Pt. 2 - Neil deGrasse Tyson, STARRY MESSENGER: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

[1:40]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zibby Owens, the creator and host of the award winning podcast that you're listening to right now. Thank you so much. Called moms don't have time to read books. It is a daily podcast three hundred and sixty five days a year, and each day we talk to an author about all of the things related to their career, their book, their life, and more in thirty minutes or less because who has time? I am now an author myself, although I wasn't when I started this podcast, and you can get my new memoir, A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature wherever books are sold starting July 1, and my children's book, Princess Charming. You can learn more about me at zibbyowens.com. But really, you're here to learn more about the authors, and that is what we're going to do. Also, sure to check out all the other podcasts in the ZCast Podcast Network. You can learn more at zcastnetwork.com and definitely check out those shows as well. This is part two of my interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's my first double episode, but it is worth it. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a total genius, and I did not wanna stop him talking. There was just too much to learn. So enjoy part two and enjoy this episode. I think it is one of the most important things and has changed my entire view

[2:57]Neil deGrasse Tyson: on life and death among other things. Enjoy. Okay. Okay. That's just one chapter. I'm sorry. Like, I think our time is up. I'm sorry. That's just life you went straight there. Life and death. I'm I'm like, how can I not ask? Okay. What's the meaning of life, you know? Okay. You know, it's so funny. I do a lot of things. Right? I do Oh, by the way, you I didn't specifically mention meaning of life. I wanna say spend a minute on that. Great. Okay. People ask I've been asked, what is the meaning of life? And first, I don't think that question is as deep as people think it is or want it to be. That's my that's just an opinion. Okay. But often they search for meaning in life. Typically, religions might offer pathways to give you meaning in life. And I've come to realize that maybe meaning in life is not something to be found. Because the question is asked as though it's, you know, behind a tree or under a rock or in the seat cushion, you know, behind in the couch, dig it out of the out of the cushions. Maybe instead, meaning is something you create. So you have more power over meaning than you've admitted to yourself. Now, clearly if organization says, We have meaning in life, come to us, they're preventing you from creating the meaning on your own. And I think on some level that's a little bit unfair because we do have this power. You ask yourself, what do you value? Do you value happiness? Do you value tranquility? Do you value people? Do you value pets, animals? Do something for them that creates meaning. So that the next day you said, this world is better off. It dovetails to the point of lessening the suffering of others. In that case, that could be how meaning comes to you, because you bring meaning to others. And so I've stopped looking for meaning in life and I spend my days, I mean I spend portions of my day reflecting on how I can bring meaning to others because bringing meaning to others brings meaning to me. And and if I can give a quick example, quick well, medium example. Oh my gosh. Okay. I heard a I heard an interview on I think it was NPR. It's one of these interviews that took place in a restaurant and they're just hanging out and you can hear the noise in the background. It's, of course, all audio. And they were interviewing a hockey star. And I don't really know hockey, but apparently this was a big star. Alright? And while they're talking, someone would walk by and ask for his autograph. Okay? And the interviewer said, does that get old? Or does that is that annoying to you? And his answer, I've never forgotten. He said, If my God given gifts as a hockey player are on a level where I can spend ten seconds of my life to give an autograph to someone and it makes their day Mhmm. It's ten seconds versus someone's happiness for a day or more, who is he to deny that infusion of happiness into the world? And I said, Woah. At that time I wouldn't I was hardly known by anybody, so no one was asking me for autographs. But when that started Mhmm. And it began with autographs, now of course it's all selfies. But they don't even know what an autograph is. Because it's selfie, you can post the selfie and then it gives you social media status. But the point is, it's a trifling investment of my time. And to the extent that it brings joy, pleasure, enlightenment. Ideally, they'd ask me a question about the universe and I'd answer it, feeling I can be educator for the moment rather than just target of celebrity. Right. But so I've never forgotten that. And so I will sort of humbly accommodate with such requests if I'm spotted in the street or or wherever whenever that happens. Wow. Okay. Now there's 11 more chapters. I was like, had I all these questions. Was gonna I'm sorry. No. Go. Go. No. I can't our time is already No. No. Okay. I'm serious. It's amazing. You can edit it and take out other stuff. No. No.

[7:24]Zibby Owens: No. It's it's amazing. My one, like, question at the end and I'm I had all this stuff on disability and race and all this stuff. Oh my gosh. We can go there. We can go there.

[7:35]Neil deGrasse Tyson: We spend a minute on disability. Let's spend a minute on disability because

[7:39]Zibby Owens: it's so important and you really question, well, what does what does it mean to be disabled? And you give so many examples, on and even on what it means to be racist and skin color and who even And gender. Yeah. And gender and all of this. But And by the way, they're all they're all You're like, is Jim Abbott disabled? Like are all these people disabled? Is Jim Abbott achieved not despite their disability,

[8:04]Neil deGrasse Tyson: but because of it. Right. Right. And so that forces you to question. Jim Abbott, for those who don't know, he was a pitcher in the major leagues and, pitch for the Yankees for a couple of seasons. And, Yankees is a very storied franchise of course. I happen to be born in The Bronx and it's the Bronx bombers, you know, the Yankees. So so I have authentic, justifiable interest in the Yankees. But he goes to pitch for the Yankees and he pitches a no hitter. And a no hitter, there are not many of this is where you get up and no one gets a hit to make it to first base. Okay? There's about I forgot the number, about 300 of those pitched out of the tens of thousands of games ever pitched. Okay? He was born without a hand. He has only one hand. One hand. Okay? Imagine growing up. I wanna be a baseball pitcher. No, you don't. Imagine what people would be telling him. Mhmm. No, you don't. You have one hand. You gotta be able to field. You gotta wear a glove. How are gonna do this? Mhmm. You can't do this. Look at the forces operating on people who do not match the norms set by others. Those forces are huge and they don't stop whether or not you don't have a hand. Are you female? Oh no, you can't I'm old enough to remember, no one will listen to a female voice for the evening news, they're not authoritative enough, they're not just to hear what society, the disenfranchised of society had to go through just to break through. Yep. These societal expectations of what you can or can't be or what you should or shouldn't be. If you're female, if you're dark skinned, if you were I was growing up, I knew early I wanted to be an astrophysicist, but I was also athletic. They said, Oh, why don't you be an athlete? They one said, Why don't you be an astrophysicist? Even though I my evidence was there, okay, had a telescope, I had a that, that they don't even see that. They saw, they saw me run and they saw my skin color. But so Jim Habit doesn't have a hand, there's a, I give a whole list of people who some of the movies have been made out of from them. And so I think we need to diversify what we embrace and what it is to be human. It involves the autism spectrum as well. There's a term for this now today, it's a great term, it's, neurodiverse, okay? And because think about it, if you think it through, let's say the day comes we have genetic engineering, you can engineer your children to be whatever you want. And what might happen? Oh, I want a perfect child, know, and and design their height, their weight, their temperament, whatever. Well, what are gonna base that on? Is there some model human, like you have model homes, you know? You're gonna buy a home go to this model home and you see how you're supposed to do it. This is where the couch would go and the bed and the bedrooms and everything. Oh, is that how you're gonna design your human? Alright. If you did that, what would that world be? You know, the stepward wives comes to mind where everyone is engineered to be the same when so much of what makes life and civilization interesting is that we're different. Mhmm. It's the different people that are responsible for most of what is interesting in this world. Different in every metric, in every way. So this is just a taste of the mind body chapter there, But we're we're short on time. So that's all I'm gonna say about about that chap. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[13:53]Zibby Owens: This is a paid partnership with Lilly.

[14:55]Zibby Owens: After. My last question. I wanna go back to the lottery, playing the lottery. Playing the lottery. Writing a book and hoping for its success, I feel, is like playing the lottery. And yet everybody keeps writing books. Right? It's impossible. There aren't enough readers. There isn't enough time for all the readers to read all the books, and yet there's this deep compulsion to keep writing, and fabulous books that keep coming out. But having a book reach that level of success is like winning the lottery, and yet everybody keeps trying. What do you make of that?

[15:25]Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think there are people who write, especially novels see, I have the advantage that I write non fiction. By the way, hate the term non fiction. I don't like what I do to be referenced as the negative of something else. Yeah, totally. Give me a word. It's Reality? Reality. Thank you. Thank you. Fiction and reality. How about that? How about that? Don't make the existence of what I do the negation of something else. Okay? Love it. So I write reality, but, but the difference is, there's an unfortunate fact here for novelists is I can write a book, a non fiction book, and if it's published it's probably because somebody sees that it's adding information to the world in some way that's worth preserving. Whereas a novel, if no one reads your novel or no one is interested in it, I don't know that it's gonna be researched later for information Right. About the in the body of knowledge that makes up civilization. Whereas in principle, every non fiction book is some contribution to our knowledge and understanding of how the world works. Even if it's political, that's rife with opinions, someone will go back and say, Oh this is what people thought, here's what that And so even if not everyone reads the book and even if it does not make the best seller list, it's still a cog in the wheel that turns and moves civilization forward. So I think we write and there are people who write because they can't not write. The people write because they they maybe they don't have other platforms. Okay? I I have other platform. I don't need to write. I can just get on it get on one of my platforms and just talk. I could do that. But here's something that hardly anyone knows, practically every sentence I ever utter in public, I've previously written down. So that I've thought about what words to use in that sentence. I've thought about how you think about the flow of that information. I've thought about the timbre and the rhythm and the phrasings and the how how the words work together in sequence, which is a higher level of communication, I think, than just speaking. And you know this because you can look at a exactly transcribed conversation and it's like, what was going on? Alright? You can't because there's a lot of just words that are just there to fill space and it's not what you would write. When I get a chance to write, there's precision, accuracy and tone that I can set. And it's from that from which I draw the words that I speak. And so for me writing has that value even if no one ever read anything I wrote. And I get to think about a perfect sentence that is uneditable by editors. Can I tell you one of my perfect sentences? I would love to hear your sentence. By the way, my idea of perfect sentences began when I was walking down the street and I saw this billboard and it quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I read the sentence and I said, Oh my gosh. Okay. I will never be a novelist. This sentence was so Oh my gosh. It's from The Great Gatsby. Okay? Yep. Here's the sentence. It's describing his party, one of his parties on his Long Island residence. In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths amid the champagne, the whispers, and the stars. It was like, woah. Okay. And it's all there. Okay. You got the man and the girl. Girls would just be younger versions of the men. Right? This is the language of the nineteen twenties. Right? And it's all there. You don't need any other thing to help you picture what's going on. And what's different about in the late the movie that had Leonardo DiCaprio is, they made the party very noisy with a lot of loud music. But I think in the original novel, the champagne, the whispers and the stars, there it is. So I said, damn, okay, I'll never be a novelist. If that's what if that's the kind of sentences you've got to write when you write a novel, count me out because I I don't have that in me. But I I have here's my best sentence ever. You ready? I'm ready. I'm ready. The spinning planets orbit the sun along their appointed paths like pirouetting dancers in a cosmic ballet choreographed by the forces of gravity. So that sentence for me, it's got the metaphor but it's the metaphor is precise. Yes. And I used to dance so that the little bit of dance vocabulary came in there, you know, But it's a rotating planet, pirouetting dancer, someone choreographed it, why are planets moving at all? Gravity is doing everything. So I'm very proud of that, that's my one perfect I love it. So now I'm gonna try for a second perfect sentence and then we'll be good, you know. So what about the poor novelists

[20:42]Zibby Owens: whose books will never be referenced again?

[20:48]Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah. I mean, I don't know what to say. I mean, I I remember when I was in college and I looked at the library, the library had, you know, 3,000,000 books in it or something and I just did the math. And I said, Okay, I'm 18 and I have this many years left, how fast would I have to read a book to get through all 3,000,000 books before I die? And it's like a book every three seconds or something. So then I realized I have to rely on others to guide me to what books to read, who are wiser than I am, who live longer and who so because it's you don't want it to be a crapshoot, you want to have some guidance in it. And you're right, some works of literature are better, objectively better, and objectively more important and significant than others. There's no doubt about it. So I don't have problems using other people's lists. And there are great places online, Goodreads for example, there you track what other people are reading and they comment on it and so there's some focusing there. Alright? You you don't you don't have to go at it cold

[21:54]Zibby Owens: and This podcast for Stop.

[21:57]Neil deGrasse Tyson: This podcast I should have listed that first. You you are a filter in the medium and I think a filter is good, a filter is good. And I guess award ceremonies are also a kind of a filter, you know, the Pulitzer Prizes, the Booker Award, this sort of thing. And so, yeah, you can't do it yourself, unfortunately. There was a date where any learned educated person could have in principle read every book that was ever published, but that was sometime, it was like the '16 early seventeen hundreds And then it rapidly got out of hand. Yeah. So I don't know how I think either no one will read this book or everyone will read this book. What's up? I don't think it'll land in the middle. Everyone's gonna read this book. No, I don't know. Everyone's gonna read this book. Cosmic

[22:46]Zibby Owens: Perspectives and Civilization. This is everything you ever need to know about life itself. What else is there? I mean, come on. Well, yeah, the life and death part kinda brings you brings it home. Yeah. Oh, no. There's so much in there. Yeah. It's amazing. It's a reframing of of everything. It's, you know, it's a new lens through it. It's a telescope. The telescope.

[23:06]Neil deGrasse Tyson: Cosmic the conduit to the cosmos to look back. Yes. One quick thing, if I could steal another minute from you. Okay. One of the things I'm proudest of in the book, in the color and race chapter Yep. I thought to myself, suppose nineteenth century anthropologists were racist black people instead of racist white people. Mhmm. Yep. What might they say? Yep. And so I have three pages I know. Of what a racist I I don't hear all of them. Skin cancer, itchy skin Right. Facial acne. Yes. You've never seen a black kid with pizza face acne. Oh my gosh. No. You have so much here. So you go through the list of things that were just simply ignored by because if you're racist, you have to be at the top. Your race, your color has to be at the top and everybody else is below you. Otherwise, why go through the exercise? So I said, let's make some racist black people and then see. There's another one in so all you have to do is say why white people are closer to chimpanzees than black people are. And they're little things like, if you part other than the hands and the face of a chimp, if you part their hair, their skin is white. Okay? This is completely white. So chimps are white and also they prune each other for lice, you've seen this. Lice outbreaks among black people is extremely rare. Yeah. The lice just doesn't like the hair of black people. Loves the hair of white people. Okay. I've never had lice, just saying. You've never But I bet you had friends who had lice? I've yes. Of course. Yeah. Okay. Other things, there are suicide rate is a fraction that of white people for for black I mean, I I make you just if you cherry pick the the data, that's what you get. And my favorite stupid one was, you've never ever seen black children walk by a tree and say, gee, I wanna live in that tree. It's never happened. That was hilarious. But, you know, white kids would say, I wanna build a tree house. Let's go. So I say So the anthropologists would say, These are the white people wanting to get closer to their roots as chimpanzees returning to the trees. So it was just, it's an attempt to just show you the absurdity of it all and what science can tell you when you look at it, especially with a cosmic perspective. Anyhow, so the book was birthed and there it is, in your hand. Yeah, in the delivery room. I'm holding it, I caught it. Yes, yes, it's not even out, it's not at this moment it's not yet released. So I guess it's still in the what do you call it? The in the room? Delivery room? No. No. The the incubation room. It's The you know The the the The the neo Yeah.

[25:49]Zibby Owens: Well, I'm honored to talk to you about it. And thanks for having me in today. I literally I'm like, you know what? Maybe I'll just make it a double episode. We'll just launch it in two episodes. Why not? Oh, that loud? Oh. I've never done it before, but Okay. I didn't want you to stop talking. Because we went too long. Okay. It's fine. Sure. I love it. You're like, I don't think I'll ever be next to such a genius again the rest of my life. Oh, no. So I'm I'm soaking it up selfishly. Anyway, thank you so much. Thanks for writing it. I'm so glad it came out fully formed. Yes. And I could read it and shift my perspective and all your thoughts today. And how motivating is that? I mean, just so intensely, fundamentally motivating. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on. Alright. Okay. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.