Joe Rogan Experience #1159 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

so why aren't there flying cars you just jumping right in you don't say hi you don't say how's the wife already how's the wife how's your book it's been on The Times bestseller list for how many weeks oh that the astrophysics for people in a hurry that's been on the on the New York Times bestseller was for 67 weeks that's pretty intense it's great that's that's a lot for any book much less for a science book and so that tells me while all these Trump books are wafting in and out this is Bob being like a court like a cork on the ocean waves as the book of the moment that either praises Trump or criticized or it criticizes them come in and off of that list so this tells me that there is this unserved hunger that people have there's a curiosity that this is serving and it's - astrophysics for people in a hurry that's kind of a that's very purposefully juxtaposed it's like neurosurgery in four easy steps you know if you saw a book with that title you have to pick up under what's going on well not to kiss your ass again but I always say this about you and I think it's important you make learning stuff about astrophysics fun and that's what's missing you know it's not that people don't like to be educated that they don't like to learn they just don't want to be bored that's a perceptive point because you know think of the image we have of let's say you're in a school where most people don't go to college if you're in high school and then last day of school comes what do people do they toss their papers in the air as they run down the steps school's out no but what's the rock song [Music] forever right so that attitude must mean the school didn't train you to embrace curiosity right that learning was a chore and now the chores are over yeah so I think the educational system needs an adjustment forget whether or not you go to college because you're going to spend years not in school than in school even if you do go to college what you want I think are lifelong learners lifelong curiosity yes where once you are trained and and and and and your curiosity is stimulated the curiosity we've all had as children your children don't need to be taught to be curious they are curious to the point of destruction of whatever it is they touch oh what is this egg on the counter what is this glass what is this plate what's under a rock what happens when I pull a leg off a daddy long you know they are experimenting with the world we don't think of it that way but that's what it is they're all born scientists and I say this often you spend the first years of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk then you spend the rest of its life telling it to shut up and sit it's this this is the wrong combination so speaking as an educator I think a missing component of school is is that the teachers is that the curriculum I don't know but when you get out of school you should say to yourself damn I want to learn more it's almost universally accepted to that that's when you're learning ends when you get out of college it's over you say you're done and if it doesn't you're ossified in line and that's how when the job market shifts you're not ready for it because you don't know how to think you don't know how to learn right no and it's the difference in the in the workplace between the person who gets an assignment I Joey Janet I need you to do this that's not in my job description I'm not trained for this that's one kind of person in a workplace another kind of person is but here's a new task I need you to do wow I've never seen that before great let me figure it out right he's a two completely different species of human being and what the world needs more of is like the the second case where you take a new task and you say wow I get to learn I'm gonna learn on my own I'll ask people who know more you just you just embrace the act of learning to satisfy your curiosity and I think this book is capturing that in the public I must be doing something yeah yeah 60 how many weeks 67 weeks yeah yeah that's a lot of weeks yeah every morning I wake up I'm I'm calm but I'm really not calm I'm saying holy [ __ ] sorry you're alive I can't can I say you can say [ __ ] I could say it Isis we're human people think you're a robot now they know this is it's a great sign I think and I think your podcast is a great sign as well the success of your podcast and the success of a lot of science podcasts that's an excellent you notice that there's a rise of science curious podcast out there stuff to blow your mind is one that I really enjoy right I really love radio lab they've always got elaborate interesting science the annual perennial favorite that so many people probably the best right yeah and and yours as well and I love Chuck nice shout-out to Chuck nice Oh Chuck we love Chuck he's great but what you're doing is you're making learning interesting and that's why it's so fun it's it's it's it's there's excitement to it he bring a comedian like Chuck on with you things get silly but they're also curious and you're getting these experts and everyone's talking about these various subjects and and as you know not only yourself as an exemplar of this stand-up comedians are some of the smartest people in the world they have it that they have that far so stand-up comedians are perceptive people yes and for sure and they're aware and they notice things that you don't notice they see the same things you do and get to shape it in a way you never thought possible and then you end up laughing at other things at yourself was it your idea to do your show with stand-ups so so what we have there there there was several of us who have created this concept and we there's Helen matzos is one of the partners and there's another one who's now left but I get his name in a minute but there were three of us who David gamble was his name the three of us got together and applied for a National Science Foundation grant what we said was there are programs out there that serve people who already know they like science but who serves the people who don't know they like science or better yet the people who know they don't like science there's nothing for them because they've already rejected it they're not gonna tune in to science Friday because they don't like science right on NPR right so what we thought was suppose we bring in a celebrity we've all that the pop culture draw this is the pop culture scaffold we bring in this scaffold and glad the scaffold with science because whatever the celebrity does it doesn't matter there's gonna be science in that person's life we had the guy who portrayed Gollum in Lord of the Rings a lot of getting that suit that he underwear exactly so what we did was we so we interview him and we talked about the technology necessary to portray go him as a lot he portrayed that live that was not some later animation he is live and he's got his whole body wired up for this and he is that voice and he is portraying it so so whatever it is that you have done that you do there is such because it's evidence that science is everywhere you're not gonna you can't say I'm done with science let me sell my textbook and move on to other things because practically anything else you do has been touched by science and so star talk is a celebration of that and then a jump species and so now we're on TV now alright this is a TV show on National Geographic Channel star talk and since you started this by the way I didn't come here to talk about you you started this where's our fourth year in a row we're nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding informational programming are you gonna keep doing cosmos too though cuz Oh cosmos so so so I have one week remaining out of like seven D shoot days to finish shooting cosmos possible worlds premiering spring 2019 there's the third installment of cosmos if you trace the first one to Carl Sagan back in 1980 okay you are I used your segment on wolves on how wolves became dogs Oh showed it to my kids and that's right see the little wheel spinning like whoa yeah that's how dog became a dog that what you didn't see is I'm sitting at the campfire and this in the snowy environment and they got wolves walking around me there on these fishing wires because they they are not dogs right okay they they debate over the [ __ ] they want what correct and when they looking at you it's it's like should I rip his neck out now or later when I'm more hungry right they're not there's no eye contact with them because they you don't that they don't see you as anything other than something that could possibly eat and so you can interact with them the way you would with ordinary dogs so they're on these fishing you know high tension fishing wire that you can't see against the snow and they're like hooting and hollering around me as I described and the name of that show is and the wolf shall become the shepherd yeah my friend did a commercial with the wolf and there's this commercial where he's running up this mountain and the wolf is there and at the end of the commercial they had to get the wolf to snarl so what the trainer does is he shows the wolf some meat and then he pulls the meat away from the wolf and the wolf snarls and they're like and then the commercials over he's like no no there's no working after that like there's no Yukie not gonna be near the wolf right like that switch is turned on done yeah and it's it's crazy like once that thing snarled everybody just backed off and the trainer let everybody know like once I get to this point we're done like there's no more everybody can [ __ ] out of here all three of these cosmoses the original one with Carl Sagan the one that the privilege of hosting in 2014 and 2019 are co-written by andrian and she's the the widow of Carl Sagan oh my and but she it kind of in his shadow back then but she's hugely creative and highly enlightened and so most of the sort of the the the soul energy if you will the that what makes cosmos distinct from other from other documentaries where you're sort of sitting there learning you put your thinking cap on your learning cap on in cosmos it's your feelin cap you're not only learning you're also feeling the science and its relationship to you to civilization to the world to the universe and her infusion of this she's a highly scientifically literate writer producer and so I just give a shout out to her just working with her as minute delight his cosmos on Apple TV or so cosmos was after at first after it premiered on Fox and then went internationally on Nat Geo it then went to Netflix so but I think this run of Netflix is gonna drop until the next one comes in I think they want to clear the clear the landing zone for the next cosmos but it went to Netflix but is it available for anyone to get right now oh right now it should be I haven't checked that's a great question I have it all on my DVR and I'm scared to delete it oh I have like 6% left space but everyone's DVR looks like I got your cosmos is in there yeah so thanks thanks for having having them all in there who's that Morgan Freeman show but through the through the wormhole yeah yeah that's that's that's a Joe Rogan thing yeah you didn't have that I'd be disappointed huh I say you're an imposter you're a fake it's it's an opportunity to be entertained and learned which i think is what everybody misses and I think that's that's what's missing in most public education it's people are bored and you take these kids with so much energy and then you make them sit still and watch something that's not even remotely stimulating by a person who doesn't really care to be there right right and they know they know this they know this intuitively if not explicitly that the enthusiasm is absent yeah they could feel it yeah and just it's the worst way to learn it's the the worst way and it's so hard to skate once you get out of that system it takes forever for a lot of these people to just get their excitement about education back you know what I say when I address teachers we all by the way I'll do this right now in this room that we have this only three of us but let's let's take a show of hands in your life with all the teachers you've ever had in every class you've ever taken how many had like a singular influence on who and what you became give me a number it's gonna be I'm betting it's five or fewer probably more like three yeah for teachers what's your number well theirs was the one that I talked about in your show the last time I saw you thanks for coming on to start my pleasure it was a science teacher that I had when I believe I was in seventh grade told me that if you really want to hurt your brain look up and recognize the fact that that goes on forever that this is infinite and then just think about what that means infinite that there really is no end to it so but how many teachers such as that we're so influential on you that one guy saying that one so he was not one class one he might be the one and what do you got for me it's like two and a half and I've had scores of teachers yeah okay a hundred teachers at least so what I tell teachers is be that teacher to your students we've all had those teachers be that teacher and in every case it wasn't because the topic was something you knew in advance you would like it's because their energy for sharing their passion and love for the subject was palpable yeah and it just spilled out of him and went into the course through your veins and your arteries and you walk out of there thinking wow that was the most interesting thing I've ever done in my life you don't even care what you get on a test after that because you got touched and you became an enlightened participant in that exercise in that exploration yeah it's just so hard for them to even get kids attentions though yes unfortunately hatches going on unfortunate that could be in some places half the energy of the teachers is maintaining order I think the success of your book the success of your show your podcast and many of these other really intelligent podcasts are showing though there's an appetite for this stuff out there yeah and I'm delighted to be a servant of that curiosity and this I brought this just because it's not even out yet this the you're airing like now live this is it you're alive you are okay so this is like a five-second delay what is this accessory to war oh this this is like another book I just this is coming out in three weeks is this about space war accessory to war the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military ah yeah so so this other book was astrophysics for people in a hurry if you're in a hurry do not buy people in a hurry this is not this is not what this is not an impulse item at the checkout line this is you got this is this is all about by the way we know what role the physicist plays in war the physicist makes the bomb invents the bomb the chemist perfects napalm the biologists weaponize --is anthrax and the astrophysicist well we sit at the end of a telescope and wait for photons to cross the universe and enter our detector and we go into conferences and argue about them so there is no obvious connection between what we do and military strength hegemony dominance empire building it's just not obvious that's why this subtitle is the unspoken Alliance it's not a secret it's just it's not there it's there but it's not nobody's talking about it do you realize I'll just give an example okay if you needed more reasons to think that Columbus was a dick okay let me add one to it when we were kids on today yeah I know I know but actually I do have something smiled Lee redeeming to offer about Columbus if you have the time I just wanted okay okay start off with that you want me start out with that well how you want to do it I'll do the dick part okay so on his third voyage he's in by the time as of his third voyage he had already planted enough Spanish flags that Spain had already begun to set up governments and infrastructures in these places he had found ya basically conquered and so so in one of the places I'd was it's in the book accurately but they think it's Hispaniola one of the island today he has to get back as his third voice 1503 or 1504 he's got to get back to Spain he doesn't have enough resources not enough food for his crew so he asked the natives would you please give us some of your stock that you have collected from your farming now this particular group of natives only makes exactly the amount of food they need to tie to the next crop they don't have surplus so they said no we don't have surplus sorry Columbus knew that one week hence coincidentally there was going to be a total lunar eclipse with a moon in its orbit around Earth enters Earth's shadow the full moon enters Earth's shadow and disappears and that the geometry of that event it's just a simple lunar eclipse but the geometry says that sunlight passes around Earth through Earth's atmosphere and takes on sunset colors that leech into Earth's shadow giving the moon if you can see it at all a deep red amber hue almost the color of blood Columbus set and he knew about this because he had read the tables the Eclipse tables all right we'd known enough about the solar system at the time too we got that okay actually back then it was just the known world with earth in the middle of the known universe that didn't matter the rhythms of the universe were known he says to the natives if you do not give us food my god which is more powerful than your God will make the moon disappear and it will turn blood red that will happen in one week you have one week to comply some of them were skeptical what you can't what others said [ __ ] we got it to what this guy says look at the ships they came in their guns their power their their culture look what they've got sure enough right on cue the moon begins to disappear according to that that is a famous woodcut that you know you got this Oh some those viewing the video of this yeah there's a famous woodcut and notice the natives bowing to him and he stands proudly cuz he knows the science he knows the astronomy he knew this and so he invokes this to dominate people who are not yet scientifically literate and within seconds of this beginning they bring him all the resources he wants and he gets and I we don't know what happened you know back at the island whether the people survived the winter but he got back to the island that is one microcosm of a set of ways that the universe has been invoked in this I'll give you another example los alamos one of the National Labs they today as basically since their inception are charged with tracking the nuclear arsenal of the United States our nuclear power the nukes that would go into nuclear weapons they think about this do you realize they hire astrophysicist I had colleagues work in there you know why because there's a room there are two rooms I mean I'm simplifying this but basically there are two rooms adjacent to one another and a computer between the two of them the most powerful computers in the world and there is code running on those computers that calculates the energy yields of hydrogen fusion that's exactly what an astrophysicist cares about when stars blow up okay the Sun is undergoing nuclear fusion right now and that's how it's making energy and when that when high mass stars dies they explode as supernovae this is a natural thing going on then you over in the universe on the other side that's a classified room they are calculating yields of hydrogen bombs and they have lunch together and they compare notes the government doesn't always have the best people but if you hire some of the best people to do whatever it is they want and their calculations happen to relate to a military project there you have a two-way street in progress why do you think the Hubble telescope that the the mirror issues notwithstanding which were ultimately fixed when it was first launched why was that so successful viewer versions of the Hubble telescope previously launched by the military looking down that that the model for that telescope had already been conceived and built and was operating then we said oh we want one of those okay but we don't that's not public that this is going on we design the telescope gets designed it has the benefit of previous versions of it having been used successfully but looking down and we look up this is the perennial two-way street of astronomy in the old days and in modern times astrophysics and the invention of the telescope you ever said anything yet oh you just you look you're a good listener should I keep just keep talking by preventing you from interrupting okay fine Galileo perfects the telescope he learned that it had just been invented in the Netherlands the the Dutch were were opticians all right so they invented the telescope and the microscope within a couple of years of one another this transformed science when did they invent the eyeglass the reading glass the reading glasses earlier than that but I don't I don't know when's that the real advance was putting two lenses in line with one another sounds trivial in modern times but that was a huge leap conceptual leap and what you would accomplish and in so doing depending on how you curve them and how you grind them grind the the shape of those lenses you would get a microscope or a telescope and and we're off to the races that's basically the birth of modern science as we now think of it and and and and conduct it because you say to yourself my senses I don't trust them to be the full record of what's going on in front of me you pull out a microscope oh my gosh leeuwen Hoch he got the microscope guy he thought he got a drop of pond water puts it under his microscope just to think to do this it's just water why do you think that's something interesting to do he said I wonder he was curious he puts it under and sees little what he described as anima cules happily of swimming anima cute anima culés these are like the amoebas in paramecia and oh oh it is and so he writes he reports on this to to the you know the scientific authorities and they don't believe him they say you know Van Leeuwen hook we think you might have had too much gin before you wrote this letter why would anyone believe this that there's entire creatures an entire universe of creatures thriving in a drop of pond water and so the way science works is one report does not make it true you need verification they sent people to the Netherlands to verify his results and there was the birth of microscopy and then they looked at everything cells you know they need vocabulary to describe what you're now seeing well that was the the journey down small then the journey went up big and Galileo perfects the telescope he looks up as whoa I see craters mountains valleys on the moon the Sun has spots Venus goes through phases this became the corpus of evidence for earth going around the Sun in support of Copernicus idea that earth went around the Sun my point is what was the second thing he did with his telescope he telephone no he he contacted the Doge of Venice invited him to the clock tower and said look at what this instrument can do for you as we look out into the lagoon you can identify a ship's intentions friend or foe by its flag 10 times farther away then you can with the unaided eye Venice bought a boatload of these telescopes in the service of their military defense and this was a source of money to Galileo and now he could go look at the universe this has been a two-way street ever since people have looked up so this is this is an accounting of that this is it's and it goes on and on the first x-ray machines for airports you're old enough to remember what why would they put in because of hijackings to Cuba basically that they were armed hijackings of airplanes of American carriers to Cuba and Congress that we got to do something about that oh by the way there's a company in Boston called American science and engineering that was building an x-ray detector small enough to put on a satellite to observe the universe in x-rays and because no one had moved use visible light but not x-ray that's a branch of the electromagnetic spectrum we think if their black holes out there their region surrounding them will give us x-rays it's a new window on the universe and then they said oh my gosh there's a call for x-ray machines at Airport we've got the technology that we've perfected to put in a fricken satellite so the technology for those ones you walk through the airport initially came initially yes yes yes there was a two-way street there was oh my gosh we need this for security oh my god we would we were using let's split let's apply that technology to these detectors well that's been a lot of the stuff with the space program right a lot of the stuff that they devised for use on the space station and some many other technologies have trickled their way down in the break well that's our and that always happens and even some simple things because people say why spend money up there and we should be spending it down here but there's interesting fact here that is almost never discussed the people who still think about the universe and study the universe are hugely creative and the creative energies cannot be pre prescribed you can't go to a create you might but I don't know that you'll get their maximum creativity say I need you to invent a cure for cancer right now use that brilliance I'll try but the greatest discoveries the greatest cures the greatest of these comes from a cross-pollination of interest that people have that where they were engaged because they were interest interested just for the sake of being interested so watch out here's an example the Space Shuttle it's it's a glider when it lands okay it's got no engines it's got flaps there's a little bit of brakes and the tires but that's about it when it comes in okay how do you make sure the thing that stays on track because they kept drifting in winds and this sort of thing and so they said why don't we groove the road so that the rubber on the road the the the runway so the rubber can align with the grooves and stay in a straight line because rubber doesn't slide well when you have doesn't slide sideways very easily on crews when they realize how effective that was it's now put on off ramps to freeways if there's a freeway off-ramp that's a little tight not quite banked well enough it's gonna be grooved check it out next time and you could say well okay that's pretty simple low-tech solution why didn't we why couldn't we just discover that on our own without the twenty billion dollar a year space agency called NASA but you didn't you didn't power tools cordless high torque power tools were invented to service satellites in orbit by NASA because you can't just plug it into 120 volt socket when you're floating in space so the engineer said how are we gonna solve this problem let's make a high torque power tool so now NASA invents the height now that is the only way you're buying a power tool today is that is the cordless variety all construction sites they're not looking for a power outlet for these things so why didn't we invent this without the twenty billion dollar space right you didn't you weren't you didn't think about it you said oh I can plug it in this is great you're not even thinking what you need so yes there are all of these applications but but I don't that's a good reason to do it but I don't think it's the best way the best reasons are my gosh don't you want to keep dreaming don't you want to keep looking into the future that would be ideal but that's not attractive to people that are spending tax dollars when it comes to tax dollars people get super pragmatic and they go why do we need to go to Mars now what we need to do is take care of this and pay for that and we were the deficit and the budget and you know so you know NASA's budget today is four tenths of one percent of the federal budget so you take a dollar or a tense one I will quantify everybody take a dollar bill and imagine that's your tax dollar and you can like cut it to whatever percent you want so let's cut four tenths of one percent off of the edge that doesn't get you into the ink you're still in the border around it all right even notice that you would even though you could trim that off the dollar and pay for anything pay for it so my point is most of the people who say don't spend it here spend it there they think NASA has more budget than it actually does they just they there if you ask them how much they think any oh ten percent five percent you know several percent no it's one-half of one percent so if you're gonna tell me that if you can take that four tenths of one percent and spend it in these other problems and solve them I would say yeah go right ahead but is this is this where you really want to pull the money from when it's the only thing that Gaza is thinking about tomorrow as just thinking about a future well forgot like you that's super important but for a guy who lives in Cleveland who doesn't give a [ __ ] about science oh excuse me that's like the person who says okay I don't need the space program why don't I need a space for it I have my cell phone and I have the Weather Channel and I'd know anything I need this is yeah you're using GPS satellites to understand where you are on this earth you to understand where grandma's house is when you pull out of it who created what who created spread spectrum technology that led the GPS and Wi-Fi who is that hedy lamarr old I didn't know that yes yes she's actress 1941 yes she did recognize for reminding me super hot though that was the problem nobody cared yeah but yeah it took it would take decades to really realize that GPS is launched by the military and it's now hundreds of billions of dollars worth of the American economy thriving on this space application but it was a military intent then it was to navigate the surface of the earth yeah to navigate and the first Gulf War was the first big use of space assets in the conduct of military operations I believe in even when hedy lamarr created it with another scientist the idea behind it was for encoded encoded transcriptions or encoded information during the war well so that that's a big challenge how do you encode information that's by the way the future of this might might come from it's not it's still not clear the jury's still out and they're sort of opposing views on this but you know you've heard about quantum entangled particles yeah where I can create a pair of particles that know about one another and now they separated in space and in time and if you observe that other particle it instantly changes the state of the particle BEC the other particle that's back where I am and by the way that they communicate instantaneously faster than the speed of light when you say if you observed do you mean that if you observe it with anything doesn't matter but you have to do something you have to do yes so something has to interact with it's not Wu into Renault sir but it's so not what people but you say that people go yeah if I saw that in a secret yeah so the problem is the word observed people thinks is a psychological thing but in physics it's got nothing it's a measurement it's a measurement thing right and so little measuring if there's a if there's an electron sitting in the middle of this table and all the lights are out I can say I think there's an electron here let me find out and the moment I turn on the lights the light interacts a photon interacts with the electron and kicks it somewhere else so the more I try to measure its position the less I know its position so because you need to the measurement requires an interaction with it and on in the quantum scale interactions change the state of the experiment that you're conducting we know this we've quantified it we don't like it but we deal with it and then the act of dealing with it you can exploit that fact for other purposes we exploit quantum craziness to birth the inductee the information technology revolution there is no creation storage or retrieval of information without an exploitation of the quantum so and by the way the quantum was discovered in quantum physics as a branch of physics was discovered in the 1920s if you were around back then and your tax buddies who don't like paying taxes you what would you have said why are you spending government money on her on the a demand on molecules if you can't even see them what good is it all I can't but would work I just care about my wood atoms right here I am yeah yeah shove that where your where your tax dollar is and so it would look like you're wasting your own time and everybody else's money it would take decades five decades of four or five decades before we would realize what role that would play in computing this creation storage and retrieval of information and by some measures it's a third of the world's GDP is traceable to what quantum physics does for us on a computing scale so anyone yes yes well I mean you there ways to do it there's certain industries that would still be there without computing but they're made more efficient with it okay so UPS tracks all of their trucks with GPS and with computing devices that invokes the quantum but UPS predates the use of this these tools but you can look at profits relative to their efficiencies that are enabled by these technologies as well as entire fields that didn't exist before computing you add all that up it's a stunning fact and so my only point is that you if you want today to say why study this when we have these other problems all I do like all I do is take you back to the cave and let's say all right we're in a cave and there's a mountain over there in a valley and I tell you I tell the truth at the cave that I tell the tribe leaders I want to explore that mountain in that valley no we can't afford to send you out there now we have to solve the cave problems first before anyone leaves the cave we laugh at that that's an absurd claim to make in caveman days I don't know if anyone did it but that's a crazy thought their solutions to your problems that might exist and time has demonstrated likely exist by leaving the cave that you can then discover so for me exploits is not just space all the frontiers of the unknown biology chemistry a I accept you know those frontiers and then you can cross pollinate them and transform civilization and then the last example I give then I'll shut up cuz I want to hear you talk to I got I don't get I want to hear you interact with what I'm telling here's one you ready okay my physics professor in college study the universe love the universe study gas clouds between stars and studied how would you detect a gas cloud if it's not radiating light will they give off radio waves all right and he figured out what kind of radio waves they give off and why and in this he gained expertise in the nucleus of the atom and he discovered that the nucleus can resonate depending on the mass of the nucleus it will which means depending on what atom it is on the periodic table it will resonate slightly differently when exposed to the same electromagnetic field he discovered a new phenomenon in physics called nuclear magnetic resonance it would then take a clever medical technologist to say wait a minute if you can distinguish one heavy atom from another let me make a machine out of that put your body in it and I can then distinguish one kind of tissue from another and thus was born the magnetic resonance imager the MRI arguably the most potent tool in the arsenal of modern medicine where I can diagnose a condition in your body without cutting you open first that is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine by the way the real title should be nuclear magnetic resonance imaging but that's the other N word you're not so you don't like that people don't like nuclear they're less likely to go inside the machine if the word nuclear was on it but my my point is that was cross-pollination of ideas with clever people on their frontiers looking over the fence at discoveries that are being made it's how we got the microwave oven that wasn't invented by a thermodynamic system I CRO waves this is a world war two attempt to communicate using microwaves and they found out some guys chocolate bar melted in the microwave field and they said what happened there and they did some more tests and of course the water molecule and other molecules common in food respond to microwaves it vibrates them ferociously and so you put food in a microwave cavity the water content of the food vibrates friction cooks the food there's still people who today we say Oh nucleus because I think it's so fast and they have no fear it's just friction okay friction it yeah and everybody's scared that it [ __ ] up the food well does it no it's just it just heats the water get scared the whoohoo people do okay so here's the thing there's certain foods that don't respond well to the flipping of the water molecule and one of them is like bread products it's hard yeah it gets chewy and leathery yeah and only if you like over do what you got to do it just right and you're still good if you overdo it you can get led that's kind of it I'm trying to think you wouldn't grill a steak in a microwave you would heat up the meat uniformly and that's that's all it would do cooks bacon pretty fast yeah but it's a mess and it splatters all over so you pick the foods that are best for that situation as you would pick the food's best you wouldn't you wouldn't put toast in an oven at 350 degrees to bread to make toast we have toasters for that right so different things in your kitchen do things best you wouldn't make ice cream and your you know and your spin your toaster oven but people were afraid of microwaves the one thing they're afraid of it's not it's not as they're afraid of microwaves that they're afraid that of things they don't understand they're afraid that something's gonna happen to their food that makes it less good correct and it's just it's it's nothing not knowing that people fear my wife's friend's mom will not eat something that comes out of a microwave really she quotes that as part of what makes her healthy it drinks a lot of water she refuses to eat microwave food the whole life is around not using microwave she won't eat anything that comes out of her Michael okay I'm glad that she doesn't you know she'll she can live a long happy life as such seems to reheat food old-school okay one of the hardest thing is reheating lasagna if you don't have a microwave Oh true that's like impostor you can equip it again you're gonna cook it again yeah that's a really good point so I think microwave ovens were invented for leftover lasagna mmm yeah just a bowl of pasta just in general yeah soup yes sweet for soup was good yeah so you don't have to worry about it it's not doing anything to it it's not not sucking any nutrients out or adding any nuclear radiation correct okay there's nothing with radiation in the normal sense other than electromagnetic radiation it's already light from the bulb we tend to use radiation in the context of stuff that would hurt you so that would be radiation of high enough energy to hurt you and microwaves are not in that category I never even thought about what microwaves do until this conversation really yeah yeah so it's a certain frequency of microwaves that beautifully pairs with the water molecule and it vibrates it brilliantly so it doesn't work for completely dried things yeah that's why if you put something that has no water in it it's not really very useful it happens it's white eve jerky it's there's still some moisture in it correct it's why it heats the food and not the plate if the plate gets hot it's not because the microwave oven heated the plate it's because the foods hit the food and the food that's why I can usually pick it up at the handles you can put food on a paper plate that's right it doesn't burst a flame doesn't burst into flame this is crazy you didn't Joe what is it between MRI and fMRI oh so an FM I don't claim total expertise here but I'll tell you the little I know that MRI they put you in there in your stationery and then they make this map of whatever part of the body they're studying is typically your head all right but you can do it other for your joints in other parts of your body that might require this level of three-dimensional analysis and it's it's a 3d map of what's going on in the part that they surveyed and so you look at it through slices through that section so you might see in MRIs of your brain of your skull and they take slices you as the slices go through you see like the eye socket come in and then go out again or the the nose cavity and and you can look at it in all three dimensions front to back side to side up to down so so depending on the sophistication of the machine fMRI is they are looking at your brain while you were thinking so time is now an active coordinate of what's going on and they're measuring it as they're talking to you but correct so they say oh think the ice cream sundae with a cherry on top but think of a naked person who you'd want to have sex with and the F stands for functional right and so it's basically a real-time observation of what's going on Viktor person there was a woman in India it's really a highly criticized case but she was convicted of a crime I believe it was murder because she had functional knowledge of the crime scene and the arguments against it were like if you're gonna be accused of a crime clearly you're gonna study the evidence you're gonna talk to a lawyer you're gonna go over some things you're gonna be I don't know if fMRI is that precise yeah it is that's why you're very disturbing that this was used in court it's like do you remember when these Italian geologists were I think they were tried because they should have known about an earthquake before it happened and then scientists had to say hey guys this is not how it works like this [ __ ] can just happen yeah that's so that no I don't but that's what I do know let me share a couple of things with you that I've thought deeply about recently there are three kinds of truths in the world okay cuz we're in it like a tree let me give you three okay the rudy guiliani okay ready true isn't always true I know so let me try to okay unpack that okay you ready okay alternative facts I did something called an objective truth an objective truth is something that is true whether or not you believe in it and the methods and tools of science are uniquely conceived to seek out and establish objective truths and this I'm in referring to the invocation of the scientific method no one scientific result result research result it's true until it is verified by other people's research results using a different experimental method with different wall current from another country when your competitor says I think you're wrong let me show how you're wrong and they would reproduce your experiment and get the same result when you have generally the same results emerging that is a newly discovered objective truth about the natural world and when you have objective truths they're not later shown to be false hmm that's an objective truth then you have personal truths these are truths that you hold dearly Jesus is your Savior Muhammad is the final prophet on earth you you know Abraham is your these are your personal truths there's a heaven you're going to no one is going to take that from you not in a free country where freedom of expression and speech and religion is protected mm-hmm that's a personal truth the problem here is you can't convince someone else of your personal truth without some act of persuasion and in the limit and act of violence hmm okay in the limit in the limit this I get holy wars so I have this personal truth and I require that you share my personal truth but why is that's a recipe for disaster and not a belief because the people who hold a belief will tell you that it's a truth so I don't want to take that usage of the word away from them okay so you're giving them a beautiful nation I'm giving them the word truth but modifying it to say personal truth that's correct I'm not gonna think they've used it that way for millennia I'm not gonna hmm okay they they feel that is true and it's true in their bones I'm simply saying that because it's your personal truth you cannot require that someone else share it and in this country because in the United States because God is not mentioned in the Constitution itself a controversial thing in its day by the way actually God is mentioned but it in a very insignificant way that the Constitution is a godfrey document and because it's a godfrey document it protects your expression of religious faith because it means the government has no say in who and what you believe or why if the Constitution said mention God and Jesus well there it is there's Christianity built into the fabric of the country and if you want to be some other religion you're gonna have a hard time because we can set laws against it this is why so many religiously persecuted people came to the United States to escape their country where they could not practice their religion a little differently or a lot differently from what was going on in their home to in their homeland so that is it a problem though to call it truth I would rather not call the truth but I I'm I'm a big word guy and I respect what happens to words I don't always like it but I respect it and so I'm gonna say there's an objective truth which is true whether or not you believe it there's your personal truth which is true to you third truth is a political truth political truth is something that is true because it has been incessantly repeated it's and then you just believe it that what okay what's Hillary Clinton's first name it's crooked her first name is actually Hillary okay I thought it was crooked Hillary this is was incessantly repeated in the Trump campaign uh-huh and that that's an absurd example of it but but but the point is if you keep saying if you keep saying that the New York Times is fake news they just keep saying that eventually people believe it and it becomes a political truth because the politicians repeated it so it's a political truth that people believe it or it's a political truth because people believe it which one is it so again you're you're you try to ret you're trying to preserve the true fundamental meaning of the word truth yeah and I've just given up on that Jordan Peterson and sam Harris had infuriatingly frustrating podcast where they went over the meaning of the word truth for more than an hour and I like I said you can do that and philosophers like arguing and debating meaning of things for me it's how our people are using the word that's the meaning okay I I concede that well we can wait it sings why I don't call myself an atheist it's why you can look up the dictionary definition of atheists and it kind of applies to me but what is the definition of atheist in practice it is what leading atheists do and it's their conduct and it's their behavior that's what they say and it's it's it's their attitude mm-hmm that is what an atheist is today because they are the most visible exemplars of that word and most of their conduct I either don't agree with or simply don't engage in what don't you agree with I don't debate religious people and tell them they're idiots hmm I don't that doesn't work whether or not it works that's just not it's not in me to do that I I don't purge myself of words that have religious foundations in them I once in my facebook I had a friend going up in orbit to repair the Hubble telescope one of the astronauts and I said Godspeed mm-hmm and then I gave the astronauts name people wrote in in the thread said I thought you were an atheist how can you say Godspeed an atheist got angry with me and I said okay first of all this phrase is deeply historical in the space program when John Glenn was launched the headline was god speed John Glenn mmm and every mission where we sent human beings into space somewhere there is that reference in the NASA fancy word means I'll tell you I'll tell you what it means please do okay so oh by the way I'll get to that in just one minute any time the atheists who are arguing that I was using God's speed as a phrase they all have used the phrase goodbye haven't they see you later goodbye where does that word come from it's from God be with you it's a contraction of those three words and why would you say this you would say this to someone leaving the city wall where it's dangerous okay back when you have city-states you're going to your God be with you to bring protection for you between one city one and corrals look out for you so now what is the source of danger if you're going to space it's not alien space muggers it is the fact that you have space Marauders it's the fact that you have high speed and high speed is the source of essentially any death of anything that's in motion if you were a part of that disaster so God speed is like a space equivalent to God be with you really the origin was just saying did they say that before there was space travel did they say God speed I don't know the actual origin of space travel of the term I don't know how far back it goes but I do know it became common after John Glenn because they're not gonna say it to Yuri Gagarin because they were they're all a theists in in the soviet union i but here in america in america god speed John Glenn and I respect that tradition hmm and so I said that and then they jumped so if a theists are jumping on me for having said that clearly I'm not an atheist and ask me my favorite Broadway musical of all time what's your favorite Jesus Christ Superstar and I and I still use BC and AD in my writings okay I still do it don't use BCE I don't use BCE hmm all right well see even you cut cop attitude right there right yeah hmm I saw your face you know I'll tell you why okay okay first of all doesn't make any sense BCE is not the current era 2,000 years ago I'm going to tell you so BCE as you know stands for before Common Era right and c e stands for Common Era so this is d religious of fiying ad and BC NB C right okay yet of course they reference the same calendar right okay well who invented the calendar we all currently use in modern society it's called the Gregorian calendar it was invented by the Catholic Church by Jesuit priest in the 1580s assigned by Pope Gregory to fix the problems in the calendar because I'm screaming at you here you can start it's green get crazy I gotta calm down I'll bring in coffee the Julian calendar put forth in ancient Rome had one modification to previous calendars it had a leap day okay it had a leap day and okay leap day is how often every four years this was good because what are we trying to track we're trying to earth goes around the Sun and so we say all right how long does that take well it takes a year but it turns out we're not actually tracking how long it takes earth to go around the Sun without tracking how long it takes earth to repeat its seasons and the repeat the year that corresponds to our seasons is slightly different from the year that corresponds to how long it takes to go around the Sun slightly different and that difference was not recognized in the early calendars and that difference accumulated so that by the year fifteen eighty four the vernal equinox the first day of spring did not occur on March 21st it occurred March 10th it shifted from the calendar date that's what happens if you don't match the cycles of things and the Pope said we're not having any of this especially since Easter might land on Passover and we try to distinguish ourselves mightily from the Jews so let's fix this the Jesuit priest got to study this they looked at the cycles of the heavens the Sun the Moon the Stars and they came up with a new calendar the Gregorian calendar a modification to the Julian calendar you know what they have to do to invoke it that to take ten days out of the calendar to jumpstart to put the first day of spring back on March 21st then this happened inoctober 1584 why is there babies on ten days out of the calendar so now how much rent do you pay they have to like invent amortized rent yeah cuz you're gonna pay for three weeks instead you know twenty days instead of 30 did they have to figure that out okay point is this was hard-earned and the whole world uses this calendar it is the most accurate calendar ever devised you know yes I'll tell you what okay you asked so watch what happens the leap day overcorrected the calendar it over corrected it over correct yes yes so you need a leap here so no so the leap day is every four years that one day every four years was slowly putting too many days into the moments into the year okay the Gregorian calendar figured this out and it had put ten extra days since the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar ten extra days first jumpstart get rid of the ten days now everything's lined up again okay now how do you prevent this from happening again because it over corrects how long do you have to wait to remove a leap day that you would otherwise put in okay okay that's every hundred years oh so every hundred years that would be a leap day you remove the leap day now turns out that under corrects it by an even smaller amount okay so how long do you have to wait before you have to put a leap day back in ever 400 years Oh God so the year 2000 was a century year which normally would not have a leap day except it's a century year evenly divisible by 400 so they put the leap day back in and everybody on February almost everybody everybody except the astronomers on February 29th in the year 2000 set it's just a leap year because it's divisible by 4 no it is a rarely Pierre it is a century year divisible by 400 that corrects it back and so now you have a stable calendar for tens of thousands of years I gotta give props to the Jesuit priest I'm not gonna say no I'm taking the Christianity out of this reference because they figured out the calendar that we all use and it's a [ __ ] awesome count sorry to drop an f-bomb so I'm not just because some atheists are telling me that Rid God out of everything in the universe that I'm not I'm not doing that I'm going to say they came up with this calendar the reasons were because they didn't want to confuse it with Passover the motivation is whatever it is but the sciences is good and so there it is so in accessori to war where we go back many centuries the editors said well we should use BCE cuz as a liberal forward thing I said I am not using BCE and see yep and by the way then there was no year 0 you know why there's no year 0 because the Romans came up with the calendar and they counted using Roman numerals and Roman numerals don't have a zero oh it was not yet invented no no so it went from 1 BC to AD 1 VC's before Christ ad is anno domini in Latin the year of our Lord Wow yeah now of course in Islam and in China and in in Hebrew cultures Israel in particular they have access to the Chinese calendar the Muslim calendar Muslim of course dates to Muhammad Chinese calendar dates to actually a planetary alignment in 4,700 BC if they don't they use a different system I use a different system that's why and the Hebrew calendar dates to like the beginning of the universe as interpreted in the in the Torah so they have access to those but when the conducting international business would just simply use the Gregorian calendar just get over it but use it in China do they use it constantly and consistently or do they alternate between the Gregorian calendar and something else I'm not a Chinese expert but from what I know of China and my friends and colleagues they have for conducting business the world's business is conducted in on the Gregorian calendar with the 12-month calendar with with the year as referenced by everybody else and does it have to be done that way in terms of like is there is anyone ever done a study on possibly creating a more effective more accurate calendar it doesn't invoke leap years and the problem is the length of the day does not cut evenly to the time it takes earth to go around the Sun so there will always be fractions of days that you're accumulating right and now what do you do with them you wait till you accumulate a day and you put it in or take it out what did the Mayan this is enough isn't a lunar cycle calendar it was that accounted abased on Venus and so yeah that a really good calendar yeah it was overstated than it was like the really accurate count overstated overstate it was good better than anything that came before and not as good as the ignorant no no Gregorian Kevin people love old [ __ ] though they do and they want to believe that especially people who you know you want to believe the people 5,000 years ago somehow knew more about the universe than we do yeah just know why is that why they wanted to believe that I think I don't know for me that's one of the great puzzles of life why do people want to believe that the Egyptians somehow had some access to the universe well they knew something Martin they of course they definitely knew how to find some incredible [ __ ] course right but that yep oh I don't take that away from doesn't the physical just the presence of these incredible buildings leave the possibility that maybe they had some knowledge that we lost lost knowledge is a real thing yeah I don't want to belittle or diminish the significance of real knows we forgot how to draw in perspective you know from ancient times had to be rediscovered in the as I understand from the artists had to be rediscovered in the Renaissance the archway the the Roman arch had to sort of be rediscovered okay so yes yes you can lose knowledge but if you look at the knowledge we have gleaned using the methods and modern methods and tools of science that go far beyond our five senses in our access to the world to say that somehow they knew something that we don't using our tools that's just false sorry that's just it's just that it's not possible but we know the physiological limits of your ability to know what's going on around you right and there people say oh I have a sixth sense fine but as a scientist I have dozens of senses right okay I can measure things that your five senses can't I can measure the magnetic field around you their electromagnetic field how much microwaves are coursing through your body now we have no sensors for this I can see auras fine I can see other things that are affecting your body now I can tell you if ionizing radiation is passing through you I have Geiger counters that can do that you can't oh you'll finally you'll eventually learn whether you're exposed to ionizing radiation because you're you'll get cancer of your organs and your limbs fall off all right I concede that we know far more today yes perhaps no not even perhaps then at any other time yes inconceivable history yes but it is possible that they knew some things like how to build a pyramid yes that we really just don't understand today I don't know what it means to not understand how to build a pyramid today we have we have we have 150 story building so we're not thinking about pyramid stuff I can tell you this do you know whether the first thing that was built by humans ever no no the that's only part of the sins sorry I love your enthusiasm my sense only barely came out of my mouth the tallest thing humans built after the pyramids I think it's a building in Dubai No so in other words what's the next tell this thing after the pyramids oh right after yeah what is the next tallest thing we built stable structure after the pyramids what the Eiffel Tower well yes 18 whatever at eighty nine eighteen said late 1800s in Paris the Eiffel Tower huh that was the first stable structure we built as a civilization that was taller than the pyramids so the Egyptians new pad and a new architecture they knew no one's taking that away from them but to claim they have some secret knowledge of the functionings of the universe no no well people love seeing that kind of stuff yeah it makes for a great TV but the fact that they didn't have steel and the fact that you're dealing with the very very most recent 2500 BC and they built you just have to be more ingenious more interview yes and we otherwise would have to be yeah how do you move the blocks howdy how they make Stonehenge those those rocks are nowhere in the region mm-hmm they were carted from somewhat they found a place where those rocks were would have been mined removed and yeah those are some big-ass rocks yeah as are the one but it's not less impressive because they're just big like what the the thing about the pyramids is so impressive is the precision and the sheer numbers two million our best hunters hundred thousand stones our best understanding of Stonehenge is that it's a functioning observatory that can actually predict eclipses so did I get just good yeah bitch-slap you there [Laughter] solstice they have there are holes that are not stones but they're 56 holes which is three times the the serous which is the cycle of eclipses of the matching of the orbits of the Sun and the moon in the sky of the paths of the Sun and the moon in the sky and when they match up you get in Eclipse is there is this an observatory guy named that's absolutely what it is there's a book published in this in the 1970s by a guy named David Dawkins it's not Richard Dawkins but it's another one of these Hawking's a rich Richard Hawkins Richard Hawkins Hawking Hawking Hawking's damn when I'm dudes damn what well we got our top crack researchers here just look up that the Taliban's book with stonehenge decoded just look up the title a book anyhow it's highly convincing and we all were all there with it there's no it's essentially just a study of the position of the stones in relationship to the where the okay Carol Gerald Hawkins thank you yeah Stonehenge decoded so he visited Stonehenge as a kid at age fifteen on an expedition and he was the expedition head oh wow yeah so how lucky for you yeah it was it was good and that stuck with me which is why I named this phenomenon in Manhattan where the Sun sets along the stress yeah yeah so so I named it Manhattanhenge sort of harkening back to my early days thinking about the alignment of the Sun and structures that we might build so twice a year for those viewers or listeners who don't know twice a year the Manhattan Street grid which is not perfectly aligned north-south the Manhattan Street grid will that the Sun will set exactly on the grid and I'll agree and what's up there now that image what's not obvious is that picture is taken along a street that is itself three miles long and then you're crossing a the Hudson River and then there's New Jersey on the other side so people try to zoom in on it but really what you really should do is zoom out from it and then you get the vanishing point on it so yeah all those are zoom zoomed in let's go to yeah that one looks more like like my photo I go back to that other one yeah see so so that's on 34th Street the one you see now and then you get this sparkling effect that happens twice a year twice like that sort of crazy wild light effect yes it looks yes Photoshop dolls yeah there's an image on his Instagram that is linked on my Instagram the most recent photo okay there he goes oh there's you with the selfie selfie right oh yeah so come on down for a fro oh yeah that's strong that was my first cell phone yeah I was fourteen four let me see it was nineteen probably 1974 Wow so I would have been 15 I think I've been 14 or 15 so your path of curiosity was set back that goes back very early right but that's nothing what we're looking for here let's go but that one thinking it is so that no there's another one but go back to all of these rivers Wow zoom back out it's you see all the pictures there you go to the bottom left there you go okay that might be the first ever Manhattanhenge photo what is that from I took that in 2001 right - and it got published in 2002 before September 11th this is July I took it before September 11th right right and then I had a means to publish it and right then the notice that it's a green light and traffic is ready to knock me over so so no one is in the streets doing this but now there are tens of thousands of people that pour into the streets on these days we post what day you're getting Manhattanhenge from the American Museum of Natural History my day job and then that goes out the press gets it and tens of thousands of people spin with the street blocking traffic and if you think of all the ways traffic gets blocked in your day yeah it was too many of them by yourself it's interesting it's great yeah so that's what it'll become holding up phones but it's all because I went to Stonehenge yeah so it's a it's also a observatory so this was it you that named this yeah yeah damn check you out coins coins I think say coined it yeah Manhattan hinge because the buildings are like hinges the hinge is a stone is a vertical stone there's a vertical structure if you made a stone it's a stone hinge why isn't it possible to construct a calendar that doesn't have leap years what you would have to do you could do it but what would happen is it means you care more about the year than you do about the day so what would happen is you would celebrate the New Year at like 3:00 in the afternoon right and then the next year you've celebrated at like 12 minutes after 3:00 in the afternoon and then 20 minutes you would you would it would sort of move through your calendar and then that means you cared more about the year the Atari you care more about the til I say that right you we always want to celebrate New Year's on midnight of the and by the way New Year's is celebrated in 24 time zones not all at the same time right so it's interesting everyone thinks of that as a moment hmm yeah it's really a calendar event I'm sorry it's a [ __ ] event it's celebrated over 24 hours yeah if you're in Thailand it's 14 hours different so therefore if you were to do it astrophysically you would know the exact moment where we returned in our orbit and everybody would celebrate that instant mmm and that would be so then the whole world would celebrate the New Year at the same time that it means you value it differently it's not a midnight celebration it's a you could do that I know less Jill so it's a celestial yeah huh so that would be the only way yeah that's the only way because a day doesn't cut evenly into the year that those two have nothing to do with one another there's no reason why that would have so we we we so in other words let me say it another way just because you're looking like you're like you're looking off in space here so there's New Year's okay let's count 365 days when we do that we are not at the same place we were when we last celebrated New Year's Day New Year's Eve okay we're not the same place in orbit a revolution around you rotate on an axis you revolve around something else as those two words okay how you use those two words so we're not in the same place but we celebrate New Year's anyway well when will we be in the same place a quarter of a day later six hours so we would celebrate the next New Year at 6 a.m. nobody's won those will end in the next New Year at noon then the next year at 6 p.m. and then the next New Year kind of aligns back again well that's the leap day the fourth year were you put in a later Oh see so it's our love of the day yes that keeps us yeah [ __ ] up with the world and it comes to the year yeah wow you pick one and then that's how that's how you do it and what the minds base it on the moon right I didn't I didn't study their calendar as deeply as I should have and wanted to especially back in 2012 and everyone said oh the Mayan calendar runs out so therefore it's the end of the world I was thinking because the Mayans said sir the Maya sets out like that was back when you know before that had happened it was you know George Bush was president in like 2007 and everybody was thinking Jesus this is this is gonna be the end oh they're so what so every decade there's somebody predicting the end of the world sure I'm actually quite entertained by this exercise do you member when they had billboards all around okay just what years know that that's a different end of the world that's that's a guy with a radio podcast Church then yeah and then the underworld didn't come and so you pushed it forward so that's it's entertaining we live in a free country it's evidence that we live in a free country where freedom of speech is protected and you can practice any religion you want right that's and they didn't learn much science in school that's a part of it that's part of the fact that you have this in our world I don't mind it actually I find it entertaining but it becomes an issue if people such as that gain power over legislation over the rest of us because this would counts this as a personal belief it's your personal belief the world is gonna end on October 19th in the that's your present you you're in fine right you but if you now create laws that require I go with that you just impose your personal belief on me and your personal belief is not true for everyone it's only true for you yeah that's a problem and an objective truth is true for everyone so if you're gonna have if you're gonna have governance you're gonna want to base governance on what is objectively true because it would apply to everyone independent of your belief system hmm yeah I agree with that and by the way there there there there there are things that we're not sure or true yet that we're still researching that's not what I'm talking about as an as an objective truth check your truth have been verified by multiple scientific studies not just one study this was the problem with the the cholesterol study there's a cholesterol study that said everybody on the course to drop their cholesterol levels okay saying it would be good for your heart and all the rest of this because a series of countries were studied where they have longevity and low heart low heart disease and low cholesterol intake that study happened to leave out France that happened and it just wasn't in the study and a couple of other places that have high cholesterol intake but don't have higher heart disease so that study was flawed but it was hard to replicate it because it went over many years and it was thousands of people and so everyone just jumped on it you don't have a scientific truth and this this is a general problem with medical results because the press is waiting at the at the at the journal editors office oh here's a new study that shows that this gives you cancer oh that must be true and out comes the headline because you want to be the first to report it mm and then that gets emblazoned in people's heads and not everyone reads the follow-up no one could duplicate that study know what so there's a flaw we don't even know what the flaw is we know that no one else could get those results so it goes in the dustbin of scientific research most research in any Journal of the moment will ultimately shown to be wrong that's the bleeding edge of science it's a it's a great place to be because you're in the you're in the trenches and you don't know what is true you can't look up in the back of the book what the answer is to double-check you don't even know what the question is to ask half the time Oh but it's very frustrating for people that don't get it and correctly but it's excited it's exciting for the science it's exciting to acknowledge ya period it's constantly expanding and growing but it's very frustrating for people that really don't have the time and you know maybe did get some outdated nutrition knowledge what they need an answer no they didn't answer right Yeah right now and and religion in many ways gives you answers right now yeah without the need to sort of research it or to go on the frontier the lack of education and the lack of the lack of curiosity about is one of the scariest things about new generations of kids right like when the new generations are coming up if they know less than the generation before that's when we really start to freak out that would be a problem although I have good confidence in the 30 and under is that millennial I how will you have to be I think Millennials have only ever known the internet and devices so recent but my son is a millennial and he's like my kids are Millennials so they're 20 ish so not 30s a little old so 25 and under I think are the Millennials yeah but 30 when they were 10 the internet was around I know but they need a different marketing term so you can market to them differently yeah so to me I would put them in the same bin just as you were thinking there but but they they have a different relationship to Science and Technology of course they're not they don't fear the science or the technology they embrace it because it has shaped the civilization that has enabled their social life it has but through this like one of the things that I tweeted I think it was from Scientific American yesterday maybe was yesterday that it's a little bit misleading but one of the things they said is only 64 percent of Millennials have a strong belief these things these coasters are terrible they look great but then things stick to the but how was it made of metal okay a metal coaster yeah see the hell is that sticks yeah that's the issue sticks when it gets moisture you know about this we flip this over and you tip it over and then it whatever done that you know what yes yeah oh because the pressure you have the air pressure okay but don't do it okay subjective truth 64% of what of Millennials are not our only 64% are convinced the world is a ball the world is a circle that lures us what is this fear oyd so what it's called oblique I mean I'd like to see how that question exactly because if they know that we are oblate and the thing is asking is earth a ball they'll say no we're in a blatant ball I'm slightly wider below the equator than at the equator so we're a pear-shaped oblate spheroid but it's not a pair that you would find normally if you found that period but this if I compare the shape like a ball so the these distinction these differences and measurements are so small that if you found it on the ground you would say this is a perfect sphere right let me tell you how this how good a sphere it is right all right you ever see the the schoolroom globes the the Geographic globes and you rub your finger over Nepal and you get the mmm the Himalayas yeah and you get the Rockies and so that is a gross exaggeration of reality yes do you realize if you took earth with all of its mountains valleys and hills and met and shrunk it down to the size of a cue ball it would be smoother than any cue ball every machined yes yes think about it what think about this Joe really generous Joe Chill listen to me right okay uh do you know the deepest part of Earth's crust no the Marianas Trench off the coast of the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean that's the deepest part deepest part goes six miles down okay okay so okay without doing thinking of the depth sorry crust exact oh no no just access to the deepest part of risk crust the lowest point on earth surface the Marianas Trench right off the coast of the Philippines the highest point on earth surface the tip of k1 k2 okay 132 this is Japan I think it's k1 what why would you name the tallest peak k2 it's a good point I'm all right I'm not a mountain climber but I'm I'm just thinking where's k1 okay with it's the Himalayan mountains okay in Nepal okay isn't it in Nepal I think it is yeah yeah okay so now let's say how high up is that was 28,000 feet so it's like five miles up okay right the distance between the lowest point on earth surface and the highest point on earth surface is 11 miles that's here to the Comedy Store that is less than the length of Manhattan Oh yet we are 8,000 miles in diameter and those two points are very far separated from one another if you are cosmic giant and you came up to earth and you rubbed your finger over Earth's surface it would feel as smooth as a cue ball to you Wow in fact in this in this book I have a whole chapter called on being round which is all about this it's all about our perception of what is round and what is not I had asked you to debate want them Flat Earth guys no I don't I can't I'd no no we talked about it and we're gonna have a month I know what we do is and I think this is a diabolical plot so that the next time we can ship people on mass into orbit they all want to be the first in line because they know we're gonna send them so if they can see the round earth they're gonna be the first ones in space just so they can stop annoying the rest I do have people that have met that don't believe because they the problem with YouTube videos is it's a problem with a lot of things but one of the things about being unchecked while you're discussing things is you can say things you can use big words you can sound articulate and smooth and you can do it in a very professional-looking manner or do it passionately yes passionately convincingly charismatic ly and you you're unchecked but if you did that in front of an expert and you showed them that along the way they go stop that's not true stop that's not what works right let me show you why this is incorrect let me show you how you can prove the this is incorrect show your objective truths but this is not happy to render your argument invalid so people don't have any education and then they watch one of these YouTube clips they start actually believing that this stuff makes sense because it's unchecked and I would say it's not about whether they've had education it's about whether the education they had teaches them skepticism of information and teaches them how to inquire you realize it's just as intellectually lazy to believe everything you see as it is to deny everything you see yes why should someone know automatically that earth isn't flat yet I tell them in the next breath that the entire universe was once as small as a marble right both of those sound cool a preposterous except one has evidence to back it and the other does not and very strong scientific theoretical and experimental underpinnings so when you are trained to inquire you don't either believe everything outright or reject everything outright you're trained to ask questions you're trained to probe deeper than the layer of information that comes to you that's what should be taught in school and it's not they give you a book and say learn this yeah and you'll get tested on it and then when you're done learn this well listen also there's a problem with being in X or oblique connected to your first belief do you when you have an idea and it's in your head it's very difficult for people to shake that ID and they start arguing that idea that idea becomes a part of their identity and they dig their heels in deeper an opposing view is presented because they connect themselves to these ideas right it's it is who they are right right and so I I try not to base my character profile on something that is not yet verified as objective truth and that's a very good thing to do it's one of the reasons why I don't have tattoos on my body but stretch in my face go on one of the reasons is there's nothing I am so sure about that I want to put it indelibly on my skin well no no that's not let me say differently there's nothing I value in my mind body and soul so much in this moment that I want to indelibly etched it on my skin because I want to leave room for me to have a possibly more enlightening thought later mmm that would override whatever was my decision in that moment and since I count myself among the lifelong learners I'm learning stuff all the time they say wow that's good I didn't know that well that's even better what's something you learned recently so you went oh okay let me let me think hmm okay or something I learned recently I think I knew this when I was a kid but if you're playing basketball and you're shooting okay and you say oh that didn't go in oh my gosh well you know the rim they should maybe make the rim a little bigger IQ score more often do you realize two basketballs can fit exactly side by side through the opening of a basketball hoop hmm really yes I guess that makes sense two basketballs top squeeze no it's not a cosmically mind-blowing moment but that gives you perspective next time you watch a basketball game it's how these guys can fly from the from the foul line in a in an airborne slam dunk and not miss because the area of this opening is four times you do the math it's four times as large as the ball itself right because of the different positions it could be so they're multiple positions and they can still do it so it's not that that's easy to accomplish but knowing this you realize how much easier it is to score than you might have otherwise thought I wonder if basketball so that was a recent that was a recent revelation that's a good revelation yeah I wonder if basketball players occasionally practice with a smaller hole I think about this all the time I said if I was a basketball player you don't want to practice with everyone saying yes because that venue would that would throw the water off your enjoy your practice with this and a bigger ball they use a bigger ball we use a ball sometimes it's almost as big as their wait a minute is it heavier no no no no you don't know you don't use a bigger bowl it's a thing they did a long time ago I bet they still don't they no longer do it because then your grip is different the grip has matters right where your two hands go and what they feel yeah so you want to do it you use a smaller rim and in baseball you throw a faster pitch to give you less reaction time there a skinnier bat the pool table is a very small pocket opening nice four inch pocket opening is opposed to a five and a half inch so it's quite a bit if you're doing it you're doing it and so I would also you know growing up I played stickball in the street in New York and so you're using basically a broom handle and so when the first time you play baseball officially it's like whoa yeah I've got this huge bat and so stickball players tend to transfer very well to baseball when you're a kid yeah because your instrument is bigger it is your a the talent code no Daniel Coyle know one of the interesting parts about it is Brazilian soccer players how good they are and they he attributed to a different game that they play with a heavier ball that they do indoors it's a small heavy ball and because they do it in tight quarters it involves incredibly fast footwork okay and movement and then these guys take that footwork and movement and it translates amazingly well to an open soccer field I wonder if they calculated that because what you would do is let's say the ball weighs twice as much then it would only go half as far when you kicked it so then you make a field half as large I don't think they did then you can reproduce almost all of the dynamics of the soccer game I think it was based on just trying to play games like how far you can rub it in over if it's balls twice as heavy you throw it half as far the field is half the size right and then you have a mini game they survive right that makes sense there's a whole fun exercise you can do playing sports on other planets with different ground it's a very very fun thing to do if you're a dork you know it's funny occasionally I'll tweet something and people say dork and I say yeah thanks for the compliment okay it's already a bath it used to be a dork as well you give wedgies to the Nerds yeah well the Nerds would also be the people that were like but now a nerd is like you can be a science nerd and people like it that's a go yeah yeah I'm an old movie nerd you can say that yeah or movie geek yeah taking dork okay taking dork and nerd yeah take that I tell you I must I must have told you this last time I was on your show when I was a kid I was bigger than other kids I was always one of the tallest two kids in the class out of 30 so I was bigger than others in the day and I was also physically fit and physically active athletic but I was squarely in the geek camp okay I had my slide rule back in the day walking down the corridor you know you were also wrestling I was captain in my high school's wrestling team so I was a geek person who could actually kick your ass okay and I saw how my fellow geeks cuz that's the community that I so seen card-carrying were treated by the football quarterback and the popular kids and the kids who are all beautiful and the ones who and I imagine my future as a superhero defender of the geek so that you put up a little you know bat signal whatever geeks they don't put a few digits of pi and I come flying in and there's a wedgie in progress right I would just land and I grabbed the the bully and and ripped them off the the encounter and I've just saved the day this is my superheroes always the football players right always it's all because there's I think they're rewarded for violence for violence they also have brain damage weekly as we've come to discover how [ __ ] up is that you find out high school kids right literally across the board the majority of people who play football have CTE right in as far down as seventh-grade yeah what yes et remind me that's Texas for um chronic traumatic encephalopathy [Music] encephalopathy dot yeah say like Mike Tyson alpha P so let me tell you that story about Christopher Columbus please so the dick story told you the dick story yeah now let me tell you just something else okay okay I think him coming to America was the most significant thing to ever happen in our species whoa silence not an internet porn no that's just porn in another medium right Wow yeah so yeah internet porn is just a matter of degree not a matter of yes does it exist or does it not right okay I think it was a most significant event to happen in our species kind of amazing when you stop and think about the fact that at that point in time other than the Native Americans who lived here who living a nomadic tribal existence very few people that had the wheel that had firearms that had all these things that had already been achieved in the rest of the world had made their way to this place so don't watch okay here's how it worked right so you're gonna hear so I that you have some skepticism of this claim as most people would especially the the Columbus haters who are out there all right now I don't really have any okay so let me let me describe to you why I think this is true okay and then you can tell me whether you agree or not all right we are hunter-gatherers we haven't settled down yet the early humans and we're basically wandering we're following the herds alright and then the ice age hits well what is an ice age an ice age means it is so cold that when the moisture evaporates from the goes to the clouds the clouds go over the land it doesn't rain it snows and the snow falls and then it stays so the water that had lifted up from the ocean does not return to the ocean it accumulates on the land and this accumulation when it's significant and sustained we call glaciers glaciers is not itself a snowfall it is compressed snow that's basically change state into this this ice river that flows very slowly back to the ocean but the oceans are getting drained faster than they're getting replenished so during the Ice Age the ocean levels dropped exposing the Bering Strait land bridge between Asia and what is now Alaska basically North America the our ancestors who come out of Africa go into Europe some stayed others kept wandering some stayed low above the Mediterranean others went high they populate Asia they keep walking because there's a land bridge there they don't even know it's a bridge it's just more land so they walk and they enter North America from there that's kind of only way you can go with South at that point the weather gets a little better the Ice Age ends the glaciers melt back into the oceans the oceans level ocean levels rise closing the land bridge stranding a branch of the human species for 10,000 years those humans who made it across that land bridge and spread out into North America Central America South America have only a few families as their parent genetic as their genetic origin okay oh it's like that some research says it's like eight family lineages populated the entire north of South American countenance then the land bridge breaks now you have Europe Asia Africa and North and South America and they know nothing of one another two separate branches of the human species the Vikings notwithstanding maybe they found came over they didn't time that even if they did their influence was near zero relative to the Europeans so we're talking about influence here this is a branch had this continued this is how you specie ate this is why the species on Australia that's why you have mammals there would they have pouches all right no other mammals do that they split off and they evolved their own way okay so ten thousand years is not enough to grow three heads or you know twelve fingers but our species is separate now Columbus crosses the Atlantic makes contact with humans this is the first time that has happened in ten thousand years we have rejoined two branches of the human species we are now one common genetic group and that genetic crossbreeding and that continues to this day we fly to any corner of the world and mates okay and the mating already began immediately yes there were diseases that Columbus brought to North America much written about that less written is that he brought syphilis back to Europe first cases of syphilis of 1492 whoa and then it yes what did they have no problem with it well yeah I don't know the details of how the physiology of the natives huh dealt with that or whether it mutated you know I don't and there may people know that I'm not among them that's fast but if just look at you look at the graph of syphilis reported syphilis cases in Europe it all began 1492 when he came back so what I'm saying is this was a hugely significant event the rejoining of the branches of the human species but ya know I would imagine that that makes sense that is the most important and by the way Native Americans you know this famous infamous problem with metabolizing alcohol okay with Native Americans you know where else has their problems the Chinese they do yes yes yes so it's an Asian issue well so who stayed in it so you look at who populated North and South America after the you know before the landbridge is whoever was right at the edge of Asia right then the land bridge is so-so Asians and and North American and and the natives of North and South America have more in common with each other because of this then most other pairs of groups you might grab around the world but my point is obviously we there's a lot to blame Columbus for but he just happened to be the guy who did it first Europe was coming to the new world no matter what that everybody was trying to find a faster trade route to the Indies and so if what if it wasn't Columbus it would have been Arnold's Mednick or whatever it doesn't matter somebody did that and the rest is as they say history Wow so personally I think it's the most significant thing to happen in our species otherwise we'd still be two stranded branches of humans it would be fascinating though like Australia stranded to see what would happen if it this has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years hundred thousand that would have been a different story right yeah and your immunities would be different your yeah well that's the big concern about aliens right one of the big concerns is that there's some sort of a virus you pick up from somewhere I think that's harder to accept so for example what are the chances that a oak tree would catch whooping cough not so good we're two different species so viruses tend to be very species targeted yeah but what about species sure they can jump species but so there's a jump mammal to mammal does it vertebrate to vertebrate but so yes that can happen but the more different the life-form is it is sensible to suppose that the less likely you're gonna share the same diseases that's all but NASA regardless has safeguards in place in the event that that happens so it's it's called the planetary protection program the NASA it's got as a whole division of masks it's protecting Earth from bugs that could be coming from space on our own spaceship that we bring back and it protects destinations from us there's a certain sterilization levels that we invoke the Cassini spacecraft we plunge that back into Saturn in its death when we were done with it and ran out of money we're done with it plunged into Saturn to vaporize we didn't leave in an orbit around Saturn why because it might have crashed into one of Saturn's moons that might have life and if someone had sneezed on the spacecraft before it got launched we don't want to contaminate the life that we were later gonna one day want to study so that's what so we plunged it into Saturn that's why that is why because they were worried about let maybe in hitting Europa once it's dead and you can't track it or guide it anymore then it's a it's a while it's a wild card it might hit your Europa is a moon of Jupiter but yeah Enceladus there are other moons that have sort of ocean water their water world's basically and so the concern is that we would introduce life suppose we did it crashed and then we go back later and find life and it has DNA just like here but was it our life that we contaminated with that you don't want to confuse the future science of it so that's a that's the plan can you even watch a science movie like science fiction movies I know you had a real problem with gravity boom yeah alright so I let me set the record straight here okay I mean let me just go on record okay okay I've been deeply misunderstood with my comments on movies deeply misunderstood deeply deeply and so I've just stopped most last time you saw a movie comment in my Twitter stream we haven't you haven't I've kind of just stopped wasn't the Matthew McConaughey movie did you comment on that one oh interstellar just oh that's the last one I commented on a big way right you've done yeah I'm done because people then thought I've just being nitpicky I did one it's not fun going in movies with you yeah why would you do that Tyson will just say that can never happen and so so my intent was my intent did not match how people received my intent my intent is here's an observation that I think if you understood this it would enhance your appreciation of the movie let me give an example please do Star Wars The Force awakens they've got one was that that's the one with that introduced a bb-8 okay that's the most recent no no no this is like four movies ago now plus I've lost track because there's another one okay so the one to introduce bb-8 cutest cute as ever okay our cute little fella and in there they have their like the the updated Death Star right okay remember the old Death Star has enough power to destroy a planet and that's devastating this one it can suck energy out of a star so that the star no longer exists hmm then it could take these energy beams and kill six planets at once it's no longer just a one planet killer six or eight whatever the number was it was like high single digits okay well I did the math on this and I tweeted and I I said first okay they did take all the energy from a star you become a star but let's not maybe they've got a containment mechanism I'll give it to them it is the future after all honey is the future but what a long time ago in a galaxy far yeah that's another another another universe of civilizations okay mass but they have Lightspeed and we don't so it's the future of our technology even if it's the past of our time so so you do the calculation and I forgot the number but I got I calculated how much energy is stored in a star that's enough energy to explode a thousand planets oh my gosh they under represented the energy that it sucked out of the Xhosa tar out of the snow hmm and I thought this could have been more badass than even they came up with in this movie that is the nature of my comments mmm not what could this happen could it not happen let me give you a perspective okay well so so 20% of people just get pissed off 80% really liked it and they want more but that 20% they they cut me no slack and I'm only doing this for people to enjoy and if if I have that level of hate mail I don't need to continue it I'm sorry to basically stop I just thought to myself but I don't have the urge to share them I still have the thoughts I gotta teach you the art of post and drop okay this is what you do you post something know people gonna get mad you drop your phone and you walk away do that man can't be reading those [ __ ] comments not it's dealing with too many human being no I got that I get that but but you don't because you're still changing your behavior here's my morons here's my rebuttal your rebuttal my rebuttal is if you're watching a movie that takes place in 1958 it's a period piece and there's a car from 1960 oh yeah and I'll be crazy and someone who's a car expert points that out you say hey he's an expert that's pretty good do you complain that the person noticed that no you praise their expertise I get mad at the movie if you get mad at the movie if you're watching a Jane Austen period piece and as 1870 whenever they took place and someone gets out of the carriage with tie-dyed bell-bottoms you would cry foul right that would take you up I'm exaggerating there obviously could be a top hat instead of a derby you would cry foul if you were a costume designer and we would all be impressed by that level of knowledge that you exhibited mmm-hmm I am bringing a level of science to bear on a movie that is no different from anybody else's expertise who is out there that we have praised for that invocation yet people are not granting me that latitude to make those comments I don't like these generalizations I don't like this is true but I don't like your saying people are not doing this now a small vocal minority that are [ __ ] and those are the people that you're altering your behavior for that's what I think is ridiculous about them no because my people would enjoy it when are you talking about gravity and the fact that hair wouldn't do that and the space stations weren't that close together right right you'll see it in the sky right right but but it's [ __ ] no I my tweets or offerings not but I'm not that's the problem the only problem is you're reading responses no you're doing is wonderful no one's getting people 20% freak out is high for that [ __ ] is 20 listen hey I don't believe those numbers here man I'm alright when it's 5% then I take notice but you say 20% like what are you doing calculations you actually do know I scan a hundred of them I see 20 of them that's just run into 20 [ __ ] so 20 [ __ ] out of the millions and millions of people that father you have decided to reach out and and you're altering your behavior for [ __ ] I like those quotes I like when you when you when you break things down because I didn't know those things and I like thinking about like the hair and gravity I was like oh yeah the [ __ ] [ __ ] be standing straight up and the only reason why I mentioned about here cuz every photo of anybody with long hair when happened to you but it was long here in space it's standing up on edge it's it's a completely obvious thing that was omitted from the filming of gravity yeah but you have to have hair and makeup they have to have a reason to exist so so what I might do I might take a poll I might put it by my puzzles I'm a servant I don't wanna force feed curiosity have to listen on your feed anybody force feeding anything you pretty offerings out there like you said there's not force feeding you're not knocking on someone's home wake up [ __ ] read my [ __ ] that is true I'm not forcing myself on your property put the shotgun down you're gonna hear me talk about your movie listen man I said about bb-8 I said first I said BBS way cuter than r2d2 and I use like five A's in the way just to just to start a fight because that's a fun fight right then I said by the way artoo bb-8 a smooth metal rolling spherical ball would have skidded uncontrollably on sand in the whole movie is moving around on sand right yeah it would that's why you deflate your top that's why you deflate your tires to drive on Sam that's correct Wow have you ever tried riding a bicycle on sand it's impossible to get pong I'd imagine that and that's with rubber tires imagine steel tires you're not running on sand dune holy oh my gosh oh yeah well the hardest things you do for talked about getting into shape yeah so it will work if you have a hard surface just below it a dusting of sand right then you course yeah then you can dig into it I've ended some resistance and then connects to the hard surface so I posted this and people say you're ruining the movie for me you're and then people start [ __ ] again when you say people you're just listening to [ __ ] smart people gonna read that go oh yeah yeah this is stupid it would roll around yeah I'm [ __ ] things you track but red you know it actually happened as a result I think I'm getting phone calls from producers oh there's a little bit of science we want to make sure that you don't tweet about so good you keeping them on point as you know I might be most famous among in movie commenting for the final scene in Titanic okay now if you knew about this what would you say about the we know where the Titanic sank the longitude the latitude yes we know what time of day Oh to Mars so at the POV the point of view of rose as she's looking up deliriously to the sky there's only one sky she should have seen and was the wrong sky not only the left side of the sky it was worse than it was worse than that the left side of this guy was a mirror reflection of the right side of the scale did you call James it was lazy because I call it didn't know repledge back in 1996 I saw it when it first came out I noticed instantly and because I know the sky I this is what I yeah okay so no reply five years later I bump into him at a meeting nasa hosted a meeting with some explorers and some scientists i brought it up to him and he says well at the time I was not overseeing post-production and that's when we added that so I immaturely wanted to grovel at my feet for forgiveness did you yeah I wanted him to but that's not what happened so then five years after that I brought it up again when I bumped into him and then he said you know last I checked Titanic Titanic has earned more than a billion dollars worldwide imagine how much more it would have earned if I'd gotten this guy correct that's a stupid answer from an [ __ ] it was it should be tweeting you know so so let's but that's an ego answer but it's not the end of the story so so that was okay I have nothing more I can say here cuz he's right okay no he's not he's right no it made it a lot of money and it would have made the same amount of money that's true but that's not the point but he [ __ ] up [ __ ] don't say how much money a week later I got a phone call so hi I forgot his name John Smith hi John how can I help you is this the dr. Titus I said yes he said I work post production for James Cameron mm-hmm he's producing a director's cut where he's adding new footage and he tells me you have a sky he could use yes oh so the Centennial release of Titanic released in April 2012 I mean oh yeah that's right yes so there was a 2012 I feel like you and I had this conversation I think we might have we laughs I just put this in context yeah it's got so so he actually put in so he did come through my so here's what happened Seth MacFarlane calls me up and said I'm making a movie about a talking teddy bear and I need to know the sky over a town outside of Boston in 1985 on Christmas Eve looking north northeast you got a sky I said I get back to you half hour later I send him the sky that was the sky that the kid wished on to for Ted came to life so Ted had the correct Scott and Titanic did not so first on first correcting these at Ted one Titanic zero on that right so the point is that people started thinking about it and if the highest compliment I ever got was Andy weir who wrote the Martian he said to himself while he was writing the novel he said because he's an engineer so he has the fluency and he's also knows how to write he's right creatively he said if Tyson were looking over my shoulder well would he would he tweet about this or not and so that put him on notice to make sure that his calculations were accurate and the Martian is one of the most entertaining ly accurate explorations of how to invoke science to not die that there ever was so for me that was a very high compliment and it was kind of worth it all of the naysayers that to know that that Andy weir came through on that yeah so why stop well maybe maybe I'll change I think you need to learn how to post and drop just think about it like this posted boom walk away walk away just go do something else man you don't need to look at that [ __ ] you don't need to look at what people are gonna say make sure that there's no typos that's always like no yeah it is isn't it amazing yeah I got a fat thumbs me too I I care though I'm sure you do about what how people can think about what I wrote mm-hmm if it's a way that I had not considered okay I like knowing it makes me a better communicator when I'm in front of an audience I'll know what percent will think one way versus another and I can modify what I'm saying to be more precise and - as we say in physics to reduce the impedance between the signal and the receiver so that there's a better match between the communicator and the audience I understand that but if you you surely have told jokes that people just took the wrong way oh yeah the right way they just didn't like what I was so yeah yeah but it's surely like you see the word cuck in a response you know versus an [ __ ] right there's certain things you just see like your cook like okay enough listening anymore now I know what you are yeah right you see that like you you spend all the time stare the [ __ ] sky instead of filling the blank those are just [ __ ] well I have pretty thick skin so it's not that it upsets me it's that I'm here to serve you not to piss you off are you not there to serve I'm an educator there's some people I'm an educator they're looking to get angry maybe I can bring them around you can't the arrogance of thinking that you could fix thirty plus years of worthless [ __ ] living with a couple of tweets okay you know something I don't even want to take you up on that challenge cuz you're probably right I'm telling you you got a lot you gotta walk away but for most people myself included in those most people I enjoy those tweets so I don't want something here's one so I tweeted something and somebody responding to somebody else's tweet said you know I don't really like Tyson he's such he's so pompous mmm okay so so I tweeted back to that person and I said thanks for your note could you please share with me the single most pompous thing you've ever seen me do and he wrote back you said damn you would have to be reading my tweets what you now you put me on the spot I can't think of anything right now but overall I really like your work I think put nothing forward yeah that happens all the time because people are just shocked that you respond but plus there's people can get into a stereotype mode where there's though that person is that and therefore everything then just decide that's the legacy that I write right you can't listen those people do smart for this and other people said look the dude wrote a book called Astrophysical people in a hurry yeah you'd say how pompous is that that's not right hello write your science educator I interviewed on Startalk yes you were one of my guests but so too was Katy Perry now you go there people get pissed off cuz they they just cuz she's a nothin add she's just pop cause I said she wanted she wrote a song about boney and alien and I wanted to find out what she was thinking yes yes her song she is a line about it which I'm making love to it so there's always ways you can you [ __ ] Russell Crowe a few times or what's named Peters sorry Russell I don't get brand Peters wrestle Pete is a good friend of Mines like Joe what the [ __ ] I don't I just come back from Italy oh yeah very confused yeah my brains zoning a little out of it out of it try to keep you awake for your friend Russell no sorry she [ __ ] Russell Brand say it I didn't know I didn't think I didn't know any of this you're married I didn't know this so he's like an alien is my point he's a very odd duck oh I see yeah he's a he's a brilliant guy but he's he's out there and he'd be like one of those guys that would be in men in black aliens that they're tracking to remember that scene in the headquarters there's a big right we're going to cover alien yeah all aliens yeah they're like Michael Jackson was there people who just there's something a little different about them you know so there's people that really do believe that that believe that there's aliens amongst us again that we learn a free country I'm fine but well you know what happens evidence at some point should matter but you find out about like Russian agents that have been living in like New Jersey for like thirty years that's the whole premise of the Americans Americans yeah well it's a real story to me really has happened on multiple occasions and so they wonder well if the Russians willing to do that what are the aliens want to do yeah so just find me one yeah maybe there are doing you open minded to that of course oh my gosh know who doesn't want to meet aliens II wish I would love to meet the aliens they're gonna have technology that we don't have o to compare notes I wanna oh my gosh do you by the way in the movie arrival with the which one arthropod okay there's and there's two arrivals well there's an earlier rival with Charlie Sheen yeah that's a good one too so this one is you know it's like a septa Puss lands yes certain freaky things would speak in ink okay so we can ink right so ice so they sent a physicist and an anthropologist not anthropologist a a linguist and I tweeted I said you know if aliens come I would not send a physicist and a link and a linguist I would send and a an astrobiologist and a cryptographer man but then the linguist got all upset and they started piling piling on the linguist PI yeah she's not a linguist she was a what if it's ant if you're an anthropological linguist ortho they all are but you just look up the title what her profession was but anyhow so so they all piled up piled up that's that's fine bollocks SAT because how many linguists are ever shown in a film so this was their time in the Sun it's a big moment so I get it that's fine but they're a couple of things so for example there it is making these circles and they're interpreting them but it's making them on glass so how do they know we weren't seeing them the mirror image of what he was trying to communicate that that was not addressed in the film but yeah I'd want to meet the aliens as they did there they brought the military of course that it would be a likely fact but because your protection is of extreme importance but here this happens in all sci-fi movies you go up to this thing and you get lifted up against the force of gravity at that point I would just put down all my weapons because stuff going on that's way beyond your understanding of the laws of physics yeah you know it's like pulling out your pistol and shooting at the spacecraft that crossed half the galaxy to to come to you what are you doing yeah they are clearly superior to you in ways that you don't even know yet so just find another way to do your talking rather than sending bullets their way but isn't that always the case in every film I mean it's always part of the narrative is that the the primitive people [ __ ] it up for the advanced civilization that's coming here too buzzer yeah it's never been good for the less technologically advanced civilization ever ever ever yeah right and going on right now currently and by the way undiscovered tribes not to sound pluggy but this one of the profiles here is of Captain Cook ah just a quick thing I've visited Hawaii only a couple of times in my life one of the times I saw Don Ho the show yes yeah oh my gosh and he was like he only sat down he was like big and heavy and old and he died a couple of decades ago but hey yeah Don Ho he just tells Hawaiian stories and one of them was about Captain Cook and heat that some want someone asked about whatever happened to Captain Cook you know how he replies he says nobody's ever seen him he's making things he's pickin Captain Cook of Lake so his rumors are that he was eaten by yeah Pacific island natives but that happened to a lot of pirates so watch what happens so the Brits and Captain Cook to the South Pacific why well you look at his marching orders it's oh there's what's called a transit of Venus that's going to take place visible only from the South Pacific this is where earth in our orbit and Venus it's in orbit are such that when Venus passes between us in the Sun it actually is exactly between us in the Sun you can watch it move this circle move across the Sun surface and then look through a device that device with it filters we're fine okay so if you measure that you can learn the exact scale of the solar system so you learn deep scientific knowledge about how far away the planets are and how far away the Sun is from the earth it was not known with precision before that measurement was made so Captain Cook goes on his voyage to do this well it's a pretty expensive voyage oh oh wait flip over the marching orders Oh open the envelope while you're there use these new navigation techniques that use the Sun Moon and stars and map every coastline you find and bring that information back to us within ten years of Captain Cook navigating the South Pacific as well as the northern coast of Australia and New Zealand within ten years Britain took control over those coastlines became part of the British Empire hegemony at its finest on the premise that he's observing something about the universe but there was a tandem role that he played I did not know they knew that much about the cycles of the planets that they could be there they knew accurately they could be part of the motivation part of the motivation of knowing any of this was navigation around the globe was navigation how you gonna know where you are on earth you can get your latitude that's just the altitude the height of Polaris the North Star above the horizon and measure that at night you can wait that long where do you know where you are vert in longitude ships would would be shipwrecked millions of dollars worth of Commerce would be at the bottom of the ocean because they didn't know where coastline was and the only way you can measure coastline is see if you have good navigational tools and tactics which involves a an accurate chronometer a timekeeping device for your prick and knowing what the Sun Moon and stars are doing in your sky so the astronomer in that day was crucial to the mapping of the earth and whose mapping earth is it just geologists for fun no it is nations wielding power over regions beyond the beyond their own coastlines and that's I have a quote here that's where this quote comes from I got a guy from seventeen whenever I get here stood 1757 James Ferguson 1757 here's his quote of all the sciences cultivated by mankind astronomy is acknowledged to be and undoubtedly is the most sublime the most interesting and the most useful for by knowledge derived from this science not only the bulk of the earth is discovered but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys our minds exalted above their low contracted prejudices oh I gotta drop a mic on that here boom drop that mic so notice he lists mapping the earth first then he talks about how it exalts in our grandeur hmm so yeah it's an exercise in dominance in hegemony in power under the guise of studying well it's not so much it's just they call fate they did it together if they matter to one another yeah I was part of it it's part of it and they're using a sextant for all this so sexton helped there's an octant a little earlier the people and the the Muslims used an astrolabe okay you've got by the way what's the number it's a third or two but I forgot that the fraction around 1/2 of all stars that have names in the night sky have Arabic names because in the Golden Age of Islam a thousand years ago navigation was a big deal and they navigated using astrolabes which is sort of the the the Islamic counterpart to the sextant and the octant that were used what is left of Europe a sphere that relates a gorgeous Oh then they're works of art their brass they're edged there's righty I sell them you can buy replicas but you know I can get original see find astrolabe yeah yeah astrolabe what that looks like oh yeah so there's a there's a thing that hangs down there are different discs that you can replace depending on where you are on earth to be to know where you are more accurately so this is all navigation so that it was almost like clips for a GPS device yes they're gorgeous they're completely gorgeous Wow what the [ __ ] you carry them with found that somewhere you go okay aliens a bit yeah yeah exactly if you didn't otherwise you know you're history look at this that's about the size of a heavyweight champions Bell buckle buckle bet so what is that thing doing so yeah depends where you are runners when you want that's what I'm saying so this is we're talking about this was you know a thousand years ago say you know this is seven hundred years ago six hundred years ago five the Ottoman Empire is spreading their influence and they've got they've got astrolabes so this is Islam did you don't even learn about this in school could you only hear about the rest of Europe Christian Europe so this mask an incredible looking device yes and these are dials that turn it looks like underneath tattoo like there's a rhyme or reason to it with all the claws and everything it completely looks like art it looks like some bizarre looks like an alien yeah yeah so again if you're only listening just just google astral astrolabe and and then look at any of them that's a primitive a more primitive one was simpler one and so that's 1602 so no so that one that has the spirit of an astrolabe but I don't know that if they would have called that an astrolabe the others they go way back and so the most decorated ones are the ones from the Middle East but anyhow the point is GPS is no different from the navigation tools in in concept from the navigation tools that Captain Cook invoked for Britain to then take control over all the South Pacific that they did it is where are we and do we know this information with precision and so and what happens if an anime force takes out our GPS and we have so much dependent on it what are we going to do we've got people now worrying about working on using navigation by pulsars can't take those out because those are cosmic they're sending highly time to pulses that reach earth in different places on the sky and by measuring them you can and the time delay between one and the other you can actually localize yourself on Earth's surface with extremely high precision and without any use of satellites that's the future of navigation where you were insulated from a rogue nation that might want to take out your satellites pulsars pulsers and by the way the Trump space force you know the many people whole lot of Trump haters out there and but if you want to hate Trump rationally you want to not hate him no matter what he says you want to evaluate statement by statement what he says right that's what you want to do he says I want a space for us well let's think about that okay in the Second World War there was the Air Force except they were not their own branch they were part of the army was called the Army Air Force and then we realized that command and control in the air needs different kinds of soldiers there because they have to be pilots it's a different kind of decision making different kinds of tactical actions you would have in the in the theater of operations and so it was sensible to spawn off a new branch of the military called the Air Force no one today would question whether that was a good idea today you should know that operations in space in the vacuum of the universe is a different regime that you're operating in from moving through the air your hardware looks different your your strategies are different your decision your command and control is different so it's not a crate just because it came out of trumps mouth doesn't make it a crazy idea that you might want a space force in fact I had proposed the space force in 2001 when I was on a commission appointed by George W Bush to explore the future of the United States space aerospace industry a commission of 12 so I put it on the table we have Air Force generals they're former members of Congress people from Lockheed Martin and people said well the Air Force is currently overseeing space the United States Space Command so everybody was happy with it and so I find that's okay let's not worry about it if everybody's have but as if as long as this needs of our presence and space grows but more importantly the size of our assets as long as that continues to grow what else would a military do beyond protecting your borders they would protect your assets and our space assets by day but day by day are growing by leaps and bounds so it's not acids meaning like satellite satellite station and the value of those it's not just the cost of the satellite is the value that's at the satellite to you right the the military is now creating a whole other GPS system that is will be exclusive to them and then they're gonna see the current GPS too and and what have we done with GPS this hard-earned engineering and physics and orbital mechanics what have we done with the GPS we now use it to find out who you want to mate with Oh someone's in your area yeah that's what this is tinder this is Grindr this is show me may double people within 20 square blocks of where I am that's a GPS mate on Grindr I did look at the definition mate mate implies you're making a baby yeah who you gonna have sex with fine yeah yeah so so that has a certain economic value to society in sodas uber so do all the things that so does UPS tracking their trucks yeah so it's not the cost of the satellite it's the value of the satellite to our economy you'd want that protected make sense is there a space force currently alig is it real how they recruited the United States Space Command so is there anybody who's in general if we make a space there's generals in the Air Force overseeing Space Command so if you're gonna make a space force you would offload you would offload the space activities of the Air Force Space Command to this US Space Command primarily to the space force and then add or subtract from that in whatever way is sensible given the needs if we have a space force you know what I wanted to see what I want them to protect us from asteroids how about that for an offense program that makes sense okay you want the government involved in that shouldn't be someone a little bit more thorough guess not how it works it's not scientists yeah you you just made you made a blanket anti-government yeah Asian cuz you're just anti-government guessing people say okay so private enterprise is not good at doing expensive things that have never been done before right need government money government government does it first okay right then you learn where the hostels are where the friendlies are where what patent did you need to make this happen then the venture capitalists meeting about whether I'm gonna make a buck on it has some has some some teeth in it they say how much will this cost will we know because the government did it and we think we can do it for half that price is it dangerous yes the government did this and they lost two people but we will put protections in so we won't have that risk what is the return on the investment the government got no return because they didn't that's it wasn't the objective but here's how we can bring so I'll do it second I won't do it first this is how you get the Dutch East India Trading Company they were not the first Europeans to the new world because where's the edge of the earth will you find India where will you get what you don't know any of this I'm screaming at you sorry you don't know any of this Columbus does it first and he can tell you where there's food and where this isn't where there isn't and where they want to kill you and where they don't then you hand that information to the mark to the mercantilist s-- and they make a buck after the fact so they come in they come in yeah that's how you do it that's how modern airplanes came about people are making planes in their garage the government said this could be a cool thing let's pay them and have them compete to carry air mail new kind of mail mail delivered by air oh that's cool so now I make an airplane cuz I want that contract you say no you want the contract you make an airplane that cat has more cargo a bet better engine you're cleverer now you just took the contract from me now I make a bigger airplane because I said oh I see what he did there but now I can improve on that now wait a minute I don't need to carry mail I can carry people and thus is born commercial yeah they're carefully the government basically bankrolled it as did as did prize money for accomplishing certain achievements like Lindbergh no one talks about the fact that there was cash money available to him for having done flown across the Atlantic solo first cash money no kid yeah I did it for the money yeah as most of them did fly the longest the highest the fastest each of these had money as ciated with it so this drove the marketplace it was not whether you could make a product out of it initially because you got to get over the early humps you got to get through you got to know what it is that works and what doesn't so is there a plan with the space force are they gonna make space weapons and spaceships there's a treaty in 1960s to which we are signatory okay and I talked about in an accessory to war it's again I hate I feel so bad for doing this plug it baby no I feel so let me hold it then no yeah you can you hold it yeah yeah yeah I just feel but it but it is the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military you look beautiful with that blank you primarily because there is a bow and arrow here other being shot by Senate arias that became a weapon and a missile at a tenure your bow and arrow guy yeah last I checked yeah you've got a freaking bow and arrow in the back room here yes what are you afraid practice when the zombies come run out of bullets yeah I'm pulling this chick from Walking Dead Oh seems to be the best weapon everybody runs out of bullets right zombies are slow and her weapon is in fact this totally yeah so was I saying before I interrupted myself space for who's paying attention out there weapons asteroid weaponizing space so this is outer space trees but treaty for the peaceful uses of outer space and it was in 1967 there's some modification since then but that's the basic one and we are signature to it and so are the other major countries of the world yeah didn't we just break out of the Paris Accord let's break out of that goddamn space [ __ ] [ __ ] it's a beautiful document it tries to be very forward-looking if there's an astronaut from another country who is at risk then you will go to help them without question it's very kumbaya okay so one of my sort of now that I'm old and tired and I just I'm a realist it's why should we promise to not kill each other in space when we are not successful at doing that here on earth and we don't even promise tonight promise to do it here honor yeah who are we to say oh well we'll kill each other there but in space we'll all hold hands maybe you know I don't have that much confidence in human conduct right I'm become cynical over my years and I'm angry demonstrate to me that on earth you'd know how to not kill one another then I'll believe you're Space Treaty so I'm saying here now given that there is a treaty it says you can't put heavy weapons in space as I detail in one of the I'll by the way I have a co-author on this I started doing this twelve years ago and was like I will never finish this for a thousand years so I brought in a co-author office Lang who is a longtime editor of my essays that I written for Natural History Magazine just give a shout out to my co-author how does that work so the in this case sort of takes your stuff and stitches in this particular case there's a lot of ways we collaborated some of them I just dictated entire chapters to her and but leaving out certain details that would require a nitty-gritty of sort of research just to get the right numbers in the right year and the right commander and the right this but I know broadly how it happened in what sequence and so then she would take that in shape that into a chapter other places I would say you know this happened this happened and that happened she would say well that wouldn't fit the narrative as it's coming together let's drop the middle one and take the other two and I say great so I'd write that up and she would stitch it she would graft it is a better word into the rest of what was going on so this is even though there are places here where I speak in first-person it's actually it's a co-written project it's not ghost written it's not I'm just putting my name but somebody else wrote I mean I write I know how to write so we're co-authors on this but thanks for asking that was good so so the here's a problem that we detail here people said I don't want weapons in space okay there's nothing more useless than a space weapon relative to Earth's surface okay if you're in space you're in orbit take it through if I use your skull here that's okay okay if this is earth okay let's do everything more spherical here I guess not I'm using your skull so okay all right so this is earth okay and I've got a satellite in orbit around the earth okay and I say okay I want to weaponize the satellite put a bomb in it and I want to drop over some city some some bad person wants to make that decision right well what's the city want it well it's up here so I'm gonna drop it halfway there so you got it well no it's not just that these are not very high above the planet and so you have to like change the orbit to align it so that it goes over your target satellites don't go over every spot on earth right they only go over the orbit that had print preset for it okay we can already destroy a city with an intercontinental ballistic missile and we can aim that we can aim a missile to any place on earth and we'll get there in less than 45 minutes and destroy the whole city with nuclear weapons we can already do that there is no advantage to putting nukes in space if that's your objective not only that suppose there's a rogue satellite and it's messing with you it's beaming energy particles at you and you want to take it out how are you gonna take it out you're gonna destroy it oh now you break it into a million pieces a thousand pieces now each piece is moving 18,000 miles an hour and put your own satellites at risk that's the modern equivalent to in the First World War when they said oh we have a good idea because we can't shoot them in the in the trenches let's gas them out so they have the mustard gas oops the wind changed directions and all of a sudden you become a victim of your own weapon such as would happen in space if you go in and start exploding satellites out of orbit so war in space is a different thing it's not what do you think it would be so what would they do so the outer peaceful use of outer space treaty allows you to have defensive things in space not offensive for defensive purposes it allows that so treaty aside though yeah what could you do could you I mean could you have a rogue state could take out our GPS satellites okay but we render the military wine and then you won't be able to pick up your uber you won't have anyone have sex with tonight that's the range of stuff that GPS applies to right and so it'll affect our economy and will affect our security and then our Navy can't talk to the Air Force the Air Force can't talk to it and that would be bad mmm Army's up wars are no longer fought just by how many soldiers have you lined up at the border it's what have you done strategically to render your opponent just to render to weaken your opponent or render them incapable of fighting you this is why the attacks on September 11th worked because we had a policy that if someone wants to hijack a plane you follow their instructions you do not deny them their requests because the assumption was that if you deny their request they will start harming people and if you follow their requests it will delay when they harm them if they harm them at all and maybe everyone will end up safe it was not in the game plan that they would crash the plane on purpose okay so September 12th you will never again be able to do that to the American plane forget the extra x-rays that we're doing a pilot will never relinquish the cockpit ever again no matter who they're torturing in the back in the back of the plane no matter what they're doing even if it's shooting people one by one because the plane going down takes everybody out so that was a pretty easy door to close literally and figuratively but no one saw it coming you know it drives me crazy when they put that drink cart mm-hmm you know the hallway yeah to protect the pilot and they opened I asked them about that so it's just to delay you a fraction of a second to give them a chance to go in and lock the door yeah right it's it's you have to get through them and the flight attendant that takes an extra second you can't just run in plus you don't even allow you to stand in the aisle while that's happening tell you they said now if you sit down correct so you have to get out of your thing charge the cart and get through the cart and the flight attendant who will be fighting for their life at this point okay and because you're the plane is everything right yeah I've seen that opening no you can get through there those ladies aren't gonna stop me Oh nobody who really is physically Joe Rogan I've already [ __ ] this through well it's an unfortunate thing that my mind does the point is you can I would never do it of course you don't I I thought about not that but I thought to myself the plane that way because I was like I witnessed September 11th four blocks six blocks away from six walking blocks for did you miss that plane hit no because that was my view is blocked from the south so but I have camcorder footage of the explosion big explosion I've ever seen and by the way one thing I noticed is that there was no shockwave I might have been the closest scientist to the event so I was all I could through was apply every bit of physics that I know there was no shockwave I said well how can we have an explosion in no shockwave and I later learned if you kind of make a deflagration wave if you Adam I as fuel and then you spark it then the flame moves across the fuel it's not a it's not a shockwave it's just a deflagration wave and therefore there's no shockwave and so windows are not blown out a quarter mile away as they were in Oklahoma City with the bomb with him Timothy McVeigh we why am i bringing this up what was I talking about September 11 the plane oh yeah oh yeah so here's something I calculated I said if I was in a 767 and we're about to crash into a building if I was in the last row of the plane how much time would elapse before the front row crumbled and it met me in the back row given the speed of the plane going into the building 500 miles an hour yeah well it's probably slower than that by then I would say closer to 400 it's a known speed and I don't know it but I don't think it was because you can't turn at that highest speed and it had to like turn around in a name I say it's about a second less half a fraction of a second it's a fraction so the question is tiny for how long does it take a plane to go its own length right when it's going at 400 miles out yeah it's a fraction so it's like that's it you can't even process that so I figured the deaths were pretty quick Wow instantaneous yes basically instantaneous you are you are pulverized pile of goo are they planning on making spaceships that can shoot down other spaceships so here so any space wars would not be war between space and earth it would be between stuff in space that's all stuff in space like space space yeah space to space yeah here's another question they're gonna do with all that stuff that's just floating around up there the debris yeah how about another task of a space force why don't you clean up space for so that we can have tourism and not risk our lives by a paint chip or you know going 18,000 more bolt or nut moving at 18,000 miles an hour that'll put a hole straight through you Yeah right so yeah I would like to see the portfolio of a space force if there is a space force broadened the scope of that to include protecting us from asteroids and figuring out a way to clean up the debris of space is there a concept in place no no no boy when you look at that map but I know the map is not the scale but it shows you the known satellites in space oh well there it's it's to scale in the sense that they're there there's that many of them it's just as those relative distance - but they have a lot you can see their orbital line so it feels crowded but it's it's so crazy when you look at it it's just like like it's just littered and we're continuing to launch new things up there then I joke I say one of the reasons why we've never been tada a lien is because they came to earth it what is all that junk what oh we're not risking our lab let's go to another planet yeah they didn't know the map of where everything was they had to calculate their income and forget it they'll just take home it's not worth it yeah I mean in when you're on your way in you have to think about it going around you were visiting another planet that had a civilization and they left a lot of crap in their atmosphere you you would yeah well those that's not the debris that's those are the satellites yeah so if you know that is debris no you got it so so the the airforce tracks debris as does NASA they both track debris and sometimes launch windows of spacecraft pieces of [ __ ] that's crazy so we're so crazy we've only been doing this for 60 years so you track it right Mo's lost the first satellite for sound Sputnik excuse me what year 62 far away from you slap you sorry it was it Sputnik October 4th 1957 57 the first artificial anything in orbit around the earth and on that day there was only one thing one thing only Wow from 57 to 2018 right so it's 60 years Wow one thing that's crazy and now how many things well there's the countless debris there's hundreds of active satellites there's thousands if you include the dead ones and yes we have no way to clean it up maybe it's some big vacuum one day I don't know but yeah space vacuum they'd have to be valuable oh you know you could probably sell space debris if you brought it back to earth yeah people are dumb they'd buy it speaking of debris speaking of debris there was this asteroid that collided with earth over chaya Binks in the Soviet Union in Russia sorry just near the Siberia in the Ural Mountains just on the coast of Siberia on the border of Siberia that was visible to everybody in broad daylight and he had to like avert your eyes when it happened and they felt a shock wave and the shock wave broke windows and sent 600 people nearly a thousand people to the hospital what happened well because they saw the light and they can't they got up from their table and went to the window to see what had happened there's a time delay between the shock wave and the light whose light travels fast and sound travels slow so we'll go to the windows and the shock wave hits and it blasts broken glass into their face so it's a big band-aid collision that we had the injured people all needed basically band-aids okay no one died but nearly a thousand people were injured so at an auction but that actually exploded and pieces of it were recovered at an auction I purchased a piece of that meteorite but you know and also I purchased some of the shards of glass that the shock wave had broken what do you do with this [ __ ] I've got it it's just a habit I'm on the part of it is a shot across our bow that's what that no one died but it's a warning there's no better way to be warned than to have a band-aid cover your injuries that could have vaporized you or rendered your species extinct what's crazy is the ones that don't even make impact still do devastating damage yes Tunguska yes that did that one detach earth well right it incinerated ten thousand square kilometers of forest honk holy [ __ ] yeah so if every 15 2013 and there is a ways over a half a ton that Peter Rock was a thousand pounds oh yeah holy that's just a piece that made it through is it iron well the actual piece would have been about the size of this room so a small home Wow so that's amazing that that small rock go back up to that again please look at the size of that that's not that no no that's what's left over most of it except a per eyes on that on the explosion as it came through the Atmos right but they're saying that that piece of it weighs a thousand pounds do they give it the weight of it yeah okay he's over a half ton yeah oh we have done yeah a thousand pounds that's crazy that rock is that [ __ ] heavy yeah so it's soda so yes well I have to read that to know for sure but I think it was an iron meteorite I'll tell you something would I a knife that was made out of a piece of meat or as do I though the beautiful hole yeah it's a kitchen knife that I use Oh mine is like a it's like a Crocodile Dundee knife oh yeah though that's not a knife awesome ah there's that's nice but it's waiting I want to make a or get someone to make a handle for it it's just that it's just a metal that would be that would then wedged for it's a forged metal with the blade but then you get a pearl handle attached to the base of oh yeah so it's a handle this and it's an unadorned piece of metal that would become a you know the right oh yes sharpen oh yeah where's the [ __ ] handle there is the metal hey have you ever seen a kitchen knives the metal goes all the way down down the center of the handle and you screw wooden handles on the sides so you just need the wooden I just need the wood or the or the if I'm patent they would be purl you know yeah yeah purl pistol yeah so so yeah it's part of history and it's a reminder that if you want to think about the future of civilization you have to include a defence plan against asteroids yeah the dinosaurs dinosaurs I bet if they could they would have had a space program to not go extinct I wouldn't know [ __ ] no is there anything that we're doing now other than we're occasionally looking up yeah we're looking with monitoring and cataloging them yeah but we don't really know what to do yeah so happen the day would come well we know what to do there's nothing funded with their engineering conferences how would you deflect an asteroid how would you destroy us we see one and it's a we see one way and it's coming 100% kiss your ass good-bye that's right we would we would have the power to tell you when you would die and what part of earth it would hit yes people that have very delusional ideas about what we can and can't do with asteroids and that drives me crazy we know how did the scene the engineering plans they look very good but there's nothing in place right there's project Sentinel you can look at that is has tasked themselves with organizing world governments to protect Earth from species killing asteroids and you need the world because you don't know in advance until it's discovered what part of Earth it's gonna hit and if it's going to hit in the Indian Ocean and if Indian if the surrounding regions don't have a space program or if are the countries that do have a space program going to sit idle no what you want to do is you want to have a fund and every country pipes in a little bit of their GDP and then or whatever but you know you measure it however you want it whatever you think is fair do it the way the way the UN does it okay so there's a tax of the world relative to your wealth and then that money pays to save the world when we find such an asteroid that that's how the Sentinel project Sentinel is is has thought this through so if they're engineers and scientists ample time there's possible there's a possibility that they could actually implement some of these plans it's all about how much time you have because what you want to do is go out and nudge it alright a little bit if you a little bit you just have to give it a sideways velocity relative to its path towards Earth if you do that early enough the the sideways velocity sort of accumulates right like ship turning slightly over the ocean over the course of time it'll deviate quite a bit correct so that angle grows I mean it's the same angle but the it spreads out and if the the ocean example is perfect is a perfect analogy so if you that early enough you do it enough so that it misses earth and it's still out there to harm you in another day but it won't render you extinct on that passage how much time do we need today if I would say we could probably get something built in ten years oh no oh my gosh so a year if we have a year the good thing about species killing asteroids is that they're large and visible what about city killing ones them boulders slip through yeah they'll slip through yeah but most of Earth's surface is not City so it'll probably hit the ocean or land but yeah if it does it would take out a city yeah there's a branch of government part of I don't if it survived the Trump changeover but it's it's part of Homeland Security where it worries about devastation to a region where the grid is taken out as well so you can't bring emergency services that bring either food water medicines any other form of transportation or communication how much thaws there to putting in a more robust grid I yeah what you would need is that's that's a good point so you need a grid that can sort of rewire itself rapidly to then bring power to a region that's what you would need and it would sort of doing that now making a grid sort of lightning proof you know power surge proof I grew up in New York City where there were a couple of very famous blackouts one in 1966 another in when was in 1978 I think and there was like whoa how should this how is this even allowed you don't have a back-up plan yeah you'll have a way to rewire this to redirect the electricity so yeah you'd need that you'd want that and I thought the new grid is supposed to have those kinds of protections built into it but I don't know enough about it to comment is one one impact oh yeah one big one yeah takes out the grid takes out the grid and then what do you have solar power at your place we just put in that solar panels yeah you lazy ever say that we have a place in the country escape - yeah that's a good move to have that escape spot yeah you have a place in upstate New Zealand yeah I used to think of it as an escape because we thought of getting it after September 11th got it in oh three oh two something like that but now it's just a good place for me to read fuel and do a lot of good writing there and they sort of thing look out for ticks oh oh my god Long Island's overwhelmed with London they got a new tick apparently that prevents you from eating meat one of the vegetarians bread that think it's followed the Lone Star tick and it prevents you from eating the meat of mammals yes it makes you allergic to alpha galactose is that what it is it's alpha gal another great radio lab podcast yeah I died detail I think the vegans and the vegetarians I think they yeah I think you still eat fish yeah not eat a mammal yes can eat red meat it's something in red meat yeah yeah so that's one of the challenges yeah right goddamn ticks yeah they are everywhere and we looked at it the other day there's I have quite a few friends that have Lyme disease and it's something you do keep for life mmm and quite a few friends like seven or eight at this point that have devastating Lyme disease and it's all East Coast people yeah well they're making love in the brush like what are they doing walking around going for a hike yeah see I'm a city person so even though I moved to come I go for a hike on my deck no just look out on the deck i but you're out there in the this gorgeous country don't you want to go wander around a little bit no no it's honestly not a thought my wife from Alaska has those thoughts all that but the power ticks overwhelms her power of curiosity those are powerful people in Alaska that's a different type of yeah they're there they're there they're bred differently oh they're strong yeah those people can survive yeah they're and they have a sentence a unity up there it's really interesting that unity I think comes from the fact that they're all in the same risk factors together yeah and if the if you and I have the same things that can kill us that makes us friends it's also they're overwhelmed by nature it's like they're overwhelmed by both its beauty and just the sheer evidence that you're insignificant I would say they're not overwhelmed they are whelmed yeah there's the right amount of whelmed I have a buddy mine who lived up there a grizzly bear killed a moose in his driveway like what right that's the kind of stuff what in the driveway they had to be careful like getting out of the house Baird cashed the Moose when we first went up there my brother-in-law hurt my wife's sister's husband kept a loaded shotgun over their bed so that when the door starts rattling in the middle of the night the the gun is in his arms reach that was good that was good yeah those [ __ ] things you ever seen one in real life I mean zoo- not a real one real one there's a there's a look they don't know I did no no we visited Denali Park but I saw it it's 500 yards away it's not closer than that did not only Park there a little bit habitual eyes too right no it's really a while oh do you know I confuse it with a Jellystone Park I'm thinking of something different you think in a Jellystone Park Denali Park is where what's that near what part of Alaska is in there it's got its got Mount McKinley it's got Denali the mountain right in it so Oh so where is it it's I forgot geographically but that's not like near the Brooks Range right no I couldn't tell you I'm not I'm not mountain range this is sheer size of Alaska when you actually look over the United States know you can superimpose it you know oh yeah what you want to know another one don't know another one yeah the size of Africa relative to United States you've done many times so excellent everything fits in there everything fits like five United States literally everything fits in there looks like most of the world yeah that's in there the United States plus Europe yeah [ __ ] crazy he's a giant place but uh what's really interesting about Alaska is how few people are there right you know I mean it's such a large intensity yeah population densities so light but but Anchorage is a really cool City like if you go there you're like oh this is a cool last house yeah nice people but if you go there in the summer bring some things to cover your eyes oh when you go into bed at night you're going to bed today yeah yeah it's yeah so so my wife said in the winter when they go to school and dark it's not nighttime just dark yeah they don't use night and day it's just our on light yeah because it's only light for a few hours yes so that's light and then it's dark you ever see that movie was it called 30 days of night vampire movie about Alaska no yeah the vampires came to us actually I've seen a pretty fun one in vampire movie in mylanta like vampire moves I have nothing against them just know that smarts they don't talk to me they don't I don't can't put that I don't see the romance of getting bitten in the neck Wow does that romance is scary actually I think the the what's that stare right series no no tell me you liked him the other series underworld the under eyes I've seen a few of those did you like those that's fun those are the dumbest ones know the Twilight fans make fun of oh no I just like the fact that there's a lead woman kicking ass those guys women who could do your show I love women put on your little show love when women are winning gasps no it's just fun well then you must love alien the original alien yeah talked about Ripley from aliens Weaver she's original female movie badass well no no they go before and I just reminded myself of this is it Barbara Rigg Barbarella no Barbara rig I think is her name she was the woman and the original British series of the Avengers oh yeah that's true but that was hokey like but she was wearing black leather that's a new martial arts and kicked ass hmm wasn't believable but whatever was believable like like when she's shooting that thing like you bought you buy it like looks throwing this to me is like to you when you're making fun okay mistakes that they make in these movies about space this [ __ ] drives me crazy people just flipping people through the air and down when they fly off buildings that stop you driving me [ __ ] crazy actually I have a tweet post it now it's too long I gotta tell you one of those dangerous guys doesn't put a case in your phone you have the [ __ ] okay Cape in your butt the back the on your phone your lock screen is the Stonehenge of Manhattan yeah yeah yeah yeah Manhattanhenge no case in your phone no you're a risk too right no so you can think of it as risk-taking or when I got the phone cuz I admire how thin this is right I'd like technology yeah serving meek ok so what I do when I got the phone I said let me do this with it ok lip it around yes and I reminded myself why do in in the military cadets why do they twirl their gun of what possible value is this in combat why do they do these things with their gun and then I realized you're not supposed to drop your gun ever hmm ever so if you twirl the gun and you don't drop it it means stuff can happen to you in combat and it is always attached to your body so I said so when I got my phone I said let me just do this ok let me just do this if I pick up the phone and so when you do that then you never drop your phone so it's not that I'm a risk-taker it's that I've changed my risk to make it so low that it is essentially won't happen and you got AppleCare know you didn't know your risk take first I fix my own damn computer second are you gonna fix your own damn phone if the screen breaks you're gonna get in there with a screwdriver and pop that [ __ ] out put the new in the key word the key phrase are there if the screen break drop it I also carry relatively expensive fountain pens what happens with that I never lose them oh I see what you're saying if you always lose your pens Amith you're not spending enough money all right like sunglasses exactly bet the same pair of sunglasses now for a record number of time right cost you $200 to get [ __ ] lose them they're just my favorite one nice time for free shout out the skeleton sunglasses Oh skeleton optics his ice lenses nice alright powerful [ __ ] psychic invented the planetarium projector did they realize they didn't make some badass 1923 1923 yeah but the same sunglasses now I think you're doing well here six months this fat stupid fingers so once you do once you get that then it doesn't drop so it's not that I'm a risk-taker is I've changed the risk so that is low enough so that it is of on part on par with other risks that you take routinely I smoked a lot of pot dude this is gonna drop I keep doing this also the things if you pick up the phone with one hand and it's upside down you you hold it in places where the center of gravity flips it but you also have some sort of a skin in the back which it's just it's just a sector of Van Gogh's Starry Night oh yeah but it's not it's there's no texture to this it's just a slippery yeah oh it's a skin it's definitely more texture you say feel that that's slicker it's complicated it's not wise there but my point is there's no ways there but it will aid in the friction a little scientists you should recognize this friction is good yes I mean isn't it one of the things they decided to do to asteroids to change their path spray some goo on them and it'll literally cause more friction in the air and cause them to deviate slightly from their path no over a long period of time I don't know where you just pull that out of your ass pray in that moment know I've read that I mean it was some dummy vacuum of space there is no friction so didn't there's some [ __ ] they could put on the if it's traveling right yes isn't there something they could put on that would aerodynamically change its path in the vacuum of space there is no aerodynamics okay so it's moving others by the time it hits Earth's atmosphere it's too late so it happens so it's what there was a coating that they were planning on putting on some aspect of would it be the act of putting the coating that's what you would do is you may be thinking of there's a coating you can put on an asteroid that differently absorbs sunlight relative to the other side so it caused it a spin that put there that can that can create a net a vector of motion is many asteroids could protect the Earth from space rock threat okay so there you go that's some [ __ ] mm-hmm okay change him out of sunlight reflected by the space but you would not do that the entire rock you do it to a part of the rock potentially nudging it away from Earth even the accumulated push provided by many thermal photons as they radiate from the app Wow the asteroids surface holy [ __ ] yeah yeah see I didn't think that through very well and somehow you added KY jelly to this I'm trying to flip this phone still yeah yeah my friend Andrew Santino he carries this [ __ ] around case free and I admire him he's braver man than I do we I sent you a list of topics did we hit all of them yeah we hit all of them we didn't hit innovation in all their cares worries no no here's one Oh we'd never even got into cars yeah just line cars why they'll never be flying cars yeah please okay since we're two hours and 40 minutes in is that allowed oh my gosh yeah we're flying no but people don't have three hours to do they oh we do it all the time really yeah oh are you sure hundred percent yeah this is not you sure yeah average podcast right now lavage really yeah I'm honored to please your average the ones we've done we've all been like close to three-hour okay here is that ding oh oh it's rude okay so let me I flipped it I turn that goddamn switch on okay so let's go back to let's go back to why anyone would want a flying car in the first place because they're an [ __ ] okay so here is stuck in traffic so here at Edison everybody just watch let's say there was only one road okay okay that was the width of your car and you're driving on this road and they're cars behind you the fastest you could go on that road is the speed of the slowest car on the road right make sense yes this is travel in one dimension that sucks what you really want is travel in two dimensions so you take the road and widen it let's make two lanes two lanes in one direction you have to the other way as well this doesn't matter here don't have too late so now I can go around you your slow ass car mmm okay but and that's fine this is a great improvement on one-dimensional travel now it's two dimensions okay I can shift left or right as well as move forward or backwards to move and the more lanes you have the more two-dimensional that is okay so four or five here in Los Angeles what is it six lanes each is twelve fricking lanes okay you are fully exploiting the two dimensionality of travel but you still have so many cars that you say to yourself I want to bypass this traffic if you went from one dimensions to two dimensions bypassing is just another lane but now all twelve lanes are plugged and you want to bypass it so you're thinking I need to travel in another dimension I want to travel in the third dimension if I do that I can bypass all these cars I want a flying car yeah okay well the point is we already have flying cars they call helicopters well the helicopters have originally invented for that they called helicopters they're noisy they have to create a downward thrust of air equal to its own weight if you're gonna have a flying cart that's what it's gonna have to do right they're noisy they're they completely disrupt the terrain wherever they fly so the issue is not that you want a flying car you want to travel in that third dimension hmm we already do that how do we do that they call tunnels they call bridges when you have a huge intersection you don't move people through one another you build the you build one Road over the other you build one road under the other you are exploiting three dimensions so that traffic can go in perpendicular directions simultaneously that's what the flying cars would have given you but we do that at intersections because it would be impossible to move 12 lanes of traffic through an intersection that crossed another freeway New York City has done this we do this the New York you're in the streets there's too many cars you can't move let's move in the third dimension let's build a subway this sounds like a guy who's trying to sell me something I'm telling you later than a flying car [ __ ] you could buy a flying car the neat I want you to appreciate moving in the third dimension the New York City subway system moves a billion people a year and they all go in the third dimension beneath the ground through tunnels tunnels that are layered on top of one another well the New York City subways this is amazing how I could move that many people it's great but it's not as good as a flying car it's not as cool as a flying car but it's as effective as a flying flying car flying car just have to get in line you'd have to get on the subway you don't have to have a token you have to go to the turnstile you deal with some guy who's rubbing his body up against yours you flying cars so you just fly around I'm just saying it's like a boat tunnels but for the air and bridges or flying cars the beautiful thing about a boat is you just go wherever you want to go now here's the thing it's kind of you don't have to call air traffic control okay I'm turning left I'm gonna take you to another dimension know someone will have to know where the hell you're flying car is going just the same way traffic rules that matter in a street you want it's not free fall you know it is with boats and you know what happens if a car fails Falls it's just on the on the ground it just stops right flying car fails you're dead right okay so I want to add another dimension to this conversation Oh a redline muskers tunnels okay ready exactly exactly so watch here's a desk in front of me okay I it's a physical desk and I have a lot of sheets of paper and and so I lay them side by side i tile the desk with all my sheets of paper then there's no desk surface left I ran out of two-dimensional space if I want to store more pages on my desk what do I do I get one of those organizers mm-hmm I've just introduced a third dimension so now I could have pages in another dimension sitting above the page that was previously occupying another place that I couldn't have put another sheet hmm that's three dimensions yes okay if we were two dimensional people we would wonder what happened to that sheet of paper because we have no access to that third dimension you it would just left our universe at this point I'll be trying to back out of the showroom and I'd say thank you though I'm going to go the flying car place so now watch but look at how much you've increased your storage by introducing another dimension now imagine a fourth spatial dimension we don't have access to that but we're now filling all three dimensions and a four dimensional creature we'll say we'll just put it up in this direction what would be the fourth dimension in that regard you can't imagine it because our brain evolved in three dimensions we haven't we can describe it mathematically maybe a wormhole and we passages in LA so our storage needs would become you can open the door put it through this portal to the fourth dimension right and close the door and look on the other side of the door and nothing would be there yeah just the way on the surface of the desk if you live in the surface test someone opens the door they put the paper through the door close the door you look around it you say where did it go I have no idea because you can't even see you came and imagine that third dimension we cannot imagine a fourth but if the world one day gets so crowded that even three-dimensional space has traffic access to a fourth dimension would greatly help that that's all I'm saying yeah good luck with that getting people to step through I still what is this Jamie some flying thing that just came out oh look at this thing wait does see that part seems CGI but it's actually flying over grass why that's moving look at this thing what is it solar-powered I don't know off the trailer like showing it describing it is it have sound does it make sound know what it looks like it looks like a human-sized drone yes it's exactly what it looks like okay what about something like this what about something like this with really powerful magnets all outside the outer edge so it repels against other drones to run a maglev flying car so if you get so close oh I see would be like a force field landing each other Oh so be like it'd be like a bumper car yes but with with cushions yes yeah yeah some sort of electromagnetic force field that you know everyone agrees that you don't have ones that are attracted to each other but opposed by the way see how big that human human size drunk drone is have you ever heard how loud a drone it [ __ ] laughs yeah you can't you can't even have a conversation yeah my neighborhood flies on around that's what shotguns are for yeah I wish I've never fired a gun in my life but the first time I ever used one its to shoot the drone that's gonna be looking through my window at my apartment oh you know this is [ __ ] [ __ ] on my neighborhood he flies around all over people's yards but I can't uncork they already think I'm crazy no way I know if I shoot it with a bow and arrow I'm not sure I'll hit it by the way did that video have sound accompanying with it has some some a little bit there's music and some description of it music but there's not the actual sound of those propellers you know this but they have on their webpage here that it's quieter than a car on a freeway what it's quieter than an electric car nor at 150 feet away measured at a hundred and fifty feet that's incredible because it's about the same as a car as a car well it says motors no count so that they're counting that as an electric car though oh they are yeah yeah Slean cars okay is that but cars today are not in top where with just energy consumption oh if they're using the same icon to represent see they're using the same so it's an electric car so it's the sound of an electric car no no there's no engine but no don't get deceived there because that's energy consumption see energy consumption uses the same icon for electric cars it does for gasoline car and then down no see it says noise it shows highway just car it doesn't tell you there's no way 76 DBA is a sound because electric cars far quieter than a regular car you all you here's the drone of the tires no but what happens is above a certain speed the the aerodynamic noise is greater than the so in a landing airplane so here's what you do you live in LA go to the in and out near LAX which is right near a landing strip okay yeah and listen to the sound of the planes as they come as they come in for landing most of that sound is airfoil noise not engine noise ah yeah which is why you can pretty much still maintain a conversation you're old enough we remember a plane would fly overhead in a city and you'd have to halt your conversation until it finished why what happened engines got quieter and quieter which enabled people to build real estate closer and closer to airports and not have not have a sound problem that's poor [ __ ] but they didn't happen overnight there was slow and steady no kidding yeah I never Boyle boys I forgot that you had to stop talking when I remember it in fact Shea Stadium in New York City near near LaGuardia Airport the the ouncers had to stop anytime a plane flew over it they couldn't they couldn't announce the game that's crazy and when the Mets were in the World Series in 1969 Mayor Lindsay redirected the airport traffic to not fly over the World Series games Wow I thought that was a badass move event of his mayor Lindsay yeah I completely forgot how loud planes used to be correct and now they're now there it's a sound that's in the in quote the noise of the street you don't even stop and notice it you didn't even pay attention at all you barely hear you barely hear it and so next time you're at a runway and when it's landing it's much noisier taking off because it's got a gained altitude but coming down it's most of that sound is glider noise and evidence of this is is the noise of air going over the airfoil of the the fuselage if you do you know the moment they deploy the the landing gear next time you're in an airplane when they say we are cleared for landing just listen listen to the ambient sound of the plane then listen to the sound after they deploy the landing is for three times as loud it ramps up hard part because of the sound of the air going around something is not aerodynamic the freaking wheels oh yes yeah yeah yeah I just never for whatever reason I never remembered that airplanes used to be louder mm-hmm yeah I think about all the time so why can't I have a flying car it's too you want the drone flying car yeah yeah so you need it you wouldn't want it that would look ugly if two of those colliding in the sky but what about my magnets here what do you what do you what night now it's got to have more power to lift the weight of the magnet solar bro plus you get some testosterone infused guy who doesn't want to let you ahead of them try to bump you then you break the propeller and then you both fall out of the sky sky rage sky rage oh it's a lot of AI rage we know it'll do it'll call the herd of testosterone driven men okay but what if they do it but the only way they work is through like the same sort of Tesla system that allows them to have you know ya know if you have automated cars you don't need flying cars yeah you do because first we too many of know there'll be fewer cars on the road but how do you figure that oh my gosh automated cars fewer cars yes how so how so how so because because what your second greatest asset your car most people's second greatest asset spends 90% of its time doing nothing you drive to work in it's parked oh you come home and it's parked 90% of his time doing nothing okay I come to work ten minutes after you a half hour after you an hour after you I'm using car you ain't using my clutch you tell you right now you're not using my car no one's using your face car I forgot this is La did you go to New York happen okay for people with a quick steal your car is a utility rather than a something you're trying to get chicks with on the street corner oh stop people try to get chicks in New York - don't drop with the cars there's a lot of people to do nobody has cars but if you do you're a baller you got one of them spots it cost you a thousand bucks a month baby I've seen some fancy cars when I've been in New York there's some fancy codes but that's not it's not it's not a hundred percent it's not a hard percent yeah but that's just that one stupid spot where you could still own the car there but you'll be delegate relegated to a lane where you won't be able to drive as fast as the automatically consider that if you're in a self-driving car and it wants to change lanes it communicates that to other self-driving cars near it there's self-driving cars tell you to [ __ ] off the Joe Rogan upload I feel like it wouldn't change anything if there's automated cars in Los Angeles I really do I don't think I don't think there'd be any less traffic I just think they're gonna make a lane that'll take automated cars and it'll go 120 miles an hour and watching everybody with their wasted horsepower in there in there is negative traffic stuck in traffic yeah I was tweet I was in LA and I was in like a Prius and we passed a Lamborghini doing 40 miles an hour and that was just seemed so embarrassing mmm - the Lamborghini still maybe doing 30 miles out we're doing 40 miles an hour we passed away better no it was like why do you have a Lamborghini because there's some times when there's no one on the road you got a Lamborghinis Drive late at night the Lamborghini is the peacock feathers as best as I can judge your Jevon one no they're wonderful its merit marvel of engineering and science I should appreciate it it's good they can go zero to 16 two and a half seconds you're still burning gas oh you don't like gas not if I don't have to did you prefer electrical if you had a car if you lived it if for whatever reason the planetarium decided look Neil you're the best ever and we opened up the most amazing spot ever it's in Los Angeles California would love you to relocate and bring a start on the car I'd if I was forced to relocate and I had only one car I'd get an electric car probably attempt to get a Prius or a Tesla would you go oh definitely testicle oh yeah you wouldn't yeah I mean like you know performance clothes Cheez Whiz Prius I'm just saying edge that's an important car that set a lot of other manufacturers into motion yeah try to you know if there's a dynamic it's a shitbox it is a dynamic that's where nice car least one thing happens and then you drive something else makes that happen but when you plug your car into the wall you're not asking yourself I wonder where this power comes from it could come from any one of a dozen sources right like hydro it could pet solar panels a tidal energy you could come from nukes it could come from oil or coal come from any of them what about clean coal have you heard about this clean coal the president's been tweeting about it clean coal all capital letters like whoa I didn't know about that I thought it was just [ __ ] cold yeah I don't so here's my point if you can if you can power things with a choice of a dozen sources of energy then those sources of energy compete with one another for your business mmm as the price of oil goes up you say I'm not going to generate power with oil we're gonna use that and I have a wind farm and I come online I'm going to sell you my wind energy and and I see you're the power company you buy my wind energy you send that power to the wall outlet and you charge in your car don't know and don't care where that energy came from Wow there's a book called turning oil into salt look it up so we can mention drain oil and assault correct why would you do that there was a day when salt was a strategic commodity yes there was no other known way to preserve food from the autumn harvest to the spring set of crops so food got salted okay yeah that's there's the book what's the woman's name again left and an Corrin okay so I'm now describing the thesis of that book okay turning oil went to salt so here's what you do so we had salt if I took away your assault reserves you would starve over the winter so everybody knew where their salt came from everybody knew how much their salt cost do you know do you realize that Grant General Grant destroy the salt reserves of the Southern Confederacy knowing that that would force them faster to surrender because they wouldn't have food reserves to last through the winter I growing up Ned did not understand the phrase you are the salt of the earth salt gives you high blood pressure what do you what do you mean the salt is stop saying that sodium does No yeah doesn't have too much right no yeah no let's get that in a minute let me finish the thing so they give them something wrong with you for that so there's whether it's chronic or not that I agree with you there feel chronic high blood pressure it's not just us right right but I I can increase my blood pressure now by not peeing and taking an ingesting salt by not peeing why would you not pee well because you retain the water and it gets good pump through this is what the salt does you retain the liver and let me get back to the okay so so I said salt of the earth why is that a compliment I remember thinking of myself but there was a day when salt really mattered okay all right so um so what happens the nineteenth century we figure out how to can foods mmm you can have berries and put them we can then we you seal you can make preserves the name of the food is what it is right it's preserved okay so now week that's another way to protect your food to have it last through times when you don't have crops wait a minute refrigeration get we have a lecture I can refrigerate wait a minute I can now freeze food hmm I got a half dozen ways I can eat over the winter and only one of them is salt so now salt has lost its strategic value lost his mojo lost his mojo it's still there we still eat salted foods and as a you know over flavor but it's a different thing culture it's a different thing now it's a matter of choice not a matter of necessity a lot of great foods came out of that you know the salted pork and the bacon and the very tasty foods came out of that movement okay so right now when you buy salt do you know where it came from no unless you get Hawaiian salt they should get gourmet salt from earth foods you just buying Morton Salt you know where it came from no do you remember how much it cost no it's too cheap grieve if you'd even remember that okay if you're gonna turn oil into salt what you're doing is you're turning energy into salt that's the value of a plug in the wall design a car that can run on five different kinds of energy then oil has to compete with the other kinds of energy oh I see what you're saying so have an engine that's works on hydrogen correct yeah yeah yeah if you sells batteries so they have hybrids now that work on two different things it's a start but my point is if you do that then we no longer fight wars for oil maybe you don't fight for freedom how about freedom bro freedom isn't free free we just did three hours three hours holy crazy how time flies by dude astrophysics for people in a hurry that's this is old hurry on the New York Times bestseller seven Ray's effect 67 weeks 67 effect the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military that's not even a yessiree to war can pre of course you can pre-order but it's not out they'd like it if you'd free work so they know how to print than the thing we got your greasy hands that's if you're not in a hurry I'm learning some things you're not look I'm reading uh don't buy this book if you're not in a hurry yeah this is this is a long-form book yes and gentlemen you got to do some thinking there's no pictures check that's why you never know Neil deGrasse Tyson ladies and gentlemen Oh start talk radio it's it's a podcast it's also Nat Geo yeah it's not about Sirius XM channel 121 the insight channel I might have and cosmos look for cosmos in the spring you know the date isn't announced yet thank you sir we got a boat always love you man love you too all right everybody [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 15,996,761

Rating: 4.783905 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, JRE #1159, JRE, Neil deGrasse Tyson, comedy, comedian, astrology, NDT, Star Talk Radio, jokes, stand up, funny, Joe Rogan

Id: vGc4mg5pul4

Length: 201min 8sec (12068 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 22 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/AnyNamesLeftAnymore]

Hah! Love that Joe invoked the first Sam/JP podcast.

2 1/2 hours of that, ladies and gents.

[u/elAntonio]

Thought this sub might be interested in this given the conversation about "truth" Sam had with Peterson.
Personally I don't agree with having such an elastic definition of truth. Makes it more difficult to say something is false.
edit: oops! title typo.

[u/bloodcoffee]

I thought this was absolutely hilarious. Like he wouldn't fight back if people started redefining words he cared about, like "physics" or "astronomy."

[u/supreme1337GOD]

personal truth seems like an oxymoron to me

[u/ZhouLe]

Godspeed is from Middle English "speden" meaning "to prosper". It's "good luck" not "don't slow down and have rapid unscheduled disassembly." That's some serious folk-etymologizing there.

NDT has a lot of insight into a lot of topics, and is a wonderful presenter, but he's infuriating when he does stupid things like this while presenting it the same way as something he is well versed in.

I would say the usefulness of these three terms is only in clarifying the usage of someone deliberately abusing the terms. Much like splitting "racism" into "institutional racism" and "racial prejudice" to someone that abuses the term "racism" to only mean the former; or clarifying "faith" to "trust", "religion", "fidelity", or "acceptance without evidence" when the term is abused in to say something like "Science requires faith".

NDT needs someone to break up the term "atheist" for him as well, because for whatever reason he has attached baggage to the word that doesn't belong. It's as if he avoids all animal derived products, but is loathe to say he's a vegan "because those people are always combative with people who eat meat".

edit: What the hell, exactly what I mean.

[u/Metamancer]

Yeeeaaaah that's just bullshit. What he means is that there's only one kind of truth but there are things about which he can tolerate people's false beliefs.

[u/Beej67]

I'm not a NDT fan at all, but I love this segment. But in a perfect world, Joe Rogan asks, "Is 'gender is a social construct' an objective truth, a personal truth, or a political truth?"

And then we see what NDT says, and we learn not only about truth, but also about him.

[u/[deleted]]

Difference is, Neil does appreciate objective truth as much as anyone, he does not deny it neither. Totally different from Jordan and Sam (in which Sam was and still is completely right). But I agree, it's mildly confusing and MIGHT be mildly unhelpful.

[u/boywonder5691]

I'm sure this is exactly what Trump meant.