The Joe Rogan Experience - #1159 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Episode Date: August 22, 2018

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and science communicator.

So, why aren't there flying cars? You're just jumping right in. You don't say hi. You don't say how's the wife and kids. How's everybody, man? How's life? How's your book that's been on the Times bestseller list for how many weeks? Oh, the Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

That's been on the New York Times bestseller list for how many weeks? Oh, the Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. That's been on the New York Times bestseller list for 67 weeks. That's pretty intense. That's a lot for any book, much less for a science book. And so that tells me, while all these Trump books are wafting in and out, this is bobbing like a cork on the ocean waves as the book of the moment that either praises Trump or criticize or criticizes him come in and off of that list. So this tells me that there is this unserved hunger that people have. There's a curiosity that this is serving and it's to astrophysics for people in a hurry. That's kind of, that's very purposefully juxtaposed. It's like neurosurgery in four easy steps. If you saw a book with that title, you'd have to pick it up

because you'd wonder what's going on. Well, not to kiss your ass again, but I always say this about you and I think it's important. You make learning stuff about astrophysics fun and that's what's missing. You know, it's not that people don't like to be educated, that they don't like to learn. They just don't want to be bored. That's a perceptive point because, you know, think of the image we have of, let's say you're in a school where most people don't go to college. You're in high school. And then last day of school comes. What do people do? They toss their papers in the air as they run down the steps. School's out.

No. What's the rock song? School's out for summer. Was it forever? No. Ever. Ever. Then forever.

Ever. Right? So that attitude must mean the school didn't train you to embrace curiosity. That learning was a chore. And now the chores are over. Right. That learning was a chore and now the chores are over. Yeah. So I think the educational system needs an adjustment. Forget whether or not you go to college because you're going to spend more years not in school than in school

even if you do go to college. What you want, I think, are lifelong learners, lifelong curiosity. Yes. Where once you are trained and your curiosity is stimulated, the curiosity we all had as children. Children don't need to be taught to be curious. They are curious to the point of destruction of whatever it is they touch. Oh, what is this egg on the counter? What is this glass? What is this plate? What's under a rock? What happens when I pull a leg off a daddy long? You know, they are experimenting with the world.

We don't think of it that way, but that's what it is. They're all born scientists. And I say this often. You spend the first years of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk. Then you spend the rest of his life telling it to shut up and sit down. This is the wrong combination. So speaking as an educator, I think a missing component of school is, is it the teachers? Is it the curriculum? I don't know.

But when you get out of school, you should say to yourself, damn, I want to learn more. It's almost universally accepted, too, that that's when your learning ends. When you get out of college, it's over. Then you say you're done. And if it doesn't, you're ossified in life. And that's how when the job market shifts, you're not ready for it because you don't know how to think. You don't know how to learn. And it's the difference in the workplace between the person who gets an assignment.

Joey, Janet, I need you to do this. That's not in my job description. I'm not trained for this. That's one kind of person in a workplace. Another kind of person is, here's a new task I need you to do. Wow, I've never seen that before. Great. Let me figure it out. These are two completely different species of human being. And what the world needs more of is like the second case where you take a new task and you say, wow, I get to learn. I'm going to learn on my own. I'll

ask people who know more. You just embrace the act of learning to satisfy your curiosity. And I think this book is capturing that in the public. Well, it must be doing something. Yeah, yeah. 60 how many weeks? 67 weeks. God dang. Yeah.

That's a lot of weeks. Yeah, every morning I wake up, I'm calm, but I'm really not calm. I'm saying, holy shit. Sorry, you're live. I can't. Can I say it? Yeah, you can really not calm. I'm saying, holy shit. Sorry, you're live. I can't, can I say it? Yeah, you can say holy shit. I can say it, okay. Neil deGrasse Tyson swears, ladies and gentlemen.

He's human. People think you're a robot. Now they know. This is, it's a great sign, I think. And I think your podcast is a great sign as well. The success of your podcast and the success of a lot of science podcasts. That's an excellent, that you noticed that. There's a rise of science-curious podcasts out there.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is one that I really enjoy. I really love Radiolab. They've always got really interesting science. Radiolab is the perennial favorite. Fantastic. So many people. Probably the best. Right, right.

Yeah, and yours as well. And I love Chuck Nice. Shout out to Chuck Nice. Oh, Chuck. We all love Chuck. He's great. But what you're doing is you're making learning interesting. And that's why it's so fun. There's excitement to it. You bring a comedian like Chuck on with you, things get silly,

but they're also curious and you're getting these experts and everyone's talking about these various subjects. And as you know, not only yourself as an exemplar of this, stand-up comedians are some of the smartest people in the world. They have an awareness. I won't go that far. Okay. Listen, come to the comedy store with me today. I'll change your mind.

All right, let me buffer that a little. They're curious. Okay, no. So stand-up comedians are perceptive people. Yes, for sure. And they're aware, and they notice things that you don't notice. They see the same things you do and get to shape it in a way you never thought possible, and then you end up laughing at other things, at yourself.

Was it your idea to do your show with stand-ups? So what we have, there are several of us who created this concept. And there's Helen Matzos is one of the partners. And there's another one who's now left. But what's his name? I'll get his name in a minute. But there are three of us who – David Gamble is his name. The three of us got together and applied for a National Science Foundation grant.

What we said was, there are programs out there that serve people who already know they like science. But who serves the people who don't know they like science? Or better yet, the people who know they don't like science? There's nothing for them because they've already rejected it. They're not going to tune in to Science Friday because they don't like science on NPR. Right. So what we thought was suppose we bring in a celebrity. That's the pop culture draw. This is the pop culture scaffold. We bring in the scaffold and clad the scaffold with science because whatever the celebrity

does, it doesn't matter. There's going to be science in that person's life. We had the guy who portrayed Gollum in Lord of the Rings. A lot of science in that. But there is. Like that suit that he had to wear. Exactly. So what we did was we interviewed him and we talked about the technology necessary to

portray Gollum. He portrayed that live. That was not some later animation. He is live, and he's got his whole body wired up for this, and he is that voice, and he is portraying it. So whatever it is that you have done, that you do, there is science, because it's evidence that science is everywhere. You can't say, I'm done with science. Let me sell my textbook and move on to other things, because practically anything else you do has been touched by science. And so StarTalk is a celebration of that.

And then it jumps species. And so now we're on TV now. All right. It's a TV show on National Geographic Channel, StarTalk. And since you started this, by the way, I didn't come here to talk about it. You started this. It's our fourth year in a row where we're nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Informational Programming. Are you going to keep doing Cosmos, too, though?

So Cosmos. So I have one week remaining out of like 70 shoot days to finish shooting Cosmos, Possible Worlds, premiering spring 2019. That's the third installment of Cosmos, Possible Worlds, premiering spring 2019. That's the third installment of Cosmos, if you trace the first one to Carl Sagan back in 1980. I used your segment on wolves, on how wolves became dogs. I showed it to my kids. And you can see the little wheels spinning like, whoa. Yeah.

That's how a dog became a dog? What you didn't see is i'm sitting at the at the campfire and this in this snowy environment and they got wolves walking around me they're on these fishing wires because they they are not dogs right okay they they do whatever the fuck they want correct and when they're looking at you it's's like, should I rip his neck out now or later when I'm more hungry? Right. There's no eye contact with them because they don't see you as anything other than something they could possibly eat. And so you can't interact with them the way you would with ordinary dogs.

So they're on these fishing, you know, high tension fishing wire that you can't see against the snow. And they're like hooting and hollering around me as I describe. And the name of that show is And the Wolf Shall Become the Shepherd. Yeah. My friend did a commercial with a wolf. And there's this commercial where he's running up this mountain and the wolf is there. And at the end of the commercial, they had to get the wolf to snarl. So what the trainer does is he shows the wolf some meat and then he pulls the meat away

from the wolf and the wolf snarls and they're like and then the commercial's over he's like no no there's no working after that like there's no you're not going to be near the wolf right like that switch is turned on done yeah and it's it's crazy he's like once that thing snarled everybody just backed off and the trainer let everybody know, like, once I get to this point, we're done. Like, there's no more. And that thing's like, okay. We're like, okay. Everybody, we're done.

Let's get the fuck out of here. All three of these Cosmoses, the original one with Carl Sagan, the one that the privilege of hosting in 2014 and 2019 are co-written by Ann Druyan. And she's the widow of Carl Sagan. Oh, wow. But kind of in his shadow back then, but she's hugely creative and highly enlightened. And so most of the sort of the soul energy, if you will, what makes Cosmos distinct from other documentaries where you're sort of sitting there learning. You put your thinking cap on, your learning cap on.

In Cosmos, it's your feeling cap. You're not only learning. You're also feeling the science and its relationship to you, to civilization, to the world, to the universe. to civilization, to the world, to the universe. And her infusion of this, she's a highly scientifically literate writer, producer. And so I just give a shout out to her. Just working with her has been a delight. Is Cosmos on Apple TV or Amazon or anything? So Cosmos was after it premiered on Fox and then went internationally on Nat Geo.

It then went to Netflix. But I think this run of Netflix is going to drop until the next one comes in. I think they want to clear the landing zone for the next Cosmos. But it went to Netflix. But is it available for anyone to get right now? Oh, right now? It should be. I haven't checked.

That's a great question. Because I have it all on my DVR and I'm scared to delete it. Oh, yeah. I only have like 6% hard drive space left. That's what everyone's DVR looks like. I got all your Cosmoses in there. Yeah, so thanks. Thanks for having them all in there. What was that Morgan Freeman show?

Through the Wormhole? Yeah, I got that on there too. That was a great show too. That's a Joe Rogan thing. Yeah. If you didn't have that, I'd be disappointed. I say, you're an imposter. You're a fake. Well, it's an opportunity to be entertained and learned, which I think is what everybody

misses. Right. And I think that's what's missing in most public education. People are bored. Yeah. And you take these kids with so much energy, and then you make them sit still and watch something that's not even remotely stimulating by a person who doesn't really care to be there. Right, right. And they know this intuitively, if not explicitly, that the enthusiasm is absent.

Yeah, they could feel it. Yeah. And just it's the worst way to learn. It's the worst way. And it's so hard to escape. It's just, it's the worst way to learn. It's the worst way, and it's so hard to escape. Once you get out of that system, it takes forever for a lot of these people to just get their excitement about education back.

You know what I say when I address teachers? We all, by the way, I'll do this right now in this room. We have only three of us, but many had like a singular influence on who and what you became? Give me a number. It's going to be, I'm betting, it's five or fewer, probably more like three. Yeah, for teachers, yeah. What's your number? Well, the one that I talked about on your show the last time i saw you thanks for coming on

to start my pleasure um who was a science teacher that i had when i believe i was in seventh grade right told me that if you really want to hurt your brain look up and recognize the fact that that goes on forever that this is infinite and then just think about what that means infinite that there really is no end to it. So, but how many teachers such as that were so influential on you? That one guy saying that one thing in that one class. It's one. He might be the one.

And what do you got? Two at most, maybe. For me, it's like two and a half. And I've had scores of teachers. Yeah. Okay? A hundred teachers, at least. So what I tell teachers is, be that teacher to your students. We've all scores of teachers. Yeah. Okay. A hundred teachers at least. So what I tell teachers is be that teacher to your students.

We've all had those teachers. Be that teacher. And in every case, it wasn't because the topic was something you knew in advance you would like. It's because their energy for sharing their passion and love for the subject was palpable. Yeah. And it just spilled out of them and went into course through your veins and your arteries. And you walk out of there thinking, wow, that was the most interesting thing I've ever done in my life.

You don't even care what you get on a test after that because you got touched and you became an enlightened participant in that exercise, in that exploration. Yeah. It's just so hard for them to even get kids' attentions though. Yeah. There's just so many wrestling matches going Yeah, unfortunately, that could be in some places, half the energy of the teacher is maintaining order. I think the success of your book, the success of your show, your podcast, and many of his other really intelligent podcasts are showing, though, there's an appetite for this stuff out there. Yeah, and I'm delighted to be a servant of that curiosity.

And I brought this just because it's not even out yet. You're airing like now live? You're live? We're live. You are live. This is like a five-second delay or something. Is that to bleep all my expletives? No, no, no, no, no.

What is this accessory to war? No, no, no, no, no. What is this, Accessory to War? Oh, this is like another book. This is coming out in three weeks. Is this about space war? Accessory to War, the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military. Oh. Yeah, so this other book was Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. If you're in a hurry, do not buy this book.

This is not for people in a hurry. This is not an impulse item at the checkout line. This is all about – by the way, we know what role the physicist plays in war. The physicist makes the bomb, invents the bomb. The chemist perfects napalm. The biologist weaponizes anthrax. And the astrophysicist, well, we sit at the end of a telescope and wait for photons to cross the universe and enter our detector,

and we go into conferences and argue about them. So there is no obvious connection between what we do and military strength, hegemony, dominance, empire building. It's just not obvious. That's why the subtitle, the unspoken alliance, it's not a secret. It's just, it's not there. It's there, but it's not, nobody's talking about it. Do you realize, I'll just give an example, okay?

If you needed more reasons to think that Columbus was a dick, okay? Let me add one to it. There's a difference between when we were kids and today. Yeah, I know, I know. But actually, I do have something mildly redeeming to offer about Columbus, if you have the time. Oh, yeah. I just want to...

Okay. Okay. We'll start off with that. You want me to start off with that? How do you want to do it? No, no, I'll do the dick part. Let's do the dick part first. Okay, so on his third voyage,

he's in... By the time of his third voyage, he had already planted enough Spanish flags that Spain had already begun to set up governments and infrastructures in these places that he had found. Yeah, basically conquered. And so in one of the places, it's in the book accurately, but I think it's Hispaniola, one of the island today. He has to get back. This is his third voyage, 1503 or 1504.

He's got to get back to Spain. He doesn't have enough resources, not enough food for his crew. So he asks the natives, would you please give us some of your stock that you have collected from your farming? Now, this particular group of natives only makes exactly the amount of food they need to tie to the next crop. They don't have surplus. So they said, no, we don't have surplus. Sorry. Columbus knew that one week hence, coincidentally, there was going to be a total lunar eclipse where the moon in its orbit around Earth enters Earth's shadow.

The full moon enters Earth's shadow and disappears. And the geometry of that event, it's just a simple lunar eclipse, but the geometry says that sunlight passes around Earth through Earth's atmosphere and takes on sunset colors that leach into Earth's shadow, giving the moon, if you can see it at all, a deep red-amber hue, almost the color of blood. Columbus said, and he knew about this because he had read the tables, the eclipse tables, all right? We'd known enough about the solar system at the time to, we got that, okay?

Actually, back then it was just the known world with earth in the middle of the known universe But that didn't matter the rhythms of the universe were known. He says to the natives if you do not give us food My god, which is more powerful than your God will make the moon Disappear and it will turn blood red that will happen in one week. You have one week to comply. Some of them were skeptical. What? You can't. What?

Others said, shit, we got to do what this guy says. Look at the ships they came in. Their guns, their power, their culture. Look what they've got. Sure enough, right on cue, the moon begins to disappear. According to that, that is a famous woodcut. Oh, you got this? Those viewing the video of this, that is a famous woodcut. And notice the natives bowing to him and he stands proudly because he knows the science. He knows the astronomy. He knew this. And so he invokes this to dominate people who are not yet scientifically literate.

And within seconds of this beginning, they bring him all the resources he wants and he gets – and we don't know what happened back at the island, whether the people survived the winter. But he got back to the island. That is one microcosm of ways that the universe has been invoked in this. I'll give you another example, Los Alamos, one of the national labs. They today, as basically since their inception, are charged with tracking the nuclear arsenal of the United States, our nuclear power, the nukes that would go into nuclear weapons, they think about this. Do you realize they hire astrophysicists? I had colleagues working there. You know why?

Because there's a room. There are two rooms. I mean, I'm simplifying this, but basically there are two rooms adjacent to one another and a computer between the two of them, the most powerful computers in the world. And there is code running on those computers that calculates the energy yields of hydrogen fusion. That's exactly what an astrophysicist cares about when stars blow up. Okay? The sun is undergoing nuclear fusion right now.

And that's how it's making energy. And when high-mass stars die, they explode as supernova. This is a natural thing going on in the universe. On the other side, that's a classified room. They're calculating yields of hydrogen bombs. And they have lunch together. They compare notes. The government doesn't always have the best people.

But if you hire some of the best people to do whatever it is they want, and their calculations happen to relate to a military project, there you have a two-way street in progress. Why do you think the Hubble telescope, the mirror issues notwithstanding, which were ultimately fixed when it was first launched, why was that so successful? There were versions of the Hubble telescope previously launched by the military looking down. The model for that telescope had already been conceived and built and was operating. Then we said, oh, we want one of those. Okay. But that's not public that this is going on. The telescope gets designed. It has the benefit of previous versions of it having been used successfully, but looking down and we look up. This is the perennial two-way street of astronomy in the old days and in modern times astrophysics.

And the invention of the telescope, you haven't said anything yet. You're a good listener. Should I just keep talking or am I preventing you from interrupting? Don't worry. Keep going. Don're a good listener. Should I just keep talking? Or am I preventing you from interrupting? Don't worry. I'll keep going. Don't worry about me. Okay. Fine. Galileo perfects the telescope. He learned that it had just been invented in the Netherlands. The Dutch were opticians, right? So they invented the telescope and the microscope within a couple of years of one another. This transformed science. When did they invent the eyeglass, the reading glass? The reading glass, earlier than that, but I don't know when.

The real advance was putting two lenses in line with one another. Sounds trivial in modern times, but that was a huge leap, conceptual leap in what you would accomplish. And in so doing, depending on how you curve them and how you grind them, grind the shape of those lenses, you would get a microscope or a telescope. And we're off to the races. That's basically the birth of modern science as we now think of it and conduct it.

Because you say to yourself, my senses, I don't trust them to be the full record of what's going on in front of me. You pull out a microscope. Oh, my gosh. Leeuwenhoek. He got the microscope guy. He got a drop of pond water, puts it under his microscope just to think to do this. It's just water.

Why do you think that's something interesting to do? He said, I wonder. He was curious. He puts it under and sees little what he described as animacules, happily swimming. Animacules. Animacules. These are like the amoebas in paramecia. And oh, oh, it is.

And so he writes, he reports on this to the scientific authorities and they don't believe him. And they don't believe him. They say, you know, von Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter. Why would anyone believe this? That there's entire creatures, an entire universe of creatures thriving in a drop of pond water. groundwater. And so the way science works is one report does not make it true. You need verification. They send people to the Netherlands to verify his results. And there it was, the birth of microscopy. And then they looked at everything, cells, you know, you need vocabulary to describe what you're now seeing. Well, that was the journey down small. Then the journey went up big. And Galileo perfects the telescope. He looks up and says, whoa, I see craters, mountains, valleys on the moon. The sun has spots.

Venus goes through phases. This became the corpus of evidence for Earth going around the sun in support of Copernicus' idea that Earth went around the sun. My point is, what was the second thing he did with his telescope? He telephoned, no, he didn't telephone. He contacted the Doge of Venice, invited him to the clock tower, and said, look at what this instrument can do for you as we look out into the lagoon. You can identify a ship's intentions, friend or fo foe by its flag ten times farther away Than you can with the unaided eye Venice bought a boatload of these telescopes in the service of their military defense And this was a source of money to Galileo now he could go look at the universe

This has been a two-way street ever since people have looked up. So this is an accounting of that. And it goes on and on. The first x-ray machines for airports, you're old enough to remember. Why were they put in? Because of hijackings to Cuba, basically. They were armed hijackings of airplanes, of American carriers to Cuba. And Congress said, we got to do something about that. Oh, by the way, there's a company in Boston called American Science and Engineering that was building an X-ray detector small enough to put on a satellite to observe the universe in X-rays. Because no one had observed, we've used visible light, but not X-rays. That's a branch of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We think if there are black holes out there, their region surrounding them will give us X-rays. It's a new window on the universe. And then they said, oh, my gosh, there's a call for X-ray machines at airports. We've got the technology that we've perfected to put in a freaking satellite. So the technology for those ones you walk through at the airport initially came out? Initially, yes. Wow. Yes, yes.

There was a two-way street. There was, oh my gosh, we need this for security. Oh my God, we're using it. Let's apply that technology to these detectors. Well, that's been a lot of the stuff with the space program, right? A lot of the stuff that they devised for use on the space station and many other technologies have trickled their way down into regular society. Well, that always happens.

And even some simple things. Because people say, well, I spend money up there and we should be spending it down here. But there's an interesting fact here that is almost never discussed. The people who think about the universe and study the universe are hugely creative.

And the creative energies cannot be pre-prescribed. You can't go to a creative, you might, but I don't know that you'll get their maximum creativity. Say, I need you to invent a cure for cancer right now. Use that brilliance. I'll try. But the greatest discoveries, the greatest cures, the greatest of these comes from a cross-pollination of interests that people have that they were engaged because they were interested just for the sake of being interested. So watch what happens. Here's an example. The space shuttle. It's a glider when it lands.

Okay. It's got no engines. It's got flaps. There's a little bit of brakes in the tires, but that's about it. When it comes in, okay, how do you make sure the thing stays on track? Because they kept drifting and crosswinds and this sort of thing. And so they said, why don't we groove the road so that the rubber on the road, the runway, so that the rubber can align with the grooves and stay in a straight line?

Because rubber doesn't slide well when you have, doesn't slide sideways very easily on grooves. When they realized how effective that was, it's now put on off-ramps to freeways. If there's a freeway off-ramp that's a little tight, not quite banked well enough, it's going to be grooved. Check it out next time. And you could say, well, okay, that's a pretty simple low-tech solution. Why couldn't we just discover that on our own without the $20 billion a year space agency called NASA? But you didn't. You didn't.

Power tools, cordless high-torque power tools, were invented to service satellites in orbit by NASA. Because you can't just plug it into a 120-volt socket when you're floating in space. So the engineers said, how are we going to solve this problem? Let's make a high-torque power tool. So now NASA invents the high-torque. Now, that is the only way you're buying a power tool today is the cordless variety, all construction sites. They're not looking for a power outlet for these things. So why didn't we invent this without the $20 billion space rate?

You didn't. You didn't think about it. You said, oh, I can plug it in. This is great. You're not even thinking what you need. So, yes, there are all of these applications. But that's a good reason to do it, but I don't think it's the best. The best reasons are, my gosh, don't you want to keep dreaming?

Don't you want to keep looking into the future? That would be ideal, but that's not attractive to people that are spending tax dollars. When it comes to tax dollars, people get super pragmatic and they go, why do we need to go to Mars? Now, what we need to do is take care of this and pay for that with a deficit and the budget. You know, NASA's budget today is four-tenths of 1% of the federal budget. So if you take a dollar...

Four-tenths of 1%? I will quantify that for you. Take a dollar bill, and imagine that's your tax dollar, and you can cut it to whatever percent you want. So let's cut four-tenths of 1% off of the edge. That doesn't get you into the ink. You're still in the white border around it. You wouldn't even notice.

They'd take that dollar. You could trim that off the dollar. And pay for anything. And pay for it. So my point is, most of the people who say, don't spend it here, spend it there, they think NASA has more budget than it actually does. If you ask them, how much do you think they're getting? Oh, 10%, 5%, several percent.

No, it's one half of 1%. So if you're going to tell me that if you can take that four tenths of 1% and spend it in these other problems and solve them, I would say, yeah, go right ahead. But is this where you really want to pull the money from? When it's the only thing that has us thinking about tomorrow, has us thinking about a future. Well, for a guy like you, that's super important. But for a guy who lives in Cleveland, who doesn't give a shit about science... Oh, excuse me.

That's like the person who says, okay, I don't need the space program. Why do I need the space program? I have my cell phone and I have the weather channel and I know anything I need. This is... Yeah. have the weather channel and I know anything I need.

You know, this is. Yeah. You're using GPS satellites to understand where you are on this earth. To understand where grandma's house is. Do you know who created it? Who created what? Who created spread spectrum technology that led to GPS and Wi-Fi? Who is that?

Hedy Lamarr. Oh, I did know that. Yes. Yes, she did. Beautiful actress. 1941. Yes, she did. How about that? Thanks for reminding me of that. Super hot, though. That was. Yes. Beautiful actress. 1941. Yes, she did. How about that? Thanks for reminding me of that.

Super hot, though. That was the problem. Nobody cared. Like, hey, you're smart, too. Yeah, but it would take decades to really realize that. And, of course, GPS is launched by the military, and it's now hundreds of billions of dollars worth of the American economy thriving on this space application. But it was a military intent. And it was to navigate the surface of the Earth.

Yeah. To navigate. And the first Gulf War was the first big use of space assets in the conduct of military operations. I believe even when Hedy Lamarr created it with another scientist, the idea behind it was for encoded transcriptions or encoded information during the war. Well, so that's a big challenge. How do you encode information? By the way, the future of this might come from, it's still not clear. The jury's still out and they're sort of opposing views on this.

But you've heard about quantum entangled particles where I can create a pair of particles that know about one another and now they're separated in space and in time. And if you observe that other particle, it instantly changes the state of the particle back, the other particle that's back where I am. And by the way, they communicate instantaneously, faster than the speed of light. When you say if you observe, do you mean that if you observe it with a- Anything. It doesn't matter. But you have to do something to observe it with.

You have to do, yes. So something has to interact with it. It's not woo. No, it's not. It's so not woo. But you say that, people go, yeah, I saw that in a secret. Yeah. So the problem is the word observe, people think is a psychological thing. But you say that, people go, yeah, I saw that in the secret. Yeah. So the problem is the word observe people think is a psychological thing. But in physics, it's got nothing to do with it. It's a measurement thing. It's a measurement thing.

Right. The act of measuring. If there's an electron sitting in the middle of this table and all the lights are out, I can say, I think there's an electron here. Let me find out. And the moment I turn on the lights, the light interacts. A photon interacts with the electron and kicks it somewhere else. So the more I try to measure its position, the less I know its position. So because you need to – the measurement requires an interaction with it.

And in the quantum scale, interactions change the state of the experiment that you're conducting. We know this. We've quantified it. We don't like it, but we deal with it. And in the act of dealing with it, you can exploit that fact for other purposes. We exploit quantum craziness to birth the information technology revolution. There is no creation, storage, or retrieval of information without an exploitation of the quantum. And by the way, the quantum was discovered in quantum physics as a branch of physics was discovered in the 1920s. If you were around back then and your tax buddies who don't

like paying taxes, what would you have said? Why are you spending government money on the atom and on molecules? You can't even see them. What good is it? All I care, I'm a woodworker. I just care about my wood atoms, right? Here I am. Yeah, shove that where your tax dollar is. And so it would look like you're wasting your own time and everybody else's money.

It would take decades, five decades, four or five decades before we'd realize what role that would play in computing, this creation, storage, and retrieval of information. And by some measures, it's a third of the world's GDP is traceable to what quantum physics does for us on a computing scale. So anyone, yes, yes. Well, I mean, there are ways to do it. There's certain industries that would still be there without computing, but they're made more efficient with it. Okay, so UPS tracks all of their trucks

with GPS and with computing devices that invokes the quantum. But UPS predates the use of these tools. But you can look at profits relative to their efficiencies that are enabled by these technologies, as well as entire fields that didn't exist before computing. You add all that up, it's a stunning fact. And so my only point is that if you want today to say, why study this when we have these other problems all I do

is take you back to the cave and let's say alright we're in a cave and there's a mountain over there in a valley and I tell you I tell the tribe leaders I want to explore that mountain and that valley no we can't afford to send you out there now

we have to solve the cave problems first before anyone leaves the cave. We laugh at that. That's an absurd claim to make in caveman days. I don't know if anyone did it, but that's a crazy thought because there are solutions to your problems that might exist and time has demonstrated likely exist by leaving the cave that you can then discover. So for me, exploration is not just space. All the frontiers of the unknown, biology, chemistry, AI, you know those frontiers.

And then you can cross-pollinate them and transform civilization. And then the last example I give, and then I'll shut up because I want to hear you talk too. It's not for me. I want to hear you interact with what I'm telling. Here's one. You ready? Okay.

My physics professor in college studied the universe, loved the universe, studied gas clouds between stars, and studied how would you detect a gas cloud if it's not radiating light? Well, they give off radio waves. All right. And he figured out what kind of radio waves they give off and why. And in this, he gained expertise in the nucleus of the atom. And he discovered that the nucleus can resonate. Depending on the mass of the nucleus, it will, which means depending on what atom it is on the periodic table, it will resonate slightly differently when exposed to the same electromagnetic field. He discovered a new phenomenon in physics called nuclear magnetic resonance. It would then take a clever medical technologist to say, wait a minute. If you can distinguish one heavy atom from another, let me make a machine out of that, put your body in it, and I can then distinguish one kind of tissue from another.

And thus was born the magnetic resonance imager, the MRI. Arguably the most potent tool in the arsenal of modern medicine where I can diagnose a condition in your body without cutting you open first. That is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine. By the way, the real title should be nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, but that's the other N word. You're not so – Nuclear, you don't like that one?

Yeah, people don't like nuclear. What about – They're less likely to go inside the machine if the word nuclear was on it. But my point is that was a cross-pollination of ideas with clever people on their frontiers looking over the fence at discoveries that are being made. It's how we got the microwave oven. That wasn't invented by a thermodynamicist. Microwaves, this is a World War II attempt to communicate using microwaves. And they found out some guy's chocolate bar melted in the microwave field. And they said, what happened there? And

they did some more tests. And of course, the water molecule and other molecules common in food respond to microwaves. It vibrates them ferociously. And so you put food in a microwave cavity, the water content of the food vibrates, friction cooks the food. There's still people today who say, oh, nuke this because it's so fast. Me. Oh, you still say that? It's still – have no fear. It's just friction. Me. Oh, you still say that. It's still. Have no fear.

It's just friction. Okay? Friction it. Yeah, but everybody's scared that it fucks up the food. Well. Does it? No. It just heats the water.

People get scared. The woo-woo people do. Okay, so here's the thing. There's certain foods that don't respond well to the flipping of the water molecule. And one of them is like bread products. Gets hard. Yeah, it gets chewy and leathery. Yeah. And one of them is like bread products. Gets hard. Yeah, it gets chewy and leathery. Yeah.

But only if you like overdo it. If you overdo it, you got to do it just right and you're still good. If you overdo it, it can get leather. That's kind of it. I'm trying to think. You wouldn't grill a steak in a microwave. You would heat up the meat uniformly and that's all it would do. It cooks bacon pretty fast.

Yeah. But it's a mess and it splatters all over. So you pick the foods that are best for that situation. As you would pick the foods best, you wouldn't put toast in an oven at 350 degrees, bread to make toast. We have toasters for that. So different things in your kitchen do things best. You wouldn't make ice cream in your toaster oven. But people are afraid of microwaves. The one thing that they're afraid of is speakers.

It's not that they're afraid of microwaves, that they're afraid of things they don't understand. That's your point. Precisely. They're afraid that something's going to happen to their food that makes it less good. Correct. And it's just the not knowing that people fear. My wife's friend's mom will not eat something that comes out of a microwave. Really?

She quotes that as part of what makes her healthy. She drinks a lot of water. She refuses to eat microwave food. The whole life is around not using microwave food. She won't eat anything that comes out of a microwave. Okay, I'm glad that she can live a long, happy life as such. She has to reheat food old school. Okay, one of the hardest things is reheating lasagna if you don't have a microwave oven.

It's true. That's like impossible. Because you're going to cook it again. You're going to cook it again. Yeah, that's a really good point. So I think microwave ovens were invented for leftover lasagna. Yeah, just a bowl of pasta, just in general. Yeah.

Soup. It's great for soup. Soup is good. Yeah. So you don't have to Yeah. Soup. It's great for soup. Soup is good. Yeah. So you don't have to worry about it. It's not doing anything to it. It's not sucking any nutrients out or adding any nuclear radiation. Correct.

It has nothing to do with radiation in the normal sense, other than electromagnetic radiation. It's already light from the bulbs. We tend to use radiation in the context of stuff that would hurt you. So that would be radiation of high enough energy to hurt you. And microwaves are not in that category. I never even thought about what microwaves do until this conversation. Really? Yeah.

Yeah. So it's a certain frequency of microwaves that beautifully pairs with the water molecule. And it vibrates it brilliantly. So it doesn't work for completely dried things? Yeah. That's why if you put something that has no water in it, it's not really very useful. What happens if you do beef jerky? Must have a little moisture.

There's still some moisture in it. Correct. Yeah. It's why it heats the food and not the plate. If the plate gets hot, it's not because the microwave oven heated the plate. It's because the food's hot. It's because the food's hot. That's why you can usually pick it up with the handles. You can cook food on a paper plate.

That's right. It doesn't burst into flames. It doesn't burst into flames. This is crazy. What? You didn't show. Show. What is the difference between MRI and fMRI?

Oh, so an fMRI, I don't claim total expertise here, but I'll tell you the little I know. An MRI, they put you in there and you're stationary, and then they make this map of whatever part of the body they're studying. It's typically your head, all right? But you can do it for your joints and other parts of your body that might require this level of three-dimensional analysis. And it's a 3D map of what's going on in the part that they surveyed. And so you look at slices through that section. So you might see in MRIs of your brain, of your skull, and they take slices. As the slices go through, you see like the eye socket come in and then go out again or the nose cavity.

And you can look at it in all three dimensions, front to back, side to side, up to down. So depending on the sophistication of the machine. fMRI is they are looking at your brain while you are thinking. So time is now an active coordinate of what's going on. And they're measuring it as they're talking to you about certain things? Correct. So they say, oh, think of Ice Cream Sunday with a cherry on top. Think of a naked person who you'd want to have sex with.

And F stands for functional. Functional. Right. And so it's basically a real-time observation of what's going on in your brain. He used it to convict a person. There was a woman in India. It's really a highly criticized case, but she was convicted of a crime. I believe it was murder because she had functional knowledge of the crime scene.

And the arguments against it were like, if you're going to be accused of a crime, clearly you're going to study the evidence. You're going to talk to a lawyer. You're going to go over some things. You're going to be. I don't know if fMRI is that precise. Yeah, they don't think it is that's why it was very disturbing that this was used in court it's like do you remember when these italian um geologists were i think they were tried because they should have known about an earthquake

before it happened and then scientists had to say hey hey, guys, this is not how it works. Like this shit can just happen. Yeah. That's so. Do you remember that? No, I don't. But that's what I do know. Let me share a couple of things with you that I've thought deeply about recently. There are three kinds of truths in the world.

Okay. Because we're in like a tree. Let me. I'll give you three. Okay. The Rudy Giuliani kind? You're welcome. Okay.

So you ready? Apparently true isn't always true. I know. So let me try to unpack that. Okay. You ready? Okay. Alternative facts?

There's something called an objective truth. An objective truth is something that is true whether or not you believe in it. And the methods and tools of science are uniquely conceived to seek out and establish objective truths. And this I'm referring to the invocation of the scientific method. No one scientific result, research result, is true. Until it is verified by other people's research results using a different experimental method with different wall current from another country. When your competitor says, I think you're wrong, let me show how you're wrong, and they reproduce your experiment and get the same result. When you have generally the same results emerging, that is a newly discovered objective truth about the natural world.

And when you have objective truths, they're not later shown to be false. That's an objective truth. Then you have personal truths. These are truths that you hold dearly. Jesus is your savior. Muhammad is the final prophet on earth. You, you know, Abraham is your, these are your personal truths. There's a heaven you're going to.

No one is going to take that from you. Not in a free country where freedom of expression and speech and religion is protected. It's a personal truth. The problem here is you can't convince someone else of your personal truth without some act of persuasion and in the limit, an act of violence. Okay? In the limit. In the limit. This is how you get holy wars.

So I have this personal truth and I require that you share my personal truth. But why is that personal truth? That's a recipe for disaster. And not a belief. Because the people who hold the belief will tell you that it's a truth. So I don't want to take that usage of the word away from them. Okay. So you're giving them a definition. I'm giving them the word truth, but modifying it to say personal truth. That's correct. They've used it that way for millennia. I'm not going to, okay. They feel that is true and it's true in their bones. I'm simply saying

that because it's your personal truth, you cannot require that someone else and it's true in their bones. I'm simply saying that because it's your personal truth, you cannot require that someone else share it. And in this country, because the United States, because God is not mentioned in the constitution itself, a controversial thing in its day, by the way, actually God has mentioned, but in a very insignificant way. The Constitution is a God-free document. And because it's a God-free document, it protects your expression of religious faith, because it means the government has no say in who and what you believe or why. If the Constitution said, mention God and Jesus, well, there it is. There's Christianity built into the fabric of the country. And if you want to be some other religion, the Constitution said, mentioned God and Jesus, well, there it is. There's Christianity built

into the fabric of the country. And if you want to be some other religion, you're going to have a hard time because we can set laws against it. This is why so many religiously persecuted people came to the United States, to escape their country where they could not practice their religion a little differently or a lot differently from what was going on in their homeland. Is it a problem, though, to call it truth? I would rather not call it truth, but I'm a big word guy, and I respect what happens to words.

I don't always like it, but I respect it. And so I'm going to say there's an objective truth, which is true whether or not you believe it. There's your personal truth, which is true whether or not you believe it. There's your personal truth, which is true to you. Third truth is a political truth. Political truth is something that is true because it has been incessantly repeated. And then you just believe it at that point. Give me one of those.

Okay. What's Hillary Clinton's first name? It's Crooked. Crooked Hillary. Oh, her first name is actually those. Okay. What's Hillary Clinton's first name? It's Crooked. Crooked Hillary. Oh, her first name is actually Hillary? Okay. I thought it was Crooked Hillary. This was incessantly repeated in the Trump campaign.

And that's an absurd example of it. But the point is if you keep saying that the New York Times is fake news, you just keep saying that. Eventually people believe it. And it becomes a political truth because the politicians repeated it. So it's a political truth that people believe it or it's a political truth because people believe it? Which one is it? So, again, you're trying to preserve the fundamental meaning of the word truth. Yeah.

And I've just given up on that. Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris had an infuriatingly frustrating podcast where they went over the meaning of the word truth for more than an hour. And like I said, you can do that. And philosophers like arguing and debating the meaning of things. For me, it's however people are using the word, that's the meaning. Okay. I concede that. Well, we con meaning of things. For me, it's however people are using the word, that's the meaning. Okay. I concede that. Well, we concede those things.

By the way, it's why I don't call myself an atheist. It's why. You can look up the dictionary definition of atheist, and it kind of applies to me. But what is the definition of atheist in practice? It is what leading atheists do, and it's their conduct, and it's their behavior, and it's what they say, and it's their attitude. That is what an atheist is today because they're the most visible exemplars of that word. And most of their conduct I either don't agree with or simply don't engage in. What don't you agree with?

I don't debate religious people and tell them they're idiots. I don't. That doesn't work. Whether or not it works, it's just not in me to do that. I don't purge myself of words that have religious foundations in them. I once in my Facebook, I had a friend going up in orbit to repair the Hubble telescope, one of the astronauts. And I said, in my Facebook, I had a friend going up in orbit to repair the Hubble telescope, one of the astronauts. And I said, Godspeed.

And then I gave the astronaut's name. People wrote in the thread, said, I thought you were an atheist. How can you say Godspeed? An atheist got angry with me? And I said, okay, first of all, this phrase is deeply historical in the space program. When John Glenn was launched, the headline was Godspeed John Glenn. And every mission where we send human beings into space, somewhere there is that reference in the NASA family. What does that word mean?

I'll tell you. I'll tell you what it means. Please do. Okay? So, oh, by the way, I'll get to that in just one minute. Take your time. The atheists who are arguing that I was using Godspeed as a phrase, they all have used the phrase goodbye, haven't they? See you later. Goodbye. Where does that word come from? It's from God be with you. It's a contraction of

those three words. And why would you say this? You would say this to someone leaving the city wall where it's dangerous. Okay? Back when you had city-states. You're going to your... God be with you. To bring protection for you between one city wall and another. Correct. The gods look out for you.

So now, what is the source of danger if you're going to space? It's not alien space muggers. It is the fact that you have space marauders. It's the fact that you have high speed and high speed is the source of essentially any death of anything that's in motion. If you were part of that disaster. So God's speed is like a space equivalent to God be with you.

Is that really the origin of it? I'm just saying. But did they say that before there was space travel? Did they say Godspeed? I don't know the actual origin of space travel, of the term. I don't know how far back it goes, but I do know it became common

after John Glenn, because they're not going to say it to Yuri Gagarin because they're all atheists in the Soviet Union. But here in America, Godspeed John Glenn. And I respect that tradition. And so I said that, and then they jumped. So if atheists are jumping on me for having said that, clearly I'm not an atheist.

And ask me my favorite Broadway musical of all time. What's your favorite Broadway? Jesus Christ Superstar. And I still use B.C. and A.D. in my writings. Okay? I still do it. You don't use B.C.E.? I don't use B.C.E.

All right. See, even you copping a two right there. Right? Interesting. I saw your face. You got the camera. Do you see his face? I just said interesting.

It's interesting. No, I'll tell you why. Okay. Okay. First of all. It doesn't make any sense. BCE. This is not current era 2,000 years ago.

I'm going to tell you. So BCE, as you know, stands for before common era. Right. And CE stands for common era. So this is dereligiousifying AD and BC. Right. Okay. Yet, of course, they referenceigiousifying A.D. and B.C. Right. Okay? Yet, of course, they reference the same calendar.

Right. Okay? Well, who invented the calendar we all currently use in modern society? It's called the Gregorian calendar. It was invented by the Catholic Church, by Jesuit priests in the 1580s, assigned by Pope Gregory to fix the problems in the calendar because – I'm sorry. I'm screaming at you here. You got me started. Scream.

Get crazy. I got to calm down. I'll bring in coffee. The Julian calendar put forth in ancient Rome had one modification to previous calendars. It had a leap day. Okay? It had a leap day. And, okay, leap day is how often?

Every four years. This was good. Because what are we trying to track? We're trying to, so Earth goes around the sun. And so we say, all right, how long does that take? Well, it takes a year. But it turns out we're not actually tracking how long it takes Earth to go around the sun. We're tracking how long it takes Earth to go around the sun, we're tracking how long it takes Earth to repeat its seasons. And the year that corresponds to our seasons is slightly different

from the year that corresponds to how long it takes to go around the sun. Slightly different. And that difference was not recognized in the early calendars. And that difference accumulated so that by the year 1584, the vernal equinox, the first day of spring, did not occur on March 21st. It occurred on March 10th. It shifted from the calendar date. That's what happens if you don't match the cycles of things. And the Pope said, we're not having any of this, especially since Easter might land on Passover, and we're trying to distinguish ourselves mightily from the Jews. So let's fix this. The Jesuit priests got to study this. They looked at the cycles of the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they came up with a new calendar, the Gregorian calendar,

a modification to the Julian calendar. You know what they had to do? To invoke it, A modification to the Julian calendar. You know what they had to do? To invoke it, they had to take 10 days out of the calendar to jumpstart, to put the first day of spring back on March 21st. And this happened in October 1584. Why has there been – They took 10 days out of the calendar. So now how much rent do you pay? They had to like invent amortized rent.

Really? Yeah, because you're going to pay for three weeks instead, you know, 20 days instead of 30. They had to figure that out. Okay? Point is, this was hard earned and the whole world uses this calendar. It is the most accurate calendar ever devised. Is it?

Yes. I'll tell you what. Okay. You asked. So watch what happens. The leap day overcorrected the calendar. It overcorrected it. Overcorrect.

Yes. Yes. So you need to leap year. So, no, no, sorry. The leap day is every four years. That one day every four years was slowly putting too many days into the, moments into the year. Okay?

The Gregorian calendar figured this out. And it had put 10 extra days since the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. 10 extra days. First, jumpstart. Get rid of the 10 days. Now everything's lined up again. Okay. Now, how do you prevent this from happening again?

Because it overcorrects, how long do you have to wait to remove a leap day that you would otherwise put in? Okay? Okay. That's every hundred years. Oh. So every hundred years, that would be a leap day, you remove the leap day. Now it turns out that under-corrects it by an even smaller amount.

Okay? So how long do you have to wait before you have to put a leap day back in? Every 400 years. Oh, God. So the year 2000 was a century year, which normally would not have a leap day, except it's a century year evenly divisible by 400, so they put the leap day back in. And everybody on February, almost everybody, everybody except the astronomers on February 29th in the year 2000 said it's just

a leap year because it's divisible by four. No, it is a rare leap year. It is a century year divisible by 400. That corrects it back. And so now you have a stable calendar for tens of thousands of years. I got to give props to the Jesuit priests. I'm not going to say, no, I'm taking the Christianity out of this reference because they figured out the calendar that we all use. And it's a fucking awesome count. Sorry to drop an F-bomb there.

So I'm not just because some atheists are telling me to rid God out of everything in the universe. I'm not. I'm not doing that. I'm going to say they came up with this calendar. The reasons were because they didn't want to confuse it with Passover. The motivation is whatever it is, but the science is good. And so there it is. So in Accessory to War, where we go back many centuries, the editors said, well, we should

use BCE because it's a liberal forward thing. I said, I am not using BCE and CE. And by the way, there was no year zero. You know why there's no year zero? Because the Romans came up with the calendar and they counted using Roman numerals and Roman numerals don't have a zero. It was not yet invented. They didn't have a zero?

No. No. So it went from 1 BC to AD1. don't have a zero. It was not yet invented. They didn't have a zero? No! No! So it went from 1 BC to AD 1. BC's before Christ, AD is Anno Domini in Latin, the year of our Lord. Wow.

Yeah. Now, of course, in Islam and in China and in Hebrew cultures, Israel in particular, they have access to the Chinese calendar, the Muslim calendar. Muslim, of course, dates to Muhammad. Chinese calendar dates to actually a planetary alignment in 4700 BC.

They use a different system. They use a different system. That's why. And the Hebrew calendar dates to like the beginning of the universe as interpreted in the Torah. So they have access to those. But when they're conducting international business, we just simply use the Gregorian calendar. Just get over it. Move on. But do they use it in China? Do they use it constantly and consistently or do they alternate between the Gregorian calendar and something else? I'm not a Chinese expert, but from what I know of China and my friends and colleagues, conducting business, the world's business is conducted on the Gregorian calendar with a 12-month calendar with the year as referenced by everybody else. And does it have to be done that way in terms of like, has anyone ever done a study on possibly

creating a more effective, more accurate calendar that doesn't invoke leap years? The problem is the length of the day does not cut evenly to the time it takes Earth to go around the sun. So there will always be fractions of days that you're accumulating. Right. And what do you do with them? You wait until you accumulate a day and you put it in or take it out. What did the Mayans have? They had a lunar cycle calendar, right?

They had a calendar based on Venus. And so, yeah, they had a really good calendar. Yeah, it was a 13 lunar cycle. It was overstated that it was like the really accurate calendar. Overstated? It was overstated. It was good. Better than anything that came before it.

Not as good as the Gregorian. No, no, no. It's the Gregorian calendar. People love old shit, though. They do. And they want to believe that people who, They do and they want to believe that people who – they want to believe that people 5,000 years ago somehow knew more about the universe than we do today. Just no. Why is that?

Why do they want to believe that? I think – I don't know. For me, that's one of the great puzzles of life. Why do people want to believe that the Egyptians somehow had some access to the universe? Well, they knew something. Of course! They definitely knew how to build some incredible shit. Of course! But that alone...

I don't want to take that away from them. Doesn't the physical, just the presence of these incredible buildings leave the possibility that maybe they had some knowledge that we lost? Lost knowledge is a real thing. I don't want to belittle or diminish the significance of real knowledge. We forgot how to draw in perspective from ancient times. Had to be

rediscovered in the, as I understand from the artists, had to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. rediscovered in the Renaissance. The archway, the Roman arch had to sort of be rediscovered. Okay. So yes, yes, you can lose knowledge. But if you look at the knowledge we have gleaned using the methods and modern methods and tools of science that go far beyond our five senses in our access to the world, to say that somehow they knew something that we don't using our tools, that's just false. Sorry. That's just, that's just, that's not possible. But we know the physiological limits of your ability to know what's going on around you.

Right. And then people say, oh, I have a sixth sense. Fine. But as a scientist, I have dozens of senses. Right. Okay. I can measure things that your five senses can't. I can measure the magnetic field around you, the electromagnetic field, how much microwaves are coursing through your body now.

We have no sensors for this. I can see auras. Fine. I can see other things that are affecting your body now. I can tell you if ionizing radiation is passing through you. I have Geiger counters that can do that. You can't. Oh, you'll eventually learn whether you're exposed to ionizing radiation because you'll get cancer of your organs and your limbs fall off. All right.

I can see that we know far more today than perhaps – no, not even perhaps than at any other time in conceivable history. But it is possible that they knew some things, like how to build a pyramid. Yes. That we really just don't understand today. I don't know what it means to not understand how to build a pyramid today. We have 150-story buildings. But we do it with different stuff. I can tell you this.

Do you know where the first thing that was built by humans? Ever? No, no. That's only part of the sentence i love your enthusiasm my sentence only barely came out of my mouth the tallest thing humans built after the pyramids i think it's a building in dubai no so in other words what's the next tallest thing after the pyramids oh right after yeah what's the next tallest thing after the pyramids? Oh, right after. Yeah.

What is the next tallest thing we built? Stable structure after the pyramids. What? The Eiffel Tower. Really? Yes. 18, whatever, 89, 1870, late 1800s in Paris, the Eiffel Tower. Huh.

That was the first stable structure we built as a civilization that was taller than the pyramids. So the Egyptians knew how to, they knew architecture. They knew. No one's taken that away from them. But to claim they have some secret knowledge of the functionings of the universe? No. No. Well, people love saying that kind of stuff.

Yeah, and it makes for a great TV. No. Well, people love saying that kind of stuff. Yeah, and it makes for a great TV. But the fact that they didn't have steel and the fact that you're dealing with the very most recent 2500 BC and they built – You just have to be more ingenious, more innovative than we otherwise would have to be. And how do you move the blocks? How do you make stone hens? Those rocks are nowhere in the region.

And how do you move the blocks? How do you make stone hens? Those rocks are nowhere in the region. They were carted from some – they found a place where those rocks were – would have been mined, removed. And, yeah. And those are some big-ass rocks. Yeah. As are the ones – but isn't it less impressive?

Because they're just big. Like, the thing about the pyramids that's so impressive is the precision and the sheer numbers. 2,600,000 stones. Our best understanding of Stonehenge is that it's a functioning observatory that can actually predict eclipses. So I just got to bitch slap you there. No, Stonehenge is not impressive. It's just big stone.

They're lined with the solar solstice. There are holes that are not stones, but there are 56 holes, which is three times the Saros, which is the cycle of eclipses, of the matching of the orbits of the sun and the moon in the sky, the paths of the sun

and the moon in the sky. And when they match up, you get an eclipse. It's an eclipse observatory. Is there, is it possible? It's an eclipse observatory. Guy named. That's absolutely what it is? There's a book published in the 1970s by a guy named David Dawkins. It's not Richard Dawkins, but it's another one of these.

Hawkins. Richard Hawkins. Richard Hawkins. Hawking. Hawking. Hawkinskings damn one of them dudes damn what oh we got our top crack researchers here james on the ball just look up the title of his book was stonehands decoded just look up the title of that book anyhow uh it's highly convincing and we all we're all there with it there's no it's essentially just a study of the position

of the stones in relationship to the where where the, okay, Gerald Hawkins. Gerald Hawkins, thank you. Yeah, Stonehenge decoded. So he, I visited Stonehenge as a kid at age 15 on an expedition and he was the expedition head. Oh, wow. Yeah, so. How lucky for you.

Yeah, it was good and that stuck with me, which is why I named this phenomenon in Manhattan where the sun sets along the street. I saw that. I saw that on your Instagram. Yeah, yeah. good and that stuck with me which is why I named this phenomenon in Manhattan where the Sun sets along the street I saw that on your Instagram yeah yeah so so I named that Manhattan hinge sort of hearkening back to my early days thinking about the alignment of the Sun and structures that we might build because so twice a year for those viewers or listeners who don't know twice a year the Manhattan Street viewers or listeners who don't know, twice a year, the Manhattan Street grid, which is not perfectly aligned north-south, the Manhattan Street grid will – the sun will set exactly on the grid.

That would be a great picture. along a street that is itself three miles long, and then you're crossing the Hudson River, and then there's New Jersey on the other side. So people try to zoom in on it, but what you really should do is zoom out from it, and then you get the vanishing point on it. So all those are zoomed in. Let's go to, yeah, that one looks more like my photo. Wait, go back to that other one.

Yeah, see? So that's on 34th Street, the one you see now. And then you get this sparkling effect. That happens twice a year. Twice a year. That sort of crazy wild light effect? Yes. That looks photoshopped almost.

Yeah. There's an image on his Instagram that is linked on my Instagram, the most recent photo. Oh, okay. There it goes. Oh, there's you with the selfie. That's the selfie. Look at you. Okay, so come on down.

Powerful afro. Oh, yeah. Strong. That was my first selfie. How old were you? I was 14. Let me see. It was probably 1974.

Wow. So I would have been 15. I think I've been 14 or 15. So your path of curiosity was set Oh, it goes back. It goes back. Very early. Right, but that's not the one we're looking for here. Let's go that one Thank you. So that no, there's another one But go back to all the images. Wow. Zoom back out. It's you see all the pictures there All right, go to the bottom left there you go okay that might be the

first ever manhattan hinge photo what year is that from uh i took that in 2001 right and it got published in 2002 this is before september 11th this is july i took it before september 11th right right and then i had a means to publish it and right then uh the notice that it's a green light and traffic is ready to knock me over. So no one is in the streets doing this, but now there are tens of thousands of people that pour into the streets on these days. We post what day you get in Manhattan Henge

from the American Museum of Natural History, my day job, and then that goes out, the press gets it, and tens of thousands of people spill into the street blocking traffic, and if you think of people spill into the street blocking traffic. And if you think of all the ways traffic gets blocked in your day. Look at this. Yeah. Look at these dorks.

All of them. There's too many of them. If it's you by yourself, it's interesting. It's great. Yeah. So that's what it has become. Thousands of people holding up phones. And it's all because I went to Stonehands.

Yeah. So it's also an observatory. So was it you that named this? Yeah. Yeah. Damn. Check you out. Coined. I'd rather say coinedge. Yeah. So it's also an observatory. So was it you that named this? Yeah. Yeah. Damn, check you out. Coined. I'd rather say coined it.

Coined it. Yeah. Manhattan Henge. Because the buildings are like hinges. The hinge is a stone. It's a vertical stone. It's a vertical structure. And if you made a stone, it's a stone hinge.

Why isn't it possible to construct a calendar that doesn't have leap years? What you would have to do, you could do it, but what would happen is it means you care more about the year than you do about the day. So what would happen is you would celebrate the new year at like three in the afternoon. Right? And then the next year you'd celebrate it

at like 12 minutes after three in the afternoon. And then 20 minutes. It would sort of move through your calendar. And then that means you cared more about the year. Sorry, you cared more about the, did I say that right? We always want to celebrate New Year's on midnight. And by the way, New year's is celebrated in 24 time zones not all at the same time right so it's interesting everyone thinks of that as a moment

yet it's really a calendar event i'm sorry it's a clock event it's celebrated over 24 hours yeah if you're in thailand it's 14 hours different so therefore if you were to do it astrophysically you would know the exact moment where we returned in our orbit and everybody would celebrate that instant. And that would be, so then the whole world would celebrate the new year at the same time. That means you value it differently. It's not a midnight celebration. It's a, you could do that.

Celestial celebration. It's celestial. Yeah. Huh. So that would be the only way? Yeah. That's the only way. Because a day doesn't cut evenly into the year.

Those two have nothing to do with one another. There's no reason why that would have... So we... So in other words, let me say it another way, just because you're looking like you're looking off in space here. So, there's New Year's. Okay? Let's count 365 days.

When we do that, we are not at the same place we were when we last celebrated New Year's Day, New Year's Eve. Okay? We're not at the same place in our rotation? In our orbit, our revolution. Around the sun. You rotate on an axis, you revolve around something else. That's those two words. Okay, how you use those two words. So we're not in the same place, but we celebrate New Year's anyway.

Well, when will we be in the same place? A quarter of a day later, six hours. So we would celebrate the next New Year at 6 a.m. Nobody's willing to do that. And the next New Year at noon, then the next New year at 6 p.m., and then the next new year kind of aligns back again. Well, that's the leap day. That's the fourth year where you put in a leap day.

See? So it's our love of the day. Yes. That keeps us fucked up with the world when it comes to the year. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. You pick one, and then that's how you do it.

And the Mayans base it on the moon, right? I didn't study their calendar as deeply as I should have and wanted to, especially back in 2012 when everyone said, oh, the Mayan calendar runs out, so therefore it's the end of the world. That's what I was thinking. I was thinking it was the end of the world, was thinking i was thinking it was the end of the world because the mayan said so the maya said so like that was back when you know before that had happened it was you know george bush was president in like 2007 and everybody was thinking jesus this

is this is going to be the end oh they're so what so every decade there's somebody predicting the end of the world sure and i'm actually quite entertained by this exercise. Do you remember when they had billboards all around L.A.? Just a few years ago. No, that's a different end of the world. That's a different one. There's a guy with a radio podcast church that he – yeah. And then the underworld didn't come and so he pushed it forward.

So that's – it's entertaining. We live in a free country. pushed it forward. So that's, it's entertaining. We live in a free country. It's evidence that we live in a free country where freedom of speech is protected and you can practice any religion you want. And they didn't learn much science in school. That's a part of it. That's part of the fact that you have this in our world. I don't mind it actually. I find it entertaining, but it becomes an issue if people such as that gain power over legislation over the rest of us. Because this would count this as a personal belief. It's your personal belief.

The world is going to end on October 19th. That's your personal. You're fine. Right. But if you now create laws that require I go with that, you just impose your personal belief on me. And your personal belief is not true for everyone. It's only true for you. Yeah, that's a problem, right?

And an objective truth is true for everyone. So if you're going to have governance, you're going to want to base governance on what is objectively true because it would apply to everyone independent of your belief system. Yeah, I agree with that. And by the way, there are things that we're not sure are true yet that we're still researching.

That's not what I'm talking about as an objective truth. Objective truth have been verified by multiple scientific studies, not just one study. This was the problem with the cholesterol study. There's a cholesterol study that set everybody on the course to drop their cholesterol levels, saying it would be good for your heart and all the rest of this, because a series of countries were studied where they had longevity and low heart disease and low cholesterol intake. That study happened to leave out France. It just wasn't in the study.

And a couple of other places that have high cholesterol intake but don't have higher heart disease. So that study was flawed. But it was hard to replicate it because it went over many years and it was thousands of people, and so everyone just jumped on it. You don't have a scientific truth. And this is a general problem with medical results because the press is waiting at the journal editor's office. Oh, here's a new study that shows that this gives you cancer.

Oh, that must be true. And out comes the headline because you want to be the first to report it. And then that gets emblazoned in people's heads and not everyone reads the follow-up. No one could duplicate that study. So there's a flaw. We don't even know what the flaw is. We know that no one else could get those results. So it goes in the dustbin of scientific research.

Most research in any journal of the moment will ultimately shown to be wrong. That's the bleeding edge of science. It's a great place to be because you're in the trenches and you don't know what is true. You can't look up in the back of the book what the answer is to double check. You don't even know what the question is to ask half the time. Oh, that's very frustrating for people that don't get it. Correct, but it's exciting

for the scientists. It's exciting for knowledge. Period. It's constantly expanding and growing. But it's very frustrating for people that really don't have the time and maybe did get some outdated nutrition knowledge from 20 years ago. Or they need an answer right now. They need an answer right now.

And religion, in many ways, gives you answers right now without the need to sort of research it or to go on the frontier. The lack of education and the lack of curiosity about it is one of the scariest things about new generations of kids. Like when the new generations

are coming up, if they know less than the generation before, that's when we really start to freak out that would be a problem although i have good confidence in the 30 and under generation is that millennial how old do you have to be i think millennials have only ever known the internet and devices so what would that be recent but my son is a millennial and he's like like – my kids are millennials, so they're 20-ish. So 30 is a little old. So 25 and under, I think, are the millennials. Yeah, but 30, when they were 10, the internet was around. I know, but they need a different marketing term so you can market to them differently.

So to me, I would put them in the same bin just as you were thinking there. But they have a different relationship to science and technology of course they're not they don't fear the science or the technology they embrace it because it has shaped the civilization that has enabled their social life it has but through this like one of the things that i tweeted i think it was from scientific american yesterday maybe it was yesterday that that it's a little bit misleading. But one of the things they said is only 64% of millennials have a strong belief. These things, these coasters are terrible.

They look great, but then things stick to the bottom of them. What the hell is it made of? I don't know, metal? Yeah, okay. A metal coaster? Yeah, see? What the hell is that? It sticks.

Yeah, that's the issue. It sticks when it gets moisture. You know about this where you flip this over and you tip it over and then it... What happens? Have you ever done that? You never did that? What? It stays?

It'll stay, yeah. Oh, because of the pressure? Yeah, the air pressure. Okay. Don't do it. I don't trust your science, your objective truth. 64% of what? Of millennials are not – or only 64% are convinced that the world is a ball.

The world is a circle. The world is a – what is it? A spheroid? Is that what it's called? Oblate? I mean I'd like to see how that question was asked. Exactly. Because if they know that we are oblate and the thing is asking is Earth a ball, they'll say no, we're

an oblate ball. We're slightly wider below the equator than at the equator so we're a pear-shaped oblate spheroid. But it's not a pear that you would find normally. If you found that pear you'd be like, this fucking pear that's shaped like a ball. So these differences

in measurements are so small that if you found it on the ground, you would say this is a perfect sphere. Right. Let me tell you how good a sphere it is. Right. All right. You ever see the schoolroom globes, the geographic globes,

and you rub your finger over Nepal and you get the Himalayas. Topographical. Yeah, yeah. And you get the Rockies. Oh, that is a gross exaggeration of reality. Yes. Do you realize if you took Earth with all of its mountains, valleys, and hills, Oh, that is a gross exaggeration of reality. Do you realize if you took Earth with all of its mountains, valleys, and hills and shrunk it down to the size of a cue ball, it would be smoother than any cue ball ever machined?

Really? Yes. Yes. Think about it. What? Think about this. Joe. Really?

Everest? Joe, chill. Listen to me. Damn. You ready? Okay. Do you know the deepest part of Earth's crust? No.

The Marianas Trench off the coast of the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean. That's the deepest part. Deepest part. It goes six miles down. Okay. Oh, okay. So, okay. I was thinking of the depth of the crust itself.

No, no. Just access to the deepest part of Earth's crust, the lowest point on Earth's surface, the Marianas Trench, right off the coast of the Philippines. The highest point on Earth's surface, the tip of K1. K2? Is it K1 or K2? Is it Japan? I think it's K1.

Why would you name the tallest peak K2? That's a good point'm just right i'm not a mountain climber but i'm i'm just thinking where is k1 okay it's the himalayan mountains okay in nepal okay isn't it in nepal i think it is yeah yeah okay so now let's how high up is that it was 28 000 feet so it's like five miles up. Okay? Right. The distance between the lowest point on Earth's surface and the highest point on Earth's surface is 11 miles. That's here to the comedy store. That is less than the length of Manhattan. Whoa. Yet we are 8,000 miles in diameter.

yet we are 8,000 miles in diameter and those two points are very far separated from one another if you were a cosmic giant and you came up to earth and you rubbed your finger over earth's surface it would feel as smooth as a cue ball to you wow in fact in this book I have a whole chapter called On Being Round which is all about this you. Wow. In fact, in this, in this book, I have a whole chapter called on being round, which is all about this. It's all about our perception of what is round and what is not.

I had asked you to debate one of them flat earth guys. No, I don't, I can't. I know. I know. We talked about it and we were going to have them on Skype. No, what we do is, and I think this is a diabolical plot so that the next time we can ship people en masse into orbit They all want to be the first in line because they know we're gonna send them So if they can see the round earth, they're gonna be the first ones in space Just so they can stop annoying the rest I do have people that have met that don't believe, because the problem with YouTube videos is, it's a problem with a lot of things, but one of the things about being unchecked while you're discussing things is you can say things, you can use big words, you can sound articulate and smooth, and you can do it in a very professional looking manner. Or do it passionately. Yes, passionately, convincingly,

charismatically, and you're unchecked. But if you did that in front of an expert, and you showed them that, along the way they go, stop, that's not true. Stop, that's not how it works. Let me show you why this is incorrect. Let me show you how you could prove that this is incorrect. And show you objective truths. But this is not happening. That render your argument invalid. So people who don't have any education, and then they watch one of these YouTube clips, they start actually believing that this stuff makes sense because it's unchecked. And I would say it's not about whether they've had education.

It's about whether the education they had teaches them skepticism of information and teaches them how to inquire. Do you realize it's just as intellectually lazy to believe everything you see as it is to deny everything you see? Yes. Why should someone know automatically that earth isn't flat, yet I tell them in the next breath that the entire universe was once as small as a marble. Right? Both of those sound equally preposterous, except one has evidence to back it and the

other does not. And very strong scientific, theoretical, and experimental underpinnings. So when you are trained to inquire, you don't either believe everything outright or reject everything outright. You're trained to ask questions. You're trained to probe deeper than the layer of information that comes to you. That's what should be taught in school. And it's not. They give you a book and say, learn this. And you'll get tested on it. And then when you're done, learn this. Well, isn't also there's a problem with being inexorably

connected to your first belief to your when you have an idea and it's in your head it's very difficult for people to shake that idea and they start arguing that idea that idea becomes a part of their identity and they dig their heels in deeper when an opposing view is presented because they connect themselves to these ideas right it's it is who they are. Right, right. And so I try not to base my character profile on something that is not yet verified as

objective truth. That's a very good thing to do. It's one of the reasons why I don't have tattoos on my body. Uh-oh. Holding a sign. Go on. Stretch in my face. Go on. One of the reasons is there's nothing I am so sure about that I want to put it indelibly on my skin.

No, no. Let me say it differently. There's nothing I value in my mind, body, and soul so much in this moment that I want to indelibly etch it on my skin because I want to leave room for me to have a possibly more enlightening thought later that would override whatever was my decision in that moment. And since I count myself among the lifelong learners, I'm learning stuff all the time. They say, wow, that's good. I didn't know that. Oh, that's even better. What's something you learned recently that you went, oh.

Okay, let me think. Okay, here's something I learned recently. I think I knew this when I was a kid. But if you're playing basketball and you're shooting, okay, and you say, oh, that didn't go in. Oh, my gosh. Well, you know, the rim, they should maybe make the rim a little bigger. I could score more often.

Do you realize two basketballs can fit exactly side by side through the opening of a basketball hoop? Really? Yes. I guess that makes sense. Two basketballs. Tough squeeze. Now, it's not a cosmically mind-blowing moment, but that gives you perspective

next time you watch a basketball game. It's how these guys can fly from the foul line in an airborne slam dunk and not miss. Because the area of this opening is four times, you do the math, it's four times as large as the ball itself. Right, because of the different positions it could be in. So there are multiple positions, and they can still do it. So it's not that that's easy to accomplish, but knowing this, you realize how much easier it is to score than you might have otherwise thought.

I wonder if basketball players – So that was a recent revelation. That's a good revelation. Yeah. I wonder if basketball players occasionally practice with a smaller hole. I think about this all the time. I say if I was a basketball player, you don't want to practice with a heavier ball. Jamie's saying yes.

Because then that would throw you off. That would throw off your inner animal. You practice with a... And a bigger ball. They use a bigger ball as well? We use a ball. Sometimes it's almost as big as the rim. But wait a minute.

Is it heavier? No. No, you don't want to use a bigger ball. It's a thing they did a long time ago. I bet they still don't. They no longer do it. Because then your grip is different. The grip matters. Right. Where your two hands go and what they feel. Yeah. I bet they still don't. They no longer do it because then your grip is different. The grip matters

where your two hands go and what they feel. So you want to do it, you use a smaller rim. And in baseball, you throw a faster pitch to give you less reaction time. That pool table that you see out there. You use a skinnier bat. That pool table is a very small pocket opening. Nice. It's a

four inch pocket opening as opposed to a five and a half inch. It's quite a bit different. You doing it you're doing it and uh so i would also you know growing up i played stickball in the street in new york and so you're using basically a broom handle and so when the first time you play baseball officially it it's like, whoa, I've got this huge bat. And so stickball players tend to transfer very well to baseball when you're a kid. Yeah. Because your instrument is bigger to hit the ball with. Did you read the talent code?

No. Daniel Coyle? No. One of the interesting parts about it is Brazilian soccer players, how good they are. And he attributes to a different game that they play with a heavier ball that they do indoors. It's a small, heavy ball. And because they do it in tight quarters, it involves incredibly fast footwork and movement. And then these guys take that footwork and movement and it translates amazingly well to an open soccer field.

I wonder if they calculated that because what you would do is, let's say the ball weighs twice as much, then it would only go half as far when you kicked it. So then you make a field half as large. I don't think they did calculate that. And then you could reproduce almost all of the dynamics of the soccer game. I think it was based on just trying to play a game in close quarters. Like how far are you going to throw it in?

If the ball's twice as heavy, you throw it half as far. The field is half the size. Right. That makes sense. It's a mini game, basically, if you do it right. That makes sense. By the way, there's a whole fun exercise you can do playing sports on other planets with different gravities.

It's a very, very fun thing to do. If you're a dork. Sorry. You know what's funny? Occasionally, I'll tweet tweet something and people say dork. And I say, yeah, thanks for the compliment. Yeah. Nerd is okay.

Nerd is – I'm taking dork. Nerd used to be a bad thing. It used to be. Take dork as well? You'd give wedgies to the nerds. Yeah. Well, the nerds would also be the people that were like – but now a nerd is like you can be a science nerd and people like it.

It's like, oh, yeah, I'm an old movie nerd. You can say that. Yeah, or movie geek. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm taking dork. Okay. I'll take it all. Geek and dork and nerd.

Yeah. Did I tell you? I must have told you this last time I was on your show. When I was a kid, I was bigger than other kids. I was always one of the tallest two kids in the class out of 30. So I was bigger than others in the day. And I was also physically fit and physically active, athletic. But I was squarely in the geek camp. I had my slide rule back in the day, walking down the corridor. You were also wrestling.

I was captain of my high school's wrestling team. So I was a geek person who could actually kick your ass. And I saw how my fellow geeks, because that's the community that I associated with card carrying, were treated by the football quarterback and the popular kids and the kids who are all beautiful and the ones who, and I imagine my future as a superhero, defender of the geeks. So that you put up a little bat signal, whatever, geek signal, put a few digits of pi,

and I come flying in and there's a wedgie in progress. I would just land and I'd come flying in and there's a wedgie in progress, right? I would just land and I'd grab the bully and rip them off the encounter and I would just save the day. This was my superhero. It's always the football players, right? Always. Because I think they're rewarded for violence.

They also have brain damage. As we've come to discover. How fucked up is that? You find out the high school kids. Right. That literally across the board, the majority of people who play football have CTE. Right. As far down as seventh grade.

Yeah. What? Yeah, CTE, remind me, that stands for? Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Encephalopathy. Enceph. Dot, dot, dot. Yeah. Encephalopathy. Encephalopathy. Dot, dot, dot. Yeah.

Encephalopathy. Say it like Mike Tyson. Encephalopathy. So let me tell you that story about Christopher Columbus. Please. So. The dick story. No, no.

I already told you the dick story. Yeah. Now let me tell you just something else. Okay. Okay. Something else. Okay. I think him coming to America was the most significant thing to ever happen in our species.

Whoa. Silence. Not internet porn? No, that's just porn in another medium. Right. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, internet porn is just porn in another medium. Right. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, internet porn is just a matter of degree, not a matter of does it exist or does it not.

Right. Okay. I think it was the most significant event to happen in our species. It's kind of amazing when you stop and think about the fact that at that point in time, other than the Native Americans who lived here who were living a nomadic tribal existence, very few people that had the wheel, that had firearms, that had all these things that had already been achieved in the rest of the world had made their way to this place. So now watch. Okay. Here's how it worked.

Right. So you're going to hear. So I presume that you have some skepticism of this claim, as most people would, especially the Columbus haters who are out there. I don't really have any skepticism about it, to be honest with you. Okay, so let me describe to you why I think this is true. And then you can tell me whether you agree or not. We are hunter-gatherers. We haven't settled down yet, early humans.

And we're basically wandering. We're following the herds, all right? And then the Ice Age hits. Well, what is an Ice Age? An Ice Age means it is so cold that when the moisture evaporates from the oceans, goes to the clouds, the clouds go over the land, it doesn't rain, it snows. And the snow falls and then it stays. So the water that had lifted up from the ocean does not return to the ocean. It accumulates on the land.

And this accumulation, when it's significant and sustained, we call glaciers. Glaciers is not itself a snowfall. It is compressed snow that's basically changed state into this ice river that flows very slowly back to the ocean. But the oceans are getting drained faster than they're getting replenished. So during the Ice Age, the ocean levels dropped, exposing the Bering Strait land bridge between Asia and what is now Alaska, basically North America. Our ancestors who come out of Africa go into Europe. Some stayed. Others kept wandering. Some stayed low above the Mediterranean. Others went high. They populate Asia. They keep walking

because there's a land bridge there. They don't even know it's a bridge. It's just more land. So they walk and they enter North America. And from there, the only way you can go is south at that point. The weather gets a little better. The Ice Age ends. The glaciers melt back into the oceans. The ocean levels rise, closing the land bridge, Ocean levels rise, closing the land bridge, strand only a few families as their parent genetic origin.

Okay? It's like some research says it's like eight family lineages populated the entire North and South American continents. Then the land bridge breaks. Now you have Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America, and they know nothing of one another. Two separate branches of the human species. The Vikings notwithstanding, maybe they found, came over, they didn't. Even if they did, their influence was near zero relative to the Europeans. So we're talking about influence here.

This is a branch. Had this continued, this is how you speciate. This is why the species on Australia, that's why you have mammals there that have pouches. All right? No other mammals do that. They split off and they evolve their own way. Okay. So 10,000 years is not enough to grow three heads or, you know, 12 fingers.

But our species is separate. Now Columbus crosses the Atlantic, makes contact with humans. This is the first time that has happened in 10,000 years. We have rejoined two branches of the human species. We are now one common genetic group. And that genetic crossbreeding now continues to this day. We fly to any corner of the world and mate, okay? And the mating already began immediately. Yes, there were diseases that Columbus brought to North America, much written about that. Less written is that he brought syphilis back to Europe. First cases of syphilis of 1492. Whoa. And then it skyrocketed. They got

syphilis from the Native Americans? Yes. Did they have no problem with it? Well, I don't know the details of how the physiology of the natives dealt with that or whether it mutated. And there may be people who know that. I'm not among them. That's fascinating. But just look at the graph of reported syphilis cases in Europe. It all began in 1492 when he came back. Whoa.

So what I'm saying is this was a hugely significant event, the rejoining of the branches of the human species. Yeah. No, I would imagine that that makes sense. That is the most important event then. And by the way, Native Americans, you know this infamous problem with metabolizing alcohol, okay, with Native Americans. You know who else has that problem? The Chinese. They do?

Yes. Really? Yes. Really? Yes. Yes. So it's an Asian issue. Well, so who stayed in – so you look at who populated North and South America after the – before the land bridge. It's whoever was right at the edge of Asia. Right. edge of Asia. Then the land bridges. So Asians and North American and the natives of North and

South America have more in common with each other because of this than most other pairs of groups you might grab around the world. But my point is, obviously, there's a lot to blame Columbus for, but he just happened to be the guy who did it first. Europe was coming to the new world no matter what. Everybody was trying to find a faster trade route to the Indies. And so if it wasn't Columbus, it would have been Arnold Schmednick, whatever. It doesn't matter. Somebody did that. And the rest is, as they say, history. So personally, I think it is the most significant thing to happen in our species. Otherwise, we'd still be two stranded branches of humans. It would be fascinating, though, like Australia is stranded, to see what would happen if this has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years.

If hundreds of thousands, that would have been a different story, right. Yeah. And your immunities would be different. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the big concern about aliens, right? One of the big concerns is that there's some sort of a virus that you pick up from somewhere. I think that's harder to accept. So, for example, what are the chances that an oak tree would catch whooping cough?

Not so good. Not so good. We're two different species. So viruses tend to be very species targeted. Yeah, but what about human beings catching? Now, they can jump species. Sure. They can jump species.

But so does it jump mammal to mammal? Does it jump vertebrate to vertebrate? Mm-hmm. But so, yes, that can happen. But the more different the life form is, it is sensible to suppose that the less likely you're going to share the same diseases. That's all. But NASA, regardless, has safeguards in place in the event that that happens. So it's called the Planetary Protection Program in NASA. It's

a whole division of NASA. It's protecting Earth from bugs that could be coming from space on our own spaceship that we bring back. And it protects destinations from us. There's a certain sterilization levels that we invoke. The Cassini spacecraft, we plunged that back into Saturn in its death when we were done with it and ran out of money. We're done with it. Plunged into Saturn to vaporize. We didn't leave it in orbit around Saturn. Why?

Because it might have crashed into one of Saturn's moons that might have life. And if someone had sneezed on the spacecraft before it got launched, we don't want to contaminate the life that we are later going to one day want to study. What? So we plunged it into Saturn. That's why? That is why. Because they were worried about maybe it hitting Europa or something? Once it's dead and you can't track it or guide it anymore, then it's a wild card.

It might hit Europa is a moon of Jupiter. But Enceladus, there are other moons that have sort of ocean water, they're water worlds basically. So the concern is that we would introduce life. Suppose we did. It crashed, and then we go back later and find life, and it has DNA just like here. But was it our life that we contaminated with? You don't want to confuse the future science of it.

So that's the plan. Can you even watch a science movie, like science fiction movies? I know you had a real problem with gravity. Yeah, all right. So let me set the record straight here. Uh-oh. Okay? Let me just go on record.

Okay. Okay? I've been deeply misunderstood with my comments on movies. Deeply misunderstood. Deeply. Deeply. And so I've just stopped. When was the last time you saw a movie comment in my Twitter stream? You haven't. You haven't. I've kind of just stopped.

Wasn't the Matthew McConaughey movie? Did you comment on that one? Interstellar. Interstellar. That's the last one I commented on in any big way. Right. And you're done. Yeah, I'm done. Because people then thought I was just being nitpicky. Oh, it's not fun going to the movies with you. Why would you do it? Tyson will just say that can never happen. And so my intent was, my intent did not match how people received my intent.

My intent is, here's an observation that I think if you understood this it would enhance your appreciation of the movie. Let me give an example. Please do. Star Wars, The Force Awakens. Which one was that? That's the one that introduced BB-8. Is that the most recent one? No, no, no. This is like

four movies ago now. Plus I've lost track because there's another one. Yeah, there's so many of them now. So the one that introduced BB-8, cute as ever. Cute little fella. Cute little fella. And in there they have the updated Death Star. Right.

Okay? Remember the old Death Star? It has enough power to destroy a planet and that's devastating. This one, it can suck energy out of a star

so that the star no longer exists. Then it could take these energy beams and kill six planets at once. It's no longer just a one planet killer. Six or eight, whatever the number was. It was like high single digits. Okay. Well, I did the math on this.

And I tweeted. And I said, first, okay. if you take all the energy from a star you become a star but let's not maybe they've got a containment mechanism I'll give it to them it is the future after all I don't think is the future but what a long time ago in a galaxy far yeah it's another another another universe of civilizations okay mess but they have light speed and we don't so it's the future of our technology, even if it's the past of our time.

Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Let me pause on that one. So you do the calculation. And I forgot the number, but I calculated how much energy is stored in a star.

That's enough energy to explode a thousand planets. Oh my gosh. They underrepresented the energy that it sucked out of the star. And I thought this could have been more badass than even they came up with in this movie. That is the nature of my comments. Not could this happen? Could it not happen? Let me give you a perspective.

Okay. So 20% of people just get pissed off. 80% really like it and they want more. But that 20%, they cut me no slack. And I'm only doing this for people to enjoy. And if I have that level of hate mail, I don't need to continue it. So I just basically stop. I'll have these thoughts to myself,

but I don't have the urge to share them. I still have the thoughts. I got to teach you the art of post and drop. Okay? This is what you do. You post something, you know people are going to get mad, you drop your phone,

and you walk away. You got to learn how to do that, man, you can't be reading those fucking comments not you're dealing with too many human beings No, I got that I get that but but you don't because you're still changing your behavior morons. Here's my rebuttal You're a buttle my rebuttal. Okay, if you're watching a movie that takes place in 1958 it's a period piece and There's a car from 1960. Oh, yeah. Drive you crazy.

And someone who's a car expert points that out. You say, hey, he's an expert. That's pretty good. Do you complain that the person noticed that? No. You praise their expertise. I get mad at the movie. If you get mad at the movie. If you're watching a Jane Austen period piece and 1870, whenever they took place and someone gets out of the carriage with tie dyed bell bottoms, you would cry foul.

Right. That would take you. I'm exaggerating there. Obviously could be a top hat instead of a derby. You would cry foul if you were a costume designer and we would all be impressed by that level of knowledge that you exhibited. I am bringing a level of science to bear on a movie that is no different from anybody else's expertise who is out there that we have praised for that invocation. Yet people are not granting me that latitude to make those comments.

I don't like these generalizations. I don't like this. It is true. No, but I don't like what you're saying. People are not doing this. No, a small vocal minority that are assholes. And those are the people that you're altering your behavior for. That's what I think is ridiculous about this.

No, because my- Most people would enjoy it. The point is- They hear you talking about gravity and the fact that hair wouldn't do that and the space stations weren't that close together. Right, right, right. You can see it in the sky. My gosh.

Yeah, it wouldn't work. Right, right. But, but. It's assholes. No, I, my tweets are offerings. Yes. But I'm not. The problem is you're reading responses.

I don't need to force people. That's the problem. The only problem is you're reading responses. No. What you're doing is wonderful. No. You're educating people. 20% freak out is high for me

What the fuck is 20%? No, no, listen Hear me out I don't even believe those numbers Hear me out I'm When it's 5% Then I take notice

But you say 20% Like what are you doing? Calculations? You're actually doing a I scan 100 of them I see 20 of them You just run into 20 assholes So 20 assholes

Out of the millions and millions of people that follow you have decided to reach out. And you're altering your behavior for assholes. I like those quotes. I like when you break things down because I didn't know those things. I like thinking about the hair and gravity. I was like, oh, yeah, that fucking shit would be standing straight up in the air. And the only reason why I mention it about hair is because every photo of anybody with long hair, it wouldn't happen to you, but anyone

with long hair in space, it's standing up on edge. It's a completely obvious thing. Yeah. That was omitted from the filming of Gravity. Yeah, but you have to have hair and makeup. They have to have a reason to exist. So, what I might do, I might take a poll.

I might post it. I'm a servant of curiosity. I don't want to force feed curiosity. You don't have to listen to your feed. I don't want to force feed anybody. You're not force feeding anything. You're pretty offerings out there, like you said. This is not force feeding.

You're not knocking on someone's home. Wake up, bitch. Read my shit. That is true. I'm not forcing myself on your property. You're not doing it at all. Put the shotgun down. You're going to hear me talk about your movie.

Listen, man. I said about BB-8. I said – first I said BB-8 is way cuter than R2-D2. And I used like five A's in the way just to start a fight because that's a fun fight. Right. Then I said, by the way, BB-8, a smooth metal rolling spherical ball would have skidded uncontrollably on sand. And the whole movie is moving around on sand. Right.

Yeah, it would. That's why you deflate your tires. That's why you deflate your tires, to drive on sand. That's correct. Have you ever tried riding a bicycle on sand? It's impossible. That's a good point. And that's with rubber tires.

Imagine steel tires. You ever tried running on a sand dune? Holy shit. Oh, my gosh. Oh, yeah. One of the hardest things you could do for exercise. Talk about getting into shape. Right.

So it will work if you have a hard surface just below a dusting of sand. Right. Then you. Of course. Yeah, then you can. You can dig into it and the sand offers you some resistance. The sand then connects to the hard surface. So I posted this and people say, you some resistance. The sand then connects to the hard surface.

So I posted this and people said, you're ruining the movie for me. And then people started. Assholes. Assholes. Again, when you say people, you're just listening to assholes. Smart people are going to read that and go, oh, yeah. Yeah, this is stupid. It would roll around.

Give that fucking thing some tractor treads. You know what's actually happened as a result, I think? I'm getting phone calls from producers. Oh, well, that's good. There's a little bit of science. We want to make sure that you don't tweet about it. Come on, man. That's good. That's good.

You're keeping them on point. As you know, I might be most famous in movie commenting for the final scene in Titanic. Okay? I don't know if you knew about this. What would you say about the final scene? Okay, so we know where the Titanic sank, the longitude, the latitude.

Yes. We know what time of day, what time of night. So at the POV, the point of view of Rose, as she's looking up deliriously to the sky, there's only one sky she should have seen, and it was the wrong sky. Ah! Not only that, the left side of the sky, it's only one sky she should have seen. And it was the wrong sky. Not only that,

the left side of the sky, it was worse than that. The left side of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right side of the sky. Did you call James Cameron? I called him. I didn't know. It was back in 1996. I saw it when it first came out. I noticed instantly. Because I know the sky.

Okay? So, no reply. Five years later, I bump into him at a meeting. NASA hosted a meeting with some explorers and some scientists. I brought it up to him and he says, well, at the time I was not overseeing post-production and that's when we added that. I immaturely wanted him to grovel at my feet for forgiveness. Did you really? Yeah. I wanted him to, But that's not what happened. So then five years after that, I brought it up again when I bumped into him.

And then he said, you know, last I checked, Titanic has earned more than a billion dollars worldwide. Imagine how much more it would have earned if I'd gotten the sky correct. That's a stupid answer from an asshole. It was. He should be tweeting you. No, no. So. That is a stupid answer from an asshole. He should be tweeting you. No, no. That is an asshole answer. That's an ego answer.

But it's not the end of the story. So that was, okay, I have nothing more I can say here because he's right. Okay? No, he's not. He's right. No, he made a lot of money, and it would have made the same amount of money if you did that. That's true, but that's not the point But he's why is you fucked up bitch? You fucked up say you fucked up. Don't say how much money a week later. I got a phone call so hi

I forgot his name John Smith. Hi John. How can I help you? Is this the doctor I said yes He said I work post-production for James Cameron He's producing a director's cut where he's adding new footage and he tells me you have a sky he could use. Yes! Oh! So, the centennial release of Titanic released in April 2012.

What, not, I mean, the... Oh, yeah. That's right. Yes. So, how'd you dig up that? There it was, April 2012. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yes. So how'd you dig up that? There it was, April 2012. I feel like you and I had this conversation before. We might have.

We might have. I just put this in context now. So he actually put it in. So he did come through. So here's what happened. Seth MacFarlane calls me up and said, I'm making a movie about a talking teddy bear, and I need to know the sky over a town outside of Boston in 1985 on Christmas Eve looking north, northeast.

You got a sky? I said, I'll get back to you. Half hour later, I send him the sky. That was the sky that the kid wished on to where where ted came to life wow so ted had the correct sky and titanic did not so it's good on first you're correcting these ted won titanic zero on that right so the point is people started thinking about it and the highest compliment i ever got was uh andyir, who wrote The Martian. He said to himself, while he was writing the novel, he said, because he's an engineer,

so he has the fluency and he also knows how to write. He's write creatively. He said, if Tyson were looking over my shoulder, would he tweet about this or not? And so that put him on notice to make sure that his calculations were accurate. And The Martian is one of the most entertainingly accurate explorations of how to invoke science to not die that there ever was. So for me, that was a very high compliment. And it was kind of worth it, all of the naysayers, to know that Andy Weir came through on that. Yeah, so why stop?

I don't know. Maybe I'll change. I think you need to learn how to post and drop. Just think about it like this. Post and drop. Boom. Boom. Walk away.

Walk away. Just go do something else, man. You don't need to look at that shit. You don't need to look at what people are going to say. Make sure that there's no typos. That's always a struggle. Yeah, it is. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah, I got fat thumbs. Me too. I care, though. I'm sure you do care. About how people can think about what I wrote if it's a way that I had not considered. Okay. I see what you're saying. It makes me a better communicator when I'm in front of an audience. I'll know what percent will think one way versus another. And I can modify what I'm

saying to be more precise and to, as we say in physics, to reduce the impedance between the signal and the receiver so that there's a better match between the communicator and the audience. I understand that. But if you see- You surely have told jokes that people just took the wrong way. Oh yeah. Without your intent. The right way, they just didn't like what I was saying. Oh yeah. Yeah. But surely like you see the word cuck in a response,

you know that person's an asshole, right? There's certain things you just see, like you're a cuck. Like, okay, I don't have to listen to you anymore. Now I know what you are. Yeah, yeah. You're a fool. Right? You see that.

Like, yeah, you spend all that time staring at the fucking sky instead of fill in the blank. Those are just assholes. Well, I have pretty thick skin, so it's not that it upsets me. It's that I'm here to serve you, not to piss you off. But you're not there to serve those people. Because I'm an educator. There's some people. I'm an educator.

They're looking to get angry. They're not really angry. I get that, but maybe I can bring them around. I bet you can't. The arrogance of thinking that you could fix 30 plus years of worthless shit bag living with a couple of tweets. Okay. And you know something?

I don't even want to take you up on that challenge because you're probably right. I'm telling you. You got to walk away. But for most people, myself included in those most people, I enjoy those tweets. So I learned something. Here's one. So I tweeted something. And somebody responding to somebody else's tweet said, you know, I don't really like Tyson.

He's so pompous. Okay. So, so I tweeted back to that person and I said, thanks for your note. Could you please share with me the single most pompous thing you've ever seen me do? And he wrote back, he says he says damn you would have to be reading my tweets would you now you put me on the spot i can't think of anything right now but overall i really like your work he put nothing forward yeah that happens all the time because people are just shocked that you respond well but, but plus there is, people can get into a stereotype mode where there's, that person

is that and therefore everything. They just decide. That's the, they decide. Yeah. They decide. Yeah. Right. Right.

You can't listen to those people, dude. You're too smart for this. And other people said, look, the dude wrote a book called Astrophysical People in a Hurry. Yeah. How pompous is that? That's not pompous at all. Right. You're a science educator.

I interviewed on StarTalk. Yes, you were one of my guests, but so too was Katy Perry. There you go. And there are people who got pissed off because she's nothing to add. She's just pop culture. I said, she wrote a song about boning an alien, and I wanted to find out what she was thinking. Did she? Did she write it?

Yeah, it's her song. And there's a line about it, where she's making love to an Alien. And I wanted to find out what she was thinking. Did she? Did she write it? Yeah, it's her song. And there's a line about it. Making love to an alien. So there's always ways you can- Well, after you fuck Russell Crowe a few times. Or what's his name? Peters. Sorry, Russell.

I don't- Brand. What did I say? Peters? Russell Peters? Russell, what's up? Russell Peters is a good friend of mine. He's like, Joe, what the fuck?

Sorry, Russell. I don't keep up with people's fuck Sorry Russell It's been a long day I just got back from Italy I'm very confused You're zoning a little I'm just out of it I'm trying to keep you awake Russell Brand

She fucked Russell Brand I didn't know any of this They were married I didn't know this He's like They were married. I didn't know this. So he's like an alien. That's my point. He's a very odd duck. Oh, I see.

Yeah. He's a brilliant guy, but he's out there. He'd be like one of those guys that would be in Men in Black, aliens that they're tracking. Remember that scene in the headquarters? There's a big board. Right. Undercover aliens. Yeah, they're all aliens and they're like michael

jackson was there people who just there's something a little different about them you know so there's people that really do believe that they believe that there's aliens amongst us again we live in a free country i'm fine but well you know what happens evidence at some point should matter but you find out about like r Russian agents that have been living in New Jersey for 30 years. That's the whole premise of the show. The Americans. Yeah, the Americans, yeah. Well, it's a real story, too.

I mean, it really has happened on multiple occasions. And so they wonder, well, if the Russians won't do that, what are the aliens willing to do? Yeah, so just find me one. Yeah. Maybe they are doing it. Are you open-minded to that? Of course. Oh, my gosh.

Who doesn't want to meet the aliens? Do you wish? I would love to meet the aliens. They're going to have technology that we don't have. I want to compare notes. I want to... Oh, my gosh. Do you...

Oh, by the way, in the movie Arrival... Which one? The arthropod alien. Okay. Isn't there two Arrivals? Well, there's an earlier Arrival with Charlie Sheen. Yeah, that was a good one, too. He played an astrophysicist, by the way. That's The arthropod alien. Okay. Isn't there two arrivals? Well, there's an earlier arrival with Charlie Sheen. Yeah. He played an astrophysicist, by the way.

That's a good one, too. So this one, it's like a septipus lands. Yes. It's got seven... Freaky things that speak in ink. Okay. Speak in ink, right? So they sent a physicist and an anthropologist.

Not an anthropologist. A linguist. And I tweeted, I said, you know, if aliens come, I would not send a physicist and a linguist. I would send an astrobiologist and a cryptographer. But then the linguists got all upset, and they started piling on. The linguists piled on. Yeah.

She's not a linguist. She was a, if you're an anthropological linguist, or they all are, but could you just look up the title, what her profession was? But anyhow, so they all piled on. But that's fine. It's acceptable. Well, what did they say to you?

Because how many linguists are ever shown in a film? So this was their time in the sun. It's a big moment. So I get it. That's fine. But there are a couple of things. So, for example, there it is making these circles, and they're interpreting them. But it's making them on glass.

So how did they know we weren't seeing them, the mirror image of what it was trying to communicate? That was not addressed in the film. But, yeah, I'd want to meet the aliens, as they did there. They brought the military of course That'll be a likely fact but because your protection is of extreme importance, but Here this happens in all sci-fi movies you go up to this thing and you get lifted up against the force of gravity At that point I would just put down all my weapons because there's stuff going on That's way beyond your understanding of the laws of physics. Yeah.

You know, it's like pulling out your pistol and shooting at the spacecraft that crossed half the galaxy to come to you. What are you doing? Yeah. They are clearly superior to you in ways that you don't even know yet. So just find another way to do your talking rather than sending bullets their way. But isn't that always the case in every film?

I mean, it's always part of the narrative is that the primitive people fuck it up for the advanced civilization that's coming here to help us. Yeah, it's never been good for the less technologically advanced civilization. Ever. Ever. Ever.

Yeah, and going on right now currently and by the way undiscovered tribes not to sound pluggy but this one of the profiles here is of Captain Cook just a quick thing I visited Hawaii only a couple of times in my life one of the times I saw Don Ho the show yeah yeah oh my gosh and he Oh, my gosh. And he was like, he only sat down. He was like big and heavy and old. And he died a couple of decades ago. But anyhow, Don Ho, he just tells Hawaiian stories.

And one of them was about Captain Cook. And someone asked him, well, what ever happened to Captain Cook? You know how he replies? He says, nobody's ever seen him. For people listening, he's making things like he's picking things out of his teeth. Nobody's ever seen Captain Cook of late. So his rumors are that he was eaten by Pacific Island natives. Well, that happened to a lot of pirates. So watch what happens.

So the Brits send Captain Cook to the South Pacific. Why? Well, you look at his marching orders. It's, oh, there is what's called a transit of Venus that's going to take place, visible only from the South Pacific. This is where Earth in our orbit and Venus in orbit are such that when Venus passes between us and the Sun, it actually is exactly between us and the Sun. You can watch it move, the circle move across the Sun's surface. Did they look at it through a device? Yeah, they had devices.

They had filters. We were fine. Okay? So if you measure that, you can learn the exact scale of the solar system. So you learn deep scientific knowledge about how far away the planets are and how far away the exact scale of the solar system. So you learn deep scientific knowledge about how far away the planets are and how far away the sun is from the earth. It was not known with precision before that measurement was made. So Captain Cook goes on this voyage to do this. Well, it's a pretty expensive voyage. Oh, oh wait, flip over the marching orders. Oh,

open the envelope. Oh, while you're there, use these new navigation techniques that use the sun, moon, and stars and map every coastline you find and bring that information back to us. Within 10 years of Captain Cook navigating the South Pacific as well as the northern coast of Australia and New Zealand, Within 10 years, Britain took control over those coastlines. Became part of the British Empire. Hegemony at its finest. On the premise that he's observing something about the universe, but there was a tandem role that he played. I did not know they knew that much about the cycles of the planets, that they could be there. They knew accurately they could be in the ocean.

The motivation, part of the motivation of knowing any of this was navigation around the globe. It was navigation. How are you going to know where you are on Earth? You can get your latitude. That's just the altitude, the height of Polaris, the North Star above the horizon. Measure that at night. You can wait that long. Where do you know where you are in longitude?

Ships would be shipwrecked. Millions of dollars worth of commerce would be at the bottom of the ocean because they didn't know where a coastline was. coastline was. And the only way you can measure coastline is if you have good navigational tools and tactics, which involves an accurate chronometer, a timekeeping device for your, and knowing what the sun, moon, and stars are doing in your sky. So the astronomer in that day was crucial to the mapping of the earth. And who's mapping earth? Is it just geologists for fun no it is nations uh wielding power over regions beyond the beyond their own coastlines and that's i have a quote here that's where this quote comes from i got a guy from 17 what do i get here 1757 james ferguson 1757 here's this quote of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, astronomy is acknowledged to be and undoubtedly is the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful.

For by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the earth is discovered, but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys. Our minds exalted above their low contracted prejudices." Whoa, that's pretty powerful. I gotta drop a mic on that, here we go. Boom, dropped that mic. So notice he lists mapping the earth first, then he talks about how it exalts in our grandeur.

So, yeah, it's an exercise in dominance, in hegemony, in power. Under the guise of studying a planet. Well, it's not so much. It's just they co- They did it together. They matter to one another. Yeah. It's part of it.

It's part of it. And they're using a sextant for all this? Sextant helped. There was an octant a little earlier. The Muslims used an astrolabe. By the way, what's the number? It's a third

or two? I forgot the fraction. Around a half of all stars that have names in the night sky have Arabic names. Because in the golden age of Islam, a thousand years ago, navigation was a big deal. And they navigated using astrolabes,

which is sort of the Islamic counterpart to the sextant and the octant that were used in the rest of Europe. Astrolabes are gorgeous. Oh, then they're works of art. They're brass, they're etched. Can you buy one? You can buy replicas. You're not going to get an original one.

Find astrolabe. I want to see what that looks like. There's a thing that hangs down. There are different discs that you can replace depending on where you are on Earth to know where you are more accurately. So this is all navigation. So it was almost like chips for a GPS device.

Wow, look at that thing. They're gorgeous. They're completely gorgeous. Wow. What the fuck? And you'd carry them with you. If you found that somewhere, you'd go, okay, aliens have been here. Yeah, exactly.

If you didn't otherwise know your history. Look at that. That is insane. That's about the size of a heavyweight champion's buckle. So what is that thing doing? So, yeah,

it depends on where you are on Earth. Holy shit. That's what I'm saying. So this, we're talking about this, you know, a thousand years ago, you know, 700 years ago, 600 years ago, you know, this 700 years ago, 600 years ago, five, the Ottoman empire is spreading their influence and they've got, they've got astrolabes. So this is Islam.

You don't even learn about this in school because you only hear about the rest of Europe, Christian Europe. So this mattered. An incredible looking device. Yes. And these are dials that turn. It looks like a tribal tattoo. It doesn't even look like there's a rhyme or reason to it with all the claws and everything.

It completely looks like art. It looks like some bizarre- Or it looks like an alien- Yeah. Yeah. So again, if you're only listening, just Google- Astrolabe. Astrolabe.

And look at any of the- That's a more primitive one there. Oh, wow. A simpler one. And so that's 1602. Oh, no. So that one, that has the spirit of an astrolabe, but I don't know if they would have called that an astrolabe. Others, they go way back.

And so the most decorated ones are the ones from the Middle East. Wow. Most decorated ones are the ones from the Middle East. But anyhow, the point is GPS is no different from the navigation tools in concept, from the navigation tools that Captain Cook invoked for Britain to then take control over all the South Pacific that they did. It is where are we and do we know this information with precision? It is where are we and do we know this information with precision? And what happens if an enemy force takes out our GPS and we have so much dependent on it? What are we going to do? We've got people now working on using navigation by pulsars.

Can't take those out because those are cosmic. They're sending highly timed pulses that reach Earth in different places on the sky. And by measuring them, you can, and the time delay between one and the other, you can actually localize yourself on Earth's surface with extremely high precision and without any use of satellites. That's the future of navigation, where you are insulated from a rogue nation that might want to take out your satellites. Pulsars. Pulsars. And by the way, the Trump Space Force, you know, there are a whole lot of Trump haters out there.

But if you want to hate Trump rationally, you want to not hate him no matter what he says. You want to evaluate statement by statement what he says. Right? That's what you need to do. He says, You want to evaluate statement by statement what he says, right? That's what you need to do. He says, I want a space force. Well, let's think about that, okay? In the Second World War, there was the Air Force, except they were not their own branch. They were part of the Army.

It was called the Army Air Force. And then we realized that command and control in the air needs different kinds of soldiers because they have to be pilots. It's a different kind of decision-making, different kinds of tactical actions you would have in the theater of operations. And so it was sensible to spawn off a new branch of the military called the Air Force. No one today would question whether that was a good idea. would question whether that was a good idea. Today, you should know that operations in space, in the vacuum of the universe, is a different regime that you're operating in from moving through the air. Your hardware looks different. Your strategies are different. Your decision, your command and control is different. So it's not a crazy, just because it came out of

Trump's mouth doesn't make it a crazy idea that you might want a Space Force. In fact, I had proposed a Space Force in 2001 when I was on a commission appointed by George W. Bush to explore the future of the United States aerospace industry, a commission of 12. So I put it on the table. We have Air Force generals there, former members of Congress, people from Lockheed Martin. And people said, well, the Air Force is currently overseeing space, United States Space Command. So everybody was happy with it. And so I'm fine. I said, okay, let's not worry about it. But as long as this needs of our presence in space grows, but more importantly, the size of our assets, as long as that continues to grow, what else would a military do beyond protecting your borders? They would protect your assets.

And our space assets by day, day by day, are growing by leaps and bounds. Space assets meaning like satellites, space stations. And the value of those, it's not just the cost of the satellite, it's the value of the satellite to you. Right. The military is now creating a whole other GPS system that will be exclusive to them, and then they're going to cede the current GPS to...

And what have we done with GPS? This hard-earned engineering and physics and orbital mechanics, what have we done with the GPS? We now use it to find out who you want to mate with. Oh, someone's in your area. Yeah. This is Tinder. This is Grindr. This is show me mateable people within 20 square blocks of where I am.

That's a GPS. I don't think a mate on grinder I did look at the definition mate mate implies you're making a baby. Okay, who you gonna have sex with fine? Yeah Yeah, so so that has a certain economic value to society It's so does uber so do all the things that so does UPS tracking their trucks Yeah, so it's not the cost of the satellite is the value of the satellite to our economy So does Uber. So do all the things that – so does UPS tracking their trucks. So it's not the cost of the satellite. It's the value of the satellite to our economy.

You'd want that protected. Makes sense. Is there a Space Force currently? Like is it real? Have they recruited people? There's a United States Space Command. Is there anybody who's a general? If we make a space – there's generals in the Air Force overseeing Space Command. So if you're going to make a Space Force, you would offload the space activities of the Air Force. Space Command. So if you're going to make a Space Force, you would offload the space activities of the Air Force

Space Command. To the U.S. Space Command primarily. To the Space Force and then add or subtract from that in whatever way is sensible given the needs. If we have a Space Force, you know what I want to see? What? I want them to protect us from asteroids. How about that for a defense program? Yes. That makes

sense. But do you want the government involved in that? Shouldn't it be someone a little bit more thorough? That's not how it works. It's not. Scientists. Yeah, you just made a blanket anti-government decision because you're just an anti-government guy. That's what people say. Okay.

So private enterprise is not good at doing expensive things that have never been done before. Right. You need government money. Government. Government does it first. Okay? Right. Then you learn where the hostels are, where the friendlies are, what patent did you need to make this happen? Then the venture capitalist meeting about whether I'm going to make a buck on it has some teeth in it.

They say, how much will this cost? Well, we know because the government did it. And we think we can do it for half that price. Is it dangerous? Yes, the government did this and they lost two people. But we will put protections in so we won't have that risk. What is the return on the investment? The government got no return because they didn't.

That wasn't the objective. But here's how we can bring it. So I'll do it second. I won't do it first. This is how you get the Dutch East India Trading Company. They were not the first Europeans to the new world because where's the edge of the earth? Will you find India? You don't know any of this. I'm screaming at you. Sorry. You don't know any of this. Columbus does it first. And he can tell you where there's food and where there isn't and where they want to kill you and where they don't. Then you hand that information to the mercantilists and they make a buck after the fact. So they come in.

They come in. Yeah. That's how you do it. That's how modern airplanes came about. People are making planes in their garage. The government said, this could be a cool thing. Let's pay them and have them compete to carry airmail, new kind of mail, mail delivered by air. Oh, that's cool. So now I make an airplane

because I want that contract. You say, no, you want the contract. You make an airplane that has more cargo, a better engine. You're cleverer. Now, you just took the contract from me. Now, I make a bigger airplane. So I said, oh, I see what he did there, but now I can improve on that. Now, wait a minute. I don't need to carry mail. I can carry people.

And thus is born commercial airplane. The government basically bankrolled it. As did prize money for accomplishing certain achievements. Like Lindbergh, no one talks about the fact that there was cash money available to him for having

flown across the Atlantic solo first. Cash money. No kidding. Yeah, he did it for the money. As most of them did. Fly the longest, the highest, the fastest. Each of these had money associated with it. So this drove the marketplace. It was not whether you could make a product out of it initially, because you got to get over the early humps. You got to get through, you got to know what it is that works and what doesn't

so is there a plan with the Space Force like are they going to make space weapons and space ships there's a treaty in 1960s to which we are signatory okay and I talk about it in Accessory to War it's again I hate I feel so bad doing this plug it baby no I feel so

let me hold it then no yeah you can you hold it yeah yeah I just feel but... Let me hold it then. No, yeah, can you hold it? Yeah. Yeah, I just feel... But it's... The unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military. You look beautiful with that book. Thank you. Primarily because there's a bow and arrow here.

Oh, there is? Being shot by Sagittarius that became a weapon and a missile. And you're a bow and arrow guy. Yeah. Last I checked. Yeah. You've got a freaking bow and arrow in the back room here. Yes.

What are you afraid? I practice. When the zombies come and they run out of bullets? Zombie some. I'm pulling this sword out like the chick from Walking Dead. Seems to be the best weapon. Everybody runs out of bullets and the zombies are slow. And her weapon is, in fact, a samurai sword.

Yeah, a samurai sword. Totally. Yeah. So what was I saying before I interrupted myself? Space force. Who's paying attention out there? Weapons. Weapons.

Asteroids. Asteroids. Weaponizing space. So there's an outer space treaty for the peaceful uses of outer space. And it was in 1967. There's some modification since then, but that's the basic one. And we are a signature to it,

and so are the other major countries of the world. Yeah, but didn't we just break out of the Paris Accord? Just break out of that goddamn space pussy shit, dude. It's a beautiful document. It tries to be very forward-looking. If there's an astronaut from another country who is at risk, then you will go to help them without question. It's very kumbaya.

Okay. So one of my sort of, now that I'm old and tired and I just am a realist, it's why should we promise to not kill each other in space when we are not successful at doing that here on Earth? And we don't even promise to not kill each other in space when we are not successful at doing that here on Earth? And we don't even promise to not kill each other here on Earth. We don't even promise to do it here on Earth. Yeah. Who are we to say, oh, well, we'll kill each other here, but in space we'll all hold hands. Well, maybe the idea.

I don't have that much confidence in human conduct. Right. I've become cynical over my years, and I'm angry. Demonstrate to me that on Earth, you know how to not kill one another. Then I'll believe your space treaty. That's all I'm saying here. Now, given that there is a treaty, it says you can't put heavy weapons in space. As I detail in one of the... Oh, by the way, I have a co-author on this. I started doing this 12 years ago, and it was like, I will never finish this for a thousand years. So I brought in a co-author, Avis Lang, who is a longtime editor of my essays that I'd written for Natural History Magazine.

Just give a shout out to my co-author. How does that work? So the co-author sort of takes your stuff and stitches it together? In this particular case, there are a lot of ways we collaborated. Some of them I just dictated entire chapters to her, but leaving out certain details that would require a nitty-gritty of sort of research just to get the right numbers and the right year and the right commander and the right this. But I know broadly how it happened and what sequence. And so then she would take that and shape that into a chapter. Other places I would say, you know, this happened, this happened, and that happened.

She would say, well, that wouldn't fit the narrative as it's coming together. Let's drop the middle one and take the other two. And I'd say, great. So I'd write that up, and she would stitch it. She would graft it, is a better word, into the rest of what was going on. So this is, even though there are places here where I speak in first person, it's actually it's a co written project. It's not ghost written. It's not. I'm just putting my name but somebody else wrote I mean, I write I know how to

write. So we're co authors on this. But thanks for asking. That was good. So so that here's a problem that we detail here. People say, I don't want weapons in space. Okay, there's nothing more useless than a space weapon relative to Earth's surface. Okay? If you're in space, you're in orbit. Think it through. If I use your skull here, that's kind of cool. Okay, if this is Earth.

Okay. Do you have anything more spherical here? I guess not. I'm using your skull. I don't think so. Okay. All right. So this is Earth. Okay. Do you have anything more spherical here? I guess not. I'm using your skull. I don't think so. Okay. All right.

So this is Earth. Okay. And I've got a satellite in orbit around the Earth. Right. Okay? And I say, okay, I want to weaponize the satellite, put a bomb in it, and I want to drop over some city. Some bad person wants to make that decision.

Right. Well, what's the city you want to hit? Well, it's up here somewhere. So you got to drop it halfway there. So you got to... Well, no, it's not just that. These are not very high above the planet. And so you have to like change the orbit to align it so that it goes over your target. Satellites don't go over every spot on earth.

Right. They only go over the orbit that had been preset for it. Okay. We can already destroy a city with an intercontinental ballistic missile, and we can aim that. We can aim a missile to any place on earth, and it'll get there in less than 45 minutes, and destroy the whole city with nuclear weapons. We can already do that. There is no advantage to putting nukes in space if that's your objective. Not only that, Advantage to putting nukes in space if that's your objective

Not only that suppose there's a rogue satellite and it's messing with you. It's beaming Energy particles at you and you want to take it out. How are you gonna take it out? You're gonna destroy it Oh now you break it into a million pieces a thousand pieces Now each piece is moving 18,000 miles an hour and put your own satellites at risk That's the modern equivalent to in the first world War when they said, oh, we have a good idea because we can't shoot them in the trenches. Let's gas them out. So they have the mustard gas. Oops, the wind changed directions.

And all of a sudden, you become a victim of your own weapon, such as what happened in space if you go in and start exploding satellites out of orbit. So war in space is a different thing. It's not what you think it would be. So what would they do? So the peaceful use of outer space treaty allows you to have defensive things in space, not offensive, for defensive purposes. It allows that. Treaty aside, though, what could you do?

Could you, I mean, could you have space war? A rogue state could take out our GPS satellites. Okay, but what if like- And render them military blind, and then you won't be able to pick up your Uber, and you won't have anyone to have sex with tonight. That's the range of stuff that GPS applies to. Right.

And so it'll affect our economy, and it'll affect our security, and then our Navy can't talk to the Air Force. The Air Force can't talk to it. And that would be bad. Wars are no longer fought just by how many soldiers have you lined up at the border. It's what have you done strategically to render your opponent – just to weaken your opponent or render them incapable of fighting you. This is why the attacks on September 11th worked.

Because we had a policy that if someone wants to hijack a plane, you follow their instructions. You do not deny them their requests. Because the assumption was that if you deny their requests, they will start harming people. And if you follow their requests, it will delay when they harm them, if they harm them at all, and maybe everyone will end up safe. It was not in the game plan that they would crash the plane on purpose. Okay? So September 12th, you will never again be able to do that to an American plane.

Forget the extra x-rays that we're doing. A pilot will never relinquish the cockpit ever again. No matter who they're torturing in the back of the plane. No matter what they're doing. Even if they're shooting people one by one. Because the plane going down takes everybody out. So that was a pretty easy door to close, literally and figuratively, but no one saw it coming. You know what drives me crazy?

When they put that drink cart in the hallway to protect the pilot when they open the door. I asked them about that. So it's just to delay you a fraction of a second to give them a chance to go in and lock the door. Right. You have to get through them and the flight attendant. That takes an extra second. You can't just run in. Plus, they don't even allow you to stand in the

aisle while that's happening. They'll tell you to sit down. They'll make you sit down. Correct. So you have to get out of your thing, charge the cart, and get through the cart and the flight attendant who will be fighting for their life at this point. Okay? And because the plane is everything.

Right. Yeah, I've seen that opening, though. You can get through there. Those ladies aren't going to stop me. Nobody who really is physically capable. So Joe Rogan has already thought this through. It's an unfortunate thing that my mind does. The point is you can –

I would never do it, of course. You know what? I thought about – not that, but I thought to myself the plane that – because I was like – I witnessed September 11th. It's four blocks – six blocks away from – six walking blocks, four blocks. Did you actually witness the plane hit? No, because my view was blocked from the south. But I have camcorder footage of the explosion, the biggest explosion I've ever seen.

And by the way, one thing I noticed is that there was no shockwave. I might have been the closest scientist to the event, so all I could do was apply every bit of physics that I know. There was no shockwave. I said, well, how can we have an explosion and no shockwave? And I later learned if you can make a deflagration wave, if you atomize fuel and then you spark it, then the flame moves across the fuel. It's not a shockwave. It's just a deflagration wave.

And therefore, there's no shockwave. And so windows are not blown out a quarter mile away as they were in Oklahoma City with the – Giant bomb, Tim McVeigh. Timothy McVeigh. Why am I bringing this up? What was I talking about? September 11th. The plane.

Oh, yeah. So here's something I calculated. I said if I was in a 767 and we're about to crash into a building, if I was in the last row of the plane, how much time would elapse before the front row crumbled and it met me in the back row? Given the speed of the plane going into the building. 500 miles an hour? Yeah. Well, it's probably slower than that by then. I would say closer to 400. It's a known speed, and I don't know it,

but I don't think it was as... Because you can't turn at that high a speed and have to turn around and aim. I'd have to say it's about a second. Less. Half a second? A fraction of a second. It's a fraction. So the question is, how long does it take a plane to go its own length? Right. When it's going at 400 miles an hour.

Oh, yeah. That's a thing. Yeah, it's a fraction of a second. So it's like, that's it. You can't even process that. So I figured the deaths were pretty quick. Wow. Instantaneous. Yeah, it's basically instantaneous. You are a pulverized pile of goo. Are they planning on making spaceships that can shoot down other spaceships? So here, so any space wars would not be war between space and Earth. It would be between stuff and space. That's all. Stuff in space, like spaceships.

Space to space. Space to space. Yeah. Here's another question. What yeah. Space to space. Yeah. Here's another question. What are they going to do with all that stuff that's just floating around up there? The debris? Yeah. How about another task of a space force?

Why don't you clean up space for us so that we can have tourism and not risk our lives by a paint chip or going 18,000 or bolt or nut moving at 18,000 miles an hour that'll put a hole straight through you. Yeah. Right? So, yeah, I would like to see the portfolio of a space force, if there is a space force, broadened. The scope of that to include protecting us from asteroids and figuring out a way to clean up the debris of space. Is there a concept in place? No. No? No. No?

No. Boy, when you look at that map, and I know the map is not to scale, but it shows you the known satellites in space. Oh, well, it's to scale in the sense that they're there. There's that many of them. There's that many of them. It's distorted. At those relative distance to the, but you can see their orbital line, so it feels crowded. But it's so crazy when you look at it.

It's just like, it's just littered, and we're continuing to launch new things up there. And I joke, I say, one of the reasons why we've never visited by aliens is because they came to Earth and said, what is all that junk? Oh, we're not risking our life. Let's go to another planet. Yeah, if they didn't know the map of where everything was and they had to calculate their incoming. Oh, forget it. They'll just take on.

It's not worth it. Yeah, I mean, when you're on your way in, you have to think about it going around in a circle. If you were visiting another planet that had a civilization and they left a lot of crap in their atmosphere, you would, yeah. Well, that's not the debris. Those are the satellites. So if you. Oh, no, that is debris. No, you got it.

So the Air Force tracks debris, as does NASA. They both track debris. And sometimes launch windows of spacecraft. Oh, that is pieces of shit that's floating around? Pieces of shit. Look at that. That's crazy. Are you scrolling through all that?

I'm going as fast as I can. Oh, my God. That is so nuts. We're so crazy. And we've only been doing this for 60 years. So you track it. Right. When was the first satellite?

First satellite was Sputnik. Excuse me. What year? When was that? 60? You're too far away from me to slap you. Sorry. Sorry.

What was it? Sputnik, October 4th, 1957. 57. The first artificial anything in orbit around the Earth. And on that day- Is that piece of shit still up there? There was only one thing. One thing.

Only then. Only. Wow. From 57 to 2018. Right. So that's 60 years. Wow. Yeah.

One thing. That's crazy. And now how many things? I don't know. Well, there's- You gotta guess. There's countless debris. There's hundreds of active satellites.

There's thousands if you include the dead ones. Thousands of dead satellites. Yeah, so we have no way to clean it up. Maybe it's some big vacuum one day. I don't know. But space vacuum. They'd have to be valuable. You could probably sell space debris if you brought it back to Earth. Yeah, people are dumb.

They'd buy it. Want some space debris in your house? Oh, hell yeah. I'm going to put this over here. Speaking of debris, there was this asteroid that collided with Earth over Chelyabinsk in the Soviet Union. In Russia, sorry. Just near the Siberia. In the Ural Mountains, just on the coast of Siberia, on the border of Siberia.

That was visible to everybody in broad daylight. And you had to like avert your eyes when it happened. And they felt a shockwave. And the shockwave broke windows and sent 600 people, nearly 1,000 people to the hospital. What happened? Well, because they saw the light and they got up from their table and went to the window to see what had happened, there's a time delay between the shockwave and the light because light travels fast and sound travels slow. So they'll go to the windows and the shockwave hits and it blasts broken glass into their face. So it was a big Band-aid collision that we had.

Wow. The injured people all needed basically band-aids. Okay, no one died. But nearly 1,000 people were injured. So at an auction, by the way, that actually exploded and pieces of it were recovered. At an auction, I purchased a piece of that meteorite. But you know what else I purchased? At an auction, I purchased a piece of that meteorite.

But you know what else I purchased? Some of the shards of glass that the shockwave had broken. What do you do with this shit? I've got it. It's just a habit. I'm a part of... It is a shot across our bow. That's what that... No one died.

But it's a warning. There's no better way to be warned than to have a band-aid cover your injuries that could have vaporized you or rendered your species extinct. What's crazy is the ones that don't even make impact and still do devastating damage like Tunguska. Yes. That one didn't even touch earth. Right. It incinerated 10,000 square kilometers of forest. Look at that hunk.

Holy shit. Yeah. So February 15, 2013. And there was a- It weighs over half a ton. That little rock was 1,000 pounds? Oh, yeah. Holy shit.

That's just a piece that made it through. Is it iron? Oh, the actual piece would have been about the size of this room. So a small home. Wow. But that's amazing that that small rock. Go back up to that again, please. Look at the size of that. That's not that big. No, that's what's left over.

Most of it vaporized on the explosion as it came through the atmosphere. Right, but they're saying that that piece of it weighs a thousand pounds. Do they give the weight of it? Yeah, it says it weighs over a half ton. Yeah. Oh, a half ton. Yeah. A thousand pounds. There you go. That's crazy. That rock is that fucking heavy. Yeah. Is it made out of it? Yeah, it says it weighs over a half ton. Yeah. Oh, a half ton, yeah. A thousand pounds. There you go. That's crazy.

That rock is that fucking heavy. Is it made out of iron? Yes. Well, I have to read that to know for sure, but I think it was an iron meteorite. I'll tell you something. What? I have a knife that was made out of a piece of meteorite. Oh, as do I. They're beautiful. Oh, yeah. It's a kitchen knife

that I use. Oh, see, mine is like a crocodile dundee knife. Ooh. Yeah. That's not a knife. That's a knife. It's a kitchen knife that I use. Oh, see, mine is like a crocodile dundee knife. Yeah. That's not a knife. That's a knife. But it's waiting. I want to make a or get someone to make a handle for it. It's just the metal that would be...

It's a forged metal with the blade, but then you get a pearl handle attached to the base of it. So it's a handle-less, it's an unadorned piece of metal that would become a knife you would carry with you. But it's sharpened and shaped? Oh, yeah. It's completely sharpened.

Oh, yeah. Where's the fucking handle? There is the metal handle. Haven't you ever seen kitchen knives? Oh, they're all metal. The metal goes all the way down the center of the handle, and you screw wooden handles on the side. So you just need the wooden part. I just need the wood or the – if I'm Patton, it would be pearl.

Yeah. Like a pearl-handed revolver? Yeah. A pearl pistol. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a part of history, and it's a reminder that if you want to think about the future of civilization, you have to include a defense plan against asteroids. Yeah. The dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs. I bet if they could, they would have had a space program to not go extinct. That would have been no shit. They didn't know what they were thinking. That wasn't no shit. They didn't know what I'm thinking. Now, is there anything that we're doing now other than occasionally looking up? Yeah, we're monitoring and cataloging them.

Yeah, but we don't really know what to do if something happens. Yeah, so the day would come. Well, we know what to do. There's nothing fun to do. There are engineering conferences. How would you deflect an asteroid? How would you destroy an asteroid? If we see one and it's a year away and it's coming 100%. It's going to hit. Just kiss your ass goodbye.

That's it. We would have the power to tell you when you would die and what part of Earth it would hit. Yeah, so there's people that have very delusional ideas about what we can and can't do with asteroids, and that drives me crazy. Well, no, it's not that we know how to... I've seen the engineering plans. They look very good, but there's nothing in place.

There's Project Sentinel, you can look it up, that has tasked themselves with organizing world governments to protect Earth from species-killing asteroids. And you need the world because you don't know in advance until it's discovered what part of Earth it's going to hit. in the Indian Ocean and if Indian, if the surrounding regions don't have a space program, are the countries that do have a space program going to sit idle? No. What you want to do is

you want to have a fund and every country pipes in a little bit of their GDP and then, or whatever, you know, you measure it

however you want it, whatever you think is fair. Do it the way the UN does it, okay? So there's a tax of the world relative to your wealth. And then that money pays to save the world when we find such an asteroid. That's how the Sentinel, Project Sentinel has thought this through. So if there was something and they had ample time, there's a possibility that they could actually implement some of these plans. It's all about how much time you have because what you want to do is go out and nudge it.

Right, a little bit. A little bit. You just have to give it a sideways velocity relative to its path towards Earth. And if you do that early enough, the sideways velocity sort of accumulates. Right, like a ship turning slightly over the ocean. Over the course of time, it'll deviate quite a bit. Correct.

So that angle grows. I mean, it's the same angle, but it spreads out. And the ocean example is perfect. There's a perfect analogy. So if you do that early enough, you do it enough so that it misses Earth, and it's still out there to harm you in another day, but it won't render you extinct on that passage. How much time do we need today? If I would say we could probably get something built in 10 years. Oh, Jesus. Neil deGrasse Tyson, what did you just do? 10 years? I'm looking for a month.

And that's, oh no. Oh my gosh. do? Ten years? I'm looking for a month. Oh, no. Oh, my gosh. So it's a year. If we have a year, we're fucked. The good thing about species-killing asteroids is that they're large and visible. What about city-killing ones? Them suckers slip through. Yeah, they'll slip through.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, but most of Earth's surface is not city, so it'll probably hit the ocean or land, but yeah, if it does, it would take out a city. Yeah, a whole city. Gone. Yeah. Yeah. Oof. There's a branch of government part of, I don't know if it survived the Trump changeover, but it's part of

homeland security where it worries about devastation to a region where the grid is taken out as well. So you can't bring emergency services that bring either food, water, medicines, any other form of transportation or communication. How much thought is there to putting in a more robust grid? Yeah, what you would need is – that's a good point. So you need a grid that can sort of rewire itself rapidly to then bring power to a region.

That's what you would need. And they're sort of doing that now, making a grid sort of lightning proof, power surge proof. I grew up in New York City where there were a couple of very famous blackouts, one in 1966, another in, when was it, 1978, I think. And it was like, whoa, how is this even allowed? You don't have a backup plan? You don't have a way to rewire this, to redirect the electricity? So yeah, you'd need that and you'd want that.

And I thought the new grid is supposed to have those kinds of protections built into it. But I don't know enough about it to comment. Yeah, what it'll take is one. One impact. Oh, yeah. One big one. Yeah. Takes out the grid.

Takes out the grid. And then what? Do you have solar power at your place? We just put in solar panels. Yeah. You live in the city. That's our city. We have a place in the country that we escape to.

Oh, that's a good move to have that escape spot. Yeah. But you have a place in upstate New York? No, no. It's on Long Island. Yeah, I used to think of it as an escape because we thought of getting it after September 11th. Yeah.

Got it in 03, 02, something like that. But now it's just a good place for me to refuel and do a lot of good writing there and this sort of thing. Look out for ticks. I know. Oh my gosh.

Long Island's overwhelmed with Lyme disease. They got a new tick apparently that prevents you from eating meat. I wonder if the vegetarians bred that. Well, I think it's called the Lone Star Tick. It prevents you from eating the meat of mammals. Yes. It makes you allergic to alpha galactose. Is that what it is?

It's alpha gal. Another great Radiolab podcast. Yeah. I think the vegans and the vegetarians. I think they did it yeah i think that you still eat fish yeah still eat chicken not eat a mammal yeah just can't eat red meat it's something in red meat yeah yeah so uh that's one of the challenges yeah right those goddamn ticks yeah they are everywhere and the we we looked at it the other day there's because i have

quite a few friends that have lyme disease and it's something you do keep for life. And quite a few friends, like seven or eight, I think, at this point, that have devastating Lyme disease. And it's all East Coast people. Yeah, what are they doing? Making love in the brush? Like, what are they doing? Just walking around, going for a hike, you know? Yeah, I'm a city person, so even though I moved to the country, I go for a hike on my deck.

You don't go anywhere? No, no. You just sit back? I just look out. I go for a hike on my deck. You don't go anywhere? No. Just sit back? Just look out. Yeah, I'm cool on the deck. But you're out there in this gorgeous country. Don't you want to go wander around a little bit? No, no.

That's honestly not a thought. My wife, who's from Alaska, has those thoughts all the time. But the power of ticks overwhelms her power of curiosity. Those are powerful people in alaska that's a different type of yeah they're they're they're they're bred differently oh they're strong yeah those people can survive yeah and they they have a sense of unity up there it's really interesting that unity i think comes from the fact that they're all in the same risk factors together yep and if the if you and i have the same things that can kill us, that makes us friends.

It's also they're overwhelmed by nature. It's like they're overwhelmed by both its beauty and just the sheer evidence that you're insignificant. I would say they're not overwhelmed. They are whelmed. Ah, whelmed. Yes. Yeah.

There's the right amount of whelm. I have a buddy of mine who lived up there. A grizzly bear killed a moose in his driveway. Ooh Like what right? That's the kind of stuff in the driveway They had to be careful like getting out of the house Yeah, the bear had cashed the moose when we first went up there my brother-in-law hurt my wife's sister's husband Kept a loaded shotgun over their bed So that when the door starts rattling in the middle of the night

the gun is in his arms reach and That was good, that was good. Yeah those fucking things you ever seen one in real life I mean zoo I mean captive not a real one real one. There's a there's a look they give you. Oh, no, no, I did. No, no. We visited Denali Park. But I saw it. It's 500 yards away. I'm not any closer than that.

Denali Park, they're a little bit habitualized, too, right? No. That's pretty wild. Oh, Denali Park is in Alaska. Don't confuse it with Jellystone Park. I'm thinking of something different. You're thinking of Jellystone Park. Denali Park is...

What is that near? What is, what is that near? What part of Alaska is that near? It's got Mount McKinley. It's got Denali, the mountain, in it. Oh, so where is it? I forgot geographically. That's not near the Brooks Range, right? No, I couldn't tell you.

I'm not mountain range fluent. This is the sheer size of Alaska when you actually look at it over the United States, when you superimpose it, you go, oh. Yeah. What? You want to know another one? You want to know another one? Yeah. The size of Africa relative to the United States.

We've done that a gang of times. Oh, excellent. Everything fits in there. Everything fits in. Like five United States can fit in Africa. Well, literally everything fits in there. It's like most of the world fits in there. The United States plus Europe plus- Asia, China. China. Yeah. Yeah. It's fucking crazy. In Africa. Well, literally everything fits in there. It's like most of the world fits in there. The United States plus Europe plus-

Yeah, Asia, China. China. Yeah. Yeah, it's fucking crazy. It's a giant place. But what's really interesting about Alaska is how few people are there. Right. I mean, it's such a large-

Population density. Yeah, population density is so light. But Anchorage is a really cool city. If you go there, you're like, oh, this is a cool-ass town. Yeah. Nice people. But if you go there in the summer, bring some things to cover your city. Like, if you go there, you're like, oh, this is a cool-ass town. Yeah. Nice people. But if you go there in the summer, bring some things to cover your eyes. Oh, why?

Because when you go into bed at night, you're going to bed during the day. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's, yeah. So, my wife said in the winter when they go to school in dark, it's not nighttime. It's just dark. Yeah. They don't use night and day. It's just dark and light.

Yeah, because it's only light for a few hours. Yeah, so that's light, and then it's dark. Did you ever see that movie? What was it called? 30 Days of Night? A vampire movie about Alaska? No. Yeah, the vampires came to...

It was actually a pretty fun movie. I've seen one vampire movie in my life. You don't like vampire movies? I have nothing against them. You got too much smarts, sir. They don't call to me. They don't. You can't put that...

I don't see the romance of getting bitten in the neck. Well, it's not romance. It's scary. Actually, I think the, what's that series? Twilight series? No, no. Tell me you liked it. The other series.

Underworld. The Underworld series. I've seen a few of those. Did you like those? Those are fun. Those are the dumbest ones. No. Those are the ones that the Twilight fans make fun of.

No, I just like the fact that there's a lead woman kicking ass. Oh, you're one of those guys. Women who kick ass. I get it. Go ahead. Do your show. I love women. Put on your little show.

I love when women are winning. Yay. Women kick ass. No, it's just fun. It's just fun. Well, then you must love Alien, the original Alien. Yeah, that's good. We talked about Ripley from Alien, Scorny Weaver.

She's the original female movie badass. Well, no, no. They go before her. And I just reminded myself of this. Is it Barbara Rigg? Barbarella? No, Barbara Rigg, I think is her name. She was the woman in the original British series, The Avengers.

Oh, yeah. That's true. But that was hokey like yeah but she was wearing black leather that's new martial arts and kicked ass wasn't believable but but it was believable like like when she's shooting that thing like you buy you buy like look she's throwing guys oh yeah okay Get the fuck out of here with this. Okay. Listen, this to me is like to you when you're making fun of astrophysics. But wait, wait, wait.

We got it. Okay. Mistakes that they make in these movies about space. This shit drives me crazy. Yeah. When people just flipping people through the air and kicking them and they fly off buildings. Stop. You're driving me fucking crazy.

Actually, I have a tweet. I'm thinking I should post it now No the tweet's too long Are you one of those dangerous guys that doesn't put a case in your phone You have the fucking The scape in your On your phone Your lock screen is the Stonehenge of Manhattan

Look at that Yeah Manhattan Henge And you have no case on your phone. No. So you're a risk taker. Right. No. So you can think of it as risk taking or when I got the phone, because I admire how thin this is.

Right. I'd like technology serving me. Okay. So what I did when I got the phone, I said, let me do this with it. Okay. Flip it around yes and I reminded myself why do uh in in the military cadets why do they twirl their gun of what possible value is this in combat why do they do these things with their gun and then I realized you're not supposed

to drop your gun ever. Ever. So if you twirl the gun and you don't drop it, it means stuff can happen to you in combat and it is always attached to your body. So when I got my phone, I said, let me just do this. Okay. Let me just do this. If I pick up the phone and. Dropped it. Okay. Jesus Christ.

So when you do that, then you never drop your phone. So it's not that I'm a risk taker. It's that I've changed my risk to make it so low that it essentially won't happen. And you got AppleCare. Did you get AppleCare? No. You didn't? No, of course not. You Did you get AppleCare? No. You didn't? No, of course not.

You don't get AppleCare? No. You're a risk taker. First, I fixed my own damn computer. Second. How are you going to fix your own damn phone? If the screen breaks, are you going to get in there with a screwdriver and pop that bitch out, put a new one in?

The key phrase is there, if the screen breaks. But you're not going to drop it, so you don't have to worry about that. I also carry relatively expensive fountain pens. What happens with that? I never lose them. Oh, I see what you're saying. If you always lose your pens, it means you're not spending enough money on them. Right, like sunglasses.

Exactly. I've had the same pair of sunglasses now for a record number of times. That meant it cost you $200 to get them. I'll fucking lose them. They're just my favorite ones. I actually got them for free. Shout out to Skeleton Sunglasses. Oh.

Skeleton Optics. Zeiss Lenses. Zeiss them for free shout out the skeleton sunglasses. Oh skeleton optics Zeiss lenses Zeiss nice nice powerful fucking so they invented the planetarium projector. Did they really they did make some badass 1923 1923 yeah But I've had these same sunglasses now. I think you're doing well here six months. This is fat stupid fingers So once you once you get that Then it doesn't drop so it's not that I'm a risk taker as I've changed the risk So that is low enough so that it is of on par on par with other risks that you take routinely I smoke a lot of pot dude. This is gonna drop. I keep doing this

Also the things if you pick up the phone with one hand And it's upside down You hold it in places where the center of gravity Flips it But you also have some sort of a skin in the back It's just a sector Of Van Gogh's Starry Night But it's not There's no texture to this

It's just as slippery as It's slippery like anything else Oh it's a skin It's definitely more slippery as it is. Can I feel that? Yeah. It's slipperier like anything else. What is it? Oh, it's the skin. It's skin. It's definitely more texture. How dare you feel that? That's slicker. It's covered with glass. Okay, but that's not why it's there.

My point is that's not why it's there. But it'll aid in the friction. A little bit. As a scientist, you should recognize this. Friction is good. Yeah. So, I mean, isn't it one of the things that they decided to do to asteroids to change their path, spray some goo on them, and it'll literally cause more friction in the air and

cause them to deviate slightly from their path, which over a long period of time.'ll literally cause more friction in the air and cause them to deviate slightly from their path, which over a long period of time- I don't know where, you just pull that out of your ass in that moment. Yeah, there's some spray. In that moment. No, I read that. That's right. Maybe it was some dummy who wrote it and I read it.

In the vacuum of space, there is no friction. But isn't there some shit they could put on the, if it's traveling, right? Yes. Isn't there something they could put on that would aerodynamically change its path? In the vacuum of space, there is no aerodynamics. Okay. So it's moving – By the time it hits Earth's atmosphere, it's too late.

So there was a coating that they were planning on putting on some aspect of – would it be the act of putting the coating on? So what you would do is, you may be thinking of, there's a coating you can put on an asteroid that differently absorbs sunlight relative to the other side. Oh, so it causes it to spin? That can create a net vector of motion. Spray painting asteroids could protect Earth from space rock threat. Okay, so there you go. That sounds like some clickbaity shit right there. That's some clickbaity shit.

Okay. Change the amount of sunlight reflected by the space rock. But you would not do that to the entire rock. You'd do it to a part of the rock. Potentially nudging it away from Earth with the accumulated push provided by many thermophotons as they radiate from the asteroid surface. Holy shit.

Yeah. Yeah. See, I didn't think that through very well. And somehow you added KY jelly to this. I'm trying to flip this phone still. Yeah. My friend Andrew Santino, he carries this bitch around case free, and I admire him. He's a braver man than I.

I sent you a list of topics. Did we hit all of them? Yeah, we hit all of them. We didn't hit innovation in other countries. No, no. Here's one. Oh, we never even got into cars. Yeah.

Let me just- There's no flying cars. Why there'll never be flying cars? Yeah. May I share this with you? We started with this. Please. Okay. Since we're two hours and 40 minutes? We started with this. Please. Okay.

Since we're two hours and 40 minutes in. Is that allowed? Oh my gosh. Yeah. We're flying, dude. No, but people don't have three hours. Do they? Oh, we do it all the time.

Really? Yeah. Oh, are you sure? A hundred percent. Yeah. This is not, you sure? Yeah. Average podcast right now.

Average. Really? Yeah. Dude, I'm honored to be your average. The ones we've done. We've all been like close to three hours. Okay. In the neighborhood.

Here you go. Is that a ding? Oh, dear. Oh, it's rude. Okay. So let me- I flipped it. I turned that goddamn switch on.

Okay. So let's go back to- Flying cars? Let's go back to why anyone would want a flying car in the first place. Because they're an asshole. Okay. No, here it is. They're stuck in traffic.

So here it is. Better than everybody. So let's watch. Let's say there was only one road. Okay. Okay. That was the width of your car. And you're driving on this road and there are cars behind you.

The fastest you could go on that road is the speed of the slowest car on the road. Right. Make sense? Yes. This is travel in one dimension. That sucks. What you really want is travel in two dimensions. So you take the road and widen it.

Let's make two lanes. Two lanes in one direction. You can have two the other way as well. That doesn't matter here. Now you have two lanes. So now you can have two the other way as well that doesn't matter here now you have two lanes so now i can go around you your slow ass car okay but and that's fine this is a great improvement on one dimensional travel now it's two dimensions dimensions, okay? I can shift left or right as well as move forward or backwards to move. And the more lanes you have, the more two-dimensional that is, okay? The 405 here in Los Angeles, what is it? Six lanes each. It's 12 freaking lanes, okay? You are fully exploiting

the two-dimensionality of travel, but you still have so many cars that you say to yourself, I want to bypass this traffic. If you went from one dimensions to two dimensions, bypassing is just another lane. But now all 12 lanes are plugged and you want to bypass it. So you're thinking, I need to travel in another dimension. I want to travel in the third dimension. If I do that, I can bypass all these cars. I want a flying car. Yeah. Okay. Well, the point is we already have flying cars. They're called helicopters. Well, the helicopters are originally invented for that. They're called helicopters. Well, the helicopters are originally invented for that. They're called helicopters.

They're noisy. They have to create a downward thrust of air equal to its own weight. If you're going to have a flying car, that's what it's going to have to do. Right. They're noisy. They completely disrupt the terrain wherever they fly. So the issue is not that you want a flying car. You want to travel in that third dimension.

We already do that. How do we do that? They're called tunnels. They're called bridges. When you have a huge intersection, you don't move people through one another. You build one road over the other. You build one road under the other. You are exploiting three dimensions so that traffic can go in perpendicular directions simultaneously.

That's what the flying cars would have given you. intersections simultaneously. That's what the flying cars would have given you. But we do that at intersections because it would be impossible to move 12 lanes of traffic through an intersection that crossed another freeway. New York City has done this. We do this. You're in the streets. There's too many cars, you can't move? Let's move in the third dimension. Let's build a subway. This sounds like a guy who's trying to sell me something that's better than a flying car. This is what it sounds like. You're like, listen man, that flying car's bullshit and I'll tell you why.

You could buy a flying car. I want you to appreciate moving in the third dimension. I do appreciate it. The New York City subway system moves a billion people a year. And they all go in the third dimension, beneath the ground, through tunnels.

Tunnels that are layered on top of one another. Well, the New York City subway system is amazing. No doubt about it. How you can move that many people. It's great, but it's not as good as a flying car. It's not as cool as a flying car, but it's as effective as a flying car. No, not for a person who has a flying car. A person who has a flying car doesn't have to get in line.

You don't have to get on the subway. You don't have to have a token. You don't have to go through the turnstile. You don't have to deal with some guy who's rubbing his body up against yours. Flying cars are shit. You just fly around. I'm just saying. It's like a boat.

Tunnels. But for the air. And bridges are flying cars. The beautiful thing about a boat is you just go wherever you want to go. Now, here's the thing. You don't have to call air traffic control and say I'm turning left. I would take you to another dimension. No, someone will have to know where the hell your flying car is going.

Just the same way traffic rules matter in a street. There's not a free-for-all. It is with boats. And you know what happens if a car fails? Falls. On the ground, it just stops. If a flying car fails, you're dead. Right.

Okay. So I want to add another dimension to this conversation. Are you ready? Elon Musk has tunnels on the ground. Ready? Exactly. Exactly. So watch. Here's a desk in front of me, okay?

It's a physical desk, and I have a lot of sheets of paper. And so I lay them side by side. I tile the desk with all my sheets of paper. Then there's no desk surface left. I ran out of two-dimensional space. If I want to store more pages on my desk, what do I do? I get one of those organizers.

I've just introduced a third dimension. So now I could have pages in another dimension sitting above the page that was previously occupying another place that I couldn't have put another sheet. That's three dimensions. Yes. Okay. If we were two-dimensional people, we would wonder what happened to that sheet of paper

because we have no access to that third dimension. It would just left our universe. At this point, I'd be trying to back out of the showroom and I'd say, thank you, but I'm going to go to the flying car place. So now watch. But look at how much you've increased your storage by introducing another dimension. Now imagine a fourth spatial dimension. We don't have access to that, but we're now filling all three dimensions and a four dimensional creature will say,

well, just put it up in this direction. What would be the fourth dimension in that regard? You can't imagine it because our brain evolved in three dimensions. We can describe it mathematically. Maybe a wormhole in Pasadena takes you to downtown LA. Point. Point. So our storage needs would be – you could open a door, put it through this portal to the fourth dimension and close the door and look on the other side of the door and nothing would be there. Yeah.

Just the way on the surface of the desk, if you live in the surface of the desk, someone opens the door, they put the paper through the door, close the door and you look around and you say, where did it go? I have no idea because you can't even see. You can't even imagine that third dimension. We cannot imagine a fourth dimension. But if the world one day gets so crowded that even three-dimensional space has traffic, access to a fourth dimension would greatly help that. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. Good luck with that.

Getting people to step through. What is this, Jamie? Some flying thing that just came out last month. Oh, look at this thing. Wait a minute. That's CGI. That part seems CGI, but it's actually flying over grass. Why?

It's moving it. Look at this thing. What is it? Solar powered? I don't know. Huh. It's just a trailer showing it, describing it maybe. Does it have sound?

Does it make sound? You know what it looks like? It looks like a human-sized drone. Yes. That's exactly what it looks describing it maybe. Does it have sound? Does it make sound? No, it looks like a human-sized drone. Yes, that's exactly what it looks like. Okay, what about something like this? What about something like this with really powerful magnets all outside the outer edge so it repels against other drones? Do you want a maglev flying car?

So if you get so close, like... Oh, I see. It'll be like a force field. So you can't slam into each other. Oh, so it'll be like a bumper car. So if you get so close, like Oh, I see. It'll be like a force field. So you can't slam into each other. Oh, so it'll be like a bumper car. Yes. But with cushions. Yes. Yeah. Some sort of electromagnetic force

field that, you know, everyone agrees that you don't have ones that are attracted to each other but are opposed. By the way, see how big that human-sized drone is? have you ever heard how loud a drone is fucking loud yeah you can't you can't even have a conversation yeah i got an asshole in my neighborhood flies on around that's what shotguns are for yeah i wish i've never fired

a gun in my life but the first time i ever used one it's to shoot the drone that's going to be looking through my window at my apartment oh yeah's this fucking asshole in my neighborhood. He flies all over people's yards. But I can't uncork. They already think I'm crazy. There's no way. And if I shoot it with a bow and arrow, I'm not sure I'll hit it. By the way, did that video have sound accompanying with it? It has a little bit. There's music and some description of it.

Oh, there's music, but there's not the actual sound of those propellers. You know, what they have on their webpage here, that it's quieter than a car on a freeway. What? It's quieter than an electric car. Noise. At 150 feet away. Measured at 150 feet. That's incredible.

Because it's about the same as a car. Well, it says electric. Motorcycles don't count. So they're counting that as an electric car, though. Oh, they are. Yeah. Yeah. Gasoline cars on the bottom.

But cars today are not. That's in top. Wait, wait. That's energy consumption. I don't know if they're using the same icon to represent. See, they're using the same icon for electric car. So it's the sound of an electric car. No, no.

So there's no engine there. But no, don't get deceived there because that's energy consumption. See, energy consumption uses the same icon for electric car as it does for gasoline car. And then down low, see, it says noise. It shows highway, just car. It doesn't tell you which of those DBA Yeah, right. There's no way 76 DBA is the sound because electric cars far quieter than a regular car The all you hear is the drone of the tires. So but what happens is above a certain speed the the aerodynamic noise is Greater than the so in a landing landing airplane. Here's what you do.

You live in LA? Yeah. Go to the In-N-Out near LAX, which is right near a landing strip. Okay? Yeah. And listen to the sound of the planes as they come in for a landing. Most of that sound is airfoil noise, not engine noise. Ah.

Yeah. Which is why you can pretty much still maintain a conversation. You're old enough We remember a plane would fly overhead in a city and you'd have to halt your conversation until it finished. Why what happened? Engines got quieter and quieter which enabled people to build real estate closer and closer to airports and not have and not have a sound problem It's poor fuck, but it didn't happen overnight. It was slow and steady. No kidding. Yeah.

I never, I forgot about that. It's airfoil noise. I forgot that you had to stop talking when planes were flying by. Oh, I remember it. In fact, Shea Stadium in New York City near LaGuardia Airport, the announcers had to stop any time a plane flew over it. Wow. They couldn't announce the game.

That's crazy. And when the Mets were in the World Series in 1969, Mayor Lindsey redirected the airport traffic to not fly over the World Series games. Wow. I thought that was a badass move of his, Mayor Lindsey, 1969. Wow. Yeah. I completely forgot how loud planes used to be. Used to be.

Correct. And now it's a sound that's in, quote, the noise of the street. You don't even stop and notice it. You didn't even pay attention at all. You barely hear it. You barely hear it. And so next time you're at a runway, when it's landing, it's much noisier taking off because it's got to gain altitude. But coming down, most of that sound is glider noise.

And evidence of this is the noise of air going over the airfoil of the fuselage. If you know the moment they deploy the landing gear, next time you're in an airplane, when they say, we are clear for landing, just listen. Listen to the ambient sound of the plane. Then listen to the sound after they deploy the landing gear. It's three times as loud. It ramps up hard. Hard, because of the sound of the air going around something that's not aerodynamic.

Oh. The freaking wheels. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just never, for whatever reason, I never remembered that airplanes used to be louder. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think about it all the time. So why can't I have a flying car? You want the drone flying car? Yeah. Yeah, so you need a- You wouldn't want it? That would look ugly if two of those collide in the sky. But what about my magnet theory?

What do you- Now it's got to have more power to lift the weight of the magnets. Solar, bro. Plus, you get some testosterone-infused guy who doesn't want to let you ahead of them and try to bump you. That kind of shit. And then you break the propeller, and then you both fall out of the sky. Skyrage.

Skyrage. Oh, it's a lot of dead. You think of skyrage. You know what it'll do? It'll cull the herd of testosterone-driven men. Okay, but what if they do it, but the only way they work is through the same sort of Tesla system that allows them to have automated cars?

If you have automated cars, you don't need flying cars. Yeah, you do. There's still too many of us. No, there'll be fewer cars on the road. What? How do you figure that? Oh my gosh! If you have automated cars, there'll be fewer cars on the road. Yes! How so?

How so? How so? Because. Because what? Your second greatest asset, your car, most people's second greatest asset, spends 90% of its time doing nothing. You drive to work and it's parked. You come home and it's parked.

Right. 90% of its time doing nothing. Okay. I come to work 10 minutes after you, a half hour after you, an hour after you, I'm using your car. You ain't using my car. I'm telling you right now, you're not using my car. No one's using anybody's car.

Okay, I forgot. This is LA. This shit's not gonna happen. You go to New York, okay, for people where a car- Even in New York, they just steal your car. Is a utility rather than something you're trying to get chicks with on the street corner? Oh, stop. People try to get chicks in New York too. Don't try to get chicks with on the street corner. Oh, stop. People try to get chicks in New York, too.

Don't try to pass me. Not with the cars. There's a lot of people that do. Nobody has cars. But if you do, you're a baller. You got one of them spots that cost you $1,000 a month? Ooh, baby. I've seen some fancy cars when I've been in New York City. There's some fancy cars, but that's not it.

It's not 100%. It's not 100%. Yeah, but that's just that one stupid spot where everybody's stacked on top of each other. You could still own the car, but you'll be relegated to a lane where you won't be able to drive as fast as the automated car. Consider that if you're in a self-driving car and it wants to change lanes, it communicates that to other self-driving cars near it. And the other self-driving cars tell you to fuck off because you have a program like that. Now I have a rude self-driving car. This is a Joe Rogan upload.

Give some rude Russian bot car that's not letting anybody in. The Joe Rogan upload. I feel like it wouldn't change anything if there was automated cars in Los Angeles. I really do. I don't think there'd be any less traffic. I just think...

They're going to make a lane that'll take automated cars and it'll go 120 miles an hour and watching everybody with their wasted horsepower in their- Stuck in traffic. Stuck in traffic. Yeah. I once tweeted. I was in LA and I was in like a Prius and we passed a Lamborghini doing 40 miles an

hour and that just seemed so embarrassing to the Lamborghini. Still in the Lamborghini. We were doing 30 miles an hour. You felt better? No, it was like, why do you have a Lamborghini? Because there's some times when there's no one on the road. Not from what I've ever seen.

You just gotta go late at night. If you got a Lamborghini, you drive late at night. The Lamborghini is the peacock feathers, as best as I can judge. Did you ever drive one? No. They're wonderful. It's a marvel of engineering and science. You should appreciate it.

It's good. They can go zero to 60 in two and a half seconds. You're still burning gas. Oh, you don't like gas. Not if I don't have to. Do you prefer electric? If you had a car, if you lived it, if for whatever reason the planetarium decided, look, Neil, you're the best ever, and we opened up the most amazing spot ever.

It's in Los Angeles, California. We would love you to relocate and bring StarTalk over here. Then I'd have to have a car. If I was forced to relocate and I had only one car, I'd get an electric car. Really? Probably a Tesla. Would you get a Prius or a Tesla? Would you go?

Oh, definitely Tesla. Yeah, you wouldn't. Yeah. I mean, if I like, you know, it's their performance car. Slice of cheese. What is that thing? Nothing against Prius. I'm just saying.

No, it's an important car that set a lot of other manufacturers into motion to try to, you know, there's a dynamic. It's a shit box. It's a dynamic. Tesla's a nice car. These one thing happens and then drive something else makes that happen. You know, there's a dynamic. It's a shit box. It's a dynamic. Tesla's a nice car. One thing happens and then drive something else. It makes that happen.

But when you plug your car into the wall, you're not asking yourself, I wonder where this power comes from. It could come from any one of a dozen sources. Right. Like hydro. It could solar panels. It could tidal energy. It could come from nukes. It could come from oil or coal. Come from any of those.

What about clean coal? Have you heard about this clean coal? The president's been tweeting about it. Clean coal, all capital letters. I'm like, whoa, I didn't know about that.

I thought it was just fucking coal. Yeah, I don't. Clean coal. That's what he tweeted. So here's my point. If you can, if you can power things with a choice of a dozen sources of energy, then those sources of energy compete with one another for your business.

And if the price of oil goes up, you say, I'm not going to generate power with oil. I'm going to use the – and I have a wind farm and I come online. I'm going to sell you my wind energy. And you're the power company. You buy my wind energy. And you're the power company. You buy my wind energy. You send that power to the wall outlet. And you charging your car don't know and don't care where that energy came from. There's a book called Turning Oil Into Salt.

Look it up so we can mention. Turning oil into salt. Correct. Why would you want to do that? There was a day when salt was a strategic commodity. Yes. There was no other known way to preserve food from the autumn harvest to the spring set of crops. So food got salted.

Okay. There's the book. What's the woman's name? Gail Lefton and Corinne. Okay. So I'm now describing the thesis of that book. What's the woman's name? Gail Lefton and Corinne. Okay. So I'm now describing the thesis of that book. Okay. Turning oil into salt. So here's what you do. So we had salt. If I took away your salt reserves, you would starve over the winter. So everybody knew where their salt

came from. Everybody knew how much their salt cost. Do you realize that Grant, General Grant, destroyed the salt reserves of the Southern Confederacy knowing that that would force them faster to surrender because they wouldn't have food reserves to last through the winter?

I, growing up, did not understand the phrase, you are the salt of the earth. Salt gives you high blood pressure. What do you are the salt of the earth. Oh. Salt gives you high blood pressure. What do you mean the salt of the earth? It doesn't. Stop saying that. That's not true. Sodium does.

No. Yeah. Doesn't. We have too much of it. No. Yeah. Nope. Yeah, but let's get that in a minute.

Let me finish the thing. Too much of it. So. I think you have to have something wrong with you for that to happen. So, whether it's chronic or not, I agree with you there. If you have chronic high blood pressure, it's not just the salt. Right. Right.

But I can increase my blood pressure now by not peeing and ingesting salt. By not peeing? Why would you not pee? Well, because you retain the water and it gets pumped through. This is what the salt does. You retain the liver. Let me get back to the thing. Sorry.

We're talking about energy. Okay. So I said salt of the earth. Why is what the salt does. You retain the liver. Let me get back to the thing. We're talking about energy. Okay. So, I said salt of the earth. Why is that a compliment? I remember thinking to myself. But, there was a day when salt really mattered. Okay? Alright. So, so what happens? The 19th century, we

figure out how to can foods. You can have berries and put them, we can them. You seal, you can make preserves. The name of the food is what it is. It's preserved. Okay, so now there's another way to protect your food, to have it last through times when you don't have crops.

Wait a minute. Refrigeration. We have electricity. I can refrigerate. Wait a minute. I can now freeze food. I got a half dozen ways I can eat over the winter, and only one of them is salt.

So now salt has lost its strategic value. Lost its mojo. Lost its mojo. It's still there. We still eat salted foods as a- Flavor. Flavor. But it's a different thing now. Culture, it's a different thing now. It's a matter of choice, not a matter of necessity. A lot of great foods came out of that. You know, the salted pork and the bacon and the very tasty foods came out of that movement.

Okay. So right now, when you buy salt, do you know where it came from? No, unless you get Hawaiian salt. Unless you get gourmet salt from Whole Foods. You're just buying Morton salt. Do you know where it came from? No. Do you remember how much it costs?

No. It's too cheap for you to even remember that. Okay. If you're going to turn oil into salt, what you're doing is you're turning energy into salt. That's the value of a plug in the wall. Design a car that can run on five different kinds of energy. Then oil has to compete with the other kinds of energy. Oh, I see what you're saying.

So have an engine that works on hydrogen. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fuel cells, batteries. So they have hybrids now that work on two different things. It's a start. But my point is, if you do that, then we no longer fight wars for oil. What do we fight for now?

Maybe you don't fight. For freedom? How about freedom, bro? Freedom isn't free. Freedom isn't free. We just did three hours. Three hours, holy shit. Isn't it crazy how time flies by? Dude. Astrophysics for people in a hurry.

This is old. That's the old one. Still on the New York Times bestseller list. Crazy fact. Astrophysics for people in a hurry. This is old. That's the old one. Still on the New York Times bestseller list. Crazy fact. 67 weeks. Crazy fact. 67 weeks. 67 weeks.

Crazy fact. The unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military. That's not even out yet. Accessory to war. You can pre-order. Of course you can pre-order, but it's not out yet. It's not out yet. They like it if you pre-order so they know how to print in the thing.

I got it right here in my greasy hands. Look at that. That's if you're not in a hurry. I'm learning some things that you're not. Look, I'm reading. Don't buy this book if you're not in a hurry. Yeah, this is a long-form book, ladies and gentlemen. You got to do some thinking.

There's no pictures. I just checked. That's why you were thumbing it? Never know. Neil deGrasse Tyson, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, StarTalk Radio It's a podcast It's also on

Nat Geo Yeah Nat Geo as well It's Sirius XM Channel 121 The Insight Channel I might add And Cosmos

Look for Cosmos in the spring Beautiful The date isn't announced yet Thank you sir Always a pleasure Love you man Love you too bro Alright

Bye everybody