(upbeat music) - [Alison] On the season premiere of "The A List," I sit down with a man who has spent a storied career as our conduit to the cosmos.

- But what fascinated me was its immensity and how much we knew, but more importantly for me, how much we had yet to discover.

And that the depths of our not knowing is what attracted me.

And from that day onward, I was starstruck.

- Join me as I sit down with renowned Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, coming up next on "The A List."

(upbeat music continues) (gentle music) Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and author who has spent a remarkable career making the science of the vast universe accessible to the rest of us here on earth.

He serves as director of the world renowned Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, has written nearly 20 books, and has received NASA's highest civilian honor, the Distinguished Public Service Medal.

Whether he's sharing his knowledge and humor as a television host, or advising on the future of the US aerospace industry, Neil's passion for the universe has made him a trusted and beloved guide to our understanding of cosmic concepts and discoveries.

Well Neil, welcome to "The A List."

- Oh, does that mean I'm an a-list person?

- You are.

- Okay, thank you, thank you.

- I think being with you makes me an A List person honestly.

- I try not to rank the world.

I think that you become vain or bitter depending on what side of that you land on.

- Well, and welcome to Chattanooga.

I don't know if you've been here before.

- I was here once in my life, 2011.

And I have to like dig up photos to sort of remember, but I'm delighted to be back.

- It's changed a bit.

And I would say welcome to my home because I really wanna take this over.

We're actually at the Edwin, but as you can see from the view, I mean anybody would be lucky to make this their temporary or permanent home so to speak.

I might just like stay here and see when they kick me out, so thanks.

- So the Edwin, everyone just knows, that's the Edwin Hotel.

- Oh, it's iconic that way, right?

Well we're thrilled that you're here and also thrilled to, I have so many questions.

- So do I, about the universe.

- About the universe.

- We should all be overloaded with questions every day of our lives.

- Well, thanks to you, we are, because you have instilled, I think you call it a cosmic curiosity in all of us.

- And I think what I'm trying to do is put the curiosity into adults, back into adults that we all once had as children.

Think about it.

When you're a kid, you're poking at everything.

And many parents constrain that because children are entropy machines.

No matter what they touch, it gets disordered.

And you want to keep a neat house or apartment.

And so you prevent the kids from doing it.

But if you actually watch them, they're experimenting with everything around them.

And every time you constrain that, you're restricting their ability to probe the forces of nature.

And so I like free range kids as well as free range adults.

- Well, while I'm boundlessly curious about the vast universe, I'm also very curious about the small little prompt or spark that got you interested in space.

- Why'd you think it was a small spark?

- Okay, maybe it was a giant pain.

(both laughing) - You're making assumptions there.

When I was nine years old, in a first visit, family visit to our local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium, where I now serve as director, and I guess I've been there for several decades now.

But I'm nine years old.

I grew up in a city, I'm a native of New York City.

No one has any relationship with the night sky.

You look up, there's a building, you look higher, there's more building, you look higher, there's like light pollution.

And back in the day, there was much more air pollution.

So you're hardly getting through that.

So no one thinks about the night sky.

And at age nine, I walk into the planetarium dome, big comfortable seats.

And then the lights dim and the stars come out.

And I thought it was a hoax.

I said, "What, is this the night sky?"

I know what the night sky looks like.

There's three stars in it.

I've seen it from the Bronx, right?

It's an entertaining hoax, but a hoax nonetheless.

I was pretty sure of it.

But what fascinated me was its immensity and how much we knew, but more importantly for me, how much we had yet to discover.

And that the depths of our not knowing is what attracted me.

And from that day onward, I was starstruck.

It would take about two years by the time I was 11, when I figured out you can make a career of studying the universe.

- Is that when you got your first telescope?

- I got it when I was 12.

- Oh, when you were 12.

- On my 12th birthday.

Yeah, yeah.

So my parents noticed this interest germinating and then fed the interest, which is I think not what most parents do.

They'll try to force an interest on their children.

And I can be certain, and so convey that my interest germinated organically within me and not by the force of someone trying to live their lives through me, as so many parents do with their kids.

So by age 11, if you ask me that annoying question that adults always ask children, which is?

- What do you wanna be when you grow up?

- [Neil] I would say astrophysicist.

- You knew that word.

- At age 11, yes.

- You knew what to call it?

- Oh yeah.

And usually someone, oh, you wanna be a doctor?

Aunt Matilda's a doctor, or Uncle Joe's a lawyer, I'd say astrophysicist.

The conversation kind of ended there because no one had a comeback on that.

But knowing my interest that early allowed me to align activities.

Think of how much time you spend doing nothing or just wandering.

Now wandering isn't always bad, but if you have a mission, a personal mission statement, then so much of that downtime can be aligned in the service fulfilling that dream.

And so I could read books on math and physics and astronomy very early.

My parents noticed that.

And this is how I was introduced to the remainder table in bookstores.

I don't know if they still have it, but when the publisher can't sell- - You mean bookstores or the remainder table, right?

- The remainder of bookstores that are out there?

Occasionally back then, the publisher would shake their warehouse tree and books would fall out that were not otherwise selling well.

And they just wanna make room and get some cash flow.

So there'd be a table of books and they'd be marked, you know.

Books were 50 cents, 25 cents.

My parents would see these and buy any book on math and physics in the universe they could find, not knowing anything about what was in the book.

So I had this huge library in middle school of science books, and I consumed every single one of them.

I still have many from that era.

- Were your parents science people?

- [Neil] Oh, no, no, not in the least.

- What did they do?

- Oh no no.

My father's a sociologist.

Was active in the civil rights movement.

Worked under Mayor Lindsay in New York City during the 1960s.

Turbulent time in America, especially in the cities.

And my mother, by prior arrangement, was a housewife raising the children.

She was home every time we came back from school.

Something I never have taken for granted because not all families are two parent households.

And after we became empty nest, she went back to school and then got a degree in gerontology, just caring for old people.

So I had two parents that were very embedded in the human condition.

And so I stayed grounded the whole time I was floating in the stars.

Just thinking about people, places, the condition of life on earth and civilization that houses it.

(bright music) - Neil devoted his teenage years to expanding his knowledge.

And by the age of 15, he had already made a big enough impression on the astronomy community that he was being solicited to give lectures.

It seems clear that from that first visit to the Hayden Planetarium, his path forward was written in the stars.

So what did that look like for you through high school and then college?

Because it's one thing to have goals, aspirations, dreams when you're nine or 11.

And it's another thing to realize them academically and to know you have not just the goal to do it, but the aptitude to achieve it.

- Yeah, I don't think of aptitude.

That's not a word that I use or think about.

Aptitude implies you either have it or you don't.

If you don't have it, go walk the other way.

I'm an educator, I can't divide people in that way.

Or I choose not to.

Do you have ambition?

Do you wanna work hard?

That's good enough for me because once you are told you don't have the aptitude, then all of a sudden that person who told you that closed off your ambitions if you had ambitions in that direction because they're passing judgment on what you are capable in life of achieving and what you are not.

And that is so anathema to me as an educator, as a person who's had people say that about me, no.

- I was gonna say it seems very personal to you.

- Well, because I am where I am not because of the support of teachers, but in spite of the absence of support.

So in school, there is no teacher at any year K through 16, so that would be high school and college.

There is no teacher anywhere that I had who, if you went back to that classroom, would they have said, "See that guy Tyson?

Watch him.

He'll go far."

None of them.

And you can ask, and I think I've come pretty far, and it's not like I was a late bloomer.

I've known since age nine what my path, what I wanted my path to be, to become.

So what's going on here?

I tell you what's going on because I've thought long and hard about it.

Teachers have, the school system, let me not blame a teacher.

The school system is designed to pass judgment on your promise as a person with intellect entering this world.

And how do they pass that judgment?

They give you exams, and they look at your score.

And if your scores are below, you stand over here.

If you're above, you're gonna excel and you're gonna achieve.

So there's this sorting that goes on, especially back in my day where there was the fast class and the medium class, and you knew, it was encoded in the names of the class, the class numbers.

You knew if you were not in the fast class.

They never put me in the fast class.

And meanwhile, I started an astronomy club, I got a telescope.

I walked dogs to buy an even better telescope in the glory days of dog walking, where you didn't have to clean up the dog poop, it just pooped, you didn't even lose stride.

Just kept walking.

50 cents per dog per walk.

That money accumulated quickly.

I bought a camera, dark room equipment, telescope in high school.

So I did all of this.

That's not in the grade in school.

Nobody sees that.

They think that their measure of you is the measure of you.

And so much else about me was going on.

And so no, I am where I am because of an inner drive, an inner love for the universe that was not gonna take no for anyone's judgment about what I should or shouldn't be in life.

That's my answer to your simple question.

- Did I read somewhere that you turned down Carl Sagan to study with him at Cornell?

- Yeah, that's part of the story.

I usually don't finish it out just because it's touching up to that point.

So I had applied for college.

I'm in high school, and my application is dripping with the universe.

I mean, by now I'm 17, and I've been interested in the universe since I was nine.

And I did a lot in that time period.

It's all over my application.

And I applied and I was accepted in several schools, Cornell among them.

And I was still thinking about it.

And I got a letter from Carl Sagan saying, "I hear you're considering coming to Cornell and you're interested in the universe.

If you come visit, I'd be happy to show you the lab to help you make a decision."

So planned a trip to Ithaca, New York from New York City.

It's like a five hour bus ride up there, in the winter this was, and he met me there outside the building, showed me the lab, and I'll never forget this.

He did a no look grab behind his desk, just like a shelf thing, no look, and pulls out.

There's a book that he wrote.

And I said, "That's badass."

(laughs) I said to myself, if you're written so many books, whatever book you grab is your book, I said wow.

And he signed it to me, to Neil, future astronomer.

I still have that book of course.

The day ended, he took me back, he drove me back to the bus station.

It started to snow.

Not an uncommon fact in Ithaca.

And he was worried.

And he said, "Here's my home phone number."

If the bus doesn't come through, call me, spend the night with my family, and leave tomorrow."

And the bus made it through, but I've had more than one person say that I just should have lied and said the bus didn't make it.

- The bus never came.

(bright music) Though he ultimately decided to continue his studies at Harvard, that early encounter with Carl Sagan taught Neil an important lesson about how to navigate his future work as an educator.

Dedicated to engaging his students with kindness, curiosity, and encouragement.

It is this same approach that has made Neil such an impactful science communicator over the course of his career.

Whether it's through the numerous columns, essays, and books he's authored, or through his work as a TV host in series like "Cosmos" and "Nova Science Now," Neil has played an important role in expanding public knowledge and excitement about our universe.

So you have plans, aspirations, intentions, I wanna use the correct terminology to become an astrophysicist.

What prepared you though to be the astrophysicist?

Really, I mean, anywhere you go, right?

People say, "Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're my astrophysicist."

Not even, I mean a lot of people say my favorite, but most of the time we claim you, I use we in the journal sense as our personal spokesperson, our personal entry into curiosity for the cosmic universe, our personal guide for what's happening on the planet.

That's gotta be a lot of responsibility.

- So I think I can condense all those words to perhaps I'm your conduit to the cosmos.

- There we go.

I love alliteration, yes, perfect.

- So when you say prepared me for it, that implies that I studied for it in advance.

And that's not what happened at all.

It was, I get interviewed, and I'd see the interview on TV, and I'd ask myself, could I have done a better job?

Could my phrasing have been a little more inventive?

Could I have said something that would've made you smile or at least make you go, "Oh, I never knew that."

So that the next morning at the water cooler, you wanna share that information.

And then not realizing at the time, I am inventing my own version of a soundbite.

A soundbite needs to be short, tasty, make you hungry for more, and you come out feeling enlightened.

It's gotta do all of that, but do it succinctly.

And so I practiced that after one failure, after the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995.

By then, I am the acting director of the planetarium in New York City.

Not yet fully appointed.

And that was at NBC News, I think it was NBC, sends up one of their action cams, you know, with the satellite dish and the camera.

Why?

Because they want an interview with the director.

They didn't know me from anything, but I had title.

So they said, "Could you explain the discovery of this new planet," because it was banner headlines.

Right now, there's nearly 6,000 known planets.

They don't make headlines anymore.

But back then, they did.

So they come up and I give my best professorial reply, because I taught at Princeton, I taught at place, I taught at Columbia.

These are, I was Professor Neil.

So I know how to give a lecture.

I get my best professorial reply.

Well, there's a doppler shift and the wavelength shifts and you can't see the planet itself.

It's not giving off much light, but it's gravity influences the host star so that it's not that the planet is going around the star, they're both going around their common center of gravity.

And so it's more like a jiggle like this that this host star does.

And that's what you measure.

And you infer the presence of the planet.

Gave my whole explanation.

And then I said, "When is this gonna air?"

They said tonight.

So I called everybody, "I'm gonna be on TV tonight."

So I'm looking at it and all they used from the interview was me doing this.

And I said, okay, all right, all right.

They came to me in my space, but they really want something that works in their space.

And that from that moment on, I said, "I will forevermore perfect the soundbite."

- Okay, I know you wake up every morning curious and asking questions.

Is there one question still that keeps you up at night?

- [Neil] Yeah.

- What is it?

(Neil laughs) - I wonder whether the human brain, the human mind is smart enough to figure out the entirety of how the universe works.

I just wonder that.

We'd like to think we're smart enough.

But who said we're smart?

Who said humans are smart?

Tell me.

- Humans.

- Humans, we said it, okay?

We said we are smart.

So what measure is that really when you think about it?

All right?

There could be something about the universe, which to understand will fall completely out of the neurological capacity of the human mind to figure out.

No matter how hard you try, I'm pretty sure this statement is true.

No matter how hard you try, you will never teach long division to a chimpanzee.

That's not happening.

Is there something like long division in the actual universe that a much smarter species would do trivially, but it's so beyond our capacity that to them, we just look like chimps just bouncing around.

We have planes and cars, and to us, that's advanced, and they just chuckle at it.

Say, "Look at what they think they are.

Isn't that cute?"

So I lay awake at night wondering if we are smart enough to figure out the universe.

- And if you ever do interact with another species.

- Aliens, you can say it.

- Aliens.

- Yes.

- What do you want them to know?

- I would first say, "I'm not taking you to our leader."

(laughs) That would never be a good idea, no matter who the leader is in the history of the world, okay?

Let's establish that upfront.

What you wanna do is, I would of course try to communicate.

It's possible that we're too stupid to communicate with it.

- Think about it.

How much do we know what's going on in the minds of chimps, our closest genetic relative?

We know if they're hungry or they're angry.

That's kind of about it.

We can't fully communicate with the closest species on earth to us, our intellect relative to its, that gap is sufficient.

We don't even know how to communicate.

Now imagine a species, an alien that has that same intelligence gap to us that we have to the chimps.

We would be incapable of understanding their simplest thoughts.

I could talk to a chimpanzee and say, "I got a meeting now at 2:00, then I'm flying to LA.

When I come back, I wanna go by the grocery store and I'll pick up some bananas and we can eat at 12 noon tomorrow."

The chimp is gonna understand one word in that entire sentence.

Bananas.

All the rest, what does it mean?

Time, noon, California, Los Angeles, airplane.

They have no understanding of it at all.

So the idea that we would be able to communicate with a more intelligent species than us is reeking with hubris.

Because the reverse might also be true, we are too stupid for them to figure out how to talk to us.

So I would try to show symbols of our achievements, like the periodic table of elements.

They would have different representations, but the organization of that chart is surely universal.

Pythagorean theorem, remember that?

A square plus B. I would show triangles.

- That's one thing I do remember from- - The Pythagorean theorem.

So I would try to get the, how much of science can I communicate to an alien using the symbols of science itself?

And I'd bring in other scientists.

I would so leave politicians out of that room.

They wouldn't know what to do with it.

- Well let's just be clear- - They would think they would know, but they won't.

- If I ever meet an alien.

- You call me, call me.

- And they say, "Take me to your leader," I'm coming straight to you.

You give me your number.

- Call me, I'm there for it.

- If the bus breaks down, I'm calling you.

- You call me.

And what I would do, I would organize a meeting with the National Academy of Sciences.

- You've thought this out.

- Oh yeah.

In fact, anytime I'm alone with a telescope in a backyard looking up, I want to get abducted.

I want that beam to come down and I'd chill with the aliens and then come back.

- Take me with you.

(Neil laughs) Take me off this earth, I mean.

So yeah, that's how I feel.

- Well, thank you for sparking not only curiosity in the context of this interview, but the cosmic curiosity that you spark in everyone who has the pleasure to interact with you.

- Well thank you.

I have one last bit of advice for an alien encounter.

- I'd love it.

- If there's some part of the organism that's just sticking out, okay?

Don't just grab it and shake it, okay?

You don't know what part of their anatomy that is.

Just recognize what human rituals are that might not be shared by aliens.

- I mean, we've heard it here first, right?

Don't say you weren't one.

- And don't even like raise your hand in any way.

You don't know what gestures could trigger them, all right?

Just be yourself, yes.

- Thanks, Neil.

- All right.

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