How to Explain Things Well [Neil deGrasse Tyson]

<p><strong>Audio source:</strong> <a href="https://www.jordanharbinger.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-cosmic-queries-for-the-acutely-curious/">https://www.jordanharbinger.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-cosmic-queries-for-the-acutely-curious/</a> 22 mins in</p><p><strong>Transcript</strong></p><p>[00:21:14] I would love to know how you develop your skills to be able to explain and communicate complex ideas effectively to the everyday person or any suggestions for people struggling in this area, because you must have worked really, really hard to be able to go, "Okay, your level of understanding is right here because you're 16, 12 or 41, and you just don't have a good science background. I'm going to now make this digestible for you." And you do that seemingly on the fly on talk shows like on the Daily Show or on TV, possibly even live. So it's not like, "Oh, Hey Neil, we're going to ask you all this stuff, come up with a clever sounding soundbite." Like you got really, really good at that through a lot of hard work I assume. </p><p>[00:21:55] <strong>Neil deGrasse Tyson: </strong>Well, first thank you for not saying, "Oh, you're so good at it. It must be natural." </p><p>[00:22:00] <strong>Jordan Harbinger: </strong>I know it's not — no one's that good at that naturally. </p><p>[00:22:03] <strong>Neil deGrasse Tyson: </strong>Thank you for granting me the expectation that it's the product of hard work. So that's my first, thank you. Second, I remembered — you know, I go back. I'm an old man now. So let me go back many decades. And I started explaining things to people because they'd asked, "Oh, you're a natural physicist. I have this question." And I would monitor their attention span, their eyebrows, would they lean into the conversation or are they easily distracted? At what word did I utter did they then lose interest? By the way, any writer thinks this way all the time, because the moment you lose someone in that sentence, they're gone. They're never coming back to your novel. Hence is the important review of a nov