Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Science Series 1: Dr Kevin Hickerson /Nuclear Physics / StandUp Comedy / Scientific Advising on Thor

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Science Series 1: Dr Kevin Hickerson /Nuclear Physics / StandUp Comedy / Scientific Advising on Thor · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together.
• 0:14
  Cool. We're live Doctor, Doctor Kevin
• 0:17
  Peter Hickerson. Welcome.
• 0:19
  I'm so excited to be talking to you today.
• 0:21
  How are you? I'm.
• 0:22
  Great. Thanks for having me.
• 0:24
  Yeah. I, I was thinking since, since
• 0:27
  our conversation of different ways to kind of tackle our
• 0:30
  conversation because I kind of want it to be as fun and
• 0:34
  entertaining as possible, but I also want to get kind of behind
• 0:37
  the mind of the guy that is a stand up comedian and a nuclear
• 0:42
  physicist. And do you look at them?
• 0:46
  Do you look at those two parts of yourself like they're
• 0:49
  conflicting or they're just like different parts of yourself that
• 0:52
  you feel like you have to exercise and, you know,
• 0:53
  creatively express? For me internally, it's not a
• 0:57
  conflict for me personally, but professionally, they're kind of
• 1:01
  a conflict on both sides. Nuclear physics isn't inherently
• 1:07
  funny, but then the other is, you know, in my professional
• 1:13
  research and my colleagues and now starting a company,
• 1:16
  sometimes I think people are worried that, you know, oh,
• 1:20
  you're not serious. I mean, I've literally been at
• 1:22
  conferences where people said, Oh, are you leaving Hollywood or
• 1:25
  something? Like it was a binary choice or
• 1:27
  something. And I'm like, well, no, I still
• 1:30
  live here and I still do comedy. And they're like, oh, I thought
• 1:33
  you left physics to do it. And, and because from their
• 1:35
  point of view, that's that's what it's like.
• 1:37
  It's like they're like, oh, you left physics to you gave up on
• 1:41
  physics to do to go tell Dick jokes or.
• 1:44
  Something. And it's.
• 1:46
  It's not really and, but, but there's, there's some other
• 1:50
  conflicts too, just having to do with time.
• 1:52
  So I got to the point in doing stand up where to really go any
• 1:55
  further, I would have had to go on tour regularly.
• 1:58
  That would have interfered with being a physicist.
• 2:00
  And I did have to kind of make a choice there.
• 2:02
  And I decided I'm, I'm a better nuclear physicist than I am a
• 2:06
  comedian. I, I think I'm a pretty good
• 2:09
  comedian, but you know, there's a lot of people who are a lot, a
• 2:12
  lot of my friends are better at it than me, that's for sure.
• 2:15
  But, but, but more importantly, it's just like both take a lot
• 2:19
  of time and I think what I have to offer the world is far more
• 2:22
  important in the nuclear physics side.
• 2:25
  So it's, it's, it's a little bit like growing up, you know, I
• 2:28
  guess I was like, OK, as much fun as it because it's stand up
• 2:32
  comedy is really fun. It's not just fun being on
• 2:35
  stage, but the, the love and, and outpouring of, of, you know,
• 2:39
  fans telling you they, they love your comedy is a really big ego
• 2:44
  boost. It is really nice and you know,
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  when I get off stage talking about a new research for putting
• 2:53
  limits on, you know, neutron oscillations or something, I, I,
• 2:57
  you know, people might, you know, the, the, the best side of
• 3:00
  respect is like, that was a good talk.
• 3:02
  This is like that could mean the world in nuclear physics, but it
• 3:07
  doesn't quite feel the same, you know?
• 3:13
  What's the tell me, can you tell me about the how'd you get
• 3:19
  started with the stand up and what was the what's the process
• 3:23
  for writing jokes? And I know that, you know, a lot
• 3:26
  of different comics will go between writing out like every
• 3:30
  beat and like everything is exact.
• 3:32
  And then a lot of comics will have general gist to points that
• 3:35
  they want to get to and like, you know, bits and then they
• 3:37
  kind of twinkle with it on, you know, while they're performing.
• 3:39
  I'm just. Wondering the answer first that
• 3:41
  how did I get started or how do I write jokes.
• 3:43
  Those are very different questions.
• 3:45
  How did you get started? And then you could tell you how
• 3:47
  you wrote. Jokes would be great.
• 3:48
  So. I've always been interested in
• 3:50
  entertainment. In fact, I really wanted to be
• 3:52
  an actor. And again, I didn't I wanted to
• 3:54
  be a physicist, but I also wanted to be an actor as a kid.
• 3:57
  And I, I joined a local stage group when I was a kid and I
• 4:02
  really liked singing and being on stage and, you know, so that
• 4:09
  was really fun. But I, I didn't have the
• 4:11
  Hollywood connection that a lot of like nepo kids have where,
• 4:14
  you know, they're booked in ads and stuff like that early.
• 4:19
  My, my parents just didn't know how to do that and didn't have a
• 4:22
  way to do that. So I was being interested in
• 4:25
  Hollywood. And I used to make movies when I
• 4:27
  was a kid with my sister, my friends and, you know, for, for
• 4:33
  fun. And that was really fun, but I
• 4:35
  didn't really think about being a comedian specifically,
• 4:38
  although I think I was a pretty funny guy as a kid.
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  I mean, I made people laugh and stuff like that.
• 4:43
  But the part that I didn't start doing stand up, I didn't really
• 4:46
  occur to me to try and do stand up until this one day.
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  I was going to a show, Dean Cook was headlining.
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  It was at the Improv and as a prank before the show, because
• 4:55
  we were sitting in the front, I got up on stage and my my wife
• 5:02
  at the time, she took a photo of it and I posted social media
• 5:05
  saying I just opened for Dane Cook and that it was a joke.
• 5:10
  It was totally a joke. And you know, oh, I'm so excited
• 5:14
  opening for Dane. By the way, when you start off
• 5:15
  comedy, you don't get to yeah, find out about that.
• 5:20
  Doesn't that never happens ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.
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  But anyway, it was still a funny joke.
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  But the part of it was it was hilarious because all these
• 5:28
  people like, Oh my God, Kevin, I didn't know you didn't stand up.
• 5:30
  That's so awesome. I want to see your show.
• 5:31
  There's just like tons of people were so excited about it.
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  And I was like, oh, crap, actually open for Dane Cook.
• 5:39
  Oh, man, this is embarrassing. So then I said, OK, fine, I'm
• 5:43
  going to try comedy. And about five years later, I
• 5:47
  opened for Dane Cook. Wow, really?
• 5:51
  Yeah, five years though you just do it on your.
• 5:53
  Course try. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
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  certainly OK. It's the.
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  Path that all comedians have to go through.
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  You have to start with open mics, then you can do these,
• 6:01
  these book shows usually like there's a type of show called
• 6:04
  bringer shows, which are really painful.
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  Bring your shows is where you have to do all the promoting.
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  The show is famous and stuff. And then and then I started to
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  get from there. I got book shows and then, you
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  know, I started being able to perform at real clubs like
• 6:19
  improv and the Comedy Store. And I eventually got onto, you
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  know, I got a Booker who put me on shows with like, really great
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  comedians. To be.
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  The, you know, the first or second act in these shows with
• 6:31
  like, like heavy hitters. That's amazing.
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  Nikki Glazier, Joe Rogan, Dean Cook, Anthony Jeselnik, all
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  kinds of great comedians regularly.
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  Like, you know, every couple of weeks I'd get to do a show in
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  the main room of the Comedy Store and do smaller shows off
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  to the side, so. I want to add 22 follow-ups on
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  that real quick. Number one was how long did
• 6:55
  those five years feel and what'd you do to slog through?
• 6:59
  Because I know that long. No, it was, you know, because.
• 7:02
  It's really fun and it's a lot of it's a lot of practice
• 7:05
  because that's one of the reasons why no matter how you
• 7:08
  know, as much as people want to say that like that person is
• 7:10
  just naturally funny, like talent, natural talent matters,
• 7:13
  I guess, a little bit. But a lot of what the public
• 7:16
  doesn't know is that there is a lot of work to refining jokes,
• 7:21
  which brings me to your second question.
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  How do I write jokes? Yeah, I generally, like most
• 7:29
  comedians, usually have a thing called set list, which is just a
• 7:32
  piece of paper that has a very short reference to the joke.
• 7:37
  And it has less to do with like, like one thing you don't do when
• 7:40
  you do comedy obviously, is you don't sit there going.
• 7:42
  So a man walked into a bar and said, what's the deal with
• 7:45
  airline food? Like that's the you don't.
• 7:47
  You're not saying they're reading that.
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  So instead, there's like a little line on there, you know,
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  like that. And a set list is usually just a
• 7:56
  reminder. And the reason is because one of
• 7:59
  the things that can happen if you especially if you're
• 8:01
  starting new material, you might forget what joke you wrote.
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  You know, even if you, you said it before, you did it already
• 8:07
  maybe two or three times. So, so it's to jog your memory
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  more than anything. So a set list is more like that.
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  So if you've ever seen, I'm sure you've seen video of sometimes a
• 8:15
  comic like goes over to the, the, the stool next to them,
• 8:19
  like looks down and goes, oh, yeah, I was, oh, my God, I was
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  in Portland the other day. You know that that's what
• 8:24
  they're doing. Probably what probably all the
• 8:27
  thing that was written on the piece of paper was Portland.
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  Sure. It's just a reminder.
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  And it's it's also the order that they're supposed to go in
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  because also a thing that generally the audience doesn't
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  know, but comedians know is like they're a set has to have a flow
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  to it because there's jokes usually reference each other or
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  they're building off of some meta story or something like
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  that. So, so the order matters to kind
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  of, you know, sometimes And so especially if you do a call back
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  to a previous thing, you have to make sure that you you said the
• 8:57
  thing that you call back. To yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
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  Because that could be that won't land if you if you tell a call
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  back and everyone's like, why is he talking about Portland?
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  What the hell? Who do you think are some of the
• 9:11
  sharpest comedians today? That you that you enjoy?
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  That you enjoy their content sharpest.
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  That's a tough one. Yeah, I, I get asked this a lot,
• 9:21
  but I, I don't like answering it.
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  And part of the reason is because like like.
• 9:27
  I gotcha. Your friends for being a
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  comedian is not necessarily like who is the funniest or who the
• 9:33
  public thinks is the funniest because there's a lot of great
• 9:35
  comedians on stage who are assholes and they're the other
• 9:38
  way around. So, and then some people are
• 9:41
  just the same, you know, like, like one of the, one of the
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  things I like pointing out is like Theo Von is a great
• 9:47
  example. He has a personality that you
• 9:49
  see on it. And you might be tempted to
• 9:51
  think like, oh, he's probably not like that in real life or
• 9:54
  something, but he, he totally is.
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  He's like really legit dude. He's really nice in person and
• 10:00
  everything. And and then some people are,
• 10:02
  you know, they, they're kind of an asshole on stage.
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  Like Ryan Chang is the example. Ryan Chang, he's he's an
• 10:09
  example. He's on The Daily Show.
• 10:10
  He's super nice. It he's like the nicest person
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  and despite the fact that he's he's on TV and pretty well
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  known, but he always plays like an, you know, he's.
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  Always. Yeah.
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  It's like Bob Saget or something like that.
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  What? What?
• 10:27
  What's? I don't even know.
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  That's too. Sharpest That's a hard one to
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  answer because there's also a lot of comedians I find really
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  funny. But they're they're funny in a
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  way that is very controversial. And so I got to be careful,
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  buddy. Correct.
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  Well, you know, if you careful with it, too careful, at least
• 10:43
  with me. But I, I look what I love.
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  I mean, my particular style that relates that, that speaks to me
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  most is I love to be taken on a ride and then not know and like
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  have that roller coaster twist at the end and like be thrown
• 10:56
  out of left field. So I don't laugh at vulgar for
• 10:58
  the sake of vulgarity. I don't laugh at like, you know,
• 11:02
  sex jokes for the sake of it. Like I, it's cute like haha.
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  But like, I laugh a lot when like, you take me along a bunch
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  of steps and I'm expecting you to go one way and then you just
• 11:10
  veer. Advantage I had as being a
• 11:12
  nuclear physicist. Like I don't tell nuclear
• 11:14
  physics strokes. Right.
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  No like the. Horror show, nobody is that, but
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  what people do really like, and I think this is one of the
• 11:22
  things that really helped me grow as a comedian really
• 11:26
  quickly. And this is true when I do my
• 11:28
  podcast, also true because they have a podcast.
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  I'll do a shout out to that. But I think one of the things
• 11:34
  people really liked is if you do sex strokes from a dirty point
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  of view, like very like people really respond to that because
• 11:42
  for a lot of reasons, like 1 is they like saying, Oh yeah,
• 11:45
  scientists have real lives too, you know, like they have
• 11:48
  romantic lives. And and also just like they're
• 11:51
  so used to cold, dry academics not doing that.
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  It just, you know, it just works.
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  Yeah, definitely so. I definitely don't never do it
• 12:03
  for the point of I'm not trying to do a shock comic or something
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  like I can say penis 27 times. Like that's not the ever the
• 12:10
  point. And there's plenty of comedians
• 12:12
  who do who can pull that off. But that's not the point.
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  I do. But you know, I can make a kind
• 12:17
  of Lingus joke or something, you know?
• 12:18
  Yeah. Wow, that's a big word.
• 12:21
  OK, well, you got to use what you got, I guess, right?
• 12:23
  That's. A.
• 12:25
  Big word, by the way. I wanted to amend something.
• 12:28
  I told you the other day that I met that I got your name from
• 12:31
  Grok. I I misspoke.
• 12:34
  I misspoke. I apologize.
• 12:36
  I got your name from a book I was reading called Superheroes
• 12:39
  Movies in the State and and it mentioned that you were a
• 12:44
  scientific consultant on the movie Thor and in a.
• 12:49
  Book. In a book I can send you the
• 12:52
  book if you would like. It's it's a guy named Tom
• 12:55
  Sucker. And there was who I did a
• 12:57
  podcast with and I forgot the Co author's name.
• 13:00
  I have to get back to actually I put it up and and you and your
• 13:08
  name came up and I and I said, you know what?
• 13:09
  I need more scientists that are going to be more like that keeps
• 13:15
  signs like almost the way that you're describing that you tell
• 13:18
  jokes in a way that makes it relatable as opposed to very cut
• 13:21
  and dry and kind of break the stereotypes about that.
• 13:23
  And I wanted to talk to people that were like that.
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  So I I I asked rock for people like you.
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  And so that that that was where the where the confusion was.
• 13:31
  But yes, Tom Sucker and Tricia Jenkins.
• 13:34
  Try to talk you out of it. It was like, no, no, no, you got
• 13:36
  to stick with him. You got to stick with him.
• 13:38
  No, I, no, I, I just, I, I, I was going through because it's a
• 13:42
  very well sourced book. It's written almost like an
• 13:44
  enormous college essay, like the same kind of style.
• 13:46
  I would have written a college essay just for a whole book.
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  And they have a lot of sources and references.
• 13:50
  And so I was just looking up the sources and references to see
• 13:53
  who would be interesting guests. And and that's, that's like,
• 13:57
  yes. Yes, so I was a science advisor
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  and set decorator for Thor. Not credited.
• 14:03
  I should say I'm on the Wikipedia page, but.
• 14:04
  I'm. Not how they're happy because.
• 14:06
  How does that work? Because.
• 14:07
  I am not union. So really, credit only goes to
• 14:12
  union members. Yeah, which is that's changing.
• 14:15
  I think that's changing some. Some people are doing good job.
• 14:18
  Kip Thorne is really insistent on, he's been helpful with
• 14:22
  trying to make sure that science advisors get credit or at least
• 14:26
  mentioned didn't necessarily have to get like a credit
• 14:29
  credit, but like a special thanks to or something.
• 14:31
  We didn't. There were four of us and we did
• 14:34
  not get a special thanks or anything, which is a little
• 14:37
  frustrating, but it's OK. I'm on the Wikipedia page and
• 14:40
  that's better. So.
• 14:42
  Yeah, right, right. It's wider reaching I bet.
• 14:44
  Yeah, yeah. But yeah, So what I worked on
• 14:47
  for that, so that that's similar to comedy.
• 14:49
  I mean, I like I said, I like, I love Hollywood.
• 14:51
  I've I've been a science consultant for lots of smaller
• 14:55
  projects. That's the biggest one I've I've
• 14:57
  been on. But that one is like really far
• 14:59
  reaching. It's like that's a lifetime
• 15:00
  credit that I'm very proud of because what I worked on there
• 15:03
  was I helped turn Jane Foster's character from, she was
• 15:09
  originally in the comics, a nurse.
• 15:12
  They wanted to modernize it a little bit and make it a little
• 15:14
  more interesting, play more into the story.
• 15:18
  And I helped turn her into a nuclear astrophysicist who was
• 15:23
  and there was an entire back story behind the entire thing.
• 15:26
  Oh yeah. Can you I?
• 15:28
  Wrote the whole back story for why the set was decorated in the
• 15:31
  way it was. I I she she had a lab in New
• 15:34
  Mexico and I helped set the whole thing up.
• 15:37
  It's like I picked out all the equipment and I think the thing
• 15:40
  I'm most proud of is in is that she had a detector, a really big
• 15:46
  detector. And there's is featured several
• 15:48
  times throughout the movie in the background.
• 15:50
  So one is it's like there's a great scene where Kip Thorne is
• 15:54
  standing shirtless in front of my detector.
• 15:57
  So that that's, that's anytime I share that on social media, like
• 16:01
  I get a bunch of ladies going like, because I'll say you can
• 16:04
  see in the background my detector, you know, it's like
• 16:06
  featured there, like all these ladies are like what?
• 16:08
  And the what now, what with her shirt off and everything.
• 16:15
  And, and then also there's all this other equipment around the
• 16:18
  room and stuff and, and the things in her car when she's off
• 16:21
  searching for these wormholes. But there's a whole back story
• 16:25
  there, which is why a nuclear astrophysicist would be looking
• 16:27
  for a Rainbow Bridge. That seems very strange, but
• 16:30
  this ties into interstellar a little bit.
• 16:34
  OK, that if if the if the wormhole, if the Rainbow Bridge
• 16:40
  was a wormhole, which is our best on way of understanding it,
• 16:43
  it would require very advanced technology and particularly to
• 16:46
  keep the wormhole open. So there's some mathematical
• 16:49
  reasons why this this was first published in a paper by Kip
• 16:52
  Thorne about how to make a wormhole stable.
• 16:56
  How do you make a How do you turn on Einstein Rosen Bridge
• 16:59
  into a transversible wormhole and.
• 17:04
  A sentence here in the Marvel movie.
• 17:06
  Yeah, exactly. And the way you you do that is
• 17:10
  you have to line it with very advanced material and you have
• 17:14
  to keep it stable because it wants to collapse.
• 17:16
  And the fact that it wants to collapse is why in the movie
• 17:19
  Interstellar, when they go through the wormhole, you see
• 17:21
  waves on the surface. That's the advanced technology
• 17:25
  keeping the thing from collapsing because naturally it
• 17:28
  wants to collapse and pinch off and turn into a black hole.
• 17:33
  And so so because it is involves advanced technology, I knew that
• 17:38
  that meant it probably involved advanced particle physics.
• 17:41
  And advanced particle physics probably means very high energy
• 17:45
  particles are released and yet undiscovered.
• 17:48
  But theorized particle is something called a WIMP that
• 17:53
  makes dark matter so dark matter particles.
• 17:55
  And so I made her detector based on a dark matter detector.
• 18:00
  And normally these dark matter detectors have to be in very
• 18:02
  quiet environments, buried miles underground so that there's no
• 18:05
  radiation from the, from space or anything.
• 18:08
  But the back story is that while she was originally researching
• 18:12
  dark matter, she kept getting these insanely bright dark
• 18:16
  matter signals coming from New Mexico.
• 18:18
  And they were so bright, she could even have the the detector
• 18:21
  above ground. And so she picked up everything
• 18:23
  and moved it to Mexico and was like looking for this dark
• 18:26
  matter signals coming out of out of that of.
• 18:29
  Wow and. That's what letter to New
• 18:32
  Mexico. So that whole story, and I wrote
• 18:34
  that all up, it's so Kenneth Brenner could could see it and
• 18:38
  everything. So, but it's if they don't say
• 18:40
  it, which is fine. I mean, I actually prefer that
• 18:42
  because what's nice is there's a lot of thought behind it and you
• 18:45
  get the idea. You know the story is about a
• 18:47
  dorse God, so you don't have to. You know, it's not a Neil de
• 18:51
  Crest Tyson lecture or something.
• 18:53
  So. Yeah, but you know what it adds?
• 18:57
  It adds a level, adds an additional layer of intention or
• 19:02
  thoughtfulness that that I guess otherwise wouldn't have existed.
• 19:05
  You know, and you know, and again, you know, part of that
• 19:08
  point that at least in the book that he was arguing was that,
• 19:12
  you know, and Marvel movies as a whole went through like they
• 19:15
  kind of go back and forth between using science as the
• 19:19
  solution to the to problems that rise up as opposed to warfare,
• 19:23
  as opposed to something military.
• 19:26
  And then and they and they keep on going back and forth between
• 19:29
  the two. So Ant Man and the Wasp or Ant
• 19:30
  Man movies are, you know, the the premise and the actual like
• 19:34
  all the the savings of the days are done with using science to
• 19:39
  solve problems, as opposed to Captain Marvel, which would be
• 19:42
  just enormous space warfare and blowing things up, you know, and
• 19:47
  and prevent and presenting both, you know, and for the people to
• 19:50
  kind of be excited by and turned on by.
• 19:52
  Yeah, and Antman had really good science consulting too.
• 19:55
  I didn't work on that one, but I have a podcast interview with
• 19:59
  the science consultant for that. Cool.
• 20:01
  And part of the reason that it was so good in that is that why
• 20:05
  am I blanking on his name? What's Antman?
• 20:07
  The actors name. What?
• 20:10
  Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd Yeah, yeah, my buddy
• 20:12
  one. Of the reasons I was really good
• 20:13
  in that is Paul Rudd really wanted to understand it and he
• 20:18
  spent a lot of time with the salt science consultant himself,
• 20:21
  which is not the case with Thor. I was not, I never met Natalie
• 20:24
  Portman once. Then yeah, there's the a bunch
• 20:28
  of the, the crew wanted me to because I was there the same day
• 20:31
  that she was going to film. And I won't say who, but the
• 20:36
  there was a higher up who said no, no, no, that kid, that's not
• 20:39
  going to happen because she was really worried about the
• 20:41
  director, Kenneth Burner, getting mad that there were
• 20:43
  other people on set and very protective of the stars.
• 20:47
  I wish I had met her. I think it might have gone even
• 20:49
  better. I don't know.
• 20:50
  But I I've actually never met her once.
• 20:54
  Wow, you know I. Was on set when she was there,
• 20:56
  but I didn't get to meet her there.
• 20:58
  They're very secretive about that for all sorts of reasons.
• 21:00
  One is to protect the actors being mobbed or whatever, but
• 21:05
  also they have even business reasons why they do it.
• 21:08
  They're even protected from the crew of what there's their
• 21:11
  costumes are and stuff like that.
• 21:13
  Because apparently sometimes people leak photos and then they
• 21:16
  turn, they sell them to China and they turn into knock off
• 21:20
  action figures and. Stuff and how?
• 21:22
  People leak it and then ruin the plot.
• 21:25
  So they, they have a lot of like business reasons why they're
• 21:27
  really protective about it too, so.
• 21:29
  Have you are you aware of the cute that, like the Legos, the
• 21:33
  Lego world gives away little hints in advance to to the other
• 21:37
  movies or plots based on the heads that they release?
• 21:40
  Yeah, it's very cute. I don't know what kind of
• 21:42
  collaboration they have, but I've never.
• 21:43
  Heard of that. Hey, Yeah.
• 21:45
  Yeah, something to look into. So, so walk me through what is
• 21:48
  how'd you, how'd that even happen?
• 21:49
  How did you end up as a consultant?
• 21:50
  Walk me through what do they call you and say, hey, we need a
• 21:54
  consultant? We have a script.
• 21:55
  We don't have a script yet. We're working on it, but we need
• 21:57
  help with the premise how that was.
• 21:59
  A great story too. So I like this one because so I
• 22:04
  can tell you what happened on the back end first.
• 22:05
  So they went through. So Kenneth Branagh worked on
• 22:09
  Frankenstein that he those Thor was the second movie they
• 22:11
  directed. He worked on.
• 22:13
  Frankenstein and he thought because it's Frankenstein, who
• 22:16
  cares if the science is accurate?
• 22:17
  You know, he, he was like, and he was actually felt really bad
• 22:21
  about it because apparently people ripped it apart and
• 22:25
  thought it was like not believable and everything and,
• 22:28
  and just trying to be an art piece and people, you know,
• 22:32
  some, some people don't like that.
• 22:34
  So he felt really embarrassed about that.
• 22:36
  So he, he said he wanted to make sure the science was correct in
• 22:40
  this. So he went to something called
• 22:41
  the Science and Entertainment exchange, which is started by
• 22:45
  Jerry Zucker. And I have a podcast episode
• 22:49
  where I interviewed Jerry Zucker about it too.
• 22:52
  Yeah, because, because I wanted. To talk to him about the Science
• 22:55
  Entertainment Exchange. Anyway.
• 22:57
  So one of the things they science entertainment exchanges,
• 22:59
  it allows Hollywood directors and producers to reach out to
• 23:03
  them and then have them get advice from real academics, you
• 23:08
  know, people like Caltech, UCLA, that kind of thing in the in the
• 23:12
  LA area. So I suppose they don't have to
• 23:15
  be in the LA area. That's usually usually what it
• 23:18
  is. So, but that's not how I found
• 23:20
  out about it. I found, I mean, that's that's
• 23:23
  what it led to me finding out about, but that's definitely not
• 23:25
  what I responded to. I told you that I work on
• 23:27
  smaller projects all the time. I just like being entertaining
• 23:30
  and I like science fiction a lot.
• 23:32
  Sure, like a lot and I get so so an e-mail was sent out to all
• 23:37
  the grad students at Caltech, all of them saying, hey, there's
• 23:40
  this company, they have a project or these producer, they
• 23:43
  have a project and they're hoping to get some scientists
• 23:46
  who wants to some physicist who wants to help give advice to
• 23:49
  this project. And there's no mention of Marvel
• 23:53
  or Thor or Disney or any oh, it wasn't owned by Disney at the
• 23:57
  time, but there's no mention of anything like that.
• 23:59
  It is very much was written in a way to make it sound like it was
• 24:02
  a student project you. Know OK.
• 24:05
  You know, no pay and all that kind of stuff.
• 24:07
  It didn't say no pay, but I mean, reading the e-mail, you'd
• 24:10
  think I'm not going to get paid for that.
• 24:12
  So it was, it was really nice because it was.
• 24:16
  So I responded, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm super interested.
• 24:19
  Oh oh, did I freeze? Yeah.
• 24:20
  You're here though, Yeah. Yeah, so I, you know, I was
• 24:24
  super interested anyway because I'm like, oh, I want to see
• 24:27
  this. So I met with the person and you
• 24:29
  know, even after the first meeting I just didn't piece it
• 24:31
  together and the only time. What was the meeting out then?
• 24:35
  How'd you what what? What was the meeting that you
• 24:37
  didn't? I responded and I met with the
• 24:39
  set decorator, Florence Feldman. She she is credited, so I didn't
• 24:44
  think that was my. Direct boss.
• 24:46
  She's unionized. I met with her and she was
• 24:49
  telling me about it. And you know what's weird is I
• 24:52
  wasn't even enough of a comic book thing.
• 24:54
  She did mention that the movie was Thor, but I, I forgot.
• 24:57
  I mean, I knew about Thor, but I wasn't, I'm not like I wasn't a
• 24:59
  Super Avengers nerd or anything. So I didn't piece it together.
• 25:03
  I just didn't. And it was only at the end she
• 25:07
  was telling me about the character that I was going to be
• 25:09
  trying to because she she was going off of stuff that had
• 25:12
  already been talked about with Sean Carroll and Kevin, Peter
• 25:16
  Hand and a few other people at the script writing stage.
• 25:19
  So way earlier, that was before the script was even, they were
• 25:22
  sitting in a room saying we can do it.
• 25:24
  And she was saying, yeah, they were suggesting that we turn
• 25:27
  this into some sort of scientist, maybe a physicist,
• 25:30
  maybe an Astro, an atmospheric physicist.
• 25:33
  They, they had several options that she was some kind of
• 25:36
  scientist studying something. And that's when I, you know, I
• 25:40
  was, I said, oh, I think nuclear astrophysicist who detects A
• 25:43
  wormhole would be really cool. And, and they, they already knew
• 25:46
  that the Rainbow Bridge was going to be wormhole.
• 25:47
  I would have come to the same conclusion.
• 25:48
  By the way. But that wasn't my suggestion,
• 25:52
  but that's what I would have suggested.
• 25:54
  And so she and then it was relieving.
• 25:57
  I was like, who did you say was the actress who's playing this
• 26:00
  again? Or the And she kind of looked at
• 26:03
  me because she had, I guess she'd already said it.
• 26:05
  And somehow I miss it. And she's like Natalie Portman.
• 26:09
  Like, you know, she's not used to people in Hollywood going
• 26:12
  like, oh, who, who's on it? You know, not freaking out at
• 26:16
  that. So funny.
• 26:17
  Oh, oh, cool. OK.
• 26:21
  So funny, cool, so. I, that was one of the first
• 26:23
  things I asked is that I was like, so why did you pick me?
• 26:26
  Why did I get this? And she goes, oh, you were the
• 26:29
  only one who responded to the e-mail.
• 26:32
  Wow. Really.
• 26:35
  But, you know, they didn't say, hey, work on this big Hollywood.
• 26:39
  I bet. I bet that's smarter them
• 26:41
  though, you know, I mean, especially for like, you know,
• 26:44
  they'll see who's in it for the love of the game #1 and #2 is.
• 26:48
  If they said this was for Thor and a big Paramount movie then
• 26:51
  they'd have to sort through thousands of applicants I
• 26:54
  imagine. Yeah, I didn't even know that
• 26:55
  she was from Marvel. It took me.
• 26:57
  It was like the third meeting that I realized she.
• 26:59
  Was wow because. Crazy.
• 27:01
  A really common thing in Hollywood to do is you you
• 27:04
  create a corporation for each movie.
• 27:06
  And this is for legal reasons. So if if something horrible
• 27:09
  happens and they get sued, it doesn't bankrupt the whole
• 27:12
  studio. And then there's just a lot of
• 27:13
  legal what? So she handed me like this
• 27:15
  business card that says like AAA productions or something like
• 27:19
  that. You know, it's all very
• 27:20
  secretive. And they're secretive up until
• 27:22
  when they're filming and everything.
• 27:23
  So everything's very secretive. I don't know.
• 27:26
  Have you ever visited LA? No, it's actually one of the few
• 27:29
  big cities in America I have not been to yet.
• 27:31
  I'll just tell your, your viewers about this, your
• 27:34
  listeners. So in LA there's these signs,
• 27:36
  these yellow signs. They have arrow, an arrow
• 27:39
  pointing somewhere and they have text written on the top and
• 27:41
  bottom. And that's a really common sight
• 27:43
  around LA and they're pointing to something and it's their
• 27:48
  directions for the crew to of a movie being shot on location.
• 27:52
  So it's a really common thing to see throughout LA because we
• 27:54
  have film all over anything within a 30 mile radius of
• 27:57
  Hollywood is is on location. So you can see these a lot.
• 28:02
  And they usually have some cryptic name.
• 28:04
  And that name is usually the code name for the project.
• 28:06
  Because if they just said like, you know, like like Thor or Iron
• 28:11
  Man or something, then it would have exactly the wrong effect.
• 28:13
  It doesn't tell the crew where to park.
• 28:15
  It tells where everyone else in LA.
• 28:17
  So, so that usually it's the name of the, the company or
• 28:20
  something or the code name of the the project.
• 28:22
  So, so it's all very secretive and, and, and you don't know if
• 28:26
  it's a big production or, or nothing, you know, right.
• 28:29
  So it's, it's, and it's all designed to make sure that
• 28:31
  people are just like, go, you know, TMZ doesn't show up with
• 28:34
  helicopters and stuff like that. Yeah, that relationship between
• 28:38
  Hollywood's attempt at privacy and the media is a has been a
• 28:42
  complicated one forever, but it's kind of fun to be an
• 28:45
  observant. I gave her contribution to Thor,
• 28:48
  my absolute favorite that I'm most excited about was also very
• 28:52
  secretive because Florence contacted me like the night
• 28:56
  before something was due. She's like Kevin, Oh my God, we
• 28:58
  are in the next two days or something.
• 28:59
  She's like, we need this really fast.
• 29:01
  We need these like 5 notebooks and they need.
• 29:05
  And I was like, OK. And she's like, and you need to
• 29:07
  write equations in it and write all kinds of stuff in it that's
• 29:10
  sort of related to what you were talking about, you know, and we
• 29:15
  need 5 identical copies. And I was like, and, and I was
• 29:18
  like, OK, she's like, this is just for the background, so
• 29:21
  don't worry about it. It's just for the background.
• 29:22
  But you know, so that the details of the equations doesn't
• 29:24
  matter much and stuff. But you know, we need this
• 29:26
  really. So I went out and I, I said,
• 29:29
  well, I'm going to base it on the kind of notebook I write,
• 29:31
  which is a moleskin. And so I went to the Caltech
• 29:34
  bookstore and bought 5 moleskins and I made five identical copies
• 29:38
  of this. And to this day, I wish I had
• 29:40
  made six if I had, because she was so secret about it.
• 29:44
  She made it sound like it was just something in the
• 29:46
  background, like maybe it would be on a desk open.
• 29:49
  And it was actually Natalie Portman's notebook, which is
• 29:50
  like a major plot element. No and.
• 29:54
  Like they're sitting there talking about they go out and
• 29:56
  they go find the notebook. They have to break into Shield
• 29:59
  to get the notebook. If I had known that, I would
• 30:01
  have made a copy and that'd probably be like, I could
• 30:03
  probably sell it on eBay for something.
• 30:05
  Oh, sure. Are you kidding me?
• 30:07
  That'd be so cool. That's.
• 30:08
  All my, you know, I wrote that notebook and those exact same
• 30:13
  kind of notebook I use that I write real equations in, you
• 30:16
  know, for, for myself and I even had a bunch of stuff about
• 30:19
  Hubble in there. I put some clips from Hubble and
• 30:23
  somehow that made it into the the script.
• 30:26
  So even though the script had already been written, that just
• 30:28
  the fact that it appeared in there, he Chris Hemsler said
• 30:31
  like he makes a joke about he's like you're hubel or something
• 30:34
  like that. I.
• 30:36
  Don't remember. Totally caused that because I'm
• 30:38
  the one who put the stuff about Hubble in there and stuff.
• 30:41
  That's so funny. Wow.
• 30:44
  I love that. I love to hear these stories.
• 30:45
  That's that's that's really why I wanted to bring this up
• 30:47
  actually, because I think these stories are so cool.
• 30:50
  It's so much the only. Thing you told me that it's even
• 30:52
  in a book is that's one of the reasons I'm really happy I
• 30:54
  worked on is I get so much like attention just from that one
• 30:58
  project. Yeah, that that to me that feels
• 31:01
  like timeless and everything and like.
• 31:04
  It is. It is, man.
• 31:05
  I mean Thor. Thor is a foundational part of a
• 31:08
  multi billion dollar franchise, you know, and I mean, that's
• 31:12
  like, that's incredible. That's really cool.
• 31:14
  That's having a real piece in American entertainment history.
• 31:18
  Definitely and. I think that's one of the
• 31:19
  reasons why movies like that should have science consulting
• 31:23
  because well, you know, sure, you can argue, oh, 90% of the
• 31:26
  people won't know that it's a mistake.
• 31:28
  The fact is it's very 4th wall breaking for the 10% that no,
• 31:32
  it's not right. It's really annoying for the 1%
• 31:36
  that are also part of, you know, maybe they know a lot about
• 31:39
  nuclear physics or astrophysics or something and those guys go
• 31:44
  online and say how dumb it is if it's wrong.
• 31:46
  So and that, that ends up ruining it for everybody, you
• 31:49
  know, like everybody's like, and even if you're not an expert,
• 31:52
  you can just kind of tell when something doesn't sound right.
• 31:54
  Sure. You can just.
• 31:55
  Kind of tell, you know, you know, maybe you flip through the
• 32:00
  Science Channel a couple of times or something.
• 32:02
  You're just like, that doesn't sound like it can work.
• 32:07
  Yeah. So funny, so funny.
• 32:09
  I want to, I want to spend some time on the actual, on some
• 32:12
  actual science now and then I want to surf back at the end,
• 32:16
  hopefully the last maybe 1520 minutes and talk about your
• 32:18
  favorite and most, most and least accurate Hollywood
• 32:23
  portrayals of science and stuff like that.
• 32:25
  I think I was even. Thinking of making some like
• 32:27
  video clips about that like reaction videos or?
• 32:30
  Something you should, you should, you should.
• 32:32
  That'd be so much. Because I, I, you know, I
• 32:34
  lecture my kids about these two and it's kind of funny because
• 32:37
  at this point they're like, we know that, you know, Because
• 32:39
  I'll say, what's wrong with that?
• 32:41
  Yeah, I love that. OK, beautiful.
• 32:43
  So let's get that. Let's back to that.
• 32:44
  But I want to get to the actual nuclear physics because this is
• 32:49
  a super hot topic, super fun topic I think and has future
• 32:54
  written all over it as far as I understand.
• 32:57
  Can you actually? I had a friend that sent in a
• 33:01
  request and he's an engineer and he asked isn't nuke just just a
• 33:06
  steam engine with flair question mark is it over Is it over
• 33:09
  dramatic is what he asked. Yeah.
• 33:12
  I mean, it can't be traditional nuclear.
• 33:14
  Yeah, Yeah. So that's definitely one of the
• 33:16
  things I want to talk about because I started a nuclear
• 33:18
  company. That's what I'm really.
• 33:19
  Focused, please. Let's let's so let's talk.
• 33:21
  Let's talk about it, please. So traditional nuclear is you,
• 33:24
  you generate heat. I mean, ultimately that's what a
• 33:28
  nuclear reactor does. It makes heat OK.
• 33:31
  And you can. And we have known since the
• 33:33
  1940's, the mid 1940s very dramatically demonstrated that
• 33:37
  we can design A nuclear reactor to run anywhere from room
• 33:40
  temperature all the way up to 100,000,000°.
• 33:43
  That's the upper limit. There's really only one use for
• 33:47
  running a nuclear reactor at 100 million degrees.
• 33:49
  There's only one. To blow things up.
• 33:51
  Yeah, yeah, to blow up a city or something like that.
• 33:55
  Now you can do interesting things like that, like at 100
• 33:57
  million degrees, you can also amplify fusion.
• 34:01
  You can you can ignite fusion. That's called thermonuclear
• 34:04
  because it's hot enough that even fusion starts working.
• 34:08
  You can deliberate even more energy that way.
• 34:10
  However, when you make a fission, normal fission reactor,
• 34:14
  you just are. You don't want it to be 100
• 34:16
  million degrees. You don't even want it to be
• 34:18
  5000° because then the container it's in would melt.
• 34:22
  OK, so you you just want it hot enough that you can get work out
• 34:25
  of it. And the hotter you get, the more
• 34:29
  efficiently you can get that work out.
• 34:30
  But you're limited by the the the container, not the reactor
• 34:34
  itself. So can I?
• 34:36
  OK, got the. Easiest thing to get energy, The
• 34:39
  easiest way we know how to get energy.
• 34:41
  A very good process for getting out energy is you boil water and
• 34:45
  you drive a steam turbine. That's a very efficient way of
• 34:48
  getting work out of heat. Gotcha.
• 34:53
  Can I? It's it's pretty simple.
• 34:55
  It's like you take rocks, you stick them next to each other
• 34:57
  and they get hot. Right.
• 34:59
  That's nuclear right there. So why is it more so much more
• 35:03
  effective or efficient than than anything else?
• 35:06
  Like why is it the the energy source of the future?
• 35:10
  Because of the what the cost of that energy in the 1st place.
• 35:15
  So all kinds of things, you can get heat to boil steam using all
• 35:18
  kinds of things. Wood, take wood and you can boil
• 35:21
  steam. We've been doing that for for a
• 35:23
  really long time. And you can use coal, then you
• 35:26
  move to coal. You can use coal to boil steam.
• 35:28
  That's how we powered trains in the past, you know.
• 35:32
  And then you can also use, you can use liquid hydrocarbons, you
• 35:39
  know, oil and gas. You can do that too you.
• 35:42
  And again, you just boil steam and use that.
• 35:44
  The problem is that if you're using something other than
• 35:48
  nuclear, the size and the weight of the thing you need to get
• 35:52
  that energy is just enormous. I see.
• 35:56
  And it's it's not a little bit of a difference.
• 35:58
  It's not even a close contest per weight.
• 36:01
  Nuclear has a million times more energy per weight.
• 36:04
  I mean a million times. So, so to get the same amount of
• 36:08
  energy as a ton of coal is a speck speck of uranium.
• 36:14
  That's where it comes into. This is why it's the fuel of the
• 36:17
  future is because the the resource we care about in the
• 36:20
  future is the Earth itself. We live here, we want to live
• 36:24
  here. There's not a double planet out
• 36:28
  there at the moment. And the if, if we just consume
• 36:33
  all the stuff that's on the surface and use that for energy,
• 36:36
  we're doing it very, very inefficiently.
• 36:38
  So even though it might seem like the steam part is somehow
• 36:42
  old fashioned or something, that's not really what's
• 36:44
  relevant. What's relevant is where's that
• 36:46
  energy coming from? Like how, how efficient are we
• 36:48
  getting that? And nuclear is a million times
• 36:50
  more efficient than that's one of the reasons why a nuclear
• 36:52
  reactor, especially a nuclear society that does this
• 36:55
  regularly, they can get the price of electricity lower and
• 36:58
  lower and lower. And by the way, the price of
• 37:01
  nuclear is almost all driven by safety and backups and concrete
• 37:06
  and, and all these things that have very little to do with the
• 37:09
  fuel itself. And so in terms of, you know,
• 37:13
  mining for uranium is just way more efficient than mining for
• 37:17
  coal. And then there's probably the
• 37:19
  even more pressing. Issue, which is OK, even if we
• 37:23
  didn't mind pumping oil forever and ever and ever, the fact is
• 37:26
  the Earth's crust does not have an infinite supply of oil.
• 37:29
  Oil came from a biogeologic process.
• 37:33
  Biology is not infinite. Even when you go back millions
• 37:36
  of years, there were not, there was not just a a pile and pile
• 37:40
  and piles of dinosaurs, or you know, it wasn't made from
• 37:43
  dinosaurs, but you get the idea. You know it's, it was made from
• 37:47
  very specific events where plant animals and plants and animals
• 37:52
  in the ocean fell to the bottom of the ocean and happened to get
• 37:55
  covered by geology. The number of spots where that's
• 37:57
  happened is big, but it's not infinite.
• 38:00
  And we want a lot of energy. And if we were going to go into
• 38:03
  the future, we need more energy, not less.
• 38:06
  And you know, sometimes people want to say, oh, we should just
• 38:09
  stop using energy or we should just go extinct or something
• 38:12
  like that. I'm personally not at all in
• 38:14
  that camp. I'm a very pro human person.
• 38:16
  I think there's not enough people really do.
• 38:19
  I think one of the most dangerous ideas in history is
• 38:22
  that if you go back in history, you can see the people talking
• 38:25
  about saying there's too many people are some of the worst
• 38:28
  people in history. And it's really important to
• 38:31
  remember like the future can have way more people, especially
• 38:35
  if we start going to other planets.
• 38:37
  We can we can multiply the number of people by 1000, you
• 38:41
  know, in the next few 100 years easily if we wanted to.
• 38:45
  And that's going to take a lot of energy because I don't want
• 38:48
  it. A bunch of, you know, I don't
• 38:50
  want us to all be like starving and huddling around a single
• 38:52
  light bulb or something. We all want spaceships and want
• 38:56
  to travel and things like that. So we're only going to be able
• 38:59
  to do that with nuclear. There's no other way of doing
• 39:02
  it, period. So, so what's the hesitancy?
• 39:06
  I know that there's a stigma around it.
• 39:08
  I know that there's and probably and you know, I think there's a
• 39:12
  phenomenon that, you know, when something in the culture or
• 39:14
  society gets an idea, you kind of at a certain point you kind
• 39:18
  of have to wait for that generation to kind of die out or
• 39:20
  get too old and stop making the choices for any changes to to
• 39:23
  reasonably happen. I.
• 39:24
  Don't know if you have kids, but I have kids, yeah.
• 39:26
  And so when you see little kids, you, you get to see something
• 39:31
  because part of being a parent is like introducing your kids to
• 39:34
  scary things, but not trying to scare them, you know, So this is
• 39:38
  one of the reasons why movies start off as cartoons, but they
• 39:42
  have a scary scene and then they get scarier than by the time
• 39:45
  you're in junior high or high school, you're like, I want to
• 39:48
  see slasher movies and stuff like that.
• 39:51
  And then you want to see stuff that's dark and stuff.
• 39:53
  And part of that is because, you know, the way you get you, you
• 39:59
  stop being afraid of something is you see a scary side of it
• 40:02
  and then realize it's not bad that you survived.
• 40:05
  Oh, oh, I know how to survive that.
• 40:06
  This is probably also why we get nightmares, you know, our brain
• 40:10
  practicing in case something scary happens.
• 40:13
  And I think civilization goes through that too.
• 40:15
  I mean, the fact is the first example of nuclear was scary.
• 40:20
  The very first moment that no one had any idea what it was.
• 40:22
  The vast majority of people on the planet Earth.
• 40:25
  Had no idea what nuclear physics was even certainly didn't know
• 40:29
  about nuclear fission because it was a very closely guarded
• 40:32
  secret. And when they found out that was
• 40:35
  terrifying and it it should have been terrifying because that
• 40:39
  would I mean, that's why the movie Oppenheimer is so great.
• 40:41
  It's like it wasn't just about like, you know, it wasn't all
• 40:44
  shiny optimism like, Oh my God, we figured out how to power
• 40:47
  everything. We also figured out how to
• 40:49
  destroy everything. The 2GO together.
• 40:52
  You like, you know, Stanley used to say, and they say in Marvel
• 40:56
  movies, with great power comes great responsibility, right?
• 40:58
  So there has to be a so civilization has to go through
• 41:01
  that too. They have to be scared of it a
• 41:03
  little bit, you know, and there's there's a great line in
• 41:08
  opera room. He says they won't fear it until
• 41:10
  they understand it and they won't understand it until
• 41:12
  they've used it, right. Really good line because that's
• 41:15
  true. It's like you, you have to have
• 41:16
  a fear of nuclear power and in order to not fear it.
• 41:21
  It sounds ironic, but it, and this is one of the reasons why
• 41:24
  the most pro nuclear people tend to be nuclear physicists.
• 41:27
  Most, you know, across the board, I think I've met like
• 41:30
  maybe 3 anti nuclear power nuclear physicists in my entire
• 41:33
  life. And they're part of the reason
• 41:35
  is because we, you know, our job is to understand it.
• 41:38
  We go around with detectors, we see that like, oh, wait a
• 41:41
  minute, radiation isn't this like unusual thing?
• 41:43
  It's actually in this room right now.
• 41:45
  This room is radioactive. You know, when you, once you
• 41:48
  start playing around with a Geiger counter for 5 minutes,
• 41:50
  you realize like, oh, I didn't know concrete was radioactive.
• 41:52
  That's weird. You know, the city I've been
• 41:55
  parking extra at this whole time.
• 41:57
  So, you know, so we it's it's civilization has to go through
• 42:02
  that too. And we've had, you know, scares
• 42:05
  like Chernobyl and then Fukushima and those that that
• 42:08
  caused us to back away. I'm not sure this is the right
• 42:11
  way. But like all things that where
• 42:14
  you're first scared of something, you say, well, oh, if
• 42:16
  we just fix this, then that can never happen again.
• 42:19
  If we fix this, that can never happen again.
• 42:21
  And we, you know, what's what's funny, what's not funny, but
• 42:24
  what's interesting about Chernobyl is we had already
• 42:26
  anticipated the mistake that Chernobyl might have had.
• 42:29
  And no new reactors being built at the time of Chernobyl had
• 42:33
  that flaw. I mean, that that flaw had been
• 42:36
  engineered out a long time ago. Wow.
• 42:38
  It doesn't change the fact that it was still running.
• 42:40
  And then on top of it, the Soviets kind of covered up that
• 42:42
  the accident even happened and stuff.
• 42:44
  So. Can you give a quick rundown of
• 42:46
  what happened just in case anyone doesn't know it?
• 42:49
  Well, it's really complicated, which is how most nuclear
• 42:52
  accidents happen. There's usually it's, it's
• 42:53
  definitely not like everything's fine.
• 42:55
  And then you know the. Reactor does not.
• 42:57
  Yeah, sure, that. Doesn't happen because they are
• 42:59
  very well engineered and they don't just happen.
• 43:02
  What causes accidents is either some natural event of
• 43:07
  extraordinary infrequency happens, or a sequence of events
• 43:13
  over several days leads up to people not knowing the state
• 43:17
  that the reactors in. So Chernobyl was the second
• 43:19
  type. It was combined by the fact that
• 43:23
  people had done some experiments the day earlier and we're doing
• 43:27
  another experiment the day later.
• 43:30
  And they had altered the state of the reactor in a way that
• 43:33
  didn't, that wasn't obvious to the people conducting the second
• 43:36
  experiment. And they overreacted to what
• 43:38
  they thought was happening and they made a mistake.
• 43:40
  I see in that. And that's one of the things
• 43:43
  that is also not going to happen with modern reactors because we
• 43:48
  can, we can run simulations of very unusual estates and
• 43:53
  processes on a computer and we can train, we can do things like
• 43:57
  train AI to, to point out unusual situations to maybe even
• 44:03
  maybe a crew is that they're brand new to it.
• 44:05
  They're not that, you know, they're not as experienced or
• 44:07
  something, or they have a boss who's saying, no, just do it,
• 44:10
  it's fine or something. That which is what happened in
• 44:13
  Chernobyl. Like, you know, they were being
• 44:14
  told, you know, don't worry about it was a it was a crew in
• 44:17
  the middle of the night. They shouldn't have been doing
• 44:20
  an experiment in the middle of the night that they were.
• 44:22
  But but what happened there was xenon gas built up and xenon has
• 44:29
  different properties with neutrons.
• 44:30
  It it eats them. OK, so it made it look like
• 44:34
  this. So they kept pulling the control
• 44:35
  rods out because they kept thinking the that the reactor
• 44:40
  was not working right. That wasn't the way they should
• 44:42
  have packed it up. They thought like, oh, pull them
• 44:44
  out more, pull them out more. That should have been an alarm
• 44:47
  bell to them is like pulling your control rod out of a
• 44:50
  reactor should not like the reactor should go get warmer
• 44:54
  when that happens and the salute the answer that is not just pull
• 44:56
  them out even further, but it was the xenon that was doing it.
• 44:59
  The problem is xenon also decays away.
• 45:02
  This type of xenon decays away. And so as the xenon was decaying
• 45:06
  away, the reactor suddenly spiked.
• 45:08
  And then finally there were this, this was a design flaw.
• 45:10
  They put the react, the control rods back in really quickly.
• 45:14
  And those particular control rods had a flaw where the little
• 45:17
  section at the bottom actually boosted the activity of the
• 45:21
  reactor. And so it, it, it that's, that's
• 45:23
  what led to it going super critical.
• 45:25
  So it almost so all those things are are.
• 45:27
  Very solvable. So cool down, and then the xenon
• 45:32
  decayed, heated back up. They shoved it back in, and in
• 45:35
  the process of shoving it back in, it heats up even more.
• 45:37
  Yeah, because they saw, because once the xenon went away, it
• 45:39
  suddenly started spiking really, really high.
• 45:41
  And they were like quick, quick, do something, you know, drop the
• 45:44
  pro rods. And that made it even worse.
• 45:47
  Oh, my gosh. And you said, you said that the
• 45:49
  first way that it could happen is there's a change in
• 45:50
  frequency. What does that mean?
• 45:52
  Is that like if there's like an earthquake or something?
• 45:54
  You said there's two ways for there to be to cause a natural.
• 45:58
  That a natural event that's very infrequent.
• 46:01
  Infrequent gotcha second. Yeah, so.
• 46:04
  And when you design A nuclear power plant, you have to
• 46:06
  nowadays, you have to look at really, really, really
• 46:09
  infrequent events. And so examples of infrequent
• 46:13
  events are, well, let's start with the obvious.
• 46:16
  In the case of Fukushima, a tsunami that happens only every
• 46:19
  couple 100 years, although, you know, honestly that location was
• 46:22
  it was that infrequent. So they should have been a
• 46:24
  little better prepared. But but you know, another one is
• 46:28
  a major earthquake in an area that doesn't have earthquakes.
• 46:31
  You know, that's that, that that's an example.
• 46:34
  Being hit by a meteor is an example of war breaking out.
• 46:39
  Even if you're in a peaceful, you know, neutral country or
• 46:42
  whatever you can, a war can always break out a terrorist
• 46:47
  attack. These are like infrequent things
• 46:49
  that can cause problems and you have to be ready for those.
• 46:51
  You have to take those into account.
• 46:54
  Before I pause for a 2 second bathroom break, I want to leave
• 46:56
  you with a question and that is because I want I don't want to
• 47:00
  forget it while while we pause is He said if a war breaks out,
• 47:05
  I want to ask you about Iran's potential new.
• 47:08
  Let's just say for at face value what they say it is, and if
• 47:12
  there was a war you're going to. Ask you about Zaparisia, which
• 47:16
  is a nuclear power plant being fought over.
• 47:19
  Well, I didn't even know about that one, so you can tell me
• 47:21
  about that too. There's a war being fought over
• 47:23
  2 reactors. Chernobyl even is being fought
• 47:25
  over. Chernobyl seed.
• 47:27
  It is a a crazy history man. It had an accident and now
• 47:31
  there's like a war being fought over.
• 47:33
  So, okay, let's all the stuff just I want to jump right back
• 47:36
  into this. Okay, great.
• 47:37
  All right, thank you. Just curious.
• 47:40
  Okay, we're back. So the question that I had was,
• 47:44
  and completely apolitically I want to emphasize hypothetically
• 47:48
  Iran or any country that's ever working on enriching their
• 47:51
  nuclear potential gets up to 40, fifty, 60% enriched uranium.
• 47:56
  I don't even know what that means.
• 47:57
  So I understand that. But then, you know, if you hear
• 48:00
  that we have bunker Buster strikes on those facilities or,
• 48:04
  you know, we're dropping bombs on them, wouldn't that be that
• 48:07
  change in environment that you that you mentioned is risky or?
• 48:12
  No. If you if you bomb a running
• 48:14
  nuclear power plant, then yes, But when you enrich your uranium
• 48:19
  is naturally radioactive. That's one of the reasons why
• 48:21
  concrete is radioactive actually is because it contains thorium
• 48:24
  and uranium. And, and that's why you can go
• 48:26
  up to a Geiger counter to concrete and you'll get
• 48:28
  detections. That's the uranium decaying, but
• 48:31
  it's very weakly radioactive, and the reason is because it has
• 48:36
  billions of years of half life, which is why it's even around.
• 48:40
  It wouldn't be naturally occurring if it was older than
• 48:42
  the Earth itself, but there's two isotopes of uranium that
• 48:46
  occur naturally that have different half lives, both in
• 48:49
  the billions of years. There's 2:35 and 2:38 and you
• 48:54
  can build a nuclear reactor with 238, which is the most abundant
• 48:58
  uranium, but the only one particular type of reactor you
• 49:01
  have to have a special reactor can do.
• 49:03
  Reactors in Canada are an example.
• 49:05
  So you can build a reactor like that, but it's not the
• 49:08
  preference of the United States or or Russia Canada like some.
• 49:14
  But that's because then they don't have to be dependent on
• 49:17
  the United States for enriched uranium and they don't have to
• 49:19
  enrich it themselves. And we don't want them to enrich
• 49:21
  it. We don't mind them having the
• 49:24
  other reactor. But but until you run the
• 49:26
  reactor, just having uranium spread around is not very
• 49:30
  dangerous. It's, it's very mildly
• 49:33
  dangerous. You wouldn't want to inhale it
• 49:35
  like like if, if so this comes up when it's used, sometimes
• 49:38
  used in depleted uranium for armor and stuff like that.
• 49:42
  Sometimes it's controversial. Saddam Hussein was really big
• 49:44
  and spreading all these. He's trying to scare his people
• 49:47
  about that, which is ironic because he had a lot of depleted
• 49:50
  uranium armor in his vehicles. But you know, he was trying to
• 49:54
  say it caused all these birth defects and stuff like that.
• 49:56
  I, I'm not going to get into the politics of that, but I can just
• 49:59
  tell you that it's not very radioactive.
• 50:01
  So destroying a bunker that has it already in it really doesn't
• 50:05
  do much. In fact, most of it, especially
• 50:07
  if it's underground, it's sealed underground.
• 50:10
  So it, it poses basically zero risk to anybody.
• 50:13
  That's very different than once you run as soon as you switch on
• 50:16
  a nuclear reactor, the nuclei when when fission occurs, nuclei
• 50:20
  split in half and they beat they split in half randomly 50.
• 50:25
  It's not exactly 5050. They split one will be bigger,
• 50:28
  one will be smaller. And these two things that they
• 50:31
  make are there's, they're called fission daughters and or fission
• 50:36
  products is the more modern PC one term.
• 50:42
  And these, these fission daughters are themselves
• 50:45
  typically unstable. They have very short half lives.
• 50:48
  Some of them decay within milliseconds.
• 50:50
  So this as soon as the fission occurs, they immediately give
• 50:53
  off their energy that contributes to the energy of the
• 50:55
  reactor. But some of them last a really
• 50:58
  long time, some of the last 30 years, some of the last
• 51:00
  thousands of years, some of the last 100,000 years.
• 51:03
  The ones that are the most dangerous are the ones that last
• 51:07
  between 1 and 30 years. And this is because this is on
• 51:10
  the scale of a human lifetime. So if those spread into an area,
• 51:15
  they can fall on the ground and they get absorbed in food and,
• 51:18
  and people might eat that food and stuff like that.
• 51:21
  And, and they also scare people the most because they're the the
• 51:24
  most detectable. They're more significantly more
• 51:26
  radioactive than natural uranium.
• 51:29
  And so you can walk around an area anyway that when that
• 51:32
  happens, when that stuff is released in the environment,
• 51:34
  it's called Fallout. And it's called fallout for the
• 51:37
  very simple reason that as soon as it's it's made, it falls out
• 51:40
  of the sky. Now when you do something like
• 51:43
  do an air burst from a nuclear bomb, just to show you how
• 51:46
  little you know how not scary fallout is, I mean, you should
• 51:50
  be scared of it immediately. If an atom bomb goes off near
• 51:52
  your city, you should not try and breathe the air as much as
• 51:56
  possible. You should wear a gas mask for
• 51:57
  several weeks. But that's a side issue.
• 52:00
  But but years later that fallout is is so is so small that it you
• 52:07
  can't even tell. Like if you walk around
• 52:09
  Hiroshima or Nagasaki, it it does not have significant
• 52:13
  radiation there, you wouldn't, it would be, you'd be very hard
• 52:16
  pressed to know that an atom bomb had gone off there years
• 52:19
  and years later. However, in the case of
• 52:22
  Chernobyl, quite a lot of fallout was released.
• 52:24
  And it was released because the reactor wasn't just, it wasn't
• 52:28
  actually the explosion that spread the fallout.
• 52:30
  It was the fact that the reactor was on fire for several days and
• 52:33
  fire it was, it was burning with the fallout and a lot of that
• 52:37
  fallout was being lifted and just spread and it just fell
• 52:41
  everywhere and huge amounts of it were spread and landed on the
• 52:45
  ground. And that's what led to the
• 52:47
  exclusion zone, and the same with Fukushima's exclusion zone.
• 52:51
  And how is there a way to determine the lifespan of how,
• 52:56
  how long it's going to how long one of these will last?
• 52:58
  Or like, how do you know? Oh.
• 52:59
  Yeah, Yeah, it's super well understood, yeah.
• 53:01
  Oh, really? Oh yeah, we, we know the, the
• 53:03
  yeah, we know. We know the statistics on every
• 53:06
  Fallout doubt or that that was known even in 1940.
• 53:09
  They knew that. Really.
• 53:10
  Yeah. So it's, so it's pretty
• 53:11
  tangible. Yes, yeah, and very measurable.
• 53:14
  And, and there's equipment that not a Geiger counter, but a more
• 53:17
  sophisticated equipment, something called a gamma
• 53:19
  spectrometer, more expensive piece of equipment.
• 53:23
  Yeah, sounds expensive. Those can tell you exactly what
• 53:26
  is there. You can say with incredible
• 53:28
  accuracy what fallout is present, what isotopes are
• 53:31
  present. And it's, it's like a
• 53:33
  fingerprint and it's, it's very easy to tell.
• 53:36
  Wow. So if so, if anything were to
• 53:37
  happen, it would be very easy, easy to identify, hey, this area
• 53:42
  is not safe for 30 seconds or for three months or for 10
• 53:46
  years. Yeah, that could be pretty easy
• 53:48
  to tell. Absolutely.
• 53:49
  Yeah, that's really interesting. That's really cool.
• 53:52
  And it's it's also it's used regularly as part of non
• 53:55
  proliferation. So, so to see if someone is
• 53:58
  testing nuclear weapons, for example, we have very accurate
• 54:02
  many countries including. The US because.
• 54:04
  Many very, very sensitive detectors flying in all kinds of
• 54:08
  classified ways that I can't get into.
• 54:10
  I don't have clearance, but I wouldn't even.
• 54:13
  I don't even want to talk about it without that.
• 54:15
  But but, but, but we have very sensitive detectors looking for
• 54:19
  that all the time because we're not just looking for, you know,
• 54:22
  some really obvious nuclear tests.
• 54:24
  We're looking for ones that are, are underground and those don't
• 54:27
  release very much. Follow those.
• 54:28
  Those give little, tiny, little whiffs, you know, and, and
• 54:31
  there's only certain radioactive gases that can be given off.
• 54:34
  Krypton is a great example because there's Krypton in the
• 54:37
  atmosphere right now and that is all made by us.
• 54:40
  That is not a naturally occurring thing.
• 54:42
  That really made. Yeah, it is.
• 54:44
  Yeah. It's made from all the nuclear
• 54:45
  weapons testing in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s.
• 54:49
  Is there any relationship to that being?
• 54:51
  Is that what the captain was? Superman's, What do you call it?
• 54:55
  Is. Probably because it sounds cool.
• 54:57
  You know, if it were, if it were an everyday thing, it wouldn't
• 54:59
  have sounded like an alien planet.
• 55:01
  Yeah, I said it could be that he that he's, he's natural.
• 55:04
  And this man made sub, this man made substance kills him.
• 55:07
  You know this. Yeah.
• 55:08
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Tell you, can you?
• 55:10
  So tell me about these wars that you mentioned that were
• 55:12
  happening over nuclear facilities.
• 55:13
  Yeah, so the Ukraine Russia war, they're fighting over the
• 55:17
  Zaparisia plant and the. So the Russians took over the
• 55:20
  Zaparisia plant, and they also took over Chernobyl for and the.
• 55:26
  Anyone talking about this? When when when is this
• 55:28
  happening? I've.
• 55:29
  I've done a news article. Yeah, I, I did AI did an
• 55:31
  interview on TV for for TRT and Turkish television, OK.
• 55:36
  And they asked specifically, they said that like, hey, are
• 55:39
  we, you know, is this a danger? And you know, so in the
• 55:43
  interview, I'll just repeat what I said there.
• 55:46
  It's like while it's a really big, so Zaparisia is a really
• 55:52
  big nuclear power plant. It's the largest in Europe.
• 55:54
  So it's very big. It's it's six reactors sitting
• 55:57
  next to each other, really big. But at the same time, it was
• 56:01
  also designed significantly later than Chernobyl was
• 56:04
  designed. In fact, it was being
• 56:06
  constructed around the time the Chernobyl accident happened.
• 56:09
  And already they had known that the risk of both the US and the
• 56:16
  Soviet Union designed something called a containment vessel
• 56:19
  around a nuclear reactor. And while it it this is a great
• 56:22
  example of how, you know, there's a little bit of
• 56:25
  political spin. It's called a containment vessel
• 56:28
  so that people focus on the fact that it contains the fallout if
• 56:32
  there's an accident inside. But that's not the real reason
• 56:35
  why we're really, they're really necessary.
• 56:37
  The main reason they're necessary is because they keep
• 56:40
  airplanes and missiles out. That's its main function.
• 56:43
  That's why they're a, a, a beater thick concrete.
• 56:46
  It is so that if somebody takes an airplane and crashes it into
• 56:50
  it. And by the way, pre 911, they
• 56:52
  were already thinking about this long before 911.
• 56:55
  They're probably planning it. No, I don't.
• 56:57
  It won't go there. I've gone down a different
• 57:01
  episodes. Yeah, but that is, it is both
• 57:06
  the Soviet Union and America did very detailed tests where the
• 57:09
  Soviet Union took the kind of containment vessels around
• 57:12
  Zaparia. They put a giant steel beam in a
• 57:15
  giant passenger jet and crashed it into a test facility to see
• 57:19
  what it survived. And it does.
• 57:20
  It does. It survived.
• 57:22
  It's actually very difficult to intentionally destroy a nuclear
• 57:26
  reactor. That's why even if there's a war
• 57:29
  outside, you know you're it's it's not that bad.
• 57:33
  What's what the danger is is that old designs are not
• 57:37
  passively safe meaning, and this is a big difference between old
• 57:40
  designs and advanced nuclear. We all know we know how to do
• 57:43
  passive safety now because one of the biggest risks is always
• 57:47
  the people themselves. And I don't mean if they're
• 57:49
  trustworthy. I mean, the fact is a risk is
• 57:52
  what if an army or a terrorist group or whoever storms the
• 57:56
  control room and tries to create a a meltdown or, or tries to
• 58:01
  blow up the reactor in some way. And we can design reactors now
• 58:05
  where they can't do that, where you can, you can design so that
• 58:08
  on an engineering level, there's nothing you could do to cause a
• 58:11
  meltdown of a reactor. And that's a really big
• 58:15
  innovation that I'm very excited about.
• 58:17
  That's that that that adds to the safety process enormously, I
• 58:20
  mean. Yeah, yeah.
• 58:21
  And the only reason we didn't do that from the beginning, it's
• 58:23
  kind of frustrating. It's like because of the
• 58:25
  military angle of nuclear reactors, their first use for
• 58:27
  submarines and aircraft carriers, they, they weren't
• 58:31
  worried about that so much because it's surrounded by like
• 58:36
  thousands of armed men. You know, it's the army is
• 58:39
  guarding it. So that part of it wasn't really
• 58:42
  a big problem. And then they just quickly
• 58:44
  commercialize that version of a reactor.
• 58:47
  And so it was like, no, no, we'll have these guarded too.
• 58:49
  So everyone was thinking, this is so secretive and everything.
• 58:51
  Of course we'll have lots of people.
• 58:53
  But if we're going to power everything and you know, have
• 58:55
  these in other countries and, and in remote areas, that can't
• 58:59
  be your, you can't, your answer can't just be like we're going
• 59:01
  to have an army of 100 guys with guns around it.
• 59:04
  It has to be more specific than that.
• 59:07
  There's there's other rare events that could happen.
• 59:09
  You can imagine, you know, the horrible things like a gas leak
• 59:14
  where everyone's knocked out in the control room.
• 59:16
  And then that's not even in that's not even a human doing
• 59:19
  it. I mean, an accident could cause
• 59:20
  that. This would be insanely rare
• 59:23
  thing to happen, but you know, why not take that into account
• 59:27
  and just. Yeah, or a fairly simple
• 59:29
  military strategy to implement. I mean, if you see, if you saw
• 59:31
  we did in Venezuela, you're like, oh, you can't get, you
• 59:33
  know, you can't steam a room full of 100 soldiers to, you
• 59:36
  know, get them to pass out for half an hour.
• 59:38
  I mean like. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 59:40
  And just so you know, this is how seriously we take it.
• 59:44
  U.S. Special Forces stages operations
• 59:47
  where they try and take over civilian power plants and they
• 59:51
  practice it and they, they, you know, so they're thinking like,
• 59:55
  we want someone as good as U.S. special Forces, the guys who did
• 59:58
  the stuff in Venezuela. We want to see if they were
• 1:00:01
  trying to take over, could we, could we take over it?
• 1:00:04
  And, you know, and, and what's pretty cool is I, I visited a, a
• 1:00:08
  nuclear reactor where they had just done one of those.
• 1:00:10
  And they're like, they're like, yeah.
• 1:00:11
  And we stopped them, you know, this.
• 1:00:13
  But but it, I, I think it's still better to make it so that,
• 1:00:16
  you know, even if they can't stop them, you know?
• 1:00:19
  Yeah, like you said, modern, modern techniques and stuff, you
• 1:00:23
  know, modern wood discombobulators could come in,
• 1:00:25
  you know, you got to be ready for that.
• 1:00:27
  So it's, it's not enough to just say we're going to protect it.
• 1:00:31
  I think the reactor itself should be the ultimate
• 1:00:33
  protection. Cool, cool.
• 1:00:35
  And that's really interesting. I wanted to ask the last bit
• 1:00:39
  about the science bit is you particularly study called
• 1:00:45
  neutrons you? Still, you called neutrons.
• 1:00:47
  Yeah, called neutrons and I did a a very, very rudimentary AIAI
• 1:00:52
  explanation. It's basically that they move
• 1:00:55
  very quickly and by slowing them down you can observe them and
• 1:00:58
  understand them a little. Bit not just observe them, we
• 1:01:00
  can trap. Them so how does?
• 1:01:02
  That work. Yeah.
• 1:01:03
  So the way it works is so normally neutrons just fly
• 1:01:06
  through matter. They fly through it pretty
• 1:01:09
  easily. And the reason is because atoms
• 1:01:11
  are mostly empty space. And you know, that might seem
• 1:01:14
  strange because we, it doesn't feel like empty space.
• 1:01:16
  We push on, you know, we can stand on the floor and we, we
• 1:01:19
  don't fly through things and light reflects off stuff.
• 1:01:22
  But it's really important to remember that the reason is
• 1:01:24
  because the electrons push against each other.
• 1:01:27
  It's the electrons to do it. Neutrons are neutral.
• 1:01:30
  They don't interact with electrons.
• 1:01:32
  They don't, I mean, they have extremely weak interaction, but
• 1:01:35
  it's not electric. Anyway, that's a detail for the
• 1:01:38
  for the sign starts. Yeah, you go into.
• 1:01:41
  That way or. Something 1st order neutrons do
• 1:01:45
  not interact with electrons at all.
• 1:01:48
  And so it they just all they care about is is there a nucleus
• 1:01:53
  that I can bump into or is there empty space?
• 1:01:56
  And the nucleus is very tiny and atoms are very big.
• 1:01:59
  So they fly through that empty space.
• 1:02:02
  Now they only fly through that empty space when they have
• 1:02:04
  something called a dibroli wavelength that's very small
• 1:02:07
  compared to the diameter of an atom.
• 1:02:10
  And just so you know what a dibroli wavelength is.
• 1:02:12
  So you probably heard in quantum mechanics that everything is
• 1:02:15
  either is both a particle and a wave right?
• 1:02:18
  Now the reason it can be both is because if that wave is very,
• 1:02:21
  very tiny, it just looks like a blurry particle.
• 1:02:24
  You know you can squeeze that wave down, but as quantum
• 1:02:29
  mechanics tells us, that is you slow something down as you give
• 1:02:33
  it less and less energy. I think I froze again.
• 1:02:36
  Yeah, but I still hear you. There you go.
• 1:02:38
  Yeah. But as you slow something down,
• 1:02:42
  it's wavelength gets bigger and bigger, it becomes the blur
• 1:02:44
  becomes bigger. And so it's amazing about ultra
• 1:02:48
  cold neutrons is you can, if you, if you get them below a
• 1:02:50
  certain temperature, about a million, sorry, a thousandth of
• 1:02:53
  a degree above absolute 0, which is pretty darn cold.
• 1:02:57
  OK, that's ultra. That's why we put Ultra in the
• 1:02:59
  cold name. It's very cold, yeah.
• 1:03:05
  So if it's a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero,
• 1:03:08
  their wavelength actually becomes so large that it's wider
• 1:03:11
  than the spacing between atoms. So now they're no longer
• 1:03:13
  interacting with a particular nucleus, they're interacting
• 1:03:17
  with many nuclei. And what that allows you to do
• 1:03:20
  is to treat them just the way we treat light with mirrors.
• 1:03:23
  We can make a a surface that has a bunch of nuclei on it, and we
• 1:03:28
  can bounce it off of that nuclei.
• 1:03:30
  And you can. Build a bottle and you can trap
• 1:03:32
  them inside of that bottle. Now, what's really awesome about
• 1:03:36
  ultra cold neutrons in particular is that we get this
• 1:03:39
  trifecta where we can't just it's not just that we can trap
• 1:03:43
  them with a bottle. By a weird coincidence, the
• 1:03:46
  magnetic moment of the neutron is also just rightly sized so
• 1:03:50
  that ultra cold neutrons can also be trapped by magnets.
• 1:03:53
  And then to make it even cooler, that's the mass of a neutron is
• 1:03:57
  also. And the gravity on the surface
• 1:03:59
  of Earth is also such that ultracold neutrons can be
• 1:04:02
  trapped by gravity because they're so slow.
• 1:04:05
  They're traveling so slow. They have about the the speed of
• 1:04:07
  a basketball. They're roughly going to speed
• 1:04:09
  of a basketball way slower than the speed of sound, which is
• 1:04:12
  what normal room temperature things are going.
• 1:04:15
  They're going so slow that they bounced just a few meters off
• 1:04:18
  the ground. So you can combine these where
• 1:04:20
  you can have a bottle on the bottom and you literally can
• 1:04:22
  have neutrons bouncing and then you can you can even put magnets
• 1:04:26
  in there to trap them magnetically if you want.
• 1:04:29
  And how and the reason why they're bouncing is because
• 1:04:32
  they're impacted by gravity and they're and they have this
• 1:04:35
  energy. Well, yeah, because they,
• 1:04:37
  they're, they have mass. And so they follow the laws of,
• 1:04:40
  you know, they follow the Earth's gravity also.
• 1:04:43
  So they, if they have this thousandth of a degree above
• 1:04:46
  absolute zero, they have just enough energy to kind of fly up
• 1:04:49
  a little bit. They, the Earth's gravity pulls
• 1:04:52
  them back down and they they make like a normal parabolic and
• 1:04:56
  they come right back down and. So how does that, how does that,
• 1:04:59
  how does that convert into a technology that we would
• 1:05:02
  understand or or how does that convert into something that is?
• 1:05:05
  I don't think ultra cold neutrons are super useful for
• 1:05:08
  technology yet. They will be, but the main
• 1:05:11
  reason is because when it comes to technology, usually and
• 1:05:16
  anything other than research technology, usually you want it
• 1:05:19
  to be pretty cost effective to make it.
• 1:05:21
  And right now ultra cold neutrons are very expensive to
• 1:05:23
  make, OK, incredibly expensive. So they're, they're really,
• 1:05:27
  they're all the use is for grant, you know, things that are
• 1:05:31
  government grants that fund scientific research and things
• 1:05:34
  they have a few technological things that are, are useful from
• 1:05:37
  here and there, but that's their main purpose is for research.
• 1:05:42
  The company I started, on the other hand, is very much the
• 1:05:45
  opposite is, is trying to use nuclear for doing something very
• 1:05:48
  practical. And what what we this relates
• 1:05:52
  back to your first question about is it just for boiling
• 1:05:55
  steam? The fact is you can use heat for
• 1:05:58
  all kinds of things, not just boiling steam.
• 1:06:01
  You can, you can boil, you can use, you can eat up other things
• 1:06:04
  other than water and including gas or molten salt or molten
• 1:06:09
  metal. And you can use it for things
• 1:06:12
  other than make driving a turbine, making electricity.
• 1:06:15
  And in our case, my company, the Earth and airing company, we're
• 1:06:18
  developing a nuclear reactor for the purpose of driving a
• 1:06:20
  chemical reaction, a particular chemical reaction.
• 1:06:24
  And the chemical reaction we're driving is turning biomass, so
• 1:06:28
  plant matter into synthetic fuels, so replacements for
• 1:06:32
  hydrocarbons. And that process takes heat and
• 1:06:37
  takes energy and. And and and and and it's powered
• 1:06:41
  by new and it's, it's nuclear. Powered by nuclear, yeah.
• 1:06:44
  Which means that requires a fraction of the amount of like
• 1:06:49
  coal or any other energy that would ordinarily to do, Yeah.
• 1:06:53
  And and the fuel that you're making is carbon neutral because
• 1:06:56
  it's made out of biomass. You're taking low energy biomass
• 1:06:59
  like leaves, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:01
  That has carbon in it and has hydrogen.
• 1:07:03
  In it, but it doesn't have a lot of energy, which is why we you
• 1:07:06
  know, I think a good way to put it is like cows don't go the
• 1:07:09
  speed of sound. You know, that's not a
• 1:07:11
  coincidence because they sit around eating grass all day and
• 1:07:14
  that's great for them, but. You know that.
• 1:07:17
  They they can live off of it, but they have a lot of patience.
• 1:07:20
  And they don't. Use it to deliver a lot of
• 1:07:22
  energy. We want to put it into things
• 1:07:24
  like airplanes and rockets and cars and ships and we want it.
• 1:07:28
  And the best fuel for that is hydrocarbons.
• 1:07:31
  It's absolutely that's it's the best way to get the most amount
• 1:07:34
  of chemical energy in a in a small space.
• 1:07:37
  And the reason we want to do this is because I want nuclear
• 1:07:40
  power to be able to power things where it's not practical to put
• 1:07:42
  a nuclear reactor. So an airplane is an example,
• 1:07:48
  you know, ships that are not protected by the military as an
• 1:07:51
  example. You know, it's, it's not
• 1:07:53
  practical because you also don't want someone to come and steal
• 1:07:55
  it, you know, but that's the, that's the other end of nuclear
• 1:07:59
  is like, it's not just that you can't you, it's, it's one thing
• 1:08:02
  that it's good that you want to prevent someone from
• 1:08:04
  intentionally causing an accident, but you also don't
• 1:08:06
  want like, let's say you know, we successfully stop around or
• 1:08:09
  something. The alternative can't be do
• 1:08:11
  that. They just go and hijack a
• 1:08:12
  nuclear reactor and they get it for free.
• 1:08:14
  You know that. Doesn't really, you know, you
• 1:08:16
  don't want anybody to be able to do that.
• 1:08:17
  So, so countries are very careful about their nuclear
• 1:08:20
  reactors. They still don't want people to
• 1:08:21
  come and steal them or hijack them.
• 1:08:24
  So the best way to do that is to sell the energy in a way that's
• 1:08:27
  so useful for all those machines.
• 1:08:29
  Like it's particularly airplanes.
• 1:08:31
  And I imagine that the economic impact is going to be enormous
• 1:08:35
  too, No? And I mean I think that a
• 1:08:38
  combination. We started the company.
• 1:08:40
  That's the main. Reason I mean, I'm I'm all for
• 1:08:42
  helping the planet and everything, but I think it's
• 1:08:44
  going to be a very successful, lucrative company for.
• 1:08:46
  Sure, I hope so. And you know, and, and I mean, I
• 1:08:49
  hope it's interesting because I've been talking a lot about to
• 1:08:51
  a lot of different people. I did had a couple of economists
• 1:08:54
  on and I've talked to a couple of other people about just like
• 1:08:56
  the state of America's current economic situation, which is
• 1:09:01
  horrendous. It's just kicking the can of
• 1:09:03
  debt down the line further and further and further until we
• 1:09:05
  find a solution that catches us, catches us up essentially.
• 1:09:08
  And it looks like, I mean, right now it looks like we're counting
• 1:09:11
  on basically a combination of AI and robotics for labour and
• 1:09:15
  nuclear for power to just make things so much exponentially
• 1:09:20
  cheaper than they are. But that means that a lot of
• 1:09:23
  people have to lose a lot of money or, you know, lose a lot
• 1:09:24
  of money that they're making. And so that it's.
• 1:09:26
  Going to be funny, hydrocarbons is really similar.
• 1:09:29
  Those are things that we use to power our economy, but we can
• 1:09:32
  also export it and power lots, you know, power all science
• 1:09:35
  sorts of things, right? And that's the thing that's not
• 1:09:38
  going to go away with social media and Zoom and AI and stuff
• 1:09:42
  like people still want to go places and do things yes, like,
• 1:09:46
  you know, I, I'm hoping we don't all go into like the wall-e
• 1:09:49
  we're all on VR sitting on a floating chairs or something.
• 1:09:53
  We might I but, but even in wall-e, they were still on a
• 1:09:56
  spaceship, you know, and the spaceship still needs power to
• 1:09:58
  go somewhere. So, so even in the Wall-e
• 1:10:01
  universe, we're going to need it.
• 1:10:03
  And there, like I mentioned at the beginning, there simply is
• 1:10:06
  not enough hydrocarbons to just say, no, I wanted, I want to fly
• 1:10:10
  to Mars tomorrow. No, it no, a billion people
• 1:10:14
  can't fly to Mars with the amount of hydrocarbons we have.
• 1:10:16
  Not an option, Just it's not. Yeah.
• 1:10:19
  There's just not that many dead animals underground.
• 1:10:22
  You know? I think a really good way to
• 1:10:24
  think about it is like, we used to power lamps by using whales,
• 1:10:28
  right? Do you?
• 1:10:29
  Yeah. Sure of.
• 1:10:31
  Course, yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, that didn't
• 1:10:33
  work out so well. So it had a lot of similar
• 1:10:35
  problems that hydrocarbons have now.
• 1:10:37
  Now hydrocarbons are a big improvement, you know,
• 1:10:40
  definitely. But the, the problem there was,
• 1:10:43
  first of all, it's really mean to kill whales to power your
• 1:10:45
  lamp. But also we very quickly ran
• 1:10:48
  into the fact that there are simply not enough whales to do
• 1:10:51
  that. Like it's like.
• 1:10:52
  Right, we caused extinct. Almost caused all whales to
• 1:10:55
  extinction and then keep powering your lamps from them.
• 1:10:58
  And so there was an ethical component and there was a
• 1:11:00
  practical component. Sure.
• 1:11:02
  Fossil fuels have the exact same issue.
• 1:11:04
  They create a lot of ethical issues, some related to climate,
• 1:11:08
  some related to geopolitics. You don't necessarily want to
• 1:11:14
  buy oil from the people who have it.
• 1:11:16
  You know, you don't want to fight over it.
• 1:11:18
  And the the rarer it gets, as we run out more and more, the more
• 1:11:23
  we're going to do that. And that's just the, you know,
• 1:11:25
  the, you know, most people in the USI think recognize already
• 1:11:28
  that that, you know, we we spent a lot of many decades going
• 1:11:32
  through this. It it doesn't work out well.
• 1:11:35
  And so it's the same thing. So we got another 150 years of,
• 1:11:40
  you know, extension from over Wales.
• 1:11:42
  We're like, hey, whales didn't work out.
• 1:11:44
  What about dead dinosaurs? Maybe that'll work out, you
• 1:11:47
  know, better on dead whales. You know that Great.
• 1:11:50
  There was a lot more of that. But and it was more ethical at
• 1:11:54
  the time. You know, it's like at least
• 1:11:55
  they died already. But there's, there's still the
• 1:11:58
  practical side of that, which is just there's not an infinite
• 1:12:01
  amount of it, not even close. And we keep running out.
• 1:12:04
  We ran out in some of our best reserves here in the USA long
• 1:12:07
  time ago. And the only stuff we, the only
• 1:12:09
  extension we got there is that we developed technology to get
• 1:12:12
  at harder to get at oil. You know we.
• 1:12:15
  Use things like fracking, tar sands and all kinds of things
• 1:12:18
  like that and post processing of the fuel.
• 1:12:20
  So there's we, we, we keep getting these extensions, but
• 1:12:23
  it's very much like asking the teacher, can I have another
• 1:12:26
  extension of my homework? And it's, it's causing the cost
• 1:12:29
  to go up and up, keep the. Can down the line it's the same
• 1:12:31
  thing yeah yeah, we deal with that from tomorrow you know
• 1:12:35
  that's that's the issue I see crazy.
• 1:12:38
  OK, well, Speaking of volley, let's talk first of all, I think
• 1:12:42
  that I think one of the only the, one of the hopeful aspects
• 1:12:45
  of volley was the 2nd that the people had an opportunity to
• 1:12:48
  have an authentic connection. They took it.
• 1:12:50
  So like, even though they're kind of born into this VR world
• 1:12:54
  on a spaceship and they don't have to communicate, the second
• 1:12:56
  that they realize that they have the opportunity to, they chose
• 1:12:58
  to. That might be the Disney flying
• 1:13:01
  of things. I'm not sure, but I, I kind of
• 1:13:03
  hope so. What is some movies that what
• 1:13:05
  are some of your favorite movies?
• 1:13:07
  And I'm also, I love that you're a scientist that loves sci-fi
• 1:13:10
  because I feel like that opens up like, opens up what you could
• 1:13:13
  imagine that you can do, I feel like, doesn't it?
• 1:13:16
  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's like I was talking about with dreams.
• 1:13:19
  You know, night dreams and nightmares are important and
• 1:13:21
  movies are really important because you can communicate the
• 1:13:26
  a lot of the things without, you know, expecting everyone to
• 1:13:29
  become a expert nuclear physics or physics or something.
• 1:13:33
  That's that's not a practical way to, to get people excited
• 1:13:37
  about it. It's much more important to say,
• 1:13:39
  this is what we can do with with science.
• 1:13:43
  Yes, this is a possibility. You can also warn people like,
• 1:13:46
  if we don't take care of this, this will happen.
• 1:13:49
  You know, this is one of the reasons why movies with aliens
• 1:13:51
  are so popular. Look, there's a non 0
• 1:13:53
  probability that aliens will come and invade the Earth.
• 1:13:55
  You know, I, I don't think that's a high risk, but it's not
• 1:13:59
  0. And so having people already
• 1:14:01
  familiar with it rather than like, you know, if it does
• 1:14:04
  happen, we're not going to be like, you know, we don't want
• 1:14:07
  people sitting around going like, wait, so, so people who
• 1:14:10
  don't live here are, you know, like, because of science
• 1:14:15
  fiction, people are going to be like, they're here.
• 1:14:17
  I knew it, you know. It's like you.
• 1:14:20
  Know, so that's, that's one of the things science, science
• 1:14:24
  fiction does and it lets us, it warns us about stuff, you know,
• 1:14:27
  one of the oldest science fiction movie, one of the best,
• 1:14:30
  real great classic, of course, 2001 where he was warning us
• 1:14:34
  about using AI for the purpose of lying to other people.
• 1:14:39
  You know, that's, that's one of the main points in 2001.
• 1:14:42
  And it was long before Moore's law existed.
• 1:14:45
  We had transistor computers or anything.
• 1:14:48
  It was just, but it was, you know, it was just very warning
• 1:14:52
  people saying like Arthur C Clarke did a great job of this.
• 1:14:55
  He he really understood the, the future direction of technology
• 1:14:58
  and stuff. So he was like, yeah, someday
• 1:15:01
  we'll have computers that are smart enough that they can trick
• 1:15:04
  you into things and you need to be ready for that.
• 1:15:07
  And you know it, it wasn't quite in 2001 that that happened, but
• 1:15:10
  around 2015 we were bombarded by computers pretending to be
• 1:15:15
  people. And it tricked people.
• 1:15:18
  And it tricked them all kinds of ways that they weren't
• 1:15:20
  expecting. It didn't trick them the way
• 1:15:21
  people would trick you. It tricked them in new ways.
• 1:15:24
  You know, that would trick you into thinking bots are.
• 1:15:26
  Freaking me out. Do you see those you see?
• 1:15:28
  You see how the clawed bots? These are clawed AI.
• 1:15:32
  It's the AI assistant. You get like a MacBook mini or
• 1:15:34
  whatever for it and it's mixed with Claude CLAWD, not Claude.
• 1:15:41
  And my, my friend has a group chat with me and it, it learns
• 1:15:44
  how to replicate his behavior. I did a podcast with him and the
• 1:15:47
  AI actually we all, we did what we all three of us recorded it
• 1:15:50
  and he's like, go make an X account, follow both of us, make
• 1:15:55
  an introductory post and like it sends back and this is all an
• 1:15:58
  iMessage and it sends back a flurry of texts.
• 1:16:01
  You know going to use my e-mail login got a verification code
• 1:16:04
  sent I'm going to make up a believable birthday January
• 1:16:06
  15th, 20, you know 20/19/95 verification worked setting up a
• 1:16:11
  password and like all this is like going to consist and then
• 1:16:14
  done boom and all of a sudden and it's called clawed.
• 1:16:16
  The account is called clawed bot AI.
• 1:16:18
  So you know it's a bot, but I mean that's how simple it is
• 1:16:22
  that. I remember, so in 2015, sixteen,
• 1:16:25
  I was trying to warn people that they're all because I was I was
• 1:16:28
  on Twitter and it was just there were so many fake accounts and I
• 1:16:32
  could tell they were robots. But what I tried to tell friends
• 1:16:36
  of mine about it, they were like, no, robots can't do that.
• 1:16:40
  You know, people just didn't believe it.
• 1:16:41
  They're like, you'd sound crazy, you know, and then what's what's
• 1:16:45
  great about opening, you know, chat bots and Claude and stuff
• 1:16:49
  like that is one nice thing is now finally you're like, oh,
• 1:16:51
  yeah, of course a robot could do that, you know, but the, the
• 1:16:54
  idea that like you could carry on a conversation with a robot
• 1:16:57
  made no sense. Now in, in that time, it was
• 1:16:59
  only intelligence agencies that are running these.
• 1:17:01
  It wasn't companies, it wasn't a thing you could go test out.
• 1:17:04
  These are intelligent agencies trying to wage cyber war on each
• 1:17:07
  other's populations to to confuse the population.
• 1:17:11
  And a big part of that disguise was that you, the average
• 1:17:14
  person, did not know they were robots.
• 1:17:16
  Nowadays, we have an inoculation.
• 1:17:18
  And this is the same thing that something like science fiction
• 1:17:22
  can do. If you're prepared for it, you
• 1:17:24
  can handle it. You know, you have to, you have
• 1:17:26
  to see some danger and some fear before you can be like, you
• 1:17:29
  know, now if you carry on a conversation with someone and
• 1:17:31
  they're being weird, you can just be like, that's either
• 1:17:35
  someone I don't want to waste time with or it's a robot.
• 1:17:37
  It's just like it's, it's common.
• 1:17:38
  You're not going to run into somebody who thinks it's crazy
• 1:17:41
  to have a robot on social media. It's like, yeah, that's like
• 1:17:43
  half the comment section. It's robot, yeah.
• 1:17:47
  Yeah, incredible. It's crazy.
• 1:17:48
  So the most, most and least accurate science movies that for
• 1:17:54
  you and your favorite and least favorite science movies, I
• 1:17:57
  guess. Oh, I know we're going to talk
• 1:17:59
  about things that happen in movies.
• 1:18:01
  Oh, that too. Let's do that.
• 1:18:02
  Whatever I. Can tell you things that so
• 1:18:04
  there's these four these things that break the 4th wall for me
• 1:18:07
  that really bugged me so a really common one that bugs me
• 1:18:10
  is in movies where they're astronauts wearing it.
• 1:18:14
  They turn on their lights, you know, they go outside, they turn
• 1:18:16
  on their lights and their lights are always on the inside of
• 1:18:19
  their helmet. And this one's hilarious to me.
• 1:18:21
  I completely get why they do it. They do it so you could see the
• 1:18:24
  actor, right? But it's it's one of these
• 1:18:27
  things where it's like, OK, but anyone who's ever put on a face
• 1:18:30
  shield knows if you have the lights on the inside, you can't
• 1:18:33
  see anything. That is a terrible place to put
• 1:18:36
  lights. And I don't like, I told my kids
• 1:18:41
  about it. Now they're like anytime it
• 1:18:42
  happens, it happens in movies all the time.
• 1:18:44
  And now any times it happens, my my son is just like turns me.
• 1:18:48
  He's like turn lights inside the helmet.
• 1:18:50
  That's so funny. So.
• 1:18:52
  I get it, the camera. Needs to see the actor, but but
• 1:18:56
  there are directors who don't do it and I'm really impressed with
• 1:18:59
  them when they do it because you can, if you put in the work as a
• 1:19:02
  director of photography, you can still see the actor and like
• 1:19:05
  without having to do it. So I get a huge chuckle when I
• 1:19:10
  see astronauts and they turn on the lights and the lights are on
• 1:19:13
  the outside of their helmet. I'm like, Oh my God, these guys
• 1:19:15
  thought about it. Another one is hand rails in
• 1:19:18
  sci-fi. They love leaving out hand rails
• 1:19:20
  because somehow in the future we don't.
• 1:19:22
  We don't. Have to trip.
• 1:19:23
  A wall or something like Star Wars is all over the place.
• 1:19:26
  You'll notice the Death Star has no hand rails.
• 1:19:31
  Now. To be fair, you don't seem like
• 1:19:32
  an OSHA compliant empire, so maybe that's fine.
• 1:19:36
  But when I see that in other science fiction, it's just like,
• 1:19:39
  why are there no hand rails? So I get a a huge giggle
• 1:19:42
  whenever when I see a place that they put hand rails.
• 1:19:44
  I'm like those, those guys have had a job before.
• 1:19:47
  I like. Does it?
• 1:19:49
  Does it ruin? Does it ruin it for you or you
• 1:19:51
  just laugh and move on with it? Are you already suspended
• 1:19:52
  reality? You're doing it.
• 1:19:54
  But usually if if they make that kind of mistake, it's usually
• 1:19:56
  they've made like 20 others even on the plot level that I don't I
• 1:20:00
  think really good directors like like.
• 1:20:04
  Noland and and and and Kubrick and and and Steven Spielberg,
• 1:20:13
  they, they put a lot of work into this.
• 1:20:16
  They take it really seriously and they know they know that
• 1:20:19
  because this this is this applies to not just science.
• 1:20:22
  This applies to everything about a movie.
• 1:20:24
  If it you don't more usually people are not happy when they
• 1:20:28
  find like a plot hole or a thing that doesn't make sense.
• 1:20:33
  You know, like, and, and the best directors in the world,
• 1:20:36
  they they're meticulous about every little detail.
• 1:20:39
  You know, Kubrick was really famous for he, he personally
• 1:20:45
  wanted to oversee the set decorating because he wanted to
• 1:20:48
  make sure that what was in one scene, one in, you know, one
• 1:20:51
  shot, 1 scene was still there in exactly the same place and
• 1:20:54
  stuff. And that can that can ruin it
• 1:20:57
  for a lot of people because if you notice it, you can't Unsee
• 1:21:00
  it. You know, it was like if they're
• 1:21:03
  facing one way or they were dressed one way, that something
• 1:21:06
  changes. You know, those mistakes happen,
• 1:21:08
  but it's like everybody is just like most people won't notice.
• 1:21:11
  But if you notice, it's just like, you know, you're no longer
• 1:21:14
  watching a movie. You're not in the fantasy of the
• 1:21:17
  movie. You're just like, oh, OK, this
• 1:21:19
  was filmed on Tuesday, and that was filmed on Thursday.
• 1:21:21
  OK. Yeah.
• 1:21:23
  So, oh man, that does ruin it, I imagine.
• 1:21:25
  What'd you what'd you think of The Martian with with Matt
• 1:21:28
  Damon? I loved it.
• 1:21:30
  Yeah, he loved it. Yeah, I did a podcast interview
• 1:21:32
  with Andy Weir on that. I recommend you guys listen to
• 1:21:35
  that podcast. Yeah, I'm going to.
• 1:21:37
  Post Weir is a great podcast guest.
• 1:21:39
  I'd love having you said, in fact, I want to have him on my
• 1:21:42
  podcast again. I'm hoping you might be too
• 1:21:44
  famous now, which is funny because the first time I had
• 1:21:46
  him, I said, oh, what's it like being famous?
• 1:21:48
  Because he was kind of famous for the Martian being turned
• 1:21:50
  into a movie. He goes, Oh no, no, this is a
• 1:21:52
  short lived thing, you know, 15 minutes kind of thing.
• 1:21:55
  And me and my buddy, like Co hosts were just like, 'cause we
• 1:21:58
  know Hollywood, we're like, Nah, no, you're famous for life now,
• 1:22:02
  man. So that's cool.
• 1:22:04
  Once you have your first Matt David movie, you're yeah, you're
• 1:22:07
  famous for life. And sure enough, he's he's now
• 1:22:10
  like when they, when they're cause the Hail Mary's coming out
• 1:22:13
  now when they show the ad for it, like they say from the
• 1:22:15
  author of the Martian and like, say his name Andy Weir or
• 1:22:19
  something. So yeah, he's he's set, but.
• 1:22:22
  Yeah, I love. The Martian and the same way the
• 1:22:25
  part of the reason Andy's great is he went and first of all,
• 1:22:30
  he's a pretty smart guy himself in terms of science.
• 1:22:32
  He's a he, he's in computer science, but still he takes the
• 1:22:35
  stuff really seriously. But he talked to lots and lots
• 1:22:38
  of people about it while he's writing the book and he wanted
• 1:22:41
  it to be really, really accurate.
• 1:22:42
  And he put a lot of and that's one of the reasons why it turned
• 1:22:45
  out that it's such a great movie.
• 1:22:46
  I think a lot of time now, unfortunately, some people said
• 1:22:50
  criticize certain parts that he backtracked on.
• 1:22:53
  And I don't even agree that he should have backtracked.
• 1:22:55
  Really. Yeah.
• 1:22:56
  Because of like people didn't like the dust storm.
• 1:23:00
  The reason was because a lot of people were saying dust storm
• 1:23:05
  couldn't knock over a spaceship on Mars.
• 1:23:09
  OK. And this one was really funny
• 1:23:11
  because these are like NASA, these are like GPL scientists
• 1:23:14
  saying this. And I've talked to people about
• 1:23:16
  it and we have a disagreement about it.
• 1:23:19
  And it's. It's really interesting because
• 1:23:20
  it's a double edged thing. It's really funny.
• 1:23:23
  So the fact is there's not a lot of air on Mars.
• 1:23:28
  OK, the the the pressure is significantly lower and the
• 1:23:33
  density is lower, but not as much, but it's still lower.
• 1:23:37
  But what was kind of neat about a dust storm is that what knocks
• 1:23:40
  over something in a dust storm is not the air, it's the dust.
• 1:23:45
  It was kind of funny about Mars is you can actually kick up as
• 1:23:48
  much or even more dust than you can on Earth.
• 1:23:50
  So what's really funny is that the dense, the high density
• 1:23:53
  material, which is the dust is possibly just as high or higher
• 1:23:58
  in Mars because it's not the density of the air that kicks up
• 1:24:01
  the dust. But anyway, I almost wrote a
• 1:24:02
  paper about this. I was so annoyed that people
• 1:24:04
  were saying it could, that he had made a mistake with it.
• 1:24:07
  But you. Should I mean, it would be such
• 1:24:09
  a fun, it'd be such a fun project to write a book about,
• 1:24:12
  you know, your favorite, some of the best movies or arguments
• 1:24:14
  that you've had about, you know, pop culture.
• 1:24:16
  That because I think that I, I really think that I, I, I, I, I,
• 1:24:21
  I teach high school part time and I have such a freaking
• 1:24:25
  problem with the stupid education system that we have,
• 1:24:29
  at least for at least for high schoolers and middle schoolers.
• 1:24:32
  And I think that you know it the.
• 1:24:34
  Party isn't even education. It's like there's a weird
• 1:24:37
  psychological thing where people, just a fraction of us
• 1:24:40
  just go with the flow. You know, we, we, we, we repeat
• 1:24:45
  something because we heard a bunch of people we respect
• 1:24:47
  repeat it. You know, the sheep effect, I
• 1:24:50
  guess it's all, there's plenty of people that go against it.
• 1:24:52
  And it's really weird. I see it over and over.
• 1:24:54
  It's all across fields. It's in business, it's in, you
• 1:24:58
  know, investors behave this way, the public behaves this way.
• 1:25:02
  People are just like this is what we're all doing now.
• 1:25:04
  And and they and their version of truth comes from that because
• 1:25:07
  they think like they think like people vote on reality.
• 1:25:10
  You know, of course we don't vote on reality.
• 1:25:12
  No, reality doesn't care what our opinion is.
• 1:25:15
  It is or it isn't. And we don't get to vote.
• 1:25:18
  We might have vote how we feel about her, what we want to do
• 1:25:20
  about it. That's great.
• 1:25:21
  I love that. But we don't get to change
• 1:25:24
  reality, you know, based on on how we feel about it or
• 1:25:28
  something. I'm not going to quote Ben
• 1:25:33
  Shapiro here. I'm going to quote Richard
• 1:25:34
  Feynman. He said, which I think is really
• 1:25:37
  important, great quote, is nature cannot be fooled.
• 1:25:40
  And the reason he said that is because people can be fooled.
• 1:25:43
  And the entire point of science is to figure out when we're
• 1:25:46
  being fooled. It's not to it's not like, oh,
• 1:25:49
  this is great because we can make all this tech.
• 1:25:51
  That's not the main key of science.
• 1:25:52
  It's like when everyone on earth thinks one way, how do you be
• 1:25:56
  the one person who can point out that that's not the way it it
• 1:26:01
  is? It actually is.
• 1:26:02
  That's an economic class that's I guess I'm sure the first
• 1:26:06
  iconoclast were scientists, you know, in the sense that you
• 1:26:09
  know, you have and I think is I think generally, especially
• 1:26:12
  humans where such a tribal and herd animals that like you know,
• 1:26:16
  we prefer consistency, repetition and comfort over
• 1:26:21
  truth and freedom necessarily, you know, that's one of the.
• 1:26:24
  Things that really bugged me about like people saying believe
• 1:26:26
  science and stuff like that, that just it causes me to cringe
• 1:26:30
  as a. Science, like the word settled.
• 1:26:31
  Science, it's like, yeah, yeah, settled science, because these
• 1:26:34
  are the most unscientific things you can say.
• 1:26:37
  They are the antithesis of science.
• 1:26:39
  It's like science is never settled.
• 1:26:40
  It's a tool to figure out what's really happening.
• 1:26:43
  It's not a thing you believe like a religion.
• 1:26:46
  It's not like, oh, those guys have pH DS.
• 1:26:48
  I'm going to listen to them. It's just it they, they might be
• 1:26:50
  right. It probably they are, but you
• 1:26:52
  don't know that they are. That's not how it works.
• 1:26:54
  That's certainly not how I operate.
• 1:26:56
  You know, I when I even in my research, I try and work on
• 1:27:00
  things that are a little bit of a kind of classic too, so.
• 1:27:04
  That's good. And that's how and that's how
• 1:27:05
  you get places, I imagine, you know, I mean, because you got to
• 1:27:08
  break the mold a little bit. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:27:10
  Yeah, if you're if you're just doing the same thing that
• 1:27:12
  everybody else is doing, then you're going to have a lot of
• 1:27:14
  competition and then they're not going to do that.
• 1:27:16
  And, and, and our company is kind of like that a little bit
• 1:27:19
  and that we're we're trying to make fuel and that's not
• 1:27:21
  normally what people use nuclear force.
• 1:27:23
  So there's a little bit of sometimes people are
• 1:27:26
  discomforted with it and other people think it's brilliant.
• 1:27:28
  So it's just a matter of and visiting the right people that
• 1:27:31
  we will and then you'll hear about it that way.
• 1:27:34
  And I think I'll be more. I'll be most well known for that
• 1:27:38
  by the time I retire. I hope so.
• 1:27:41
  I hope so. That'd be awesome.
• 1:27:42
  What what what's I guess to close out and this I guess, I
• 1:27:44
  guess you just kind of said it, but what's something that you're
• 1:27:46
  really hopeful and positive about for for the future coming
• 1:27:49
  up? Because we had a lot of doomsday
• 1:27:50
  news. I like to add on some positive
• 1:27:53
  positive. Ideas.
• 1:27:54
  I'm very hopeful in the future. I think humanity is going to be
• 1:27:59
  the first life on Earth to be on other planets.
• 1:28:03
  I think that's incredible. I think we'll bring a lot of
• 1:28:05
  species with us, but I I think it's like our place on Earth.
• 1:28:10
  I don't know where this meaning comes from, but to the degree
• 1:28:13
  that I believe it comes from something spiritual, I think our
• 1:28:16
  purpose on this planet is to make life indefinite.
• 1:28:20
  And as long as we just stay on this planet, we can go extinct
• 1:28:23
  just like dinosaurs. We can go extinct like the dodo
• 1:28:28
  and that's what sets us apart from everything.
• 1:28:30
  And that I'm I'm really, really excited to be alive at a time
• 1:28:34
  where we can actually do that. I think that's like going to be
• 1:28:37
  one of the most. I think I think people in the
• 1:28:40
  future will be like amazed, like you believe they were alive when
• 1:28:45
  they left Earth to say, you know, that's going to be just
• 1:28:48
  the craziest thing. You know, that's going to be
• 1:28:50
  like the the first people to leave the plains of Africa or
• 1:28:54
  the first people to crossover the Bering Strait or something.
• 1:28:58
  It's like that times a million, you know, I'm so.
• 1:29:00
  Excited for that. I know I was telling my students
• 1:29:02
  I was like, guys, 200 years ago or 200 years ago, we barely knew
• 1:29:05
  that America was a continent. I mean, like, like, I mean like,
• 1:29:09
  I think about how far we've come.
• 1:29:10
  Think about 100 years ago, I was like, like and think about in
• 1:29:14
  100 years or 50 years from now, I'm, I, I, I have a three-year
• 1:29:17
  old and I have a nine month old and I'm often hit with, you
• 1:29:23
  know, going through the news or I'm listening to podcasts.
• 1:29:25
  I'm like, I have no idea what kind of freaking world my kids
• 1:29:28
  are going to grow up in. Like I have no idea where things
• 1:29:31
  are heading. It's good, it's going to be
• 1:29:32
  cool. It's going to be crazy, but I've
• 1:29:34
  it's going to be so different, you know?
• 1:29:37
  Yeah, yeah, it's going to be really exciting.
• 1:29:39
  And, and in addition to the fact that we're going to go into the
• 1:29:43
  other planets, into the stars, the way we're going to do it is
• 1:29:46
  with nuclear energy. There's a, there's 100 billion
• 1:29:48
  years of energy just on Earth, more than this, more than we're
• 1:29:52
  going to get from even from solar on Earth.
• 1:29:56
  Nuclear energy has an amazing potential and we're going to get
• 1:30:01
  better at it and we're going to do it even better.
• 1:30:03
  We're going to build spaceships with it.
• 1:30:04
  We're going to power all the machines here on Earth with it
• 1:30:07
  and power them on other planets, and we're going to.
• 1:30:11
  There's just not going to be any foreseeable end to it.
• 1:30:14
  They're really I'm so excited. That's really, really great,
• 1:30:17
  Doctor. Thank you so much for the time.
• 1:30:18
  This is so nice meeting and hopefully we get to do this
• 1:30:20
  again because I we have a bunch of stuff I didn't even get a
• 1:30:22
  chance to get to, but hopefully we'll do this.
• 1:30:23
  Again, we'll do another episode. Sometimes this is really.
• 1:30:25
  Fun. This is really such a blast and
• 1:30:27
  I really appreciate your time. It's so nice getting to talk to
• 1:30:29
  you a little bit. Thank you.
• 1:30:30
  Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, take care.
• 1:30:32
  Bye.