This is Exactly How You Should NOT Raise Your Kids! | Neil deGrasse Tyson on Impact Theory

I was in Central Park. We were just finishing one [music] of the Shakespeare in the Park performances and it had rained a little earlier so there were puddles in some of the walkways. I saw a woman walking with her kid. The kid has galoshes on and a raincoat on and they're coming down the walkway. And there's this big juicy muddy puddle right there. And I said, "Please let the kid jump in the puddle. You know the [music] kid wants to jump in the puddle. The kid is like three or four." You know the kid and what is what [music] is the mother do? She pulls the kid around to prevent that from happening. That's an experiment in cratering. That's what had Craters happen that way. You splash the water, there's mud, it's fun, you get to see the cause and effect of a force, downward force operating on a on a fluid. Gone. That was a bit of curiosity [music] in that moment that was extinguished. Hey everyone, welcome to Impact Theory. Today's guest is arguably one of the most important scientific voices of our time. A Harvard and Columbia educated doctor of astrophysics with an impressive string of best-selling books under his belt. He's been instrumental in creating some of the most influential works of popular science the world has ever known. From his funny and informative show StarTalk which in its very first year on TV was nominated for an Emmy for best informational programming to being the executive editor and on-camera host of the groundbreaking television series Cosmos which garnered four Emmys, a Peabody Award, two Critics' Choice Awards, was translated into 45 languages, ran in 181 countries, and has been viewed by over 750 million people, helping to inspire entire generations of budding scientists the world over. His rare ability to spark curiosity and guide public scientific discourse has not only made him one of the most sought-after public intellectuals, but it's seen him amass a staggering list of accolades, including more than 20 honorary doctorates. NASA bestowed upon him their distinguished public service medal. The International Astronomical Union recognized his contributions by naming an asteroid after him. He's had multiple presidential appointments, was made a research associate of the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, and was named as the fifth head of the world-renowned Hayden Planetarium in New York City, as well as their first-ever occupant of the Frederick P. Rose directorship. So, please, help me in welcoming the man People magazine named the sexiest astrophysicist alive, the author of Letters from an Astrophysicist, the legendary Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. How you doing, man? All right, thank you. Man, my pleasure. Thank you for being on the show. What an introduction you gave me there. But, I need to clarify something, first of all. Um the the People magazine distinction uh sexiest astrophysicist, that was for 50 lbs ago. Okay, [laughter] just make that clear. Uh second, I I don't think that's one of the more competitive categories that they have in there. I I will say that you there's just now more sexy on the astrophysicist, and that whether it's a big category or not, you're a very distinguished uh I don't know who I beat out, you know, at the time. You you to Hawking, you know, I don't know. I don't know what that victory. It was I it um But that year, I think that was the only year, this is back in 2000. I think it was the only year they actually had that category. They have these fun categories that they throw in just for for for entertainment purposes. But they're the recurring categories like sexiest action hero, right? Sexiest athletes, sexiest actors. So, those are those are really competitive categories. And in my year, the cover who is transcends all categories was Brad Pitt, and he was the sexiest man alive. Beyond category. So, there you go. See? the epitome of sex symbols back in the day, for sure. So, you were in good company. That's good. [laughter] I want to start So, the book is great, by the way, and I really enjoyed it. It's a wonderful pick and mix, as they call it in the UK, of different topics where you're diving in, sometimes very quickly, and then other times are much more prolonged. Yeah, depending on the on the subject and what or depending on how much I knew about [laughter] about the subject brought to me that I could then comment on. Equally fair. One of the ones that really hit me was you talking about your dad. You called it a eulogy of sorts. And you went through some of the things that he did, which I actually I didn't know anything about your dad before reading that. What was it about your dad that impacted you so much that you still carry today? So, it's not so much oh, he's my dad, I love my dad. That's all true, but at the end of the day, what matters is for who and what you become in life, for me, at least, was what level of wisdom did he glean in his life and then successfully communicate to me, either by example or by just explicit statement. And that combination of those two means of delivery had some important impacts impact. Uh what I did there? impact on my life. Uh just for example, and I gave these examples in that in that that eulogy was a letter to him during the memorial service. He died a couple of years ago at age 89, so it's not it's not a tragic death. But you still miss someone even though you know they're ready to check out. And uh I'll just give one example, if I may. In high school, he was in gym class and they were lining up and they were about to enter the next athletic year and it was track and field. And the gym instructor pointed to my father online and said, "Cyril Tyson, everyone look at him. He does not have the body type that would excel in track." And they used him as an example. And he says, "What? No one is going to tell me what I can't do in my life." And he used that as a reason to start running. And he started track in that moment. I mean, not that exact moment, but [laughter] he decided that his one of his next tasks in life would be to take up running and excel at it. Within a few years of that, he became world-class. At one time, had the fifth fastest time in the world in the middle distance, they don't run this anymore, 600-yard run. And uh he, in 1948, the Olympics was not yet ready to come back to us because we're still reeling roiling from the Second World War. Instead, they were still in Olympics, it was called the GI Olympics and it was held in Hitler's stadium. Wow. So he competed in Hitler's stadium uh in the late 1940s and just one of the great memories of his life. But reason I'm saying all of that is there's a friend of his named Johnny Johnson who they were competing against the New York Athletic Club. In the day, it mattered that you had amateur status. No one's thinking of that anymore, but back then, you couldn't compete in the Olympics if you were professional at all. And there's a whole So, professional was deemed sort of you were tainted in some way. And it's hard to think that that used to be how people thought, but that's what how it was. Uh in the day, once you graduated college, you needed some sanctioning body to compete with. So, there were athletic clubs. The New York Athletic Club at the time accepted only white Protestants. So, there was another club called the Pioneer Club, which took everybody who was not accepted to the New York Athletic Club, which was basically blacks and Jews. It's really what that came down to. And some Catholics, but basically blacks and Jews. So, he competed alongside Jewish athletes. So, there they are competing against the New York Athletic Club, and his best friend, Johnny Johnson, okay? Was coming around the back stretch. Might have been the quarter mile. Coming on the final straightaway. And a runner from New York Athletic Club is a few paces behind him. And Johnny Johnson overhears that runner's coach say, "Catch that nigger." And he overheard this. And so, what did he say to himself? He said, "This is one he ain't going to catch." [laughter] And he And that extended his his his lead to the finish line. And he tells this story not with any bitter tone, as you might think. Any story like that today would certainly be um told with with great remorse and consternation. So, he never had that kind of tone when he shared those stories with us. It was here's an occasion to parlay what today might be called a microaggression into a reason to excel even more than you had expected of your own abilities and talents. And so I have taken that lesson with me. He was just telling a story. He didn't say, "Let me give my kids a lesson today." No, these are just things that happened in his life. And uh in my sort of letter to him in death, I recount for the audience several of these examples and that among them. Yeah, that story is really powerful to me and in the book you you frame much of your own success is you know, I especially when I was starting the the system of certainly astrophysics didn't exactly open its arms wide to me. NASA was born the same year I was born and there was not uh a welcoming of people of my color and so in some ways the the amount that I've overshot average is a result of having to push back against that friction. But again, there's no bitterness in your voice. So, how did you make that a positive thing in your life? Yeah, I think dare I even suggest that it's possible to draw a line in the sand between transgressions, be they racial, cultural, religious. I mean, we live in a very fractured world today. I don't know if it's the most fractured ever, but I mean, the First World War, Second War, that that would those were fractured times. Uh so, I I don't want to claim uniqueness in how fractured we are, but what is clear is that the internet has enabled and social media have enabled people to tribalize. You might go your whole life without ever finding another person who thinks the Earth is flat. You go online and you see them all and they have conventions and they they and they meet here, even if it's it's only virtual. So, so you have ways to say why you are different from other people. And I don't know that that's always a healthy place to be. In a pluralistic land, you want to celebrate differences rather than go out of your way to establish differences and then claim one group is better than another. It is the very motto of the United States, out of many, one. E pluribus pluribus unum. You can carry that forward to to immigration and the ethnicity, the the melting pot of ethnicity that was the goal or or at least the vision for what we thought a future America would be. And I don't feel it heading that way now. So So, but you can draw a line in the sand between people who transgress but do not hold power over you from those who transgress and do. So, the coach who said catch that he doesn't have power over Johnny Johnson unless you allow him to. This is a famous quote from Martin Luther King, you can only be ridden if your back is bent. And so, in the earlier days, not only when I was less known, but just the racial climate was different. Uh yellow taxis in New York City would not pick me up if I was going uptown in the direction where Harlem is, whether or not I was had intended to get out before then. They just wouldn't pick me up. I'd have to switch sides of the street, pretend I'm going downtown, then they pick me up and then I say, "Please go up to this." I'd have to pay an extra 50 cents for that turnaround. But, that taxi driver, whatever is their bias, was not between me and my goal in becoming an astrophysicist. So, I I apportioned my emotional reactions to where it actually mattered for my life's trajectory. A lot of people when they hit adversity, they're broken by it. And whether that's um just it's hard to get good at something or it's something like that where it's prejudice, sort of nakedly, um it stops them. And they never overcome that. And and you've said and this is so interesting and exciting to me, especially in today's world, that that worked almost as like a uh gravitational slingshot that threw you farther. So, how do people capture that energy? I see what you did there, the slingshot. Very good. Um so, the slingshot case, everyone doesn't know. So, what happens is all the planets go in the same direction around the sun, cuz we all formed in a disc that rotated, a gaseous disc, and the planets condense out of that, so they everybody's moving the same direction. From the top, it's counterclockwise at the top. Um so, if you launch a spacecraft and don't have enough fuel to go the distance that you want, what you can do is you can come in behind a planet and fall towards it. And the act of falling towards it is its gravity pulls you in, that's fine. But the act of getting pulled in, you actually gain the speed of the orbit of the planet as well. So, falling into the gravity, you now have to exit the other side, that will eat the speed that you gained by falling in because of its gravity, cuz that's symmetric. But that entire process, you gain the orbital speed of the planet coming out the other side. It's called a gravitational assist. And you can do like a multi-cushion pool shot in the solar system to get enough energy to reach Pluto or beyond. And almost all of our spacecraft that went into the distant solar system, rather than giving huge rockets, which are expensive, to get it there, you use a smaller rocket and you just what you're doing is you're stealing orbital energy from other planets, which is they don't miss it, they'll be fine. [laughter] Unless you did it like all the time, then they'll they'll you can mess them up, but Jupiter versus our spacecraft, Jupiter doesn't care. So, I just want to explain the orbital assist in case others didn't know. So, yes, these these microaggressions are converted to enthusiasm to excel. And dare I say something that I think today many people are thinking, older folks are thinking, but they're not speaking. I'm going to say it. When I grew up, I'm I'm probably older than you. It was very common to hear the phrase, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me." You recited this. This is what you were told when you came home when you said, "Oh, you know, this bully called me a name." And then sticks and stones can break my bone, but words will never hurt me. And so, this was an inoculation against hate speech, really. Against just evil people, just nasty people. You ever develop a set a system of defenses against unpleasant people out there. And I haven't heard that phrase in a long time. I don't hear it recited in the elementary schools. What I think has happened over the years is we came to learn as civilization that words can be hurtful. And words can sort of change your mood or it set you into a depression. Like And so, I don't have a problem with that. That's This is an an enlightened new place to understand the role of our emotional state and how it interacts with our world around us. That's an advance in in mental health. What I see on the flip side of that coin, however, is people are less able to deal with the very same people who are around today who were around back then, who are calling you names. The people who might be bullying you on the internet but saying things about you. We I don't know that we have how to defend against that now other than seeing a counselor for your emotional state. I can say from the era in which I grew up, I don't give a rat's ass what you say to me, okay? Um unless you are between me and some goal, then I have I'll have to navigate that some way. If there's a racist person or sexist person or a person with some kind of cultural bias, I want to know that actually. I don't want them to hide that. I want you to say everything you want to say. Then I'll say, "Okay, that's who you are. That's how you're thinking. So now, what do I need to do because you're in my way? Do I dig under you, go around you, leap over you? Or do I go this way and then come out the other side? Yeah, it's longer, it's more effort, it's more energy. Yeah. But on some level, it's sort of same different day. So as they say, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, you just hope you don't get killed, okay? [laughter] That's So I hear in all this an echo of the notion that your dad gave you, which was so powerful for me when I read it, which is it's not enough to be right, you have to be effective. Oh, yeah. Uh he worked for city government in New York City during the civil rights movement. And if I just add one thing to that, uh the press doesn't write about stories that don't happen. Uh understandably. But I just want to say that he at the time, the 1960s, mid '60s to the late '60s, arguably the most turbulent set of years on American soil in American history since the Civil War itself a century earlier with the assassinated leaders and the campus unrest and inner cities were burning, the ghettos as they were known at the time. And what is what is a riot if not the very last act of desperation because you are left without any hope at all. That is what a riot is. And so Watts burned and Washington burned and Chicago burned. Federal troops brought in. 1968 after Martin Luther King was shot. New York City silent. Just some skirmishes here and there, nothing. So no one writes a story about that. My father was active. He was a commissioner in New York City um in the Human Resources Administration. Human Resources. This is human capital being nurtured and and established in such a way that you feel some sense of meaning and importance in your life because you have a job waiting for you after you get out of school. There wasn't any lost hope there. There was still some hope. And so he was behind the scenes on that. And he just knew that in the most turbulent year of the most turbulent decades since the 1860s the most populous city with the largest ghetto in the country did not burn. And so you can be right and say, "Oh, I have this plan. Let's just do this." If you can't implement it you're just talking. You just You just You know, you you can say things that sound nice and a few people can cheer you on, but if you don't have a strategy to make it happen a path That's why I went as I did my hand gestures. There's somebody in my way and I and I want to get there. I can't just say, "Let me You got to let me through. I have a good idea." No, that's not good enough. I can't say, "You're being racist. You're being That's not You You to navigate it. I think high school that's where you learn how to deal with difficult people. There's not a single high school movie that doesn't show the angst of the cliques that have formed and what the relationships are that they have to one another. It's this microcosm of real stuff that goes on in the real world. There are beautiful people and they will get jobs you're not going to get, okay? There are people who are nasty. You're going to have to navigate them. There are people who you cannot interact with for whatever reason or another. They're going to be in the cubicle next to you in your workplace. So, I think we undervalue the total social pot that people are tossed into in their high school experience. They want to say, "Oh, I could have learned more, but I had to deal with all these people." Hey, having to deal with all these people is now in your portfolio for when you're in the workplace, you've got it. And research continually shows that the people who ascend to manager level and beyond, they know how to interact with have high social uh what do you EQ? Emotional quotient. All right. As somebody who has achieved astronomically grand heights because they have an ability to almost translate, like take things from the scientific world and make it accessible or navigate, you know, finding that path when somebody's trying to stand in your way for whatever reason. Do you have strategies specifically that you're like consciously aware of using? And if so, what are they? Yeah, when you're communicating or when you're looking for a path Oh, yeah. Well, so first of all, just to be clear, I I don't know that I totally fit the the philosophy of this show and I I've seen many of your shows, not all of them, but many and what's driving the conversations and your motivation for the guest that you have in this couch is that they they had some vision statement. And they and they have grit. Okay, they got knocked down, they stood back up, they tried another way, they got knocked down again, then they were successful either measured by wealth or influence or or just joy in their life's passions. For me, what I do for the public is prime almost 80 plus percent of it is driven by duty. Not by ambition. What gives you the sense of duty? Because I can do something. And if I can do it better than others and it's for a greater good in society, I would be irresponsible if I did not. That's how I view it. So, when I get requests to either advise in the science on a movie, artist calling, I say, "Well, my expertise is not unique in what it is you need. Here are seven other people you should get them." I'm not seeking this visibility. If someone says, "Well, we need this for this reason and we came to you for that reason." I say, "Yeah, I think I can make a unique stamp on what it is you're doing. I will agree to do that." Because if I didn't then the product would not be as good as I know I could have helped it become. And so, I'd be irresponsible if that were the case. This is how I ended up hosting Cosmos in 2014. Ann Druyan, the widow of Carl Sagan who is hugely talented and a little bit in his shadow over his years, but she co-wrote the original Cosmos in 1980. Co-wrote it and was co-writer of the Cosmos that I was the host of in 2014. She's one of the most enlightened people I've ever met. Okay. She approached me and said uh "Would you consider hosting Cosmos?" I said, "I don't There's a dozen people, maybe half dozen others who would jump at this opportunity. I don't need to do this. I really don't. I have books I want to write, that sort of thing. I don't I don't need to be a TV star. Then I thought about it and I said, well, I had met Carl Sagan when I was 17. I was applying to colleges, he was at Cornell. I had been accepted at Cornell, but didn't know what college I wanted to go to. And the admissions office saw that I wasn't totally in the moment there. They for- I didn't know this, they had forwarded my application to him for his reaction. I was already deep in the universe since I was nine. And he sent me a letter. He doesn't know me from Adam. I'm a 17-year-old kid from the Bronx. He's a professor of astronomy at Cornell University. And I get this letter and I open it says, "I understand you like the same stuff I like. Do you want to come visit the campus to help you decide if you want to go to Cornell?" It was like, "Whoa, this is Now, he hadn't done Cosmos yet, that's how old I am, but he was already famous. He'd been on the Tonight Show and, you know, and had best-selling books. So, I took him up on it. I took a bus up to Ithaca, New York. He met me outside his building on a Saturday. Invited me up to his office. Saw the labs. I'm there in front of him. He did something really cool. He reached back. Didn't even look. Grabbed a book off the shelf. It was one of his books. I thought that was the baddest That was a badass thing. Don't even have to look. That's one of my books, yep. Okay, here. And he signed it to me. Neil Tyson, future astronomer, sign, Carl. But that's not That's only the half of it. Later in the day, I'm ready to go back to New York and it begins to snow as it does often in December in Ithaca. And he says, "Here's my home number. If the bus can't get through from the snow, spend the night with my family and go back tomorrow." I'm thinking, "Who am I? Why why? I'm nobody." But I was somebody to him. And I said to myself, "If I'm ever as remotely famous as he is, I will treat students the way he has treated me. So, why did I go down that path? Oh, because I had that memory. And I said to myself, if we can fold this memory into this this next cosmos, then we have a way to justify who and what I am as the next host, because a torch got passed. It wasn't passed in 2014. It was passed in 1975. All right? To Neil Tyson, future astronomer. I still have that book. So, I thought to myself, I possibly could bring a unique contribution as host to the show. And that's what I did. So, my visibility is primarily because things that I think I can contribute uniquely, or that people request, and it would help enhance their lives. I think we have to talk about purpose a little bit, and you have such an interesting take on purpose. I get asked a lot, you know, what's the purpose of life, or what's meaning, and all that. Tell people your take on purpose. Purpose, I I consider purpose and meaning equivalent in this answer. Maybe there's a way to divide them, but let me treat them as the same for the moment. Um I that many people look for meaning in life. A- as though they will you know, I'm still searching for meaning in what my life is. Though it's going to be under a rock, or behind a tree. Oh, there's my meaning. And I'm thinking to myself, you have more power than that. You have the power to create meaning in your life, rather than passively look for it. So, for me, I create the meaning. And meaning to me is, do I know more about the world today than I did yesterday? That enhances meaning for me. And if that accumulates and and accrues daily, in a month you you know way more than you did than just that day later. So that you continue to grow. Uh have I by whatever powers I have available to me, have I lessened the suffering of others? Or the corollary to that would be have I enhanced the life of others? They're related. And I don't mean have I devoted the whole day to doing that, then I would be ignoring myself. But if there's some small gesture that I can do that can completely add value to someone's life, I'm going to do it. Because the leveraging of 10 minutes of my life into the happiness or enlightenment or the reduced suffering of someone else, I'd be irresponsible if I did not. How did you develop that as like a guiding value? Where did that come from? No one ever told me that I had to search for meaning in life to begin with. So that was never even a part of me. It was uh I got my life. This is who and what I am. This is what I did in school. These are my dreams and ambitions. How do I create meaning in my life as I go forward? My first question of me wasn't where do I find meaning? It was how do I create meaning? And that started early. Early teens. Did you help your kids with this? Is that something that you found a way to sort of educate on or pass down so that they would be asking a similar question instead of doing the sort of wander search thing? Yeah, I have an unorthodox approach to what we did with our kids. My wife has a [laughter] It was all legal. My wife has a a PhD in mathematical physics. So people always ask us are your kids up? You know, [laughter] something. You know, they always ask cuz cuz they to them scientists are like always doing experiments. But um we discussed this, my wife and I, and I wanted to make sure that in however they were raised that they retained the curiosity of childhood into adulthood. Man, how do you do that? Well, it's that implies that you have to do a lot of work to make it happen when in fact you'd be surprised how much work you put in to squash it. Okay? Let's say there's a little toddler walking here, okay? Crawling on the ground and comes up and they start grabbing this. What's the first thing you say? "No, don't touch that." Okay? This was an experiment waiting to happen that you just squashed. This is a cup. It has water in it, okay? This is breakable. The kid doesn't know that. They want to experiment. So, they'll grab it, they'll it'll fall, it'll break, water will spill all over. That was an experiment you just prevented. So, you would let your kids wander over? and the kids make a complete mess of the house. You don't have kids with the intent of retaining a clean house. These are non-commensurate goals, okay? Kids are sources of chaos and and disorder. Get over that fact. And where does the disorder come from? It's because they are experimenting with their environment. Everything is new to them. Everything. And uh I was This is an obscure example, but I I I was in Central Park. We were just finished seeing one of the Shakespeare in the Park performances, and it had rained a little earlier, so there were puddles in some of the walkways. I saw a woman walking with her kid. The kid has galoshes on and a raincoat on, and they're coming down the walkway. And there's this big juicy muddy puddle right there. And I said, "Please let the kid jump in the puddle. You know the kid wants to jump in the puddle. The kid is like three or four. You know the kid." And what is the What does the mother do? She pulls the kid around to prevent that from happening. That's an experiment in cratering. That's what Craters happen that way. You splash the water, there's mud, it's fun, you get to see the cause and effect [clears throat] of a force, downward force operating on a on a fluid. Gone. That was a bit of curiosity in that moment that was extinguished. So, with our kids, curiosity, provided it does not kill them, if it meant we had extra work in front of us, I would do that extra work. So, your task is less to instill curiosity in your kids than it is to make sure you don't squash what's already there. And I have pretty high confidence that they'll retain that curiosity through the turbulent middle school years into high school. And what is a an adult scientist but a a kid who's never lost the curiosity? And so, in here, people ask about raising their kids. They ask about education. And one day I'm going to have an education book. One day. But but I'm not ready for that because I'm still baking these ideas and I I can tell you this, if if we're if Einstein were here and we're talking with Einstein, we we could talk with him for hours and hours and hours. And you know what question will never come out of our mouths? Is, "What college did you go to? I want to go [snorts] to that same college." I bet most of your people who've sat in this chair, it's not about what college they went to. It's about their own initiative, their own drive, their own ambitions, their own curiosity. That is not taught in school. Sadly. School they view you as this empty vessel that they pour information in and you test it over here, you get a high grade, you're praised. You might even give the commencement speech. Is that who become the shakers and movers of the world? I don't think so. There'll be some of them, but not with the not with the totality of expectation that is brought upon those who would who who who succeed in school in that way. So I can just tell you that what has to change in schools and I don't have a recipe yet. I just know the result what the result has to be. It has to be when you come down the steps on the last day of school, you are not singing the Alice Cooper song school's out forever. You'll be there'll be a sad song you'll be singing saying gee, I got to go two or three months without learning anything. You should be sad that school is over, not happy. And the fact that you're happy that school is over means something is not working in there. You're not enjoying the learning process. And on the other side of that is school should as a minimum preserve that curiosity for you. It Yeah, if you lost some of it cuz it's not going to be in all of us, put it back in. So that when you graduate school, you can give literal meaning to the word commencement. Commencement means beginning. It doesn't mean ending. And so you leave school and you say to yourself, I now know how to learn. I now have a curiosity of all things I have yet to be exposed to and I will now become a lifelong learner. Without that, you become ossified in whatever was the body of knowledge that existed the day you graduated. And you will lead a life always looking back at that time without continuing to grow who and what you can become in life. I think we should all get as high grades as you can, but if you don't get the highest grades possible, no one should be standing in judgment of that. If you have some other ambitions that have pathways that don't get encoded in the GPA that other people are referencing. That's all I'm saying. And you said the goal of school is to hopefully commencement you know how to learn. When you approach a topic that you don't know well, how what is your actual process Thank you. Great question. So, I'm going to give you a slightly longer answer than you bargained for just cuz cuz it's got good flesh on it. I'm a scientist raised Catholic but started drifting when I was like in third grade. None of it was making much sense to me. And so, not only that, my household, though we went to church, it was a secular household. There were no decisions made in the house that referenced the Bible or God or Jesus or anything. So, in that sense decision-making was secular and rationally informed. And I thank my parents for that and and actually a testimony to them in this book. Just thank them for their just their rational approach to everything. It It It I value that as someone being raised by them because it meant if something didn't make sense, they wouldn't do it cuz I said so. Well, that's not a rational reply to your child. They would have the reason for it and they would discuss the reasons. [snorts] So, early on as I became more visible, I'd get letters and people would ask about God. And I don't know much about God, you know, so I my early letters were well, science is this but and religion is that and I can't help you any further. Then I thought to myself, that's not fair to the person who wrote the question. They're coming from a place in some religious tradition, whatever that tradition is. And I if if I'm receiving that letter, there's a contract, an implicit contract between me and the person who's seeking my guidance, my wisdom, my insights. And I owe it to that person to know as much as possible as I can about where they're coming from. So I said, I I should really read up on this. So I started buying Bibles. Okay. I I bought the Torah. I bought the New Testament, the Old Testament. I bought the Mormon Testament. I bought the Quran and different translations and I started reading them. And I studied the rituals, how the rituals differ. How who celebrates what holidays and the Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate Christmas, last I checked. Okay, they have a different interpretation and understanding of the same passages that other people say time to celebrate Christmas. That's interesting to me. Because people raised in different traditions and different um uh belief systems, at different times they are writing to me. So I have shelves upon shelves of religious tracts. I have shelves upon two shelves of UFO material. Okay? People say, I saw a UFO, what was it? I think it's an alien. Let me find out where these people are coming from. What literature have they been exposed to? What are they thinking? What is their belief system? Conspiracy theorists. So I have shelves on all this stuff. Usually you go to someone's house and you find books that completely align with their world views. All right? Someone asked me that. Someone said, what what are the books on your shelves right now? And I and I made I gave them the list and they said, "Wait a minute, do you believe in that stuff?" And I said, "I read things that take me to places where other people think. If I'm an educator, I want to know that. Because when you're speaking to me and I have some understanding of you, I I can navigate We talked about navigation earlier. I can navigate your receptors for learning. I don't have to have you come to where I am. That's not right. I'm the educator, not you. You're the curious person. So, I'm going to meet you on your territory. And I had to read all of that to do so. Just to be genuine and honest in my replies to people. In this book, one of what took me a year to answer one of the questions. It was a a Jewish woman, Orthodox. How do I know she's Orthodox? I didn't have the latitude to ask her because it's just a letter. I know she's Orthodox because she doesn't spell God is G-D. So, I know above certain thresholds you don't even utter the name God. That's so that's a level of piety that I got that. She's Jewish. She's got a 10-year-old son. She's sending him to Hebrew school so that he can learn This is I'm quoting her. So, she can learn where he comes from and his learn his traditions. Oh, by the way, he's on the autism spectrum. So, this is building, right? Okay, she's Orthodox, she's really religious, she's got a 10-year-old son going to Hebrew school, he's on the autism spectrum, and he says, "By the way, one day he came home and said he doesn't believe in God." And he thinks Bible stories can't possibly be true. And she asks him, "How did you come to think this?" And he said, "Cosmos." I was like, "Okay, so I'm in deep now. Okay. Should I read further? Where is this going to go? This can only end badly." I'm saying to myself. And it turned out she was very open. She said, "You know, I don't want to make him believe things that might not be true. He respects you. I know that and I thank you for that. But sometimes I have my doubts, too, about these stories in the Bible. So, I just don't know, you know, can science and God coexist? And I just want to be a good parent." It was like, "Whoa. Okay." So, I went back and brushed up on sort of Jewish rituals and and it took me a year just to get all the right words on the page. So, I wrote back. I think it's my finest letter in the book. So, you can ask, "Well, so how did it all resolve?" So, my only thought I'll tell you is it was a year and a half later or so. She wrote to me and invited me to his bar mitzvah. [laughter] So, I said, "Okay. I think that that worked out. That that worked out good." So, you said, "How do I prepare? What what was the essence of your How do I learn?" I learn because I want to be better at what it is I'm doing than I am. Sounds like it starts with books. It's reading disconfirming evidence, which I think is super powerful. Yes. I mean, point at you. Please point away. I'll take it. It was like, "Yes." I tried and one of my highest compliments I got one day, I'm This is earlier when I was sort of sort of recognizable to people. People would say, "I think I know who you are," but they're not quite sure. I was in a CVS and you I'm waiting in line and there are the magazines that are there, the impulse magazines, right? And one of them was Life magazine and it was This was around Easter, right? And it was like, "Jesus. Um what different cultures say about him." Is it Hispanic, French, German, whatever. So, I looked at it and I said, "That could be interesting. Let me" So, I pick that up and I add it to the stash. Only when I did that did a person in another aisle come up to me and say, "You're Neil deGrasse Tyson, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "I would I wasn't sure until I saw you pick up the magazine on Jesus. Because I know you read everything." And I said, "Wow. This guy really knows who I am." So, yes. You said the right Disconfirming books. Yes. Yeah, I think that's really powerful. If you were going to give people one topic that they should study that would be sort of the most eye-opening and useful in their lives that dealt with the cosmos, what would it be? Yeah, I'm going to give you a cop-out answer for that and I'm going to say I want you to learn what science is and how and why it works. Where would you send people for that? Is there a particular book, a website, one of your books? Yeah, I kind of did that a lot in my book. So, [laughter] it's kind of I don't mean to I'm just saying. Uh one of my books uh which did very well not as well as the the most recent one. It's called Death by Black Hole. That book is the sum of my pedagogical insights into connecting you who might otherwise be disconnected to science and putting you in the middle of what science is how and why it works. What it means when we say we know something, what it means when we say we don't know something. And in spite of the morbid title, it's really about science as an enterprise. And uh one of the sections is called The Nature of Knowing. And another section called The Knowing of Nature. Right? There's There are philosophical dimensions to it where you will come out of that book, that's my goal, you'll come out of it saying, "S- The world looks different to me now because I see all the way science has reached in and has enlightened civilization to enhance our health, our wealth, our security in this place we call nature. Where's the best place for people to connect with you? You've got a lot of amazing stuff. Oh, well, I'm upping my presence on Instagram. Your Instagram feed is rad, dude. but it's there's not many postings there. It You could do more. I won't lie. But they're awesome. Okay, so what I started my Instagram cuz I I have a I had to spend a period of time in my life where I I did a lot of photography as art Mhm. art projects. I I'm deeply sensitive to art. My brother is a professional artist, so I grew up just He went to the High School of Music and Art. So, I would just grew up as the nerd scientist, but exposed to art. And so, I like photography. So, my initially my Instagram was I think how many Instagram accounts were. They were just places to put beautiful photos. But lately they've come they've Instagram has become a platform for communicating. Yes. So, I'm I I I'm I think I'm going to ramp that up a bit. Dude. And It is good Mhm. All right. My last question. What's the impact you want to have on the world? I don't seek impact. Um I Okay. My impact would be people learn from me in a way that they are empowered by what I taught them. So, that when they think of what they learned from me, they no longer think of me. They think of their own base of understanding of how this world works. And so that I become irrelevant from that um exercise. And because if people say this is true cuz Tyson said so, then I failed. That's not how you teach someone. That's that's teaching them by authority. I don't you know, that's no. I want to I I want to teach you how to think about the world and then you say I have a new way to understand the world and you just run off. Don't you don't even look back. Because a new level of hunger has descended upon you and methods and tools to feed that hunger are now accessible to you. So, my impact would be that others are impacted and they don't even remember that I had something to do with it. On my tombstone I want the epitaph be ashamed to die until you have scored some victory for humanity. Wow, that's harsh, man. I can get behind that. victory for humanity is not a victory for yourself. It's not statues, it's not your name, it's just humanity's better off. You want the world to be any of us, I think, should want the world to be a little better off for you having lived in it. That doesn't mean people praising you, that that's no. Not even about that. So, what do you have to give with no expectation of return? Back to duty. I get it. That's what it is. It's beautiful, man. Yeah. Guys, there are some people that get famous on hype and there are some people that get famous on substance. I'm telling you right now, this man has gotten where he's gotten on substance. It is an incredible dive into his world. You will not regret it. Follow his Instagram account. It's absolutely incredible. Read all of his books. I can vouch for several of them and they are amazing. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Neil deGrasse Tyson in the house. Thank you, dude. good with all these equations, there was that pot of gold out there. I wanted to understand Einstein. I wanted to understand the quantum theory. I wanted to be at the cutting edge of science, even if it meant that I had to sit at my chair and simply crank out the math. You got to pay your dues.