The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Brutal Truth About Astrology! Our Breath Contains Molecules Jesus Inhaled!
13 Oct 2025
Chapter 1: What does Neil deGrasse Tyson say about the influence of astrology on Gen Z?
Surveys find that roughly 80% of Gen Z believe in astrology, and many allow it to influence major life decisions.
But what would be sad is if that number got to 100%, then this civilization just goes back to the cave, where everything that happened in the natural world was created by forces beyond our knowledge and understanding. So if you want to think you're not in control of your fate because the sun, moon, and planets are, it's a free country.
but I'm creating meaning in my life because I can control that.
But is there anything that the universe does to influence us?
Yes.
Really?
Yeah, and I'll tell you how. Ready? Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the most recognizable voices in modern science who turns the mysteries of the universe into simple truths and simple truths into life lessons.
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Chapter 2: How does Neil deGrasse Tyson define the concept of oneness?
As a scientist, it's disturbing how easily people divide each other based on skin color, religion, what food you eat, what language they speak, and then they find some other philosophy that differs, and then they go to war. But when I step back with a cosmic perspective, you realize how ridiculous it is.
Give me the cosmic perspective.
Well, there's nothing that we can put on the table that can rival the measurements of the universe. And we are literally composed of stardust. So when people think they're different, they have DNA in common with all of the life forms on Earth. Like, you have 20% identical genes to a banana. Excuse me. Not just you. And that's not all.
Chapter 3: What insights does Neil provide about our DNA and its connection to other life forms?
There are molecules that went in and out of your lungs that are in China being breathed by people now and go further back. Jesus inhaled them. So how's that for oneness with others?
That can't be true.
And that's the next problem. People value what they think is true more than what is true. That's a recipe for the unraveling of civilization as we know it. But as a scientist, show me the data.
And as someone that knows so much about the universe and objective truth, I've got a lot of questions. So what do you think is the probability of me getting to another planet in my lifetime?
Chapter 4: How does Neil deGrasse Tyson explain the relationship between mortality and meaning in life?
And then could you make the case that the universe is simulated by some sort of advanced life form? And also, did humans evolve at some point to believe? And do you think you would be happier if you believed in God?
Oh, so you're going to spice this up a bit.
Okay, so... Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.
And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. I've been watching a lot of videos of yours, I think, because I've reached the stage in my life where I've become really existentially curious.
I think we all do at some point. And especially the more you've lived, the more it all sort of, you asked, what does it all mean? How does it all come together? What will it mean to me in five years, ten years? I don't know if you're old enough to think about your mortality, but that's a thing. When you have fewer years left than the years you've lived.
And you can, I think the way they say it is there's, you can have a good expectation to live as long as your parents did. I lost both of them in the last five years. So that's my horizon. And the fact that we die has a capacity to bring focus into the remaining time you're alive.
Because think about it, if knowing you're going to die brings focus and purpose and resolve and action, then if you live forever, what's your hurry? For me, knowing I'm going to die gives meaning. to my remaining life. Whereas if I'm never going to die, then mathematically that would mean I'd lead a life of no meaning at all.
Because there's no way to focus an infinity amount of time into anything and have it be meaningful. So I'm taking mortality as a very serious force operating on happiness, productivity. Can you do something for the world? And on my tombstone, What I want to say – what I want it to say is a quote from Horace Mann. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
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Chapter 5: What happens if the Earth gets swallowed by a black hole?
At that point, light can't even escape. Light is the fastest thing in the universe. If light can't escape, if you fall in, you don't escape either. There's no better description of a hole than that. And worse yet, it's a hole in any direction you approach it. Not just a hole in the street or in the floor. It's a three-dimensional hole. And how do we know it's there?
Because it distorts the fabric of space and time around it. We see galaxies behind concentrations of matter, black holes, and the shape of the galaxy is distorted. Because Einstein tells us that gravity distorts the fabric of space and time. That's one way we discover black holes. Another way is most stars in the night sky are binary and multiple star systems, most of them.
Chapter 6: How do we know black holes exist?
You can't see it because you just have human vision. You whip out a telescope, you see, oh my gosh, there are two stars, not just one. If there's a pair of stars and one of them becomes a black hole and this one ages, it expands and some of its material spills onto and orbits around the event horizon of the black hole.
This swirling material gets hotter and hotter and hotter and it radiates X-rays and ultraviolet. We have X-ray and ultraviolet telescopes that see every one of these in the night sky. They're all black holes.
And it's created from an explosion?
There's a star that wants to explode, but it has so much mass, the explosion doesn't overcome the gravity, and the star collapses down on itself to make a black hole. There's one way to make a black hole.
So our sun, when that runs... It's not going to become black.
It's pretty wimpy in that department.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of every breath we take?
It'll still kill us, but for different reasons. So the mass of the object is so big that it can't actually explode because the gravitational pull inwards is so strong.
Correct. That's above a certain threshold. Within there, there's the stars that the explosion is greater than what the gravity can contain, and it makes a supernova. And those are the stars that spread heavy elements across the galaxy, enabling us to even exist.
So I'm going to read this again. A golf ball-sized black hole would weigh more than Earth and swallow it whole, leaving behind something the size of a lime.
Yeah, so when black holes eat, they get bigger. So a lime is bigger than a golf ball, but not by very much. You can calculate what the size is. Where would everything go? It's in there.
It's compressed down inside the hole. And everything near it's going to get pulled in there as well. If it comes too close, right.
If it comes too close. Yeah, you can keep your distance. Black holes, they're not giant sucking devices. I mean, if you keep your distance, if the sun became a black hole right now, we would still orbit it. The gravity we feel at our distance is no different.
You say that if the sun suddenly shut off, we'd freeze at minus 462 Fahrenheit, which is the background temperature of the universe.
Yes.
Once the stored energy ran out.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Neil deGrasse Tyson have about regret?
And then you'll live on Earth until the Earth's energy died out. Ideally, by then, you just go to another planet. I mean, why not?
How long has our sun got left?
About another 5 billion years.
How would we know?
That's a good question. That's the product of 20th century modern astrophysics. Then it was modern. I think of it as modern. Where you say, what kind of star is this? You look around the universe for other stars that are just like it. And then you see those stars in their stages of evolution. Stars being born, living out their lives, and dying.
And the star changes its properties from birth to death. And so you can line up where the sun is in that chart. Plus, we know how old Earth is. So we directly measure the age of the Earth. And so there's no reason to think that Earth did not form at the same time the sun did.
Another really fascinating one was, every breath you take contains molecules once inhaled by every human in history. Yep. That can't be true.
Chat GPT it. No, so here it is. You ready? Yeah. There are more molecules of air in a single breath of air than there are breaths of air in Earth's entire atmosphere. So if you breathe in and then breathe out, there's enough molecules that you breathed out to populate every breath that anyone will ever again take on this Earth. And air mixes rather quickly, okay? So it has to mix.
It's not immediately, give it some time, but you give it some time, There are molecules that went in and out of your lungs that are in China being breathed by people there when enough time has elapsed. You can calculate that. It's years, 10 years, something like that. There's tremendous mixing of air. So how's that for feeling kinship with others? Same with water. You drink water.
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