The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1130 - Adam Frank

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June 12, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience

02:23:44

Joe Rogan Experience #1130 - Adam Frank

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adam frank

01:30:48

joe rogan

50:56

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jamie vernon

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		Five, four, three, two, one.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Boom.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Boom.
		Adam, what's up, man?
		How you doing?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's good to be here today.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's good to be here, too, with you and to talk.
		Whoa, I'm already knocking shit over.
		Can't be trusted.
		Your book, Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		All about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's deep shit, man.
		Just the title alone.
		You're like, whoa.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I love aliens.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Everybody loves aliens.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Everybody does, but what are your thoughts on actual aliens and whether or not they've ever visited here?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, sort of two things.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So first of all.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We should tell everybody you have a background in science.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I do.
		I'm an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester.
		I run a research group that studies like stars and planets.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you're not a crazy person I brought on here.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
		I'm a card-carrying scientist.
		I got my card and everything.
		So, yeah, I've been doing research on, you know, astronomy, astrophysics for a long time, but I also do all this popular writing, like for NPR, New York Times.
		And the genesis of this book came, A, because I love science fiction.
		I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid.
		But also, I do a lot of work on climate change.
		And so I do a lot of climate change denial.
		And what I realized was that there's this way we talk about it that is like completely forgets about the fact that like we're probably not the first, you know?
		And that led me to a whole bunch of research that eventually led to this book, including one paper that we did that showed that the odds that we're the only time it's ever happened, the only civilization in the entire history of the universe, the only way that that could be true is if the odds per planet are one in 10 billion trillion, right?
		That's pretty low, right?
		So the odds of anything being one in 10 billion trillion, that's pretty freaking low.
		So it's probably happened before, you know?
		There's been other civilizations before ours.
		And once you realize that, man, that is like, you know, it changes everything about how we think about ourselves, you know, and what's happening to us right now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So of other civilizations before ours that have fucked things up.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's kind of the premise, right?
		So that's what, you know, when you look at climate change, right?
		Basically what it is, is civilizations are giant machines for turning energy into work, right?
		You know, New York City, right?
		You sit over and you look at Manhattan and you're like, holy shit, right?
		There's all this energy flowing into it.
		And then there's all this work being done, you know, to keep everything moving.
		And, you know, there's no way not to have an impact.
		If you build a world-girdling civilization, which, you know, that's what a civilization is, there's going to be impact.
		So the whole point of my doing this book was to start looking at ourselves as just one of, you know, we're not alone.
		We're not the only time this has ever happened.
		Doesn't mean anybody's around now.
		Like, that's a different question.
		But the idea that it's never happened before, it meaning like, you know, civilization, what's happening around us, like this machinery and everything, that, you know, that just in the new world of what we understand about planets and shit, that is just like, you know, it's not tenable anymore.
		We got to wake up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The idea that some civilization has to be the first one, that's what the only, the only way you could ever think that we're the only ones is that some civilization has to be the first one, even in a universe that's infinite.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It has to happen one time.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But the idea is, are the conditions ideal in a trillion different spots all over the infinite spanse of the universe?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And that's the thing, right?
		So what we've learned, so one of my trips right now is like, this is not your grandfather SETI anymore, right?
		Our understanding, we went through this major revolution in our understanding of planets about 20 years ago.
		So you look back at the Greeks, right?
		And you can see them arguing about whether any other stars had planets other than the sun.
		And it goes back and forth.
		Some of the Greeks were like, yeah, it's definitely happening.
		And then Aristotle was like, no, we're the only world in the whole universe that has life.
		And then as time goes on, it kind of goes back and forth.
		And even at the turn of the 19th century, people thought planets were incredibly rare.
		They thought the only way you could get a planet was if two stars passed really close to each other and they kind of like taffy pulled out stuff that would eventually form a planet.
		And the odds of those kinds of collisions are so small that people are like, you know what?
		There's just no planets.
		And no planets, no life, unless something really freaky is going on.
		But then 20 years ago, we discovered our first planet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that crazy when you really think about that 20 years is such a short amount of time?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		1998.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And nobody knew before that.
		Like nobody knew whether there were any planets, right?
		You know, when I was starting an astronomy, people were like, well, we don't know whether there's going to be any other planets.
		And we went from, so the first one was actually 96, I think, 95, 96.
		From that to now, where we know that every freaking star in the sky has a planet, at least one.
		Pretty much everyone.
		The giant ones, maybe not, but they're so rare that pretty much every star you see in the sky has a family of planets around it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That is so nuts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so nuts that this is such a new discovery.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, when we think about what we know about the universe, we think that we've had a pretty good understanding of it for a long time.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But the fact that we didn't even know for sure that there are planets.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
		In my own lifetime, you know, people were teaching me when I was starting, like, you know, we just don't know, maybe they're rare.
		And now we know for certain that they're everywhere.
		And the thing people have to realize is every one of those planets is a place.
		You know what I mean?
		It's a place you could walk around.
		Some of them for sure are going to have oceans.
		There's going to be mountains.
		There's going to be rain falling.
		You know, I mean, like, they're all freaking places and they're all places where things can happen.
		You know, planets are basically like nature's way of taking sunlight and doing something interesting with it.
		So you have 10 billion trillion planets in the universe, right?
		And every one of them is an experiment that's being run.
		So, you know, the idea that like, we're the first time it's ever, now that we know that, right?
		Now that we've gone through that revolution and understand that planets are like time a dozen.
		We're not only talking about planets here.
		We're talking about planets are in the right place for life to form.
		So there's the idea of the habitable zone, right?
		So, you know, Mercury sucks.
		You cannot, you know, Mercury's so hot that there's no way anything's going to happen.
		And, you know, planets that are far enough out, they're going to be so cold.
		You know, they're so far away from their star that they're going to be so cold that it's hard to get liquid water on the surface.
		So we define the habitable or Goldilocks zone as the place where you can have, you can pour water onto the surface and it'll sit there.
		It won't freeze and it won't sort of just evaporate away.
		So all these 10 billion trillion planets I'm talking about are all in the right place for life to form.
		And so like with that many numbers, that many experiments being run, like you got to be a psychotic pessimist to say that like this is the only time a civilization's ever happened.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		But there's still no evidence yet.
		Obviously, we didn't even know there really absolutely were planets until 20 years ago.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But we don't know for sure that there's something else out there.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, no, this is an argument by, I call it like an argument by exhaustion.
		You know, if I gave you a bag of 10 billion trillion planets and you have to sort through all of them, right?
		The odds that you're going to, you're never going to find another one that built a civilization is pretty, now, you know, like I said, you're really asking for a really serious pessimism.
		But, you know, we're just getting started with this game, right?
		Of looking for life.
		That's why I keep saying it's not, this is not your grandfather's SETI where you like you point a radio telescope at a star and you kind of wait to see whether somebody's signaling you.
		Who knows whether they are signaling?
		Who knows what they'd be using?
		Now what we can do, because we got all these planets to stare at, is we're going to be able to stare at them as they pass in front of their star and get the light that passes through their atmosphere.
		So we're going to like, who knows what we're going to find?
		You know, we're not waiting for them to signal us anymore.
		Over the next, I swear to God, man, in the next 30 years, we're going to have data relevant to the question of life.
		Maybe not civilizations.
		That could happen too, but just life on other worlds.
		And we've never had that before.
		All the arguments for the entire history of humanity have just been two dudes yelling at each other.
		But in the next 30 years, because of the stuff we're building, and now that we know there's planets, we're going to have real data to argue over with.
		So, man, it's like, we're in a whole nother ball game now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think the big fear for a lot of people is what happens when we find out for sure that there's something else out there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If we really do find like some other Manhattan on some Goldilocks planet that's hovering some similarly sized star a billion light years away or whatever the hell it is, that's going to be very, very, very strange.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It will be.
		It'll be a game changer, right?
		Because for religions, for, you know, I mean, wow, you know, what do you do if you find other intelligent creatures who are building civilizations?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You start making them pay taxes.
		That's what you do.
		Fuck.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You go get pissed off that they're not doing what you want them to do.
		You should be believing this one.
		But I think, you know, for me, the thing is like, it's about climate change because what it means is like there's no way.
		From my perspective, that if you have a civilization, you push your planet.
		You can't stop it in some sense.
		If you build a civilization, it's kind of like.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the only way around it is if you have like a subsistence culture, indigenous Native American culture.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which it seems impossible, but it existed here 200 years ago, which is a blink of an eye.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
		I know it's amazing.
		It's only 200 years since the ramp up.
		You know, that the world population only crossed the billion mark in like 1850.
		You know, I mean, it's, there were so few of us on the planet for most of the time that even we've been around.
		Forget the planet's history.
		So, you know, I think like there is, you know, the discovery, if we were to get any evidence, you know, and I think the way it's going to happen is going to be more by accident than by like signaling, you know, like that.
		So, so, but if we had any evidence of another technological, if we had any evidence of just life, right?
		If we just find a biosphere, evidence that, you know, and we can do that from a distance, right?
		Even if the star is, you know, 30 light years away, if we get, if we see, as the light passes through the star's atmosphere for those few moments, if we see oxygen in the atmosphere, you know, we'll be able to detect that.
		That's what we can do with telescopes.
		We can tell like what you can see, the fingerprints of the different kinds of elements.
		If we see oxygen in the atmosphere, you know, and methane, that pretty much says that there's a biosphere there, that there's life.
		Because you wouldn't get oxygen would just react away really fast if it wasn't for life.
		Like on Earth, if it wasn't for life, there'd be no oxygen in the atmosphere.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What are the possibilities of life that exists in a completely different environment than we expect?
		Like, I know that they found life at the bottom of the ocean in these volcanic vents at extreme heats, boiling water.
		They didn't expect to see this.
		And this is fairly recent as well.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That is, yeah.
		The idea that the because right, this whole definition of the habitable zone was based on the idea, like, oh, you got to have a surface and it's got to be, you know.
		But now with the every, you know, not every, but like a bunch of the moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, the gas giants, they have oceans under them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's thoughts that Europa might have something below the surface, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, because the Europa is, you know, it's this pretty big moon, and we know it's covered in ice, right?
		You can see it's covered in a, you know, and we think that layer of ice is maybe like, I don't know, 10 kilometers thick, and then below that, there may be 100 kilometers of ocean.
		And because as it moves around Jupiter, the gravity of Jupiter is always squishing the inside, so there's probably volcanic activity happening at the surface.
		So you have hydrothermal vents, you know, heat escaping out of the, and chemicals escaping out of the, at the surface onto the ocean.
		And that's how we think life formed on Earth.
		That's one of the arguments for how life formed.
		It formed first in the hydrothermal vents.
		So yeah, you know, that's another game changer, right?
		So that we should also be thinking not just about the classic habitable zone, but now we've got to think about like life.
		And can you get civilizations in an underwater civilization?
		You know, in an underwater, maybe you have a really rich ecosystem.
		But the problem with an underwater life or forming civilization is that you can't really do fire, right?
		Fire was pretty important for us for metallurgy.
		You know, to build advanced technology, you kind of need combustion.
		So that's kind of the open question with that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we are not really concerned with animals.
		We're concerned with things that think and change their environment.
		Isn't that weird?
		Like we are concerned with life, but we're only concerned with life that's at least similar or comparable to us.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, microbes don't like, we don't, we don't, yeah, they don't get too excited.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Go to Jupiter for some microbes.
		But we are excited about the things that they've recently found on Mars, right?
		I mean, very recent discovery.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
		So, you know, the thing is actually from the, you know, so I'm going to, I, I, I work in a lot of fields, but I would also consider myself an astrobiologist, right?
		Which is a pretty kind of wild idea that you can do astrobiology, even though you only have one example, which is the Earth.
		But we've learned so much that now we can start asking ourselves about the possibility of life elsewhere.
		So finding even a microbe, like even a friggin, you know, amoeba on Mars would be, or even evidence that there used to be amoebas on Mars.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is the evidence that they've discovered on Mars?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		What they found was organic chemistry, right?
		And so, but organic chemistry, man, I hated chemistry when I was growing up, and I hated organic, was that's just basically chemistry involving carbon, you know?
		So you can have non-organ, you know, organic chemistry doesn't mean organisms, but it's the kind of chemistry that organisms love, right?
		So finding evidence that there was like they drilled amazing, like we sent a freaking robot to Mars that could drill through a rock, you know, and then ingest the rock and, you know, and then send the data back across space.
		Man, we're, you know, pretty good for a bunch of hairless apes.
		Yeah.
		So what they found was evidence for fairly complex, you know, organic chemistry, which meant that way back when Mars, and this we know for sure, right, Mars had water on it.
		We know that for sure now.
		Mars was a blue planet for.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did they think that Mars was hit by an asteroid or a comet or something along those lines?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, everything got hit by comets.
		That's how we have, you know, we have chunks of Mars here, right?
		That, you know, the thing in 96 or whatever when they were like, oh, we found life on Mars.
		You know, they thought what they found was fossil bacteria in a chunk of Mars that they found in Antarctica.
		So the planets have been swapping spit for like the entire history of the solar system.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's fossilized bacteria that they found.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Has that been confirmed?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Most people now think that the Allen Hills meteorite, that probably, you know, it's inconclusive and it's not conclusive enough to be like, yeah, we found life.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like a tiny little squiggly worm looking thing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's what it was, yeah.
		But it was so small that it was like way smaller than any of the microscopic fossilized bacteria we've ever seen before.
		So people in general are like, meh.
		But by find, but that's what started, right?
		That's when Clinton was like, okay, we're going to send a lot of shit to Mars.
		Because back in 90, early 90s, people were kind of done with Mars.
		And so that's what triggered the whole, you know, one space probe after another, the rovers.
		And like, so, you know, the thing we found was a direct result of that effort, which was this organic chemistry, which says that back in the day, Mars had a lot of this stuff lying around, had a lot of these, you know, these organic chemicals lying around, which if you're life, that's what you're going to be using.
		So that's like one more step.
		Like we've been putting the Lego blocks for the argument for life on Mars one piece at a time since the, you know, since the first rovers went there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, if we did discover just even plants on some other planet, even just a planet with some sort of plant-like life.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that would be...
		That would be a game changer.
		Because right now we don't know if there's, you know, are we the only time in the entire history of the universe that like this crazy thing where you got, we went from non-life to life.
		Like, is that common or is that never, ever, ever happen?
		So that's the question we want to, you know, we want to answer.
		And I, you know, I mean, like, you know, that argument I was given before is I think from the probable arguments, I'm saying it's like, you know, it's almost overwhelming that, yeah, it probably happened somewhere.
		Again, it doesn't mean anything's here, but we need evidence, right?
		Science.
		So we got to build that evidence.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and if we do find something, one of the weirder things would be if we found something and there was a way to get there.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, we find something and we're like, yeah, we find something, but we're pretty sure there's some kind of life and it's three billion light years away.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You're like, well, that's cool.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what do we do?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's nice to know that we're not the only ones.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, you know, it's interesting, like, how much would that change?
		You know, even if we found like evidence for, this is a debate.
		Like, if we found evidence of a technological civilization, we saw like alien megastructures, like that star they thought.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what was that nonsense?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It wasn't really nonsense.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was, you know, something floating around, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, so here's what they saw.
		So, you know, the way we discover planets is we look for when the planet passes in front of the star, you get a little dip in the light, right?
		It blocks out a little bit of light.
		It's like a little eclipse.
		And so, you know, we've now, that's how we know that every star in the sky has planets.
		But there's like, they found one that just made no sense.
		Like the light would dip, then it would stop dipping, then it would dip again three times, and it would stop dipping.
		Sometimes it was lower, sometimes it was higher.
		And, you know, for a year or so, people were like, what the fuck is this?
		You know?
		And so, you know, Jason Wright, Jason's a friend of mine.
		You know, they wrote a paper where they're like, hey, you know, at least, because this is what the future is going to look like.
		We can't say, we have to at least consider the possibility that these are artificial structures that are like orbiting the star or, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It would have to be ungodly huge.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Ungodly huge.
		Alien megastructures.
		Like that's the best word ever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like the size of a country, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, these things would be huge, right?
		But that's what people think.
		Like, you know, when people think about advanced alien civilizations, the idea of building large-scale structures is you think that may be the next thing you do once you reach a certain point.
		Like, you know, the Dyson sphere, the idea you could collect all of the sun's energy and use it for yourself by building a giant sphere around the sun with solar panels on the inside.
		People think like, that goes back to Kardashev's, the idea of this Kardashev scale back in the 60s, where he was like, look, there's going to be a natural progression of civilizations that goes, first, you collect all the energy you can from your planet, and then you use that to do amazing things.
		And then you collect all the energy from your star, and then you do that.
		You do amazing shit with that.
		And then, you know, the whole galaxy.
		So, you know, Kardashev thought there was a scale that civilizations naturally progress through.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you hopefully don't blow yourself up along the way.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that's the question.
		I mean, I've criticized the Kardashev scale in one of the papers I recently did because what it fails to take into account is the fact that on your way up to the type one, type one is when you harvest all the energy from your planet, which basically means somehow covering your planet in solar panels or something.
		That neglects what we've learned since Kardashev wrote his paper in 64 is that, you know, planets don't like that shit.
		Like planets, the planet's going to feedback.
		You try and build massive shit on your planet.
		The planet has its own biosphere is pretty powerful and you've got to take the biosphere into account or you get climate change.
		You get the planet being pushed off in another direction.
		But whatever.
		So for the alien megastructures, people thought like, oh, maybe this is like a piece of a Dyson sphere, right?
		This is like, you know.
		Now, so, you know, when he proposed this, people went bonkers over this, right?
		He's just saying, he's like, look, here's the 15 different things could be, and I'm going to have to at least consider the possibility that it's artificial.
		But for me, and some people got really angry and everything, but I thought like this is – Because there's been a thing in the community over the years.
		SETI got a bad name, right?
		SETI for a bunch of SETI was sort of thought as being like, oh, only wackadoodles do that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But why is that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just because there was no results?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I just think, you know, you know what it is?
		It's because of shitty TV.
		I mean, I realize in some ways, right?
		It's all, you know, it's prosthetic foreheads, right?
		It's the whole, we've had so much kind of crappy, you know, speculation about aliens that trying to do anything scientific always had this whiff of sort of being a little, you know, and then there's the UFO stuff, you know, which is completely separate, has nothing to do with it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But SETI never really achieved any results, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There was that one big blip that was highly popularized.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, wow signal.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		But here's the thing about SETI.
		We never really did SETI that much.
		You know what I mean?
		Like people have this idea like, wow, we've got telescopes all over the world and they're looking.
		So the government never funded a SETI study, anything major, right?
		So people, you know, all that SETI has done is like basically, you know, some dudes on a telescope get a little extra time.
		Like, hey, man, look, let's go look at a star.
		So Jill Tarter, who's one of the, you know, the founders, one of the greats of SETI, she compares it's like, you know, we got an ocean that we need to look at.
		And so far we've looked at a thimble, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Was she the Jodi Foster character?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		She's the Jody Foster character.
		Yeah.
		We're in the contact.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So she's, you know, and it's a good point.
		Like we haven't really looked yet.
		So the idea that the stars are silent or anything, it's like, man, come on, we haven't even begun to do a comprehensive survey.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		SETI makes me sad.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Why?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because I feel like they're wasting their time.
		And there was a documentary I saw once about some biologist who was convinced that the giant sloth was still alive and that there was examples of them in South America.
		And this poor bastard had spent more than a decade looking for this giant sloth in South America.
		And there was this moment where he was chasing down this supposed dung pile and they were looking for it.
		Dowdy.
		And he had this look in his eyes where he was like, holy shit, what if I waste my fucking life in my academic career chasing down something that's not even real?
		That's kind of how I've always felt about SETI.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but that's not the way the people, I mean, everybody who's involved in it, you know, I don't do SETI, you know, I mean, you know, I respect the people who are doing it.
		But, you know, most of them are like, look, this is just a multi-generational thing.
		And if even if I don't find it, I'm laying the foundation.
		It's like, you know, cathedrals, right?
		It took like, how many generations did it take to build a cathedral in medieval Europe, right?
		So the first guy who laid the stone was like, I'm not going to see this.
		You know, maybe my great-grandkid.
		So most of them are like, you know, they know that this is going to, you know, this is a, this is a huge, it's like the most important question in humanity, right?
		Are we alone?
		And they're willing to accept that.
		Like, you know, if you're going to do it scientifically, you're going to have to do it brick by frickin brick, you know?
		And so you just have to accept that and, you know, go on.
		But like I said, I think we were, you know, this is a new era now.
		So the idea of like looking for signals, which assumes that somebody's putting out signals, right?
		That's, that's a huge assumption right there.
		But now that we know that there's all these planets and we're staring at all these planets, it's kind of we need to be thinking differently about, you know, we need to be prepared for like what happens when we see something we don't understand.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's also, we don't even use radio anymore.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Right.
		Cable.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Radio is dying slowly but surely.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Local radio is it's kind of a thing of the past.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
		The only thing that's really we're beaming out a large scale is military radars.
		You know, that's the main thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So there would be some kind of signal.
		It wouldn't necessarily have to be radar or radio.
		It would just have to be something that we could detect, some form of anomaly that seemed to be artificial.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So here's some of the suggestions that people are talking about.
		So Avi Loeb at Harvard talks about the idea, you know, maybe what you need, and you're going to need the sensitivity for this, you're going to see like rocket engines going back and forth between, you know, you have a planet, you have a multi-planet civilization on something, and you're going to see little flares as rockets decelerate and accelerate back and forth.
		People have talked about seeing city lights.
		You know, the telescopes are getting, you know, we're building these giant telescopes.
		They're like 30 meters away.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There may be potential one day to see a city light.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You could see city lights.
		When you're going to see the planet come around, like this is all like, you know, we're not there yet.
		But people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		20 years, 30 years.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		30 years, 40 years.
		You know, this is a long game, and you've got to be playing the long game.
		At some point, we're going to need to build stuff in space that's even larger so we can collect more light.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And won't the issue also be that if we do see these city lights, we're seeing city lights from millions of years ago.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, it depends.
		Like it tend, you know, a planet that's in a star 10 light years ago, that's 10 years ago.
		So it's not like, you know, these things could still be around.
		Here's a really interesting idea.
		Like, because, you know, one of the things that I'm talking about in my book is like, how long does any civilization last, right?
		That's the real question.
		All of this stuff is super relevant for us now because the question is, what is the average lifetime of a civilization?
		So you might be able to see artifacts from civilizations that are gone.
		Like imagine a civilization covered one of its moons in solar panels, right?
		The reflected light is going to show a spectral signature of the panels.
		So it's like they don't even have to necessarily be alive now that we still might be able to see stuff from there, evidence of like artificial structures or something that's not natural around them.
		So that's the thing, man.
		It's like we're really, we're just, we're about to take this step in astrobiology where we're, you know, we're already running models of exo-biospheres, right?
		Which we're asking, like, oh, what kind of chemistry can you have if you don't like, if you have photosynthesis on a planet around a star that's smaller than ours, that star is going to be mostly red as opposed to yellow like ours.
		So the light that's coming off it is going to be different.
		Can you have photosynthesis in that case?
		And people are like, yeah, you probably could.
		And what would it look like?
		So we're already doing the work to be ready for exo-biospheres.
		So exo-civilizations, we kind of need to be prepared for that too, looking for, you know, what could be the traces, what might we see from a distance from an exo-civilization.
		They don't have to be signaling us.
		You know, they're just there and we're going to catch some aspect of their being around.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, if we did see rocket, if we did see some sort of a signature from rockets going back and forth, we would have to assume that this is a similarly aged civilization to ours.
		Whereas if we saw something that was 1,000, 100,000 years advanced, we probably wouldn't see that anymore.
		We probably see some sort of a manipulation of time and space.
unidentified		Right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		If that's possible.
		If it's possible.
		If it's possible.
		Yeah.
		So that's, I mean, of course, that is one of the problems is that when you start, you know, when you start pushing, it's just like saying, like, you know, what is what are we going to be like in a million years?
		Who the freak knows?
		You know, I mean, it's so long.
		So I think you start with what you know.
		And the cool thing about the planet part, though, is that, you know, unless they become like energy beings, you know, they're going to have an effect on their planet.
		So looking at their planets to look for, you know, for spectral indications, that's probably, even after they die, there might even be things.
		So that's, I think, a, you know, a good way to go.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm so curious as to what we're going to be able to do in a thousand years, ten thousand years, and a hundred thousand years if civilization does stay around and we figure out how to not melt the earth or boil the oceans or whatever, whatever the fuck we're doing.
unidentified		Yeah, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But there's a bunch of science fiction films that do speculate of what's going to be possible in the future.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And one of them was, what was that recent one with what's his name?
unidentified		All right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		What's his name?
		What the fuck's his name?
unidentified		McCaugh.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Matthew McConaughey.
		Matthew McConaughey.
		The one where they go through the wormholes.
		How much do those movies piss you off?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		They don't.
		I don't know.
		I do not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, but they get so.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I love science fiction.
		So, you know, I mean, I do not need my science fiction to be correct.
		I mean, you know, if they want to make it, you know, so I love The Expanse.
		The Expanse is my favorite show ever.
		I will talk about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is The Expanse?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		The Expanse?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't even know.
		Thank you.
		Help me.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So The Expanse, it's a series of books, first of all, that I think are the best science fiction books in the last 15 years.
		Really?
		And then they made it into a show on sci-fi.
		And then they had three years of it.
		And, you know, at first people are like, oh, this is kind of hard to follow because, you know, it's a lot of stories coming together.
		And then, you know, this year it got 100% ratings.
		What is it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Rotten tomatoes?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Rotten tomatoes.
		100% or 95%.
		Like, people love a show.
		And then freaking sci-fi canceled it.
		And so then Jeff Bezos, just yeah, Jeff Bezos just picked it up.
		Oh, because people love this show, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fuck yeah, Richard.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So let me tell you why this show is amazing, right?
		So it takes place about 200 years from now, and we are truly a multi-planet species.
		Like Mars now has, you know, you know, billion people on it, and it's become its own political power, right?
		It's separated from the Earth.
		And then the asteroid belt has also people are colonizing and living on the asteroid belt to mine resources.
		But the belters, as they call them, are like, they're like second-class citizens.
		They're basically like super poor, and they got the boot on their necks by either Earth or Mars.
		And so there's this whole interplanetary kind of political shit going on, which is just great, you know.
		And then there's, you enter into this, they discover like what they call the proto-molecule.
		Like, you know, it was this is basically this alien molecule that was really a device that some aliens threw our way billions of years ago.
		That was, you know, how much am I supposed to give away?
		You know, I don't want to.
		So, no, not too much.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, no one's going to remember.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		All right, good, good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's not complicated.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So that, you know, that becomes kind of a weapon in this political intrigue.
		So it's just a great story.
		It's kind of people call it like the Game of Thrones in space.
		But I'll tell you what I love about it is that this is what it's going to look like.
		Like they get the science on this show so right, as much as you can, right?
		So, you know, in space, if your rocket motors are on, there's gravity because, you know, the rocket motors push up towards you.
		And so, yeah, you got gravity.
		You can walk around.
		When you turn the rocket motors off, you float around, right?
		On spinning things, you know, anything.
		So, you know, in this universe, you know, in this fictional universe, they've taken the big asteroids and they've hollowed them out and spun them up.
		So people live on the inside, you know.
		And so at one point, like one of the characters, the private eye, they got this great sort of film noir thing going on.
		And he pours a drink, you know, some whiskey, and the whiskey does this.
		It spirals into this.
		So they got like the Coriolis effect.
		I feel like I peed my pants.
		I was like, oh my God, they got the Coriolis effect, right?
		So it's like, this is really what it's going to look like.
		You know what I mean?
		If you want to imagine 200 years from now, which I think is completely feasible that we have millions of people living in space.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do they make any advances socially?
unidentified		No.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		People are assholes to each other.
		And that's what makes it.
		But it's only 200 years.
		That's a lot to ask for.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, think about how different we are from people that lived 50 years ago.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, are we that different?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think we're quite a bit different.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		In what way?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		What do you think?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think we're, well, we have this ability to communicate now that we never did before, where everybody has an ability to say their piece about how they feel about how things are going.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, that's interesting, right?
		And that has changed a lot of things in a lot of ways.
		But I mean, has it changed who we are?
		I mean, I think evolution.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think it's chipping away.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, that would be good if it could.
		Because one of the things my thing, so what's interesting about this fictional world, too, is that like climate, you know, the Earth is dealing with climate.
		The Earth has like 30 billion people on it.
		And, you know, New York is halfway underwater.
		And so that's part of the story, too.
		So we're trying to navigate our way through now becoming a multi-planet species.
		So, you know, that is a version of at least 200 years where you can really extrapolate the technologies and ask yourself, because that's real.
		I mean, I think that's really going to happen.
		If we make it through climate change, that's the prize at the end of the, you know, of the story.
		If we make it through climate change, you know, what the stuff that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are doing, man, that's real.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is this what your number one concern is, climate change?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Michael, I'm a single voter.
		Yeah, climate change.
		Because it's like, it is an existential dilemma.
		And because of all the writing I did for NPR and the New York Times, I have dealt with a lot of climate change denialists, man, and it drives me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is their big, what's the big, because I recently had a discussion with someone on the podcast that didn't believe in climate change.
		And it was a weird thing because I kept pulling up all the different scientific consensus studies, all the different studies that show that we're having an impact.
		It's an undeniable impact.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Undeniable.
		30 years of science.
		Yeah, I know.
		I saw that, and she was like, you know, well, that's what you say.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think that she's really thinking about that.
		And in her case, it was, I don't think she really thinks about it.
		I think she just has this stance that she believes that that group that she's a part of subscribes to.
		So there's an ideological aspect of it where you kind of, you have a predetermined pattern that you're supposed to follow when you're on one side.
		You have to be pro-life.
		You have to be pro-Second Amendment.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		There's a bucket of stuff.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's a bucket of stuff.
		Yeah.
		And I think it's a giant problem with our culture.
		There are two groups of people.
		You can't, like, to truly be an independent thinker, you're like one of these weirdos that's off in the fringe.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, to be independent of either party.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
		And the thing about science is the whole point of science is to be and to have, you know, what science is, science is a way of having public knowledge.
		You know what I mean?
		Like everybody has their opinions, whatever.
		But science is about the stuff we can all be like, oh, yeah, for sure.
		You know, it's this whole process that we've evolved over 400 years.
		And with climate denial, man, sometimes, you know, it's just, yeah, you want to be like, what, what are you saying, man?
		Like, what?
		Read a book because they'll say stuff.
		Like, here's my favorite one.
		Climate's always changing.
		Hey, man, climate's always changing, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is true.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but if so, so if somebody comes to me, because what I want most for people, like, I consider myself an evangelist of science.
		I love science.
		And so if people come to me and they say, hey, man, isn't the climate always changing?
		I'm like, oh, man, great question.
		You know, we actually know the answer to that.
		Yeah, it's changing, but it's changing.
		Like, what's the time scale?
		You know?
		So it changes often on million-year time scales.
		But like from the last 10,000 years, since the last ice age, which was 10,000 years ago, which is amazing, like there used to be a mile of ice above our heads, you know, 10,000 years ago.
		Climate has been remarkably stable.
		There's been little blips in it, but no major changes, right?
		So like, and I can show them the graph of this and everything.
		So if you're, if you know, if they're interested, you know, I mean, if they're, so if they're asking the question because they want to know, I'm down to talk until the cows come home.
		But that's not what typical deniers are.
		Deniers are like, climate changing all the time.
		But they're not interested in the answer.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But isn't it, not only are they not interested in the answer, they're just trying to win.
		It's not a real conversation because it's a really complex thing.
		If you dig an ice core and you tap down to 50,000, 80,000, 100,000 years, you see all these bizarre shifts of the climate that could be indicative of super volcanoes and asteroidal impacts and solar flares.
		A lot of shit happens over the course of a million years.
		But to hang all your ideas on the party's ideology and to deny all this really interesting stuff and all these variables.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's what pisses me off.
		It's like, you know, what I try and tell people is like, look, climate science is like awesome.
		Like, it's science.
		It's got these amazing stories to tell about, you know, yeah, the Earth.
		I mean, Earth, over the past 4.5 billion years, the Earth has gone through the most profound changes.
		And we've learned about, aren't you interested in that?
		But no, right.
		They basically have this thing where like, you know, I'm part of this group and therefore I have to have this opinion.
		And I'm like, dude, it's science.
		Science doesn't care who you voted for.
		You know what I mean?
		Like the radiative properties of a CO2 molecule doesn't care whether you're wearing a blue tie or a red tie.
		And the fact that people can't make that distinction, and here's the real problem.
		Once you go down this slippery road of denying, saying like, okay, that kind of science I hate, man, they're all a hoax.
		Well, you know, America's prosperity and our safety has been built on science over the last 200 years.
		You know, you start to erode the whole thing.
		You can't just like call one group of scientists hoaxers, you know, and so they're only doing it for learning, and not have it slowly infect everything else to the point where like, you know, China will be happy to eat our lunch, you know, when it comes scientifically.
		China's pumping huge amounts of money into science.
		They're not doing this.
		So like, you know, we're, we're limiting.
		And here's the other thing that really bums me out.
		Science is not a, it's not a lunch buffet.
		You know what I mean?
		You can't be like, oh man, can I have some of those antibiotics?
		I love antibiotics.
		And oh, yeah, the cell phone's great.
		I'll use that.
		And I really want to fly on a plane.
		But climate change is bullshit.
		You know, I mean, like, you know, either you accept that you live in a scientific society.
		It doesn't mean like you're slavishly adhered to anything comes out in a journal late yesterday.
		But either you adhere to the idea that this method has produced miracles for us, or give me the cell phone back.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the scientific method is what has established the actual real facts of how things interact with each other that's allowed us to create technology.
		And I think they split that distinction.
		They focus on the technology and commerce, which is more important in their eyes than the consequences of the environment or what's going to happen to the environment.
		The big hope is that we're going to figure it out.
		And I'm hopeful of that too, is that we're going to figure out some way to extract carbon from the atmosphere with devices or some enormous like there was some, I don't know if it was a working prototype or it's just a concept, but there was an enormous building that was really an air filter.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they're starting to look at carbon capture again.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		With places like Hong Kong and places where they have terrible Beijing, they have terrible, terrible pollution, and more importantly, particulates in the atmosphere.
		So it's not just like a carbon thing.
		It's like they have shit in their air.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right, that they're breathing in their lungs.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's awful, man.
		I went to Mexico City a couple years back.
		I've been there twice, but I went there for a UFC.
		And we were flying in.
		I took photos and I put them on my Instagram.
		See if you find those.
		They're fucking shocking.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's unbelievable.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What kind of a creepy animal is the human?
		Where the human is capable of burning smoke into the very air that we need to take into our lungs to keep our body alive.
		Oh, you see, it's so bad.
		People have never been to Mexico City.
		Like, it's a stunner.
		Dude, my fucking head was killing me after two days there.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, that's what happened with Beijing when they had the Olympics, right?
		They had to like, you know, they had to stop all industrial activity for like two months.
		Right.
		LA used to look like this, right?
		Before the Clean Air Act, LA would have to be a good thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what I wrote.
		I wrote Mexico's LA on steroids.
		Mexico City's LA on steroids.
		It's just so dark.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know, this whole question of what we'll do, like, this brings us back to the aliens, right?
		So my point is that we're not the first time this has happened.
		Pretty much, if you build a civilization, anybody who builds a civilization like we've done is going to trigger climate change, right?
		It's like it's kind of unavoidable, right?
		So that goes back to the denier thing.
		You know, one of the things I'm trying to do with the book is flip the script, right?
		Because you talk to climate denialists, and it's the same freaking set of things that, like, you know, man, dude, we've been here before.
		We've had this question's been answered.
		But I'm trying to like flip it to show that like the whole question of, you know, did we change a climate?
		That's what everybody focuses on.
		Did we, did we not?
		You know?
unidentified		Right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, from when you take the 10,000 light-year view, then what you realize is like, what did you expect?
		Like, we built a world-girdling civilization that uses a quarter almost of all the energy the biosphere uses, right?
		So, you know, every you know, every day the biosphere has like, you know, 200 terawatts of energy that it's producing in sugars.
		We use about a quarter of that.
		Like, how did you expect there wasn't going to be an impact, right?
		So this changes the whole way we look at it.
		We don't need to argue about like, did we or didn't we?
		Of course we did.
		This is what happens when you reach this level.
		And the other thing that, you know, in the book that I'm trying to argue that also kind of pushes back against the deniers, is like, well, climate deniers are human haters.
		You know, they're all like, you know, like, you know, we did this amazing thing.
		We changed the atmosphere of an entire planet, right?
		Climate change shows on one level how freaking awesome we are.
		You know, how far we've gotten.
		And if you look at the, you know, from the perspective of, you know, species doing this again and again across the universe, this shows that we've reached a level, right?
		We have, we've leveled up, right?
		You know, I play a lot of video games, right?
		And so that whole thing when you level up and, you know, you get the sniper rifle, we've leveled up.
		And so now the question is, are we smart enough, you know, to see what we've done and make the right choices?
		Because that's what the universe is going to be.
		There's going to be species that trigger climate change.
		It's going to happen all the time.
		And some are going to be like, oh, man, we need to do something, right?
		And they'll make the actions.
		They'll be able to work it out, get it together.
		And other ones, you know, we're just going to end up in the cosmic waste pile.
		So we're like cosmic teenagers.
		And just like when you're a teenager and you're, you know, you start to drive, right?
		Either you figure it out, you know, either you're drinking and you're partying and drive the car off a cliff, or you figure out how to handle your responsibility.
		And that's us now, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I agree with you.
		And I feel like there's a fundamental problem with the way people approach ideas.
		And I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about right versus left or Republican versus Democrat.
		They're not thinking of the consequences of arguing against the possibility that climate change is a human-caused thing.
		They're not thinking of the consequences.
		They just want to win.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They want their side to be right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		They want their side to be right.
		And what bumps me out is they don't understand the consequences of that for both the American enterprise and the human enterprise.
		Right.
		I mean, because if you keep calling one branch of science a hoax, then what's to say the other branches?
		Like, well, you know, then you just, you're down, you're rolling down this slippery slope.
		We're like other countries, you know, like so most of the Nobel Prizes Americans have won were people from other countries.
		They came here to do their science because we had the best scientific enterprise.
		You know, the next generation will just go somewhere else.
		They'll go to China, you know?
		So there's that part of it.
		And the other part is like, dude, it's just science.
		It doesn't care about your political views.
		And, you know, it's not fair to use the cell phone and take the antibiotics and then turn around and like and then suddenly treat this thing as if it was another thing in your bucket of ideologies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think also people think if you somehow or another compromise industry's ability to work, that you're going to kill jobs and you're going to damage the economy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's more important.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but I think it's the exact opposite, right?
		And if people really saw, right?
		I mean, you know, again, just like I'm saying, climate change shows how powerful people have become.
		It also shows how powerful our enterprise, right?
		We did this by, you know, building businesses, by building enterprise, by, and we built this world girdling machine of civilization.
		And it, you know, the planet actually noticed.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why do you like that term, world girdling?
unidentified		Because that's, it gives me the girdle.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I think it's because it's from like Shakespeare, like from Caesar or something.
		I always thought it was a good.
		But it's the idea that like, you know, in the Foundation trilogy, the Isaac Asmanov, you know, classic science fiction thing, there's the city of the planet of Trantor, which is the center of the empire, the galactic empire.
		And it's, you know, it's basically the whole planet's been covered in city, you know, like the planet, you got to go down like 500 levels before you get to the surface.
		So that idea, you know, I mean, what I like about it is the idea that like, you know, we've done something, we're kind of covered the planet in our effect, you know, covered the planet in our enterprise.
		So this issue of business is that like there's a place I can stand in Rochester.
		I did this for NPR.
		And there's the Erie Canal.
		I can stand right on the edge of the Erie Canal.
		Then there's a train tracks.
		You know, the tracks were laid.
		Those tracks were laid back in the original line back in the 1870s.
		Then there's a highway.
		And then there's the airport right over there.
		Four different infrastructures, which every one took huge amounts of money to build, one of which we don't even use anymore, right?
		So the idea of building an infrastructure that will not be carbon polluting, will not trigger climate change.
		Like, dude, this is what we do, you know?
		So the idea that there's going to be more jobs that come out of this than it could ever come out of fossil fuels.
		It's not a big deal for human beings because that's what we do, to switch infrastructures.
		And there will be a lot of wealth generated by, just like there was when we switched to the trains.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, where's the argument coming that we, because there are people that just adopt the party line, the party line that, you know, climate's always change and human beings barely affect it and it's not something to concentrate on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Where's that coming from?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Again, I think it's the, you know, the gradual political polarization of everything.
		You know, because you look at in the, we're now at the, what is it, 30-year anniversary of Jim Hansen, who was, you know, the famous climate scientist, giving his testimony in front of Congress in 1988 on a hot, sweltering summer day.
		We said climate change is already happening.
		You know, and that made news everywhere.
		And that was the first like public awakening that this was happening.
		And if you look at the first Bush administration, they were like, oh, yeah, we're ready to do something about this.
		Sure, we can do it.
		And then it just gradually over time as the whole political polarization thing happened, you can actually see the very purposeful denial, right?
		They took a page out of the cigarette companies.
		For years, right, cigarettes were like, oh, the cigarette companies were like, no, it's not a problem.
		So they were purposefully, there were people who had money invested, right?
		You know, who like did it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's a documentary that goes into that.
		What is the name of that?
		Merchants of Doubt?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Merchants of Doubt.
		That's a great book, man.
		That's a really good book.
		Yeah.
		And the documentary is really good.
		So it was purposeful.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's also confusing.
		It's like, why are they doing that?
		Like, who's paying them to do that?
		Obviously, the cigarette companies would be paying the same people to put doubt into the idea that cigarettes are addictive or cigarettes cause cancer.
		And this is what had been done in the past.
		Now the same people are involved in doing it with climate change.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		But why?
		Well, one time I wrote a piece for the NPR that was kind of positive about like, yeah, we can switch infrastructures, like I'm saying.
		And some guy wrote me back very angry and he said, you know, the proven reserves, you know, the stuff, the oil that's in the ground, has a wealth, you know, has a monetary value.
		Like, you know, that's in there in the oil company's banks, you know, in their bank accounts of like $1.5 trillion.
		And the guy said, dude, you know, people have gone to war for a lot less than $1.5 trillion.
		So, you know, if we were to really be like, hey, man, we can't burn that.
		You know, you're going to have to leave that in the ground.
		That's like their bank accounts going like, you know, down to zero pretty fast.
		So what I don't see.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it's those industries.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I think that's part of it.
		And then it get linked to other things.
		And then it becomes this sort of like mass, you know, becomes the political polar.
		They use the political polarization to sort of, you know, sort of make this happen.
		It doesn't have.
		And look, other countries aren't doing this, right?
		That's the important thing.
		You know, other countries, there's always a little bit of climate denial going on, but we're like the only country that's got, as you can see, because we're the only ones who are not part of the Paris Accord.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's one of the weirder things about this right-left thing is the left is always supporting the environment.
		The left is all about the environment.
		The left is about clean air and clean water.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, how did that happen?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't understand.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't understand that either.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The whole thing is very strange.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, I got, you know, I mean, I have issues with environmentalists too, because I think after one of your shows I was watching, you know, the whole idea of eco-bros, right?
		And you get eco-broad by people.
		And, you know, so I have a piece in the New York Times today, an op-ed, where I'm basically saying, like, look, man, the planet's going to be fine.
		Like, you know, long term, there's nothing we can throw at the biosphere that is going to kill it.
		It's not about saving the planet.
		The Earth is not a fuzzy little bunny.
		You know, the planet is powerful, and it's really about saving us.
		Let's be honest about what's going on.
		And there's going to be all kinds of ethical choices that go on that.
		You know, the polar bears may not be able to come along with us on the ride here.
		You know, we need a healthy biosphere with a lot of biodiversity, but we're part of it and we're going to have an impact.
		There's no such thing as no impact.
		And already I'm getting eco-broad.
unidentified		People are like, hey, man, you don't care about life.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what about it?
		Oh, come on, man.
		I just put it in the thing.
		I said we need to be wise and compassionate.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But they're like, well, people have convenient opinions.
		I mean, this is one of the things you get involved with when you start talking with people about really important issues.
		I mean, it's like we were talking about earlier.
		They want to be right.
		Yeah.
		And they want to be on the side that's righteous and with virtue and ethics.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And they find anything that you disagree or that they disagree with that you're saying, they don't ask you questions.
		They don't go, what do you think the implications are?
		How do we minimize the effects and the negative consequences of our...
		They just immediately want to say, you are insensitive.
		You are an asshole.
		You are the problem.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		You know, you know, my way around that, and that's what the whole book is about, is to like, when you've got a polarization, right?
		You know, where, you know, you're either this or you're that.
		The thing that, and this is like a mathematical idea, is to go orthogonal.
		You know?
		When you, you know, you go, because, you know, it's a line, basically, right?
		You're either on this side or that side.
		Go 90 degrees to it.
		Now you're in a whole new space.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now you're up and down instead of left and right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		And now like the questions that, so you see this in like revolutions in science, right?
		So you look at Einstein and what happened when Einstein came up with relativity.
		Everybody at the time was like, you know, they were all concerned with what they call the luminiferous ether.
		That, you know, light needed, light's a wave, and everybody thought it needed something to propagate through, right?
		Radio wave or water waves go through water, sound wave go through air.
		So, you know, the whole thing was about this ether, the luminous ether.
		Does it exist?
		Does it not exist?
		Einstein was like, you know, I'm not really interested in that problem.
		I'm not even going to do it.
		He just like changed the whole thing and he just said, look, here's two new ideas.
		They have nothing to do with the luminous ether.
		And like all the old questions, all the old battles kind of just fell away.
		They didn't even make sense anymore.
		So that's what I'm trying to do in the book is say, look, when you look at climate change as a planetary transition, a predictable planetary transition, the whole idea of like environmentalism versus business interests and right Republicans versus Democrats, it just doesn't, it's not even relevant anymore.
		What matters is that this is going to happen.
		We should have expected it to happen.
		And now the question is, do we become a cosmic winner or a cosmic loser?
		And we have to think about the biosphere differently.
		We have to think about our place in the biosphere differently.
		And the old arguments, so that's what sometimes with climate change deniers, I'll throw this stuff at them.
		And it's really kind of fun to watch them and be like, because they're expecting me to say like A, B, and C, and they've got D, E, and F in response.
		And I throw this stuff at them, and they're just like, you know, and I'm not doing it just to fight with climate change, but I think it's true.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, who was it that was on the podcast that was talking about climate stabilization techniques and that this is probably the future?
		Was it Boyan?
		Maybe.
		Anyway, what people are really worried about when you talk to people that understand the history of the human race and the history of the Earth is climate cooling.
		They think that climate cooling is far more terrifying than climate warming.
		Because if we go into a giant ice age again, I mean, way more people are going to die, terrible loss of resources, and it could be devastating to the human race.
		But that is, is that something that you agree with?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I don't think so.
		I mean, it's true.
		And here's something interesting.
		We're kind of overdue for an ice age.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, that was the thing in the 70s.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They were saying that we were on the verge of an ice age.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, there was just a couple of guys.
		I mean, that whole thing, because that's often something that climate deniers will throw at you.
		In the 70s, there was one or two guys who said that, and then it got picked up on the news, but the climate community at that time was not like, oh, my God, it's cooling.
		But here's the interesting thing for me, and it fits into this whole idea, is that we're holding off an ice age.
		Like, there may never be, if humanity is successful and we navigate the Anthropocene, you know, that term, the Anthropocene, that we've now entered, we've now entered the human-dominated era.
		We've been, for the last 10,000 years, the geological epoch has been what they call the Holocene.
		That's all of human civilization happened in the Holocene.
		You know, it's pretty warm.
		It's pretty wet, moist, you know, everything's not locked up in ice.
		And it's an interglacial period.
		And if we weren't around, yeah, another 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 years would be another ice age.
		But the Anthropocene that we're triggering could hold off ice ages forever, right?
		As long as we're around, there won't be another ice age because we've already added enough warmth to the planet that it overcomes the effects that trigger an ice age.
		So what are the ethical responsibilities of that?
		That's what I try and tell the environmentalists.
		Like, you know, you got this image, like, oh, we got to save the Earth.
		But they're thinking of like the Holocene.
		And it's like, well, you know, the planet, even with us, even if we successfully keep biodiversity rich, and it's not going to be the Earth we started with, you know, because we're here.
		So yeah, what about the species that never form because we held off the ice age?
		You know, I mean, forever.
		Like, what about the ethical responsibility of those?
		So like it opens.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Boy, that is a long equation, though, isn't it?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		In what way?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		To try to contemplate what species would have existed if we allowed the Earth to cool and our responsibility for allowing the Earth to cool so that the potential for new species to advance.
		It's like, fuck those species.
		Let's keep this place warm so we can stay alive.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, all I'm saying, and the only reason I'm raising that, I'm not, you know, I'm raising that because when we talk about climate change, what you get sometimes within the environmental movement is this sort of like, the polar bear, the polar bear.
		And it's like, what I'm trying to say is, look, I love polar bears.
		Kind of funny that polar bears always think because polar bears will rip your head off and drink your blood section.
		Yeah, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The most predator, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not only that, they're one of the rare bears that doesn't eat anything but meat.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right, right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And so it's so funny that we're like, oh, polar bear.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My friend Kevin is a biologist, and he said, like, when you get polar bear babies, like right out of the womb, he said they're like the alien from the chest, chest burster steam.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He said they literally are like, like right out of the womb, they're looking to kill and eat.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you're like, oh, you're so killed.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, whoa, made a man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like, that is a fucking, obviously people have tamed them and fed them to the point where they don't never.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		They're working to chew your head off.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but that's a fucking predatory, enormous animal.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So I'm raising that point to say, like, look, the thing we're going through now is a, it's an epic-making planetary transition.
		And we're part of it, right?
		And whether or not we're still part, that's the question.
		Whether or not we're still part of it a thousand years from now, you know, is the big issue.
		So, you know, there are ethical issues about the polar bear, right?
		But there are also ethical issues.
		You know, we can't just return the Earth to some pristine state.
		We're here.
		There's 7 billion of us.
		So, you know, you have to, we're going to have to understand like there's this deeper ethical question about what does an earth look like that's been changed by us, that's healthy, but still has us on it.
		It may not have polar bears, you know?
		It may have rich phytoplankton, you know, and it may be very species diverse, but some of the species may not come with us.
		So like we can't, this sort of like thing of like, oh, the pristine earth, there is no more pristine earth.
		You know, we've been changing the earth since we were here.
		So it's like, how do we have a healthy, a rich, healthy biosphere with us and our civilization still in it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And the thing about things that have gone extinct in the past and more than 90% of everything that's ever existed is extinct.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The problem is we didn't know then.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We didn't have a, you know, a checklist.
		Right.
		Like, oh, spotted owl, check, got it.
		You know, tree frog, check, got it.
		Now we do.
		And when one goes away, we kind of freak out.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And that's, you know, I mean, you know, we have to have compassion for life because we're part of it.
		Like without the compassion, you know, we end up with, as Gavin Schmidt, a friend of mine calls, we have ecological hooliganism, right?
		We just do crazy.
		We're just dumping shit into rivers.
		Like, yeah, you don't have to do that, man.
		But, you know, in my talks on this, I'll show like the polar bear, the lonely polar bear on the island.
		And, you know, like, oh, everyone's really, you know, bummed out about this.
		And then I'll show like a Velociraptor, right?
		You know, who's crying for the Velociraptor, right?
		Species come and go.
		So we have to, you know, and the Earth goes through these huge transitions.
		I'm not saying be like, don't care about those species, but you got to have the bigger picture with us in it.
		Here's the problem with the environmental movements, you know, sometimes the way it gets framed, it's not just the environmental movement, it's the way we talk about climate change.
		We think of ourselves as being a plague, right?
		Oh, human beings, we suck, right?
		That's the basic, that's the only story.
		We have two stories.
		It's not happening or we suck.
		And my whole thing is like, that is the wrong, not only is that story wrong, it's unhelpful.
		You know, we are what the biosphere is doing now.
		You know, millions of years ago, it was grasslands.
		You know, grasslands were a new innovation and they changed the planet.
		You have a lot of grass.
		You know, the biosphere evolved grasslands.
		They swept across the planet.
		They changed how the planet worked.
		And then the Earth moved on with it, went on to the new experiment.
		We are what the, we're exactly that.
		We are like the dinosaurs or the grasslands or the blue-green algae that created the oxygen atmosphere.
		And like, you know, we're not, we're, you know, there's no difference between a city and a forest on some biospheric level.
		We don't suck.
		The question is whether we're smart enough to still be part of what the biosphere is using us to trigger.
		You know what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What are your thoughts on the reintroduction of extinct animals through genetic cloning?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know, I watched Jurassic Park.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But they're talking about doing it with woolly mammoths.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is a real possibility something.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The close ancestor of the woolly mammoth is still alive.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		I know.
		I'd be down for seeing a woolly mammoth.
		In my science museum in Rochester, there's a woolly mammoth that they found, you know.
		And sometimes I'm looking at that and I'm like, that's a giant hairy ass elephant, man.
		And it was walking around right in my, you know.
		I think like, depending on what you do with it, you know, trying to reintroduce it into the biosphere could be a little dangerous.
		I mean, the thing, look, climate change is, this is something I like to say.
		Climate change is not our fault.
		And what I mean by that is we, you know, we found fossil fuels and they were awesome, you know, and they were just a continuation of what we'd always done, you know?
		And so we inadvertently, climate change was a mistake, you know.
		Now, if we don't do something about it, it's our fault, right?
		But, you know, and so you want to be really careful about unintended consequences.
		You know, so this is my same thing with geoengineering.
		People talk like, oh, we should, you know, put particulates in the atmosphere to make it more reflective.
		I'm like, man, dude, we triggered the whole, we triggered climate change because, you know, we didn't know what we were doing.
		We didn't know what the consequences were.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If we put those particles up there, how do we get them out?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Speed them out with a net?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, no, they'll rain down.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You got to keep putting them in.
unidentified		That's the problem.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You've got to keep putting them in.
		So what happens if one nation decides they don't want to do it anymore?
		And or the whole thing falls apart.
		Now suddenly you're going to get massive changes.
		So like anything like that, why don't we just work on not using fossil fuels?
unidentified		You know what I mean?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Like why take the hardest solution that's got the most uncertainty as opposed to the simpler solution, which just means building a different infrastructure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, especially in California.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this is one of the weirder places ever to not see solar power when it's never, it never rains.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It should be everywhere.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Everywhere.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Most things should be run on solar power.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, why not, man?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And solar system is so efficient now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's also very difficult to get it up and running.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like I had a friend of mine who had his done for four or five months before he got approved.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because he said they make it difficult for you.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, which is crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		To be on solar power and not be on the grid.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So, you know, I mean, these are all the kinds of things that we're going to have to work out.
		I'm hopeful.
		People are like, are you hopeful or not hopeful?
		Because, you know, I mean, I ran these, I did these models.
		One of the pieces of research we did was we modeled planets and civilizations, like alien civilizations.
		We developed a simple mathematical model about how a civilization will use a planet's resources to make more babies, alien babies, and then how the, you know, by using those resources, you feedback on the planet, right?
		And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to model the possible outcomes.
		Like, what is the generic outcome?
		You know, if I've got 100,000 civilizations all being born in different places, what's the, you know, in general, what happens?
		And what we found is like basically four different possibilities.
		One was good news.
		Like in these models, there was like, you know, the population shoots up, the planet's temperature shoots up, but they come to a nice steady state.
		Like, you know, you know, the population's stable, everything's good.
		So they're in those models was hope.
		We also saw die-off, where like the population, you know, skyrockets, the planet, they overshoot the carrying capacity of their planet, and then you get something like 70% of the population dying off.
		So like seven out of every 10 people you know is gone.
		So you know, but then you come to a steady state.
		So maybe if you can survive the disaster, you're still there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But there's also a problem with surviving the disasters, how much of the information gets restored.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because you think about if you're killing seven out of ten people, how many of those seven people are the ones who know how to make cell phones?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
		That's a dark age, right?
		That's what happens in the dark age.
		I remember the first time I went to Europe and I saw those Roman, you know, the aqueducts, man, like five stories tall carrying water.
		You know, and by the 900 AD, nobody knew how they got built.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's a few of those dips in human civilization.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And so it's not clear, especially with a society as complex as ours, right?
		If like the food doesn't arrive in my grocery store, what do I do?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know, I garden, but you know, I'm not, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not enough.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Not enough, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's going to keep you alive.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So for a complex civilization like ours, even if you don't go extinct, you may not be able to have this kind of civilization.
		But we did find collapse.
		We did find complete like extinction curves as well, where the population went way up and then boom, dropped like a stone.
		And we even found those, we built into the models the possibility for the civilization to switch from a high-impact resource to a low-impact resource, like fossil to solar.
		And sometimes, because planets have minds of their own, there's an internal dynamics to planets, and you push them far enough and they're just going to roll off.
		So we'd have ones where the population went way up, they made the switch, and then the population started to come down, the planet started to cool down.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you factor in random geological events, random solar events, random events?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, this was really all about just planet civilization and its feedback on the planet.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		We could build models like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That would be one of the major issues with any advanced civilization is it's a matter of time before something happens.
		Yeah, right.
		As we said, you know, we know that Mars has been hit before.
		We know Earth's been hit.
		The moon's been hit.
		Everything.
		I mean, the moon is one of our best examples.
		We just look at it and you see craters everywhere because it doesn't have an environment or an atmosphere, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		The moon was built by a huge impact between Earth and a Mars-like body at the beginning of the planet's history.
		So yeah, those happen all the time.
		I think if you get advanced, so like we are on the lip of being a multi-planet species, right?
		And once you do that, which means you become a space-faring race, then I think certainly the asteroid stuff you can take care of, right?
		We've already done, we've identified like a huge fraction of all the Earth-crossing asteroids.
		Like we're not really sure what to do about them if we find one coming at us.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But we see some coming at us all the time where they just recognize them a few hours before they're near.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But that didn't happen a couple weeks ago.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And, you know, luckily it always, you know, it passes.
		You can't always.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So we couldn't really, like, you know, we're young enough now that if we discovered one heading right towards us, we could just, you know, put your legs between your head between your legs and kiss your butt goodbye.
		But in time, right, 200 years from now, we will have done a much better job of mapping out all the major rocks.
		Yeah.
		Well, I think so.
		I mean, I'm really, that's a, you know, I mean, if we have that kind of interplanetary, we're going to be mapping them out just because you don't want to run into them.
		Or you're going to be mining them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What do you think is promising in terms of the ability to prevent impacts?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		There's a couple of things.
		I think the best one, if you catch it early enough, there's the gravity tug, where you just literally park a spaceship next to it and slowly have the spaceship, you know, move.
		Because all you have to do is alter the trajectory a little bit.
		You just have to tap on it.
		Yeah, and it'll, you know.
		Because shit in space is just so vast that a little tap will make it miss.
		So the gravity tug, you know, you don't have to try and do the, you know, what was it?
		What was the movie Apocalypse?
		The one from the 90s with the space miners.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Armageddon.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Armageddon.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, thank you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then there was a Deep Impact, too.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Deep Impact was the smart one.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Armageddon was the biggest one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But they rip each other's off, right?
		Because they both came out at the same time.
		And I think Deep Impact came out first, but it was developed second.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That'd be a bummer to be the one that, like, you know, they both come out at the same time and your movie doesn't get any attention and the other one becomes like a massive hit.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So like, you know, there they drilled holes and stuff and you try and blow them up.
		But then the problem there is you now have a bunch of rocks and if some of those rocks are big enough.
		So I think the gravity tug is kind of probably the best idea.
		But you know, because of mining asteroids, well, probably, you know, those little ones may be the easiest to, you know, to mine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What are you worried about more than anything in terms of climate change?
		Like, are you worried about the rising of the ocean levels?
		Are you worried about the heating of the actual planet?
		The temperature being unsustainable for human life?
		Like, what are you worried about the most?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		The one thing I worry about the most, like we were talking before, you know, technological societies are these like overlaid networks.
		You know, you got the transportation network, you got the energy network, you got social networks, you know.
		And those are really complex.
		And so I do a little, what's called network theory.
		And what you find with network theory is that you may have an individual network that's pretty robust, meaning like I can cut some of the connections.
		Like you got your social network.
		I could take 20% of the people out of your social network.
		And the social network will still function.
		Most people will still talk to each other and everything.
		But once you start layering them, so the social network is now connected to the telecommunications network, which is connected to the energy network, blah, blah, blah, then you can ripple a small change, ripples through the whole thing, and blows it apart.
		It just doesn't function anymore.
		So I don't need like apocalypses to have the fabric of technological civilization fall apart.
		So if just the weather patterns change enough that agriculture becomes really hard, we're used to the rains falling pretty much the same way they do yearly and everything.
		That, you know, like we talk about, you look at what the, you know, like refugees, how much, you know, the trouble, you know, having a huge influx of refugees can cause.
		Climate change is going to have people moving all over the planet because now they can't grow food anywhere.
		So it's like, I don't, you know, like I said, you don't need, I do worry, like ocean rise is going to be huge.
		Most people live in coastal cities.
		Most of the wealth in the world is in coastal cities.
		But you don't really need too much to like really shift the weather patterns and then the thing you're used to falls apart.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now, when you factor in human beings and our evolution from primitive hominids to what we are today, and you sort of extrapolate and keep going and think about what we're going to be in the future and then think about what these creatures might be that live 100 million light years away or whatever the fuck it is.
		What I mean, we've got, I've got to think that whatever is holding us back, our primitive instincts, these human reward systems that were engaged when we were running away from wild animals and fighting off tribes of invaders, that slowly but surely those are going to either evaporate or evolve.
		And we're going to get to a point where we can be more rational about complex issues.
		If we do do that, what is the motivation for expanding the human race?
		Isn't sustaining the human race in a healthy way on this planet a better option than traveling to Mars or traveling to the other solar systems?
		Like, wouldn't we be better served trying to achieve some sort of a balance here on this planet?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I think the one serves the other.
		Like, you look at the human migration patterns from when we started, right?
		You know, we started off as a bunch of people in Africa, maybe a few thousand, right?
		And then you see this migration, like, you know, a bunch of us, like a few hundred, crossed the Red Sea, which was pretty low at the time.
		And then it's like they just worked their way around the coasts, you know, took boats over to Australia, went all the way back around through, like, we're explorers, man.
		Like, you know, it's really, I think, something fundamental for us psychologically to have these frontiers.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		That's my question, though.
		Will we evolve past that?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't think that's a bad thing.
		I think.
		Yeah, yeah, I don't think this bad thing.
		Because, again, it goes back to the biosphere.
		This is kind of like, I think there's something deep in life that wants more life, right?
		So if we settle Mars, right?
		Then it's not going to be really us settling Mars.
		It's going to be the Earth's biosphere, right?
		I mean, really, we are.
		That's what we are.
		We're the agent of the biosphere, right?
		And, you know, the biosphere started off as like, you know, single-celled creatures in like little tiny parts of the planet and then, you know, conquered the oceans.
		And then eventually when they were, you know, because in the beginning, they weren't continents.
		The Earth was a water world when we started off.
		And so when there was enough continents, then they took over the life took over the land.
		I think it's just kind of life may be kind of like a cosmic force if I can get all woogly on you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So if we do go to Mars, it will essentially be ultimate panspermia.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yes, exactly.
		Right.
		Yeah.
		In that way, right, panspermia, which is always a weird word.
		You kind of like the panspermia.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's just because people feel weird about sperm.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Sperm, right?
		I know.
		Whenever I give an academic talk, I'm like, panspermia.
unidentified		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a strange, when you say sperm in front of people, they're like, you piece of shit.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
unidentified		What do you know?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's a scientific term, man.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I swear to God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a matter.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like saying niggardly.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a very difficult word to say, even though it has nothing to do with the N-word.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So, you know, I think it's part of life.
		I think life wants more life.
		And this is the question you're raising about, like, what do we look like in a million years?
		What happens to a species that become, and now we're in the realm of science fiction, but that's all cool.
		You know, like, what might we become?
		Like the gods in some sense.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that this is my theory, and I've thrown this out so many times people are sick of it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But I think that what we're looking at when we see these archetypal aliens with the big heads and the big eyes and the tiny bodies and no genitals, I think we think this is what we're eventually going to be.
unidentified		Genitals?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think we're going to move past that.
unidentified		Oh, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'll see you in your panspermia.
unidentified		And I'll raise you genital as aliens.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Typical.
		I'm not going there.
		Talking about gender.
		This is the problem with science.
		This is why we need diversity.
		I just think that if we can.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So those are archetypes kind of built into us in some sense.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That we're moving past, like, what did we used to be?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, we used to be monkeys.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And what are we going to be?
		Well, we're going to be that thing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That thing that can levitate things with its mind, that thing that communicates telepathically, that thing that has this incredible ability to map out the cosmos and create wormholes and super advanced intellect to the point where we can't even comprehend.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So like if you think about how what, you know, we evolved from, at one point in time, we split from mollusks like what, 600 something years ago.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's got to be on it.
		It's got to be past the Cambrian explosion.
		But, you know, it's like, yeah, 300, 400.
		I don't know.
		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But a while ago.
		How much does a squid understand about cell phone networks and whether or not Sprint's unlimited data plans really any good?
		They don't.
		Well, we'll extrapolate that to what this alien creature is going to be in terms of its understanding of time and space and matter versus ours.
		We are this crude thing that's weirded out by the word sperm, whereas it is telepathically communicating with a universal language and it has this unbelievable ability to manipulate matter.
		And they've achieved homeostasis with their environment.
		They no longer have this.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's one of the things about, you know, there's the Fermi paradox, right?
		Like, why haven't we seen...
		So, as I already said, we haven't looked enough to say that we haven't seen evidence of life.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like opening your door and going, well, where are all the buffalo?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You got to go to Wyoming, bro.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, there is a kind of a problem with, because we're just doing a paper on this now.
		You know, part of the Fermi paradox.
		Let's get, I don't want to go too far on this because we can come back and circle back to it later.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I liked it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The Fermi paradox is fascinating.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It is, right?
		So the idea that you explain it to people.
		Okay, so the Fermi paradox is the idea that like, you know, if there is, if the paradox part is like, if you're telling me that intelligence is common, it evolves everywhere, then why don't I see it already, right?
		So if you're asking about like, why don't we see signals from, I've already answered that, right?
		Because we just, we haven't looked yet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We haven't looked enough.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		But part of his question, and this was done by a guy in Hart.
		I mean, so Fermi was just, this happened over a conversation for lunch, you know, in 1950.
		So he just posed, he said, where are they all?
		But in 1975, a guy named Hart wrote a paper where he really mapped out the, here's the main problem.
		Even if you're traveling at a 10th of the speed of light, if you manage to build like world ships that can travel across the stars, you know, and you're traveling at 0.1% of the speed of light, in, you know, if you do that and you hop from one star to the other, build another ship, hop to the next one, in about 600,000 years, you have covered the whole galaxy, right?
		So 600,000 years sounds like a long time, but it's a tiny part of the galaxy's history.
		Galaxy is 10 billion years old.
		So in that case, like why, you know, then every, if, you know, just one species has to do that, and they can cover the galaxy.
		So why aren't there, why don't we see the colony ships here, right?
		That's that's a much harder version of the Fermi paradox to get around.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is it though?
		Because if we did, look, we're already sending robots to Mars, right?
		We're not going to Mars yet, but we're sending robots there.
		What if we decide that there's no real benefit in sending biological entities into space and that the dangers of radiation and asteroidal impacts, this is just too great.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's far better to send something.
		I mean, look at what we're capable of doing now in terms of projection of video.
		We can take a cell phone video and you could send it to your friend in New Zealand and they can get it almost instantaneously.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You don't have to go to New Zealand right there, like a walk-in.
		Do a Skype call with that.
		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If we can get some sort of 3D virtual reality imaging of these planets, like, hey, man, do you want to see what it's like on Pandora?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Here, put these goggles on and you will go wherever you want that robot to go and you'll be there.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And maybe it'll get to the point where you can actually smell it and touch it and feel it, but not be compromised by its environment in terms of your biology.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's actually a huge point.
		So that's one of the things we're looking at in this paper is the idea that good planets may be hard to find.
		There's this great novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, who's like just, for me, one of the great science fiction writers.
		And it's called Aurora.
		And it's the usual world ship thing.
		So they build the colony ship.
		It takes three generations to cross space and they get to the planet.
		And the planet sucks.
		It looked like it was going to be good.
		But there's like prions, tiny, super small biological shit that just makes you can't live there.
		And then you're going back, right?
		So it's like, it may be exactly like you're saying that, you know, we think like, oh, you just land on a planet and you terraform it and you just turn it into habitable.
		And it's like, that may not work.
		And maybe it does, but that's a science fiction idea.
		So, right, it's entirely possible.
		I mean, there's a lot of possible solutions, this, which is just that, you know, one of which is space travel is really hard and really interstellar, not interplanetary, but interstellar travel is really hard and really expensive.
		I was just reading a paper on this where the guy estimated that in order to get like, say you wanted to have a thousand people on a world ship to get to another star, that would take the economy, you'd need like, I think it was like 100,000 Earth economies to build that.
		You know what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jeff Bezos, are you listening?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		By the time we're ready, you might have to economize.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		But it was just like, it was so much that, like, you know, unless you were, he said, you know, what the conclusion he came to, unless you were a multi-planet species, if you were like, if you had conquered the entire or settled the entire solar system, maybe you'd have an economy that big.
		So one, one possible solution is good planets are hard to find.
		And, you know, it's just too expensive.
		It really costs a lot.
		And so, yeah, it's not really worth the effort.
		You send out some probes once in a while, but it's not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's also finding an environment that's not just habitable, but stable.
		I mean, our environment is habitable, but look what's going on in Hawaii right now.
		There is a 400-year-old lake that evaporated in a matter of hours.
		It's the biggest lake on the big island.
		It's gone.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is such a tragedy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's not.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's also magnificent.
		You watch that lava roll into that lake and say, that's a wrap, kids.
		No more lake, you fucks.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And it really shows you the power of a planet, too, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, of the forces at work.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What makes continents?
		I mean, it made the island in the first place.
		You can't be upset at it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Billowing off.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It is what made the island, and it's continuing to make the island bigger.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right, exactly.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You're crying about your house, but now you got more real estate, so shut up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's making the island bigger, and it's always done that.
		It's been doing that for millions of years.
		It's a fascinating place.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		If you've been?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I've been, and I've seen the park.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you do the helicopter thing?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, man.
		You got to do the helicopter thing.
		It's crazy because you fly over the volcanoes, but you can't now because it's too crazy.
		But I did it a few years back, and you could watch the lava go into the ocean.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you see these lava vents pour this red, Hot fucking, it's like it's glowing and it's going into the ocean.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		During the day, I saw that part.
		We went to the park to see it, you know.
		Then when you go to that volcano park, there's just like vents where steam's coming out, like New York City with the, you know, the manholes.
		You're like, what the f ⁇ ?
		That's like, that's just from this heat coming up from the bottom of the planet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are you scared about Yellowstone?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Like the, what was that movie, 2012?
		Nah.
		You know, like, where did that, because that's like such a, that's like a, you know, that's what made the Adirondacks, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, what was the 2012 movie?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I never saw that.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		With Cooper.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Day after tomorrow, day before tomorrow.
		No, no, no, no, no, no.
		It was climate change.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It was John Kuzak.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's actually a pretty good movie.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's another like destroy the planet.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Those guys who made that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hold on, stop right there.
		That was not a pretty good movie.
		That movie sucks.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I thought it was good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That movie was so stupid.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, it's stupid.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Conno is totally missed disaster by inches with cars.
		They never got a flat.
		They always got away from the world caving in.
unidentified		Oh, yeah, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, super believable.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I thought it was.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, Yellowstone is a caldera.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a super volcano, and they're experiencing thousands of earthquakes a year.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that eventually every six to eight hundred thousand years, it's a continent killer.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The last time it blew was 600,000 years ago.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So why aren't you scared?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I just don't think about it, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm fucking thinking about it every day, man.
		I'll smoke a joint.
		I think about it.
		Once a month, I think about Yellowstone.
unidentified		Really?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		About Yellowstone?
		Yes, I just, you know, I should.
		Okay, I'm going to add that to my list of things I'm freaking out about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I have friends in Australia, and that's where I'm going.
unidentified		Yeah, because you fly over, just start driving on the left-hand side.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's might be the only thing you can go to.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I worry more about Seattle.
		I lived in Seattle for a while.
		And they say the super earthquake that they're looking at that's going to turn the whole thing into jello, right?
		You get an earthquake so bad that the ground just literally becomes porous.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is it really that scary there?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		They're predicting, because, you know, Seattle's got like, I mean, I don't know that much about this.
		I'm way out of my, I'm in the danger zone.
		The plates are super deep, you know, so you don't get as many tremors, but, you know, when it releases, it's going to, you know, it's just be a super powerful earthquake.
		And, you know, it'll, it'll be so powerful.
		Yeah, that they said that, like, there's not going to be a lot.
		Even with the earthquake proofing, there's not going to be a lot of stuff left standing.
unidentified		Jesus.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Seattle.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You must be, I mean, because you're here, right?
		You feel tremors.
		They must, they happen all the time, right?
		I've only been a few times when I've been standing there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not all the time.
		I've felt them before.
		The biggest ones I ever felt was when I first moved here.
		I first moved here in 94, and it was right after the Northridge earthquake.
		And I was in my house, and I felt, I guess it was like a 5.5 where the whole thing just was weird.
		It gave me the impression that the house that I was living in or the apartment that I was in was made out of the same stuff, like a box that a refrigerator would come in.
		You know, you could move it around.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you're going to play inside.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The whole thing was just moving easily left and right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I was like, holy shit.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, that was my, I've only had a few times that I've, you know, felt.
		I'm like, it's like, it's, you know, at first I thought it was a truck.
		I thought a truck was rolling by.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know, and I'm like, and somebody's like, no, man, that was an earthquake.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And the one that I experienced was nothing.
		I mean, it was a baby one.
		The ones that they're getting, you know, right now somewhere in the world, I mean, there's always something that's like a five or a six.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So this goes back to your point about the, you know, a lot of planets, right, will be like way more plate tectonically active.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Volatile.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, than ours.
		So, you know, I mean, a lot of, that's what I mean.
		I think good planets are going to be like really hard to find.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, it may be, that may be the solution.
		The other solution is, you know, I mean, the way you guys found out about me is I did that article about the previous civilization.
		You know, like, how do you know whether or not there was a previous civilization on Earth?
		And, you know, one solution could be that, look, they were here, you know, that somebody did arrive and spent some time on Earth.
		But if it was like half a billion years ago and they only lasted, right, every civilization has a finite lifetime.
		If they only lasted for, you know, even a few hundred thousand years, they wouldn't leave.
		There'd be no record left.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There would be nothing left.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		There'd be nothing left.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that's possible that something's ever visited here?
		Because that is the big question.
		And that's the thing that gets the UFO dorks more jazzed up than anything is the possibility that we've been visited.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, not in the, I'm definitely not UFOs.
		I have two arguments against UFOs.
		One is as a friend of mine, Jason Wright, says, is like, look, as astronomers, man, we're finding all those asteroids.
		We're finding little chunks of rock moving.
		Nobody looks at the sky harder than we do.
		Right.
		And if anything, unless you want to go to the conspiracy theories, we would have found something.
		My other argument is like, what's with the headlights?
		You know what I mean?
		People are just like, oh, man, I saw lights in the sky and then they moved around and then they disappeared, but they don't really want to be seen.
		I'm like, well, why do they have headlights on?
		Like, why just turn off the freaking lights?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why would they have lights in the first place?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Why do you have lights in the came from another civilization and you can't get around without your high beams?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the idea is, what the fuck are you seeing with those lights?
		You're not seeing shit.
		When was the last time you saw?
		I mean, planes have lights so other planes don't run into them.
		They don't have lights so they could see where they're going.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so what?
		So why do they have right, exactly?
		Planes have lights so other people can see them.
		So if they're here, but they're mysterious, they don't want to be found, then turn off the freaking lights.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, they wouldn't have any lights.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they always have lights.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		People are always seeing, like, oh, and I saw lights in the sky, and then they move back and forth.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's also the problem with human memory.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Memories are horrible.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And memory of events that are stunning or shocking or unnerving or you think you saw something.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		They've done all that research, even in trials, right, where people see things currently.
		So just UFOs, you know, I'm just kind of like.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you think it's possible that there could be life on other planets, and it's possible there could be intelligent life on other planets, and we send probes to Mars.
		Why wouldn't we?
		And I think that if they do send something here, they're going to send something without biological life inside of it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you know, well, this, you know, what's a really interesting question is like, and we're talking about like what will we evolve into in a million years?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know, it may be possible that biology is a short period of intelligence.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You just, you build machines and the machines become, you know, you download yourself into them.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's a real possibility that, like, you know, silicon makes a lot more sense than wetware.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the problem is we think of artificial intelligence as artificial.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's definitely real.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, that's exactly it.
		It's not fake.
		It's right there.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's like there's artificial milk.
		You know what I mean?
		But it's a liquid.
		It's an actual liquid.
		There's not an artificial life.
		It's just silicon created life.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		But that's again the idea of the biosphere.
		This may be what the biosphere solution to spreading itself, you know, to getting it.
		Maybe that, like, yeah, silicon, that's a kind of a normal phase.
		I mean, I am super skeptical about like the whole transhuman thing about we're going to download ourselves into intelligence.
		You know, into conversation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever gone to one of those conventions on those dorks?
unidentified		No.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		There's some pretty serious dorking going on there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's geniuses in those dorks too.
		It's really interesting.
		It's like they're fully, wholly committed to this prospect of downloading themselves.
		Have you talked to Kurtzwell before?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, but I've read his stuff.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I had a chance to interview him a few years back for sci-fi.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		He's super smart.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That dude is like beyond super smart.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But goddamn is he committed to it.
		And then when you get to it, you realize that what he actually wants to do is recreate his father.
		Yeah, his father died when he was young, and he wants to be able to, through memories and photographs and what he knows about his father, literally recreate his father and be able to have a conversation with him.
		He was talking about this.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But what he's doing is he's going way, way into the future into the possibilities of he's not seeing like, well, five years from now, we're going to be able to send, you know, gigabyte pictures through the mail.
		No, he's saying, let's think of if you keep going exponentially, electronics and technology and innovation keeps continually accelerating, we could potentially get to the point where it's the impossible.
		Well, you would be able to recreate human beings based on your knowledge of them, and then they'll be able to come up with some sort of a program where he'll be able to have a conversation with his father.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, see, I think that misunderstanding.
		I mean, I think it's true about the possibility of a singularity in technological development.
		But it's not going to be his father.
		That's the sad thing.
		I think we seriously, I've done some work on this as an interest of mine about mind.
		What is mind?
		And what's the relationship between mind and matter?
		And I think we have a serious misunderstanding.
		We don't understand consciousness very well at all.
		So the idea that, oh, yeah, it's just going to be trivial to download your, you know, your consciousness into a computer, I think gets pretty, you know, there's like a shitload of assumptions in there about like what mind is and the relationship between like your neurons and you know awareness.
		So that's why I think those guys, it's a little bit of a religion.
		You know what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It is a little bit of religion.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Transcend.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, so it's like.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, 2045 is the new benchmark for whatever reason.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's the new number that we're going to be able to do.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		They're going to keep pushing back.
		It's going to be like every other, you know, every other rapture.
		Oh, we thought it was 2045.
		We really meant 2065.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We went to this 2045 conference, me and my friend Arian Duncan, and we got to talk to some of these guys.
		And it's really fascinating.
		And one of them had created some robot that was supposed to be him, but it didn't work well.
		So they never revealed it at the conference.
		It had too many bugs in it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's intriguing.
		It's like, I want them to keep going.
		Because, I mean, when are we going to get to ex-Machina?
		When are we going to get it?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Talk about good movies, though.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Did you like that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One of my favorite movies ever.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So smart.
		So just like simple.
		He's not beating you over the head with it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No cut the shit moments in that movie.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You were like, whoa.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The entire, I think that's one of my all-time top 20 movies.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		When she stabs him just emotionless.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Just like, really, I'm putting the blade in.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was amazing.
unidentified		Amazing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no.
		Yeah.
		Did you like Annihilation?
		Yeah, I like it already.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I didn't like it as much, but I liked it.
		It was very weird.
		And the ending seemed like some producers put their jiz in the soup.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Back to Bantsmur.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what's happening here?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Who made this part?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But I enjoyed it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So I think like, you know, I mean, and the danger with anything when it comes to AI and stuff.
		So when you know, here's an interesting thing about AI.
		Like we are getting making amazing strides with AI.
		Now, now, artificial intelligence is different from artificial consciousness.
		You know what I mean?
		So like, but the AI, you know, what we're getting out of it is nothing like us, right?
		So the, you know, back in the day where people were like, oh, we're going to like model the human brain.
		And that's how we'll do it.
		We'll like make programs that are what.
		And what they've learned is like, oh, that doesn't really work that well.
		So now this whole big data thing, like, you know, network theory and big data and deep learning, we're like, you know, they're using statistical, you know, the power of having huge amounts of computing and statistical reasoning.
		So that like, you know, yeah, the computer, like, you know, it'll find the picture of the cat, but you have no idea why it found the pit.
		It didn't reason like, oh, yeah, that sort of looks like cat, and I like cats.
		You know, it's just like, oh, these kinds of lines go with that kind of thing.
		It has no idea what it's doing, but it'll act intelligently.
		And so that's, you know, I mean, that's kind of freaky deeky in a lot of ways, too.
		I think people are, I think it's smart to think about the dangers of AI.
		Not necessarily.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the dangers to us.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not necessarily the dangers.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just the dangers to this thing that we are, this weird monkey thing that wants to keep being a monkey thing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, you mean in the sense of like, right, that it's going to replace us.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think it's inevitable.
		I mean, don't you think that if you go back and interview the single-celled organism before it branched off into multi-cell, that'd be kind of a boring interview.
		Fuck this multi-cell bullshit.
		I don't want to stay a single cell at the bottom of the ocean.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		These are assholes, man.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		With their rock and roll music.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're going to make cars.
		Fuck that.
		I don't want a car, man.
		I like staying down here.
		Like, there's a real thought to that, that we are the wetware that is the problem.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		No, no, listen.
		I think it's fully conceivable.
		Like, I'm not going to be like, it'll never happen.
		But as a guy knows a philosopher says, you know, there's a certain way in which everything we do with AI right now, it's not like, you know, Watson is playing chess.
		It's like we're using Watson to play chess.
		It's our tool, you know.
		And I think the fear is the tool gets out of hand.
		Not that it like develops a thing where like, I hate humans, you know, dad, I hate you.
		But more that it's like, you know, these things which are not actually thinking, they act intelligently, but they're not thinking, can have a huge, like, it'll have a really negative impact.
		You know, it'll, it'll, you know, what is it?
		There's that example of like if you design something that is an AI system to make paper clips, it ends up consuming the entire planet making paper clips because that's what you told it to do.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You never told it to make a sustainable amount of paperclips.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, exactly.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So I'm more worried about that than I am of like Skynet, you know, coming over and like, you know, deciding that it's going to, you know, drop all the bombs on us because it needs to get rid of us.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's no biological imperative for a silicon-based artificial intelligence to procreate, to keep going and move forward.
		Like, why would they do that?
		We do it because we came from biology and biology needs to stay alive.
		And everybody wants bigger, faster, stronger.
		You want to keep moving.
		And it's because there's a real possibility that you might get consumed by some other life form.
		So you have to protect yourself and you have to look out for other people who might want to breed with the viable female that you've copulated with.
		There's a lot of shit that's going on.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's built in evolutionarily to have that.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That we assume that somehow or another these artificial creations will have as well.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Which is why, right?
		I mean, yeah, like if we unless we program it in.
		So the thing is, like, but will it wake up?
		Like, so that's the.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, even if it does wake up, will it have the inclination towards scientific research?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Would it even want to send something through the cosmos to view us?
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		No, that's a really interesting.
		You know, and I think we just don't know, right?
		If it actually, because listen, we understand so little about what consciousness is and what its imperatives are.
		Like, yeah, once you wake up or you're like, oh, you're dead.
		You know, dead, I got to kill.
		I mean, like, why?
		Like, who knows what really.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you like Battlestar Galactica?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I loved Battlestar.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How goddamn good was that new?
		The new version.
		Yeah, no, the new version.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I got to say that.
		I love the old version because I was camping.
		Yeah, I was 14 years old and I was like, yeah, spaceships.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But the new version was amazing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If there is a show that I wish they would bring back, it's Battlestar Galax.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		How'd you like the ending?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		What did you think about the ending, though?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was, you know, they had to end it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was all right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But the fucking series was brilliant.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was brilliant.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know what was amazing about that, the way they wrapped like all the political shit that was happening after 9-11 into that, man?
		From like the torture scenes to the.
		Yeah, man, it was so.
		And then they even had the whole thing with Starbuck about, you know, what was she?
		Yeah.
		That was a really, you know, there was a couple, like, it was five years, right?
		And there were a couple seasons where like it kind of got a little ran off the rails.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That girl, what's her name?
		Katie Sackoff.
		Is that her name?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		The Starbucks?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that her name?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She's so good.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, she was really good in that role.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Being both like tough.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She's a favourite stuff since.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		She's got a movie out right now on Netflix.
		I haven't seen it, right?
		But I'm sort of like, oh, yeah, there's, you know.
		But she had, right, she sort of disappeared.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She was so good in that show.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I was like, well, this is like the launching pad for her.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And you know what was revolutionary about that show, too?
		Way they did the special effects were like, you know, the camera moved around.
		Like, there's a spaceship, but I'm, you know, I don't have it, it didn't do, you know, sometimes it did those long pans, but it was, it kind of opened up a whole new way of sort of looking at, you know, just sort of what it looks like to be in space and stuff.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it really scared the shit out of people in terms of artificial life, something that we create that decides it's done with us and it's taking over.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know what's amazing about that, and this is, I've written about this, this idea that, like, you know, we keep telling that story over and over again.
		How many movies, you know, can you think of that have that?
		And I think like, so I'm really interested in myth, right?
		You know, the whole mythology, the way, like, you know, we can never get away from the myths, you know, coming of age, the hero's journey, Joseph.
unidentified		Campbell.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Joseph Campbell.
		I'm a big Joseph Campbell fan.
		But like, you know, what's happening with us now, we got, there's nothing in the, there's nothing in the storehouse of myth to take care of like building machines that take over, right?
		So the reason we keep telling that story over and over again is we're preparing ourselves, right?
		We're building the myths, you know, that sort of will help us.
		We don't know what's going to happen, but we have to keep telling that story because we can feel it coming.
		You know what I mean?
		So we need to keep telling that story to kind of explore what the options are.
		And I like, that's what I liked about the ending.
		And I didn't think the ending was great, but the idea that like, oh, yeah, this balance, you know, you're going to keep going through these cycles of trying to achieve this balance between, you know, silicon forms and non-silicon and biological forms.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But we're worried that we're going to be taken over by something else, but we're not overly concerned with evolving our own biology and changing.
		And maybe that's the solution in terms of our physical limitations is some sort of a symbiotic connection between us and technology that instead of artificial technology and artificial life taking over, usurping us, instead of that, maybe we become a part of it and it becomes a part of us.
		And we, I mean, you have glasses on.
		You can see better with those glasses.
		That's essentially cyborg.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Right.
		Right.
		And these things, you know, these cell phones, my God, my memory's in there, right?
		I used to know cell phones.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I left my house two days ago without my phone and I turned around in a panic on my own street.
		I'm like, where's my fucking phone?
		I was like, no.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Do you remember when you used to have phone numbers in your head?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know, like you have 20 phone numbers.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I can't.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		My wife's number, I can't, like, I got three digits out of it.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I can't go further than that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's crazy.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		It's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's crazy.
		But we remember a lot of other stuff now.
		I mean, you have so much.
		I mean, I'm really overwhelmed.
		I think I'm in that weird zone where I just don't have, I don't, I don't have enough data space.
		I don't have enough storage.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		For all those.
		That's you got to kind of pick and choose, right?
		Sort of, you know, and it was just like Wikipedia where all human knowledge, the entire sum of human knowledge is right there.
		You know, I mean, like, whoa, what a freaking, I mean, you talk about changes, right, that you were talking about.
		What an amazing change that you can have pretty much, you know, like, you know, I love comics, right?
		You know, I was a comic Marvel guy way back, right?
		And back in the day, you know, you paid for your, you had to, you know, first of all, you got your ass kicked, but, you know, you had to go to the store every week and get the comics and, you know, and now, you know, you just look up Captain America and you can know everything there was about his, you know, his origin story and everything.
		So it's like that idea that like there's no domains of knowledge that you can't instantly access and have all the backstory that you need.
		That's got to be it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Physical comic books are amazing, but I have to be honest, comic books on an iPad are better because you don't see the next frame.
		Yeah.
		You just swipe and then you get the next frame.
		You don't see it in advance.
		Like if you're reading the left side of Doctor Strange and the right side is an explosion.
		You're like, well, I see that.
		I see that shit's coming next.
		Like it's kind of a shitty way to do it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, I agree.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I have an iPad.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's fucking amazing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's amazing.
		Yeah.
		No, and you do that thing.
		And now with the, it's like embarrassing as a professor of physics at a major university.
		I have like $3,000 worth of comic books.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But why is that embarrassing?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's not embarrassing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It can't be.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You're still a brilliant guy, but you just also like cool shit.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, shouldn't I be reading like Dostoevsky or something?
		I don't know.
		My dad was always like, don't say, because my dad was a writer.
		It's like, oh, you're comic books, you know.
		But I was like, dad, I'm learning it, especially with Marvel, right?
		Marvel had great language, right?
		I learned the word synopsis from Marvel.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Especially like, I mean, some of the, like, Doctor Strange had some great shit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, Fantastic Four.
unidentified		He didn't.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, the doctors.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know, I was the science advisor for Doctor Strange.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		With the movie?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		For the movie, yeah.
unidentified		Were you really?
		Yeah, yeah.
		That was the best day ever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I always say, I said, did you have to correct anything?
unidentified		No, no, not really.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Because they called me in.
		So I know Scott Derek.
		Actually, I lunch with breakfast with Scott yesterday.
		I know Scott from my first book, which is about science and religion.
		Somebody connected us and we'd been talking for a long time.
		And when he got tapped to do Doctor Strange, he contacted.
		Like I said, email said, Marvel wants to talk to you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I was like, oh, thank you.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And I got out there for a day.
		I met Kevin Fee, man.
		It was just like, oh, man.
		And so we basically worked on, he wanted to work on two things for that.
		And what's funny here is I never read Doctor Strange, right?
		Because I was like a science guy.
		It was all about Tony Stark, you know, or, you know, or Spider-Man or the X-Men.
		So I never, I was like, oh, the guy uses magic.
		So the thing we had to figure out was, first of all, that scene where he first encounters the ancient one, you know, and she has to kind of like, you know, school him on there's more ways to think about the world than science.
		And then the multiverse.
		That was the other thing that, because I've written a lot on the multiverse.
		But man, it was awesome.
		It was so much fun to be in the writer's room, you know, with them and just like be thrown around ideas.
unidentified		Wow.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, it was, you know, and it'll probably never ever happen again, but I don't care.
		You know, I don't care.
		I got my shot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It is a weird thing that when you're young, you like all this cool stuff, but then when you get old, you're supposed to be more pragmatic.
		You're supposed to abandon that stuff and be mature.
		But when I was a kid, I was super embarrassed when I became an adult that I still liked muscle cars.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like, why do I like these stupid things?
		And I love them.
		I would see one drive by.
		I'd hear the rumble.
		I'd go, ooh.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's awesome.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look at that thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then when I became an older adult, I was like, who gives a fuck?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's really what it is.
		That's where I'm now.
		No one cares, man.
		You know, because I love video games.
		I play a lot of video games.
		And people always like, oh my God, why are you playing video?
		They're terrible.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's your children.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they're awesome, man.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		There is no better way to kill an hour, especially after a stressful day than to go and shoot aliens.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this is like, you know, I mean, and it stimulates the mind.
		I mean, Jamie and I have talked about this many times that we have this deep appreciation for chess and for Go and all these ancient games.
		But there are games like StarCraft and even like one-on-one Quake matches that require intense calculating.
		You have to think about the environment, the understanding of the map that you're competing in.
		There's a lot of strategy.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, that's what's really good about it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I tend to be, I do a lot of, I really like RPGs, you know, so with a map and everything.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You'll be one of them, EverQuest dorks.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, I don't do Everquest.
		I don't do anything multi-player, right?
		Because I'm so bad at it that like, I know there's some kid, some 13-year-old in Korea who's just like, you're dead, back or you're dead.
		Spawn, die, spawn.
		But I like something with a really good story, you know?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What's the game you like?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, God.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		My favorite game is Last of Us.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Dude, what is that?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, man.
unidentified		Last of Us.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It is fucking awesome.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Because I don't like zombie games because I get scared.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You get scared?
unidentified		When I saw versus zombies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a nice simple one.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
		That might work.
		No, I saw the Night of the Living Dead when I was like 12.
		It was on PBS Little Screen.
		And it's just like, after that, I'm sorry, zombies.
unidentified		Wow.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I can't believe they put it on TV.
		Like, you know, for it was like the 11 o'clock show.
		So, but Last of Us is kind of a zombie survival story, but it's beautiful.
		I mean, it's really the narrative of it.
		It's this guy, you know, it's 20 years after.
		And the thing about this thing, it opens up with the, you know, the zombie outbreak happening, and the guy loses his daughter.
		Like, you see him lose his daughter.
		And it's so well.
		It's the same company that did Uncharted, which are other, I really like those as well.
		And so it's just like the acting in it was really beautiful.
		And then, you know, it's 20 years later, and this guy's broken.
		You know what I mean?
		Like, he's just, he's a certain, you know, he survived in this, you know, the society's fallen apart.
		But, you know, you just, you track him as he gets this young girl who is immune and he's got to take her cross-country to, you know, and you're following this guy's story.
		And, you know, then there's zombies and there's.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that the theme of a movie?
		A really recent movie?
		Wasn't that like a foreign movie with a foreign zombie movie that was supposed to be very good, but that was the idea behind it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it was his own daughter, wasn't it?
		Oh, no, maybe it wasn't Schwarzenegger?
		I bet they took it from this because they did.
		Because, you know, so Last of Us has won like huge amounts of awards.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How old is it?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Six years maybe.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Last of Us 2 is just about to come out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the Schwarzenegger movie is older than that, I believe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because it came out right around the time where his wife left him because he banged the maid.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		Whoops.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Downfall.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Whoops.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		He was the governor then, wasn't he?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		The governor?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He was post.
		It was post, post-governor.
		Yeah.
		But that theme is a reoccurring theme.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That is a reoccurring.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Anyone, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How many times has that come back?
		The plague wipes people out.
		They come back to life.
		They're zombies.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So you got to wonder what's up with that.
		Like, why is that something that's like stirring around in our head?
		I think the apocalypse is because we kind of feel, we're nervous about what's happening with us because we can see sort of we're pushing up against boundaries.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, we're also vulnerable.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And we're vulnerable to disease and we're vulnerable to, I mean, there's so many different things that people can get.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Rabies and malaria.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And we had plagues.
		We used to have plagues all the time.
		You know?
		So, yeah, no.
		But that's what makes this game so great is that it really takes the world after the fall seriously.
		And it's heartbreaking.
		You know what I mean?
		It's beautifully done.
		Scarier than shit, but beautifully done.
		And for me, it's like everything that I love most in the game.
		Because like you're saying, is you get into these situations and you're going to get killed.
		You know, like there's Dark Souls where there's no getting through.
		Dark Souls is apparently the most hardest game ever.
		I've never played it, but you know, this game is hard, and you got to keep it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It is Dark Souls.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Dark Souls is also a story-based open-world game, single-player.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I think that's probably a multiplayer mode, but it's like kind of an elvish, you're in that kind of world, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you're just trying to stay alive?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Trying to stay alive, and it's just like the hardest game ever.
		That's what they say.
		But I said, a good hard game, you gotta, you know, you're gonna keep going back.
		Like, oh, I just died.
		All right, let me try.
		Let me try coming around from this side.
		You know, oh, let me use this weapon.
		Let me, you know, it's really, you know, we did a my, I had a textbook that just came out a couple years ago, and we did a video game.
		We built a full, first ever, full video game for an intro astronomy course.
		And the whole idea was like, the coolest thing about a game is like the first thing you have to do is learn the rules, right?
		And that's what makes being in a game world interesting.
		You know, there's a whole set of rules.
		You got to know how to craft.
		You got to know which weapons to use in different kinds of situations.
		And our idea with the video game was like, just make the real, the real rules.
		Make them the science rules.
		Oh, you want to go mine an asteroid?
		Well, how do you know which asteroid has the most ore in it?
		I'm just going to do what you're going to normally do in astronomy.
		So I think, you know, video games have not recognized, they haven't, like you said, people don't understand actually how important they are.
		You know, for teaching, for all kinds of things, video games, and for entertainment, you know, for like a future of storytelling, too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, people take them, they think that's a waste of time until they find out how much these professionals make.
		You know, someone was saying that some guy, what is the number that kid was making?
		$500,000 a month playing Fortnite.
		Wasn't that what Sean is?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		It does, but that's way more than that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He makes more than that?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So what is Fortnite?
		Can somebody explain Fortnite to me?
		I'm sorry.
		I'm still in Far Cry 5 right now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You're a crazy third-person shooter.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You're jumping around shooting people.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I'm good with third-person shooters.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Is it a story or is it just like you're fucking people up, I think?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the story is really just dropping in to survive.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		There's no campaign mode or if there's a campaign.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		There is, but that's a separate.
unidentified		Yeah.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		That's not whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know what's interesting to me about Fortnite?
		The graphics suck.
		Don't you add me.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		That's a graphic style that it has.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Because it does.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It kind of has like an Xbox 2 sort of.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Somebody had an image and it was from 2007.
		And it said, man, look at this.
		I wonder what video game is going to be looking like.
		The graphics are going to be looking like in 2018.
		And then it shows Fortnite.
		And it's like, this is like...
unidentified		Dude, you did it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like they've turned the textures off.
unidentified		Yeah.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		They 100%.
unidentified		You turn the textures off when you play online if you don't have a powerful enough computer.
unidentified		Sure.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		You don't have to be streaming.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So it doesn't make your streaming, it doesn't make your video game video card work so hard.
		But also it makes it easier to recognize shapes because they're not as like, that was the thing they did with Quake.
		They would completely turn the textures off when guys would be like playing in high-level matches.
		And you would just deal with these flat walls and then the object, the person that you were fighting against, they would stand out in stark contrast.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you'd have to have, you know, otherwise you'd be in this castle wall.
		You'd have incredible textures on the wall and you wouldn't be able to see them as easily.
		It would be distracting.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's one thing I think I love about video games, too, is like, you know, the scenery.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Sometimes I just want to stop and be like, whoa, dude.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		The right side has full graphics, the left side is not.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		So it depends on what you were actually doing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the right side's reasonable.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it still is a little bit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's not much different at all.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, sort of, but the left side is just dark.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		No, look, there's grass.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, look at the grass.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but there's still some movement on the ground.
		It's not flat-plane like it is in Quake.
		Go to Quake 3 No Textures.
		Make a video or pull up a video of that, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
		What I'm talking about is like literal flat walls where people turned everything off.
		And it got to a point where they weren't allowing it in certain competitions because it makes such a big difference.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Because now you're just like, it's a target in front of a blank screen.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You could also replace all of the characters with a larger character.
		Like, say, if you were playing as like this girl.
		It's like, is this one?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		It's doing like it's showing the mod in between.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maybe I'm thinking.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It might even be a new one.
unidentified		I'm sorry.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry.
		What is Quake?
		I've heard it.
		I dare you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You son of a bitch.
		No, no, Jamie, pull up Quake, no textures.
		Pull up Quake, no textures, and then you can watch what it looks like.
		That is not no textures.
		That's different.
		You can see the difference in the colors and things are moving.
		When they turn off all the textures, you get to see these flat walls.
		That's what it looks like.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		See?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now that is a way different experience.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it would be much easier to see.
		Right.
		You can't.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Shadows still exist, but all the textures are gone.
		And if you show a video of that, see if you can find a video of that, Jamie.
		When in the videos you see things moving around with no textures and you realize what an advantage it would be if you were playing someone who's you're constantly dealing with all this visual input.
		You have all this different shit.
		High visibility.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		What is it Quake 3 though?
unidentified		It's hard to find the Quake Live.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		This is, again, I still got to ask, what is Quake?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I know I've heard of it, but I've never played it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's the ultimate first-person shooter, and it's the original one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was originally Quake 1, and, well, there was Doom, but it was...
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Doom I've heard of.
		Yeah.
		They did Doom, didn't they?
		They came out with another.
		Didn't they come out with another version of Doom?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes, they did, and there's another one that's coming out soon.
		But what Quake 1 was, was these cool maps, and you'd run around and shoot each other, and you'd have these death matches.
		So one-on-one death matches.
		You'd shoot rockets at each other and shit.
		And you're seeing it through your perspective.
		So if you have a rocket launch, you see the rocket launcher in front of you.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, so that whole idea of first person.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is this one?
		Oh, this is Quake Champions.
		This is the newest version.
		I mean, the graphics are fucking incredible on these things now.
		They're so exciting.
		We're setting up a LAN here, a local area network here, where we're going to stream live and play each other.
		Excellent.
		And waste massive amounts of time.
		I'm sure I'm going to get you.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, man.
		Sometimes I'm sort of like, oh, three hours just went by.
		Yeah, I was going to go to sleep a little bit.
		Oh, well, whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Dude, it will suck up your time.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It'll suck up.
		But, you know, I can't play.
		I'm just, I'm not good enough to play those kinds of things.
		Like, it's just like spawn, die, spawn, die.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, you can figure out how to do it.
		You're a smart guy.
		How dare you say that?
		How dare you put the limitations on myself?
		Yeah, you can't do that.
		You just need to learn W-A-S-D.
		Learn how to move your fingers around.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm a console guy, too.
unidentified		I need those.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Consoles are bullshit.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I know that's what people say.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Listen, you can't get any real accuracy with a console.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's your problem.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Wait, how do you do?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, but with the finger to type, I mean, the console now I'm playing, I can't.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I can't listen to you.
		How do you learn physics?
		How do you, what is that?
		All this fucking.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You can't do it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't understand all this side.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's like that movie where you're like, you can do it, man.
unidentified		You can't do it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's like Rocky or something.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Karate Kid or whatever.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Has anybody ever done that for video games?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		There's never been that movie where you're saying.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, someone teaches someone how to play a video game?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and then like the guy's a nerd in the beginning and he's like a loser, but he comes back and he gets the girl.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this in particular is because I am more and more convinced that our future may lie in some artificially created world and that people are more interested and more attracted every day to virtual reality.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Augmented reality, virtual reality.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And Jamie, what was that game, the one game where there was created worlds?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I was going to pull that up earlier and ask.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		It's called No Man's Sky.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I played that.
		I played that.
		I bought it because, of course, any space game, I'm like, it's boring, though.
		It is, because, you know, they have 80 trillion worlds, but they're all the, they're basically, they don't look that different.
		You know, so it's like oatmeal, 80 million bottles of old over there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not like you go there and people are shooting each other and stealing money.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
		What is better for that kind of thing?
		Yeah, right.
		I mean, it's, you know, it looked like it was beautiful, but what's better is Elite Dangerous.
		So after this, I was so disappointed in this.
		I went back and I found Elite Dangerous, which actually.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You were just disappointed in this because there was no action.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there was nothing.
		You just ran around in your mind stuff.
		It was sort of like, there just wasn't nothing exciting.
		There was nothing exciting.
		There was no, you know, there was no.
		So like I said, I don't usually play sort of these massive multiplayer games.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So this is Elite Dangerous?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		This is Elite Dangerous.
		And it is, man, the trading or, you know, you can decide, like, oh, I want to be a bounty hunter.
		You know, it's incredible.
		And it was so rich.
		I just, I spent, there was like a good six months of my life that I was like, you know, working my way, getting better ships.
		I became, because who doesn't want to be a bounty hunter, right?
		You know what I'm saying?
		Like, that's what everybody's.
		And this just, this game had, you know, and there's like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand people in there, you know, creating the universe.
		It's evolving.
		They add storylines.
		So, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, we are setting up an HTC Vive here.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And we're, we, Jamie was.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		HTC vibe.
		How dare you?
		I know, man.
		It's like, you know, that's a good idea.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You call yourself a dork.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You call yourself a double dynamic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You're not a real nerd.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You'll never not have sex again.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Virtual reality.
		And it's consumer virtual reality.
		And my friends.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You've never done the boy.
		I know.
		I've been waiting.
		I've been sort of.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, we tried to get one.
		Jamie went out yesterday and look, they're all sold out.
		So we had to order one.
		And so we're ordering one.
		We're going to have it set up in here.
		And the games.
		I played the games of two years ago.
		And I'm sure they're way more advanced than they are now.
		There's a crazy archery game where you're on the top of a castle and these little monsters that look like they could be in South Park.
		They're not like detailed.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're kind of cool looking monsters and you shoot at them with bows and arrows.
		They're trying to invade the castle.
		But man, it's addictive because you really look down.
		You see them all around you.
		You have like a real so how do you play those?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		This has always been my question about like, you know, I sit on my chair and I play a video game.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So like, are you, yeah, so this is it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		See, this guy has a thing in his hands, and he's moving around.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is like a Star Wars one.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And there's a bunch of different ones that I've seen.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So you always got to be standing, right, in some sense.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Doesn't that make it more easy?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Don't you want to just like sit down with a beer and like?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You can, but there's also a boxing one that you get a real workout in.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it's a game, and I played it over Duncan's house.
		So I think there's a video of it.
		But it's weird because you punch wrong.
		So like the, like if I'm holding my hands like this, which is I'm holding my hands vertically where my thumbs are up, right?
		The boxing gloves would be horizontal like they would be if you were punching someone.
		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So it doesn't do the turn.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, it's weird.
		So as you move your hands forward like this, which you really wouldn't punch like that, the punches come out.
		So they've got to iron that out.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's what I'm going to say.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That'll be something they'll work out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And make the controller rotate the way a fist would.
		But as you're doing it, you throw real punches and someone's throwing punches at you.
		And when they throw punches at you and they hit you, you see a white flash in front of you.
unidentified		That's good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which makes you nervous just like real sparring does.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Yeah.
		Well, you know, and so like this question of like, what are we going to do with virtual reality?
		Because like I said, you know, I already, you know, I see huge potential for like education in gaming.
		And that's why we built our game.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, here's, this is me over at Duncan's house.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Just don't want anybody to walk by.
		You know, I got to go get a beer.
		Bam.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm beating this guy up, moving around him.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		See, that's the thing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I always wonder.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Duncan got pissed because that guy was fucking Duncan up every day.
		He's like, dude, how did you beat it?
		I was like, move around.
		Don't stand right in front of it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, the rope.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Punch it in the face.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		They're just gonna do the rope-it-dope.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you gotta have footwork and movement, but you can really get a workout with that.
		I'm not joking.
		You get exhausted.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you keep going and fight tougher and tougher opponents.
unidentified		Right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, and that's the question.
		So they talk about haptic suits, like where eventually, you know, you're going to wear things.
		I didn't see the, I read the book, but I didn't see the, what was it, the movie that just, Ready Set, Ready Player One?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I didn't see it either.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I didn't see it.
		Have you read the book?
		The book's really good because the book is like full immersion.
		Like the whole book is about when virtual reality is it.
		And so everybody has these suits that, you know, and you're kind of in this ball.
		You play the game in a ball so you can run.
		But in some sense, yes, we're just starting out along these lines.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, they have these places you can go that they have a warehouse set up and you go inside of it.
		And I went through one with my kids and it's a Star Wars one at Disneyland.
		Dude, it's fucking wild.
		You go across, you're walking across this platform.
		Like they have all these different places where you actually walk through.
		And as you're walking through, you look to the left and to the right and there's fire, but you feel the heat from the fire.
		It's fucking crazy.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so they've got like heaters set up so that it blows.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And stormtroopers start shooting at you.
		This is it right here.
		What is it called?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		The void.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The void.
		Yeah.
		And you do this.
		I'm telling you, man, this is better than any of the rides at Disneyland.
		And it's just outside of Disneyland in downtown Disney.
		So you don't have to pay to get into Disney to get it.
		But it costs, I think it's $35 for half an hour.
		It's not cheap, but...
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's not too bad.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's not like you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's fucking awesome.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it is awesome.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So the question is, what happens with all this, right?
		Future, right?
		Because, yeah, virtual reality, we're just on the cusp of it, right?
		We're just beginning to start playing around with these technologies.
		Because people have been saying it for years, and it kind of sucked.
		It was sort of clunky.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, we used to play Pong, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's what I started with.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How old are you?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I'm 55.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm 50.
		So I remember Pong.
		We were excited.
		I can't believe I'm controlling the TV and making the thing move on the TV.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Or asteroids?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we flew the.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It was a Star Wars game.
		I don't think it was called asteroids, but you flew through the trench and everything.
		It was just like fucking wireframe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it was amazing to see that.
unidentified		I love that.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I dropped a lot of quarters on it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		So go from that to what you were showing us here with these crazy new space games.
		Yeah.
		And then imagine what these, I mean, the Star Wars thing today, the void, is really cool.
		But you know that it's not real.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's cool.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you know it's not real.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're not going to be able to tell it's not real in 20 years.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And how much time are people?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you wear a haptic suit, by the way.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When you do this.
unidentified		Oh, really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So there's a lot pressure on you.
		And you feel it when you're getting shot.
		Wow.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You feel like Yeah.
		And you know, it's funny, even with the controller on my crappy PS4, when it vibrates, you know?
		Yeah.
		Even that's enough to sort of give you, it's amazing how much the brain sort of picks up on these signals.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When you're using the HTC Vive and you draw an arrow back, when it gets to the knocking point, you feel it like, ah, it's cool.
		And you release.
		There's a feeling in your hand of releasing the arrow.
		It's really cool.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So what happens when, and you know, right, I can be sort of like, you know, grandpa and be like, that's terrible.
		People should be going out in nature.
		Which I think they should be.
		They should, you know, for now.
		But, you know, I always, I'm always aware.
		Whenever I'm sort of like, oh, shit, this is going to be terrible.
		I always remember the whole, you can see in like, I think at some point, Socrates, you know, 2,000 five years, 500 years ago, he's like, ooh, kids today, they're a whole bunch of, you know, assholes.
		Right.
		So, you know, who knows what we'll do with it?
		And, you know, hopefully, maybe it'll help.
		You know, maybe, I don't know.
		You know, I mean, I think there is, I don't want to be like, oh, that's terrible, but there clearly are there's going to be dangers with this a different game, Jamie?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		This is a new one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, boy, I'm fucked.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I am going to be fucked.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Just wild with the, yeah, just the hands.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And so you have two little hand controllers, and one of them would be the arrow, and the other one would be the bow.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And you wear them, and that's the haptic part.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And there's controllers on them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you feel the arrow vibrating against the riser of the bow as you draw it back, too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's really cool.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's funny because we talked about like, you know, for the game that we built, which was awesome.
		You know, it's really a lot of fun to actually go through the process of like, how do you, you know, how do you script it?
		How do you teach people?
		You know, like, because that whole thing that when we get in a good, when you're in a good game, right?
		You know, in the first couple hours of a game and you're just learning the basic stuffs and you get excited.
		You're like, oh, this is, this is a cool world to be in.
		But I'd be interested to think like sort of, you know, at some point I tried VR for the same thing because what can you, once you can have people be tactile and they're not just sort of in their head, what else can you do to sort of show them, teach them things, you know, like glaciers or, you know, for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's another thing in Disneyland.
		They have a thing called soaring over the world that you sit in a chair and you get raised up and there's a giant like IMAX style screen and it flies you over these environments.
		It's incredible.
		It's so beautiful.
		And different smells are in the air and the different places that you go to.
		Like when you go over the elephant, yeah, the elephants, you smell grass and hay.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And I think that it's just a matter of time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like as we were talking about before, where biological entities might not be necessary for space travel, you might be able to send a robot, put on a suit, and be able to experience these worlds like in real time.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, so, you know, you know, the simulation argument?
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's the philosophy argument.
		Yeah.
		You know, and so that's a really interesting idea.
		Should we just run through it for people who don't know it?
		So I forgot who it was, Nick Bostrom, maybe not.
		Brandon Carter.
		You know, there's this guy, philosopher, came up with this brilliant argument for like why we're probably a simulator.
		We're probably somebody else's simulation, self-aware simulation.
		And the idea is like, look, if you get one, you know, we've been talking about like civilizations when they get a million years ahead, what can they do?
		That they're so powerful, they can build computers that can simulate reality, like fully simulate reality.
		Where like, you know, just like in the matrix, you have programs that are self-aware.
		And so, you know, once they get to that and they start running simulations of the world, right?
		It's cheaper to run, it's cheap to run simulations.
		So they just run trillions of them, right?
		So the idea is that from that argument, there's more simulated realities than there is the one real reality.
		So odds are, right?
		You know, if there's a trillion simulated realities and one real reality, you're probably in a simulated reality.
		So are we a, you know, everything like right now, you and I think this is real, you know, but what we are is an incredibly detailed and we are self-aware programs in, you know, a silicon matrix of, you know, so that argument is brilliant.
		I mean, you know, I mean, just from the, just from the point of view of like numbers, you know, there's lots of reasons to say that's not possible, but but it's, you know, raises this issue of like, yeah, what is simulation?
		If you were in a simulation, the whole matrix thing, if you were in a simulation that was that real, how would you know?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, how could you know?
		One day we're going to be if you allow technology to continue, right?
		If we keep moving forward at an exponential pace, there's going to come a point in time where we have something that's indistinguishable from reality.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So how do we know that we're not already in it?
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know what I mean?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And once we're in it, will we create another reality?
		Will we continue to create simulations inside of simulations like fractals?
		I mean, fractals exist in nature.
		They exist everywhere in the universe.
		And there's also the argument that the atomic structure itself might really be a universe.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Which is dude.
		That's super stoner talk.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, it's really, I mean, that's why I love science fiction.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know, the explorations of these ideas, you know, I mean, they're way out there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And they're fun exercises.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		They're fun exercises.
		And there's a way in which, again, when you think a million, two million years in the future, this is why I might want to, you know, I hate to loop this back to climate change, but just like, God, if we can just make it through, who the fuck knows what we're going to be?
		Right.
		I mean, there's the whole universe.
		One thing I did like about Interstellar was the idea that like our future selves, which have now become integrated in the very fabric of reality.
		You know, that's how far you've evolved.
		You become the laws of physics, that they're kind of opening up the wormhole for us.
		And so, you know, a million years is so long.
		And who knows what we can become?
unidentified		I mean, it's just like, you know, don't hold us back.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm not a fan of the people that deny science, but one thing I am a fan of is watching them do it.
		Like watching monkeys throw shit at the zoo.
		It's just something weird about watching people argue like really obvious right-wing talking points.
		And most of them, by the way, have no financial interest in climate change one way or the other.
		They're not the wealthy elite.
		They're these weirdos that are like vampire familiars.
		Like they want to be recognized as like an ally of the elite.
		They think somehow that's going to get them in.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's really what it is, right?
		Yeah.
		And it's like, you know, and again, it's the tribalism, but as you said, it's like watching them do this.
		And the part that's so frustrating is just that, like, dude, you're using science.
		It's not fair.
		It's not fair that, like, oh, you get like, you know, you get into an accident and you're like, oh, God, please give me the MRI.
		And then, you know, as soon as your arm heals, you're going to be tweeting about how like, you know, climate change is all bullshit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The Earth is flat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure what to do with that.
unidentified		Right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, are those guys just like, I mean, is this something we should like pay attention to?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Or should we just be like, okay, you know, fine, go ahead, do your thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I had an interesting conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson about it.
		And he said, one of the real problems with debating these people is you elevate their profile and they're never going to believe it in the first place.
		And the reality is there's a mental illness involved in a lot of these people.
		They're schizophrenics.
		There's something wrong with them.
		They believe this.
		And then there's this massive lack of education and a lack of reading.
		They're not interested in understanding how they know that the Earth is round or how they know that every other planet in the solar system is round.
		Or how they know that every other planet that we've observed, all the stars, are round.
		Why they're round.
		Why it's a matter of mass and gravity and all these.
		They don't care about all that.
		But what they want to think is the government as if it's the government is like one cabal of equally minded people that are all working together to fuck you over somehow by convincing you that the earth is round.
		It is one of the dumbest things.
		But it's also a sign that we've created this world that's really easy to survive in.
		We've nerfed all the hard edges and we keep the wolves off the streets.
		And there's so these fucking dumb dumbs and then they get online with computers, which is hilarious.
		So these idiots might.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		They did research.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, when you looked at a website, not research.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's kind of stunning.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, I think your point about actually, we've made the world so safe.
		Because, yeah, there's a certain way, like, you know, in Hunter-Gatherer, those people would be food.
		Those are the people who are standing there looking at the tiger being like, that's not a tiger.
		Yeah, that's not a tiger, man.
		You know, and that's orange.
		And it's right.
		But what's weird about that?
		So that is like the UR exam.
		Like, that is the dumbest shit you could possibly imagine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So there's dumber.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's dumber.
		There's people that think there's aliens underneath the earth and there's tunnels and reptilians.
		And there's a secret cabal of kid fuckers that run the world.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You made a really excellent point just a minute ago, right?
		Which is because like the philosopher Karl Popper once said, if there was a conspiracy, it failed, right?
		The whole conspiracy thing is that like, oh, yeah, everybody's in on it.
		Like, as if, like, look, there are the powerful.
		There are the, you know, there's elites who control, you know, but they have their own agendas.
		They're beating the crazy.
		And it's the whole history of the world.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're going after each other left and right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's about finances.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
		And the idea that like, oh, somebody's going to be able to keep this amazing secret, right?
		You know, about the earth is flat.
		And never, I mean, you know, it just, it gives people way more credit than, you know, than they deserve.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you would have to have everybody on the same page.
		All the different governments all over the world.
		They're all like, yeah, yeah, lie about the earth.
		Like, where's the benefit in lying about the shape of the planet?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right, right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Who's making money?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Who's making money?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, here's what's really messed up is that like, you know, climate change denial is just like a slightly less whackadoodle version of that, right?
		Because, you know, there's a guy, writer, philosopher, I forgot his name, Morton, if I got his first name.
		But he talks about climate change being a hyper object.
		Like, you know, that modern world, we have things that are hyper objects, which means they're just so big that we just, we have a hard time wrapping our minds around them.
		And that hyper objects, you know, if we're going to evolve, right, we're going to evolve new behaviors.
		One of them is the capacity to deedle with hyper objects.
		But people want everything to be simple, you know?
		I mean, which cracks me up because like they're fine with this being complex.
		You know, their cell phone can be complex because they like to use it.
		But like, you know, the idea that like, you know, the climate could change, climate change, they need it.
		It freaks them out because it's too complicated or something.
		So they go for the simple answer, which is that, you know, it's a conspiracy.
		It's a hoax.
		I love this one.
		The scientists are all doing it for the money.
		As if my pay was that good that, you know, I mean.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think a big issue happened with Al Gore.
		When Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth, everybody connected Al Gore with the left.
		He's a Democrat.
		And then they found out that he flies private jets and they're like, this motherfucker.
		And so they're like, this is all bullshit.
		And so there's enough holes where they started poking through and then looking for conspiracies and then looking to deny the whole thing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I totally agree.
		I really wish, you know, I got nothing against Al Gore, but I wish he did.
		I mean, I wish it didn't become the face of climate change because it just pushed.
		I mean, if only, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sagan was still alive or, you know, had done it, it would have been a totally different thing because it wouldn't have happened.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's benefited off of it in an extreme way.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Pull up this article.
		Al Gore may be the first climate change billionaire or green billionaire.
		He's made so much money doing these seminars and speeches and the film itself.
		And then they're doing a film.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And then people become, I think it actually came out.
		It didn't do that well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then it came out already?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I think so.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I thought I saw.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Al Gore could be the world's first carbon billionaire.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Former vice president, become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no, that's okay.
		That part's okay.
		Because if he's investing in these companies and the companies start making money, which like already solar is-solar employs more people now than coal does.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's amazing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, coal.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that was one of the dumbest things when Trump became president.
		They're going to bring back coal.
		How about bring back knocking rocks together to start fires?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, it's like the fuck up.
unidentified		It's as if coal.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's as if the typewriter companies got together and made sure you never bought a computer.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Like, we're going to make computers illegal because you've got to keep using typewriters.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Coal's fucking terrible.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, terrible across the business.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I don't need it anymore.
		It's like, you know, it's just, but listen, I got to, one thing that you always got to acknowledge is that like this, you know, when you change infrastructures, people are going to get hurt.
		You know what I mean?
		Like, I mean, for those coal miners, man, that's what they've done their whole life.
		It's been an honorable fucking thing.
		So you can't just sort of be like, hey, we're switching infrastructures.
		See ya.
		You know, there's got to be some deep understanding of consequences and helping people who are going to be training how to put up solar panels.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How do you feel about universal basic income?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever looked at it?
unidentified		Oh, yeah, yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, no, I've thought about that a lot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's a big thought in consideration when it comes to automation and technology.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know, with the automation thing, it's so true, right?
		Because, you know, when you think about what's been going on with the last election, you know, and everybody was like, oh, you know, like, you know, what's happened with blue-collar people, you know, workers, which is totally true.
		But like, man, it's not China.
		It's automation, right?
		And that's what's what really is going to screw up the whole nature of work, you know, for everybody from truck drivers, you know, even to me to university professors is we got this, the AI, you know, the automation coming on.
		And right, what do you do?
		What do you do in the middle of the moment?
		There's no more.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When a university professor is one day going to be retro, that kids are going to want to learn online.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're going to want to learn through some sort of an interactive course so that you can get on your phone rather than go to an actual physical place.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It's possible, you know, I mean, it's possible.
		But I think, and this is going to be the whole question with the new economy, or whatever, whatever happens, whatever we're moving into, is finding those places where, you know what, I don't want a machine.
		You know what I mean?
		So right now, like, so when the, what is it, the MOOCs came out, the massively online courses, you know, that was like five years ago.
		I went like, that's it.
		Universities are done.
		Everybody's going to take these online courses.
		And it never happened, you know, because people want to be together.
		They want to learn.
		They want the experience of having, you know, part of my students is not just lecturing.
		Though I'm a great lecturer.
unidentified		I don't know.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		My students are probably like, I bet you are, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You're a good talker.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I had one student say, the reviews you get at the end, the guy said, hey, I hate to say this, but you should make those tapes for people to go to sleep because every class, your voice put me to sleep.
		And he meant it in a nice way.
		He's like, you have a nice voice, you know?
unidentified		That's passive-aggressive for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, fuck, whoever it is.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I think that I think people will always, with education, there'll be some component of it that, yeah, sure, you can learn it online.
		Why don't you?
		But I think like, you know, we're going to have to, there'll be a place for like people coming in and like learning in groups and having somebody who like has, you know, spent their whole life studying the thing, telling you, you know, what's going on.
unidentified		Right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Like there's a lot of things where like, and we've lost a lot of this, mentorship, right?
		Or apprenticeship, right?
		There's a lot of things you need.
		Somebody who spent their whole life going, oh, you know, you crank it this way, not that way, because if you're going to get that way, it'll never work.
		You can't learn that from watching a video or something.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's like, well, there's certain things, martial arts, which is a big part of my life.
		You have to learn from a person because there's tiny things that they must show you while you're doing it.
		But you can learn a lot of things from videos.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no doubt.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's a lot of things that people are putting up online, instructional courses and stuff.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I use some of them, you know, if I have to fix my sink, I'm like, okay, how does this work?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, for sure, man.
		Yeah.
		It's kind of amazing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So, you know, I think like with everything.
		So let's circle back to the UBI.
		You know, like with everything, we're going to have to invent new ways.
		We will, because we're just human beings.
		Like, there's a way in which we're going to find niche places that there will be economies where people make things.
		But yeah, in the end, I mean, UBI may be necessary.
		I think it may really be necessary because if there's no work, I mean, that's a recipe for disaster for your democratic society.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I just hope we can move past this idea that everybody who needs that is some sort of a welfare brat.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right, right.
		Well, you know, once there's no work at all, you know, I mean, they're going to, because like, you know, this is the thing like with self-driving cars, right?
		So I ask this question a lot and I've written about this.
		Sort of like, okay, everyone's like, we got to have self-driving cars.
		We're heading towards self-driving cars.
		Like self-driving cars will destroy the last good blue-collar job in America, you know, truck driving, right?
		And that's a really good livelihood for a lot of people.
		And it's like, oh, we're just going to eliminate it.
		It's like, why?
		Like, do we have to?
		Like, okay, yeah, you're telling me there's going to be...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, for safety's sake.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's what they say, right?
		But until it's not entirely clear, right?
		You know, that that will work.
		And, you know, what are the, for the lives that are lost in the driving, I mean, you know, the car crashes, is that going to be worth the social upheaval that comes from not having any work anymore?
		So, I mean, just like, there are these huge issues.
		It's just bearing down on us.
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If it's your friend or your mom or loved ones or yeah, but these are the kind of calculus.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you know, if it tears down, if wiping out these jobs destroys democracy, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And you end up with, you know, silly, though.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That doesn't seem possible.
		I just think that what it's going to do is going to make travel safer.
		And then we have to figure out, well, these jobs that people got from traveling, how do we replace that income?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, one of the things is we're going to have to start teaching kids to be creative.
unidentified		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That's the niche of it.
		I think there's going to be places where like now you'll have.
		So listen, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, I know you're not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You're just being, you're just looking at all the variables.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and I'm asking like the, you know, we're moving so rapidly into this new world, right?
		That like, who's deciding for us?
		Who's deciding that we want cars?
		You know, I mean, we're told that we're going to get it, but like a lot of these things, I think they're, you know, there needs to be a little bit more dialogue with democracy, right?
		And having this stuff shoved down our throats and told, like, it's the best thing ever, you know?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, well, you know, how about cell towers?
		They're fucking everywhere.
		I mean, there's no getting away from it.
		If you could, I mean, is there a community anywhere that's made some sort of an agreement, will there be no cell towers in our community?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, but there are communities that have decided to, like in the Southwest, that no lights, no lights at night.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's amazing.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Because they want to preserve their night sky.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We should really have some sort of a day where everybody shuts everything off.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And sees the sky.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And see how crazy it is that we live in this weird state where we're on an organic spaceship flying through infinity.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And we don't see that, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Because, you know, if you're, you know, when you do backpacking or something, you're in the backcountry, you know, a couple days, you notice things change and like, oh, the moon's not as quiet as it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And so nobody looks up now anymore, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Because there's nothing to see.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You don't see anything because of light pollution.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I went to the Keck Observatory on the Big Island.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Have you been?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I've never been.
		I'm a theorist.
		I don't, you know, nobody's going to get any close to a telescope, I'll break it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fucking just, you don't even have to go all the way to the observatory, the visitor station, which is, I forget where it's at.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I think it's 12 or something.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Something like that.
		It's really high.
		But they have diffused lighting all over the big island, so there's no light pollution.
		And when you look up, it is just stunning.
		You look up, you're like, wow.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		The Milky Way, right?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And most people have never seen the Milky Way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's right there.
		Like, I thought you have to have a telescope to see all.
		No, it's right there.
		And you feel like you're flying through space.
		And you have this really humble feeling that I think people get in a couple of different places.
		People get when they live next to mountains.
		They get it when they live next to the ocean.
		But you really get it if you could see space.
		And I think one of the things that is haunting the human race is the arrogance of humans, which is compounded by the fact that we can't see the cosmos, that we only see what's in front of us.
		So this is the world that we live in.
		We put a roof over our head.
		This is the box.
		I got my blinders on.
		I'm moving ahead because I want a new Lexus or whatever, you know, whatever it is, whatever material thing you're trying to possess.
		When this unstoppable force in front of it, when you look up and you see the cosmos, it's like it's an undeniable reality.
		And you go, oh, okay, okay, this is just a small thing.
		My existence is just a small thing in this mystery, this giant mystery of what, you know, we just found out 20 years ago, there's planets out there.
		I mean, this is a giant mystery.
		You're looking up at 100 billion stars in this galaxy alone.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Man, I couldn't, you're speaking my language.
		I mean, you know, the loss.
		Well, and the capital M word, right?
		So I'm a scientist.
		I'm an atheist, but I believe in mystery.
		I believe that kind of at the core of our lives is just, I wake up every day and I'm freaking here.
		And I'm not going to, I'm going to be here until I die.
		And then I have no idea what the hell happens.
		So, you know, and as you said, like mountains in particular, you know, I have a thing for mountains.
unidentified		Me too.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		The night sky is, it reminds you.
		It opens that space up, right?
		You know, where you're sort of like, you know, and you're right.
		You can, you know, we can talk about it, right?
		We can talk about, but it's really, it's an experience.
		It's an experience that just shows you you're part of this.
		It's more than you, but you're here.
		And, you know, and I think, right, a lot of the stupidity of the modern age, you know, as you said, the consumerism, particularly, like all that matters to me is getting my next pile of shit.
		When you're out there, you realize who cares?
		You know, who freaking cares?
		Like, you know, for a moment, even you just get the sense of that mystery.
		And it can be transformative, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think what's happening is we've created these civilizations.
		The civilizations need to be lit up.
		The lights keep us from seeing the universe.
		The universe humbles us, so we're not humble.
		Then we move towards acquiring physical possessions, material objects, because we think that that's going to make us happy.
		And our entire society is geared towards innovation because everybody wants the newest, shiniest shit to sell us.
		That is what's leading us to artificial life.
		And that all this shiny shit is all innovation and it's eventually going to move to this one singularity.
		And that singularity is some new being.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So it's funny.
		Because, you know, one thing when I think about like, you know, all these other, you know, my argument about all these other civilizations is that, you know, whether or not you make it, maybe that the evolutionary heritage you get, right?
		So we evolved from both chimpanzees or the chimpanzee ancestor and the bonobo ancestor.
		So we've got like, we fight, we're hierarchy, we're very hierarchical, right?
		So, you know, we've got a lot of aggression in this, but we also got the bonobo, kind of like, let's just have sex, everything's cool.
		So we're like, we're sort of, we've got this really weird mixed evolutionary baggage.
		And whether or not you can make it to the next side with the existential challenge of triggering climate change is kind of like, A, what your evolution, what evolution gave you, you know, because you can imagine species like hive minds, you know, if you came from termite, an intelligent termite species, it might be a lot easier to deal with climate change.
		You're like, everybody, you know, get on the, you know, get on the course.
		But most essentially is can you evolve new behaviors?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So we've been on this track and it's leading us in a way that, as you said, it's like the shiny thing dangling in front of us is leading us off on this one track.
		And the question is, can we evolve new behaviors?
		Which actually I'm going to say this.
		I think part of it is spiritual, you know, or at least in my atheist way of like reconnecting with mystery to see like, ah, you know, we're part of this and we need to respect it.
		And, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What do you, when you say spiritual, what do you mean?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		So my first book was about science and religion.
		And I, you know, I'm an atheist, but I'm not a Richard Dawkins atheist.
		I think that whole idea of well, you know, Richard Dawkins is what I would call a strident atheist.
		And he's like, you know, anybody who has any spiritual or any, you know, any inclination towards mystery is an idiot, you know?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And like Richard Dawkins needs to do LSD.
unidentified		Right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		In a certain way, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Or DMT or psilocybin or something that just gives you an undeniable experience of mystery.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Exactly.
		You know, so I've been doing Zen meditation for like the last 30 years, you know, and like, you know, so I've been staring at a wall for 30 years.
		And the first thing you learn is it's really boring.
		And then the second thing you learn is that there's stuff under your thoughts.
		You are not just the shit you're thinking.
		You know, there's just sort of you settle down and there's just like this openness, you know?
		And so the spiritual part is like you said, you know, when you're in the mountains, right?
		So I love doing backcountry hiking.
		And when you get above tree line, there's a weird thing that happens when you're above tree line.
		And you're just like, you know, you got this panorama around you.
		And that thing is, you know, the earth, right?
		Of which we are part.
		And, you know, so this is an interesting question about like, can virtual reality do this or do you actually need to get out there?
		I kind of think you need to get out there, but maybe virtual reality can give people the impetus to get out there, you know?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it'll be a different experience.
		I don't think there's anything wrong with the virtual reality experience of being in the mountains.
		I think it'd probably be pretty fucking cool, but it's not going to be being in the mountains.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Something about being in the mountains is also there's a there's a weird feeling, and I don't know if it's real, but there's a weird feeling that there's no signal out there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because in the places where there's no cell signal, there's no, there's a feeling you get when you're absolutely not connected.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then you see wildlife and the wildlife out there, they're almost like these mystical beings.
		Like when you see a deer step out of the tree line and it's like catch its eye.
		Yeah, that thing has been that way for a million years.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's that species has not changed at all in a million years.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And the signal, what you're talking about, the signal, it's really the thing is what for me, it's like when I get far enough back that I know there's just not another human being here.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		You know?
		And this is like when I leave, this exact, this is going to still be happening.
		Like it just doesn't give a shit about you.
		Right.
		And it's just moving along.
		And as you said, it's been moving this way for millions of years.
		And you just realize, like, and that's why, you know, part of the thing I'm saying with the book is that like, look, if we trigger climate change, that's just the Earth's way of like creating the next set.
		You know, it used us to create climate change to now move on to something else.
		That's what the Earth does.
		It's just this animate power.
		And when you're out there, you feel that.
		And you, you know, and the thing that I think we need to do is sort of re-establish our connection to that.
		We're part of that.
		We're from that.
		We're not evil.
		We're not bad.
		We need to reintegrate ourselves in a way that we still get our civilization, but you know, that's what I mean.
		So, yes, why spiritual?
		Because when we connect to that mystery, then we're in a better place to make the right decisions, to understand what the decisions are.
		If not, we're like, oh, we got to save the polar bears.
		And we're not looking at, no, no, it's the biosphere as a whole that we have to understand.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, operating out of ego and ideology and not out of rational thought with all the information at our disposal and really verifying that information, understanding what's correct and what's not correct, and whether or not there's bias behind it or scientific research that was funded by people that have a vested interest in it leaning one way or the other.
		All that stuff is very, very slippery and very dangerous.
		And when you find out that studies have been influenced by special interest groups or lobbyists or whatever, and that they, you know, like especially pharmaceutical studies are the creepiest where they can do a series of studies and only one of them shows some sort of a positive impact for whatever weird reason, and that's the one they use.
		And they don't have to publish the fact that they ran 100 fucking studies.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
		Well, no, you know, I try and teach people.
		I'm sorry, go ahead.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, go ahead.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		That, you know, science, I think the most important thing that people need to understand about science is not so much science's results, but how science works, you know, because it does work, right?
		That's why we have all this stuff.
		And so they can distinguish.
		So I say that science is three things.
		It's spitballs, super tankers, and stadiums, right?
		You know, the problem with the news, it'll be like, the latest study shows the color red, you know, will make you have better sex.
		It's like, why are you talking?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, the latest study that can get you to click on that USA Today article.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right, exactly.
		The media reports is as if this was science.
		Like every day, a whole bunch of new articles come out.
		You know, I write scientific articles.
		That's the currency of my profession.
		But like one study is just like, it's a spitball, right?
		It's like basically we're shooting spitballs at each other.
		But science is like a super tanker, right?
		You know, we're like, it takes seven miles to turn a super tanker around.
		That's what really science is, the things that we think we deeply understand in science is like this super tanker.
		And people are shooting spitballs.
		That's the papers every day.
		And if you get enough spitballs on one side of the, you know, the prow or whatever, it starts to turn it, right?
		So science will turn slowly if enough of the spitballs are lined up.
		So people, you know, it's not about the single study.
		It's about have there been 300 studies over the last 30 years that say the same thing.
		So like, you know, the coffee stuff, coffee's good, coffee's bad.
		Clearly, the fact that we keep getting both answers means we don't know.
		That's all.
		We don't know yet.
		It's just not clear.
		Climate change, 30, not even 30 years, 100 years of the same results.
		Yeah, we got that, you know?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's always a problem with diet in that you're not taking into account how nutrients interact with other foods or different foods interact with foods.
		I mean, when you say coffee's bad, okay, was it bad when you're smoking cigarettes or bad when you're eating grass-fed meat or bad when you're on a vegan diet?
		When is it bad?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And who are these people and what are they putting in their system and how much sugar are they taking in and how much sodium and what's the nutrient levels of their blood?
		Did you test them for B12 deficiencies and all these different things?
		Like that's the real problem with any dietary studies.
		Like they don't take into account the extremely varied diet of science.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		And the complexity of the system, right?
		I mean, so I would tell people that like, you know, when it comes to like health sciences, anything in general about human beings, look, this stuff is really complex.
		And as you said, there's a thousand different things that can interact.
		So you got to really take that stuff with a grain of salt.
		Like, okay, does smoking cause cancer?
		Yeah, got that, you know?
		But like, yeah, is coffee good or bad?
		We just, the studies aren't there yet, you know?
		But that's different from climate change or, you know, gravity, you know, or is the earth round?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Yeah, those are, those are stupid.
		So listen, man, thank you very much for being here.
		I really appreciate it.
		It was really good to talk to you.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It was fun.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you have an audio book out?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there is an audiobook.
		Did you read it?
		I have not.
		I mean, did I read the...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you read the words that are in the audiobook version?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Were you narrating it?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No.
		You weren't?
		No, I didn't.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		God damn it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why did they do that?
unidentified		I don't know.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		They never used to do that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're really good at talking.
		What the fuck, man?
		Dude, they've been really animated.
		I hate that when I buy audiobooks and I know that the guy who's reading it doesn't have a fucking single bone invested in this idea that he's saying.
		He's just repeating the words.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Well, the guy, I'm sure whoever did it was like, you know, trolly channeling.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I must have felt it in the astral plane.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It would be better if you read it, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They should have let you do it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why the fuck didn't they let you do it?
unidentified		I don't know.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I just pushed for it?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No, I didn't even know that part of the, you know, I didn't understand part of the publishing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Tell people the title again.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Light of the stars, alien worlds and the fate of the earth.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Dun dun dun.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Your Twitter is Adam Frank4.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why for?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Because that's the only one that everything else was taken.
unidentified		So I was just like, oh, I got to come up with a six years ago when I got on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Adam Frank4.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And do you have an Instagram as well?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		No.
unidentified		No?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		I have a Facebook author page.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And website?
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Website is Adam Frank Science, I think.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		If you just Google Adam Frank, he'll pop up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Adam.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I really appreciate it.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it was so much fun, man.
adam frank ▲ ● ▼		It was really a lot of fun.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Bye.

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