SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.
SPEAKER_1: My day job is as Director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.
SPEAKER_1: Today, we'll be listening to my interview with Ann Druyan.
SPEAKER_1: She was Carl Sagan's wife and collaborator on many of his works and projects, including the original COSMOS.
SPEAKER_1: She's also co-writer, director, and executive producer, and by many people's measure, the sole of the new COSMOS series.
SPEAKER_1: That's COSMOS, A Spacetime Odyssey, that I have the privilege of serving as host and narrator.
SPEAKER_1: In this first interview clip, Ann tells me about her background and how she first met Carl Sagan.
SPEAKER_2: I was a college dropout, something of which I used to be ashamed of, and now I feel tremendous pride.
SPEAKER_1: The awesomest people in the world were college dropouts.
SPEAKER_2: There's a growing list of the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs.
SPEAKER_1: And Michael Dell.
SPEAKER_2: Are they all on the tech world or are there other people?
SPEAKER_1: Oh, maybe they're all tech people, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Well, it was the 60s, Neil, and the joint was jumping.
SPEAKER_1: That's usually the excuse for anything that happened in the 60s.
SPEAKER_2: It was the 60s.
SPEAKER_2: I had a great curiosity and interest in many subjects, which I pursued, but I was so restless.
SPEAKER_2: I couldn't sit still.
SPEAKER_2: And my attention wandered in every course that wasn't like advanced courses in Herman Melville, who I adored, or things like that.
SPEAKER_2: I didn't get that Ph.D.
SPEAKER_2: but I did have parents who were literate and who valued writing and literature very highly.
SPEAKER_2: And so I guess that's half the battle.
SPEAKER_1: So you had books at home?
SPEAKER_2: Huge number of books.
SPEAKER_1: And I didn't realize the importance of that until my father pointed this out to me.
SPEAKER_1: He said, there are homes where there are just no books.
SPEAKER_1: And so what do you do as a child?
SPEAKER_1: You don't even know that there are books there to learn from.
SPEAKER_2: That was my mother's very snobby metric for going to people's homes.
SPEAKER_2: If she didn't see any books, she immediately became very hostile and aggressive.
SPEAKER_2: It was wonderful.
SPEAKER_1: A snob metric?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, no, it really was.
SPEAKER_2: You didn't read the New York Times every single day, including the shipping notices.
SPEAKER_2: And she didn't want to talk to you.
SPEAKER_1: So you might have turned out differently without that kind of background then.
SPEAKER_2: I'm sure I would have turned out completely differently.
SPEAKER_2: I wouldn't have turned out at all if my parents hadn't met on a subway train.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, think of it, you know.
SPEAKER_1: There you go again, putting the whole big context.
SPEAKER_2: Right?
SPEAKER_2: Well, that's the stochastic, crazy, roulette wheel nature of life.
SPEAKER_1: I think you would have somehow emerged somewhere in the universe.
SPEAKER_1: The universe needed you.
SPEAKER_2: That's wonderfully romantic and non-scientific of you, but I'm honored that you would violate your own scientific standards.
SPEAKER_1: To describe who the hell you are in this world?
SPEAKER_2: To give me that great compliment.
SPEAKER_2: It's really…
SPEAKER_2: I'm thrilled.
SPEAKER_1: So, where does science come in?
SPEAKER_1: Because the hyperliterate people often, to my disappointment, say, well, I was never good at science, I was never good at math, and use that as a reason to not learn more.
SPEAKER_1: And clearly that wasn't the case with you.
SPEAKER_1: So, what happened there?
SPEAKER_2: So, as a child of the 60s, I was hungry for a way to understand the world that could cut through deceit and lies.
SPEAKER_2: And, you know, if you think of the 60s as a moment when the great middle, including me, of the American people, began to realize that they couldn't trust the government.
SPEAKER_2: After years of, you know, during the Second World War, it was total faith and credit, the government was beyond reproach.
SPEAKER_2: And in the 60s, this edifice starts to crumble.
SPEAKER_2: And so...
SPEAKER_1: For the first time, right, in America.
SPEAKER_2: See, I don't know what was happening 100 years before, but certainly in modern history.
SPEAKER_2: And so, I was hungry for a way to know what's real.
SPEAKER_2: And I looked everywhere.
SPEAKER_2: And I found it in the pre-Socratic philosophers, the ancient Greeks, who invented science.
SPEAKER_2: And I suddenly realized, oh, Jesus, I was such an idiot.
SPEAKER_2: I didn't really pay attention in science when it has this error-correcting mechanism that nothing else has.
SPEAKER_2: And so, that's what attracted me to science.
SPEAKER_1: The urge to know the truth in anything.
SPEAKER_2: Nothing absolute, but just give me some truth, as John Lennon famously was saying.
SPEAKER_1: So, you first met Carl when?
SPEAKER_2: I met him in 1974 at a dinner party given by Nora Ephron.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: The Nora Ephron.
SPEAKER_1: She always seemed to me like a busybody.
SPEAKER_1: Is that, is she?
SPEAKER_1: She's always in some places.
SPEAKER_2: She was bossy.
SPEAKER_2: She was really bossy, but I loved her.
SPEAKER_2: She was a great girlfriend.
SPEAKER_1: And this was in New York.
SPEAKER_2: This was in New York when she lived in the East 50s and she worked for the New York Post.
SPEAKER_1: Carl, by then, was already Professor Cornell.
SPEAKER_1: So what's he doing in the city?
SPEAKER_2: He actually goes to one of those luncheons at the Washington Post for the editorial board, where they have, I don't know if they were weekly or monthly in the 70s, but the flavor of the month, the most exciting person to emerge on the radar screen.
SPEAKER_1: Do they still do that?
SPEAKER_1: That sounds like a good idea.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know.
SPEAKER_2: So I remember Nora Ephron turning to me in her apartment.
SPEAKER_2: She's arranging some magazines in a basket, and she said, oh, Annie, I met the most fascinating man last week at the Washington Post editorial board luncheon.
SPEAKER_2: And I've got to have him and his wife over for dinner, and I'm going to invite you and some other friends of ours.
SPEAKER_2: You've got to meet this guy.
SPEAKER_2: He's unbelievable.
SPEAKER_2: Unbelievable.
SPEAKER_2: And for some reason, that was a memory that I kept, whereas there are an infinite number of moments that don't stay with you.
SPEAKER_2: But that moment really stayed with me.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know why.
SPEAKER_2: And sure enough, Nora was a woman of her word in every way.
SPEAKER_2: She had this dinner a month later, and I walked into this room, and I saw this man lying on the rug in Nora Ephron's living room.
SPEAKER_1: Wait, lying on the rug, with her clothes on.
SPEAKER_1: What?
SPEAKER_1: You said this guy was lying on the rug.
SPEAKER_2: No, he was completely naked.
SPEAKER_2: And that was the thing.
SPEAKER_2: That was the first thing I noticed.
SPEAKER_2: No, of course not.
SPEAKER_2: No, he was wearing a blue work shirt with his sleeves rolled up.
SPEAKER_2: It was a really hot, early autumn, late summer night.
SPEAKER_2: And he was lying on the rug, and he was laughing uncontrollably, like a mental patient.
SPEAKER_1: I remember his guffaw.
SPEAKER_1: You know, some people laugh because they know they're being listened to.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_1: And others laugh.
SPEAKER_2: Naturally.
SPEAKER_2: They don't care if anyone's listening.
SPEAKER_1: Right, right.
SPEAKER_2: And they don't care if anyone thinks they're crazy.
SPEAKER_2: And that was Carl's laugh.
SPEAKER_2: It was from the heart completely, from his toes.
SPEAKER_2: Anyway, we struck up a conversation about baseball and Trotsky.
SPEAKER_1: And it's probably the first time Trotsky in baseball has ever been put in the same sentence.
SPEAKER_2: Is that true?
SPEAKER_2: I'm sure they must have been in the 40s or 30s.
SPEAKER_2: There must have been a young Trotskyite baseball team.
SPEAKER_2: Anyway, it was a terrific evening.
SPEAKER_2: I met a number of other people that evening who were very important to me.
SPEAKER_2: And that was the beginning.
SPEAKER_2: Worked together for three years in a totally platonic way as friends.
SPEAKER_2: And I really didn't fall in love or acknowledge that love until Voyager.
SPEAKER_1: The Voyager project?
SPEAKER_2: Yep.
SPEAKER_3: And if Voyager should sometime in its distant future encounter beings from some other civilization in space, it bears a message.
SPEAKER_3: A phonograph record, golden, delicate.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome back to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: In this show, we're featuring my interview with Ann Druyan.
SPEAKER_1: And as she mentioned in the previous segment, Ann worked with Carl Sagan on the Voyager mission.
SPEAKER_1: The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were sent on a grand tour of the solar system back in the 70s and 80s, and they each carried with them a phonograph record containing not only songs like Johnny B.
SPEAKER_1: Goode by Chuck Berry, but also a bird song and a whale song.
SPEAKER_1: Among its many other sounds, the record had the noise of trains, planes, and automobiles, a lightning storm, and greetings in 55 different languages, acquired one afternoon on the steps of the United Nations.
SPEAKER_1: Ann Druyan was the creative director of that Voyager interstellar message.
SPEAKER_1: In this next clip, she shares her experience developing the golden record.
SPEAKER_2: Frank Drake, John Cassani of NASA, and Carl and Carl's wife, Linda Salzman, had created the Pioneer plaque.
SPEAKER_2: So those were, at that point, the most distant objects we ever created.
SPEAKER_2: John Cassani came to them and said, both Voyagers are going to leave the solar system.
SPEAKER_2: They're gonna get this gravitational assist from Jupiter that's gonna send them at 40,000 miles an hour outwards.
SPEAKER_1: They're gonna overtake the Pioneers.
SPEAKER_2: They'll overtake the Pioneers.
SPEAKER_2: And Carl thought, well, the Pioneer plaque was great, but it was like a license plate.
SPEAKER_2: But we could send something now that would be a complex message on a phonograph record.
SPEAKER_2: Not only could you send music, but you could also translate the imagery into data.
SPEAKER_2: So you could send pictures.
SPEAKER_2: And that's-
SPEAKER_1: But Ann, doesn't that require they have a phonograph player?
SPEAKER_1: We sent it.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, we sent everything you need to play the record.
SPEAKER_1: Everything you need.
SPEAKER_2: We sent a stylus, a needle.
SPEAKER_2: We sent the instructions.
SPEAKER_1: The instruction manual, oh my God.
SPEAKER_2: Absolutely, and so if you are a space-bearing extraterrestrial of 100 or 1,000 million years from now, if you know how to get into space, then you have to speak science, speak physics, mathematics, and you can read the instruction manual, very simple.
SPEAKER_1: So you make an interesting and plausible assumption that an alien civilization that would have any measure of intelligence would be able to just figure out how to reproduce this.
SPEAKER_2: Right, and boy, what a treat.
SPEAKER_2: They get the Easter egg of all times if they do that.
SPEAKER_1: What's your favorite thing on the record?
SPEAKER_2: Well, I have to say that the fact that my brain waves, two days after Carl and I fell madly in love with each other, have been part of an hour-long meditation in which all of my neurological electrical impulses have been recorded, and that data translated into sound on the record.
SPEAKER_2: So that extraterrestrials of the distant future might be able to understand something of what it was like to be alive.
SPEAKER_1: They'll be so misled, they'll think that everyone on Earth is in love.
SPEAKER_2: Well, that's kind of my dream of the world.
SPEAKER_2: If that were true, I don't think people would go around hitting each other.
SPEAKER_2: No, they've come to this planet with the highest expectations.
SPEAKER_1: In this next clip, I asked Ann about her writing and collaborations, and she shared her experience in creating both the old and the new COSMOS series.
SPEAKER_2: The poetry is inherent in the material, I feel.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, the universe reeks poetry.
SPEAKER_2: It does.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, if nature isn't beauty, then what is beauty?
SPEAKER_2: If the vastness, the immensity doesn't make you choke up and make you feel something spiritual and uplifting, then, you know, you're missing a chip.
SPEAKER_2: And so, you know, people always say to me, you know, you really bring the passion and the emotion and the poetry.
SPEAKER_2: Yes, I really hope so.
SPEAKER_2: And I think Carl and I are the perfect combination to create these things because, for one thing, his knowledge was so fast.
SPEAKER_2: Once he had explained the concept to me, we were like sea mammals swimming together, executing left turns at 90 miles an hour without any kind of words needed to pass between us.
SPEAKER_2: We would work day and night, every day of the week.
SPEAKER_2: There was no boundary between happiness and work, between fulfillment, love, and not only that, but supplying the right sentence or giving the right trope or the right word even was a love offering.
SPEAKER_2: It was another way of making love, and it was the most fun thing.
SPEAKER_2: Thinking with him just was a feast of ideas of traveling through the universe.
SPEAKER_1: So going back to the original series, there was three writers of records.
SPEAKER_1: There was you, Carl, and Steve Soder.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: My admiration for Steve is boundless.
SPEAKER_1: For those who don't know, the two of you, you and Steve Soder, you were invited to write our first two inaugural space shows for the Planetarium in a reopened facility.
SPEAKER_1: So I've always known that you guys were kind of a writing dyad in that way.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: Well, Carl also loved Steve, and our trio creating the original series.
SPEAKER_2: There was a complementarity, mutual respect, and excitement of creating together.
SPEAKER_2: Everybody just sparks flying with new ideas.
SPEAKER_1: And Steve has an extraordinary repository of historical...
SPEAKER_2: He's a historian of science.
SPEAKER_2: He's a scientist.
SPEAKER_2: And he's someone who was so curious and fascinating and very sweet person.
SPEAKER_2: And after Carl's death, Steve and I continued to collaborate into the first drafts of the new series.
SPEAKER_1: What were the challenges of writing with commercials?
SPEAKER_2: Well, actually, I kind of like the commercials because you need a hook at every act break.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, you like the fact that there's a commercial break, whether or not you like the commercials themselves.
SPEAKER_2: People hate the commercials.
SPEAKER_2: It's a chronic complaint online, but it allows you to kind of take it in.
SPEAKER_2: I don't think there's been a more information-dense program on commercial television.
SPEAKER_2: Ever.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, there's so much information coming at you.
SPEAKER_2: But for the writer, it's great because it was fun trying to think up that hook that would keep you from changing the channel through the commercials.
SPEAKER_2: That was the challenge.
SPEAKER_1: So you had to manipulate the suspense elements more deftly.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: And then you get to reset when people come back from the break.
SPEAKER_2: You know, you get to take a breath and then start it anew and then also remind the audience of certain basic premises that are needed for the concept.
SPEAKER_1: So, Ann, when you're writing, there's a line between educating and preaching.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: And so where's that line in your head?
SPEAKER_2: Well, I have to write it the way I think it and then I have to look at it with fresh eyes the next day or a week later.
SPEAKER_2: And one of the things I love the most is editing, is crossing out things.
SPEAKER_2: Like, I hate the woman who wrote this.
SPEAKER_2: This is, like, so preachy.
SPEAKER_2: Who the hell does she think she is?
SPEAKER_2: What does she know?
SPEAKER_2: And just taking out stuff.
SPEAKER_2: That's like being a sculptor and just carving out.
SPEAKER_2: All that isn't the piadra dura, you know, the beautiful statue.
SPEAKER_2: That's editing.
SPEAKER_2: That's why I don't like to send anything out within 24 hours.
SPEAKER_2: I like to sit on it because my cooler head prevails.
SPEAKER_1: I take it that you don't want to preach.
SPEAKER_2: No.
SPEAKER_1: So there's a philosophical point you're making here that...
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_1: You can change someone's heart not by hammering them on the head, but by offering them an educational path.
SPEAKER_2: That's why the global warming episode, I think, is so effective, because it's a very Socratic series of questions.
SPEAKER_2: It's really examining each scientific argument by asking these questions, taking it apart, whether it's human-caused, whether it's not a natural phenomenon that comes from the sun or comes from some other place.
SPEAKER_2: There are all these questions that people have.
SPEAKER_2: And I think by that point, I hope we've established our bona fides, that we're trying to be as honest as humanly possible.
SPEAKER_2: But what I'm most proud of in terms of the favorite passage in the series is when you are in the ship and you're holding the manganese nodule.
SPEAKER_1: I remember this line.
SPEAKER_2: You're talking about the fact that in the center of the manganese nodule is evidence of an incredibly minute nature that stars were exploding not terribly far away and creating this layer which when looked at by scientists in our time, you could determine the date of those explosions because we know the rate of the crystallization of what's going on inside the manganese nodule.
SPEAKER_2: And the line I'm most proud of is when you say the difference between looking at a pebble and seeing just a little dark stone and reading the history of the COSMOS inscribed within, that's science.
SPEAKER_1: Well, Ann, I can tell you that only the projects you've ever been involved in have there been words drawn from it that ended up tattooed on people's bodies.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know any other science documentary where people are plucking phrases and etching them on their skin indelibly.
SPEAKER_2: It's because there's this yearning for that spiritual uplift that Carl was a pioneer in creating and that Steve and I had a great time adding to, and that's unbelievably gratifying.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome back to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: We've been featuring my interview with Ann Druyan, who developed the new COSMOS series.
SPEAKER_1: That's COSMOS, A Spacetime Odyssey.
SPEAKER_1: As Ann said in the previous segment, she worked with Carl Sagan and Stephen Soder on the original COSMOS in the late 1970s, and it aired on PBS in 1980.
SPEAKER_1: Now, more than 30 years later, it was due for an update.
SPEAKER_1: In this next clip, Ann and I talk about the long quest to make the new COSMOS series.
SPEAKER_1: So, Ann, I remember burning some shoe leather, knocking on doors with you and Steve Soder and Mitch Canald.
SPEAKER_1: We were sort of a core four at some point, trying to shop around the idea for COSMOS.
SPEAKER_2: For three years.
SPEAKER_1: And we had interested parties.
SPEAKER_2: Everyone wanted it.
SPEAKER_1: They were.
SPEAKER_1: You know, the usual cast of characters, Discover Channel and Science Channel, National Geographic, Production Entities and PBS, of course.
SPEAKER_1: All right, so we're knocking on all those doors.
SPEAKER_1: And you just kept saying, no.
SPEAKER_1: What's wrong with this woman?
SPEAKER_1: They want to do it.
SPEAKER_1: So what were you concerned about?
SPEAKER_2: Well, two things.
SPEAKER_2: One is I wanted creative control of it.
SPEAKER_1: Nobody likes giving up creative control.
SPEAKER_1: So you're being stubborn.
SPEAKER_1: You realize this.
SPEAKER_2: No, because I was protecting a legacy, a global legacy of COSMOS.
SPEAKER_2: If we had come out with a COSMOS that had been trimmed to fit the sponsor or the network's fears and insecurities, then that wouldn't be COSMOS.
SPEAKER_2: We didn't have to do that in the first one, and I wasn't going to do it on this one.
SPEAKER_1: In spite of the original having big bankrolls from ARCO, an oil company.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: The ARCO, the Atlantic Richfield Corporation, gave us all the money we needed for COSMOS, and when Carl and I needed more money for COSMOS, we went back and got more.
SPEAKER_2: And we told Robert O.
SPEAKER_2: Anderson, who was the CEO at the time, we said, we need all this money, but we want you to know that in episode four, we really take the oil companies to task and we talk about global warming.
SPEAKER_2: This is 1979.
SPEAKER_2: And he said, fine, don't worry, that's very good of you.
SPEAKER_2: And he looked at us like the fools that we were, because of course he knew people would like the show or they wouldn't like the show.
SPEAKER_2: But his job on the 70th floor, whatever it was, of the Arco building in Los Angeles was secure.
SPEAKER_2: This was a time of hand over fist record oil company profits as it is now.
SPEAKER_2: And they were like, here, take your money and make your show, you're very nice people.
SPEAKER_2: We were a tiny net and they were a giant elephant, being very generous.
SPEAKER_2: Now the other problem with all those places that you and I and Mitchell and Steve schlepped to in trying to find a platform, the new COSMOS, was they wouldn't give me enough money to produce it.
SPEAKER_2: And I knew without the greatest VFX that you could possibly get on television, which was why Rainer Gombos and Adi Manes and Natasha Francis were so critical to the outcome.
SPEAKER_1: These are visual effects supervisors.
SPEAKER_2: Visual effects, esthubes and producers.
SPEAKER_2: Without them and without that kind of dazzling, eye-popping glory, we wouldn't be able to attract the broadest possible global audience.
SPEAKER_2: So they kept saying, yes, yes, we'll do it, but we'll control it and we'll give you a dollar and a half for each episode.
SPEAKER_2: It wasn't quite that bad, but for what we needed, it was too far away.
SPEAKER_2: And of course, until you introduced Seth MacFarlane to us, nothing really went forward except we unfortunately acquired larger and larger legal bills.
SPEAKER_2: And that was it.
SPEAKER_2: And everybody was thinking I was a nut.
SPEAKER_1: Legal bills, because every time you're almost in a conversation with someone, you're negotiating, you get the negotiating lawyer in.
SPEAKER_2: And then we get to that point where that's as much money as they're going to spend, they're not going to give us control.
SPEAKER_2: Forget it.
SPEAKER_1: All right.
SPEAKER_1: Did you have any apprehensions about going to Fox?
SPEAKER_2: I never had any apprehension about going to Fox.
SPEAKER_2: I must say, when Seth first suggested it to us, I had a little flicker of skepticism of like, you know, can he really pull this off?
SPEAKER_2: He was already a hero in my household.
SPEAKER_2: My kids loved Family Guy.
SPEAKER_2: The ones that I watched, I thought were terrific.
SPEAKER_2: So I figured, here's a man with a lot of clout.
SPEAKER_2: And remember, Seth was willing to bankroll one half the cost of the pilot.
SPEAKER_1: In that meeting with the executives at Fox, he doesn't know what the reaction is going to be.
SPEAKER_1: So he has to sort of sweeten the table.
SPEAKER_1: And he says, you know, how about we can make a pilot?
SPEAKER_1: I'll put in a million, you put in a million.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: And Peter Rice said, not so fast, with the checkbook, hold on.
SPEAKER_2: And I had come with a copy of the original COSMOS series.
SPEAKER_2: And he said, I'm going to watch it with my kids.
SPEAKER_2: I missed it the first time it came around.
SPEAKER_2: I was just the wrong age for it.
SPEAKER_1: No, I didn't really believe him.
SPEAKER_1: I thought they took this meeting just because Seth called for it.
SPEAKER_1: And Seth is a major product, so you got to say, all right, we'll do the meeting.
SPEAKER_1: What did the cat drag in?
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: And who could blame you?
SPEAKER_2: We had been through three years of schlumping around and thinking that it was a done deal.
SPEAKER_1: He says, I'm going to watch it.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: No, I'm going to watch it.
SPEAKER_2: And weeks later, he called us back.
SPEAKER_2: And he said he'd like to order 13 episodes.
SPEAKER_2: And I was like, don't you want a pilot?
SPEAKER_2: And he pointed to the original DVD and he said, that's your pilot.
SPEAKER_2: And he gave me this big, wonderful hug.
SPEAKER_2: And he said, I just can't wait for the head snap when people hear that COSMOS is on Fox.
SPEAKER_2: And four years later, here we are, Neil, we did it.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome back, StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: In my interview with COSMOS creator, Ann Druyan, I had to ask her, what makes COSMOS, COSMOS?
SPEAKER_1: In other words, what is unique about this series?
SPEAKER_1: What makes it so different from all the other science documentaries out there?
SPEAKER_1: I think it's unique because it reaches for more than just teaching you what is.
SPEAKER_1: It also conveys a sense of why science matters, and a sense of what you can do, armed with the knowledge and the methods and tools of science to make a better world.
SPEAKER_1: But let's find out what Ann had to say.
SPEAKER_2: Cosmos is that intersection where your brain, your heart, your eye, your ear, your soul can all be operating at full tilt.
SPEAKER_2: It is not any one important human component at the expense of the other.
SPEAKER_2: So in other words, no fantasy which breaks the laws of science.
SPEAKER_2: No science that is denuded of its awe-inspiring impact.
SPEAKER_2: You're allowed to feel.
SPEAKER_2: You're not allowed to lie.
SPEAKER_2: You're not allowed to distort.
SPEAKER_1: Or deceive yourself or others.
SPEAKER_2: Or deceive yourself or others.
SPEAKER_2: No.
SPEAKER_2: You've got to be straight about how the universe is put together.
SPEAKER_2: You've got to be honest.
SPEAKER_2: But, to me, it's the greatest source of that soaring feeling there is.
SPEAKER_2: And COSMOS is the history.
SPEAKER_2: It's the struggle of the orphan in Bavaria with no prospects.
SPEAKER_2: So often, I found myself writing in the episodes of Whom Nothing Was Expected, the orphan in the glass factory struggling in the drudgery and the hopelessness of that life.
SPEAKER_1: heroes of each of these episodes.
SPEAKER_2: What does he do?
SPEAKER_2: Oh, he grows up to become Fraunhofer, and he essentially invents astrophysics, your field, or Michael Faraday, who's, you know, born into such poverty in a society that is so brutally class-conscious and rises to the top of the scientific world purely by this very hard work, this genius, this brilliance, or the women in our story.
SPEAKER_2: The men rode off with such arrogance, like Cecilia Payne, and Annie Jump Cannon, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt.
SPEAKER_2: These were geniuses who are about to really change things, and nobody knows it but them.
SPEAKER_2: So it's society, it's feeling, it's science, it's history, it's the warp and the weave.
SPEAKER_1: Science in its many branches.
SPEAKER_2: In its many different fields.
SPEAKER_1: Of the 13 episodes, what would you say was the most potent passage?
SPEAKER_2: Well, that's a little unfair because, of course, the pale blue dot is in episode 13.
SPEAKER_2: And in terms of audience testing and global interest, that is on a level of its own.
SPEAKER_2: But I'm extremely proud of the end of episode 13.
SPEAKER_2: That's the episode I directed.
SPEAKER_2: And I'm really proud of that because for me, that was a cry from the heart.
SPEAKER_2: I felt that at that point, if you stayed with us for those 12 hours, then we had earned the right to actually draw some conclusions.
SPEAKER_1: So what you're saying is we spend 13 episodes teaching you about the universe and why it matters and what it feels like and what it means.
SPEAKER_1: And then you give us a little space at the end to emote.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_1: By the way, there's some passage I couldn't keep a dry eye while I was reading them.
SPEAKER_2: I know.
SPEAKER_2: I was choking up.
SPEAKER_2: Every time I would be sitting in the editing room, and the editors too, and the assistant editors.
SPEAKER_1: And this is a place where you hear the same damn passage a hundred times in a row.
SPEAKER_2: A hundred times.
SPEAKER_2: People start welling up.
SPEAKER_2: Someone asks someone a question.
SPEAKER_2: There's no answer.
SPEAKER_2: The guy's sitting in there in the dark with you.
SPEAKER_2: What's up?
SPEAKER_2: And didn't you hear me?
SPEAKER_2: And it's like, I can't talk.
SPEAKER_2: I'm just gonna cry.
SPEAKER_2: So I feel like the case for science, which was at the nucleus of the dream of COSMOS, is being made.
SPEAKER_2: And finally, we get to tie it all together with your amazing performance and the astonishing visual effects and the script.
SPEAKER_2: You know, what really gets me and why we all cried, like 30 of us in the screening room who had worked on it for years, was when you let that ship go and the chair is empty.
SPEAKER_2: People in 180 countries around the world have seen this case for science, have seen what we have to show about the universe, the dream that all of us could be changed sufficiently so that we could awaken from our stupor and act in defense of the planet and science and demand our governments to be more scientifically aware of the needs and challenges of our planet, but also of the promise of the cosmos.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome back to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: As you may have read, COSMOS won many Emmy Awards.
SPEAKER_1: This is an affirmation that we were all doing the right thing at the right time in the right place.
SPEAKER_1: I want to thank everyone for their support of the series and Fox for putting it on the air in prime time, National Geographic for spreading the love around the world.
SPEAKER_1: And in this final part of my interview with COSMOS creator Ann Druyan, we talked about what I wore while I guided the ship of the imagination, that sleek silver spacecraft that transported me through the cosmos.
SPEAKER_1: We also talked about the concept for the ship itself and also whether she'd be willing to develop another COSMOS series in the future.
SPEAKER_1: When we were discussing my outfit, I mean my costume for the ship, so many of us are saying, well, maybe we should put a little lapel pin or that.
SPEAKER_1: And you kept saying no, because that would mean you would be of some special fleet and no one else would be invited or they're not in it.
SPEAKER_1: And so there's no accoutrements on me.
SPEAKER_1: There's no epaulettes, there's no chevrons.
SPEAKER_1: No, that's a deep thought.
SPEAKER_2: Well, that's so that the audience in the very last shot can become the captain of their own ship.
SPEAKER_2: That's the meaning of the ending is really, it's your ship now.
SPEAKER_2: You're turning it over just as it was turned over to you.
SPEAKER_2: You're turning it over to the next one.
SPEAKER_1: That's a badass ship.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yes, riot church.
SPEAKER_2: Brilliant.
SPEAKER_1: In reading the original scripts, there were so many changes from the original, but one of the things that's there is your description of what the ship of the imagination needed to be.
SPEAKER_1: And I don't know if you remember the line, it just said simply, impossibly minimalist.
SPEAKER_1: I remember that phrase.
SPEAKER_1: And the ship of the imagination is exactly that.
SPEAKER_1: There are no knobs, there's no buttons.
SPEAKER_2: Because everything gets old, everything is such a short shelf life.
SPEAKER_2: Our fantasies of the extraterrestrials, our fantasies of the ships that will take us to the stars, all of them, for ten years they might look good at best.
SPEAKER_2: The wisdom is in not showing those things.
SPEAKER_2: Because like Jules Verne, you know, putting gas lights in your submarine, putting heavy red velvet curtains with flounces in your submarine, you know, is a failure of the imagination.
SPEAKER_2: But it's not.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, Jules Verne was one of the most imaginative people who ever lived.
SPEAKER_2: But even he...
SPEAKER_2: Yes, that's the problem we always are up against.
SPEAKER_1: That's why we didn't have curtains on this ship.
SPEAKER_1: We were done so easy.
SPEAKER_1: I wanted curtains.
SPEAKER_1: I want to sleep at night.
SPEAKER_2: I wanted Venetian blinds.
SPEAKER_2: But they were like, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_2: My architectural standard are the pyramids.
SPEAKER_2: You look at them and you think that is the oldest thing.
SPEAKER_1: There is.
SPEAKER_2: And the newest.
SPEAKER_2: Nothing ever gets old about a geometric solid, you know.
SPEAKER_2: It's true.
SPEAKER_2: It's just like, just look at it.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, it's not festooned with any crap or anything like that.
SPEAKER_2: No orange.
SPEAKER_2: No fringe.
SPEAKER_2: Nothing.
SPEAKER_2: It's beautiful forever.
SPEAKER_2: It has its own perfect natural beauty.
SPEAKER_2: The reason I wanted to be so simple was what we had out our window.
SPEAKER_2: As Brandon said, nature is the star, not the ship, not anything else.
SPEAKER_2: And that was the idea.
SPEAKER_1: Well, I think it accomplished that and I would not have been able to project that in advance because looking at the ship alone, it's a work of beauty.
SPEAKER_1: And then you wonder, will it somehow compete with anything?
SPEAKER_1: But it doesn't.
SPEAKER_2: No, it reflects it.
SPEAKER_1: It's there.
SPEAKER_1: And then when there's something else to look at, the ship disappears.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, intellectually, emotionally, when something is happening, you're not distracted by the ship.
SPEAKER_2: Not at all.
SPEAKER_2: I'm very happy with the way it turned out, I have to say.
SPEAKER_1: So when people ask me, okay, you're ready to do another COSMOS?
SPEAKER_1: And I'm thinking, that must be like asking a woman right when she gives birth, do you want another kid?
SPEAKER_1: You've had kids.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_1: You've just done COSMOS.
SPEAKER_1: So you're the only person I can ask this.
SPEAKER_1: So if Fox comes, knocks on your door and says, let's do this next year, what are you going to do?
SPEAKER_2: I would like to think about it.
SPEAKER_2: I would like to give it some serious thought.
SPEAKER_2: I think one of the reasons that COSMOS has been so cherished by the audience is that it's kind of an event that comes once every 35 years.
SPEAKER_1: Once a generation.
SPEAKER_2: Once a generation.
SPEAKER_2: I have way more stories I'd like to tell.
SPEAKER_1: You show me your file cabinet in your home, just stories in progress that are not yet realized.
SPEAKER_1: Exactly.
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: I'm so thrilled.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, if you see Jan Ort and Edmund Halley trending in the top three subjects on Twitter, you know that you have struck a chord, and there are so many other stories.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, why not make heroes of the people who've brought us knowledge instead of heroes of the people who have the best stylists or the people who spend the most money or the people who have a mask?
SPEAKER_1: Who drive the fanciest car.
SPEAKER_2: Why?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, do we want our kids to be scientists or want them to be clothes hangers?
SPEAKER_2: That's the question.
SPEAKER_1: So, not to put words in your mouth, but you have enough creative spirit and enough ideas that you could easily just stay in business for the next several years without having to make another COSMOS.
SPEAKER_1: You can still keep the spirit going.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I have a lot of things I want to do.
SPEAKER_2: I'm working on two other projects.
SPEAKER_2: And I think that they're always the same values, consonant with the ones in COSMOS and in everything else I've ever had the privilege to work on.
SPEAKER_2: I know that every single person engaged in the whole multi-year project would want to work with you and me again, as we would want to work with them.
SPEAKER_2: And so who knows what the future will bring.
SPEAKER_1: There was such goodwill on set that I had not, not that I've done this often, but they've all told me other sets that just don't.
SPEAKER_2: No, this was a great experience.
SPEAKER_1: What do hugs sound like on the radio?
SPEAKER_1: You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, brought to you in part by a grant from the Sloan Foundation.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, urging you, as always, until next time, to keep looking up.