The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1130 - Adam Frank

00:00:01.000 Five, four, three, two, one.

00:00:07.000 Boom.

00:00:08.000 Boom.

00:00:08.000 Adam, what's up, man?

00:00:09.000 How you doing?

00:00:10.000 It's good to be here today.

00:00:11.000 It's good to be here, too, with you and to talk.

00:00:14.000 Whoa. 0.99

00:00:14.000 I'm already knocking shit over. 0.99

00:00:16.000 Can't be trusted. 0.99

00:00:19.000 Your book, Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.

00:00:25.000 Yeah.

00:00:26.000 All about it. 1.00

00:00:27.000 That's deep shit, man. 1.00

00:00:28.000 Just the title alone, you're like, whoa. 1.00

00:00:31.000 I love aliens.

00:00:32.000 Everybody loves aliens.

00:00:33.000 Everybody does, but what are your thoughts on actual aliens and whether or not they've ever visited here?

00:00:39.000 Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, sort of two things.

00:00:42.000 So, first of all...

00:00:44.000 We should tell everybody you have a background in science.

00:00:46.000 I do.

00:00:47.000 I'm an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester.

00:00:49.000 I run a research group that studies, like, stars and planets and So you're not a crazy person I brought on here.

00:00:54.000 No, no, no.

00:00:55.000 I'm a card-carrying scientist.

00:00:56.000 I got my card and everything.

00:00:58.000 So yeah, I've been doing research on astronomy, astrophysics for a long time.

00:01:02.000 But I also do all this popular writing, like for NPR and New York Times.

00:01:06.000 And the genesis of this book came, A, because I love science fiction.

00:01:09.000 I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid.

00:01:11.000 But also I do a lot of work on climate change.

00:01:13.000 I deal with a lot of climate change denial.

00:01:15.000 What I realized was that there's this way we talk about it that completely forgets about the fact that we're probably not the first.

00:01:23.000 That led me to a whole bunch of research that eventually led to this book, including one paper that we did That showed that the odds that we're the only time it's ever happened, the only civilization in the entire history of the universe, the only way that that could be true is if the odds per planet are 1 in 10 billion trillion,

00:01:44.000 right?

00:01:44.000 That's pretty low, right?

00:01:46.000 So the odds of anything being 1 in 10 billion trillion, that's pretty freaking low.

00:01:50.000 So it's probably happened before.

00:01:52.000 You know, there's been other civilizations before ours.

00:01:55.000 And once you realize that, man, that is like, you know, it changes everything about how we think about ourselves, you know, and what's happening to us right now.

00:02:02.000 So other civilizations before ours that have fucked things up.

00:02:07.000 Well, that's kind of the premise, right?

00:02:09.000 So that's what, you know, when you look at climate change, right, basically what it is is civilizations are giant machines for turning energy into work, right, you know?

00:02:18.000 New York City, right? 0.97

00:02:18.000 You sit over and you look at Manhattan, you're like, holy shit, right? 0.97

00:02:21.000 There's all this energy flowing into it, and then there's all this work being done to keep everything moving. 0.97

00:02:26.000 And there's no way not to have an impact.

00:02:29.000 If you build a world-girdling civilization, which that's what a civilization is, there's going to be impact.

00:02:34.000 So the whole point of my doing this book was to start looking at ourselves as just one of.

00:02:40.000 You know?

00:02:41.000 We're not alone.

00:02:42.000 We're not the only time this has ever happened.

00:02:43.000 Doesn't mean anybody's around now.

00:02:45.000 Like, that's a different question.

00:02:46.000 But the idea that, like, it's never happened before, it meaning, like, you know, civilization, what's happening around us, like this machinery and everything, that, you know, that just in the new world of what we understand about planets and shit, that is just like, you know, it's not tenable anymore.

00:02:59.000 We gotta wake up.

00:03:00.000 The idea that...

00:03:02.000 Some civilization has to be the first one.

00:03:05.000 The only way you could ever think that we're the only ones is that some civilization has to be the first one, even in a universe that's infinite.

00:03:14.000 It has to happen one time.

00:03:18.000 But the idea is, are the conditions ideal in a trillion different spots all over the infinite spans of the universe?

00:03:27.000 Yeah.

00:03:27.000 And that's the thing, right?

00:03:28.000 So what we've learned – so one of my trips right now is like this is not your grandfather's SETI anymore, right?

00:03:33.000 Our understanding – we went through this major revolution in our understanding of planets about 20 years ago.

00:03:38.000 So you look back at the Greeks, right? 0.72

00:03:40.000 And you can see them arguing about whether any other stars had planets other than the sun.

00:03:45.000 I think?

00:04:08.000 And the odds of those kinds of collisions are so small that people are like, you know what?

00:04:12.000 There's just no planets.

00:04:13.000 And no planets, no life.

00:04:14.000 Unless something really freaky is going on.

00:04:16.000 But then 20 years ago, we discovered our first planet.

00:04:19.000 Isn't that crazy when you really think about that 20 years is such a short amount of time?

00:04:24.000 1998. Yeah, yeah.

00:04:25.000 And nobody knew before that.

00:04:28.000 Like, nobody knew whether there were any planets, right?

00:04:30.000 You know, when I was starting in astronomy, people were like, well, we don't know whether there's going to be any other planets.

00:04:34.000 And we went from...

00:04:35.000 So the first one was actually 96, I think.

00:04:37.000 95, 96. From that to now, where we know that every freaking star...

00:04:42.000 In the sky has a planet.

00:04:44.000 At least one.

00:04:45.000 Pretty much every one.

00:04:46.000 The giant ones, maybe not, but they're so rare that pretty much every star you see in the sky has a family of planets around it.

00:04:53.000 That is so nuts.

00:04:54.000 It's so nuts that this is such a new discovery.

00:04:57.000 Yeah.

00:04:57.000 I mean, when we think about what we know about the universe, we think that we've had a pretty good understanding of it for a long time.

00:05:03.000 Right.

00:05:04.000 But the fact that we didn't even know for sure that there are planets.

00:05:07.000 Right, right.

00:05:07.000 In my own lifetime, you know, people were teaching me when I was starting, like, you know, we just don't know.

00:05:11.000 Maybe they're rare.

00:05:12.000 And now we know for certain that they're everywhere.

00:05:15.000 And the thing people have to realize is every one of those planets is a place.

00:05:17.000 Right.

00:05:18.000 You know what I mean?

00:05:18.000 It's a place you could walk around.

00:05:20.000 Some of them for sure are going to have oceans.

00:05:22.000 There's going to be mountains.

00:05:23.000 There's going to be rain falling.

00:05:24.000 You know, I mean like they're all freaking places and they're all places where things can happen.

00:05:30.000 You know, planets are basically like nature's way of taking sunlight and doing something interesting with it.

00:05:34.000 So you have 10 billion, trillion planets in the universe, right?

00:05:40.000 And every one of them is an experiment that's being run.

00:05:42.000 So, you know, the idea that, like, we're the first time it's ever—now that we know that, right?

00:05:46.000 Now that we've gone through that revolution and understand that planets are, like, dime a dozen.

00:05:51.000 Planets—we're not only talking about planets here.

00:05:52.000 We're talking about planets are in the right place for life to form.

00:05:54.000 So there's the idea of the habitable zone, right? 0.97

00:05:56.000 So, you know, Mercury sucks.

00:05:58.000 You cannot—you know, Mercury's so hot that there's no way anything's going to happen.

00:06:01.000 And, you know, planets that are far enough out, they're going to be so cold, you know, they're so far away from their star that they're going to be so cold that, you know, it's hard to get liquid water on the surface.

00:06:09.000 So we define the habitable or Goldilocks zone as the place where you can pour water onto the surface and it'll just sit there.

00:06:16.000 It won't freeze and it won't, you know, sort of just evaporate away.

00:06:19.000 So, uh, all these 10 billion trillion planets I'm talking about are all in the right place for life to form, you know?

00:06:25.000 And so, like, with that many numbers, that many experiments being run, like, you gotta be a psychotic pessimist to say that, like, this is the only time a civilization's ever happened.

00:06:34.000 Right.

00:06:35.000 But there's still no evidence yet.

00:06:37.000 Obviously, we didn't even know there really absolutely were planets until 20 years ago.

00:06:42.000 Right.

00:06:42.000 But we don't know for sure that there's something else out there.

00:06:45.000 No, no.

00:06:46.000 This is an argument by – I call it like an argument by exhaustion.

00:06:49.000 If I gave you a bag of 10 billion trillion planets and you have to sort through all of them, right, the odds that you're never going to find another one that built a civilization is pretty – Like I said, you're really asking for really serious pessimism.

00:07:01.000 But we're just getting started with this game of looking for life.

00:07:05.000 That's why I keep saying this is not your grandfather's SETI where you point a radio telescope at a star and you kind of wait to see whether somebody's signaling you.

00:07:13.000 Who knows whether they are signaling?

00:07:14.000 Who knows what they'd be using?

00:07:16.000 Now what we can do, because we got all these planets to stare at, is, you know, we're going to be able to, like, stare at them as they pass in front of their star and get the light that passes through their atmosphere.

00:07:25.000 So we're going to, like, who knows what we're going to find?

00:07:27.000 You know, we're not waiting for them to signal us anymore over the next...

00:07:30.000 I swear to God, man, in the next...

00:07:32.000 In the next 30 years, we're going to have data relevant to the question of life.

00:07:35.000 Maybe not civilizations.

00:07:36.000 That could happen too.

00:07:37.000 But just life on other worlds.

00:07:40.000 And we've never had that before.

00:07:41.000 All the arguments for the entire history of humanity have just been two dudes yelling at each other.

00:07:44.000 But in the next 30 years, because of the stuff we're building, and now that we know there's planets, we're going to have real data to argue over with.

00:07:51.000 So, man, it's like we're in a whole other ballgame now.

00:07:55.000 I think the big fear for a lot of people is what happens when we find out for sure that there's something else out there.

00:08:00.000 If we really do find some other Manhattan on some Goldilocks planet that's hovering some similarly sized star a billion light years away or whatever the hell it is, that's gonna be very, very, very strange.

00:08:15.000 It will be.

00:08:15.000 It'll be a game changer, right?

00:08:16.000 Because for religions, for, you know, I mean, wow, you know, what do you do if you find other intelligent creatures who are building civilization?

00:08:23.000 You start making them pay taxes.

00:08:24.000 That's what you do.

00:08:26.000 That's right.

00:08:27.000 You go get pissed off that they're not doing what you want them to do.

00:08:30.000 You should be believing this one.

00:08:31.000 You know?

00:08:32.000 So, but I think, you know, for me, the thing is, like, it's about climate change.

00:08:35.000 Because what it means is, like, there's no way...

00:08:37.000 Well, from my perspective, you know, that if you have a civilization, you push your planet.

00:08:42.000 You know, you can't stop it in some sense.

00:08:44.000 If you build a civilization, it's kind of...

00:08:46.000 Well, the only way around it is if you have, like, a subsistence culture, indigenous Native American culture. 0.94

00:08:54.000 Right.

00:08:54.000 Which...

00:08:55.000 It seems impossible, but it existed here 200 years ago, which is a blink of an eye.

00:09:01.000 Right, right.

00:09:01.000 I know.

00:09:02.000 It's amazing it's only 200 years since, like, the ramp-up.

00:09:05.000 You know, the world population only crossed the billion mark in, like, 1850. You know?

00:09:10.000 I mean, there were so few of us on the planet for most of the time that even we've been around.

00:09:14.000 Forget the planet's history.

00:09:16.000 So, you know, I think, like, there is, you know, the discovery, if we were to get any evidence, you know, and I think the way it's going to happen is going to be more by accident than by, like, signaling, you know?

00:09:27.000 But if we had any evidence of another technological, if we had any evidence of just life, right?

00:09:31.000 If we just find a biosphere, evidence that, you know, and we can do that from a distance, right?

00:09:35.000 Even if the star is, you know, 30 light years away, if we get, if we see, as the light passes through the star's atmosphere for those few moments, if we see oxygen in the atmosphere, you know, we'll be able to detect that.

00:09:47.000 That's what we can do with telescopes.

00:09:48.000 We can tell, like, you can see the fingerprints of the different kinds of elements.

00:09:51.000 If we see oxygen in that atmosphere, You know, and methane, that pretty much says that there's a biosphere there, that there's life.

00:09:58.000 Because you wouldn't get...

00:09:58.000 Oxygen would just, like, react away really fast if it wasn't for life.

00:10:01.000 Like, on Earth, if it wasn't for life, there'd be no oxygen in the atmosphere.

00:10:05.000 What are the possibilities of life that exists in a completely different environment than we expect?

00:10:10.000 Like, I know that they found life at the bottom of the ocean in these volcanic vents, at extreme heats, boiling water.

00:10:17.000 They didn't expect to see this.

00:10:18.000 And this is fairly recent as well.

00:10:20.000 That is.

00:10:20.000 Yeah, the idea that the...

00:10:22.000 Because, right, this whole definition of the habitable zone was based on the idea like, oh, you've got to have a surface and it's got to be, you know.

00:10:28.000 But now with the, you know, not every, but like a bunch of the moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn and the gas giants, they have oceans under them.

00:10:35.000 Well, there's thoughts that Europa might have something below the surface, right?

00:10:39.000 Yeah, yeah, because the Europa is, you know, it's this pretty big moon, and we know it's covered in ice, right?

00:10:45.000 You can see it's covered in a, you know, and we think that layer of ice is maybe like, I don't know, 10 kilometers thick, and then below that there may be 100 kilometers of ocean.

00:10:51.000 And because as it moves around Jupiter, the gravity of Jupiter is always squishing the insides, so there's probably volcanic activity happening at the surface.

00:10:58.000 So you have hydrothermal vents, you know, heat escaping out of, and chemicals escaping out of the surface under the ocean.

00:11:04.000 And that's how we think life formed on Jupiter.

00:11:07.000 Yeah.

00:11:09.000 Yeah.

00:11:10.000 Yeah.

00:11:23.000 Really rich ecosystem.

00:11:24.000 But the problem with an underwater life or forming civilization is that you can't really do fire.

00:11:31.000 Fire was pretty important for us, for metallurgy.

00:11:34.000 To build advanced technology, you kind of need combustion.

00:11:38.000 So that's kind of the open question with that.

00:11:40.000 Yeah, we are not really concerned with animals.

00:11:43.000 We're concerned with things that think and change their environment.

00:11:46.000 Isn't that weird?

00:11:46.000 Like, we are concerned with life, but we're only concerned with life that's at least similar or comparable to us.

00:11:52.000 Yeah, microbes don't get too excited.

00:11:56.000 We're not going to go to Jupiter for some microbes.

00:11:58.000 But we are excited about the things that they've recently found on Mars, right?

00:12:01.000 I mean, there was a very recent discovery.

00:12:03.000 Right, right.

00:12:04.000 So, you know, the thing is actually from the, you know, so I work in a lot of fields, but I would also consider myself an astrobiologist, right?

00:12:10.000 Which is a pretty kind of wild idea that you can do astrobiology, even though you only have one example, which is the Earth.

00:12:16.000 But we've learned so much that now we can start asking ourselves about the possibility of life elsewhere.

00:12:20.000 So finding even a microbe, like even a friggin', you know, amoeba on Mars would be, or even evidence that there used to be amoebas on Mars.

00:12:28.000 What is the evidence that they've discovered on Mars?

00:12:29.000 What they found was organic chemistry, right?

00:12:32.000 And so, but organic chemistry...

00:12:34.000 Man, I hated chemistry when I was growing up.

00:12:36.000 And I hated organic chem.

00:12:38.000 Was that just basically chemistry involving carbon, you know?

00:12:41.000 So you can have non...

00:12:43.000 Organic chemistry doesn't mean organisms.

00:12:45.000 But it's the kind of chemistry that organisms love, right?

00:12:48.000 So finding evidence that there was like they drilled...

00:12:51.000 Amazing.

00:12:52.000 We sent a freaking robot to Mars that could drill through a rock, you know, and then ingest the rock.

00:12:57.000 And then send the data back across space. 0.96

00:13:00.000 You know, pretty good for a bunch of hairless apes, you know? 0.98

00:13:02.000 Yeah.

00:13:03.000 So what they found was evidence for fairly complex organic chemistry, which meant that way back when, Mars – and this we know for sure, right?

00:13:14.000 Mars had water on it.

00:13:15.000 We know that for sure now.

00:13:16.000 Mars was a blue planet for at least a while.

00:13:18.000 Did they think that Mars was hit by an asteroid or a comet or something along those lines?

00:13:22.000 Well, everything got hit by a comet.

00:13:23.000 That's how we have, you know, we have chunks of Mars here, right?

00:13:26.000 That, you know, the thing in 96 or whatever, when they were like, oh, we found life on Mars, you know, they thought what they found was fossil bacteria in a chunk of Mars that they found in Antarctica.

00:13:35.000 So the planets have been swapping spit for, like, the entire history of the solar system.

00:13:39.000 That's fossilized bacteria that they found.

00:13:40.000 Has that been confirmed?

00:13:41.000 No, no.

00:13:42.000 Most people now think that the Allen Hills meteorite, that probably, you know, it's inconclusive and it's not conclusive enough to be like, yeah, we found life.

00:13:50.000 It's like a tiny little squiggly worm looking thing.

00:13:52.000 That's what it was, yeah.

00:13:52.000 But it was so small that it was like way smaller than any of the microscopic fossilized bacteria we've ever seen before.

00:13:57.000 So people in general are like, nah.

00:14:00.000 But that's what started, right? 0.99

00:14:02.000 That's when Clinton was like, okay, we're going to send a lot of shit to Mars. 0.99

00:14:05.000 Because back in 90... 0.99

00:14:07.000 You know, early 90s, people were kind of done with Mars.

00:14:09.000 And so that's what triggered the whole, you know, one space probe after another, the rovers.

00:14:13.000 And like, so, you know, the thing we found was a direct result of that effort, which was this organic chemistry, which says that back in the day, Mars had a lot of this stuff lying around, had a lot of these, you know, these organic chemicals lying around, which if you're life, that's what you're going to be using.

00:14:28.000 So that's like one more step, like we've been putting the Lego blocks The argument for life on Mars, one piece at a time since the first rovers went there.

00:14:38.000 Yeah, if we did discover just even plants on some other planet, even just a planet with some sort of plant-like life...

00:14:47.000 Yeah, that would be...

00:14:48.000 That'd be a game changer.

00:14:49.000 That'd be a game changer.

00:14:50.000 Because, you know, right now we don't know if there's, you know, are we the only time in the entire history of the universe that, like, this crazy thing where we went from non-life to life, like, is that common or is that never, ever, ever happened?

00:15:03.000 So that's the question we want to answer.

00:15:05.000 I mean like that argument I was given before is I think from the probable arguments, I'm saying it's like it's almost overwhelming that, yeah, it probably happened somewhere.

00:15:13.000 Again, it doesn't mean anything is here.

00:15:15.000 But we need evidence, right?

00:15:16.000 Science.

00:15:16.000 So we got to build that evidence.

00:15:18.000 Yeah.

00:15:19.000 And if we do find something, one of the weirder things would be if we found something and there was a way to get there.

00:15:26.000 Yeah.

00:15:27.000 You know, we find something and we're like, yeah, we find something, but we're pretty sure there's some kind of life and it's three billion light years away.

00:15:34.000 You're like, well, that's cool.

00:15:35.000 Yeah, what do we do?

00:15:36.000 Yeah, it's nice to know that we're not the only ones.

00:15:39.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:15:39.000 Well, you know, it's interesting.

00:15:40.000 Like, how much would that change?

00:15:42.000 You know, even if we found, like, evidence for – this is a debate.

00:15:45.000 Like, if we found evidence of a technological civilization, we saw, like – Alien megastructures, like that star they thought about.

00:15:50.000 Yeah, what was that nonsense?

00:15:51.000 It wasn't really nonsense.

00:15:53.000 It was something floating around, right?

00:15:55.000 So here's what they saw.

00:15:56.000 So the way we discover planets is we look for when the planet passes in front of the star, you get a little dip in the light, right?

00:16:03.000 It blocks out a little bit of light.

00:16:04.000 It's like a little eclipse.

00:16:05.000 And so now that's how we know that every star in the sky has planets.

00:16:09.000 But they found one that just made no sense.

00:16:12.000 Like the light would dip, then it would stop dipping, then it would dip again three times, and it would stop dipping.

00:16:15.000 Sometimes it was lower, sometimes it was higher. 0.98

00:16:18.000 And for a year or so, people were like, what the fuck is this?

00:16:22.000 And so Jason Wright and others, Jason's a friend of mine, they wrote a paper where they were like, hey, at least – because this is what the future is going to look like. 0.84

00:16:30.000 We can't say – we have to at least consider the possibility that these are artificial structures that are like orbiting the star.

00:16:37.000 It would have to be.

00:16:38.000 Ungodly huge.

00:16:59.000 All of the sun's energy and use it for yourself by building a giant sphere around the sun with solar panels on the inside.

00:17:06.000 People think like...

00:17:07.000 That goes back to Kardashev's, the idea of the Kardashev scale back in the 60s, where he's like, look, there's going to be a natural progression of civilizations that goes first, you collect all the energy you can from your planet, and then you use that to do amazing things.

00:17:18.000 And then you collect all the energy from your star, and then you do that. 0.92

00:17:21.000 You do amazing shit with that. 0.98

00:17:22.000 And then the whole galaxy. 0.99

00:17:25.000 So Kardashev thought there was a scale that...

00:17:27.000 That civilizations naturally progress through.

00:17:29.000 And you hopefully don't blow yourself up along the way.

00:17:31.000 Well, I think that's the question.

00:17:33.000 I mean, I've criticized the Kardashev scale in one of the papers I recently did because what it fails to take into account is the fact that like, you know, on your way up to the type one, type one is when you harvest all the energy from your planet, which basically means somehow covering your planet in, you know, solar panels or something. 0.97

00:17:48.000 That neglects what we've learned since Kardashev wrote his paper in 64 is that, you know, planets don't like that shit. 0.73

00:17:53.000 Like, The planet's going to feed back. 0.99

00:17:54.000 You try and build, you know, massive shit on your planet, the planet has its own, you know, biosphere is pretty powerful and you've got to take the biosphere into account or you get climate change. 0.97

00:18:02.000 You get, you know, the planet being pushed off in another direction. 0.99

00:18:04.000 So, but whatever.

00:18:05.000 So for the alien megastructures, people thought like, oh, maybe this is like a piece of a Dyson sphere, right?

00:18:11.000 This is like, you know.

00:18:12.000 Now, so, you know, when he proposed this, people went bonkers over this, right?

00:18:16.000 He was just saying, he's like, look, here's the 15 different things could be and I'm going to have to at least consider the possibility that it's artificial, right?

00:18:23.000 But for me – and some people got really angry and everything.

00:18:25.000 But I thought like this is – Why did they get angry?

00:18:27.000 Because there's been a thing in the community over the years.

00:18:31.000 SETI got a bad name, right?

00:18:33.000 SETI for a bunch of – SETI was sort of thought as being like, oh, only wackadoodles do that.

00:18:37.000 But why is that?

00:18:38.000 Just because there was no results? 0.99

00:18:40.000 I just think, you know, it's because of shitty TV. I mean, in some ways, right? 0.95

00:18:46.000 It's prosthetic foreheads, right?

00:18:48.000 It's the whole, we've had so much kind of crappy speculation about aliens.

00:18:53.000 They're trying to do anything scientific.

00:18:55.000 Always had this whiff of sort of being a little, you know.

00:18:58.000 And then there's the UFO stuff, you know, which is completely separate.

00:19:00.000 It has nothing to do with it.

00:19:01.000 But SETI never really achieved any results, right?

00:19:05.000 There was that one big blip that was highly popularized.

00:19:09.000 The wow signal.

00:19:09.000 Yeah.

00:19:10.000 But here's the thing about SETI. We never really did SETI that much.

00:19:12.000 You know what I mean?

00:19:13.000 Like, people have this idea, like, wow, we've got telescopes all over the world, and they're looking—you know, so the government never funded a SETI study, anything major, right?

00:19:21.000 So people—you know, all that SETI has done is, like, basically, you know, some dudes on a telescope get a little extra time.

00:19:27.000 They're like, hey, man, quick, let's go look at a star.

00:19:28.000 Right.

00:19:29.000 So Jill Tartar, who's one of the founders, one of the greats of SETI, she compares it.

00:19:34.000 It's like, you know, we've got an ocean that we need to look at, and so far we've looked at a thimble, right?

00:19:39.000 Is she the Jodie Foster character?

00:19:40.000 She's the Jodie Foster character, yeah. 0.51

00:19:42.000 In contact.

00:19:43.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:19:43.000 So she's, you know, and it's a good point.

00:19:45.000 Like, we haven't really looked yet.

00:19:47.000 So the idea that, you know, the stars are silent or anything, it's like, man, come on, we haven't even begun to do a comprehensive survey.

00:19:54.000 SETI makes me sad.

00:19:55.000 Why?

00:19:56.000 Because I feel like they're wasting their time.

00:19:58.000 And there was a documentary I saw once about some biologist who was convinced that the giant sloth was still alive and that there was examples of them in South America. 0.95

00:20:09.000 And this poor bastard had spent more than a decade looking for this giant sloth in South America. 0.85

00:20:16.000 And there was this moment where he was chasing down this... 1.00

00:20:23.000 Supposed a dung pile and they were looking for it. 0.99

00:20:25.000 He had this look in his eyes where he was like, holy shit, what if I waste my fucking life in my academic career chasing down something that's not even real? 0.99

00:20:37.000 That's kind of how I've always felt about SETI. Yeah, but that's not the way the people – I mean, everybody who's involved in it – I don't do SETI. I mean, I respect the people who are doing it. 0.97

00:20:46.000 But most of them are like, look, this is just a multi-generational thing.

00:20:51.000 And even if I don't find it, I'm laying the foundation.

00:20:53.000 It's like cathedrals, right?

00:20:54.000 It took like – how many generations did it take to build a cathedral in medieval Europe?

00:20:58.000 So the first guy who laid the stone was like, I'm not going to see this.

00:21:00.000 Maybe my great-grandkid.

00:21:01.000 So most of them are like – You know, they know that this is going to, you know, this is a huge, it's like the most important question in humanity, right?

00:21:09.000 Are we alone?

00:21:10.000 And they're willing to accept that, like, you know, if you're going to do it scientifically.

00:21:14.000 You're going to have to do it brick by frickin' brick.

00:21:16.000 And so you just have to accept that and go on.

00:21:20.000 But like I said, I think this is a new era now.

00:21:23.000 So the idea of looking for signals, which assumes that somebody's putting out signals, right?

00:21:26.000 That's a huge assumption right there.

00:21:29.000 But now that we know that there's all these planets and we're staring at all these planets, we need to be thinking differently.

00:21:35.000 We need to be prepared for what happens when we see something we don't understand.

00:21:39.000 Well, it's also, we don't even use radio anymore.

00:21:42.000 Right, right.

00:21:42.000 Cable.

00:21:43.000 I mean, radio is dying slowly but surely.

00:21:46.000 Yeah.

00:21:46.000 Local radio is, I mean, it's kind of a thing of the past.

00:21:50.000 Yeah, right.

00:21:51.000 The only thing that's really we're beaming out a large scale is military radars.

00:21:55.000 You know, that's the main thing.

00:21:57.000 So there would be some kind of signal.

00:21:59.000 It wouldn't necessarily have to be radar or radio.

00:22:02.000 It would just have to be something that we could detect, some form of anomaly that seemed to be artificial.

00:22:07.000 Right.

00:22:07.000 So here's some of the suggestions that people are talking about.

00:22:10.000 So Avi Loeb at Harvard talks about the idea, you know, maybe what you need, and you're going to need the sensitivity for this, you're going to see, like, rocket engines going back and forth between, you know, you have a multi-planet civilization in some way.

00:22:23.000 And you're going to see little flares as rockets decelerate and accelerate back and forth.

00:22:26.000 People have talked about seeing city lights.

00:22:28.000 You know, the telescopes are getting, you know, we're building these giant telescopes.

00:22:32.000 They're like 30 meters across.

00:22:34.000 Where there may be a potential one day to see a city light.

00:22:36.000 You could see city lights.

00:22:37.000 You know, you're going to see the planet come around.

00:22:39.000 Like, this is all, like, you know, we're not there yet.

00:22:42.000 20 years, 30 years.

00:22:43.000 30 years, 40 years.

00:22:44.000 You know, this is a long game.

00:22:45.000 And you've got to be playing the long game.

00:22:46.000 At some point, we're going to need to build stuff in space that's even larger so we can collect more light.

00:22:50.000 And won't the issue also be that if we do see these city lights, we're seeing city lights from millions of years ago?

00:22:55.000 Well, it depends.

00:22:56.000 A planet that's in a star 10 light years ago, that's 10 years ago.

00:23:00.000 So it's not like these things could still be around.

00:23:03.000 Here's a really interesting idea.

00:23:05.000 Because one of the things that I'm talking about in my book is how long does any civilization land?

00:23:09.000 That's the real question.

00:23:10.000 All of this stuff is super relevant for us now because the question is what is the average lifetime of a civilization?

00:23:16.000 So you might be able to see artifacts from civilizations that are gone.

00:23:20.000 Like imagine a civilization covered one of its moons in solar panels, right?

00:23:26.000 The reflected light is going to show a spectral signature of the panels.

00:23:32.000 So it's like they don't even have to necessarily be alive now that we still might be able to see stuff from their evidence of artificial structures or something that's not natural around them.

00:23:42.000 So that's the thing, man.

00:23:43.000 It's like we're about to take this step.

00:23:48.000 In astrobiology, we're already running models of exo-biospheres, which we're asking, what kind of chemistry can you have?

00:23:55.000 If you have photosynthesis on a planet around a star that's smaller than ours, that star is going to be mostly red as opposed to yellow.

00:24:03.000 So the light that's coming off it is going to be different.

00:24:05.000 Can you have photosynthesis in that case?

00:24:07.000 People are like, Yeah, you probably could.

00:24:08.000 And what would it look like?

00:24:09.000 So we're already doing the work to be ready for exo-biospheres.

00:24:13.000 So exo-civilizations, we kind of need to be prepared for that too. 1.00

00:24:17.000 Looking for, you know, what could be the traces?

00:24:19.000 What might we see from a distance from an exo-civilization?

00:24:21.000 They don't have to be signaling us.

00:24:23.000 You know, they're just there and we're going to catch some aspect of their being around.

00:24:27.000 And if we did see rocket, if we did see some sort of a signature from rockets going back and forth or the...

00:24:41.000 Right.

00:24:42.000 Right.

00:24:45.000 Right.

00:24:49.000 If that's possible.

00:24:50.000 If it's possible.

00:24:51.000 If it's possible.

00:24:52.000 Of course, that is one of the problems.

00:24:57.000 It's just like saying, what are we going to be like in a million years?

00:25:00.000 Who the frick knows?

00:25:02.000 It's so long. 0.94

00:25:03.000 I think you start with what you know.

00:25:05.000 The cool thing about the planet part, though, is that unless they become energy beings, they're going to have an effect on their planet.

00:25:12.000 Looking at their planets to look for spectral indications, even after they die, there might even be things.

00:25:19.000 So that's, I think, a good way to go.

00:25:22.000 Yeah, I'm so curious as to what we're going to be able to do in a thousand years and ten thousand years and a hundred thousand years if civilization does stay around and we figure out how to not melt the earth or boil the oceans or whatever the fuck we're doing wrong.

00:25:39.000 But there's a bunch of science fiction films that do speculate on what's going to be possible in the future.

00:25:46.000 And one of them was, what was that recent one with, what's his name?

00:25:50.000 Alright, alright.

00:25:51.000 What's his name? 0.99

00:25:52.000 What the fuck's his name? 1.00

00:25:53.000 Matthew McConaughey. 1.00

00:25:56.000 The one where they go through the wormholes.

00:25:58.000 How much do those movies piss you off?

00:26:00.000 They don't.

00:26:01.000 I do not.

00:26:02.000 I mean, I love science fiction.

00:26:05.000 So, you know, I mean, I do not need my science fiction.

00:26:08.000 To be correct?

00:26:08.000 To be correct.

00:26:10.000 I mean, you know, if they want to make it, you know, so I love The Expanse.

00:26:12.000 The Expanse is my favorite show ever.

00:26:13.000 I will talk about it.

00:26:15.000 What is The Expanse?

00:26:15.000 The Expanse?

00:26:16.000 I don't even know.

00:26:17.000 Thank you.

00:26:18.000 Help me.

00:26:19.000 So The Expanse, it's a series of books, first of all, that I think are the best science fiction books in the last 15 years.

00:26:24.000 Really?

00:26:25.000 And then they made it into a show on SyFy.

00:26:28.000 And then they had three years of it.

00:26:30.000 And at first people were like, oh, this is kind of hard to follow because it's a lot of stories coming together.

00:26:33.000 And then this year it got 100% ratings.

00:26:40.000 What is it?

00:26:41.000 Rotten Tomatoes?

00:26:42.000 Rotten Tomatoes, 100% or 95%.

00:26:43.000 People love a show.

00:26:44.000 And then freaking SyFy canceled it.

00:26:46.000 And so then Jeff Bezos, yeah, Jeff Bezos just picked it up.

00:26:49.000 Oh, good for you, Jeff.

00:26:50.000 Because people love this show, man. 1.00

00:26:51.000 Fuck yeah, rich man. 0.99

00:26:52.000 So let me tell you why this show is amazing, right? 0.99

00:26:55.000 So it takes place about 200 years from now, and we are truly a multi-planet species.

00:26:59.000 Like Mars now has, you know, a billion people on it.

00:27:02.000 I think?

00:27:28.000 And then there's, you enter into this, they discover like what they call the protomolecule.

00:27:33.000 Like, you know, it was, this is basically this alien molecule that was really a device that some aliens threw our way billions of years ago that was, you know, I don't, how much am I supposed to give away?

00:27:43.000 You know, I don't want to, so no, not too much.

00:27:44.000 It's okay.

00:27:45.000 No one's going to remember.

00:27:46.000 All right, good, good.

00:27:47.000 So complicated.

00:27:48.000 So that becomes kind of a weapon in this political intrigue.

00:27:53.000 So it's just a great story.

00:27:54.000 It's kind of like people call it like the Game of Thrones in space.

00:27:57.000 But I'll tell you what I love about it is that this is what it's going to look like.

00:28:00.000 Like they get the science on this show so right, as much as you can, right?

00:28:04.000 So, you know, in space, if your rocket motors are on, there's gravity.

00:28:08.000 Because, you know, the rocket motors push up towards you and so you've got gravity, you can walk around.

00:28:12.000 When you turn the rocket motors off, You float around, right?

00:28:14.000 On spinning things, you know, anything.

00:28:16.000 So, you know, in this universe, you know, in the fictional universe, they've taken the big asteroids and they've hollowed them out and spun them up.

00:28:23.000 So people live on the inside, you know.

00:28:25.000 And so at one point, like one of the characters, the private eye, they got this great sort of film noir thing going on.

00:28:31.000 And he pours a drink, you know, some whiskey.

00:28:33.000 And the whiskey does this.

00:28:34.000 It spirals into this.

00:28:35.000 So they got like the It's like I peed my pants.

00:28:38.000 I was like, oh my God, they got the Coriolis effect right.

00:28:41.000 So it's like, this is really what it's going to look like.

00:28:44.000 You know what I mean?

00:28:45.000 If you want to imagine 200 years from now, which I think is completely feasible that we have millions of people living in space.

00:28:51.000 Do they make any advances socially?

00:28:54.000 No. 1.00

00:28:57.000 People are assholes to each other, and that's what makes it. 0.99

00:29:00.000 But it's only 200 years. 1.00

00:29:01.000 That's a lot to ask for.

00:29:02.000 Well, think about how different we are from people that lived 50 years ago.

00:29:05.000 I mean, are we that different?

00:29:07.000 I think we're quite a bit different.

00:29:08.000 In what way?

00:29:08.000 What do you think?

00:29:09.000 Well, we have this ability to communicate now that we never did before, where everybody has an ability to say their piece about how they feel about how things are going.

00:29:18.000 Yeah.

00:29:18.000 No, that's interesting, right?

00:29:19.000 And that has changed a lot of things in a lot of ways.

00:29:21.000 But I mean, has it changed...

00:29:23.000 Who we are.

00:29:24.000 I mean, I think evolution...

00:29:25.000 I think it's chipping away at who we are.

00:29:27.000 Well, that would be good if it could.

00:29:29.000 Because one of the things, my thing...

00:29:30.000 So what's interesting about this fictional world, too, is that the Earth is dealing with climate.

00:29:34.000 The Earth has like 30 billion people on it, and New York is halfway underwater.

00:29:37.000 And so that's part of the story, too, is that we're trying to navigate our way through now becoming a multi-planet species.

00:29:44.000 So that is a version of at least 200 years.

00:29:48.000 Where you can really extrapolate the technologies and ask yourself, because that's real.

00:29:52.000 I mean, I think that's really going to happen.

00:29:53.000 If we make it through climate change, that's the prize at the end of the story.

00:29:58.000 If we make it through climate change, with the stuff that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are doing, man, that's real.

00:30:04.000 Is this what your number one concern is, climate change?

00:30:06.000 I'm a single voter, yeah, climate change.

00:30:09.000 Because it is an existential dilemma.

00:30:12.000 Because of all the writing I did for NPR and the New York Times, I have dealt with a lot of climate change denialists, man, and it drives me crazy.

00:30:17.000 What is their big...

00:30:18.000 What's the big...

00:30:19.000 Because I recently had a discussion with someone on the podcast that didn't believe in climate change.

00:30:24.000 And it was a weird thing because I kept pulling up all the different scientific consensus studies, all the different studies that show that we were having an impact.

00:30:33.000 It's an undeniable impact.

00:30:35.000 Undeniable.

00:30:35.000 30 years of science.

00:30:37.000 I saw that and she was like, you know, well, that's what you say.

00:30:40.000 I don't think that she's really thinking about that.

00:30:42.000 In her case, I don't think she really thinks about it.

00:30:46.000 I think she just has this stance that she believes that that group that she's a part of subscribes to.

00:30:52.000 So there's an ideological aspect of it where you have a predetermined pattern that you're supposed to follow when you're on one side.

00:31:00.000 You have to be pro-life.

00:31:02.000 You have to be pro-Second Amendment.

00:31:04.000 All this whole bucket of stuff.

00:31:04.000 There's a bucket of stuff.

00:31:05.000 Yeah, and that's, I think it's a giant problem with our culture.

00:31:08.000 There are two groups of people that you can't, like to truly be an independent thinker, you're like one of these weirdos that's off in the fringe.

00:31:16.000 You know, to be independent of either party.

00:31:18.000 Right, right.

00:31:19.000 And the thing about science is the whole point of science.

00:31:21.000 Is to be independent.

00:31:22.000 And to have, you know, what science is, science is a way of having public knowledge.

00:31:27.000 You know what I mean?

00:31:27.000 Like, everybody has their opinions, whatever.

00:31:29.000 But science is about the stuff we can all be like, oh, yeah, for sure.

00:31:32.000 You know, it's this whole process that we've evolved over 400 years.

00:31:35.000 And with climate denial, man, sometimes, you know, it's just, you know, you want to be like, what are you saying, man?

00:31:41.000 Like, what?

00:31:42.000 You know, read a book, because they'll say stuff.

00:31:44.000 Like, here's my favorite one.

00:31:45.000 Climate's always changing.

00:31:46.000 Hey, man, climate's always changing, man.

00:31:47.000 Which is true.

00:31:48.000 So if somebody comes to me, because what I want most for people, I consider myself an evangelist of science.

00:31:53.000 I love science.

00:31:55.000 And so if people come to me and say, hey man, isn't the climate always changing?

00:31:58.000 I'm like, oh man, great question.

00:31:59.000 We actually know the answer to that.

00:32:00.000 Yeah, it's changing, but it's changing.

00:32:02.000 What's the timescale?

00:32:04.000 So it changes often on million-year timescales.

00:32:07.000 But from the last 10,000 years, since the last ice age, which was 10,000 years ago, which is amazing.

00:32:12.000 There used to be a mile of ice above our heads 10,000 years ago.

00:32:16.000 Climate has been remarkably stable.

00:32:18.000 There's been little blips in it, but no major changes.

00:32:21.000 And I can show them the graph of this and everything.

00:32:24.000 So if they're interested...

00:32:26.000 So if they're asking the question because they want to know, I'm down to talk until the cows come home.

00:32:31.000 But that's not what typical deniers are.

00:32:33.000 Deniers are like, get climate changing all the time.

00:32:35.000 And they're not interested in the answer.

00:32:36.000 Not only are they not interested in the answer, they're just trying to win.

00:32:41.000 It's not a real conversation because it's a really complex thing.

00:32:46.000 If you dig an ice core and you tap down to 50,000, 80,000, 100,000 years, you see all these bizarre shifts of the climate that could be indicative of super volcanoes and astroidal impacts and solar flares. 0.59

00:33:01.000 A lot of shit happens over the course of a million years. 0.58

00:33:04.000 Right. 0.98

00:33:07.000 To hang all your ideas on the party's ideology and to deny all this really interesting stuff and all these variables.

00:33:19.000 That's what pisses me off.

00:33:20.000 It's like, you know, what I try and tell people is like, look, climate science is like awesome.

00:33:24.000 Like, it's science.

00:33:25.000 It's got these amazing stories to tell about, you know, yeah, the Earth.

00:33:29.000 I mean, Earth, over the past 4.5 billion years, the Earth has gone through the most profound changes.

00:33:33.000 And we've learned about...

00:33:34.000 Aren't you interested in that?

00:33:36.000 But no, right.

00:33:36.000 They basically have this thing where like, you know, I'm part of this group and therefore I have to have this opinion.

00:33:42.000 And I'm like, dude, it's science.

00:33:43.000 Science doesn't care who you voted for.

00:33:45.000 You know what I mean?

00:33:46.000 Like the radiative properties of a CO2 molecule doesn't care whether you're wearing a blue tie or a red tie.

00:33:51.000 And the fact that people can't make that distinction.

00:33:53.000 And here's the real problem.

00:33:54.000 Once you go down this slippery road of denying saying like, OK, that kind of science I hate, man, they're all a hoax.

00:34:01.000 Well, you know, America's prosperity and our safety has been built on science over the last 200 years.

00:34:06.000 You know, you start to erode the whole thing.

00:34:08.000 You can't just, like, call one group of, you know, scientists hoaxters, you know, and not have it slowly infect everything else to the point where, like, you know, China will be happy to eat our lunch, you know, when it comes scientifically. 0.66

00:34:19.000 China's pumping music.

00:34:20.000 Huge amounts of money into science.

00:34:22.000 You're not doing this.

00:34:22.000 So, like, you know, we're limiting.

00:34:24.000 And here's the other thing that really bums me out.

00:34:26.000 Science is not a lunch buffet.

00:34:29.000 You know what I mean?

00:34:30.000 You can't be like, oh, man, can I have some of those antibiotics?

00:34:32.000 I love antibiotics.

00:34:33.000 And, oh, yeah, the cell phone's great.

00:34:34.000 I'll use that.

00:34:34.000 I really want to fly in a plane.

00:34:35.000 But climate change is bullshit. 0.99

00:34:38.000 I mean, like, you know, either you accept that you live in a scientific society. 0.99

00:34:42.000 It doesn't mean like you're slavishly adhered to anything that comes out in a journal yesterday.

00:34:46.000 But, you know, either you adhere to the idea that this method has produced miracles for us, or, you know, give me the cell phone back.

00:34:53.000 You know what I mean?

00:34:54.000 Well, the scientific method is what has established the actual real facts of how things interact with each other that's allowed us to create technology.

00:35:03.000 And I think they split that distinction.

00:35:06.000 They focus on the technology and commerce, which is more important in their eyes than the consequences of the I don't know if it was a working prototype or just a concept,

00:35:33.000 but there was an enormous building that was really an air filter.

00:35:36.000 Yeah, they're starting to look at carbon capture again.

00:35:39.000 With places like Hong Kong and places where they have terrible, Beijing.

00:35:43.000 They have terrible, terrible pollution.

00:35:44.000 And more importantly, particulates in the atmosphere.

00:35:47.000 So it's not just like a carbon thing. 0.99

00:35:50.000 It's like they have shit in their air. 0.99

00:35:52.000 Right, right. 1.00

00:35:53.000 That they're breathing into their lungs.

00:35:54.000 Yeah, it's awful, man.

00:35:55.000 You know, I went to Mexico City a couple years back.

00:35:58.000 I've been there twice, but I went there for a UFC. And when we were flying in, I took photos.

00:36:02.000 And I put them on my Instagram.

00:36:04.000 See if you can find those. 0.99

00:36:06.000 They're fucking shocking, man. 0.99

00:36:07.000 It's unbelievable. 1.00

00:36:08.000 What kind of a creepy animal is the human?

00:36:11.000 Where the human is capable of burning smoke into the very air that we need to take into our lungs to keep our body alive.

00:36:20.000 Oh, you see it so bad.

00:36:22.000 People have never been to Mexico City.

00:36:23.000 Like, it's a stunner. 0.99

00:36:25.000 Dude, my fucking head was killing me after two days there. 0.99

00:36:28.000 Yeah, well, that's what happened with Beijing when they had the Olympics, right? 0.99

00:36:30.000 They had to stop all industrial activity for like two months.

00:36:34.000 LA used to look like this, right?

00:36:36.000 Before the Clean Air Act, LA would have- That's what I wrote.

00:36:38.000 I wrote, Mexico is LA on steroids. 0.80

00:36:40.000 Mexico City is LA on steroids.

00:36:42.000 It's so dark.

00:36:44.000 This whole question of what we'll do, this brings us back to the aliens, right?

00:36:47.000 So my point is that we're not the first time this has happened.

00:36:53.000 Pretty much if you build a civilization, anybody who builds a civilization like we've done is going to trigger climate change, right?

00:36:59.000 It's like it's kind of unavoidable, right?

00:37:00.000 So that goes back to the denier thing.

00:37:02.000 One of the things I'm trying to do with the book is flip the script, right?

00:37:04.000 Because you talk to climate denialists and it's the same freaking set of things that like, you know, man, dude, we've been here before.

00:37:09.000 The question's been answered.

00:37:10.000 But I'm trying to like flip it to show that like...

00:37:13.000 The whole question of, you know, did we change the climate?

00:37:16.000 That's what everybody focuses on.

00:37:17.000 Did we?

00:37:17.000 Did we not?

00:37:18.000 You know?

00:37:18.000 Right.

00:37:18.000 And, you know, from when you take the 10,000 light year view, then what you realize is, like, what did you expect?

00:37:23.000 Like, we built a world-girdling civilization that uses a quarter almost of all the energy the biosphere uses, right?

00:37:30.000 So, you know, every day the biosphere has, like, you know, 200 terawatts of energy that it's producing in sugars.

00:37:36.000 We use about a quarter of that.

00:37:38.000 Like, how did you expect there wasn't going to be an impact?

00:37:41.000 So this changes the whole way we look at it.

00:37:43.000 We don't need to argue about like, did we or didn't we?

00:37:45.000 Of course we did.

00:37:46.000 This is what happens when you reach this level.

00:37:48.000 And the other thing that, you know, in the book that I'm trying to argue to also, and it pushes back against the deniers, is like, climate deniers are human haters.

00:37:55.000 You know, they're all like, you know, like, you know, we did this amazing thing.

00:37:58.000 We changed the atmosphere of an entire planet, right?

00:38:01.000 Climate change shows on one level.

00:38:04.000 How freaking awesome we are.

00:38:05.000 You know, how far we've gotten.

00:38:06.000 And if you look at the, you know, from the perspective of, you know, species doing this again and again across the universe, this shows that we've reached a level, right?

00:38:14.000 We've leveled up, right?

00:38:16.000 You know, I play a lot of video games, right?

00:38:17.000 And so that whole thing when you level up and, you know, you get the sniper rifle, we've leveled up.

00:38:21.000 And so now the question is, are we smart enough?

00:38:23.000 You know, to see what we've done and make the right choices.

00:38:27.000 Because that's what the universe is going to be.

00:38:28.000 There's going to be species that trigger climate change.

00:38:30.000 It's going to happen all the time.

00:38:31.000 And some are going to be like, oh, man, we need to do something, right?

00:38:34.000 And they'll make the actions.

00:38:35.000 They'll be able to work it out, get it together.

00:38:36.000 And other ones, you know, we're just going to end up in the cosmic waste pile.

00:38:39.000 So we're like cosmic teenagers.

00:38:40.000 And just like when you're a teenager and you're, you know, you start to drive, right?

00:38:44.000 Either you figure it out, you know, either you're drinking and you're partying and drive the car off a cliff or you figure out how to handle your responsibility.

00:38:50.000 And that's us now, you know?

00:38:52.000 Yeah, no, I agree with you.

00:38:54.000 And I feel like there's a fundamental problem with the way people approach ideas.

00:38:59.000 And I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about right versus left or Republican versus Democrat.

00:39:06.000 They're not thinking of the consequences of arguing against the possibility that climate change is a human-caused thing.

00:39:12.000 They're not thinking of the consequences.

00:39:13.000 They just want to win.

00:39:14.000 Right, right.

00:39:15.000 They want their side to be right.

00:39:16.000 They want their side to be right.

00:39:17.000 And, you know, what bums me out is they don't understand the consequences of that for both the American enterprise and the human enterprise, right?

00:39:25.000 I mean, because, you know, if you keep calling one branch of science a hoax, then what's to say the other branches?

00:39:33.000 Like, you know, then you're rolling down this, you know, slippery slope where, like, the...

00:39:36.000 Other countries...

00:39:38.000 So most of the Nobel Prizes Americans have won were people from other countries.

00:39:43.000 They came here to do their science because we had the best scientific enterprise.

00:39:47.000 The next generation will just go somewhere else.

00:39:49.000 They'll go to China. 0.95

00:39:51.000 So there's that part of it.

00:39:53.000 And the other part is like, dude, it's just science.

00:39:55.000 It doesn't care about your political views.

00:39:58.000 And it's not fair to use the cell phone and take the antibiotics...

00:40:02.000 And then turn around and like – and then suddenly treat this thing as if it was another thing in your bucket of ideologies.

00:40:07.000 I think also people think if you somehow or another compromise industry's ability to work that you're going to kill jobs and you're going to damage the economy and that's more important.

00:40:19.000 Yeah, but I think it's the exact opposite, right?

00:40:20.000 And if people really saw, right?

00:40:22.000 I mean, again, just like I'm saying, climate change shows how powerful people have become.

00:40:27.000 It also shows how powerful our enterprise, right?

00:40:30.000 We did this by building businesses, by building enterprise, and we built this world-girdling machine of civilization, and the planet actually noticed.

00:40:41.000 Why do you like that term, world-girdling?

00:40:43.000 Because that's, it gives me the...

00:40:45.000 Like a girdle wrapping around the earth?

00:40:47.000 I think it's because it's from like Shakespeare, like from Caesar or something.

00:40:52.000 I always thought it was a good...

00:40:53.000 But it's the idea that like, you know, in the Foundation trilogy, the Isaac Asimov, you know, classic science fiction thing, there's the city of, the planet of Trantor, which is the center of the empire, the galactic empire.

00:41:03.000 And it's, you know, it's basically the whole planet's been covered in city.

00:41:07.000 You know, like, you know, the planet, you got to go down like 500 levels before you get to the surface.

00:41:11.000 So that idea, you know, I mean, what I like about it is the idea that, like, you know, we've done something, we're kind of covered the planet in our effect, you know?

00:41:19.000 Covered the planet in our enterprise.

00:41:21.000 So this issue of business is that, like, there's a place I can stand in Rochester.

00:41:25.000 I did this for NPR. And there's the Erie Canal.

00:41:28.000 I can stand right on the edge of the Erie Canal.

00:41:29.000 Then there's a train tracks, you know?

00:41:31.000 Those tracks were laid back in, you know, the original line back in the 18th, you know, whatever, 70s.

00:41:36.000 Then there's a highway.

00:41:37.000 And then there's the airport right over there.

00:41:39.000 Four different infrastructures, you know, which everyone took huge amounts of money to build, one of which we don't even use anymore, right?

00:41:46.000 So the idea of building an infrastructure that will not be carbon polluting, will not trigger climate change, it's like, dude, this is what we do, you know?

00:41:55.000 So the idea that there's going to be more jobs that come out of this than it could ever come out of fossil fuels.

00:42:00.000 You know, it's not a big deal for human beings because that's what we do to switch infrastructures and there will be a lot of wealth generated by, you know, just like there was, you know, when we switched to the trains.

00:42:12.000 Trevor Burrus Where's the argument coming that we – because there are people that just adopt the party line, the party line that, you know, climates always change and human beings barely affect it and it's not something to concentrate on.

00:42:23.000 Where's that coming from?

00:42:24.000 Trevor Burrus Again, I think it's the, you know, the gradual political polarization of everything.

00:42:29.000 Because if you look at in the – we're now at the – what is it?

00:42:33.000 30-year anniversary of Jim Hansen, who was a famous climate scientist, giving his testimony in front of Congress in 1988 on a hot, sweltering summer day.

00:42:41.000 We said climate change is already happening.

00:42:43.000 And that made news everywhere.

00:42:44.000 And that was the first like public – Awakening that this was happening.

00:42:48.000 And if you look at the first Bush administration, they were like, oh, yeah, we're ready to do something about this.

00:42:51.000 Sure, we can do it, you know?

00:42:53.000 And then it just gradually over time as the whole political polarization thing happened, you can actually see the very purposeful denial, right?

00:43:01.000 They took a page out of the cigarette companies, you know, for years, right?

00:43:04.000 Cigarettes were like, oh, the cigarette companies were like, no, it's not a problem.

00:43:06.000 So they were purposefully, you know, there were people who had money invested, right?

00:43:11.000 There's a documentary that goes into that.

00:43:15.000 What is the name of that?

00:43:17.000 Merchants of Doubt? 0.99

00:43:17.000 Merchants of Doubt. 0.99

00:43:18.000 That's a great book, man.

00:43:19.000 That's a really good book.

00:43:20.000 And the documentary is really good, too.

00:43:22.000 So it was purposeful.

00:43:25.000 It's also confusing.

00:43:26.000 It's like, why are they doing that?

00:43:28.000 Like, who's paying them to do that?

00:43:29.000 Obviously, the cigarette companies would be paying the same people to put doubt into the idea that cigarettes are addictive or cigarettes cause cancer.

00:43:38.000 And this is what had been done in the past.

00:43:40.000 Now, the same people are involved in doing it with climate change.

00:43:43.000 But why?

00:43:44.000 Well, you know, one time I wrote a piece for the NPR that was kind of positive about, like, yeah, we can switch infrastructures, like I'm saying.

00:43:51.000 And some guy wrote me back very angry.

00:43:52.000 And he said, you know, the proven reserves, you know, the stuff, the oil that's in the ground has a wealth, you know, has a monetary value.

00:44:00.000 Like, you know, that's in the oil company's banks, you know, in their bank accounts of like $1.5 trillion.

00:44:06.000 And the guy said, dude, you know, people have gone to war for a lot less than $1.5 trillion.

00:44:11.000 So, you know, if we were to really be like, hey, man, we can't burn that, you know, you're going to have to leave that in the ground.

00:44:16.000 That's like their bank accounts going like...

00:44:19.000 You know, down to zero pretty fast.

00:44:20.000 So what I don't get— So it's those industries.

00:44:23.000 I think that's part of it.

00:44:24.000 And then it gets linked to other things.

00:44:26.000 And then it becomes this sort of like mass—you know, it becomes the political—they use the political polarization to sort of, you know, sort of make this happen.

00:44:34.000 It doesn't—and look, other countries aren't doing this.

00:44:36.000 That's the important thing.

00:44:37.000 Other countries, there's always a little bit of climate denial going on, but we're like the only country that's got, as you can see, because we're the only ones who are not part of the Paris Accord.

00:44:44.000 Well, it's one of the weirder things about this right-left thing is the left is always supporting the environment.

00:44:49.000 The left is all about the environment.

00:44:51.000 The left is about clean air and clean water.

00:44:53.000 Yeah, how did that happen?

00:44:55.000 I don't understand it.

00:44:55.000 Yeah, I don't understand that either.

00:44:56.000 The whole thing is very strange.

00:44:58.000 Well, I got, you know, I mean, I have issues with, you know, environmentalists too, because I think for one of your shows I was watching, you know, the whole idea of eco-bros, right? 0.99

00:45:06.000 And you get eco-bro'd by people.

00:45:08.000 So I have a piece in the New York Times today, an op-ed, where I'm basically saying, like, look, man, the planet's going to be fine.

00:45:13.000 Like, you know, long term, there's nothing we can throw at the biosphere that is going to kill it.

00:45:17.000 It's not about saving the planet.

00:45:18.000 The Earth is not a Fuzzy little bunny.

00:45:20.000 You know, the planet is powerful.

00:45:22.000 And it's really about saving us.

00:45:24.000 Let's be honest about what's going on.

00:45:25.000 And there's going to be all kinds of ethical choices that go on.

00:45:27.000 You know, the polar bears may not be able to come along with us on the ride here.

00:45:31.000 You know, we need a healthy biosphere with, you know, a lot of biodiversity.

00:45:34.000 But, you know, we're part of it and we're going to have an impact.

00:45:37.000 There's no such thing as no impact.

00:45:38.000 And, you know, already I'm getting eco-bro'd.

00:45:40.000 Hey man, you know, you don't care about life.

00:45:43.000 Yeah, what about...

00:45:44.000 It's just like, oh, come on, man.

00:45:45.000 I just put it in the thing.

00:45:46.000 I said we need to be wise and compassionate, you know?

00:45:48.000 But they're like, man.

00:45:49.000 Well, people have convenient opinions.

00:45:51.000 I mean, this is one of the things you get involved with when you start talking with people about really important issues.

00:45:59.000 I mean, it's like what we were talking about earlier.

00:46:00.000 They want to be right.

00:46:02.000 Yeah.

00:46:02.000 And they want to be on the side that's righteous and with virtue and ethics.

00:46:06.000 Right, right.

00:46:07.000 And they find anything that you disagree or that they disagree with that you're saying, they don't ask you questions.

00:46:12.000 They don't go, what do you think the implications are?

00:46:15.000 How do we minimize the effects and the negative consequences of our... 1.00

00:46:19.000 They just immediately want to say, you are insensitive, you are an asshole, you are the problem. 1.00

00:46:26.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:46:26.000 You know, my way around that, and that's what the whole book is about, is to like, when you've got a polarization, right, you know, where, you know, you're either this or you're that, the thing that, and this is like a mathematical idea, is to go orthogonal, you know? 1.00

00:46:37.000 When you, you know, you go, because, you know, it's a line, basically, right?

00:46:40.000 You're either on this side or that side.

00:46:42.000 Go 90 degrees to it, now you're in a whole new space.

00:46:44.000 Now you're up and down, so the left Exactly.

00:46:46.000 And now like the questions that – so you see this in like revolutions in science, right?

00:46:51.000 So you look at Einstein and what happened when Einstein came up with relativity.

00:46:54.000 Everybody at the time was like – they were all concerned with what they called the luminiferous ether that light needed – light's a wave and everybody thought it needed something to propagate through, right?

00:47:04.000 Water waves go through water.

00:47:05.000 Sound wave goes through air.

00:47:06.000 So the whole thing was about this ether, the luminous ether.

00:47:09.000 Does it exist?

00:47:10.000 Does it not exist?

00:47:11.000 Blah, blah, blah.

00:47:11.000 Einstein was like, you know, I'm not really interested in that problem.

00:47:13.000 I'm not even going to do it.

00:47:14.000 He just like changed the whole thing and he just said, look, here's two new ideas.

00:47:17.000 They have nothing to do with the luminous ever.

00:47:19.000 It's either.

00:47:19.000 And like all the old questions, all the old battles kind of just fell away.

00:47:24.000 They didn't even make sense anymore.

00:47:25.000 So that's what I'm trying to do in the book is say, look, We're good to go.

00:47:42.000 What matters is that this is going to happen.

00:47:44.000 We should have expected it to happen.

00:47:46.000 And now the question is, do we become a cosmic winner or a cosmic loser?

00:47:49.000 And we have to think about the biosphere differently.

00:47:51.000 We have to think about our place in the biosphere differently.

00:47:54.000 And the old arguments...

00:47:55.000 So that's what, you know, sometimes with climate change deniers, I'll throw this stuff at them.

00:47:58.000 And it's really kind of fun to watch them be like, bleh.

00:48:00.000 Because they're expecting me to say like A, B, and C, and they've got D, E, and F in response.

00:48:04.000 And I throw this stuff at them, and they're just like...

00:48:07.000 And I'm not doing it just to fight with climate change, but I think it's true.

00:48:10.000 Well, who was it that was on the podcast that was talking about climate stabilization techniques and that this is probably the future?

00:48:17.000 Was it Boyan?

00:48:18.000 I don't know.

00:48:21.000 What people are really worried about when you talk to people that understand the history of the human race and the history of the earth is climate cooling.

00:48:28.000 They think that climate cooling is far more terrifying than climate warming.

00:48:33.000 Because if we go into a giant ice age again, I mean, way more people are going to die, terrible loss of resources, and it could be devastating to the human race.

00:48:44.000 Is that something you agree with?

00:48:46.000 Yeah, no, I don't think so.

00:48:47.000 I mean, it's true.

00:48:49.000 Here's something interesting.

00:48:50.000 We're kind of overdue for an ice age.

00:48:52.000 Yeah, well, that was the thing in the 70s.

00:48:54.000 They were saying that we were on the verge of an ice age.

00:48:56.000 Yeah, I mean, there was just a couple of guys.

00:48:58.000 I mean, that's often something that climate deniers will throw at you.

00:49:01.000 In the 70s, there was like one or two guys who said that, and then it got picked up on the news.

00:49:05.000 But the climate community at that time was not like, oh, my God, it's cooling.

00:49:08.000 But here's the interesting thing for me, and it fits into this whole idea, is that we're holding off an ice age.

00:49:14.000 If humanity is successful and we navigate the Anthropocene, that term the Anthropocene, that we've now entered the human-dominated era.

00:49:23.000 For the last 10,000 years, the geological epoch has been what they call the Holocene.

00:49:26.000 That's all of human civilization happened in the Holocene.

00:49:29.000 It's pretty warm.

00:49:30.000 It's pretty wet, moist.

00:49:32.000 Everything's not locked up in ice.

00:49:34.000 And it's an interglacial period.

00:49:35.000 And if we weren't around, yeah, another 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 years would be another ice age.

00:49:40.000 But the Anthropocene that we're triggering could hold off ice ages forever, right?

00:49:46.000 As long as we're around, there won't be another ice age because we've already added enough warmth to the planet that it overcomes the effects that trigger an ice age.

00:49:53.000 So, like, what are the ethical responsibilities of that?

00:49:55.000 That's what I try and tell the environmentalists.

00:49:57.000 Like, you know, you got this image like, oh, we got to save the Earth.

00:50:00.000 But they're thinking of like the Holocene.

00:50:02.000 And it's like, well, you know, the planet, even with us, even if we successfully keep biodiversity rich, it's not going to be the Earth we started with, you know, because we're here.

00:50:11.000 So, yeah, what about the species that never form because we held off the Ice Age?

00:50:17.000 I mean, forever.

00:50:18.000 What about the ethical responsibility of those?

00:50:20.000 Boy, that is a long equation, though, isn't it?

00:50:24.000 In what way?

00:50:25.000 To try to contemplate what species would have existed if we allowed the Earth to cool, and our responsibility for allowing the Earth to cool so that the potential for new species to advance... 1.00

00:50:35.000 It's like, fuck those species. 0.99

00:50:36.000 Let's keep this place warm so we can stay alive. 0.99

00:50:39.000 Well, all I'm saying, the only reason I'm raising that, I'm not, you know, I'm raising that because when we talk about climate change, what you get sometimes when the environmental movement is this sort of like, the polar bear, the polar bear!

00:50:48.000 It's like, what I'm trying to say is, look, I love polar bears.

00:50:51.000 Kind of funny that polar bears always think, because polar bears will rip your head off and drink your blood in a second.

00:50:55.000 Yeah, right.

00:50:55.000 The most ruthless.

00:50:56.000 Apex predator, man.

00:50:57.000 Not only that, they're one of the rare bears that doesn't eat anything but meat.

00:51:00.000 Yeah, right, right.

00:51:01.000 And so it's so funny that we're like, oh, polar My friend Kevin is a biologist, and he said when you get polar bear babies right out of the womb, he said they're like the alien from the chest bursters team.

00:51:13.000 He said they're literally like...

00:51:14.000 Like right out of the womb, they're looking to kill and eat. 1.00

00:51:18.000 Yeah, you're like, oh, you're so cute.

00:51:19.000 Oh, whoa. 1.00

00:51:20.000 Yeah, it's like that is a fucking... 0.99

00:51:21.000 Obviously, people have tamed them and fed them to the point where they don't never worry about... 0.99

00:51:26.000 They're not looking to chew your head off. 1.00

00:51:27.000 Yeah, but that's a fucking predatory, enormous animal. 1.00

00:51:31.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:51:31.000 So I'm raising that point to say, like, look, the thing we're going through now is a, it's an epic making planetary transition. 0.99

00:51:38.000 And we're part of it, right?

00:51:39.000 And whether or not we're still part, that's the question, whether or not we're still part of it a thousand years from now, you know, is the big issue.

00:51:45.000 So, you know, there are ethical issues about the polar bear, right?

00:51:48.000 But there are also ethical issues.

00:51:51.000 We can't just return the Earth to some pristine state.

00:51:54.000 We're here.

00:51:54.000 There's seven billion of us.

00:51:56.000 So we're going to have to understand there's this deeper ethical question about what does an Earth look like that's been changed by us, that's healthy, but still has us on it.

00:52:06.000 It may not have polar bears.

00:52:08.000 It may have rich phytoplankton, and it may be very species-diverse, but some of the species may not come with us.

00:52:15.000 So we can't...

00:52:16.000 This sort of thing of like, oh, the pristine Earth.

00:52:18.000 There is no more pristine Earth.

00:52:20.000 We've been changing the Earth since we were here.

00:52:22.000 So it's like...

00:52:23.000 How do we have a rich, healthy biosphere with us and our civilization still in it?

00:52:28.000 And the thing about things that have gone extinct in the past, and more than 90% of everything that's ever existed is extinct, the problem is we didn't know then.

00:52:37.000 Right.

00:52:38.000 We didn't have a, you know, a checklist.

00:52:42.000 Like, oh, spotted owl, check, got it.

00:52:45.000 You know, tree frog, check, got it.

00:52:47.000 Now we do, and when one goes away, we kind of freak out.

00:52:50.000 Yeah, and that's, you know, I mean, we have to have compassion for life because we're part of it.

00:52:53.000 Like, without the compassion, you know, we end up with, as Gavin Schmidt, a friend of mine, calls, we have ecological hooliganism, right?

00:53:00.000 We just do crazy. 0.99

00:53:01.000 We're just dumping shit into rivers. 0.98

00:53:02.000 Like, you know, you don't have to do that, man. 0.97

00:53:05.000 But, you know, in my talks on this, I'll show, like, the polar bear, the lonely polar bear on the island.

00:53:10.000 And, you know, like, oh, everyone's really, you know, bummed out about this.

00:53:12.000 And then I'll show, like, a velociraptor, right?

00:53:14.000 You know?

00:53:15.000 Who's crying for the velociraptor?

00:53:16.000 Right.

00:53:17.000 Species come and go.

00:53:18.000 So we have to – and the earth goes through these huge transitions.

00:53:21.000 I'm not saying be like don't care about those species, but you got to have the bigger picture with us.

00:53:27.000 And here's the problem with the environmental movements.

00:53:31.000 Sometimes the way it gets framed – it's not just the environmental movement.

00:53:32.000 It's the way we talk about climate change.

00:53:34.000 We think of ourselves as being a plague, right? 1.00

00:53:36.000 Oh, human beings, we suck. 1.00

00:53:38.000 That's the only story. 1.00

00:53:40.000 We have two stories. 0.99

00:53:41.000 It's not happening or we suck. 0.94

00:53:43.000 And my whole thing is like, not only is that story wrong, it's unhelpful.

00:53:49.000 We are what the biosphere is doing now.

00:53:52.000 You know, millions of years ago, it was grasslands.

00:53:55.000 You know, grasslands were a new innovation, and they changed the planet.

00:53:58.000 You have a lot of grass, you know, the biosphere evolved grasslands.

00:54:02.000 They swept across the planet.

00:54:03.000 They changed how the planet worked.

00:54:05.000 And then the Earth moved on with it, went on to the new experiment.

00:54:07.000 We are what the, we're exactly that.

00:54:09.000 We are like the dinosaurs or the grasslands or the blue-green algae that created the oxygen atmosphere.

00:54:17.000 There's no difference between a city and a forest on some biospheric level.

00:54:21.000 We don't suck. 0.85

00:54:22.000 The question is whether we're smart enough to still be part of what the biosphere is using us to trigger. 0.56

00:54:27.000 You know what I mean?

00:54:28.000 Yeah.

00:54:29.000 What are your thoughts on the reintroduction of extinct animals through genetic cloning?

00:54:35.000 You know, I watched Jurassic Park.

00:54:37.000 But they're talking about doing it like with woolly mammoths.

00:54:41.000 Yeah.

00:54:42.000 This is a real possibility someday.

00:54:44.000 Yeah, I know.

00:54:44.000 Because the close ancestor of the woolly mammoth is still alive.

00:54:48.000 Right.

00:54:48.000 I know.

00:54:48.000 I'd be down for seeing a woolly mammoth.

00:54:50.000 In my science museum in Rochester, there's a woolly mammoth that they found, you know.

00:54:54.000 And sometimes I'm looking at it and I'm like, that's a giant, hairy-ass elephant, man.

00:54:58.000 And it was walking around right in my, you know.

00:55:00.000 I think, like, depending on what you do with it, you know, trying to reintroduce it into the biosphere could be a little dangerous.

00:55:05.000 I mean, the thing, look, climate change is, this is something I like to say, climate change is not our fault.

00:55:10.000 And what I mean by that is we, you know, we found fossil fuels and they were awesome, you know, and they were just a continuation of what we'd always done, you know.

00:55:18.000 And so we inadvertently, climate change was a mistake.

00:55:22.000 Now, if we don't do something about it, it's our fault, right?

00:55:25.000 And so you want to be really careful about unintended consequences.

00:55:29.000 So this is my same thing with geoengineering.

00:55:32.000 People talk like, oh, we should put particulates in the atmosphere to make it more reflective.

00:55:37.000 I'm like, man, dude, we triggered climate change because we didn't know what we were doing.

00:55:41.000 We didn't know what the consequences were.

00:55:42.000 If we put those particles up there, how do we get them out?

00:55:44.000 We're going to scoop them out with a net?

00:55:46.000 Well, no, no.

00:55:46.000 They'll rain down.

00:55:47.000 You've got to keep putting I mean, that's the problem.

00:55:49.000 You've got to keep putting them in.

00:55:50.000 So what happens if, like, one nation decides they don't want to do it anymore, you know, or the whole thing falls apart?

00:55:55.000 Now suddenly you're going to get massive changes.

00:55:57.000 So, like, anything like that, like, why don't we just work on not using fossil fuels?

00:56:02.000 You know what I mean?

00:56:02.000 Like, why take the hardest solution that's got the most uncertainty as opposed to the simpler solution, which just means building a different infrastructure?

00:56:09.000 Yeah, well, especially in California.

00:56:11.000 I mean, this is one of the weirder places ever to not see solar power when it never rains.

00:56:17.000 It should be everywhere.

00:56:18.000 Everywhere.

00:56:19.000 Most things should be run on solar power.

00:56:21.000 Yeah, why not, man?

00:56:21.000 And solar is so efficient now.

00:56:23.000 Well, it's also very difficult to get it up and running.

00:56:26.000 Like, I had a friend of mine who had his done for four or five months before he got approved.

00:56:31.000 Wow.

00:56:32.000 Because he said they make it difficult for you.

00:56:35.000 Yeah, which is crazy.

00:56:36.000 Yeah.

00:56:37.000 To be on solar power and not be on the grid.

00:56:39.000 Yeah.

00:56:40.000 So, you know, I mean, these are all the kinds of things that we're going to have to work out.

00:56:43.000 I'm hopeful.

00:56:43.000 People are like, are you hopeful or not hopeful?

00:56:45.000 Because, you know, I mean, I ran these, I did these models.

00:56:47.000 One of the pieces of research we did was we modeled planets and civilizations, like alien civilizations.

00:56:51.000 We, you know, developed a simple mathematical model about, you know, how a civilization will use a planet's resources to make more babies, alien babies.

00:56:59.000 And then how the, you know, by using those resources, you feed back on the planet, right?

00:57:03.000 And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to model the possible outcomes.

00:57:06.000 Like, what is the generic outcome?

00:57:08.000 You know, if I've got 100,000 civilizations all being born in different places, what's the, you know, in general what happens?

00:57:14.000 And what we found is like basically four different possibilities.

00:57:17.000 One was good news.

00:57:18.000 Like in these models, there was like, you know, the population shoots up, the planet's temperature shoots up, but they come to a nice steady state.

00:57:25.000 The population's stable.

00:57:27.000 Everything's good.

00:57:27.000 So in those models was hope.

00:57:30.000 We also saw die-off, where the population skyrockets.

00:57:35.000 They overshoot the carrying capacity of their planet.

00:57:37.000 And then you get something like 70% of the population dying off.

00:57:40.000 So seven out of every ten people you know is gone.

00:57:43.000 But then you come to a steady state.

00:57:45.000 So maybe if you can survive the disaster, you're still there.

00:57:49.000 The real problem with surviving the disaster is how much of the information gets restored.

00:57:53.000 Right.

00:57:53.000 Because you think about if you're killing seven out of ten people, how many of those seven people are the ones who know how to make cell phones?

00:57:58.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:57:59.000 That's a dark age, right?

00:58:00.000 That's what happens in a dark age.

00:58:01.000 I remember the first time I went to Europe and I saw those Roman aqueducts, man, like five stories tall carrying water.

00:58:06.000 And by the 900 AD, nobody knew how they got built.

00:58:09.000 Yeah, there's a few of those dips in human civilization.

00:58:12.000 Right.

00:58:12.000 And so it's not clear, especially with a society as complex as ours, right?

00:58:15.000 If, like, the food doesn't arrive in my grocery store, what do I do?

00:58:19.000 Right.

00:58:20.000 You know, I garden, but, you know, I'm not— It's not enough.

00:58:22.000 Not enough, right?

00:58:23.000 It's not going to keep you alive.

00:58:24.000 Yeah.

00:58:24.000 So for a complex civilization like ours, even if you don't go extinct, you may not be able to have this kind of civilization.

00:58:30.000 But we did find collapse.

00:58:31.000 We did find complete, like, extinction curves as well, where, you know, the population went way up and then, boom, dropped like a stone.

00:58:38.000 And we even found those, we built into the models of possibility for the civilization to switch from a high-impact resource to a low-impact resource, like fossil to solar.

00:58:46.000 And sometimes, because, you know, planets have minds of their own, you know?

00:58:49.000 There's an internal dynamics to planets, and you push them far enough, and they're just going to roll off.

00:58:53.000 So we'd have ones where the population went way up, they made the switch, and then the population started to come down, the planets started to cool down.

00:59:00.000 Did you factor in random geological events, random solar events, random astroidal events?

00:59:07.000 This was really all about just planet civilization and its feedback on the planet.

00:59:12.000 We could build models like that.

00:59:13.000 That would be one of the major issues with any advanced civilization is it's a matter of time before something happens.

00:59:20.000 Yeah.

00:59:20.000 As we said, you know, we know that Mars has been hit before.

00:59:23.000 We know Earth's been hit, the Moon's been hit, everything.

00:59:26.000 I mean, the Moon is one of our best examples.

00:59:29.000 We just look at it and you see craters everywhere because it doesn't have an environment or an atmosphere.

00:59:33.000 The Moon was built by a huge impact between Earth and Mars, a Mars-like body, you know, at the beginning of the planet's history.

00:59:39.000 So, yeah, those happen all the time.

00:59:40.000 I think if you get advanced...

00:59:41.000 So, like, we're on the lip of being a multi-planet species, right?

00:59:44.000 And once you do that, which means you become a space-faring race, then I think, like, certainly the asteroid stuff you can take care of, right?

00:59:50.000 We've already done...

00:59:51.000 We've identified, like, a huge fraction of all the Earth-crossing asteroids.

00:59:56.000 Like, we're not really sure what to do about them if we find one coming at us.

00:59:59.000 But we see some coming at us all the time where they just recognize them a few hours before they're near.

01:00:03.000 Right, right.

01:00:04.000 That happened a couple weeks ago.

01:00:05.000 Right.

01:00:06.000 And, you know, luckily it always, you know, it passes.

01:00:08.000 You can...

01:00:09.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:00:09.000 So we couldn't really, like, you know, we're young enough now that if we discovered one heading right towards us, we could just, you know, put your legs between your legs and kiss your butt goodbye. 1.00

01:00:19.000 But in time, right, 200 years from now, we will have done a much better job of mapping out all the major rocks. 0.93

01:00:25.000 Yeah.

01:00:26.000 Yeah.

01:00:26.000 Well, I think so.

01:00:27.000 I mean, if we have that kind of interplanetary, we're going to be mapping them out just because you don't want to run into them, or you're going to be mining them.

01:00:34.000 What do you think is promising in terms of the ability to prevent impacts?

01:00:39.000 There's a couple of things.

01:00:40.000 I think the best one, if you catch it early enough, there's the gravity tug, where you just literally park a spaceship next to it and slowly have the spaceship move.

01:00:49.000 Because all you have to do is alter the trajectory a little bit.

01:00:51.000 You know, you just really have to kind of tap on it.

01:00:53.000 Yeah, and it'll, you know... 0.99

01:00:55.000 Because shit in space is just so vast that a little tap will make it miss. 0.94

01:00:58.000 So the gravity tug, you know, you don't have to try and do the... 0.99

01:01:01.000 What was it?

01:01:01.000 What was the movie, Apocalypse?

01:01:02.000 The one from the 90s with the...

01:01:05.000 Space Miners.

01:01:07.000 Oh.

01:01:08.000 Armageddon.

01:01:09.000 Yeah, thank you.

01:01:09.000 And then there was a Deep Impact, too.

01:01:11.000 Deep Impact was the smart one. 0.99

01:01:13.000 Yeah, Armageddon was the dumb one. 0.97

01:01:14.000 But they rip each others off, right? 0.99

01:01:15.000 Because they both came out at the same time.

01:01:17.000 I know.

01:01:17.000 I think Deep Impact came out first, but it was developed second.

01:01:20.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:01:21.000 That'd be a bummer to be the one that, like, you know, they both come out at the same time, and your movie doesn't get any attention, and the other one becomes, like, a massive hit, you know?

01:01:29.000 Yeah, well...

01:01:30.000 So, like, you know, there they drilled holes and stuff and, you know, try and blow them up.

01:01:33.000 But then the problem there is you now have a bunch of rocks, and if some of those rocks are big enough...

01:01:36.000 So I think the gravity tug is kind of probably the best idea.

01:01:39.000 But, you know, because of mining asteroids, well, probably, you know, those little ones may be the easiest to, you know, to mine, so...

01:01:46.000 What are you worried about more than anything in terms of climate change?

01:01:51.000 Are you worried about the rising of the ocean levels?

01:01:54.000 Are you worried about the heating of the actual planet?

01:01:57.000 The temperature being unsustainable for human life?

01:02:00.000 What are you worried about the most?

01:02:01.000 The one thing I worry about the most, like we were talking before, you know, technological societies are these like overlaid networks, you know, you got the transportation network, you got the energy network, you got social networks, you know, and those are really complex.

01:02:13.000 And so I do a little what's called network theory.

01:02:15.000 And what you find with network theory is that you, you know, you may have an individual network that's pretty robust, meaning like I can cut some of the connections, like you got your social network, I could take, you know, 20% of the people out of your social network and the social network will still function, you know, like most people will still talk to each other or anything.

01:02:30.000 But once you start layering them so that the social network is now connected to the telecommunications network, which is connected to the energy network, blah, blah, blah, then you can ripple a small change, ripples through the whole thing and blows it apart and it just doesn't function anymore.

01:02:42.000 So, you know, I don't need like apocalypses to have the fabric of technological civilization fall apart.

01:02:49.000 Like, so if just the weather patterns change enough, that agriculture becomes really hard, you know?

01:02:55.000 We're used to the rains falling pretty much the same way they do yearly and everything.

01:02:59.000 That, you know, like we talk about, you look at what the, you know, like refugees, how much, you know, Trouble having a huge influx of refugees can cause. 1.00

01:03:08.000 Climate change is going to have people moving all over the planet because now they can't grow food anywhere.

01:03:12.000 So it's like I don't – like I said, you don't need – I do worry like ocean rise is going to be huge.

01:03:17.000 Most people live in coastal cities.

01:03:19.000 Most of the wealth in the world is in coastal cities.

01:03:21.000 But you don't really need too much to like really shift the weather patterns and then the thing you're used to falls apart.

01:03:28.000 Now, when you factor in human beings and our evolution from primitive hominids to what we are today, and you sort of extrapolate and keep going and think about what we're going to be in the future, and then think about what these creatures might be that live a hundred million light years away, 0.87

01:03:48.000 or whatever the fuck it is. 0.82

01:03:49.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:03:51.000 I mean, I've got to think that whatever is holding us back, our primitive instincts, these human reward systems that were engaged when we were running away from wild animals and fighting off tribes of invaders,

01:04:06.000 that slowly but surely those are going to either evaporate or evolve and we're going to get to a point where we can be more rational.

01:04:14.000 Yeah.

01:04:15.000 About complex issues.

01:04:16.000 If we do do that, what is the motivation for expanding the human race?

01:04:23.000 Isn't sustaining the human race in a healthy way on this planet a better option than traveling to Mars or traveling to other solar systems?

01:04:33.000 Wouldn't we be better served trying to achieve some sort of a balance here on this planet?

01:04:41.000 I think one serves the other.

01:04:45.000 You look at the human migration patterns from when we started, right?

01:04:48.000 We started off as a bunch of people in Africa, maybe a few thousand, right?

01:04:52.000 And then you see this migration.

01:04:55.000 A bunch of us, like a few hundred, crossed the Red Sea, which was pretty low at the time.

01:05:00.000 And then it's like they just worked their way around the coasts, took boats over to Australia, went all the way back around through.

01:05:07.000 We're explorers, man.

01:05:08.000 It's really, I think, something fundamental for us psychologically to have these frontiers.

01:05:15.000 Exactly.

01:05:16.000 That's my question, though.

01:05:17.000 Will we evolve past that?

01:05:19.000 Well, I don't think that's a bad thing.

01:05:35.000 I mean, really, right?

01:05:36.000 That's what we are.

01:05:37.000 We're the agent of the biosphere, right?

01:05:39.000 And, you know, the biosphere started off as like, you know, single-celled creatures in like little tiny parts of the planet and then, you know, conquered the oceans.

01:05:46.000 And then eventually when they were, you know, because in the beginning there weren't continents.

01:05:49.000 The Earth was a water world when we started off.

01:05:51.000 And so when, you know, there was enough continents, you know, then they took over the, life took over the land.

01:05:56.000 I think it's just kind of, life may be kind of like a cosmic force if I can get all woogly on you.

01:06:00.000 So if we do go to Mars, it will essentially be ultimate panspermia.

01:06:04.000 Yes, exactly.

01:06:05.000 Right, yeah.

01:06:06.000 And that way, right, panspermia, which is always a weird word.

01:06:08.000 You're kind of like, panspermia.

01:06:09.000 Well, it's just because people feel weird about sperm. 0.71

01:06:12.000 Sperm, right. 1.00

01:06:14.000 Whenever I give an academic talk, I'm like, panspermia.

01:06:16.000 I know, it's strange. 1.00

01:06:18.000 When you say sperm in front of people, they're like, you piece of shit. 1.00

01:06:20.000 Yeah, right. 1.00

01:06:21.000 It's like, no, no, it's a scientific term, man.

01:06:22.000 I swear.

01:06:23.000 It doesn't matter.

01:06:23.000 It's like saying niggardly.

01:06:25.000 Yeah, right.

01:06:25.000 It's a very, very difficult word to say, even though it has nothing to do with the N-word.

01:06:29.000 Yeah.

01:06:31.000 So, you know, I think it's part of life.

01:06:33.000 I think life wants more life.

01:06:34.000 And this is the question you're raising about, what do we look like in a million years?

01:06:37.000 What happens to a species that become...

01:06:40.000 And now we're in the realm of science fiction, but that's all cool.

01:06:44.000 You know, like, what might we become?

01:06:47.000 Like the gods in some sense.

01:06:48.000 Do you think that...

01:06:49.000 This is my theory, and I've...

01:06:51.000 I've thrown this out so many times people are sick of it, but I think that what we're looking at when we see these archetypal aliens with the big heads and the big eyes and the tiny bodies and no genitals, I think we think this is what we're eventually going to be.

01:07:04.000 No genitals? 0.98

01:07:04.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:07:05.000 Really? 0.99

01:07:05.000 That sucks. 0.99

01:07:05.000 I think we're going to move past that. 0.99

01:07:06.000 Oh, man!

01:07:07.000 I'll see you in your panspermia. 0.99

01:07:11.000 And I'll raise you some genitalist aliens. 1.00

01:07:15.000 Typical males talking about gender. 0.73

01:07:18.000 This is the problem with science.

01:07:21.000 This is why we need diversity.

01:07:23.000 I just think that if we could get— So those are archetypes kind of built into us in some sense.

01:07:28.000 That we're moving past—like, well, what did we used to be?

01:07:31.000 Well, we used to be monkeys, right?

01:07:33.000 And what are we going to be?

01:07:34.000 Well, we're going to be that thing.

01:07:35.000 Yeah.

01:07:35.000 That thing that can levitate things with its mind.

01:07:38.000 That thing that communicates telepathically.

01:07:40.000 That thing that has this incredible ability to map out the cosmos and create wormholes.

01:07:48.000 Super advanced intellect.

01:07:50.000 To the point where we can't even comprehend.

01:07:54.000 So if you think about how...

01:07:56.000 We evolved from...

01:07:59.000 At one point in time, we split from mollusks like, what, 600-something million years ago? 0.91

01:08:06.000 It's got to be past the Cambrian explosion.

01:08:09.000 But it's like, yeah, 300, 400, I don't know, but a while ago.

01:08:13.000 How much does a squid understand about cell phone networks and whether or not sprints...

01:08:19.000 You know, unlimited data plan is really any good.

01:08:21.000 They don't.

01:08:22.000 We'll extrapolate that to what this alien creature is going to be in terms of its understanding of time and space and matter versus hours.

01:08:32.000 We are this crude thing that's weirded out by the word sperm, whereas it is telepathically communicating with a universal language and has this unbelievable ability to manipulate matter.

01:08:44.000 And they've achieved homeostasis with their environment.

01:08:47.000 They no longer have this...

01:08:48.000 Well, that's one of the things about...

01:08:50.000 There's the Fermi paradox, right?

01:08:51.000 Like, why haven't we seen...

01:08:53.000 So, as I already said, we haven't looked enough to say that we haven't seen evidence of life.

01:08:57.000 Right.

01:08:57.000 It's like opening your door and going, well, where are all the buffalo?

01:09:00.000 Yeah.

01:09:01.000 Right.

01:09:02.000 You got to go to Wyoming, bro.

01:09:06.000 But there, you know, there is a kind of a problem with, because we're just doing a paper on this now, you know, part of the Fermi Paradox, let's get, I don't want to go too far on this, we can go back, circle back to it later.

01:09:15.000 Please do, though.

01:09:15.000 I like it.

01:09:16.000 The Fermi Paradox is fascinating.

01:09:17.000 It is, right?

01:09:19.000 Explain it to people.

01:09:20.000 Okay, so the Fermi Paradox is the idea that like, you know, if there is, if the paradox part is like, if you're telling me that intelligence is common, it evolves everywhere, then why don't I see it already?

01:09:31.000 Right?

01:09:32.000 So if you're asking about, like, why don't we see signals from...

01:09:35.000 I've already answered that, right?

01:09:37.000 Because we haven't looked yet.

01:09:38.000 We haven't looked enough.

01:09:39.000 But part of his question, and this was done by a guy in Hart.

01:09:42.000 So Fermi was just...

01:09:43.000 This happened over a conversation for lunch, you know, in 1950. So he just posed...

01:09:48.000 He said, where are they all?

01:09:49.000 But in 1975, a guy named Hart wrote a paper where he really mapped out...

01:09:52.000 Here's the main problem.

01:09:55.000 Even if you're traveling at a tenth of the speed of light, if you manage to build world ships that can travel across the stars and you're traveling at 0.1% of the speed of light, if you do that and you hop from one star to the other, build another ship, hop to the next one, in about 600,000 years,

01:10:10.000 you have covered the whole galaxy, right?

01:10:12.000 So 600,000 years sounds like a long time, but it's a tiny part of the galaxy's history.

01:10:16.000 Galaxy's 10 billion years old.

01:10:18.000 So in that case, just one species has to do that, and they can cover the galaxy.

01:10:25.000 So why don't we see the colony ships here?

01:10:28.000 That's a much harder version of the Fermi paradox to get around.

01:10:33.000 Is it though?

01:10:34.000 Because if we did, look, we're already sending robots to Mars, right?

01:10:37.000 We're not going to Mars yet, but we're sending robots there.

01:10:40.000 What if we decide that there's no real benefit in sending biological entities into space?

01:10:45.000 And that the dangers of radiation and asteroid impacts, this is just too great.

01:10:50.000 It's far better to send something.

01:10:52.000 I mean, look at what we're capable of doing now in terms of projection of video.

01:10:57.000 We can take a cell phone video and you can send it to your friend in New Zealand and they can get it almost instantaneously.

01:11:03.000 You don't have to go to New Zealand.

01:11:05.000 You don't have to go there.

01:11:05.000 Do a Skype call with them.

01:11:07.000 If we can get some sort of 3D virtual reality imaging of these planets, like, hey man, do you want to see what it's like on Pandora?

01:11:15.000 Here, put these goggles on, and you will go wherever you want that robot to go, and you'll be there.

01:11:21.000 And maybe it'll get to the point where you can actually smell it and touch it and feel it, but not be compromised by its environment in terms of your biology.

01:11:29.000 Well, that's actually a huge point.

01:11:30.000 So that's one of the things we're looking at in this paper is the idea that, you know, good planets may be hard to find, you know.

01:11:34.000 There's this great novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, who's like just, for me, one of the great science fiction writers.

01:11:40.000 And it's called Aurora.

01:11:41.000 And, you know, it's the usual world ship thing.

01:11:42.000 So they build the colony ship.

01:11:43.000 It takes, you know, three generations to cross space.

01:11:46.000 And they get to the planet. 0.97

01:11:48.000 And the planet sucks. 0.75

01:11:49.000 It looked like it was going to be good, you know. 1.00

01:11:51.000 But there's like prions, tiny, you know, super small biological shit that just makes you can't live there. 0.99

01:11:56.000 And then you're going back. 0.99

01:11:56.000 Right? 0.99

01:11:57.000 So it's like, it may be exactly like you're saying, that we think like, oh, you just land on a planet, you terraform it, and you just turn it into habitable.

01:12:04.000 And it's like, that may not work.

01:12:05.000 And maybe it does, but that's a science fiction idea.

01:12:09.000 So, right, it's entirely possible.

01:12:11.000 I mean, there's a lot of possible solutions to this, which is just that, you know, one of which is space travel is really hard and really, interstellar, not interplanetary, but interstellar travel is really hard and really expensive.

01:12:22.000 I was just reading a paper on this where the guy estimated that in order to get like, say you wanted to have a thousand people on a world ship to get to another star, that would take the economy, you'd need like, I think it was like a hundred thousand Earth economies to build that.

01:12:36.000 Jeff Bezos, are you listening?

01:12:37.000 By the time we're ready, you might have 100,000 Earth economies.

01:12:41.000 But it was just like, it was so much that, like, you know, unless you were, you know, with the conclusion he came to, unless you were a multi-planet species, if you were like a, if you had conquered the entire, or settled the entire solar system, maybe you'd have an economy that big.

01:12:54.000 So one possible solution is good planets are hard to find, and it's just too expensive.

01:13:00.000 It really costs a lot.

01:13:02.000 And so, yeah, it's not really worth the effort.

01:13:05.000 You send out some probes once in a while, but it's not...

01:13:08.000 Well, it's also finding an environment that's not just habitable, but stable.

01:13:13.000 I mean, our environment is habitable, but look what's going on in Hawaii right now.

01:13:17.000 There is a 400-year-old lake that evaporated in a matter of hours.

01:13:22.000 It's the biggest lake on the Big Island.

01:13:24.000 It's gone.

01:13:25.000 Which is such a tragedy.

01:13:26.000 But it's not.

01:13:28.000 It's just what happens.

01:13:29.000 Because it's also magnificent.

01:13:29.000 You watch that lava roll into that lake and say, that's a wrap, kids.

01:13:33.000 No more lake, you fucks. 1.00

01:13:34.000 And it really shows you the power of a planet, too. 0.99

01:13:37.000 The forces at work.

01:13:39.000 What makes continents.

01:13:40.000 It made the island in the first place.

01:13:43.000 You can't be upset at it.

01:13:44.000 Billowing off.

01:13:44.000 It is what made the island, and it's continuing to make the island bigger.

01:13:48.000 That's a good point.

01:13:48.000 Yeah, right, exactly.

01:13:49.000 That's what it's doing. 0.99

01:13:49.000 Oh, you're crying about your house, but now you've got more real estate, so shut up. 0.99

01:13:52.000 Well, it's making the island bigger, and it's always done that. 0.86

01:13:55.000 Yeah, right.

01:13:55.000 It's been doing that for millions of years.

01:13:57.000 It's a fascinating place.

01:13:58.000 Have you been?

01:13:59.000 I've been, and I've seen the- I went to the park- Did you do the helicopter thing?

01:14:03.000 No.

01:14:04.000 Oh, man, you got to do the helicopter thing.

01:14:05.000 It's crazy because you fly over the volcanoes.

01:14:07.000 Well, you can't now because it's too crazy.

01:14:10.000 But I did it a few years back and you could watch the lava go into the ocean. 0.97

01:14:14.000 And you see these lava vents pour this red, hot fucking... 0.98

01:14:20.000 It's glowing. 0.99

01:14:22.000 It's going into the ocean.

01:14:23.000 During the day.

01:14:24.000 I saw that part.

01:14:24.000 We went to the park to see it.

01:14:27.000 When you go to that volcano park, there's just like vents where steam's coming.

01:14:30.000 Like New York City with the manholes.

01:14:33.000 You're like, that's just from this heat coming up from the bottom of the planet.

01:14:38.000 Are you scared about Yellowstone?

01:14:41.000 Like the, what was that movie, 2012?

01:14:43.000 Nah.

01:14:46.000 That's what made the Adirondacks, right?

01:14:48.000 What was the 2012 movie?

01:14:50.000 I never saw that.

01:14:52.000 Day After Tomorrow, Day Before Tomorrow.

01:14:54.000 No, no, no, no.

01:14:55.000 That's a climate change movie, actually.

01:14:57.000 It was John Cusack.

01:14:57.000 It's actually a pretty good movie.

01:14:58.000 Oh, yeah, that's right.

01:14:59.000 It's another, like, Destroy the Planet.

01:15:00.000 Those guys who made the...

01:15:01.000 Hold on, stop right there.

01:15:02.000 That was not a pretty good movie. 0.99

01:15:03.000 That movie sucked. 0.98

01:15:04.000 I thought it was good. 1.00

01:15:04.000 That movie was so stupid. 1.00

01:15:06.000 No, it was stupid. 1.00

01:15:07.000 It was totally stupid. 1.00

01:15:08.000 They get constantly missed disaster by inches with cars. 1.00

01:15:11.000 They never got a flat.

01:15:12.000 They always got away from the world caving in behind them.

01:15:16.000 Dude, totally believable, man.

01:15:17.000 Oh, yeah, man. 1.00

01:15:18.000 Like, stupid believable. 1.00

01:15:20.000 Yeah, no, I thought it was. 1.00

01:15:21.000 Well, Yellowstone is a caldera.

01:15:23.000 It's a super volcano, and they're experiencing thousands of earthquakes a year.

01:15:26.000 Yeah, and that eventually, right, you could get one.

01:15:29.000 Yeah, well, every 600,000 to 800,000 years, it's a continent killer.

01:15:31.000 The last time it blew was 600,000 years ago.

01:15:34.000 Yeah.

01:15:34.000 So why aren't you scared?

01:15:35.000 I don't know, I just don't think about it, man. 0.96

01:15:37.000 I'm fucking thinking about it every day, man. 0.97

01:15:39.000 I'll smoke a joint and think about it. 0.99

01:15:40.000 Once a month, I think about Yellowstone and freak out.

01:15:42.000 Really?

01:15:42.000 About Yellowstone?

01:15:43.000 Yeah.

01:15:43.000 I should.

01:15:44.000 Okay, I'm going to add that to my list of things I'm freaking out about.

01:15:46.000 I have friends in Australia, and that's where I'm going.

01:15:48.000 Yeah, because there's nothing.

01:15:50.000 Fly over, just start driving on the left-hand side.

01:15:52.000 That might be the only thing you can go to.

01:15:54.000 I worry more about Seattle.

01:15:55.000 I lived in Seattle for a while.

01:15:57.000 And they said the super earthquake that they're looking at that's going to turn the whole thing into jello, right?

01:16:00.000 You get an earthquake so bad that the ground just literally becomes porous.

01:16:03.000 Is it really that scary there?

01:16:05.000 Yeah, they're predicting...

01:16:06.000 Because, you know, Seattle's got like...

01:16:07.000 I mean, I don't know that much about this.

01:16:08.000 I'm way out of my...

01:16:09.000 I'm in the danger zone.

01:16:11.000 The plates are super deep, you know?

01:16:13.000 So you don't get as many tremors.

01:16:15.000 But, you know, when it releases, it's going to just be a super powerful earthquake.

01:16:20.000 And, you know...

01:16:22.000 It'll be so powerful, yeah, that they said that there's not going to be a lot.

01:16:25.000 Even with the earthquake-proofing, there's not going to be a lot left standing.

01:16:28.000 Jesus.

01:16:29.000 So, yeah.

01:16:30.000 Dan, Seattle.

01:16:31.000 You must be...

01:16:32.000 I mean, because you're here, right?

01:16:33.000 You feel tremors.

01:16:34.000 They happen all the time, right?

01:16:35.000 I've only been a few times when I've felt tremors.

01:16:37.000 No, not all the time.

01:16:37.000 I've felt them before.

01:16:39.000 The biggest ones I ever felt was when I first moved here.

01:16:41.000 I first moved here in 94, and it was right after the Northridge earthquake.

01:16:44.000 And I was in my house, and I felt...

01:16:46.000 I guess it was like a 5.5, where the whole thing just...

01:16:53.000 It was weird, but it gave me the impression that the house that I was living in, or the apartment that I was in, was made out of the same stuff, like a box that a refrigerator would come in.

01:17:03.000 You know how you'd kind of move it around?

01:17:05.000 Yeah, you'd go and play inside.

01:17:06.000 The whole thing was just moving, like, easily, left and right. 0.99

01:17:09.000 I was like, holy shit! 0.99

01:17:11.000 Well, that was my... 0.99

01:17:11.000 I've only had a few times that I've, you know, felt one. 0.99

01:17:13.000 I'm like...

01:17:14.000 At first I thought it was a truck.

01:17:16.000 I thought a truck was rolling by.

01:17:17.000 And somebody's like, no man, that was an earthquake.

01:17:20.000 And the one that I experienced was nothing.

01:17:22.000 I mean, it was a baby one.

01:17:24.000 The ones that they're getting right now somewhere in the world.

01:17:27.000 I mean, there's always something that's like a five or a six.

01:17:32.000 So this goes back to your point about the, you know, a lot of planets, right, will be like way more plate tectonically active.

01:17:38.000 Volatile.

01:17:38.000 Yeah, than ours.

01:17:39.000 So, you know, I mean, I think good planets are going to be like really hard to find.

01:17:44.000 Yeah.

01:17:44.000 So, you know, that may be the solution.

01:17:46.000 The other solution is, you know, I mean, the way you guys found out about me was I did that article about the previous civilization.

01:17:53.000 You know, like how do you know whether or not there was a previous civilization on Earth?

01:17:56.000 Yes.

01:17:56.000 And, you know, one solution could be that, look, they were here, you know, that somebody did arrive and spent some time on Earth.

01:18:03.000 But if it was like half a billion years ago and they only lasted, right?

01:18:06.000 Every civilization has a finite lifetime.

01:18:08.000 They only lasted for, you know, even a few hundred thousand years.

01:18:11.000 They wouldn't leave.

01:18:12.000 There'd be no record left.

01:18:13.000 There'd be nothing left.

01:18:14.000 There'd be nothing left.

01:18:14.000 Do you think that's possible that something's ever visited here?

01:18:17.000 Because that is the big question and that's the thing that gets the UFO dorks more jazzed up than anything is the possibility that we've been visited.

01:18:26.000 Yeah.

01:18:26.000 I'm definitely not UFOs.

01:18:28.000 I have two arguments against UFOs.

01:18:31.000 One is, as a friend of mine Jason Wright says, is like, look, as astronomers, man, we're finding all those asteroids.

01:18:37.000 We're finding little chunks of rock moving.

01:18:39.000 Nobody looks at the sky harder than we do.

01:18:41.000 Right.

01:18:41.000 Right?

01:18:42.000 And, you know, if anything, unless you want to go to conspiracy theories, we would have found something.

01:18:47.000 My other argument is, like, what's with the headlights?

01:18:49.000 You know what I mean?

01:18:49.000 People are always like, oh, man, I saw lights in the sky, and then they moved around, and then they disappeared, you know, but they don't really want to be seen.

01:18:54.000 I'm like, well, why do they have headlights on?

01:18:56.000 Like, just turn off the frickin' lights.

01:18:58.000 Why would they have lights in the first place?

01:18:59.000 Why do they have lights?

01:19:00.000 Like, what, you know, you came from another civilization, and you can't get around without your high beams? 0.99

01:19:04.000 Well, the idea is, what the fuck are you seeing with those lights? 0.99

01:19:07.000 Right. 1.00

01:19:07.000 You're not seeing shit. 1.00

01:19:09.000 When was the last time you saw... 0.99

01:19:10.000 I mean, planes have lights so other planes don't run into them.

01:19:13.000 They don't have lights so they can see where they're going.

01:19:15.000 Yeah, so why do they have...

01:19:16.000 Right, exactly.

01:19:17.000 The planes have lights so other people can see them. 0.83

01:19:19.000 So if they're here, but they're mysterious, they don't want to be found, then turn off the freaking lights.

01:19:22.000 Well, yeah, they wouldn't have any lights. 0.73

01:19:24.000 Yeah, they always have lights.

01:19:25.000 Yeah.

01:19:26.000 That is true.

01:19:26.000 People are always saying like, oh man, I saw lights in the sky and then they move back and forth.

01:19:29.000 There's also a problem with human memory.

01:19:32.000 Memory is horrible.

01:19:33.000 Yeah.

01:19:34.000 And memory of events that are stunning or shocking or unnerving or you think you saw something.

01:19:39.000 Right.

01:19:39.000 They've done all that research even in trials, right, where people, you know, see things.

01:19:43.000 So I just do UFOs, you know, just kind of like...

01:19:45.000 But you think it's possible that there could be life on other planets, and it's possible there could be intelligent life on other planets, and we send probes to Mars.

01:19:54.000 I think that if they do send something here, they're going to send something without biological life inside of it.

01:19:59.000 Yeah.

01:20:00.000 You know what's a really interesting question?

01:20:01.000 We're talking about what will we evolve into in a million years.

01:20:05.000 It may be possible that biology is a short period of intelligence.

01:20:09.000 Yes.

01:20:09.000 You build machines, and the machines become, you know, you download yourself into them.

01:20:15.000 I mean, that's a real possibility that, like, you know, silicon makes a lot more sense than wetware.

01:20:20.000 Well, the problem is we think of artificial intelligence as artificial.

01:20:24.000 Right.

01:20:24.000 It's definitely real.

01:20:25.000 Right.

01:20:26.000 Yeah, no, that's exactly it.

01:20:27.000 It's not fake.

01:20:28.000 It's right there.

01:20:29.000 Right.

01:20:29.000 You know, it's like there's artificial milk.

01:20:32.000 You know what I mean?

01:20:32.000 But it's a liquid.

01:20:34.000 It's an actual liquid.

01:20:35.000 Yeah.

01:20:36.000 There's not an artificial life.

01:20:37.000 Right.

01:20:39.000 Silicon created life.

01:20:40.000 That's, again, the idea of the biosphere.

01:20:42.000 This may be the biosphere solution to spreading itself, you know, to getting it.

01:20:46.000 Maybe that, like, yeah, silicon, that's kind of a normal phase.

01:20:49.000 I mean, I am super skeptical about, like, the whole transhuman thing about we're going to download ourselves into computers. 1.00

01:20:57.000 Have you ever gone to one of those conventions and talked to those dorks?

01:20:59.000 No. 0.98

01:21:00.000 There's some pretty serious dorking going on there. 0.93

01:21:02.000 Well, there's geniuses in those dorks, too. 1.00

01:21:04.000 It's really interesting.

01:21:05.000 It's like they're fully, wholly committed to this prospect of downloading themselves.

01:21:09.000 Have you talked to Kurzweil before?

01:21:11.000 No, but I've read his stuff.

01:21:12.000 I had a chance to interview him a few years back for sci-fi.

01:21:15.000 He's super smart.

01:21:16.000 That dude is like super smart. 0.89

01:21:17.000 But goddammit, he committed to it. 0.91

01:21:19.000 And then when you get to it, you realize that what he actually wants to do is recreate his father. 0.93

01:21:26.000 Yeah, his father died when he was young, and he wants to be able to, through memories and photographs and what he knows about his father, literally recreate his father and be able to have a conversation with him.

01:21:40.000 He was talking about this.

01:21:41.000 Right, right.

01:21:42.000 But what he's doing is he's going way, way into the future, into the possibilities of...

01:21:48.000 He's not seeing like, well, five years from now, we're going to be able to send gigabyte pictures to the mail.

01:21:54.000 No, he's saying, let's think of if you keep going exponentially.

01:22:00.000 Electronics and technology and innovation keeps continually accelerating.

01:22:03.000 We could potentially get to the point where...

01:22:07.000 It's the impossible.

01:22:08.000 Well, you'd be able to recreate human beings based on your knowledge of them and then they'll be able to come up with some sort of a program where he'll be able to have a conversation with his father.

01:22:18.000 Yeah.

01:22:18.000 See, I think that misunderstood.

01:22:19.000 I mean, I think it's true about like the possibility of a singularity in technological development.

01:22:24.000 But, you know, it's not going to be his father.

01:22:26.000 That's the sad thing.

01:22:27.000 You know, I think we seriously, you know, I've done some work on this as an interest of mine about mind.

01:22:31.000 What is mind?

01:22:32.000 What's the relationship between mind and matter?

01:22:34.000 And I think we have a serious misunderstanding.

01:22:37.000 We don't understand consciousness very well at all.

01:22:40.000 So the idea that, oh yeah, it's just going to be trivial to download your consciousness into a computer, I think there's a shitload of assumptions in there about what mind is and the relationship between your neurons and awareness.

01:22:55.000 So that's why I think those guys, it's a little bit of a religion.

01:22:57.000 You know what I mean?

01:22:58.000 It is a little bit of religion.

01:22:59.000 Yes, we will transcend!

01:23:01.000 Well, 2045 is the new benchmark for whatever reason.

01:23:05.000 That's the new number.

01:23:06.000 They're going to keep pushing back.

01:23:07.000 It's going to be like every other rapture.

01:23:10.000 Oh, we thought it was 2045. We really meant 2065. Well, we went to this 2045 conference, me and my friend Ari and Duncan, and we got to talk to some of these guys, and it was really fascinating.

01:23:19.000 And one of them had created some robot that was supposed to be him, but it didn't work well, so they never revealed it at the conference.

01:23:27.000 It had too many bugs in it.

01:23:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:30.000 It's intriguing.

01:23:31.000 I want them to keep going.

01:23:33.000 When are we going to get to Ex Machina?

01:23:37.000 Talk about good movies though.

01:23:38.000 Did you like that one?

01:23:38.000 It's one of my favorite movies ever.

01:23:40.000 So smart.

01:23:40.000 So simple.

01:23:42.000 He's not beating you over the head with it. 1.00

01:23:43.000 No cut the shit moments in that movie. 1.00

01:23:46.000 You were like, whoa. 0.99

01:23:48.000 I think that's one of my all time top 20 movies.

01:23:51.000 When she stabs him, just emotionless.

01:23:53.000 I'm putting the blade in. 0.99

01:23:54.000 It was amazing.

01:23:56.000 Spoiler alert.

01:23:58.000 Did you like Annihilation?

01:24:00.000 Yes!

01:24:00.000 Yeah, I liked it a lot too.

01:24:02.000 I didn't like it as much, but I liked it.

01:24:04.000 It was very weird.

01:24:05.000 And the ending seemed like some producers put their jizz in the soup.

01:24:09.000 Back to Pittsburgh.

01:24:10.000 Yeah, what's happening here?

01:24:11.000 Who made this part?

01:24:12.000 Yeah.

01:24:13.000 But I enjoyed it, yeah.

01:24:17.000 The danger with anything when it comes to AI... Here's an interesting thing about AI. We are making amazing strides with AI. Now, artificial intelligence is different from artificial consciousness, you know what I mean?

01:24:29.000 But the AI, what we're getting out of it is nothing like us.

01:24:34.000 Back in the day, people were like, oh, we're going to model the human brain, and that's how we'll do it.

01:24:39.000 We'll make programs that are what...

01:24:40.000 And what they've learned is, oh, that doesn't really work that well.

01:24:43.000 So now this whole big data thing, like, you know, network theory and big data and deep learning, where, like, you know, they're using statistical, you know, the power of having huge amounts of computing and statistical reasoning.

01:24:54.000 So that, like, you know, yeah, the computer, like, you know, it'll find the picture of the cat, but you have no idea why it found the picture.

01:25:01.000 It didn't reason, like, oh, yeah, that sort of looks like cat, and I like cats.

01:25:04.000 You know, it was just like, oh, these kinds of lines go with that kind of thing.

01:25:06.000 It has no idea what it's doing, but it'll act intelligently.

01:25:10.000 And so that's...

01:25:11.000 You know, I mean, that's kind of freaky-deaky in a lot of ways, too.

01:25:15.000 I think people are...

01:25:16.000 I think it's smart to think about the dangers of AI. Not necessarily when it takes over...

01:25:21.000 Well, the dangers to us...

01:25:22.000 Yeah.

01:25:23.000 Not necessarily the dangers.

01:25:25.000 Just the dangers to this thing that we are, this weird monkey thing that wants to keep being a monkey thing.

01:25:31.000 Yeah.

01:25:31.000 Well, you mean in the sense of like, right, that it's going to replace us.

01:25:34.000 Yes.

01:25:34.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:25:35.000 I think it's inevitable.

01:25:36.000 I mean, don't you think that if you go back and interview the single-celled organism before it branched off into multi-celled?

01:25:42.000 That'd be kind of a boring interview. 1.00

01:25:44.000 Fuck this multi-cell bullshit. 1.00

01:25:45.000 I want to stay a single cell at the bottom of the ocean. 1.00

01:25:48.000 These guys are assholes, man. 1.00

01:25:50.000 With their rock and roll music. 1.00

01:25:52.000 What are they going to do?

01:25:52.000 They're going to make cars?

01:25:53.000 Fuck that. 1.00

01:25:54.000 I don't want a car, man. 1.00

01:25:55.000 I like staying down here.

01:25:57.000 There's a real thought to that, that we are the wetware that is the problem.

01:26:02.000 Yeah.

01:26:02.000 No, no, listen.

01:26:03.000 I think it's fully conceivable.

01:26:05.000 I'm not going to be like, it'll never happen.

01:26:07.000 But as a guy I know as a philosopher says, there's a certain way in which everything we do with AI right now, it's not like Watson is playing chess.

01:26:16.000 It's like we're using Watson to play chess.

01:26:18.000 It's our tool.

01:26:19.000 And I think the fear is the tool gets out of hand. 0.98

01:26:22.000 Not that it, like, develops a thing where, like, I hate humans, you know, Dad, I hate you.

01:26:26.000 But more that it's like, you know, these things which are not actually thinking, they act intelligently, but they're not thinking, can have a huge, like, it'll have a really negative impact.

01:26:35.000 You know, it'll, you know, what is it?

01:26:36.000 There's that example of, like, if you design something that is an AI system to make paperclips, it ends up consuming the entire planet making paperclips because that's what you told it to do.

01:26:44.000 Right, you never told it to make a sustainable amount of paper clips.

01:26:47.000 Right, exactly.

01:26:47.000 So I'm more worried about that than I am of Skynet, you know, coming over and deciding that it's going to drop all the bombs on us because it needs to get rid of us.

01:26:55.000 Well, there's no biological imperative for silicon-based artificial intelligence to procreate, to keep going and move forward.

01:27:03.000 Like, why would they do that?

01:27:04.000 We do it because we came from biology.

01:27:08.000 And biology needs to stay alive. 0.81

01:27:10.000 And everybody wants bigger, faster, stronger.

01:27:13.000 You want to keep moving.

01:27:14.000 And it's because there's a real possibility that you might get consumed by some other life form.

01:27:19.000 So you have to protect yourself and you have to look out for other people who might want to breed with the viable female that you've copulated with. 0.99

01:27:28.000 There's a lot of shit that's going on. 0.98

01:27:30.000 It's built in evolutionarily to have that. 1.00

01:27:32.000 Right.

01:27:32.000 That we assume that somehow or another these artificial creations will have as well.

01:27:36.000 Right.

01:27:37.000 Which is why, right?

01:27:38.000 I mean, yeah.

01:27:39.000 Unless we program it in.

01:27:41.000 So the thing is, but will it wake up?

01:27:43.000 So that's the other thing.

01:27:44.000 Well, even if it does wake up, will it have the inclination towards scientific research?

01:27:48.000 Would it even want to send something through the cosmos to view us?

01:27:51.000 Yeah.

01:27:52.000 No, that's a really interesting...

01:27:53.000 And I think we just don't know, right?

01:27:55.000 Because listen, we understand so little about what consciousness is and what its imperatives are.

01:27:59.000 Like, yeah, once you wake up, you're like, oh, you're dead.

01:28:02.000 You know? 1.00

01:28:03.000 Dead, I gotta kill. 1.00

01:28:03.000 I mean, like, why? 1.00

01:28:04.000 Like, who knows what really...

01:28:05.000 Did you like Battlestar Galactica?

01:28:07.000 I loved Battlestar Galactica. 0.96

01:28:08.000 How goddamn good was that new? 0.96

01:28:10.000 The new version. 0.97

01:28:11.000 Yeah, no, the new version.

01:28:12.000 The old version was fine.

01:28:13.000 I love the old version because I was 14 years old and I was like, yeah, spaceships!

01:28:17.000 But the new version was amazing.

01:28:19.000 If there is a show that I wish they would bring back, it's Battlestar Galactica. 0.97

01:28:24.000 Goddamn, that was good.

01:28:24.000 What did you think about the ending, though?

01:28:26.000 It was, you know, they had to end it.

01:28:27.000 It was alright. 0.99

01:28:28.000 But the fucking series was brilliant. 1.00

01:28:30.000 It was brilliant. 0.99

01:28:31.000 You know what was amazing about that? 0.93

01:28:32.000 The way they wrapped all the political shit that was happening after 9-11 into that, man? 0.94

01:28:37.000 From the torture scenes to the... 0.99

01:28:39.000 Yeah, man.

01:28:40.000 And then they even had the whole thing with Starbuck about, you know, what was she?

01:28:44.000 There was a couple, like, it was five years, right?

01:28:46.000 And there were a couple seasons where it kind of got a little ran off the rails.

01:28:50.000 That girl, what's her name? 1.00

01:28:51.000 Katie Sackhoff?

01:28:52.000 Is that her name?

01:28:53.000 The Starbuck?

01:28:54.000 Yeah.

01:28:55.000 Is that her name?

01:28:55.000 Yeah.

01:28:56.000 She's so good.

01:28:57.000 Yeah, she was really good in that role.

01:28:59.000 I haven't seen her in stuff since.

01:29:01.000 She's got a movie out right now on Netflix.

01:29:03.000 I haven't seen it, right?

01:29:04.000 But I'm sort of like, oh yeah, there's, you know.

01:29:05.000 But she had, right, she sort of disappeared after that.

01:29:07.000 She was so good in that show. 1.00

01:29:09.000 I was like, well, this is like the launching pad for her.

01:29:12.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:29:13.000 And you know what's revolutionary about that show too?

01:29:14.000 The way they did the special effects were like, you know, the camera moved around, like there's a spaceship, but I'm, you know, I don't have, it didn't do, you know, sometimes it did those long pans, but it was, it kind of opened up a whole new way of sort of looking at, you know, just sort of what it looks like to be in space and stuff.

01:29:28.000 Yeah, but it really scared the shit out of people in terms of artificial life.

01:29:31.000 Something that we create that decides it's done with us and it's taking over.

01:29:35.000 Well, you know what's amazing about that, and I've written about this, this idea that we keep telling that story over and over again.

01:29:40.000 How many movies can you think of that have that?

01:29:42.000 So I'm really interested in myth, the whole mythology, the way we can never get away from the myths, coming of age, the hero's journey, blah, blah.

01:29:52.000 Joseph Campbell.

01:29:52.000 Yeah, Joseph Campbell.

01:29:53.000 I'm a big Joseph Campbell fan.

01:29:55.000 But like, you know, what's happening with us now, there's nothing in the storehouse of myth to take care of, like, building machines that take over, right?

01:30:03.000 So the reason we keep telling that story over and over again is we're preparing ourselves, right?

01:30:07.000 We're building the myths, you know, that sort of will help.

01:30:10.000 We don't know what's going to happen, but we have to keep telling that story because we can feel it coming, you know what I mean?

01:30:15.000 So we need to keep telling that story to kind of explore what the options are.

01:30:20.000 And that's what I liked about the ending.

01:30:22.000 I didn't think the ending was great.

01:30:23.000 But the idea that like, oh yeah, this balance, you know, you've got to keep going through these cycles of trying to achieve this balance between, you know, silicon forms and biological forms.

01:30:32.000 But it's inevitable.

01:30:34.000 We're worried that we're going to be taken over by something else, but we're not overly concerned with evolving.

01:30:40.000 Our own biology.

01:30:42.000 I know.

01:30:42.000 And changing.

01:30:42.000 And maybe that's the solution in terms of...

01:31:03.000 Yeah.

01:31:04.000 Yeah.

01:31:06.000 Right.

01:31:06.000 And these things, you know, these cell phones, my God, my memory's in there, right?

01:31:10.000 I used to know cell phones.

01:31:11.000 I left my house two days ago without my phone, and I turned around in a panic on my own street. 0.99

01:31:16.000 I'm like, where's my fucking phone? 0.99

01:31:18.000 I was like, no! 0.99

01:31:19.000 Do you remember when you used to have phone numbers in your head?

01:31:21.000 Oh, yeah.

01:31:21.000 You know, like you'd have 20 phone numbers.

01:31:23.000 Yeah, I can't even, my wife's number, I can't, like I got three digits out of it.

01:31:27.000 I can't go further than that.

01:31:28.000 It's crazy.

01:31:29.000 But we remember a lot of other stuff now.

01:31:33.000 I mean, I'm really overwhelmed.

01:31:37.000 I think I'm in that weird zone where I just don't have enough data space.

01:31:44.000 I don't have enough storage.

01:31:45.000 Yeah.

01:31:46.000 Yeah, for all of us.

01:31:47.000 You've got to kind of pick and choose, right?

01:31:49.000 Like Wikipedia, where all human knowledge, the entire sum of human knowledge is right there.

01:31:55.000 You know?

01:31:55.000 I mean, like, whoa, what a freaking...

01:31:57.000 I mean, talk about changes, right, that you were talking about.

01:31:59.000 What an amazing change that you can have pretty much, you know...

01:32:03.000 Like, you know, I love comics, right?

01:32:06.000 You know, I was a Marvel guy way back, right?

01:32:09.000 Me too. 1.00

01:32:09.000 And back in the day, you know, you paid for your, you had to, you know, first of all, you got your ass kicked. 1.00

01:32:13.000 But, you know, you had to go to the store every week and get the comics and, you know. 0.96

01:32:17.000 And now, you know, you just look up Captain America and you can know everything there was about his, you know, his origin story and everything.

01:32:22.000 So it's like that idea that, like, there's no domains of knowledge that you can't instantly access and have all the backstory that you need.

01:32:29.000 That's got to be it.

01:32:30.000 Well, physical comic books are amazing, but I have to be honest.

01:32:33.000 Comic books on an iPad are better because you don't see the next frame.

01:32:37.000 Yeah.

01:32:37.000 You just swipe, and then you get the next frame.

01:32:41.000 You don't see it in advance.

01:32:42.000 If you're reading the left side of Doctor Strange, and the right side is an explosion, you're like, well, I see that. 0.99

01:32:48.000 I see that shit's coming next. 0.99

01:32:50.000 It's kind of a shitty way to do it. 1.00

01:32:52.000 No, I agree. 0.99

01:32:53.000 On an iPad, it's fucking amazing. 0.98

01:32:54.000 It's amazing. 0.98

01:32:55.000 Yeah, no, and you do that thing, and now it's embarrassing.

01:32:58.000 As a professor of physics at a major university, I have like $3,000 worth of But why is that embarrassing?

01:33:04.000 No, it's not embarrassing.

01:33:06.000 It can't be.

01:33:06.000 No, no, it's not.

01:33:07.000 You're still a brilliant guy, but you just also like cool shit. 0.99

01:33:09.000 Yeah, well, shouldn't I be reading Dostoevsky or something? 0.99

01:33:12.000 I don't know.

01:33:13.000 My dad was always like, Dostoevsky, because my dad was a writer.

01:33:16.000 He was like, oh, you comic books.

01:33:17.000 But I was like, Dad, I'm learning, especially with Marvel.

01:33:19.000 Marvel had great language.

01:33:20.000 I learned the word synopsis from Marvel.

01:33:23.000 Yeah.

01:33:24.000 Especially, like, some of the... 1.00

01:33:26.000 Like, Doctor Strange had some great shit. 0.99

01:33:28.000 You know, Fantastic Four. 1.00

01:33:29.000 I didn't...

01:33:30.000 Yeah, no, the Doctor...

01:33:31.000 You know, I was the science advisor for Doctor Strange.

01:33:33.000 For the movie?

01:33:34.000 For the movie, yeah.

01:33:35.000 Were you really?

01:33:35.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:36.000 That's amazing.

01:33:37.000 Best day.

01:33:39.000 Did you have to correct anything?

01:33:41.000 No, no, not really, because they called me in.

01:33:43.000 So I know Scott Derrick.

01:33:43.000 I actually had lunch or breakfast with Scott yesterday.

01:33:46.000 I know Scott from my first book, which is about science and religion.

01:33:50.000 Somebody connected us, and we've been talking for a long time.

01:33:53.000 And when he got tapped to do Doctor Strange, he contacted us.

01:33:56.000 Like I said, you know, email us.

01:33:57.000 He said, Marvel wants to talk to you.

01:33:58.000 I was like, oh, thank you!

01:34:01.000 And I got out there for a day and met Kevin Feige, man.

01:34:04.000 It was just like, oh, man.

01:34:06.000 And so we basically worked on...

01:34:07.000 He wanted to work on two things for that.

01:34:09.000 And what's funny here is I never read Doctor Strange, right?

01:34:11.000 Because I was like a science guy.

01:34:12.000 It was all about Tony Stark.

01:34:13.000 Sure.

01:34:14.000 Or Spider-Man or the X-Men.

01:34:18.000 So I never...

01:34:18.000 I was like, oh, that guy uses magic.

01:34:19.000 So the thing we had to figure out was...

01:34:22.000 First of all, that scene where he first encounters the ancient one, you know, and she has to kind of like, you know, school him on there's more ways to think about the world than science.

01:34:32.000 And then the multiverse.

01:34:33.000 That was the other thing.

01:34:34.000 Because I've written a lot on the multiverse.

01:34:36.000 But man, it was awesome.

01:34:37.000 It was so much fun to be in the writer's room, you know, with them and just like be throwing around ideas.

01:34:42.000 Wow.

01:34:42.000 Yeah, no.

01:34:44.000 And it'll probably never, ever happen again, but I don't care!

01:34:46.000 You know, I don't care.

01:34:46.000 I got my shot!

01:34:48.000 It is a weird thing that when you're young, you like all this cool stuff, but then when you get old, you're supposed to be more pragmatic.

01:34:54.000 You're supposed to abandon that stuff and be mature.

01:34:56.000 But when I was a kid, I was super embarrassed when I became an adult that I still like muscle cars.

01:35:02.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:35:02.000 I was like, why do I like these stupid things? 0.99

01:35:04.000 And I loved them. 1.00

01:35:05.000 I would see one drive by and hear the rumble.

01:35:07.000 I'd go, ooh.

01:35:08.000 That's awesome.

01:35:09.000 Look at that thing. 0.99

01:35:11.000 And then when I became an older adult, I was like, who gives a fuck? 0.99

01:35:14.000 That's really what it is. 0.99

01:35:15.000 That's where I'm now.

01:35:16.000 Who cares, man?

01:35:17.000 Because I love video games.

01:35:18.000 I play a lot of video games.

01:35:19.000 And people are always like, oh my god, why are you playing video games?

01:35:21.000 They're terrible for children.

01:35:23.000 Yeah, they're awesome, man.

01:35:24.000 There is no better way to kill an hour, especially after a stressful day, than to And it stimulates the mind.

01:35:33.000 Jamie and I have talked about this many times, that we have this deep appreciation for chess and for Go and all these ancient games, but there are games like StarCraft and even one-on-one quake matches that require intense calculating.

01:35:48.000 You have to think about the environment and understanding of the map that you're competing in.

01:35:54.000 There's a lot of strategy.

01:35:55.000 No, that's what's really good about it.

01:35:57.000 I mean, I tend to be...

01:35:58.000 I really like RPGs, you know, with a map and everything.

01:36:01.000 Oh, you're one of them EverQuest dorks.

01:36:03.000 Well, I don't do anything multi... 0.99

01:36:05.000 Because I'm so bad at it that I know there's some kids, some 13-year-old in Korea who's just like, pow, you're dead, pow, you're dead, spawn, die, spawn. 0.80

01:36:12.000 But I like something with a really good story, you know?

01:36:14.000 Right.

01:36:15.000 What's the game you like?

01:36:16.000 Oh, God.

01:36:17.000 My favorite game is Last of Us.

01:36:19.000 Ooh, what is that?

01:36:20.000 Oh, man, Last of Us. 0.98

01:36:21.000 It is fucking awesome. 0.96

01:36:22.000 Because I don't like zombie games because I get scared, you know? 0.97

01:36:25.000 You get scared?

01:36:26.000 I saw Night of the Living Dead.

01:36:28.000 What about Plants vs. 1.00

01:36:30.000 Zombies?

01:36:30.000 That's a nice, simple one.

01:36:31.000 Yeah, right.

01:36:32.000 That might work.

01:36:32.000 No, I saw the Night of the Living Dead when I was like 12. It was on PBS on the screen.

01:36:37.000 And it's just like, after that, I'm sorry, zombies.

01:36:39.000 Wow.

01:36:40.000 Yeah.

01:36:40.000 I can't believe they put it on TV. It was like the 11 o'clock show.

01:36:45.000 But Last of Us is kind of a zombie survival story.

01:36:50.000 But it's beautiful.

01:36:50.000 Beautiful.

01:36:51.000 I mean, it's really the narrative of it.

01:36:53.000 It's this guy, you know, it's 20 years after.

01:36:55.000 And the thing about this thing, it opens up with the, you know, the zombie outbreak happening.

01:36:59.000 And the guy loses his daughter.

01:37:00.000 Like, you see him lose his daughter.

01:37:02.000 And it's so well, it's the same company that did Uncharted, which are other, I really like those as well.

01:37:08.000 And so it's just like the acting in it was really beautiful.

01:37:10.000 And then, you know, it's 20 years later, and this guy's broken.

01:37:13.000 You know what I mean?

01:37:13.000 Like, he's just, you know, he survived in this, you know, the society's fallen apart.

01:37:19.000 But, you know, you track him as he gets this young girl who is immune, and he's got to take her cross-country.

01:37:28.000 And you're following this guy's story, and then there's zombies.

01:37:30.000 Isn't that the theme of a movie?

01:37:32.000 A really recent movie, wasn't it?

01:37:34.000 Like a foreign zombie movie that was supposed to be very good, but that was the idea behind it.

01:37:43.000 Yeah, but it was his own daughter.

01:37:46.000 I bet they took it from this.

01:37:47.000 I bet they did.

01:37:48.000 Last of Us has won huge amounts of awards.

01:37:51.000 How old is it?

01:37:53.000 Six years, maybe?

01:37:54.000 Last of Us 2 is just about to come out.

01:37:56.000 The Schwarzenegger movie is older than that, I believe.

01:37:59.000 Because it came out right around the time where his wife left him because he banged the maid.

01:38:05.000 Oh, yeah.

01:38:09.000 Whoops.

01:38:10.000 Downfall.

01:38:10.000 He was the governor then.

01:38:12.000 Wasn't he the governor?

01:38:12.000 He was post-governor.

01:38:14.000 It was post-governor.

01:38:16.000 But that theme is a reoccurring theme.

01:38:19.000 That is a reoccurring theme.

01:38:20.000 More than anyone, right?

01:38:21.000 How many times has that come back?

01:38:23.000 The plague wipes people out.

01:38:24.000 They come back to life.

01:38:25.000 They're zombies.

01:38:26.000 Yeah, so you've got to wonder what's up with that.

01:38:28.000 Why is that something that's stirring around in our head?

01:38:30.000 I think the apocalypse is because we kind of feel we're nervous about what's happening with us because we can see we're pushing up against boundaries.

01:38:35.000 Well, we're also vulnerable.

01:38:37.000 Yeah, right.

01:38:38.000 And we're vulnerable to disease, and we're vulnerable to, I mean, there's so many different things that people can get.

01:38:43.000 Rabies and malaria.

01:38:45.000 And we had plagues.

01:38:46.000 We used to have plagues all the time, you know?

01:38:48.000 So, yeah, no.

01:38:50.000 But that's what makes this game so great, is that it really takes the world after the fall seriously, and it's heartbreaking.

01:38:57.000 You know what I mean?

01:38:58.000 It's beautifully done. 0.99

01:38:59.000 Scarier than shit, but, you know, beautifully done. 0.98

01:39:02.000 And for me, it's like everything that I love most in the game. 1.00

01:39:04.000 Because like you're saying is, you get into these situations, and, you know, you're going to get killed.

01:39:08.000 You know, like there's Dark Souls, where there's no getting through.

01:39:10.000 Dark Souls is apparently the most hardest game ever.

01:39:12.000 I've never played it.

01:39:13.000 But, you know, this game is hard, and you've got to keep coming back.

01:39:15.000 What is Dark Souls?

01:39:16.000 Dark Souls is also a story-based open-world game.

01:39:20.000 Single-player.

01:39:20.000 I think it's probably a multiplayer mode.

01:39:22.000 But it's kind of an elvish...

01:39:27.000 You're in that kind of world.

01:39:28.000 And you're just trying to stay alive?

01:39:29.000 Trying to stay alive.

01:39:30.000 And it's just the hardest game ever.

01:39:32.000 That's what they say.

01:39:34.000 But like I said, a good, hard game, you gotta...

01:39:37.000 You know, you're going to keep going back.

01:39:38.000 Like, oh, I just died.

01:39:39.000 All right, let me try it.

01:39:40.000 Let me try coming around from this side.

01:39:41.000 You know, oh, let me use this weapon.

01:39:43.000 Let me, you know, and it's really, you know, we did a, I had a textbook that just came out a couple years ago.

01:39:48.000 And we did a video game.

01:39:49.000 We built a full, first ever, full video game for an intro astronomy course.

01:39:53.000 And the whole idea was, like, the coolest thing about a game is, like, the first thing you have to do is learn the rules, right?

01:39:58.000 And that's what makes being in a game world interesting.

01:40:02.000 You know, there's a whole set of rules.

01:40:03.000 You've got to know how to craft.

01:40:04.000 You've got to know which weapons to use in different kinds of situations.

01:40:06.000 And our idea with the video game was, like, just make the real rules.

01:40:10.000 Make them the science rules.

01:40:10.000 Oh, you want to go mine an asteroid?

01:40:12.000 Well, how do you know which asteroid has, you know, the most, you know, ore in it?

01:40:16.000 You know, I'm just going to do what you're going to normally do in astronomy.

01:40:19.000 So I think, like, you know...

01:40:20.000 Video games have not recognized...

01:40:23.000 Like you said, people don't understand actually how important they are.

01:40:26.000 For teaching, for all kinds of things, video games, and for a future of storytelling, too.

01:40:33.000 Well, people think it's a waste of time until they find out how much these professionals make.

01:40:38.000 Someone was saying that some guy...

01:40:42.000 What is the number that kid was making?

01:40:44.000 $500,000 a month playing Fortnite?

01:40:47.000 Wasn't that what Sugar Sean was?

01:40:47.000 That's what he advertised it as, but it's way more than that.

01:40:49.000 He makes more than that?

01:40:50.000 So what is Fortnite?

01:40:52.000 Can somebody explain Fortnite to me?

01:40:53.000 I'm sorry, I'm still in Far Cry 5 right now.

01:40:55.000 It's a crazy third-person shooter.

01:40:57.000 You're jumping around shooting people.

01:40:58.000 I'm good with third-person shooters.

01:41:00.000 But is it a story, or is it just like you're... 0.99

01:41:02.000 You're just fucking people up, I think. 0.98

01:41:03.000 Yeah, the story is really just dropping in to survive. 0.99

01:41:06.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:07.000 There's no campaign mode.

01:41:08.000 There is, but that's a separate...

01:41:10.000 You know what's interesting to me about Fortnite? 0.98

01:41:12.000 The graphics suck. 0.97

01:41:15.000 Don't you have me. 0.99

01:41:17.000 That's a graphic style that it has.

01:41:19.000 Yeah, but it's clunky.

01:41:21.000 It kind of has an Xbox 2 sort of.

01:41:24.000 Somebody had an image, and it was from 2007. And it said, man, look at this.

01:41:30.000 I wonder what video games are going to be looking like, the graphics are going to be looking like in 2018. And then it shows Fortnite.

01:41:36.000 It's like they've turned the textures off.

01:41:40.000 You turn the textures off when you play online if you don't have a powerful enough computer so that you don't screw up your streaming.

01:41:47.000 It doesn't make your video card work so hard, but also it makes it easier to recognize shapes.

01:41:55.000 That was the thing they did with Quake.

01:41:57.000 They would completely turn the textures off when guys would be playing in high-level matches.

01:42:01.000 And you would just deal with these flat walls, and then the object, the person that you were fighting against, they would stand out in stark contrast.

01:42:09.000 Right, right.

01:42:10.000 Whereas, you know, otherwise you'd be in this castle wall, you'd have incredible textures on the wall, and you wouldn't be able to see them as easily.

01:42:17.000 It would be distracting.

01:42:18.000 I mean, that's one thing I think I love about video games, too, is, like, you know, the scenery.

01:42:22.000 Sometimes I just want to stop and be like, whoa, dude.

01:42:24.000 That's it.

01:42:25.000 The right side has full graphics.

01:42:27.000 The left side is not.

01:42:28.000 So, like, it depends on what you were actually looking for.

01:42:29.000 Yeah, the right side's reasonable.

01:42:31.000 I mean, it still is a little bit, you know, that's not much different at all.

01:42:35.000 Yeah, it is.

01:42:36.000 Yeah, I mean, sort of.

01:42:37.000 The left side is just dark.

01:42:38.000 There's grass.

01:42:39.000 Yeah, look at the grass.

01:42:41.000 There's still some movement on the ground.

01:42:44.000 It's not flat plain like it is in Quake.

01:42:46.000 Go to Quake 3 No Textures.

01:42:51.000 Make a video or pull up a video of that and you'll see what I'm talking about.

01:42:56.000 What I'm talking about is like literal flat walls where people turned everything off.

01:43:01.000 And it got to a point where they weren't allowing it in certain competitions because it makes such a big difference.

01:43:06.000 Because now you're just like, it's a target in front of a blank screen.

01:43:10.000 You could also replace all of the characters with a larger character.

01:43:15.000 Like say if you were playing as like this girl.

01:43:18.000 It's like, is this one?

01:43:19.000 It's showing the mod in between.

01:43:22.000 Maybe I'm thinking...

01:43:22.000 This might even be a new graphic.

01:43:23.000 I'm sorry, I'm a loser.

01:43:25.000 What is Quake? 0.89

01:43:26.000 How dare you? 1.00

01:43:27.000 You son of a bitch. 1.00

01:43:29.000 No, no, Jamie, pull up Quake No Textures. 1.00

01:43:34.000 Pull up Quake, no textures, and then you can watch what it looks like.

01:43:38.000 That is not no textures.

01:43:40.000 That's different.

01:43:40.000 You can see the difference in the colors and things are moving.

01:43:43.000 When they turn off all the textures, you get to see these flat walls.

01:43:48.000 That's what it looks like.

01:43:49.000 See?

01:43:51.000 Now that is a way different experience.

01:43:53.000 It'll be much easier to see.

01:43:56.000 Shadows still exist, but all the textures are gone.

01:43:59.000 And if you show a video of that, see if you can find a video of that, Jamie.

01:44:03.000 When, in the videos, you see things moving around with no textures, and you realize what an advantage it would be if you were playing someone who's...

01:44:10.000 You're constantly dealing with all this visual input. 0.99

01:44:13.000 You have all this different shit. 0.99

01:44:15.000 High visibility... 0.99

01:44:16.000 This isn't Quake 3, though.

01:44:17.000 It's hard to find out.

01:44:18.000 Who is this?

01:44:18.000 Which game is this?

01:44:19.000 Quake Live.

01:44:20.000 Oh, okay.

01:44:20.000 So, again, I still gotta ask, what is Quake?

01:44:23.000 I mean, I know I've heard of it, but I've never played it.

01:44:24.000 Like, what?

01:44:25.000 It's the ultimate first-person shooter, and it's the original one.

01:44:28.000 It was originally Quake 1, and, well, there was Doom.

01:44:32.000 Doom I've heard of.

01:44:33.000 They just redid Doom, didn't they?

01:44:36.000 Didn't they come out with another version of Doom?

01:44:38.000 Yes, they did, and there's another one that's coming out soon.

01:44:41.000 But what Quake 1 was was these cool maps, and you'd run around and shoot each other, and you'd have these deathmatches, so one-on-one deathmatches and shoot rockets at each other and shit.

01:44:53.000 And you're seeing it through your perspective.

01:44:55.000 So if you have a rocket launcher, you see the rocket launcher in front of you.

01:44:59.000 Oh, so that whole idea of first person.

01:45:01.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:45:01.000 What is this one? 0.71

01:45:01.000 Oh, this is Quake Champions. 0.71

01:45:03.000 This is the newest version. 0.87

01:45:04.000 I mean, the graphics are fucking incredible on these things now. 0.93

01:45:08.000 They're so exciting. 0.82

01:45:09.000 We're setting up a LAN here, a local area network here, where we're going to stream live and play each other.

01:45:16.000 Excellent.

01:45:17.000 And waste massive amounts of time.

01:45:19.000 Massive amounts of time.

01:45:20.000 I'm sure I'm going to get yelled at.

01:45:21.000 Oh man, sometimes I'm sort of like, oh, three hours just went by.

01:45:23.000 Yeah.

01:45:24.000 I was going to go to sleep a little bit.

01:45:25.000 Oh well, whatever.

01:45:26.000 Dude, it will suck up your time. 0.98

01:45:28.000 It'll suck up.

01:45:29.000 But you know, I can't play, I'm just, I'm not good enough to play those kinds of things. 0.90

01:45:32.000 Like, it's just like, spawn die, spawn die.

01:45:34.000 No, you can figure out how to do it.

01:45:35.000 You're a smart guy.

01:45:36.000 How dare you say that?

01:45:38.000 How dare you put the limitations...

01:45:39.000 On myself.

01:45:40.000 Yeah, you can't do that.

01:45:42.000 No, I'm good.

01:45:42.000 I'm good with open words.

01:45:43.000 Listen, you just need to learn, laugh, W-A-S-D. Learn how to move your fingers around and get a good response. 0.82

01:45:49.000 No, I'm a console guy, too.

01:45:49.000 I need the...

01:45:50.000 Consoles are bullshit. 1.00

01:45:52.000 I know, that's what people say. 1.00

01:45:52.000 Listen, you can't get any real accuracy with a console. 1.00

01:45:55.000 That's your problem.

01:45:56.000 But wait, how do you do it?

01:45:56.000 I mean, the console now is pretty good.

01:45:59.000 Hey, listen to you.

01:46:00.000 How do you learn physics?

01:46:02.000 What is that? 1.00

01:46:02.000 All this fucking... 1.00

01:46:03.000 I can't do it, man. 1.00

01:46:04.000 I'll never make it.

01:46:04.000 I don't understand all this science.

01:46:05.000 This is like that movie where you're like, you can do it, man.

01:46:07.000 Yeah, it's like Rocky or something.

01:46:09.000 That's right, exactly.

01:46:09.000 Karate Kid or whatever.

01:46:11.000 Has anybody ever done that for video games?

01:46:13.000 There's never been that movie?

01:46:14.000 Oh, someone teaches someone how to play a video game?

01:46:16.000 Yeah, like the guy who's a nerd in the beginning and he's like a loser, but you know, he comes back and he gets the girl.

01:46:20.000 Well, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this in particular is because I am more and more convinced that our future may lie in some artificially created world and that people are more interested and more attracted every day to virtual reality.

01:46:38.000 Augmented reality, virtual reality, and...

01:46:41.000 Jamie, what was that game, that one game where there was created worlds?

01:46:47.000 I was going to pull that up earlier and ask.

01:46:48.000 It's called No Man's Sky.

01:46:49.000 Oh, I played that.

01:46:50.000 I bought it because, of course, any space game, I'm like, yeah.

01:46:53.000 That's boring, though.

01:46:54.000 It is because they have 80 trillion worlds, but They're basically, they don't look that different.

01:46:59.000 So it's like oatmeal, 80 million bottles of oatmeal.

01:47:02.000 And there's nothing happening over there.

01:47:02.000 It's not like you go there and people are shooting each other and stealing money.

01:47:06.000 No, no.

01:47:07.000 What is better for that...

01:47:08.000 Yeah, right.

01:47:09.000 I mean, it looked like it was beautiful, but what's better is Elite Dangerous.

01:47:12.000 So after this, I was so disappointed in this, I went back and I found Elite Dangerous, which actually has...

01:47:18.000 And you were just disappointed in this because there was no action.

01:47:20.000 Yeah, you just ran around and you mined stuff.

01:47:22.000 It was sort of like, it just wasn't, you know...

01:47:24.000 Nothing exciting.

01:47:25.000 There was nothing exciting.

01:47:26.000 There was no, you know, there was no...

01:47:28.000 So, like I said, I don't usually play sort of these massive multiplayer games.

01:47:31.000 So this is Elite Dangerous?

01:47:32.000 This is Elite Dangerous.

01:47:33.000 And it is, man, the trading, or, you know, you can decide, like, oh, I want to be a bounty hunter, you know?

01:47:38.000 That's incredible.

01:47:39.000 And it was so rich.

01:47:41.000 I just, I spent, there was like a good six months of my life that I was like, you know, working my way, getting better ships.

01:47:45.000 I became, because you know, who doesn't want to be a bounty hunter, right?

01:47:47.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:47:48.000 Like, that's what everybody's, and this just, this game had, you know, and there's like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand people in there, you know, creating the universe.

01:47:54.000 It's evolving.

01:47:55.000 They add storylines.

01:47:57.000 So, you know.

01:47:58.000 Well, we are setting up an HTC Vive here, and we're, we, Jamie was.

01:48:03.000 What that means, HTC Vive?

01:48:04.000 How dare you?

01:48:05.000 I know, man.

01:48:06.000 It's like, you know, that's it. 0.99

01:48:07.000 You call yourself a dork. 0.99

01:48:08.000 You call yourself a dork. 1.00

01:48:09.000 You call yourself a nerd. 0.99

01:48:10.000 You're not a real nerd. 0.99

01:48:12.000 You'll never not have sex again. 0.97

01:48:13.000 It's virtual reality.

01:48:15.000 And it's consumer virtual reality.

01:48:18.000 I've never done the goggles.

01:48:20.000 I've been waiting.

01:48:21.000 I've been sort of...

01:48:22.000 Well, we tried to get one.

01:48:24.000 Jamie went out yesterday.

01:48:26.000 And look, they're all sold out.

01:48:27.000 So we had to order one.

01:48:28.000 And so we're ordering one.

01:48:29.000 We're going to have it set up in here.

01:48:31.000 And the games...

01:48:33.000 I played the games of two years ago.

01:48:36.000 And I'm sure they're way more advanced than they are now.

01:48:38.000 Yeah.

01:48:38.000 There's a crazy archery game where you're on the top of a castle and these little monsters that look like they could be in South Park.

01:48:46.000 They're not like detailed, but they're kind of cool looking monsters and you shoot at them with bows and arrows and they're trying to invade the castle.

01:48:51.000 But man, it's addictive because you really look down, you see them all around you.

01:48:56.000 You have like a real...

01:48:57.000 So how do you play though?

01:48:58.000 This has always been my question about it.

01:49:00.000 I sit on my chair and I play my video games.

01:49:03.000 Well, this is it.

01:49:04.000 See, this guy has a thing in his hands, and he's moving around.

01:49:07.000 This is like a Star Wars one, and there's a bunch of different ones that I've seen that are like this.

01:49:11.000 So you've always got to be standing, right, in some sense?

01:49:13.000 Yes.

01:49:14.000 Does that make it more exhausting?

01:49:15.000 Don't you want to just sit down with a beer?

01:49:16.000 Well, you can, but there's also a boxing one that you get a real workout in.

01:49:20.000 Wow.

01:49:20.000 So it's a game, and I played it over at Dunkin's house, so I think there's a video of it.

01:49:25.000 It's weird because you punch wrong.

01:49:28.000 If I'm holding my hands like this, which is I'm holding my hands vertically where my thumbs are up, the boxing gloves would be horizontal like they would be if you were punching someone.

01:49:41.000 So it doesn't do the turn.

01:49:43.000 No, it's weird.

01:49:44.000 So as you move your hands forward like this, which you really wouldn't punch like that, the punches come out.

01:49:50.000 So they've got to iron that out.

01:49:51.000 That's what I was going to say.

01:49:52.000 That'll be something that'll work out in time.

01:49:53.000 Yeah, and make the controller rotate the way a fist would.

01:49:57.000 But as you're doing it, you throw real punches, and someone's throwing punches at you.

01:50:01.000 And when they throw punches at you and they hit you, you see a white flash in front of you.

01:50:04.000 That's good.

01:50:05.000 Which makes you nervous just like real sparring does.

01:50:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:50:08.000 Yeah.

01:50:08.000 Well, you know, and so like this question of like, what are we going to do with virtual reality?

01:50:12.000 Because like I said, you know, I already, you know, I see huge potential for like education in gaming.

01:50:17.000 And that's why we built our game.

01:50:19.000 Yeah, here's, this is me over at Duncan's house.

01:50:22.000 Just don't want anybody to walk by, you know, I gotta go get a beer.

01:50:25.000 Bam! 0.98

01:50:25.000 I'm beating this guy up, moving around him. 0.98

01:50:29.000 See, that's the thing.

01:50:29.000 I always wonder.

01:50:31.000 Duncan got pissed because that guy was fucking dunking up every day. 0.99

01:50:35.000 He's like, dude, how did you beat it? 0.99

01:50:37.000 I was like, move around.

01:50:38.000 Don't stand right in front of that thing. 1.00

01:50:40.000 Just punch it in the face. 1.00

01:50:41.000 Gotta do the rope-a-dope. 0.99

01:50:42.000 Well, you gotta have footwork and movement.

01:50:44.000 But you can really get a workout with that.

01:50:47.000 I'm not joking.

01:50:48.000 You get exhausted.

01:50:49.000 And you keep going and fight tougher and tougher opponents.

01:50:54.000 Right.

01:50:55.000 So talk about haptic suits, where eventually you're going to wear things.

01:50:59.000 I read the book, but I didn't see the movie, Ready Player One.

01:51:04.000 I didn't see it either.

01:51:05.000 Have you read the book?

01:51:06.000 The book's really good.

01:51:07.000 Because the book is full immersion.

01:51:08.000 The whole book is about when virtual reality is it.

01:51:11.000 And so everybody has these suits, and you're kind of in this ball.

01:51:14.000 You play the game in a ball so you can run.

01:51:17.000 But in some sense, yes, we're just starting out along these lines.

01:51:20.000 Well, they have these places you can go, but they have a warehouse set up, and you go inside of it.

01:51:25.000 And I went through one with my kids, and it's a Star Wars one at Disneyland. 0.97

01:51:30.000 Dude, it's fucking wild. 0.83

01:51:32.000 You go across, you're walking across this platform, like they have all these different places where you actually walk through. 0.99

01:51:38.000 And as you're walking through, you look to the left and to the right, and there's fire, but you feel the heat from the fire. 0.99

01:51:43.000 It's fucking crazy. 0.77

01:51:44.000 Yeah, so they've got, like, heaters set up so that it blows. 0.99

01:51:47.000 Yep, and stormtroopers start shooting at you.

01:51:49.000 This is it right here.

01:51:50.000 What is it called?

01:51:50.000 The Void.

01:51:51.000 The Void, yeah.

01:51:53.000 And you do this...

01:51:54.000 I'm telling you, man, this is better than any of the rides at Disneyland, and it's just outside of Disneyland, in downtown Disney, so you don't have to pay to get into Disney to get it.

01:52:02.000 But it costs...

01:52:03.000 I think it's...

01:52:05.000 It's $35 for half an hour.

01:52:06.000 It's not cheap, but...

01:52:07.000 It's not too bad.

01:52:08.000 It's not too bad. 0.97

01:52:09.000 But it's fucking awesome. 0.96

01:52:11.000 I mean, it is awesome. 0.94

01:52:12.000 So the question is, what happens with all this, right?

01:52:15.000 The future, right?

01:52:16.000 Because, yeah, virtual reality, we're just on the cusp of it, right?

01:52:17.000 We're just beginning to start playing around with these technologies.

01:52:21.000 Because people have been saying it for years, and it kind of sucked.

01:52:22.000 It was sort of clunky.

01:52:23.000 Well, we used to play Pong, right?

01:52:26.000 Boop, boop, boop. 1.00

01:52:27.000 That's what I started with, right?

01:52:28.000 How old are you?

01:52:28.000 I'm 55. Yeah, I'm 50. So I remember Pong.

01:52:32.000 We were excited.

01:52:32.000 I can't believe I'm controlling the TV. I know.

01:52:35.000 I'm making the thing move on the TV. Or Asteroids.

01:52:38.000 Yes.

01:52:38.000 When we flew the...

01:52:39.000 Oh, yeah, man.

01:52:39.000 It was a Star Wars game.

01:52:40.000 I don't think it was called Asteroids, but you flew through the trench and everything. 0.99

01:52:43.000 It was just like fucking wireframe, man. 0.94

01:52:45.000 Yeah, but it was amazing to us at the time. 0.99

01:52:46.000 I loved that.

01:52:47.000 I dropped a lot of quarters on that.

01:52:48.000 Sure.

01:52:48.000 So go from that to what you were showing us here with these crazy new space games.

01:52:53.000 And then imagine what these...

01:52:56.000 I mean, the Star Wars thing today, the Void, is really cool.

01:52:59.000 But you know that it's not real.

01:53:01.000 Right.

01:53:01.000 But it's cool.

01:53:02.000 Right.

01:53:02.000 But you know it's not real.

01:53:04.000 Well, you're not going to be able to tell it's not real in 20 years.

01:53:06.000 Yeah, right.

01:53:07.000 And how much time are people going to spend there?

01:53:08.000 And you wear a haptic suit, by the way.

01:53:09.000 Right.

01:53:09.000 When you do this, you have a vest on you.

01:53:12.000 And you feel it when you're getting shot.

01:53:14.000 Wow.

01:53:14.000 You feel like...

01:53:15.000 Yeah.

01:53:16.000 And it's funny, even with the controller on my crappy PS4, when it vibrates, even that's enough to sort of give you, it's amazing how much the brain sort of picks up on these signals.

01:53:27.000 When you're using the HTC Vive and you draw an arrow back, when it gets to the knocking point, you feel it like, and then you release.

01:53:35.000 There's a feeling in your hand releasing the arrow.

01:53:37.000 It's really cool.

01:53:38.000 Yeah, so what happens when, and you know, right, I can be sort of like, you know, grandpa and be like, that's terrible!

01:53:43.000 People should be going out in nature!

01:53:45.000 Which I think they should be.

01:53:46.000 They should, for now. 0.99

01:53:47.000 But, you know, I'm always aware, whenever I'm sort of like, oh shit, this is going to be terrible, I always remember the whole, you can see in like, I think at some point, Socrates, you know, 2,500 years ago, is like, oh, kids today, they're all a bunch of, you know, assholes. 0.99

01:53:59.000 Right. 0.99

01:54:00.000 So, you know, who knows what we'll do with it?

01:54:02.000 And, you know, hopefully, maybe it'll help, you know, maybe, I don't know, you know, I mean, I think there's, I don't want to be like, oh, that's terrible, but they're clearly Is this a different game, Jamie?

01:54:11.000 This is a new one. 0.99

01:54:12.000 Oh boy, I'm fucked. 1.00

01:54:15.000 I am going to be fucked. 1.00

01:54:16.000 Oh, that's wild with the, yeah, just the hands. 1.00

01:54:19.000 Yeah, and so you have two little hand controllers, and one of them would be the arrow, and the other one would be the bow.

01:54:26.000 And you wear them, and that's the haptic part, and there's controllers on them.

01:54:29.000 Well, you feel the arrow vibrating against the riser of the bow as you draw it back, too.

01:54:35.000 It's really cool.

01:54:36.000 Well, it's funny, because we talked about, for the game that we built, which was awesome.

01:54:40.000 It was really a lot of fun to actually go through the process of, like, How do you script it?

01:54:46.000 How do you teach people?

01:54:48.000 Because that whole thing, when you're in a good game, the first couple hours of a game, and you're just learning the basic stuff, and you get excited, you're like, oh, this is a cool world to be in.

01:54:57.000 But I'd be interested to think, at some point, I'd try VR for the same thing.

01:55:01.000 Because once you can have people be tactile, and they're not just sort of in their head, what else can you do to teach them things?

01:55:08.000 Like glaciers.

01:55:09.000 Oh, for sure.

01:55:10.000 Well, that's another thing.

01:55:11.000 In Disneyland, they have a thing called Soaring Over the World.

01:55:16.000 Yeah.

01:55:32.000 And I think that it's just a matter of time.

01:55:35.000 Like, as we were talking about before, where biological entities might not be necessary for space travel.

01:55:41.000 You might be able to send a robot, put on a suit, and be able to experience these worlds, like, in real time.

01:55:46.000 Yeah.

01:55:47.000 Well, so, you know, you know the simulation argument?

01:55:50.000 Yes.

01:55:52.000 And so that's a really interesting idea.

01:55:54.000 Should we just run through it for people who don't know it?

01:55:56.000 Sure, please do.

01:55:57.000 So I forgot who it was.

01:55:58.000 Nick Bostrom?

01:55:59.000 No, maybe not.

01:56:00.000 Brandon Carter?

01:56:00.000 You know, there's this guy, philosopher, who came up with this brilliant argument for, like, why we're probably somebody else's simulation, self-aware simulation.

01:56:09.000 And the idea is like, look, if you get one, you know, we've been talking about like civilizations, when they get a million years ahead, what can they do?

01:56:15.000 That they're so powerful, they can build computers that can simulate reality, like fully simulate reality, where like, you know, just like in the Matrix, you have programs that are self-aware.

01:56:24.000 And so, you know, once they get to that, and they start running simulations of the world, right?

01:56:28.000 It's cheaper to run, it's cheap to run simulations, so they just run trillions of them, right?

01:56:32.000 So the idea is that...

01:56:34.000 From that argument, there's more simulated realities than there is the one real reality.

01:56:40.000 So odds are, right, you know, if there's a trillion simulated realities and one real reality, you're probably in a simulated reality.

01:56:46.000 So are we a, you know, everything, like right now, you and I think this is real, you know, but what we are is an incredibly detailed and we are self-aware programs in, you know, a silicon matrix of, you know...

01:56:59.000 So that argument is brilliant.

01:57:01.000 I mean, you know, just from the point of view of, like, numbers, you know, there's lots of reasons to say that's not possible.

01:57:08.000 But it's, you know, raises this issue of, like, yeah, what is simulation?

01:57:11.000 If you were in a simulation, the whole matrix thing, if you were in a simulation that was that real, how would you know?

01:57:16.000 How could you know?

01:57:18.000 One day we're going to be, if you allow technology to continue, if we keep moving forward at an exponential pace, there's going to come a point in time where we have something that's indistinguishable from reality.

01:57:29.000 So how do we know that we're not already in it?

01:57:31.000 And once we're in it, will we create another reality?

01:57:34.000 Will we continue to create simulations inside of simulations, like fractals?

01:57:39.000 I mean, fractals exist in nature.

01:57:41.000 They exist everywhere in the universe.

01:57:43.000 And there's also the argument that the atomic structure itself might really be a universe.

01:57:48.000 Right, right.

01:57:49.000 Dude.

01:57:51.000 That's super stoner talk.

01:57:53.000 But, you know, it's really...

01:57:54.000 I mean, that's why I love science fiction.

01:57:55.000 You know, the explorations of these ideas...

01:57:58.000 You know, I mean, they're way out there.

01:58:00.000 But they're fun exercises.

01:58:01.000 They're fun exercises. 0.96

01:58:02.000 And there's a way in which, again, when you think a million, two million years in the future, this is why my, you know, I hate to loop this back to climate change, but just like, God, if we could just make it through, who the fuck knows what we're going to be? 0.93

01:58:12.000 Right? 0.87

01:58:12.000 I mean, there's the... 0.87

01:58:13.000 There's the whole universe.

01:58:14.000 One thing I did like about Interstellar was the idea that, like, our future selves, which have now become integrated into the very fabric of reality, you know, that's how far you've evolved.

01:58:24.000 You become the laws of physics, that they're kind of opening up the wormhole for us.

01:58:28.000 And so, you know, a million years is so long, who knows what we can become?

01:58:34.000 And it's just like, you know, don't hold us back.

01:58:37.000 I'm not a fan of the people that deny science, but one thing I am a fan of is watching them do it. 0.99

01:58:46.000 Like watching monkeys throw shit at the zoo. 0.98

01:58:49.000 It's just something weird about watching people argue really obvious right-wing talking points. 0.99

01:58:55.000 And most of them, by the way, have no financial interest in climate change one way or the other.

01:59:02.000 They're not the wealthy elite.

01:59:04.000 They're these weirdos that are like vampire familiars.

01:59:07.000 They want to be recognized as an ally of the elite.

01:59:11.000 They think somehow that that's going to get them in.

01:59:13.000 Isn't that sad?

01:59:13.000 That's really what it is.

01:59:16.000 And it's like, you know, and again, it's the tribalism.

01:59:18.000 But as you said, it's like watching them do this.

01:59:20.000 And the part that's so frustrating is just that like, dude, you're using science.

01:59:25.000 It's not fair.

01:59:26.000 It's not fair that like, oh, you get like, you know, you get in an accident and you're like, oh, God, please give me the MRI. And then, you know, as soon as your arm heals, you're going to be tweeting about how like, you know, climate change is all bullshit. 0.99

01:59:36.000 The earth is flat. 0.98

01:59:37.000 Yeah.

01:59:38.000 I'm not sure what to do with that, right?

01:59:40.000 I mean, are those guys just like, I mean, is this something we should like pay attention to or should we just be like, okay, you know, fine, go ahead, do your thing.

01:59:48.000 Well, I had an interesting conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson about it.

01:59:51.000 And he said, one of the real problems with debating these people is you elevate their profile and they're never going to believe it in the first place.

01:59:56.000 And the reality is there's a mental illness involved in a lot of these people.

02:00:00.000 There's schizophrenics. 0.88

02:00:02.000 There's something wrong with them.

02:00:04.000 They believe this.

02:00:05.000 And then there's this massive lack of education and lack of reading.

02:00:10.000 They're not interested in understanding how they know that the Earth is round or how they know that every other planet in the solar system is round.

02:00:17.000 Or how they know that every other planet that we've observed, all the stars are round.

02:00:20.000 Why they're round.

02:00:21.000 Why it's a matter of mass and gravity and all these...

02:00:24.000 They don't care about all that.

02:00:26.000 But what they want to think is the government as if it's...

02:00:28.000 The government is like one cabal...

02:00:30.000 That's what it is. 0.99

02:00:31.000 ...of equally minded people that are all working together to fuck you over somehow by convincing you that the Earth is round. 0.98

02:00:36.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:00:36.000 It is one of the dumbest things. 1.00

02:00:39.000 But it's also a sign that... 0.99

02:00:41.000 We've created this world that's really easy to survive in. 0.86

02:00:44.000 We've nerfed all the hard edges, and we keep the wolves off the streets, and there's so these fucking dum-dums, and then they get online with computers, which is hilarious. 0.77

02:00:54.000 I did research. 0.55

02:00:56.000 You looked at a website?

02:00:58.000 That's not research, man.

02:00:59.000 I saw YouTube videos.

02:00:59.000 I mean, it's kind of stunning.

02:01:03.000 Well, I think your point about actually, we've made the world so safe.

02:01:06.000 Because, yeah, there's a certain way, like, you know, in hunter-gatherer, those people would be food.

02:01:12.000 Those are the people who are standing there looking at the tiger being like, that's not a tiger.

02:01:15.000 Yeah, that's not a tiger, man.

02:01:16.000 You know, and then orange.

02:01:18.000 You know, so, and it's, right.

02:01:20.000 But what's weird about that, so that is like the ur example. 1.00

02:01:23.000 Like, that is the dumbest shit you could possibly imagine. 1.00

02:01:26.000 Oh, there's dumber. 1.00

02:01:28.000 Oh God, please. 1.00

02:01:29.000 There's people who think there's aliens underneath the earth and there's tunnels and just reptilians and there's a secret cabal of kid fuckers that run the world. 0.98

02:01:39.000 You made a really excellent point just a minute ago, right? 0.93

02:01:42.000 Which is because the philosopher Karl Popper once said, if there was a conspiracy, it failed, right?

02:01:46.000 The whole conspiracy thing is that like, oh yeah, everybody's in on it.

02:01:50.000 As if...

02:01:50.000 Like, look, there are the powerful.

02:01:52.000 There are the, you know, there's elites who control, you know.

02:01:55.000 But they have their own agendas. 0.99

02:01:56.000 They're beating the crap. 0.99

02:01:57.000 It's the whole history of the world. 0.99

02:01:58.000 They're going after each other left and right.

02:02:00.000 It's about finances.

02:02:01.000 Right, right.

02:02:02.000 And the idea that, like, oh, somebody's going to be able to keep this amazing secret, right, you know, about the earth is flat.

02:02:08.000 And never, I mean...

02:02:08.000 It gives people way more credit than they deserve.

02:02:13.000 Well, you would have to have everybody on the same page.

02:02:16.000 All the different governments all over the world.

02:02:19.000 They're all like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:02:20.000 Lying about the...

02:02:21.000 Where's the benefit in lying about the shape of the planet?

02:02:23.000 Yeah, right, right.

02:02:24.000 To hold you down, man.

02:02:26.000 Who's making money?

02:02:27.000 But, you know, here's what's really messed up is that, like, you know, climate change denial is just like a slightly less wackadoodle version of that, right?

02:02:35.000 Because, you know, there's a guy, writer, philosopher, I forgot his name, Morton, I forgot his first name.

02:02:42.000 But he talks about climate change being a hyperobject.

02:02:45.000 Like, you know, that modern world, we have things that are hyperobjects, which means they're just so big that we have a hard time wrapping our minds around them.

02:02:53.000 And that hyperobjects, you know, if we're going to evolve, right, we're going to evolve new behaviors, one of them is the capacity to deal with hyperobjects.

02:03:01.000 But people want everything to be simple.

02:03:03.000 I mean, which cracks me up because they're fine with this being complex.

02:03:06.000 Their cell phone can be complex because they like to use it.

02:03:08.000 But the idea that the climate change, they need it.

02:03:14.000 It freaks them out because it's too complicated or something.

02:03:16.000 So they go for the simple answer, which is that it's a conspiracy.

02:03:20.000 It's a hoax.

02:03:21.000 I love this one.

02:03:22.000 The scientists are all doing it for the money.

02:03:24.000 As if my pay was that good.

02:03:26.000 Yeah.

02:03:27.000 I think a big issue happened with Al Gore.

02:03:29.000 When Al Gore came out with an inconvenient truth, everybody connected Al Gore with the left.

02:03:34.000 He's a Democrat. 1.00

02:03:35.000 And then they found out that he flies private jets, and they're like, this motherfucker. 1.00

02:03:39.000 And so they're like, this is all bullshit. 1.00

02:03:41.000 And so there was enough holes. 1.00

02:03:44.000 Well, they started poking through and then looking for conspiracies and then looking to deny the whole thing.

02:03:50.000 I totally agree.

02:03:50.000 I really wish...

02:03:51.000 You know, I got nothing against Al Gore, but I wish he didn't become the face of climate change.

02:03:56.000 Because it just pushed...

02:03:57.000 I mean, if only Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sagan was still alive or, you know, had done it, it would have been a totally different thing.

02:04:03.000 Well, he's profited off of it in an extreme way.

02:04:06.000 Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

02:04:07.000 I don't know, but, you know...

02:04:08.000 Did you pull up this article, Al Gore may be the first...

02:04:12.000 Climate change billionaire or green billionaire that he's made so much money doing these seminars and speeches and the film itself and they're doing a sequel to the film.

02:04:24.000 And then people become...

02:04:25.000 I think it actually came out.

02:04:26.000 It didn't do that well.

02:04:27.000 The sequel came out already?

02:04:29.000 I think so.

02:04:30.000 Al Gore could be the world's first carbon billionaire.

02:04:34.000 Former vice president become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies.

02:04:39.000 Well, no, that's okay.

02:04:40.000 That part's okay.

02:04:41.000 Because if he's investing in these companies and the companies start making money, which already solar employs more people now than coal does.

02:04:48.000 That's amazing.

02:04:50.000 Coal. 0.99

02:04:50.000 That was one of the dumbest things when Trump became president. 0.99

02:04:54.000 They're going to bring back coal. 0.99

02:04:55.000 How about bring back knocking rocks together to start fires?

02:04:59.000 No, it's like... 1.00

02:05:00.000 The fuck, man? 1.00

02:05:01.000 Coal? 1.00

02:05:01.000 It's as if the typewriter companies got together and made sure you never bought a computer. 1.00

02:05:05.000 Like, computers are legal because you've got to keep using typewriters. 0.99

02:05:08.000 Coal's fucking terrible. 0.99

02:05:10.000 It's terrible across the board. 1.00

02:05:11.000 Oh, man, and you don't need it anymore.

02:05:12.000 It's like, you know, it's just...

02:05:13.000 But listen, I've got to...

02:05:14.000 One thing that you've always got to acknowledge is that when you change infrastructures...

02:05:19.000 People are going to get hurt.

02:05:20.000 You know what I mean?

02:05:21.000 For those coal miners, man, that's what they've done their whole life. 0.99

02:05:23.000 It's been an honorable fucking thing. 0.95

02:05:25.000 So you can't just sort of be like, hey, we're switching infrastructure. 0.98

02:05:28.000 See ya.

02:05:29.000 There's got to be some deep understanding of consequences and helping people who are going to be Train them how to put up solar panels.

02:05:39.000 How do you feel about universal basic income?

02:05:41.000 Have you ever looked into that?

02:05:42.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

02:05:43.000 No, no, I've thought about that a lot.

02:05:44.000 It's a big thought and consideration when it comes to automation and technology and...

02:05:51.000 You know, with the automation thing, it's so true, right?

02:05:52.000 Because, you know, when you think about what's been going on with the last election, you know, and everybody was like, oh, you know, like, you know, what's happening with blue collar people, you know, workers, which is totally true. 0.98

02:06:01.000 But like, man, it's not China, it's automation, right?

02:06:05.000 And that's what really is going to screw up the whole nature of work.

02:06:16.000 Do you feel like being a university professor is one day going to be retro?

02:06:21.000 That kids are going to want to learn online?

02:06:23.000 They're going to want to learn through some sort of an interactive course so that you can get on your phone rather than go to an actual physical place?

02:06:30.000 It's possible.

02:06:31.000 You know, I mean, it's possible, but I think, and this is going to be the whole question with the new economy, or whatever, whatever happens, whatever we're moving into, is finding those places where, you know what, I don't want a machine.

02:06:40.000 You know what I mean?

02:06:40.000 So right now, like, so when the, what is it, the MOOCs came out, the massively online courses, you know, that was like five years ago.

02:06:46.000 Everyone's like, that's it, universities are done, everybody's going to take these online courses.

02:06:49.000 It never happened, you know, because people want to be together.

02:06:51.000 They want to learn, they want the experience of, you know, part of my students, it's not just lecturing.

02:06:56.000 No, I'm a great lecturer.

02:06:57.000 My students are probably like...

02:06:58.000 I bet you are, man.

02:06:59.000 You're a good talker.

02:07:00.000 I had one student say, you know, the reviews you get at the end, the guy said, hey, I hate to say this, but, you know, you should make those tapes for people to go to sleep because every class, your voice put me to sleep.

02:07:12.000 And he meant it in a nice way.

02:07:13.000 He's like, you have a nice voice, you know?

02:07:16.000 That's passive-aggressive, for sure. 1.00

02:07:18.000 Little fuck, whoever he is. 0.99

02:07:21.000 I think that people will always, with education, there'll be some component of it that, yeah, sure, you can learn it online. 0.99

02:07:27.000 But I think, like, You know, we're going to have to, there'll be a place for, like, people coming in and, like, learning in groups and having somebody who, like, has, you know, spent their whole life studying the thing, telling you, you know, what's going on.

02:07:40.000 Right, like, there's a lot of things where, like, and we've lost a lot of this, mentorship, right?

02:07:44.000 Or apprenticeship.

02:07:45.000 Mm-hmm.

02:07:46.000 There's a lot of things you need somebody who spent their whole life going, oh, you crank it this way, not that way, because if you crank it that way, it'll never work.

02:07:53.000 You can't learn that from watching a video or something.

02:07:55.000 Well, there's certain things.

02:07:57.000 Martial arts, which is a big part of my life, you have to learn from a person.

02:08:01.000 You've got to have.

02:08:02.000 Tiny things that they must show you while you're doing it.

02:08:04.000 But you can learn a lot of things from videos.

02:08:07.000 No, no, no doubt.

02:08:08.000 Yeah, there's a lot of things that people are putting up online, instructional courses and stuff.

02:08:13.000 I use some of them.

02:08:14.000 If I have to fix my sink, I'm like, okay, how Oh, for sure, man.

02:08:17.000 Yeah, it's kind of amazing, you know?

02:08:38.000 I think it may really be necessary, because if there's no work, you know, I mean, that's a recipe for disaster, you know, for your democratic society.

02:08:48.000 Yeah, I just hope we can move past this idea that everybody who needs that is some sort of a welfare brat.

02:08:54.000 Yeah, right, right.

02:08:55.000 Well, you know, once there's no work at all, you know, I mean, they're good.

02:08:59.000 Because, like, you know, this is the thing, like with self-driving cars, right?

02:09:04.000 So I ask this question a lot, and I've written about this.

02:09:06.000 Sort of like, okay, everyone's like, we've got to have self-driving cars.

02:09:09.000 We're heading towards self-driving cars.

02:09:10.000 Like, self-driving cars will destroy the last good blue-collar job in America, you know, truck driving, right?

02:09:15.000 And that's, you know, a really good livelihood for a lot of people.

02:09:17.000 And it's like, oh, we're just going to eliminate it.

02:09:19.000 It's like...

02:09:20.000 Why?

02:09:21.000 Like, do we have to?

02:09:22.000 Like, okay, yeah, you're telling me there's going to be...

02:09:24.000 Well, for safety's sake.

02:09:25.000 That's what they say, right?

02:09:26.000 But until...

02:09:27.000 It's not entirely clear, right?

02:09:28.000 You know, that will work.

02:09:30.000 And, you know, for the lives that are lost in the driving, I mean, you know, the car crashes, is that going to be worth the social upheaval that comes from not having any work anymore?

02:09:42.000 So, I mean, just like, there are these huge issues bearing down on us.

02:09:45.000 Yes.

02:09:45.000 If it's your friend or your mom or your loved ones.

02:09:49.000 Yeah, but these are the kind of calculus.

02:09:50.000 I mean, you know, if it tears down, if wiping out these jobs destroys democracy, right?

02:09:57.000 And you end up with fascism.

02:09:59.000 That seems silly, though.

02:10:00.000 That doesn't seem possible.

02:10:00.000 I just think that what it's going to do is it's going to make travel safer.

02:10:05.000 And then we have to figure out, well, these jobs that people got from traveling, how do we replace that income?

02:10:12.000 Yeah.

02:10:13.000 Well, one of the things is we're going to have to start teaching kids to be creative.

02:10:17.000 Yeah.

02:10:18.000 That's the niche stuff.

02:10:18.000 I think there's going to be places where now you'll have...

02:10:21.000 So listen, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have...

02:10:23.000 No, I know you're not.

02:10:24.000 You're just looking at all the variables.

02:10:26.000 Yeah, and I'm asking, we're moving so rapidly into this new world, right?

02:10:30.000 That who's deciding for us?

02:10:33.000 Who's deciding that we want cars?

02:10:35.000 We're told that we're going to get it, but a lot of these things, I think there needs to be a little bit more...

02:10:43.000 Dialogue.

02:10:43.000 It's democracy, right?

02:10:44.000 And having this stuff shoved down our throats and told, like, it's the best thing ever, you know?

02:10:48.000 Well, you know, how about cell towers? 0.99

02:10:50.000 They're fucking everywhere. 0.99

02:10:51.000 I mean, there's no getting away from it. 1.00

02:10:52.000 Right.

02:10:53.000 If you could...

02:10:53.000 I mean, is there a community anywhere that's made some sort of an agreement?

02:10:57.000 Will there be no cell towers in our community?

02:10:59.000 Yeah.

02:10:59.000 No, but there are communities that have decided, like in the Southwest, that no lights, no lights at night.

02:11:04.000 That's amazing.

02:11:05.000 Yeah, because they wanted to preserve their night sky.

02:11:07.000 We should really have some sort of a day where everybody shuts everything off.

02:11:12.000 And see how crazy it is that we live in this weird state where we're on an organic spaceship flying through infinity.

02:11:20.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:11:21.000 And we don't see that, right?

02:11:22.000 Because, you know, when you do backpacking or something, you're in the backcountry, you know, a couple days, you notice things changing, like, oh, the moon's not as quiet as you know.

02:11:29.000 And so nobody looks up now anymore, right?

02:11:31.000 Because there's nothing to see.

02:11:32.000 You don't see anything because of light pollution.

02:11:34.000 I went to the Keck Observatory on the Big Island.

02:11:36.000 Oh, man.

02:11:36.000 Have you been?

02:11:37.000 I've never been.

02:11:38.000 I'm a theorist.

02:11:39.000 Nobody's going to get me close to a telescope.

02:11:40.000 I'll break it.

02:11:41.000 You don't even have to go all the way to the observatory, the visitor station, which I forget where it's at.

02:11:46.000 I think it's...

02:11:47.000 14 or 12 or something.

02:11:49.000 Something like that.

02:11:49.000 It's really high.

02:11:51.000 Right.

02:11:51.000 But...

02:11:52.000 They have diffused lighting all over the Big Island, so there's no light pollution.

02:11:55.000 And when you look up, it is just stunning.

02:11:58.000 You look up, you're like, wow.

02:12:00.000 The Milky Way, right?

02:12:01.000 Most people have never seen the Milky Way.

02:12:03.000 It's right there.

02:12:05.000 I thought you have to have a telescope.

02:12:07.000 No, it's right there.

02:12:08.000 And you feel like you're flying through space.

02:12:10.000 And you have this really humble feeling that I think people get in a couple of different places.

02:12:16.000 People get when they live Next to mountains, they get it when they live next to the ocean, but you really get it if you could see space.

02:12:23.000 And I think one of the things that is haunting the human race is the arrogance of humans, which is compounded by the fact that we can't see the cosmos, that we only see what's in front of us, so this is the world that we live in, we put a roof over our head, this is the box, I got my blinders on, I'm moving ahead because I want a new Lexus,

02:12:40.000 or whatever it is, whatever material thing you're trying to possess.

02:12:45.000 This unstoppable force in front of, when you look up and you see the cosmos, it's like it's an undeniable reality.

02:12:51.000 And you go, oh, okay, okay, this is just a small thing.

02:12:56.000 My existence is just a small thing in this This mystery, this giant mystery of, you know, we just found out 20 years ago, there's planets out there.

02:13:05.000 I mean, this is a giant mystery.

02:13:07.000 You're looking up at 100 billion stars in this galaxy alone.

02:13:11.000 Man, I couldn't, you're speaking my language.

02:13:13.000 I mean, you know, the loss, and the capital M word, right?

02:13:17.000 So I'm a scientist, I'm an atheist, but I believe in mystery.

02:13:19.000 I believe that kind of at the core of our lives is just this I wake up every day and I'm freaking here.

02:13:24.000 And I'm going to be here until I die and then I have no idea what the hell happens.

02:13:27.000 So, you know, and as you said, like mountains in particular, you know, I have a thing for mountains.

02:13:32.000 Me too.

02:13:33.000 But the night sky, it reminds you, it opens that space up, right?

02:13:37.000 You know, where you're sort of like...

02:13:39.000 You know, we can talk about it, but it's really an experience.

02:13:44.000 It's an experience that just shows you you're part of this.

02:13:48.000 It's more than you, but you're here. 1.00

02:13:50.000 And I think, right, a lot of the stupidity of the modern age, as you said, the consumerism, particularly, all that matters to me is getting my next pile of shit. 0.99

02:13:59.000 When you're out there, you realize, who cares? 1.00

02:14:01.000 Who freaking cares?

02:14:03.000 For a moment, even, you just get the sense of that mystery.

02:14:06.000 And it can be transformative.

02:14:08.000 I think what's happening is we've created these civilizations.

02:14:12.000 The civilizations need to be lit up.

02:14:13.000 The lights keep us from seeing the universe.

02:14:15.000 The universe humbles us, so we're not humbled.

02:14:18.000 Then we move towards acquiring physical possessions, material objects, because we think that that's going to make us happy. 0.99

02:14:25.000 And our entire society is geared towards innovation because everybody wants the newest, shiniest shit. 0.99

02:14:32.000 To sell us. 0.99

02:14:33.000 That is what's leading us to artificial life.

02:14:35.000 Yeah. 0.93

02:14:36.000 And that all this shiny shit is all innovation and it's eventually going to move to this one singularity and that singularity is some new being. 0.96

02:14:44.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:14:45.000 Being born out of it.

02:14:53.000 Maybe the evolutionary heritage you get, right?

02:14:56.000 So we, you know, evolved from, you know, both chimpanzees or, you know, the chimpanzee ancestor and the bonobo ancestor.

02:15:01.000 So we've got, like, we fight.

02:15:03.000 We're very hierarchical, right? 0.96

02:15:06.000 So, you know, we've got a lot of aggression in this, but we also got the bonobo, kind of like, let's just have sex, everything's cool. 0.94

02:15:10.000 So we're like, we're sort of...

02:15:11.000 We've got this really weird mixed evolutionary baggage.

02:15:14.000 And whether or not you can make it to the next side with the existential challenge of triggering climate change is kind of like...

02:15:20.000 A, what your evolution, what evolution gave you, you know, because you can imagine species like hive minds, you know, if you came from termite, an intelligent termite species, it might be a lot easier to deal with climate change.

02:15:29.000 You're like, everybody, you know, get on the, you know, get on the, get on the course.

02:15:34.000 Um, but, uh, uh, The most essentially is can you evolve new behaviors, right?

02:15:40.000 So we've been on this track and it's leading us in a way that, as you said, it's like the shiny thing dangling in front of us is leading us off on this one track.

02:15:48.000 And the question is, can we evolve new behaviors, which I actually am going to say this.

02:15:51.000 I think part of it is spiritual, you know, or at least in my atheist way of like reconnecting with mystery to see like, you know, we're part of this and we need to respect it.

02:16:01.000 And, you know, when you say spiritual, what do you mean?

02:16:04.000 So my first book was about science and religion.

02:16:06.000 You know, I'm an atheist, but I'm not a Richard Dawkins atheist.

02:16:09.000 I think that whole idea...

02:16:10.000 What is the difference?

02:16:10.000 Well, you know, Richard Dawkins is what I would call a strident atheist.

02:16:13.000 And he's like, you know, anybody who has any spiritual or any, you know, any inclination towards mystery is an idiot, you know? 0.99

02:16:19.000 Richard Dawkins needs to do LSD. Right, in a certain way, right? 0.99

02:16:23.000 Or DMT or psilocybin or something that just gives you an undeniable experience of mystery.

02:16:30.000 Right, exactly.

02:16:32.000 So I've been doing Zen meditation for the last 30 years.

02:16:36.000 So I've been staring at a wall for 30 years, and the first thing you learn is it's really boring.

02:16:39.000 And then the second thing you learn is that there's stuff under your thoughts. 1.00

02:16:42.000 You are not just the shit you're thinking. 0.99

02:16:44.000 You settle down, and there's just like... 1.00

02:16:47.000 This openness, you know?

02:16:49.000 And so the spiritual part, like you said, you know, when you're in the mountains, right?

02:16:52.000 So I love doing backcountry hiking and, you know, when you get above treeline, there's that weird thing that happens when you're above treeline and you're just like, you know, you got this panorama around you and that thing is, you know, the earth, right?

02:17:05.000 Of which we are part.

02:17:06.000 And, you know, so this is an interesting question about, like, can virtual reality do this or do you actually need to get out there?

02:17:11.000 I kind of think you need to get out there, but maybe virtual reality can give people the impetus to get out there, you know?

02:17:16.000 Well, it'll be a different experience.

02:17:18.000 I don't think there's anything wrong with the virtual reality experience of being in the mountains.

02:17:21.000 I think it'd probably be pretty fucking cool, but it's not going to be being in the mountains.

02:17:25.000 Right.

02:17:25.000 Something about being in the mountains is also there's a weird feeling, and I don't know if it's real, but there's a weird feeling that there's no signal out there.

02:17:33.000 Because in the places where there's no cell signal, there's a feeling you get when you're absolutely not connected.

02:17:39.000 And then you see wildlife.

02:17:41.000 And the wildlife out there, they're almost like these mystical beings.

02:17:45.000 Like when you see a deer step out of the tree line and it's...

02:17:49.000 Catch its eye.

02:17:50.000 Yeah, that thing has been that way for a million years.

02:17:53.000 That species has not changed at all in a million years.

02:17:57.000 Yeah.

02:17:57.000 Yeah, and the signal, what you're talking about, the signal, it's really the thing is, for me, it's like when I get far enough back that I know there's just not another human being here, you know?

02:18:06.000 And this is like, when I leave, this is going to still be happening. 0.93

02:18:09.000 It just doesn't give a shit about you, right? 0.92

02:18:11.000 And it's just moving along, and as you said, it's been moving this way for millions of years, and you just realize, like, and that's why, you know, part of the thing I'm saying with the book is that, like, look, if we trigger climate change, that's just the Earth's way of, like, It used us to create climate change to now move on to something else. 0.97

02:18:29.000 Because that's what the Earth does.

02:18:30.000 It's just this animate power.

02:18:32.000 And when you're out there, you feel that.

02:18:35.000 And the thing that I think we need to do is sort of re-establish our connection to that.

02:18:40.000 We're part of that.

02:18:41.000 We're from that.

02:18:41.000 We're not evil.

02:18:42.000 We're not bad.

02:18:43.000 We need to reintegrate ourselves in a way that we still get our civilization.

02:18:48.000 So yes, why spiritual?

02:18:49.000 Because When we connect to that mystery, then we're in a better place to make the right decisions, to understand what the decisions are.

02:18:57.000 If not, we're like, oh, we got to save the polar bears.

02:18:59.000 And we're not looking at, no, no, it's the biosphere as a whole that we have to understand.

02:19:03.000 Well, operating out of ego and ideology and not out of rational thought with all the information at our disposal and really verifying that information.

02:19:11.000 Right.

02:19:12.000 Right.

02:19:13.000 Right.

02:19:18.000 Right.

02:19:42.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:19:42.000 And they don't have to publish the fact that they ran a hundred fucking studies. 0.99

02:19:45.000 Right, right, right. 0.99

02:19:46.000 Well, no, I try and teach people...

02:19:47.000 I'm sorry, go ahead.

02:19:47.000 No, go ahead.

02:19:48.000 I think the most important thing that people need to understand about science is not so much science's results, but how science works.

02:19:55.000 Because it does work, right?

02:19:57.000 That's why we have all this stuff.

02:19:58.000 And so they can distinguish...

02:20:00.000 So I say that science is three things.

02:20:02.000 It's spitballs, supertankers, and stadiums, right?

02:20:06.000 The problem with the news, it'll be like, the latest study shows the color red will make you have better sex.

02:20:11.000 It's like...

02:20:13.000 That's just the latest study that can get you to click on that USA Today article.

02:20:17.000 Yeah, right.

02:20:17.000 Exactly.

02:20:18.000 The media reports this as if this was science.

02:20:20.000 Every day, a whole bunch of new articles come out.

02:20:22.000 I write scientific articles.

02:20:23.000 That's the currency of my profession.

02:20:25.000 But one study is just like it's a spitball, right?

02:20:29.000 It's like basically we're shooting spitballs at each other.

02:20:31.000 But science is like a supertanker, right?

02:20:34.000 It takes seven miles to turn a supertanker around.

02:20:37.000 That's what really science is.

02:20:38.000 The things that we think we deeply understand in science is like this supertanker.

02:20:42.000 And people are shooting spitballs at the papers every day.

02:20:44.000 And if you get enough spitballs on one side of the prow or whatever, it starts to turn it, right?

02:20:50.000 So science will turn.

02:20:52.000 We're good to go.

02:21:16.000 Well, there's always a problem with diet in that you're not taking into account how nutrients interact with other foods or different foods interact with foods.

02:21:24.000 When you say coffee's bad, okay, was it bad when you're smoking cigarettes or bad when you're eating grass-fed meat or bad when you're on a vegan diet?

02:21:33.000 When is it bad?

02:21:34.000 And who are these people, and what are they putting in their system, and how much sugar are they taking in, and how much sodium, and what's the nutrient levels of their blood?

02:21:41.000 Did you test them for B12 deficiencies, and all these different things?

02:21:45.000 That's the real problem with any dietary studies.

02:21:47.000 They don't take into account the extremely varied diet of human beings.

02:21:52.000 And the complexity of the system, right?

02:21:53.000 So I would tell people that when it comes to health sciences, anything in general about human beings, look, this stuff is really complex.

02:22:00.000 And as you said, there's a A thousand different things that can interact.

02:22:03.000 So you got to really take that stuff with a grain of salt.

02:22:05.000 Like, okay, does smoking cause cancer?

02:22:07.000 Yeah, got that, you know?

02:22:08.000 But like, yeah, is coffee good or bad?

02:22:10.000 We just, the studies aren't there yet, you know?

02:22:12.000 But that's different from climate change or, you know, gravity, you know, or is the earth round, you know? 1.00

02:22:18.000 Yeah, yeah, those are stupid. 0.99

02:22:21.000 So, listen man, thank you very much for being here. 0.99

02:22:24.000 It was a pleasure.

02:22:24.000 I really appreciate it.

02:22:25.000 It was really good to talk to you.

02:22:26.000 It was fun.

02:22:26.000 Do you have an audiobook out?

02:22:28.000 Yeah, there is an audiobook version.

02:22:29.000 Did you read it?

02:22:30.000 I have not.

02:22:31.000 Did I read the...

02:22:32.000 Did you read the words that are in the audiobook version?

02:22:35.000 Were you narrating it?

02:22:36.000 No.

02:22:36.000 You weren't?

02:22:37.000 No, I didn't. 1.00

02:22:38.000 God damn it. 0.99

02:22:38.000 I'm sorry, they didn't ask. 0.99

02:22:39.000 Why did they do that?

02:22:40.000 I don't know, they never asked me.

02:22:41.000 But you're really good at talking. 1.00

02:22:42.000 What the fuck, man? 1.00

02:22:43.000 I could have been really animated. 1.00

02:22:45.000 I hate that.

02:22:46.000 When I buy audiobooks and I know that the guy who's reading it doesn't have a fucking single bone invested in this idea that he's saying. 0.95

02:22:57.000 He's just repeating the words.

02:22:58.000 Well, the guy, I'm sure whoever did it was like, you know, totally channeling.

02:23:02.000 I must have felt it in the astral plane.

02:23:03.000 It would be better if you read it, man.

02:23:04.000 They should have let you do it.

02:23:05.000 Yeah, I don't know. 0.97

02:23:06.000 Why the fuck didn't they let you do it? 0.98

02:23:07.000 I don't know. 0.99

02:23:07.000 Did you push for it? 0.99

02:23:08.000 No, I didn't even know, you know, that part of the, you know, I didn't understand part of publishing.

02:23:13.000 Tell people the title again.

02:23:14.000 Light of the Stars, Alien Worlds, and the Fate of the Earth.

02:23:19.000 And your Twitter is?

02:23:23.000 AdamFrank4.

02:23:23.000 Why 4?

02:23:24.000 Because that's the only one that everything else was taken.

02:23:26.000 So I was just like, oh, I've got to come up with it.

02:23:28.000 Six years ago when I got on.

02:23:30.000 AdamFrank4.

02:23:30.000 And do you have an Instagram as well?

02:23:32.000 No.

02:23:32.000 I have a Facebook author page.

02:23:34.000 And website?

02:23:36.000 Website is AdamFrankScience, I think.

02:23:38.000 If you just Google Adam Frank, it'll pop up.

02:23:39.000 Thank you, Adam.

02:23:40.000 I really appreciate it.

02:23:41.000 It was so much fun, man.

02:23:42.000 It was really a lot of fun.

02:23:43.000 Bye!

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 12, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1130 - Adam Frank

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