Ep 613 - Solar System Part 1 (feat. Nate Marshall)

Support the D. A. W. G. Z. @ patreon.com/MSsecretpod Support Nate and the Bros @ https://www.patreon.com/pitm Go See Matt Live @ mattmccusker.com/dates Go See Shane Live @ shanemgillis.com Go See Lemaire Lee Live @ https://lemairelee.fun/ Go See Shawn Gardini Live if you want @ https://www.shawngardini.com/live hello. Hope you're all having a good week. Shang is out Cali way for the netflix fest / roast (everyone tune in this wknd!!!!). We wish our brother luck on his journey. In his absence we got a solo-solar cast for you this week. Cusk talks RAH aka the sun. We talk Mercury and Venus on the paytch. Please enjoy. God Bless. Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/DRENCHED and use code DRENCHED and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! Exclusive $25-off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/MSSP. Promo Code MSSP Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Wow, wow, Wes.

• 0:02Matt McCusker?

  Hey, what's up, everybody? We're here. This is a breaking episode. It's gonna be a solo cast. Solo cast asterisk, obviously have Nate here. But Shane's away Netflix is a joke festival, which is, uh, that'll be fun. So. It'll be pretty much wrapping up by the time you guys see this. However, I don't know, maybe Hulu will do one too. I like when the streaming giants get silly in the comedy space.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  You know, huh? They start gonna start battling?

• 0:28Matt McCusker?

  I mean, yeah, they're all the streaming giants are battling. That's all they do is battle each other.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  I didn't know they were battling for stand up rights now. Oh, yeah, I guess Hulu's doing those specials.

• 0:35Matt McCusker?

  Hulu does hilarious or Hulu's laughing now.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Those are both terrible names.

• 0:41Matt McCusker?

  Hulu's laughing now? You don't like Hulu's laughing now?

• 0:44Speaker 00

  I hate that. I hate Hulu.

• 0:46Matt McCusker?

  I think the streaming giants are just on the next level with the branding.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  They might just be getting, I'm a dumbass. They know what they're doing.

• 0:53Matt McCusker?

  Hulu's laughing now, dude, that's I saw that and I literally cracked up. And I say, these guys know comedy like none other. Wow. Also, Amazon does not have comedy specific branding.

• 1:08Matt McCusker?

  Um, I would like to propose to Amazon. Ah, Amazon. Hey, come on.

• 1:16Matt McCusker?

  Come on. Let me, let me know what you guys think in the comments. Like, subscribe. Yeah. So, yeah, this week I was sitting here. I was going, the hell should we talk about, man? You know, it's like. Political stuff? No. The war, pretty much political stuff? No. I don't want to talk about that.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Bombers, big bombers.

• 1:34Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, you know what I was, I was like, you know, it would be sick to actually get into it. Nobody, I haven't heard anyone talking about it all. It's the solar system. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Can't beat space.

• 1:45Matt McCusker?

  This dude, the planets. Here's the thing. We learned about the planets when we were little boys.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  We learned last heard about the planets when we still had an extra planet.

• 1:53Matt McCusker?

  Let me get it. Let me get a camera.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  We still had an extra planet the last time we learned about planets.

• 1:59Matt McCusker?

  You're talking Pluto.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  I'm talking Pluto.

• 2:01Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. So I haven't got, I haven't got to Pluto yet, but I'm kind of. I was, I'm a little salty we've nixed Pluto. It's like, what, what was it? It's not hurting anybody. Was that, was that like a coalition of fat science teachers who were like, we don't feel like covering Pluto? Like, why would they drop?

• 2:16Speaker 00

  I think it literally just didn't fit into the curriculum. They were like, we can't get this all the way through the year. We gotta knock one off.

• 2:23Matt McCusker?

  I mean, what, what a dick. That was definitely some Astra, whatever they're called, Astra, not an astrophysicist, but like, just like a space.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, space.

• 2:30Matt McCusker?

  Scientist, whatever they're called. Definitely just being like, you know, technically it doesn't count. It's just like, dude, what the fuck?

• 2:37Speaker 00

  It's, it's a, it's a big ball and it rotates around the sun. Let it be a planet.

• 2:41Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. What's, what's your fucking problem? They go, it's technically just like an exo, but it's like, dude, it's a fucking planet, man.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  My theory is Saturn's not a planet.

• 2:51Matt McCusker?

  What's your problem with the gas giants?

• 2:52Speaker 00

  It's a gas giant. You can't.

• 2:54Matt McCusker?

  There's several gas giants.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  But is it?

• 2:56Matt McCusker?

  Do you know where Saturn's rings come from?

• 2:59Speaker 00

  I want to say Uranus, but that was just me being, that was just me being.

• 3:04Matt McCusker?

  If you're going to bring that attitude with the fucking solar system discussion, you're going to get ejected, dude.

• 3:10Matt McCusker?

  Dude, Phil, when you like, this makes me want to call the cops on you so bad. Excuse me.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  You can't do that. You can't sit there.

• 3:18Matt McCusker?

  Karen Cam, um, excuse me. We'll see. Might I call the cops on eight by the end of the solar system discussion? We'll see. All right.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Are we, was there a direction we're going or did you just?

• 3:29Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Inside out?

• 3:31Matt McCusker?

  Nope. Starting from the sun.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Starting from the sun.

• 3:33Matt McCusker?

  I almost, I almost skipped the sun. That, that's the craziest part. I was, I was going to do this. I was talking to Sean about it. I was like, Sean, what do you think about this?

• 3:42Matt McCusker?

  And I was like, you know what, dude? I gotta, I gotta cover, I'll start from the sun and move on, but I'm like, I gotta cover the sun. That'd be crazy to do the solar system and not cover the fucking thing it's named after.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Can I tell y'all a thing I don't talk about much? The sun freaks me out.

• 3:56Matt McCusker?

  Bro, I'm not going to lie.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:59Matt McCusker?

  I didn't know much about it. The more I learned about it, I, I'm not lying. I had a panic attack in my office. Researching about how the sun works and I got into like the, the nitty gritty of it.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:10Matt McCusker?

  I for real at one point had to like stop and just like sit down and take some breaths. Cause the sun, I mean, it gets. It cuts you down to the base, the bare fundamentals.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:20Matt McCusker?

  To where you're like, what even, what, okay, so this is where light comes from and it's like.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  I don't want, I hope I'm not jumping the gun, but the fact that it could like blow up at any time.

• 4:31Matt McCusker?

  Well, we'll see.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  It's not like close.

• 4:33Matt McCusker?

  The, the sun has maintained equilibrium for four and a half billion years and it's pretty much, it'll, it will continue to maintain equilibrium. The problem, solar flares.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:42Matt McCusker?

  A solar flare.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Another scary thing.

• 4:44Matt McCusker?

  We'll get into solar flares as well. No, no, no, you're eager. You're eager. Before you're disruptive, now you're eager.

• 4:51Matt McCusker?

  We, we've gone a full dangerous minds arc in 30 seconds. This is amazing. But I will say this, it's like, here's why I wanted to do the solar system. Cause like, we learned about it as boys, but that was so long ago and so much stuff has come out about the planets. Like all the shit you learned about the planets, planets, I'm not going to say is wrong, but a lot of new details have come out.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:13Matt McCusker?

  So every, the average adult is kicking around. I'm not, I'm not coming for people, but a total fucking ignoramus in terms of the solar system. People have, like, no one knows shit about how all these planets work, including myself. So, you know, I, uh, while, you know, while we were out here just kind of messing around in high school, drinking, college, people were.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:33Matt McCusker?

  A lot of girl scientists too, by the way, were working hard.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  That kind of seems like girl science, actually.

• 5:40Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it kind of, dude, it's, it's dominated. There's a lot of guy scientists, obviously, but there's a ton. A lot of these discoveries are girl scientists.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Astrology, then the, then the solar system. It's like a clear path, pipeline.

• 5:52Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, the horoscope's like, you gotta go all the way in.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:54Matt McCusker?

  You need to know what's up with the fucking cloud layer of Venus, which actually there was a discovery by girl scientist, big discovery by girl scientist. This episode is brought to you by AG1. Dude, real quick, gotta tell you guys about this.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  I like this.

• 6:06Matt McCusker?

  I like that too. AG1, the healthy stuff I've been drinking recently. Still just one scoop, once a day, vitamins, minerals, probiotics. All this stuff my actual diet doesn't provide. Mix is great, doesn't taste like a fistfight. Packaged travel easily if you're on the road doing shows or just too lazy to measure anything out, which dude, come on. They also recently came out with AG1 Pro, the same foundation, but with creatine in one simple delicious drink. So if you're someone who trains a lot or wants to get more impact out of your stack, this one might be worth checking out. So hurry up and go to drink AG one.com slash secret pod and for a limited time only

• 6:49Matt McCusker?

  get a free immune support bundle, including omega three, fish oil and vitamin D three plus K two with your first subscription to AG one next gen or AG one pro. That's drink AG one.com slash secret pod. That's crazy because right now on YouTube, people are trying to take there. There's a decent argument people are making to take voting rights away from women. People want to remove women's suffering. I watched a whole debate on it the other day and the line of thinking is if if women and we'll get to the outer space in a second, but this is important is I'm protecting girl scientists, girl space scientists right to vote, but they're trying to say that since women can't be drafted into the war, then they have no right to be able to vote, which could essentially send men who have no choice to go fight in the

• 7:34Matt McCusker?

  war that they're exempt from. Essentially, it's not fair. You shouldn't be able to wield political power in a system that like asks more of men. Men should have more political power, which I say obviously is a fair position, but I think you would be stripping the women's vote via girl logic, which is it's not fair. Yeah, yeah. Only a girl cares about if it's not fair. As a guy, you can't be like, that's not fair. It's like, well, now I'm taking your vote too, because you're being a girl. If you want to keep, that's the thing. It's just a vicious cycle. You can't be like, it's not fair. If you act like a girl, we also take your right to vote. I mean, it has to be across the board. Why? Why can't girls vote? Because they act

• 8:17Matt McCusker?

  like girls, but you're acting like a girl to take the vote. Also, it's when I see the debate, it's like, okay, you can make as clear concise point about it. No one's, it's like, no one's ever going to do. It's not gonna happen. Yeah. Who's gonna stand on that platform for real, for real? I mean, you could stand on it all you want. Never get pussy again. The, yeah, well, the one guy that I've watched has his wife pilled on the no vote for women. She's fully with it. And it's like, dude, again, do your thing, live your life. I don't care. But let's be honest, it's never going to fucking hap. They're never going to do it. Is he a politician or is he like a? He's like a debater. He's a good debater too. He's a, he's a very, very solid debater. Forget his name, but he, uh, yeah, I was watching the whole thing and like.

• 9:01Matt McCusker?

  It's just one of those things where it's like, it sounds sick, obviously. You're on your channel. You're like, here are the reasons. You're watching, you're like, yeah, we're gonna fuck you to it. We're gonna take their vote away.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Not in two.

• 9:12Matt McCusker?

  I mean, dude, it's, it's just never gonna fucking happen. It's like, it's, it's just, it won't, dude. No one, nobody, the country, no country can possibly withstand that amount of, the nagging would be crazy, dude. Like, let's be honest, dude.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Divorce rates would go through the roof. If you're a dude who goes, I agree with this, you're done. You're not getting pussy. Your lady's leaving.

• 9:35Matt McCusker?

  Again, this guy's got his babe. She's on board. That is a fucking rarity, dude.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. He's got the, like, the one percenter of babes.

• 9:44Matt McCusker?

  I know when babes, your babe might be like, yeah, I could see that. And then just like on a random Tuesday, be like, can't believe I can't fucking vote.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Soon as her period hits.

• 9:51Matt McCusker?

  You said it was fine. We watched the YouTube debate. We both agreed that guy was right. They're never gonna go along with it. It's, it's just one of those things where it's like, dude, like, you can, you're kind of chasing your tail. You can, you know, whatever. But that's, and then after doing all this outer space research, I'm going, dude, women are dominating.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  We need some babes.

• 10:09Matt McCusker?

  We need these babes to fucking look, tell us about outer space. Again, I don't know if it's all of them, but a lot of these discoveries are from babe scientists while we've been just absolutely fucking around the entire time.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  We will, if we take away their right to vote, they're gonna stop focusing on science. They're gonna try to get their right to vote back. We can't do it.

• 10:27Matt McCusker?

  I don't know. We could, though. If we did take the vote, we could get, there might be some humble babe action. Like, almost like, like, reuniting right after a breakup.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:38Matt McCusker?

  Could be best behavior. We could have best behavior.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  I do like the idea of women acting right.

• 10:46Matt McCusker?

  I would just vote. I'd be like, just tell me. I'll vote however you want. I don't even care.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  We get double votes?

• 10:52Matt McCusker?

  Tell me, babe, I'll vote for whatever you want. I don't fucking care. And also, too, like, the nuts and bolts of blocking the vote, I mean, it's like, what the only option would, you'd have to physically hold, you'd have to literally physically hold them back. They would flood the voting booths.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  We would also have so many trans women, like, women, I just thought about that. Or we'd have to, we'd have to, we'd have to go down that rabbit hole then. It'd be a whole different thing. Cause they would, they would definitely spite trans. I know women would spite you.

• 11:22Matt McCusker?

  No, you'd have to have the FBI female body inspectors.

• 11:27Matt McCusker?

  That'd be the only way. But either way, I don't want to get mired down in politics. I want to talk outer space. Cause it would be dude, I'm saying it'd be a sad sight if like, you know, you're there, the actually you passed the law on this fucking Handmaidens Tale bullshit world. The only way you could stop women was by, you'd have to have like a security force like Scrappy Doo, holding their heads while they fucking. And that would bum me out. I'm trying to cast my vote for the Republic. I'm seeing women get Scrappy Dooed just nonstop.

• 11:54Matt McCusker?

  That would be, that would fucking piss me off. Some of them good girl scientists that are fucking enlightening us about space. This episode is brought to you by PrizePix. The regular season's done and the NBA playoffs are here. Time to get in on the action with PrizePix, a preferred partner of the NBA.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  NBA.

• 12:12Matt McCusker?

  N space B space A. Download the PrizePix app today and use code DRENCH to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. And during the playoff, during the playoffs, make a $5 lineup with a live NBA pick for a shot at the Do It Live sweepstakes trip to the NBA Finals. That's a rough one, man. Whoa. More info can be found on the PrizePix promos board. PrizePix, a preferred partner of the NBA. So either way, I mean, the long story short is that new details have emerged about the solar system. Very juicy details. Like, comment, subscribe below in the chat. Um, so, okay, okay. So we got, you got everything out of the way.

• 12:57Matt McCusker?

  Again, the plan was start closest to the sun and work out and you go, you know, and work. Um, but then it was like, dude, let me hit the fucking sun. And actually this was Sean's idea. In while we're doing the planets, we're going to do kind of a mini deep dive into why they have that name, what the name says about the planet. Does that actually match up with the physical characteristics? Cause like all of them are named after basically Greco-Roman gods, except for Earth, except for Earth. Yeah, we're talking Rome a little bit, except for Earth, weirdly enough. Why? Why did Earth not get, I mean, I guess probably because we're standing on it, you know, it doesn't get a cool god name.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  We might have already had it named, you know, we might have already been calling it Earth.

• 13:36Matt McCusker?

  Just Earth, just Earth. All you could name Earth after a god, really, because it was like, you know, the gods were supposed to be in the heavens and whatever, unless you believe in like, God, yeah. So. Okay, before we talk planets, let's talk sun. Okay, and basic facts. This is the stuff I already knew before I researched. Sun is 93 million miles away from Earth. I know that one. That was, I learned that from a Wu-Tang song.

• 14:00Matt McCusker?

  It's from Triumph. It's literally in the song, which is kinda crazy. That's like some dude smoking sherm in the projects would have

• 14:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:06Matt McCusker?

  literally been teaching a prim ass white boy like myself about the solar system. That's what happened. That's how I started my love for outer space. And now I've joined the lineage of great teachers, because I've actually smoked sherm on accident before. So that's the only-

• 14:20Speaker 00

  What sherm mix? How do you get-

• 14:21Matt McCusker?

  It's just PCP.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  PCP, okay, okay.

• 14:23Matt McCusker?

  It's just wet, yeah. It's just, I accidentally smoked sherm myself, so that's how I've just following a great lineage of teachers, just smoking sherm once or twice.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  What'd that feel like?

• 14:31Matt McCusker?

  Hard, weird. Doring it was sick.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:34Matt McCusker?

  I really, literally flew up a staircase. It's awesome. I could breathe flames out of my mouth. But then I got like deeply paranoid that these babes were trying to poison me.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 14:44Matt McCusker?

  And I could have kissed them.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 14:46Matt McCusker?

  But I was too shermed out. But that's, that's the life of a fucking astronomer like myself. So, okay, so let's go size of the sun. Right off the bat, how big is the sun in relative terms? 1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Yeesh, that's crazy.

• 15:03Matt McCusker?

  It's fucking, dude, it's massive. If the sun, if the sun were a hollow ball, you could fit every planet in the solar system inside of it and still have room.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Like a lot of room, right?

• 15:14Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it's fucked up how big this, the sun is like, just to get a glimpse, you see it every day.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:19Matt McCusker?

  You're just don't even think about it. Oh, fucking sun. 1.3 million Earths could fit inside of the sun. How hot is the sun exactly? Depends on where you measure. At the core, the sun is 15 million degrees Celsius. It's fucking hot as shit. So we'll get into exactly what that means, because you hear that, it's almost abstract. The surface of the sun is only, air quotes, about 5,500 degrees Celsius. John, can we get some conversion?

• 15:45Speaker 00

  With the surface?

• 15:46Matt McCusker?

  The surface of the sun, because there's a core, there's the inner core, where like the, you know, we'll get into what's happening in there, and then there's like an actual body of the sun.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 15:56Matt McCusker?

  That's only 5,500 degrees, which is like, pretty low compared to the core. Kind of weird.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  I might Google it.

• 16:03Matt McCusker?

  How many degrees?

• 16:05Matt McCusker?

  10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. What's a surface in Fahrenheit? If it's 15 million degrees Celsius, that's gotta be, I don't know, Celsius throws me off because it's close at some points and super-

• 16:17Matt McCusker?

  Thirty probably is. I think it's probably thirty, thirty million degrees. Thirty million degrees, dude. Let's, well, we'll wait for the official numbers to come in. Here's the weird part. So the surface, core is fifteen million degrees, surface is fifty five hundred million, fifty five hundred degrees Celsius.

• 16:35Matt McCusker?

  Okay, so it's twenty seven million degrees Fahrenheit, you know, whatever. We'll stick to Celsius. That's what fucking scientists, they, they love, libs love Celsius, obviously. So the outer atmosphere, so there's, there's the core of the sun, there's its surface, then there's an outer atmosphere of the sun called the corona, which paradoxically reaches over one million degrees Celsius, which violates-

• 16:56Speaker 00

  It's hotter than-

• 16:56Matt McCusker?

  Hotter than the body of the sun, not hotter than the core.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh yeah, okay.

• 16:59Matt McCusker?

  But according to, I believe, the law of thermodynamics, it's supposed to get colder the further you move away from a hot thing. The corona violates the law, basic, basic physics. People still don't know why.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:11Matt McCusker?

  Pretty wild. And the corona, this is kind of weird, it actually extends, because it's like a, um, you know, there's the core, there's the body. The corona is like the, what you see when there's an eclipse. There's that like light around the moon. That's the corona. It goes on for millions of miles. And it's a million degrees for millions of miles.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 17:31Matt McCusker?

  And then it actually peters out into the solar winds that basically go through the entire solar system. And then they stop after Pluto, for planet formerly known as Pluto.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  So when we're getting heat hitting our planet, it's corona that's gotten here? Is that what, kinda?

• 17:46Matt McCusker?

  We'll get to that.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 17:47Matt McCusker?

  We'll get to that. Luckily, our atmosphere, but well, yeah, we'll get to that. It's not technically the corona, but the light coming out of the sun, which, you know, is kind of a bug out in and of itself. But that's, that's where interstellar space starts, is when the sun's solar wind finally stops somewhere after Pluto.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:01Matt McCusker?

  The solar wind stops and you're in interstellar space properly. Which again, is kind of like weird to think about. So yeah, there's the thing called the corona paradox. We'll get into kind of theories into why that might be, but again, it's like, it's, it's completely wrong. It's fifty million degrees and it's like fifty five hundred degrees, and then it goes to one million again, outside, away, further from, and you're like, what the hell? So- Now, I'm sure you've thought about this, like, what would happen to you if you, like, just tried to get towards the sun?

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:30Matt McCusker?

  And in reality, you would just burn up so fast.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:32Matt McCusker?

  You would hit that. But here's the thing, we have, because we, like, you know, how do you think, how do they know the sun's core is 15 million degrees? We can't get close enough to measure it.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:43Matt McCusker?

  So they do a thing where they, there's a couple methods, I don't really understand them, but there's like, ways you can look at light signatures and the certain colors coming off give you, like, you know, this is how hot this is, this is how hot this is. There's also, uh, they like, the neutrinos that bounce out of the sun hit the ground and they somehow like, collect those and measure those. But still, I'm like, I don't know, I'm taking it with a grain of salt. There's no way you can actually measure without the direct probe. NASA in 2018 launched the Parker Solar Probe and, uh, they got within, in 2024, about 6.1 million kilometers to the sun's surface. It's close. So they're in the corona. So they were able to theorize how hot it would be.

• 19:22Matt McCusker?

  And then they actually sent this probe into the corona that could verify, like, okay, our models were correct.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  No, I'm assuming there was no camera or nothing, no pictures that got sent back.

• 19:32Matt McCusker?

  I don't think so. I think this thing was a, I mean, it was basically a bullet. It traveled about 692,000 kilometers an hour. Fastest any human-made object has ever moved. So they just fuck, it had a carbon heat shield about four and a half inches thick. That kept everything inside at room temperature, even as it like, hit temperatures at like, 1,400 degrees Celsius. So now I'm going like, oh, that's why too, the corona is, it's kind of thinned out. So like, it is technically a million degrees, but the particles, I think, are so thinned out that like, it doesn't feel as hot. That's why they're able to get in there. So I don't know. That, that's a little confusion, a little confusing. But it's still like.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  The only thing my brain can even like, compare that to is like, when humidity makes things feel hotter than it is.

• 20:14Matt McCusker?

  It's, you, you know, you really feel pretty fucking dumb when you try to think about this shit. But it's like, you know, if you try to really comprehend how hot these temperatures are. There's, there's nothing, you know, like molten metal is thousands of times cooler than the sun's coolest part, which is the surface.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:34Matt McCusker?

  So you, it's like, it's almost abstract. So it's like, in the way to think about this is like, as you go up the temperature ladder, you don't just get more hot as you get to like, you know, things like 15 million degrees. It literally alters what the matter fundamentally is. So he changes literally, like when you go, when you get to the sun's core, it, it turns into plasma, which is a whole different state of matter. It's like solid gas, liquid plasma is just like a soup of particles. Cause everything just breaks down.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Is that kind of a laser beam? I don't know.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  I'm going video games. I'm going video games because you've got plasma guns all the time.

• 21:16Matt McCusker?

  So let's just, so again, like the whole idea of imagine yourself floating towards the sun, how close can you get before you're destroyed? I mean, in terms of, in terms of pure radiation and heat, you're dead. Unprotected human tissue would be destroyed long, long, long before getting anywhere near the surface, obviously, if you could even preserve yourself.

• 21:37Matt McCusker?

  Parker solar probe, like we said, you got the closest. For context, Mercury, which we'll get to the closest planet is still about 46 million kilometers from the sun at its nearest point. So it's like halfway between Earth and Mercury is like the halfway point between here and the sun.

• 21:54Matt McCusker?

  So yeah, with the general scientific like consensus is that without shielding, you would not survive much closer than Mercury's orbit. So, and here, here's the scale for reference, the term of temperatures. Zero degrees Celsius, water freezes, 100 degrees Celsius, water boils, thousand degrees Celsius, lava, molten rock. That's, that's what lava is. 1500 degrees steel melts, 3500 degrees tungsten melts. This is the highest melting point of any metal. It's using light bulb filaments. 55 degrees, so 5500 degrees Celsius, the surface of the sun. And anything that exists as a solid or liquid is already just long gone. 1.1 to 3 million is the Corona temperature. 15 million degrees is the core of the sun.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  She.

• 22:35Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. Which is kind of nuts. And then here's, so like we said, the surface of the sun is cooler than the area outside the Corona, which, you know, we already, we already talked about that. But again, this is a big paradox. Physicists are like.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  They have no idea.

• 22:50Matt McCusker?

  They don't really know. However, the leading theory on the Corona paradox, why the outside area of the sun is hotter than the body of the sun. Again, just excluding the core, which is just literally nuclear. They think that the massive heat shift around the Corona is due to electromagnetic fields snapping together. And like, you know, in tiny, tiny increments and each of the realignments generates heat and like micro flares. So it's similar to a big solar flare.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:18Matt McCusker?

  That originates on the sun's surface, but in the Corona, they're thinking like this is happening on a tiny level. But just like billions of them every single second.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  So it turns into a big ass thing, kinda.

• 23:28Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. So like it kind of collectively heats. It's more so like electromagnetic heat than technically heat from the sun. But it is coming from the sun because the sun's core does generate electromagnet or does like dictate the movement of electromagnetic lines. It's dude, electromagnetic shit is so, so fucking weird. So it's like, think of like, you know, we talked about solar flares, obviously. So solar flares, I think originate because there's like, um, you know, the core is doing all of its crazy shit. It gets so hot that the electromagnetic fields get all like whacked out. So then like they're getting all whacked out coming from, you know, the core of the sun. They hit the sun's body and as the sun's rotating, the electromagnetic lines just twirl together. And they get so tense, like twirling rubber band together and eventually they just snap.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:13Matt McCusker?

  And just fire off like a massive thing of heat and energy. And the, the biggest solar storm that hit earth that we know of was the Carrington event, 1859. It was so strong that it set telegraph machines on fire.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:26Matt McCusker?

  So those old Morse code lines were all, were all connected by copper wires. So everyone was just working on them and out of nowhere, like people got like shocked.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:34Matt McCusker?

  And like some of them burst in flames.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  I think it was all over the.

• 24:37Matt McCusker?

  It just, it just, that energy got absorbed by those copper wiring, connecting them all together. So like some of them burst into flames, other operators were just like, ow, just got shocked.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Did it hit the whole planet or?

• 24:48Matt McCusker?

  Whole planet.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Like a chunk of it, like one side.

• 24:50Matt McCusker?

  I think it hit the whole, I think it fucked up like the. I think it fucked up anywhere that had that stuff.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah.

• 24:58Matt McCusker?

  Um, also, the weird thing was the, the energy from the solar flare after they, they had unplugged some of the machines. Like, what the fuck's going on with these? And they were still powered, no plug in. The energy from the solar flare flare actually powered the machines for a time being afterwards.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  But they were just fucked.

• 25:13Matt McCusker?

  It was off. They were off, but they were on.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  But they were on.

• 25:16Matt McCusker?

  You couldn't turn them off. They had too much juice.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:19Matt McCusker?

  So, and the, the cool thing too was the, the solar flare was so intense that the, you know, like the aurora borealis you can see from like the poles?

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:27Matt McCusker?

  You could see that in like Cuba. It just lit up the electric, whatever that is, like hits the sky and it bounces, colors bounce off of the atmosphere. And it just, there was like an aurora borealis visible, something like it visible all the way down.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Silver lining to that chaos. I, cause aurora borealis is like one of my bucket list, see that in person thing.

• 25:44Matt McCusker?

  It'll be sick.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:45Matt McCusker?

  Although the weirdest part was it was so bright that that, it happened in the middle of the night.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 25:50Matt McCusker?

  So people woke up in the middle of the night thinking it was daytime. So they kind of popped up like, oh man, birds, it would, birds even got tricked. Birds started singing like it was nighttime. They came out being like, what the fuck? It's three in the morning. Why is it so bright? Yeah. It just looked completely fucked up. The weirdest thing is if such a solar flare happened today, it would destroy the infrastructure of the entire internet.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:12Matt McCusker?

  Trillion, it would cause trillions of dollars in damage. The internet would go down as far as I know.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  That's terrifying.

• 26:18Matt McCusker?

  Plus side, search history. Destroyed, destroyed. Everyone clean slate.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  I'd be so mad.

• 26:25Matt McCusker?

  We're talking if we get a big enough solar flare, it could destroy, now would destroy the entire internet, dude. Clean break.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  But what about my bookmarked favorites?

• 26:34Matt McCusker?

  Bro, you gotta let them go.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Gotta.

• 26:36Matt McCusker?

  You could find them again. You'd have to create, recreate them.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would be the real thing. Cause they, they would be gone. They'd just be gone.

• 26:42Matt McCusker?

  They would exist in your heart and you would have to write them down like fucking, like one of those ancient Greeks historians.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Just a lady would come on her face with a ball.

• 26:54Matt McCusker?

  Who's the lady that's always getting like having sex in the shower with like wet makeup on her face?

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Uh, I don't know.

• 26:59Matt McCusker?

  Michaels.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Gi, Gianna Michaels?

• 27:02Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 27:03Matt McCusker?

  You have to write about, you have to sing her song. You make the bars.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  I would definitely. This is a story of Miss Michaels. Gianna Michaels and Pinky would, I'd, I'd sing to the heavens.

• 27:14Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, they'd have to live on through you. So.

• 27:19Matt McCusker?

  And this is, this is why we're talking solar flares. That has to do with the leading theory on why the corona is so much hotter is like, you know, that that's how a massive flare works of like, just the twisting and breaking of electromagnetic fields when they reconnect, it like generates a ton of heat and energy that I think that's what powers a solar flare. But again, who knows? We don't know. Electromagnetic fields are, they're actually a very, very spooky subject in and of themselves. They're, they're, I mean, fields are non-physical entity, like objects that somehow affect physical objects.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:50Matt McCusker?

  Very, very spooky, man. Very spooky. This episode is brought to you by AG1. Dude, real quick, gotta tell you guys about this.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Oh, I like this.

• 27:58Matt McCusker?

  I like that too. AG1, the healthy stuff I've been drinking recently. Still just one scoop, once a day, vitamins, minerals, probiotics, all this stuff my actual diet doesn't provide. Mixes great, doesn't taste like a fistfight, package travel easily if you're on the road doing shows or just too lazy to measure anything out, which dude, come on. They also recently came out with AG1 Pro, the same foundation, but with creatine in one simple delicious drink. So if you're someone who trains a lot or wants to get more impact out of your stack, this one might be worth checking out. So hurry up and go to drinkag1.com/secretpod and for a limited time only, get a free immune support bundle

• 28:43Matt McCusker?

  including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 with your first subscription to AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/secretpod. This episode is brought to you by NutraFol.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:56Matt McCusker?

  NutraFol.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  NutraFol.

• 28:58Matt McCusker?

  A pity than NutraFol.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  NutraFol. NutraFol is the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand, and it's the number one hair growth supplement brand personally used by dermatologists. Because hair health isn't one size fits all. NutraFol offers different formulas for both men and women at any age or stage of life.

• 29:16Matt McCusker?

  It's 100% vegan, biotin-free, and comes in a smaller capsule size to make your daily routine easier.

• 29:24Matt McCusker?

  I can't get enough of this stuff.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  See thicker, stronger, faster growing hair with less shedding in just three to six months. Right now, Nutraful is offering our listeners $10 off your first month's subscription, free shipping when you visit nutraful.com and enter promo code MSSP. That's nutraful.com, spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L.com, promo code MSSP.

• 29:48Matt McCusker?

  So also too, just how big, we talked a little bit about just how big the sun's corona is. So it's like, all right, the diameter of the sun's visible surface is about 864,000 kilometers, which if you were to take a radius of that, half the circle.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:05Matt McCusker?

  Guess how big it would be? 432,000 kilometers. Anyway, pretty sick. The corona, starting at the end of the sun's surface, extends for, like we said, three to five million miles, raging at roughly a million degrees, which again, asterisk that because apparently they were able to probe it and it was only 1400, well, you know, only 1400 degrees Celsius. So maybe that was like the outer, outer reaches. I don't, oh yeah, you know what? It probably was because they weren't even, yeah, they had got to like the outer reaches of that. Uh, maybe they're in salt, because the corona of the sun that goes off the body extends for 3.5 million miles at a million degrees and then thins out into the solar wind that we talked, extends all the way out to Pluto and beyond. So this, the, technically speaking, the whole solar system is located

• 30:50Matt McCusker?

  inside of the sun.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:51Matt McCusker?

  And I'm going to get pushed back because they're going to say, dude, that's the fuck, you can't include fucking solar winds. Was like, hey, man, I didn't write the rules.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 30:58Matt McCusker?

  The girls did. This is girl rules.

• 31:02Matt McCusker?

  Girl rules. Sorry, I didn't make them.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Actually used to look like space.

• 31:05Matt McCusker?

  Now, if you really want to take away their vote, you can amend the solar winds. It'd be like, no, it does not extend to all of the thing.

• 31:12Matt McCusker?

  All right. So we covered the surface and the corona, I think, pretty well. What about the core, the churning powerhouse of the sun? The core is where,

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:20Matt McCusker?

  I mean dude, like the surface is cool and all, the corona's pretty cool, you know, paradoxical, whatever. The core.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  I don't think I've ever heard shit about the core.

• 31:28Matt McCusker?

  Bro, you, I, I'm, if you want to cover your ears, I don't blame you.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  It's freaky.

• 31:32Matt McCusker?

  You'll never look at the sun again the same way. So the core makes up the innermost 25% of the sun's radius. So 25% of the sun's size is the radius, not obviously including solar winds and all that stuff. But don't look that for you. 25% of the sun is still enormous. The core alone is roughly twice the diameter of Jupiter. The largest planet in the solar system. So it's massive.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:54Matt McCusker?

  So you have this massive ball. It's 15 million degrees Celsius. And again, we've already established the corona's 1.3 million degrees. The core is five to 15 times hotter than that. And like we said, every step up the temperature ladder changes what matter fundamentally is. So once you get into the core, you're, you're like, you're just complete, you're, you're beyond what any physical matter on earth is basically. You're, you turn into plasma and the pressure, this is fucked up if you think about it. The pressure of the core, it's 250 billion times earth's atmospheric pressure. And pressure's not gravity. It doesn't mean you weigh like 250 billion times more.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:33Matt McCusker?

  It's like if you were, you know, when you're underwater, when like submarines go thousands of feet and they get crushed?

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:38Matt McCusker?

  Dude, like, if you did like a couple hundred thousand times bigger, you're crushed. It's 250 billion times atmospheric pressure. It'd be like being like 10 billion feet underwater. Like it's, it's unfathomable how much it grows. It's, it's crushing. It's containing an explosion, which the core essentially is.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:56Matt McCusker?

  The core's explosion is equivalent to 90 trillion nuclear warheads going off every second.

• 33:05Matt McCusker?

  Already for four billion years slated for another roughly 4.5 billion years more. Every second, every second you look at the sun is 90 trillion nuclear warheads just going.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  We're just looking at it like, damn, it's a pretty day out there.

• 33:19Matt McCusker?

  Dude, it's so, it's insane. So, okay, twenty, two hundred fifty billion times Earth's atmospheric pressure. And again, it's being crunched down by gravity. The sun contains three hundred thirty three thousand times the mass of Earth. And all of that mass is gravitationally attracted to its own center. I don't really know that's how gravity works. So if you have a big ball like Earth or the sun, all like, it's like the weight. So you have like, you're standing on France, all of France from the surface, down to like, all the shit underneath it, is pressing on the core. And you have China, that's also somehow pressing into the core as well. And every place is just crunching down on the core. So the, the core of the,

• 34:00Matt McCusker?

  the, the sun is just fucking massive amounts of gravity containing this never ending explosion that just kind of repowers itself over and over. So every layer of the sun is sitting top on the, on top of the layer below it. It's, I mean, it's the most extreme pile on ever, just all the way down to the core, like we say. And the temperature, so it's the temperature, by the way. So we're saying about like, the, the, you know, fifteen hundred, fifteen million degrees changing what matter fundamentally is. It's from two things. It's from the temperature and it's from the pressure. So the temperature gets the particles mass moving fast enough to overcome the repulsion. Because you have like, say, you have hydrogen, a hydrogen nucleus, seems another hydrogen nucleus. So it's just sitting there like this. They're repelled like magnets. Like, think about two magnets, you can't get them

• 34:45Matt McCusker?

  to touch each other. You're sitting there like, you know, I can't do it. So the heat gets the particles moving so fast that the electrons, since it's plasma, the electrons fall away. Now we have the soup. The electrons are just floating here and there. There's no order to any of these things. And then neutrons are just going like this. And then they get hot enough, they get fast enough, and they get close enough to each other to overcome the repulsion.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  That's love.

• 35:09Matt McCusker?

  So like, dude, it'd be like, if you threw a magnet so fast, it is love. It's like, if you threw the magnet so fast, which I've, I actually seen one of my boys do this one time. You throw the magnet fast enough, it would, it would just go, and would actually connect. However, the connection is nuclear, it's like particle fusion. So it's, it's what powers nuclear bombs. And the pressure, so it's like, the temperature gets them moving fast enough to overcome the repulsion. But then the pressure gets them close enough for the strong nuclear force to grab them together. So, and this is the core is the only place in the solar system where both conditions are met at once, which is why fusion only happens in the center of stars and nowhere else. It really is when people do atomic bombs.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 35:54Matt McCusker?

  It's the power of the stars. And here, yeah, so and the cool part is the same gravity.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  That's kind of badass that people were just harnessing the power of stars on the planet. I didn't mean to cut you off.

• 36:04Matt McCusker?

  It's cool. It's certainly, it's terrifying.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  It's terrifying.

• 36:06Matt McCusker?

  It's really scary.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  We did kind of do that though.

• 36:09Matt McCusker?

  I know. I mean, shout out to us, obviously. But yeah, the same crushing gravity is what keeps the whole system stable. The fusion at the core, and we'll get into exactly what fusion is, is nuclear fusion, is constantly trying to blow the sun apart. So, and again, like we said, 90 trillion nuclear bombs per second exploding. Gravity is just hugging around it, just, no brother, just holding it all together. And these two forces, these two massive forces have been pretty much perfectly balanced for 4.6 billion years. Like we said, turns out we get another 5 billion in the bank. So we're chilling on the sun for 5 billion more years. The sun's a controlled explosion that gravity won't let escape and fusion won't let collapse in on itself. So the fusion also is pushing out against gravity, wanting to just fucking

• 36:54Matt McCusker?

  crunch it all in.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  I wonder if it'll be like signs. I mean, obviously we won't be here for, but you know, 400 billion years from now, will the sun like feel or look different? You know what I mean? Cause we've lived it. We've experienced it for such a short period of time. We don't even.

• 37:07Matt McCusker?

  I don't know.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:08Matt McCusker?

  I don't know. They claim, they claim that it's been relatively stable, but it's like, you know, again, I, I'm like, okay, we'll see. Okay, girl scientist, we'll see. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. Moms are no stranger to chaos. In some of your craziest moments together, pure comedy in hindsight. That's why an Aura Frame makes the perfect Mother's Day gift. They capture not just the memories, but the chaos you caused along the way. Personalization requested. Please talk for 10 to 15 seconds about a chaotic moment your mom had to handle, especially something you caused that was stressful at the same time, but you both laugh about now.

• 37:49Matt McCusker?

  For example, like that family road trip where I somehow got us lost. Um, what chaos did I cause? Well, one time I, I don't know if you know what a Mad Libs thing is, but it was a, it's like a word puzzle. Not a word puzzle. It was like a story, but you got to fill in all the words. I don't know. You know what it was? That was bad because I put nothing but like butthole and penis. My mom found it, got mad, but I, I signed someone's yearbook one time. I was in seventh grade and I signed an eighth grade boys yearbook and I said, dear Joey, I hope you get buttfucked this summer. And his mom called my mom and my mom called to school and told me that my dad was going to beat my ass when I got home. And I just sat in dread all day and waited and that, yeah, my dad beat my ass.

• 38:33Matt McCusker?

  And it'd be nice if we had a picture I could put on an Aura frame. That'd be a very beautiful memory. Moments like that are priceless and priceless. Now you can immortalize them. Aura Frames keeps your favorite memories alive with unlimited photo and video storage. Pre-load your photos before it even ships, personalize it with a message and share the laughs effortlessly through the free Aura app, or even just by texting photos straight to the frame. Named number one by Wirecutter, you can save on the gifts mom loved by visiting auraframes.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $25 off their best-selling Carver Matte Frame with code MSSP. That's A-U-R-A, frames.com promo code MSSP. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.

• 39:18Matt McCusker?

  Also guys, I have the, I have some new tour dates coming up. Uh, I'm, I'm actually kind of pumped to announce them. There'll be summer and a pretty much winter. Pretty cute, pretty cute. But the big one right now, Toronto sold out. Thank you guys. Canada, you guys rule. And then the Riviera Theater, Chicago, Illinois. I'm going to check right now, guys. I think, yeah, I think tickets are almost gone. I'm not just saying that, but we have about, we're a week out. And I believe last time I checked, I was at like 90% sold, so. Yeah, so I'm looking right now. It's making me click to make sure I'm not a robot, whatever. There's not a lot of tickets left, guys. I can say that for a fact. So get them if you want to come. It's gonna be a close one. So that's it.

• 39:59Matt McCusker?

  Chicago and that is sorry, I should say the date for that. That is gonna be May 16th, I believe. I don't know. So yeah, May 16th, it's being microphones being a piece of shit. So come on, come on. We'll get it. We'll get into fusion because again, we kind of touched on it, but how it happens is really cool. So like, you know, what actually happens to these, you know, molecules or like hydrogen particles at 15 million degrees. So again, at a few thousand degrees, molecules break apart into atoms at around 10,000 degrees Celsius. Atoms is when it becomes plasma. Atoms themselves start to break down like we said, electrons get stripped away because it's like, you have remember the science thing you have a nucleus, which is like a, I think a proton and a neutron. And then it's circled by electrons.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:41Matt McCusker?

  And luckily hydrogen has no proton, no hydrogen has no neutrons or something. So it's just a proton. That's why they have like the proton collider thing. That's what they're trying to replicate. Did you ever hear of the Higgs boson particle collider?

• 40:53Speaker 00

  No.

• 40:54Matt McCusker?

  They have these things on their ground and they're trying to get particle fusion. They try to shoot them at such speeds that they can overcome that natural resistance and actually collide and.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  That's how scary this shit is to fuck around with.

• 41:04Matt McCusker?

  These girls are out of control right now, man.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Blows up. Oh my God.

• 41:11Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it's actually pretty freaky, but at 10,000 degrees, 10,000 degrees Celsius, matter stops becoming matter in any recognizable sense that we know and becomes plasma, which we said is a soup of free electrons and bare atomic nuclei. So it's like the nucleus not surrounded by their revol, you know, the electrons that are spinning around it. Again, this is a fourth state of matter between solid, liquid and gas. So that's at 10,000 degrees Celsius. The core is 15 million degrees. So you're so far past plasma that the nuclei, the proton and neutron, in the case of hydrogen, just the proton, like we said, themselves are being slammed into each other hard enough to fuse. And like we said, it's because the electrons are stripped away from the heat, leaving the protons. Again, not being positively charged, but still to repel each other like magnets.

• 41:55Matt McCusker?

  The repulsion between these protons is called the coloon barrier, in case you're wondering. So that's the barrier that keeps protons from kind of slamming. But now, like we said, the heat has the protons going so fast, they overcome the repulsion. And so then, as they do this, they just fucking boom slam into each other. These are two hydrogen nuclei colliding and merging, transforming in a flash in nuclear, you know, a miniature nuclear explosion, transforming to form helium in the process. So you have a hydrogen, a hydrogen, which by the way, two hydrogen, one hydrogen, I think, is heavier than a helium. But when the two come together, which you would think, oh, the helium is going to be heavier. The helium is lighter than these two guys that just crashed together.

• 42:39Matt McCusker?

  So because helium is fundamentally lighter. And the loss of weight, right? So you have, say a hydrogen weighs one pound, or they don't, but let's say for the sake of numbers, two hydrogen nuclei is weigh one pound each. They slam, now they weigh like collectively, I don't know, whatever the fuck it is. They've lost 0.7% of the mass.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  They get smaller though.

• 42:58Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, they're lighter than those. So you start off with two things weighing something, they collide. You left, you have the leftover, the helium is like the ash of a cigarette. It's like a leftover component of this reaction that had nuclear reaction. That tiny little bit of weight that's lost is then transferred into the energy that basically becomes light. So those particles colliding in the 15 million degrees.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  In the core.

• 43:20Matt McCusker?

  In the core is what generates the sun's light. But it's happening over and over and over and over, over and over, just boom, boom, boom, every second it's and there's this light blinding flashes of gamma rays, which you don't want to fucking. I know you think you're tough, but you do not want a gamma ray at all.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Put me on the gamma ray.

• 43:39Matt McCusker?

  You do not want to get, it's, it's that, that little, the hydrogen nuclei, this is important, colliding and merging, transforming to helium, which is like kind of the body of the sun.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:49Matt McCusker?

  Boom, white flash, but that just like infinitesimal part of the mass that's lost becomes a force, it becomes a gamma ray, which is like really weird to think like, if you took a tiny bit of weight of this thing, seeing, you know, I don't know what it weighs, probably fucking. Not even like point one pounds. That would become a intense burst of light energy. This is what, you know, it's trying to think of how to explain this. So, so the fusion of two particles, again, which is because of heat and pressure, transmutes the hydrogen into helium. We already, we already said that and it loses that little bit of weight. That just becomes light, pure

• 44:30Matt McCusker?

  energy. And here's how I try to think of it. So it's like when the protons collide in nuclear fusion, they turn into helium, which we said is the byproduct of the reaction. And the reaction's a massive explosion of energy relative to the size of the tiny bit of weight that was lost. So like, think of it this way. If you multiply something's mass, right? This is how I kind of figured it out. If you multiply something's mass by the speed of light and then multiply that number by the speed of light again, you'll see how much energy has been converted in the process. So this is just think like, you know, E for energy, M for mass, and let's do C for the speed of light and square that. You get, I think it's like E equals MC squared. Whoa. Oh dude, that's crazy. That's Einstein's theory, actually. But that's what, I had no idea that's

• 45:14Matt McCusker?

  what E equals MC squared is. It's just accounting for how much, how much mass converts, how much, the tiniest amount of mass converts to like light energy, basically.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:24Matt McCusker?

  It's Einstein's theory of special relativity. It's crazy case of parallel thinking, honestly, but I just, I was like, oh yeah, that's how that works. So going back to the sun.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  You're dude sitting there by himself and just figuring that all out for the first time? Yo, he's just being like, I'm him.

• 45:45Matt McCusker?

  He's definitely him. I think though, there was a guy who figured out, what is it? Magnetism and electricity are part of the same thing. And that came first, which was also like, what the fuck? And I think that, they say that's what kind of like helped Einstein be like, oh, okay. And he kind of piggybacked off that. He basically alley ooped Einstein.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Was that, that's not Tesla, right?

• 46:06Matt McCusker?

  No, no, I forget the guy's name.

• 46:10Matt McCusker?

  Be the guy who discovered electromagnetism, another beast. That was a big one, dude. That was crazy to somehow be like, no, they're the same thing because it's like, electricity and magnetism. You can't have one without the other. The one produces electricity and the other one produces magnetism and there it's a self sustaining field.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  A thing that I've, this is a little sidetracked, but like we're talking, you're talking this, I, cause we're talking about how beast these guys are. I've kind of, I don't know if the, is Instagram or the internet has, I always pictured like smart dudes as, I didn't even see you doing it. I was picturing smart dudes as dorks. And like now you're starting to see like sometimes like nerds are kind of just cool, you know, smart people.

• 46:47Matt McCusker?

  They used to be cool. Einstein was cool.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. He used to like, I see stuff that he seemed like he was kind of him back in the day.

• 46:53Matt McCusker?

  Like he wasn't like, well, you know what it was though? Those early physicists and those type of guys, they would look at this outer space shit and be like, they took almost like a religious perspective. They'd be like, God, God's mysteries are so tight. Now scientists are like, cold and objective and they're like, they talk like robots.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:12Matt McCusker?

  They lost all their swag.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  I see.

• 47:14Matt McCusker?

  They lost their swag when they stopped being like, this is so beautiful, dude. How do I fit into this beautiful tapestry? Now they're like, well, the forces are impersonal and cold and dark.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  And they turn on the guy who, who, who tries to go back to the other shit. They go like, no, that's not what we do now. We can't write peer reviewed papers on that.

• 47:30Matt McCusker?

  I know. How can you quantify that? It's like, dude, shut the fuck up, dude. That's why Einstein got pussy and you didn't.

• 47:36Matt McCusker?

  So. May want to Michael Faraday, what the hell? Huh? I think it's Ernest Mock.

• 47:46Matt McCusker?

  What?

• 47:48Matt McCusker?

  Lorenz is who Einstein built directly off. Did he? Maybe he was. I don't know. But either way, we'll leave that. Like, comment below. Figure that out. So going back to the sun. That is a good point. Why Einstein was the man. I, I do think they just lost their respect for, you know,

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:03Matt McCusker?

  They took it. They stopped taking a poetic view towards nature. They just started being like, yeah, yeah, it's fucking bunch of math.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  It's just math.

• 48:13Matt McCusker?

  Going back to the sun. So nuclear fu- nuclear fusion is constantly happening at the core. Hydrogen nuclei slamming, fusing, gamma burst. And this is what sunlight is. And then leftover helium, the body of the sun. So the sun, by the way, through fusion is converting four million tons of mass into energy gamma rays every single second. And this isn't like burning a log. This is physically, like, you know, that's like you, you burn it. It's like, it's light. This is physically converting mass into like traveling light beams. You know, a fire is just kind of like, oh, it's like a candle. It just kind of hovers. That's more of a chemical reaction.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:50Matt McCusker?

  This is fundamentally taking mass and going like being flying out. So in gamma rays too, by the way, here's a cool thing too. The gamma rays don't just blast out of the reaction and hit us. Cause if they did, we'd be fucked. Like we would be. Gamma rays are in terms of energy rays, like gamma X rays, all that shit. They're the king daddy of energy rays. They have no mass, no charge. It's just pure energy moving at the speed of light. So, and you think, okay, what's the fuck's the big deal about that? So, okay, so let's just get into this thing first. The gamma ray, cause if, well, let's just say if it hit you, you're fucked. Like a gamma ray goes, UV ray hits your skin and it gets trapped. You get a little sunburn maybe, but your body is like, okay, let's kind of repair that.

• 49:35Matt McCusker?

  A gamma ray would go right through you.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Like it's gonna be a hole in my body?

• 49:39Matt McCusker?

  Wouldn't be a hole, but it would pass through you, but it would sever anything it touched in terms of like your DNA cells. So it goes through you and just severs your DNA. So if you got hit with a full body dose of gamma, all your, all your DNA strands would just be severed. Instant, like, like that. So anything.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Huh? Do you vape? That sounds like you vape.

• 49:57Matt McCusker?

  You don't vaporize. You're just, you would just be there like nothing happened, but all of a sudden you'd be like, ugh, like your bo- all your body's natural intelligence just goes offline and you become what's called a walking ghost. And you just slowly die. Like you die in like two minutes. Cause your body, all your bodily processes are just like, what the fuck was that? Their lines of DNA just shred. It's that your DNA is what's telling all your cells what to do.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:19Matt McCusker?

  That just goes down and then you go. Oh, I don't feel so good. Two minutes later, fucking toast. So that's what's happening in the sun's core. Now, here's the cool part.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  We have those kind of weapons.

• 50:30Matt McCusker?

  The gamma would fuck, dude, that would suck getting hit with gamma. So the core, you would think like, oh, okay. So that light hits the core. The hydrogen, you know, or hydrogen hits each other, turns into gamma, the hydrogen turns into helium. That's like the energy process, the energy exchange or whatever. That gamma, those gamma rays produced by the particle fusion. It gets trapped in the sun's core. It just, it can't get out. It goes, bounces around. Guess how long it bounces around for?

• 51:01Speaker 00

  I guess a million years.

• 51:04Matt McCusker?

  Seventeen thousand.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Seven, okay.

• 51:05Matt McCusker?

  Seventeen thousand. You should have went low for, for record, just go low next time, makes it better. No, but so if those escaped, we'd be toast.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:13Matt McCusker?

  Somehow, and the sun's already kind of nuts right now, but the gas, the energy it produces, it holds it inside of itself and just kind of, it bounces around on a weird ten to seventeen thousand year journey inside of the core where it's slowly degraded into like lesser and lesser forms of energy, basically. So it's like gamma all the way to where it's like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Now it comes out as UV light. Soon as it escapes the core and hits the, you know, basically surface of the sun.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:41Matt McCusker?

  It takes eight seconds to get to earth. So it bounces around for, let's say seventeen thousand years. And then it gets to the, the sun's surface and it's eight seconds, hits you right in your fucking face.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Get a little tan.

• 51:53Matt McCusker?

  As UV, and you get a little tan, you know, white boys like me get a little crispy. So yeah, it's pretty, uh, it's pretty crazy, man. Al, it's like every, every time you stand in the sunlight, the light hitting you seventeen thousand years old.

• 52:07Matt McCusker?

  And has been stepped down. It kind of is set up for black people originally. So white people might be from Yakub. But it was, it's kind of just like held in the sun and then shot out at like the perfect shit that we need for here for plants and people and, you know, all that other stuff.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  That's fire.

• 52:24Matt McCusker?

  Pretty beautiful.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:25Matt McCusker?

  Pretty beautiful. Pure gamma, dude.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Don't want no parts of that.

• 52:29Matt McCusker?

  You don't want that, dude. You just, you just don't, you don't want anything. Literally like we said, just malfunctions, everything gets you fucked up.

• 52:37Matt McCusker?

  But yeah, dude, and then like we said before, the sun, this is actually kind of cool, too. The sun somehow, sun basically self-regulates. So like we said before, the, you know, the outward pressure of a fusion is kind of trying to explode the sun just out into the, into the solar system. But the size of the sun itself is kind of crunching it down in on itself. So here's the thing, when fusion speeds up, the sun expands. So the sun, it's like, okay, the thing is starting to explode, but the sun expanding expands the core too, which then naturally cools the core down. And so like we said, the heat is what gets the particles moving faster.

• 53:17Matt McCusker?

  So when the core expands, the particles slow down ever so slightly. So fusion slows down. So then the sun contracts again, because everything cools down.

• 53:25Speaker 00

  So it's like breathing.

• 53:26Matt McCusker?

  It's, it's literally self-regulating. So it's just, it's expanding. It's been doing this every, for four billion years, keeping itself in perfect balance. Making the light just perfect for us. Pretty fucking wild. However, so it's doing this all the time, but then within that kind of like breathing kind of thing. Every 11 years, it's on, it's on a, it's been on a cycle like this forever. Every 11 years, it has solar flare cycle. So we're, we're in a period of high solar flare, flares right now. So every 11, like we said, that's from just electromagnetic fields, just twisting, twisting, twisting and snap and they go and shoot out. So it's like you have, it's always solar flaring, but every 11 years, it's like high solar flares. And then every 11 years, next 11 years, like low solar flares.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Okay. So we're in high times right now.

• 54:10Matt McCusker?

  We're in high, we're in high solar.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  How long is it supposed to, longer than that supposed to last? The high times, like.

• 54:15Matt McCusker?

  I don't know which, where we're at in it, but you know, we're probably just say we're at the middle, we got like five more years of solar flares. And apparently the flares do have, I should have researched this, I did not, but they do have like a measurable effect on like people's like thinking and stuff like that. So they can like, they can get you, it might be why we're all a little crazy right now. We're in heavy, we're in heavy solar flare. Hopefully, you know, we're on time for in. I've said it before, I think 2030 onward is going to be chill. That's my prediction now. If I check solar flares right now and it lines up with that, I'm just going to run with that.

• 54:45Matt McCusker?

  So yeah, that's another mystery. It's like, okay, the sun is a self-regulating, it's, it's, it has like rhythms and stuff that it does. Um, and also like we said, obviously it's, it's held at a perfect balance for 4.6 billion years. Um, with like really no room to mess up. Like if it, if it got like just a few degrees cooler or hotter. I mean, life on earth is fucking toast. So it's like, it doesn't have a huge window of error. If the sun goes off just a little bit, we're fucked.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  We're cooked.

• 55:14Matt McCusker?

  So brings me to the next question. Is the sun conscious?

• 55:18Speaker 00

  I was for real. I was sitting here whole and then I was sitting here whole and then saying something about that. Cause I was literally, I have that thought sometimes, whether or not like planets and like shit in the solar system is a higher form of life that we just don't understand yet.

• 55:32Matt McCusker?

  I don't know. I mean, if life is exist on earth and grows out of earth, what the fuck is earth? That's what I'm saying. What's the sun, dude? I don't know.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  The sun.

• 55:40Matt McCusker?

  Dude, here, my thing is that, so if you, if you, if your brain produces consciousness, your brain is just a bunch of like electrical sparks flying around and like water and tissue. Why can't the sun, dude? You have electromagnetic fields. You have water. You have heat. I mean, the sun doesn't have water, but you know what I'm saying? There's, there's like water on the planets. You have heat. You have electromagnetic fields. I mean, dude, why not, dude? I don't know. I don't know. So then the, the people, there's people that say that consciousness, this is like the idealist or like panpsychics. They, they say that consciousness is like a field, just like gravity or electromagnetism. It's just present and then we just, you know, pick up on it. Just like gravity crushes us. There's like a field for consciousness. You have the right stuff. You tap into the field. I could be the sun, the sun could be conscious. I don't know.

• 56:25Matt McCusker?

  However, I think regardless of how you feel about it, something like a religious reverence is due for the sun. After I learned about it, I was like,

• 56:33Speaker 00

  We need to go back to sun gods.

• 56:35Matt McCusker?

  Dude, or at least just look at it and get stoked. I, I, ever since I look at it, like, dude, I got into just how like the sun puts out these like, um, whatever it is, radiation and our eyes are designed to actually see radiation. Like if, if our eyes weren't designed, we couldn't pick up on light, basically. We have like light sensors in our eyes and I just like. I was here typing and I was like, wait, so do we see light or does light let us see? And I was just like getting all wrapped up on if we even see light in the first place. And I had, I took a knee by my computer. I was like, dude, shut up. Just chill, go outside, dude. It's fucked up.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  There's a, it's a dumb, this is dumb as shit, but it's a cart in the show Invincible. There's a whole scene where they go into this room and you can't see anything because of, becau- because they, that was exactly what you're talking about. They, they, it's like a certain, they have a certain kind of light on in the room that our eyes aren't made

• 57:27Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 57:28Speaker 00

  to be able to pick up on.

• 57:29Matt McCusker?

  Fuck.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  And then they had, they like, they like give him a needle that injects. In the show, they give him a needle that injects something that makes his eyes be able to see this new type of light. It's kind of what you're saying.

• 57:38Matt McCusker?

  No, exactly. Well, there's also a ton, there's also a ton of, uh, yeah, like infrared wavelengths that we can't see.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:44Matt McCusker?

  So there could be shit like going on that we, we just, we will never be able to see it. It's bugging me out, dude. But here's the thing too. It's like, you know, people, people back in the day would look up at the sun. This is, this is, you know, the rest of the solar system. Look at the sun and all the planets. And just be like, dude, these are gods. They like really truly thought they're like, oh shit. They'd be like just kicking around in the morning and they'd just see like Venus and be like, oh shit. There's the fucking horny god.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:09Matt McCusker?

  They would just be like.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Where's my babe?

• 58:12Matt McCusker?

  There's my baby.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Horny gods in the sky.

• 58:14Matt McCusker?

  So even the, the term, so we're going to get into kind of the, try to get into the, somewhat into the etymology of the planets. So the term sun. They, they, you know, there's like stuff went back and forth being like, yeah, actually the sun in the English language has no connection to the gods, like, you know, mercury, Venus, all those are like easily traceable. So they're claiming the sun has no connection in the English language

• 58:40Matt McCusker?

  to the gods. But then I, you know, I started doing a little digging. And it's, it actually, it does actually. So it's like, so this, the term sun in English can be traced back through the proto Indo-European language family to a relation with the Norse deity Sol, which is actually Latin for the, so they did have a sun god in, uh, Rome. Actually became the official god of, uh, like it was some of the late Roman empires. It was like the, it was called the undefeated sun.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:05Matt McCusker?

  It was a minor god in the Roman pantheon. And during the fall of Rome, some people were like, we call sun god is our god. Cause actually Julius Caesar called Venus the horny god to be, he claimed to be descended from the horny god. Which is pretty sick. And everyone had to be like, yeah, dude, for sure.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  You're the horniest guy.

• 59:21Matt McCusker?

  So the, the actual term sun in English, it can be traced back to the Norse deity Sol, also called, also called Sula. Sol back then was a goddess, literally the sun itself, which would race across the sky, being chased by a hungry wolf. You know the hungry wolf's name? Skull. Skull. And a race in the, the hungry wolf was trying to eat the sun, which is why they thought the sun went across. And at Ragnarok, the apocalypse, Skull would catch and eat Sol. And during eclipses, it was thought that Skull got himself a little bite of her, but the chase continued. And actually, Sunday, believe it or not, is actually named after this ancient sun babe. So, pretty sick. Pretty sick. So that, you know, my friends and haters, is the deal with the sun. And it would be crazy. I almost skipped over the sun. I almost

• 1:00:04Matt McCusker?

  skipped over the sun, but, oh man, just think, all the nuclear fusion going on in there, the perfect balance of light being trapped, honed to perfection, released. It's, I, I just thought it was fucking sick.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  Hits us, it feels good when it hits us.

• 1:00:17Matt McCusker?

  Feels fucking awesome. It powers your body, dude. If you don't get enough sun, you don't produce tests. That's why I fucking do ride my blanket at a tank top all the time.

• 1:00:25Matt McCusker?

  So from the sun now, we move on to mercury. And, you know, mercury is the, actually, should we, we'll slide to the Patreon. Let's slide to the page. Yeah, let's slide to the page. We're already at an hour. Oh yeah, we're good. Guys, thank you for joining me for the, uh, the series into the, the planets, but we have to slide to the Patreon. We have, we have places to be. I probably promised you that wasn't planned. I just, goddamn, those, you know, what the hell? I've been doing this for a while. Exactly an hour on the sun. Who would have thought? Nate, thank you. Sean, thank you. We're sliding to the Patreon. We're gonna do mercury and Venus. If you don't want to join, don't join, whatever, I don't care.

• 1:01:01Matt McCusker?

  Watch new episodes of Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast on Spotify.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Do it.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 1:01:30Speaker 06

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 1:01:33Speaker 05

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 1:01:34Speaker 06

  Make them remember you.

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.