#1130 - Adam Frank

[0] Five, four, three, two, one.

[1] Boom.

[2] Boom.

[3] Adam, what's up, man?

[4] How you doing?

[5] It's good to be here today.

[6] It's good to be here, too, with you and to talk.

[7] Whoa, I'm already knocking shit over.

[8] Can't be trusted.

[9] Your book, Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.

[10] Yeah.

[11] All about it.

[12] That's deep shit, man. Just the title alone, you're like, whoa.

[13] I love it.

[14] Aliens.

[15] Everybody loves aliens.

[16] Everybody does, but what are your thoughts on actual aliens and whether or not they've ever visited here?

[17] Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, sort of two things.

[18] So, first of all, uh, we should tell everybody, you have a background on science.

[19] I do.

[20] I'm an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester.

[21] I run a research group that studies like stars and planets.

[22] So you're not a crazy person I brought on here.

[23] No, no, no. I'm a card carrying scientist.

[24] I got my card and everything.

[25] So, you know, I've been doing research on, you know, astronomy, astrophysics for a long.

[26] time.

[27] But I also do all this popular writing, like for NPR and New York Times.

[28] And the genesis of this book came, A, because I love science fiction.

[29] I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid.

[30] But also I do a lot of work on climate change.

[31] And so I deal with a lot of climate change denial.

[32] And what I realized was that like there's this way we talk about it that is like completely forgets about the fact that like we're probably not the first, you know.

[33] And that led me to a whole bunch of research that eventually led to this book, you know, including one paper that we did that showed that the odds that were the only time it's ever happened, the only, you know, the only civilization in the entire history of the universe, the only way that that could be true is if the odds per planet are one in 10 billion trillion, right?

[34] That's pretty low, right?

[35] So, you know, the odds of anything being one in 10 billion trillion, that's pretty freaking low.

[36] So it's probably happened before, you know.

[37] There's been other civilizations before ours.

[38] And once you realize that, man, that is like, you know, it changes every, about how we think about ourselves, you know, and what's happening to us right now.

[39] So other civilizations before ours that have fucked things up.

[40] Well, that's kind of the premise, right?

[41] So that's what, you know, when you look at climate change, right, basically what it is, is civilizations are giant machines for turning energy into work, right?

[42] You know, New York City, right?

[43] You sit over and you look at Manhattan.

[44] You're like, holy shit, right?

[45] There's all this energy flowing into it.

[46] And then there's all this work being done, you know, to keep everything moving.

[47] And, you know, there's no way not to have an image.

[48] If you build a world girdling civilization, which, you know, that's what a civilization is, there's going to be impact.

[49] So the whole point of my doing this book was to start looking at ourselves as just one of, you know, we're not alone.

[50] We're not the only time this has ever happened.

[51] Doesn't mean anybody's around now.

[52] Like, that's a different question.

[53] But the idea that like it's never happened before, it meaning like, you know, you know, civilization, what's happening around us, like this machinery and everything.

[54] That, you know, that just in the new world of what we understand about planets and shit, that is just like, you know, it's not.

[55] anymore.

[56] We got to wake up.

[57] The idea that some civilization has to be the first one.

[58] That's what the only way you could ever think that we're the only ones is that some civilization has to be the first one, even in a universe that's infinite.

[59] Yeah.

[60] Yeah.

[61] It has to happen one time.

[62] Right.

[63] But the idea is are the conditions ideal in, you know, a trillion different spots all over the infinite spance of the universe?

[64] Yeah.

[65] And that's the thing, right?

[66] So what we've learned, so, you know, one of my trips right now is like, this is not your grandfather's setty anymore, right?

[67] Our understanding, we went through this major revolution in our understanding of planets about 20 years ago.

[68] So you look back at the Greeks, right?

[69] And you can see them arguing about whether any other stars had planets other than, you know, the sun.

[70] And, you know, it goes back and forth.

[71] You know, some of the Greeks were like, yeah, it's definitely happening.

[72] And then like Aristotle was like, no, we're the only world in the whole, in the whole universe, you know, that has life.

[73] And then as time goes on, it kind of goes back and forth.

[74] And even at the turn of the 19th century, people thought planets were incredibly rare.

[75] They thought the only way you could get a planet was if two stars passed really close to each other.

[76] And they kind of like taffy pulled out stuff that would eventually form a planet.

[77] And the odds of those kinds of collisions are so small that people are like, you know what, there's just no planets.

[78] And no planets, no life, you know, unless something really freaky is going on.

[79] But then 20 years ago, we discovered our first planet.

[80] Isn't that crazy when you really think about that 20 years is such a short amount of time?

[81] 1998.

[82] Yeah, yeah.

[83] And nobody knew before that, like nobody knew whether there were any planets, right?

[84] You know, when I was starting in a drive, people were like, well, we don't know whether there's going to be any other planets.

[85] And we went from, the first one was actually 96, I think, 9596.

[86] From that to now where we know that every freaking star in the sky has a planet, at least one.

[87] You know, pretty much everyone.

[88] I mean, the big, the giant ones maybe not, but they're so rare that, you know, pretty much every star you see in the sky has a family of planets around it.

[89] That is so nuts.

[90] It's so nuts that this is such a new discovery.

[91] Yeah.

[92] I mean, when we think about what we know about the universe, we think that we've had a pretty good understanding of it for a long time.

[93] Right.

[94] But the fact that we didn't even know for sure that there are planets.

[95] Right, right.

[96] In my own lifetime, you know, people were teaching me when I was starting, like, you know, we just don't know maybe they're rare.

[97] And now we know for certain that they're everywhere.

[98] And the thing people have to realize is every one of those planets is a place.

[99] You know what I mean?

[100] It's a place you could walk around.

[101] Some of them, for sure, are going to have oceans.

[102] There's going to be mountains.

[103] There's going to be rain falling.

[104] You know, I mean, like, they're all freaking places, and they're all places where things can happen, you know?

[105] Planets are basically, like, nature's way of taking sunlight and doing something interesting with it.

[106] So you have 10 billion, trillion planets in the universe, right?

[107] And every one of them is an experiment that's being run.

[108] So, you know, the idea that, like, we're the first time it's out.

[109] Now that we know that, right, now that we've gone through that revolution and understand that planets are like dime a dozen.

[110] We're not only talking about planets here, we're talking about planets are in the right place for life to form.

[111] So there's the idea of the habitable zone, right?

[112] So, you know, Mercury sucks.

[113] You cannot, you know, Mercury's so hot that there's no way anything's going to happen.

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

[115] Is the place where you can have, you can pour water onto the surface and they'll sit there.

[116] It won't freeze and it won't sort of just evaporate away.

[117] So all these 10 billion trillion planets I'm talking about are all in the right place for life to form.

[118] you know and so like with that many numbers that many experiments being run like you got to be a psychotic pessimist to say that like this is the only time a civilization's ever happened right but there's still no evidence yet obviously we didn't even know they're really absolutely were planets until 20 years ago right but we don't know for sure that there's something else out there no no this is an argument by uh i call it like an argument by exhaustion you know if i gave you a bag of 10 billion trillion planets and you have to sort through all of them right the odds that you're never going to find another one that built a civilization is pretty...

[119] Like I said, you're really asking for really serious pessimism.

[120] But, you know, we're just getting started with this game, right?

[121] Of looking for life.

[122] That's why I keep saying it's not, this is not your grandfather's setty where you, like, you point, you know, a radio telescope at a star and you kind of wait to see whether somebody's signaling you.

[123] Who knows whether they're signaling?

[124] Who knows what they'd be using?

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

[126] So we're going to like, who knows what we're going to find?

[127] You know, we're not waiting for them to signal us anymore.

[128] Over the next, I swear to God, man, in the next 30 years, we're going to have data relevant to the question of life.

[129] Maybe not civilizations.

[130] That could happen too, but just life on other worlds, you know, and we've never had that before.

[131] All the arguments for the entire history of humanity have just been two dudes yelling at each other, right?

[132] But in the next 30 years, because the stuff we're building.

[133] And now that we have, no, there's planets.

[134] We're going to have real data to argue over it.

[135] So, man, it's like, we're in a whole other ballgame.

[136] now.

[137] I think the big fear for a lot of people is what happens when we find out for sure that there's something else out there.

[138] Yeah.

[139] If we really do find like some other Manhattan on some Goldilocks planet, it's hovering some similarly sized star a billion light years away or whatever the hell it is, that's, that's going to be very, very, very strange.

[140] It will be.

[141] It'll be a game changer, right?

[142] Because for religions, for, you know, I mean, wow, you know, what do you do if you find other intelligent creatures who are building civilization?

[143] You start making them pay taxes.

[144] That's what you do.

[145] That's right.

[146] You go get pissed off that they're not doing what you want them to do.

[147] You should be believing this one.

[148] You know, so, but I think, you know, for me, the thing is like, it's about climate change because what it means is like there's no way, well, from my perspective, you know, that if you have a civilization, you push your planet.

[149] You know, you can't stop it in some sense.

[150] If you build a civilization, it's kind of.

[151] Well, the only way around it is if you have like subsistence culture, indigenous Native American culture.

[152] Right.

[153] which it seems impossible, but it existed here 200 years ago, which is a blink of an eye.

[154] Right, right.

[155] I know.

[156] It's amazing.

[157] It's only 200 years since like this, the ramp up.

[158] You know, that the world population only crossed the billion mark in like 1850.

[159] You know, I mean, there were so few of us on the planet for most of the time that even we've been around.

[160] Forget the planet's history.

[161] So, you know, I think like there is, you know, the discovery, if we were to get any evidence, you know, and I think the way it's going to happen is going to be more by action.

[162] accident then by like signaling, you know, like that so, so, but if we had any evidence of another technological, if we had any evidence of just life, right?

[163] If we just find a biosphere, evidence that, you know, and we can do that from a distance, right?

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

[165] That's what we can do with telescopes.

[166] We can tell like what you can see the fingerprints of the different kinds of elements.

[167] If we see oxygen in that atmosphere, you know, and methane, that pretty much says that there's a biosphere there, that there's life.

[168] Because you wouldn't get, oxygen would just, like, react away really fast if it wasn't for life.

[169] Like on Earth, if it wasn't for life, there'd be no oxygen in the atmosphere.

[170] What are the possibilities of life that exists in a completely different environment than we expect?

[171] Like, I know that they found life at the bottom of the ocean and these volcanic vents at extreme heats, boiling water.

[172] They didn't expect to see this.

[173] Yeah.

[174] And this is fairly recent as well.

[175] That is.

[176] Yeah.

[177] The idea that the, because right, this whole definition of the habitable zone.

[178] was based on the idea like, oh, you've got to have a surface and it's got to be, you know, but now with the, you know, not every, but like a bunch of the moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn and the gas giants, they have oceans under them.

[179] Well, there's thoughts that Europa might have something below the surface, right?

[180] Yeah, yeah, because the Europa is, you know, it's this pretty big moon and we know it's covered in ice, right?

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

[182] And because as it moves around Jupiter, it's the gravity of Jupiter, it's the gravity of who's always squishing the insides, that there's probably volcanic activity happening at the surface.

[183] So you have hydrothermal vents, you know, heat escaping out of the, and chemicals escaping out of the surface under the ocean.

[184] And that's how we think life formed on Earth.

[185] That's one of the arguments for how life formed.

[186] It formed first in the hydrothermal vents.

[187] So, yeah, you know, it's a new, that's another game changer, right?

[188] So that we should also be thinking not just about the classic, the habitable zone.

[189] But now we've got to think about like life and can you get civilizations in an underwater, you know, in an underwater?

[190] Maybe you have a really rich ecosystem, but, you know, the problem with a, you know, an underwater life or forming civilization is that you can't really do fire, right?

[191] Fire was pretty important for us, for metallurgy, you know, to build advanced technology, you kind of need combustion.

[192] So, you know, that's kind of the open question with that.

[193] Yeah, we are not really concerned with animals.

[194] We're concerned with things that think and change their environment.

[195] Isn't that weird?

[196] Like, we are concerned with life, but we're only concerned with life that's at least similar or comparable to us.

[197] Yeah, microbes don't like, you know, we don't, yeah, they don't get too excited, yeah.

[198] We're not going to go to Jupiter for some microbes.

[199] Yeah, right.

[200] But we are excited about the things that they've recently found on Mars, right?

[201] I mean, there's very recent discovery.

[202] Right, right.

[203] So, you know, the thing is actually from the, you know, so I'm going to, I work in a lot of fields, but I would also consider myself an astrobiologist, right, which is a pretty kind of wild idea that you can do astrobiology, even though you only have one example, which is the earth.

[204] But we've learned so much that now we can start asking ourselves about the possibility of life elsewhere.

[205] So finding even a microbe, like even a frigging, you know, amoeba on Mars would be or even evidence that there used to be amoebas on Mars.

[206] And what is the evidence that they've discovered on Mars?

[207] What they found was organic can.

[208] chemistry, right?

[209] And so, but organic chemistry, man, I hated chemistry when I was growing up, and I hated organic chem, was that just basically chemistry involving carbon, you know, so you can have non or, you know, organic chemistry doesn't mean organisms.

[210] But it's the kind of chemistry that organisms love, right?

[211] So finding evidence that there was like, they drilled it amazing.

[212] Like, we sent a freaking robot to Mars that could drill through a rock, you know, and then ingest the rock.

[213] And then send the data back across space.

[214] Man, we're, you know, pretty good for a bunch of hairless apes, you know.

[215] Yeah.

[216] So what they found was evidence for, you know, fairly complex, you know, organic chemistry, which meant that way back when Mars, and this we know for sure, right, Mars had water on it.

[217] We know that for sure now.

[218] Mars was a blue planet for at least a well.

[219] Do they think that Mars was hit by an asteroid or a comet or something along those lines?

[220] Well, everything got hit by comets.

[221] That's how we have, you know, we have chunks of Mars here, right?

[222] That, you know, the thing in 96 or whatever, when they were like, oh, we found life on Mars.

[223] You know, they thought what they found was fossil bacteria in a chunk of Mars that they found in Antarctica.

[224] So the planets have been swapping spit for, like, the entire history of the solar system.

[225] That's fossilized bacteria that they found.

[226] Has that been confirmed?

[227] No, no. Most people now think that the Allen Hills meteorite that probably, you know, it's inconclusive and it's not conclusive enough to be like, yeah, we found life.

[228] It's like a tiny little squiggly worm -looking thing.

[229] That's what it was, yeah.

[230] But it was so small that it was like way smaller than any of the microscopic fossilized bacteria we've ever seen before.

[231] So people in general are like, nah, but by fine, but that's what started, right?

[232] That's when Clinton was like, okay, we're going to send a lot of shit to Mars.

[233] Because back in 90, early 90s, people were kind of done with Mars.

[234] And so that's what triggered the whole, you know, one space probe after another, the rovers.

[235] And like so, you know, the thing we found was a direct result of that effort, which was this organic chemistry, which says that back in the day, Mars had had a lot of this stuff lying around, had a lot of these, you know, these organic chemicals lying around.

[236] which if your life, that's what you're going to be using.

[237] So that's like one more step.

[238] Like we've been putting the Lego blocks for the argument for life on Mars, one piece at a time since the first rovers went there.

[239] Yeah.

[240] If we did discover just even plants on some other planet, even just a planet with some sort of plant -like life.

[241] Yeah, that would be a game changer.

[242] Because right now we don't know if there's, you know, are we the only time in the entire history of the universe?

[243] That like this crazy thing where you got, we went from non -life to life.

[244] Like, is that common or is that never, ever, ever happen?

[245] So that's the question we want to, you know, we want to answer.

[246] I mean, like, you know, that argument I was given before is I think from the probable arguments, I'm saying it's like, you know, it's almost overwhelming that, yeah, it probably happened somewhere.

[247] Again, it doesn't mean anything's here.

[248] But we need evidence, right?

[249] Science.

[250] So we got to build that evidence.

[251] Yeah.

[252] And if we do find something, the one of the weirder things would be if we found something and there was a way to get there.

[253] Yeah, you know, we find something and like, yeah, we find something, but it's, we're pretty sure there's some kind of life and it's three billion light years away.

[254] You're like, well, that's cool.

[255] Yeah, what do we do?

[256] Yeah.

[257] Yeah.

[258] It's nice to know that we're not the only ones.

[259] Yeah.

[260] Well, you know, it's interesting.

[261] Like, how much would that change?

[262] You know, even if we found, like, evidence for, this is a debate, like, if we found evidence of a technological civilization, we saw like alien megastructures, like that star they thought about.

[263] Yeah, what was that nonsense.

[264] It wasn't really nonsense.

[265] It was, you know, something floating around, right?

[266] So here's what they saw.

[267] So the way we discover planets is we look for when the planets passes in front of the star, you get a little dip in the light, right?

[268] It blocks out a little bit of light.

[269] It's like a little eclipse.

[270] And so, you know, now that's how we know that every star in the sky has planets.

[271] But there's like, they found one that just made no sense.

[272] Like the light would dip, then it would stop dipping.

[273] Then it would dip again three times and it would stop dipping.

[274] Sometimes it was lower.

[275] Sometimes it was higher.

[276] And, you know, for a year so, people were like, what the fuck is this?

[277] You know?

[278] And so, you know, Jason Wright and others, Jason.

[279] a friend of mine.

[280] You know, they wrote a paper where they were like, hey, you know, at least, because this is what the future is going to look like.

[281] We can't say, we have to at least consider the possibility that these are artificial structures that are like orbiting the star or, you know.

[282] It would have to be ungodly huge.

[283] Ungodly huge.

[284] Alien megastructures.

[285] Like that's the best word ever.

[286] Like the size of a country, right?

[287] Yeah.

[288] These things would be huge, right?

[289] But that's what people think, like, you know, when people think about advanced alien civilizations, the idea of building large scale structures is, you think that maybe.

[290] the next thing you do.

[291] Once you would reach a certain point, like, you know, the Dyson sphere, the idea that you could collect all of the sun's energy and use it for yourself by building a giant sphere around the sun with solar panels on the inside.

[292] People think like, that goes back to Cardishchev's, the idea of this Cartesheff scale back in the 60s, where he's like, look, there's going to be a natural progression of civilizations that goes first, you collect all the energy you can from your planet, and then you use that to do amazing things, and then you collect all the energy from your star, and then you do that, you know, you do amazing shit with down.

[293] And then, you know, the whole galaxy.

[294] So, you know, Cardishchev thought there was a scale that civilizations naturally progress through.

[295] And you hopefully don't blow yourself up along the way.

[296] Well, I think that's the question.

[297] I mean, you know, I've criticized the Cardochef scale in one the papers I recently did because what it fails to take into account is the fact that, like, you know, on your way up to the type one.

[298] Type one is when you harvest all the energy from your planet, which basically means somehow covering your planet in, you know, solar panels or something.

[299] That neglects what we've learned since Cardochev wrote his paper in 64 is that, you know, planets don't like that shit.

[300] Like the planet's going to feed back.

[301] You try and build, you know, massive shit on your planet.

[302] The planet has its own, you know, biosphere is pretty powerful and you've got to take the biosphere in account or you get climate change.

[303] You get, you know, the planet being pushed off in another direction.

[304] So, but whatever.

[305] So for the alien megastructures, people thought like, oh, maybe this is like a piece of a Dyson sphere, right?

[306] This is like, you know.

[307] Now, so, you know, when he proposed this, people went bonkers over this, right?

[308] He was just saying, he's like, look, here's the 15 different things could be.

[309] And I'm going to have to at least consider the possibility that it's artificial.

[310] official.

[311] But for me, and some people got really angry and everything, but I thought like this is, look, why did they get angry?

[312] Because there's been a thing in the community over the years, you know, SETI got a bad name, right?

[313] SETI for a bunch of you know, SETI was sort of thought as being like, oh, only whack -a -doodles do that.

[314] But why is that?

[315] Just because there was no results?

[316] I just think, you know, there was, you know what is?

[317] It's because of shitty TV, you know?

[318] I mean, I really, in some ways, right?

[319] It's all, you know, it's prosthetic foreheads, right?

[320] It's the whole we've had so much kind of crappy, you know, speculation.

[321] about aliens that trying to do anything scientific always had this whiff of sort of being a little you know and then there's the UFO stuff you know which is completely separate has nothing to do with it but seti never really achieved any results right there was that one big blip that was highly popularized oh wow signal yeah but here's the thing about setty we never really did setty that much you know i mean like people have this idea like wow we've got telescopes all over the world and they're looking you know so the government never funded a setty study anything major right so people you know All that SETI has done is like basically, you know, some dudes on a telescope get a little extra time.

[322] You're like, hey, man, quick, let's go look at a star.

[323] Right.

[324] You know, so Jill Tarter, who's one of the founders, one of the greats of SETI, she compares it.

[325] It's like, you know, we've got an ocean that we need to look at.

[326] And so far we've looked at a thimble, right?

[327] Was she the Jody Foster character?

[328] She's the Jody Foster character.

[329] Yeah, we're in contact.

[330] Yeah.

[331] Yeah.

[332] So she's, you know, and it's a good point.

[333] Like, we haven't really looked yet.

[334] So the idea that, you know, the stars are silent or anything, it's like, man, come on.

[335] We haven't even begun to do a comprehensive survey.

[336] SETI makes me sad.

[337] Why?

[338] Because I feel like they're wasting their time.

[339] And there was a documentary I saw once about some biologist who was convinced that the giant sloth was still alive.

[340] And that there was examples of them in South America.

[341] And this poor bastard had spent more than a decade looking for this giant sloth in South America.

[342] And there was this moment where he was chasing.

[343] down this supposed dung pile and they were looking for it they were you know found it and he had this look in his eyes where like he was like holy shit what if I waste my fucking life yeah in my academic career yeah chasing down something that's not even real yeah that's kind of how I've always felt about SETI yeah but that's not the way the people I mean everybody who's involved in it um you know I don't do SETI you know I mean you know I respect the people are doing it it's not you know but you know most of them are like look this is just a multi generational thing you know and if Even if I don't find it, I'm laying the foundation.

[344] It's like, you know, cathedrals, right?

[345] It took, like, how many generations did it take to build a cathedral in medieval Europe?

[346] Right, sure.

[347] So the first guy who laid the stone was like, I'm not going to see this.

[348] You know, maybe my great grandkid.

[349] So most of them are like, you know, they know that this is going to, you know, this is a, this is a huge.

[350] It's like the most important question in humanity, right?

[351] Are we alone?

[352] And they're willing to accept that.

[353] Like, you know, if you're going to do it scientifically, you're going to have to do it brick by frickin' brick.

[354] You know, and so you just have to accept that and, you know, go on.

[355] So.

[356] But like I said, I think we.

[357] You know, this is a new era now.

[358] So the idea of like looking for signals, which assumes that somebody's putting out signals, right?

[359] That's a huge assumption right there.

[360] But now that we know that there's all these planets and we're staring at all these planets, it's kind of, we need to be thinking differently about, you know, we need to be prepared for like what happens when we see something we don't understand.

[361] Well, it's also, we don't even use radio anymore.

[362] Right.

[363] Right.

[364] I mean, radio is dying slowly but surely.

[365] Local radio is, I mean, it's kind of a thing of the past.

[366] Yeah, right.

[367] Right, the only thing that's really we're beaming out a large scale is military radars.

[368] You know, that's the main thing.

[369] So there would be some kind of signal.

[370] It wouldn't necessarily have to be radar or radio.

[371] It would just have to be something that we could detect, some form of anomaly that seemed to be artificial.

[372] Right.

[373] So here's like, here's some of the suggestions that people are talking about.

[374] So Avi Loeb at Harvard talks about the idea, you know, maybe what you need and you're going to need the sensitivity for this.

[375] You're going to see like rocket engines going back and forth between, you know, you have a planet.

[376] You have a multi -planet civilization in some.

[377] And you're going to see little flares as rockets decelerate and accelerate back and forth.

[378] People have talked about seeing city lights.

[379] You know, the telescopes are getting, you know, we're building these giant telescopes.

[380] They're like 30 meters across.

[381] Where there may be a potential one day to see a city light.

[382] You could see city lights.

[383] You know, you're going to see the planet come around.

[384] Like this is all, like, you know, we're not there yet.

[385] Right.

[386] 20 years, 30 years.

[387] 30 years, 40 years.

[388] You know, this is a long game.

[389] And you've got to be playing the long game.

[390] At some point, we're going to need to build stuff in space that's even larger so we can collect more light.

[391] And won't the issue also be that if we do see these city lights, we're seeing city lights for millions of years ago?

[392] Well, it depends.

[393] Like, you know, a planet that's in a star 10 light years ago, that's 10 years ago.

[394] So it's not like, you know, these things could still be around.

[395] Here's a really interesting idea.

[396] Like, because, you know, one of the things that I'm talking about in my book is like, how long does any civilization last, right?

[397] That's the real question.

[398] All of this stuff is super relevant for us now because the question is, what is the average lifetime of a civilization?

[399] So you might be able to see artifacts from civilizations that are gone.

[400] Like, imagine a civilization covered one of its moons in solar panels, right?

[401] The reflected light is going to show a spectral signature of the panels.

[402] You know, so it's like they don't even have to necessarily be alive now that we still might be able to see stuff from their, you know, evidence of like artificial structures or something that's not natural around them.

[403] So, you know, that's the thing, man. It's like we're really, we're just, we're about to take this step in astrobiology where we're, you know, we're already running models of exobiospheres, right, which we're asking like, oh, what kind of chemistry can you have if you don't, like, if you have photosynthesis on a planet around a star that's smaller than ours, that star is going to be mostly red as opposed to yellow like our, so the light that's coming off and is going to be different.

[404] Can you have photosynthesis in that case?

[405] And people are like, yeah, you probably could and what would it look like.

[406] So we're already doing the work to be ready for exo biospheres.

[407] So exo -civilizations, kind of need to be prepared for that too, looking for, you know, what could be the traces, what might we see from a distance from an exo civilization?

[408] They don't have to be signaling us, you know, they're just there and we're going to catch some aspect of their being around.

[409] And if we did see rocket, if we did see some sort of a signature from rockets going back and forth or the, we would have to assume that this is a similarly aged civilization to ours.

[410] Whereas if we saw something that was a thousand, a hundred thousand years advanced, we probably wouldn't see that anymore.

[411] We'd probably see some sort of a manipulation of time and space.

[412] Right.

[413] If that's possible.

[414] If it's possible.

[415] Yeah.

[416] So that's, I mean, of course, that is one of the problems is that when you start, you know, when you start pushing, it's just like saying like, you know, what is the, what are we going to be like in a million years?

[417] Who the freak knows?

[418] You know, I mean, it's so long.

[419] So I think you start with what you know.

[420] And the cool thing about the planet part, though, is that, you know, unless they become like energy beings, you know, they're going to have an effect on their planet.

[421] So looking at their planets to look for you know, for spectral indications.

[422] That's probably, even after they die, there might even be things.

[423] So that's, I think, you know, a good way to go.

[424] Yeah, I'm, yeah, I'm so curious as to what we're going to be able to do in a thousand years and 10 ,000 years and 100 ,000 years.

[425] If civilization does stay around and we figure out how to not melt the earth or boil the oceans or whatever the fuck we're doing wrong.

[426] Oh, yeah, right.

[427] But there's, you know, a bunch of science fiction films that do speculate, what, what's going to be possible.

[428] in the future and one of them was uh what was that recent one with uh what's his name all right all right what's his name what's his name Matthew McConaughey Matthew McConaugh um the one where they go through the wormholes right how much to those movies piss you off they don't I don't I do not mean but they get so love science fiction so you know I mean I do not need my science fiction to be correct to be correct I mean you know if they want to make you know so I love the expanse the expanse is my favorite show ever I will talk about it What is the expanse?

[429] The expanse?

[430] I don't even know.

[431] Thank you.

[432] Help me. So the expanse, it's a series of books, first of all, that I think are the best science fiction books in the last 15 years.

[433] Really?

[434] And then they made it into a show on sci -fi.

[435] And then they had three years of it.

[436] And, you know, at first people were like, oh, this is kind of hard to follow.

[437] Because, you know, it's a lot of stories coming together.

[438] And then, you know, this year it got 100 % ratings.

[439] Or what is it?

[440] Rotten tomatoes?

[441] Rotten tomatoes.

[442] 100 % or 95%.

[443] Like, people love a show.

[444] And then freaking sci -fi canceled it, you know?

[445] And so then Jeff Bezo just, yeah, Jeff Bezo just picked it up.

[446] Oh, good for you, Jeff.

[447] Fuck yeah, Richman.

[448] All right, so let me tell you why this show is amazing, right?

[449] So it takes place about 200 years from now, and we are truly a multi -planet species.

[450] Like Mars now has, you know, billion people on it.

[451] And it's become its own political power, right?

[452] It's separated from the Earth.

[453] And then the asteroid belt has also people are colonizing and, you know, living on the asteroid belt to, you know, mine resources.

[454] But the belters, as they call them, are like, they're like second -class citizens.

[455] They're basically like super poor and they've got the boot on their necks by either Earth or Mars.

[456] And so there's this whole interplanetary kind of political shit going on, which is just great, you know.

[457] And then there's you enter into this.

[458] They discover like what they call the proto molecule.

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

[460] You know, I don't want to.

[461] So, no, that's okay.

[462] No one's going to remember.

[463] All right, good, good.

[464] So that, you know, that becomes kind of a weapon in this, this political intrigue.

[465] So it's just a great story.

[466] It's kind of like people call it like the Game of Thrones in space.

[467] But I'll tell you what I love about it is that this is what it's going to look like.

[468] Like, they get the science on this show so right as much as you can, right?

[469] So, you know, in space, if your rocket motors are on, there's gravity.

[470] Because, you know, the rocket motors push up towards you and so, you've got gravity.

[471] You can walk around.

[472] When you turn the rocket motors off, you float around, right?

[473] On spinning things, you know, anything.

[474] So, you know, in this universe, you know, in this, the fictional universe, they've taken the big asteroids and they've hollowed them out and spun them up.

[475] So people live on the inside, you know.

[476] And so at one point, like one of the characters, the private eye, they got this great sort of film noir thing going on.

[477] And he pours a drink, you know, some whiskey.

[478] And the whiskey does this.

[479] It spirals into this.

[480] So they got like the Coriolis effect.

[481] It's like, I peed my pants.

[482] I was like, oh, my God, they got the Coriolis effect, right.

[483] So it's like, this is really what it's going to look like.

[484] You know what I mean?

[485] This is if you want to imagine 200 years from now, which I think is completely feasible that we have millions of people living in space.

[486] Do they make any advances socially?

[487] No. People are assholes to each other and that's what makes it.

[488] But it's only 200 years.

[489] That's a lot to ask for.

[490] Well, think about how different we are from people that live 50 years ago.

[491] I mean, are we that different?

[492] I think we're quite a bit different.

[493] In what way?

[494] What do you think?

[495] Well, we have this ability.

[496] to communicate now that we never did before where everybody has an ability to say their peace about how they feel about how things are going yeah no that's interesting right and that has changed a lot of things in a lot of ways but I mean has it changed who we are I mean I think evolution I think it's chipping away yeah well that would be good if it good I'm you know because one of the things my thing so it what's interesting about this fictional world too is that like climate you know the earth is dealing with climate the earth has like 30 billion people on it and you know New York is halfway underwater and so that's part of the story too is that you know so we're trying to navigate our way through now becoming a multi -planet species.

[497] So, you know, that is a version of at least 200 years where you can really extrapolate the technologies and ask yourself, because that's real.

[498] I mean, I think that's really going to happen.

[499] If we make it through climate change, that's the prize at the end of the, you know, of the story.

[500] If we make it through climate change, you know, with the stuff that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are doing, man, that's real.

[501] Is this what your number one concern is, climate change?

[502] Michael, I'm a single voter, yeah, climate change.

[503] Because it's like it is an exosite.

[504] existential dilemma, you know, and because of all the writing I did for NPR in the New York Times, I have dealt with a lot of climate change denialous, man, and it drives me. What is their big, what's the big?

[505] Because I recently had a discussion with someone on the podcast that didn't believe in climate change.

[506] And it was, it was a weird thing because I kept pulling up all the different scientific consensus studies, all the different studies that show that we were having an impact.

[507] It's an undeniable impact.

[508] Undeniable.

[509] And the 30 years of science.

[510] I know, I saw that.

[511] And she was like, you know, well, that's what you say.

[512] I don't think that she's really thinking about that.

[513] In her case, it was, I don't think she really thinks about it.

[514] I think she just has this stance that she believes that that group that she's a part of, subscribes to.

[515] So there's an ideological aspect of it where you kind of, you have a predetermined pattern that you're supposed to follow when you're on one side.

[516] You have to be pro -life.

[517] You have to be pro -second amendment.

[518] There's a bucket of stuff.

[519] There's a bucket of stuff, yeah.

[520] And that's, I think it's a giant problem with our culture.

[521] there are two groups of people that you can't like to truly be an independent thinker you're like one of these weirdos it's off in the fringe you know to be independent of either party right right and the thing about science is the whole point of science is to be independent is to be and to have you know what science is a way of having public knowledge you know I mean like everybody has their opinions whatever but science is about the stuff we can all be like oh yeah for sure you know it's this whole process that we've evolved over 400 years and with climate denial man sometimes you know you know You know, it's just, yeah, you want to be like, what, what are you saying, man?

[522] Like, what, you know, read a book because they'll say stuff.

[523] Like, here's my favorite one.

[524] Oh, climate's always changing.

[525] Hey, man, climate's always changing, man. Which is true.

[526] Yeah, but if somebody comes to me, because, you know, what I want most for people, like, I consider myself an evangelist of science.

[527] I love science.

[528] And so if people come to me and say, hey, man, isn't the climate always changing?

[529] I'm like, oh, man, great question.

[530] You know, we actually know the answer to that.

[531] Yeah, it's changing, but it's changing, like, what's the time scale, you know?

[532] So it changes often on million year times scales.

[533] But, like, from the last 10 ,000 years since the last ice age, which was 10 ,000 years ago, which is amazing.

[534] Like, there used to be a mile of ice above our heads, you know, 10 ,000 years ago.

[535] Climate has been remarkably stable.

[536] Yeah, there's been a little blips in it, but no major changes, right?

[537] So, like, and I can show them the graph of this and everything.

[538] So if you're, if they're interested, you know, I mean, if they're, so if they're asking the question because they want to know, I'm all, I'm all down to talk until, you know, the cows come home.

[539] But that's not what the typical deniers are.

[540] Deniers are like, get climate changing all the time.

[541] And they're not interested in the answer.

[542] But isn't it, it's not only they're not interested in the answer, they're just trying to win.

[543] It's not a real conversation because it's a really complex thing.

[544] If you dig a nice core and you tap down to 50 ,000, 80 ,000, 100 ,000 years, you see all these bizarre shifts of the climate that could be indicative of super volcanoes and asteroidal impacts and solar flares.

[545] A lot of shit happens over the course of a million years.

[546] Right.

[547] But to hang all your ideas on the party's ideology and to deny all this really interesting stuff and all these variables.

[548] That's what pisses me off.

[549] It's like, you know, what I try and tell people is like, look, climate science is like awesome.

[550] Like it's science.

[551] It's got these amazing stories to tell about, you know, yeah, the Earth, I mean, Earth, over the past 4 .5 billion years, the Earth has gone through the most profound changes.

[552] and we've learned about, aren't you interested in that?

[553] But no, right, they basically have this thing where like, you know, I'm part of this group and therefore I have to have this opinion.

[554] And I'm like, dude, it's science.

[555] Science doesn't care who you voted for.

[556] You know what I mean?

[557] Like the radiative properties of a CO2 molecule doesn't care whether you're wearing a blue tie or a red tie.

[558] And the fact that people can't make that distinction.

[559] And here's a real problem.

[560] Once you go down this slippery road of denying, saying like, okay, that kind of science, I hate, man, they're all a hoax.

[561] Well, you know, America's prosperity and our safety has been built on science over the last 200 years.

[562] You know, you start to erode the whole thing.

[563] You can't just, like, call one group of, you know, scientists, hoaxers, you know, and it's all they're only doing it for them and not have it slowly infect everything else to the point where, you know, China will be happy to eat our lunch, you know, when it comes scientifically.

[564] China is pumping huge amounts of money into science.

[565] You're not doing this.

[566] So, like, you know, we're limiting.

[567] And here's the other thing that really bums me out.

[568] Science is not a, it's not a lunch buffet.

[569] You know what I mean?

[570] You can't be like, oh, man, can I have some of those antibiotics?

[571] I love antibiotics.

[572] And oh, yeah, the cell phone's great.

[573] I'll use that.

[574] And I really want to fly in a plane.

[575] But climate change is bullshit.

[576] You know, I mean, like, you know, either you accept that you live in a scientific society.

[577] It doesn't mean like you're slavishly adhered to anything, you know, comes out in a journal late yesterday.

[578] But, you know, either you adhere to the idea that this method has produced miracles for us or, you know, give me the cell phone back.

[579] You know what I mean?

[580] Well, the scientific method is what has established the actual real, fact.

[581] of how things interact with each other that's allowed us to create technology.

[582] Right.

[583] And I think they split that distinction.

[584] They focus on the technology and commerce, which is more important in their eyes than the consequences of the environment or what's going to happen to the environment.

[585] Yeah.

[586] The big hope is that we're going to figure it out.

[587] And I'm hopeful of that, too, is that we're going to figure out some way to extract carbon from the atmosphere with devices or some enormous – like, there was.

[588] was some, I don't know if it was a working prototype or it was just a concept, but there was an enormous building that was really an air filter.

[589] Yeah, they're starting to look at carbon capture again.

[590] With places like Hong Kong and places where they have terrible Beijing, they have terrible, terrible pollution and more importantly, particulates in the atmosphere.

[591] So it's not just like a carbon thing.

[592] It's like they have shit in their air.

[593] Right, right, that they're breathing into their lungs.

[594] Yeah, it's awful, man. It's, you know, I went to Mexico City a couple years back.

[595] I've been there twice, but I went there for a UFC and we were flying in.

[596] I took photos and I put them on my Instagram.

[597] See you to find those.

[598] They're fucking shocking.

[599] It's unbelievable.

[600] What kind of a creepy animal is the human where the human is capable of burning smoke into the very air that we need to take into our lungs to keep our body a lot.

[601] Oh, you see it so bad.

[602] People have never been to Mexico City.

[603] Yeah.

[604] Like it's a stunner.

[605] Dude, my fucking head was killing me after two days there.

[606] Yeah, well, that's what happened with Beijing when they had the Olympics, right?

[607] They had to stop all industrial activity for like two months.

[608] Right.

[609] L .A. used to look like this, right?

[610] Before the Clean Air Act, L .A. would have...

[611] Well, that's what I wrote.

[612] I wrote Mexico's L .A. on steroids.

[613] Mexico City's L .A. on steroids.

[614] It is so dark.

[615] You know, this whole question of what we'll do, like this brings us back to the aliens, right?

[616] So my point is, is that, you know, we're not the first time this has happened.

[617] Pretty much if you build the civilization, anybody who builds a civilization like we've done is going to trigger climate change, right?

[618] It's like it's kind of unavoidable, right?

[619] So that goes back to the denier thing.

[620] You know, one of the things I'm trying to do with the book is flip the script, right?

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

[622] We've asked questions been answered.

[623] But I'm trying to like flip it to show that like the whole question of, you know, did we change a climate?

[624] That's who everybody focuses on.

[625] Did we?

[626] Did we not?

[627] You know?

[628] And, you know, from when you take the 10 ,000 light year view, then what you realize is like, what did you expect?

[629] Like, we built a world girdling civilization that uses a quartering civilization that uses almost of all the energy the biosphere uses, right?

[630] So, you know, every day the biosphere has, like, you know, 200 terawatts of energy that it's producing in sugars.

[631] We use about a quarter of that.

[632] Like, how did you expect there wasn't going to be an impact, right?

[633] So this changes the whole way we're looking at it.

[634] We don't need to argue about, like, did we or didn't we?

[635] Of course we did.

[636] This is what happens when you reach this level.

[637] And the other thing in the book that I'm trying to argue also, and it pushes back against the deniers is like, climate deniers are human haters, you know?

[638] They're all like, you know, like, you know, we did this amazing thing.

[639] We changed the atmosphere of an entire planet, right?

[640] Climate change shows on one level how freaking awesome we are, you know, how far we've gotten.

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

[642] We have, we've leveled up, right?

[643] You know, I play a lot of video games, right?

[644] And so that whole thing when you level up and, you know, you get the sniper rifle, we've leveled up.

[645] And so now the question is, are we smart enough, you know, to see what we've done?

[646] and make the right choices because that's what the universe is going to be.

[647] There's going to be species that trigger climate change is going to happen all the time and some are going to be like, oh, man, we need to do something, right?

[648] And they'll make the actions, they'll be able to work it out, get it together.

[649] And other ones, you know, who's just going to end up in the cosmic waste pile.

[650] So we're like cosmic teenagers and just like when you're a teenager and you start to drive, right?

[651] Either you figure it out, you know, either you're drinking and you're partying and drive the car off a cliff or you figure out how to handle your responsibility and that's us now, you know?

[652] Yeah, no, I agree with you.

[653] And I feel like, there's a fundamental problem with the way people approach ideas.

[654] And I think it goes back to what we're talking about earlier, about right versus left or, you know, Republican versus Democrat.

[655] They're not thinking the consequences of arguing for against the possibility that climate change is a human -caused thing.

[656] They're not thinking of the consequences.

[657] They just want to win.

[658] Right, right.

[659] They want their side to be right.

[660] And, you know, what bums me out is they don't understand the consequences of that for both the American enterprise and the human enterprise, right?

[661] Because, you know, if you keep calling one branch of science a hoax, then what's to say the other branches?

[662] Like, you know, then you're rolling down this, you know, slippery slope where like the other countries, you know, like so most of the Nobel Prizes, Americans have won, were people from other countries.

[663] They came here to do their science because we had the best scientific enterprise.

[664] Right.

[665] You know, the next generation will just go somewhere else.

[666] I'll go to China, you know.

[667] So there's that part of it.

[668] And the other part is like, dude, it's just science.

[669] doesn't care about your political views.

[670] And, you know, it's not fair to use the cell phone and take the antibiotics and then turn around and, like, and then suddenly treat this thing as if it was another thing in your bucket of, you know, ideologies.

[671] I think also people think if you somehow or another compromise industry's ability to work, that you're going to kill jobs and you're going to damage the economy and that's more important.

[672] Yeah, but I think it's the exact opposite, right?

[673] And if people really saw, right, I mean, you know, again, just like I'm saying, climate change.

[674] shows how powerful people have become.

[675] It also shows how powerful our enterprise, right?

[676] We did this by, you know, building businesses, by building enterprise, by, and we built this world girdling machine of civilization, and it, you know, the planet actually noticed.

[677] Why do you like that term world girdling?

[678] Because that's, it gives me the, it's actually, girdle, wrapping around the earth.

[679] I think it's because it's from like Shakespeare, like from Caesar or something.

[680] I always thought it was a good, but it's the idea that like, you know, in, um, The Foundation Trilogy, the Isaac Asmanoff, you know, classic science fiction thing, there's the city of the planet of Trantor, which is the center of the empire, the galactic empire.

[681] And it's basically the whole planet's been covered in city, you know, like the planet, you got to go down like 500 levels before you get to the surface.

[682] So that idea, you know, I mean, what I like about it is the idea that, like, you know, we've done something, we're kind of covered the planet in our effect, you know, covered the planet in our enterprise.

[683] So this issue of business is that, like, there's a place I can stand in Rob.

[684] Rochester.

[685] I did this for NPR.

[686] And there's the Erie Canal.

[687] I can stand right on the edge of the Erie Canal.

[688] Then there's a train tracks, you know, the tracks were laid back in, you know, the original line back in the 18th, you know, whatever, 70s.

[689] Then there's a highway.

[690] And then there's the airport right over there.

[691] Four different infrastructures, you know, which everyone took huge amounts of money to build, one of which we don't even use anymore, right?

[692] So the idea of building an infrastructure that will, that will not be carbon polluting, will not trigger climate change.

[693] He's like, dude, this is what we do, you know?

[694] So the idea that there's going to be more jobs that come out of this than it could ever come out of fossil fuels, you know.

[695] It's not a big deal for human beings because that's what we do to switch infrastructures.

[696] And there will be a lot of wealth generated up by, you know, just like there was, you know, when we switched to the trains.

[697] Well, where's the argument coming that we, because there are people that just adopt the party line, the party line that, you know, climate's always changed and human beings barely affected and it's not something to concentrate on.

[698] Where's that coming from?

[699] Again, I think it's the gradual political polarization of everything.

[700] You know, because you look at in the – we're now at the – what is it, 30 -year anniversary of Jim Hansen, who was, you know, the famous climate scientist, giving his testimony in front of Congress in 1988 on a hot, sweltering summer day.

[701] We said climate change is already happening, you know, and that made news everywhere.

[702] And that was the first, like, public awakening that this was happening.

[703] And if you look at the first Bush administration, they were like, oh, yeah, we're ready to do something about this.

[704] Sure, we can do it, you know.

[705] And then it just gradually over time, as the whole political polarization thing happened, you can actually see the very purposeful denial, right?

[706] They took a page out of the cigarette companies, you know, for years, right?

[707] The cigarettes were like, oh, the cigarette companies were like, no, it's not a problem.

[708] So they were purposefully, you know, there were people who had money invested, right?

[709] You know, like didn't want this change.

[710] There's a documentary that goes into that.

[711] What is the name of that?

[712] Merchants of Doubt.

[713] Merchants of Doubt.

[714] That's a great book, man. That's a really good book, yeah.

[715] And the documentary is really good, too.

[716] So it was purposeful, you know.

[717] But it's also confusing.

[718] It's like, why are they doing that?

[719] Like, who's paying them to do that?

[720] Obviously, the cigarette companies would be paying the same people to put doubt into the idea that cigarettes are addictive or cigarettes cause cancer.

[721] And this is what had been done in the past.

[722] Now, the same people are involved in doing it with climate change.

[723] Right.

[724] But why?

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

[726] And some guy wrote me back very angry.

[727] And he said, you know, the proven reserves, you know, the stuff, the oil that's in the ground has a wealth, you know, has a monetary value.

[728] Like, you know, that's in their, in the oil company's banks, you know, in their bank accounts of like $1 .5 trillion.

[729] And the guy said, dude, you know, people have gone to war for a lot less than $1 .5 trillion.

[730] So, you know, if we were to really be like, hey, man, we can't burn that, you know, you're going to have to leave that in the ground.

[731] That's like, you know, down to zero pretty fast.

[732] So what I don't get.

[733] So it's those industries.

[734] I think that's part of it.

[735] And then it gets, you get linked to other things.

[736] And then it becomes this sort of like mass, you know, becomes the political polar.

[737] They use the political polarization to sort of, you know, sort of make this happen.

[738] It doesn't.

[739] And look, other countries aren't doing this, right?

[740] That's the important thing.

[741] You know, other countries, there's always a little bit of climate denial going on.

[742] But we're like the only country that's got, as you can see, because we're the only ones who are not part of the Paris Accord.

[743] Well, it's one of the weirder things about this right left things.

[744] The left is always supporting the environment.

[745] The left is all about the environment.

[746] The left is about clean air and clean water.

[747] Yeah, how did that happen?

[748] I don't understand that either.

[749] The whole thing is very strange.

[750] Well, I got, you know, I mean, I have issues with, you know, environmentalists too, because, I think one of your shows I was watching, you know, the whole idea of eco bros, right?

[751] And you get eco -browed by people.

[752] And, you know, so I have a piece in the New York Times today, an op -ed where I'm basically saying, like, look, man, the planet's going to be fine.

[753] Like, you know, long -term, there's nothing we can throw at the biosphere that is going to kill it.

[754] It's not about saving the planet the Earth.

[755] It's not a fuzzy little bunny.

[756] You know, the planet is powerful.

[757] And it's really about saving us.

[758] Let's be honest about what's going on.

[759] And there's going to be all kinds of ethical choices that go on that.

[760] You know, the polar bears may not be able to come along with us on the ride here.

[761] You know, we need a healthy biosphere with, you know, a lot of biodiversity.

[762] But, you know, we're part of it and we're going to have an impact.

[763] There's no such thing as no impact.

[764] And, you know, already I'm getting eco -brode.

[765] People are like, hey, man, you know, you don't care about life.

[766] Yeah, what about?

[767] I'm just like, oh, come on, man. I just put it in the thing.

[768] I said we need to be wise and compassionate, you know?

[769] But they're like, man. Well, people have convenient opinions.

[770] I mean, this is one of the things you get involved with when you start talking with people about really important issues.

[771] I mean, it's like what we were talking about earlier.

[772] They want to be right.

[773] Yeah.

[774] And they want to be on the side that's righteous and with virtue and ethics.

[775] Right, right.

[776] And they find anything that you disagree or that they disagree with that you're saying, they don't ask you questions.

[777] They don't go, what do you think the implications are?

[778] Like, how do we minimize the effects and the negative consequences of our?

[779] They just immediately want to say you are insensitive, you are an asshole, you are the problem.

[780] Yeah.

[781] You know my way around that, and that's what the whole book is about, is to like when you've got a polarization, right, you know, where, you know, you're either this or you're that, the thing to, and this is like a mathematical idea is to go orthogonal, you know.

[782] When you, when you, you know, you go, you know, you go, you know, you go 90 degrees to it.

[783] Now you're in a whole new space.

[784] Now you're up and down to the left and right.

[785] Exactly.

[786] And now, like, the questions that.

[787] this in like revolutions in science, right?

[788] So you look at Einstein and what happened when Einstein came up with relativity.

[789] Everybody at the time was like, you know, they were all concerned to what they called the luminiferous ether.

[790] That, you know, light needed, lights a wave and everybody thought it needed something to propagate through, right?

[791] Radio wave, or water waves go through water, sound wave goes through air.

[792] So, you know, the whole thing was about this ether, the luminous or ether, is this exist, does it not exist, blah, blah.

[793] Einstein was like, you know, I'm not really interested in that problem.

[794] I'm not even going to do it.

[795] He just like changed the whole thing.

[796] And he just said, look, here's two new ideas.

[797] They have nothing to do with the luminous ever its either.

[798] And like all the old questions, all the old battles kind of just fell away.

[799] They didn't even make sense anymore.

[800] So that's what I'm trying to do in the book is say, look, when you look at climate change as a planetary transition, a predictable planetary transition, the whole idea of like environmentalism versus, you know, business interests and, you know, right, Republicans versus Democrats, it just doesn't, you know, it's not even relevant anymore.

[801] What matters is that this is going to happen.

[802] We should have expected it to happen.

[803] And now the question is, do we become a cosmic winner or a cosmic loser.

[804] And we have to think about the biosphere differently.

[805] We have to think about our place in the biosphere differently.

[806] And the old arguments, so that's what, you know, sometimes with climate change in Irish, I'll throw this stuff at them.

[807] And it's really kind of fun to watch them and be like, bleh.

[808] Because they're expecting me to say like A, B, and C, and they've got D, E, and F in response.

[809] And I throw this stuff at them, and they're just like, eh, you know.

[810] And I'm not doing it just to fight with climate change, but I think it's true.

[811] Well, who was it that was on the podcast that was talking about climate stabilization techniques and that this is probably the future?

[812] Was it Boyon?

[813] Anyway, what people are really worried about when you talk to people that understand the history of the human race and the history of the earth is climate cooling.

[814] They think that climate cooling is far more terrifying than climate warming.

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

[816] That is, is that something that you agree with?

[817] No, I don't think so.

[818] I mean, it's true.

[819] And here's something interesting.

[820] We're kind of overdue for an ice age, right?

[821] Well, that was the thing in the 70s.

[822] They were saying that we were in the verge of an ice age.

[823] Yeah, I mean, there was just a couple of guys.

[824] I mean, that whole thing, because that's often something that climate deniers will throw at you.

[825] In the 70s, every, you know, it was like, there was like one or two guys who said that, and then it got picked up on the news.

[826] But the climate community at that time was not like, oh, my God, it's cooling.

[827] Right.

[828] But here's the interesting thing for me, and it fits into this whole idea, is that, like, we're holding off a nice age.

[829] Like, there may never be, if humanity is successful, and we now, navigate the Anthropocene, you know, that term the Anthropocene that we've now entered, we've now entered the human -dominated era.

[830] We've been, for the last 10 ,000 years, the geological epoch has been what they call the Holocene.

[831] That's all of human civilization happened in the Holocene.

[832] You know, it's pretty warm, it's pretty wet, moist.

[833] You know, everything's not locked up in ice.

[834] And it's an interglacial period.

[835] And if we weren't around, yeah, in another 1 ,000, 3 ,000, 5 ,000 years would be another ice age.

[836] But the Anthropocene that we're triggering could hold off ice ages forever, right?

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

[838] So, like, what are the ethical responsibilities of that?

[839] That's what I try and tell the, you know, the environmentalists.

[840] Like, you know, you got this image like, oh, we got to save the Earth.

[841] But they're thinking of like the Holocene.

[842] And it's like, well, you know, the planet, even with us, even if we successfully keep biodiversity rich and it's not going to be the Earth we started with, you know, because we're here.

[843] So, yeah, what about the species that never form because we held off the ice age?

[844] you know I mean forever like what about the ethical responsibility to those so like it opens poor that is a long equation though isn't it uh in what way to try to contemplate what species would have existed if we allowed the earth to cool and our responsibility for allowing the earth to cool so the the potential for new species to advance that's like fuck those species let's keep let's keep this place warm so we can stay alive well all I'm saying the only reason I'm raising that I'm not you know I'm raising that because right we know when we talk about climate change what you get, sometimes when the environmental movement is this sort of like, the polar bear, the polar bear.

[845] It's like what I'm trying to say is, look, I love polar bears.

[846] Kind of funny that polar bears always think because polar bears will rip your head off and drink your blood in a second.

[847] Yeah, right.

[848] The most ruthless.

[849] The apex predator, man. Not only that, one of the rare bears that doesn't eat anything but meat.

[850] Yeah, right, right, right.

[851] And so it's so funny that we're like, oh, polar bears.

[852] My friend Kevin is a biologist, and he said, like, when you get polar bear babies, like right out of the womb, he said they're like the alien from the chest bursterstein.

[853] He said they literally are like, Like right out of the womb, they're looking to kill and eat.

[854] Yeah, you're like, oh, you're so cute.

[855] Oh, whoa, made a man. Yeah, it's like that is a fucking, obviously people have tamed them and fed them to the point where they don't never worry about.

[856] They're not looking at your head off.

[857] Yeah, but that's a fucking predatory, enormous animal.

[858] Yeah.

[859] So I'm raising that point to say, like, look, the thing we're going through now is a, it's an epic -making planetary transition.

[860] And we're part of it, and we're part of it.

[861] That's the question.

[862] Whether or not we're still part of it a thousand years from now, you know, is the big issue.

[863] So, you know, there are ethical issues about the polar bear, right?

[864] But there are also ethical issues.

[865] You know, we can't just return the earth to some pristine state.

[866] We're here.

[867] There's seven billion of us, you know.

[868] So, you know, you have to, we're going to have to understand like there's this deeper ethical question about what does an earth look like that's been changed by us that's healthy, but still has us on it.

[869] It may not have polar bears, you know.

[870] It may have rich phytoplankton, you know, and it may be very species diverse, but some of the species may not come with us.

[871] So like we can't, this sort of like thing of like, oh, the pristine earth, there is no more pristine earth.

[872] We, you know, we've been changing the earth since we were here.

[873] So it's like, how do we have a healthy, a rich, healthy biosphere with us and our civilization still in it?

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

[875] Right.

[876] Right.

[877] We didn't have a, you know, a checklist.

[878] Like, oh, spotted owl.

[879] check, got it.

[880] You know, tree frog, check, got it.

[881] Now we do.

[882] And when one goes away, we kind of freak out.

[883] Yeah.

[884] And that's, you know, I mean, you know, we have to have compassion for life because we're part of it.

[885] Like, without the compassion, you know, we end up with, as Gavin Schmidt, a friend of mine calls, we have ecological hooliganism, right?

[886] We're just do crazy.

[887] We're just dumping shit into rivers.

[888] Like, you know, you don't have to do that, man. But, you know, in my talks on this, I'll show like the polar bear, the lonely polar bear on the island.

[889] And, you know, like, oh, everyone's really, you know, bummed out about this.

[890] And then I'll show like a velociraptor, right?

[891] You know, who's crying for the velociraptor, right?

[892] Species come and go.

[893] So we have to, you know, and the Earth goes to these huge transitions.

[894] I'm not saying be like, don't care about those species, but you got to have the bigger picture with us.

[895] And here's the problem with the environmental movements, you know, sometimes the way it gets framed.

[896] It's not just the environment.

[897] It's the way we talk about climate change.

[898] We think of ourselves as being a plague, right?

[899] Oh, human beings, we suck, right?

[900] That's the basic, that's the only story.

[901] We have two stories.

[902] It's not happening or we suck.

[903] And my whole thing is like that is the wrong.

[904] Not only is that story wrong, it's unhelpful, you know.

[905] We are what the biosphere is doing now.

[906] You know, millions of years ago, it was grasslands.

[907] You know, grasslands were a new innovation, and they changed the planet.

[908] You have a lot of grass.

[909] You know, the biosphere evolved grasslands.

[910] They swept across the planet.

[911] They changed how the planet worked.

[912] And then the Earth moved on with it.

[913] Went on to the new experiment.

[914] We are what the, we're exactly that.

[915] We are like the dinosaurs or the grasslands or the blue green algae that.

[916] created the oxygen atmosphere and like you know we're not we're you know there's no difference between a city and a forest on some biosphere level we don't suck the question is whether we're smart enough to still be part of what the what the biosphere is using us to trigger you know I mean yeah what are your thoughts on the reintroduction of extinct animals through genetic cloning you know I watched Jurassic Park but they're talking about doing it like with woolly mammoths yeah this is a real possibility someday because the close ancestor of the woolly mammoth is still alive.

[917] Right.

[918] I know.

[919] I'd be down for seeing a woolly mammoth.

[920] In the science museum in Rochester, there's a woolly mammoth that they found, you know.

[921] And sometimes I'm looking at that, they're like, that's a giant, hairy -ass elephant, man. And it was walking around right in my, you know, I think, like, depending on what you do with it, you know, trying to reintroduce it into the biosphere could be a little dangerous.

[922] I mean, the thing, look, climate change is, this is something I like to say.

[923] Climate change is not our fault.

[924] And what I mean by that is we, you know, we found fossil fuels and they were awesome, you know, and they were just a continuation of what we'd always done, you know, and so we inadvertently, climate change was a mistake, you know, now if we don't do something about it, it's our fault, right?

[925] But, you know, and so you want to be really careful about unintended consequences.

[926] You know, so this is my same thing with geoengineering.

[927] People talk like, oh, we should, you know, put particulates in the atmosphere to make it more reflective.

[928] I'm like, man, dude, we triggered the whole, we triggered climate change because, you know, we didn't know what we were doing.

[929] We didn't know what the consequences were.

[930] If we put those particles up there, how do we get them out?

[931] You're going to scoop them out with the net?

[932] Well, no, no, they'll rain down.

[933] You've got to keep putting them in.

[934] That's the problem.

[935] You've got to keep putting them in.

[936] So what happens if, like, one nation decides they don't want to do it anymore, you know, or the whole thing falls apart?

[937] Now suddenly you're going to get massive changes.

[938] So, like, anything like that, like, why don't we just work on not using fossil fuels?

[939] You know what I mean?

[940] Like, why take the hardest solution that's got the most uncertainty as opposed to the simpler solution, which just means building a different infrastructure.

[941] Yeah.

[942] Well, especially in California.

[943] I mean, this is one of the weirder places ever to not see solar power.

[944] It never rains.

[945] It should be everywhere.

[946] Everywhere.

[947] Most things should be run on solar power.

[948] Yeah, why not, man?

[949] You got it.

[950] And solar is so efficient now.

[951] Well, it's also very difficult to get it up and running.

[952] Like, I had a friend of mine who had his done for four or five months before he got approved.

[953] Wow.

[954] Because he said they make it difficult for you.

[955] Yeah, which is crazy.

[956] Yeah, to be on solar power and not be on the grid.

[957] Yeah.

[958] So, you know, I mean, these are all the kinds of things that we're going to have to work out.

[959] I'm hopeful.

[960] People are like, are you hopeful or not hopeful?

[961] Because, you know, I mean, I ran these, I did these models.

[962] One of the pieces of research we did was we modeled planets and civilizations, like alien civilizations.

[963] We, you know, developed a simple mathematical model about, you know, how a civilization will use a planet's resources to make more babies, alien babies.

[964] And then how the, you know, by using those resources, you feed back on the planet, right?

[965] And so what we wanted to do was, We wanted to model the possible outcomes.

[966] Like, what is the generic outcome?

[967] You know, if I've got 100 ,000 civilizations, all being born in different places, what's the, you know, in general what happens?

[968] And what we found is like basically four different possibilities.

[969] One was good news.

[970] Like in these models, there was like, you know, the population shoots up, the planet's temperature shoots up, but they come to a nice steady state.

[971] Like, you know, the population's stable, everything's good.

[972] So there in those models was hope.

[973] We also saw die off where like the population, you know, skyrockets, the plant.

[974] planet, they overshoot the carrying capacity of their planet, and then you get something like 70 % of the population dying off.

[975] So, like, you know, seven out of every 10 people you know is gone.

[976] So, you know, but then you come to a steady state.

[977] So, look, maybe if you can survive the disaster, you can, you're still there.

[978] But we also...

[979] The real problem with surviving the disaster is how much of the information gets their story.

[980] Right, right.

[981] Because you think about, if you're killing seven out of ten people, how many of those seven people are the ones who know how to make cell phones.

[982] Yeah, exactly.

[983] That's a dark age, right?

[984] That's what happens in a dark age.

[985] I remember the first time I went to Europe and I saw those Roman, you know, the aqueducts, man, like five stories tall carrying water.

[986] You know, and by the 900 AD, nobody knew how they got built.

[987] Yeah, there's a few of those dips in human civilization.

[988] Right, right.

[989] And so it's not clear, especially with a society as complex as ours, right?

[990] If, like, the food doesn't arrive in my grocery store, what do I do?

[991] Right.

[992] You know, I garden, but, you know, I'm not, you know.

[993] It's not enough.

[994] Not enough, right?

[995] It's not going to keep alive.

[996] Yeah.

[997] So for a complex civilization like ours, even if you don't go extinct, you may not be able to have this kind of civilization.

[998] But we did find collapse.

[999] We did find complete, like, extinction.

[1000] curves as well, where, you know, the population went way up and then boom, dropped like a stone.

[1001] And we even found those, we built into the models of possibility for the civilization to switch from a high -impact resource to a low -impact resource, like fossil to solar.

[1002] And sometimes, because, you know, planets have minds of their own.

[1003] You know, there's an internal dynamics to planets.

[1004] And you push them far enough, and there's going to roll off.

[1005] So we'd have ones where the population went way up.

[1006] They made the switch.

[1007] And then the population started to come down.

[1008] The planet started to cool down.

[1009] Did you factor in random geological events?

[1010] Random solar events, random historical events.

[1011] This was really all about just planet civilization and its feedback on the planet.

[1012] We could build models like that.

[1013] That would be one of the major issues with any advanced civilizations.

[1014] It's a matter of time before something happens, right?

[1015] As we said, you know, we know that Mars has been hit before.

[1016] We know Earth's been hit.

[1017] The moon's been hit.

[1018] I mean, the moon is one of our best examples.

[1019] We just look at it and you see craters everywhere because it doesn't have an environment or an atmosphere.

[1020] The moon was built.

[1021] by a huge impact between Earth and Mars -like body at the beginning of the planet's history.

[1022] So, yeah, those happen all the time.

[1023] I think if you get advanced, you know, so like we're on the lip of being a multi -planet species, right?

[1024] And once you do that, which means you become a space -faring race, then I think, like, certainly the asteroid stuff you can take care of, right?

[1025] We've already done, we've identified, like, a huge fraction of all the Earth -crossing asteroids.

[1026] Like, we're not really sure what to do about them if we find one coming at us.

[1027] But we see some coming at us all the time where they just recognize them a few hours before they're near.

[1028] Right, right.

[1029] That happened a couple weeks ago.

[1030] And, you know, luckily it always, you know, it passes.

[1031] You can, I mean, like so.

[1032] So we couldn't really, like, you know, we're young enough now that if we discovered one heading right towards us, we could just, you know, put your legs between your head between your legs and kiss your butt goodbye.

[1033] But in time, right, 200 years from now, we will have done a much better job of mapping out all the major rocks.

[1034] Hopefully.

[1035] Yeah.

[1036] Well, I think so.

[1037] I mean, I'm really, you know, I mean, if we have that kind of interplanetary, we're going to be mapping them out just because you don't want to run into them.

[1038] you're going to be mining them.

[1039] What do you think is promising in terms of the ability to prevent impacts?

[1040] There's a couple of things.

[1041] I think the best one, if you catch it early enough, there's the gravity tug where you just literally park a spaceship next to it and slowly have the spaceship, you know, move, you know, because you all you have to do is alter the trajectory a little bit, you know, you just really have to kind of tap on it, yeah, and it'll, you know, because shit in space is just so vast that a little tap will make it miss. So the gravity tug, you know, you don't have to try and do the, you know, what was it, What was the movie Apocalypse, the one from the 90s with the space miners?

[1042] Oh, Armageddon.

[1043] Armageddon, yeah, thank you.

[1044] And then there was a deep impact, too.

[1045] Deep Impact was the smart one.

[1046] Yeah, Armageddon was the dumb one.

[1047] But they rip each other's off, right?

[1048] Because they both came out at the same time.

[1049] I know.

[1050] I think Deep Impact came out first, but it was developed second.

[1051] Yeah, yeah.

[1052] That'd be a bummer to being the one that, like, you know, they both come out at the same time and your movie doesn't get any attention, and the other one becomes like a massive hit, you know?

[1053] Yeah.

[1054] Wow.

[1055] So, so, like, you know, there they dream.

[1056] drilled holes and stuff and you try and blow them up.

[1057] But then the problem there is you now have a bunch of rocks and if some of those rocks are big enough.

[1058] So I think the gravity tug is kind of probably the best idea.

[1059] But, you know, because of mining asteroids, well probably, you know, those little ones may be the easiest to, you know, to mine.

[1060] What are you worried about more than anything in terms of climate change?

[1061] Like, are you worried about the rising of the ocean levels?

[1062] Are you worried about the heating of the actual planet, the temperature being unsustainable for human life?

[1063] Like, what are you worried about the most?

[1064] The one thing I worry about the most, like we were talking before, you know, technological societies are these like overlaid networks, you know, you got the transportation network, you got the energy network, you got social networks, you know, and those are really complex.

[1065] And so I do a little what's called network theory.

[1066] And what you find with network theory is that you, you know, you may have an individual network that's pretty robust, meaning like I can cut some of the connections.

[1067] Like you got your social network.

[1068] I could take, you know, 20 % of the people out of your social network.

[1069] And the social network will still function, you know, like most people will still talk to each other or anything.

[1070] But once you start layering them, so the social network is now connected to the telecommunications network, which is connected to the energy network, blah, blah, then you can ripple a small change, ripples through the whole thing and blows it apart, and it just doesn't function anymore.

[1071] So, you know, I don't need, like, apocalypses to have the fabric of technological civilization fall apart.

[1072] Like, so if just the weather patterns change enough, that agriculture becomes really hard, you know, we're used to the rains falling pretty much the same way they do yearly and everything.

[1073] that, you know, like we talk about, you look at what the, you know, like refugees, how much, you know, the trouble, you know, having a huge influx of refugees can cause.

[1074] Climate change is going to have people moving all over the planet because now they can't grow food anywhere.

[1075] So it's like, I don't, you know, like said, you don't need, I do worry, like ocean rise is going to be huge.

[1076] Most people live in coastal cities.

[1077] Most of the wealth in the world is in coastal cities.

[1078] But you don't really need too much to like really shift the weather patterns and then the thing you're used to falls apart.

[1079] now when you factor in human beings and our evolution from primitive hominids to what we are today and you sort of extrapolate and keep going and think about what we're going to be in the future and then think about what these creatures might be that live a hundred million light years away or whatever the fuck it is yeah what I mean we've got I've got to think that whatever is holding us back are primitive instance these human reward systems that were engaged when we were running away from wild animals and fighting off tribes of invaders that slowly but surely those are going to either evaporate or evolve and we're going to get to a point where we can be more rational about complex issues if we do do that like what is the motivation for expanding the human race isn't sustaining the human race in a healthy way on this planet a better option than traveling to Mars or traveling to other solar systems?

[1080] Like, wouldn't we be better served trying to achieve some sort of a balance here on this planet?

[1081] I think the, I think one serves the other.

[1082] Like, we, you know, you look at the human migration patterns from when we started, right?

[1083] You know, we started off as a, you know, a bunch of people in Africa, maybe a few thousand, right?

[1084] And then you see this, you know, migration, like, or, you know, a bunch of us, like a few hundred cross the Red Sea, which was pretty low at the time.

[1085] And then it's like they just worked their way around the coast, you know, took boats over to Australia, went all the way back around through, like, we're explorers, man. Like, you know, it's really, I think, something fundamental for us psychologically to have these frontiers.

[1086] Exactly.

[1087] That's my question, though.

[1088] Will we evolve past that?

[1089] Well, I don't think that's a bad thing.

[1090] You don't think so?

[1091] Yeah, yeah, I don't this bad thing because again you know it goes back to the biosphere this is kind of like i think there's something deep in life that wants more life right so if we kind of you know settle mars right then it's not going to be really us settling mars it's going to be the earth's biosphere right i mean really right that's what we are we're the agent of the biosphere right and you know the biosphere started off as like you know single cell creatures in like little tiny parts of the planet and then you know conquered the oceans and then eventually when they were you know because in the beginning there weren't continents the earth was a water world when we started off And so when, you know, there was enough continents, you know, then they took over the, life took over the land.

[1092] I think it's just kind of, life may be kind of like a cosmic force if I can get a wugly on you, you know?

[1093] So if we do go to Mars, it will essentially be ultimate pan spermia.

[1094] Yes, exactly, right, yeah.

[1095] And that way, right, panpspermia, which is a weird word, you kind of like, panpsermia.

[1096] Well, it's just because people are, they feel weird about sperm.

[1097] Sperm, right.

[1098] Whenever I give an academic talk, I'm like, panespermia.

[1099] I know, it's a strange, when you say sperm in front of people, they're like, you piece of shit.

[1100] Yeah, right.

[1101] It's like, no, no, it's a scientific term, man, I swear.

[1102] It doesn't matter.

[1103] It's like saying niggardly.

[1104] Yeah, right.

[1105] It's a very, very difficult word to say, even though it has nothing to do with the N word.

[1106] So, you know, I think it's part of life.

[1107] I think life wants more life.

[1108] And this is the question you're raising about, look like, what do we look like in a million years?

[1109] What happens to a species that become?

[1110] And now we're in the realm of science fiction, but, you know, that's all cool.

[1111] You know, like, what might we become?

[1112] Like, the gods in some sense.

[1113] Do you think that this is my theory?

[1114] And I've thrown this out so many times people are sick of it.

[1115] But I think that what we're looking at when we see these archetypal aliens with the big heads and the big eyes and the tiny bodies and no genitals.

[1116] I think we think this is what we're eventually going to be.

[1117] Oh, genitals?

[1118] Yeah.

[1119] Really?

[1120] I think we're going to move past that.

[1121] Oh, man. I'll see you and your panpspermia.

[1122] Yeah, right.

[1123] And I'll raise you some genital -less aliens.

[1124] Typical males talking about gender.

[1125] This is the problem with science.

[1126] This is why we need diversity.

[1127] I just think that if we...

[1128] So those are archetypes kind of built into us in some sense.

[1129] That we're moving...

[1130] Like, what did we used to be?

[1131] Well, we used to be monkeys, right?

[1132] And what are we going to be?

[1133] Well, we're going to be that thing.

[1134] Yeah.

[1135] That thing that can levitate things with its mind, that thing that communicates telepathically, that thing that has this incredible ability to map out the cosmos and create wormholes and super advanced intellect.

[1136] To the point where we can't even comprehend.

[1137] So, like, if you think about how what, you know, we evolved from, at one point in time, we split from mollusks like, what, 600 something million years ago?

[1138] It's got to be on, it's got to be past the Cambrian explosion.

[1139] But, you know, it's like, yeah, 300, 400.

[1140] I don't know, yeah, but a while ago.

[1141] How much does a squid understand about cell phone networks and whether or not sprints, you know, Unlimited data plan is really any good.

[1142] They don't.

[1143] We'll extrapolate that to what this alien creature is going to be in terms of its understanding of time and space and matter versus ours.

[1144] We are this crude thing that's weirded out by the word sperm, whereas it is telepathically communicating with a universal language and it has this unbelievable ability to manipulate matter and they've achieved homeostasis with their environment and no longer have this.

[1145] Well, that's one of the things about, you know, there's the Fermi paradox, right?

[1146] Yeah, like, why haven't we seen?

[1147] So, you know, as I already said, we haven't looked enough to say that the, we haven't seen evidence of life.

[1148] Right.

[1149] It's like opening your door and going, well, where are all the buffalo?

[1150] Yeah.

[1151] You got to go to Wyoming, bro.

[1152] But, you know, there is kind of a problem with, because we're just doing a paper on this now.

[1153] You know, part of the Fermi paradox, let's get, I don't want to go too far on this.

[1154] We can go back and circle back later.

[1155] I like it.

[1156] The Fermi Paradox is fascinating.

[1157] It is, right?

[1158] So the idea that - Explain it to people.

[1159] Okay, so the Fermi paradox is the idea that, like, you know, if there is, if the paradox part is like, if you're telling me that intelligence is common, it evolves everywhere, then why don't I see it already, right?

[1160] So the, if you're asking about, like, why don't we see signals from, I've already answered that, right?

[1161] Because we just, we haven't looked yet.

[1162] We haven't looked enough.

[1163] But part of his question, and this was done by a guy in heart, I mean, you know, so Fermi was just, this happened over a conversation for lunch, you know, in 1950.

[1164] So he just posed, he said, where are they all?

[1165] But in 1975 guy named Hart wrote a paper where he really mapped out the, here's the main problem.

[1166] Even if you're traveling at a tenth of the speed of light, if you manage to build like world ships that can travel across the stars, you know, and you're traveling at 0 .1 % of the speed of light, in, you know, if you do that and you hop from one star to the other, build another ship, hop to the next one.

[1167] In about 600 ,000 years, you have covered the whole galaxy, right?

[1168] So 600 ,000 years sounds like a long time, but it's a tiny part of the galaxy's history.

[1169] galaxy is 10 billion years old.

[1170] So in that case, like, why, you know, then every, if, you know, just one species has to do that and they can cover the galaxy.

[1171] So why aren't there, why don't we see the colony ships here, right?

[1172] That's, that's a much harder version of the Fermi paradox to get around.

[1173] Is it, though, because if we did, look, we're already sending robots to Mars, right?

[1174] We're not going to Mars yet, but we're sending robots there.

[1175] What if we decide that there's no real benefit in sending biological entities into space and that the dangers of radiation and asteroid impacts on this is just too great it's far better to send something i mean look at what we're capable of doing now in terms of projection of video we can take a cell phone video and you can send it to your friend in new zealand and they can get it almost instantaneously you don't have to go to in zealand right right do a Skype call right if we can get some sort of 3d virtual reality imaging of planet's like, hey, man, do you want to see what it's like on Pandora?

[1176] Here, put these goggles on, and you will go wherever you want that robot to go, and you'll be there.

[1177] Yeah, right.

[1178] And maybe it'll get to the point where you can actually smell it and touch it and feel it, but not be compromised by its environment in terms of your biology.

[1179] Well, that's actually a huge point.

[1180] So that's one of the things we're looking at in this paper is the idea that, you know, good planets may be hard to find, you know.

[1181] There's this great novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, who's like just, for me, one of the great science fiction writers.

[1182] And it's called Aurora.

[1183] And it's the usual world ship thing.

[1184] So they build the colony ship.

[1185] It takes, you know, three generations to cross space and they get to the planet.

[1186] And the planet sucks.

[1187] It looked like it was going to be good, you know.

[1188] But there's like prionts, tiny, you know, super small biological shit that just makes you can't live there.

[1189] And they're going back, right?

[1190] So it's like it may be exactly like you're saying that, you know, we think like, oh, you just land on a planet and you terraform it.

[1191] And, you know, you just turn it into habitable.

[1192] And it's like, that may not work.

[1193] And maybe it does.

[1194] But that's a science fiction idea.

[1195] So, right.

[1196] Right.

[1197] It's entirely possible.

[1198] I mean, there's a lot of possible solutions this, which is just that, you know, one of which is space travels really hard and real interstellar, not interplanetary, but interstellar travel is really hard and really expensive.

[1199] I was just reading a paper on this where the guy estimated that in order to get like, say you wanted to have a thousand people on a world ship to get to another star, that would take the economy that come, you need like, I think it was like 100 ,000 Earth economies to build that.

[1200] You know what I mean?

[1201] Jeff Bezos, are you listening?

[1202] By the time we're ready, you might have.

[1203] 100 ,000 Earth economies.

[1204] But it was just like, it was so much that, like, you know, unless you were, he said, you know, with the conclusion he came to, unless you were a multi -planet species, if you were like a, if you had conquered the entire, or settled the entire solar system, maybe you'd have an economy that big.

[1205] So one possible solution is good planets are hard to find and, and, you know, it's just too expensive.

[1206] It really costs a lot.

[1207] And so, yeah, it's not really worth, you know, the effort.

[1208] You, you know, you send out some probes once in a while, but, you know, it's not.

[1209] Well, there's also finding an environment that's not just habitable but stable.

[1210] I mean, our environment is habitable, but look what's going on in Hawaii right now.

[1211] There is a 400 -year -old lake that evaporated in a matter of hours.

[1212] It's the biggest lake on the big island.

[1213] It's gone, which is such a tragedy.

[1214] But it's not.

[1215] It's not.

[1216] It's also magnificent.

[1217] You watch that lava roll into that lake and say, that's a rap, kids.

[1218] No more lake, you fucks.

[1219] And it really shows you the power of a planet, too, right?

[1220] I mean of, you know, the forces at work.

[1221] What makes continents.

[1222] I mean, it made the island in the first place.

[1223] You can't be upset at it.

[1224] Billowing off.

[1225] It is what made the island, and it's continuing to make the island bigger.

[1226] Right, yeah, right, exactly.

[1227] Oh, you're crying about your house, but now you've got more real estate, so shut up.

[1228] Well, it's making the island bigger, and it's always done that.

[1229] Yeah, it's been doing that for millions of years.

[1230] It's a fascinating place.

[1231] Have you been?

[1232] I've been, and I've seen the, I went to the park.

[1233] Did you do the helicopter thing?

[1234] No, no. Oh, man, you've got to do the helicopter thing.

[1235] It's crazy because you fly over the, volcanoes we can't now right because it's too crazy but I did it a few years back and you could watch it the lava go into the ocean yeah and you see these lava vents pour this red hot fucking yeah it's like it's glowing yeah it's going into the ocean during the day because I saw that part we went to the park to see it you know then when you went to when you go to that volcano park there's just like vents where steam's coming out like New York City with the you know the manholes you're like that's like that's just from this heat coming up from the bottom of the planet.

[1236] Are you scared about Yellowstone?

[1237] Like the, what was that movie, 2012?

[1238] Nah.

[1239] You know, like, because that's like such a, that's like a, you know, that's what made the Adirondacks, right?

[1240] What was the, what was the 2012 movie?

[1241] I never saw that.

[1242] With Cudan.

[1243] Day after tomorrow, day before tomorrow.

[1244] No, no, no, no, no. It's a climate change movie, actually.

[1245] It was John Cusack.

[1246] It's actually a pretty good movie.

[1247] Oh, yeah, that's right.

[1248] It's another, like, destroy the planet.

[1249] Those guys who made that.

[1250] Hold on, stop right there.

[1251] That was not a pretty good movie.

[1252] That movie was so stupid.

[1253] No, it was stupid They get constantly missed disaster by inches With cars They never got a flat They always got away from the world caving in Behind them Oh yeah man Like super believable man Yeah no I thought it was Well Yellowstone is a caldera It's a super volcano And they're experiencing thousands of earthquakes a year Yeah and that eventually Yeah Well every six to 800 thousand years It's a continent killer The last time it blew was 600 ,000 years ago Yeah So why aren't you scared?

[1254] I don't know, I just don't think about it.

[1255] I'm fucking thinking about it every day, man. I'll smoke a joint.

[1256] I think about, once a month.

[1257] I think about Yelston.

[1258] About Yelston?

[1259] Yeah.

[1260] So I just, you know, I should.

[1261] Okay, I'm add that to my list of things I'm freaking out about it.

[1262] I have friends in Australia and that's where I'm going.

[1263] Yeah.

[1264] Because there's nothing.

[1265] Fly over, just start driving on the left -hand side.

[1266] That's might be the only thing you can go to.

[1267] I worry more about Seattle.

[1268] I lived in Seattle for a while.

[1269] You know, and they said the super earthquakes that they're looking at that's going to turn the whole thing into jello.

[1270] Right?

[1271] You get an earthquake so bad that the ground just literally becomes porous.

[1272] predicting, because, you know, Seattle's got like, I mean, I don't know that much about this.

[1273] I'm way out of my, I'm in the danger zone.

[1274] The plates are super deep, you know, so you don't get as many tremors, but, but, you know, when it releases, it's going to, you know, it's just be a super powerful earthquake.

[1275] And, you know, it'll be so powerful, yeah, that they said that, like, there's not going to be a lot.

[1276] Even with the earthquake proofing, there's not going to be a lot of left standing.

[1277] Jesus.

[1278] So, yeah.

[1279] Damn, Seattle.

[1280] You must be, I mean, because you're here, right?

[1281] You feel tremors.

[1282] They must say, they happen all the time, right?

[1283] I've only had a few times when I felt her.

[1284] Not all the time.

[1285] I felt them before.

[1286] The biggest ones I ever felt was when I first moved here.

[1287] I first moved here in 94 and it was right after the Northridge earthquake.

[1288] And I was in my house and I felt I guess it was like a 5 .5 where the whole thing just it was weird.

[1289] It gave me the impression that the house that I was living in or the apartment that I was in was made out of the same stuff like a box that a refrigerator would come in.

[1290] You know how you kind of move it around.

[1291] Yeah, you're going to play inside, yeah.

[1292] The whole thing was just moving, like, easily, left and right.

[1293] I was like, holy shit.

[1294] Well, that was my, I've only had a few times that I've, you know, felt on it.

[1295] I'm like, it's like, it's, you know, at first I thought it was a truck.

[1296] I thought a truck was rolling by.

[1297] You know, and I'm like, and somebody's like, no, man, that was an earthquake.

[1298] And the one that I experienced was nothing.

[1299] I mean, it's a baby one.

[1300] The ones that they're getting, you know, right now somewhere in the world.

[1301] I mean, there's, there's always something that's like a five or six.

[1302] Yeah.

[1303] So this goes back to your point about the, you know, a lot of planets right will be like, way more plate tectonically active.

[1304] Volatile.

[1305] Yeah, than ours.

[1306] So, you know, I mean, lots of me, I think good planets are going to be, like, really hard to find.

[1307] So, you know, it may be, that may be the solution.

[1308] The other solution is, you know, I mean, the way you guys found out about it was I did that article about the, previous civilization, you know, like, how do you know whether or not there was a previous civilization on Earth?

[1309] And, you know, one solution could be that, look, they were here, you know, that somebody did arrive and spent some time on Earth.

[1310] But if it was like half a billion years ago and they only lasted right every civilization has a finite lifetime they only lasted for you know even a few hundred thousand years they wouldn't leave there'd be no record left there would be nothing left there'd be nothing left do you think that's possible that something's ever visited here because that is the big question and that's the the thing that gets the UFO dorks more jazzed up than anything is the possibility that we've been visited yeah not I'm definitely not you UFOs there's two arguments against UFOs one is as as you know a friend of mine Jason Wright says it's like look as astronomers, man, we, you know, we're finding all those asteroids.

[1311] We're finding a little chunks of rock moving, you know, nobody looks at the sky harder than we do, right?

[1312] And, you know, if anything, unless you want to go to conspiracy theories, we would have found something.

[1313] My other argument is, like, what's with the headlights?

[1314] You know what I mean?

[1315] People always like, oh, man, I saw lights in the sky, and then they moved around and then they disappeared, you know, but they don't really want to be seen.

[1316] I'm like, well, why do they have headlights on?

[1317] Like, why just turn off the freaking lights?

[1318] It just...

[1319] Why would they have lights in the first place?

[1320] Why do they have lights?

[1321] Like, what?

[1322] You know, you came from another civilization and you can't get around without your high beams?

[1323] Well, the idea is, what the fuck are you seeing with those lights?

[1324] Right.

[1325] You're not seeing shit.

[1326] When was the last time you saw, I mean, planes have lights so other planes don't run into them?

[1327] They don't have lights so they can see where they're going.

[1328] Yeah, so why are they have?

[1329] Right, exactly.

[1330] The planes have light so other people can see them.

[1331] So if they're here, but they're mysterious.

[1332] They don't want to be found.

[1333] Then turn off the freaking light.

[1334] Well, yeah, they wouldn't have any lights.

[1335] Yeah, they always have lights.

[1336] Yeah.

[1337] That's true.

[1338] People are always seeing like, oh, and I saw lights in sky and then they move back and forth.

[1339] So I just think like...

[1340] Well, this is also the problem with human memory.

[1341] Memories is horrible.

[1342] Yeah.

[1343] And memory of events that are stunning or shocking or unnerving or you think you saw something.

[1344] Right.

[1345] They've done all that research, even in trials, right, where people, you know, see things going on.

[1346] So, just UFOs, you know, just kind of like.

[1347] But you think it's possible that there could be life on other planets and it's possible that there could be intelligent life on other planets and we send probes to Mars.

[1348] Why wouldn't, and I think that if they do send something here, they're going to send something without biological life inside of it.

[1349] Yeah, you know, well, this is, you know what's a really interesting question is like, and we're talking about, like, what will we evolve into?

[1350] in, you know, a million years.

[1351] You know, it may be possible that biology is a short period of intelligence.

[1352] You just, you build machines and the machines become, you know, you download yourself into them.

[1353] I mean, that's a real possibility that, like, you know, silicon makes a lot more sense than wetware.

[1354] Well, the problem is we think of artificial intelligence as artificial.

[1355] Right.

[1356] It's definitely real.

[1357] Right.

[1358] Yeah, no, that's exactly it.

[1359] It's not fake.

[1360] It's right there.

[1361] Right.

[1362] You know, it's like there's artificial milk.

[1363] You know what I mean?

[1364] I mean, but it's a liquid.

[1365] It's an actual liquid.

[1366] There's not an artificial life.

[1367] It's just silicon created life.

[1368] And that's again, the idea that the biosphere, this may be with the biosphere solution to spreading itself, you know, to getting it.

[1369] Maybe that, like, yeah, silicon, that that's kind of a normal phase.

[1370] I mean, I'm, I am super skeptical about, like, the whole transhuman thing about we're going to download ourselves into intelligence, you know, into computers.

[1371] Have you ever gone to one of those conventions and talk to those dorks?

[1372] No. There's some pretty serious dorking going on there.

[1373] Well, there's geniuses in those dorks, too.

[1374] It's really interesting.

[1375] It's like they're fully wholly committed to this prospect of downloading themselves.

[1376] Have you talked to Kurtz well before?

[1377] No, but I've read his stuff.

[1378] I had a chance to interview him a few years back for sci -fi.

[1379] He's super smart.

[1380] He's beyond.

[1381] But God damn, is he committed to it.

[1382] And then when you get to it, you realize that what he actually wants to do is recreate his father.

[1383] Yeah, his father died when he was young.

[1384] And he wants to be able to, through memories.

[1385] and photographs and what he knows about his father literally recreate his father and have be able to have a conversation with him.

[1386] He was talking about this.

[1387] Right, right.

[1388] But what he's doing is he's going way, way into the future, into the possibilities of he's not seeing like, well, five years from now, we're going to be able to send, you know, gigabyte pictures to the mail.

[1389] No, he's saying, let's think of if you keep going exponentially, and electronics and technology and innovation keeps continually accelerating, we could potentially get to the point where it's the impossible.

[1390] Well, you would be able to recreate human beings based on your knowledge of them and they'll be able to come up with some sort of a program where he'll be able to have a conversation with his father.

[1391] Yeah, see, I think that misunder, I mean, I think it's true about like the possibility of a singularity in technological development, but, you know, it's not going to be his father.

[1392] That's the sad thing, you know.

[1393] I think we seriously, you know, I've done some work on this as an interest of mind about mind.

[1394] What is mind?

[1395] You know, what does the relationship be to mind and matter?

[1396] And I think we have like a serious misunderstanding.

[1397] We don't understand consciousness very well at all.

[1398] So the idea that like, oh yeah, it's just going to be trivial to download your, you know, your consciousness into a computer.

[1399] I think it's pretty, you know, there's like a shitload of assumptions in there about like what mind is and the relationship between like your neurons and, you know, awareness.

[1400] So that's why I think those guys, it's a little bit of a religion.

[1401] You know what I mean?

[1402] It is a little bit of religion.

[1403] Yes, we will transcend.

[1404] And, you know, so it's like...

[1405] Well, 2045 is the new benchmark for whatever reason.

[1406] That's the new number that they're going for.

[1407] It's going to be like every other, you know, every other rapture.

[1408] Oh, we thought it was 2045.

[1409] We really meant 2065.

[1410] Well, we went to this 2045 conference, me and my friend Ari and Duncan, and we got to talk to some of these guys.

[1411] And it was really fascinating.

[1412] And one of them had created some robot that was supposed to be him, but it didn't work well.

[1413] So they never revealed it at the conference.

[1414] had too many bugs in it.

[1415] Yeah, yeah.

[1416] But it's intriguing.

[1417] It's like, I want them to keep going.

[1418] Because, I mean, when are we going to get to X Machina?

[1419] Yeah.

[1420] When are we going to get it?

[1421] Talk about good movies, though.

[1422] Did you like that one?

[1423] One of my favorite movies ever.

[1424] So smart.

[1425] So, like, just like simple.

[1426] Perfect.

[1427] He's not beating you over the head with it.

[1428] No, cut the shit moments in that movie.

[1429] Yeah, no, no. You were like, whoa.

[1430] I think that's one of my all -time, like, top 20 movies for sure.

[1431] When she stabs them, just emotionless.

[1432] Just like, Kelly, I'm putting the blade in.

[1433] It was amazing.

[1434] Amazing.

[1435] Spoiler alert.

[1436] Yeah, right.

[1437] Did you like Annihilation?

[1438] Yes.

[1439] Yeah, I liked it a lot, too.

[1440] I didn't like it as much, but I liked it.

[1441] It was very weird.

[1442] And the ending seemed like some producers put their jizz in the soup.

[1443] It's just like, what's happening here?

[1444] Who made this part?

[1445] Yeah.

[1446] But I enjoyed it, yeah.

[1447] Yeah.

[1448] So I think like, you know, I mean, the danger with anything when it comes to AI.

[1449] So here's an interesting thing about AI.

[1450] Like we are getting, making amazing strides with AI.

[1451] Yeah.

[1452] Now, now artificial intelligence is different from artificial intelligence.

[1453] artificial consciousness, you know what I mean?

[1454] So like, but, but the AI that, you know, what we're getting out of it is nothing like us, right?

[1455] So the, you know, back in the day where people were like, oh, we're going to like model the human brain and that's how we'll do it.

[1456] Well, like, make programs that are what and what they've learned is like, oh, that doesn't really work that well.

[1457] So now this is the whole big data thing, like, you know, network theory and big data and deep learning where like, you know, they're using statistical, you know, the power of having huge amounts of computing and statistical reasoning.

[1458] so that, like, you know, yeah, the computer, like, you know, it'll find the picture of the cat, but you have no idea why it found the picture.

[1459] It didn't reason like, oh, yeah, that sort of looks like cat, and I like cats.

[1460] You know, it was just like, oh, these kinds of lines go with that kind of thing.

[1461] It has no idea what it's doing, but it'll act intelligently.

[1462] And so that's, you know, I mean, that's kind of freaky -diki in a lot of ways, too.

[1463] I think people are, I think it's smart to think about the dangers of AI, not necessarily when it takes over - not necessarily the dangers just the dangers to this thing that we are this weird monkey thing that wants to keep being a monkey thing yeah well you mean in the sense of like right that it's going to replace us yes yeah yeah I think it's inevitable I mean don't you think that if you go back and interview the single cell organism before I branched off into multi -celled that'd be kind of a boring interview fuck this multi -cell bullshit I want to stay a single cell at the bottom of the ocean these guys are assholes man with their rock and roll music they're going to do.

[1464] They're going to make cars.

[1465] Fuck that.

[1466] I don't want a car, man. I like staying down here.

[1467] There's a real thought to that, that we are the wetware that is the problem.

[1468] Yeah.

[1469] No, no, listen, I think it's fully conceivable.

[1470] Like, I'm not going to be like, it'll never happen.

[1471] But as a guy knows, a philosopher, says, you know, there's a certain way in which everything we do with AI right now, it's not like, you know, Watson is playing chess.

[1472] It's like we're using Watson to play chess.

[1473] It's our tool, you know.

[1474] And I think the fear is the tool gets out of hand.

[1475] Not that it like develops a thing we're like, I hate humans, you know, Dad, I hate you.

[1476] But more that's like these things which are not actually thinking, they act intelligence but they're not thinking, can have a huge like it'll have a really negative impact.

[1477] You know, it'll, you know, what is it?

[1478] There's that example of like if you design something that is an AI system to make paper clips, it ends up consuming the entire planet making paper clips because that's what you told it to do.

[1479] Right, you never told it to make a sustainable amount of paper clips.

[1480] Right, exactly.

[1481] So I'm more worried about that than I am of like Skynet, you know, coming over and, like, you know, deciding that it's going to, you know, drop all the bombs on us because it needs to get rid of us.

[1482] Well, there's no biological imperative for a silicon -based artificial intelligence to procreate, to keep going and move forward.

[1483] Like, why would they do that?

[1484] We do it because we came from biology, and biology needs to stay alive, and everybody wants bigger, faster, stronger, you want to keep moving, and it's because there's a real possibility that you might get consumed by some other life form.

[1485] So you have to protect your self.

[1486] and you have to look out for other people who might want to breed with the viable female that you've copulated with.

[1487] There's a lot of shit that's going on.

[1488] It's built in evolutionarily to have that.

[1489] Right.

[1490] That we assume that somehow or another these artificial creations will have as well.

[1491] Right.

[1492] Which is why, right?

[1493] I mean, yeah.

[1494] Unless we program it in.

[1495] So the thing is like, but will it wake up?

[1496] Like, so that's the other thing.

[1497] Even if it does wake up, will it have the inclination towards scientific research?

[1498] Would it even want to send something through the cosmos to view a?

[1499] Yeah.

[1500] Yeah, no, that's a really interesting, you know, and I think we just don't know, right?

[1501] If it actually, because listen, we understand so little about what consciousness is and what its imperatives are.

[1502] Like, yeah, once you wake up or you're like, oh, you're dead, you know, dead, I got to kill.

[1503] I mean, like, why?

[1504] Like, who knows what really.

[1505] Did you like Battlestar Galactica?

[1506] I loved Battlestar god damn good was that new the new version yeah no the new version yes I got sad I love the old version because I was yeah I was 14 years old and I was like yeah spaceships but the new version was amazing if there is a show that I wish they would bring back it's Battlestar galac yeah yeah how'd you think about the ending though it was you know they had to end it it was all right yeah but the fucking series was brilliant it was brilliant you know it was amazing about that the way they wrapped like all the political shit that was happening after 9 -11 into that man from like the torture scenes to the yeah man it was so and then they even had the whole thing with starbuck about you know what was she yeah that that was a you know there was a couple like it was five years right and there were a couple seasons where like it kind of got a little ran off the rails that girl what's her name katie sackoff is that her name yeah is that her name she's so good yeah she was really good in that role being both like tough and stuff since she's got a movie out right now on netflix i haven't seen it right but i'm so like oh yeah there's you know But she had, right, she sort of disappeared after that.

[1507] She was so good in that show.

[1508] I was like, well, this is, this is like the launching pad for her.

[1509] And you know, it was revolutionary about that show, too, the way they did the special effects were like, you know, the camera moved around.

[1510] Like, there's a spaceship, but I'm, you know, I don't have, it didn't do, you know, sometimes it did those long pants, but it was, it kind of opened up a whole new way of sort of looking at, you know, just sort of what it looks like to be in space and stuff.

[1511] Yeah, but it really scared the shit out of people in terms of artificial life.

[1512] Something that we create that decides it's done with us and it's taking over.

[1513] Well, you know, it's amazing about that, and this is, I've written about this, this idea that, like, you know, we keep telling that story over and over again, right?

[1514] How many movies, you know, can you think of, you know, so I'm really interested in myth, right?

[1515] The whole, you know, mythology, the way, like, you know, we can never get away from the myths, you know, coming of age, the hero's journey.

[1516] Joseph Campbell.

[1517] Yeah, Joseph Campbell.

[1518] Yeah, a big Joseph Campbell fan.

[1519] But, like, you know, what's happening with us now, we got, there's nothing in the, there's nothing in the storehouse of myth to take care of, like, building machines that take over, right?

[1520] So the reason we keep telling that.

[1521] So the reason we keep telling that.

[1522] story over and over again is we're preparing ourselves, right?

[1523] We're building the myths, you know, that sort of will help.

[1524] We don't know what's going to happen, but we have to keep telling that story because we can feel it coming.

[1525] You know what I mean?

[1526] So we need to keep telling that story to kind of explore what the options are.

[1527] And I like, that's why I liked about the ending.

[1528] And, you know, I didn't think the ending was great.

[1529] But the idea that like, oh, yeah, this balance, you know, you get to keep going through these cycles of trying to achieve this balance between, you know, silicon forms and non -silicate and biological forms.

[1530] But it's inevitable.

[1531] We're worried that we're going to be taken over by something else, but we're not overly concerned with evolving, our own biology and changing.

[1532] And maybe that's the solution in terms of our physical limitations is some sort of a symbiotic connection between us and technology, that instead of artificial technology and artificial life taking over, usurping us.

[1533] Instead of that, maybe we become a part of it and it becomes a part of us.

[1534] I mean, you have glasses on.

[1535] You can see better with those glasses.

[1536] That's essentially Cyborg.

[1537] And these things, you know, these cell phones.

[1538] My God, my memory's in there, I used to know cell phones.

[1539] I left my house two days ago without my phone and I turned around in a panic on my own street.

[1540] I'm out, where's my fucking phone?

[1541] I was like, no. Do you remember when you used to have phone numbers in your head?

[1542] Oh yeah.

[1543] You know?

[1544] I have like 20 phone numbers.

[1545] Yeah.

[1546] I can't even, my wife's number I can't, like I got three digits out of it.

[1547] Yeah.

[1548] I can't go further than that.

[1549] It's crazy.

[1550] Yeah.

[1551] I mean, you have so much, I mean, I'm, I'm really overwhelmed.

[1552] I think I'm in that weird zone where I just don't have, I don't have enough data space.

[1553] I don't have enough storage.

[1554] Yeah, yeah, for all those.

[1555] That's you got to kind of pick and choose, right?

[1556] Sort of, you know, like Wikipedia, where all human knowledge, the entire sum of human knowledge is right there, you know?

[1557] I mean, like, whoa, what a freaking, I mean, talk about changes, right, that you were talking about.

[1558] What an amazing change that you can have pretty much, you know.

[1559] Like, you know, I love comics, right?

[1560] You know, I was a comic, Marvel guy way back, right?

[1561] And back in the day, you know, you paid for you.

[1562] You had to, you know, first of all, you got your ass kicked.

[1563] But, you know, you have to go to the store every week and get the comics and, you know.

[1564] And now, you know, you just look up Captain America and you can know everything there was about his, you know, his origin story and everything.

[1565] So it's like that idea that like there's no domains of knowledge that you can't instantly access and have all the backstory that you need.

[1566] That's got to be a physical comic books are amazing, but I have to be honest.

[1567] Comic books on an iPad are better because you don't see the next frame.

[1568] Yeah.

[1569] You just swipe and then you get the next frame.

[1570] You don't see it in advance.

[1571] Like if you're reading the left side of Dr. Strange and the right side is an explosion, you're like, well, I see that.

[1572] I see that shit's coming next.

[1573] Like it's kind of a shitty way to do it.

[1574] No, I agree.

[1575] On an iPad, it's fucking amazing.

[1576] It's amazing.

[1577] Yeah, no, and you do that thing.

[1578] And now with the, it's like embarrassing.

[1579] As a professor of physics at a major university, I have like $3 ,000 worth of comic.

[1580] books.

[1581] But why is that embarrassing?

[1582] No, it's not embarrassing.

[1583] It can't be.

[1584] No, no, it's still a brilliant guy, but you just also like cool shit.

[1585] Yeah, well, shouldn't I be reading like Dostoevsky or something?

[1586] I don't know.

[1587] You know, it's from like, you know, my dad was, my dad was always like, oh, you're comic books, you know.

[1588] But I was like, dad, I'm learning, especially with Marvel, right?

[1589] Marvel had great language, right?

[1590] I learned the word synopsis from Marvel, you know, so.

[1591] Especially like, you know, some of the, like Dr. Strange had some great shit, you know, Fantastic Four.

[1592] I didn't, yeah, no, the doctors, you know, it's, I was the science advisor for Dr. Strange.

[1593] For the movie?

[1594] For the movie?

[1595] Were you really?

[1596] That was amazing.

[1597] Best day ever.

[1598] I always say.

[1599] Did you have to correct anything?

[1600] No, no, not really because they called me in.

[1601] So I know Scott Derrick's.

[1602] I actually had lunch with our breakfast with Scott yesterday.

[1603] I know Scott from my first book, which is about science and religion.

[1604] You know, so we got, somebody, you know, connected us and we've been talking for a long time.

[1605] And when he got tapped to do Dr. Strange, he contacted.

[1606] Like I said, you know, like I was saying, you know, I said, Marvel wants to talk to you.

[1607] You know, it's like, oh, thank you.

[1608] And, you know, I got out there for a day.

[1609] Kevin Fee, man. It was just like, oh, man. And so we basically worked on, he wanted to work on two things for that.

[1610] And what's funny here is I never read Dr. Strange, right?

[1611] Because I was like a science guy.

[1612] It was all about Tony Stark.

[1613] Sure.

[1614] Or, you know, or a Spider -Man or the X -Men.

[1615] So I never, I was like, oh, the guy uses magic.

[1616] So the thing we had to figure out was, first of all, that scene where he first encounters the ancient one, you know, and she has to kind of like, you know, school him on there's more ways to think about the world than science.

[1617] And then the multiverse.

[1618] That was the other thing, because I've written a lot on the multiverse.

[1619] But, man, it was awesome.

[1620] It was so much fun to be in the writer's room, you know, with them and just, like, be thrown around ideas.

[1621] Wow.

[1622] Yeah, no, it was, you know, and it'll probably never, ever happen again, but I don't care.

[1623] You know, I don't care.

[1624] I got my shot.

[1625] It is a weird thing that when you're young, you like all this cool stuff, but then when you get old, you're supposed to be more pragmatic.

[1626] You're supposed to abandon that stuff and be mature.

[1627] But when I was a kid, I was super embarrassed when I became an adult that I still like muscle cars.

[1628] I was like, why do I like these stupid things?

[1629] And I love them.

[1630] I would see one drive by, I'd hear the Rambla, I'd go, ooh.

[1631] That's awesome.

[1632] Look at that thing.

[1633] And then when I became an older adult, I was like, who gives a fuck?

[1634] That's really what it is.

[1635] That's where I'm now.

[1636] Like, who cares, man?

[1637] You know, because I love video games.

[1638] I play a lot of video games.

[1639] And people always like, oh my God, why you play video games?

[1640] You're terrible.

[1641] It's like, children.

[1642] Yeah, they're awesome, man. There is no better way to kill an hour, especially after a stressful day than to go and shoot aliens, you know?

[1643] I mean, this is like, you know, And it stimulates the mind.

[1644] I mean, Jamie and I have talked about this many times that we have this deep appreciation for chess and for Go and all these ancient games.

[1645] But there are games like Starcraft and even like one -on -one quake matches that require intense calculating.

[1646] You have to think about the environment, understanding of the map that you're competing in.

[1647] There's a lot of strategy.

[1648] No, that's what's really good about it.

[1649] I mean, I tend to be, I do a lot.

[1650] I really like RPGs, you know, so with a map and everything.

[1651] Oh, you're one of them EverQuest Dorks.

[1652] Well, I don't do ever, I don't do anything multi -player, right?

[1653] Because I'm so bad at it that, like, I know there's some kids, some 13 -year -old in Korea who's just like, p, you're dead, p, p, you're dead, spawn, die, spawn.

[1654] But I like with something with a really good story, you know?

[1655] What's the game you like?

[1656] Oh, God, my favorite game is Last of Us.

[1657] Oh, what is that?

[1658] Oh, man, Last of a...

[1659] It is fucking awesome.

[1660] Because I don't like zombie games because I get scared, you know?

[1661] You get scared?

[1662] Ever since, when I saw...

[1663] What about Plants versus Zombies?

[1664] That's a nice simple one.

[1665] Yeah, right.

[1666] That might work.

[1667] No, I saw the Night of Living Dead when I was like 12.

[1668] It was on PBS little screen.

[1669] And it's just like after that, I'm sorry, zombies.

[1670] Wow.

[1671] Yeah.

[1672] I can't believe they put it on TV.

[1673] Like, you know, for it was like the 11 o 'clock show.

[1674] So, but last of us is kind of a zombie survival story.

[1675] But it's beautiful.

[1676] I mean, it's really the narrative of it.

[1677] It's this guy, you know, it's 20 years after.

[1678] And the thing about this thing, it opens up with the, you know, the zombie outbreak happening.

[1679] And the guy loses his daughter.

[1680] Like you see him lose.

[1681] his daughter and it's so well it's the same company that did um uh uncharted which are other i really like those as well um and so it's just like the acting in it was really beautiful and then you know it's 20 years later and this guy's broken you know what i mean like he's just he's a you know he's survived in this you know the society's falling apart um but uh you know he just you track him as he gets this this young girl who is immune and he's got to take her cross country to you know and you're following this guy's story and you know and then there's zombies and there's not a The theme of a movie, a really recent movie, wasn't that?

[1682] Like a foreign movie with a foreign zombie movie that was supposed to be very good, but that was the idea behind it.

[1683] Yeah, but it was his own daughter, wasn't it?

[1684] Or no, maybe it wasn't Schwarzenegger?

[1685] I bet they took it from this because this is, yeah.

[1686] Because, you know, so Last of Us has won, like, huge amounts of awards.

[1687] How old is it?

[1688] Six years, maybe.

[1689] Last of Us 2 is just about to come out.

[1690] Well, the Schwarzenegger movie is older than that, I believe.

[1691] Because it came out right around the time.

[1692] where his wife left me because he banged the maid.

[1693] Oh, yeah.

[1694] Whoops.

[1695] Downfall.

[1696] He was the governor then.

[1697] Wasn't he the governor?

[1698] He was post.

[1699] It was post, post governor.

[1700] Yeah.

[1701] But that theme is a reoccurring theme.

[1702] That is a reoccurring.

[1703] More than anyone.

[1704] Right.

[1705] How many times does that come back?

[1706] The plague wipes people out.

[1707] They come back to life.

[1708] They're zombies.

[1709] Yeah.

[1710] So you've got to wonder what's up with that.

[1711] Like, why is that something that's like stirring around in our head?

[1712] I think the apocalypse is because.

[1713] we kind of feel, we're nervous about what's happening with us because we can see sort of we're pushing up against boundaries.

[1714] Well, we're also vulnerable.

[1715] Yeah.

[1716] And we're vulnerable to disease and we're vulnerable to, I mean, there's so many different things that people can get, rabies and malaria.

[1717] And we had plagues.

[1718] We used to have plagues all the time, you know?

[1719] So, yeah, no. But that's what makes this game so great is that it really takes the world after the fall seriously.

[1720] And it's heartbreaking.

[1721] You know what I mean?

[1722] It's beautifully done scarier than shit.

[1723] but you know beautifully done and it's for me it's like everything that I love most in because like you're saying is you get into these situations and you know you're going to get killed you know like there's Dark Souls or like there's no getting through Dark Souls is apparently the most hardest game ever I've never played it but you know this game is hard and you got to keep coming back.

[1724] What is Dark Souls?

[1725] Dark Souls is a it's also a story based you know open world game single player I think that's probably a multiplayer mode but um it's like you know kind of an elvish you know you're in that kind of world And you're just trying to stay alive?

[1726] Trying to stay alive and it's just like the hardest game ever that's what they say um but like you know like said a good hard game you got a you know you gotta you're gonna keep going back like oh i just died all right let me try let me try coming around from this side you know oh let me use this weapon let me you know and it's it's really you know we did a my um i had a textbook that i just came out a couple years ago and we did a video game we built a full first ever full video game for an intro astronomy course and the whole idea was like the coolest thing about a game is like the first thing you have to do is learn the rules right and that's what makes being in a game world interest.

[1727] You know, there's a whole set of rules.

[1728] You've got to know how to craft.

[1729] You've got to know which weapons to use in different kinds of situations.

[1730] And our idea with the video game was like, just make the real rules.

[1731] Make them the science rules.

[1732] Oh, you want to go mine an asteroid.

[1733] Well, how do you know which asteroid has, you know, the most, you know, or in it?

[1734] You know, I'm just going to do what you're going to normally do in astronomy.

[1735] So I think, like, you know, video games have not recognized.

[1736] They haven't, like you said, people don't understand actually how important they are, you know, for teaching, for all kinds of things, video games, and for like a future of storytelling, too.

[1737] Well, people take them, they think that it's a waste of time until they find out how much these professionals make.

[1738] You know, someone was saying that some guy, what is the number that kid was making $500 ,000 a month playing Fortnite?

[1739] Wasn't that what Sean is?

[1740] That's what you advertise it as, but that's way more than that?

[1741] He makes more than that?

[1742] So what is Fortnite?

[1743] Can somebody explain Fortnite to me?

[1744] I'm sorry, I'm still in Far Cry 5 right now.

[1745] It's a crazy third -person shooter.

[1746] You're jumping around shooting people I'm good with third person shooters Yeah Like is it a story or is it just like you're You know you got other people up I think Yeah the story is really just drop it into survive Oh yeah There's no campaign mode or if there's a campaign There is but that's a separate Yeah That's not whatever that's playing You know what's interesting to me about Fortnite The graphics suck Don't you have me That's a graphic style That it has Yeah It does it kind of has like a Xbox 2 Yeah Somebody had an image and it was from 2007 and it said man look at this I wonder what video games are going to be looking like the graphics are going to be looking like in 2018 and then it shows Fortnite and it's like this is like it's like they've turned the textures off yeah they 100 % you turn the textures off when you play online if you don't have a powerful enough computer sure you don't like quick right so it doesn't make your streaming it doesn't make your video game video card work so hard but also it makes it easier to recognize shapes because they're not is like that was the thing they did with Quake, they would completely turn the textures off when guys would be like playing in high level matches and you would just deal with these flat walls and then the object, the person that you were fighting against would, they would stand out and stark contrast.

[1747] Right, right.

[1748] Whereas, you know, otherwise you'd be in this castle wall.

[1749] You'd have incredible textures on the wall and you wouldn't be able to see them as easily.

[1750] You'd be distracting.

[1751] I mean, that's one thing I think I love about video games too is like, you know, the scenery.

[1752] Sometimes I just want to stop and be like, whoa, dude.

[1753] That's like.

[1754] If the right side has full graphics, the left side is not.

[1755] So, like, it depends on what you were actually looking.

[1756] Yeah, the right side's reasonable.

[1757] I mean, it still is a little bit.

[1758] Wait a minute.

[1759] That's not much different at all.

[1760] Yeah, it is.

[1761] Yeah, I mean, sort of.

[1762] The left side is just dark.

[1763] No, like, there's grass.

[1764] Yeah, look at the grass.

[1765] Yeah, but there's still some movement on the ground.

[1766] It's not flat plane like it is in Quake.

[1767] Go to Quake, go to Quake 3, no textures.

[1768] Make a video or pull up a video of that, and you'll see what I'm.

[1769] I'm talking about.

[1770] What I'm talking about is like literal flat walls where people turned everything off.

[1771] And it got to a point where they weren't allowing it in certain competitions because it makes such a big difference.

[1772] Because now you're just like it's a target in front of a blank screen.

[1773] You could also replace all of the characters with a larger character.

[1774] Like say if you were playing as like this girl, it's like is this one?

[1775] It's doing like it's showing the mod in between.

[1776] Maybe I'm thinking.

[1777] What is quite.

[1778] I'm sorry.

[1779] I'm sorry.

[1780] I'm This is not it.

[1781] What is quake?

[1782] I've heard of it.

[1783] How dare you, you son of a bitch.

[1784] No, no, Jamie, pull up quake, no textures.

[1785] Pull up quake, no textures, and then you can watch what it looks like.

[1786] That is not no textures.

[1787] That's different.

[1788] You can see the difference in the colors and things are moving.

[1789] It's when they turn off all the textures, you get to see these flat wall.

[1790] That's what it looks like.

[1791] Right.

[1792] See?

[1793] Yeah.

[1794] Now, that is a way different experience.

[1795] Yeah.

[1796] It would be much easier to see, right, you can't.

[1797] Shadows still exist, but all the textures are gone.

[1798] And if you show a video of that, see if you could find a video of that, Jamie.

[1799] When in the videos, you see things moving around with no textures and you realize what an advantage it would be.

[1800] If you were playing someone who's, you're constantly dealing with all this visual input.

[1801] You have all this different shit.

[1802] High visibility.

[1803] This isn't Quake 3 that it's hard to find out.

[1804] Who is this?

[1805] Which game is this?

[1806] Quake Live.

[1807] Oh, okay.

[1808] So, all right, again, I still got to ask, what is Quake?

[1809] I mean, I know I've heard of it, but I've never played it.

[1810] It's the ultimate first -person shooter, and it's the original one.

[1811] It was originally Quake 1, and, well, there was Doom, but it was...

[1812] Doom I've heard of, like, Doom I've even, you know, they did Doom, didn't they?

[1813] They came out with another, didn't they come out with another version of Doom?

[1814] Yes, they did, and there's another one that's coming out soon, but what Quake 1 was, was these cool maps, and you'd run around and shoot each other, and you'd have these death matches, so one -on -one death matches and shoot rockets at each other and shit.

[1815] And it's, you're seeing it through your perspective.

[1816] Like, so if you have a rocket launch, you see the rocket launcher in front of you.

[1817] Oh, so that whole idea of first person.

[1818] What is this one?

[1819] Oh, this is Quake Champions.

[1820] This is the newest version.

[1821] I mean, the graphics are fucking incredible in these things now.

[1822] They're so excited.

[1823] We're going to have, we're setting up a land here, a local area network here, where we're going to stream live and play each other.

[1824] Excellent.

[1825] And, uh, waste massive amounts of time.

[1826] And I'm sure I'm going to get yelled at.

[1827] And sometimes I'm sort of like, oh, three hours just went by.

[1828] Yeah.

[1829] I was going to go to sleep a little bit of, oh, well, whatever.

[1830] Dude, it will suck up your time.

[1831] It'll suck up.

[1832] But, you know, I can't play.

[1833] I'm just, I'm not good enough to play those kinds of things.

[1834] Like, it's just like, spawn die, spawn die.

[1835] No, you can figure out how to do it.

[1836] You're a smart guy.

[1837] How dare you say that?

[1838] How dare you put the limitations.

[1839] On myself.

[1840] Yeah, you can't, you can't do that.

[1841] Listen, you just need to learn W -A -S -D, learn how to move your fingers around and get a good I need the consoles are bullshit I know that's what people say listen you can't get any real accuracy with a console that's your problem but wait how do you do the thing of the type I mean the console now I'm pretty good I listen to you how do you learn physics how do you what is that all this fucking I can't do it man I don't understand all this science like that movie we're like you can do it's like that movie or something that's like rocky or something that's right kid or whatever has anybody ever done that for video games he's never been that movie where you someone teaches someone how to play a video game yeah and like the guy he's a nerd in the beginning and he's like a loser and he's like a loser and he's like a nerd in the But, you know, he comes back and he gets the girl.

[1842] Well, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this in particular is because I am more and more convinced that it's, our future may lie in some artificially created world and that people are more interested and more attracted every day to virtual reality.

[1843] Yeah.

[1844] Augmented reality, virtual reality.

[1845] And, Jamie, what was that game, the one game where there was created worlds?

[1846] I was going to pull that up earlier and ask it.

[1847] called no man sky oh i played that i played that i bought it because of course any space game i'm like yeah that's boring though it is because you know they have 80 trillion worlds but they're all the they're basically they don't look that different you know so it's like oatmeal 80 million bottles and there's nothing over there it's not like you go there and people are shooting each other and stealing money no no what is better for that yeah right i mean it's you know it looked like it was but what's better is um elite dangerous so after this i was so disappointed in this uh i went back and i found Elite Dangerous, which actually has...

[1848] And you were just disappointing this because there was no action.

[1849] Yeah, there was not...

[1850] You just ran around and you mind stuff.

[1851] It was sort of like, it just wasn't, you know...

[1852] Nothing exciting.

[1853] There was nothing exciting.

[1854] There was no, you know, there was no...

[1855] So, like I said, I don't usually play sort of these massive multiplayer games.

[1856] So this is Elite Dangerous?

[1857] This is elite dangerous.

[1858] And it is, man, the trading or, you know, you can decide, like, oh, I want to be a, I want to be a bounty hunter, you know?

[1859] And it was so rich.

[1860] I just, I spent...

[1861] There was like a good six months of my life that I was like, you know, working my way, getting better ships.

[1862] I became...

[1863] Because, you know, who doesn't want to be a bounty hunter, right?

[1864] You know what everybody's, and this just, this game had, you know, and there's like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand people in there, you know, creating the universe, it's evolving.

[1865] They add storylines, so, you know.

[1866] Well, we are setting up an HTVive here and we, we, Jamie was.

[1867] How dare you.

[1868] I know, man, it's like, you know, that's it.

[1869] You call yourself a dork.

[1870] You call yourself a nerd.

[1871] You're not a real nerd.

[1872] You'll never not have sex again.

[1873] It's virtual reality.

[1874] and it's consumer virtual reality and my friend's never done the oh boy I've been waiting I've been sort of well we tried to get one Jamie went out yesterday and look they're all sold out so we had to order one and so we're ordering one we're going to have it set up in here and the games I played the games of two years ago and I'm sure they're way more advanced than they are now but there's a crazy archery game where you're on a top of a castle and these little monsters that look like They could be in South Park.

[1875] They're not, like, detailed, but they're kind of cool -looking monsters, and you shoot at them with bows and arrows, and they're trying to invade the castle.

[1876] But, man, it's addictive because you really look down, you see them all around you.

[1877] You have, like, a real...

[1878] So how do you play, though?

[1879] This is that always been my question about it.

[1880] Like, you know, I sit on my chair and I play my video game.

[1881] So, like, are you...

[1882] Well, this is it.

[1883] See, this guy has a thing in his hands, and he's moving around.

[1884] This is like a Star Wars one.

[1885] Right.

[1886] And there's a bunch of different ones that I've seen.

[1887] You always got to be standing, right, in some sense.

[1888] Yes.

[1889] Does that make it more exhausting?

[1890] Don't you want to just, like, sit down with a beer and like, you know.

[1891] You can, but there's also a boxing one that you get a real workout in.

[1892] Wow.

[1893] So it's a game, and I played it over Dunkett's house.

[1894] I think there's a video of it.

[1895] But it's weird because you punch wrong.

[1896] So like if I'm holding my hands like this, which is I'm holding my hands vertically where my thumbs are up, right?

[1897] The boxing gloves would be horizontal like they would be if you were punching someone.

[1898] Yeah, yeah.

[1899] So it doesn't do the turn.

[1900] No, it's weird.

[1901] So as you move your hands forward like this, which you really wouldn't punch like that, the punches come out.

[1902] So they've got to iron that out.

[1903] That's what I was going to say.

[1904] That'll be something to work out in time.

[1905] Yeah, and make the controller rotate the way a fist would.

[1906] But as you're doing it, you throw real punches, and someone's throwing punches at you.

[1907] And when they throw punches you and they hit you, you see a white flash in front of you.

[1908] That's cool.

[1909] That's good.

[1910] Which makes you nervous just like real sparring does.

[1911] Yeah.

[1912] Well, you know, and so like this question of like, what are we going to do with virtual reality?

[1913] Because, like I said, you know, I see huge potential for, like, education in gaming.

[1914] And that's why we built our game.

[1915] Yeah, here's, this is me over Duncan's house.

[1916] Just don't want anybody to walk by, you know.

[1917] I got to go get a beer.

[1918] Bam!

[1919] I'm beating this guy up, moving around him.

[1920] See, that's the thing.

[1921] I always wonder.

[1922] Duncan got pissed because that guy was fucking dunking up every day.

[1923] He's like, dude, how did you beat it?

[1924] I was like, move around.

[1925] Don't stand right in front of that thing.

[1926] Just punch it in the face.

[1927] I've got to do the rope -a -dope.

[1928] Well, you got to have footwork and movement, but you can really get a workout with that.

[1929] I'm not joking.

[1930] Like, you get exhausted.

[1931] And, you know, you keep going and fight tougher and tougher opponents.

[1932] Right.

[1933] Well, you know, that's the, and that's the question, you know, so like talk about haptic suits.

[1934] Like, where eventually, you know, you're going to wear things.

[1935] I didn't see the, I read the book, but I didn't see the, what was it, the movie that just, ready set, ready player one?

[1936] I didn't see it.

[1937] I didn't see it.

[1938] Have you read the book?

[1939] No. Because the book is, like, full immersion.

[1940] Like, the whole book is about, like, when virtual reality is.

[1941] it and so everybody has these suits that you know and you're kind of in this ball you play the game in a ball so you can run and you know um but in some sense yes we're just starting out along these lines well they have these places you can go that they have a warehouse set up and you go inside of it and i i went through one with my kids and it's a star wars one at Disneyland dude it's fucking wild you go across you're walking across this platform like they have all these different places where you actually walk through yeah and as you're walking through you look to the left and to the right, and there's fire, but you feel the heat from the fire.

[1942] It's fucking crazy.

[1943] Yeah, so they've got, like, heaters set up so that blows.

[1944] Yep, and Stormtroopers start shooting out you.

[1945] This is it right here.

[1946] What is it called?

[1947] The void.

[1948] The void, yeah.

[1949] And you do this.

[1950] I'm telling me, man, this is better than any of the rides at Disneyland, and it's just outside of Disneyland in downtown Disney, so you don't have to pay to get into Disney to get it.

[1951] But it costs, I think it's $35 for half an hour.

[1952] It's not cheap, but.

[1953] It's not too bad.

[1954] It's not too bad.

[1955] It's not like, you know.

[1956] But it's fucking awesome.

[1957] I mean, it is awesome.

[1958] Yeah.

[1959] So the question is what happens with all this, right?

[1960] Future, right?

[1961] Because, yeah, virtual reality, we're just on the cusp of it, right?

[1962] We're just beginning to, like, start playing around with these technologies.

[1963] Because people would have been saying it for years, and it kind of sucked.

[1964] It was sort of clunky.

[1965] Well, we're used to play Pong, right?

[1966] That's what I started with, right?

[1967] How old do you?

[1968] I'm 55.

[1969] Yeah, I'm 50.

[1970] So I remember Pong, we were excited.

[1971] I can't believe I'm controlling the TV.

[1972] I'm making the thing move on the TV.

[1973] Or asteroids?

[1974] Yes.

[1975] We flew the, it was a Star Wars game.

[1976] I don't think it was called Asteroids, but you flew through the trench and everything.

[1977] It was just like fucking wireframe.

[1978] Yeah, but it was amazing.

[1979] I loved that.

[1980] I dropped a lot of quarters on that.

[1981] Sure.

[1982] So go from that to what you were showing us here with these crazy new space games.

[1983] And then imagine what these, I mean, the Star Wars thing today, the void, is really cool.

[1984] But you know that it's not real.

[1985] Right.

[1986] But it's cool.

[1987] Right.

[1988] But you know it's not real.

[1989] Well, you're not going to be able to tell it's not real in 20 years.

[1990] Yeah, right.

[1991] And how much time are people?

[1992] You wear a haptic suit, by the way, when you do this.

[1993] Oh, really?

[1994] You have less on you.

[1995] And you feel it when you get in shot.

[1996] Wow.

[1997] You feel like, Yeah.

[1998] And, you know, it's funny.

[1999] Even with the controller on my crappy PS4, you know, when it vibrates when you, you know, like even that's enough to sort of give you.

[2000] It's amazing how much the brain sort of picks up on these signals.

[2001] When you're using the HTC vibe and you draw an arrow back, when it gets to the knocking point, you feel it like, ah.

[2002] That's cool.

[2003] And you release.

[2004] There's a feeling in your hand.

[2005] Yeah.

[2006] releasing the arrow.

[2007] It's really cool.

[2008] Yeah.

[2009] So what happens when, and you know, right, I can be sort of like, you know, grandpa, very like, that's terrible.

[2010] People should be going out in nature, which I think they should be.

[2011] They should, you know.

[2012] For now.

[2013] But, you know, I always, I'm always aware, whenever I'm sort of like, oh, shit, this is going to be terrible.

[2014] I always remember the whole, you can see in like, I think at some point Socrates, you know, 500 years ago, is like, oh, kids today, they're a bunch of, you know, assholes.

[2015] Right.

[2016] So, you know, who knows what we'll do with it.

[2017] And, you know, hopefully, and maybe it'll help, you know, maybe, I don't No, you know.

[2018] I mean, I think there's, I don't want to be like, oh, that's terrible.

[2019] But there clearly are, it's going to be dangerous with this.

[2020] Is this a different game, Jamie?

[2021] This is new one.

[2022] Oh, boy, I'm fucked.

[2023] I am going to be fucked.

[2024] Oh, that's wild with the, yeah, just the hands.

[2025] Yeah.

[2026] And so you're, you have two little hand controllers.

[2027] And one of them would be the arrow and the other one would be the bow.

[2028] And you wear them and that's the haptic part.

[2029] And it'll, there's just controllers on them.

[2030] Well, you feel the arrow vibrating against the riser of the bow as you draw it back, too.

[2031] it's really cool well it's funny because you know we talked about like you know for the the game that we built which was awesome it was really a lot of fun to actually go through the process of like how do you you know how do you script it how do you teach people you know like because that whole thing that when we get in a good when you're in a good game right you know in the first couple hours of a game and you're just learning the basic stuff and you get excited you're like oh this is this is a cool world to be in but I'd be interested to think like sort of you know at some point I did try VR for the same thing because what can you once you can have people be tactile and they're not just sort of in their head.

[2032] What else can you do to sort of show them, teach them things, you know?

[2033] Like glaciers or, you know, I mean.

[2034] Oh, for sure.

[2035] Well, that's another thing in Disneyland, they have a thing called soaring over the world that you sit in a chair and you get raised up and there's a giant, like, IMAX -style screen and it flies you over these environments.

[2036] It's incredible.

[2037] It's so beautiful.

[2038] Right.

[2039] And you different smells are in the air and the different places that you go to, like when you go over the elephant.

[2040] Yeah, the elephants, you smell grass and hay.

[2041] And I think that it's just a matter of time.

[2042] Like, as we were talking about before, where biological entities might not be necessary for space travel, you might be able to send a robot, put on a suit, and be able to experience these worlds, like in real time.

[2043] Yeah.

[2044] Well, so, you know, you know the simulation argument?

[2045] Yes.

[2046] So it's a philosophy argument about, you know.

[2047] And so that's a really interesting idea.

[2048] Should we just run through it for people who don't know it?

[2049] Please do.

[2050] So I forgot who it was Nick Bostrom, now maybe not, Brandon Carter.

[2051] You know, there's this guy philosopher who came with this brilliant argument for like, why.

[2052] we're probably a simulate, we're probably somebody else's simulation, self -aware simulation.

[2053] And the idea is like, look, if you get one, you know, we've been talking about like civilizations when they get a million years ahead, what can they do, that they're so powerful.

[2054] They can build computers that can simulate reality, like fully simulate reality.

[2055] We're like, you know, just like in the matrix, you have programs that are self -aware.

[2056] And so, you know, once they get to that and they start running simulations of the world, right?

[2057] It's cheaper to run, it's cheap to run simulations of them, right?

[2058] So the idea is that from that argument, there's more simulated realities than there is the one real reality.

[2059] So odds are, right?

[2060] You know, if there's a trillion simulated realities and one real reality, you're probably in a simulated reality.

[2061] So are we a, you know, everything like right now, you and I think this is real, you know, but what we are is an incredibly detailed and we are self -aware programs in, you know, a silicon matrix of, you know.

[2062] So that argument is brilliant.

[2063] I mean, you know, I mean, just from the, just from the point of view of, like, numbers, you know, there's lots of reasons to say that's not possible, but it's, you know, raises this issue of like, yeah, what is simulation?

[2064] If you were in a simulation, the whole matrix thing, if you were in a simulation that was that real, how would you know?

[2065] Yeah, how could you know?

[2066] There are.

[2067] One day we're going to be, if you allow technology to continue, right?

[2068] If we keep moving forward in an exponential pace, there's going to come a point in time where we have something that's indistinguishable from reality.

[2069] Right.

[2070] So how do we know that we're not already in it?

[2071] And once we're in it, will we create another reality?

[2072] Will we continue to create simulations inside of simulations, like fractals?

[2073] I mean, fractals exist in nature.

[2074] They exist everywhere in the universe.

[2075] And there's also the argument that the atomic structure itself might really be a universe.

[2076] Right, right.

[2077] Yeah.

[2078] Which is, dude.

[2079] That's super stoner talk.

[2080] But, you know, it's really, I mean, that's why I love science fiction.

[2081] You know, the explorations of these ideas, you know, I mean, they're way out there.

[2082] But they're fun exercises.

[2083] They're fun exercises, and there's a way in which, again, when you think a million, two million years in the future, this is why my, you know, I hate to loop this back to climate change, but just like, God, if we can just make it through, who the fuck knows what we're going to be, right?

[2084] I mean, there's the whole universe.

[2085] One thing I did like about interstellar was the idea that, like, our future cells, which have now become integrated in the very fabric of reality.

[2086] You know, that's how far you've evolved.

[2087] You become the laws of physics, that they're kind of opening up the wormhole for us.

[2088] And so, you know, a million years is so long.

[2089] and that yeah who knows what we can become and it's just like you know don't hold us back I'm you know I'm not a fan of the people that deny science but one thing I am a fan of is watching them do it like like watching monkeys throw shit at the zoo it's something weird about watching people argue like really obvious right -wing talking points and and most of them by the way have no financial interest in climate change right right one way or or the other, they're not, they're not the wealthy elite.

[2090] They're these weirdos that are like vampire familiars.

[2091] Like, they want to be recognized as like an ally of the elite.

[2092] They think somehow know that that's going to get them in.

[2093] That's really what it is, right.

[2094] Yeah.

[2095] That the, you know, and it's like, you know, and again, it's the tribalism.

[2096] But as you said, it's like watching them do this.

[2097] And the part that's so frustrating is just that, like, dude, you're using science.

[2098] It's not fair.

[2099] It's not fair.

[2100] It's not fair.

[2101] They're like, oh, you get like, you know, you get in an accident.

[2102] And you're like, oh, God, please give me the MRI.

[2103] And then, you know, as soon as your arm heals, you're going to be tweeting about how, like, you know, climate change is all bullshit.

[2104] Their earth is flat.

[2105] Yeah.

[2106] I'm not sure what to do with that, right?

[2107] I mean, are those guys just like, I mean, is this something we should, like, pay attention to, or should we just be like, okay, you know, fine, go ahead, do your thing.

[2108] Well, I had an interesting conversation with Neil DeGrasse Tyson about it.

[2109] And he said, one of the real problems with debating these people is you elevate their profile and they're never going to believe it in the first place.

[2110] And the reality is there's a mental illness involved in a lot of these people.

[2111] there's schizophrenics, there's something wrong with them.

[2112] Right.

[2113] They believe this.

[2114] And then there's this, there's this massive lack of education and lack of reading.

[2115] Yeah.

[2116] They're not interested in understanding how they know that the Earth is round or how they know that every other planet and the solar system is round.

[2117] Right.

[2118] Or how they know that every other planet that we've observed, all the stars are round.

[2119] Right.

[2120] Why they're round.

[2121] Right.

[2122] Why it's a matter of mass and gravity and all these.

[2123] They don't care about all that.

[2124] But what they don't want to think is the government as if it's, the government is like one cabal.

[2125] That's what it is.

[2126] Of equally minded people that are all working together to fuck you over somehow by convincing you that the earth is round.

[2127] Yeah.

[2128] It is one of the dumbest things.

[2129] But it's also a sign that we've created this world that's really easy to survive in.

[2130] We've nerfed all the hard edges and we keep the wolves off the streets.

[2131] And so these fucking dumb -dums.

[2132] And then they get online with computers, which is hilarious.

[2133] Yeah.

[2134] So these idiots make - I did research.

[2135] Yeah.

[2136] When you looked at a website?

[2137] YouTube videos.

[2138] Saw YouTube videos.

[2139] Yeah, right.

[2140] I mean, it's, it's kind of stunning.

[2141] Yeah.

[2142] Well, I think your point about actually, we've made the world so safe because, yeah, there's a certain way, like, you know, in Hunter Gatherer, those people would be food.

[2143] Those are people who are standing there looking at the tiger being like, that's not a tiger.

[2144] Yeah, that's not a tiger, man, you know, and then orange, you know.

[2145] So, and it's, right, but what's weird about that, so that is like the, the er example.

[2146] Like, that is the dumbest shit you could possibly imagine.

[2147] So, but.

[2148] Oh, there's dumber.

[2149] Oh, God, please.

[2150] Don't you.

[2151] people to think there's aliens underneath the earth and there's tunnels and just reptilians and there's a secret cabal of kid fuckers that run the world and you made a really excellent point just a minute ago right which is because like the philosopher carl popper once said if there was a conspiracy it failed right the whole conspiracy thing is that like oh yeah everybody's in on it like as if like look there are the powerful there are the you know there's a leads who control you know but they have their own agendas they're beating the crass the whole history of the world going after each other left and right and it's about finances right right and the idea that like oh somebody's going to be able to keep this amazing secret right you know about the earth is flat and never i mean you know it just it gives people way more credit than you know than they deserve that you would have to have everybody on the same page all the different governments yeah all over the world they're all like yeah yeah lie about the like where's the benefit in lying about the shape of the planet yeah right right who's making money who's making money but you know here's what's really messed up is that, like, you know, climate change denial is just like a slightly less wackadoodle version of that, right?

[2152] Because, you know, there's a guy, writer, philosopher, I forgot his name, but he talks about climate change being a hyper object.

[2153] Like, you know, that modern world, we have things that are hyper objects, which means they're just so big, that we just, we have a hard time wrapping our minds around them.

[2154] And that hyper objects, you know, if we're going to evolve, right, we're going to evolve new behaviors, one of them is the capacity to deal with hyper objects.

[2155] But people want everything to be simple, you know?

[2156] I mean, which cracks me up because, like, they're fine with this being complex.

[2157] You know, their cell phone can be complex because they like to use it.

[2158] But, like, you know, the climate could change, climate change.

[2159] They need it.

[2160] It freaks them out because it's too complicated or something.

[2161] So they go for the simple answer, which is that, you know, it's a conspiracy.

[2162] It's a hoax.

[2163] I love this one.

[2164] The scientists are all doing it for the money.

[2165] Yeah, as if my pay was that good that, you know, I mean.

[2166] I think a big issue that happened with.

[2167] Al Gore.

[2168] When Al Gore came out with an inconvenient truth, everybody connected Al Gore with the left.

[2169] He's a Democrat.

[2170] And then they found out that he flies private jets and they're like, this motherfucker.

[2171] And so they're like, this is all bullshit.

[2172] And so there was enough, there's enough holes where they started poking through and then looking for conspiracies and then looking to deny the whole thing.

[2173] I totally agree.

[2174] I really wish, you know, I got nothing against Al Gore, but, but I wish he didn't, and I wish he didn't become the face of climate change.

[2175] Because it just pushed, I mean, I only, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sagan was still alive or, you know, had done it.

[2176] It would have been a totally different thing because it wouldn't have had this.

[2177] Well, he's profited off of it in an extreme way.

[2178] Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

[2179] I don't know.

[2180] But, you know.

[2181] Pull up this article, Al Gore may be the first climate change billionaire or green billionaire that he's made so much money doing these seminars and speeches and the film.

[2182] And then people become, right.

[2183] And then people become, I think he actually came out.

[2184] It didn't do that well.

[2185] And then people came out already?

[2186] I think so.

[2187] I thought I saw, I don't know.

[2188] Al Gore could be the world's first carbon billionaire.

[2189] Former vice president become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies.

[2190] Well, no, that's okay.

[2191] That part's okay.

[2192] Because if he's investing in these companies and the companies start making money, which like already solar employs more people now than coal does.

[2193] That's amazing.

[2194] Well, coal.

[2195] Well, that was one of the dumbest things when Trump became president.

[2196] They're going to bring back coal.

[2197] Like, what?

[2198] How about bring back?

[2199] knocking rocks together to start fires.

[2200] No, it's like...

[2201] It's as if coal...

[2202] It's as if the typewriter companies got together and made sure you never bought a computer.

[2203] Like, we're going to make computers illegal because you've got to keep using typewriters.

[2204] Coal's fucking terrible.

[2205] It's terrible across the board.

[2206] Oh, man, and you don't need it anymore.

[2207] It's like, you know, it's just...

[2208] But listen, I got to...

[2209] One thing that you always got to acknowledge is that, like, this...

[2210] You know, when you change infrastructures, people are going to get hurt.

[2211] You know what I mean?

[2212] Like, I mean, for those coal miners, man, that's what they've done their whole life.

[2213] It's been an honorable fucking thing.

[2214] And they've, you know...

[2215] So you can't just sort of be like, hey, we're switching infrastructure to see you.

[2216] You know, there's got to be some deep understanding of, of, of consequences and helping people who are going to be, you know, train them how to put up solar panels.

[2217] How do you feel about universal basic income?

[2218] Have you ever looked into that?

[2219] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[2220] No, no, I've thought about that a lot.

[2221] You know, it's a big thought when, in consideration, when it comes to automation and technology and.

[2222] You know, with the automation thing, it's so true, right?

[2223] Because, you know, when you think about what's been going on with the last election, you know, And everybody was like, oh, you know, like, you know, what's happening with blue collar people, you know, workers and being, which is totally true.

[2224] But like, man, it's not China.

[2225] It's automation, right?

[2226] And that's what's, I mean, what really is going to screw up the whole nature of work, you know, for everybody from truck drivers, you know, even to me to university professors is we got this, the AI, you know, the automation coming on.

[2227] And, right, what do you do?

[2228] Do you feel like being a university professor is one day going to be retro that kids are going to want to learn online?

[2229] They're going to want to learn through some sort of an interactive course so that you can get on your phone rather than go to an actual physical place.

[2230] It's possible, you know, I mean, it's possible.

[2231] But I think, and this is going to be the whole question with the new economy or whatever, whatever happens, whatever we're moving into, is finding those places where, you know what, I don't want a machine.

[2232] You know what I mean?

[2233] So right now, like, so when the, what is it, the MOOCs came out, the massively online courses.

[2234] Yeah, that was like five years ago.

[2235] I once like, that's it.

[2236] Universities are done.

[2237] Everybody's going to take these online courses.

[2238] It never happened, you know, because people want to be together.

[2239] They want to learn.

[2240] They want the experience of having, you know, part of my students is not just lecturing.

[2241] No, I'm a great lecturer.

[2242] My students are probably like, I bet you are, man. You're a good talker.

[2243] I had one student say, you know, the reviews you get at the end, the guy said, hey, I hate to say this.

[2244] But, you know, you should make those tapes for people to go to sleep because every class your voice put me to sleep.

[2245] And he meant it in a nice way.

[2246] He's like, you have a nice voice, you know.

[2247] That's passive aggressive for sure.

[2248] So.

[2249] A little fuck, whoever he is.

[2250] I think that I think people will always With education There'll be some component of it That yeah sure You can learn it online But I think like You know We're gonna have to There'll be a place For like people coming in And like learning in groups And having somebody who Like has you know Spent their whole life Studying the thing Telling you You know What's going on Right like There's a lot of things We're like And we've lost a lot of this Mentorship Right Or apprenticeship Right There's a lot of things You need Somebody who spent their whole life Going oh you know You're cranking get this way, not that way, because if you can't get that way, it'll never work.

[2251] You can't learn that from watching a video or something.

[2252] Yeah, well, there's certain things, martial arts, which is a big part of my life, you have to learn from a person.

[2253] You've got to have tiny things that they must show you while you're doing it.

[2254] But you can learn a lot of things from videos.

[2255] No, no, no, no doubt.

[2256] Yeah, there's a lot of things that people are putting up online, instructional courses and stuff.

[2257] I use some of them, you know, if I have to fix my sink.

[2258] I'm like, okay, how is this work?

[2259] Oh, for sure, man yeah it's kind of amazing you know yeah so you know I think like with everything so let's circle back to the UBI um you know like with everything we're going to have to invent new ways we will because we're just human beings like there's a way in which we're going to find you know niche places that there will be economies where people make things but yeah in the end I mean UBI may be necessary yeah I think it may really be necessary because if there's no work you know I mean that's a recipe for disaster, you know, for your democratic society, you know?

[2260] Yeah, I just hope we can move past this idea that everybody who needs that is some sort of a welfare brat.

[2261] Yeah, right, right.

[2262] Well, you know, once there's no work at all, you know, I mean, they're going to, because like, you know, this is the thing that I, like with self -driving cars, right?

[2263] So I asked this question a lot, and I've written about this, sort of like, okay, everyone's like, we got to have self -driving cars.

[2264] We're heading towards self -driving cars.

[2265] Like, self -driving cars will destroy the last good blue collar job in America, you know, truck driving, right?

[2266] And that's, you know, really good livelihood for a lot of people.

[2267] And it's like, oh, we're just going to eliminate it.

[2268] It's like, why?

[2269] Like, do we have to?

[2270] Like, okay, yeah, you're telling me there's going to be, that's what they say, right?

[2271] But until it's not entirely clear, right, you know, that that will work.

[2272] And, you know, what are the, for the, for the lives that are lost in the driving, I mean, you know, the car crashes, is that going to be worth the social upheaval that comes from not having any work anymore.

[2273] So I mean, just like there are these huge issues bearing down on us.

[2274] Yes.

[2275] If it's your friend or your mom or your loved ones.

[2276] Yeah, but these are the kind of calculus.

[2277] I mean, you know, if it tears down, if the, if wiping out these jobs destroys democracy, right?

[2278] And you end up with, you know, fascism.

[2279] That seems silly though.

[2280] That doesn't seem possible.

[2281] I just think that what it's going to do is going to make travel safer.

[2282] And then we have to figure out, well, these jobs that people got from traveling how do we replace that that income yeah right well one of the things is we're gonna we're gonna have to start teaching kids to be creative yeah well that's the niche that I think there's gonna be places where like the now you'll have so listen I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have no I know you're just being you're just looking at all the variables yeah and I'm asking like the you know we're moving so rapidly into this new world right that like who's deciding for us who's deciding that we want car you know you know we're told that we're going to get it but like a lot of these things I think they're you know there needs to be a little bit more dialogue, it's a democracy, right?

[2283] And having this stuff shove down our throats and told like, it's the best thing ever, you know, I mean.

[2284] Well, you know, how about cell towers?

[2285] They're fucking everywhere.

[2286] I mean, there's no getting away from it?

[2287] Right.

[2288] If you could, I mean, is there a community anywhere that has made some sort of an agreement?

[2289] Will there be no cell towers in our community?

[2290] Yeah.

[2291] No, but there are communities that have decided, like in the Southwest, that no lights, no lights at night.

[2292] That's amazing.

[2293] Yeah, because they wanted to preserve their night sky.

[2294] We should really have some sort of.

[2295] sort of a day where everybody shuts everything off and sees the sky and see how crazy it is that we live in this weird state where we're on an organic spaceship flying through infinity and we don't see that right because you know if you're you know when you do backpacking or something you're in the backcountry you know a couple days you notice things changing like oh the moon's not as quiet yes and so nobody looks up now anymore right because there's nothing to see because you don't see anything because of light pollution i went to the keck observatory in the big island have you been i've never been i'm a theorist i don't you know nobody's going to You get me close to a telescope, I'll break it.

[2296] The fucking just, you don't even have to go all the way to the observatory, the visitor station, which is, I forget where it's at.

[2297] I think it's 14 or 12 or something.

[2298] Something like that.

[2299] It's really high.

[2300] Right.

[2301] But there's, they have diffused lighting all of the big island, so there's no light pollution.

[2302] And when you look up, it is just stunning.

[2303] Right.

[2304] You look up, you're like, wow.

[2305] The Milky Way, right?

[2306] And most people have never seen the Milky Way.

[2307] It's right there.

[2308] Right.

[2309] Like, I thought you have to have a telescope, see, no, it's right there.

[2310] And you feel like.

[2311] you're flying through space, and you have this really humble feeling that I think people get in a couple of different places.

[2312] People get when they live next to mountains.

[2313] They get it when they live next to the ocean, but you really get it if you could see space.

[2314] And I think one of the things that is haunting the human race is the arrogance of humans, which is compounded by the fact that we can't see the cosmos, that we only see what's in front of us.

[2315] So this is the world that we live in.

[2316] We put a roof over ahead.

[2317] This is the box.

[2318] I got my blinders on.

[2319] I'm moving ahead because I want a new Lexus or whatever, you know, whatever it is, whatever material thing you're trying to possess, when this, this unstoppable force in front of it, when you look up and you see the cosmos, it's like it's an undeniable reality.

[2320] And you go, oh, okay, okay, this is just a small thing.

[2321] My existence is just a small thing in this mystery, this giant mystery of, you know, we just found out 20 years ago, this planets out there.

[2322] I mean, this is a giant mystery.

[2323] You're looking up at 100 billion.

[2324] stars in this galaxy alone.

[2325] Man, I couldn't.

[2326] You're speaking my language.

[2327] I mean, you know, the loss, well, and the, the capital M word, right?

[2328] So I'm a scientist, I'm an atheist, but I believe in mystery.

[2329] I believe that kind of at the core of our lives is just, I wake up every day and I'm freaking here.

[2330] And I'm not going to, I'm going to be here until I die.

[2331] And then I have no idea what the hell happens.

[2332] Right.

[2333] So, you know, and as you said, like mountains, mountains in particular, you know, I have a thing for mountains.

[2334] Me too.

[2335] But the night sky is, it reminds you, it opens that space up, right?

[2336] You know, where you're sort of like, you know, and you're right, you can, you know, we can talk about it.

[2337] But it's really, it's an experience.

[2338] It's the experience that just shows you, you're part of this.

[2339] It's more than you, but you're here.

[2340] And, you know, and I think, right, a lot of the stupidity of the modern age, you know, as you said, the consumerism, particularly, like, all that matters to me is getting my next pile of shit.

[2341] When you're out there, you realize, who cares, you know, who freaking cares?

[2342] Like, you know, for a moment even, you just get the sense of that mystery.

[2343] And it can be transformative, you know.

[2344] I think what's happening is we've created these civilizations, the civilizations need to be lit up, the lights keep us from seeing the universe, the universe humbles us, so we're not humbled.

[2345] Then we move towards acquiring physical possessions, material objects, because we think that that's going to make us happy.

[2346] And our entire society is geared towards innovation because everybody wants the newest, shiniest shit.

[2347] And that is what's leading us to artificial life.

[2348] and that all this shiny shit is all innovation, and it's eventually going to move to this one singularity, and that singularity is some new being born out of it.

[2349] Because, you know, one thing when I think about, like, you know, all these other, you know, my argument about all these other civilizations is that, you know, whether or not you make it may be that the evolutionary heritage you get, right?

[2350] So we, you know, evolve from, you know, both chimpanzees or, you know, the chimpanzee ancestor and the bonobo ancestor.

[2351] So we've got like, we fight.

[2352] We're higher, we're very hierarchical, right?

[2353] So, you know, we've got a lot of aggressionist, but we also got the bonobo kind of like, just have sex.

[2354] Everything's cool.

[2355] So we're like, we're sort of, we've got this really weird mixed evolutionary baggage.

[2356] And whether or not you can make it to the next side with the existential challenge of triggering climate change is kind of like, is kind of like, is kind of like, you know, because you can imagine species like hive mines, you know, if you came from termite and intelligent termite species, it might be a lot easier to deal with climate change.

[2357] You're like, everybody, you know, get on the, you know, get on the course.

[2358] the most essentially is can you evolve new behaviors, right?

[2359] So we've been on this track, and it's leading us in a way that, as you said, it's like the shiny thing dangling in front of us is leading us off on this one track.

[2360] And the question is, can we evolve new behaviors, which I actually am going to say this.

[2361] I think part of it is spiritual, you know, or at least in my atheist way, of like reconnecting with mystery to see like, you know, we're part of this and we need to respect it.

[2362] And, you know, when you say spiritual, what do you mean?

[2363] So my first book was about science and religion.

[2364] And I, you know, I'm an atheist, but I'm not a Richard Dawkins' atheist.

[2365] I think that whole idea of...

[2366] What is the difference?

[2367] Well, you know, Richard Dawkins is what I would call a strident atheist.

[2368] And he's like, you know, anybody who has any spiritual or any, you know, any inclination towards mystery is an idiot, you know.

[2369] Richard Dawkins needs to do LSD.

[2370] Right, in a certain way, right?

[2371] Or DMT or psilocybin or something that just gives you an undeniable experience of mystery.

[2372] Right, exactly, you know.

[2373] So I've been doing Zen meditation.

[2374] for like the last 30 years, you know?

[2375] And like, you know, so I've been staring at a wall for 30 years.

[2376] And the first thing you learn is it's really boring.

[2377] And then the second thing you learn is that there's stuff under your thoughts.

[2378] You are not just the shit you're thinking.

[2379] You know, there's just sort of you settle down and there's just like this openness, you know.

[2380] And so the spiritual part, like you said, you know, when you're in the mountains, right?

[2381] So I love doing backcountry hiking.

[2382] And you know, when you get above tree line, there's that weird thing that happens when you're above tree line.

[2383] And you're just like, you know, you got this panorama around you.

[2384] And that thing is.

[2385] you know, the earth, right, of which we are part.

[2386] And, you know, so this is an interesting question about, like, can virtual reality do this?

[2387] Or do you actually need to get out there?

[2388] I kind of think you need to get out there.

[2389] But maybe virtual reality can give people the impetus to get out there, you know?

[2390] Well, it'll be a different experience.

[2391] I don't think there's anything wrong with the virtual reality experience of being in the mountains.

[2392] I think it'd probably be pretty fucking cool.

[2393] But it's not going to be being in the mountains.

[2394] Right.

[2395] Something about being in the mountains is also there's a weird feeling.

[2396] And I don't know if it's real, but there's a weird feeling that there's no signal out there.

[2397] Because in the places where there's no cell signal, there's no, there's a feeling you get when you're absolutely not connected.

[2398] Yeah.

[2399] And then you see wildlife.

[2400] And the wildlife out there, they're almost like these mystical beings.

[2401] Like when you see a deer step out of the tree line and it's like that.

[2402] Catch its eye.

[2403] Yeah.

[2404] That thing has been that way for a million years.

[2405] That species has not changed at all in a million years.

[2406] Yeah.

[2407] And the signal, what you're talking about the signal, it's really the thing is what for me, it's like when I get far enough back, that I know there's just not another human being here.

[2408] Right, you know?

[2409] And this is like, when I leave, this exact is, this is going to still be happening.

[2410] Like, it just doesn't give a shit about you, right?

[2411] And it's just moving along.

[2412] And as you said, it's been moving this way for millions of years.

[2413] And you just realize, like, and that's why, you know, part of the thing I'm saying with the book is that, like, look, if we trigger climate change, that's just the Earth's way of, like, creating the next set of, you know, it used us to create climate change to, you know, now move on to something else.

[2414] Because that's what the Earth does.

[2415] It's just this animate power.

[2416] you know and when you're out there you feel that and you know and the thing that I think we need to do is sort of reestablish our connection to that we're part of that we're from that we're not evil we're not bad we need to reintegrate ourselves in a way that we still get our civilization but you know that's what I mean so yes why spiritual because when we connect to that mystery then we're in a better place to make the right decisions to understand what the decisions are if not we're like oh we got to save the polar bears and we're not looking at no no it's the biosphere as a whole that we have to understand.

[2417] Well, operating out of ego and ideology and not out of rational thought with all of the information at our disposal and really verifying that information, understanding what's correct and what's not correct, and whether or not there's bias behind it or scientific research that was funded by people that have a vested interest in it leaning one way or the other.

[2418] All that stuff is very, very slippery and very dangerous.

[2419] And when you find out that studies have been influenced by special interest groups or, you know, lobbyists or whatever, and that they, you know, like, especially pharmaceutical studies are the creepiest.

[2420] Well, they, they can do a series of studies and only one of them shows some sort of a positive impact for whatever weird reason, and that's the one they use.

[2421] Yeah.

[2422] And they don't have to publish the fact that they ran 100 fucking studies.

[2423] Right, right.

[2424] Well, no, I try and teach people.

[2425] I'm sorry, go ahead.

[2426] No, go ahead.

[2427] That, you know, science, I think the most important thing that people need to understand about science is not so much science's results, but how science works, you know, because it does work, right?

[2428] That's why we have all the stuff.

[2429] And so they can distinguish.

[2430] So I, you know, I say that science is three things.

[2431] It's spitballs, super tankers, and stadiums, right?

[2432] You know, the problem with the news, it'll be like, the latest study shows the color red, you know, will make you have better sex.

[2433] It's like, what are you talking?

[2434] You know, the latest study that can get you to click on that USA Today article.

[2435] Yeah, right, exactly.

[2436] The media reports is as if this was science.

[2437] Like, every day, a whole bunch of new articles come out.

[2438] You know, I write scientific articles.

[2439] That's the currency of my profession.

[2440] But, like, one study is just like, it's a spitball, right?

[2441] It's like, Basically, we're shooting spitballs at each other.

[2442] But science is like a super tanker, right?

[2443] You know, we're like, it takes seven miles to turn a super tanker around.

[2444] That's what really science is.

[2445] The things that we think we deeply understand in science is like this super tanker.

[2446] And people are shooting spit balls.

[2447] That's the papers every day.

[2448] And if you get enough spitballs on one side of the, you know, the prow or whatever, it starts to turn it.

[2449] Right.

[2450] So science will turn slowly if enough of the spitballs are lined up.

[2451] So people, you know, it's not about the single study.

[2452] It's about have there been 300.

[2453] studies over the last, you know, 30 years that say the same thing.

[2454] So, like, you know, the coffee stuff, coffee's good, coffee's bad.

[2455] Clearly, the fact that we keep getting both answers means we don't know.

[2456] That's all.

[2457] We don't know yet.

[2458] It's just not clear.

[2459] Climate change, not even 30 years, 100 years of the same results.

[2460] Yeah, we got that, you know.

[2461] Well, there's always a problem with diet in that you're not taking into account how nutrients interact with other foods or different foods interact with foods, a different, you know, when you say coffee's bad, okay, was it bad when you're smoking cigarettes?

[2462] are bad when you're eating grass -fed meat or bad when you're on a vegan diet like when is it bad right right right and who are these people and what are they putting in their system and how much sugar are they taking in how much sodium and you know what what's the nutrient levels of their blood did you test them for b12 deficiencies and all these different things like that's the real problem with any dietary studies like they don't take into account the extremely varied diet and the complexity of the system right so that's i mean so i would tell people that like you know when comes to like health sciences anything in general about human beings look this stuff is really complex.

[2463] And as you said, there's a thousand different things that can interact.

[2464] So you've got to really take that stuff with a grain of salt.

[2465] Like, okay, does smoking cost cancer?

[2466] Yeah, got that, you know.

[2467] But like, yeah, is coffee good or bad?

[2468] We just, the studies aren't there yet, you know.

[2469] But that's different from climate change or, you know, gravity, you know, or is the earth round, you know.

[2470] Yeah.

[2471] Yeah, those are stupid.

[2472] So, um, listen, man, thank you very much for being here.

[2473] I really, really appreciate it.

[2474] It was really good to talk to you.

[2475] It's fun.

[2476] Do you have an audio book out?

[2477] Yeah, there is an audio book.

[2478] Did you read it?

[2479] I have not.

[2480] Did I read the...

[2481] Did you read the words that are in the audiobook version?

[2482] Did you...

[2483] Were you narrating it?

[2484] No. You weren't?

[2485] No, I didn't.

[2486] God damn it.

[2487] I'm sorry.

[2488] They didn't ask...

[2489] Why do they do that?

[2490] I don't know.

[2491] They're really good at talking.

[2492] What the fuck, man?

[2493] Dude, they...

[2494] I hate that.

[2495] I hate that.

[2496] When I really...

[2497] When I buy audiobooks and I know that the guy who's reading it doesn't have a fucking single bone, you know, invested in this idea that he's saying.

[2498] He's just repeating the words.

[2499] Well, the guy...

[2500] I'm sure whoever did it was like, you know, totally channeling.

[2501] I must have felt it in the astral plane.

[2502] It would be better if you read it, man. They should have let you do it.

[2503] Yeah, I don't know.

[2504] Why the fuck didn't they let you do it?

[2505] I don't know.

[2506] Did you push for it?

[2507] No, I didn't even know, you know, that part of the, you know, I didn't understand part of publishing.

[2508] Tell people the title again.

[2509] Light of the stars, alien worlds and the fate of the earth.

[2510] Don, don't, don't, done, done, done.

[2511] And your Twitter is.

[2512] Adam Frank, four.

[2513] Why four?

[2514] Because that's the only one that, everything else was taken.

[2515] So I was just like, oh, I got to come up with a six years ago.

[2516] when I got on Adam Frank for and do you have an Instagram as well no no I have a Facebook author page and website uh website is Adam Frank science I think you just Google Adam Frank I'll pop up yeah thank you Adam really appreciate it was so much fun man yeah it's really a lot fun bye