"Neil deGrasse Tyson"

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Subject to change. Hey everybody, you're listening to SmartList, hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and myself, Sean Hayes.
I know, I wish my voice was more masculine, too.

This show is about learning through laughter

in the brains of people around the world

who are far smarter than us three idiots.

And each week, one of us brings on a guest

who the other two don't know about.

So with that, let's jump into the Smartless rocket ship

and let's blast off into the universe together.

Ooh, I think I just turned myself on.

Smart.

Smart.

Smart. Oh, I think I just turned myself on.
I went to seventh grade with Janet Jackson.

Are you serious?

Did you?

Yeah, at a school called Valley Professional. It was a perfect, hold on.
It was a school that was only from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.
so that you had your afternoons free for auditioning. For auditions, yeah.
It was sort of like the back of a gas station on Sherman Way and Vineland, and I'm not sure they were accredited. I think chances are high that they were not accredited.
I went to high school with one of the kids. This is not a bit from the original Degrassi, junior high.
So. I went to college with, I was piano majors with Craig Robinson from the office.
Really? Oh, I knew that. Wait, I knew that.
Piano majors together, yeah. What's a piano major? You major in piano and you don't minor in it, get it? Major and minor.
Oh, oh, oh. Well, there are different ranks.
There's different, because I was a piano colonel, but, and then. That is so dumb, I can't believe you.
It's the stupidest thing. Of course you're going to laugh.
I just watched you, Hayes, because I knew, I knew that. Anyway, at ease.
Who's our guest? Whose guest is it today? Whose guest is it today? Guys, today my guest today grew up in the Bronx. He became interested in astronomy at the age of nine after visiting the Hayden Planetarium.
And today... Is this Derek Jeter? No, it's not Derek Jeter.
Close. He's now the director of that same planetarium.
And after studying at Harvard, he earned his doctorate from Columbia University. He was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
Sean, you've really done it this time. He's known for his ability to make difficult concepts accessible to every audience, Will.
Sure, yep. So, guys, we have with us today my favorite astrophysicist of all infinity neil degrasse tyson unbelievable sean what a guess hey guys what an honor thank you so much for being on here i know this is uh very nice of you to come and chat with us today i want to you know do people kind of like jump right in and ask you things about the universe in the same way one might, you know, after discovering someone's a doctor and go, you know, I have a pain in my lower back.
Without hesitation. Instead of asking you about you first.
Yeah, no, I don't care about me. And as an educator, I don't think who I teach should care about me.
That's like cult building. Really? Yeah, so compare these two scenarios.
Someone comes up to me and say, hey, aren't you Neil deGrasse? I said, yes. Tell me more about a black hole in this.
So that's the perfect educational encounter. The one that's not is, are you Neil Tyson? I said, yes.
Oh, what's your favorite color? And all of a sudden, I become the object of their curiosity rather than the universe itself. And in that way, I have failed.
And you don't like that? No, it's a failure. No, no.
It's a failure of my educational efforts. Got it.
If I become the object of their interest, that's all. I'll do it and I'll accommodate it.
But on a certain level, you feel like you've failed in your objective. Must not have made the science interesting enough for them to come at that.
But not knowing you, I would think, you know, all I ever see of you, and again, I'm such a huge fan of yours, and I could hear you talk about all of this crap, which I love, for hours. Oh, the stuff that he spent his life studying, you summed up as crap.
Thank you, Sean. I have a PhD in crap.
That's crap. This is why I don't have a PhD.
Crap is piled high and deep. That's what the PhD stands for.
No, but you know what I'm saying? Like, I want to get into that. And believe me, you will answer all of my questions.
I'm here for you, yes. But, like, when I read that thing that you first became enamored with, the universe at nine years old, going to the Hayden Planetarium, and now you're the director of the Hayden Planetarium.
Like, most teenagers don't have that drive, you know, because I read that you obsessively studied astronomy when you were a teenager. And so most teenagers don't have that drive.
What was the thing that kept you going? It was like, oh, my God, the thirst for knowledge. It was the, it wasn't so much the thirst for knowledge, but the fact that I knew that when I looked up, I was completely steeped in ignorance.
And boundless ignorance. And so there's this quest.
Jason usually just looks in the mirror and that happens. He's so connected with that thought.
I actually sleep with my eyes open. The fact that there's something around us that we know, about which we know so little, became this infinite source of curiosity for me.
And I've never been the same since, since age nine. And I didn't know that most people are still sort of ambling in college.
What am I going to major in? Oh, you majored in astronomy. Was that because it's early in the alphabet? You know, no, my stuff goes deep with regard to that.
And to that point, explain to people like us idiots who don't know what the difference between astrophysics and astronomy is. Well, so we're all in modern times do astrophysics.
Astronomy is the traditional older name for it. But in the late 1800s, we figured out how to apply the laws of physics to what was going on in the universe

and thus was birthed astrophysics.

Before then, it's like, well, the star is over here

and it's this bright and it's that color.

Oh, it might be moving, okay?

So let's call it a planet.

Or it's got a tail.

So we call it a comet.

So it's descriptive.

In the 19th century, we learned how to take spectra of stars

and a spectra breaks the light into its colors like a rainbow.

and when you do that, you learn things like how fast is it moving, how fast is it rotating, what it's made of, how long ago it was born. You can create models of that.
And so all of a sudden, the universe becomes our backyard. Yeah, because, you know, when I still do this, I mean, on the dumbest level, on the most, you know, simplest level, there's places on Earth and it's wearing thin where the air is cleaner and you can see more stars somewhere like Hawaii or whatever.
And you lie there and you, like a kid, I still act like a kid and I look up. And the longer you look up at a clear sky to all the stars, you can't help but think about everything you're talking about.
which is where do we come from? That light that we're seeing is like way older than the earth and whatever. That's the one that got me.
When I was about 12 years old, a teacher said to me, he said, look up, he said, you see that star? I don't know what I was doing with the teacher in the middle of the night, but he said, the light that you're seeing. That's another episode.
It's a different episode a different episode it's a whole different podcast that one's called you don't want to know then on a very special you don't want to know um so he said the light you're seeing right now left that star back in the roman empire and i said well what is what does that mean he says well the speed of light is and correct me if i'm wrong, you're 186,000 miles a second. You got it.
Okay. So 186,000 miles a second.
You just pull that out? Yeah. I mean, he left a mark.
Hold your jokes. Hold your jokes, Will.
So if you travel at 186,000 miles a second for a year, that's a light year. Yeah.
So it's a measurement of distance. So he said, so the light traveling at 186,000 miles per second since the Roman empire, that's how far away that- And that light has only just now reached us, that's correct.
Yeah. And he said, for instance, the sun, the heat that you're feeling on your face, this is after we woke up.
He said, he said,

he said,

that's... And you put down the cigarette.
Yeah. He put it out on my forearm and he said, that is seven minutes old, the heat from the sun.
So that's how far the sun is away. Okay.
So I don't know how you got the speed of light correct and that number wrong. Oh.
Uh-oh. You're close enough.
No, you're close enough. It's a long night.
So it's not seven minutes away. I'm going to give you the correct number.
I mean, to know the speed of light to that precision and then get that other number wrong, that's a little weird. But it's eight minutes and 20 seconds.
500 seconds. Wow, I was so close.
And by the way, it's not only the light that takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach us, so too does it take the sun's gravity. So if you were some giant and plucked the sun out of the middle of the solar system, we would still orbit.
We would still feel its gravity. We would not know any different for 8 minutes and 20 seconds.
And at that instant, we would plunge into darkness and fling out into interstellar space.

So that is, those moments, those things,

a teacher telling Jason that thing,

those are mind-blowing moments.

And I've had those mind-blowing moments

where I hear these things,

which obviously throughout,

because of what you do throughout your life,

you must have had a million mind-blowing revelations and stats and things thrown at you and discoveries that you've made. Have you reached a point where it doesn't blow your mind anymore? Or what are the things that blow your mind about the universe around us? So everyone, I think, should have their mind blown at least once a week, okay? That's the mind-blowing quota, I think, should be about that.
And if your mind is blown, it means you're not reading enough or you're not exploring enough because there's stuff out there. I'll give you, here's a simple one.
Ready? If you go to the flower of an apple orchard and count how many petals are on that flower. Okay.
There are five petals. Then that flower shrivels up and then it becomes the fruit of the tree, the apple.
If you cut the apple horizontally through it and you see the chambers, there are five chambers. So there's a correspondence between the number of seed chambers in the apple and the petals on the flower that became the apple.
I mean, this is just kind of, if you don't notice that, start noticing it. And then there are places where, and that's not even anything.
That's got nothing to do with the origin of the universe. But it's something simple that's around you.
I've had a question that I've been waiting to talk with somebody like you to help me try to answer. And it takes a cream, right? You're looking for a cream or an ointment or an ointment or a gel um the okay so if you look with a strong enough telescope uh you can see uh further and further back in time right because you're seeing light that is older and or new well you'll contextualize that for me but basically you could effectively look at the Big Bang.
Yeah, the origin of the universe. Exactly.
So you are looking at the past and then- By the way, just to be clear, we're in a coronavirus right now, but if I were sitting across the table from you, you don't see me in your present. You see me in your past.
Light at 186,000 miles per second goes one foot per nanosecond, one foot per billionth of a second. So if we're like three feet across from each other, you see me not as I am, but as I once was, three billionths of a second ago.
We don't make a big deal of that because human lifespan is much longer than billionths of a second.

But if I start getting farther in front, the moon is one and a half light seconds, the sun 500 light seconds, the nearest star four light years, you keep going farther and farther away, you get to significant timeframes back into the past of the object you're observing. And that's why, that's where cosmology comes in.
It's how we decode the record of the universe because it takes light so much damn time to reach us. And Sean, you were going to take cosmology, right, at one point? Yeah, for my skin.
Beauty school. That's why I glow.
That's why I glow like a star. Beautifully, the so if you're looking back at at something that happened a long time ago i.e the big bang um somewhere in that big bang is our planet is is the earth and therefore every you see the earth before anything has ever happened on it no so if you can see so if you can see back i'll let you continue but i i should really stop there.
But I'll let you continue. Well, so let's make an assumption that the Big Bang was the start of everything.
So at some point, whatever we're rolling around on here on this rock was in there. So my point is, if you can see all the way back that far, is there a theory, because it would be impossible to actually construct, where you could set up a series of mirrors where you could look back and forth and back and forth and back and forth enough times, theoretically, where you could see yesterday? Yes.
If we can already see the Big Bang, that's got to be harder than seeing yesterday. But if you constricted that into, or contracted that rather, into a series of mirrors, then maybe you could eventually see last week, last month.
Yeah, so if you put a mirror one light day away from you and you look at it, you will see yourself yesterday. Right.
Okay, but that requires a mirror. The Big Bang is not a mirror.
So when you see evidence of the Big Bang that far out, you're not seeing us go through the Big Bang. You're seeing another part of the universe go through the Big Bang.
If they looked to where we are, they don't see our light from you right now in this podcast. No.
They see Earth and our galaxy 14 billion years ago when we were going through the Big Bang.

So you have to be that distance away to see that far in the past.

So there is no way to construct a window into the past by setting up a series of well-tuned mirrors.

Well, if someone else set that up for you, yeah, so you can set up a mirror seven light days away, and then you look at it, you'll see yourself two weeks ago. Because it's seven days out, seven days back.
So in theory, like, Jason could apologize to me for certain things that he did. In theory.
Do you think we could set enough mirrors in a row so that we could look far back enough to see the start of Jason's question?

No.

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Find it on Amazon or at Target today. I want to go back again.
A lot of people don't ask you about you and I'm interested in you as well as all the other stuff. And I still want to get to that.
But you have two kids, right? Did they ever follow in your passion or do they have, are they on TikTok and that's it? There was never that expectation or obligation. And they had freedom to think what they want, to study what they want.
And they're each doing different things right now. But I can tell you that by the time they were 12 or 13 certified scientifically literate.
Oh, wow. Oh, yeah.
You don't have to tell us, but are they in that world of science? No, no, but they're scientifically literate. So the difference is, if you're scientifically literate, it means your brain is wired for inquiry.
It's wired for thought. So that at a young age, I'm happy that they were also polite when they did this because otherwise it would be embarrassing.
If you were a grown-up, walked into the room, and you said something, oh, I checked my horoscope sign today and my 12-year-old,

13-year-old kids heard that, they would say, well, what did you find?

They would start asking questions.

And what are you basing that on?

And have you tested it?

And they would just calmly sort of ask the questions to drive you into the corner that

you really are in because you have no foundation for those thoughts.

That's the science literacy that I'm talking about that anybody can and should cultivate for themselves, whether or not you become a scientist. Neil, if you could pick one subject that you would have an equal level depth of knowledge about, what would it be? Is there another area? Thanks for that question.
If I had a, if there's a parallel universe. Uh-oh, here we go.
An alternative, not in this universe, but another universe. In another universe, I would be writing songs for Broadway musicals.
Are you serious? Do you write? Do you play anything? Oh, here it comes, Sean. No, this is why it's another universe.
That's why I said. So I don't have musical ability, but I do, I like to write.
I like knowing the effect that words have on your emotions, on your thoughts, on your enlightenment. I like simplifying phrases.
And good songs are not complex stories. Go read a book if you wanted a complex story.
It's got to hit you emotionally. So I am, my family, we go to musical theater often.
I will tear up at a simple Broadway boy meets girl musical or nowadays it's boy meets boy, girl meets girl. Any of those where there's the expression of human emotion.
Well, thank you for checking out the 2010 smash hit on Broadway Promises, Promises, starring Sean Hayes and Kristen Chenoweth. That's so nice of you.
That's incredible. Way to go backstage, Neil.
Yeah. So if I had an alternative universe, so I like to write.
And so when I write my books, each sentence, each phrasing, each turn of the syllables of a word, I'm thinking about how that lands in the reader. And I think if it's done well, that's what it should be like because then you'll just want more of it.
So if there's another universe, that's what I'd be doing in that universe. I have an idea, and I'm not being snarky here at all.
What if you wrote a space musical? Like if you – I could see that would be really interesting if you somehow, I mean, would anybody think to make a musical about Hamilton? You know, like that's just bizarre. Yeah.
The fascinating fact about Broadway musicals is that they have been on every possible subject you couldn't ever have imagined. But not space.
Katz, the prime minister of Argentina. You know, just make the list.
How does that even happen? So why don't you do that? Because that's another... How did I start this? I said, in another universe.
But you could be the creative consultant. You're saying he could write the book and somebody else could write the music.
Yeah, I think so. I would need a...
I do have some ideas and I have notes in my book, but that's not, I got other stuff. I got the universe.
Call Sean. But we're making deals here.
But you know, it's funny that you say, Neil, that you say, you know, that they've, there are Broadway musicals based on every conceivable subject. The president of Argentina with Evita, they're, you know, whatever it is.
And that kind of reminded me of, and this whole conversation reminded me of somebody one time explaining to me the idea of infinity. And they said, imagine infinity is, imagine a room, imagine a library that is filled with books on every possible subject, including me describing that library to you.
There's a book on, uh, about me describing, describing that book to you. There's like on every possible, the effect of me describing that, uh, you know, to you.
Oh, we got an effect that has on butterflies, like whatever. Understood moving forward.
So then imagine that they're stacked in every direction. Yeah.
As far as you can see, they said that's what infinity is.

We got it. No, no, no.
The libraries themselves. End it with a question.
Will, can I talk to you for a sec? My question is this. No, I got one for you.
I'll give you a starter infinity, right? Because it's not really infinity, but it is something to think about. So if, consider that if you open a dictionary, every word used in the definition of every word is in that same dictionary.
Yeah. That's kind of mind-blowing.
Yeah, that is interesting. I never thought about that.
Okay. Now, other things that sort of transcend comprehension.

Pinocchio.

Okay, here's a sentence that Pinocchio utters.

Ready?

My nose is about to grow.

What will happen?

It's going to grow.

It's going to grow, probably.

It's not going to grow.

It's not going to grow.

Oh, no, because he's a liar. Let me finish probably it's not gonna grow it's not gonna grow

he's a liar let me finish it's not gonna grow that that means he was lying so that's right so it's not gonna grow no that means he was telling the truth okay so let me get to some other questions i have so my my point is that sentence has no meaning in Pinocchio's universe,

even though the nouns and verbs are all in the right place. It transcends the world that you have set up to understand Pinocchio's statements and his actions.
It's a very simple sentence. Given that we agree upon the rules of Pinocchio.
Yes. Yes.
We all, of course we agree. Of course we agree.
Given those rules, this is a sentence that cannot even be uttered in his world. Okay.
So, infinity is something that is not fundamentally accessible to the wiring of our brain because our brain evolved on the plains of the Serengeti to not get chased by a lion, okay? Not get eaten by a lion. This is – so the tools we need to not die in our evolutionary past do not include infinity.
Now, so based on that, so Neil, so our brains are not wired to understand the concept of – fundamentally to understand the concept of infinity. Yeah, there's an absence of logic.
We are logical creatures relative to other life forms, but our capacity to not be logical knows no bounds. But the fact is, you know that, and so you have to make certain leaps in order to try to, how do you hack that in order to make discoveries and things that you have to do? Do you know and are you just aware of your own inability to do it simultaneously? It comes from the math.
So you do the math long enough, then you absorb the math as part of your intuition. So you can think intuitively about what the math equations would have done rather than relying solely on how you would have not gotten eaten by a lion and the wiring that that provides.
So you start building up other wiring in your brain that empowers you to think in these other ways. And this is how you think in the quantum.
The quantum world is really weird. Particles popping in and out of existence, particles simultaneously existing as a wave and a wave wave-particle duality, you might have heard of this.
All of this is fundamental, and the mathematics describes it, the experiments measure it. The brain cannot comprehend it.
I know we don't have a lot of time. I have tons of questions.
So let's do, like, not a rapid fire. A lightning round.
I'm good. I got you.
Okay. Let's do it.
Boxers or briefs. And by the way, my lightning answers need to be matched with your lightning questions, just to be clear, in order for that to work.
No, we're here to listen to you. If you guys have, like, something to follow.
But these are really, I wrote these down because I really want to know. Are we ever going to get to Mars, and why do we want to? We will if it has geopolitical priorities.
But otherwise, I think it's a very distant dream. So if China says they want to put military bases on Mars, we're there in nine months.
If not— Come on. Really? Really? Yeah.
Yeah. We're going to the moon again.
Is that right? Did I just read that? Yeah, because other countries are gaining power over what's called cislunar space, the space between Earth and the Moon, and that's the new high ground.

So, there are geopolitical

forces that make all of that happen.

The business cases come later.

The tourism, then all the rest of this, and the

SpaceX, that all comes after.

The first forays out

there are countries

who have geopolitical interests in mind.

Columbus came to the new world.

Was that, did Queen Isabella

say, oh, Columbus, take

pictures and bring them back? No.

No, it was like, here's a satchel of Spanish flags. Plant them wherever you go and find a shorter trade route to India.
It's always been the driver of humanity. Always, always.
So, because I'm obsessed with the speed of light, how soon will we be able to travel the speed of light? Because so many scientists- you know, through the, wait, but wait, they've informed us of certain laws of physics. I'm just wondering, when do we start applying those? So breaking the light barrier is not the same thing as breaking the sound barrier, right? When you heard people say, oh, we'll never fly.
And they were just idiots. You know why? Because birds fly, right? And they're heavier than air.
You just haven't figured it out yet. And can you never go faster than sound? Rifle bullets went faster than sound before we had planes.
So we can make things faster than sound. Just figure it out.

The speed of light is not just a good idea.

It's the law of the universe.

And if you want to go faster, you have to, like, tunnel through space-time or have warp drives, which is what all the science fiction ones do.

They don't just actually travel faster than light.

They try to find some plausible scientific accounting for how they can travel faster than light. And I applaud them all for that.
Right, so why then, after what seems like a hundred years, is the only means of fast travel an airplane? Because doesn't it seem like by now there should be some kind of improvement on the plane? The only is you know don't get pissed off i know he sounds angry today i am because because i'm frustrated that this is the lightning round right i'm gonna tell you oh sorry good here it is now somebody else is angry uh some of you are old enough to remember the the concordST. Supersonic, right? Yeah, for sure.
Okay, so that's like the next leap from an ordinary airplane. Do you know something? We didn't have a supersonic commercial plane, but France and England did.
Right. That was the Concorde.
And I always wondered why they stopped making them. Oh, you know why? Oh, well, wait a minute.
Why can't they fly to Los Angeles? Oh, we're not going to let them because they'll have a sonic boom over the continental United States. So we cut them off at their kneecaps and said, yeah, you can fly, but you can only cross the ocean.
That greatly limited the growth of that supersonic industry. And why don't we want a sonic boom over the country? Because it's too scary? What? It can shatter dishes and things and knock them off.
The space shuttle did it, though. Well, that's because it's coming in over Florida, and it's over low-density area and mostly ocean.
You have to understand, Neil. Sean's theory is that if you're high enough, anything's okay.
Oh. It's so stupid.
So what we really want is hypersonic transportation where you get to Tokyo in an hour and a half. This would be suborbital.
I want that. Right.
Okay, that's even faster than just the Concorde. You know, if you go suborbital, you are not farther than 45 minutes from any two places anywhere on Earth.
Here's the problem. What does it mean that it took you an hour and a half to drive to the airport and another 45 minutes in TSA? So it took you three hours, and then you got to park the car, three hours to take a 45-minute trip to Tokyo.
There's a point where, just put me on an airplane where I have internet and movies, and I'm fine, and I don't need to get there faster. So correct me if I'm wrong.
This is what suborbital is. The Earth is rotating at a thousand miles an hour, right? At the equator.
At the equator. Okay.
So it's spinning around, let's say a thousand miles an hour. A plane really looks for interest in math or easy numbers that goes 500 miles an hour.
500 miles an hour. Right.
So if you're going the direction the Earth is rotating, you're never going to get to that destination. No, because you're inside this three-mile gravitational bubble, right? Neil, you should know that the teacher told him that on the second night.
Because he stayed for a second night. We had a wonderful time.
Wonderful time. No, no.
So if you launch your plane at the equator and you stay in Earth's atmosphere, because it's flying through the Earth's atmosphere, Earth is turning as 1,000 miles an hour. The air is moving at 1,000 miles an hour.
The plane is moving at 1,000 miles an hour. Now it goes 500 miles an hour.
So it's going 1,500 miles an hour through space. But if you go straight up and you leave this three-mile sort of bubble, you then leave gravitational pull and you can take advantage of that 1,000-mile-an-hour spin.
So they want that 1 that thousand miles to get a little extra boost to go into orbit around the earth and orbital speed is 18 000 miles an hour so you get a little get a little boost by doing that if you go back the opposite way you got to make up 2 000 miles per hour's worth of speed but even if you just went straight up like a rocket does and you know it doesn't in fact that they. In fact, they don't do that.
I'm saying if, but if. Just be clear.
It's just something people don't know. Yeah.
Most of the energy of a rocket launch is not to go up. It is to go downstream and give it enough sideways speed so that it doesn't fall out of the sky.
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Hey guys, everybody should have a support system, right? Who's your support system? My support system, as you well know, talk about all the time, is Scotty and of course my two besties, Will and Jason. Whenever I have a problem, an issue, I talk to them about it.
And if they're not available, I will talk to a therapist. And I've been going to therapy for a long time, and it's always great.
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Wow. So the space shuttle, the space station, they're all going 18,000 miles an hour sideways.
That's why Mission Control, you're now going through the Execute the Roll program. And this is the space shuttle now going sideways downstream.
We're down. So they're not going up.
They're going sideways. That's most of their energy.
We think space is up. You know how high up they go? Where do you guys live? Where do you live? In LA? Okay.
Yeah. They are less above Earth's surface than the distance of San Francisco from Los Angeles.
Okay? No way. Wow.
In fact, they're half that distance. What's it? How many miles? San Francisco.
It's like four. 300 miles? 350 miles? Yeah.
It's about three. Yeah.
Yeah, about 350 miles. So two-thirds of that, that's the height that the space shuttle flies.
So you can drive that in a few hours. That's not even what the rocket is doing.
Okay? It's just getting up above the atmosphere because it doesn't have to plow through air. By the way, if we didn't have an atmosphere, it would just go sideways.
Just launch it sideways, okay? So once you're above the atmosphere, you're outside the gravitational pull, right? How tall is the atmosphere? No. Last we checked, Earth is orbited by the moon.
The moon feels Earth's gravity. So all astronauts are deep within Earth's gravity.
The difference is they're weightless, not because they've left Earth's gravity, but because they are falling towards Earth. So here's the brilliance of Isaac Newton.
You want something mind-blowing? Here it is. Isaac Newton.
He said, hmm, there's the moon in orbit around the Earth, and I drop an apple and it falls straight to earth. Is this the same thing or is it two different things going on? And then he had a thought experiment.
This is why he's Isaac Newton and we're the rest of us. He said, suppose I have a mountain and I have a cannon and I fire a cannonball from that mountain horizontally.
It'll go out a few hundred yards and hit the ground, right? Suppose I fire it faster. It'll go farther along Earth's surface before it hits the ground.
Let me keep increasing the speed, and it falls farther and farther away from you. There must be a speed where it falls so far away from you, it completely goes around the Earth and hits you in the back of the head.
Well, at that point, just duck, and the ball continues in what we call orbit and that entire time it was falling towards earth the difference is it fell by the exact amount that earth curved away from it i try to throw knowledge at jason from a low distance and it never hits him in the head never ever hits him in head. No, just think about it.
This is profound. Think about this.
Yeah, it's incredible. You're going sideways so fast that when you've dropped a foot, when you've dropped a foot, Earth's curvature curves away from you by a foot.
So you never catch up to it. You never catch up to the Earth.
Right. Thus is the definition of an orbit, and you're in free fall the entire time, like cutting the cables of an elevator, falling straight down, except you happen to have sideways motion.
And so falling straight down means you never hit the Earth. Neil, there's a lot of debate about this, because I know you've got to go, but there's a lot of debate about it.
Do you agree, a lot of people say, that the best season of Will and Grace was season five? Do you think that that's true? Because... Okay, wait.
I know you have to go, but I really... This is the biggest one I wanted to talk to you about, and we can just plow right through it.
What's that? I want to talk about aliens. I love them.
I want to meet them. Nobody doesn't love the aliens.
I'm all there. Okay, sure.
I would be with them. Are they real? Have we been visited by them? And if not, will we? Because...
And this is the other follow-up thing. I watched, you know, I'm like an obsessed documentarian about aliens in space and all that flying, Area 51.
So Bob Lazar has this documentary, did you see it? It was about, he claimed he had or has some element that is not of this Earth which alien craft is made up of. Is this, do you know this? Yeah, I've heard of these claims, but they don't offer it to laboratories to...
I mean, here's the thing. If we're visited by aliens, why...
Maybe we've been visited. Okay? Maybe.
I think we have. Okay.
Let me offer you countervailing thought regarding that. Do you realize we collectively upload a billion photographs and videos to the internet per day? Per day.
Every day we upload more photos and videos to the internet that existed in the world in the first hundred years of photography. We have photos of extremely rare phenomena, like buses tumbling in hurricanes, or in tornadoes.
In the day, you wouldn't say, oh, that's interesting. Let me go home and get my camera and film this.
No, everybody's got a camera. until everybody had a camera, you had all these reports of people getting abducted.
Where's the photo of the craft? Where's the, why is it that your, your best evidence for aliens visiting is fuzzy Navy video? Yeah, I know. I get that.
Why, why is that your best evidence? What do you think, what do you think about the Navy video, Neil? What do you think? i don't know what it is that's why it's a you unidentified flying but in this documentary they say you know what you're saying why why wouldn't aliens come down and greet that greet us and why don't they say because and the explanation is they are afraid of us and they are afraid what we would do to them so the common denominator of all conspiracy theorists is when they don't have the data, they have to invent something to bridge the gap in their data. So I'm not bridging any gap.
I'm saying everybody is a recorder. Where's the evidence of these visitations? Why is it that crop circles only happen when nobody's looking? All right.
Why? Are the aliens just shy? Okay. Aliens are shy.
Then maybe they don't want to be disturbed by us. Fine.
Okay? But when the aliens finally come who are not shy, I don't think they're only going to show up in fuzzy Navy video. So let's close with this.
First of all, we do have one thing in common, you and I. You have over a dozen honorary doctorates because of all the knowledge in your brain, while I have over a dozen doctors treating the condition of my brain.
So, what are the scientists getting right right now, and what are they getting wrong as far as COVID and global warming? Okay, so one of the challenges is when you model climate, it's very messy. There's a lot of, there's the heat from the sun, there's the uptake of carbon dioxide in the ocean, there's the spewing of carbon dioxide.
It's very complicated. And so what we need is training on how to think about models presented by scientists, because every model has an uncertainty range.

And so you present the model and the uncertainty range to lawmakers and to policy people and say, here's the best available knowledge. Now find a political solution to this.
You don't say, take the politics and say, oh, we deny what your scientists are saying. What is that? What are you doing? This is a recipe for disaster.

As I've said, I think I tweeted this recently.

Every disaster movie begins with what?

People ignoring the warnings of a scientist.

Right, right, right.

Of course.

But it goes to what you were saying before. As we know, and whether people want to admit it or not, we are constantly driven by geopolitical goals, et cetera, personal.

And I accept that.

But just don't put those in front of objectively true scientific information.

Of course.

Because then you're arguing a house of cards and nothing good will ever come of that.

So maybe we need to retrain people to understand what science is, how and why it works.

What is an objective truth?

What does it mean to be convinced by something?

Why do we have people who think Earth is flat? Why? I know, it's crazy. Where is the failure? Do you think global warming is the next, quote, pandemic that we're going to be dealing with? It's an existential crisis that's happening on a longer timescale than the pandemic is.
So the timeframes over which things have been happening with regard to the pandemic are rapid. They're happening hourly, all right? Right.
And we all need to behave coherently to fight it. It's like saying, oh, well, some states wants to open before other states, and my favorite analog to that is that's like opening a peeing section of the pool.
Okay? Okay? You just go to that section of the pool and pee there. Here's the problem.
The virus is not visible. Okay? By the way, if your pee turned purple in contact with the chlorine, everybody would be called out for that.
Okay? Right. Instantly.
But you can't see the virus. And so people think they're somehow immune to it.
But if a monster came out of the woods, grabbed people at the rate that COVID deaths are happening, grabbed them and bit their head off and spilled their bloods in the streets, the coordinated effort in the world to get rid of this creature would know no bounds, okay? Right, right. So here we have a virus that you can't see and somehow you think is not going to affect you.
This is a problem with human cognition and human – again, it relates to the Serengeti. Is it big and it can eat you? I'm scared of it.
Otherwise, I don't know. I'm not scared, okay, even though if I should be.
It's amazing the resources that the government uses and the money and the power to solve this problem almost immediately when they could do that with anything. Very good point.
And so for me, it was a shot across our bow. Think of if hostile aliens came and visited.
We should all coordinate. Put down your weapons against each other because they're after humans and we are all human.
And it could be the greatest peace-inducing force there ever was for all humans to realize they have a common enemy. So my point is this is a practice run.
Global warming is happening on a slower timescale than weeks. Yet we all have to coordinate.
You can't say, well, if China's not going to fix the air, why should I when air molecules don't need passports to go from one country to another? Neither do water molecules and pollution molecules. So at some point, we have to think globally as one species.
And I don't see that happening anytime soon. You know, we did – there was an initial big response to this pandemic when people were – you know, everybody was locked down.
All of a sudden, nobody knew what to do. But it's about that sustained interest in it.
And it's somebody, I remember somebody saying it's such a, we're experiencing such an American lockdown that eventually people are like, nah, I'm kind of bored of it now. Right? It's not headlines anymore.
It's not really, yeah, it's not really that interesting to me anymore. And the problem is, is that what is, once again, certain interests, special interests, they start to outweigh the value of this sustained interest in overcoming this.
So let me be devil's advocate here for the moment. So you're a restaurant worker, and now restaurants are closed by law, okay? You're a busboy.
You're a whatever. And so the problem is we didn't go into this with a plan to give people hope and expectations for how they will return to normal.
Right. So the governmental handling of the scientific information, you know, in hindsight, it's easy to say that it was botched.
I don't know how to have done it differently. I don't have a silver bullet here.
But I can tell you, the next time this happens, we got to have a rollout plan. And the factory floors.
Factory, you go into virus mode. And people separate.
And the production goes down a little, but it doesn't go to zero. OK? And you have people shifts.
And people work this eight-hour shift and that eight-hour shift so that they're not right on top of each other. We didn't have any of those plans, and that's what you need.
Do you think that we need to get ready for this happening, not necessarily with corona or a different corona or whatever it is, that this is our new reality? It's called disaster preparedness, and the problem is no one wants to spend money on it if it's not an obvious threat. And let me get back to the CO2 warming the planet.
If CO2 were purple and you'd walk by a car and you saw purple stuff coming out, well, purple's too pretty. If it was sludgy brown and you see this coming out and you see it coming out of smokes and you see that and it just stayed in the air, you would say, we got to stop this.
This is hurting me. This is killing me.
But it's invisible and you can't smell it. And so we're very ostrich-like in this regard.
Well, Neil, I know you've got to run. I'm a huge fan of science.
I'm a huge fan of facts. And I'm a huge fan of good people.
And you are all three of those things. So thank you so much for being here today.
You've had like three or four fax machines in your life, haven't you? Yeah, for sure. And I still use it.
I get like auditions from it. Good to you, Sean.
I've got to refill it, actually. No, but Neil, thank you so much.
Yeah, please keep sharing your knowledge in the generous and interesting way that you do. Well, thanks for that.
And I'd love to come back on. I mean, when you— Oh, we'd love that.
If all your other guests say, no, I'm never doing that again, you can call me back. Listen, I was going to say I can't speak for the other guys, but I can.
I would say I know that we would all be delighted to have a part two with you. If you'd be willing to do it.
Because the universe is vast. And I also want to say, if I could spend just one moment fanboying, you guys make really fun movies and they're just, for me, a little bit of escapism in it.
Movie. Well, thank you.
So just keep it going. We need it.
We need the diversion. Levity.
We need the escape. Yeah, the levity.
Well, thanks, pal. Which would be the opposite of gravity.
Levity. Way to bring it back around.
Beautiful. Right there.
Well, thank you very much, Neil. Thanks, Neil.
Thank you very, very much.

We'll see you later.

Bye. Isn't he, like, for me, I don't know why I have that chip in my brain that is endlessly fascinated by that stuff.
I could talk for hours and hours and hours about all of those subtopics. Same here.
I'm incredible.

The one thing I wanted to ask him, and I could ask you guys the same,

because I don't know what my answer would be about it either. Do you think if you went up to space and then you came back down, if you just did like one lap and you came, would you be like depressed? Oh.
Just literally to get up so high to like look back down at the earth, then come back down, everything would be so anticlimactic. I wonder if it would be...
I think more people need to think like that. Like you're saying, Jason, well, any astronaut I've heard in an interview or I think they say the exact same thing you're saying.
You go up there, you get a picture and an image of the world we live in and you realize how small it is. And every astronaut that has experienced that has said,

you realize that we're all the same and that why can't we figure out how to get along?

You know what I mean?

And I think every astronaut always asks,

like, what is that experience when you're out in space

and they say it's out of this world?

Nice one.

Will, you just dropped out for a little bit.

Sorry, what happened?

Oh, there you are. You're back.
Trust me, it was pretty good, Sean. Well, did you guys learn anything today? So much.
How badly do we need to have him? We should have him on like once every three months just to keep us, you know, what's going on with the cosmos? What's happening? Right, right. When Neil said, every single day, we upload over a billion photos.
Will goes, I mean, the four of us. Yeah.
He loves to post. Will's a real poster.
I know. Tag it.
Post it. Like it.
Will, do you tweet still? Rarely. Yeah, he does.
Will's very frequent. It's like, hey, lines are long at Starbys today.
It's like, shut up, Will. It's with a very frequent it's like hey lines are long at starby's today it's like shut up will hey it's my right to call it starby's i wanted to i wanted to ask neil if he starts his day off at starbucks wow wow he probably pays with starbucks do you guys get that do you guys get that yeah no i got it, do you get your own joke? Do you even get your own joke? All right, let's let our listener get to dinner or whatever.
I love the idea that anybody who listens to our podcast is rushing to a meal. We have to book our sole listener at some point.
That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.
Thank you, Sean. All right.
Love you guys. Love you guys.
Love you too. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Smart. Less.
Smart. Less.
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