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<i>
Cosmos</i> yet. 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. Subtitles by the Amara.org community
