Andrew Clavin’s Deep Fake News dissects media hypocrisy—from Adam Schiff’s fictional "soulless weasels" speech to CNN’s Jeff Zucker’s partisan directives and the NBA’s cowardly China apology, where LeBron James traded freedom for profit. He exposes Project Veritas’ revelations of anonymous Democrat leaks as a distraction from "ObamaGate," while mainstream outlets ignore Hunter Biden’s corruption. The episode also contrasts Neil deGrasse Tyson’s scientific rigor with media sensationalism, like dark matter’s 85% cosmic dominance and unproven multiverse theories, before concluding that truth is sacrificed for power—whether in politics, science, or corporate kneeling. [Automatically generated summary]
McCarthyite Congressman Adam Schiff says in order to stop Donald Trump from violating every sentence in our Constitution, he must violate every sentence in our Constitution.
In an address to the American Association of Soulless Weasels, Schiff said, quote, Donald Trump is a threat to everything we hold dear as Americans, and in order to stop him, I must destroy everything we hold dear as Americans.
Trump has repeatedly shown his disrespect for every single one of the principles I'm about to abandon and continues to hold himself above the laws I'm in the process of breaking.
Therefore, in order to end this threat to our way of life, I have to completely eradicate our way of life.
Unquote.
After announcing the opening of a make-believe impeachment hearing, Schiff began interviewing witnesses in a locked room in the basement of the Capitol where no one could hear their testimony, though Schiff said he would release appropriate bits and pieces of it to the New York Times, because after all, if you can't trust the New York Times, who can you trust besides everybody else?
Though Republicans and other reliable witnesses were not allowed into the interrogation room, a janitor wandering by the door heard loud screams of agony, followed by Schiff shouting, quote, confess the president is un-American or I will use the hot pincers on you again, unquote.
Later, Schiff admitted that his methods were an extreme betrayal of every ethical and moral standard on which our civilization rests, but he added, quote, I only did these things in reality.
They're nothing compared to what Trump has done in my imagination, unquote.
President of the Chuck Todd Fan Club, Chuck Todd, went on totally objective NBC News or completely leftist MSNBC News, it's impossible to tell the difference, and announced that he was inspired by Schiff and from now on would defend journalism from Trump's attacks by violating every standard of journalism in an effort to destroy him.
So basically, he'll just go on doing what he's been doing.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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When I was a kid, we used to wonder if you dug a hole deep enough, would you come out in China?
Well, the National Basketball Association is apparently going to try that experiment and find out.
They started digging after Houston Rockets GM Daryl Maury, tweeted his support for the demonstrators in Hong Kong, the brave men and women fighting to keep their liberty as China slowly closes its iron grip on the formerly free British colony.
The NBA apologized for Maury's righteous tweet.
They apologized disgustingly in English and even more disgustingly in Chinese.
They started ejecting fans who openly supported freedom in the face of communist tyranny.
Maury had to apologize to the Chinese tyrants.
Players apologized.
Golden State coach Steve Kerr, who's Superman when it comes to attacking the American president, suddenly turned into a mealy-mouthed worm, drawing a comparison between the 65 million Chinese murdered by the communists and something, something, something about America.
It was appalling crap.
And now, James LeBron, King James, has turned himself into Chairman James with this stupid statement.
We all talk about this freedom of speech.
Yes, we all do have freedom of speech.
But at times, there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you're not thinking about others and you only think about yourself.
So I don't believe, I don't want to get into a word or sentence feud with Daryl, with Daryl Moray, but I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand and he spoke.
And so many people could have been harmed, not only financially, but physically, emotionally, spiritually.
So just be careful what we tweet and we say and what we do, even though, yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too.
Yeah, James tried to explain that away, but it just got worse.
And the thing is, I don't even want to pick on LeBron.
His job is to put a ball through a hoop.
He's very good at putting balls through hoops.
He may be the best putter of balls through hoops since balls were hooped.
But I do think this situation, which has besmeared not just him and everyone in the sport, not to mention Everso Woke ESPN, which suddenly went morally dark on the China subject, and Disney, who owns ESPN and isn't about to lose access to that big old Chinese audience for its films.
And by the way, let's not forget the NFL, where all those oh-so-brave Kaepernicks disrespect the American flag.
They apologized to China back in 2004 for accidentally airing a second-long image of Tiananmen Square during the Super Bowl halftime show.
Same exact thing.
This situation brings a lot of things into focus and into question.
It brings into question celebrity culture.
Why does putting a ball through a hoop or reciting lines someone else wrote for you elevate LeBron James's opinion or Robert De Niro's opinion to relevance?
That is corrupting.
That attitude is corrupting.
It brings into question our reliance on capitalism and free trade for moral guidance.
Without the brave and moral hearts of human beings, these systems will operate only on the basis of profit, and that's corrupting.
And it brings into question the drive toward globalism.
It sounds pretty to say we should all act as one world, but if we don't act under truly moral rules, as opposed to Chinese rules, then economic and military might will decide what's right, and that's about as corrupting as you can get.
Freedom is the first moral good of politics, because without freedom, every other good is just oppression with a smiley face.
If you can't choose your own path and speak your own mind and spend your own money as you see fit, you're nothing.
You're no one.
No matter how much free stuff or law and order the state gives you in return for your soul and no matter how much good the government tells you it is doing with your money.
I support capitalism because it's the most free system.
I support free trade because it supports capitalism.
And it's wonderful that capitalism, when it's done honestly, raises everyone to a higher economic level.
But if you put the economics before the freedom, you become corrupt.
And that's what's happened to the NBA and the NFL and Disney and a lot of other people who sold their values for the almighty Yuan.
No system can do the moral thing for you.
Shareholders are not an excuse.
Cultural sensitivity is not an excuse.
No one can demand that you be willing to die for freedom.
Not everyone's a hero, but we can hold you in contempt when you won't even speak up for freedom, when there are people in the streets of Hong Kong risking everything.
You know, here's the thing.
It actually doesn't bother me that the Democrats oppose the Republicans.
We're supposed to have two parties.
We're supposed to argue with each other.
We're supposed to find ways to compromise.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
But the thing is, the Democrats have so lost their way.
They have so lost their way that they no longer put freedom first.
Anything they say, anything they say they're going to give you.
You should always be asking them, what's the cost, not just in money.
See, conservatives are always doing this.
Republicans are always saying, who's going to pay for that?
What's the cost?
That's not the point.
The point is, what's the cost in freedom?
And they never.
tell you that.
And there's a reason they never tell you that.
They're at war with the people and in the person and especially in the person of Donald Trump.
James O'Keefe, our friend, great guy, runs Project Veritas, which is a very, very important institution.
He has a whistleblower inside CNN, a guy named Gary Carrie Porch, a satellite technician, decided he was going to wear a camera and a hidden microphone and go in because he was so disturbed.
He said he was kind of a liberal before or in the center.
And he was so disturbed by the left-wing bias at CNN that he started to move toward the right.
And he got CNN president, Jeff Zucker.
They have these meetings on the phone at 9 a.m. every morning.
And Jeff Zucker gives his marching orders.
And here's just a couple of clips of Zucker telling these people that all he wants to talk about is impeachment.
Impeachment, impeachment, impeachment.
That is what CNN is going to be about.
We're moving towards impeachment.
I mean, don't like, you know, we shouldn't pretend, oh, this is going one way.
And so all these moves are moves towards impeachment.
So don't lose sight of what the big story is.
So I just want to say on the Let's Graham front.
I know that there's a lot of people at CNN that are friendly with Lynch Grounds.
It's time to knock that off.
And it's time to call him out.
Fake conspiracy nonsense that Fox has spread for years is now deeply embedded in American society.
And frankly, that is college destructive to America.
And I do not think we should be scared of it to say so.
And then a guy is on the call, David Shalin, I think it's pronounced.
He's the political director, but he has no bias whatsoever, but everything is the fault of Republicans.
I think as big of a story as what President Trump has done here is the Republicans sort of either delusional or defiant or silent responses.
I mean, it's as big a story in what is going on.
So that's their attitude, right?
It's all the Republicans' fault.
They don't hear, maybe they don't hear their bias.
It doesn't matter.
You know, there's a guy, he got one guy, a media coordinator named Nick Neville, and he's the guy like basically on the floor.
Got him complaining about this system.
Let's listen to him for just a sec.
Yeah, because what's difficult is like you have some conflicting things at play here.
Like, there's a lot of people who are out here trying to just do what they think is like the best of journalistic integrity.
And then you get on the 9 a.m. call and big boss, Jeff Zucker, tells you what to do.
And it's like, you have to, like, to a certain extent, you have to follow his verdict.
Yeah, you got to go with the ⁇ so you got to go with the boss there.
And he's not, well, he's a big.
I mean, he's like had an ongoing feud with Trump.
It's no surprise.
Yeah, he's an ongoing feud with Trump since The Apprentice.
Right, because Trump, Zucker was on, I guess it was NBC that did The Apprentice.
He was at NBC when Trump was doing The Apprentice.
That's the face behind the news.
I mean, good job, Project Veritas.
That's the face behind the news.
And it's not just CNN.
Obviously, Zucker has a personal beef with Trump, but it is obviously the New York Times, too, where everybody is so woke.
And let me just show you how that plays out for you in just a sec.
Pro-Trump Video Feud00:14:28
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So the New York Times has a story out, right?
Adam Schiff is running these star chamber investigations of impeachment, and he's got his minions on TV saying, oh, yeah, this is the way it should be done, because it's just like a criminal investigation, which is not.
It's a political process.
It should be totally out in the open.
So yesterday, they had a woman named Fiona Hill, a former White House aide, was on.
And today, the New York Times, a Democrat outlet, it's a left-wing Democrat outlet, brings out this story.
The effort to pressure Ukraine for political help.
And by the way, I don't go into this story all that much, the details of the story, because I think the whole thing is just a cover up for ObamaGate.
But I just want to read you the New York Times.
The effort to pressure Ukraine for political help provoked a heated confrontation inside the White House last summer that so alarmed John Bolton, then the National Security Advisor, that he told an aide to alert White House lawyers, House investigators were told on Monday in this secret Star Chamber session.
Mr. Bolton got into a tense exchange on July 10th with Gordon Sunderland, the Trump donor turned ambassador to the European Union, who was working with Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, to press Ukraine to investigate Democrats, according to three people who heard the testimony.
The aide, Fiona Hill, testified that Mr. Bolton told her to notify the chief lawyer for the NSC, the National Security Council, about a rogue effort by Mr. Sunderland, Mr. Giuliani, and Mick Mulvaney.
Okay, so now stop for a minute and think about this.
Anonymous, obviously Democrat sources, right?
They're leaking to the New York Times.
They're Democrats.
They're leaking what they want to leak to the New York Times.
They're leaking what the Democrats want the people to know.
Okay, so an anonymous Democrat source is leaking to the Democrat New York Times, former newspaper, but now just a Democrat spokesperson, the New York Times.
So now they are reporting that Fiona Hill said John Bolton said Rudy Giuliani was doing something wrong.
That's the story, right?
That's the story.
Now, I'm not even saying it's untrue.
I'm not even saying Fiona Hill didn't say it.
I have no way of knowing.
I just don't know, right?
I don't know.
All I know is that Democrats are feeding information to Democrats.
And even if we get into an argument about this story, we're arguing about what they want us to be talking about.
We're talking about what they want us to be talking about.
Democrats who have an agenda, going to the New York Times, which has an agenda, talking about people who may or may not have an agenda we don't know, talking about other people talking about other people.
That's the news in the Trump era.
That's the news in the Trump era.
And we know why, because they're no longer putting freedom first.
They're no longer putting truth first.
They're no longer putting the moral point.
See, when I said freedom is the first good of politics, right?
It's not the first good of all things, but it's the first good of politics.
That means the point of politics, the telos of politics, the end result of politics, is supposed to be freedom.
If you're not moving toward freedom, you're not doing politics right.
Just like in religion, it's love.
If you're not moving toward love, you ain't doing religion right, okay?
So the New York Times, their job is to report the news.
It's to tell the truth.
If you don't put truth first, if you don't put truth first, you're not doing journalism right.
It's all about the intention of the thing you're doing.
It's true in your life.
It's true in my life.
Whatever we're doing, we have to live into the inner intention of that thing.
And this is what the New York Times is not doing.
It's what the NBA isn't doing.
It's what the NFL isn't doing.
You have to be living into freedom first, into truth first, into love first, or you're not doing your job.
I mean, this is appalling.
So now, you know, we heard that Chuck Todd, he just came right out and said, you know, I'm not going to show you what the president says about Hunter Biden because Hunter Biden is not a public figure, which is garbage, right?
Hunter Biden, obviously, it seems, or at least let's put it this way, it seems, got jobs because his father was vice president of the United States, got jobs in the Ukraine, in Ukraine.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't say the Ukraine, and got jobs in Ukraine, got jobs in China that he wouldn't have gotten had he not been named Biden.
Now he's quit those jobs and he says, I'm not going to take these jobs if my father gets elected president.
Here he is talking to ABC News.
Do you regret being on the board to begin with?
No, I don't regret being on the board.
What I regret is not taking into account that there would be a Rudy Giuliani and a president of the United States that would be listening to this ridiculous conspiracy idea, which has, again, been completely debunked by everyone.
I think people at home are thinking, how could that not have crossed your mind or you wouldn't have felt just a little bit in your gut?
Like, maybe this isn't a good idea to go and sit on the board of this Ukrainian company.
I said to you, in retrospect, I was stuck my judgment.
You never thought this might not look right.
You know what?
I'm a human.
You know what?
Did I make a mistake?
Well, maybe in the grand scheme of things, yeah.
But did I make a mistake based upon some ethical lapse?
Absolutely not.
You know, so here's ABC run by George Stephanopoulos, Clinton Hack, right?
Another Democrat outlet interviewing a Democrat.
Glenn Beck went on his show over at the Blaze, and he said, here are some questions that they should ask.
He says, in 2010, this is Glenn Beck, he says, in 2010, Joe Biden met with the Chinese president in Washington as part of the nuclear security summit at the exact same time Hunter Biden was in China with his two business partners, John Kerry's stepson, Christopher Hines, and Kerry's former campaign finance manager, manager Devin Archer.
The three of them met with executives from China's big, biggest banks and its sovereign wealth and social security funds.
Biden's company was brand new.
It had no business securing these meetings with Chinese state-run entities.
Was this meeting granted because Joe was making deals with the Chinese president?
These are just questions.
This is journalism, journalisting.
You know, this is what you do when you're a journalist.
Glenn Beck has five or six of those questions that he asked.
They're good questions.
He's not throwing accusations around.
He's asking questions.
They're not asking questions on GMA.
They're asking, oh, shouldn't you have thought about that?
I mean, anybody can weasel out of that kind of question.
It's not doing what they're supposed to be doing.
They're not living into the intention of their profession because they have lost the meta value of what they're doing for this inner Trump hatred, which also, by the way, is you hatred.
It's hating you who voted for him.
Turkey, too.
You know, we had yesterday we had Mike Durant on.
I still haven't decided.
Mike's take on things was so different about Turkey basically saying we should be allied with, we should be allies in fact with Turkey, that we made a mistake going in with the particular Kurds we were fighting with against ISIS.
Very different point of view, but at least he pointed out facts that you're not hearing on the mainstream media.
You're not hearing that the Kurds who are being attacked are in fact affiliated with the communist Kurds in Turkey that Erdoyan doesn't like because they're terrorists.
I mean, you're not really hearing about that.
It's all Trump, Trump, Trump.
Trump did this wrong.
Trump did that wrong.
And again, I've said that I think he made a mistake.
It looks to me like a fiasco, very possibly, and that's a bad thing for Trump.
It's a bad thing for all of us because it means it's going to be harder to make deals with China.
It means that Russia will be emboldened when the president is under siege, when he's not, when he hasn't got the trust of his allies, when he hasn't got the trust of the public, and we're all divided like this.
That's when our enemies act.
So it's a bad, bad thing.
So here's ABC reporting on what's happening in Turkey.
And if you're not watching, it's just incredible video of explosions and rockets and missiles and tracers going off in the night.
This video obtained by ABC News appears to show the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tal Avias, a border town bombarded by Turkey's military.
This video right here appearing to show Turkey's military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town.
The Kurds who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS.
Now, horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies.
So that looks, I shouldn't laugh, but it looks really bad.
But in fact, that video obtained by ABC News was not Syria at all.
It was a gun range in Kentucky where they were putting on an army demonstration.
And they haven't even apologized for it on the air.
They apologized for it on Twitter, I think, but they haven't gone on and said, oh, guess what?
All that stuff we showed you.
Because they're not thinking, how can that possibly happen?
How could it possibly happen?
That can only happen because they're not thinking straight.
They're not living into what they do.
And then, you know, they do this thing.
There's a video going around.
You remember that movie, Kingsman?
It was kind of a hyper-violent movie with Colin Firth.
And there's one scene, I believe it's in the first Kingsman, because there were two of them where he goes into a church and he slaughters everyone in the church.
So a pro-Trump group put out a video where they took that video, they put Trump's face on Colin Firth, and they put the opposition on the faces of all the people he kills.
So it's the media and it's the Democrats, and he goes through shooting all these people.
And of course, oh my gosh, the horror, the horror, the horror.
But listen to the way NBC reports this, reports the story, and listen to just the desperate desire to tag this on Trump.
Tonight, the White House is trying to distance the president from a disturbing video showing a likeness of him violently attacking his political opponents and the news media.
It was apparently played at a conference at one of the president's Florida resorts.
Hallie Jackson has that story.
It's a video so violent we can only show a few seconds of it.
President Trump's face superimposed onto a shooter's body inside what's described as the church of fake news.
In a graphic scene, he shoots, stabs, bludgeons, and in one instance, lights on fire depictions of his political opponents like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and news organizations like the Washington Post and NBC News.
The Trump campaign says it did not produce the video, which appears to be based off the movie Kingsman, the Secret Service.
The New York Times, which first reported on the video, says it was played at a pro-Trump conference by an outside group at the president's resort in Miami last week.
Both sides of the aisle, disgusted.
People say they are disgusted, including the White House, which issued a statement saying we disapprove of this.
We had nothing to do with it.
But they just could not let it go.
And by the way, by the way, they didn't do anything like this when, remember in New York, Shakespeare in the Park staged Julius Caesar and they had Caesar was Donald Trump and he was assassinated on stage and oh, what a great work of art that was.
And when they wrote books and showed movies of George W. Bush being assassinated, no problem, no problem at all.
When they had Snoop Dogg shooting Donald Trump, an actor playing Donald Trump, no problem at all.
But now this thing that has nothing to do with Donald Trump, I mean, it is ugly.
I don't think, you know, some people, including Matt Walsh, Matt's been doing a great, great job lately.
His commentary has been absolutely excellent.
But he said, oh, well, nobody complained in the movie they're shooting churchgoers.
Nobody complained about that.
But the movie is fiction.
We all know it's fiction.
The movie is a work of an artist and they have a right to say whatever they want to say.
These are real people.
He's showing him shooting and there is a lot of anger and violence in the country.
I don't like it.
Trump didn't like it.
The White House doesn't like it.
You can report on it.
But please, please do not forget all the time, all the violence.
Just the other day, it was in Minnesota.
Trump had that big rally and the people were coming out.
They were being spat on.
They were being heckled and shouted at.
One woman was smacked in the face by an anti-Trump protester.
I mean, the ugliness is so much, so weighted toward the left, but they never, never cover it.
I mean, you can't go to a Trump rally.
You can't wear a MAGA hat.
And when people get hit or screamed at when they're wearing MAGA hats, the newsmen go on and say, well, you know, the MAGA hat is a sign of racism.
No, it's not.
See, this is the thing.
This is the thing.
They have so demonized the people in their mind that they can't support freedom in their mind.
How can you support freedom if you don't support the people who are going to be free?
Let me just play one last clip because I want to get, we have an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, which I think was a really good interview.
Steve Donelson, Sam Donelson, who used to be the big reporter during the Nixon.
Was it Nixon or Reagan?
Reagan, he was always shouting at.
He's always shouting at him just like Acosta does today, although he, Donaldson, at least was a better journalist.
But Donaldson goes on, and this is his description of Donald Trump supporters.
And I play it not to get at Donaldson because it is just indicative of so many people in the press today.
He's talking to Brian Stelter.
I mean, lock her up.
I mean, all the things he says, all the vicious, mean things he says, they love it.
There are these people in this country.
They're good Americans.
Otherwise, they'll probably give you the shirt off their back.
They'll help you if you need.
But they have this fixation.
They want to return this country to the white Christian country that they believe it should be again.
They don't want the diversity.
The Multiverse Debate00:15:52
And they follow him for this.
But they're not the country.
We are diverse people, we are good and strong because of that, and we're going to come back to that, I assure you.
Why didn't Brian Stelter say to him, what's your evidence?
What's your proof of that?
What's your proof that these people are racist, these 64 million of your fellow Americans are voting because they want a white Christian country?
I mean, I want a Christian country voluntarily.
I mean, I want people to find Christ for their own pleasure and joy and salvation.
But, you know, that somehow the diversity of the country is what's bothering these Trump followers, what's bothering people like me who want freedom.
What's his proof?
Where's his evidence?
Has he got a quote?
Has he got a survey?
Has he got anything?
No.
Stelter doesn't ask him because he already knows.
They know this is who you are.
They know this is who you are.
So they know that you shouldn't be free.
So they don't have to support freedom.
So they don't have to do their jobs.
It is really a shame that they have lost.
It's not a coincidence.
It's not a coincidence that the same people who disrespected the flag and the NFL and the NBA are kow-towing to the Chinese.
That's not a coincidence.
They have lost the plot of America because they don't like the people of America.
That's why.
All right, we've got Neil deGrasse Tyson coming up.
But don't forget, Another Kingdom Season 3, Episode 3 is out right now.
It is one of the best episodes, and there are even better episodes to come.
A new episode drops every Monday, but subscribers get early access to them on Friday, so subscribe now because also you can be in the mailbag.
It's a little stuffy and scratchy in there, but you can ask any question you want.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson, coming up in just a second.
Well, you know Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He's an astrophysicist, an author, podcast, TV host.
He's director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.
I really, you'll hear me thank him for coming on the show because he has taken a lot of flack.
He was on Ben's show, Ben's Sunday special, and he got hit by slate for this.
So he knows he's putting his head out there.
Some of you don't like him because he's not a religious guy.
He's not a religious guy.
And I could hear, I read his book and I could hear by the way he was talking that in a lot of ways the way he thinks and the kind of person he is is not going to give him access to the joy and salvation of religion.
That's too bad.
But this is the kind of guy he is.
And we talked about it in a very honest way.
And I thought he was great.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me back.
You know, I got to tell you before we start, I have a million things I want to talk to you about, so I won't take too much time.
But I just want to tell you how much I respect you.
There'll be a thousand things per second.
Exactly.
Exactly.
We won't even worry about the speed of light or anything.
But I want to tell you how much I respect you for coming on this show and on Ben Shapiro's show.
I know there are people who demonize you for showing up on shows where they have opinions that they disagree with and maybe you disagree with.
And I appreciate your bringing science to my audience and other people's audience as well.
So I really think that I'm delighted to.
Without conversation, there is no civilization.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
That's how I see it.
So much of news reporting about science is politicized and geared toward disaster, terrible things that might happen that are happening.
What are you thrilled about right now in the field of astrophysics?
What's happening that we don't hear about that's really a breakthrough and exciting?
Yeah, just a comment about sort of disaster reporting.
While there are some scientists who can thrive on that, it's mostly journalists who are, because you can get a bigger headline if you're going to say that the world is going to end or that the asteroid is going to hit.
And that's not uniquely applied to science.
That's applied to practically anything that goes on in journalism today, particularly when an article now appears online and then it becomes clickbait for some nearby ad that gets posted there.
So there's been a shift in the honesty of what actual threats are or have been in reporting, which is, I'm concerned about that because some people only ever read headlines.
The only disasters that an astrophysicist would ever present to you is the threat of an asteroid, for example, or an attempt to further communicate what's going on on Earth as a planet climactically, because we also study other planets climactically, which gives us a cosmic perspective on climate change and other things that have long-term effects.
Personally, for me, in the universe, I'm still eagerly looking for a solution to what dark matter is in the universe.
It's 85% of the gravity of the universe has no known origin, but we measure its effect on everything else.
And it's just a mystery.
And then there's this thing we call dark energy, which is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that's making the universe accelerate in its expansion against the wishes of the gravity of all the galaxies.
And so both of those together, it's a profound state of ignorance that actually is quite exciting because if we solve that, it could solve a host of other things that have been perplexing us for so long.
And two last quick points to make.
Another frontier, but this from biology, is how do we go from organic molecules to self-replicating life?
That's a frontier in biology.
And last in my field is like, what was around before the Big Bang?
We have top people assigned to these tasks, but they remain fascinating frontiers that we're all sort of scratching our head about.
That really is interesting.
I always hear people, when people ask that question about the Big Bang, I always hear scientists say that there was no before because there was no time.
That's a very unsatisfying answer.
Yeah, it's completely satisfying to me as well.
It's an answer, but to make that your only answer, I think is it is true we define the beginning of time as the Big Bang.
And there's no way to think about measuring time outside of this universe.
So to say that there's a before the clock even existed might be a philosophical issue.
It's like saying what is north of the North Pole.
Well, the North Pole is by definition the North spot where Santa Claus is, right?
So you can't get more north than that.
So, yeah, so interesting you remembered that and remembered being frustrated by it.
You were completely, legitimately frustrated by that kind of an answer.
What it calls for is if the multiverse is a thing, we would need some way of reckoning time that transcends timekeeping within our own expanding bubble.
So you'd have sort of a meta time, for example, in the higher dimensions of the multiverse.
I want to get back to the multiverse in a second.
But before that, you open letters from an astrophysicist with a tribute to NASA.
And one of the things I keep hearing is sort of filtering into the conversation these days is people saying that really manned space, interplanetary space travel with an eye toward colonizing other planets is a myth.
It's a complete pipe dream.
It'll never happen.
Do you agree with that?
No.
Well, there are very good arguments for and against it.
And there's no reason to dogmatically settle on one or the other.
The reasons for it are it's kind of it would be good to be a multi-planet species.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Okay.
That ensures our survival.
We became multi-continent, and the voyages across the oceans took as long or longer than some of the trips we're taking in space.
So, of course, the difference is when Columbus landed in the New World, he was greeted by other human beings.
When he gets off the ship, he can breathe the air in the new world, right?
And if a ship needs repair, the trees are also made out of wood in the new world.
Whereas if you land on Mars, you can't breathe the air.
There are no replacement factories for your broken circuit boards.
And there's no farmland.
There's no natives to feed you and help you not die.
So the challenge is yet to be something to be realistically resolved.
One of my favorite words of the past few decades is terraforming.
One way to do it is you terraform Mars.
Elon Musk is big into that.
The idea that you could seed the atmosphere or the soils with microbes so that they then generate oxygen and pump oxygen into the air, creating an ozone layer.
And you just sort of turn Earth, turn Mars into Earth.
And then you just move there.
Then it's not a matter of your food.
You're basically homesteading at that point.
So they're interesting and strong arguments in both directions, and I haven't landed on one or the other yet.
As for interstellar travel, no, that's not happening.
It's never going to happen.
I could say you want to ship, you'll get there in 100,000 years.
Right.
And that's wholly incommensurate with your life expectancy.
And you don't think any of the science fiction ideas about wormholes or anything like that is happening?
So if there are wormholes, we don't know how to keep them propped open.
They're very unstable.
Our equations tell us that they are unstable.
But if we're going to travel across the galaxy, we need wormholes and or warp drives, which is just de rigueur in sci-fi storytelling.
But yeah, so I can't wait for that day.
That'd just be fun.
But you're not holding your body.
But if without that, we're not going anywhere.
We're not leaving the solar system.
All right.
Now, you and I have very different religious outlooks.
I'm a deeply religious Christian, and obviously you have some unkind words for the Bible.
I laughed out loud at the guy who wrote you saying he heard the voice of his dead father, and you had all these questions you wanted him to ask his dead father.
Oh, right.
If you're going to have a conversation, this is someone who wrote in who had a two-way conversation with her dead father on a slab in the funeral home.
And I couldn't help but just say, okay, the next time this happens, ask these questions, not the ones that you ask.
All right.
Say, where are you?
Are you wearing clothes?
Do you eat?
Who makes the food?
You know, ask questions that can give serious information from the other side.
Otherwise, it's just not as useful.
And if she's really communicating with the other side, that would be extraordinary.
So why not get evidence that could establish that definitively?
It's such a science.
I don't think I make fun of the Bible.
I just reference it.
If it says something that's objectively false, I'll say so.
But I'm not, I don't.
Tons of religious people are not using the Bible, the Judeo-Christian Bible, as a textbook to understand the physical universe.
Tons are saying the Bible is a place where I get spiritual, emotional, philosophical wisdom, but I'm not comparing it chapter and verse to nature, right?
So it's not really as big a problem as people want to say it is between science and religion.
You know, I agree with this, but you make some really good points about religious people sometimes replacing science with superstition.
Perfectly fair.
But it also seems to me that sometimes scientists go out of their way to avoid the simplest explanation, which is why I wanted to ask you about the multiverse.
The multiverse seems to me an unprovable theory that is supposed to answer the question of how we wound up with this completely unbelievable universe that we can understand, which seems against all odds.
Isn't it, you know, they used to accuse religious people of having a God of the gaps, of filling in places where there is no scientific information with God.
But isn't that science of the gaps?
Isn't that filling in like answering a question with something completely unprovable theory where you could just as easily say it had to do with a creation?
That's an excellent question.
So a couple of things.
First, it's almost never good for a scientist to put forth an idea that cannot be tested.
That's just not useful.
It may be true, it may not be true, but if we can't test it, we'll move on to some other problems that are testable.
It's just a matter of the practicality of invested time.
So I just want to say that.
With regard to the multiverse, we didn't just pull that out of nowhere.
What happens is we learned about quantum physics.
That was discovered in the 1920s.
Think of that as the physics of very small things.
So atoms, molecules, atoms, and nuclei.
There's a whole world down there that is behaving in ways entirely unfamiliar to us outside of our senses.
Particles pop in and out of existence.
It's a crazy world, but it's true.
And in fact, the entire IT revolution is based on exploiting our understanding of quantum physics.
General theory of relativity put forth by Einstein is the theory of the large.
And that explains the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe, all of that.
And it turns out those two understandings of the universe do not play well together in the sandbox.
They work in their own regimes, but you put them together as one coherent whole.
They do not agree with one another.
This is where the string theorists came in to try to unify those two branches of physics.
But now, here's where it gets interesting.
At the Big Bang, the large was small.
So what happens when the entire universe was the size of an atom?
And so what the quantum physics people were doing was saying, let us proceed with applying quantum physics to the entire universe when the entire universe was as small as an atom.
What do you get?
You get multiverses.
And each multiverse has a slightly different laws of physics operating in it than another multiverse.
So we were forced to that by already successful and already tested theories of the universe.
And that's why it's on the table for discussion.
And maybe there is a way to test it that we have not thought of yet.
For example, gravity has a way of leaking out of one universe and can penetrate the boundaries of an adjacent universe.
Could it be that dark matter in our universe is regular matter in an adjacent universe whose forces of gravity we feel across the boundary membranes between their universe and ours?
Could it be?
I mean, I'm just saying it's to propose something and in that moment not know how to test it should not mean to discard it entirely.
You put it on the shelf and maybe something will come along one day that will allow it to be tested.
Maybe we'll master wormholes and you wormhole from one universe to another.
That would be dangerous though, because if the Lords of Fleas are slightly different, you could dissolve into a pile of goo because the charge on the electron no longer holds your molecules together, for example.
Shelf of Speculation00:02:42
So that would just be really dangerous, but that's the kind of thing you'd want to be thinking about.
So no, we didn't just invent it just to make us happy.
No, it followed out of already successful tested ideas.
Well, that's the first time I've ever heard explained where it made any sense whatsoever.
So I appreciate it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The book is Letters from an Astrophysicist.
Thanks so much for coming on.
I really enjoy talking to you, and I hope you come back.
Thanks for that standing invitation.
I'll be sure to take you up on it.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
I really enjoy talking.
Whenever people talk to scientists now, they ask them about God.
But I don't want to really know what a scientist thinks about God any more than I want to know what LeBron James thinks about freedom.
I'm interested in the way their minds work, and I'm really interested in the things that are coming down the pike and the things that they're working on and don't know.
It's almost more interesting what people don't know than what they do at this point.
I'm out of time, but I want to remind you, I'm giving a speech tonight at Acton.
If you go to acton.org, they will be live streaming it.
And I'll be wearing a tuxedo, so it's worth it just for that.
And of course, the mailbag is tomorrow.
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All right, I'll be back here tomorrow in this very same hotel room, and I will see you then.
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