In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, host Alex Blumberg sits down with astrophysicist Joe Grgurich to talk about UFOs, the dark side of the universe, and why we should all be worried about the night sky. Plus, a special guest appearance from the Austin Astronomy Club. Guests: Astronomy Professor Joe Grurich, University of Texas at Austin, Astronomy and Physics Prof. Dr. Robert Kiyosaki, Director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Studies at UT Austin, and Astronomy Editor-in-Chief of the Astronomy & Space Studies journal. Thanks to caller Joe, and thanks to our sponsor, for coming up with the idea for the episode title. Thanks also to the folks at the UFO Sighting Project, and to all the people who sent in their UFO sightings and theories. Thank you, Joe! Thanks to everyone who called in with their theories, and we hope you enjoy the episode. It's a great listen, and if you like it, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! or wherever else you get your stuff. We're listening to you! Cheers, Joe and Alex! -The Astronomy And Space Studies Podcast. -Jon Sorrentino and . - The Astronomy Project is a production of Gimlet Media and Space Traveler , a podcast about all things astronomy, science, and all things related to the night skies, space travel, and space travel. . . . , and other things going on in the universe. , and everything else that goes on the sky. and space and space. (including the stars and the stars we see in general. by the stars, the Milky way, the moon, the constellations, the stars that we see up in general, the planets, the galaxy, and the Milky Way, the universe and the universe itself. ...and everything in between. . . and the rest of it. And so much more! , we hope that you enjoy this episode, it's a beautiful, beautiful, wonderful, beautiful stuff! and we love you like that, yay! Thanks for listening! ! thank you, bye, bye! -- Alex and Alex -- Jon & the crew at , Caitie AND ,
00:03:10.000You're like one of the first guys that I want to talk to because you always have a skeptical...
00:03:15.000Inquisitive perspective on these things.
00:03:17.000You're not necessarily dismissive, but you're not willing to just adopt this narrative that we're being visited by UFOs from another planet.
00:03:26.000By the way, let's start with the military.
00:03:32.000If there are glowing lights in the sky and we don't know what it is, They damn sure better look into it.
00:04:43.000I say, okay, right now NASA landed a rover on Mars with a helicopter and And this is at 120 million miles away, controlling it, and it's on Mars where it's 100 degrees below zero.
00:04:59.000Meanwhile, Texas, where it's cold, has no electricity.
00:05:04.000So all I said was, maybe NASA, instead of politicians, should run Texas.
00:05:36.000And it doesn't necessarily have to make sense.
00:05:38.000But if enough people are angry and upset at their own lives, and they just decide they're going to attack Neil deGrasse Tyson because he makes a poignant point...
00:05:47.000I try to have you smile about it a little.
00:05:50.000Plus, Texas is no stranger to NASA. Houston, we have a problem.
00:06:17.000Just randomly- It's a stupidly large number, and I don't, I'm- I still don't understand it because I want to remind people every few days, you'd realize you're following an astrophysicist.
00:06:28.000There's still time to unfollow just in case this is something you did by accident.
00:06:34.000Yeah, but you're a different kind of astrophysicist.
00:06:36.000You're an entertaining educator, and that's so important because you make things fun.
00:06:41.000You make things fun while pointing out really important points, like really important things that we should probably understand about the way the universe works and physics and...
00:06:51.000Well, thanks for thinking about it that way.
00:07:08.000And there's a pleasing feeling that they had at a point when they learned something.
00:07:13.000And so that's got to work some kind of dopamine chemicals so that you say, I want to learn something again tomorrow.
00:07:20.000Yeah, I mean, science educators are so important because so many people equate, whether it's mathematics or science or even history, they equate it with boredom, right?
00:07:31.000I think not only science, but many academic subjects.
00:07:34.000And what's that song by Alice Cooper, School's Out?
00:07:38.000School's out for summer, school's out forever.
00:07:42.000This is an anthem for people who hate school.
00:08:25.000Or if I have to leave school because I graduated, let me find other ways to continue to stay enlightened throughout my life.
00:08:33.000Otherwise, you get ossified in one way of thinking with one dimension of information or facts or insights.
00:08:43.000And then you're stuck there and you think that's the world and it's not.
00:08:45.000It's not, but let's put this into perspective.
00:08:48.000Think about the budget for the homeless.
00:08:50.000Think about the budget for the military.
00:08:52.000Now, let's think about the budget that a school has to work with.
00:08:55.000And think about the fact that you have to take 40 kids who may not have been paying attention most of their life, and then all of a sudden you catch them when they're 14. Good luck.
00:09:19.000And then their hormones are kicking in, so they can't pay attention to anything anyway.
00:09:23.000It's easy for me to make these statements, but I'm not the one in the trenches there, especially in those middle schools where hormones are riding everything.
00:09:31.000Right when they start popping, the kids don't know what to do with them.
00:09:41.000And then just trying to get 40 kids or however many is in the typical classroom to pay attention to the same thing at the same time and to be interested in the same thing at the same time.
00:09:51.000You know, there's a lot of intelligent kids that get left by the wayside because school, for whatever reason, doesn't jive with the way they learn things.
00:09:59.000It doesn't mean that they're not smart.
00:10:01.000Well, I think we have similar, each of us, you and I, have similar challenges in a theater audience, right?
00:10:08.000Now, you have the advantage that they're all fans, so they know where you're coming from when you do a stand-up routine.
00:10:14.000But still, there's a thousand people or more who are different from each other.
00:10:19.000Some are old, some are young, some are left, some are right, you know, politically.
00:10:23.000And you thread that, and I think you thread it brilliantly.
00:10:26.000You get people with you And you get them to want to listen to you.
00:10:30.000So part of what I glean from people's reactions to my Twitter posts is, was that how you thought about that?
00:11:10.000And so if I want to stay effective as an educator, First, I will never want them to meet me at the chalkboard, or whatever boards are made of today.
00:12:02.000So if I have an audience and some of them are over 75, look for the silver-haired folks.
00:12:07.000They'll remember, you know, the later stages of the Second World War and early stages of the Cold War.
00:12:14.000I'll throw in a reference just for them.
00:12:16.000You know, the 20-somethings won't know and they won't care.
00:12:19.000They probably won't even get it, but I'll go buy it quickly enough that I offer the other community demographic in the audience something else.
00:12:32.000I'm hitting the ball back and forth to different people.
00:12:34.000And that way I can take this body of knowledge that is the universe and have everybody share in it.
00:12:41.000Otherwise, I don't know that I can claim to be an educator.
00:12:44.000Well, you certainly can claim to be an educator, but maybe you're not making the best use of your particular abilities.
00:12:51.000Your particular abilities that are unique to you are your humor and your fun, your jovial, along with being deep and philosophical and talking about it.
00:13:30.000So, it's weird to me that now the Pentagon is saying that these are real videos that they've captured off of naval vessels and they've been hovering over defense systems and they don't know what they are.
00:15:13.000And if you run the numbers on it, it's about, I got this from someone from Google, there's about six billion photos and videos uplifted to the internet every day.
00:15:24.000And in that collection, you find really rare things that you only heard about or maybe you saw the results of, but you didn't actually see it happen.
00:15:34.000So there are videos of buses tumbling in the winds of a tornado.
00:15:41.000Now, in the aftermath of a tornado, there's a bus on its side, and so you knew when took it there.
00:15:48.000But previously, no one is going to say, oh, that bus is about to lift into the air.
00:15:53.000Wizard of Oz style, like the house, let me go in and get my movie camera and then come back out and shoot this.
00:17:45.000And so it comes and it goes back and gets another stone, drops it in, and every time it drops it in, the water level rises and it can drink more water.
00:21:26.000But all of what has been put forth as evidence for aliens, to me, is insufficient evidence to excite my interest, my research interest, in devoting time to finding it out.
00:21:37.000But it definitely has excited other people.
00:21:41.000I am not saying defund the military, A program on UAPs, which of course is just updated UFO. I know, they like to say that now because there's like a stigma to UFO. I know, that's just, that's a really transparent...
00:22:11.000I have a feeling that these things are probes.
00:22:13.000And I feel like if you just think about biological entities flying through the universe, like, why do that?
00:22:18.000When you have sophisticated technology that's good enough right now from our, like, relatively primitive in consideration of what we think is possible a million years from now, right?
00:22:29.000But we could send that Mars rover around.
00:23:42.000But as a scientist, when you're presenting information, you don't say, this thing was at 80,000 feet and it dropped to zero to sea level in one second or whatever it was, the measure.
00:26:34.000We proposed another planet and we found it.
00:26:37.000So Neptune's not following all the laws of gravity that from all the other planets in the sun, there must be another planet out there, a planet X. Let's look for it.
00:27:15.000And if you glue together all the pieces of the asteroid belt, you get something like 5% the mass of the moon.
00:27:22.000So, yeah, it gave us the location of the Astro Belt, but that's not a planet.
00:27:26.000So, Bode's Law, it's fun to play with, but, you know, there are limits to how far you want to declare its relevance to the actual universe.
00:27:35.000So, we're out here at Neptune, and so I said, maybe there's a planet X. Everybody started looking.
00:27:40.000Everybody started looking, including Percival Lowell.
00:30:48.000There was no Planet X. All the other data, when he connects across, removing the data from the one where the observing log said they did something different, Neptune fell right onto Newton's laws.
00:31:04.000And so, since 1993, there is no Planet X. And Pluto, and not for that, we probably would have been a long time before we discovered Pluto, because no one would have looked for it.
00:31:13.000They found another, like, Pluto- Let me just finish the lesson there.
00:31:17.000The lesson there is, you have information that you think is correct from your sensors.
00:31:26.000This was an observatory, a fine observatory.
00:31:29.000And you're going to say, this observatory says Neptune is misbehaving.
00:31:35.000But then you learn there was something wrong with the data.
00:31:41.000So I'm trying to say this happens all the time in science.
00:31:46.000You have to be careful what you're analyzing before you declare that what the thing measured is true and then realign all your resources to address what you think is true when it might have just simply been a glitch or multiple glitches or anything.
00:32:00.000And we do this all the time in science.
00:32:54.000And this Kuiper Belt, there was some speculation.
00:32:58.000Now, I read this quite a while ago, so forgive me.
00:33:02.000But there was some speculation that we might be in some sort of a binary star system, and there might be a burnt-out star that's way, way, way outside of our solar system.
00:33:14.000And that's causing the galactic shelf to drop off?
00:33:19.000Like this Kuiper belt is responding to some other gravity that's way out there?
00:33:42.000Was it every 20 million years or something?
00:33:44.000There was some period that repeated where the fossil record showed a dramatic drop or a mild drop in the species count from one layer to the next in the geological sediment.
00:33:58.000And so if this has a rhythm to it, there is nothing in the solar system that has a 20 million year rhythm.
00:34:05.000So someone suggested maybe the sun has a really eccentric, as in its orbit, It's in a binary star system where there's another star that plunges in through the solar system coming through the Kuiper belt and then goes back out in this dance with the sun.
00:34:28.000So we wouldn't have seen it in our civilization because this is – all right.
00:34:33.000But when it does that, it disrupts the Kuiper belt gravitationally.
00:34:37.000And if you do that, you will send a rain of comets down.
00:34:41.000A higher than average rate of comets down into the inner solar system, and then you could render many life forms extinct on Earth, just the way we lost the dinosaurs from an asteroid.
00:36:33.000When you think about this idea of everyone having these video cameras in their pocket and high-resolution imagery and that where is that stuff?
00:36:43.000But the absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence.
00:38:37.000But scientifically, I've gathered enough information to convince me there's no bear in the cave and I will operate on that assumption going forward.
00:38:48.000And you think that's a valid way to dismiss the lack of UFO evidence because these people have these phones and they're just all filming and taking photographs of things constantly?
00:39:03.000You can ask, you're perfectly allowed to say what would happen if we were visited by aliens and you crowdsourced The access to aliens among 7 billion people in the world.
00:39:17.000How many people are out in the middle of the ocean?
00:39:42.000Of course, there are traffic paths, right, where you're more likely to find them than in other paths because there's either no destination there or the Great Circle route doesn't favor it.
00:39:51.000But you look at how often, every single day, the sky, the airspace is crisscrossed by way more commercial carriers than military vehicles.
00:40:05.000And I'm thinking you'd have an encounter with something that was not a fuzzy object that no one can describe.
00:40:11.000They would photograph something through the cockpit window.
00:42:20.000Now think of the hubris of us saying this advanced civilization of aliens who can cross the gaps of space Are interested in us and our gonads and they want to paint circles in our crops.
00:43:19.000We're the weirdest things, the weirdest things.
00:43:23.000Listen, if you studied us, if you were from another planet filled with things like us, like if there was another planet of us and we found a planet doing the exact same kind of nonsense that we do somewhere else, we would be riveted.
00:43:37.000Here's how I think about another planet, if I can share this.
00:43:41.000This is a little deep, if you're ready for that.
00:45:50.000And I don't think they would be interested in us.
00:45:53.000I think if they really are using photosynthesis, they're plant-based creatures, they're probably going to be so tired all the time, they're not going to have the will to travel through the universe.
00:46:07.000You're confusing the vegetarian with the plant life.
00:47:10.000So they asked if he could come by in addition to other activities at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where I work.
00:48:20.000Yeah, I'm one of those who's a little worried when we give our return address broadcast out into space because you don't give your email to strangers in the street.
00:48:28.000We're giving the coordinates of Earth broadcast out to the gaps of interstellar space.
00:50:59.000I think this whole ramping up of all this information is, all the videos and all the conversations about it, the article in the New York Times.
00:51:07.000Yeah, it's part of what Trump set into motion.
00:51:10.000I mean, the landscape was ripe for it, but...
00:51:15.000Oh, by the way, UFO sightings went up during COVID, I think?
00:51:19.000Because everyone was home bored with nothing to do, and you'd go out and look up.
00:51:24.000Yeah, there's a lot of cultural statistics related to the frequency of UFO sightings.
00:51:30.000But Trump, just before he left office, Required, he slips something into the COVID relief bill, as they do so often in Congress, where you agree with the rest of this, I don't agree with that, but I want to get it through.
00:51:47.000The full disclosure, within six months, he wants all federal agencies that collect information on unidentified sky objects to put together reports and deliver it to Congress within six months.
00:52:01.000What's weird, though, is this belief that somehow the government is some repository of knowledge and secrets that we don't otherwise have access to.
00:52:13.000That's not the kind of country we live in, nor is the government that competent.
00:52:17.000So yeah, they try to keep secrets, and they keep many secrets.
00:52:20.000They tend to be of the uninteresting kind.
00:52:23.000But if you have an interesting secret, if you're stockpiling aliens and you're telling me that the secretary, the admin, the janitor, that they're not sneaking out an iPhone photo, Really?
00:52:47.000It was an intriguing conversation because...
00:52:50.000He is of the belief that they have had access to some objects and some crafts and some things that are unexplainable and don't seem to come from any technology that we're...
00:53:05.000But any technology that we're currently capable of reproducing?
00:53:11.000OK. I mean he might have seen something that the military was actually working on that would be mysterious to someone who is only familiar with unclassified propulsion systems and the like.
00:53:22.000Do you think it's possible that a propulsion system so outside of the norm, something that is not working off burning fuel, something that's working off some new technology that is, whether it's some sort of gravity distorting or gravity-based technology,
00:53:38.000that that could actually be conceived in a vacuum where they could get the top scientists that work in propulsion, people that do understand, I mean, as much as we do understand gravity.
00:53:49.000As much as we understand the possibility of some sort of propulsion system, it's pretty minimal, right?
00:53:55.000Yeah, we're still primitive with our propulsion systems, yes.
00:53:58.000Is it possible that this could all be done in a vacuum?
00:54:02.000That it could all be done without anybody ever having known about it, and they could produce something that's so preposterously advanced from anything we've been capable of making before?
00:54:14.000Advances tend not to be large leaps like that.
00:54:18.000It seems more likely that it's from a different source than from human beings.
00:54:24.000If what he's describing is true, then it would not be incremental.
00:54:30.000I mean, we tend to do things incrementally.
00:54:32.000That's just the nature of discovery and human innovation.
00:54:37.000So if something actually can move the way, supposedly, these units, these various tracking systems that they have that can follow something from 80,000 feet above sea level.
00:54:54.000If it's actually a thing, there's no physics that explains it that we know of.
00:55:01.000And if something can move that way, if it's confirmed that the systems are accurate and that this thing does move that fast and can do things that are beyond our capability currently as far as we understand it, would it be more likely that it would come from some other advanced civilization outside of Earth?
00:55:20.000Or would it be more likely that it was conceived in a vacuum here without anybody having any access to any of the technology in these incremental forms?
00:55:30.000So, it's possible you can have, like, you know, black ops, as they say.
00:55:34.000You know, you look at the airplanes that came out of Lockheed Martin during the Cold War.
00:55:38.000These were all just secret, and they gave the engineers- A kind of incremental.
00:55:44.000Sure, but they looked really different and they behaved very differently.
00:55:48.000So yes, it was still incremental, but let's imagine a deep black ops where they're making their own incremental changes, but you don't get to see them.
00:55:57.000So by the time it shows up, it looks like it's a big leap, even though they got there incrementally.
00:56:20.000The best scientists are going to go to the private sector because there's more money there.
00:56:23.000Or academia where you have freedom of research.
00:56:26.000Some will go because there is money in the military, but you're forced to work on projects that might not be the most creative investment of your own energies.
00:56:38.000You hire a physicist, make a bomb at the end of this.
00:56:41.000So it would take something pretty monumental for you to shift your belief to this is probably not from us.
00:56:55.000They may be, and maybe it's happened before, but when I'm hearing about these things flying around and I'm seeing what we're doing on Mars, I'm like, yeah, it's a better version of that.
00:57:52.000No one saw it happen except the military because we're monitoring the Arctic because that's where rockets get, you know, we're on the case here.
00:58:00.000Then they get captured and we want to mine them for the technology that's in them.
00:58:08.000But we want to do it in a way nobody knows.
00:59:37.000I gotta go back and check that one out.
00:59:39.000It had crashed into Antarctica or something like that.
00:59:43.000Frozen forever and then they discovered it.
00:59:46.000They were like digging in and they found this thing and then it came out and it would transform and become like an identical copy of whatever it touched.
00:59:58.000You don't remember that with Kurt Russell?
01:00:47.000When I look at what we're doing with human beings and, you know, replacing people's knees and replacing people's hips and artificial this and artificial that, and then with CRISPR and genetic engineering, I think it's a matter of time before we are some sort of symbiotic thing.
01:01:05.000We're partially created by, you know, whatever technology is available at the time, whether it's 100 years from now or 500 years from now.
01:01:14.000Something that's going to be superior, that's not going to provide us with all the problems.
01:01:32.000We control your cholesterol, your inflammation, we know how to reduce the chance of stroke.
01:01:42.000So you're thinking very narrow on this.
01:01:45.000I need a new kneecap or I need a new this.
01:01:49.000The fact is, science and technology has already been infused in the human condition in a way that, for example, has doubled our life expectancy within the last 150 years.
01:02:05.000So now you want to do it mechanically because that requires Material science, and that's a much later field than chemistry was developed in order to contribute to what our lives are.
01:02:16.000Now you want to get into our DNA that's just the next level.
01:04:21.000Because when you look at the archive, there's...
01:04:24.000In science, you want to convert data to sort of facts, and facts into knowledge, knowledge into insight, and then ultimately insight into wisdom.
01:04:39.000And that wisdom will help you make better choices and help you understand the world you're living.
01:08:08.000Because if there's some celebrity who dies, you'll edit the page by adding a paragraph, though they died in their sleep or whatever.
01:08:15.000So that's editing, but that doesn't put the content at risk if you're just adding information.
01:08:22.000So if I know that a page has been edited 40 times in the last three days, then the likelihood that that information is objectively true is very low.
01:08:38.000And so when you're doing a book report or any kind of report and you're citing wiki pages, You would have a side index that tells you this page is rife with conflicting and contested edits.
01:08:56.000Now that I know that, here's what they said.
01:08:59.000Whereas other pages that are stable, I think we have a good right to say this contains objectively true information.
01:09:08.000And you would be able to make the judgment yourself.
01:09:12.000And it'd be easy to track that on a computer with all the edits.
01:09:16.000And you'll know, did someone just correct spelling?
01:09:19.000You know, you would give the nature of what the edit is.
01:09:21.000And I thought that research is, if you don't know what the answer is, let's at least know how controversial the information is.
01:09:27.000This brings up an interesting point because one of the things that we're talking about when it comes to technology, we're talking about improvements in the way the human brain works with a symbiotic relationship to whatever Neuralink or whatever new technology is invented.
01:10:36.000My shoulder went across the midplane of the seat, so I have to be there with a small other human, but two of me wouldn't be able to fit in the front seat without being very snuggly at the deltoid.
01:10:47.000If we could come to a point where technology could eliminate deception...
01:10:54.000How much more information could be shared and how much more could we understand?
01:10:57.000What I don't know is if we cannot eliminate deception in ourselves, either self-deception or purposeful deception in others, I don't see how we can program that into our technology.
01:11:10.000But I think we can if we can understand whether someone's telling the truth or not.
01:11:15.000If it's clear and glaringly obvious, if you and I are talking and I start talking to you and all of a sudden a green light pops up, which indicates I'm full of shit, you'll see it and I'm like, oh, my green light's showing.
01:11:27.000No, but that assumes that things are either true or false.
01:12:20.000Another one is there's so many things that are...
01:12:23.000And that's what makes the world interesting, I think.
01:12:28.000So you want an example of where the truth is nuanced?
01:12:35.000I can't think off the top of my head, but I'm just telling you that in almost every case where someone wants to turn a question into a binary answer, They're doing a disservice to human intellect,
01:14:29.000My thought was just eliminate purposeful deception.
01:14:33.000Like if you knew someone was lying to you, con artists, Ponzi skiing people, someone's trying to fuck you over, if you knew, if you could be clear that what this person was doing is they're not really going to make you a lot of money, they're trying to rip you off with a pie-in-the-sky idea.
01:19:27.000Imagine if all aliens were built like The Rock.
01:19:29.000Yeah, I think the thinking is that they're in the future and they're advanced, and they don't need their body to be advanced, but their brain is advanced.
01:19:36.000Well, and also they're using telekinesis, and they probably have the 50th version of Elon's Neuralink installed.
01:19:43.000I'm not dismissing the beautiful things about people, whether it's our artistic creations or just communicating with people.
01:19:52.000The fact that we're so complicated and there's so many different layers of emotions and the history of your own life that you're adding into it.
01:20:02.000There's a lot of cool things about being a person.
01:20:29.000There's a very different thing going on.
01:20:32.000Artistic creation is very different than a lie.
01:20:35.000So you have to have, in addition to your lie meter, You have to judge whether someone is being creative in the thing they're telling you that's not true.
01:20:44.000Well, if they say it's a nonfiction book, then they're lying, right?
01:20:48.000If it's a fiction book, then they're being creative.
01:20:51.000If someone's being deceptive in a nonfiction book, that's a bad person.
01:20:56.000But if someone is writing something like Salem's Lot from Stephen King, this crazy story about a town that gets taken over by vampires, that's just fun.
01:22:18.000I just think that if technology, to go back to it, and we'll come back to the questions, if technology continues to advance in the direction that it's going, it seems to me...
01:22:28.000That one of the things that's happening is the distance between us and information is getting smaller and smaller.
01:22:36.000Our access to information is getting greater and greater.
01:22:39.000And that as this time goes on, it's going to be more integrated into who you are as a person, whether it's through Elon's creation or someone else's creation.
01:22:49.000Once that happens, I could envision A language that's being used through which we can communicate with each other that Elon was discussing when he said you're going to be able to communicate without using words.
01:23:04.000That once that happens, you're going to be able, whether it's 100 years from now or 1,000 years from now, whatever it is, You're going to be able to display or to communicate with pure intent.
01:23:18.000You're going to be able to do things without our ability to use personality and charisma and language and to be more articulate and impressive in the way you talk, to have a different impact on the way a person receives your thoughts.
01:23:34.000Instead, it'll be purely your intent and your thought.
01:24:25.000So the home of the future was just a button.
01:24:28.000And then people imagine that the future evolution of humans, we grow a big index finger because you have to be pushing buttons all the time.
01:24:35.000And now, no, we don't have buttons all over the house.
01:25:24.000People imagined the future where we have motorized sidewalks and monorails and everything, and what we didn't get was we thought energy would cost nothing.
01:25:37.000So we imagined a world with transportation, motion, and actions that all require energy to enable.
01:25:46.000And those worlds came out of the heads of people who extrapolated forward, and they did not understand.
01:25:52.000That the real action was in information.
01:25:56.000Information is what became cheap, not energy.
01:26:00.000And when information becomes cheap, I have the world at my fingertips.
01:26:06.000Even though I still have to walk down the sidewalk and it's not a motorized pathway.
01:26:10.000Yeah, that's the thing they never saw coming in any of those.
01:26:17.000And so I'm not one to just take what's going on now and extrapolate it and say everyone is going to be living that differently.
01:26:25.000Because other things come in from the side that you don't anticipate.
01:26:29.000And when they come in from the side, it is not an extrapolation of what you're doing now.
01:26:34.000It is something you didn't even imagine because an innovative, creative person looks to the left, looks to the right, and says, I can combine these into something that's completely new that no one even imagined.
01:27:32.000So, when I think today to thirty years from now, I'm saying I don't know that I can predict anything, but there's some things that I know are going to happen in the next few years.
01:27:42.000Self-driving cars, it's going to take over like that.
01:27:49.000Half the people replace the car every five years.
01:27:51.000So in five years, if I have a self-driving car and all the HOV lanes are now reserved only for self-driving cars, that's the next car you're going to drive.
01:29:51.000Within 20 years, we went from horses and an entire industry that supported the horses, the buggy whips, the carriages, the stables, the food, the blacksmiths, an entire industry vanishes within two decades,
01:31:16.000In order to have everybody, there'll be car tracks.
01:31:19.000And then the government's just gonna shut down your car and pull you out.
01:31:24.000Just gonna shut down the highway because everything's gonna be automated and they're gonna need access to all the cars just in case there's a high-speed chase.
01:31:30.000The government built the freaking highway.
01:32:18.000Plus, self-driving cars that you don't own, that you just sort of use, that reduces the number of cars in the road by, what, a factor of 10?
01:32:43.000So, you get on the horn, you go to Home Depot, get on the line, say, I need a hand drill with this bit, and then a drone drops it off that afternoon, and you use it, and then it takes it back.
01:34:17.000But it's just these people that are doing this insane innovation like him, like trying to deliver things with drones and trying to spread the business further and further and further.
01:34:28.000It's like you always wonder, like, what is the motivation?
01:34:34.000I can tell you this, you know, did I imagine 10 years ago that when I ordered something on the internet, I would be disappointed if it didn't come tomorrow?
01:39:28.000Okay, not that anybody asked, but laid end to end, Jeff Bezos' $200 billion can encircle Earth 180 times, then reach the moon and back 30 times, and with what's left over,
01:41:12.000They help give meaning to events in your life.
01:41:15.000When you got a guy like Bezos, though, that is at the helm of this intense empire and also is, in many ways, like Elon, fascinated with technological growth, right?
01:41:28.000He's got this deep, what is this, blue sky, blue origin?
01:41:40.000Plus, people worry that all the billionaires are building rockets to get to Mars, and they wonder, are they just going to leave us all here on Earth?
01:43:57.000Even though nouns and verbs were in the right place and it had a question mark and you were able to design an experiment, the question had no meaning in that realm.
01:45:15.000I am assuming you're not a flat earther.
01:45:17.000You know not to ask that because the Earth's surface curves back on itself.
01:45:21.000The question has no meaning on a curved surface.
01:45:25.000But you thought you were proud of yourself for even coming up with the question.
01:45:29.000Now you design a whole research project to answer that question and you find out You shouldn't have asked the question to begin with, but you didn't know in advance necessarily.
01:47:33.000What I'm saying is that Pinocchio cannot interact with his nose in any truthful way because the world of rules associated with his universe prevents it.
01:50:36.000So, now, we have a beginning, but what was around before the beginning?
01:50:41.000That's an important and interesting question.
01:50:43.000I don't know I should say that differently.
01:50:47.000That is a question, an English language sentence question.
01:50:51.000I do not know if that question has any more or less meaning than asking Santa Claus which way is north.
01:50:59.000When we look at the Big Bang and we look at the fact that the universe is expanding and they know that there was some sort of an event, by measuring, how exactly do they measure the radio frequencies that come from the Big Bang?
01:51:26.000So, do you realize you can't see through the sun?
01:51:30.000The sun is not transparent to visible light.
01:51:33.000Because visible light, when it enters the sun, the sun is made of plasma, which is a gas where electrons have been ripped off, ripped into the soup.
01:51:42.000So you have free-moving electrons and atoms, and it's a soup.
01:51:47.000The electrons are not part of the atoms.
01:51:50.000The consequence of that is light interacts heavily with free electrons.
01:51:56.000So, you try to move light through a plasma, and the light sees an electron.
01:52:08.000And so, by the time the light comes out the other side, you lost all hope of any information about what was on the other side of the star, or on the other side of that plasma.
01:52:45.000All of a sudden the beam of light is no longer batted to and fro by these free electrons.
01:52:52.000And you reach a point where the universe clears and it becomes transparent to the passage of light.
01:53:00.000In that moment, all the light that was contained in that fireball now moves free across the universe.
01:53:08.000That light For the last 14 billion years has been expanding with the expanding universe and the energy of the visible light is now microwaves.
01:53:19.000You point a microwave telescope in any direction, it is bathed in microwaves from that event.
01:55:33.000So as long as there is a universe out there, and as long as the whole universe had the same birth date, which all evidence points to, I will always see evidence of the Big Bang.
01:55:46.000Because that information is always fresh to us From a distance whose light only just now reached us.
01:55:58.000So, what you're gonna look for is the day when this expanding horizon washes over nothing.
01:56:11.000If this expanding horizon moves and there's no galaxies there, and there's nothing, then all the information about the formation of the universe goes away.
01:56:22.000And the Big Bang no longer has anybody telling us it is going through a Big Bang.
01:56:29.000That would be the edge of the known matter content of the universe.
01:56:41.000This information and they look back at this time period of 13.8 billion years and they hypothesize or they try to come up with theories about how far it could go back beyond that.
01:57:54.000So the galaxies will no longer be able to hold together because the expansion of the universe is now manifesting at a local level rather than on a much larger level.
02:00:07.000I don't have much time left, personally.
02:00:09.000But the idea that there'll be no universe at all to speak of what we're looking at, it'll all be molecules broken down.
02:00:20.000Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to even wrap my head around it.
02:00:23.000Yeah, well, it's why it's so important for people like that to be out there that have these things that they can pose, these questions and these scenarios they could describe, where your mind is like, wait, what?
02:01:23.000If you get further and further out, if you had to bet all your money, if you had, again, if you had one side yes, one side no, For simulation theory.
02:02:31.000What happens is all stars die, and the proton decays, and we're left with an entire universe of just sort of base particles where nothing happens because there's no source of energy left.
02:02:50.000And that's a less interesting fate than a big rip.
02:02:54.000But what's for me interesting is – and by the way, all this is in the last chapter.
02:06:00.000When you start combining quantum physics with general relativity, because there was a time when the universe was small, then the entire universe behaves in quantum ways.
02:06:14.000And so you can create a state of the universe where it's what's called a false, it's in a false state.
02:07:08.000From people I've spoken with who work in this field, because it's slightly outside of my direct astrophysics interests, There are different kinds of these multiverses.
02:07:19.000One of them could have the same laws of physics that we have.
02:07:22.000That's what leads people to say there's another Joe Rogan but he's the evil Joe Rogan with a goatee or whatever.
02:07:28.000But also there's another Joe Rogan that said everything that I've said exactly the way I've said it.
02:07:59.000Now imagine a universe where the laws of physics are slightly different.
02:08:03.000That's a different manifestation of this process.
02:08:07.000Is the speed of light a little different?
02:08:12.000So that's another level of multiverse.
02:08:15.000And there's several levels, but the most significant one is one where not only are the laws of physics different, but maybe there's a universe where there are no laws of physics at all.
02:08:52.000Non-fungible tokens have brought it up.
02:08:55.000So all I'm saying is in the last part of the book, we explore all of these exit ramps from the universe That take us to the end of the universe and we don't even know if we're asking the right question.
02:09:10.000But what we share with you is a sense of where the current thinking would take us if you extended it to its limits.
02:09:19.000When you ponder questions like this, when you ponder questions like other universes with different laws of physics or no laws of physics or fungible laws of physics, When you sit around, what is your process?
02:09:33.000Do you sit alone in your office and sit in front of a laptop and start writing this stuff out?
02:09:56.000That's not the solo burning midnight oil.
02:10:00.000When you're trying to think deep thoughts about what might or might not be true, objectively true in the universe, that can be a little more solitary, I think.
02:10:12.000And you can come up with ideas anyway.
02:10:14.000Forget this, deductive, reasoning, inductive, forget all that.
02:10:18.000You can have an idea just sitting on a toilet, okay?
02:12:57.000But add to that, maybe you are so diverse in what you expose yourself to that you see more than what other people see.
02:13:07.000And when you see more, you have the capacity to make connections that might not have previously been imagined, either by you or by anybody else.
02:13:18.000This is the value of cross-pollinating fields.
02:13:22.000It's why major discoveries can come in from the side in what is otherwise a very staid path of progress.
02:13:33.000So, in a hospital, People say, how do you want to invest money?
02:13:48.000So that makes sense, you know, as a headline, but let's unpack that.
02:13:53.000Go walk into a hospital and line up every single machine brought into the service of diagnosing the condition of the human body without cutting you open.
02:14:05.000So you'd have the MRI, you'd have the x-ray machines, you'd have the ultrasound.
02:15:19.000So, new ideas, especially new things that can transform society, tend to come from fields that, if they're not tangent to your field, they're just some other kind of way in.
02:15:32.000And so some of the greatest advances in my field came about because chemists were in the coffee lounge at the same time we were.
02:16:06.000No one person, you know, the midnight oil makes a good TV show or movie, the midnight loner genius, but science, most science today does not unfold that way.
02:16:18.000So getting back to my point, personally I do a lot of reading and when I have an idea then I bounce it off of people who are highly critical and skeptical of any new idea.
02:16:29.000And if it survives that, you can't have an ego going into it.
02:16:51.000In fact, I was once at a wine tasting, and there's someone else there who's a biologist, and we came up with an idea together, and we're probably going to write a paper on it.
02:17:26.000And so this kind of creativity, this sort of cooperative exploration of ideas, then that gives birth in your mind to the idea of writing a book about something.
02:17:37.000It can, but first you would write a research paper and get a peer review, this sort of thing.
02:17:41.000And then if it's good and it's successful and the public wants to know about it, that's ripe for a book.
02:17:46.000My books tend to be a little more summative than that.
02:18:13.000And as I tweet and as I post and as I walk the streets and as I sit in an airplane with someone next to me who learns that I know astrophysics and I hear their questions and as I reply, do their eyebrows go up and their eyes lighten or do they look bored and want to order their next drink?
02:18:51.000And especially my goal is to reignite Curiosity within your soul of knowledge and searching that may have once ignited when you were a kid but has long been dampened because we don't live in a world that promotes curiosity.
02:21:17.000And I look at it, and I analyze it from three dimensions, and I say, I'm going to clad this bit of information on that part of that scaffold.
02:21:25.000And how do you actively, like, engage with pop culture and curate sort of a knowledge base about what these wacky kids are interested in today?
02:21:34.000I read responses to my social media posts.
02:21:58.000If I think something isn't funny and they do laugh, if I missed something, if I was insensitive to something that I would have wanted to be had I known, that comes out.
02:23:37.000But is anything in life worth achieving that isn't itself hard?
02:23:41.000Your role as an educator, and as an educator, a public educator, meaning you're someone who's in the public eye all the time, educating people in a pop culture way.
02:26:56.000Well, he's also explaining, clarifying what the actual scientific method is versus just a flat statement like science doesn't need you to believe it's true or however you phrased it.
02:27:10.000Well, I'm just saying that, yeah, so the Stakem one, there's some informed people there, I think, and they just like creating controversy.
02:27:33.000And then I tried to be a little clever, clumsily.
02:27:36.000I said, if you and your followers took four minutes to put down your steak and cheese hoagie to read this essay, you would then understand the meaning of that treat and you would not...
02:27:50.000So I said that and then it became a whole thing.
02:27:53.000But that's the nature of social media.
02:27:54.000But I realized that I cannot have one tweet reference another because if the previous one is alive...
02:29:01.000We can call it beliefs, but they call it personal truths.
02:29:04.000If you look at the word truth, the first websites are religious websites.
02:29:10.000Truth is a very important word within belief systems.
02:29:14.000And so I studied that, and I said, all right, I'm not going to tell them, give me the word truth, because you're not describing truth, you're describing belief.
02:29:23.000That's a fight I'm not interested or willing to have.
02:30:06.000It gets co-opted because we, in nature, in the Serengeti, if we see something repeating, it gives us a good indication that maybe it's real and we should be careful about it or it's a reliable thing.
02:30:19.000In modern times, we have co-opted that feature of human evolution and now we give you information that has no foundation in truth but repeat it and in your head it becomes true.
02:30:42.000The third truth is an objective truth.
02:30:45.000This is a truth established by the methods and tools of science and verified by the methods and tools of science.
02:30:55.000Once that is established, it doesn't later on become false.
02:30:58.000Like the temperature of boiling water.
02:31:00.000For example, under atmospheric conditions, like the fact that Earth orbits the sun, like the fact that Earth is round, the sun is hot, there's thermonuclear fusion in the core, that the universe is expanding, that the galaxy is rotating, that there are other galaxies, that there's such a thing as quantum physics,
02:31:16.000that there are things called electrons and protons and neutrons and atoms and carbon.
02:31:22.000There is a body of objective truths established by the methods and tools of science That when it is established, it is not later found to be false.
02:31:34.000The truth can become deeper, but it doesn't become false.
02:31:40.000And these methods and tools have been in practice basically since Galileo and Sir Francis Bacon, around 1600. Before then, some people knew about this process that science goes through,
02:31:56.000but it wasn't widespread practice, not until about 1600. So if you're going to say, you should see the responses in here, scientists told us the Earth was flat.
02:32:05.000That was before 1600. Scientists used to, oh, we used to bleed you with leeches.
02:32:39.000And the press gets a single scientific result.
02:32:42.000That's kind of intriguing and interesting, and they report it as a new scientific truth because it was a scientific study, especially if it comes from a place like Harvard, where they'll put that up in the front sentence without saying, we don't know if this is actually true.
02:32:57.000We need verification from other studies.
02:33:00.000They don't say that typically, or that's later on in the article.
02:33:04.000So that's how you can go from, oh, cholesterol is good for you.
02:40:48.000But if it ever has, if someone really did tell someone that something was going to happen and it did happen, that to me is very fascinating.
02:41:04.000But again, maybe it's an emerging phenomenon.
02:41:08.000Maybe it's a thing that one day human beings will have in our natural toolbox.
02:41:13.000What's the difference between you manifesting this yet-to-be-fully-harnessed power intermittently and other times it doesn't work for you, but sometimes it does?
02:41:25.000So what's the difference between that and you hitting on something correctly at random?
02:41:33.000Well, one thing would be if you're hitting on something at random, you don't really know, you're guessing.
02:41:42.000The idea about this phenomenon is that you're getting a signal.
02:44:34.000And plus, we are so hubristic and ego-driven that we think we are special for having flipped head ten times in a row, when almost every time you do this experiment, somebody's going to flip heads ten times in a row.
02:44:50.000That mirrors what I've always said about the secret and the law of attraction.
02:44:54.000I'm like, you're only talking to winners.
02:45:03.000It didn't work out for them because they might have really been thinking hard about it all day and night, but you can't just manufacture things from your mind.
02:45:14.000But what you can do is have a goal, work towards it, have discipline, have focus, learn from your mistakes, improve upon your approach, and then eventually get to a place where you can look back and say, you know, I did it all with my mind.
02:47:55.000Everything that's happening here, we understand.
02:47:58.000From the material science, to the strength, to what happens, there's liquid in my glass, there's paint, there's material, all of this is understood.
02:48:12.000It's at the limits of the energetics of the world.
02:48:15.000And yes, there, there's some things we don't understand.
02:48:19.000Just recently, One of the particles in the universe, the muon, was sent into a magnetic field and it started moving in ways nobody predicted.
02:48:30.000Our understanding of what the muon is supposed to do, it did not obey.
02:48:39.000The press puts it as, oh, physics is tossed on its ear.
02:48:43.000Everything else still works as we imagined it, as we've measured it, but there's a new phenomenon.
02:48:50.000People are all in it right now trying to figure out what this particle called the muon is making it do something that we didn't expect it to do.
02:52:09.000So, because the total force is different across Earth, Earth gets stretched a little, elongated.
02:52:19.000It's especially visible in the oceans relative to the land, but Earth's physical body is also stretched in a direction towards the moon, except it's a little ahead of it, but we don't have to worry about that for the moment.
02:56:05.000And of course, Shakespeare knew this, and hence his line in, was it in Julius Caesar, the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but within ourselves.
02:56:17.000So Shakespeare knew this, and notice he's talking about fault, right?
02:56:22.000It's always what caused that to happen.
02:56:25.000And you want to blame things that are not within yourself.
02:56:28.000But even if you're not talking about yourself in terms of what's happening, if you're working in an emergency room, a lot of doctors will swear that there's more activity during a full moon.
02:57:15.000So this is life imitating art in that case.
02:57:20.000So what you really need to do is check to see when you don't know it's a full moon because it's cloudy and you come overcast and you come out of the bar, do you act crazy?
02:58:42.000I mean, so just the absurdity of how you'd have to imagine this would play out.
02:58:47.000But also, and you can do the calculation, that the gravity of people in the room on you And the machine, the light fish, is greater than the gravity of the moon on you.