November 27, 2024 • 49 mins
Scientists and hosts of Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe join the show to talk about media depictions of science, the importance of STEAM education and funding, and why exploratory science benefits us in ways we can’t anticipate.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeart Podcast And how the tech
are you? Yes, I am excited. That is why I
had the crazy high energy introduction for this episode. That's
(00:24):
because I have two phenomenal guests on today's episode. They
are the hosts of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. There
are two brilliant scientists here to talk science and tech
and depictions of science and popular media and how they
always get at one hundred percent right all the time.
(00:46):
It's Daniel and it's Kelly. Welcome to Tech Stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Thanks very much, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
I wish you could call me every day to cheer
me up with with you know, a nice introduction just
like that.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Oh, I'd be happy too, I'd be happy to My
rates are very and pretty soon I'm going to be
looking for a gig. I don't know if you have
heard this, but I'm actually stepping away from hosting tech
Stuff in the new year.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Oh what are you going to do instead?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
There's a giant, cloudy question mark in my near future. Actually,
I will be my listeners know that I'm stepping away.
I did an episode talking about it. But yeah, I've
been hosting Tech Stuff for sixteen and a half years.
I've got more than twenty three hundred episodes under my belt,
and I thought it was time for someone else to
talk about tech for a while, and so I'm stepping
(01:31):
back in early January, and I will be focusing on
executive producer duties moving forward, potentially hosting the occasional episode
and or show in the future. Nothing is set in stone,
but I'm excited to be able to kind of shift
some gears.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Happy retirement, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
I mean, I'll still be working like a crazy person,
it just won't be I just won't be creating three
episodes a week. But I'm so glad to have you here. Daniel,
Welcome back to the show. I don't know if you remember,
but years ago you did a little guest appearance on
Tech Stuff, And I'm sure you don't remember this, but
I do because it's an important moment in my life.
You name me an honorary engineer in that episode, and
(02:10):
I've been holding onto that title like with a death
grip ever since.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
He hasn't given me that title.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, I'm not sure that title is something you should
be proud of. You know, scientists and engineers are usually
sort of, you know, tooth and nail against each other,
so I'm not sure I meant that in a.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Positive pay Oh, that's fair, that's fair. I think we
were chatting about how I think of engineers as people
who view the world as a series of problems that
need to be solved, and by the end of it
you said I was an honorary engineer, which made sense
because I do have an Android phone, and I feel
like that's a device made by engineers for engineers.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
That's like sixty percent of it.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Like the iPhone is incredibly intuitive
and the Android is it does stuff.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
So yeah, well my engineer dad has an Android, so
that's totally consistent.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
It tracks right, Like, well, there we go. That's not
confirmation by us or anything. We're just going to go
with that. Yes, So here on tech stuff, we have
this kind of underlying philosophy which does not directly relate
to tech. It relates to the direction of the show,
which is I say, it's a combination of creative thinking approach,
it's compassion, and it's critical thinking, and I'm curious if
(03:21):
you think of a similar philosophy for your show.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I think our show is all about curiosity and excitement
because we viewed the whole universe as like a big mystery.
That because we viewed the whole universe as like a
big mystery to unravel, and every new little piece of
truth that we pry away at, the truth minds. You know,
where we go to work every day is an exciting discovery.
It's always fantastic. Whatever the universe chooses to reveal to us,
(03:47):
it's always amazing.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah, I think enthusiasm is huge. We're really excited about
the information we've managed to extract from the Earth and
all the cool stuff that's left to figure out.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Yeah. I've been listening to your show and I just
want to say I also want to congratulate you on
your incredible sense of timing because we're heading up to
Thanksgiving and then the most recent episode I listened to
was all about cannibalism, and I just felt that you
you really you planned those thematic shows really well.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, you know, we put a lot of thought into
each episode, and we do have a like an actual
Thanksgiving episode coming out on Thanksgiving where we Daniel. So
Daniel talks about cannibalism a lot, even though he's not
the biologist. Did you manage to get a reference to
cannibalism into that episode a bit?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Absolutely? Yes, Okay, cannibalism and aliens. I always got to
work those two angles into every episode somehow.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yeah, So it's enthusiasm, creativity, cannibalism, aliens. That's what our podcasts.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Is kind of amazing that you didn't name the show
What's Eating You.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
I had a paper published called What's Gotten Into You,
and it was all about how parasites changed behavior. But
I guess it's not What's Eating You, but it's it
was What's Gotten into You? Anyway, it was I felt
very good about that time well.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
And that was kind of like one of the things
that sort of was the genesis of my idea for
this episode was that talk about you know, your work
in science and then how you view the media depiction
of science. You know, I'm sure there's like part of
you correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure there's
part of you that just appreciates. Oh well, obviously they
had to do this for the narrative to work, like
(05:20):
this is a storytelling convention, it's required. They're not presenting
this as if it's hard science. And so therefore, if
they do the Arthur C. Clark thing where they just
use science as a way to stand in for magic,
that's okay. And then there's probably part of you that's like, cush,
darn it, that's not what particle accelerators do. And I
wish they would stop because people are getting the wrong idea. So, Kelly,
(05:44):
one of the ones I mentioned to you was there's
the show The Last of Us, which actually they did
a fairly decent job in talking about how the fungal
parasites that can affect insects and control them and their
behavior to some extent, how that really wouldn't trate to
more complex life forms. They actually go so far as
to say that in the intro, so they lampshaded it
(06:06):
quite a bit, right, They said, this is not really possible,
and yet hear it happened in the show, which of
course dates back to the actual video game that inspired
that series. So when you see things like that, like,
what's your reaction having actually written about these kinds of
parasites that do alter behaviors?
Speaker 3 (06:25):
My philosophy in general is that you know fiction is
it just it's a totally different thing. And as long
as they create worlds that are consistent and then they
stick with the rules that they've made for their world,
I'm cool with that. The only thing that gets me
grumpy is when people like change their rules halfway through.
Like I hated Lost because it was like I thought
we were in the real world and now there's like
smoke monsters and like, yeah, anyway, so I thought the
(06:47):
Last of Us was great.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Oh gosh, I have a feeling that you and I
would have some of the best post viewing coffee sessions
for various shows and movies, because you have hit upon
one of my most passionate topics, which is consistency and rules.
As much as as I enjoyed the Buffy the Vampire
Slayer television show when it first aired, I got consistently
(07:10):
more upset with that show as it went on, as
I felt that it was violating the rules that it
itself had set up in previous seasons. And meanwhile, all
my friends were Buffy fans, were like, why are you
so upset about this? I'm like, it's the easiest thing
in the world to be consistent. You have to go
out of your way to be inconsistent.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
We should get together for coffee because you know, I
feel like often the you need to be consistent about
the rules. People like aren't the first one to invite
to the parties, right, so we have to stick together.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yes, we're the ones that somehow get overlooked when the
invitations go out. I don't understand it either.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
It's not a fair world we live in.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
It is not.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
And you know, if you're watching like a murder mystery,
everybody expects you to follow the rules, right, Like if
there was a clue laid in act one, you expect
that to still be relevant in act three. But somehow
if it's science fiction and like, hey, we could just
those rules out the window. You know, let's be fair
about the standards we apply.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yes, absolutely, same thing's true for horror movies. By the way,
if your horror movie is predicated upon information purposefully withheld
from the audience, and you can't expect me to be
wold when you have your big reveal, you need to
set that stuff up in subtle ways that I don't
pick up on, but then can appreciate at the end. Yes, amen,
I say that as someone who just watched the horror
(08:24):
movie this past weekend, and I was like, Oh, that's
that's not Chekhov's gun, but that is Chekhov's wooden plank
with nails sticking out of it. People who have seen
it now know what I'm talking about. Daniel, like, same
sort of thing for you. I mean, you've obviously worked
on some of the most famous particle physics projects in
the world, and not only have we seen interesting depictions
(08:45):
of that in fiction media, but obviously the news media
had all sorts of speculation as to what was going
to happen once the large Hadron collider was operating at
full power. People may not remember that, but there were
so many stories about everything from time traveling, conspiracy theories
involving birds dropping twigs down ventilation shafts, to some sort
(09:09):
of message from the future being sent back saying, for
the love of all that's holy, don't turn it on.
What was your reaction as all this was unfolding.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
I thought it was sort of amazing and hilarious, but
also terrifying. I mean, it's always fun to see your
own work depicted in the popular media, and you know,
Stephen Colbert when he was still on The Daily Show,
did a whole bit about whether we should turn on
the LEDC and understanding and probability and you know, it's
not safe for work, but people should definitely go check
that out because it's really fun. But it's also a
(09:41):
little terrifying to see these concepts that you've worked on,
these projects that you're passionate about, sort of leave your
control and enter the broader cultural conversation where you don't
really necessarily have a voice to combat the misinformation. And
there's a lot of well meaning misinformation out there, people
who try to cover this stuff and just don't get
the details right. And I don't have, or it didn't
(10:04):
at the time, at least have a platform to be like, hey, actually,
this is how it works, and I don't want to
throw cold water on your ideas because the reality is
much more interesting and fascinating, right. That's the thing that
frustrates me is when they get the story wrong, but
the real story is even more exciting. It's even more
clickbaity than the misconceptions.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
When you reach a certain level with science, obviously, it
gets to a point where there is no easy way
to communicate the topic to a general audience. You're either
going to have to spend an an ordinate amount of
time setting it up and building upon a foundation and
hoping that your audience stays with you for the entirety
of that, or you run the risk of oversimplifying, hoping
(10:48):
that they get the gist of it, knowing that you're
going to be leaving out some important nuance that it
really is needed to have a full understanding of or
even a working understanding of the topic. That's something that
I struggle with all the time on tech stuff, right, Like,
there are tech topics that are really complex, and how
(11:09):
do you approach discussing this in a way that is
I think responsible, so that your audience has an understanding.
And of course I always advocate that people look into things,
read up more about them if they're interested, to do
more exploration, because there's only so much I can say
in an hour long episode. But you know that still
(11:30):
weighs on me. That being said, sometimes there are layups
out there where you'll see something portrayed and you'll just say, well,
that's just wrong, that's just wrong. It's not even remotely
in the realm of possibility. I'm reminded. I wish I
could remember which procedural it was. It was one of
those cop procedural shows where there's always something about hacking.
(11:51):
So there was a scene where there are two characters
simultaneously typing on the same keyboard while trying to counteract
to hacker who's trying to get into a system. And
I thought, in one world, can a keyboard accept two
separate forms of input at the same time and haven't
mean anything. It would just be like me just smashing
(12:12):
my hands randomly on keys. This makes no sense. I'm like,
it couldn't have made sense when they shot it. Did
they do this on purpose? As like a wind up?
So there are moments like that that stand out as.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
A parasitologist, as person who studies parasites. There was an
episode of Grey's Anatomy where someone had neurosistas yorcosis. So
it's this big fluid filled sack filled with tapeworms in
your brains that causes nervous system problems. Yeah, and it's
a very delicate procedure to remove that sack because if
it breaks, you have this crazy like neuroimmune response to
the sack and it's really bad. But they pulled it
out in the reveal it was a nematode, and all right,
(12:46):
so I get upset. No one else would care. That's
a totally different phylum than the actual parasite that causes
the problem. But it was like a squiggly worm that
fell back in and they were like reaching around trying
to get it, and I'm like, you're screwing up the
brain and like, actually it's a sack. It's not a
like the little nematode. Anyway, I was Everything was wrong
about that. That kept me up at night.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
See now that makes me think of the Adventures of
Buckaroo Bonzai where there's a moment early in that film
where Buckaroo Bonzi, who is a rocket scientist neurosurgeon rock
star wow. Peter Weller played him. Fantastic, Very slow movie
nineteen eighties science fiction movie. John Lithgal plays a crazy
alien in it. If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching.
(13:26):
But it is slow paced and convoluted.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
You're not selling it well.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
I have to warn because I introduced a friend of mine,
a millennial, to this film, and she was like, that
was the slowest, most confusing science fiction film I've ever seen.
I'm like, there's a rock star neuroscientist, rocket scientist, race
car driver as the main character. How could you not
love it? But there's a moment where they're doing brain
surgery where that character says to his surgical assistant, no, no, no,
(13:55):
don't pull on that. You don't know what's connected to Like, okay, Well,
that seems realistic to me. That seems like realistic depiction
of brain surgery. I think I'm okay with that, Daniel.
Are there any like depictions that you have seen that
kind of stand out in your your mind? As this
might have been a very creative way to tell a story,
but it was a terrible way to leverage actual science
that you are familiar with.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Well, I have a lot of respect for science fiction authors,
and I get what they're going for. Often they read
some new idea or they hear an explanation, and then
inspire some story they imagine that they could tell only
in some alternative universe. And with Kelly, I agree, like,
it doesn't have to follow the rules of our universe
as long as they are consistent about it. But the
thing that does frustrate me is that I think it
(14:38):
is possible for a lot of folks out there to
understand the subtle nuances of the science as long as
it's explained well and on our show at least, we
really believe that the science can be communicated clearly and effectively,
that it's possible for people to really get these things.
I think there's a lot of folks out there who
really love science and maybe wanted to do it, but
something happened in their life they didn't end up being
(15:00):
a scientist, and so they want to stay up on
the details and they want to hear more than just like,
here's the pop size story. You've heard a lot about
quantum mechanics and entanglement and to really have it connect
for them, and that's what we try to do on
the show. But to directly answer your question, one of
the things that sort of grinds my gears a lot
is when people use like two entangled particles to communicate
(15:21):
faster than light. And you know, you hear this in
pop science all the time, and there are subtle nuances there,
like there is something happening faster than light when two
entangled particles collapse. But you can't use it to send
messages across the stars, as much as I wish you could.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Right right that whole concept of the entangled particles. Usually
we're talking about something like spin particle spin. So if
one's spinning up, the other one's spinning down, and they're
entangled together, and no matter how far apart you separate
these two particles until the system collapses, until that entanglement breaks,
then you're still going to have one spinning up, one
(15:58):
spinning down. There'll always be in that connect. But then
once you observe it all breaks down and that connection
is severed and you can't do anything useful with it. Yeah,
we've used that discussion when talking about things like quantum computers,
when talking about entanglement and superposition and all these really
interesting ideas. I'm fascinated with the methods people have created
(16:19):
to try and take advantage of these quantum effects. And
to me, like, that's one of those areas where I
definitely run up against the barriers of my ignorance. Right,
I understand up to a point, and then after that
I'm like, WHOA, Okay, there was a leap made here
(16:40):
that I can't follow, and I from a kind of
like a high level concept I can understand, but it's
so counterintuitive based upon just my day to day experience
with physics on the macro level, that you might as
well be describing a magic spell to me, because it's
so it's so unusual. I mean, I can see why
(17:01):
Einstein would call it spooky action at a distance, right
like it's it seems like it doesn't make any any
real sense.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
And that's the incredible thing about the universe, right it
is this bizarre mystery. It seems like it doesn't make sense.
And yet over the years and the decades and the centuries,
we have slowly chipped away at the truth and always
found some explanation. And that explanation is often not what
we expected, not what we thought it was going to be,
and mind blowing when we understand it. But amazingly it
is possible to understand this universe like we have no
(17:30):
guarantee of that. It could be that eventually the universe
runs on some systems, some mathematics that are beyond our comprehension,
but so far we've always been able with our puny
little ape brains to figure it out.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
But for some of this stuff, we're still in the
process of trying to understand it. And so, you know, you
were saying that you get to a point where you're like, oh,
my brain just can't make that leap. While talking to Daniel,
I've learned that a lot of the places where I
was like, oh, my brain can't make that leap. When
I talked to Daniel, He's like, oh, we just we
don't know why that happens yet, and I'm like, no,
we just hit against everyone's under standing there. And so,
you know, I think that's a great thing about science
(18:03):
if it's explained well, you can let people know that, like, no,
we're all we all get a wall.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Eventually, we'll be back in just a moment to talk
more about science and science, depictions of media, and who
knows what else with Daniel and Kelly after these messages.
(18:26):
When I used to write for How Stuff Works, there
was a point where I was given the assignment of
how string theory works. So I was I was diving
into everything string theory. And I'm an English Lit major, y'all.
My major was in Shakespeare, and I can rattle Shakespeare
off like nobody's business. But you asked me to describe
string theory, and we got ourselves a problem.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
I want to hear a sonnet about string theory.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
You know what? Give me a week and I'll have
it for you. I'm assuming you mean Shakespearean not Edwardians,
because you're Spencerian. Okay, good, I can do that. I'm
an expert at Shakespearean's on It's excellent. I remember distinctly
I watched a I think it was a Nova special
about string theory, and I'm taking notes and I mean,
(19:13):
I've got like like seven eight pages of handwritten notes
and I'm just sweating bullets watching this and everyone's really
a great communicator on that special. And it gets to
one point where one of the experts is being interviewed
and he says, yeah, I think this is the point
where I just have to admit I don't understand how
it works. I just know that this is what the
math says. And I'm like, oh my gosh, if you
don't know, what hope is there for me? But that,
(19:37):
to me is fascinating. It's one of the reasons why,
by the way, I love doing a tech podcast is
that technology is science manifest into devices and gadgets, and
it's proof that science works, right because if science didn't work,
the tech wouldn't work. So I've always pointed at like
we are constantly surrounded by proof that the scientific approach works,
(20:03):
because otherwise the things that we come in contact with
on a minute by minute basis wouldn't function absolutely.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
What gets me about a lot of tech, though, is
that it works, but the science we don't always even
know why it works. I was talking to someone who
does deep brain stimulation, so like the essentially, you know,
electrocute the center of your brain to try to stop
the electrical storms that cause seizures. And I asked her,
I was like, why does like putting electrical circuits through
someone's brain stop it? And they're like, we don't know,
(20:32):
but it's great that it works. And I was like, wow,
So I mean sometimes just because engineering works doesn't mean
we understand it at the level that we'd like to.
But it's great that it works.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, that's true. Yeah, there are lots of examples of that. Like,
it's to me, it's interesting that we have great stories
going in both directions, right. We have the stories of
the people who were real innovators, really phenomenal. They thought
outside the box. You know, they're probably building upon work
that previous generations had done, but they've done something themselves
(21:03):
that has transformed thinking in some way and has really
pushed science forward. So the person I love to talk about,
and I was actually just chatting about this with my
producer the other day, Ada Lovelace. You know Lord Byron's daughter.
Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage, who built the Decision Machine,
the Decision Engine, and she was one of the first people,
(21:25):
probably the first person that I know of, who came
up with the concept of what if we took things
like pictures or music and we converted that into mathematical statements,
and then we used a machine like this to process that.
We could create art, we could create music, we could
alter existing pieces. And so she was essentially talking about
(21:47):
computer programming, you know, generations before anyone else would even
be able to do this, and the fact that she
was able to ideate around that without there being any
lead up, Like, as far as I can tell, she
just sort of had a Eureka moment. And those are
so rare, Like it's easy for us to point at
things and say, this is the inventor of such and such,
(22:08):
but when you look into it, you're like, oh, actually
they were iterating on previous generations of stuff. But as
far as I can tell, This is like Ada Lovelace
coming up with a truly novel idea. And that's one
of the things I love most about podcasting is finding
those stories, as well as the ones where someone's like, yeah,
we didn't know if it would work, and we tried
it and we work. We don't know why it works,
(22:29):
but it does seem to work. So we'll figure out
the why someday maybe, but for now, the fact that
it works is important enough.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah, and it really highlights the human side of science.
You know, I feel like there's a sandwich there. People
feel like, oh, science, maybe it's sort of like a
sterile or it's intellectual, or it's bigger than people, but
you know, it really exists only in a human context,
both because of the philosophical side of it, like you're
talking about, Oh, we understand the math, but what does
(22:57):
this really mean? Right? We always want to understand signs
in terms of a story, like what is this telling
us about how the universe works? About what is real?
But then also on the other side of it, like
what does it mean for humans to live? How does
this technology change our lives? How does it change what
it's like to be a human in the world? What
does it let us do? What kind of lives can
we lead that we couldn't lead before? I mean, there's
(23:19):
human stories everywhere on both sides of it, from the
philosophy to the engineering.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of that too right now.
Just a lot of overt discussion about that with the
explosion of generative AI, which some people are now saying
like we might be hitting like peak AI for at
least the time being, not that it won't go any higher,
but that the level of evolution may be slowing down
a bit as we're kind of hitting the limits of
(23:45):
what large language models can do.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Oh my gosh, can I rant about that? For am
a lead? Because I see people saying like, let's spend
a trillion dollars and build a huge, large language model
because it will solve physics. And I'm like, you know what,
let's spend a trillion dollars on human physics first and
try that, because trust me, if we spend that much
money on physics, we could probably bigen the thing out.
(24:07):
Like why do we need to dumb do an AI?
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I've got very strong my listeners know I don't need
to go on another rant for my listeners but I
have very strong feelings about generative AI. I don't think
it's a inherently bad technology. I mean, it's again going
back to Shakespeare, there's nothing either good nor bad, but
thinking makes it. So this is what AI. You've got
artificial thinking. But I have a lot of strong opinions
(24:31):
on it. I even did an episode of tech Stuff
where I titled it. This episode was written by AI
open bracket, sort of in bracket. And what I did was,
I had I had that do an episode like, I
gave it a prompt chat GPT is what I used.
I gave it a prompt, I told it to make
an episode of tech stuff, and so it had me
(24:55):
inserted in there.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
And the thing that I found the most distressed First,
it got stuff wrong, which is bad, right, But I'm like, well,
I get stuff wrong too, sometimes I'm human. It does happen.
But the thing that upset me was it invented experts
to deliver points of data. So it was as if
I had interviewed I think it was three or four
(25:17):
different people in the transcript that it printed, but none
of those people even exist, let alone. I never spoke
to anyone obviously, but they don't even exist. There were
these names and they were given titles and given a
position at places. So I tried to verify it. Not
a single person existed, And I thought, you're inventing quotes,
(25:38):
and then you're attributing those invented quotes to invented people,
and you're presenting it without any indication that these are inventions.
I mean, this is where we get into you know,
confabulations or hallucinations with AI, and to me, that immediately
sets off enormous alarms, which is why I would not
want to entrust using large language model based generative AI
(26:01):
to tackle the greatest problems in physics, because ultimately you
don't know at what point it's just creating the statistically
likely sentence, right Like, it's just statistically choosing words to
create grammatically correct sentences, and there's no regard as to
whether or not there's truth in there.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yeah. We wrote a book about living in space and
we had a chapter on food and space, and we
thought we had found all the books on food and space.
And after the book came out, we were on chat
GPT and we were like, tell us the ten books
about food and space, and it popped out ten because
we had asked for ten and some of them were
books we had, and the rest we were like, oh,
how did we miss these books? And we looked them
up and they didn't exist. And just like you said,
(26:46):
we asked, like, well, tell us more about the person
who wrote this book that doesn't seem to exist, and
they gave them a bio, they gave them affiliations. And
these hallucinations are really scary if you're going to rely
on it for research.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, nobody I ever should rely on it
for research. It's not a research tool, right, Yeah. It
generates the facsimile of research. It doesn't do any research,
doesn't do any thinking. There's no reasoning there, and sometimes
that's very useful for research. I use Genai in my
research all the time because it's very good at generating examples,
and sometimes you need something which can rapidly generate examples.
(27:20):
But you have to know exactly what you're asking to do, yeah,
because it can't think.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Yeah. I've used it to create like a bullet point
of a bullet list of summary points from like really
long articles, and then I went back and checked to
make sure that what it was creating was reflected in
the articles, and in that case, at least that specific case,
it was whether or not that's ninety nine times out
of one hundred or one hundred times out of one hundred.
I can't say. In my one use case, which is
(27:46):
a terribly small sample size, it did work out. But
I am not naive enough to suggest that that means
it's going to work every single time you use it.
But yeah, same sort of thing. I've used it a
couple of times for the purposes of like organizing thoughts,
that kind of thing, because otherwise I get, as you
can probably tell from this episode, real Lucy Goosey with
my approach, my approach to podcasting.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Well, fundamentally, I think that humans have to play a
role in science because science is a human thing. It's
like by people and for people. Right, we have questions
we want answers to and then we want those answers
to make sense to us. So it doesn't make any
sense to me to take humans out of that equation,
you know, to say it to an AI like go
figure out the universe, Like I want to understand the universe,
(28:32):
and it has to make sense to me and it
has to answer my questions. So humanity is an important
part of science.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
What if it answered the question and explained it to
you clearly, why would it not be okay that AI
got the answer.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
It would be fine if AI found the answer, but
it's I got to ask the questions and I have
to be satisfied with the answer.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
I would like to refer both of you to the
great nonfiction work of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
in which we create an incredibly colligent computer that tells
us the answer to life, the universe, and everything is
forty two, and then spends the next eternity trying to
figure out what the question is.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
But that seems exactly like what you were talking about there,
Daniel is like, we don't want to create a world
that is ideal for AI. We want to make sure
that we continue to work on a world that's ideal
for humans, which involves making some tough choices like maybe
not using so much AI that's incredibly hungry for all
the electricity, and maybe maybe going down that pathway is
(29:31):
not the most productive. So, Kelly, I'm curious. I'm sure
you must have read and or seen The Martian. Oh yeah,
what's your take?
Speaker 3 (29:40):
On that.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
I'm curious because I remember when I read it, I thought,
this feels like it's fairly realistic, maybe with a couple
of caveats.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, I think it's fairly realistic with a couple of caveats.
And again, like I think, the rules are what matters,
and he was very andy. Weir was very consistent with
the rules of the world we created. So mars Is
atmosphere is one percent of Earth's. That's enough to support
dust storms that engulf the entire planets, but it's probably
not enough to knock over their giant rocket because one
percent atmosphere is just not enough. And that's the premise
(30:11):
that sets up the whole movie. Yep. And additionally, Mark
Wattney is growing potatoes in soil and his own feces. Yes, Martian,
it's called regolith.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
That dirt on the surface is laced with prochlorates, which
are endocrine disrupting hormones that mess up your metabolism. So
if he had been growing his potatoes directly in there,
he would have been massively poisoning himself. In addition, all
the like fecal material he had in there that he'd
have to be careful to clean up.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Wow, Yeah, I didn't know that part. I know that
NASA has been using simulacrums of regolith in order to
do experimentation about what could or could not be grown
on the surface of Mars. That part I knew, but
I didn't know about the potential for really messing up
your system. Yeah. I agree that, Like the thin atmosphere
(30:58):
was one of those things that kind of tripped me up.
Another was, and I'm sure it was explained in the book,
and it's been a long time since I've read the book.
I've seen the movie more recently, but the concept of
a short term Martian expedition made no sense to me,
simply because to have the planets line up properly so
that you can make the journey with the least amount
of fuel needed to do it, you would, in my understanding,
(31:21):
need to kind of be ready for like a two
year stay on the planet before you could try and
make your trip back home. At least in the film version,
it felt like it was supposed to be like, oh,
this is a mission that lasts maybe a month and
a half and then we head back and I'm like, well,
how does that work? How much fuel are you bringing
with you or is this a nuclear powered rocket? What's
(31:42):
going on? So that was one of those things that
tripped me up to But yeah, the windstorm, that was
another one where you would need to be able to
go out and clean the solar panels, clear them of
dust and all that. But it wouldn't be enough to
maybe drive a big metal shard through someone's suit into
their body the way it does near the beginning of
(32:03):
the story.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah, or knock over that rocket, which, yeah, which was
part of the rocket. Yeah, and Daniel would be very
happy that they included cannibalism in there. That was really important.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, I'm glad that we can stick on topic. I
didn't think of any Italian cannibal horror movies that I
could add into the discussion here. Also, it would be
terrifying to find out that you had watched those. But
Daniel and Kelly have a lot more to say as
we talk all things science and geekiness. And I'm absolutely
(32:39):
loving every second of this. But first let's take a
quick break to thank our sponsors. Let me ask you this,
out of all the topics you've covered so far on
your show, are there any standouts of things that were
just either delight or surprising to you are just you
(33:02):
were really eager to sink your teeth into when you
were going to communicate those to your audience.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
From my point of view, I like to drill down
into the basics, and because I think that people are
curious about the universe and have pretty simple questions that
they want answers to, questions like what is space? Or
how does time work? Or like what is everything made
out of? And all of the answer in the end,
the disappoint Kelly is almost always like, well, we know
(33:29):
up to hear, and then we have questions. I think
it's worthwhile to bring people up to that point of
understanding of these really basic questions that remain, because I
think a lot of times people get the impression that
science has progressed so far and we've basically figured it out.
It's just like a couple of details remaining. But there's
like very basic, vast questions about the universe we don't
have simple answers to, and I think it's totally fun
(33:52):
and very worthwhile to explain those to people in a
way they can really get.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
I think it's hard to pick a favorite, you know,
like it's hard to pick a favorite child. We've interviewed
these episodes haven't come out yet, but we interviewed James
sa Corey, so the guys who wrote the expanse and
Mary Roach and I love all of those people, and
podcasting is a great opportunity to reach out to amazing
people and ask them to talk to you for an hour.
So that was great, but I really all also have
(34:18):
enjoyed the episodes on space and time because Daniel is
really good at explaining things and I really love learning
about stuff that I don't already know. And physics. I
took physics in college. I did fine, but I definitely
studied to get an A on the test and then
forget it immediately afterwards. Yeah, and I know, sorry, there's
a lot of stuff I didn't understand, and it feels
good to have like professionals say okay, we've reached the
(34:40):
end of what we understand and be like, oh okay,
I can follow it up until the edge, and like, anyway,
I've learned a lot and it's been fun.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
That's cool. Yeah. So both my parents are science fiction authors,
so yeah, so I grew up going to science fiction
conventions being around other authors as well as science can
meet indicators and stuff. I had a really fortunate childhood
in that way, and I keep thinking one of my
missed opportunities is I never had my dad on the podcast.
I could still ask him if he'd want to do it,
(35:09):
because I would love to have a conversation about things
that science fiction authors predicted that ultimately came to pass.
So Arthur C. Clark is obviously a big example with
geostationary satellites, and you know, you have Isaac Asimov and
the laws of robotics and things of that nature. My dad, famously,
in my mind anyway, made an incredible prediction. He predicted
(35:32):
the existence of Teddy Ruxman.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Oh nice, Yeah, I loved Teddy Ruxman.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
And he also predicted commercials that do not, upon first glance,
tell you what the heck they're advertising. He called it
the oblique cell, but that was in his fantasy novel anyway.
It just makes your discussion there just made me think
about that as well. I love how people can take
(35:58):
inspiration from not just the observations they make, but from
fiction as well and say like, well, well, there's no
reason why that shouldn't work if we just figure some
things out and then work toward that. Now, obviously it
doesn't work for everything. Like my own personal opinion with
Star Trek is that if you were to use a transporter,
you're committing suicide and you're just creating a copy of
yourself somewhere else. And that's not really you. It's someone
(36:21):
else who has all your thoughts and beliefs and everything,
but you are. You're dead, and that's a copy. And
so I'm a bones McCoy kind of guy when it
comes to the transporter.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
I do ask that question every time we interview a
sci fi person on our show.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Oh, is the transporter just killing you? Yeah? Yeah, I'm
fully on board with the transporters killing you.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
I'm but would you step into one knowing that it's
going to kill you and then it's going to be
another version of you on the other side.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
No, I'm too egotistical. I require this version of my
ego to continue and not a perfect copy. First of all,
I don't want there to be a perfect copy of
me out there. I got enough competition out there as
it is. No, I don't think I could. And maybe
if we were talking about distances that are beyond what
(37:10):
we can conveniently travel today, and like, yeah you can,
you can hop on over. We've colonized a planet that's
you know, twenty light years away. There's no way you're
going to get there. Otherwise, like, well, had a good
run here, Jonathan two point zero can take it from
here and make a new life on Earth two or whatever.
(37:34):
Are there Are there any particular thing, you know, sources
of inspiration that got you both or either of you
interested in pursuing a career in science, Like was there
was there someone or something that you know, you thought, well,
this is this is what makes I want to do,
whether it was directly in your field or maybe even
(37:54):
an unrelated field of science.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Well, like many people, I was inspired by Well, like
many people, I was inspired by my high school physics teacher.
I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, so there's
lots of physicists around, and one of them came to
teach our ap physics class in the morning before he
went to work at the lab, and he seemed to
be having a lot of fun and he was a
great teacher. And you know, I just want to say
(38:16):
thank you to all the science teachers out there in
high school working on the front lines, because They're literally
responsible for creating the next generation of scientists. Huge fraction
of the scientists I know were inspired to enter their
field chemistry or biology or whatever because of their high
school science teacher. It's such an important job.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
I really liked the show er, and so I really
wanted to be an er surgeon. And then I talked
to an er surgeon who was like, actually, most of
your day is really boring. It's nowhere near as exciting.
You're like waiting for someone to come in so you
can like stitch their hand because they like cut it
on the side of their car or something. And then
I thought maybe i'd be a veterinarian, but then I'd
still have to deal with people, and I turns out
(39:00):
I feel okay about people. But but then I like,
I had an overwhelming course load, and so I was like,
I'm gonna take ecology as an easy a because it's
like hippies playing in the woods. And it turned out
that they were using all of these like elegant equations
to describe the behavior of the animals interacting with each other,
and I was like, this is actually rigorous, and these
(39:21):
people are spending like their whole lives outside collecting these
data and then they get to think about what's happening outside.
And like, I fell in love with ecology in that class,
and so that easy a totally like derailed my financial
future and I went into science instead.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
But you became a rigorous hippie in the woods.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
I did, Man, I love it out here and then
I but I thought that I was going to be
studying like lions in the Serengetti, and I applied to
all of those labs for grad school, and then I
ended up studying like their parent, whatever's happening in their guts.
Turns out that's what I'm most interested in. So I
like the creepy stuff.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
I guess that's the edge of all knowledge, right, that's
the biological dark matter for sure.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, I love it. I love these stories.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
What about you? How did you go from Shakespeare to
podcasting about tech?
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Okay, Yeah, that's a great question. For the first several
years of my professional career, I actually worked at a
human resources management consulting firm. So I like to say
I worked for the Bobs in office space, the two Bobs. Yeah.
More often than not, I was writing up reports about
why our consultants were recommending that a company layoff ten
(40:32):
percent of their employees. It was very demoralizing. I was
good at what I did. I hated my job. I
love the people I worked with, but I hated my job.
But I was good at it, and so I didn't
want to leave it. One of the consultants I worked for,
his name is frank Casa Grande, or Frankie big House
as I used to call him. Frankie big House. He's
from New Jersey. Came to me, He's like, John, John,
(40:54):
this isn't your passion, John, you got to get out
of here. You're killing yourself meant for bigger things. And
so it really sunk in. But I was so comfortable
that I did not leave that job until they got
rid of the position I was in. So I didn't
I wasn't fired. I just didn't have a job anymore.
The distinction was lost on me. I will be honest
(41:16):
with you. So then for for six months, I'm out
of work, trying to get a job, and I try
applying for writing gigs at different places around Atlanta, including
places like the Cartoon Network and Turner and CNN and
which are all the same company. But whatever, and ultimately
none of those pan out. I took another job at
a different consulting firm, which was soul crushing, and six
(41:39):
months after that, I one of the jobs I had
i'd interviewed for but I had not heard back from,
gets back to me, and it was HowStuffWorks dot Com.
So I come in, I interview with how stuffworks dot Com.
I get the job. I become one of two staff
writers at how stuffworks dot com, the other one Tracy Wilson,
who is currently a host of Stuff you missed in
(42:00):
history class. That's where the stuff and tech stuff comes from.
So I start writing articles. And my background in English
literature involved lots of research and lots of writing, and
so I was just applying that same skill set. But
now I got a chance to explore topics that I
often knew very little about. So I got to learn
(42:21):
and it was so exciting. It was like being in college,
but without all the pressures of college and all the
distractions of college. And I learned all about different things.
And then it was my job to explain what I
had learned to an audience and to synthesize that information
and communicate it outward. And I loved that too, and
it soon became clear that, unlike the other English majors
(42:45):
who joined the editorial department of HowStuffWorks dot com, I
was not afraid of technology. Everybody else we almost all
of us had attended the University of Georgia, almost all
of us had a degree in some form of English,
whether it was English Led or English whatever. But they
were all scared of tackling tech, and I wasn't because,
as I described to them, like tech either works or
(43:06):
it doesn't. It's it gets pretty simple when you get
to the macro level. It's when you dive into the
particulars where it can get a little intimidating. But I
found that those skills of being able to research a topic,
to find an understanding, and then to communicate that understanding
to an audience, that that tapped into a passion I
(43:27):
didn't even know I had. And so the podcast started
as an extension of the website and gave me even
more opportunity to not only communicate these these ideas about technology,
not just how it works, but how it impacts us
and how we change the tech. It also, most importantly
(43:47):
gave me an opportunity to make terrible puns. That's all
we really want to Yeah, getting paid to make terrible
puns and if you if you, if you position them
just you know, they had to hear it, and that's
the best.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Feeling.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Yeah, it is, it's great. It's like it's the only
thing I regret is that podcasting is a one way
communication medium and I can't hear the groans on the
other side, which is you know, that's what really nourishes
the soul in my opinion. But yeah, that's how it
all happened for me, and I have always had great
admiration for not just scientists, but science communicators who take
(44:26):
it very seriously, you know, learning and communicating and sort
of instilling that communication with the passion they have for
the process of learning. Like I think that's really what
it boils down to for me, is that I love
to learn. And I feel like a lot of scientists
that's kind of their core principle too. They just have
this love of learning. As you said at the beginning,
(44:48):
curiosity is one of those those guiding principles, and I
genuinely think that in order to live a fulfilling life,
you do have to maintain a sense of curiosity. Throughout.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
It sure helps.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
And it's what powers all of science.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
The reason that we get millions or billions of dollars
to build a collider is because people want to know
the answer to these questions, you know, And so I
think we have an obligation not just to do the
science and to try to understand the universe, but to
share the answers with everybody, because everybody deserves to know
what we do and don't know about particles and cannibals.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
All. Yeah, I don't think I find it. I think
one of the most distressing things I encounter is when
someone says, well, what good is that going to do me?
If you learn that, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's
like I'm talking to a different kind of creature because
I can't understand why the act of knowing isn't exciting
(45:45):
enough all on its own. Why you have to be like, okay,
but is that going to make my cell phone faster? Like,
first of all, we don't know what it'll do.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
That's yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Like, if you look back at all the technological advancements
that have been possible over the years, we didn't anticipate
most of those because we had no way of knowing.
I mean, certainly miniaturization alone was something no one had
thought about. Back in the twenties and thirties, everyone thought
computers were going to be the size of skyscrapers because
they had to be so like, don't worry about you know,
(46:18):
a specific benefit that you get beyond knowing knowing itself
as a benefit. And then on top of that, who
knows what else will be able to leverage from the
knowledge we uncover. So amen, yeah, yeah, so, gosh darn it.
Funded science, yes, please, yes, fund easy and obvious investment
(46:39):
in humanity and in our future.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
I don't understand why it's not a bipartisan thing, you know.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah, either do I I always I always don't. I
don't get why people will will portray science as somehow
having a political bias. That's not the way science works.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Daniel and Kelly, thank you so much for joining tech stuff.
This has been a lot of fun. I know it's
kind of an unhinged whirlwind episode, but I mean, I'm
coming up to the end of my run kind of
like all the safety measures are off as far as I'm.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Concerned, the rails are off. That's the most fun. Thank you.
So much for having us on the show. This was
a blast.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
I recommend everyone go check out the podcast. You have
to listen, especially if you know you're sitting there and
curious about which animals will eat their own kind, because
you'll learn. You will learn some things you cannot unlearn.
You're welcome, Thanks again, and I hope you have a
great day.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Thanks you too, Thanks very much. Well.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
I hope all of you enjoyed that conversation I had
with Daniel and Kelly of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
You should definitely check out that podcast. Like I said,
it's fascinating stuff. They tackle all things science. They've had
some great guests on as well to talk about stuff
like quantum computing. They really take these complicated topics and
break them down in ways that are really accessible and
(48:01):
fun and exciting. And it's the sort of stuff I
always aspire to do. I hope that on occasion I
achieve that. Based upon some of the wonderful messages I've
been getting from listeners who have reached out to express
how how much they appreciate the show, it feels like
once in a while I hit that target, which is
a great feeling. I hope all of you out there
(48:22):
are doing well. If you are here in the United States,
happy Thanksgiving. I hope you have a wonderful, safe time
with their loved ones nearby. For everyone else around the world,
have a great week. You know, if you want to
participate in Thanksgiving on kind of a metaphorical level, just
pour some gravy down your throat and be thankful. That's
(48:44):
what I do every year, Tari can attest. She says
it's disturbing and that if I do it again in
front of her, she's going to hr Well, have a
great week, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(49:08):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeart Podcast And how the tech
are you? Yes, I am excited. That is why I
had the crazy high energy introduction for this episode. That's
(00:24):
because I have two phenomenal guests on today's episode. They
are the hosts of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. There
are two brilliant scientists here to talk science and tech
and depictions of science and popular media and how they
always get at one hundred percent right all the time.
(00:46):
It's Daniel and it's Kelly. Welcome to Tech Stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Thanks very much, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
I wish you could call me every day to cheer
me up with with you know, a nice introduction just
like that.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Oh, I'd be happy too, I'd be happy to My
rates are very and pretty soon I'm going to be
looking for a gig. I don't know if you have
heard this, but I'm actually stepping away from hosting tech
Stuff in the new year.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Oh what are you going to do instead?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
There's a giant, cloudy question mark in my near future. Actually,
I will be my listeners know that I'm stepping away.
I did an episode talking about it. But yeah, I've
been hosting Tech Stuff for sixteen and a half years.
I've got more than twenty three hundred episodes under my belt,
and I thought it was time for someone else to
talk about tech for a while, and so I'm stepping
(01:31):
back in early January, and I will be focusing on
executive producer duties moving forward, potentially hosting the occasional episode
and or show in the future. Nothing is set in stone,
but I'm excited to be able to kind of shift
some gears.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Happy retirement, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
I mean, I'll still be working like a crazy person,
it just won't be I just won't be creating three
episodes a week. But I'm so glad to have you here. Daniel,
Welcome back to the show. I don't know if you remember,
but years ago you did a little guest appearance on
Tech Stuff, And I'm sure you don't remember this, but
I do because it's an important moment in my life.
You name me an honorary engineer in that episode, and
(02:10):
I've been holding onto that title like with a death
grip ever since.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
He hasn't given me that title.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, I'm not sure that title is something you should
be proud of. You know, scientists and engineers are usually
sort of, you know, tooth and nail against each other,
so I'm not sure I meant that in a.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Positive pay Oh, that's fair, that's fair. I think we
were chatting about how I think of engineers as people
who view the world as a series of problems that
need to be solved, and by the end of it
you said I was an honorary engineer, which made sense
because I do have an Android phone, and I feel
like that's a device made by engineers for engineers.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
That's like sixty percent of it.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Like the iPhone is incredibly intuitive
and the Android is it does stuff.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
So yeah, well my engineer dad has an Android, so
that's totally consistent.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
It tracks right, Like, well, there we go. That's not
confirmation by us or anything. We're just going to go
with that. Yes, So here on tech stuff, we have
this kind of underlying philosophy which does not directly relate
to tech. It relates to the direction of the show,
which is I say, it's a combination of creative thinking approach,
it's compassion, and it's critical thinking, and I'm curious if
(03:21):
you think of a similar philosophy for your show.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I think our show is all about curiosity and excitement
because we viewed the whole universe as like a big mystery.
That because we viewed the whole universe as like a
big mystery to unravel, and every new little piece of
truth that we pry away at, the truth minds. You know,
where we go to work every day is an exciting discovery.
It's always fantastic. Whatever the universe chooses to reveal to us,
(03:47):
it's always amazing.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah, I think enthusiasm is huge. We're really excited about
the information we've managed to extract from the Earth and
all the cool stuff that's left to figure out.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Yeah. I've been listening to your show and I just
want to say I also want to congratulate you on
your incredible sense of timing because we're heading up to
Thanksgiving and then the most recent episode I listened to
was all about cannibalism, and I just felt that you
you really you planned those thematic shows really well.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, you know, we put a lot of thought into
each episode, and we do have a like an actual
Thanksgiving episode coming out on Thanksgiving where we Daniel. So
Daniel talks about cannibalism a lot, even though he's not
the biologist. Did you manage to get a reference to
cannibalism into that episode a bit?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Absolutely? Yes, Okay, cannibalism and aliens. I always got to
work those two angles into every episode somehow.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yeah, So it's enthusiasm, creativity, cannibalism, aliens. That's what our podcasts.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Is kind of amazing that you didn't name the show
What's Eating You.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
I had a paper published called What's Gotten Into You,
and it was all about how parasites changed behavior. But
I guess it's not What's Eating You, but it's it
was What's Gotten into You? Anyway, it was I felt
very good about that time well.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
And that was kind of like one of the things
that sort of was the genesis of my idea for
this episode was that talk about you know, your work
in science and then how you view the media depiction
of science. You know, I'm sure there's like part of
you correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure there's
part of you that just appreciates. Oh well, obviously they
had to do this for the narrative to work, like
(05:20):
this is a storytelling convention, it's required. They're not presenting
this as if it's hard science. And so therefore, if
they do the Arthur C. Clark thing where they just
use science as a way to stand in for magic,
that's okay. And then there's probably part of you that's like, cush,
darn it, that's not what particle accelerators do. And I
wish they would stop because people are getting the wrong idea. So, Kelly,
(05:44):
one of the ones I mentioned to you was there's
the show The Last of Us, which actually they did
a fairly decent job in talking about how the fungal
parasites that can affect insects and control them and their
behavior to some extent, how that really wouldn't trate to
more complex life forms. They actually go so far as
to say that in the intro, so they lampshaded it
(06:06):
quite a bit, right, They said, this is not really possible,
and yet hear it happened in the show, which of
course dates back to the actual video game that inspired
that series. So when you see things like that, like,
what's your reaction having actually written about these kinds of
parasites that do alter behaviors?
Speaker 3 (06:25):
My philosophy in general is that you know fiction is
it just it's a totally different thing. And as long
as they create worlds that are consistent and then they
stick with the rules that they've made for their world,
I'm cool with that. The only thing that gets me
grumpy is when people like change their rules halfway through.
Like I hated Lost because it was like I thought
we were in the real world and now there's like
smoke monsters and like, yeah, anyway, so I thought the
(06:47):
Last of Us was great.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Oh gosh, I have a feeling that you and I
would have some of the best post viewing coffee sessions
for various shows and movies, because you have hit upon
one of my most passionate topics, which is consistency and rules.
As much as as I enjoyed the Buffy the Vampire
Slayer television show when it first aired, I got consistently
(07:10):
more upset with that show as it went on, as
I felt that it was violating the rules that it
itself had set up in previous seasons. And meanwhile, all
my friends were Buffy fans, were like, why are you
so upset about this? I'm like, it's the easiest thing
in the world to be consistent. You have to go
out of your way to be inconsistent.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
We should get together for coffee because you know, I
feel like often the you need to be consistent about
the rules. People like aren't the first one to invite
to the parties, right, so we have to stick together.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yes, we're the ones that somehow get overlooked when the
invitations go out. I don't understand it either.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
It's not a fair world we live in.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
It is not.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
And you know, if you're watching like a murder mystery,
everybody expects you to follow the rules, right, Like if
there was a clue laid in act one, you expect
that to still be relevant in act three. But somehow
if it's science fiction and like, hey, we could just
those rules out the window. You know, let's be fair
about the standards we apply.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yes, absolutely, same thing's true for horror movies. By the way,
if your horror movie is predicated upon information purposefully withheld
from the audience, and you can't expect me to be
wold when you have your big reveal, you need to
set that stuff up in subtle ways that I don't
pick up on, but then can appreciate at the end. Yes, amen,
I say that as someone who just watched the horror
(08:24):
movie this past weekend, and I was like, Oh, that's
that's not Chekhov's gun, but that is Chekhov's wooden plank
with nails sticking out of it. People who have seen
it now know what I'm talking about. Daniel, like, same
sort of thing for you. I mean, you've obviously worked
on some of the most famous particle physics projects in
the world, and not only have we seen interesting depictions
(08:45):
of that in fiction media, but obviously the news media
had all sorts of speculation as to what was going
to happen once the large Hadron collider was operating at
full power. People may not remember that, but there were
so many stories about everything from time traveling, conspiracy theories
involving birds dropping twigs down ventilation shafts, to some sort
(09:09):
of message from the future being sent back saying, for
the love of all that's holy, don't turn it on.
What was your reaction as all this was unfolding.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
I thought it was sort of amazing and hilarious, but
also terrifying. I mean, it's always fun to see your
own work depicted in the popular media, and you know,
Stephen Colbert when he was still on The Daily Show,
did a whole bit about whether we should turn on
the LEDC and understanding and probability and you know, it's
not safe for work, but people should definitely go check
that out because it's really fun. But it's also a
(09:41):
little terrifying to see these concepts that you've worked on,
these projects that you're passionate about, sort of leave your
control and enter the broader cultural conversation where you don't
really necessarily have a voice to combat the misinformation. And
there's a lot of well meaning misinformation out there, people
who try to cover this stuff and just don't get
the details right. And I don't have, or it didn't
(10:04):
at the time, at least have a platform to be like, hey, actually,
this is how it works, and I don't want to
throw cold water on your ideas because the reality is
much more interesting and fascinating, right. That's the thing that
frustrates me is when they get the story wrong, but
the real story is even more exciting. It's even more
clickbaity than the misconceptions.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
When you reach a certain level with science, obviously, it
gets to a point where there is no easy way
to communicate the topic to a general audience. You're either
going to have to spend an an ordinate amount of
time setting it up and building upon a foundation and
hoping that your audience stays with you for the entirety
of that, or you run the risk of oversimplifying, hoping
(10:48):
that they get the gist of it, knowing that you're
going to be leaving out some important nuance that it
really is needed to have a full understanding of or
even a working understanding of the topic. That's something that
I struggle with all the time on tech stuff, right, Like,
there are tech topics that are really complex, and how
(11:09):
do you approach discussing this in a way that is
I think responsible, so that your audience has an understanding.
And of course I always advocate that people look into things,
read up more about them if they're interested, to do
more exploration, because there's only so much I can say
in an hour long episode. But you know that still
(11:30):
weighs on me. That being said, sometimes there are layups
out there where you'll see something portrayed and you'll just say, well,
that's just wrong, that's just wrong. It's not even remotely
in the realm of possibility. I'm reminded. I wish I
could remember which procedural it was. It was one of
those cop procedural shows where there's always something about hacking.
(11:51):
So there was a scene where there are two characters
simultaneously typing on the same keyboard while trying to counteract
to hacker who's trying to get into a system. And
I thought, in one world, can a keyboard accept two
separate forms of input at the same time and haven't
mean anything. It would just be like me just smashing
(12:12):
my hands randomly on keys. This makes no sense. I'm like,
it couldn't have made sense when they shot it. Did
they do this on purpose? As like a wind up?
So there are moments like that that stand out as.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
A parasitologist, as person who studies parasites. There was an
episode of Grey's Anatomy where someone had neurosistas yorcosis. So
it's this big fluid filled sack filled with tapeworms in
your brains that causes nervous system problems. Yeah, and it's
a very delicate procedure to remove that sack because if
it breaks, you have this crazy like neuroimmune response to
the sack and it's really bad. But they pulled it
out in the reveal it was a nematode, and all right,
(12:46):
so I get upset. No one else would care. That's
a totally different phylum than the actual parasite that causes
the problem. But it was like a squiggly worm that
fell back in and they were like reaching around trying
to get it, and I'm like, you're screwing up the
brain and like, actually it's a sack. It's not a
like the little nematode. Anyway, I was Everything was wrong
about that. That kept me up at night.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
See now that makes me think of the Adventures of
Buckaroo Bonzai where there's a moment early in that film
where Buckaroo Bonzi, who is a rocket scientist neurosurgeon rock
star wow. Peter Weller played him. Fantastic, Very slow movie
nineteen eighties science fiction movie. John Lithgal plays a crazy
alien in it. If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching.
(13:26):
But it is slow paced and convoluted.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
You're not selling it well.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
I have to warn because I introduced a friend of mine,
a millennial, to this film, and she was like, that
was the slowest, most confusing science fiction film I've ever seen.
I'm like, there's a rock star neuroscientist, rocket scientist, race
car driver as the main character. How could you not
love it? But there's a moment where they're doing brain
surgery where that character says to his surgical assistant, no, no, no,
(13:55):
don't pull on that. You don't know what's connected to Like, okay, Well,
that seems realistic to me. That seems like realistic depiction
of brain surgery. I think I'm okay with that, Daniel.
Are there any like depictions that you have seen that
kind of stand out in your your mind? As this
might have been a very creative way to tell a story,
but it was a terrible way to leverage actual science
that you are familiar with.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Well, I have a lot of respect for science fiction authors,
and I get what they're going for. Often they read
some new idea or they hear an explanation, and then
inspire some story they imagine that they could tell only
in some alternative universe. And with Kelly, I agree, like,
it doesn't have to follow the rules of our universe
as long as they are consistent about it. But the
thing that does frustrate me is that I think it
(14:38):
is possible for a lot of folks out there to
understand the subtle nuances of the science as long as
it's explained well and on our show at least, we
really believe that the science can be communicated clearly and effectively,
that it's possible for people to really get these things.
I think there's a lot of folks out there who
really love science and maybe wanted to do it, but
something happened in their life they didn't end up being
(15:00):
a scientist, and so they want to stay up on
the details and they want to hear more than just like,
here's the pop size story. You've heard a lot about
quantum mechanics and entanglement and to really have it connect
for them, and that's what we try to do on
the show. But to directly answer your question, one of
the things that sort of grinds my gears a lot
is when people use like two entangled particles to communicate
(15:21):
faster than light. And you know, you hear this in
pop science all the time, and there are subtle nuances there,
like there is something happening faster than light when two
entangled particles collapse. But you can't use it to send
messages across the stars, as much as I wish you could.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Right right that whole concept of the entangled particles. Usually
we're talking about something like spin particle spin. So if
one's spinning up, the other one's spinning down, and they're
entangled together, and no matter how far apart you separate
these two particles until the system collapses, until that entanglement breaks,
then you're still going to have one spinning up, one
(15:58):
spinning down. There'll always be in that connect. But then
once you observe it all breaks down and that connection
is severed and you can't do anything useful with it. Yeah,
we've used that discussion when talking about things like quantum computers,
when talking about entanglement and superposition and all these really
interesting ideas. I'm fascinated with the methods people have created
(16:19):
to try and take advantage of these quantum effects. And
to me, like, that's one of those areas where I
definitely run up against the barriers of my ignorance. Right,
I understand up to a point, and then after that
I'm like, WHOA, Okay, there was a leap made here
(16:40):
that I can't follow, and I from a kind of
like a high level concept I can understand, but it's
so counterintuitive based upon just my day to day experience
with physics on the macro level, that you might as
well be describing a magic spell to me, because it's
so it's so unusual. I mean, I can see why
(17:01):
Einstein would call it spooky action at a distance, right
like it's it seems like it doesn't make any any
real sense.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
And that's the incredible thing about the universe, right it
is this bizarre mystery. It seems like it doesn't make sense.
And yet over the years and the decades and the centuries,
we have slowly chipped away at the truth and always
found some explanation. And that explanation is often not what
we expected, not what we thought it was going to be,
and mind blowing when we understand it. But amazingly it
is possible to understand this universe like we have no
(17:30):
guarantee of that. It could be that eventually the universe
runs on some systems, some mathematics that are beyond our comprehension,
but so far we've always been able with our puny
little ape brains to figure it out.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
But for some of this stuff, we're still in the
process of trying to understand it. And so, you know, you
were saying that you get to a point where you're like, oh,
my brain just can't make that leap. While talking to Daniel,
I've learned that a lot of the places where I
was like, oh, my brain can't make that leap. When
I talked to Daniel, He's like, oh, we just we
don't know why that happens yet, and I'm like, no,
we just hit against everyone's under standing there. And so,
you know, I think that's a great thing about science
(18:03):
if it's explained well, you can let people know that, like, no,
we're all we all get a wall.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Eventually, we'll be back in just a moment to talk
more about science and science, depictions of media, and who
knows what else with Daniel and Kelly after these messages.
(18:26):
When I used to write for How Stuff Works, there
was a point where I was given the assignment of
how string theory works. So I was I was diving
into everything string theory. And I'm an English Lit major, y'all.
My major was in Shakespeare, and I can rattle Shakespeare
off like nobody's business. But you asked me to describe
string theory, and we got ourselves a problem.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
I want to hear a sonnet about string theory.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
You know what? Give me a week and I'll have
it for you. I'm assuming you mean Shakespearean not Edwardians,
because you're Spencerian. Okay, good, I can do that. I'm
an expert at Shakespearean's on It's excellent. I remember distinctly
I watched a I think it was a Nova special
about string theory, and I'm taking notes and I mean,
(19:13):
I've got like like seven eight pages of handwritten notes
and I'm just sweating bullets watching this and everyone's really
a great communicator on that special. And it gets to
one point where one of the experts is being interviewed
and he says, yeah, I think this is the point
where I just have to admit I don't understand how
it works. I just know that this is what the
math says. And I'm like, oh my gosh, if you
don't know, what hope is there for me? But that,
(19:37):
to me is fascinating. It's one of the reasons why,
by the way, I love doing a tech podcast is
that technology is science manifest into devices and gadgets, and
it's proof that science works, right because if science didn't work,
the tech wouldn't work. So I've always pointed at like
we are constantly surrounded by proof that the scientific approach works,
(20:03):
because otherwise the things that we come in contact with
on a minute by minute basis wouldn't function absolutely.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
What gets me about a lot of tech, though, is
that it works, but the science we don't always even
know why it works. I was talking to someone who
does deep brain stimulation, so like the essentially, you know,
electrocute the center of your brain to try to stop
the electrical storms that cause seizures. And I asked her,
I was like, why does like putting electrical circuits through
someone's brain stop it? And they're like, we don't know,
(20:32):
but it's great that it works. And I was like, wow,
So I mean sometimes just because engineering works doesn't mean
we understand it at the level that we'd like to.
But it's great that it works.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, that's true. Yeah, there are lots of examples of that. Like,
it's to me, it's interesting that we have great stories
going in both directions, right. We have the stories of
the people who were real innovators, really phenomenal. They thought
outside the box. You know, they're probably building upon work
that previous generations had done, but they've done something themselves
(21:03):
that has transformed thinking in some way and has really
pushed science forward. So the person I love to talk about,
and I was actually just chatting about this with my
producer the other day, Ada Lovelace. You know Lord Byron's daughter.
Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage, who built the Decision Machine,
the Decision Engine, and she was one of the first people,
(21:25):
probably the first person that I know of, who came
up with the concept of what if we took things
like pictures or music and we converted that into mathematical statements,
and then we used a machine like this to process that.
We could create art, we could create music, we could
alter existing pieces. And so she was essentially talking about
(21:47):
computer programming, you know, generations before anyone else would even
be able to do this, and the fact that she
was able to ideate around that without there being any
lead up, Like, as far as I can tell, she
just sort of had a Eureka moment. And those are
so rare, Like it's easy for us to point at
things and say, this is the inventor of such and such,
(22:08):
but when you look into it, you're like, oh, actually
they were iterating on previous generations of stuff. But as
far as I can tell, This is like Ada Lovelace
coming up with a truly novel idea. And that's one
of the things I love most about podcasting is finding
those stories, as well as the ones where someone's like, yeah,
we didn't know if it would work, and we tried
it and we work. We don't know why it works,
(22:29):
but it does seem to work. So we'll figure out
the why someday maybe, but for now, the fact that
it works is important enough.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah, and it really highlights the human side of science.
You know, I feel like there's a sandwich there. People
feel like, oh, science, maybe it's sort of like a
sterile or it's intellectual, or it's bigger than people, but
you know, it really exists only in a human context,
both because of the philosophical side of it, like you're
talking about, Oh, we understand the math, but what does
(22:57):
this really mean? Right? We always want to understand signs
in terms of a story, like what is this telling
us about how the universe works? About what is real?
But then also on the other side of it, like
what does it mean for humans to live? How does
this technology change our lives? How does it change what
it's like to be a human in the world? What
does it let us do? What kind of lives can
we lead that we couldn't lead before? I mean, there's
(23:19):
human stories everywhere on both sides of it, from the
philosophy to the engineering.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of that too right now.
Just a lot of overt discussion about that with the
explosion of generative AI, which some people are now saying
like we might be hitting like peak AI for at
least the time being, not that it won't go any higher,
but that the level of evolution may be slowing down
a bit as we're kind of hitting the limits of
(23:45):
what large language models can do.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Oh my gosh, can I rant about that? For am
a lead? Because I see people saying like, let's spend
a trillion dollars and build a huge, large language model
because it will solve physics. And I'm like, you know what,
let's spend a trillion dollars on human physics first and
try that, because trust me, if we spend that much
money on physics, we could probably bigen the thing out.
(24:07):
Like why do we need to dumb do an AI?
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I've got very strong my listeners know I don't need
to go on another rant for my listeners but I
have very strong feelings about generative AI. I don't think
it's a inherently bad technology. I mean, it's again going
back to Shakespeare, there's nothing either good nor bad, but
thinking makes it. So this is what AI. You've got
artificial thinking. But I have a lot of strong opinions
(24:31):
on it. I even did an episode of tech Stuff
where I titled it. This episode was written by AI
open bracket, sort of in bracket. And what I did was,
I had I had that do an episode like, I
gave it a prompt chat GPT is what I used.
I gave it a prompt, I told it to make
an episode of tech stuff, and so it had me
(24:55):
inserted in there.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
And the thing that I found the most distressed First,
it got stuff wrong, which is bad, right, But I'm like, well,
I get stuff wrong too, sometimes I'm human. It does happen.
But the thing that upset me was it invented experts
to deliver points of data. So it was as if
I had interviewed I think it was three or four
(25:17):
different people in the transcript that it printed, but none
of those people even exist, let alone. I never spoke
to anyone obviously, but they don't even exist. There were
these names and they were given titles and given a
position at places. So I tried to verify it. Not
a single person existed, And I thought, you're inventing quotes,
(25:38):
and then you're attributing those invented quotes to invented people,
and you're presenting it without any indication that these are inventions.
I mean, this is where we get into you know,
confabulations or hallucinations with AI, and to me, that immediately
sets off enormous alarms, which is why I would not
want to entrust using large language model based generative AI
(26:01):
to tackle the greatest problems in physics, because ultimately you
don't know at what point it's just creating the statistically
likely sentence, right Like, it's just statistically choosing words to
create grammatically correct sentences, and there's no regard as to
whether or not there's truth in there.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yeah. We wrote a book about living in space and
we had a chapter on food and space, and we
thought we had found all the books on food and space.
And after the book came out, we were on chat
GPT and we were like, tell us the ten books
about food and space, and it popped out ten because
we had asked for ten and some of them were
books we had, and the rest we were like, oh,
how did we miss these books? And we looked them
up and they didn't exist. And just like you said,
(26:46):
we asked, like, well, tell us more about the person
who wrote this book that doesn't seem to exist, and
they gave them a bio, they gave them affiliations. And
these hallucinations are really scary if you're going to rely
on it for research.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, nobody I ever should rely on it
for research. It's not a research tool, right, Yeah. It
generates the facsimile of research. It doesn't do any research,
doesn't do any thinking. There's no reasoning there, and sometimes
that's very useful for research. I use Genai in my
research all the time because it's very good at generating examples,
and sometimes you need something which can rapidly generate examples.
(27:20):
But you have to know exactly what you're asking to do, yeah,
because it can't think.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Yeah. I've used it to create like a bullet point
of a bullet list of summary points from like really
long articles, and then I went back and checked to
make sure that what it was creating was reflected in
the articles, and in that case, at least that specific case,
it was whether or not that's ninety nine times out
of one hundred or one hundred times out of one hundred.
I can't say. In my one use case, which is
(27:46):
a terribly small sample size, it did work out. But
I am not naive enough to suggest that that means
it's going to work every single time you use it.
But yeah, same sort of thing. I've used it a
couple of times for the purposes of like organizing thoughts,
that kind of thing, because otherwise I get, as you
can probably tell from this episode, real Lucy Goosey with
my approach, my approach to podcasting.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Well, fundamentally, I think that humans have to play a
role in science because science is a human thing. It's
like by people and for people. Right, we have questions
we want answers to and then we want those answers
to make sense to us. So it doesn't make any
sense to me to take humans out of that equation,
you know, to say it to an AI like go
figure out the universe, Like I want to understand the universe,
(28:32):
and it has to make sense to me and it
has to answer my questions. So humanity is an important
part of science.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
What if it answered the question and explained it to
you clearly, why would it not be okay that AI
got the answer.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
It would be fine if AI found the answer, but
it's I got to ask the questions and I have
to be satisfied with the answer.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
I would like to refer both of you to the
great nonfiction work of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
in which we create an incredibly colligent computer that tells
us the answer to life, the universe, and everything is
forty two, and then spends the next eternity trying to
figure out what the question is.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
But that seems exactly like what you were talking about there,
Daniel is like, we don't want to create a world
that is ideal for AI. We want to make sure
that we continue to work on a world that's ideal
for humans, which involves making some tough choices like maybe
not using so much AI that's incredibly hungry for all
the electricity, and maybe maybe going down that pathway is
(29:31):
not the most productive. So, Kelly, I'm curious. I'm sure
you must have read and or seen The Martian. Oh yeah,
what's your take?
Speaker 3 (29:40):
On that.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
I'm curious because I remember when I read it, I thought,
this feels like it's fairly realistic, maybe with a couple
of caveats.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, I think it's fairly realistic with a couple of caveats.
And again, like I think, the rules are what matters,
and he was very andy. Weir was very consistent with
the rules of the world we created. So mars Is
atmosphere is one percent of Earth's. That's enough to support
dust storms that engulf the entire planets, but it's probably
not enough to knock over their giant rocket because one
percent atmosphere is just not enough. And that's the premise
(30:11):
that sets up the whole movie. Yep. And additionally, Mark
Wattney is growing potatoes in soil and his own feces. Yes, Martian,
it's called regolith.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
That dirt on the surface is laced with prochlorates, which
are endocrine disrupting hormones that mess up your metabolism. So
if he had been growing his potatoes directly in there,
he would have been massively poisoning himself. In addition, all
the like fecal material he had in there that he'd
have to be careful to clean up.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
Wow, Yeah, I didn't know that part. I know that
NASA has been using simulacrums of regolith in order to
do experimentation about what could or could not be grown
on the surface of Mars. That part I knew, but
I didn't know about the potential for really messing up
your system. Yeah. I agree that, Like the thin atmosphere
(30:58):
was one of those things that kind of tripped me up.
Another was, and I'm sure it was explained in the book,
and it's been a long time since I've read the book.
I've seen the movie more recently, but the concept of
a short term Martian expedition made no sense to me,
simply because to have the planets line up properly so
that you can make the journey with the least amount
of fuel needed to do it, you would, in my understanding,
(31:21):
need to kind of be ready for like a two
year stay on the planet before you could try and
make your trip back home. At least in the film version,
it felt like it was supposed to be like, oh,
this is a mission that lasts maybe a month and
a half and then we head back and I'm like, well,
how does that work? How much fuel are you bringing
with you or is this a nuclear powered rocket? What's
(31:42):
going on? So that was one of those things that
tripped me up to But yeah, the windstorm, that was
another one where you would need to be able to
go out and clean the solar panels, clear them of
dust and all that. But it wouldn't be enough to
maybe drive a big metal shard through someone's suit into
their body the way it does near the beginning of
(32:03):
the story.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah, or knock over that rocket, which, yeah, which was
part of the rocket. Yeah, and Daniel would be very
happy that they included cannibalism in there. That was really important.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, I'm glad that we can stick on topic. I
didn't think of any Italian cannibal horror movies that I
could add into the discussion here. Also, it would be
terrifying to find out that you had watched those. But
Daniel and Kelly have a lot more to say as
we talk all things science and geekiness. And I'm absolutely
(32:39):
loving every second of this. But first let's take a
quick break to thank our sponsors. Let me ask you this,
out of all the topics you've covered so far on
your show, are there any standouts of things that were
just either delight or surprising to you are just you
(33:02):
were really eager to sink your teeth into when you
were going to communicate those to your audience.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
From my point of view, I like to drill down
into the basics, and because I think that people are
curious about the universe and have pretty simple questions that
they want answers to, questions like what is space? Or
how does time work? Or like what is everything made
out of? And all of the answer in the end,
the disappoint Kelly is almost always like, well, we know
(33:29):
up to hear, and then we have questions. I think
it's worthwhile to bring people up to that point of
understanding of these really basic questions that remain, because I
think a lot of times people get the impression that
science has progressed so far and we've basically figured it out.
It's just like a couple of details remaining. But there's
like very basic, vast questions about the universe we don't
have simple answers to, and I think it's totally fun
(33:52):
and very worthwhile to explain those to people in a
way they can really get.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
I think it's hard to pick a favorite, you know,
like it's hard to pick a favorite child. We've interviewed
these episodes haven't come out yet, but we interviewed James
sa Corey, so the guys who wrote the expanse and
Mary Roach and I love all of those people, and
podcasting is a great opportunity to reach out to amazing
people and ask them to talk to you for an hour.
So that was great, but I really all also have
(34:18):
enjoyed the episodes on space and time because Daniel is
really good at explaining things and I really love learning
about stuff that I don't already know. And physics. I
took physics in college. I did fine, but I definitely
studied to get an A on the test and then
forget it immediately afterwards. Yeah, and I know, sorry, there's
a lot of stuff I didn't understand, and it feels
good to have like professionals say okay, we've reached the
(34:40):
end of what we understand and be like, oh okay,
I can follow it up until the edge, and like, anyway,
I've learned a lot and it's been fun.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
That's cool. Yeah. So both my parents are science fiction authors,
so yeah, so I grew up going to science fiction
conventions being around other authors as well as science can
meet indicators and stuff. I had a really fortunate childhood
in that way, and I keep thinking one of my
missed opportunities is I never had my dad on the podcast.
I could still ask him if he'd want to do it,
(35:09):
because I would love to have a conversation about things
that science fiction authors predicted that ultimately came to pass.
So Arthur C. Clark is obviously a big example with
geostationary satellites, and you know, you have Isaac Asimov and
the laws of robotics and things of that nature. My dad, famously,
in my mind anyway, made an incredible prediction. He predicted
(35:32):
the existence of Teddy Ruxman.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Oh nice, Yeah, I loved Teddy Ruxman.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
And he also predicted commercials that do not, upon first glance,
tell you what the heck they're advertising. He called it
the oblique cell, but that was in his fantasy novel anyway.
It just makes your discussion there just made me think
about that as well. I love how people can take
(35:58):
inspiration from not just the observations they make, but from
fiction as well and say like, well, well, there's no
reason why that shouldn't work if we just figure some
things out and then work toward that. Now, obviously it
doesn't work for everything. Like my own personal opinion with
Star Trek is that if you were to use a transporter,
you're committing suicide and you're just creating a copy of
yourself somewhere else. And that's not really you. It's someone
(36:21):
else who has all your thoughts and beliefs and everything,
but you are. You're dead, and that's a copy. And
so I'm a bones McCoy kind of guy when it
comes to the transporter.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
I do ask that question every time we interview a
sci fi person on our show.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Oh, is the transporter just killing you? Yeah? Yeah, I'm
fully on board with the transporters killing you.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
I'm but would you step into one knowing that it's
going to kill you and then it's going to be
another version of you on the other side.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
No, I'm too egotistical. I require this version of my
ego to continue and not a perfect copy. First of all,
I don't want there to be a perfect copy of
me out there. I got enough competition out there as
it is. No, I don't think I could. And maybe
if we were talking about distances that are beyond what
(37:10):
we can conveniently travel today, and like, yeah you can,
you can hop on over. We've colonized a planet that's
you know, twenty light years away. There's no way you're
going to get there. Otherwise, like, well, had a good
run here, Jonathan two point zero can take it from
here and make a new life on Earth two or whatever.
(37:34):
Are there Are there any particular thing, you know, sources
of inspiration that got you both or either of you
interested in pursuing a career in science, Like was there
was there someone or something that you know, you thought, well,
this is this is what makes I want to do,
whether it was directly in your field or maybe even
(37:54):
an unrelated field of science.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Well, like many people, I was inspired by Well, like
many people, I was inspired by my high school physics teacher.
I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, so there's
lots of physicists around, and one of them came to
teach our ap physics class in the morning before he
went to work at the lab, and he seemed to
be having a lot of fun and he was a
great teacher. And you know, I just want to say
(38:16):
thank you to all the science teachers out there in
high school working on the front lines, because They're literally
responsible for creating the next generation of scientists. Huge fraction
of the scientists I know were inspired to enter their
field chemistry or biology or whatever because of their high
school science teacher. It's such an important job.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
I really liked the show er, and so I really
wanted to be an er surgeon. And then I talked
to an er surgeon who was like, actually, most of
your day is really boring. It's nowhere near as exciting.
You're like waiting for someone to come in so you
can like stitch their hand because they like cut it
on the side of their car or something. And then
I thought maybe i'd be a veterinarian, but then I'd
still have to deal with people, and I turns out
(39:00):
I feel okay about people. But but then I like,
I had an overwhelming course load, and so I was like,
I'm gonna take ecology as an easy a because it's
like hippies playing in the woods. And it turned out
that they were using all of these like elegant equations
to describe the behavior of the animals interacting with each other,
and I was like, this is actually rigorous, and these
(39:21):
people are spending like their whole lives outside collecting these
data and then they get to think about what's happening outside.
And like, I fell in love with ecology in that class,
and so that easy a totally like derailed my financial
future and I went into science instead.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
But you became a rigorous hippie in the woods.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
I did, Man, I love it out here and then
I but I thought that I was going to be
studying like lions in the Serengetti, and I applied to
all of those labs for grad school, and then I
ended up studying like their parent, whatever's happening in their guts.
Turns out that's what I'm most interested in. So I
like the creepy stuff.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
I guess that's the edge of all knowledge, right, that's
the biological dark matter for sure.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, I love it. I love these stories.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
What about you? How did you go from Shakespeare to
podcasting about tech?
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Okay, Yeah, that's a great question. For the first several
years of my professional career, I actually worked at a
human resources management consulting firm. So I like to say
I worked for the Bobs in office space, the two Bobs. Yeah.
More often than not, I was writing up reports about
why our consultants were recommending that a company layoff ten
(40:32):
percent of their employees. It was very demoralizing. I was
good at what I did. I hated my job. I
love the people I worked with, but I hated my job.
But I was good at it, and so I didn't
want to leave it. One of the consultants I worked for,
his name is frank Casa Grande, or Frankie big House
as I used to call him. Frankie big House. He's
from New Jersey. Came to me, He's like, John, John,
(40:54):
this isn't your passion, John, you got to get out
of here. You're killing yourself meant for bigger things. And
so it really sunk in. But I was so comfortable
that I did not leave that job until they got
rid of the position I was in. So I didn't
I wasn't fired. I just didn't have a job anymore.
The distinction was lost on me. I will be honest
(41:16):
with you. So then for for six months, I'm out
of work, trying to get a job, and I try
applying for writing gigs at different places around Atlanta, including
places like the Cartoon Network and Turner and CNN and
which are all the same company. But whatever, and ultimately
none of those pan out. I took another job at
a different consulting firm, which was soul crushing, and six
(41:39):
months after that, I one of the jobs I had
i'd interviewed for but I had not heard back from,
gets back to me, and it was HowStuffWorks dot Com.
So I come in, I interview with how stuffworks dot Com.
I get the job. I become one of two staff
writers at how stuffworks dot com, the other one Tracy Wilson,
who is currently a host of Stuff you missed in
(42:00):
history class. That's where the stuff and tech stuff comes from.
So I start writing articles. And my background in English
literature involved lots of research and lots of writing, and
so I was just applying that same skill set. But
now I got a chance to explore topics that I
often knew very little about. So I got to learn
(42:21):
and it was so exciting. It was like being in college,
but without all the pressures of college and all the
distractions of college. And I learned all about different things.
And then it was my job to explain what I
had learned to an audience and to synthesize that information
and communicate it outward. And I loved that too, and
it soon became clear that, unlike the other English majors
(42:45):
who joined the editorial department of HowStuffWorks dot com, I
was not afraid of technology. Everybody else we almost all
of us had attended the University of Georgia, almost all
of us had a degree in some form of English,
whether it was English Led or English whatever. But they
were all scared of tackling tech, and I wasn't because,
as I described to them, like tech either works or
(43:06):
it doesn't. It's it gets pretty simple when you get
to the macro level. It's when you dive into the
particulars where it can get a little intimidating. But I
found that those skills of being able to research a topic,
to find an understanding, and then to communicate that understanding
to an audience, that that tapped into a passion I
(43:27):
didn't even know I had. And so the podcast started
as an extension of the website and gave me even
more opportunity to not only communicate these these ideas about technology,
not just how it works, but how it impacts us
and how we change the tech. It also, most importantly
(43:47):
gave me an opportunity to make terrible puns. That's all
we really want to Yeah, getting paid to make terrible
puns and if you if you, if you position them
just you know, they had to hear it, and that's
the best.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Feeling.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Yeah, it is, it's great. It's like it's the only
thing I regret is that podcasting is a one way
communication medium and I can't hear the groans on the
other side, which is you know, that's what really nourishes
the soul in my opinion. But yeah, that's how it
all happened for me, and I have always had great
admiration for not just scientists, but science communicators who take
(44:26):
it very seriously, you know, learning and communicating and sort
of instilling that communication with the passion they have for
the process of learning. Like I think that's really what
it boils down to for me, is that I love
to learn. And I feel like a lot of scientists
that's kind of their core principle too. They just have
this love of learning. As you said at the beginning,
(44:48):
curiosity is one of those those guiding principles, and I
genuinely think that in order to live a fulfilling life,
you do have to maintain a sense of curiosity. Throughout.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
It sure helps.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
And it's what powers all of science.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
The reason that we get millions or billions of dollars
to build a collider is because people want to know
the answer to these questions, you know, And so I
think we have an obligation not just to do the
science and to try to understand the universe, but to
share the answers with everybody, because everybody deserves to know
what we do and don't know about particles and cannibals.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
All. Yeah, I don't think I find it. I think
one of the most distressing things I encounter is when
someone says, well, what good is that going to do me?
If you learn that, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's
like I'm talking to a different kind of creature because
I can't understand why the act of knowing isn't exciting
(45:45):
enough all on its own. Why you have to be like, okay,
but is that going to make my cell phone faster? Like,
first of all, we don't know what it'll do.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
That's yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Like, if you look back at all the technological advancements
that have been possible over the years, we didn't anticipate
most of those because we had no way of knowing.
I mean, certainly miniaturization alone was something no one had
thought about. Back in the twenties and thirties, everyone thought
computers were going to be the size of skyscrapers because
they had to be so like, don't worry about you know,
(46:18):
a specific benefit that you get beyond knowing knowing itself
as a benefit. And then on top of that, who
knows what else will be able to leverage from the
knowledge we uncover. So amen, yeah, yeah, so, gosh darn it.
Funded science, yes, please, yes, fund easy and obvious investment
(46:39):
in humanity and in our future.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
I don't understand why it's not a bipartisan thing, you know.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah, either do I I always I always don't. I
don't get why people will will portray science as somehow
having a political bias. That's not the way science works.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Daniel and Kelly, thank you so much for joining tech stuff.
This has been a lot of fun. I know it's
kind of an unhinged whirlwind episode, but I mean, I'm
coming up to the end of my run kind of
like all the safety measures are off as far as I'm.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
Concerned, the rails are off. That's the most fun. Thank you.
So much for having us on the show. This was
a blast.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
I recommend everyone go check out the podcast. You have
to listen, especially if you know you're sitting there and
curious about which animals will eat their own kind, because
you'll learn. You will learn some things you cannot unlearn.
You're welcome, Thanks again, and I hope you have a
great day.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Thanks you too, Thanks very much. Well.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
I hope all of you enjoyed that conversation I had
with Daniel and Kelly of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
You should definitely check out that podcast. Like I said,
it's fascinating stuff. They tackle all things science. They've had
some great guests on as well to talk about stuff
like quantum computing. They really take these complicated topics and
break them down in ways that are really accessible and
(48:01):
fun and exciting. And it's the sort of stuff I
always aspire to do. I hope that on occasion I
achieve that. Based upon some of the wonderful messages I've
been getting from listeners who have reached out to express
how how much they appreciate the show, it feels like
once in a while I hit that target, which is
a great feeling. I hope all of you out there
(48:22):
are doing well. If you are here in the United States,
happy Thanksgiving. I hope you have a wonderful, safe time
with their loved ones nearby. For everyone else around the world,
have a great week. You know, if you want to
participate in Thanksgiving on kind of a metaphorical level, just
pour some gravy down your throat and be thankful. That's
(48:44):
what I do every year, Tari can attest. She says
it's disturbing and that if I do it again in
front of her, she's going to hr Well, have a
great week, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(49:08):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
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