The Tim Ferriss Show - #389: Neil deGrasse Tyson — How to Dream Big, Think Scientifically, and Get More Done

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Starting point is 00:04:10 and so on that you can apply to your own life. My guest today is Neil deGrasse Tyson. I've wanted to have Neil on this podcast for years. Who is Neil? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, on Twitter, at Neil Tyson, was appointed the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium in 1996. Dr. Tyson's professional research interests are primarily related to the structure of the Milky Way galaxy and the formation of stars, supernovas, and dwarf galaxies. And you've never heard anyone communicate and explain quite the way that Neil does. Anyway, back to the bio.

Starting point is 00:04:47 Dr. Tyson graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, received his BA from Harvard, and earned his PhD in astrophysics from Columbia University in 1991. In 2001, he was appointed by President Bush to serve on a 12-member commission that studied the future of the U.S. aerospace industry. In 2004, Tyson was once again appointed by President Bush to serve on a nine-member commission on the implementation of the United States space exploration policy, dubbed the, quote, Moon, Mars, and Beyond, end quote,

Starting point is 00:05:17 commission. In 2016, he was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Defense as an advisor to the DoD's future of SciTech innovation. DoD is Department of Defense. Dr. Tyson has been awarded 21 honorary degrees. What? That's just crazy. Let that sink in for a second. Okay. The NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal and has authored multiple books on the universe, including Space Chronicles, Facing the Ultimate Frontier, Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, which was a New York Times bestseller, and The Plutophiles, subtitled The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, chronicling his experience at the center of the controversy over Pluto's planetary status. His newest book, brand new, is Letters from an Astrophysicist,

Starting point is 00:06:01 a companion to his 2017 bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Since 2006, Tyson has appeared as the on-camera host of PBS Nova's spinoff program Nova Science Now. Dr. Tyson also hosts a popular radio show and podcast. That's a huge understatement, massively popular radio show and podcast called StarTalk in addition to the Emmy-nominated StarTalk TV show in National Geographic. He also hosted a reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos in 2014. Without further ado, the author of the new book, Letters from an Astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks, Tim. It's my first time, in this case, being able to ask you all the questions I'd like to ask.

Starting point is 00:07:06 And I thought we would start talking about talking. And specifically, I'd love to hear about any influences or inspirations for teaching or speaking. You're such a good communicator. And there are many scientists who are good scientists who are not good communicators. There are many good communicators who are not good scientists or scientific thinkers. Who are some of the people who have influenced or inspired you when it comes to communicating the way that you do? So first, to your credit, believe it or not, no one has ever asked me that. All right, here we go. Good, promising start.

Starting point is 00:07:44 This is a good first pitch home run right there. So I can go back to my childhood and middle school years where I had already sort of exhausted the exhibitry of the American Museum of Natural History's astronomy section, which is basically the Hayden Planetarium. And so it's not just the planetarium, there are exhibits and lining the corridors and things. It doesn't take much to exhaust simple exhibits. And fortunately, for me at least, the museum had sort of evening classes and lectures and lecture series. So I was an avid consumer of these additional offerings of the institution. And I remember distinctly, there was some instructors who just had such a

Starting point is 00:08:37 facility with words and sentences and humor and tenor, where I said to myself, by the way, just back up, I knew I was interested in the universe from age nine. So this is, I'm already there, right? So this is not a matter of, oh, they got me, I'm already there. But there was a couple, there were a couple of instructors that had such a facility with delivering information in a pleasing, enjoyable way that I said to myself then, I must have been 14 or 13, that if I am ever an educator, I want to be as effective as they are. And it had to do with the combination of just, you could just sit down and look at the good storytellers, right? And that's, one of them would be describing sort of the constellations of the night sky and all the mythological characters that are up there and what Greek and Roman traditions were behind it and what the stories are. And, and so to hear how they told the stories and when and where they put

Starting point is 00:09:47 emphasis, I never forgot that. And so, so that was one side of it. Now, another side, there was a scientist, also an educator, but in this particular case, he had such a facility with the content. He just knew so much about the Big Bang and black holes and galaxies and stars and planets. I said to myself, I don't know if I will ever learn as much as he knows. Now, I didn't realize, you know, I was only 14. And my life's learning until then, you know, my entire life is small compared with how long he's been alive, right? I mean, he might have been 50 at the time. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:10:31 But I just could not even imagine knowing, learning what it would take to learn as much about the universe as he did. But I said, if I am successfully a scientist, I want the command of the content the way he has. And plus, he had a very good sense of humor as well. So if you combine knowledge-based humor, facility with words and language, and storytelling, that was in me. Or at least the mission statement to achieve this was in me since my mid-teens. That's incredible. And directionally, you said at age nine, you're already sort of pointed in terms of interest at the universe, as you mentioned. How did that develop? Oh, so, okay. So now you are now the thousandth person to ask me.

Starting point is 00:11:22 I figured I would follow up with a first by asking the nth number question, just for those people who don't know your background. Does that negate the first question? No, no, no. It doesn't negate. It just averages down. If it was a home run, you already scored. So this is a bunt. Let's see if we can get the base on it so so uh it was a first visit to the

Starting point is 00:11:49 hayden planetarium my local planetarium in new york city which happens to be large and significant so the word local doesn't really capture what's actually going on there it's a content producing facility so we produce of course i'm now director of that planetarium, that very same planetarium. But my parents would take my sister, my brother, and me to each weekend. It felt like each weekend, but it was probably maybe one or two weekends a month, but on family trips to various cultural institutional offerings in the city and in the region. So it didn't matter. It would be, we'd go to the aquarium, we'd go to the zoo, we'd go to the art museum,

Starting point is 00:12:34 we'd go to an opera, we'd go to a play, we'd go to a Yankee game, you know, a Giants game, a college football game, there would just be something where we would observe adults doing with expertise. So it wasn't just, oh, you want to grow up to be a doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. No, it was, what else do full-grown humans do in this world? And that exposure was significant. And I thought it was just, they're just trying to get us out of the house. But there was a master plan in place, a master objective, which was to expose the three of us to as much as they possibly could, so that when we decided

Starting point is 00:13:17 what we wanted to be when we grew up, it would have a certain authenticity of origin. I mean, think of how many people who are raised by ambitious parents where the parents really kind of tell the kids what they're going to major. You're going to be a doctor or you're going to be an attorney like your parents, like your mother. Or, you know, I never could be an attorney, but now you're going to be one, right? There are these pressures, some overt, some covert, but there's so many places or occasions where kids are not really doing what their heart wants them to do. They're doing what their family wants them to do or what their family needs them to do. You're going to inherit my business and you're going to be an expert in furniture or whatever it is. So that was not going on in our household.

Starting point is 00:14:10 In our household, it was a free expression of interest. And when I first went to the Hayden Planetarium at age nine, I was hooked. I mean, you sit back in this big comfy chair. I realize now that big comfy chairs that recline in the dark will put an adult to sleep immediately. But as a kid, it was, wow. And then the lights dimmed and the stars came out. First, I thought it was a hoax because I had seen the night sky from the Bronx where I grew up. And, you know, you get a couple dozen stars, tops.

Starting point is 00:14:46 And so I had no idea that that wasn't real, that it was light polluted and air polluted. Back then it was much more air pollution. And I had no idea. So I thought it was a hoax. But it was a very, it was an entertaining hoax. And so I was not going to stop it or walk out. And only later would I learn that that sky on the dome was authentic. And what's embarrassing in an urban sense is that to this day, when I go to mountaintop observatories, the finest observing sites in the world, and I look up and I see the night sky, I whisper to myself, wow, this reminds me of the Hayden Planet.

Starting point is 00:15:29 It's a little embarrassing, but it's true. And so, yeah, that's how it began. Meanwhile, my brother, we would visit an art museum and he was totally taken by art and would ultimately attend the High School of Music and Art in New York. And I would ultimately attend New York's – the Bronx High School of Science. So my sister ultimately was a total sellout, and she went into corporate America. She got her MBA. But she loved horses, and we had gone horseback riding in Van Cortlandt Park. There are stables there. And again, these are things things you can do.

Starting point is 00:16:12 And so she's had a lifelong appreciation for equine sports and just riding in general. But my my point is, all of our interests are, and I think we've been happier for it. We're not hiding some inner need at the risk of disappointing parents. So, yeah, so that's the full story right there. That's my origin story. And I want to dig into the, maybe some of the, the inner folds of the origin story. I, it, it certainly sounds like you and your family and your, at your parents' encouragement use New York city as a learning laboratory of sorts. And you had these weekend excursions. You just said it way better than I just did. It's learning laboratory. Thank you. Can I use that in the future, Matt?

Starting point is 00:17:05 Yes, all yours. And I'd love to hear if anything else comes to mind, say during the week or evenings when families were together, or were there any other habits or routines or approaches that they used for cultivating curiosity. Yes. But before I tell you that, there's something else I want to add. And I don't mean to pit demographic against demographic or neighborhood against neighborhood, but I can tell you that think about how many parents,

Starting point is 00:17:41 particularly back then, is less so today. But back in the day of urban flight, where I'm stereotyping here, but let's imagine you just got out of college, you got married, and you got a good job in the city. So you're working in the city, and you and your spouse say, let's have kids, but we don't want to raise them in the city. There's no backyard, there's no swing set. And so you save your first bonus check or whatever because these are upwardly mobile couples. And then you buy a home in the suburbs. And that's where you birth your kids.

Starting point is 00:18:12 And that's where you raise them. And then they attend suburban schools. So when you go out to the suburbs, you don't have these cultural institutions. Right. Cultural institutions are focused in the city. Not only that, on the weekend, where are the kids going to go? They go hang focused in the city. Not only that, on the weekend, where are the kids going to go? They go hang out at the mall, right? So the interstitial time, the downtime does not have the access typically, especially not, you know, you don't even know how

Starting point is 00:18:40 to drive yet until you're 16 or 17. So you're already almost out of high school before you have a full up sort of driver's license. And so, so the fact that we were in the city meant, yes, the city was our laboratory. And, and, uh, this is another quick thing. You didn't ask this, but I remembered researching it. You can also ask the question, particularly back in the very dangerous times of the city. When I grew up, there were 2000 homicides a year in New York City, about seven a day. And so that was just your state of mind. This was the 19, late 60s, especially the 1970s. That's, if you're a movie buff, that's the decade that Escape from New York was made. It's got a cult following, but I think it was one of the worst movies ever made. Not just because I'm from New York City and the government had turned Manhattan into a prison.

Starting point is 00:19:38 The island is a prison. So they just dumped criminals there and let them fend for themselves. So holding aside they did that to my hometown. I still think it was an awful movie, but any, yes, that was made in that era. So now I wanted to slip in another little fact that you can ask the question, um, what are the chances given crime and all the other factors of not surviving to age 18. Okay? And you can say, I want to live where my chances of survival to 18 are at its highest. That would be one measure of the safety of the neighborhood that you choose. Well, someone did a study on that, and here's what they found. They said, let's compare the city and the suburbs.

Starting point is 00:20:22 The city is where everyone is thinking that everything is dangerous, right? So going back, this study was done probably about when the homicide rate was around a thousand a year. It had dropped. I think I remember reading this in the 1980s. Oh, by the way, right now it's just a few hundred. Most of those homicides are between people who know each other, which is very hard for the police to stop if you have access to each other. So it's between you and your drug dealer, you know, that sort of thing. And so if you're pretty sure no one you know wants to kill you, the statistics are extraordinarily safe for New York City today. But we're going back 30 years.

Starting point is 00:21:04 So now watch. So the study was, what are the chances of dying before age 18? Extraordinarily safe for New York City today. Today. But we're going back 30 years. So now watch. So the study was, what are the chances of dying before age 18? And in the city, and you want to compare neighborhoods of equal income. Okay? So you go to the Upper East Side of New York, a very well-to-do place. And then you go to Scarsdale, or Greenwich, a well-to-do suburb of New York. And one is in Westchester, one is in Connecticut, but they're both in commuting distance of New York. Here's what they found, that you were two or three times less likely to survive age 18 in the suburbs than you were in the city at any income level.

Starting point is 00:21:50 And you say, well, what's going on there? Well, I thought the city was dangerous. The city is dangerous, but you know, it's more dangerous driving. Okay. Driving is more dangerous. So auto accidents of drunken teens who just got their,'s permit or they're just fresh off the just minted driver's license or prom night or you kill somebody else because you're drunk or you were playing in your front yard and the ball rolled into the street and you're a kid and you roll out and you get hit by a car. Car-related deaths. Vast. So they swamped the deaths from violence that would occur in the city. Also, suicides were higher in the suburbs than in the city. And I wonder, not that I have any expertise in psychological health, but you got to wonder how low can you feel walking home after you've

Starting point is 00:22:47 stepped over three homeless people, right? I mean, what, how, how much at the bottom are you? It's as Red Fox once joked, because poor people commit suicide at a lower rate than higher than rich people. He said, well, it's hard to kill yourself jumping out of the basement window. That was Red Fox. Anyhow, that's just a little side thing about city life versus suburban life. And as you may know, there's a flight back to the city in recent years. Upwardly mobile people did well in and they did well in college and they're lifelong learners. They want to stay close to the learning centers. And you have art openings and

Starting point is 00:23:33 wine tastings and indie movie premieres, and none of that's in the suburbs. That's the challenge here. So there's a return back to the cities and the real estate trends in recent years. But anyhow, getting back to your point. So once any of our interests were revealed, my brother, my sister to keep the powder keg, you know, from igniting. And in fact, in the late 60s, New York City had only the smallest of inner city unrest relative to Watts or Detroit or Cincinnati or Washington or Atlanta there were cities that burned especially in 1968 the the the most turbulent year of the most turbulent decade in American history since the Civil War the 1860s so there was New York City. And my father was

Starting point is 00:24:46 active in that. He was commissioner of the Human Resources Administration. And what is that? These are people who care about you and what job you might have. And what is a riot but the last gasp of hopelessness expressed? That's what a riot is. And if you have hope, I'm going to have a job this summer. I'm going to make money. I'm going to do this. There are people who care about me. The city cares. This whole state of mind has basically, I will come out and just say, diffused whatever might have been a riot in the biggest city in the country with the largest quote ghetto in the country back now we just call them inner cities so so that's what my father was engaged in and my mother was a uh homemaker until we became empty nest and then she went back to school and went on

Starting point is 00:25:41 and got a got her undergraduate degree, which she hadn't finished before they got married, and then a graduate degree in gerontology. So I'm taking you down that path just to alert you that both my parents were active in professionally relieving the suffering of others, right? That's their goal. And here's their kid, the astrophysicist. So I have no clue how to help me along at all, except whenever my mother would visit a bookstore, she would go to the remainder table. I don't know if those still exist. You know, we're publishers, they printed too many books and then they just want to get rid of them. They shake the tree, the books fall out

Starting point is 00:26:20 and they sell high quality books for like 50 cents or a dollar. And my mother just find any book on mathematics or science, certainly astronomy, bought them for low, low budget. And they would come home, they would be my birthday gifts. I had the biggest library of any middle schooler in the hood. And that included brain brain teaser books so they didn't know for sure and but basically um you know they were some some of this is let's how does the saying go um uh uh raise the flag and see who salutes it right so they they were raising these book flags and which ones did i that attract me which ones didn't most of them were good most of them further developed me they would buy art books for my brother and so it's a it's seeing what our interests are and then supporting it and that's

Starting point is 00:27:19 i had no no regrets and that was uh my wife's and my objectives with our kids. My wife has a PhD in mathematical physics, and I have a PhD in astrophysics, and people come up to me and say, are your kids okay? Can that mess up your kids? It's not. People only think that when you have science parents, not when they have lawyer parents or anything. So our kids are into their own thing. They're not pressured to do science or anything like that. I have to pause just to mention that this is deja vu all over again for me. It's the first time I've had a guest describe exactly what happened with my family. Also. My parents exposed us to a lot. They would see what caught our attention, and they didn't have budget for new bikes or other things. But my mom would always say,

Starting point is 00:28:13 we have budget for books. And what that meant was going to the remainder table specifically at the bookstore to pick up books on whatever had caught our attention. It's very, very similar. That's really wild. And the thing is, as I got older, when I considered writing books myself, I said, suppose my book ends up on the remainder table. It's a bittersweet thing. It's like, I don't want it to be on the remainder table, but that's how I cut my teeth in this. So it's not selling well if it's on the remainder table. Actually, that's not always true. Sometimes the hardcover is slowing down and they want to go to paperback.

Starting point is 00:29:02 So then they release the hardcover to the remainder table and then the paperback does well on another budget level. So yeah, the remainder table, I have a love-hate relationship now that I'm an author. If we jump from where we started around 14 at the beginning of this conversation. And flash forward, not too far forward, I suppose. Could you describe, and this is I'm sure something you've been asked before, but I'm going to add a twist to it, which is, could you describe for people who don't know the name who Carl Sagan is, and then also perhaps share a story or any observations about what people don't fully appreciate about him or don't know about him? Yeah, excellent. Thanks for that question. So, Carl Sagan is probably the most famous popularizer of science there ever was.

Starting point is 00:30:04 And I can't say he's the most popular scientist, that would probably be Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton or Stephen Hawking. But he, if you look at sort of visibility, he was a very productive scientist in his own right. But that's not how most people remember him. They remember him as initially author of some very, very readable books on the universe as a multi-time guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Johnny Carson, the Tonight Show host who preceded Jay Leno, who preceded Jimmy Fallon. So there had only been a handful of hosts of the Tonight Show. Carl Sagan came of age at a time when Johnny Carson was host, and Johnny Carson was a big fan of science, and more so than Jay Leno was.

Starting point is 00:31:00 So Jay Leno, in all of his tenure, had very few scientists on. I was on his show like the last week before he swapped out with Jimmy Fallon. science concepts and he i was already knew i was going to do astrophysics before i even knew he existed so i can't credit him for for inspiration to become an astrophysicist but what i can credit for me what i can credit him for is is the power of analogy. And I'll give you an example. I heard him give a talk, and he was describing the size of a payload in a space mission. So rather than say it was, you know, 8 inches by six inches but he didn't say that he said it's about the size of a two pound coffee can and i said i know exactly what that is oh okay i got that

Starting point is 00:32:16 all right and something that simple not giving the metric of something, giving something else that is familiar in your life, somehow makes it real. So that every thenceforth, anytime I saw a two pound coffee can, I thought about space missions. So he was really good at that. And so I said, wow, okay, if I'm ever in the position of communicating complex ideas to the public, I will try to make sure that I can fold this in as well. And I think one of my best versions of this was I was being interviewed on the Today Show back when the Cassini spacecraft had just pulled into orbit around Jupiter, excuse me, around Saturn, for a 12-year observing mission, right?

Starting point is 00:33:12 Observing the rings, ring system, the moons, the magnetic fields, the gas, everything about the Saturnian system. And the host asked me, you know, trying to go hard hitting, said, well, Dr. Tyson, this is after we said nice things about the spacecraft. Now it was going to take a turn. Now I knew journalists do this. So I was just ready. He had no idea how ready I was. Out comes the question. This is a $3 billion mission. How can we possibly justify that expense with all the problems we have in the world today? Okay. If I'm going to be stumped on national television, it's not going to be by a morning host. It's going to have to be someone who was like in the

Starting point is 00:33:58 trenches in Vietnam, one of those reporters, all right? Then I'm okay with it. I'm not going to be stumped on the morning news. I'm sorry. So I said, wait, it's not $3 billion. That's the cost of the 12 years. It's what matters is the budget per year. All right. And so the budget per year, you know, it's three or $400 million a year and Americans spend more than that per year on lip balm. Bam! Now, we all, you know, lip balm is in a general sense, so it includes lipstick, chapstick, you know, all the stuff we put on our lips.

Starting point is 00:34:40 You add that up, it costs more than that mission. And so I was very proud of that. And I didn't know at the time that this is the Today Show, and you know they have the people in the plaza outside looking in the window holding up signs from their hometown. I didn't know that the audio from the show gets piped out into the street. Because when the show ended, I walked out. There was a chorus of people holding up their chapstick saying, we want to go to Saturn.

Starting point is 00:35:10 So I thought, well, I could start a chapstick movement. But all of that is traceable to Carl Sagan's ability to find some other analogy that drives home the scientific point that he was making. So to complete the influencers on me as an educator, his facility with that, I've tried to make part of my own tactics, methods, tools, and tactics when I find myself in those situations. And in the mid-70s, why? Oh, excuse me. And oh, after everything I just said, he went on and made Cosmos, okay?

Starting point is 00:35:51 And it's called A Personal Voyage and came out in 1980, aired on PBS. And that was seen, I think, by a billion people. It was the most successful documentary there ever was. And that really made him a household name at the time. We're now 40 years ago. And, you know, invited by heads of state to places and this sort of thing. And what distinguished that from any other documentary, you know, no one thinks of Cosmos

Starting point is 00:36:21 as a documentary. There's something else going on in it. And it has to do with the creativity of not only Carl, but especially the co-writer that had two co-writers at the time, Ann Druyan, who he would later marry, and Steve Soder, who is a colleague of mine. In fact, he's got an office in my department, they have that combination of wit, insight, sensitivity to the human condition,

Starting point is 00:36:54 made Cosmos something else. It was like, this is not just about the universe, it's about why all of science matters to us. Not only to you, the individual, but to civilization. And it was a call to action to become better shepherds of this world. Back then, we were still in the Cold War, so nuclear threat was real. I was privileged enough to host the second of these Cosmoses, if that's the plural of Cosmos, Cosmoses in 2014, 34 years after the first. And Ann Druyan, as the lead writer in that she uh while not a scientist herself

Starting point is 00:37:48 uh i can tell you that she's one of the most enlightened people i've ever met she's she's she sees and feels the science so that there's science that needs to be conveyed she will find a way to communicate that science such that you will never forget it. That it becomes part of your inner soul of concern and curiosity. And that's the potency of this series. So I don't think science communication and science education has ever been the same since Cosmos has landed on the landscape.

Starting point is 00:38:26 So I'm going to come up, or I should say come up, come back to a Carl Sagan follow-up. But since we're talking about science, science communication, I would like to revisit, and feel free to fact check this because I don't want to believe everything I find on the internet. But this is this is from Harvard Business Review. And the question to you was, how can schools and workplaces emphasize curiosity, we can focus on the schools. And the the answer I have, which which I'd love to hear you comment on is there should be a class where you learn how and why science works and what the methods and tools of science do.

Starting point is 00:39:10 And many people's understanding science is just this body of knowledge, but really it's a way of querying nature. How would you teach such a class? If you had, if you had that as your mandate and where you chose that as your mission, what might the structure or curriculum look like if you were to teach such a class? Okay, first, I have no memory of that interview, but I do remember saying that. No, no, I don't remember being in the Harvard Business Review. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:39 Wow, okay. Could have been syndicated, could have been copied and pasted. Who knows what agreement they have? Right, because why would Harvard Business Review care about me at all? So, yes, but that entire quote is accurate. It's what I think and it's what I've said. And I would double down on that and say, this shouldn't just be one class. There should be an entire line of curricula that threads through all of your years in school that capture the need to stimulate curiosity. So, yeah, you have to learn how to ask questions and a course is typically are here here is knowledge and learn it rather than here is something we don't understand how would you probe it how would you ask what what what sequence of questions would you ask to to to learn what this thing is. Right? And, I mean, let me just, this might be contrived,

Starting point is 00:40:48 but it'll serve the point. Let's say there's a sapling there, like a small tree growing. You say, if you never knew, if you didn't know anything about this, what, how would you go about investigating it? You'd say, well, okay, I'd ask, what does it weigh? Can I weigh it? What are these things on the thing? We call them leaves. Well, what's the purpose of a leaf? What happens if I block it from sunlight? Because it looks like it wants to see sunlight. What happens if I do that? What happens if I, what does it need to live? Does it need soil? Does it need water? It looks like it likes water. What happens if I don't give it water? What

Starting point is 00:41:32 happens if I give it Coca-Cola or something? So, so it's an open ended inquiry into the operations of nature. And the open endedness,, I think, is what stimulates curiosity. Because some of your questions won't lead to an answer and others will. So, you know, you want to hone that. And you don't always know in advance which are the best questions to ask. If you ask the question, what kind of cheese is the moon made out of? Well, okay. Grammatically, that's a legitimate question. But scientifically, if you don't know and you think it's cheese, then you'll set up experiments to try to test, is it Roquefort? Is it Edam?

Starting point is 00:42:18 Is it goat cheese? Do you know? And you find out that none of anything productive. Why? Because it's not made of cheese. That itself is a revelation. It's made of silicates. You know, silicon is an active ingredient in rocks.

Starting point is 00:42:33 So, and silicon is a very common ingredient in the universe. So, I think the class would stimulate open-ended inquiry in all the different academic subjects. So not only the science subjects, but also history and English. I mean, why not? You know, where did this word come from? I don't know. Let's find out. Well, here's the root. Here's the this. Oh, who first used it? You know, why is it that I did not know about the Oxford English Dictionary until I was like 25 or 30? Okay, why? Why is that so? You know, the Oxford English Dictionary is every single appearance of a word in the history of the language where the usage of the word pivoted. So it has not only the first appearance of the word,

Starting point is 00:43:26 but any subsequent appearance where someone gave it a different nuance of meaning. And that's kind of fun to dig that up. How come we never did that in English class? That would have been really fun. And I would have learned then instead of two years ago that the word acronym, acronym acronym we all know this word do you realize that's a modern word i have a dictionary from 1939 and it's not in that dictionary it's an unabridged dictionary and it's not in that dictionary i would later learn that

Starting point is 00:44:00 that word was invented to describe all of the abbreviations that came out of agencies and organizations in the Second World War. Acronym. And technically, it's an abbreviation that you can pronounce as a word. So NASA is an acronym, and SCUBA is an acronym, and LASER is an acronym. But IBM or CIA are not acronyms, because you can't spell them out. But that would have been just kind of cool. This is inquiry. This is free inquiry into knowledge. And if you can stimulate that, then kids who get out of school will not celebrate the end of school.

Starting point is 00:44:40 They will lament that they will admit, i can't learn anymore well yes you can because you now know how to be curious and you will now shape a lifelong uh you now create an arc of learning that continues for the rest of your life this this is a really important subject of course and by the way i'm giving you very long answers. Is that okay? Long answers are great. This is why we have time. Okay.

Starting point is 00:45:11 This is not a short podcast. No. Not only allowed, but encouraged. All right. And I'd like to dig a little deeper on scientist versus scientific thinking, because it strikes me that I've come across many people just in travels, public speaking, and so on, different types of engagements who would say, I'm not a scientist. And in saying that sort of throw out the hope or possibility of developing

Starting point is 00:45:42 scientific thinking. And I certainly wouldn't call myself a scientist, but I've greatly benefited from reading Bertrand Russell, or there's a book called Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, who's an MD, but who writes about many different things. And this book talks about how to read a study and how to read journalism that supposedly accurately covers studies. I found it deeply enriching and valuable in navigating reality. Are there any particular books or resources you would recommend or approaches for people who would like to develop their ability to look at the world through this type of lens that you're describing? So that's an important and insightful question. Because, you know, you should really be a host of a podcast. If I haven't convinced you of that by the end of this, you know,

Starting point is 00:46:41 so you're right, not everyone can be a scientist. And there's all this talk, we need more scientists in Congress. And I think that'd be great. But what you really need are scientifically literate leaders who know how to trust the emergent scientific truths of scientific research and how to then embrace that and fold it in as necessary into legislation or policy, either at the executive branch or the legislative branch. So it's possible to be scientifically literate and not be an expert in any particular scientific line, discipline. And so what does it mean? Tapping back to a few moments ago, it means knowing how to ask questions. It means

Starting point is 00:47:35 knowing how to invoke skepticism. Skepticism allows an open mind for things that you're unfamiliar with to be true, but it does not allow your mind to be so open that your brains spill out and you lose the capacity to judge what is true and what is not. And so I, um, uh, in this, in this effort to know what is true and what is not, I, at the risk of sounding self-serving, one of my books, it's called Death by Black Hole, in spite of its title, it's a gory title, it's actually about what science is and how and why it works. And when people write to me with questions, I know based on how they worded the question, whether they read that book or not. That's how effective I think it can be on the reader. Because it says, there are chapters in there on how do we know what we know? And why do we know what we know? And do we know what we know and what is our confidence in what we know and and so there's an entire unpacking of the anatomy of of science um in that book and until recently that was my biggest selling book but i have a couple of books that

Starting point is 00:49:01 have done better than that since then but it's uh I'm very proud of that book in the summation of what it delivers to the reader. If you're collecting book names, another good book is How to Lie with Statistics. A cute little tiny book that tells you all the things who people want to fool you into thinking something that's true that's not and how they manipulate statistics in order to accomplish this it's it's in print and it's been in print for like 50 years i i think it came out in the 1950s um so that would make it 60 years so that i think put that one very high uh on the list and i'm going to make a note of this other book that you're describing, was it Bad Science? If it influenced you as much as you say, then I'm going to check it out. It's a good book. It's by Ben Goldacre, Gold and then Acre, like the parcel of land. And it's very helpful specifically for parsing health-related information in media or marketing. Yeah, so one thing I have to say is the press, in all fairness to them,

Starting point is 00:50:15 they want to, you know, each journalist wants to be the first to break a story. And because then they, everyone references them as the, and you know, this is how Pulitzer Prizes are given if you break a story. And if you hang out at the coffee lounges of scientific conferences and you hear a new result that could be amazing or devastating or mind-blowing, and you write an article about it what you're not doing as a journalist is honestly presenting the the likelihood that it's true you're just presenting it as true or you'll say if this is true this will revolutionize everything and then you leave that phrase in

Starting point is 00:51:03 the in the first sentence of the article and all the rest of the article assumes it's true. And so the reader is left with the assumption that it's true. Whereas a scientific truth is never any one person's research paper. Ever. Ever. The research frontier is a ratty, bloody, bleeding place. And it's most things will be wrong. And the few things that are right are demonstrated to be right because of verified other research that supports it.

Starting point is 00:51:42 And so what you're looking for is a consensus, not of opinion. I'm using that word because I don't have a better word. It's a consensus of scientific experiments and observations. And once you have that, you can say, oh my gosh, this result continues to persist as the results of experiments, even when conducted by this person's competitor, even when conducted in another country where they use 240 volts instead of 120 volts, you know, maybe the power of the experiment influences the results. You know, who knows? You just don't know. So when you have enough different people getting the same result, now the journalist can talk

Starting point is 00:52:21 about it as the new truth, but they don't. Yeah, the importance of replication, I think, does not get enough popular press. And you mentioned earlier that in some measure, becoming a scientifically literate person is determining what sequence of questions you might ask to figure something out. And I think you'll, I think you could enjoy Ben's work. Then I can, I can point you to some of it because it'll, it'll help readers to at the very least look at, say a, a piece in a newspaper or a magazine or online and identify what is missing right so if somebody says eating bananas doubles the risk of colorectal cancer something like that right well there are a bunch of questions which is like how did you determine that how many bananas were you injecting bananas into rats uh are rats comparable to humans? And if doubled means that the risk went from, you know,

Starting point is 00:53:27 one in 20 million to two in 20 million, is it really something that you need to worry about? Right, because we remember the word doubled without reference to the baseline on which you are doubling. Yeah, right. That how to lie with statistics is a great one too, yeah. Make sure your y-axis has a label. I promised I would come back to it, and I want to, in part because Carl Sagan is one of those people I would have loved to have met.

Starting point is 00:53:55 I would have loved to have had a chance to meet him. If this is true, why did the admissions office of Cornell University forward your application to Carl's attention? Oh, yeah. So when I was 17, a senior in high school, applying to college, Cornell, where Carl Sagan was professor, was one of the schools I applied to. And unknown to me, they forwarded my application to him. They had already accepted me. And they, I think they had already accepted me. Is that right? Actually, it doesn't matter at this point.

Starting point is 00:54:37 They forwarded to him to get his reaction to it. And my application was dripping with the universe. I was in the astronomy club. I walked dogs to buy my own telescope in the glory days of dog walking before you had to clean up after the pre-Pooperscooper laws. And he saw my application and sent me a letter in the mail saying, I saw your application. I'd love to help you decide if you want to come to Cornell and I'd be delighted to meet with you and give you a tour of the campus. And the next time you're up here, it was like, holy shit, this is Carl

Starting point is 00:55:14 Sagan, the one who was on the Tonight Show and all the books. Yes, it was. And sure enough, I got on a bus and went from New York City to Ithaca, all four and a half or five hours of that bus ride. And sure enough, he met me out front of the lab. And in fact, it was a Saturday that he did this because I couldn't take time off from school and showed me the lab. And I remembered he was sitting behind his desk and he reached back, didn't even look, grabbed the book from the shelf and then signed it. It was just one of his books that he wrote. I said, that's badass. If you don't have to look, pull anything off the shelf behind you. It's one of the books that you wrote. So I still have thatomer. Amazing. That was the, it's still in there.

Starting point is 00:56:06 And so I, oh, then, then it started snowing. And I was scheduled to take the bus back. And he left me his home phone number. And said, if the bus can't get through, then call me and spend the night with my family and go out tomorrow. And I thought, who, what is, what's going on, why? I'm thinking to myself, and I realized that he was deeply committed to making sure that a next generation had access. A next generation had the enthusiasm that he had. And I said to myself at the time, if I am ever as remotely famous as he is, then I will give time to students, allocate time to students the way he has to me.

Starting point is 00:57:04 And now I joke that, because now, of course, I have my own books behind my desk, and I reach for it when students come in. Every time I do that, I say, yep, this is an homage to Carl. And I joke that, you know, if I'm on the phone, you know, Barack, I got to get back to you. I got a student who's waiting for students first. So I already knew I was going to be an astrophysicist at that point. But that exchange with him codified for me what kind of a scientist I would be, what kind of humanity I would carry with me in my interactions with others, especially students. What do you hope to instill or infuse in students if you have a short amount of time with them, if they are in your office and you're going to reach back and grab a

Starting point is 00:58:01 book? Yeah, that's a great question. It's ambition. It's, you know, ambition has gotten a bad, bad meaning lately because people think, oh, that's an ambitious person in the office place, you know, in the business setting. That usually means you're stepping on top of people to get forward. You know, that's an ambitious person. And it doesn't always mean that, but it carries some of that patina today. I'm simply saying, what is your confidence in yourself? What are you doing to boost who and what you are in this subject? And how far do you want to take it? These are all

Starting point is 00:58:42 aspects of the ambition tree. And so I also encourage people, you should not distract yourself with what grade you're getting. After your second job, no one asks you what grade you got ever. All right? Go ask any 30-year-old person. When was the last time someone asked what their GPA was? They won't even remember when that was. What matters is, are you a good problem solver? Are you moral?

Starting point is 00:59:08 Are you a hard worker? Are you a good leader? Do you have insights into the field? These are the questions that matter. And if you take hard classes rather than easy classes, you might get a lower grade. Sure. But if you take an easy class and get a high grade, well, that's what everyone else is getting. So you will not distinguish yourself in the actual workplace because everyone else has exactly that same profile because they took all the same easy classes you did. If you take a harder class, risk the lower grade, you are actually ascending a pyramid

Starting point is 00:59:50 or a ladder, let's say, that you're adding rungs to a ladder that you then ascend. And every next rung, you are higher above the ground than everybody else. And at one point, you will get, you will reach a rung of the ladder where no one else is adjacent to you. And people have to beat a path to your door to solve their problems, their business problems, their academic, whatever it is they're doing, because you kept ascending, doing the hard things to accomplish it. And this is, this is a recurring message that I give students who come in. And in my next book, Letters from an Astrophysicist, it's curious that you have these arc of questions because these are letters I've written in exchange to questions asked of me where all of these topics have been covered. And it's because I get letters from students.

Starting point is 01:00:48 Oh, there are also letters. There's an open letter I wrote, a letter to my parents that I wrote for their 30th wedding anniversary. This is back in the 1980s where I'm thanking them for being supporting me. You know, so this whole part of this conversation that involved me remembering what my parents did, that's in there. You'll see that. And wisdom from my father about, you know, what, how to stay grounded, but also continue to, to continue to dream about where I want to land, however high above the ground that dream is.

Starting point is 01:01:26 So, I'm delighted to say that a lot of this conversation is actually contained in that book. Hmm. Now, let's talk about that for a second. So, the letters from an astrophysicist, you have in reading, in preparation for this, looking at your bio, looking at your current projects, I somehow create the illusion that I do a lot of stuff, but you really seem to have an incredible ability to work on multiple projects. You certainly have more opportunities than bandwidth to execute on all of those opportunities. How do you choose to write a book, let's say like Letters from an Astrophysicist? Why that book and why now? Just the decision process for choosing that amongst all of the many things that you could spend time on. Yeah, so it's a matter of, you remember the game in the arcade where all these coins are piled on top of each other and you have this pushing bar?

Starting point is 01:02:37 Yes. And the bar pushes and you add another coin and it pushes and there's a big stack. Is it going to come? No, it's not going to come. Let me try again. So I don't know what that game is called, but I think we're all familiar with it. There are occasions where so many things are preloaded in my life that I have to ask, well, what am I going to do today instead of tomorrow? What should I have done yesterday?

Starting point is 01:03:02 Well, there's this big stack that's ready to spill over. That's the one I I got to do now. Otherwise I'll lose it all. It'll roll down the street. So some of it is, is not to overstretch the metaphors, but some of it is like the person who spins the plates and keeps them all spinning all at once. I don't know if that, that arcade trick is still, you know,

Starting point is 01:03:24 that doesn't make the evening, uh, variety shows anymore. That used to count as entertainment. Plates spinning on sticks. But, um, yeah, so I'm spinning and people have asked, well, how do you achieve equilibrium in life? But what is the balance? There is no balance. It is never in balance, ever. With family, with kids, with wife, with work, with writing, with television and other media, with Twitter, nothing is ever in balance. And so I spend a lot of time trying to do what I do do more efficiently today than yesterday.

Starting point is 01:04:05 Then you can squeeze in a little more. But no, there is no balance. There is no. How do I accomplish it? I don't know. It's done. Now, the letters book, although, has a simpler origin story. So I've been answering letters from the public forever.

Starting point is 01:04:28 In fact, my first and third books are compilations of Q&A. I used to have a Q&A column in a magazine called Stardate, and it was under the pen name Merlin. So my very first book ever was called Merlin's Tour of the Universe, which was a compilation of those letters. And then I had more, and it had enough for a second volume, which became my third book. But that was 40 years ago, 30 years ago. Right now, in sort of my modern life, I would answer questions from the public.

Starting point is 01:05:02 And every now and then, some, wait, some of the questions would be sort of straightforward science questions. And I have a team of people at the Hayden Planetarium who can field those. And I made sure that it was answered under their own name. They answered it, even though it came to me, it would come from them. Other letters, much more personal, much more specific to me about in reaction to something I said or wrote or those letters I would answer personally. And one out of ten of those letters, I would find myself doing a little extra homework to make sure I gave the sort of the fleshiest answer I could or I would put in a little extra literary effort and When I would do that I say, you know It'd be a shame if only this one person saw this letter

Starting point is 01:05:59 So I put it aside in a folder on the possibility that I would one day collect letters into a volume. And so two years ago, because books take time to plan and contract and all of this, I said, wow, I've got 500 letters of this variety where I've put an extra effort to communicate. And I think it's time for a book. So I called them down to about 200. And that was still a lot. And with the help of my agent editor, said, let's hone it down some more. So now the actual book,

Starting point is 01:06:40 Letters from an Astrophysicist, has 101 letters, which is the creme de la creme de la creme with regard to range of content, with regard to insights, letters from an astrophysicist has 101 letters, which is the creme de la creme de la creme, with regard to range of content, with regard to insights, with regard to plight of the person who asks the questions. Three of them are from prison inmates. Others are from parents trying to be better at raising their kids. There's a whole chunk from religious people. There's Muslim, Jews, Buddhists. But most of the religions, as you might guess, are from Christians who are desperately trying to reconcile science with biblical passages. And so there's quite the slice of who is out there and who is asking questions

Starting point is 01:07:29 of an astrophysicist. And so that, that became the collection. So the editing was huge because you can't put everybody's full letter in because many of them were just rambly bambly. And so I paraphrase many of the letters just to get it in there. But once that was done, and then you have to sort of edit for clarity and grammar and all the rest of this, an editorial choice, I said, when punctuation is expressing emotion, when excessive punctuation expresses emotion, I leave it in. So if someone, when someone says, I want to know the answer to this now, and like now is capitalized as three exclamation points, I leave it in just so you can share the person's feelings in composing the letter. One of the chapters is hate mail because it really pissed off people.

Starting point is 01:08:27 So I'm just honest about what kind of correspondence I've had with people. Most of it was over a 10-year period when my email was publicly findable on the Internet. And some other letters have trickled in since then. The prison letters have trickled in since then. They don't have Internet, so it comes as a paper letter to my office. And so, so yeah. And so that, so that I've been working on that for the last two years. And so finally it hits October. Yeah. Exciting. Congratulations. I want to come back to the, the comment on balance on balance, which makes sense to me. Maybe like trying to stabilize your heart rate indefinitely.

Starting point is 01:09:09 It's not a great idea. Excellent analogy. Yeah, heart rate variability. It's a thing. a full life as you do, if and when you ever feel, say, overwhelmed or scattered in some way, or if you feel like you've lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? Do you have any practices or questions, anything that you use to refocus or sort of down-regulate in order to reassess things? That's a great question, and I think that would be a perfect question for most people. But I run my life a little differently from that, and so it's as follows um i agree to probably 10 more projects than i will finish

Starting point is 01:10:15 i get about four times as many requests to participate in projects than i will ever so i have to say no to most things and the ones i say yes to it's about 110 so it's like airline overbooking if you will continuing creative analogy it's it's you don't overbook so much that you'll there's a mutiny or that there's a, there's a, people want to overthrow your, but there's just enough so that circumstances will have whatever is the a hundred percent of what I produce get made. The other 10% don't get made. It's that simple. And so basically I default on about 10% of the projects that I agree to in advance. And that means the time is always completely full. Always. And how do I refocus? No, it's not quite like that. My day, as is true with anybody's day, is comprised of time slots of very different quality from one another. All right? When I'm on the subway,

Starting point is 01:11:26 I sit in the corner with a hat and glasses so I minimize how the selfies that would get requested. And I do email. Email is, you know, you can do email any time of day or night. You don't have to, I have to focus now. I'm about to do email. No, you can do email waiting for the bus. All right? So the interstitial time in my day, I do email. It's not the only time I do email,

Starting point is 01:11:53 but that's when I do a lot of the tedious email when I wouldn't otherwise be doing anything. Okay. My wife is an avid consumer of news. She sends me clips, mostly from the New York Times, but other sources as well, if she thinks it has some relevance to me. Remember, she has a PhD in mathematical physics, so we have strong alignment in terms of what I would consume and find interesting. She's not sending you a lot of horoscopes? No. So she actually is a pre-filter for news, right?

Starting point is 01:12:34 And so that works great. There are periods of time on the weekends where I have a five-hour block. I will write during five-hour blocks. It might take you an hour to get into it, all right? Well, if you only have an blocks. It might take you an hour to get into it. All right. Well, if you only have an hour block and it takes you an hour to get into it, you can't write an hour blocks. That doesn't make any sense. So all of the timeframes throughout the week are allocated for what kind of things I would do in them. So there isn't a time where I have to focus. Well, I only have an hour. I don't

Starting point is 01:13:07 have to focus. I'm just doing email. It's not about getting ready to focus or regrouping or plus everything I agreed to, I'm excited about. I want to do it. I do it because I think I can do it uniquely. And so there isn't this, oh, I got to slog through this. I'm fortunate that most of what occupies my day has electively landed on my calendar. I'm not a medical doctor. Yeah, I don't feel like open heart surgery tonight. No. They don't have this luxury. They have to be on point, on focus when that is necessary.

Starting point is 01:13:47 So all I do is study the universe. The patient never dies. So let's talk about Dr. Tyson Airlines for a second. With the overbooked airline. Yeah, with the overbooking. So in the airline business, they have systems for managing overbooking if everyone happens to show up. So they might ask for volunteers, and then they offer bribes, and then they offer free trips, and then so on and so forth. What is your approach to canceling or renegotiating the 10% breakage, so to speak, that overage? What does the communication

Starting point is 01:14:29 look like? Yeah. So, there's a lot of finesse there. Again, that's another insightful question. Because the energy and effort to say no gracefully is way greater than saying yes. Absolutely. Because you can say yes ungracefully and it's a yes, but a no, there's no reason to make enemies with people. You want to make sure they're still there. You want to make sure they might ask you once again to do what it might be. And then maybe it'll end up in the 100% rather than in the overbooking

Starting point is 01:15:05 part. So just to be clear, the overbooked could have been in the accommodated part. It just landed in the overbooked section. So what I will typically do, I'll send a polite note of regret and say, my calendar got away from me. I could not keep up. And that is a very believable fact, right? They know what I'm doing and how productive I am. And then I'll try to offer something in recompense. I will say, can you check back with me in the spring? And when I think I, my table will be more cleared than it is now. Or there are places where people want me to come give a talk or to host a fundraiser or something. And I'd say, maybe I can do it. I'm not sure.

Starting point is 01:15:55 No, I can't do it. But how about this? I will donate autographed books for you to auction at this fundraiser. And then there's some comeback. So that's my equivalent of offering discount on another trip or whatever airlines are doing these days. Got it. Thank you. This is sort of an area of study that's become increasingly interesting to me,

Starting point is 01:16:23 not just how to say no initially, which may be the easiest, if done well, the first no, but also how to renegotiate as needed when circumstances change or when you're overbooked and things along those lines. So thanks for sharing your approach. I've been fascinated by your approach to preparation and a number of different examples that came up when I was reading and prep for this. The first was, despite being wooed by Carl Sagan, you did not go to Cornell. You were accepted at Harvard, NYU, MIT, and Cornell, maybe among others. And I'll just give two examples that I want to follow up with a question. So these are both from the New Yorker profile. But you went about deciding to go by making-

Starting point is 01:17:17 Oh, by the way, that New Yorker profile, I was going to write a companion analysis to that profile. Only because while the profile was fact-checked, it was not impression-checked. Okay. And you can say something that is factually true, but then you can ask, if someone reads this, what are they going to think? And if they don't think what that which is true, even though what they read was technically a fact, then the article is not authentically communicating reality. And so I was going to do that. And I just never got around to it because it was kind of nitpicky. And let me just move on. I might still do it if I ever teach a writing class, which I once did, by the way. I was a visiting writing professor at Yeshiva College in upper Manhattan, a fascinating visiting professor of writing.

Starting point is 01:18:21 And I talked – it was, of course, nonfiction writing, and science writing. And so I very much enjoyed that it allowed me to formulate what it is I do in the context of a curriculum rather than just this is what I do. So but so I was going to do that. But so now you're going to if you're going to quote from it, if there's an impression check, I will jump in. Oh, yes, please do. And, and, and I'm sorry that you had that experience. I also had that experience with a New Yorker profile, which was really upsetting to me at the time with the impression, sort of the impression assessment, as you put it, which I think was put very well. So, these, I think, may be pretty neutral. So, the two things that I wanted to mention, and you can correct me if these are inaccurate, were to decide where to go undergrad, you create a spreadsheet that listed recent contributors to physics and astrophysics, articles to Scientific

Starting point is 01:19:19 American showing which schools they'd attended and which faculty they had later joined. The school that appeared most frequently on spreadsheet was Harvard, and so you decided to go there. And then I'll give you one more, and then you can correct. That's accurate. Okay, great. The second was, before going on The Daily Show, this is with Jon Stewart, you studied past episodes counting how many sentences Jon would permit a guest to speak before butting in with a joke.

Starting point is 01:19:47 And so you were able to really, not necessarily script out particular example that comes to mind of preparation really, really paying off. If there were any inflection points in your life or just particularly important moments where preparation has paid off for you. No, it paid off not in a literal money sense, but in a, in a success sense, it pays off every single time I am interviewed on television because I started, I look at the, at the host and I look at, like I said, as was accurately portrayed in that profile for John Stewart. I knew that if he interrupts you before you get a point across, everyone will laugh at his comedic quip. But now you have this dangling information that you have to get back to. And maybe you won't get back to it smoothly. And maybe the conversation

Starting point is 01:20:56 will move on. And that makes for a messy trail in the exchange that you're having with the host. So I would parcel my information in these container ships, in these containers, where I would get that across. He then interrupts, and now we have a fully expressed thought, and we have a funny quip, and then we move on, and now we have a nicely knitted together interview. So it pays off every single time. I study, well, how often do they reference current events? Well, I better do my three-day read of current events so that if they're not going to go back a week because it's not going to be current in people's minds, they'll go back three days tops, typically one or two days in a reference. And so I will have to study um that i also need to know depending on how pop culturized the person is i'll go in there brushing up on what did beyonce do what did um

Starting point is 01:21:54 you know you pick some pop performers did they do anything funny or stupid or embarrassing i need to know that because they might make reference to it. And I don't want to look, you know, look like I'm not connected. As a result, I spend some stupid amount of time. That's not fair. I spend more time than I otherwise would. How's that for saying it politely? Expose myself to pop culture and current events. We all should, of course, but pop culture, um, getting exposure to pop culture is what enables me to communicate with people who live in pop culture,

Starting point is 01:22:32 be they interviewers or their audience. You know what, what I'd, I, I would love to do, uh, is, uh,

Starting point is 01:22:40 I only have a handful of, of, of questions left is for those people who listen to this interview or any interview on this podcast, it's sometimes easy to feel intimidated by guests when reading or hearing about the many, many, many great successes. If you'd be open to it, just to kind of humanize things a bit, would you be open to sharing how a failure or apparent failure

Starting point is 01:23:13 perhaps set you up for later success or a tough time that you were able to get through? Are you open to sharing? Oh, of course. Well, so first of all, let's start with the more recent example. There was an episode of the Colbert rapport. I ended up being on his show about 13, 14 times, something like that. I think I was his most repeated guest. Actually, one of the times I missed a current event. Now he, his interview in character is the most challenging interview I do ever I've ever done on television. And to this day is the most challenging because Stephen Colbert is smart. I think he's the smartest one out there and he's creating this character. So I have to know what there's a double thread through that and it could rear

Starting point is 01:24:06 itself in any way at any moment so there was a in one episode the news had broken about the governor from south carolina who was having affairs with a woman in Argentina and was, this got revealed and it was embarrassing and everyone, and this governor of South Carolina who no one had heard of before became a household name. I think this was especially relevant to Stephen Colbert because he's from South Carolina. All right. I missed that news story. All right. No, I mean, I knew of it, but I didn't preload my utility belt walking into that interview. And he leads off by saying, oh, you know, I just read recently that there was a survey conducted that most people cannot name a living scientist. What do you have to say about that? And so I said, I don't care if you can name,

Starting point is 01:25:05 I don't care about names. I care about ideas. I care about the science itself. And he said, well, but really though, isn't all that would take is to have some scientists go to Argentina? And the whole audience started laughing. And I said, why are they laughing? I hope I don't funny. I have no idea. I'm saying, holy shit. Okay. So I then, I had to go to plan B.

Starting point is 01:25:37 And the plan B is I will laugh alongside the audience. Okay? And smile, nod, and then move the subject forward, preventing him from coming back to it. Cause I put something else on the table that he then has to deal with. That was me saving face rather. That's my ego there, right? Rather than saying, I have no idea why you're all alive. And they didn't have to explain it to me. And then that messes up the joke. And so, but I successfully steered out of that, out of that mud slide, right. And kept going forward. So that was, that was a mistake. I, cause that was very current events and I just missed it. And I had no excuse at all. Um, there was another, so that's just, Oh, another one. I was a guest on,

Starting point is 01:26:28 um, Desus and Miro. These are two very hip, uh, uh, hosts of a talk show. Very, very hip, like complete with hoodies and graffiti sprayed on the jackets. And I'm walking in there with a sport coat and a button up shirt. And no one in there is wearing a button up shirt, not the production crew, nothing. So I say, damn, I am, I don't know, you know, how am I going to pull this one off? Okay. And so, because I don't have just one message delivered one way, I try to fit an audience, right? I mean, that's what you should do. They have a following and I'm a guest on their show. Let me try to fit that environment. So I'm in there and they're asking very hip questions and I'm at the limits of my cool. I don't know if I can continue this. I'm at the limits. And I see one of them is wearing a Yankee hat as he's from the Bronx. I'm from the Bronx

Starting point is 01:27:22 and I'm a Yankee fan. That gave me some to go in the conversation, uh, keeping it buoyant. And at one point they asked me, one of them asked me, Oh, by the way, who's your favorite member of the Wu-Tang clan? It was like, Oh, okay. I only know one member of the Wu-Tang clan. So I'm just going to say his name and maybe that'll get me through this. I said, Oh, the Jizza, of course. Oh yeahang Clan. I'm just going to say his name, and maybe that'll get me through this. I said, oh, the Jizza, of course. Oh, yeah, great, great, good answer. I don't know if they knew I was at the cliff face right at that point. Again, the point is we're serving their audience,

Starting point is 01:28:01 and to have some awkward interview doesn't serve anybody. It's probably not where you wanted me to go with these answers, but, and I'll go there. So you talk about failures. I was never anyone's model student. And what is a model student? It means you get good grades in class and you, you're not disruptive. Well, I had mediocre grades and I was disruptive. Okay. And disruptive, not in a bullying sense, but just, I had a lot of social energy and I'd pass notes among friends. And, you know, I, uh, there's an error when spit balls were in and I'd shoot spit balls to the ceiling, see how long they would stick, you know, things like that. And that is not the conduct that any teacher would say, hey, he'll go far. Now, here is the one of the impressions that were false in the New Yorker article.

Starting point is 01:28:56 It said that I was a mediocre student. OK, but that was a translation from I had mediocre grades, but I was anything but a mediocre student. Right. Like I said, I was part of the astronomy club. I'd taken extra classes at the museum. I already knew I was reading far more than anybody else of my classmates. I was visiting observatories when we went on trips to cities. I was very committed and very serious. I was into photography. I set up my own dark room at home back when dark rooms were a thing. I would take over a bathroom that didn't, one of our bathrooms didn't have any windows. I took that over. I sold photos to the local newspaper when I photographed graffiti. There was an anti-graffiti movement. And so in my mind, I was never a mediocre student, even though my grades were mediocre. But if you have the bias that your grades are who you are, then yes, you're going to write a sentence in an article. He was a mediocre student.

Starting point is 01:30:01 Right. And so it looks if I say to you, this person's mediocre student, what are you going to think? Oh, they're not really interested. And they don't even know school is for them. There's an entire impression that you get if you're told this is a mediocre student. That was not me. Nothing could have been farthest from the truth about me. Okay. And it's all the rest of the stuff I did. I went on expeditions. Uh, I got a scholarship to go on an expedition to study Stonehenge, uh, with other research anthropologists, uh, and Stonehenge has scientific value. And so I brought science, my, this is in high school

Starting point is 01:30:38 while I did this. Right. And I also viewed a total solar eclipse off the coast of Northwest Africa. And I was 14 when I went. I lied and told everyone I was 16. And I went alone, brought my telescope. I had a scholarship to do that. All of this is going on, all right? And that's why I was admitted at Harvard, okay? Harvard didn't give a fuck about, excuse me, didn't care about the grade. If the rest of this is what's going on in my life, it means I'm a doer. It means I have ambitions. It means I have a mission statement for myself and someone is going to succeed, fine. But if you also

Starting point is 01:31:26 recognize that there are people out there who get stuff done in their lives, then that gives you access to a whole other category of person who's out there. So did I learn anything from not being any teacher's best student? No, because I was self-driven. But it's still awkward and uncomfortable to know how driven you are, but then not get recognized for it. And ultimately, I was recognized by the colleges that admitted me. And then later on, I made it into something called the Harvard 100, which is a list of the 100 most influential living graduates. And so I think they knew what they were doing when they admitted me. And by the way, they get more applicants who are valedictorians of their high school than there are slots in their entering class. So if they wanted to, they could just take every valedictorian. But they apparently, and fortunately for me,

Starting point is 01:32:28 see other things about a person that they care about. And it seems like your parents were also, and I'm kind of reading between the lines here, but supportive of you being ambitious and self-motivated as an autodidact outside of the classroom and not overly fixated on grades within the classroom? Is that a fair statement? Yeah, since I wasn't failing any classes, they were not concerned.

Starting point is 01:32:56 And I got A's, B's, and C's my whole life, averaging a B, basically. So it was not a problem. And my brother and sister needed more sort of buoyant support from my parents academically than I did. So looking back, I think I was pretty easy kid to raise all things considered. Right. So for example, if I, if I go out on a Friday night, and I come back late, they can't say, why did you come back late? You have to come back early. Well, why? Well, because you could have been studying. No, I was, you know, my grades are okay, you know.

Starting point is 01:33:32 So what I mean is my parents were not, if I got a B, they're not asking how come it wasn't a A, right? Or if I got an A minus, how come it wasn't an A plus? That's not what kind of parents they were. As long as I was progressing in school and moving through and doing okay, they were fine. You have an impressive memory for... One last thing. So ask yourself, suppose they were high pressure parents with regard to grades. So there I am with my own sort of photography business, right? And I'm in the astronomy club and this sort of thing. And they're saying, we don't want B's, we want A's. Then I'd have to cut away those other activities to spend more time in the books to get A's. Then I would have had A's and then

Starting point is 01:34:21 nothing else in my life would have developed. And that's an interesting tradeoff one is making of their kids as a parent. If you're going to require grades when their time they might have otherwise spent, they could have grown in other ways that are not measured by grades. But go on. You might not have had time for developing your ankle pick in wrestling, as another example. Which we won't get into in this conversation. Yes, I used to wrestle. I'd be very self-indulgent.

Starting point is 01:34:54 But those of you who are interested, you can follow up another time. Dr. Tyson was also a very successful wrestler. I was mentioning... Well, in high school, I was undefeated in high school. College was another matter. I started wrestling corn-fed guys from the Midwest. Yeah. Tough breed.

Starting point is 01:35:14 Tough breed. I'm sure hauling cows from childhood. And that was a whole other level of commitment. And so I had a losing record all my level of commitment. And, and so I had a losing record, my, all my years of college. I think my senior year, I might've,

Starting point is 01:35:29 you know, been six and five or something, but I enjoyed the sport immensely, whether or not I was winning. I, I, I'm, I'm gonna,

Starting point is 01:35:39 I'm gonna show some restraint in, in jumping into wrestling for the rest of this conversation. So I'll grab the lifeline back to my question about memory. What's indirectly about memory? You seem to really have a knack for remembering quotes, facts, figures, all sorts of data and sayings. I'm curious if there are any particular quotes that you think of often or live your life by. Are there any favorite quotes that you come back to often?

Starting point is 01:36:20 Yeah, one is by Ptolemy, Claudius Ptolemy, who is a, 2,000 years ago, he was an Alexandrian mathematician who wrote a book, which was the crowning achievement of a geocentric universe. Of course, the whole concept was wrong, but it was interestingly wrong, right? If you're going to be wrong, at least be wrong in a way that stimulates further research, which is what that did. The translation of which, which went into Arabic a thousand years ago, was called Al-Majest, which, when it was translated into Arabic, that title is now the title that we now use for it, because that's the form in which it was most remembered. In other words, it was most widely distributed after it was preserved in Arabic and then retranslated back into Latin and English.

Starting point is 01:37:15 Almagest means the greatest. So in there, in the margin of the manuscript, he writes, by the way, the planets were still not, their movement in the night sky was still not deeply understood. The planet would be moving sort of right to left against the background stars over the weeks. It would slow down and then go backwards. Oh my gosh. We have a word for that.

Starting point is 01:37:41 It's called retrograde. People actually thought the planets were actually going backwards. Well, if the whole world revolved around Earth, yes, they would be going backwards. But since that's not the case, this retrograde motion is just sort of an illusion of who's moving to the left or right as you go around one side of the sun versus the other. But here's the quote. When I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia. That's one of my favorite. That is beautiful. I feel that when I look up. And it's also, it borders on spiritual, right?

Starting point is 01:38:33 He is invoking God, in this case Zeus, as someone who he's hanging out with, enjoying the unfolding of cosmic events. And I don't count myself among the ranks of the religious, but when I look up and I see mysterious things, there's sort of a spiritual connectivity with the unknown that courses through me, and where I feel exactly that.

Starting point is 01:39:05 Just while we're on it, a couple more quotes. I happen to like wine. You know, I'm a wine enthusiast. And so here's a quote from Galileo. I have to paraphrase it. Forgive me. It's, the sun can keep the planets in orbit on their appointed paths, yet somehow manage to ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the world to do.

Starting point is 01:39:37 That's fantastic. Yeah, while I'm on a roll, Dom Perignon, the monk, who has a very famous champagne named after him, stumbled on this double fermentation process where the first fermentation of the yeast gets you alcohol from sugar. And then a second fermentation gives you carbon dioxide, which is the bubblies. He does this by accident. And then he tastes it. And his first comment was,

Starting point is 01:40:05 I believe I am tasting the stars. There's one other quote. This is a quote where this is why I know I'll never be a novelist because this quote is just, oh my gosh, I can't, I can't do this. This is just too perfect. Okay. Here it is. It's from F. Scott Fitzgerald from, from the great Gatsby. And you know, he's a party guy, right? Okay. The great guy, wealthy party guy. Here's a quote. In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths amid the whispers,

Starting point is 01:40:54 the champagne, and the stars. It's like, whoa! Okay, that is, I can't do that. I'm sorry. Never be a novelist. I'm sorry, not the whispers, among the whisper can't do that. I'm sorry. Never be a novelist. I'm sorry. Not the whispers. Among the whisperings.

Starting point is 01:41:09 Excuse me. Whisperings. Among the whisperings. So the theme and the takeaway that come to mind is that you and I have to have some wine or bubbly and talk about stars. I mean, that's clearly the subtext here. But I don't want to credit for good memory. I don't know how it compares with the average person's memory, but I like remembering things that matter to me, that have moved me. It takes nothing to remember a quote that moves you. In this moment,

Starting point is 01:41:48 I'm wearing a shirt with the entire tract of Desiderata printed on it. Old-timers might remember it from back in the 70s. It's this manifesto for how you might live one's life, written by Max Ehrlman, but that was only discovered later. It was originally attributed to some anonymous monk, because they found it in a church in the 1600s, in a desk drawer, and they figured it was from when the church was founded. But no, it's more modern. It's from 1927. And Max Ehrlman happens to be a rabbi, very different from a monk in the 1600s. But one of the lines is, take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. I take that to heart.

Starting point is 01:42:40 I used to dance. I was a performing member of three dance companies. They were college troops. And people say, you know, we have dances with stars on TV. Why don't you do that? Don't you want to do that again? No. I'm done dancing.

Starting point is 01:42:55 That's a chapter of my life. I'm in a different chapter now. I don't have chapters of the past that I then long to relive in the future. For every chapter you long to relive, you have not done long to relive in the future. For every chapter you long to relive, you have not done enough with your life in the present to continue to grow who and what you are and what you can be, benefiting from the wisdom that you've accumulated over all the years you've been alive since then. So, this letters book is a summation of wisdom. A letter is wisdom. And I could not have written the letters book when I was dancing. And when I

Starting point is 01:43:34 was dancing, no one would have wanted my books anyway, even if I did write one. And so, I have no interest to do what I did in the past when I'm doing something different now. And I'm really looking forward to letters from an astrophysicist. I recommend everybody check it out. And I'll certainly be linking to that and everything we've discussed in the show notes, including Ptolemy with a PT for those people who want to look him up, but that'll be in the show notes. And people can say hello to you on Twitter at Neil Tyson, Facebook, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Instagram, also at Neil deGrasse Tyson. This has been so much fun. I really appreciate you making the time to have this conversation. Well, thanks for your insightful and welcomed questions.

Starting point is 01:44:25 I think they're all the right questions in the right way, giving me a chance to say fresh things to a listening audience. So thanks. My pleasure. Is there anything else you'd like to say, ask, suggest, any parting comments before we wrap up? No, I see myself as a servant of the public's curiosity. So the fact that you had interest in interviewing me meant that you felt that your fan base, your following, would have an interest in me. And so I'm flattered by that consideration. And I just hope I served their curiosity or stoked their curiosity in whatever ways that are within my abilities. Well, you certainly stoked my curiosity. I have pages of notes and that gives me

Starting point is 01:45:14 certainly hope that that's the case for a lot of people who will have listened to this. And it'd be fun to see you again in person sometime. Excellent. Look forward to that. Very much appreciate it. Thanks again. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

Starting point is 01:45:38 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read

Starting point is 01:46:06 and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and

Starting point is 01:46:26 you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. If you've ever sold anything online, or if you sell anything online, then you know what a pain in the ass the shipping process is. It's time consuming. It's expensive. You're always copying and pasting orders from different sites, trying to figure out the best carrier, so on and so forth. It's such a hassle. And in a previous life, I shipped tens of thousands of units overseas, domestically, overnight, ground, every possible carrier. It drove me bonkers. ShipStation was created to make your life easier. I wish I had had it when I was in the biz, so to speak.

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Starting point is 01:48:34 I focused on dramatically improving a few things. Surprise, surprise. Most notably, the quality of my sleep, which seems to affect just about everything. This led me to revisit, you name it, my daily routine, morning routine, exercise, diet, all the way to affect just about everything. This led me to revisit, you name it, my daily routine, morning routine, exercise, diet, all the way to what I slept on. And I ended up getting all new beds here in Austin, Texas, including mattresses from Helix Sleep. Helix has built a sleep quiz that takes two minutes to complete, and they use the answers to match your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress. Whether you're a side sleeper, hot sleeper, cold sleeper, or you like plush, you like firm, with Helix, there's no

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #389: Neil deGrasse Tyson — How to Dream Big, Think Scientifically, and Get More Done

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #389: Neil deGrasse Tyson — How to Dream Big, Think Scientifically, and Get More Done

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