The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - The Best of the Origins Podcast, Part 1:

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

As promised at the beginning of this month, here is the first of two “Best of” selections from the Origins Podcast. I apologize that this hasn’t come out sooner, but the lazy days of August caught up with all of our production team. In any case, here, on the last day of August (in all US timezones), enjoy this collection of great clips from many of our exciting guests over the first two years of the podcast. These were all recorded before the pandemic and so we were able to travel to talk with my guests at their location, or bring them to our origins studio. As a result, they were all shot with 3 cameras, so the video record is better than one gets on zoom. This video version is available now to paid subscribers, and this audio version is available to all subscribers. A Youtube version will be released later this week. I hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed putting this compilation together. For those of you who are Origins veterans, we will give you a chance to relive the highlights from podcasts with some of the most remarkable scientists, artists, and writers on the planet. For those of you who are newer subscribers this will give you a chance to see some tidbits from some fascinating conversations with fascinating individuals, and perhaps encourage you to explore our backlist for the full discussions. We will return with new content in September, and will release the second “Best Of” compilation sometime later in the fall. Once again, thanks for your support of Critical Mass, which remains an essential part of allowing The Origins Project Foundation to continue its programming.Enjoy! Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. I hope those of you are living in the Northern Hemisphere are having a great summer. And to top off our summer and to give me a short break, we're releasing in the month of August two episodes of highlights, best-up videos from our four years of Origins podcast. It's hard to believe we've been going over four years for over four years. years now. And when we go back and look at the episodes we've done, it's really humbling to see the amazing guests who've agreed to be on and the fun times we've had. And so we've tried to compile for you a set of best up videos and we'll be releasing two podcasts, the first for the first two years

and the second for the second two years. In this first podcast, we go back to the very beginning of the origins podcast with our earliest guests and included Ricky Gervais and Noam Chomsky, among others, among Nobel laureates, Sheldon Glashow, scientist Alan Stern, astrophysicist musician Brian May. The list goes on and on. And it's amazing to go back and see all the variety of people we interviewed. And in those days, we were traveling around the world. It was before the pandemic. And we visited, uh, we visited, uh, Brian May in England and Neil deGrasse Tyson in New York and and Stephen Greenblatt in Boston at Harvard and of course Ricky in England. I hope you enjoy these early episodes and for those of you were new

to the Origins Podcast. I hope this will give you a chance to see that our backlist is worth listening to. Either way, I hope you have a great summer and I hope you enjoy this first podcast of Best of Videos from the Origins podcast. And I hope you all consider supporting us and continuing to support us on critical mass, because that provides us a necessary support to keep the podcast going and also for the Origins Project Foundation to do its work. So enjoy this first podcast, and I hope it wets your appetite for the second two years. The laws of physics we at least understand can be extrapolated back to a time when the entire universe, yeah, all 100 billion galaxies each containing 100 billion stars, all that matter was crammed into a region the size of a single atom.

Is that, I mean, so weird. So that's because most things are nothing, aren't they? So, so an atom is mostly nothing. A fly in the Alba Hall going around a tennis ball. Yeah, I mean, madam mostly, it's 10,000. The electron orbits the nucleus of a size about 10 to 100,000 times bigger than the atom. Right. But it's even smaller than that. Yeah. So does it work, though, does that, if that's a, not just a metaphor, this is what annoys me, where I, I, I, Sooner right, I don't want the metaphor. I want to do the truth. But to start with a metaphor,

does the science work if every atom was the Albert Hall with a golf ball and a fly going out? Could every golf ball and fly in the universe fit into one Albert Hall? Yes, but the problem is it stops being an atom. Because the atom is... So can you squish that even more?

Oh, yeah, you are. At that point, atoms don't exist because they couldn't. So if we get down to what matter is, what is there, is there, I like feeling stupid. No, no. Asking questions is never stupid. Okay, so, so, so is there anything that is pure, is there something as pure matter that can't be squished anymore? That was what that we don't know. We know, we know that.

Fuck you. Yeah, no, no, but that's the right answer. You and your science. Yeah, exactly. What a fraud. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We don't know. We can all say that.

Exactly, see. Right, okay, so, so, okay, oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, no, and there's the other thing, right? Okay, okay. So, okay, we've done that.

Yeah, okay, we've done that. Right, right, wait. So, there was no, there was no time before time. That's a good question. Well, we don't know. There was a said. Wait. So, so there was.

So there was a place? No, I... This is what kills me. Okay, so let's get that, right? All the, everything that exists, matter, antimah, everything. Space, time, nothingness. All didn't, it didn't have to exist. That's the great thing.

It can spontaneously pop into existence. Space, time, matter. And you don't need any supernatural shenanigans. I wrote this book called The Universe for Nothing. It's amazing to me that science has come to the point saying, well, we don't know, but it's plausible that you can start, with no space, no time. Right.

Poop. Because of the law's mechanical, space and time so they pop into existence. Okay, so if we take, let's get to what's physical and real.

So everything that exists now was in the thing in size, it's small and out of it. And a lot more than what exists. Yeah. Okay. What?

Yeah, yeah, no, it's really weird. We've lost some bits. Yeah, yeah, we've lost a lot. Oh, fuck me. Where's that? Nowhere. It just disappeared. Yeah, it's nowhere.

Exactly. It's just dissipated. Right. I mean, this is what annoys me about quantum physics. it overturns all the things I held sacred in science. Yeah, exactly.

It's counterintuitive. Which is what's wonderful. That's what you should love it. You should love it because nothing's sacred. But I mean, I mean from like Newton's laws to relativity, which I had down. Well, no, but they're not wrong. The great thing about science is, no, they were. They're just contingent as opposed to what.

But everything's contingent. But they're just out of interest. This, okay. Right. Okay. The uncertainty principle. Okay. Okay.

Fuck me. Where do I start? I know so little that I don't know what question to ask. That's how fucking frustrating this is for me. I haven't got the language to ask you the right question. So, yeah, so we can work together through the right questions. And the question. Trump knows what he's doing when he builds up fear of the rapists and murderers and Islamic terrorists.

Just to give you an example, a couple of weeks ago, Steve Bannon, you know, his kind of respite and came down to Arizona, where we live in Tucson. And there was a meeting. He ran a meeting at a very luxurious gated community south of Tucson, not too far from the border. You know, guards, gates, very rich and so on. He had a lot of nice people there, like Chris Kobach, this guy who's trying to keep people from voting. There was a good report of it in kind of an independent Tucson newspaper, Tucson Sentinel, had a reporter there. The goal of the meeting was to try to raise private money to build the wall.

Because Congress is run by communists. They're not going to do anything. So all these super rich people are pitching in money to. build the wall, but the discussions were interesting. People were describing how frightened they are. I mean, if there's anybody in the world safer than them, I don't know how you'd find them. Yeah. But these are people who are frightened. We've got to protect ourselves. In fact, there was one legislator there who said, I'm not only in favor of the wall,

I think we ought to have a wall from the border right along the Arizona border, against California all the way up to the Canadian border because these people are going to come in from California. We've got to protect ourselves. And maybe we need an army to protect us around the gated community. And when Trump talks to the public, at least according to the reports that come up, people resonate. Yeah, no, it really works effectively.

I never know with Trump whether it's an accident or whether he really knows what he's doing, whether he just latches on by luck to an issue that seems to resonate and he uses it and then pick it up. He just tests at the water. But he's doing that very, but meanwhile, you have to remember that his primary constituency, corporate power and wealthy,

he's serving them with real dedication. Would you say that in terms of, you know, I mean, I don't want to harp on this too much, But in terms of the greatest danger, if there is one of Trump being president, many people feel that the fact that he's a loose cannon, the fact that he does no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no reading, no knowledge about details about the world around, or it certainly doesn't read or listen to his advisors.

We do say that's a bigger danger than the fact that effectively he's apparently implementing underneath all the noise, the, the, the, an agenda that, that, that you worry about or not? I mean, there's a lot of things. with Trump. The worst one, which overwhelms everything else, is the dedication to destroy the environment. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that just swamps everything else. That ought to be a screaming headline every day. Well, I'm surprised that if private money wanted to build the wall, $8.6 billion is not a lot of money that could easily be done. I mean, more than that spent on

elections, but interestingly enough, when you put it in perspective, talking about the environment, talking about progress, $8.6 billion, which is what he's asking for the wall, is more than the entire amount, the entire budget of the National Science Foundation. I mean, if it talks about what is better for our security in the future. How about the subsidies to the fossil fuel industry? Which is much bigger than that. How about the subsidies to the financial institutions? There's some good technical studies, IMF and others, who point

out that the financial institutions, which are pretty much predatory, they barely help the economy, they may harm it. And they're a huge part of the economy. They're huge. They are maintained effectively by public subsidy by the implicit government insurance policy, which raises their credit ratings, gives them access to cheap money. When you count all of that, it's pretty much their profits. I mean, compared with this, the wall and the National Science Foundation aren't even visible. Yeah, yeah. No, that's, I mean, it's interesting to think about that.

And similarly, when we come to the climate change and those issues, that's the two things that ought to be emphasized by the political opposition, if there were one, are this dedicated commitment to destroy the prospects for organized human life within a short period and the radical intensification of the already extremely dangerous arms military confrontation. And this notion that we started with, the notion that intellectuals and elites aren't necessarily are sort of by the party line almost more than anyone else. But I see another issue that's really become more pronounced since we last had our dialogue,

which is this issue of free speech. And in this case, free speech on campuses. You may be able to speak more freely, but one is finding more and more two things that are remarkable, interesting, and maybe to some extent disturbing. That is, first of all, that we're seeing more and more speakers, especially on the right to some extent,

but almost every subject area being stopped from speaking on campus, not by students in this case. the notion that there was a, there was a, um, a lecture that was happening in a university in the West where the speaker was going to speak about due process and free speech. And there were, and safe rooms were set up on campus so that students didn't have to hear discussions about this. Yet it's an issue that seems to now be adopted by the right that, that, that there, if you look at and saying, who is speaking out and again, one of the, you know, Trump's executive order

may be impotent, but the notion that, you know, Trump would put an executive order saying universities can't get federal funding unless they promote free speech. It's kind of interesting, this notion that the left in some ways is now being seen as not promoting free speech. So I thought we should have that discussion a little bit. Well, I question the notion of the left, but it's certainly happening. Yeah. And it's wrong in principle. And beyond that, it's just tactically insane.

it's the best gift that you can give to the right. Yeah. If some right wing speaker tries to go to a campus and is blocked, it's a gift. They love it, and you can see the way they're using it. This is, oh, okay, we're the good guys. We're defending freedom of speech. You guys are Nazis trying to protect. So if you want to give enormous gifts to the right wing and the,

to the far right to the neo-fascists. That's the way to do it. Exactly, but it's even broader than that, I think that there's some concern. And, you know, two people that, I obviously am not a fan of Trump. I'm not a fan of Betsy DeVos.

I've written about how opposed many of our aspects, but there's another aspect of this notion which comes back to people being afraid in the United States, this notion that words have to be protected. That words are scary, that there needs to be safe,

zones. It's like trigger warnings. Trigger warnings that when you would think, and I've always said this in the context of science, but I think it's true more generally, one of the purposes of education, I used to say it of science, but one of the purposes of education is to make people uncomfortable. Because if you're comfortable,

you're not pushing the, you're not pushing the boundaries of what you know, understand. And if we, if we, I was just at a lecture where people were saying they've changed their curriculum because they're, if they're, if they upset students. They're worried that universities will remove them from teaching. And that seems to me,

especially in an environment where our, at least our higher educational system has been very effective in educating students more so maybe than the public school system. I'm as concerned about, I think the fact that the right is usurping an issue that will come back to haunt others is one thing. But I'm equally concerned about the fact that people are afraid of ideas or or discussions that make them uncomfortable. First of all, that's always been true. But since it was always the mainstream, who was fighting off the wild men in the wings,

nobody noticed it. Now we're noticing it. And it was wrong then, and it's wrong now. It's even worse now with the idea that somehow, like what you said, you have to have special places where students won't hear things. This is totally crazy.

I mean, if a speaker comes in who you think is extremely offensive, first of all, you don't have to go to the talk if you don't want. Exactly. But the same thing to do, which sometimes is done, is to use it, use the opportunity as an educational opportunity. Yeah. Go listen to them. Meanwhile, set up alternative forums where you discuss the issues. You think about them. You look at the pros and cons.

Nothing is ever 100% obvious. Let's go through it. Let's come out with a reasonable position. We'll have a basis if it's the great outcome to oppose their positions, not just shout them down, saying, well, we're so scared of them, we can't even hear them. Exactly. Shout them down, play music so they can't talk, even if they're allowed on campus. I've had enough of that in my own experience, but that's not the reason.

It's wrong. Whoever does it when the right wing is targeted. It's tactically crazy. When the left is targeted, it doesn't matter because nobody pays attention anyway. But when those who have some basis in power systems are attacked, then it's tactically ridiculous because it's giving them an enormous gift. Well, what I never see is this recognition, well, I very rarely see it, of the fact that the whole purpose of free speech is to protect the speech of those you detest.

In principle. That's what a democracy is supposed to be. principle, but the people who have upheld that have always been bitterly denounced on every issue. Well, and, but you know what's... I can give you many examples. Yeah, but I'm pretty scared. I mean, as someone who sort of grew up in the 60s to see that the people that I used to think of as progressive are now supporting exactly the opposite.

Yes, but that was the 60s. Yeah. And remember, the 60s was the period when even the Supreme Court, really for the first time, took strong positions in support of freedom of speech. That's not American history. It's worth remembering that. First of all, the First Amendment does not protect freedom of speech. It prevents prior restraint.

But if I give a talk criticizing the government, First Amendment permits them to put me into jail, as long as they didn't stop me from saying it in the first place. First Amendment's a very weak. barrier to repression. And in fact, freedom of speech issues didn't arise at the court level, the Supreme Court, until the 20th century. And if you look at the history, it's not uplifting. The first protections of freedom of speech sort of were during the First World War, the famous dissents of Holmes and Brandeus. Notice, first of all, they were dissents.

Secondly, they were quite very limited. So in the Schenck case, the first case, where Schenck's guy was being sentenced for having written pamphlets against the war, the dissenters, Holmes, voted in favor of the decision. They said, well, you know, too far, we've got to have a little freedom speech, but nevertheless did it. It's a very mixed record up until the 60s. The first strong defense of freedom of speech by the court was actually in 1964. It's Times v. Sullivan when it was civil rights issue. When the state of Alabama declared that they were being liable by the Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement because racist sheriffs were being intact.

Kind of technically they were right by the thinking of the framers. But the Supreme Court overruled what's called sovereign immunity. Yeah. That the state is protected from harmful speech, which holds in most countries, incidentally, including Canada, including Britain. They still have them. Yeah. But the United States struck it down. Then there was even further decisions.

Braddardt v. Ohio took a very strong position in favor of freedom of speech. That's 1969. That's not American history. Yeah. So, yes, there is a modern tradition of protection of freedom of speech, but it's not deeply rooted or sturdy. And when, say, Clarence Thomas recently said, we got to review these decisions because that's not what the framers had in mind, he's not wrong, you know, if you really look back at the history. But nevertheless, it's true that among the countries of the world, the United States, it's been. probably supreme and protection of freedom of speech.

Yeah, I know. That's one who grew up in Canada, and I used to do history of Canada. Yeah, it's amazing to see how those protections were more effective here than Canada. Well, remember the Salman Rushdie case? Uh-huh. When this came up in Canada, there was a question debated about whether he was attacking the state religion. And they finally decided he wasn't, so it was okay because it was some other religion. In fact, in Britain, that same case,

Remember, this was when he was criticizing Islam. It went to the House of Lords. They considered, they said, well, he isn't liable because he was condemning Islam. If he'd been condemning the Anglican church, it would have been a different story. That's Britain. We're not talking about Nazi German. Yeah, yeah, no. So these are very thin reeds.

And like in France, for example, there are laws. laws. I mean, I'm bitterly condemned for having criticized them, but there are laws in France that grant the state the right to determine historical truth and to punish deviation from what they determine.

And that's been used, okay? And the French left intellectual support it. We've got to stop the speech we don't like. Yeah. I mean, this stuff is very thin. And the United States, by and large, has comparatively

a good record. But the things you're pointing out are heading away at some of the best things that have happened here. And unfortunately, it is coming from students, young people. Your chapter on Darwin and Adam Neve really resonated with me, not just because I'm a fan of Darwin, but because of something, there's two things. One, it reminded me of the whole Adam Neve story and the confrontation that, of course, modern evolution in terms of does to literate to the religion. And the whole, and I love the way Hitchens described the Adam and Eve story in some sense that we're born, born sick and commanded to be well, which is just the perfect, to me, the perfect utter contradiction that makes most of modern

religion despicable, in my opinion. Is that what Hitchens? Yeah. That's interesting because it's a, it's a quotation as Hitchens probably knew from a 17th century. English poet named Fulk Greville, who was a Calvinist, oh, weirism condition of humanity, born under one law, to another bound, created sick, commanded to be sound. Well, see, there you go. I'm sure, there's no doubt that Hitchens got that. Oh, that's lovely.

I've learned something. I think there's another aspect of global warming that, again, is relatively simple physics that people can understand. If you look at a pattern of global warming, what you see is that the Arctic's warmed a lot more than the rest of the world over the last hundred years, and also that the land has warmed about twice as much as the ocean. So overall, the world's warmed by about one degree. Over land, that number's almost two degrees. And it turns out there's a very simple reason for that.

You know, when we plant tulip bulbs in the fall, you plant them a few inches down, and they're protected from the frost of the winter. Right? Since Lord Kelvin in the 19th century, he actually measured temperature down a mine shaft to study the diffusion through soils. So, you know, he did all of these amazing experiments. He was interested in the age of the earth from thermal conductivity.

Yeah, it's wonderful. I mean, that's what I always love about when I do physics, is that whatever question you have, someone has spent their life studying it. It's really kind of amazing. But when you think about this problem, it means that the surface of the earth doesn't actually have a whole lot of ability to absorb heat.

And the reason is not because it has low heat capacity. Rock actually has a lot of heat capacity. It's that essentially rock is, you have to diffuse. You're conducting that heat through a solid, and that's fundamentally slow. Yeah. That's why you can plant your tulip bulbs a few inches down and they're protected from the winter freeze, right?

Okay. So, but the ocean is different. The ocean mixes. The upper hundred meters mixes almost instantly because of the winds and the churning. Deeper down, you have currents that mix it on slightly longer time scales, but, you know, decades to centuries, now you're talking about, you know, the upper thousand meters of the ocean and the deepest ocean, the four or five thousand meters down is mixed over thousand. thousand-year time scales. But what that means is if you had the planet completely land and

you, and if we had no oceans at all, and we raise the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, like we've done by burning fossil fuels, the Earth's surface would heat up relatively quickly and achieve that equilibrium really quickly because there's not much ability to soak up heat. We have an world that's covered with ocean, right? 70% of our surface, is covered with ocean, and it mixes. And so what you can think of this is do the experiment. You're adding carbon dioxide. The Earth's trying to heat up, right?

Energy's coming in, and the way you achieve that energy balance is by the surface heating up so that the radiation going out equals the radiation coming in. Exactly. But the problem is the oceans are cold. Yeah. And it takes a while to heat up, because they mix that heat downward. And so essentially 90% of the energy from the greenhouse effect that's being absorbed by the surface of the earth

is going into heating the oceans. Where do we see that? We actually see that in sea level rise. So thermal expansion of water. And so in some ways, sea level rise is global warming. Because that's 90% of the energy. Global warming is ocean warming. I want to decompress that a little bit for people

because I think a lot of people think sea level rise comes just from simply melting of ice, you know, in Antarctica Greenland. But the point is that the sea level rise we're seeing, when water heats up, it expands. That's just simple. And so... And today, it's about half, maybe a little less, 40% of the total sea level rise is due to thermal expansion. There is an important contribution from Greenland and from Antarctica.

It turns out that over the next century, those are going to get much bigger. Yeah, exactly. Thermal expansion will continue, but the melting of the ice sheets is what we have to worry about because they're the ones that can really add to the sea level rise. But today, global warming, like, it's happening. And people too often use, like, surface temperatures to indicate global warming. You say, that's the tail. That's not the dog.

The dog is the ocean. Yeah. Right? And if you want to see global warming, measure the temperature of the ocean. What's incredible is that we actually have new technology now, you know, until 15 years, ago, the way we measured the temperature of the ocean is we went out on ships. Yeah, sure. I remember that. Dropped oceanographers down on a wire and measured them. That's what physical oceanographers

did. Yeah. Yeah. Hank Stommel, the great physical oceanographer, who was at Woods Hole and at MIT, Hank Stomel, I guess in the 50s, he said, oceanography is like trying to do weather forecasting with a handful of cars towing kites around on a moonless night with clouds so that you couldn't see into the medium. Wow. You know, that's essentially what oceanography was. Fifteen years ago, they started this program called Argo, where these floats, they actually are designed to sit at about a thousand meters depth.

And every 10 days, they drop down to 2,000 meters, and then they slowly rise up to the surface, taking measurements every meter. of temperature and salinity, and then when they get to the surface, they beam the data back to a satellite, and then they sink back down to 1,000 meters and wait another 10 days. We now, in a few years,

we collected more data on the oceans than we had in the whole history of oceanography. How many of these things are out there? There are about 4,000 of them, and it's a huge international program. The U.S. is the biggest contributor, but we're probably, we've certainly contributed much less than half.

There are, I think, 60 nations that have contributed to this float program? It's nice to see a global effort for a global problem. It's always nice to see that. It is transformed our understanding of the oceans. And it's allowed us to see that the oceans are indeed heating up. And that is to me the real proof of global warming.

There's another dark side of this, though, which is that it means that if we were to somehow magically freeze the level of CO2 tomorrow, not emit any more carbon dioxide from burning fossil, fuels, which is not possible. The ocean's probably got another thousand years of warming because the oceans are not in equilibrium,

right? The oceans are cold. They're soaking up this heat. And they're going to still coke it up. And the carbon dioxide's still there. And yeah. So if you think about it, the land gets to equilibrium pretty quickly. The oceans are lagging behind. And so we may have

close to double the amount of warming we've already experienced already. already committed in the system. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's a very important thing. But there's two points I want to take for this. One is that yeah, even if we stop things today, there are going to be effects we can change. And two,

many people think climate change is all based on predictions and models in the future. But it's happening now. It's based on data you can measure. And even if a senator brings a snowball into the Senate, the point

is that you know, you make measurements of the ocean that are unambiguous. It doesn't matter whether it's cold today in Boston. And oh my God, there's no global warming because it's we're having a cold winter. There are real measurements that show you exactly what's happening. Unambiguously, it's not model dependent, it's not consensus dependent, it's not politically dependent, it's happening. There's always that question is constant, and it's one of the questions that I believe that both answers is correct. You know, there's a, there's a show Glenn Beck, which is a right-wing show. He's a Mormon. It has a very religious following. And I've gone on that show. And I've

talked with him. And Tommy Smothers, the Smothers brothers, who was a huge hero of mine. I mean, it still is, big influence on me. I was on a TV show with him. And Tommy Smothers turned and ripped me to pieces and said, you went on Glenn Beck. You. You. You. You. You. And he said, you went on Glenn Beck. you went on Glenn Beck, you gave him legitimacy by being on that show. And I said, yes, and I'm the only person who's ever said on that show, there is no God. I went on that show and I told the truth as I saw it. He said, it doesn't matter that you told the truth. He can now say that you were on that show.

And all of a sudden that gives him some legitimacy. You need to pick what shows you go on. He said, if Hitler had a talk show, you would go on. And I'd say, yeah, I would. And then I try to tell the truth as I saw. But I believe Tommy Smothers is 100% right, and I believe I'm 100% right. It's just a call that you have to make. I think there's one thing wrong with Tommy Smothers said is that somehow that Penn Gillette being on a show gives it legitimacy.

Exactly. I did try to make that point. I did try to make that point and say I'm really not that important, Tommy. But having said that, and this is a call you have to make. Sure, of course. Exactly. Who do you debate? Who do you not abate? Now let me let's end because I want to ask you, what would you say about a profession where people lie are paid to lie for a living? What would you say about that? I mean, and pick a, pick the profession where that's done the most. Political consultancy. There you go. Okay, you're safe. I am safe. Because he's paid to lie for a living as a magician. So, so, so I just want to. But only after I say I'm lying.

It might make a huge difference. It makes a huge moral difference. Look, I would love to talk to both of you for forever. I'm so happy to bring the two of you together. There we are. Both of whom, both of you, for better or worse, I love. And so thank you for being told. Did we give each other legitimacy?

Oh, my God. That's interesting question. I would worry about your following now, no. I mean, the thing about the relationship between populism and demagoguery is that they are, They need one another. It's a mutually parasitic care. There's a wonderful phrase I wrote down here. You said, populist sentiments is an element in which demagogues swim.

That's right. Because, you know, look, if you're poor, if you're out of work, if you're, you know, disenfranchised by society, you're not really fully participating. You can't get access to all the social goods that, you know, are important in society. You're in a very enfeebled position. So to imagine the masses getting together and rising up as a populist whole is a bit of a myth. It takes a demagogue to come along and say to these people, you're in trouble and I know the answer to it. If you will vote for me or follow me or rise up with me, then I'm going to solve all your problems for you.

This is the demagogue. This is not the person who is going to solve their problems easily because nobody can, but he's got a promise that he can do it. And this is where you get populism really depending upon the demagogue to get itself going and to make a big difference. And that can really rock the boat a lot. I talked about the two groups and the portion in between. When you get populism upsurging as we're getting in Europe today, that really does shift things in that center ground in a way which is very destabilizing. The trouble is the lack of depth in the discussion, the lack of information. Part of the problem is that our press, you know, the more responsible newspapers, newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian newspaper, independent newspaper here, who try to discuss the issues and explore them a little bit and get the facts out there for people.

They're read by very, very few people, relatively speaking. And it's social media and it's popular programming that gets out slogans. So instead of analysis, you get slogans. Instead of proper policies worked out, you just. You just get tweets. You just get tweets. Yeah, exactly. And this is very corrupting of the process

and very easy to capture by anybody who has a knack for getting the right tweets or the word slogans out now. I've always had this feeling that art and science are not really any different. They're different parts of the same animal. And the Victorians felt that instinctively. If you look at the Crystal Palace 1851,

it was the works of all nations. It wasn't arts and science brought together. It was just works. And thanks to the glorious Prince Albert. And the Victorians generally, if you look at all the great scientists, they're generally musicians, almost without fail. And they didn't see the distinction. All the great photographers, I'm a passionate collector of Victorian photography, especially the stereoscopic stuff. All those guys are artists and scientists.

And they have to be, because they're working in a medium that requires incredible knowledge of chemistry and physics. they also are creating art, creating portraits, landscapes, beautiful things. And they don't even think that there's a distinction. So that's how I am. And I resisted the 20th century concept that you have to be one or the other. And they try to split us and they succeeded for a while. I think that was bad. And I think now we're seeing a coming together, a rejoining of art and science.

In someone like Matt Taylor, for instance, who's the PI of another NASA mission, the Rosetta mission, expect to meet this boffin guy who's one of the most successful scientists of her time. He's a heavy metal phenomenon. He's got Einstein tattooed here and Lemmy tattooed on the other side. And he's as much passionate about his music as he is about his work, you know, his science and his engineering. So that to me is lovely. I think that's a healthy thing. We're all coming together and realizing that we're human beings. We're supposed to be complete human beings. We're supposed to have all those sides to us.

Otherwise, we're not complete. What's the biggest surprise about the solar system itself? Is that it's typical or not typical, that it's unique or not unique, based on what you, you know, that and what we've seen now from exoplanets. Well, I would give you two responses.

One is that from the exploration of the solar system, this amazing enterprise stretches back 50 years now, even 55, going on 60 years since the earliest missions to the planets. Just how rich nature is. Yeah.

That every place we've gone, it just blows our doors off. Every time I've learned about discovery of a new planetary system, almost every time we've discovered we thought our conventional wisdom told us what couldn't happen, happens. Yeah. Giant planets in the inner part of the solar system

and all these things we didn't think could happen. The other thing I was going to say is then from what we've learned about exoplanet systems, we've learned that our solar system is very atypical. Yeah. Right? Everyone always, and that's, again, not what we thought. We had a great little tidy logical story of why you should have rocky planets on the inside and gas giants on the outside.

It sounded so good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And nature, you know, is just so amazing. The imagination of nature is so much greater than the imagination of humans, which is why we have to keep exploring. Why we can't just have theoretical physicists like me in rooms, because we come up, if we figured out what's happening, the picture we have would not be the picture of the universe. We have to look outward because it keeps surprising us. We need the exploration. We need the explorers like you and the missions. that you develop. We need the data. Yeah, the data.

And that's the basis of science. I know for theoretical physics. Data is a four-letter word. No, no, no. For me, I mean, that's what guides theorists. At least I'm an old-fashioned kind of theoretical physicist. That if the data, it doesn't matter whether it's elegant or beautiful or pretty. What matters is a correspondent reality.

And the only way to know is to look out and find it. The major interest that I have is this stereoscopic side of everything. You know, I had this passion for 3D. stereoscopy of all kinds It's nice to be surrounded by here Yeah, here we have around us all sorts of stereoscopy starting from about 1838 onwards

and of course stereoscopy was huge in the 1850s which is the great boom and that's kind of where my heart is but I apply everything that I learned from the 1850s to astro photography so you just all the time that you think nothing there's nothing new under the sun since Charles Wheatstone

who discovered the principle. So all you need is a baseline. And in astronomy, and especially with all these probes that go out and get close to objects, you can normally get what you need to take an amazing stereoscopic picture of something. You know, well, actually, we have one of your books here, and I know a bunch of 3D books. Have you produced a 3D book of astronomy, of astronomical images? Well, Mission Moon 3D is all about the Apollo 11. The Apollo missions and the whole space race about the Russians too so that's the closest we've come to an actual strong

I've never I haven't seen any 3D pictures of Pluto yet oh there is one yeah I was able to get it that was my great scoop you know I happened to be in the right place at the right time and oh you haven't seen that okay well I'll show you but yeah you just need a baseline

and this probe is flying thousands of miles an hour past this object called Pluto which until now has been a white dot yeah distance and what you get as a picture from this point and then it moves on, you get a picture from the next point. And so you have your baseline. How far a baseline do you know?

It would be tens of thousands of miles quite a bit, but it's a few thousand miles away. Yeah, sure, sure. And the speed is going, you have to snap those pictures relatively quickly. Yeah, which is what they do. I mean, it's a kind of nail-biting thing that New Horizons does because most of these missions, it's very different from most of the NASA missions, which go around things. Like the Rosetta mission, they go there, they get into a position next to it, and they more or less orbit these objects.

New Horizons doesn't do that. It just whizzes straight past, so everything has to happen in a few minutes. And the tension, the drama in that is colossal. Because if you mess up, there will never, ever be another chance. And you've been waiting for decades. Yeah, for 12 years, you've waited for that moment. So it's incredible to watch it unfold. the moment when you first see that image is incredible.

Rosemary's Baby was a movie exactly about that, right? About satanic rituals and infants and things going on that she wasn't quite aware of. And I'm wondering if that movie had an impact on, have you ever thought about that? I hadn't really thought about that. I don't remember it coming up in a lot of, you know, because I read a lot of medical records, therapy notes, and I could see what the patient and the therapists were talking. about. And I don't remember a lot of, gee, I just went to the movies. Well, I mean, not. I'm just wondering if, you know, when things are, when things are popular,

and I mean, that's why I actually wanted to go into the alien thing, because, you know, there was this another wave of repressed memories or, or invented memories, induced again by psychologists often of alien abduction. Yes. And, and then when there's one person, there suddenly seems to be many, and they all have similar stories. And one can't help but think. what's bubbling in the background of society, whether it's from a movie or from a popular book, ends up also, even if it isn't implanted by an individual like a therapist, but implanted by society,

that people can change their memories. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, you're calling to my mind the Exorcist. Yeah. The Exorcist did lead to a whole bunch of people starting to think that they were possessed by the devil. and they started displaying some of those symptoms. Well, but also, you know, what's interesting to me is people often say, well, you know, if it was just one person, I wouldn't believe it, but there's so many people that are independently coming up with the same thing, therefore must be believable. But there's that sense of independence is a fallacy.

It isn't there because everyone's subject to the same news. For example, when people report on what the aliens that abducted them look like, they all look the same. Yes. Now, there's two possibilities for that. One, they're really there. Or is it amazing that they all looked like aliens that were shown on the cover of a magazine at one point? And so those things must have an impact. One thing that interested me about you, given that it seemed to me that you're a tinkerer. This is patented, right? It's your... Yeah, I'm an inventor. I love it. I sit in my little workshop and I fiddle around and make stuff. Now, but I wonder, that's what surprised me, because I, as a, if I understand your astronomical work, it's theoretical, right? No, not really. No, I was an experimental astronomer. My PhD is about spectroscopy, looking at movements of lines.

But not building spectroscopy. Yeah, I built my spectrometer. Oh, you did? I built the spectrometer, the sealer stat that went with it to direct the light into it, and I built the electronics, very crude electronics in the 1970s. which processed the information. No, it was a purely... Yeah, it was experimental P.C.

But you have to bring some theory into figure out what you're looking at. Okay, that makes more sense. I just seem to me that given everything else I knew about you, that I would have been surprised if your science wasn't involved in building and including the electronics to some extent. Yeah, I hated it.

I hated my electronics because it was very crude and didn't always work. What about the electronics of the guitar, which I understand you wired differently? Yeah. How did that come about? Well, I had my dad. See, my dad's an electronics engineer,

so I really had a great start there. He taught me about everything. He taught me what series and parallel meant. And I wasn't as good as he was ever. You know, he just lived and breathed electric currents and PDs and stuff, yeah. But he taught me that. So it makes it very good sense that we rewire the guitar. Well, we wired the guitar in a way that was different from anyone else at the time.

You know, in the 50s and 60s, when, before we really had spaceflight and we used telescopes to look out across the solar system and the scientists of the day looked and they couldn't find any oceans anywhere and the earth is unique. It turns out the earth

is unique but it's a weirdo it wears its oceans on the outside. Oceans are common but they're on the inside and the interesting thing about those oceans and I've written a couple of scientific papers on this is that the concept of a habitable zone is very geocentric.

Of course. Right? Warm, liquid water inside of worlds that can, in principle, seed the development of biology, can take place anywhere in the solar system, even at Pluto with a surface temperature of 400 Fahrenheit,

minus 400 Fahrenheit. If that ocean is really there, as we strongly suspect, it could be an abode for life. So it actually changes our perception, again, that we should not be so geocentric. We should not be so myopic or solyptic in the sense that we assume we are, that we are necessarily typical?

Precisely. The Copernican revolution continues. Yeah, exactly. It continues in every way outside and inside. And, you know, in fact, what you just said is true not just for Pluto and not just to the planets. What we're learning on Earth is that it could be that there's a lot more life underneath the surface of the Earth than above. Absolutely. And again, it's weird to think. And it's so amazing.

we live in a time when we're just discovering that. When people kind of feel like, oh, well, we know everything about the Earth. We don't. We don't. The nature of life, even on our home planet, is still ripe for discovery. And if you just put a little more thought into it, you think about these ocean morals that have their oceans on the interior. In many ways, they're actually better suited to the development of life. They don't require a magnetosphere for protection.

They don't care if they're catastrophic planetary impacts because they're up hundreds of kilometers on the surface. they're not going to damage the ocean. And as people have said in the origin of life and Earth, many people think it originated deep in the ocean. One of the reasons would be that it's at least protected from some impacts. But this is much more protection. And in fact, those worlds don't even care if there's a star around. You could have interstellar planets that have been ejected, but interior is still warm and having an ocean. You don't care about stellar flares. You don't care about nearby supernovae. They're actually pretty hospitable for the development of life.

Whether, I mean, be horrible for astronomy because there's a roof over your head. Yeah, exactly. That was just going to say. The astronomers there would say, wow, look at the universe. It's full of water. There is no universe.

It's just all of us. Well, their universe would be their water. Yeah, yeah. In the 17th, 18th century, there were people who said, let's apply standards of scientific rationality to a much wider range of subjects. Let's do history on scientific principles.

Let's think about society, and political organization on scientific principles. Let's try and understand human nature in that way. And so this was trying to think in an orderly and disciplined way about things. And it had tremendous consequences. I mean, you think of the outcome of the Enlightenment in the great changes politically and socially that followed it. The advent, for example, of democracy and of human rights and civil liberties

and the much wider spread of education and the refutation of the claims of absolute monarchy and of religion. So these were good things. And there were, of course, people much later, people like Hawkehima and Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School who said, ah, the Enlightenment was to blame for Nazism and Stalinism because it privileged kind of organized bureaucracy

and bureaucracy goes rotten after retirement, blah, blah. They're wrong about that, but anyway, that's a different story. But the people who objected to Enlightenment rationality were the romantics who said, if you have reason dominating life, then it desicates life. It just takes all the color and all the magic and music out of it. And we think, we romantics, we think that it should all be about how we feel and it should be about our connection with the soil or the land or the people or the folk or this, that, and the other.

Now, I like to point out that we would not for one minute like to dispense with the poetry and the music of romanticism, but we could certainly do without the politics and sociology and anthropology of romanticism. because that's where nationalism and Nazism and racism and all that stuff come from. I mean, talking about, you know, our adherence to the land or to the blood or to our ancestors or, you know, the race or something, you know, all that is pernicious, and we've seen the effect of that. So the anti-rationalist reaction to the Enlightenment produced all these evils, which really, you know, caused so many deaths. I'm thinking of the first, especially the Second World War.

And it illustrates, gives you this marvelous historical illustration of how if you're just irrationally and irrational and you're going to privilege all sorts of other things that dominate the way you act and think about the world, you're going to get into trouble. Because the rationalism of the Enlightenment itself never ever claimed that reason should operate at the expense of emotion or at the expense of those things in life that give it its sense of value and sentiment. In fact, it's so interesting to notice that in the Enlightenment itself, the idea of sentiment, the idea of the importance of romance in life, the idea that our emotions are important motivators for our choices in life. David Hume, one of the great figures in the Enlightenment.

Reason is a slave of passion. Exactly. You know, in other words, the result was that the Enlightenment drive to think more rationally, not of the expense of our emotions, but just, more, actually, actually, was read by those who were frightened of what reason might expose about the inadequacies of absolute monarchy and religious attorney, you know, to do this black and white thing. Oh, all reason is bad. When you say that our voting system isn't democratic, maybe you can explain what you mean by that, because I know what you, I think I know what you're talking about. Okay, so for the House of Representatives in the U.S. and for House of Commons in the UK, we use what's called a plurality system or first-past-the-post system. Yeah.

Okay, so just to give an example, suppose you've got a congressional district, 100 voters and 10 people stand for election and 8 of them get 10 votes each and one gets 9 votes and the last gets 11 votes. He's the guy who goes to Congress. Representing 11 people out of 100. The other 89 are completely unrepresented. There's no representation there. And from this simple fact, which shows that our systems of election are undemocratic and, by the way, elections of the Senate, you know, are proportional to the number of states, not the number of people in them. then the electoral college, which exists, you know, to stop some idiot, ignorant, bloviating. Yeah, it didn't work very well.

Yeah, okay. So you can see that all the other institutions of the U.S. are even more remote than that. But right there in the system of representation, you've got a very distorting voting system, leave aside even the fact of gerrymandering. Yeah. To get a more proportional system of election, which really does reflect the variety of preferences and choices will probably result in the failure of the two-party system. And almost all countries that have the first-past-the-post voting system have a two-party system

and power swings between the two parties. And the result of that is that whoever happens to control the party, the clique, the group at the top of that party, or the activists in the country who, you know, determine party policy, are the people who run the country. Whereas if you have proportional representation, you tend to get co-eastern. abolition governments. So you can look at places like Germany and others where they have good systems of proportional representation, or you look at places like Italy and Israel where they have bad ones. So in the bad ones, you get very small minorities over-influencing policy. But where

you've got the right kind of system and it really works, what tends to happen is that it drains politics out of government. Instead of government being highly politicized, all the politics happens in elections and then in the negotiations between the different parties who are going to constitute the coalition. And then you get a kind of consensus emerging, and then there's government. And government should be for all the people, not just the people who voted for a particular party. That's what it says, yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, that's what it says in the preamble to the US Constitution, you know, the people, the whole people. So it's incredibly important that we should look at the way that our system has, in fact, evolved, de facto, in practice evolved, and how really, recent events have kind of ripped the cover off it and said, look, it's just dysfunctional. A lot of people will say to you, well, if you take religion away, then what are people are left with? What do they believe in? What gives them their morality and their sense of

meaning in life? And I say to them, look, there is a fantastic, a much better alternative. And this is humanism. Humanism has its roots in the philosophical thinking of Socrates, Aristotle, and others in the classical tradition. It doesn't predicate the existence of a God, our morality is not something dictated from outside human experience. Instead, humanism says this, let's think for ourselves, let's take responsibility for thinking for ourselves about how we're going to treat other people, how are we going to relate to them, how are we going to live together in communities, how are we going to do the things that we know, because we know that the vast majority of people don't like to be cold and lonely and hungry

and in pain and deprived of possibilities and so on. We know. We've got to be a lot of We just have this, you know, basis of knowledge about what conduces to human flourishing. Let's work for that. Let's work for that together. You know, it's not about brownie points getting into heaven or something. It's because we're human beings and we have sympathies. That is the basis of humanism. And when you start to think about the sorts of things that people have said,

when you read, I don't know, again, Aristotle or Senegal, you know, anybody in the great tradition of thought over the last couple of thousand years, who've addressed this question of how we can make lives meaningful and significant, how we can foster relationships, how things like our intimacies, our love, our family lives, our community engagements, and so on can really make life feel good and rich for us. When we understand how art, music, learning, endeavor are meaningful, then we can understand that it's all here in life between the cradle and the grave.

You don't have to reach outside it for something that's going to give you meaning, because you can create meaning if you will do it, if you will take that effort. I mean, one good example of this is the so-called existentialist tradition. People like to wave their arms and say, Jean-Bor Sartre and Albert Camus and so. But you know, they had a couple of good points to make. Oh, I'm a big fan. Yeah, Camus wouldn't describe himself as an existentialist because he fell out with Sartre. He would say he was an absurdist.

What they both agree on is this. you know, we don't get born for a reason. There's no purpose here. We're not sent into the world by some great headmaster in the sky who's given us a job to do or anything. We just find ourselves in the world and in a set of historical and social conditions. And it's up to us to accept the fact

that we have to make certain kinds of choices for ourselves. And that meaning is possible for us if we create it. Camus has this marvelous essay, I'm sure most of the people listening to this know it, an essay called The Myth of Sisyphus, where he says, okay, so think about that myth, that Greek myth about Sisyphus who has to roll the bowed rubber hill, and he's never going to get to the top,

and this is going to go on for eternity. Can his existence be meaningful to him? And he gives the answer, yes. Now that is powerful. That's pretty damn deep. It totally affected me. And in fact, I ended one of my books with referring back to that, my book about Adam,

because as a young person, the realization that you can make the meaning in your own world, in a world that's absurd in a general sense, is profoundly important, I think. Sure. Well, let's say, that's that resource. So humanism, which is about, you know, our relationships, but also about our individual responsibilities

to respect the meanings that other people are creating in their lives. Obviously, you know, there is a question of where we draw our lines. You know, they say an open mind is a great thing. Well, not so open that your brains fall out. Okay? So, all right. In the case of our ethical lives, we've got to think about the sorts of lines that we don't regard as being crossable. You know, people who are cruel, who are harmful, who are greedy, or selfish, you do bad things to other people, we're not going to accept that. But what we are going to accept is that there are as many ways that lives can be good or meaningful to people as there are people to live them. And none of us has a right to say to anybody else, no, you're

not allowed to do that or see that or think that or feel that or act that way. That's that's their business. Okay, so here's, so he, so he influenced you, but nevertheless, he told you this, and then you tried to lie to him. You talk about the busts? Yeah, yeah, why he's tell the story? It's a good story. Well, Randy was very proud of having this bust of Houdini.

And it was from a museum in Niagara Falls. Okay. And it had burned down. Oh, okay. And Randy had the only copy of this bust of Houdini that was very, very famous. He was very, very proud of it. And this is a fairly recent story. This is just like 15, maybe 20 years ago.

But not ancient history. And we were visiting the Educational Foundation, and he had this bust here, and it was all in the case and very, very proud of it. And Teller and I saw that, and I got an idea. I got a little idea up my head. So while Teller was talking to Randy, I went off into the other room and made a huge number of phone calls to find someone in Florida

who were able to do casting, any sort of casting. And I found this like B movie company where the people did casting. Now, of course, I have no reason to trust them except I trust everybody. So I called them up and said, hi, this is Penn.

We're going to show, call Penn and Teller. I want to break into James Randy's Center for, inquiry tonight, and I want to break into a case and take his cast of Houdini and make a copy of it. Can you do that in eight hours? Wow.

It's amazing you could find something. And they said, well, you know, I got stuff to do, and I pulled out the checkbook and kept up in the amount, up in the amount, up in the amount. Until they finally found it was more time. Suddenly found they had nothing to do that night. And then, you know, Randy dropped me off of the hotel, right?

Could I read? Hmm. Pick us up for breakfast the next morning. And then I ran back, met them in the parking lot. I'd scoped out the place. I broke in. Uh-huh. And then I said, we're going to open this case, and this is valuable, and we're going to make a copy of it.

So they have all the plastered paris. And there I am with them for, you know, six hours. Oh, my God. Hmm. Yeah. But I wanted to make sure I didn't want to love. lose the bust of a media. So we then had a negative of it.

Of course, yeah, yeah. Of course, there was plastered a pair of it. Everything, newspapers, and we're mopping up and everything else. And I send them off. And then I run back to the hotel, right? And I get up and Randy comes and picks me up. We go out to breakfast. Nothing is said.

We go in, go on it da-da-da-da. And then four months later, five months later, Randy comes to visit us in Vegas. And he comes over to my house and there are 30 bus, Mudini, all over my house, in gold, in bronze, in plaster. And he goes over to tellers and they're all over the place. And then he goes backstage and they're all over the place. And nothing is said.

Nothing, nothing is said. I never say, hey, do you like this bust? I never say anything. and Randy at about bus bus number 70 Randy just goes Fuck you Oh does he say that

It's kind of quietly I don't know why he I don't know why No no Because you can get these things Absolutely I thought you didn't get those things In any airport

I just you know I had a few myself Yeah Yeah see here everywhere It's fabulous Yeah And Randy of course Randy would not have even said, fuck you,

until he'd figured out the whole thing. He had had the whole thing figured out. You know what I mean? Randy would not say, how did you do that? That is not within Randy's ego. You know, so I had to say, yeah, Randy, you know that night. I know. Yeah, when was he alone?

Yeah, that's right. Well, you have to figure this one out. Okay. Did it just, was a textbook, or did you discover you had to do something dramatic in order to make, to be where you wanted to be it? Was there any moment? Not dramatic, but Herculian. We had to do a lot of homework to pin down Pluto's orbit. We had to go back and take glass plates for the 1930s, astronomical plates, and reanalyze them with modern

techniques to increase the arc length and drop the error bars on the known position of Pluto. We had to track our spacecraft with a technique that involves quasars as distant, reference frames to make sure that we knew where it was and where it was going. We had to take images on approach of Pluto against the Starfield and ship them home and analyze them quickly to determine the difference. But down to the pixel, where is Pluto compared to where it should be if we're in the right place and from the difference compute homing burns that would correct and not only correct our position to arrive at the right place.

We had to arrive after nine and a half years within 450 seconds. because the spacecraft doesn't actually see the data from its instruments. It can't tell I'm off. I'm not looking at the target. Right? After all that. Entry space. Exactly.

Or even, you know, half. Yeah, yeah, right? And so the timing, because everything's moving, the spacecraft's going 32,000 miles an hour. Pluto's going, you know, in its heliocentric orbit at many thousands of miles per hour. All the satellites are rotating in their orbits at speeds of like a kilometer per second. And the spacecraft knows its position, and it has an ephemorous. It can compute for where all the targets are. And based on knowing the time and the time of arrival and where it is and where those things ought to be,

it does the trigonometry and points and points again and points again as it flies through. But it's doing it what we call open loop. It's not seeing if those images are actually centered. And so we had to very accurately navigate. Yeah, you had to be... 450 seconds error maximum after nine and a half years. It's amazing. For a while, I guess, you had to separate, right?

I mean, you had to... You left astronomy to do music. I did. I always thought astronomy benefited from me leaving here. Yes, I did. But you came back, and was it hard to come back? Was it hard? Well, I was never that far away.

Yeah, okay. You always sort of... Academically, it was hard. Yes, it was. It was tough. And it was a mountain that I nearly didn't manage to climb, to be honest. I was fortunate in having Michael Ron Robinson,

who was the head of astrophysics at the time, about to retire. I was one of his last projects. Yeah, but he rang me up when he'd heard that I was thinking of rejoining this astronomical community, which had become astrophysics. Yeah.

And said, if you want to finish your PhD, I am here at the place where you started it, and I will be your supervisor. Oh, that was wonderful. So it was incredible. I mean, my heart kind of stopped, really, and I dropped everything. And I dropped for a year, I didn't do anything, pretty much, except, yeah, except just sitting in the little office in Imperial College back where I'd started.

Yeah. Picking up the pieces of my PhD. It was tough. Yeah, and they had to, I mean, they couldn't make it easy for me because that's not what PhDs are about. PhDs are about making it fucking hard. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to be happy to get it over with. Yeah, every PhD student has to want to give up or else he hasn't earned his, you know what that's like. Well, you know, I think, yeah.

Because if you didn't, you might be too comfortable being a PhD student. Yeah, exactly. So I was hard. And I think three distinct times I tried to give up, but I had good friends. One of them was Garik Israelian who runs Starmus. Yeah. He took me away for a week and taught me how to read papers. Again?

Scientific papers. He re-educated me on how to actually get the information out. And that was incredibly valuable to me. And Patrick Moore was incredibly supported. He just kept saying, you couldn't do it, Brian. Of course you can do it. Of course you can. I went, Patrick, I can't.

My brain's gone. I've been playing music for 30 years. I can't do this. Of course you can. One of the things that you understand or that we understand from studying the geologic past is that the timescale of climate change, you know, most of the IPCC studies and the UN stuff,

people look at 2100 or 2050. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They might go out to 2150. Yeah, yeah. Right? But remember that, you know, of the, the atmospheric CO2, so when we burn fossil fuels, about 60% of the CO2 stays in the air, about 40% goes into the ocean and the land. That's 60% that goes into the air, half of that

is still going to be there a thousand years from now. That's a vital importance. I think that if it's one thing people should understand. It's really important. People don't think about it this way, but nuclear waste, high-level nuclear waste in a thousand years, about 1% of the radioactivity is left. Because most of it has short half-flict. Yeah, yeah. Right? So that's what makes it so nasty. Yeah, exactly.

That's why this stuff you worry about is this stuff that is short half-lives. Right. So a thousand years from now, nuclear waste, 1%. Yeah. CO2, 50% in a thousand years. And probably about a third of it will still be here 20,000 years from now. So the timescales are really long. We are changing the Earth, not just for a few generations,

but for tens of thousands of generations. of humans if humans are so lucky to stay on this earth for that long. So that's, you know, hard to get your head around. Absolutely. And it'll become relevant. What many people say is, well, you know, maybe this is a problem, but we have economic problems. We have other problems. Well, let's not worry about it now. Let's worry about it in 50 years. And the problem is if you keep dumping it in there, dealing within 50 years becomes so much harder than, you know, we've skirted it. But I want to make it clear to people who haven't heard of this issue, exactly what the change is in greenhouse gases. We really haven't said what the impact of human industrial activity is on that global

historical time scale, just so people could put in perspective. We skipped it, and I think it's worth you spending a few minutes just giving that. Sure, sure, sure. So 20,000 years ago, last glacial maximum, we have a kilometer of ice where we're standing in Boston, in Cambridge, carbon dioxide levels were about 180 parts per million. The pre-industrial, the interglacial, about 280 parts per million. And we've seen that cycle periodically over the last few couple million years. When Dave Keeling started measuring CO2 in 1958, it was already at about 315 parts per million. So up about 35 parts per million from the pre-industrial level.

Today we're about 412 parts per million. So we are really going into completely unexplored territory. That has not been seen on earth in at least the last few million years. At least probably four or five million years. And by mid-century, we're going to be well above 500 parts per million. And now we're talking about maybe 30 or 35 million years. So we're doing something extraordinary. And it's really important to realize that when people talk about it,

you see parts for million, who the heck cares about? parts per million, that the natural cycle has not, has not anywhere approached this level. And, and, moreover, as the natural cycle has varied over that, climate has varied tremendously. It's not as if, it's not as if, sure, people can say, well, it didn't ever varied much, but who cares. But it varied a small amount and climate change dramatically. We're doing something that has never been, an experiment that's never been performed, and at least in the last few million years. That's exactly right.

And we can look at the paleo climate record to get a pretty good sense of how sensitive the Earth's climate system is to changes in CO2. Because we have CO2 reconstructions and we know how much the temperature changed. And the answer seems to be that the sensitivity, that is, per doubling of CO2,

you get a surface temperature change of about three or four degrees. Now, what we've experienced over the last hundred years is only about, you know, maybe one and a half to two degrees per doubling because we've only warmed by a little more than a degree, and we haven't yet doubled CO2, right? Yeah, but we've got the oceans.

But that's it. So you have the ocean. So the other half is still coming. Yeah, the other half. So that's probably the resolution of that. So it's probably about three degrees per doubling. And just understand, three degrees doesn't sound like that much. But remember, the difference between the last glacial maximum, sea level 130 meters lower, you know, North America, half of North America covered with ice, the ice coming down to New York City. Completely different world, right? That was five degrees lower, colder, right? So we're talking about probably in the next 100 to 150 years being five degrees warmer.

It's extraordinary. But what they did do is expose us. We had the fortune to be raised in New York City in this context, right? Yes, it was dangerous. Yes, it was, you know, there were riots and all the, yes. All that. That all actually did happen. But we're embedded in quite a repository of cultural institutions.

Sure. And so every weekend, we did something different. Yeah. It was we went to the opera. We went to a play. We went to a musical. We went to the ball game. Even went to a hockey game.

Went to the art museum. Went to the zoo. Wow. And each of these weekends, it might have been two weekends a month. It felt like every weekend. Oh, that's great. And this was exposure. to things trained adults do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's beyond just the doctor, lawyer, Indian chief options. And my brother ultimately became an artist, having been moved by our visits to art museums, and he ended up going to the high school of music and art, got his MFA, and now teaches art and paints. And my sister, she's the big sellout. She went into corporate America.

Oh, well. Yeah. Someone had to. She left school, but then came back and got her MBA And so, but my point is, it enabled us. It empowered us to follow our own drummer. Yeah, they sort of planted seeds, and you got to decide which ones grew. Correct.

And then once they saw these seeds germinate, they would then feed, once they nourish them. So my best example of this, best example, I think you would appreciate this as an academic and someone who's a voracious reader. In middle school, my mother, not knowing anything. Anything about astrophysics. She would visit bookstores and go to the remainder shelf. Okay. All right.

And just find any book that said math or science on it or the universe of which there are many, it turns out. Yeah, yeah, sure. And she'd bring them home. And these books cost 50 cents, 25 cents. I had the largest library of any middle schooler in my school. And also brain teaser books, anything that was just fun things to do with your brain rather than just hang out in the street. And so I probably still have books, some of those books on my shelf. They don't have some marker line across the binding saying that it has been marked down.

I haven't lately seen remainder shelves much in bookstores. I used to go looking to see if my own books weren't on them. The notion for many, many years was quite different about what memory was, you know, going back to ancient times where people thought, you sort of memories and knowledge was intrinsic. And you were just somehow probing what was already there. And then, and never sort of creating memories or memories as dynamic. And then the idea that memories were like tape recorders where they weren't already there, but once they happened, they were in your mind.

And it was a matter of just going to the right data location and calling them out. And what you began to show, and I've showed, of course, abundantly since then, is that that's not the case at all, that memories are not static and maybe weren't even there in the first place. Well, yes. I mean, and that tape recorder, video recorder, you know, model of memory is still sadly, widely embraced by some lay people. Yeah. I think most people still think memories, you work hard, you get the memory and that's it. And if it's there, if it's a memory, it must have been, it must have happened. Right. Memory studies, as you said, had been sort of trying to remember the name of an animal name with a letter Z or a series of numbers or facts. And you began to, your research has involved more stories.

Right. Why do you think you were thinking stories versus facts in that sense? What influenced you to think in those terms? Is it because you were so interested in the way people really work in the real world of trying to remember their own stories? Or what caused you to go in that direction? Well, I think I know, actually. Good.

You think you know. No one told you this. No, I think I actually know. Okay. So there I was, you know, thinking to myself after that conversation with my lawyer cousin, where I thought I wanted to do something that has some practical applicability, something that's more socially relevant. And briefly, around that time, my father was dying of cancer. And I wished I could work on cancer, but I couldn't work on cancer because I don't know anything about it.

I had no skills. So, but what could I work on that I could be excited about? Well, and then to find out what excited me, I asked myself, well, what is it you like to talk about when you're, let's say, at a party, a dinner party or something, and you can talk about whatever you want. What do you talk about? And I found myself often talking about legal situations, legal cases. So this made me think, okay, I want to like maybe combine memory. with legal cases, well, how about eyewitness memory, accidents, crimes, things like that? That's how I got there.

So what's happened in Brazil? I won't go through the whole history, of course, but just recently. In 2003, they elected Lula da Silva, president. He's an uneducated union leader, a very remarkable person. I knew him back in the 90s, followed him closely. He's a very remarkable person, very effective, you know, take my opinion. The World Bank published a study of Brazil in 2016, in which they discussed what they called the golden decade, a unique period in Brazil's history under Lula's two terms, 2003 to 2011.

period in which there was remarkable improvement, poverty reduction, enormous poverty reduction, large expansion of inclusiveness, marginalized. Remember, these are very unequal countries. Rich but incredibly unequal, enormous poverty, tremendous resources wasted. Inclusion of people, Afro-Brazilians, almost half the population, indigenous people and women brought into educational institutions, a sense of dignity, of commitment. The country just changed. They say it's a remarkable example of development rarely equaled.

At the same time, Lula became probably the most respected statesman in the world, a very respected statesman as a voice for the global south, respected everywhere. I remember visiting Brazil. It seemed like, yeah, it seemed like a beacon. Yeah, it was. And a remarkable period, well, Brazilian elites couldn't tolerate this. And not only the, first of, he was very supportive of establishment institutions. He didn't interfere with the wealth robbing the country.

You know, he paid off the debts to the foreign investors. He satisfied the IMF. He's not a radical. Yeah. I mean, his belief's pretty straight. Or you just put money in the hands of poor people. That'll take care of things. That's his radicalism.

But for the Brazilian elite who are outlandish, all the Latin American elite, this is intolerable. Furthermore, there's enormous class hatred. How can this uneducated worker who doesn't even speak proper Portuguese dare to be sitting in the presidential palace? These people have to have humility. We'll take care of them, that sort of thing. That's deeply rooted all throughout Latin America, and Brazil in particular. Anyhow, a couple of years after he stepped down, the oil prices dropped, and the commodity prices dropped with China cutting back development.

There's a lot of claims that the improvements under his rule were just illusory that. But the World Bank didn't agree. You look at their analysis, they say that's not true. In fact, if you look more clearly, closely I've written about this. The Brazilian economists have written about it. It was mainly the predatory financial institutions who prevented any sensible reaction to this. Every effort that was taken was beaten back.

And it did lead to a recession. That gave the opportunity for the soft coup that's been going on since then. The first step was to impeach his successor, Dilma Rousseff, on absolutely derisory grounds. I mean, you look at them. It's not even a joke. And she was impeached by a gang of thieves of a sort you can't even describe. That was the first step.

Then comes the next, just a couple months ago. There was an election coming up in October, October 2018. Elula was way ahead in the polls. It was pretty clear he was going to win the election. So what they do, put them in jail, solitary confinement, 25-year sentence, basically a death sentence, prevented from reading newspapers and journals, and crucially prevented from making a public statement, not like murderers and death row. This is right before the election. Next step, which is we should look closely because it's a test. run for the 2020 election here.

A massive campaign on the social media, which are the main source of information for most of the population presses, of course, mostly right wing, but these are. But the media campaign is just unbelievable. I mean, the lies, the fabrications, the vitriol, you know, the workers' party, his party is planning to turn all the boys into homosexuals. It's going to kill religion. They're going to put out baby bottles with penises as the nipples, on and on like this.

People believed it. They finally manage just by these means, shut up, silence, the guy who's probably going to win, flood the so-called information system, grotesque lies and attacks that can't be responded to. And remember, we're going to see this soon. We're starting to see it already. This is Testron.

They managed to get into office, a guy who's the most outrageous of the right-wing fanatics all over the world. Just to illustrate, this is a guy who, when he was in the parliament, when he voted for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, he did. He dedicated his vote to her torturer. She was a guerrilla tortured by the military regime. He dedicated his vote to her torturer, the general who was in charge of the torture. He supports the military dictatorship, which was vicious.

But he criticizes it, too, because it didn't go far enough. He said it should have. It was too soft. They should have killed 30,000 people like the Argentines did, the worst. of the military dictatorships. He goes back to the 19th century. It criticizes the Brazilian cavalry because they didn't do what the Americans did, wipe out the indigenous population.

If they'd done that, we wouldn't have these problems today. In fact, now that he's in office, first of, his economics advisor is an ultra-right Chicago boy, Pablo Gettas. His motto is literally privatize everything. sell the country out to mostly foreign investors. Right now they're killing the social security system, which is not that strong, but something. Hand everything over to the rich and the powerful.

The newest legislation is change the history books so that they don't criticize the military dictatorship. They say it was necessary to protect the country from communism. He says the whole country has been taken over by what's called cultural Marxism, including the right-wing press, the university. We've got to block that science. It's finished. We don't support that.

We don't waste money on that kind of stuff. So the Brazilian science is pretty powerful. Interesting thing. It was upcoming. So, I mean, this is just indescribable. And it's happening in the most powerful country, important country in Latin America. one of the most important in the world, with the strong support of the United States, very powerful. In fact, this media campaign, you can't prove it, but it has all the fingerprints of the people have been running these things elsewhere.

This does raise a question of what happens to scientists when they get old. Something which is of concern to me, even to you. And I think there are three routes, many of them just do let me. science, become administrators or synch into torpor in some form, some overreach themselves and go to new fields. Under Hoyle, Shockley, Pauling, and others, Eddington, they're people who they would still say they're motivated by trying to understand the world, but they no longer get satisfaction from the routine stuff they're good at.

And they try and do something where they're not experts. So, of course, Fred Hoyle did this sort of thing in his old age, attacking Darwin, saying that flew up with Debis came in on comets and things like that. So that's the second way. And the third way is, of course, to go on doing what you're good at and realizing that your work will be on a plateau and you won't get better. And I think it's interesting to see why it's the case for many artists, certainly painters and composers, that their last works are their greatest.

But you wouldn't say this of many scientists. The best they could do is say on a platter. And I think the reason is that if you're, say, composer, then you're influenced by the musical environment when you're young. But thereafter, it's just internal development. Whereas in science, it's a collective activity. You've got to be able to absorb new techniques and new data and new ideas. Exactly.

And that's what we get less good at when we get older. Absolutely. And, I mean, it's, they're rare exceptions. Of course, to every thing like this, there are exceptions. But, you know, an example of being, an famous example is Einstein, who, you know, was incredibly in tune with what was current at the time. That's right.

But then later on, sort of refused to accept, or at least refuse to be in touch with what the key experimental things that were going on. His obsession with unifying electricity and magnetism became an anachronism because already in the 30s we knew there were other forces in nature. and it was kind of, it was not the, you couldn't unify. It was premature to do it. Yeah, yes. But also he didn't really follow through on the implication of his own theory,

yeah, yeah, yeah. He didn't work on black holes. Yeah. And he was in the same place as Oppenheimer for 10 years. Yeah. And Oppetheimer had done this wonderful paper in 1939, yeah, which was a step towards understanding gravitation collapse. And they never discussed it, I don't think.

That is fascinating. Well, it's, so I guess the idea is to try and, and keep an open mind and listen, but it gets harder because I think the other problem... Keep a mind ajar and not completely vacant. Yeah, exactly. But also, the more accomplished one is that sometimes the sense, when I've seen people get the sense that they should therefore only be working on things that are profound and important.

When in fact, most of the time when you're a scientist, you're working on little things that are interesting you. And my friend, Shelley Glashogal calls them pieces of grizzle. But so if you're always trying to solve grand problems, you rarely make any progress. Right, but only cranks and geniuses work on the big problems in one go. You've got to work in a piecemeal way. Yeah. I get the sense of immense respect for Hillary Clinton in a time when she was running president

and was vilified by many. I mean, not just being the first – actually, that book was written before she was a candidate, but before she'd gotten the nomination, which happened after that book. Hillary Clinton, tell me about it. Just to stick it out and have such a messy history, which had to do in part with just being the first woman at this and that this, and also trying to have a career when her husband had this career, all the stuff that went into her life,

part of which is the exact history of the women's movement, part of which is totally peculiar to the Clintons and what they did. And she's stuck it out. She strode on forward. And whatever else you think about what she did and now, it's very popular. It's like, oh, my God, just terrible Canada, I'd run around. She made it normal. And the person who makes stuff normal.

And this country is very adaptable. And once you get used to something, it's fine. I remember the first time when Katie Couric became the first on-air anchor at night. And everyone was going crazy. It was such a big deal. And 10 minutes later, Diane, and so he became the second one. And everybody was like, well, yeah, of course,

that's what we do. Here it is. And now nobody would ever know human being. What ever think is that a man or a woman sitting there giving us the news at night? It's just Americans are very adaptable. And now you're saying it this year, you've got 200 million women thinking about running for president.

And we'll spend this whole next period looking and saying, oh, wait a minute, you're doing this here. Are you considering the women too? And how are you treating them? Is it the same all the way to, along the line, it's going to be very subtle and very strange, and we're going to do another thing, and we're going to get used to another thing. And within, you know, 10 years, it just what, men, women, whoever, you know, it'll be something new that we're worried about.

What I think is the good thing is that young people are being, I don't know the way the word is radicalized, but being a beginning to want to protest. And I think that's always a good thing. I mean, I'm biased. I grew up in the 60s, but the notion that events cause people to be skeptical of what they're being told enough to want to protest when they're young, I think is the best thing that can happen because it means that a lifetime of therefore being willing to disagree, question, and potentially act. So I think, I think, anytime I was so depressed when I first started teaching at Yale, which was the 19th, which was the 19th. early 1980s, that the students were so much more conservative than the faculty at that time that I knew, because most of us had grown up in area where you protested. I mean, it was just the standard thing. And I wasn't seeing any of that, but I am seeing more of it now, and so that's a positive thing. Yeah, it's really hard to, that balance when you have a huge problem

with misinformation, and you want to be ridiculously free speech. And you have that problem when someone's going to speak on a campus. And the idea of a protest crosses over into not letting those people speak. There's that really, I mean, free speech is never pretty. You know, it's never, it's never neat. It's never even because as soon as you start talking about someone's absolute right for free speech, the other side has that power. and not the other side, the other infinite number of sides have that power.

And where do we decide and who gets to do the rules on if you yell this much, they're no longer allowed to speak? And where does that stop? Well, I think there can be consensus on that. So protest at meetings is legitimate. Standing up and screaming is legitimate. Breaking up the meeting isn't. I've had plenty of experience with this. And you feel there's a really easy line we could all agree.

Nothing in life is easy, but I think there's a reasonable line which you can sort of accept and agree on. But I agree with it. It should be not only in principle, but even because of consequences, there should be every opportunity for people to speak freely. I know you've been wanting to get to this because you've been needling me with it for a little while. Now, you want to get to the climate change thing because you just read a book I wrote several years ago. Yeah, yeah. which has an attack at someone who attacked me on climate change. I think that there's no way you can deny that there's climate change.

I have completely changed on that. Although completely changed is a little bit confusing. Yeah. Because I never went beyond, I don't know. Yeah. What bothers me about the climate change thing was the great disservice done by Al Gore. of exaggerating. Yeah, no, it's always...

We have to scare people. We have to do this. And I hate the fact that style affected me, but the kind of people who were talking about it were the kind of people that were so dismissive of people that I loved that I brought... You had an emotional reaction. It was very, very emotional.

And also the fact, and this is true for everything, which is why I don't know why it's special, but it feels special. I just don't have... You know, my friend Tim Jenison took a deep dive into climate change, and Tim is really smart. And Tim has the resources to be able to take six months and do nothing else. He can do that. It's a nice job if you can get it.

Yeah, yeah. And he said, it's too hard. So I have to admit that I am taking climate change strictly on authority and peer pressure. And saying that sentence bothers me. And yet I do it on everything else. Yeah, we all do it and everything else. But I think you could let me try and reassure you a little bit. We can't be experts at everything, right?

So we have to take into car mechanics. But what you can always ask yourself, if you're a skeptic, you say, okay, look, I don't have the time, resources or not more background to be able to necessarily test everything this person tell me. But you can ask yourself the question, what's in it for them? And is there a reason for them to lie to me? Is there a reason for them to fabricate? Is there a reason? And I think those are the kind of questions you can ask.

But those, that question gets the exact wrong answer that you want from me. Okay. Because there's a lot of reasons. Any sort of doom saying of any kind is really, really sexy. discovering the end of the world and how to fix it makes you a superstar and a hero. There's also always money in it. Well, no, where's the money?

I mean, for most of it, you've got to look, there's a few people who become public figures, and that's a different thing. But there are thousands of scientists who are just doing this, you know, working on their models and a computer model, and they're not, whatever the answer at the end of the thing, they're not going to get more money if it's one thing or another. In fact, as I've,

You know, if they, if their computer model, and it's well done, shows something dramatically different than the rest of the crew, and they can defend it, then they become, then they become famous. And so there's every reason to try and go against the tide in science. And so, you know all this. I know, I don't need to. But I also think, and I guess this is just, I think it was okay when Al Gore was doing all that lying. to go, I don't know, for a few months for maybe a year. It's always, look, it's always right to, I mean, I can sympathize with that, I think. Of course I can.

And you know, the fact that he did. Well, the fact that people oversimplied, well, the question is, do you know it knowingly? Here's my, look, I spend a lot of time trying to explain science, and there are lots of reasons why I think it's worthwhile doing. I have very low standards in terms of what I find acceptable. I mean, the bar when I, when I, when I, when I, when I, when I, when I, when I, when I, when I, when I, when I, when I'm explaining something, I know I'm misleading at some level, because I can never, unless you do the exact mathematics, whatever analogy I'm providing, always fails somewhere. Well, analogy is never true. Exactly.

It's long, but if I'm careful to say that, to say where it's not accurate, that's fine. But the one thing that I have no tolerance for, and I know a lot of people, I'm not going to name names, is to knowingly mislead. But here's how I got beat up, okay? We did a thing called comic relief for homeless. Sure, yeah, yeah. With Robin Williams, you know what I mean? And there was this whole speech in there that said anyone can become homeless. It's not just if you're mentally ill.

It's not just if you're on drugs. It's not just this. This could happen to anybody or your family any day. But I said to Robin, that's not true. Oh, well. That's really not true. more, a great number of the homeless people do have mental illness issues. Oh, yeah, sure, sure.

A great number. It's not true that it hits people at random. No, no, no. And there's no way doing it. But there's things that can happen to you. They have no control. Right. But what I'm talking about is they were saying, well, that helps us have more compassion for people.

And I was saying, no, no, no, no. We just tell the truth. These people need help, let's help them. The exact same thing happened. We started an organization called Broadway Cares, which is for people suffering with AIDS. Yeah. And it was in the 80s. It was very early on, very early on.

And I was in all these meetings. And they would say, we have to stress that this is not gay. This is not drug users. This is everybody. And this is going to be moving to the straight population right away. And I say, well, we don't know that. So far it is drug users and it is gay. And we can tell people that.

And they said, no, no, no. We won't get any help from people if we do that. We have to scare everybody with that. And I said, no, no, we can't. No. And they'd say, and I'm now quoting, so please forgive me, you're not going to get America to care about a bunch of faggots. And I said, well, maybe they do. Maybe there is a love out there.

You can't assume. And they said, we have to say it's going to everybody. So there were all these shows in the 80s saying, you know, it's going to move into the straight population, this amount of time. And their point of it was we need to help people. It was done for compassion. And then I was asked to do VO when I was on Comedy Central. And they said, this much rainforest is being destroyed every day. And there was just a series of numbers I was giving.

And the studio wasn't ready, which is their only mistake. And I went through when I did the mathematics, the arithmetic, not arithmetic, just did it. And I said, this actually doesn't play out. He just said the number of acres and stuff. multiplied it out, and it's strong. And they said, doesn't matter. And I said, well, no. It does. It kind of does. They said, when we got this from the, it does, I said, well, just

let them tell me, let me call somebody, because I'm not good at this, but there might be something wrong here. And they said, doesn't matter, just do the VO. And I said, fuck you. And I just left. Well, no, that's, you know, you see, that's your damn problem. You're just too honest. So, no, I mean, I'm, you know, I have to, but what I'm saying is, you are one of the most

honest people I've ever met. But what I'm saying is, Al Gore, please, for the love of Christ, you've got something that could be the end of the world. Don't cheat. Do not cheat. But the other thing was,

that was so important to be, was Beatle Bootlegs. Okay. The first Beatle Bootleg that came to Greenfield was a thing called Comeback, K-U-M-B-A-C-K, it was outtakes-free. from Let It Be. A little bit from Abbey Road, but mostly from Let It Be.

I think it was maybe all Let It Be. And I had believed, firmly believed, that I still can fall into this. I had believed that the Beatles would get the idea for Sergeant Pepper's in their head. They would talk about it, and they would get clearly what they wanted it to sound like. every kazoo, every violin part, every vocal. They would get that clear in their head, then they would go into the studio with George Martin, and they would say, this is what has to be.

We have to get this kind of crowd sound to start Sergeant Peppers, that we want to orchestra tuning up. And then we'll first have a kind of fuzz guitar come in, and then on beat three, we'll have the drums come in. And they would lay that out, and they would then do it. and I would just go this is the most perfect thing ever

and that was every record blonde on blonde freak out I just believe that and then Beatle Bootleg $10 at Gribbins music store I go and I buy Come Back When I find Mother Mary comes to me

Yeah Spree mumma Let it be Holy fuck You mean you can work on this shit? You mean, you don't, you know, and then John's singing the wrong lines? Yeah, yeah. Like, what?

What's he doing? And then George doing it completely inappropriate solo? So that was... I was like, oh, you get to try this stuff. So that it didn't, it didn't heartbreak you. It opened up a whole word. Totally inspired me. I mean, I want to say in this, please, please, uh, forgive me.

for this, but I kind of said, I can do this. Now, I'm not telling you I can do Sergeant Pepper's. Yeah, yeah. But I can work in the arts. Yeah, yeah, okay. So that show you that was accessible. And I still go crazy over this when you know, the new the new blood on the tracks,

Bob Dylan Bootleg came out with every single version of it. And I am fascinated by, you know, this all ties into one of my least favorite words, which is the word genius, which is another word for lazy.

Yeah. Someone that uses the word genius as someone who's lazy. Yeah, yeah. Because they want to say, oh, this guy can just do this. Yeah. And there's no guy who can just do this.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, there was always this myth that was Bob Dylan did blood on the tracks. He was having fights with Sarah. They were going to get a divorce. He went to the studio. He poured his heart out. He wasn't quite happy with that.

He added a band. Blood in the tracks came out. He's just pure from his heart just poured out. Then there were rumors that there was a notebook where Dylan took little notes and worked on it. And everybody heard about the notebook. Now he's given his archives to that new museum. There were three notebooks in tiny, tiny writing,

both sides of the page. Every single song on the album, every single word changed. Crossed out, added in, crossed out. They finally interviewed Bob Dylan and said, So this was just about your marriage break. Because I was reading Chekhov. And I was interested in whether short stories could be told out of time.

And I was also studying painting and the perspective idea of how that changed over time interested me. And I wanted to put that down in the words. And that's why I'm changing these things here and there. But weren't things terrible with Sarah? Yes. They were. But I was also working on a record. Yeah, exactly.

You know, there's a guy named Kreskin. I'm still around. I know. I'm Canadian, as a matter of fact. Yeah, mind reader, supposedly. And he came out with a show that he would do all. He didn't know it on Carson because Carson hated him. But there was some show he did where he came out and demonstrated mind reading ability and talked about the science of this.

At that time, the best I can figure from when the game was released and so on and going back and doing a little bit of forensics, I was probably 13. Okay. He came out with that. I was very into science. Crazy into science. I read science all the time. I love science.

And that was going to be my life. And I watched him do this scientific experiment as he presented it on TV. And he had this ESP kit that he sold. Yeah, I remember that. Which was a little pendulum with the idiomatic movements and the ESP cards. And my parents, my dad was a jail guard. I have wonderful relationship with my parents. They were not wealthy.

Sure. But this was science. So I could buy this ESP kid. So I bought the ESP kid. My sister, much older than me. She was 23 when I was born. So I was raised essentially as an only child with my sister living in town.

And so my mom and dad, every night, would run through this stupid ESP kit with me. And I kept all the records and kept everything carefully and did all the graphs and all the science. And then as luck would have it, I was very into juggling. The juggling section of the library,

if you remember your Dewey Decimal System, is... Oh, yeah, it's ingrained. Very close to religion, but... Yeah, yeah. All of them, the 900. Yeah. And juggling is near the magic, right?

I remember that. I saw a book by Duninger and just kind of thumbing through it And the tricks started to look similar to what Krest could have done as ESP. And I finally looked through and found the trick. And my reaction was so inappropriate. You had an inappropriate reaction? I can't believe it.

I was heartbroken. I was destroyed. The fact that a scientist, I'm putting this in my terms from them. The fact that a scientist went on TV and lied to it. me inconsolable and embarrassed in front of my parents. Mom and dad, I was making you do this and it was all stupid. It was all jive. And I went from, and this is absolutely true, from straight A's in science to flunking,

to being directly to my science teacher, I want nothing to do with you people. You lie to people. Wow. And my entire school career changed there. And I went from a straight-A student to flunking the rest of rest. That was the demarcation. Wow. And my hatred for magicians and scientists who to me were the same.

You got to see this all as a 12-year-old. Sure, absolutely. There's no background, no, yeah, no perspective of what were the different. And then through a kind of uninteresting series of events, I met Teller. Uh-huh. And Teller simply said to me, he said, you can do magic without lying. You had a personal event in your life very young where that happened.

Did that impact? I don't know if you want to talk about it. You don't have to if you don't want to. No, I know what you're referring to because I was being interviewed by a reporter and this experience had just happened to me. And I told this reporter about the experience because it was so amazing to me. That would have been in the 90s. So that would have been, you know, decades, you know, almost a couple of decades after I started this work.

So what happened to me that was so amazing that I told this journalist was a chronicle of higher education writer, as a matter of fact. My mother did drown when I was 14 and now jump ahead. I'm an adult. I've been working on memory for 15 years or more. when I went to a 90th birthday party for an uncle of mine, Uncle Joe. And at this birthday party, a relative made reference to my mother's death from decades, decades before, and said, you know, you were the one who found the body. I said, no, in lying in the swimming pool. And I said, I didn't, her sister did, my aunt.

Oh, no, you're the one who found it. And this relative was so positive, older relative. And it had been so long. And I started thinking, wow, maybe I did. And then I started picturing her in the swimming pool face down. And I started to believe and remember this. And I started to draw inferences that were consistent with my having found it. I remembered that when the fireman came to the place that they gave me on,

oxygen. Well, maybe they gave me oxygen because I was so upset because I'm the one who found the body. And so now I had this memory. A week later, the relative called and said, I'm so sorry, I made a mistake. It wasn't you. It was your aunt who found the body. And I thought, boy, that's what it feels like. That's really interesting when you have that personal experience of exactly what you're working on. Oh, yeah. It was so incredible. By the way, I once finally had the experience of sleep paralysis. I think there are two kinds of people. And maybe this sounds pompous.

I don't know. You'll tell me. But there are people who really, when they hear something, when they realize there's something they don't know, are thrilled. And there are people who are when they realize there's something they don't know are upset, I think. Yeah. Because the thrill, the fact that there's so much more to know about the world is what keeps me going personally every day. In some sense, I kind of think that's the difference between religion and not, in the sense that the thrill of not knowing.

Well, yeah. And Feynman said that. You know, I'm not afraid of not knowing. And I think that... I don't know if you've ever heard the 10 and one model I've been doing fire eating. No. But I have a... This was, and I...

This is just bragging. Okay, good. I just did it too, so it's good. Feynman. There was the monologue that closed our show on Broadway. closed our show off Broadway, and we did it also before that in L.A. And it was a final monologue I did about how to eat fire.

I taught people how to eat fire. And I talked about what the carnival meant to me. And I had a section in there, which I won't do the whole thing, was I said people often think that scientists don't like the mystery, want to end the mystery. And the fact is scientists are the ones that love. of the mystery. Yeah, sure.

The people that don't like the mystery, the people that when there's a mystery there, they just believe the first thing they're told. Yeah. Or they make up something and believe that. Mm-hmm. Or they believe anything they hear on Oprah. Yeah.

Just anything to shut out the mystery and stop them from thinking. You know, what scientists want is more mystery. It's the opposite. It was a whole model of all. Yeah, sure. And it all culminates in teaching how to eat fire. It's all about fire.

Okay. It's the fact of, does it take away the mystery to explain the physics of fire eating, doing that whole thing? And Feynman saw us accidentally. We were playing a hundred-seat theater in Hollywood before anybody knew who we were.

And he introduced himself as Richard Feynman and almost passed out. I didn't know how big a deal he was, but the deal I thought he was was enough. And he said, I mean, I made cry saying it now. Feynman said, your final monologue is what I've been trying to explain to my wife for 20 years. Oh, wow.

And I never got her to understand it. Oh. And he said she understood it tonight with you eating that fire. He said it's the most perfect description of science ever. Oh. And then three weeks later, Feynman showed up with eight Nobel Prize winners. He signed up. And he came up afterwards and said, this may be the largest concentration of Nobel Prize winners in a magic show ever.

In a magic show. And none of them can figure it. out the magic. No, not. Fool them, don't, don't fool them. But he said that that description, that monologue

was what he was trying to say. That it was not, it's not closing down mysteries. And there's, every time you read this anti-athist stuff of scientists think

they have all the answers. You just go, what are you talking about? Religion people think they have all the answers. Exactly. And you don't even have a path to all the answers.

Yeah, we don't even know what the questions are. You don't even have a path there. I mean, if you solve every single thing you're working on right now, you can't even measure that you've gotten closer. Yeah, absolutely. What's really important, it seems to me, in talking about this to members of the public and sometimes politicians,

is that this isn't always rocket science. The details are very complicated models, but the basic physics of energy flow is pretty straightforward. That's exactly right. And what's surprising is that it works. I mean, maybe not surprising, But when you see that these basic physics predictions work, there's good reason to trust them. Yeah, I mean, the basic idea of climate change has been around for 100 years.

Yeah, I mean, it's just the energy in, energy out. It's not much different. I mean, no, absolutely not. And indeed, you know, people sometimes forget our neighboring planet Venus, right? Which is very similar to the Earth in size and is about 460 degrees Celsius on its surface. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Super hot. Why? It turns out most people, think because it's closer to the sun. And it's true. Venus gets about twice as much solar energy as the Earth does, because it is closer to the sun. But because it's so bright and reflective on the surface, if Venus had the same atmosphere as the Earth, it would be substantially colder than the Earth,

which is interesting. It is interesting. The reason Venus is so hot, you know, it's 460 Celsius. It's credible hot. It's because it has an atmosphere almost 100 times thicker than the Earth. and 97% of that atmosphere is carbon dioxide. Yeah, okay. So, you know, the greenhouse effect as a, as a phenomenon is really not in question. And it was relevant at the early history of the earth. The earth would have been, I mean, the sun has been getting brighter, was 15% less bright to the early history of the Earth.

And so we should have been frozen except the carbon. And then there was a greenhouse effect that preserved liquid water on the earth in the early history of the earth. The carbon dioxide density was something like 10,000 times what it is now in the very earliest moments of the Earth or something? Probably not that thick, but, and there may have been some additional gases as well. But here's the, but the general idea is there's actually a remarkable chemical reaction. So there's a chemical reaction between carbon dioxide, water, which makes carbonic acid, and then rock.

Yes. And that reaction, igneous rock, volcanic rock. And that reaction yields, essentially it's an acid-based reaction. So carbonic acid is an acid, and it reacts with, you know, and it reacts with the, you know, with igneous rock and basically makes calcium carbonate or chalk or limestone. Stores the carbon. And so essentially that chemical reaction takes carbon dioxide out of the air and converts it to limestone on the ocean floor.

Yes. What's amazing about that, so that reaction, because that reaction is temperature dependent, that becomes a thermostat. So when the earth gets too hot, that reaction speeds up and CO2 is drawn down. And when that reaction goes too slowly, volcanoes naturally, Now remember, volcanoes are only putting out about 1% of what we're burning from fossil fuels. So it's not like volcanoes are a danger. But they're doing it all the time.

And the CO2 coming out of volcanoes is balanced by what is going back down with calcium carbonate. It's this remarkable balance of. Until life evolved. Now, what we're doing to it is really extraordinary. Yeah. We're perturbing it by a factor of 100. Yeah, that's important. I think that, you know, when people say...

And the Earth will take care of it, right? Again, these chemical weathering reactions, this reaction between water and rock and CO2 will happen. But... But on geological... But it will take about 100 to 200,000 years. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So it's just not fast enough. Yeah. So let me start. In fact, there's a picture on here. Pluto, planet or not? Planet. Me too. Now, why do you think it's a planet?

Because my daughter did her grade four project on Pluto. And I thought, there's no way I'm going to make her go back to grade four and redo that. But why is the planet to you? No, you know, there's a bit of a story here. But, you know, we have undergone this revolution in both planetary science and astrophysics. Sure, sure. That you go back a generation, you go back to, say, 1990. And all we knew of were the nine planets of our solar system.

Sure. And then the Kuiper Belt was discovered, the third zone of our solar system. And not only did we find lots of small, primordial, what we call planetesimals out of what planets were made from. But we started finding the cohort population for Pluto, other dwarf planets. And it freaked some people out because when the world was quaint and our knowledge was limited and we only knew of nine planets,

you could know all their names. Yeah, exactly. And then as the numbers grew, believe it or not, scientists, people who you think would respect data, started to say, oh, this will tarnish our reputation. You know, school children won't be able to remember it. And the International Astronomical Union freaked out in 2006 and said, no, we're going to keep the number at eight. That's it.

You know what I said in response? We're going to go back to eight states now? Yeah, exactly. I mean, are we going to limit the periodic table to stop at Borrelium? Yeah, well, I mean, the point is, and this is the point, one of the reasons I ask you is that people say, what defines a planet? And of course, it's a really vague. So actually, there's a really good physical definition. It's called the geophysical planet definition.

And it's very simple. It says a planet is an object in space that's large enough to be rounded by its own self-gravity. I did an experiment once at the Rose Planetarium. Neil Tyson had me there, and we're talking about the same subject. We set this up in advance. Oh, good, because I've hit Neil about Pluto many times whenever I'm there.

Yeah, well, Neil's selling a buck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this was in 1999, and we got to talking about this, and then we had set it up. I had his ushers pass out a blank sheet of paper to every person in this 1,100-seat theater. And we said, draw a picture of a planet. And then we collected them, and we counted the number that were round and the number that were squares, triangles, or other shapes. 1100 to zero. Yeah, exactly.

I was going to say that. Well, you know, it's interesting because I've heard people say, well, it's not just that they're round, but they also must control gravitationally sort of sweep out the region around them, be the dominant gravitational object. And the bottom line is, and one of the reason I want to bring it up is it reminded me of when I've worried about this silly debate about whether Pluto was a planet or not, and as I say, for those of us as old as me and you, it's going to be a planet because we grew up with it that way, was Richard Feynman, actually. There's a story when Feynman was young.

His father used to take him for walks in the woods and, you know, talk about nature. And they'd be looking at these birds and he'd say, well, you know, what's the name of that bird? And his father said to them, the name doesn't matter. We don't learn anything by the label of a bird. What you learn about, what's important to know

is how the bird behaves, how it goes for food and all of the aspects of its behavior. That tells you something, but the name is unimportant. Right. But, you know, science is, ultimately reductionist. Yeah. Right?

We try to take a large number of disparate facts and make sense out of them. And categorization is important. Now, about this gravitational criteria, we don't require that stars control their zones in galaxies,

for example. Nowhere else in astronomy, is there any definition that was specifically engineered to limit the number of objects to something that you can memorize? Yeah. It's very anti-scientific

if you think about it. But it is important that we as planetary scientists, and I know you're an astrophysicist and physicist, but in planetary science, we need to understand which objects are and are not the central topic of our field. Sure, sure. And we want a definition that works. Now, the interesting thing is after the 2006 IAU vote, the press completely bought it, and then the textbooks changed and teachers started teaching

eight planets, Pluto's not a planet kind of thing, neither of the other dwarf planets. Planetary scientists more or less ignored that. If you go to planetary science meetings where people are giving talks, they'll use the word planet, not just to describe Pluto as a matter of course and the other dwarf planets,

but even large satellites that orbit other planets. So from a planetary science standpoint, the objects that are planets it doesn't matter what they orbit, what they're near. Your zip code, your location has nothing to do with it. It's the intrinsics of the object. The same way that a biologist doesn't care to categorize a given being in its species,

whether it's in a herd or a flock or owned by itself. And Phil Metzker, who's a professor at the University of Central Florida, Phil did a paper yesterday last year. Fascinating paper. He did. He used some machine learning. techniques to look at all the planetary science literature since 2006 and determine how many papers written by planetary scientists are using the IAU definition. Do you know what he found? None.

He looked at some, I may have the number wrong, he looked at tens of thousands of research papers. He found the only papers that used the definition were papers about the definition. And that every research paper in every journal uses the geophysical planet definition maybe without saying it because it's useful. Because it's physical, that's the point. And the IAU definition is just not useful. There's a couple of things wrong with the concept of American exceptionalism.

The one is the facts. Yeah. Okay. The other is it's not American. Every great power has had the same exceptionalism. Britain, when it was virtually genocidal all over the world, was praising itself on its magnificence. Sure. I mean, France had the civilized mission while the French minister of war was calling on the army to exterminate the population of Algeria.

If we had records from Matilla the Hun, he would probably be just overwhelmed with good. The fact that every country has thought that they've been the unique source of goodness and, you know, because of their powers. There's nothing exceptional about American exceptional. Well, but since it isn't exceptional, what about is the reverse? You give me examples. Are other countries, I mean, other countries are trying to assume and lead impede American economic progress?

And what's the response here? How can they impede American economic? Well, I guess, I mean, let me just, let me give you, I'm not an economist. My ignorance is going to show here, but I'm assuming, for example. You should know better than to judge, except specialist judgments. Yeah, I know, exactly. But, I mean, to some extent, China. can impede American progress by being able to produce the same goods and services much more cheaply.

But who's producing them in China? U.S. corporations who want a function work in China. If U.S. corporations don't like Chinese rules, they can invest somewhere else. By the way, there was an article in today's New York Times. It said exactly that, right? The response to some of the pressure of Trump, one might say is, I don't know if you saw this article, but it was basically saying there's some impact to what's going on. and some companies are stopping having made things in China,

but what they're doing is not bringing back to the United States. You're just finding another place to do it. But the idea that it's unfair for China to impose technology transfer restrictions or partial ownership restrictions on, say, Boeing is not a question of national policy. If Boeing doesn't like that, nobody's forcing them to invest there. Yeah. Okay. So what right do we have to punish them for trying to do that?

Quite apart from the fact that the whole history, that's how we develop, how England develop, how everybody developed. I think this is very in, and it's just my theory. It's probably not true again. There's a difference between when I'm making like afterlife, where I'm trying to create a world and there's words and pictures and a story to get people in. And I think that's the most fundamental thing. we have a storytelling.

Sure. You can have all the avatars and CGIs in the world, but it had come down to one person telling another person what happened to them. And that's the most human it gets, okay? That's never, that's what it's all. That's where empathy starts, where caring starts, where intrigue. That is it, right? Yeah.

So I do that and I make it and I put music on it and, you know, you manipulate emotions and you take them on a joke, and you're surprised them and all that, right? And then you do your best. guess and it's what you wanted, I get fine led it, and if it works out like I wanted it, I can't fail. And I put it out there and there's nothing I can do about it. They tell me if they liked it or they didn't. Stand-up's different. Stand-up is slightly more like a science because it either works or it doesn't. So I go out there every night and I hear the laugh. So I keep that bit. I don't hear the laugh,

lose that bit or change it. So eventually I've created this perfect beast. It's natural selection. It is. The audience is the world. And they've chosen the bits that work for them. And audience is the same everywhere. Interesting, really. Yeah, the biggest, whether it's a Friday or a Monday,

whether it's a hall or a theatre, makes more difference to where that 1,000, 10,000 people are. Because when you get that many people, that's a sample. Yeah, yeah. So if they can understand what you're saying, right? Yeah. Yeah. They're the same. I could do, I could play Chicago.

one night and Liverpool the next and I could do a readout of the laughs and the gas exactly the same. That's fascinating. That is interesting. Yeah. And I've, well, you know, when I lecture, I mean, humor is an essential part of for me, it keeps me going. So when I'm lecturing or writing, humor is a big part of it.

And what I was going to say is I notice, I don't know if people are understanding me when I'm in Russia, say, giving a lecture. But the way I figure out find out is by making a joke. Yeah. And then you know, because of course, then there's like three-second delay. Because they all have to laugh at the same time. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. They can be nodding and pretending to get you. I agree. It's like, it's, that's when you tell you. It's like if you're not listening to a teacher and they say, so what do you think? And you have to go, I wasn't listening. Yeah. If I make a joke, yeah.

Yeah. Let me give my opinion of art. Okay. I think an artist, artist task, is not to capture that which is, evident to everyone for being extraordinary. They should capture things that we forgot to notice or never noticed at all. Okay.

Who is Paul Revere? Who is he? Who is he? Well, he's famous in American history, that Paul Revere, for his ride, which he, which he went not, I was waiting, I know you're not. famous in American history.

He was, who, who knows in any war that has, in any war that has ever been a, pewter, pewter, who knows in any war that has ever been fought, the name of the person

who told everybody the enemy is coming. Do you know that name of that person in any war that has ever been fought? No, no. But you know Paul Revere. Why? Because a poet wrote a poem about it.

Yeah, okay. He took a... A nighttime ride of. Can you name generals from that war other than General Washington? No. No, you can't, but you name Paul Revere. I can name the British ones because I grew up in Canada. Okay.

So the poet... Now, I don't know if the Midnight rival Paul Revere is considered high poetry, but it's memorable poetry. Yeah, okay. How about Joyce Carroll? I mean, Joyce Kilmer. Joyce Kilmer. Mm-hmm.

What's her most famous poem? It's about a tree. Yeah, okay. A tree. Is it about some famous event, some general, some battle, some, some, no, it's about a tree. And you read that poem, you never look at a tree the same way again, and you've been walking by them every day of your life. Yeah, so, so you're right, but that's the, look, I think I say it a different way. So therefore, that's what I'm saying.

I'm, my, my, what I, I see, one of my tasks is to help people celebrate things about, the world, about the universe, about laws, the physics, that they either take for granted or never knew we're there, and they walk away from it having a new appreciation of their world. Well, look, and that's a... I'm sorry to scream at you again. It's okay. You make me scream at you all the time, and I love it.

I know you mean, well. I mean, you were the first woman who was the editor of the opinion pages, right? Can I tell you about that? Yeah, good. I was going to ask you about it. This is a thing that when I go out. and talk about women's stuff. But I like to talk about,

there was a generation of women who came right before me who went to court, who fought in this company too, who found that there was no pattern, there was no way forward, there were no women editors, there was no way a woman could move into the top,

the most exciting, the most profitable parts of the company. And they went to court, and they filed suits, and the company responded, but when the company responded, they were never the ones who got the reward because they were the pains in the neck who had gotten all the trouble.

It was people like me who were walking in the door right then, who had not pissed anybody off because we were just in college, who got all those advantages. And there is a generation of women who, you know about the great leaders like Gloria Stein and Benickford-Den, but there are all these women who nobody talks about who just filed suit. and who never got the stuff themselves

and who filed suits for pensions. And the people coming into the workplace then got equal pension opportunities, but they never got their pensions. It happens all over the place. So it just, you want every time you talk about this stuff to talk about these people who opened up all the doors but never got to walk through them themselves.

And then, so you view yourself as a beneficiary. Absolutely. Yeah, which I assume is a, I mean, for many movements, for the civil rights movement, I suppose it's, I mean, Obama would say the same thing, right? I mean, at least he said the same thing. I think it's useful if you're a person who, I mean, I got to be editorial page editor in large part because of the people who were conceivably qualified to do it. I was the woman. And they wanted that to happen. They wanted that to happen.

Did that bother you? No. And it doesn't, I mean, what bothers. you is when you feel like, oh my God, nobody thinks I can do the job. Well, that's what worries me. When you say, when you're always referred to as the first editor of the editorial page, it doesn't, you know, that implicitly suggests, first female editor of the editorial page, that people are asking that question.

I got to tell you, when this came up, Hal Raines, who was the editor before me, who was moving downstairs to become the executive editor, came in to see me and said, we've talked about this, and we think that you should take my job. And I was not really in the line for it. And I was a columnist. I was really enjoying that. And I said, gee, how. I remember thinking how sad I was that you were leaving as a column. I was going to happen. I was sad, too. And I said, how? I don't know. And he said, look at it this way. Look at where you are on the course of the history of the world. There are not many first women jobs left out there.

And unless you think you're going to be baseball commissioner, this is the one you take to be the first woman to do something. And I thought, yeah, that's cool. I could be the first woman. So that was an argument for me. I've always wanted to have on this program an omnivorous intellect. And the definition of the word intellectual, people may not realize, but in my opinion, you are an intellectual. We'll try and display that. I believe the best definition of intellectual I've ever heard is someone who's willing to change their mind with information. Isn't that a nice definition? It is a great.

And it's important that did not just be changed their mind. With information. With information, which means you don't need the emotion. Yeah. You can do it with information. And that's a separate skill. Being able to change your mind is a different skill than changing your mind. By the way, you know, I wonder whether you found it hard to play.

In afterlife, you play someone who speaks his mind without a filter. How on earth did you get to... Well, you say that. You say that. But actually, I don't speak my mind. I know I bite my tongue every 30 seconds, because... I'm not a psychopath and I worry about the consequences. So, you know, when I'm mugged, I hand over the money.

Yeah, yeah. Because they might have a knife. Yeah, yeah, sure. Or you might be with someone who get hurt or they know where I live. But, you know, obviously, Tony, my character, he's got nothing to lose. So he goes, bring it on. Yeah. You know, so I think the comedy and the drama comes from us living vicariously through his freedom that we haven't got.

because, you know, we do worry about people's feelings and we do worry about being right and honest. And I think as I go on, as a writer or a comedian, all I care about now, again, the funny is still first. Yeah, sure. But next is, am I being as honest as I could be? That's interesting. Am I really striped?

I've just got to be honest and brave. Am I being as honest and brave as I could be? Because that's all that matters now. It is. Well, I guess do you think because it's easier, because you have such great success, it gives you more opportunity to be honest and brave, then would you have been more afraid of it

when you were breaking into the field? You could say the other way that, you know, you've got more to lose and you're a famous person, you can, everything, everyone goes for you. But so what I try and do is try and make what I say defendable and, you know, bulletproof. Now I've got to worry about what I say being defundable. offendable in 10 years time with people going back and finding historic tweets and ruined people's

career. But I don't care. I love the fact, you know, that one of the things I admire, and you're in a position where you can do that. When I, you know, when I'm associated with an institution like university, I can't do that. And that you, you respond to ridiculous tweets and you, you know, and you just say, you say what he's been said. And, and without, it seems to me, without fear of later on being deep profile, deep platform for having said something. Well, I just think that I don't want to be beholden to anyone. Yeah, yeah. I don't work for anyone.

I don't. Actually, tell you, that's one. I was motivated. It was actually you in a way that made me think about doing this podcast and working just for myself through this because it gives you so much more freedom to be able to do the things you want to do. Of course. Because you're not beholden anyone.

because I respect the law. Yeah. And I respect honesty. And, you know, with all these, there's, there's already a load of caveats to freedom of speech. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I agree with libel and slander laws. I agree with those. I agree with protecting children.

I believe with the watershed. I agree with food additives. I agree, you know, I agree with all the things. What I don't agree with is you shouldn't say something in case it hurts someone's feeling somewhere. Well, fuck that. Yeah, well, the whole point in which we try and explain. I try to, lately in the United States is more and more under attack. Unfortunately, it's the right wing that are at least defending it a little bit.

It's an ocean freedom of speech is designed to protect speech you don't like. You don't have to respect speech you like. It's designed to respect to someone that you say, that's horrible. If you don't believe in respecting the freedom of speech for people who say things you don't agree with, you don't agree with freedom of speech. And it's this nonsense that I did a tweet recently that I said, I'm a typical lefty, liberal, Snowflake, champagne, socialist kind of guy, anti-racist, anti-sex, and yet when I defend freedom of speech, I'm suddenly all right. Yeah, when did that happen?

Yeah. It's crazy. Well, but it is crazy, and it worries me in the States that the people who, because of this safe zone issue, the fact that people don't want to be uncomfortable, there, in fact, there was a U.S. university, I heard this. My wife was telling me this, that a speaker came in, and he was speaking on due process and freedom of speech. And they created a safe zone so people didn't have to hear. And I say, but that's hurting the left because the rights, you know, Trump, it's like a monkey on a

typewriter. Every one, he does something right every now. And then he actually issued an executive order, which is without teeth, but nevertheless saying that if universities didn't respect freedom of speech, they wouldn't get federal funding. But it's, but it's sad when it has to be Trump that says that. But it's, yeah, it's crazy. that it's colleges, that is the seat of education and progress. And that, that, that's odd that it's there. You'd think that they'd have their, you'd think they'd have their backs against the wall with flaming torches saying, keep away with what we, you think there'd be the last

bastion of that, and they're not. It's odd. And it's, and it's actually art. Yeah. That's, that's, you know. Have you, do college, did you do college campuses or, you know, on your, wouldn't stand-up tours or anything like that? Did you ever do that?

I don't, but that's because we don't really. have them like you do in America. I mean, you've never been in a situation where... Rupert said, well, you can't come. We don't want you. You're just too... No, I don't think anywhere's... I mean, I've played a few colleges,

but I think they're private theatres that are in. I haven't walked into a student union and said, I want to tell you some truths. I don't do... I think people think that of me, like, I run into churches and going, it's all pollux. I don't do that. I don't care what they do.

I don't care. It's something of a piece on, people pose on you that you respond. Yeah, but when you come to see one of my gigs, that's my church. Yeah, yeah. You know, this is like, your only choice is leaving. Yeah, yeah, really. And I think that, and in art, you know, that is your only choice. You know, the only form of censorship is your right not to listen.

Yeah, it's cool. It's amazing when people come to hear you or come to read you and they say, that's offensive. And you say, why do you bother, you know? Yeah, you know. Actually, there was a situation that happened to be here in the UK, probably the most terrifying thing I've done. It was a very nice group here asked me to do a debate on atheism versus Islam. And they were very respectful of me.

But one of the things was that people told me they were going to segregate it between male and female. I said, you're not going to do that. And they said, no, we're not going to do that. And then I went in and there was a separate door for men, a separate door of women, separate. And I just went and I said, I'm not going to do this. And I'm going to walk out. And they put a lot of publicity. So I walked out, and of course, they had me come back in.

Mixed him up a bit. Well, and I said, you've got to mix them up. And some kids moved, and there was a big, as always, there was someone on a camera. And the good news was that this got in the papers and actually ended up this group. This was at the University College London, I think. It was at a public, it was at a secular environment,

and they eventually got told they couldn't do that anymore. But what happened was at the end of it, there was a question period. And there were a bunch of women in Berkers. And one of them was very upsetting. Why did you force me to sit? Well, it's really, it's particularly serious, I think, for Americans who think that, I mean, who become complacent about nuclear weapons, but think, well, probably the most dangerous place where nuclear weapons might be it's India, Pakistan, where there really are two states that

really are in war that really hate each other, that both are nuclear states. And what is important to point out is that it's not isolated, that a mere use of 200 nuclear weapons in Indian and Pakistan will produce a climate change that will probably kill a billion people in terms of the agriculture over the course of a decade. So there is no, it's not as if a local, there's not even an option. You can't think about it. And meanwhile, the Trump administration is escalating the threat. The so-called low-yield nuclear weapons.

I mean, you know, people can think about this. You can't even imagine what's in their minds. I suppose you're the opponent and somebody launches a missile which you say has only low-yield nuclear weapons on it. How do they know? They're going to react by massive violence and you're done. Yeah, no, I mean, the idea of usable nuclear weapons

is a fallacy. And it's unfortunately the notion that if they're small enough, They're indistinguishable from, we have to overcome that. But that's the, as far as I can see, that's the myth that's happening now. And that's why the Ellsberg book, I think, is important because it points out, people have become complacent because we've had 75 years of not using them against civilian populations. But it took a look at the record. Yeah.

We've come. So close. So close. So close. It's frightening. A wonderful book about how close we've come to domestically and internationally. And it's not going. That luck is not going to last forever.

I mean, case after case, we've come within a couple of minutes of using. Maybe because it evolved over a long time, thousand years, perhaps, as you point out, in one way or another, the Adam of Eve story is so pervasive throughout early human writing or talking or storytelling. But do you think that those profound issues resided there or was Adam and Eve just a simple way of explaining something that people just had no possibility of understanding at the time?

And let's just classify it and get it out of the way. I mean, you ask a question in effect that's about the nature of myth and all myths. I mean, would equally apply to Oedipus? Sure. Or to innumerable other myths that I believe and you believe don't have divine origin that they were made up by people, and then they begin to circulate. If you're asking, is every thought

that's been had about Oedipus or about Adam and Eve already in the head of the first person who circulated that story? Of course not. It would be true of Shakespeare or Mozart or anyone else. I mean, but the human beings don't, our lives are, at least in the traces that we leave behind and not limited to, this particular moment or this particular identity and the fantasy that it should all be in the head of this single individual as a kind of quasi-theological fantasy.

I mean, what happens is that we survive as a species because we've developed cultures that keep circulating objects. But the fact that it didn't all happen in the head of the person who came up with us doesn't mean that the questions are not real. or even that they're not in the story. It just has a slightly naive account of what it takes to create something or how much is conscious in what one does. It's not an accident in Shakespeare's case that he invented virtually nothing. He's always ripping somebody off. But the ripping off is the circulating of stories,

the little salt story that the third daughter who says, I love you as much as salt, that goes back a tremendously long time. Shakespeare does a version of it in King Lear. So does that make the original story? Does that mean that it's less powerful? Yes. Less profound?

On the contrary, to me, the circulation actually is part of the profundity. And it goes back to something you said earlier about. You read these things and you realize that the same problems. Well, that's true, but it's it's, it's, it's, it's, It's true that we experience reading the works by dead people often, that if they matter at all to us, we think, oh, my God, this person has written a letter directly to me. Yeah, yeah. And that's part of the thrill of the survival of anything from the past that actually is reaching your power. Trump is not my favorite person, as you know.

Yeah. But on North Korea, basically, I think he's doing the right things. And he's attacked for it on all sides. whenever he does something more or less right, why, I don't know, maybe he's shooting arrows randomly. Monkeys on a typewriters every now and then they get it right. Whatever the reasons are. But let's take a look at North Korea on just the recent history. April 27th, I think it was, 2017, the two Koreas met and negotiated and issued a very serious document.

historic document, Panmenjum Declaration. Very serious. In fact, a good article about it in foreign affairs of all places. For the first time, they not only made rhetorical commitments towards denuclearization, towards integration. And as foreign affairs pointed out, made concrete proposals here. We'll do it step by step. And then it said the two Koreas, we'll do this. on their own accord, crucially.

On their own accord, meaning leave us alone. We know who they're talking to. Yeah. Okay. Trump is the one leading figure for whatever reason, who's more or less observed this. The Singapore summit for which Trump was bitterly denounced by the liberals, the conservatives, by everyone.

He basically said, well, you guys go ahead on your own accord. Yeah. He even took steps towards reducing what he recognized to be a provocative military operations, American military operations in South Korea. Remember what's going on. And these operations, the U.S. is flying nuclear. capable aircraft bombers right at the border of a country that the U.S. wiped out, literally wiped out back in the early 50s.

I mean, by the time the war settled into a kind of a stalemate, what was happening was the U.S. who was bombing massively. They couldn't find any more targets. You read the official Air Force history. They describe how, well, we're nothing to bomb. We'll just bomb the dams. which is a huge war crime.

Yeah. And then it discusses how it's interesting to read, how euphoric they were about bombing this huge dam and a massive flood of waters, swamping all this area and Asians. A little bit of racism. They depend on rice and they're fleeing and they're screaming and so on. This is the country that we're now flying nuclear-on bombers right on their border.

So yes, it is provocative. and Trump said, well, let's cut back some of this. I mean, I'm not saying what he said was wonderful, but it's basically in the right direction. Well, except what he says and what he does are not always exactly the same. I mean, and, you know, the one thing, it's interesting to me that after all this bluster, the foreign policy is somewhat coming back to what might have been considered more realistic. I mean, the last dialogue broke off because once again, the United States said, unless you totally disarm, we're not going to reduce actions,

which just seems to me to be completely unrealistic. Well, that's, I think, you know, I don't know the inside story, but it looks like Pompeo and Bolton. Yeah. I mean, it seems as if Trump's instinct was to say, well, go ahead, he was kind of pushed. And remember, he's under attack from all sides. The liberals attack him even more sharply than as sharply as the hawks.

But as I say, of all the major political actors here, he seems on this issue to be the one who's closest to being what I would regard as taking the same position, letting the two Koreas proceed on their own accord as they've... But I want to ask, you know, your brother influenced you there. I think you said your brother was the funniest person you'd ever... Growing up, he was the first person I saw saying things undermining things undermining. societal norms being being funny and irreverent and impolite and I thought and you know and it worked you know yeah sure um and you know the first person you answer back to was your parents and he answered back you know he got sent to bed yeah I remember thinking no he was right yeah and I thought oh you they lost the argument they lost the argument okay he said a few truths yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly

they could they had no recourse but like jesus yeah that's right yeah I'll go to bed yeah um So, yeah, I certainly... Did he... Do you think that... I guess the answer is obvious, but that had an impact on you? Well, you know, everything does, yeah. My older brother was sort of quiet and smart,

and that had an influence on me. I quite liked the idea of academia from there. My sister... I felt like I was an experiment because my sister taught me to read when I was three. I remember the teachers showing other parents that making me read like I was... performing monkey in this school, right?

And so they all had an influence on me. And I think that's because being the youngest has an influence. I was going to say, the fact you're the youngest. Oh. Are more comedians the youngest, the youngest? I don't know if that's true. You have to jump around to be heard. Yeah, you have to be a cliche, but there must be something in it.

Yeah, yeah. And your boundaries have already been pushed a little bit. Yeah. You know, you get an easier life, the life's a bowl of cherries, but you just have to be heard. Yeah. And you sort of see the absurdity of life by watching your older brothers interact. with your parents and stuff like that. And sometimes it can go far too far the other way because there was a danger that I was

almost like an only child. Yeah. Because 11 years. How old much older to your sister? So it goes 11, 13, 14. Oh, wow. I remember asking my mum when I was about 13, why are my brothers and sister so much older than me?

And she said, because you were a mistake. Great. I just laughed. Honesty. Honesty is good. Yeah, yeah. I wanted to say, okay, if we're doing something, they're all a mistake. Yeah, yeah.

They were all a mistake. Yeah. You say that? I've seen the wedding pictures. It's not just pandering. It's really, there's a reason for it, as you point out. Yeah, yeah. And it can trigger interest and spawn further investigation.

When you say you practiced, did you? I looked in a mirror, and I had, what you have is you have someone sort of bark out to you. Yeah. Single word of anything in your field. Yeah. Black hole. Saturn. Yeah.

The sun. Yeah. Big bang. And we can try it, right? Say anything in my field. Say anything in your field. Dust. Dust.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, hang on, hang on. So, the regions of the universe where gas clouds become so cold that atoms come together and make molecules. And molecules come together and make dust. And these are atoms forged in stars that have given their lives beforehand. And this dust ultimately makes planets and lines. So we are star dust. Okay, good. That's a soundbite.

That's a great soundbite. And they would use that entire three sentences. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, whoa, I never knew that. Oh, my gosh, that's what happens. And you get a little education in there. Adams become molecules, molecules become something we call dust. So that's, so I practice that.

And I said, well, let me think. Well, you take some hydrogen. No, that's not relevant. They're not going to remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The sound bites should contain that which they would have remembered the next Well, when we're talking about the Equal Rights Amendment going through

and everybody was passing it, they couldn't wait, and then suddenly, right before there were enough states to vote to put in the Constitution, it came to a screeching halt with a movement that was not really about the Equal Rights Amendment, that was just about all the women who had been raised to believe that they had a certain role that was honored the housewife, the glories of the housewife in the 50s and the 60s on all TV programs. She was the heroine woman and that was what you wanted to be.

And you were in all the magazines. There are pictures of you doing your cleaning and stuff. And that was the thing. And suddenly, almost it seemed like overnight, everybody is saying you're a total failure, only a housewife. Yeah. Only a housewife. Oh, my Lord, what the heck is going on here? And there was a great response.

a great kind of reaction against it. And it stopped the Equal Rights Amendment at that point in time. Interesting. But then there was also an equal reaction, which I think is continuing today, which is the sense that you talk about and that you were a failure if you couldn't do it all. Suddenly you had this opportunity. And at that time, of course, when these opportunities were open, there was one thing that was really important you mentioned is no child care. There was never these opportunities were created without the infrastructure that could support those opportunities. And it's very interesting that even now we're just beginning to have a big national debate about early childhood education and whether families should simply have the right to quality early childhood care and early childhood education, which is the thing you need to call it, by the way. It's not daycare. We want early childhood education for all. And that's the thing. And it's, I think, going to be one of the big issues and the big social issues that we're dealing with. It's certainly if a Democrat is elected, I can't think of anything that pushes right down to the core life patterns of so many people.

Again, the United States is, well, frankly, is behind many other countries in terms of social, many social programs. And, you know, I grew up in Canada. I've lived in Australia. And I was kind of shocked to discover and claimed about my university when one of my executive assistant got pregnant the first time. And I saw that she, got something like three weeks paid leave, and she could take another three weeks from, you know, from her sick leave or something and use that up. Other countries provide six months or a year. It's a total, from the point of view of ensuring the ability of people to effectively carry on long-term careers, having three weeks, it just seems to me to be an automatic non-starter. Well, everything about having children is not built into the system. I mean, it's, in,

And theory is great. But, yeah, and people want to have it all. Yeah. And economically, women presume they're going to have to have the working part of it for a great point of their lives. But it's just that nobody has been willing to do that. There was a couple of grand moments in Congress when it almost happened. And then just at the very last second, something fell apart and didn't happen.

Do you think that what we see and learn from exoplanets will illuminate and help us, understand the evolution of life here on Earth? Well, I think we've got to do both. First, I think that the people think about the horizon of life on Earth, which is, of course, a problem that even the most firmly ground-based biologists cares about, they ought to be able to tell us, was it a rare fluke or not? And also, was there something really special about the DNA-R-N-A base that we have? Or could there be other quite different forms of life?

So I think we'll know that in 10-20 years. And I also think that we will have some clues as to whether the biosphere is elsewhere. We may find something under the ice of Enceladus or even on Mars, but we will, I think, with the next generation of telescopes, have some spectral evidence about some of the Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars, which will tell us, you know, are they green, is evidence for non-equilibrium atmosphere, etc.

And so I think within 20 years anyway, it's not absurd to think we will have some evidence as to whether there is a biosphere on another planet. Whether we're unique. I can't imagine that the answer won't be yes, but do you agree? Well, I think I bet that there will be other biospheres. It may be more than 20 years before we are convinced of that. But, of course, whether those biospheres evolve into anything like what's happened here, anything interesting.

Certainly anything intelligent is quite a separate question. Yeah, that's a, yeah, because we're here by, I mean, there's no evidence that intelligence is an evolutionary puritive or, or, I mean, we took four and four billion years on Earth before we get this kind of intelligence. So yeah, I agree. That's a, that may be much more special. Yes. But, but it's hard to imagine, given that the, at least to me, given that life evolved on Earth about it almost as soon as the laws of physics could have allowed. And that the fundamental constituents, water, organic molecules and sunlight and energy is kind of, of ubiquitous throughout the galaxy. I have a hard time believing that life itself, that kind of life itself is ubiquitous. Logically, it could be, it was unique here, but it does seem unlikely, I agree. You knew you wanted to do science earlier. Oh, yeah. Why? Age nine, I was called by the universe. You were called by the universe? Yeah, first visit here to the Hayden Planet. I just said divinely. I just said the universe. You put the divinity in the universe. That's well I like to. It's one of my divine bits. So my first visit to New York City's

Hayden Planetarium. Is it? And that was one. That's where our office right now. We're recording this. It's a story that I think plays better in a small town. You know, small town kid goes away, comes back and runs the stuff. Here I tell that to people they say, yeah, and your point is it's not as impressive in a big town. But a part of me is delighted, even enchanted by the duty that I have to bring to others what educators and scientists of your have brought to me when I was up and coming. Well, look, I mean, I think that notion, I mean, there's various people who are as renowned science communicators as you. And so with great power comes great responsibility.

But was it really, I mean... Just a script for a superhero movie? What are we doing here? I don't know what, I don't know having to figure out who yet, but we'll worry about that. But you need a deeper voice. With great power comes great responsibility. You've got the voice. There we go.

Thank you. But so was it a... really a transformative? Was it really an epiphany coming here? Or was it, I mean, when you were growing up before? It was epiphantic. Yes. I'm in the dome and the lights dim, the stars come out, and I'd only seen the stars from the Bronx. Oh, which can you see? A dozen of them. Yeah, yeah. And so the stars come out in the dome of the planetarium. And think about it, it's kind of, planetarium experiences. We probably all remember our first time in a planetary dome. And in a way, it was the world's first virtual reality space. Just think about it.

Absolutely, yeah, yeah, absolutely. You're transformed, the room disappears, and you're just floating in space. And I was just awestruck, starstruck, I should say. And that star-struckness stayed with me. And at first I thought it was a hoax. It was like, there aren't this many stars. I know. I have evidence, I have Bronx evidence, that there aren't this many stars.

And I learned later that that is how many, there's more than that even. Yeah, yeah. And it was not the space program, even though these years occurred in the late 1960s for me. Yeah. Yeah, I loved that we went to the moon, but that had no forces operating on my ambitions to study the universe. I knew enough then that the moon is like sitting in front of our noses. And I cared about, you know, the big bang and galaxies and quasars.

Wow. Okay. So that was on a scale far beyond just joyriding in orbit, you know, 200 miles above Earth's surface or even the moon that is far to our spaceships, but close in the universe. One of the things that was happening in the field of learning and memory at the time is that people were working with very simple stimuli. They would have people memorize a list of words and learn a list of words and try to remember them after different periods of times. Every now and then they used stimuli that maybe were a little different. But they were very simple, sometimes nonsense syllables.

They were trying to have them be as simple as possible. And when I started my experiments, I wanted them to more closely match the real world. So I started showing people films of auto accidents. And those were my stimuli. And other scientists were not doing that way. So in that sense, that was a little different. Oh, yeah, sure. But the parent, but the.

Am I correct that? By the way, in those experiments, you could get people to just to get, and maybe it's a precursor to what would happen later, was it in those experiments where you could get people to infer how fast someone was going by describing an auto accident in different terms? Well, you're asking a question that uses a loaded word for how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other versus how fast were the cars going when they hit each other. And we showed that people said the cars were going faster was smash than hit.

So it was already an early indication that you could influence what people thought, by the way, by just giving them loaded words. Yes, but my first thought was I was looking at leading questions. And I could see that the leading questions would affect the answer. Then I showed that those leading questions could affect the answers to totally different questions that you put to a person often much later. So if I came back to you after I'd asked you the smash question a week later and say, by the way, a few more questions for you. Did you see any broken glass? People were twice as likely to say, yes, I saw broken glass. There wasn't any if we had used the word smash versus hit.

So then I began to see these leading questions as just a vehicle for supplying suggestive information to people that would affect their memory. and that ultimately would lead to the label of the misinformation effect. You supply people with misinformation, and they will often accept it, absorb it into their memory, it causes a contamination or a distortion of memory. I think I've heard that called the loftest effect, actually, from other people. Well, I called it the misinformation effect. When did you know, did you know even when you're pursuing your PhD that this was the direction,

that you were going to become an academic, or at the time, did you think it was a stepping dose on to potentially something else? No, I think when I started, I was diffident and uncertain, but after a year of working as a graduate student, I got enthusiastic and I was convinced

that I was going to enjoy it. And therefore, when I got my PhD, I did try to get some post-doctoral position and was glad I did. Yeah, I would manage to do. Was it any? specific thing that turned you on, that turned you on and said, this is the right path for me? I don't think so, because it was interesting, but it was the micro-background discovered,

and I really it was possible to have some new simple ideas which were relevant to these. For some listeners, I guess that there was a sea change, and even it was a little early for me, although, yeah, so in terms of understanding the significance, but one of your, I guess, someone who was potentially a mentor of some sort, Fred Hoyle, there was a big, debate about whether there was a big bang. And I mean, while the microwave background was discovered, which is the remnant of the Big Bang, that we now recognize as the Remnant of the Big Bang, was it immediately, I mean, in retrospect, we often make it sound like something immediately changed, there was a paradigm shift. Was there a paradigm shift at the time that was immediately

recognized as unambiguous, did people change their minds or not? Well, I think in a year or two, they had data at different wavelengths to see if the spectrum was thermal. But, but but I think it did convert almost everyone at that time. Fred Hoyle himself was never fully converted. He tried to have elaborate theories. And I would say he ended up believing what I call a steady bang, some compromise. Yeah, yes. And, of course, I hugely admired Fred Hoyle,

but I never really work with him because he started to go off in slightly eccentric directions at the time when I started to be in the subject. But he was a really great figure in the subject. if you look back at all the things he did. He had an immense impact and certainly, well, these things are always, I know your view about awards and I share it in many cases,

but he certainly, he did work that certainly was on par and many people could say worthy of a Nobel Prize. Of course, well, he should have got it for his work with Fowler, but more generally he was a real polymath and very inventive and made lots of contributions to all branches of astronomy.

And of literature. But he also enjoyed, he enjoyed, And before the microwave background was discovered, there was, as you say, the Steady State Theory, which advocated by him and Bondian gold. There were three sort of very noisy and articulate people. I don't think they carried much resonance outside the UK. Oh, really? Certainly not in Russia or not in America either.

But in the UK, it was an important debate. And the debate involved the radio astronomers, because they were the first people who found evidence that the universe couldn't. be in a steady state because they found that there was more evidence that radio sources were strong and that radio galaxies existed spewing out radio waves in the past than now, contrary to what you'd expect in a steady state. And this was a debate where Martin Ryle was correct. And I listened to these debates in the 60s and I felt that Hoyle was perverse not to take them seriously. But then I read more history of the subject. I realized that in the 50s,

Royal had been equally dogmatic when he'd been wrong. Oh, I see. And so I understood that Fred had a reason for being somewhat skeptical, whereas I came fresh on the scene, and Royal seemed to be talking a great deal of sense. And indeed he was at that time, but he had been dogmatic and wrong. I see. So you're... I see. So you... I just think, you know, we put... We restrict movies because they have sex in them, but we don't if, when people are being stabbed in the eye or their head is being out. I think it was training day. I was watching in America. I was in the gym once, believe it or not. And a training day was on. Exactly. Yeah. And it was like 2 p.m. in the morning. And there's a scene there where he's going, fuck you. No, fuck you. And they changed that to forget

you, right? And then he shot him in the heart. Yeah. Yeah. I'd rather, I'd rather you swore at me. Yeah. Given the choice. Yeah. Given the choice. What I find more offensive. Yeah, exactly. No, it's, yeah, that's really, uh, it. Well, but, you know, what's kind of nice is that one can use comedy, I think, to talk about things which, which would otherwise, uh, be of great concern, but it gives you an in, in, it gives you a secret way. That's what humans for.

It gets us over bad stuff. Yeah. If you can't joke about bad stuff, what, what kind of, that, that's exactly what it's exactly what it's for, you know, it, um, it sharpens our, our claws, you know, it makes us, it, It keeps us fighting for the real world. It also gives you license as either an entertainer or as a public figure. Oh, of course. It helps you understand things as well.

I think it was a Picasso that said art is a lie that helps you understand the truth. So all these things in a metaphor, poetry, jokes, satire, they are teaching you something, whether you know it or not. It's sneaking in learning. Yeah. See, now I didn't meet you to the philosophy program. There was the art. You get me the airline. That was it.

Yeah. That was it. Yeah. I've got loads of it. I've got loads of sounds of other really clever people. Well, it's, you know, but that's often what you need to get at school. It's really interesting to say that. But, or at least appreciating what are good ideas and bad.

That itself is an interesting and take some learning or at least some experience to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Yeah. Well, I mean, and obviously the problem comes that we're all different. And art is subjective. Yeah. comedy or whatever. What's funny. What people find funny.

It depends upon their experience. And the mood they're in the day and so many other things. I don't think you should be ashamed of finding anything funny. Yeah. Because it's not your fault. That's what you are. Yeah. If you see someone fall over the street and you laugh, you can then feel, but you've obviously found it funny.

Yeah. You can't deny it. Yeah. I see it with audiences. They laugh and then they go, oh, my God. I shouldn't have. I don't know. Well, if you laughed, you should have.

It's a great feeling. Yeah, it's a great feeling. And there must be, and there's got to be an evolutionary purpose, right? I think so. Oh, it has to be. And what was amazing to me is not, it's not amazing that we recovered from whatever you want to call the Dark Ages. It's amazing that they survived for so long because there's this innate, ultimately, people had to recognize how ridiculous some of the dogmen's word, just asking yourself the question, including Adam and Eve. I mean, ultimately the self-contradictory issues of good and evil, of taking people, as you describe in Adam and Eve, who are completely innocent and punishing them for something, they have no ideas wrong.

These questions must have been there, but there ultimately must have been an incredible fear. Well, there was an incredible fear of questioning because if you questioned, your life was in peril. But look, I agree. And, of course, you couldn't stand up at a certain point and say, this story is absurd as an origin story. There are, I'll tell you five other ones that are better and so forth and so on. So that's true. You would get in horrendous trouble. You wouldn't reproduce.

That said, for me, and you may not agree with this, probably don't agree with this, but I couldn't have written this. I couldn't have spent years thinking about the Adam and Eve story and writing this book on the rise and fall of the Adam and Eve story if I believed that it was contemptible and ridiculous. Oh, sure. I think that it is incredibly powerful, including the things that are to us the most disturbing about the story,

such as the fact that there's a prohibition not to eat at the tree of good and evil when it's only if you understood something about the difference between good and evil that you'd know how to observe a prohibition. But that's Kafka. That's not absurdity. Well, it is absurdity, but in an existential sense that we're constantly confronted with situations like this. That's what it is to be, for one thing. It's what it is to be a child and not understand the nature of most of the rules and yet have to be told that you have to obey them without horrendous consequences.

And sometimes actually there are horrendous consequences and so forth. In other words, when I thought it was only ridiculous people, if I thought it was only ridiculous people who have a, you know, one of a theme park in which they ride dinosaurs in Kentucky, I wouldn't have wanted to take this seriously. It's actually understanding that some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people for centuries and centuries not only took this seriously, not because they were afraid,

but because they thought there was something deep and important to learn from this, that it is one of the great human fictions. It's just a fiction. That's the thing that you have to understand. It's a fiction. It's a work of literature, but a work of literature, a tiny one, but in its way as powerful as King Lear, as powerful as anything where we think, yes, the Mahabarata,

this is a deep way of thinking about the world. sticking point in the negotiations right now, according to Trump, is intellectual property rights. They are not observing intellectual property rights. What that means is exorbitant patent restrictions radically opposed to free trade built into the World Trade Organization system to protect U.S. corporations. So we want Bill Gates to be the richest man in the world. So therefore, there's essentially monopoly for windows. Pharmaceutical prices have to go out of sight. So therefore, there's huge patent restrictions for pharmaceuticals.

Suppose China decided not to observe them. Who suffers? Well, Bill Gates will have a little less money. Users of computers will be able to find better programs. and windows, pharmaceutical corporations instead of having, you know, trillions of dollars will only have a few trillions, people will be able to buy cheaper drugs. I mean, it's argued that this would cut back innovation. But if you look into it, that's not the way innovation takes place, takes, say, Windows.

I mean, I don't have to tell you, the development of computers, software, internet, and so on, that was all a tax-backer. Most of it, a taxpayer expense for decades. Same with pharmaceuticals. There's a good reason why if you walk around MIT, you see Pfizer, you know, all that. They're all there, kind of feeding off the creative scientific work done at the laboratories, mostly at government expense. If you'd gone back there 50 years ago, you would have seen Raytheon.

When I was a student there, Raytheon. Those were the big... And that's because electronics was kind of the cutting edge of the economy. Yeah. Now it's biology. And this is at every research university in the country, not just MIT. Sure. So going back to China and the intellectual property, why should they observe the intellectual property rights,

which are rammed through by the United States and other rich countries? Now let's look at a little history. How did England develop? by stealing technology from more advanced countries like India or the low countries, even Ireland. How did the United States develop by stealing technology from England? That's why we got a textile industry, steel industry, and so on. Of course, it wasn't called stealing then. It was just that's the way you develop.

Every single developed country has developed that way. Then comes something that economic historians call, kicking away the ladder. At first you climb the ladder, then you kick it away so nobody else can do it. Well, that's kind of what lies behind. All of this lies behind the effort to try to impede Chinese economic development

by things like demanding intellectual property rights. Do you see any discussion of this? I try not to think how the universe is without actually learning how it is in the first place. But yeah, we still has that pretty much. But I do have some examples. There are things that I thought were true that later in life learned they were not true. Or I slightly misunderstood it.

And that was astonishing to me. It was, whoa. Whoa. Okay, I have one for you. You ready? Easter, for me, for 20 years of my life, it was the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the Vernal Econox. Oh.

Okay. Okay. That's really, that was for the first 20 years of life, that's how you define Easter. No, no, no, no. That's what, it's not how I defined this. I was very impressed. It was my understanding of Easter in the Gregorian calendar. Oh, okay.

The Gregorian calendar redefined Easter. Yeah, okay. For all of the Catholic world at the time in 1582. And the Protestants were later to uptake this, this new definition. Anyhow, it turns out it's not that. It's the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21st. After literally March 21st? Yes.

So that's the religious equinox. And then there's the astronomical equinox, which could go to the 22nd or go to the 20th. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And right now it happens to be in March 20th, which was awkward in the year 2019 because there was a full moon. on March 21st. Oh. So Easter would have been, according to my definition, the very next Sunday, like two days later. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it was not. And that confused me. So I had to call up all my expert friends. I said, no, no, no, you're using the astronomical equinox. It's the religious equinox, which by definition is March 21st. Okay. Yes. And what was your reaction to learning that?

I was a little embarrassed that I would have been publicly saying this. Okay. Well, I decide, yeah, I'm okay because you're a public figure, but personally, was that exciting? It was fun. Corrected it. Oh, yeah. That's the point. And I tell people often, I want to learn something new every day.

Yeah, I mean, being proved you're wrong is actually personally, well, not for everybody, but it's fun. The aha experience is essentially saying, aha, I never realized it was that way. Right. And we get a kind of inner joy at that. Because they always said March 21st, and for many decades, that was when the Equinox landed. And I did not give myself the occasion to imagine that even the Jesuit priest who came up with this would have anchored it to that day on the calendar and not actually chased it to the equinox because they knew enough astronomy, even pre-Galileo, to know when the equinox, what, you know,

what day the equinox occurred on. Anyhow, that was the most recent, and that was just a few weeks ago from the time of this recording. Yeah. About a subject about Easter, which I never met here. And Passover is the first full moon. is after the equinox. Because the Jewish calendar is really lunar-based, right? It's lunar-based, but you do it on the full moon. Don't look at me. Your people.

Your genetic brethren. My ancestors. Your genetic brethren. Yes. In fact, I have to say, the 23 and me told me that they're definitely my generic. Okay. What is it again? So I know.

Okay. So it turns out the Jewish definition of the equinox is the same as the Christian one. It's just March 21st. Oh, I see. Okay. So it is the first full moon. moon after March 21st. Oh.

And so the way the Catholic Church said, we're never going to have these overlap, because there was a risk of that happening, the way it was previously defined. Yeah. Okay. It was previously defined as the first Sunday after the Equinox. Okay. The full moon was not even in the picture. Okay.

And until 1582, the Julian calendar was not properly accounting for leap days. And so it had a leap day every four years that overcorrected the calendar. We had to start taking out leap days to re-corrected. and we had accumulated 10 days that didn't belong there. You got me started on this. But I'll finish in 10 seconds. So, they took out the 10 days and jumped started the calendar. October that year lost 10 days, which was interesting for how you're going to pay rent.

You have to invent sort of amortizing rent schedules. And so therefore, and they added just for good measure. I'm going to let you go because I know that 10 seconds. They added for good measure. It's a fascinating five minutes. It's the Sunday after the first full moon, after March 21st. and Passover's on the full moon, and so we're good. Okay, good.

They'll never be on the same day. Okay. Okay, that's good to know they'll never be on the same. But they almost were. And that was the confusion. They're very close this year. Yeah, and 2019, everything lands in the religious, most religious possible way. Passover is on Thursday, which is Holy Thursday.

Passover, you have your Seder. It's rumored that the Last Supper was a Seder. Yeah, even I know that. And then Good Friday. Jesus gets tortured and crucified. Why it's called Good, I don't know. Oh, yeah, exactly. One of the mysteries of the Trinity.

Yeah. And three days, you know, on the third day, Sunday he rose, and then you get Easter. That's the story. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And... Plus, they had to go through a lot to turn the Sabbath

from Saturday to Sunday. The Sabbath was everybody Sabbath. Yeah, so they had to turn it to Sunday. And now you have the Christian Sabbath. They said, we can't do it. They can't do this with Jews. Jews are bad. So,

another day, so they pick Sunday. But if you look at the name for Saturday in the romance languages, in Spanish, Sabbath, Sabbath, though, it's all Sabbath. Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's all rooted there. Yeah. I love, I love letting you go off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and the funny thing is, it's the seventh day, God rest it. And a sabbatical, you go on a sabbatical, it's the seventh year. See, it's all good. Any other, any? No, we're good. Beat that one into the ground. What's next in your note? The one thing I hadn't attended to talk about was Easter and Passover. No, it's good. But as an example. example, but my goal is never to know when Easter or Passover is. But anyway, now you know.

Yeah, I know. Well, it doesn't, except maybe. And Lucretius, you know, it's interesting to me that you expressed Lucretia said, because again, it's an issue. It's something I always try and say in my, in my dialogues, we should enjoy our brief moment of the sun. The fact that we'll disappear, for some is tragic. But I think, I like to think from Lucretia's from my understanding, and my understanding essentially completely comes from you, that we should enjoy our brief moment of the sun for a real reason, that life is more precious because it disappears. Yes, although that's actually a deep problem in Lucretian philosophy. Why is life more precious?

Why is it better to live than not to live? I think that is a problem that's not easily answered in Epicureanism, in a way that it is easily answered in Judaism, Christian. Christianity, Islam, whatever, there are a variety of where it's all part of a divine scheme. It's a way of serving God and whatever the account would be. It's not clear in Lucretius why essay is better than known essay. Why does it matter? Is that a reason not to fear death?

Well, he thought that was a reason not to fear death. But there's another flip side of that, which is that. which is why then should you savor existence? Not entirely clear. And his way of dealing with that, but it isn't, as to say, philosophically, I mean, there are people who are more expert than I am in this, so they may have a different view.

But it seems to me that his way of dealing with that is to take a kind of swerve from that and say, it's the pursuit of pleasure. The reason that you save your existence, is because we're we should pursue pleasure as our highest good. We don't pursue God as our highest good. We don't pursue moral virtue as a highest good. We pursue pleasure.

And in that, we share with all other sentient creatures. That's what a cow does. That's what a cockroach does. That's what it is to be alive and to want to reproduce. And that's what he drew from that. I mean, it's a complex, it actually, when you, it seems simultaneously simple, then when you push on it, it's rather complex. What you grew from that was, first of all, it's not about you.

It's not about you, Lawrence, Stephen, but it's not about you as a species. You're not going to last forever, but also your species is not going to last forever. There's a constant set of mutations and adaptations to what's available in the universe, so how to eat and reproduce. And we do it well at the moment, apparently, but we're not going to do it forever. Something better will come along, or our environment will change.

What does that mean in terms of our long-term trajectory? I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people, who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsprojectfoundation.org