The Resilient Mind - You Are Greater Than Your Limits - Neil Degrasse Tyson

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author, and science communicator known for making the cosmos accessible and captivating to the public. As the director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of shows like Cosmos and StarTalk, he blends deep scientific insight with cultural relevance and wit. Driven by a mission to empower curiosity and critical thinking, Tyson champions the idea that true education ignites a lifelong hunger for understanding.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_JournalThis episode was created in partnership with Tom Bilyeu. Subscribe to Tom Bilyeu’s channel for more inspiring speeches: https://www.youtube.com/c/TomBilyeu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to, You Are Greater than the Limits You Were Given, with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. What's the impact you want to have on the world? My impact would be, people learn from me in a way that they are empowered by what I taught them. So that when they think of what they learn from me, they no longer think.

think of me. They think of their own base of understanding of how this world works and so that I become irrelevant. Because if people say, this is true because Tyson said so, then I failed. That's not how you teach someone. That's teaching them by authority. I want to teach you how to think about the world. And then you say, I have a new way to understand the world. And you run off. You don't even look back because a new level of hunger has descended upon you and methods and tools to feed that hunger are now accessible to you. So my impact would be that others are impacted and they don't even remember that I had something to do with it. On my tombstone, I want the epitaph be ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for humanity.

And a victory for humanity is not a victory for yourself. It's not statues. It's not your name. It's just humanity's better off. Any of us, I think, should want the world to be a little better off for you having lived in it. That doesn't mean people praising you. Not even about that. What do you have to give with no expectation of return?

No one ever told me that I had to search for meaning in life. Many people look for meaning in life as though it's going to be under a rock or behind a tree. And I'm thinking to myself, you have more power than that. You have the power to create meaning in your life rather than passively look for it. So for me, I create the meaning. And meaning to me is, do I know more about the world today? than I did yesterday, that enhances meaning for me. By whatever powers I have available to me, have I lessened the suffering of others?

Or the corollary to that would be, have I enhanced the life of others? And I don't mean, have I devoted the whole day to doing that, then I would be ignoring myself. But if there's some small gesture that I can do that can completely add value to someone's life, I'm going to do it. because the leveraging of 10 minutes of my life into the happiness or enlightenment or the reduced suffering of someone else, I'd be irresponsible if I did not. If Einstein were here and we're talking with Einstein, we can talk them for hours and hours and hours. You know what question will never come out of our mouths?

What college did you go to me? I want to go to that same college. I bet most of your people who've sat in this chair. It's not about what college they went to. It's about their own initiative, their own drive, their own ambitions, their own curiosity. That is not taught in school. Sadly, school, they view you as this empty vessel that they pour information in and you test it over here. You get a high grade.

You're praised. Is that who become the shakers and movers of the world? I don't think so. School should as a minimum preserve that curiosity for you. Yeah, if you lost some of it because it's not going to be in all of us, put it back in. So that when you graduate school, you can give literal meaning to the word commencement. Commencement means beginning. It doesn't mean ending.

And so you leave school and you say to yourself, I now know how to learn. I now have a curiosity of all things I have yet to be exposed to. and I will now become a lifelong learner. Without that, you become ossified in whatever was the body of knowledge that existed the day you graduated. And you will lead a life always looking back at that time without continuing to grow who and what you can become in life. What was it about your dad that impacted you so much that you still carry today? For me, at least, was what level of wisdom did he, glean in his life and then successfully communicate to me either by example or by just explicit

statement. For example, in high school, he was in gym class and they were lining up and they were about to enter the next athletic unit and it was track and field. And the gym instructor pointed to my father online and said, Cyril Tyson, everyone look at him, he does not have the body type that would excel in track. And they used him as an example. And he says, what? No one is going to tell me what I can't do in my life. And he used that as a reason to start running.

And he started track in that moment. He decided that one of his next tasks in life would be to take up running and excel at it. Within a few years of that, he became world. class. At one time, had the fifth fastest time in the world. In the middle distance, they don't run this anymore, 600-yard run. In 1948, the Olympics was not yet ready to come back to us because we're still reeling, roiling from the Second World War. Instead, it was still in Olympics. It was called the GI Olympics, and it was held in Hitler's stadium. So he competed in Hitler's stadium in the late 1940s.

It's just one of the great memories of his life. But the reason I'm saying all of that is they were competing against the New York Athletic Club. In the day, once you graduated college, you needed some sanctioning body to compete with. So they were athletic clubs. The New York Athletic Club at the time accepted only white Protestants. So there was another club called the Pioneer Club, which took everybody who was not accepted to the New York Athletic Club, which was basically blacks and Jews, is really what that

came down to. And his best friend, Johnny Johnson, was coming around the back stretch. It might have been the quarter mile, coming on the final straightaway. And a runner from the New York Athletic Club is a few paces behind him. And Johnny Johnson overhears that runner's coach say, catch that. And he overheard this. And so what did he say to himself? He said, this is one, he ain't going to jacks him. And that extended his lead to the finish line. And he tells this story not with any bitter tone. So he never had that kind of tone when he shared those stories with us.

It was, here's an occasion to parlay what today might be called a microaggression into a reason to excel even more than you. you had expected of your own abilities and talents. And so I have taken that lesson with me. I had met Carl Sagan when I was 17. I was applying to colleges. He was at Cornell. I had been accepted at Cornell, but didn't know what college I wanted to go to.

And the admissions office saw that I wasn't totally in the moment there. They four, I didn't know this. They had forwarded my application to him for his reaction. I was already deep in the universe since I was nine. And he sent me a letter. He doesn't know me from Adam. I'm a 17-year-old kid from the Bronx. He's a professor of astronomy at Cornell University.

And I get this letter and I open and says, I understand you like the same stuff I like. Do you want to come visit the campus to help you decide if you want to go to Cornell? It was like, whoa, this is, now he hadn't done Cosmos yet. That's how old I am. But he was already famous.

So I took him up on it. I took a bus up to Ithaca, New York. He met me Outside his building on a Saturday Vited me up to his office Saw the labs I'm there in front of him He did something really cool

He reached back Didn't even look Grabed a book off the shelf It was one of his books That was the badass thing Don't even have to look That's one of my books Yep, okay here

And he signed it to me Neal Texan future astronomer signed Carl Later in the day I'm ready to go back to New York It begins to snow as it does often in December in Athaca. And he says, here's my home number. If the bus can't get through from the snow,

spend the night with my family and go back tomorrow. I'm thinking, who am I? Why? Why? I'm nobody. But I was somebody to him. And I said to myself, if I'm ever as remotely famous as he is,

I will treat students the way he has treated me. How do I create meaning in my life as I go forward? My first question of me wasn't, where do I find meaning? It was how do I create meaning? And that started early, early teens. Did you help your kids with this? Is that something that you found a way to sort of educate on or pass down so that they would be asking a similar question instead of doing the sort of wander search thing? Yeah, I have an unorthodox approach to what we did with our kids.

We discussed this, my wife and I. And I wanted to make sure that however they were raised, that they retained... the curiosity of childhood into adulthood. Okay, let's say there's a little toddler walking here, okay, crawling on the ground, it comes up, and they start grabbing this. What's it for a thing? No, don't touch that. Okay?

This was an experiment waiting to happen that you just squashed. This is a cup. It has water in it. Okay? This is breakable. The kid doesn't know that. They want to experiment. So they'll grab it, it'll fall, it'll break, water will spill all over.

That was an experiment you just prevented. They are experimenting with their environment. Everything is new to them. I saw a woman walking with her kid. The kid has galoshes on and a raincoat on. And they're coming down the walkway. And there's this big, juicy, muddy puddle right there. And I said, please let the kid jump in the puddle.

You know the kid wants to jump in the puddle. The kid is like three or four. You know the kid. And what does the mother do? that you pulls the kid around to prevent that from happening. That's an experiment in cratering. That's what had craters happen that way.

You splash the water, there's mud, it's fun, you get to see the cause and effect of a force, downward force operating on a fluid. Gone, that was a bit of curiosity in that moment that was extinguished. So, with our kids, curiosity provided it does not kill them, If it meant we had extra work in front of us, I would do that extra work.

And I have pretty high confidence that they'll retain that curiosity through the turbulent middle school years into high school. And what is an adult scientist? But a kid who's never lost the curiosity. We live in a very fractured world today. But what is clear is that the Internet has enabled, in social media, have enabled people to tribalize. you might go your whole life without ever finding another person who thinks the earth is flat. You go online and you see them all and they have conventions and they meet here, even if it's only virtual. So you have ways to say why you are different from other people.

And I don't know that that's always a healthy place to be in a pluralistic land. You want to celebrate differences rather than... and go out of your way to establish differences and then claim one group is better than another. You can draw a line in the sand between people who transgress, but do not hold power over you from those who transgress and do.

So the coach who said catch that, he doesn't have power over Johnny Johnson unless you allow him to. This is a famous quote from Martin Luther King. You can only be ridden if your back is bent. When I grew up, it was very common to hear the phrase, sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me. You recited this.

This is what you were told when you came home when you said, oh, you know, this bully called me a name. Sticks and stones can break my bone, but words will never hurt me. And so this was an inoculation against hate speech, really, against just evil people, just nasty people. You were able to develop a system of defenses against unpleasant people out there. And I haven't heard that phrase in a long time. What I think has happened over the years is we came to learn as civilization that words can be hurtful.

I don't have a problem with that. This is an enlightened new place to understand the role of our emotional state and how it interacts with our world around us. That's an advance in mental health. What I see on the flip side of that coin, however, is people are less able to deal with the very same people who are around today, who were around back then, who are calling you names, the people who might be bullying you on the internet by saying things about you. I don't know that we have how to defend against that now other than seeing a counselor for your emotional state. I can say from the era in which I grew up, I don't give a rat's ass what you say to me, okay? unless you are between me and some goal, then I'll have to navigate that some way.

If there's a racist person or sexist person or a person with some kind of cultural bias, I want to know that, actually. I don't want them to hide that. I want you to say everything you want to say. Then I'll say, okay, that's who you are. That's how you're thinking. So now what do I need to do because you're in my way?

Do I dig under you, go around you, leap over you? Would I go this way and then come out the other side? Yeah, it's longer, it's more effort. It's more energy. But on some level, it's sort of same shit different day. I think we should all get as high grades as you can.

But if you don't get the highest grades possible, no one should be standing in judgment of that. If you have some other ambitions that have pathways that don't get encoded in the GPA that other people are referencing. When you approach a topic that you don't know well, what is your actual process to learn? Great question. I read things that take me to places where other people think.

If I'm an educator, I want to know that. Because when you're speaking to me and I have some understanding of you, I can navigate your receptors for learning. I don't have to have you come to where I am. That's not right. I'm the educator, not you. You're the curious person. So I'm going to meet you on your territory. What I do for the public is primary, almost 80 plus percent of it is driven by duty, not by ambition.

What gives you the sense of duty? Because I can do something. And if I can do it better than others and it's for a greater good in society, I would be irresponsible if I did not. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.