Transcript
[0:01] All right, here we are on The Post Show. So I don't know if any of you guys are paying attention to the whole Sam Bankman-Fried FTX thing that's going on. Did you know that PJ Vogt started up a new podcast?
Who? The guy from Reply All?
Nope. I have no idea who that is.
Oh. Well, he did a whole thing on cryptocurrencies and stuff.
It is called... Did you catch him? Good job.
I caught one. Caught one. Now he's dead.
The new podcast is called search engine. Is that what you've been listening to this last couple of days?
No, but he's done a whole bunch on it, including Sam Bankman-Fried.
Well, I mean, my feeling on cryptocurrencies hasn't changed in the many years since they started it.
I think it's been reinforced. If anything, but what was interesting was not, I mean, I can talk, what?
I'm just making faces at Shannon for rustling her, That's why I didn't say anything I just making faces.
[1:10] So I You're not allowed to have fun, Sorry So actually my mother what was interesting was I was having a conversation with somebody about this and they were mentioning how weirdly like they were advertising on like on what was Twitter at the time that they were just like popping Adderall and other amphetamines like candy and this person made a comment like you know you shouldn't be doing that stuff like.
[1:52] During work you do that for fun and my thing was, you know, we have not only an entire kind of industry, but we prop up countries because we want to have a steady supply of coffee.
And look, you can make coffee taste delicious, but that's not why we do it.
Coffee is, and you mentioned coffee earlier, coffee is just like a, it is a complete stimulant that we use to make sure that we can do the work that we need to do.
Or not kill people, in my case. And it is insane how much of our economy is dedicated to making sure that it's available and we have easy access to it.
[2:47] And there's a there's a portion of that of that that is dedicated to making it so it tastes good, So we can make it also taste good. But again, That ain't why we do it. No, that ain't why we're spending so much money It's not why starbucks and mcdonald's sell more coffee right in an hour than all of the good tasting coffee does in a year, How did you put starbucks and mcdonald's coffee together?
You know what why wouldn't you why wouldn't you I think is right Who's the second biggest coffee seller in the country if it's not McDonald's then I think it does probably the first, They might be, Wait, McDonald's coffee has You was for a while like the the best like go for the coffee though. You go.
[3:35] Did for a while that was McCafe. We branded it. I know. It's no longer trucker coffee. I think Starbucks overtook them, but like but before Starbucks, McDonald's coffee was kind of nationwide something that people, Kind of were attracted to like that. It was a consistent not bad, It was always fresh. Yeah sure. It was definitely fresh, but.
[4:05] It's not great coffee by any means, but it's but it's not terrible what you get if you went to a gas station, Or you had it work because nobody.
[4:21] Back from disaster Yeah I moved my laptop and I had a loose plug over there and it was really loud when the soundboard went out. Yeah, and, I was gonna search about like who the biggest coffees retailers are in the country and.
[4:39] Caused disaster. So yeah, well, they shouldn't care then So one thing that's interesting about these dice that I'm looking at is so like on a you notice Especially the six-sided died that the op this both the opposite should add to seven, right?
So on one side is the one the other side is the six. Yeah Five and two and that's traditional, I didn't notice that. Well, I didn't look at them as closely.
If you look at any die, any like six-sided die, you'll notice that.
And that's traditional for most dies. Like, for example, on this, eight-sided die, the eight and the one are opposite, and the three and the six are opposite, so they're all going to add to nine.
On these other ones, though, that doesn't quite follow through, There's not really a way to do that, like the 5 and the 4 are opposite on this one.
And on the, this is the 7-sided die, so like on the opposite side of the 3 is the 2, and on the other side of the 6 is the 1.
So it's interesting, right, I mean, I assume that they're writing that this is as fair as possible, but it's interesting that that's how they had to do it.
Yeah.
[6:03] Like for example on this is the night side is on the nine the opposite of the nine and the eights are flat, and the rest of it is, So we have a four to three opposite. We have a two and well, this one's hard to do opposite because it's yeah, Yeah, it's not really even an opposite, Yeah, I mean, The two-sided though It totally checks out on the opposite of the one is a tune, I Do remember that the ten-sided die, yeah, okay said it has I died ten and one the opposite and, eight eight and nine or Hmm.
[6:54] Just something just something I've searched for like the largest coffee retailers and sellers and things like that, Starbucks is number one McDonald's isn't coming up in any of the lists. I'm not surprised I mean, I don't think like...
Because it's not a snobby coffee. If you went back to 1980, like, what would it look like?
Well, I'm wondering, are they not in the list because they don't, weren't being in the list?
No, yeah. Or these lists are just like coffee places.
Dunkin' is by far the number two. Absolutely.
I knew it, I called that when... I mean, just by being in Boston, if you, there's a Dunkin' every, every single corner of every... Yeah.
[7:37] Think it's the fact that The McDonald's isn't a coffee house. It's right But if you added up the coffee that they sell would they be on the list? I, Don't think so. No, no, I Don't think anymore. No, but I think they would have been I mean remember the big hot coffee lawsuit that you know, Yeah, and that was, Still at the time, I think McDonald's coffee was pretty thought of pretty highly.
See, I was thinking more of since they did McCafe and do do do do do.
Yeah, well, I think they try to, you know, they've lost a lot of market share, I think, to Dunkin. Trying to upscale their stuff.
[8:22] Now they have breakfast all day, you know, that kind of shit.
So now I wonder if their coffee does get like that burnt trucker coffee flavor since they, you know, have that breakfast coffee thing.
It can't be any worse than their, than their, was it the Mc, what's the thing that always fails?
There's something, there's a McDonald's thing, it's either their, I don't know whether it's their shake machine or their, oh the milkshake machines, yeah.
Something about it where it's like proprietary and it always fails and is a, limited supply to people who can fix it and there's actually like a like some federal agency is looking into it because of yeah yeah it's a milkshake machine yeah like like right to repair kind of stuff like like franchise owner can't go out of the approved repair mechanism to fix their milkshake machines and there's thought that there's like an artificial obscurity being an artificial uh... not obscurity but well I guess kind of... scarcity scarcity artificial scarcity yeah, Mm-hmm McDonald's milkshakes, which aren't that great? No.
[9:42] Like I I get people who like McDonald's fries because there's a there's to them. I.
[9:48] Am one of those people I do like McDonald's fries a lot if you if you say What?
Fast food restaurant. Do you prefer getting your fries from I'm gonna say McDonald's every time, Yeah, in terms of deep-fried six of potato, I think that McDonald's has a pretty interesting offering.
Tater tots for life, bro. Well, I mean... Tater tots. Fuck yeah.
Tater tots. Fuck yeah. Oh, yeah. I love tater tots.
So much better. But, I mean, give me some really good fries.
Give me a potato pancake anytime over a tater tot.
Oh, tater tots are so good because they're crispy through and through.
Tots taste like fifth grade to me. That's why fifth grade was so good.
You had some soggy tater tots. I had some real soggy tater tots. That's why.
I mean, the air fryer used some tater tots. No, a crispy tater tot doesn't do it for me.
I like that inside of a good potato fry, it's a mushy thing.
Whereas inside of a tater tot, you don't necessarily You're getting you could get mushy and it's mushy is probably not great. It needs to have some consistency there but if it's too much of a, Rod like consistency of the data then then it's then it's bad. I think.
[11:14] It's so hard to do tear tops, right?
I don't I don't think I've ever had it perfect and even if I did I don't think I'd like it that much, If I'm at a place and they're like you want fries sweet potato fries or tater tots. It's tater tots all day favorite.
[11:29] Tater tots for me, but, not tater tots, fries for me, but if I had to choose, you know, mayo for the condiment.
Oh, for fries, yeah.
Ranch.
For, for tater tots or fries? For fries. Oh, okay. No. Um, malt vinegar.
Another good one. Yeah, malt vinegar is good. Mayonnaise though.
I'm Pulp Fiction. Yeah, cover that shit fiction makes it sound stupid, but It well doesn't not that sounds good, but to to, To Vincent who is an uneducated and sounds absurd. Yeah, who is it was not a not a man of the world, It sounds absurd and he treats it like it's absurd and and the only fear that I have is that some people will.
[12:25] You know how people like watch Fight Club and thought this is a model for how you should behave as opposed to these people are idiots.
[12:34] You know, you fear the people are gonna be like me Mayonnaise, I saw that in a movie and that sounded the grossest thing ever. It's like try it, Giving a shot. Yeah He's good, What else going on people? Well, I you owe me a job. Yeah I'll get mixing. What else is going on? So I'm looking at you. Do you want to play this IPA song that you put in?
No, no, I don't think good. I thought I could be intro music if we didn't have any other ideas, the the lyrics especially towards the end that are kind of, Funny. Yeah, I don't know. I just came up to my that's cool. That's cool Um, there's a topic I do want to get to, I just, I have a feeling that when I do get to it, uh, you're going to zone out.
Me? Yeah.
Probably. If you feel like that's going to happen, then that's probably, that's going to happen.
So I don't want to get to that until, Until I'm ready to, until you're like, ready to leave anyway.
I'm definitely going to be ready to take a shower soon and get all that.
Did you know vermouth goes bad? Yes.
That's why you put it in the fridge. Well, I thought about that.
It's a fortified wine. You put it in the fridge. We didn't know that.
Yeah. Now we know that. Mm-hmm.
There you go.
[14:00] Yeah, put your vermouth in the fridge, everybody, just like you would your port.
And use a vacuum wine stopper on it, too.
Yeah, that'll work, too. Well, both.
You should do. I buy smaller things, so it's generally not, like, my vermouth is, you know, smaller things, so I don't think it matters that much.
But yes, if you have a big thing of vermouth, then yeah, vacuum stop it if you can.
But yeah, definitely keep it in the fridge. You never told us that before, or you've seen it sitting there?
I didn't think about it, so yeah, blame me. Yeah, I'm going to.
I only learned about it maybe a couple years ago from Alton Brown.
But I didn't learn about cocktails until the last couple years is when I started to get into cocktails.
[14:55] And I found them to be quite a bit more delicious than I ever thought they would be.
I think that you, first of all, I think you have to grow into them because, you know, when you're younger, your taste buds aren't there for bitter stuff or things like that.
And at the same time, it's a more complicated thing and you're not as concerned with just, getting alcohol into you.
So it's a lot, it's light beer in that sense, but it's also, you, it's easy, you can, you know, if you get a 16 ounce beer or something, you can drink it and you have some time, if you get a cocktail, you gotta, you gotta nurse it, if it's a good one, and that can be hard to do.
Especially in old fashioned. Yeah, especially when they're really, really tasty.
So, but they can be like just delicious and yeah, there's definitely an art to it and, the stuff I make at home, I cook way better than I make cocktails.
My cocktail skills are just ordinary, if not less than ordinary.
[16:17] I think my cooking skills are pretty good. My cocktail skills are just slightly better.
Your cooking skills are excellent.
But my cocktail skills, yeah, no. I can make passable versions of cocktail.
Part of the problem is that making good cocktail requires a lot of good ingredients and a lot of work with a lot of good expensive ingredients. I've been collecting some things to have.
I would have never had, and I haven't even opened it yet, but I have now blue carousel. Oh.
I should get a good carousel, but I also have a blue carousel. You gotta have that. Yeah. I have, Orzo, this is a Greek sort of, You know, it's for aniseed. It has those notes to it, Orzo I believe.
[17:20] No, don't take any of my pronunciation and attempts to, as anything but just how it looked, on a page to me. So what else? What's a good cocktail you like?
I mean, if you ask me what cocktail I want, I'm always gonna say an old-fashioned.
A classic and very tasty. Yeah, except at the Blackthorn Resort.
Tell that story. Yeah, that's where we camped at Maker's Camp last weekend and, or last week.
And Craig, you know him? Have I mentioned him? Never heard of the guy.
Well, he's this guy, anyway.
So he says, you gotta ask them for, we're at the bar. The bar that's at this resort, which isn't a lot of resort.
Okay, it's not one of those like five star resorts that you would think.
Let's just say it lives up to its name, Blackthorn Resort. What would you think of when you heard that?
Well, Blackthorns comes to mind.
Blackthorns.
[18:43] So, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's this, It's a campground that's kind of friendly to all sorts of people. They have these big motorcycle retreats or something up there because they've got t-shirts that have all this motorcycle stuff on and in fact our wristbands were, our gold, We bought food passes for the time that we were there and the meal ticket and we get wristbands for it And it said something about some.
[19:27] Thunder. Oh, yeah, Catskill Mountain motorcycle thundered Yeah, so we were cat skills. I think of old Jewish comedians. So it's uh, there's, people who Parker trailer there and have an annual thing and then they build like decks onto their trailer or a whole house over it and around it and really, Oh, sure. Hey, yeah, everyone it's it's, the people who choose to live in east or new york or most of them are Choosing to be the opposite of new york city. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, new york's a very big state. Yes, It is and it's not just new york city new york city is such a small part, Yeah of that state such a tiny little dot on that influence in the most populated Yeah, well, that's that's the point is what gets representation the person or an acre?
Yeah, so but I mean, there's some really cool people up there. We met I mean.
[20:34] We were at Jimmy D'Oresta's house. Yeah, there's a kind of like one of the original YouTube makers, Jimmy D'Oresta he's the reason it's there. He lives just up the road and How convenient for him?
I'm gonna make a festival outside of my house It was actually a guy who works at the Blackthorn who pulled in Jimmy because Jimmy has connections with everyone. But anyway.
[21:01] Yeah, it's super cool.
[21:05] There were some really cool people there that live there and and I mean he's one of them He's a really cool person And then I but what was the cocktail that you had there because you said?
Oh, that's what we were talking about. Yeah, you totally lost the thread there. I don't know how it happened.
All right. So let me paint the picture. There's a bar Full bar back with bottles of booze and everything everything from draft beer and beer and wine, and, so Craig said Order the quarter booze like the large the tall the tall, Comes in like a soup takeout container. It's a court court, and it has a lid and a hole in it for a straw, but it is a Court suit quarter container and you get a little quarter liquor, So the I was like, okay, Sure. I mean, it's Craig. He's I'm gonna do it. He tells me to you and, like It's funny how this runner just keeps going and it keeps just getting more I'm gonna make sure that.
[22:18] I'm like, all right First cocktail comes to mind because it's my favorite cocktail, It's my go-to if I go to a restaurant and they have shitty wine and they have shitty beer I'm gonna order an old-fashioned, So I think if they have shitty beer and your wine, I'm gonna get a shitty old-fashioned, Still get a decent old-fashioned fashion. No you don't, you've had so many bad ones.
Like my go-to like at a wedding or something like that is a is a vodka tonic. Yeah, Well, so I did switch it up. I'm sorry. What are the old-fashioned? I ordered it. What did the bartender say?
She's like, I don't know how to make that And I just looked at her like am I on candid camera or something.
[23:07] Doesn't know how to make an old-fashioned That is a bartender And then so I told her how to make like a normal size and, But I guess she forgot that you ordered a tall so she brought over a normal size Yeah, she brought her normal size, but it so she didn't know, To tell her how to ice it. Yeah, she brought it over room temp. It was a room temp. It was just, the whole thing was just like that, founders Bastard beer we had tonight. I mean great comparison because you remember which what urban was in it, It was actually a good bourbon, wasn't it? I don't remember. I'm pretty sure it was a good bourbon You have bourbon why don't you describe what it is you made? Oh made a boulevard EA, I've that make one for you before we just talk about you made one. I think yes, I think last time you were for karaoke. I made you a Negroni. Yeah, this is the boulevard EA So there's similar their cousin drinks, right? That's good. They have Campari as the main, You've come around you didn't like the Campari flavor for a long time. It takes getting used to the party is a is a lot.
[24:20] But It's also like as a sipper It grows on you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm surprised you said so good. I didn't know you'd come around the Campari so it's um, if you've had Negroni's, you know, they're a gin based drink, which has It features Campari, which is this bitter arrowroot liqueur.
[24:41] And the Boulevard ADA is the bourbon version of that. So it is two parts bourbon, one part Campari, one part vermouth. I went a little light on the vermouth on this one, just a hair light.
I think orange bitters would be really good in that. So the way I was taught, or that I'd taught, The way I read was that a Negroni is 1-1-1, gin, vermouth, Campari.
A Boulevardier is 1-1-1.
Bourbon to one comparator one. Okay, that's what the New York Times said two to one to one So that's what I made trust New York Times over me because I was explaining, Before what you were making and I'm I'm not good at making yeah I wasn't sure the the ratio so I just googled it real quick and the New York Times came up and that's what I made Sure, I'm sure there this tastes great. So yeah, so the comparis kind of a bitters, right?
I mean, maybe orange like you're saying I an orange peel would be good here. Yeah, But the bitters would overwhelm be too big. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, I don't feel I look for orange oranges in the fridge, but we're out.
[25:59] Lemon peel would also work something but you know, yeah, yeah Have I ever made you my the the cowboy coffee cocktail? Yes, I believe you have. Okay, that's what's in it But yeah, it's bourbon with some crushed coffee beans. Mm-hmm, and, it's They're simple in it. I Don't think there's an go in it angostura. I can't have to go double-check, And then it's garnishes a lemon wedge, but it's crazy how muddling some coffee beans in whiskey like how quickly the flavor, Diffuses that's a really good drink to Yeah, Google it cowboy coffee cocktail, the top recipe that comes up is the one that I make and I enjoy it quite a bit.
[26:50] One thing that's nice about having the AeroGarden is I got mint all the time. It's like making mojitos, And I love mojitos. That's uh, I don't make a very good mojito, But it's fine I've had great mojitos.
What rum do you normally put in?
So I've tried like good rum and it didn't work for me and so just Bacardi, just clear Bacardi is the stuff that I use. I've used the Cruzan, so it's kind of mid-shelf stuff.
It's pretty good. I've enjoyed those quite a bit. This stuff's really good.
I'm not sure, I'd want to make sure that I can taste it in the cocktail, this Hidden Harbor.
Hidden Harbor is a tiki bar in Shadyside and they paired with Maggie's Farm, they made this and this stuff is tits.
[27:44] Good tits not droopy tits. No What are you saying Greg? I'm just like, On the scale of you don't need to get over bad things bad things will happen if you open it, Tits are always great, but droopy tits aren't as great as like perky tits. Yes, sure, Droopy tits droopy dick. I mean they both suck. Yeah, you don't want to either one of them Like I said, it's not a no-go, it's not a, it's not a, yeah, it's a good round.
[28:27] It's not like game over, droopy tits, but it's just like. Game over is with a droopy dick, though.
Someone with a droopy dick can salute you out, right? Yeah.
You know true and they can grab a dildo, How did we even get here, I said the rum is I said that the rum is to have his tits. Yeah, then you went on you and, The dick Because he talked about droopy tits, not...
But the thing is like...
I have droopy tits. Like, I mean... laughs, Tits and dicks are different. I, Didn't say droopy pussy.
[29:29] No, that's flabby, On the YouTubes are the x-tubes or the whatever tube on the YouTube. This is just gone.
Yeah, there was a sideshow. Such an average show of the average.
For droopy pussy. Can we just? It's the best.
Why hasn't there been a rap about droopy pussy? Why are we still having this conversation?
Wet ass pussy. So let's go back to, I don't know, Craig.
Yeah, does he have a drippy dick I would What about Rebecca black that's a conversation for the other day.
[30:22] So Cocktails yes Do you like the cock or the tail better This is a bar in St. Pete, Florida, named Cocktails.
I just recently learned about it. Cocktails.
Woo woo. That was a DuckTales joke for those who don't know.
I know, but there may be somebody who didn't get that reference.
I'm trying to think of the verse. It's eluding me right now.
[31:00] It's right on the tip of my tongue something something, Danger behind you stranger out to find you scary song. I mean, geez, What to do just grab on to some duck tales Oh, geez Duck tales ask perry about it. Oh, no, I, Well, I can talk to you about transformers which are more than meets the eye Her brother is, Eight years younger than she is. So her brother was watching DuckTales. Yes, Transformers and she's, Eight years older like what the fuck? Yeah Can you just put on?
So there's a bugs bunny this reminds me of so there's there's a story that that over the Cape when I was with my sister and my parents and we're just talking about some funny shit that happened in our youth and I remember and I remember this thing and she did too which was it there's a tragedy that happened but the point of the story isn't so much a tragedy it's more the family dynamics between me and her the tragedy was the Challenger disaster oh So that happened when we were both kids and I was in high school. Yeah, and.
[32:29] And and she's older than me so we get home and You know, she watches the stuff and I go upstairs and I start watching my cartoons, And then she complains we joked with like it was, you know you know, kids do stupid shit.
She complained to my parents that I wasn't watching the Challenger explosion, and my excuse was, I've seen it a hundred, you know, why do I need to see it over and over and over again?
But what I also told her this time was, yes, like, there was a truth to that, but also, whatever cartoon I was watching was the fourth repeat of Transformers, I'm sure.
Like, it was not like a new episode of something that I was like, oh, I have to see to understand what happens in Optimus Prime's journey.
[33:26] It was it was the silliest shit from both of us so I just thought that was funny and your sister being like you've got to be a citizen and, Take part of the national tragedy is an interesting Again, we were kids and it was a rivalry thing. It was not like, I've talked about how my sister and I were, you know four years and four days apart, And there was a lot of tension between, we never, like, I guess when I was really young it was fine because I was a baby and she was four years old and that was great.
But we never got along at all when we were in the same house.
And then as soon, like literally as soon as she went to college, our relationship improved dramatically to the point where we were really, really close.
So it's it's interesting how it happened, but it is funny to look back on how just.
[34:26] Against each other we were And and, the the the reason why I was brought up was because it was like one of those funny stories and like, When I think back to how much there was animosity to each other and now it's like now She's one of the people I care for most Mm-hmm, and it's just like it's so weird to look back and to be like, what was that all about?
And The and this moment what had had enough of a resonance that we both remembered it very well. Mm-hmm, It was just cool to do that You know, I came to the realization in the moment that yeah, I was just probably watching some repeat of a cartoon I'd seen a 20 times. All right, so I, Didn't have much of a leg to stand on no.
[35:17] But you how many times can you watch a giant fireball in the sky so I mean like these days it would, Fascinate me and I'd be dissecting it, right? Yeah, you'd be like, can I get a new angle? Yeah, Yeah, let's look at that frame 740 380. There's some there's some Meows smoke coming out of this here, What is like I would be entranced?
I mean the tragedy of course would be there but so it probably would have been hard at the time to be entranced by it but there would have been still those intellectual like what's going on what happened here type stuff but at the time I just want to watch my cartoon stories my DuckTales woo-woo as they say as they say.
[36:12] Yeah, very for some reason I was home from school watching it live on TV when it blew up, And I remember asked my mom what happened? What what what happened?
You know, like what happened? She didn't know but like I need to know what happened. You guys couldn't see it from here, right?
Yeah. Oh, no, I mean I was in dc Okay, you know you can only see it from no, 400 miles away you can see I I mean I was so I was at school and um, I don't know if it was lunch or if I was just out.
Who knows? Because I wasn't at school that often. I skipped a lot.
But in high school. But standing outside the school at the time, back then we could smoke cigarettes as long as we were not in the school.
And so I was smoking a cigarette and we watched it.
It was at 1139 literally watched it below it. So yeah, it was lunchtime Yes, our lunch break, but I stood out there and watched it blow up in the sky, so my memory and I don't know how like at this point it's hard for me to to, Reliably say that you know that this is actually what happened. I could just tell you what my memory tells me.
[37:32] It seems very much based on what I remember that I was in elementary school I believe I was in either 5th or 6th grade, and I was not one of the people who watched it.
I think I knew about it, I was still interested in that kind of stuff, but there were classes that watched it, but that was not a class that I was in, I suppose.
I remember somebody coming up to me and saying, did you hear what happened to the space shuttle?
And the first thing I said was, yeah, they're launching a teacher into space.
And then he told me, no, it blew up. And that was like, what?
So like, that's and then my memory kind of drifts off, I don't know anything about what happened after that.
But I do remember that moment, or at least my memory tells me that that moment happened.
To the extent that that is real, I don't know.
But it's what I remember.
Interesting. You know, weird thing to experience when you're a kid. Yeah, definitely.
But easy for me to distance myself from at that age.
[38:55] Yeah. So what was really neat too, not neat, I don't know, but just weird coincidence.
My son, my son, my middle child, his third grade teacher, she was a student of the teacher. Oh, of Chris McAuliffe? Yeah.
She was in her class that year.
Oh God, that must have been horrible. Yeah, can you imagine?
Because I'm sure everyone was... Everyone was in the classroom watching it on TV, with a substitute or the principal, I don't know.
Probably an auditorium kind of thing, the whole school probably.
Yeah, it could have been, and yeah.
So that was very early, it was either January or February, because that's the reason why it blew up, was because of those O-rings.
So I remember that it was, the only reason I remember it was, that is because I know what caused the accident, not because I remember anything about the day.
But it must, so it must've been either January or February. It was January 20th, yeah. Yeah, okay.
[40:09] And I mean, in Florida, I guess that doesn't really matter. No, not usually.
I mean, you have those occasional days.
Part of it was that it was unseasonably cold for a few days.
[40:24] Happens a couple times a year. Yeah, I wanna say that it got down into the 40s in the morning before the sun came up.
And yeah, that was the problem. The seals on the solid rocket booster stiffened up in the cool temperatures and didn't seal right.
Yep. And it was not something that was considered in the safety aspect.
The weird thing is, if you look at like the stuff that has been.
Analyzed, with today's analysis methods of the shuttle, it's almost remarkable it didn't have more accidents.
It was a whole bunch. I think that they thought that there was a 1 in 1,000 to 10,000 chance when they were doing the space shuttle, when they were doing the program, that something catastrophic would happen.
That the most recent one, it was something like 1 in 30.
Oh. Yeah. Like ridiculously awful systems in place. It was not a good system based on what we know now.
[41:41] So yeah, even though it was a remarkable machine, the building that machine was incredible.
But it still was not the right design. And part of it, it's a whole story behind it.
They had to change it because in order to get funding for it, the Department of Defense wanted to be able to use it for certain things.
They had to extend certain things about its payload bay and certain things about how it was launched.
There's a whole bunch of story about it. The Space Shuttle is a fascinating story.
And not the right way to design a spacecraft for humans. But it is, yeah, again, a fascinating story if you ever cared to go deep into it, because.
[42:40] But it turns out that they were right in the 60s. Capsules was a great design, Yeah I was trying to figure out what I swear I was home from school that day, February in january in pittsburgh might have been a snow day. Um, It looks like there was just a tiny little bit of snow that day um 11 39 is too late for a two-hour delay so I, Makes me wonder was I actually home or was Was that I come home from school and think I was watching it live, but I have a very clear memory, Maybe invented but a very clear memory of Anticipating the launch watching the countdown, you know, and I don't think I would have had that had I, Was just watching a newscast, you know, it was definitely something I was aware of, Because like I said, I knew like when the kid came up to me in my memory I knew that that this teacher was going into space. I knew that was happening, I didn't, Yeah, so have we probably haven't talked about it.
[43:47] If you are you sure for all mankind Yes on Apple TV. Yes. Have you watched it? I watched like one and a half episodes and I was like, I don't, Really? Yeah, I Get it. I get what they're going for for but something about it did not and first of all I felt that that first episode dragged like crazy. I mean I get it it's not the best acting it's not the best pacing the, the plot the sci-fi of it. It's neat that they take all these like all these things that were, Lately there's one where it there was a legitimate proposal for a launch from the ocean, And and they I know they did that. Yeah, so the so I'm all right. I'll spoilers for you. You know, The premise it's an Apple TV plus show. It's.
[44:46] Alternate history where during the space race the Russians get to the moon first and, And the Americans get there a few days later if I remember right, but the the the coolest part about this whole show is it shows the, evolution of technology in the lens of America not resting on their laurels, After winning the Space Race because after the Americans won the Space Race, Russia kind of shut down, Like there wasn't that competition after that right there wasn't really continuing competition, And for all mankind, you know, Russia got that front seat, they were more competitive, so there was more continuing competition.
So certain technologies that exist today, existed 20 years earlier in the show, you know. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, keep going.
You know, it's it's it's the the kind of the not the the main dramatic plot but the, Technological thing is can be really neat in that show and I know you don't want to watch a show just for that one little non, Like for the subtext part of it, you know, let me ask you this question because I'm curious about this I like I said, I haven't watched it. I know that I've seen bits of it I've seen pieces where people are, you know, hey, look they did this thing at the end.
[46:14] What always gets to me is that the Moon program was not really a science program.
It was a propaganda thing.
It was taking modified and slightly enhanced weapons technology from ICBMs and building tin cans for people to barely be able to survive to get to things.
We went there way earlier than we probably should have based on things.
And we were lucky that no one got seriously.
There was Apollo 1 or something like that. But we're lucky that Apollo 13 happened and no one died from that.
The idea that we would keep pushing so much money into that sector of our economy for what?
What is the gain that we get?
Well, the way the show puts it together is because there's continued competition on that, but they concede that.
[47:27] Mean there is I'm trying to think back, but I believe I mean when they have a moon base There's mining on the moon, you know, so there's a gun. I, Don't remember lithium maybe I don't Helium through would be the first thing that comes to mind, but you need to have The Nord has to be in any way useful. You have to have some, usable metal there's a basic that's there, you know the The plot the I can see you're losing interest, The science advice the science Imagineering that's happening in the show is fun because oh, absolutely. No, I'm not saying it's not fun Yeah, and you know sure there's contrivances, right? Yeah, but like it's been so long since I've watched some of like things like, Video calling like it's like teams and Skype right like in zoom like it only became Common in the late 20-teens, you know here it was, I mean, they had figured it out and they'd figure out but it wasn't gone, right?
Yeah, but in for all mankind in the mid 70s everyone at least, Astronaut families have video phones in their houses, you know.
[48:44] And that was probably that was one of the more obvious ones that everybody got that's a back to the future kind of wow Yeah, that's like a silly thing because that's the one I remember drinking, bro, No, no, but let me explain like yeah, In order for video technology be widespread, right?
I mean like again there were like in the 80s and I think even in the 70s that there was, The ability to do this, but you had to a have a very good connection, Like, you know ridiculously good connection with your copper And you also had to have really expensive equipment. That was was not something that was mass manufactured.
[49:28] You know, Skype and FaceTime and stuff. What that had to have was mass manufacturing of, cameras and screens and stuff like that. For that to be in other people's houses, let alone...
Can you guess what company manufactures the video terminals? Kodak.
In For All Mankind? Kodak. What network is it on? AT&T?
No, no. What streaming service is For All Mankind on? Apple so they're all Apple device. There's the there they look like Apple to ease, kind of but they have, this shaped Wrinkly, it's great like a shape like like a cell phone. I mean, it's it's it's definitely portrait It's somewhat like this has a huge ugly 1980s bezel around it with the Apple logo, but, But so they just took a phone and put it in there because it was easy to make that it seemed bigger It seemed more iPod iPad shape sure, but it was easy to make it as a prop, but yeah, but it was this aspect ratio Yeah, it's easy to make it as a prop. Yeah.
[50:36] Not because that's a realistic But yeah, but it was it was yeah back in the late 70s early 80s, Apple what was the AT&T telephone manufacturer video phones, you know that kind of thing?
I mean keep in mind that those old video phones had you know, like analog cameras that were not CCDs like we have now, that I think some of the first CCDs, I mean they obviously came before this, but some of the first like amazing CCDs were launched in the Hubble telescope. That was where a lot of this technology came out of. So having flat cameras that can translate photons directly in images was not something that was available.
So you had to have like legit, and I don't know if you remember, my parents had had a video camera with, it was connected to a VCR, this was probably, this was in the 80s, I guess.
And so this big camera with, you know, just huge lenses and stuff like that, then had to be connected to another device that then recorded it.
And that was what we, that was the home, That was a home video recorder.
And it probably cost, like, at the time, probably near $1,000, which would have been like, five or six, or maybe even $8,000 in today's money.
[52:02] Yeah, So and that was um, that was a mass-manufactured product, too So the idea that Astronauts homes would have something like no, they'd maybe have one admission control and maybe in a lab somewhere, but the premise is Look how you know, there's other like it's a big old. It's a whole commentary. It's not just technology, social Things progress differently in the show, you know women are, you know, the glass ceiling is Way higher or shattered kind of thing is what they're proposing like because and then and also women in tech and stem are, What much more represented? Yeah, so they're kind of showing the aspirational points of that, But you know, it's it's many parts of society how just alternate history, I We probably talked about a man in the high tower before yeah, that's another one, You probably would like it Also the universe it's an alternate universe where the Germans win World War two and actually occupy, Germans occupy the east coast of the United States and the Japanese occupy the west coast the United States Oh.
[53:20] America still has some Unseated land, but then there's a connection between our universe right there. Right? Isn't that how it works?
Connection wasn't what isn't part of, Isn't there some sort of I don't think so. I think it's just a Different I thought there was literally like oh, I don't know if I watched the end of that series between, You know what? I I think I remember the cliffhanger where?
There's a carriage type, you know character met themselves from our universe. Yeah, Yeah, I don't know if you ever seen fringe with fringe was interesting show where it kind of it was had a really weird And kind of dreary first season and then it had a really kind of cool, Second season and an amazing third season and then it kind of fell off a cliff.
[54:13] Really amazing first half of the third season, but it part of the idea was And it's slowly built to this, but by the end of the first season, you realize that there are alternate universes, and there was travel between them.
And then that was sort of more explored in the second universe.
And then the third, there was like literally people traveling between.
It got really, really cool. And there was like different tech in different universes, but slightly different.
And there were slight...
For example, the World Trade Centers weren't destroyed in the alternate universe, but the White House was. The Statue of Liberty was...
It's patino's removed and it was it was So it was copper when he was the you know, Golden copper instead of having the the leaders. There's these little subtle things Yeah, coffee was actually nearly extinct in the alternate universe.
[55:18] The reason I brought that up is it's all of the coffee is like a single Species of coffee and if there's a mold or something that runs rapid there to to okay, There's a rabbit and there's a the other one. No one drinks the other one. So, Robusta robusta. Yeah, the robustness sucks compared to a rabbit. Yeah So like if there was a blight on a rabbit coffee, like it's again It's not we don't drink because it's delicious like we can make it delicious, but that's not yeah no people have talked about like there's a, It's not like a don't worry about it I think it's you have much higher risk of dying in your commute to work and really but but the copper old coffee supply could, Get wiped out, The thing to be more worried about is bananas Because bananas it's already happened to if you ever have banana candy. Mm-hmm, if you've noticed that tastes different than bananas that you're that you're used to it's because the banana candy is based on a banana that.
[56:23] Called, I believe, the Gros Michel, that was destroyed by a fungal, because they're all clones, and this thing was just destroyed. And then another banana was found that was resistant.
The Cavendish, which sucks compared to these other ones. Compared to the old one, totally sucks. Now, there are apparently artisanal Gros Michels out there, but they're hard to find. And the one that is able to be manufactured big time is the Cavendish, but there's another thing that's...
They're trying to control it, but could destroy all the Cavendish bananas.
Oh, no. I hope I'm dead by then. But, like, that's bananas, and frankly, we understand how bananas taste.
We can make things that taste like banana if we really need to.
Jelly Belly's really good at it. And like you said, the Cavendish kind of sucks as a fruit. It's not great.
So a better banana would actually be a good thing for everybody if we could do it.
Yeah, I've actually, I guess, watched YouTubes or listened to podcasts about, you know, like.
[57:33] Trying, because there used to be five or six bananas that were marketed as bananas.
Look at how many apples you can get at the store now.
But several of them are still around, but they're expensive, they're hard to get, that kind of thing.
So basically, whatever show I was watching, some documentarian kind of thing, hunting for three or four different kinds of bananas and the expense and all that stuff.
I'd love to try a Grocery Shop Banana, that'd be great. But I don't know where to get it.
Don't know you there.
[58:13] No, there's plan I bet he would know Where can I find a gross Michelle, Asking for a friend.
[58:35] I I think we could find them in Stratford Jeffrey body and on where Where Shakespeare's from?
Yeah, yeah, you know where Noah Khan's from it's much more important There was a quote. Oh so back to, Bitcoin ish thing with the sandbag McFree. There was a quote so, I don't know if you follow any of this stuff, but so there was a, a book written about him by some guy that like the same guy who wrote like the big short and other things that already know that well you know think, things that were like well-loved books that didn't got turned to movies and he wrote a book about Tim Beckwith-Free but it's like a hagiography it's like It's like Theresa's got like you the fucking hero and.
[59:34] This guy this Sam Beckman free is not a fucking hero He is not I could talk for hours about the stupid shit that he did, the the lying the the nonsense behind the the, God the the the what was his Effective altruism. Mm-hmm, right that is that bullshit I, could go for hours and hours, but he made a comment and was like it was, put in this book about how, He didn't He didn't like Shakespeare because he said, I'm trying I don't have the exact quote here, but it's something like, What are the chances?
That the best person to ever write English was born way before most English people ever spoke.
So he was trying to use this Bayesian probability bullshit to say, I don't need to read Shakespeare.
And it's like...
You're applying this logical bullshit to something that doesn't...
[1:00:53] The domains are completely different. Logic by itself is just a way to be wrong with confidence if you don't... if you're not using it with any kind of backing. And the whole thing, His whole bullshit was using Bayesian inferences and probabilities and shit like that.
One of the things that was recently brought up was apparently, so in the trial, his on and off girlfriend said that he had said, if there was a, if he had the choice to make a 50-50 chance between either destroying the world or making it twice as good, he'd definitely take that bet.
Because you have a 50-50 chance of destroying the world. Right.
Like, none of your decisions should be based on that kind of rigorously uninformed and, just an uncaring bit about how the rest of.
[1:02:11] How this affects anything else. Taking it in an isolation as something and saying that, oh, the effective, you get such a better result if you win, so doesn't that beat the, And the whole point is, fucking no.
How could you possibly think that that's true?
And how could you write something that treats this person as a hero who thinks like this?
[1:02:51] It just it is repugnant to make that kind of, Repugnant repugnant. I haven't heard that word in a while, Well, it's the one that I think fits it fits. Yeah Just haven't heard it in a while.
[1:03:07] So yeah, I I'm just plus all the embezzlement and other Ponzi bullshit he did so I don't know if you heard the interview, he was in a Forbes interview, this was sort of like a couple months before FDF fell, but he was explaining, he was trying to explain to them what he does and the guys at Forbes were like, so it sounds like what you're saying is you're in the Ponzi business and the business is good.
Because he basically explained, yeah, I'm doing a Ponzi scheme.
Like so I mean a big part of So there was FTX and then there was the other company he would be on which had a coin I'll meet a media research. I'll meet a research and they had a coin. They had a they had a, It was FTT, which was there right and that FT. Oh, breaking out the peanut butter peanut butter got some Reese's Pizza Reese's a peanut butter cup. And then the FTT was backed by some stablecoin or something else.
Well FTT wasn't backed by anything. Well no, it went one layer deeper before it was bullshit.
[1:04:23] Stable coins apparently are these oh my goodness woman Stable coins are a made-up nonsense that people, Manufacture the prop up their other prop up their other stuff by pretending as if there is a backing of actual, Dollars that you can peg to it when there aren't and They're easy to just create and uses. I mean you have to be.
[1:04:54] Vault, a bank, right? You have to be, you have to have, if a stable coin require you to have the dollars.
If it were legitimate, you could only have as many stable coins as you have dollars, and then you could say, okay, each stable coin is associated, fungible as it may be, a dollar that you can get from, you know, I mean, let's face it, most dollars, like the vast majority of dollars in the world are not physical, but nonetheless, they are, associated with a number that's in a ledger that is controlled.
And if you don't have the dollars stored, any other claim of being a stablecoin is bullshit, I mean, is that basically...
Yes. I mean, there's nothing I'm missing, right?
No. And the fact that people can just create stable coins and use them to...
Without having any real backing, and pretend like they have backing. How do they...
All right. So, say I'm...
[1:06:07] Maybe the premise is faulty. But say I'm an honest broker who wants to run a stablecoin, but I don't want to buy the dollars.
First of all, your premise is faulty immediately. You're an honest broker who wants to run a stablecoin. It doesn't happen. Give me a minute. Let me ask the question.
All right. I want to run a stablecoin. If I wanted to run a stablecoin and I got the reserves, Then that can work, right as long as it's a Craig coin.
[1:06:42] Ten dollars of my if I take ten dollars of money and Put it in a bank or under my pillow or something. And then I make, Ten Jeff coins, right and I don't make any more than ten Jeff coins, That should work then in theory And the ledger small enough that like how do I how do I cover the cost of commuting the ledger?
Don't worry about that part then in theory You would think that in a market your Jeff Quinn would be worth a dollar, right?
[1:07:13] And that's what a stable coins definition. That's the idea behind a stable coin. But of course stable coins can vary because the market and, Dollars while the different things in different places and in different times and there's probably no value to invest in or to buy Jeff coin unless I strike some exclusivity deals with certain retailers right right whereas getting dollars is easy if you're especially if you're doing it legitimately it's really easy to do it legitimately all right so the people that are running stable coins pretend they're not just 100% okay there's another faulty present another faulty premise coming your way you run a stable coin you don't have the reserves to back the stable coin but you're still pegging it to the dollar yes how does that adjustment happen other than just being bullshit I mean is it anything that's more than bullshit I don't have enough economic know-how to explain except in exceptionally simple terms why it's Bullshit and not in a way that will that's not as funny Maybe the answer is as simple as if you don't have the reserves and you're trying to pick something to another currency, Then it's bullshit, you know, yeah, but aside from stable coins, what the I.
[1:08:42] Think that there I have an easier time explaining the FTT prop token thing which was so they have this token that they said was kind of like.
[1:08:55] A piece of stock in them, right? So they said this token is backed by us and but they could make as many of the token as they wanted and when they were you and then they were taking loans out real money loans and using the fact that they had this token that was worth x amount on on this market as collateral. Well the problem is if you start to sell this token the price goes down. So if this token experiences a run then the collateral is not worth anything and if your entire if all your business is backed up by this fake thing that is just propped up by people's... I should be clear, all money works this way.
[1:09:51] All money works on the premise that people assign value to it and that they are willing to trade that value as an abstract concept. Fiat, Bitcoin, whatever.
At least with fiat money, if it drops to zero, you can wipe your ass with it. Bitcoin is nothing.
None of these coins, you can make an endless type amount of Bitcoin copies that are exactly the same with slight exceptions in the hash or whatever.
And why is there any...
[1:10:38] Why would anybody put any worth into Bitcoin than anything else?
And it's the same reason that people put worth into dollars, which is that there are people who are using it as an exchange.
They're using it... There are people who ascribe value to it.
So the whole argument of fiat is bad, Bitcoin is good, doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever because the very same backing is there, at least with the dollar.
The backing is the US government will, it's the only thing you can use to pay US taxes.
And the US government will enforce things and they will, and there's an enterprise behind the operation. What is there with Bitcoin?
[1:11:35] Absolutely not. There is nothing. There is the fact that people believe it has value.
And there isn't even anything physical.
And as people have made hundreds of shit coins, hundreds of different coins, there's nothing particularly novel about Bitcoin other than it was like the first and most popular of of this type of thing.
[1:12:08] So, and also, like, if your computer is, like, if EMP hits and everyone's computers are off, you can't do shit with your Bitcoin, at least, and as we said, most dollars aren't physical, right?
So you can't do anything with the, you know, $42 billion that, you know, you had in the bank, But you could take your thousand dollars of cloth money, and at least say something about that.
Or you could say, oh, I have an asset here that I can sell.
Right, I mean, like there's things that have some sort of tangibility.
And the things that aren't tangible at least are backed by the same conceptual idea that the physical money is, in the sense that if you needed to, you could perceivably make enough cloth money dollars, or mint a coin that is worth that much.
[1:13:18] You know, mint a trillion dollar coin that could be done.
So And that's backed by the government United States and if the government you know, you should make a trillion-dollar coin, We said that's been used as a way to, As a potential way to get around debt ceiling ship. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is by minting, And I don't again. I'm not that I'm excited something about the, the something different between coins and dollars the reserve There's some way with the mint can make money that the Fed the Federal Reserve can order the mint to make, To make a certain amount of money and then that money is then.
[1:13:58] But why the mint and not that you're a printing and engraving? That's my question. I don't know. I, Don't know. It's one of those weird, like Recondite kind of things you have to know a lot about a very specific bit of Economics to understand even that much even if you know, even if you really understand economics, you're still like this bit. That's like, My comparison would be, I really took a lot of time to learn and study the Higgs mechanism.
A lot of people know stuff about particle physics, don't understand the Higgs mechanism, why would they?
It's a very weird cul-de-sac in the particle physics regime.
I think that this whole mint dollar thing is a very weird cul-de-sac in an economic regime that, you know, smart people looked at and some people say it's useful, some people say it's not.
This is a constitutional way to do the thing.
Yeah, and there's a lot of arguing about it because it's never really been tried and there's really kind of a legal question about whether it actually works.
I'm mostly curious about why it has to be a coin and not a dollar bill.
I remember when they were talking about this, they specifically talked about how the mint has the capability.
I don't remember them saying, because if you're telling, if you want something to be catchy, it's a trillion dollar bill, not a trillion dollar coin.
[1:15:24] It's some weird regulation language that allows it, and it's also, the fact that this kind of weird regulation language exists is also sort of an explainer for why we have things like sovereign citizens, where people think that you can use words as magic.
[1:15:45] I believe that that comes from people seeing lawyers use words as things that they don't understand and it meaning something and them thinking that there's a quicker way if you just learn the magic words that will do it for you because there are in laws weird clauses and ways in which you can sort of dive in and figure your ways into weird situations. Those do exist because there's a huge amount of laws out there. That's what lawyers basically do, at least a good lawyer. A lot of a good lawyer's time is based on looking up a whole bunch of cases and finding out the weird intricacies and the ways in which you can take this and take this and put them together. Whereas the Sovereign Citizens are just like, oh, it's more like a magic spell. And if you learn like the right combination of words, then you'll be...
You'll be able to get away from it for free.
But I think that the answer to your question about why it is the Mint is there is some weird...
[1:16:58] Like, in the way in which it works, there is some weird laws that if you put them together, they will say that you can actually mint the coin and it would be worth this much, and then it could also be used by the Federal Reserve to pay off debts.
[1:17:15] But not a dollar. It has to be a coin that's minted and not maybe a bill that's printed for whatever reason.
Not a loophole, though. Oh, I mean, the thing is that this kind of thing, and the reason why it really hasn't been done is because it probably won't survive legal scrutiny.
It probably will be overturned ultimately.
Yeah. So it's more of like a scheme as opposed to an actual method of solving a problem.
Yeah. Sovereign citizens, you mentioned on real quick. Yeah, the certain kind of person who like feels like they're seeing in four dimensions, you know, like, they know something no one else knows.
[1:18:10] And, you know, it's really a community of people who believe that and they tend to follow the same politician, political views and not always, but they do tend to and it's a really a form of magical thinking that I think it's tied in with anti-vax stuff, it's tied in with spiritual crystal bullshit, it's tied in with flat earth nonsense, where people think that they...
First, it's weird because I think that when people are confronted with the reality of the world and all its complexity, it's easy to think, what the hell is this?
And.
[1:18:58] And to not want to accept that you don't understand stuff. And when somebody tells you, no, there's an easy way to understand it, it's this, this, and this, and you can understand what they're saying, it feels like, aha, everything, oh, I see.
That's all of religion, isn't it?
Yes. Okay. At least religion, In Some areas has more Depth to it that people have created, Yeah Like, you know, there's communities around.
[1:19:47] Well, there's intellectual depth the certain number to certain types like Like Catholicism is a very long tradition of intellectual depth.
Judaism does, Islam does. That's not the same Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam that most adherents follow, but there is an intellectual breed of this stuff.
There's not an intellectual breed of flat earthers or sovereign citizens. There's no...
There's no rigor there. It's more Alex Jones. It's wishful thinking.
There's no intelligence involved.
There's intelligence, but it's intelligence that's pointed, that's not aimed the right way and that's not treated.
[1:20:48] It hasn't been groomed right. It hasn't been grown in the right conditions.
So it turns into weird splinters and things that aren't able to comprehend or aren't able to understand the limits to the knowledge that they can get by going down these roads.
I mean, it's also like belief in a global cabal kind of stuff.
For example, I know a notary who just notarized some documents for a person of this kind of ilk who believes that there's some kind of birthright signed away to the government, and if they revoke it and do this paperwork, they'll get like hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Maritime law and gold rimmed flags, and if you use your name in capital letters, that's your.
[1:21:43] Name that is a corporation of you, but...
But, oh God, the whole, you try to, it's, because I went down the path of trying to, understand where Flat Earthers were coming from and came to the conclusion that there wasn't, a way out of that because there's no, there's no thread that you could follow.
There's just a bunch of ideas that are sort of, Very loosely connected and if you try to like the thing about law the thing about, Technology I think about science is it's a whole bunch of different threads of stuff But they all sort of come together and you can see how this influences that you, This can be used to understand this this can be used understand that it all kind of comes together.
[1:22:38] There's none of that with these Like this premise, right? It's every, natural-born American or something along those lines, If they did these right magic steps, they could get hundreds of thousands of dollars And this is a secret that only a few know right, right, Whereas I mean there are plenty of like legit. I don't know if conspiracies right or but legit like, Cabal's like where the 1% is absolutely like hoarding money and making sure that the laws that are made are all allowing them to keep money for them and their progeny. But that's a fact. But that's a fact and that's supported by a whole bunch of evidence you can point to and show how it all connects to each other legitimately. Whereas you have to take a whole bunch of weird assumptions to make any of the other stuff work.
[1:23:38] Yeah, I mean, it's, there's, there's...
I will admit that, like, no one knows everything, and trying to figure out your way around some of these things can be difficult.
But if anyone is ever telling you there's an easy way to do something complicated, they're lying to you.
Or they're just full of shit. And they don't realize it. They're lying to you, or they have been lied to and they believe it.
Yes. Exactly.
Mm-hmm. And...
The fact of the matter is, things are complicated. And there are...
[1:24:26] The thing that we try to protect from kids is not that there's a secret to the world, but it's that we, as adults, don't understand the world and we're scared by it, too.
[1:24:44] That's what you try to protect from your kids, not that I'm trying to hide from you the secrets of the world, but the world is fucking scary for me too, and I'm just trying to not scare you by it.
The world is scary to everybody. The world is fascinating and interesting and beautiful and terrible and all of that, and No one can understand all of it and you have to rely on other people and you have to actually spend time and effort at things to get good at them and you have to devote time to one thing and that means you can't devote time to another thing.
We're stuck in this world that is not perfect and can't ever be.
And that is the tragedy and sort of the beauty of life.
And when you try to say there's easy ways around it, you're just going to get yourself into trouble and get other people into trouble.
[1:25:57] Think that about wraps up the post show. I didn't talk about any matter. Oh, well, she goes a bit, Yeah Okay, I love you good night.
[1:26:14] Like more platonically, but you get it. I mean we get some I mean, I'm fine talking about a matter I'm just saying you wrap that up like it wears like on the script right there So I thought we'd wrap it up, but no anti matter. Tell me about your anti matter. Good night Craig, Good night, Craig. Good night, Craig. Yeah. Good night, Papa Craig.
The cult leader. Oh god, Craig. We're a cult, aren't we? Yeah. Well, you know, everyone's in a cult of some sort, but you know. Yeah. Good night. Good night. See you later, babe.
Antimatter. What do you know about antimatter? Let me ask you that, Craig. Antimatter is a matter, like regular matter, except it has an opposite charge. So instead of a electron, You have an anti-electron which has a positive charge, but the mass of an electron and same thing for a proton It's an anti-proton which has a negative charge, but the same mass as a proton, very close You're missing a key point, but you're very very close close enough that I would give you a B, Okay, test. Let me think if I could talk about, What else can I talk? What else do I know about it?
I don't know what anti-neutrons would be, if there are a thing or if... There are.
Yeah. I don't know what that means.
[1:27:33] I don't think I know anything else about antimatter. Okay, so antimatter, like you said, is charge-reversed, or charge-reversed matter, but it's also parity-reversed.
Okay. So, parity is... The easiest way I can explain parity is if you look at yourself in a mirror.
Okay. It's a different parity.
So your right looks like your left, your left looks like your right.
Okay. And if you look at something that's moving clockwise in a mirror, it looks like it's moving clockwise, counterclockwise in the mirror.
So if you're talking about like.
Spin of quarks and particles and things like that, I guess that's what you mean is parity.
Yeah. So in fact, like there are spin is not really spin. Yes, it's the word that is a good analogy for what the particle does.
But it's it's not spinning.
It's angular momentum.
Okay. But it's not spin like you would classically think of as rotation.
It's a quantum thing that has to do with quantizing the momentum, but also is based on which way you measure it.
So if you measure, for example, like, okay, let's say you measured the earth and you were.
[1:28:54] Saying, you know, what way is it spinning? It's pretty obvious. Okay.
It's an axis, and it's spinning in this way. And whereas if you do it with a particle.
[1:29:09] You can measure it in x, y, and z, and you get a spin one way or the other.
Does that mean it's somehow spinning in all three possible canonical directions?
How does that work?
You can't think of it like that is basically the answer. You can't imagine spin as spin.
It's an unfortunate name, but it's stuck.
But there is handedness of particles. And that is also kind of sort of neighborless, but there are right-handed and left-handed particles.
For example, a left-handed electron has something called a weak isospin, or sorry, a weak hypercharge, a right-hand electron does not.
So that's just weird. Why would that be the case? So a left-handed electron has weak isospin.
A right-handed anti-electron has weak isospin.
OK. A left-handed does not. So the parody is different.
Uh, in fact, there are no right-handed, as far as we can tell, we've not been able to detect any right-handed neutrinos. All neutrinos are left-handed.
[1:30:38] All anti-neutrinos are right-handed. Okay. So there's this parity difference. What if our universe is the anti-universe?
It's just a label we put on things, right? So there's no reason why it couldn't be.
Be. The question to antimatter, we obviously detect it, we see it all the time. It's something that happens all the time. It happens because of conservation, because when, for example, when a... if you lose a charge you gotta maintain... the charge has to be equalized. Anyway, it gets complicated, but essentially something that we see all the time. But all we see around us is what we call matter and we don't see a big amount of antimatter. And here's the problem with that. According to our laws of physics, when everything was created it should have been created equally because that's what we see.
When there's something called the baryon asymmetry problem.
[1:31:50] Baryon number is conserved, which means you can't. It's why a proton in the standard model can't decay.
There's nothing that it can, there's no lighter thing that it can decay into.
And you can't just get rid of a proton, because that is a baryon number of one.
You have to annihilate it with an antiproton that has a baryon number of negative one turning into zero.
You can't just get rid of a baryon.
Leptons have the same thing.
[1:32:23] But baryons are important here because we think that when the Big Bang happened, the way that the symmetry works.
Antiproton?
Antiproton. Oh, I'm sorry.
And you said I was hearing photon. Mm-hmm, okay. So, yeah.
And I was like, wait, anti-photon? Like, never mind. Photons are major antiparticles.
[1:32:51] It doesn't really matter for photons. Right, right.
And I didn't think it did. And then I thought you said it. And then I was confused.
And I reinforced my mishearing. A photon is its own antiparticle.
And then I even said the wrong word without realizing I was saying the wrong word.
So but so according to our symmetry laws and according to everything you understand about the universe There should have been an equal amount of very eyes and it's very nice created, Because that's how the universe works, right? Where are all the anti-barons?
[1:33:18] We don't I mean my best Stupid hypothesis is that there's pockets in the universe and it's splotchy, No, that that's a legit hypothesis people have proposed. But the thing is is, even in interstellar space, there is dust, and there is things, and we would see, as things collide, we would see gamma-ray bursts, you know, because when the baryons interact with an anti-baryon, or let's say, because like a proton and anti-neutron won't interact, You need to have a proton and a positron won't really do anything to each other.
You have to have an exact opposite, so an antiproton and a proton.
That's the only way you get annihilation.
But when you do that, you get high-energy gamma ray, and we don't see that.
We should see that all the time. If there was pockets of antimatter elsewhere, we should see huge bursts of gamma rays all over and we just don't see that anywhere.
[1:34:27] So, again, where's all the antimatter? It should have been created in equal amounts.
Right. So, I think what you're saying is it's probably, probability-wise, unlikely that the antimatter segregated away and there's not an interface that we can observe.
Right. Yeah, it doesn't, based on our observations, that does not hold true.
We should, when you have a strong reason to expect there to be evidence for something and you don't see it, you haven't heard the thing, you know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
That's not necessarily true if you should expect to see it based on how you understand the universe to work.
Based on how we understand the universe to work, we should absolutely expect to see tons of collisions, just lit up, the sky lit up with that, and we don't.
So that's not a good answer to the baryon asymmetry question.
There is a proposal, it was taken somewhat seriously at the time, and you know when new proposals come out you should take them a little seriously, but it's sort of lost its seriousness, which is the idea that antimatter is matter going backwards in time.
[1:35:50] Because if you think about it, an electron has this charge, and it has this sort of chirality.
Oh, if you reverse time, it mirrors all the things.
Right. It's very Superman. But that's not taken super seriously, but it's still like, can that work?
And here's the thing. The question is, does it solve more problems than any other solution?
Well, here's the thing. If that were the case, then you would expect that antimatter would demonstrate anti-gravity.
If something falls in... Well, okay, so you have photons, which don't play in this game, right?
They do not play this game.
So, if matter is going backwards in time, photons should, too...
Hmm... Well, they don't experience time. Okay, that's really weird, yeah, because time doesn't...
Time is not something that photons... Yeah, okay, I get it. Okay, so what does that mean, though? Like, it...
[1:37:14] A photon is traveling, and it doesn't experience time. You shouldn't really think of photons as traveling.
They're glued to the background. It's hard for me to get into why, but one of the consequences you might think of the backwards in time is antigravity.
It's not the only reason why people have been thought that there might be a potential for antimatter to be antigravity.
But it was something that was very hard to see, because there's a real problem.
The scale of the interactions, when you're talking about particles, is ridiculously large compared to the interactions that they have with gravity. So how do you tell?
[1:38:02] Like, when you're talking about electric, you know... Yeah, you only have a microgram of, you know, anti-helium.
You don't even have that much, you have a couple particles.
Well, I mean, if you've made... They've manufactured micrograms, so...
But not in a way that you could even, like... They have, but, like, not...
Anyway, it's difficult for me to get into... How do you, I guess, if you have known masses on both sides, what kind of balance, you'd be able to measure anti-gravity, right?
It would be this repulsive force.
I mean, there's lots of reasons why anti-gravity seems ridiculous, but it was one of those things that everyone sort of assumed that antimatter should respond to gravity just the same way that matter does, because everything that we know about antimatter is that it's just as we call it CP, charge parity reverse matter, and there's nothing else to it.
[1:38:58] Otherwise is exactly the same as matter. You can just flip the labels around, So it should respond to rabbiting exactly the same way But how do you test that?
There recently was a Test at CERN that finally did They were able to do this. They have this this sort of.
[1:39:22] Semi-magnetic trap that be the problem with it with a full magnet trap is that you have the magnetic field is 30 times, 30 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity so you can't just use that because gravity is so weak but you could trap a bunch of like a gas of particles in this and then release it and see which way the majority goes because some of it is going to be obviously moving up some was going to be moving down, but the majority should—if we do it with helium, for example, the majority goes down because of gravity, and a smaller percentage goes up because they bounced off of things and moved up, but most of them is being pulled down by gravity.
This is what they were able to do with antimatter, the same experiment, basically.
They sort of bottled up a bunch of antihelium and then released it, and yeah, most of it felt that. So indeed, antimatter responds the same to gravity that matter does.
[1:40:35] Neat really cool experiment. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine when you fizz out like I know how much you know Antimatter exists, right? Yeah, that's not much gravity. So like the sensors that detect, What will do you know what the ratio was like detection wise?
I mean, it's got to be like it was something on the order and I don't remember the exact numbers There's something in the order of 70 30.
[1:41:03] That's better than I would have, Yeah, I mean, I guess 50-50 if it was non-reacting. Right.
And it was the exact same that they got for regnum matter, so it behaves in exactly the same way.
So that just reinforces the idea that, yeah, antimatter is not special.
It reinforces more of the mystery.
Why don't we see antimatter everywhere? This big problem of baryon asymmetry, why does it happen?
There are some things we have found, some processes that can, that do seem to favor matter over antimatter, according to some really weird nuclear processes, but not nearly enough to explain the universe that we see.
It actually if it did exhibit anti-gravity that would help with the whole why there's no collisions kind of thing, You know, I there's a lot of there's a lot of weird things that I would introduce, Because anti-gravity really doesn't make sense.
[1:42:21] There's too much about how we understand gravity and how we understand how that works with the rest of the universe to, to have anti-gravity actually be a reasonable thing.
If anti-gravity was real, then perpetual motion would be real.
[1:42:39] The argument, I'm not making the direct connection, but there is an argument that you could show that that would be true. And so things that would be anti-gravity would be propelled further away from gravity and faster and faster. And like you could then use that to create a perpetual motion machine. There's a lot of reasons why it was absolutely expected that antimatter would behave like gravity, but you don't know until you test it.
And you kind of love when the work is put in, and yep, there it is, right there on the paper, right there in the experiment, right there in the data.
[1:43:23] It's the same. Doesn't answer questions about asymmetry, but it does say, yeah, this is sort of working like how we expected it to.
So opens more questions, answers some questions, it's a beautiful experiment, it's a beautiful thing to see when you are spending time to confirm your beliefs.
Spending time to say, all right, this is how we think it works, but let's fucking test it because we don't know until we actually test it.
For sure.
That's my... That's antimatter. Anti-mash.
Sounds good. Thanks for listening, guys.
[1:44:10] We will talk to you another time.