Factually! with Adam Conover - What If? with Randall Munroe

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

Would leaving your freezer door open help climate change? What would happen if you slid down a fire pole from the Moon down to Earth? And how has creativity on the Internet changed over the past few decades? Legendary XKCD cartoonist and author Randall Munroe joins Adam today to ask and answer some of the most mind-blowing questions you’ve ever heard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together and we're going to have a fantastic time doing it.

Now, I want to remind you that I am on tour right now. I am bringing my brand new hour of stand-up comedy all around the country. I just had a fantastic weekend in Portland, Oregon, and I just added two new dates in November. From November 3rd through November 5th, I'm going to be in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And on November 17th through 19th, I'm going to be in Raleigh, North Carolina. If you want tickets, head to adamconover.net. And I am looking to add dates all around the country. So please keep letting me know where you want me to come.

I can't wait to come and see you. And hey, if you love this show, please support us on Patreon. For just five bucks a month, you can get unlimited ad-free episodes of this show. You can join our community Discord. We got a whole bunch of other great benefits too. And most importantly, it supports me and the show directly. No middle people allowed. So head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover if you want to do that. Now let's talk about this episode. Do you guys remember the internet? You know, back when it was a fun, enjoyable place to be on the internet, I fell in love with back in the late 90s and the early 2000s, creative nerds made their own content for each other. Remember that? One great example of this was web comics. Towards the beginning of the century, there was an explosion of them,

made by people with really weird and specific points of view. And if you wanted to read these comics, you had to be active about it. You had to bookmark the website and click on view. And if you wanted to read these comics, you had to be active about it. You had to bookmark the website and click on it. Or if you were really technologically savvy, you could add it to your RSS reader. Remember those? But either way, you had to seek out this content and it was able to build a small but often very engaged audience that really supported those artists. Unfortunately, a couple decades later, this ecosystem of weird individual creative talents has sort of evaporated in many ways.

Now, everyone goes to major platforms like Twitter or TikTok to get an unending, algorithmically curated feed of content. And the power of these algorithms has homogenized the content that we read, watch, and consume. Because you need to cater to the algorithm for your stuff to do well, it means that all the content starts to look and feel the same. It really sucks. But it's not the first time that media has trended towards sameness and homogeneity, and it won't be the last. In the 90s, the radio industry lobbied to change the limit on station ownership, and the result was a company that owned 40 stations could now own as many as it could buy around the country, and the result was more homogenized syndicated content and less regional identity. And, you know, you see this pattern over and over throughout

media. It seems to almost be a law of the media universe, but that doesn't mean that there isn't cool work out there or that there isn't cool people still doing that work independently, outside the confines of the algorithm. Some of these weird little projects can and do transcend or survive changing tastes and confining algorithmic platforms. And one of those survivors is XKCD, a webcomic I have been reading since like 2006. It is written by Randall Munroe, an incredibly curious and funny thinker who can comfortably bring up weird concepts from physics, coding, math, history, and spin them into not just comedic gold, but content that actually educates and informs you about the world and makes you think differently.

And he has been able to take his very specific worldview and turn it into a media empire that he runs on his own terms. I have always been inspired by his work, so I am so excited to have him on the show today. Please welcome Randall Munroe, author of the new book, What If Too. Randall, thank you so much for being on the show today. Hey, thanks for having me. This is kind of unique for me because it's, I think, the first time I've had someone on the show whose work I have been reading for as long as yours. I have been reading your comic XKCD since,

God, probably since the beginning, since the mid-2000s at the very least. Where were you in the mid-2000s? Well, my memory was that I... Not to date ourselves. I went to college at Bard College at Upstate New York. I remember talking with my friends about the comic, and so I thought that I was

reading it while I was at college, but I graduated in 04 and I saw that you started in 05. So I must have been reading it since like 2006 or something in that case. Yeah. It's funny how once you get a few years between you and things, people, I will have people insist to me that I drew a comic like at a specific time in their life where I'm like, I promise I was not on the internet at that point. You know, I was not posting comics at that point, but they're like, no, no, no, you must have it wrong. Cause I remember this. Yeah, it is incredible. I do it myself even after having done multiple television episodes about the fallibility of human memory,

how often I am still certain of things because of how the version that exists in my brain currently, I'm like, this must match reality in the past. There has to be a one-to-one correspondence, even though I know that's not how memory works. We're very, very easily tricked by memory. But you're really unique in that I think you're a, you're one of the very few internet media publications that existed in that, you know,

you're a one person shop. You're making the comic yourself. You're uploading it. And you've been doing it continuously for close to two decades now in a very similar style with, you know, to that you had at the beginning. That's like pretty exceptionally rare. I'm curious how you have seen the internet change in that time. Certainly internet culture has evolved enormously in that

time. Yeah. I think one of the things that sticks out to me the most again, you know, maybe this is a fallible memory talking, but what I remember is when I was starting out, I said, I have a website and people are looking at it. And people would ask, well, how do they find it? Where do you advertise it? And I remember struggling to explain, well, if you put something up, sometimes people will see it,

but then they'll send it to their friends, and then they'll send it to their friends. And ultimately that ends up reaching people really fast, and it's this really like weirdly powerful thing. And I think I did not have the word for like viral marketing, you know, like viral Internet phenomenon. Yeah. So I was like trying because I remember trying to put that into words to say like, well, there's sort of, you know, it's like word of mouth. Although, you know, it's it's yeah, it's hard to explain.

But it turns out a lot of people can see something really quickly that way. But virality was so different back then. I mean, we did have that word in 2006, 2007 to a certain extent. So I, at the time, was in a sketch comedy group called Old English, and we put our video sketches on the internet. And I compressed them with QuickTime Player myself. This was before YouTube. I compressed the videos, uploaded them. You needed to install QuickTime Player on your computer in order to watch them, but they would go viral. And we had a little backend, you know, server monitor of, you know,

the counter for how many people were visiting the site. And I remember thinking like, how did people find it? I knew that they must've just been emailing each other, but that's what virality meant at the time was just this sort of like shadowy network of people sending emails, people telling each other, maybe chatting in IRC chat rooms, whatever. Now, virality, we still have it, but it's so tightly controlled by a couple companies' algorithms.

And it's entirely determined by whether you got in the YouTube sidebar, whether TikTok is showing it to people, et cetera. And it's funny because it has the same effect, but it's so tightly channeled through a couple of corporations. It's a completely different internet now. Yeah, it's true. I mean, even at the time though, there were a few places that would drive a surprising amount of content. I don't know. This is almost a little outside my wheelhouse in terms of, you know, internet marketing, I guess.

But, like, I remember checking server stats, you know, back in the day and seeing a huge amount of traffic coming through StumbleUpon, which was definitely, like, an error. And I remember, you know, installing the extension and clicking, and it was just, you know, it was sort of an algorithm, but also sort of just, like, stuff got fed into it, and if other people were clicking on it, then you you know, it was sort of an algorithm, but also sort of just like stuff got fed into it.

And if other people were clicking on it, then you saw it, too. But it was weird how much that could be a driver of things, you know. Yeah, it was a serendipity machine. And one of the, you know, TikTok as a platform I have very mixed feelings about. But one of the things that drew me to it initially was it had a little bit of that feeling of serendipity, that that, you know, what I call the early internet, it's late to other people, but, you know, the mid-2000s internet

had that sort of serendipitous feeling. You, though, and your work, let's talk about the comic for a little bit more before we get into the book, really felt like it defined to me almost, or at least exemplified an era in internet culture that uh you know the uh very i hesitate to use the word geeky but the very sort of technical uh uh joke writing that you would do about topics in science math uh philosophy um and the the sort

of stick figure comic style um was very much like when I think about what Internet culture was like in that period, I very much like imagine your work. What got you started doing it? I'm sure you've told the story many times, but I've actually never heard it. So I'm very curious. No, no, no. Well, it's funny. I mean, I didn't sit down and be like, I want to I want to try to capture the culture, you know, of what's going on. I was just I so I started off drawing, just drawing, uh, in my notebooks, mostly in class while I was supposed to be listening. And then at some point I had a website and like a lot of people in the early two thousands, I didn't really know what to do with it, but I was maintaining it, you know? Um, and so I,

at some point I was like, Hey, I have all these drawings in these notebooks that are falling apart. I should like scan some of them and all these drawings in these notebooks that are falling apart. I should like scan some of them and put them on the computer so I don't lose them. And so I scanned them and I put them in a folder on my website. And people started like passing some of them around. And then as they, you know, started to get sent more and more places, I was like, oh, people like these drawings. I can keep making these. This is fun, you know.

like these drawings, I can keep making these, this is fun, you know. But I was really trying to trying, I was just writing down stuff, you know, telling jokes about the stuff my friends were talking about the stuff going on in my life, you know. And it just happened to be in that time and place, you know, where I was that. But for me, I really wasn't thinking... So now and then, the most fun thing about this whole job is people finding it and being really excited. Because they're like, oh man, there's someone else out there who thinks this same thing I do about traffic signals. Or who is annoyed by this feature of this piece of software. And for me, I get that feeling, except I get to learn that there were like,

tons and tons and tons of people out there who felt the way I did. So you know, it's really fun in that way. Just like, whatever era it is, you know, whatever moment it is, or subgroup, it's just like finding out, oh, hey, there are lots of people out there who, you know, feel like I do about these things. It's really like comforting, you know, really nice. One of the things that I have always loved about your work is that, first of all, for those who haven't seen it, and I have trouble imagining there's a lot of people who fall into this category because I find it very ubiquitous, but, you know, you do a lot. of course there are, of course there are, but this is the internet we're talking to. This podcast is going out on the internet. Surely people have seen

an XKCD comic or two. If you go to the website, I'm sure you'll see some that you recognize. Um, but, uh, you know, so many of your strips are about topics in science, mathematics, other fields like that. And they fall loosely into, you know, the category that I would say are like, you know, there's this humor that like professors would put onto the door of their office right that you would look at while you're waiting for office hours to open um like oh here's something that a that a professor found funny but um what i love about your work as a comedy writer is that you're often like isolating something very small and funny about a particular technical subject, whether it's chemistry or physics or whatever the hell it is, and really

blowing it out into a huge, you know, set of ideas. Um, I know that sounds very vague. I'm a little bit curious if you could talk about like what sort of ideas you are drawn to that like make you want to do those investigations. Does that make sense? Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm, I guess I'm not, I'm not totally sure. Like one thing that has been really fun is discovering that like I can dive into something and even if it doesn't fit the mold of like what I would think of as a usual comic that I can like dig into a subject make a chart about it you know uh uh try to visualize it and then and then as long as I draw a box around it at the end it's a comic and I can post it

and and a lot of the time what I'll do is I will be trying to understand something and I'll be like, okay, does it work this way? Well, no. Okay, well, why not? You know, well, what about, does that mean this? You know, as I'm trying to put it together, you know, I'll ask some question like, I remember when I was learning about SQL injections, SQL injections, you know, which is like a way that you can attack databases back in the day.

Someone was walking me through the process because I was like, oh, okay, yeah, I can see how this kind of parser would break when you read this data. You could insert a command into a piece of text and the computer trying to read the piece of text would accidentally interpret the command. And I was like, oh man,

so this is a common flaw things have. And then I thought for a minute And I was like, oh man, so this is a common flaw things have. And then I thought for a minute, I was like, well, wait, am I understanding right? Like, what if, but what if you're a parent and you actually name your kid after a command? Like, like what if you insert that text into your kid's actual name? Will they just like break computer systems their whole life? Is that like, what do they do to deal with that? And then as I sort of realized, I was like, that can't be how that works, right? And then as I sort of realized, oh, that is how that works. I'm like, well, I'm going to just do a comic about someone doing that.

And I really had to fight with my editors later on. I ultimately agreed it would not be a good idea to title my book with Database Injection in the name. later on. I ultimately agreed it would not be a good idea to title my book with Database Injection in the name. I understand that that would be rude to the very nice people who are running stores and trying to sell my books,

but boy, I was tempted. If you sell this book, it will crash the database system at your bookshop. That's a hell of a selling point. I love that, though. And that is, I don't know, that sort of delightful idea is what is so present in your work and what has always drawn me to it. And it's the sort of, you have that sort of thought as a reader, oh, that's the sort of thing I like to think of if I had thought of anything that clever, which is a

wonderful sort of feeling to get. Well, tell me about the book. Your new book is What If Too. This is based on your, or it's a sequel to your first book where you expand. You tell me how you describe it. I was about to try to describe it, and I think I was going to butcher it. Well, the way I started doing What If was, you know, when I'm doing these comics about various science topics, I really did not expect this, but I started getting letters from people where they wanted me to settle some argument they were having with their friends. You know, like, me and my friend were having an argument about whether if Superman can move at this percent of the speed of light

and you fire this, you know, kind of projectile at him and he did this, what would, you know, what would happen? And, and the, and the messages always had this, like a little bit of a subtext to them that was like, we don't think this is a good enough question to bother a real scientist with. Like we all agree it's pretty ridiculous, but, but, you know, then we both thought, oh yeah, that, that guy who does the comics, he seems like he must have a lot of free time. And, and so I would be insulted, but also they were, yeah, that guy who does the comics, he seems like he must have a lot of free time. And so I would be insulted, but also they were kind of right. You know, I was like, because I would get these questions, and I would be like, well, now I'm really curious, too.

And then I would think, okay, wait, I think I know how to solve this. I think. Well, okay, I'd have to get this data, which I think I could find by going to this source. And then, like, before I know it, it's like I blacked out and six hours have passed. And I have hundreds of PDFs open, a whole bunch of calculations spread out in front of me, and I have an answer to their Superman question. And then I'd be like, okay, did I really need to spend six hours on that? No, but I did. Okay, I'm going to write this up and send the most satisfying answer.

And then half the time I would send it, and they would be like, oh, lol I did. Okay, I'm going to write this up and send them the most satisfying answer. And then half the time I would send it and they would be like, oh, lol, thanks. It was clear they did not actually want this detailed answer. Or sometimes I'd email it and the email would bounce or they'd be really excited. But then I would be like, I put a lot of work into that.

Maybe I should save these. And so I started, and they were so much fun to answer people's questions. So I would I started posting them on my website and soliciting more of them. And and then that turned into what if and now what if, too? There's something so funny and thrilling about taking a stupid question or a stupid idea and following it through really, really rigorously as best you can, which is what you do in the book, right? Like, what are some of your favorite questions that you tackle in this book? What I like are the questions where you hear it

and you're like, I think I know what the answer to that is, but I'm not actually 100% sure. And so now I'm curious too. Someone asked what would happen if they went and stood over the geyser at Old Faithful and stood there when it erupted. Yeah. And the questioner, I think, was like, you know, I'm sure it seems like I'd probably die, right? But also how and like what would happen? At the very least, your colon would be really

clean yeah yeah and so that that i was like yeah i mean that's gotta it must be that you're flung into the air but well no wait or is it just steam would you i mean you'd get burned i'm sure it is hot right yellowstone is hot isn't it i think you know and so then i would like immediately that raised like three or four new questions and i like went and looked it up and I ended up finding a book by a park historian at Yellowstone that like listed all of the different ways that people have died exploring the park and the hazards there. And I learned and I learned a bunch of really cool, interesting stuff, including that no one as far as the the historian could tell it doesn't sound like there are any documented cases of anyone dying in a in an eruption of old faithful um which is great a huge number of people have been burned pretty badly oh god okay especially back in around the 20s before they really had signs up or boardwalks.

It was like every couple of years, a tourist would be leaning over the geyser to look down into the vent and exactly what you would think would happen happens. But what I learned from this was that really the big danger around Yellowstone isn't the geyser itself, it's that in the field surrounding it the sort of geyser field there are a lot of these boiling mineral water pools with a crust over the surface and so if you try to walk what looks like solid ground could be um uh you know you can just like break through it's like a creme brulee uh situation into boiling water, and you'll plunge into boiling water with all kinds

of weird chemicals and stuff. Wow. So no one's been killed by Old Faithful erupting, but a lot of people have died that way by plunging through these crusts as they're trying to walk around Old Faithful. And it really left me, learning

all this, really left me with a respect for the boardwalk railings and signs because like you see that you're like oh that must be some kind of a weird liability thing it's like no it's because people die all the time like really listen to the signs they know what listen to the uh the the park people at yellowstones and like absolutely stay on the boardwalk it is pretty wild how many times because you go to a national park and you're like, well, this is for tourists. Like everything must be pretty safe here. And then you encounter something where like, no, you'll die. Like this is a hike you can go on and you can fall off

and you can very much die in it. Yeah. And it's, and it's a really, it's sort of a really interesting and subtle question because there's like a certain degree to which the park is responsible and a degree to which people are responsible like they're inviting you to come there but then how much do you do do they have to warn you about the dangers of things yeah you know and and so and i think that's just there's no easy answer you know it's a really tough question that they that they've struggled with you know if you're running a a place like that you know you invite people to come and look at the bears but i think that creates a certain obligation to let them know

about bear safety and make sure they've understood what you're telling them, you know, because on one hand, you know, someone goes up to a bear and tries to take a photo posing on it, or a bison especially are pretty, are more dangerous than people realize. You know, on one hand, you're like, well, that's that person's fault. You know, it's not nature provided the bears and the person decided to go up and pose with it. So in one sense, like the park can't be responsible for making everyone make good decisions. But at the same time, you know, they're inviting people there. They're hosting them.

People walking around a park have an expectation that like, oh, yeah yeah, well whatever I see has been cleared by the park people. So it's like you have to arrive at a mutual understanding about expectations. I don't know, it's sort of not where I expected to end up with that question, but it's a really interesting one. Even so often I'll start with, like, here's my overall question I'm trying to answer.

But then the actual answer is, like, a nice conclusion. But really what's interesting is all the new questions I ran into along the way. Yeah. Well, I want to ask you about how you write a fire pole from the moon to the earth. But first we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Randall Munroe.

Okay, we're back with Randall Munroe. I really want to know the answer to this one. How do you write a fire pole from the moon to the earth? Does that even make sense to ask as a question? It's in your press release about the book, so you must have written about it yeah yeah yeah um no this was a this was a great question um from a five year old in germany and so one of the fun things about what if questions is that you get to like take the premise as a given you're like okay i know it would be impossible to connect the Earth and the moon with a fire pole.

But like supposing you did. Yeah. Then, and so you don't have to worry about how it works. You know, like it's just, it's supported by some, in some way. Then what if you try to climb up it? How long would it take? And so it's fun because if you can imagine that there is a fire pole like anchored to the moon end and you're standing on the moon. And one of the things that's sort of funny to think about is from the moon, you'd be going up. Yeah. So you'd be climbing up this pole

toward the earth. But then at some point, um, you know, a little ways, uh, along the pole, But then at some point, you know, a little ways along the pole, the direction of down would start to turn around because you would start being pulled down toward the Earth by the Earth's gravity. And so you could climb up the pole at the moon. It would be a lot easier than climbing a pole on Earth because you'd have a lot less gravity to fight against i looked up to try to figure out okay how fast can you climb a pole assuming your spacesuit is like lightweight and and uh easy to move around in yeah um and i looked up okay what's the fastest that people climb poles and i was delighted to discover that there are there are international competitive pole climbing championships. Of course there are.

And so that was like a fun rabbit hole to go down to like, all right, well, what's the world record? Are there any controversies? You know, like, has there ever been a contested championship? You know, and I'm immediately like, oh, what's the fun drama in the competitive pole climbing world? I think it's really funny that you didn't revise this question to say, hey, it could just be a ladder. Like we could have there be some pegs on the side, you know, but you stuck with, no, no, no.

This is somebody who's shimmying the whole way up a pole with no handholds. I know, right? And it's interesting the ways that they climb. No, right? And it's interesting the ways that they climb. Like you – I think the really efficient way to climb a pole is like you have like a strap in your hands that you wrap around it. So you're kind of leaning back and that way you can brace your feet against it and get more traction. Oh, you're almost like walking up it a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. If you see people sometimes who climb palm trees, they'll often have a trick like that. a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. If you see people, sometimes you climb palm trees, they'll often have a trick like that. Yeah. Um, but yeah, no, I mean, but like the moment you asked that part of my brain was like, are there ladder climbing championships? It's like, I mean, it's like, like rock climbing, but if you don't like hard problems, you don't like, you don't, it's like rock climbing, but like less thinking more, more just the physical motions. Um, Like less thinking. Yeah. More just the physical motions.

But yeah, I assume, who do you think the champion, who's going to be the world champion ladder climber? I feel like it's probably a rock climber. Yeah, I would think so. I feel like there must be a lot of skill crossover. Well, except that rock climbers do it very deliberately. Okay, there must be a speed category for rock climbing. I would assume that there is. Yeah, I think there's speed climbing.

But it's generally a pretty deliberate activity, rock climbing. Yeah, that's true. There's a lot of safety involved. Ladder climbing, you know, you're really just putting one hand over another as fast as you can if you're trying to do it speedily, I guess. Yeah, I wonder if there's another. Do you think gymnasts who do parallel bar? Okay. See, this is exactly, this is how this works.

I get, you know, like each, even when the question itself is kind of straightforward, it like leads you down all these like side avenues. Yeah. So a lot of my process of writing, of answering these is like go down a whole bunch of side avenues and then at the end be like, okay, which of those actually those actually led somewhere fun yes can i ask you a completely different rabbit hole on this question yeah you said if you uh you know you ignore the fact that it's impossible to connect a uh you know a pole or a ladder from the moon to the earth and that immediately started me wondering like why i mean apart from the logistical challenge of doing it which let's

set aside um i'm thinking through why well okay the earth and the moon rotate at different speeds uh or you know at different rates we're not always looking at the same face of the moon all the time correct are we wait wait yep no no we are always looking at the same face of the moon yeah we are okay plus or minus a little it wobbles a little. Yeah. Which is one of those words that there are a bunch of words for the moon's orbit that I never say how loud. Someone just wrote a good article about like words that you're nervous about pronouncing. It's going to be like peroidal or doidal or something like that.

Yeah. So there's, I think, libration, but I always mix it up with Libation, which I think is drinks. And so – but yeah, there's like Obliquity, I think, which also I mix up with Obsequity. There are so many of these. But the – yeah, so the first – the problem that might occur to you would be materials. So like you could anchor it to the moon's face and the moon does wobble around a little bit, but it would stay mostly pointed in the same direction. Like the moon moves, the earth moves around in the sky from the moon.

I think by like on the order of like 15 degrees, it, you know, shifts around away from the center point. But, you know, you could still, you could have the pole anchored there and pointing toward the Earth. What's tricky is that the Earth end of the pole couldn't be in orbit. Because as you get closer to the Earth, your orbit speed speeds way, way up. So like out at the moon's distance, the moon is moving at about a thousand meters per second, a kilometer per second, which is really slow. So stuff that's orbiting the earth, I think it's about seven or eight thousand meters per second down at like very close to the earth. So like the space station. So what you've got is the Earth is over on one side,

and then right next to the Earth you've got stuff whipping around it really fast. Like every 90 minutes it circles. That's how fast satellites go. And the Moon is out here taking way out at the other, you know, far away, taking a full month to orbit around. Yeah. And so if you want the pole to connect from the Moon to the Earth, it's going to get down to the Earth, but it's still going to be moving at that really slow one orbit a month speed.

And that's just not fast enough. So the reason things stay in orbit is that they're going so fast that they fight gravity. Oh, it's icy. It's not, because the moon is far enough away, it doesn't need to orbit so quickly in order to not fall into the earth and like just become part of earth. Yeah, exactly. Got it. So you'd have this pole dangling down from the earth,

but like down at the earth end of the pole, it's not gonna be weightless. It's not gonna be in space. It's gonna be like hanging down with all, you know, tens of thousands of, you know, hundreds of thousands of kilometers of pole weight, all of that pulling on the moon, you know? And so there's, we don't have any materials right now

that you could build that pole out of. You know, it's sort of the same problem as building a space elevator. You've got to find stuff with enough tensile strength. you must have done a lot of research on space elevators which in science fiction are always like hey this is the easy way to get into orbit as you build a space elevator until you actually start like looking into the details of building space elevators and it gets it runs into exactly this problem so even if you did have a moon that was like the the face of the moon on either side was like locked to the same

side of the earth you'd still run into this into this orbiting problem yeah yeah that stuff that's close to the earth has to orbit at different speeds um you know if if they're close enough or if you have strong enough materials you can do it um but what's what so with this question what i assume is okay you've got a fire pole and it's somehow made of material strong enough that it can just dangle there, and it'll hold its position pretty well. You know, like, it's not going to get whipped around by, for example, winds at the end. Because if it's going to dip down into the atmosphere and get you close to the ground... So this is something I had never tried to calculate before, but like one thing that I saw that really surprised me once was someone who said the,

how big is the area of the earth that's under the moon? And, and it's sort of a weird question, but like now and then the moon passes straight over you. And if you pointed straight up, you're, you know, you are pointing straight at the surface of the moon passes straight over you. And if you pointed straight up, you're, you know, you are pointing straight at the surface of the moon. If I pointed straight perpendicular to the ground on which I stand, I point straight up. There's a moment occasionally where the moon is at the other end of that invisible line.

Yeah. And so if you do the, I forget exactly how big the area is that's directly under the moon. I think it's roughly the size of the motorway around London. Is it the M25? It would be the, wouldn't it be the size of the totality of an eclipse or is that,

am I overcomplicating it? No, no, that's about right. The eclipse has the thing where the sun has area as well, and so the totality zone is a cone. It's like the umbra of the shadow tapers a little bit coming toward the earth. So it's not quite exact, but that's roughly the right idea. But yeah, so there's this area. I calculated that once.

I was like, okay, how big is the area under the moon? And it's on the scale of a city. But how fast is that area moving is another question that I hadn't really thought about. But like the moon is moving at a thousand uh about a thousand meters per second i think is the speed but then um at the surface of the earth if it's going around at that speed really far away then right here at the surface right here really close to the center you know uh on the surface of the earth it's moving along a lot more slowly sort of like how the like the you know you're if you swing something around the end is moving a lot faster slowly. Sort of like how the, like the, you know, your, if you swing something around,

the end is moving a lot faster than the part right by your hand. Right. And so the, the moon is actually moving relative to the earth, you know, relative to the center of the earth. It's only about 35 miles per hour. Oh, wow. So if the earth were not spinning, then the bottom end of the fire pole would just be moving over the surface at 35 miles an hour. Like you could conceivably run along and grab it, you know, like you would just be hanging out and be like, all right, Hey,

my space alerts app says the moon fire pole is going to be coming through town in a couple hours. You know, let's go out there and get, you know, like maybe you get on your bike and get up to, Space Alerts app says the moon fire pole is going to be coming through town in a couple hours. Let's go out there and get – maybe you get on your bike and get up to – you can go 20 miles an hour over flat ground on a bike. So you get riding. It comes by and you grab it and get yanked off the bike. Just like a Depression-era hobo hopping onto a train in a movie. Yeah, exactly.

But you wouldn't want to do that because that trip is much worse. It's much worse to go from the Earth to the moon on this barber pole because you have to fight Earth gravity shimmying up for a very long time like one of the championship pole shimmiers. And then when you get to the moon side, gravity is not going to help you out as much. What you want to do is climb the moon end where there's much gravity, where there's much less gravity, and then do a controlled slide down on the earth end. That would save – it's a lot more energy going one way than the other. Yeah, yeah. And that's why rockets are so hard to build.

That's why it took that gigantic Saturn V rocket to get to the moon. But then they got back using basically the engines inside that little lander plus uh you know the orbiter oh man this reminds me of one of my favorite comics of yours and and the way your comics work is you know they'll just come to mind once or twice a year you know and there was one where one year one of the characters i'm gonna i'm gonna you know ruin it but um one of the characters one character says to another oh what are you thinking about and the other character says oh i'm just thinking about the fact that we're trapped at the bottom of a gravity well,

that like on Earth, we are just, we're just trapped because we live on this big ball. It takes so much energy to get off the Earth in the first place. It's like extraordinarily difficult. We have to burn enormous amounts of fuel just to get like anything into space whatsoever. And if you look at it in that sense, it's like we're trapped down here.

You know, we're at the bottom of the hole and it's really hard to get out. And that just stuck with me as like a very dark insight into like the nature of our reality that I had never had before. Yeah. And yeah, we can, you know, we can get out. It's like, we're trapped here, but ultimately, like, you know, but it's hard to get out. But also that makes it even cooler that we figured out ways to.

And it makes the problem of figuring out more efficient ways to like the space elevator, like lots of fun. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible that we've just spent about close to half an hour discussing exactly one of these problems, each of which is so fascinating. Yeah, and we're like halfway.

Well, because the thing that you just mentioned, like the energy. When you're coming down the pole, you still have to deal with that amount of energy. Like you think, oh, this is easy. Now I'm just sliding. Yeah. But like if you let yourself slide, you build up speed. Like you have to slow down at some point. And this is the problem that spacecraft deal with with reentry.

You've got all this speed. You don't want to be going fast, but you are because you had to be to be in orbit. And now how do you slow down? And the reason they have those big heat shields is it takes so much energy. There's so much energy that they have that they need to burn off somehow. That like heating up a heat shield and, you know, even letting bits of it vaporize is like one of the only ways we could figure out to do that without taking a huge amount of space and material. So like as you're sliding down this pole, you're like, oh, no problem. I'll just like clamp onto the pole to like slow down.

But if you're doing that to try to shed that much speed, your hands are going to start to get really hot. Like you're going to start melting whatever your gloves are. You're going to have to figure out like brake pads. Your brake pads are going to heat up and wear away. Like it's bad enough taking a truck down a hill where they have those signs that are like, Hey, if your brakes fail down this hill, you know, turn off into this gravel pit so your truck doesn't, you know, build up speed. But like going down those hills can be really rough on brakes. And that's just like going a mile vertically. Yeah. This is going, you know, tens of thousands of miles in, in that gravity that gravity. So you would literally need one of those space shuttle heat shields on your hands in order to, because instead of the friction being the air against the bottom of the space shuttle,

it's the pole against your gloves. Yeah, yeah. It's actually, it's like, it would be easier if you could use the air just because, you know, you could heat up the air and then let it go away. Like grabbing onto the pole, you've got a very limited amount of pole to work with. If the pole gets too hot, is it going to snap? Like, are you going to start wearing away?

Are you going to wear away the pole if your gloves are too strong and you're going too fast? This is what's great about your work is that it illuminates these, you know, again, these are thought experiments. They're somewhat, they seem somewhat silly or they're humorous, but like they really illuminate like for you actual problems in science, engineering, math. Like the fact that, the fact that, okay, yeah, when you're, I never thought of it that way. When you're reentering earth, there's like an enormous amount of energy that you need to do something with. I never thought of it that way.

When you're reentering Earth, there's like an enormous amount of energy that you need to do something with. That like I understand something now about the challenges that face people at NASA when they're trying to design these things that I didn't before. Sorry, I cut you off. Yeah, the same math. You can use the same math to solve like ridiculous questions and serious important ones. and serious, important ones, you know? So like looking at these ridiculous questions, it's partly fun just because they're fun, but it's also fun because then like you swap out one of the terms in the question

and suddenly you're like working on a real, actual important problem. Yeah. Wait, so I have one more question about the very hot hands. What if instead of doing a slide, like a skid, like a fire person does

when they go down the pole right what if i say no i'm just gonna go inch by inch i'm gonna grab onto the pole and i'm just gonna you know go to like now i go down six inches now i go down six more inches i'm not using friction i'm just sort of like doing a controlled descent i'm treating it like i'm walking down a flight of stairs but with with a pole. Why, in my imagination, nothing is getting hot, but am I wrong? Is there, what is happening to the energy in that case? No, you're right. Nothing is getting hot.

So you might find you're gonna get hot because this is expending a lot of energy with your muscles. Right. You're doing a lot. Now, it's a little bit tricky following the flow of energy here because like your muscles are doing work. So like that's energy that you are adding to the system.

But what they're also doing is, like, when you shimmy down for a second, your hands are heating up a little bit. You know, your muscles are heating up a little bit. Your body speeds up and then it stops in the jolt of stopping. You know, you've gained some speed and lost it and the atoms in your body are jiggling a little bit more than they were and if you do it slowly enough you you stay in equilibrium with your environment you radiate that heat away just as fast as you were um but you could find that maybe you're doing that little shimmying you drop a little stop drop a little stop, drop a little stop. Like for the first few minutes, your hands don't heat up.

But then very slowly you start to notice like, oh, wow, this is actually getting warm. It's like if you've ever like bent a piece of metal. Yeah. Like you're trying to break it. You'll bend it a few times and you don't notice that it's getting a little bit warmer because it's not that much heat and it's, you know, being spread out efficiently through the metal. But then you keep doing it. And then before you know it, you like shift your hand a little bit and you get burned by the part of the paperclip that you're that's getting the

hottest. I love, though, that you connected to that like universal. I mean, that's something I did over and over again as a kid, you know, like getting you get a test from the teacher that's held together the paperclip and you bend it and you feel it get hot. And, you know, that sort of like very, your work often goes back to that very, you know, childlike understanding of physics that we all develop just by, I think about all the time when I'm a little kid, when I was a little kid and you just sort of play with physical objects and like see how they behave in this, you know, stuff like spinning quarters or like watching how light refracts through water, like that kind of thing. And a lot of times your work like connects me back to that experience of like, you know, trying to understand the world in this very elemental way, which is really enjoyable.

Yeah, that's I mean, I feel like that's how I try to understand stuff myself. Yeah, that's, I mean, I feel like that's how I try to understand stuff myself. Like, like, I think people have this idea of, of physics and math as being a sort of thing, like you look at it, you look at an equation and something is happening. You know, it's like you're, you can read this language and in your brain, you see some kind of abstract symphony of numbers that, you know, and like, it's sort of like learning a language, but it's also, for me, I'm always trying to connect it up to something real so that I feel like I have a gut level understanding of it. You know, like when I look at an equation, I'm thinking like, okay, this is saying that if this thing gets big, this thing will get smaller or bigger. Okay, I don't know. Let's see, you know,

you know, I'm, I'm always trying to connect the, like these abstract ideas to those real everyday experiences just so I can understand them, you know, like, cause I don't know what, what a random abstract math function means, except in terms of things that I have experienced and looked at. This is just making me think about why my high school physics teacher was such a good teacher. Because it's that connection of it to real experience is like what makes you go, aha, and what makes the problem suddenly seem vital and interesting. It's like having that. And your work does that so effectively.

Oh, thanks. Let's take another quick break. But afterwards, I want to keep getting into more of these. We'll be right back with more Randall Munroe. OK, we're back with Randall Munroe. So, look, I had this thought occur to me like a couple of weeks ago. We cover global warming a lot on this show. And I was thinking about the air conditioning in my home and thinking about the fact that I know what the air conditioning does. It takes hot air from my home and it pumps it outdoors. And it thus makes the air in my home cooler.

It made me wonder if there is any effect on global warming from the simple fact that we are taking some heat from indoors and we're pumping it outdoors, if that makes sense. Like if the total volume of indoor space in the world that we are cooling is enough to increase the heat outside. That was an idle thought that I had. Here I see now that you answer, you attempt to answer what I would call a very similar question, but a much more fun question than the one that I just asked, but it's maybe related, which is that, could you solve global warming by having everyone open their freezer doors? A really wonderful question. Uh, who asked this question and would it actually work? I can't imagine it would, but I'd love to hear. No, this is, this is from, uh, uh, Nicholas, uh,

who, who said, uh, who, yeah, no, so it wouldn't work. Spoiler. And it wouldn't work because fridges heat their surroundings. Freezers, what they do is they move heat from the inside to the outside. And they don't do it perfectly efficiently, which is why they consume power. And so your fridge will cool down the interior and move that heat to the coils in the back where it dumps it out. And it actually dumps out more

heat than it removed because of the extra power it's taking to run the process. And so like on net, your fridge makes the front cooler and the back hotter. And overall, it heats up. And this, and it's basically the same thing as an air conditioner you know where a heat pump style air conditioner where you get um you know you're removing heat from inside your house and moving it outside you're basically just turning your house into a giant freezer that you are not turning down enough you're not turning the temperature down enough to actually freeze anything. So there was a poll recently, sort of weird.

I like when polls will ask people questions that are like factual, where they ask people, do you think it takes more, it costs more energy to heat or cool the average house? Oh. In the US.S.? And I think they were asking year-round. Wait, can I ask a couple questions about that question? Sure.

Because I want to guess, but I have questions about the question first. Mm-hmm. Which is that, okay, is it the average home, are we taking average climate in the United States into account? Because I don't know if, like here in Los Angeles, I have to cool my house much, much, much more often than I heat it. I only heat it a couple days a year because I have pretty good insulation. And I don't know if I were to average out the entire United States, which places need to be heated or cooled more often.

Yeah. I think the question was asking about the average American home. So it would be like the average climate, like the typical, like if you pick a random house, is it more likely that they spend the energy cost, the energy, the amount of energy consumed to heat it or cool it is bigger. And it's the amount of energy consumed, like if we're, it's not the literal dollar amount. Right. I mean, yeah, depending on whether you get, how you get electricity, fuel oil, this is like consumption at that. So the stats I looked up were consumption at the at the house, like the amount of either fuel or electricity that are crossing over and, you know, onto your property. stuff in the house that makes it hot. Just being in a house with the doors closed, right? And stuff happening in the house, the house will naturally get a little hotter than its surroundings because

there's people in it and there's cooking being done and stuff like that. Um, but cooling is, feels more against nature to me. Yeah. The house is not going to get cold by itself. Yeah. So you're, you're not alone not alone. They even broke it down by region. This was a YouGov poll. Everyone in all regions agreed cooling seems more like it takes more energy. And the answer is heating, and it's not even close. Wow. In fact, it's something like, you know, like heating interior spaces takes like about five times more energy than cooling, than air conditioning across the U.S. on average.

And also even just heating hot water in most areas takes more energy than air conditioning. Wow. And I think people have this. I was thinking about like, well, why is, you know, when I was reading the question, I was like, yeah, I'm not sure it could be either one, you know, like I didn't realize that it was heating. Uh, and, and I think it's because air conditioning feels like a luxury. Yeah. You know, it also costs more because he, uh, you know, we're used to very cheap oil and natural gas prices, whereas cooling is done with electricity and therefore often costs more. Like my air conditioning bill, my electricity bill is higher than my gas bill.

And I think that's the case for most people. And so I think they have that they have that idea as well. Like, you know, dad saying dads tend to want to keep the thermostat, tend to worry about more about the thermostat in the summer than they do in the winter because of the cost. tend to worry more about the thermostat in the summer than they do in the winter because of the cost. But yeah, it's funny that it's really, you know, the heating that is the biggest driver, especially I didn't realize how much hot water, heating hot water is a big consumer of energy.

Yeah, but people have this impression of cooling as a luxury, I think, and heating as like a necessity that's going to be built in. It's like the number of houses that don't have air conditioning is much larger, I think, than the number that don't have heating of some kind across the U.S. Even though in places like Los Angeles, it might be the other way around. Well, no, it actually is the case that I believe heating in, I'm not entirely sure what is required in like building codes here, but it's more common to have, you know, at the very least a little gas heater on the wall and no air conditioning than it is the other way around.

And that is interesting because like, you know, heat kills a lot of people and is going to kill even more people as the earth continues to get hotter. Yeah, yeah. And that's why like air conditioning is sort of becoming more widespread in general. But, like, it's also going to, you know, become more and more of a life-saving essential, you know. Yeah. But then you have this problem that, like, of course, air conditioning, you know, uses up energy. And burning energy is how we get climate change.

Yeah. And so what I decided, so if you have a fridge and you set it outside, you could add a sizable chunk to your electric bill by just opening the door, which meant the fridge compressor is just going to be running flat out all the time. And so what I tried to work out was

what if everyone in the world had a refrigerator and they all put them outside and left the doors open and just said, freeze, uh, told the refrigerator to run, you know, to freeze the interior, uh, cool the cooling area and freeze the freezer and then had the door open. So it just was going to be running flat out all the time and, and, uh, unable to, to, to, um, you know, just struggling forever, that would, it would definitely add a sizable chunk to your electric bill. Maybe not quite double it, probably, but, you know, add to it.

And so then what I wondered is, okay, that will directly heat the environment. Yeah. But not very much. Like, it's not all that much heat on net. It's not anything that you could measure. Because the direct heat being produced by that fridge is still, like, fairly small on the scale of, you know, the amount of sunlight coming into the earth and the flowing away and, you know, the overall heat flux. sunlight coming into the earth and the flowing away and, you know, the overall heat flux. But if the refrigerator is powered by fossil fuels, then when running that refrigerator is going to raise your electric bill, raise the amount of electricity you need to consume,

involve more production at the source. So I figured out if all of those people are running their refrigerator, are all running these 8 billion refrigerators using the mix of power sources that the U.S. has right now, you know, which is like a mix of some clean, some dirty, still some coal, which is the dirtiest, but, you know, a lot of natural gas in there. What would be the climate impact? And so I went and got these climate models, you know, where they have these estimates and looked at over the next century, if we just kept running the fridge, you know, kept running all these refrigerators, the added carbon put into the atmosphere by the power plants running to power those refrigerators would add, the estimate I came to was about

a third of a degree Celsius to the planet's temperature by the end of the century. That's a lot. On top of whatever we already are doing. Yeah. And that's not nothing. You know, that's the unit, the reference point I always have is that

at the last ice age, things were four degrees colder than they are now. Celsius, yeah. Yeah. And that's sort of, and then at the Cretaceous, which is about the hottest the Earth has been any time recently, when there were like palm trees in the Arctic and Antarctic, that was about eight degrees different.

Wow. And like when the ice age engine ended, the, the last glaciation ended, we went up from, you know, minus four to the present baseline. And now we've already gone, you know, basically one degree up from the modern baseline. So that's like a quarter of the way, a quarter of the distance to, uh, the, the last, uh last ice age when there were glaciers a mile deep where I'm sitting right now in Massachusetts. And so like a third of a degree is actually like, that's a substantial amount.

That's a third of the global warming we've done so far, and we've already definitely seen effects from that. Okay, so you're saying we shouldn't try this. Yeah, I think everyone, we shouldn't take 8 billion refrigerators, run them off of fossil fuels and leave them in our front yards for indefinitely. But but these but, you know, I did the math to make sure I wasn't sure. Yeah, I checked. And and it is actually a bad idea. But what I love about your work, again, is it illustrates like in a really clear way, like how simple these forces are to some degree.

Like one of the things that I love thinking about when it comes to climate change is that what you're talking about, fossil fuels, you know, you've described the energy system very simply here. You know, we're taking energy from one place. We're taking heat from one place, moving it to another. There's also inefficiency in the system. So we need to supply more energy.

And one of the things I really love thinking about is the fact that all that energy, that fossil fuel, is literally just sunlight that came to Earth billions of years ago, millions to billions of years ago, was absorbed by plants. They turned it into matter that was eaten by dinosaurs and whatnot. They died. That energy was contained in their bodies. That turned into various chemicals deep within the Earth's crust. And so we just have all this stored energy down there. And the reason that global warming exists as a problem is that we're taking energy that was stored in an inert form

that wasn't causing anything to get hotter. It's just sort of sitting there like a battery sitting on the shelf of the supermarket. And we're taking the stuff out of the ground and releasing all the energy into the air. And it's like, when you look at it that way, when you look at the system that simply, as your work encourages us to do,

it like makes the problem very obvious and clear. Yeah. And it's funny thinking that like when we burn coal, yeah, it's like lagged carboniferous sunlight from the period when the earth was covered in giant ferns. Some cool plants. Yeah. And then it's not quite, you know, there's also like we're burning the energy, but it's not even the energy that's the problem. Like because there are ways, you know, to burn that energy where the exhaust gases don't end up in the atmosphere. Right. You know, if we can do that, it's like the energy isn't the sin itself.

You know, it's specifically the way we're doing it. What if we were yeah what one thing that kind of kills me about about climate science is like at its core so like everything is complicated if you dig into it but you know enough there are always complicated problems and even the simplest question but like at its core the physics of of climate change are simple you know like? Like, in the 1800s, you read the papers, and they're like, huh, you add this gas to the atmosphere, then the heat flowing in is not counterbalanced in the same way by the heat coming out because we absorb a lot of the infrared,

and so the surface heats up. And they did, like, some rudimentary calculations of, like, how much the surface heats up. And those, like, 1800s calculations are, like, still basically right. And we've been refining it. We've learned, oh, they didn't account for this correctly. There's this complication.

Then there's like, El Nino has this effect. There are all these complicated cycles. But at its core, it's not the science. It's an easy problem science, it's, you know, it's like it's an easy problem. Like we understand it, you know. The heat is flowing in and not as much heat is flowing out. And so the heat is building up and it's getting hot. And that's why when people are like, oh, well, you know, the earth is very complicated.

And like it is. But this is actually, it's sort of as simple as it sounds almost, you know. And that's, yeah, and so I feel like people try to make it complicated, you know, or like confuse things on purpose to make it seem more like, well, who knows? And so I like to remind people like, no, that basic phenomenon is actually like pretty simple. Well, the problem is that we don't understand people as well as we understand the climate. And so the climate is very, you know, it's a simple energy system like you described. But why don't people, when presented with that information, take the action necessary to solve the problem that is so clear?

That is a question of psychology and sociology that we have a much harder time answering. We don't have, we know the easy solution to the the problem that is so clear, that is a question of psychology and sociology that we have a much harder time answering. We don't have, we know the easy solution to the physics problem. We don't know what the easy solution is to the social problem of solving climate change. Yeah, yeah, people are almost always the most complicated part of any system, I think.

Let me ask, because look, occasionally I'll have a question pop into my head that I feel like is a good fit for you, right? Like earlier this week, I found myself wondering if I were to build a time machine that allowed me to move in time, but not space, right? Literally, literally just allows me to move in time. Well, what could I do with that? Because the Earth is rotating. The Earth is rotating around the sun. The solar system is moving. I became curious about that system. However, look, I do a little bit of research myself. I work with researchers in my

own work. I can read a paper, but in terms of the first step of like, okay, I want to investigate that problem. When you come up with a stupid question that you're trying to answer, what are the first steps of your research process in case anyone listening wants to dive in themselves? Well, like, so like that question, right away you sort of have to ask about not moving and what that means. And so that's a place where, like, because anyone who has a physics background

is immediately going to get this kind of suspicious, like, now wait a minute. I know relativity says something about this. And so right away I'm like, all right, let's look into exactly whether, like, what happens when you try to define not moving, because I've seen, you know,

I've, I've run into these problems before with relativity, you know, with, uh, uh, I know that if you try to define a universal rest frame, you run into one small problem after another.

And eventually it leads you to the entire like invention of relativity. And yeah, this is the entire insight of of relativity and yeah this is the entire inside of relativity yeah there is no such thing right yeah well and and so what well and i think the entire you know and people often will will attach that to einstein but like the idea that there's no universal frame of reference but that's that is sort of that's, that is sort of, that's actually Galilean relativity. Like that's the idea that you had before was that maybe, you know, if one thing is moving, the other thing is still, you could define the other thing is still in the first thing is moving or vice versa. Um,

but the problem was that the equations for electromagnetism look like they aren't compatible with that. And that's why we didn't run into trouble with this until the late 1800s. You know, Maxwell wrote out his equations, but they show an electric field always moving. You know, like they show a light wave will always oscillate and move through space. But then Einstein is like, well, wait a minute.

If you're flying along next to the light wave, you're going to see it sitting still, but the equations don't allow for that. Because they say that if you have a light wave where the wave goes up and down, a moment later it'll oscillate and go down and up, and that's how waves move. But Einstein was like, well, wait a minute.

If you have no preferred frame of reference, then what about when you're moving along next to the light wave? You'd see it sitting still. That doesn't work. The equations don't allow for that. Yeah. And so you're like, do Maxwell's equations require us to have a universal frame of reference? And it turns out they don't. And the way you reconcile that is special relativity. And the way you reconcile that is special relativity. I love talking to you for 20 minutes, and I'm immediately just tripping out on relativity now. Well, but what I like about that question, so often when there's a question where I'm like, well, this is not a well-formed question because of relativity, that feels like an unsatisfying answer, though, because you're like, now, wait a minute.

Because it's, first of all, kind of an easy answer. Like, it's like a cop out, like, and be like, well, I know that that's a bad question because of relativity, you know, but that's sort of not helpful in a way, like, it's fun. But, but also, okay, but what did you mean, you know, what are the other ways of interpreting that question that might make more sense or might have another answer. And I think it's actually, it's really interesting to think, okay, you have a time machine, you can go back in time, but you are anchored to this spot on the ground. So I was walking, I have this, I got this geologic guide to the area where I live. And, and it was interesting trying to figure out, okay, these rocks I'm standing on, where did they start? Where did they first form? And what I learned is that the rocks I was standing on had formed on a side of a volcano, and then they'd been eroded away and flowed down

the volcano. And they formed this sort of conglomerate of large and small bits of igneous rock that had been transformed in various ways. And those rocks were on not – so I'm in eastern Massachusetts, which didn't used to be part of the North American continent. These rocks formed in a volcanic arc, sort of like what you have in like the philippines or japan right now um there are a lot of these arcs of of uh volcanoes where two plates are colliding and so there was a volcanic arc that collided with north america you know uh uh sort of 300 400 million years ago and so where I'm standing at one point was out in the middle of the ocean off the coast of North America.

And so I ended up getting these cool, there's a cool app that was made many years ago by some geology people that's like Assembly of Pangea, I think is the name of it. It's this obscure, it costs like $10 or something. And it just lets you scroll through a bunch of geologic record showing where the different parts of the Earth's crust

were at different times, you know, paleo-reconstruction and so I was playing with this and I'm trying to figure out, okay, where did this volcanic arc, because you could see this volcanic arc forming, and I'm like these are the rocks I was standing on and so I traced it backward if I kept on standing on these rocks,

I'd be on these volcanoes that moved north across the Atlantic. And they actually collided with a couple of other volcanic arcs as they were crossing, you know, what I would think of as the Atlantic, but it was like several oceans ago. And I learned the rocks that I'm standing on, like formed originally around the South Pole as a volcanic arc there. And then just drifted north. And that was about 500 to 600 million years ago.

And so that was, like, when life was first getting complicated, you know, when multicellular life was first exploding. And they've been drifting north since then. cellular life was first exploding. And they've been drifting north since then and have eventually made their way across and then collided with North America, stuck to it, almost broke loose during the Triassic, but have stayed here ever since. And so like when I pick up a rock, it's like you can put an anchor on this spot and move back in time and you would end up on a volcano on the South Pole. And that is just weird. And I, I feel like just geology is, is more of a trip than relativity. I think.

I love that. I love that as, I mean, it's an answer to my question that went in an entirely different place than I anticipated. Um, uh, well,

where do you like when, when you are, I guess that's also an answer to my question though, of like where, uh, how you do the research process that you're, uh, in an effort to answer that question, you end up going through like a strange geology app and, and et cetera. But do you have a, do you have a place that you go to first when you're looking for, you know, when you're, when you're puzzling through a new question? when you're puzzling through a new question? Sometimes.

I mean, a lot of the time when I'll pick a question, it's because I have an idea of somewhere to go for an answer. It'll be like, oh, this is asking about something that I could solve if I had a good paleo reconstruction. And didn't so-and-so mention that there was a cool app for this? Or like, oh, I remember seeing a book. I should go try to find that, or a PDF, or the report by so-and-so mention that there was a cool app for this? Or like, oh, I remember seeing a book. I should go try to find that, you know, or a PDF or the report by so-and-so. So I have like a whole pile of cool pieces of research where it's like, I don't really know what to do with this information, but it's really neat. And maybe at some point it will be useful. Like I'll have a question. I'll

be like, as a matter of fact, I know a cool paper about this, but a lot of it is like not stuff that I necessarily found while trying to answer that question. It's stuff that I found while like, I'm just trying to figure out, okay, there's a piece of bedrock sticking out of the ground near where I live. Where is that from? You know? And, and that's why I really like, um, I always like taking questions and making them more concrete. Like, what type of rock is that? Because I'll look it up and I'll be like, oh, it's a so-and-so metamorphic nice. You know, or it's this kind of feldspar.

And it's like, okay, but I still don't, you know, I know a name and I know something to Google now to find out more information to ask someone about. But I don't actually know anything more about the rock yet. And so like, but now I have a thing I can go Google or a thing I can go, you know, look up in this, this geology guide. Uh, but no, where, where I go, I mean, sometimes I'll just Google like, Hey, are there, you know, like some version of the question and be like, okay, it looks like, you know, the question itself doesn't have an easy answer. What about this other question I have while I was trying to answer it? Has anyone written a paper on this? And then I'll go find a paper and start reading it and see what they refer to.

But I think it varies so much from one question to another. Because some of them I'll go straight into calculating stuff. Like someone who asked about how much of, what would happen if you tried to funnel all the water in Niagara Falls through a drinking straw? Like, the math there is sort of straightforward. Because it's like, you just need to know how much water flows over Niagara Falls and how big straws are. So I just need to go find a reliable source for both of those,

and then I do the division. But then figure out how fast does the water have to be flowing to all make it through that tiny area. And so I spent a minute on the McDonald's website being like, what's the most standard straw? Or fast food trade journals. And, you know, then I'll do the same. I'll Google like Niagara Falls flow rate and like find the website of the Joint Commission that administers the falls.

And but then like sometimes that that will then be what leads me into a new direction, because I ended up in answering that question, finding out that there are special authorities who are appointed by the U.S. and Canada to regulate and observe the amount of water that goes over Niagara Falls. Because the U.S. and Canada have a treaty because they share the falls and neither one of them wants the falls to dry up, but they both want to use water for hydropower and stuff like that. And so they have a treaty that's like, okay, we both agree that we will keep the falls flow rate at at least this level and so they each appoint an officer you know so i'm reading about this treaty and they each appoint an officer

to oversee to certify that the falls are in compliance one from the u.s and one from canada and so that i'm like so who are they who's'm sure that, you know, because I want to know. In my head, they're like a Mulder and Scully pair. You know, I'm sure that really what they do is they just like certify something on a document. But like, I like to think that they're like international waterfall police. They're like empowered. If there's water missing, they're empowered to go find it. So like, I wanted to name check them in my answer. You know, I wanted to mention who they

are. And it was really hard to figure out. I ended up reading through like org charts from the many committees that are involved in overseeing the falls that don't all have great internet presences or like, and I ended up getting in touch with the Harvard Law Library for a different question. And then I was like, hey, I'm trying to figure out who the current appointees under this treaty are. And all of their web resources are from like five years ago. And the Harvard librarians are amazing. Like they actually got in touch with the International Commission. Wow. And we're just like, hey, we can confirm so-and-so is the current appointee. And so I got to like put the current updated names in my book.

What's crazy about roles like that, because that's exactly the same sort of thing I'm fascinated by. And it's something that we've covered in some of my work on my, on my Netflix show, the G word was crazy is when you find out that a person like that actually has a lot of power or that there's some weird situation where nobody's been appointed in five years because there's some power struggle that nobody's heard about. And as a result, something bad is happening at Niagara Falls. That didn't happen at Niagara Falls. But things like that have been known to happen, right? I know.

Any time I open up an org chart, it's sort of like people talk about like, oh, they're reading this romance novel, but they're flipping ahead to find the sexy stuff. like, oh, they're reading this romance novel, but they're flipping ahead to find the sexy stuff. You know, when I open an org chart, I'm like a media or like, you know, a monthly report from the meeting. I'm like scrolling down and like looking for my answer, but also looking for like, have there been any fights? Like, what are they? Is there a whole section where they're just like complaining about this one person? Why are they mad? Who's right? Who's wrong? Like, show me the drama. Like, I love finding weird, like, power struggles or arguments in reports like that. Where someone's like, I know I'm writing a report on the waterfall flow rate treaty compliance for the so-and-so committee.

But also, you know who's really been out of line lately? Is this the head of the other committee? So, and then there'll be, like, the head of the other committee? So, and, and then there'll be like three pages of grievances of like having to mop, clean up their bad work. You know, if you go into any organization and try to understand why it is the way it is, you'll find out,

you'll find the one person who says, Oh, let me tell you something in 2015, this person came in and shit really went sideways. And we've been trying to fix it ever since. And that's one of the delights of looking into anything is there are stories everywhere. I'm curious, as a last question, we've talked at length about how, you know, doing these thought experiments are, you know, it's fun.

And you also, it really illustrates things about the real world. I'm curious, though, if you have ever discovered anything that you felt was truly significant that like, hold on a second. Like, you know, you're researching whether fridges solve global warming and you're like, hold on a second. Maybe they would. Right. Like the world needs to know about this, not just for edification reasons. But, you know, have you ever stumbled across anything that you want to alert the presses about? I don't think I've stumbled upon anything

where I'm like, I have a duty to let the public know about this. I do sometimes feel like someone will ask a question and I'll be like, the answer to this question touches on something that is actually really important, you know? Which can be anything from, you know, I need to let people know about how our energy consumption, you know, how it directly affects climate change. Here's a way to think about that. Here's a place where you see that happening. Or like, I'll learn about some mining process or some other, you know, thing like that, where I'm like, oh, wow, this is actually kind of

kind of messed up. I'm going to mention this just to like, let people know. Or really simple things like when I started off my chapter about, about what would happen if you stood on top of the geyser at Yellowstone. Um, I didn't, I didn't realize how much I would feel like I really need to let people know, follow those instructions about staying on the boardwalk. But that ended up being like my biggest takeaway was like, I should really clarify for people that, that it is actually extremely dangerous. Okay. I mean, yeah, that is very meaningful.

Like if you save a life or two by saying, hey, please, at the end of the day, you've written this entire book. At the end of it, the entire takeaway is please follow the posted signs and notifications at national parks. They're very important. Yeah, I do. I think a lot of one thing that I come across a lot is places where. Like one of the I mentioned polling at one point in one of my other books, I did a chapter on like, what are the things that we what are the opinions that we hold the most universally. And it was partly fun finding, okay, almost everyone is in favor of

no one talking on the phone in a movie theater. Everyone's against that. They've pulled it, it's like 97%. Everyone thinks that it should be against the law to text while driving, even if people don't always behave right. But I think sometimes it's helpful to let people know that even things where you wouldn't think there's that much agreement on them, they really do agree. agree. And this happened especially during COVID, where if you like listen, listen to the way people talk about it as a controversy and you know, in the media, you'd get this impression from the beginning of the pandemic that it's like, the country is split half the

people want everyone to get COVID and half of the people want to protect people. And like, if you look at polling, that is not how people felt. People agreed more on COVID mitigation than they do on liking apple pie and liking Tom Hanks, like thinking he's a good guy. There was really this huge consensus. And I feel like the way we talk about people can sometimes be dismissive of that, which both harms us because we don't realize that the problem we're having is not

convincing people to be on our side. It's getting them, it's like getting everyone on the same page and how we, how we're talking about it and what we want to do with that energy. Yeah. And it's also, and it's, it's sort of condescending in a way. It's like, well, like people are just, you know, they don't understand things, you know, they're. And I think that's not helpful either. And this comes back. This comes up with climate change. Like, you know, the number of people who actually do not think the climate is changing is like really small. Yeah.

It's like in some of the latest polls, you know, it's like 8%. You know, people who actively think the climate is not changing, it's fake. You know, like that's not a big group. We talk about them like they are half of the debate and, and really like it's good to know most people are to some extent, you know, on the same, like they do think the climate is changing. They're not, not all of them are sure about how we're affecting it, but like, they're not like hardcore deniers.

It's it's people who might actually benefit from hearing about, you know, like a nudge or an example or an illustration of how it works to give them context. I mean, that pattern was so evident during the pandemic of there was so much energy spent on railing against anti-vaxxers, which I think was mostly just protective to stop us from facing the fact that it was our own communications failures and our own equity failures that caused vaccines to not be distributed widely. Because the number of people who felt that strongly about it were pretty small compared to the number of people who just like nobody knocked on their door and said hey you want to get vaccinated today you know um nobody people you know didn't have time off work etc this is all stuff we talked about on the show but um i love how your work you know holds up these like uh it's it's in a very fun way but ends up holding these like very clear truths that we that we we, uh, really, really helped clarify our understanding of the world. I can't thank you enough for, for writing the book and for the years of comic enjoyment you've given me and for,

for coming on the show, Randall, seriously. No, well, thank you. Thank you so much. Uh, uh, no, it's been a pleasure. It's been so much fun chatting. Well, thank you once again to Randall for coming on the show. If you like that conversation as much as I did, you can get his new book, What If To, at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producer, Sam Rodman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. That's Adrian, Alexey Batalov, Alan Liska, Anne Slagle, Antonio LB,

Aurelio Jimenez, Beth Brevik, Kumu and Lego, Charles Anderson, Chase Thompson-Bowe, Chris Staley, Courtney Henderson, David Condry, David Conover, Drill Bill, Dude With Games, Eben Lowe, Ethan Jennings, Hillary Wolkin, Jim Myers, Jim Shelton, Julia Russell, Kelly Casey, Kelly Lucas, of course, to Andrew W Spencer Campbell, Susan E. Fisher, and WhiskeyNerd88. Thanks, of course, to Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at AdamConover.net or at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media. If you want to support us on Patreon, by the way, you can do so at Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next week on Factually.

I don't know anything. Starbends Avenue. A podcast network. That was a HeadGum Podcast.