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.
I can say from the era in which I grew up,
I don't care what you say to me, OK?
You can only be ridden if your back is bent.
On my tombstone,
I want the epitaph
"Be ashamed to die
until you have scored some victory for humanity."
Many people look for meaning in life.
As though it's going to be under a rock
or behind a tree.
Oh, there's my meaning.
You have more power than that.
You have the power to create meaning in your life
rather than passively look for it.
Meaning to me is, do I know more
about the world today than I did yesterday?
That enhances meaning for me.
And if that accumulates and accrues daily
in a month you- you know way more than you did than just that day later
so that you continue to grow.
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.
You can draw a line in the sand between people who transgress
but do not hold power over you.
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
"Stick and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me"
I haven't heard that phrase in a long time.
I don't hear it recited in the elementary schools.
What I think has happened over the years is
we came to learn as a civilization that words can be hurtful.
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.
I can say from the era in which I grew up
I don't care what you say to me.
Unless you are between me and some goal
then I'll have to navigate that someway.
If there's a racist person or a sexist person or
a person with some kind of cultural bias
I want to know that actually.
I want you to say everything you want to say
then I’ll say, okay, that's who you are, that's how you're thinking.
So now, what do I need to do
because you're in my way.
Do I dig under you, go around you, leap over you
or do I go this way
and then come out the other side. Yeah, it's longer, it's more effort,
it's more energy
but on some level it's sort of the same thing, different day.
I can't say you're being racist, you're being... that's not...
you got to navigate it. I think high school,
that's where you learn how to deal with difficult people.
There are people who are nasty
you're going to have to navigate them.
There are people who you cannot interact with for whatever reason or another
they're going to be in the cubicle next to you in your workplace.
So I think we undervalue the total social pot
that
people are tossed into in their high school experience.
They want to say, "Oh, I could have learned more
but I had to deal with all these people."
Hey, having to deal with all these people is now in your portfolio.
Your motivation for the guests that you have in this couch.
They...
they had some vision statement
and they have grit.
Okay, they got knocked down, they stood back up
they tried another way, they got knocked down again
then they were successful either measured by wealth or influence or...
or just joy in their life's passions.
For me, what I do for the public
80+ percent of it is driven by
duty
not by ambition.
That's how I view it. If that were the case.
This is how I ended up hosting Cosmos in 2014.
Ann Druyan, the widow of Carl Sagan
who was hugely talented.
She approached me and said,
"Would you consider hosting Cosmos?" I said, "I don't..."
there's a dozen people, maybe half dozen others
who would jump at this opportunity.
I don't need to do this.
I really don't.
Then I thought about it and I said, well, I met Carl Sagan when I was 17.
I was applying to colleges, he was at Cornell
I had been accepted at Cornell but didn't know what college I wanted to go to
and the admissions office saw that I wasn't totally in the moment there.
They had forwarded my application to him
for his reaction and he sent me a letter.
And I get this letter and I open it and 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?
He met me...
outside his building on a Saturday.
He did something really cool, he reached back, grabbed a book off the shelf
it was one of his books and he signed it to me.
Neil Tyson, future astronomer. Signed Carl.
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.. 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.
If we can fold this memory
into this- this next cosmos
then we have a way
to justify who and what I am as the next host
because a torch got passed.
It wasn't passed in 2014
it was passed in 1975
to Neil Tyson, future astronomer.
I still have that book.
And what is an adult scientist?
But a kid who's never lost the curiosity.
I bet most of your people who have 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.
In school they view you as this empty vessel that they pour information in
and you test it over here you get a high grade, you're praised.
You might even give the commencement speech.
Is that who become the shakers and movers of the world?
I don't think so.
When you come down the steps on the last day of school
you are not singing the Alice Cooper song
Schools out forever!
You will be, there will be a sad song you'll be singing
saying gee...
I got to go 2 or 3 months without learning anything.
You should be sad that school is over,
not happy.
And so you leave school
and you say to yourself, I now know how to learn.
I now have a curiosity of all things
I have yet to be exposed to
and I will now become a lifelong learner.
I read things
that take me to places where other people think.
What was it about your dad
that impacted you so much that you still carry today?
For me, at least was...
what level of wisdom
did he glean in his life
and then successfully communicate to me?
Either by example
or by just explicit statement.
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 in line
and said
Cyril Tyson, everyone look at him.
He does not have the body type
that would excel in track.
And he says, what?
No one is going to tell me what I can't do
in my life.
And he used that as a reason to start running.
Within a few years of that he became world class.
In 1948
the Olympics was not yet ready to come back
to us because we're still reeling, rowling
from the second world war.
Instead, there was still an Olympics
it was called the GI Olympics
and it was held in Hitler's Stadium.
So he competed in Hitler's Stadium
in the late 1940s
But the reason why I'm saying all of that is
There wa's a friend of his named Johnny Johnson.
They were competing against the New York Athletic Club,
the New York Athletic Club at the time
accepted only white protestants.
So there was another club called the Pioneer Club
which took everybody who was not accepted to the New York Athletic Club
which was basically Blacks and Jews.
And his best friend Johnny Johnson
okay
Was coming around the back stretch
might have been the quarter-mile, coming on the final straightaway
and a runner from New York Athletic Club is a few paces behind him
and Johnny Johnson overhears that runner's coach
say,
"catch that N***"
And he overheard this
and so what did he say to himself?
He said,
"This is one N*** he ain't going to catch"
and that extended his-his-his lead
to the finish line.
And he tells this story
not with any bitter tone.
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.
My last question, 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.
I become irrelevant
and because if people say, this is true because Tyson said so
then I failed.
That's not how you teach someone.
That's- that's teaching them by authority.
I don't.. you know, just no
I want.. I want to teach you how to think about the world
and then you say, I have a new way to understand the world
and you just run off. You don't even look back
because a new level of hunger
has descended upon you.
And methods and tools to feed that hunger
are now accessible to you.
So my impact would be
that others are impacted
and they don't even remember
that I had something to do with it.