The Jordan Harbinger Show - 327: Neil deGrasse Tyson | Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, host of StarTalk Radio, and author of New York Times bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. What We Discuss with Neil deGrasse Tyson: How a seasoned scientist maintains childlike curiosity. The power of science to transcend bias. Why Neil didn't have typical public speaking jitters when he gave his first lecture at age 15. Do you have to be a math wizard to pursue science? What enlightened leadership (from either side of the aisle) understands about the value of science -- and why science denial has surged so dramatically in recent years. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/327 Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DePhilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave. We want you to become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, as well as toolbox. for skills like negotiation, body language, persuasion, and more. So if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, then you'll be right at home here with us. Today, one from the vault.

We're talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Man, how do you introduce someone of this magnitude? Someone with this amount of gravity. See what I did there? I got these dad jokes on fleek with only a seven-month-old. It's only going to get worse from here, folks. He's one of America's most beloved science personalities, kind of a cross between Mr. Rogers and Carl Sagan.

He's an amazing guy, brilliant, obviously, and one of the major influences in science today, certainly in the zeitgeist and vernacular of science pop culture in any case. We're talking exoplanets, black holes, and more. This is science, education, politics and science, finding your calling while you're young, getting obsessed with astronomy, finding mentors, cognitive bias, and focus, ironically. This was such an interesting episode, so much fun, everything from dark matter to keeping a childlike curiosity in science. This was a great pleasure, and it's my pleasure to introduce you here to Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. If you want to know how I managed to book all these great folks, well, it's always through my network,

and I'm teaching you how to create and maintain relationships using systems and using tiny habits. Check out our six-minute networking course, which is free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us, and you'll be in smart company. Now, here's Neil deGrasse Tyson. I did like the book. It's a well-written sampler platter of astrophysics, if you've ever heard of exoplanets or black hole stuff,

and you think, yeah, that's a space thing, but you know nothing else about it. I thought this is a really good place to start. And like you said, for people in a hurry. And you can plow through that thing instead of being really nervous about the wedding you have in five hours, which is what I, that's what I used it for.

It's a great way to look at how small you are in the universe. I got married on Saturday, huge significant events. in my life, the whole existence of the entire planet of Earth is in the scheme of the whole universe, not significant really whatsoever. And that was a cool realization to have right before going, what if I fall? What if I forget this thing? Or what if I stumble over a word? And whenever you think of that, you just go, it benchmarks at all. It benchmarks at all. Sentient beings in other galaxies, don't give a rat's ass if you stumble over your wedding vows. It's like watching two

Amoeba get married or something like that. How do you keep childlike curiosity when you're a scientist and you know a bunch of things and you've studied a bunch of things and you're at a planetarium teaching a bunch of things. How do you not let things get in the way? Oh, so no, you don't have to maintain it. You just have to make sure nothing interferes with it, which is different from having to actively maintain something. So if you have something that's always at risk of evaporating away or fading, then you've got to pump it, but I don't have to pump my curiosity. I've had it since childhood. It's the same curiosity you have as a kid, but I just have it as an adult. And I think all scientists have it as adults.

Maybe the only way you can be a scientist, everything is curious to you. You know, what's that? I wonder how that works. You know, almost distractingly curious. So, yeah, it's there. I just make sure that things don't get in the way of it. Sure, I'm curious all the time, but I put in things I learned about something yesterday and just go and steamroll the learning process with bias.

Yeah, well, bias is an interesting force. You can't expect to live life without bias, but you can live life self-aware. of it, or self-aware of the risk of it. Often bias, you don't even know you're biased in a moment that you're being biased. So you would at least have the self-awareness that you can be biased, and then at another time and another mindset, or you know to bring someone else

into the equation and just assess how effective you were being unbiased if that's necessary for the thoughts that you're having. Sure, like a scientific experiment, the double-blind thing, ideally keeps out as much bias as possible. Exactly. And so not only,

that, there's the fact that someone else does the experiment who might have a different bias from you, but if they get the same result, then it means you've transcended the bias. Right, especially if they're trying to prove you wrong and they still get your results. Exactly. Exactly. That's got to be a little disheartening if you're a scientist and you're thinking, I'm going to prove this guy is full of it. And you keep doing it and you're bashing your head against the law. And you just make the results even better. Right. You're making it more accurate. One of the problems in science today is there's not much reward for verifying someone else's result. Sure. So the person who gets the result first will get the Nobel Prize. The person who verifies it

enabling the rest of us to believe the first result essentially gets nothing. Gets fired for not discovering something. We would benefit from a shift in the culture in the peer-reviewed scientific publishing universe, but it's still the best thing we've got going in terms of how you would decode what is and is not true in the world. Thankfully, people are still stumbling into correct results whether or not they want to find them or not, I suppose. People who fund those things might be less crazy about that, but the people who are running it at least are doing good, still doing science. Right.

It's still science, even if you get the result that you don't want. It's still science. Well, provided the experiment is properly designed. Yeah. Sure. When I went to school, I was one of those kids who went, is there a book full of majors? Because I was told I have to pick one of these,

and I'm flipping through the book. And eventually, luckily enough, I made my own concentration out of different subject areas. Very few people do that because it's a huge pain. But that was dodging a bullet. of just deciding on business or something else because it sounds good. Do you find that finding your calling really young is an advantage that has shaped your career path? I took it for granted that I had that interest very young and did not realize how odd that was until college. And just like you said, I'm there in college and half the people are still thumbing the course catalog.

I could have told them astrophysics is early in the alphabet. You could hit that pretty early. Only then did I look back and deeply value the fact that I could align my life's pistons early on so that they're all firing together. And I guess with emergent electric cars, the piston analogy will rapidly go extinct. So align my electrical currents so that every decision I make can be in the service of that mission statement. You were giving lectures on this stuff when you were, what, 15 years old? At first public lecture, yeah.

And that's bananas. I think most people in their subject area, they give a talk when they're 35 and they go, okay, I've got to learn how to do this. Oh, it wasn't that I had to learn how to do anything. I was simply talking about what I loved. So if you love something so deeply and you know a lot about it and someone says, tell me about it, are you nervous? No, you'll just start talking. So now it's like, tell me about it except there's 50 people in the room or 100 people in the room. So that didn't make any functional difference to me, sharing it with one individual or a room full of people. The difference was when I gave it to the room full of people, they actually paid me. Right, you got a check at the end and they clapped instead of saying.

And I did it without expecting that. They were candid and said, look, this is what we would pay other speakers. And I mean, the subtext was, you're only 15. We probably could have gotten away with not paying you at all, but we're going to pay you because that's what we pay all our people. It might not have been more than $50 or something, but it felt like an infinite amount of money at the time. Somebody just gave you enough money to buy pretty much everything you can wrap your hand around.

And all I did was talk about what I was about what I was about talk about what I loved. Yeah, not bad. I felt really cheap. Like, no, the world should not be configured this way. Did I sweat? Did I bleed? Did I, no, it was just an outing.

Then I realized that society values knowledge. Yeah, some parts of it anyway. In some part. Looking through the course book, thumbing through trying to find a major, if you're trying to help people save time and work by suggesting that they select astrophysics, I think my recommendation could be a little bit off. But what do you recommend for people who email, tweet at you,

I assume you get this all the time. What should I do with my life? That's got to be a tough one. What typically happens is it's not so blunt as that. It's a more common example, not necessarily in detail, but broadly, is that someone made a career in a subject that their parents wanted them to go into. They took over the family business. The parents are doctors. They became a doctor. The parents didn't become doctors but wanted to become doctors, so they wanted their kids to become doctors. So they're establishing a career based on forces that they do not control. For that category of person, they reach a point where they realize they're not fulfilled because they're not doing what you love.

And then I get the phone call because they like the science they read about. And typically people have a very different range of mathematical background. So nonetheless, there are many places and ways you can plug in to this moving frontier. Of course, if you have high math ability, you know, sky's the limit. But if you don't, they're artists who reach for the universe as their career. creative muse. They're attorneys who are trying to create a new frontier of space law. Who owns this patch of land on the moon if you get there first? You get to homestead it. Who owns the mineral rights to the asteroid that you paid a mission to go visit? And so I think almost no matter your

mathematical ability, there are places you can plug in that still have tremendous value, provided you love what you do. I used to be an attorney as well. And in part, it's funny you should mention math ability. One of the things I triple checked on before going to law school was how much math is involved in this particular course of study. And they said, oh, virtually none. And I said, great, I'm in. Not really the only decision factor you'll want to look at when choosing your career, of course, math ability,

but maybe when looking at science and things like that. It matters, but there's something that's not widely embraced, but should be, is you get a kid in a math class, and they already have some established interest somewhere else, and they'll recite the following phrase. I will never need to know this for the rest of my life. Right. Why am I slogging over it now?

And I think that's the wrong outlook, because that ignores what hoops the brain goes through just to solve a problem. The statement would be true if learning was, I will learn all the things I need to know to do things I will one day need to do. But that's really not what learning should be, because that ossifies you into whatever was the hot topics at the time you were in school. A more powerful posture would be having had your brain trained for thought and analysis and processing information. And then if there's a new thing you've never seen before, you will just attack it with vigor, attack it in a good way. Because it's an unsolved problem and you can't get enough unsolved problems. I feel like what happened to you in college as well, looks like by your own account you didn't maybe spend as much time in the research lab as you would have needed to because you had some dance and some rowing and some wrestling. that would have been in graduate school.

Graduate school. Yeah, undergraduate, my load outside of class work was not atypical of others who lived down the hall for me in the dorm. But graduate school, yeah, I spent a lot of time. I mean, how much of my time, maybe a fourth? In retrospect, I clearly shouldn't have. I should have spent all that time in the lab. But I can say at the end of it all that I have a certain enrichment of thought and of creativity

that I don't know that I would have obtained any other way. I started writing with fountain pens back then. I just like fountain pens. I like the way they feel. I like ones that have an interesting nib where they can leave an interesting line on the page. If you just have a fountain pen that leaves the same line in every direction,

just might as well just use a ballpoint. But look at the flourish and the expressive elements of communication that went on in the era of the handwritten letter. In the era of the handwritten letter and handwritten correspondence in general, the words would be written with the flavor of the meaning you're trying to convey and it would influence the flourish or how big the first letter is or the curly cues underneath it.

And so it was a dimension of communicating that went beyond the simple definition of the words you were writing. All that went away with the typewriter because every word now comes out identical on the page. Same font, same size. Yeah, exactly. And then more of that went away in the era of texting, where big words are just abbreviated into letters. See you tomorrow is the letter C, the numeral two. Evidence that pure texting is completely inadequate to communicate is the flux of emojis that have come down. Right. So instead of writing how you feel, you just put a picture of how you feel. That is the supreme height of illiteracy, where you just put pictures of hyroglyphics again. Is it pictonary? I mean, like, what is this? Right, it's back to hieroglyphics

again. I used fountain pens as a way to commune with the past. That interest started while I was in graduate school, and so I had some pens, and I bought ink, and I would practice penmanship. Back in the day, you'd had these big computer pages that came out of the big printers. And so it was huge real estate. Dots, you got to rip off on the side. Yeah, the perforated holes. Yeah, perforated, yeah. There are dots. Yeah, you've got to fold it, and then you rip its sides. So my point of saying this is, In my adult life, I have found that now that I've written books, people are vastly more appreciative when I sign it with one of my fountain pens because it has interesting form to it that the pen brings to the signature in ways that no Sharpie ever could. Is that what you got in your pocket right there? Because all I got is a Sharpie.

All right, well, I'm not going to need this thing. You dare put a Sharpie in front of me? Fling it over my shoulders. And speaking of emoji, I'm feeling pretty smiley face with glasses and buck teeth right now. Oh, uh-huh. So that's a good sign. It's a good interview. There and smiling face with hearts on it in the eyes instead of eyes.

Your career started off, well, I should tell you before that, with your doctoral dissertation committee getting dissolved from the University of Texas, that's got to be kind of scary, right? Because you're in the process of completing this childhood dream. Even before, when you're 15, you're giving lectures on this stuff. And now they're kind of like, hey, sports medicine is a burgeoning area you might want to look at. I mean, how did that affect you at that time? Well, I don't think they had any clue of the depth of my interest.

in the subject, the depth and breadth. So to say, oh, we're going to dissolve me, now what are you going to do? Thinking that I'll just do something else, as though going to graduate school was some lark, decision made on a lark. So, no, I persisted. And so I knocked on doors and called people I knew, asked if they would admit me. I'd take whatever test were necessary. So I transferred my graduate program to Columbia University from the University of Texas

after the committee was dissolved. And so there was a year delay in there because they wanted me to take the general exam, which is what you take after you finish coursework. But once you know material, I mean, you're becoming an expert in a field and a world's expert in a subpart of that same field. So the idea that somehow taking an exam would be arduous, that's a foreign concept. We're academics. This is what we do.

Not only that, the idea that I would lose years having put into graduate school and sort of re-jumpstart that exercise also sounds a bit harrowing. But no, because what you do in graduate school is exactly what you do when you get your PhD and beyond. You just get paid less. It's not, oh, now I have to slog through another thesis and another thing. And like, that's what science is, posing a problem, researching it, writing it up, publishing it. So it was lost professional standing and it was lost income, but it wasn't lost ambition. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. In the close-up version of that story, it probably looks a lot like you fell off the tracks. Obviously, now you come back to become a legend in the game, which is pretty cool. Not everybody does

that, but the fact is, they can't really remove your interest from that. They can tell you, well, you know, we're not going to do this anymore because you're doing too much Latin ballroom or whatever, wrestling or whatever the deal was. Both, yeah. But they can't stop you from going through it. And macro picture, big picture, do you feel like that even was anything more than a hurdle or a speed bump, or maybe not even that? It was a huge hurdle because I had to leave Texas and I was living in my parents' basement. My wife, who I met in Texas, got her Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the University of Texas at Austin. She moved with me to New York. By the way, she's from Alaska. So this is a huge shift for her.

She moved with me to New York. This is when we were just still dating. Then while I was living in my parents' basement, I proposed her. Oh, wow. And she said yes. And so I don't think you can get more pure than that. No, especially if she wasn't sure what's going to happen. I mean, was there ever a time when you were thinking this might not work out, especially if you get that letter, hey, we're dissolving your dissertation committee? It's possible, but again, I had a huge fuel tank of energy to pursue these interests. It was not anywhere near empty.

It was lower, maybe one-fourth full, but a car that has one-fourth a tank of gas can actually go faster than a car that has a half a tank of gas. Oh, that's a good point. Hadn't thought about that. Yeah. Because the weight factor. The weight factor. So you just have to need enough to feed the cylinders and you're good to go. Well, speaking of fuel, I've read and heard you say this a lot.

We can't make America great again until we make America smart again. Right. What that mean? You need to make wise decisions. And I recently wrote an op-ed. It's posted on my Facebook page, if anybody cares. It has the same title as that video that got so much distribution just before the science march. It's the same title for both, and it's called Science in America.

But the op-ed gets to flesh out in sort of written detail what that means. There's a section of the op-ed. It's about a thousand words where I just go president by president, from Abe Lincoln fast-forwarding to the 20th century and just moving forward and identifying which president was responsible for creating which well-known agency that is responsible for thinking about science. So that would include the National Institutes of Health, the National Academy of Sciences, the Center for Disease Control,

the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. You just track this over the past 140 years, and it just bounces back and forth across the aisle. Truman puts in the National Science Foundation, and that becomes law in 1950, although it was proposed a few years earlier. And he's Democrat. He was, of course, the vice president to Franklin Roosevelt. Then Eisenhower, a Republican, puts in NASA in 1958. Of course, Kennedy, a Democrat, sends us to the moon. 1970, we have the Environmental Protection Agency put into place by Nixon, a Republican.

That same year, Noah, signed by Nixon, a Republican. In the 1990s, there are major investments in bringing the Internet from an obscure thing that scientists use to a household product. And these are investments in the Clinton administration. So you just look at this, and it's clear that enlightened leadership knows that. and understands and values what role science and technology can play in our health and our wealth, especially our wealth, but also our security. So to enter an era where people are standing in denial of science, in denial of what is true, established by science, which is the most reliable

path we have ever invented between ignorance and truth, is a recipe for the complete dismantling of all that I grew up in here in this country. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify

your understanding of the key takeaways from Neil degrass Tyson. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger. dot com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm 37. I'm not that old, but I've seen from when I was younger, there was very little dissent on a lot of obvious scientific truths. And people were in agreement of that. And of course, there's criticism while you just didn't hear the

dissent and this and that and the other thing. And, you know, why would the thinking be better back then in one way, but not the other? Well, So just to be clear, right now, people can dissent and have it distributed worldwide via the internet. Before the internet, you could dissent, but no one would care and no one would print your thoughts. So maybe there was just as many people who would have dissented if they had the mouthpiece to do so. But of course, they didn't have the mouthpiece to do so. And that's what's critical here. So we now live in an age where you can have an idea that has no foundation in any reality, no foundation in nature. And you can create a website. And I have the same no

foundation thought as you have. And I'll search my no foundation thought and I'll find every other person in the world who thinks exactly the way I do, giving the illusion of affirmation of an idea that in a previous generation would have never seen the light of day. So in a free country where at least we tell ourselves we live in a free country, free of thought and of speech, I actually don't care what you believe. That's why you don't see me chasing people down, knocking on their door. I care as should everyone. If someone says, I think Earth is flat, okay, let's find a job for you that doesn't depend on Earth being around. It's funny you should bring that out. Plenty of jobs for you. I'm sure we can find a job. And that way you can think what you want

in this free country of ours. I had Shaq on the show a few weeks ago, and he came out on this show and said, oh, I was just kidding about that. And it made all these news outlets and things like that. And I thought, well, it's funny, but it's more dangerous than people think because it's still getting quoted everywhere. I got hundreds of emails from people that went, well, you know why he had to say that, right? Because the Freemasons made him do this and now it's all that. What's the, you put that out there? You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube when you're an influencer. I just don't know why anyone cares what shape Shaq things earth is. I don't know why that's news. Just because he's Shaq. I'm sure that's right. I mean, well, except that he has a PhD and business management. So he's

Dr. O'Neill. And you would think that if you have a PhD, and anything that you are a learned person in ways more than sort of the average other person. It might include being able to figure stuff out. And, but he said he was kidding, so okay, fine. So I just don't see why people care. I think people like to laugh at slash with concept like that. If he says something that is false,

that can influence some agency he has power over. Then it's a problem. Then it's a problem. Then you're building a house of cards. You might get two layers high. It looks solid. With third layer, that's all she wrote. That's all she wrote.

Yeah, yeah. Game over. Game over. Well, we see a lot of really cool science activism and awareness shows like Nova specials, Cosmoist Build Nines, new show on Netflix, which looks really good. I haven't been able to crack into that yet. And they do a great job so far of explaining the importance of scientific literacy to the masses, right? Like you mentioned earlier, we live in this area that's just dominated by the internet,

social media, and a lot of that separates people, creates those little microcosms, like you said, the majority illusion, the bubble, that breeds scientific illiteracy. When I watch science. It reads much more than that. It breeds, not just science illiteracy, it breeds dogma. So you have a point of view that you are sure is correct. And you never see critique of your thoughts because your search engine never takes you there. And even if you did, you would staunchly defend your thoughts because it's in a deeply held principle within you. It could be a bit of religious philosophy, political philosophy, cultural philosophy, each of which, if taken strongly, you can create a bubble that's impervious to criticism. Then you ossify in place. This is a huge problem, especially for maybe

younger people that grew up digital natives, if you want to call it. Yeah, so what they got to do. So what we're missing is, okay, now that we have this internet and there's such susceptibility to it, By the way, if you hear kids in school talk, the teachers have never trust anything you see on the Internet. By the way, that is equally as intellectually lazy as trusting everything you see on the Internet. What we need is not telling people don't trust anything on the Internet. We need in kindergarten through 12 curriculum somewhere in there multiple times taught how to process information and evaluate the likelihood of it being true. And that has huge value in these modern times. It's just simply not taught.

It's really hard to teach that, which is one reason. Yes, it's hard, but so what? Well, yeah, I agree with you. The point is that, yeah, it's hard, but you got to figure out how to do it because it's more important than just teaching facts. I think when I watch scientific shows and when other people that I know, we talk about geeky stuff because we're all on that same page, but in a way, those shows preach to the choir, right? If I've listened to every other episode of StarTalk and I watch all the cosmos, I can talk with certain people about that. And the rest of the people go, I don't know what that is. Anyway, the Earth is flat and climate change is fake.

The StarTalk, by design, is intended to grow its audience in every single episode because the guest is hardly ever a scientist. And so that person, if they're famous enough, they'll have a fan base that'll chase them wherever they go. So now their fan base follows them to a science-based talk show. And in a science-based talk show, they're going to hear their favorite person talking about science in all the ways that's the moving frontier of science has touched their lives. livelihood. The goal for StarTalk is to reach people who don't know that they like science, or better yet, know that they don't like science. I think we're on the same page there. This show is about getting people who don't care about learning better critical thinking skills to figure out that these can be really interesting, depending on who the guest is, of course. Maybe I should have

science-based guests on this show. It's really a good idea to do this, and it's mandatory, I think, because a lot of people want to lock themselves into a cone of ignorance, but I think a lot of other people just don't realize they're in. But they wouldn't call it a cone of ignorance. They were saying this is the actual truth and everyone else doesn't know what they're talking. Right, so don't waste your time with all that stuff. We already figured it out already. Yeah. So what can we do ourselves aside from making sure that we're watching or looking at different sources of information?

What would you do if someone you cared about, your next door neighbor kid goes, oh yeah, you know, I heard about all this completely false, dumb stuff and he thinks it's true. Where do you even get people started on that? So what I've seen happen, there might be something written about something that I wrote or said. If it's critical in a way that's completely missing the idea or the point, there are enough people out there who will jump into the comment thread and just sort of take the person to task. Why would you say that? Because he's never actually said this.

But you're saying he said it. No, he said instead this. There are people who are plugged in enough into the whole portfolio that I have that's out there, that they become sort of defenders in the comment threads. And so you should, I think, always be prepared to have that argument with someone who might otherwise just simply go on challenge. If you let false arguments go on challenge, they become lost. Oh, that's interesting.

It's true. And it can be really tempting to do so, especially when you're talking with somebody who is not only maybe condescending, but just refuses to hear your side of the argument. I guess there's only so much you can do, but especially when it's a young person, the conversation's always worth having. Just because somebody who has their head up their butt got to them first doesn't mean they should be doomed to think that way for life. They'll be more open to a learning session. School is closer in their memory.

Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. On campuses, the word lecture has meaning, right? What does it mean to be lectured to get a lecture? You go and attend and you take notes and you paid for it and you take the test. But interestingly, for me, the word lecture has negative connotations in essentially every other context. Yeah, of course. Don't lecture me.

Yeah. Why are you lecturing to me? That's bad. Which is odd because I would say, please, lecture to me. I want to learn. Keep at it. Repeating a broken record. Do you know what a broken record is?

I'm very familiar with broken records. I've broken many records of my parents, just ask. Oh, okay, because the record is not really broken. It's just dust on it. Oh, it just dusty? Then it skips each time. You haven't seen me break a record, you know. So a broken record repeats the same groove each time

because there's something in a groove that has it pop over and go back to the same place. And bounce it back. And bounce it back. So that colloquially is a broken record. For everyone 30 and under, who might not know that. Don't like your else on broken records. See? Somehow we've created an educational pipeline where the urge to not be in school is greater

than the urge to be in school. Right on down to the last day of school where some, not everyone, some take their notes and throw it in the air and say, no, school, summer's been. I'm graduated. And when all they ever had to do was learn in their life. So something's missing in the educational trajectory. love of learning, re-instilling a sense of wonder and curiosity. Because if you graduate curious, then you spend the rest of your life learning, and you learn vastly

more the rest of your life than you would have ever learned in school. I think it is possible to get back there because when I graduated law school, I was sick of it. When I graduated college, I was sick of that. When I graduated high school, I was definitely sick of that. And I learned more now than I ever had a fatigue factor. Definitely. Okay.

That's interesting. I definitely did it. I didn't even go to the graduation ceremonies of high school, college, or graduate school, because I just could not, for one more day, be around it. And I, for years, thought, oh, man, I'm just not cut out for any of this. It's a miracle I made it through here. Good thing I have a job now, and I don't have to learn anything ever again in my whole life. But now that I'm a grown-up and an adult in different ways, I read more now and I've learned much more now.

So you retain curiosity, and you will spend so much more time not in school than in school, that to define being in school as the one arc of occasions that you learn, is such a disservice to your life. Yeah, it's a shame, actually, all around. Well, in fact, there are many studies that show the strong correlation between the simple existence of books in your home growing up compared to other homes that have no books at all. And the kids that come from homes with books do much, much better.

Is it because the parents make an environment that is more literate, or is it that smart kids come from smart parents? And if the parents have books, they might be smarter than average. Maybe. Depends on the books, but yeah. The jury may still be out on that, But the idea that books can matter, I think that's in motion right now. When I talk to younger people about this kind of thing, there's a lot of hope involved.

2.37, so what's a younger people to you? People still in college. College. Yeah, because I get hundreds and hundreds of emails every day from people who go, and I want a job like yours, you know, what was your career path? And I tell them seven years of college learning about something I don't do anymore. And they're like, I got to skip all that. But it becomes very tricky to show people that life after college is, one, better in many ways,

because you have more freedom over what you can learn and what you can do with the knowledge. And two, that it's actually worth pursuing because when you're in the middle of this funnel, this siphon where you have to learn different things that you're not crazy about and apply them in ways that are often mildly torturous, it's tough to convince somebody that you're going to want to do some parts of this for the rest of your life and apply them and use them. Yeah, so that's why education has to be not only here's a craft and here's where you're going to apply the craft. It's got to be, how is your brain wired for thought so that when you confront a problem you've never seen before, you will attack the problem rather than shun it.

So much of learning is the preparation of the mind for just those situations. The fact that you have students in school thinking that what they're learning has to have some direct application, otherwise it's not useful to them. That's a tragic state of affairs under the educational umbrella if that permeates the system. That would mean everyone would just have to be taught a trade. Then you go out and lay the bricks or smelt the steel or whatever they do. and steel. Do they still make steel? Yeah, in China. Okay. That's the right answer to any question. Right, yeah. Yes, in China. Right, right. Yeah, they do it in China. How do you prepare your brain then for that? If you're listening to this right now, if I'm listening to this right now, and I'm thinking,

yeah, I've got to prepare my brain to realize that not everything that I learn has to be applied in some way. Sounds like a great idea. Where do I begin? No, no, it's not that active. It's passive in the sense that I majored in physics in college. Half of my courses were neither science nor math. It was liberal arts school. So I had art and psychology and economics and a little bit of history. Well, for me, it wasn't as fun learning about that as in my major of choice. Nonetheless, there are seeds planted that flesh out all the total kinds of thoughts you can have. You don't know the thoughts that you're not having. But does it make sense that the more you know about the more things, the more enriched your thoughts would be?

Sure. So even if they're seemingly unrelated. Correct. And then there are people, especially saying this to some. scientists. I don't want to know too much scientists that'll take away the wonder and the majesty of the world. So if we're both sitting on a rock and there's a sunset and there's a sunset, and you look at the sunset for its beauty and the colors and the warmth, and I look at the sunset and I say that it is a star, a glowing ball of incandescent gas undergoing thermonuclear fusion in its

core. You might say, see you've ruined it. But what they're missing is the fact that I also see a beautiful sunset with a curtain of twilight colors. I now have another dimension that I can take in the experience. Knowing how something works has never ruined anything for me. I don't understand that perspective at all. I feel like that. Yeah, I was tweeted. Do you remember there was the double rainbow guy on YouTube?

What does it mean that guy? Yeah, yeah. I tweeted the link to that and I said, this is how you behave if you haven't had physics. I wonder what was wrong with that guy. Yeah, you think there is, lack of physics class. It's just one physics class. Optics is part of a physics class.

Then he would understand double rainbows. You can triple rainbows if the optics are just right. And each rainbow is significantly dimmer than the previous one. So the multiple rainbows are very hard, and so therefore they're rare. And the rarity is what, in part, accounts for the enthusiasm of the person who left his recording device on. Because remember, he's like, oh, oh, my God. He started crying, practically. And you don't see him, but you hear him.

So you might say, well, did I take away his wonder by doing this? I don't think so because we understand rainbows. You want to wonder? I'll put you on the frontier. There's a lot of wondering that needs to happen there. Like, what is the nature of dark matter and what is the nature of dark energy and what was around before the Big Bang? And how do you go from inanimate organic molecules to self-replicating life?

That's a transition that remains. We've got top people working on that right now. So if you're going to assert what we don't know is what matters for your wonderment, and now you worry that we discover what the wonder is and that somehow it's gone, no, as the area of your knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of your ignorance. I agree. When I was reading this book, it's astrophysics, any sort of science, I would imagine, is like the, you ever go to the Winchester Mystery House? No. It's right around here. I know you don't have time to deal with that. But basically, this crazy lady whose husband invented the rifle, the Winchester rifle, she built a house and you'll walk in a room and there'll be 20 doors in the room and you'll open some of them and there's a brick wall and you'll open another one. There's a big pit. Wait, wait. You're saying you invented rifling? He invented the Winchester rifle. Okay. So all these people died as a result of his invention and she was loaded and she thought the ghosts of all the people. Loaded with money.

Not loaded with lead. Yeah, it's different. I'm just saying because rifling is a very specific feature of the barrel. He may have done something with that, in fact, and maybe that's why the Winchester. I think that may be part of it. I'm not saying he wasn't. I just, if the Winchester rifle was the first to rifle a rifle, then. Successful invention.

Yeah. And in fact, I think it goes unnoticed by many. If you look at the most iconic image of James Bond in a poster, you're looking through this cylinder and he's at the other end and you see his silhouette. and he turns and he shoots. And that cylinder is rifled. Right. So you're actually looking down the barrel of a gun.

Right. The spiral grooves that cause the pressure to spin the bullet and stabilize it. So you may be right. I'm going to have to look that up. No, no. I didn't say any. There's nothing to me to be right about.

I'm just wondering if what you said is exactly as true as you said. I might have misspoken and been totally right on that. But if that was the most deadly rifle ever made, then clearly something was different about it. Sure. Either the bullet traveled faster or it was spin stabilized in ways previous ones weren't. And the Civil War didn't hurt.

I mean, people were shooting each other all the time with this particular weapon. Anyway, my analogy is completely ruined now. Oh, I'm sorry. Doesn't matter. Did I derail your entire? It was going to be magical. So she said what? Basically, she just built this house with all kinds of crazy doors that lead in different shapes.

Some of them lead nowhere. But the book reminded me of this kind of situation in which when you get... I mean, that's a good for people in hurry. Correct, yes. Your new book right here, which everyone should grab and we'll link to it in the show notes. The things that you're learning that I'm learning that you're teaching in this book, As soon as you find something in there, dark matter, why planets look like they wobble, or the fact that things arrange themselves into spheres, you end up with 20 other doors to go through,

20 different questions about the thing that you just learned. So there's no way. And that's my fault. I apologize. So that's the point, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The point is, you read this and you go, wait, I'm interested in all of these different subject areas. So losing wonder based on learning something is a complete, that's a load.

Yes, it's a statement implicitly admitting that it doesn't fully understand wonder or discover. Sure. Now, dare I say that Walt Whitman fell victim to this? There's a poem. If you write beautifully, is it a poem even if it doesn't rhyme? If you say it's a poem or do they say it's a poem after you die, then that's how they it doesn't have to rhyme, yeah. I might be mixing two poems from two different people, but there's one called the learned astronomer.

And he talks about sitting in a lecture hall listening to the astronomer speak. And all this beauty and wonder of the universe now gets laced with formulas and math and equations and numbers, and his eyes glaze over, and he has to get up and walk outside and drink and the beauty of the night once again. Maybe we can find it to read it again today. Sure. It presumes that these mysteries, and then we figure out the mysteries, and then there are no more mysteries.

And it doesn't recognize that when you figure out a mystery, you are now standing in a new place, and you're empowered to ask questions that you never even dreamt of before. And so for someone who is curious where you have learned to love the questions themselves, this is a very natural trajectory through the world of research. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air.

To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to us in the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Did you want to read the learned astronomer? Oh, do you have it? Shall I read it? Do it. Knock it out. Walt Whitman. When I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures were ranged in columns before me,

when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide, and measure them. When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, how soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick, till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself into the mystical moist night air, and from time to time, looked up in perfect silence at the stars. It is a beautiful poem. It's beautiful. Too bad he didn't like the mathematical formulas.

So the counterpart to this would be, oh, sir, literate one, why ruin what something looks like by describing it with words when I can see it fully with my eyes? Your words just get in the way. I'd rather my mind float freely as I gaze upon something of interest than have the writer step in between me and it and interpose his or her own interpretation. If I were to compose a poem, it would have been that in rebuttal to that. We should write that down. producer will do that and leave. Yildegras-Tysons reply to Walt Whitman in the show notes. But I don't really feel that way. But if I had to offer a rebuttal, it's the kind of rebuttal I've thought about often because I've many times been in a party maybe hosted by highly social liberal arts type. So artists or English majors, history majors, people do a lot of reading and writing.

And they're generally really informed about things in ways that none of the rest of us are. And so it's a cocktail party. So I'm there and there's a little scrum of them over in a corner and I try to join in. And they're talking about some Shakespeare sonnet. And they say, apparently there's a well-known one, but I didn't ever read it. In fact, at the time, I hadn't read any of Shakespeare's sonnets. And you feel the pressure that I'm not sharing the literacy that mattered in the corner. Okay?

And I feel it. After that, I went up and dug up some of his sonnets. But consider the opposite of this. Suppose I had a geek party where everybody is sort of, of engineering, math, science, especially physical sciences. And then we're talking about Fairmont's math, blast theorem or something. So what will happen is you get those same people who threw that other party. This is a stereotype of what happens, but this has actually happened, and I've seen this happen.

Over here, the conversation, and then they'll say, oh, I was never good at math, and then chuckled about that. Yeah, right. To themselves or to their friends to chuckle. It's not an embarrassment that they were not good at math. It's a chuckle, that they were not good at math. It's a chuckle that they were not good at math. And so what's the counterpart to that?

It wouldn't be just me feeling guilty I hadn't read the sonnets. It would be me saying, oh, I was never good at nouns and verbs. It sounds way more... They would think I was some kind of stupid idiot, uneducated idiot. The assessment of your person is not symmetric in those two cases. I'm so guilty of that, though. Oh, this math, I'm intimidated by this, even though I can obviously add a receipt together. That's different from saying, oh, I was never good at it and chuckle.

Oh, sure. That's all I'm saying. There's no shame and not knowing or having struggled. That's not my point. My point is somehow thinking that it is making light of the fact that you don't know it. These are people who are learned people. And if you are learned in person, you should never make light of anything you don't know. You should run home and learn it.

If it arises in front of you, and it was a gap in your knowledge you never even knew was there. Especially now, because you don't have to go to the library and look up seven books on the subject. You can Google that thing in the Uber on the way to the next venue. You can get a good synopsis. No, that's a sentence that made no sense 10 years ago. True. You can Google it in your Uber. On the way, right, from your smartphone.

Yeah, smartphone is 10 years old this year. Yeah, officially. Yeah. Take a picture of the book with your phone. as you Google it in your Uber. And then text it to me. Put it on Snapchat. No, we had texting before then.

That's true. It wasn't as fully. Texting's from the 90s. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. SMS. Sending a picture via text, though, that came later. Mm-hmm.

That came much later. So what stuff keeps you awake at night, proverbially now? Is it dark matter, dark energy, that kind of stuff? What do you think about? No, I'm a little more obscure than that. Okay. What keeps me awake is wondering what questions I don't yet know to ask

because they would only become available to me, visible to me, after we discover what dark matter and dark energy is. Oh, man. Because think about it, the fact that we even know how to ask that question, that's almost half the way there. Sure, because you know there's something there. There's something there, and I can design an experiment,

as we're doing now with face probes and things. But I want to know the question that I can't know yet because it's not available. It's not in reach. That's what keeps me awake at night. What is the profound level of ignorance that will manifest after we answer the profound questions we've been smart enough to pose thus far. Do you think we'll figure that out within our lifetime, the dark matter thing, or is that just so far away?

Dark matter, maybe. I'm not sure about dark energy. The over under on the dark matter is it's going to be likely a particle that one or more family of particles that don't interact with ours, but of course they would have gravity. The problem with dark matter is that it not only doesn't interact with us in any way other than by gravity. So in other words, it doesn't stick. the experiments intended to detect it are hoping that however elusive they are because they don't interact with us every now and then it'll actually interact with one of our molecule. Glitch in the matrix. A glitch in the matrix.

And so it's very hopeful, mind you, but my sense is dark matter not only doesn't interact with ordinary matter, it doesn't much interact with itself. So it can't collapse to become solid objects, even if it's a dark matter solid object. So we don't see concentrations of dark matter, the way you see concentrations of regular matter, because we have the electromagnetic force to hold our molecules together and doesn't even have that, correct? Because if it did have it, it would interact with our particles. Sure, right, it would have to. Is that what you were showing on, maybe it was Cosmos, some of the stuff that blurs together,

where you're going down miles underneath and there's this giant vat of something and we're just hoping a neutrino flies through? Oh yeah, it shows a neutrino detector. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And there were reasons why you would have these detectors deep underground. you would shield it against the kinds of things that might masquerade as a signal that you're trying to detect because the rocks protect you from it.

I was a cell phone service down there. No, they're good repeaters, I think. Although I don't know that I tried my cell phone. These are abandoned salt mines and things. So they're kind of already there. Yeah, I've been in one of those. My parents took me to one when I was a kid in abandoned salt mine, and if it was the coolest thing ever,

still sounds weird saying it out loud that an abandoned salt mine is the coolest thing ever. They filled it with toxic waste, I remember that. Which just mean, well, just to get rid of the toxic waste. Right. Right. So it just means you're, curious into adulthood. Yeah, yeah.

To say that an abandoned salt mine is really cool. And of course, do you know how the salt got there? Ocean water deposits, I guess. Yeah, exactly. You evaporate generally not an ocean, but a, I mean, it could have been, but generally it's a body of water that completely evaporated out, leaving behind the, what was previously dissolved salts. So what that means is even mine salt is sea salt.

Ah, true. It's just from lakes long evaporated from millions of years ago. So I think the mine salt. community lost an opportunity there. Right. They might still be able to jump in on it, but basically all salt is sea salt. So you get sea salt from Indiana if you could find a salt mine or wherever we were. Exactly.

Yeah. I was climbing a mountain in Israel once, not climbing like, you know, a fancy kind, but walking on a trail on a mountain. That's not climbing a mountain. I was walking on a high map. You were walking on a trail. Yes. It happened to be uphill.

Yeah, okay. I was probably going downhill. To be honest, I took the bus to the top. Probably walked down. Yeah, yeah. But, uh... There's a chair lift. Yeah.

If I keep listening, so I was driving down this mountain, and I put my hand out on the trail, and I remember it crumbled, and I looked at what had crumbled away, and it was a bunch of seashells and little things like that, and I looked down, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of feet, or even more,

and there's the ocean. It's such a mind trip to go, wow, at some point that was so high that this was the bottom, and these are all the things that collected there over hundreds or thousands of years that are still there. Yeah, well, there's so much that the ocean was higher, which can have been the case, but more likely is that you have the geologic rising of the landmass.

Now that you mention it just since you went there, there's an interesting take you through a reasoning that then has a fork in the road, tell you about each fork. The fact that there are seashells on mountaintops had been for centuries invoked by devout Christians, devout religious, monotheistic religious people, as evidence for Noah's flood. Ah, sure.

And, of course, you wouldn't have to be Christian because that's in the Jewish Bible, not the Christian Bible. So the flood would have brought seashells to high places as the whole earth was covered. Okay. That was widely accepted as such. And then Leonardo da Vinci comes along and looks at these seashells and says, wait a minute, these seashells are perfectly laid out.

It looks like they got fossilized in place in an orderly way. And if there's a catastrophic earthwide flood, nothing gets laid down orderly. You'd expect broken shells, twisted, mixed with all manner of things. And so he used the fact that the shells were orderly, not broken, in their fossilized state, at high altitude, to suggest that maybe the land and the seas were at different elevations in Earth's history. Incredible. And that was in the 1400s. And everyone went.

That doesn't even make any sense. Oh, they went, you ruined it. There goes the wonder. To leave it to Da Vinci, who invited this guy. Uh-huh. What do you think is something that we as humans can see? but not really kind of comprehend that we're going to discover later

as part of this astrophysical sort of super complex. No, I don't think we understand consciousness yet, and I'll give you some blunt evidence of it. So if you go to a bookstore and ask, where are your books on consciousness? They'll show you the shelf, and it's like shelf after shelf after shelf, and books still being published on that subject.

You now say, well, where are your books on gravity? Well, it's like three books on one side of one shelf. So evidence that we don't understand something yet is that people keep publishing books saying that we understand it. When you understand something, the book gets written, and then you move on to other topics, and you're done. So we have Newton Gravity and Einstein Gravity. Get that in three or four books.

No one is still trying to explain it. Explain it as a mystery to be explained. They might explain it because maybe this other method wasn't as successful as you have some new educational twist that you would put on it. But then it's an educational exercise, not someone putting their next idea out as an explanation. for it. And by the way, this would be true for almost anything. Just look around. If active researchers

are still publishing it, it means we know least about it typically. That tells me if we don't fully understand consciousness, yet there are people who fear AI becoming conscious. I don't see one following from the other. We're afraid it's going to become this thing we don't fully understand yet because we're afraid of that, maybe. Yeah, but like I said, we don't understand our own id in a way to think that just simply having a faster computer is going to make an id in the computer. But we'll see. I remain fearless of AI.

I say bring it on. Just bring it. Bring it on. Bring it on. When you start thinking about AI, it starts to answer a lot of questions where people think, oh, an alien civilization will never contact us

because there's too many stars. And when you start looking at, well, if AI and computers can start to look at things, millions or billions of times faster than we can, yeah, they'll figure it out. It starts to narrow that gap quite a bit. Right. I know you've got to go really soon.

And one last thing that I want to wrap with, July 29th, 1958, NASA gets kicked off. It started. The world's captivated on space travel. We're trying to beat the... Would you get July 29th? Would you get that? Because it was written right here. Maybe that's an incorrect.

Did you get it off the internet? I did. I don't trust everything I see on the internet, though. So almost in all cases, the actual truth is a little more subtle than the simplified truth that is presented. And that's not a problem. It's just a reality. Okay?

So, for example, if I say, what path does Earth take and its order? orbit around the sun, what would you tell me? Elypses. Okay, ellips. So if I drew a perfect circle and then a sort of an oval and then like a really skinny oval, and I said, pick the orbit that comes closest to Earth's orbit. You might pick the ellipse that is in the middle. However, the perfect circle comes closer to what Earth's orbit is than this sort of ovalized ellipse that I had just drawn. Earth's orbit is a 3% ellipse. If I draw that on a page, you're not even really going to notice that.

imperceptible, essentially. Yeah, if you looked hard and you folded it to see if the edges match up, yes, okay? So you're saying ellipse because you've been taught ellipse, but to say a circle would not be all that bad. But here's the rub. It's not even an ellipse because the Earth and the Moon orbit their common center of gravity. It's the center of gravity of the Earth's Moon system that traces the ellipse. But Earth itself does this loop-de-loop wobbling with the Moon as it goes around the sun. That's the actual path of the Earth around the Sun.

But we just say it's an ellipse because we don't want to talk about the loop-de-loops. Sure. Because that's a deeper level of understanding of what's going on. If I ask you what shape is the Earth, what would you say? Sphere.

Okay? That comes very close to what we actually are. At least I got that one right. But if you want to be more precise, you would say we're a spheroid, we're wider at the equator than pole to pole, like a hamburger, right? But then we're not even that.

We're slightly wider below the equator than at the equator. So we're a pure shaped. shaped oblate spheroid. Provided that the earth isn't flat, right. Just in case the earth is in the flat. Just in case. So I'm saying all that as preamble to... It was July 29th, 95th.

Right. So I don't know that date in association with NASA. It could be the date that the legislation was proposed, passed by Congress. There's a different date where it actually became law, where they ratified the document that lays out everything that NASA does. That was the one-year anniversary in the week of the one-year anniversary.

of Sputnik in October. So whatever date you found, it will be something that, I'm not denying it was an useful, some important date, but generally the date that's quoted is the one in October. Oh, okay. Well, there's that in. And it's easy to remember because it's on the anniversary

of Sputnik. Right. And it's the same week that I was born. Oh, well, that's how I'll remember from now on. The question, regardless of what NASA was started, was that we're trying to beat the USS out of space, or to the moon, anyway. Not at the time, just get in space at all.

At all, right. What do we need to do to get people and to take things like space exploration, this seriously once again? What do you think we have to do? Well, the two easy ways. One of them is we go to war with China because they want to put military bases on Mars. Oh, I guess we have to go to Mars. And then we go to Mars because it's a military project, as was the entire founding of NASA.

NASA is a civilian agency, but it was triggered by what was viewed as a military show of muscle. Sputnik was not as innocent as we want to think it was. Because even though it was a radio transmitter that just went bleep, bleep, it was a radio transmitter inserted into a hollowed-out intercontinental ballistic missile shell. Oh, I didn't know that. That's why it said. It's been cleansed over the years. There were laws about who can fly over whose airspace,

but there were no rules about who could fly over whose space space. How about the space over the air over your country? Is there any rule about that? No. And there is Sputnik crossing our country in an intercompetal. In a missile body. They had contemplated doing the experiment with a warhead, a disarmed warhead. But they were concerned that that might be viewed as an active war, whereas it just simple radio transmitter would not be.

So you can still show your might without it being an active war by having no weaponry in it. But it's the thing that would house the weaponry that does it. Anyone who was alive, October 4th, 1957, remembers that. like it was yesterday. I don't think in modern times people can fully capture how berserk we went here, because these are sworn godless enemies, the communists. And we already kind of didn't like him. It was pre-Berlin Wall. But, I mean, it was so significant that in the mid-1950s, we wanted to show that we were God-fearing and they were godless. So we added God to the Pledge of Allegiance, To the Pledge of Allegiance and to the money and to the back wall of the House of Representatives.

So in God we trust, that phrase. And if you look at the Pledge of Allegiance, it doesn't really make literary sense read with God in it. Do you know the phrase? In God, right? No, no. A one nation under God indivisible. Right, exactly. Okay.

So if you take out under God, it reads one nation indivisible. That makes sentence sense. Yes, yes. One nation indivisible. You put under God indivisible, and it breaks that. but you're reminded what that was before this was introduced. And so we're doing this in every way to show that we are better, that our system of government is better, that our system of economics is better,

that we are in the free world, that they are enslaved to their own country's rules. And if we're better, but they then put up something that clearly takes technology. Oh, my gosh, we went ballistic. No pun intended. No, definitely pun intended. Ballistic, if you only know ballistics through guns, a ballistic projectile is something that moves only under the influence of gravity. And so a bullet after it has left the gun, also there's some aerodynamics in there, but it doesn't have its own propulsion.

Oh, yeah, sure. If a bullet had its own little rockets on it, it wouldn't be ballistics. Did not know that. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I wrote an essay long ago called Going Ballistic, which was all about arc of weaponry. But anyhow, so. Method one, go to war with China.

Yeah, yeah, that would happen. Oh, no. So another way, so I joke about this, you go to China and say, could you go to the head of China and say, could you please leak a memo that says you want to put military bases on Mars? Just leak one. It doesn't have to be true. Just leak a memo. Then we're on Mars in 10 months. Elon.

We're on Mars in 10 months. So, of course, I presume most, if not all, people don't want this to happen as the consequence of a military engagement. I'm simply being frank and saying, that's how we went to the moon. That's how we light a fire under butts to get to the moon. That's how and why we went to the moon, even though we've cleansed that memory as well. You go to the Kenny Space Senator, Florida. There's a bust of JFK.

and there's a whole granite wall behind him. And chiseled into the granite is his famous line from his speech, I pledge or whatever it is that we will put a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth. You know, I can hear his voice as I read those words, and it's stirring. What they left out, and there's plenty of room on this granite wall to have included it. Of that same speech, he says the following,

if the events of recent weeks, this is almost verbatim, I'm probably paraphrasing a little, because the speech he gave six weeks after Yuri Gagarin had come out of orbit. We didn't yet have a spacecraft that wouldn't explode, much less a spacecraft worthy of putting a human being in it. It would still be the next year before John Glenn would fly after many failed experiments with our rockets. So in that same speech, a few paragraphs earlier, he says, if the events of recent weeks wouldn't utter the man's name, Yuri Gagarin. If the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure of the minds of men everywhere, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. It was a battle cry against communism.

Once you say that, nothing else matters in the speech. We can cherry pick it and put it on granted and say to ourselves that we were explorers and we're Americans, but that's not the reality of how that stuff went down. And when you feel threatened, money flows like rivers. But I would say, and I wrote this in a whole other book, not this current one, that there's another way to do it. One of the great drivers of investment is economics, the promise of economic return. So if you can construct our exploration of space as something that,

ultimately pumps the economy, then it would be trivial to justify doing so. And when I say pumping the economy, I'm not talking about spin-offs or any of the traditional. It will be, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a cultural shift, a firmware upgrade in our mind, body, and soul related to how we value exploration, innovation, and discovery. When you go into space in a big way, you have to invent stuff. Patents get awarded. Records are set.

Headlines are written, and it reaches us in all of our social fabric, especially in the K-12 pipeline. In the 1960s, you didn't need special programs to get people interested in science. We would attract teachers to become science teachers. We knew tomorrow was getting invented by science and technology. In spite of all the other problems we had in the 60s, civil rights movement and the Cold War, hot war, assassination, campus unrest, we were going to the moon and that shaped our visions.

That's how you get TV shows like the Jetsons. Even at that level, children's cartoons, we are thinking about what science and technology will bring for the future. And this is why I made the point in that video, Science in America video, when I grew up, nobody was standing in denial of whether something was scientifically true,

not at high levels of power. Even if you were there, you were not in power. That's my only point. If you were hidden and you thought Earth was flat and that medicine would kill you rather than make you better, and everything else, anti-scientific, you're not in power of anything, so I didn't really matter. Economically, we go into space.

It could be transformative on our civilization, certainly on the American culture and possibly the entire civilization, unless you have some other more potent way to do it. I'm all ears. Yeah, well, hopefully in the new future, we'll see a resurgence in this point. You began by saying we sleep on our backs and we look up and wonder about the night sky.

Space exploration, I think there's a little piece of that in everyone, just because we've all gone out into the darkness of the night and looked up. and wonder. I'm super happy that we got to do this. I'm super, super happy there are educators like you. I know I'm not alone in that, so thank you so much for coming out of you. Okay, excellent. Thanks for having me. Big thank you to Neil deGrasse Tyson. His books will be linked in the show notes. Also in the show notes, there are worksheets for each episode so you can review what you've learned here from Neil degrass Tyson. We also now have transcripts for each episode, and those can be found

in the show notes as well. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Don't kick the can down the road. The number one mistake I see people make is postponing this and not digging the well before they get thirsty. Build your network before you need it, even if it means starting from scratch.

These drills are designed to take just a few minutes per day. This is the stuff I wish I knew decades ago. It is not fluff. It is crucial, and it's free. It's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests you hear on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us and you'll be in smart company.

Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is created in association with Podcast One. This episode is produced by Jen Harbinger and Jason DePhilippo, engineered by Jay Sanderson. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own.

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