The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1347 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

00:00:05.000 Hello.

00:00:05.000 Joe.

00:00:06.000 What's going on, man?

00:00:07.000 Man.

00:00:07.000 Good to see you.

00:00:08.000 Thanks, thanks.

00:00:08.000 I feel a little overdressed.

00:00:09.000 Sorry about this.

00:00:10.000 You look good.

00:00:11.000 Oh, look at that.

00:00:12.000 A little bit of Starry Night there.

00:00:14.000 Yeah, you're really into that, huh?

00:00:15.000 Yeah, I got...

00:00:16.000 That's what's on your phone as well.

00:00:18.000 So you remembered, yeah.

00:00:19.000 Yeah, it's on the phone.

00:00:22.000 Starry Night.

00:00:22.000 You know what I like about Starry Night?

00:00:24.000 It's not what Van Gogh saw that night.

00:00:28.000 It's what he felt.

00:00:30.000 How do you know what he felt?

00:00:33.000 Oh, okay.

00:00:49.000 Hmm.

00:00:50.000 Okay.

00:00:51.000 So even photographs that take you to a slightly other kind of dimension as you gaze upon them, it's more than what was actually going on at the time.

00:01:00.000 And that's art taken to the craft of photography.

00:01:04.000 That's why you like it?

00:01:06.000 That's one of the reasons why.

00:01:07.000 Plus, I think it was the very first painting where its title is the background.

00:01:16.000 Think about that.

00:01:18.000 This could have been called, you know, in the full painting, obviously this is a snippet.

00:01:23.000 So there's a town there, there's a cypress tree, there's a church steeple.

00:01:26.000 It could have been called Cypress Tree.

00:01:28.000 It could have been called Sleepy Village.

00:01:29.000 It could have been called Rolling Hills.

00:01:31.000 But no, it's called Starry Night.

00:01:33.000 And everything in front of it, everything in front of it is just in the way.

00:01:39.000 And how often do you paint something where the title is the background?

00:01:44.000 That's my point.

00:01:45.000 And in this particular case, the background is the universe.

00:01:49.000 And so for me, this was a pivot point in art.

00:01:53.000 And it's 1889, which is recent, given the history of paintings that go all the way back.

00:02:00.000 So yeah, there it is.

00:02:02.000 Is that your favorite painting ever?

00:02:03.000 I have to say yes.

00:02:05.000 It has to be.

00:02:05.000 You have a vest and a phone cover.

00:02:07.000 If it's not, what are you doing?

00:02:11.000 I have four or five ties that have this painting on them in different ways.

00:02:17.000 I'm all in.

00:02:19.000 I'm all in.

00:02:19.000 What's interesting is that the town is...

00:02:22.000 Wait, have you seen Starry Night in Bacon?

00:02:24.000 Dig it up on the screen.

00:02:26.000 Somebody did it in Bacon. 0.88

00:02:28.000 It was just crazy.

00:02:30.000 Oh, God.

00:02:31.000 How weird.

00:02:34.000 That's weird.

00:02:36.000 How weird.

00:02:37.000 Go back to the original one, please.

00:02:38.000 What's interesting about the original one is that the town is realistically depicted.

00:02:44.000 The trees are recognizable as trees.

00:02:46.000 If you ever saw a sky that looked like that, the end would be here.

00:02:50.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:02:52.000 Plus that swirling is not wind and it's not clouds because if it was clouds, you wouldn't see the stars.

00:02:58.000 Right.

00:02:59.000 What is it?

00:03:00.000 It's how he felt.

00:03:01.000 That's all I can tell you.

00:03:02.000 By the way, that is a real evening.

00:03:04.000 Sorry, it's early morning.

00:03:06.000 The crescent moon, when it's that orientation, means this is before sunrise.

00:03:11.000 And that white object lower on the horizon, that sort of glowy, that's very likely Venus.

00:03:15.000 And that enables us to trace over what set of weeks this painting was actually painted.

00:03:22.000 So it's kind of like forensic astronomy.

00:03:26.000 Has anyone done an analysis of where he must have been?

00:03:30.000 Yeah, it's well known.

00:03:31.000 He was in a real place. 1.00

00:03:33.000 He didn't pull this out of his ass, right? 0.99

00:03:35.000 He painted what he saw, folded into what he felt. 0.99

00:03:41.000 That's how art should be, I think.

00:03:43.000 Otherwise, what do you need artists for? 0.99

00:03:47.000 Make cool shit. 0.98

00:03:49.000 The cool stuff is something that they felt and it came out of them. 0.99

00:03:52.000 Yeah.

00:03:53.000 And they feel stuff.

00:03:54.000 Artists feel the natural world in ways different from the rest of us.

00:04:00.000 And that's why they're artists.

00:04:01.000 Do they or do they just express it with more skill?

00:04:04.000 Oh, sorry.

00:04:04.000 Yes, we all can feel it.

00:04:06.000 But to be able to express it, that's a whole other talent.

00:04:10.000 Right, just to capture it.

00:04:10.000 And you know what I think about often?

00:04:13.000 Why do we all know who Paul Revere is?

00:04:18.000 It's a household name.

00:04:20.000 Yet is there any other war ever fought in the history of the world where a household name is the name of the person who told other people the enemy was coming?

00:04:30.000 We can mention his name, but we can't list the generals that all fought in that war.

00:04:35.000 Why?

00:04:36.000 It's because a poem was written about him.

00:04:40.000 And he had this mundane job, let me tell people the enemy is coming.

00:04:44.000 And so the artist, in this case the poet, Elevated the mundane to something that forces you to reckon it with your understanding of this world.

00:04:57.000 What's Joyce Kilmer's most famous poem?

00:05:01.000 It's about a tree.

00:05:03.000 Dogs piss on trees.

00:05:04.000 You drive by trees, you don't even know they're there.

00:05:23.000 That's a word?

00:05:31.000 Oh, beatify?

00:05:32.000 You never knew that?

00:05:32.000 No, that's a good one.

00:05:33.000 Beatify, yeah, I'm using it loosely.

00:05:35.000 It's the intermediate step between being an ordinary person and being a saint.

00:05:40.000 The beatification of someone in the Catholic Church.

00:05:42.000 I would have thought it's making something more beautiful.

00:05:46.000 Oh, okay, it could have similar roots.

00:05:50.000 Yeah, it could come from that.

00:05:58.000 I think?

00:06:10.000 And limited public religious honor.

00:06:12.000 She was beatified six years after her death.

00:06:14.000 Yeah, so I think you can't become a saint unless you've previously been beatified.

00:06:18.000 I think that's the rule.

00:06:20.000 But I'm looking at the number one definition there, to make supremely happy.

00:06:24.000 So that's interesting.

00:06:26.000 Yeah, that moved ahead of it.

00:06:28.000 Definition of beatify.

00:06:29.000 Yeah.

00:06:30.000 It's a weird word.

00:06:31.000 The verb was up there.

00:06:33.000 You had on the screen.

00:06:35.000 Roman Catholic Church.

00:06:37.000 He beatified Juan Diego, an Indian believed to have a vision of a Virgin Mary.

00:06:41.000 Synonyms, canonize, sanctify, hallow, consecrate.

00:06:44.000 So I think if you take something ordinary and you subject it to the interpretation of an artist, it can be beatified and elevated on a level where it becomes a household recognition of its importance in this world.

00:06:58.000 So my brother's an artist.

00:07:00.000 My brother's an artist.

00:07:01.000 What kind of art?

00:07:02.000 Fine art, but also he paints and he teaches history of art.

00:07:06.000 So I've had this sort of baptism my whole life, being exposed to him.

00:07:11.000 I'm the sibling scientist.

00:07:14.000 But they have an artist in the family.

00:07:16.000 Everyone should have an artist in the family. 0.81

00:07:19.000 I've got an uncle.

00:07:20.000 And, of course, the whole STEAM movement, science, technology, engineering, and math, the artists got in there and said, wait, the STEM movement, science, engineering, and math, they want to throw in the A to get art as part of that movement, science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

00:07:36.000 Change it from STEM to STEAM. It's just STEAM, so you get full STEAM ahead.

00:07:39.000 STEAM is a better word than that.

00:07:40.000 Well, they're both good words for what they need.

00:07:43.000 That just sounds like a bunch of awesome stuff.

00:07:45.000 It does.

00:07:47.000 Why not throw in comedy and building houses?

00:07:51.000 It seems like you're getting very...

00:07:53.000 It's like the LBGTQAI. Things get really squirrely when you start adding more letters. 0.99

00:07:59.000 Yeah, you can add letters, but if it doesn't spell anything, then the memorization has to kick in.

00:08:02.000 But Steam, you don't have to memorize that.

00:08:04.000 It's already there for you.

00:08:05.000 So it's cleverly conceived.

00:08:07.000 I think the abbreviation was...

00:08:10.000 It's tacit...

00:08:14.000 I think?

00:08:32.000 So if you're around running, you don't have them on your show, but if you run around saying, I don't like science, science is bad, science is evil, okay, well then you will die in poverty if you elect officials who believe that as well. 0.99

00:08:45.000 Who the fuck thinks that science is bad in 2019? 0.98

00:08:49.000 And how did they express this? 0.99

00:08:51.000 Did they express it through science?

00:08:52.000 Okay, so...

00:08:53.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:08:54.000 Like, are they saying it online?

00:08:55.000 I have a book coming out in a month called Letters from an Astrophysicist.

00:08:59.000 Okay.

00:09:00.000 It's not out yet.

00:09:02.000 But I've got it.

00:09:03.000 It's not...

00:09:03.000 How did you get a copy?

00:09:04.000 But I got it.

00:09:05.000 I don't even have my copy yet.

00:09:06.000 But I got it.

00:09:07.000 Okay?

00:09:08.000 What I'm saying is in there...

00:09:10.000 And there's a whole chapter on just angry people who don't like anything, including science.

00:09:16.000 And one of them, it's a riff.

00:09:18.000 He just says, I hate that science brings some of the worst things that's ever happened to humanity and pollution and this.

00:09:24.000 He goes on and on and on and on and on.

00:09:26.000 And so I reply.

00:09:28.000 It's letters from an astrophysicist.

00:09:29.000 And I reply as calmly and as rationally as possible.

00:09:33.000 It's possible when you get attacked that way.

00:09:36.000 But what I'm saying is not everyone embraces everything that science does.

00:09:41.000 And some will cherry pick it.

00:09:43.000 You have the science deniers for global warming.

00:09:45.000 You have science deniers with vaccines.

00:09:47.000 You have science deniers with GMOs.

00:09:49.000 There's all manner of science denying going on in modern society.

00:09:55.000 You know, in a free society, what are you going to do, right?

00:09:59.000 That people can think what they want.

00:10:01.000 But if thinking what they want influences policy, which then affects everybody, then your science denial has consequences to the economic health of the nation.

00:10:13.000 And by the way, it's not only economics, it's your, the economic health, it's your physical health, because medicine flows through advances in science, as well as our security.

00:10:22.000 Well, there's people that deny some aspects of science while conveniently using other.

00:10:28.000 That's where it gets weird, right?

00:10:29.000 You're driving a car that's relying on GPS. You're using a phone to complain about the global warming hoax.

00:10:37.000 You know, you're...

00:10:37.000 Correct.

00:10:38.000 One of my more sort of popular tweets was, you remember when we had the photo of the black hole from a distant galaxy?

00:10:46.000 And it was banner headlines, maybe a year ago, less than a year ago.

00:10:50.000 Banner headlines.

00:10:53.000 And first photo ever of a black hole.

00:10:55.000 And it was an astounding engineering achievement to accomplish that.

00:10:59.000 It was multiple telescopes all around the world pooling the data to get it right.

00:11:03.000 And it was one of the greatest collaborative efforts we've ever undertaken in my field of astrophysics.

00:11:08.000 Okay.

00:11:09.000 And everybody was loving the results.

00:11:11.000 So all I tweeted was, scientists report first photo of a black hole.

00:11:17.000 Public.

00:11:18.000 Ooh.

00:11:19.000 Ah.

00:11:20.000 Scientists report humans are warming the Earth.

00:11:24.000 Oh, you brought it up.

00:11:26.000 Okay.

00:11:27.000 Scientists.

00:11:27.000 We produced the first ever image of a supermassive black hole 55 million light years away.

00:11:32.000 The response?

00:11:33.000 Ooh.

00:11:34.000 Scientist, we've concluded that humans are catastrophically warming the Earth.

00:11:38.000 Response, that conflicts with what I want to be true, so it must be false.

00:11:42.000 That is the cherry-picking of science.

00:11:44.000 It is the cherry-picking of science.

00:11:45.000 But the global warming thing is very much connected to a certain type of ideology.

00:11:51.000 A certain type of person who thinks of themselves as a no-nonsense person.

00:11:55.000 It doesn't matter to me.

00:11:56.000 Yes, it does matter.

00:11:57.000 What I'm trying to say is...

00:12:04.000 We're good to go.

00:12:21.000 Complaining that conservatives who have embraced no global warming platform are denying science and they need science on their side.

00:12:29.000 And many of those same people are rubbing crystals together to be healed by the crystal energy or they're denying vaccines, thinking that they're somehow bad for you.

00:12:39.000 And so...

00:12:43.000 All of this requires some or total rejection of mainstream science.

00:12:48.000 And we're living in that world now.

00:12:51.000 And I don't know.

00:12:53.000 I don't think it'll stop the progress of civilization, but it can certainly slow it down and occasionally stall it.

00:13:00.000 Well, that is certainly a problem, but how big of a problem is it?

00:13:04.000 Like, how many people are really in denial of science in 2019?

00:13:08.000 And it's got to be a small number.

00:13:09.000 For me, in a free country, that's not what matters.

00:13:11.000 What matters is, in a free country, that you elect officials who are not.

00:13:15.000 Officials.

00:13:16.000 Yes, you elect people who are scientifically literate.

00:13:18.000 They don't have to be scientists.

00:13:22.000 And if they're not scientifically literate, they should be self-aware of that.

00:13:26.000 And then listen to people who are.

00:13:31.000 So...

00:13:31.000 Don't you think what they're doing, though, is they're doing what their constituents would like them to do?

00:13:38.000 That's why I don't beat politicians over the head.

00:13:41.000 Ever.

00:13:42.000 I don't do that.

00:13:43.000 We're a republic.

00:13:44.000 We're a democracy.

00:13:46.000 Whatever they believe, if they think Earth is 6,000 years old and they got elected, it's because the people elected them believe Earth is 6,000 years old.

00:13:54.000 Or because they're willing to let that one go because they believe in their policies?

00:13:57.000 Possibly.

00:13:58.000 That's a good point, because you have a portfolio of thoughts and beliefs.

00:14:01.000 Or because he's such a profound Christian.

00:14:03.000 I mean, he's so profoundly Christian that he just wants the literal definition of the Bible.

00:14:08.000 There are plenty of Christians who are connected to science that don't, including the Pope, by the way.

00:14:12.000 Can you get more Christian than the Pope?

00:14:14.000 Yeah, he believes in science now.

00:14:16.000 This new Pope is pretty interesting.

00:14:17.000 Yeah, if you read his encyclical from a couple of years ago, it's a scientifically literate Yeah.

00:14:27.000 Okay, so he's still religious, right?

00:14:29.000 So Jesus still rose from the dead, and there were still miracles and all the rest of that in the New Testament.

00:14:33.000 So he's not in denial of that.

00:14:36.000 But given that, he is saying, oh my gosh.

00:14:39.000 Here's something we, the religious community, and scientists can partner behind, and that is we want to save life on Earth.

00:14:45.000 And so we have to be better shepherds of what is going on on this Earth.

00:14:49.000 And one of them is we don't want to flood low-lying countries in the South Pacific, where the average sea level is 10 feet above sea level, or whatever it is.

00:14:58.000 You're going to lose these countries if you keep melting our... 1.00

00:15:03.000 Ice caps.

00:15:04.000 Not the ice caps because that would include a north and there's no land in the north.

00:15:08.000 So the glacier ice, that's land-based ice, right?

00:15:12.000 Because any ice that's in the water floating, that can melt and it's not going to change the water level.

00:15:17.000 So it's why you can do this experiment.

00:15:19.000 It's really cool.

00:15:20.000 Fill up your glass.

00:15:21.000 Put a few cubes of ice in a glass of water.

00:15:24.000 Fill the glass up as much as you possibly can without spilling it.

00:15:28.000 And the ice is bobbing above that level.

00:15:31.000 Because ice is about 10% buoyant on that.

00:15:34.000 About 10% of an ice cube will be lifted above.

00:15:36.000 This is the iceberg equation, right?

00:15:39.000 That's the tip of the iceberg.

00:15:41.000 Well, you see 10% above and 90% is not visible to you.

00:15:45.000 This is, by the way, I don't want to get too many off-ramps here, but that's one of the things that they did right in Titanic.

00:15:51.000 Okay?

00:15:52.000 If you look at the earliest Titanic movie that was in black and white, they see this huge iceberg on the horizon and they can't swear away from it because it, oh my gosh, it doesn't have, no, no.

00:16:04.000 The iceberg that cuts the bottom of your boat is a little bit of ice sticking out above the water because 90% of it is underwater and that's where the damage occurs.

00:16:12.000 And in the James Cameron Titanic, The iceberg that they hit above water looks like a little chunk of ice.

00:16:20.000 Oh, that couldn't hurt anything.

00:16:21.000 All the damage was underwater.

00:16:23.000 Anyhow, so back to this.

00:16:24.000 So do this experiment and then let the glass sit there and let the ice melt.

00:16:28.000 And the water level will stay the same.

00:16:31.000 Because when ice melts, it takes up lower volume than it was when it became ice.

00:16:37.000 And that's why pipes break.

00:16:40.000 I thought pipes break just because the water expands.

00:16:44.000 Yeah, I just described that in the opposite direction.

00:16:45.000 Oh.

00:16:46.000 Oh, so because as it freezes, I didn't know it gets larger.

00:16:50.000 That's what expansion means with your vocabulary here.

00:16:53.000 No, but I'm saying like when you freeze something, it gets larger?

00:16:58.000 Your ice cube is sitting 10% above the water level and it melts and becomes water.

00:17:01.000 The water takes up 90% of the volume of the ice.

00:17:05.000 So that just melts back into the water and it doesn't overflow.

00:17:09.000 Even though it was sticking above the water line when you had the glass.

00:17:12.000 So now let's do the opposite.

00:17:14.000 There's water in the pipes.

00:17:16.000 Oh, can I tell you something that might blow your mind?

00:17:18.000 No.

00:17:20.000 Is that allowed?

00:17:21.000 I don't know.

00:17:22.000 How many times does your mind...

00:17:23.000 At least once a day.

00:17:24.000 Yeah, at least once a day.

00:17:25.000 You need your mind blown, okay?

00:17:26.000 Here's how it works.

00:17:27.000 Okay.

00:17:28.000 So let's put water in the pipes, okay?

00:17:32.000 And then the temperature drops.

00:17:35.000 Now, pipes have a certain strength.

00:17:37.000 Right.

00:17:37.000 Copper pipes, you know, they're rigid, okay?

00:17:40.000 I grew up around breaking pipes.

00:17:42.000 Okay, so now watch.

00:17:43.000 So the water's in there.

00:17:45.000 And now the temperature begins to drop.

00:17:49.000 The water wants to turn to ice, but it can't because the pipe is containing it.

00:17:59.000 So it just sits there at 32 degrees as water, even though the temperature outside is dropping below 32 degrees.

00:18:10.000 And it still sits there.

00:18:11.000 It gets to 30 degrees.

00:18:13.000 29. The pipe is squeezing the attempt of this water to become ice.

00:18:20.000 And the act of squeezing it prevents the temperature from dropping.

00:18:24.000 Okay?

00:18:24.000 And you, as the temperature drops, depending on how strong the pipe is, and the temperature gradient across it, as the outside temperature continues, it gets to now 25 degrees.

00:18:34.000 The pipe is still holding on to the liquid water.

00:18:37.000 And it's still 32 degrees inside there.

00:18:39.000 And it holds on to, and it keeps happening, and it keeps happening.

00:18:42.000 You get a point where the pipe can no longer contain the water.

00:18:47.000 And the water freezes spontaneously.

00:18:53.000 It just goes right down to that temperature and the pipe is helpless in the face of this.

00:18:58.000 So the point is, the stronger the pipe is, the lower the temperature has to be outside for the freezing water to break it.

00:19:06.000 So theoretically, if you had a pipe that was made of a stronger material than copper, you can get even lower than that?

00:19:10.000 You can get even lower temperatures.

00:19:11.000 How low can you get?

00:19:15.000 Because when things freeze, they have to expand?

00:19:17.000 So what?

00:19:18.000 No, only when water freezes.

00:19:19.000 Why does water expand? 0.96

00:19:20.000 It's a remarkable fact about water that is shared by very few other ingredients.

00:19:26.000 Most things, when they cool, they shrink, as all men know. 0.99

00:19:30.000 Oh, hey.

00:19:34.000 So most materials, because things cooler, the vibrating molecules slow down and they take up less space.

00:19:42.000 Water is the opposite of that as it passes down through.

00:19:46.000 So I'm going to describe to you an extraordinary fact about water and why we're alive today.

00:19:51.000 So watch.

00:19:52.000 Let's take a lake that has fish in it.

00:19:55.000 Temperature drops outside and the lake slowly begins to get cooler because there's a time lag between the air temperature and the waters.

00:20:02.000 That's why the first freeze, the lake is still there.

00:20:05.000 It's got to be cold longer.

00:20:07.000 So what happens?

00:20:08.000 The water gets cold on the surface and it begins to shrink.

00:20:21.000 So that water falls, it shrinks.

00:20:23.000 That makes it denser, it falls to the bottom.

00:20:25.000 Fine.

00:20:26.000 It does that down to about 4 degrees Celsius.

00:20:29.000 As it goes from 4 degrees Celsius to 0 degrees Celsius, the freezing point, it begins to expand and become less dense than the water.

00:20:39.000 So now, as the water wants to actually freeze, it stays on top.

00:20:45.000 When it does freeze, you freeze the top surface of the lake.

00:20:49.000 Well, how about the water below it?

00:20:51.000 It's insulated from the dropping air temperature, and the fish don't die.

00:20:57.000 Imagine if ice were denser than water.

00:20:59.000 What would happen?

00:21:00.000 You'd freeze the top layer, it would sink.

00:21:01.000 The bottom is frozen.

00:21:03.000 Freeze the next layer, it sinks.

00:21:04.000 And fish would be systematically forced to swim in shallower and shallower waters until they were all freeze-dried on the top surface of the lake.

00:21:15.000 And all fishes would be dead every winter in every lake.

00:21:20.000 I think it's fish.

00:21:21.000 What?

00:21:21.000 I think you're supposed to say fishes.

00:21:23.000 Fishes is a double plural.

00:21:25.000 You could do that?

00:21:25.000 Yeah.

00:21:26.000 All fish would be dead?

00:21:27.000 Like all deer?

00:21:29.000 Would you say all deers?

00:21:30.000 Well, because generally if you had multiple kinds of deer, yeah.

00:21:33.000 Oh, so if you had like Sitka deer and white deer.

00:21:36.000 But it's rare that they're all in the same place.

00:21:38.000 You generally have one kind of deer in one place.

00:21:39.000 But the ocean has many kind of fish in the same place.

00:21:42.000 Oh, that's interesting.

00:21:43.000 So you would say fishes.

00:21:44.000 Fishes, it's a double plural.

00:21:46.000 It's different kinds of plural fish.

00:21:48.000 Oh.

00:21:49.000 Double blow my mind.

00:21:50.000 You didn't know that?

00:21:51.000 You blew it again.

00:21:52.000 Oh, no!

00:21:53.000 I didn't know.

00:21:53.000 I never thought about it that way.

00:21:54.000 The many fishes in the...

00:21:55.000 Oh, yeah.

00:21:56.000 Yeah.

00:21:56.000 Yeah, so sorry.

00:21:57.000 Fishes in the sea.

00:21:58.000 Yeah, so multiple plurals of different kinds of fish.

00:22:01.000 How cold does it have to get where ocean water freezes?

00:22:03.000 Well, it's salt water.

00:22:04.000 Do you have the word fishes up there?

00:22:05.000 Some weird anomaly that happened where there was too little oxygen in the water and somehow the frozen fish got pushed out in a wall of ice.

00:22:14.000 This is South Dakota a couple years ago.

00:22:17.000 So there's too little oxygen because of...

00:22:19.000 I don't know.

00:22:20.000 I can't explain that.

00:22:21.000 I don't know what happened there.

00:22:21.000 If you look at the green in the water, most likely it's algae.

00:22:26.000 So that happens with certain lakes that get polluted with certain types of algae.

00:22:29.000 You can kill the lake by doing that.

00:22:31.000 You can kill the lake.

00:22:31.000 Well, you get it in the ocean, too.

00:22:33.000 You get these zones.

00:22:33.000 I don't see how you get frozen fish, though.

00:22:35.000 That's incredible.

00:22:37.000 Stop.

00:22:38.000 Go back up.

00:22:39.000 Yeah.

00:22:40.000 Scroll down so you can read it.

00:22:41.000 Fish froze in a wall of ice in South Dakota's Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge.

00:22:46.000 That's incredible, man.

00:22:48.000 Is that a video, Jamie?

00:22:49.000 Yeah.

00:22:50.000 I think it's just the pictures, though.

00:22:51.000 God, that's amazing.

00:22:52.000 I don't know how they froze because they can just swim to where it's not frozen.

00:22:55.000 So I'd have to do more homework on that one to see what caused that.

00:22:59.000 Wow.

00:23:00.000 So my point is, because of this property of water...

00:23:05.000 That ice floats.

00:23:06.000 It insulates the bottom layers of the lake and fish can survive over the winter because of this.

00:23:11.000 That's how eglues work too, right?

00:23:12.000 Insulate so you can inside, you get like a nice little warm spot.

00:23:15.000 Yeah, sure.

00:23:16.000 Yeah.

00:23:17.000 I mean, if you put a barrier between you and the changing elements outside, that's basically an insulating layer.

00:23:22.000 Have you ever done ice fishing?

00:23:23.000 No, I never...

00:23:24.000 It's a good way to get away from your wife. 1.00

00:23:27.000 I'm a New York City person.

00:23:27.000 Well, they have them in New York City.

00:23:29.000 People go ice fishing, I'm sure, in Central Park.

00:23:31.000 Wait, do women go ice fishing to get away from their husbands? 1.00

00:23:33.000 They do.

00:23:33.000 Yeah, okay.

00:23:34.000 It's a joke.

00:23:35.000 It's like, why do people golf?

00:23:37.000 You know, but ice fishing is particularly weird because you have to continually scoop out the ice and maybe even drill again.

00:23:45.000 Right.

00:23:45.000 So that works because...

00:23:48.000 Frozen water is less dense than non-frozen water, and it's one of the rare ingredients for which that's so.

00:23:53.000 And it's likely there would be no life on land or anywhere on Earth if that were the case, if the opposite of that were the case.

00:24:00.000 So water is a very special ingredient to life on Earth.

00:24:02.000 It's cited by many religious folks as saying, see, Earth is sacred for these.

00:24:07.000 It's in the list of special ingredients for what make Earth habitable for life.

00:24:13.000 Yeah.

00:24:14.000 That is a really strange thing, though, that if you can contain it somehow in an incredibly strong pipe, that it won't freeze.

00:24:20.000 Yes, it won't freeze.

00:24:21.000 What is a temperature variant, though?

00:24:22.000 Is there a number where it doesn't matter?

00:24:24.000 Well, that's why pipes don't freeze when it just hits 30 degrees outside.

00:24:27.000 That's not when you hear it.

00:24:29.000 It freezes when it gets really low.

00:24:31.000 And they crack.

00:24:32.000 Yeah, and then it'll break the copper like it's paper.

00:24:35.000 It'll tear it like it's not...

00:24:39.000 On the flip side of that, try this at home.

00:24:42.000 Take an ice cube that's like at 30 degrees, okay?

00:24:48.000 How would you measure that?

00:24:49.000 Pull out an ice cube, and just because they'll be near zero Fahrenheit if you have a good freezer, just pull out and leave it on the counter.

00:24:56.000 Put it on a wooden cutting board, okay?

00:24:59.000 And just let it sit there for like 10 minutes, and its temperature will come up.

00:25:03.000 There'll be a point where it hasn't melted yet, But you can take it and squeeze the ice cube, and you can force it to melt by squeezing it.

00:25:12.000 Because you're forcing it into a smaller volume that it currently contains.

00:25:16.000 And the only way you can accomplish that is if the ice turns to water.

00:25:21.000 Then it will occupy a smaller volume.

00:25:23.000 So the act of squeezing ice can actually melt it.

00:25:26.000 So if you had some sort of a pipe that could physically constrict, like something that had threads in it that could wind down to a smaller size, you could stick a cylinder of ice in it and you could slowly crank it down.

00:25:37.000 Oh yeah, yes, yes.

00:25:38.000 It would melt.

00:25:39.000 Yes, you can melt.

00:25:40.000 If you had some machine that squeezed ice.

00:25:42.000 And the colder the ice is, the harder it would be for you to squeeze it to accomplish that.

00:25:49.000 So it's sort of fun with ice.

00:25:51.000 In fact, you know what else you can do?

00:25:53.000 This is a harder experiment to do.

00:25:54.000 If you take a mesh, like a screen mesh, it has to be sort of wider openings than a screen door would.

00:26:02.000 So what would this be?

00:26:03.000 Like a fence, like a chain link fence.

00:26:06.000 And hold it horizontally and get a big block of ice and just place it on top.

00:26:11.000 A block of ice that's heavy.

00:26:13.000 What'll happen is the ice, the weight of the ice Will melt the ice in the contact points of the chain itself because it's feeling that pressure to squeeze it into a smaller volume.

00:26:27.000 But by the time it melts, the ice has now passed through the grate and it will refreeze on the other side.

00:26:34.000 So you can actually pass a block of ice through a chain link fence vertically just by pushing it.

00:26:41.000 Yeah, it's pretty cool.

00:26:43.000 It's a slow experiment, but it's real.

00:26:45.000 How long?

00:26:46.000 I mean, it depends on the temperature of the ice and how much it weighs.

00:26:50.000 Right.

00:26:50.000 Because the pressure is what's...

00:26:52.000 This is why you can ice skate.

00:26:54.000 Why can you skate on ice?

00:26:56.000 Because the edge of the blade is very high pressure on the ice and it's melting a bead of water.

00:27:02.000 And you're actually gliding on water when you're skating.

00:27:04.000 You're not skating on slippery ice.

00:27:07.000 Really?

00:27:08.000 Yes.

00:27:08.000 I thought you were just cutting the ice with the blade.

00:27:11.000 Well, so the blade, have you ever seen a sharpened blade?

00:27:14.000 It's not just flat.

00:27:16.000 There's actually a concave cross-section to it.

00:27:18.000 So each edge, the left edge and the right edge, is basically a knife edge.

00:27:23.000 Not quite as sharp as a knife, but you can feel how it's sharp.

00:27:28.000 So that when you lean on that edge, either your inner edge or outer edge...

00:27:32.000 Your entire body weight is being held up on a very narrow surface area of the blade, so the pressure is extreme.

00:27:43.000 It's like 1,000 pounds per square inch.

00:27:45.000 You don't weigh 1,000 pounds, but you're not skating on a square inch, right?

00:27:49.000 So you do the math on that, and what you can have is...

00:27:55.000 You will skate and you're actually...

00:27:57.000 What makes it so slippery on ice skates is because you're moving on a bead of water that freezes right behind you as you go past it.

00:28:05.000 Dude.

00:28:06.000 Yeah.

00:28:07.000 So it's possible for ice to be so cold you can't really skate on it.

00:28:10.000 Because even that pressure is not enough to melt it.

00:28:13.000 How cold would it have to be?

00:28:15.000 Last I did a calculation, it was really cold.

00:28:17.000 Like tens of degrees below zero.

00:28:19.000 How does dry ice work?

00:28:20.000 Oh, it's just frozen carbon dioxide.

00:28:22.000 That's all.

00:28:23.000 So here's the difference.

00:28:24.000 You have a block of frozen H2O and a block of frozen CO2. So there they are.

00:28:31.000 It turns out the air pressure on Earth is high enough, at sea level, is high enough to allow...

00:28:41.000 The ice to melt and sustain a liquid state.

00:28:46.000 Okay?

00:28:48.000 The CO2, under air pressure, normal air pressure, it wants to melt, but it can't sustain a liquid.

00:28:56.000 And it goes straight to gas.

00:29:00.000 If we had much higher air pressure, you could have CO2 melt and have liquid CO2. So now watch what happens.

00:29:09.000 So, can I blow your mind again?

00:29:12.000 This is really good stuff, okay?

00:29:14.000 It's good like physical chemistry.

00:29:16.000 So here you go.

00:29:17.000 So, watch what happens.

00:29:19.000 So what happens if I reduce the air pressure?

00:29:23.000 Okay?

00:29:24.000 Well, the transition from ice to water is still the same.

00:29:26.000 It's not affected.

00:29:27.000 But the boiling point is affected.

00:29:30.000 As you know, cooking times have to be adjusted on mountaintops.

00:29:34.000 Because when you boil water, it's not 212 degrees.

00:29:37.000 Depending on the height of the mountain, there's less air pressing down that's preventing it from boiling.

00:29:43.000 The boiling point is not some absolute fact about the water.

00:29:46.000 It has to do with what the air pressure is sitting above it.

00:29:49.000 If you have extremely high air pressure, water has to go to a much higher temperature before it boils.

00:29:55.000 So the boiling point of water that's reported in all textbooks is at sea level, at one atmospheric pressure.

00:30:02.000 That's how you get 212 degrees.

00:30:04.000 If you start reducing the atmospheric pressure, it's 210 degrees, 205 degrees, 200 degrees, 190 degrees, 180 degrees.

00:30:11.000 180 degrees?

00:30:12.000 No!

00:30:12.000 Yes, and so that's not as hot as 212 degrees, so you've got to cook the food longer.

00:30:18.000 All cooking times are increased for this reason.

00:30:21.000 So now watch.

00:30:22.000 I'm not done with you.

00:30:23.000 Uh-oh.

00:30:23.000 Let's keep reducing the air pressure.

00:30:26.000 Okay?

00:30:28.000 Theoretical?

00:30:28.000 Or like possible on Earth?

00:30:30.000 No.

00:30:31.000 No, no.

00:30:32.000 Like Himalayas.

00:30:32.000 Yeah.

00:30:33.000 Or take it up.

00:30:34.000 You can ascend in some kind of copter or some kind of device.

00:30:37.000 Okay.

00:30:37.000 Or air balloon or whatever.

00:30:39.000 But I'm saying you can do this experiment in a laboratory.

00:30:42.000 Okay.

00:30:42.000 You keep reducing the air pressure.

00:30:44.000 Boiling point keeps dropping.

00:30:46.000 It's 170 degrees, 150, 120, 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, 50 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:31:00.000 32 degrees Fahrenheit! 0.99

00:31:03.000 Holy shit! 0.99

00:31:04.000 What happens? 0.99

00:31:05.000 The ice melts and becomes water.

00:31:08.000 The water evaporates and becomes steam.

00:31:11.000 And all of that's happening at 32 degrees.

00:31:14.000 There is an atmospheric pressure for which water, ice, and steam coexist.

00:31:21.000 And it's called the triple point of water.

00:31:24.000 And all ingredients have a triple point.

00:31:28.000 Wow.

00:31:29.000 What is the atmospheric pressure?

00:31:30.000 Mars is very close to the triple point of water.

00:31:33.000 So you can have a simultaneous bath in certain regions of Mars.

00:31:40.000 A simultaneous bath because the air pressure is so low.

00:31:44.000 It's like 1 100th Earth's air pressure.

00:31:46.000 It's very, very low.

00:31:47.000 So you have a place where a pot of water, ice cubes, and steam are coming out all at once.

00:31:55.000 It's at the triple point.

00:31:57.000 The lesson here is we live life in our world at one atmospheric pressure, at one room temperature, atmospheric pressure,

00:32:13.000 and we define what is normal based on that life experience, based on how our senses interact with that environment.

00:32:20.000 But the actual universe is far...

00:32:26.000 Freakier than what our five senses are exposed to on Earth.

00:32:32.000 What did you think about Elon Musk's idea about nuking the poles of Mars in order to make it warmer?

00:32:38.000 Yeah, so some of these are kind of pie-in-the-sky ideas, but let's get to what he's trying to get at.

00:32:44.000 What you want to do is you want to introduce warmth, you want to block the ultraviolet, So that you can protect organic life.

00:32:55.000 So we have an ozone layer.

00:32:57.000 It's three oxygen atoms.

00:32:59.000 O3. And ozone likes ultraviolet light.

00:33:04.000 So ultraviolet light comes from the sun and gets eaten by ozone.

00:33:08.000 Gets eaten.

00:33:10.000 And when you do that...

00:33:12.000 The ultraviolet light doesn't make it to Earth's surface.

00:33:14.000 So even though they say, oh, where's sunscreen and sunblock 45?

00:33:21.000 Yes.

00:33:22.000 That's for the 1% of the ultraviolet that gets through the atmosphere.

00:33:26.000 If you're above the atmosphere, you are fried.

00:33:30.000 So...

00:33:30.000 Because ultraviolet is highly hostile to organic molecules and what we're made of as life.

00:33:37.000 So you want to protect...

00:33:40.000 You want to give life a chance.

00:33:41.000 So you want to not only heat Mars, you want to find a way to block the ultraviolet light coming from the sun.

00:33:46.000 So you need some mechanism, if not ozone, or just live underground, for example.

00:33:51.000 Okay?

00:33:51.000 And so...

00:33:53.000 So I don't think we should...

00:33:56.000 Think of the idea as a literal thing, but it's a general principle of what you want to accomplish on Mars in doing so.

00:34:05.000 So you want to warm it, you want to protect what could be the future of biochemistry, and then you seed it.

00:34:12.000 And then you wait.

00:34:14.000 You don't want to wait too long, you want to sort of speed it up if you could.

00:34:17.000 And then you terraform Mars.

00:34:20.000 SpaceX has, I visited him a couple of times, he's got a mug you can buy there.

00:34:24.000 Then it has Mars on it, okay?

00:34:26.000 And then you put hot liquid in it, and Mars turns to an arable blue-green marble.

00:34:34.000 That's hilarious.

00:34:34.000 So, yeah, it's very good.

00:34:35.000 And it doesn't tell you that when you say, oh, I got a Mars mug, you know?

00:34:39.000 And you show it off, and oh my gosh, when did that happen?

00:34:41.000 It's an Earth mug, but it doesn't look like Earth.

00:34:44.000 There's a lot of people that go on high altitude camping.

00:34:48.000 Also, we think there's a lot of...

00:34:50.000 Water that was once on Mars, which is a certainty, and we think it's just sitting below in a permafrost.

00:34:56.000 So you wouldn't have to bring water to Mars.

00:34:59.000 By the way, in the really distant future, you can just redirect a comet and get all the water you need.

00:35:03.000 How far distant is that?

00:35:05.000 The comet's everywhere, dude.

00:35:06.000 We're in a shooting gallery.

00:35:08.000 Yeah, that's not what I asked.

00:35:09.000 How far away do you think it is before we could redirect?

00:35:12.000 How far away in time?

00:35:13.000 Yes.

00:35:13.000 Okay, sorry.

00:35:19.000 We know how to do it, but there's no real incentive.

00:35:22.000 So there's no engineering, funded engineering plan to do it, but we know how to do it on paper.

00:35:27.000 We know how to do it in a conceivable way?

00:35:29.000 Oh yeah!

00:35:31.000 So, first of all, it happens with or without us, because we are in the shooting path of countless thousands of asteroids and comets.

00:35:39.000 So what you would do is, you'd find one that's headed close to us anyway.

00:35:44.000 In the seventh orbit down the line, or the hundredth orbit down the line, and then you'd slightly deflect it in such a way that it would then collide with Mars or even Earth if you wanted, if Earth needed some more fresh water.

00:35:58.000 Yeah, I heard that there's a possibility.

00:35:59.000 But the problem is, if something really big that would fill lakes, if that collided with Earth, that would just be bad for life on Earth.

00:36:07.000 Because it's a spontaneous deposit of energy that can change the climate.

00:36:11.000 So you want to do that on a planet that you're trying to terraform.

00:36:15.000 Isn't that the speculation of how water got here in the first place?

00:36:18.000 So the jury's still out on that.

00:36:20.000 There are tags in the oceans, in the water molecule, that tell you that the water must have come from more than one source.

00:36:29.000 So that's what's confusing things.

00:36:31.000 We want it to be a simple thing.

00:36:32.000 It all came by comets, or it all came from inside the Earth, through volcanoes.

00:36:36.000 Volcanoes emit So, the final word is still out on that.

00:37:05.000 What do you think about what's going on in Hawaii now with the protesting of the building of this largest and latest telescope?

00:37:12.000 Yes, the TMT, 30 meter telescope, which would be the largest ever by far of any kind of telescope.

00:37:20.000 The history of astronomy is one where Bigger telescopes become bigger buckets to collect light.

00:37:29.000 Telescopes today are the same as telescopes when they were invented.

00:37:32.000 They're just bigger.

00:37:34.000 The principle behind them is bigger because what they're doing is simple.

00:37:38.000 All you're trying to do is get as much light as possible.

00:37:40.000 And the more light you get, the dimmer is the object you can detect and the farther away is the object you can see.

00:37:48.000 And so for every generation of new large telescopes that have been built, It has increased and deepened our understanding of our place in the universe.

00:37:59.000 So that's just the background.

00:38:01.000 The proposal is for a 30-meter telescope, largest ever, on the big island of Hawaii, in Mauna Kea, where there are other telescopes there.

00:38:12.000 That's where the kek is, right? 0.99

00:38:14.000 Yeah, I think that's where the kek is. 0.98

00:38:16.000 I think they sighted it in a place that's sort of tucked behind most sight lines to it.

00:38:22.000 But that's not so much what's important here.

00:38:24.000 It's that the native Hawaiians, from what I've read, view the mountain as a sacred place.

00:38:31.000 And so...

00:38:34.000 To put a telescope, yet another telescope there becomes sort of invasion of sacred land.

00:38:41.000 And so, yeah, there's a standoff last I looked.

00:38:46.000 I mean, people protesting in the streets.

00:38:48.000 And there's some native Hawaiians who embrace this because it means jobs, high-quality jobs, engineering jobs, because you've got to build it, you've got to maintain it.

00:38:58.000 There's an entire...

00:39:00.000 Supportive infrastructure for that that means jobs.

00:39:03.000 And it's done in collaboration with the University of Hawaii.

00:39:07.000 And all the other telescopes are partnered with the University of Hawaii, where people are educated there.

00:39:17.000 You have to ask, well, how are you going to make decisions going forward?

00:39:21.000 Are you going to make them democratically?

00:39:23.000 Then you take a vote.

00:39:24.000 Do you want the natives to be the deciders of their own fate? 0.93

00:39:30.000 And is that democratic?

00:39:31.000 Okay, so the natives vote.

00:39:34.000 Or is it the few people who are protesting?

00:39:36.000 Do they win the day?

00:39:38.000 I mean, it's complicated, and there are a lot of nuanced issues going on there.

00:39:43.000 There's a branch of thinking that the United States government and normal municipal leaders have no authority over it.

00:39:54.000 There are some who claim that this is native Hawaiian property that does not belong to any municipal entity of the U.S. government, so therefore...

00:40:03.000 Even state representatives have no say.

00:40:05.000 So there's a lot going on there.

00:40:08.000 But if I were to weigh in, this is how I would do so.

00:40:14.000 I would say first, I think what should happen is, I don't know if they even have the infrastructure, I don't know how the system is set up, but if they could set it up this way, if the mountain is viewed as sacred by the natives,

00:40:33.000 The natives should have entire say of what happens to the mountain.

00:40:37.000 Okay?

00:40:38.000 That's how I think that should be.

00:40:39.000 So now, what you want to make sure is that whatever decision gets made and voted upon by the natives, that it's fully informed.

00:40:49.000 You don't want to vote being misinformed or under-informed in any election, let alone whether you're voting for a telescope on your sacred mountain.

00:40:57.000 Okay?

00:40:58.000 Otherwise, you're voting out of nowhere, right?

00:41:00.000 You're influencing your future based on partial information.

00:41:04.000 And decisions based on partial information are bad decisions no matter what.

00:41:08.000 Okay?

00:41:08.000 So, I would say...

00:41:11.000 Hold a vote with the natives and make sure everybody's fully informed.

00:41:15.000 And here's a bit of information I just want to add to the information.

00:41:19.000 Okay?

00:41:22.000 You know what we do as astrophysicists.

00:41:25.000 We study the universe.

00:41:29.000 Rather passively at that.

00:41:30.000 We sit there at the end of a telescope and wait for light to reach us.

00:41:35.000 It's not a petri dish where we stir it or heat it or freeze it or crack it or we're just kind of there, communing with the cosmos.

00:41:46.000 My PhD thesis was significantly fed by data that I obtained from mountaintops at telescopes.

00:41:53.000 I got my data from mountains in Chile, Cerro Tololo, and it employed all the natives, the local people.

00:42:03.000 That's another telescope.

00:42:04.000 So there's all these telescopes that all have specific Access points to the universe.

00:42:11.000 They're not all asking the same questions.

00:42:14.000 And so it's the collection of all the data that gives us the complete understanding of what we think is a complete understanding of the universe.

00:42:20.000 So what we do is try to understand our place in the universe.

00:42:26.000 And all I'm going to say is that if you have power over what happens on that mountain and it's sacred to you because Whatever that is, it is something important to you and your sense of your understanding of your place in this world that would be spiritual significance.

00:42:51.000 I can tell you that what we learn as astrophysicists from those mountaintops gives us a deeper understanding Of who and what we are in this universe.

00:43:12.000 So I would say that whatever is your concept of God, be it the creator of the universe, the spirit energy that pervades all of space and time, whatever is your concept, the discoveries of astrophysicists bring you closer to it.

00:43:36.000 I get your perspective.

00:43:37.000 Let me be the opposing view.

00:43:41.000 They feel— I'm not trying to— No, I know you're not.

00:43:44.000 This is just information.

00:43:45.000 I'm putting—this is information, and I walk out of the room, and then you all vote, right?

00:43:50.000 I'm not—you know, we believe in democracy here and majority rules.

00:43:54.000 That's kind of a good thing.

00:43:55.000 It's kind of worked.

00:43:56.000 All right?

00:43:57.000 But if it's not majority rules, I don't know how they're going to make decisions.

00:44:00.000 But let's say invent a future where the natives vote.

00:44:04.000 If they vote, I wanted to make sure they heard what I just said.

00:44:07.000 And now take control of your own fate.

00:44:11.000 I just don't think they care.

00:44:13.000 I think they've decided that that's a sacred space and they don't want anybody doing anything to it.

00:44:17.000 Then that's their decision.

00:44:19.000 You think that's okay?

00:44:20.000 I don't judge people's...

00:44:26.000 But if you wanted to make a convincing appeal to them...

00:44:28.000 No, all I would say is what I just told you.

00:44:30.000 That's it.

00:44:30.000 That is all I would tell them.

00:44:32.000 And when they vote, I want them to understand that fact.

00:44:37.000 I could take it one step further and say...

00:44:41.000 Mountaintops, because of the access they give astrophysicists, and by proxy us all to the universe, are sacred places to scientists.

00:44:56.000 Okay?

00:44:57.000 Now it's not sacred in a religious sense, but it's sacred in a, in terms of a pathway to knowing and understanding who and what we are in this universe.

00:45:08.000 We place great value on that.

00:45:11.000 But it's not our land.

00:45:14.000 So specifically these things have to take place.

00:45:16.000 Europeans didn't come to Hawaii and find legions of scientists there conducting experiments.

00:45:22.000 They found native peoples governing themselves.

00:45:25.000 So that's that.

00:45:27.000 The consequence, if it gets voted down and that's permanent and there's no way around that, that telescope is still going to be built.

00:45:35.000 It just won't be built in Hawaii.

00:45:36.000 Okay.

00:45:36.000 Well, where will it be built?

00:45:38.000 Don't they have to be built on mountaintops?

00:45:40.000 Yeah, so there are other mountaintops.

00:45:41.000 It's an elevation issue, right?

00:45:41.000 Yeah, you want to be above, you know, schmutzy clouds and haze and you want a dry environment so there's less rain.

00:45:50.000 I went to the Keck.

00:45:51.000 Oh, you visited?

00:45:52.000 Yeah.

00:45:53.000 Very good.

00:45:53.000 I went to the Keck, uh...

00:45:55.000 More than 10 years ago, the first time.

00:45:57.000 And it was...

00:45:59.000 I got very fortunate.

00:46:00.000 It was a night where the moon was not out.

00:46:02.000 Yes.

00:46:03.000 The moon is not the astronomers' favorite thing.

00:46:06.000 Yeah.

00:46:06.000 You want the darkest sky you can.

00:46:08.000 We were worried as we were driving up there that it was really cloudy.

00:46:11.000 But we drove through the clouds.

00:46:12.000 And we got to the top.

00:46:14.000 And we got to the observatory.

00:46:16.000 And it was the most amazing...

00:46:17.000 Without telescopes.

00:46:18.000 There was telescopes there, but without telescopes.

00:46:21.000 It was the most amazing view of the sky I'd ever seen in my life, and it changed my perspective of our place in the universe.

00:46:29.000 This is what we do.

00:46:30.000 It looked like we were on a spaceship, like we were flying through the universe.

00:46:34.000 Because of the diffused lighting on the Big Island, because it's all set up so that it doesn't ruin what they're trying to accomplish at the Keck.

00:46:42.000 When you're up there...

00:46:42.000 Minimize reflections in the wrong place.

00:46:44.000 It's amazing.

00:46:45.000 Not only that, if there was a moon out...

00:46:55.000 Yeah.

00:46:57.000 Yeah.

00:46:59.000 Yeah.

00:47:11.000 And so my brethren, my fellow astrophysicists who have also observed from mountaintops, by the way, it's becoming a lost art.

00:47:20.000 Well, it's not lost, but it's becoming something we don't do anymore.

00:47:23.000 It's something called service observing, where you put in your observing program and it's handed to a technician at the telescope who points the telescope, gets the data, and sends it back to you.

00:47:34.000 So the next generation doesn't have the experience that my generation did because it was a pilgrimage to the top of the mountain and you converted your life's path, you converted your life's schedule to become nocturnal.

00:47:47.000 And in so doing...

00:47:49.000 You know, the journey was long enough because you're in the middle of nowhere.

00:47:53.000 Now you've got to go nocturnal.

00:47:55.000 And by the time you're ready for this, you are communing with the cosmos.

00:47:58.000 It is you, the detector, the telescope, and the universe.

00:48:06.000 And there's an eerie silence up there, too, because you don't hear any.

00:48:09.000 The hum of maybe the motor of the telescope, but that's it.

00:48:15.000 And so all I'm saying is, If they choose to not have it, the telescope will go somewhere else.

00:48:20.000 One of them is the Canary Islands.

00:48:22.000 These are also volcanic hilltops, not as high as Mount Akea.

00:48:29.000 It's at 14,000 feet, by the way.

00:48:31.000 I should have checked what temperature water boils at the top of Mount Akea.

00:48:34.000 We could have rounded that story out.

00:48:38.000 I think it's around 180 degrees, actually.

00:48:41.000 I think I did actually calculate it one time.

00:48:43.000 But anyhow, so you'd find a mountaintop and we'll put it somewhere else.

00:48:47.000 And the data won't be as good, but that'll be a consequence of it.

00:48:51.000 And none of that'll go to Hawaii.

00:48:53.000 How do you think that's going to get resolved, though, if you had to guess?

00:48:55.000 I don't know.

00:48:57.000 I... I just don't know.

00:49:01.000 A lot of people are against it, including Jason Momoa.

00:49:05.000 Aquaman's against it. 1.00

00:49:06.000 Oh, uh-huh.

00:49:07.000 Who's out there protesting.

00:49:08.000 Yeah, and so when you get celebrity types to put the weight of their name behind it, it magnifies the cause of others, even if they're in the minority.

00:49:16.000 And so, like I said, I think natives should...

00:49:22.000 Does everyone know who all the natives are?

00:49:24.000 Is there some listing so that they can all vote for this one thing?

00:49:27.000 You wouldn't want people voting who are not native if you're voting on whether it's so sacred you don't want to put a telescope there.

00:49:32.000 You'd want people who have an indigenous concern for what goes on there. 1.00

00:49:45.000 Even indigenous in reference to Hawaii is relative.

00:49:48.000 Every usage of the word indigenous is relative.

00:49:50.000 Especially with Hawaii. 0.94

00:49:52.000 The only indigenous people are black people in Africa. 0.92

00:49:57.000 Because human life began in Africa. 0.68

00:50:00.000 Everyone else traveled to where they were.

00:50:04.000 So native, you set a time frame to declare what is native and what's not.

00:50:09.000 And a native in its simplest form is, are you born there?

00:50:13.000 So I'm a native New Yorker, I'm born there.

00:50:15.000 But I wasn't the original settler there.

00:50:19.000 My species did not form on Manhattan Island.

00:50:23.000 So everybody traveled to where they are.

00:50:26.000 They just got there before the Europeans. 0.98

00:50:27.000 And so that has become the definition of indigenous.

00:50:31.000 Were you there when the Europeans landed?

00:50:33.000 Then you're indigenous.

00:50:35.000 But to other life forms on that rock, on that, Hawaii's or a volcanic, it's a volcanic archipelago.

00:50:46.000 You know how that happens, by the way?

00:50:48.000 You have all these multiple volcanoes in a string.

00:50:51.000 You ever wonder why?

00:50:53.000 How that happens?

00:50:54.000 Sure.

00:50:55.000 You did wonder?

00:50:56.000 Yes.

00:50:56.000 Do you know?

00:50:57.000 Why?

00:50:57.000 Oh, because there's a hot spot beneath Earth's crust, and it's just sitting there, okay?

00:51:03.000 And when you're beneath Earth's crust, stuff doesn't move around the way it does on Earth's crust.

00:51:06.000 Earth's crust shifts, okay?

00:51:08.000 So that hot spot gurgles up, makes a volcano, then the hot spot goes dormant, but the shelf still drifts.

00:51:17.000 You still have continental drift.

00:51:18.000 So it drifts.

00:51:19.000 Then the hotspot says, time for me to gurgle again.

00:51:21.000 It gurgles up.

00:51:22.000 Now you get another volcano.

00:51:24.000 And then it goes dormant.

00:51:25.000 That volcano goes dormant.

00:51:26.000 It shifts.

00:51:27.000 You get another one.

00:51:28.000 Anytime you see a chain of islands.

00:51:32.000 Guaranteed they're made by volcanoes over enough time for continental to have shifted the plates over the hotspot of Earth's mantle.

00:51:42.000 So do you think what they're concerned with is the eventual spoiling of this beautiful natural resource that slowly but surely people are putting up houses there and...

00:51:53.000 Developments and all these different things.

00:51:55.000 And then the scientists are saying, we need this sacred land because we're going to put a volcano.

00:52:00.000 And they're like, look, there's already a telescope.

00:52:04.000 There's already a telescope up here.

00:52:06.000 Enough.

00:52:07.000 You think that's what it is?

00:52:08.000 They're trying to halt the progress of civilization?

00:52:10.000 Or, I mean, maybe progress is a bad word.

00:52:12.000 The expansion of civilization.

00:52:15.000 Yeah, I mean, let's go back.

00:52:18.000 What did Teddy Roosevelt do?

00:52:20.000 He said, we've got to preserve these lands because they're beautiful.

00:52:23.000 And by the way, he said that after he shot all those elephants and tigers and lions and tigers and bears, yeah, I mean, I hail from a museum, the American Museum of Natural History, where he's the patron saint of that museum.

00:52:36.000 What happened was he realizes how important this land is and how beautiful it is, and he is the patron saint of the national park system.

00:52:45.000 So, that's the secular version of sacred, right?

00:52:49.000 We don't say it's sacred, but we've all decided as a community that we care about these lands, and you don't want to drill on it, you don't want to put housing...

00:52:57.000 Was it Lyndon Johnson's wife, Lady Berg Johnson, who said, our freeways that we're so carefully building after the Second World War, the Eisenhower Freeway Project, okay, you know, the interstate system, is...

00:53:11.000 This is our country.

00:53:13.000 We want to keep it beautiful.

00:53:15.000 So certain stretches of it, there are no billboards.

00:53:18.000 Billboards would, you know, would change your relationship to nature.

00:53:24.000 So certain stretches of interstate are secularly sacred, if I can say that.

00:53:33.000 So I remember visiting Australia.

00:53:37.000 And there's the famous rock out in the outback, the Uluru.

00:53:44.000 Please help me get my correct pronunciation of this.

00:53:48.000 Uluru.

00:53:51.000 I'm told it's one coherent geologic rock.

00:53:55.000 It's not just an assembly of rocks.

00:53:57.000 And so I don't know enough about the geology of it, but I do know that the Australian Aborigines, Uluru, iconic red rock.

00:54:05.000 Look at that cool thing.

00:54:06.000 Okay?

00:54:07.000 So that is one sort of geologic thing.

00:54:12.000 And climbers want to climb it.

00:54:16.000 By the way, that's huge.

00:54:17.000 It's miles in circumference, okay?

00:54:19.000 So we visited it.

00:54:21.000 I rented a bicycle with my wife and kids, and we rode around it, okay?

00:54:26.000 So now...

00:54:30.000 That is sacred to the local indigenous peoples.

00:54:36.000 So they don't want you to climb on it.

00:54:38.000 Well, I'm a rock climber.

00:54:40.000 You know, what do you care?

00:54:41.000 I'm not going to ruin it.

00:54:42.000 I'm not going to...

00:54:42.000 They don't want you to climb on it.

00:54:44.000 And I try to think to myself, is there a counterpart to this?

00:54:49.000 That would sort of wake up a Westerner to say, I get it.

00:54:55.000 Now suppose some people from, some natives from Alaska or some tribes from Africa or some Aborigines came up from these remote places of the world, walked up to the Vatican and said,

00:55:11.000 we want to climb the walls of this Vatican just for sport.

00:55:14.000 What would we say?

00:55:17.000 We want to climb the walls of St. Paul's Cathedral in downtown London.

00:55:23.000 What would you say?

00:55:24.000 You say no.

00:55:25.000 Yeah, but are those comparable?

00:55:26.000 Wait, wait, wait, hold on.

00:55:27.000 We want to rappel down the Tower of Big Ben.

00:55:32.000 You're going to say no. 1.00

00:55:34.000 Get the fuck, you would say no. 1.00

00:55:37.000 These are important structures to us. 1.00

00:55:39.000 Now, are you going to say, well, we built those, and the natives didn't build the rock. 0.79

00:55:44.000 Right, exactly.

00:55:45.000 Okay.

00:55:46.000 Okay.

00:55:47.000 It depends on how important that detail is to you.

00:55:50.000 All I'm saying is, on the level of, we say this is sacred, you say that is sacred, and now you're going to have different rules for who's climbing what.

00:56:01.000 I think it'll force you to take pause.

00:56:04.000 Well, here's an argument in Supporting what you're saying, look at what's going on with the Himalayas. 1.00

00:56:12.000 I mean, it's the human shit that they leave behind there. 0.99

00:56:16.000 All the climbers. 1.00

00:56:17.000 It's so disturbing.

00:56:18.000 The climbers.

00:56:19.000 Yeah.

00:56:19.000 It's horrible.

00:56:20.000 It's really horrible.

00:56:21.000 I mean, there's tons of it.

00:56:24.000 Tons of human waste.

00:56:25.000 Okay, so what you do there is, if it's still not a problem that people are climbing, it's that they're leaving waste.

00:56:31.000 You don't stop the climbers, you tax them at some level, so that now you have cleanup crews that come up after them.

00:56:36.000 Yeah, but it's incredibly difficult to bring anything back.

00:56:40.000 So?

00:56:42.000 You tax them, you make it worth it.

00:56:44.000 But you understand, like, they have to leave the bodies up there, right?

00:56:48.000 You know that.

00:56:48.000 That's what I heard.

00:56:49.000 That's what I heard. 0.99

00:56:50.000 Well, why do you think they could bring tons of shit when they can't even bring bodies back? 0.99

00:56:54.000 Here's what I'm saying. 0.99

00:56:54.000 When they invented cars, and cars were killing people in the street because people didn't know how to cross the street. 0.99

00:57:00.000 They didn't know where to cross the street.

00:57:01.000 People don't know how to stop the cars.

00:57:03.000 They say, well, cars are actually a pretty useful thing.

00:57:05.000 Do we ban cars?

00:57:06.000 No.

00:57:07.000 We make stoplights.

00:57:08.000 Oh, people are crossing.

00:57:10.000 Well, we make crosswalks.

00:57:11.000 Oh, let's put lanes so the cars don't hit each other. 0.61

00:57:13.000 And let's make airbags so that you don't fly through the windshield.

00:57:17.000 Alright?

00:57:18.000 So there are ways around problems if you value the thing that it is that you want to do.

00:57:23.000 So if people are leaving crap up there, you make them bring it back.

00:57:28.000 Or you develop a system that enables the stuff to come back no matter what.

00:57:33.000 And if you can't do that and you don't want it messed up, then cancel the whole operation.

00:57:38.000 We didn't cancel cars.

00:57:39.000 We got really innovative about how to keep them. 0.99

00:57:41.000 I think there's a big difference between cars and human shit that's left in the side of the mountain. 0.98

00:57:46.000 I think the real problem, too, is... 0.99

00:57:49.000 If you value mountain climbing...

00:57:52.000 And you want to keep doing it, then you solve the problem.

00:57:55.000 This is what engineers do.

00:57:57.000 That's all they do.

00:57:58.000 Is it what's your problem?

00:57:59.000 I'll solve it.

00:57:59.000 They've never been able to bring those bodies back because of the physical limitations of the human body.

00:58:04.000 You barely have enough juice to climb.

00:58:07.000 It's so thin.

00:58:08.000 The air is so thin.

00:58:09.000 It's so dangerous.

00:58:10.000 And the energy draw on you is so high.

00:58:12.000 So they leave those bodies there. 1.00

00:58:14.000 Is that the human shit that you're talking about? 1.00

00:58:16.000 No, there's that and human shit. 1.00

00:58:17.000 You're talking about the fact that humans were there, that we're not very clean about our presence. 1.00

00:58:23.000 That's what you're talking about, right?

00:58:25.000 Well, we're just being human.

00:58:26.000 We have to go.

00:58:27.000 When you gotta go, you gotta go.

00:58:28.000 When you gotta go up there, you just open up the hatch and let a rip down the side of a mountain.

00:58:33.000 And the resulting... 0.98

00:58:35.000 Do you know in the space station they recycle your urine and your crap? 0.99

00:58:38.000 Congratulations to them. 0.99

00:58:40.000 Because they put engineers on the problem.

00:58:42.000 When they recycle it, they extract all the water from it.

00:58:45.000 And then what's left is highly dried and mineral.

00:58:48.000 Yeah, water is water.

00:58:50.000 It's a water molecule.

00:58:51.000 That's the thing about water.

00:58:53.000 If you drink water, people's pee is in it. 0.97

00:58:55.000 That's correct.

00:58:56.000 You got a bottle of water here?

00:58:58.000 Caveman pee.

00:58:59.000 Okay.

00:59:00.000 This has... 0.97

00:59:01.000 Napoleon's pee in it. 0.97

00:59:02.000 Yes.

00:59:03.000 Yes, there are more molecules of water in this bottle than there are bottles of water, this volume of water, in all the world's oceans.

00:59:13.000 So in other words, if you drank this and peed it out, Okay?

00:59:19.000 You have enough molecules in your pee and in your sweat and in the moisture that you exhale.

00:59:25.000 All that goes back into the environment, scattering into all sources of water of the world, and there's enough of those molecules to occupy every...

00:59:34.000 Half liter of water that covers the surface of this earth.

00:59:38.000 So that given enough time, you scoop a cup of water out of there.

00:59:42.000 I don't even care if you filter it.

00:59:44.000 The H2O is still there.

00:59:45.000 That is water that is passed through the kidneys of Abraham Lincoln.

00:59:50.000 Genghis Khan.

00:59:53.000 Joan of Arc.

00:59:57.000 Socrates.

00:59:58.000 Plato.

00:59:59.000 No.

01:00:00.000 Jesus?

01:00:01.000 No.

01:00:01.000 Can I get a bottle of Jesus?

01:00:02.000 I'm trying to get my Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure list going here, okay?

01:00:07.000 You just ruined it.

01:00:08.000 But yes, Jesus would be included in that.

01:00:10.000 So would Socrates, yes.

01:00:12.000 So that is the, by the way, the same is true with breaths of air.

01:00:16.000 There are more molecules of air in every breath you take than there are breaths of air in all the atmosphere of the earth.

01:00:26.000 So when you exhale, there's enough of those molecules to scatter, and the air currents will do this, to scatter into every breath of air that is inhaled.

01:00:38.000 So when you take a breath of air, you have molecules of air that went through the lungs of Jesus.

01:00:46.000 We're all connected, and there's no way around it.

01:00:49.000 And the water that we have is the water that we have, right?

01:00:53.000 We drink it.

01:00:53.000 We pee it.

01:00:54.000 It goes to the atmosphere.

01:00:55.000 It comes down as rain.

01:00:56.000 Yeah.

01:00:57.000 And the rain is an important difference is most of the water on Earth is salt water that you can't drink.

01:01:03.000 Right.

01:01:03.000 And there's a limited amount that's fresh water.

01:01:05.000 How much of a...

01:01:06.000 By the way, all the glaciers are fresh water because it's frozen rain.

01:01:09.000 Right.

01:01:10.000 Frozen rain.

01:01:11.000 Here's something that no one talks about.

01:01:13.000 When the glaciers melt, where does the water go?

01:01:18.000 Where's it going?

01:01:18.000 Just tell me.

01:01:19.000 You know the answer.

01:01:20.000 In the ocean?

01:01:22.000 Back in the ocean.

01:01:22.000 Okay.

01:01:23.000 But this is now non-salty water going into the ocean.

01:01:28.000 So you're mixing fresh water with brackish water.

01:01:31.000 And they occupy different places in the vertical profile of the ocean.

01:01:37.000 Because salt water is heavier than fresh water.

01:01:39.000 So fresh water occupies the top, but it's not as salty as the water below.

01:01:44.000 And there are circulations in the ocean, not only up and down northern latitude, southern latitude like the Gulf Stream, there's also circulation top to bottom.

01:01:56.000 And the combinations of all these circulations create the stability of the ocean.

01:02:00.000 If you disrupt that, oh my gosh.

01:02:04.000 There are animal fishes that can't live anymore where they used to be because the salt level is different.

01:02:09.000 And so some animals might go extinct.

01:02:12.000 Some weather patterns will change because the ocean affects climate.

01:02:16.000 So this is why climate modeling is so critical yet so complicated.

01:02:23.000 It's because there are a lot of variables that show up.

01:02:26.000 Why can't we take the salt out of the water?

01:02:29.000 You can.

01:02:30.000 It just takes energy.

01:02:30.000 You can do it.

01:02:31.000 But why isn't that being done on large scale?

01:02:33.000 You can.

01:02:33.000 You have to ask.

01:02:35.000 Who's paying for the energy? 0.71

01:02:36.000 Where are you getting the energy from?

01:02:37.000 It's an energy thing.

01:02:38.000 Well, I would think that would be very valuable.

01:02:40.000 I mean, think about how many people buy bottles of water.

01:02:41.000 It's not valuable enough yet.

01:02:43.000 That's the point.

01:02:44.000 Well, is it that...

01:02:45.000 It's just money.

01:02:47.000 Dude, it's just money.

01:02:49.000 You can ask, what does it cost to ship a half pint of water from Fiji?

01:02:55.000 Okay, whatever the hell is the square bottle that you buy.

01:02:58.000 Fiji water.

01:02:59.000 Is it Fiji, right?

01:03:00.000 Yeah.

01:03:00.000 Fiji water.

01:03:01.000 What does it cost to bottle that in Fiji, ship it here, relative to...

01:03:09.000 Desalinating the ocean.

01:03:11.000 It's cheaper to ship to Fiji.

01:03:14.000 There'll be a day when that's not the case.

01:03:16.000 And future wars are going to be fought over who has access to fresh water.

01:03:20.000 And the value of water will go up.

01:03:22.000 And by the way, the value of water in space is $10,000 a pound.

01:03:28.000 So if you lasso a comet...

01:03:31.000 And you say, this is a lot of fresh water?

01:03:34.000 Yeah, I guess you can bring it back down to Earth, but that's expensive.

01:03:37.000 You're better off selling it to NASA for $9,000 a pound.

01:03:41.000 Because it costs them $10,000 a pound to put water into orbit.

01:03:45.000 So you're better off keeping it up there and somehow or another transferring it.

01:03:48.000 Yeah, so if you harness water in space, you're better off trading in space with it than bringing it back down to a planetary surface at the moment.

01:03:56.000 The economics favor that.

01:03:57.000 What is the desalination process?

01:03:59.000 So it's simple.

01:04:00.000 You just evaporate the water.

01:04:02.000 It's basically a still.

01:04:04.000 It's a distillery, right?

01:04:07.000 So here's a pocket of water that's highly salty, and you just heat it.

01:04:15.000 H2O evaporates, leaving sodium chloride behind.

01:04:19.000 And at the end, you get this salt deposit at the bottom of your dish, at the bottom of your vessel.

01:04:25.000 Oh, wait a minute.

01:04:26.000 What happens to lakes that used to be there, salty lakes that used to be there that aren't?

01:04:30.000 There's a salt deposit.

01:04:32.000 That's the source of our modern day salt.

01:04:34.000 This is what I tweeted the other day, that all table salt is sea salt.

01:04:41.000 It just came from long buried, prehistoric, evaporated seas.

01:04:48.000 So salt mines, and I was told by some geologists, I had had a narrow usage of the word mine.

01:04:56.000 When I think of a mine, I think of a hole in the ground.

01:04:58.000 But mining operations include surface operations as well.

01:05:01.000 So there's surface lakes that have evaporated, and you get salt from that, as well as the mines that you would dig down.

01:05:08.000 So that whole, all of that is a mining operation.

01:05:11.000 My tweet only referenced the buried ones, but it's all from evaporated water.

01:05:16.000 It's all from evaporated, it's all sea salt, is the point.

01:05:19.000 Now, nuclear power plants rely on steam, right?

01:05:23.000 Isn't that part of what nuclear power plants do?

01:05:25.000 Just to finish the point, so you evaporate the water, and the salt left, maybe you might want to use that and make some sea salt out of it, table salt, and that evaporated water condenses out over here, and that is distilled water.

01:05:38.000 Now, you might want to mineralize it so it tastes good because distilled water doesn't taste good.

01:05:42.000 Plus, it's not really healthy to drink it, as you probably know.

01:05:45.000 You drink distilled water, it goes into equilibrium with your minerals, sucking minerals out of you so it has the same minerality that your body does.

01:05:54.000 And then you pee it out and you'll systematically drain yourself of important minerals.

01:05:58.000 Yeah.

01:05:59.000 So generally the water that you would say tastes good and you enjoy has some mineral bits, some kind of minerals in it.

01:06:10.000 Now, nuclear power plants, don't they – the process is using that nuclear energy to create steam to operate turbines?

01:06:18.000 Yeah.

01:06:18.000 Basically, all of our electricity today comes from essentially – mostly electricity is coming from turbines that convert steam to electricity.

01:06:30.000 So, sorry.

01:06:30.000 So, you heat water.

01:06:32.000 The water makes steam.

01:06:33.000 The steam turns the turbine, and the turning turbine generates the electricity.

01:06:36.000 Isn't there – To boil the water.

01:06:41.000 That's what it comes out.

01:06:42.000 Is it coal?

01:06:43.000 Is it oil?

01:06:44.000 Is it nukes?

01:06:45.000 Is it wind?

01:06:47.000 Is it hydro?

01:06:48.000 All of this.

01:06:49.000 You get a hydro plant.

01:06:51.000 Oh, by the way, in a hydro plant, they don't have to make steam because they have the water pressure at the base of the dam moves through the turbines and turns the turbines and they make electricity.

01:07:02.000 They don't have to heat anything because they have the water pressure to do that anyway.

01:07:06.000 That is also solar power, by the way.

01:07:09.000 Because the sun evaporated ocean water.

01:07:14.000 The water lifts up, becomes a cloud.

01:07:16.000 The cloud moves over the land.

01:07:19.000 The cloud rains into the lake that is above the dam.

01:07:23.000 So the energy that got the water up there in the first place is all solar.

01:07:29.000 So you should think of hydroelectric as solar as well as wind energy because wind is the unequal heating of air on Earth's surface and that creates air currents.

01:07:39.000 That's also solar power.

01:07:40.000 It's all solar.

01:07:41.000 Isn't it conceivable that you could come up with a combination of desalination and power plant where you're using the heat to combine, you know, to make the turbines move and then you steam it off and that's where you get the water from?

01:07:55.000 That would be a good...

01:07:56.000 That's an interesting idea, and I don't know how much that's been thought about.

01:08:00.000 What you're saying is, I'm making steam anyway.

01:08:02.000 Yeah.

01:08:02.000 So why don't I do it with salt water?

01:08:05.000 Suck all the ocean water out. 0.97

01:08:05.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:08:06.000 And make two things.

01:08:07.000 That's a nice two-for-one kind of thing.

01:08:09.000 Three-for-one.

01:08:10.000 You get salt out of the two.

01:08:10.000 And you get salt out the other side.

01:08:12.000 You get salt.

01:08:12.000 Get salt.

01:08:14.000 You...

01:08:14.000 Get fresh water.

01:08:15.000 Get fresh water, and you generate electricity.

01:08:17.000 Yeah.

01:08:17.000 So do it.

01:08:18.000 Patent it.

01:08:19.000 No.

01:08:20.000 It's free for anybody who wants it.

01:08:22.000 Go take that and run with it.

01:08:23.000 I have high hopes for tidal energy, because there are certain places on Earth where tides are very powerful, and you just put some paddles in there, and it works both ways when the water comes in and out.

01:08:35.000 Is it battery technology that's the reason why L.A. isn't completely dependent upon solar?

01:08:39.000 Because it seems like this is the spot to do it.

01:08:42.000 It never rains.

01:08:43.000 If it rains here 50 days a year, it's crazy.

01:08:46.000 Or any desert.

01:08:47.000 We're next door to the Mojave Desert.

01:08:49.000 Fill it up.

01:08:50.000 So one of the problems is, and by the way, the deserts are generally localized to certain latitudes on Earth.

01:08:57.000 It's because of general circulation on Earth.

01:09:00.000 So the air pockets on Earth, there's a lot going on.

01:09:05.000 The air moves in a lot of ways.

01:09:07.000 But there's an overriding circulation of air that has air sort of rising up at the equator.

01:09:16.000 Imagine a cylindrical movement of air that girds the Earth.

01:09:22.000 Okay?

01:09:23.000 So just above the equator, you have a cylinder rotating where you have air rising.

01:09:28.000 And just below the equator, you have a cylinder rotating the opposite way so that air is still rising at the equator.

01:09:36.000 Okay?

01:09:37.000 So air rises at the equator.

01:09:38.000 It's unstable.

01:09:38.000 It makes clouds.

01:09:39.000 The equator is the cloudiest place on Earth, practically.

01:09:42.000 One of the cloudiest places.

01:09:44.000 Well, how about the other side of those cylinders where the air descends?

01:09:50.000 Okay?

01:09:51.000 When you have descending air, you don't make clouds.

01:09:55.000 Well, how big is the cylinder?

01:09:57.000 It's about 30 degrees of latitude wide.

01:10:01.000 So, your rainiest places on Earth are at the equator.

01:10:06.000 That's where you get the Amazon rainforest and the lake.

01:10:09.000 And your driest places on earth are at 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south.

01:10:15.000 Because these cylindrical movements of air have descending air there.

01:10:21.000 So the Mojave Desert, the Sahara Desert, the Gobi Desert, they're all around 30 degrees north latitude.

01:10:33.000 So we live on the surface of the earth where there are forces operating that are so much bigger than us that we don't even think about it.

01:10:43.000 And India would be a desert because it's right in that zone were it not for the seasonal monsoons.

01:10:54.000 It doesn't rain much in India except when it's monsoon season.

01:10:58.000 So the monsoon is sort of the exception to what would otherwise happen there.

01:11:03.000 And that's why everyone loves the monsoon.

01:11:05.000 They hate it, but they love it.

01:11:06.000 It cools the weather.

01:11:07.000 They get sources of water.

01:11:10.000 There it is.

01:11:11.000 So to ask you the question again.

01:11:13.000 Oh, did I not answer?

01:11:13.000 Sorry.

01:11:16.000 Battery technology?

01:11:18.000 Why isn't LA completely solar?

01:11:20.000 It should be.

01:11:21.000 It's not.

01:11:22.000 Some of it is cost.

01:11:24.000 LA is so car heavy.

01:11:28.000 And plus, there's a Lamborghini passing me at 20 miles an hour on the 405. This is the land of wasted horsepower, right?

01:11:38.000 So any place that has a lot of sunlight should be thriving on solar panels, and you guys aren't.

01:11:43.000 I looked around.

01:11:44.000 Very few homes have solar panels, and I don't fully understand that.

01:11:49.000 If you did that, then you'd run off your own power.

01:11:52.000 You can do this.

01:11:53.000 You can do the equation.

01:11:54.000 It makes it very difficult, by the way.

01:11:55.000 And so, yeah, I mean, the price might have to come down a little further.

01:12:01.000 You don't really see the full price of oil.

01:12:05.000 It's subsidized in ways that are not obvious to us.

01:12:09.000 You know, we built the roads with our taxes so that car companies could sell you a car that you drove on the road that was built for them.

01:12:18.000 If they had to build all their own roads, the price of gas to go in the car would have been much higher.

01:12:22.000 The price of your car would have been, all of that would have been much higher.

01:12:24.000 If the car companies had to do it?

01:12:26.000 What I'm saying is, I make a product and I want you to use it, but there's no roads.

01:12:30.000 Oh, I convinced you to build the road so you can buy my car and drive on that road.

01:12:36.000 That's a weird way of looking at it.

01:12:37.000 But it's a way...

01:12:38.000 Isn't it difficult?

01:12:38.000 It's full cost accounting.

01:12:40.000 It's full cost accounting.

01:12:41.000 What is the cost of coal?

01:12:43.000 It's how many people died of lung disease, of pneumono ultramicroscopic silica vulcanoconiosis.

01:12:48.000 Okay?

01:12:49.000 That's the longest word in the Random House Dictionary.

01:12:52.000 Is it?

01:12:52.000 Yeah.

01:12:53.000 That's basically black lung.

01:12:55.000 Yeah, it's basically black lung.

01:12:56.000 But you can break it up.

01:12:57.000 Pneumono...

01:13:00.000 Ultramicroscopic silicavel with the silicates in canoconiosis.

01:13:05.000 So there's all medical bits stapled together to make that word.

01:13:10.000 So what is the cost to their health, their death, their air quality, asthma?

01:13:18.000 The total cost of oil is not what you pay at the gas tank.

01:13:22.000 It's other things that we shell out that are not realized in the actual cost of that source of energy.

01:13:29.000 If you full cost accounted what all this really costs, then the solar option would look way better than it does relative to it.

01:13:39.000 That's all I'm telling you.

01:13:39.000 But when you're talking about cars and car manufacturers having to pay for roads, isn't that like restaurants?

01:13:44.000 No, they didn't pay for roads. 0.68

01:13:46.000 Isn't that like restaurants having to pay for toilet paper? 0.99

01:13:48.000 No.

01:13:50.000 Restaurants have to pay for land that you would park your car on to go into the restaurant.

01:13:57.000 Not in New York City, but in places where everybody has cars.

01:14:00.000 If you don't have valet parking, my restaurant will not occupy the entire plot of land I just bought.

01:14:06.000 It's going to be a fourth of that land, and all the rest are going to be parking spots.

01:14:11.000 I have absorbed the cost of your parking your car in my acquisition of that real estate, for example.

01:14:20.000 To make it convenient so people could use your facility.

01:14:22.000 Correct.

01:14:23.000 But I bore that cost as restaurateur.

01:14:27.000 Right.

01:14:28.000 Or maybe I'm renting, of course, but that's...

01:14:30.000 How does that relate to someone...

01:14:33.000 The car manufacturers being forced to pay for the roads, or that they should be.

01:14:38.000 That would have been interesting had they, because then it would have changed the pricing of everything.

01:14:42.000 But why would they be?

01:14:44.000 Are you going to make a car and no one has a road to drive it on?

01:14:47.000 That's your responsibility.

01:14:48.000 It's what?

01:14:49.000 It's your responsibility.

01:14:50.000 Then you don't have a business.

01:14:52.000 But don't you want a car?

01:14:54.000 Yes.

01:14:54.000 So we all agree.

01:14:55.000 Cars are good.

01:14:56.000 They move fast.

01:14:57.000 They get you where you want to go, right?

01:14:59.000 So how do we as a society make it easier for people to get where they want to go?

01:15:03.000 Well, we all chip in and we make roads.

01:15:05.000 It's not entirely dependent.

01:15:06.000 Before there were cars, nobody's thinking, you know, I want to go to Chicago tomorrow and I'll be back on Thursday.

01:15:11.000 No one is even having that thought.

01:15:13.000 Before there were email, no one was thinking, I'm going to send you an email.

01:15:15.000 Right.

01:15:15.000 These are not thoughts.

01:15:16.000 So I'm just talking about all the forces that had to align to make it actually work.

01:15:22.000 I understand.

01:15:22.000 Okay?

01:15:23.000 So now, what's holding back electric cars?

01:15:25.000 Well, I might not be able to charge it.

01:15:27.000 It takes a little too long to charge compared to my other vehicle.

01:15:30.000 Are there enough chargers along the way?

01:15:33.000 Well, these were questions that were asked when people got cars.

01:15:36.000 If I have cars and it takes gas, is there a gas station?

01:15:38.000 Oh, Standard Oil says we'll put a gas station there because you're buying cars.

01:15:43.000 And so it's a whole family of businesses coming together and you're paying for a big part of that.

01:15:51.000 It's not just the car.

01:15:52.000 You paid for the roads.

01:15:54.000 That's all I'm saying.

01:15:56.000 I'm not complaining about it.

01:15:57.000 I'm just describing it as a reality.

01:15:59.000 I get it.

01:15:59.000 I just didn't understand the comparison to car manufacturers paying for it.

01:16:04.000 If I make a car and I want you to buy my car, I need a road.

01:16:08.000 So I'm going to build the road.

01:16:10.000 Oh, wait a minute.

01:16:11.000 I convinced you to build the road.

01:16:12.000 That's even better.

01:16:14.000 Oh my gosh, I made it a national priority.

01:16:16.000 Oh, it's a security problem.

01:16:17.000 We need a military design interstate system. 1.00

01:16:23.000 That's why it goes through mountains instead of over them.

01:16:27.000 That's why there are long stretches of straightaways.

01:16:29.000 You can land an airplane on it.

01:16:30.000 That's why they're built above the road.

01:16:32.000 That's why the surface roads are not the same thing as highways.

01:16:35.000 Because the highways are not on the surface.

01:16:36.000 Why?

01:16:37.000 Because they're built up.

01:16:37.000 Why?

01:16:38.000 Because tanks can drive on them without decomposing the road.

01:16:42.000 What specs did we put this to?

01:16:44.000 To the Autobahn.

01:16:45.000 The Germans invented the modern highway system.

01:16:47.000 They invented the cloverleaf.

01:16:49.000 They invented the off-ramps.

01:16:50.000 They invented all of that.

01:16:51.000 And their armies could move on their roads like it was nobody's business.

01:16:55.000 And Eisenhower said, hey, I'll get me some of that.

01:16:58.000 That's probably not how he said it, I'm guessing.

01:17:00.000 But he comes out and convinces us all that we need to build an interstate system.

01:17:05.000 I got nothing against the interstate system.

01:17:06.000 I'm just giving you the foundational facts for it.

01:17:10.000 And by the way, the interstate system costs as much as going to the moon, about $100 billion in total cost.

01:17:16.000 It seems like a bargain compared to how many people use it versus how many people went to the moon.

01:17:19.000 Yeah, it's huge.

01:17:19.000 And it grows the economy.

01:17:21.000 It has a lot of – but basically it was sold as a security need because if you're at war, you need to move material and personnel and you might have to land an airplane.

01:17:35.000 In an emergency way.

01:17:36.000 And so all freeways do this.

01:17:38.000 If you're going to crash a plane, do it on a freeway.

01:17:41.000 Happens.

01:17:42.000 Yeah.

01:17:42.000 But do it because you might land safely.

01:17:44.000 And if you don't land safely, the road comes to you to get to the hospital.

01:17:49.000 Don't crash in a forest.

01:17:50.000 We can't get to you.

01:17:52.000 Right.

01:17:52.000 You can't get emergency vehicles.

01:17:54.000 Good call.

01:17:55.000 Yeah.

01:17:56.000 You know, have you seen this new, Porsche has a new electric vehicle that they're about to release, and it's got revolutionary groundbreaking technology that allows it to charge much faster.

01:18:07.000 You could charge up to 80% in 20 minutes, because it's double the, well, pull up the information, was it wattage or amperage?

01:18:16.000 Well, just a couple of things.

01:18:18.000 A bunch of different battery technology.

01:18:19.000 You can't cheat physics.

01:18:20.000 So, yes, some batteries charge faster than others, but what really drives the charging speed of battery is the voltage over which you charge the battery.

01:18:32.000 And it goes as the square of the voltage.

01:18:35.000 Right.

01:18:35.000 So a supercharger.

01:18:37.000 So if you charge an electric car in your 120-volt home electricity...

01:18:44.000 It could take 30 hours.

01:18:46.000 If you go to 240 volts, it'll take 10 hours.

01:18:51.000 If you go to 384 volts, you keep going up, that drops precipitously.

01:18:57.000 And you can get a voltage where the thing will charge in a couple hours.

01:19:02.000 Yeah, we have a supercharger here.

01:19:03.000 Oh, you do?

01:19:04.000 Yeah, we have some setup here for my Tesla.

01:19:05.000 So there you go.

01:19:06.000 Which Tesla do you have?

01:19:07.000 So it charges quicker.

01:19:07.000 The S? Yes, yeah, cool.

01:19:09.000 Yeah, so you charge it in, at most, 90 minutes.

01:19:12.000 I don't think they call it that anymore.

01:19:14.000 I think they only have- The superchargers?

01:19:15.000 No, there's the Tesla.

01:19:17.000 I think they call it a, they have like an S Raven. 0.91

01:19:21.000 They have two distinctions.

01:19:21.000 Oh, you don't think they call it the S anymore?

01:19:23.000 No, it's not the P100D. That's the high battery capacity.

01:19:27.000 Okay.

01:19:27.000 Now I think they have it based on whether it's a single engine or a double engine.

01:19:32.000 They've simplified things.

01:19:33.000 They've also removed all the labels to make it a little slicker.

01:19:38.000 So in the Porsche, is it just that they're selling a higher voltage charger to you?

01:19:43.000 Trying to find that info.

01:19:44.000 Or is the battery so completely different?

01:19:46.000 Google 10 interesting things about the new Porsche Taycan.

01:19:51.000 How do you say it?

01:19:51.000 Taycan?

01:19:52.000 That's the article I was reading today.

01:19:55.000 So that's cool.

01:19:56.000 So my concern is batteries are still kind of 19th century technology.

01:20:00.000 Yeah.

01:20:01.000 You know who invented the battery?

01:20:02.000 Yeah.

01:20:02.000 Volta.

01:20:03.000 Alexander Volta.

01:20:04.000 Oh, that makes sense.

01:20:05.000 Yeah, he's cool.

01:20:08.000 Voltage?

01:20:08.000 Volts.

01:20:09.000 Volts come from him.

01:20:11.000 Volt?

01:20:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:20:11.000 All these guys got, you know, they got famous.

01:20:13.000 So Tesla, we got a car named after him.

01:20:16.000 The guy had a car.

01:20:17.000 There's actually a unit of electromagnetism named after Nikola Tesla.

01:20:21.000 Really?

01:20:21.000 Yeah, it's...

01:20:23.000 Webers per square meter, I think.

01:20:26.000 So it's like the density of magnetic field strength within a certain area through a surface.

01:20:37.000 But it's charged by an inductive plate.

01:20:40.000 The conventional charge says the Porsche claims that the Porsche turbocharging system charges at 350,000 kilowatts in 15 minutes.

01:20:49.000 80% in just 15 minutes.

01:20:51.000 Oh, that's cool.

01:20:52.000 It's not clear how Porsche will prevent battery overheating.

01:20:55.000 Maybe they won't. 1.00

01:20:56.000 Good luck, bitch. 1.00

01:20:57.000 So it could be vaporware. 1.00

01:20:59.000 But we'll see.

01:21:00.000 Well, they've already been driving it.

01:21:02.000 But it's game on.

01:21:03.000 That's what that means.

01:21:04.000 It's game on.

01:21:05.000 Whether it works or not, it's like Tesla's on notice.

01:21:08.000 Everybody's on notice.

01:21:09.000 Oh my gosh, I'm going to lose market share because people want to buy an electric car.

01:21:14.000 And...

01:21:15.000 They want something that's going to charge fast.

01:21:17.000 And that's the number one complaint that most people have over electric cars.

01:21:20.000 Or you find a way to...

01:21:21.000 Okay, so that's one way.

01:21:23.000 But another way is you find a way to swap batteries as quickly as it...

01:21:26.000 In less time than it takes to fill a tank.

01:21:28.000 Yeah.

01:21:29.000 You know, how much time do you stand there with your hand on the nozzle waiting for the gas to go in?

01:21:33.000 Right, so they would have to have a mountain of batteries sitting there waiting for people to just come in and take a new one out.

01:21:37.000 Is it any worse than a mountain than a sunken reservoir tank of gas?

01:21:42.000 There's no different.

01:21:44.000 Why is that any different?

01:21:45.000 Probably a larger volume, right?

01:21:47.000 Possibly, but so what?

01:21:48.000 If it's economic, you just do it.

01:21:50.000 Right.

01:21:51.000 And if the battery's all at the bottom of the car, go like NASCAR. You run in, pop it up.

01:21:56.000 Mm-hmm.

01:21:58.000 Take out the battery, put in the next one, you're off.

01:22:00.000 Do you think that's the future?

01:22:01.000 Why not?

01:22:02.000 It's better than charging the battery.

01:22:03.000 You don't have a car, do you?

01:22:05.000 No, I do.

01:22:06.000 Yeah, I do have cars now.

01:22:07.000 I didn't used to.

01:22:08.000 I didn't used to.

01:22:09.000 It's expensive as hell to garage it in New York.

01:22:11.000 It just went up.

01:22:12.000 The price just went up.

01:22:13.000 The big price point of that was, when did the average cost to garage a car for a month in Manhattan equal the average cost of a two-bedroom home in the United States?

01:22:26.000 And we've passed that.

01:22:27.000 Cost of rent.

01:22:29.000 What's the average cost to rent?

01:22:31.000 It was like $600 a month or something.

01:22:33.000 To rent a parking spot?

01:22:34.000 To rent a parking spot, right.

01:22:35.000 One spot.

01:22:36.000 One spot a month per month.

01:22:38.000 And you can rent a home in many places in the suburbs somewhere for $600 a month.

01:22:43.000 What kind of car do you drive?

01:22:44.000 So I now have a Tesla.

01:22:45.000 Yeah, so I ponied up.

01:22:48.000 They're expensive, by the way.

01:22:50.000 I heard.

01:22:50.000 Yeah, so I have the X. So that's my sort of utility vehicle.

01:22:53.000 The X is the SUV. A very high acceleration, as you know.

01:22:57.000 And But yeah, there's no maintenance on it, right?

01:23:01.000 There's no oil change.

01:23:03.000 There's no, you know, the only moving part is what you're turning the wheels with, right?

01:23:09.000 No pistons, nothing.

01:23:11.000 So, you know, cars really should have been this 100 years ago, and then we would have had 100 years of clever engineering to perfect that.

01:23:17.000 You ever see the documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?

01:23:19.000 No, I haven't, but I know about it.

01:23:20.000 And I know some of the background story behind it.

01:23:23.000 And the electric car was one of the first...

01:23:25.000 Because electricity was all the rage 100 years ago.

01:23:27.000 Let's electrify the cities.

01:23:29.000 There's Edison.

01:23:30.000 There's Tesla.

01:23:31.000 Everybody wants to do everything electric.

01:23:33.000 And the car had just come out.

01:23:34.000 Let's do it electric.

01:23:35.000 So this was not a new concept.

01:23:37.000 And it's unfortunate that more sort of innovative thinkers hadn't been brought to task on how to perfect the electric car.

01:23:46.000 Wow.

01:23:46.000 Speaking of Tesla and electricity, what did you think about Tesla's initial idea that Westinghouse shot down to sort of broadcast electricity so that people could just pull it out of the air?

01:23:59.000 Yeah, so the people in the Nikola Tesla fan club I don't know.

01:24:24.000 But his contributions to electromagnetism are real and recognized in the world of physics.

01:24:30.000 Like I said, there's a unit of electromagnetism named after him.

01:24:33.000 So don't come crying to me and say he was not recognized by my people.

01:24:37.000 Okay?

01:24:37.000 He's recognized.

01:24:39.000 He had some ideas that were a little out there.

01:24:43.000 And out there on a level where...

01:24:47.000 It almost certainly would have not worked.

01:24:50.000 And here's why.

01:24:52.000 Okay?

01:24:53.000 Electromagnetic energy is communicating between us.

01:24:57.000 I see you.

01:24:58.000 That's because visible light is reflecting off of your scalp.

01:25:02.000 Okay?

01:25:02.000 To me.

01:25:03.000 It's reflecting off of my nose back to you.

01:25:05.000 You can ask, how much energy is in that?

01:25:07.000 Well, not much.

01:25:09.000 There's not much energy in visible light photons.

01:25:12.000 If you stayed there long enough, you might feel a little warmth from it.

01:25:15.000 But no, you're not going to drive a car with that energy.

01:25:18.000 You're not going to run a motor with it.

01:25:20.000 Okay.

01:25:21.000 Well, of what good is it?

01:25:22.000 Oh, you know what we found?

01:25:23.000 We can use electromagnetic radio waves, which are the lowest form of electromagnetic energy, lowest energy level of all of our...

01:25:31.000 We can use radio waves not to transmit energy.

01:25:34.000 That's not the point of it.

01:25:35.000 The point is to transmit information.

01:25:39.000 And information became what characterized the modern era.

01:25:43.000 And that's why in the 1950s and 60s, when everyone is imagining flying cars and motorized sidewalks, everything is running on energy because they're thinking energy is going to be free in the future.

01:25:56.000 But what they didn't figure was that information would be free or easy to transmit and to generate and to store and to delete.

01:26:08.000 And whereas the energy that it would take to move things and to drive things, that would be a problem.

01:26:15.000 No one saw that coming.

01:26:16.000 Nobody saw that coming.

01:26:17.000 So...

01:26:19.000 As your photons get higher and higher energy, yes, you can start doing things with them.

01:26:24.000 You get X-rays and gamma rays.

01:26:26.000 But that's not what Tesla was referring to.

01:26:28.000 He was talking about moving radio waves through the space that would charge things up.

01:26:32.000 You can't pack sufficient energy in your radio wave to do anything we need to do mechanically.

01:26:42.000 Currently.

01:26:43.000 But back then, would it be sufficient?

01:26:45.000 There might have been something you could have done with your radio waves, because the needs were...

01:26:49.000 No, I take that back.

01:26:51.000 That was the height of the Industrial Revolution.

01:26:53.000 That was the age of the machine, the age of the giant turbines.

01:26:58.000 Radio energy is not touching that.

01:27:01.000 Right, but wasn't it possible that he was considering it for things like radios, or light bulbs, or household items?

01:27:09.000 Would it be possible to use that power for that?

01:27:12.000 So what happens?

01:27:14.000 If you had enough power in radio waves to generate a light bulb, to power a light bulb, through the air, are you standing in the way of this?

01:27:25.000 This energy has pathways.

01:27:27.000 We now send energy through wires.

01:27:30.000 Because you're not standing in the way of the wire.

01:27:32.000 The wire is buried.

01:27:33.000 The wire has insulation.

01:27:34.000 It would have some sort of residual effect.

01:27:36.000 You want to move it through the air and you want to walk around like...

01:27:41.000 No!

01:27:41.000 That's not how that works.

01:27:43.000 What I've heard...

01:27:44.000 If you're moving enough energy through the air to power something that itself could kill you, the energy moving through the air could kill you.

01:27:54.000 Unless you bring a little bit amount and then you store it and then use it later.

01:27:58.000 You could do it that way.

01:28:00.000 Sure.

01:28:01.000 Some sort of battery system.

01:28:02.000 Yeah, you need a storage system.

01:28:04.000 But you would still probably have some sort of residual effect of having this stuff broadcast through the air.

01:28:08.000 And who knows what it would do to human health.

01:28:10.000 If you needed that much energy, right now, the energy to transmit information is so low that it, no, it has no effect on your health.

01:28:18.000 That's why I can pull out my cell phone.

01:28:20.000 I'm in a brick.

01:28:21.000 Is this a fake brick?

01:28:22.000 That's a fake brick.

01:28:23.000 No, those are real bricks.

01:28:24.000 No, it's not.

01:28:24.000 Yes, it is.

01:28:25.000 Go touch it.

01:28:26.000 I don't believe you.

01:28:26.000 Go ahead.

01:28:27.000 Those are real bricks.

01:28:29.000 Go touch the bricks, man.

01:28:31.000 Jesus Christ, he thinks we got fake bricks.

01:28:33.000 Who do you think we are?

01:28:36.000 Okay.

01:28:36.000 Oh.

01:28:36.000 You got it.

01:28:37.000 Thought I was a liar.

01:28:38.000 How weird.

01:28:40.000 Now, let me be honest.

01:28:42.000 It's a veneer.

01:28:43.000 A brick veneer.

01:28:44.000 Okay, it's not holding anything up.

01:28:45.000 It's from real buildings.

01:28:45.000 So it's not structural brick.

01:28:47.000 They slice the end off bricks and then they mortar it in and everything with real bricks and make it look cool.

01:28:50.000 Okay, so we're both right.

01:28:53.000 No, it's real brick.

01:28:54.000 It's real brick, but it's not structural.

01:28:56.000 It's not structural brick.

01:28:56.000 So here I am.

01:28:57.000 I'm real fake.

01:28:59.000 So, we're inside.

01:29:01.000 I can pull out my cell phone and have a phone call.

01:29:03.000 Yes.

01:29:03.000 These are microwaves of a frequency that can penetrate walls, send information to my cell phone, and I can communicate using information and not have that energy kill me.

01:29:16.000 But it's not enough to power the actual device itself.

01:29:18.000 It is not enough to power the device.

01:29:19.000 Correct.

01:29:20.000 So in Tesla's days...

01:29:21.000 So Tesla, everyone is thinking, he's got the solution to the future transmission of energy.

01:29:26.000 No, he doesn't.

01:29:27.000 Well, I don't think anyone's saying that, but what they are saying...

01:29:28.000 He did, and his fans do.

01:29:30.000 But back then, there were no computers.

01:29:33.000 Back then, there were no televisions.

01:29:34.000 But we did have machines.

01:29:35.000 It was the era of the big machine.

01:29:38.000 Right, but I don't think he was insinuating that you could use that to power factories.

01:29:40.000 I don't know what he wanted to power with it.

01:29:41.000 I don't know what he would have powered with it, if not light bulbs and other things.

01:29:44.000 You know, one thing you brought up that's really interesting, you talked about light reflecting off of things.

01:29:48.000 Are you aware that BMW painted one of their cars Vanta black?

01:29:54.000 This is jet black.

01:29:56.000 Yes, the ultimate black. 1.00

01:29:58.000 No light can bounce off of it, and you can't drive it.

01:30:03.000 Because people won't be able to see it at night.

01:30:06.000 They're literally saying this is just a theoretical...

01:30:08.000 What do you want to do?

01:30:10.000 You can line it with a light trim.

01:30:12.000 Pull up the image of it.

01:30:12.000 I saw one in a parking lot.

01:30:14.000 It's very badass.

01:30:15.000 You actually saw one in real life?

01:30:16.000 That's not what I saw.

01:30:17.000 I saw a sports car.

01:30:19.000 Oh, you saw a Vantablack car?

01:30:21.000 They have them?

01:30:22.000 I saw a sports car.

01:30:23.000 That was Vantablack?

01:30:24.000 The car you have up there, I don't know what that is.

01:30:25.000 That's the BMW that they painted Vantablack.

01:30:28.000 Okay, well then that Vantablack is available on their badass, low-to-the-ground sports car.

01:30:34.000 No, it's not available commercially.

01:30:37.000 What do you want me to say?

01:30:38.000 I'm saying for BMW. It's not something they're offering.

01:30:41.000 I'm in LA. You have all your cars here.

01:30:44.000 Everything's showcased here.

01:30:45.000 I didn't see it in New York.

01:30:46.000 I saw it here in LA. Well, I'm sure someone...

01:30:48.000 Well, maybe it wasn't a BMW. Maybe somebody else did.

01:30:50.000 No, I'm just saying BMW, if someone did it, BMW didn't make it themselves.

01:30:55.000 Okay.

01:30:56.000 Someone must have done...

01:30:57.000 I mean, you can do it.

01:30:58.000 It's a real thing.

01:30:59.000 Vantablack's a real color.

01:31:00.000 Okay, so one of the principles of stealth is that if you send a signal to it, it never comes back to you.

01:31:07.000 So you have no sort of radar measure of its existence.

01:31:12.000 Correct.

01:31:13.000 But there are two ways you can do that.

01:31:15.000 One of them is you cannot reflect back.

01:31:18.000 Okay?

01:31:19.000 By absorbing it.

01:31:20.000 Right.

01:31:21.000 Okay?

01:31:22.000 So a jet matte black will absorb it and not reflect it back.

01:31:27.000 But, if there's enough energy coming at it, it will heat up, because you can't get something for nothing here.

01:31:33.000 It'll heat up the skin of that, and it could be bad for the occupants.

01:31:37.000 That's what they said about the article about Vantablack.

01:31:39.000 Yeah, if you put that in the desert, forget it.

01:31:41.000 Well, they were saying even in Los Angeles, it'll make the car so hot, it'll be ridiculous.

01:31:44.000 So another way to do it is, the signal comes to me, and I reflect it in a direction that is not back to you.

01:31:52.000 So the B-2 bomber is not only non-reflective, Back to you.

01:31:58.000 It takes the signal and reflects it and double bounces it so that all your energy gets sent in other directions and not back to you.

01:32:06.000 So it doesn't then keep the energy that was sent to it.

01:32:11.000 So that's another way to do it.

01:32:13.000 There's another stealth, which was featured in one of the recent, not recent, four years ago, James Bond movies, where light that comes at it, the light that's behind it, Goes around it coherently and continues to come towards you so that you think you're seeing what's behind it and it's not there.

01:32:36.000 You are seeing what's behind it, but the path of that light went around the vessel and continued on its way to you.

01:32:42.000 So you think you're just seeing the grass and the tree, but there's a car sitting right there.

01:32:49.000 You don't know about this technology?

01:32:50.000 No.

01:32:51.000 Yeah.

01:32:51.000 Right now it exists only for very – look up stealth, light ray stealth.

01:32:59.000 And so the material has to be able to know what is behind it.

01:33:04.000 You're saying small objects only?

01:33:06.000 No, no, no.

01:33:06.000 That only works in one sight line.

01:33:08.000 Oh, okay.

01:33:09.000 Whereas if you needed functional stealth, everybody looking at it should be – every path – Every sight line to it should be able to see what's behind it on the other side of that sight line.

01:33:19.000 So the way it reflects things...

01:33:21.000 Yeah, it carries the light beam around it and sends it out the other side.

01:33:26.000 Do you able to find it?

01:33:27.000 Yeah.

01:33:28.000 Yeah, what you have is there's like a solid block and a person is looking at it and you see their eye out the other side.

01:33:34.000 It's really freaky.

01:33:36.000 It's a future of stealth.

01:33:38.000 What are your thoughts on digital privacy?

01:33:41.000 What do you mean?

01:33:42.000 Well, like phones.

01:33:44.000 Do you ever talk to someone about something and then you see it in your Google feed?

01:33:50.000 Do you see ads?

01:33:53.000 I haven't researched this, but my wife tells me we were once gifted one of these What do you call those things that you talk to?

01:34:05.000 Oh, Alexa? 0.97

01:34:06.000 Yeah, whoever the Google one is.

01:34:08.000 Is that Alexa?

01:34:08.000 At home, Google at home.

01:34:10.000 No, Alexa is Amazon, right?

01:34:11.000 So it's Google at home.

01:34:12.000 And she says, don't turn that on.

01:34:14.000 I said, why not?

01:34:15.000 Because they'll be listening.

01:34:17.000 And I didn't believe her at first, and then I started hearing stories.

01:34:20.000 And so I don't have one, but it's not because I know that it's listening or not listening.

01:34:25.000 Well, it is.

01:34:26.000 Substantiated.

01:34:27.000 Being actual.

01:34:29.000 They've said they've apologized.

01:34:31.000 For actual human contractors listening in to conversations that people have had, having sex, having arguments.

01:34:39.000 Like, it's real.

01:34:40.000 Yeah.

01:34:41.000 That seems like it should be a problem.

01:34:43.000 It's a giant problem.

01:34:43.000 So what's your question to me?

01:34:45.000 What, am I all for it?

01:34:46.000 What's your question?

01:34:47.000 No, my question is, one of the things that you're getting out of their ability to scan things is they're tailoring things to your liking.

01:34:57.000 Like, you know how your phone tells you it's 22 minutes until you get home?

01:35:00.000 I get it. 0.99

01:35:00.000 And you're like, bitch, how do you know where I live? 0.99

01:35:02.000 Exactly. 1.00

01:35:02.000 I didn't tell you where I live. 1.00

01:35:03.000 I got it.

01:35:04.000 Here it is.

01:35:06.000 And I'm just old-fashioned about this.

01:35:09.000 Okay.

01:35:10.000 I'm get off my lawn about this.

01:35:12.000 Yeah.

01:35:12.000 I'm the old man in the rocking chair on the porch saying, Sonny, get off my lawn.

01:35:16.000 But you're also a scientist.

01:35:17.000 Okay, but I don't want to...

01:35:19.000 Okay, I wear multiple hats.

01:35:21.000 I'm also a dad.

01:35:22.000 I'm also a husband.

01:35:23.000 I got all these hats for all those things.

01:35:25.000 In this particular case, I'm old man.

01:35:28.000 And my old man sensibility is, if you track what I shop at a store, what I buy at a store...

01:35:37.000 And then send me coupons based on what you think I'm going to buy next, based on what I've bought before, which is kind of the same thing you're describing.

01:35:48.000 You have denied me the chance of stumbling upon something that I never thought of buying.

01:35:57.000 And that takes away my freedoms and I don't want that.

01:35:59.000 How have they denied you the chance of stumbling upon something different?

01:36:03.000 It's not diabolical.

01:36:04.000 It's just in the casual flow of life.

01:36:07.000 I'll give an example.

01:36:08.000 I walk into a wine shop.

01:36:10.000 I say, can I help you?

01:36:12.000 And I say, if you help me find what I'm looking for, it's a guarantee that I will never find what I'm not looking for.

01:36:24.000 And I'll end up spending less money in your wine shop.

01:36:28.000 That's a weird way of looking at it.

01:36:30.000 It's the art of browsing.

01:36:31.000 Dude, you're old enough to remember when I got to look up this word in a dictionary and you get through six other words.

01:36:37.000 Oh, I never knew that word.

01:36:38.000 Let me read that.

01:36:39.000 You learn other words en route to the word you're targeting.

01:36:42.000 I understand.

01:36:42.000 Okay, so that is how I feel and that's how I think about my interaction with this world.

01:36:48.000 I like the randomness.

01:36:50.000 The randomness of it enriches my life.

01:36:54.000 And if you're going to advertise to me because you think you know who I am, maybe you do, but I'll ultimately end up spending less money because it's the diversity of how I think and what I buy and what I think of buying and how I buy it and how much money I spend that is the richness of the life I lead.

01:37:15.000 You're trying to channel me into some product, something that fulfills a, what do you call it when they have the study, whether you're going to buy something or not?

01:37:27.000 Survey?

01:37:27.000 No, no.

01:37:28.000 The table of people, do you like this product or not?

01:37:34.000 Focus group.

01:37:35.000 Am I just a focus group to you?

01:37:38.000 If I am, you don't know me.

01:37:43.000 And I want to experience this world by stepping where I've never stepped before and buying something I've never thought of buying.

01:37:50.000 And if you know my previous habits, You're assuming I'm going to stay that way for the rest of my life.

01:37:56.000 And maybe most people do.

01:37:58.000 And maybe I might do that.

01:38:00.000 But if I do, it's because I chose to.

01:38:02.000 Not because you have decided that that's how I should be.

01:38:05.000 Well, don't you think they're just doing it?

01:38:06.000 I'm screaming at you.

01:38:07.000 I'm sorry.

01:38:07.000 No, you're getting a little excited.

01:38:08.000 Sorry.

01:38:08.000 Don't you think they're just doing that because they think it would be effective to advertise in that way?

01:38:12.000 So if you go Googling new Nikes, and then as you're looking at something and a Google ad pops up and it's for new Nikes, they say, hey, Neil.

01:38:22.000 I know you were looking at these bad boys.

01:38:24.000 We saw you.

01:38:24.000 Maybe you just need a little nudge.

01:38:28.000 I mean, I don't think that's that diabolical.

01:38:32.000 I'm the old man on the porch.

01:38:33.000 I'm saying the next generation might feel completely different.

01:38:36.000 They might say, I love it.

01:38:37.000 They know exactly what I want.

01:38:38.000 You heard about the case where they were...

01:38:41.000 I read this.

01:38:42.000 I haven't re-verified it, but it's completely plausible.

01:38:45.000 There was a teenage girl who was Googling pregnancy tests because maybe she got pregnant. 0.99

01:38:52.000 Okay.

01:38:53.000 And the fact that she had searched...

01:38:57.000 Pregnancy test?

01:38:58.000 She got coupons in the mail for baby products.

01:39:03.000 And her parents said, what is this?

01:39:07.000 She got outed.

01:39:09.000 That's a little weird.

01:39:10.000 Yeah, but it's the kind of thing that can happen.

01:39:12.000 That seems intrusive, certainly.

01:39:15.000 Oh, that's intrusive only because it's pregnancy? 0.84

01:39:16.000 It's intrusive in every way.

01:39:18.000 No.

01:39:18.000 Don't tell me it's not intrusive because you want to buy Nikes.

01:39:21.000 Because they're sending you physical things.

01:39:24.000 It's not just something that appears on your Google feed that you can quickly glance over.

01:39:29.000 What's the difference between sending you mail to your mailbox and filling your advertising space in front of your face with product?

01:39:38.000 For one, other people can see it.

01:39:40.000 I walk by your computer, I can see it.

01:39:41.000 Don't look.

01:39:46.000 I guess I'm arguing in principle rather than in detail.

01:39:49.000 Okay, well let me take the counterpoint.

01:39:53.000 On the positive side, what they're doing in terms of, particularly Google, in terms of your driving, right?

01:40:02.000 And in terms of using of Google Maps and documenting the history of all these people driving, and especially with things like Waze, which they acquired, is they've developed a much more efficient product than Apple.

01:40:15.000 Which, what Apple does with Apple Maps...

01:40:17.000 They shred everything you do.

01:40:19.000 Yes, they do.

01:40:20.000 All where you've been and where you're going, that's correct. 0.97

01:40:23.000 But Apple Maps sucks. 0.95

01:40:26.000 Because they don't have enough data. 0.97

01:40:27.000 They don't have nearly the amount of data.

01:40:29.000 Google has billions.

01:40:30.000 What is Google giving you that Apple Maps isn't?

01:40:34.000 They're telling you, you're 22 minutes from home, time for you to drive home?

01:40:37.000 Are you valuing that?

01:40:39.000 Well, yes, and also it's just a better map.

01:40:41.000 Wait, hold on.

01:40:42.000 Their program's far better. 0.99

01:40:44.000 I can ask it how long it'll take me to go somewhere, rather than it knowing what my daytime schedule looks like, and then coming in, like you said, how do you know, bitch? 1.00

01:40:53.000 You know? 0.98

01:40:53.000 I had that same reaction as you did. 0.98

01:40:55.000 And I said, I wonder what's causing this.

01:40:57.000 It's a little creepy.

01:40:59.000 And again, I'm the old man syndrome.

01:41:00.000 So a 10-year-old kid that's only ever known this and becomes 15 and 20, that is life to them, right?

01:41:07.000 Why would they even?

01:41:08.000 Maybe they're not going to complain about it.

01:41:10.000 But I'm the old man on the porch.

01:41:12.000 But do you think that this sort of intrusiveness, or at the very least, this connection that you have to these devices and that they have to your patterns and your information, it seems inevitable.

01:41:25.000 That doesn't mean I have to welcome it with open arms, but I agree it's inevitable.

01:41:29.000 I agree.

01:41:30.000 Plus, we have security cameras everywhere.

01:41:32.000 Everybody knows where you are.

01:41:33.000 If the KGB had access to people the way we, during the Cold War, the way modern United States has access to us, We would say, oh my gosh, you have taken away your country's freedoms.

01:41:47.000 We're the leaders of the free world and you guys have imprisoned your entire population.

01:41:52.000 Oh my gosh.

01:41:54.000 The KGB would give their right arm to have the monitoring devices that are actively in place here in the United States today.

01:42:12.000 Yeah.

01:42:13.000 Yeah.

01:42:23.000 Yeah, it relies on so many points of data.

01:42:24.000 Yeah, so many points of cheekbones and nose-eye separations and everything.

01:42:29.000 Ratios of numbers are highly powerful probes of the structure and the form of things, just so you know.

01:42:37.000 Fibonacci sequence, right?

01:42:39.000 That could be in there.

01:42:40.000 Maybe you have a Fibonacci head.

01:42:42.000 Doesn't everybody's face?

01:42:43.000 No, Fibonacci I think is a little overplayed.

01:42:45.000 Fibonacci is a little overplayed.

01:42:46.000 Especially once you get a nose job.

01:42:48.000 So Fibonacci, you can find it in nature and say, oh, isn't this beautiful?

01:42:51.000 But you've overlooked all the places where it doesn't show up in nature.

01:42:55.000 Right, but it appears so many times.

01:42:57.000 It doesn't appear in more places than it does appear.

01:43:00.000 Right, but in a lot of living things, plants, pine cones, pineapples, there's a lot of sunflower seeds, or sunflower seeds.

01:43:09.000 Yeah, really weird, isn't it?

01:43:12.000 Yeah.

01:43:13.000 That it appears this random, I mean, not random, but this very distinct pattern.

01:43:15.000 Well, if the next thing you do depends on the previous two things you did, you get the Fibonacci series.

01:43:21.000 I mean, that's often the case with, you know...

01:43:28.000 Think of things in your life you do where the third thing you do depends on you having done the previous two things in exactly the same way.

01:43:34.000 That's not everything in your life, but you can surely find some things that do that.

01:43:39.000 I think it was Camden, New Jersey, where they had such a crisis.

01:43:43.000 Wow, that was so random.

01:43:45.000 No, it's not, because you're talking about surveillance.

01:43:47.000 Camden, New Jersey had such a crisis of funding that I think there was a brief period of time, at least I don't know if it's changed, where they literally didn't have a police force.

01:43:56.000 And one of their solutions was to put surveillance cameras everywhere. 0.95

01:44:01.000 And the idea was to sort of try to capture all the shit that was going down. 0.99

01:44:06.000 Here it is. 0.99

01:44:07.000 The surveillance city of Camden, New Jersey, a community beset by crime and the intrusive tools they're using in hopes of stopping it.

01:44:15.000 Right.

01:44:16.000 Yeah, this was, I mean, I don't remember reading anything after this happening.

01:44:20.000 It's, let me take away your freedoms for your own safety. 1.00

01:44:24.000 Yeah.

01:44:25.000 This is a well-known, you know, Benjamin Franklin wrote about it.

01:44:29.000 What's his famous Benjamin Franklin quote about security and freedom?

01:44:33.000 Yeah, he who abandons freedom for security deserves neither.

01:44:38.000 Or is getting neither or something.

01:44:40.000 Yeah.

01:44:41.000 So this is not...

01:44:44.000 They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

01:44:52.000 Those who sacrifice liberty for safety, for security, deserve neither.

01:44:56.000 He who would trade liberty for some temporary security deserves neither liberty...

01:45:00.000 He's got all combinations.

01:45:02.000 Yeah, man. 1.00

01:45:02.000 He wanted to cover that bitch. 1.00

01:45:05.000 All permutations on that one. 1.00

01:45:07.000 This is what I mean.

01:45:08.000 I don't want to leave any room for misquoting.

01:45:10.000 He understood that.

01:45:11.000 So your security...

01:45:14.000 You give up some security for privacy, I think.

01:45:17.000 Yes.

01:45:18.000 And I don't know if it's a well-known place where that should be drawn...

01:45:21.000 And you can actually get an entire generation born into a state where they think that's normal.

01:45:27.000 We all now think it's normal that you have to show ID to walk into an office building.

01:45:31.000 Oh my gosh.

01:45:32.000 What would that look like during the Cold War?

01:45:34.000 In the United States, you have to show your papers just to walk into a building?

01:45:38.000 Well, they're also changing the ID system, where if you don't want to travel with a passport, you're going to have to have a new federal ID. I've already been through that.

01:45:46.000 A federal driver's license.

01:45:47.000 A federally endorsed driver's license.

01:45:49.000 I just went through that last week.

01:45:52.000 When did that go into play?

01:45:54.000 When is that going into play?

01:45:55.000 It's for everybody, like next year or something.

01:45:57.000 It's very soon.

01:45:58.000 If you want to travel in a particular way.

01:46:00.000 If you don't drive, then it doesn't matter.

01:46:02.000 If you want to fly, correct.

01:46:04.000 Correct.

01:46:04.000 And I carry my passport wherever I go, so it's not really a problem for me.

01:46:08.000 Why do you carry your passport everywhere you go if you want to just jet out of the country?

01:46:12.000 Affect this place.

01:46:13.000 You're like a spy. 1.00

01:46:14.000 How is your brain wired? 1.00

01:46:15.000 Mine?

01:46:17.000 I think you know by now.

01:46:18.000 You want to escape?

01:46:21.000 No, if I had four passports, then you'd say, do I want to leave the country?

01:46:25.000 Yeah, or whoever.

01:46:27.000 Anybody in an espionage movie, there's somebody who has five passports.

01:46:31.000 In a safe somewhere.

01:46:32.000 And with wads of cash of every currency.

01:46:35.000 So, I think...

01:46:38.000 I worry that we're sliding towards a state of total monitoring on the premise that we're all better off for it.

01:46:47.000 And it's like the frog in the heated water.

01:46:51.000 We don't feel it day by day, but it's happening.

01:46:54.000 We all agree that we can be hand-padded down just to get on an airplane.

01:47:00.000 We've all accepted that because of a handful of people.

01:47:05.000 A handful of people.

01:47:06.000 Historically handful.

01:47:07.000 Historically handful.

01:47:08.000 Not even a handful in this moment, just historically handful of people.

01:47:12.000 We all say, yes, take my luggage, x-ray my luggage, take away my liquids, pat me down, and I'm okay with that.

01:47:21.000 That's a transition.

01:47:22.000 And I'm okay with security cameras in the street.

01:47:27.000 It was okay in banks.

01:47:29.000 We understood that.

01:47:30.000 But now, when I exit the bank and I'm in the street, when I'm walking in the park, so I don't know the future of that.

01:47:40.000 I really don't know.

01:47:40.000 I saw the movie 1984 recently.

01:47:43.000 Not a very good movie.

01:47:44.000 The book is better than the movie and I hate to be one of the people who say that.

01:47:47.000 But I was reminded how you can create an entire state Where everyone is kept in line because somebody is telling you, we are fighting this battle out on the front lines.

01:48:00.000 I'd forgotten this from the book.

01:48:02.000 They're fighting a war on the front lines.

01:48:04.000 You never see the war.

01:48:05.000 You never hear about the war.

01:48:06.000 You don't know anything about the war other than it exists.

01:48:09.000 And you have to do things a certain way in country.

01:48:14.000 So that your country can protect itself from these evil people that want to take over and destroy your way of life.

01:48:21.000 So everybody's under control.

01:48:23.000 Some big brother.

01:48:24.000 Well, what they didn't anticipate, though, was these social media companies would be the guards or the gatekeepers of your privacy.

01:48:33.000 Because that's what's interesting.

01:48:35.000 Could you voluntarily give them all your information?

01:48:37.000 Yeah, it's not governments.

01:48:38.000 It's Twitter and Facebook and Google and all the stuff that we use on a daily basis that has access to everything that you do.

01:48:46.000 It's almost...

01:48:49.000 It was inconceivable to someone outside of this generation that there would be a company that would provide a service, and through that service you would give up all notions of privacy.

01:48:59.000 All privacy.

01:49:00.000 Yeah, because literally you have a microphone that's listening everywhere you go.

01:49:03.000 You have a bug that you're carrying around with you.

01:49:05.000 I mean, I don't remember what...

01:49:07.000 Yeah, you've been pin-bugged, right?

01:49:08.000 It really is real.

01:49:09.000 You've been pinned with a lapel.

01:49:11.000 You will get ads for things you talk about.

01:49:14.000 I mean, that has been proven.

01:49:16.000 So what is that?

01:49:18.000 These passive listening devices that are only picking up key words.

01:49:21.000 It's no big deal.

01:49:22.000 It's just key words.

01:49:23.000 It's the frog in the water.

01:49:24.000 That's what I'm telling you.

01:49:24.000 Yeah.

01:49:25.000 So I don't know where it's going to go.

01:49:26.000 Like I said, I'm a little old fogey about that.

01:49:28.000 But I think we'll resolve it.

01:49:30.000 Do you think there should be regulation?

01:49:32.000 Generally, if you have something good and it gets abused, you regulate it.

01:49:36.000 That's the whole point.

01:49:37.000 We're here alive today because of regulation.

01:49:39.000 Because there are nefarious people who, in control of powerful forces operating on society, would gain at the expense of everyone else and would not be good for the progress of civilization.

01:49:53.000 So you regulate.

01:49:55.000 Okay?

01:49:56.000 Airlines are regulated so that you don't die.

01:50:00.000 All right?

01:50:01.000 We have the safest record now ever for commercial airlines, American carriers.

01:50:07.000 The safest ever.

01:50:09.000 Look at not only how many people have not died relative to when we grew up.

01:50:14.000 We grew up through at least one or two planes crashed each year.

01:50:16.000 You'd lose between one and three hundred people every year.

01:50:19.000 That was like the baseline number.

01:50:21.000 That number...

01:50:22.000 It's near zero now and way more planes are taking off and landing than at any time when we were kids.

01:50:30.000 So it's a double progress point for not only the Transportation Safety Administration but engineering, technology, and everything we care about.

01:50:43.000 We want to fly.

01:50:45.000 So you regulate.

01:50:46.000 You make sure these are inspected this often.

01:50:48.000 The pilots don't fly more than this many hours.

01:50:51.000 This gets oiled.

01:50:52.000 This gets replaced.

01:50:55.000 It's one of the triumphs of modern engineering, aerodynamics.

01:51:00.000 Aerospace engineering as a branch of what we do as civilization is one of the greatest achievements there ever was.

01:51:07.000 Agreed.

01:51:08.000 Jamie, did you find that stealth stuff?

01:51:11.000 I found there are cars that have black velvet.

01:51:14.000 This wouldn't be a car.

01:51:16.000 This would be a laboratory.

01:51:17.000 I don't find anything.

01:51:19.000 Oh, okay.

01:51:21.000 Look up.

01:51:23.000 Laboratory Stealth Light.

01:51:30.000 Something.

01:51:31.000 Try that.

01:51:32.000 I found those cloaks that people wear that sort of seems like video tricks. 0.98

01:51:36.000 Yeah, that seems like fuckery.

01:51:39.000 But in Harry Potter, the cloak that they wear, the invisibility cloak, that would be this principle if it existed previously. 0.95

01:51:50.000 There's a bunch of videos of that, but it seems like they're just using After Effects, like Adobe or something like that, to fuck with the video rather than create an actual product.

01:52:00.000 Because there was a woman in an office that had a blanket, and she held up the blanket, and you could only see the whole office. 0.62

01:52:07.000 You wouldn't see the blanket at all.

01:52:09.000 You'd see what's behind her. 0.90

01:52:11.000 And as she lowered the blanket, you could see her, and then from the blanket down... 0.74

01:52:16.000 So why isn't that just a green screen of the background image?

01:52:19.000 I think she was holding up a green blanket.

01:52:22.000 This might be it.

01:52:24.000 Stealth dark matter.

01:52:25.000 No, no, no, no.

01:52:26.000 No, no, sorry, sorry.

01:52:27.000 No, no, no.

01:52:27.000 There's nothing to do with that.

01:52:29.000 That's the map of dark matter in the universe.

01:52:32.000 A three-dimensional map.

01:52:33.000 I've tried to give that a shot.

01:52:35.000 No, we don't know what it is, so don't worry about it if you don't understand it.

01:52:38.000 Yeah, but it's too goddamn confusing for me.

01:52:40.000 No, it's not confusing at all.

01:52:42.000 It's something out there that has 85% of the gravity of the universe, and we don't know what the hell it is.

01:52:47.000 That's not confusing?

01:52:48.000 It's not confusing.

01:52:49.000 If you don't know what the hell it is, it's confusing by nature.

01:52:52.000 Okay, I have a more nuanced definition of confusing.

01:52:56.000 Confusing is...

01:52:58.000 I'm confused.

01:52:59.000 I don't know how to think.

01:53:00.000 Dark matter is...

01:53:01.000 I don't even know what to think.

01:53:03.000 I need something in my head to be confused.

01:53:06.000 Right?

01:53:07.000 Dark matter has...

01:53:08.000 There's no...

01:53:08.000 We don't know what the hell it is.

01:53:09.000 Do you anticipate a solution to that or some sort of a...

01:53:12.000 Sure.

01:53:13.000 Is it in Hawaii?

01:53:15.000 I hope it might have been.

01:53:16.000 It might have been.

01:53:18.000 Listen, folks.

01:53:19.000 It's not the GDT. It's the TMT. 30 meter telescope.

01:53:25.000 Part of what it is to explore is not knowing what it is that You will find.

01:53:32.000 And all these telescopes, the launched ones as well as the ground-based ones, we have enough foresight.

01:53:38.000 We're mature enough as a field to know that even though it's designed to look for certain things that were part of the program that you set up for it, You want to have a serendipity mode for it.

01:53:49.000 You want to be able to say, let's point it in some random direction and see what shows up.

01:53:55.000 Without that, you could miss something in plain sight.

01:53:58.000 If you're only looking for one thing that you think is there, extrapolate it from what you knew before.

01:54:03.000 And the way I think of it is, you know, there's the old saying, as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.

01:54:13.000 Hmm.

01:54:14.000 So, as that area goes, there are more places to look over the fence and stare into the abyss of ignorance that awaits you.

01:54:25.000 So, dark matter is sitting on the other side of the fence.

01:54:30.000 The way I've heard it described is the bonfire of our knowledge grows brighter.

01:54:35.000 The area of our ignorance is illuminated.

01:54:42.000 Okay, I had to think about that.

01:54:44.000 That's similar to what I said.

01:54:45.000 More and more things are illuminated.

01:54:46.000 If the bonfire is your knowledge that's lighting the way, you go see more stuff you've never noticed before.

01:54:55.000 It's the same principle.

01:54:56.000 That's a giant one though, man.

01:54:58.000 85%.

01:54:58.000 It's 85% of the gravity.

01:55:00.000 So yeah, and you add that to the dark energy.

01:55:03.000 We don't know what that is either.

01:55:05.000 Right.

01:55:05.000 Dark matter, dark energy comprise 95% of everything that's driving the universe.

01:55:13.000 So everything we know and love, the chemistry, the physics, the biology, life, planets, stars.

01:55:20.000 Is 5% of the universe.

01:55:22.000 So people, theologians and folks say, well, maybe God is in the other 95%.

01:55:27.000 Maybe.

01:55:28.000 Okay, yeah.

01:55:29.000 Maybe God's dark matter.

01:55:30.000 Wouldn't that be crazy?

01:55:30.000 Well, people say that.

01:55:31.000 Surprise!

01:55:32.000 Yeah.

01:55:33.000 But I don't know why dark matter would care about... 0.71

01:55:37.000 Gay people? 0.55

01:55:38.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:55:39.000 Whether they're not chicks drive cars? 1.00

01:55:41.000 Right.

01:55:42.000 Yeah, yeah, depending on which religion you're in, right?

01:55:44.000 Yeah, all the religions got their thing. 0.97

01:55:46.000 What are you wearing?

01:55:47.000 Don't you know I'm God?

01:55:48.000 What is the...

01:55:49.000 Come on, I'm dark matter.

01:55:51.000 Yeah.

01:55:54.000 Oh, by the way, just to...

01:55:57.000 In letters from an astrophysicist, which isn't out yet, but again, I don't know how the hell you got the book, but there's an entire chapter where I am conversing with people who are strongly religious.

01:56:11.000 There's a conversation I have in there with an Orthodox Jewish person, a Muslim, multiple...

01:56:18.000 We're fundamentalist Christians, and we're talking about the age of the earth and why, and why do we think one way or another?

01:56:23.000 And so there's a lot of intimate stuff in there that I generally don't go public with, but I did it one-on-one with those who had written to me about these challenges they were facing in life, and they wanted to know what an astrophysicist had to say about it.

01:56:36.000 What's the youngest version of how old a religious person thinks the earth is?

01:56:42.000 What's the...

01:56:43.000 6,000 years.

01:56:45.000 That's Christians. 0.95

01:56:46.000 Yeah, Christians. 0.90

01:56:47.000 Well, of all...

01:56:48.000 And not all Christians, by the way. 0.71

01:56:51.000 No, no, of all religions.

01:56:52.000 I don't know the age...

01:56:54.000 Scientologists is like a month old.

01:56:56.000 I don't know enough about how old all the religions think the universe is.

01:57:01.000 The youngest you're going to get...

01:57:04.000 The youngest universe you're going to get from a devout Christian is 6,000 years. 0.98

01:57:07.000 The oldest is around 10,000.

01:57:10.000 But it's far and away from billions.

01:57:12.000 Mormons are a unique one because they think you get your own planet when you die. 1.00

01:57:18.000 Are you torn on that?

01:57:21.000 I want my own planet.

01:57:23.000 Nobody told me that.

01:57:25.000 It's odd how one religious group would comment on how preposterous another religious group's comments are.

01:57:35.000 I love that.

01:57:35.000 You know, I was once, I don't know if you know this, I was once quoted after I think the Scientology documentary came out on HBO and everybody was talking about it.

01:57:44.000 Going clear.

01:57:44.000 I think that was it.

01:57:45.000 And there was a lot of chat about it for a couple of weeks.

01:57:49.000 And one of the news outlets, I forgot who, called me up and said, do I think Scientology should be a religion?

01:58:02.000 Classified as a religion, as an authentic religion.

01:58:05.000 And you can say, well, why are they calling me?

01:58:07.000 Well, because in Scientology, they're aliens.

01:58:11.000 And they're space beings.

01:58:13.000 You're not supposed to give up this information.

01:58:15.000 Oh, sorry.

01:58:17.000 So that's how I got brought into this conversation.

01:58:22.000 Because of the sectors of Scientology that involve space beings.

01:58:27.000 Okay?

01:58:28.000 All right.

01:58:29.000 Okay.

01:58:30.000 So my answer was, we live in a country that protects the free expression of faith-based systems, provided they don't subtract from the rights of others.

01:58:44.000 So I will not sit here and judge whether thetans from space exhume souls from volcanoes At least a third of what I just said is accurate from Scientology.

01:59:03.000 Or whether a man born of a woman is the son of God who died and rose from the dead.

01:59:12.000 I'm not going to compare those and judge whether one of them is more authentic than another when they're both founded on belief systems.

01:59:21.000 And so, in this country, belief systems are protected.

01:59:25.000 And we've all bought into that.

01:59:27.000 And so, you know what the headline was?

01:59:30.000 Tyson defends Scientology.

01:59:33.000 Of course.

01:59:34.000 That's how you get clicks.

01:59:36.000 That was the clickbait of my comment there.

01:59:38.000 It's want to get clicks.

01:59:39.000 You've got to distort a little bit.

01:59:41.000 There are some rational people who in the comment thread said, that's not what he said!

01:59:46.000 Of course.

01:59:47.000 Yeah.

01:59:47.000 But isn't it more interesting when they do do that and then inside the actual article itself they give your full quote so people can see the deception.

01:59:53.000 The real confusing thing is when they take a chunk of your quote and they kick it out of context, which they love to do.

02:00:00.000 You should go to jail for that, by the way.

02:00:02.000 So that's interesting.

02:00:03.000 So for me, I'm an observer of that, not a complainer about it.

02:00:08.000 So, oh, is that how they're doing it?

02:00:09.000 Okay, so maybe I can shape this phrase differently to minimize the chance of that happening in the future.

02:00:15.000 Minimize the chance of you being lied about.

02:00:17.000 Correct.

02:00:18.000 So for me, that is a landscape.

02:00:19.000 There's some landmines here.

02:00:21.000 There are some trap doors here.

02:00:23.000 And so for me...

02:00:26.000 One who communicates on that landscape, that's just information for me to navigate it slightly more nimbly in the future.

02:00:37.000 Got it.

02:00:38.000 Interesting.

02:00:40.000 Gravity is one thing that I wanted to talk to.

02:00:41.000 You're still hooked up on gravity?

02:00:43.000 Yes.

02:00:43.000 I'm always hooked up on gravity.

02:00:44.000 Mm-hmm.

02:00:46.000 As you should be.

02:00:47.000 Well, since we've talked last, I've been reading a lot about it.

02:00:51.000 And one of the things that confuses me the most is that we don't really understand what gravity is.

02:00:56.000 We know its effects.

02:00:57.000 We can measure them.

02:00:58.000 We know how to measure them.

02:01:01.000 We know what mass is involved.

02:01:04.000 But we don't really know what gravity is.

02:01:07.000 There's a similar question in the book, but they got a little more philosophical than you just did.

02:01:12.000 But they both lean philosophical.

02:01:14.000 It's science can describe how gravity works, but can they describe why it works?

02:01:21.000 Can we?

02:01:21.000 So this is the how-why duality here.

02:01:26.000 And allow me to just answer it from a how-why point of view, and then we can apply it to gravity after I say that.

02:01:33.000 In science, if we can describe how something works and predict its future behavior, we claim to understand it and we move on.

02:01:41.000 You can ask deeper questions about it.

02:01:43.000 Why is there gravity?

02:01:44.000 What is the meaning?

02:01:45.000 What is the purpose?

02:01:47.000 And go ahead, but I'm good with what I've done and I can land a spacecraft on Mars inside of a crater in a hole-in-one using my understanding of gravity, so I'm pretty good with it, okay?

02:02:01.000 So, I'm not distracted by the more philosophical side of that.

02:02:05.000 Why does it work?

02:02:07.000 Okay.

02:02:09.000 Einstein...

02:02:10.000 So, Newton was deeply puzzled by how you can have something called, in which he coined the phrase, action at a distance.

02:02:17.000 Okay?

02:02:18.000 He wrote down the equation that worked.

02:02:22.000 He wrote down the equation.

02:02:23.000 The moon goes around the Earth, Earth goes around the Sun.

02:02:25.000 The moons of Jupiter go around Jupiter.

02:02:28.000 He...

02:02:31.000 Accurately describe that with his equations of gravity.

02:02:33.000 Okay.

02:02:35.000 He said, one day I think we're going to find some way that they're connecting to each other, but I don't know what that is right now, but I know my equations work.

02:02:43.000 He called it spooky.

02:02:44.000 It was spooky to him.

02:02:45.000 That's his word.

02:02:46.000 Spooky action at a distance.

02:02:48.000 All right.

02:02:49.000 Fast forward 300 years.

02:02:53.000 300?

02:02:54.000 No.

02:02:55.000 Fast forward 230 years.

02:02:57.000 Get to Albert Einstein.

02:03:00.000 Um...

02:03:02.000 Gravity is the curvature of space and time.

02:03:06.000 And you're moving on the curvature of that fabric.

02:03:10.000 That's gravity.

02:03:11.000 Oh my gosh, is it even a force then?

02:03:13.000 Is it even?

02:03:14.000 So there's no need to think of it as an action at a distance.

02:03:19.000 And in a phrase first uttered by, I think it was John Archibald Wheeler, a student of Einstein.

02:03:26.000 And I learned relativity from John Archibald Wheeler.

02:03:30.000 In fact, that's where I met my wife in relativity class in graduate school.

02:03:36.000 It's space.

02:03:39.000 So matter tells space how to curve.

02:03:43.000 Space tells matter how to move.

02:03:47.000 It moves along the curvature of space.

02:03:49.000 You don't need an action at a distance.

02:03:51.000 There is no action.

02:03:53.000 It can't do anything else but do that.

02:03:57.000 It's like you have a funnel and you take a ball and you roll it on the funnel.

02:04:02.000 The ball can only do what that funnel tells it to do.

02:04:07.000 And if you give it a sideways motion, it'll start spinning around.

02:04:11.000 There's no magic hand coming in there.

02:04:14.000 It is following the curvature of its space-time continuum.

02:04:20.000 This construct that you provided for it.

02:04:23.000 So now, I can describe what gravity is doing.

02:04:27.000 I even have a mechanism for it.

02:04:31.000 Are you going to still ask me why is there gravity?

02:04:35.000 Is that answer not fulfilling enough to you, even in the why department?

02:04:41.000 You can say, well, why would a particle curve space?

02:04:44.000 You can just keep doing that.

02:04:46.000 That's fine.

02:04:48.000 But is there a point where you'll be satisfied with the answer?

02:04:53.000 Oh, that answer is my why.

02:04:56.000 I can say, well, why did this half liter of water drop Off the edge here.

02:05:02.000 Well, it's no longer the forces are imbalanced.

02:05:05.000 No, but why did it fall?

02:05:07.000 Well, there's nothing holding it up.

02:05:08.000 Why did it...

02:05:09.000 There's a point where it's not especially productive to continue to think about the world that way.

02:05:17.000 Because what I'm claiming is, answers to the how, when you understand the how enough, are tantamount to having answered the why question.

02:05:31.000 That's what I'm telling you.

02:05:33.000 Tantamount in terms of your ability to measure it and accurately use it.

02:05:37.000 Correct.

02:05:37.000 So we can say, okay, you've got a bald head.

02:05:40.000 We can say, well, why did you go bald?

02:05:43.000 Well, okay, the hair follicles, when you start in your late 20s, when did you go bald?

02:05:48.000 When did you start losing your hair?

02:05:49.000 Probably late 20s, early 30s.

02:05:50.000 Yeah.

02:05:50.000 Yeah, that's common.

02:05:52.000 If you have your hair when you're 30, you'll probably have it for the rest of your life.

02:05:56.000 That's how that goes.

02:05:57.000 You start losing it right going up until you're 30. So, you can say, well, the hair follicle begins to not producing the keratin or whatever.

02:06:04.000 We get the explanation.

02:06:06.000 Then you say, well, why does the hair follicle stop doing that?

02:06:10.000 Then you say, oh, well, because the DNA has a pre-coded about the hair kind of thing.

02:06:16.000 Well, why does the DNA have the hair?

02:06:19.000 Well, because, so...

02:06:20.000 Right, but we know far more about how and why people go bald than we do about what gravity really is, correct?

02:06:28.000 I'm telling you, gravity really is the curvature of space and time.

02:06:35.000 That gets us the Big Bang and everything we've ever known and loved.

02:06:39.000 The curvature of space and time, but it's also based on mass, right?

02:06:41.000 It's based on the amount of mass...

02:06:42.000 Any concentration of matter and energy, and or energy, will curve the fabric of space and time.

02:06:47.000 And the more mass, the more gravity.

02:06:49.000 And the movement of matter on that fabric of space and time, we call gravity.

02:06:57.000 And I'm good with that.

02:06:59.000 Okay, but you seem a little oddly defensive about something that's scientific.

02:07:04.000 No, I have to say I'm good with the...

02:07:05.000 But you are, because you're kind of defending it.

02:07:07.000 No, you can say, well, why does matter...

02:07:10.000 Why do you need to know why?

02:07:12.000 That's what you're saying.

02:07:13.000 No, I'm saying, why does matter and energy curve the fabric of space and time?

02:07:18.000 You can ask that.

02:07:20.000 Okay, why?

02:07:21.000 And I don't have an answer for that.

02:07:22.000 I can say- Well, that's all I'm asking.

02:07:24.000 Well, no.

02:07:24.000 What I'm telling you is- Okay.

02:07:26.000 You don't need to know why.

02:07:27.000 I got you to the point- Right.

02:07:29.000 We had to walk to that point- Yes.

02:07:32.000 Where your why got unanswered.

02:07:35.000 I understand that, but- But before we got to that point, I answered otherwise.

02:07:39.000 But I'm not disputing that.

02:07:40.000 Good.

02:07:40.000 So what I'm telling you is that I can answer your why question most of the time.

02:07:46.000 But then you'll come back to a point where there's a point where there's the why doesn't have the answer.

02:07:52.000 So you say, why did it fall?

02:07:54.000 I say there's a force of gravity operating on it.

02:07:56.000 Why did it fall that way?

02:07:57.000 Because of the curvature of space and time.

02:07:58.000 I'm answering your whys.

02:08:00.000 I understand.

02:08:01.000 Then, well, why does matter and energy curve space and time?

02:08:05.000 Okay, that's a frontier.

02:08:06.000 We're still working on that.

02:08:07.000 But that's all I'm asking.

02:08:08.000 That's good.

02:08:09.000 That's fine.

02:08:10.000 But you are a man of science.

02:08:11.000 So you're a person that should probably embrace whys. 1.00

02:08:15.000 Except many people who ask why questions, they really want to know purpose.

02:08:20.000 Oh, I'm not asking purpose.

02:08:22.000 Well, then that distinguishes you from many other people who ask why questions.

02:08:26.000 Oh, okay.

02:08:26.000 I don't know if there's a purpose for anything.

02:08:28.000 Why did you bang the table?

02:08:29.000 I was angry.

02:08:30.000 There's a purpose behind it.

02:08:32.000 Yeah, that seems...

02:08:33.000 So if your why is just a curiosity of...

02:08:37.000 What's going on?

02:08:39.000 That's one thing.

02:08:40.000 If you are inquiring about purpose, Then it's theological, okay?

02:08:45.000 Because when it's theological, then religions give purpose to life.

02:08:48.000 Clearly I'm not doing that.

02:08:49.000 But I just think it's amazing that something that's such a massive part of life on this planet, that we stay glued to the ground because of gravity.

02:09:00.000 Can you pull up my Instagram account?

02:09:02.000 I only post...

02:09:04.000 Do you have an Instagram account now?

02:09:05.000 Because you had a fake one for a while.

02:09:07.000 Yeah, I took it over.

02:09:07.000 It's a friend of mine, actually.

02:09:08.000 I know the guy.

02:09:09.000 I took it over.

02:09:09.000 He gave it to you?

02:09:10.000 Oh, the guy who had it?

02:09:11.000 Yeah.

02:09:12.000 No, no, no.

02:09:12.000 Actually, sorry.

02:09:13.000 I went to Instagram and said, people think this is a real account and it's not.

02:09:17.000 Can I have it back?

02:09:18.000 And if it's an account that's an imposter and followers don't know it, it's illegal.

02:09:24.000 Right.

02:09:25.000 So there's one that says, fan of Neil Tyson.

02:09:29.000 Yes.

02:09:29.000 And that's a different one.

02:09:30.000 That's the guy I know.

02:09:31.000 So I only post art house photos, most of which I've taken.

02:09:35.000 So just scroll down and look for Muscle Beach.

02:09:38.000 There it is.

02:09:38.000 Click on that.

02:09:40.000 Okay, so here's my cap.

02:09:41.000 Go to my caption.

02:09:42.000 Go full screen on that, my caption.

02:09:43.000 Okay.

02:09:44.000 For most of our life on Earth, we either resist or succumb to the force of gravity.

02:09:50.000 At Muscle Beach, gravity loses every time.

02:09:56.000 That's not true.

02:09:59.000 I was proud of that caption.

02:10:01.000 You call me out on that caption? 0.68

02:10:03.000 That's nonsense.

02:10:05.000 Gravity never loses.

02:10:07.000 Gravity doesn't even have little tiny losses.

02:10:10.000 It's not like there's a war and gravity loses a battle.

02:10:12.000 For those just listening to this, I was in Venice, California, and the sun was setting behind some guy who was doing...

02:10:21.000 Hand presses.

02:10:23.000 Suspended up on the chin-up bar, right?

02:10:25.000 And it was cool.

02:10:27.000 He was silhouetted.

02:10:28.000 There's a palm tree.

02:10:29.000 There's the beach.

02:10:30.000 He's there. 1.00

02:10:31.000 Gravity's going to beat that motherfucker, let me tell you. 0.99

02:10:33.000 Eventually, but while he's there, he's conquering gravity. 0.99

02:10:38.000 Are you getting too old?

02:10:40.000 You haven't conquered gravity lately.

02:10:41.000 No, I work out all the time.

02:10:42.000 I'm not buying it.

02:10:44.000 No! 0.99

02:10:45.000 I ain't conquering shit. 0.99

02:10:46.000 He's pulling rank now. 0.99

02:10:48.000 He said, I work out and you don't because I see your middle-aged man belly. 0.67

02:10:55.000 Well, when I've talked to other astrophysicists and scientists- Wait, let me ask.

02:11:00.000 Are these conversations supposed to have a theme or a purpose?

02:11:04.000 Or is it just you sit there and just whatever comes to your head, you send my way?

02:11:07.000 Well, you and me?

02:11:07.000 Yeah.

02:11:08.000 Well, clearly.

02:11:09.000 It's just whatever comes to my head.

02:11:10.000 Okay, I don't know.

02:11:11.000 I don't know.

02:11:11.000 How do you say this episode is about?

02:11:13.000 You can't say that.

02:11:14.000 I don't ever do that.

02:11:15.000 You don't do that.

02:11:15.000 Okay, fine.

02:11:16.000 It's just episode number...

02:11:17.000 Secret to my success is that I don't have a purpose.

02:11:20.000 You got no commitments. 0.98

02:11:21.000 Well, how the fuck could I ever have a threat? 0.98

02:11:23.000 Think about all the different people that I have in here. 0.98

02:11:25.000 Yeah, of course.

02:11:25.000 It's like impossible.

02:11:26.000 Of course.

02:11:27.000 Between fighters and scientists and scholars and crackpots.

02:11:31.000 There's like a bunch of different people coming through here, man.

02:11:34.000 I can't have any agenda.

02:11:36.000 All right.

02:11:36.000 I mean, that's probably the only reason why this thing is as successful as it is.

02:11:41.000 But that's a weird one for people, this one thing that is so powerful.

02:11:46.000 What is?

02:11:47.000 Oh, gravity.

02:11:47.000 That's a weird one for people.

02:11:49.000 Yeah, I mean...

02:11:50.000 It seems like you're frustrated by all the various questions.

02:11:53.000 No, no.

02:11:54.000 You seem a little defensive there.

02:11:56.000 Am I right?

02:11:56.000 No, because I thought you were taking your why to ultimately mean purpose.

02:12:01.000 If it's just why, I'm claiming that many responses to how are also responses to a why.

02:12:09.000 That's the point I'm making.

02:12:11.000 And I don't like splitting...

02:12:14.000 Definitions.

02:12:14.000 Do you think we'll ultimately understand gravity?

02:12:16.000 I think we do.

02:12:17.000 That's why we can land things on Mars. 0.63

02:12:19.000 Well, we understand the effects.

02:12:19.000 I think we do, which is why your cell phone gets time from GPS satellites that is pre-corrected for Einstein's general theory of relativity because they're in a different gravitational field in orbit than you are on Earth's surface.

02:12:34.000 Dun-dun-dun.

02:12:35.000 We got this.

02:12:36.000 You're getting angry.

02:12:40.000 Einstein is triumphing.

02:12:41.000 We're running short on time here.

02:12:43.000 So I sent you something that I wanted to ask you.

02:12:46.000 What's that?

02:12:46.000 I sent you an email.

02:12:47.000 Did you get that email?

02:12:48.000 Oh, I did.

02:12:48.000 I did.

02:12:49.000 It was about a black hole that landed in a mysterious place in our understandings.

02:12:53.000 Yes.

02:12:54.000 Yeah.

02:12:55.000 So let me just give the – I'll give the sort of Reader's Digest version of this.

02:13:01.000 Okay?

02:13:01.000 Okay.

02:13:03.000 There are black holes that are...

02:13:05.000 I'll send it to you, Jamie.

02:13:07.000 There are black holes that are formed at the consequence of the death of stars.

02:13:13.000 Okay?

02:13:14.000 Okay.

02:13:15.000 And we think we understand the formation of stars well enough to say, well, a star is born with this much mass, and it'll lose a certain amount of mass over its life.

02:13:23.000 All stars lose mass because there's so much pressure and so much energy coming out, it carries particles with it.

02:13:29.000 So they lose mass.

02:13:31.000 The sun is losing mass as we speak.

02:13:33.000 It's called the solar wind.

02:13:34.000 So everybody loses mass out there.

02:13:36.000 The question is, at what rate are you losing mass?

02:13:39.000 Is it a lot compared to your total mass?

02:13:41.000 Is it small?

02:13:42.000 So, very high mass stars are not especially stable objects.

02:13:48.000 They remain stars for 100,000 at most a million years and they'll explode and become a supernova.

02:13:55.000 If you're more massive than that, they will not explode because the gravity is so strong that it cannot explode against the strength of the gravity and it collapses into a black hole.

02:14:05.000 So, we expect black holes to have It's slightly less mass, somewhat less mass than the most massive stars that we know how to make.

02:14:17.000 So if you have a hundred times the mass of the Sun star, it'll lose half its mass over its life and you have a black hole that's 30 times the mass of the Sun or 50 times the mass of the Sun.

02:14:29.000 Fine.

02:14:30.000 Put a pin in that.

02:14:31.000 In the centers of galaxies, there are supermassive black holes.

02:14:36.000 Hundreds of thousands, millions times the mass of the Sun.

02:14:41.000 And they're supermassive, and they're black holes.

02:14:43.000 We call them supermassive black holes because that's how we roll as astrophysicists.

02:14:48.000 All right.

02:14:49.000 Well, could you have black holes somewhere in the middle of these two extremes?

02:14:54.000 We do not know a phenomenon...

02:15:00.000 That will give you a black hole that will birth a black hole that's in between these two categories.

02:15:08.000 You can make a black hole that eats its way there.

02:15:12.000 Fine.

02:15:12.000 But we don't know how to make one.

02:15:15.000 And we think, my colleagues who've done this, think they've discovered a black hole that is sitting in this sort of netherworld where there's no evidence that it ate to become that massive.

02:15:30.000 And we don't know how to explain it by the formation and death of stars and is nowhere near the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.

02:15:37.000 So it's the frontier of research at this moment.

02:15:41.000 So it's just a newly discovered type of black hole.

02:15:44.000 It's in a mass regime.

02:15:47.000 It's physically impossible.

02:15:49.000 You know, headlines.

02:15:49.000 We're reading the headline now.

02:15:51.000 Black hole shock.

02:15:52.000 Show me where this appears.

02:15:56.000 Express.

02:15:57.000 So this is a British... 0.82

02:15:59.000 I think they're British.

02:16:00.000 Anyhow, it's a news digest for science.

02:16:03.000 So black hole shock theories swirl around the discovery of a physically impossible black hole.

02:16:08.000 So scientists don't use the word impossible unless it's violating a known law of physics.

02:16:15.000 So I bet that was an editor's title.

02:16:19.000 And I don't mind a little bit of sensationalism there.

02:16:23.000 You can say it is a black hole that comes from an...

02:16:26.000 If it comes from an object, it is an object we know nothing about and have yet to discover.

02:16:31.000 We're not going to say it's an impossible object.

02:16:33.000 Every time we point the telescope to the universe, we find something that we never predicted or understood.

02:16:39.000 And it adds to the knowledge base that we already have whenever they do discover things, and then it becomes what we know and understand, like the supermassive black holes at the center of every galaxy.

02:16:50.000 That was a fairly recent discovery in terms of human history.

02:16:53.000 It was hypothesized, because we saw the centers of the galaxy were behaving really weirdly.

02:16:58.000 Things, stars were moving faster than they should have, given how much gravity was tugging on them.

02:17:03.000 And we said, dude, something's got to be there.

02:17:06.000 And it's got to be really small because we're tracking stars really close to the middle.

02:17:11.000 Well, if it was made of ordinary matter, how big would it have to be?

02:17:14.000 It had to be really, really big.

02:17:15.000 So this has to be really, really small in order for this to happen.

02:17:18.000 The only thing we know that could fill that small volume and have that much gravity is a black hole.

02:17:23.000 So it was suspected for a long time.

02:17:24.000 It was confirmed that as a common thing by the Hubble telescope and first photographed, By this recent result in the galaxy M87. Messier 87 is the name of the galaxy.

02:17:37.000 And you can determine how big the black hole is based on the size of the galaxy.

02:17:42.000 We can determine the mass of the black hole by how fast stars are moving at the distance they are from it.

02:17:47.000 So in other words, so we're Earth orbiting the Sun and we have a certain speed.

02:17:52.000 We're going about...

02:17:53.000 I forgot how, what, 18 miles per second?

02:17:58.000 I think that's the number.

02:17:59.000 30 kilometers a second.

02:18:00.000 That's our speed around the sun.

02:18:03.000 That's pretty fast, okay?

02:18:06.000 If the sun had more mass instantly, that speed is not enough to maintain our orbit, and we'll start spiraling in towards it.

02:18:17.000 If the sun had less mass, that speed is too high To be in this orbit, it'll take it to a... 0.89

02:18:27.000 Sorry, it's too fast to maintain this orbit.

02:18:29.000 It'll climb us out to a higher orbit, slow us down, and we'll be in a higher orbit with a slower speed.

02:18:36.000 So in other words, for any object...

02:18:39.000 At any distance, there's only one speed you can maintain and have a stable orbit around it.

02:18:44.000 So when we see stars orbiting something in the center of the galaxy, it is a straightforward Astro 102 equation to calculate how much mass the thing is orbiting.

02:18:55.000 And you get the mass and you can't see it.

02:18:57.000 It's small.

02:18:58.000 It's a black hole.

02:19:00.000 And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the podcast.

02:19:04.000 This book will be available when, sir?

02:19:06.000 It comes out in October, first week of October.

02:19:09.000 I'm very proud of this book.

02:19:10.000 It's my most heartfelt thing that I've ever done.

02:19:13.000 Well, when it comes out, I will take a photograph and put it up on the Instagram and the Twitter.

02:19:17.000 Let everybody know about it.

02:19:18.000 Yeah, and it also has letters from people in prison.

02:19:24.000 A person who just learned that they had terminal cancer.

02:19:28.000 I mean, there's a lot of people reaching out.

02:19:30.000 So it's you responding to letters from people.

02:19:31.000 Yes, it's me responding.

02:19:32.000 And their letters, I can't fit all of their letters.

02:19:34.000 Some are very long tomes.

02:19:35.000 But most of their letters are in there and all of my correspondence is in there.

02:19:39.000 So it's my most heartfelt contribution to this universe.

02:19:43.000 And StarTalk is still a podcast.

02:19:46.000 We're still going.

02:19:47.000 Still going.

02:19:47.000 StarTalk.

02:19:48.000 We're pumping up 50 episodes.

02:19:50.000 And a television show.

02:19:52.000 Yeah, so we can see if we're going to have a new season.

02:19:54.000 We don't know yet.

02:19:55.000 That's to be announced.

02:19:57.000 But we're going through...

02:19:58.000 It's always a podcast, and we've got a YouTube channel.

02:20:01.000 StarTalk YouTube channel.

02:20:02.000 And we're thinking of branching out into other kinds of educational product that's still fun and comedic and the like.

02:20:10.000 And I love your support for this because you're also a comedian, so you know the value.

02:20:15.000 And I love comedians.

02:20:16.000 They're a fundamental part of how we deliver science to the public on StarTalk.

02:20:20.000 So thanks for that plug.

02:20:22.000 My pleasure, my friend.

02:20:23.000 Dude.

02:20:23.000 Thank you.

02:20:23.000 Always good.

02:20:24.000 Always good.

02:20:24.000 Thank you.

02:20:25.000 Thank you very much.

02:20:26.000 Bye, everybody.

02:20:29.000 All right, dude.

The Joe Rogan Experience - September 05, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1347 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Summary

Transcript