Science Series 1: Dr Kevin Hickerman /Nuclear Physics / StandUp Comedy / Scientific Advising on Thor

0:01 Welcome to another episode of Come Together. Cool. We're live Doctor, Doctor Kevin Peter Hickerson. Welcome. I'm so excited to be talking to you today. How are you? I'm. Great. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I, I was thinking since, since our conversation of different ways to kind of tackle our conversation because I kind of want it to be as fun and entertaining as possible, but I also want to get kind of behind the mind of the guy that is a stand up comedian and a nuclear physicist. And do you look at them?

0:46 Do you look at those two parts of yourself like they're conflicting or they're just like different parts of yourself that you feel like you have to exercise and, you know, creatively express? For me internally, it's not a conflict for me personally, but professionally, they're kind of a conflict on both sides. Nuclear physics isn't inherently funny, but then the other is, you know, in my professional research and my colleagues and now starting a company, sometimes I think people are worried that, you know, oh, you're not serious. I mean, I've literally been at conferences where people said, Oh, are you leaving Hollywood or something? Like it was a binary choice or something. And I'm like, well, no, I still live here and I still do comedy. And they're like, oh, I thought you left physics to do it. And, and because from their point of view, that's that's what it's like.

1:37 It's like they're like, oh, you left physics to you gave up on physics to do to go tell Dick jokes or. Something. And it's. It's not really and, but, but there's, there's some other conflicts too, just having to do with time. So I got to the point in doing stand up where to really go any further, I would have had to go on tour regularly. That would have interfered with being a physicist. And I did have to kind of make a choice there. And I decided I'm, I'm a better nuclear physicist than I am a comedian. I, I think I'm a pretty good comedian, but you know, there's a lot of people who are a lot, a lot of my friends are better at it than me, that's for sure. But, but, but more importantly, it's just like both take a lot of time and I think what I have to offer the world is far more important in the nuclear physics side.

2:25 So it's, it's, it's a little bit like growing up, you know, I guess I was like, OK, as much fun as it because it's stand up comedy is really fun. It's not just fun being on stage, but the, the love and, and outpouring of, of, you know, fans telling you they, they love your comedy is a really big ego boost. It is really nice and you know, when I get off stage talking about a new research for putting limits on, you know, neutron oscillations or something, I, I, you know, people might, you know, the, the, the best side of respect is like, that was a good talk. This is like that could mean the world in nuclear physics, but it doesn't quite feel the same, you know?

3:13 What's the tell me, can you tell me about the how'd you get started with the stand up and what was the what's the process for writing jokes? And I know that, you know, a lot of different comics will go between writing out like every beat and like everything is exact. And then a lot of comics will have general gist to points that they want to get to and like, you know, bits and then they kind of twinkle with it on, you know, while they're performing. I'm just. Wondering the answer first that how did I get started or how do I write jokes. Those are very different questions. How did you get started? And then you could tell you how you wrote. Jokes would be great. So. I've always been interested in entertainment. In fact, I really wanted to be an actor. And again, I didn't I wanted to be a physicist, but I also wanted to be an actor as a kid.

3:57 And I, I joined a local stage group when I was a kid and I really liked singing and being on stage and, you know, so that was really fun. But I, I didn't have the Hollywood connection that a lot of like nepo kids have where, you know, they're booked in ads and stuff like that early. My, my parents just didn't know how to do that and didn't have a way to do that. So I was being interested in Hollywood. And I used to make movies when I was a kid with my sister, my friends and, you know, for, for fun. And that was really fun, but I didn't really think about being a comedian specifically, although I think I was a pretty funny guy as a kid.

4:41 I mean, I made people laugh and stuff like that. But the part that I didn't start doing stand up, I didn't really occur to me to try and do stand up until this one day. I was going to a show, Dean Cook was headlining. It was at the Improv and as a prank before the show, because we were sitting in the front, I got up on stage and my my wife at the time, she took a photo of it and I posted social media saying I just opened for Dane Cook and that it was a joke. It was totally a joke. And you know, oh, I'm so excited opening for Dane. By the way, when you start off comedy, you don't get to yeah, find out about that. Doesn't that never happens ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.

5:24 But anyway, it was still a funny joke. But the part of it was it was hilarious because all these people like, Oh my God, Kevin, I didn't know you didn't stand up. That's so awesome. I want to see your show. There's just like tons of people were so excited about it. And I was like, oh, crap, actually open for Dane Cook. Oh, man, this is embarrassing. So then I said, OK, fine, I'm going to try comedy. And about five years later, I opened for Dane Cook. Wow, really? Yeah, five years though you just do it on your. Course try. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly OK. It's the. Path that all comedians have to go through. You have to start with open mics, then you can do these, these book shows usually like there's a type of show called bringer shows, which are really painful.

6:07 Bring your shows is where you have to do all the promoting. The show is famous and stuff. And then and then I started to get from there. I got book shows and then, you know, I started being able to perform at real clubs like improv and the Comedy Store. And I eventually got onto, you know, I got a Booker who put me on shows with like, really great comedians. To be. The, you know, the first or second act in these shows with like, like heavy hitters. That's amazing. Nikki Glazier, Joe Rogan, Dean Cook, Anthony Jeselnik, all kinds of great comedians regularly. Like, you know, every couple of weeks I'd get to do a show in the main room of the Comedy Store and do smaller shows off to the side, so. I want to add 22 follow-ups on that real quick. Number one was how long did those five years feel and what'd you do to slog through?

6:59 Because I know that long. No, it was, you know, because. It's really fun and it's a lot of it's a lot of practice because that's one of the reasons why no matter how you know, as much as people want to say that like that person is just naturally funny, like talent, natural talent matters, I guess, a little bit. But a lot of what the public doesn't know is that there is a lot of work to refining jokes, which brings me to your second question. How do I write jokes? Yeah, I generally, like most comedians, usually have a thing called set list, which is just a piece of paper that has a very short reference to the joke. And it has less to do with like, like one thing you don't do when you do comedy obviously, is you don't sit there going.

7:42 So a man walked into a bar and said, what's the deal with airline food? Like that's the you don't. You're not saying they're reading that. So instead, there's like a little line on there, you know, like that. And a set list is usually just a reminder. And the reason is because one of the things that can happen if you especially if you're starting new material, you might forget what joke you wrote. You know, even if you, you said it before, you did it already maybe two or three times. So, so it's to jog your memory more than anything. So a set list is more like that. So if you've ever seen, I'm sure you've seen video of sometimes a comic like goes over to the, the, the stool next to them, like looks down and goes, oh, yeah, I was, oh, my God, I was in Portland the other day. You know that that's what they're doing. Probably what probably all the thing that was written on the piece of paper was Portland.

8:30 Sure. It's just a reminder. And it's it's also the order that they're supposed to go in because also a thing that generally the audience doesn't know, but comedians know is like they're a set has to have a flow to it because there's jokes usually reference each other or they're building off of some meta story or something like that. So, so the order matters to kind of, you know, sometimes And so especially if you do a call back to a previous thing, you have to make sure that you you said the thing that you call back. To yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Because that could be that won't land if you if you tell a call back and everyone's like, why is he talking about Portland? What the hell? Who do you think are some of the sharpest comedians today? That you that you enjoy?

9:13 That you enjoy their content sharpest. That's a tough one. Yeah, I, I get asked this a lot, but I, I don't like answering it. And part of the reason is because like like. I gotcha. Your friends for being a comedian is not necessarily like who is the funniest or who the public thinks is the funniest because there's a lot of great comedians on stage who are assholes and they're the other way around. So, and then some people are just the same, you know, like, like one of the, one of the things I like pointing out is like Theo Von is a great example. He has a personality that you see on it. And you might be tempted to think like, oh, he's probably not like that in real life or something, but he, he totally is.

9:55 He's like really legit dude. He's really nice in person and everything. And and then some people are, you know, they, they're kind of an asshole on stage. Like Ryan Chang is the example. Ryan Chang, he's he's an example. He's on The Daily Show. He's super nice. It he's like the nicest person and despite the fact that he's he's on TV and pretty well known, but he always plays like an, you know, he's. Always. Yeah. It's like Bob Saget or something like that. What? What? What's? I don't even know. That's too. Sharpest That's a hard one to answer because there's also a lot of comedians I find really funny. But they're they're funny in a way that is very controversial. And so I got to be careful, buddy. Correct.

10:41 Well, you know, if you careful with it, too careful, at least with me. But I, I look what I love. I mean, my particular style that relates that, that speaks to me most is I love to be taken on a ride and then not know and like have that roller coaster twist at the end and like be thrown out of left field. So I don't laugh at vulgar for the sake of vulgarity. I don't laugh at like, you know, sex jokes for the sake of it. Like I, it's cute like haha. But like, I laugh a lot when like, you take me along a bunch of steps and I'm expecting you to go one way and then you just veer. Advantage I had as being a nuclear physicist. Like I don't tell nuclear physics strokes. Right. No like the. Horror show, nobody is that, but what people do really like, and I think this is one of the things that really helped me grow as a comedian really quickly. And this is true when I do my podcast, also true because they have a podcast.

11:31 I'll do a shout out to that. But I think one of the things people really liked is if you do sex strokes from a dirty point of view, like very like people really respond to that because for a lot of reasons, like 1 is they like saying, Oh yeah, scientists have real lives too, you know, like they have romantic lives. And and also just like they're so used to cold, dry academics not doing that. It just, you know, it just works. Yeah, definitely so. I definitely don't never do it for the point of I'm not trying to do a shock comic or something like I can say penis 27 times. Like that's not the ever the point. And there's plenty of comedians who do who can pull that off. But that's not the point.

12:15 I do. But you know, I can make a kind of Lingus joke or something, you know? Yeah. Wow, that's a big word. OK, well, you got to use what you got, I guess, right? That's. A. Big word, by the way. I wanted to amend something. I told you the other day that I met that I got your name from Grok. I I misspoke. I misspoke. I apologize. I got your name from a book I was reading called Superheroes Movies in the State and and it mentioned that you were a scientific consultant on the movie Thor and in a. Book. In a book I can send you the book if you would like. It's it's a guy named Tom Sucker. And there was who I did a podcast with and I forgot the Co author's name.

13:00 I have to get back to actually I put it up and and you and your name came up and I and I said, you know what? I need more scientists that are going to be more like that keeps signs like almost the way that you're describing that you tell jokes in a way that makes it relatable as opposed to very cut and dry and kind of break the stereotypes about that. And I wanted to talk to people that were like that. So I I I asked rock for people like you. And so that that that was where the where the confusion was. But yes, Tom Sucker and Tricia Jenkins. Try to talk you out of it. It was like, no, no, no, you got to stick with him. You got to stick with him. No, I, no, I, I just, I, I, I was going through because it's a very well sourced book. It's written almost like an enormous college essay, like the same kind of style.

13:46 I would have written a college essay just for a whole book. And they have a lot of sources and references. And so I was just looking up the sources and references to see who would be interesting guests. And and that's, that's like, yes. Yes, so I was a science advisor and set decorator for Thor. Not credited. I should say I'm on the Wikipedia page, but. I'm. Not how they're happy because. How does that work? Because. I am not union. So really, credit only goes to union members. Yeah, which is that's changing. I think that's changing some. Some people are doing good job. Kip Thorne is really insistent on, he's been helpful with trying to make sure that science advisors get credit or at least mentioned didn't necessarily have to get like a credit credit, but like a special thanks to or something.

14:31 We didn't. There were four of us and we did not get a special thanks or anything, which is a little frustrating, but it's OK. I'm on the Wikipedia page and that's better. So. Yeah, right, right. It's wider reaching I bet. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, So what I worked on for that, so that that's similar to comedy. I mean, I like I said, I like, I love Hollywood. I've I've been a science consultant for lots of smaller projects. That's the biggest one I've I've been on. But that one is like really far reaching. It's like that's a lifetime credit that I'm very proud of because what I worked on there was I helped turn Jane Foster's character from, she was originally in the comics, a nurse.

15:12 They wanted to modernize it a little bit and make it a little more interesting, play more into the story. And I helped turn her into a nuclear astrophysicist who was and there was an entire back story behind the entire thing. Oh yeah. Can you I? Wrote the whole back story for why the set was decorated in the way it was. I I she she had a lab in New Mexico and I helped set the whole thing up. It's like I picked out all the equipment and I think the thing I'm most proud of is in is that she had a detector, a really big detector. And there's is featured several times throughout the movie in the background. So one is it's like there's a great scene where Kip Thorne is standing shirtless in front of my detector.

15:57 So that that's, that's anytime I share that on social media, like I get a bunch of ladies going like, because I'll say you can see in the background my detector, you know, it's like featured there, like all these ladies are like what? And the what now, what with her shirt off and everything. And, and then also there's all this other equipment around the room and stuff and, and the things in her car when she's off searching for these wormholes. But there's a whole back story there, which is why a nuclear astrophysicist would be looking for a Rainbow Bridge. That seems very strange, but this ties into interstellar a little bit. OK, that if if the if the wormhole, if the Rainbow Bridge was a wormhole, which is our best on way of understanding it, it would require very advanced technology and particularly to keep the wormhole open. So there's some mathematical reasons why this this was first published in a paper by Kip Thorne about how to make a wormhole stable.

16:56 How do you make a How do you turn on Einstein Rosen Bridge into a transversible wormhole and. A sentence here in the Marvel movie. Yeah, exactly. And the way you you do that is you have to line it with very advanced material and you have to keep it stable because it wants to collapse. And the fact that it wants to collapse is why in the movie Interstellar, when they go through the wormhole, you see waves on the surface. That's the advanced technology keeping the thing from collapsing because naturally it wants to collapse and pinch off and turn into a black hole. And so so because it is involves advanced technology, I knew that that meant it probably involved advanced particle physics.

17:41 And advanced particle physics probably means very high energy particles are released and yet undiscovered. But theorized particle is something called a WIMP that makes dark matter so dark matter particles. And so I made her detector based on a dark matter detector. And normally these dark matter detectors have to be in very quiet environments, buried miles underground so that there's no radiation from the, from space or anything. But the back story is that while she was originally researching dark matter, she kept getting these insanely bright dark matter signals coming from New Mexico. And they were so bright, she could even have the the detector above ground. And so she picked up everything and moved it to Mexico and was like looking for this dark matter signals coming out of out of that of.

18:29 Wow and. That's what letter to New Mexico. So that whole story, and I wrote that all up, it's so Kenneth Brenner could could see it and everything. So, but it's if they don't say it, which is fine. I mean, I actually prefer that because what's nice is there's a lot of thought behind it and you get the idea. You know the story is about a dorse God, so you don't have to. You know, it's not a Neil de Crest Tyson lecture or something. So. Yeah, but you know what it adds? It adds a level, adds an additional layer of intention or thoughtfulness that that I guess otherwise wouldn't have existed. You know, and you know, and again, you know, part of that point that at least in the book that he was arguing was that, you know, and Marvel movies as a whole went through like they kind of go back and forth between using science as the solution to the to problems that rise up as opposed to warfare, as opposed to something military.

19:26 And then and they and they keep on going back and forth between the two. So Ant Man and the Wasp or Ant Man movies are, you know, the the premise and the actual like all the the savings of the days are done with using science to solve problems, as opposed to Captain Marvel, which would be just enormous space warfare and blowing things up, you know, and and prevent and presenting both, you know, and for the people to kind of be excited by and turned on by. Yeah, and Antman had really good science consulting too. I didn't work on that one, but I have a podcast interview with the science consultant for that. Cool. And part of the reason that it was so good in that is that why am I blanking on his name? What's Antman?

20:07 The actors name. What? Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd Yeah, yeah, my buddy one. Of the reasons I was really good in that is Paul Rudd really wanted to understand it and he spent a lot of time with the salt science consultant himself, which is not the case with Thor. I was not, I never met Natalie Portman once. Then yeah, there's the a bunch of the, the crew wanted me to because I was there the same day that she was going to film. And I won't say who, but the there was a higher up who said no, no, no, that kid, that's not going to happen because she was really worried about the director, Kenneth Burner, getting mad that there were other people on set and very protective of the stars.

20:47 I wish I had met her. I think it might have gone even better. I don't know. But I I've actually never met her once. Wow, you know I. Was on set when she was there, but I didn't get to meet her there. They're very secretive about that for all sorts of reasons. One is to protect the actors being mobbed or whatever, but also they have even business reasons why they do it. They're even protected from the crew of what there's their costumes are and stuff like that. Because apparently sometimes people leak photos and then they turn, they sell them to China and they turn into knock off action figures and. Stuff and how? People leak it and then ruin the plot. So they, they have a lot of like business reasons why they're really protective about it too, so.

21:29 Have you are you aware of the cute that, like the Legos, the Lego world gives away little hints in advance to to the other movies or plots based on the heads that they release? Yeah, it's very cute. I don't know what kind of collaboration they have, but I've never. Heard of that. Hey, Yeah. Yeah, something to look into. So, so walk me through what is how'd you, how'd that even happen? How did you end up as a consultant? Walk me through what do they call you and say, hey, we need a consultant? We have a script. We don't have a script yet. We're working on it, but we need help with the premise how that was. A great story too. So I like this one because so I can tell you what happened on the back end first. So they went through. So Kenneth Branagh worked on Frankenstein that he those Thor was the second movie they directed. He worked on.

22:13 Frankenstein and he thought because it's Frankenstein, who cares if the science is accurate? You know, he, he was like, and he was actually felt really bad about it because apparently people ripped it apart and thought it was like not believable and everything and, and just trying to be an art piece and people, you know, some, some people don't like that. So he felt really embarrassed about that. So he, he said he wanted to make sure the science was correct in this. So he went to something called the Science and Entertainment exchange, which is started by Jerry Zucker. And I have a podcast episode where I interviewed Jerry Zucker about it too. Yeah, because, because I wanted. To talk to him about the Science Entertainment Exchange. Anyway.

22:57 So one of the things they science entertainment exchanges, it allows Hollywood directors and producers to reach out to them and then have them get advice from real academics, you know, people like Caltech, UCLA, that kind of thing in the in the LA area. So I suppose they don't have to be in the LA area. That's usually usually what it is. So, but that's not how I found out about it. I found, I mean, that's that's what it led to me finding out about, but that's definitely not what I responded to. I told you that I work on smaller projects all the time. I just like being entertaining and I like science fiction a lot. Sure, like a lot and I get so so an e-mail was sent out to all the grad students at Caltech, all of them saying, hey, there's this company, they have a project or these producer, they have a project and they're hoping to get some scientists who wants to some physicist who wants to help give advice to this project. And there's no mention of Marvel or Thor or Disney or any oh, it wasn't owned by Disney at the time, but there's no mention of anything like that.

23:59 It is very much was written in a way to make it sound like it was a student project you. Know OK. You know, no pay and all that kind of stuff. It didn't say no pay, but I mean, reading the e-mail, you'd think I'm not going to get paid for that. So it was, it was really nice because it was. So I responded, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm super interested. Oh oh, did I freeze? Yeah. You're here though, Yeah. Yeah, so I, you know, I was super interested anyway because I'm like, oh, I want to see this. So I met with the person and you know, even after the first meeting I just didn't piece it together and the only time. What was the meeting out then? How'd you what what? What was the meeting that you didn't? I responded and I met with the set decorator, Florence Feldman. She she is credited, so I didn't think that was my. Direct boss.

24:46 She's unionized. I met with her and she was telling me about it. And you know what's weird is I wasn't even enough of a comic book thing. She did mention that the movie was Thor, but I, I forgot. I mean, I knew about Thor, but I wasn't, I'm not like I wasn't a Super Avengers nerd or anything. So I didn't piece it together. I just didn't. And it was only at the end she was telling me about the character that I was going to be trying to because she she was going off of stuff that had already been talked about with Sean Carroll and Kevin, Peter Hand and a few other people at the script writing stage. So way earlier, that was before the script was even, they were sitting in a room saying we can do it. And she was saying, yeah, they were suggesting that we turn this into some sort of scientist, maybe a physicist, maybe an Astro, an atmospheric physicist.

25:33 They, they had several options that she was some kind of scientist studying something. And that's when I, you know, I was, I said, oh, I think nuclear astrophysicist who detects A wormhole would be really cool. And, and they, they already knew that the Rainbow Bridge was going to be wormhole. I would have come to the same conclusion. By the way. But that wasn't my suggestion, but that's what I would have suggested. And so she and then it was relieving. I was like, who did you say was the actress who's playing this again? Or the And she kind of looked at me because she had, I guess she'd already said it. And somehow I miss it. And she's like Natalie Portman. Like, you know, she's not used to people in Hollywood going like, oh, who, who's on it? You know, not freaking out at that. So funny.

26:17 Oh, oh, cool. OK. So funny, cool, so. I, that was one of the first things I asked is that I was like, so why did you pick me? Why did I get this? And she goes, oh, you were the only one who responded to the e-mail. Wow. Really. But, you know, they didn't say, hey, work on this big Hollywood. I bet. I bet that's smarter them though, you know, I mean, especially for like, you know, they'll see who's in it for the love of the game #1 and #2 is. If they said this was for Thor and a big Paramount movie then they'd have to sort through thousands of applicants I imagine. Yeah, I didn't even know that she was from Marvel. It took me. It was like the third meeting that I realized she.

26:59 Was wow because. Crazy. A really common thing in Hollywood to do is you you create a corporation for each movie. And this is for legal reasons. So if if something horrible happens and they get sued, it doesn't bankrupt the whole studio. And then there's just a lot of legal what? So she handed me like this business card that says like AAA productions or something like that. You know, it's all very secretive. And they're secretive up until when they're filming and everything. So everything's very secretive. I don't know. Have you ever visited LA? No, it's actually one of the few big cities in America I have not been to yet. I'll just tell your, your viewers about this, your listeners. So in LA there's these signs, these yellow signs. They have arrow, an arrow pointing somewhere and they have text written on the top and bottom. And that's a really common sight around LA and they're pointing to something and it's their directions for the crew to of a movie being shot on location.

27:52 So it's a really common thing to see throughout LA because we have film all over anything within a 30 mile radius of Hollywood is is on location. So you can see these a lot. And they usually have some cryptic name. And that name is usually the code name for the project. Because if they just said like, you know, like like Thor or Iron Man or something, then it would have exactly the wrong effect. It doesn't tell the crew where to park. It tells where everyone else in LA. So, so that usually it's the name of the, the company or something or the code name of the the project. So, so it's all very secretive and, and, and you don't know if it's a big production or, or nothing, you know, right. So it's, it's, and it's all designed to make sure that people are just like, go, you know, TMZ doesn't show up with helicopters and stuff like that. Yeah, that relationship between Hollywood's attempt at privacy and the media is a has been a complicated one forever, but it's kind of fun to be an observant. I gave her contribution to Thor, my absolute favorite that I'm most excited about was also very secretive because Florence contacted me like the night before something was due. She's like Kevin, Oh my God, we are in the next two days or something.

28:59 She's like, we need this really fast. We need these like 5 notebooks and they need. And I was like, OK. And she's like, and you need to write equations in it and write all kinds of stuff in it that's sort of related to what you were talking about, you know, and we need 5 identical copies. And I was like, and, and I was like, OK, she's like, this is just for the background, so don't worry about it. It's just for the background. But you know, so that the details of the equations doesn't matter much and stuff. But you know, we need this really. So I went out and I, I said, well, I'm going to base it on the kind of notebook I write, which is a moleskin. And so I went to the Caltech bookstore and bought 5 moleskins and I made five identical copies of this. And to this day, I wish I had made six if I had, because she was so secret about it.

29:44 She made it sound like it was just something in the background, like maybe it would be on a desk open. And it was actually Natalie Portman's notebook, which is like a major plot element. No and. Like they're sitting there talking about they go out and they go find the notebook. They have to break into Shield to get the notebook. If I had known that, I would have made a copy and that'd probably be like, I could probably sell it on eBay for something. Oh, sure. Are you kidding me? That'd be so cool. That's. All my, you know, I wrote that notebook and those exact same kind of notebook I use that I write real equations in, you know, for, for myself and I even had a bunch of stuff about Hubble in there. I put some clips from Hubble and somehow that made it into the the script.

30:26 So even though the script had already been written, that just the fact that it appeared in there, he Chris Hemsler said like he makes a joke about he's like you're hubel or something like that. I. Don't remember. Totally caused that because I'm the one who put the stuff about Hubble in there and stuff. That's so funny. Wow. I love that. I love to hear these stories. That's that's that's really why I wanted to bring this up actually, because I think these stories are so cool. It's so much the only. Thing you told me that it's even in a book is that's one of the reasons I'm really happy I worked on is I get so much like attention just from that one project. Yeah, that that to me that feels like timeless and everything and like. It is. It is, man. I mean Thor. Thor is a foundational part of a multi billion dollar franchise, you know, and I mean, that's like, that's incredible. That's really cool.

31:14 That's having a real piece in American entertainment history. Definitely and. I think that's one of the reasons why movies like that should have science consulting because well, you know, sure, you can argue, oh, 90% of the people won't know that it's a mistake. The fact is it's very 4th wall breaking for the 10% that no, it's not right. It's really annoying for the 1% that are also part of, you know, maybe they know a lot about nuclear physics or astrophysics or something and those guys go online and say how dumb it is if it's wrong. So and that, that ends up ruining it for everybody, you know, like everybody's like, and even if you're not an expert, you can just kind of tell when something doesn't sound right. Sure. You can just.

31:55 Kind of tell, you know, you know, maybe you flip through the Science Channel a couple of times or something. You're just like, that doesn't sound like it can work. Yeah. So funny, so funny. I want to, I want to spend some time on the actual, on some actual science now and then I want to surf back at the end, hopefully the last maybe 1520 minutes and talk about your favorite and most, most and least accurate Hollywood portrayals of science and stuff like that. I think I was even. Thinking of making some like video clips about that like reaction videos or? Something you should, you should, you should. That'd be so much. Because I, I, you know, I lecture my kids about these two and it's kind of funny because at this point they're like, we know that, you know, Because I'll say, what's wrong with that?

32:41 Yeah, I love that. OK, beautiful. So let's get that. Let's back to that. But I want to get to the actual nuclear physics because this is a super hot topic, super fun topic I think and has future written all over it as far as I understand. Can you actually? I had a friend that sent in a request and he's an engineer and he asked isn't nuke just just a steam engine with flair question mark is it over Is it over dramatic is what he asked. Yeah. I mean, it can't be traditional nuclear. Yeah, Yeah. So that's definitely one of the things I want to talk about because I started a nuclear company. That's what I'm really. Focused, please. Let's let's so let's talk. Let's talk about it, please. So traditional nuclear is you, you generate heat. I mean, ultimately that's what a nuclear reactor does. It makes heat OK.

33:31 And you can. And we have known since the 1940's, the mid 1940s very dramatically demonstrated that we can design A nuclear reactor to run anywhere from room temperature all the way up to 100,000,000°. That's the upper limit. There's really only one use for running a nuclear reactor at 100 million degrees. There's only one. To blow things up. Yeah, yeah, to blow up a city or something like that. Now you can do interesting things like that, like at 100 million degrees, you can also amplify fusion. You can you can ignite fusion. That's called thermonuclear because it's hot enough that even fusion starts working. You can deliberate even more energy that way. However, when you make a fission, normal fission reactor, you just are. You don't want it to be 100 million degrees. You don't even want it to be 5000° because then the container it's in would melt.

34:22 OK, so you you just want it hot enough that you can get work out of it. And the hotter you get, the more efficiently you can get that work out. But you're limited by the the the container, not the reactor itself. So can I? OK, got the. Easiest thing to get energy, The easiest way we know how to get energy. A very good process for getting out energy is you boil water and you drive a steam turbine. That's a very efficient way of getting work out of heat. Gotcha. Can I? It's it's pretty simple. It's like you take rocks, you stick them next to each other and they get hot. Right. That's nuclear right there. So why is it more so much more effective or efficient than than anything else?

35:06 Like why is it the the energy source of the future? Because of the what the cost of that energy in the 1st place. So all kinds of things, you can get heat to boil steam using all kinds of things. Wood, take wood and you can boil steam. We've been doing that for for a really long time. And you can use coal, then you move to coal. You can use coal to boil steam. That's how we powered trains in the past, you know. And then you can also use, you can use liquid hydrocarbons, you know, oil and gas. You can do that too you. And again, you just boil steam and use that. The problem is that if you're using something other than nuclear, the size and the weight of the thing you need to get that energy is just enormous. I see.

35:56 And it's it's not a little bit of a difference. It's not even a close contest per weight. Nuclear has a million times more energy per weight. I mean a million times. So, so to get the same amount of energy as a ton of coal is a speck speck of uranium. That's where it comes into. This is why it's the fuel of the future is because the the resource we care about in the future is the Earth itself. We live here, we want to live here. There's not a double planet out there at the moment. And the if, if we just consume all the stuff that's on the surface and use that for energy, we're doing it very, very inefficiently.

36:38 So even though it might seem like the steam part is somehow old fashioned or something, that's not really what's relevant. What's relevant is where's that energy coming from? Like how, how efficient are we getting that? And nuclear is a million times more efficient than that's one of the reasons why a nuclear reactor, especially a nuclear society that does this regularly, they can get the price of electricity lower and lower and lower. And by the way, the price of nuclear is almost all driven by safety and backups and concrete and, and all these things that have very little to do with the fuel itself. And so in terms of, you know, mining for uranium is just way more efficient than mining for coal. And then there's probably the even more pressing. Issue, which is OK, even if we didn't mind pumping oil forever and ever and ever, the fact is the Earth's crust does not have an infinite supply of oil.

37:29 Oil came from a biogeologic process. Biology is not infinite. Even when you go back millions of years, there were not, there was not just a a pile and pile and piles of dinosaurs, or you know, it wasn't made from dinosaurs, but you get the idea. You know it's, it was made from very specific events where plant animals and plants and animals in the ocean fell to the bottom of the ocean and happened to get covered by geology. The number of spots where that's happened is big, but it's not infinite. And we want a lot of energy. And if we were going to go into the future, we need more energy, not less. And you know, sometimes people want to say, oh, we should just stop using energy or we should just go extinct or something like that. I'm personally not at all in that camp. I'm a very pro human person.

38:16 I think there's not enough people really do. I think one of the most dangerous ideas in history is that if you go back in history, you can see the people talking about saying there's too many people are some of the worst people in history. And it's really important to remember like the future can have way more people, especially if we start going to other planets. We can we can multiply the number of people by 1000, you know, in the next few 100 years easily if we wanted to. And that's going to take a lot of energy because I don't want it. A bunch of, you know, I don't want us to all be like starving and huddling around a single light bulb or something. We all want spaceships and want to travel and things like that. So we're only going to be able to do that with nuclear. There's no other way of doing it, period. So, so what's the hesitancy?

39:06 I know that there's a stigma around it. I know that there's and probably and you know, I think there's a phenomenon that, you know, when something in the culture or society gets an idea, you kind of at a certain point you kind of have to wait for that generation to kind of die out or get too old and stop making the choices for any changes to to reasonably happen. I. Don't know if you have kids, but I have kids, yeah. And so when you see little kids, you, you get to see something because part of being a parent is like introducing your kids to scary things, but not trying to scare them, you know, So this is one of the reasons why movies start off as cartoons, but they have a scary scene and then they get scarier than by the time you're in junior high or high school, you're like, I want to see slasher movies and stuff like that.

39:51 And then you want to see stuff that's dark and stuff. And part of that is because, you know, the way you get you, you stop being afraid of something is you see a scary side of it and then realize it's not bad that you survived. Oh, oh, I know how to survive that. This is probably also why we get nightmares, you know, our brain practicing in case something scary happens. And I think civilization goes through that too. I mean, the fact is the first example of nuclear was scary. The very first moment that no one had any idea what it was. The vast majority of people on the planet Earth. Had no idea what nuclear physics was even certainly didn't know about nuclear fission because it was a very closely guarded secret. And when they found out that was terrifying and it it should have been terrifying because that would I mean, that's why the movie Oppenheimer is so great.

40:41 It's like it wasn't just about like, you know, it wasn't all shiny optimism like, Oh my God, we figured out how to power everything. We also figured out how to destroy everything. The 2GO together. You like, you know, Stanley used to say, and they say in Marvel movies, with great power comes great responsibility, right? So there has to be a so civilization has to go through that too. They have to be scared of it a little bit, you know, and there's there's a great line in opera room. He says they won't fear it until they understand it and they won't understand it until they've used it, right. Really good line because that's true. It's like you, you have to have a fear of nuclear power and in order to not fear it. It sounds ironic, but it, and this is one of the reasons why the most pro nuclear people tend to be nuclear physicists.

41:27 Most, you know, across the board, I think I've met like maybe 3 anti nuclear power nuclear physicists in my entire life. And they're part of the reason is because we, you know, our job is to understand it. We go around with detectors, we see that like, oh, wait a minute, radiation isn't this like unusual thing? It's actually in this room right now. This room is radioactive. You know, when you, once you start playing around with a Geiger counter for 5 minutes, you realize like, oh, I didn't know concrete was radioactive. That's weird. You know, the city I've been parking extra at this whole time. So, you know, so we it's it's civilization has to go through that too. And we've had, you know, scares like Chernobyl and then Fukushima and those that that caused us to back away. I'm not sure this is the right way. But like all things that where you're first scared of something, you say, well, oh, if we just fix this, then that can never happen again.

42:19 If we fix this, that can never happen again. And we, you know, what's what's funny, what's not funny, but what's interesting about Chernobyl is we had already anticipated the mistake that Chernobyl might have had. And no new reactors being built at the time of Chernobyl had that flaw. I mean, that that flaw had been engineered out a long time ago. Wow. It doesn't change the fact that it was still running. And then on top of it, the Soviets kind of covered up that the accident even happened and stuff. So. Can you give a quick rundown of what happened just in case anyone doesn't know it? Well, it's really complicated, which is how most nuclear accidents happen. There's usually it's, it's definitely not like everything's fine. And then you know the. Reactor does not. Yeah, sure, that. Doesn't happen because they are very well engineered and they don't just happen.

43:02 What causes accidents is either some natural event of extraordinary infrequency happens, or a sequence of events over several days leads up to people not knowing the state that the reactors in. So Chernobyl was the second type. It was combined by the fact that people had done some experiments the day earlier and we're doing another experiment the day later. And they had altered the state of the reactor in a way that didn't, that wasn't obvious to the people conducting the second experiment. And they overreacted to what they thought was happening and they made a mistake. I see in that. And that's one of the things that is also not going to happen with modern reactors because we can, we can run simulations of very unusual estates and processes on a computer and we can train, we can do things like train AI to, to point out unusual situations to maybe even maybe a crew is that they're brand new to it.

44:05 They're not that, you know, they're not as experienced or something, or they have a boss who's saying, no, just do it, it's fine or something. That which is what happened in Chernobyl. Like, you know, they were being told, you know, don't worry about it was a it was a crew in the middle of the night. They shouldn't have been doing an experiment in the middle of the night that they were. But but what happened there was xenon gas built up and xenon has different properties with neutrons. It it eats them. OK, so it made it look like this. So they kept pulling the control rods out because they kept thinking the that the reactor was not working right. That wasn't the way they should have packed it up. They thought like, oh, pull them out more, pull them out more. That should have been an alarm bell to them is like pulling your control rod out of a reactor should not like the reactor should go get warmer when that happens and the salute the answer that is not just pull them out even further, but it was the xenon that was doing it.

44:59 The problem is xenon also decays away. This type of xenon decays away. And so as the xenon was decaying away, the reactor suddenly spiked. And then finally there were this, this was a design flaw. They put the react, the control rods back in really quickly. And those particular control rods had a flaw where the little section at the bottom actually boosted the activity of the reactor. And so it, it, it that's, that's what led to it going super critical. So it almost so all those things are are. Very solvable. So cool down, and then the xenon decayed, heated back up. They shoved it back in, and in the process of shoving it back in, it heats up even more. Yeah, because they saw, because once the xenon went away, it suddenly started spiking really, really high.

45:41 And they were like quick, quick, do something, you know, drop the pro rods. And that made it even worse. Oh, my gosh. And you said, you said that the first way that it could happen is there's a change in frequency. What does that mean? Is that like if there's like an earthquake or something? You said there's two ways for there to be to cause a natural. That a natural event that's very infrequent. Infrequent gotcha second. Yeah, so. And when you design A nuclear power plant, you have to nowadays, you have to look at really, really, really infrequent events. And so examples of infrequent events are, well, let's start with the obvious. In the case of Fukushima, a tsunami that happens only every couple 100 years, although, you know, honestly that location was it was that infrequent. So they should have been a little better prepared. But but you know, another one is a major earthquake in an area that doesn't have earthquakes.

46:31 You know, that's that, that that's an example. Being hit by a meteor is an example of war breaking out. Even if you're in a peaceful, you know, neutral country or whatever you can, a war can always break out a terrorist attack. These are like infrequent things that can cause problems and you have to be ready for those. You have to take those into account. Before I pause for a 2 second bathroom break, I want to leave you with a question and that is because I want I don't want to forget it while while we pause is He said if a war breaks out, I want to ask you about Iran's potential new. Let's just say for at face value what they say it is, and if there was a war you're going to. Ask you about Zaparisia, which is a nuclear power plant being fought over.

47:19 Well, I didn't even know about that one, so you can tell me about that too. There's a war being fought over 2 reactors. Chernobyl even is being fought over. Chernobyl seed. It is a a crazy history man. It had an accident and now there's like a war being fought over. So, okay, let's all the stuff just I want to jump right back into this. Okay, great. All right, thank you. Just curious. Okay, we're back. So the question that I had was, and completely apolitically I want to emphasize hypothetically Iran or any country that's ever working on enriching their nuclear potential gets up to 40, fifty, 60% enriched uranium. I don't even know what that means. So I understand that. But then, you know, if you hear that we have bunker Buster strikes on those facilities or, you know, we're dropping bombs on them, wouldn't that be that change in environment that you that you mentioned is risky or?

48:12 No. If you if you bomb a running nuclear power plant, then yes, But when you enrich your uranium is naturally radioactive. That's one of the reasons why concrete is radioactive actually is because it contains thorium and uranium. And, and that's why you can go up to a Geiger counter to concrete and you'll get detections. That's the uranium decaying, but it's very weakly radioactive, and the reason is because it has billions of years of half life, which is why it's even around. It wouldn't be naturally occurring if it was older than the Earth itself, but there's two isotopes of uranium that occur naturally that have different half lives, both in the billions of years. There's 2:35 and 2:38 and you can build a nuclear reactor with 238, which is the most abundant uranium, but the only one particular type of reactor you have to have a special reactor can do.

49:03 Reactors in Canada are an example. So you can build a reactor like that, but it's not the preference of the United States or or Russia Canada like some. But that's because then they don't have to be dependent on the United States for enriched uranium and they don't have to enrich it themselves. And we don't want them to enrich it. We don't mind them having the other reactor. But but until you run the reactor, just having uranium spread around is not very dangerous. It's, it's very mildly dangerous. You wouldn't want to inhale it like like if, if so this comes up when it's used, sometimes used in depleted uranium for armor and stuff like that. Sometimes it's controversial. Saddam Hussein was really big and spreading all these. He's trying to scare his people about that, which is ironic because he had a lot of depleted uranium armor in his vehicles. But you know, he was trying to say it caused all these birth defects and stuff like that.

49:56 I, I'm not going to get into the politics of that, but I can just tell you that it's not very radioactive. So destroying a bunker that has it already in it really doesn't do much. In fact, most of it, especially if it's underground, it's sealed underground. So it, it poses basically zero risk to anybody. That's very different than once you run as soon as you switch on a nuclear reactor, the nuclei when when fission occurs, nuclei split in half and they beat they split in half randomly 50. It's not exactly 5050. They split one will be bigger, one will be smaller. And these two things that they make are there's, they're called fission daughters and or fission products is the more modern PC one term.

50:42 And these, these fission daughters are themselves typically unstable. They have very short half lives. Some of them decay within milliseconds. So this as soon as the fission occurs, they immediately give off their energy that contributes to the energy of the reactor. But some of them last a really long time, some of the last 30 years, some of the last thousands of years, some of the last 100,000 years. The ones that are the most dangerous are the ones that last between 1 and 30 years. And this is because this is on the scale of a human lifetime. So if those spread into an area, they can fall on the ground and they get absorbed in food and, and people might eat that food and stuff like that. And, and they also scare people the most because they're the the most detectable. They're more significantly more radioactive than natural uranium.

51:29 And so you can walk around an area anyway that when that happens, when that stuff is released in the environment, it's called Fallout. And it's called fallout for the very simple reason that as soon as it's it's made, it falls out of the sky. Now when you do something like do an air burst from a nuclear bomb, just to show you how little you know how not scary fallout is, I mean, you should be scared of it immediately. If an atom bomb goes off near your city, you should not try and breathe the air as much as possible. You should wear a gas mask for several weeks. But that's a side issue. But but years later that fallout is is so is so small that it you can't even tell. Like if you walk around Hiroshima or Nagasaki, it it does not have significant radiation there, you wouldn't, it would be, you'd be very hard pressed to know that an atom bomb had gone off there years and years later. However, in the case of Chernobyl, quite a lot of fallout was released.

52:24 And it was released because the reactor wasn't just, it wasn't actually the explosion that spread the fallout. It was the fact that the reactor was on fire for several days and fire it was, it was burning with the fallout and a lot of that fallout was being lifted and just spread and it just fell everywhere and huge amounts of it were spread and landed on the ground. And that's what led to the exclusion zone, and the same with Fukushima's exclusion zone. And how is there a way to determine the lifespan of how, how long it's going to how long one of these will last? Or like, how do you know? Oh. Yeah, Yeah, it's super well understood, yeah. Oh, really? Oh yeah, we, we know the, the yeah, we know. We know the statistics on every Fallout doubt or that that was known even in 1940.

53:09 They knew that. Really. Yeah. So it's, so it's pretty tangible. Yes, yeah, and very measurable. And, and there's equipment that not a Geiger counter, but a more sophisticated equipment, something called a gamma spectrometer, more expensive piece of equipment. Yeah, sounds expensive. Those can tell you exactly what is there. You can say with incredible accuracy what fallout is present, what isotopes are present. And it's, it's like a fingerprint and it's, it's very easy to tell. Wow. So if so, if anything were to happen, it would be very easy, easy to identify, hey, this area is not safe for 30 seconds or for three months or for 10 years. Yeah, that could be pretty easy to tell. Absolutely.

53:49 Yeah, that's really interesting. That's really cool. And it's it's also it's used regularly as part of non proliferation. So, so to see if someone is testing nuclear weapons, for example, we have very accurate many countries including. The US because. Many very, very sensitive detectors flying in all kinds of classified ways that I can't get into. I don't have clearance, but I wouldn't even. I don't even want to talk about it without that. But but, but, but we have very sensitive detectors looking for that all the time because we're not just looking for, you know, some really obvious nuclear tests. We're looking for ones that are, are underground and those don't release very much. Follow those. Those give little, tiny, little whiffs, you know, and, and there's only certain radioactive gases that can be given off.

54:34 Krypton is a great example because there's Krypton in the atmosphere right now and that is all made by us. That is not a naturally occurring thing. That really made. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's made from all the nuclear weapons testing in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s. Is there any relationship to that being? Is that what the captain was? Superman's, What do you call it? Is. Probably because it sounds cool. You know, if it were, if it were an everyday thing, it wouldn't have sounded like an alien planet. Yeah, I said it could be that he that he's, he's natural. And this man made sub, this man made substance kills him. You know this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Tell you, can you? So tell me about these wars that you mentioned that were happening over nuclear facilities. Yeah, so the Ukraine Russia war, they're fighting over the Zaparisia plant and the. So the Russians took over the Zaparisia plant, and they also took over Chernobyl for and the.

55:26 Anyone talking about this? When when when is this happening? I've. I've done a news article. Yeah, I, I did AI did an interview on TV for for TRT and Turkish television, OK. And they asked specifically, they said that like, hey, are we, you know, is this a danger? And you know, so in the interview, I'll just repeat what I said there. It's like while it's a really big, so Zaparisia is a really big nuclear power plant. It's the largest in Europe. So it's very big. It's it's six reactors sitting next to each other, really big. But at the same time, it was also designed significantly later than Chernobyl was designed. In fact, it was being constructed around the time the Chernobyl accident happened.

56:09 And already they had known that the risk of both the US and the Soviet Union designed something called a containment vessel around a nuclear reactor. And while it it this is a great example of how, you know, there's a little bit of political spin. It's called a containment vessel so that people focus on the fact that it contains the fallout if there's an accident inside. But that's not the real reason why we're really, they're really necessary. The main reason they're necessary is because they keep airplanes and missiles out. That's its main function. That's why they're a, a, a beater thick concrete. It is so that if somebody takes an airplane and crashes it into it. And by the way, pre 911, they were already thinking about this long before 911.

56:55 They're probably planning it. No, I don't. It won't go there. I've gone down a different episodes. Yeah, but that is, it is both the Soviet Union and America did very detailed tests where the Soviet Union took the kind of containment vessels around Zaparia. They put a giant steel beam in a giant passenger jet and crashed it into a test facility to see what it survived. And it does. It does. It survived. It's actually very difficult to intentionally destroy a nuclear reactor. That's why even if there's a war outside, you know you're it's it's not that bad. What's what the danger is is that old designs are not passively safe meaning, and this is a big difference between old designs and advanced nuclear. We all know we know how to do passive safety now because one of the biggest risks is always the people themselves. And I don't mean if they're trustworthy. I mean, the fact is a risk is what if an army or a terrorist group or whoever storms the control room and tries to create a a meltdown or, or tries to blow up the reactor in some way. And we can design reactors now where they can't do that, where you can, you can design so that on an engineering level, there's nothing you could do to cause a meltdown of a reactor. And that's a really big innovation that I'm very excited about.

58:17 That's that that that adds to the safety process enormously, I mean. Yeah, yeah. And the only reason we didn't do that from the beginning, it's kind of frustrating. It's like because of the military angle of nuclear reactors, their first use for submarines and aircraft carriers, they, they weren't worried about that so much because it's surrounded by like thousands of armed men. You know, it's the army is guarding it. So that part of it wasn't really a big problem. And then they just quickly commercialize that version of a reactor. And so it was like, no, no, we'll have these guarded too. So everyone was thinking, this is so secretive and everything. Of course we'll have lots of people. But if we're going to power everything and you know, have these in other countries and, and in remote areas, that can't be your, you can't, your answer can't just be like we're going to have an army of 100 guys with guns around it.

59:04 It has to be more specific than that. There's there's other rare events that could happen. You can imagine, you know, the horrible things like a gas leak where everyone's knocked out in the control room. And then that's not even in that's not even a human doing it. I mean, an accident could cause that. This would be insanely rare thing to happen, but you know, why not take that into account and just. Yeah, or a fairly simple military strategy to implement. I mean, if you see, if you saw we did in Venezuela, you're like, oh, you can't get, you know, you can't steam a room full of 100 soldiers to, you know, get them to pass out for half an hour. I mean like. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And just so you know, this is how seriously we take it. U.S. Special Forces stages operations where they try and take over civilian power plants and they practice it and they, they, you know, so they're thinking like, we want someone as good as U.S. special Forces, the guys who did the stuff in Venezuela. We want to see if they were trying to take over, could we, could we take over it?

1:00:04 And, you know, and, and what's pretty cool is I, I visited a, a nuclear reactor where they had just done one of those. And they're like, they're like, yeah. And we stopped them, you know, this. But but it, I, I think it's still better to make it so that, you know, even if they can't stop them, you know? Yeah, like you said, modern, modern techniques and stuff, you know, modern wood discombobulators could come in, you know, you got to be ready for that. So it's, it's not enough to just say we're going to protect it. I think the reactor itself should be the ultimate protection. Cool, cool. And that's really interesting. I wanted to ask the last bit about the science bit is you particularly study called neutrons you? Still, you called neutrons.

1:00:47 Yeah, called neutrons and I did a a very, very rudimentary AIAI explanation. It's basically that they move very quickly and by slowing them down you can observe them and understand them a little. Bit not just observe them, we can trap. Them so how does? That work. Yeah. So the way it works is so normally neutrons just fly through matter. They fly through it pretty easily. And the reason is because atoms are mostly empty space. And you know, that might seem strange because we, it doesn't feel like empty space. We push on, you know, we can stand on the floor and we, we don't fly through things and light reflects off stuff. But it's really important to remember that the reason is because the electrons push against each other. It's the electrons to do it. Neutrons are neutral.

1:01:30 They don't interact with electrons. They don't, I mean, they have extremely weak interaction, but it's not electric. Anyway, that's a detail for the for the sign starts. Yeah, you go into. That way or. Something 1st order neutrons do not interact with electrons at all. And so it they just all they care about is is there a nucleus that I can bump into or is there empty space? And the nucleus is very tiny and atoms are very big. So they fly through that empty space. Now they only fly through that empty space when they have something called a dibroli wavelength that's very small compared to the diameter of an atom.

1:02:10 And just so you know what a dibroli wavelength is. So you probably heard in quantum mechanics that everything is either is both a particle and a wave right? Now the reason it can be both is because if that wave is very, very tiny, it just looks like a blurry particle. You know you can squeeze that wave down, but as quantum mechanics tells us, that is you slow something down as you give it less and less energy. I think I froze again. Yeah, but I still hear you. There you go. Yeah. But as you slow something down, it's wavelength gets bigger and bigger, it becomes the blur becomes bigger. And so it's amazing about ultra cold neutrons is you can, if you, if you get them below a certain temperature, about a million, sorry, a thousandth of a degree above absolute 0, which is pretty darn cold.

1:02:57 OK, that's ultra. That's why we put Ultra in the cold name. It's very cold, yeah. So if it's a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero, their wavelength actually becomes so large that it's wider than the spacing between atoms. So now they're no longer interacting with a particular nucleus, they're interacting with many nuclei. And what that allows you to do is to treat them just the way we treat light with mirrors. We can make a a surface that has a bunch of nuclei on it, and we can bounce it off of that nuclei. And you can. Build a bottle and you can trap them inside of that bottle. Now, what's really awesome about ultra cold neutrons in particular is that we get this trifecta where we can't just it's not just that we can trap them with a bottle. By a weird coincidence, the magnetic moment of the neutron is also just rightly sized so that ultra cold neutrons can also be trapped by magnets.

1:03:53 And then to make it even cooler, that's the mass of a neutron is also. And the gravity on the surface of Earth is also such that ultracold neutrons can be trapped by gravity because they're so slow. They're traveling so slow. They have about the the speed of a basketball. They're roughly going to speed of a basketball way slower than the speed of sound, which is what normal room temperature things are going. They're going so slow that they bounced just a few meters off the ground. So you can combine these where you can have a bottle on the bottom and you literally can have neutrons bouncing and then you can you can even put magnets in there to trap them magnetically if you want. And how and the reason why they're bouncing is because they're impacted by gravity and they're and they have this energy. Well, yeah, because they, they're, they have mass. And so they follow the laws of, you know, they follow the Earth's gravity also.

1:04:43 So they, if they have this thousandth of a degree above absolute zero, they have just enough energy to kind of fly up a little bit. They, the Earth's gravity pulls them back down and they they make like a normal parabolic and they come right back down and. So how does that, how does that, how does that convert into a technology that we would understand or or how does that convert into something that is? I don't think ultra cold neutrons are super useful for technology yet. They will be, but the main reason is because when it comes to technology, usually and anything other than research technology, usually you want it to be pretty cost effective to make it. And right now ultra cold neutrons are very expensive to make, OK, incredibly expensive. So they're, they're really, they're all the use is for grant, you know, things that are government grants that fund scientific research and things they have a few technological things that are, are useful from here and there, but that's their main purpose is for research.

1:05:42 The company I started, on the other hand, is very much the opposite is, is trying to use nuclear for doing something very practical. And what what we this relates back to your first question about is it just for boiling steam? The fact is you can use heat for all kinds of things, not just boiling steam. You can, you can boil, you can use, you can eat up other things other than water and including gas or molten salt or molten metal. And you can use it for things other than make driving a turbine, making electricity. And in our case, my company, the Earth and airing company, we're developing a nuclear reactor for the purpose of driving a chemical reaction, a particular chemical reaction.

1:06:24 And the chemical reaction we're driving is turning biomass, so plant matter into synthetic fuels, so replacements for hydrocarbons. And that process takes heat and takes energy and. And and and and and it's powered by new and it's, it's nuclear. Powered by nuclear, yeah. Which means that requires a fraction of the amount of like coal or any other energy that would ordinarily to do, Yeah. And and the fuel that you're making is carbon neutral because it's made out of biomass. You're taking low energy biomass like leaves, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That has carbon in it and has hydrogen. In it, but it doesn't have a lot of energy, which is why we you know, I think a good way to put it is like cows don't go the speed of sound. You know, that's not a coincidence because they sit around eating grass all day and that's great for them, but. You know that.

1:07:17 They they can live off of it, but they have a lot of patience. And they don't. Use it to deliver a lot of energy. We want to put it into things like airplanes and rockets and cars and ships and we want it. And the best fuel for that is hydrocarbons. It's absolutely that's it's the best way to get the most amount of chemical energy in a in a small space. And the reason we want to do this is because I want nuclear power to be able to power things where it's not practical to put a nuclear reactor. So an airplane is an example, you know, ships that are not protected by the military as an example. You know, it's, it's not practical because you also don't want someone to come and steal it, you know, but that's the, that's the other end of nuclear is like, it's not just that you can't you, it's, it's one thing that it's good that you want to prevent someone from intentionally causing an accident, but you also don't want like, let's say you know, we successfully stop around or something. The alternative can't be do that. They just go and hijack a nuclear reactor and they get it for free.

1:08:14 You know that. Doesn't really, you know, you don't want anybody to be able to do that. So, so countries are very careful about their nuclear reactors. They still don't want people to come and steal them or hijack them. So the best way to do that is to sell the energy in a way that's so useful for all those machines. Like it's particularly airplanes. And I imagine that the economic impact is going to be enormous too, No? And I mean I think that a combination. We started the company. That's the main. Reason I mean, I'm I'm all for helping the planet and everything, but I think it's going to be a very successful, lucrative company for. Sure, I hope so. And you know, and, and I mean, I hope it's interesting because I've been talking a lot about to a lot of different people. I did had a couple of economists on and I've talked to a couple of other people about just like the state of America's current economic situation, which is horrendous. It's just kicking the can of debt down the line further and further and further until we find a solution that catches us, catches us up essentially.

1:09:08 And it looks like, I mean, right now it looks like we're counting on basically a combination of AI and robotics for labour and nuclear for power to just make things so much exponentially cheaper than they are. But that means that a lot of people have to lose a lot of money or, you know, lose a lot of money that they're making. And so that it's. Going to be funny, hydrocarbons is really similar. Those are things that we use to power our economy, but we can also export it and power lots, you know, power all science sorts of things, right? And that's the thing that's not going to go away with social media and Zoom and AI and stuff like people still want to go places and do things yes, like, you know, I, I'm hoping we don't all go into like the wall-e we're all on VR sitting on a floating chairs or something.

1:09:53 We might I but, but even in wall-e, they were still on a spaceship, you know, and the spaceship still needs power to go somewhere. So, so even in the Wall-e universe, we're going to need it. And there, like I mentioned at the beginning, there simply is not enough hydrocarbons to just say, no, I wanted, I want to fly to Mars tomorrow. No, it no, a billion people can't fly to Mars with the amount of hydrocarbons we have. Not an option, Just it's not. Yeah. There's just not that many dead animals underground. You know? I think a really good way to think about it is like, we used to power lamps by using whales, right? Do you? Yeah. Sure of. Course, yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, that didn't work out so well. So it had a lot of similar problems that hydrocarbons have now.

1:10:37 Now hydrocarbons are a big improvement, you know, definitely. But the, the problem there was, first of all, it's really mean to kill whales to power your lamp. But also we very quickly ran into the fact that there are simply not enough whales to do that. Like it's like. Right, we caused extinct. Almost caused all whales to extinction and then keep powering your lamps from them. And so there was an ethical component and there was a practical component. Sure. Fossil fuels have the exact same issue. They create a lot of ethical issues, some related to climate, some related to geopolitics. You don't necessarily want to buy oil from the people who have it. You know, you don't want to fight over it.

1:11:18 And the the rarer it gets, as we run out more and more, the more we're going to do that. And that's just the, you know, the, you know, most people in the USI think recognize already that that, you know, we we spent a lot of many decades going through this. It it doesn't work out well. And so it's the same thing. So we got another 150 years of, you know, extension from over Wales. We're like, hey, whales didn't work out. What about dead dinosaurs? Maybe that'll work out, you know, better on dead whales. You know that Great. There was a lot more of that. But and it was more ethical at the time. You know, it's like at least they died already. But there's, there's still the practical side of that, which is just there's not an infinite amount of it, not even close. And we keep running out.

1:12:04 We ran out in some of our best reserves here in the USA long time ago. And the only stuff we, the only extension we got there is that we developed technology to get at harder to get at oil. You know we. Use things like fracking, tar sands and all kinds of things like that and post processing of the fuel. So there's we, we, we keep getting these extensions, but it's very much like asking the teacher, can I have another extension of my homework? And it's, it's causing the cost to go up and up, keep the. Can down the line it's the same thing yeah yeah, we deal with that from tomorrow you know that's that's the issue I see crazy. OK, well, Speaking of volley, let's talk first of all, I think that I think one of the only the, one of the hopeful aspects of volley was the 2nd that the people had an opportunity to have an authentic connection. They took it.

1:12:50 So like, even though they're kind of born into this VR world on a spaceship and they don't have to communicate, the second that they realize that they have the opportunity to, they chose to. That might be the Disney flying of things. I'm not sure, but I, I kind of hope so. What is some movies that what are some of your favorite movies? And I'm also, I love that you're a scientist that loves sci-fi because I feel like that opens up like, opens up what you could imagine that you can do, I feel like, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, it's, it's like I was talking about with dreams. You know, night dreams and nightmares are important and movies are really important because you can communicate the a lot of the things without, you know, expecting everyone to become a expert nuclear physics or physics or something.

1:13:33 That's that's not a practical way to, to get people excited about it. It's much more important to say, this is what we can do with with science. Yes, this is a possibility. You can also warn people like, if we don't take care of this, this will happen. You know, this is one of the reasons why movies with aliens are so popular. Look, there's a non 0 probability that aliens will come and invade the Earth. You know, I, I don't think that's a high risk, but it's not 0. And so having people already familiar with it rather than like, you know, if it does happen, we're not going to be like, you know, we don't want people sitting around going like, wait, so, so people who don't live here are, you know, like, because of science fiction, people are going to be like, they're here.

1:14:17 I knew it, you know. It's like you. Know, so that's, that's one of the things science, science fiction does and it lets us, it warns us about stuff, you know, one of the oldest science fiction movie, one of the best, real great classic, of course, 2001 where he was warning us about using AI for the purpose of lying to other people. You know, that's, that's one of the main points in 2001. And it was long before Moore's law existed. We had transistor computers or anything. It was just, but it was, you know, it was just very warning people saying like Arthur C Clarke did a great job of this. He he really understood the, the future direction of technology and stuff. So he was like, yeah, someday we'll have computers that are smart enough that they can trick you into things and you need to be ready for that.

1:15:07 And you know it, it wasn't quite in 2001 that that happened, but around 2015 we were bombarded by computers pretending to be people. And it tricked people. And it tricked them all kinds of ways that they weren't expecting. It didn't trick them the way people would trick you. It tricked them in new ways. You know, that would trick you into thinking bots are. Freaking me out. Do you see those you see? You see how the clawed bots? These are clawed AI. It's the AI assistant. You get like a MacBook mini or whatever for it and it's mixed with Claude CLAWD, not Claude. And my, my friend has a group chat with me and it, it learns how to replicate his behavior. I did a podcast with him and the AI actually we all, we did what we all three of us recorded it and he's like, go make an X account, follow both of us, make an introductory post and like it sends back and this is all an iMessage and it sends back a flurry of texts.

1:16:01 You know going to use my e-mail login got a verification code sent I'm going to make up a believable birthday January 15th, 20, you know 20/19/95 verification worked setting up a password and like all this is like going to consist and then done boom and all of a sudden and it's called clawed. The account is called clawed bot AI. So you know it's a bot, but I mean that's how simple it is that. I remember, so in 2015, sixteen, I was trying to warn people that they're all because I was I was on Twitter and it was just there were so many fake accounts and I could tell they were robots. But what I tried to tell friends of mine about it, they were like, no, robots can't do that. You know, people just didn't believe it.

1:16:41 They're like, you'd sound crazy, you know, and then what's what's great about opening, you know, chat bots and Claude and stuff like that is one nice thing is now finally you're like, oh, yeah, of course a robot could do that, you know, but the, the idea that like you could carry on a conversation with a robot made no sense. Now in, in that time, it was only intelligence agencies that are running these. It wasn't companies, it wasn't a thing you could go test out. These are intelligent agencies trying to wage cyber war on each other's populations to to confuse the population. And a big part of that disguise was that you, the average person, did not know they were robots. Nowadays, we have an inoculation. And this is the same thing that something like science fiction can do. If you're prepared for it, you can handle it. You know, you have to, you have to see some danger and some fear before you can be like, you know, now if you carry on a conversation with someone and they're being weird, you can just be like, that's either someone I don't want to waste time with or it's a robot.

1:17:37 It's just like it's, it's common. You're not going to run into somebody who thinks it's crazy to have a robot on social media. It's like, yeah, that's like half the comment section. It's robot, yeah. Yeah, incredible. It's crazy. So the most, most and least accurate science movies that for you and your favorite and least favorite science movies, I guess. Oh, I know we're going to talk about things that happen in movies. Oh, that too. Let's do that. Whatever I. Can tell you things that so there's these four these things that break the 4th wall for me that really bugged me so a really common one that bugs me is in movies where they're astronauts wearing it. They turn on their lights, you know, they go outside, they turn on their lights and their lights are always on the inside of their helmet. And this one's hilarious to me.

1:18:21 I completely get why they do it. They do it so you could see the actor, right? But it's it's one of these things where it's like, OK, but anyone who's ever put on a face shield knows if you have the lights on the inside, you can't see anything. That is a terrible place to put lights. And I don't like, I told my kids about it. Now they're like anytime it happens, it happens in movies all the time. And now any times it happens, my my son is just like turns me. He's like turn lights inside the helmet. That's so funny. So. I get it, the camera. Needs to see the actor, but but there are directors who don't do it and I'm really impressed with them when they do it because you can, if you put in the work as a director of photography, you can still see the actor and like without having to do it. So I get a huge chuckle when I see astronauts and they turn on the lights and the lights are on the outside of their helmet. I'm like, Oh my God, these guys thought about it. Another one is hand rails in sci-fi. They love leaving out hand rails because somehow in the future we don't.

1:19:22 We don't. Have to trip. A wall or something like Star Wars is all over the place. You'll notice the Death Star has no hand rails. Now. To be fair, you don't seem like an OSHA compliant empire, so maybe that's fine. But when I see that in other science fiction, it's just like, why are there no hand rails? So I get a a huge giggle whenever when I see a place that they put hand rails. I'm like those, those guys have had a job before. I like. Does it? Does it ruin? Does it ruin it for you or you just laugh and move on with it? Are you already suspended reality? You're doing it. But usually if if they make that kind of mistake, it's usually they've made like 20 others even on the plot level that I don't I think really good directors like like.

1:20:04 Noland and and and and Kubrick and and and Steven Spielberg, they, they put a lot of work into this. They take it really seriously and they know they know that because this this is this applies to not just science. This applies to everything about a movie. If it you don't more usually people are not happy when they find like a plot hole or a thing that doesn't make sense. You know, like, and, and the best directors in the world, they they're meticulous about every little detail. You know, Kubrick was really famous for he, he personally wanted to oversee the set decorating because he wanted to make sure that what was in one scene, one in, you know, one shot, 1 scene was still there in exactly the same place and stuff. And that can that can ruin it for a lot of people because if you notice it, you can't Unsee it. You know, it was like if they're facing one way or they were dressed one way, that something changes. You know, those mistakes happen, but it's like everybody is just like most people won't notice.

1:21:11 But if you notice, it's just like, you know, you're no longer watching a movie. You're not in the fantasy of the movie. You're just like, oh, OK, this was filmed on Tuesday, and that was filmed on Thursday. OK. Yeah. So, oh man, that does ruin it, I imagine. What'd you what'd you think of The Martian with with Matt Damon? I loved it. Yeah, he loved it. Yeah, I did a podcast interview with Andy Weir on that. I recommend you guys listen to that podcast. Yeah, I'm going to. Post Weir is a great podcast guest. I'd love having you said, in fact, I want to have him on my podcast again. I'm hoping you might be too famous now, which is funny because the first time I had him, I said, oh, what's it like being famous? Because he was kind of famous for the Martian being turned into a movie. He goes, Oh no, no, this is a short lived thing, you know, 15 minutes kind of thing.

1:21:55 And me and my buddy, like Co hosts were just like, 'cause we know Hollywood, we're like, Nah, no, you're famous for life now, man. So that's cool. Once you have your first Matt David movie, you're yeah, you're famous for life. And sure enough, he's he's now like when they, when they're cause the Hail Mary's coming out now when they show the ad for it, like they say from the author of the Martian and like, say his name Andy Weir or something. So yeah, he's he's set, but. Yeah, I love. The Martian and the same way the part of the reason Andy's great is he went and first of all, he's a pretty smart guy himself in terms of science. He's a he, he's in computer science, but still he takes the stuff really seriously. But he talked to lots and lots of people about it while he's writing the book and he wanted it to be really, really accurate.

1:22:42 And he put a lot of and that's one of the reasons why it turned out that it's such a great movie. I think a lot of time now, unfortunately, some people said criticize certain parts that he backtracked on. And I don't even agree that he should have backtracked. Really. Yeah. Because of like people didn't like the dust storm. The reason was because a lot of people were saying dust storm couldn't knock over a spaceship on Mars. OK. And this one was really funny because these are like NASA, these are like GPL scientists saying this. And I've talked to people about it and we have a disagreement about it. And it's. It's really interesting because it's a double edged thing. It's really funny.

1:23:23 So the fact is there's not a lot of air on Mars. OK, the the the pressure is significantly lower and the density is lower, but not as much, but it's still lower. But what was kind of neat about a dust storm is that what knocks over something in a dust storm is not the air, it's the dust. It was kind of funny about Mars is you can actually kick up as much or even more dust than you can on Earth. So what's really funny is that the dense, the high density material, which is the dust is possibly just as high or higher in Mars because it's not the density of the air that kicks up the dust. But anyway, I almost wrote a paper about this. I was so annoyed that people were saying it could, that he had made a mistake with it.

1:24:07 But you. Should I mean, it would be such a fun, it'd be such a fun project to write a book about, you know, your favorite, some of the best movies or arguments that you've had about, you know, pop culture. That because I think that I, I really think that I, I, I, I, I, I teach high school part time and I have such a freaking problem with the stupid education system that we have, at least for at least for high schoolers and middle schoolers. And I think that you know it the. Party isn't even education. It's like there's a weird psychological thing where people, just a fraction of us just go with the flow. You know, we, we, we, we repeat something because we heard a bunch of people we respect repeat it. You know, the sheep effect, I guess it's all, there's plenty of people that go against it.

1:24:52 And it's really weird. I see it over and over. It's all across fields. It's in business, it's in, you know, investors behave this way, the public behaves this way. People are just like this is what we're all doing now. And and they and their version of truth comes from that because they think like they think like people vote on reality. You know, of course we don't vote on reality. No, reality doesn't care what our opinion is. It is or it isn't. And we don't get to vote. We might have vote how we feel about her, what we want to do about it. That's great. I love that. But we don't get to change reality, you know, based on on how we feel about it or something. I'm not going to quote Ben Shapiro here. I'm going to quote Richard Feynman. He said, which I think is really important, great quote, is nature cannot be fooled.

1:25:40 And the reason he said that is because people can be fooled. And the entire point of science is to figure out when we're being fooled. It's not to it's not like, oh, this is great because we can make all this tech. That's not the main key of science. It's like when everyone on earth thinks one way, how do you be the one person who can point out that that's not the way it it is? It actually is. That's an economic class that's I guess I'm sure the first iconoclast were scientists, you know, in the sense that you know, you have and I think is I think generally, especially humans where such a tribal and herd animals that like you know, we prefer consistency, repetition and comfort over truth and freedom necessarily, you know, that's one of the.

1:26:24 Things that really bugged me about like people saying believe science and stuff like that, that just it causes me to cringe as a. Science, like the word settled. Science, it's like, yeah, yeah, settled science, because these are the most unscientific things you can say. They are the antithesis of science. It's like science is never settled. It's a tool to figure out what's really happening. It's not a thing you believe like a religion. It's not like, oh, those guys have pH DS. I'm going to listen to them. It's just it they, they might be right. It probably they are, but you don't know that they are. That's not how it works. That's certainly not how I operate. You know, I when I even in my research, I try and work on things that are a little bit of a kind of classic too, so.

1:27:04 That's good. And that's how and that's how you get places, I imagine, you know, I mean, because you got to break the mold a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if you're if you're just doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, then you're going to have a lot of competition and then they're not going to do that. And, and, and our company is kind of like that a little bit and that we're we're trying to make fuel and that's not normally what people use nuclear force. So there's a little bit of sometimes people are discomforted with it and other people think it's brilliant. So it's just a matter of and visiting the right people that we will and then you'll hear about it that way. And I think I'll be more. I'll be most well known for that by the time I retire. I hope so. I hope so. That'd be awesome. What what what's I guess to close out and this I guess, I guess you just kind of said it, but what's something that you're really hopeful and positive about for for the future coming up? Because we had a lot of doomsday news. I like to add on some positive positive. Ideas.

1:27:54 I'm very hopeful in the future. I think humanity is going to be the first life on Earth to be on other planets. I think that's incredible. I think we'll bring a lot of species with us, but I I think it's like our place on Earth. I don't know where this meaning comes from, but to the degree that I believe it comes from something spiritual, I think our purpose on this planet is to make life indefinite. And as long as we just stay on this planet, we can go extinct just like dinosaurs. We can go extinct like the dodo and that's what sets us apart from everything. And that I'm I'm really, really excited to be alive at a time where we can actually do that. I think that's like going to be one of the most. I think I think people in the future will be like amazed, like you believe they were alive when they left Earth to say, you know, that's going to be just the craziest thing. You know, that's going to be like the the first people to leave the plains of Africa or the first people to crossover the Bering Strait or something.

1:28:58 It's like that times a million, you know, I'm so. Excited for that. I know I was telling my students I was like, guys, 200 years ago or 200 years ago, we barely knew that America was a continent. I mean, like, like, I mean like, I think about how far we've come. Think about 100 years ago, I was like, like and think about in 100 years or 50 years from now, I'm, I, I, I have a three-year old and I have a nine month old and I'm often hit with, you know, going through the news or I'm listening to podcasts. I'm like, I have no idea what kind of freaking world my kids are going to grow up in. Like I have no idea where things are heading. It's good, it's going to be cool. It's going to be crazy, but I've it's going to be so different, you know? Yeah, yeah, it's going to be really exciting.

1:29:39 And, and in addition to the fact that we're going to go into the other planets, into the stars, the way we're going to do it is with nuclear energy. There's a, there's 100 billion years of energy just on Earth, more than this, more than we're going to get from even from solar on Earth. Nuclear energy has an amazing potential and we're going to get better at it and we're going to do it even better. We're going to build spaceships with it. We're going to power all the machines here on Earth with it and power them on other planets, and we're going to. There's just not going to be any foreseeable end to it. They're really I'm so excited. That's really, really great, Doctor. Thank you so much for the time. This is so nice meeting and hopefully we get to do this again because I we have a bunch of stuff I didn't even get a chance to get to, but hopefully we'll do this.

1:30:23 Again, we'll do another episode. Sometimes this is really. Fun. This is really such a blast and I really appreciate your time. It's so nice getting to talk to you a little bit. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, take care. Bye.