Neil deGrasse Tyson explores how astrophysics fuels war in Accessory to War, tracing military adoption of infrared tech and astronomical algorithms—like those from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey—for surveillance, from Galileo’s telescopes to Captain Cook’s Venus transit mapping for British colonialism. The U.S. Space Force’s creation mirrors WWII’s Air Force split, while Tyson rejects mixing religion with science, warning fundamentalist curriculum battles threaten national security. Meanwhile, EA’s Battlefield 5 bans "Nazi" in chat but keeps female soldiers—unless they lose to all-male German teams—sparking debates on censorship, Me Too hypocrisy, and tech bias, like Google employees’ emotional meltdowns over Trump’s 2016 loss. Science’s dual role as both enabler of empire and protector of progress remains unresolved. [Automatically generated summary]
Electronic Arts is beta testing its new video game Battlefield 5.
The game is a first-person shooter in which players fight in World War II.
But in order to keep the game from becoming toxic, EA is banning the use of the word Nazi during online game chat.
The Nazi ban raises several questions for gamers, like, why are you shooting at all those German people?
And what have they ever done to you?
When asked these questions during online chat, players responded with answers such as, it's because they are, and those lousy krauts are all a bunch of, which seemed highly unsatisfactory given the appalling level of violence.
One gamer said he was killing the Germans because their leader was, quote, literally Hitler, unquote.
But this just seemed like the usual left-wing hyperbole.
After all, what's wrong with Hitler being literally Hitler as long as he's not a Nazi?
And is he a Nazi?
No one could say.
There are other controversial issues with the game.
For instance, some players complained Battlefield 5 allowed gamers to play as female soldiers fighting on the front lines, which they said was not realistic.
But while Electronic Arts said they would not remove the female soldiers, they did agree to make the game more realistic by having them lose every battle to the superior all-male German army, which they're fighting for no discernible reason.
Further investigation revealed that the ban on the word Nazi was the idea of EA game developer Hakmi Dinwitz, who previously contributed to the George W. Bush administration by naming the war on terror.
Dimwitz told reporters, quote, Bush wanted to call it the war on radical Islam or the war on any damn SOB who can't worship God like a civilized human being, but I thought war on terror would be less toxic by depriving the entire conflict of any comprehensible motive, unquote.
Battlefield 5 will soon be available in stores to anyone who wants to kill Germans for no apparent reason.
So it should be a popular game.
Crisis of Communication00:11:05
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging also singing hunky-dunkity.
Shipshape tipsy topsy, the world is it easing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, hooray, the hooray-hurrah guy.
As back the eight-year-old called me, the hooray.
That's my name from now on, the hooray-hurrah guy.
We have a really interesting interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson today.
He has a new book out called Accessory to War.
And Tyson gets a lot of dinging from the right because he has sort of, yeah, he said a lot of things about religion.
He's made some comments about, you know, Trump and right-wingers and all this.
But I asked him about all of this.
It's a really interesting interview, and we had a very good conversation.
And I thought he came across, you know, held his, put forward his line pretty well.
It's really worth listening to.
And I hope you'll hang around.
For that, we will stay on Facebook and YouTube.
That's not no reason.
It's actually more a reason for you to come over to the Daily Wire and subscribe.
And also, of course, the main reason we want your money.
Also, if you're obviously on the Carolina coast, it's going to be a big clavinless weekend over there.
The Hurricane Florence is coming in.
My advice to you, do not be an idiot.
Be a smart guy.
The way you can tell is if you are on the Carolina coast and you turn to the person next to you and he's no longer there.
He's the smart guy.
You're the idiot.
Okay, that's how you tell that.
All right.
And when you evacuate, take your quipped toothbrush with you.
You got to have your quipped toothbrush with you because as my dentist has told me and my dental hygienist has told me that the electronic toothbrushes are better for your teeth and will keep your teeth cleaner and whiter.
So you will have that beautiful smile that you will still have after you evacuate from the Carolina coast.
But the problem with electric toothbrushes is that they are the size of bazookas, not quip.
Quip has this beautiful, slim design.
It packs just the right amount of vibrations into a slimmer design at a fraction of the cost of the bulkier traditional electric brushes.
Quip also comes with a mount that suctions right to your mirror.
I like to suction it right to my forehead just because it makes me laugh.
And it unsticks to use as a cover for hygienic travel anywhere, whether it's going in your gym bag or carry-on.
You can take it anywhere you go.
And Quip starts at just $25.
And if you go to getquip.com/slash Clavin right now, you'll get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush.
Very important to subscribe and get the refill pack every three months.
That's what they recommend.
That's your first refill pack free at getquip.com slash Clavin.
That's G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash Clavin.
And as you brush your teeth, you can say to yourself, hey, McKay, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So I was on Crowder Show yesterday, and we were talking about the way we have these conversations, right?
And the way that suddenly everything is a revolution.
Everything is a moral crisis that we're in.
All of a sudden, it happens just like the rug being pulled out from under you.
So for 2,000 years, homosexuality is the sin that dare not speak its name.
It's so horrific that you can't even talk about it.
You can't even mention for 2,000 years.
Then one day, it's like if you are not in favor of gay marriage, you're a hater.
You're a bigot.
You're a terrible person.
It's like that.
It's Tuesday, 12 o'clock.
Sorry, you were normal before.
1201, you're a hater.
And by the way, if you're Barack Obama and you had another opinion, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
But if it's you, you are a hater the next day.
If anybody had come to you and said, you know, let's have a conversation about this.
Let's talk about this.
I know 2,000 years, I know, I know, we thought, you know, this was a terrible sin.
But here's my argument why it's not such a terrible.
We on this show, you and I, the audience and I, have had civilized conversations about this, back and forth that have given me a lot of cause to think about things.
I hope I've given you some cause to think about things.
But if just one day I came in and said, oh, you know that thing you've been believing for 2,000 years?
Now you stink.
Bang.
Suddenly.
Suddenly it's a crisis.
Same thing meant transgenderism, even worse, really, but transgenderism.
The difference between men and women is a human universal.
There is no such thing as a society that does not divide the roles of men and women for obvious reasons.
Why?
Because there are two kinds of people in the world, only two kinds of people in the world.
One of them is men, one of them is women.
They're different.
They have different roles.
They have different roles in procreation.
They have different kinds of personalities.
So it's a human universal that they're different.
One day, Thursday, 1.30, bang.
If you believe that, you're a hater.
Yes, all of humankind for all of human life has believed one thing.
Thursday, sorry, time's up.
You stink.
So when you have that idea, of course, it's all based on the idea that they are selling you something that they really don't have an argument for.
They really do not have good arguments.
And so they just make it a panic situation.
They make it a situation of right and wrong.
It's like one side, one idea is their idea that suddenly there are no such things as gender.
Suddenly that's a construct.
And the other is hatred.
There's not like, oh, what is your, I mean, one of the things that's so interesting about this conversation between Neil deGrasse Tyson and I, is I know he's has different political views than I do.
I know he has different religious views than I do.
But we were two people just talking whereupon you find that that can actually be accomplished.
So this brings me back, and I mentioned this yesterday, but more information has come out about it.
This brings me back to Norm McDonald, one of my favorite comedians, really an offbeat guy.
I mean, I think he's had lots of problems in his life, but he's also stood up for a lot of things.
He was thrown off Saturday Night Live for making jokes about O.J. Simpson when he was on trial, and he was obviously guilty.
And the president of NBC was unhappy because he played golf with Simpson.
And basically, that cost him like one of the top jobs in television, just being an honest guy.
He's got a big mouth, but he is hilarious.
I listened to his audiobook.
I've said this before, based on a true story, his kind of fake novelized memoir.
Twice I had to pull off the road.
I was laughing so hard, I would have died.
When I say that, I mean I literally would have crashed the car.
I was laughing so hard, the tears pouring down my face.
Prowder calls him the most important comic mind in the country.
I think that's absolutely right.
He is certainly the most original stand-up guy going.
He went out and he made these statements about Me Too.
He's supposed to be on the Tonight Show.
And it was Kimmel's show, right?
Was it Jimmy Kimmel's show?
Valent.
Valon.
Okay, it was Fallon Show.
Sorry.
So he was going to be on Fallon's show, and he made these comments in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter where he said, you know, it used to be they would say, well, there's so many women accusing 100 women can't be lying.
Then it became one woman can't lie.
And that became, I believe all women.
And you're like, what?
And obviously, he's right.
He's right.
We don't believe all women any more than we believe all men.
You have this right to due process.
It does when a company has, you know, 100 people complaining about one of their employees.
Maybe it's time to look at that.
But he's absolutely right about it.
And then he said that, you know, he started to talk about his feeling for people that he knew, like Roseanne Barr and Louis C.K.
And he was talking about how sad it was and all this.
And so Jimmy Fallon comes backstage.
And here's, I'm reading Norm McDonald's description of how he was bounced off the tonight show for making these remarks.
Jimmy came back in.
Can I talk to you, buddy?
And he said he was very, very broken up about it.
He didn't want this.
He said, I don't know what to do.
I said, you think I shouldn't do the show?
And he said, people are crying.
And I said, people are crying?
Yeah, he said, senior producers are crying.
I said, good Lord, bring them in.
Let me talk to them.
I didn't even know I had the capacity to make people cry.
So I felt so bad from that comment.
Jimmy said, come back whenever you want, but I think it will hurt the show tonight.
I said, Jimmy, I don't want to hurt your show.
That's the last thing I want to do is hurt your show.
What are they crying about?
What are they crying about?
I mean, even if he's wrong, and some of the things he said are wrong, but even if he's wrong, what are they crying about?
You talk to people.
He's going on a talk show.
Talk.
That's all.
If it's not a crisis, why does everybody have to get fired?
Why does that have to happen?
Why does he have to get banned?
I mean, they just banned Brandon Stracha from Facebook for 30 days.
We have an interview with him.
We're going to play it a little closer to his march.
He's the walk away guy, walk away from the left, and he's staging a march, and they banned him because he mentioned Alex Jones or tried to link to InfoWars or something like this.
They're not banning him for that.
They're banning him to keep his march from getting publicized.
They're doing it on purpose.
Why?
Why is it a crisis?
Why is it a crisis for there to be two different opinions?
And like, I have to say, when it comes to this Me Too thing, oh, the funny part about this, by the way, is, of course, of course, Norm McDonnell had to apologize.
So he apologized and said, you know, I do feel for the victims of Me Too because he made some joke about, oh, it's not so bad to be a Me Too victim.
You just buy some new shoes or something like this.
And he said, I apologize.
You have to have Down syndrome.
He said, you have to have Down syndrome not to sympathize with the victims.
He insulted people with Down syndrome.
So now it's like, you just can't move.
You can't talk.
And it's only for people on the right.
Let's be clear.
It is only for people on the right who get crucified like this for what they say.
The thing about the Me Too thing is this too, this too falls into the same category of one side is all right and the other side is crisis is hatred.
You know, I mean, there's no way to have a conversation about it.
And I want to talk about this for a minute.
I want to talk about Me Too, but let me first talk about Helix Sleep.
Why?
Because some of you want a comfortable sleep, not me.
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I know it's comfortable because I used it once, and then my wife stole it.
Right now, Helix is offering up to $125 off all mattress orders.
Get up to $125 off at helixsleep.com/slash Clavin.
That's helixleep.com/slash Clavin for $125 off your mattress order.
HelixSleep.com/slash Clavin.
And let's hear it.
How do you spell it?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So the thing about me too is I feel this is also, there's some nuance, room for nuance here, too.
I have mixed feelings about Kevin Spacey, who obviously behaved badly on the set of House of Cards and on other sets and was chasing the boys around or whatever he was doing.
Nuances In Me Too00:06:38
But since everybody knew what was going on and nobody stopped him, shouldn't everybody quit?
Why is it just him?
I mean, the rules changed.
If the rules change, I think the guy has a chance to get a chance to adapt to the new rules.
I mean, even some of these guys who behaved in really ugly ways toward women, if they didn't actually break the law, some of them were playing by this is what's going on in this place.
You know, why isn't everybody to blame?
Why does that one guy get targeted?
So I really do have mixed feelings about it.
Now, unless Moonvest we were talking about, if those charges of the violent assaults are true, then obviously that is a terrible, terrible thing.
And now there's a new one.
The guy from 60 Minutes, Jeff Fager, the longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, he was fired after Jericha Duncan.
I like this because she reported on it.
Jerica Duncan, a reporter, said, you know, there were accusations against him in the New Yorker, and she said she was going to report on it.
And he wrote to her, if you repeat these false accusations without any of your own reporting to back them up, you will be held responsible for harming me.
Be careful.
There are people who lost their jobs trying to harm me.
And if you pass on these damaging claims without your own reporting to back them up, that will become a serious problem.
So he's saying the claims are untrue, but he threatened her, and that's what he was fired for.
He threatened her basically with losing her job, and that's why he lost his job.
Very disturbing video, very disturbing video of Harvey Weinstein and a business lady named Melissa Thompson.
And I'm going to show like just a few minutes of this while she's also talking to, I think it's a Sky News reporter.
So she is walking the Sky News reporter through this video.
She was selling a demo for her tech startup company, a new video and analytics service.
And as part of this, she was recording the sales pitch, right?
And Harvey Weinstein came in and dismissed into her office and dismissed all the people and locked the door.
And so she's in there alone with Harvey Weinstein.
And he's offering basically to buy her service.
But then he starts to flirt, you know, flirt with her.
And he says, can I flirt with you?
And she says, well, you can flirt with me a little.
She's a very attractive lady.
Let's just play a little bit more of this.
And this is both the video and her explaining it.
Okay.
And I'm going to use your service.
Good.
On Marilyn Royale.
Good.
And then, you know, you can assign me up, tell your boss.
And so he's going from almost pulling a trigger on using this platform to then he would put his hand up under the table up my dress.
I was trying to save face that at first I was trying to kind of manage the situation.
There was a combination of confidence and naivety that led me to, You know, this dynamic that we see now.
Data's so hot, right?
What's that?
Data's so hot.
It is hot.
A little bit.
A little hot.
It's a little hot.
That's a little hot.
Okay, so she's kind of flirting with him.
She slaps him on the shoulder.
She says, Data's so hot.
He says, if you couldn't hear it, he's kind of muttering.
He says, you're so hot.
And he puts his hand under her dress and she says, that's a little high.
That's a little high.
Now, there's all kinds of nuance here, right?
You can say, oh, well, she said he could flirt a little.
She didn't say, take your hand off me.
She said, that's a little too high.
Later, he enticed her to his hotel room and raped her, she says.
She says he actually raped her.
Now, I got to tell you, I watched this thing.
I have no feeling in favor of Harvey Weinstein here.
I understand there's nuance.
He may not be guilty of anything in court for what is on that video, right?
He may not be guilty for anything that's on that video.
She herself says she let him get away with things.
She kind of fell into, he's playing her.
He's good at what he does.
He's, you know, these rapist guys are always good at what they do.
He's playing her.
He knows how far he can go.
He backs off a little.
He comes back on again.
I got no respect for him.
I've got no feeling for him.
If he was backed over by a truck, I wouldn't blink, okay?
That's the way I feel about this.
But the reason I feel that way is because I'm not a feminist.
That's the reason I feel that way.
If you're a feminist, if you believe that men and women are equal, if you believe that they are on complete equal footing, then she's responsible.
She is responsible wholly for herself.
She is responsible for saying, take your hand out from under my dress.
I do not want you doing that.
I don't care whether you buy my product or not.
If you're a feminist, if you're not a feminist, if you're me, like the last non-feminist on earth, right, then you believe that he has some responsibility for her because he's a man and she's a woman, that we have to take care of women a little bit.
We have to watch out for them a little bit.
The world has changed.
When I say I'm not a feminist, it's not like I don't understand the world has changed.
It's that I don't feel women were oppressed.
I feel that they had a certain role, that some of that role changed because of technology and the world changed and some of their economic power disappeared with the Industrial Revolution when a lot of industries moved out of the home.
Women's lives changed.
Now they've changed and moved into the business world.
They can make any choice they want as far as I'm concerned, but they don't stop being women and men don't stop being men.
And if men do not behave like gentlemen, women are going to suffer.
So, you know, there's a piece by a New York Times writer, Courtney Sender, and she talks about having a younger man come over.
She meets him on Tinder.
Good thinking, Courtney.
She meets him on Tinder and he comes over and everything he does, he asks for permission.
Can we go to the bedroom?
Can I take off your sweater?
Can I take off your tank top?
You know, he asks every step of the way, he asks.
Finally, he sleeps with her, gets in an Uber, disappears, never calls her again, right?
And she says, well, gee, maybe consent should go beyond just sex.
Maybe afterwards, you should have some responsibility for the person that you're in.
And it's like, I'm thinking, wait, wait, you have to give me your consent after I'm gone, after it's over?
No, that's not the point.
You cannot twist the word consent to mean that.
But maybe, maybe the whole system is broken.
Maybe this feminist system isn't working.
Maybe you cannot twist human relations to that degree and get away with it.
And so, you know, if we discuss these things instead of bursting into tears, if we discuss these things instead of condemning people, instead of throwing people off, I would have liked to hear the conversation with Norm McDonald if Jimmy had said, said, if Fallon had said to him, you know, those were some stupid things to say.
You know, let's hear your excuse.
You know, that might have been an interesting conversation.
Feminist System Breakdown00:15:36
Crying doesn't, you know, there's no crying in freedom.
There's no crying, you know, that old movie with Tom Hanks is no crying in baseball.
Well, there's no crying in freedom.
You've got to be tough to be free.
And it's not enough to sit there and say, oh, he said something that's hateful, it's hateful.
Find out.
Talk to him.
You know, I want to just play one more clip before we go into the Neil deGrasse-Tyson interview, because it's a long interview, and I want to have time to play it all.
But they just released, Breitbart got hold of a meeting, the first all-staff meeting that they had at Google after the Trump election, okay?
And there too, they're crying.
So let's just play a little bit of this.
Ruth Borat, she is the financial officer, chief financial officer, describing the night of the election to the entire staff, her entire staff of Google, fighting back tears.
I want to take you back to 8.30 p.m. on Tuesday night.
I was at home with friends and family watching the election returns.
And as we started to see the direction of the voting, I reached out to someone close to me who was at the Javit Center where the big celebration was supposed to occur in New York City, somebody who'd been working on the campaign.
And I just sent them a note and said, you know, are you okay?
It looks like it's going the wrong way.
And I got back a very sad short text that read, people are leaving.
Staff is crying.
We're going to lose.
That was the first moment I really felt like we were going to lose.
And it was this massive kick in the gut that we were going to lose.
And it was really painful.
You know, note the use of the word we there.
She's talking to a room full of people, assuming all of them are on the same side.
There's so much to say about what she just said.
You know, that we're all on the same side.
And they probably are, because if they're not, they get fired.
We know that.
They fire you for disagreeing on all these social media companies.
Google fires people if they think men and women are different.
So she's fighting back tears.
It's so terrible.
And let's also remember who Donald Trump was running against, right?
Let's remember that he was running against, you know, I don't know what C means on a classified document.
I had no idea those documents were classified.
I just saw the letter C.
I thought they, you know, it was like Sesame Street or something like that.
You know, so the whole thing is so absurd as if there weren't two choices to be made there.
You know, it was, maybe it was Gorgo versus Godzilla, but that was the choices we had.
Those are the two choices they had.
And she's just assuming that the arc of justice went in the wrong direction because she lost an election.
Now, they keep telling us that, oh, they actually put out a statement after Breakbutt releases, oh, yeah, but that doesn't affect our actual work.
Well, we know it affects their work.
We have an email showing that they used their, they used Google to direct especially Latinos to get them to vote because they knew that they'd vote for Clinton.
They believed it was.
The people actually doing it said in a stolen email that they believed that this was something they were doing to help Clinton.
There is a movie coming out, a documentary called Creepy Line, The Creepy Line.
And it's about the power these people have.
And I just want to end with that because I want you to remember, this is just a mindset.
They're the ones who are afraid of conversation.
I'm not afraid to talk to anybody or have anybody on this show.
They're the ones who are afraid of conversation because they're the ones who've created the system in which there's their way and there's hatred.
And this is just a reminder from it.
This is the trailer for this movie Creepy Line of just how powerful they are.
Facebook constantly manipulates their users.
They do it by the things that they insert into the news feeds.
They do it by the types of hosts they allow their users to see.
They can suppress certain types of results based on what they think you should be seeing, based on what your followers are presenting.
It's what Google and Facebook are doing on a regular basis, by suppressing stories, by steering us towards other stories rather than the stories we're actually seeking.
That's the real manipulation that's going on.
I was a design ethicist at Google where I studied how do you ethically fear people's thoughts.
It will always favor one online music service over another and one candidate over another.
Google and Facebook.
Has the power to undermine democracy without us knowing that democracy has been undermined.
There's what I call the creepy line and the Google policy about a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it.
You know, these guys have so much power and they talk so much about making the world a better place and serving humankind and all this stuff.
They would serve humankind so much more if they would teach people to talk to one another instead of defining hate for them and defining fake news for them and editing people and censoring people.
If they would just introduce ways to debate, they would do so much more for humankind because that's the problem we have, that we're not talking to each other.
It's almost time, talking about the conversation.
It's almost time for the next episode of the conversation here.
It is tomorrow at 5.30 p.m. Eastern.
Is that right?
That can't be right.
It's tomorrow, Friday?
Tomorrow.
Okay.
I always thought it was on Tuesday.
So tomorrow at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific, all of your questions will be answered by the Daily Wire's own Ben Shapiro.
And you can record it and slow it down so you understand what he's saying.
He may not guarantee his responses will change your life the way mine do, but they'll still make you the smartest, most well-informed person on your block.
That is true.
They will.
As always, this episode will be free for everyone to watch on Facebook and YouTube, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by Ben tomorrow at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
Join the conversation.
So please stay tuned and listen to this interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
We get to the God question at the end, but he has lots of interesting things to say about his new book, Accessory to War, The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.
The book is out now.
He is, of course, an astrophysicist, an author, podcast, TV host, and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, one of my favorite venues in New York City.
His podcast, StarTalk, is Emmy-nominated, and his show, Cosmos, A Space-Time Odyssey, which debuted back in 2014, won four Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, two Critics' Choice Awards, and more.
The right loves to attack him, but I think you'll find this interview really interesting.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, thanks so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for having me, and thanks for your interest.
Well, the book is called Accessory to War.
Really interesting.
I'm reading it written with your research associate, Avis Lang.
You're talking essentially about a marriage between the defense industry and astrophysics.
Is that a fair way to put it?
That's precisely what the entire book is about.
And the fact that it's 600 pages long is a small indication of how rich and nuanced and extensive and timeless that relationship has been.
And the subtitle of the book, it's Accessory to War, The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.
None of this is secret.
It just never, no one ever has the occasion to reflect on it.
Whereas the physics community, we know they made the bomb, you know, the H-bomb and the A-bomb.
You needed a physicist for that.
They tap the energy of the atom and chemists, they make napalm and chemical weapons.
The traditional sciences have obvious applications to conflict when you think about it.
But my field, not so much.
You say, well, I wonder what it is.
And so this book is an exploration of the history of that relationship.
So let's go, let's start with now and then go back into time.
Right now, what is the relationship?
What is the defense industry looking to astrophysics for?
Well, so that's a great question.
And in a very recent example, and oh, by the way, just to be clear, since we don't make the bombs or the weapons, but what we care about is strongly overlaps with what the military cares about.
So we care about detecting really dim things in multi-spectral wavelengths.
That's exactly what the military cares about.
And our intellectual advances in those and innovative advances in those categories have direct application to things that the military cares about, including stealth.
And in two recent examples, we once mapped the entire sky using infrared.
Again, this is part of the multi-spectral imaging.
When we think of a spectrum, we think of, naively, you just think of like a rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.
But the entire electromagnetic spectrum is not only visible light, but it's infrared and ultraviolet and X-rays and gamma rays and radio waves.
We've heard of these bands before, but maybe didn't put them all together as one construct.
All of that is light.
And through our own innovations, primarily through that of engineers and scientists, we found ways to exploit each of those bands of light for our own needs in civilization.
We take microwaves and we use it for communication and to heat our food.
We have infrared.
Again, it's invisible light, but we use it, the infrared part of bulbs to keep the French fries warm at McDonald's for hours before you buy it.
But also, missiles moving through the atmosphere leave infrared signals, signatures.
And we have maps of the sky charting every single infrared-emitting object in the universe detectable from Earth.
Well, if you want to detect a missile, you want to know what's not a missile first.
Okay, so you need to know the background infrared signatures that are out there so that if something is then moving across it, you can then identify it, target it, and take it out.
So, this is an example where we create an infrared map, the military just takes it.
Another example of recent years, there's the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is a huge collaboration of many universities.
Sloan is the major funding organization, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
They fund not only sort of educational programming on PBS, they also fund science, actual science experiments and projects.
This is the largest survey of objects in the night sky that has ever been conducted.
Every star, every galaxy, every quasar, everything that goes bump in the night is now in this catalog.
This project was conceived knowing that the bandwidth of data that it's producing nightly would be so huge that you want to create algorithms to process that information effectively and efficiently.
Otherwise, you're awash in it and you can't do anything with it.
So, we had whole teams of computer scientists guided by the needs of the astronomical questions we're asking, and they developed very innovative pipelines, data pipelines to obtain, process, and interpret the information.
This thing gets published in computer journals because it was all innovative, without precedent.
National security interests took notice.
And our people then briefed the national security agencies of the United States on what these algorithms are because they want to do the same thing.
They want to take SCADs of information, process it, and come out with interpreted information that means something.
It's not just noise in the din of signals.
So, and that's just two examples just in recent years, but this goes all the way back to navigation in the times of Columbus, Magellan, Galileo, basically selling his telescope to the military to get money.
And then he looks at the sun, moon, and stars.
And the military says, oh, my gosh, I have a telescope.
I can see the enemy when they can't see me.
And I can know how big their troop movement is.
And they don't know that I know this.
What an advantage I have.
So this is the kind of relationship that's explored.
And there's also, it seems to me, things that come out in ancillary ways that when the military and astrophysics works together, we actually learn things that we might not have learned without that marriage.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, that's fair, but I wouldn't so much call it a marriage as because marriage implies you're always talking to one another.
It's not actually the case.
Well, or not, in some cases.
But think of it as like a two-way street or we're neighbors and there's a picket fence.
And every now and then I come out and say, oh, what's cooking over there?
Oh, we just developed this.
Oh, I could use one of those.
And then they come out and look over the picket fence and see what we've developed.
But then they reach over and take it.
We can't prevent them from taking it because we just published the data and it's at that point it's in public domain.
But that's what the relationship is.
And the biggest contribution, I would say, historically has been towards navigation.
If you have whatever your motives are, is it defense?
Is it empire building?
You want to know where your enemies are and where they're not.
And if you navigate around the globe, how do you know where you are?
There are no longitude and latitude lines imprinted in the ocean surface or on land masses.
We learned this because astronomers of the day mapped the sun, moon, and stars, and that became a coordinate system for the sky projected down onto Earth's surface.
And once you do that and you know how to read this, then you can then navigate.
And in one example of this, a stunning example, Captain Cook, you've all heard of the guy, he was sent to the South Pacific to actually do a science experiment to observe what's called a transit of Venus.
It only happens every 200 years, a couple hundred years.
Venus moves between Earth and the sun.
You can see a black disk move across the sun as Venus orbits.
Okay, it's a slow, slow thing, but it's important.
You make that measurement precisely.
You can use geometry to figure out the distances in and among the planets in the solar system.
An interesting astronomical challenge.
He gets sent with telescopes and tools to make these measurements.
Oh, boy, this is Great Britain that sent him.
What was their motto for centuries?
The sun never sets on the British Empire.
Well, why do they get to say that?
They got to say that because, among other reasons, Captain Cook had a second set of instructions on the flip side of first, observe the Venus.
Oh, here, here's new navigation tools our astronomers just perfected.
Use it to map coastlines of every landmass that is unfamiliar to you and bring that information back.
He brings it back within 18 years.
Great Britain took control of northern Australia, of Tasmania, of New Zealand, of the Cook Islands, of Pitcairn Islands, of Fiji, of Tuvalu, all of these island states in Oceania, Britain took control over.
And they started shipping convicts to Australia.
And so this was empire building, exploiting the knowledge of astronomers to accomplish it.
Control of the Skies00:09:38
But there is also, I mean, we do want to defend the country.
It's not necessarily a bad thing.
I mean, what do you think of Trump's idea for a space force?
Yeah, so, you know, the Trump naysayers, you know, they made fun of it.
But the fact is, the concept of space force is not new.
In fact, in the early 2000s, I'm sure I'm not the first one, suggested this in a commission that I was appointed to by then George W. Bush.
There were 12 of us to study the future of the aerospace industry.
It was on hard times back then.
It had lost half a million jobs.
There was consolidation.
There was worry that if we lose our aerospace industry, that would affect our commerce.
But you order something today, it's on your doorstep tomorrow from Amazon.
An airplane brought it there, right?
Our commerce, our transportation, and our security because they make the jets for the Air Force, the Air Force jets and Navy jets.
So I'm on a commission to study this.
And in so doing, that's when I saw sort of how some of that sausage is made and what the values.
And I said, well, should we separate out space from air here?
These are two different areas of command and control.
The dynamics are different.
The expertise you need to operate in those regimes are different.
And the Air Force guy says, We don't think that's necessary.
They're in control then and now of U.S. Space Command.
We already have space under military control.
It's done by the Air Force.
So if we made a Space Force, it's mostly an accounting shift.
You take all these things that were under the Air Force and you shift them over.
Now it's just a Space Force.
The Air Force launched the GPS satellites under the U.S. Space Command branch of the Air Force.
So it would not be a weird thing.
And we've done this before with the Air Force.
Right.
In World War II, it was the Army Air Force.
So they were not their own branch.
And then we said, look, guys, if you're training them, you need to train pilots and not infantry.
That's a different thing.
The engineers have to fix aerodynamic surfaces and not tanks.
So the Air Force became its own branch of the military.
And no one today would question the value of that.
So I imagine the future where no one questions the value of a space force.
That makes sense.
We're talking about the book Accessory to War, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang.
I want to ask you about something else.
And I don't mean this in a debating way, but it's something I've always wanted to talk to a real science writer about.
I read a lot of science books, a lot of popular science books, and I love it.
And I'm also a devout Christian.
And I have noticed almost every book I read now has chapter after chapter explaining to me why God doesn't exist.
And one of the things that always bothers me about this is that the arguments, the people who are writing are fantastically intelligent and informed, but their arguments are not really theologically informed.
I wonder if it is a problem to have scientists talk about this in the same way it's a problem to have actors talk about politics.
Do you ever feel that you're being asked, being taken away from your expertise on this question?
So, so, so, a couple of reactions to that.
First, let's look at some numbers.
And these numbers are accurate.
The last I knew of them, if there's an updated survey, I'd have to check on that.
If you look at the percentage of Americans who are religious, and there's an interesting way to answer that question unambiguously, rather than ask, do you go to church every weekend?
There are people who go to church who just go for the cupcakes, you know, or to meet people.
And you don't want to count them among those who are religious just because they say they go to church.
So you want to ask a deeper question.
So you can ask, do you pray to God with the expectation that God's divinity will touch you in some way and come and influence events or phenomena in your life?
If you answer yes to that, you're religious.
Yeah, we're good with that.
Okay.
That's a really clean, sharp divider.
Okay.
And this also weeds out people, oh, I'm spiritual, but do you have any plan?
You know, so, okay.
So, all right.
If you ask that question, something like 85% of Americans are religious.
Now you go to academia, so people who are highly sort of educated folks in any field, that number drops to about 60, 65%.
You go to science-trained people, so it'd be engineers, mathematicians, and the physical sciences, biological science.
It drops further.
You get to about 40%.
Then you want to divide it up.
You get to sort of the biologists.
They're actually down around 15%.
My field is a little more than that, maybe 18%.
My point is, whatever books you're reading, if they're trying to argue that God doesn't exist and they're written by science-trained people, it's not written by the 40% who pray to God.
Okay.
So that's fact number one.
Fact number two, I don't know what books you're reading, but most science books I read don't mention God at all.
Are you attracted to the ones that try to put the right?
I don't know which ones you're reading.
Well, I'm attracted to books that have a big outlook, and I'm reading books like Sapiens and Enlightenment Now.
I just finished one of Just Babies and things like that.
Philosophical sweeps.
Okay, yes, yes.
So now I get to where you're coming from.
If you're just reading a book on black holes, they're not talking about God.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, yeah.
Right, right.
But yeah, if you read the larger philosophically driven books, there will likely be, if not a part of a chapter, a whole chapter addressing this.
And so I can't speak for them, but I can speak for myself.
And I will here and now.
And what I'll say is, my only issue with, let's take Christianity specifically, because that's most familiar to us in the United States and presumably to both of us.
My only issue is if you are using your Christianity to interpret the Bible in such a literal way that it directly conflicts with objectively established scientific evidence.
And by the way, I don't even have a problem with that.
I only have a problem with that if you now want to take that into the science classroom and present it as science.
It's not science.
It's theology.
It's religion.
If it's anywhere, put it in the religion classroom.
Put it in comparative religion.
Put it in Sunday school.
You don't have, here's something I think is interesting.
You don't have scientists, much less atheists, picketing outside of churches, saying that might not necessarily be true.
In America, there's generally respect for what you do on a Sunday or if you're Jewish on a Saturday.
Okay.
And unless you're in a really rabid racist neighborhood, you're not going to harm the Muslim who's praying the five times a day.
In this country, the free expression of religion is one of its most beautiful, strongest points.
That's what attracted so many immigrants because they couldn't practice the freedom of religion where they came from.
Okay?
So, all right.
So, so, um, so meanwhile, while you don't have atheists picketing churches, you have fundamentalist Christians trying to influence school boards to change the science curriculum.
Now, what I will say there is a simple response.
It's because education is not mentioned in the Constitution, by default, it means it's now the purview of the states.
Anything not explicitly forbidden in the Constitution is allowed and controlled by the states, okay?
Which means states control education.
School boards control education.
If you are on a school board and you're deeply devout to the point of being fundamentalist, that is, every word in the Bible is literally true, and you want to put that in your science classroom, no one can stop you.
No, you can outvote anybody who wanted to keep science as it is traditionally taught.
No one will stop you, but I can tell you what will happen.
Those students will not know what science is or how and why it works.
And science, that knowledge is fundamental to the future of the economic growth of the nation, our health, and our security.
So your objection is not to God per se, no matter what your personal beliefs are, but.
Personal, I speak for myself.
No, no.
And I don't, you don't see me debating anybody on this.
You don't see own the internet.
Okay.
And some of my more viewed videos, I do mention God, but I mention God like in one tenth of 1% of anything I say publicly, but everybody focuses on that and it sort of grows out of proportion with my actual material.
But if I'm ever there, I'm simply commenting on however religious you are, we need you to know the difference between theology and science and that science is a fundamental driver of everything we care about in modern civilization.
And when you start interfering with that, you're interfering with the future of what the country can be relative to any other country that is heavily investing in science.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Insights00:03:09
A fair response.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the book is Accessory to War.
Thanks so much for coming on.
I hope you come back and talk again.
By the way, thanks for asking me.
I mean, you know, if all the books you read on science, they're all saying God doesn't exist, and you bring a scientist on yourself.
No, I love science.
And it was an absolutely fair response.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Talking to you.
Thanks.
Really interesting.
I would love to know your response, what you think of that interview and what he had to say, especially there at the end, but all throughout.
Write to A. Clavin at dailywire.com.
And if we get some responses, we'll come on and talk about them.
You probably are wondering how to spell A. Clavin.
It's A-K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's.
All right.
We got to end for the week.
Again, if you're on the East Coast and you're in danger and the people are telling you to get out, that's what they're there for.
That's their job.
Get out.
Stuff I like.
Stuff I like, stuff I like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
All right.
I guess we're running out of contributions.
You know, a new version of A Star is Born is coming out.
I think it's coming out in early October with, who's in it?
Bradley, what's his name?
Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, I think, isn't it?
Go back and watch the original Star Is Born, 1937, directed by William Wellman, one of the truly great directors, starring a forgotten movie star, Frederick March.
He actually started out as a silent film star, but he went in, had a career well into the 60s and 70s, I think.
Janet Gaynor in her only Technicolor film about, and it's the old story of Star Isborn is an actor, a famous actor discovers a young woman who wants to be an actress, and he helps her career and falls in love with her.
And she starts to go up as he starts to decline.
And that became a musical with Judy Garland, which is pretty good.
It's a good musical.
It is kind of touching because it's really after she had lost her youth and she'd been on drugs.
And you can just tell she's kind of losing it.
And so even in the movie, while she plays the young girl rising, she's actually an older star falling.
So that's a good movie too.
But really go back and watch this because it is just a wonderful depiction of old Hollywood from old Hollywood.
And it's just a, there's something so basic about it.
They always remake it as a musical, but as a drama, it's great.
It also has the greatest last line.
I shouldn't say the greatest, but one of the greatest last lines in all of movie history.
It has a terrific ending.
All right, we got to go.
The Clavinless weekend is upon us.
You can get through, not all of you, but most of you, many of you, some of you, a few of you, who knows?
Can get through.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
The Greatest Last Line00:00:19
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring, senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.