The Joe Rogan Experience - #1347 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Episode Date: September 5, 2019

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

Hello. Joe. What's going on, man? Man. Good to see you. Thanks, thanks. I feel a little overdressed. Sorry about this.

You look good. You know. Oh, look at that. A little bit of Starry Night there. Yeah, you're really into that, huh? Yeah, I got, I got. Is that, that's what's on your phone as well. So you remembered, yeah.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, it's on the phone. Starry Night. You know what I like about Starry Night? It's not what Van Gogh saw that night. It's what he felt. How do you know what he felt? Because this is not a representation of reality.

Oh, okay. And anything that deviates from reality is reality that has filtered through your senses. And I think art at its highest is exactly that. If this was an exact depiction of reality, it would be a photograph and I don't need the artist. Hmm, okay. So even photographs that take you

to a slightly other kind of dimension as you gaze upon them, it's more than what was actually going on at the time. And that's art taken to the craft of photography. That's why you like it? That's one of the reasons why. Plus, I think it was the very first painting where its title is the background. Think about that. This could have been called, in the full painting, obviously, this is a snippet.

Yeah. So there's a town there. There's a cypress tree. There's a church steeple. It could have been called Cypress Tree. It could have been called Sleepy Village. It could have been called Rolling Hills. But no, it's called Starry Night. And everything in front of it, everything in front of it is just in the way. And how often do you paint something where the title is the background?

That's my point. And in this particular case where the title is the background? That's my point. And in this particular case, the background is the universe. And so for me, this was a pivot point in art. And it's 1889, which is recent given the history of paintings that go all the way back. So, yeah, there it is. Is that your favorite painting ever? I have to say yes. It has to be. You have a vest and a phone cover.

If it's not, what are you doing? Yeah. I have four or five ties that have this painting on them in different ways. I'm all in. I'm all in. What's interesting is that the town is... Wait, wait. Have you seen Starry Night in Bacon?

Somebody did. Look. Dig itry Night in bacon? Somebody did. Look. Dig it up on the screen. In bacon? Somebody did it in bacon. It was just crazy. Oh, God. How weird.

Yeah, so- That's weird. Yeah. How weird. Go back to the original one, please. What's interesting about the original one is that the town is realistically depicted. The trees are recognizable as trees if you ever saw a sky that looked like that the end would be here yeah exactly plus that swirling

is not wind and it's not clouds because if it was if it was clouds you wouldn't see the stars right what is it it's how he felt that's all i can tell you by the way that is a real evening so that's sorry it's not even the it's early morning the crescent moon when it's how he felt. That's all I can tell you. By the way, that is a real evening. So that's, sorry, it's not even the evening. It's early morning. The crescent moon, when it's that orientation, means this is before sunrise. And that white object lower on the horizon, that's sort of glowy, that's very likely Venus.

And that enables us to trace over what set of weeks this painting was actually painted. So it's kind of like forensic astronomy. Has anyone done an analysis of where he must have been? Yeah, yeah, it's well known. Yeah, he was in a real place. And so that really would be- He didn't pull this out of his ass, right?

I mean, it was- He painted what he saw, folded into what he felt. Yeah. Heavy. That's how art should be, I think. Yeah? Otherwise, what do you need artists for? Make cool shit.

The cool stuff is something that they felt and it came out of them. Yeah. And they feel stuff. Artists feel the natural world in ways different from the rest of us. And that's why they're artists. Do they or do they just express it with more skill? Oh, sorry. Yes, we all can feel it. But to be able to express it, that's a they're artists. Do they, or do they just express it with more skill? Oh, sorry. Yes, we all can feel it,

but to be able to express it, that's a whole other talent. Right, just to capture it. You know what I think about often? Why do we all know who Paul Revere is? It's a household name, yet is there any other war ever fought in the history of the world

where a household name is the name of the person who told other people the enemy was coming? We can mention his name, but we can't list the generals that all fought in that war. Why? It's because a poem was written about him. And he had this mundane job, let me tell people the enemy is coming. And so the artist, in this case the poet, elevated the mundane to something that forces you to reckon it with your understanding of this world. What's Joyce Kilmer's most famous poem? It's about a tree. Dogs piss on trees.

You drive by trees. You don't even know they're there. Yet a poem about a tree. I'll never see something as lovely as a tree. Oh my gosh. So the art forces you to pause and just reflect on things that you took for granted, things that became ordinary in your life and they were elevated to to to they get beatified by the talents of artists that's a word oh beatify you never know beatify yeah i'm using it loosely it's the intermediate step between being an ordinary person and being a saint the beatification of someone in the catholic. I would have thought it's making something more beautiful. Oh, okay. It could have similar roots.

I'm just guessing. Yeah, it could come from that. But to be beatified is the first steps on route to sainthood. Oh. Yeah. That's if I remember the word correctly. Here it goes. Oh, you got it. Jerry pulled it up.

The definition. To make supremely happy, Christianity declared to have attained blessedness of heaven and authorized the title blessed and limited public religious honor. She was beatified six years after her death. Yeah, so I think you can't become a saint unless you've previously been beatified. I think that's the rule. But I'm looking at the number one definition there, to make supremely happy. So that's interesting. Yeah, that moved

ahead of it. The definition of beatify. It's a weird word. The verb was up there you had on the screen. Roman Catholic Church. He beatified Juan Diego, an Indian believed to have a vision of a Virgin Mary. Synonyms canonize, sanctify, hollow,

consecrate. So I think if you take something ordinary and you subject it to the interpretation of an artist, it can be beatified and elevated on a level where it becomes a household recognition of its importance in this world. So my brother's an artist. My brother's an artist. What kind of art? Fine art, but also he paints and he teaches history of art. So I've had this sort of baptism my whole life, being exposed to him.

I'm the sibling scientist. But to have an artist in the family, everyone should have an artist in the family. I've got an uncle. And, of course, the whole STEAM movement, science, technology, engineering, and math, the artists got in there and say, wait, STEAM movement, science, technology, engineering, and math, the artists got in there and said, wait, the STEM movement, science, technology, engineering, and math, they wanted to throw in the A to get art as part of that movement. Science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Change it from STEM to STEAM.

It's a STEAM. So you get full STEAM ahead. STEAM is a better word in that. Well, they're both good words for what they need. That just sounds like a bunch of awesome stuff. It does. Why not throw in comedy and building houses? It seems like you're getting very – it's like the L-B-G-T-Q-A-I.

Things get really squirrely when you start adding more letters. Yeah, you can add letters, but if it doesn't spell anything, then the memorization has to kick in. But STEAM, you don't have to memorize that. It's already there for you. So it's cleverly conceived. I think the abbreviation was it's tacit recognition that these are elements in society that advance civilization and grow the economy, actually. So, in fact, there's hardly any growth economy in the world that isn't growing because it has been – not having been touched by science or technology. Everything.

Just think about it. So if you're around running – you don't have them on your show. But if you're running around saying, I don't like science. Science is bad. Science is evil. Okay. Well, then you will die in poverty if you elect officials who believe that as well. Who the fuck thinks that science is bad in 2019?

And how do they express this? Do they express it through science? Okay, so. You know what I'm saying? Like, are they saying it online? I have a book coming out in a month called Letters from an Astrophysicist. Okay. It's not out yet.

But I've got it. It's not. How did you get a copy? But I got it. I don't even have my copy yet. I've got it. It's not. How did you get a copy? But I got it. I don't even have my copy yet. But I got it. What I'm saying, in there, there's a whole chapter on just angry people who don't like anything, including science. And one of them, it's a riff.

He just says, I hate that science brings some of the worst things that's ever happened to humanity and pollution and this. He goes on and on and on and on and on. And so I reply. There's letters from an astrophysicist. And I reply as calmly and as rationally as possible when you get attacked that way. But what I'm saying is not everyone embraces everything that science does. And some will cherry pick it. You have the science deniers for global warming.

You have science deniers with vaccines. You have science deniers with GMOs. There's all manner of science denying going on in modern society. And in a free society, what are you going to do? People can think what they want. But if thinking what they want influences policy, which then affects everybody, then your science denial has consequences to the economic health of the nation. And by the way, it's not only economics, it's your, the economic health, it's your physical

health, because medicine flows through advances in science, as well as our security. Well, there's people that deny some aspects of science while conveniently using other. That's where it gets weird, right? You're driving a car that's relying on GPS. You're using a phone to complain about the global warming hoax. Correct. One of my more sort of popular tweets was, you remember when we had the photo of the black hole from a distant galaxy? And it was banner headlines, maybe a year ago, less than a year ago, banner headlines, and a first photo ever of a black hole. And it was an astounding engineering achievement to accomplish that. It was multiple telescopes all around the world, pooling the data to get it

right. And it was one of the greatest collaborative efforts we've ever undertaken in my field of astrophysics. Okay. And everybody was loving the results. So all I tweeted was, scientists report first photo of a black hole. Public. Ooh. Ah. Scientists report humans are warming the earth.

Oh, you brought it up okay scientist we produced the first ever image of a supermassive black hole 55 million light years away the response scientists we've concluded that humans are catastrophically warming the earth response that conflicts with what i want to be true so it must be false well that is the cherry picking of science it is the cherry-picking of science. It is the cherry-picking of science. But the global warming thing is very much connected to a certain type of ideology. A certain type of person thinks of themselves as a no-nonsense person. What I'm saying – yes, it does matter. What I'm trying to say is that is a demographic that has cherry-picked science to deny human-caused global warming.

There are other demographics that have cherry-picked other science to deny other things. And it's not all located in one political branch. So you tend to find liberal folk complaining that the conservatives who have embraced no global warming platform are denying science and they need science on their side. And many of those same people are rubbing crystals together to be healed by the crystal energy or they're denying vaccines, thinking that they're somehow bad for you. And so all of this requires some or total rejection of mainstream science. And we're living in that world now.

And I don't know – I don't think it will stop the progress of civilization, but it can certainly slow it down and occasionally stall it. Well, that is certainly a problem. But how big of a problem is it? Like how many people are really in denial of science in 2019? And it's got to be a small number. For me, in a free country, that's not what matters. What matters is in a free country that you elect officials who are not. Officials.

Yes, you elect people who are scientifically literate. They don't have to be scientists. And if they're not scientifically literate, they should be self-aware of that and then listen to people who are. Right. Don't you think what they're doing, though, is they're doing what their constituents would like them to do? That's why I don't beat politicians over the head, ever. I don't do that. We're a republic. We're a democracy. Whatever they believe, if they think Earth is 6,000 years old and they got elected, it's because the people who elected them believe Earth is 6,000 years old. Or because they're willing to let that one go because they believe in their policies.

Possibly. That's a good point because you have a portfolio of thoughts and beliefs. Or because he's such a profound Christian. I mean, he's so profoundly Christian that he just wants the literal definition of the Bible. There are plenty of Christians who are connected to science that don't, including the Pope, by the way. Can you get more Christian than the Pope? All right. Yeah, he believes in science now. This new Pope is pretty interesting. Yeah, if you read his encyclical from a couple of years ago's it's a scientifically literate doc document yeah and no this okay so it's not he's still religious right so jesus still rose from the dead and there was still miracles and

all the rest of that in the new testament so he's not in denial of that but given that he is saying oh my gosh here's something we the religious community and scientists can partner behind and that is we want to save life on earth and so we have to be better shepherds of what is going on on this earth. And one of them is we don't want to flood low line countries in the South Pacific where the average sea level is 10 feet above sea level or whatever it is. You're going to lose these countries. If you keep melting our, our, our, um, the, the, the ice caps, because that would include a north and there's no land in the north. So the glacier ice, that's land-based ice, right? Because any ice that's in the water floating, that can melt and it's not going to change the water level.

It's why you can do this experiment. It's really cool. Fill up your glass. Put a few cubes of ice in a glass of water. Fill the glass up as much as you possibly can without spilling it. And the ice is bobbing above that level. Okay. Cause ice is about 10% buoyant on that. About 10% of an ice cube will be lifted above this. This is the, this is the iceberg equation, right? All right. That's the tip of the iceberg. Well, you see the

10% above and 90% is not visible to you. This is, by the way, I don't want to get too many off ramps here, but that's one of the, one of the things that they did right in Titanic. Okay. If you look at the earliest Titanic movie that was in black and white, they see this huge iceberg on the horizon and then it can, they can't swear away from it because it, oh my gosh, it doesn't have, no have no no the iceberg that cuts the bottom of your boat is a little bit of ice sticking out above the water because 90 of it is underwater and that's where the damage occurs and in the james cameron titanic the iceberg that they hit above water was looks like a little chunk of ice you know that couldn't hurt anything all the damage was underwater

anyhow so back to this so do this experiment and then let the glass sit there and let the ice melt. And the water level will stay the same. Because when ice melts, it takes up lower volume than it was when it became ice. And that's why pipes break. I thought pipes break just because the water expands. Yeah, I just described that in the opposite direction. Oh, so because as it freezes it, but I didn't know it gets larger. That's what expansion means.

What's with your vocabulary here? No, but I'm saying like when you freeze something, it gets larger? Your ice cube is sitting 10% above the water level, and it melts and becomes water. The water takes up 90% of the volume of the ice. Right. So that just melts back into the water and it doesn't overflow, even though it was sticking above the water line

when you had the glass. So now let's do the opposite. Okay. There's water in the pipes. Right. Oh, can I tell you something that might blow your mind? No. Sure.

Is that allowed? I don't know. How many times does your mind, at least once a day. Yeah, at least once a day. You need your mind blown. Okay? Here's how it works.

Okay. So let's put water in the pipes. Okay? And then the temperature drops. Now, pipes have a certain strength. Right. Copper pipes, you know, they're rigid. I grew up around breaking pipes.

Okay, so now watch. In Massachusetts. So the water's in there. And now the temperature begins to drop. Okay. The water wants to turn to ice, but it can't because the pipe is containing it. So it just sits there, okay, at 32 degrees as water, even though the temperature outside is dropping below 32 degrees, okay? And it still sits there.

It gets to 30 degrees, 29. The pipe is squeezing the attempt of this water to become ice. And the act of squeezing it prevents the temperature from dropping. Okay? And the temperature drops depending on how strong the pipe is and the temperature gradient across it. As the outside temperature continues, it gets to now 25 degrees. The pipe is still holding on to the liquid water. And it's still 32 degrees inside there. And it holds on to it. And it keeps happening.

It keeps happening. You get a point where the pipe can no longer contain the water, and the water freezes spontaneously. It just goes right down to that temperature, and the pipe is helpless in the face of this. So the point is the stronger the pipe is, the lower the temperature has to be outside for the freezing water to break it. So theoretically, if you had a pipe that was made of a stronger material than copper, you can get even lower than that?

You can get even lower temperatures. How low can you get? Because when things freeze, they have to expand? So what? No, only when water freezes. Why does water expand? It's a remarkable fact about water that is shared by very few other ingredients. Most things, when they cool, they shrink, as all men know.

Oh, hey. So most materials, because things cooler, the vibrating molecules slow down and they take up less space. Water is the opposite of that as it passes down through. So I'm going to describe to you an extraordinary fact about water and why we're alive today. So watch, let's take a lake that has fish in it. Temperature drops outside and the lake slowly begins to get cooler because there's a time lag between the air temperature and the waters. That's why the first freeze, the lake is still there. It's got to be cold longer. So what happens? The water gets cold on the surface. Okay. And it begins to, okay. The water gets cold on the surface and it begins to shrink.

So that water falls, it shrinks. That makes it denser, it falls to the bottom. Fine. It does that down to about four degrees Celsius. As it goes from four degrees Celsius to zero degrees Celsius, the freezing point, it begins to expand and become less dense than the water. So now, as the water wants to actually freeze,

it stays on top. When it does freeze, you freeze the top surface of the lake. Well, how about the water below it? It's insulated from the dropping air temperature, and the fish don't die. Imagine if ice were denser than water. What would happen? You'd freeze the top layer. It would sink.

The bottom is frozen. Freeze the next layer. It sinks, and fish would be systematically forced to swim in shallower and shallower waters until they were all freeze-dried on the top surface of the lake and all fishes would be dead every winter i think it's every lake i think it's fish what i think you're supposed to say fishes fishes is a double plural you could do that? Yeah You never heard fishes? All fish would be dead?

You never heard Like all deer? Would you say all deers? Well because generally If you had multiple kinds of deer Yeah Oh so if you had like Sitka deer

But it's rare that they're all in the same place You generally have one kind of deer But the ocean has many kind of fish In the same place Oh Yeah That's interesting So you would say fishes

Fishes. Because you're talking about a bunch of different kinds. It's different kinds of plural fish. Oh. Yeah. Double blow my mind. You didn't know that. You blew it again.

Oh, no, no. I didn't know. I never thought about it that way. The many fishes in the, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so sorry. Fishes in the sea. Yeah, so multiple plurals of different kinds of fish. How cold does it have to get where ocean water freezes?

Because that's where it gets really warm. Well, it's salt water. Do you have the word fishes up there? There's some weird anomaly that happened where there was too little oxygen in the water, and somehow the frozen fish got pushed out in a wall of ice. It was in South Dakota a couple years ago. So there's too little oxygen because of- I don't know.

I can't explain that. I don't know what happened there. If you look at the green in the water, most likely it's algae. So that happens with certain lakes that get polluted with certain types of algae. Right. You can kill explain that. I don't know what happened there. If you look at the green in the water, most likely it's algae. So that happens with certain lakes that get polluted with certain types of algae. Right, you can kill the lake by doing that. Yes, you can kill the lake. Well, you get it in the ocean, too. You get these zones.

But I don't see how you get frozen fish, though. That's incredible. But scroll. Stop. Go back up. Yeah. Scroll down so I could read it. Fish frozen in a wall of ice in South Dakota's Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge.

That's incredible, man. Is that a video, Jamie? I think it's just a picture, though. God, that's amazing. I don't know how they froze because they can just swim to where it's not frozen. So I'd have to do more homework on that one to see what caused that. Wow. So my point is, because of this property of water. How weird.

That ice floats. It insulates the bottom layers of the lake and fish can survive over the winter. That's how igloos work too, right? Insulate so you can inside, you get like a nice little spot. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you put a barrier between you and the changing elements outside, that's basically an insulating layer.

Have you ever done ice fishing? No, I never. It's a good way to get away from your wife I'm a New York City person Well, they have them in New York City People go ice fishing, I'm sure, in Central Park Wait, do women go ice fishing to get away from their husbands? They do Yeah, okay

It's a joke It's like, why do people golf? You know, but ice fishing is particularly weird Because you have to continually scoop out the ice And maybe even drill again. Right. So that works because frozen water is less dense than non-frozen water, and it's one of the rare ingredients for which that's so.

And it's likely there would be no life on land or anywhere on Earth if that were the case, if the opposite of that were the case. So water is a very special ingredient to life on Earth. It's cited by many religious folks as saying, see, Earth is sacred for these, it's in the list of special ingredients for what make Earth habitable for life.

That is a really strange thing, though, that if you can contain it somehow in an incredibly strong pipe, that it won't freeze. Yes, it won't freeze. What is a temperature variant, though? Is there a number? That's why pipes don't freeze when it just hits 30 degrees outside. That's not when you hear it. Right.

It freezes when it gets really low. And it crack. Yeah, and then it'll break the copper like it's paper. It'll tear it like it's nothing. Now, on the flip side of that, try this at home. Take an ice cube that's like at 30 degrees, okay? How would you measure that? Pull out an ice cube, and just because they'll be at near zero Fahrenheit if you have a good freezer,

just pull out and leave it on the counter. Put it on a wooden cutting board, okay? And just let it sit there for like 10 minutes, and its temperature will come up. There'll be a point where it hasn't melted yet yet but you can take it and squeeze the ice cube and you can force it to melt by squeezing it because you're forcing it into a smaller volume that it currently contains and the only way you can accomplish that is if the ice turns to water then it will occupy a smaller volume so the act of squeezing ice can actually melt it. So if you had some sort of a pipe that could physically constrict, like something that

had threads in it that could wind down to a smaller size, you could stick a cylinder of ice in it and you could slowly crank it down. Oh yeah, yes, yes. It would melt. Yes, you can melt. If you had some machine that squeezed ice. Yeah. And the colder the ice is, the harder it would be for you to squeeze it to accomplish that.

So it's sort of fun with ice. In fact, you know what else you can do? This is a harder experiment to do. If you take a mesh, like a screen mesh, it has to be sort of wider openings than a screen door would. So what would this be? Like a fence, like a chain link fence and hold it horizontally and get a big block of ice and just place it on top, a block of ice that's heavy. What will happen is the ice, the weight of the ice will melt the ice in the contact

points of the chain itself because it's feeling that pressure to squeeze it into a smaller volume but by the time it melts the ice has now passed through the grate and it will refreeze on the other side so you can actually pass a block of ice through a chain link fence vertically just by pushing it yeah it's pretty it's a pretty. It's a slow experiment, but it's real. How long? I mean, it depends on the temperature of the ice and how much it weighs. Right. Because the pressure is what's...

This is why you can ice skate. Why can you skate on ice? Because the edge of the blade is very high pressure on the ice, and it's melting a bead of water. And you're actually gliding on water when you're skating. You're not skating on slippery ice really yes i thought you were just cutting the ice with the blade well so the blade have you ever seen a sharpened blade it's not just flat there's actually a concave cross-section to it so each edge the left edge and the right edge is is

basically a knife edge okay not quite as sharp as a a knife, but you can feel how it's sharp so that when you lean on that edge, either your inner edge or outer edge, your entire body weight is being held up on a very narrow surface area of the blade. So the pressure is extreme. It's like, you know, 1,000 pounds per square inch. You don't weigh 1,000 pounds, but you're not skating on a square inch, right?

So you do the math on that, and what you can have is you will skate, and you're actually, what makes it so slippery on ice skates is because you're moving on a bead of water

that freezes right behind you as you go past it. Dude. Dude. Yeah. So it's possible for ice to be so cold you can't really skate on it because even that pressure is not enough to melt it. How cold would it have to be? Last I did a calculation, it was really cold, like tens of degrees below zero.

How does dry ice work? Oh, it's just frozen carbon dioxide. That's all. Oh. So here's the difference. Here's the difference. You have a block of frozen H2O and a block of frozen CO2. So there they are.

It turns out the air pressure on Earth is high enough, at sea level, is high enough to allow the ice to melt and sustain a liquid state. Okay? The CO2 under air pressure, normal air pressure, it wants to melt, but it can't sustain a liquid, and it goes straight to gas. If we had much higher air pressure, you could have CO2 melt and have liquid CO2.

So now watch what happens. So can I blow your mind again? Sure. This is really good stuff, okay? It's good like physical chemistry. So here you go. So watch what happens. So what happens if I reduce the air pressure, okay?

Well, the transition from ice to water is still the same. It's not affected. But the boiling point is affected. As you know, cooking times have to be adjusted on mountaintops. Because when you boil water, it's not 212 degrees. Depending on the height of the mountain, there's less air pressing down that's preventing it from boiling. Okay.

The boiling point is not some absolute fact about the water. It has to do with what the air pressure is sitting above it. If you have extremely high air pressure, water has to go to a much higher temperature before it boils. So the boiling point of water that's reported in all textbooks is at sea level, at one atmospheric pressure. That's how you get 212 degrees. If you start reducing the atmospheric pressure, it's 210 degrees, 205 degrees, 200 degrees, 190 degrees, 180 degrees.

180 degrees? Oh, yes. And so that's not as hot as 212 degrees, so you got to cook the food longer. All cooking times are increased for this reason. So now watch. I'm not done with you. Uh-oh. Let's keep reducing

the air pressure. Okay? Theoretical? Or like possible on Earth? No, no. Like Himalayas. Yeah, but, or take it up,

you can ascend in some kind of copter or some kind of device. Okay. Or air balloon, or whatever. But I'm saying you can do this experiment

in a laboratory. Okay. Okay? You keep reducing the air pressure. Boiling port keeps dropping. It? You keep reducing the air pressure. Boiling port keeps dropping. It's 170 degrees, 150, 120, 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, 50 degrees Fahrenheit,

40 degrees Fahrenheit, 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Holy shit. What happens? The ice melts and becomes water. The water evaporates and becomes steam. And all of that's happening at 32 degrees. There is an atmospheric pressure for which water, ice, and steam coexist. And it's called the triple point of water.

And all ingredients have a triple point Wow what is that Mars Mars is very close to the triple point of water so you can have you can have a simultaneous bath in certain regions of Mars a simultaneous bath because the air pressure is so low it's like 1 100th earth's air pressure it's very very low so you have a place where a pot of water ice cubes and steam are coming out all at once it's at the triple point so so so here's the the lesson here is we live life in our world at one atmospheric pressure, at one room temperature atmospheric pressure, and we define what is normal based on that life experience, based than what our senses are exposed, our five senses are exposed to on Earth. What did you think about Elon Musk's idea about nuking the poles of Mars in order to make it warmer? Yeah, so some of these are kind of pie-in-the-sky ideas. Right.

But let's get to what he's trying to get at. What you want to do is you want to introduce warmth. You want to block the ozone. You want to block the ultraviolet so that you can protect organic life. All right. So we have an ozone layer. It's the three oxygen atoms, O3.

And ozone likes ultraviolet light. So ultraviolet light. So ultraviolet light comes from the sun. It gets eaten by ozone. It gets eaten. And when you do that, the ultraviolet light doesn't make it to Earth's surface. So even though they say, well, wear sunscreen and sunblock 45, yes, that's for the 1% of the ultraviolet that gets through the atmosphere if you're above the atmosphere you are fried so the because ultraviolet is highly hostile

to organic molecules and what we're made of as life so you want to protect you want to give life a chance so you want to not only heat mars you want to find a way to block the ultraviolet light coming from the sun. So you need some mechanism, if not ozone, or just live underground, for example. Okay? And so I don't think we should think of the idea as a literal thing, but just it's a general principle of what you want to accomplish on Mars in doing so. So you want to warm it. You want to protect what could be the future of biochemistry, and then you seed it. And then you wait.

You don't want to wait too long. You want to sort of speed it up if you could. And then you terraform Mars. SpaceX has – I visited him a couple of times. He's got a mug you can buy there. Then it has Mars on it, okay? And then you put hot liquid in it, and Mars turns to an arable blue-green marble. That's hilarious.

So, yeah, it's very good. And it doesn't tell you that. It's, oh, I got a Mars mug, you know? And you show it off, and oh, my gosh, when did that happen? It's an Earth mug, but it doesn't look like Earth. There's a lot of people that go on altitude camping. Also, we think there's a lot of water that was once on Mars, which is a certainty. And we think it's just sitting below in a permafrost.

So you wouldn't have to bring water to Mars. By the way, in the really distant future, you can just redirect a comet and get all the water you need. How far distant is that? The comet's everywhere, everywhere dude we're in a shooting gallery yeah that's not what i asked oh how far away do you think it is before we could redirect how far away in time yes okay sorry um uh we know how to do it but there's no real incentive so there's no engineering funded engineering plan to do it but we know how to do it, but there's no real incentive. So there's no engineering, funded engineering plan to do it, but we know how to do it on paper. We know how to do it in a conceivable way? Oh yeah. So first of all, it happens with or without us because we are in the shooting path

of countless thousands of asteroids and comets. So what you would do is you'd find one that's headed close to us anyway in the seventh orbit down the line or the hundredth orbit down the line. And then you'd slightly deflect it in such a way that it would then collide with Mars or even Earth if you wanted. If Earth needed some more fresh water. Yeah, I heard that there's a possibility. But the problem is if something really big that would fill lakes, if that collided with Earth, that would just be bad for life on Earth. Because it's a spontaneous deposit of energy that can change the climate. So you want to do that on a planet that you're trying to terraform.

Isn't that the speculation of how water got here in the first place? So the jury's still out on that. There are tags in the oceans, in the water molecule, that tell you that the water must have come from more than one source. So that's what's confusing things. We want it to be a simple thing. It all came by comets, or it all came from inside the earth through volcanoes. Volcanoes emit lakes, historically, lakes and oceans worth of water just out of their out of their calderas so so the problem is what as we say in science over determined there's plenty of comets to

have delivered all the water there's plenty of water that could have come out of uh out of um volcanoes to give us all the work so but in the oceans it's clearly a mixture and so the the final word is still out on that. What do you think about what's going on in Hawaii now with the protesting of the building of this largest and latest telescope? Yes, the TMT, 30-meter telescope, which would be the largest ever by far of any kind of telescope. The history of astronomy is one where bigger telescopes become bigger buckets to collect light that's the only telescopes today are the same as telescopes when they were invented they're just bigger right the principle behind them is bigger because what they're doing is

simple all you're trying to do is get as much light as possible and the more light you get the dimmer is the object you can detect and the dimmer is the object you can detect, and the farther away is the object you can see. And so for every generation of new large telescopes that have been built, it has increased and deepened our understanding of our place in the universe. So that's just the that's the background the proposal is for a 30 meter telescope largest ever um on the big island of hawaii in mauna kea where there are other telescopes there that's where the keck is right yeah i think if i it's where the keck is i think they they cited it in a place that sort of tucked behind most sight lines to it but that's not so much what's important here. It's that the native Hawaiians, from what I've read, view the mountain as a sacred place.

And so to put a telescope, yet another telescope there becomes sort of invasion of sacred land. And so, yeah, there's a standoff last I looked, I mean, people protesting in the streets and there's some native Hawaiians who embrace this because it means jobs, high, high quality jobs, engineering jobs, because you got to build it, you got to maintain it. There's an entire supportive infrastructure for that. That means jobs. jobs um and it's done in collaboration with the university of hawaii um and the all the other telescopes are partnered with the university of hawaii where people are educated there and so so at the end of the day you have to ask

well how are you going to make decisions going forward are you gonna make them democratically then you take a vote or you do you want the natives to to be the deciders of their own fate and is that democratic okay so the natives vote okay or is it the few people who are protesting do they win the day i mean it's it's complicated and it's very it's very there are a lot of nuanced issues going on there. There's a branch of thinking that the United States government and normal municipal leaders have no authority over it. There are some who claim that this is native Hawaiian property that does not belong to any municipal entity of the U.S. government. So therefore, even state representatives have no say, right? So there's a lot going on there, okay? But if I were to weigh in, this is how I would do so,

okay? I would say first, I think what should happen is, I don't know if they even have, the infrastructure, I don't know how the system is set up, but if they could set it up this way, if the mountain is viewed as sacred by the natives, the natives should have entire say of what happens to the mountain.

That's how I think that should be. So now, what you want to make sure is that whatever decision gets made and voted upon by the natives, that it's fully informed. You don't want to vote being misinformed or under-informed in any election, let alone whether you're voting for a telescope on your sacred mountain. Okay? Otherwise, you're voting out of nowhere, right? You're influencing your future based on partial information.

And decisions based on partial information are bad decisions no matter what. Okay. So I would say hold a vote with the natives and make sure everybody's fully informed. And here's a bit of information I just want to add to the information. Okay. You know what we do as astrophysicists. You know what we do as astrophysicists. We study the universe rather passively at that.

We sit there at the end of a telescope and wait for light to reach us. It's not a Petri dish where we stir it or heat it or freeze it or crack it. Or we're just kind of there, communing with the cosmos. Or we're just kind of there, communing with the cosmos. My PhD thesis was significantly fed by data that I obtained from mountaintops at telescopes. I got my data from mountains in Chile, Cerro Tololo. And it employed all the natives, the natives, the local people. Is that VLT? That's another telescope. All the natives, the natives, the local people.

Is that VLT? That's another telescope. So there's all these telescopes that all have specific access points to the universe. They're not all asking the same questions. Right. And so it's the collection of all the data that gives us the complete understanding, what we think is a complete understanding of the universe. So what we do is try to understand our place in the universe.

And all I'm going to say is that if you have power over what happens on that mountain and it's sacred to you, because whatever that is, it is something important to you and your sense of your understanding of your place in this world that would be spiritual significance. I can tell you that what we learn as astrophysicists from those mountaintops gives us a deeper understanding of who and what we are in this universe. So I would say that whatever is your concept of God, be it the creator of the universe, the spirit energy that pervades all of space and time, whatever is your concept, the discoveries of astrophysicists bring you closer to it. I get your perspective. Let me be the opposing view. They feel-

No, I'm not trying to- No, I know you're not. This is just information i'm putting this is information and i walk out of the room and then you all vote right i'm not you know we believe in democracy here and majority rules that's a that's kind of a good thing it's kind of worked all right but if it's not majority rules i don't know how they're going to make decisions but let's say invent a future where the the natives vote if they vote, I want to make sure they heard what I just said. And now take control of your own fate.

I just don't think they care. I think they've decided that that's a sacred space and they don't want anybody doing anything to it. Then that's their decision. It means something to them. You think that's okay? I don't judge people's – But if you wanted to make a convincing appeal to them no all i would say is what i just told you that's it that is all i would tell them and when they vote i want them to understand that fact i could take it one step further and say

mountaintops because of the access they give astrophysicists and by proxy us all to the universe, are sacred places to scientists. Okay? Now, it's not sacred in a religious sense, but it's sacred in terms of a pathway to knowing and understanding who and what we are in this universe. We place great value on that. But it's not our land. So specifically these things have to take place.

Europeans didn't come to Hawaii and find legions of scientists there conducting experiments. They found native peoples governing themselves. So that's that the consequence if it gets voted down and that's permanent and there's no way around that that telescope is still going to be built it just won't be built in hawaii well where will it be built don't they have to be built on mountaintops yeah so there are other elevation issue right yeah you want to be above you above schmutzy clouds and haze. You want a dry environment so there's less rain, fewer clouds. Oh, you visited. Very good.

I went to the Keck more than 10 years ago the first time, and I got very fortunate. It was a night where the moon was not out. Yes. Moon is not the astronomer's favorite thing. Yeah. You want the darkest sky, you can. We were worried as we were driving up there that it was really cloudy, but we drove through the clouds and we got to the top and we got to the observatory and it was the most amazing, without telescopes. There was telescopes there, but without telescopes. It was the most amazing view of the sky I'd ever seen in my life

and it changed my perspective of our place in the universe it looked like we were on a spaceship like we were flying through the universe because of the diffused lighting in on the big island because it's all set up so that it doesn't ruin what they're trying to accomplish at the keck when you minimize reflections in the wrong place. It's amazing. Not only that, if there was a moon out and you did ascend up through the clouds, the moonlight illuminates the clouds and you are an island in the middle of white cotton.

Yeah. And you're not even connected to the earth. It's what you imagine Mount Olympus would have been. I've been up there when that happens too. With the gods up there and it's kind of, that's their place. It's their you imagine Mount Olympus would have been. I've been up there when that happens, too. With the gods up there, and it's kind of, it's their place. It's their, so, so, so, yes. And so any, my brethren, my fellow astrophysicists who have also observed from mountaintops, by the way, it's becoming a lost art. It's not lost, but it's becoming something we don't do anymore something called service observing where you put in your observing program and it's handed to a technician at the

telescope who points the telescope gets the data and sends it back to you so the next generation doesn't have the experience that my generation did because there was a pilgrimage to the top of the mountain and you converted your life's path you converted your life's schedule to become nocturnal and in so doing you you know this is the journey was long enough because you're in the middle of nowhere now you got to go nocturnal and by the time you're ready for this you are communing with the cosmos it is you the detector telescope, and the universe. And there's an eerie silence up there too because you don't hear any. The hum of maybe the motor of the telescope, but that's it.

And so all I'm saying is if they choose to not have it, the telescope will go somewhere else. One of them is the Canary Islands. These are also volcanic hilltops, not as high as Mount Achaea. That's at 14,000 feet, by the way. I should have checked at what temperature water boils at the top of Mount Achaea. We could have rounded that story out. But I think it's around 180 degrees, actually. I think I did actually calculate it one time. But anyhow, so you'd find a mountaintop and we'll put it somewhere else and the data won't be as good um but that'll be a consequence of it and none of that will go to hawaii how do you think that's going to get resolved though if you had a guess i don't know um i uh i i just don't know a lot of people are against it including jason momoa aquaman's against it, including Jason Momoa.

Aquaman's against it. Oh, uh-huh. He was out there protesting. Yeah, and so when you get celebrity types to put the weight of their name behind it, it magnifies the cause of others, even if they're in the minority. And so, like I said, I think natives should – Has it been voted on? Does everyone know who all the natives are? Is there some listing so that they can all vote for this one thing? You wouldn't want people voting who are not native if you're voting on whether it's so sacred you don't want to put a telescope there.

You'd want people who have an indigenous concern for what goes on there. Even indigenous in reference to hawaii's relative every usage of the word indigenous is relative yeah especially with hawaii because i mean the only indigenous people are black people in africa okay because life human life began in africa you everyone else traveled to where they were so So native, you set a timeframe to declare what is native and what's not. And native in its simplest form is, are you born there? So I'm a native New Yorker. I'm born there, but I wasn't the original settler there. My species did not form on Manhattan Island. So everybody traveled to where they are. They just got there before the Europeans.

And so that has become the definition of indigenous. Were you there when the Europeans landed? Then you're indigenous. But to other life forms on that rock, on that Hawaii's or a volcanic, it's a volcanic archipelago. Do you know how that happens, by the way? You have all these multiple volcanoes in a string. Do you ever wonder why, how that happens?

Sure. You did wonder? Yes. Or do you know? Why? Oh, because there's a hotspot beneath Earth's crust, and it's just sitting there, okay? And when you're beneath Earth's crust, stuff doesn't move around the way it does on Earth's crust. Earth's just sitting there okay and when you're beneath earth's crust stuff doesn't move around the way it does on earth's crust earth's crust shifts okay so that hot spot gurgles up makes a volcano then the hot spot goes dormant but the con the the shelf still drifts you still

have continental drift so it drifts then the hot spot says time for me to gurgle again it gurgles up now you get another volcano and then it goes dormant that volcano goes dormant it shifts you get another one anytime you see an a chain of islands jet guarantee they're made by volcanoes over enough time for continental jift to have shifted the plates over the hot spot of earth's mantle so do you think what they're concerned with is the eventual spoiling of this beautiful natural resource that slowly but surely people are putting up houses there and developments and all these different things and then the scientists are saying we need this sacred land because we're going to put a volcano and they're like look there's already a

there's already a i mean we're going to put a, there's already a, there's already a, I mean, we're going to put a telescope. There's already a telescope up here. Enough. You think that's what it is? They're trying to halt the progress of civilization or, I mean, maybe progress is a bad word. The expansion of civilization. Yeah. I mean, let's go back. What did Teddy Roosevelt do?

He said, we got to preserve these lands because they're beautiful. And by the way, he said that after he shot all those elephants and tigers lions and tigers and bears uh yeah i mean i i hail from a museum the american museum of natural history where he's the patron saint of that museum what happened was he realizes how important this land is and how beautiful it is and he is the he's the patron saint of the national park system. So that's the secular version of sacred, right? We don't say it's sacred, but we've all decided as a community that we care about these lands. And you don't want to drill on it. You don't want to put housing.

Was it Lyndon Johnson's wife, Lady Bird Johnson, who said, our freeways that we're so carefully building after the Second World War, the Eisenhower Freeway Project, the interstate system, is this is our country. We want to keep it beautiful. So certain stretches of it, there are no billboards. Billboards would change your relationship to nature. So certain stretches of interstate are secularly sacred, if I can say that. So I remember visiting Australia, and there's the famous rock out in the outback, the Uluru. Please help me get my correct pronunciation of this.

Uluru. I'm told it's one coherent geologic rock. It's not just an assembly of rocks. And so I don't know enough about the geology of it, but I do know that the Australian Aborigines, Uluru, an iconic red rock. Look at that cool thing. Okay.

So that is one sort of geologic thing. And climbers want to climb it. By the way, it's miles in circumference, okay? So we visited it. I rented a bicycle with my wife and kids and we rode around it. Okay. So now that is sacred to the local indigenous peoples. So they don't want you to climb on it. Or, you know, what do you care? I'm not going to ruin it. I'm not going to.

They don't want you to climb on it. And I try to think to myself, is there a counterpart to this that would sort of wake up a Westerner to say, I get it. All right. from Alaska or from some tribes from Africa or some Aborigines came up from these remote places of the world, walked up to the Vatican and said, we want to climb the walls of this Vatican just for sport. What would we say? We want to climb the walls of St. Paul's Cathedral in downtown London. What would you say? You'd say no. Yeah, but are those comparable? What would you say? You say no.

Yeah, but are those comparable? I mean, these are human constructions. We want to rappel down the Tower of Big Ben. You're going to say no. Get the fuck out. You would say no. These are important structures to us. Now, are you going to say are they equivalent?

Well, we built those, and the natives didn't build the rock. Right, exactly. Right. Exactly. Okay. It depends on how important that detail is to you. All I'm saying is, on the level of we say this is sacred, you say that is sacred, and now you're going to have different rules for who's climbing what. I think it'll force you to take pause. Well, here's an

argument in for and like supporting what you're saying look at what's going on with the himalayas i mean it's the human shit that they have they leave behind there all the climbers so disturbing yeah the climbers yeah it's horrible it's really horrible i mean they there's tons of it tons of human waste. Okay, so what you do there is, if it's still not a problem that people are climbing, it's that they're leaving waste. You don't stop the climbers. You tax them at some level so that now you have cleanup crews that come up after them. Yeah, but it's incredibly difficult to bring anything back.

So? You tax them. You make it worth it. But you understand they have to leave the bodies up there, right? You know that. They can't bring them back. That's what I heard. Well, why do you think they could bring tons of shit when they can't even bring bodies

back? Here's what I'm saying. When they invented cars and cars were killing people in the street because people didn't know how to cross the street. They didn't know where to cross the street. People don't know how to stop the cars. They say, well, cars are actually a pretty useful thing. Do we ban cars?

No, we make stoplights. Oh, people are crossing. Well, we make crosswalks. Oh, let's put lanes so the cars don't hit each other. And let's make airbags so that you don't fly through the windshield. All right. So there are ways around problems if you value the thing that it is that you want to do. So if people are leaving crap up there, you

make them bring it back. Or you develop a system that enables the stuff to come back no matter what. And if you can't do that and you don't want it messed up, then cancel the whole operation. We didn't cancel cars, we got really innovative about how to keep them. I think there's a big

difference between cars and human shit that's left on the side of the mountain. I think the real problem, too, is I think it's incredibly- If you value mountain climbing and you want to keep doing it, then you solve the problem. This is what engineers do. That's all they do. Right, but you know-

Is it what's your problem? I'll solve it. I've never been able to bring those bodies back because of the physical limitations of the human body. It's barely you barely have enough juice to climb it's so thin the air so thin it's so dangerous and the energy draw on you is so high leave those bodies there so is that the human shit that you're talking about or is that oh there's no you're talking about the fact that humans were there that we got we we're

not very clean about our presence that's's what you're talking about, right? Well, we're just being human. We have to go. When you got to go, you got to go. When you got to go up there, you just open up the hatch and let it rip down the side of a mountain. And the resulting – Do you know in the space station, they recycle your urine and your crap? Congratulations to them.

Because they put engineers on the problem. When I mean recycle it, they extract all the water from it. And then what's left is highly dried and mineral. Yeah, water is water. It's a water molecule. That's the thing about water. By the way, every glass of water, people's pee is in it. That's correct.

Yes. You got a bottle of water here? Caveman pee. Okay. This has- Napoleon's pee in it. Yes. Yes.

There are more molecules of water in this bottle than there are bottles of water, this volume of water in all the world's oceans. So in other words, if you drank this and peed it out, okay, you have enough molecules in your pee and in your sweat and in the moisture that you exhale. All that goes back into the environment, scattering into all sources of water of the world, and there's enough of those molecules to occupy every half liter of water that covers the surface of this earth. So that given enough time, you scoop a cup of water out of there.

I don't even care if you filter it. The H2O is still there. That is water that has passed through the kidneys of Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Socrates. Plato. No. Jesus? Can I get a bottle of Jesus?

I'm trying to get my Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure list going here, okay? You just ruined it. But yes, Jesus would be included in that. So would Socrates, yes. So that is the... By the way, the same is true with breaths of air. There are more molecules of air in every breath you take than there are breaths of air in all the atmosphere of the earth.

So when you exhale, there's enough of those molecules to scatter, and the air currents will do this, to scatter into every breath of air that is inhaled. So when you take a breath of air, you have molecules of air that went through the lungs of Jesus. We're all connected, and there's no way around it. And the water that we have is the water that we have, right? We drink it, we pee it, it goes to the atmosphere, it comes down as rain. Yeah.

And the rain is, an important difference is, most of the water on Earth is salt water that you can't drink. Right. And there's a limited amount that's fresh water. How much of a- By the way, all the glaciers are fresh water water that you can't drink. Right. And there's a limited amount that's fresh water. How much of a... By the way, all the glaciers are fresh water because it's frozen rain. Right. Frozen rain.

Here's something that no one talks about. When the glaciers melt, where does the water go? Where does it go? Just tell me. You know the answer. Into the ocean? Back in the ocean. Okay.

But this is now non-salty water going into the ocean. So you're mixing fresh water with brackish water. And they occupy different places in the vertical profile of the ocean. Because salt water is heavier than fresh water. So fresh water occupies the top. Right. But it's not as salty as the water below. And there are circulations

in the ocean not only up and down you know northern latitude southern latitude like the gulf stream there's also circulation top to bottom and the combinations of all these circulations create the stability of the ocean if you disrupt that my gosh, there are animal fishes that can't live anymore where they used to be because the salt level is different. And so some animals might go extinct. Some weather patterns will change because the ocean affects climate. So this is why climate modeling is so critical yet so complicated. It's because there are a lot of variables that show up. Why can't we take the salt out of the water? You can. It just takes energy.

You can do it. But why isn't that being done on a large scale? You can. You have to ask who's paying for the energy? Where are you getting the energy from? It's an energy thing. I would think that would be very valuable. I mean, think about how many people buy bottles of water. It's not valuable enough yet. That's the point. Well, is it that? It's not valuable enough yet. That's the point. Well, is it that-

It's just money. Dude, it's just money. You can ask, what does it cost to ship a half pint of water from Fiji, okay, whatever the hell is the square bottle that you buy in a- Fiji water. Is it Fiji, right? Yeah. Fiji water. right? Yeah. Fiji water. What does it cost to bottle that into Fiji, ship it here, relative to

desalinating the ocean? It's cheaper to ship by the Fiji. There'll be a day when that's not the case. And future wars are going to be fought over who has access to fresh water. And the value of water will go up. And by the way way the value of water in space is ten thousand dollars a pound so if you if you lasso a comet and you say this is a lot of fresh water uh yeah you could i guess you can bring it back down to earth but that's expensive you're better off selling it to nasa for nine thousand dollars a pound because it costs them ten thousand dollars a pound to put water into orbit. So you're better off keeping it up there and somehow or another. Yeah. So if you, if you harness water in space, you're better off trading in space with it than bringing it back down to a planetary surface at the moment, the economics favor that.

What is the desalination process? So it's, it's simple. You just evaporate the water. It's, it's basically a still it's, it's, It's simple. You just evaporate the water. It's basically a still. It's a distillery, right? So here's a pocket of water that's highly salty, and you just heat it. The H2O evaporates, leaving sodium chloride behind.

And at the end, you get this salt deposit at the bottom of your dish, at the bottom of your vessel. Oh, wait a minute. What happens to lakes that used to be there, salty lakes that used to be there that aren't? There's a salt deposit. That's the source of our modern day salt. This is what I tweeted the other day, that all table salt is sea salt. It just came from long buried prehistoric evaporated seas. So salt mines, and I was told by some geologists, I had had a narrow usage of the word mine. When I think of a mine, I think of a hole in the ground.

But mining operations include surface operations as well. So there are surface lakes that have evaporated and you get salt from that, as well as the mines that you would dig down deep below. So all of that is a mining operation. My tweet only referenced the buried ones, but it's all from evaporated waters. It's all sea salt, is the point. Now, nuclear power plants rely on steam, right? Isn't that part of what nuclear power plants do? Just to finish the point. So you evaporate the water and the salt left, maybe you might want to use that and make some sea salt out of it, table salt. And that evaporated water condenses out over here and that is distilled water.

Now you might want to mineralize it so it tastes good because distilled water doesn't taste good. Plus it's not really healthy to drink it as you probably know. So it tastes good because distilled water doesn't taste good. Plus, it's not really healthy to drink it, as you probably know. You drink distilled water, it goes into equilibrium with your minerals, sucking minerals out of you so it has the same minerality that your body does. And then you pee it out and you'll systematically drain yourself of important electrolytes. So generally, the water that you would say tastes good and you enjoy has some mineral bits, some kind of minerals in it. Now, nuclear power plants, the process is using that nuclear energy to create steam to operate turbines. Yeah, basically all of our electricity today comes from essentially, mostly electricity is coming from turbines

that convert steam to electricity. So, sorry. So you heat water, the water makes steam, the steam turns the turbine, and the turning turbine generates the electricity. Isn't there... So it's a matter of where do you get the energy to boil the water?

That's what it comes down. Is it coal? Is it oil? Is it nukes? Is it wind? Is it oil? Is it nukes? Is it wind? Is it hydro? All of this. If you get a hydro plant,

oh, by the way, in a hydro plant, they don't have to make steam because they have the water, the water pressure at the base of the dam moves through the turbines and it turns the turbines

and they make electricity. They don't have to heat anything because they have the water pressure to do that anyway. That is also solar power, by the way, because the sun evaporated ocean water. The water lifts up, becomes a cloud. The cloud moves over the land. The cloud rains into the lake that is above the dam. So the energy that got the water up there in the first place is all solar.

So you should think of hydroelectric as solar as well as wind energy because wind is the unequal heating of air on Earth's surface, and that creates air currents. That's also solar power. It's all solar. Isn't it conceivable that you could come up with a combination of desalination and power plant, where you're using the heat to combine, to make the turbines move, and then you steam it off, and that's where you get the water from? That would be a good, that's an interesting idea, and I don't know how much that's been thought about. What you're

saying is, I'm making steam anyway. Yeah. So why don't I do it with salt water? Suck all the ocean water out. Yeah. Yeah. And make two things. That's a nice two for one kind of thing. Three for one. You get salt out of two.

And you get salt out the other side. You get salt. Get salt. You get fresh water. Get fresh water. And you generate electricity. Yeah. So do it.

Patent it. No. It's free for anybody who wants it. Go take that and run with it. I have high hopes for tidal energy Because there's certain places on earth Where tides are very powerful And they're very

And you just put some paddles in there And you sort of And it works both ways When the water comes in and out Now is it battery technology That's the reason why LA Isn't completely dependent upon solar Because it seems like this is the spot to do it

Like it never rains I mean if it rains here 50 days a year, it's crazy. Or any desert, right? And we're next door to the Mojave Desert, right? So one of the problems is, and by the way, the deserts are generally localized to certain latitudes on Earth. It's because of general circulation on Earth. So the air pockets on Earth, there's a lot going on.

The air moves in a lot of ways. But there's an overriding circulation of air that has air sort of rising up at the equator. Imagine a cylindrical movement of air that girds the Earth. Okay? So, just above the equator, you have a cylinder rotating where you have air rising. And just below the equator, you have a cylinder rotating

the opposite way so that air is still rising at the equator. Okay? So air rises at the equator, it's unstable, it makes clouds. The equator is the cloudiest place

on earth, practically. One of the cloudiest places. Well, how about the other side of those cylinders where the air descends? Okay? Okay. When you have descending air, you don't make clouds. Well, how big is this cylinder?

It's about 30 degrees of latitude wide. So, your rainiest places on earth Are at the equator That's where you get the Amazon rainforest And the lake And your driest places on earth Are at 30 degrees north And 30 degrees south Because these cylindrical movements of air

Have descending air there So the Mojave Desert The Sahara Desert The Gobi Desert, they're all around 30 degrees north latitude. So we live on the surface of the earth where there are forces operating that are so much bigger than us that we don't even think about it. Why is, and India would be a desert, because it's right in that zone, were it not for the seasonal monsoons.

It doesn't rain much in India, except when it's monsoon season. So the monsoon is sort of the exception to what would otherwise happen there. And that's why everyone loves the monsoon. They hate it, but they love it. It cools the weather. They get sources of water.

There it is. So to ask you the question again. Oh, did I not answer it? Sorry. Oh, so. Battery technology? Why isn't LA completely solar? It should be.

It's not. Some of it is cost. LA is so car heavy all right and plus you know there's a lamborghini passing me at 20 miles an hour on the 405 that this is the the land of wasted horsepower right so any place that has a lot of sunlight should be thriving on solar panels and you guys aren't i looked around very few how very few homes have solar panels and i don't fully understand that um you could if you did that then you'd run your own run off your own power you can do this yeah you can do the equation very difficult by the way and so so um yeah i mean the price might have to come down

a little further you don't really see the full price of oil. It's subsidized in ways that are not obvious to us. We built the roads with our taxes so that car companies could sell you a car that you drove on the road that was built for them. If they had to build all their own roads, the price of gas to go in the car would have been much higher. The price of your car would have been, all of that would have been much higher. If the car companies had to do it? What I'm saying is I make a product and I want you to use it, but there's no roads. Oh, I convince you to build the road so you can buy my car and drive on that road. That's a weird way of looking at it.

But it's a way, it's full cost accounting. It's full cost accounting. What is the cost of coal? It's how many people died of lung disease, of pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovalcanoconiosis. Okay? That's the longest word in the Random House Dictionary. Is it? Yeah.

That's basically black lung. Black lung? Yeah, it's basically black lung. But you can break it up. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicoval, what's the, uh, silicate in, uh, canoconiosis. So there's all medical, um, bits, uh, stapled together to make that word. So, so what is the cost to their health, their death, their, the air quality, asthma, the total cost of oil is not what you pay at the gas tank. It's other things that we shell out

that are not realized in the actual cost of that source of energy. If you full cost accounted what all this really costs, then the solar option would look way better than it does relative to it. That's all I'm telling you. But when you're talking about cars and car manufacturers having to pay for roads, isn't that like restaurants having to pay for toilet paper? No. Restaurants have to pay for land that you would park your car on to go into the restaurant.

Not in New York City, but in places where everybody has cars. If you don't have valet parking, my restaurant will not occupy the entire plot of land I just bought. It's going to be a fourth of that land, and all the rest are going to be parking spots. I have absorbed the cost of your parking your car in my acquisition of that real estate, for example. To make it convenient so people could use your facility. Correct. But I bore that cost as restaurateur. Right.

Or maybe I'm renting, of course. How does that relate to someone, the car manufacturers, being forced to pay for the roads that they should be? That would have been interesting had they because then it would have changed the pricing of everything. But why would they be? Are you going to make a car and no one has a road to drive it on? That's your responsibility. It's what? It's your responsibility.

Then you don't have a business. But don't you want a car? Yes. So we all agree. Cars are good. They move fast. They get you where you want to go, right? So how do we as a society make it easier for people to get where they want to go?

Well, we all chip in and we make roads. It's not entirely dependent on people to make the cars. Nobody is thinking, you know, I want to go to Chicago tomorrow and I'll be back on Thursday. No one is even having that thought. Before there were email, no one was thinking, I'm going to send you an email. Right. These are not thoughts. So I'm just talking about all the forces that had to align to make it actually work.

I understand. Okay? So now what's holding back electric cars? Well, I might not be able to charge it. It takes a little too long to charge compared to my other vehicle. Are there enough chargers along the way? Well, these were questions that were asked when people got cars. If I have cars and it takes gas, is there a gas station?

Oh, Standard Oil says we'll put a gas station there because you're buying cars. We'll put a gas station there because you're buying cars. And so it's a whole family of businesses coming together, and you're paying for a big part of that. It's not just the car. You paid for the roads. That's all I'm saying. I'm not complaining about it. I'm just describing it as a reality.

I get it. I just didn't understand the comparison to car manufacturers paying for it. If I make a car and I want you to buy my car, need a road so i'm going to build the road oh wait a minute i convince you to build the road that's even better oh my gosh i made it a national priority oh it's a security problem we need a we need a military design interstate system that's what the interstate is. That's why it goes through mountains instead of over them. That's why there are long stretches of straightaways. You can land an airplane on it. That's why they're built above

the road. That's why the surface roads are not the same thing as highways, because the highways are not on the surface. Why? Because they're built up. Why? Because tanks can drive on them without decomposing the road. What specs did we put this to? To the Autobahn. The Germans invented the modern highway system. They invented the cloverleaf. They invented the off-ramps. They

invented all of that. And their armies could move on their roads like it was nobody's business. And Eisenhower said, hey, I'll get me some of that. That's probably not how he said it, I'm guessing. But he comes on, convinces us all that we need to build an internet. I got nothing against the interstate system. I'm just giving you the foundational facts for it. And by the way, the interstate system costs as much as going to the moon. About $100 billion in total cost.

It seems like a bargain compared to how many people use it versus how many people went to the moon. And it grows the economy. It has a lot of... But basically, it was sold as a security need. Because if you're at war, you need to move material and personnel, and you might have to land an airplane in an emergency way. And so all freeways do this. If you're going to crash a plane, do it on a freeway.

Happens. Yeah. But do it because you might land safely. And if you don't land safely The road comes to you To get to the hospital Don't crash in a forest We can't get to you

Right You can't get emergency vehicles Good call Yeah You know Have you seen this new Porsche has a new electric vehicle That they're about to release

I haven't seen it And it's got revolutionary Groundbreaking technology What's groundbreaking That allows it to charge much faster. You could charge up to 80% in 20 minutes because it's double the, well, pull up the information. Was it wattage or amperage?

Well, just a couple of things. A bunch of different battery technologies. You can't cheat physics. So, yes, some batteries charge faster than others, but what really drives the charging speed of battery is the voltage over which you charge the battery. And it goes as the square of the voltage. Right. So a supercharger.

So if you charge an electric car in your 120-volt home electricity electricity it could take 30 hours if you go to 240 volts okay it'll take you know 10 hours if you go to 384 volts you keep going up that drops precipitously and you can get a voltage where the thing will charge in a few a couple hours yeah we have a supercharger here oh you do yeah we have something set up here for my Tesla. So there you go. Which Tesla do you have? So it charges quicker. The S?

The S, yeah, cool. P100D. Yeah, so you'll charge it at most 90 minutes. I don't think they call it that anymore. I think they only have- The superchargers? No, the Tesla. I think they call it a-

They have like an S Raven. They have two distinctions. Oh, you don't think they call it the S anymore? No, it's not the P100D. That's the- That's the high battery capacity. Okay. Now, I think they have it based on whether it's a single engine or a double engine. They've simplified things.

They've also removed all the labels to make it a little slicker, sleeker. So in the Porsche, is it just they're selling a higher voltage charger to you? Trying to find that info. Or is the battery so completely different? Google 10 interesting things about the new Porsche Taycan. How do you say it? Taycan? That's the article I was reading today.

So that's cool. So my concern is batteries are still kind of 19th century technology. Yeah. You know who invented the battery? Volta. Alexander Volta. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, he's cool. Yeah. You know who invented the battery? Volta. Alexander Volta. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, he's cool.

Voltage? Volts. Volts come from him. Volt? Yeah, yeah. All these guys got, you know, they got famous. So Tesla, we got a car named after him. The guy had a, now there's a car.

There's actually a unit of electromagnetism named after Nikola Tesla. Really? Yeah. It's Weber's per square meter, I think. So it's like the density of magnetic field strength within a certain area through a surface. So, but it's charged by an inductive plate. The conventional charge that the Porsche claims that the Porsche turbocharging system charges at 350,000 kilowatts in 15 minutes.

80% in just 15 minutes. Oh, that's cool. It's not clear how Porsche will prevent battery overheating. Maybe they won't. Maybe good luck, bitch. So it could be vaporware. But we'll see. Well, they've already been driving it.

But it's game on. That's what that means. It's game on. Whether it works or not, it's like Tesla's game on. That's what that means. Yes. It's game on. Whether it works or not, it's like Tesla's on notice. Everybody's on notice. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

I'm going to lose market share because people want to buy an electric car. They want something that's going to charge fast, and that's the number one complaint that most people have over electric cars. Or you find a way to... Okay, so that's one way, but another way is you find a way to swap batteries as quickly as it... In less time than it takes to fill a tank. Yeah. You know, how much time do you stand there with your hand on the nozzle waiting for the gas to go in? Right, so they would have to have a mountain of batteries sitting there waiting for people to just come in and take a new one out. Is that any worse than a mountain, than a sunken reservoir tank of gas?

That's no different. Why is that any different? Probably be larger volume, right? Possibly, but so what? If it's economic, you just do it. Right. And if the battery's all at the bottom of the car, and go like NASCAR. You run in, pop it up.

Take out the battery, put it in the next one, you're off. Do you think that's the future? Why not? It's better than charging the battery. You don't have a car, do you? No, I do. Yeah, I do have cars now. You keep? It's better than charging the battery. You don't have a car, do you? No, I do. Yeah, I do have a car now. You keep a car?

I didn't used to. I didn't used to. It's expensive as hell to garage it in New York. It just went up. The price just went up. The big price point of that was when did the average cost to garage a car for a month in Manhattan equal the average cost of a two-bedroom home in the United States. And we've passed that cost of rent.

What's the average cost of rent? It was like $600 a month or something. To rent a parking spot? To rent a parking spot, right. One spot. One spot a month per month. And you can rent a home in many places in the suburbs somewhere for $600 a month. What kind of car do you drive?

So I now have a Tesla. Yeah. So I pony it up. They're expensive, by the way. I heard. Yeah. So I have the X. So that's my sort of utility vehicle.

The X is the SUV. A very high acceleration, as you know. But yeah, there's no maintenance on it, right? There's no oil change. There's no, you know. The only moving part is what you turn in the wheels with, right? No pistons, nothing. So, you know, cars really should have been this 100 years ago.

And then we would have had 100 years of clever engineering to perfect that. You ever see the documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? No, I haven't, but I know about it. And I know some of the background story behind it. And the electric car was one of the first, because electricity was all the rage a hundred years ago. Let's electrify the cities. There's Edison, there's Tesla. Everybody wants to do everything electric. And the car had just come out. Let's do it electric. So this was not a new concept. And it's unfortunate that more sort of innovative thinkers hadn't been brought to task on how to perfect the electric car.

Speaking of Tesla and electricity, what did you think about Tesla's initial idea that Westinghouse shot down to sort of broadcast electricity so that people could just pull it out of the air? Yeah. So the people in the Nikola Tesla fan club somehow feel that he got wronged in his life. Okay? And surely some of that is true with regard to his business acumen and patents and who owns the patent. And does he have good business sense?

Is he as savvy or as sneaky, whatever other words you might apply, to Edison? All right? So I get that. whatever other words you might apply to Edison. So I get that. But his contributions to electromagnetism are real and recognized in the world of physics. Like I said, there's a unit of electromagnetism named after him. So don't come crying to me and say he was not recognized by my people.

He's recognized. He had some ideas that were a little out there, and out there on a level where it almost certainly would have not worked. And here's why. Okay. Electromagnetic energy is communicating between us. I see you. That's because visible light is reflecting off of your scalp.

Okay. To me. It's reflecting off of my nose back to you. You can ask, how much energy is in that? Well, not much. There's not much energy in visible light photons. If you stay there long enough, you might feel a little warmth from it. But no, you're not going to drive a car with that energy.

You're not going to run a motor with it. Okay. Well, of what good is it? Oh, you know what we found? We can use electromagnetic radio waves, which are the lowest form of electromagnetic energy, lowest energy level of all of our life. We can use radio waves not to transmit energy. That's not the point of it.

The point is to transmit information. And information became what characterized the modern era. And that's why in the 1950s and 60s, when everyone is imagining flying cars and motorized sidewalks, everything is running on energy because they're thinking energy is going to be free in the future.

But what they didn't figure was that information would be free or easy to transmit and to generate and to store and to delete. And whereas the energy that would take to move things and to drive things, that would be a problem. No one saw that coming. Nobody saw that coming.

So as your photons get higher and higher energy, yes, you can start doing things with them. You get x-rays and gamma rays. But that's not what Tesla was referring to. He was talking about moving radio waves through the space that would charge things up. You can't pack sufficient energy in your radio wave to do anything we need to do mechanically. Currently. Currently. Back then, would it be sufficient there might have been

something you could have done with your radio waves because the needs were no but that no no i take that back that was the height of the industrial revolution that was the age of the machine the age of the giant turbines radio energy is not touching that right but wasn't it possible that he was considering it for things like radios or light bulbs or household items would it be possible to use that power for that so now what so what happens so the radio waves if you had enough power in radio waves to generate a light bulb to power a light bulb well how through the? Are you standing in the way of this? This energy has pathways.

We now send energy through wires because you're not standing in the way of the wire. The wire is buried. The wire has insulation. The wire is on a high suspension. You want to move it through the air and you want to walk around? No. That's not how that works. No. That's not how that works.

What I've heard people discuss... If you're moving enough energy through the air to power something that itself could kill you, the energy moving through the air could kill you. Unless you bring a little bit amount and then you store it and then use it later. You could do it that way. Sure. Some sort of battery system. Yeah, you need a storage system. But you would still probably have some sort of residual effect of having this stuff broadcast through the air.

And who knows what it would do to human health. If you needed that much energy, right now, the energy to transmit information is so low that it, no, it has no effect on your health. That's why I can pull out my cell phone. I'm in a brick. This is fake brick. That's fake brick. I'm in a build. No, those are real bricks.

No, it's not. Yes, it is. Go touch it. I don't believe you. Go is fake brick? That's fake brick. I'm in a building. No, those are real bricks. No, it's not. Yes, it is. Go touch it. I don't believe you. Go ahead. Those are real bricks. Go touch the bricks, man. Jesus Christ.

He thinks we got fake bricks. Who do you think we are? Okay. Oh. You got it. Thought I was a liar. How weird. Now, let me be honest.

It's a veneer. A brick veneer. Okay, it's not holding anything up. It's from real buildings. So it's not structural brick. They slice the end off bricks and then they mortar it in and everything. That's real brick. They make it look cool.

Okay, so we're both right. That's real brick. No, it's real brick. It's real brick, but it's not structural. It's not structural brick. So here I am. I'm real fake. So we're inside.

I can pull out my cell phone and have a phone call. Yes. These are microwaves of a frequency that can penetrate walls, send information to my cell phone, and I can communicate using information and not have that energy kill me. But it's not enough to power the actual device itself. It is not enough to power the device. Correct. So in Tesla's days— So Tesla, everyone is thinking he's got the solution to the future transmission of energy.

No, he doesn't. Well, I don't think anyone's saying that. He did, and his fans do. But back then, there were no computers. Back then, there were no televisions. But we did have machines. It was the era of the big machine. Right, but I don't think he was insinuating that you could use that to power factories.

I don't know what he wanted to power with it. I don't know what he would have powered with it, if not light bulbs and other things. You know, one thing you brought up that's really interesting, you talked about light reflecting off of things. Are you aware that BMW painted a, they painted one of their cars Vanta black? I saw, this is jet black. Yes. Yes, I saw one recently.

The ultimate black. Yes. So no light can bounce off of it, and you can't drive it, because people won't be able to see it at night. They're literally saying like this is just a theoretical, I mean just like. Well, what do you want to do? You can line it with a light trim. Pull up the image of it.

No, I've seen it. I saw one in a parking lot. It's very badass. Oh, you actually saw one in real life? That's not what I saw. I saw a sports car version. Oh, you saw a Vantablack car? They have them?

I saw a sports car. That was Vantablack? It was not this. The car you have up there, I don't know what that is. That's the BMW that they painted Vantablack car? They have them? I saw a sports car. That was Vantablack? It was not this. The car you have up there, I don't know what that is. That's the BMW that they painted Vantablack. Okay. Well, then that Vantablack is available on their badass, low-to-the-ground sports car. And so-

No, it's not available commercially. What do you want me to say? I'm saying for BMW. It's not something they're offering. I'm in LA. You have all your cars here. Everything's showcased here. I didn't see it in New York. I saw it here in LA. Well, I'm sure L.A. You have all your cars here. Everything's showcased here. I didn't see it in New York.

I saw it here in L.A. Well, I'm sure someone... Well, maybe it wasn't a BMW. Maybe somebody else did. No, I'm just saying BMW, if someone did it, BMW didn't make it themselves. Okay. Someone must have done... I mean, you can do it.

It's a real thing. Vantablack's a real color. So, one of the principles of stealth is that if you send a signal to it, it never comes back to you. So you have no sort of radar measure of its existence. Correct. But there are two ways you can do that. One of them is you cannot reflect back. Okay.

But by absorbing it. Right. Okay. So a jet matte black will absorb it and not reflect it back. But if there's enough energy coming at it, it will heat up because you can't get something for nothing here. It'll heat up the skin of that and it could be bad for the occupants. That's what they said about the article about Vantablack.

Yeah. If you put that in the desert, forget it. Well, they were saying even in Los Angeles. Right. It'd make the car so hot. Exactly. put that in in the desert forget it well they were saying even in los angeles so hot exactly so another way to do it is the signal comes to me and i reflect it in a direction that is not back to you so the b2 bomber is not only non-reflective back to you it takes the signal and reflects it

and double bounces it so that all of your energy gets sent in other directions and not back to you. So it doesn't then keep the energy that was sent to it. So that's another way to do it. There's another stealth, which was featured in one of the recent, not recent, four years ago, James Bond movies, where light that comes at it,

the light that's behind it, goes around it coherently and continues to come towards you. So that you think you're seeing what's behind it and it's not there. You are seeing what's behind it. But the path of that light went around the vessel and continued on its way to you. So you think you're just seeing the grass and the tree, but there's a car sitting right there. You don't know about this technology?

No. Yeah. Right now it exists only for very, look up stealth, light ray stealth. And so the material has to be able to know what is behind it. You're saying small objects only? No, no, no.

That only works in one sight line. Oh, okay. Whereas if you needed functional stealth, everybody looking at it should be – every path, every sight line to it should be able to see what's behind it on the other side of that sight line. So the way it reflects things. Yeah, it carries the light beam around it and sends it out the other side. Do you have a little find? Yeah. Yeah, what you have is like a solid block and a person is looking at it and you see their eye out the other side.

It's really freaky. It's a future of stealth. What are your thoughts on digital privacy? What do you mean? Well, like phones. Yeah. digital privacy what do you mean well like phones yeah like phones like do you ever talk to someone about something and then you see it on your google feed you see ads uh yeah so uh we don't i mean i haven't researched this but uh my wife tells me we were once gifted

one of these you know what do you call those things that you talk to? Oh, Alexa? Yeah, whoever the Google one is. Is that Alexa? At home, Google at home. No, Alexa is Amazon, right? Amazon, yes. So it's Google at home.

And she says, don't turn that on. I said, why not? Because they'll be listening. And I didn't believe her at first, and then I started hearing stories. And so I don't have one, but it's not because I know that it's listening or not listening. Well, it is. Substantiated. Yeah.

Being actual. They've said, they've apologized for actual human contractors listening in to conversations that people have had having sex, having arguments. Like, it's real. Yeah. That seems like it should be a problem. So what's your question to me? What, am should be a problem. So what's your question to me? What, am I all for it?

Or what's your question? No, my question is, one of the things that you're getting out of their ability to scan things is they're tailoring things to your liking. Like, you know how your phone tells you it's 22 minutes until you get home? I get it. And you're like, bitch, how do you know where I live? Exactly. I didn't tell you where I live. I got it.

Here it is. And I'm just old- where I live. I got it. Here it is. And I'm just old fashioned about this. Okay. I'm get off my lawn about this. Yeah. I'm the old man in the rocking chair on the porch saying, Sonny, get off my lawn. But you're also a scientist.

Okay. But I don't want to. Okay. I wear multiple hats. I'm also a dad. I'm also a husband. I got all these hats for all those things. In this particular case, I'm old man. And my old man sensibility is if you track what I shop at a store, what I buy at a store,

and then send me coupons based on what you think I'm going to buy next based on what I've bought before, which is kind of the same thing you're describing. You have denied me the chance of stumbling upon something that I never thought of buying. And that takes away my freedoms and I don't want that. How have they denied you the chance of stumbling upon something different? It's not diabolical. It's just in the casual flow of life. I'll give an example. I walk into a wine shop.

I say, can I help you? And I say, if you help me find what I'm looking for, it's a guarantee that I will never find what I'm not looking for. And I'll end up spending less money in your wine shop. That's a weird way of looking at it. It's the art of browsing. Dude, you're old enough to remember when, I got to look up this word in a dictionary, and you get through six other words.

Oh, I never knew that word. Let me read that. You learn other words en route to the word you're targeting. I understand. Okay. So that is how I feel. And that's how I think about my interaction with this world. I like the randomness, the randomness of it enriches my life. And if you're going to advertise to me, because you think you know who I am,

maybe you do, but I'll ultimately end up spending less money because it's the diversity of how I think and what I buy and what I think of buying and how I buy it and how much money I spend. That is the richness of the life I lead. You're trying to channel me into some product, something that fulfills a, what do you call it when they have the study whether you're going to buy something or not? Survey? No, no. The table of people,

do you like this product or not? Focus group. Am I just a focus group to you? If I am, you don't know me. And I want to experience this world by stepping where I've never stepped before and buying something I've never thought of buying. And if you know my previous habits,

you're assuming I'm going to stay that way for the rest of my life. And maybe most people do. And maybe I might do that. But if I do it because I chose to, not because you have decided that that's how I should be well don't you think they're screaming at you I'm sorry you're getting a little excited sorry

don't you think they're just doing that because they think it would be effective to advertise in that way so if you go googling um new nikes and then as you're looking at something and the google ad pops up and it's for new nikes they said, Neil, I know you were looking at these bad boys. We saw you. Maybe you just need a little nudge. I mean, it's not – I don't think that's that diabolical. I'm the old man on the porch. I'm saying the next generation might feel completely different. They might say, I love it. They know exactly what I want.

You heard about the case where they were – I read this. I haven't re-verified it, but it's completely plausible. There was a teenage girl who was Googling pregnancy tests because maybe she got pregnant. Okay. And the fact that she had searched pregnancy tests, she got coupons in the mail for baby products. And her parents said, what is this? She got outed.

That's a little weird. Yeah, but it's the kind of thing that can happen. That seems intrusive, certainly. Oh, that's intrusive only because it's pregnancy? It's intrusive in every way. No, because- Don't tell me it's not intrusive because you want to buy Nikes. It's sending you physical things.

It's not just something that appears on your Google feed that you can quickly glance over. What's the difference between sending you mail to your mailbox and filling your advertising space in front of your face with product? For one, other people can see it. I walk by your computer, I can see it. Don't look. I walk by your computer, I can see it. Don't look. I guess I'm arguing in principle rather than in detail.

Okay, well, let me take the counterpoint. On the positive side, what they're doing in terms of particularly Google, in terms of your driving, right, and in terms of using of Google maps and documenting the history of all these people driving and especially with things like ways which they acquired as they've developed a much more efficient product than apple which what apple does the apple maps they shred everything you do yes they do they do they all where you've been and where you're going that's correct but apple map sucks so you have to because they don't have enough data they don't have nearly the amount Yes, they do. They value your privacy. All where you've been and where you're going? That's correct. But Apple Maps sucks. Because they don't have enough data. They don't have nearly the amount of data. Google has billions.

What is Google giving you that Apple Maps isn't? They're telling you you're 22 minutes from home. It's time for you to drive home? Are you valuing that? Well, yes. And also, it's just a better map. Wait. Hold on.

Their program's far better. I can ask it how long it'll take me to go somewhere, rather than it knowing what my daytime schedule looks like, and then coming in, like you said, how do you know, bitch? You know? I had that same reaction as you did. And I said, I wonder what's causing this. It's a little creepy. And again, I'm the old man syndrome.

A 10-year-old kid that's only ever known this and becomes 15 and 20, that is life to them, right? Why would they even, maybe they're not going to complain about it, but I'm the old man on the porch. And I'm saying it off my lawn. But do you think that this sort of intrusiveness or at the very least this connection that you have to these devices and that they have to your patterns and your information, it seems inevitable. That doesn't mean I have to welcome it with open arms, but I agree it's inevitable. I agree. Plus, we have security cameras everywhere.

Everybody knows where you are. If the KGB had access to people the way we, during the Cold War, the way modern United States has access to us, we would say, oh my gosh, you have taken away your country's freedoms. We're the leaders of the free world and you guys have imprisoned your entire population. Oh my gosh. The KGB would give their right arm to have the monitoring devices that are actively in place here in the United States today. We know where you are. We know how long you stayed there. We have records of it. We know what streets you stayed there. We have records of it. We know what streets you were walking on. We don't necessarily monitor it,

but we can dig it up if we have to. And with facial recognition, I can track you wherever you are. I feel like there was... You use a facial recognition. I use it now. It doesn't care if I'm wearing a hat or sunglasses. It still knows who the hell I am.

Yeah, it relies on so many points of data. Yeah, so many points of cheekbones and nose-eye separations and everything. I think- Ratios of numbers are highly powerful probes of the structure and the form of things, just so you know. Fibonacci sequence, right? That could be in there, if you have a Fibonacci head. Doesn't everybody's face-

No, Fibonacci, I think, is a little overplayed. Fibonacci is a little overplayed. Especially once you get a nose job. So Fibonacci, you can find it in nature and say, oh, isn't this beautiful? But you've overlooked all the places where it doesn't show up in nature. Right, but it appears so many times. It doesn't appear in more places than it does appear. Right, but in a lot of living things.

No, yeah, living things, of course. Plants, pine cones, pineapples. There's a lot of sunflower seeds. It's very, or sunflowers. Right, but in a lot of living things. No, yeah, living things, of course. Plants, pine cones, pineapples. There's a lot of sunflower seeds. Flowers, yeah. Yeah, really weird, isn't it? Yeah. That it appears this random, I mean, not random, but this very distinct matter. Well, if the next thing you do depends on the previous two things you did, you get the Fibonacci series.

I mean, that's often the case. the Fibonacci series. I mean, that's often the case with, you know, think of things in your life you do where the third thing you do depends on you having done the previous two things in this exactly the same way. That's not everything in your life, but you can surely find some things that do that.

I think it was Camden, New Jersey where they had such a crisis. That's such, that was so random. No, it's not. because you're talking about surveillance. Yeah. Camden, New Jersey had such a crisis of funding that I think there was a brief period of time, at least I don't know if it's changed, where they literally didn't have a police force.

And one of their solutions was to put surveillance cameras everywhere. And the idea was to sort of try to capture all the shit that was going down here it is the surveillance city of camden new jersey a community six years ago by crime and the intrusive tools they're using in hopes of stopping it right yeah this was uh i mean i don't remember this is classic after this happening it's let me take away your freedoms for your own safety yeah this is this is a well known you know benjamin franklin wrote about it what's his famous benjamin franklin quote about security and freedom yeah he who abandons freedom for security deserves neither or is getting neither or something yeah yeah so so this, yeah, they that can give up

essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Those who sacrifice liberty for safety, for security,

deserve neither. He who would trade liberty for some temporary security deserves neither liberty, he's got all combinations. Yeah, man, he,

he wanted to cover that bitch. All permutations on that one. This is what I mean. I don't want to leave any room for misquoting. He understood that. So your security, you give up some security for privacy, I think. Yes. And I don't know if it's a well-known place where that should be drawn.

And you can actually get an entire generation born into a state where they think that's normal. We all now think it's normal that you have to show ID to walk into an office building. Oh, my gosh. What would that look like during the Cold War? You have to show, in the United States, you have to show your papers just to walk into a building? Well, they're also changing the ID system where if you don't want to travel with a passport, you're going to have to have a new federal ID.

I've already been through that. A federal driver's license. A federally endorsed driver's license. I just went through that last week. Yeah. Right? So. When did that go into play?

When is that going to play? It's for everybody like next year or something. It's very soon. If you want to travel in a particular way. If you don't drive, then it doesn't matter. You want to fly. Right. You want to fly.

Correct. Correct. And I carry my passport wherever I go, so it's not really a problem for me but uh so you carry your passport everywhere you go if you want to just jet out of the country what how's your brain wired what i think you know you want to escape uh no if i had four passports then you say, do I want to leave the country? Like Jeffrey Epstein? Yeah, whoever.

Anybody in an espionage movie, there's somebody who has five passports. In a safe somewhere. And with wads of cash of every currency. Yes, yes. So I think, I worry that we're sliding towards a state of total monitoring on the premise that we're all better off for it. Right. And it's like the frog in the heated water. We don't feel it day by day, but it's happening.

We all agree that we can be hand-padded down just to get on an airplane. We've all accepted that because of a handful of people. A handful of people. Histor historically handful not even a handful in this moment just historically handful of people we all say yes take my luggage x-ray my luggage um take away my liquids pat me down and i'm okay with that that's a transition and i'm okay with security cameras in the street it was okay in banks we understood that but now when i exit the bank and i'm in the street when i'm walking and walking in the park so i don't know i don't know the future of that i really don't know i saw the movie 1984 recently not a very good movie the book is better than the movie, and I hate to be one of the people who say that.

But I was reminded how you can create an entire state where everyone is kept in line because somebody is telling you, we are fighting this battle out on the front lines. I'd forgotten this from the book. They're fighting a war on the front lines. You never see the war. You never hear about the war. You don't know anything about the war other than it exists.

And you have to do things a certain way in country so that your country can protect itself from these evil people that want to take over and destroy your way of life. So everybody's under control from Big Brother. Well, what they didn't anticipate, though, was these social media companies would be the guards or the gatekeepers of your privacy. Because that's what's interesting.

Could you voluntarily give them all your information? Yeah, it's not governments. Right. It's Twitter and Facebook and Google and all the stuff that we use on a daily basis that has access to everything that you do. It's almost inconceivable to someone outside of this generation that there would be a company that would provide a service. And through that service, you would give up all notions of privacy. All privacy. Yeah, because literally you have a microphone that's listening everywhere you go.

You have a bug that you're carrying around with you. I mean, I don't remember what. Yeah, you've been pin-bugged, right? It really is real. You've been pinned with a lapel. You will get ads for things you talk about. I mean, that has been proven. So what is that?

What are these passive listening devices that are only picking up keywords? It's no big deal. It's just keywords. It's the frog in the water. That's what I'm telling you. Yeah. So I don't know where it's going to go. It's the frog in the water. That's what I'm telling you. Yeah. So I don't know where it's going to go. Like I said, I'm a little old fogey about that.

But I think we'll resolve it. Do you think there should be regulation? Generally, if you have something good and it gets abused, you regulate it. That's the whole point. We're here alive today because of regulation. Because there are nefarious people who, in control of powerful forces operating on society, would gain at the expense of everyone else and would not be good for the progress of civilization. So you regulate. Okay?

Airlines are regulated so that you don't die. All right? We have the safest record now ever for commercial airlines american carriers the safest ever look at look at not only how many people have not died relative to when we grew up we grew up through at least one or two planes crashed each year you'd lose between one and three hundred people every year that was like the baseline number that number is near zero now, and way more planes are taking off and landing than at any time when we were kids. So it's a double progress point for not only the Transportation Safety Administration, but engineering, technology, and everything we

care about. We want to fly. So you regulate. You make sure these are inspected this often. The pilots don't fly more than this many hours. This gets oiled. This gets replaced. It's one of the triumphs of modern engineering, aerodynamics. Aerospace engineering as a branch of what we do as civilization is one of the greatest achievements there ever was.

Agreed. Jamie, did you find that stealth stuff? I found there are cars that have black velvet. This wouldn't be a car. This would be a laboratory. A laboratory. I didn't find anything. Oh, okay.

Oh. Look up laboratory Stealth Light Something Try that I found those like Cloaks that people wear That sort of seems like Video tricks

Yeah Yeah that seems like Fuckery Yeah there's a lot of But in Harry Potter The The What's that cloak

That they wear The invisibility cloak That that would be this principle. Yeah. If it existed with that portability. There's a bunch of videos of that, but it seems like they're just using After Effects, like Adobe or something like that, to have fuck with the video rather than create an actual product. Because there was a woman in an office that had a blanket and she held up the blanket and you could only see the whole office. You wouldn't see the blanket at all. You'd see what's

behind her. And as she lowered the blanket, you could see her and then from the blanket down... So why isn't that just a green screen of the background image? Yeah, I think that's what it was. I think she was holding up a green blanket. This might be it. Stealth, dark matter. No, no, no. No, no This might be it. Still dark matter.

No, no, no, no. No, no, sorry, sorry. No, no, no. There's nothing to do with that. That's the map of dark matter in the universe. A three-dimensional map. I've tried to give that a shot. No, we don't know what it is.

So don't worry about it if you don't understand it. Yeah, but it's too goddamn confusing for me. No, it's not confusing at all. It's something out there that has 85% of the gravity of the universe, and we don't know what the hell it is. That's not confusing? It's not confusing at all it's not it's something out there that has 85 percent of the gravity of the universe and we don't know what the hell it is that's not confusing it's not confusing it's it's if you don't know what the hell it is it's confusing by nature okay i i i have more nuanced definition of confusing confusing is i'm confused i don't know how to think dark matter is i don't even know what to think i need something in my head to be confused right dark matter is, I don't even know what to think. I need something in my head to be confused. Right?

Dark matter has, there's no, we don't know what the hell. Do you anticipate a solution to that or some sort of a, sure. I want my eyes. Is it in Hawaii? I hope it might've been.

Yeah. Telescope might've been. Yeah. Listen, folks, it's not the GDT. That'd be the goddamn test. It's the TMT 30 meter telescope.

So yeah, solutions to, you don't know. Part of what it is to explore is not knowing what it is that you will find. And all these telescopes, the launched ones as well as the ground-based ones, we have in a foresight. We're mature enough as a field to know that even though it's designed to look for certain things that were part of the program that you set up for it, you want to have a serendipity mode for it. You want to be able to say, let's point it in some random direction

and see what shows up. Without that, you could miss something in plain sight if you're only looking for one thing that you think is there, extrapolated from what you knew before. And the way I think of it is, there's the old saying, as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.

So as that area grows, there are more places to look over the fence and stare into the abyss of ignorance that awaits you. stare into the abyss of ignorance that awaits you. So dark matter is sitting on the other side of the fence. The way I've heard it described is the bonfire of our knowledge grows brighter. The area of our ignorance is illuminated. Okay.

I had to think about that. That's similar to what I said. More and more things are illuminated. If the bonfire is your knowledge that's lighting the way- As it grows bigger, you see more shit you don't know. You go see more stuff you've never noticed before. It's the same principle. That's a giant one, though, man. 85%.

It's 85% of the gravity. So, yeah. And you add that to the dark energy. We don't know what that is either. Right. Dark matter, dark energy comprise 95% of everything that's driving the universe. So everything we know and love, the chemistry, the physics, the biology, life, planets, stars, is 5% of the universe. So people, theologians and folks say, well, maybe God is in the other 95%.

Maybe. Okay, yeah. Maybe God's dark matter. Wouldn't that be crazy? Well, people say that. Surprise. Yeah. But I don't know why dark matter would care about-

Gay people? Yeah. Whether or not chicks drive cars. Yeah, yeah. Depending on which religion you're in, right? Yeah, all the religions got their thing. What are you wearing? Don't you know I'm God?

What is the... Come on. I'm dark matter. Yeah. Oh, by the way, just in letters from a natural physicist, which isn't out yet. But again, I don't know how the hell you got the book. which isn't out yet but again i don't know how the hell you got the book but it's um there there's an entire chapter where i am conversing with people who are strongly religious there's a conversation i have in there with a orthodox jewish person a muslim multiple um fundamentalist

christians and we're talking about the age of the earth and why and why do we think one way or another and so that's there's a lot of intimate stuff in there that i generally don't go public with but i would did it one-on-one with those who had written to me about these challenges they were facing in life and they wanted to know what an astrophysicist had to say about it what's the youngest version of how old a religious person thinks the earth is what's the how what's, what's the, 6,000 years. That's Christians. Yeah,

yeah, Christians. Well, of all, and not all Christians, by the way. No, no,

of all religions. I don't know the age. Scientologists is like a month old. I don't know enough about how old all the religions think the universe is. Right. The youngest you're going to get, the youngest universe you're going to get from a devout christian is 6 000 years the oldest is around 10 000 and but it's far and away from

billions mormons are a unique one because they think you get your own planet when you die yeah and what's what's funny torn on that what's i want my own planet nobody told me that uh it's odd how one religious group would would comment on how preposterous another religious group's comments are i love that you know i was once i don't know if you know this i was once quoted after i think the the scientology documentary came out on hbo and everybody was talking about it. Going clear. I think that was it. And there was a lot of chat about it for a couple of weeks. And one of the news outlets, I forgot who, called me up and said, do I think Scientology should be a religion? Classified as a religion, as an authentic religion.

And you can ask, well, why are they calling me? Well, because in Scientology, they're aliens. And they're space beings that come- You're not supposed to give up this information. Oh, sorry. No. So that's how I got brought into this conversation. Ah.

Because of the sectors of Scientology that involves space beings. Okay. All right. So my answer was, we live in a country that protects the free expression of faith-based systems, provided they don't subtract from the rights of others. provided they don't subtract from the rights of others. So I will not sit here and judge whether thetans from space exhumed souls from volcanoes. At least a third of what I just said is accurate. It's from Scientology. From Scientology. Or whether a man born of a woman is the son of God who died and rose from the dead.

I'm not going to compare those and judge whether one of them is more authentic than another. When they're both founded on belief systems. And so in this country, belief systems are are protected and we've all bought into that and so you know what the headline was tyson defends psychology of course that's how you get clicks that was the clickbait of my comment there get clicks you gotta distort a little bit there are some rational people who in the comment thread said, that's not what he said. Of course. Yeah. But isn't it more interesting when they do do that and then inside

the actual article itself they give your full quote so people can see the deception. The real confusing thing is when they take a chunk of your quote and they take it out of context, which they love to do. You should go to jail for that, by the way. So that's interesting. So for me, I'm an observer of that, not a a complainer about it so is that how they're doing it okay

so maybe i can shape this phrase differently to minimize the chance of that happening in the future minimize the chance of you being lied about correct so for me that is a landscape there's some landmines here there are some some trap doors here. There is something. And so for me, one who communicates on that landscape, that's just information for me to navigate it slightly more nimbly in the future. Got it. Interesting. Gravity is one thing that I want to talk to you about. You're still hooked up on gravity. Yes.

I'm always hooked up on gravity. As you should be. Well, since we've talked last, I've been reading a lot about it. And one of the things that confuses me the most is that we don't really understand what gravity is. We know its effects. We can measure them. We know how to measure them. We know what mass is involved.

But we don't really know what gravity is. There's a similar question in the book, but they got a little more philosophical than you just did, but they both lean philosophical. It's science can describe how gravity works, but can they describe why it works? Can we? So this is the how-why duality here. And allow me to just answer it from a how-why point of view, and then we can apply it to gravity after I say that. In science, if we can describe how something works and predict its future behavior, we claim to understand it and we move on.

You can ask deeper questions about it. Why is there gravity? What is the meaning? What is the meaning? What is the purpose? And go ahead, but I'm good with what I've done and I can land a spacecraft on Mars inside of a crater in a hole-in-one using my understanding of gravity, so I'm pretty good with it. Okay? So I'm not distracted by the more philosophical side of that. Why does it work? Okay.

Einstein, so Newton was deeply puzzled by how you can have something called, in which he coined the phrase, action at a distance. Okay. He wrote down the equation that worked. He wrote down the equation. Moon goes around the earth. Earth goes on the Sun. The moons of Jupiter

go around Jupiter. He accurately described that with his equations of gravity. Okay. He said, one day, I think we're going to find

some way that they're connecting to each other, but I don't know what that is right now, but I know my equations work. He called it spooky. It was spooky to him. That's his word. Spooky action at a distance. All right. Fast forward 300 years. 300? No. Fast

forward 230 years. Get to Albert Einstein. Gravity is the curvature of space and time. Um, gravity is the curvature of space and time. And you're moving on the curvature of that fabric. That's gravity. Oh my gosh. Is it even a force then? Is it even, so there's no need to think of it as an action at a distance. And in a phrase, um, first uttered by, I think it was John Archibald Wheeler, a student of Einstein.

And I learned relativity from John Archibald Wheeler. In fact, that's where I met my wife, in relativity class in graduate school. It's space. So matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move. It moves along the curvature of space. You don't need an action at a distance. There is no action.

It can't do anything else but do that. It's like you have a funnel and you take a ball and you roll it on the funnel. The ball can only do what that funnel tells it to do. And if you give it a sideways motion, it'll start spinning around. There's no magic hand coming in there. It is following the curvature of its space-time continuum, this construct that you provided for it. So now I can describe what gravity is doing. I even have a mechanism for it. Are you going to still ask me why is there gravity?

Is that answer not fulfilling enough to you even in the why department? You can say, well, why would a particle curve space? You can just keep doing that. That's fine. But is there a point where you'll be satisfied with the answer? Oh, that answers my why. I can say, well, why did this half liter of water drop off the edge here? Well, it's no longer the forces are imbalanced.

No, but why did it fall? Well, there's nothing holding it up. Why did it? There's a point where it's not especially productive to continue to think about the world that way. Because what I'm claiming is answers to the how, when you understand the how enough, are tantamount to having answered the why question. That's what I'm telling you. Tantamount in terms of your ability to measure it and accurately use it. Correct. So we can say, okay, you've got a bald head.

We can say, well, why did you go bald? Well, okay, the hair follicles when you start in your late 20s, when did you go bald? Well, okay, the hair follicles, when you start in your late 20s, when did you go bald? When did you start losing your hair? Probably late 20s, early 30s. Yeah. Yeah. That's common. If you have your hair when you're 30, you'll probably have it for the rest of your life. That's how that goes. You start losing it up right going up until you're 30. So you can say, well, the hair follicle begins to not producing the keratin or whatever. We get the explanation. Then you say, well, why does the hair follicle begins to not producing the keratin or whatever. We get the explanation. Then you say, well, why does the hair follicle stop doing that?

Then you say, oh, well, because the DNA has it pre-coded about the hair kind of thing. Well, why does the DNA have the hair? Well, because so. Right, but we know far more about how and why people go bald than we do about what gravity really is, correct? I'm telling you, gravity really is the curvature of space and time. That gets us the Big Bang and everything we've ever known and loved. The curvature of space and time, but it's also based on mass, right? It's based on the amount of mass.

Any concentration of matter and energy and or energy will curve the fabric of space and time. And the more mass, the more gravity. The movement of matter on that fabric of space and time, we call gravity. And I'm good with that. Okay. But you seem a little oddly defensive about something that's scientific.

No, I have to say I'm good with it. But you are because you're kind of defending it. No, you can say, well, why does matter? Why do you need to know why? That's what you're saying. No, I'm saying why does matter and energy curve the fabric of space and time? You can ask that. Okay, why?

And I don't have an answer for that. I can say. Well, that's all I'm asking. Well, no. What I'm telling you is. Okay, you don't need to know if i can say well that's all i'm asking well no but what i'm telling you is okay you don't need i got you to the point right we had to walk to that point where your why got unanswered i understand that but before we got to that point i answered otherwise but i'm not disputing that good good so what i'm telling you is that i can answer your

why question most of the time, but then you'll come back to a point where there's a point where there's the why doesn't have the answer. So you say, why did it fall? I say there's a force of gravity operating on it. Why did it fall that way? Because of the curvature of space and time. I'm answering your whys. I understand.

Then why does matter and energy curve space and time? Okay, that's a frontier. We're still working on that. But that's all I'm asking. That's good. That's fine. You are a man of science, so you're a person that should probably embrace whys.

Except many people who ask why questions, they really want to know purpose. Oh, I'm not asking purpose. Good. Well, then that distinguishes you from many other people who ask why questions. Oh, okay. I don't know if there's a purpose for anything.

Like, why did you bang the table? I was angry. There's a purpose behind it. Yeah, that seems. So if your why is just a curiosity of what's going on, that's one thing. If you are inquiring about purpose, then it's theological, okay? Because when you're theological, then religions give purpose to life. Clearly, I'm not doing that.

Right. But I just think it's amazing that something that's such a massive part of life on this planet, that we stayed glued to the ground because of gravity. Can you pull up my Instagram account? I only post – Do you have an Instagram account now? Because you had a fake one for a while. Yeah, I took it over. It's a friend of mine actually. I know the guy. I took it over.

He gave it to you? Oh, the guy who had it? No, no, no. Actually, sorry. I went to Instagram and said people think this is a real account and it's not. Can I have it back? And if it's an account that's an imposter and followers don't know it, it's illegal. Right.

So there's one that says fan of Neil Tyson and that's a different one. Okay. That's the guy. Okay. So I only post art house photos. Okay. That I've taken most of which I've taken. So just scroll down and look for muscle beach. There it is.

Click on that. Okay. So here's my cap. Go to my caption. Go full screen on that. My caption. Okay. Okay, so here's my cap.

Go to my caption. Go full screen on that. Remember my caption. Okay. For most of our life on Earth, we either resist or succumb to the force of gravity. At Muscle Beach, gravity loses every time. That's not true. I was proud of that caption.

You call me out on that caption? That's nonsense. Gravity never loses. Gravity doesn't even have little tiny losses. It's not like there's a war and gravity loses a battle. For those just listening to this, I was in Venice, California, and the sun was setting behind some guy who was doing hand presses suspended up on the chin up bar right and it was

so and it was cool he was silhouetted there's a palm tree there's the beach he's there gravity's gonna beat that motherfucker

let me tell you eventually but while he's while he's there he's conquering gravity are you getting too old you haven't conquered gravity lately

no I work out all the time I'm not buying it that guy ain't conquering shit he's pulling rank now he, I work out all the time. I'm not buying it. That guy ain't conquering shit. He's pulling rank now. He said, I work out and you don't because I see your middle-aged man belly. Well, when I've talked to other astrophysicists and scientists. Wait, let me ask.

Are these conversations supposed to have a theme or a purpose? Or is it just you sit there and just whatever comes to your head, you send my way? Well, you and me? Yeah. Well, clearly, it's just whatever comes to my head. Okay, I don't know. I don't know. How do you say this episode is about?

You can't say that. I don't ever do that. You don't do that. Okay, fine. It's just episode number. The secret to my success is that I don't have a purpose. You got no commitments. Well, how the fuck could I ever have a thread?

Think about all the different people that I have in here. Of course, of course. It's like impossible. Of course. Between fighters and scientists and scholars and crackpots. There's like a bunch of different people coming through here, man. I can't have any agenda. All right.

I mean, that's probably the only reason why this thing is as successful as it is. But that's a weird one for people, this one thing that is so powerful. What is? Gravity. Gravity. That's a weird one for people that this one thing that is so powerful what what is oh gravity that's a weird one for people yeah i mean it seems like you're frustrated by all the various questions no no like no you seem a little little defensive there am i right because i thought that i thought you were taking your why to ultimately mean no purpose If it's just why, I'm claiming that many responses to how are also responses to a why. Mm-hmm. That's the point I'm making. And I don't like splitting definitions.

Do you think we'll ultimately understand gravity? I think we do. That's why we can land things on Mars. Well, we understand the effects. I think we do, which is why your cell phone gets time from GPS satellites that is pre-corrected for Einstein's general theory of relativity because they're in a different gravitational field in orbit than you are on Earth's surface. We got this. You're getting angry. Einstein is triumphing.

We're running short on time here. So I sent you something that I wanted to ask you. What's that? I sent you an email. Did you get that email? Oh, I did. I did. It was about a black hole that landed in a mysterious place in our understandings.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So let me just give the, I'll give the sort of Reader's Digest version of this. Okay? Okay. There are black holes that are. I'll send it to you,

Jamie. There are black holes that are formed at the consequence of the death of stars. Okay. Okay. And we think we understand the formation of stars well enough to say, well, star is born with this much mass and it'll lose certain amount of mass over

its life. All stars lose mass because there's so much pressure and so much energy coming out. It carries particles with it. So they lose mass. The sun is losing mass as we speak. It's called the solar wind. So everybody loses mass out there. The question is, at what rate are you losing mass? Is it a lot compared to your total mass? Is it small? So very high mass stars are not especially stable objects. They remain stars for 100,000 at most a million years, and they'll explode and become a supernova.

If you're more massive than that, they will not explode because the gravity is so strong that it cannot explode against the strength of the gravity, and it collapses into a black hole so we expect black holes to have slightly less mass somewhat less mass than the most massive stars that we know how to make so if you have a hundred times the mass of the sun star it'll lose half its mass over its life and you have a a black hole that's 30 times the mass of the sun or 50 times the mass of sun fine put a pin in that in the centers of galaxies there are super massive black holes hundreds of thousands millions times the mass of the sun

and we call their super massive and their black holes we call them super massive black holes because that's how we roll as astrophysicists all right well could you have black holes somewhere in the middle of these two extremes we do not know a phenomenon that will give you a black hole that's in between that will birth a black hole that's in between these two categories. You can make a black hole that eats its way there. Fine. But we don't know how to make one. And we think, my colleagues who've done this, think they've discovered a black hole that is sitting in this sort of nether world

where there's no evidence that it ate to become that massive and we don't know how to explain it by the formation and death of stars and is nowhere near the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy so it's the frontier of research at this moment so it's just a newly discovered type of black hole. It's in a mass regime. This physically impossible, you know, headlines. We're reading the headline now. Black hole shock. Show me where this appears.

Express. So this is a British. I think they're British. Anyhow, it's a news digest for science. So black hole shock. Theories swirl around the discovery of a physically impossible black hole so scientists don't use the word impossible unless it's violating a known law of physics um so i i bet that was a editor's title and i don't

have a problem i don't mind a little bit of sensationalism there. You can say it is a black hole that comes from an – if it comes from an object, it is an object we know nothing about and have yet to discover. We're not going to say it's an impossible object. Every time we point the telescope to the universe, we find something that we never predicted or understood. And it adds to the knowledge base that we already have whenever they do discover things. And it adds to the knowledge base that we already have whenever they do discover things. And then it becomes what we know and understand, like the supermassive black holes at the center of every galaxy. That was a fairly recent discovery in terms of human history. It was hypothesized because we saw the centers of the galaxy were behaving really weirdly. Things, stars were moving faster than they should have given how much gravity was tugging on them.

And we said, dude dude something's got to be there and it's got to be really small because we're tracking stars really close to the middle well if it was made of ordinary matter how big it would have to have to be really really big so this has to be really really small in order for this to happen the only thing we know that could fill that small volume and have that much gravity is a black hole. So it was suspected for a long time. It was confirmed as a common thing by the Hubble telescope and first photographed by this recent result in the galaxy M87. Messier 87 is the name of the galaxy. And you can determine how big the black hole is based on the size of the galaxy.

We can determine the mass of the black hole by how fast stars are moving at the distance they are from it. So in other words, so we're Earth orbiting the sun and we have a certain speed. We're going about, I forgot how, what, 18 miles per second. I think that's the number. 30 kilometers a second. That's our speed around the sun. That's pretty fast.

Okay. a second. That's our speed around the sun. That's pretty fast, okay? If the sun had more mass instantly, that speed is not enough to maintain our orbit, and we'll start spiraling in towards it. If the sun had less mass, that speed is too high to be in this orbit. It'll take it to a, sorry, it's too fast to maintain this orbit. It'll climb us out to a higher orbit, slow us down, and we'll be in a higher orbit with a slower speed. So in other words, for any object, at any distance, there's only one speed you can maintain and have a stable orbit around it. So when we see stars orbiting something in the center of the galaxy, it is a straightforward Astro 102 equation to calculate how much mass the thing is orbiting. And you get the mass and you can't see it.

It's small. It's a black hole. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the podcast. This book will be available when, sir? It comes out in October, first week of October. I'm very proud of this book. It's my most heartfelt thing that I've ever done. Well, when it comes out, I will take a photograph and put it up on the Instagram and the Twitter and let everybody know about it.

Yeah, and it also has letters from people in prison, a person who just learned that they had terminal cancer. I mean, there's a lot of people reaching out. So it's you responding to letters from people. Yes, it's me responding. And their letters, I can't fit all of their letters. Some are very long tomes. But most of their letters are in there, and all of my correspondence is in there. So it's my most heartfelt contribution to this universe.

And StarTalk is still a podcast. We're still going. Still going. It's my most heartfelt contribution to this universe. And StarTalk is still a podcast. We're still going. Still going. StarTalk. We're pumping up 50 episodes. And a television show. Yeah, so we can see if we're going to have a new season. We don't know yet.

That's to be announced. But we're going. So it's always a podcast. And we've got a YouTube channel, StarTalk YouTube channel. And we're thinking of branching out into other kinds of educational product that's still fun and comedic and the like. And I love your support for this because you're also a comedian. So you know the value. And I love comedians.

They're a fundamental part of how we deliver science to the public on StarTalk. So thanks for that plug. My pleasure, my friend. Dude. Thank you. Always good. Always good. Thank you very much. Bye Always good. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Bye, everybody. All right, dude. Bye. Bye. Bye.