A few weeks ago I went to “The Universe Is Absurd,” an unscripted conversation between Neil deGrasse Tyson and William Shatner at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. What I got was two hours of two very different people thinking out loud together about space, their trip to Antarctica, curiosity, physics, and what it means to explore things you don’t fully understand yet.
It was genuinely one of the most entertaining nights I’ve had in a long time. And one thing Tyson talked about has been stuck in my head ever since.
The NBC Story
At some point during the evening, Tyson told a story about a public speaking lesson he learned early in his career. I remembered the gist of it, but not the details. I thought it might be a helpful framework for me since I’m not terribly comfortable with public speaking. So I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole to find clips of him telling the full story.
In 1995, he had just become director of the Hayden Planetarium when scientists discovered the first planet ever found orbiting a star other than our sun. It was a huge deal. NBC News called and asked him to come on camera and explain it.
He was thrilled and prepared what he described as his best professorial reply. It was detailed and thorough. But NBC aired almost none of it, except a clip of him rotating his hips in imitation of an orbiting planet.
He realized in that moment that he had been speaking in his space, not theirs. He thought they wanted details, to learn something. But what they really wanted was something that a person watching the evening news could remember and maybe even repeat to someone else the next morning.
So he went home and taught himself how to talk to a news reporter. He stood in front of a mirror and had friends bark topic words at him such as “Saturn,” “rings,” “black hole,” and “Big Bang.” For each of these, he practiced building a three-sentence soundbite. Each sentence had a specific job. The first sentence delivers a core nugget of information. The second connects it to something the audience already understands.The third makes it “tasty,” meaning something that makes the audience smile and want to turn to the person next to them and repeat it.
He compared the discipline of it to writing a haiku. Every word earns its place or it doesn’t stay.
Here’s an example of his:
“Gas clouds in space become so cold that atoms come together and make molecules. These molecules then come together to make dust, which is forged from stars that gave their lives beforehand. This dust ultimately makes planets and life—so we are stardust.”
His deeper point was that a soundbite isn’t a dumbed-down explanation. It’s an invitation. It triggers enough curiosity that the person goes and learns more on their own. The “We are stardust” example is very tasty. Who wouldn’t want to learn more about that and tell their friends?
Why That Matters to Me
I’m studying astrodynamics and mission design at Purdue, which means most of what I work on, such as trajectory optimization, orbital mechanics, and deep space navigation, are not something you can summarize at a dinner party. The math alone can fill pages, and that’s before you get to the interesting part.
But the career I want isn’t going to involve talking only to people who already understand that math. Mission design decisions get presented to program managers. Budgets have to be signed off on by executives. Citizens and politicians have to be convinced that the spending is worthwhile. If we’re actually going to get to Mars, we’ll have to explain things to a whole lot of people who have never taken an orbital mechanics class in their lives.
If I can’t explain what I do in a way that makes someone lean forward instead of glaze over, I’ve lost them. And if I’ve lost them, it doesn’t matter how good the work is. I won’t get the project funded, and I might not even get me funded.
Tyson’s mirror exercise stuck with me because it’s so practical. It doesn’t mean I have to dumb things down when I talk with non-engineers, it just means that I have to distill them down to their simplest essence. And make it interesting enough that someone will want to know more. That’s a skill that (like most skills) will take practice.
Two Very Different Kinds of Curious
The other thing I kept thinking about when I was watching Tyson and Shatner together was how differently curiosity can impact two people.
Tyson is analytical, precise, and data-driven, while Shatner is emotional, experiential, and philosophical. When Shatner talked about his actual spaceflight and how he felt while looking back at Earth, it was visceral in a way that no technical description could convey. When Tyson responded, he brought it back to physics and scale and what that experience actually represents scientifically.
They both were enormously curious; they were just curious in different ways.
I think about that in the context of engineering, too. We’re trained to be precise and systematic, and that’s the job. But the reason any of us ended up in aerospace in the first place is usually something more like Shatner’s side of it. We all have the same sense of wonder, imagination, and a feeling that space matters in a way that’s hard to fully articulate. Staying connected to that, even while doing deeply technical work, is something that matters to me.
What I’m Taking With Me
I went to the Saban Theatre expecting to be entertained, and I was. But I also walked out with something more practical: a reminder that being good at the technical work is only part of the job.
I came away with the realization that engineers and scientists who get missions funded, who inspire the next generation, and who can make you care about what’s happening 140 million miles away are probably also the ones who can tell you why it matters in three sentences that are so good you want to repeat them.
I think I have a lot of strengths, but I’m not sure that’s one of them just yet. So I guess it’s time to start practicing.