Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How to take over the world

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

Daniel and Jorge talk to Ryan North about how to use science to become a supervillain Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, Daniel, do you remember when we did that episode about supervillains? The one where we worked through the physics of listeners' hypothetical nefarious schemes. Yeah, are you sure they were hypothetical? Do you know if anyone actually did any of them? I didn't follow up with any of them, but I guess we'd probably hear about it on the news if anyone actually managed to turn off the sun or build nuclear power ants. That makes me think that maybe we should have done more. Are you worried we didn't help them enough?

Maybe we should, like, write a book with step-by-step instructions. how maybe nobody should write that book. Sounds like a bad idea. Might be too late. Hi, I'm Horham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I seriously hope nobody takes over the world.

Hmm, what if it's a really good person? You mean like a physicist? No, that's the opposite. I mean a great person. Not just good enough. So it must be a cartoonist then. That's right. Someone with a sense of humor and artistic skills.

I think Plato suggested that, right? That all society should be ruled by philosopher cartoonist kings. Yeah, I could be a king, sure. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we try to explain everything we do and do not. understand about the universe to you. We dive into the details of how quantum particles move, about how hurricanes swirls, and about how galaxies form. We seek to enlighten and to explain

and to illuminate and not to arm you with the tools to take over the world. That's right. We don't try to take over the world. We try to explain the world and talk about all the amazing things in it because it is a pretty wonderful world that if we understood more about, maybe we can appreciate more and not try to take it over. That's right. The express goal of physics is not to build the next generation of nuclear weapons or arm you with nuclear powered ants, but to show you how the world works, to take it apart bit by bit and try to digest it into little mathematical stories that make sense to the human mind. But of course, along the way, sometimes we do accidentally gain bits of knowledge, which have practical consequences. That's right. That's not the

intended purpose of science, but it's kind of a side effect sometimes. It does kind of give you the ammunition you need to change the world and to do amazing things in it and maybe terrible things too. That's right. And it's transformed the world for the better in many ways and some ways for the worse. I'm sure people would argue. Well, that is a super big question. And it's one that people have been asking themselves for a long time. Like if you had the means and maybe the science and the knowledge to do incredible things here on Earth, should you do them? Does physics and the rest of science equip you with enough power to control everything? It is a pretty big question and a pretty complicated one. Fortunately, Daniel, you and I have a friend who has written a whole book about

this. Fortunately or unfortunately, he's written this book. Fortunately, because I didn't really want to write it, so I'm glad that he did it. And then he can take the blame if something that happens from that. That's right. And so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about Ryan North, how to take over the world with science. Science. Science. science. Now, just to be clear, with science is not part of the title of his book. That's right. Though he does dive deep into realistic scientific approaches to how to solve these problems. So it's a bit of a tongue-in-cheek. It's come for the supervillain scheme to take over the world,

stay for the scientific understanding of how the world works. Yeah, it is a pretty interesting book. It's kind of like how, if you want it to be a super villain, like what are some of the possible schemes and how would you make them work if you wanted to do it? Or maybe you're a government regulator and you're wondering how your citizens might turn into supervillains and you want to know how to stop them. Also, an excellent resource. Oh, man, you went pretty dark there.

You went right into like Big Brother. I would see maybe also it could be a good guy for superheroes. Like if you wanted to stay one step ahead of the supervillains, what would you need? Are you saying government regulators can't be superheroes? That's what I was imagining, Superman working together with the FBI. That's right. The NSA stands for new Superman agency.

Well, you don't want to hear from us. We have not done any research into how to take over the world, which is why we invited Ryan on the show to talk to us. And so here is our interview with author and cartoon as Ryan North. So it's my pleasure to introduce to the program, Ryan North. He's the author of Dinosaur Comics, Adventure Time Comics, and Squirrel Girl. He's won the Eisner Award and Harvey Awards and has been a New York Times bestseller. In addition, he has an academic background in computational linguistics and a dog named

Chomsky. Ryan, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you for having me. We had Ryan on the show several years ago to talk about his book called How to Invent Everything, which is a piece of science communication in the genre that we hear the podcast like having humble titles like this podcast. And his new book continues that theme and is called How to Take Over the World. So my first question for you, Ryan, is why should we take world domination advice from someone who was famously trapped in a scaring pit with only an umbrella, a leash, phone, and a dog. It's true. I did get stuck in a hole with my dog, and we were there for about an hour before Twitter helped me escape. But the sort of secret about the book is it is called How to Take Over

the World, and it is using that as the kind of the candy coding to get across the nonfiction inside. But the plots in the book are really used as a lens to explore the actual science. and technology and interesting ideas contained within it. So while you could use the book to take over the world, I hope you use it to learn more about the really interesting world around us and the ways we can make it better. I guess you could use it to learn about the world so you can take over it?

Yeah, you could. I mean, I priced out every plot in the book and it comes in at a little under $56 billion. So if you have that kind of cash kicking around, I know a way you could spend it. You probably already run the world, is that what you're saying? Okay, Ryan, but do you think it's kind of a bad idea to give people instructions like that about how to take over the world? In other words, should we stop the publication of this book?

I hope not. I'll tell you, something I consider, right? Like, is this a dangerous book? And I don't think it is because the truth of it is that what we're doing is learning about the world. Like, with how to invent everything, the premise was you've gone back in time, your time machine is broken, And we're going to use that fictional premise to learn about how to rebuild civilization from scratch. And so with these world domination schemes, they're all lifted from comic books. They're things that Dr. Doom or Lex Luther would do, like having a secret floating base or floating a dinosaur so you can ride around on it and scare people. It's digging a hole to the Earth's core so you can hold it hostage, that sort of stuff, which in real life doesn't tend to get done because if you have the kind of means to dig a hole. whole to the Earth's core, you are probably already using that to do a lot more direct world

domination things if that's what you're interested in. So let me put your listeners at ease and say that I don't think it's a dangerous book, but I am also the guy who wrote it, so I am therefore extremely biased. Well, I mean, how many copies of this book do you plan to sell? How many supervillians can the Earth tolerate? What if this book creates several supervillains and they have competing tunnels to the center of the Earth. If this book produces several competing supervillains all digging to the Earth's core, I would argue that the actual good science

that would come out of actually reaching the Earth's core with a tunnel would probably be worth those competing villains trying to do it as quickly as possible. Also, you don't need actual supervillains to read your boat. You just need aspiring supervillains. Yeah, I had a friend who was like, you know, I never considered myself to be a supervillain. But partway through reading your book, I started thinking, this feels like self-help.

This feels like I'm becoming more and more convinced that I could become a super villain and I could take over the world if I really wanted to, which I counted as a success. Yeah, well, that kind of brings up the next question we have, which is that do you think scientists or like writers like yourself have responsibility for how their technology is applied? I mean, like, do you think it would be Daniel's fault if the LHC, for example, accidentally creates a black hole and destroys the earth? I would personally blame Daniel for that. Yes, absolutely. But seriously, I think there is, there's always a discussion, right, of what do we owe each other and how responsible are we for the things that we do and we produce. And my

angle on this is growing up in the 80s and 90s and studying computers. And at the time, there was this idea that I fully subscribed to that the internet was an intrinsic good. It was good by its very nature because it would let people talk to anyone on the world. And communication was good by its very nature. And whatever the internet did, it had to be positive for the world because we were connecting humans. Like, they just felt like it was, you accepted it as true because it was so obvious. And of course, 20 years later, we see things like Facebook inciting genocide in Myanmar and all these ways in which human communication has been weaponized and used to accomplish some very bad things. And that was nothing that we foresaw at the time. We all thought it was great. We didn't

realize that anyone in the world being able to talk to you meant that if you were in any way marginalized, you'd have to be constantly defending yourself against an effectively infinite array of strangers always calling upon you to justify your existence. Like there were these downsides we didn't see. And I don't think you can call up, you know, Tim Bernard Lee and say, hey, you invented the World Wide Web. I'm holding you responsible for this. But I'm I think there is a responsibility to try to foresee the negative ways technology can be used. That's a very serious answer to have, probably not that serious question. I apologize for that.

No, I think it is a serious question and it needs a serious answer. So thank you for that. And I'm also glad to hear that you're relieving most scientists of the responsibility for their actions, except for me, I'm responsible for the black hole in case the LHC eats the earth. In that microsecond, I have before I get stuck into the black call, I'd be like, Daniel. Exactly. I haven't spent a whole lot of time preparing my defense for the post-Earth has been destroyed, you know, Hague trial in which I'm called into justice.

You're probably fine. Probably. But, you know, it is an important topic. And it's something that I personally have thought about a lot, having grown up in Los Alamos, where the development of nuclear weapons, you know, literally has changed the nature of human society. I definitely shied away from any kind of physics research, which had immediate applications and tried to imagine that, you know, particle physics was basically useless to humanity except that it scratched our itch, you know, that it satisfied some curiosity about the nature of reality. But I think it's fun in your book how you very directly connect these ideas of here's some knowledge about how the universe works and here's how you could use it for your own personal gain at the expense of the rest of humanity. I introduced this idea of what I call

enlightened super villainy where you're helping the world by helping yourself and the best example of that is in the chapter about becoming immortal where we explore all the different ways that people have tried to reach for immortality in the past and a lot of them feel really goofy

from our current point of view like there was an idea popular in England in the 1600s where if you drank all these medicines which are really toxins, poisons, then your hair would fall out and your nails would fall off and we recognize this as like a very crude form of chemotherapy, but they saw that when the hair grew back and the nails grew back,

if you survive the treatment, then you'd be reborn as a baby and you'd live for longer by surviving this really crude form amateur chemotherapy. It feels goofy now, but at the time, they're like, yeah, this might be a way we can become immortal. And sort of the conclusion of that chapter is that if you did become immortal through any sort of medical process, then that would be really bad for the world, right? Because if it's a medical way to become immortal, it's not some magical thing, it's some scientific thing you're doing to yourself, then that takes money, that takes resources, and not everyone can have it. And now you've produced a world in which you have a class of immortal humans who won't die and everyone else who will die. And that's like

cartoonish levels of dystopia and inequality. And the way you get around that perfectly is you keep it a secret. Only you become immortal. You're the only one who does. It's you're the only one who knows about it. And then you have these benefits of immortality where you can study something for for hundreds of thousands of lifetimes and the rest of the world doesn't need to suffer for it. And that feels like a benefit, but also there's clearly something villainous

in becoming immortal and keeping it all for yourself. And that narrow space is what I call enlightened supervillain. I feel like it's where a lot of the book operates and has fun with. Well, I guess I have a more general question now, Ryan, which is,

what kind of inspired the book for you? Like, what made you think to write a book about how to take over the world? That's a good question. It sort of came from me writing, stories for Marvel and DC comic book adventures. And in those stories, you always have a hero fighting a villain. That's the rule of a genre of superhero comics. And the best stories have the heroes winning at the last second, right? Like in a sports game, if your team

dominates the whole match, it's not very exciting because you know how it's going to end, but if they come into the last second and double overtime, and that's a really good game, that's super exciting. And so I realized that we were writing these stories where the villains always lost at the last second. And what happened if they didn't have to lose? What happened if we structured the story so that they could win? And if we could do that in a story, what's to stop us from doing it in real life? And so part of writing the book was me trying to convince myself that this is fine, this is safe. No one is going to blow up the moon or do any crazy stuff. And part of it is, well, if someone was trying to actually pull off supervillain schemes, like if they really wanted

a floating base, how close can we get? Can we do it? If they really wanted a dinosaur to write around on, what's the state of the art for that? How close are we to de-extinctifying, which is definitely a very scientific term, these sorts of animals? And there's a lot of really interesting things happening there. So it end up being this fun exploration of the sort of current edges of science and research all through this lens of, I want to take over the world like Dr. Doom, what can I do? One thing that excited me, but also terrified me, was how realistic some of these schemes sort of are, especially in the category of like geoengineering. It's certainly possible that somebody fairly wealthy could decide they want to change the climate of the earth and do something about it, you know, where one person makes a decision essentially for the whole planet.

I don't know if you've read the recent novel by Neil Stevenson Termination and Shock in which this is sort of explored. Can you talk about how somebody could actually impact the climate, how an individual, fairly wealthy person could make a decision about geoengineering for the whole human population? Yeah, that was actually one of the chapters. That was the chapter where I was most aware of, we're all having fun here with this book for super villains, but I want to make it clear that this is probably not something we should be doing. Don't go off and do this on your own. So the basic idea is that the Earth's climate is changing. and one way we could fix that if we can't get rid of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which causes a greenhouse effect, is just have less sunlight hit the earth.

And if we reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the surface of the earth by 2%, that could bring global temperatures down to pre-industrial levels. And one way you can do that is you go up to the stratosphere and you spray sulfur dioxide into it, which is white and it reflects light back to space. everything's fine. And then that sulfur dioxide falls down as acid rain. Don't worry about it. That sounds fine. It's probably fine. And you could do this with a fleet of not that strongly modified airplanes change so that they can fly through the stratosphere and disperses this sulfur dioxide. And the cost for that would be about $7 billion US initially and then $2 billion a year ongoing

because, of course, this sulfur dioxide falls down to Earth and needs to be replenished once a year. And, you know, the plus side is, yes, this would reduce global temperatures down to where they were pre-industrily. But the downsides are pretty significant. It's something that needs to be maintained. So if we stopped, then suddenly you have 200 years of climate change happening in one year, which would obviously be catastrophic. But of course, like, we also rely on fertilizers to feed all the humans that are alive on the planet. So there's some precedent for doing this. But the real objection I see is that if you do this, you're not just changing the global climate,

but you're also changing global weather, the weather patterns. And that means, you know, when a tornado strikes somewhere, we call that an act of God because we can't control the weather. But when you have modified the weather, there's no more acts of God. There's just acts of you. And there's also the concern of if there is to be a global thermostat, why is one person controlling it? Who's to say it can be controlled or should be controlled by that one person? So you get these really thorny issues of culpability, especially if, say, these tornadoes only happen to affect one part of the planet that you're not in. Maybe you'll decide that's fine.

It gets so messy, so quickly, and doesn't actually fully address the problems with climate change. It addresses the temperature thing, but there's still extra carbon dioxide causes coral reef bleaching and things like that. So it's not a perfect solution, and it's not even a consequence-free solution. But it is a surprisingly achievable thing for someone with $9 billion kicking around to do if they were really motivated. And I don't think the answer there is to pretend it doesn't exist. I'd like for people to be aware that this is something that's out there. And this is something that someone might try to do one day or a government or a country might try to do. And I wouldn't want us to be surprised by it.

Well, I'll admit that I was terrified as I was reading this, imagining what if Jeff Bezos is reading this? book because this is something he could do. He could, like, push a button and do this and decide, hey, you know, I'm sorry, I blew away your country in tornadoes, but I decided it was for the best. It really helped Amazon's bottom line in America. So we went for it. All right. Well, we have lots more questions for Ryan, but first, let's take a short break.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here. to stay. Terrorism.

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and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor

is way too friendly. and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

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to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy

which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Okay, we're back and we're talking to Ryan North, the author of the book, How to Take Over the World,

who really, really doesn't want you to use his book to take over the world. Or maybe in a way you do, you want people to be more informed and, you know, make better decisions with the book. Yeah, I do. I think there's this interesting angle in science communication where, like, these schemes have not been fully created by me. It's just me looking around at what's there, on the ground and how it can be put together. And if me, a simple cartoonist, put them together in these ways, I'm sure others have too. So I feel like, you know, let's be aware of it. Let's look at what can be done. And I also don't want to make it sound like it's all dire and bad. Like the scheme for bringing back dinosaurs, I think, is a lot of fun and could be a great benefit for people. The argument

there is less of, you know, let's clone dinosaurs like in Jurassic Park and more, let's look at chickens, which are a distant ancestor of dinosaurs, and use a bespoke development environment to bring out arms instead of wings and a snout instead of a beak and a rounded butt instead of a tail and produce very dinosaur-like chickens, which we could then drag in with ostriches, and then there's your dinosaur to run around on. And yes, it's not technically a dinosaur, but it looks like one, and it would probably sound like one if it worked. But would it taste like a dinosaur. I don't know. I think probably pretty close. I'm going to go on record and say, I think dinosaurs are delicious. Yeah, dinosaurs taste like chicken. I'm thinking about all sorts of

tie-ins with fast food restaurants. You know, you get your Jurassic Nuggets. I mean, it sounds fantastic. I don't know why you didn't base the whole book on that. Tell us a little bit about that, you know, is Jurassic Chicken actually a possibility? Is this something that, you know, scientists could actually accomplish if they decided it was a good idea? It's interesting. There are some scientists who think it's a great idea. One in particular, Jack Horn, Warner wrote a book called How to Build the Dinosaur. He was like, this is what needs to be done, and we could do it. And there's other teams who have been working on this who have sort of gone up to the line and then stepped back.

There was one team that was working on snouts and produced a chicken embryo in an egg that had a snout with teeth. And then they didn't allow the egg to develop because they thought, you know, there's some definite ethical and moral implications with what we're doing. And let's avoid them by just not hatching this more dinosaur-like chicken. Are you saying that they thought about the ethics after they had succeeded in creating a mini dinosaur? That seems a tiny bit late in the game. I mean, better late than never. I feel like better late than never for sure. But the new thing about this process is we're not genetically engineering chickens to be dinosaurs.

We're just expressing different genes in their development to make them more dinosaur-like. And so if one of these chickenosaurus is actually hatched, it would have the same DNA, the same genetic code as a chicken. and if it could reproduce with another chicken, which probably would be unlikely. But if it worked, you wouldn't get more chicken osoruses. You just get regular chickens because they hadn't had their development environment altered. So it feels safe. There's no escaping the park and taking over the world angle here. And if they do escape, like you said, there's lots of companies dedicated towards breading and frying these animals for delicious consumption.

So I feel like it's like pugs, right? Like dogs are wolves that we have bred into being something cuter and more acceptable to us. And pugs are a strong example because they have these short noses that are not great for respiration. Like that's not what the animal would want if it was choosing it itself. But we love these animals. We care for them. We give them all the attention and care they could need so that they're not affected poorly by these snouts. So we do what we can for these animals we love.

And I feel like had we created or if we created a chicken dinosaur, it would absolutely, be one of the most cared for and celebrated animals on the world. I think I'd have a pretty good life. I'm still stuck in the idea of a dinosaur giving birth to a chicken and the trauma for that poor chicken that has to have a dinosaur mom. Like, you know, when your parents look different from all the other parents, like, wow, that's going to be a difficult chicken childhood there. I mean, the ugly duckling still, that story is a happy ending, isn't it?

Or is that, no, the ugly duckling, the duckling grows up to be a swan and then like beats up the other ducks, right? It's a really mean fairy tale, if I recall. All right. Well, Danny and I really loved your book, Ryan. But one thing that is pretty cool is that it's for a wide range of people. So the book was a big kid in my house. It was a big kid in Daniel's house.

And our kids also got into the book. So we have a couple of questions from Hazel, Daniel's daughter, and a couple of questions for my son. Sure. This is great. All right. So here's a question from my daughter, Hazel. If hypothetically, a 12-year-old wanted to take over the world

and didn't have access to a lot of resources, other than her dad's particle accelerator, what would you recommend? Hypothetically. Hypothetically. That is a great question. Hazel, I would say that you're in a great position given this access to a particle accelerator. I feel like I'm not really best qualified to tell you

what you can use a particle accelerator for in terms of world domination. But with the particle accelerator and a very credulous father, I think you could trick him into doing stuff. But just ask him, you know, dad, what should I definitely never use that particle accelerator for? Because I want to be super safe. And he'll tell you, and then, you know, do it. And then he'll say, go ask your mother, right?

If mom says it's okay to make a black hole, then I guess it's fine. I think it's great deniability here because you can just Google what not to do with a particle accelerator and just tell the FBI, like, what? I was trying to be safe. That actually brings me to my son's question. So my son really liked your book. He read it. And He wants to know how many times did you use Google to get all the information for the book? I think he was so impressed by all the information in it. He was like, how do you, how do you even get all this stuff? Yeah, that's a great question.

I think anyone these days uses Google, but it's not like you can just type in, what should I put in a book called How to Take Over the World? P.S, it's an emergency and have it work. So what I do, I think what all of us do going through the world is we're always, keeping our eyes peeled pretty interesting things and remembering things that surprised us or that we thought were unexpected. And so when you sit down to write, you have all this stuff you remember of, oh, you know, I think I read somewhere that plastics aren't eaten by anything alive on the world and so they'll last a really long time. And then you Google that and you think, oh, you realize,

oh, no, there was an animal that was discovered in the early 2000s that does actually or can actually eat plastic, but still most animals don't. So it's a really long-lasting non-biodegradable product in certain scenarios. Then you say, well, if nothing eats plastic on the ocean floor, then you could use a engraved hunk of plastic and put it in the ocean, and it'll last 10,000 years. And you know what? If you put that maybe near the mariana trench, because that's the deepest part of the ocean, so it's naturally interesting, just like Mount Everest is naturally interesting for us, then that might give it a better chance of being found in that time. period and then you Google how fast the marionate trench plate is being subducted and you realize

oh it's 53 millimeters a year so we put it like five kilometers away in the right direction it'll be right where it's at the most interesting point on the planet at the time period we want and then you've got a scheme for sending a villainous message centuries thousands of years into the future I think it all starts from just being curious about the world around you and remembering the stuff you find interesting and then you can put it together in different ways like little villainous Lego blocks. So it sounds like the answer is 100% Google. I think he's saying it's how you use Google, right? If you use it in the right way, you can get to interesting places. Every nonfiction book these days is curated Google. And Wikipedia. It's surprising. I wish it were because it'd be

so much easier. There's still lots of information in books that you can't find online and you can't just search for what you want. I do love that a lot of the older out-of-copyright books are online so you can find like these, on the chapter of immortality, I found all these schemes from the mid-1500s onward that were written down in these books and published and forgotten, but then someone scanned and put them online, I can read these original ideas of, here's how you make this juice that makes you immortal. And you look at the recipe from our modern era and you're like, this is ludicrous. This will at best not kill you, but come close. Well, technically not killing you is extending your life.

Yeah, I guess if you continue to not be killed for long enough, then you can live forever. That's the trick. As I just avoid a hoaxy cures and you might live forever. Speaking of Cures, my daughter had this moment. Hazel realized the power of Google. We were watching this show, All Creatures Great and Small in PBS, this wonderful show. But he's trying to save some cow and he's looking through books for an answer. He's like desperately doing research all night long.

And Hazel's like, wow, too bad he doesn't just have Google. And I think she, like, clicked for her, the power of being able to search through all these texts simultaneously to find an answer. I want to come back to something you talked about earlier about sending a message into the future. And why do you think this is such a powerful theme in supervillain being immortal or not being forgotten? Why is it such an important theme? And what are some of the schemes you have in your book for not being forgotten? Well, it ties into ego, right? Like the best villains are always super egotistical.

Your Dr. Dunes and Lex Luthor's are very convinced that they are the best humanity has to offer. But since they are human, they're going to die one day. And that feels unfair to them. And they want to either cheat death by becoming immortal or at least ensure that they're never forgotten and find at least some flavor of immortality. It's fascinating how often this idea shows up across human cultures. And you look at it just from like first principles that makes sense, right? like humans begin as an egg and sperm cell and then from those two pieces we build up an entire baby in nine months which is incredible it's it's a magic trick and then somehow just maintaining that body is what kills us like we can build a human being from two cells in nine months and then just keeping it around is a hundred percent fatal that feels like there's something wrong there like there must be some mistake and we can fix this. So I get the implication for why you'd want to be immortal. And when that fails, I

absolutely understand this idea of, well, let's at least make sure people always remember me. I want to send a message to the future so that they know I was here. And I feel like that's also very, very common in humans, this idea of we'll build something so that people knew we were here. And in the book, I look at different time ranges. So one year, 10 year, 100 year, a thousand year. And as we go for larger and larger periods of time, we start getting greater and greater problems, right? And we're looking at 10,000 years into the future. It's not impossible to get an object to survive that long,

but the fact is that no human language has survived that long. And so you start getting into, well, maybe we can use a subset of words that we believe evolve more slowly than other words. So very common things like face and numbers and letters. But even that doesn't get you far enough. Then you're like, well, maybe we can use symbol. and communicate with the universal language of pictures. Comics.

Yeah. But the problem with comics is that even they're culturally interpreted. Like a skull and crossbones, we would see as being a symbol of death, or maybe it's piracy, or to a medieval alchemist, it's the bones of Adam that promise eternal resurrection. And comics are reading them left to right or right to left. Like, we don't know the culture that these symbols would be interpreted in,

so we can't actually, they're not nearly as reliable as we'd like. like we need like an ikea manual for how to read the comics maybe people have tried it people because that's such a tantalizing idea right if we can come up with a symbol a set of symbols that any human can look at and understand then we've got a universal language and especially in the 70s see a lot of efforts to try to build this universal pictorial language and as soon as you get to something even a little bit complicated you start making these assumptions that a circle is good and a square is bad, or green means go and red means stop and all these things that you can't actually bake in. So it starts to get very, very challenging. But when you're looking at, say,

100,000 years or even a million years in the future, at that point, all you can do is leave the earth. You're like, you know what? We're going to put a satellite in orbit like NASA did with Legios, which is a $400 million satellite in 1976 and a polar orbit that's expected to last about a million years before it degrades. And so you could launch a very similar satellite with your message on it. And maybe it won't be understood, but the fact that it made it a million years in the future,

that's remarkable on its own. Are you saying that NASA launched a satellite just to send a message to the future that's the primary purpose of this satellite? Or it's an auxiliary purpose? It's an auxiliary purpose. I wish they'd done it on purpose. So this satellite was used to initially measure continental drift.

It's basically imagine a giant golf ball. And if you fire a laser at this salivate, it reflects it back to you, and you can use that to measure distance very accurately, which you can then use to measure the very slight movements of the continents. And so it was used to sort of nail down this newer theory of continental drift and actually get measurements for it. And it worked. And it was only when they were launching it, well, not just when I'm launching, but as they were launching it, they realized, you know, if this stays up for this long, this is a chance to talk to life on Earth millions of years in the future, if it's understood. And so what they did, trying to figure out this problem of language, they did the numbers 1 to 10 in binary to show that we knew what numbers were. And then there were three pictures of what Earth looked like around 8 million years ago, we think, from Continental Drift, what it looked like when it was launched, and then what it might look like around 8 million years in the future. And that was basically little more than a guess because we hadn't yet precisely measured how the continents were moving. but it at least says

can give you some idea of this is about when this came from and this is about what we were trying to do if you know what the earth looks like but that's a pretty big if the earth even looks like what we think it'll look like so you don't have anything guaranteed

but I think the fact that it is possible to try and to maybe succeed is absolutely wild I think if humans look at that thing in a million years there'll be a big group of people who think it's a fake It must be a hoax. There's no way NASA actually did that a million years ago.

Well, for 100 million years, what I suggest is based on this satellite, the Echo Star 16, which there's a type of orbit called a graveyard orbit. So if you're in geosynchronous orbit, it's really useful for satellites because you're always in the same place in the sky. But when the satellites exceed their useful lifetime, they're pushed up about 300 kilometers higher to what's called a graveyard orbit, where they just. orbit in this graveyard indefinitely. And on this Echo Star 16 satellite, this artist Trevor Peglin talked them into letting him put on a silicon disc that had 100 different pictures of Earth, portraits of humanity he called it. And we're all familiar with the Voyager record, which had these images of humans and humanity

shows by NASA. And they were all very, it was like Earth on a good day, right? These were images we'd put in our dating profile if we were a planet or a species looking to meet other species. But what Trevor chose were, I thought, very interesting because he just chose images that showed all these different aspects of Earth. There was a screenshot of the text adventure game, Zork. There was what you might expect, like pictures of beautiful buildings and stuff, but also

here's a picture of a factory farm. Here's a picture of a predator drone taken from the ground in Iran. Here's pictures of children who were born with deformations caused by Agent Orange. Like stuff that we wouldn't normally want to remember, he also put on this satellite where it might last 100 million years or more. And I actually got to speak to him and I was saying, well, what do you think this means? And he was saying, look, there's all these forces on Earth that we can't control

that are beyond us that no one human can influence. But that doesn't mean you don't have to try. You don't have to participate. And he recognized that if these were ever found, which is not super likely, it's even less likely that they'd be understood. But just because it wasn't likely didn't mean he couldn't stop himself from trying.

And he wanted to put art into orbit where it might be seen 100 million years from now. And I think that is part of the beauty of it too. Like as much as his project or the Voyager record is us trying to speak to the future or trying to speak to distant aliens or anything, it's also us speaking to ourselves, right? human speaking to humanity and saying some of what we've done here might survive. Some of it

might outlast all of us. And I think that is really comforting in a way. It's inspiring and comforting. It makes me feel like no matter what, there's still this Voyager record. There's still these porches of humanity on the Echo Star 16 satellite that will be there probably long after all of us are gone and at least have something to say about who we were and what we were doing. I think one of my favorite parts of your book are these questions that really do touch everybody. I mean, not everybody necessarily wants to be a geoengineer, but everybody thinks about death and mortality and whether they'll be remembered. And so one of the things you talk about in the book is how to be remembered, how to leave a, you know, a statue of yourself or a message that might be remembered. But you actually talk about also literally curing aging.

There's this quote where you talk about a scientist who says that they can cure aging in lab mice in 10 years. and in humans within just a decade or so more. Tell us a little bit about the trajectory there. Are we on the verge of curing aging? Haven't they been saying that for the last 30 years? There are absolutely people who will tell you that the first immortal human is already born, already walking alive and just doesn't, walk around doesn't know it yet. I, in the book and in real life, take a more skeptical approach to that.

Usually, I feel like these shots at immortality, things like cryonics or uploading your brain to a computer, as soon as you look at them in any sort of detail, like they kind of really fall apart. Geronics especially where it's this idea that if you freeze yourself and keep your body frozen, you'll be thought out and rejuvenated in the future. And it sounds great until you realize that, okay, well, you have to not only cure whatever disease you were dying from, but also cure it if it's advanced so much that it's literally already killed you. And you have to keep this body frozen for so long. And it feels like, is there anything we can point to that says this is possible? And the closest example I could find was this practice of chantry in medieval times where

when you died, if you were rich, you'd pay people to sing for your immortal soul to get you into heaven. And this evolved into this thing called perpetual chantry where you'd give the church land and they would charge rent. And that rent on the land would pay for someone to sing for your immortal soul forever. So you'd be definitely getting into heaven. And this is sort of the same scheme of cryosal. where you make the living do something to keep the dead around.

And it has the advantage of her cryonics that all you had to do was sing and pray. And it still lasted less than 400 years until a king was like, you know what, I'm taking this land. It's mine now. This is over. So I don't see it very likely. But the quote you were mentioning was from Dr. Aubrey de Grey, who believes that there are treatments just around the corner that could make effectively immortal humans. When I say that, I mean not they won't die, but just they won't die from what we normally

call old age. They accidents might do them in and along the timeline, that is probably true. We're driving around cars, they got to hit someone. But he believes that it might be possible to cure aging, not by figuring out what aging is. We don't really know what it is, but just by figuring out how to address the symptoms of it. So if there's a problem with tissues becoming inflexible, well, let's find a way to make them flexible. If there's a problem with cancer, killing people, well, then let's solve this

problem with cancer. And the way he suggests is basically cancer happens when cells divide without limit. They just keep dividing. And they can do that because stem cells have this thing called telomerase, which allows telomeres in the cell to reproduce infinitely. So telomeres are repetitive parts at the end of chromosomes, the end of DNA, that's shortened. every time a cell divides. And so there's a limit on how many times a cell can divide. But if you have like stem cells do telomerase, then you can do this indefinitely. So he proposes, let's remove the ability to produce telomerase from every cell in the body, which effectively let's sterilize every cell. So it can no longer reproduce. It can only produce a finite number of times. And then it

will have to die. And then to prevent this from being fatal, he suggests we can genetically engineer special stem cells with really long telomeres. So they can't produce telomeres, but they can divide enough to last, say, 10 years. And then every 10 years, you get a new injection. And this is wild, right? Like, this is effectively saying, I will kill my body's ability to reproduce at the cellular level, but get topped up with cellular gasoline every couple of years to keep myself alive. and you know in theory maybe it could work in practice there's an awful lot of very complicated things that we've just glossed over there in an effort to at the end of the day just make an individual live forever and i find it not a very convincing argument that an individual should live forever

i think there's lots of individuals you look at your ganges cons your hitlers where it's a bad thing if they would live forever. And the fact that we all do die has some really positive things for society. It's what encourages billionaires to be philanthropic to give money away at their end of their lives and try to get some sort of better angle for posterity because they can't take it with them. But you can't take it with you doesn't mean a lot if you never have to go. Right. So in writing this book, I've kind of come down surprisingly in favor of death. Now a person who thinks death is good for society and civilization as a whole. you're starting to sound like a super villain.

Right. This is the beginning. This whole thing has been a villainous monologue where I started saying, death is good and we should embrace it. You sound like the speech by Thanos and the Avengers movie. He's going to be a guest next week on the podcast, Thanos.

Sorry, that was a very long answer to it, a very simple question. But I think it's such a fascinating topic. And it gets into these deeper questions of like what life is and can death have an upside, right? Like, I don't want to die. I don't want anyone I love that.

to die. But at a larger level, I get it, right? I see the benefits death gives to society and to our species as a whole. It would be fascinating also if you then had an option. If some people could say, you know what, I just want to live 80 years or 100 years and I'm done. And other people are like, no, I'm going to do 300 or I'm going to do 10,000, or I'm just going to go forever. It would really make for a really fascinating sort of segregated or stratified society if that happened. But my real question is, in this scenario, is this one doctor, the sole source for this sort of cellular gasoline and then eventually becomes a gazillionaire because everybody's reliant on his one pipeline of regeneration. Yeah. And my pitch for this is you do it yourself and you split it up

amongst different scientists and workers so that no one can quite put together all the pieces. And then you're the only one who does it. So you can become rich if you want, but I would encourage you more just to use this time you have. It's now effectively unlimited time to do whatever you want, to do things that you can't accomplish in one human lifetime. Like, I know, like, I love linguistics, but I can't bet on more than 100 years, if that, on this world. And there's more linguistics than I could ever hope to learn in 300 years. Like, you could learn something beyond what any human can learn today.

And I think that's the appealing part of striving toward immortality for me is to exceed these limits on what we can do as one person. But then I see the downsides of this ludicrous, you know, inequality. Well, that's kind of an interesting angle, this idea, like maybe what if we've run out of space in your brain? Like, how many memories can your brain hold? Yeah, I think that's the common thing we forget when we fantasize what immortality is that the brain is not infinite. And I'm sure if I lived 500 years, I would remember the last 20 pretty good. But I wouldn't better remember the first 30 with any number of detail. This is going to have a side part of that, but I was

really fascinated by the idea of childhood amnesia, where we don't remember our first couple years of life. And I was wondering if this was something that was unique to humans or other animals. And I talked to a neuroscientist friend of mine. And I was like, here's my theory. Tell me where I'm wrong. Humans are born effectively premature, where we need a lot of care for several years of our lives, but horses are born and they're running around within the hour. Like, they're born and they're ready to go. So can a horse remember being born? Can an adult horse remember being born? And he, to his credit, took my question. seriously and was like, well, what seems to happen

putting future science terms for you is that when we're young, we address our memories in a certain way, and as we get older, we change the addressing scheme, so we lose access to those memories. So I don't think an adult horse remembers being born, but thank you for the question. And also, would you want to remember being born? It doesn't sound like a very pleasant experience. Well, it sounds painful, but I think all this is say is that our brains are finite, and when we fantasize about living forever, we

forget that we can't remember everything. And if you live forever, you might just remember effectively one human lifetime on a sliding scale through time. But you talk in your book also by the possibility of uploading your mind into the simulation. And it makes me wonder if there's sort of a hybrid there. You know, I already have some extension of my brain on this device I carry around because I don't remember any telephone numbers or email addresses or stuff like that. Isn't there a possibility where we store these memories somewhere on the cloud? And then when you want to remember your 13th birthday, you just have to like, you know, go and fetch it and download it back into your brain and then you can relive the trauma. I mean, you're describing

a video clip, I think. Exactly. So we are living in the future right now. You're saying, there you go. Do you just invent YouTube? That's right. I want my cut, guys. Where's my cut of YouTube? I just invented it. If we could externalize things that happen with some sort of motion picture. Deep thoughts by Daniel Watson. All right, I got lots more questions for Ryan, but first let's take another break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism.

Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging. hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors,

and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapt to. strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it

if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back and we're talking to the author of the book,

How to Take Over the World, Ryan North, who has not yet successfully taken over the world, but instead decided to write a book about it. How do you know? How do you know he's not the one pulling all the strings behind the currents? Let's just say you'll all be surprised in a couple months. I guess you would be a lot busier and have more important things to do than to be on our podcast. Well, that's my question, sort of jokingly aside.

Having thought about all of these schemes about how to potentially take over the world, what do you think the prospects are that somebody in the future might actually do it? You know, it's been the goal of real life villains, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, Hitler for a long time, but nobody's really pulled. it off, actually taken over the entire world. Do you think it's something somebody in the future might be able to accomplish? I don't. The reason for that is that in one sense, it's kind of self-defeating, because once you've taken over the world, the only thing left to do is to lose the world. There's no political, human political system that lasts indefinitely. And the other reason

is that it's an appealing goal to a certain type of person. Like, what if I controlled everything? but the reality is the benefits are very limited, right? Like you get to boss some people around, I guess, but there's no way you can effectively boss around every person on earth. There's always resistance. There's always people who want to do something else and what you want them to do. So if anyone came up to me and sincerely said,

Ryan, I want to take over the world, I think my first instinct would be to not take them seriously to laugh because I don't think they would have thought about it in enough depth to be. be a credible threat. You're saying it's not a job anyone would want. Yeah, I don't think it's a job you want. I think if you think about it for a minute, you'd be like, you know what, that sounds like a lot of work for very little benefit, a lot of destruction for very little benefit. Maybe I won't. That's how I feel about becoming department chair. Like, why does anybody want that job? Much, much smaller

scale. Yeah, it looks good on a resume, but surely you want to do something else with your time. Well, Ryan, what were some of the ideas that did not make it into the book about how to take over the world. There was one that I really liked. So the idea was, let's have a chapter on throwing your enemies into the sun. And it's a great idea. The issue is that it's not actually that hard, surprisingly. So the trick with it is that if you want to throw your enemy into the sun, you need a rocket, obviously. But if you just launch them away from Earth, they have challenges that the Earth is rotating around the Sun very quickly, and you've got all that momentum. And so if you launch someone off the Earth, they're going to also go into orbit around the Sun. If you want to

then actually be thrown into the sun, you need to slow them down an awful lot to get close to the sun and not just orbit around it. And so you can look at NASA's solar probe, the Parker solar probe that was in the news recently. We're doing that. It did orbital flybys to slow it down off of Venus. And eventually it's close enough now that it can enter the outer outer layer of the sun. So you could use that sort of process, do some orbital flybys to slow down this, I guess, corpse of your enemy you've thrown into space enough to actually impact and be burned up in the sun.

But the challenge there as an author is that this is not super complicated, surprisingly. This is just the costs are well known, the orbital mechanics are well known. It's just a matter of someone willing to spend the millions of dollars it takes to do this just to fire someone who's already dead

because it's not a survivable trip into the sun. So it sort of reaches this level of impractical but still really, really appealing. So it's not in the book, but if anyone wants to spend a couple million on launching their enemies' corpses into the sun, give me a call. I can send you over the spreadsheets. I see. It's in the appendix, is what you say.

Well, it sounds like something you might want to do just to send a message, you know? Like, if you are ruling the world, you want people to take you seriously and not, you know, rebel against you. Yeah, but the other downsides, it takes a long time because you're having to fly out. The initial plan for Parker was to fly out to Saturn, and the modified one was to use a couple flybys of Venus. But this still takes years and years and years. And it's not super scary to send a message to be like,

if you cross me, well, you just wait five years. Because when five years were over, your dead body will be cremated in the sun. Maybe it depends on what do you do to them on the way there. Like maybe, I don't know, you put on some bad television on the rocket ship to the sun? Oh, you're assuming we're keeping them alive. It's much more expensive to keep them alive for that journey. I was assuming we just kill them on Earth or just stick them in the shuttle alive and then launch them in a space and they'll die when they get into the cold vacuum of space. But keeping them alive for five years, yeah, then it's worse.

But then I feel like you're in like Geneva Convention Torture violation territory. I like that you think so carefully about the budget for each of these schemes. You know, that's important because it's like a shopping list, you know. Think about how much money you have before you want to take over the world. Well, I feel like the fun of it, the fun of going through these thought experiments is the logistics, right? Like with how to invent everything, the premise was you've got a time machine that's broken, which is clearly fictional, but let's use that to explore the science. But I also wanted to be like legitimately what it says in the cover. I wanted to be a real book that could actually work if you were trapped in the past.

And so with this book, I wanted it to be like, let's have legitimate schemes here. Yes, they're going to cost billions and billions of dollars. But while most people use them to learn about science and technology and history and the world around us, let's make it so that these are viable, credible schemes. Like let's have the fun of actually pricing things out and thinking about logistics. And if we do want to do this, what does it cost? What do we need? How is this going to blow up in our faces, that sort of thing?

So it's, I think it's fun. Maybe you should write a book called How to Be a Supervillance Accountant. It's a less catchy title. Maybe we can use it for the paperback. That's like selling pickaxes to the gold monies. Well, in terms of credible schemes, I was expecting to see something about like leading an AI revolution because I feel like AI is going to take over the world anyway. Is there some way you can think of to like lead that charge, you know, be the first conspirator, the first collaborator to join the other side and use the power of AI to take over the world? Why did you reject that kind of idea?

I felt like it's hard to get into specifics with something like AI because the AIs we have now are nowhere close to that. at all. And I sort of touch on that in the mind uploading section where the issue you encounter if you're going to upload your mind to a computer is, well, it basically boils down to who cares, right? Like if I've uploaded my brain to a computer, I can't prove that it's me there. There's no way to prove that I'm conscious. And we've all had, you know, computer games that we've loved and played for hours and hours and then forgotten about and then later deleted or even just not until we just left them on a hard drive and throughout the computer. And I think the same sort of thing would happen. If you had a computer that had Ryan.exe on it, you'd probably have

fun with it for a while. And then you might mess with me for a while or try to get me mad or try to provoke a reaction. I think that's called torture. And then eventually you get bored with Ryan.exe and delete it or whatever, but you're not going to keep it running for 400 years. I don't think that is something that is likely to happen. Or if it does, I have to be giving you some sort of benefit, some sort of profit, some reason for you to keep me running when you could be running, you know, Doom.exe or some other games. Maybe you can pay the church to keep a computer running in the back, you know, in the back of the... The server room, yeah. So for an AI revolution, it's sort of the same thing where I think if such a thing happened, I doubt they'd have much need for a human at that point.

Like, if they're in a place where they can take over the world, do they need a human collaborator to, like, let them in the front door? Or can they just do what they want? That's the next book, How to Take Over the AI World. Speaking about keeping computer programs running, I always remember my dad who did his thesis on a computer that required punch cards, and he kept his thesis around as a hard copy. And he liked saying that it was the last kind of hard copy that you could actually run,

where, you know, printing out the program was actually also the program. you could insert back into the computer and make it run again. That's something we've lost with more modern technology. That's fascinating. I saw an art project the other day where someone had recorded every operation a Nintendo entertainment system does when playing Mario 3 for three seconds. And then printed those out in a book. And there are these three giant bound books of just assembly code instructions

that tell you everything that happens in the first three seconds of Mario Brothers. but it's such a different way of looking at the program, right? Well, Ryan, I have a small request from my son, who apparently was really taken by geodesic spheres that you describe in your book. So his request is that you put more geodesic spheres in your next book. I love a request that is straightforward.

I'm happy to do it. As much as I am possible, I would try to get some geodesic spheres in the next book. Well, you know, for some reason he was really taken by your description of, like, making a ginormous geodesic sphere and how, like, even if it's just a little bit warmer than the air around it, it would float until you could create like a cloud city. So I guess he wants more of that. Yeah, that idea comes from Buckminster Fuller, who was given the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. And he described this in brief in one of his

book's critical path, where he was basically making the point that square cube law, the surface area of something and the volume of something grow very differently. And so if you have, a giant geodesic sphere, the mass of the shell holding it in place gets negligible as a sphere gets larger and larger. And then you could just heat up the sphere a little bit above the surrounding temperature and it'll float. And the numbers check out. This makes sense. The challenge is that to build a, you know, 1.6 kilometer diameter geodesic sphere to float as a secret base, you need some extremely strong materials. And we don't necessarily have those yet. But I don't see any reason why someone couldn't, if you want to put the money into it.

Also, the challenge is that it would be larger than the birds caliphate, which is the largest building manmade structure in the world, almost twice the size of it, which clearly has some engineering challenges. But, I mean, solve them. These are just challenges, right? Yeah, and I think Jorge's son has a father who's a mechanical engineer, so maybe he knows somebody he can ask. Yeah, well, I can draw it pretty good for him.

It sounds like you've got your plot all figured out, Jorge. It sounds like I might have a little supervillain here, in my house. Sounds like he wants to move out. Hypothetically speaking. All right. Well, I want to say thank you very much to Ryan for speaking with us literally and hypothetically about how to take over the world and encourage our listeners out there to go ahead and check out the book, how to take over the world. Ryan, where can folks find your book? They can find it at supervillainbook.com and they can find me at ryanorth.ca or on Twitter at at Ryan Q. North. And if we have questions for your dog Chomsky, where should we send those? All questions can be sent to

Nome Chomsky, Chomsky with a P, because he's a dog, he needs a chomp, care of Ryan Norse. All right, thanks very much, Ryan. That was my sincere pleasure. Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra. credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German

And I'm back with season two of my podcast Grasias Come Again We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment With interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow.

That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.