Neil deGrasse Tyson Rates Exotic Male Dancing, GZA, and Galactic Apparel

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Well, 'scuse me.

This Miss Universe Pageant; can someone please

call it Miss Earth?

What hubris we have.

We say this is universal.

No, it's earth wide.

I study the universe.

If there's a Miss Mars, she was not in the competition.

In name, it's very overrated

(laughs)

to call a pageant of women on earth, and the winner,

Miss Universe.

Come on now.

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Guys don't have many options and so,

what is it, it's maybe our cuff links, the tie, a vest.

That's kinda it.

You know, I wear cosmic ties.

I have more than a hundred of them, and I have

aesthetic thresholds for them, by the way.

No Captain Kirk.

(laughs)

No Enterprise.

It's gotta be some artistic attempt to convey

what the universe feels like.

You see me in...

He's kinda weird wearing that.

Come to an Astrophysics Society Conference.

I am wearing camouflage, all right,

cause everybody has got the geeky tie.

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Now that's been done twice.

First by the Voyager One Spacecraft.

Carl Sagan convinced NASA to have the camera turn around,

the onboard camera; take a picture of the

inner solar system with earth in view,

and I think its underrated.

I think people do not reflect on this fact often enough.

When you look at this from space, the only reaction

you can possible have is,

what the fuck are you doing?

On this speck we call earth.

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Nobody doesn't love whipped cream.

I think whipped cream has places where it belongs

in this world.

I think definitely hot cocoa.

It's great on ice cream, and of course,

it's great straight.

(laughs)

I like it.

So, just a reminder, heavy cream is lighter

than skim milk.

That's why it rises to the top.

Don't let the words fool you.

The physics will set you free.

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GZA's got his own thing.

He's accurately rated.

There are people who are not taking you to new places,

so they'll satisfy you in the moment, but then

beyond the moment they're easy to forget.

And then there are people who have thought more deeply

about what they're feeding you than you

have ever thought for yourself.

In this you can grow, and they leave you in a new place.

This is where GZA is.

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My field Astrophysics, we name things like we see them.

It's not overrated, it's not underrated,

it's just there.

People see our words, and they take 'em.

Candy.

There's Mars Bar.

Even though the dude's name is Mar,

I get that.

But still, it's called Mars.

I'm taking the planet.

Milky Way.

Orbit gum.

Eclipse gum.

You know Moonglow bath beads.

Celestial Seasonings tea.

And not to mention car names:

Saturn, Mercury, Geo, Prism, Nova.

My favorite in the day, the Galaxie 500.

Oh my gosh, the last of the land yachts.

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Yeah, I'm kinda disappointed in myself.

I was in graduate school.

I'm in graduate school and we're not paid very much.

We are paid, by the way, because we serve as

teaching assistants in the classes for which

undergraduates are taught.

So we're paid for that, but it's not very much.

I simply wanted more money, and at the time,

I was in really good shape.

I was a performing member of two different

dance companies, and one of my fellow dancers,

upon hearing my financial woes said, come on down.

I said, down to what?

Oh, we dance at night at this male strip club.

(laughs)

And the women, you know, put money in your thing.

I said all right, I'll have a look.

So I go down there, and they come out dancing

with asbestos lined jock straps that had been ignited,

and they come out shaking and dancing to

Jerry Lee Lewis's Great Balls of Fire.

In that instant, I said, I think I'll be a math tutor.

(laughs)

Now why didn't I think that before?

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In my recent book, that is titled,

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry,

I try to bring the universe down to earth.

When we have this vast universe to reflect upon,

to explore, to offer a perspective that lifts

us above and beyond ourselves, we call this

a cosmic perspective.

It just, it puts you in a new place; a new understanding

of our relationship with one another, our relationship

with the rest of the life on earth, a relationship to life

yet to be discovered in the universe.

Not only that, a relationship to the atoms

and molecules that comprise the universe itself,

because those ingredients within us share

common origin with those ingredients found in stars.

And that origin is other stars.

We are not just figuratively, but literally stardust.

It's simultaneously humbling and enlightening,

and I would say in the spirit of this program,

by far the most underrated fact there is

in the universe.

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