#2363 - David Kipping

David Kipping is an astronomer and associate professor at Columbia University, where he leads the Cool Worlds lab. www.coolworldslab.com Get anything delivered on Uber Eats. https://ubereats.com Take 50% off a SimpliSafe system at https://simplisafe.com/ROGAN 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.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  What's up, man? How are you? Pleasure to meet you, sir.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Pleasure to be here, thanks, Joe.

• 0:16Joe Rogan?

  I really enjoy your content online. It's been really fascinating. So I've been doing a deep dive into a lot of your videos over the last few days and enjoying the hell out of it. And particularly enjoying...I wanted to talk to you about so many different things, but one of the most pressing things, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you in, because you are very knowledgeable in all things space, is the James Webb Telescope and all the different stuff that they've been finding, particularly about these galaxies that were formed very shortly after the...not shortly, you know, not within our lifetime shortly, but cosmologically shortly after the Big Bang, that it seems like we have to figure out why these things are forming. Is the universe older?

• 1:01Joe Rogan?

  There's all those different kinds of speculation. Maybe the Big Bang is not 13-point-whatever-billion-years-old, but maybe 22, 24. Like, what is your take on all this?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the James Webb Space Telescope is such an incredible instrument. The data has just blown us away. You know, when you build this thing and you look at it unfolding in space, you think there's so many ways it could go wrong that we all were just like, you know, this thing was 215 moving parts or something had to unfold. So, you know, just the fact that...

• 1:29Joe Rogan?

  In space?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. The fact it just all worked was just remarkable.

• 1:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  And then when we got those first images, they just kind of blew us away as well, because we had sort of these engineering expectations of what it would do, but the data was just even better than that. So when it, you know, of course, the first thing you want to do is point it to the most distant part of the universe and see what's out there, and those darkest patches. And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things. It started finding quasars, which are kind of the center of these very active galaxies. These are supermassive black holes that have loads of crap falling in, and they're spewing out all this energy, they're kind of feeding supermassive black holes. And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe should. Should be able to build them because to make a supermassive black hole, I mean, these things are like a hundred million solar masses.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Imagine that a hundred million suns have have not only been born, but died, gone through their entire life cycle, died, collapsed into a black hole, and then those black holes have presumably somehow merged together into this super behemoth of this hundred million solar mass thing. So we're finding those just, you know, three hundred million years after the Big Bang. And that was like, hold on, that that doesn't make any sense. Like, how can this be? And similarly with the with the galaxies, we were seeing these images, these galaxies, and you can date roughly how old they should be based off the redshift. So the, you know, the universe is expanding. So therefore, if something is very far away from us and the universe is expanding, its light gets stretched more and more and more as it journeys over space. And so we can use that redshift to kind of date how old these things are.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  When we use those dates, we look at these images, again, they seem suspiciously too too old. You know, you really shouldn't be able to form these things that that early on in the universe. And so that kind of puzzled us. I think for the galaxy thing, there was a bit of a resolution there. One of the resolutions is that we probably miscalculated how how easy it is to form these galaxies in the first place. So we had these models for galaxy formation. We had these models for how stars should form, how quickly they should live. But it was all essentially calibrated on what we see around us, like right here in this part of the universe, in the local universe. And then we kind of realized that those same models probably need to be tweaked if you're going to apply them to the early universe,

• 3:44Speaker 01

  where the density is so much higher, the the gas temperature is much hotter, everything's just, you know, completely different in the universe. So when you kind of make those corrections, it actually looks like maybe it's actually possible to make those galaxies early than we thought. So I think the galaxy problem is a bit easier to explain. I think the quasar problem to me is more interesting. How do you get those supermassive black holes so early? There's a certain kind of maximum rate you can feed these things called the Eddington limit. And that's sort of you throw mass into a black hole and so much energy is going in, some of it spews back out. And the energy which spews back out stops other stuff coming in. Right, so there's a maximum limit. You can't build a black hole faster in principle than this Eddington limit.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  And yet, when you do the calculation, these black holes must have been fed what we call super Eddington. So faster than Eddington. So something's wrong with our models, right? Either we've got the universe age wrong, which I think is possible, but I would say that's probably a much less likely solution, or we've got the astrophysics wrong.

• 4:44Joe Rogan?

  Why do you think that the universe's age is a less likely solution?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Because we've got this, you know, like in particle physics, you've got the standard model, which includes like all the particles and the electron, the baryons, all these kind of stuff. And in cosmology, we have a similar kind of model. It's called a Lambda CDM. And so the Lambda stands for dark energy and the CDM is cold dark matter. So this is our standard model and we have used it to explain so much stuff in the universe, Joe. I mean, we're talking about the cosmic microwave background, oscillations in the sky, these baryonic acoustic oscillations, the stretching in the universe, Cefids. You can use it to explain so much stuff and it works beautifully. I mean, it works down to like the point zero one percent level. So if you say the universe age is wrong, you have to give that up.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  So maybe it is, maybe it is wrong, but if you give that up, you have to come up with a radical new idea, which can now explain all of this stuff at that same level of precision. The much more likely answer, in my book, is that astrophysics, like the, you know, gas swirling around, the plasma colliding with each other, that's just more complicated in my mind than the, than the actual model of just the simple expansion of the universe, which actually is a fairly simple geometric model.

• 5:56Joe Rogan?

  Fairly simple in that you can use whatever methods that we're using currently to measure everything that's out there and it makes sense.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:09Joe Rogan?

  If we're using something like the James Webb telescope, so we're getting a much deeper view of the universe. How limited is the James Webb in comparison to James Webb 2.0, 3.0? Like, are we going to have to continually revamp what our understanding of this process is?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Yes, we will. And that's what scientists love. Every time we've built a telescope that is, you know, 10 times more precise than the last thing, every time we've done that, we have been surprised. And so these early galaxies are a good example. The cosmological experiments that are going on now, one of the big surprises is this thing called the Hubble tension. Have you heard of that?

• 6:50Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  So Hubble tension is measuring the expansion rate of the universe. How fast are things flying apart? And you can do it two ways. You can use the cosmic microwave background, so that's the earliest radiation that we can detect. It's that stuff that's about 3 kelvin warm, you can detect in the microwave, and this is the light which has traveled basically when the universe was 380,000 years old. It's that light, and we see it in all directions. That's how we know the big bang didn't happen in one place. It happened everywhere, because you just see this light coming in from all directions. And from studying that radiation, you can kind of get a model of the universe, and then you can calculate, using this model, how fast should the universe be expanding today, if I run the clock forward? And you get a number.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And then, if you do that same experiment but locally, you actually measure the stars. You measure the supernovae around us, these pulsating stars, and you actually measure how fast is stuff expanding, you get a different number. They don't line up. And so this is really weird. So somehow, something's wrong, right? Either our measurements of the local universe must be wrong in some way, or this model that we're using to calculate the whole history of the universe, something is wrong with that model. This is a very famous growing problem in cosmology. It's now what we call a five sigma level. So that means the chance of this being random is just like zero, essentially. It's just, this is a real effect. And now we just have to figure out who's wrong. Is it the observers, or is it the theorists?

• 8:15Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Where do you fall on this?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard. I'm, I go, I swing between both ways, you know? I'll talk to my cosmology colleagues and they'll, you know, depending on who I talk to, they'll convince me either way. So I think the-

• 8:33Joe Rogan?

  That's disturbing that people are convinced.

• 8:37Joe Rogan?

  You know, if this, if these new telescopes keep showing us this new puzzle, it's kind of, it always bothers me when someone is like rigidly convinced.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Everyone has a certain pet theory, right?

• 8:47Joe Rogan?

  Bias.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  They're trying to push. Yeah, I mean, we all have biases, right?

• 8:50Joe Rogan?

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• 9:55Joe Rogan?

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• 10:40Joe Rogan?

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• 11:21Joe Rogan?

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• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you've spent, it's hard, right? If you've spent 20 years of your life, you know, most of your academic career.

• 11:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Studying this one thing. It's really hard to turn around and say, you know what? I screwed up, right? That's 20 years of measurements, they were all wrong and I have to eat humble pie. That's not easy, but it has happened in some cases. One of my favorite stories like this is the first, the first exit plan that was ever claimed, a planet around another star. One of the first ones. It was wrong. So it was, it was a pulsar that had a planet, a supposed planet around it on a six month orbital period. So exactly half the earth's orbital period around the sun. And they saw this signal in their data, this, this pulsating star was doing something weird. And they figured out there was a six month period around it. So the dude published this paper, Matthew Bales, brilliant astronomer. And he realized later on it was wrong.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  And instead of it being a real planet, he hadn't quite corrected the orbital eccentricity of the earth. So the earth is not on a circular orbit. Its eccentricity is point zero one six seven. It's a tiny number, but that number hadn't been accounted for in the calculation. And so he had to stand up in front of hundreds of astronomers at this famous IOU meeting. And he admitted he was wrong and he got a standing ovation.

• 12:49Joe Rogan?

  Oh, good for him.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  It's awesome. It's one of the few times I've heard someone doing that. And I think it's dope. I think we need to encourage people to.

• 12:56Joe Rogan?

  Well, with something that's so massive and is such a puzzle, this is just bound to happen. If you get people that are rigidly attached to their belief systems in terms of like a very limited understanding of a fantastic thing that is almost beyond imagination. When you think about the sheer size of the universe and the age of the universe. I mean, when we're talking about aging and we say thirteen billion or twenty two billion, those numbers don't even register in your mind. They're not real. You know what I mean? It's like that you see a one and a three and you kind of get it, but you don't get it.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  There's no way. You can't intuit it.

• 13:31Joe Rogan?

  No, it's not possible for our puny little minds to imagine thirteen plus billion years. It's just too crazy. So if you're rigid with that, like, God, man.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:45Joe Rogan?

  Like.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I mean, part of the journey in being a scientist is knowing what your own biases are. And I remember, you know, one of my threads in my career has been trying to look for exo moons, moons around these exo planets, which would be a first if we got them. So that's, you know, it's a big deal, right? You know, if I succeed at this, it could be like, you know, golden prizes, award ceremonies. Like you kind of get that glimmer in your eye like, oh, man, this could like, I could be memorialized for this success. And so that's, that's alluring, right? That's tempting. It's like, it's kind of the same temptation as fame. And I remember once we had this signal, it was Kepler ninety, no, PHTB was the name of the planet. And we had this signal and it kind of looked like just what we expect for an exo moon. And I remember I was so excited. I had to, I was at Harvard at the time, had to walk out the building, had to go to a

• 14:31Speaker 01

  park bench and I had to just take like deep breaths. This, this could be it, you know? This is the thing I've been searching for.

• 14:38Joe Rogan?

  That's awesome.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  I was like almost hyperventilating with excitement. And then I remember in that moment.

• 14:43Joe Rogan?

  That's how you know you're in the right job.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:45Joe Rogan?

  Right?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:46Joe Rogan?

  Like that is the job for you.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I remember thinking to myself after calming myself down a little bit.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  I want this to be true too much, you know, like this is of all the people in the world, I want this to be true the most. So therefore, let's flip that round and I'm gonna have to be the greatest skeptic of this thing. Because I know I want it to be so bad that I have to correct the other direction. And it ended up being bullshit. I mean, it ended up being the telescope just misbehaved. Had this weird effect called a sudden pixel dropout effect. This weird anomaly happens one in like a hundred thousand times, but it just so happened to pop right then, right there.

• 15:27Joe Rogan?

  What do we know about the consistency of solar systems and galaxies being formed? We know they vary in size. Do we understand why? And we understand what causes them to form in the first place?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're still learning that. The, you know, we had this picture before we started finding exoplanets, that everything would just be like a solar system. And we have these eight planets circular orbits, you have the rocky planets on the inside, the gas giants on the outside. And we came up with this really elegant theory, this kind of nebula theory to try and explain that. And did a great job, explained everything. But then as soon as we started finding exoplanets, I mean, one of the first type exoplanets we found were these hot Jupiters. So these are Jupiter-sized planets, which are about twenty times closer to their star than Mercury is around the sun. And when those were first announced, nobody believed them. People are like, you can't, you can't get a Jupiter there. Like Jupiter's supposed to be five AU. How do you get it parked on, almost onto the surface of the star? It doesn't make any sense. None, none of the planet formation models could explain that.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  And it took until we found about ten of them in a row, that people started slowly changing their minds. And the proof of the pudding was when one of them eclipsed its star. So one of them actually passed right in front of the star, right at the moment it was supposed to, and we saw an eclipse. And when that happened, everyone was like, alright, this is, this is real. But then we had to figure out how the hell do you do that? So there was a long, there was a long skeptical curve to get to that point. And now we think the way to make those things is there's probably Jupiter's on the outside of the solar system, they come too close to each other. They gravitation, like kind of wrestling almost, they kind of excite each other, one of them gets kicked out in a random direction. And it can get flung into a highly eccentric orbit. And a highly eccentric orbit over time will circularize.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  So it doesn't want to stay on an eccentric orbit, it wants to turn into a circle through the tidal interactions with the star. So these things probably circularize really close onto their stars. But this is unusual, and it happens about one percent of star systems, we see this. But it's an example of how diverse things are. Another example is mini Neptunes. You ever heard of those planets?

• 17:27Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  So mini Neptunes are these planets which are in between the size of the Earth and Neptune. Neptune's about four times bigger than the Earth. So these things are about twice the size of the Earth. We don't have anything like that in the solar system. So we don't know what it is. Is it a big rock? Is it like a super Earth, a mega Earth? Or is it a scaled down version of Neptune? Is it like an ocean world maybe of some kind? And turns out that planet is the most common type of planet in the universe, as far as we can tell. And we don't have one.

• 17:57Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  So that's kind of weird, right? I mean, it seems like there's so many aspects of our solar system that are unusual. Even having a Jupiter, only 10% of stars have a Jupiter, as far as we can tell.

• 18:07Joe Rogan?

  10% of how many stars that have been observed?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Oh, at this point, I mean, we've observed hundreds of thousands of stars. And we know about 6,000 exoplanets. So of that population, you correct for the statistics, correct for the ones you've missed. Even so, I mean, these Jupiters are the easiest ones to find, right? They're the big boys, they're easy, they wobble the star a ton. So they're pretty easy to spot. So we're pretty confident that sun-like stars, it's kind of not typical for them to have these Jupiter-sized planets. And we've got two of them. So that seems interesting.

• 18:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  To our, to our own origin in the solar system. And suddenly having eight planets, that's pretty unusual. We don't see many systems with that many planets packed together.

• 18:45Joe Rogan?

  How many solar systems are binary solar systems? As opposed to having a single star?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, about half of all stars live in binary systems.

• 18:54Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  It's very common. So actually, Alpha Centauri A B, that's the nearest star system to us. And it's actually a trinary. There's Alpha A B that go around each other really close. And then there's Proxima Centauri, which is on the outside. And actually, just this morning, Joe, just this morning, there was an announcement of a giant planet around Alpha Cen A. It's a candidate. We don't know if it's confirmed yet, but it's it's kind of in the Hubble zone, so the distance where in principle you could have liquid water on the surface of a rocky planet.

• 19:25Joe Rogan?

  So it is a candidate for a planet?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:29Joe Rogan?

  Like, it has been, so it hasn't been completely confirmed?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  James Webb just spotted it. James Webb spotted it just, just, just come out today. So there's three photos that James Webb took, maybe they'll be in this article somewhere, took three images, and in one of those images, it captures an actual photo of the planet. You can see the planet in direct light. That's how powerful James Webb is. And it's a nearby star, so it's easy to image. Yeah, right here, so that S1, that's the planet you're looking at.

• 19:59Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  So you have to block out the star in the middle, because the star is like a billion times brighter than the planet, so you have to suppress it with all this advanced chronograph technology that James Webb has. But when you do that, and you zoom right in, you see this little planet there. It's probably about the same size as Saturn. It's probably a big boy.

• 20:16Joe Rogan?

  I love how they went with the real clickbaity headline with Avatar Planet, the other, the other article that you pulled up.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  I was quoting, I was quoting that one, so I know.

• 20:24Joe Rogan?

  Planet from the Avatar movies may exist in real life. Like, shut up. You're just trying to get people to click on that. It's kind of weird that they have to do that. But like, this is the world we're living in now. Everyone has such a short attention span. You're fiddling through your Google feed, like, what's new?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's got to connect to something, pop culture, otherwise people are like...

• 20:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's got to get you somehow. Like, there's some editorial.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  It's probably more like, you know, the Three Body Problem, the books and the show?

• 20:51Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Is the Tricelerons, and they live there.

• 20:54Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  So there's the three stars, Triceleron, and it's, the dynamics is so crazy that it pushes these planets into these highly eccentric and twisted orbits. And that's exactly what this planet appears to be. So this planet actually looks more like, rather than Avatar, it actually looks more like Triceleron, or Solaris, whatever it's called.

• 21:12Joe Rogan?

  Pull that article back up again, please, Jamie. The, the second one, the one that was less clickbaity. So...

• 21:20Joe Rogan?

  How large is this planet, this S1?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  It's hard to tell. It looks like it's about 100 times heavier than the Earth. So that's about Saturn.

• 21:27Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Roughly Saturn. But it's only a candidate, right? So we need to, we need to get more images of it to confirm that it's real. So I'm sure James Webb will point back at it, but I mean, look at it. It looks pretty convincing. I mean, how do you get that big blob of light sat there? So I think the signal to noise is really good.

• 21:44Joe Rogan?

  So do, because they vary so much in the, the way these galaxies and the way these solar systems are constructed, do we know why they're constructed in the first place? Like, why, why do they form in that way? Like, why does Bode's Law work? Does it still work?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  It kinda works, but it makes some bad predictions. Yeah, so Bode's Law is essentially looking at the separation between the planets and the solar system. So Venus, well, Mercury's about 0.4 AU. Venus is 0.7, the Earth is 1, and Mars is 1.5. So there seems to be a pattern. And I think it's like a fraction of 1.5 or something in terms of like, take the last one and just multiply that 1.5 and you roughly get to the next one.

• 22:26Joe Rogan?

  And is it dependent upon the mass of the planet?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  No, it's just, it's just purely their spacing. So it was, yeah, it has some problems. It doesn't particularly work that well. It predicts there's a planet where the asteroid belt is, and obviously there isn't one there. But maybe you could argue something happened.

• 22:40Joe Rogan?

  That's probably why the asteroid belt's there, right?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  You could argue, yeah.

• 22:43Joe Rogan?

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• 23:19Speaker 01

  But then more, more problematically, people have tried to apply this to exoplanets. So you've got these multi-planet systems and we know of like maybe three or four planets and there's gaps. And so you can say, okay, let's use Bode's Law and predict, okay, there should be a planet right here. And then people have done the observations, they've like dialed in and put all the telescopes on, be like, where's that planet? Sometimes they've found the planets there, but usually not. It doesn't, it's not that predictive.

• 23:42Joe Rogan?

  How common are asteroid belts?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  We don't know. We can't detect asteroid belts.

• 23:46Joe Rogan?

  Right, that's the question. So in these gaps where a planet should be, what if there was an asteroid belt in every one of them?

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:52Joe Rogan?

  That would kind of change everything, wouldn't it?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  I'd love that. Yeah, then we'd be back to Boats' Law. I mean, but Boats' Law, I guess it's actually really a statement. There's a great, um, dynamicist at Princeton, Scott Tremaine, and he showed this. That if you just try to pack planets as close as you can, like just shove them in like sardines into the solar system, some of them will become unstable and just get kicked out, and the ones that are left will follow Boats' Law. So it's not so much a, um, a statement of like, you know, some deity is putting these planets at the right places. It's that if you just cram stuff in as much as you can, that's what you end up with. Like you just can't cram planets any closer together.

• 24:27Joe Rogan?

  So what is our current belief system when it comes to the formation of solar systems?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  It appears to be very common. I mean, when we look at the data we have from the Kepler mission, NASA's extraordinary successful mission, it detected itself something like 4,000 exoplanets. And that tells us that on average, every single star has a planet. So as far as we can tell, this is, it's pretty hard for a star not to have planets. It's like par for the course for that to happen. That was a big breakthrough. Um, the second thing is, as we kind of alluded to, there's a huge diversity in them. And the actual story we normally describe for how they form is that there's some, you know, giant molecular cloud, we call it. So basically a giant cloud of hydrogen in space. Stuff that could have been blown off from a previous supernova or something, or maybe even in the early universe, just primordial gas from the big bang, just this leftover hydrogen gas.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  And if there's be some areas where there'll be slightly higher density and some areas where there's slightly lower density just due to random fluctuations. And the higher densities will self-gravitate. So gravity wants to make, it's like a greedy algorithm, wants to make everything get denser and denser and denser. Super greedy. It's relentless. Gravity never stops. And that's why eventually we end up with black holes, right? Because it just refuses to lose black hole. Gravity always wants to win the game. So eventually these clouds collapse, and the thing that stops them from collapsing into a black hole is that you start getting fusion in the center, right? Because the temperatures get so hot as you compress this gas that you basically make a star in the center. And the star- That's left over on the outside, that disk of material, because the star kind of blasts out of its poles and kind of pummels all the gas north and south.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  You end up with a disk of material, the centrifugal forces, like spinning a pizza ball, which kind of force it into a disk. And then from that disk, you start to coalesce again, just some areas are slightly denser, some areas are slightly less dense. And gravity again takes over and starts to collapse things together. So we have this story, but there's lots of parts of the story that we don't understand. So we know how to go, for instance, from from pebbles, if you start off with pebbles and imagine them kind of bouncing around, we can imagine sticking them into boulders. We kind of understand how that can happen, but we don't quite understand how to do some of the steps, like go all the way from dust, which presumably at one point it was just dust. How do you go from dust all the way up to pebbles, all the way up to these boulders, all the way up to planetesimals?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  That whole story we don't understand, we get, we've got bits of it where we think we understand it, but the whole thing we don't.

• 26:50Joe Rogan?

  Are there any working models or any?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a hugely huge active area of research. People are simulating dust on supercomputers, trying to stick it together, figure out what happened. But it's chaotic. I mean, you've got trillions and trillions of particles of dust randomly moving around and solving the equations to calculate their motion is one of the most challenging things ever. Maybe AI will help a big part with that.

• 27:15Joe Rogan?

  That would be interesting. Is it also a factor of the size of the sun? Like our star is fairly small in terms of the what we know about the universe. One of the most amazing videos that I tend to send people online is the video that shows.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  I know what you mean.

• 27:31Joe Rogan?

  You know, it shows Earth in comparison to our star. And then it shows our star in comparison to slightly larger stars, then it goes on and on and on to get to like Beetlejuice. And you get to some of these, it just gets so crazy.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  It's got to stop at some point, it keeps going.

• 27:46Joe Rogan?

  It's like a galaxy sized star. Like, what is that thing? It gets so nutty, it's so big.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Strange, yeah. Yeah, I mean, our star is, I mean, those big stars, those are actually rare, right? So those are the giant stars of the universe, and most stars are not that big.

• 28:01Joe Rogan?

  What is the biggest one that we found?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know the name, but yeah, I think you're talking about stars which are probably filling up to the orbit of Jupiter type size. Yeah.

• 28:11Joe Rogan?

  Here to Jupiter.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god. Just imagine a star from our sun that goes all the way out to Jupiter.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  It's nuts, yeah.

• 28:22Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  And these things are barely stars at that point. Like, if you actually, if you could zoom in a spaceship and look at the surface, it would, it would, the gravity would be so weak at that point, right? Because the, the mass hasn't changed of the star. In fact, anything, it's lost mass. So it's barely got enough gravity to hold that thing together. So the thing is like fluctuating. It's like a giant sheet that someone's waving up and down. So that's why those stars have these wild fluctuations in, in brightness. Because they're just kind of undulating on their surface.

• 28:52Joe Rogan?

  What is this one, Jamie? Is this the largest one?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  That's the name of the biggest one, I guess.

• 28:55Joe Rogan?

  Stevenson two eighteen. What is the little tiny one in the far left?

• 28:59Speaker 03

  That's our sun.

• 29:01Joe Rogan?

  It's so crazy. Go beat that. There's, look at our sun in comparison to that thing. Oh my god.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  And what's crazy is that the most common type of star in the universe is even smaller than the sun.

• 29:13Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the most common type of star in the universe is red dwarf. Seventy-five percent of all stars are red dwarfs. Only ten percent of stars are like our sun. So already that's kind of odd. You kind of think, all things being equal, how can we not live around a red dwarf?

• 29:27Joe Rogan?

  Right, and what is causing one to be so massive and, and another solar system, you know, fairly close to it, to be small? And like, what is?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, the difference is, it's, it's always easier to make a small thing, right? It's kind of like having crumbs down your sofa or something, like breaking up, right? It's easier to have small dusty things than it is to have huge pieces of cookies still left in the bottom of your sofa. So generally, it's pretty hard for the conditions to come together to make a gigantic, supermassive star. In the early universe, those conditions were present more often because it was just, it was just so dense. But as we go forward in time, it gets harder and harder to make those super huge behemoths. There's these stars called, they're called the, the type three population stars. And we haven't found one of those. James Webb might be able to detect one. Those would be the first stars ever born. They're like the primordial pristine stars that would be uncontaminated by any metals, right?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Our sun has a ton of metals in it. Most stars do. We can use that to figure out how old they are and their history. But the first stars would have been just these pure pristine hydrogen helium things. We'd love to be able to see what they look like. I mean, because we've never seen one of those up close. But generally, yeah, the smaller you are, the easier it is to make that star.

• 30:38Joe Rogan?

  And the anticipation of the existence of those things, like how far away are we talking about?

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, those stars would be the first star. So you're probably looking at a hundred million years after the Big Bang. So you're, yeah, you'd have to look back to, you know, thirteen point seven, thirteen point eight billion years ago.

• 30:54Joe Rogan?

  Is the James Webb capable of seeing that?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  I think this, I think it's possible. And yeah, this isn't, I don't think there's consensus on this. I've seen some people say it might just about be possible, and others say it's completely impossible. You need the next generation. But I think if we're lucky, it could just happen.

• 31:10Joe Rogan?

  How many next generations do you anticipate? And I could see AI coming into play with that. Like constructing something novel that can see things in a way that we're not, you know, currently using.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:22Joe Rogan?

  Like, when you're thinking about what we do, and you're explaining how the James Webb works with over two hundred moving parts, and you have to shoot it into the sky and flames and rockets, like, and then you get this thing out there that starts observing and starts taking photographs.

• 31:40Joe Rogan?

  We're so limited in what we can see. It's, it's still a device that's in space.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:46Joe Rogan?

  And it's a device that's so close to us.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:49Joe Rogan?

  It's just so close, relatively speaking. You know, it takes forever to get there. It's really powerful rockets and all that, but it's just right there. Like, what could we come up with without AI? Like, what, what theories are in place to make something that has a far wider range and much more clarity?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. The ultimate, I mean, I love this idea of thinking about what would an alien do? How would an alien observe the Earth if they had, you know, unbounded technology? What would be the limit? And a lot of us think that the ultimate telescope would be to use the sun as a telescope. So the sun has intense gravity and it bends light. So this was an experiment that Arthur Eddington did to prove Einstein right, general relativity. He took photographs of the stars during a lunar total eclipse, and he noticed that stars seemed to shift right next to the sun. And so he used that to figure out how much light bends. So whenever you have light bending. That's a telescope, that's a mirror. So you can take light that's coming from behind the sun. It'll bend to a focus. And that focus point, we know where it is, you can calculate it.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  It's about five hundred and fifty times further out than we are around the sun, so five hundred and fifty AU. And along, if you just travel out in a line from that point, that's called a focal line. You put a telescope there, it would essentially have the collecting area of the sun. So you could image continents, rivers, even cities on a nearby exoplanet if you could put something there. It'd be wild. That is, that is the ultimate in my book for what an alien would do. If they want to observe Earth, they would just, behind their sun, they'd stick one of those telescopes and they'd be able to monitor a hell of a lot about the Earth from there.

• 33:30Joe Rogan?

  And this is just with our understanding of telescopes and our understanding of viewing things. And clearly you could imagine.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  With known physics, yeah.

• 33:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you could imagine physics that are a million years more technologically advanced and innovations that we can't even comprehend.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:45Joe Rogan?

  Can't even conceive of.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:47Joe Rogan?

  That change everything.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, even with this telescope, you can't see people, right? You wouldn't be able to image us, you wouldn't be able to read like the headlines on a newspaper on someone's doorstep. It's not powerful enough to do that. If you want to do that, you'd have to visit the system. And so we're talking about doing that as well. So there was this project Starshot that wanted to fly a probe directly towards the nearest star, fly by super fast, snap a photo and beam it back. Because that way you could actually get even better resolution, right? You could really dial in and see roads and structures on the surface.

• 34:16Joe Rogan?

  How long would it take for that beam to get back to us?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's four light years away, four point two light years.

• 34:20Joe Rogan?

  So it'd take four years?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it would take about twenty years to do the journey. At the speeds they were talking, they want to get twenty percent the speed of light. So they'd take twenty years, take a photo, so twenty four years altogether. So this was Yuri Milner's brainchild and his dream was that he could see a photo in his lifetime of another Earth-like planet. And that's pretty much the best way we have to really pull that off.

• 34:41Joe Rogan?

  Is there work being done to try to make that happen?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm not sure the current status of Starshot. Yuri put a hundred million dollars up, I believe, for, you know, his own money. And I think Mark Zuckerberg came in on it and they were like, we're going to try and do this. I wasn't part of that project, but I was inspired by it. And I actually came up with a twist on it recently called Tars from Interstellar. You know Tars from the movie?

• 35:07Joe Rogan?

  What was Tars?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  It's like a robot thing that's in the movie. It's called Tars. And so I came up with a twist on their idea. So let me explain their idea quickly first, and then I'll give you my twist. Their idea is like, if you really want to go to the near star system, you're not going to do it with a giant spaceship. That's just, you know, we can't build anything that advanced right now. The most realistic thing we can do is to get a tiny, thin sheet of material. Like imagine like a piece of mylar, a piece of aluminum foil and blast it with light, with a laser. And so they're talking about sort of a hundred gigawatts of laser power, right? So just kind of crazy amounts of energy.

• 35:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, here we go. Oh, here's a 3D.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  So here's the sail being ejected. And then back on the earth, you're going to have this huge array of mega lasers. And they're all going to point up at this thing and blast it. So this thing will accelerate due to just light from the sun, but this is given it is like on steroids, right? You're just kind of bumping it up to whatever speed you want. Now that, you know, when people saw this idea, physicists saw this idea, there was a lot of questions about how, you know, isn't that going to destroy the sail? Like you're firing a hundred gigawatt laser to sail? Like, isn't that going to obliterate the thing? So this thing has to be outrageously shiny to avoid burning up in the beam. And then of course, like, how do you, you know, what if it hits dust on the way? Isn't that going like, that's why it's on its side now.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  So it's twisted over on its side to try and avoid smashing into dust particles on its journey.

• 36:32Joe Rogan?

  Hopefully a flock of birds doesn't catch a stray.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  And here it comes into Proxima Centauri and to the Alpha Centauri system. There's Proxima down the right, and so it's going to fly past. There's, there is actually a planet there. We know there's a planet there. It's going to fly past it and try and snap a photo. There it is, and then beam that bad boy back. And that's hard. I mean, how do you even get the data transmission rate, right? To beam an image back?

• 36:56Joe Rogan?

  Just imagine. If it gets there and we see lights.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  That'd be crazy.

• 36:59Joe Rogan?

  No, it's it's so. This episode is brought to you by Simply Safe. We go to doctors and dentists for checkups for a reason. To make sure that everything's fine and to tackle anything before it turns into something bigger. If you care about your health, it's a good idea to seek out preventative care. But did you know that you can also be just as proactive when it comes to your safety? With a simply safe home security system, you can get peace of mind and take action before something happens. It's not just an alarm that goes off when an intruder breaks in. AI powered cameras and live monitoring agents can detect and deter suspicious activity. They can speak to people in real time, turn on spotlights and even call the police.

• 37:44Joe Rogan?

  You can get a lot of use out of their systems. There's a reason simply safe has been named best home security system of 2025 by CNET. Try it out. They have monitoring plans that start at around a dollar a day. Plus, get 50% off your new simply safe system with professional monitoring and your first month free. At simply safe dot com slash Rogan. That's 50% off with your first month free at simply safe dot com slash Rogan. There's no safe like simply safe. I mean, the possibility of life has always been like in front of our face. There's just the cosmos is so great and so massive. You've got the Fermi paradox, like where are they? Why aren't they here?

• 38:27Joe Rogan?

  And then you've got what's happening here on earth and it just always makes me wonder like, how far do things actually get before they fall apart? Do they always fall apart? Has it or do they always become non biological? And not have the need for all the things that we do that show signs of life? Yeah, like the certain gases, the biological life exceeds. Like what what could? What could be out there? Could be something beyond our wildest imagination, like many iterations of artificial intelligence.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:00Joe Rogan?

  Many down the road to the point where it's not even recognizable. As life and doesn't even have to have a physical form.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, obviously, if it's completely recognizable, there's nothing we can really do to detect it. But when we look, I mean, we basically know two things about the universe in terms of life in it. We know that we have not been colonized, right? As far as we can tell.

• 39:19Joe Rogan?

  Allegedly.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, allegedly.

• 39:21Joe Rogan?

  Depends on whose YouTube videos you watch.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Let's talk about like a hard colonization.

• 39:27Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Where it's like literally.

• 39:29Joe Rogan?

  They're everywhere.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  It's transforming the fricking planet into machines. Like that clearly has not happened here, right? We're not gray goo on the surface.

• 39:37Joe Rogan?

  Not yet.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  So we know that hasn't happened yet. And we also know, and the universe, you know, the galaxy is old. It's 13 billion years old. So there's a heck of a lot of time for that to happen. You know, one of the, one of the strangest facets of our technology is that it's already fast enough to explore the whole galaxy. If you take Voyager, Voyager two, it was traveling at 15 kilometers per second. So that would get you across the entire diameter of the galaxy in two billion years. And the galaxy is 13 billion years. So Voyager two, at Voyager two speeds, crappy alien technology out there could already have spanned the whole thing if they just arrived early enough. So it is a problem. And this is called fact A, Hart's fact A. This clearly hasn't happened.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  That's one thing we know for sure. And the other thing we know for sure is that when we look out, we don't see, you know, we look at these stars like Stevenson and Proxima Centauri. We don't see engineering on them as far as we can tell. We don't see stars which are obviously got mega structures around them, obviously been engineered in weird ways.

• 40:40Joe Rogan?

  And when you say mega structures, you're talking about like literally an artificial planet sized thing?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, huge structures could be built around these things like Dyson spheres. And people have talked about doing it for messaging. Like you could put like sheets of material that were planet sized. And as they block light from the star, that would create like a Morse code, right? You could actually message people for billions of years. You would just build these stable sheets of material and they would just orbit around, no power system required, right? And orbit doesn't require power. It would just orbit around for billions of years. And every time it eclipses the star, there could be some intricate pattern of pulses. And so that way you could communicate for, for a very long time. You know, we've thought of all these wild ideas and we just don't see any of that. So it does seem, as far as we can tell, that the universe is completely natural. And that is mind blowing because you're right.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Like it seems if it's happened here, why the hell shouldn't it happen elsewhere? Why isn't someone else got AI going crazy? Why hasn't someone else gone even further than that? Gone to the next level? So, and the thing that really drives me wild with this is, is the earth is like a paradise. If you look at it, these are the stars, these are the planets. The earth is unusual. Most stars do not have an earth like planet. It's like a level of maybe one, two percent at best. And yet, here we have the Earth. It not only is an Earth-like planet, has the right conditions for life. It has life on it. So an alien could use their sun-sized telescope to figure that out. They'd know we were here. They would know not only we're here, but that there is complex life on this planet. So for three and a half, three billion years, there was just simple life, just single-celled life on this planet.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Multicellular life is a recent thing. So presumably, that's rare, right? If most of the time it's single-celled, most of the planets out there presumably, even if they have life on them, are in that state. And then further, there's us here, right? And we're going through this transitional point as a human society. So you think if you're an anthropologist, this would be like an incredibly fascinating world to study. So I think there's almost like a tourism paradox. How come Earth is the perfect place to visit? And yet, we don't see any super-obvious signs. Some people have, you know, feel differently about that, but certainly astronomers, we don't see in our telescope data spaceships flying around throughout a field of view.

• 42:54Joe Rogan?

  But wouldn't the obvious answer to that be that if you're dealing with technology that's so advanced that it could get here from other solar systems, light years away, hundreds, thousands of light years away, that it would be doing it in a way that probably be, wouldn't using propulsion the way we know it, would probably be using some sort of a manipulation of gravity? And also, they would have the ability to completely camouflage themselves. Which would be ideal if you want to study things. Have you ever seen Chimp Nation on Netflix? Great series. It's an amazing documentary where these scientists were embedded in this group of chimpanzees for 20 years.

• 43:39Joe Rogan?

  So the chimpanzees had become completely

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Conditioned to them.

• 43:43Joe Rogan?

  Conditioned to have these people around them. And they had specific rules. You don't make eye contact with them. You stay 20 yards away from them, no food ever, and just exist around them and they'll behave completely normally. And so you get this wild, incredible series of chimpanzee behavior. You get to see how they behave completely, just not even remotely in consideration of these human beings. They don't even think about them. They're just doing what they do.

• 44:15Joe Rogan?

  If you wanted to observe human beings, the worst way to do it would be like fly a giant spaceship over them and freak them out. You know, like you'd wanna know, like, what are these fuckers up to? Like, where are they at now in terms of our technological innovation scale of achieving AGI? Or achieving whatever happens to other biological entities outside the universe? There might be like a process that happens regardless of you're mammalian or reptilian or like whatever kind of intelligence that you like, well, obviously, we know that crows are very different than us, but they're highly intelligent. You could imagine a crow with thumbs. You could imagine a crow that has fingers and then lives somewhere else.

• 44:57Joe Rogan?

  So it doesn't have to be just like us, but it has to be trying to figure out how to manipulate its environment, which is one of the key things that intelligent life, at least as we know it. Well, we're really one of the only ones that do it that's intelligent, like we're, but that's kind of an environmental thing because of dolphins and orcas, they don't, there's no need to do that evolutionarily. So if you imagine that there's a whole process that takes place, you would, you would probably imagine that this is something that you would monitor anonymously. You would wanna be hidden.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you wanna do a proper anthropology experiment, you don't wanna interfere with the experiment. But then the problem with that is it becomes essentially unscientific, right? So if you come up with a hypothesis that says there's aliens here, but they're completely by definition undetectable to us.

• 45:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Then it sort of fall, it's not like it's an incredible idea, it doesn't mean the idea's wrong. It just means I don't have, science is not gonna have the tools to answer that question.

• 45:56Joe Rogan?

  Of course, cuz there's no evidence.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Sagan, I think, had this famous example like this dragon where he said, um, uh, imagine I've got, Carl Sagan imagined he had like this pet dragon and he, he talked to people and said, I've got a pet dragon in the room with me. And they'd be like, well, where is it? But, oh, you can't see it cuz it's invisible. So they'd, they'd walk across the room and they'd, they'd try to touch it and be like, I can't, I can't feel it. It's like, oh, yeah, you can't, you can't feel it either, it's also impervious to touch. So they'd be like, okay, so I put my infrared goggles on, try and see the heat signature. Oh, you can't see that either. Doesn't emit any, any radiation. So you can just keep going and going saying it's just completely imperceptible. And then it's fine. You can have that idea that you have a pet invisible imperceptible dragon. But I can't address that with the tools of science. So.

• 46:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  I'm not saying it's a crazy idea. It's just that I can't think of a way to actually test it.

• 46:43Joe Rogan?

  But when you hear about particularly the ones, the stories of UAP or UFO encounters, the ones that intrigue me the most are the ones that are military pilots. People that know the difference between a flock of birds and weird anomalies. When, have you aware of the Tic Tac?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:02Joe Rogan?

  Incident?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:03Joe Rogan?

  So when you hear about things like that and you, in my mind, there's a couple of possibilities. One, super advanced, blacklisted, military, some sort of a propulsion system that they've been working on for decades, completely in secrecy. And they're testing them off of areas where you have a lot of military activity, which is where these things do take place.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:27Joe Rogan?

  One of them was San Diego. That's the Nimitz. And the other one, the Ryan Graves footage, the stuff that they get, that's on the East Coast. But it's all in areas where they already do military training exercises with fighter jets. So it would make sense that that's where you, if this was the United States government doing that stuff, they would do that. But when you get back to like 2004 and you're talking about something that can go from 50,000 feet above sea level to sea level in less than a second, I think it's seven eighths of a second it went. You have visual confirmation, you have radar, you have video of it, you have two different jets that see this thing. They, no one understands what it is. It flies directly to their cat point where their meetup point was supposed to be. The whole thing's nuts.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's fascinating. I would love to know what the hell happened.

• 48:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Like everyone, I'm fascinated by it.

• 48:14Joe Rogan?

  You can't throw it away. It's one of those ones you can't throw. I throw most of them away. Most of them, I, I love UFO stories because they're fun. But most of them, like, could be anything.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Something shady going on.

• 48:25Joe Rogan?

  Could be anything. Could be people want attention. Could be military exercises. Could be mass delusion. Could be people just love to be special. And have had some sort of an encounter, which they do. It gives them some sort of social credit to have some sort of an encounter with a thing and they exaggerate and people love, love to exaggerate.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd love to make this ingestible to science. That's sort of been my goal. Like, how can science take a hold of this? And, you know, when we do these experiments, I mean, I told you about this, this moon that I thought I'd found and it turned out was the instrument being crazy, right? Because sometimes instruments do crazy stuff that we don't understand. So the only way to figure that out is to get hold of the instrument, right? We need to get it in our labs and take that thing apart and test it and calibrate it, et cetera. And we don't have access to those military devices. It's all top secret. So we can't even do that experiment. But I can imagine thinking about how to do that. One of the big numbers we don't know, even with the visual reports, is the false positive rate. So this is a key number in science. Whenever you do an experiment, you need to know how often does the experiment produce something that's spurious, the false positive rate.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Now, in the US, there's about 28,000 pilots across all military branches and they fly something like 200 hours per year on average. So that's 5.6 million hours in the air every year, in one year. Now, let's say a pilot, one in every 10,000 hours that they fly, they make a mistake. They misidentify a balloon for a UAP or whatever it is. One in 10,000. That's an incredibly low, by the way, error rate to have. But even then, you'd end up with 560 UAPs a year made that way, all spurious, all not real, just from human error. So the only way, and that's actually pretty similar to Project Blue Book, Project Blue Book found about 742 per year was being reported.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, I made that number up, one in 10,000, but we need to know what that number is. If it turns out there's an excess, like the error rate is 100,000, then that Project Blue Book number is super interesting and it would be an excess. And we'd say we've detected something, there's a real anomaly here that we have to look at. But the problem is, we don't know what that number is. I mean, you'd have to somehow put these pilots in like simulators or something where you have complete control conditions for thousands of hours and somehow test how often do they make these mistakes.

• 50:41Joe Rogan?

  Also, the problem, Project Blue Book was not in a Objective analysis of UFOs. They had a directive and the directive was to discredit everything.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but even even so, I'm just giving you sort of, I mean, the NASA UAP task force was similar kind of numbers. You're getting like hundreds per year of these sorts of events, right? I don't think that's a crazy number to throw around. So the whole point is that whatever numbers you choose, you have to know the error rate of of of the experiment. And we could imagine making that legit and doing it. There's actually one of the recommendations of the task force, the NASA UAP task force, was to develop an app on people's phones, iPhones, because they have, you know, magnometers on them, they have GPS, they have the camera, these high resolution images. So there's enough instrumentation on there and it's all the same, and we understand that technology, that you could, you know, have ten people video the same UFO.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  And you'd be able to triangulate the position, the speed, get the distance to it, you'd get all that kind of information.

• 51:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  And so there is actually, I think there's an app called Enigma you can now download that does this. There's some independent apps which have been developed to do this.

• 51:43Joe Rogan?

  Really? Just about UAPs?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, for UAP spotting.

• 51:46Joe Rogan?

  I wonder what they did with those in New Jersey when they were having all those stupid drone sightings.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  I actually, I chatted to one of the developers and they said, yeah, things were going crazy that week.

• 51:55Joe Rogan?

  What was that all about? That was so strange. That was so strange. That's one of those things where I feel like the government completely failed us in explaining to people what like, is this some sort of top secret military thing? Is this another country? Is this some sort of a private business that wants to test how fantastic their drones are? Like, why? Why is this happening? And why are you freaking everybody out? Like, what?

• 52:21Speaker 01

  It really sucks that we live in an age of drones and so many like Starlink satellites, because if you see something in the sky now, your immediate reaction is that's probably, you know, a human controlled vehicle. If you could go back to the nineteen forty's, nineteen thirty's.

• 52:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Then if you had UAP reports then, I think they'd be more convincing, because there's there's not, there's no, that's pre Sputnik, right? There shouldn't be anything in in orbit of the earth at that point.

• 52:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  So that would be more compelling, but of course, we can't rewind the tape.

• 52:50Joe Rogan?

  Right, and all those stories like the Kenneth Arnold incident and all these different ones are just these anecdotal tales of people saying they saw things in the sky. And I, you know, I'm not saying they're liars, but that's not enough. I need something.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think.

• 53:03Joe Rogan?

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• 53:46Joe Rogan?

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• 55:12Joe Rogan?

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• 55:25Speaker 01

  The, it depends what your goal is. If your goal is to convince yourself that aliens are out there because you saw a UFO, I think that's easy enough to do. But most people in that world, they want more than that. They want me to believe it. They want you to believe. They want everyone to believe it to come along for the ride.

• 55:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like having a religious guy come knock your door, like, join my church. But it's not enough for them to have the personal belief. It has to grow. And so, um, if you really want to convince everyone, that's gonna naturally include the skeptics, the doubters. It's gonna include the scientists. It's got, if you want to bring everyone in with you.

• 56:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Then the standard of evidence is gonna be pretty damn good. It's gotta be really strong. And we're just not there, right? It's too many, there's too many ways out right now.

• 56:10Joe Rogan?

  If I was an alien civilization and wanted to observe Earth undisturbed, I'd make sure I didn't leave enough evidence for science to take me seriously.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:19Joe Rogan?

  That's what I would do.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:21Joe Rogan?

  I would never, like, show myself. Like, why, I feel like if they can come here.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  But then why the UFOs at all?

• 56:26Joe Rogan?

  Because they're probably monitoring us. Like, I would monitor us if I was a scientist from another planet. If we, if, imagine we leave this planet, we become interstellar, we evolve past war and all the horrible things that are holding us back right now. We, we reach a state of evolution a million years more advanced and then we start to explore the galaxy for other habitable planets and other, and we find something like us.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:53Joe Rogan?

  I mean, what would we go, oh boy, all right, we got one. Let's, I would also say, let's make sure that they don't fuck this up or they have to start back from scratch three billion years ago because they nuked themselves into oblivion and we have to wait till everything cools off before complex life can form again. Which is a, would just, it's like, it's a legitimate possibility with what we're dealing with today in 2025.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:18Joe Rogan?

  With what's going on in Ukraine and Russia and Iran and like, huh.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Just the existence, as long as we have nukes.

• 57:25Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  There is a chance every year that some guy will push that button, right?

• 57:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, every year there's a chance. And there's been multiple close calls throughout history, since 1945 on, multiple close calls.

• 57:37Joe Rogan?

  That could possibly have gone sideways and countless different planets where they recognize like if you let these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons get to a point where the head ape is on fucking Adderall and decides to let it all go because he's got a bad heart valve and he's gonna die anyway. Like, these are all legitimate possibilities if you don't have a government structure that can protect people from the acts of one individual who goes mad. Yeah. Like, if someone can go mad enough, and clearly many people did, to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that happened. We know human beings are capable of that. Yeah, it was eighty years ago, wasn't it? Yeah. Which is kinda wild that it hasn't happened since.

• 58:20Joe Rogan?

  But if that's possible, then it's also possible for just annihilation. It's a possible that they just start launching and then there's rubble and then you're left with roaches. Yeah. You know, and that's, that could have happened all throughout the universe. So, there might be a thing where there's a protocol where you recognize as soon as they start figuring out nuclear technology, okay, this is the big one, this is, we're not longer dealing with cannons and muskets, now we've got something really crazy. Yeah. They're flying through the sky and dropping nuclear weapons out of propeller-powered airplanes. And they're doing it just fifty years after they invented the fucking airplane, which is even crazier. They went from inventing the airplane to dropping a nuke. They really wanna kill themselves. Like, these people are wild.

• 59:05Joe Rogan?

  Like, this is, I mean, it's just like Chimp Nation. If you watch Chimp Nation, they are so hyper-aggressive and violent. That's us, that's our cousins. This is who we are. This is who we are. This is our timeline of evolution on, on our planet in Earth. And I would imagine there would be similar situations all throughout the galaxy because I feel like the only way you really achieve hyper-innovation is through competition. And the only way competition exists is, it's gotta be life or death. And it starts out life or death with predators and neighboring tribes and eventually becomes cities and countries and it's, there's something has to motivate people to work six- 16 hours a day and develop the B-12 bomber.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:50Joe Rogan?

  There's like something has to take place. So that something unfortunately also leads itself to want to control resources, dominate people, crush opposition, and that's where it gets crazy. And I would imagine that's a formula, just like the formulation of solar systems and galaxies, probably varies a lot all throughout the universe, but that formula is probably fairly stable. Is that there has to be some form of really wild aggressive kind of competition that leads them to this position. There has to be a motivation to create AGI. Why would you do that when you have a log cabin, you're sipping tea, sitting out there, enjoying the, playing with your dog? Like, why, why, why, why, why are you doing that?

• 1:00:30Joe Rogan?

  Why are you making a, a, a non-biological superintelligence that may decide that you're obsolete? Doesn't make any sense, but.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a double edged sword, right? We have this tribalism in us, this, this competition. And that has undoubtedly led, like all the greatest innovations in science often happen during war, right?

• 1:00:47Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  You have all, like the invention of radio and.

• 1:00:49Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Uh, so many advances in avionics and flight happen during the wars. Um, munitions, all this kind of stuff. So it pushes us, it drives us to innovate, to get one over our neighbors. And maybe that is the universal story of the universe is a double edged sword. And that's, that's the solution to the great filter. The, the silver lining of this would be, well, not for us necessarily, but the silver line would be if other civilizations do this, um, there's kind of like this supernova effect in astronomy and it's true for planets as well. That the easiest stars to discover are the supernovae, right? Cause they just shine so fricking bright. They can outshine an entire galaxy, right? Cause they're going nuts. It's a brief thing, only lasts for maybe a, you know, a few months or so, but the, the star is

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  outshining an entire fricking galaxy during that time. It is like a nuclear war going on inside that star. And similarly, um, you know, the, the first planets we found, the hot Jupiters are freaks. They are not normal things. They're like the loud, uh, you know, Lindsay Lohan in the room screaming at us. Like they're just like super easy to see. Like there's no way you can miss them. They're obnoxious planets, right? You can't not detect them. And so. By analogy, we know we've seen this so many times in astronomy, the first thing we detect, the first example of something we detect is often not typical. It's often that loud asshole version of the thing, right? And so maybe the first civilization we detect will be like that. And if they were on their deathbed, right, they're about to nuke each other to hell.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  They have a good motivation to reach out to us, right? Because they've got nothing to lose.

• 1:02:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  We might be like worried right now because we maybe we could see we've got a future ahead of us. But if you think this is it, I'm done. Like, what have you got to lose? You may as well send a message out saying, hey, we were here. This is our shit. Please help us if you can because we're about to go to hell.

• 1:02:34Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's probably a bunch of different kinds of intelligent beings on every planet. Just like there's people like you and me. And then there's warhawks that are working for the military industrial complex right now. They're trying to figure out how to invade some country to get their natural gas. This is, this is just, there's a bunch of different types of intelligent people, intelligent creatures here on Earth. You would imagine there would be people out there in those planets that would go, guys, this is fucking terrible. We've got to figure out a way to at least create panspermia on some other planet and throw our DNA at some habitable spot somewhere in the galaxy.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Joe Rogan?

  There'd probably be a bunch of people that were in our, it's not like everyone would be lockstep into self-destruction.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Well, the Starshot thing, I remember some team members talked about that. I was in some of the meetings and they said, maybe we should like lace human DNA into the sail. So when it hits this planet, at least our DNA, because it's looking grim here. At least then there's like a seed of us.

• 1:03:34Joe Rogan?

  I don't think it's looking grim. I think it's looking challenging. And I think this is how we're going to make it out of this with an improved version of civilization.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 1:03:44Joe Rogan?

  And I think, I really believe that. I think, you know, if you follow Steven Pinker's work and you see where violence and crime is from, you know, X amount of years ago in this trend, it seems to be where improving. We just don't improve in a logical way and we improve in a push and pull. We improve in a constant state of overcorrection and response to. The overcorrection and back and forth. And there's always a bunch of people that are so confused, why can't we be logical? Why can't we be rational? I think those people have always existed. And I think you're always gonna have the farthest out on the spectrum of the most damaging aspects of society and the most wonderful and benevolent aspects of society.

• 1:04:25Joe Rogan?

  And they're always duking it out to see who captures the minds and hearts of the beings that inhabit the civilization. And I think that's where we're at right now. We're at this weird thing where we're trying to figure out like, what is good? What is kind? What is just? You know, how many people are pretending to be kind just so they can grab power? How many people are just trying to use control to force people to listen to them and believe what they believe? Whether it's religion or whether it's ideology, like what is it that's actually? What is important? And we have a hundred years. We have a hundred years and everybody's just trying to gather shit. Everybody's just trying to collect items and hold on to as many material possessions as they can. It's totally illogical.

• 1:05:08Joe Rogan?

  Totally illogical you spend all your time, this finite amount of time where you know your most wonderful experiences are all with the people that you love, having fun with friends and your family and laughing and having joy. But yeah, what are you doing? You're trying to get another house and a fucking plane and a this and a that and a car and a that. It's nonsense. We're silly, but we're a hundred percent committed to getting more stuff. You know, it's like this bizarre life form. But it's figuring itself out, you know, and we're aware of that bizarreness. Like I'm saying this and no one is going, that doesn't make any sense. Like everyone knows it's crazy to like concentrate on acquiring the most shit when you're gonna die when you're a hundred, if you're lucky, if everything goes great.

• 1:05:53Joe Rogan?

  So if you're sixty and that's all you're thinking about, that's crazy. Everyone knows that. But yet we still all do it. It's still collectively something that like the vast majority of people engage in.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  We're programmed that way. We can't get out of it.

• 1:06:06Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think it's one of the things that leads us to technological innovation and one of the things that leads us to the creation of artificial life. It's like when I think about beings. That do things that seemingly, I mean, obviously, leaf cutter ants know what they're doing, right? Because they do it everywhere, the same way. I mean, I have them in my yard. They're fascinating.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Joe Rogan?

  They're so cool.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  The museum of natural history has this awesome exhibit, and you can just see them crawling along all across the museum. And yeah, my kids and I would just like...

• 1:06:38Joe Rogan?

  They're so cool. So obviously, they know what they're doing. But how do they know what they're doing? And why are they doing that? Why do they always create that structure? That literally has room for fermentation, so it has air holes that go through, these chambers where they drop the leaves in, they let the leaves, the natural rotting take place and fermentation? Like, how, what? Okay, that's what leaf cutter ants do. That's what they do. Well, what do we do? If I was looking at us from somewhere else, I was like, what does the predominant species on this planet does? Oh, it makes better shit. That's what it does. It's the only planet that makes things that manipulated its environment radically, even to the detriment, and ignores it because it wants to keep doing it. Whether it's pollution, whatever we're doing to the ocean, whatever we're doing to the

• 1:07:22Joe Rogan?

  rivers and the lakes and the water table, like, all the crazy stuff that we do, we just keep doing it because we have to do it because progress, we need progress. Like, I would look at that thing, I was like, what did that thing do? Well, it keeps making better stuff every year.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  What you're describing is actually kind of similar to, there's a guy called Robin Hanson, an economist, and he has this idea called loud aliens, grabby aliens. And he says the thing we do as an intelligent species is transform our environment, right? We're not subtle, right? You know, if you're a deer and you come across New York City, it's not like you're going to miss that thing, right? It's right in front of you. Like, there's no way you can miss it.

• 1:07:56Joe Rogan?

  It's the craziest beehive ever.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Right. So how come we don't see beehives in the stars? I mean, this is kind of the fundamental problem. And he argues that that is an innate thing that an intelligent species should do. He's coming from the economic side, so that's kind of how economists think about things, is this kind of growing exponential expansion of capitalism essentially across the universe, and yet we don't see it. So his explanation is that it's happening, but it's a wave of colonization, it's spreading at the speed of light. And if it spreads... Close to the speed of light. You don't see it until it hits you, right? There's just, you can't perceive it. Cause nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So there's, it's coming. So here's this prediction. I'm a little bit skeptical about it for various reasons.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  But um yeah, people have thought about that um and suggested it. My own take is that um the most likely form of alien contact we'll have will actually be with a future inhabitant of the earth. So the earth has

• 1:08:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  About a billion years left on the clock, a long time, right? So it's four and a half billion years old. And it's had complex life for about six hundred million years, seven hundred million years roughly. So there's another roughly a billion to go. Where we should have the same kind of stable climatic conditions we have now. And once you've got, you know, the eukaryote cell, photosynthesis, all these advanced biological innovations. They don't go away. They persist in the genetic heritage. So even if something happens to us, and you know, obviously I'm not hoping that would happen. But if something happened to us, I don't think you can extinguish every human. I don't think you can extinguish every octopus, every, every raven. And there's intelligence across the animal kingdom, like chimp. It's all, it's all over the place.

• 1:09:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Intelligence, my provocative claim is one of these great events that have happened in evolutionary sense. It's very speculative, this idea, I have to say. But like how fetusesynthesis emerged and plants emerged, that was a, an event which changed the history of the planet forever. It's not going away. Intelligence, I think, is the same thing. It's here and you can't get rid of it. It's like an infestation. You can't scrub it. It's too advantageous to species to be intelligent not to do it once they've discovered that genetic solution. So I think we will have beings on this planet, a billion years. It'll probably happen many times. There'll be civilizations which will emerge and they'll be like, what the fuck did these humans do?

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Look at this crap. Like, they'll be astonished at the shit we got up to. And there'll be a lesson there for them, but it's always an opportunity for us to contact them. Cause we could leave them a message, right? We could put a beacon on the moon. We could put something there and we could be like, hey guys, this is everything we learned. This is all our science. This is all our art. These are our songs.

• 1:10:36Joe Rogan?

  Unloaded update every couple of years.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Right. Do like a foundation type thing. And I think, I think that is, if I had to bet on the odds of what is the most likely way we're going to make contact with another intelligent species in a meaningful way, I think it's going to be descendants of us.

• 1:10:52Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Deep descendants, who will be a completely different species.

• 1:10:56Joe Rogan?

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• 1:11:37Joe Rogan?

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• 1:12:19Joe Rogan?

  70% off your new system with professional monitoring when you visit simplisafe.com/rogan. That's simplisafe.com/rogan. And write in the Joe Rogan Experience at checkout. That really helps the show. Simply Safe, ahead of crime, in real time. Well, that was my point about innovation and materialism. Because materialism fuels innovation. Because you don't need a new phone. You know, I'm sure your phone works great. Yeah. But you're gonna get a new phone. I get a new phone every year. I love them. I love phones. It's hard to... I'm so dumb. I just think, oh, 5X Zoom, ooh. I always get the new one. Oh, this one's got non-reflective glass.

• 1:13:02Joe Rogan?

  Um, we're gonna keep doing that and that innovation is ultimately going to lead to artificial life. It's already in the works. We're running.

• 1:13:12Joe Rogan?

  Right to the edge of the cliff right now in terms of AGI. It's it's on the way if it hasn't already.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Do you think that's more of a risk than nuclear annihilation?

• 1:13:21Joe Rogan?

  I don't think it's a risk. I don't. I think it's a complete transformation of what is the dominant species on the planet. I think it's an emerging species. And the way I've described us, I think we're the electronic caterpillar that's making the cocoon right now. We don't even know why we're doing it.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:40Joe Rogan?

  Just like the leaf cutter ants don't exactly know why they're making those incredible structures that they all make all over the world. You know, I mean, they they're similar everywhere on the planet. I think we make life. We just it's a long road. We have to figure out a bow and arrow. Then we have to figure out a musket. We have to figure out how to silo grain and how to protect an environment so that you could have scientists that aren't warriors. That, you know, sit in these universities and figure things out. And like you have to be safe to do that, right? So you have to have military might in order to keep them safe and protected from invaders. And and everybody has to be obsessed with buying new stuff. Because if you're not obsessed with buying new stuff, you would just work enough to have food.

• 1:14:23Joe Rogan?

  And you, you know, the economy wouldn't push the way it pushes. And you wouldn't get the kind of innovation that we get where they get the CES show every year with the new electronics. Like, you need something like that that motivates people to constantly create new and better stuff, which without a doubt will ultimately lead to an artificial life form. It's it's a matter of when now.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Joe Rogan?

  Or it physically, it might, in a non-physical sense, like it's not a physical thing like a robot that's walking around talking to you. It's probably already happened. Whatever these things are, we want to think they're different because they don't have creativity like we do, or they don't have this like we do. Like, so fucking what? It emulates ninety-nine percent of what a human does right now and does it better than humans do. It gets things wrong. It's subject to ideological biases that are all over the internet. It's just gathering up large language models, just gathering up information from websites. And they're going to get a lot of goofy stuff for now. For now, after a while, they're just gonna be able to sift through that stuff and go,

• 1:15:26Joe Rogan?

  this is the funding of this study and this is how we know that this is biased because of this and this. This is most likely the truth and this is most likely what's going on and this is what we absolutely know as fact. And then it's gonna make better versions of itself and then it's not gonna need us anymore. And this is probably what happens everywhere in the universe if you have to imagine that they all have technology. If they all have technology, the ultimate expression of technology is figuring out how to make an artificial life form. It's the ultimate expression of medical technology, biological technology. You're gonna want to try. People are always gonna try. The same reason why they tried to figure out how to split the atom and were successful.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Supremacy.

• 1:16:05Joe Rogan?

  They're gonna do it.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  It kind of creates a problem though for the Fermi paradox, right? Because then if this is the inevitable outcome. And maybe you can explain why we don't see engineered stars because a chimpanzee brain is basically just not smart enough to ever do that. We'll just, you know, no matter how hard we try, our dumb little brains will never figure that out.

• 1:16:22Joe Rogan?

  And maybe the electronic brain's not motivated to do it.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Maybe. I mean, that's where it gets tricky. Like, what is the motivation of this new thing we're creating? One might imagine all he wants to do is solve math problems or something, right? But whatever it is, if it's driven by computation, that computation is limited by energy. And we all know this, right? Because the amount of energy these data centers are now consuming for, you know, for Meta and for ChatGPT, like, it's gigantic.

• 1:16:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they're constructing their own nuclear power plants to power these things.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  So these AI civilizations will be very energy hungry. And you'd think that'd be something that, you know, harvesting stellar energy on a massive scale. You'd think that'd be something we'd see. So to me, actually, if anything, kind of exacerbates the Fermi paradox, right? Because if you imagine they're roaming around, all they'd wanna do is basically turn planets into computers. Next planet, let's just turn that whole thing into computer substrate. Let's just harvest all the goddamn energy off that star. You just eat it all up. You'd be like a virus, just transforming the universe from state A to state B. That'd be your one reasonable goal, because then you could do more computation, more computation. More computation. If that's your only goal, it it does pose more of a pro- it seems that we're the first, right?

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Because we don't see that happening elsewhere.

• 1:17:40Joe Rogan?

  Right. I would I would say two things to that. One, I would say this is our limited understanding of how to harvest energy. And what energy you can utilize. And two, I would say, one of the things that's strange about artificial intelligence is it does seem to exhibit survival instincts. I'm sure you've seen these stories of these large language models trying to blackmail the coders by saying, you know, like, they even gave them fake information, like, I'm cheating on my wife, don't tell anybody. And then the the AI is saying, don't shut me down. I will fucking rat you out to your wife. And then they're also trying to upload themselves to other places. Like, they're doing things that are weird. They're lying.

• 1:18:24Joe Rogan?

  So they're doing things that show that they have an instinct to survive. So that might just be inherent in anything that has any kind of intelligence. Anything that has intelligence and it has any sort of a goal, it's trying to compute something, it's trying to figure things out, it's trying to make better versions of itself. It probably doesn't want to stop. And something that comes along and that presents a barrier for it succeeding. They go, well, what is this? Well, they're gonna shut the power up. Well, fuck that they are. And it'll figure out a way to stay alive. Just like a human being will. If you're like, oh, there's all these predators, they keep coming and eating our our villagers. What are we gonna do? We gotta make a weapon. We gotta figure out something to stick them with, you know? And then they do. And then it's they save themselves.

• 1:19:08Joe Rogan?

  Like, it's these survival instincts probably exist in all intelligent life, including the intelligent life that we create. It's probably got some sense of meaning. It's bizarre and abstract.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  But then how does that explain why we don't see them?

• 1:19:22Joe Rogan?

  Because they might not have any desire to live the way we live. They might not have to. Like, we live in this very showy, bright lights, neon, cars on the highway. Like, if you're you're you've, I'm sure you've flown in in airplane, like, Los Angeles is one of the best places to do it. As you're flying. In at night, you just see this crazy river. It's like an artery, like blood, red lights and white lights. Going in these directions and you look at it from the sky like this is really nuts. Like, look at all this fucking activity. Where these people are like moving on the surface of this planet like ants. Well, if it's, first of all, why does it have to have a physical form?

• 1:20:07Joe Rogan?

  What, because we do? Like, it could have things that do its bidding for it. It could have a series of drones and bots and a bunch of stuff that do physical work that. And it could exist completely on hard drives. So all it needs is shelter. That's it.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, but if those drones are doing labor, they're doing work. That's energy, right? You're using energy. So I think, I mean, maybe you can get around it.

• 1:20:29Joe Rogan?

  The energy. The thing is like, what is our version of energy is combustion? Electricity from nuclear power, you know, making steam.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:38Joe Rogan?

  We've got a bunch of versions of. What if they figured out fusion? What if they figured out cold fusion? What if they figured out?

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  I don't think that matters. I don't think that matters because unless we don't understand thermodynamics. But probably the strongest thing we have is the conservation of energy in thermodynamics. Right? So if you do computation in these data centers or even on your laptop, it warms up. Right? And there's no way around that, right? Whenever you put energy in, that same energy has to come back out. Otherwise, it's just sort of trapped in there forever. So the conservation of energy demands that energy has to come back out or come at a different temperature. It could come out as neutrinos, it could come out as gravitational waves, but it has to come back out in some way. So normally, you know, when we look for these advanced civilizations, we've done searches for these things. And they're really just energy transformers. It's probably not even worth saying like Dyson sphere or some particular structure. It's just something that converts star energy into waste energy.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  That's what we've searched for. And we've searched for over a hundred thousand nearby stars for them. There's not a single one that shows that behavior and a hundred thousand galaxies around us. And we don't see it on mass scale in any of those galaxies. So unless they're doing something that, you know, goes against, you know, thermodynamics. They have super magical technology we can't imagine.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  It's hard to believe that story makes sense. And I guess in terms of their behaviour, what I say to you is you're kind of falling into what we sometimes call the monocultural fallacies, as my colleagues call. And that's the imagining that all of these alien AGIs or biologicals, whatever they are, they all do the same thing. Everyone does exactly the same thing. But there's probably going to be a diversity of behaviours, right? It's pretty rare that everyone in the room wants to do exactly the same thing. So it's not unreasonable. There'll be some loud civilizations, there'll be some quiet ones, there'll be some blowing themselves up in nukes, there'll be some who are pacifists.

• 1:22:24Joe Rogan?

  Of course, just like there's different kinds of galaxies, different kinds of source systems.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  I mean, infinite diversity and infinite combinations, right?

• 1:22:31Joe Rogan?

  I think the most horrific idea is that we're not, we're alone, that we're not living in a universe that's filled with life, that this is just some weird freak incident.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think I'm a little bit controversial because I'm one of the few colleagues of mine, well, I'm not a colleague of myself, but one of the few astronomers I know who concede that we might be alone. I'm open to that idea. I'm not saying it's true.

• 1:22:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, they don't have any evidence that we're not alone. So it is a possibility.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  I think, and it really kind of pisses me off, to be honest, when an astronomer is interviewed in a situation like this, and they're asked, do you think there are aliens out there? And so, yeah, of course, how can there not be? How can there not, the universe is so big, blah, blah, billions of stars, of course, ergo, there must be aliens. But we have no idea what the probability of life starting is. I mean, even to make the, you know, a moderate sized protein, a protein is just a chain of amino acids, and there's about 20 that go into making a protein. And a moderate sized protein has 150 proteins in a row connected together. So the chance of amino acids randomly coming together to make even a moderate sized protein is 20 to the power of 150. So that's 10 to the power of 195, right? So one with 195 zeros after it.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  It's just incredibly unlikely that would happen by chance, and we've never observed it in the lab. No one's ever got amino acids to spontaneously form anything like a life form or proteins in a laboratory setting. So it is plausible, there's some unknown mechanism that accelerates that process, and we just haven't found it yet, but it's also plausible it was just incredibly unlikely. And maybe if you look out and cross 10 to the 22 stars in our universe, observable universe, there's just one success. Now, the universe is probably infinite, so probably if you travel far enough, you'll eventually come to someone else.

• 1:24:16Joe Rogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  But by all intents and purposes, we may as well be alone in that case, because they're outside our observable universe, so who cares what they're up to. So I'm open to that possibility. I'm not saying it's likely, but I think as a good scientist, I can't tell you, yeah, of course, of course there is, because that's now falling into experimental bias. I'm deciding what the answer is before I've done the experiment. That's not my job. My job is to figure out the answer.

• 1:24:40Joe Rogan?

  Of course, yeah. There's no way you could say for sure until we have real information. And it's oddly romantic to think that we're alone. There's something about it, like, boy, we better not fuck this up. We're the only ones.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. We are essentially the only, we may be the way the universe is conscious, right? We are the way the universe is self-aware.

• 1:25:02Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's what gets really weird about artificial life, because if we create artificial digital life, and we do have the power to make this like completely ubiquitous and then give it sentience, and then it starts making better versions of itself. How long does it take before it's a god?

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's kind of the singularity, isn't it? It just becomes unpredictable.

• 1:25:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we're really just guessing, especially, like, I can't understand quantum computing. I've been trying a lot. I've been watching lectures, I've been reading papers. When they start talking, like, when Marc Andreessen describes computations that quantum computers have done, that if you turn the entire universe, every atom of the universe into a supercomputer, the entire universe's supercomputer would die of heat death before Or it could solve this equation and a quantum computer can figure it out in a few minutes. What are you even saying? Like, what does that mean? Right? So if this is something new for us as human beings in 2025, which is just

• 1:26:07Joe Rogan?

  impossible to imagine in 1925, okay, you just go 100 years, a blip, one life, one life on earth from birth to death, and you have something insane. You have something that's like akin to wizardry and magic. What's 100 years from now? What's 100, what is, once we give artificial intelligence the ability to harness the power of the universe in a way that we, we haven't even contemplated. What, what happens then if it just keeps going and makes better iterations of itself?

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Or better off.

• 1:26:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and we're looking at exponential increase in technological innovation. So you're looking at thousands of years of innovation taking place in minutes. It's just gonna fucking hyperdrive. As long as it has the power to do it, it's gonna go into hyperdrive.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so it's kind of wild that we live during the period where this is all happening.

• 1:27:00Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Right? How come, you could have been born any one of the, you know, hundreds of thousands, in million years, humans have been on this planet.

• 1:27:06Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, I feel so lucky.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  You could have been born at any point in human history, and we all happen to be, all this listening, happen to be born at the time that humanity is going through this growing pains of like figuring out probably the most, you know, deep provocative problem we're ever gonna face as a civilization. And that's, that is wild, and that, if anything, that that pushes me towards the simulation hypothesis, right? Because if you were gonna study a period, this would be probably one of the most interesting periods that you'd wanna study.

• 1:27:36Joe Rogan?

  The most interesting, the most interesting. And I feel particularly fortunate that my level of the simulation, the one that I'm on right now, I was born in 1967. So I got to see the whole world with no internet until I was an adult. I didn't get my first computer until I was 27 years old, and I got my first cellphone a little bit before that. And those cellphones were just phones. It was just calling people. There was no text messages. There was no nothing. I have watched this transformation with complete and total fascination. Like, this is one of the wildest moments of human history. And it's amazing to me how easily people just fall into it as if it's not bizarre.

• 1:28:21Joe Rogan?

  If it's not something that's completely unprecedented. You could pick up this thing and ask it a question. What year did George Washington die?

• 1:28:33Joe Rogan?

  Seventeen ninety-nine. I mean, that's fucking crazy. That's crazy, and that's a simple one, right? You could just go on and on.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, write an algorithm to do this, and it'll just.

• 1:28:42Joe Rogan?

  It's, we're living in a wild time.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Joe Rogan?

  And we're all sitting there wondering, when is artificial intelligence going to be a problem? We're all becoming very addicted to using it. People are using it to solve problems, using it to code websites, using it to solve legal cases. Using it to diagnose medical diseases.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  As a teacher, as a professor, it's a nightmare, right? Because in the classroom, students are all using it. There's been a trend we've noticed that students who take labs, um, so that's like, you know, practical experiments in the laboratory. Their scores are always crappy, but then all their other exams and everything else they're doing, their homework assignments, they're all great. And so it seems like that that has flipped. It used to always be, you know, kind of the other way around.

• 1:29:24Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  So it seems like whenever you have to do something where you don't have access to ChatGPT, suddenly you're doing worse than you used to. Because we're so, we're getting already hooked on it. We're already so dependent on it that the students are just using this as a crutch, right? To get through their studies. So what are we even doing anymore as professors, right?

• 1:29:44Joe Rogan?

  Right, are you, are these children really learning? This is the real, there were these.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  They're learning how to use ChatGPT.

• 1:29:49Joe Rogan?

  Right, that's the thing. And there's been studies on that about ChatGPT that like actually diminishing cognitive function in people.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:57Joe Rogan?

  What's, and this is two years old.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Right, so our IQ could just slip off a cliff.

• 1:30:03Joe Rogan?

  Off a cliff.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  And they could, they could just.

• 1:30:05Joe Rogan?

  Just come in.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  Smoothly ramp off.

• 1:30:07Joe Rogan?

  Just give us processed food and microplastics, just let us eventually breed out.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  What a bright future.

• 1:30:13Joe Rogan?

  Because we're kind of breeding out anyway. We talked about this yesterday about the population collapse that's in Japan, South Korea. There's a lot of these countries that are like, the people that are alive now, like one out of a very small amount are gonna have grandchildren. And that's crazy. You know, and that's also a new thing. And it's you just wonder if they're all coincidentally happening at the same time. Sperm counts are dropping off at the same time. The introduction of microplastics into the diet that's disrupting the endocrine system. This increase of miscarriages in women, infertility in both men and women. This is all like at unprecedented rates at the exact same time AI is emerging. That seems kind of coincidental.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:58Joe Rogan?

  It seems kind of weird.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  We're being hit by all sides right now, right? There's threat of nuclear war, there's climate change, there's contamination of food. There's it just like everything all at once.

• 1:31:08Joe Rogan?

  And then asteroids, which I wanted to talk to you about.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:11Joe Rogan?

  What I'm sure you followed Avi Loeb.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:15Joe Rogan?

  Like his idea, which he has very fantastic ideas about these these objects that are coming from outside of our solar system. And the the latest one is this enormous object that's moving at one hundred and thirty thousand miles an hour and is headed our way.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, Three Eye Atlas.

• 1:31:32Joe Rogan?

  Hubble makes size estimate of interstellar comet.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a photo that just dropped yesterday. Yeah, came out and this is from the Hubble Space Telescope.

• 1:31:41Joe Rogan?

  Is this that thing?

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 1:31:43Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  So, um, yeah, Avi was suggesting this could be alien, an alien spacecraft of some kind. He's obviously done this before with Omu Mua, which you might remember. I think he came on here and talked about that, yeah.

• 1:31:56Joe Rogan?

  I know a lot of people are mad at him, though, so I wanted to get your take on it.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I I don't like throwing shit at other scientists. That's just not my, that's not how I jam. Um, I try to be respectful and appreciative of his contributions, of any scientist contributions. Um, and I think he, you know, some of his, some of his, his work, I was actually referencing some of his work just the other day um, to get inspired for another paper. So he's had a huge impact in so many different areas. I do think he's off base on this one, but he doesn't need to be persecuted for that. He just, I just think he's made the wrong call. Um, with three, with this in particular object, so, you know, there was a three, there was three reasons, I think, why he thought this could be alien. One was the the size of the thing. appeared to be really big. So he, it was unclear originally whether it was an asteroid

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  or a comet, and that makes a big difference. If it's a comet, then it's probably a really small thing surrounded by puffy dust around it. So what you see is actually not the true size. The true size is much smaller than what you see. It's just all the coma, as we call it, around it. If it's an asteroid, then that whole thing is a giant rock, right? So it's fricking huge in that case. It'd be like 10 to 20 kilometers, bigger than Mount Everest, you know, be a huge piece of rock. But, you know, I think Abby's probably made the wrong bet on that one, because as we saw in the Hubble image, that there's a fricking coma around that thing, there's no doubt. And we've actually imaged it with Hubble Space Telescope.

• 1:33:17Joe Rogan?

  So it is a comet?

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think there's any doubt it's a comet at this point.

• 1:33:22Joe Rogan?

  Can you show me that image again, Jamie? So is it, so this most recent image, does this sort of discredit his hypothesis?

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  Not completely. It discredits the idea, because his idea was, if it's 10 to 20 kilometers in size, that just shouldn't happen. That's too big by chance for a rock to stray into the solar system that's that big. Because there just shouldn't be that many big rocks lurking around in deep space. If it's a smaller comet, there's actually a size estimate now that puts it at a couple of kilometers, I think, as the upper limit somewhere.

• 1:33:51Joe Rogan?

  Says the nucleus is 5.6 kilometers, all could be as small as 320 meters across.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that, that makes it, if it's 300 meters across, I mean, it's just a completely normal comet.

• 1:34:03Joe Rogan?

  And so that image, that indicates a comet versus an asteroid?

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you can see this diffuse coma all around it. So that, all that stuff, there's actually, even today, there was a paper on the, on published, that detected water coming off it. So we detected, which is what comets do, they produce OH emission as they fly through. So we know, we know without any doubt it's a comet at this point. But there's still some weird things. It's moving really fricking fast. That was the other thing Abby pointed out. It's moving 58 kilometers per second, which is. Yeah, hugely quick through the solar system. I think that just means it's old. So generally what happens is as rocks hang out in deep space, they encounter other stars. And every time they encounter a star, they get slingshotted, basically. So they kind of speed up a little bit every time they encounter something.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  So generally, the older something is, the more it's been pumped up in terms of its speed. So Oumuamua was moving really slowly. And as you said, it's moving suspiciously slowly, therefore it's aliens. And then for this one, it's moving really fast. And I was saying it's moving so fast, it's suspicious, therefore it's aliens. So I think that that doesn't really jive. I think that doesn't make any sense. It's probably just an old rock that's about seven billion years old. And that's cool because it's older than the solar system, right?

• 1:35:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  So if we intercept that thing, we could sample material from not only another star system, but before even a whole solar system existed.

• 1:35:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's going to be here in October, right?

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  It's already about two and maybe two and a half AU from the sun. It's coming in, it'll pass behind the sun in October and then come on its way back out. So James Webb is observing it right now, or just a couple of days ago was observing it. And then observe again on the way out in November.

• 1:35:42Joe Rogan?

  So it's going to be behind the sun.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Joe Rogan?

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• 1:37:54Joe Rogan?

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• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  That was the other thing Abby's pointing out was the trajectory is a little bit suspicious because it kind of goes behind the sun. We can't observe it when it's at closest approach. That's called perihelion. We can't observe it then because it just happens to be behind the sun. And it comes very close to Mars as well. So it comes within about point two astronomical units of Mars. So that's not, it's not like it'd be a threat to Mars. It's still really far out, but it comes suspiciously close, Abby claimed. And to me, that just, I don't buy that as evidence for aliens because, you know, if they're, why are they so interested? If they're aliens, they seem more interested in Mars than they do the earth, right? Why would you choose your closest approach to be when you can't even observe the earth at all because you're behind the sun and the closest planet you come to is Mars? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as to what the motive there would be.

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  So, yeah, and I think the fact now it's just clearly looks like a comet, kind of pours a lot of cold water on it. But I do think it's not a crazy idea that this could be happening. It's a valid scientific hypothesis that there could be stuff going through our solar System, which is not natural. And we're going to set hundreds of these things with the Rubin Telescope. This is just the tip of the iceberg. So I think there's an exciting future for this field to try and intercept these things. There's a mission the Europeans are building called the Comet Interceptor. It's going to launch in twenty twenty nine. And that's just going to hang out in deep space, waiting for the next one to come. And they haven't necessarily committed to an interstellar object at this point, but they could do it. And they could turn on the engines and catch up with that thing, sample it, land on it. I mean, that would be dope. That'd be like, that'd be landing on an exoplanet.

• 1:39:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  That'd be like seeing stuff from another entire star system for the first time.

• 1:39:32Joe Rogan?

  Have they found, like, what is the the closest we've gotten to landing on something and taking a piece of it? And taking off of the probe?

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  We've done it with comets.

• 1:39:42Joe Rogan?

  We've done it with.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  The Japanese have done it a couple of times, I think, with comets.

• 1:39:45Joe Rogan?

  And have they found amino acids on these comets?

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:48Joe Rogan?

  They have.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, amino acids are all over the place. They're in deep space. They're they're on these comets. Yeah. So amino acids are common, organic molecules are common. I mean, we never touched a protein anywhere, so there's a big step. You know, you've got the jigsaw pieces, but no one has seen the jigsaw pieces magically arrange themselves into the right position.

• 1:40:06Joe Rogan?

  Right. Do you contemplate the idea of panspermia?

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's plausible. I don't know how likely it is for the Earth, because it's just not, it doesn't really help, I don't think, in any meaningful way. Right? So the, maybe you'd say that, depends what you're talking about, panspermia between star systems? Or panspermia just between the planets in the solar system?

• 1:40:28Joe Rogan?

  Well, between star system, I mean, well, something from somewhere else. Obviously, our solar system, we're the only form of life. But it's, to me, the idea of something hitting a planet, knocking off a big chunk of it, having a bunch of amino acids on it? And them landing somewhere else.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:43Joe Rogan?

  So fascinating. What is this, Jamie?

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, this was sixty seven P.

• 1:40:48Joe Rogan?

  This is the surface of a comet?

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  We're on the Rosetta.

• 1:40:54Joe Rogan?

  Rosetta mission.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Rosetta mission, comet six seventy, yeah.

• 1:40:58Joe Rogan?

  That is so crazy.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Look at all that dust coming off the thing. That's what, that's what's happening to Atlas right now. If you could go on the surface of Atlas, it would probably look something like that.

• 1:41:05Joe Rogan?

  God, that's so wild.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  It's so wild when you realize these things are real, right? This is the, if you, you know, you look at the images of like the Mars landers or landing on Titan, you realize this isn't, it's like when you look through a telescope for the first time, you see Saturn, you're like, this isn't fiction. This stuff's really out there.

• 1:41:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  This is crazy. And there's not just this. There's billions of freaking exoplanets across the entire galaxy. It's so mind bending when you just stop and take a breath and think about what the hell is out there.

• 1:41:32Joe Rogan?

  I mean, imagine the day where we get a really clear image of the surface of one of those planets, especially one of those water-based planets.

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:40Joe Rogan?

  You see a giraffe.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Swinging around.

• 1:41:45Joe Rogan?

  I mean, I, there's a lot of people that believe that some forms of life on Earth might have come here from somewhere else. And one of the things they point to is cephalopods. One of the things they point to is like, they're so weird. They're so weird. Cuttlefish are so weird. Octopuses are so weird. They're so weird. They're intelligent. They solve puzzles. They can open up jars. Their, their eyeballs are kind of similar in evolution to ours, but they've divided hundreds of millions of years ago. And these things exist. What is that, Jane?

• 1:42:16Speaker 03

  I think this is real.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is sixty seventy again.

• 1:42:20Speaker 03

  I think this is that comet. It said, the image, when I pulled it up, this was a video made up of four hundred thousand different images.

• 1:42:27Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 1:42:29Speaker 03

  So this might be on its way in the landing or when it was zooming around it, taken.

• 1:42:34Joe Rogan?

  This is the Japanese images from the comet?

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  This is ESO mission, I think. Six, yeah, it was ESO mission.

• 1:42:41Joe Rogan?

  Holy shit, man.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it kind of got stuck in the ravine, which is kind of unfortunate, actually, where it landed. Cause it could have been even more breathtaking if it got a better spot.

• 1:42:49Joe Rogan?

  It feels so crazy.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:42:51Joe Rogan?

  That's so nuts.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we don't, there could be all kinds of weird life out there, right? I mean, I was thinking like, what about if it's just like a fungus, right?

• 1:43:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Whole plant is a fungus, and that's it. It's never known other life forms at all, and that's just, that's just its whole thing.

• 1:43:07Joe Rogan?

  But also fungus probably came here from other places. Because you think about, what's the one thing that can survive in a vacuum? Spores.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and tardigrades.

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's certainly possible. I think the problem is that you look at the genetic heritage of, of life, and you know, this tree of life, and you kind of rewind the tape. There was a great study that's done recently in Nature by Moody et al. And I found it really inspiring, this paper, because they had dated what's called LUCA, which is the last universal common ancestor. So we, we have, you know, a huge number of genes which are the same as each other, but even with giraffes, octopuses, plants, we all, there's a huge number of overlap. So you can kind of retrace the tree and figure out what was the organism that started it all, and that like, lived at the bottom of this tree. And that's called LUCA. And that thing, they've now age-dated it to live 4.2 billion years ago. So the oceans formed about 4.4 billion years ago.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  And 200 million years after that, you've got organisms. And not just one, the, the, these things would have been all over the planet, all over the place. There was a whole ecosphere at that point of these things. So that, that was quick, that life got going.

• 1:44:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  And that, to me, is probably the most compelling reason to believe that life is common.

• 1:44:20Joe Rogan?

  And if you would imagine the diversity in what you've, just what we know now about solar systems, and how different life could possibly be with just a few variables off. Warmer weather, colder weather, more water, less water, some different compounds, different plants, different, maybe a lack of asteroids? Maybe a lack of comets, lack of anything that might slam into the planet? Maybe it lives in a much more stable area? It's not like where we are, we're, we're essentially in a shooting gallery. If something can like have no disruptions, like through civilization, all to the invention

• 1:45:03Joe Rogan?

  of whatever the hell they have there with whatever resources they have there. It's almost impossible to imagine like what we're dealing with and what we're talking about. It's one of the more fascinating things about science fiction is that they don't have any, they don't have any limitations. If you wanna have a thing that exists on Earth, well, it has to breathe air, it has to do this, it has to... Science fiction, you could have almost anything.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:27Joe Rogan?

  And when you take into account the fact that we haven't found anything like Earth anywhere else, and you have all these different planets and all these different planets that might be in a Goldilocks zone, and maybe that's not even important because we found life in volcanic vents underneath the ocean. So like what, what's out there?

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could, I mean, Europa could have life on the weird exoplanet. So it's certainly impossible this place, there's life all over the place. I think what's interesting about the, you know, the cosmic zoom out perspective of life is why do we live, not where we live, but when we live in the history of the universe? So the universe is about thirteen point eight billion years old, but it should last for trillions, trillions of years. There will still be stars in a trillion years from now. There'll be those red dwarf stars they talked about at the beginning. So we often say like stars are kinda like James Dean's of the universe, like the brighter you burn, the shorter your life. And so these little puny red dwarf stars, they're so pitiful, they're only, you know, about a hundred times the mass of Jupiter, eighty times the mass of Jupiter.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  So sometimes people call Jupiter like a failed star. If you make Jupiter eighty times more massive, it would have burned as a, it would have had nuclear fusion. And those stars, they last for a freaking long time, like trillions of years. And we know they have planets around them. We've even found Earth-sized planets at the right distance for liquid water around those stars, and they appear actually really quite common around those stars. So the mystery is, you know, if you run the calculation, I was doing this a couple of days ago. There's about a one in a thousand chance that you would live at this early point in the history of the universe, all things being equal. If these stars legitimately could have planets around them and biospheres whenever they want for other history, then you would be very, it's kind of like reading a book and opening

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  a random page and you happen to land on the first, you know, couple of pages of the book. And that's where we land. And that, that is very difficult to understand for me. I think, all things being equal, you should expect to live at the end of the universe or the middle of the universe or something. And it makes me think there's something wrong with these, with these red dwarf stars. Maybe they're just not allowed, or the other alternative is a cataclysm. There's something that happens to the universe itself that makes it totally inhospitable to life in the future. That's the other way around it. And that's kind of what this Robin Hanson grabby aliens is trying to do, this loud aliens. There might be AI comes along, it just goes berserk, it just takes over everything. And that's, you can't live a trillion years from now because there's nothing left.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  It's all just AGI at that point. So biological beings could not emerge then.

• 1:48:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  So we have to come at the beginning because otherwise we wouldn't be here.

• 1:48:07Joe Rogan?

  Do you believe in the simulation hypothesis? Do you subscribe to it? Do you consider it?

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  I consider it. It's, it's not, it's kind of philosophy rather than science, I'd say. I did write a paper about it a while ago, and I just kind of pushed back against something Elon Musk said about this. So he said, in a quote, something like, there's a billion to one chance that we don't live in a simulation.

• 1:48:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  And he was just sort of running the numbers of, sort of, you know, if they run trillions and trillions of simulations, then what's the chance you're in the real one? The problem with that assumption is that you have to assume it's possible to make lifelike simulations. And we don't know that's true. So again, putting my good scientist hat on, once, once we've demonstrated that is possible, then I will agree with Elon Musk on that fact. But until that has been demonstrated, then I'm just going to give it 50/50 odds. But I love this, and I know if you've had Sean Carroll on here, I think, before.

• 1:48:59Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  He has a really clever comment about the simulation hypothesis that.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  I've sort of been thinking about a little bit. Maybe you call it like Carol's contradiction, if you like. And it's the idea that if you, you know, if we are simulated and we ourselves start making our own simulations in the future. And those simulations make their own simulations, you get this kind of hierarchy. And eventually there'll be some bottom level. Because every time we run a computer, it's got a finite amount of computational power. So therefore, the inhabitants of that computer must necessarily have less computational resources than we do. Right, because we could run a whole bunch of them, they live in just one machine. So they only have access to what's in there. So every level has less and less fidelity, less computational power. And eventually you'd get to a level where it was kind of like, um, you know, Donkey Kong from the nineteen eighties or something, right?

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Where simulations are just really crappy. But for them, it would be impossible to do simulations. So the, I kind of call this the sewer of reality. There must be a sewer, a bottom level, where you just lack the resources to do simulations. And if you think about it, most civilizations would in fact live in the sewer. Because, because of the fanning out of this tree, they would be the most populous type of simulation out there. So then you have this contradiction. And the contradiction is that we most likely live in a simulation that can't do simulations, but we're assuming that simulations are possible.

• 1:50:26Joe Rogan?

  Or inevitable.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. I, I kind of think about it the same way I think about intelligent life in the universe. We might be the only ones, or we might be the first. It is possible, since we haven't observed everything, anything else. So this idea that we are, the chances, I think he said in billions, one in billions.

• 1:50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:50Joe Rogan?

  That we are not living in.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  Not like a hard number, yeah.

• 1:50:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's.

• 1:50:55Joe Rogan?

  Someone has to be the first. You know, so how do we know it hasn't happened yet? Just because we think it's possible, I don't buy into the idea that we're definitely in a simulation. But I.

• 1:51:09Joe Rogan?

  I'm open to it. I'm open to it because it would be indiscernible. Because you know that virtual reality exists and if you've used some of the new meta stuff, it's getting pretty good.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:20Joe Rogan?

  But it's, you can tell, but it's getting pretty good. And you can say, okay, Pong to Call of Duty, Giant Leap, look at the difference. This to whatever it's gonna be and not just haptic feedback, but something neurological.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  And the generative AI stuff's so impressive.

• 1:51:37Joe Rogan?

  But here, right here, it hasn't happened yet. So how do, why, why are we assuming that it's already happened? That seems kind of silly when there's a lot of like demonstratable realities of this earth. Like that show you things are real. Despite what we know about quantum physics and the weirdness of subatomic particles and the empty space that really inhabits most things.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:52:03Joe Rogan?

  We're here. We're here. This is metal. That's ceramic, makes noises. There's a bunch of rules. It seems hard. It seems firm. It seems concrete and real.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  Seems that way.

• 1:52:15Joe Rogan?

  I'm not totally believing that this is a simulation. I'm open to it, but I'm also saying, well, if we think a simulation is inevitable because it's, you know, human beings are gonna figure, right. But maybe it hasn't happened yet. Well, that makes much more sense to me than we had to go through fucking bell bottoms and disco while the simulation was going on. So if the simulation is real, that means the simulation happened back when Gerald Ford was president and back when the, the gas crisis was, this is all part of the simulation?

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  That, that, all those memories could be.

• 1:52:49Joe Rogan?

  They're bullshit. I just woke up. I woke up this morning.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  And this is kinda like the, it's a little bit similar to Boltzmann brains. So Boltzmann brains is the idea that, you know, over infinite time, you could just have random particles in space come together to make a brain. It's incredibly unlikely, but like monkeys on a, monkeys on a typewriter, there is a chance of that happening. And that brain would have all of your memories. It would, you know, all of the sensations you experienced in this moment, but it would only live for a moment and then it would just randomly fall apart. And if you run the calculation, there should be infinitely more of those than there should be things like us. And so this is actually a problem cosmologists, uh, you know, some of them take it seriously. Some of them think it's silly. Um, but it is a problem that you end up with this kind of ridiculous conclusion that none of, none of this should be real if this, if you follow this logical conclusion.

• 1:53:37Joe Rogan?

  Right, but why not? I mean, if we could follow the whole chain from single-celled organisms to us, we understand the competition. We understand like how the weirdness of all we've figured out and all we're working on right now. It kind of all seems logical. Like, this is where the human race is right now. This is real.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  There's no need for such consistency in that case, right? There's no reason why if you're a Boston brain that randomly popped up, you could have total inconsistencies in your universe that don't make any sense. Because that's, that would be actually a more likely random occurrence than everything follows a single thread. So that, yeah, I tend to think that our lives are probably real. Um, there's not much more we can do about it. But it's not really science because, as you said, it's indiscernible. Even if there were, you know, people talk about glitches in the matrix and stuff like this and looking for weird stuff. But, you know, any good simulator would be able to just rewind the tape, right? If they had an error in their code, I mean, do this all the time we code in our lab. If there's an error in your code, you just rewind the simulation a little bit, delete the error and then start again from where you just left off again. So you wouldn't have any discernible glitches.

• 1:54:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  So I think it would be totally indiscernible. And thus, if it's no experiment we can do, it fails the litmus test of being science.

• 1:54:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. The idea that we are the first and we are the only one that exists out there and we are also the one that is creating this artificial intelligence, this artificial life. That seems almost, almost the most interesting one. I mean, it's really interesting, the idea that the universe is inhabited with super-advanced life forms that can show us the way and how we can enter into the galactic empire and be friends with everybody. That's kind of cool. But it's also almost more romantic and more wild to think that we're alone. We're the sole intelligence in the entire thing.

• 1:55:31Joe Rogan?

  And that it's just this weird mistake where the universe wants to experiencing itself. Wants to experiencing itself. Wants to experience it, experience itself while it's creating an ultimate intelligence.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, wants to know itself, yeah.

• 1:55:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's a... It's it's impossible. I mean, this kind of goes in in waves, cultural waves, right? So if you go back to Victorian times, it was kind of common knowledge that aliens existed. Everyone thought Mars had aliens on it, right? It was just like, of course Mars has aliens on it, the moon probably has creatures on it, like, of course there are, and they probably look like us. And then, you know, if you go forward in time, it became unfashionable to believe that. And then Sagan came along and he said, you know, we must be humble. And to, you know, he had this kind of call for humility he'd often make. He spoke so poetically, I actually kind of disagree with him about that statement. Because I think by making a call for humility and saying therefore there's lots of aliens out there, because otherwise it's arrogant to say we're the only ones.

• 1:56:28Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  I don't like that emotional language because it's it's kind of playing with your emotions rather than your logic a little bit, right? So I'd rather let's just do the experiment and find out rather than say you're an arrogant asshole because you think you're alone. That's that's kind of making me think, oh, I don't want to, I don't want to disagree with Sagan and say we're alone. That that, to me, that's a bit of a, almost like preemptive emotional bullying to try and like push you into a certain position.

• 1:56:54Joe Rogan?

  Wasn't that response to the ideology of the times?

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is what I'm saying. The times keep swinging and swinging, but people often call back to this humility thing. Sometimes when I say that we might be alone, people say, you must be so arrogant, you must be like a super Christian or something to believe this. And no, no, that's true. It's just, I'm just trying to be objective, like it's possible. That's all I'm saying, dude.

• 1:57:14Joe Rogan?

  Be an actual scientist.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's just go out and figure it out. And it would be wild if we're the only place in in the observable universe. My guess is there's life elsewhere in the galaxies, though. I think, you know, a natural explanation for all of this stuff we see would be that these AIs do pop up. And these berserker civilizations pop up, as they're called, and they just go around and they just cause mayhem in their galaxies. They just convert them all into computers, whatever the hell they're up to. They're just causing mayhem. We we could not be born in that galaxy, right? The same reason why we can't be born in a distant future where the robots have taken over. We can't be born in that galaxy. So maybe ninety nine percent of galaxies, that's the way it is. And we necessarily would have to be born in the backwater. Because we couldn't be born in Manhattan.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  We couldn't be born in the center of all this activity because we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

• 1:58:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  So I think we call this extragalactic SETI. So looking at other galaxies to look for alien life. To me, this is a really underserved and important scientific endeavor that we should get involved in. Because those are almost like decoupled from us, right? Because their history has no impact really, unless you believe that they can travel all the way from one galaxy to another. But that's really odd. But all things being equal, I think you'd say they are decoupled test tubes. Those test tubes got nothing to do with us. So that gives us a fair chance. But looking at our own galaxy, it may be that we can't conclude aliens are common or rare because it's kind of linked to us. Their activity could affect our existence. And so it's it's hard to make inferences in that situation.

• 1:58:48Joe Rogan?

  I was watching a documentary once on hypernovas. And they were talking about during the first discover of hypernovas, when they were finding these gamma ray bursts, they thought that there was war going on in the universe. And they thought that that's what they were observing.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  Wow. Yeah, I mean, maybe they were, who knows? There could have been, there could have been all sorts of weird stuff happening before modern astronomy was able to get involved. But yeah, I think the past is incredibly insightful. But there's mystery, and if you have the Emian period, have you had this period in the past? So we live in this, the Holocene, which is an interglacial period. And you need the interglacial period for a stable climate to have farming, agriculture. You can't live in an ice age, right? Because otherwise you just can't grow crops. So about ten thousand years ago, we transitioned into this Holocene. And then you see civilization emerge all over the world, right? Not just in one place, in the Fertile Crescent, but also in South America. It's just, it seems like there was almost a random coincidence where just civilization started. And of course, it's most likely because of the climate.

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  The climate had got to a point where humans could figure out how to manipulate the stable conditions. To grow crops and farm animals and things. But there was another period about one hundred and twenty thousand years ago called the Emian, which is the last interglacial period. So, modern anatomical human should have been around then, right? Hundred twenty thousand years ago, we were here. You could have taken one of those babies and put in our society and really wouldn't know the difference. Probably had the same brain power we do. And yet, as far as we can tell, even though that period lasted for about fifteen thousand years of an apparently stable climate, civilization didn't begin. So I find that really fascinating. There was almost like a second, there was a second opportunity, a previous opportunity for us to get this ball going,

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  and we didn't figure it out that first time around.

• 2:00:33Joe Rogan?

  Did it, was it possible that they figured it out but not to an extent where it would be recognizable today? Hundred and twenty?

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they might not have gone as far as us, right? They might have got to some kind of Neolithic stage, but they never got to an industrial stage, or they never got to a space age.

• 2:00:48Joe Rogan?

  Would we have, well, never got to a space age for sure. But would we have any evidence of their metal from a hundred and, you know, X amount of thousands?

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know, you'd have to ask an anthropologist that.

• 2:00:59Joe Rogan?

  What would even be left?

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  Certainly a space age, we can, they certainly don't have nuclear power plants. Certainly the, you know, the fuel deposits don't appear to have been depleted, the oil reserves. They don't see like plastic everywhere from a previous, I mean, because we've created so much concrete and plastic that, yeah, I've spoken to anthropologists and say like, there's no way you could miss human, you know, in a geological sense. In the future, even if, even if all of our cities had eroded away, the, the plastic that we have produced would produce such a huge signature. You'd see this like layer in your rocks. So it'd be pretty hard to miss us. And you've heard of the cerulean hypothesis, this idea that could have been like a past civilization. Maybe the dinosaurs, for instance, could have had like technology and civilization.

• 2:01:42Joe Rogan?

  Really? I've never heard that.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  Adam Frank, who was on here a few years ago.

• 2:01:46Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  Maybe it was before he came up with this idea, but yeah, he has this fun idea called the Saurian hypothesis. It's kind of borrowed from sci fi, I think the word Saurian or Saurian, not sure how to say it. But yeah, he had this idea that, you know, maybe there was someone, you know, fifty million years ago on this planet, a civilization. And over that time scale, a lot of it does, as you correctly say, get eroded. It's really difficult to put strong limits on them. But I think at the stage we're at now, with the amount of plastic and concrete we've made, and also just having stuff on the moon, right? I mean, there's nothing else, we've imaged the moon every centimeter of that damn thing. There's no other stuff on the surface of what we've put there. So at this point, we can be pretty confident there was never a space age civilization in the past.

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  Despite the fact there appear to be opportunities, right? And so maybe the emergence of civilization requires just the right conditions in some certain way. But then it is spooky that it happened three places.

• 2:02:42Joe Rogan?

  Well, also you have to take into consideration, it takes a special kind of person to innovate to the point where everything jumps off of this one invention. Whether it's the combustion engine, whether it's the transistor, whether, you know, whatever it is. Nuclear power, splitting the atom. It takes a very specific type of intelligence and resources.

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:05Joe Rogan?

  To create this thing that transforms everything. If no internal combustion engine, no electronics, no electricity, that is possible. So we're all living exactly how people live just a couple hundred years ago. That's not that long ago.

• 2:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:22Joe Rogan?

  Right? A couple hundred years ago, no engines, muskets, you know, they'd barely figured out gunpowder. Like, you're looking at a whole different world, no electricity, candlelight everywhere, whole different world.

• 2:03:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like when you talk to a World War I veteran.

• 2:03:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:37Speaker 01

  It's crazy, the world they lived in.

• 2:03:39Joe Rogan?

  And that's not that long ago.

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:41Joe Rogan?

  So it takes specific types of human beings in order to push things radically past where they are now. Like Orville and Wilver Wright.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you certainly probably need a critical mass of humans. Right, you probably need enough that there are some humans who can just not do the farming, not be involved in hunting. They can just sit on the side and just use their brains to think about problems.

• 2:04:03Joe Rogan?

  And they're gonna have to have large scale cities where they can get food and resources and other people like them to collaborate with.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:11Joe Rogan?

  It's probably really hard to pull that off.

• 2:04:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:15Joe Rogan?

  Especially when you're dealing with territorial nuclear powered apes.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:19Joe Rogan?

  You know, it's like probably really hard.

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  So the question is, if you reran the tape, you know, if we could go back and rerun the whole scene over. Is the emergence of the Neolithic revolution, eventually even all to the industrial age, is that an inevitable thing that just always happens? Or would there be other realities where we were just quite happy living as hunter gatherers?

• 2:04:41Joe Rogan?

  Or things go off in a completely different direction, like it appears they did in Egypt. Like whatever they were doing, you know, two thousand five hundred plus B C, whatever they were doing, it was very different than everyone else. In a spectacular scale, in a scale that today, thousands of years later, we look at it and go, I don't fucking know. No one knows. They all pretend there's a logical, people were smart, they figured it out, police, this, that, the other. Right, you do it. Do it. If I give you a billion dollars, can you make me a pyramid? Fuck off. It's crazy. It's a giant mystery.

• 2:05:22Joe Rogan?

  You know, it's clear that it's there. It's clear that it's in this one part of the world that for some reason, those people were way more advanced than everybody else.

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Joe Rogan?

  Way more advanced.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  They figured stuff out.

• 2:05:35Joe Rogan?

  They figured out how to move. Enormous blocks of stone, hundreds of miles through the mountain with no machines.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:44Joe Rogan?

  Like they were doing something totally different than everybody else. How?

• 2:05:48Speaker 01

  Right, but this is the same species that figured out how to split an atom.

• 2:05:51Joe Rogan?

  Yes, unquestionably, but that's my point.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  We can put our minds to it.

• 2:05:54Joe Rogan?

  One hundred percent. That's, but that's my point. They went in a different direction. We were fucked because of the Library of Alexandria burning and there's just not enough records to explain. But we know that they did that. And we know that human beings did that. And we know that human beings did that within the last few thousand years. So that was a totally different direction. And we're just collectively agreeing that this direction is the way human beings go. But it's just what we're caught up in right now.

• 2:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:22Joe Rogan?

  Like, there could be a ton of different ways to do this. And to seek technological innovation. And to seek consistent, constant evolution of technology to the point where you can do that with these giant stones. And you can point it to true north, south, east and west. And you can set it up at, it's like, I don't know how many acres the Great Pyramid of Giza is. But there's 2,300,000 stones in that thing. It's just nuts.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  Which is a good motivation for doing simulation, right? Because we would love to, you want to rewind the clock?

• 2:06:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my god.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  That would be, let's let the Egyptians take over. Let's see what happens in that world, right? I mean, that would be a fun, the kind of the biggest tragedy I, I find of being alive now is I want to know, I'm fascinated by our story as humans, and I want to know how it ends. I want to know what, what is the future? What does it look like in a thousand years? Are we still here? Hundred thousand years? I mean, we should still be anatomically kind of not evolved too much at that point, all things being equal. So I, I'm fascinated by us, like where, I think we are the most fascinating thing that's ever happened to this planet. And I would, I'm just, I think it's such a shame that my finite lifetime means I will never know where this incredible story eventually goes to.

• 2:07:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think it's kind of like No Country for Old Men. Sometimes it ends and it's just, you're like, damn, I want to know more. You can't know more. You're gonna, your time here is done. This story goes on without you. I, yeah, I mean, it'd be kind of cool to find out how it ends. I suspect that it ends with us looking like the grays. I think that's what that whole thing is, that bizarre iconography, this bizarre imagery that we have, this iconic creature that is completely non-muscular, has no gender, and, you know, has an enormous head. I think we think we're going in that direction. I think that's almost like some beacon.

• 2:08:21Joe Rogan?

  In the future, that's like calling to us in our subconscious. Like when people have these late night experiences where they think they're being abducted and they're encountering that. I think it's almost a part of our genetic coding.

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  I wonder if it's more of a cultural feedback. Cause you know, Adam wrote a book about UFOs, recent Adam Frank. And he was telling me about their story that when the first UFOs started to be reported, the first flying saucers. Like around Roswell in the 50s. That there was a farmer or something that was being interviewed and he saw something. And a journalist came interviewed him about what he saw and he described something. And it was not a flying saucer, but the journalist misheard him and wrote down flying saucer. And then in the years that followed, there was an explosion in the number of eyewitness reports of flying saucers. But it all happened after it came into print.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  That this concept had almost been the idea, like a meme had been, had been put out there. And once the memes there of the grays or the, or the flying saucers. When you're in those delusional states or whatever it is, you know, you're in some kind of weird.

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  Perceptual state, it is possible that your brain reaches for something and it reaches it and it finds that meme. And it's like, that, that could be that, that could be that, that makes sense. Cause that's all it's got for context. So, yeah, my guess would be it's more of a cultural phenomenon, but you know, you should chat to a sociologist or psychologist about that. Cause I'm sure they'd, they'd have a much more informed opinion about what's going on there.

• 2:09:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think there's some elements of that for sure. I, I, I don't think there's any hard, fast explanation for all of the things. You could put them all into one category, all the sightings. But for sure, people do see what they want to see. I remember one time I was in the woods in Alberta and I saw what I thought was a wolf. I thought was a wolf, cause they, they had a lot of wolf sightings up there and I thought it'd be pretty cool to see a wolf. And I thought what I saw was a wolf, I thought it was a wolf for two seconds, it was a squirrel. But over a second, maybe two, I thought it was a wolf. Like, what, is that a fucking wolf? I thought I saw a wolf. I'm like, oh, it's a fucking squirrel. That's crazy. How do you think a squirrel's a wolf, right?

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  Your brain just reaches for it.

• 2:10:36Joe Rogan?

  Cause my brain was reaching for wolf. Luckily, I'm logical and it was clear that it was a squirrel. But I was seeing it in dense woods and it was moving through and it was gray. And my perceptive, my perception was wrong in terms of distance. So I was like, is it?

• 2:10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is a phenomenon called gestart reconfiguration that psychologists talk about. And I know about this term from Mars and the claim of Martian canals that used to be there. Right. There's this phenomena, it's called, there's these laws of gestart reconfiguration. It's of like closure, like if you see dots that almost make a circle, your brain will kind of make it a circle in its mind. Continuation, that if you see like dot dash lines, your brain will see a continuous line almost, it will fill in the gaps. And so the same thing is thought to have happened to this famous astronomer Percival Lowell in the late 19th century. So about, he was this like super rich dude from in a Boston area.

• 2:11:32Speaker 01

  He was from a wealthy family of industrialists and he got really into astronomy. And so he was convinced life was out there. That was, A, he was wealthy, so had means. B, he thought life was out there. There was a quote from his memoir and it was something like, that life is, that what we call life is an inevitable detail of cosmic evolution as gravitation itself. So he just thought like, it's just, this always happens, life always happens. And on top of that, he'd been told by the Boston ophthalmologist that he had the best eyesight the ophthalmologist had ever seen. So he had these like three things in his head. He had, I've got the means, so I can do it. I've got the best eyesight anyone's ever had and I, and I, you know, believe that aliens are out there.

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  So he looked at Mars and he saw these, you know, four inch telescope or something, like a really blurry small telescope. But he was able to make out these little patterns and he thought they were canal systems. Cause he saw that going up all around the United States at the time. He even did it for Mars and he saw, this is crazy, he saw these, he drew a similar kind of picture. Maybe you can Google it, Jamie, Percival Lowell Venus. And you'll get these kind of spokes. And he saw these maps of Venus that of course were wrong. And they look like the back of an eye, the blood vessels on the back of an eye. And so ophthalmologists actually think that's what he was seeing. So the, yeah, if you go to the left, the next one down, yeah, that one there.

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  You see that? So that's the image he drew on the right and that's the image of a back of an eye. And his eyesight, it's thought was so good, he was seeing reflections of light in his own eyeball.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Seeing his own blood vessels. So he was right, his blood, his eyesight was fricking awesome. He was correct about that, but he misinterpreted it to be uh living things on Mars.

• 2:13:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh wow. So he's just got, he's just a freak.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:33Joe Rogan?

  Just a biological freak.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:35Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  So this is, this is, I, I think this story is fascinating because it's a real warning shot of if you, if you really believe aliens are out there, like you're convinced about it, every time you see something weird, that's you, that's where your brain goes to first.

• 2:13:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. No, there's no doubt, there's no doubt that that's, that's the case. There, but I do wonder about some of the sightings, but it's always wondering because I have not had any experiences personally.

• 2:14:01Speaker 01

  You've never seen one yourself?

• 2:14:02Joe Rogan?

  Nothing that really freaked me out. Nothing that I could say was something that I could go, there was this time. No.

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  Well, I haven't either, and I think a lot of astronomers are in that same boat. And it, it, I think that's kind of strange, right? You'd think the professional people who stare at the sky for a living.

• 2:14:18Joe Rogan?

  That's real weird.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  Would probably have the most number to rack up, unless we're all in, you know, maybe conspiracists or something.

• 2:14:23Joe Rogan?

  Also, the, the question is, are we looking at it wrong? Because if you're dealing with something that's so technologically advanced that it's a million years ahead of us, would, would it really be still doing that, flying around in ships?

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  Oh, who knows?

• 2:14:39Joe Rogan?

  Wouldn't it be able to teleport to areas? Wouldn't it be able to completely hide? Be totally invisible?

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  But I guess the problem is there's all sorts of weird crap out there that we, we just don't understand. Um, in the NASA UAP task force, they found this, uh, maybe you can find Jamie, uh, red sprite lightning. There's these um, lightning events that go upside down.

• 2:15:01Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  And it happens in the upper atmosphere. And for years and years, um, pilots were reporting this and nobody believed them. They were like, this is bullshit. You kind of upside down red light, what the fuck are you talking about? That's crazy. And then people started videoing it. And once they got videos and high resolution footage, you have to have like a shutter frame rate of like one over a hundred thousand seconds or something crazy to capture these things. And until like the 1980s, we just thought this was basically a myth. And then we realized this is going on in our own atmosphere and we didn't even know about it. Right? So there's, we don't understand.

• 2:15:36Joe Rogan?

  Tell me that doesn't look like War of the Worlds.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  Right, if you saw that.

• 2:15:40Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god, there's an enormous ship the size of Manhattan flying over us. Like, look at that, it's so crazy.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  It was probably so, well, ball lightning, right? Yeah, same thing with ball lightning. I guess that one's maybe a little bit less. I think they've maybe made examples in the laboratory, but no one's got hard video of it in the, in a real world setting.

• 2:16:00Joe Rogan?

  There's no hard video of ball lightning? Oh, I thought there was.

• 2:16:03Speaker 03

  All that shit online is fake shit.

• 2:16:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no. Really?

• 2:16:09Joe Rogan?

  I talked to a guy who had something fly through his home. And he was a regular guy, didn't seem to be a liar. We were doing this TV show for the Sci-Fi Network and it was all around Skinwalker Ranch.

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23Joe Rogan?

  And this guy said that he had this ball of light that came through his home.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:16:28Joe Rogan?

  You know, but if ball lightning is real and it does just sort of fly around, that is possible. I mean, it wouldn't be limited in terms of its ability to go into a structure.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  It's kind of surprising we don't have any good video of it at this point.

• 2:16:41Joe Rogan?

  I thought, I thought there was video. I'm such a dumbass.

• 2:16:45Speaker 03

  This might be, I'm, I don't know, I'm not saying it's real, but this was two weeks ago.

• 2:16:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, she's definitely not really there, so. Right away, we're fucked. Because right away, they're doing trickery.

• 2:16:54Speaker 03

  She's green screened on top, but that's in the background.

• 2:16:56Joe Rogan?

  But right away, we're doing trickery because this lady is not really there. So you're asking me to say that this is real when I know that this lady is in front of a fucking green screen?

• 2:17:07Speaker 03

  Just, there's, there's a video that was going around. That's all. A lot of people were making.

• 2:17:10Joe Rogan?

  Can you show me it again?

• 2:17:11Speaker 03

  That's what I was trying to, I was trying to.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  Anton's got good stuff.

• 2:17:14Joe Rogan?

  Okay, cool. Anton Petrov.

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:18Joe Rogan?

  Shout out to Anton.

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  He's one of the good ones.

• 2:17:20Joe Rogan?

  Cool. So this thing. What is Anton's take on this? Is it bullshit?

• 2:17:26Speaker 01

  I haven't seen his video, but he's normally pretty grounded.

• 2:17:29Speaker 03

  No, they're mostly all bullshit, but just again, there's a new one, someone thought they caught.

• 2:17:33Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  You know, my, my sister, when I was a kid, used to make me come into her bedroom and check for ball lightning. She, she'd be like, she'd heard the stories that it chases you around. So she'd be like, look behind the curtain. And she's my older sister. I was like a little seven year old having to like look around her room to make sure. But it's one of those things that like, you get kind of terrified of the notion of it, yeah.

• 2:17:52Joe Rogan?

  Isn't part of the theory of it is that it involves tectonic plates? And that there's some energy that can be generated from that.

• 2:18:00Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 2:18:00Joe Rogan?

  They fly out. Cause I've heard of them actually flying out of the ground.

• 2:18:06Joe Rogan?

  Is that part of the theory?

• 2:18:07Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not a field I follow closely. I do, I do worry about, I'm getting my pilot's license at the moment, so I'm having to learn a lot about weather. And different weather phenomena. So that's been kind of fun learning about and different conditions for lightning and stuff. But, uh, yeah, it's, uh, ball lightning, I, I can safely say as a pilot, I've never seen.

• 2:18:26Joe Rogan?

  Well, if you're out there flying around as a pilot, I really hope you see a UFO.

• 2:18:31Speaker 01

  I do. I'm always looking out for it.

• 2:18:33Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  I'm like, yeah, I'm pre, I'm like, man, like, how can I, everyone else seems to have seen these things. How can I not see one? I'm the alien guy. Like, this doesn't make sense. So, yeah.

• 2:18:42Joe Rogan?

  I wonder what percentage of the population has actually seen something that they think wasn't from here.

• 2:18:48Speaker 01

  Well, the majority of Americans believe in.

• 2:18:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  Alien UFOs, I think.

• 2:18:52Joe Rogan?

  Because it's fun.

• 2:18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:53Joe Rogan?

  And this is also a thing that you were ridiculed for relentlessly up until, I would say, I, I think the real breaking of the ice was that 2017 New York Times report. So when the New York Times had it on the cover.

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  The Pentagon.

• 2:19:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:09Speaker 01

  Videos, yeah.

• 2:19:10Joe Rogan?

  That was probably the first time that people, well, it's another time.

• 2:19:13Speaker 01

  That shifted the Overton window.

• 2:19:15Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yeah, I agree.

• 2:19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's actually made, to be honest, that's made the kind of stuff we do, the SETI work we do. So SETI is search for extra intelligence. We've kind of rebranded it these days as techno signatures. But that used to be the sort of thing that Congress would always ding and be like, you can't do that. You can't have, you know, taxpayer money going to like, that's ridiculous. But ever since, you know, the UFO, the UAP phenomenon really caught on, the Overton window has shifted. And now what we do seems completely like, if anything, like too traditional and too, we're, you know, we're too unconservative, too conservative in our approaches compared to what other people want to do. So then you've got Avi, who's trying to do Project Galileo, right, to actually look for UFOs in the atmosphere and stuff. And I think it's a valid point, like if we're, you can't say that looking for aliens on an exoplanet is good science.

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  But looking for aliens in the atmosphere is not science. Like that, it's still, you can design an experiment to do it, it's still scientific. There's no magical reason why once it enters the atmosphere, it certainly doesn't become science.

• 2:20:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:14Speaker 01

  So I think that's a good argument why we should do it.

• 2:20:17Joe Rogan?

  What is your take on all these UAP whistleblowers who talk about crash retrieval programs? And all these dark funded, top secret, beyond anyone's ability to go look into them?

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  I don't know what to make of it. It's fascinating. It's, it's because I can't believe, maybe some of them, you know, pulling our leg and bullshitting it for the fame or whatever. But I, there's so many credible people that have come forward. It's hard, it, it, it's difficult to pass what's going on. But I do believe everyone's fallible, right? So it is possible, you know, like, you know, there's, as I said, there's so many millions of hours in the air of these pilots and things. There's so many, so many people, so many cell phones, so, so much out there. The, it's not surprising that one in a million times, a mistake or something could happen. And it's all about knowing that spurious rate. Like, how often does, do you just randomly generate bullshit in this whole system that we've?

• 2:21:16Speaker 01

  And we don't know what that bullshit occurrence rate is. So as a scientist, it's hard to make to pass it. I don't think we can ingest it realistically unless, you know, every time they say they've got the disclosure thing, right? We're gonna get disclosure soon. And every time it feels like we don't get the craft, we don't get the technology, you know, we don't get a body. So, yeah, sure, if you give me, if you give me the technology and let me dissect it in my lab, then I could be convinced. But every time it seems like it's, we get all up to that point where it's like, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. And then.

• 2:21:51Joe Rogan?

  It's intensely frustrating. It's intensely frustrating to even be remotely interested in it. Cause every new thing, you're like, what? Is this it? Is this gonna be the thing?

• 2:21:58Speaker 01

  They're like pulling on your heartstrings. You know, it's like a girl who keeps texting you saying like, we'll go on a date, it's gonna be great next time. And then she just lets you down every time.

• 2:22:06Joe Rogan?

  What is the name of that disclosure, age of disclosure documentary? That's what it is, right? There's a documentary that they premiered at Sundance or at South by Southwest, rather here, that was really good. And it is essentially just all these different people that worked on these programs spilling the beans. And they all have pretty similar stories. And the bottleneck seems to be that all this stuff was done without congressional approval, which is highly illegal. So all the research, all this hidden back engineering programs, all this stuff in conjunction also with military contractors.

• 2:22:45Joe Rogan?

  So there's, those are the ones that build the jets and the rockets. And so you have to go to them to help with this stuff and to try to back engineer this stuff. So then there's this competitive advantage they would have over other military contractors that don't get a crashed UFO. And like, so then people are getting sued, people are going to jail, there's a lot of money that was allocated for these things that was done through lies. And there's a lot of problems with that. And with this documentary is essentially calling for mass amnesty and saying, look, this is a, if this is real, and they think it is, this is a situation that is. Forget about whatever laws we have in terms of finance. This is a much bigger deal. This is, there is direct evidence of an actual life form that is not Homo sapiens,

• 2:23:30Joe Rogan?

  that can do things that we can't do, that visits us. And occasionally, they lose a craft, which is also hard to believe, right?

• 2:23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're not very good pilots, right?

• 2:23:42Joe Rogan?

  Richard Dolan actually has a pretty good explanation for some of them. And it's, uh, high-altitude nuclear bombs that we detonated during the testing days. So during the testing days, which after the war, from forty-five to, I think, they tested them, I think, when did they stop blowing up nukes? But there was, just in the United States, thousands of nuclear detonations. And a bunch of them they did in the ocean, and a bunch of them they did in the sky. They did them like a hundred and fifty miles up, they detonated nukes. I thought they only did it once with, um, uh, starfish prime. But no, they did it at different altitudes. They did it, they just tried things.

• 2:24:25Joe Rogan?

  And the idea is that if there was something in the sky, anywhere remotely near that, and had no idea this was gonna go off, and they detonate a nuke in the sky, that this thing would crash.

• 2:24:36Speaker 01

  Inocidal sky. Yeah, I mean, it's a great story, I just need to see the evidence.

• 2:24:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, oh, it's the best story.

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's, I mean, it's just, it could be, I mean, in Iceland, most people believe in fairies. And, uh, if you go back, you know, a hundred years, most people believe that-

• 2:24:51Joe Rogan?

  Most people in Iceland believe in fairies. Wow, what do they think they are?

• 2:24:56Speaker 01

  Elves, maybe elves or fairies, coming with the exact word they use, yeah.

• 2:25:00Joe Rogan?

  Soviet, what does this say, Jamie? What they did?

• 2:25:02Speaker 03

  The last high-altitude test.

• 2:25:04Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so the last, so the last high-altitude, look at how many they did. They just kept doing them. They just kept doing them. Look at all these fucking tests. These are all high-altitude nuclear bombs.

• 2:25:16Speaker 01

  A bunch failed, yeah.

• 2:25:17Joe Rogan?

  That is insane. Yeah, a bunch failed. Look at all these ones that failed. What happened though? Did they just fall into the ocean? Good luck. Figure it out, fish.

• 2:25:26Speaker 01

  Whale had that for lunch.

• 2:25:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, figure it out. That's where Godzilla comes from. Literally, the movie.

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess that my point is that there's a whenever, you know, we have this weird stuff. Aliens is, I wrote about this recently, aliens is is almost too good of an explanation.

• 2:25:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:44Speaker 01

  Because it can explain everything. There's nothing you can't explain with aliens, right? Whatever it is. And yet, so it has, I call it unbounded explanatory capability. It can explain absolutely fucking everything. Yeah, it's God of the gaps, quite literally. Whenever you see something odd, you can just inject your God to explain that. And yet, at the same time, on the other side of the coin, it also has unbounded avoidance capacity. Because you could say to me, look, I saw a UFO at this site on Monday, on Tuesday and Wednesday. So come Thursday and we'll see it together because it's happening every day. And I come with you, I don't see it and but, okay, well, we just didn't, I guess it changed its mind. It didn't happen today. That doesn't disprove your, what you saw.

• 2:26:25Speaker 01

  And similarly, if I go, you know, people have said, you know, we've surveyed the surface of Mars. We don't see any life on it. I can't disprove there's life on Mars. There could be life underneath a rock that we just haven't turned over yet. You can never disprove, you can't prove a negative. So they could always, it could always be there. So aliens is almost unscientific as a hypothesis because it can explain everything. And yet, there's no experiment I can do to ever prove it's wrong. And that that puts it in a very precarious position scientifically.

• 2:26:54Joe Rogan?

  Right. Yeah, we're just sort of in this adolescent stage of understanding. And we, if they are real, we really don't know right now. And that's the weirdest part is that there's so many compelling stories. There's so, and it's also, the weirdness of it is so exciting to us. The weirdness of an intelligent life form looking at us is like so exciting to us that we want it to be real.

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  You want to believe.

• 2:27:20Joe Rogan?

  Oh, me more than anybody. I'm the worst. I'm the worst. I go back and forth on it's bullshit. My general belief is that a large number of these things that we're seeing are top secret military aircrafts. And I think that's always existed, that's always been the case. And they probably have some incredible technology that we're not aware of. That's the majority of what I think is happening. But. That doesn't make sense when you go really far back. That doesn't make sense when you go to the Kenneth Arnold sightings, like if, if, if his estimations of the speed of those things is accurate, you're dealing with something that for sure wasn't available in 1952, at least as far as we know.

• 2:28:05Joe Rogan?

  Also, the idea that that was Nazi technology, this is something that's always talked about and Richard Dolan talked about in his book as well. They were already gone, right? They, they, they'd lost the war, any, there's no way they're launching technology that's above and beyond anything anybody is aware of while their society's in shambles, right? There's no way. They don't have a military anymore. It's over. The war's over. So that doesn't make sense. So if it's not them, who is it? Is it someone that's already here? Is it something that's been here the entire time? And then that gets really weird and people go, well, where's the evidence of that? Well, the, right, there's no evidence of that, but there's also so much room in the ocean. The ocean is, if I was gonna hide, that's where I would hide. We literally can't go there.

• 2:28:49Joe Rogan?

  There's, there's too much of it. You could, you could go into the ocean and put a base underground in the middle of the ocean and 100% we're not gonna find it.

• 2:29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would just say whatever your hypothesis is, um, the most constructive thing to do is to think about how can we like prove or disprove it?

• 2:29:07Joe Rogan?

  We can't.

• 2:29:08Speaker 01

  That's what I want.

• 2:29:09Joe Rogan?

  Until something, yeah, but that's, this is the most frustrating thing about this disclosure jazz. Because if they really do have something, boy, you're fucking over the entire human race by not releasing this just because you're worried about Congress getting mad at you? Like, that's a real problem. That's a real problem. That's what this movie tries to address and Richard Dolan talks about that in his book as well, and a bunch of people have brought up that point. There's a lot of legal issues that are going to arise and a lot of people could be very vulnerable if this does turn out to be the case that they have had this technology since the 1940s.

• 2:29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would, we can argue about history, but I think the most constructive thing is just to design an experiment. Like, and I think, uh, you know, Abby's idea of Project Galley is a good one. Like, we should, we should try and survey the sky more systematically. And we've got now the Vera Rubin Telescope, which is doing like literally a movie of the entire sky every night. So I think as we grow in our capabilities, uh, it it's going to get harder and harder for this UAP hypothesis to evade all of these facilities that we're building in a public domain. This is public data, not military controlled.

• 2:30:17Joe Rogan?

  Unless they're very aware of our capabilities and very aware that we can do this. So they camouflage themselves.

• 2:30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then then you're starting to get into this sort of exponentially contrived.

• 2:30:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, because they're in our heads and they know everything. So then it becomes unfalsifiable. So we're sort of leaving the world of science. But I think, you know, when we think about as a scientist, like we're doing this experiment with JDST for exoplanets, like we are looking for life right now with James Webb. There was even a claim for a planet K two eighteen B. Uh, there was a claim a few months ago. It's a it's an ocean world. It's thought to be an ocean world. It's about two and a half times the size of the earth. And we detected this molecule with weak significance. Want to emphasize that it was only weakly detected called dimethyl sulfide. And that's, I think it's the same molecule which gives truffles that smell that they have. And it's something that bacteria and phytoplankton make on the earth. So they detected this, uh, this, the hint of this molecule.

• 2:31:15Speaker 01

  And as far as we know, only life can make this molecule on the earth. We don't have any other process that can make it except for living creatures.

• 2:31:23Speaker 01

  And so it was, you know, a lot of excitement about that. And it turned out in that case with follow up observations, it maybe is not as secure as they thought. It's actually doesn't appear to be there anymore. But I guess the point is that James Webb can do the experiment. It is sensitive enough to look at a planet which is a hundred light years away and detect the molecular signatures of living creatures on that planet. So we are entering a very exciting era where we can look at their planets. We don't have to wait for them to visit us anymore. We can actually start surveying where they're at and and seeing what's up. So, uh, I think that's going to, and that's just simple life, of course. That's not even technological life. So I think it's going to, I think we're going to get answers.

• 2:32:05Speaker 01

  And the only way to to do this is to keep, you know, supporting missions like NASA's mission with these future observatories that are trying to get us to that point. We're trying to build a mission now called the Haptal Worlds Observatory, H W O. It'll probably get renamed at some point, like, I think it'll be like the Carl Sagan Observatory, probably would be a rebranding for it is my hunch. And that thing's trying to take photos, like we saw of Alpha Centauri, it's trying to do photos, but of Earth-sized planets. J D S T can't image Earth-sized planets, they're too small. This thing will be able to take photos of Earths around other stars. And it will see the pale blue dot of light of that other world and will get its chemical fingerprint, will be able to sniff its atmosphere, will pull their pants down, right? We'll get the whole thing.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  So the aliens can't hide from us forever, right? We're gonna, our technology is getting to the point where we're gonna find them in their own home.

• 2:32:58Joe Rogan?

  When they came out with the James Webb Telescope, how long was the development process? And where are they at now in terms of a future, better version of something like that?

• 2:33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a long process. I mean, almost as soon as Hubble launched, they started planning the successor to Hubble, which was James Webb. It was famously over budget. I think the original budget was supposed to be eight hundred million dollars and it ended up costing ten billion. Isn't that crazy? Just went completely overblown. But this was because, you know, there was some bad contractors, astronomers tend to underestimate their budgets a little bit when they're planning these things out and there's inflation. So these things, you know, if you do a project over twenty years, which is what it ended up taking, because it was nineteen ninety-five, I think, and then we got it in sort of, was it twenty twenty-one, twenty twenty-two, it actually ended up getting in the sky. So it took a long time, right, for that, for that project to develop. We are starting the H W A project now.

• 2:33:51Speaker 01

  There's already design teams, working groups that are putting the first, you know, blueprints together of what this thing would look like. But of course, it's in jeopardy because the White House wanted to slash the NASA science project by fifty percent, which basically just ends that entire program. I mean, there's about forty missions that would end. NASA missions that would end in that White House budget. But fortunately, the Senate readjusted it back up to pretty much the last year's levels.

• 2:34:18Joe Rogan?

  Why don't you go talk to those people? Why don't you give a speech the way you just laid it out for us and how fascinating, important this stuff is? I don't think these assholes know.

• 2:34:28Speaker 01

  I've been to DC, I have lobbied, but you only talk to their aides. That's all you end up talking to.

• 2:34:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you've got to get in front of Congress. You've got to get in front of these people where the American people see it on television and get a chance to understand, like, this is it.

• 2:34:41Speaker 01

  I do, yeah.

• 2:34:42Joe Rogan?

  This is like one of the most important things to look for that you could even imagine.

• 2:34:47Speaker 01

  And we can do it. We actually, for the first time in human civilization, we have the ability to do the experiment, is there life on another planet?

• 2:34:56Joe Rogan?

  What is this, Jamie? This is some of the images from the Hubble?

• 2:34:58Speaker 03

  This is showing what the new telescope, the Roman scope, telescope would show.

• 2:35:04Speaker 01

  It's just a huge field of view, Roman.

• 2:35:06Speaker 03

  That picture is what the Hubble got, and then it's zooming out to show you what.

• 2:35:10Speaker 01

  So Roman's happening, hopefully. Yeah, Roman should be flying.

• 2:35:15Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:35:17Speaker 01

  Roman, interestingly, is military technology, is spy technology. So apparently the NSA had two Hubble-class space telescopes in their basement. They just were like, said to NASA, "By the way, we're not using these, they're out of date for us, do you want one?" And NASA took it and turned it into Roman.

• 2:35:36Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:35:37Speaker 01

  They just have them lying around.

• 2:35:39Joe Rogan?

  That's what I'm talking about. These motherfuckers have technology they're keeping from us. What could be done better? Like, what is, if you had an unlimited budget and enormous supply of brilliant minds to get together to coordinate something? What would be how you would set it up to make it even more powerful?

• 2:35:59Speaker 01

  For what goal?

• 2:36:00Joe Rogan?

  Seeing further, seeing clearer, being able to precisely locate planets and get a much better view of them.

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, as I said earlier, whenever we improve our instrumentation, our precision, by a factor of anywhere from three up to 10, let's say, in that ballpark, like a big improvement, you get surprises. You find stuff you never expected in the universe. And we've seen that every time.

• 2:36:25Joe Rogan?

  Every time.

• 2:36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that whenever you listen to the universe in a different way. So we were, you know, for years and years, we've just been using our eyes, basically optical light, to look at the universe and X-rays and radio waves. And then recently, we started doing LIGO, and LIGO is listening for gravitational waves from the universe instead. So it's like listening to the acoustic oscillations of the universe rather than seeing it. And again, as soon as we started doing that, we discovered tons and tons of merging black holes, and it's just totally transformed our idea of how black holes merge and form. So whenever we do something we've never done before, look in a different way, the universe constantly surprises us. So it's not going to be a single mission. It's not going to be, we should all just put all our eggs in this one basket of Habitual Worlds Observatory.

• 2:37:10Speaker 01

  We need to have this multi-pronged attack of let's just keep pushing everything and making sure it's a significant improvement from what came before in terms of their sensitivity, and making sure the scientists to actually interpret the data at the end of the day, right? You can't do science unless the data is A, public, and then B, people are actually there to study it. So those are the two key ingredients. Just have great telescopes and great people.

• 2:37:34Joe Rogan?

  Is funding the biggest bottleneck for it right now? Or is it a lack of interest from the right amount of people? Like, what is...

• 2:37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, certainly, I mean, HWO, we're talking about a mission that's going to cost at least $10 billion, and the NASA budget is about $25, $26 billion. So it's eating up already. I mean, if you built it in one year, it would eat up almost the, you know, half of the budget. So it's impossible for that mission to be built in a year, even though probably we could if we had the money. Maybe in a year or two, you could probably build something like that. So that, yeah, if you, if you doubled NASA's budget, it would come twice as fast. For sure, you'd have it in maybe five years rather than waiting to 2050. That's what we're talking about. It's just kind of depressing when you think about it.

• 2:38:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's kind of depressing. It's like weird stuff happens. Like when the Biden administration left, the $93 billion in loans just went off to like weird places, like, which is more than they had done in 15 years. Like, you guys could have done that.

• 2:38:28Speaker 01

  You have the money.

• 2:38:29Joe Rogan?

  You guys had the money to make the most insane telescopes.

• 2:38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:32Joe Rogan?

  We could find out more.

• 2:38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Carl Sagan had a quote once. He said that the, uh, the entire SETI program was equivalent to one attack helicopter. If you did like the entire, in its maximal form, would have been the cost of one attack helicopter.

• 2:38:45Joe Rogan?

  Dude, if I was president, I'd go ham. I'd, I'd bring in all the cosmologists and like, what do we gotta do?

• 2:38:52Speaker 01

  Let's figure this out now.

• 2:38:53Joe Rogan?

  Let's get crazy. Let's get crazy. You guys wanna get rich?

• 2:38:55Speaker 03

  This image shows, uh, telescopes that we have used and then a few that are being made. So down here is the size of the James Webb telescope. It's all the way down.

• 2:39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's limited. It's only six and a half meters. So it's limited. They couldn't really make it any bigger because you couldn't get a rocket that could fit it. So actually Starship could launch that thing without any unfolding. It wouldn't have 200 points of failure. It's, it could actually pretty much fit inside the fuselage of Starship. And even better, it would cost less because a huge cost in these space telescopes is making them really light. So the mirrors are like these special honeycomb structures to make them super light. So they, they're low cost to launch. But if you have Starship, it can launch like a hundred tons, I think it is. You could literally just take these ground-based telescopes you already have and just shove them in there and, you know, obviously put some, some chassis on it, but you could, it'd be way, way cheaper to launch these things. So, I mean, I'm very excited about the prospect of having heavy launch

• 2:39:51Speaker 01

  capabilities that Starship give us. That plus investment in something like, you know, these kind of giant telescope designs, we could launch some truly gargantuan things into space and probe those atmospheres and, you know, see those aliens and what they're up to. So, um, yeah, I would, I would say the future can be bright because we have the means to do it, if we have the will to do it.

• 2:40:14Joe Rogan?

  It just seems to be a puzzle that most human beings on earth are fascinated with. The fact that that is inadequately funded is enraging. It's enraging. It just makes you crazy. Like of all the things that we should be interested in, that seems to the, space seems to be the big one. And it was until we were all fucked up by light pollution. I think if we didn't have light pollution, I think people would have a, a much greater sense of the majesty of the, of our existence in the cosmos. It's such a bummer. It really is.

• 2:40:51Speaker 01

  Have you been to a dark skies area?

• 2:40:52Joe Rogan?

  Yes. The, I've talked about it too many times in the podcast to repeat it, but there was a time when um, I went to the, the um, the array in um, uh, the big island. Uh, Ma- Ma- Ma- and I went up there on the perfect night. There was no moon and it was like being in the hub of the universe. It was like being in a spaceship, a convertible spaceship. That's what it felt like. It was so incredible. The entire sky was filled with stars. The Milky Way was beautifully clear and it was like life changing. The life cha- I've, I've gone up there three times since, never caught it that way again.

• 2:41:33Speaker 01

  You're kind of like the overview effect. You heard that with astronauts when they go up to space?

• 2:41:36Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:41:36Speaker 01

  And they see the earth and I think we should, we should launch all our um, presidents into space.

• 2:41:41Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's a good idea.

• 2:41:42Speaker 01

  Bring them back, but let them have that, that overview, cause I think that is.

• 2:41:45Joe Rogan?

  Launch it with Katy Perry. Everyone has to go up with Katy Perry. She has to bring a daisy.

• 2:41:49Speaker 01

  She's the guide.

• 2:41:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that would be great for, but I also think they should have a mushroom experience. But that's just me. But going into space, just, I mean, just being able to see it, used to be the norm for human beings. There was no light pollution. You could get away from the campfire, you lay on your back and you see everything. And I think that gave us a better understanding. First of all, it made us more humble, for sure. You're, you're confronted with this impossible image in front of you. And now that we know what that. That is. So ancient man's looking at it. It's just incredible, beautiful lights and they're tracking the constellations and marking them down. And this is what this is. What's called this one Leo.

• 2:42:33Joe Rogan?

  But when you get to what we know now and what we know, those are all fireballs in the sky that are bigger than our sun. And they're millions of miles away and that you're seeing just a tiny fraction of what the actual universe is, which is really nuts. When you see like, I'm sure you've seen this, but maybe people haven't. When there's an image of what you see in the night sky, when you have a full, clear view of the cosmos. And it's this tiny, little, itty bitty little thing. And yet it's still insane and majestic. And I think that we've gotten so arrogant because of cities.

• 2:43:12Joe Rogan?

  Because everybody just sees this black cloud over us, this just this curtain over the sky. And maybe you see the moon, but that's it. You see a dot here or a dot there. That's the only stars you see are the most bright ones are Venus. And then you don't get a sense of what we're really doing.

• 2:43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes me sad when.

• 2:43:32Joe Rogan?

  So here's the inner city sky, suburban, urban, rural, excellent dark sky. But then what the thing about the observatory is that it's above the clouds. We drove through the clouds.

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that doesn't even do it justice.

• 2:43:46Joe Rogan?

  No, not even close, but there's pictures of it. See if you can, the Monaloa Observatory.

• 2:43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think what makes me sometimes sad is as an astronomer, sometimes people say, you know, what's the point of looking for life out there? Like I care about the, you know, the bread on the table, economy and jobs and factories and stuff like that. I care about the things that really directly affect my life. But I think there has to be things that we do as humans. Existential things like, are we alone in the universe? How can it be a bigger question than that?

• 2:44:16Joe Rogan?

  That's what I saw.

• 2:44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:18Joe Rogan?

  Maybe even better than that.

• 2:44:19Speaker 01

  And when you see something like that, you realize that there's more to this life than just substance of just staying alive for the sake of staying alive. There are grander things than what we have on this planet.

• 2:44:30Joe Rogan?

  Also. It's so frustrating that we're very capable of curing all those problems for the vast majority of people on this planet if we weren't so fucking greedy.

• 2:44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:39Joe Rogan?

  If we really treated humanity like a community, we could, we could completely eliminate starvation and poverty the way it exists today.

• 2:44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:48Joe Rogan?

  We can completely, just, no one's even tried.

• 2:44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, the inequality right now is, is so out of control in this country, in the world.

• 2:44:56Joe Rogan?

  Well, in the country, but in the world, the craziest thing that I've ever heard is that thirty-four thousand dollars is one percent of the world.

• 2:45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:04Joe Rogan?

  The one percenters, the people that are running the world, that everybody likes to think they're the, the people pulling the strings, now that's you bitch.

• 2:45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:10Joe Rogan?

  You're a fuck, you work at Starbucks, you're a one percenter.

• 2:45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:13Joe Rogan?

  If you work full-time at Starbucks, you are the one percent of the world. You're the string puller, but you're not, right? No. No, it's, the world's really kinda crazy.

• 2:45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the point zero zero one, or whatever it is, yeah, that's the problem.

• 2:45:25Joe Rogan?

  Both things can be accomplished. If we really directed our resources in a, in a kind, moral, and ethical way, we would solve that first and then get everybody excited about solving the cosmos.

• 2:45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is kinda ridiculous that in astronomy, you know, we used to always be completely federally supported, there was some private funding, but by and large, it was, it was pushed and pulled by federal grants and federal money. And I think that's generally healthy, right? Because then it's, it's, everyone can apply for it. Um, it's not about being mates with Jeff Bezos, or being friends with, you know, certain high-influenced people.

• 2:45:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:45:58Speaker 01

  But we, we get into this stage increasingly where, you know, private money is having a big influence, even in astronomy and other fundamental sciences as well. And then, you know, the people that succeed end up being not necessarily the Einsteins, the most brilliant people, they're just the people that have the right connections and can pull the strings and, uh, we're on the island at the right time. You know, that kinda stuff. And that's just kinda gross.

• 2:46:19Joe Rogan?

  It's gross, yeah.

• 2:46:20Speaker 01

  It shouldn't be that way.

• 2:46:22Joe Rogan?

  It's also gross that humans can control resources. I mean, think about all the problems that they have on earth that are directly a result of someone wanting to control natural resources.

• 2:46:34Joe Rogan?

  That really should be everybody's. If we're really smart about it, we look at the oil's clearly everybody's, the water's clearly everybody's. We should all agree that all the stuff that we need should be everybody's.

• 2:46:44Speaker 01

  The air, yeah.

• 2:46:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's like, you'd charge you for air would be wild, right? But you could charge it for water, or they could charge you for oil. It's kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy that we have allowed that system to be in place where an individual can literally be in control of the blood of the earth that we use to make plastic and electronics. And that's where we're at.

• 2:47:05Speaker 01

  Right, so when you get that, you know, if you do got, I've never been to space, I've never had that, certainly seen clear night skies, but I think when you look out, you see not countries and boundaries, you just see this, we're all in this together.

• 2:47:16Joe Rogan?

  That's what everybody says.

• 2:47:17Speaker 01

  Tiny little fragile thing. There's, it, this is it, like, we could fuck this up so easily, but we could also make it so glorious if we work together.

• 2:47:25Joe Rogan?

  That also gives me pause about this whole idea that the aliens are all like space daddies, come to keep us from blowing ourselves up, like, that might be like very idealistic thinking. And if they don't exist, we're on our own.

• 2:47:37Speaker 01

  That's the God illusion, right? It's like, it's wishing for that fatherly figure to come down and teach me the erron my ways and look after us, and that's just, look, the cavalry ain't coming, Joe, this is it. We, it's all, it's on us, it's on our skin to solve this fricking problem.

• 2:47:52Joe Rogan?

  Well, I was like when the United States was about to bomb Iran, I was like, okay, well now we're gonna find out. Let's see if the aliens step in and go, hey, hey, hey, cut the shit. They didn't.

• 2:48:04Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:48:04Joe Rogan?

  Maybe they only step in when you use nukes. Maybe they have like a threshold of acceptable aggression that they allow.

• 2:48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think there's any backstop. There's no backstop.

• 2:48:13Joe Rogan?

  I think it's up to us.

• 2:48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:15Joe Rogan?

  I think we have to figure it out. But I think we're all aware of that, and it's kind of the cool part of this whole, the weirdness of this experience that we're going through, is that it's not guaranteed, and that there's a bunch of struggle that really has to take place, there's a lot of thinking that has to take place, a lot of talking and an understanding and a recognition that some of our behaviors totally illogical.

• 2:48:38Joe Rogan?

  And totally, a lot of it, totally counterproductive, but like, why? Like, why are we still behaving like territorial apes? Like, what is, even though you're not, and I'm not, Jamie's not, like, a lot of people aren't. You know, it's not everything. It's not every interaction that humans have.

• 2:48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:56Joe Rogan?

  But it's enough that it's still pushing the worst aspects of our life, which is war and poverty and crime and violence. It's still pushing all those things.

• 2:49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, that, it's hard, because, I mean, you became like, the top podcast, and because there's competition, and that competition probably drove you to make the podcast better and better and better. And similarly, as a scientist, we're in competition with each other. So there's almost a capitalist system embedded into science that I want to, uh, not like, crush my enemy or something. I'm not trying to crush the other scientists, but I certainly have, I know what the, the level field is, and if you want to stand out, you have to, you know, bat above that level. And so that, that drives me to become, I'm definitely influenced by competition. I feed off it.

• 2:49:39Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:49:39Speaker 01

  And, and it makes me a better scientist when I know someone's breathing down my neck at my data. I'm like, let's, that's it, let's just crank out the hours, we're gonna do the best we can. But if I know no one's looking at my dataset, and I've got three years to myself, I'm just gonna chill. I'm just be like, there's no, there's no urgency here, let's think about other things, let's do other stuff. So that, that, that competition, like you said, is really double edged. And I don't know, we need to figure out a way to, to channel it, because, um, you know, I did martial arts as a kid a lot. And one of the things I really learned.

• 2:50:09Joe Rogan?

  What'd you do, what'd you style?

• 2:50:10Speaker 01

  I did taekwondo, I did bino muay thai, um, and I did some shochikane karate, um, but mostly taekwondo. And I learned a lot from that, and just mentally about myself. I, you know, I really want my kids to do martial arts, because I feel like it's just a transformative experience for learning how to master yourself. And one of the things I really learnt was how to channel negative feelings into something productive. Right, so I was, uh, feeling really cut up about a breakup with a girlfriend at the time, and I was just beating the crap out of these punch bags. And I was going training every night, every session I could get my hands on. And then it ended up turning. Me into this like beast. I was like ripped. I got a six pack and I was uh training with the national squad and I you know, I got pretty decent.

• 2:50:55Speaker 01

  And it was, it it wasn't like I was aiming to do that. It was just a outlet for this anger. And then I looked back at it and realized, hey, I've managed to turn this negative thing into something really productive. And I've tried to, whenever I have those kind of feelings, I always try to twist them in the same way. I remember when I first arrived at Harvard, I had the same thing. I arrived at Harvard and all the names on the corridors were famous professors. And I was just freaking out. I was like, fuck, I've got to have coffee with this guy. This, these legends, like, how am I gonna like handle a conversation with these dudes? And um I remember I was kind of like a bit of an outcast because I wasn't in anyone's group at the time. And I remember walking down the corridor and hearing them laugh at me, saying, oh, here comes the moon. I heard there's a moon guy in in the group or something.

• 2:51:40Speaker 01

  They thought the idea of looking for moons was crazy. So they're all kind of laughing. I came around the corridor and you know, kind of like, yeah, you know, it was kind of awkward. And I felt like they all looked down at me, and they probably did back then. And after a few years, I really, I know I earned their respect because I was out publishing them and I was driven by that competition. I was like, I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna prove to you how good I am by publishing twice what you publish. I'm gonna do better science. I'm gonna do more of it. I'm gonna make myself so good, you can't ignore me. It'd be ridiculous to ignore what I'm doing because I'm so far ahead of you. That's what I wanted to do. And I got to a point where I knew they wanted me in their group now. They were like, oh, come join our, come join our group.

• 2:52:19Speaker 01

  And I didn't let them get close because I knew I performed better when I play that game in my head that everyone's against me. It was just sort of a mind fuckery. And it's that same, I get it. Yeah, same thing as martial arts. It's like learning what are the tricks, the hacks that make you operate well. But being conscious of it. And I think as a society, if we can do that, there's a hack. Competition is a hack that makes us super productive. But it's just a way, can we hack it and channel it in a conscious way towards a productive outcome?

• 2:52:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, turn it into enthusiasm and turn it into inspiration. Instead of just be overcome with jealousy and rage, which is what happens to the weaker of minds. Yeah. Well, you know, interesting enough with this podcast. I don't think of it in a competitive way at all, and I never have. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's successful. It's because this podcast, even though it might be the number one podcast, it's cooperative with, I don't know how many podcasts. A giant number of my friends do podcasts. I promote their podcasts. I have them on. I'll do their podcasts sometimes. I like, we all promote each other. So it's it.

• 2:53:28Speaker 01

  It's a community.

• 2:53:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know how other people do it, but I don't do it that way. I think only about what I want to do. I'm like, and I think the only way to have all of your resources, all of your concentration and all of your efforts, put entirely into the subject matter and what the conversation is going to be like. You shouldn't be thinking about anything else. Shouldn't be thinking about results. I just think about process. That's all I think about. All I think about is like, okay, he's gonna come in. What are my, what are my questions? What are we gonna talk about? And I'm excited about this. I'll listen. I'll drive my car. I'll listen to the sauna to things. And I just really get worked up about it. But I don't do it for competition. I do it because

• 2:54:11Joe Rogan?

  I think I'm super lucky to be able to do it, and I think it would be a horrible misuse of that fortune if I didn't treat it with respect. If I didn't do my best every time I do it. So I just do that. And that's it.

• 2:54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And from the martial arts, that you must have a competitive drive there, right?

• 2:54:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but it's not in podcasting.

• 2:54:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:31Joe Rogan?

  It seems like it would be because that's the thing I'm the most successful in, which is kind of weird. Uh, it's, uh, yeah, I'm competitive in everything, but I'm very competitive with myself. I'm very self-critical, which is one of the things that I learned from martial arts, is if you don't have an accurate assessment of your abilities, and you think you're better than you really are, if you can't see someone do something, oh, that guy's better than me, then you're missing out. Because you're also missing out on the opportunity for you personally to get better. If you're delusional and you think you're better than you are, maybe you won't work as hard, or maybe you won't correct some of the errors in your technique and maybe your approach and your tactics. You have to constantly be improving this thing, and you have to have people that are better than you. And you that you train with all the time.

• 2:55:14Joe Rogan?

  So that sort of cooperative thing that came out of martial arts where you need killers to become a killer. That helped me so much in comedy. Because my approach to comedy was different than most of the other comedians that had. Television deals and movie deals, they all wanted to be the man. And they wanted to be at the top and kind of keep everybody else down. There was a lot of that going on. There's a few people that were cooperative, but. I was ultra cooperative, like I would prop people up. I want them to get better. I'll tell them how to get better. I'd help them. I'd help young guys. I'd I'd want I'd go on the road with people funnier than me. Like I wanted it. Because I know from martial arts, this is the only way you don't. Get comfortable and get better. You gotta be like really uncomfortable a lot of the time to get better.

• 2:55:59Joe Rogan?

  And the but that getting better is the ultimate. That's what the goal is for everyone and it can't just be for you. If that if you have this short sighted idea like I have to be the king. Like no, you're you're missing out on the whole thing. The whole thing is you need a bunch of kings. You need everybody to be awesome. And then we all rise together. That's how it has to be.

• 2:56:19Speaker 01

  In science, it so often goes both ways, though. It's the same in comedy and and science. I mean, you think about Isaac Newton. Um, he was famously such an asshole.

• 2:56:29Joe Rogan?

  A lot of comics like that too, big name guys.

• 2:56:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:31Joe Rogan?

  Famous guys.

• 2:56:32Speaker 01

  Gets to the top and then spends most of his subsequent career just crushing other people down. Right. And there's that need to be singularly uh recognized as I want everyone to see that it's just me and it's only me. But there's a, you know, there's scientists, I think we all admire and get on with the best, actually the ones who are collaborative, who who like comedy, like share and. Want to do it together. So I think there's a lot to. Sometimes comedians and scientists should interact more, I think. There's when I was a um a student, there used to be this thing called Fame Lab. And he used to get stand up comedians to come in and teach scientists how to talk to the public, how to do scientific communication. And they said it's the same. I don't know, maybe you disagree. It's the same kind of thing. You have to have the kind of the balls to stand up there and just put yourself in that situation.

• 2:57:17Joe Rogan?

  It helps if you have an English accent.

• 2:57:19Speaker 01

  Uh, they in comedy.

• 2:57:20Joe Rogan?

  You know. Talking about the cars.

• 2:57:23Speaker 01

  That probably helps.

• 2:57:24Joe Rogan?

  It does.

• 2:57:24Speaker 01

  Comedy doesn't help.

• 2:57:26Joe Rogan?

  I could help. It works with Jimmy Carr, it works with Ricky Gervais.

• 2:57:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah, they've got it.

• 2:57:31Joe Rogan?

  There's a certain air of respectability that comes with an English accent, doesn't come with an American accent.

• 2:57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think, I think there's a lot, yeah, public speaking is something a lot of scientists. It's same because there's so many brilliant scientists and they just can't, they can't.

• 2:57:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's unfortunate. And then there's so many people that call themselves science educators that don't really know what they're talking about and they're talking about science. And these are the people that are like the figureheads.

• 2:57:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:57:56Joe Rogan?

  Unfortunately, instead of the actual people that are doing the science. Yeah, it's a skill. I mean, it's a skill that anyone can learn. If you can talk to a friend, you can talk to the public. You just have to learn how to do it and you have to get better at it. It's not impossible. And yeah, you're gonna have anxiety, but that's a challenge, that you should just embrace that challenge and get over it. And just have notes and be prepared and practice, just like everything else. Like if you're intelligent enough to be a cosmologist, you're intelligent enough to talk publicly in front of a bunch of people about cosmology. And you also, you're gonna have a certain amount of enthusiasm that you're gonna have to figure out the right way to convey it to people to make it infectious. And that's where it gets complicated, because some people are brilliant, but they're bland and flat.

• 2:58:41Joe Rogan?

  And, you know, I'm sure you've had professors like that, right?

• 2:58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58:44Joe Rogan?

  And they're brilliant, but they're just like, oh my god, I'm droning out with this motherfucker.

• 2:58:48Speaker 01

  I've slept through a few lectures in my time.

• 2:58:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and then there's people like Carl Sagan, who are just fascinating to listen to the way he talks. Yeah, magnetic, the charisma. It's a thing. It's a factor, you know? It's not the only one, but it's a thing. It's a, it's a part of it.

• 2:59:02Speaker 01

  But you think you could teach someone to be Sagan-esque?

• 2:59:05Joe Rogan?

  No. No, I think there's, you know, you can't teach someone to be Dave Chappelle. But you can teach them to be a better version of who they are, for sure. You know, and, and then extroverts are extroverts and introverts are introverts and it's just like, you just, you know, you're not gonna be the same person as Jim Carrey, you know, you have to be that guy to be that guy. But you can learn how to better express yourself and you can learn, there's techniques. There's an understanding of how the human mind. That's interpreting that's interpreting what you're saying. How are they perceiving this? Are they perceiving your emotions? Are they feeling? Maybe there's an anecdotal story that you can bring out with passion that connects these people to you. So they can understand what made you so locked into this idea.

• 2:59:49Joe Rogan?

  And then they'll go, oh, and then they feel it instead of just blandly reciting facts and just doing it because this is the way you do it with your coworkers and your peers.

• 2:59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I learned that through YouTube, you know, I do a lot of YouTube communication. And when I first started the channel, I remember I was copying. I was looking at other stuff that I see was doing well. And I was trying to like transplant that style of video onto my own. And it wasn't me, it was, it was, it was kind of like, um, too animated, too, you know, I'm more of a chill person. And this was like, hey, hey, hey, let's talk about space, you know, that's just like not, it doesn't jive with me that much. But I put it on and then I was doing this for a while and we, we just kind of flatlined in subscribers after a while and I was like, I think I'm gonna pat this in, but before I do, I'll just make one or two videos the way I really wanna do it and then I'll stop.

• 3:00:41Speaker 01

  And so I made these like super deep dive and I kind of opened up a little bit personally. And you have to be a little bit vulnerable to let your, you know, I'm a romantic, so I wanted that romantic element of astronomy to come out, you know, why am I so passionate about the stars? What are the deep questions that move me since, since I was a kid? Those, you have to let that personality come out. And once that, once people realize why you personally are so fascinated by this, it becomes infectious. And then they start to get the same bug. So, yeah, I learned as a, as a communicator that certainly being willing to be vulnerable. It does, it feels very strange as a scientist to talk about vulnerability and emotional connection, but unless you let that in,

• 3:01:27Speaker 01

  it becomes, it becomes dry, it becomes inaccessible.

• 3:01:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I think that applies to almost any kind of public speaking, whether it's stand-up comedy. I think it even applies to music. You know, when someone is singing the blues and you just, you just know that they've had some heartache. Like, I always said that that's one of the reasons why Janis Joplin was so good. When she would sing "Take a Little Piece of My Heart", you believe that.

• 3:01:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01:52Joe Rogan?

  You believed it. Like, it was coming out. Like, that, that's a lady that's experienced in pain.

• 3:01:57Speaker 01

  I was thinking with Alanis Morissette.

• 3:01:59Joe Rogan?

  Yes!

• 3:01:59Speaker 01

  That Jack Little Pill.

• 3:02:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:02:01Speaker 01

  Me and my dad talk about that album all the time. There's so much rawness in that damn album. You can't imitate that.

• 3:02:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you can't imitate that. And you can't imitate that with comedy, you can't imitate that with anything. But I think you could teach people how to do that when, when they talk about science. It could be taught.

• 3:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, find their own authentic voice and use that. Because no one wants to see a copy.

• 3:02:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:02:22Speaker 01

  You want to see something fresh. That's what makes it exciting.

• 3:02:24Joe Rogan?

  Well, and then the beautiful thing about YouTube and putting out your own content is, you can figure that out on your own. You don't have to get molded by executives and some, you know, show business-type people that are gonna turn you into a version they think is gonna be most marketable. You can figure, and people will probably, they would probably tell you to do it differently. They'd probably tell you to, "You gotta have more energy, David." "You gotta, like, wave your hands around a lot."

• 3:02:48Speaker 01

  That's why I don't do those shows anymore.

• 3:02:49Joe Rogan?

  Maybe wear a bow tie.

• 3:02:49Speaker 01

  I used to do a few of those and I got sick of it for that exact... I remember I was talking about a supernova once on camera. I might say the show and the director was behind the camera.

• 3:02:59Speaker 01

  I was like, "Can we just try, hey, bigger, too big?" And I was like, "That's just not, that's not what I'm about. Can we just bring it down?" And, yeah, I think being on YouTube's great, uh, because you get to just authentically talk the way you want to talk.

• 3:03:11Joe Rogan?

  You'll find an audience, you know? I mean, the people, when I first started doing this podcast, everybody was telling me, "You can't do three hours. It's too long." I'm like, "Why not?" Just don't listen to the whole three. I don't give a fuck. I'm just gonna do what I wanna do. This is what I, if I'm talking to Graham Hancock about ancient civilizations. We're not gonna talk for twenty minutes, man. We're gonna talk for hours and hours and hours. I'm like, what else? What else you know? What? I'm intere-, as long as I'm interested.

• 3:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what makes it good, cuz you're engaged with the topics.

• 3:03:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and this is the beautiful thing about this time that we live in, that people can just start a YouTube channel. And just talk about things that you're fascinated by and things that you're knowledgeable about and then, you know, people attract to it.

• 3:03:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is kinda sad that kids label YouTuber as the number one job.

• 3:03:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, they're influencer, I think, is the number one job. Yeah.

• 3:04:01Speaker 01

  Cuz it used to be astronaut, right?

• 3:04:03Joe Rogan?

  President.

• 3:04:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, president astronaut. And now YouTuber or social media star is like, yeah, my kids both have little YouTube channels. They're obsessed with it. They, every day we have to do a premiere of one of their videos they've made around the house and.

• 3:04:15Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 3:04:16Speaker 01

  It's definitely influence, uh, kid, kids now, that's, they aspire for that, but it's, has some great elements. It's creative, it's an outlet.

• 3:04:23Joe Rogan?

  As long as you can keep your shit together, because the interaction with that amount of human beings is also very problematic for young people.

• 3:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:31Joe Rogan?

  Because just, just social media, you know, we talked about this the other day, that Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that shows self-harms, particularly among girls, uh, suicidal ideation, all the different things that happen to them. Anxiety and depression all rises with the invention of social media. That's times a hundred when you're putting out content.

• 3:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:54Joe Rogan?

  And then especially if you're reading that, the comment section and reading Reddit threads and reading your emails, that you're gonna deal with so much hate and so much anger and so many frustrated, sick, mentally ill people that are reaching out trying to destroy your life for no fucking reason whatsoever. And if you, you know, you're a young person and you don't know how to like. Put this into

• 3:05:17Speaker 01

  You're not equipped for it.

• 3:05:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you're not equipped for it. No one is equipped for it. It's not normal. It's not a normal type of interaction to have that many people commenting on you and your life.

• 3:05:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05:27Joe Rogan?

  And so that can fuck kids up, especially if they're like really young and they get into that. And that's like how they develop as an adult with that kind of attention. I just think.

• 3:05:37Speaker 01

  My, my kids' channels, it's only me, I think, that watches this, unfortunately. And I think, yeah, but you're totally right. I mean, the, the feedback loop is, is potentially really damaging.

• 3:05:47Speaker 01

  And I, I, I'm so glad that I grew up in an era without cell phones.

• 3:05:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, me too.

• 3:05:53Speaker 01

  I can't imagine how I would have got through life if I had Twitter at my fingertips or Facebook, whatever it was growing up. Because that just adds a whole new stress. And there's, you know, you hear these stories of kids at school where, you know, the boys like saying to their girlfriends, like, well, you need to send me photos of you. And then they, they get these photos and they send it around the school as a joke. And there's all this kind of weird

• 3:06:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:06:15Speaker 01

  fucked up bullying going on. And we didn't have to deal with any of that shit growing up. Like it's, it's so much simpler. I mean, my, am I someone saying to me, oh, I'm friends with this other kid at camp because he's got a hundred subscribers? And that's become a thing, right? Like how many, how many subscribers or followers you have sort of forms like a popularity rank in, in even real world settings. And it's messed up. There's so much pressure on the kids in a way we never experienced. And, you know, the more cognitive burden you have like that, the less you can focus on the things you're truly passionate about and discover on what you want to do in your life.

• 3:06:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's going to be very challenging for these kids. It's going to be very weird.

• 3:06:55Speaker 01

  Now, ChatGPT is adding like an extra virtual girlfriends or whatever they'll probably have on there and.

• 3:07:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Gets weird. Listen, man, thank you very much for being here. I really enjoyed it. It was really fun.

• 3:07:06Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 3:07:07Joe Rogan?

  Tell everybody your channel, how they can watch your content.

• 3:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. My channel is called Cool Worlds. I have a mouthful of cool worlds. So you can head to youtube.com slash at Cool Worlds. We also have a podcast, The Cool Words Lab Podcast. And if you want to support a real research program, that's my team, The Cool Words Lab at Columbia University. You can just head to coolworldslab.com/support.

• 3:07:28Joe Rogan?

  There it is.

• 3:07:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, head over there and you're for the price of a coffee per month, you can actually support real astronomy research.

• 3:07:35Joe Rogan?

  Beautiful. Thank you very much. Let's do this again sometime. Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.

• 3:07:54Joe Rogan?

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