The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1159 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

00:00:06.000 So, why aren't there flying cars?

00:00:10.000 You're just jumping right in.

00:00:11.000 You don't say hi.

00:00:13.000 You don't say how's the wife and kids.

00:00:16.000 How's everybody, man?

00:00:17.000 How's life?

00:00:18.000 How's your book that's been on the Times bestseller list for how many weeks?

00:00:22.000 Oh, the Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

00:00:24.000 That's been on the New York Times bestseller list for 67 weeks.

00:00:29.000 That's pretty intense.

00:00:30.000 That's a lot for any book, much less for a science book.

00:00:33.000 And so that tells me, while all these Trump books are wafting in and out, this is bobbing like a cork.

00:00:40.000 On the ocean waves as the book of the moment that either praises Trump or criticizes him come in and off of that list.

00:00:49.000 So this tells me that there is this unserved hunger that people have.

00:00:55.000 There's a curiosity that this is serving.

00:00:57.000 And astrophysics for people in a hurry, that's kind of...

00:01:03.000 That's very purposefully juxtaposed.

00:01:05.000 It's like neurosurgery in four easy steps.

00:01:08.000 You know, if you saw a book with that title, you'd have to pick it up because you'd wonder what's going on. 0.99

00:01:13.000 Well, not to kiss your ass again, but I always say this about you and I think it's important. 0.99

00:01:17.000 You make... 0.99

00:01:18.000 Learning stuff about astrophysics fun and that's what's missing.

00:01:24.000 You know, it's not that people don't like to be educated, that they don't like to learn.

00:01:28.000 They just don't want to be bored.

00:01:30.000 That's a perceptive point because Think of the image we have of – let's say you're in a school where most people don't go to college.

00:01:40.000 You're in high school.

00:01:40.000 And then last day of school comes.

00:01:42.000 What do people do?

00:01:43.000 They toss their papers in the air as they run down the steps.

00:01:46.000 School's out.

00:01:47.000 No.

00:01:47.000 What's the rock song?

00:01:49.000 School's out.

00:01:49.000 School's out for summer.

00:01:52.000 Was it forever?

00:01:53.000 And then ever.

00:01:53.000 Ever.

00:01:54.000 Then forever.

00:01:54.000 Ever.

00:01:54.000 Right?

00:01:55.000 So that attitude must mean the school didn't train you to embrace curiosity.

00:02:02.000 Right.

00:02:03.000 That learning was a chore, and now the chores are over.

00:02:07.000 Yeah.

00:02:07.000 So I think the educational system needs an adjustment.

00:02:10.000 Forget whether or not you go to college, because you're going to spend more years not in school than in school, even if you do go to college.

00:02:17.000 What you want, I think, are lifelong learners, lifelong curiosity.

00:02:20.000 Yes.

00:02:21.000 Where once you are trained and your curiosity is stimulated, the curiosity we all had as children.

00:02:29.000 Children don't need to be taught to be curious.

00:02:31.000 They are curious to the point of destruction of whatever it is they touch.

00:02:35.000 Oh, what is this egg on the counter?

00:02:37.000 What is this glass?

00:02:38.000 What is this plate?

00:02:40.000 What's under a rock?

00:02:41.000 What happens when I pull a leg off a daddy long one? 0.97

00:02:43.000 You know, they are experimenting with the world.

00:02:46.000 We don't I don't think of it that way, but that's what it is.

00:02:48.000 They're all born scientists.

00:02:50.000 And I say this often.

00:02:52.000 You spend the first years of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk, then you spend the rest of his life telling it to shut up and sit down.

00:02:59.000 This is the wrong combination.

00:03:02.000 So speaking as an educator, I think a missing component of school Is it the teachers?

00:03:09.000 Is it the curriculum?

00:03:10.000 I don't know. 0.98

00:03:10.000 But when you get out of school, you should say to yourself, damn, I want to learn more. 0.98

00:03:14.000 It's almost universally accepted, too, that that's when your learning ends. 0.98

00:03:17.000 When you get out of college, it's over.

00:03:19.000 Then you say you're done.

00:03:20.000 And if it does, then you're ossified in life.

00:03:22.000 And that's how when the job market shifts, you're not ready for it because you don't know how to think.

00:03:26.000 You don't know how to learn.

00:03:28.000 And it's the difference in the workplace between the person who gets an assignment and say, Joey, Janet, I need you to do this.

00:03:37.000 That's not in my job description.

00:03:39.000 I'm not trained for this.

00:03:40.000 That's one kind of person in a workplace.

00:03:43.000 Another kind of person is, here's a new task I need you to do.

00:03:46.000 Wow, I've never seen that before.

00:03:48.000 Great!

00:03:48.000 Let me figure it out.

00:03:50.000 These are two completely different species of human being.

00:03:53.000 And what the world needs more of is like the second case, where you take a new task and you say, wow.

00:04:01.000 I get to learn.

00:04:02.000 I'm going to learn on my own.

00:04:02.000 I'll ask people who know more.

00:04:04.000 You just embrace the act of learning to satisfy your curiosity.

00:04:09.000 And I think this book is capturing that in the public.

00:04:12.000 Well, it must be doing something.

00:04:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:04:14.000 60 how many weeks?

00:04:15.000 67 weeks.

00:04:17.000 God dang.

00:04:17.000 Yeah.

00:04:18.000 That's a lot of weeks.

00:04:19.000 Yeah, every morning I wake up, I'm calm, but I'm really not calm. 0.99

00:04:21.000 I'm saying, holy shit! 0.99

00:04:25.000 Sorry, you're alive. 0.99

00:04:26.000 Can I say it? 1.00

00:04:27.000 Yeah, you can say holy shit. 1.00

00:04:28.000 I can say it, okay. 0.99

00:04:28.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson swears, ladies and gentlemen. 0.99

00:04:30.000 He's human.

00:04:31.000 People think you're a robot.

00:04:32.000 Now they know.

00:04:34.000 It's a great sign, I think.

00:04:36.000 And I think your podcast is a great sign as well.

00:04:38.000 The success of your podcast and the success of a lot of science podcasts, I love.

00:04:43.000 That's excellent that you notice that.

00:04:45.000 There's a rise of science-curious podcasts out there.

00:04:49.000 Stuff to Blow Your Mind is one that I really enjoy.

00:04:51.000 I really love Radiolab.

00:04:54.000 Radiolab is the perennial favorite.

00:04:56.000 Fantastic.

00:04:57.000 So many people.

00:04:57.000 Probably the best.

00:04:58.000 And yours as well.

00:05:00.000 And I love Chuck Nice.

00:05:01.000 Shout out to Chuck Nice.

00:05:02.000 We all love Chuck.

00:05:03.000 He's great.

00:05:04.000 But what you're doing is you're making learning interesting and that's why it's so fun.

00:05:11.000 There's excitement to it.

00:05:12.000 You bring a comedian like Chuck on with you, things get silly but they're also curious and you're getting these experts and everyone's talking about these various subjects.

00:05:22.000 And as you know, not only yourself as an exemplar of this, stand-up comedians are some of the smartest people in the world.

00:05:30.000 They have an awareness.

00:05:31.000 I won't go that far.

00:05:32.000 Okay.

00:05:33.000 Listen, come to the comedy store with me today.

00:05:35.000 I'll change your mind.

00:05:37.000 All right, let me buffer that a little.

00:05:40.000 They're curious.

00:05:41.000 Okay, no, so stand-up comedians are perceptive people.

00:05:44.000 Yes, for sure.

00:05:45.000 And they're aware, and they notice things that you don't notice.

00:05:48.000 They see the same things you do and get to shape it in a way you never thought possible, and then you end up laughing.

00:05:56.000 Was it your idea to do your show with stand-ups?

00:05:59.000 There were several of us who created this concept.

00:06:05.000 Helen Matsos is one of the partners.

00:06:08.000 There's another one who's now left.

00:06:13.000 I'll get his name in a minute.

00:06:15.000 But there were three of us who...

00:06:17.000 David Gamble is his name.

00:06:18.000 The three of us got together and applied for a National Science Foundation grant.

00:06:23.000 What we said was, there are programs out there that serve people who already know they like science.

00:06:29.000 But who serves the people who don't know they like science?

00:06:31.000 Or better yet, the people who know they don't like science?

00:06:34.000 There's nothing for them because they've already rejected it.

00:06:38.000 They're not going to tune in to Science Friday because they don't like science on NPR, right?

00:06:43.000 So what we thought was suppose we bring in a celebrity.

00:06:48.000 That's the pop culture draw.

00:06:50.000 This is the pop culture scaffold.

00:06:52.000 We bring in the scaffold and clad the scaffold with science.

00:06:56.000 Because whatever the celebrity does, it doesn't matter.

00:06:59.000 There's going to be science in that person's life.

00:07:02.000 We had the guy who portrayed Gollum in Lord of the Rings.

00:07:06.000 A lot of science in that.

00:07:09.000 But there is.

00:07:10.000 Like that suit that he had to wear?

00:07:11.000 Exactly.

00:07:12.000 So what we did was we interviewed him and we talked about the technology necessary to portray Gollum.

00:07:21.000 He portrayed that live.

00:07:23.000 That was not some later animation.

00:07:26.000 He is live.

00:07:30.000 We're good to go.

00:07:40.000 You can't say, I'm done with science, let me sell my textbook and move on to other things.

00:07:45.000 Because practically anything else you do has been touched by science.

00:07:48.000 And so StarTalk is a celebration of that.

00:07:51.000 And then it jumps species.

00:07:52.000 And so now we're on TV now, all right?

00:07:55.000 It's a TV show on National Geographic Channel, StarTalk.

00:07:58.000 And since you started this, by the way, I didn't come here to talk about it.

00:08:02.000 You started this.

00:08:04.000 It's our fourth year in a row where we're nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Informational Programming.

00:08:09.000 Are you gonna keep doing Cosmos too though?

00:08:11.000 Cosmos!

00:08:12.000 So I have one week remaining out of like 70 shoot days to finish shooting Cosmos.

00:08:21.000 Possible Worlds, premiering spring 2019. That's the third installment of Cosmos, if you trace the first one to Carl Sagan back in 1980. I used your segment on wolves, on how wolves became dogs.

00:08:36.000 I showed it to my kids.

00:08:38.000 And you can see the little wheels spinning like, whoa!

00:08:41.000 Yeah.

00:08:42.000 That's how a dog became a dog?

00:08:44.000 What you didn't see is I'm sitting at the campfire in this snowy environment and they got wolves walking around me.

00:08:51.000 They're on these fishing wires.

00:08:54.000 Because they are not dogs. 1.00

00:08:57.000 Do whatever the fuck they want. 1.00

00:08:59.000 Correct. 1.00

00:09:00.000 And when they're looking at you, it's like, should I rip his neck out now or later when I'm more hungry?

00:09:06.000 There's no eye contact with them because they don't see you as anything other than something they could possibly eat.

00:09:14.000 And so you can't interact with them the way you would with ordinary dogs.

00:09:18.000 So they're on these fishing, you know, high tension fishing wire that you can't see against the snow.

00:09:23.000 And they're like hooting and hollering around me as I describe.

00:09:27.000 And the name of that show is And the Wolf Shall Become the Shepherd.

00:09:29.000 Yeah.

00:09:30.000 My friend did a commercial with a wolf.

00:09:33.000 And there's this commercial where he's running up this mountain and the wolf is there and at the end of the commercial they had to get the wolf to snarl.

00:09:40.000 So what the trainer does is he shows the wolf some meat and then he pulls the meat away from the wolf.

00:09:47.000 The wolf snarls and they're like and then the commercials over he's like no no there's no working after that like There's no you're not gonna be near the wolf right like that switch is turned on done Yeah, and it's it's crazy like once that thing snarled everybody just backed off and the trainer let everybody know like once I get to this point We're done like there's just no more and that thing Okay Everybody,

00:10:14.000 we're done. 0.98

00:10:14.000 Let's get the fuck out of here. 0.98

00:10:16.000 All three of these Cosmoses, the original one with Carl Sagan, the one that the privilege of hosting in 2014 and 2019, are co-written by Ann Druyan. 0.92

00:10:26.000 And she's the widow of Carl Sagan.

00:10:29.000 Oh, wow.

00:10:30.000 But kind of in his shadow back then, but she's hugely creative.

00:10:35.000 We're good to go.

00:11:02.000 Thank you.

00:11:05.000 Thank you.

00:11:14.000 Is Cosmos on Apple TV or Amazon or anything?

00:11:18.000 So Cosmos was, after it premiered on Fox and then went internationally on Nat Geo, it then went to Netflix.

00:11:26.000 But I think this run of Netflix is going to drop until the next one comes in.

00:11:32.000 I think they want to clear the landing zone for the next Cosmos.

00:11:36.000 But it went to Netflix.

00:11:37.000 But is it available for anyone to get right now?

00:11:40.000 Oh, right now?

00:11:41.000 It should be.

00:11:42.000 I haven't checked.

00:11:43.000 That's a great question.

00:11:43.000 Because I have it all on my DVR, and I'm scared to delete it.

00:11:46.000 Oh, yeah.

00:11:46.000 I only have like 6% hard drive space left.

00:11:51.000 That's what everyone's DVR looks like.

00:11:52.000 I got all your Cosmoses in there.

00:11:55.000 Yeah, so thanks.

00:11:56.000 Thanks for having them all in there.

00:11:57.000 What was that Morgan Freeman show?

00:11:59.000 Through the Wormhole?

00:12:01.000 Yeah, I got that on there, too.

00:12:02.000 That was a great show, too.

00:12:03.000 That's a Joe Rogan thing.

00:12:05.000 If you didn't have that, I'd be disappointed in that.

00:12:07.000 I say you're an imposter. 1.00

00:12:09.000 You're a fake. 0.96

00:12:10.000 It's an opportunity to be entertained and learned, which I think is what everybody misses. 0.90

00:12:15.000 And I think that's what's missing in most public education.

00:12:20.000 People are bored.

00:12:22.000 And you take these kids with so much energy and then you make them sit still and watch something that's not even remotely stimulating by a person who doesn't really care to be there.

00:12:29.000 Right, right.

00:12:30.000 And they know this intuitively, if not explicitly, that the enthusiasm is absent.

00:12:37.000 Yeah, they could feel it.

00:12:39.000 Yeah.

00:12:39.000 And just, it's the worst way to learn.

00:12:42.000 It's the worst way, and it's so hard to escape.

00:12:45.000 Once you get out of that system, it takes forever for a lot of these people to just get their...

00:12:50.000 Excitement about education back.

00:12:52.000 You know what I say when I address teachers?

00:12:54.000 We all, by the way, I'll do this right now in this room.

00:12:57.000 There's only three of us, but let's take a show of hands.

00:13:00.000 In your life, with all the teachers you've ever had in every class you've ever taken, how many had like a singular influence on who and what you became?

00:13:11.000 Give me a number.

00:13:12.000 It's going to be, I'm betting, it's Five or fewer.

00:13:17.000 Probably more like three.

00:13:18.000 Yeah, for teachers, yeah.

00:13:19.000 What's your number?

00:13:22.000 Well, there's the one that I talked about on your show the last time I saw you.

00:13:25.000 Thanks for coming on to StarTalk.

00:13:27.000 My pleasure.

00:13:28.000 It was a science teacher that I had when I believe I was in seventh grade who told me that if you really want to hurt your brain, look up and recognize the fact that that goes on forever, that this is infinite.

00:13:40.000 And then just think about what that means, infinite, that there really is no end to it.

00:13:45.000 So, but how many teachers such as that were so influential on you?

00:13:49.000 That one guy saying that one thing in that one class, he might be the one.

00:13:54.000 What do you got?

00:13:56.000 Two.

00:13:57.000 For me, it's like two and a half.

00:13:59.000 And I've had scores of teachers.

00:14:02.000 Okay?

00:14:02.000 A hundred teachers, at least.

00:14:04.000 So what I tell teachers is, be that teacher to your students.

00:14:08.000 We've all had those teachers.

00:14:09.000 Be that teacher.

00:14:10.000 And in every case, it wasn't because the topic was something you knew in advance you would like.

00:14:15.000 It's because they're The energy for sharing their passion and love for the subject was palpable.

00:14:21.000 And it just spilled out of them and went into course through your veins and your arteries.

00:14:27.000 And you walk out of there thinking, wow, that was the most interesting thing I've ever done in my life.

00:14:31.000 You don't even care what you get on a test after that because you got touched and you became an enlightened participant in that exercise, in that exploration.

00:14:40.000 Yeah, it's just so hard for them to even get kids' attentions, though.

00:14:45.000 I mean, there's just so many wrestling matches going on.

00:14:47.000 Unfortunately, that could be, in some places, half the energy of the teacher is maintaining order.

00:14:52.000 I think the success of your book, the success of your show, your podcast, and many of these other really intelligent podcasts are showing that there's an appetite for this stuff out there.

00:15:01.000 Yeah, and I'm delighted to be a servant of that curiosity.

00:15:06.000 Yeah.

00:15:09.000 I brought this just because it's not even out yet.

00:15:13.000 You're airing now live?

00:15:15.000 We're live.

00:15:16.000 You are live.

00:15:18.000 This is like a five second delay or something.

00:15:21.000 Is that the bleep all of my expletives?

00:15:23.000 No, no, no.

00:15:25.000 What is this, Accessory to War?

00:15:26.000 Oh, this is like another book.

00:15:28.000 This is coming out in three weeks.

00:15:31.000 Is this about space war?

00:15:32.000 Accessory to War, the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military.

00:15:40.000 Yeah, so this other book was Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

00:15:45.000 If you're in a hurry, do not buy this.

00:15:47.000 This is not for people in a hurry.

00:15:49.000 This is not an impulse item at the checkout line.

00:15:55.000 This is all about...

00:15:58.000 By the way, we know what role the physicist plays in war.

00:16:02.000 The physicist makes the bomb, invents the bomb.

00:16:05.000 The chemist perfects napalm.

00:16:08.000 The biologist weaponizes anthrax.

00:16:14.000 And the astrophysicist, well, we sit at the end of a telescope and wait for photons to cross the universe and enter our detector, and we go into conferences and argue about them.

00:16:24.000 So there is no obvious connection between what we do and military strength, hegemony, dominance, empire building.

00:16:37.000 It's just not obvious.

00:16:39.000 That's why the subtitle...

00:16:41.000 The unspoken alliance.

00:16:43.000 It's not a secret.

00:16:44.000 It's just, it's not there.

00:16:46.000 It's there, but it's not, nobody's talking about it.

00:16:49.000 Do you realize...

00:16:50.000 I'll just give an example, okay? 0.99

00:16:52.000 If you needed more reasons to think that Columbus was a dick, okay? 0.99

00:16:57.000 Let me add one to it, okay? 0.99

00:16:59.000 There's a difference between when we were kids and today.

00:17:01.000 Yeah, I know, I know.

00:17:02.000 But actually, I do have something mildly redeeming to offer about Columbus, if you have the time.

00:17:09.000 Oh, yeah.

00:17:09.000 I just want to...

00:17:10.000 Okay.

00:17:11.000 We'll start off with that.

00:17:12.000 You want me to start off with that?

00:17:13.000 How do you want to do it? 0.99

00:17:14.000 No, no, I'll do the dick part. 0.99

00:17:15.000 Let's do the dick part. 0.99

00:17:16.000 Okay, so on his third voyage... 0.95

00:17:19.000 By the time of his third voyage, he had already planted enough Spanish flags that Spain had already begun to set up governments and infrastructures in these places that he had found.

00:17:32.000 Yeah, basically conquered.

00:17:33.000 And so...

00:17:37.000 In one of the places, it's in the book accurately, but I think it's Hispaniola, the island today.

00:17:43.000 He has to get back, this is his third voyage, 1503 or 1504. He's got to get back to Spain.

00:17:48.000 He doesn't have enough resources, not enough food for his crew.

00:17:51.000 So he asks the natives...

00:17:53.000 Would you please give us some of your stock that you have collected from your farming?

00:17:59.000 Now, this particular group of natives only makes exactly the amount of food they need to tie to the next crop. 1.00

00:18:06.000 They don't have surplus.

00:18:08.000 So they said, no, we don't have surplus.

00:18:10.000 Sorry.

00:18:12.000 Columbus knew that one week hence, coincidentally, there was going to be a total lunar eclipse where the moon in its orbit around Earth enters Earth's shadow.

00:18:22.000 The full moon enters Earth's shadow and disappears.

00:18:28.000 The geometry of that event, it's just a simple lunar eclipse, but the geometry is such that sunlight passes around Earth through Earth's atmosphere and takes on sunset colors that leach into Earth's shadow, giving the moon, if you can see it at all,

00:18:44.000 a deep red amber hue, almost the color of blood.

00:18:51.000 Columbus said – and he knew about this because he had read the tables, the eclipse tables, all right?

00:18:56.000 We had known enough about the solar system at the time to – we got that, okay?

00:19:02.000 Actually, back then it was just the known world with Earth in the middle of the known universe.

00:19:07.000 But that didn't matter.

00:19:07.000 The rhythms of the universe were known.

00:19:09.000 He says to the natives, if you do not give us food, My god, which is more powerful than your god, will make the moon disappear and it will turn blood red.

00:19:21.000 That will happen in one week.

00:19:23.000 You have one week to comply.

00:19:25.000 Some of them were skeptical.

00:19:27.000 What?

00:19:27.000 You can't.

00:19:28.000 What?

00:19:28.000 Others said, we gotta do what this guy said.

00:19:31.000 Look at the ships they came in.

00:19:32.000 Their guns, their power, their culture.

00:19:35.000 Look what they've got.

00:19:38.000 Sure enough, right on cue, the moon begins to disappear.

00:19:44.000 That is a famous woodcut.

00:19:47.000 Oh, you got this?

00:19:48.000 Those viewing the video of this, that is a famous woodcut.

00:19:52.000 And notice the natives bowing to him, and he stands proudly because he knows the science.

00:19:57.000 He knows the astronomy.

00:19:59.000 He knew this.

00:20:00.000 And so he invokes this.

00:20:03.000 To dominate people who are not yet scientifically literate.

00:20:07.000 And within seconds of this beginning, they bring him all the resources he wants.

00:20:12.000 And we don't know what happened back at the island, whether the people survived the winter.

00:20:17.000 But he got back to the island.

00:20:18.000 That is one microcosm of ways that the universe has been invoked in this.

00:20:25.000 I'll give you another example.

00:20:25.000 Los Alamos, one of the national labs.

00:20:27.000 They today, basically since their inception, are charged with...

00:20:34.000 Tracking the nuclear arsenal of the United States, our nuclear power, the nukes that would go into nuclear weapons, they think about this.

00:20:43.000 Do you realize they hire astrophysicists?

00:20:45.000 I had colleagues working there.

00:20:46.000 You know why?

00:20:47.000 Because there's a room.

00:20:49.000 There are two rooms.

00:20:50.000 I mean, I'm simplifying this, but basically there are two rooms adjacent to one another and a computer between the two of them.

00:20:57.000 The most powerful computers in the world.

00:21:00.000 And there is code running on those computers that calculates the energy yields of hydrogen fusion.

00:21:09.000 That's exactly what an astrophysicist cares about when stars blow up, okay?

00:21:14.000 The Sun is undergoing nuclear fusion right now, and that's how it's making energy.

00:21:19.000 And when high-mass stars die, they explode as supernova.

00:21:23.000 This is a natural thing going on in the universe.

00:21:26.000 On the other side, that's a classified room.

00:21:29.000 They're calculating yields of hydrogen bombs.

00:21:33.000 And they have lunch together.

00:21:34.000 They compare notes.

00:21:36.000 The government doesn't always have the best people, but if you hire some of the best people to do whatever it is they want, and their calculations happen to relate to a military project, there you have a two-way street in progress.

00:21:52.000 Why do you think the Hubble telescope, the The mirror issues notwithstanding, which were ultimately fixed when it was first launched.

00:22:00.000 Why was that so successful?

00:22:01.000 There were versions of the Hubble telescope previously launched by the military, looking down.

00:22:10.000 The model for that telescope had already been conceived and built and was operating.

00:22:16.000 Then we say, oh, we want one of those.

00:22:17.000 Okay?

00:22:18.000 But that's not public that this is going on.

00:22:21.000 The telescope gets designed.

00:22:22.000 It has the benefit of previous versions of it having been used successfully, but looking down, and we look up.

00:22:30.000 This is the perennial two-way street of astronomy in the old days and in modern times astrophysics.

00:22:37.000 And the invention of the telescope.

00:22:39.000 You haven't said anything yet.

00:22:40.000 You're a good listener.

00:22:42.000 Should I just keep talking?

00:22:43.000 Or am I preventing you from interrupting?

00:22:47.000 Don't worry about me.

00:22:48.000 Okay, fine.

00:22:50.000 Galileo perfects the telescope.

00:22:52.000 He learned that it had just been invented in the Netherlands.

00:22:55.000 The Dutch were opticians, right? 1.00

00:22:58.000 So they invented the telescope and the microscope within a couple of years of one another.

00:23:02.000 This transformed science.

00:23:04.000 When did they invent the eyeglass, the reading glass?

00:23:07.000 The reading glass?

00:23:08.000 Earlier than that, but I don't know when.

00:23:10.000 The real advance was putting two lenses in line with one another.

00:23:13.000 Sounds trivial in modern times, but that was a huge leap, conceptual leap in what you would accomplish.

00:23:19.000 And in so doing, depending on how you curve them and how you grind them, grind the shape of those lenses, you would get a microscope or a telescope.

00:23:28.000 And we're off to the races.

00:23:30.000 That's basically the birth of modern science as we now think of it and conduct it.

00:23:36.000 Because you say to yourself, my senses, I don't trust them.

00:23:39.000 To be the full record of what's going on in front of me.

00:23:43.000 You pull out a microscope, oh my gosh, Lee Wenhoek, the microscope guy, he got a drop of pond water, puts it under his microscope, just to think to do this.

00:23:55.000 It's just water.

00:23:56.000 Why do you think that's something interesting to do?

00:23:58.000 He said, I wonder.

00:24:00.000 He was curious.

00:24:01.000 He puts it under and sees little, what he described as, animocules.

00:24:06.000 Happily a-swimming.

00:24:07.000 Animocules.

00:24:08.000 Animocules! 0.85

00:24:09.000 These are like the amoebas in Paramecia.

00:24:12.000 And so he reports on this to To the, you know, scientific authorities and they don't believe him.

00:24:22.000 They say, you know, von Leeuwenhoek, we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter.

00:24:32.000 Why would anyone believe this?

00:24:33.000 That there's entire creatures, an entire universe of creatures thriving in a drop of pond water.

00:24:40.000 And so the way science works is one report does not make it true.

00:24:44.000 You need verification.

00:24:45.000 They sent people to the Netherlands to verify his results.

00:24:48.000 And there it was.

00:24:49.000 The birth of microscopy.

00:24:51.000 And then they looked at everything.

00:24:53.000 Cells.

00:24:54.000 You know, you need vocabulary to describe what you're now seeing.

00:24:57.000 Well, that was the journey down small.

00:25:00.000 Then the journey went up big.

00:25:01.000 And Galileo perfects the telescope.

00:25:05.000 He looks up and says, whoa, I see craters, mountains, valleys on the moon.

00:25:09.000 The sun has spots.

00:25:11.000 Venus goes through phases.

00:25:13.000 This became the corpus of evidence for Earth going around the Sun in support of Copernicus's idea that Earth went around the Sun.

00:25:22.000 My point is, what was the second thing he did with his telescope?

00:25:26.000 He telephoned...

00:25:29.000 He contacted the Doge of Venice, invited him to the clock tower, and said, look at what this instrument can do for you as we look out into the lagoon.

00:25:39.000 You can identify a ship's intentions, friend or foe, by its flag ten times farther away than you can with the unaided eye.

00:25:51.000 Venice bought a boatload of these telescopes in the service of their military defense.

00:25:57.000 And this was a source of money to Galileo?

00:26:00.000 Now he could go look at the universe.

00:26:02.000 This has been a two-way street ever since people have looked up.

00:26:07.000 So this is an accounting of that.

00:26:11.000 And it goes on and on.

00:26:13.000 The first x-ray machines for airports.

00:26:17.000 You're old enough to remember.

00:26:18.000 Why were they put in?

00:26:19.000 Because of hijackings to Cuba, basically.

00:26:21.000 They were armed hijackings of airplanes, of American carriers to Cuba.

00:26:27.000 And Congress said, we've got to do something about that.

00:26:29.000 Oh, by the way, there's a company in Boston called American Science and Engineering that was building an X-ray detector small enough to put on a satellite to observe the universe in X-rays.

00:26:41.000 Because no one had – we've used visible light but not x-rays.

00:26:44.000 That's a branch of the electromagnetic spectrum.

00:26:46.000 We think if there are black holes out there, their region surrounding them will give us x-rays.

00:26:51.000 It's a new window on the universe.

00:26:55.000 And then they said, oh my gosh, there's a call for x-ray machines at airports. 0.57

00:26:59.000 We've got the technology that we've perfected to put in a freaking satellite.

00:27:04.000 So the technology for those ones you walked through at the airport initially came out?

00:27:08.000 Initially, yes.

00:27:08.000 Wow.

00:27:09.000 Yes.

00:27:10.000 There was a two-way street.

00:27:11.000 There was, oh my gosh, we need this for security.

00:27:13.000 Oh my God, we were using it.

00:27:16.000 Let's apply that technology to these detectors.

00:27:18.000 Well, that's been a lot of the stuff with the space program, right?

00:27:21.000 A lot of the stuff that they devised for use on the space station and many other technologies have trickled their way down into regular society.

00:27:27.000 Well, that always happens, and even some simple things.

00:27:31.000 Because people say, why spend money up there and we should be spending it down here?

00:27:34.000 But there's an interesting fact here that is almost never discussed.

00:27:38.000 The people who think about the universe and study the universe are hugely creative.

00:27:43.000 And the creative energies cannot be pre-prescribed.

00:27:46.000 You can't go to a – you might, but I don't know that you'll get their maximum creativity.

00:27:51.000 Say, I need you to invent a cure for cancer right now.

00:27:54.000 Use that brilliance.

00:27:56.000 I'll try.

00:27:57.000 But the greatest discoveries, the greatest cures, the greatest of these comes from a cross-pollination of interest that people have where they were engaged because they were interested just for the sake of being interested.

00:28:14.000 So watch what happens.

00:28:15.000 Here's an example.

00:28:16.000 The space shuttle.

00:28:17.000 It's a glider when it lands.

00:28:19.000 It's got no engines.

00:28:21.000 It's got flaps.

00:28:22.000 There's a little bit of brakes in the tires, but that's about it.

00:28:24.000 When it comes in, How do you make sure the thing stays on track?

00:28:30.000 Because they kept drifting and crosswinds and this sort of thing.

00:28:33.000 And so they said, why don't we groove the road so that the rubber on the road, the runway, so that the rubber can align with the grooves and stay in a straight line?

00:28:43.000 Because rubber doesn't slide well when you have – doesn't slide sideways very easily on grooves.

00:28:49.000 When they realized how effective that was, it's now put on off-ramps to freeways.

00:28:55.000 If there's a freeway off-ramp that's a little tight, not quite banked well enough, it's going to be grooved.

00:29:01.000 Check it out next time.

00:29:02.000 And you could say, well, okay, that's a pretty simple low-tech solution.

00:29:07.000 Why couldn't we just discover that on our own without the $20 billion a year space agency called NASA? But you didn't.

00:29:17.000 You didn't.

00:29:19.000 Power tools.

00:29:21.000 Cordless, high-torque power tools.

00:29:24.000 We're invented to service satellites in orbit by NASA. Because you can't just plug it into a 120 volt socket when you're floating in space.

00:29:34.000 So the engineer said, how are we going to solve this problem?

00:29:37.000 Let's make a high torque power tool. 0.99

00:29:39.000 So now, NASA invents the high torque.

00:29:41.000 Now, that is the only way you're buying a power tool today, is the cordless variety.

00:29:47.000 All construction sites.

00:29:48.000 They're not looking for a power outlet for these things.

00:29:52.000 So, why didn't we invent this without the $20 billion spacecraft?

00:29:56.000 You didn't.

00:29:57.000 You didn't think about it.

00:30:00.000 You said, oh, I can plug it in.

00:30:01.000 This is great.

00:30:02.000 You're not even thinking what you need.

00:30:04.000 So, yes, there are all of these applications.

00:30:09.000 But that's a good reason to do it, but I don't think it's the best reason.

00:30:12.000 The best reasons are, my gosh, don't you want to keep dreaming?

00:30:15.000 Don't you want to keep looking into the future?

00:30:17.000 That would be ideal, but that's not attractive to people that are spending tax dollars.

00:30:21.000 When it comes to tax dollars, people get super pragmatic and they go, why do we need to go to Mars?

00:30:26.000 Now, what we need to do is take care of this and pay for that and with the deficit and the budget.

00:30:32.000 So, you know, NASA's budget today is four-tenths of one percent of the federal budget.

00:30:41.000 So if you take a dollar...

00:30:42.000 Four-tenths of one percent?

00:30:44.000 I will quantify that for you.

00:30:45.000 Take a dollar bill and imagine that's your tax dollar and you can, like, cut it.

00:30:52.000 To whatever percent you want.

00:30:53.000 So let's cut four tenths of one percent off of the edge.

00:30:57.000 That doesn't get you into the ink.

00:30:59.000 You're still in the white border around it.

00:31:02.000 You could trim that off the dollar and pay for anything.

00:31:07.000 So my point is, most of the people who say, don't spend it here, spend it there.

00:31:14.000 They think NASA has more budget than it actually does.

00:31:19.000 If you ask them, how much do you think they're getting?

00:31:20.000 Oh, 10%, 5%, you know, several percent?

00:31:24.000 No, it's one half of 1%.

00:31:26.000 So if you're going to tell me that if you can take that four tenths of 1% and spend it in these other problems and solve them, I would say, yeah, go right ahead.

00:31:37.000 But is this where you really want to pull the money from?

00:31:40.000 When it's the only thing that has us thinking about tomorrow, has us thinking about a future.

00:31:45.000 Well, for a guy like you, that's super important. 0.99

00:31:47.000 But for a guy who lives in Cleveland, who doesn't give a shit about science... 0.99

00:31:51.000 Oh, excuse me. 0.99

00:31:52.000 That's like the person who says, okay, I don't need the space program.

00:31:56.000 Why do I need the space program?

00:31:58.000 I have my cell phone and I have the weather channel and I know anything I need.

00:32:03.000 This is...

00:32:06.000 You're using GPS satellites to understand where you are on this earth, to understand where grandma's house is.

00:32:12.000 Do you know who created it?

00:32:13.000 Who created what?

00:32:14.000 Who created spread spectrum technology that led to GPS and Wi-Fi?

00:32:18.000 Who is that?

00:32:18.000 Hedy Lamarr.

00:32:19.000 Oh, I did know that.

00:32:20.000 Yes.

00:32:21.000 Yes, she did.

00:32:21.000 Beautiful actress.

00:32:22.000 1941. Yes, she did.

00:32:23.000 How about that?

00:32:24.000 Under-recognized.

00:32:24.000 Thanks for reminding me of that.

00:32:25.000 Super hot, though.

00:32:26.000 That was the problem.

00:32:27.000 Nobody cared.

00:32:29.000 Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're smart too.

00:32:30.000 Yeah, but it would take decades to really realize that.

00:32:34.000 And of course, GPS is launched by the military, and it's now hundreds of billions of dollars worth of the American economy thriving on this space application.

00:32:43.000 But it was a military intent, and it was to navigate...

00:32:48.000 The surface of the Earth.

00:32:50.000 Yeah.

00:32:50.000 To navigate.

00:32:51.000 And the first Gulf War was the first big use of space assets in the conduct of military operations.

00:32:58.000 I believe even when Hedy Lamarr created it with another scientist, the idea behind it was for encoded transcriptions or encoded information during the war.

00:33:10.000 Well, so that's a big challenge.

00:33:12.000 How do you encode information?

00:33:15.000 By the way, the future of this might It's still not clear.

00:33:20.000 The jury's still out and they're sort of opposing views on this.

00:33:23.000 But, you know, you've heard about quantum entangled particles where I can create a pair of particles that know about one another and now they're separated in space and in time.

00:33:33.000 And if you...

00:33:36.000 Observe that other particle, it instantly changes the state of the particle back, the other particle that's back where I am.

00:33:43.000 And by the way, they communicate instantaneously, faster than the speed of light.

00:33:47.000 When you say if you observe, do you mean that if you observe it with a...

00:33:52.000 Anything.

00:33:52.000 Doesn't matter.

00:33:53.000 But you have to do something to observe it with.

00:33:55.000 Yes.

00:33:56.000 So something has to interact with.

00:33:57.000 It's not woo.

00:33:57.000 No, it's not...

00:33:59.000 It is so not woo.

00:34:00.000 But you say that, people go, yeah, I saw that in the secret.

00:34:03.000 Yeah, so the problem is the word observe, people think is a psychological thing.

00:34:09.000 But in physics, it's got nothing to do with it.

00:34:10.000 It's a measurement thing.

00:34:11.000 It's a measurement thing.

00:34:12.000 Right.

00:34:13.000 The act of measuring.

00:34:14.000 If there's an electron sitting in the middle of this table and all the lights are out, I can say, I think there's an electron here.

00:34:21.000 Let me find out.

00:34:23.000 And the moment I turn on the lights, the light interacts, a photon interacts with the electron and kicks it somewhere else.

00:34:29.000 So the more I try to measure its position, the less I know its position.

00:34:33.000 So, because the measurement requires an interaction with it.

00:34:38.000 And in the quantum scale, interactions change the state of the experiment that you're conducting.

00:34:43.000 We know this, we've quantified it, we don't like it, but we deal with it.

00:34:49.000 And in the act of dealing with it, you can exploit that fact for other purposes.

00:34:53.000 We exploit quantum craziness to birth The information technology revolution.

00:35:00.000 There is no creation, storage, or retrieval of information without an exploitation of the quantum.

00:35:07.000 And by the way, the quantum physics as a branch of physics was discovered in the 1920s.

00:35:15.000 If you were around back then and you're tax buddies who don't like paying taxes, what would you have said?

00:35:20.000 Why are you spending government money on the atom and on molecules?

00:35:26.000 You can't even see them.

00:35:27.000 What good is it?

00:35:28.000 I'm a woodworker.

00:35:29.000 I just care about my wood atoms, right?

00:35:31.000 Here I am.

00:35:32.000 Shove that where your tax dollar is.

00:35:36.000 And so it would look like you're wasting your own time and everybody else's money.

00:35:42.000 It would take decades, five decades, four or five decades before we'd realize what role that would play.

00:35:49.000 In computing, this creation, storage, and retrieval of information.

00:35:53.000 And by some measures, it's a third of the world's GDP is traceable to what quantum physics does for us on a computing scale.

00:36:01.000 So anyone...

00:36:03.000 Yes.

00:36:04.000 Yes.

00:36:04.000 Well, I mean, there are ways to do it.

00:36:06.000 There are certain industries that would still be there without computing, but they're made more efficient with it.

00:36:11.000 Okay?

00:36:12.000 So UPS tracks all of their...

00:36:14.000 Trucks with GPS and with computing devices that invokes the quantum.

00:36:18.000 But UPS predates the use of these tools.

00:36:22.000 But you can look at profits relative to their efficiencies that are enabled by these technologies, as well as entire fields that didn't exist before computing.

00:36:32.000 You add all that up, it's a stunning fact.

00:36:35.000 And my only point is...

00:36:38.000 That you, if you want today to say, why study this when we have these other problems?

00:36:45.000 All I do is take you back to the cave and let's say, alright, we're in a cave.

00:36:49.000 And there's a mountain over there and a valley.

00:36:51.000 And I tell you, I tell the tribe leaders, I want to explore that mountain and that valley.

00:37:00.000 No, we can't afford to send you out there now.

00:37:02.000 We have to solve the cave problems first before anyone leaves the cave.

00:37:09.000 We laugh at that.

00:37:10.000 That's an absurd claim to make in caveman days.

00:37:15.000 I don't know if anyone did it, but that's a crazy thought because there are solutions to your problems that might exist and time has demonstrated likely exist by leaving the cave that you can then discover.

00:37:29.000 So for me, exploitation is not just space.

00:37:31.000 All the frontiers of the unknown.

00:37:34.000 Biology, chemistry, AI. You know those frontiers.

00:37:38.000 And then you can cross-pollinate them and transform civilization.

00:37:42.000 And then the last example I give, and then I'll shut up because I want to hear you talk too.

00:37:45.000 It's not for me.

00:37:48.000 I want to hear you interact with what I'm telling.

00:37:51.000 Here's one.

00:37:52.000 You ready?

00:37:52.000 Okay.

00:37:53.000 My physics professor in college Studied the universe, loved the universe, studied gas clouds between stars, and studied how would you detect a gas cloud if it's not radiating light?

00:38:05.000 Well, they give off radio waves, all right?

00:38:07.000 And he figured out what kind of radio waves they give off and why.

00:38:11.000 And in this, he gained expertise in the nucleus of the atom.

00:38:14.000 And he discovered that the nucleus can resonate.

00:38:20.000 Depending on the mass of the nucleus, which means depending on what atom it is on the periodic table, it will resonate slightly differently when exposed to the same electromagnetic field.

00:38:31.000 He discovered a new phenomenon in physics called nuclear magnetic resonance.

00:38:37.000 It would then take a clever medical technologist to say, wait a minute, if you can distinguish one heavy atom from another, Let me make a machine out of that, put your body in it, and I can then distinguish one kind of tissue from another.

00:38:55.000 And thus was born the magnetic resonance imager, the MRI, arguably the most potent tool in the arsenal of modern medicine where I can diagnose a condition in your body without cutting you open first.

00:39:09.000 That is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine.

00:39:15.000 By the way, the real title should be Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, but that's the other N-word.

00:39:22.000 Nuclear?

00:39:23.000 They don't like that one?

00:39:24.000 Yeah, people don't like nuclear.

00:39:26.000 They're less likely to go inside the machine if the word nuclear was on it.

00:39:30.000 My point is that was a cross-pollination of ideas with clever people on their frontiers looking over the fence at discoveries that are being made.

00:39:40.000 It's how we got the microwave oven.

00:39:42.000 That wasn't invented by a thermodynamicist.

00:39:46.000 Microwaves.

00:39:46.000 This is a World War II attempt to communicate using microwaves.

00:39:51.000 And they found out some guy's chocolate bar melted in the microwave field.

00:39:55.000 And they said, what happened there?

00:39:56.000 And they did some more tests.

00:39:57.000 And of course, the water molecule and other molecules common in food respond to microwaves.

00:40:03.000 It vibrates them ferociously.

00:40:08.000 And so you put food in a microwave cavity, the water content of the food vibrates, friction cooks the food!

00:40:16.000 There's still people today who say, oh, nuke this, because it's so fast.

00:40:21.000 Me.

00:40:21.000 Oh, you're still saying that.

00:40:24.000 It's still...

00:40:25.000 Have no fear.

00:40:27.000 It's just friction.

00:40:28.000 Okay?

00:40:28.000 Friction it.

00:40:29.000 Yeah, but everybody's scared that it fucks up the food.

00:40:32.000 Well...

00:40:32.000 Does it?

00:40:33.000 No.

00:40:33.000 It just heats the water.

00:40:35.000 People get scared.

00:40:35.000 The woo-woo people do.

00:40:37.000 Okay, so here's the thing.

00:40:38.000 There's certain foods that don't respond well to the flipping of the water molecule, and one of them is like bread products.

00:40:44.000 It gets hard.

00:40:45.000 Yeah, it gets chewy and leathery.

00:40:47.000 Yeah.

00:40:47.000 But only if you, like, overdo it.

00:40:48.000 If you overdo it, you got to do it just right and you're still good.

00:40:51.000 If you overdo it, you can get leather.

00:40:52.000 That's kind of it.

00:40:53.000 I'm trying to think.

00:40:54.000 You wouldn't grill a steak in a microwave.

00:40:56.000 You would heat up the meat uniformly and that's all it would do.

00:41:00.000 It cooks bacon pretty fast.

00:41:02.000 Yeah.

00:41:02.000 But it's a mess and it splatters all over.

00:41:04.000 So you pick the foods that are best for that situation.

00:41:07.000 As you would pick the foods best, you wouldn't put...

00:41:11.000 Toast in an oven at 350 degrees, bread to make toast.

00:41:15.000 We have toasters for that.

00:41:17.000 So different things in your kitchen do things best.

00:41:20.000 You wouldn't make ice cream in your toaster oven.

00:41:25.000 But people are afraid of microwaves.

00:41:27.000 The one thing they're afraid of is ignorance.

00:41:29.000 It's not that they're afraid of microwaves.

00:41:30.000 It's that they're afraid of things they don't understand.

00:41:32.000 That's your point.

00:41:33.000 Precisely.

00:41:34.000 They're afraid that something's going to happen to their food that makes it less good.

00:41:38.000 Correct.

00:41:39.000 And it's just the not knowing that people fear.

00:41:43.000 My wife's friend's mom will not eat something that comes out of a microwave. 1.00

00:41:48.000 Really?

00:41:49.000 She quotes that as part of what makes her healthy.

00:41:52.000 She drinks a lot of water.

00:41:53.000 She refuses to eat microwave food.

00:41:56.000 The whole life is around not using microwave food.

00:41:59.000 She won't eat anything that comes out of her microwave.

00:42:01.000 Okay, I'm glad that she doesn't, you know, she can live a long, happy life as such. 0.94

00:42:05.000 She has to reheat food old school. 1.00

00:42:07.000 Okay, one of the hardest things is reheating lasagna if you don't have a microwave oven.

00:42:11.000 It's true.

00:42:11.000 That's like impossible.

00:42:12.000 Because you're going to cook it again.

00:42:13.000 You're going to cook it again.

00:42:14.000 Yeah, that's a really good point.

00:42:16.000 So I think microwave ovens were invented for leftover lasagna.

00:42:19.000 Yeah, just a bowl of pasta, just in general.

00:42:23.000 Soup.

00:42:23.000 It's great for soup.

00:42:24.000 Soup is good.

00:42:26.000 So you don't have to worry about it.

00:42:27.000 It's not doing anything to it.

00:42:28.000 It's not sucking any nutrients out or adding any nuclear radiation.

00:42:32.000 Correct.

00:42:33.000 It has nothing to do with radiation in the normal sense, other than electromagnetic radiation.

00:42:38.000 Radiation, it's already light from the bulb.

00:42:41.000 We tend to use radiation in the context of stuff that would hurt you.

00:42:45.000 So that would be radiation of high enough energy to hurt you.

00:42:48.000 And microwaves are not in that category.

00:42:50.000 I never even thought about what microwaves do until this conversation.

00:42:54.000 Really?

00:42:55.000 Yeah.

00:42:55.000 Yeah, so it's a certain frequency of microwaves that beautifully pairs with the water molecule.

00:43:01.000 And it vibrates it brilliantly.

00:43:04.000 So it doesn't work for completely dried things?

00:43:06.000 Yeah, that's why if you put something that has no water in it, it's not really very useful.

00:43:10.000 What happens if it's beef jerky?

00:43:12.000 Must have a little moisture.

00:43:14.000 There's still some moisture in it, correct.

00:43:15.000 It's why it heats the food and not the plate.

00:43:19.000 Mmm.

00:43:20.000 If the plate gets hot, it's not because the microwave oven heated the plate.

00:43:24.000 It's because the food's hot.

00:43:26.000 That's why you can usually pick it up with the handles.

00:43:28.000 You can cook food on a paper plate.

00:43:31.000 That's right.

00:43:32.000 It doesn't burst into flames.

00:43:33.000 It doesn't burst into flames.

00:43:34.000 This is crazy.

00:43:35.000 What?

00:43:36.000 You didn't show?

00:43:37.000 What is the difference between MRI and fMRI?

00:43:42.000 I don't claim total expertise here, but I'll tell you the little I know.

00:43:45.000 An MRI, they put you in there and you're stationary, and then they make this map of whatever part of the body they're studying.

00:43:51.000 It's typically your head.

00:43:53.000 But you can do it for your joints and other parts of your body that might require this level of three-dimensional analysis.

00:43:59.000 And it's a 3D map.

00:44:02.000 of what's going on in the part that they surveyed.

00:44:05.000 And so you look at slices through that section.

00:44:08.000 So you might see in MRIs of your brain, of your skull, and they take slices.

00:44:13.000 As the slices go through, you see like the eye socket come in and then go out again, or the nose cavity.

00:44:20.000 And you can look at it in all three dimensions, front to back, side to side, up to down.

00:44:27.000 So, depending on the sophistication of the machine, fMRI is they are looking at your brain while you are thinking.

00:44:35.000 So time is now an active coordinate of what's going on.

00:44:39.000 And they're measuring it as they're talking to you about certain things?

00:44:42.000 Correct.

00:44:42.000 So they say, oh, think of an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top.

00:44:46.000 Think of a naked person who you'd want to have sex with. 0.99

00:44:50.000 And F stands for functional. 0.99

00:44:52.000 Functional, right.

00:44:53.000 And so it's basically a real-time observation of what's going on in your brain.

00:44:58.000 He used it to convict a person.

00:44:59.000 There was a woman in India.

00:45:01.000 It's really a highly criticized case, but she was convicted of a crime.

00:45:05.000 I believe it was murder because she had functional knowledge of the crime scene. 0.94

00:45:12.000 And the arguments against it were, like, if you're going to be accused of a crime, clearly you're going to study the evidence.

00:45:18.000 You're going to talk to a lawyer.

00:45:19.000 You're going to go over some things.

00:45:21.000 I don't know if fMRI is that precise.

00:45:24.000 Yeah, they don't think it is.

00:45:25.000 That's why it was very disturbing that this was used in court.

00:45:29.000 It's like, do you remember when these Italian geologists were, I think they were tried because they should have known about an earthquake? 0.97

00:45:39.000 Before it happened, and then scientists had to say, hey guys, this is not how it works. 0.99

00:45:44.000 Like, this shit can just happen. 0.96

00:45:46.000 Do you remember that? 1.00

00:45:48.000 No, I don't, but that's what I do know.

00:45:52.000 Let me share a couple of things with you that I've thought deeply about recently.

00:45:56.000 There are three kinds of truths in the world.

00:45:59.000 Three?

00:46:01.000 I'll give you three.

00:46:03.000 The Rudy Giuliani kind?

00:46:05.000 You're welcome.

00:46:08.000 Apparently, true isn't always true.

00:46:10.000 I know.

00:46:10.000 So let me try to unpack that.

00:46:12.000 You ready?

00:46:13.000 Alternative facts?

00:46:14.000 There's something called an objective truth.

00:46:16.000 An objective truth is something that is true whether or not you believe in it.

00:46:21.000 And the methods and tools of science are uniquely conceived to seek out and establish objective truths.

00:46:29.000 I'm referring to the invocation of the scientific method.

00:46:33.000 No one scientific research result is true.

00:46:39.000 Until it is verified by other people's research results using a different experimental method with different wall current from another country.

00:46:48.000 When your competitor says, I think you're wrong, let me show how you're wrong, and they reproduce your experiment and get the same result.

00:46:55.000 When you have generally the same results emerging, that is a newly discovered objective truth about the natural world.

00:47:03.000 And when you have objective truths, they're not later shown to be false.

00:47:08.000 That's an objective truth.

00:47:09.000 Then you have personal truths.

00:47:12.000 These are truths that you hold dearly.

00:47:15.000 Jesus is your savior.

00:47:16.000 Mohammed is the final prophet on earth. 1.00

00:47:20.000 Abraham is your... 0.69

00:47:22.000 These are your personal truths.

00:47:24.000 There's a heaven you're going to.

00:47:25.000 No one is going to take that from you, not in a free country where freedom of expression and speech and religion is protected.

00:47:33.000 That's a personal truth.

00:47:34.000 The problem here is You can't convince someone else of your personal truth without some act of persuasion and in the limit, an act of violence.

00:47:47.000 Okay?

00:47:47.000 In the limit.

00:47:48.000 In the limit.

00:47:49.000 This is how you get holy wars.

00:47:51.000 So I have this personal truth and I require that you share my personal truth.

00:47:56.000 That's a recipe for disaster.

00:47:58.000 And not a belief.

00:47:59.000 Because the people who hold the belief will tell you that it's a truth.

00:48:03.000 So I don't want to take that usage of the word away from them.

00:48:05.000 Okay, so you're giving them the definition.

00:48:08.000 I'm giving them the word truth, but modifying it to say personal truth.

00:48:12.000 That's correct.

00:48:14.000 They've used it that way for millennia.

00:48:16.000 I'm not going to...

00:48:17.000 Okay?

00:48:18.000 They feel that it's true, and it's true in their bones.

00:48:22.000 I'm simply saying that because it's your personal truth, you cannot require that someone else share it.

00:48:29.000 And in this country, because the United States, because God is not mentioned in the Constitution, itself a controversial thing in its day, by the way.

00:48:39.000 Actually, God is mentioned, but in a very insignificant way.

00:48:42.000 The Constitution is a God-free document.

00:48:45.000 And because it's a God-free document, it protects your expression of religious faith, because it means the government has no say in who and what you believe or why.

00:48:59.000 If the Constitution said, mention God and Jesus, well, there it is.

00:49:03.000 There's Christianity built into the fabric of the country.

00:49:06.000 And if you want to be some other religion, you're going to have a hard time because we can set laws against it. 1.00

00:49:11.000 This is why so many religiously persecuted people came to the United States, to escape their country where they could not practice their religion a little differently or a lot differently from what was going on in their homeland.

00:49:25.000 Is it a problem, though, to call it truth?

00:49:29.000 I would rather not call it truth, but I'm a big word guy, and I respect what happens to words.

00:49:36.000 I don't always like it, but I respect it.

00:49:38.000 And so I'm going to say there's an objective truth, which is true whether or not you believe it.

00:49:43.000 There's your personal truth, which is true to you.

00:49:46.000 Third truth is a political truth.

00:49:48.000 Political truth is something that is true because it has been incessantly repeated, and then you just believe it at that point.

00:49:59.000 Give me one of those.

00:50:00.000 Okay, what's Hillary Clinton's first name? 0.91

00:50:03.000 It's Crooked.

00:50:04.000 Crooked Hillary. 1.00

00:50:07.000 Oh, her first name is actually Hillary? 1.00

00:50:09.000 Okay.

00:50:10.000 I thought it was Crooked Hillary. 1.00

00:50:11.000 This was incessantly repeated in the Trump campaign.

00:50:14.000 And that's an absurd example of it.

00:50:17.000 But the point is, if you keep saying that the New York Times is fake news, It just keeps saying that.

00:50:25.000 Eventually people believe it.

00:50:27.000 And it becomes a political truth.

00:50:30.000 Because the politicians repeated it.

00:50:55.000 For more than an hour.

00:50:56.000 And like I said, you can do that, and philosophers like arguing and debating meaning of things.

00:51:01.000 For me, it's however people are using the word, that's the meaning.

00:51:05.000 Okay.

00:51:06.000 I concede that.

00:51:07.000 Well, we concede those things.

00:51:09.000 By the way, it's why I don't call myself an atheist.

00:51:13.000 It's why.

00:51:14.000 You can look up the dictionary definition of atheist, and it kind of applies to me, but What is the definition of atheist in practice?

00:51:23.000 It is what leading atheists do and it's their conduct and it's their behavior and it's what they say and it's their attitude.

00:51:31.000 That is what an atheist is today because they're the most visible exemplars of that word and most of their conduct I either don't agree with or simply don't engage in. 1.00

00:51:42.000 What don't you agree with? 1.00

00:51:44.000 I don't debate religious people and tell them they're idiots. 1.00

00:51:48.000 That doesn't work. 1.00

00:51:50.000 Whether or not it works, it's just not in me to do that.

00:51:54.000 I don't purge myself of words that have religious foundations in them.

00:52:00.000 I once in my Facebook, I had a friend going up in orbit to repair the Hubble telescope, one of the astronauts, and I said, Godspeed.

00:52:09.000 And then I gave the astronaut's name.

00:52:11.000 People wrote in in the thread, said, I thought you were an atheist.

00:52:14.000 How can you say Godspeed?

00:52:15.000 An atheist got angry with me? 1.00

00:52:16.000 And I said, okay, first of all, this phrase is deeply historical in the space program.

00:52:24.000 When John Glenn was launched, the headline was, Godspeed John Glenn.

00:52:28.000 And every mission where we send human beings into space, somewhere there is that reference in the NASA family.

00:52:35.000 What does that word mean?

00:52:35.000 I'll tell you.

00:52:36.000 I'll tell you what it means.

00:52:37.000 Please do.

00:52:37.000 Okay?

00:52:39.000 So, oh, by the way, I'll get to that in just one minute.

00:52:42.000 Take your time.

00:52:43.000 The atheists who are arguing that I was using Godspeed as a phrase, they all have used the phrase goodbye, haven't they? 1.00

00:52:52.000 See you later, goodbye.

00:52:53.000 Where does that word come from?

00:52:54.000 It's from God be with you.

00:52:56.000 It's a contraction of those three words.

00:52:59.000 And why would you say this?

00:53:01.000 You would say this to someone leaving the city wall.

00:53:05.000 Where it's dangerous.

00:53:07.000 Okay?

00:53:07.000 Back when you had city-states, you're going to...

00:53:10.000 God be with you.

00:53:12.000 To bring protection for you between one city wall and another.

00:53:17.000 The gods look out for you.

00:53:19.000 So now, what is the source of danger if you're going to space?

00:53:22.000 It's not alien space muggers.

00:53:25.000 It is the fact that you have...

00:53:27.000 Space marauders.

00:53:29.000 It's the fact that you have high speed...

00:53:32.000 And high speed is the source of essentially any death of anything that's in motion if you were part of that disaster.

00:53:41.000 So Godspeed is like a space equivalent to God be with you.

00:53:47.000 Is that really the origin of it?

00:53:49.000 I'm just saying it's...

00:53:50.000 But did they say that before there was space travel?

00:53:52.000 Did they say Godspeed?

00:53:53.000 I don't know the actual origin of space travel, of the term.

00:53:57.000 I don't know how far back it goes, but I do know it became common after John Glenn, because they're not going to say it to Yuri Gagarin, because they were all atheists in the Soviet Union.

00:54:06.000 Right.

00:54:07.000 But here in America...

00:54:09.000 In America, Godspeed John Glenn.

00:54:12.000 And I respect that tradition.

00:54:14.000 And so I said that, and then they jumped.

00:54:16.000 So if atheists are jumping on me for having said that, clearly I'm not an atheist.

00:54:21.000 And ask me my favorite Broadway musical of all time.

00:54:24.000 What's your favorite Broadway musical?

00:54:25.000 Jesus Christ Superstar.

00:54:28.000 And I still use B.C. and A.D. in my writings.

00:54:34.000 Okay?

00:54:35.000 I still do it.

00:54:36.000 You don't use BCE? I don't use BCE. Hmm.

00:54:39.000 All right.

00:54:39.000 Oh, see, even you copping a tube right there, right?

00:54:42.000 Interesting.

00:54:43.000 I saw your face.

00:54:44.000 You got the camera?

00:54:45.000 Did you see your face?

00:54:46.000 No, I just said interesting.

00:54:46.000 I just said interesting.

00:54:47.000 It's interesting.

00:54:48.000 No, I'll tell you why.

00:54:49.000 Okay.

00:54:49.000 Okay, first of all...

00:54:50.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:54:51.000 BCE... This is not current era 2,000 years ago.

00:54:54.000 I'm going to tell you.

00:54:55.000 So BCE, as you know, stands for before common era.

00:54:57.000 Right.

00:54:58.000 And CE stands for common era.

00:55:00.000 So this is de-religiousifying... 0.94

00:55:03.000 A.D. and B.C. Yet, of course, they reference the same calendar.

00:55:08.000 Well, who invented the calendar we all currently use in modern society?

00:55:13.000 It's called the Gregorian calendar.

00:55:14.000 It was invented by the Catholic Church, by Jesuit priests in the 1580s, assigned by Pope Gregory to fix the problems in the calendar because...

00:55:24.000 I'm sorry I'm screaming at you here.

00:55:25.000 You got me started.

00:55:25.000 Scream.

00:55:26.000 Get crazy.

00:55:26.000 I got to calm down.

00:55:27.000 I'll bring in coffee.

00:55:31.000 The Julian calendar, put forth in ancient Rome, had one modification to previous calendars.

00:55:39.000 It had a leap day.

00:55:40.000 Okay?

00:55:41.000 It had a leap day.

00:55:44.000 And, okay, leap day is how often?

00:55:47.000 Every four years.

00:55:48.000 This was good.

00:55:50.000 Because what are we trying to track?

00:55:52.000 Earth goes around the sun.

00:55:53.000 And so we say, all right, how long does that take?

00:55:57.000 Well, it takes a year.

00:55:58.000 But it turns out we're not actually tracking how long it takes Earth to go around the sun.

00:56:02.000 We're tracking how long it takes Earth to repeat its seasons.

00:56:06.000 And the year that corresponds to our seasons is slightly different from the year that corresponds to how long it takes to go around the sun.

00:56:16.000 Slightly different.

00:56:17.000 And that difference was not recognized in the early calendars.

00:56:22.000 And that difference accumulated so that by the year 1584...

00:56:29.000 The vernal equinox, the first day of spring, did not occur on March 21st.

00:56:33.000 It occurred on March 10th.

00:56:35.000 It shifted from the calendar date.

00:56:38.000 That's what happens if you don't match the cycles of things.

00:56:41.000 And the Pope said, we're not having any of this, especially since Easter might land on Passover, and we're trying to distinguish ourselves mightily from the Jews, so let's fix this. 0.99

00:56:51.000 The Jesuit priests got to study this.

00:56:53.000 They looked at the cycles of the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they came up with a new calendar, the Gregorian calendar, a modification to the Julian calendar.

00:57:02.000 You know what they had to do?

00:57:03.000 To invoke it, they had to take 10 days out of the calendar, to jumpstart, to put the first day of spring back on March 21st.

00:57:11.000 And this happened in October, 1584. Why has there been- They took 10 days out of the calendar.

00:57:17.000 So now how much rent do you pay?

00:57:18.000 They have to, like, invent amortized rent.

00:57:21.000 Really?

00:57:22.000 Yeah, because you're going to pay for three weeks instead, you know, 20 days instead of 30. They have to figure that out, okay?

00:57:28.000 Point is, this was hard-earned, and the whole world uses this calendar.

00:57:32.000 It is the most accurate calendar ever devised.

00:57:35.000 Is it?

00:57:36.000 Yes, I'll tell you what.

00:57:37.000 Okay, you asked.

00:57:38.000 So watch what happens.

00:57:40.000 The leap day overcorrected the calendar.

00:57:45.000 It overcorrected it.

00:57:46.000 Overcorrected?

00:57:46.000 Yes.

00:57:47.000 Yes.

00:57:48.000 So you need a leap year.

00:57:49.000 So...

00:57:50.000 No, sorry.

00:57:50.000 The leap day is every four years.

00:57:51.000 That one day every four years was slowly putting too many moments into the year.

00:57:58.000 Okay?

00:57:58.000 The Gregorian calendar figured this out.

00:58:00.000 And it had put 10 extra days since the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar.

00:58:05.000 10 extra days.

00:58:06.000 First, jumpstart.

00:58:07.000 Get rid of the 10 days.

00:58:08.000 Now everything's lined up again.

00:58:10.000 Okay.

00:58:10.000 Now, how do you prevent this from happening again?

00:58:14.000 Because it overcorrects, how long do you have to wait to remove a leap day that you would otherwise put in?

00:58:22.000 Okay?

00:58:23.000 Okay.

00:58:24.000 That's every hundred years.

00:58:25.000 Oh.

00:58:26.000 So every hundred years that would be a leap day, you remove the leap day.

00:58:33.000 Now it turns out that undercorrects it.

00:58:37.000 By an even smaller amount, okay?

00:58:40.000 So, how long do you have to wait before you have to put a leap day back in?

00:58:46.000 Every 400 years.

00:58:48.000 Oh, God.

00:58:50.000 So, the year 2000 was a century year, which normally would not have a leap day.

00:58:58.000 Except it's a century year evenly divisible by 400, so they put the leap day back in.

00:59:04.000 And everybody on February, almost everybody, everybody except the astronomers, on February 29th in the year 2000 said it's just a leap year because it's divisible by four.

00:59:14.000 No.

00:59:15.000 It is a rare leap year.

00:59:17.000 It is a century year divisible by 400. That corrects it back, and so now you have a stable calendar for tens of thousands of years.

00:59:29.000 I gotta give props to the Jesuit priests. 0.93

00:59:32.000 I'm not gonna say, no, I'm taking the Christianity out of this reference, because they figured out the calendar that we all use, and it's a fucking awesome calendar. 0.97

00:59:40.000 Sorry to drop an F-bomb there. 0.98

00:59:42.000 I'm not just because some atheists are telling me to rid God out of everything in the universe.

00:59:47.000 I'm not doing that.

00:59:49.000 I'm going to say, they came up with this calendar.

00:59:52.000 The reasons were because they didn't want to confuse it with Passover.

00:59:55.000 The motivation is whatever it is, but the science is good.

00:59:59.000 And so there it is.

01:00:00.000 So in Accessory to War, where we go back many centuries, the editors said, well, we should use BCE because it's a liberal forward thing.

01:00:07.000 I said, I'm not using BCE and CE. And by the way, there was no year zero.

01:00:14.000 You know why there's no year zero?

01:00:15.000 Because the Romans came up with the calendar, and they counted using Roman numerals, and Roman numerals don't have a zero.

01:00:21.000 It was not yet invented.

01:00:23.000 They didn't have a zero?

01:00:24.000 No!

01:00:25.000 No!

01:00:26.000 So it went from 1 BC to AD 1. BC is before Christ, AD is Anno Domini in Latin, the year of our Lord.

01:00:35.000 Wow.

01:00:36.000 Yeah.

01:00:37.000 Now, of course, in Islam and in China and in Hebrew cultures, Israel in particular, they have access to the Chinese calendar, the Muslim calendar.

01:00:48.000 Muslim, of course, dates to Muhammad.

01:00:50.000 Chinese calendar dates to...

01:00:53.000 Actually, a planetary alignment in 4700 BC. They use a different system.

01:00:59.000 They use a different system.

01:01:00.000 That's why.

01:01:01.000 And the Hebrew calendar dates to like the beginning of the universe as interpreted in the Torah.

01:01:08.000 So they have access to those.

01:01:10.000 But when they're conducting international business, we just simply use the Gregorian calendar.

01:01:14.000 Just get over it.

01:01:16.000 But do they use it in China?

01:01:17.000 Do they use it constantly and consistently?

01:01:19.000 Or do they alternate between the Gregorian calendar and something else?

01:01:22.000 I'm not a Chinese expert, but from what I know of China and my friends and colleagues, for conducting business, the world's business is conducted on the Gregorian calendar with a 12-month calendar.

01:01:33.000 With the year as referenced by everybody else.

01:01:37.000 And does it have to be done that way in terms of, like, has anyone ever done a study on possibly creating a more effective, more accurate calendar that doesn't invoke leap years?

01:01:47.000 The problem is the length of the day...

01:01:52.000 Does not cut evenly to the time it takes Earth to go around the Sun.

01:01:56.000 So there will always be fractions of days that you're accumulating.

01:02:00.000 Right.

01:02:00.000 And what do you do with them?

01:02:01.000 You wait until you accumulate a day and you put it in or take it out.

01:02:04.000 What did the Mayans have?

01:02:05.000 They had a lunar cycle calendar, right?

01:02:07.000 They had a calendar based on Venus.

01:02:09.000 And so, yeah, they had a really good calendar.

01:02:12.000 Yeah, it was a 13 lunar cycle.

01:02:13.000 It was overstated that it was a really accurate calendar.

01:02:16.000 Overstated?

01:02:16.000 It was overstated.

01:02:17.000 It was good, better than anything that came before it.

01:02:19.000 Not as good as the Gregorian.

01:02:20.000 No, no, no.

01:02:21.000 Gregorian calendar. 1.00

01:02:21.000 People love old shit, though. 1.00

01:02:23.000 They do, and they want to believe that people who, you know, they want to believe that people 5,000 years ago somehow knew more about the universe than we do today. 1.00

01:02:32.000 Just, no.

01:02:32.000 Why is that?

01:02:33.000 Why do they want to believe that?

01:02:34.000 I think...

01:02:37.000 I don't know.

01:02:38.000 For me, that's one of the great puzzles of life.

01:02:41.000 Why do people want to believe that the Egyptians somehow had some access to the universe?

01:02:47.000 Well, they knew something.

01:02:48.000 Of course! 1.00

01:02:49.000 They definitely knew how to build some incredible shit. 1.00

01:02:51.000 Of course! 0.99

01:02:52.000 I don't want to take that away from them.

01:02:56.000 Doesn't the physical, just the presence of these incredible buildings leave the possibility that maybe they had some knowledge that we lost?

01:03:06.000 Lost knowledge is a real thing.

01:03:07.000 I don't want to belittle or diminish the significance of real knowledge.

01:03:12.000 We forgot how to draw in perspective, you know, from ancient times.

01:03:15.000 Had to be rediscovered in the, as I understand from the artists, had to be rediscovered in the Renaissance.

01:03:21.000 The archway.

01:03:23.000 The Roman arch had to sort of be rediscovered, okay?

01:03:27.000 So yes, yes, you can lose knowledge.

01:03:31.000 But if you look at the knowledge we have gleaned using the methods and modern methods and tools of science that go far beyond our five senses in our access to the world, to say that somehow they knew something that we don't using our tools, that's just false.

01:03:47.000 Sorry.

01:03:48.000 That's not possible.

01:03:51.000 We know the physiological limits of your ability to know what's going on around you.

01:03:56.000 And then people say, oh, I have a sixth sense.

01:03:59.000 Fine.

01:04:00.000 But as a scientist, I have dozens of senses.

01:04:02.000 I can measure things that your five senses can't.

01:04:05.000 I can measure the magnetic field around you, the electromagnetic field, how much microwaves are coursing through your body now.

01:04:11.000 We have no sensors for this.

01:04:12.000 I can see auras.

01:04:14.000 Fine.

01:04:15.000 I can see other things that are affecting your body now.

01:04:18.000 I can tell you if ionizing radiation is passing through you.

01:04:21.000 I have Geiger counters that can do that.

01:04:23.000 You can't.

01:04:23.000 Oh, you'll eventually learn whether you're exposed to ionizing radiation because you'll get cancer of your organs and your limbs fall off.

01:04:32.000 All right.

01:04:33.000 I concede that we know far more today than perhaps – no, not even perhaps – than at any other time in conceivable history.

01:04:40.000 Yes.

01:04:41.000 But it is possible that they knew some things, like how to build a pyramid, that we really just don't understand today.

01:04:50.000 I don't know what it means to not understand how to build a pyramid today.

01:04:54.000 We have 150 story buildings.

01:04:56.000 We're not thinking about pyramids.

01:04:58.000 I can tell you this.

01:04:59.000 Do you know where the first thing that was built by humans?

01:05:03.000 Ever?

01:05:03.000 No, no.

01:05:05.000 That's only part of the sentence.

01:05:06.000 Sorry.

01:05:08.000 I love your enthusiasm.

01:05:09.000 My sentence only barely came out of my mouth.

01:05:12.000 The tallest thing humans built after the pyramids?

01:05:18.000 I think it's a building in Dubai.

01:05:20.000 No.

01:05:21.000 So in other words, what's the next tallest thing after the pyramids?

01:05:25.000 Oh, right after.

01:05:26.000 Yeah.

01:05:26.000 What is the next tallest thing we built?

01:05:28.000 Stable structure after the pyramids.

01:05:30.000 What?

01:05:32.000 The Eiffel Tower.

01:05:32.000 Really?

01:05:33.000 Yes.

01:05:35.000 18, whatever, 89, 1870, late 1800s in Paris, the Eiffel Tower.

01:05:40.000 Huh.

01:05:41.000 That was the first stable structure we built as a civilization that was taller than the pyramids.

01:05:47.000 So the Egyptians knew how to, they knew architecture.

01:05:52.000 They knew.

01:05:53.000 No one's taken that away from them.

01:05:56.000 But to claim they have some secret knowledge of the functionings of the universe?

01:05:59.000 No.

01:06:00.000 No.

01:06:01.000 Well, people love saying that kind of stuff.

01:06:03.000 Yeah, and it makes for a great TV. But the fact that they didn't have steel and the fact that you're dealing with the very most recent 2500 B.C. You just have to be more ingenious, more innovative than we otherwise would have to be.

01:06:20.000 How do you move the blocks?

01:06:21.000 How do they make Stonehenge?

01:06:22.000 Those rocks are nowhere in the region.

01:06:25.000 They found a place where those rocks would have been mined, removed. 0.84

01:06:33.000 And yeah, those are some big ass rocks. 0.63

01:06:36.000 Yeah, as are the ones. 0.96

01:06:37.000 But it's not less impressive because they're just big.

01:06:41.000 Like, the thing about the pyramids that's so impressive is the precision and the sheer numbers.

01:06:46.000 Two million, six hundred thousand stones.

01:06:49.000 Our best understanding of Stonehenge is that it's a functioning observatory that can actually predict eclipses. 0.99

01:06:56.000 So, I just gotta bitch slap you there. 1.00

01:07:02.000 Oh, Stonehenge's not impressive. 1.00

01:07:04.000 It's just big stone.

01:07:05.000 They're lined with the solar solstice.

01:07:09.000 They're holes that are not stones, but they're 56 holes, which is three times the Saros, which is the cycle of eclipses of the matching of the orbits of the sun and the moon in the sky, the paths of the sun and the moon in the sky.

01:07:23.000 And when they match up, you get an eclipse.

01:07:25.000 It's an eclipse observatory.

01:07:27.000 That's absolutely what it is?

01:07:29.000 There's a book published in the 1970s by a guy named David Dawkins.

01:07:38.000 It's not Richard Dawkins, but it's another one of these.

01:07:40.000 Hawkins.

01:07:41.000 Richard Hawkins.

01:07:42.000 Richard Hawkins.

01:07:44.000 Hawking.

01:07:45.000 Hawking.

01:07:46.000 Damn. 1.00

01:07:46.000 One of them dudes. 1.00

01:07:47.000 Damn. 1.00

01:07:47.000 We got our top crack researchers here. 1.00

01:07:50.000 Jamie's on the ball.

01:07:50.000 Just look up, the title of his book was Stonehenge Decoded.

01:07:53.000 Just look up the title of that book.

01:07:54.000 Anyhow, it's highly convincing and we're all there with it.

01:07:58.000 So it's essentially just a study of the position of the stones in relationship to the, where the, okay, Gerald Hawkins.

01:08:05.000 Gerald Hawkins, thank you.

01:08:06.000 There we go.

01:08:07.000 Yeah, Stonehenge Decoded.

01:08:08.000 So he, I visited Stonehenge as a kid at age 15 on an expedition and he was the expedition head.

01:08:15.000 Oh, wow.

01:08:16.000 Yeah, so...

01:08:17.000 How lucky for you.

01:08:18.000 Yeah, it was good.

01:08:20.000 And that stuck with me, which is why I named this phenomenon in Manhattan, where the sun sets along the street grid.

01:08:26.000 I saw that.

01:08:27.000 I saw that on your Instagram.

01:08:28.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:29.000 So I named that Manhattanhenge, sort of hearkening back to my early days, thinking about the alignment of the sun and structures that we might build.

01:08:39.000 So twice a year, for those viewers or listeners who don't know, twice a year, the Manhattan street grid Which is not perfectly aligned north-south.

01:08:48.000 The Manhattan street grid, the sun will set exactly on the grid.

01:08:53.000 And what's up there now, that image, what's not obvious, is that picture is taken Along a street that is itself three miles long, and then you're crossing the Hudson River, and then there's New Jersey on the other side.

01:09:10.000 So people try to zoom in on it, but what you really should do is zoom out from it, and then you get the vanishing point on it.

01:09:19.000 So all those are zoomed in.

01:09:22.000 Let's go to...

01:09:23.000 Yeah, that one looks more like my photo.

01:09:25.000 Wait, go back to that other one.

01:09:27.000 Yeah, see?

01:09:28.000 So that's on 34th Street, the one you see now.

01:09:31.000 And then you get this sparkling effect.

01:09:33.000 That happens twice a year.

01:09:34.000 That sort of crazy wild light effect that looks photoshopped almost.

01:09:39.000 Yeah.

01:09:40.000 There's an image on his Instagram that is linked on my Instagram.

01:09:45.000 The most recent photo.

01:09:47.000 Oh, okay.

01:09:47.000 There it goes.

01:09:48.000 Oh, there's you with the selfie!

01:09:48.000 That's the selfie.

01:09:49.000 Look at you.

01:09:50.000 Okay, so come on down.

01:09:51.000 Powerful afro.

01:09:52.000 Oh, yeah.

01:09:52.000 Strong.

01:09:53.000 That was my first selfie.

01:09:54.000 How old were you?

01:09:54.000 I was 14. Let me see.

01:09:57.000 It was probably 1974. Wow.

01:10:00.000 So I would have been 15. I think I've been 14 or 15. So your path of curiosity was set very...

01:10:07.000 Oh, it goes back.

01:10:07.000 It goes back.

01:10:08.000 Very early.

01:10:09.000 Right.

01:10:09.000 But that's not the one we're looking for here.

01:10:11.000 That one, thank you.

01:10:14.000 There's another one.

01:10:17.000 Go back to all the images.

01:10:18.000 Across the river is wild.

01:10:19.000 Zoom back out so you see all the pictures there.

01:10:22.000 Go to the bottom left.

01:10:23.000 There you go.

01:10:24.000 Okay.

01:10:24.000 That might be the first ever Manhattan Henge photo.

01:10:28.000 What year is that from?

01:10:30.000 I took that in...

01:10:32.000 2001. Right.

01:10:32.000 And it got published in 2002. This is before September 11th.

01:10:36.000 This is July 11th.

01:10:36.000 I took it before September 11th.

01:10:38.000 Right.

01:10:38.000 And then I had a means to publish it.

01:10:41.000 And right then...

01:10:44.000 Notice that it's a green light and traffic is ready to knock me over.

01:10:48.000 So no one is in the streets doing this, but now there are tens of thousands of people that pour into the streets on these days.

01:10:54.000 We post what day you get Manhattan Henge from the American Museum of Natural History, my day job.

01:10:59.000 And then that goes out, the press gets it, and tens of thousands of people spill into the street blocking traffic.

01:11:05.000 And if you think of all the ways traffic gets blocked in your day...

01:11:08.000 Look at this.

01:11:09.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:11:10.000 Look at these dorks. 0.99

01:11:11.000 Ha! 0.99

01:11:12.000 All of them.

01:11:13.000 There's too many of them.

01:11:14.000 It was you by yourself.

01:11:14.000 It's interesting.

01:11:15.000 It's great.

01:11:16.000 Yeah.

01:11:16.000 So that's what it has become.

01:11:17.000 Holding up phones.

01:11:18.000 And it's all because I went to Stonehenge.

01:11:20.000 Yeah.

01:11:20.000 So it's also an observatory.

01:11:23.000 So was it you that named this?

01:11:25.000 Yeah.

01:11:26.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:11:26.000 Damn. 1.00

01:11:27.000 Check you out. 1.00

01:11:27.000 Coined it. 1.00

01:11:28.000 I'd rather say coined it.

01:11:29.000 Coined it.

01:11:29.000 Yeah.

01:11:30.000 Manhattanhenge.

01:11:31.000 Because the buildings are like hinges.

01:11:33.000 The hinge is a stone.

01:11:34.000 It's a vertical stone.

01:11:35.000 It's a vertical structure.

01:11:36.000 If you made a stone, it's a stone hinge.

01:11:38.000 Why isn't it possible to construct a calendar that doesn't have leap years?

01:11:44.000 What you would have to do, you could do it, but what would happen is it means you care more about the year than you do about the day.

01:11:51.000 So what would happen is you would celebrate the new year at like 3 in the afternoon.

01:11:58.000 And then the next year you'd celebrate it at like 12 minutes after 3 in the afternoon.

01:12:04.000 And then 20 minutes.

01:12:06.000 It would sort of move through your calendar.

01:12:10.000 And then that means you cared more about...

01:12:14.000 The year...

01:12:14.000 Sorry, you care more about the...

01:12:16.000 Did I say that right?

01:12:18.000 You...

01:12:18.000 We always want to celebrate New Year's on midnight.

01:12:22.000 And by the way, New Year's is celebrated in 24 time zones, not all at the same time.

01:12:27.000 So it's interesting.

01:12:27.000 Everyone thinks of that as a moment.

01:12:30.000 Yet, it's really a calendar event.

01:12:33.000 I'm sorry, it's a clock event.

01:12:35.000 It's celebrated over 24 hours.

01:12:36.000 Yeah, if you're in Thailand, it's 14 hours difference.

01:12:39.000 So therefore, if you were to do it astrophysically, you would know the exact moment where we returned in our orbit, and everybody would celebrate that instant.

01:12:48.000 And that would be...

01:12:50.000 So then the whole world would celebrate the new year at the same time.

01:12:53.000 It means you value it differently.

01:12:55.000 It's not a midnight celebration.

01:12:56.000 It's a...

01:12:58.000 You could do that.

01:12:58.000 It's a celestial celebration.

01:12:59.000 It's celestial, yeah.

01:13:01.000 Huh.

01:13:02.000 So that would be the only way?

01:13:04.000 Yeah, that's the only way.

01:13:05.000 Because a day doesn't cut evenly into the year.

01:13:08.000 Those two have nothing to do with one another.

01:13:10.000 There's no reason why that would have...

01:13:12.000 So we...

01:13:13.000 So in other words, let me say it another way.

01:13:16.000 Just because you're looking like you're looking off in space here.

01:13:20.000 So, there's New Year's.

01:13:23.000 Okay?

01:13:24.000 Let's count 365 days.

01:13:27.000 When we do that, we are not at the same place we were when we last celebrated New Year's Day, New Year's Eve.

01:13:37.000 We're not at the same place in our rotation?

01:13:39.000 In our orbit, our revolution.

01:13:41.000 Around the sun.

01:13:42.000 You rotate on an axis, you revolve around something else.

01:13:44.000 That's those two words, how you use those two words.

01:13:46.000 So we're not in the same place, but we celebrate New Year's anyway.

01:13:50.000 Well, when will we be in the same place?

01:13:52.000 A quarter of a day later.

01:13:55.000 Six hours.

01:13:57.000 So we would celebrate the next New Year at 6 a.m.

01:14:00.000 Nobody's willing to do that.

01:14:01.000 And the next New Year at noon, then the next New Year at 6 p.m., and then the next New Year kind of aligns back again.

01:14:08.000 Well, that's the leap day.

01:14:09.000 That's the fourth year where you put in a leap day.

01:14:13.000 See? 0.53

01:14:14.000 So it's our love of the day that keeps us fucked up with the world when it comes to the year. 0.93

01:14:22.000 Yeah. 0.96

01:14:23.000 Wow.

01:14:24.000 You pick one, and then that's how you do it.

01:14:27.000 And the Mayans base it on the moon, right?

01:14:30.000 I didn't study their calendar as deeply as I should have and wanted to, especially back in 2012 when everyone said, oh, the Mayan calendar runs out, so therefore it's the end of the world.

01:14:41.000 That's what I was thinking.

01:14:44.000 I was thinking it was the end of the world, baby.

01:14:46.000 Because the Mayans said so.

01:14:47.000 The Maya said so. 0.98

01:14:49.000 I also felt like that was back when, you know, before that had happened, it was, you know, George Bush was president in like 2007 and everybody was thinking, Jesus, this is going to be the end.

01:15:01.000 So every decade there's somebody predicting the end of the world.

01:15:04.000 Sure.

01:15:04.000 I'm actually quite entertained by this exercise.

01:15:07.000 Do you remember when they had billboards all around L.A. just a few years ago?

01:15:10.000 No, that's a different end of the world.

01:15:11.000 That's a guy with a radio podcast church that he – yeah.

01:15:17.000 And then the other world didn't come and so he pushed it forward.

01:15:20.000 So that's – it's entertaining.

01:15:22.000 We live in a free country.

01:15:23.000 It's evidence that we live in a free country where freedom of speech is protected and you can practice any religion you want.

01:15:30.000 Right.

01:15:31.000 And they didn't learn much science in school.

01:15:34.000 Right.

01:15:35.000 That's a part of it.

01:15:35.000 That's part of the fact that you have this in our world.

01:15:38.000 I don't mind it, actually.

01:15:39.000 I find it entertaining.

01:15:41.000 But it becomes an issue if people such as that gain power over legislation over the rest of us.

01:15:48.000 Because this would count this as a personal belief.

01:15:51.000 It's your personal belief the world is going to end on October 19th.

01:15:56.000 You're fine.

01:15:58.000 But if you now create laws that require I go with that, you just impose your personal belief on me.

01:16:05.000 And your personal belief is not true for everyone.

01:16:09.000 It's only true for you.

01:16:11.000 Yeah, that's a problem, right?

01:16:12.000 And an objective truth is true for everyone.

01:16:14.000 So if you're going to have governance, you're going to want to base governance on what is objectively true.

01:16:20.000 Because it would apply to everyone.

01:16:22.000 Independent of your belief system.

01:16:27.000 Yeah, I agree with that.

01:16:28.000 And by the way, there are...

01:16:32.000 There are things that we're not sure are true yet that we're still researching.

01:16:37.000 That's not what I'm talking about as an objective truth.

01:16:40.000 Objective truths have been verified by multiple scientific studies, not just one study.

01:16:45.000 This was the problem with the cholesterol study.

01:16:49.000 There's a cholesterol study that set everybody on the course to drop their cholesterol levels, okay?

01:16:53.000 Saying it would be good for your heart and all the rest of this.

01:16:56.000 Because a series of countries were studied where they had longevity and low heart disease and low cholesterol intake.

01:17:03.000 That study happened to leave out France.

01:17:06.000 It just wasn't in the study.

01:17:09.000 And a couple of other places that have high cholesterol intake but don't have higher heart disease.

01:17:15.000 So that study was flawed.

01:17:18.000 But it was hard to replicate it because it went over many years and it was thousands of people and so everyone just jumped on it.

01:17:25.000 You don't have a scientific truth.

01:17:27.000 And this is a general problem with medical results because the press is waiting at the journal editor's office.

01:17:35.000 Oh, here's a new study that shows that this gives you cancer.

01:17:39.000 Oh, that must be true.

01:17:41.000 And out comes the headline because you want to be the first to report it.

01:17:43.000 And then that gets emblazoned in people's heads and not everyone reads the follow-up.

01:17:47.000 Exactly.

01:17:48.000 No one could duplicate that study.

01:17:51.000 So there's a flaw.

01:17:53.000 We don't even know what the flaw is.

01:17:54.000 We know that no one else could get those results.

01:17:57.000 So it goes in the dustbin of scientific research.

01:18:01.000 Most research in any journal of the moment will ultimately shown to be wrong.

01:18:07.000 That's the bleeding edge of science.

01:18:09.000 It's a great place to be because you're in the trenches and you don't know what is true.

01:18:15.000 You can't look up in the back of the book what the answer is to double check.

01:18:18.000 You don't even know what the question is to ask half the time.

01:18:24.000 But it's very frustrating for people that don't get it.

01:18:28.000 Correct, but it's exciting for the scientists.

01:18:30.000 It's exciting for knowledge, period.

01:18:33.000 It's constantly expanding and growing.

01:18:34.000 But it's very frustrating for people that really don't have the time and maybe did get some outdated nutrition knowledge from 20 years ago.

01:18:42.000 Or they need an answer right now.

01:18:43.000 They need an answer right now.

01:18:45.000 And religion, in many ways, gives you answers right now.

01:18:48.000 Without the need to sort of...

01:18:50.000 To research it or to go on the frontier.

01:18:53.000 The lack of education and the lack of The lack of curiosity about it is one of the scariest things about new generations of kids, right?

01:19:02.000 Like when the new generations are coming up, if they know less than the generation before, that's when we really start to freak out.

01:19:07.000 That would be a problem.

01:19:08.000 Although, I have good confidence in the 30 and under generation.

01:19:13.000 Is that millennial?

01:19:14.000 How old do you have to be?

01:19:15.000 I think millennials have only ever known the internet and devices.

01:19:19.000 So, what would that be?

01:19:21.000 There was a recent...

01:19:22.000 My son is a millennial, and he's like...

01:19:24.000 My kids are millennials, so they're 20-ish.

01:19:27.000 So 30 is a little old.

01:19:28.000 So 25 and under, I think, are the millennials.

01:19:31.000 Yeah, but 30, when they were 10, the internet was around.

01:19:34.000 I know, but they need a different marketing term so you can market to them differently.

01:19:37.000 So to me, I would put them in the same bin just as you were thinking there.

01:19:41.000 But they have a different relationship to science and technology.

01:19:47.000 Of course.

01:19:48.000 They don't fear the science or the technology.

01:19:50.000 They embrace it because it has shaped the civilization that has enabled their social life.

01:19:55.000 It has, but through this, like, one of the things that I tweeted, I think it was from Scientific American yesterday, maybe it was yesterday, that it's a little bit misleading, but one of the things they said is only 64% of millennials have a strong belief.

01:20:10.000 These things, these coasters are terrible.

01:20:13.000 They look great, but then things stick to the bottom of them.

01:20:16.000 The hell is it made of?

01:20:17.000 I don't know, metal.

01:20:17.000 Yeah, okay.

01:20:18.000 A metal coaster?

01:20:19.000 Yeah, see?

01:20:20.000 What the hell is that?

01:20:21.000 Sticks. 0.67

01:20:21.000 Yeah, that's the issue. 0.67

01:20:23.000 Sticks when it gets moisture.

01:20:26.000 You know about this where you flip this over and you tip it over and then it...

01:20:29.000 What happens?

01:20:30.000 Have you ever done that?

01:20:31.000 You never did that?

01:20:32.000 What?

01:20:33.000 Stays?

01:20:33.000 It'll stay, yeah.

01:20:34.000 Oh, because of the pressure?

01:20:35.000 Yeah, the air pressure on it.

01:20:37.000 Okay.

01:20:39.000 Don't do it.

01:20:41.000 I don't trust your science, your objective truth.

01:20:44.000 64% of what?

01:20:46.000 Of millennials are not, or only 64% are convinced that the world is a ball.

01:20:58.000 I'd like to see how that question was asked.

01:21:00.000 Exactly.

01:21:01.000 Because if they know that we are oblate, and the thing is asking, is Earth a ball?

01:21:05.000 They'll say, no, we're an oblate ball.

01:21:07.000 We're slightly wider below the equator than at the equator, so we're a pear-shaped oblate spheroid.

01:21:12.000 But it's not a pair that you would find normally. 0.98

01:21:15.000 If you found that pair, you'd be like, this is a fucking pair that's shaped like a ball. 0.95

01:21:18.000 So these differences in measurements are so small that if you found it on the ground, you would say this is a perfect sphere. 0.99

01:21:26.000 Right.

01:21:26.000 Let me tell you how good a sphere it is.

01:21:29.000 Right.

01:21:29.000 You ever see the schoolroom globes, the geographic globes, and you rub your finger over Nepal and you get the Himalayas.

01:21:38.000 Topographical.

01:21:38.000 Yeah, yeah, and you get the Rockies.

01:21:39.000 You say, oh, oh, oh.

01:21:41.000 That is a gross exaggeration of reality.

01:21:44.000 Yes.

01:21:45.000 Do you realize if you took Earth with all of its mountains, valleys, and hills and shrunk it down to the size of a cue ball, it would be smoother than any cue ball ever machined.

01:21:55.000 Really?

01:21:55.000 Yes.

01:21:56.000 Yes.

01:21:58.000 Think about it.

01:21:59.000 What?

01:21:59.000 Think about this.

01:22:00.000 Joe!

01:22:01.000 Really?

01:22:01.000 Everest?

01:22:02.000 Joe!

01:22:02.000 Chill!

01:22:03.000 Listen to me. 1.00

01:22:04.000 Damn. 1.00

01:22:04.000 You ready? 1.00

01:22:05.000 Okay?

01:22:06.000 Do you know the deepest part of Earth's crust?

01:22:09.000 No.

01:22:09.000 The Marianas Trench off the coast of the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean.

01:22:13.000 That's the deepest part.

01:22:14.000 Deepest part.

01:22:15.000 It goes six miles down.

01:22:16.000 Okay?

01:22:17.000 Oh, okay.

01:22:18.000 So, okay.

01:22:19.000 I was thinking of the depth of the crust itself.

01:22:23.000 No, no.

01:22:23.000 Just access to the deepest part of Earth's crust.

01:22:26.000 The lowest point on Earth's surface.

01:22:28.000 The Marianas Trench right off the coast of the Philippines.

01:22:31.000 The highest point on Earth's surface.

01:22:33.000 The tip of K1. K2? Is it K1 or K2? Is it Japan? 0.75

01:22:40.000 I think it's K1. Why would you name the tallest peak K2? That's a good point.

01:22:46.000 I'm just...

01:22:47.000 I'm not a mountain climber, but I'm just thinking...

01:22:49.000 Where is K1? It's the Himalayan Mountains.

01:22:52.000 Okay.

01:22:52.000 In Nepal.

01:22:53.000 Okay?

01:22:54.000 Isn't it in Nepal?

01:22:55.000 I think it is.

01:22:56.000 Yeah.

01:22:57.000 Yeah.

01:22:57.000 Okay.

01:22:58.000 So now, how high up is that?

01:23:00.000 It was 28,000 feet.

01:23:01.000 So it's like five miles up.

01:23:04.000 Okay?

01:23:04.000 Right.

01:23:06.000 The distance...

01:23:08.000 Between the lowest point on Earth's surface and the highest point on Earth's surface is 11 miles.

01:23:15.000 That's here to the Comedy Store.

01:23:17.000 That is less than the length of Manhattan.

01:23:20.000 Whoa.

01:23:21.000 Yet we are 8,000 miles in diameter.

01:23:26.000 And those two points are very far separated from one another.

01:23:30.000 If you were a cosmic giant and you came up to Earth and you rubbed your finger over Earth's surface...

01:23:37.000 It would feel as smooth as a cue ball to you.

01:23:41.000 In fact, in this book, I have a whole chapter called On Being Round, which is all about this.

01:23:48.000 It's all about our perception of what is round and what is not.

01:23:51.000 I had asked you to debate one of them flat Earth guys.

01:23:55.000 No, I don't.

01:23:55.000 I can't.

01:23:56.000 No.

01:23:56.000 I know.

01:23:57.000 We talked about it, and we were going to have him on Skype.

01:24:00.000 No, what we do is, and I think this is a diabolical plot, so that the next time we can ship people en masse into orbit, they all want to be the first in line because they know we're going to send them so that they can see the round Earth.

01:24:11.000 They're going to be the first ones in space.

01:24:13.000 Just so they can stop annoying the rest of us.

01:24:15.000 I don't think you're correct there.

01:24:17.000 I don't think you're correct.

01:24:19.000 You don't think it's a diabolical plot?

01:24:20.000 I do have people that I've met that don't believe, because the problem with YouTube videos is, it's a problem with a lot of things.

01:24:29.000 But one of the things about being unchecked while you're discussing things is you can say things, you can use big words, you can sound articulate and smooth, and you can do it in a very professional-looking manner.

01:24:41.000 Or do it passionately.

01:24:42.000 Yes, passionately, convincingly, charismatically, and you're unchecked.

01:24:48.000 But if you did that in front of an expert...

01:24:52.000 And you showed them that, along the way they go, stop.

01:24:55.000 That's not true.

01:24:55.000 Stop.

01:24:56.000 That's not what works.

01:24:57.000 Let me show you why this is incorrect.

01:24:59.000 Let me show you how you can prove that this is incorrect.

01:25:01.000 Let me show you objective truths.

01:25:02.000 But this is not happening.

01:25:03.000 That render your argument invalid.

01:25:05.000 Right.

01:25:05.000 So people who don't have any education, and then they watch one of these YouTube clips, they start actually believing that this stuff makes sense because it's unchecked.

01:25:13.000 And I would say it's not about whether they've had education.

01:25:15.000 It's about whether the education they had teaches them skepticism of information and teaches them how to inquire.

01:25:22.000 Do you realize it's just as intellectually lazy to believe everything you see as it is to deny everything you see?

01:25:32.000 Yes.

01:25:33.000 Why should someone know automatically that Earth isn't flat, yet I tell them in the next breath that the entire universe was once as small as a marble?

01:25:45.000 Both of those sound equally preposterous.

01:25:48.000 Except one has evidence to back it and the other does not.

01:25:51.000 And very strong scientific, theoretical, and experimental underpinnings.

01:25:57.000 So when you are trained to inquire, you don't either believe everything outright or reject everything outright.

01:26:04.000 You're trained to ask questions.

01:26:06.000 You're trained to probe deeper than the layer of information that comes to you.

01:26:11.000 That's what should be taught in school.

01:26:13.000 And it's not.

01:26:15.000 They give you a book and say, learn this.

01:26:17.000 Yeah.

01:26:18.000 And you'll get tested on it.

01:26:20.000 And then when you're done, learn this.

01:26:22.000 Well, isn't also there's a problem with being inexorably connected to your first belief?

01:26:28.000 When you have an idea and it's in your head, it's very difficult for people to shake that idea and they start arguing that idea.

01:26:34.000 That idea becomes a part of their identity.

01:26:36.000 And they dig their heels in deeper when an opposing view is presented to them.

01:26:40.000 Because they connect themselves to these ideas.

01:26:42.000 Right.

01:26:42.000 It is who they are.

01:26:44.000 Right, right.

01:26:44.000 And so I try not to base my character profile on something that is not yet verified as objective truth.

01:26:54.000 That's a very good thing to do.

01:26:56.000 It's one of the reasons why I don't have tattoos on my body.

01:26:59.000 Uh-oh.

01:27:04.000 Go on, stretch in my face.

01:27:06.000 Go on.

01:27:07.000 One of the reasons is there's nothing I am so sure about that I want to put it indelibly on my skin.

01:27:16.000 No, no.

01:27:17.000 Let me say it differently.

01:27:18.000 There's nothing I value in my mind, body, and soul so much in this moment that I want to indelibly etch it on my skin.

01:27:28.000 Because I want to leave room For me to have a possibly more enlightening thought later that would override whatever was my decision in that moment.

01:27:39.000 And since I count myself among the lifelong learners, I'm learning stuff all the time.

01:27:45.000 They say, wow, that's good.

01:27:50.000 That's even better.

01:27:52.000 What's something you learned recently that you went, oh...

01:27:55.000 Okay, let me think.

01:28:01.000 Okay, here's something I learned recently.

01:28:02.000 I think I knew this when I was a kid, but if you're playing basketball and you're shooting, okay, and you say, oh, that didn't go in, oh my gosh, well, you know, the rim, they should maybe make the rim a little bigger.

01:28:12.000 I could score more often.

01:28:13.000 Do you realize...

01:28:15.000 Two basketballs can fit exactly side by side through the opening of a basketball hoop.

01:28:23.000 Really?

01:28:24.000 Yes.

01:28:25.000 I guess that makes sense.

01:28:27.000 Two basketballs.

01:28:28.000 Tough squeeze.

01:28:29.000 No, it's not a cosmically mind-blowing moment, but that gives you perspective next time you watch a basketball game.

01:28:36.000 It's how these guys can fly from the foul line in an airborne slam dunk and not miss.

01:28:49.000 Because the area of this opening is four times, you do the math, it's four times as large as the ball itself.

01:28:56.000 Right, because of the different positions it could be in.

01:28:58.000 So there are multiple positions and they can still do it.

01:29:03.000 So, it's not that that's easy to accomplish, but knowing this, you realize how much easier it is to score than you might have otherwise thought.

01:29:13.000 I wonder if basketball players...

01:29:14.000 So, that was a recent revelation.

01:29:16.000 That's a good revelation.

01:29:17.000 Yeah.

01:29:18.000 I wonder if basketball players occasionally practice with a smaller hole.

01:29:21.000 I think about this all the time.

01:29:24.000 I say, if I was a basketball player, you don't want to practice with a heavier ball.

01:29:26.000 Jamie's saying yes.

01:29:27.000 Because then that would throw you off.

01:29:29.000 That would throw off your animal.

01:29:30.000 You practice with a...

01:29:31.000 And a bigger ball.

01:29:32.000 They use a bigger ball as well?

01:29:33.000 Yeah.

01:29:33.000 We use a ball.

01:29:34.000 Sometimes it's almost as big as the rims.

01:29:35.000 But wait a minute.

01:29:36.000 Is it heavier?

01:29:36.000 No.

01:29:37.000 No, no.

01:29:37.000 No, you don't want to use a bigger ball.

01:29:39.000 It's a thing they did a long time ago.

01:29:41.000 I bet they still don't.

01:29:42.000 They no longer do it.

01:29:42.000 Because then your grip is different.

01:29:44.000 The grip matters where your two hands go and what they feel.

01:29:48.000 So you want to do it, you use a smaller rim.

01:29:51.000 And in baseball, you throw a faster pitch to give you less reaction time.

01:29:55.000 That pool table that you see out there.

01:29:56.000 You use a skinnier bat.

01:29:58.000 That pool table is a very small pocket opening.

01:30:01.000 Nice.

01:30:01.000 It's a four inch pocket opening as opposed to a five and a half inch.

01:30:04.000 It's quite a bit different.

01:30:05.000 You're doing it.

01:30:06.000 You're doing it.

01:30:07.000 And so I would also, you know, growing up I played stickball in the street in New York.

01:30:14.000 And so you're using basically a broom handle.

01:30:17.000 And so when the first time you play baseball officially, it's like, whoa, I've got this huge bat.

01:30:26.000 And so stickball players tend to transfer very well to baseball when you're a kid.

01:30:32.000 Yeah.

01:30:32.000 Because your instrument is bigger to hit the ball with.

01:30:35.000 Did you read the talent code?

01:30:35.000 No.

01:30:36.000 Daniel Coyles?

01:30:37.000 No.

01:30:37.000 One of the interesting parts about it is Brazilian soccer players, how good they are.

01:30:42.000 And he attributes to a different game that they play with a heavier ball that they do indoors.

01:30:47.000 Yeah.

01:30:48.000 It's a small, heavy ball.

01:30:49.000 And because they do it in tight quarters, it involves incredibly fast footwork and movement.

01:30:56.000 And then these guys take that footwork and movement and it translates amazingly well to an open soccer field.

01:31:03.000 I wonder if they calculated that because what you would do is, let's say the ball weighs twice as much, then it would only go half as far when you kicked it.

01:31:10.000 So then you make a field half as large.

01:31:13.000 I don't think they did calculate.

01:31:14.000 And then you could reproduce almost all of the dynamics of the soccer game.

01:31:18.000 I think it was based on just trying to play a game in close quarters.

01:31:21.000 Like how far are you going to throw it in?

01:31:22.000 If the ball's twice as heavy, you throw it half as far.

01:31:26.000 The field is half the size.

01:31:27.000 Right.

01:31:28.000 That makes sense.

01:31:28.000 And then you have a mini game, basically, if you do it right.

01:31:30.000 That makes sense.

01:31:31.000 By the way, there's a whole fun exercise you can do playing sports on other planets with different gravities.

01:31:36.000 It's a very, very fun thing to do. 0.99

01:31:38.000 If you're a dork. 0.98

01:31:40.000 Sorry. 0.98

01:31:42.000 You know, it's funny.

01:31:43.000 Occasionally I'll tweet something and people say dork and I say, yeah, thanks for the compliment. 0.91

01:31:49.000 Nerd is okay. 0.94

01:31:51.000 Nerd used to be a bad thing. 0.91

01:31:53.000 It used to be. 0.98

01:31:54.000 Take dork as well? 0.98

01:31:55.000 You'd give wedgies to the nerds. 1.00

01:31:56.000 Yeah.

01:31:57.000 Well, the nerds would also be the people that were like, but now a nerd is like you can be a science nerd and people like it.

01:32:05.000 It's like, oh, yeah.

01:32:05.000 I'm an old movie nerd.

01:32:07.000 You can say that.

01:32:08.000 Yeah, or movie geek.

01:32:09.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.90

01:32:09.000 So I'm taking dork. 0.90

01:32:11.000 Okay. 0.99

01:32:11.000 Geek and dork and nerd. 0.99

01:32:13.000 Yeah, take them. 0.99

01:32:14.000 Did I tell you?

01:32:14.000 I must have told you this last time I was on your show.

01:32:17.000 When I was a kid, I was bigger than other kids.

01:32:20.000 I was always one of the tallest two kids in the class.

01:32:24.000 Out of 30, so I was bigger than others in the day.

01:32:29.000 And I was also physically fit and physically active, athletic.

01:32:35.000 But I was squarely in the geek camp, okay?

01:32:40.000 I had my slide rule back in the day, walking down the corridor.

01:32:45.000 But you were also wrestling.

01:32:47.000 I was captain of my high school's wrestling team. 1.00

01:32:48.000 So I was a geek person who could actually kick your ass, okay? 0.99

01:32:53.000 And I saw how my fellow geeks, because that's the community that I associated with, card carrying, were treated by the football quarterback and the popular kids and the kids who are all beautiful and the ones who... 0.99

01:33:05.000 And I imagined my future as a superhero and Defender of the geeks.

01:33:14.000 Wow.

01:33:14.000 So that you put up a little, you know, bat signal, whatever, geek signal, put a few digits of pi, and I come flying in, and there's a wedgie in progress, right?

01:33:24.000 I would just land, and I'd grab the bully and rip them off the encounter, and I would just save the day.

01:33:33.000 This is my superhero.

01:33:34.000 It's always the football players, right?

01:33:35.000 Always.

01:33:36.000 Because I think they're rewarded for...

01:33:39.000 Violence.

01:33:39.000 For violence.

01:33:40.000 They also have brain damage.

01:33:42.000 As we've come to discover. 0.99

01:33:43.000 How fucked up is that? 0.99

01:33:44.000 You find it out of high school kids. 1.00

01:33:46.000 Right, right.

01:33:46.000 That literally across the board, the majority of people who play football have CTE. Right.

01:33:51.000 As far down as seventh grade.

01:33:54.000 Yeah.

01:33:55.000 What?

01:33:56.000 Yeah, CTE, remind me, that stands for...

01:33:58.000 Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy...

01:34:02.000 Encephalopathy...

01:34:04.000 Dot, dot, dot.

01:34:05.000 Yeah.

01:34:06.000 Encephalopathy...

01:34:09.000 Say it like Mike Tyson.

01:34:11.000 So let me tell you that story about Christopher Columbus.

01:34:14.000 Please. 0.99

01:34:15.000 The dick story. 0.99

01:34:16.000 No, no, I already told you the dick story. 0.99

01:34:18.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:34:18.000 No, let me tell you just something else about him. 0.97

01:34:21.000 Okay.

01:34:21.000 I think him coming to America was the most significant thing to ever happen in our species.

01:34:31.000 Whoa.

01:34:34.000 Silence.

01:34:37.000 Not internet porn?

01:34:38.000 No.

01:34:40.000 No, that's just porn in another medium.

01:34:42.000 Right.

01:34:44.000 Wow.

01:34:46.000 Yeah.

01:34:46.000 So, yeah, internet porn is just a matter of degree, not a matter of does it exist or does it not.

01:34:52.000 Right.

01:34:52.000 Okay.

01:34:53.000 I think it was the most significant event to happen in our species.

01:34:56.000 Kind of amazing when you stop and think about the fact that at that point in time, other than the Native Americans who lived here who were living a nomadic tribal existence, Very few people that had the wheel, that had firearms, 0.52

01:35:12.000 that had all these things that had already been achieved in the rest of the world had made their way to this place.

01:35:17.000 So now watch.

01:35:17.000 Okay.

01:35:18.000 Here's how it worked.

01:35:19.000 Right.

01:35:21.000 So I presume that you have some skepticism of this claim, as most people would, especially the Columbus haters who are out there.

01:35:30.000 I don't really have any skepticism about it to be honest with you.

01:35:32.000 It makes sense.

01:35:33.000 Okay.

01:35:33.000 So let me describe to you why I think this is true.

01:35:36.000 Okay.

01:35:37.000 And then you can tell me whether you agree or not.

01:35:39.000 All right.

01:35:41.000 We are hunter-gatherers.

01:35:44.000 We haven't settled down yet.

01:35:45.000 Early humans.

01:35:47.000 And we're basically wandering.

01:35:51.000 We're following the herds.

01:35:52.000 All right.

01:35:54.000 And then the ice age hits.

01:35:56.000 Well, what is an ice age?

01:35:59.000 An ice age means it is so cold that when the moisture evaporates from the oceans, goes to the clouds, the clouds go over the land, it doesn't rain, it snows.

01:36:13.000 And the snow falls and then it stays.

01:36:18.000 So the water that had lifted up from the ocean does not return to the ocean.

01:36:24.000 It accumulates on the land.

01:36:26.000 And this accumulation, when it's significant and sustained, we call glaciers.

01:36:33.000 Glaciers is not itself a snowfall.

01:36:36.000 It is compressed snow that's basically changed state into this ice river that flows very slowly back to the ocean.

01:36:48.000 But the oceans are getting drained faster than they're getting replenished.

01:36:52.000 So during the Ice Age, the ocean levels dropped.

01:36:57.000 Exposing the Bering Strait land bridge between Asia and what is now Alaska, basically North America.

01:37:07.000 Our ancestors who come out of Africa go into Europe.

01:37:10.000 Some stayed.

01:37:11.000 Others kept wandering.

01:37:13.000 Some stayed low above the Mediterranean.

01:37:15.000 Others went high.

01:37:16.000 They populate Asia.

01:37:18.000 They keep walking because there's a land bridge there.

01:37:22.000 They don't even know it's a bridge.

01:37:23.000 It's just more land.

01:37:25.000 So they walk, and they enter North America. 0.98

01:37:27.000 And from there, the only way you can go is south at that point.

01:37:30.000 The weather gets a little better.

01:37:32.000 The Ice Age ends.

01:37:36.000 The glaciers melt back into the oceans.

01:37:39.000 The ocean levels rise, closing the land bridge, stranding a branch of the human species.

01:37:53.000 For 10,000 years.

01:37:55.000 Those humans who made it across that land bridge and spread out into North America, Central America, South America, have only a few families as their parent genetic origin.

01:38:13.000 Some research says it's like eight family lineages populated the entire North and South American continents.

01:38:20.000 Then the land bridge breaks.

01:38:23.000 Now you have Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America, and they know nothing of one another. 0.72

01:38:31.000 Two separate branches of the human species.

01:38:34.000 The Vikings notwithstanding, maybe they found, came over, they didn't. 0.97

01:38:40.000 Even if they did, their influence was near zero relative to the Europeans.

01:38:43.000 So we're talking about influence here.

01:38:46.000 This is a branch.

01:38:47.000 Had this continued, this is how you speciate.

01:38:51.000 This is why the species on Australia, that's why you have mammals there that have pouches, all right?

01:38:56.000 No other mammals do that.

01:38:57.000 They split off and they evolve their own way.

01:39:01.000 Okay, so 10,000 years is not enough to grow three heads or, you know, 12 fingers, but our species is separate.

01:39:12.000 Now, Columbus crosses the Atlantic.

01:39:17.000 Makes contact with humans.

01:39:18.000 This is the first time that has happened in 10,000 years.

01:39:22.000 We have rejoined two branches of the human species.

01:39:27.000 We are now one common genetic group.

01:39:33.000 And that genetic crossbreeding now continues to this day.

01:39:38.000 We fly to any corner of the world and mate.

01:39:41.000 Okay?

01:39:42.000 And the mating already began immediately.

01:39:44.000 Yes, there were diseases that Columbus brought to North America.

01:39:47.000 Much written about that.

01:39:49.000 Less written is that he brought syphilis back to Europe.

01:39:52.000 First cases of syphilis of 1492. Whoa.

01:39:57.000 And then it skyrocketed.

01:39:58.000 They got syphilis from the Native Americans?

01:39:59.000 Yes.

01:40:00.000 Did they have no problem with it?

01:40:01.000 Well, I don't know the details of how the physiology of the Natives dealt with that, or whether it mutated.

01:40:09.000 There are many people who know that.

01:40:11.000 I'm not among them.

01:40:12.000 That's fascinating.

01:40:13.000 But just look at the graph of reported syphilis cases in Europe.

01:40:17.000 It all began in 1492 when he came back.

01:40:20.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:40:20.000 So, what I'm saying is, This was a hugely significant event, the rejoining of the branches of the human species. 0.71

01:40:29.000 Yeah, no, I would imagine that that makes sense.

01:40:32.000 That is the most important event then.

01:40:33.000 And by the way, Native Americans, you know this infamous problem with metabolizing alcohol, okay, with Native Americans. 1.00

01:40:41.000 You know who else has that problem?

01:40:42.000 The Chinese. 0.54

01:40:44.000 They do?

01:40:44.000 Yes.

01:40:45.000 Really?

01:40:46.000 Yes.

01:40:47.000 Yes.

01:40:48.000 So it's an Asian issue.

01:40:49.000 Well, so...

01:40:52.000 So you look at who populated North and South America before the land bridge.

01:40:58.000 It's whoever was right at the edge of Asia. 0.54

01:41:01.000 Then the land bridges.

01:41:02.000 So Asians and the natives of North and South America have more in common with each other Because of this, then most other pairs of groups you might grab around the world. 0.88

01:41:16.000 But my point is, obviously, there's a lot to blame Columbus for, but he just happened to be the guy who did it first.

01:41:23.000 Europe was coming to the New World no matter what.

01:41:26.000 Everybody was trying to find a faster trade route to the Indies.

01:41:30.000 And so if it wasn't Columbus, it would have been Arnold Schmednick, whatever.

01:41:34.000 It doesn't matter.

01:41:35.000 Somebody did that.

01:41:36.000 And the rest is, as they say, history.

01:41:40.000 So personally, I think it is the most significant thing to happen in our species.

01:41:45.000 Otherwise, we'd still be two stranded branches of humans.

01:41:49.000 It would be fascinating, though, like Australia is stranded, to see what would happen if this has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years.

01:41:57.000 If hundreds of thousands, that would have been a different story, right.

01:41:59.000 Yeah.

01:42:00.000 And your immunities would be different.

01:42:02.000 Oh, yeah.

01:42:03.000 Yeah.

01:42:03.000 Well, that's the big concern about aliens, right?

01:42:05.000 One of the big concerns is that there's some sort of a virus that you pick up from somewhere.

01:42:09.000 I think that's harder to accept.

01:42:13.000 So, for example, what are the chances...

01:42:17.000 That an oak tree would catch whooping cough.

01:42:22.000 Not so good.

01:42:23.000 We're two different species.

01:42:24.000 So viruses tend to be very species-targeted.

01:42:28.000 Yeah, but what about human beings catching...

01:42:30.000 Now, they can jump species.

01:42:31.000 Sure.

01:42:31.000 They can jump species, but...

01:42:33.000 So, does it jump mammal to mammal?

01:42:35.000 Does it jump vertebrate to vertebrate?

01:42:37.000 Mm-hmm.

01:42:38.000 So, yes, that can happen.

01:42:40.000 But the more different the life form is...

01:42:44.000 It is sensible to suppose that the less likely you're going to share the same diseases.

01:42:48.000 That's all.

01:42:49.000 But NASA, regardless, has safeguards in place in the event that that happens.

01:42:55.000 So it's called the Planetary Protection Program in NASA. It's got a whole division of NASA. It's protecting Earth from bugs that could be coming from space on our own spaceship that we bring back.

01:43:08.000 And it protects destinations from us.

01:43:10.000 There's a certain sterilization levels that we invoke.

01:43:13.000 The Cassini spacecraft, we plunged that back into Saturn in its death when we were done with it and ran out of money.

01:43:22.000 We're done with it.

01:43:23.000 Plunged into Saturn to vaporize.

01:43:24.000 We didn't leave it in orbit around Saturn.

01:43:26.000 Why?

01:43:26.000 Because it might have crashed into one of Saturn's moons that might have life.

01:43:33.000 And if someone had sneezed on the spacecraft before it got launched, we don't want to contaminate the life that we are later going to one day want to study.

01:43:43.000 So we plunged it into Saturn.

01:43:45.000 That's why?

01:43:46.000 That is why.

01:43:47.000 Because they were worried about maybe hitting Europa or something?

01:43:49.000 Once it's dead and you can't track it or guide it anymore, then it's a wild card.

01:43:57.000 Europa is a moon of Jupiter.

01:43:58.000 But Enceladus, there are other moons that have sort of ocean water.

01:44:03.000 They're water worlds, basically.

01:44:06.000 So the concern is that we would introduce life?

01:44:08.000 Suppose we did.

01:44:09.000 It crashed, and then we go back later and find life, and it has DNA just like here.

01:44:13.000 But was it our life that we contaminated with?

01:44:16.000 You don't want to confuse the future science of it.

01:44:19.000 So that's the plan.

01:44:21.000 Can you even watch a science movie, like science fiction movies?

01:44:24.000 I know you had a real problem with gravity.

01:44:25.000 Yeah, all right.

01:44:26.000 So let me set the record straight here.

01:44:29.000 Uh-oh.

01:44:29.000 Okay?

01:44:29.000 Let me just go on record.

01:44:31.000 Okay.

01:44:32.000 Okay?

01:44:34.000 I've been deeply misunderstood with my comments on movies.

01:44:39.000 Deeply misunderstood.

01:44:40.000 Deeply.

01:44:41.000 And so I've just stopped.

01:44:45.000 When was the last time you saw a movie comment in my Twitter stream?

01:44:47.000 You haven't.

01:44:48.000 You haven't.

01:44:50.000 I've kind of just stopped.

01:44:51.000 Wasn't it the Matthew McConaughey movie?

01:44:53.000 Did you comment on that one?

01:44:55.000 Oh, Interstellar.

01:44:57.000 Interstellar.

01:44:57.000 That's the last one I commented on in any big way.

01:45:00.000 And you're done.

01:45:01.000 Yeah, I'm done.

01:45:02.000 Because people then thought I was just being nitpicky.

01:45:06.000 Oh, it's not fun going to movies with you.

01:45:08.000 Why would you do this?

01:45:10.000 Tyson will just say, that can never happen.

01:45:13.000 And so my intent was...

01:45:17.000 My intent did not match how people received my intent.

01:45:20.000 My intent is, here's an observation.

01:45:24.000 That I think if you understood this, it would enhance your appreciation of the movie.

01:45:28.000 Let me give an example.

01:45:29.000 Please do.

01:45:30.000 Star Wars, The Force Awakens.

01:45:32.000 Which one was that?

01:45:34.000 That's the one that introduced BB-8.

01:45:37.000 Is that the most recent one?

01:45:39.000 No, no, no.

01:45:39.000 This is like four movies ago now.

01:45:40.000 Plus I've lost track because there's another one.

01:45:42.000 Yeah, there's so many of them now.

01:45:43.000 So the one that introduced BB-8.

01:45:44.000 Cute as ever.

01:45:46.000 Cute little fella. 1.00

01:45:47.000 And in there they have the like...

01:45:50.000 The updated Death Star.

01:45:52.000 Right.

01:45:53.000 Okay?

01:45:54.000 Remember the old Death Star?

01:45:55.000 It has enough power to destroy a planet.

01:45:57.000 And that's devastating.

01:45:58.000 This one.

01:45:59.000 It can suck energy out of a star so that the star no longer exists.

01:46:06.000 Then it could take these energy beams and kill six planets at once.

01:46:12.000 It's no longer just a one planet killer.

01:46:14.000 Six or eight.

01:46:15.000 Whatever the number was.

01:46:16.000 It was like high single digits.

01:46:17.000 Okay?

01:46:17.000 Okay.

01:46:19.000 Well, I did the math on this.

01:46:21.000 And I tweeted.

01:46:22.000 And I said, first, okay, if you take all the energy from a star, you become a star.

01:46:29.000 But let's not, maybe they've got a containment mechanism.

01:46:31.000 I'll give it to them.

01:46:32.000 It is the future, after all.

01:46:34.000 I don't think it's the future.

01:46:35.000 A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

01:46:38.000 Yeah, it's another universe of civilizations, okay? 1.00

01:46:41.000 It's a fucking mess. 0.97

01:46:42.000 But they have light speed and we don't, so it's the future of our technology, even if it's the past of our time. 0.99

01:46:50.000 Let me pause on that one.

01:46:53.000 So, you do the calculation, and I forgot the number, but I calculated how much energy is stored in a star.

01:47:02.000 That's enough energy to explode a thousand planets.

01:47:06.000 Oh my gosh!

01:47:07.000 They underrepresented the energy that it sucked out of the star.

01:47:13.000 And I thought, this could have been more badass than even they came up with in this movie.

01:47:20.000 That is the nature of my comments.

01:47:22.000 Not, could this happen, could it not happen?

01:47:25.000 Let me give you a perspective.

01:47:26.000 Okay, wait, wait.

01:47:27.000 So, 20% of people just get pissed off.

01:47:31.000 80% really like it and they want more.

01:47:34.000 But that 20%, They cut me no slack. 0.84

01:47:38.000 And I'm only doing this for people to enjoy.

01:47:41.000 And if I have that level of hate mail, I don't need to continue it.

01:47:46.000 So I just basically stop.

01:47:48.000 I'll have these thoughts to myself, but I don't have the urge to share them.

01:47:52.000 I still have the thoughts.

01:47:53.000 I've got to teach you the art of post and drop.

01:47:58.000 Okay?

01:47:58.000 This is what you do.

01:47:59.000 You post something, you know people are going to get mad, you drop your phone, and you walk away.

01:48:04.000 Right?

01:48:06.000 You gotta learn how to do that, man. 1.00

01:48:07.000 You can't be reading those fucking comments. 1.00

01:48:09.000 You're dealing with too many human beings. 1.00

01:48:10.000 No, I get that.

01:48:11.000 I get that. 1.00

01:48:12.000 But you don't because you're still changing your behavior based on morons. 1.00

01:48:16.000 Here's my rebuttal. 1.00

01:48:17.000 Your rebuttal?

01:48:17.000 My rebuttal is, if you're watching a movie that takes place in 1958, it's a period piece.

01:48:24.000 And there's a car from 1960. Oh, yeah.

01:48:27.000 Drive you crazy.

01:48:28.000 And someone who's a car expert points that out.

01:48:30.000 You say, hey, he's an expert.

01:48:32.000 That's pretty good.

01:48:34.000 Do you complain that the person noticed that?

01:48:36.000 No.

01:48:36.000 You praise their expertise.

01:48:38.000 I get mad at the movie.

01:48:39.000 If you get mad at the movie.

01:48:41.000 If you're watching a Jane Austen period piece in 1870, whenever they took place, and someone gets out of the carriage and With tie-dyed bell-bottoms, you would cry foul!

01:48:54.000 I'm exaggerating there, obviously.

01:48:55.000 Could be a top hat instead of a derby.

01:48:57.000 You would cry foul if you were a costume designer.

01:49:00.000 And we would all be impressed by that level of knowledge that you exhibited.

01:49:06.000 I am bringing a level of science to bear on a movie that is no different from anybody else's expertise who is out there that we have praised for that invocation.

01:49:17.000 Yet people are not granting me that latitude to make those comments.

01:49:21.000 I don't like these generalizations.

01:49:24.000 It is true!

01:49:25.000 No, but I don't like what you're saying.

01:49:26.000 People are not doing this. 1.00

01:49:27.000 No, a small, vocal minority that are assholes. 0.99

01:49:31.000 And those are the people that you're altering your behavior for. 1.00

01:49:33.000 That's what I think is ridiculous about this. 0.60

01:49:36.000 Most people would enjoy it.

01:49:37.000 They hear you talking about gravity and the fact that hair wouldn't do that and the space stations weren't that close together.

01:49:43.000 Right, right, right.

01:49:43.000 You can see it in the sky?

01:49:45.000 My gosh!

01:49:45.000 Yeah, it shouldn't work.

01:49:46.000 Right, right. 1.00

01:49:49.000 It's assholes! 1.00

01:49:50.000 My tweets are offerings. 1.00

01:49:54.000 The problem is you're reading responses.

01:49:57.000 That's the problem.

01:49:58.000 The only problem is you're reading responses.

01:50:00.000 What you're doing is wonderful.

01:50:01.000 You're educating people.

01:50:02.000 20% Freak out is high for me. 0.99

01:50:06.000 What the fuck is 20%? 0.99

01:50:07.000 Listen, hear me out. 1.00

01:50:08.000 I don't even believe those numbers.

01:50:09.000 Hear me out.

01:50:11.000 When it's 5%, then I take notice.

01:50:14.000 But you say 20%.

01:50:15.000 Like, what are you doing?

01:50:16.000 Calculations?

01:50:16.000 You're actually doing a...

01:50:17.000 I scan a hundred of them.

01:50:18.000 I see 20 of them. 1.00

01:50:19.000 You just run into 20 assholes. 1.00

01:50:21.000 So 20 assholes out of the millions and millions of people that follow you have decided to reach out and you're altering your behavior for assholes. 1.00

01:50:32.000 I like those quotes. 0.99

01:50:33.000 I like when you break things down, because I didn't know those things.

01:50:36.000 I like thinking about the hair and gravity. 0.99

01:50:38.000 I was like, oh yeah, that fucking shit would be standing straight up in the air. 0.98

01:50:41.000 And the only reason why I mention it about hair, because every photo of anybody with long hair, it wouldn't happen to you, but anyone with long hair in space, it's standing up on edge. 0.99

01:50:49.000 It's a completely obvious thing that was omitted from the filming of Gravity.

01:50:55.000 Yeah, but you have to have hair and makeup.

01:50:57.000 They have to have a reason to exist.

01:50:58.000 So what I might do, I might take a poll. 1.00

01:51:02.000 Fuck polls! 1.00

01:51:03.000 Stop! 1.00

01:51:04.000 I'm a servant of curiosity.

01:51:05.000 I don't want to force-feed curiosity.

01:51:07.000 You don't have to listen to your feed.

01:51:08.000 No one has to read it.

01:51:09.000 I don't want to force-feed anybody.

01:51:10.000 You're not force-feeding anything.

01:51:11.000 You're putting offerings out there, like you said.

01:51:13.000 This is not force-feeding.

01:51:15.000 You're not knocking on someone's home. 1.00

01:51:16.000 Wake up, bitch. 1.00

01:51:16.000 Read my shit. 1.00

01:51:17.000 That is true. 0.99

01:51:18.000 I'm not forcing myself on your property.

01:51:20.000 You're not doing it at all.

01:51:21.000 Put the shotgun down.

01:51:22.000 You're going to hear me talk about your movie.

01:51:24.000 Listen, man.

01:51:25.000 I said about BB-8.

01:51:27.000 First, I said...

01:51:29.000 BB-8 is way cuter than R2-D2. And I used like five A's in the way just to start a fight because that's a fun fight.

01:51:36.000 Then I said, by the way, BB-8, a smooth metal rolling spherical ball would have skidded uncontrollably on sand.

01:51:49.000 And the whole movie is moving around on sand.

01:51:52.000 Right.

01:51:52.000 Yeah, it would.

01:51:53.000 That's why you deflate your tires.

01:51:55.000 That's why you deflate your tires.

01:51:56.000 To drive on sand.

01:51:57.000 That's correct.

01:51:58.000 Have you ever tried riding a bicycle on sand?

01:52:00.000 It's impossible.

01:52:00.000 That's a good point.

01:52:01.000 And that's with rubber tires.

01:52:03.000 Imagine steel tires.

01:52:04.000 It's not happening.

01:52:04.000 You ever try running on a sand dune?

01:52:06.000 Holy shit. 1.00

01:52:06.000 Oh my gosh. 1.00

01:52:07.000 Oh yeah.

01:52:07.000 One of the hardest things you can do for exercise.

01:52:09.000 Talk about getting into shape, right.

01:52:10.000 So, it will work if you have a hard surface just below a dusting of sand.

01:52:18.000 Right.

01:52:18.000 Then you...

01:52:19.000 Of course.

01:52:19.000 Yeah, then you can...

01:52:20.000 You can dig into it and the sand offers you some resistance.

01:52:22.000 The sand then connects to the hard surface.

01:52:24.000 So, I posted this and...

01:52:28.000 People say, you're ruining the movie for me.

01:52:29.000 And then people started... 1.00

01:52:31.000 Assholes. 1.00

01:52:32.000 Again, when you say people, you're just listening to assholes. 1.00

01:52:36.000 Smart people are going to read that and go, oh yeah. 1.00

01:52:38.000 Yeah, this is stupid. 1.00

01:52:39.000 It would roll around. 1.00

01:52:41.000 Give that fucking thing some tractor treads. 1.00

01:52:43.000 You know what's actually happened as a result, I think? 1.00

01:52:45.000 I'm getting phone calls from producers.

01:52:48.000 There's a little bit of science.

01:52:50.000 We want to make sure that you don't tweet about it.

01:52:52.000 Come on, man.

01:52:53.000 That's good.

01:52:54.000 You're keeping them on point.

01:52:56.000 As you know, I might be most famous in movie commenting for the final scene in Titanic.

01:53:03.000 Okay?

01:53:03.000 I don't know if you knew about this.

01:53:05.000 What would you say about the final scene?

01:53:07.000 Okay, so we know where the Titanic sank, the longitude, the latitude.

01:53:10.000 Yes.

01:53:10.000 We know what time of day, what time of night.

01:53:14.000 So at the POV, the point of view of Rose, as she's looking up deliriously to the sky, there's only one sky she should have seen, and it was the wrong sky.

01:53:23.000 Ah!

01:53:24.000 Not only that, the left side of the sky, it was worse than that.

01:53:29.000 The left side of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right side of the sky.

01:53:32.000 Did you call James Cameron?

01:53:33.000 So it was lazy.

01:53:34.000 I called him back in 1996. I saw it when it first came out.

01:53:37.000 I noticed instantly.

01:53:39.000 Because I know the sky.

01:53:40.000 This is what I... Okay?

01:53:42.000 So, no reply.

01:53:44.000 Five years later, I bump into him at a meeting.

01:53:47.000 NASA hosted a meeting with some explorers and some scientists.

01:53:51.000 I brought it up to him, and he says, well...

01:53:54.000 At the time, I was not overseeing post-production, and that's when we added that.

01:53:57.000 I immaturely wanted him to grovel at my feet for forgiveness.

01:54:01.000 Did you really?

01:54:02.000 Yeah, I wanted him to.

01:54:03.000 But that's not what happened.

01:54:04.000 So then five years after that, I brought it up again when I bumped into him.

01:54:09.000 And then he said, you know, last I checked, Titanic has earned more than a billion dollars worldwide.

01:54:16.000 Imagine how much more it would have earned if I'd gotten the sky correct.

01:54:20.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:54:21.000 That's a stupid answer from an asshole. 1.00

01:54:24.000 He should be tweeting you. 1.00

01:54:25.000 No, no. 1.00

01:54:27.000 That is an asshole answer. 1.00

01:54:29.000 That's an ego answer. 1.00

01:54:30.000 But it's not the end of the story.

01:54:31.000 So that was...

01:54:33.000 Okay, I have nothing more I can say here because he's right.

01:54:36.000 Okay?

01:54:37.000 No, he's not.

01:54:38.000 He's right!

01:54:38.000 No, it made it a lot of money, and it would have made the same amount of money if you did that.

01:54:44.000 That's true, but that's not the point. 1.00

01:54:45.000 The point is you fucked up, bitch. 1.00

01:54:48.000 You fucked up! 1.00

01:54:49.000 Say you fucked up! 1.00

01:54:49.000 Don't say how much money it made. 1.00

01:54:51.000 A week later, I got a phone call.

01:54:53.000 I said, hi, I forgot his name, John Smith.

01:54:54.000 Hi, John, how can I help you?

01:54:55.000 Is this Dr. Tyson?

01:54:56.000 I said, yes.

01:54:57.000 He said, I work post-production for James Cameron.

01:55:02.000 He's producing a director's cut where he's adding new footage, and he tells me you have a sky he could use.

01:55:10.000 Yes!

01:55:10.000 Oh!

01:55:11.000 So, the centennial release of Titanic, released in April 2012. Oh, yeah.

01:55:23.000 That's right.

01:55:23.000 Yes.

01:55:24.000 So, how'd you dig up that?

01:55:26.000 There it was, April 2012. I feel like you and I had this conversation before.

01:55:30.000 We might have.

01:55:31.000 We might have.

01:55:31.000 I just put this in context now.

01:55:33.000 So, he actually put it in.

01:55:35.000 So, he did come through.

01:55:36.000 So, here's what happened.

01:55:38.000 Seth MacFarlane calls me up and said, I'm making a movie about a talking teddy bear and I need to know the sky over a town outside of Boston in 1985 on Christmas Eve looking north-northeast.

01:55:55.000 You got a sky?

01:55:56.000 I say, I get back to you.

01:55:58.000 Half hour later, I send him the sky.

01:56:00.000 That was the sky that the kid wished on.

01:56:02.000 To where Ted came to life.

01:56:05.000 Wow.

01:56:06.000 So Ted had the correct sky.

01:56:08.000 And Titanic did not.

01:56:11.000 So it's good that you're correcting these people.

01:56:13.000 Ted won Titanic zero on that.

01:56:15.000 Right.

01:56:16.000 So the point is people started thinking about it.

01:56:19.000 And the highest compliment I ever got was Andy Weir who wrote The Martian.

01:56:25.000 He said to himself, while he was writing the novel, he said – because he's an engineer, so he has the fluency and he also knows how to write creatively.

01:56:35.000 He said, if Tyson were looking over my shoulder, would he tweet about this or not?

01:56:42.000 And so that put him on notice to make sure that his calculations were accurate.

01:56:48.000 And The Martian is one of the most entertainingly accurate explorations of how to invoke science to not die that there ever was.

01:56:56.000 So for me, that was a very high compliment.

01:56:57.000 And it was kind of worth it, all of the naysayers, to know that Andy Weir came through on that.

01:57:05.000 Yeah, so why stop?

01:57:07.000 I don't know.

01:57:08.000 Maybe I'll change.

01:57:09.000 I think you need to learn how to post and drop.

01:57:12.000 Just think about it like this.

01:57:13.000 Post and drop.

01:57:15.000 Boom.

01:57:16.000 Walk away.

01:57:17.000 Walk away.

01:57:18.000 Just go do something else, man. 1.00

01:57:19.000 You don't need to look at that shit. 1.00

01:57:21.000 You don't need to look at what people are going to say. 0.99

01:57:23.000 Make sure that there's no typos.

01:57:25.000 That's always a struggle.

01:57:26.000 Yeah, it is.

01:57:27.000 Isn't that amazing?

01:57:28.000 Yeah, I got fat thumbs.

01:57:29.000 Me too.

01:57:30.000 I care, though, about how people can think about what I wrote if it's a way that I had not considered.

01:57:42.000 I like knowing.

01:57:43.000 It makes me a better communicator when I'm in front of an audience.

01:57:46.000 I'll know what percent will think one way versus another and I can modify what I'm saying to be more precise and to, as we say in physics, to reduce the impedance between the signal and the receiver so that there's a better match between the communicator and the audience.

01:58:02.000 I understand that.

01:58:04.000 But if you see...

01:58:05.000 You surely have told jokes that people just took the wrong way.

01:58:07.000 Oh, yeah.

01:58:08.000 Without your intent.

01:58:09.000 The right way.

01:58:09.000 They just didn't like what I was saying.

01:58:11.000 Oh, yeah.

01:58:12.000 Yeah.

01:58:12.000 But surely, like, you see the word cuck in a response.

01:58:17.000 You know that person's an asshole, right? 1.00

01:58:20.000 There's certain things you just see. 1.00

01:58:21.000 Like, you're a cuck. 0.99

01:58:23.000 Like, okay. 1.00

01:58:24.000 I don't have to listen to you anymore.

01:58:25.000 Now I know what you are. 1.00

01:58:26.000 You're a fool, right? 1.00

01:58:27.000 You see that. 1.00

01:58:28.000 Like, yeah, you stand all the time staring at the fucking sky instead of fill in the blank. 1.00

01:58:34.000 Those are just assholes. 1.00

01:58:35.000 Well, I have pretty thick skin, so it's not that it upsets me. 1.00

01:58:38.000 It's that I'm here to serve you, not to piss you off.

01:58:41.000 But you're not there to serve those people.

01:58:41.000 I'm an educator.

01:58:43.000 There's some people...

01:58:43.000 I'm an educator.

01:58:44.000 They're looking to get angry.

01:58:46.000 I get that, but maybe I can bring them around.

01:58:49.000 I bet you can't. 0.96

01:58:51.000 The arrogance of thinking that you could fix 30 plus years of worthless shitbag living with a couple of tweets. 0.99

01:58:59.000 Okay. 0.97

01:59:03.000 And you know something?

01:59:04.000 I don't even want to take you up on that challenge because you're probably right.

01:59:07.000 I'm telling you.

01:59:08.000 You've got to walk away.

01:59:10.000 But for most people, myself included in those most people, I enjoy those tweets.

01:59:14.000 I learned something.

01:59:16.000 Here's one.

01:59:16.000 So I tweeted something.

01:59:17.000 And somebody responding to somebody else's tweet said, you know, I don't really like...

01:59:23.000 Tyson, he's so pompous, okay?

01:59:28.000 So I tweeted back to that person and I said, thanks for your note.

01:59:36.000 Could you please share with me the single most pompous thing you've ever seen me do?

01:59:44.000 And he wrote back, he says... 0.99

01:59:47.000 Damn, you would have to be reading my tweets, would you? 0.99

01:59:50.000 Now you put me on the spot. 0.99

01:59:52.000 I can't think of anything right now, but overall I really like your work.

01:59:57.000 He put nothing forward.

01:59:59.000 Yeah, that happens all the time because people are just shocked that you respond.

02:00:01.000 But plus, people can get into a stereotype mode where there's, well, that person is that and therefore everything...

02:00:09.000 Yes, they just decide.

02:00:10.000 They decide.

02:00:11.000 Yeah.

02:00:11.000 They decide.

02:00:12.000 Yeah.

02:00:12.000 Right.

02:00:13.000 Right.

02:00:14.000 Yeah, you can't listen to those people, dude.

02:00:15.000 You're too smart for this.

02:00:16.000 And other people said, look, the dude wrote a book called Astrophysical People in a Hurry.

02:00:20.000 Yeah.

02:00:20.000 How pompous is that?

02:00:21.000 That's not pompous at all.

02:00:23.000 Right.

02:00:23.000 You're a science educator.

02:00:26.000 I interviewed on StarTalk.

02:00:28.000 Yes, you were one of my guests, but so too was Katy Perry.

02:00:32.000 There you go.

02:00:32.000 There are people who got pissed off because she's nothing to add.

02:00:35.000 She's just popcorn. 0.99

02:00:36.000 I said, she wrote a song about bony an alien, and I wanted to find out what she was thinking.

02:00:43.000 Did she?

02:00:43.000 Did she write it?

02:00:44.000 Yeah, it's her song.

02:00:45.000 And there's a line about it, where she's making love to an alien. 0.99

02:00:49.000 So, there's always ways you can- Well, after you fuck Russell Crowe a few times. 0.99

02:00:52.000 Or what's his name? 0.99

02:00:53.000 Peters.

02:00:54.000 Sorry, Russell.

02:00:55.000 I don't- Yeah.

02:00:56.000 Brand.

02:00:56.000 What is his name?

02:00:57.000 Oh, Russell Brand?

02:00:58.000 Russell Peters!

02:00:59.000 Russell, what's up?

02:01:00.000 Russell Pete is a good friend of mine. 1.00

02:01:01.000 He's like, Joe, what the fuck? 0.99

02:01:03.000 Sorry, Russell. 0.99

02:01:04.000 It's been a long day.

02:01:06.000 I'm on jet lag.

02:01:07.000 I just came back from Italy.

02:01:08.000 Oh, yeah?

02:01:08.000 I'm very confused.

02:01:09.000 Yeah, my brain's...

02:01:11.000 You're zoning a little.

02:01:13.000 Yeah, I'm just out of it.

02:01:14.000 Just completely out of it.

02:01:15.000 I'm trying to keep you awake for your audience.

02:01:17.000 Russell Brand.

02:01:18.000 Sorry. 1.00

02:01:18.000 She fucked Russell Brand. 1.00

02:01:20.000 Say it! 1.00

02:01:20.000 I didn't know any of this. 1.00

02:01:23.000 They were married.

02:01:24.000 I didn't know this.

02:01:25.000 So, he's like an alien, is my point. 0.77

02:01:27.000 He's a very odd duck. 0.84

02:01:28.000 Oh, I see.

02:01:29.000 Yeah.

02:01:29.000 He's a brilliant guy, but he's out there.

02:01:31.000 He'd be like one of those guys that would be in Men in Black, aliens that they're tracking.

02:01:38.000 Do you remember that scene in the headquarters?

02:01:40.000 There's a big boy.

02:01:41.000 Right.

02:01:42.000 Undercover aliens.

02:01:43.000 Yeah, they're all aliens.

02:01:45.000 And they're like, Michael Jackson was there.

02:01:47.000 People who just, there's something a little different about them, you know?

02:01:51.000 There's people that really do believe that, that believe that there's aliens amongst us.

02:01:55.000 Again, we live in a free country.

02:01:58.000 Fine.

02:01:59.000 Well, you know what happens?

02:02:00.000 Evidence, at some point, should matter.

02:02:02.000 But you find out about, like, Russian agents that have been living in, like, New Jersey for, like, 30 years.

02:02:08.000 That's the whole premise of the show.

02:02:10.000 The Americans.

02:02:10.000 Yeah, the Americans, yeah.

02:02:11.000 Well, it's a real story, too.

02:02:12.000 I mean, it really has happened on multiple occasions.

02:02:15.000 And so they wonder, well, if the Russians want to do that, what are the aliens willing to do?

02:02:21.000 Yeah, so just find me one.

02:02:22.000 Yeah.

02:02:23.000 Maybe they are doing it.

02:02:24.000 Are you open-minded to that?

02:02:25.000 Of course!

02:02:26.000 Oh my gosh!

02:02:27.000 Who doesn't want to meet the aliens?

02:02:28.000 Do you wish?

02:02:29.000 I would love to meet the aliens!

02:02:31.000 They're going to have technology that we don't have.

02:02:33.000 I want to compare notes.

02:02:34.000 I want to...

02:02:35.000 Oh my gosh!

02:02:36.000 Oh, by the way, in the movie...

02:02:38.000 Arrival.

02:02:41.000 Which one?

02:02:42.000 The arthropod alien.

02:02:44.000 Okay.

02:02:44.000 Isn't there two arrivals?

02:02:46.000 Well, there's an earlier arrival with Charlie Sheen.

02:02:47.000 Yeah, that was a good one, too.

02:02:47.000 He played an astrophysicist, by the way.

02:02:49.000 That's a good one, too.

02:02:49.000 So this one, it's like a septopus lands.

02:02:54.000 Yes.

02:02:54.000 It's got seven- Freaky things that speak in ink.

02:02:56.000 Okay, speak in ink, right?

02:02:58.000 So they sent a physicist and an anthropologist- Not an anthropologist, a linguist.

02:03:06.000 And I tweeted, I said, you know, if aliens come, I would not send a physicist and a linguist.

02:03:12.000 I would send an astrobiologist and a cryptographer.

02:03:22.000 But then the linguists got all upset, and they started piling on.

02:03:28.000 The linguists piled on.

02:03:29.000 She's not a linguist.

02:03:30.000 She was a... 0.99

02:03:31.000 If you're an anthropological linguist, or they all are, but could you just look up the title, what her profession was?

02:03:38.000 But anyhow, so they all piled on.

02:03:41.000 But that's fine.

02:03:42.000 It's acceptable.

02:03:43.000 How many linguists are ever shown in a film?

02:03:46.000 So this was their time in the sun.

02:03:48.000 Their big moment.

02:03:49.000 So I get it.

02:03:49.000 That's fine.

02:03:50.000 But there are a couple of things.

02:03:52.000 So, for example, there it is making these circles and they're interpreting them.

02:03:56.000 But it's making them on glass.

02:03:57.000 So how do they know we weren't seeing them the mirror image of what he was trying to communicate?

02:04:02.000 That was not addressed in the film.

02:04:04.000 But, yeah, I'd want to meet the aliens, as they did there.

02:04:08.000 They brought the military, of course.

02:04:09.000 That will be a likely fact.

02:04:11.000 Because your protection is of extreme importance.

02:04:14.000 But...

02:04:15.000 This happens in all sci-fi movies.

02:04:17.000 You go up to this thing and you get lifted up against the force of gravity.

02:04:20.000 At that point, I would just put down all my weapons.

02:04:23.000 Because there's stuff going on that's way beyond your understanding of the laws of physics.

02:04:29.000 It's like pulling out your pistol and shooting at the spacecraft that crossed half the galaxy to come to you.

02:04:35.000 What are you doing?

02:04:37.000 They're clearly superior to you in ways that you don't even know yet.

02:04:42.000 So just find another way to do your talking rather than sending bullets their way.

02:04:47.000 But isn't that always the case in every film?

02:04:50.000 I mean, it's always part of the narrative is that the primitive people fuck it up for the advanced civilization that's coming here to help us. 0.75

02:04:57.000 Yeah.

02:04:58.000 It's never been good for the less technologically advanced civilization.

02:05:02.000 Ever.

02:05:03.000 Ever.

02:05:04.000 Yeah.

02:05:04.000 And going on right now currently with Undiscovered Tribes.

02:05:08.000 Not to sound pluggy, but this one of the profiles here is of Captain Cook.

02:05:15.000 Just a quick thing.

02:05:17.000 I visited Hawaii only a couple of times in my life.

02:05:19.000 One of the times I saw Don Ho in a show. 1.00

02:05:21.000 No shit. 1.00

02:05:22.000 Yeah! 1.00

02:05:23.000 Oh my gosh.

02:05:23.000 And he was like...

02:05:25.000 He only sat down.

02:05:26.000 He was like big and heavy and old and he died a couple of decades ago.

02:05:29.000 But anyhow, Don Ho, he just tells Hawaiian stories and one of them was about Captain Cook.

02:05:36.000 And someone asked him, well, whatever happened to Captain Cook?

02:05:40.000 You know how he replies?

02:05:41.000 He says, nobody's ever seen him since he's ever seen him.

02:05:52.000 For people listening, he's making things like he's picking things out of his teeth.

02:05:58.000 Nobody's ever seen Captain Cook of late.

02:06:01.000 So his rumors are that he was eaten by Pacific Island natives.

02:06:05.000 Well, that happened to a lot of pirates.

02:06:06.000 So watch what happens.

02:06:07.000 So the Brits send Captain Cook to the South Pacific.

02:06:11.000 Why?

02:06:13.000 Well, you look at his marching orders.

02:06:14.000 It's, oh, there's what's called a transit of Venus.

02:06:17.000 That's going to take place, visible only from the South Pacific.

02:06:20.000 This is where Earth in our orbit and Venus in orbit are such that when Venus passes between us and the Sun, it actually is exactly between us and the Sun.

02:06:29.000 You can watch it move, the circle move across the Sun's surface.

02:06:33.000 And did they look at it through a device?

02:06:35.000 Yeah, that device.

02:06:36.000 It filters.

02:06:36.000 We're fine.

02:06:37.000 Okay?

02:06:39.000 If you measure that, you can learn the exact scale of the solar system.

02:06:43.000 So you learn deep scientific knowledge about how far away the planets are and how far away the sun is from the Earth.

02:06:48.000 It was not known with precision before that measurement was made.

02:06:52.000 So Captain Cook goes on this voyage to do this.

02:06:54.000 Well, it's a pretty expensive voyage.

02:06:57.000 Oh, oh wait, flip over the marching orders!

02:07:00.000 Oh! 0.60

02:07:01.000 Open the envelope.

02:07:02.000 While you're there, use these new navigation techniques that use the sun, moon, and stars and map every coastline you find and bring that information back to us.

02:07:15.000 Within 10 years of Captain Cook navigating the South Pacific as well as the northern coast of Australia and New Zealand, within 10 years, Britain took control over those coastlines.

02:07:29.000 Became part of the British Empire.

02:07:33.000 Hegemony at its finest.

02:07:35.000 On the premise that he's observing something about the universe, but there was a tandem role that he played.

02:07:43.000 I did not know they knew that much about the cycles of the planets, that they could be there.

02:07:49.000 They knew accurately they could be in the ocean.

02:07:53.000 Part of the motivation of knowing any of this was navigation around the globe.

02:07:58.000 It was navigation.

02:07:59.000 How are you going to know where you are on Earth?

02:08:01.000 You can get your latitude.

02:08:02.000 That's just the altitude, the height of Polaris, the North Star above the horizon.

02:08:06.000 Measure that at night.

02:08:07.000 You can wait that long.

02:08:08.000 Where do you know where you are in longitude?

02:08:11.000 Ships would be shipwrecked.

02:08:14.000 Millions of dollars worth of commerce would be at the bottom of the ocean because they didn't know where a coastline was.

02:08:21.000 The only way you can measure coastline is if you have good navigational tools and tactics, which involves an accurate chronometer, a timekeeping device for your, and knowing what the sun, moon, and stars are doing in your sky.

02:08:34.000 So the astronomer in that day was crucial to the mapping of the Earth.

02:08:40.000 And who's mapping Earth?

02:08:41.000 Is it just geologists for fun?

02:08:43.000 No.

02:08:43.000 It is nations wielding power.

02:08:47.000 Over regions beyond their own coastlines.

02:08:51.000 I have a quote here.

02:08:54.000 That's where this quote comes from.

02:08:55.000 I got a guy from 17...

02:08:58.000 What do I got here?

02:08:59.000 1757, James Ferguson.

02:09:03.000 1757. Here's his quote.

02:09:05.000 Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful.

02:09:16.000 For by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the earth is discovered, But our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys.

02:09:29.000 Our minds exalted above their low, contracted prejudices.

02:09:36.000 So notice he lists mapping the earth first.

02:09:43.000 Then he talks about how it exalts in our grandeur.

02:09:47.000 So, yeah, it's an exercise in dominance, in hegemony, in power.

02:09:55.000 Under the guise of studying...

02:09:57.000 Well, it's not so much...

02:09:58.000 It's just they...

02:09:59.000 They did it together.

02:10:00.000 They matter to one another.

02:10:02.000 Yeah.

02:10:03.000 It's part of it.

02:10:04.000 It's part of it.

02:10:05.000 And they're using a sextant for all this?

02:10:08.000 Sexton helped.

02:10:08.000 There was an octant a little earlier.

02:10:11.000 And the Muslims used an astrolabe. 1.00

02:10:15.000 Okay?

02:10:16.000 By the way...

02:10:18.000 What's the number?

02:10:18.000 It's a third?

02:10:20.000 I forgot the fraction.

02:10:22.000 Around a half of all stars that have names in the night sky have Arabic names.

02:10:30.000 Because in the golden age of Islam, a thousand years ago, navigation was a big deal. 1.00

02:10:34.000 And they navigated using astrolabes, which is sort of the Islamic counterpart to the sextant and the octant that were used in the rest of Europe.

02:10:44.000 What does that look like?

02:10:44.000 Astrolabes?

02:10:44.000 Astrolabes are gorgeous.

02:10:45.000 Oh, they're works of art.

02:10:46.000 They're brass.

02:10:47.000 They're etched.

02:10:48.000 Can you buy one?

02:10:49.000 Do they sell them?

02:10:50.000 You can buy replicas, but you're not going to get an original one.

02:10:53.000 See?

02:10:53.000 Find Astrolabe.

02:10:54.000 Yeah, yeah, Astrolabe.

02:10:55.000 I want to see what that looks like.

02:10:56.000 Oh, yeah.

02:10:56.000 So there's a thing that hangs down.

02:10:59.000 There are different disks that you can replace depending on where you are on Earth to know where you are more accurately.

02:11:06.000 So this is all navigation.

02:11:08.000 So it was almost like chips for a GPS device.

02:11:11.000 Wow, look at that thing. 0.84

02:11:12.000 They're gorgeous.

02:11:13.000 They're completely gorgeous.

02:11:14.000 Wow. 1.00

02:11:16.000 What the fuck? 1.00

02:11:17.000 And you'd carry them with you. 1.00

02:11:17.000 If you found that somewhere, you'd go, okay, aliens have been here. 1.00

02:11:20.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:11:21.000 If you didn't otherwise know your history.

02:11:22.000 Look at that.

02:11:23.000 That is insane.

02:11:24.000 That's about the size of a heavyweight champion's buckle.

02:11:32.000 So what is that thing doing?

02:11:35.000 So, yeah, it depends on where you are on Earth. 0.99

02:11:37.000 Holy shit! 0.99

02:11:38.000 That's what I'm saying! 0.99

02:11:39.000 So we're talking about this 1,000 years ago, 700 years ago, 600 years ago.

02:11:46.000 The Ottoman Empire is spreading their influence, and they've got astrolabes. 0.99

02:11:52.000 So this is Islam.

02:11:53.000 You don't even learn about this in school because you only hear about the rest of Europe, Christian Europe. 0.98

02:11:58.000 So this mattered.

02:12:00.000 That is an incredible looking device.

02:12:01.000 Yes.

02:12:01.000 And these are dials that turn underneath one another.

02:12:03.000 It looks like a tribal tattoo.

02:12:06.000 It doesn't even look like there's a rhyme or reason to it with all the claws and everything.

02:12:10.000 It completely looks like art.

02:12:11.000 It looks like some bizarre- Or it looks like an alien- Yeah.

02:12:14.000 Yeah.

02:12:14.000 So again, if you're only listening, just Google- Astrolabe.

02:12:18.000 Astrolabe.

02:12:19.000 And look at any of the- That's a more primitive one there.

02:12:22.000 Oh, wow.

02:12:22.000 A simpler one.

02:12:24.000 And so that's 1602. So that one, that has the spirit of an astrolabe, but I don't know if they would have called that an astrolabe.

02:12:34.000 Others, they go way back.

02:12:36.000 And so the most decorated ones are the ones from the Middle East.

02:12:42.000 But anyhow, the point is...

02:12:46.000 GPS is no different from the navigation tools, in concept, from the navigation tools that Captain Cook invoked for Britain to then take control over all the South Pacific that they did.

02:13:00.000 It is where are we and do we know this information with precision?

02:13:05.000 And so, and what happens if an enemy force takes out our GPS? And we have so much dependent on it.

02:13:14.000 What are we going to do?

02:13:15.000 We've got people now working on using navigation by pulsars.

02:13:21.000 Can't take those out because those are cosmic.

02:13:23.000 They're sending highly timed pulses that reach Earth in different places on the sky.

02:13:29.000 And by measuring them, and the time delay between one and the other, you can actually localize yourself on Earth's surface with extremely high precision and without any use of satellites.

02:13:42.000 That's the future of navigation where you are insulated from a rogue nation that might want to take out your satellites.

02:13:48.000 Pulsars.

02:13:49.000 Pulsars.

02:13:50.000 And by the way, the Trump Space Force, you know, there are a whole lot of Trump haters out there.

02:13:56.000 But if you want to hate Trump rationally, you want to not hate him no matter what he says.

02:14:02.000 You want to evaluate statement by statement what he says, right?

02:14:05.000 That's what you need to do.

02:14:06.000 He says, I want a Space Force.

02:14:07.000 Well, let's think about that.

02:14:09.000 Okay?

02:14:10.000 In the Second World War, there was the Air Force, except they were not their own branch.

02:14:15.000 They were part of the Army.

02:14:16.000 It was called the Army Air Force.

02:14:18.000 And then we realized that command and control in the air needs different kinds of soldiers because they have to be pilots.

02:14:25.000 It's a different kind of decision-making, different kinds of tactical actions you would have in the theater of operations.

02:14:33.000 And so it was sensible to spawn off a new branch of the military called the Air Force.

02:14:39.000 No one today would question whether that was a good idea.

02:14:44.000 You should know that operations in space, in the vacuum of the universe, is a different regime that you're operating in from moving through the air.

02:14:55.000 Your hardware looks different.

02:14:57.000 Your strategies are different.

02:14:59.000 Your decision, your command and control is different.

02:15:03.000 So, just because it came out of Trump's mouth doesn't make it a crazy idea that you might want a Space Force.

02:15:09.000 In fact, I had proposed a Space Force in 2001 when I was on a commission appointed by George W. Bush to explore the future of the United States aerospace industry, a commission of 12. So I put it on the table.

02:15:24.000 We have Air Force Generals there, former members of Congress, people from Lockheed Martin, and People said, well, the Air Force is currently overseeing space, the United States Space Command.

02:15:37.000 So everybody was happy with it, and so I'm fine.

02:15:39.000 I said, okay, let's not worry about it.

02:15:42.000 But as long as this needs of our presence in space grows, but more importantly, the size of our assets, as long as that continues to grow, what else would a military do beyond protecting your borders?

02:15:55.000 They would protect your assets.

02:15:57.000 And our space assets by day, day by day, are growing by leaps and bounds.

02:16:03.000 Our space assets meaning like satellites, space stations.

02:16:06.000 And the value of those.

02:16:07.000 It's not just the cost of the satellite.

02:16:08.000 It's the value of the satellite to you.

02:16:11.000 Right.

02:16:12.000 The military is now creating a whole other GPS system that will be exclusive to them.

02:16:17.000 And then they're going to cede the current GPS to...

02:16:20.000 And what have we done with GPS? This hard-earned engineering and physics?

02:16:26.000 And orbital mechanics, what have we done with the GPS? We now use it to find out who you want to mate with. 0.99

02:16:33.000 Oh, someone's in your area.

02:16:34.000 Yeah.

02:16:35.000 This is Tinder.

02:16:36.000 This is Grindr.

02:16:37.000 This is show me mateable people within 20 square blocks of where I am.

02:16:42.000 That's a GPS. I don't think they mate on Grindr.

02:16:48.000 I did look up the definition of mate.

02:16:50.000 Mate implies you're making a baby.

02:16:51.000 Yeah.

02:16:51.000 Okay.

02:16:52.000 Who are you going to have sex with? 1.00

02:16:53.000 Fine. 1.00

02:16:54.000 Yeah.

02:16:55.000 So that has a certain economic value to society.

02:16:59.000 So does Uber.

02:17:01.000 So do all the things that – so does UPS tracking their trucks.

02:17:04.000 So it's not the cost of the satellite.

02:17:06.000 It's the value of the satellite to our economy.

02:17:08.000 You'd want that protected.

02:17:10.000 Makes sense.

02:17:11.000 Is there a Space Force currently?

02:17:13.000 Like, is it real?

02:17:13.000 Have they recruited people?

02:17:14.000 There's the United States Space Command.

02:17:15.000 Is there anybody who's a general?

02:17:17.000 If we make a space...

02:17:18.000 There are generals in the Air Force overseeing Space Command.

02:17:20.000 So if you're going to make a Space Force, you would offload the space activities of the Air Force...

02:17:28.000 Space Command.

02:17:29.000 ...to the U.S. Space Command primarily, to the Space Force...

02:17:33.000 And then add or subtract from that in whatever way is sensible given the needs.

02:17:37.000 If we have a Space Force, you know what I want to see?

02:17:39.000 What?

02:17:40.000 I want them to protect us from asteroids.

02:17:41.000 How about that for a defense program?

02:17:43.000 That makes sense.

02:17:44.000 But do you want the government involved in that?

02:17:45.000 Shouldn't it be someone a little bit more thorough?

02:17:47.000 That's not how it works.

02:17:49.000 It's not.

02:17:49.000 Scientists.

02:17:50.000 You made a blanket anti-government decision because you're just an anti-government guy.

02:17:56.000 That's what people say.

02:18:02.000 Private enterprise is not good at doing expensive things that have never been done before.

02:18:08.000 Right.

02:18:09.000 You need government money.

02:18:09.000 Government does it first.

02:18:11.000 Right.

02:18:12.000 Then you learn where the hostiles are, where the friendlies are, what patent did you need to make this happen.

02:18:18.000 Then the venture capitalist meeting about whether I'm going to make a buck on it has some teeth in it.

02:18:26.000 They say, how much will this cost?

02:18:27.000 Well, we know because the government did it, and we think we can do it for half that price.

02:18:31.000 Is it dangerous?

02:18:32.000 Yes, the government did this and they lost two people, but we will put protections in so we won't have that risk.

02:18:37.000 What is the return on the investment?

02:18:39.000 The government got no return because they didn't, That wasn't the objective, but here's how we can bring it.

02:18:44.000 So I'll do it second, I won't do it first.

02:18:46.000 This is how you get the Dutch East India Trading Company.

02:18:49.000 They were not the first Europeans to the new world.

02:18:52.000 Because where's the edge of the earth?

02:18:54.000 Will you find India?

02:18:56.000 You don't know any of this.

02:18:58.000 I'm screaming at you, sorry.

02:19:00.000 You don't know any of this.

02:19:00.000 Columbus does it first.

02:19:02.000 And he can tell you where there's food and where there isn't, and where they want to kill you and where they don't.

02:19:07.000 Then you hand that information to the mercantilists.

02:19:11.000 And they make a buck after the fact.

02:19:15.000 So they come in.

02:19:16.000 They come in.

02:19:17.000 Yeah.

02:19:17.000 That's how you do it.

02:19:18.000 Yeah.

02:19:19.000 That's how modern airplanes came about.

02:19:22.000 People are making planes in their garage.

02:19:24.000 The government said, this could be a cool thing.

02:19:26.000 Let's pay them and have them compete to carry air mail. 1.00

02:19:31.000 New kind of mail.

02:19:33.000 Mail delivered by air.

02:19:34.000 Oh.

02:19:35.000 Oh, that's cool.

02:19:36.000 So now I make an airplane because I want that contract.

02:19:39.000 You say, no, you want the contract.

02:19:40.000 You make an airplane that has more cargo, a better engine.

02:19:44.000 You're cleverer.

02:19:45.000 Now you just took the contract from me.

02:19:47.000 Now I make a bigger airplane because I say, oh, I see what he did there, but now I can improve on that.

02:19:52.000 Now...

02:19:54.000 Wait a minute.

02:19:54.000 I don't need to carry mail.

02:19:56.000 I can carry people.

02:19:58.000 And thus is born commercial airplane.

02:20:03.000 Government basically bankrolled it, as did prize money for accomplishing certain achievements.

02:20:13.000 Like Lindbergh, no one talks about the fact that there was cash money available to him for having flown across the Atlantic solo first.

02:20:22.000 Cash money.

02:20:23.000 No kidding.

02:20:24.000 Yeah, he did it for the money.

02:20:25.000 As most of them did.

02:20:26.000 Fly the longest, the highest, the fastest.

02:20:29.000 Each of these had money associated with it.

02:20:31.000 So this drove the marketplace.

02:20:33.000 It was not whether you could make a product out of it initially.

02:20:38.000 Because you've got to get over the early humps.

02:20:41.000 You gotta get through, you gotta know what it is that works and what doesn't.

02:20:45.000 So, is there a plan with the Space Force?

02:20:47.000 Like, are they gonna make space weapons and space ships?

02:20:51.000 There's a treaty in the 1960s to which we are signature, okay?

02:20:55.000 And I talk about it in Accessory to War.

02:20:57.000 It's, again, I hate, I feel so bad doing this.

02:21:00.000 Plug it, baby. 0.99

02:21:01.000 No, I feel so...

02:21:02.000 Let me hold it then.

02:21:02.000 No, yeah, can you hold it?

02:21:03.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:21:05.000 Yeah, I just feel...

02:21:06.000 But it's...

02:21:08.000 The unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military.

02:21:14.000 You look beautiful with that book.

02:21:15.000 Thank you.

02:21:16.000 Primarily because there's a bow and arrow here.

02:21:18.000 Oh, there is.

02:21:19.000 Being shot by Sagittarius that became a weapon.

02:21:22.000 Oh.

02:21:23.000 And a missile.

02:21:24.000 And you're a bow and arrow guy.

02:21:26.000 Oh.

02:21:27.000 Yeah.

02:21:28.000 Last I checked.

02:21:29.000 Yeah. 0.51

02:21:30.000 You've got a frickin' bow and arrow in the back room here. 0.51

02:21:33.000 Yes. 0.88

02:21:33.000 What, are you afraid... 0.88

02:21:35.000 Not a practice.

02:21:37.000 When the zombies come and they run out of bullets.

02:21:40.000 I'm pulling that sword out like the chick from Walking Dead. 0.96

02:21:43.000 It seems to be the best weapon.

02:21:44.000 Everybody runs out of bullets and the zombies are slow.

02:21:46.000 And her weapon is, in fact, a samurai sword.

02:21:48.000 Yeah, a samurai sword.

02:21:49.000 Totally.

02:21:50.000 So, what was I saying before I interrupted myself?

02:21:54.000 Space Force.

02:21:56.000 Who's paying attention out there?

02:21:58.000 Weapons.

02:21:59.000 Asteroids.

02:22:00.000 Weaponizing space.

02:22:01.000 So there's an outer space treaty for the peaceful uses of outer space.

02:22:05.000 And it was in 1967. There's some modifications since then.

02:22:09.000 But that's the basic one.

02:22:10.000 And we are a signature to it.

02:22:11.000 And so are the other major countries of the world.

02:22:13.000 Yeah, but didn't we just break out of the Paris Accord? 1.00

02:22:15.000 Break out of that goddamn space pussy shit, dude. 1.00

02:22:19.000 It's a beautiful document. 1.00

02:22:20.000 It tries to be very forward-looking.

02:22:22.000 If there's an astronaut from another country who is at risk, then you will go to help them without question.

02:22:29.000 It's very kumbaya.

02:22:31.000 Okay.

02:22:31.000 So one of my sort of, now that I'm old and tired and I just am a realist, it's Why should we promise to not kill each other in space when we are not successful at doing that here on Earth?

02:22:47.000 And we don't even promise to not kill each other here on Earth.

02:22:49.000 We don't even promise to do it here on Earth.

02:22:51.000 Who are we to say, oh, well, we'll kill each other here, but in space we'll all hold hands.

02:22:56.000 I don't have that much confidence in human conduct.

02:23:02.000 I've become cynical over my years, and I'm angry.

02:23:07.000 Demonstrate to me that on Earth you know how to not kill one another.

02:23:10.000 Then I'll believe your space treaty.

02:23:13.000 That's all I'm saying here.

02:23:14.000 Now, given that there is a treaty, it says you can't put heavy weapons in space.

02:23:31.000 My essays that I had written for Natural History Magazine.

02:23:34.000 Just give a shout out to my co-author here.

02:23:35.000 How does that work?

02:23:36.000 So the co-author sort of takes your stuff and stitches it together?

02:23:40.000 In this particular case, there are a lot of ways we collaborated.

02:23:45.000 Some of them I just dictated entire chapters to her, but leaving out certain details that would require a nitty-gritty Of sort of research just to get the right numbers and the right year and the right commander and the right this.

02:24:00.000 But I know broadly how it happened and what sequence.

02:24:03.000 And so then she would take that and shape that into a chapter.

02:24:06.000 Other places I would say, you know, this happened, this happened, and that happened.

02:24:10.000 She would say, well, that wouldn't fit the narrative as it's coming together.

02:24:14.000 Let's drop the middle one and take the other two.

02:24:16.000 And I'd say, great.

02:24:16.000 So I'd write that up and she would stitch it.

02:24:19.000 She would graft it, is a better word, into the rest of what was going on.

02:24:23.000 So this is – even though there are places here where I speak in first person, it's actually – it's a co-written project.

02:24:30.000 It's not ghostwritten.

02:24:31.000 It's not – I'm just putting my name but somebody else wrote – I mean I write.

02:24:34.000 I know how to write.

02:24:35.000 So we're co-authors on this.

02:24:37.000 But thanks for asking.

02:24:38.000 That was good.

02:24:40.000 So here's a problem that we detail here.

02:24:44.000 People say, I don't want weapons in space.

02:24:47.000 Okay, there's nothing more useless than a space weapon relative to Earth's surface.

02:24:53.000 Okay?

02:24:54.000 If you're in space, you're in orbit.

02:24:55.000 Think it through.

02:24:56.000 If I use your skull here, that's kind of cool.

02:24:59.000 Okay, if this is Earth.

02:25:00.000 Okay.

02:25:02.000 Do you have anything more spherical here?

02:25:04.000 I guess not.

02:25:04.000 I'm using your skull.

02:25:05.000 I don't think so.

02:25:05.000 Okay.

02:25:06.000 All right.

02:25:07.000 So this is Earth.

02:25:08.000 Okay.

02:25:08.000 And I've got a satellite in orbit around the Earth.

02:25:10.000 Right.

02:25:11.000 Okay? 0.94

02:25:12.000 And I say, okay, I want to weaponize the satellite, put a bomb in it, and I want to drop over some city.

02:25:17.000 Some bad person wants to make that decision.

02:25:20.000 Right.

02:25:20.000 Well, what's the city you want to hit?

02:25:21.000 Well, it's up here somewhere.

02:25:22.000 So you've got to drop it halfway there.

02:25:24.000 So you've got to – well, no, it's not just that.

02:25:26.000 These are not very high above the planet.

02:25:29.000 And so you have to, like, change the orbit to align it so that it goes over your target.

02:25:35.000 Satellites don't go over every spot on Earth.

02:25:37.000 Right.

02:25:37.000 They only go over the orbit that had been preset for it.

02:25:40.000 Okay.

02:25:41.000 Right.

02:25:42.000 We can already destroy a city with an intercontinental ballistic missile and we can aim that.

02:25:47.000 We can aim a missile to any place on Earth and it'll get there in less than 45 minutes.

02:25:55.000 And destroy the whole city with nuclear weapons. 0.81

02:25:57.000 We can already do that.

02:25:59.000 There is no advantage to putting nukes in space if that's your objective.

02:26:04.000 Not only that, suppose there's a rogue satellite and it's messing with you.

02:26:08.000 It's beaming energy particles at you and you want to take it out.

02:26:12.000 How are you going to take it out?

02:26:13.000 You're going to destroy it?

02:26:14.000 Oh, now you break it into a million pieces, a thousand pieces.

02:26:18.000 Now each piece is moving 18,000 miles an hour and put your own satellites at risk.

02:26:23.000 That's the modern equivalent to in the First World War when they said, oh, we have a good idea because we can't shoot them in the trenches.

02:26:30.000 Let's gas them out. 0.93

02:26:31.000 So they have the mustard gas.

02:26:33.000 Oops! 0.78

02:26:34.000 The wind changed directions.

02:26:35.000 And all of a sudden, you become a victim of your own weapon.

02:26:39.000 Such as would happen in space if you go in and start exploding satellites out of orbit.

02:26:45.000 So war in space is a different thing.

02:26:49.000 It's not what you think it would be.

02:26:52.000 So what would they do?

02:26:53.000 So the peaceful use of outer space treaty allows you to have defensive things in space, not offensive, for defensive purposes.

02:27:02.000 It allows that.

02:27:04.000 Treaty aside though, what could you do?

02:27:07.000 A rogue state could take out our GPS satellites and render the military blind and then you won't be able to pick up your Uber and you won't have anyone have sex with tonight.

02:27:16.000 That's the range of stuff that GPS applies to.

02:27:19.000 And so it'll affect our economy and it'll affect our security and then our Navy can't talk to the Air Force, the Air Force can't talk to it, and that would be bad.

02:27:29.000 Wars are no longer fought just by how many soldiers have you lined up at the border.

02:27:35.000 It's, what have you done strategically to render your opponent, just to weaken your opponent or render them incapable of fighting you?

02:27:48.000 This is why the attacks on September 11th worked.

02:27:51.000 Because we had a policy that if someone wants to hijack a plane, you follow their instructions.

02:27:59.000 You do not deny them their requests.

02:28:01.000 Because the assumption was that if you deny their requests, they will start harming people.

02:28:07.000 And if you follow their requests, it will delay when they harm them, if they harm them at all, and maybe everyone will end up safe.

02:28:14.000 It was not in the game plan that they would crash the plane on purpose.

02:28:19.000 Okay?

02:28:20.000 So, September 12th, you will never again be able to do that to an American plane. 0.72

02:28:27.000 Forget the extra x-rays that we're doing.

02:28:30.000 A pilot will never relinquish the cockpit ever again.

02:28:33.000 No matter who they're torturing in the back of the plane.

02:28:37.000 No matter what they're doing.

02:28:38.000 Even if they're shooting people one by one.

02:28:40.000 Because the plane going down takes everybody out.

02:28:43.000 So that was a pretty easy door to close.

02:28:47.000 Literally and figuratively.

02:28:50.000 But no one saw it coming.

02:28:52.000 Do you know what drives me crazy?

02:28:53.000 When they put that drink cart in the hallway to protect the pilot when they open the door?

02:28:59.000 I asked them about that.

02:29:00.000 So it's just to delay you a fraction of a second to give them a chance to go in and lock the door.

02:29:06.000 Right.

02:29:07.000 You have to get through them and the flight attendant.

02:29:11.000 That takes an extra second.

02:29:12.000 You can't just run in.

02:29:14.000 Plus, they don't even allow you to stand in the aisle while that's happening.

02:29:17.000 They'll tell you to sit down.

02:29:18.000 They'll make you sit down.

02:29:18.000 Correct.

02:29:18.000 So you have to get out of your thing, charge the cart, and get through the cart and the flight attendant, who will be fighting for their life at this point.

02:29:28.000 Okay?

02:29:30.000 Because the plane is everything.

02:29:32.000 Right.

02:29:33.000 Yeah, I've seen that opening, though.

02:29:35.000 You can get through there.

02:29:38.000 Those ladies ain't going to stop me. 1.00

02:29:39.000 Okay.

02:29:40.000 Nobody who really is physically capable.

02:29:43.000 So Joe Rogan has already thought this through.

02:29:45.000 It's an unfortunate thing that my mind does.

02:29:48.000 The point is, you can...

02:29:50.000 I would never do it, of course.

02:29:51.000 You know what?

02:29:52.000 I thought about, not that, but I thought to myself, the plane that went...

02:29:55.000 Because I was like, I witnessed September 11th.

02:29:57.000 It's four blocks, six blocks away from...

02:29:59.000 Six walking blocks, four blocks.

02:30:02.000 Did you actually witness the plane hit?

02:30:03.000 No, because my view was blocked from the south.

02:30:06.000 But I have camcorder footage of the explosion, the biggest explosion I've ever seen.

02:30:11.000 And by the way, one thing I noticed is that there was no shockwave.

02:30:16.000 I might have been the closest scientist to the event, so all I could do was apply every bit of physics that I know.

02:30:24.000 There was no shockwave.

02:30:25.000 I said, well, how can we have an explosion and no shockwave?

02:30:28.000 And I later learned, if you can make a deflagration wave, if you atomize fuel and then you spark it, then the flame moves across the fuel.

02:30:37.000 It's not a shock wave.

02:30:39.000 It's just a deflagration wave.

02:30:41.000 And therefore there's no shock wave.

02:30:42.000 And so windows are not blown out a quarter mile away as they were in Oklahoma City with the...

02:30:48.000 Giant bomb, Tim McVeigh.

02:30:50.000 Timothy McVeigh.

02:30:53.000 Why am I bringing this up?

02:30:57.000 What was I talking about?

02:30:58.000 September 11th.

02:31:00.000 The plane.

02:31:01.000 Oh, yeah.

02:31:02.000 So here's something I calculated.

02:31:03.000 I said, if I was in a 767 and we're about to crash into a building, if I was in the last row of the plane, how much time would elapse before the front row crumbled and it met me in the back row?

02:31:25.000 Given the speed of the plane going into the building.

02:31:27.000 500 miles an hour?

02:31:29.000 Yeah.

02:31:29.000 Well, it's probably slower than that by then.

02:31:31.000 I would say closer to 400. It's a known speed, and I don't know it, but I don't think it was as...

02:31:35.000 Because you can't turn at that high a speed, and it had to, like, turn around and aim.

02:31:40.000 I'd have to say it's about a second.

02:31:42.000 Less.

02:31:43.000 Half a second?

02:31:43.000 A fraction of a second.

02:31:44.000 It's a fraction.

02:31:45.000 So the question is, how long does it take a plane to go its own length when it's going at 400 miles an hour?

02:31:52.000 Oh, yeah.

02:31:52.000 Ten for the second.

02:31:53.000 Yeah, it's a fraction.

02:31:54.000 So it's like, that's it.

02:31:56.000 You can't even process that.

02:31:58.000 So I figured the deaths were pretty quick.

02:32:00.000 Wow, instantaneous.

02:32:02.000 Yes, basically instantaneous.

02:32:03.000 You are pulverized.

02:32:07.000 Pile of goo.

02:32:08.000 Are they planning on making spaceships that can shoot down other spaceships?

02:32:14.000 So any space wars would not be war between space and Earth.

02:32:17.000 It would be between stuff and space.

02:32:19.000 That's all.

02:32:20.000 Stuff in space, like spaceships.

02:32:23.000 Space to space.

02:32:25.000 Here's another question.

02:32:26.000 What are they going to do with all that stuff that's just floating around up there?

02:32:29.000 The debris?

02:32:30.000 Yeah.

02:32:30.000 How about another task of a Space Force?

02:32:32.000 Why don't you clean up Space Force so that we can have tourism and not risk our lives by a paint chip or, you know, going 18,000 or bolt or a nut moving at 18,000 miles an hour that'll put a hole straight through you.

02:32:47.000 Yeah.

02:32:48.000 Right?

02:32:48.000 So, yeah, I would like to see the portfolio of a Space Force, if there is a Space Force, Broadened the scope of that to include protecting us from asteroids and figuring out a way to clean up the debris of space.

02:33:02.000 Is there a concept in place?

02:33:05.000 No.

02:33:06.000 No?

02:33:07.000 No.

02:33:07.000 Boy, when you look at that map, and I know the map is not to scale, but it shows you the known satellites in space.

02:33:14.000 Oh, well, it's to scale in the sense that they're there.

02:33:17.000 There's that many of them.

02:33:18.000 There's that many of them.

02:33:20.000 At those relative distance, too.

02:33:22.000 But you can see their orbital line, so it feels crowded.

02:33:25.000 But it's so crazy when you look at it.

02:33:27.000 It's just like, it's just littered.

02:33:30.000 And we're continuing to launch new things up there.

02:33:32.000 And I joke, I say, one of the reasons why we've never been visited by aliens...

02:33:36.000 It's because they came to Earth and said, what is all that junk?

02:33:39.000 Oh, we're not risking it. 0.68

02:33:41.000 Let's go to another planet.

02:33:42.000 Yeah, if they didn't know the map of where everything was and they had to calculate their incoming...

02:33:46.000 Oh, forget it.

02:33:47.000 They'll just take on...

02:33:47.000 It's not worth it.

02:33:48.000 Yeah, I mean, when you're on your way in, you have to think about it going around in a circle.

02:33:52.000 If you were visiting another planet that had a civilization and they left a lot of crap in their atmosphere...

02:33:59.000 Well, that's not the debris.

02:34:01.000 Those are the satellites.

02:34:02.000 So if you...

02:34:04.000 Oh, no, that is debris.

02:34:05.000 No, you got it.

02:34:06.000 So the Air Force tracks debris, as does NASA. They both track debris.

02:34:11.000 And sometimes launch windows of spacecraft... 0.99

02:34:15.000 Oh, that is pieces of shit that's floating around? 0.99

02:34:17.000 Look at that. 1.00

02:34:18.000 That's crazy.

02:34:20.000 Are you scrolling through all that?

02:34:22.000 As fast as I can.

02:34:23.000 Oh my god.

02:34:23.000 That is so nuts.

02:34:25.000 We're so crazy.

02:34:26.000 And we've only been doing this for 60 years.

02:34:28.000 So you track it.

02:34:29.000 Right.

02:34:30.000 When was the first satellite?

02:34:32.000 First satellite was Sputnik.

02:34:33.000 Excuse me.

02:34:33.000 What year?

02:34:34.000 When was that?

02:34:35.000 60? 0.95

02:34:36.000 You're too far away from me to slap you. 0.50

02:34:38.000 Sorry.

02:34:39.000 What was it?

02:34:40.000 Sputnik.

02:34:41.000 October 4th, 1957. 57. The first artificial anything in orbit around the Earth.

02:34:46.000 Is that piece of shit still up there? 0.99

02:34:48.000 There was only one thing. 1.00

02:34:50.000 One thing.

02:34:50.000 Only then.

02:34:51.000 Only.

02:34:51.000 Wow.

02:34:52.000 From 57 to 2018. Right.

02:34:55.000 So it's 60 years.

02:34:56.000 Wow.

02:34:56.000 Yeah.

02:34:57.000 One thing.

02:34:58.000 That's crazy.

02:34:59.000 And now how many things?

02:35:01.000 Well, there's countless debris.

02:35:03.000 There's hundreds of active satellites.

02:35:05.000 There's thousands, if you include the dead ones.

02:35:08.000 Thousands of dead satellites.

02:35:10.000 Yeah, so we have no way to clean it up.

02:35:11.000 Maybe some big vacuum one day. 0.75

02:35:13.000 I don't know.

02:35:15.000 Space vacuum?

02:35:17.000 They'd have to be valuable.

02:35:19.000 You know, you could probably sell space debris if you brought it back to Earth. 1.00

02:35:22.000 Yeah, people are dumb. 0.99

02:35:24.000 They'd buy it. 1.00

02:35:25.000 You want some space debris in your house?

02:35:27.000 Oh, hell yeah.

02:35:28.000 I'm gonna put this over here.

02:35:30.000 Speaking of debris, speaking of debris, there was this asteroid that collided with Earth.

02:35:38.000 Over Chelyabinsk in the Soviet Union.

02:35:40.000 In Russia, sorry.

02:35:42.000 Just near the Siberia.

02:35:44.000 In the Ural Mountains, just on the coast of Siberia.

02:35:46.000 On the border of Siberia.

02:35:48.000 That was visible to everybody in broad daylight.

02:35:53.000 And you had to like avert your eyes when it happened.

02:35:55.000 And they felt a shockwave.

02:35:56.000 And the shockwave broke windows and sent 600 people, nearly a thousand people to the hospital.

02:36:03.000 What happened?

02:36:04.000 Well, because they saw the light, and they got up from their table and went to the window to see what had happened, there's a time delay between the shockwave and the light, because light travels fast and sound travels slow.

02:36:18.000 So we'll go to the windows, and the shockwave hits, and it blasts broken glass into their face.

02:36:22.000 So it was a big Band-Aid thing.

02:36:25.000 Collision that we had.

02:36:27.000 The injured people all needed basically band-aids.

02:36:30.000 Okay, no one died, but nearly a thousand people were injured.

02:36:33.000 So at an auction, by the way, that actually exploded and pieces of it were recovered.

02:36:40.000 At an auction, I purchased a piece of that meteorite, but you know what else I purchased?

02:36:46.000 Some of the shards of glass that the shockwave had broken. 1.00

02:36:51.000 What do you do with this shit? 0.99

02:36:52.000 I've got it. 1.00

02:36:52.000 It's just a habit. 1.00

02:36:53.000 I'm a part of...

02:36:55.000 It is a shot across our bow.

02:36:58.000 That's what that...

02:36:59.000 No one died.

02:37:00.000 But it's a warning.

02:37:01.000 There's no better way to be warned than to have a band-aid cover your injuries that could have vaporized you or rendered your species extinct.

02:37:11.000 What's crazy is the ones that don't even make impact and still do devastating damage like Tunguska. 0.99

02:37:15.000 Yes.

02:37:16.000 That one didn't even touch Earth.

02:37:17.000 Yeah.

02:37:18.000 Right.

02:37:18.000 It incinerated 10,000 square kilometers of forest.

02:37:21.000 Look at that hunk. 1.00

02:37:22.000 Holy shit. 0.99

02:37:24.000 Yeah, so February 15, 2013. And there is a... 0.91

02:37:28.000 It weighs over half a ton.

02:37:29.000 That little rock weighs a thousand pounds?

02:37:31.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

02:37:32.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:37:33.000 That's just a piece that made it through. 0.99

02:37:34.000 Is it iron?

02:37:35.000 Oh, the actual piece would have been about the size of this room.

02:37:40.000 So a small home.

02:37:42.000 Wow.

02:37:42.000 But that's amazing that that small rock...

02:37:45.000 Go back up to that again, please.

02:37:46.000 Look at the size of that.

02:37:47.000 That's not that big.

02:37:48.000 No, that's what's left over.

02:37:49.000 Most of it vaporized on the explosion as it came through the atmosphere.

02:37:54.000 Right, but they're saying that that piece of it weighs a thousand pounds.

02:37:58.000 Do they give the weight of it?

02:38:00.000 Yeah.

02:38:00.000 It says it weighs over a half ton.

02:38:02.000 Yeah.

02:38:03.000 Oh, a half ton.

02:38:03.000 Yeah.

02:38:03.000 A thousand pounds.

02:38:04.000 There you go.

02:38:04.000 That's crazy.

02:38:05.000 That rock is that fucking heavy. 0.99

02:38:07.000 Is it made out of iron? 0.99

02:38:09.000 Yes.

02:38:10.000 Well, I have to read that to know for sure.

02:38:12.000 But I think it was an iron meteorite.

02:38:14.000 I'll tell you something.

02:38:15.000 What?

02:38:15.000 I have a knife that was made out of a piece of meteorite.

02:38:19.000 Oh, as do I. Oh, they're beautiful.

02:38:20.000 Oh, yeah.

02:38:20.000 It's a kitchen knife that I use.

02:38:22.000 Oh, see, mine is like a Crocodile Dundee knife.

02:38:27.000 That's not a knife.

02:38:28.000 That's a knife.

02:38:29.000 But it's waiting.

02:38:30.000 I want to get someone to make a handle for it.

02:38:34.000 It's just the metal that would then get...

02:38:38.000 It's a forged metal with the blade, but then you get a pearl handle attached to the base of it.

02:38:44.000 It's a handle-less...

02:38:46.000 It's an unadorned...

02:38:50.000 A piece of metal that would become a knife you would carry with you.

02:38:55.000 But it's sharpened and shaped?

02:38:55.000 Oh yeah, it's completely sharpened.

02:38:57.000 Where's the fucking handle? 0.99

02:38:59.000 There is the metal handle. 1.00

02:39:00.000 Haven't you ever seen kitchen knives?

02:39:02.000 Oh, they're all metal.

02:39:03.000 The metal goes all the way down the center of the handle, and you screw wooden handles on the side.

02:39:08.000 So you just need the wooden part?

02:39:09.000 I just need the wood, or if I'm patent, it would be pearl.

02:39:14.000 Yeah.

02:39:15.000 Yeah, like a pearl-handed revolver.

02:39:17.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:39:18.000 A pearl pistol.

02:39:19.000 Yeah.

02:39:20.000 So, yeah, it's a part of history, and it's a reminder that if you want to think about the future of civilization, you have to include a defense plan against asteroids.

02:39:32.000 Yeah.

02:39:33.000 The dinosaurs, I bet if they could, they would have had a space program to not go extinct. 0.99

02:39:40.000 That was no shit. 0.99

02:39:41.000 They didn't know me thinking. 0.99

02:39:44.000 Now...

02:39:45.000 Is there anything that we're doing now other than occasionally looking up?

02:39:50.000 Yeah, we're monitoring and cataloging them.

02:39:53.000 Yeah, but we don't really know what to do if something happens.

02:39:56.000 Well, we know what to do.

02:39:57.000 There's nothing funded.

02:39:58.000 Their engineering conference is, how would you deflect an asteroid?

02:40:00.000 How would you destroy an asteroid?

02:40:02.000 If we see one, it's a year away.

02:40:05.000 And it's coming 100%.

02:40:06.000 It's going to hit. 1.00

02:40:07.000 Yeah, just kiss your ass goodbye. 1.00

02:40:08.000 That's it. 1.00

02:40:08.000 We would have the power to tell you when you would die and what part of Earth it would hit. 1.00

02:40:12.000 Yeah, so there's people that have very delusional ideas about what we can and can't do with asteroids, and that drives me crazy because I've heard that.

02:40:19.000 We know how to...

02:40:20.000 I've seen the engineering plans.

02:40:22.000 They look very good, but there's nothing in place.

02:40:24.000 There's Project Sentinel, you can look it up, that has tasked themselves with organizing world governments to protect Earth from species-killing asteroids.

02:40:33.000 And you need the world because you don't know in advance...

02:40:37.000 Until it's discovered what part of Earth it's going to hit and if it's going to hit in the Indian Ocean and if the surrounding regions don't have a space program, are the countries that do have a space program going to sit idle?

02:40:52.000 No.

02:40:53.000 What you want to do is you want to have a fund and every country pipes in a little bit of their GDP or whatever.

02:41:03.000 You measure it however you want it, whatever you think is fair.

02:41:05.000 Do it the way the UN does it, okay?

02:41:10.000 So there's a tax of the world relative to your wealth.

02:41:14.000 And then that money pays to save the world when we find such an asteroid.

02:41:18.000 That's how...

02:41:19.000 Project Sentinel has thought this through.

02:41:23.000 So if there was something and you have ample time, there's a possibility that they could actually implement some of these plans.

02:41:31.000 It's all about how much time you have.

02:41:32.000 Because what you want to do is go out and nudge it.

02:41:34.000 Right.

02:41:35.000 A little bit.

02:41:36.000 You just have to give it a sideways velocity relative to its path towards Earth.

02:41:42.000 And if you do that early enough...

02:41:45.000 The sideways velocity sort of accumulates.

02:41:48.000 Right.

02:41:48.000 Like a ship turning slightly over the ocean.

02:41:50.000 Over the course of time, it'll deviate quite a bit.

02:41:53.000 Correct.

02:41:54.000 So that angle grows.

02:41:56.000 I mean, it's the same angle, but it spreads out, and the ocean example is perfect.

02:42:00.000 It's a perfect analogy. 0.88

02:42:01.000 So if you do that early enough, you do it enough so that it misses Earth, and it's still out there to harm you in another day, but it won't render you extinct on that passage.

02:42:09.000 How much time do we need today?

02:42:14.000 I would say we could probably get something built in 10 years.

02:42:18.000 Oh, Jesus!

02:42:19.000 What?

02:42:20.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson, what did you just do?

02:42:22.000 10 years?

02:42:23.000 I'm looking for a month.

02:42:25.000 Oh, no.

02:42:26.000 Oh, my gosh.

02:42:26.000 So it's a year.

02:42:27.000 If we have a year, we're fucked. 0.99

02:42:28.000 The good thing about species-killing asteroids is that they're large and visible. 0.99

02:42:34.000 What about city-killing ones? 0.96

02:42:35.000 Them suckers slip through. 0.99

02:42:37.000 Yeah, they'll slip through. 0.97

02:42:37.000 Oh, yeah. 0.97

02:42:39.000 Yeah, but most of Earth's surface is not city, so it'll probably hit the ocean or land.

02:42:45.000 But yeah, if it does, it would take out a city.

02:42:47.000 Yeah, a whole city, gone.

02:42:48.000 Yeah.

02:42:50.000 Oof.

02:42:51.000 There's a branch of government, part of...

02:42:53.000 I don't know if it survived the Trump changeover, but it's part of Homeland Security, where it worries about...

02:43:02.000 Devastation to a region where the grid is taken out as well.

02:43:07.000 So you can't bring emergency services that bring either food, water, medicines, any other form of transportation or communication.

02:43:17.000 How much thought is there to putting in a more robust grid?

02:43:23.000 Yeah, what you would need is...

02:43:25.000 That's a good point.

02:43:26.000 So you need a grid that can sort of rewire itself.

02:43:31.000 Rapidly to then bring power to a region.

02:43:35.000 That's what you would need.

02:43:36.000 And they're sort of doing that now, making a grid sort of lightning proof, you know, power surge proof.

02:43:45.000 I grew up in New York City where there were a couple of very famous blackouts.

02:43:48.000 One in 1966, another in, when was it, 1978, I think.

02:43:53.000 And it was like, whoa, how is this even allowed to You don't have a backup plan.

02:44:01.000 You don't have a way to rewire this, to redirect the electricity.

02:44:05.000 So, yeah, you'd need that and you'd want that.

02:44:08.000 And I thought the new grid is supposed to have those kinds of protections built into it.

02:44:13.000 But I don't know enough about it to comment.

02:44:16.000 Yeah, what all it'll take is one.

02:44:18.000 One impact.

02:44:19.000 Oh, yeah.

02:44:20.000 One big one.

02:44:21.000 Yeah.

02:44:22.000 Takes out the grid.

02:44:23.000 Takes out the grid.

02:44:24.000 And then what?

02:44:25.000 Do you have solar power at your place?

02:44:27.000 We just put in solar panels.

02:44:31.000 You live in the city?

02:44:32.000 We have a place in the country that we escape to.

02:44:35.000 That's a good move to have that escape spot.

02:44:37.000 But you have a place in upstate New York?

02:44:39.000 No, no.

02:44:40.000 It's on Long Island.

02:44:41.000 I used to think of it as an escape because we thought of...

02:44:44.000 Getting it after September 11th.

02:44:46.000 Got it in 03, 02, something like that.

02:44:49.000 But now it's just a good place for me to refuel and do a lot of good writing there and this sort of thing.

02:44:55.000 Look out for ticks.

02:44:56.000 I know.

02:44:57.000 Oh my gosh.

02:44:58.000 Long Island's overwhelmed with Lyme disease.

02:44:59.000 They got a new tick apparently that prevents you from eating meat.

02:45:03.000 I wonder if the vegetarians bred that.

02:45:05.000 No.

02:45:06.000 Well, I think it's called the Lone Star Tick.

02:45:10.000 It prevents you from eating the meat of mammals.

02:45:13.000 Yes.

02:45:14.000 It makes you allergic to alpha galactose.

02:45:17.000 Is that what it is?

02:45:17.000 It's alpha gal.

02:45:18.000 Another great Radiolab podcast.

02:45:21.000 Yeah, I think the vegans and the vegetarians.

02:45:24.000 You think they did it?

02:45:25.000 Yeah, I think that.

02:45:26.000 You still eat fish.

02:45:28.000 Yeah.

02:45:28.000 Still eat chicken.

02:45:29.000 Not eat a mammal.

02:45:30.000 You just can't eat red meat.

02:45:31.000 It's something in red meat.

02:45:32.000 Yeah.

02:45:33.000 Yeah, so that's one of the challenges.

02:45:36.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:45:36.000 Those goddamn ticks. 1.00

02:45:38.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:45:38.000 They are everywhere. 1.00

02:45:39.000 And we looked at it the other day, because I have quite a few friends that have Lyme disease, and it's something you do keep for life.

02:45:46.000 And quite a few friends, like seven or eight, I think, at this point.

02:45:50.000 That have devastating Lyme disease, and it's all East Coast people. 1.00

02:45:53.000 Yeah, what do they do, making love in the brush?

02:45:55.000 Like, what are they doing?

02:45:56.000 Just walking around, going for a hike, you know?

02:45:58.000 Yeah, see, I'm a city person, so even though I moved to the country, I go for a hike on my deck.

02:46:03.000 Oh, you don't go anywhere?

02:46:05.000 No, no.

02:46:06.000 Just sit back?

02:46:06.000 Just look out.

02:46:07.000 Yeah, I'm cool on the deck.

02:46:08.000 But you're out there in this gorgeous country.

02:46:12.000 Don't you want to go wander around a little bit?

02:46:14.000 No, no.

02:46:16.000 That's honestly not a thought.

02:46:18.000 My wife, who's from Alaska, has those thoughts all the time. 0.99

02:46:20.000 But the power of ticks overwhelms her power of curiosity.

02:46:23.000 Those are powerful people in Alaska.

02:46:25.000 That's a different type of human.

02:46:26.000 Yeah, they're bred differently up there.

02:46:29.000 Oh, they're strong.

02:46:30.000 Those people can survive.

02:46:32.000 And they have a sense of unity up there.

02:46:34.000 It's really interesting.

02:46:35.000 That unity, I think, comes from the fact that they're all in the same risk factors together.

02:46:42.000 And if you and I have the same things that can kill us, that makes us friends.

02:46:46.000 It's also they're overwhelmed by nature.

02:46:49.000 It's like they're overwhelmed by both its beauty and just the sheer evidence that you're insignificant.

02:46:55.000 I would say they're not overwhelmed.

02:46:57.000 They are whelmed.

02:46:58.000 Ah, whelmed.

02:46:59.000 Yes.

02:47:00.000 There's the right amount of whelm.

02:47:02.000 I have a buddy of mine who lived up there.

02:47:03.000 A grizzly bear killed a moose in his driveway.

02:47:05.000 Ooh.

02:47:06.000 Like, what?

02:47:07.000 Right.

02:47:08.000 That's the kind of stuff.

02:47:09.000 What?

02:47:09.000 In the driveway.

02:47:10.000 They had to be careful, like, getting out of the house because the bear had cached the moose.

02:47:14.000 When we first went up there, my brother-in-law, my wife's sister's husband, kept a loaded shotgun over their bed.

02:47:24.000 So that when the door starts rattling in the middle of the night, the gun is in his arm's reach.

02:47:31.000 And...

02:47:32.000 That was good.

02:47:35.000 That was good.

02:47:35.000 Yeah.

02:47:36.000 Those fucking things. 1.00

02:47:37.000 You ever seen one in real life? 1.00

02:47:39.000 I mean, zoo.

02:47:40.000 I mean, captive.

02:47:41.000 Not a real one.

02:47:42.000 Real one.

02:47:43.000 There's a look they give you.

02:47:45.000 Oh, no, no, I did.

02:47:45.000 No, no.

02:47:45.000 We visited Denali Park.

02:47:47.000 But I saw it.

02:47:48.000 It's 500 yards away.

02:47:49.000 It's not any closer than that.

02:47:51.000 Denali Park, they're a little bit habitualized, too, right?

02:47:55.000 No.

02:47:56.000 That's pretty wild.

02:47:57.000 Oh, Denali Park is in Alaska.

02:47:58.000 Don't confuse it with Jellystone Park.

02:48:00.000 I'm thinking of something different.

02:48:01.000 You're thinking of Jellystone Park.

02:48:02.000 Denali Park is...

02:48:04.000 What is that near?

02:48:06.000 What part of Alaska is that near?

02:48:07.000 It's got Mount McKinley.

02:48:09.000 It's got Denali, the mountain, in it.

02:48:13.000 Oh, so where is it?

02:48:14.000 It's...

02:48:14.000 I forgot geographically, but...

02:48:17.000 That's not like near the Brooks Range, right?

02:48:19.000 No, I couldn't tell you.

02:48:20.000 I'm not mountain range fluent.

02:48:22.000 This is just the sheer size of Alaska.

02:48:24.000 When you actually look at it over the United States and superimpose it, you go, oh.

02:48:29.000 Yeah.

02:48:29.000 What?

02:48:30.000 You want to know another one?

02:48:31.000 You want to know another one?

02:48:32.000 Yeah.

02:48:32.000 The size of Africa relative to the United States.

02:48:34.000 We've done that.

02:48:34.000 Gang of times, yeah.

02:48:35.000 Oh, excellent.

02:48:36.000 Everything fits in there.

02:48:36.000 Everything fits in.

02:48:38.000 It'd be like five United States can fit in Africa. 0.99

02:48:40.000 Well, literally everything fits in there.

02:48:42.000 It's like most of the world fits in there.

02:48:45.000 The United States plus Europe, plus... 0.53

02:48:46.000 Yeah, Asia, China.

02:48:47.000 China. 1.00

02:48:48.000 Yeah, it's fucking crazy. 1.00

02:48:49.000 It's a giant place. 0.98

02:48:51.000 But what's really interesting about Alaska is how few people are there.

02:48:55.000 Right.

02:48:55.000 You know, I mean, it's such a large...

02:48:56.000 Population density.

02:48:57.000 Yeah, population density is so light.

02:48:59.000 But Anchorage is a really cool city.

02:49:01.000 Like, if you go there, you're like, oh, this is a cool-ass town.

02:49:04.000 Yeah.

02:49:05.000 Nice people.

02:49:05.000 But if you go there in the summer, bring some things to cover your eyes.

02:49:08.000 Oh, why?

02:49:09.000 Because when you go to bed at night, you're going to bed during the day.

02:49:12.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:49:15.000 So my wife said in the winter when they go to school in dark, it's not nighttime, it's just dark.

02:49:19.000 Yeah.

02:49:20.000 They don't use night and day.

02:49:21.000 It's just dark and light.

02:49:22.000 Yeah, because it's only light for a few hours.

02:49:24.000 Yeah, so that's light and then it's dark.

02:49:26.000 Did you ever see that movie?

02:49:28.000 What was it called?

02:49:28.000 30 Days of Night?

02:49:29.000 A vampire movie about Alaska?

02:49:31.000 No.

02:49:32.000 Yeah, the vampires came to...

02:49:33.000 It was actually a pretty fun movie.

02:49:35.000 I've seen like one vampire movie in my life.

02:49:36.000 You don't like vampire movies?

02:49:37.000 I have nothing against them.

02:49:39.000 You got too much smart, sir.

02:49:40.000 They don't call to me.

02:49:41.000 They don't...

02:49:43.000 You can't put that...

02:49:44.000 I don't see the romance of getting bitten in the neck.

02:49:47.000 Well, it's not romance.

02:49:49.000 It's scary.

02:49:49.000 Actually, I think the...

02:49:50.000 What's that series?

02:49:53.000 Twilight series?

02:49:53.000 No, no.

02:49:54.000 Tell me you liked it.

02:49:55.000 The other series.

02:49:57.000 Underworld.

02:49:58.000 The Underworld series.

02:49:58.000 I've seen a few of those.

02:49:59.000 Did you like those?

02:50:00.000 Those are fun. 1.00

02:50:00.000 Those are the dumbest ones. 1.00

02:50:03.000 Those are the ones that the Twilight fans make fun of. 1.00

02:50:07.000 No, I just like the fact that there's a lead woman kicking ass. 1.00

02:50:09.000 Oh, you're one of those guys. 1.00

02:50:11.000 Women who kick ass. 1.00

02:50:12.000 I get it. 1.00

02:50:12.000 Go ahead. 1.00

02:50:12.000 Do your show. 1.00

02:50:13.000 I love women. 1.00

02:50:14.000 Put on your little show.

02:50:15.000 I love when women are winning. 1.00

02:50:16.000 Yay! 1.00

02:50:17.000 Women kick ass. 1.00

02:50:18.000 No, it's just fun. 1.00

02:50:19.000 Well, then you must love Alien, the original Alien.

02:50:22.000 Yeah, that's good.

02:50:23.000 We talked about Ripley from Aliens, Corny Weaver.

02:50:25.000 She's the original female movie badass. 1.00

02:50:28.000 Well, no, no.

02:50:28.000 They go before her.

02:50:29.000 And I just reminded myself of this...

02:50:31.000 Is it Barbara Rigg?

02:50:34.000 Barbarella?

02:50:35.000 No, Barbara Rigg, I think is her name.

02:50:37.000 She was the woman in the original British series, The Avengers.

02:50:43.000 Oh, yeah.

02:50:44.000 That's true.

02:50:45.000 But that was... 0.99

02:50:47.000 Yeah, but she was wearing black leather and new martial arts and kicked ass. 1.00

02:50:53.000 Wasn't believable. 0.99

02:50:56.000 But Sigourney Weaver was believable.

02:50:59.000 Like, when she's shooting that thing, like, look, she's throwing guys in the air. 0.83

02:51:03.000 Oh, yeah, okay. 0.99

02:51:04.000 Get the fuck out of here with this. 0.98

02:51:05.000 Listen, this to me is like to you when you're making fun of astrophysics mistakes that they make in these movies about space. 1.00

02:51:13.000 This shit drives me crazy. 0.98

02:51:15.000 People just flipping people through the air and kicking them and they fly off buildings. 1.00

02:51:20.000 Stop! 1.00

02:51:21.000 You're driving me fucking crazy. 1.00

02:51:23.000 Actually, I have a tweet. 0.99

02:51:24.000 I'm thinking I should post it now.

02:51:27.000 No, the tweet's too long.

02:51:28.000 I've got to tighten it up.

02:51:29.000 Are you one of those dangerous guys that doesn't put a case in your phone? 1.00

02:51:31.000 You have the fucking escape on your phone. 1.00

02:51:36.000 Your lock screen is the Stonehenge of Manhattan. 1.00

02:51:39.000 Look at that!

02:51:41.000 Yeah, Manhattan Henge.

02:51:44.000 And you have no case on your phone, so you're a risk-taker.

02:51:47.000 No, so you can think of it as risk-taking, or when I got the phone, because I admire how thin this is.

02:51:54.000 I'd like technology Serving me.

02:51:58.000 Okay, so what I do when I got the phone, I said, let me do this with it.

02:52:04.000 Flip it around?

02:52:05.000 Yes.

02:52:06.000 And I reminded myself, why do, in the military cadets, why do they twirl their gun?

02:52:13.000 Of what possible value is this in combat?

02:52:16.000 Why do they do these things with their gun?

02:52:18.000 And then I realized, you're not supposed to drop your gun.

02:52:22.000 Ever.

02:52:23.000 Ever.

02:52:24.000 Ever.

02:52:25.000 So if you twirl the gun and you don't drop it, it means stuff can happen to you in combat and it is always attached to your body.

02:52:32.000 So when I got my phone, I said, let me just do this.

02:52:39.000 Okay, let me just do this.

02:52:41.000 If I pick up the phone and...

02:52:44.000 Drop it.

02:52:45.000 Okay.

02:52:46.000 Jesus Christ.

02:52:48.000 So when you do that, then you never drop your phone.

02:52:52.000 So it's not that I'm a risk taker.

02:52:54.000 It's that I've changed my risk to make it so low that it essentially won't happen.

02:53:01.000 And you got AppleCare.

02:53:03.000 Did you get AppleCare?

02:53:04.000 No.

02:53:04.000 You didn't?

02:53:05.000 No, of course not.

02:53:05.000 You don't get AppleCare?

02:53:06.000 No.

02:53:06.000 You're a risk taker.

02:53:07.000 First, I fixed my own damn computer. 1.00

02:53:09.000 Second... 1.00

02:53:09.000 How are you going to fix your own damn phone? 1.00

02:53:11.000 If the screen breaks, are you going to get in there with a screwdriver and pop that bitch out? 1.00

02:53:15.000 Put a new one in? 0.98

02:53:16.000 The key phrase is there, if the screen breaks.

02:53:19.000 But you're not going to drop it, so you don't have to worry about that.

02:53:21.000 I also carry relatively expensive fountain pens.

02:53:25.000 What happens with that?

02:53:26.000 I never lose them.

02:53:27.000 Oh, I see what you're saying.

02:53:29.000 If you always lose your pens, it means you're not spending enough money on them.

02:53:32.000 Right, like sunglasses.

02:53:33.000 Exactly.

02:53:34.000 I've had the same pair of sunglasses now for a record number of times.

02:53:37.000 That meant it cost you $200 to get them. 0.99

02:53:39.000 I'll fucking lose them. 0.99

02:53:40.000 They're just my favorite ones. 0.99

02:53:41.000 I actually got them for free.

02:53:42.000 Shout out to skeleton sunglasses. 0.99

02:53:44.000 Oh.

02:53:44.000 Skeleton optics.

02:53:45.000 Zeiss lenses.

02:53:47.000 Zeiss.

02:53:48.000 Powerful fucking sunglasses. 1.00

02:53:49.000 They invented the planetarium projector. 1.00

02:53:50.000 Did they really?

02:53:51.000 Yes, they did.

02:53:51.000 They make some badass binoculars.

02:53:53.000 1923. 1923. Yeah, shout out to Zeiss.

02:53:56.000 Invented it.

02:53:57.000 But I've had these same sunglasses now, I think, for like six months.

02:54:01.000 You're doing well here. 1.00

02:54:01.000 Look at these fat, stupid fingers. 1.00

02:54:03.000 So once you get that, then it doesn't drop. 1.00

02:54:08.000 So it's not that I'm a risk taker.

02:54:09.000 I've changed the risk.

02:54:11.000 So that it's low enough so that it is on par with other risks that you take routinely.

02:54:17.000 I smoke a lot of pot, dude.

02:54:18.000 This is going to drop if I keep doing this.

02:54:21.000 Also, if you pick up the phone with one hand and it's upside down, You hold it in places where the center of gravity flips it.

02:54:30.000 But you also have some sort of a skin in the back.

02:54:33.000 It's just a sector of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

02:54:37.000 But there's no texture to this.

02:54:39.000 Nothing?

02:54:40.000 It's just as slippery as it is.

02:54:41.000 Do I feel that?

02:54:41.000 Yeah.

02:54:41.000 It's slippery like anything else.

02:54:43.000 What is it?

02:54:43.000 Oh, it's a skin.

02:54:44.000 It's skin.

02:54:44.000 It's definitely more texture.

02:54:46.000 How dare you feel that?

02:54:47.000 That's slicker.

02:54:49.000 It's cover over the glass.

02:54:50.000 Okay, but that's not why it's there.

02:54:50.000 My point is that's not why it's there.

02:54:51.000 But it'll aid in the friction.

02:54:53.000 A little bit.

02:54:53.000 As a scientist, you should recognize this.

02:54:55.000 Friction is good.

02:54:56.000 Yes.

02:54:56.000 I mean, isn't it one of the things they decided to do to asteroids to change their path?

02:55:00.000 Spray some goo on them, and it'll literally cause more friction in the air and cause them to deviate slightly from their path, which over a long period of time...

02:55:08.000 I don't know where... 1.00

02:55:08.000 You just pull that out of your ass in that moment. 1.00

02:55:10.000 Yeah, there's some spray. 1.00

02:55:11.000 In that moment.

02:55:12.000 No, I read that.

02:55:13.000 That's right. 0.99

02:55:14.000 Maybe it was some dummy who wrote it and I read it.

02:55:17.000 In the vacuum of space, there is no friction.

02:55:19.000 So... 1.00

02:55:20.000 But isn't there some shit they could put on the... 1.00

02:55:22.000 If it's traveling, right? 1.00

02:55:23.000 Yes.

02:55:23.000 Isn't there something they could put on that would aerodynamically change its path?

02:55:27.000 In the vacuum of space, there is no aerodynamics.

02:55:30.000 Okay, so it's moving...

02:55:32.000 By the time it hits Earth's atmosphere, it's too late.

02:55:35.000 So there was a coating that they were planning on putting on some aspect of...

02:55:41.000 Would it be the act of putting the coating?

02:55:42.000 No, so what you would do is, you may be thinking of, there's a coating you can put on an asteroid that differently absorbs sunlight relative to the other side.

02:55:52.000 Oh, so it causes it to spin?

02:55:54.000 That can create a net vector of motion.

02:56:00.000 Spray painting asteroids could protect Earth from space rock threat.

02:56:03.000 Okay, so there you go. 0.99

02:56:05.000 Some click-baity shit right there. 1.00

02:56:07.000 That's some click-baity shit. 1.00

02:56:10.000 Okay. 0.99

02:56:11.000 Change the amount of sunlight reflected by the space rock.

02:56:14.000 But you would not do that to the entire rock.

02:56:16.000 You'd do it to a part of the rock.

02:56:18.000 Potentially nudging it away from Earth with the accumulated push provided by many thermophotons as they radiate from the asteroid surface. 0.99

02:56:26.000 Holy shit. 0.99

02:56:27.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:56:29.000 See, I didn't think that through very well.

02:56:30.000 And somehow you added...

02:56:39.000 I'm trying to flip this phone still. 0.98

02:56:42.000 My friend Andrew Santino, he carries this bitch around case-free, and I admire him. 1.00

02:56:47.000 He's a braver man than I. I sent you a list of topics. 0.97

02:56:52.000 Did we hit all of them?

02:56:52.000 Yeah, we hit all of them.

02:56:54.000 We didn't hit innovation in other countries.

02:56:57.000 Oh, here's one.

02:56:57.000 No, no.

02:56:57.000 Here's one.

02:56:58.000 Oh, we never even got into cars.

02:56:59.000 There's no flying cars.

02:57:01.000 Why there'll never be flying cars?

02:57:02.000 Yeah.

02:57:02.000 May I share this with you?

02:57:03.000 We started with this, please.

02:57:05.000 Okay.

02:57:05.000 Since we're two hours and 40 minutes in.

02:57:08.000 Is that allowed?

02:57:08.000 Oh my gosh.

02:57:09.000 Yeah, we're flying, dude.

02:57:10.000 No, but people don't have three hours, do they?

02:57:13.000 Oh, we do it all the time.

02:57:14.000 Really?

02:57:15.000 Yeah.

02:57:15.000 Oh.

02:57:16.000 Are you sure?

02:57:17.000 100%.

02:57:18.000 Yeah.

02:57:18.000 This is not...

02:57:19.000 You sure?

02:57:19.000 Yeah.

02:57:20.000 Average podcast right now.

02:57:21.000 Average.

02:57:22.000 Really?

02:57:22.000 Yeah.

02:57:23.000 Dude.

02:57:23.000 I'm honored to be your average.

02:57:26.000 The ones we've done.

02:57:27.000 We've all been close to three hours in the neighborhood.

02:57:30.000 Here you go.

02:57:30.000 Is that a ding?

02:57:32.000 Oh, it's rude.

02:57:33.000 Okay.

02:57:33.000 So let me...

02:57:34.000 I flipped it. 1.00

02:57:34.000 I turned that goddamn switch on. 1.00

02:57:36.000 Okay. 1.00

02:57:36.000 So let's go back to... 1.00

02:57:40.000 Flying cars?

02:57:41.000 Let's go back to why anyone would want a flying car in the first place. 1.00

02:57:45.000 Because they're an asshole. 1.00

02:57:46.000 Okay. 1.00

02:57:46.000 No, here it is. 1.00

02:57:47.000 They're stuck in traffic.

02:57:47.000 So here it is.

02:57:48.000 Better than everybody.

02:57:49.000 So let's watch.

02:57:50.000 Let's say there was only one road.

02:57:52.000 Okay.

02:57:53.000 Okay?

02:57:53.000 That was the width of your car.

02:57:55.000 And you're driving on this road, and there are cars behind you.

02:58:00.000 The fastest you could go on that road is the speed of the slowest car on the road.

02:58:05.000 Right.

02:58:05.000 Make sense?

02:58:06.000 Yes.

02:58:07.000 This is travel in one dimension. 0.97

02:58:10.000 That sucks. 0.80

02:58:11.000 What you really want is travel in two dimensions. 0.97

02:58:15.000 So you take the road and widen it.

02:58:18.000 Let's make two lanes.

02:58:20.000 Two lanes in one direction.

02:58:22.000 We can have two the other way as well.

02:58:23.000 That doesn't matter here.

02:58:25.000 Now you have two lanes.

02:58:26.000 So now I can go around you. 0.99

02:58:29.000 Your slow-ass car. 0.99

02:58:31.000 Okay? 0.99

02:58:32.000 Okay.

02:58:34.000 But, and that's fine, this was a great improvement on one-dimensional travel.

02:58:38.000 Now it's two dimensions, okay?

02:58:41.000 I can shift left or right, as well as move forward or backwards to move.

02:58:49.000 And the more lanes you have, the more two-dimensional that is, okay?

02:58:54.000 The 405 here in Los Angeles, what is it, six lanes each?

02:58:57.000 It's 12 frickin' lanes, okay?

02:59:01.000 You are fully exploiting the two-dimensionality of travel.

02:59:04.000 But you still have so many cars that you say to yourself, I want to bypass this traffic.

02:59:11.000 If you went from one dimensions to two dimensions, bypassing is just another lane.

02:59:16.000 But now all 12 lanes are plugged and you want to bypass it.

02:59:20.000 So you're thinking, I need to travel in another dimension.

02:59:24.000 I want to travel in the third dimension.

02:59:27.000 If I do that, I can bypass all these cars.

02:59:31.000 I want a flying car.

02:59:33.000 Yeah.

02:59:34.000 Okay.

02:59:34.000 Well, the point is, we already have flying cars.

02:59:39.000 They're called helicopters.

02:59:41.000 Well, the helicopters are originally invented for that.

02:59:44.000 They're called helicopters.

02:59:47.000 They're noisy.

02:59:48.000 They have to create a downward thrust of air equal to its own weight.

02:59:55.000 If you're going to have a flying car, that's what it's going to have to do.

02:59:59.000 They're noisy.

03:00:01.000 They completely disrupt the terrain wherever they fly.

03:00:07.000 So the issue is not that you want a flying car.

03:00:10.000 You want to travel in that third dimension.

03:00:14.000 We already do that.

03:00:15.000 How do we do that?

03:00:16.000 They're called tunnels.

03:00:18.000 They're called bridges.

03:00:20.000 When you have a huge intersection, you don't move people through one another.

03:00:27.000 You build one road over the other.

03:00:30.000 You build one road under the other.

03:00:32.000 You are exploiting three dimensions so that traffic can go in perpendicular directions simultaneously.

03:00:42.000 That's what the flying cars would have given you.

03:00:44.000 But we do that at intersections because it would be impossible to move 12 lanes of traffic through an intersection that crossed another freeway.

03:00:55.000 New York City has done this.

03:00:58.000 We do this.

03:01:00.000 You're in the streets.

03:01:02.000 There's too many cars.

03:01:03.000 You can't move.

03:01:04.000 Let's move in the third dimension.

03:01:06.000 Let's build a subway.

03:01:09.000 This sounds like a guy who's trying to sell me something that's better than a flying car.

03:01:14.000 This is what it sounds like. 0.99

03:01:15.000 You're like, listen man, that flying car is bullshit and I'll tell you why. 0.99

03:01:19.000 You could buy a flying car. 0.99

03:01:20.000 I want you to appreciate moving in the third dimension.

03:01:23.000 I do appreciate it.

03:01:24.000 The New York City subway system moves a billion people a year.

03:01:29.000 And they all go in the third dimension, beneath the ground.

03:01:33.000 Through tunnels.

03:01:34.000 Tunnels that are layered on top of one another.

03:01:36.000 Well, the New York City subway system is amazing.

03:01:39.000 No doubt about it.

03:01:40.000 How you can move that many people.

03:01:42.000 It's great, but it's not as good as a flying car.

03:01:44.000 It's not as cool as a flying car, but it's as effective as a flying car.

03:01:48.000 No, not for a person who has a flying car.

03:01:50.000 A person with a flying car doesn't have to get in line.

03:01:53.000 You don't have to get on the subway.

03:01:54.000 You don't have to have a token.

03:01:56.000 You don't have to go through the turnstile.

03:01:57.000 You don't have to deal with some guy who's rubbing his body up against yours. 1.00

03:02:01.000 Flying cars is shit. 1.00

03:02:03.000 You just fly around. 1.00

03:02:04.000 I'm just saying...

03:02:05.000 It's like a boat.

03:02:06.000 Tunnels...

03:02:07.000 But for the air.

03:02:08.000 ...and bridges are flying cars.

03:02:10.000 The beautiful thing about a boat is you just go wherever you want to go.

03:02:13.000 Now, here's the thing.

03:02:14.000 You don't have to call air traffic control and say, I'm turning left.

03:02:17.000 I would take you to another dimension.

03:02:19.000 No, someone will have to know where the hell your flying car is going.

03:02:21.000 Just the same way traffic rules matter in a street.

03:02:24.000 It's not a free-for-all.

03:02:26.000 It is with boats.

03:02:28.000 And you know what happens if a car fails?

03:02:30.000 It falls out of the sky.

03:02:32.000 On the ground it just stops.

03:02:33.000 If a flying car fails, you're dead.

03:02:37.000 I want to add another dimension to this conversation.

03:02:41.000 Elon Musk has tunnels on the ground.

03:02:43.000 Exactly.

03:02:44.000 So watch.

03:02:45.000 Here's a desk in front of me.

03:02:48.000 It's a physical desk and I have a lot of sheets of paper.

03:02:51.000 And so I lay them side by side.

03:02:54.000 I tile the desk with all my sheets of paper.

03:02:56.000 Then there's no desk surface left.

03:02:59.000 I ran out of two-dimensional space.

03:03:01.000 If I want to store more pages on my desk, what do I do?

03:03:07.000 I get one of those organizers.

03:03:10.000 I've just introduced a third dimension.

03:03:13.000 So now I could have pages in another dimension sitting above the page that was previously occupying another place that I couldn't have put another sheet.

03:03:25.000 That's three dimensions.

03:03:26.000 Yes.

03:03:27.000 Okay.

03:03:27.000 If we were two-dimensional people, we would wonder what happened to that sheet of paper because we have no access to that third dimension.

03:03:36.000 It would just left our universe.

03:03:38.000 At this point, I'd be trying to back out of the showroom and I'd say, thank you, but I'm going to go to the flying car place.

03:03:44.000 So now watch.

03:03:45.000 But look at how much you've increased your storage by introducing another dimension.

03:03:51.000 Now imagine a fourth spatial dimension.

03:03:55.000 We don't have access to that.

03:03:57.000 But we're now filling all three dimensions.

03:03:59.000 And a four-dimensional creature will say, well, just put it up in this direction.

03:04:04.000 What would be the fourth dimension in that regard?

03:04:07.000 You can't imagine it.

03:04:08.000 Because our brain evolved in three dimensions.

03:04:12.000 We can describe it mathematically.

03:04:14.000 Maybe a wormhole in Pasadena takes you to downtown LA. Boom!

03:04:19.000 So, our storage needs would be, you could open a door, put it through this portal to the fourth dimension, and close the door, and look on the other side of the door, nothing would be there.

03:04:31.000 Yeah.

03:04:33.000 Just the way on the surface of the desk, if you live in the surface of the desk, someone opens a door, they put the paper through the door, close the door, and you look around it, you say, where did it go?

03:04:41.000 I have no idea, because you can't even see, you can't even imagine that third dimension.

03:04:45.000 We cannot imagine a fourth dimension.

03:04:48.000 But if the world one day gets so crowded that even three-dimensional space has traffic, access to a fourth dimension would greatly help that.

03:04:59.000 That's all I'm saying.

03:05:01.000 Yeah, good luck with that.

03:05:03.000 Getting people to step through.

03:05:05.000 What is this, Jamie?

03:05:06.000 Some flying thing that just came out last month.

03:05:09.000 Oh, look at this thing.

03:05:10.000 Wait a minute, that's CGI. That part seems CGI, but it's actually flying over grass.

03:05:13.000 What?

03:05:14.000 It's moving it.

03:05:15.000 Look at this thing.

03:05:16.000 What is it, solar-powered?

03:05:17.000 I don't know.

03:05:19.000 It's just a trailer showing it, describing it.

03:05:21.000 Does it have sound?

03:05:23.000 Does it make sound?

03:05:24.000 You know what it looks like?

03:05:24.000 It looks like a human-sized drone.

03:05:27.000 Yes, that's exactly what it looks like.

03:05:29.000 Okay, what about something like this?

03:05:30.000 What about something like this with really powerful magnets all outside the outer edge so it repels against other drones?

03:05:38.000 You want a maglev flying car.

03:05:40.000 So if you get so close, like...

03:05:42.000 Oh, I see.

03:05:43.000 It'll be like a force field.

03:05:44.000 So you can't slam into each other.

03:05:45.000 Oh, so it'll be like bumper cars.

03:05:48.000 Yes.

03:05:49.000 But with cushions.

03:05:50.000 Yes.

03:05:51.000 Yeah, some sort of electromagnetic force field that everyone agrees that you don't have...

03:05:58.000 Ones that are attracted to each other but are opposed.

03:06:01.000 By the way, see how big that human-sized drone is? 0.94

03:06:05.000 Have you ever heard how loud a drone is? 0.99

03:06:06.000 Fucking loud. 0.99

03:06:07.000 Yeah, you can't even have a conversation underneath it. 1.00

03:06:09.000 Yeah, I got an asshole in my neighborhood that flies one around. 1.00

03:06:11.000 That's what shotguns are for. 1.00

03:06:13.000 Yeah, I wish I had one.

03:06:13.000 I've never fired a gun in my life, but the first time I ever used one, it's to shoot the drone that's going to be looking through my window at my apartment.

03:06:20.000 Oh, yeah, there's this fucking asshole in my neighborhood. 1.00

03:06:22.000 He flies all over people's yards. 1.00

03:06:25.000 But I can't uncork.

03:06:27.000 They already think I'm crazy.

03:06:29.000 There's no way. 0.99

03:06:31.000 And if I shoot it with a bow and arrow, I'm not sure I'll hit it.

03:06:34.000 By the way, did that video have sound accompanying with it?

03:06:37.000 It has a little bit.

03:06:38.000 There's music and some description of it.

03:06:39.000 Oh, there's music, but there's not the actual sound of those propellers.

03:06:41.000 You know, they have on their webpage here that it's quieter than a car on a freeway.

03:06:45.000 What?

03:06:46.000 It's quieter than an electric car.

03:06:47.000 No, it is.

03:06:48.000 At 150 feet away.

03:06:49.000 Measured at 150 feet.

03:06:51.000 That's incredible.

03:06:52.000 Because it's about the same as a car.

03:06:55.000 Well, it says electric.

03:06:55.000 Motorcycles don't count.

03:06:56.000 So they're counting that as an electric car, though.

03:07:00.000 Oh, they are, yeah.

03:07:00.000 Yeah, gasoline car is on the bottom, but is that...

03:07:03.000 But cars today are not...

03:07:05.000 But that's on top.

03:07:05.000 Wait, wait, just to be...

03:07:06.000 That's energy consumption.

03:07:07.000 I don't know if they're using the same icon to represent...

03:07:09.000 See, they're using the same icon for an electric car.

03:07:11.000 So it's the sound of an electric car.

03:07:12.000 But no, no.

03:07:13.000 So there's no engine there.

03:07:13.000 But no, don't get deceived there, because that's energy consumption.

03:07:16.000 See, energy consumption uses the same icon for electric car as it does for gasoline car.

03:07:20.000 And then down low, see, it says noise.

03:07:23.000 It shows highway, just car.

03:07:25.000 It doesn't tell you 76 dBA.

03:07:27.000 Yeah.

03:07:27.000 Which of those...

03:07:28.000 There's no way 76 dBA is the sound, because an electric car is far quieter than a regular car.

03:07:33.000 All you hear is the drone of the tires.

03:07:36.000 But what happens is, above a certain speed, the aerodynamic noise is greater than the...

03:07:43.000 So, in a landing airplane, here's what you do.

03:07:45.000 You live in LA? Go to the In-N-Out near LAX, which is right near a landing strip, okay?

03:07:51.000 Yeah.

03:07:52.000 And listen to the sound of the planes as they come in for a landing.

03:07:57.000 Most of that sound is airfoil noise, not engine noise.

03:08:01.000 Which is why you can pretty much still maintain a conversation.

03:08:05.000 You're old enough, we remember, a plane would fly overhead in a city and you'd have to halt your conversation until it finished.

03:08:12.000 What happened?

03:08:15.000 Engines got quieter and quieter which enabled people to build real estate closer and closer to airports and not have not have a sound problem It's poor Fox, but they didn't happen overnight.

03:08:25.000 It was slow and steady.

03:08:26.000 No kidding.

03:08:27.000 Yeah, I never I forgot I forgot that you had to stop talking when I remember it in fact Shea Stadium in New York City near near LaGuardia Airport The announcers had to stop any time a plane flew over it.

03:08:42.000 They couldn't announce the game.

03:08:44.000 That's crazy.

03:08:44.000 And when the Mets were in the World Series in 1969, Mayor Lindsey redirected the airport traffic to not fly over the World Series games.

03:08:54.000 Wow.

03:08:54.000 I thought that was a badass move of his, Mayor Lindsey.

03:08:59.000 Wow.

03:08:59.000 I completely forgot how loud planes used to be.

03:09:02.000 Used to be, correct.

03:09:03.000 And now it's a sound that's in the, quote, the noise of the street.

03:09:08.000 You don't even stop and notice it.

03:09:09.000 You didn't even pay attention at all.

03:09:11.000 You barely hear it.

03:09:12.000 And so next time you're at a runway, when it's landing, it's much noisier taking off because it's got to gain altitude.

03:09:18.000 But coming down, most of that sound is glider noise.

03:09:22.000 And evidence of this is...

03:09:25.000 Is the noise of air going over the airfoil of the fuselage.

03:09:29.000 You know the moment they deploy the landing gear.

03:09:34.000 Next time you're in an airplane, when they say, we are clear for landing, just listen.

03:09:39.000 Listen to the ambient sound of the plane.

03:09:42.000 Then listen to the sound after they deploy the landing gear.

03:09:45.000 It's three times as loud.

03:09:47.000 It ramps up hard.

03:09:48.000 Hard, because of the sound of the air going around something that's not aerodynamic.

03:09:54.000 The frickin' wheels.

03:09:55.000 Oh yeah.

03:09:56.000 Yeah.

03:09:58.000 I just never, for whatever reason, I never remembered that airplanes used to be louder.

03:10:04.000 Yeah, I think about it all the time.

03:10:05.000 So why can't I have a flying car?

03:10:08.000 You want the drone flying car?

03:10:10.000 Yeah.

03:10:10.000 You wouldn't want it?

03:10:12.000 That would look ugly if two of those collide in the sky.

03:10:15.000 But what about my magnet theory?

03:10:18.000 Now it's got to have more power to lift the weight of the magnets.

03:10:21.000 Solar, bro.

03:10:26.000 Plus, you get some testosterone-infused guy who doesn't want to let you ahead of them.

03:10:30.000 They try to bump you. 1.00

03:10:31.000 That kind of shit. 1.00

03:10:31.000 And then you break the propeller, and then you both fall out of the sky. 1.00

03:10:34.000 Skyrage.

03:10:35.000 Skyrage.

03:10:36.000 Oh, it's a lot of dead.

03:10:37.000 Skyrage.

03:10:38.000 We know what it'll do.

03:10:38.000 It'll cull the herd of testosterone-driven men.

03:10:41.000 Okay, but what if they do it, but the only way they work is through the same sort of Tesla system that allows them to have automated cars?

03:10:49.000 Auto, yeah.

03:10:50.000 No, if you have automated cars, you don't need flying cars.

03:10:53.000 Yeah, you do.

03:10:54.000 There's still too many of us.

03:10:55.000 No, there'll be fewer cars on the road.

03:10:57.000 What?

03:10:59.000 How do you figure that?

03:11:00.000 Oh my gosh!

03:11:01.000 My gosh!

03:11:02.000 If you have automated cars, there will be fewer cars in the world.

03:11:04.000 Yes!

03:11:04.000 How so?

03:11:05.000 How so?

03:11:06.000 Because...

03:11:07.000 Because what?

03:11:07.000 Your second greatest asset, your car, most people's second greatest asset, spends 90% of its time doing nothing.

03:11:16.000 You drive to work and it's parked.

03:11:18.000 You come home and it's parked.

03:11:20.000 Right.

03:11:21.000 90% of it's time doing nothing.

03:11:23.000 Okay.

03:11:23.000 I come to work 10 minutes after you.

03:11:25.000 A half hour after you.

03:11:26.000 An hour after you, I'm using your car.

03:11:28.000 You ain't using my car.

03:11:30.000 I'm telling you right now.

03:11:31.000 You're not using my car.

03:11:32.000 No one's using anybody's car.

03:11:34.000 I forgot.

03:11:34.000 This is L.A. This shit's not gonna happen.

03:11:36.000 Okay, for people where a car is a utility rather than something you're trying to get chicks with on the street corner? 1.00

03:11:44.000 Oh, stop.

03:11:45.000 People try to get chicks in New York, too. 1.00

03:11:46.000 Don't try to pass people.

03:11:47.000 Not with their cars!

03:11:48.000 There's a lot of people that do.

03:11:49.000 Nobody has cars!

03:11:50.000 But if you do, you're a baller.

03:11:52.000 You got one of them spots that cost you a thousand bucks a month?

03:11:54.000 Ooh, baby! 0.96

03:11:57.000 I've seen some fancy cars when I've been in New York City.

03:12:00.000 There's some fancy cars, but that's not it.

03:12:02.000 It's not 100%.

03:12:03.000 It's not 100%. 0.99

03:12:04.000 Yeah, but that's just that one stupid spot where everybody's stacked on top of each other. 0.93

03:12:07.000 You could still own the car, but you'll be relegated to a lane where you won't be able to drive as fast as the automated car. 0.93

03:12:12.000 Consider that if you're in a self-driving car and it wants to change lanes, it communicates that to other self-driving cars near it. 0.98

03:12:19.000 And other self-driving cars tell you to fuck off because you have a program like that. 0.99

03:12:22.000 No, I have a rude self-driving car. 1.00

03:12:24.000 This is a Joe Rogan upload.

03:12:26.000 You have some rude Russian bot car that's not letting anybody in. 1.00

03:12:30.000 The Joe Rogan upload.

03:12:32.000 I feel like it wouldn't change anything if there was automated cars in Los Angeles.

03:12:37.000 I really do.

03:12:38.000 I don't think there'd be any less traffic.

03:12:41.000 They're going to make a lane that'll take automated cars and it'll go 120 miles an hour and watching everybody with their wasted...

03:12:50.000 Horsepower in their...

03:12:52.000 Stuck in traffic.

03:12:53.000 Stuck in traffic.

03:12:54.000 Yeah.

03:12:55.000 I was tweeting.

03:12:55.000 I was in LA and I was in like a Prius and we passed a Lamborghini doing 40 miles an hour and that just seemed so embarrassing to the Lamborghini.

03:13:08.000 We were doing 30 miles an hour and we passed the Lamborghini.

03:13:11.000 You felt better?

03:13:12.000 No, it was like, why do you have a Lamborghini?

03:13:15.000 Because there's sometimes when there's no one on the road.

03:13:19.000 Not from what I've ever seen in Los Angeles.

03:13:20.000 You just gotta go late at night.

03:13:22.000 If you got a Lamborghini, you drive late at night.

03:13:25.000 The Lamborghini is the peacock feathers, as best as I can judge.

03:13:29.000 Have you ever driven one?

03:13:30.000 No.

03:13:30.000 They're wonderful.

03:13:32.000 It's a marvel of engineering and science.

03:13:34.000 You should appreciate it.

03:13:35.000 It's good.

03:13:36.000 Then it goes 0 to 60 in two and a half seconds.

03:13:38.000 You're still burning gas.

03:13:39.000 Oh, you don't like gas.

03:13:41.000 Not if I don't have to.

03:13:42.000 Do you prefer electric?

03:13:43.000 If you had a car, if you lived in, if for whatever reason the planetarium decided, look, Neil, you're the best ever, and we opened up the most amazing spot ever, it's in Los Angeles, California, and we'd love you to relocate and bring StarTalk over here.

03:13:57.000 Then I'd have to have a car.

03:13:57.000 If I was forced to relocate, and I had only one car, I'd get an electric car.

03:14:02.000 Really?

03:14:03.000 Probably a Tesla.

03:14:04.000 Would you get a Prius or a Tesla?

03:14:05.000 Oh, definitely a Tesla.

03:14:06.000 Yeah, you wouldn't.

03:14:07.000 Yeah, I mean, if I like, you know, their performance car.

03:14:10.000 Slice of cheese.

03:14:12.000 Nothing against Prius, I'm just saying.

03:14:14.000 No, it's an important car that set a lot of other manufacturers into motion to try to, you know, there's a dynamic. 0.98

03:14:21.000 It's a shitbox.

03:14:22.000 It's a dynamic.

03:14:23.000 Tesla's a nice car.

03:14:25.000 One thing happens and then drives something else and makes that happen.

03:14:28.000 But when you plug your car into the wall, You're not asking yourself, I wonder where this power comes from.

03:14:34.000 It could come from any one of a dozen sources.

03:14:36.000 Right.

03:14:37.000 Like hydro, solar panels, tidal energy.

03:14:42.000 It could come from nukes.

03:14:44.000 It could come from oil or coal.

03:14:46.000 It could come from any of those.

03:14:47.000 What about clean coal?

03:14:48.000 Have you heard about this clean coal?

03:14:49.000 The president's been tweeting about it.

03:14:51.000 Clean coal, all capital letters.

03:14:53.000 I'm like, whoa, I didn't know about that. 0.99

03:14:55.000 I thought it was just fucking coal. 0.98

03:14:57.000 Yeah, I don't... 1.00

03:15:00.000 Clean coal.

03:15:01.000 That's what he pretweeted.

03:15:02.000 So here's my point.

03:15:03.000 If you can power things with a choice of a dozen sources of energy, then those sources of energy compete with one another for your business.

03:15:12.000 And if the price of oil goes up, you say, I'm not going to generate power with oil.

03:15:16.000 I'm going to use the...

03:15:18.000 And I have a wind farm and I come online.

03:15:20.000 I'm going to sell you my wind energy.

03:15:22.000 And you're the power company.

03:15:24.000 You buy my wind energy.

03:15:25.000 You send that power to the wall outlet.

03:15:27.000 And you charging your car don't know and don't care where that energy came from.

03:15:32.000 Whoa.

03:15:34.000 There's a book called Turning Oil into Salt.

03:15:38.000 Look it up so we can mention...

03:15:39.000 Turning Oil into Salt?

03:15:40.000 Correct.

03:15:41.000 Why would you want to do that?

03:15:43.000 There was a day when salt was a strategic commodity.

03:15:48.000 Yes.

03:15:49.000 There was no other known way to preserve food from the autumn harvest to the spring set of crops.

03:15:55.000 So food got salted.

03:15:57.000 Okay?

03:15:59.000 There's the book.

03:16:00.000 What's the woman's name?

03:16:01.000 Gail Lefton and Corrin.

03:16:02.000 Okay?

03:16:03.000 So I'm now describing the thesis of that book.

03:16:07.000 Okay?

03:16:08.000 Turning Oil into Salt.

03:16:10.000 So here's what you do.

03:16:11.000 So we had salt.

03:16:13.000 If I took away your salt reserves, you would starve over the winter.

03:16:18.000 So everybody knew where their salt came from.

03:16:20.000 Everybody knew how much their salt cost.

03:16:23.000 Do you realize that Grant, General Grant, destroyed the salt reserves of the Southern Confederacy, knowing that that would force them faster to surrender because they wouldn't have food reserves to last through the winter?

03:16:39.000 I, growing up, did not understand the phrase, you are the salt of the earth.

03:16:45.000 Salt gives you high blood pressure.

03:16:46.000 What do you mean the salt of the earth?

03:16:47.000 It doesn't.

03:16:48.000 Stop saying that.

03:16:49.000 That's not true.

03:16:50.000 Sodium does.

03:16:51.000 No.

03:16:52.000 Yeah.

03:16:52.000 Doesn't.

03:16:52.000 Do we have too much of it?

03:16:53.000 No.

03:16:54.000 Yeah.

03:16:54.000 Nope.

03:16:55.000 Yeah.

03:16:55.000 But let's get that in a minute.

03:16:56.000 Let me finish the thing.

03:16:57.000 Too much of it.

03:16:59.000 So.

03:16:59.000 I think you have to have something wrong with you for that to happen.

03:17:03.000 So, whether it's chronic or not, I agree with you there.

03:17:07.000 If you have chronic high blood pressure, it's not just the salt.

03:17:09.000 Right.

03:17:10.000 But I can increase my blood pressure now by not peeing and taking and ingesting salt.

03:17:15.000 By not peeing?

03:17:16.000 Why would you not pee?

03:17:17.000 Well, because you retain the water and it gets pumped through.

03:17:20.000 This is what the salt does.

03:17:21.000 You retain the liver.

03:17:22.000 Let me get back to the thing.

03:17:23.000 Sorry.

03:17:23.000 We're talking about energy.

03:17:25.000 Okay.

03:17:26.000 So, I said salt to the earth.

03:17:28.000 Why is that a compliment?

03:17:29.000 I remember thinking to myself.

03:17:30.000 But there was a day when salt really mattered.

03:17:33.000 Okay?

03:17:34.000 All right.

03:17:35.000 So, what happens?

03:17:40.000 The 19th century, we figure out how to can foods.

03:17:45.000 You can have berries and we can them.

03:17:48.000 You seal, you can make preserves.

03:17:51.000 The name of the food is what it is.

03:17:53.000 It's preserved.

03:17:55.000 Okay, so now that's another way to protect your food, to have it last through times when you don't have crops.

03:18:05.000 Wait a minute.

03:18:06.000 Refrigeration!

03:18:07.000 We have electricity!

03:18:08.000 I can refrigerate!

03:18:10.000 Wait a minute.

03:18:12.000 I can now freeze food!

03:18:16.000 I got a half dozen ways I can eat over the winter and only one of them is salt.

03:18:23.000 So now, salt has lost its strategic value.

03:18:27.000 Lost its mojo.

03:18:29.000 Lost its mojo.

03:18:30.000 It's still there.

03:18:31.000 We still eat salted foods as a flavor.

03:18:35.000 But it's a different thing now.

03:18:36.000 Culture is a different thing now.

03:18:37.000 It's a matter of choice, not a matter of necessity.

03:18:40.000 A lot of great foods came out of that.

03:18:42.000 You know, the salted pork and the bacon and the very tasty foods came out of that movement.

03:18:47.000 Okay.

03:18:48.000 So, right now...

03:18:50.000 When you buy salt, do you know where it came from?

03:18:52.000 No.

03:18:53.000 Unless you get Hawaiian salt.

03:18:54.000 Unless you get gourmet salt from Whole Foods.

03:18:56.000 You're just buying Morton salt.

03:18:58.000 Do you know where it came from?

03:18:59.000 No.

03:18:59.000 Do you remember how much it cost?

03:19:01.000 No.

03:19:02.000 It's too cheap for you to even remember that.

03:19:05.000 Okay.

03:19:06.000 If you're going to turn oil into salt, what you're doing is you're turning energy into salt.

03:19:13.000 That's the value of a plug in the wall.

03:19:16.000 Design a car that can run on five different kinds of energy.

03:19:20.000 Then oil has to compete with the other kinds of energy.

03:19:23.000 Oh, I see what you're saying.

03:19:24.000 So have an engine that works on hydrogen?

03:19:27.000 Correct.

03:19:28.000 Fuel cells, batteries.

03:19:31.000 So they have hybrids now that work on two different things. 0.97

03:19:34.000 It's a start.

03:19:35.000 But my point is, if you do that, then we no longer fight wars for oil.

03:19:44.000 What do we fight for now?

03:19:46.000 Maybe you don't fight.

03:19:47.000 For freedom?

03:19:48.000 How about freedom, bro?

03:19:50.000 Freedom isn't free.

03:19:53.000 Freedom isn't free.

03:19:54.000 We just did three hours.

03:19:56.000 Three hours.

03:19:57.000 Isn't it crazy how time flies by?

03:20:00.000 Dude.

03:20:01.000 Astrophysics for people in a hurry.

03:20:03.000 This is old.

03:20:04.000 That's the old one still on the New York Times bestseller list.

03:20:08.000 Crazy fact.

03:20:09.000 67 weeks.

03:20:10.000 67 weeks.

03:20:11.000 Crazy fact.

03:20:13.000 The unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military.

03:20:16.000 That's not even out yet.

03:20:17.000 Accessory to war.

03:20:18.000 Of course you can pre-order, but it's not out yet.

03:20:20.000 It's not out yet.

03:20:21.000 They like it if you pre-order so they know how to print in the thing.

03:20:23.000 I got it right here in my greasy hands.

03:20:25.000 Look at that.

03:20:26.000 That's if you're not in a hurry.

03:20:27.000 I'm learning some things that you're not.

03:20:28.000 Look, I'm reading it.

03:20:30.000 Don't buy this book if you're not in a hurry.

03:20:32.000 Yeah, this is a long-form book, ladies and gentlemen.

03:20:35.000 You got to do some thinking.

03:20:36.000 There's no pictures.

03:20:37.000 I just checked.

03:20:38.000 That's why you were thumbing it?

03:20:40.000 Never know.

03:20:42.000 Neil deGrasse Tyson, ladies and gentlemen.

03:20:44.000 Oh, StarTalk Radio.

03:20:45.000 It's a podcast.

03:20:47.000 It's also on Nat Geo.

03:20:48.000 Nat Geo as well.

03:20:50.000 It's Sirius XM, Channel 121. The Insight Channel, I might add.

03:20:56.000 And Cosmos.

03:20:56.000 Look for Cosmos in the spring.

03:20:58.000 Beautiful.

03:20:58.000 The date isn't announced yet.

03:20:59.000 Thank you, sir.

03:21:00.000 Always a pleasure.

03:21:01.000 Love you, man.

03:21:02.000 Love you too, brother.

03:21:02.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 22, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1159 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

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