Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and cosmologist, an author, and a very prominent communicator of science to the public. He recently hosted the Cosmos series, the reboot of Carl Sagan's very famous series, The Cosmos. In this episode, we talk about his journey to becoming a science communicator, what it's like to live in the public eye, and what it means to be a scientist in the 21st century. He also shares some of his thoughts on how science and pop culture can coexist, and why it's important to have a healthy dose of pop culture in everyday life. This episode was recorded on the day of the Super Bowl, so there's not much else to say other than that it's a good one. It's a great listen, and I think you'll agree that there's a lot more to be learned from it than that. If you're not a fan of Super Bowl ads, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, you'll enjoy the podcast and leave us a rating and review! Thank you, Sam. You're making sense, and we'll be listening to you! Make sense! - Sam Harris The Making Sense Podcast is a podcast that's all about making sense of the world, by people who are trying to make sense of what makes sense in a world that doesn't make sense, by thinking and talking about things that make sense and making sense. - That's why you should listen to the world and write about it. Please consider becoming one of us, because we're all of us. . We're not here to help make sense. We're making it so we can all be a little bit more like that, right? Thanks for listening to the Making Sense: a podcast about science, more of us are making sense in the real world, not less of it, more like us, and less of us? - Amy Poehler - Tom Bell, and more! -- thank you, Amy Bell, and thank you for being a friend of science, and more, and thanks for being kinder than you know what we can do better than you can do that? -- Thank you for listening, and good morning!
00:02:34.100And I look forward to getting into everything that we are mutually obsessed by.
00:02:38.880Yeah, I mean, and I'm impressed you had the time to read at least what I had to send your way.
00:02:43.820I guess I was noticing just how frequently you're being raked over the coals by people who are chapter and verse, you know, talmudically analyzing your words, but some words and not others.
00:02:57.040And the balance of the message gets altered.
00:03:00.000And it seemed like at times everyone is speaking past one another.
00:03:05.180And I just thought I might be able to throw in some suggestions.
00:03:09.560Yeah, yeah, well, that would be awesome.
00:03:11.420If we live part of our lives in the public eye, then that we could have something to share.
00:03:16.400Yeah, well, but before we get into that, I think that's going to be fascinating and useful.
00:04:52.100I'll just take the time to tweet any bit of physics that comes to my mind as I'm watching the game.
00:04:58.840Physics of the momentum of linebackers, the spiral stabilized throw of a quarterback.
00:05:06.640And in one particular playoff game, there was a kick, an overtime field goal winning kick that hit the left upright of the goalposts and went in for the win.
00:05:21.840And I said, wait a minute, what's the orientation of that stadium?
00:05:24.480I checked quickly and I ran a quick calculation.
00:05:27.420And I felt confident enough to tweet that that score was enabled by a third of an inch deflection to the right due to Earth's rotation.
00:05:41.420Just the Coriolis force of Earth's rotation.
00:05:49.500OK, and then went on to the websites and and it's it's it's reaction functions such as that that remind me that people can care about science in ways you might not have imagined, provided it's properly or or or playfully folded into the pop culture they already care about.
00:06:08.960And obviously we're going to get into areas of science affecting the public interests that are that are far more consequential than field goals.
00:06:16.120But a little bit more on on your place in the world at the moment.
00:06:18.320You know, what are you currently working on?
00:06:28.800So we've had a podcast called was a radio show called Star Talk.
00:06:33.480And it began about five or six years ago on a grant from the National Science Foundation.
00:06:39.020And the experiment was, can we make a viable product, radio product, bringing science to the public to people who either don't know that they like science or know that they don't like science?
00:07:09.020And my guest is hardly ever a scientist.
00:07:12.140It's a famous actor, actress, a, a, um, an inventor, an explorer, a singer, a performer.
00:07:19.280And the conversation explores any science that may have touched that person's life.
00:07:26.320If not, then do they have a secret geek underbelly that we can rub?
00:07:31.020Often people, you know, maybe they're science fiction fanatics or they, they love superheroes or any, any of the topics that would be fair game at a Comic-Con.
00:07:41.200Do any of them have these kinds of leanings?
00:07:43.300And what happens is since they are hewn from pop culture, they bring a fan base to this conversation, a fan base that wouldn't otherwise have an excuse to listen to science.
00:07:53.060And then in that conversation, they get fed science as it matters to the person they care about.
00:08:20.200Oh, and by the way, the model is a little more subtle than that.
00:08:22.580If we get an act, you know, typically an actor might have an interest that touches science, but of course they don't have the expertise necessarily in that topic.
00:08:30.500They could be pro-environment or anti-this or pro-that.
00:08:35.100And that comes out in the interview, but what we then do in studio, that's the base interview.
00:08:41.000Then we cut that into a show where in studio we bring in an academic expert on that topic.
00:08:48.760So the best example here was I interviewed President Jimmy Carter.
00:08:53.520And, you know, he's got this, he's working heavily by ridding sub-Saharan Africa of certain diseases that are peculiar to humans.
00:09:02.440And once you remove it from the last human, it'll never come back again because it doesn't have the contagious vector.
00:09:09.180So he's speaking about this, but he's not an expert in that disease.
00:09:12.340We got a, we got someone who's an expert in transmittable diseases to supplement comments that he made about the mission statement of his causes.
00:09:21.820So, so this, it turns out this has been working and we even got an Emmy nomination for best informational programming this past season.
00:09:30.240So all quite proud of it because it was got crafted and, and molded and, and assembled.
00:09:35.420But other than that, we're in conversation about whether we're going to do another Cosmos.
00:09:39.460Cause I hosted the, that 21st century.
00:10:18.760There's that, that's a number and that changes, right?
00:10:21.220Another number is just purely how many Twitter followers do you have?
00:10:24.740That's sort of a monotonically increasing function for anyone because rarely do you unfollow someone on Twitter.
00:10:30.820And so during Cosmos, the, the, the Twitter numbers bumped up, but by maybe 10% or so, not like 50% or 100%.
00:10:41.300And so it was, I think a lot of people who watch Cosmos already knew me and already followed.
00:10:46.360So, and I think that's a stronger statement than if it was just some spontaneous spike, because it means it was kind of sort of earned.
00:10:56.580People are coming on, they see retweets and they, and, and it's kind of the slow build, I think is a stronger number at the end of the day.
00:11:06.280And by, by contrast, when Charlie Sheen announced he would be on Twitter, 24 hours later, he had a million followers.
00:11:12.040They're not following him because of the tweets he had posted, they're following him because they're, they're fans of his or they want to see him crash and burn, whichever.
00:11:20.880And so that my Twitter following, however, has been very slow, but real.
00:11:25.760And I, I like that because it meant that people are responding to the tweets themselves.
00:11:30.200Well, it's great to see your platform grow by whatever metric, because you are so good at publicly communicating science.
00:11:38.500And I think there are people who are cynical about that role when, when a scientist assumes it.
00:11:43.960You know, I think they're, they're undoubtedly, they're scientists who attack you as a, a mere popularizer of science.
00:11:51.560I mean, they did the same thing to Sagan.
00:11:53.200They do the same thing to Steven Pinker.
00:11:56.220How much does that noise even show up on your, your radar?
00:11:59.820That's a great question and an important question.
00:12:02.240And I can say, let me just say, I benefit from the fact that Carl Sagan sort of did this first and he sort of cleared the brush and bramble.
00:12:11.100And, you know, there's blood on the tracks from him having done this in a way that no one had even approximated before.
00:12:18.400So now here I am on a partially, if not mostly cleared field and I get to operate without what I'm doing, surprising people.
00:12:57.940Whenever there's a late-breaking news story, let's say the gravity wave was discovered a few months ago or the Higgs boson, my phone rings off the hook.
00:13:08.020And what I say to the press is, especially the TV media, I say, have you spoken to the people who actually did this work yet?
00:13:17.460No, no, no, no, no, we just want you to tell us what was discovered and why.
00:13:39.580So if you look at news stories of major, major scientific discoveries that overlap my interests and my expertise, if I come in, it's at the end.
00:13:47.300And I say what the discovery means or its significance.
00:13:49.840And in that way, I think all boats rise in the tidewaters.
00:13:56.140And I can't be criticized for that if by my being a part of that story brings more attention to their work.
00:14:03.520And so I've been very careful about that.
00:14:05.860And as a result, I still every now and then get invitations to do a year sabbatical at prestigious institutions.
00:14:11.820And I don't think that would happen if somehow people felt that I was a loose cannon out there.
00:14:17.480Right. I don't think people are aware of how much heat Sagan took for this.
00:14:22.420I might not even be aware of most of the details, but I just know in the abstract that he got fairly hammered by his colleagues for his role as a communicator of science.
00:14:33.440Yeah. So it happens on many dimensions.
00:14:36.620I mean, some of it is just what is the state of social maturity of the academic field?
00:14:43.720And even his closest collaborator for the original Cosmos, Steve Soder, who was also co-writer of the Cosmos that I, co-writer with Andruyan of the Cosmos that I hosted.
00:14:55.800He, at the time, back in the 70s, when Carl Sagan was invited to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, he thought it would be a mistake.
00:15:04.900How could you do this? This is entertainment.
00:15:11.500And once that got unfolded and Johnny Carson turned out to be a fan of science and of skepticism, and all of a sudden, members of Congress would hear from their constituents,
00:15:26.240oh, I think maybe we should do more science.
00:15:28.220Wait, is that the science that I saw on TV last night?
00:15:31.960And all of a sudden, funding streams would increase.
00:15:35.520And so my field, the astrophysics field, we were kind of early out of the box on this, and we did recognize ultimately, even in spite of the blood on the tracks, that it's a good thing for science, for people who, in the end, paid for the science through the national science tax monies that fund NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other sort of government agencies that serve this.
00:15:59.640In the biology field, of course, it's the National Institutes of Health, this sort of thing.
00:16:03.760If they're paying for it, at some point, they ought to know what you're doing.
00:16:07.100And if you can be good at that, then everybody benefits.
00:16:11.120So my field, I think we've matured past that.
00:16:14.600And now we can celebrate one another who have given some of their lives to, again, like, as I said, bring the universe down to Earth.
00:16:22.340And resistance to this seems to me to be short-sighted and confused on at least two levels of resistance to the public communication of science or the stigma that attaches to a scientist who spends a lot of time or even most of his time doing this.
00:16:38.860Because, one, as you say, we want a scientifically informed public, and I think it's pretty easy to see the price we pay for people's scientific ignorance on, you know, climate change or any other topic that is socially and politically divisive at the moment.
00:16:54.040But also, it's just this idea that there's some kind of clear boundary between the context in which you can make original and useful contributions to scientific thought.
00:17:04.380It's though in the covers of a 300-page book, all you could possibly be doing as a scientist is selling out, whereas in the context of a journal article that only 300 people are going to read, there you're doing real science.
00:17:18.120And, I mean, this demarcation may make a little sense in pure mathematics, for instance, because, you know, no one's going to publish your theorem proof widely, and you're not going to put it on PBS or, you know, your next show.
00:17:34.680But for most of science, you have people like, as I mentioned, Steven Pinker, who, in the context of a book, is saying scientifically edgy and original things.
00:17:45.220And it's not mere, I mean, the boundary between communicating science to the public and doing science in the act of, you know, just thinking out loud about data, I mean, there is no clear boundary between those things.
00:17:58.640And in my field, we have the, it's just a fact, I don't know, do I judge it as a positive or negative, it just is, that when we make discoveries, there's huge public interest in them.
00:18:13.340If we discover a new black hole, a new exoplanet, a new, you know, organic molecules in space, the edge of the universe, the multiverse, our topics tend to be more ripe for public absorption than what I have found to be true in other fields, except, say, for perhaps medicine, where people's health and well-being are directly affected by discoveries.
00:18:38.060And so, and also, our content feeds very smoothly into moviemaking and the storytelling of science fiction.
00:18:48.340And our vocabulary is actually, we shouldn't underestimate the value of a tractable vocabulary as part of formal lexicon.
00:18:55.720Consider that the official name, the official term for the beginning of the universe is Big Bang.
00:19:09.000We have this trove of single syllable words that are actually official in our field that are just fun for the public to follow.
00:19:18.740So that when I'm describing new discoveries, there isn't this smoke screen of lexicon that you have to get through just to even hear the idea that I'm trying to put on the table.
00:19:29.860The idea becomes, the idea is laid bare immediately because the words don't get in the way.
00:19:37.220So, and many of those topics, as you point out, are not, I mean, they're certainly not politicized.
00:19:42.660I guess the Big Bang, if you reach back far enough into our confusion that the Big Bang becomes politicized, or you could just say it happened 6,000 years ago.
00:19:51.460So, but you communicate, I think you communicate on some more highly charged issues as well.
00:19:58.420I mean, so is climate science something you're, you're touching or have touched in the recent years?
00:20:18.160And yes, I could comment on it, but I won't because you have, what I'm trying to do is spread the, the, the Rolodex base of who they would call when they need commentary.
00:20:29.860Now, when you take a step back from that and they ask, tell us about our responsibility as citizens on planet Earth, then there's the larger stratospheric, the cosmic perspective on it that I'm delighted to bring to the dialogue.
00:20:46.520And so, but people, I'm, I'm a visible target and people know how to find my Twitter stream.
00:20:53.060And so people who are climate deniers will try to fight that.
00:20:57.440But I try to always take the high road.
00:20:59.860I'm not interested in fighting you in the trenches.
00:21:02.480So for example, I had a tweet recently that did very well.
00:21:06.120If you measure it by retweets and it was, uh, I just had to put it out there.
00:21:11.480I said, if you, uh, a skeptic is someone who doubts the claim and is convinced by evidence and a denier is someone who doubts the claim and doubts the evidence.
00:21:26.800So, so something like, I think my tweet was better constructed than that.
00:21:31.620And I put that out there because in the trenches is let's fight about climate change.
00:21:36.180No, I think as an educator, I can help train your mind how to think about information and how to process information and how to arrive at conclusions because this, this is the ways and means of what science is and how and why it works.
00:21:50.960Then you're empowered and then you, you, you, you can make whatever politically leaning decisions you must, but have them anchor on objectively verifiable science.
00:22:02.700But that's why you don't see me debating people.
00:22:04.460I just, I don't have the time or the patience.
00:22:07.200I'd rather just educate you in the first place so that the debate isn't even necessary.
00:22:11.720So how political do you view your job in this sense?
00:22:15.220Because I'm hearing that there are certain things you don't want to talk about, not because you don't have an, don't have a position on them or that you're not, you don't feel yourself qualified to be the one talking about it necessarily.
00:22:27.980I mean, I take your point about climate science, but if I push hard enough, you have a view on it that you don't feel unqualified to express, all the while admitting that you are not the one doing original work in climate science.
00:23:30.040I know, I, you know, I'm not the, you know, the buff guy I once was, but okay, fine.
00:23:36.820Uh, in there, I became really the, the effigy to be burned, the, the, the liberal effigy to be burned by the article, uh, by the, by the, by the cover story article.
00:23:49.980And on my vest, because that's my trademark vest with the moons and planets, they had buttons representing every single liberal cause that's out there.
00:23:59.200So there's the gay rights button and the women's lib button and the anti-GMO button and the, and, and I'm looking and I say, wow, like I've hardly ever said anything about most of those subjects.
00:24:11.160And in fact, the little bit that I have said about GMO, I was telling people to chill out because every organ, practically everything you eat that you acquire from a grocery store is a genetically modified version of something that sometime long ago was natural.
00:24:27.260And so, you know, everything's been, milk cows, you know, everything, big plump strawberries, oranges, and somehow people have drawn what they think is a genuine, yet it's arbitrary line between food that is natural and food that is not.
00:24:46.200By the way, that point is not even pro-GMO or anti-GMO.
00:24:49.480I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm teaching people that we as a culture have been genetically modifying organisms for tens of thousands of years, period.
00:25:00.980Now, take it to do, you still want to be against scientists, genetically, genetically modifying organism, go ahead, but understand, understand what the foundation is or isn't of that argument.
00:25:17.540Well, so I'm, I'm just wondering though, if you feel a need that, for instance, you know, I don't feel, or certainly someone like Richard Dawkins doesn't apparently feel, to preserve a kind of political neutrality on certain questions because you serve in a role that is, I mean, so for instance, I've noticed you've, you've been on presidential commissions, you know, science commissions over the years.
00:25:40.820Do you feel, do you feel, do you feel, do you feel, do you feel, do you feel that you need to kind of walk a razor's edge between political passions and polls on questions of religion or, you know, hot button issues of kind of culture war, science, evolution, et cetera, because you're trying to preserve a kind of trust from both sides insofar as that's possible?
00:26:02.560So that's a great, very pointed question.
00:26:05.500So I have, I'm going to unpack it into several variables.
00:26:08.820And if I get distracted in myself, just get me back on track.
00:26:12.820So, so initially I thought I was walking a razor's edge because I, I'm not out here to just offend anybody.
00:26:19.960I just want to enlighten people as an educator.
00:26:23.020That's, I have no other objective in this.
00:26:25.740And I thought that was a razor's edge initially.
00:26:27.920And then I realized, no, it's not actually, it's a rather strong position.
00:26:32.520And that position is there are objective truths out there that you ought to know about.
00:26:38.200And I, as an educator, have some, some, I don't want to call it an obligation.
00:26:42.680Let me say a duty to alert you of those objective truths.
00:26:46.780What you do politically in the face of those objective truths is your business, not my business.
00:26:52.200I have opinions on many things, but they're not the kind of opinions where I give a rat's ass if you agree with my opinion.
00:35:54.780And so I'm trying to, it's my way of saying that governmental decisions, policy, laws need to be secular in a country that preserves religious freedoms.
00:36:09.400Yeah. So, yeah, I'm glad you brought this up because I went out on Twitter yesterday, I think,
00:36:14.280just saying that I was looking forward to speaking with you and asking my Twitter followers what we should talk about.
00:36:19.720And this was probably the, probably no surprise to you, probably the most common question they raised,
00:36:25.560this lack of endorsement of the label atheist, you know, that you're not happily wearing this label.
00:36:32.360I actually, you know, I have a talk I gave some years ago, I think entitled The Problem with Atheism,