Full transcript: Neil deGrasse Tyson on London Real
8:22 Brian Rose: This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
8:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Good morning. Nice to meet you and good morning here in London.
8:30 Brian Rose: You are an astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author. You’re also the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.
8:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
8:40 Brian Rose: You are America’s most popular scientist. You were voted the sexiest astrophysicist alive, which might be a backhanded compliment.
8:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I can’t figure that out. Yeah, just consider the category. I don’t know who I beat out for that. I don’t know. Okay, so I don’t get big headed about it.
8:58 Brian Rose: Okay, well, it’s still, it’s a compliment, you know, sexiest something. You will soon be hosting a Cosmos space.
9:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson: It’s not always a compliment to be objectified.
9:05 Brian Rose: Oh, okay, yeah, oh, that’s true, actually, yeah, okay. I guess as men, we’re not used to it.
9:09 Yeah, as men, it’s a weird thing. We don’t have the reaction A lot of women are like, don’t objectify me.
9:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Right, right, I’m just saying it’s not always, but I didn’t mind, that’s fine. That was all right.
9:19 Brian Rose: You will soon be hosting Cosmos, A Spacetime Odyssey, which is a sequel to Carl Sagan’s television show, Cosmos, A Personal Journey.
9:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Correct. From the 80s. From 1980. From 1980, exactly, right.
9:30 Brian Rose: Welcome to London Real.
9:31 Brian Rose: Thank you. Thanks for being here. You know, I took my daughter to the Greenwich Observatory a few weeks ago, and I showed her the old Victorian telescope, like the 28 inch and 28 feet long, And we saw like the different meridians. It was like the Airy meridian and the Haley meridian. All these guys had like literally drawn lines in the sand and then the longitude clocks are there.
9:50 And I was just wondering, when you land in Heathrow Airport and you think of London, do you think about that historical astronomy stuff or do you think of completely other things?
9:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I mean, I don’t think of Greenwich. I mean, Greenwich is another city, right? Outside of London. It is, it’s a few miles out.
10:03 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, it’s just across the Thames, I guess, right? Yeah, it’s south. Yeah, yeah.
10:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson: No, I don’t think of that. I do revel in the fact that I’m on the prime meridian’s time zone.
10:18 I’m very aware of that. I like knowing that. It’s the referent for all other, I don’t know how many Londoners walk up and down every day thinking that. I think it’s just the time. But in doing so I don’t necessarily think Greenwich Observatory.
10:39 Brian Rose: Once that line got set up, you won. You won that contest. In London, they beat out Paris, the line. That was the next in London. Paris was very close.
10:49 It was Victorian England that was just fighting.
10:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah. And either city could have had it, because when you continue the line to the other side of the world, you get the international date line, and you’re just in the middle of the Pacific. So the Pacific wouldn’t care where the international date line would go. So the distance between Paris and London is not large enough to have made a difference on the other side of the world, because the lines would cross and be like that.
11:17 Brian Rose: What do you associate with London? When was the first time you came here?
11:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson: It’s basically the first international city I ever visited. I was 14. Yeah, I came alone, actually, and I was on an expedition.
11:31 It was the first stop before an expedition to, well to Stonehenge and the Salisbury plane. I was in high school at the time but no I didn’t fly with a group. Well the expedition part was with a group. But I came to London early to tour London and so that was my first time here. And looking at the tube that was interesting because I knew the New York City subway system.
12:00 So everyone talked about the tube, so I wrote the tube. Were you impressed with it? I felt very… No, I wasn’t impressed with it. No, the New York City subway is ten times the size.
12:08 Brian Rose: Oh, there’s no contest. Is it still? There’s no contest. But they have cushioned seats on the London tube. I spent four years in New York City and when I had cushion on them I was like, this will last about a year in New York.
12:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well, yeah, I’m not sure if you hardly ever get to sit, so who’s noticing? No, the New York City subway moves three billion people. There’s some crazy number of people moved every year, like a billion people every year. So the sheer scale is not commensurate. But I felt very comfortable, I felt at home, I felt like, I felt urban because I’m born and raised in New York City.
12:45 And back then it was a little grittier, the cars were a little more exhausting if there’s such a word. And I think in the early 70s England had just switched, recently switched to a decimal monetary system. Okay. Because for the currency. Yeah.
13:05 The currency. And so people were talking about it and I never knew what a shilling pence or any of that was. I still don’t know. Yeah. I just never knew.
13:14 So I was intrigued. I felt curiously a foreigner yet at home, a big city yet a lot of people speak differently. Yeah, a little bit. You catch up to it.
13:23 Brian Rose: The black cabbies are a little tough, you know I’m from San Diego and I remember as a kid probably at 10 years old I had a single mother we had three kids in the house and I remember her walking around the house saying Billions and billions and billions of stars. She used to actually kind of get up in my face about it And I actually haven’t seen the show but she was fascinated by Carl and the show of course He never said billions and billions. I read that he said billions upon billions.
13:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson: No never well Well, no, no, no.
13:54 He just said billions and billions. There was a book, one of his last books, called Billions and Billions, just to just get it out there. Johnny Carson said billions and billions while imitating Carl Sagan. Okay. Yeah.
14:10 Brian Rose: How did Carl-
14:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Johnny Carson, two hosts ago- Two hosts ago. Of America’s Tonight Show.
14:16 Brian Rose: Yeah, I remember him. It dates us a bit. So how did Carl transcend science so much at the time?
14:23 Brian Rose: Because there was no social media back then, there was no Twitter, it had to be him as a person and the production value of the show.
14:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, so I think, what I learned from Cosmos, because I was already established in my career path to become an astrophysicist, so his science expositions didn’t influence me to become a scientist. What they did influence, it was kind of like existence proof for me that it is possible for a scientist to have a bedside manner, a fireside, you know, wow, I can just put him here.
15:03 And when he’s on the TV, he’s actually like on the couch next to me, talking to me. You’re not lecturing, you’re not pontificating, he’s just having a conversation. And he’s speaking with a sort of poetic grace that you had never heard before, the vocabulary of a scientist, of any kind, and there are scientists who could find some interesting elements of their profession and share them with you, and then you’d sort of meet them halfway because it was interesting.
15:32 With Carl Sagan, he took steps beyond that in which he would find something interesting and then show why it mattered to you, or why it should matter to you, why you should care, take it to heart. So science became not only an intellectual exercise but an emotional one. And realizing that that was possible told me that if I’m ever in a position to bring science to the public, that’s how I’m going to attempt, that’s what I’m going to attempt to do. And it requires some socialization, right?
16:04 You’ve got to know who you’re talking to and why and what they’re thinking. And it doesn’t normally go on in a professor’s lecture hall. The professor is under no obligation to care what’s going on in your head while that lecture is being given. It’s your responsibility to learn the material. You’re paying for this privilege to learn.
16:28 But in the real world, on television, in books, there’s a different kind of contract with the consumer of that product. And to be successful, that contract has to fully embrace who and what the consumer of of that product is, the reader, the viewer, the listener.
16:45 Brian Rose: Did you change your style after watching Cosmos?
16:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I didn’t really have a style. I was just entering graduate school.
16:53 My first year of graduate school was 1980. So no, I’d given some talks and things. But looking at his way, I said, yeah, if I need that, that’s what I’m going to reach for.
17:04 Brian Rose: Oh, yeah. And I was on that same note, how do you transcend science?
17:08 I mean, I’m guessing you didn’t create the person that you are. You didn’t say I want to be this guy at this point in my life.
17:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, no, it’s just, well, well, so.
17:18 Brian Rose: I mean, you’re a kid from the Bronx.
17:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, the Bronx.
17:21 So, so I am not, I just am, okay? If I had my way, I would just stay home, okay? I would just stay home. But what happened is the universe, but I happen to live in New York City and the universe flinches and the press, the media, They call me up, and they send the action camera truck, or they taxi in, and I comment on the explosion in the sun, the asteroid that was just discovered, the new planet that was found, the next mission to Pluto, whatever, and then I go home.
18:03 I would say 15%, no more, of all the occasions I’m on the telly, it’s because, no, 15% is because I wrote a book and so the marketing people got me on a show, right? So you expect that, that’s how that whole system works. All the other times I’m on television, it’s because I was called by the gatekeepers of the news, who judged that something that happened in the universe was interesting enough to talk about. And so when being called to do that, I say to myself, I’d like to do as good a job as I can.
18:41 They ask me a question and I look at their eyes, their eyebrows, are they responding? Who is their audience? And so I think about it. I say, well, what responses would resonate with this interviewer or that audience at this time of day? And what references, what analogies would best serve this topic.
19:04 And that’s what comes out in the interview. And then I did that and I found out they kept coming back. So this visibility rises not because I had any such objectives at all, but because I’m happy to report that there’s an appetite for the cosmos out there. And the gatekeepers of news wouldn’t put it on the news unless they judged that their audience was going to enjoy the news story. And I remember in the early days that I get called in, it would be in our morning news programs, there are usually multiple hours.
19:36 And if you’re in the second hour versus the third hour, the news gets softer and softer in the celebrity interviews, in the recipes, in the cooking demonstrations, in the third hour. So in the early days, the cosmic interviews I found in the third hour. So they were viewing it as sort of public interest but not news. And then it sort of moved into the second hour. Now it’s in the first hour.
19:59 Every time I appear in the morning news, it’s in the first half hour. They’re judging what NASA does, what happens in the universe, all of these phenomena as news that is deserving of the first hour’s priorities.
20:12 Brian Rose: Is that because people care more now?
20:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I can only judge that people care more about it. Or is it because of you?
20:19 I don’t know. be a little of both that I’m enabling them to foster the audience they know is going to then watch it for that reason, perhaps. But my simple point is I’m serving a public appetite. That’s what I’m doing. And I’m happy to do it.
20:39 It’s a privilege. And it’s an awesome responsibility to do it, to get it right. As a servant, that’s a responsibility. But if I had them away I would just stay home. And so-
20:56 Brian Rose: I find that hard to believe.
20:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Now what I do do that’s active is I write books, so I’ve written ten books, three were co-authored of that. And I like, but I’m home write, when I write a book I’m at home writing. I’m not on TV writing, I’m at home. So I feed a Twitter account, and I don’t know if you’re going to get to that, but I have tweet-worthy thoughts all the time.
21:26 Brian Rose: You’re known for a guy that can put your thoughts into 140 characters.
21:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well no, it’s not that I can put them into 140 characters, it’s that before Twitter I had 140 character thoughts all the time, except I just shared them with myself, okay? I would just observe the world and I’d have a thought.
21:49 Brian Rose: You said there was something, nothing as brilliant as a haiku you’ve said.
21:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well, yeah, so a tweet is essential. If it’s written in a way that’s informative but can still fit, it’s kind of like a haiku.
22:05 It’s like all the fat is trimmed and it’s the essence of an idea laid to a sequence of words. So there’s some, I don’t intentionally compose haikus, but when I read haikus, I think of some tweets that I had composed, I mean there’s some correspondence there. So I’m just saying I have those thoughts all the time. Random thoughts. That’s why people say, oh can you tell me about dark matter, and they tweet back.
22:33 Dark matter, dark energy, the moon, I say no this is not a Q&A service. You’re just eavesdropping on my random brain thoughts every day. That’s why they’re everywhere. There’s no rhyme or reason to them.
22:50 Brian Rose: To your Twitter feed.
22:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, there’s sports, there’s culture, because that’s what I’m thinking at the moment. So it’s the perfect social media feed. And I rarely tweet where I am, because that’s not, I don’t…
23:04 Brian Rose: I noticed you hadn’t mentioned London in your feed, so you know, you get stalkers, so…
23:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson: No, no, no, I just don’t, I don’t presume that someone is interested, whether or not they are, in what I’m doing from minute to minute in a day.
23:19 If that’s what I reported, I’m not being an educator, I’m being, that’s cultism, right?
23:25 Brian Rose: So you make sure you use it for a certain purpose.
23:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, I’m an educator and a scientist, so let my tweets be that. So there was one, I did tweet my location, may I share this, you have the time for this. I was in a Charlotte, North Carolina airport and if you go from like a real plane to one of the puddle jumping planes in that airport, I swear it’s one or two miles in the airport.
23:52 I swear whether or not it is that, it feels that way. So there I am walking and then you get to the motor walkway so you do that but then they’re still walking and you’re still walking and you’re still walking. I had to tweet something about it. I said, I can’t wait until we harness wormholes so that any two gates in an airport can just be adjacent to one another. And I thought I was being clever, you know, looking at my tweet.
24:21 And someone tweeted back, if we harness the power of wormholes we wouldn’t need airports. It was like, okay, you got me there. So that was a case where I’m making an observation about an event in my life and it triggered some clever replies, cleverer than even my tweet itself.
24:42 Brian Rose: Does a lot of your fan base come from Twitter?
24:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I don’t know.
24:47 I don’t know. I wake up every morning astonished that I, forget the I, I wake up every morning astonished that an astrophysicist can have 1.7 million Twitter followers. That’s, what, no, did I remind you that I’m an astrophysicist? Did you forget this? Did you, I’m surprised, I’m astonished, I’m surprised and astonished.
25:19 I’m delighted that the, like I said, that the appetite is out there, but I’m just, like I said, sharing my thoughts. And that number is growing. It’s been growing steadily. And I think it bodes well for the future of science literacy that people have that kind of curiosity. Like I said, it’s not a mission statement to grow the number. It’s not a mission statement to be visible. It’s not for me. In fact, after Cosmos Air, I just want to go to Bahamas.
25:54 Brian Rose: I think it’s really hard to fake a genuine persona, someone who’s genuinely inspired and interested in what they do these days when it comes to podcasting, when it comes to social media, when it comes to you being in the media so much, and that if people don’t feel your genuine interest and passion for it, then you can’t sell them something 30 minutes away.
26:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well, exactly. No, you make an important point. You’re right. I’m not selling anything, not even the universe, figuratively or literally.
26:24 You are eavesdropping on my enthusiasm for my own work. That’s really what’s happening here. And I’m happy to bring you along. But the minute I am not effective, or the minute people start wailing or complaining, I’m just going to, I’ll just go home. I don’t, I don’t, like I said.
26:42 Brian Rose: Well, I think it was Carl Sagan that once said there were two reasons that scientists should explain science. One was to promote funding of science, which is, I guess, their reproductive organs. And the second one it was just the pure excitement of communicating one’s own excitement about science.
26:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah I would say that when you communicate your excitement about science the public gets excited about the science and then they vote in ways that stimulate funding to support the science.
27:08 So I would say one leads to the other.
27:11 Brian Rose: You’re a jazz fan.
27:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I like jazz but I don’t claim deep expertise. I enjoy listening to jazz. And in the genre I would specify that my favorite is the blues.
27:24 Brian Rose: Right. And Buddy Holly?
27:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well yeah, I mean some, not all, not the full repertoire, but I hand pick. So you know I like it, but I wouldn’t go to like a jazz convention and compare who’s got the vinyl first pressing and whomever. But I have my playlist carry me through.
27:45 Brian Rose: Well Miles Davis I think once said, you can’t do what you just did. I guess it was a way of him saying that jazz was about improvisation. And okay I’m going to take that parallel to maybe the cosmos. You’re rebooting something from a long time ago. So I was wondering why do it for you, why do it now of all things?
28:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, great reference to Miles Davis there. What that implies is when you create, if it’s on the spot and it’s live, it’s something that’s never been created before. if the notes are the same on the page. Right. Or will be created again.
28:20 Yeah, exactly. Because you are, the moment defines the creative expression. And I feel that way when I give talks, just to back door my way to answer your question. When I give a talk, there are people, hosts, public talk, there are hosts of that event who will say, oh could you send your talk in advance? No, the talk is the talk that I give at that time, at that moment, to that audience.
28:47 There is no talk in advance. If I could send a talk in advance, I would do that and I would stay home. Again, let me get back home referencing here. I don’t need to, if that’s alright, but the talk is my interaction with your live audience. That’s the talk.
29:08 And so I feel the same way that Miles Davis felt when he spoke those words. So Cosmos is the continuation, not a reboot. That showed up in an early press release but it’s not a reboot, it’s a continuation of that journey. And this one is Cosmos has Space Time Odyssey and I’m hosting it. When I had the opportunity to do so, again I was just at home.
29:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson: And I thought to myself, all right, I met Carl Sagan when I was 17. He invited me to his office at Cornell University.
29:44 Brian Rose: So you were already going to Cornell to tour it and then they knew you liked Carl and they put you two together?
29:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson: No, it was deeper than that. I was accepted at Cornell, still a senior in high school, and unknown to me, the admissions office forwarded my application, which was dripping with the universe because I knew what I wanted to study.
30:05 That application to Carl Sagan. He then, on his own initiative, sent me a letter, Neil Tyson from Carl Sagan, he was already famous, he hadn’t done Cosmos yet, but he was already famous. And I said, why doesn’t he write me a letter? I opened it up and he said, I understand you’re considering Cornell. If you’d like to come by and visit I’d be happy to show show you around to help you decide whether this is where you want to go. Who am I? So I went up there, he met me on a Saturday outside the lab and we went up and we toured the facility, talked about the universe, talked about the Viking mission that was being imagined at the time. And this is the Viking craft that did a tour of the planets and now made the news a few months ago for exiting the solar system.
30:58 Brian Rose: Is it the farthest piece of manmade material?
31:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Farthest piece of human touch thing ever. So that touched me and one of my favorite, I mean his office saying he reaches back to anyone, look, reaches back, pulls out one of the books that he wrote and he signs it to me. From the library, from his desk. I just thought that was so, that was so, he didn’t even have to look.
31:23 Book back there I wrote. So I said if I’m ever as influential or as well known as he is, it benchmarked me for how I would interact with students for the future. I said if I am ever, remotely, what he is, that’s how I’m going to treat students.
31:39 Brian Rose: Do you think you wouldn’t have done that series, this series now, if you hadn’t met him?
31:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think if I hadn’t done the series, there’d be less of a case for me to be host. There There are other people, there are scientists in the public eye right now, I’m happy to report and I met, my last time I was in London I met Brian Cox, who’s at all the rage here in the UK.
32:04 Brian Rose: One point two million followers, so it’s close, you’re ahead of him.
32:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Twitter peeing contest, right, who’s the… It’s a dangerous game. I think it’s simply that the United States has a bigger population than the U.K., perhaps. That’s always the case.
32:26 I mean, why did the Beatles come to America? It’s a bigger, it’s a bigger, it’s a bigger marketplace. And in fact, this is the anniversary year that Beatles landing at JFK. Fifty years ago. In fact, it wasn’t called JFK yet.
32:41 Brian Rose: Did they call the airport that yet?
32:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Probably not. Yeah.
32:44 Brian Rose: Because he died in 63, right? Yes, I had a while.
32:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson: But anyhow, so there are other people who might have hosted, perhaps, Brian Cox. I mean, he’s very likable as host. We call them presenters here. Very likable as a presenter of science content. And can I express my bias?
33:05 I think he’s most likable when he’s talking about the universe. He’s a physicist, right? Because the universe just has likable things in it, so he combined that with his personality. So his popularity is well deserved and fully understandable. But there are others in the United States as well who might have hosted it, perhaps.
33:24 But having met him at age 17, having become an astrophysicist, having had a rising profile with the public, having thought much about what he did, Carl, did to communicate, at the point that I offered myself, I realized that if I did not do Cosmos, it would be irresponsible of me to decline it. Because I knew I could do it and do it in a way that I felt the passion for that role. And Andrea, who is one of the original three creative principals in the original Cosmos, Carl Sagan’s longtime collaborator and now widow.
34:10 She’s the writer of record for this, she’s the principal writer and executive producer of this cosmos. So she feels the universe. I can tell you about what’s out there, but she’ll connect that with your heart, with your soul. And that’s cosmos. That kind of makes cosmos.
34:29 Brian Rose: What can we expect from this series?
34:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson: It’s 13 episodes. It was like the hard work. Oh my god. Don’t eat. Let’s not even go there
34:41 A lot there’s only two of us at this you got more cameras here than we shot cosmos with But we’ll get a miss. Is this a move I’m gonna do it. No, we got we got the wrong angle
34:51 Brian Rose: Where did you shoot it? Was it green screens? Was it in
34:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson: there’s a lot of green screen because you can’t actually visit the Sun, right?
34:59 So at some point you got to put the stuff on green screen and Carl had a lot of tech for him back in the back in The day that was cutting back in the day was cutting edge and they shot on film and on videotape yeah, but we didn’t they didn’t have of course the the The VFX the visual effects that now derived from what people do on a computer as distinct from the the special effects which are models and that you would film in a particular way to make them look real and which might even include green screen projection of some place you might be standing grafted with some prop that’s in the foreground. So there are ways to do it. And the universe has a lot of visible places that you can’t actually visit.
35:45 Brian Rose: I mean, that would be stunning to visit that you can’t go. A black hole, a galaxy that is sent to the edge of the universe.
35:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson: And the cosmos is not only just the universe, even though the word implies that. The cosmos is anything where it’s a frontier of human knowledge of how the world works. So we descend into a dewdrop.
36:06 We spend nine or 10 minutes just hanging out in a dewdrop, talking about the cosmos within the drop. And so there’s a seamless movement crossing the boundaries of biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astrophysics, all the frontier sciences that typically you think of as distinct entities, the universe doesn’t care. It’s all science to the universe. And so this exploration of the cosmos as shared with you through this vessel we call cosmos. It’s an exposure not only to what we know about the universe but why it matters. And I was happy and privileged to be a part of that project.
36:56 Brian Rose: Were you happy with it?
36:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Oh yes, where we filmed. There’s a lot on green screen as you would suspect, but there’s a lot of on location work as well because there are stories we tell of people who mattered in the history of science, and you might not have heard about them. And so Michael Faraday, for example, he’s well known to physicists, but he’s much less known to the public. Without him, I mean, he basically birthed modern understanding of electromagnetism, and his inventions are how today we still produce electricity, and he was at work in the middle 19th century, and he was a Brit.
37:36 So that’s when I was in London, and we filmed in a place where he hung out, where his papers are kept as the royal institution. So there’s some historical props we’re giving to people, not physical props, but giving proper recognition to people who have come before us, who have struggled, who discovered some truth, that either personal struggles, Faraday had very modest beginnings, personal struggles or struggles upon arriving at a truth, bringing it to the world around them only to confront a level of resistive dogma that basically made them martyrs in the history of science because their ideas were suppressed, in some cases they lost their lives. We profile a Giordano Bruno, who you don’t hear of because right after him came Galileo.
38:30 Like minutes, practically minutes after him, Galileo’s on the scene and we learn about his conflicts with the church, not Bruno’s conflicts with the church. Bruno looked up at night and said, I see all these stars, that’s kind of cool, I wonder if those stars are like our sun, just like really far away. If that’s the case, maybe they have planets like our sun has, because Copernicus said, not in the center, the sun is. And if we’re not in the center and we’re one of multiple planets, that means there could be other places for life. That means there could be life out there in the universe. Well, that was a heretical idea. It would mean Earth was not the object of creation. It would mean God was looking elsewhere as well to put life. This was just completely heretical to the Catholic Church at the time. He refused to recant and the Inquisition handled that case and handed him over to the Roman authorities and had him burned at the stake.
39:30 Some centuries later, there would finally be a statue honoring him in I think the Campo di Fiore in Rome and there’s a rather sad statue. He’s there hooded monk with a monk garb and a tribute to his first idea that may be The universe is bigger than we thought. We tell this story. So mixed in with all the places we go that I take you as your personal guide, there are stories we tell that I narrate. And in those stories, the characters that are represented, it’s kind of a graphic novel style animation of these historical retellings.
40:17 And so we actually got marquee voice talent to be these characters.
40:22 Brian Rose: You have some voice talent yourself. Me? Yes.
40:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Oh I don’t hear my voice.
40:28 Brian Rose: Okay. Yeah I don’t. You know you have the answering machine, you have to do that test. I don’t know who that is, that’s not me.
40:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think your voice sounds much more resonant in your own cranial cavity than detached from it.
40:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I don’t think about it, but thank you for that. But we, so we have, so Richard Gere is one of the voices and Sir Patrick Stewart is one of them. And even Seth MacFarlane is one of the voices.
41:00 Brian Rose: And it’s not Stewie, no.
41:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson: He does a great job.
41:04 I mean, everyone cared about this project. They knew it was something bigger than themselves. that we have an important mission here. And that’s to raise the science literacy of the world, just a couple of notches, above where it is. Because there’s so much out there.
41:20 There’s so many forces that want to deny a scientific truth just because it conflicts with their ideology. They determine that they don’t like science and therefore it doesn’t matter to them. There are all these categories of how people think about science that are not always healthy for the future of a state, for the future of our species, the future of the earth.
41:48 Brian Rose: Do you still think science is dumbed down in the U.S. or in the world?
41:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think that is changing.
41:55 I think dumbing down science tends to get a bad name, but it’s better to dumb down science than not get any science at all. I mean, I don’t have an issue with that if that’s what someone feels they need to do. But in my life, I don’t think I’ve ever dumbed down science. And dumbing down is, okay, let me explain here that I’ve never been accused of dumbing down. Because in what I say, I’m telling you things that you know are real, not because I have an authority to declare it, it’s real because I’d say, well here’s why, and that happened and that happened, and now you understand.
42:29 And when you do that, there’s no dumbing down, there’s an understanding that is emerging from the conversation on such a level that you then take ownership of that knowledge and that insight and that wisdom and then I walk away and you no longer have to reference me. It’s not true because I said so. It’s true because you’ve learned how we came to know why it’s true. There’s no dumbing down in that. And I would say my highest compliment that I would get is someone says, I’ll give this an example. I’m amalgamating several kinds of responses, but it’s something like meet someone in the street and they’ll recognize me, they’ll say, and it could be like a construction worker or a sanitation person or a meter maid, they come up to me and say, thank you for the first time in my life I felt smart. And someone who’s fully educated never really would say that because they take exams, they’re professors that they have.
43:38 So they already have been in the world of what it is to be thought of as smart. I’m talking about people who hard work in people in the street and so they actually have access and presumably through the occasions I’ve been on television, been interviewed and those surely have access now that Cosmos airs. And to say that you feel smart, that doesn’t happen if you just got lectured to. Just doesn’t. If you get lectured to, it’s a dump of information.
44:10 You might know a couple of extra things, but you don’t feel like your thinking has changed. And the feeling that you’re smarter comes about when you see things differently in a new way. In an enlightened way.
44:22 Brian Rose: Yeah, a common mantra that I hear people say, I’m not good at math, I’m not good at science. kind of close their mind off to it.
44:30 But when they can see something presented that way, where they actually can see the education, maybe the inspiration from you, then all of a sudden it changes your perception of yourself.
44:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, everything. I mean, you stand up a little taller. And you might look up the next time you walk out of a building on the possibility that the sky is clear and the universe is talking to you.
44:49 Brian Rose: So 13 episodes?
44:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Not literally, but figuratively.
44:52 Brian Rose: Figuratively. I mean, it’s a lot of pressure. I mean, not only you have all these stars trying to make something better for science and to communicate it better. You also have the legacy of Carl and the original Cosmos. After 13 weeks, are you happy with everything that happened?
45:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, I mean I’m new to this. Yes, I’ve been on TV and I hosted a small spin-off of the PBS in America called Nova Science Now, but this was my first large sort of Hollywood scale project where they close off streets. And I’m being chased by the makeup person and the wardrobe person and just the whole, and I have my trailer, you know, that was, it was, I don’t want to say it was fun, it was novel. The whole thing was novel. Everything.
45:41 We were working 12 hours tomorrow and then we’re off another 12 hours and then we’re going to go to this other location and here’s your clothing and here’s your makeup and get a rest here and here’s the food, and we want to get you the food, and wherever I am does someone there ready like to take the glass from my hand or to hand me something. So just the scale of operation that goes on for any movie, for me to experience that was novel from beginning to end. And it’s not something I don’t know that I want to do that more than once.
46:12 It was a huge hit to my calendar, the stability of my life was wholly disrupted by this. And so I don’t see it as something – so that being said, the novelty of it kept me going. It was like, wow, this is great. Wow, that’s interesting. Was that how they do the green screen?
46:34 Was that what a gaffer is? I don’t know what a gaffer is. Now I know what a gaffer is, right? That’s the lighting people. And so when the show airs, you’ll see me in front of camera.
46:45 But when I see me in front of camera, that’s not what I’ll think. I’ll think I saw the hundred people in front of me collaborating to make this project work.
46:54 Brian Rose: Okay. Let me take you back to 17, where you first met Carl. I was actually 17, and I toured Cornell, because it was one of the schools.
47:01 You were one 17. Yeah. I remember flying up, I went to Boston first, and then I went up to Ithaca, and I went there, and I looked around. And like you, I chose not to attend Cornell. Why did you go to Harvard and not go to Cornell and not go to MIT like I did?
47:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, so I was a geek kid. I also was athletic, so I don’t think I fulfilled the stereotype of the geek.
47:27 Brian Rose: You’re a wrestler.
47:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, I used to wrestle.
47:31 Brian Rose: Which is very different.
47:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, so there was no football player giving me a wedgie against the locker.
47:36 Brian Rose: So you had a presence.
47:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Because I wrestle, wrestlers have a presence of, I can double leg take you.
47:41 Brian Rose: Oh yeah, of course. Even though you’re not going to.
47:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, yeah, there’s, you’re not, you just know, no one can exploit your.
47:48 Brian Rose: And people feel that presence. Yeah, no one is gonna take advantage of you at all. It’s just not gonna happen, right? There’s no one who’s gonna grab you in a way that you haven’t been grabbed before on a wrestling match.
48:03 Brian Rose: So this is a certain confidence that you might have. So. It’s probably helping you to this day.
48:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson: But yeah, I think so, I think so. So what I mean by being a geek is I was a geek sympathizer, if you think of it that way, and I was card carrying at the time.
48:23 I’m old enough to have been formally trained in the use of a slide rule. And at the time in my high school I carried a slide rule. And I went to a geeky high school, the Bronx High School of Science. And so this is before you carried around your cell phones, your smartphones, and your cell phones. And before you carried around the Sony Walkman, you would carry around a calculator.
48:45 And before the calculator, there was the slide rule, and the bigger your slide rule, the more precise the calculation was you could make. And so in the Bronx High School of Science, we had a full range of personality profiles that you’d find in any high school. It was just all shifted to the geek side of the spectrum. So we had bullies, but they were geek bullies. So I was a geek bully, you know, they’ll calculate how they’re-
49:09 Brian Rose: Like as you can tell on the periodic table.
49:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah exactly, exactly. So I was a geek sympathizer and I was a, I thought of myself, because I could wrestle as sort of a defender of geeks, and so, but now I forgot the question you were asking. So at that time I really thought about the world and my life and my ambitions and it’s funny just as we speak there’s a profile on me that is appearing in the New Yorker magazine like this minute, it just hit the stands. And I told the interviewer that there is no teacher in any time in my life, from kindergarten through 12th grade and beyond, whoever would have said he’ll go far pointing to me. None of them ever thought that, none of them ever said it. I did not have that kind of relationship with my teachers. I mean my grades didn’t stand out in some way that would make them notice. But I knew since age 9 I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I knew. And I was doing things leading into that direction, from what I read, from a telescope.
50:33 But so my saying that teachers never said that I would go far, there’s a sentence in that profile that says, Neil Tyson was a mediocre student. If I tell you that there’s a mediocre student there, what I was is not the image that would come into your head. You could have a different image of that student, a student who doesn’t want to learn, who could care less. No, I was learning daily. Oh, whether or not it was happening in the classroom.
51:02 So, it’s interesting how people, there’s the urge to say, well, Einstein failed math. They wanna say something, there’s a, no, I was a committed student. Whether or not my grades revealed it to a teacher who uses grades to judge whether you’re gonna be something when you grow up is another matter.
51:19 Brian Rose: Is that a lesson that people should learn?
51:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think so, don’t get me started.
51:23 That’s another thing, call me back. I could see it started. Just hold me back. So in high school, I had subscribed to many magazines, including Scientific American. And my favorite part of that magazine was a section called About the Authors.
51:37 And reliably, it would record for the authors of these articles on the frontier of science, where they went or were an undergraduate, where they got their master’s, where they got the PhD, and on whose faculty they serve at the moment. I made a list of the schools I was accepted to and then put a check in the box of which of these schools, these authors of all the physics and astronomy articles that appeared in the magazine, I made a checklist of where all of them had gotten their bachelor’s, master’s, PhD’s, and where they’re in fact, and Harvard’s list blew away the rest of the school. And I said to myself, if being asked to write for Scientific American is an indicator of the potency of the education at such a location, or just how productive the research facilities are, then there’s no other option here but to go to Harvard.
52:39 And it had nothing to do with Harvard or the legacy of how I didn’t care. If that had been too glue state, the university, if it had a list that long, that’s where I would have been in Harvard, would have been in my rear view mirror. So I didn’t want to go to Cornell only because one man invited me with the possible opportunity of working with him. Because I knew enough to know that you can end up switching schools. Faculty are not at an institution forever, many are.
53:07 But occasionally you might switch institutions. Carl Sagan just before he was at Cornell was at Harvard. So not everybody’s always in the same place at all times. For me to commit four years of my life irreversibly because of one individual was not sufficient reason for me to attend Cornell.
53:22 Brian Rose: Understood.
53:23 We always ask everyone the same question on London Real, and I’m going to give it to you. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Neil deGrasse Tyson and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him?
53:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, I’m going to give you a cop-out answer. OK. I’m going to say I wouldn’t give any advice at all, because the act of being 20 is itself part of what it is to become who you are.
54:00 If you start siphoning information from the future, the act of having learned it first hand by experiencing it, is what made me the person who would put me in a position to call the 20 year old and say, here’s the advice. So I don’t mean to get tautological on you, but the act of learning by life experience has sufficient value that to just have someone tell you what you should or shouldn’t do not what makes you who and what you are. Who and what you are is what you do and what you learn from what you did. Yeah, you can tell somebody something, but if they don’t think it’s true, it’ll fall on deaf ears. Let them find out. And the act of finding out is the lesson, not the lesson itself. So there is nothing I can tell myself at any time in life because I am learning what it is to be alive. I’m learning what it is to become I’m a scientist.
55:08 I’m learning what it is when people treat me one way or another because they presume I should be an athlete rather than a scientist. That’s life experience that feeds what I am today. Even if I’m steeped in ignorance at some point in my life and then that gets figured out because I visit some place or I read a book, that’s life experience. You can’t just tell someone that. You know what it reminds me of?
55:37 The immigrant who comes to America, and this is an often retold kind of story, they come to America with not a penny to their name and they work hard and they start a business and they finally get actually wealthy, not an uncommon story in America. And they struggled and they knew the meaning of a dollar and so then they have a family. And they say to themselves, I will never have my kids experience the poverty that I have, or the hunger, or not knowing where the next meal, that will not happen with my kids.
56:15 So the kids have everything provided for them. And then they become deadbeats. And then they say, then the parent says, where did I go wrong? I gave you everything I didn’t have. It’s the fact that you started with nothing, gave you the work ethic to become who you are.
56:35 So to turn around and say, now I’m going to change all that for my kids, of course, no, you don’t want your kids to go hungry so they become somebody like you. But just don’t presume that your latter day knowledge, your latter day wealth, if introduced into a next generation as advice or as a handout, will create the person that you are. In fact, it can circumvent it. It can derail that pathway.
57:01 Brian Rose: Warren Buffett’s not giving any of his money to his kids, I think, for that particular purpose.
57:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson: He’s given them enough to learn. Yeah, just now get the rest of it, yeah, yeah.
57:12 Brian Rose: Neil, thanks so much for your time. Love your podcast, by the way. StarTalk.
57:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Oh, StarTalk Radio, thank you, yeah.
57:18 Brian Rose: You’ve got the GZA on there, I would love an intro. You’ve got all sorts of great people, it’s fun.
57:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we try to pull people hewn from pop culture, and then I have a conversation them about science. So the goal is they’ll bring their fan base to hear their, you know, it’s their person, right? They’ll bring their fan base to a show where science is the topic.
57:38 People who might not have otherwise had the occasion to listen to a conversation about the universe or anything else.
57:45 Brian Rose: Perfect. And on Twitter, how do they follow you?
57:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Oh, at Neil Tyson. Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah. So I, just a warning, I tweet, like I said, people want to ask me encyclopedic questions. I want to say, well, there’s wiki, just go to wiki, but really I’m not there to, for that medium, I’m not a servant of your questions, you are a passive eavesdropper on my brain droppings.
58:09 But I write books and things that, in these various media, you can get questions, answers. In fact, we have a version of StarTalk, which is just what we call cosmic queries. We solicit questions from the fan base of the show. And I sit there with a comedian, and we have a fun time. The comedian reads the question, and I never heard the question before, and we answer it.
58:29 So I have ways that I do address the cosmic curiosity that lies within us all.
58:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, I like that part of your show. Wishing you all the best with Cosmos. Can’t wait to watch it. And yeah, it’s just a fantastic feeling.
58:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, it’s opening in 171 countries in 45 languages. That’s crazy. As well as the United States in English. Yeah. Fantastic.
58:47 Brian Rose: Well, as we say in London Real, it’s about the journey. Wish you all on yours, and all the best.
58:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, thank you. Okay, which camera do I say? Thank you, too.
58:54 All of them. Okay. All right. Cool, well done. Thank you so much.
58:59 Thank you.
