In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about one of the most important scientific inventions ever made: the telescope. Joe and his guest, astrophysicist Dr. Joe Keating, talk about the history of the telescope and how it changed the way we look at the night sky, and how we can use it to help us see the stars and galaxies we see in our everyday lives. Joe and Dr. Keating talk about how the telescope led to the discovery of the universe, and the impact it had on our perception of the world, and what we can do with it today. Joe also talks about how important it is to have a telescope, and why you should probably get one. Joe's a great guy, and I'm glad he's here to talk about it! Thanks to our sponsor, Keck Observatories, for sponsoring this episode. We hope you enjoy it, and if you like it, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. We re listening to your favorite podcasters! Joe Rogans Podcast by day, by night, all day, all the time. Thank you for listening! XOXO, -Jon Jon Sorrentino Timestamps: 5:00 - Astronomy by Night, by Day, All Day, 8:30 - The Astronomy Podcast 9:00 11:15 - Galileo and the Telescope 12:20 - The Hubble 13: What's a good telescope? 15: What is a good night out there? 16:40 - Galileo's telescope 17: What are you looking at the universe? 18:30 19:40 21:00 | What can you see? 22:30 | What s a good place to see it? 27:40 | How can I see it better? 26:00 / 27:00 // 27:10 28:00 & 29:00 +30: What would you like to see the moon? 35:30 & 35: What do you think of the moon 36: Is there a better place to get a better night ? 39:30 + 35:40: Is it better than this better than that? 41:00 And so much more? 45:00 Is it a better than the moon and other stuff? 44:00 =
00:01:44.000Because with a telescope, you could see a ship in the Venetian Lagoon a day or two out before it would come on shore and you could see it from the ground.
00:01:54.000So the distance back then was stealth technology.
00:03:12.000So that was in the original direction from directly from the Gutenberg Bible to glasses.
00:03:18.000And then what's so funny is the glasses then led to making a telescope.
00:03:22.000And then the telescope led to the Earth being moved away from being the center of the universe, which the Gutenberg Bible, you know, in some connotations, suggested that we were.
00:03:32.000So there's a direct line from the Gutenberg Bible to the glasses to the telescope to then now religion is not so centralized in the age of scientific reason.
00:03:48.000Like how many levels of magnification?
00:03:51.000So a good telescope that you can get, I was joking, I'm not a doctor, but I'm not a real doctor.
00:03:56.000But the only prescription Dr. Keating makes is that you should buy your kid a telescope.
00:04:01.000And actually, the reason I said this is the reason I'm probably sitting here with you is because I became a scientist thanks to getting a telescope at about age 12. And you can actually see something.
00:04:09.000I know you've been to, like, the Keck Observatories, and you've seen the night sky from there, and that is wonderful.
00:04:15.000But every single thing that Galileo saw with his 20-power telescope, which is not that much.
00:06:33.000So what Galileo realized is sometimes you don't want to use everything that you have.
00:06:38.000Sometimes you want to do what's called stopping down.
00:06:40.000So you have for aperture stops in photography.
00:06:42.000So when you stop down something, it does something really important.
00:06:46.000It reduces what are called systematic effects, aberrations, unwanted effects.
00:06:52.000So instead of maximizing, say, oh, I got the biggest telescope, which is, well, now astronomers fight, but my telescope's bigger than yours.
00:06:59.000He said, no, no, no, you want to stop it down, and that will actually improve the quality.
00:07:03.000And you can actually see this with your own fingers.
00:07:28.000But you're actually reducing some of the rays outside of your peripheral vision, essentially, that would otherwise come in if you have any cataracts or anything like that.
00:07:37.000So what Galileo said is, no, don't use everything you have.
00:07:40.000Actually stop it down, make it smaller, make it seem less efficient, but actually improve the quality, not the quantity, tremendously.
00:07:48.000And when did they first start getting them to the point where you get telescopes like the Keck Observatory?
00:08:05.000The lenses change the speed of light inside of the medium, and that causes light waves at different angles to travel through different thicknesses and travel slower, and that causes them to converge or diverge as necessary.
00:08:17.000Nowadays, so this telescope was invented by this guy Hans Lippershey and perfected by Galileo.
00:08:24.000Isaac Newton came along almost 100 years later, actually he was born when Galileo died in 1642, and he invented not a refracting telescope, but a reflecting telescope of the type that the Keck telescopes you've seen are.
00:08:39.000These are telescopes that use mirrors, like, to focus the light.
00:11:33.000I've actually done quite a lot of work with binoculars because I was trying to figure out what's the difference in binoculars for outdoor activities, hunting and stuff.
00:11:43.000And there's such a difference when you get to the higher quality binoculars.
00:11:47.000It's really fascinating because they both have the same, you know, they have different, you know, like it's 10x42.
00:12:51.000But a telescope using mirrors, right now in space, we've got, you know, the six-meter diameter Webb telescope, which is, you know, six times bigger than the Yerkes Observatory, and that's in space.
00:13:01.000That's a million miles away from the Earth.
00:13:03.000But that's built with reflecting technology.
00:13:05.000So when you see a mirror, mirrors reflect colors independently.
00:13:27.000This is currently the world's highest operating astronomical observatory.
00:13:30.000It's at 5,200 meters, 17,200 feet above sea level.
00:13:35.000And the telescope that's pictured there is the 6-meter diameter, we call it the Large Aperture Telescope, that my friend Mark Devlin Is this the VLT one that I keep hearing about?
00:13:45.000No, this is just called the Simons Observatory.
00:13:48.000So when our mutual friend Eric Weinstein was on last time, he talked a lot about this man, James Simons, who organized and ran the math department at the State University of New York in Santa Barbara.
00:14:00.000But he's one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world.
00:14:43.000I'm a Professor Joe, so this won't show up on the screen.
00:14:46.000But then it goes across, and it goes into that white little chamber over there.
00:14:50.000That white chamber, like, I could sit on your back and we would have plenty of room inside there.
00:14:55.000That's over six and a half feet across.
00:14:58.000This is also built by Mark Devlin and his group and detectors by my friend Suzanne Staggs at Princeton.
00:15:04.000And this is going to be the world's most sensitive and the world's highest operating observatory when we start taking data with it next year.
00:15:36.000So David's like one of the greatest mentors I've ever had.
00:15:39.000He and I and others, Adrian Lee at Berkeley, we decided, oh, we want to build the world's most capable astronomical observatory, and I happened to be very close and connected to James Simons.
00:15:50.000His original job was math professor at the State University of New York called Stony Brook.
00:15:56.000And he hired my father, my late father, which maybe we'll talk about later.
00:16:01.000And they were best friends for a long time.
00:16:03.000And then Jim Simons went on to become one of the most successful hedge fund managers.
00:16:10.000He quit being a math professor and said, I'm going to start trading futures and commodities back in the early 70s.
00:17:20.000And you can't just say to my graduate student, hey, come back in two years when the pandemic, or come back when there's a vaccine, or do whatever you want.
00:17:27.000We instead said, no, we kept it going.
00:17:32.000So now we just yesterday, my colleague Adrian Lee, They deployed the first receiver, along with Nikolitsky, who's a professor right up the street here at UT Austin.
00:17:40.000They deployed this telescope camera, and we're about to start taking data for the first time in our project history.
00:21:48.000When I go down there, I can't recognize the constellations that I know and I've known since I was 12 years old because there's no contrast.
00:21:57.000Like every star just is like blowing you away and it's just magnified so much by the clarity and the distance and the remove from light pollution.
00:22:32.000And what I brought here, this is a representation of the cosmic microwave background.
00:22:36.000This is made by my friends Lyman Page and David Spergel and others on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.
00:22:43.000This is God's view of the cosmos, if you will.
00:22:46.000So this is what you'd see if you were sensitive to microwave vision instead of optical light.
00:22:52.000So microwaves are longer than infrared light, they're longer wavelength, they're shorter than radio waves, and they're longer than infrared light, much longer than visible light.
00:23:00.000This would be your microwave constellations.
00:23:03.000In other words, if you could see, these are unchanging fixed patterns on the sky that are only visible to microwave instruments.
00:24:00.000So, actually, if you go back, Jamie, to the Alma picture that you showed just a second ago, the Incas were a really fascinating culture, and astronomically speaking.
00:24:13.000We look at the stars, like, I don't know how many constellations you can recognize.
00:24:19.000But the Incas, they didn't use our constellations, obviously.
00:27:24.000So because you're holding your breath?
00:27:26.000Because you're oxygen deprived, the intensity of starlight and the contrast, as you just said, between the blackness and the lightness and the points of light, it will be essentially like you're basically out of your senses.
00:27:41.000I wonder if we're going to get to a point with technology that we figure out how to use some sort of diffuse lighting everywhere where we minimize light pollution, at least minimize it to the point where you do see stars.
00:27:54.000I think it really is a bad thing for us.
00:27:57.000I think it's akin to people not getting sunlight in the winter.
00:28:01.000They don't do well because they don't get vitamin D. I think there's something psychological.
00:28:07.000There's a medicine to the awe-inspiring cosmos.
00:28:22.000His whole shtick is get out in the morning, see the morning sunlight.
00:28:26.000What I want to talk to him about – because he's an expert in the eye and the physiology of the eye as well as all the other stuff that he does for his laboratory, right?
00:28:34.000But I want to ask him about astronomical things.
00:29:50.000I said, this is the best Christmas gift you could possibly get a kid.
00:29:54.000Because with it, you can see the same craters on the moon that Galileo saw.
00:29:59.000Light pollution does not obscure I'm not advocating for light pollution, but I'm just saying right here in the middle of Austin or in the middle of San Diego, I can see the exact same things that caused Galileo to realize that the sun is the center of the solar system using scientific reasoning and evidence based on observation.
00:31:03.000There were only five things they could see that would move in space, and those were the planets from Mercury, Venus.
00:31:09.000Obviously, they could see Mars and Jupiter and Saturn.
00:31:12.000But they couldn't see anything else, so they named those things the Wanderers, and they wandered against the fixed stars.
00:31:17.000Now we know the stars do move, and actually the whole galaxy moves, and potentially, we'll get to this maybe later, and maybe the universe, in some sense, could be said to be moving in a vaster landscape called the multiverse, which we can get to at a certain point.
00:32:24.000They use what's called adaptive optics.
00:32:26.000That's to avoid like the thermal radiation from the earth.
00:32:29.000Like you're shooting something or elk or whatever at great distance, there's thermal radiation close to the ground and then the air is much cooler and so you get these boundary layers of the atmosphere that causes differential refraction which changes the color and the position of where the deer is and that's not good,
00:33:47.000I don't know if you've ever done any boating or whatever, but when you're out on the ocean, it's extremely hard to determine what your longitude is.
00:33:56.000You just look for Polaris, the North Star.
00:33:58.000You measure your elevation, and that's going to complement where you are latitudinally on the But it was impossible to tell where you are east to west from the prime meridian unless you had an accurate way of measuring time.
00:34:13.000So Galileo was one of the first people to try to compete to win this prize which was worth like a million dollars back then in those days.
00:34:22.000And he tried a couple different ways to invent time pieces.
00:34:26.000But the one that he's tried to settle on was this use of the planet Jupiter's moons.
00:35:01.000But I wonder if, Jamie, if you could find something that wasn't great.
00:35:06.000If you look up Starry Messenger, Galileo, Sketch, Jupiter.
00:35:16.000So what Galileo did is he turned the telescope to the moon in 1609, and then in 1610, there they are, Jamie, on the right with those stars.
00:35:57.000So this is a depiction of him showing, so Galileo's the guy with the beard looking down, like Andrew Huberman, at the guy with the white beard.
00:38:32.000I don't know if Spotify is going to hook you up there.
00:38:36.000But the feeling that Galileo had, you can have that tonight.
00:38:40.000You can feel what it's like to see things for the first time in human history because it's your own history.
00:38:47.000You're experiencing it for the first time.
00:38:48.000There's no other scientific tool, nothing.
00:38:51.000Even the microscope, it's not the same viscerally.
00:38:54.000You will be connected to Galileo 400 years ago feeling he was terrified.
00:38:59.000When he saw those pictures of those dots, he realized what he was looking at was not just like some stars that happened to be next to Jupiter.
00:39:07.000He realized he discovered another solar system A system in which there was a massive gravitating object, Jupiter, and around it were orbiting satellites, were orbiting moons around it.
00:39:18.000Today they're called the Galilean satellites.
00:39:20.000He actually named them after his benefactor, those patrons, the Medicis, who were the richest, you know, people in that part of northern Italy.
00:39:31.000It would be like if we named the, you know, whatever, the Higgs boson, we named that after, you know, the European equivalent of the IRS, right?
00:39:40.000He was kind of a kiss-up, you know, in some ways.
00:39:43.000But it had to save his life and he needed money and stuff.
00:39:46.000But when he drew that, he realized, wait a second, the Bible and all teaching heretofore said there is only one center to the solar system and it's the Earth.
00:40:02.000Aristotle, Plato, everybody had believed that for a long time because it said it was natural that heavy things should fall towards a center, and the center that everything seemed to fall towards was the center of the Earth or the Earth itself.
00:40:14.000Therefore, the Earth must be the center of the universe.
00:40:17.000Remember, the solar system was the universe for a long time.
00:40:19.000Then for an equally long time almost, the galaxy was the whole universe.
00:40:23.000And now there's the universe and maybe the multiverse that we'll talk about.
00:40:28.000So this was just incredible realization to him.
00:40:31.000Imagine like you come upon this thing and you realize you're the first person in human history ever to feel that.
00:40:36.000Is there any documentation of his struggle with trying to convey these ideas to people that had very strong religious beliefs?
00:40:59.000I always make a provocative statement that, like, we don't need English departments.
00:41:02.000We should just teach, like, Physics and astronomy, because some of the great scientists of history, men and women, were tremendous orators, they were tremendous writers, and they could convey things through the written word that was pure artistry and mastery.
00:41:17.000And Galileo would say things like, I do not believe that the same God who has given us senses to understand the world would require that we not use that, and I'm butchering the quote, not use them in order to better understand it.
00:41:29.000He would write things that he had discovered things, you know, only as a way to open a portal into the universe such that minds more astute than mine may be able to walk through this portal.
00:41:43.000And he was being a little falsely humble.
00:42:46.000In fact, two of his daughters were nuns and because of his You know, I always say, like, imagine we're living in a time where someone like Anthony Fauci or, you know, Francis Collins or somebody, that they had—they were not only the scientists, the expert scientists,
00:43:03.000say, but they also control the government.
00:43:05.000In other words, the most powerful force on Earth at that time, at least where Galileo was, was the Vatican.
00:43:19.000It was a Catholic, you know, band of jurisdiction and Catholic Church had sway over that part of Italy and Tuscany where he was.
00:43:25.000He was very religious, but he thought that he could say things like if he proved that something scientifically was true, he didn't understand why that couldn't be part of the religious canon.
00:43:40.000In other words, he felt that the signature of God Yeah.
00:44:00.000It could lead, I'm not saying it's good, but it could lead them to want to suppress that, right?
00:44:05.000Because it could lead to insurrections, it could lead to whatever, and rebellions.
00:44:10.000And that could be perceived as very threatening to the state.
00:44:12.000But to answer your question, the Bible doesn't say anything about geocentrism.
00:44:17.000There are passages in the Bible, there's two famous ones.
00:44:19.000The most famous one is that Joshua, in the Battle of Jericho, he caused the sun to stand still.
00:44:27.000And that, to many people, implies that the sun was orbiting around the Earth.
00:44:33.000It certainly could be construed that way.
00:44:35.000But to answer your question, there is no real cosmology.
00:44:38.000You know, I would say, like, let me ask you, I don't know how much, I know you've had some exposure to Christianity, but I don't know how much you've ever read of the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible, but the beginning of Genesis, right?
00:44:51.000So I know that you're interested in origin stories, right?
00:44:54.000So why is it that a book about, you know, a nomadic band of Bronze Age, you know, peasants, why does it begin with the creation of the world, of the universe?
00:46:56.000What ended up happening was the reason it was dangerous for him, and he was accused of apostasy.
00:47:02.000It was because he was claiming against the doctrine of—effectively of Aristotle, and actually Stephen Meyer taught this to me in a conference that I went to with him last year, just a conversation.
00:47:15.000I always wondered, why is it that the Catholic Church—Catholicism branches Christianity, which came from Judaism, right?
00:47:24.000I mean, the origin of—they accept the Hebrew Bible, right?
00:47:27.000So why is it that a sect of, say, the scientific and technological elite of the Catholic Church, why did they want to support a doctrine which really traced itself back to Aristotle?
00:47:42.000The Aristotelian notion was that everything was centered on the earth.
00:47:47.000There's nothing in the Bible that says the earth is the center of the solar system or doesn't say that.
00:47:51.000But Aristotle made such logical sense to the Christians, to the early Christians and later to the Catholic Church, that they basically sanctified and made Aristotle effectively into a saint.
00:48:13.000It's really strange because, you know, Aristotle was a pagan, right?
00:48:18.000He was pantheistic, which is the number one law of the Ten Commandments, right, is I am the Lord, you shall have no other gods before me, meaning that Judaism came to destroy pantheism and to accept monotheism and establish it throughout the world, and now three billion people are affiliated with it in some way,
00:50:04.000He's still alive, thankfully, and he lives on the East Coast.
00:50:08.000And his family was ten brothers and sisters.
00:50:12.000And they welcomed me into their home, and my older brother Kevin...
00:50:17.000With such love and graciousness and just touching humility and this big Irish Catholic family, they basically would call – they thought that we became their biological grandchildren, cousins, nephews and so forth.
00:50:35.000And in contradistinction to that, anything I remember about Judaism from age zero to seven was just like, okay, well, like you have to not eat, you know, once you can't eat that tasty bacon.
00:50:45.000It was all things you can't do and so forth, right?
00:50:48.000So this was like Christmas, Easter, hanging out, like just boisterous 50 cousins at Christmas.
00:50:54.000So I became, at the traditional age that a Jewish boy starts learning for his bar mitzvah at age 12, I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church in Chappaqua, New York.
00:51:06.000And at the exact same time, I was saving up money to buy my first telescope.
00:51:13.000Because one night I had fallen asleep and I woke up in the middle of the night and outside the window I saw this huge bright light and I didn't think there was a street light out there in the middle of summer looking at it.
00:51:27.000And I was like, wait, that's the moon?
00:51:29.000And there was something next to the moon that was like, it looked like a little fragment of the moon had broken off and was just like to the left of it.
00:51:35.000It was as bright as the moon, but much, much smaller.
00:52:10.000Like, I didn't know you could see a planet without a, like, Hubble space, you know, whatever, or without a satellite.
00:52:16.000And so I just got really interested, and I kept watching them night after night.
00:52:19.000And I was unknowingly, and I always joke, I have a pretty big ego, but I'm not going to compare myself to Galileo.
00:52:25.000But indirectly, I kept doing the things that Galileo had done, like seeing, oh, wait, the moon has craters on it?
00:52:30.000Oh, wait, the moon has mountains on it?
00:52:32.000And maybe I could measure the height of those mountains from the size of the shadow and knowing the distance to the moon?
00:52:37.000And the planet Jupiter has these four little dots around it, and they would change their position night to night.
00:52:43.000And like a lesser intellect like mine, you know, not intelligent at the time, looking at it, would have just said, oh, you know, Jupiter's just next to some stars, and it's going to move, tomorrow will be different.
00:52:53.000But no, Galileo realized he was looking at a mini solar system edge-on.
00:52:58.000If you looked out above, he'd see these four moons going around like this, but he was looking at it like this, so they were kind of going like this back and forth, and it was periodic.
00:53:06.000And he kept doing it for night after night after night.
00:53:09.000And it kind of got boring in his book, The Sidereus Nuncius, which is otherwise an amazing book.
00:53:14.000But when you look at it, he realized, hey, it's so periodic, I could use it as a clock.
00:53:20.000So he tried to win this prize to invent the first stable, accurate clock that could be used by mariners on the ocean's surface far from land to determine the time difference between them and Greenwich, therefore determining their longitude.
00:53:33.000And what's the mechanism that he proposed to try to measure these planets going around?
00:53:38.000Yeah, so if you just plotted their distance over enough time, it was periodic, so you could just calculate it, just like the moon.
00:53:45.000Right, but I mean in terms of the actual mechanical clock itself?
00:53:48.000Is it just a calculated clock on paper?
00:53:52.000You'd look up in a table, like a database.
00:55:18.000But actually Galileo tried to do this from his youth.
00:55:22.000He would be in church and I remember even though I was an altar boy and I loved it and I had good experiences in the Catholic church even though I abandoned it later on as I'll describe.
00:55:31.000But one day Galileo was in church and the priest was giving some boring sermon and Galileo was just sitting there like this.
00:55:42.000And he looked up and there was a lantern and like some horse cart had gone through or whatever and the lantern was going back and forth like a pendulum.
00:55:49.000And Galileo put his fingers on his pulse.
00:55:53.000And he timed the period of the pendulum and he realized it didn't change.
00:56:30.000Jamie, if you want to look up a Galileo thermometer.
00:56:32.000How did they discern the amount of minutes in an hour, the amount of hours in a day?
00:56:38.000So, to get to a level of precision now, or then, to a few minutes or a fraction of a day, that was easily significant enough to make measurements of longitude.
00:56:49.000So, the actual kind of level of precision, that didn't occur into the 1800s, to get really good clocks.
00:56:55.000And now, I talk to, you know, people, Bill Phillips on my podcast, the Nobel Laureate, At NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, and they are making clocks that are accurate to one part in a thousand trillionth of a second.
00:57:11.000This thing will not lose time over the age of the universe.
00:58:24.000But I mean, and then, you know, obviously there's time zones and, you know, with traveling, the way we do now, it's so fascinating because you could literally fly somewhere and it's 10 hour difference in time zone.
00:58:35.000Or like Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island, it's half hours.
00:58:57.000When you buy this cup of coffee, When you buy the Black Rifle or the Onnit or whatever, how do you know you're getting exactly what they say?
00:59:11.000No, we had issues with that in the past when we first started the company.
00:59:15.000Well, we were getting stuff made in these places that do supplements.
00:59:20.000And so we were third-party testing our stuff and finding things in our supplements that weren't supposed to be in there, like different vitamins.
00:59:31.000And that's a lot of athletes actually get popped from small levels of steroids that are in like protein powders and creatines and things that they buy from, you know, kind of shade organizations.
00:59:44.000Yeah, my man, Fernando Tatis, he got nailed for that last year, right?
01:00:58.000I mean, she's still in great shape, but this is like 10 or 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago.
01:01:02.000And I used to joke when I was dating my wife Sarah, I was like, you know, normally I take a girl out, you know, scared of her father, like, I'm terrified of your mother.
01:02:11.000We need a urine test and we need a blood sample.
01:02:14.000And they do that all the time, and these jacked people don't get caught.
01:02:21.000Either they're doing it so sophisticated that even with USADA, which is the most sophisticated anti-doping program that we have available, and very invasive, right?
01:02:40.000So there's some short-acting testosterone supplements that you can take that Particularly now, apparently there's some new ones that they leave the body in like two and a half hours.
01:02:52.000So you can take them and get an elevated level of testosterone.
01:02:56.000You can take them multiple times a day and it doesn't affect your natural testosterone production and it also doesn't show up if you get past that two and a half hour window.
01:03:06.000So there could be a lot of people who are just rolling the dice.
01:03:29.000This guy, Sugar Sean O'Malley, who just won the Bantamweight title, Dan Gardner is his nutritionist, and I was actually just going back and forth with him on Instagram because I watched one of the videos that he did, and I was like, that is really impressive stuff.
01:03:46.000Dan Gardner is, what is his profile here?
01:06:19.000Click on that link right there with me standing next to him.
01:06:22.000The one that you just had with his flexing upper right-hand corner of those yeah that that one so that's him weighing in and these his cheeks are sucked in and he'll gain literally 40 pounds almost Between them and Fight Night.
01:07:31.000And I think for some of these guys, yeah, I mean, if it's sacrificing your lifespan, your healthspan, whatever Peter or Tia would talk about, what's it worth?
01:07:41.000I mean, is that high worth it, like, to be champion for a day?
01:09:23.000When you win a Nobel Prize, so my very close friend and mentor, Barry Barish, he won the 2017 Nobel Prize for discovering gravitational weight.
01:09:31.000He'd be an amazing guest for you, by the way, if I can have the temerity to even make such suggestions.
01:09:36.000But he invented or co-invented the LIGO experiment, which was this experiment.
01:09:40.000One branch of it's in Louisiana and one's in Washington State.
01:09:45.0001.2 billion years ago, in a galaxy we have no idea where it is to this day, two black holes were orbiting around each other, just like Roger Penrose had predicted, and they came together, and each one was about 30 times, one was 30 times the mass of the Sun,
01:10:04.000They made a giant black hole, even bigger, but it only had the mass of, say, 60 times the mass of the Sun.
01:10:11.000So like two masses worth of the Sun vanished.
01:10:14.000And it didn't produce light because they're black holes.
01:10:17.000And the energy supplied by them did not go anywhere else except into making what are called gravitational waves.
01:10:24.000Waves in the fabric of space-time, such that if one were coming through this room right now, I mean, you couldn't notice it, but technically it would make your weight go up and down, like these guys on the weigh-in would love it.
01:10:35.000It would make it go up and down, except it would take, you know, a couple hundred days for it to even change by a billionth of a percent.
01:10:41.000But it changes your physical manifestation of gravity.
01:10:45.000It gives you anti-gravity for a second, and then many seconds, and then the longer it makes you heavier, lighter.
01:12:11.000I say at the end, it's kind of like my wrap-up, you know, what advice would you give yourself as a 20-year-old to give you the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible?
01:12:52.000But when you win it, I said, how could you possibly have the imposter syndrome, this fear of inadequacy, that you don't belong where you're at, that you don't deserve the accolades that you've had?
01:14:21.000I looked up this quote and I showed it to him.
01:14:23.000I said, Albert Einstein called Isaac Newton not only the greatest scientist in history, but the man who single-handedly changed Western civilization more than any other person through the principia and the study of natural determinism and laws.
01:15:29.000And if you read his writings, do you know what Isaac Newton, the creator of calculus, the first person to understand universal gravitation, discovered laws of optics.
01:15:38.000Do you know what his biggest accomplishment, according to him, was?
01:16:06.000And the only way he could do it, he couldn't, like, fast or, I don't know, he couldn't walk on water, he couldn't turn water into wine, he couldn't turn loaves into fishes or whatever Jesus also did.
01:17:17.000When you win it, you literally, the king of Sweden comes up to you and you must bow down to him.
01:17:22.000And he puts the gilded graven image on your head.
01:17:25.000So for all the trappings and all the 90% of National Academy members who do not believe, actively profess a belief in God, this can become, at some level, a religion.
01:17:38.000Well, the unattainable that's maybe perhaps attainable to a very select few is always the thing that people are chasing after, especially like high achievers.
01:18:24.000But it was acceptable because people told me, you know, like, if you discover these waves of gravity manifest in the cosmic background radiation that I study, you're guaranteed to win the Nobel Prize.
01:18:37.000I don't know about you with your, you know, relations with your father, but I had a very difficult relationship with my father.
01:18:44.000And in it, it was really predicated the way that some kids would like get into fights or, you know, with their father or maybe they would try to be a better football player than their dad or whatever.
01:18:54.000My father was a great scientist and mathematician.
01:18:57.000And the one thing, the one prize he never won was a Nobel Prize.
01:19:02.000And so after he abandoned us, this became kind of the way that I could supersede him.
01:19:07.000And it became an obsession to me, as well as being scientifically interesting to be a part of, there are very few projects that are eligible to win a Nobel Prize, let alone that can win it.
01:19:17.000But for me, it was kind of an added dimension that came with it.
01:19:20.000And that was, you know, a normal kid might have it with sports and their dad or maybe the other way around.
01:19:26.000When you're a dad, you might treat your kids like that.
01:19:29.000Like, oh, you think you could take me on or whatever.
01:19:32.000And so for that, that was the main source of driving impetus for my personal quest to get this particular idol in my life.
01:19:46.000He is, I believe he's out of the University of Connecticut.
01:19:51.000He studies time travel and he became obsessed with time travel after his father died when he was a young boy because he felt like if he worked hard enough he could develop a time machine and go back and save his father.
01:20:05.000It's literally a Spider-Man origin story.
01:20:08.000This guy has been dedicated his life to finding a working model of a time machine.
01:20:41.000But yeah, he had a spiraling, he had a rotating cosmos where you could have what are called world lines.
01:20:45.000You could have your Just like you could walk around the surface of the Earth, and if you go in the same direction, eventually you'll come back to where you started.
01:20:51.000If the universe was somehow rotating in the way that he envisioned it, you could have it end up on a time start where you began in the beginning.
01:20:59.000Yeah, see that traveler's lifelike, time-like curve.
01:22:17.000And Einstein says, First, you must tell me your IQ. And the guy goes, I have 140 IQ. Oh, we could talk about the math and string theory and this and that.
01:22:26.000And then another guy comes up, what's your IQ? It's 130. Oh, we can talk about the stock market, and we can talk about all these financial...
01:22:35.000And then someone comes up, I have 100 IQ. We can talk about culture wars.
01:22:43.000I think it's more of a tribal thing than anything with us.
01:22:47.000I think what's going on is just something that's like written into the human reward system.
01:22:53.000That there's a lot of social value in being part of a tribe.
01:22:57.000There's a lot of social value in being part of a committed ideology, whether it's a religion or a cult or politics.
01:23:06.000I mean, you know, not to be too overbearingly praiseworthy, but, you know, there's a Yiddish saying, if you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit from both sides of the street.
01:25:22.000To figure out things for themselves and decide how they view all these different subjects, not have this predetermined group of questions and answers that they're a part of the ideology.
01:25:39.000You must subscribe to them wholeheartedly, wholesale.
01:25:41.000Trevor Burrus And even by you, like apparently – so Lex mentioned that Andrew Huberman's Wikipedia page because you platformed – I'm like, the guy is a Kennedy.
01:26:17.000And they removed that because they had decided that they were going to...
01:26:21.000I don't know what their thought process was, what their motivation was, but it appears that what they're doing is punishing him for what he said by labeling him in a very...
01:26:30.000They're maligning him in multiple different ways.
01:26:33.000I thought about saying, like, well, you know who else Joe Rogan had on this guy named Peter Hotez?
01:26:37.000Yeah, well, I try to have a lot of people on.
01:26:40.000There's nothing wrong with having a guy who's running for president on a podcast to discuss things.
01:27:28.000But nevertheless, I feel like I owe it to people to translate what my fellow scientists are doing into layman's terms that they can understand because they pay our freaking salary.
01:27:37.000Trevor Burrus It's very valuable what you do.
01:28:28.000And we are so bad at communicating what we do.
01:28:32.000And worse than that, we don't feel like it's our obligation.
01:28:36.000I always joke, and maybe it's not even a joke.
01:28:39.000Scientists have a moral obligation to communicate what they do to the people that fund them, but they also have, you know, just common sense.
01:28:46.000If the public gets turned off to science because the scientists say, ah, I am too specialized for you, Joe.
01:28:53.000I can't break it down for an everyman to understand.
01:28:55.000What I do is very—I should stay in the lab because we need people that just stay in the lab and don't get—you know, I always joke, like, how do you know a scientist is outgoing?
01:29:10.000But if I don't teach my students these things, if I don't teach them, look, part of the soft skills that will get you farther in life and all the Nobel laureates that I've talked to, they all have that in common.
01:29:19.000They're not just awesome and the top elite killers of science, Joe.
01:29:28.000Because you don't just make a great idea and everyone accepts it.
01:29:31.000You have to convince people, editors, peer reviewers, funding agencies, and you're in a complex battle against the world's other killers.
01:29:40.000And what if you're just a little bit better than them?
01:29:43.000Because you have learned that it's important for you to communicate to your bosses, to your funding agents, such that we don't have this elite that the general public can't understand.
01:29:53.000So they just defer to whichever way the wind's blowing, and we have what we've had for the last few years.
01:30:00.000I mean, the reason why you have so many science influencers or science educators is because science is way more complicated than all those other things.
01:30:42.000Something as simple as a pencil could be considered complicated.
01:30:45.000But complicated means if you follow it, my PhD thesis, if you follow it, you will build a polarimeter that's capable of measuring the cosmic microwave background's polarization.
01:30:58.000Like if you try to make a sand pile and have exactly the same number of grains of sand, or if you want to have this particular thunderstorm that's brewing in the plains of Austin, Texas tonight, that is a complex system.
01:31:11.000That is a system that is not capable of being described by a finite number of steps.
01:31:17.000It may have building phase, dissipating phase, hail, whatever.
01:31:21.000And it may have commonalities, but like the butterfly effect, the flapping of the wind, you cannot replicate the sensitivity to the initial conditions that then lead to a complex event.
01:31:31.000Science can be both complicated and complex, but there's no way around this.
01:31:37.000If you can't explain it to somebody who is not an expert, you've failed at a certain level.
01:31:43.000Because just imagine if you were working, like, do you think it's complicated to be an accountant at a top 10 accounting firm?
01:32:10.000If I say, I can't explain to you why this is the freaking absolute coolest thing in the world to do, and if you didn't pay me, or Gavin Newsom, my boss, your former governor, if he didn't pay me to do it, Joe, I would do it for free.
01:32:23.000In other words, we are so animated by it, but why don't we do it?
01:32:27.000Because, actually, it's the converse of what you said.
01:32:30.000Communicating to the public is hard to scientists.
01:32:32.000It's not the science that's hard to do.
01:32:34.000It's to learn how to distill it and teach it.
01:32:37.000I've had over 2,000 students in my career.
01:32:39.000I don't think I'm the best teacher, but I think I can do a good job enough to take somebody who was a layperson, and now they're an expert, and now they're teaching down the street from you here, and they're much better and smarter than I am.
01:34:58.000By the way, I only have the job I have now and not like building some weapon because we're not at war.
01:35:03.000I think it was 60 years ago in Oppenheim, and you'll watch it, you know, like they took the killers of science, and they were all in the desert in Los Alamos, and they were squirreled away, and they didn't tell anybody.
01:35:13.000And the same thing was going on in London and England, working on radar, and the same thing was going on at MIT. And it's just, we serve at the pleasure of the public as scientists.
01:35:23.000And too few of us realize this, and too few of us view it as a moral obligation to communicate back to the public.
01:35:28.000And so therefore, we have this industry of science popularizers, and some people make quite a good living.
01:35:33.000Yeah, well, it's great that people are interested in it now and it's one of the things that I think Podcasts like Lex Friedman's and many other ones that platform these people and have these discussions It's like makes things digestible.
01:36:00.000So you had this tweet that took over the internet and Instagram posted.
01:36:04.000Well, it was actually something that I had heard before that.
01:36:07.000Someone was saying there was something like a quasar that they had discovered that seemed to be far older than it was supposed to be.
01:36:13.000So ever since the Webb Telescope, Webb Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021, and it's been traveling out to a million miles past the Earth-Moon system.
01:36:22.000It's about a million miles from the Earth.
01:36:26.000It orbits around a blank piece of space that orbits around the Earth and the Sun.
01:36:30.000So it's a wild thing that was figured out a couple hundred years ago and is only possible to be used now.
01:36:35.000But anyway, this orbit allows James Webb and its cameras to see things in what's called the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
01:36:45.000So if you take—here, I brought another GIF for Joe.
01:36:48.000So these are called a diffraction grating.
01:36:50.000So this is like a billion mini-prisms.
01:38:30.000If I put a thermometer, imagine you put a thermometer like right here.
01:38:34.000The thermometer would register 70 degrees or whatever it is in this room.
01:38:37.000If you go outside and the sun's out, and the sunlight's not directly hitting the thermometer, and you put it where the red comes out over here, it starts to heat up.
01:39:14.000Then there's infrared, et cetera, et cetera.
01:39:17.000And then finally there's radio waves way off over there that you can't see with something like this, obviously.
01:39:21.000You can't even see infrared light with this.
01:39:23.000So they realize there's invisible light beyond the red, invisible to the eye, but visible to sensors and detectors.
01:39:30.000So what Webb has are a series of detectors like these things.
01:39:34.000These are actually superconductors, which I want to talk to you about this recent claim of detectors that can conduct electricity with no resistance.
01:39:56.000So if you put them at the focus of a telescope...
01:39:58.000And you spread out the light using something like this to disperse the light, such that only infrared light falls on that telescope, then you'll be detecting infrared radiation from whatever objects you look at.
01:40:09.000Now, if you pointed at a galaxy that's far off in the distance, or a quasar, that light has been red-shifted.
01:40:16.000It's been moved all the way from where it started in the visible light, because those galaxies are made of suns and stars just like ours, so they should have visible light, but they're mostly red.
01:40:26.000Only the Webb Telescope can see those with the kind of clarity and distinction that they're able to perceive it.
01:40:32.000What was claimed by a paper, and actually I've been communicating with the author, so one of the cool things about having a podcast is that when someone puts out a claim, oh, like a superconductor that works at room temperature, which would revolutionize, or there's fusion, not fission, but fusion that exists now for the first time,
01:40:49.000I can call them up and say, hey, I have this fun podcast.
01:41:14.000Shattered all my dreams about what the universe is really like.
01:41:18.000And this guy, I don't want to use their names, but this guy pulled that quote and said, this proves the Big Bang never happened.
01:41:26.000That was the first thing that happened after Webb came out last year.
01:41:29.000This gentleman is claiming that the universe is infinitely old, and that the reason that you see red galaxies is not because they're red-shifted by the expansion of this—if I kept blowing up this beach ball, these things would be moving apart from each other, red-shifting their wavelengths away from one another.
01:41:47.000He's saying, no, that's not what's happening.
01:41:51.000They've been overwhelmed by this notion of the Big Bang.
01:41:54.000The Big Bang never happened, but light is losing energy and getting more and more red as it travels to us in an infinite universe that's infinitely old.
01:42:04.000Is this person qualified to make this statement?
01:42:06.000This person has marginal qualifications.
01:42:09.000They give away the tell and poker language of this guy's non-seriousness is that he wrote the same thing 30 years ago when the Hubble telescope was launched.
01:42:17.000He's had the same thing, and he has a book.
01:42:19.000But the second thing that you tweeted relative to was not that the universe was infinitely old, that it was twice as old as we thought.
01:42:25.000Yeah, it's like 26-something billion years old.
01:42:28.000So I did a podcast with Alison Kirkpatrick, and she and I went through this guy's claims.
01:42:35.000And then the next day, we showed what he was saying is slightly different.
01:42:39.000He's saying the universe has a finite age, that a Big Bang-like event happened, but because of these properties of galaxies that I'll explain in just one minute, because of the properties of the galaxies, the universe has to be much, much older than astronomers claimed.
01:42:54.000He doesn't say you guys are fools and idiots, and he's a legitimate professor in Ottawa.
01:43:24.000Well, so I call this the academia media hype complex.
01:43:28.000So ordinarily you're working on something and let's say you discover, oh, there's this new material and it has a breaking point of 10,000 kilograms per millimeter.
01:43:50.000But sometimes there'll be something that will be enough of a surprise that the professor, like me, will then go and say to their dean, hey, this is a cool result.
01:44:16.000Then a local newspaper, in my case, the San Diego Union Tribune, in his case, you know, the Ottawa Times or whatever, they'll start to, you know, kind of promote it.
01:44:24.000And then if it's really provocative, it might make national news or in the physics news.
01:44:29.000And then if it's incredibly provocative, you know, one of the world's foremost influencers might say something about it.
01:44:35.000And then Elon Musk might retweet and say that actually he thinks dark matter is even more sketchy than the age of the universe.
01:44:41.000So this and, like, the astronomer community just sent people into apoplexy.
01:44:46.000They were going, no, these guys should not be talking about...
01:45:20.000But people then perceive this as like now these influencers are now overturning the work of literally thousands of astronomers and physicists working right now on legitimate scientific topics.
01:45:33.000Let's get back to the actual claim itself.
01:46:32.000They're appearing too early on the universe's early history.
01:46:37.000To have developed into the spiral characteristics and the population distribution of them is too numerous to have occurred in a universe that's only, quote unquote, 13 billion years.
01:46:49.000I always thought, you know, 13 billion's a pretty big number.
01:46:51.000You know, now they're saying 27, so what's the difference?
01:46:53.000But there's a big difference, because implicit in that criticism is that there are flaws and imperfections in how we understand the Big Bang, okay?
01:47:02.000When in reality, at best, he could be correct about the formation of galaxies.
01:47:08.000But you see, those are two separate things, right?
01:47:10.000The formation and the structure of a galaxy has no bearing on how old the universe is, necessarily.
01:47:16.000It tells you something about your models of computer simulations, is what he's effectively criticizing.
01:47:22.000Not criticizing the evidence that something like a Big Bang occurred at a very definite point in the universe's past.
01:47:36.000But if you looked at a 50-year-old person, you could say, you know the day they were born, plus or minus a week.
01:47:42.000Like, that's the precision with which modern astronomers know the age of the universe.
01:47:47.000And one guy is coming up with this idea that because there are certain galaxies within it, That have formed this.
01:47:53.000Again, imagine if we found a hyper-advanced civilization that has warp drives and does type 3 Dyson civilizations or whatever, they would not cast doubt on the evolution and the history of the universe itself.
01:48:08.000That would not cause me to question that.
01:48:10.000It would cause me to question my models of how popular people form and aliens form and stuff like that.
01:48:15.000But it wouldn't cause me to question the age of the universe.
01:48:19.000When we are studying the age of the universe and the vastness of space, Is there potentially new technology that would expose more than we currently can view that would change your model?
01:48:36.000In the sense that we are jobs as scientists, especially me as an experimentalist, in contrast to people like Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eric Weinstein, etc.
01:48:48.000My job is not to prove theories right.
01:48:51.000My job is actually to prove them wrong.
01:48:53.000That's really what I get paid to do is to narrow and winnow out so much so that what is left is the truth.
01:49:47.000I mean, that's almost like predicting hurricanes.
01:49:50.000You know, I just came through a hurricane to see you, right?
01:49:52.000There's a big hurricane in San Diego this week, and it's like an inch of rain, okay?
01:49:56.000You know how we drive in Southern California, right?
01:49:58.000So even a slick of a trace of rain causes us to go into total terror.
01:50:04.000But we didn't know where it was going to make exact landfall because climate is an example, as I said earlier, not of something that's merely complicated.
01:50:30.000So in the context of what you said, absolutely.
01:50:33.000And people like Allison and others, Kirkpatrick, they definitely would be more thrilled than anybody to discover, well, we don't understand there's something wrong with our model of how the universe – not how the universe form, but how galaxies form.
01:50:47.000So what I'm asking is, with the levels of detection that we have available, How significant is the change in what the web is able to do, and is it possible that, like, when we're looking, is it whatever levels of detection,
01:51:05.000whatever methods of detection we have now, is it absolute that if you go to 13 point whatever billion years, we couldn't have better methods of detection?
01:51:16.000There's no way we would get more data and more information, and would it change?
01:51:21.000No, no, I misinterpreted what you said.
01:51:22.000What I'm saying is like, is it possible that with new technology we would get more information, we'd be able to see more, and then you would remap this idea?
01:53:32.000And you'll see, on average, a couple of meteors per hour burning up in the atmosphere.
01:53:36.000Those came from parts of our solar system, or Avi Loeb, our mutual friend, has discovered what he claims and seems to be pretty likely is fragments of a meteorite from another solar system that could potentially contain alloy.
01:56:41.000So you asked the question, could new technology reveal properties, not about the age of galaxies, but the age of the universe that would cause me to question things?
01:58:18.000It's to eliminate whatever ones of those I can with my team, obviously.
01:58:23.000And in so doing, our new technology, which is the most cutting-edge technology ever made, it might be the last of its kind...
01:58:30.000Operating in Chile, which is turning on later this year, is going to start revealing the answer to those questions.
01:58:37.000And the way that it will do that is really a combination of three different tools.
01:58:43.000The only three tools astronomers have are telescopes, detectors and telescopes, brains, you know, that do theoretical work and make models, and then computers to simulate and to assess the data.
01:59:31.000Can be done other than what we're doing right now to try to detect whether or not there is either signals from an intelligent species out there somewhere or some sort of evidence of them in terms of some manipulation of their atmosphere or something like that.
01:59:51.000Yeah, this is obviously a big, big topic.
01:59:53.000And I really wouldn't have gotten so interested in it.
01:59:57.000And I still am, probably you'd call me an alien minimalist because I think there's almost no chance that there are aliens.
02:00:05.000Certainly there's almost, I would say there's almost no chance that there's intelligent technological aliens.
02:00:11.000In other words, it could be slime mold on some exoplanet Proximus in Turi B, but we never know about it because they don't have thumbs and technology, right?
02:00:18.000But I even think that that might be impossible or as close to impossible.
02:00:22.000As a good scientist, I should never say zero chance they're aliens or zero.
02:00:26.000But as you go down the logical chain, as you go down the evolutionary chain of, say, alien technology, as you said, could they be communicating with us?
02:00:34.000Well, we only know of these three different ways that they can communicate with us.
02:00:38.000The three things I brought here, you know, the meteorites that could send objects, trash.
02:00:43.000Avi Loeb thinks these are trash, you know.
02:00:52.000He and I had a conversation, very technical, but I like to think I can compliment some of the cool stuff that you do by going deep into the astronomy so that my colleagues actually get some interest out of it, too.
02:01:03.000But when we think about craft, now you're not sending things other than sending neutrino beams to us or sending gravitational waves to us or sending light.
02:01:15.000Those are all things that propagate near the speed of light.
02:01:50.000So the Drake equation is essentially a parameterization of our ignorance about certain things in the universe.
02:01:56.000And we've kind of checked off seven of the terms and the eight terms of the Drake equation, thanks to new technology, thanks to new telescopes, how many stars have planets around them, how many totals.
02:02:07.000But there's a couple terms in there, the lifetime of a civilization and a certain fraction of how much that civilization can dedicate its energy or what have you towards broadcasting its presence, right?
02:02:20.000So for us to know that they exist, they have to have made technology for them to exist.
02:02:25.000And they have to exist in the first place.
02:02:27.000So how many of such objects are there?
02:02:29.000That's what the Drake equation is really parameterizing.
02:02:33.000Now, I propose that you should be able to do the following thing.
02:02:37.000If there's life in the universe, just life, slime mold, I don't care what it is, you should be able to set limits on it in the following sense.
02:02:46.000And what I'm going to do is do a radicchio ad absurdum.
02:02:50.000I'm going to motivate, hopefully I can't prove, but I'm going to motivate the illogic of suspecting that there are extraterrestrial intelligence civilizations.
02:03:30.000I said to you, Joe, what do you think the odds are that those two neighboring planets, there's no reason physically they shouldn't both be identical.
02:03:37.000What are the odds that the other one should not have life?
02:03:44.000It's the same solar system environment, same properties, rocky planet, had liquid water, it has an atmosphere, it has a magnetic field, you know, has all sorts of things.
02:03:53.000I would think it would be more likely that it would have life.
02:04:29.000Sometimes some of that material from Mars gets impacted.
02:04:32.000Imagine something that big that Jamie showed before slamming into it.
02:04:35.000It's going to eject it from the surface of Mars.
02:04:37.000That's going to orbit in the clouds of Mars.
02:04:39.000It's eventually going to get outside the atmosphere of Mars if the impact is great enough.
02:04:42.000Carrying some of the debris, the surface, the crust of Mars, etc.
02:04:45.000And that will then percolate throughout the solar system for tens of millions of years, perhaps, until the Earth smashes into it and it lands.
02:05:30.000And actually, Sir Fred Hoyle, the guy who came up with the idea for the name of the Big Bang, he actually believed in the steady state model.
02:05:37.000He believed that's how life was seeded on Earth.
02:05:40.000The fact is that we've been exchanging material for literally billions of years from when the Earth was, you know, just bacteria and Mars was flowing with water.
02:07:04.000So usually astronomers will do calculations a following way, instead of asking what's the probability of that.
02:07:12.000For example, I've been to Antarctica twice.
02:07:14.000I'm in the South Pole, which you would just be bored out of your mind probably, because all it is is going out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and freezing it.
02:09:10.000I want to understand how you can look at all of the variables that are possible in terms of the composition of planets, in terms of temperature, in terms of also different kinds of environments for life that we haven't encountered yet but could be real.
02:09:28.000Things that are very, very alien to what we perceive of as carbon-based life forms.
02:09:33.000I just don't understand how you're looking at one planet that has a very different environment than Earth, even though Earth has life and it doesn't, and using that one example to sort of dismiss the possibility that in the insanely vast universe that there couldn't be something that's very similar to the conditions of Earth.
02:10:03.000And you should be able to say that how likely it is, you should be able to run a simulation, say for every time there's a planet that's rotten with life like the Earth, there's some odds in the overlapping communal history of those two planets in a binary planet system that they should share life.
02:11:54.000So wouldn't you then say, again, if you knew that life is so incredible, there's these extremophiles that live in volcanic vents 3,000 meters under the ocean.
02:12:03.000So again, You have to say, like, what are the odds that we would not see life on Mars or on Enceladus?
02:12:09.000And I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying there is no other life.
02:12:23.000There are scientists that believe that without Jupiter we wouldn't be here because Jupiter is like a big vacuum cleaner.
02:12:29.000There are scientists that believe that if the moon wasn't as close as it is, you know, that the moon is exactly the same angular diameter as the sun from the earth.
02:12:38.000Do you know what that implies for you?
02:12:39.000And next April 8th when I come and visit you again, there's a total eclipse of the sun.
02:13:44.000Each one of those is a secret service agent that took the bullet for us.
02:13:50.000Any one of those could have exterminated.
02:13:52.000The fact that we did have a huge impact 65 million years ago that led to the advent of the mammals to replace the dinosaurs.
02:14:01.000The fact that we have internal terrestrial magnetism that then allows cosmic radiation to avoid impacting the Earth where the population is the largest of all species, the auroras are in the North.
02:14:43.000You say, to have an iPhone, you're going to need eight things.
02:14:47.000I think there's like trillions and trillions of things.
02:14:49.000But imagine there's eight of them, okay?
02:14:50.000And imagine each one, that the Earth has a moon that's just the right distance to have tides to slosh biological material back and forth from the early...
02:15:11.000Let's just say there's eight of them, right?
02:15:13.000Let's say each one has a probability in your godlike cosmic roulette wheel of one in a thousand for each one of those eight things to occur.
02:15:38.000It's the same as the number of stars in the whole universe throughout history.
02:15:42.000In other words, one thing, only eight different things that had to occur to make life in my simplified God computer that Joe Rogan is controlling.
02:15:50.000And the probability of those eight things only is only one part in 10 to the 24th.
02:15:56.000Then the problem is you're multiplying a large number by a number that's completely unknown.
02:16:02.000The probability that all these events can line up to make life.
02:16:05.000And you're saying anything times infinity is finite.
02:16:22.000So wouldn't they maybe not get as pelted by asteroids and meteors and have more time to develop?
02:16:30.000Isn't that conceivable that there could be a different kind of life?
02:16:34.000If we find so much variety of life, like we talked about the volcanic vents, isn't it possible that there could be other ways that life could form in different environments that may be hostile to biological life on Earth, but not to whatever evolves there?
02:16:50.000We're talking about an infinite number of variables.
02:16:52.000We're talking about so many different planets.
02:16:55.000But why is it that the large number—see, again, that's the Carl Sagan, you know, if there's no life in the universe, it's a big, awful waste of space.
02:17:04.000But that implies— I don't think that's true.
02:17:06.000I think that's— That's what he said.
02:17:09.000I'm not saying that he didn't say that, but I don't think that way at all.
02:17:12.000I think we're so silly to think that this finite thing that we call biological life is the most significant thing and something that we know is at least 13 whatever billion years old.
02:17:24.000That's so insane that human life, which is just like this never-ending cycle of birth and death with this one particular organism, That that thing is the most important thing that's going on in the fucking universe.
02:19:45.000But I'm saying, right now, if you had a bet, if you had a bet, and there's some kind...
02:19:50.000You would make that bet, yes, there is life.
02:19:52.000And maybe you even bet there's technological life, because maybe you believe that there are extraterrestrial beings that are visiting us, or perhaps there could be the possibility.
02:20:14.000So when you are seeing all this UAP disclosure talk and all this stuff, what is your take on this stuff?
02:20:21.000So I've talked to people, Ryan Graves, who you've had on, I've talked to, I actually did a podcast with his wingman, one of his former Navy pilot wingmen.
02:20:46.000Remember earlier, like two hours ago, I was going to ask you for advice, and I'm such a blabbermouth, I didn't get to ask you for advice as a podcaster.
02:20:52.000The advice I want to ask you is, when you're talking to somebody, and for one reason or another, maybe it's your past history, maybe it's researches you've done independently that even an expert hasn't done, and you're thinking this person's wrong, or this person's making a mistake.
02:21:10.000I mean, I always do or try to do my very best to let someone express himself fully before I interject.
02:21:18.000But there are some times we have to say that's not true.
02:21:21.000That this is not what you're saying has been disproven.
02:21:25.000And this is like we should show how it's been disproven.
02:21:29.000Or, you know, you could be talking about something that I'm an expert in.
02:21:33.000Like if someone wants to bring, like from UFC, for example, somebody wants to say, if you wanted to fight in the UFC, all you need to do is learn kung fu.
02:21:43.000If someone said that, I'd be like, you're out of your mind.
02:21:50.000But I mean, anybody who watches the fights, they know they're real.
02:21:52.000But if someone had this very distorted perspective on something that I know a lot about, Yeah, maybe I would be like, you shouldn't say that, because this is why that's not accurate.
02:22:05.000So I'm talking to Ryan Graves, and I've talked to Lieutenant Anne Dietrich, who is the wing woman, I guess you'd say, of Commander David Fravor, who you've had on.
02:22:14.000I've talked to them, and I've talked to them, okay, look, I'm a pilot, I fly a little Cessna, it's not going to be like...
02:22:21.000You know, I'm talking to super hornet pilots, I'm like a schmuck, right?
02:22:24.000But, you know, when you see things like, I'm told, like, I can't question them because I didn't serve in the military, or they have great hand-eye coordination, or they're trained observers.
02:22:33.000I actually know, my flight instructor told me a couple of things.
02:22:36.000He said to me, he said, you relying on hand-eye coordination, or you relying on your innate abilities as a pilot, or your, you know, your ability to perceive things is going to get you killed.
02:22:50.000But the point being, you're trained to ignore your senses and pay attention to your instruments.
02:22:56.000Therefore, the human factor is irrelevant.
02:22:59.000The fact that he can land on a carrier at night in the middle of a typhoon doesn't have anything to do with the fact that he is not necessarily better at judging evidence versus me as a scientist or even as a layperson.
02:24:00.000Fravor and Dietrich, when they were flying, they, you know, saw things and they tried to perceive them from great altitude, something the size of a school bus, you know, and how fast it was moving relative to the ground.
02:24:16.000I know an awful lot about radio technology, radar sensing.
02:24:20.000So I don't think that being a military pilot, as much as I don't have the balls to do what any of them do, and I never had the guts to sign up to the military, though I might have liked to, Doesn't mean that we accept what they say uncritically.
02:24:33.000And in Ryan's case, I find it unpersuasive.
02:24:36.000I don't mean to say that it's not important.
02:24:38.000It's very important, very significant what he's doing.
02:24:40.000Because I think at best, at worst rather, it could save the lives of pilots if it's some Chinese spy balloon.
02:24:47.000It could be American PSYOP. It could be doing all sorts of things.
02:26:05.000I did puke and I was so embarrassed because I'd gotten through seven and a half G's and I made it, you know, from hooking, you know, the thing you do where you go, You're forcing blood into your brain, and I did that at seven and a half G's, and then I failed to do it on a lesser turn, and I blacked out.
02:27:37.000You had any kind of material traveling through the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed would be at least illuminated and at least probably be incinerated.
02:27:46.000But, okay, so then the argument becomes, well, maybe they have advanced metamaterials that we don't have access to.
02:27:51.000So you can keep adding things onto it, which is exactly, by the way, what this guy Gupta and the galaxy thing did.
02:27:55.000He keeps adding – if you keep adding parameters to your theory in order to make it fit observations that otherwise don't compare.
02:28:01.000Yeah, but observations backed by data, and this data is from these very advanced military detection systems that did detect this physical object that was witnessed by two fighter jets.
02:28:14.000Isn't another possibility that there's some method of propulsion that doesn't—it's not propulsion at all— Instead, it's manipulating gravity, manipulating whatever the fuck it's doing to go from one point in space to another point in space almost instantaneously.
02:28:38.000So the reason you've heard, or I mentioned this Chicxulub, which is the meteor crater off the Yucatan Peninsula.
02:28:44.000That was the theory in which that was kind of unveiled was a physicist, nuclear physicist, Nobel Prize winner named Luis Alvarez, who plays a small role in Oppenheimer that you'll see.
02:28:53.000And that he was responsible for radar in World War II as part of one of his jobs.
02:29:00.000And he realized something that they could do.
02:29:03.000So radar works by interrogating an object with radio frequency waves that travel at the speed of light and bounce off an object.
02:29:11.000And you can get timing between when they get bounced off and when it comes back.
02:29:16.000And you can measure the distance to them and you can measure the speed if you get a couple of those measurements.
02:29:20.000And it's totally similar in concept to what you described with the advanced military instrument.
02:29:26.000Luis Alvarez was a creative, incredibly brilliant scientist.
02:29:30.000When he was working on that plan, he knew that the Germans and the Japanese could have similar technology.
02:29:35.000And in fact, they were starting to develop it.
02:29:37.000It turns out the Allies were good at not only the Manhattan Project, but they were good at developing radar and both were the technologies that were crucial.
02:29:43.000But the Germans were developing it too.
02:29:45.000He realized there's something called the inverse square law, which is that the signal gets weaker, not as the distance away from it, but it gets diminished by the distance to the second power.
02:29:54.000Meaning that if, as you go away from something, the gravitational force that you feel, if I double the distance, is four times lower.
02:30:07.000So Alvarez said, I could spoof the Germans by intentionally, when they send me a signal, I'm going to send them a signal when I'm coming closer to them, I'm going to take their signal, I'm going to diminish it, I'm going to shoot it back exactly as the inverse square, because he knew how far away they were too.
02:30:22.000So he spoofed them and he transmitted the signal.
02:30:25.000So even though he was getting closer, they thought, oh, nothing to worry about.
02:30:35.000Now, what would the German radar operator have said?
02:30:38.000That object defied the laws of physics.
02:30:41.000It was getting closer, but my radar showed it getting farther away.
02:30:44.000I'm not saying that's what happened, Joe, but haven't I provoked a little bit of a doubt that maybe there could be other explanations other than alien technology?
02:31:00.000I think there's a real issue with it being in these areas of heavy military activity.
02:31:05.000I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that the United States has developed some black ops secret project where they've figured out a way to do something with drones that's unprecedented.
02:31:20.000When they're talking about it openly, as soon as they start talking about it openly, crafts out of this world, I smell bullshit.
02:31:30.000Like I said, I've said it multiple times in the show, there's something about this that doesn't feel real.
02:31:36.000And I also gave myself the possibility that maybe if disclosure did happen, it would be so preposterous and so strange and alien just in the idea that there's life outside this planet and that it's more advanced than us and that it's been visiting us forever.
02:31:52.000Maybe that would feel so fake because it's so crazy.
02:32:33.000And I just have this idea that if they were going to do something with some really advanced shit, wouldn't they do it in restricted airspace where the fucking military operates all the time?
02:32:43.000Of course, is it weird that it's happening off the coast of Virginia and also off the coast of San Diego?
02:32:49.000It seems to me that that's more likely.
02:32:55.000But then again, then there's these instances of people encountering these things.
02:33:01.000And the concept of interdimensional travel, whatever that means, whatever interdimensional travel.
02:33:08.000I know Grush tried to sort of explain that in some sort of a strange way.
02:33:11.000And physicists pulled it apart and said, this doesn't make sense.
02:33:33.000But the point being that there was some new discovery that could lead to the possibility of travel to other dimensions, or at least detecting other dimensions in a manner where you could conceivably prove that there is something else outside of what we're physically capable of experiencing.
02:34:18.000The light and or gravity would decrease with an exponent greater than two.
02:34:22.000And so these black holes that crash together and release gravitational wave energy, again, my friend David Spurgle, they've been able to set limits on the dimensionality of space-time.
02:34:32.000And it's very, very close to three dimensions of space.
02:34:35.000And from an object that's a billion light-years away, Joe.
02:35:01.000So when we talk about forces of nature, so there are four main forces of nature.
02:35:07.000Gravity that we're familiar with, right?
02:35:08.000And then there's the electric force, and then there's the magnetic force, and then there's two types of nuclear force.
02:35:14.000One is called the weak nuclear force, that's like radioactive decay, and then there's a strong nuclear force that's responsible for things like fusion and so forth.
02:35:23.000When we look at these particles, we say for each type of force, there's a corresponding object that responds to that force, say it could be mass, like matter, like we're made up of.
02:35:32.000And there's a boson, and the boson communicates the force to that massive object.
02:35:38.000So the Higgs boson is what gives particles mass, and that's the mechanism by which we acquire mass and inertia, resistance to motion.
02:35:46.000Electricity and magnetism, they're communicated by a boson called the photon.
02:35:50.000The photon is the gauge carrying force that propagates the interaction between magnetic fields, electric fields, charges.
02:35:59.000And then there's strong and weak nuclear forces.
02:36:02.000This is saying that there seems to be a new calculation, a new data that's been discovered in what are called muons.
02:36:10.000And these muons have a relationship between their charge and their spin.
02:36:15.000And that charge-spin relationship, for one reason or another, should be exactly in a ratio of two.
02:36:20.000So their spin versus their magnetic type of property to their spin.
02:36:25.000And so this little dreidel, one of your last pieces of GIFs here.
02:36:43.000That precession for a muon, you can think of as a little tiny spinning top also, and that will have a special relationship between its magnetic properties as it's spinning to its physical angular momentum, which is what this thing is doing.
02:36:56.000It's like the procession of the equinoxes.
02:37:59.000That thing has symmetry about more than one axis, such that when you spin it in the direction clockwise, it'll spin forever, like the dreidel.
02:38:07.000But if you try to spin it the other way, it stops and goes back because there's torque being...
02:38:36.000Now those observations disagree at a very significant level, such that the odds of it occurring by fluke chance is about 1 in 30 million or something like that.
02:38:45.000And so now they're saying the one way to explain it is if there's another type of boson, which would mean another type of force, which would be the fifth force for those caping score at home.
02:39:33.000What he's claiming is that he uncovered these programs that he thinks as a patriotic American and as a citizen of the world, that people should know that there's crash retrieval programs and that they are in possession of biological entities that they keep in freezers.
02:40:45.000He is attempting to get permission to discuss more.
02:40:48.000These are the things that he could have discussed with them in the SCIF. That's why he brought it up this way.
02:40:53.000He's trying to do this all by the book.
02:40:55.000And it appears that there's both resistance and support for this.
02:41:00.000Well, this is the argument I had with Avi Loeb when he came on my show.
02:41:04.000He talked about this object, Oumuamua, which is this interstellar object that he claims is either a junk debris or maybe it's a tourist scout or a spy drone.
02:41:12.000It's much more reflective, rather, right?
02:41:15.000It has properties that can't be explained by the typical astronomical pedantic ways of explaining things.
02:41:20.000And I told him when he came on my podcast, and I love Avi, I've had him on many times.
02:41:24.000I said, Avi, you know, you happen to also be friendly, because I said, would you go, why don't you go after this thing and go track it down?
02:41:33.000He said, in a couple of years, one of the most ambitious and important observatories is coming online, and I'm happy to recommend people that work on it to you when it comes out, called the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, not too far from where our Simon's observatory is.
02:41:46.000And that observatory, he said, is going to capture thousands of these things, if I'm right.
02:41:51.000And I said, Avi, what if you're wrong?
02:41:53.000You know, what if this is one time only event?
02:41:56.000I said, Avi, I live in San Diego, and San Diego has the following properties.
02:42:01.000It's the absolute best and easiest place to be a meteorologist on the planet, except for yesterday.
02:42:12.000But it's the absolute worst place to be a sportscaster because we, of all the major cities in the United States, we have never won a world championship in any sport, okay?
02:42:22.000So last year, then the Padres got into the division series, and I'm a huge Padres fan.
02:42:28.000I should not have said, well, the Padres are in the Division Series, even though it's the first time since Tony Gwynn was playing and they've been around for 55 years.
02:43:14.000Anyway, they're spending $100 million on it.
02:43:16.000And they're going to shoot these things there and they'll get there in 20 years and they'll transmit at the speed of light.
02:43:21.000It'll take another four years to get back to the Earth because it's four light years away.
02:43:25.000Instead of having him spend $100 million on that, why don't you get him to get a little CubeSat and shoot it off and go catch up to Oumuamua while it's still in your freaking neighborhood?
02:43:36.000So you think he's resisting that because it doesn't...
02:43:40.000He doesn't want it to be disproven because he's getting a lot of attention off of this idea that this interstellar object is something from an alien civilization.
02:47:26.000Or, like, could it be true of a civilization as a whole?
02:47:29.000Could it be true that, like, hey, wait, we shouldn't be dedicating all this effort?
02:47:33.000And I think it's—I wouldn't say it's as unlikely as life, you know, having iPhones on Proxima Centauri B, but I'd say it's pretty unlikely that we're going to do that in the next hundred years to have colonized Mars.
02:47:44.000It's— It's incredibly difficult from a technological standpoint, from a biological standpoint, a psychological standpoint.
02:47:52.000There's a tremendous number of reasons that it's not possible.
02:47:54.000Sure, but if technology progresses the way it has since 1800, the world's unrecognizable.
02:48:02.000You could conceivably say that if it continues in the same direction and we don't blow ourselves up, we may very well have the ability to do something like that.
02:49:43.000All these diminishing S-curves, they call them.
02:49:45.000They start off really high and so you get the go-go 90, you know, and then it goes, drops off to zero.
02:49:50.000There's no saying that that might not also happen for both extraction of resources that you need to build a colony on Mars, fuel, rocket parts, etc., but also for the coming AI and computing revolution.
02:50:03.000In other words, Moore's Law is saturating For a very interesting reason.
02:50:07.000It's not that the speed of the computers is still doubling, but the amount...
02:50:12.000Do you care about the speed of your computer?
02:50:14.000No, you care about what I can do with it, right?
02:50:15.000How fast does the web page load up, right?
02:50:17.000Well, so you can have the fastest computer, but it's loading really slowly because there's so many other people that want to take advantage and use that same resource.
02:50:24.000It's a very highly in demand resource.
02:50:26.000That will happen with quantum computing, too.
02:50:28.000It's already happening with classical supercomputers.
02:50:30.000In other words, their speed is going up, but the number of floating point operations they do is saturating because so many people want to use them because they're so good.
02:50:37.000They're a victim of their own success in a certain sense.
02:50:50.000But even all the things you just stated, isn't that just within our technological limitations as of today and our understanding of how to put together computers, our understanding of what technology can consist of in terms of minerals, in terms of like stable materials?
02:54:11.000There's a probability of that happening, but we should be precise about it, and we should do that and not dismiss it, but also be precise about it.
02:54:19.000Well, it also depends upon what kind of people you're talking about.
02:54:22.000You know, if you're talking about only high-level military people that have a long history of being able to keep secrets, that it's a part of the culture, and these are the only people that have access to these vehicles or this thing, I could conceivably see how someone could keep something quiet for a very long time.
02:54:39.000And then you have people that have claimed to have seen these things and worked on these things, and it's always hard when you're dealing with anecdotal evidence and people discussing things, and you don't know what's true and what's not true.
02:54:52.000What is fascinating to me is, have you seen the Go Fast video?
02:54:58.000What do you think about those videos where there's no heat signature, no visible means of propulsion, and these things are whipping through the sky?
02:55:07.000I mean, you've talked to Mick West and other people, and I'm not saying he's a scientist in the sense that someone like I am.
02:55:13.000But some of these things are, you know, it always comes down to like, well, whose data is it?
02:55:31.000So when I look at those things, there's a couple of different things that you have to look at from an optical perspective, from a sensor perspective, from a...
02:56:59.000It's not like there's something coming out the back, like a jet engine where you can see it clearly.
02:57:02.000So there have been mock-ups and simulations done for this where it's like you could have a balloon, you could have something spherical, or something that's actually going with the wind.
02:57:10.000Can't they detect how fast it's moving?
02:57:20.000Clearly they're having a hard time locking onto it.
02:57:22.000So I asked Ariel Kleinerman and Ryan about this, and they said it's classic.
02:57:26.000Like, they wouldn't tell me what their radar is capable of saying, only that they can use it to determine certain properties of things.
02:57:31.000But it seemed very evident in that video that they were having a hard time catching it, because it was moving at a very high rate of speed.
02:57:38.000This is what, 2004, I think, this video?
02:57:53.000Don't you think they would have an understanding of the speed that something's moving and not think of it as a balloon that's just floating around?
02:58:01.000Well, remember, this is stabilized, so they're locking on, so they're moving in a perspective where it's...
02:58:05.000Right, but don't you think their equipment has the ability to detect speed?
02:58:09.000Do you know how big the field of view of that thing was?
02:58:20.000So if you were to look through this telescope at the moon, and there was a balloon floating in front of the moon, and you could see it, and it was big in a Chinese spy balloon or something like that.
03:01:32.000It was like right before this disclosure was about to get kicked off.
03:01:36.000I mean, there's some weird things that are going on.
03:01:38.000You connect those two things together, one thing that moves in a very bizarre way that they can't seem to replicate.
03:01:45.000They don't know how these things stay stable at 120 knots.
03:01:49.000According to all of his equipment, unless their equipment totally sucks, and this is like the equipment that got upgraded in 2014. Right, but then they say, I can't tell you about the equipment.
03:01:57.000Right, but they can tell you that when the equipment was upgraded, that's when they started detecting these things.
03:02:02.000So if the equipment is accurate, and the equipment is upgraded, and then they put it on these jets, and these guys are detecting these things, and then there's visual...
03:03:22.000So I always have to look for the simplest explanation of what they could be.
03:03:26.000And certainly the simplest- I don't think anyone would disagree.
03:03:29.000The simplest explanation is certainly not- These are interdimensional beings that have traveled across the literal equivalent- Of, you know, trillions upon trillions of miles or, if you like, thousands of light years or billions of light years as objects only to navigate that whole way and end up being sighted off of Catalina Island and Newport News,
03:03:55.000So then there's a teleological explanation.
03:03:57.000We're trying to propose a mechanism by which that motivates some species or something to do that, right?
03:04:02.000Now, Avi, to get back and give him his credit, because I don't want to be perceived as I'm denigrating him in any way, but he has built this Galileo project.
03:04:10.000And I should say, I never got interested in any of this stuff, Joe.
03:04:15.000Although, I do think if it were true, you know who should be the most interested in it are physics professors and physics researchers, right?
03:04:22.000Because if this is true that they have mastered, there are creatures that have mastered the interdimensional manipulation of space-time, that would shortcut me and my colleagues four or five centuries, right?
03:05:01.000But when he says that these objects that we need, where are the theoretical physicists studying this?
03:05:10.000I claim you don't really need theoretical physicists to study it yet.
03:05:14.000You might instead want experimental physicists such as myself, my colleagues, people that are used to dealing with data, with sensors, with actually building technology, observing things, again, observing the skies.
03:05:25.000We've been watching the skies in all wavelengths.
03:05:27.000By the way, you only see it with visible light.
03:05:29.000How come these aren't showing up only in the radar microwave region of the spectrum, infrared?
03:05:34.000Why would they choose the narrow band of wavelengths that some marginal species of, you know, primitive apes, you know, evolved apes have sensitivity to, namely this narrow window?
03:05:45.000You're saying why wouldn't they hide themselves?
03:05:47.000Why wouldn't there be other modalities in which they're observed other than visible sightings, eyewitness sightings, which, in other words, why couldn't they manipulate the signatures that they travel?
03:06:02.000But that you don't need Edward Witten to help you with, right?
03:06:06.000You don't need a theoretical physicist.
03:06:08.000You need an experimental physicist, an observational astronomer who's used to looking through telescopes.
03:06:13.000My whole job, Joe, Staring up at the sky with things like this in all different dimensions and looking for objects that don't seem to make sense or looking for phenomena that have never been observed before.
03:06:24.000Why would you assume that they would want to hide?
03:06:26.000I'm not saying they would want to hide.
03:06:27.000I'm just saying they seem to be evasive, right?
03:06:29.000Maybe just the way they travel is so insane that you can't really detect them.
03:06:35.000They only go on Catalina Island and Newport News.
03:06:37.000In other words, how come they're not over the observatory that's in western Texas that the University of Texas operates?
03:06:43.000How come they get spotted Right over military bases.
03:06:47.000So if I just told you nothing, but they happen to appear in restricted warning areas, military areas, would you say that makes them more likely to be aliens?
03:06:58.000I would say if I was an alien and I came here to observe a territorial ape with nuclear weapons, I would probably check out where the nuclear weapons are.
03:07:08.000I'd be like, what are these fucking crazy assholes up to?
03:07:12.000They're blowing themselves up by dropping bombs out of planes, and they have enough missiles pointing at each other all over the world to essentially eliminate all life.
03:08:48.000So when I brought this up, when I first got interested in this, I was really – I should say I have this disposition as you've already uncovered that I don't believe that there's extraterrestrial technology in the whole universe with high confidence or even with moderate degree of confidence.
03:09:08.000So therefore, I certainly don't believe that there are, you know, I'm not predisposed to believe that there are alien technology crafts visiting the Earth, right?
03:09:16.000But when I talk about that and I say, look, there are these astronomers and there are these people like me who study things and NASA. And part of the reason I got interested to take this seriously is my friend David Spergel.
03:09:28.000And he is leading NASA's UAP investigation for NASA, which didn't report last month.
03:09:34.000And so on Twitter, this whole thing is like, well, how come you're not at the reporting thing and we don't have any reason to trust NASA? There's a whole subculture, which I think is like almost like denialism, whatever form you want to employ for that.
03:09:47.000But that won't accept any explanation unless it's aliens.
03:09:52.000So how should I, as a scientist, interact with a lay person who's educated, well-meaning perhaps, but has this deep distrust of science, scientists, the scientific method?
03:10:02.000I mean, I don't think they necessarily have a deep trust of science or the scientific method.
03:10:07.000I think there's a large number of people that have a vested interest in believing that aliens are amongst us and that UFOs are real and that disclosure is about to happen.
03:10:27.000But I'm also skeptical of things that just seem fake.
03:10:33.000There's something about this whole thing that seems like a show.
03:10:36.000And it really kind of brings me back to...
03:10:39.000I mean, I'm not accusing people of mind control experiments, but...
03:10:44.000It has been done in this country many, many times.
03:10:47.000And one of the big ones was MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax, where the CIA literally set up brothels and gave these Johns LSD and monitored them through two-way mirrors.
03:11:01.000We know that there's been psyops before.
03:11:04.000And when there's all this discussion about, like, out-of-world crafts and not of this world, and we have alien bodies, I'm like, yeah, fucking stop talking.
03:11:45.000That's even weirder because it's like, now we're talking about aliens.
03:11:49.000There's a giant difference between 19 years ago, the physics of 19 years ago, our understanding of propulsion systems, technology, computing, everything.
03:12:07.000What the United States government did to Native Americans, tremendous atrocities, right?
03:12:12.000But there was almost as much done – I don't want to say almost.
03:12:15.000There was a lot of intertribal warfare where we would cause them to fight with each other.
03:12:21.000And that was part of our strategy to atomize them and to reduce their capability to mount some kind of a force against the United States government, which is truly awful part of our history.
03:12:32.000But, nevertheless, they, you know, so that there was also a plausible deniability.
03:12:36.000Well, you Indians were fighting against each other, too.
03:12:38.000It wasn't like you guys had, you know.
03:12:40.000So, I'm wondering, at this level, is there a possibility?
03:12:43.000They're going to set up alien wars, fake alien wars to blame them.
03:12:47.000Or just anything that polarizes us, right?
03:13:37.000Yeah, the simulation hypothesis, right?
03:13:39.000This is another one that people just look to and they act as an explanation why we don't have free will because they don't want to be held to their accountability.
03:13:46.000I always say to these people like Sam Harris who doesn't believe in free will, I'm like, have you ever met someone, I don't know, have you ever met someone who acts as if they don't have free will?
03:13:55.000I'm not talking about someone who's insane.
03:13:56.000Imagine Sam Harris, totally rational, reasonable, brilliant, intellectual person.
03:14:01.000But like him, but he's like, I don't believe in free will.
03:14:04.000Therefore, I'm going to act in accordance with that belief.
03:14:08.000Like, I'm determined to do this because of the Big Bang.
03:14:11.000Well, I think it's a complex or complicated scenario where you're trying to say that determinism is the only thing that causes people to do things and that you're not responsible or not.
03:14:22.000You're not necessarily saying you're not responsible, but that there's you have no choice.
03:14:27.000There's these factors all play a part of it.
03:14:31.000It seems like we encourage choice in the right direction.
03:14:34.000We discourage choice that we feel like is in the wrong direction.
03:14:38.000It seems like there's a part of us socially, collectively as a group that wants the right choices to be made because we know that people have the ability to make decisions.
03:15:30.000I've listened to a couple because, like, it was a Graham Hancock one and I wanted to reabsorb some of the stuff that he said or, you know, someone was just really interested.
03:15:39.000But what I'm getting at is, you know, writing a book and, like, encapsulating that.
03:15:46.000I mean, surely you've thought about it.
03:15:47.000And I'm just wondering, you know, a book is something different.
03:15:51.000You know, it's really the operating system of humankind, whereas audio is incredible.
03:15:56.000But, like, what are the odds your great-grandkids are going to listen to, you know, a preponderance of it versus the distilled wisdom of Joe Rogan?
03:19:12.000And I guess the last couple of podcast questions, if you'd indulge me on them.
03:19:16.000So, you know, when I think about, you know, the kind of animating impulse for me to do what I'm doing and trying to do, you know, Hardcore science and keep people interested and engaged and give the public some ROI and their money that supports my salary.
03:19:32.000I'm a public – I went to public college, schools.
03:19:35.000I went to public – I teach at a public school.
03:19:38.000When I think about it, like there's – it's difficult to get a sense of pleasing your audience and then also doing legit science.
03:19:49.000And I think – You know, finding that balance for me, that is hard for me, and I don't know, like, I mean, obviously one solution is stop podcast.
03:19:57.000I mean, I'm not going to stop being a scientist because it's who I am.
03:19:59.000It's physically written into my DNA almost.
03:20:03.000I guess, you know, it's like I could always be doing real science.
03:20:07.000You know, I could always be, for every hour I'm reading a book of a guest that's coming up, I could be doing an hour with, you know, in the laboratory.
03:20:13.000Right, but don't you, we've already talked about that what you're doing is very beneficial, and that you think that that's actually part of what scientists should be doing.
03:22:00.000And this famous quote of any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
03:22:06.000And then the name of my podcast comes from a statement that the only way to determine the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
03:22:13.000And I always phrase that in terms of your 20-year-old self advice.
03:22:16.000So, like, you were going back to Joe and, you know, back then, you're 20 years old.
03:22:20.000You know, you had 30 seconds with him.
03:22:30.000Because you figure it out on your own.
03:22:32.000There's nothing I could have told him.
03:22:34.000You need life, and you need a bunch of people that you interact with, and you learn, and you keep absorbing information, and you keep trying to do a better job at being a human being, and you get better.
03:22:46.000But you're gonna have to go through it.
03:22:48.000There's not a goddamn thing I can say to my 20-year-old self like, wow, This is the magic thing.
03:23:02.000It's a lot of fun, and if you have a lot of fun friends, you can really enjoy it.
03:23:07.000But progress comes incrementally with a lot of fucking work, and you're gonna have a lot of heartache, and there's gonna be a lot of heartbreak, and there's gonna be a lot of disappointment, and then there's gonna be a lot of great moments.
03:23:22.000And the great moments don't dwell on them too much.
03:23:25.000You gotta figure out how to not get intoxicated by great moments and just enjoy it as part of the process.
03:23:31.000And then just keep trying to do whatever you're doing.
03:23:33.000Whatever it is you're trying to do, whether you're trying to do science, whether you're trying to do art, whatever you're trying to do.
03:23:39.000That would be, if I give any advice, it's just like, Don't expect this.
03:24:29.000Because if I can keep getting better at stuff, as long as I don't physically deteriorate too much, and I can keep getting better at stuff, that would be fun.
03:24:55.000And actually, it's possible that anybody can live forever.
03:24:59.000But you can't be a greedy SOB. You can't be greedy and want your body to come with you and your money and your, you know, the denial of death is why they built these pyramids, right?
03:25:58.000It was the biggest thing until the Eiffel Tower.
03:25:58.000Have you ever looked into any of that Younger Dryas impact theory?
03:26:03.000This is the theory that coincides with the end of the Ice Age and it's also backed up by core samples where they believe that Earth was hit somewhere around 11,800 years ago and that all over Earth was hit with a comet storm,
03:26:20.000you know, that we went through a barrage of large objects and it destroyed civilization and that There was an advanced civilization in Egypt and in many other places where there's actual physical evidence now.
03:26:35.000Well, physical evidence now, Turkey and Gobekli Tepe, because back then they'd thought that 11,000 plus years ago it was just hunter-gatherers.
03:26:44.000But then they found this Gobekli Tepe.
03:27:07.000And then they've only uncovered 5% of them.
03:27:10.000With LiDAR, they've found so many more of them.
03:27:11.000That's what the 3D carved structures look like.
03:27:13.000So they carbon dated all this stuff, too, because it was purposely covered somehow or another, and they don't know who or why, but it was purposely covered somewhere around 11,000 plus years ago.
03:27:25.000I mean, that would seem to have astronomical evidence for it.
03:27:28.000No, the comet thing is 11,800 years ago.
03:27:32.000And they think again somewhere around 10,000 years ago as well, but it coincides with the end of the Ice Age, and it also coincides with...
03:27:41.000There's a lot of evidence of iridium when they do the core samples, you know, in that area.
03:27:51.000It's very fascinating because it just speaks to, like, maybe civilization, maybe this isn't just this emergence from Genghis Khan to us today.
03:28:13.000This is just humans that had reached a very advanced state and then got hit.
03:28:19.000But it wasn't until this Younger Dryas Impact Theory that they had all the physical evidence that goes with this.
03:28:26.000And when Randall Carlson discusses this, it's very crazy because he talks about just the immense amount of water that moved through North America In a very short amount of time, it just carved massive trails and canyons through the earth.
03:28:42.000And he thinks it happened because of an instantaneous meltdown from asteroid impact.
03:28:47.000Because we know that the U.S. alone was half of it was covered in more than a mile high sheet of ice up until that point.
03:29:23.000I'm sure it will and I really appreciate you and thank you very much for the meteor and the shitty magnet and the good magnet and the stickers and the prism.