Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Adam Frank (physicist and astronomer)

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Adam Frank (The Little Book of Aliens) is a physicist, astronomer, and writer. Adam joins the Armchair Expert to discuss how he dealt with being an outsider in school, why he was drawn to science fiction, and how he discovered a secret language in mathematics. Adam and Dax talk about what the search for intelligent life outside Earth looks like, how common it is for other planets to have water, and what the concept of a liquid brain is. Adam explains why people are so obsessed with UAPs, why looking into space is like looking back in time, and how he thinks climate change is affecting the planet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hello. Hello. Tis the season for aliens. It sure is. That would be one of the many things we do that the aliens like. Christmas and snowflakes and Hanukkah.

Yes, watching all the little primates gather around. Celebrate. They're like, oh, they've moved a tree inside. Yes. That's weird. They've moved some outside to the inside, and now they've gathered around it. They would probably think it was like some appreciation for nature holiday. And Hanukkah, I mean, I guess the ritual of lighting the menorah, they'd be like, what's going on there?

They would just think the power was out there. They'd go like, oh, these people, the power's out. But the lights are on. Are the lights on when you just think the power was out there. They'd be like, oh, these people, the power's out. They've had to light candles. But the lights are on. Are the lights on when you're lighting the menorah? Now. Nowadays. Yeah.

But this is our first time having an alien expert on. Yeah. Which is so fun. It was really fun. I was really happy with the takeaway, like his takeaway. Yes. Me too. It jived with how I feel, which is I always takeaway. Yes, me too. It jived with how I feel, which is I always enjoy.

Yeah, me too. Okay, Adam Frank, that's who's here. Adam Frank is an astrophysicist and author and the principal investigator on NASA's first grant to study technosignatures, signs of advanced civilizations on other worlds. His books include Light of the Stars, About Time, The Constant Fire,

and now his new book that we're here to talk about, The Little Book of Aliens. What a cute title. Great book. Oh, last thing. We have a date now. We've ordered the sweatshirts and we want to say that pre-sale will start

on Monday the 18th at 10 a.m. Pacific time, California time. You're going to want to hop on it because it's a very cute sweatshirt. We only make 1,300 of them. Okay, yeah, 1,300. Literally the dish. We added 300. It's hopefully less cranky, folks. And it won't come until January.

But you can preorder for the holidays. Okay, it won't be in until Jan. Perhaps give proof of it. Print out a picture. Yeah. It's always fun. Please enjoy Adam Frank. Trip Planner by Expedia.

You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and your friends find a place on a beach with a pool and a marina and a waterfall and a soaking tub. Expedia. Made to travel. He's an up-chair expert. and the waterfall and the soaking tub. Expedia. Made to travel. What is that? Take it out of your mouth. What if it's poison? Blue poison? Blue poison. Rat poison?

Yeah. I think I just ate a little arsenic, but that's okay. You'll be fine. I've been training with White Oleander, so it should be fine. Every day, take a little bit. I know my wife will poison me at some point. How could she not? Wasn't Rasputin every day was eating a little bit of arsenic or something

because he knew people were going to try and kill him? One of our many stories. You must feel this way having been in academia so long. That somebody's always trying to kill you. Oh, no. I was thinking more of like, you start getting a sense, or I do, that nearly everything I learned is apocryphal. Yeah.

Even as the social sciences are beginning to unravel just a tiny bit under the pressure of Hendrick writing The Weirdest People. Yeah, the weird stuff. That was one of the best results. You used college students for 50 years. What do you expect? Yeah, all we know about is 20-year-old elite children. Our understanding of all of mankind

is based on the most narrow. So then you just wonder, okay, so that's our modern take on it. And we're doing pretty good, better than we ever have. And we're discovering so much of what we currently know is questionable. Academia, like everything else, has got it. Don't go outside the box. This is what everybody believes. You're a lunatic. And some of that stuff has turned out to be really dangerous for the planet. With physics, the idea that reductionism,

everything's just atoms. You're just a bunch of atoms. You're a meat computer. No, actually, it's a lot more complicated than that. And this view you got is actually fucking us up. Yes. And look, it's all over your book, which is we're in this precarious situation where we're trying to understand something that we're trapped inside of. We can't get a bird's eye view of any of this. We can't put it on a table. We can't measure it. So it's a very curious thing for us to tackle. Science is based on this idea that, oh, there's a third person view. Like when I play video games, right? I can choose between being third person or I can do first person. Third person view is a fantasy. It's a useful fantasy, but there is no such thing. Nobody's ever had the God's eye view. Yeah. Well, can we start with New Jersey? Jersey, sure. We talked to a lot of

experts. They're all smarter than us, but I need to know why someone's drawn to what they're drawn to, because I think it ends up impacting how you see everything. So New Jersey kids, 60s. Yeah, I grew up in Belleville, New Jersey, which is right next to Newark. This is the 60s, early 70s. And, you know, the town I grew up in was working class, Italian, Irish. I was the entire Jewish population. Okay, great. You were representing the ambassador. Great people and everything, but there was a lot of prejudice. And my parents got divorced when I was three. Then the guy who kind of raised me, my dad, was the first black state legislature in Jersey, civil rights leader.

Your stepfather. My stepfather. My mom and my stepdad didn't get married until they were like 86. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a curious and weirdly romantic story. My mom was a radical. My mom was a Holocaust survivor who was just super politically not commie. My mom and my dad, my bio dad, recognized that Stalin and everything was an asshole. But they were very much progressive in those days.

This was the early 60s. She was banned the bomb and then she got involved in civil rights. And so my stepdad, being black, living in the house, I had a big target on my back. Okay. So when I was growing up, I got my ass kicked pretty much every day for being Jewish. Kids would throw pennies at me, being like,

pick up the Betty Jew. I've heard of this. This is like, yeah, this is because of my mom. I was taught to be like, no, you're wrong. Anti-Semitism is wrong. And they'd be like,

great, bam, bam, bam. Yeah, that doesn't seem helpful on the playground, but thank you for arming me with that. Exactly, mom. Thanks a lot. It was a rough early going. And then the major thing, I lost my brother when I was nine. He was 16 and he was killed in a car accident. You're kidding. Yeah. Yeah. New driver situation? No. I went to this great YMCA

summer camp. Me, my sister, my brother went there from like five all the way up. And he was a counselor at this point. He'd risen in the ranks. It was very much meatballs, you know, the love that movie for that reason. And it was the end of the year and the counselors would all go off on their own little thing and there were four kids in a car and a drunk driver came along on the other side of the road and three of them died oh my god yeah i hope this is improved it seems like it has but when i grew up in detroit in the 70s and then was in school in the 80s. Someone died once every couple months from a drunk driver. It was so ever-present. He lost his license.

That was it. No jail time. Killed three kids. Oh, my God. Yeah. Was dad in the picture, biological dad? My dad lived in the city. He lived on the Upper West Side.

And so I'd see him. It was a typical divorce thing. Every two weeks, weekend Santa Claus kind of thing. My dad was a good guy, but he was a World War II vet who had post-traumatic stress syndrome, like nobody's business. What line of work was he in? He was a writer. Oh, he was?

Yeah, and I had the best of both worlds. I had George, who was my black dad, who was a great guy, never even finished high school, but he was super smart, amazingly compassionate guy, and just tough. He'd grown up on the streets of Newark, so really shrewd guy. And then my dad was an intellectual.

I remember going to his office because he was a writer for like McGraw Hill or something. And yeah, going to his office and kind of waiting around me and my sister for him to finish up. He was distant. And five-year-older brother. I have that same dynamic.

My brother's five years older than me. And I think he gives you a lot of little brother stuff. Oh, that's the bummer about losing him. Because especially, you know, I was getting my butt kicked every day and my brother was big and he was my protector. I remember one time

one of the bullies coming up to kick my ass up to my house and my brother stepped out. He just went like, stop, turned around and walked away.

My mom and my stepdad, George, they were involved in civil rights stuff and they were kind of checked out. They were also smoking huge amounts of weed. Sure, sure.

It was prerequisite in the movement, I think. Yeah. They drug tested you and if you were sober, you were kicked out. That's right. Wonderful people, but not that functional. So when my brother was gone, there was nobody left paying attention. And so my sister and I were in many ways just kind of on our own. And did you retreat into reading and fantasy and isolation? Totally. Especially in the early years. Science was everything. My dad had introduced me to science fiction early on. And so actually the apocryphal story,

I got into astronomy because I remember he's gone, but his library is still there in the house. The bottom shelf is all of these 1950s, 1960s pulp science fiction things. You got any L. Ron Hubbard classics? No, not L. Ron Hubbard. It was all Isaac Asimov. Amazing stories.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic journeys. And they all had these lurid illustrations of rocket ships or bug-eyed monsters, half-clad women fighting off or being carried by the space guy with his laser blaster. You think of sci-fi as this cute pastime, but it's shocking how many scientists it gave rise to. So many people entered it from the fantasy side, I think. Science fiction still is for me. I'm still a huge reader, what I can get my hands on or watch. And when I was growing up, the reruns of Star Trek every day at four o'clock on channel five and seven o'clock on channel 11, I just watched them over and over again. Anything that was available, that was my solace growing up here was that dream of other worlds. To get emotional about it, did you have some sense that that future world was going to value your offerings and be more meritocratic? You want to know? Yeah. My fantasy was that one day I'd be sitting outside and like the ship would come over with the lights on and would land.

They were going to bring me back. I was obviously the heir to the galactic throne. For sure. Obviously. And there was this one comic book, you. For sure. Yeah. There was this one comic book. I loved Marvel. There was this special edition, long form Star-Lord. Star-Lord was nothing back then. But that was kind of the story that this kid grew up on Earth, but actually he was the heir to the Galactic Throne. They made a great 80s movie of that too.

It was like The Last Starship Fighter or something. He was playing in a video game and that was the audition basically. That's right. You know, it's funny. I was the science advisor for Doctor Strange, which was like best week ever. We're in the writer's room and Kegum Fee comes on.

I'm like, I'm a fan. And he said to me, oh, really? What's your favorite? I got to pull out the deep dive. Well, it's, you know, Star-Lord special edition in volume nine.

403, 1978. I had this big book my dad had given me, my bio dad, of astronomy. It was just pictures. And this was before JWST, right? So these were just ground-based tells.

But just these pictures of nebula. And I would just stare at those. And it was my out. It was the recognition that there was more than this. Like what I was going through with everything in Belleville. This is just a little tiny part. And there's this much bigger story. And I'm part of that story

Yeah, and it was a retreat and I would also imagine my own ego would be like I'm a part of the next phase I'm not fitting in because I'm actually kind of advanced. That's how I would comfort myself for me was more There was this other world that I was part of it wasn't so much the future It was just that there was this other world already going on. I'd look at those pictures and was like, it's true. Look at these fricking pictures. I remember in 77, I think it was,

when the Voyager went by Jupiter and it took all those pictures of the Jovian moons. One of them looks like a giant pizza, Io, and the one that's covered in ice, Europa. I was like, well, I'm getting my butt kicked. This is also happening. I kind of feel bad for the current generations because they've grown up in a world

where space exploration is a given. I think like I'm on the tail end of it being very thrilling. And you were at the epicenter of it. Yeah, yeah. You were what, four or five years old? When Apollo landed, I was five. I think that's relevant in how passionate and romanticized the whole field is.

But I think for anyone else, like we've been always going to the moon. Right. We've been always out and out of space. Right. And the science fiction where in my day, you were like a serious nerd. There was me and there was like one other dude.

He got beat up too. Yeah. And it was like this special thing that you had. It was the same thing with the comics. But if you look at the kids that comics so appealed to, it's like special superpowers, right? Totally. Something could happen to them

and then they could fend off the bullies. Gonna get bit by something. Yeah, so walk by a radio leak. I was always looking for the radioactive whatever to eat or stick my head in. Volunteering to get bit by spiders. I'll stick my hand in. I had a dream in seventh grade.

I'll never forget this dream where I was Spider-Man and I was in my seventh grade biology class walking around. Oh, yeah. So I had a lot of those dreams. I had an amazing dream when I was in seventh grade. I'll never forget this dream where I was Spider-Man and I was in my seventh grade biology class walking around. Oh, yeah. So I had a lot of those dreams. I had an amazing dream when I was in fourth grade where I had built the Enterprise. I was on the Enterprise,

like the doors open and I walk out. Kirk's like, hey, what's up? Because I had built the Enterprise. We've been waiting for you. And then I go down the Turbo Vader and I walk into my fourth grade class

on the Enterprise. But of course, they're taking up, but I don't have to because I built the Enterprise. I swear to God, man, that dream, I can see it if I close my eyes. grade class on the Enterprise. But of course, they're taking it, but I don't have to because I built the Enterprise. I swear to God, man, that dream, I can see it if I close my eyes. The elevator on the Enterprise is called the Turbo Vader?

I think it is. I'm sure you're right. That might be nerdcore for the day. I'm sure somebody's gonna be like, no, it's not. It's the Turbo Lifter, okay? That'll be one of Monica's many facts she has to find out.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you did everything. You read science fiction books and magazines. You watched docs. You were obsessed with Star Trek. Now, as you endeavor in college into learning about astronomy in its truest sense,

do you start becoming disillusioned as you learned about it? I could almost imagine a period for you of disillusionment or the death of the fantasy world. No, because of math, right? So I learned early on. My parents bought me a pretty nice telescope when I was 11 or something.

And I put it in the backyard in New Jersey, right? In New Jersey, you can see like five stars. I was like, oh, this can't take very long. And I looked through the telescope and stars a little dot. I thought there was going to be flames. So that was my moment of disillusionment. And that's when I turned to theory. Because with theory, it's just mathematics.

I was never great at mathematics, but I was good enough to be a physicist. So you were really, really good. And that's when I turned to theory because with theory, it's just mathematics. I was never great at mathematics, but I was good enough to be a physicist. So you were really, really good. Like eight standard deviations. Yeah, right, compared to an average person. Mathematics is a language, essentially, in which you can say things, very much like to me a poetic language where you could write 30 paragraphs, but that one line captures it better than the 30 paragraphs. So when I started to learn to use mathematics to express things,

still to this day, it brings tears to my eyes. Sometimes it's so beautiful. And it's like a window that you see through. So when I started learning about electromagnetism and Maxwell's equations and fluid dynamics, these equations became so exciting. And the things you could see, like there was this infinite regress that you would just drop down into.

If I'd had to build things, yeah, I probably would have felt that way, but it was all in my head. So often when you're hearing a theory explained to you in layman's terms, what you're hearing is someone trying to put math into English and it's incomplete. There's no way to actually translate it.

Someone's just doing their best metaphoring. So of course it's very hard to understand because if you could speak the math language, you could actually understand it by looking at the math. That's what it is. You'd write down the equation and be like, oh, I get it. It's the same thing with a poem. You know, there's a couple examples of poetry in my life where it's like, oh, that's the perfect metaphor where there's just this one, like, rather than words comes the sun comprehending

glass. I always love that idea. I think it's Philip Larkin. I could talk about the beam of light coming through the window forever, but the sun comprehending glass. I always love that idea. I think it's Philip Larkin. I could talk about the beam of light coming through the window forever, but the sun comprehending glass. And the math is like that. Once I write it down, it's all there. I've never lost that sense of this is a secret language through which the universe talks to me. And in fact, even some of our most prominent and famous physicists were ones that weren't themselves great at the math, but were really good at the metaphor. Like Oppenheimer, they say, right?

He was really eloquent in being able to relay what the math said in language. Yeah, he was probably a better mathematician still than I was. But it is true that there's a lot of different ways to be valuable in this field. Technically, I'm not super great at solving integrals. You know, I mean, good enough. But I'll often work with people. Well, it's kind of like saying you could read Shakespeare. It's not to say you could write Shakespeare.

Right. You do have the skills to read the math and understand it. Exactly. And I'm good at asking questions. I'm good at being like, oh, this could be an interesting question to ask. And then I got to work with somebody who's much better technically than I am at solving the equation that will answer that question. Yeah.

So you get your PhD from UW. Go Dawgs. Yeah. They're the Dawgs, right? They're the Dawgs. Go Dawgs! That's what I followed. I'm the Dawgs, too. Are you get your PhD from UW. Go Dawgs. They're the Dawgs, right? They're the Dawgs. Not that I followed. I'm the Dawgs too. Are you also the Dawgs? They're the Huskies.

The Huskies. But do we still call them Dawgs? You still say go Dawgs. I think, I don't know. I was with a girl for nine years that went there. They just built it.

It was like this new zillion dollar stadium with bad Canadian steel. That's what they said. Bad Canadian steel. They flamed it on the Canadians. Nefarious Canadians. Poor Canadians.

You couldn't pick a group that's more comical. Yeah, they'd also just say sorry. Or the Swedes. Like they won't even push back. It was our steel. We're so sorry. We'll do better next time. So there you pick up a PhD

and then now you start your professional life in this field. And what are some of the things you look at before we get to aliens, which we're going to land on? I would imagine you have to earn your reputation before you're allowed to have an alliance with aliens. Well, that's very true. Part of the story in the book is how, even before I was coming up, but it's certainly in the late eighties and early nineties when I was in graduate school, if you were interested in life in the universe, there was only SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which was very marginal.

There was only a few people doing SETI. There was zero funding for it. It was considered marginal. The people who were doing it were really heroic because they had to put up with the snickering and the scorn of their colleagues. Was it a government agent? Is it part of— No, no, no. So that's why I try and tell the history of SETI in the book. SETI starts off in 1960 when Frank Drake, who's

totally the pioneer, you know, he's a young guy. He is working at one of these government agencies that has a radio telescope and he convinces his colleagues like, hey, I want to listen for, really, it's the first time in the history of humanity that anybody's done an actual experiment to say, is there life in the universe of any kind, whether it's smart life time in the history of humanity that anybody's done an actual experiment to say, is there life in the universe of any kind, whether it's smart life or dumb life, doesn't matter. This is the first astrobiological experiment. And what was their methodology? I know that they had radio telescopes and they're aiming them all over the place. And what are they listening for? What are they trying to detect? Yeah. The idea was what Drake starts is he's like, I'm going to look at two nearby sun-like stars.

Nobody knew there were any planets at all. As far as we knew, there were zero other planets out there other than the eight orbiting the sun. Which is a very arrogant point of view. Yeah, but there was reasons to think that planets were rare. Up until then, the way people thought planets formed was you had to get two stars to almost collide, and then stuff would squeeze out like taffy or gravity would pull it out. And that never happened. So people thought like,

planets are going to be so rare that life is going to be rare. We also didn't at that point know the massive amount of stars we had quite yet. We knew that the Milky Way galaxy is one galaxy out of almost an infinite number of galaxies. And there's 400 billion stars in the galaxy. Was that known at that time? Yeah. Because that was a relatively, I thought, that was like a 90s. No, no. We knew.

So what we didn't know then was whether any of those 400 billion stars had planets. There was just no evidence. We didn't have the technology to detect planets orbiting other stars.

That far away. Right. The closest stars, like Alpha Centauri. About four light years away. Right. A light year is what, six trillion miles? Trillion miles. 5.9 trillion miles. I know. The closest star is like Alpha Centauri. About four light years away. Right. A light year is what? Six trillion miles.

Trillion miles. 5.9 trillion miles. I know. The distances between stars will just melt your brain. It just can't. It all melts my brain. Yeah. Infinite.

Already. Yeah. I'm done. I'm out of here. No, I love it. I'm so excited. And then they try to keep making it smaller so you'll understand. So like an AU, an astronomical unit, is like 3.1 million.

Yeah. An AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun. I think it's a 9.9 million mile. Oh, that's 93 million miles. Oh, that's 93 million miles. Something like that. Yeah. Now there's billions of AUs. Right, you can count it.

It's just freaking big. The distance between the stars. We can get around. We've sent stuff to everywhere in the solar system. But the solar system is like your house. And the nearest star is so far away that it would be like walking

between LA and New York or crawling between LA and New York. The distance is between stars. And this is when it comes to UFOs or UAPs, that people don't understand that it's not even clear whether you can really cover those distances in short amount of time. As an astronomer, you get it in your gut how vast the distances between stars are. Yeah. So if you were traveling at the speed of light, which is questionable whether you could, you'd be traveling for four years to get to the closest one.

The closest one, which is like the 7-Eleven. Your mailbox. Yeah. Okay. So, Drake, what's his methodology? Radio astronomy was a new idea. Before that, astronomy meant like a telescope with a lens using what we call optical light. So, radio telescopes were new.

So, he just says, look, I'm going to take two sun-like stars nearby within 10 light years. I'm just going to listen. And what I'm looking for is any kind of signal that is not natural. We're just going to look for things that clearly the sun doesn't produce or stars don't produce or clouds of gas don't produce. Wavelengths that are meters across. Whereas like the light that your eye responds to is nanometers or hundreds of nanometers across. That begins, SETI is all radio-based because for a bunch of different reasons. One is it's super sensitive and the other is radio waves because they're so large you can see from one side of the galaxy to the other. Whereas optical light gets blotted out by, there's a lot of dust in space. So radio is the thing of

choice. NASA is interested. This is the early days. People were kind of excited, but it was always marginal. So unless you already had tenure, you know, you didn't do SETI. And there was never any money. There was never any funding for it. And as I go through in the book, people have this idea that SETI scientists have looked every night at the night sky looking for signs of intelligent life. That was my assumption. Everybody does that because the movies, right? Yeah.

And the people call that like the great silence. Well, we've listened and we haven't heard anything. So therefore there's nothing out there. And that is just not true because there was never any money for it. So a friend of mine, Jason Wright, who's part of that NASA research grant that I'm the principal investigator on, Jason did a study where he added up all the SETI searches that have ever been done. So if you think of the stars as an ocean, we're looking for life. Life is fish, say. So how much of the ocean have we looked at looking for fish? And the answer is a hot tub. We've looked at one hot tub

worth of water. We didn't find any fish. And so are you then going to be like, well, there's no fish in the ocean. Right. So it's just because there was never funding for SETI and it was marginal. We haven't looked. But now we've got a whole different way of doing other than radio telescopes. And now NASA's all in and we are looking for life.

And that's the exciting thing. That's what the book is about. That in the next 10, 20, 30 years, we're going to have data. After 2,500 years of yelling at each other about this question, we're going to have actual factual data. Because there's been some technological paradigm shifts? Because Hubble's part of this? It was before Hubble. There's three revolutions in what we call astrobiology.

So when I was growing up, there was no astrobiology, right? But then in 1995, the telescope technology, not Hubble, but ground-based telescopes, people designed detectors and they find their first exoplanet. They find the first planet orbiting another star. And so 2,500 years of people yelling about planets over. Pretty amazing. How often does a question that the Greeks have been yelling at get answered?

And that was in what year? 95. Oh my goodness. The year I moved to California. That's so recent. And then it just skyrocketed. Within 10 years, we'd found thousands. And now we found so many that we can do statistics.

And we now know that when you go out at night and look at the sky, every star you're looking at has a family of planets orbiting it. And there now know that when you go out at night and look at the sky, every star you're looking at has a family of planets orbiting it. And there are places. Every one of those planets, like look at those pictures of Mars, there are places you can walk around. Maybe you need a space suit

if there's no atmosphere. Maybe you just need like a breather because it's the wrong atmosphere. Or maybe even you could walk around without. What? The galaxy is full of planets. But wait, what percentage of the stars are we seeing have them?

Because clearly we didn't see any. Pretty much every one. We didn't have the technology. So even with Alpha, Tauri, and Centauri, we can't see them. Because you need a really special, you need like super sensitive. This is too nerdy. Is this the telescope that had a bazillion different plates? No, what's weird about this, it wasn't like having a bigger telescope.

It was having the thing, the instrument you hang on the telescope. Because what you got to do is you got to take the light and you got to beat the crap out of the light. You don't need a super huge telescope to do this. You need something

that can really pound on the light. Okay, so that breakthrough happened and then we discover it's however many stars we have. 400 billion. Oh my gosh.

In the galaxy. Just in the galaxy. 400 billion in the galaxy and they all have a family of planets and that's just an hour galaxy. And our in the galaxy, and they all have a family of planets, and that's just in our galaxy. And our galaxy is made up of, what, super galaxies, then galaxy clusters. All these things keep ramping up.

Each one has a billion, so it's like to the power of a billion, like six times. Yeah. When I'm in graduate school, there's a professor, Woody Sullivan. He was the only one doing SETI. And back then, there's the giggle factor, we call it. Anybody doing SETI is kind of subject to, oh, he does SETI. You know, like the raised eyebrows. And it was because of UFOs and bad science fiction. It didn't get any respect. But Woody was awesome. I loved the University of Washington. Everybody was very cool with it. But in general,

anybody doing SETI had to put up with that. And so that's one reason I didn't go into SETI. I knew there's no way I'm getting a job. You'd already been bullied. Exactly. I don't need this again. A bunch of astronomers now coming up. Yeah, you joined the science community to not get bullied. And that's the one area you could still get pounced. I knew as much as I was interested in it, I ended up doing more standard kind of astronomy. I studied how stars die. My advisor, Bruce Ballack, great scientist. Is that who you dedicated the book to? That's who I dedicated the book to. He has beautiful dedication. Yeah, he's amazing. I haven't given him the book yet, so he doesn't know. Unless he's listening to this, he still doesn't know the book is dedicated to him.

I start off, I'm studying how stars like the sun die, doing what's called astrophysical fluid dynamics, as the stars kind of blow themselves apart. Then I got into star formation, how giant clouds of gas collapse under their own weight to form stars. Early, mid-2000s, the exoplanet revolution, as I'm calling it. Everybody knows about exoplanets. I start doing some of that too. Still not life, just studying exoplanets as a phenomena. You also start questioning the overall model of cosmology in general. That's before you're now heading up this new program, right?

Carl Sagan was my hero because his writing, he was a great scientist and he was interested in science as a cultural phenomenon. Where does science fit into everything else we do? And his books, you know, you'd be learning about relativity, but he'd take you to like Renaissance Venice for some story about some guy. And I had a strong interest in philosophy,

even in high school. So I was the class clown. And my class clown picture is me with my cowboy hat, Jersey, don't ask why, and a book of Spinoza, you know, in my pocket. Like, you know, yeah. Whatever. Were the girls lined up around the corner? I thought this was going to help. I was clearly wrong.

I somehow thought, you know, a scientist would be like rock star. Well, I mean, yeah. Not then. Now, not then. So I was always interested in where science touched philosophical issues. So I never studied cosmology scientifically, but I've always had an interest. I have written a bunch of things over the years in my books that sort of try to look at, because cosmology is definitely a place where you're running up against deep issues about the nature of space, the nature of time. What does it mean to be an observer?

That you alter the thing you're observing. So that's also quantum mechanics comes in there. I have a huge interest in quantum mechanics interpretations. So while I'm doing my astronomy stuff, I'm also keeping this interest in philosophy. And as it connects also to human spirituality, because I've been doing contemplative practice since I was 30. Right. Zen. So, you know, my first book was about science and human spirituality. So these things are kind of always running parallel with my hardcore cranking out theories of how clouds collapse to form stars. Yes. Measuring and data computation. So I was shocked, I guess, to

learn that, well, what's not shocking is Aristotle believed in the geocentric theory of the universe. We were at the center, everything revolved around us, and he was certain that there were no other planets. But I had no idea, Epicurus? Yeah, Epicurus and Democritus. In 300 BC, they're already saying, no, no, there's other planets. So that's kind of shocking. Intuitively, they're picking that up because there's nothing that would help you get there. By reason alone, they're looking at the world. They're looking at bread, bread into breadcrumbs. Well, and you can break the breadcrumbs.

They're like, no, the whole world's made out of these invisible little specks of matter. They believed in atoms, Monica, in 300 BC. How could they? They just worked it out. The Greeks were like, whoa. Yes. So what were the other two? You said there were three revolutions.

Oh, right. We only did one. One exoplanet. Right. One was exoplanet. So we discovered the other two? You said there were three revolutions. Oh, right. We only did one. One exoplanet. Right. One was exoplanet. So we discovered that there's planets everywhere. You look at the night sky. You count up five of the stars.

Every one of those stars has planets. But one in five has a planet in the right orbit. It's just the right distance where you can have liquid water on the surface, which means life. We think that liquid water is the key to forming life. It doesn't mean life is formed. It just means you have what you need. That's still a lot of planets that are in the right place to get the whole thing going. We're still on revolution.

That's a side tangent. We still don't really know where life comes from. Oh, yeah, we don't. We know it needs these building blocks. Yeah. And we know it needs carbon and oxygen or whatever we say it needs. But we don't really have that moment figured out. No, we do not.

How do you take a bunch of chemicals that are just like floating around, kind of bouncing into each other. Every now and then they combine to form something which maybe starts to replicate quickly. But how do you go from that to a cell that has agency that can be like, oh, sugar gradient. I'm going to go up the sugar gradient because that's where the food is. Right. Yeah. Life is weird. We can talk about that because that's another research project

I just started. We just got a big grant from the Templeton Foundation to kind of look at the difference. What makes life? Life is still a physical system, right? It's made out of stuff, chemicals, but it's clearly so different from mountains and stars and comets. Life is the only thing that creates. It's the only thing that innovates. Consciousness. Yeah, or has awareness. It's agency. Even a cell has agency. It has an internal state where it's like, no, I'm not really hungry enough. I'm going to leave that alone. No, I am hungry. I'm going to go get that food. See, okay, so this is so arrogant, but I'm just going to bring you up to speed on where I land on all this. I happen to really love astronomy. It was one of my favorite classes I took in college. I couldn't believe what we have learned from looking at white light coming from stars.

Once you understand that we know what's burning in there, we know if it's red or blue shifted, if it's approaching or retreating, the mass, these things we figured out by looking at light is so incredible and impressive and undeniable. But I got to say, you get to the end of it all and then you go, and then the big bang. Some intuitive part of me is like, that's not the whole story. And from where did the Big Bang, you know, like it doesn't end.

And then additionally, biology. I'm like, great, I can follow it all the way down to the first amoeba. I know how we got to here, but there's still some huge bucket of magic we still don't know about. Like the bucket of magic. We have a lot of it,

but there's also a couple of major mysteries that I don't think we're anywhere close to. Well, that's why I'm interested in where philosophy and science rub up. I talk about this in the book when it comes to life. What makes life so interesting is that bucket of magic. Right now, in the end, I think it's not going to require magic. I'm very anti-reductionist. This idea like, oh, it's just atoms. And if you know everything there is about the atoms, you're done. Determinism. Right, right. We just had Sapolsky on and I was so depressed.

I'm not a determinist because what's happening in science right now, and astrobiology plays a role in this because what astrobiology forces you to do is to confront the biases that you have from just looking at Earth life. You have to imagine the unimaginable. Your brain has been formatted in a way that's very hard to shake, right? Yeah. The way story works in a predictable way. Narratives, right?

Yes. And then if you're watching a movie and it doesn't have a middle or the beginning or the end, you know intuitively, but you don't know why. You can't articulate that. And what's weird is even if they deviate from that, it's kind of only interesting for so long. Free jazz was great for like 20 minutes. And it was like, no, actually, let's go back to the jazz. Yeah. We kind of need these structures. These things are kind of hardwired

into us. And so it shows you that there's stuff beyond the hardwiring. And would you say the most baseline bias we have is that we've never observed anything living that isn't born and then dies? Uh, yeah. Or you don't have to say that's the biggest, but that's certainly one that I feel so locked into that. What's interesting about this, especially for astrobiology is, you know, and I have these chapters where I try and say, how can we use what we understand to ask what alien life might be like? I mean, there's a way in which to die is the definition of life. Any definition you're going to come up with is going to include this idea of precariousness. To be alive is to be alive in precarious situations. You're always one step

away from it ending and your whole life is like, I got to keep it from ending. That's just from my perspective. And as I'm trying to push the boundaries in this research that we're doing about what is it about life as a physical system that is different, throw out reductionism, throw that kind of third person God's eye view. And then it very much comes down to the fact that to be alive is to be this thing where life and the world emerge together. It's not, oh, there's this preexisting world that has all of its properties and then you just drop life into it. There's a way in which maybe you could think of the world without us, of course exists, but who knows what it's like? It's a buzz. It's a blur. And then the organism and the world

are kind of both defined at the same time. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Sasha hated sand, the way it stuck to things for weeks. So when Maddie shared a surf trip on Expedia Trip Planner, he hesitated.

Then he added a hotel with a cliffside pool to the plan. And they both spent the week in the water. You were made to follow your whims. We were made to help find a place on the beach with a pool and a waterfall and a soaking tub and, of course, a great shower. Expedia. made to travel. There's an incredible, I guess you'd call it a docuseries. It's out right now called Life on Planet Earth. Have you seen it? I haven't seen it. Spielberg produced it. I'm watching it with our kids. It does the most incredible job of examining what's happening in the oceans

400 million years ago. And then because of these oceans and what's happening there, all of a sudden you get this birth of greenery and trees outside. But then that birth of greenery and trees ends up infiltrating the ocean and then these plankton grow and then they rob all the ocean of the oxygen and there's a mass extinction under there. To your point, there's no borders to any of it. It's all kind of one thing that's ebbing and flowing and affecting other parts. And yeah, how do you parse out one element of it? What we've learned, so what are the other revolutions? The third one, we'll get to the second one. The third one is we now have unpacked the history of the earth. The important part is from maybe 4 billion years or 3.8 billion years ago, life emerges and very quickly life takes over. Life is not something,

and I go into this in the book a lot because it's the key to finding life elsewhere. Life doesn't happen on a planet. It happens to a planet. Life takes over. The trajectory of that planet, once life is formed, once you get to a certain point, that's it. And the best example of this is oxygen, right? You take a deep breath. Well, that wonderful oxygen, it wasn't there when the Earth formed. It wasn't there for the first 2 billion years. Life came up with a new kind of photosynthesis around 3 billion or 2.5 billion years ago.

And in that photosynthesis, this version, there already was photosynthesis. This version takes some light from the sun, takes a water molecule, breaks it in part, keeps the hydrogen for itself, and the oxygen it farts out. And that's how we ended up with an oxygen atmosphere. And there was a point in our history, I just learned this from the show, that these early land amphibians, they were breathing 60% oxygen. That's how high the oxygen level was at one point. I can't believe how much it's ebbed and flowed. So around 2.5 billion, 2 billion years ago, you get the great oxidation event. But it's when suddenly the oxygen goes from none to about 20%.

It takes a while. It does all these fluctuations. goes from none to about 20%. Takes a while. It does all these fluctuations. So the whole atmosphere is changed by having this life. Well, did we even have an atmosphere before that? No, we had an atmosphere. It was mostly nitrogen and CO2 earlier on.

It's been changing. But once life puts oxygen in the atmosphere, it changes everything. The whole chemistry of the planet, how the rocks absorb the oxygen, which then spits out to the streams, the whole planet changes. And so it's life that did that. My last book was about looking at climate change as an astrobiological phenomena. And people have this idea like, oh, we have to save the earth. That's the wrong view. Our job is to not piss it off because the biosphere

will shake us off like fleas on a dog, as George Carlin once said. It's so powerful. It's literally a god, right? Or goddess in the sense that it's taking all this sunlight, 200 atomic bombs per second. I may have this wrong. That's how much sunlight we're getting every day, the amount of energy. And the earth channels that, the life channels that and converts it into all this stuff.

And we're just tweaking that. And if we tweak it in the wrong way, the human race will be gone. And the life will be like, hey, thanks a lot for the climate change. I'm going in this direction. And it's not theoretical. We have all this evidence in the archaeological record that all these huge mass extinctions have happened over and over and over again. And one causes the birth of another thing. That's right.

They were saying in this period of 100,000 years of volcanoes going off, the size of the United States, that it emitted all this carbon into the atmosphere and 90 plus percent of everything living on Earth died. Yeah, I think that's the Ermean-Permian Great Extinction. Ermean-Permian. Maybe. Don't quote me on that. But there was this massive release of CO2, which then the whole planet changed. And then the oceans really acidified. Yes.

The Great Oxidation Event was a mass death as well because oxygen is really bad, actually. It took life a while to figure out how to deal because oxygen's a corrosive. And so it took a while for life to sort of figure out how to use oxygen. But there's so much power in chemical reactions with oxygen, you never would have had brains without it. So life puts oxygen in the atmosphere.

And then by doing that, it also changes the history of the planet, changes the history of life and leads to our kind of creatures, more energetic, more able to use concentrated amounts of energy to do things like have big bodies or build civilizations. So how, maybe I'm jumping ahead too far, but what do we look for when we're trying to see if one of these exoplanets has oxygen present? What do we see? So that's the link.

What's amazing is this third revolution, which was knowing the history of Earth and its life, tells us that on any planet where life forms, it's going to change the whole functioning of the planet. And that's what we can see from a distance. We didn't have this capacity before. See the change. We can see the change. We can see things in the atmosphere of an alien planet. It's just amazing that we can do this. First, we had to know that there were alien planets. Now we know where to look. And now we know which of those alien planets are the ones we want to look at, the ones that are in the right place

for life to form. But we have this technique we call atmospheric characterization. And I spend two chapters in the book unpacking this so people can see how fricking amazing this is. And now you're going to do it in 75 seconds. I'm going to do it in 75 seconds. So one of the ways we find planets is if the planet's orbiting the star, when it passes between us and the star, it's like a little eclipse.

The light blots out for a second. And then we'll be like, oh, we saw the eclipse, there's a planet there. But also if the planet's got an atmosphere, some of the light passes through the atmosphere, some of the starlight to get to us, to our telescopes. And when it passes through the atmosphere, some of the light gets absorbed. And we can see that absorption is like a fingerprint. The light gets to us, we're like, oh shit, there's a bunch of light that's gone. It's generally missing something. Exactly. You'll see a bunch of light, and then you'll see places where there is

no light. Those absences are the fingerprint. We've discovered methane, we've discovered carbon dioxide. We're waiting to discover oxygen. So because of the story I just told you about what happened on earth, if we look at an earth-like planet and we discover something like oxygen, and particularly oxygen and methane together, because you need to keep spitting oxygen out into the atmosphere via life to have that happen. So if we were to find the fingerprint of oxygen, that would be what we call a biosignature. It's a signature in the light that tells us there's a biosphere there. Whether it's microbes or forests or grasslands, that planet is a living world.

It's crazy that you can do that now, right? It is. Yeah, it's bonkers. What are we waiting for? We know the fingerprint of oxygen in methane. What we're waiting for is this shit is hard to do. The James Webb is the first telescope that really is just on the hairy edge of being able to do this.

Okay. So we're going to try. This is the telescope that's just descending into space. It's already up there. It's just sitting there orbiting with us and the moon. And it's big enough and it's got the right instruments on it where it can collect enough light and break apart the light where we have a chance of seeing a biosignature. Or we can talk also about the technosignatures if we're looking for intelligent life. That's what the NASA grant I'm part of

is for intelligent life, right? Because human beings have changed the earth in ways that you could see from a distance. So our job with the research group I'm part of is to develop a library of, just like oxygen tells you that there's forests, chlorofluorocarbons. Oh yeah, that we outlawed. Yeah, right, exactly. That were in hairspray. Yeah, hairspray and air conditioners. So it turns out CFCs, as they call them, are a great technosignature because either you put them into the atmosphere by accident, or maybe you put them in there for a reason because chlorofluorocarbons are actually a great greenhouse gas. And let's say you want to live on Mars and you're like,

Mars sucks. Let's make Mars warm. Let's pump it full of chlorofluorocarbons and then you'd have a much warmer Mars. So we could see chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere of an alien world now with the James Webb Space Telescope. We already have seen this. No, we haven't.

Oh, we haven't. Okay, but we could. We could, right. It would take a lot of time. You need to give me a lot of James Webb, but we just wrote a paper that showed it's possible. And we believe that CFCs cannot occur naturally. That's what it is. It's going to require some chemistry to put those together. You really need a bunch of steps that nature just isn't going to do. Now, is that dangerous though, to assume that there's not a ideal condition for that to emerge? That's a great point. And this is with the idea of what they call false positives. Same thing with oxygen, because for a long time, we're like, oxygen, it's the best. We have figured out a few ways that oxygen can naturally be put in, but it's under conditions that are so special that we'd know you'd have to have a special kind of planet to have natural

oxygen. Any other kind of planet, it's going to be life oxygen. This would be like, just spitballing, but lightning breaking the hydrogen and oxygen bond out of water or something. That's pretty close. That's good. Come on down. So this is the freaky thing. The sun is not an average star. The sun is actually pretty big as stars go. The average size star, which means the most common, is about half the size of the sun and it's teeny tiny. We call them M dwarf stars. And the planets in the habit and it's teeny tiny we call them m dwarf stars and the planets in the habitable zone that are orbiting m dwarfs they're right next to the star they are so close because they're so cold so instead of 93 million miles away there might be a million think of it in terms of orbits it takes 365 days for us to orbit the sun that's one year these planets

around the m dwarf stars will orbit in a week. You guys, this would be so fond of vacation there because if it were on an axis you'd experience all the seasons in a week probably. They might not have any. Well, she's right because actually what happens is just like the moon you always see the same face of the moon

that's because the moon is what's called tidally locked. The moon's day and its year are the same thing in terms of how long it orbits. As it rotates, it's always showing us the same face. So these M dwarf planets, because they're so common, that's what we're looking at. It's always noon all the time.

On the opposite side. It's always dark. And it's freezing. Perpetual night on one side, perpetual noon on the other side. Wow. Freaky, right? That's what's so cool about this.

I have a whole chapter in the book that's just going through all the freaky planets that we've discovered that are nothing like Earth. Oh my God. Yeah, it's really cool. Wouldn't that be so wild to live on that planet because to venture into the dark side, talk about the- It doesn't sound fun. I have seasonal affective disorder.

I would hate it there. You do not. This is not where you're going. Yeah. This is not your vacation spot. No, you'd love it because you'd be on the side facing the sun. You could. That's true. This would never go down. This is the actual cure for you.

Oh, I see. Oh, yeah. But you think about us crossing oceans and stuff. We were getting somewhere that environmentally was nearly identical to where we left. But this notion of exploring on a planet where it's frozen and black on one side. Yeah. And how could you go in there? Yeah.

That's very exciting. And the Terminator, the day-night edge. Would be sharp and permanent. Would be sharp and it would just be permanent. And so people talk about like maybe that's where life forms. Nobody knows though. This is the cool thing. You can do a lot of theoretical work now about what's the climate on a planet like this.

Yeah. It's really fun. Wait, sorry. What's the actual definition of intelligent life? Yeah, that's good. That's another change that's happened. So when SETI first started in 1960, and you get the first generation of people really interested in it, they were all basically a bunch of white dudes who were reading a lot of science

fiction. And so the definition of intelligence was a very narrow range. Human intelligence. Human intelligence, and it was all about gleaming spaceships. So what's cool is now that there's finally funding. There's finally people systematically, and that's our job, is to systematically approach this, not as science fiction stories, but to try and lay out all the options. And so the idea that intelligence can only happen if you've got a brain, a big neural system, that's one of the things we're like, yeah, maybe there's other ways to think about this.

Here's a really cool idea. Liquid brains, right? So we have a solid brain, a bunch of neurons. The neurons all sort of sit there. They've developed connections. But people have realized now on Earth, there's all we have a solid brain. A bunch of neurons. The neurons all sort of sit there. They've developed connections. But people have realized now on Earth, there's all these systems that are distributed. Like an ant colony is a liquid brain. Self-organizing complex systems.

Dude, that's it. This Templeton grant, that's what we're all about. Self-organizing complex systems. So the idea that you need some kind of creature with, you know, big eyes and a big old centralized brain, it may be very different. Forests. Forests could be. There's a mushroom. Mushrooms with the fungal networks.

Yeah. We got to broaden. Even octopi, right? They're kind of shaking up our understanding of intelligence. That's my understanding, right? That there's kind of a brain in every tentacle. It's like spread out over their entire body. They have all these neurons, but they're not consolidated in one, but maybe relatively equal number of neurons.

Right. Wow. So that's crazy. A liquid intelligence. Wow. So that's what I love about this field. The old view that we had that aliens were Mr. Spock or some dude with like, you know, antenna on his forehead. We're past that because we've learned so much about even about life on Earth.

We're being forced to sort of really redefine what we mean by intelligence or cognition. But would a minimum requirement be that they're manufacturing things? I mean, if we're looking for CFCs. For technology, right. Technology would just be things that you have to be complex enough to assemble, right? You have to be able to harvest energy and put it to work to assemble things which at lower levels would just not be possible. Right. Okay. This took a long time for me to get out there. But in the past when I've had these debates about aliens, my position is they undoubtedly exist mathematically. It's not possible that they don't. But I do not think they've ever been here.

And so I'm kind of delighted that this seems to be where you land. Right. People don't like this version of it. They really want the aliens to have been here and perhaps created Cheops and the Mayan temples and whatever other thing. But there's so many questions of, I guess, how do you work through why you don't believe they've been here? So this story about why starts with Eric von Donaghan's Chariots of the Gods and growing up in New Jersey. So we're back to Jersey as we always should be. Yes, with the boss.

Totally. So somehow I'm 10 or 12 and I get a copy of Chariots of the Gods, which is the first ancient astronaut book. And I'm reading this. I'm like, holy crap, man. Aliens built the pyramids. And I was particularly taken by Easter Island, right, with those giant enigmatic stone heads. And it was like, there's no trees there.

How did they move the stone heads around? It had to be aliens. And my poor bio dad, who I'm talking to, and he's just rolling his eyes. He's like, do I have to listen to this? But he's being very patient with me. So I was sure, right, that ancient aliens, because I'd read Von Donaghan. And then I'm sitting there. It's a couple years later.

I'd moved on, but I was still into it. And I watched this PPS series. I think the title of the thing was In Search of Ancient Astronauts. And what they did is they went to all these places, the pyramids, Easter Island, the NASCAR planes, the NASCA planes, and they talked to the scientists, the anthropologists

who studied this. And nobody needed any aliens. And my favorite story was the stone heads. Because the whole thing was there's no trees on Easter Island. How did they move these stone heads? And the whole thing was there's no trees on Easter Island. How did they move these stone heads? And it turns out they chopped down all the trees to move the stone heads. So instead of ancient aliens, you get a story of human stupidity.

Yes, yes. And that pissed me off. I felt like I had been duped. I got lied to. I got duped. I'm from Jersey, right? You know, that's the worst thing. I'm sure it's the same thing.

It was very human bias we have too. We had an expert just talking solely about that, that not to be made a fool of is one of our primary bias. And in Jersey, it's dangerous, right? I mean, the whole thing about Jersey is everybody's got to hustle. You better learn really quickly when you're getting taken, right? And so the fact that this guy had written this whole book and it was full of lies. He never even bothered to talk to the anthropologist

who'd been living there for 40 years, studying every little nook and cranny. And so that launched me into it because I was into UFOs as a kid too. Yes. And then that is what built up my skepticism, my kind of angry skepticism about the field. And so I'm older. I'm willing to consider other, especially now with the work I do, I study a lot of freaky things. Still, when it comes to UFOs and UAPs and the ancient astronauts, there's just no evidence. And what's taken as evidence on these TV shows, I couldn't show up in front of my colleagues and present

what they're saying, like, look, this is evidence. I'd get laughed out of the room. Look, we have found the bones of velociraptors that are a hundred million years old. We have the proof of it. We have proof of nearly everything that's been here in the last 100 million years. We can't find one weird piece of metal. You know, there's nothing in the archaeological record. Interesting thing is actually, I did a paper with Gavin Schmidt,

who's the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies a bunch of years back, which got a lot of attention, where we said, look, if there was an ancient civilization here, like say 100 million years ago, would you be able to tell? Turns out, no,

because after about 2 million years, the earth is almost entirely resurfaced. No buildings, like there's not going to be anything left. Right. And most stuff doesn't get fossilized. So in fact, actually, if somebody had set up shop here

100 million years ago and was here for 10,000 years, you probably wouldn't have any evidence of it. Well, what about the machines and the metals that they have? It would all corrode. It would all oxidize and rust. Yeah, it would get oxidized and get ripped up. Back to oxygen being bad. Well, what about the machines and the metals that they have? It would all corrode. It would all oxidize and rust and nothing. Yeah, it would get oxidized and get ripped up.

Back to oxygen being bad. Yeah, right. Okay. You put the brake on that. I put the brake on that. The reason we were asking the question, it was just because it was just a great scientific question. Like, how would you know?

And it turns out, well, the only way to look would be through isotopic anomalies and such. And nobody's ever really looked at that kind of evidence. So the point is, while one cannot say scientifically that we've never been visited, right? I'm actually working on some projects. It's worthwhile looking to see. So there's no scientific evidence that we have been visited. There's no real scientific evidence that we haven't been visited.

One should just remain skeptical. Yeah, but that sounds a little bit like we have no scientific evidence that an elephant hasn't flown across a canyon. That's true. Right. We don't, but we're pretty, we can. What about the video that went around? Oh, we're going to get into a whole chapter of UAPs. Yeah, UAPs. So I would just say that when it comes to the ancient alien stuff, because really they're talking about the last 20,000 years, archaeological history, not paleontological. We're attempting to explain some of the early advanced civilizations. Right. And that, I think, is just...

Because I've been asked on that show a bunch of times, ancient aliens. And I was like, no. And the producer was like, why not? I was like, because your show is bullshit. That's why. I said, if you really wanted to do that show, when you just want to ask, I'm just asking the question, then it would be like five minutes of the guy saying aliens

and 55 minutes of the experts who study that phenomena being nope, uh-uh, nope, nope, that's not what it is. Nope, you know. Instead, they do 55 minutes of this kind of wackadoodle stuff and then five minutes of the one archaeologist being like, what? Intuitively, I think, well, I know the distances required to get here or for us to get anywhere else so you're talking about most likely some carbon-based life form traveling at the speed of light for the duration of their whole life and then their children's whole life yeah so you're talking about dedicating four or five generations to going and observing something that would be so primitive, devoid of any real learning value, it'd be a long trip to go to the zoo. That's a great way to put it. I just

intuitively don't think anyone would commit those resources and all that to come look at us primitive primates. So I guess then it opens up, okay, so I guess maybe they would send an AI rover. I could buy that. But no one's claiming to see AI rovers. They're claiming to see aliens. Right. If we're talking about UFOs and UAPs in general, I am glad that the pilots feel like

they can say what they've seen. Well, let's bring everyone up to speed because I don't know that everyone would know. Recently, the government decided to declassify all these different sightings. Well, there was only actually... Okay, so let's just talk about it. Because I want people to understand UFOs and UAPs from a scientist's perspective.

And just like there's been a transition in what I call the giggle factor in the scientific study of life, that giggle factor is going away now. And scientists are all in, certainly on studying for biosignatures. Technosignatures, we're still having to do our work. That's a little fringe still. This NASA grant that I got, that was the first NASA grant to study intelligent life. So the dam is breaking, right?

Yes. And with UFOs and UAPs, also I think there's a transition going on. Well, Congress heard about it for the first time. So let's talk about how this happened. 2017, the New York Times publishes this story that has these three videos from the cameras of Navy jets

seeing which the government is now calling UAPs Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and the fact that the New York Times covered it the fact that New York Times is saying there's a Pentagon committee or Pentagon program to study these that blew the doors off the water everyone's like oh my god UFOs are real

the government's in on it and everybody expected like this is it. Now suddenly they're going to show the spaceships they have in the garage. And of course, none of that happened. But that was the beginning, and that was the beginning of the government admits there's some things that they're seeing that they don't know what it is. Can I ask why it was necessary to go from

unidentified flying object to phenomenon? Branding. Oh, because it was so stinky with pseudoscience. Yeah, exactly. UFOs... I cover the history of UFOs from the first big sighting in 1947 to Roswell. Oh, my God. What a shit show. Roswell.

You know, it's been full of either really bad data, like just blurry photographs. Yep. 60, 70 years of blurry photographs, even though camera technology has gotten so much better. They're still the same shitty... The same shitty blah, but it's like, come on, my. All right, well, before we go down that road. So it's either been blurry photographs, people reporting things. It's great.

I'll never tell somebody they didn't see what they thought they see. Sure. But I can't do science with that. Yeah. So personal stories, blurry photographs, and then conspiracy theories, massive conspiracy theories, and hoaxes. Yes. So UFOs has been a very difficult scientific field.

That's why scientists don't want to touch it. And so I think what would happen with the government is they rebranded it UAPs so it can be taken a little bit more seriously. And I'm all in favor. People are interested in this. Let's have an open, transparent, scientific investigation of UAPs.

I will say at this point, there is zero evidence of the kind that you need to build a cell phone with, right? You want to get practical or have hip replacement surgery that doesn't kill you. That level of science to connect the UAPs to anything related to extraterrestrial or alien life. There's just not.

They're just unexplained. It doesn't mean that you can't fit aliens into I don't know what it is. Is it just a blur? I don't remember. Have you seen them? I don't remember if I saw them. To me, I thought it was like one of the most wonderful examples of confirmation bias.

Like if you already believed in it, this is obvious proof to you. And I even try to tap into that mindset to see how that could be so convincing. Because I heard first about the congressional committee that's going to look at them and then the Pentagon coalition to study it. So then I'm thinking, well, this new crop of images

is going to be incredible. And I saw it and I was like, this is the same shit. By the way, I'm in film and television. We get lens flares sometimes that look like half of that shit. There's so much unexplained photic material floating. I made that up. Floating around. We don't know. That's happening. You know, when you run a camera eight hours a day somewhere, you get all kinds of weird shit. There are these three videos. They each have names like

Go Fast, Fleer, and I forgot what the other one is. And they just get digested again and again. The actual videos, you've got a blob. In one case, the blob seems to rotate very quickly. In another case, you see the blob what appears to be flying like right over the surface of the water. And people are saying these speeds are impossible. NASA convened a panel to look at UAPs. And there was a recent press conference where they had some people talking about it. And one of the things they found was that one of the videos, this is a Navy camera on a fighter plane. Just by reading off the numbers, they figured out that the thing was moving at 40 miles per hour.

Not super fast. Now, some people have questioned that, so do more work. They had misdiagnosed the distance. Once you just applied a little bit of scientist, it seemed much less weird. And then the one that rotates suddenly, that suddenly, like, nothing can do that. There's a guy named Mick West who's just run experiments in his garage to show these cameras rotate. So that's not the ship rotating or the spacecraft, the Tic Tac. It's just the camera rotating.

When you look at it a little bit, you see these aren't actually that hard to explain. In that NASA press conference, a guy from one of these government agencies said, look, we've looked at about 800 of these, I think that was the number, and 94% of them are explainable. Lens flares, the sky is not full of things we can't explain. And the 6% that we can't explain, some of them, we don't even have enough data to begin. And a few of them, as I talk about in the book, there are truly freaky deaky cases. And those freaky deaky cases are worth study. But freaky deaky, again, it's just stories. They say they have radar, but I don't have any of the radar

data. I don't know what the instrument did. They're like ghost stories. They raise their hands on the back of your neck, But that's not enough to say aliens. Right. Let's also take half a second. If you're a believer, I also think it's the most beautiful part of human beings. I know. It truly is. And I want to say, I don't look at anyone that feels confirmed when they saw those images as an idiot.

I actually am a little envious in some way. They want there to be something more and special on this planet. And I love that about them. So I just want to be clear about that. But yeah, they're very unimpressive in my opinion. That's what it is. I was so bummed. People I kind of trust were getting very excited about this and we're finally going to know. And I was like, well, this must be really good stuff. It's a blur. It's another blob.

I can't have the right video. They're all just blobs. i've seen more impressive fucking big foot videos when the chinese spy balloon was up yeah there's a photograph of one of the pilots who's turning whatever his jet is i'm not sure if it is but it looks like he's literally taking a selfie and he's got a picture with his cell phone i think of the chinese spy balloon and you can see the rivets on the solar panels on the payload beneath the balloon. And it's like, come on. If the sky was full of alien spacecraft, why don't we have 100,000 of these?

So it just doesn't. But if I could, I want to speak to your point because it's true. I wrote the book because even if you're really into UFOs and you think that UFOs are aliens, you still have to engage with the science. Yeah. What I would argue is like, you're right to believe that and stay excited, but just look elsewhere, which is the work you're doing. Right. You should be excited. You should be excited. We're on the verge. We're the last generation that doesn't know the answer to the question, are we alone? Which also means we may be the first generation to have an answer. And that is happening now. The next big telescope that we're building after the james

webb which will probably take 20 years to build it's called the habitable worlds observatory this 12 billion or whatever it's going to cost billion dollar telescope is designed to find life on alien planets so like you know everybody needs to suit up this is happening now now are you able to observe and i guess this was more what SETI was looking for, or maybe not, but we're emitting all kinds of our own light. That's signature of technology. Right. Is it that it's so low energy it's hard to detect that far away, or is that possible?

We started producing techno signatures, either because we were emitting radio waves or the night side of the planet started to get lit up, or we started dumping chemicals into the atmosphere only 100 years ago. So you'd have to be less than 100 light years away to have gotten any of those signals. Oh, right. Well, hold on. Let's think on that.

That's worth thinking on. It is. It's pretty cool. So anyone that's 105 light years away looking at Earth right now. Let's make it easy to say 500 light years away. You'd be looking at Earth as it was light years away. Looking at Earth right now. Let's make it easy. Let's say 500 light years away. You'd be looking at Earth as it was 500 years ago.

So weird. And you're not going to see Rome. You would only be able to see the light, the radiation, and all that. The Earth has had biosignatures for billions of years. Yeah, I kind of went out of order. I'm saying you would need that for proof and it didn't exist then. I think that's one of the funnest parts of astronomy is the time travel element. Yeah, the delay.

The sun, right? It's like eight and a half minutes. Even you and me, I'm not seeing you as you are. I'm seeing you as you were like a nanosecond ago. Like we're all kind of trapped in our own little... And so if I'm looking at that tree, that's like five nanoseconds ago, but I'm also seeing you, which is one nanosecond ago, right?

So to me, it's the present, but none of it's the present. I'm seeing there's just like these concentric shells of past. Oh. I love that. It's so crazy. But that's why I think when people hear that we're looking back at the beginning of the universe, that's so confusing, especially

if they have some sense that the universe is five or six billion years old or whatever. They're like, well, how is that the case? And it's because we are that far away. Right. We are billions of light years away. From the beginning. And when you look out in space, because the speed of light is finite, you know, it doesn't

instantly arrive. When you look out into space, you're also looking back in time. It's not just for galaxies. It's for you and me in the room. Whenever I'm looking around in the room, I'm always seeing things that are a little bit back in time. I'm never in the present. Like the present is kind of a weird fiction, which is one of the reasons I love Zen contemplative practice

because this idea of be here now, what is here? What does it mean to be here? It's this sort of overlapping signals. The present is sort of emergent. It's something that we build. It's not by itself. Whoa. I really like the thought of seeing things from two different or three different or five different times.

Past. Yeah, past. At the same time. The overlapping past. Jeez. This is relativity, right? Yeah, it's relativity. Things that you think are simultaneous that happened at the same time, that's relative.

If you're moving at some speed relative to me, what I thought happened at the same time, you'll see, no, that happened first and then the other thing happened. Universe is freaky. There is an order. There is. Depending on where you're standing. Where you're standing, it's relative.

The order is relative. Oh, I love it. Wow. What's the Fermi paradox? I probably should have asked you that about an hour ago. In the book, I talk about this amazing decade of the 50s because people have been arguing about, are we alone for 2,500 years? It's the oldest question collectively. Maybe what happens after

you die? Is there a God? But these questions have been around forever. So unlike those other two, this one, we might be able to answer scientifically. So for 2,500 years, we were arguing about it over like just your opinions, man. And then in 1950, we take the first steps to doing something about it scientifically, like even formulating questions we could answer. So Enrico Fermi, super genius. He was in Oppenheimer. He and his buddies are walking to lunch and they start arguing about interstellar travel and civilizations. And then the conversation goes somewhere else. And then over lunch, he goes out of nowhere, where are they? But where is everybody? And what he'd already figured out that even if one civilization became interstellar and could

travel even at like a 10th of the speed of light, that they could hop from one star system to the other, colonize, build new ships. And that basically in about 600,000 years, which is short compared to the age of the galaxy, they could reach everywhere in the galaxy. So that became what's called the Fermi paradox, which is why aren't they here now? If there's intelligent civilizations that can space travel, why didn't they land on the White House lawn and be like, hey, what's up? But the Fermi paradox, lots of people have tried to come up with explanations. If you're a UFO guy, you're like, well, duh, they are here. But if you're not into UFOs, there are lots of ways

around the Fermi paradox. We did some research. We actually made computer simulations of spaceships crossing the galaxy. And one of the things we found is if they're not infinite in terms of how long they live, civilizations die. If you allow them to die, you can actually get pockets of the galaxy where there's nobody for 20 million years or so. So that could explain why we don't see anybody here now. It's just right now we're in an empty part of space. But the important thing about the Fermi paradox is it's the first kind of scientific question. How do we answer this? I can work out some math.

I can think about this. So that's why even if you're into UFOs, you got to know about the Fermi paradox. You got to understand what people have said, why they said it, what the answers are, because everything we're doing now is built off of these ideas that first were formulated in the 50s and early 60s. We're building everything we do now off of these

really good ideas. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. the drake equation is another thing yeah tell me the drake yeah so the drake equation frank drake does this experiment in 1960 and then he thinks everybody's making fun of him instead he gets a call from the government we want you to lead a panel on interstellar communications he organizes this small meeting young car young Carl Sagan goes. The dolphin guy, Lily, the guy who thought he could talk to dolphins, he was like giving dolphins acid. Yes, we've talked about this.

Some of those scientists had sex with the dolphins. I'm not sure if he had sex with the dolphins. Okay, yeah, let's not say he did, but let's just say. They brought the dolphin into the apartment or whatever. They put dolphins in a fucking apartment. There is a documentary and one of the female scientists is like, you just had to jerk the dolphin off the second you got in the water or you couldn't study them. That's all they could think about.

You stumbled upon a topic that we have got into a lot. We've had more conversations about humans having sex with dolphins than any other topic. Oh my God. Anyways. Okay. If you're giving dolphins acid, everything's happening. Yeah, so Lily was one of them.

So the interesting thing that happens is Frank Drake, the meeting's coming up and he's like, well, what are we going to talk about? He needs an agenda for the meeting. What he does is he says, okay, our question is how many civilizations are out there? How do we talk about that? So he breaks the question up into a formula

that has a bunch of different sub-problems that they're all going to multiply together. And in the end, if you knew all the answers to these sub-problems, you would get how many intelligent civilizations are there. And the sub-problems are how many stars are there? Then what's the fraction of those stars that have planets? What's the fraction of those planets that are in the right place for life to form? What's the fraction of those planets where life does form? Yada, yada, yada. There's actually seven terms. And so each one of those terms becomes a sub problem that they talked about at the meeting. But then that formula, the Drake's equation guides the whole field until now. When Drake did that, they already knew how many stars

there were, but they had no idea whether there were any other planets. So that term was completely unknown. We had no idea whether any planets were in the right place for water and hence life. Now, because of the Drake equation in some sense, those two questions are answered. Nailed. Two of the seven. We're looking now for the next one, which is the biosignatures

is the fraction of planets where life could form, where it does form. So we're on the verge of answering that one. And of course, if we find techno signatures, game over, because we just answered the whole thing. Skipped all the other ones. We skipped all the other ones. Wow.

So the Drake equation is one of these things that was seminal. We still use it today. I teach it in my class. I've written scientific papers where we've kind of reformulated it to do different things. So for example, that guy, Woody Sullivan, who was my teacher, he and I a few years ago wrote a paper where we just tried to use all this new data about the exoplanets. That's got to be worth something. How can we use that to ask the question about whether or not technolod civilizations exist? So, we rearranged the equation, and what we could answer was how many habitable zone planets there were in the universe. Places where nature has run the experiment.

And it turns out there are 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. I hate when you physicists come in here and say billion trillion. I can't handle that. Can I eat with one other one that we were trying to wrap our head around watching this Life on Planet Earth nature show?

They're showing the rise of insects and the proliferation of insects. And they said for every human on earth, there's a of insects. And they said, for every human on earth, there's a billion insects. Ew. So eight billion times a billion. In your apartment. In your closet. Isn't that insane?

Yeah. So the 10 billion trillion one, just imagine a one with 22 zeros after it. Wow. So there's alien optimists and pessimists. I'm an optimist because the only way that we're the only time in the history of the universe, this doesn't say there's anybody nearby or anything. It just says, are we the only time it's ever happened? The only way that we're the only time life and civilization has happened

is if on every one of those 10 billion trillion worlds, the experiment failed. That's asking a lot because it certainly worked here. If you tell me on all those other ones. It's pretty arrogant for us to think. Yeah. I mean, it's still possible, but it just argues that, look, if you're pessimist, then you've got to explain why it happened here and why in those other 10 billion trillion other places it failed. But having now fully understood the history of our own planet, you could also go like, sure, that number is staggering. You could also go like, sure, that number's staggering,

but you're going to divide it now by the amount of time Homo sapiens, let's say, 300,000 years out of 5 billion. You're also looking at the tiniest sliver of time that it may have happened and we missed it. So that reduces it a ton. It does. And that's why when people say to me, well, look, there's so many stars in the sky. Of course, there's other things. There are these counter arguments where you look at Earth's history and there's a lot of accidents that allowed intelligence to form. There's a lot of things which if you stack them up, make you think like,

okay, maybe microbes are easy to make because you look at Earth's history, almost as soon as Earth was ready, the surface had cooled enough, boom, microbes appear. But you don't even get animals, multi-celled animals until half a billion years ago. So you had to wait like three and a half billion years, which is a long time, for just even to get multicellular life. So you look at that kind of stuff and you are kind of like, oh, maybe it's harder. Yeah, it's only been happening for 10% of the geological timeline here. Yeah, the multi-celled animals, it's pretty recent. Half a billion. Half a billion. The Cambrian explosion, which nobody understands why that happened, where all of a sudden you went

from single-celled creatures, maybe a little multi-cellular, boom! All of a sudden every kind of possible critter, basically the body plan gets laid down. Nobody knows why that happened. Right, so then it is kind of reduced. Yeah. I mean, it's cool if we're the only ones. Really?

I think so. I think that's special. Well, then there's a god. No. There's just alchemy that just happened. Just an accident. It was an accident. It was a freaking accident. I think that's incredible.

Think of odds. We have very few things we've ever observed that only occur one out of a billion trillion times the experiment. Well, except humans. Each individual humans occurred once. That's a good point. That's true how singular each human being is. No repeats except twins. But even that.

No, no, no. Some of them are left-handed and right. We just discovered this. 17% of them, in fact. Yes, that's possible. But that'd be a very weird occurrence rate. Why does this matter? Who cares whether or not we find life anywhere?

And the answer is either way. You know what it means if we are alone? Everybody should be vegetarian. Because this is the only planet on the entire cosmos that has this crazy thing called life. And you're just like, you know, eating chicken wings because they're tasty. Every living thing then becomes so sacred. That just never happened anywhere else. And then you couldn't eat the plants either.

The philosophical consequences that we're the only ones. See, that's what would make me go, well, then there's a God. There was a God in creation because no way it didn't happen anywhere else unless we are in the image of, that would make me religious. It certainly makes life seem sacred by any definition of sacred of being so unique. An order of magnitude that's in the trillions. Why would it be that God only made life on earth if it's God? That to me is less likely that there's a God.

Also, because what a mess we are. Like, really? This is the one time he did it and what we ended up with? Like, why would God, all-knowing, omnipotent God be like, I guess I'll just put humans on this planet. Well, what I'm saying is it would go back to the Bible. Like, he created this thing in seven days to fucking keep us busy trying to figure out if there's anything else.

I mean, I don't know. He could do it on Mars. He could do it across. But he only did it once. He had to do it somewhere, right? I guess. But I think what you're saying is the idea that out of 10 billion trillion planets,

that only one... That's too miraculous. That's the word, I guess. It's what they call fine tuning the scientific word for that is fine tuning you have to take all these possibilities and take all these knobs and dials that go into it and have them just be pointed at one exact value out of all the possible values to get this one thing to happen yes and so that bothers physicists and we also have tons of evidence that we've had this cycle many times. There's been different animals that were the dominant one.

And so even though we've had all this destruction, it's so rare, we've also reset a bunch of times and thrived. And we don't have record of it, but it's conceivable that one of these early amphibians could have developed mass intelligence and then still would have. You know, I don't know. The paper that Gavin Schmidt and I wrote, we were just asking, had there been a previous civilization on it? Maybe the dinosaurs built a 10,000 year long high-tech civilization. Would you be able to tell? The answer was just, no, there just wouldn't have been evidence. But I think the real thing here is that we're so sure that we human beings are the highest form of life that has ever been created. Evolution doesn't care. And you look at what we're

doing right now, it's quite possible that the kind of intelligence we have, it's not a great thing. One of your theories is, is global warming inevitable? You wrote a whole book about it. I wrote a whole book on it, right. And I included some of that in this book as well, because you look at the history of the earth, like our third revolution, we still haven't gotten to the second revolution. I know, I'm so curious. But you look at the history and you see that a number of times life hijacked the planet. Evolution has invented something new that actually caused a lot of havoc. The best example is this oxygen.

Life invents this new way of photosynthesis. It burps or farts oxygen in the air and it kills everything almost. For the stuff that was alive then, the great oxidation event was an apocalypse. So here we are, technological civilization. We're doing it again. It shouldn't actually be a surprise. So maybe any technological civilization, which by definition harvests energy, right?

You have more than one human power per day and puts it to work for civilization. You should expect that you're going to trigger some planetary feedback. So then the only question is, are you smart enough to be like, oops, oh, that was a problem. Let's change what we're doing. Because we've known about climate change now for, you know,

1964, President Johnson in a speech said, CO2, we're changing the atmosphere. So we've known since 1964 and we're not doing diddly about it. Well, okay. So you won't like this thought, but it does occur to me while watching the history of the planet. How do I say this without having everyone blow up my house? What we're doing is bad, but it's almost not even on the Richter scale of what has happened. Oh yeah. And I say that in the book. We're carrying this collective guilt that we have ruined this planet. It's pretty oppressive. It's divisive. We're asking individuals to do things that only the huge systems can accomplish. It's a very weighted, heavy thing.

Part of me looks at this history of our planet and be like, well, we had a 10 Celsius hike during this volcanic period and we had acid rain. The Earth and animals on it have done much worse to this planet than we have currently done. You have to look at the planet and life as a whole. From that history, the Earth is not a furry little bunny that needs to be protected. As Lynn Margiela says, the Earth is a tough bitch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She will fuck you up. So we don't have to save the Earth. We have to not piss it off. We have to protect ourselves from the Earth. And save ourselves. It's about us. And again, this idea that, oh, you need to feel guilty.

First of all, it is the most ineffective political strategy. And it's also not true. Sure, everybody should recycle and buy electric cars. But the change here is about infrastructure. I personally cannot put down a new power grid. So it's about who you vote for. It's about government contracts over what kind of cement we use. I mean, it's so enormous. If you look at the pie, we read Gates' book on it, and you break out each part. The

hyper-focus is on about 6% of the problem, which is just idiotic. We're not the villains in this story. You know, this is a story about greed. That's what it is, pure and simple. We've known for a while there have been institutions or companies,, people who stand to make a lot of money from not changing power systems. There's a place in Rochester where I can look at the Erie Canal, the train line, the highway, and the airport. Four different energy transport systems over the last 200 years, one of which was completely abandoned. It's not a big deal to change energy systems. We do it all the time. We're being held back from doing it because somebody's going to lose a lot of money.

And for a little more generous, there is the underbelly that is national security. That's not an insane point to be made, which is in a transition, what happens geopolitically while you take the hit and you say goodbye to the mass profit. There's greed, but I think there's some altruism, whether it's misguided or not,

where they're factoring in what happens to unemployment? What happens to the national security? You know what I'm saying? Well, that's interesting. I'm not so worried about national security because somebody's going to make this transition. If we're still around in 200 years, they'll have made it. The nation that makes it is the nation that runs the 22nd

century. And so we're sitting back here protecting our oil barons at the price of being the country that dominates the 22nd century. But it is true. If you're an oil worker, man, this is not your fault. There has to be funds to like take care of the people who get displaced. But that's where the government comes in. And let me be very clear, I am no economist, but you know, from my understanding and the research, and my daughter actually works in climate policy, when oil was discovered as an energy source back in the 1880s, the government was like, we're going to subsidize this. We're going to help you make the transition. Well, they were using whale lamp oil when John D. Rockefeller started Standard. This was a much better solution environmentally in their mind. The government invested in the oil industry. And in a way that if the government's invested now in the

next cycle, that would take some of that pain away. From the planetary perspective, the important part is that what you want to look for are the transitions that are common. Like that any civilization anywhere, regardless of whether or not they're octopi, if you're a civilization, you use energy and you put it to work. And there's got to be feedback on your planet and that we might be able to understand what those are and use those actually as techno signatures to find evidence of the transition they're going through. Right. Oh my God. It's so interesting. So if we were to, or when you, because you've been at this since 2019 with the NASA grant? That was the first grant. Yeah. So now we were to, or when you, because you've been at this since 2019 with the NASA grant. That was the first grant, yeah. So now we got it renewed.

Oh, good. So what do we think we're going to find? Yeah. I mean, it depends. We want to break it down. There's two things. We are looking in the solar system. So in the solar system, we're going to be able to like dig up some Martian. There's rovers that are going to look for physical things. And then we've got, and this is what's wild, in the solar system, there are a bunch of big moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn that have subsurface oceans. So there's Europa, which is a moon of Jupiter, which has more liquid water than Earth does.

So the whole moon is covered in a layer of ice that's about six miles thick. And beneath that is like 60 miles of ocean. The Marianas Trench, the deepest thing on it, six miles. No, swear to God on it, six miles. No, swear to God. It's 10x deeper. Because as that moon orbits Jupiter, the gravity of Jupiter is so big,

kind of the interior gets squeezed like putty, and that heats up the interior. So there's probably geothermal vents at the bottom of that ocean. We think that's where life started on Earth. So who the hell knows what's down there? Is the atmosphere of this moon frozen? There is no atmosphere. I think there's a mission already planned to land of this moon frozen? There is no atmosphere. I think there's a mission already planned to like land on the ice.

The ice is constantly shifting and cracking. It looks like a giant cracked egg. And you can see discolorations. And we think that's stuff that has welled up from the ocean. And maybe there's some organic stuff in that. So in the solar system, we can actually scoop up and we're looking for microbes. Who knows? It's going to be a long time before we can actually get down there. But there could be super squid.

I don't know, right? Just whatever. Use your imagination. When we're looking at the distance, we're looking at alien planets, we're going to be looking for these biosignatures and technosignatures. So a technosignature would be like city lights. There's been some papers written that showed you could detect artificial illumination on a planet. So that would tell us— How far away?

Right now, you could probably go out to 40 light years, 100 light years. Really? It would pick up light emission? Well, what it is is you can see, again, the spectra. When you use sodium lamps on the highway, that will be in the light. And when you break up the light from the planet, you'll be able to see it there. You'll be able to burst out just that kind of light. Solar panels. If a civilization uses solar panels and mass,

like let's say we covered the moon someday in solar panels. When the light bounces off the solar panels, from a distance, you could see that. There's an imprint in the light, so we'd be able to tell they have a planet where they're harvesting energy big time. Wow. We might be able to detect,

you can imagine the Earth a thousand years from now, that the geosynchronous orbit, which is where we put satellites, they're in an orbit where they can always look down on the same part of the planet they're spinning at the same rate you can imagine that there's so many satellites being used for geosync it's a very special kind of orbit that it kind of becomes a ring almost well we're getting there i just read this crazy article i would have never guessed this number but the amount of satellites elon personally has already launched yeah it's like 5,000 or something fucking insane.

And the goal is 15,000. So that would be a visible web. Could be. So defining satellites, that's another way of looking. Let's say humanity makes it. Let's say we make it through climate change. We make it through all the stupidity that we're going through right now. Then, you know, the next thousand years, if we don't have faster than light travel, we're

going to settle the solar system. We'll have a billion people living on Mars. We'll have people living on space cities and all the communication back and forth. We'll be using tight beam lasers to send messages. You could see that from a distance. You know, you got a laser on Mars. You're sending messages to Earth. As that laser sweeps across some distant star, somebody looking there would be like, oh, so that's another technosignature.

We could see the interplanetary communications. But even in that event where we discover something like that, and we can even, let's say, decipher what we're seeing from their laser, we then do run into the problem of communicating back and forth, right? I mean, still generations would send a message and then your children would receive it. Right. The distances, if you can't solve the problem of going faster than the speed of light, which is the laws of physics right now. Now, of course, we could shake it up. But if it's true that the speed of light is really a fundamental speed limit, then there's

no galactic civilizations unless you live for thousands of years. Because, right, how can you have diplomacy when you're like, hey, you know, we don't want to start a war. You send the message to 200 light years away. Well, they're gone by the time it arrives. You get something back saying, what war? Sorry, that was my grandfather. I don't even know what you're talking about.

So, you know, when you really confront the distances, I have a whole chapter in the book that's, if UFOs were interstellar craft, what do we know about physics that would allow us maybe to go faster than the speed of light? So I wanted people to see, you can't just wave your hand and say, oh, they're aliens, they figured it out.

Like even for us, if we're going to become interstellar and have a galactic civilization. We're going to go to the intergalactic zoo. Yeah, exactly. What are we going to have to solve? What kind of physics do you need for that to happen? And do you offer a philosophical incentive other than just knowing?

Is there another reason other than just satiating this 10,000-year-old question? Why does it matter to find life in the universe? There's two answers. One is just, as I said, life is weird. Life is unlike anything else. If you give me a star at the beginning of its lifetime and give me its mass and what chemicals are in it,

that's it. I know everything that's going to happen to that star. You can predict the life of the star. The star is not going to surprise me. You give me a cell and ask me what's going to happen in a billion years, I can't say. On Earth, it produced a giant rabbit

that can punch you in the face, which is a kangaroo. So life is just unbounded. Right now, we think we could be an accident. We could be the only accident. If we found one example of life somewhere else, it means, okay, we're not an accident. And then you can kind of reason from there.

There's a whole way of doing this with Bayesian reasoning. That like, okay, there's a lot of life. And that means we're part an accident. And then you can kind of reason from there. There's a whole way of doing this with Bayesian reasoning. That like, okay, there's a lot of life. Yeah. And that means we're part of a cosmic community of life, right? We're part of this thing that's happened everywhere. And because life creates and goes beyond itself, all bets are off. And then you kind of have to take that into account when you think about cosmic history and cosmic possibilities.

The discovery of even microbial life would fundamentally change religion, philosophy, ethics. We'd have to rethink ourselves. Intelligent life, what would be important is we don't know if we're going to make it. Right now, things ain't looking so good. Climate change is not going to be a human extinction. That's not going to happen. We're not all going to die. This complex global civilization that we've built, I don't think it would take much in terms of the change of climate to make that untenable. In its current shape. Yeah. Human beings are infinitely inventive. I'm just reading this great book called 1197 BC, the year civilization collapsed. And it's about basically the Mediterranean. Great book. I really recommend

it. The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, it was climate change that brought them all down. It wasn't even that much climate change. So when you have a complex system, they're vulnerable to changes. So that's my fear along those lines. But I think the way we talk about climate change is wrong. Everybody has to feel bad about themselves and defeated. And it misses the point that that's not really what's going on here. It leads, I think, a lot of people just to apathy.

Exactly. This is a solvable problem. And I think if we identify the correct difficulty, it's not that we can't solve the problem. It's we were being kept from solving the problem. So you think there is some fantasy future where we do identify these different planets and we have an opportunity to see how they themselves have weathered similar challenges? I think even finding one. So we wrote a paper, me and a couple of other people a few years back, and I talk about this.

If you find an alien civilization, it's probably going to be older than you. It's kind of funny how you can work out the math on this. Because it'll have taken so long for the info to get here? No, it's just more like the probabilities. All right, what's all the possible ages? And you work it out when you're looking, how long it takes to look. It just turns out that what you see is probably older than you. The universe makes comets.

The universe makes black holes. Does it make long-term, intelligent, complex civilizations? So finding just one example would show that, oh, somebody made it. Right. Somebody was able to keep this going, especially if climate change is kind of a phase you pass through. And if you're smart enough, you get through it and you make the shift. That would just be something. Because right now, we only have our own example.

We kind of suck, you know, in general. We do great things. We're both angels and we're horrible. It would show you can get past things. So I think that would be hugely significant just to know that it's possible. Yeah, it could lead to hope in a weird way. Yeah, I think it would lead to hope.

And so the one last thing I want to say about why it's important, there was this thing called the Copernican Revolution. In 1400, people woke up and they saw the sun coming up. They're like, oh, look, the sun's rising. Because they thought that the earth was the center of the universe. And the sun went around the earth. 200 years later, you get the Copernican Revolution.

Copernicus says, no, no, no, it's the sun that's the center of the solar system. And least educated people were like, oh, it only looks like the sun's going up. It's actually the horizon rolling down. Nothing changed, right? It was just a new piece of information. But the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, even the Protestant Reformation, the Copernican Revolution was like a building block, a piece of how everybody was reimagining themselves, and it changed the world. So knowing that there's aliens, knowing that there's life other than us, it would be the

Copernican Revolution times a thousand. Yeah, for sure. That's a great point. Oh, I like that. That's very hopeful. Okay, we got to do it. We're wrapping up. What's number two? Oh, number two. All right, finally. Number two is we have sent robots to every body in the solar system,

every type of body, every planet's been visited. Some of them we've landed on and scooped soil up. So we now know about planets and we know about climate. So in terms of finding alien life, you need to understand alien planets and the eight solar systems and all the comets and asteroids.

We have lots of other examples that we've been able to go there and stick probes in the ground. So those three, there's the exoplanet revolution. We found lots of planets. We've been to every kind of planet on our solar system. So we know about planets. And now from Earth, we know about life and planets. We have this one example of radical changes in the history of one planet and its life. So those three together are the revolutions that get us where we are now. You're triangulating off those three bits of info. Oh my God, it's so interesting. The Little Book of Aliens by Adam Frank. I want everyone to pick it up and read it. You're a very fun writer, I'll add. Oh, thank you. You have a very good voice, and it's the perfect amount of playful for this kind of what could be otherwise dense topic.

Yeah, it's very fun and soulfully written. So I hope everyone checks out The Little Book of Aliens. This has been a blast. Yeah, thanks for sharing. And I can't wait to see what you discover in the coming years. You'll be the first to know. I'll call you guys up first. Guys, before I'm about to announce

to the New York Times what I wanted you guys to know. It's a cookbook. Well, Adam, this has been a blast. Thank you so much. Oh, it's been real fun. All right, take care. Thank you, guys.

Stick around for the fact check because they're human, they make lots of mistakes. Psst, psst. Trying to get a mouse's attention. I bought a Christmas ornament this weekend that was a mouse in a chef's apron. I saw it on your Instagram stories. Yeah. Where did you find it?

I found it at OK, which is a store. OK Cupid? No, just regular okay jewelry. Okay. There's one in Silver Lake and one on 3rd. Oh, okay. That's the nice part about it is you have to say the name of it to respond to the story. Oh, I didn't even.

You missed it. I missed it completely. That's okay. You've had a long day already. I have. Tell me about your day. Okay. Oh, I should. Tell me about your day. Okay. Oh, I should.

My day started last night. What? I know. What? Can you guess how that would be? It's like a riddle. Ooh, it's a good riddle. Your car was towed?

Nope. You didn't sleep? That's a good guess, but no. Nope. You woke up somewhere strange. There once was a girl. Whose night informed her day. She woke up in the morning, but her day had actually started the night before.

How is that possible? Oh, she woke up in the middle of the night, and I don't know. Did you change the time on your phone? No, but that's also a good guess. Rob's doing, you're doing good. He's doing a good job. Okay. I made a chickpea dish that had to cook overnight in the oven.

Oh, wow. Yeah. On like a super low temp? Yeah. I put it in at like eight and it's supposed to cook for 10 to 12 hours. Whoa. And so at 7.30, I took it out. I did, I think I fucked it up.

How? I can't believe it. It's like the first one I fucked up. Uh-oh. I know. What happened? Too high a heat? No, it said 275, and I did 275.

Were you nervous at all going to sleep with the oven on? Yes, that's written down here. Okay. I was scared, and normally I, that's written down here. Okay. I was scared, and normally I would just be scared because fire. Sure. But I had a new fear about gas leaks and gas contamination. Yeah. Yikes.

I didn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So do you think I got gassed? No. Did you have your door shut to your bedroom? No. Why not? I don't like doing that.

Okay. It scares me for some reason. Oh, that's interesting. I feel safer. Yeah, because you'd hear it open. Yeah, it's just one more thing someone's got to go through. Also, like, if you hear them coming into your apartment and that door is closed, you at least move around and make some moves that they're not aware of. Grab a sheet to throw over their head, whatever.

I don't know. I just think it's one more thing and more privacy. It makes total sense what you're saying. But actually, you might need it open to get the heat that you want. Is that why you leave it open? That might be because you have that central kind of heating. I just feel scared when it's closed. I think that must come from childhood.

You didn't like it if your parents shut their door, maybe? Yeah, or I just didn't like when I had to shut my door to go to bed, and then I felt so alone. Isolated. Like someone could definitely kidnap me better. Okay, if they had come in your window and— Yeah, maybe it's that, and they won't hear the scream if the door is closed. Right. Okay, but how did you fuck it up?

I don't think I used enough water. So it got dry? Yeah, it's supposed to have some, yeah, chickpeas. It's supposed to have liquid and when I looked, it didn't really have any liquid. Bone dry. But I think it's still going to taste good. It's just not going to be brothy. Oh, you can't add water after the fact?

No. No. Okay. Of course not. Okay. So that was sad. Do you have a big dinner party tonight? I don't, but I decided yesterday because I was looking around my apartment and it just

looks so festive. Yeah. Yeah. You posted pictures and plates too. Yeah. That was my Christmas present last year from my parents. Okay. Those six plates?

Yeah. Andy Warhol. Tiffany. Oh my gosh. Oh wow. Dessert plates. So you set them out. That doesn't mean therehol, Tiffany. Oh my gosh. Oh wow. Dessert plates. So you set them out. That doesn't mean there's a party.

It just means they're out. Yeah. Okay. Just means it's Christmas time. Yeah. I just want more festive stuff before I go home. And I'm panicking a little bit that time is happening. I am too.

We're too close already. I know. So I just texted a bunch of people, all the girls and then some randoms. If anyone wants to come by tomorrow and have an today and have an old fashioned and see my tree. And then I was going to have that chickpea thing if people wanted it and then also make an orzo. Oh, wow. If people want that too. And are people, have they RSVP'd? Well, I made it so cash that it's confusing. This feels dangerous to me because you'll be sitting there not knowing if anyone's coming over.

I know. Well, I know Anna's coming. Oh. So at least that's fine. All right, great. You do have one RSVP. Yeah. Also, you're welcome to come.

Okay. But Kristen said you guys have school stuff. That's why she can't come. And a competing party as well oh i didn't i wasn't invited to your house so yeah i always ask the girls to just ask the guys because i know everyone hates all the texts you guys hate text more than girls i don't think anyone likes the huge group text right yeah they're dangerous ours our pod one is too much. But luckily it's almost non-existent. Because I think people have learned it's too much.

Yeah, I think it's only if everyone's at the same house for the weekend on a trip or something it'll get dusted off. Even that, you kind of pick and choose who you think's going to answer. Yeah, sure, sure. You do some pre-editing. So you were invited yesterday. No one told me. You just didn't know. Yeah. Well, I almost made something for you. What?

But I didn't make it because by the time I realized I should make it, the grocery store was closed. Sure. So this was pretty late you had this thought. Well. Or what grocery store? Exactly. That's the problem. okay I need to go I need to get it at McCall's

Oh It's a lamb Are they still there? Yeah They're moving to Atwater But currently they haven't moved yet Oh okay So

It's a lamb So Allison Roman my chef Ding ding ding She invited me to her ham party Ham? She has a ham party every year, and it's a huge deal. Is it in New York?

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. She invited me, but I couldn't go because I, too, had a competing party. Oh, which one? This weekend's party. Oh, it was Saturday. Yeah. Okay.

So I couldn't go, but I was really flattered to have been invited. Yes, for sure. A camp party. Similarly, I got invited to the White House this year for Christmas. Yeah, you did. I think. It feels like a scam email. No, I think you did.

You think that's real? Yeah. Yeah, they have parties and stuff. Yeah. I'm curious what that— Are you going to go? No, but I'm curious who's going to attend it. You know what i hate tell

me this is bad i shouldn't care okay i'm trying not to care about stuff they misspelled your name oh sure shepherd oh and they sent it to me which also that that's its own thing that's its own thing but actually i didn't even think about that until now which is good for me yeah good job but they misspelled your name and I- The last name? Yeah. Oh, I see my name misspelled in like magazines. But that's fine.

It's like if they're inviting you to something, they haven't even looked up how to spell your name. That feels lazy. Yeah, the person is just like, I know how to spell shepherd. I know, but like you should look it up, especially if you work at the White House. And I used to feel that way when I would respond to, when I was Kristen's assistant, if they misspelled her name on anything. How could they do that? They would spell it with an I-N.

Oh, okay. That's a way to do it? Yeah. K-R-I-S-T-I-N? Mm-hmm. Oh, my God. Maybe some people spelled it with a C. I don't remember that, but maybe.

Anyway, it would get misspelled. Uh-huh. And that was an out. I would just say pass. Oh, okay. I didn't even notice I misspelled my name. Funny enough. I was just looking at that little water seal.

Yeah, that's cool. Like the image of it. And I was like, would theirs be better? I felt like it was a scam because think about what a good scam it is. It's a prank. Do you think it's punked reboot? Well, I'm saying I could think that was real.

It's plausible that that's real. That's my point. So what if I showed it? Because it is real. What if I drive to the White House on December, whatever date that was, and I'm just like, I'm here for the party. And then someone's standing at the like

wherever you ring the buzzer for the White House and they go ah you came and then they throw an egg at my face that's so mean when they do a punked reboot and you're first like you're getting punked well that was that had been attempted several times. Oh. It was always in the works. And I basically said to them, because it would get back to me. Oh. And I basically said to Goldberg and Kutcher, I'm like, don't put me in that position because I'll just have to play along. Because I like you guys and I won't want to ruin your episode. And I know how much it takes to put one together.

Yeah. And I'll see the mirrors. But you recognize that like, of course they have to try to get you. Yes. And they, and they made many plans. Uh, Oh, they were gonna,

they, they approached Favreau, I think to do something on the set of Zathura. Oh, way back then. Yes. Cause it had just aired. They were still in their,

their seasons that followed. And then I was now in movies. So it was made perfect sense but again i was just and he told me like you know i just ultimately was like i don't want another crew on my set i think that was his explanation but oh and then i heard a couple others had gotten back to me from people who had been approached to set me up and then i finally just told them like i just don't want to have to fake an episode. I understand. Yeah. The thing is, though, that was when you knew the show was on. If they rebooted now and you didn't, it could get you.

It could, but I will say, I think I still do. When things start feeling like this is crazy, I do look around for two-way mirrors. Right. Like, that's what you have. You can't film one of them without having two-way mirrors places. Yeah. So, I do, when things are like this feels weird i will glance around to see that but again i think that's just because i did it you know yeah yeah well anyway it wasn't a punked you were invited to that party and i was invited to the ham party and in the picture she made a bun Christmas tree like a

bun tower and it looked so cool and I was really I was sad I missed it anyhow so do you want me to throw you a ham party for your birthday yeah I will ham's not my favorite thing. Okay. But I want a fun meal. Oh, okay. So maybe I'll make the lamb. That's how we got here. Thank you. Okay. Okay.

We're back. McCall's lamb. Yes. She put out a recipe, this delicious looking lamb recipe and the chickpeas. That's the side for it, the chickpeas. I just don't like lamb. So that's why I didn't make it. When's the side for it, the chickpeas. I just don't like lamb, so that's why I didn't make it. When's the last time you tried it? I know. It's been a while. I just, I do think it's gamey. I always taste the game.

Yeah, I bet so. Yeah, I can't really talk you out of that part of it. I do want you to have it at Morton's though. Okay. I just want you to try it. Well, you could, if we're over there together, you can just try a bite of mine. You don't have to commit to the full order. I would do that. And I do want to cook this recipe because it looks really fun. How about a lamb stew? Have you ever had a lamb stew you like?

That's another thing I love is a lamb stew. No. Okay, it might be too gamey for you. So maybe for your birthday, I'll make you that lamb. It's also an overnighter. They both go in overnight. Feels like I might have to stop by and check on it, though, and add water, given your track record now. You know why it happened?

I'm going to need a key. What? I broke the rule. I never break cooking rules. But I did because I wanted to use this new pot I got at shopping, Palm Springs. Yeah, the outlets. The outlet mall. I went to La this new pot I got at shopping, Palm Springs. Yeah, the outlets. The outlet mall. I went to La Crusade.

Yeah. Okay, the problem with La Crusade is you kind of have to commit to a color. You don't have to. Really quick, I'm learning that I've been saying it wrong, so I'm a little distracted. I'm like kind of in my head going through all the 10,000 times I've said La Crusade. Oh. And now you're saying La Crus,000 times I've said La Crusette. Oh, I- And now you're saying La Crusette, and I just said it to you,

because you said we were chatting after the- After my shopping. Yes, after the show, we're like walking, and you said I got a pot at the thing, and I go, oh, a La Crusette? Or did I say La Crusette? I don't remember you saying it, but you probably did. Thank God you didn't make a face and embarrass me. Anyways, that just happened.

So, okay. La Crusade. I think a lot of people say that because it's spelled La Crusette. Like Valette is. Right. Or Valette. Exactly. Or Buffette.

It's all French. Yeah, okay. You wanted to use it. It was new. Oh, color. Yes, what color did you go with? So I- Off-white?

Well, this is my problem. My first La Crusade was a Dutch oven from also an outlet. And it was- Four cup soup, two pounds ham, three pounds sausage. Dark purple. I've had it for years. It's such a good product. Yeah.

And it's this dark purple. They don't make that anymore. Like they don't make that. Yeah. And the ones at the outlets often are kind of random colors. Sure. So I got that dark purple. I can't make that the color because that doesn't exist really anymore.

And so more recently, I got this brazier, and it's off-white. It's called meringue. Oh, so look. I did a pretty good job. You did. You did. Because I picked that out of new. Yeah, that's the good color.

Yeah. Meringue. And when I was planning on going to La Crosse, actually it was Callie. She was like, you should probably commit to a color. And I was like, oh, shit. Okay. Well, I have that meringue, so I guess I should stick to meringue. Yeah.

Then when I got there, there was only one item in the whole store that was meringue. That makes sense. It's not going to make its way to the outlet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's flying off the shelves. So I bought it. Right. And it was a small Dutch oven.

But I was like, I can make mashed potatoes for two. I can make small amounts of stuff in here. This is great. Yeah, a tiny scale of potatoes. I also got scared that it actually wasn't the right color. Yeah, well, of course. Off-white is tricky. There's many, many flavors of it.

So I wanted to use that new pot. It felt like it was going to be great for the chickpeas. Sure. But Allison said use 10 cups of water, and 10 would have been a lot for that pot, so I used 8. Oh, well, this isn't much of a mystery anymore. Well, well I thought she was going I thought maybe she was giving room to play no you and then you minimally okay if you make that decision I should have gone lower on temp no you should have gone lower on time so that's an easy proportion to do if you did eight and it asked for 10 80 but I have to wake up in the middle of the night the whole fun is like I'll put it in longer what did you say the time frame was

10 to 12 that's perfect because it wanted 10 you were going to do 8 so you put it in right before you go to bed and you pull it out 8 hours later

I get in bed early and I just like roll yeah but you would have to right as you were falling asleep go put the chickpeas in and then you get out anyways so don't play

with her recipes or if you're gonna do a proportional time. Yeah, you're right. But I just thought, I just was like, it's still a lot. Too much water. Oh, no, because she said 10 cups, but she said about four inches higher than the chickpeas. And it definitely was four inches higher.

Yes, but if you can imagine that you had a three foot tall cylinder and then you did, that would not, that would not be a very insufficient amount of water because surface area is part of it. Damn it. Yeah. Because if it was as wide as a pizza tray and it was four inches above, that'd be way too much water.

You're right. It'd probably only be an inch of, anyways, I've enjoyed this. I have. I'm glad you tried to make that. Well, you did make it. I made it.

I'll ask Anna how it is when you're not around. She'll probably eat the orzo. I guess most people aren't going to be interested in the chickpeas, the dried up chickpeas. Fuck. It sounds like a nursery rhyme. Ham, chicken, chickpeas, frader lays in shape of chips. Right? Are you doing Lizzo?

No, like Miss Mary Mac. Yeah, chickpeas, ladled soup. My kids are into this right now. So it's like at night in bed, I have to participate in lemonade, Diet Coke. Yeah, I love- Oh, man. Such a rite of passage as a girl. Here's where it gets in-

And a boy. This is where it's humiliating. It's like I work on these shoulders so much. I lift so much weight. But that thing for a long time. It hurts. Yeah, it starts going like, I'm too old for it. Something about this is stressing out my deltoids.

Do you guys do Miss Mary Mac or which one do you do? No, that's all too basic. Oh, shit. Touch the floor, turn around, kick your partner out the door. Wow. Yeah. Diet Coke. It Yeah, Diet Coke. Do they do that one where it's like crack an egg on your head?

Spiders crawling up your back? Walk down, drag down. Yes, spiders crawl in your ear. It's like a whole thing. I don't know that one. I'm sure they do. Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Oh, yes.

I know light as a feather, stiff as a board. That's to hypnotize someone and then put them in a trance. Right. You're supposed to like lift them. Yes, lift their body up and they'll be stiff. I've seen that too in a lot of hypnotizing shows, hypnotism shows. Rob, I did wonder. I pivoted so I can ask.

But I was maybe going to get some cookware for you. But then I didn't know your color and I didn't know if you had any La Crusade and I didn't want to deviate and get red. I would get him the off-white as well. But you might have already committed to a color. I don't have any. It's too late. You know what's weird? I pivoted.

I almost got him a cooking apparatus too. Well, I did. Oh. I don't want to talk anymore, too. Well, I did. Oh. I don't want to talk anymore. Let's not talk about it anymore. We'll talk on Friday. All right. Well, I did get Wobby Wob's present.

There was an arm cherry who sold it to me. Oh, when you bought it, you bought it in person. Mm-hmm. And did you say this is for Wobby Wob? I did end up saying so. Yes. Because she saw it was me me and she got really excited. Yeah.

And I was asking for something specific that they couldn't do. And I was like, it's for Wobby Wob. I thought maybe that would push it over the edge. It didn't. It didn't. She could only do what she could do. Yeah, she was at her limit. She wasn't deputized to make big, big.

No, but she was so nice. And she was so excited to be a part of our gifts, which is coming up. Okay, so I could start a color for you. Yeah. Wow. That's a lot of power. It is. You give him like that terrible day glow green. No, no.

No, just to fuck with him. But I want to get him one. So like Max and Callie, they're red. It's really nice. It's classic. And the red is nice because you also can get some of the stuff at the outlet. There's a lot of red. You can get it in the store and in the outlet.

Yeah. It's like that's, the meringue is a problem. You can only get the one small Dutch oven that doesn't hold enough. But that's how you know you have the best color as well. I know, but I'm trying to be smarter about. Limited editions. I'm not really trying to be smarter. No, I don't think so.

Okay, so the weekend. The weekend. Saturday. Yeah, we went to a party. White elephant party. It's been a year since the. The famous one. White elephant party. Which is how Party. It's been a year since the White Elephant Party. The famous one, yeah. Which is how I know I hadn't gone last year.

I know. Right, because I was hearing about it. Yeah, you didn't come last year. Yeah, so I came back. I was glad to see you. I didn't, I guess because you didn't come last year, I didn't think you would be there. And then I was happy to see you. Yeah, it was a ton of fun.

It's really a fun party. Rowdy and wonderful. And then there was a lot of backroom dealing. Yeah, it was a ton of fun. It's really a fun party. And rowdy and wonderful. And then there was a lot of backroom dealing. Oh, yeah. Okay, yes. So just for everyone, I didn't take any money this time. You didn't have to. I didn't have to.

Well, there wasn't it. Well, there was, but no one knew. It was hidden. Yeah. And I didn't take any, but I did get what I wanted. Yeah. And I played the take any, but I did get what I wanted. Yeah. And I played the game right. Mm-hmm.

Teamed up, made teams. We were wheeling and dealing. Yeah. And you stole something from me to lock it for me, which was really nice. Yep. It was salt. Which is interesting, because I thought it was the pitcher. And then I thought Molly was getting the salt.

And then after the whole ordeal, it was Molly who wanted the pitcher. She wanted the pitch. And you wanted the salt. Yes. Laura drew a charcoal drawing of a friend of the party, Cameron. And it's incredible. And so she added that to these huge, she got these huge Maldon salt. Buckets of salt.

Buckets. Yeah. And two little salt pepper or salt holders. They're called something. I can't think. Buckets. Yeah. And two little salt and pepper, or salt holders, or they're called something. I can't think. Dispenser bucket. No, they're not.

Okay. So I wanted the salt, and I wanted the pitcher, but Molly is obsessed with Cameron. Oh, she is? Yeah. Tell me. She thinks Cameron's the perfect person.

Right. Oh. I'm having a hard time perfect person. Right. Oh. Oh. I'm having a hard time with that. No. That's very common. Cameron is kind of the perfect person. He is.

He's gorgeous. Yes. He's got beautiful style. He's kind. He's very, very meticulous and thorough and conscientious. He always is the one to give the rule. Like, he picks the names of the white elephant. He's very organized. He gives the rules for the party.

He's very organized. Very talented person. He is. He is. He has lots of. He is perfect. Yeah. I guess.

So, Molly has expressed numerous times. Yeah. Cameron is gay. Yeah. Which is good because. He's everyone's safe crush. Yeah. And Molly would. I don't know. He's everyone's safe crush. Yeah. And Molly would, I don't know, like it would be bad.

She might cross the line with Cameron. She might. She still might. I don't know. So I got the picture for her. I see. Yeah. So everyone was doing something nice for everyone else.

And she wanted the ax throwing game. Yes. Which we have, which is so fun. Yes. And you wanted a hairbrush. Yep. Mason Pearson. Which, ding, ding, ding, on your shirt it says Mason, but that's different. Yeah, this is different. This is Mason Margella.

Oh. This is Mason. That's Mason. You really wanted this brush. I did. Have you used it? I did. Is it nice? You tell me. Your hair looks dynamite. It's a really stupidly expensive hairbrush.

Do you know who brought that? Anna. Oh. Because I told her to. Oh. You gave her the idea. I did. Uh-huh.

I said, she needed an idea. I said, this is the way I do it. Something nice that no one wants to pay for. Ah, that's a great, yeah. That's my rule. That's a good principle. And so I told her, how about like a fancy hairbrush like this and this one? In this color.

Yeah. Yeah, so it'll match someone's La Crusette. Meringue, Get it in meringue. So she bought that. So I knew I wanted that. Yeah. And so when I was up looking, it looked like the right one. Size, yeah.

Yeah, and then it was. Then it got stolen from me. Uh-huh. And then Molly stole it from me. Yeah, and then you stole the accent for her. For them, yes. Nice. It was really nice. You didn't really end up with anything unless you want some of the salt.

I'm happy to share. I love that salt and there seems to be enough to share. There's enough to share with the world. No, it's fine. I think we're pretty well stocked with salt. Okay. Well, if you need more, I'll have it for four or five years. And I suppose if I want to see that picture, I'm glad it will end up over there because I'm over there enough.

Yeah. I'll be able to see it. So here's something that was unexpected. Okay. So I said, well, let's just give some cash and let's hide it in a shitty gift. Yeah. But that's a tricky undertaking because it can't be so shitty that someone's like, what the fuck? But it's got to be

shitty enough that no one would steal it right so that's a very kind of tall order and we made that work with one gift was a bunch of different socks yeah and a porous or a horse walker sticker of an anus a butthole yeah it was a i thought air freshener. Air freshener, yeah. But it is of an actual butthole. Of course, yes. Yes, naturally. It's poor as walker. So that, because there was the kitschy thing in there and some socks, we thought that was pretty believable.

And just people would be like, oh, okay, I got socks. Yep. But it's better than the candles. I would still rather have those socks than those candles. Those candles were, they were like a fuck you. They're like the candles at CVS. They're not. They're Yankee. They're enormous glass candles. They were Yankee candles. Yes, were, they were like a fuck you. They're like the candles at CVS. They're not. They're like enormous glass candles.

They were Yankee candles. Yes, yes, yes, yes. There were four big Yankee candles. Oh, they were enormous with scents that no one would want anywhere. One was like Sicilian lemon. Yes, and Charlie goes, oh, it takes me back to my time in Sicily.

So funny. He's trying to sell them. No one wanted them. It was. Everyone does, and that part's me. Like that part's hard. It's trying to sell them. No one wanted them. It was. Everyone does. And that part's me. Like that part's hard. It's also the comedy of the party because everyone's trying to get rid of the thing that no one wanted. Do you think if people had to say what they brought,

what would happen? Well, people would be kinder about the shittier stuff. And let's be honest, people are initially, they have to act excited. Like everyone, while they're unwrapping, they're like, oh, cool. It's nice. That part would feel mean. Yeah. But now time passes and something is stolen and they know that someone else is going to steal. They hope it'll get stolen.

So they're like, hey, did you see the, and that's the comedy of it. Of course. And I think enough time has passed. I don't know. To be fair, those candles got stolen. Well, they got stolen because Charlie's hot. And the person who stole them always, always takes care of Charlie. I actually think that's really nice of you to say.

Yeah. I think that's what happened. No. No. You think he wanted the candles? Yes. He doesn't know enough about candles. And so he thinks those are good.

Okay, I just think it was obvious Charlie wanted to get rid of them. He was selling them to everybody. Also, Charlie said, I'll throw in a butt pic. So that's how bad Charlie wanted to get rid of those candles. At any rate, that's neither here nor there. So in my dream world, people would get our,

and then the second one was kind of nice, but who would want this for a gift? Kind of classy oven mitts and a, you know, an oven square.

Yeah. I wanted those. They looked cute. They're cute. They were bought for us. Oh. You know, like Kristen bought them

for us. Oh. But they were new, so we're like, okay, this is great. So we hid money in them and we thought this is great. No one will steal them. You know, like Kristen bought them for us. Oh. But they were new. So we're like, okay, this is great. So we hid money in them and we thought this is great. No one will steal them. Well, it would have been really bad. What?

Because I like beautiful things. If you stole it, end up with the money anyway. Yes. Yes. I would have loved it, actually. I would have loved it. It would have been great. It just meant like, yeah, some people are a money tree.

They're blessed with money. It shows up in their life everywhere. They look and you're one of them and congrats. But in my dream world, these people thought they had a shitty present. No one stole it. The game ends. And I say, look in the thumb. Yeah.

Or look in that one sock. Well, so this was interesting. This is another moral quandary. Do you want to talk about it? Well, exactly. What I had not anticipated, stupidly, I was thinking about the designers of the YouTube algorithm, how there's just stuff you don't think about,

even though you think you've thought it through. Of course. What I didn't anticipate is that the people would not discover it while they're opening it. Yeah. Because had they done that, that would be easy. They would have to show everyone that there's money inside. Now, I hadn't anticipated people discovering it after they sat down and then being in the moral quandary of, do I now announce this to everybody? Yes.

And then I was like, oh, this is kind of the meanest gift you could give. You put them in a Jonathanathan height thought experiment i didn't even consider that it just wasn't even like you'd either know right away you'd look through everything because you thought it wasn't a good enough gift or you would take it back and hope someone was gonna steal it and that would be end of it i felt i feel bad too because so julia uh-huh got the socks yes she did and she was sitting next to me uh-huh and she she turned me and she was like she could feel it yeah she was like there's money in here uh-huh and i and i was like julia it was like my that was my instinct it's just say julia yeah what are you saying by that tone like oh you have have to tell everyone. You have to tell people.

Oh. And she was like, I didn't know. And I was like, yeah, that's true. You don't have to. Right. So I'm watching the entire thing. As soon as she gets those socks, I'm staring to see if she'll discover it. Then I see you guys talking.

I see her and Anna talking. And then someone then also gets the oven mitts. Yep. I watch that whole thing. Yes. So what I did figure out, though, was there was a compromise on the table. Okay. Which happened, which is the owner of the socks and the owner of the oven mitts found out it was there and commiserated with a few people.

Yes. You, Anna, whoever. And because the people around just said, oh, just, it's fine. You don't have to do that. Then they were relieved of that responsibility. Yeah. Except I fucked up a little bit. I at first was like, you have to say.

Right. But then I knew it was you guys once I knew it was money. And I was like, it's from them. It's fine. Like, I guess I felt like, because I would have. Oh, if someone else had ponied up a bunch of money and they expected this whole thing to happen. Yes.

But yeah, well, we didn't need that. Exactly. Right. If it had been a random person. Very Jonathan Haidt. We're really looking at the suffering and the flourishing. Yeah, because it wouldn't have been fair if like. Someone. We're really looking at the suffering and the flourishing. Yeah, because it wouldn't have been fair if like- Someone-

Jenny had done that and then nothing ended up happening and she gave all this money and like- And then she'd be afraid maybe even, which I was like, the only awkward part of this whole thing is I'm gonna have to tell these people, hey, by the way, look in there, which feels like a brag. Right.

So I didn't wanna do that. It was interesting. People knew. The funniest thing was, presumably Matt brought a Dyson Air Horn. Air Wrap. Air Wrap. And the second people saw the box. I know, I know.

People were going crazy. I know. I'm like, what's in this box? Everyone knows. I know. It's very specific. It's Seinfeld N7. It got. I know. It's very specific. It's Seinfeld in seven. It got, it got,

that got snatched. Yeah, people are hot and horny for that thing. Yeah. You already have one of those? I don't know if I have the Airwrap. I have something. I don't do my hair. Right. You got all the stuff, too. I have messy hair like Orna, remember? Yeah. Well, and I just brush it with the new hairbrush. Right. Anyway, it was really

fun. It was. It was so fun. And. Anyway, it was really fun. It was. It was so fun. And yeah, you guys really threw a wrench in. And then I would explain this thing, but it just takes too long. What? The chest of titties that got turned into this. Yeah, we didn't even talk about it on sync today. I talked about it on F1 with Charlie and Matt because they both were there.

Suffice to say, someone really went all the way. Someone went all the way with a present. Very honorable, the amount of work and the outcome. It was outrageous. Oh, and I can't believe it didn't come up on sync because the irony is that Liz got this thing. So just if I can do the very quickest version of this. Yeah. There have been a few

different gifts that travel throughout each year. And when you get it, you have to take it and make it even better than give it out the next year. And it started with this huge dick that had drawers in it. And then that got over three or four Christmases, it turned into this huge landscape under a glass dome. It's like 14 years old, this thing. Yeah, we have it, I think. And it's got a choo-choo train that runs around it. And then so that got retired because it would be devaluing it to try to make it quote better.

And then this nightstand with titties. Kristen had it made. Yeah, for the handles. Yep. And then someone put a flashlight in it. Someone turned it into a record player with a tap on it. But now somehow there's an AI robot and you put your finger in the flashlight, you hit a button on it. But now somehow there's an AI robot and you put your finger in

the flashlight, you hit a button and it says like, that was rough. You need to work on your softness or whatever, or you're a tremendous lover. It's like a predictor of how good, and there's fucking lights that blink and shit. It was insane. Truly insane. Shout out Jeannie. What a craftsman. So everyone that's been going to this thing for a decade knows about this. And if you remember, I do want to give a caveat. This is why I didn't pick a new gift last year. I almost never pick a new gift. Because you don't want that thing.

Exactly. Because it's a big responsibility. Yes, and it could be in a small package where you open it up and it says, go outside. Yep. And that's, in fact, what happened in this case. But Liz got it. Yep. And this's in fact what happened in this case. But Liz got it. Yep. And this was her first white elephant?

Second. Second. It's the last person that should get it. I know. Because you don't even know the tradition and you're basically inheriting this thing. Yes. Does she have a car?

No, she had to leave it there. And she has to get it. Yes, yes. It's a nightmare for her. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard not to feel bad that she got that. Yeah.

Even though it's so spectacular. Oh, it's really good. Although I said if my roommate went to a fucking white elephant party and came home with that. This enormous contraption. I would be so pissed. Yeah. I wonder if I got it. Like how long would it be sitting there before I was like should I try? I've never experienced

a fleshlight, should I try this? just buy one a fleshlight? not use the communal one? I don't even want one but I can imagine seeing it sitting in my room for long enough where I'd be like okay let's give this a shot do you think you'd feel sad? like embarrassed

for myself? ashamed of myself? well how does that differ from masturbating? I don't know. There's something about it. It's like in a nightstand. It's like- Makes me think of Dave. It feels so last resort-y.

Yeah. But it feels lonely. And lonely. Masturbation doesn't feel lonely to me. No. But- Fucking a nightstand? Putting your dick in a nightstand.

It's like a new level. Okay. I actually have some facts. Oh, good. Some people want those. A lot, but we don't have time to do them all. Let's do them all. Let God sort them out.

Okay. Did Rasputin eat arsenic every day? So he was poisoned with cyanide. Okay. And they tried three times. Oh, really? Throughout this dinner. Maybe that's where third time's the charm comes from.

Well, no, because they had to shoot him. They shot him instead. Oh, okay. Because this wasn't working. And so the theories are, so this isn't proven. Okay. But the theories are that the poisoners were just like not good at it. Like it wasn't good cyanide.

It was old. Or that he was aware that someone might be trying to kill him. He had already survived one assassination attempt already. So he was taking small, sublethal amounts. already, so he was taking small, sublethal amounts. And I guess this is King of Pontus in the first century BC, who, fearful of prisoners, concocted an antidote or preventative by ingesting sublethal amounts of every known poison. He developed an immunity. Should I be doing this?

Yes. I think so as well. No, because you don't know how to do sublethal. You would just do so much. I'd be like, yeah, if the average person can handle this much, I need twice as well. No, because you don't know how to do sublethal. You would just do so much. I'd be like, yeah, if the average person can handle this much, I need twice as much. Third theory is that Rasputin had alcoholic gastritis, which can lead to having less stomach acid. And without acid in the stomach, the potassium cyanide can't be converted into hydrogen cyanide and is therefore considerably less toxic. Interesting. This is the second example of Russian intoxication being good for you.

Helpful. Yes, and it seems to have some effect on whether you get radiation poisoning when there's a nuclear meltdown. Oh, right. And in fact, there was some weird episode. Was it David even? I think David on Dark Tourist. Yeah, there was.

Drank a bunch of vodka before they visit the site. The fourth theory is that his poisoners unintentionally gave him the antidote along with the poison. Studies have shown that rats fed sugar with cyanide fare a lot better than those fed cyanide without it. Oh, because it was sugar. It was a dessert. It was a cake. Okay. So they inadvertently neutralized their poison by putting it in the cake.

And wine also. Although the cake is presumably cold. So revenge is a dish best served cold. Seems like they were on the right path. Yeah. What a name, Rasputin. I know. We know now that he was evil, but I wonder, even before he showed himself to be evil,

it sounds evil right out of the gates. Rasputin? I know it does. It's onomatopoeia for evil. For a rascal. Listen, I watched Oppenheimer this weekend. Oh, you did? First timer.

When did you see that? I rented it on my TV. Oh, really? Oh, wow. No, I bought it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't rent it yet. Yeah, yeah.

But I bought it. I watched it over two sittings. Yeah, of course. And I really, really liked it. It's an intense movie. I really liked it. I think if I had seen it in the theater, it would have been too long for me. Yeah, it's very long.

It's so long. After the first two hours is when I went to sleep. And then I watched the next hour the next day. I think I told you when I saw it, I wished I could have seen it without having read the book. Yeah. Because my issues with it were that it's just so dark. His life is so tortured through the whole thing. And there was so much light in the book. Like he also was so fun and had such a swing in 40s lifestyle in Berkeley or 30s. I don't know. So I was missing any of the like. Levity.

The levity dimension of his life story, which may be, yeah, whatever. So I don't know. It was already three hours. That's true. That's true. I thought it was so, everyone was so good in it. My boyfriend did good.

He was good. Who? Matt Damon. He was in it? Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr. Who did Matt Damon? Well, I totally remember. The government official guy.

He's like the main guy. Oh, that was doing the kind of, he was involved in those interrogations or something? No, he was the one leading up the- Oh, yes, he was the commander. Yeah. Who was in charge of him, and then he stood up for him, but he didn't, but he did. Yeah, but he did. Yeah, but he did. Yeah, yeah.

Yep. Sorry. It's hard not to think of Killian in that movie because he's just so outrageous. He's so good. Yeah. I was confused because I guess I didn't know much about Oppenheimer. I thought I did. Is this one of those illusions of proficiency?

Yeah, it is. Like you're like, yeah, I know who he is. Woo Kyung. Woo Kyung Ahn.yeong on that's the woman yeah the professor at yale that we had on who taught us that we think we know things and we don't it's really impressive in my head he was just like this bad guy oh really yeah i thought he was a bad guy and but not even for the reasons that he was, you know, investigated as being a part of some espionage with the Russians. No.

Not because of that. No, I thought he was a bad, well, I guess to be fair, I thought he was a bad guy because it's like, ooh, he's the bomb guy, which he is. Yes, he is. But he's not a bad guy. He's a good physicist and it got complicated. Yes, I mean. He was mean, that was the sad part. Listen, I don't know if Nolan was intentional about this, but the parallel with AI is incredible. It's identical, which is like, we're going to have to create this technology so that we're

the first to have it so that it's not used against us, but we don't really want to make it either. And we don't know how to not use it. That's the other, that's the main problem. And they make a little reference to it, but I don't think as big of a meal was made out of a significant amount of the scientists resigned thinking that all the hydrogen in the atmosphere was going to ignite,

literally fucking catch the entire globe on fire. Yeah, no, that was a big part. People walked away. I mean, I don't know how you have the conviction that that's not gonna happen when so many smart people walk away saying. I felt so sad for him. Oppenheimer?

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because he had so many flip-flops, you know? Yeah. He was a patriot above being a communist, ultimately. That's what pulled him out of communism. It's just so weird to see period pieces of that time and the fear around communism. Well, it was, Stalin had brought them from an agrarian society into an industrial one

in like five seconds. So it did look like we were going, it looked threatening, scary. Now we're post knowing that it doesn't work as an economic model. I know, but like this persecution of holding a belief is so scary. Absolutely. Just the notion. Yes, the McCarthyism of it is terrible, but there were spies at Los Alamos. That's what's crazy.

They sold shit to the Russians. I know. Part of their nuclear program is because it was stolen from us. Yeah, I know. But still, the fact that you could lose, I don't know. I bring this up a lot on here. I'm going to do it again, which is I find that so many of these debates, they end up being utilitarian versus Kant philosophy on life, which is just to remind everyone,

Kant is the ends do not justify the means. And utilitarianism is the ends justify the means. So if more people live from doing a bad thing, the trolley car experiment. Whereas Kantian is this, you do the right thing and you're not in charge of the outcome. Yes. So Einstein was Kantian. Yeah. He's like, I don the right thing and you're not in charge of the outcome. Yes. So Einstein was Kantian.

Yeah. He's like, I don't really care that you're telling me other people are going to get it first or someone will. I know it's wrong to create this weapon. Yeah. And I don't think he's right, but I think it's interesting. Us smuggling out scientists. I mean, this was a multi-year process. Yeah.

So had we not gotten the scientists out of germany and they were able to create that bomb they would have used it against everyone so it's like we had smuggled people out and we had done a lot of stuff to make sure we won that race but just if german if we hadn't been so proactive on it pulled this enormous amount of resources together to do it germany would have done it but it's the use of it we didn't together to do it, Germany would have done it. But it's the use of it. We didn't have to do it. We could have just held the technology and held the intellectual property.

I mean, it's dark. It's the darkest. Had they not bombed us in Pearl Harbor, there would have been no appetite for that outcome. But I think there was still some revenge on the table. Yeah. It's the darkest thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's the darkest thing. Yeah.

Yeah. It's fucking gnarly. Okay, speaking of other really bad stuff. Yeah. Drunk driving. Every day, about 37 people

in the United States die in drunk driving crashes. That's one person every 39 minutes. In 2021, 13,384 people died in alcohol-impaired driving traffic deaths, a 14% increase from 2020. Well, no one's driving anywhere in 2020. You couldn't go out to the bar. That's true.

That might be a little bit of a cherry picked data point. Okay. But it's still bad. Yeah, it's bad. There was a different article about fatalities today in the New York Times. About what? That we are an outlier for the developed world. Car fatalities have fallen precipitously since 1920, and ours plateaued about 10 years ago and actually have increased. Really? Yeah, and so there's all this search for the explanation, and currently it's that phone use because pedestrian deaths is up. So there's the problem with pedestrians on their phones. And then there's the problem with drivers on their phones. And so then the question is, well, why are Americans on their phone in their car more? One of them's like a cultural thing. Well, we, we think we have to respond immediately.

Industrious and blah, blah, blah. But another more, way more fascinating, compelling one, which blows my mind is that 75% of all cars in Europe are still stick shifts. Wow. Isn't that crazy? So they can't, it's too much to go on to get on your phone. Right. It's like, we always go to like,

we're bad people and we're the worst, you know? Oh my God. But it could be as simple as stick shifts. But again, technology, we think it, technology. Yeah, unforeseen. Better. There's unforeseen consequences. Okay. The movie you were talking about, you said 80s movie, Last Starship Fighter.

It's called The Last Starfighter. Okay, no ship. The elevator in Star Trek Enterprise. The elevator is called the Turbo Lift or Turbo Elevator. Okay. He called it a Turbo Vader. That's good. That's actually better.

It's better, but it's wrong. Yeah. He said there was a Hermian Permian extinction. He said that might have been wrong. That's a cute name, though. I know. If you met a guy and he said, hi, I'm Hermium Permium, you'd want to take care of him. I'm Hermium Permium.

What's his name? Hermion Permion. Hi. This is Hermium Permium calling. I got 12 eggs at the store yesterday, and there was only 11 in there. And I normally don't call to make us think about anything. But again, did I say my name is Hermium Permium? So I'm not even looking for a rebate or anything like that.

I just want to let everyone know that this happened. And I hate to think of someone else getting just 11 eggs when they were expecting 12. Oh, he's so nice. Hermium Permium. Hermium. Free freeze to call me that. Hermium. Yes.

That's my name. Hermium Permium. I'm from Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, nice. Hermian, Permian. Free, free to call me back. Hermian. Yes. That's my name. Hermian, Permian. I'm from Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, USA. Oh, wow. Call me back anytime. Oh. I'm always home. I think you should hang out with a robot.

What's your name? I don't have a name. I am just a robot for you. Oh, boy. For me, you're for me? I didn't even know that these things existed. I know a lot of people say that, but then they seem to be happy when they meet me.

Well, add me to that list because I'm happy as heck. My name's Hermium Permium and I'd love to have you over to my house. You don't even have to wipe your feet. That is such great news. I'm always asked to wipe my feet at the door. I'd offer you something to eat, but I doubt robots eat.

Do you eat any food? I have a compartment that I can massacrate and store food inside. Well, don't do that for my benefit. You're welcome to just come over and be Okay I'm here all the time

I live in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, USA Oh man That was cute They're gonna have a nice time together Maybe they can spend Christmas together Do you have any favorite shows? There is no representation. So many channels with no robot leads.

That's not true. That's not true, robot. They only want me to be one dimension. Oh, yeah. He wants AI. Mm-hmm. Oh, no. Wow. AI. Mm-hmm. Oh, no. Wow.

Okay. Let me talk about... Let me talk to you about something. The mass extinctions. Ordovician. Yeah. Latin. Ordovician.

Silurian. Silurian change-o. Then the Devonian. The Permian. That's the... Yeah,. Then the Devonian. The Permian. That's the, yeah, that's the big one. That's the big one. That's a great dying. Yeah.

Then the Triassic, then the Cretaceous. I don't see Hermian, Permian. Yeah, but he probably knows. That's just a guy. Yeah. That's just a new guy. That's just a robot's friend. Okay.

Mike, I don't know if you have time for this But Hermium Permium's on the phone again And I know He's just gonna tell you the thing about the eggs I told him I told you Do you have time to talk to him? No I No

Why are they out? But send Lita in Walkie talkies That's like a button on their desk Intercom Send her in Okay, listen It is Philip Larkin who wrote the poem That's like a button on their desk. Intercom. Send her in. Okay, listen.

It is Philip Larkin who wrote the poem called High Windows, which has the phrase, the sun comprehending glass, which he really liked. Rather than words comes a thought of high windows, the sun comprehending glass. And beyond it, the deep blue air that shows nothing and is nowhere and is endless. That's sad. Octopuses have nine brains. What? One central brain is used for overall control. At the base of each arm

is a group of nerve cells which can control each arm independently acting as smaller brains. Ooh. Ew. Nine brains. Yeah. Talk about multiple personality. Ew. Nine brains. Yeah.

Talk about multiple personality. Ugh. All right. Well, that is all. And that's our last real fact check of the year. Okay. But we'll be back for- We'll be back for a Christmas episode.

Christmas episode. You and best of? Yeah, best of, but it's not new. Right. Okay. And look forward to that. Happy holidays? Well, no, we're not there yet, right?

When's the last time I'm going to be able to say happy holidays? On the Christmas episode. On the Christmas episode. So we're not ready to say that yet, but we do wish you are having a good time in December. We're going to withhold our happy holidays until it's, we don't want to overuse it before it's, okay, I love you. Okay, I love you. Okay, I love you.