 Fantastic. Okay, beautiful people. It's five o'clock, it's a Monday, and that means it's time for Watch Me Work. I'm Susan Laurie Parks. We have been doing this show for 15 years. We started in a little theater down the street from the public theater, we moved into the public theater, and then when lockdown came and COVID came, we moved onto Zoom. We have been supported all that time by HowlRound, and more recently by the new work development department at the public theater. Today, we have an amazing special guest. I promise you special guests, and we have the most amazing special guest ever. We have Neil deGrasse Tyson. We will be speaking with Neil in Levelle. Oh, look, he's so wonderful, generous and brilliant, and so inspiring. And we'll be talking with Neil about his work and all that. The first thing we'll do, which is what we always do, we will be working together this time because we have a very special guest. We will be working together for 10 minutes, not together. We will be working for 10 minutes. And then we will speak with Neil and then take your questions about your work and your creative process. And New Work Development Department, could you tell us how to get in touch if you have a question, please? Sure, once the 10 minute is up, we will go ahead and start a queue for questions. And if you could go ahead and use the raise your hand function on your Zoom, we'll go in and get a nice queue going and we will call on your name to please unmute and we'll go and go from there. And if you didn't know, on Zoom, you can have the hand that you raise match your skin color. Thanks, brother. Go in there to dig in and you can see, okay? It can be. Yeah. The early Zoom couldn't do that, so. That's true. Yeah. Fantastic. Just to remind everybody, while we don't have the bandwidth for you to present your work, we do have plenty of bandwidth and plenty of time, again, to talk with Neil about his work and talk with Neil about your own creative process. So without further ado, we're gonna go. Let's work for 10 minutes. Thank you. All right, that was 10 minutes by my timer. Our very special guest today is Neil deGrasse Tyson. He is a brilliant astrophysicist. He's the author of 16 books, probably over 16 books by now and countless articles. He's the host, was the host of PBS's Nova Science Now, which was a fantastically wonderful show. We watched it very much in my house. One of his books, Astrophysics for People in a Hurray, spent 81, 81 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It's fun to read and it's also really fun to listen to because Neil reads the book to you if you get audible or one of those devices. He's been a writer in residence teaching writing at Yeshiva University. He's so revered by the world community that he's had asteroids named after him and he's also had leaping frogs named after him, which is amazing. He's also been voted the sexiest astrophysicist alive by People Magazine. He's a great writer, a brilliant scientist, brilliant creative mind, and he's a very generous spirit. And he's also a native New Yorker. Please welcome Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hey, Neil, thank you so much for joining us on Watch Me Work, Bro. If I may make an adjustment to some of that introduction. There's only one asteroid named after me, not multiple. Oh, mercy, sorry. Okay. And I double checked when that honor came. I said, is it headed towards Earth? You don't want to be that asteroid. Asteroid Tyson ready to take out the civilization. So also that People Magazine distinction that was 40 pounds ago, just if I can measure time by weight, that's what's happening. But thank you for that intro. Thank you. And by the way, I was feeling the creative energy, even though everyone was on mute, I looked at the three screens and I was feeling it. So like the brains were going, except some people don't have their video on. There's just their name or just their still photo. So I couldn't, I didn't feel your energy at all. I want to ask you a few questions about your work and your creative process, Neil. And just to get us started. And the first one, we often talk about calling and I thought for a minute, like Neil is a native New Yorker and he's an astrophysicist. And when I look up into the night sky, all I see are the city lights. So how did you get your calling to be an astrophysicist and being a native New Yorker? Yeah, that's a great question. I think about that often by the way. And I don't have a good, I have an answer. I don't know if it's a good answer, but it's an answer. And it's growing up as I grew up in the Bronx and there's eight stars visible and then the sun and moon, that's it. So that was my world until I was nine and a first visit to my local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium, where I now serve as director. And I'm sitting there in the chair and the stars come out, the lights dim and the stars come out. And I thought it was a hoax. I said, there aren't this many stars. I know, I've seen, this is wrong. It's a fun hoax, a role with you on this, but I was incredulous of it until later in my life, we would leave New York on trips through Pennsylvania to the Caribbean where we had relatives and I'd see the night sky as nature had intended. And to this day, when I see that, I say to myself, that reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. It's a very urban, like stupid, urban way to feel, but that, so here's why, here's my analysis of this. I wonder, suppose I'd grown up on a farm and farms would be away from city lights typically and every night would look like the inside of the Planetarium dome or better. Then I wonder if I would just take it for granted. How many farmers become astrophysicists? I don't think many actually, not that I know many farmers, but I'm just, I know many astrophysicists, none of them came from a farming family because it was just always there. Whereas, since I never saw it, first day I saw it, I'm old enough at age nine, you can be impacted by many things, I was struck by the universe. It was not the wallpaper of the night sky that I grew up with because I didn't have a night sky. I was star struck. So that's why I half jokingly, only half jokingly suggest that it was the universe that called me, not I who called it and because it all happened that one day. And I was mining my own business, sitting there in a big comfy chair. So that's my sort of origin story. And by the time I was 11, I realized that you can make a career of this. And then I had an answer to that annoying question that adults always ask kids. We all know the question, what do you want to be when you grow up? And then I'd have the answer to that. I'd say astrophysicists. Usually, if you say almost anything else, the person who asks you know somebody, who knows somebody, right? Oh, you want to be an engineer. Aunt Matilda is an engineer. Uncle Joe is an engineer or a lawyer, but nobody knew any astrophysicist. So it's a pretty short lived conversation. Wow, I love that you say you were star struck that's so, so beautiful. I mean, you have a lot of what I would call lyricism or poetry in your writing. I love how in astrophysicists for people in a hurry, you make this joke, cosmology, not to be confused with cosmetology. So you have all and you have all these great jokes as a way of sort of bringing those of us who aren't scientists into a beautiful understanding. But I wonder, you've written 16 plus books, numerous articles. What, and been a host of fabulous TV shows, what inspires you to be creative? Where do you get your inspiration from? It's, I don't, so here's, I don't know how transferrable this is to others. It might be everyone has their own key and walk combination to release the creativity within themselves. What I can say with some confidence, however, just primarily because of my age, I've seen a lot and thought a lot. And when I see people who are getting older to, oh, gee, I wish I was younger. I said, I don't wish I was younger because like I was an idiot when I was younger. And there's a wisdom that I carry for my age. And so maybe the real answer is don't get older unless you have wisdom to show for it. And to acquire the wisdom to show for it means you're always exposing yourself to, to ideas, people, places, things, the creativity of others. I don't take it for granted that my brother came an artist. And he knew this very early in his life. My parents took my brother, my sister, and me to the various cultural offerings of New York City. It felt like every weekend, those probably maybe once or twice a month, but it felt like every weekend we'd go to the aquarium, to the science museum, to the natural history museum, to the planetarium, to the art museum. We'd even go to places where full grown adults are doing things that you don't normally, you're not normally trained to do in your school curriculum. Like we would go to see the opera. There's no opera classes in K through 12, right? There's no, we go the opera, we go to plays. We would go to, my first hockey game, all right? A football game. These are adults doing things that are not your standard professions. The point is with all of that exposure, I ended up getting struck by the stars. My brother is struck by a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. And my sister is the sellout in the family. She went on to corporate America. So we all get loans from her, you know, nothing, no. So that exposure first helped me decide where I wanted my path to align, but continued exposure gives you, at the risk of stating the obvious, the more things going on in your head, the more places, the more sources of possible influence on your creativity can be expressed. And so if you, so I can't stress strongly enough the value of life experience. And I'm especially saying that in my advancing age, right? I have life experience. Life experience in traveling, in meeting people, in reading books, in watching films, in visiting museums, and also especially anytime I have the opportunity, especially with off-Broadway productions, if one of the productions has the creative artists there on stage afterwards, definitely go to that. And you find out, well, what were you thinking when you did this? And why did you do it that way? And how come, was there a blind path? And did you see that? And that, anytime, we've, so I've been doing more writing lately than theater going, but typically my wife and I, mostly through her initiative to get the subscriptions because I can't keep track of all that. We would see, certainly you play every couple of months, six plays a year, sorry, six theater things a year. So that could include music or off-Broadway play, a Broadway musical, this sort of thing. And now let me pull from that various influences. When I was a kid through high school, we would go to musicals, and I hate musicals, I just hated them. Because it's like, really, you're gonna sing these feelings right now? Really? Really? This is awesome. Can't you just say them once and move on with the plot, all right? And I went away to college, and I didn't realize that the musical genre was, had been in me, but hadn't gelled, it was just sort of there because I had the exposure. And I get to college, after one semester of college, I say, wow, I haven't been to a musical in four months. It was like, well, why do I care? Because I don't care about music, but it started getting at me. And they realized that good musicals, there are songs that they come in because mere conversation does not plumb the depths of your emotions the way songs do. Yes, you can be influenced by beautiful writing, of course, but why is it that you can sit there and listen to music 24 seven? Not everyone, perhaps, but music, pick your genre, music affects you emotionally. It'll ride your ups and downs, it can support them, it can pull you out, it can sink you down, it explores what it is to be human more than the simple written word because it's affecting you in this other dimension. And so I had the same reaction with choral music layered on top of orchestral, classically composed music. I say, why are these people singing now? Let me just hear the violin or the piano. And around this time, I transitioned to that as well. And I realized that instruments, while they can reflect your emotions, humans know your emotions better than instruments, the human voice, the human, when a human joy, human sadness, that is above instruments. So then I realized if I'm communicating science, which science generally is not people's best subject in school, science and math, generally not. And they'll list 10 other subjects they'd rather be studying than science. And I realized that the people teaching science typically are not influenced by the arts in ways that would shape how they communicate. And the more I learned about the arts, the more I cared about how I communicate and what word would be juxtaposed with another word so that it lands in your sense, in your mind, ear combination with that much more potency. And my favorite sentence, and I'll stop after this for a question, my favorite sentence that I've ever composed is actually the sum of so much in my life, manifesting only as simple words. So for example, I was also a performing member of three different dance companies. I loved dance as a form, as an art form. And I don't see enough of it. There's the Joyce Theater in New York and that's kind of about it. I had to wait for some special other arrangements at other theaters, but these were college troops. They were not the Bolshoi here, right? I had, in graduate school, when I really should have been in the lab, I was with a dance company and in college. But this, just the idea that your body is also a force of expression. And yes, you can speak a word. The words can be more interestingly composed. You can, and I give public talks, is it behind a podium? No, yeah, that's base camp, but I have my limbs are trained objects from having performed in dance. So as I'm speaking, I have body gestures that add flavor and nuance to that communication. So here's the sentence. I'm very proud of this. Whether or not you all, I'm proud of it, okay? I'm gonna write a job, right? I'm gonna write a job. The spinning planets orbit the sun along their appointed paths, like pirouetting dancers in a cosmic ballet choreographed by the forces of gravity. So what I like about the sentence, if I may phrase my own sentence, is the, you know every word in the sentence. There's no jargon, okay? A, B, the metaphor has a certain precision to it where it's not a stretch. I talk about spinning planets and I talk about pirouetting dancers. That's the same thing, okay? And who's the choreographer? It's gravity. So it's almost, if there's a word sitting that staples together literal and figurative, this was a literal figurative sentence where the figurative elements had such a literal value that the meaning was fully conveyed. And it's, so I've tried to find ways to fold pathways of life into the very sentence structure that I'm using to communicate science. And so, and thank you for, if anyone who has noticed that in my writings, I do that. And that's without dumbing it down, all right? Everybody knows if you're dumbing something down. Let me see if I can explain it to you this way. How about, in that, no, that's dumbing it down. Just come out and say it, but work harder at it and make it then work, make it pry open the communication channel as wide as possible. And you can't really do that if you don't see other walks of life. And even if they look random at the time, keep, put it in your pocket because later on there might be a connection back to it. I also, I never doodled in class because I'm not much of an artist, not an artist at all. But I always liked typefaces. Oh, oh yeah. You know, there's gothic, the New York Times banner head is basically gothic. The, there's the HALIS script, which you'd find on wedding invitations. I've always just, I've been intrigued by that to the point where very early, like in starting middle school, but it really took hold in high school, college, I started collecting pens that could do interesting things on the page. And the only pens that could really do that are fountain pens. Forget the ballpoint pen, fountain pen. So I have a medium large collection of fountain pens. Each can do something different with a line. Oh, cool. And the, and so, no, I'm not doodling in class. I'm practicing my penmanship with the different pens. And the reason I'm even mentioning this at all is there are times when I said, you know, my lowercase q needs work. So I'll sit there and draw out like a hundred lowercase qs connected to each other. So that ultimately when I come to a q, it just rolls. It's what do you call it when it's muscle memory rather than having to think about it. All right. I say all this because while I was doing that, I probably should have been doing some home, you know, physics homework when I was in college. So I have no justification for that other than that I enjoyed it. Okay. Today I have a custom fountain pen just for signing books. And so there are people who very much value the books that I give them because they're signed holographically with one of my fountain pens. And I said to myself, oh, so this little thing I was doing when I should have been doing something else finally matters in my life in this other way. And it might have just been lost, but I kept it in my pocket so that it can manifest in this way. And I'm so saddened when, okay, keep in mind, there's the word on the page. And before there were typewriters, the style of how you wrote it carried some of the emotion that was your intent in what it was that you were writing. And so just this is what the illuminated manuscripts are all about. That's the whole point. All right. So, but watch what happens. We get the typewriter. So now there's no flourish. There's just the word on the page, which puts extra onus on the words you choose because you can't bake it with extra curly cues. All right. But then that might, I'm saddened because today we have emojis. It's so, you know what I'm saying? So rather than express your feelings either in words or in flourish, you just hop in and then move on and you tell yourself, I have just expressed my emotion. And I don't want to judge that because that's a next generation thing. And I don't want to be the old man on the porch saying, get off my lawn. But yeah, I don't know where that's gonna go. Plus Neil to talk enough. Just plus today, the kids in school aren't learning are no longer taught cursive. So there's that too. But I love how you talked about, you know, pry and open the channels of communication. I have so many questions that I want to ask you. And instead, we're gonna turn it over to our community here. And if any of y'all have questions about your work and your creative process or you wanna ask Neil another question about his work, please let's start the queue. Great. Great, so we have a great queue going. We're gonna start with MD. So MD, if you could please unmute yourself. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, MD. Hey Neil, it is so great to at least hear that while you were also dying in grad school and in undergrad, you ran away to dance classes rather than doing your lab work. To my question. Which makes me a better presenter in an audience. I claim, I declare this. And again, it would have been just a random other thing that people saying, I'm wasting my time. I need to focus and I didn't focus, but it's all come together as who I am today. Okay, yes. All right, so for my question, growing up in the arts with passion for mathematics and sciences, it's an incredible pleasure to be speaking with both black legends that have inspired me as a playwright and a scholar. As such, I bring ecological, archeological, anthropological, theological, all the all its goals within my plays. But how have you navigated your career paths of blending your intellectual discoveries and the desire to share them with the world? And what invite, like what advice would you give to artists who are afraid to be seen as didactic or egotistical with this intellectual artistic blend? Damn. Okay. Show all work. Handed in by tomorrow morning. So I think I followed your question. So let me attempt that. So first of all, so maybe the similarity here is I write because I can. And we have to ask, would I write if no one bought my books? Then it'd just be my diary, I guess, right? But if you care about other, well, see, science is civilization pivots on how wise we are in handling our science, technology, engineering and math. So part of me, it feels obligated to get people thinking straight out there because a whole lot of decisions are made that are based on objectively false things. So part of my duty that I self-appointed duty is to share, share this with an audience. Now about, I don't know if you use the word ego, but ego was an element of what you described. If I shared it in a way where I know best, you must listen to me, well, then I'd just be an asshole, okay? Maybe the equivalent to that is I wrote the best play in the world and you must come see it. No, no, no, no, no, no. You, I don't know the precise counterpart to playwriting, but in what I do as an educator, as an educated educator, is I present information so that you take ownership of it. So that at no time are you saying, this is true because Tyson said so. No, that never ends well. Because that's just cult building. That's truth by authority. So I invest a crazy amount of my time and energy shaping information so that when you see it, read it and absorb it, you walk away and you don't think about me anymore because you've completely folded it into your own knowledge, understanding, awareness of the world. So I'd like to think that a play, dare I comment in that space, at its best matters to who sees it. It's not some, are you writing an autobiography or are you just taking your life experience and infusing it in the characters that you have created? Right? And the value of your play is measured not by how much you value it, but how much the viewer values it. It reminds me of, if you look at art work, let me define good art, okay? No one should do this, but I'm about to do it, okay? For me, good art is something that invites me to participate in what it is the artist is expressing. If I don't have an open invitation, then it's just you creating something and I'm not invited. If I'm not invited, I don't care about your work. I'm gonna go to one where I am invited. And I'll give an example. I was in the, what's that art museum in Paris that's in a train station, the- Musée d'Orsay. Musée d'Orsay, thank you. In the Musée d'Orsay. And I'm in a room and I must have been the same artist who did these two opposite paintings. One of them is a society woman. They're both society women, it's the same woman. But in, and she's obviously a high society person, right? She's got this dress on and she's posing next to the back of the couch. And it's a paint, oil painting from how 19th century, maybe 18th century, that doesn't matter here. And one of them, she's like there and displaying her, she is, and she's all happy. And another one, she looks melancholy, but she's still dressed up all like she's ready to party. And in the party picture, I don't care what she's thinking. She's a rich, happy lady. Okay, fine, okay. But in this other one, it's like, why is she sad? Well, I care now. There's some emotion there that is, did something happen today? Is she actually unhappy in her marriage, in her situation? So that was artwork that attracted me in and engaged me. That's simple difference. So as a professor, as an educator, if I can't get you to take ownership of the new material, I'm not actually teaching you anything. Then it becomes a lesson in memorization. And then you spew it all back and you move on and forget everything that I taught you. So in that creative process, where you're folding in all of the oligies, with the oligies or the isms or whatever it was, yes, do that. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, if you can't reach me, go home, I don't need you as an artist. Take up another profession. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you, M.G., for your question. And, Tammy, you have the floor, can I unmute every ready? Excellent. Thank you so much. So I am a playwright and a history nerd, and I'm really actually excited. I'm going back to school for experience design. And so I sort of have like a museum, education, entertainment question for both of you. I'm writing a podcast, which can also serve as an audio walking tour through the center of a very cute historic town. And the history involves military history, literary history, natural history, like all of these different things. And part of me is scared that I'm not gonna be, so the podcast is literally divided into, half of it is gonna be fiction. And after each fictional episode, I'm gonna have all of the history and all of the facts and all of the citations in another episode. That informs the fiction, you mean. Yeah, because the fiction is all about actual people and events and facts that actually exist. But I'm sort of weaving them together in a way that hasn't been done before. Because I've grown up near this town and this is what I wanted when I was 14. Like I'm really annoyed that all of the museums are only about the military history or only about the literary figures or like they have to be really careful about how they present things to tourists. And I wanna just have a party where I invite everybody to my wild and wacky story, but I still wanna keep people engaged. And so I was wondering if you have any questions, especially like dealing with museums and conveying all of this amazing learning that you're really excited about. How do you do it skillfully and how do you keep people engaged? Yeah, I would say, I would give you an answer that I don't know is common. And maybe that's because it's wrong. But let me offer it to you anyway. Okay, all right, you know that some people when they get in front of an audience they get very nervous or anxious, there's an anxiety. Some people might get a panic attack and we can ask why would this be the case? And other than the physiological facts that one can't control, at least some of it is, maybe I'll flub my presentation or maybe I'll say something wrong or maybe I'll, okay. What I have found is, if I'm going to appear in public, this will relate to you in a minute, it doesn't sound like it, but it will. If I'm gonna be in public and speak, I need to know, especially if I'm gonna interact with the public with the questions at the end, I need to go in there with 10 times more information that I will ever actually need to perform that task. Factor of 10, factor of 10. Let me give a fast example here. It was 1996, Cassini spacecraft had just pulled into orbit around Saturn, but it hadn't gotten data yet. The Today Show calls him as he wants you to come in and talk about this mission. And I said, I don't, there's no science yet. Well, we know, we know, but just come in and talk about what the science you expect. Okay, so I go in. The Today Show. So there's Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. And Matt Lauer decides to ask the question, oh, tell me what we'll find. Oh, there's a magnetic field and this and that and the other moons and that's fine. Then he decided to put on the hard hitting Matt Lauer hat, okay. The journalist, I'm telling you with all the problems we have in the world today, how can we justify the $3 billion for this mission? Okay, so what's going on in my head? It's, if I'm going to be stumped on national television by a question, it will not have been asked by Matt Lauer, okay. That was, I'm sorry, but that was my thought, okay. Of all the news anchors, like Dan Rather who had been to Vietnam and been shot at or rode helicopters into the thing, not Matt Lauer. So I said, pause, it's $3 billion over 12 years. That divides out to less than what Americans spend on lip balm every year. At that, the moment I said it, the camera shook, the lighting guys, everyone was like trying to hold back their laughter. And all he said was, okay, back to you, Katie. My point is, I had that information ready. I didn't calculate it on the spot, it was pre-loaded. I didn't know what questions I'd be asked, but all of that was pre-loaded. I could have answered it in terms of pizza, how much pizza we buy, but New Yorkers eat more pizza than the rest of the country. I wanted something a little more mundane to contrast it with space exploration and that got it for me. My point is, if you're gonna write a story, I claim that the depths, the richness of that story will be measured by how much content you're an expert on that'll never even make it into the story. If you put every bit of your expertise into the story, then it's not digested. It's not the pearls. And you only know how it takes a long time to make a pearl. A pearl is what rises up after you've studied the culture and studied the anthropology and studied the war and studied the religion and studied all the things that mattered to that community. And you know it so well that what shows up in the story is the bits and pieces that are the finest do-drops of that content. And one of my earliest exposures to this was I was on a, I don't know if you ever even had calculus but there's a guy named Lohapital, L-apostrophe H-O-P-I-T-A-L Lohapital, there's something called Lohapital's rule in calculus. It's a very simple, it's really simple. It's like you say anybody could have come up with this. That's how simple it is. And that's the first and only time I ever heard the guys name Lohapital. I was in my college's math library one day and I'm just looking at the shelves and then I come to a shelf, the complete works of Lohapital and it's like an entire shelf. And I said, what the heck? And it's somewhere in there is his rule. And like did it take that much background to do something that simple? That's what you have to remember, okay? People in New York might know that there's something each year called Manhattan Henge. You've heard of any New Yorkers here where the sun sets exactly on the street grid because it does that twice a year because the sunset point changes throughout the year and thousands of people crowd the streets, the traffic stops and finally traffic stops for a reason other than police activity and con-ed digging holes, okay? There's a cosmic reason why it's stopping, okay? I came up with this. Well, that's kind of weird because it's always been that way, all right? I didn't put the sun there. The sun has always been there but no one stopped for it until I took a photograph of it, wrote an article, put it in a magazine and then each year put out the dates and times. Here's my point. How come no one else came up with it? Why, if they could have, it's been there since the Manhattan grid has been in place because it doesn't set exactly due east. So it's a, you have to calculate what this, someone could have discovered it even by accident. Maybe, but nobody did. Why not? Meanwhile, when I was 14, I went on an expedition to the British Isles that studied Stonehenge and other stone monuments in the British Isles. And I wrote a research paper on it that I published in high school about stone monuments and ancient people and what they did to align their stones with the sky. They weren't just religious temples. They were actually figuring stuff out. All of that background was in me. Just to come up with this one thing, oh, by the way, pause on the street and take a look. So, Tammy, that's my long answer to say, know things as deeply as you possibly can. And don't try to put it all in because it'll be boring if you put everything in. Do the homework for everybody else and have it digest and become the pearls, the dew drops of insight and wisdom so that when that story gets written, people say, wow, this is deep. And they'll start digging deeper and there'll be things there for them to discover just the way you can do that with J.R.R. Tolkien. And you look at Lord of the Rings and you find out the guy is an expert in ancient traditions of Scotland and Ireland and all of that is in there. And you think he's just pulling stuff out of his ass? No, there's an entire intellectual foundation unfolding there. And his storytelling is that much richer for it. So sorry, that's my long answer to- I loved every single word of it. Thank you so much. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Thank you so much, Tammy. Michael G, please unmute yourself. Okay, all right. I am Michael Goldfried. I'm a director and a writer and an educator and thank you both so much. Thank you, everyone, for being here. And Susan Laurie, I just wanna thank you for doing this for so long and for that sustaining this and creating community. I remember going way back to 365 plays and the community you created with that. And so my question for Neil deGrasse Tyson is, so my husband is obsessed with you and particularly space in specific. And he'll come to me and he'll be like, Neil deGrasse Tyson said this incredible thing about space and he'll tell me about the planets and it's like, it's so overwhelming to understand that this is actually happening, that this is real, this isn't Star Trek and this is, you know, it's real. And what I'm wondering is like, with all that you do as a writer and a speaker and is your, I don't know how this is gonna come out but is your knowledge of the universe, how does that actually like fill you with purpose as an individual on this earth as opposed to a kind of it being so overwhelming that it goes the opposite way and it's like, what's the point? So the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the lines in one of the poems, forgive me for not remembering the lines that lead up to this line because this last line is the most important one. It's in life, we need to learn to love the questions themselves. And if you're only after answers, then an answer is a very final thing. There's a question to answer and then you're done. You want to love the questions, the questions stimulate the curiosity. So the immensity of the universe which is something I gleaned when I was nine years old is what attracted me. It was the fact that the unknown was so vast and there are many people who have to have answers and they don't tend to make good scientists because they have not learned to love the questions themselves, I'll give an example. I'll say, people will ask me, tell me about the Big Bang. I said, well, we got 13.8 billion years ago and matter and energy, blah, blah, blah. They said, well, what was around before the Big Bang? And I said, well, we have top people working on it but we don't know. They said, there's got to be something. I said, possibly, sure, but we don't know there's got to be something. There must have been, how about God? God must have been, right? That's exactly how that conversation went. So the unknown at the beginning of the universe was so unsettling to this person that they had to invoke an answer so that they can bring peace to their anxiety. So... And that's like the birth of religion, right? Well, one aspect of, yes, there's other elements of it. So there's that factor. By the way, the fact that your husband was intrigued by what I said, I'd like to think that it stimulated further curiosity with him rather than having him just getting done with what I just said. If he says, Tyson said it, but now I want to learn more and he goes off and learns more, that's another way of taking ownership. A person takes ownership of their own curiosity, right? By the way, with regard to child rearing, we all know that kids ask questions all the time. What adults don't do, which I think they should and I'll be writing about this in the next few years, not now because I got other stuff on my plate, is as an apparent, rather than answer their questions, you need to find the answer with them together, together with them. You know, why is this, well, let's find out. Dig up some books and some picture books and some, and then the answer becomes an exploration rather than a closed, a completely closed door. So, no, when I look up, I feel large. I don't feel small, especially knowing that the atoms of my body, all of our bodies, are traceable to stars that have lived their lives billions of years ago, created these heavy elements, they exploded, scattered the enrichment into gas clouds that then formed subsequent generations of star systems, one of which is our own. So, yes, we're alive in the universe, but the universe is also alive within us. And that fact borders on the spiritual even, and it's a gift of 20th century astrophysics to civilization. And it might not sit well if you have a big ego, because you have to be in the center of everything, but if you realize how small we are, yet we're nonetheless connected to the great unfolding of cosmic events, that can be some of the most uplifting thinking you will ever do in your life. So, for this reason, I'm completely comfortable, and I've been in my comfort zone since I was nine. That's beautiful, thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, we are at 5.59, so I know that there are other questions, but because we are holding to our time at an end at six o'clock, I'm gonna handle it back to SLP to wrap us up. Yeah, Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you so very much for being our most wonderful special guest ever. You say that to all your guests, for sure. Happy leap year, everybody, happy leap year, Neil. Oh yeah, oh by the way, if you're still wondering why the hell we have leap years, I have a video online now, I guess I think it's on YouTube by now. It's more than you ever cared to know about leap days is there, so check it out. And I'm sorry, my answers were so long. It meant we couldn't get to all of the questions, but I hope they were long and nonetheless relevant and interesting to everyone, even if we couldn't get to all questions. So I apologize for that. They were relevant and interesting and brilliant and very, very generous. We so appreciate you, brother, so appreciate you.