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Neil deGrasse Tyson's nearest audiences are comedians, satirists, and political commentators — not other scientists or academics. Across the top 10 neighbors, similarity scores run from 0.98 down to 0.95, a narrow band that signals no single dominant pull but a consistent audience type.
The shape is flat: Last Week Tonight (0.98) and John Oliver (0.98) sit at the top, followed closely by Megan Rapinoe (0.97) and Stephen Colbert (0.96). The Oatmeal (0.96) and Merriam-Webster (0.96) round out the mid-tier, with The Onion (0.96), Greta Thunberg (0.96), Curiosity Rover (0.95), and Dan Levy (0.95) completing the set. By subcategory, the top 10 breaks down as: two comedians, one TV show, one athlete, one humor/satire entity, one website (general), one website (satire), one activist, one technology entity, and one actor. Not one other Academic appears in the top 10 — the audience that follows Tyson looks nothing like a typical academic's audience in compositional terms.
The dominant cluster is comedians and satirists, with a secondary thread of activists and politically engaged figures. The cross-kind pattern here is the structural finding: an academic whose nearest audiences are shaped almost entirely by comedy, satire, and civic commentary.
