How Storytelling Prevented Nuclear War

How did movies change the Cold War? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice learn about how apocalyptic films influenced us and began the first cybersecurity measures with Future of Life Award recipients and filmmakers Lawrence Lasker, Walter Parkes, and Nicholas Meyer.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, we're exploring the Future of Life Award. Who gets it? People who had something to do with the preservation of civilization. And most recently, it was given to storytellers. The writers, directors of the 1980s film War Games and The Day After. We're going to find out why they are celebrated now in the 40th anniversary of the appearance of those films and what that had to say for the preservation of life, society, and civilization as we know it. Coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here. You're a personal astrophysicist. And of course, I got Chuck Nice with me.

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  Hey, Neil.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, man. And you know what we're going to talk about today? The Future of Life Award.

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. You know, I would, I would think that just getting to go into the future is an award.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. An award or reward for, for a life hard-earned. All right, let's, let's find out more about this and bring in our two guests. First, Larry Lasker. Larry, welcome. Thank you. Nice to be here. Yeah. You, you are a 2023 recipient, co-recipient of the Future of Life Award. You're a screenwriter, producer. Uh, I know some of your work. You're co-writer of War Games. That was, that was an important movie back in the eighties. We'll get, we'll get back to that. We also have with us Walter Parks. Walter, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Hi, Neil. Nice to be here.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Co-writer of War Games with Larry.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  That's just by luck. We happen to be on the same podcast.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And co-recipient of the 2023 Future of Life Award, also a producer, screenwriter, media executive, more recently, co-founder of Dreamscape Learn, and this is immersive virtual reality education, but also the two of you produced Awakenings. I remember that film explicitly. We can talk about that. That received three Oscar nominations and co-wrote the film Sneakers. I remember that. That had Sidney Poitier in it. I remember that movie. So, let's go back in time. Now, 2023 is the 40th anniversary of War Games,

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matthew Broderick. Remind me, was that before or after Ferris Bueller's Day Off? I think it was before.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  It was right before, yeah.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just before Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And United Artists, Sherwood Productions, and who else was in that? We had John Wood, Dabney Coleman, and?

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Ali Shidi.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes, of course, the girlfriend, Ali Shidi, and?

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Barry Corbin. He played the general.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did not remember. He was in that.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  He was the general.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yes. And he plays that role well because he reprised something like that in that long-running series, Northern Exposure. He was a astronaut military vet, played that, you know, he puts the, you know, you put the chewing tobacco in and he's ready to make important military decisions. So, so remind us of the plot.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  He improvised the line, "God damn it, I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it'd do any good." Came up with that on the set.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Also, Larry, if I remember correctly, he was based on the actual commander of NORAD, who he met.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, that we met, yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we named this one, this character Berenwhale.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So, guys, just remind us all, 1983, we are still in the Cold War. So, this is the landscape on which this movie arrives, and it's not just grownups doing their grown-up things, it involves kids. And so I thought that was a brilliant juxtaposition because they're the next generation. And how does it affect them? How are they thinking about the problem? Just remind us of the climate, the geopolitical climate, and then tell us what was the thinking behind this film?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you, as is become appropriate for a show that's hosted by a physicist, one of the two pillars of that, this really was another physicist. Larry had been particularly interested in Stephen Hawking.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  I saw a documentary on TV about Stephen Hawking and the idea that he could figure out the unified field theory, but because of his condition, he wouldn't be able to communicate it. I found a fascinating existential dilemma, and it suggested that he needed someone to pass on his knowledge to a kid who could understand him. And that character became the character in War Games, a juvenile delinquent type whose problem was that he was too smart for his environment.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Quite unbeknownst, I had come across a book about a middle-class family, I think in Kansas, who had a child that turned out to be a super genius and about what the travails of what it was like to grow up having that intelligence. So it was sort of two pieces of a puzzle there. And what's interesting, Neil, is that you asked about the geopolitical climate. It really began as a character premise between these two characters, a kid who really needed a mentor and a super genius who needed someone to pass his knowledge on to. So all of the geopolitical stuff and all of the ideas about super nuclear war and about computers really came out of research. Larry had a background in journalism and I, mine was in documentary films, but it really

• 6:02Speaker 02

  started with a character story, and which is, I think, one of the reasons why it's still valid.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, give me, give me a three-sentence review of the plot. So we've got a kid in high school who accidentally hacks into NORAD.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Thinking about unintended consequences. He hacks into what he thinks is a game company just wanting to play the coolest new game and inadvertently hacks into NORAD and runs a simulation which is mistaken by NORAD as an actual missile attack. And it sort of becomes a story there which unbeknownst to him or anyone, he's actually triggered an AI program that was left over in the system by its original creator who cannot or that cannot discern the difference between reality and simulation.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so and it unfolds from there and the government pick them up and they chase them. The chase scene, helicopters, you know, and so and it's Matthew Broderick, who's a completely lovable character and you're cheering from him the entire time.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And and so so this so the moral to the story then was what?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Don't have a computer.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Well, I I think we stumbled upon something that, you know, it was seems simplistic, but it sort of landed.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  If there is a moral that you take away with that there's certain games in which the only winning move is not to play.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that was the that was the computers.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bit of wisdom.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  And and it was illustrated in a game of tic-tac-toe, but then sort of generalized to the whole idea of thermonuclear war. And again, it sometimes, you know, simple is best. And I think we we were able to kind of boil down some complex ideas to a simple enough premise that it landed with people, particularly in the government, as it turned out.

• 8:06Chuck Nice?

  And how how telling is it that all this time later?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  The fact is that the AI knew better than we do. Okay, that's number one. And number two, the fact is that you're looking at right now, there seems to be a push towards proliferation once again, you know, where for many, many years, what

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, nuclear proliferation.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  For many years, it's been, let's reduce, let's reduce, let's get rid of, let's, let's move towards a place where, you know, we make this as minimal as possible. And now we're actually going in the opposite direction. Well, in many ways, we're going in the opposite direction. Yeah, yeah.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so explain to me now what the Future of Life Award is and what you guys did to earn it.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Well, it's the most prestigious award that no one has ever heard of.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, can I?

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says two recent recipients of the award. Yes. Okay.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Well, listen, it's put, given by the Future of Life Foundation and, you know, which is an extraordinary group that, you know, perhaps had one lapse in judgment, which is deciding to give it to two screenwriters. It's really been given to some extraordinary people, including Carl Sagan, I, I think received it. Um, for a number, I, I think the idea is that it's given to people who, in retrospect, have made substantial contributions to sort of the life of the planet or the quality of life on the planet, but were not recognized at the time. Um, and if you go on the website, there's some extraordinary stories there, including actual Russian commander. Yeah, two of them refused.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, who refused to actually, to, to, to accept an order that was ordering a launch. Um, and, and I think that in this case with both us and with Dick Meyer, who directed The Day After, they're acknowledging the role of narrative and popular culture in spreading certain ideas and making them accessible to people that now in retrospect were sort of foundation.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is the Future of Life Award has opened up its criteria to recognize. How significant the effect of storytelling can be on the sentiment of a nation and of the world.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Larry and I were beyond honored and surprised to be to be given this award. But listen, you know, complex issues are difficult for people to grasp and whether they're policymakers or the public at large, so there's certainly a role of story in all of that. You know, stories can be very powerful things, powerfully good, powerfully bad. You had a time of a lot of very false narratives carrying a lot of weight. So I think in this case, the institute was just trying to, I don't know, acknowledge that when done right, and hopefully we did, you know, a story in pop culture can be a way of educating the public about very serious-

• 11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we're all for, on StarTalk, we're all for that because we only, I think people come for the pop culture and humor, but they stay for the science, right? I mean, the attractors are something that matters here. Otherwise, you have no influence on anybody, all right? If, because they're not always looking where you need them to look, but they will come to you if there's a pop culture vessel that they can react to.

• 11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I think of this movie, I wasn't thinking of this at the time because it was just a movie and I was enjoying it, but a lot of themes are intersecting here. So you have the geopolitics of just nation against nation. You have the Cold War nuclear arsenals. You have game theory. You have computing power. You have power struggles. How does a military force interact with a genius who doesn't care about your, you know, whether you're a general or corporal or private? They just know what's true. And then you have kids caught up in the middle of it, you know, genius kids.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of that was happening at once and it blended and became a coherent story. So I just want to congratulate the two of you on that.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  And I want to know, did the government actually learn anything from you?

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, we screened the movie for the President Reagan at the time at Camp David, uh, the opening weekend of War Games. And, uh, I had known the Reagans growing up, so.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he was a, he was a movie star, right? So did you know him through the California, uh, connection?

• 13:04Speaker 03

  He was, uh, he and Nancy were friends of my parents. My mom was a movie star and, uh, they would come to our house for Saturday night parties. And, uh, my parents often showed first run movies. So Saturday night movies was a theme of, uh, and the Reagans were always the first to arrive. Seven o'clock on the nose, ding dong. And, um, so when, uh, when the movie was coming out, I, I actually happened to run into Nancy Reagan. And I said, I got this movie coming out. She said, let's screen it. So we sent it to Camp David. And the following week Reagan comes into the meeting of his generals and says,

• 13:49Speaker 03

  has anyone seen this movie War Games? You know, a kid could start World War III by accident. And it really got him thinking and, and his generals looked into it and said, oh yeah, it could happen.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Oh, that's comforting.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when was the, when was the concept, forgive me for not remembering this, the concept of mutual assured destruction? That was around that.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Oh, it had been around for years.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it was around for years. Okay. And it's not a very encouraging strategy, I would think, but.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  But it worked.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Well, it works. I mean, it's, look, look what's happening without it, um, in terms of world conflict. But it, it ironically, yeah, as Larry said, uh, President Reagan asked his generals about this, and it's been written about quite a lot. There's a book that reported this, uh, quite extensively and, and, and, uh, as it turns out that a lot of. Even the current cybersecurity laws that are on the books in the US government sort of have their foundation in that screening and in what happened as a result of that. It was a real sort of case study in, again, as you're talking about Neil, how popular culture and story can actually have an effect on policy

• 15:07Speaker 02

  because it presents ideas in a way that can be understood.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and it reminds me, you know, I was on a White House commission studying the future of aerospace in the nation and in the world. And we visited an airshow and I boarded one of these military air force jets. And this is very early in the internet, I mean, very early, where everything was dial up and things. And so, I actually, while I was there, just on this tour, I hacked into the internet of that airplane and I saw a couple of things. So then I told them about it and they said, "Oh, you can't do that." And they got angry and I said, "Wait, dude."

• 15:56Chuck Nice?

  Why would you leave this perfectly secure computer terminal sitting here for me to access? If you didn't want me to compromise nuclear secrets?

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I'm saying is, there is, am I the enemy or did I just do them a favor?

• 16:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, by finding this weak spot on that plane. And so, I don't think people knew how to react to that kind of breach at the time. And so, yeah, you pick them up, you try to, you know, there's a chase scene, there's a, you know, you had all the right movie elements to make it an exciting storytelling.

• 16:33Chuck Nice?

  It's funny you say that because now the government actually hires hackers to try and break into things.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't offer me a job at the time, I'm sorry.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  That was the premise of our next movie together called Sneakers, which are really about tiger teams that are hired to test the security of installations or computer systems without the targets knowing in order to reveal, you know, where the insecurities might be, where the vulnerabilities might be. Sometimes I think that, you know...

• 17:09Chuck Nice?

  Did we do the world a disservice by igniting all sorts of like hackers like doing, you know, bad things? Or was this a good thing to draw attention to the fact that these systems are vulnerable?

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The future of life believes it's a good thing.

• 17:25Chuck Nice?

  Well, thank you.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm kind of thinking that. So if he worries about now, security. So you're saying Reagan started thinking about cybersecurity at that time. That would have been an early time to think that way, correct?

• 17:40Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was the first law about cybersecurity on the books.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  But it also led to his trying to reduce the threat of nuclear war with the Russians or the Soviets at the time.

• 17:56Chuck Nice?

  You know, I think it's great, though, because when you think about it, when I don't think it's hyperbolic, you know, when you look at the premise of this young kid doing this, I think that is it a good thing that, you know, from a pop culture standpoint, we started thinking that way? Like, what if you could break into, you know, the government and you could, you know, get nuclear codes or start a launch? Sure, that's unlikely, but just thinking about it in that way, I think, creates a better arena for security. And you look at it today, we look at AI, and I'm going to say, if it weren't for James

• 18:37Chuck Nice?

  Cameron, looking at AI in such a way where, you know, you have a singularity, you have the machines take over, we wouldn't be thinking about AI right now in the way that we.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you talking about Terminator?

• 18:49Chuck Nice?

  Yes, thank you. I should have said the movie.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. I was thinking of Titanic.

• 18:54Chuck Nice?

  I remember when the AI was dying on the board floating and Rose was saying.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the plank.

• 19:03Chuck Nice?

  No, but yeah, like, it's great that you get people to think a certain way, and then that becomes a collective consciousness, because then we all.

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it affects who they vote for. It triggers an entire sequence of shift, a zeitgeist shift, which is important when you need it.

• 19:24Chuck Nice?

  I, it is funny, when you think back then, there were sort of a spate of those movies, ours being kind of the tail wagging one of them, which has to do with.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Digital technology run amok, right? I think Robocop is one, actually a favorite movie of mine.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first one, not the second one.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  But the first Robocop's fantastic, Terminator, you know, in a funny way, War Games. And I think there is something about demystifying all of that. In other words, and becoming aware of that so that we can actually deal with both the, you know, the opportunities afforded by digital technology or AI, but also be very aware of the potential dangers.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we can't, nor can we forget the film Manhattan Project, right? Which is also a high school kid who invents an atomic bomb. And there was another one, just sort of in that, in that genre. So I'm wondering if all that was partly influenced by the John Hughes portfolio, which showed teenagers in high school as the primary protagonists in every story that unfolded, with the adults as the immature idiots.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  I'm gonna say that's, it was just a marketing ploy to get teens out to the movies.

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So after you screened it for Reagan, presumably others would, in the government, would then have interest. So what was the, what was the path that came out of that screening room in the White House?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Well, other people wanted to see it. Reagan actually started telling the, the meeting of generals the plot. And they all said, please, sir, don't tell us anymore. We want to see the movie. And then we, and then the MGM screened War Games for Congress.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, interesting. And, and what about this very scary prospect, which Chuck has been hinting at this whole conversation? In your movie, the computer, this AI machine, had power over the launch codes.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that it could make an autonomous military decision about a strike. And that is a scary prospect then and now.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Probably more now. And even before the AI part of it, Larry, you know the anecdote better. We actually, while we were working on the film, there was a near War Games like scenario that took place where a simulation was mistaken by command and control as an actual attack.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were, we were actually in my apartment in Santa Monica, working on the script. And we were going, is anyone going to believe that this could happen? And I turned on the CBS Evening News and it was Walter Cronkite. The top of the news was, for three minutes yesterday, the United States went on a full-scale nuclear alert. It turned out it was a simulation tape that had been left in a computer. And it completely freaked out the military because they thought we were under attack. Because the simulation was of a full-scale Russian missile attack. Fortunately, someone caught it before we volleyed our missiles back. So then we turned off the TV and said, yeah, people will believe it.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yep, let's keep going, keep on the script.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Neil, you brought up the zeitgeist and you're talking about why, why kid characters. And we had a really interesting experience, what was it about five or, I forget how many years ago, where we, we were featured at a, the founder's lunch they do at Google. To have a talk, a conversation about, about War Games. Because it turns out it was a fairly important film for a lot of the people who worked there. And at the time, looking back, we realized we got all sorts of things wrong. But we got one big essential thing right in that movie. Which was that the, and this is going to your idea of the young characters, that

• 23:24Speaker 02

  That the world wouldn't be changed by the US government policies or by IBM or by Ma Bell, but would be young people either in their garages or in their bedrooms using these extraordinary new digital tools.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please tell everyone what Ma Bell is.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  The telephone company. Yeah, yeah, back when there was one.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When there was one telephone company, AT&T was Ma Bell. Okay.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  But, but, but the point is there is a, David Lightman, the character, our, our main character, did have his roots in being kind of a punky, you know, anti-establishment kid. And we certainly understood that, you know, that in this case, innovation didn't come from institutions, didn't come from the government. It actually came from, you know, the ground up and from kids who had a sort of intuitive understanding of what these tools could be. And so if you look then over the next, you know, five, 10, 15, 20 years, most of the innovation did come from outside of big, big companies.

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, in fact, a year later was, the Macintosh was introduced.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, and wired in a garage.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the timing of our work on, on beginning this screenplay was, was quite propitious. Um, the, the first thing we did when we got the deal, uh, the next week, we, I called SRI, Stanford Research Institute, and talked to the public information guy there, told him a little bit about what we're working on. And he said, uh, all right, uh, you want to come up Tuesday? And I said, sure. And we went up there and he had like five meetings set for us to meet smart people who basically told us why we had come and what questions to ask. And all we had to do was take notes. And the, the last meeting was with a bunch of futurists.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  And one of them, Peter Schwartz, said, uh, you know what Atari is up to? And, yeah, video games. He says, okay, well, the, the military is trying to piggyback onto them.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  And I think that's where your kid and your dying scientists are gonna hook up.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  And then, uh.

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause at the time, adults didn't really play video games, right?

• 25:32Speaker 03

  It was just, just getting going. And, uh, and then when we, during research, when we discovered that home computers could hook up over phone lines to big computers. We thought, well, there's our movie. I mean, that was a major revelation. That's how the kid alone in his bedroom could get caught up in, in the world of high, you know, tech and science.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that third movie I was saying in this, in this kid genre was, it was your movie War Games, there was Manhattan Project, a high school kid. And of course, there was Real Genius, which were young college kids trying to outsmart the military, the US military. So, given your life experience here and that you're at least celebrated, if not in the day, certainly later when people reflect on how different the world might have been, had that movie not been made. Is there some movie you think that needs to be made today? That isn't, that we need?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  And even if there isn't some, what movie would you make today?

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  I've, I've been giving it some thought. I haven't come up with a definitive answer yet, but I'm gonna keep trying.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You still, you still think, oh, yeah.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  You know, here's the thing about writing movies. And it, it really goes back to the fact that we didn't set out to do a movie about nuclear war.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Or geopolitics, or about the emerging computer revolution or AI. As I said, it, it was a movie about, you know, an idea about two characters. And luckily, we had the background in the Time to Kill to do a lot of research so that we sort of had an emotional foundation.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were open to what was going on in the world. And then we got some really good informants, too. David Lewis, who was at the UCLA Computer Club, and he was a hacker. And he just took us through the whole, every step of what a hacker would do. And I could call him up, and I'm writing a scene, and say, well, how do you get a computer to play itself? Number of players, zero. Okay, thanks, David. And then, uh, and then Willis Ware, who was at the RAND Corporation, was our advisor on sort of the computer systems. And he had actually designed the computer system at NORAD. And when we said, unlike some experts who tell you why you can't do whatever you want to do, Willis would say, what do you need?

• 28:01Speaker 03

  We'd say, well, we need the kid to be able to access, you know, a top-secret computer. And he says, yeah, you could do it. He says, they tell you those computers are absolutely standalone, isolated. Bullshit. Everyone, everyone wants, if they want to work from home on the weekend, they set up a little back door. Your kid could find that back door.

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a backdoor concept.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a backdoor all the way. And the programmer of the software can leave a backdoor without telling anybody else.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  But, but just to go back to Chuck's question, so I don't think you can ever decide, I'm going to make a movie about, you know, a concept. I mean, I, or, or it'll just turn out to be sort of, I don't know, rigid, but...

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For fun theory, yeah, yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yes, but we are at a moment, in terms of AI, that we're pretty much depending on tropes of the last 20 years. We brought up Jim Cameron's movies, et cetera, and it's a much more complex issue than that. And I wonder if there's a way to go after that idea, um, with a narrative.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  As you could imagine, Larry and I over the years have been brought more than our share of ideas for War Games sequels. But in a funny way, the idea that there would be a, you know, an intelligent program, our Joshua program, that's been alive out there in the cyber, in cyberspace for the last

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joshua was the name of the program.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For those who didn't remember this, yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Correct. That's been out there, learning and navigating the cyberspace as, as the distinction between the virtual world and the physical world becomes less and less. There is probably a good story to be told there.

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you make the sequel, you gotta bring Matthew Broderick back as the general.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be good. That's a, that's an implicit endorsement, right? Yeah, totally. Not that any of you all asked, but I served on a board of the Pentagon, a Pentagon Innovation Board, where we thought deeply about what role emerging technologies, computing and otherwise, would or should play in national security. And we tackled AI in a statement and a report where we said, AI is fine for identifying targets and all this sort of thing, but there must be, but there must be a human in a loop

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  if that decision requires a kill. You cannot have AI autonomously decide that an attack should occur, that autonomously decide that an attack will occur. You have to have a human being in there. And this is a sort of an ethos that is now part of the military as we go forward, trying to figure out how AI fits into our lives. So in, in the case of War Games, that was not the case. The case of War Games, it was not written that way. It was like Joshua could do this all by itself.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, the beginning of the movies, the premise is that the missile commanders fail the test. They don't want to turn the keys to, to kill 100 million people until they get someone on the phone to tell them. And so they decide, well, we can't do this. Let's get rid of the humans and just put the machines in control.

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. I've forgotten that. There was a bit of tension at the beginning there. Yes, yes, very good. Very good. Well, gentlemen, this has been a delight to have you on. We're continuing this program on the Future of Life Award. Because coming up, we're gonna have Nicholas Meyer, who directed the TV film The Day After, which was seen by essentially every single American when it aired. And we'll pick up that conversation. Again, guys, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, continuing with this Future of Life Award. What intrigues me is that this is a set of awards that this year went to the power of storytelling to affect change, rather than people who might have themselves had access to the button and didn't push it, thereby sort of saving the world. This is there are other ways to save the world. And we cannot undervalue the power of a good story told well, told with impact and emotion. And that brings us right to the director of the movie The Day After. I remember this movie.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was like fully alive and cognizant when this movie came out in 1983. We have with us the director of that movie, Nicholas Meyer. Nicholas, welcome to StarTalk.

• 33:21Speaker 05

  Hi, thanks for inviting me.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Nicholas Meyer, you're not only a screenwriter, director, author, you're deep into the Star Trek.

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Universe. There's a universe or world. What should I? There's like the Marvel Universe. Universal work. Okay, Universe works. By the way, that's how I know him. Oh, okay. Uh, you were director of The Wrath of Khan, co-writer of The Voyage Home. Was that Save the Wails? That was the Save the Wails one, right? Yes, it was. That's five, that's right. But, yeah, my, my best line in that is, what is exact change as they get kicked off the bus? Uh, and so, uh, in, in Star Trek Discovery, you're all in the Star Trek universe. So, you, you, you've got the right street cred here for our audience. And, and in there, among there, before that, you were director of The Day After.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So apparently, not only are you in the Star Trek fandom, creating content for that universe, uh, you're also writing Sherlock Holmes. Oh my God. So, a year ago, The Return of the Pharaoh? And coming up Sherlock Holmes and the telegram from hell. So you're a busy guy, a busy guy. Congratulations on it all. Thank you. And, and the world is a better place and, dare I say, safer place for you being in it. Um, my mother thanks you, and I thank you.

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so The Day After is like, is the day after total thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. It's a movie about that. It aired on ABC. It was a TV movie. It aired on ABC. Uh, everybody, what, everybody was talking about this, The Day After, The Day After, and... Like, almost the entire country watched. Yes. One, one thing at one time. One thing at one time, which doesn't happen anymore. That doesn't happen anymore. And, and a hundred million people, I'm one of those hundred million. So, so Nicholas, can you just remind us of the geopolitical climate in 1983? Reagan was president, Gorbachev was, uh, head of the, the party in, I think.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Soviet Union, yes, he was. Well, actually, excuse me, he was not. Uh, his predecessor was the very aged Yuri Andropov.

• 35:46Speaker 05

  And uh, this was, I, at the time, characterized as the absolute low point in US Soviet relations. There's no more Soviet Union, but US Russia relations are now at a, as, as bad or probably worse point than they were in 1983. But Yuri Andropov, uh, believed that Ronald Reagan was prepared to push the button at any moment, and he wasn't far wrong. Ronald Reagan came

• 36:23Speaker 05

  to power believing in a winnable nuclear war. As, if, if you watch, um, Dr. Strangelove, uh, George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson says to, uh, the president, played by Peter Sellers, "Mr. President, I'm not saying we're not gonna get our hair must, but I'm telling you, 10, 20 million dead, tops." And it was that sort of thinking that prevailed at the time that the movie came out.

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we were, we were all, everyone was basically held hostage to this nuclear arms race. And so, so you, you have many talents in this space as screenwriter, director, and author. Um, how did you land the director's role for The Day After?

• 37:15Speaker 05

  Well, I certainly was nobody's first choice, I believe.

• 37:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, okay.

• 37:22Speaker 05

  You're, you're our first choice.

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are, you are our first choice, of course.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  Well, but I was the, I believe I was the third director to be asked. I think it's important to establish the great paradox with which we are dealing and have been dealing since 1945 and the explosion of atom bombs over, uh, used in.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  The ability to annihilate ourselves is arguably, possibly along with climate change, the most important question that has ever faced the human race and by extension of all of planet Earth. And yet, and here's the paradox, it is so disturbing that nobody can bear to think about it. We don't want to talk about it. In the words of George Bush, we say, "Go shopping." So what we do is we pretend that this Damoclean sword, which is dangling by an ever-fraying cord over our heads, doesn't exist. But as Daniel Ellsberg said,

• 38:32Speaker 05

  "Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a strategy." And I have to say that at the time I was the third director to be offered this, I didn't want to think about nuclear war either. I had directed a couple of hit movies. I'd been nominated for an Academy Award. Who wanted to do this? But in fact, I was being psychoanalyzed at the time. I was lying on the couch and trying to talk my way out of doing this when my analyst, who never spoke,

• 39:13Speaker 05

  said, "Well, I think this is where we find out who you really are." Checkmate. That's how I wound up doing the movie. Not because I'm a professional do-gooder or altruist.

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so here's my memory of the plot, and tuned it up if I get it wrong. So it follows a family or some town in Kansas, where we have a higher concentration of nuclear, of silos. And in any first exchange, what I do know is you want to first take out the other person's nukes before you start going after their cities or any other targets. And so Kansas became a hotbed for the first arrival of these nuclear weapons. And they do hit, and they do go off, and you watch people attempting to survive this into the next day. That was what I remember.

• 40:10Speaker 05

  Well, basically, Lawrence, Kansas was picked simply because it's the geographical center of the continental United States. The fact that we have these missile silos all over the United States, they're all over, um, is, is part of the great folly of our policy and politics because it simply makes sitting targets for

• 40:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For every place you have a missile.

• 40:42Speaker 05

  Every place you have a missile is a target, whereas as Daniel Ellsberg so, um, precisely pointed out, we can defend ourselves with Polaris submarines, which are much harder to locate than pinning these targets all over the place. And, and accidents happen in these targets. You may remember some years ago in Arkansas, a monkey wrench fell down a missile silo, unloosed the fuel leak that almost precipitated, uh, the annihilation of all of Arkansas. So, and there've been a lot of nuclear accidents, many, two nuclear.

• 41:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a literal monkey wrench?

• 41:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it a literal monkey wrench?

• 41:23Speaker 05

  Yes, it was a monkey wrench. What Ed Hume, who wrote the screenplay, did was he simply wrote about a lot of regular people, not just one family, but different people doing different things, going to college, getting married, on and on and on. Some people, uh, who worked in the military who go down in those silos among them. In other words, people like us doing what we do, and they all get nuked. That's the movie.

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the, all right, I love the laugh, but, but that's the, uh, but, but I remember it was, it was an event. It was a television event. And I also distinctly remember that after the film, there was a panel of experts, which included Carl Sagan, uh,

• 42:12Speaker 05

  Henry Kissinger, Ellie Wiesel,

• 42:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Robert.

• 42:15Speaker 05

  William Buckley.

• 42:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Robert Jastrow, yes.

• 42:18Speaker 05

  Carl Sagan, yeah.

• 42:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some of the deep. Deep thinkers of the day to analyze what had just happened. And so let me ask you this, the Future of Life Award goes to people who played some pivotal role in saving all of humanity and most people don't even know it. So it's a way to tease out of the history of human conduct, those people who mattered greatly. So, so if this movie was just a movie and people saw it and went about their way, you wouldn't be recognized 40 years later, it's just a movie. So how did this end up mattering geopolitically afterwards?

• 43:00Speaker 05

  Ronald Reagan, as I said, came to power believing in a winnable nuclear war. You know, when a child falls down a well, that's a tragedy, but when millions die, that's statistics. Mr. President, I'm not saying we're not going to get our hair must. We're just talking abstraction at this point. But when you see those missiles take off and, and we've all been raised on a hundred years of Hollywood happy endings and suddenly there was, and he flipped out.

• 43:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's a Hollywood guy. He's a Hollywood guy. So this is especially affects him.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  I, I don't even think that's the main point. There was a general on Castro's staff who said that the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been real to him till he saw the movie. I think it's about imagining the unimaginable. Doesn't matter if you're a Hollywood actor or, or not, he, yes, he may have been more naive. He told Helen Caldecott that the missiles could be recalled. And she said, Mr. President, they can't be recalled. He didn't know that. Um, anyway, what happened was this, I guess.

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was just on the job training, that's all.

• 44:14Speaker 05

  He wound up changing his mind. And when Gorbachev.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After, after he's, after he saw the film.

• 44:22Speaker 05

  Yes. I don't, you know, I don't, I think Edmund Morris, who was in the White House, who was his official biographer, uh, and I also got to know Morris because he wrote The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which I wrote as a screenplay for Martin Scorsese at one point. And he told me, he lived in the White House for three years. And he said, the only time he ever saw Reagan lose it was after he saw the movie. And ultimately, what happened was Yuri Andropov died and Gorbachev took over, and there was Glasnost, and there was Perestroika, and Reagan went to Reykjavik to meet with Gorbachev

• 45:05Speaker 05

  and ultimately signed the intermediate missile range treaty with him. He was on his way to signing off on a lot more, but he wouldn't give up his strategic defense initiative, which we call Star Wars. And then he, so that, and Daniel Ellsberg explained to me, and Ellsberg had been a nuclear war planner, that the treaty that resulted between Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland, which the fearless [BLEEP] grabber in chief has now walked out of, was the only treaty that ever resulted

• 45:44Speaker 05

  in the physical dismantling of nuclear weapons. So that's my little contribution to world history.

• 45:52Chuck Nice?

  I'm interested to know how that, how it came to Reagan. Did you guys, as a production, say, hey, you know, you should take a look at this?

• 46:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, screen this at the White House, yeah.

• 46:04Chuck Nice?

  Or did his advisors say, my God, or was it just the sheer magnitude of the event itself, the fact that more than half the country watches one television event all together? And then what kind of, what kind of public reaction, did that have something to do with maybe him?

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, that's a good point, because often a politician in a democracy, in a republic, has to be responsive to what the public thinks, right? They can't be opposite what their electorate says, otherwise you don't get reelected. So Chuck, that's a good point.

• 46:44Chuck Nice?

  Unless you have gerrymandering, that's a whole nother show.

• 46:47Speaker 05

  Well, let me, let me explain as best I can. Basically, the secret of the film's success, in my opinion, but I think I can sort of back it up, was the controversy that accompanied it. The very idea, everybody at ABC, the network that was making the movie, hated the movie, hated the idea of it. Couldn't stand it. They knew they were gonna lose all their sponsors. This is not what was shown on American network television.

• 47:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In prime time, in prime time.

• 47:23Speaker 05

  They did the Flying Nun, they did Laugh-In. But their main business is to sell product. It's, it's, it's to advertise. And they knew this wasn't gonna happen. They were gonna lose a bucket on this. One man wanted this movie made. His name was Brandon Stoddard. If you're giving prizes, he's not alive, but he should get the prize because he insisted, despite death threats and all, he had to threaten to resign to get this movie on the air. This is what he wanted. He's the guy who did Roots. And he was looking to a follow-up for Roots. And the controversy and the nuclear freeze movement got Reagan's attention, got the White House's attention.

• 48:06Speaker 05

  And before he saw the movie, Ronald Reagan regarded the movie as a threat. We were offered Defense Department cooperation. You can have missiles, you can have tanks, you can have helicopters, whatever you want. Just make sure that the Russians started the war. We told them to fuck off. So we had to sort of do it in our own way, without that.

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 48:30Speaker 05

  But this was on Reagan's radar. And the more Phyllis Schlafly and Bill Buckley went running up and down the country like Chicken Little, insisting that the sky was falling if this movie got on the air, the more the White House and the country got drawn into, "What is it? Why can't I watch it?" Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's, that's why 100 million people watched it in one night. Incidentally, there's a documentary about the making of this movie now, which is called Television Event. And I believe Television Event is available on YouTube. And I must also tell you, because I just got this in the mail.

• 49:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 49:13Speaker 05

  That this is coming out November 15.

• 49:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell us the title, for those who are only listening.

• 49:18Speaker 05

  It's called Apocalypse Television: How the Day After Helped End the Cold War, by David Craig. Um, I just got it in the mail this morning. It, it comes out on the 15th. And I, I read it, of course I went-

• 49:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  15th of-

• 49:34Speaker 05

  November.

• 49:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The 15th of November.

• 49:36Speaker 05

  I immediately went to the index to see how I turned out.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  And yeah, I come off like a jerk half the time and the rest of the time I come out okay. So I figure whatever.

• 49:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On balance, but but there are other apocalyptic moments. For for example, Netflix had the film, um, uh, Don't Look Up, although that was comedic. But they're they're apocalyptic films are are an important genre. Oh, my gosh.

• 50:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I think there the difference, there's a certain. Now that we have great special effects, it's kind of fun to see New York City inundated by water and and and and so the effects take over. I I'm sure there are loads of versions where the White House blows up and so on and so forth. My point is that I, as a director, figuring out about this movie while I was making it, I realized that I didn't want to make a really good piece of cinema. Because I realized that if the movie had great acting and great cinematography and a catchy theme song, blah, blah, nobody was going to talk about the subject.

• 50:52Speaker 05

  We would do anything not to talk about the subject.

• 50:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Nicholas, what I remember most is that I didn't recognize any of the actors.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  Well, we didn't want a lot of bold face names.

• 51:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, you you that's you succeeded at that. And I I had, there was nothing else I could pay attention to, but the storyline. That that's kudos to you, kudos to your whole concept.

• 51:16Speaker 05

  I wanted to make a movie like a public service announcement. If you have a nuclear war, this is what it's going to look like on a good day. We didn't show nuclear winter because we didn't know about it. But we did show the electromagnetic pulse because we did know about that. Um, and.

• 51:42Speaker 05

  And I started out thinking, oh, yes, right, I could unseat Ronald Reagan or some grandiose shit like that. And then I realized, no, forget all that. Just show them what it's gonna be like. And we couldn't make it too terrible, because people would reach for the clicker and change the channel to something else.

• 52:01Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 52:02Speaker 05

  So it was a tightrope act. But I, you know, again, I didn't want music in the movie. So there's very little music in the movie. I didn't want to be accused of goosing anybody's emotions or editorializing. Just the facts, ma'am.

• 52:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're running short on time. A quick question here. So remind me, who launched missiles first, if you ignored the DOD's request to not show, um, America as a first strike? I don't remember what started it.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  Nobody, nobody knows. We never showed it. We, that was the whole, that was the whole point of the movie, was not to show who's, who started it. And by the way, when we get nuked.

• 52:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no one will care.

• 52:47Speaker 05

  No one will know. No.

• 52:48Chuck Nice?

  No one will know. And no, nobody's gonna be afterwards going, who did this?

• 52:54Speaker 05

  Because it's just not gonna happen, because it'll be so incredibly devastating. No, we'll be sitting here talking, and then we'll be gone. And it's not a question of who started it.

• 53:02Chuck Nice?

  And that's it.

• 53:03Speaker 05

  Right. It won't, it won't matter. Um.

• 53:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Nicholas, give me, give me something positive to think about going forward?

• 53:11Speaker 05

  We have to get past the paradox of not wanting to think about this. It's not enough to, you know, contribute to some charity online, send in, you know, $10 and hope for the best. Luck is not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy. You have to get out in the streets and demand change. And you have to do it in astronomical numbers in order to make things happen.

• 53:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a call to action.

• 53:41Speaker 05

  You bet. And, and, and there's not a lot of, uh... There's not a lot of time.

• 53:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 53:49Chuck Nice?

  It's interesting you say that because what the thing that is most disturbing about this issue right now is that you have talk when and saber rattling surrounding limited strike capabilities.

• 54:04Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:04Chuck Nice?

  Or this is a big thing that's being bandied about right now, and I don't know how you feel about that.

• 54:10Speaker 05

  You don't?

• 54:11Chuck Nice?

  I could guess. I could venture the guess.

• 54:14Speaker 05

  The thing, the thing that's really dumb about nuclear weapons is that they can never be used, and yet we, we keep on building more and more of them.

• 54:27Speaker 05

  You're not going to get the toothpaste back in the tube. Once this starts, it won't stop.

• 54:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, that's, that's a, a call to action, a call for peace, a call for sanity.

• 54:40Speaker 05

  It's a call for sanity, one hopes, yes.

• 54:42Chuck Nice?

  Sanity.

• 54:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. Well, Nicholas, first, congratulations on this award.

• 54:47Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 54:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we need more people to keep the world safe, whether they're household names or not, and I'm delighted that we could at least help in our little way to bring attention.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  I'm extremely grateful and very honored.

• 55:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. All right. All right, Nicholas. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. So this has been StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, and we had a celebration of the Future of Life Award. Check it out, futureoflife.org online. As always, keep looking up.