What's the impact you want to have on the world?
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.
Because if people say “This is true because Tyson said so.”,
then I've failed.
That’s not how you teach someone.
That’s teaching by authority.
I want to teach you how to think about the world.
Then you say “I have a new way to understand the world."
and you can just run off, 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 have something to do with it.
On my tombstone, I want the epitaph
"BE ASHAMED TO DIE UNTIL YOU HAVE SCORED SOME VICTORY FOR HUMANITY."
And the victory for humanity is not a victory for yourself.
It’s not statues, it’s not your name,
It’s just humanity is better off.
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.
Not even about that.
But what do you have to give
with no expectation of return?
No one ever told me
that I had to search for the meaning of life.
Many people look for meaning in life
as though it’s going to be under a rock or behind a tree.
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.
Meaning to me is, do I know more about the world today than I did yesterday?
That enhances meaning for me.
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?
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 ten minutes of my life
into the happiness or enlightenment or the reduced suffering of someone else,
I'd be irresponsible if I did not.
If Einstein were here and we're talking with Einstein,
we could talk for hours and hours.
You know what question would never come out of our mouth?
Is, “what college did you go to?”
I want to go 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.
Is that who become the shakers and movers of the world?
I don’t think so.
School should as a minimum preserve that curiosity for you.
If you lost some of it, coz 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,
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
at 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.
What was it about your dad
that impacted you so much that you still carry today?
For me, at least, it was, what level of wisdom
did he glean in his life
and then successfully communicate it to me,
either by example or by just explicit statement?
For example, in high school
he was in gym class,
and they were lining up,
and they were about to enter the next athletic unit,
and it was track and field,
and the gym instructor pointed to my father on line and said:
"Cyril Tyson, everyone, look at him.
He does not have the body type that would excel in track."
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 the reason to start running.
And he started track in that moment.
He decided that 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.
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, there was still an Olympics that was called the GI Olympics,
and it was held in Hitler's Stadium.
So he competed in Hitler's Stadium in the late 1940s.
That’s just one of the great memories of his life.
But the reason I'm saying all of that is
they were competing against the New York Athletic Club.
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's 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 his best friend, Johnny Johnson,
was coming around the back stretch,
might’ve been the quarter-mile,
coming on the final straightaway,
and a runner from the York Athletic Club, a few paces behind them
and Johnny Johnson overhears that runner’s coach say: "catch that …"
And he overheard this.
So what did he say to himself? He said:
"this is what, he's not going to catch that ..."
That extended his lead to the finish line.
And he tells this story, not with any bitter tone.
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.
I met Carl Sagan when I was 17.
I was applying to colleges. He was at Cornell.
I had been accepted at Cornell,
but I didn't know what college I wanted to go to,
and the admissions office saw that I wasn't totally in the moment there.
I didn't know this.
They’d 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. 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, wow!
This is... Now, he hadn't done
That's how old I am.
But he was already famous,
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 me 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.
Yeah, Okay, here!
And he signed it to me.
Neil Tyson, future astronomer, signed, Karl.
Later in the day. I'm ready to go back to New York.
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? 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.
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 things?
Yeah. I have an unorthodox approach to what we did with our kids.
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.
Let's say there's a little toddler walking here, crawling on the ground.
It comes up, and they start grabbing this. What's it for?
No, don't touch that!
This was an experiment waiting to happen that you just squashed.
This is a cup that has water in it, okay?
This is breakable.
The kid doesn't know that.
They want to experiment.
So they'll grab it. It'll fall. It'll break.
Water will spill all over.
That was an experiment you just prevented.
They are experimenting with their environment.
Everything is new to them.
I saw a woman
walking with their kid.
The kid has galoshes on and a raincoat on,
and they're coming down the walkway,
and this is a 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,
and what does 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 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.
And I have pretty high confidence that they'll retain that curiosity
through the turbulent middle school years into high school.
And what is an adult scientist
but a kid who's never lost the curiosity?
We live in a very fractured world today.
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 meet here,
even if it's only virtual.
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.
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 …"
doesn't have power over Johnny Johnson.
Unless you allow him to.
There's a famous quote from Martin Luther King:
“You can only be ridden if your back is bent.”
When I grew up, 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 it’s “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
And so this was an inoculation against hate speech, really.
Against just evil people, just nasty people.
You were able to develop a set, a system of defenses
against unpleasant people out there.
And I haven't heard that phrase in a long time.
What I think has happened over the years is we came to learn as a civilization
that words can be hurtful.
I don't have a problem with that.
This is 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 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
by saying things about you.
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?
Unless you are between me and some goal,
then I have to navigate that someway.
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, "Ok, 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?"
Yes, longer. It's more effort, It's more energy,
but on some level, it's sort of same shit, different day.
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.
When you approach a topic that you don't know well,
what is your actual process to learn?
Thank you. Great question.
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 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.
What I do for the public, 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.
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