Neil deGrasse Tyson’s iPhone Story

I was watching the interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson on On The Verge where he was asked about his life as a meme and his wishes for NASA. However the interview then moved onto gadgets and Tyson is a particular fan of Apple products and says his MacBook Pro is a part of him, not just a computer. He then told the story of how he first bought the iPhone, I’ve tried to transcribe it as best as I could below;

Some years ago, the year when the iPhone first came out, I had semi-season tickets to the Yankees. So I’m at Yankee’s Stadium, the iPhone had been out for a month. When you have season tickets you know the other people in the sections. I’m there on a Wednesday afternoon game and a couple comes in, kind of young, if I were to stereotype them I’d say fresh out of college, first internship in new york, summer intern, right?  So maybe early twenties, a couple. They come in and sit to my left. She sits to my left, he sits to her left.

The woman is especially attractive, like on a scale that’s just kind of off scale. [Interviewer: Beyond 10?] Yeah 11. He is kind of frumpy, you would not have pair them but love knows no bounds, so it’s fine. So they’re looking around and, it’s my town, it’s my stadium and clearly they’ve never been to the stadium before. So I said “Have you been to Yankee Stadium before?” “This is my first time ever at any sporting event.” she replied. So I said “Oh okay well that’s Babe Ruth’s Corner and that’s where they…” While I’m saying this, it’s the first and a half inning, she’s on the jumbotron so the left field camera found her. Who ends up on the jumbotron? Really beautiful people and crazy people end up on the jumbotron, right? People with like their underwear on their heads, stuff like that. So it wasn’t just my assessment, the left field camera from 200 yards away found her and put her up on the jumbotron. So she think everybody’s turn is up next because beautiful people don’t really know what the world is actually like.

So he pulls out his iPhone, and so I looked because I’m thinking about the iPhone but I want data. Data not supplied to me by Apple alone. So I lean to him and I say “How do you like your iPhone?”, she answers “It’s his new girlfriend!” and I said “Wooooooaaaahhh”. So that was a Wednesday and by the Monday I had my iPhone. If he’s looking at his iPhone and not her and she’s on the jumbotron that’s gotta be an awesome device.

So to this day, I think about this all the time, if I ever have the opportunity to build a time machine with Stewie (Griffin), we go back and if I were to meet Isaac Newton and bring one thing back it’s going to be the iPhone.

You can watch the interview over at On The Verge and Tyson’s interview starts at roughly 22:30.