The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 104 - Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Unusual Explanation For Life On Earth

Starting point is 00:00:00 Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

Starting point is 00:00:24 And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Happiness and meaning. Where does that come from in your perspective? What I have found is it's an urge people have to search for meaning. Is it under this rock, metaphorically, right? Is it under a rock?

Starting point is 00:01:04 I'm going to search under a rock. Is there meaning? Is it under a rock? I'm gonna search under, is there meaning? Is it behind a tree? If I join this group, will I find meaning with them? If I, and I think to myself, okay, go ahead. But what you're doing is relegating meaning in your life to a search. Suppose you don't find meaning. That'd be a force of disappointment in your life. You're setting yourself up to be disappointed if you don't find meaning. So I have another idea. I use this for myself. It may or may not work for others, I recognize long ago that in a free society

Starting point is 00:01:47 where I'm not enslaved and I'm not, you know, an indentured servant and I have some freedom of choice, that I have the power to manufacture meaning in my life. I can make decisions about my own life that create the meaning. For me, a meaningful life is learning something new tomorrow that I didn't know yesterday.

Starting point is 00:02:16 Otherwise, it's a wasted day. You know the prisoner who puts X's in the boxes on the wall for the day they get out? I have that in my head, and the day that I get out is the day I die. All right? And what these boxes remind you of is every day you're alive, you're one day closer to death. So there's one fewer days in there to accomplish something that you might have wanted to accomplish. So I want to keep learning about our world,

Starting point is 00:02:48 about each other, about things I don't otherwise know about. And there are people who only read things that they agree with or that they already know about or that it's they're they're feeding some urge to be what's the word to be validated i have books on my shelf at my bedside every book is a subject that I either know nothing about or I completely disagree with going into the book so maybe it'll change my mind learn new ideas okay I once presented that list to the New York Times when they said because I my book was doing well at one point and they try to get authors to talk about other books to keep the book wheel turning because fewer people are reading today.

Starting point is 00:03:47 So what books are you reading? So on your shelves, I've listed the books. One of them was a book in its 30th printing or something. It was originally written back in the early 60s, I think, maybe even the 50s. A book by Barry Goldwater. It's called The conscience of a conservative and So I'm reading this and people wrote to me after they saw this listen said I didn't know you're a closet conservative I didn't know you're really a Republican. Did you vote for Trump and all of a sudden people?

Starting point is 00:04:21 Were presuming that if I'm reading a book on something that book must be what whole life is about, rather than it's a portal to another place of how people think and what people do. So that shocked me, actually, because that tells me that most people must have just books that continue to feed their own interests. And that is the best way to not grow in this world. So one of my measures of meaning is how much more do I know about the world tomorrow than I did yesterday? Because almost any path you take will make you wiser as a person. So I value wisdom that gives meaning to my life, a new perspective. It's not just knowledge. No. What is the arc? There's data. Data can become information. Information on further study becomes knowledge. And after enough time, when you see how the knowledge plugs in and applies, it can become wisdom. Wisdom is the distilled essence of all the details.

Starting point is 00:05:34 The wisest statements ever spoken to you generally have no detail in them at all, do they? It's, as I've heard it said this way, wisdom is what's left over after you've forgotten all the details. It's the distilled heard it said this way, wisdom is what's left over after you've forgotten all the details. It's the distilled essence of it all. So I wanna be wiser on the porch, on my rocking chair. I don't wanna be the old curmudgeon. In my day, we did it best.

Starting point is 00:05:59 No, I don't wanna be that guy, no. So that's one source of meaning. Another, and it's directly traceable to my parents, but I'd like to also think it's traceable to common sense, is spend a little bit of your life lessening the suffering of others. I don't mean redirect your life. Some people do. They work in soup kitchens and start not-for-profits to serve. Yes, I'm not that person. No, because the universe is what calls me. But in my day, in a week, do something that lessens the suffering of someone else, however trifling that gesture is. And that's an infusion of good. Yeah, I'm value judging it.

Starting point is 00:07:02 I'm saying, yes, it's a good thing to lessen the suffering of others. Yeah, I'm value judging it. I'm saying yes. There's a good thing to lessen the suffering of others Yeah, I'm declaring that I try not to ever put opinions out there, but it's my opinion that if you lessen the suffering of others You make a better world and Don't we all want to live in a better world if your happiness were a recipe right consisting of various ingredients that needed to be present in certain quantities for you to be a happy person and under the assumption that you know no one is perfectly happy under any kind of sense of the word what what is missing from your list of ingredients at the moment

Starting point is 00:07:43 or what could you have more of that would make you happy? I don't think of life that way. Okay. How do you think of life? Why is that wrong, that question? I didn't say it was wrong. I don't value judge, okay? It's not what's right or wrong here. It's, I don't live life that way because it means you carry with you the emotions. I could be happier if I were doing this and how come I'm not? And all of a sudden, well, then I must be miserable if I'm not as happy as I could be. No, I don't measure day to day.

Starting point is 00:08:18 Am I happy or not? It's not the measure. Yes, it's in there, but that's not the metric. The metric is, am I successful at what I'm doing? Am I, no, it's not even that. It's, am I as good at this as I can be? If you're not going to try to improve, go home. Find something else.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 104 - Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Unusual Explanation For Life On Earth

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