much of this conversation was derived from knowledge and insight in researching, preparing, and writing the book, Starry Messenger, the book, Stari Messenger, cosmic perspective on civilization. Stari Messenger is directly lifted from Galileo's first book called Stari Messenger, where he used a telescope to reveal

things about the universe that people didn't know were true, or in a worst case, didn't want to be true. The Earth was not the center of all motion. And so the story of messengers, like the stars are bringing messages to us that may disrupt your understanding of your place in the universe. And of course, he got into big trouble with the Catholic church and for a combination of reasons,

including that he's finding things out that we're consistent with what people were sure were true from biblical Genesis. And so one of my favorite quotes from Galileo is, the Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Only he could say that because he had a telescope went up and looked at the sky. So without Galileo's permission, I'm borrowing the title of his book, Stari Messinger, because there are more messages from the stars than this generation in this century, in this millennium, that can serve that same role that his discoveries serve in his generation. And I also

have a podcast, Star Talk, which combines comedy, pop culture, and science. And so it's very irreverent fun. And if you want to smile in life while you're learning some science, then that's definitely for you. And you can just go to my website, NeilagrassTyson.com, and you can see books and other projects that I've been involved in,

all in the spirit of bringing the universe down to earth, for whoever will pay attention. Good news is a lot of people are paying attention. Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you very much. Thanks for your interest, thanks for having me. Thanks again to Neil deGrasse Tyson, very cool to meet him. I guess for the second time I was on his show not long ago. Thank you very much for listening.

Go rate and review us if you've got a second that really helps us. And thanks most of all to everybody who worked so hard on this show 10% happier is produced by Justine Davy Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman and Kimmy Regler is our managing producer. Scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio and Nick Thorburn of the Great Band Islands, wrote our theme.

We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. We're talking to the Dharma teacher Eugene Cash with part two of our eightfold path series. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.