Factually! with Adam Conover - Are We About To Discover Life On Mars? with Nathalie Cabrol

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

NASA's Perseverance rover recently discovered a rock on Mars that could be the key to finding evidence of life beyond Earth. Coupled with the recently discovery that hundreds of millions of other planets exist in the "habitable zone" of their stars, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we’re not alone in the universe. While finding extraterrestrial life would be one of the most groundbreaking scientific achievements ever, the ongoing search is already shedding light on our own origins and place in the cosmos. This week, Adam sits with Nathalie Cabrol, director of the Carl Sagan Center at SETI and author of The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life. Together, they explore the probability of discovering alien life in our lifetimes, whether there could be a form of life so alien we wouldn't even recognize it, and the possibility that life on Earth might not have started here. Find Nathalie's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. You know, if you ask me, one of the simplest pleasures in life is getting up in the morning and reading the news with a nice bowl of cereal. I got my little ritual. I do some quick stretching. I drink a big glass of cool water, make some tea,

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Got it? So click the link in the description to go to magicspoon.com slash factually for $5 off. You do that, I'm gonna eat this cereal. Mm-hmm. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to think.

I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's OK. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. We have some huge news to talk about on today's show

because scientists have discovered a rock on Mars. But this rock is different from most of the other rocks up there because this one might, might show us for the first time that there is life beyond Earth. If this is the case, this weird little rock will go down as one of the greatest finds in human history. It would transform our sense of the universe and our place in it. And I know that sounds like a lot, because it is.

We might want to back up here and ask, how did we get from a close-up of some bumps and streaks from a rock on Mars to arrive at a potentially profound discovery? Well, the answer comes from the ever-expanding field of astrobiology. Astrobiology is kind of a funny word, and it's also a hopeful one, because in the decades since we started exploring space, we found a hundred percent astro and zero percent biology, pretty tilted on one side. But the lack of definitive proof of life beyond our planet masks huge developments in the field. Here's one example. In the early 90s, we didn't know for sure

if there were any planets orbiting stars outside of our solar system, let alone any that would orbit stars at the right distance to support life. But now, just a few decades later, we have discovered thousands of planets, including many in the so-called habitable zone. And scientists have since extrapolated from that,

that there are hundreds of millions of planets in the habitable zone of stars, just like our own, in our galaxy alone. And that is just the start to the discoveries. There is reason to believe that finding life beyond our planet has only become more likely in recent decades, not less. In this episode, we are gonna get into all of those incredible discoveries and why, but before we do, I just wanna remind you

that if you wanna support this show and all the amazing conversations we bring you every week, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. You can join our online community. We would love to have you there. And if you like standup comedy, come see me on the road.

Coming up soon, I'm headed to San Francisco, California, Austin, Texas, Baltimore, Maryland, Batavia, Illinois, Toronto, Ontario. I'm adding new dates all the time. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this week's show. It is a very exciting time in astrobiology. And today we have the perfect guest

to explain where the field stands. Natalie Cabral is the director of the Carl Sagan Center at SETI. There are few people who have been closer to the field of astrobiology as it has grown in the last few decades. So I am so thrilled to have her on the show. Her new book is called

The Secret Life of the Universe, an astrobiologist search for the origins and frontiers of life. Please welcome Natalie Cabral. Natalie, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you for having me. So you are an astrobiologist. Tell me what that means. Well, I try to help finding life in the universe beyond Earth. And have you done it yet?

I mean, if you're an astrobiologist, surely there must be some astrobiology to study. There is a lot of astrobiology to study, especially on Earth to start with. Oh. And, you know, this is also what we use to try and find life somewhere else, because this is the only data point we have so far. Got it. All right. So I guess, yeah, life on Earth, we are among the stars ourselves, so we count as astrobiology. Oh, absolutely. We are our reference.

And this is funny, because we are both the observation and the observer. So that makes the experiment the most biased experiment in the entire universe. That's fascinating. Well, look, I want to jump right in with the current news. There was recently a rock discovered on Mars that has made a lot of waves.

People saying that this rock could have evidence of life on Mars. Tell me about it and what is the real deal with this, because I'm sure you have some opinions about it. Yeah, of course, the rock, you know what I love first about it is that it was serendipitous. This discovery reminds me of when we found these traces of funerals on Gusev Crater

with a rover spirit. And it's just because we are dragging a wheel. We had one wheel that was not functioning. We were dragging a trench and when we looked back, we found this pile of salt. That told us that a long time ago, there were fumaroles. It's a little bit the same kind of thing that happened here. We're not dragging a wheel, but curiosity just crushed a rock and then all of a sudden, we discover sulfur, mineral

sulfur, elemental sulfur. This is the first time we find it. It's not the first time we find a different type of sulfur, sulfates, et cetera, on Mars. But the crystalline sulfur, that's the very first time. Some other minerals are there. This is interesting from the standpoint of life. We need the analysis now. We have images. We are waiting for the data. But it seems to be interesting because it may tell us about volcanic hydrothermal environment. These are really the cool stuff you want for life,

energy, water, potentially nutrients. Of course, all of the headlines were, we found life on Mars. No, we didn't, not yet. But we found a pretty good environment, something that we knew on Earth might be good for life. So the headline should have been more like, we found sulfur, which indicates that there might have earlier been an environment

that would be appropriate for life or could perhaps support life maybe. You forgot possibly in it. And so you understand how that goes with editors and clickbats, right? So that works a lot less well. But in truth, it's a real problem because sometimes you want to draw people's attention,

but at the same time, you want to stay true with the content and never assign this is going to tell you that they found something when they haven't. And so sometimes that comes and bite us because people are telling us, okay, you've again discovered water on Mars today. We've heard that every single week for the past 20 years. Yes. When do we get to the good stuff? That's what everyone wants to know. Yeah, yeah, and it's the good stuff, every single week for the past 20 years. You know, yes.

When do we get to the good stuff? That's what everyone wants to know. Yeah, yeah, and it's the good stuff. But it's the good stuff at this point in time from the scientific standpoint. And if you want to stay true to yourself, then you have to say, we found something that really looks good.

Let us take the time and look at the data. We'll come back with the headline. But are astrobiologists in the astrobiologist community excited about this discovery? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, if nothing else, even if it's not life, it's an environment that could have been conducive to life. And just unpack for me a little bit more why finding sulfur is an indication of that.

why finding sulfur is an indication of that? Because sulfur generally comes with volcanic environments and hydrothermal environment. And again, for life, you need to have water, energy, nutrient, a source of carbon and shelters. And typically a volcanic hydrothermal environment is an excellent candidate for life to be for us. This is for life. We think on earth, this could have been sites where life, uh, as a marriage. Really?

Like we think on earth that, uh, hydrothermal areas or underwater volcanoes, that kind of thing could be, those are the sort of places we're on earth currently where, where extremophiles live, right? There's certain types of life that live around those sorts of thermal vents. Am I confusing things? Is that sort of scenario? So we are not talking about a black smoker or what smoker, which is what you are referring to at this point in time. You know, those big chimneys at the bottom of the ocean where you have this incredible, this teaming with life. And why? Because you have this mineral, you have these nutrients, a lot of energy, heat.

We think that this is this type of environment where life first started. What we don't know if it's under the water at the bottom of the ocean or the same type of environment on land. The land scenario has an advantage which it allows to have dry and wet cycles. Once you are at the bottom of the ocean, it's always wet, right? But on land, you will have those cycles and what that does, it gives the energy to create long chains of molecules and that's really good for life. So right now, very exciting.

What it is, we will know in a few weeks when we have the data back from analysis, and we will know exactly what we are dealing with, but it's very, very exciting. That's cool. And so what would be the significance of finding that there was life on Mars? That would be exciting, obviously,

just it would be a good headline, but in terms of our understanding of life itself, like what would we hope to discover scientifically? So Mars would be a very interesting, it would be fascinating to find life on Mars because well, here is the thing with Mars. Mars was formed as a planet earlier than the Earth, like a few tens to hundreds of millions before.

And we think that Mars had an ocean before the Earth and the environment was quite similar, not the same, but similar to the environment of early Earth. And so the other thing that we know from Mars is that imagine the solar system at the time being this giant destruction alley with big asteroids and comets and planetoids colliding and having huge explosion material flying all over the place in the solar system. And then you have pieces of Mars that are being ejected and flying and because of celestial mechanics these rocks end up on the earth. On earth.

We know that. And we still receive them because you know, all of that, the Martian meteorites, right? The other way around is true. I don't know about the Martian meteorites. I'm sorry. Tell me about the Martian. Pieces of rocks on, of Mars coming from Mars on the earth all the time.

I had no idea about this. We have Martian meteorites that are being collected often in Antarctica. So, you know, they are landing there. We know that. And how we know they are from Mars is because when they left, they trapped air bubbles. When the rock is still hot, it traps air bubbles and that captures the atmosphere of Mars at the time it leaves. And Mars has specific isotopes in its atmosphere. Wow.

And this is the signature. It's just like Mars signing the rock and say, you know, many Mars. So- Has anyone ever breathed the Martian atmosphere? Just like, could I grab a Martian meteorite and just like, like, huff it, you know? You don't want to do that unless you want to end up funny

because it's almost 96% CO2. But we're getting close on Earth. We're doing our best. I have a theory about that. But, you know, it's, so we know that- So we're finding Martian, we're finding rocks from Mars on Earth. And the reason we know they're from Mars,

there's air trapped in them. We analyze the air and there's specific chemical they're from Mars, there's air trapped in them, we analyze the air and there's specific chemical or atomic isotopes, I forget the word, that could only have come from Mars. That is fucking cool. Yes, and so the other way around is true too. It takes a little bit more time, but terrestrial rocks end up on Mars.

So now, here's the thing. So Mars having about the same environment as Earth when it started and all the good ingredients that we know are on Mars, we know that potentially Mars was habitable. So let's imagine that life started on Mars and kind of each hiked its way to the Earth and maybe we are those Martians that we are looking for. And- That is insane. Yeah, well, that's a pretty cool idea.

So the- That would mean that all life on earth is like, we're an invasive species basically. Like we all hitchhiked on a rock or just whatever, a very, very, very, very early single-celled ancestor or even a proto- Prebi or even proto piece of life. Even chemical, prebiotic chemistry that found a good place on earth to get started.

So here's the deal though. So that would still be very cool, but it would be a different version of us, which means that in fact, we still only found life once. The only thing that we demonstrated is that given the chance, life is going to be able to thrive on any good environment that it finds. What we really hope, and I mean on Mars, it also can be that Mars didn't have life at

all. That's going to be the toughest one to prove because when do you pull the plug and say, I've been looking everywhere. Right. The other option is that indeed Mars has developed life that is totally separate from the earth. In that case, that tells us that we have two planets in a system of eight that have developed life

when they had a chance. So that tells us something about the abundance of life in the universe. That makes life seem a lot more likely throughout the universe if not just Earth-like planets, but Mars-like planets could also spontaneously. Okay, okay, fair enough. It's very different right now, it's red.

Yeah, it is now, but it wasn't, you know, four billion years ago. So finding it would be very cool for, you know, one reason. And this is why I really love Mars, even if it's red and barren at the surface, it's because it might just be our unique chance to get the Rosetta stone about ourselves, about how prebiotic chemistry transition to become life.

This record on Earth is lost just because our planet is very active. You have blood tectonics, you have erosion, all the large continents and rocks, the old one, only few of those are left at the surface of the Earth. It's not enough for us to have a statistical chance to find the place or the rock and the outcrop preserved telling you how that happened. On the other hand, on Mars, the geology is much slower. It was very active four million years ago, but everything changed, as you said. Now, erosion is much lesser than on Earth.

You have 4.2, 4.3 billion-year-old rocks that are sitting in outcrops and maybe somewhere there, there is the answer to how prebiotic chemistry turns into biology. So Mars is very precious for that. Now that would be great. Even better, I'd say, would be if we find life in the outer solar system. The outer solar system. The outer solar system? Yeah, like Europa and Solatus Titan beyond Jupiter because then the likelihood for planetary exchange, the thing I talked about, the rocks flying, et cetera, is very, very, very small. It would take millions of years for rocks coming from the earth to end up, you know, on one of those worlds.

And so in all likelihood, if there is life there, it's a completely different, what we call Genesis. But either one of those options, if we discover life that's a completely separate Genesis, a completely separate starting point that spontaneously arose. And then we say, okay, well, Earth, life on Earth spontaneously arose at a different time, a different place. That's an incredibly cool, fascinating discovery. It's also an incredibly cool, fascinating discovery

to say, oh, we have discovered that life on Earth originated somewhere else. And then, you know, sort of Earth was seeded by that. Those are both profound discoveries. They are profound discoveries and they are telling us even more. Today we all have in mind the black smokers or the continental version of that,

but I draw from all spring as being the leading theory about the emergence of life on earth. But you have people who still disagree today and say that life emerged in cold environment, that makes sense. The sun was only 75% in terms of luminosity. It was colder on Earth at that time. And then others say, no, not at all. It started in clays or it started there and it started here. But when

you look at all of these options, actually they could work, which means that there might be more than one way to make life happen. This is only looking at environments for life and looking at the origins of life. If you are looking into the nature of life, that's a little different. And I prefer this approach because the origin of life is looking at life as a thing. You know? You...

It's just like cooking. You bring the ingredients, you mix everything in the pot. And if you put more salt, you're going to get this. If you put less salt, you're going to get that. But you know, it's cooking. That's a thing. You get a cake, you get something else. If you're looking at the nature of life, this looks at life as a process. And then you start looking into what are the processes in the universe that could take us and explain what life is.

You know, why all of a sudden we have a bunch of chemicals going through something we don't really understand yet. And four billion years later, they're having a conversation on a podcast asking this question. And so- This is a fascinating question. This is the thing that has fascinated me

ever since I was young, was how does a chemical process, or as you said, prebiotic chemical reaction result in us? And what is the connection and what does that mean? Resulting in us, it's called evolution. And Darwin demonstrated pretty clearly how that works. But if you're looking back at the very basic, when you're taking the living and the non-living, we're all a bunch of atoms.

And we're all ruled by the same laws, which are universal laws. And somebody in 1942 named Schrodinger, you might know his cat, you know? Yes. I know his cater, you might know his cat. You know? Yes. I know his cat. I don't know his cat. I'm not sure which right now.

Yeah. And so, you know, he started looking into the, what he called the origins of life. In fact, he was looking more into the process of life and he wasn't looking at biology at all. He was looking at the physics of it. And he was starting to look at the quantum level of it, which is the very small thing, which we all are at the very beginning.

And for him, thermodynamics had to be involved somewhere. And today this work has been taken and moved forward by a new generation of scientists. I quoted Jeremy England in my book because he's representative of this crowd. He's going after all these experiments and he has this sentence that I really love and he says, life is the inevitable result of thermodynamics. He said life is hot. And why? Because it's the best way to beat entropy. And here you go. Now you have maybe a way to think of life in a universal term. And that opens an incredible kind of worms because if you say that, you say, okay, but thermodynamics, etc., it has to change as the universe evolves. The universe was not all the time as we see it today. And so does that mean that life as we understand it is a result of a generational something in the universe that happens right here, right now?

Wow. Yeah. I understand. When you start going down that rabbit hole, it becomes so amazing. That doesn't mean that life cannot exist before, but it might have been different. Maybe we wouldn't recognize it. And so maybe there is a general aspect

of life to the universe. To me, this is poetry. This is sheer poetry, quantum physics poetry. Yeah, that is beautiful. And you said so much, and I kinda wanna break it down so that I'll make sure I understand what you're saying. So first of all, you said we want to understand life as a process, not just the origin.

And you mean what life actually is, like all of life, not just where it came from, but like what it is physically, chemically, how do we describe it, what is it as a process? And so then you said Schrodinger was talking about it on a quantum level, which confused me a little bit because I'm like, hold on a second. Isn't life happening on sort of a layer above quantum?

Quantum is very, very small. I thought life, I always thought of life as a chemical process. So. But look, you know, when you break down atoms, you are going down to the electron, et cetera, et cetera. Ultimately you are going down, when you're getting to the atom to the electron, et cetera, et cetera. Ultimately, you are going down. When you're getting to the atom and the electron, you are talking about the quantum level.

Classical physics has a little bit of difficulty with that. It works well with the big things. So necessarily, when you are getting down to those molecule size and atom size, you are at the quantum level. And ultimately we are, I'm going to say just quote and quote, a factory of atoms, we are organized as atoms. It's not because we are looking big and mean and even that a small rodent is already a very big thing.

But if you break it down to the essential components, we are organized Adam capable of looking at themselves or the universe and asking big questions. Yes. You know, break down the universe into all these simple components and you get down to the, you know, infinitesimal. So that's why the quantum physics is what applies. And it's so easy to forget that we are made of things that operate on the quantum level,

so quantum physics must interact with us somehow. And I guess I've always held on to that distinction I learned in high school, where classical physics is for big things and quantum physics is for little things. I was like, well, life is big enough to just be classical, but of course that's an oversimplification, that we are quantumly active for little things. I was like, well, life is big enough to just be classical. But of course that's an oversimplification that we are quantumly active on some level.

Yes, you know, gravity applies. Yeah. But if you're looking at yourself with a very, very powerful microscope, then you see all these atoms, you know. And what is really interesting, what intrigues me, and I'd like to spend more time in the near future thinking about those things, is obviously it doesn't surprise me that your scientists right now are starting to bridge an intellectual gap with

quantum physicists because they start to realize that maybe the brain is actually acting at the quantum level. And there was a paper not so long ago and I didn't read it in detail. I looked at the headline and quickly at the abstract. That's what I do too. Don't worry about it. Yeah. But the thing is that they were saying that our brain actually can communicate

with the universe at the quantum level. So I want to open this up because there are a number of things and these are the big question of astrobiology. What's the origin of life? This is one. And then other questions that are not solved in astrobiology, which are related to all that is, you know, so we don't know what intelligence is either. We have no food for me, a bacteria that was able to survive pretty much

unchanged for 4 billion years as some sort of intelligence to still be here today. So what is intelligence? And then there is consciousness. Why is it important in astrobiology to understand consciousness? Because this is how you comprehend the universe around you. Basically, you know, this is what allows you to connect with it. And as a scientist to ask questions. And I already know that my brain is lying to me because, you know, it feels in gaps.

The brain feel gaps. Yeah. But does the brain have anything to do with consciousness? Neuroscientists for a longest time said, yeah, consciousness is a function of the brain. And you have all that school up to very recently as of yesterday's recently, saying that was the case. And now you have neuroscientists and quantum physicists

starting to argue with that, saying that consciousness might not be a function of the brain and might be located somewhere else. So- Really? Oh yeah. This is now getting into, as I often mentioned on this show, I have a bachelor's in philosophy,

and this was the subject of my senior thesis, was the mind-body problem of whether consciousness is located in the brain. So now you're getting into something that I studied for one year in 2004, and I feel like I know a little something about. Where else would it be located? I mean, even if it's quantum in the brain,

I still think it's, you know, it still allows me to be a materialist and say that, well, consciousness is, you know, a property of the physical world, right? Well, I don't know about that. I, you know, I need to read that article in the first place. But they seem to be questioning that and saying that the brain might be more of a receptor,

something else. And so to me, again, I will look at this as a theory that needs to be verified or falsified. And it matters a lot, but I'm going to take the stand of the scientists say, you know, it's not what matters. What matters is that what we are going to do to verify or falsify it. And this is going to take us in a different place. You know, that's the scientific process, but I really love this place where we are right now, where we're in a position to ask those questions, because now if you are questioning consciousness, you are, and also your brain, then you are questioning your reality and reality is really how you apprehend the

world and the universe. So to me, this is very profound because, well, you know, maybe reality is not exactly what we think it is. It's still real enough for you and I to be talking. Yeah. This is also something that I asked two people and especially neuroscientists when we're having those discussions said, okay, let's assume that reality is subjective and reality doesn't exist. Like space, time, all of these things, some people tell you time doesn't exist.

It's a creation of the brain to allow us to live in an experiment. And then if you remove time, then talk to Einstein, you remove space too, because the two are connected, right? So let's say nothing exists, but we're around the same table. We are talking to each other. And I don't know if you are seeing exactly the same reality as I do right now, but we know that we are talking to each other and the decor around us seems to be the same for you and I.

So what's the deal with that? You know, it's just mind boggling. And just like you, believe it or not, I'm coming from a philosophy degree from La Sorbonne in France. That's much better than upstate New York where I would go to school. But I like to question the questions. And also this is what the book is about. It's not to give, you know, an overview of where we are right now, because I felt that was needed after four or five decades where we had lots of data, but I didn't think that the intellectual frameworks

had evolved that much. And I wanted to start questioning the questions. And this is fascinating. Well, and I love that the bigger the questions get in these fields, the more they start to merge. The bigger the questions of astrobiology, physics, quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy, the closer you get to the root questions, the more the fields start to combine

and you start hearing physicists talk about consciousness and the subjective nature of reality, your physicists start sounding like Emanuel Kant talking about, well, the way it looks in my mind is not reality in itself because my mind is a filter, et cetera, et cetera. You can put Einstein and Daniel Dennett in conversation in terms of-

And you can go even further, you know? And if you look at this, and I said a number of times, I'm not a religious person, but I'm a very spiritual person, look at the ancient texts. People only thinking and writing with their intuition. Of course they didn't have iPads and iPods and whatnot, and they didn't spend all their lives on internet. They were so close to nature. The Greeks foresaw the atoms and so many other things just through

their reflections. You're right. Those fields are merging. I think this is the beauty of astrobiology. It enables us to connect those dots and to bridge those disciplines. We have right now a spectrum of things. We still have people thinking that humans are different, they are conscious, and this is something that is a very rare quality or whatever you want to name it in nature and they are very hesitant to bestow other species with consciousness. Whereas if you're starting to think that consciousness is not necessarily a function of the brain that is sitting somewhere outside and here we do have a receptor, then everything that is alive is conscious.

And now you are not talking about something that conscious or not conscious, but beings with different levels of consciousness. And now, which personally I would root for. So if you look at the spectrum, you are so the human or special to the time where we are right now, where the more we look, the less special we look really. Our planetary system is nothing really very special. You know, it's condition might be special. There are gazillions of them. And then you are starting to say, well, maybe everything is conscious and we don't really know

where the transition is between living and non-living and does it make sense to have a transition? And then you have guys like Lenza, Robert Lenza. I don't know if you ever read Biosympathism. You should. Whether you agree with that or not, again, doesn't matter. It's the provocative nature of what you write and you teamed up with a biologist and it says that it's not the universe that creates life and consciousness,

it's consciousness that creates the universe. Oh boy, and what does it mean by that? Yeah, that's the thing. I know you're coming with it know, it's, it's beautiful because now you have people who dare, you know, they're exploring those avenues. They don't claim they are right. Yeah. Or this, they shouldn't because this is science and we are going to go after and you, and you need data and you need to be able to reproduce that. But we are coming from a place where we are so unique

and centered to everything to really literally expanding our consciousness and finding out that we are part of that universe maybe in ways that we cannot fathom yet. pattern yet. Now, this is in a separate thing that I wrote. There is no separation. We create those separations because in science, it's hard to be all the time holistic in your approach. You have to be reductionist, right? What we forget to do is to step back from time to time and just say, okay, what did I learn from this and what is the big picture right now? Okay. So it is just this time where we have a download of information. And as you so rightfully said earlier on, it all brings towards this idea of expanding as part of the wall and being a universe in ourselves, but also being completely part of the universe. We're not separated. Everything we do at the quantum level has

an implication on the atom next to us. And I mean, the simplest thing people don't realize, this is why I think it's so hard for people to understand why we should be so responsible in what we do with ourselves and with our planet and with the people around us, because we interact at the quantum level with each other and with the environment. Yeah. with each other and with the environment. Yeah. Natalie, I love how scientists, when you get really deep into this stuff,

you start talking like Buddhists. You know, that's what I really enjoy. And I can hear, I know the difference between someone diving into Woo Woo and someone who just understands everything so thoroughly that you are really thinking about it on this large level. I just love I love your perspective on this. I want to return to something that you said about 10 minutes ago that fascinated me.

You said there was the idea that life was like a necessary result of the laws of thermodynamics, according to Schrodinger still, I think. Schrodinger and Jeremy England is the younger scientist, the youngest generation. Jeremy has been writing a book 10 years ago and he has more article and he's doing some computer modeling and you know. So is the idea that the laws of thermodynamics in our universe, if you have a universe like ours

and you have the laws of thermodynamics, you are almost inevitably gonna have life somewhere because some process is gonna try to beat entropy and we are the ones that did it. Like there's some incentive in the overall system or some push towards life because something somewhere has to beat entropy at least for a little while. Is that the idea?

It's the idea. It's the idea. And that all of a sudden, you know, that gives you a very different perspective on how to look for life. Right now we are looking for life through environments, through something that could be good for the type of biochemistry

that we know. That's the problem with our quest right now. We only have one data point, so we are looking for the stuff that we know. Carbon-based life in a watery environment that has energy, etc. By the way, this is not preposterous. We just discovered with exoplanet that there are millions of planets that could host life as we know it. The stuff we are made of is so common. As I said, GWST has discovered organic molecules that are over 12 billion years old now. Wow. So we are pushing back on these notions that life, or at least the stuff of life, is something that came later in the universe. No, it was present very early on. But as we do that, we still have to follow the rules of biochemistry as we know it. So we are looking for the stuff that we know, things that could resemble what we can recognize. And that's a little bit of a problem because, well, although it's abundant, it might not be all.

And maybe there is this elephant in the room that's just right in front of us and we cannot see it. And I talked about it in the book. The terrestrial version of that would be the shadow biosphere, you know, a different tree of life that could have stemmed from early Earth. And that would be different enough that we cannot pick it up as life. Obviously, it's not, you know, evolved life, but let's say that microbes develop from a different tree of life. And our tests are just designed to find life

as we understand it. So maybe that stuff is right next to us and we cannot pick it up. You think there could be a form of life that is so alien to us that we would not even recognize it as life, even though it were, even though it was? That's the theory with the shadow biosphere. Wow.

And again, it doesn't matter so much if that theory is true or false. What matters is it forces us to try and figure out how could we recognize such a life, which is taking us on the road to understand how to search for life as we don't know it. But the problem with that, with biochemistry is that, well, it's really hard, unless you have, I don't know, I'm going to see a white rabbit jumping in front of the rover's camera, it's going to be really hard to say that it's alive. And even if I see a white rabbit, I don't know if it's a robotic rabbit, but at least it will tell me that somebody put that robot together. But when you take the idea, the notion of life from the physical standpoint, from the

thermodynamical standpoint or from universal markers standpoint, then you are getting rid of the issue with biochemistries. Now you are looking at processes. What I really hope is that as he goes along, Jeremy is going to learn what are those signatures. From the standpoint of astrobiology right now, we are looking both at biosignatures and technosignatures, you know, so biosignatures are the signature of life that we could recognize on another planet. The issue we're having right now with those biosignatures are that none of them are unambiguously the signatures of life. For instance, you can have methane.

We have methane on Mars that we have questioned Mark about, but methane can be produced seven different ways. Half of them are from the environment and the rest is biological. Calpharts. Yeah, that, but we haven't seen any cal so far on Mars. Oxygen's the same. We created this ladder of life detection

for biosignature on another planet. What it does, it has eight rungs that are going from favorable environment to specific molecules. But even then, when you get to the top of that ladder, it's converging evidence. But on top of it, because we don't have a good definition for life, we don't have any definition for life actually.

That's what I was going to ask you in a second. It's that you have to respect the skepticism principle. Basically we cannot say we've found life because we don't know what life is. Whereas if we can find a physical process whereby we know that this is what life does and this is the unique way life behaves, that's a different thing. For techno-signature, if you want an unambiguous evidence that we discovered life, that might be the best one. There I'm putting the hat of the director of the Corsican Center at the SETI Institute.

But in truth, if you have a flying saucer landing in the middle of Washington, then you will know that there is life signature of a molecule in an atmosphere, meaning that an alien species is messing up the environment or processing things. Basically we are looking for something that cannot be explained by the environment alone. As far as the chemistry and the biochemistry, we know it's really hard at this point in time to just pull life out of the environment. It's a lot easier for techno signatures, I would say.

Wow. I wanna dwell on the question of what the definition of life is and why we don't have one. Because that was literally going to be my next question for you, was what is the definition of life is and why we don't have one. Because that was literally going to be my next question for you, was what is the definition of life? You say we do not have a good one. I'd like to try to come up with one

and you tell me why I don't have it. Is that okay? Okay. Which is to me, it seems as though life is an extremely complex, anti-entropic chemical reaction that beats entropy as long as you put new energy into it that is constantly changing, right? There has to be variability.

It can't just be a star burning for a long time, but it has to have that element of descent and variation over time in order to qualify as life. Tell me why that is not an apt definition. Yeah, that's fine, but you just also define the economy market. Ah, fuck. Okay, okay, let me think about that.

There is a thermodynamics of money, you know? And so that's the thing. It's just not, there is not this one thing. People say life reproduced, but you can see, you can see that are happening in life that mimics all of these processes. And so, yeah. And the thing is that none of them are wrong and they are not, but they are not definition, they are description.

The way I see this is that you imagine that life, or I'm going to sound like chap GPT for a second, like this big tapestry. I love it. Even you have commercial using that now in the big tapestry of life. Imagine that you have a postcard and you have different people. It's a very, very large postcard and they are all looking at different aspects of this postcard and they are looking with their telescopes. So they have a finite field of view and some of them are looking at this landscape. So some of them say, okay, they're looking at the sky, so life is the sky.

This is what they see. They are studying this. So another one is looking somewhere else. It's looking at the clouds and say, well, life is a cloud. Another one look at the trees, et cetera, et cetera. You see where I'm with this. And so for each of them, depending on what they are interested in, they are going to define life from a different perspective. Actually, this is not a definition. They can tell me close to a definition would be, well, life is this white thing that seems to be changing when the temperature is changing because the cloud is changing form or et cetera, et cetera.

Then if you bring them together, all of these observations are going to give you a more complex description of life. Astrobiology does that, but at this point in time, we're still at the level of description. And it's fine, it's fine, but it doesn't give you a definition. That's why I prefer something on the side of biophysics and thermodynamics because all of a sudden you have a process. Life is messing with the environment in ways that non-living things are doing.

So- To a certain extent, it seems as though life, trying to define life is trying to define it's like my least favorite question when people ask is a hot dog a sandwich and they think that's a very clever question to ask and What you have to understand when people ask that is that well humans came up with sandwiches There's edge cases for every category that humans came up with and you can always find an edge case You can say is that a dog is that a tree? Whatever, you know that I've heard people argue

that there's no such thing as a vegetable, right? Because there's always an edge case for every human word because we are trying to apply order to a chaotic universe that does not come in neat categories. And so the question of defining life is a question like that to some degree, where you can bicker about the definition or you can look at, hey, what does actually exist

in the world and what can we learn about it? Absolutely, and I think, again, if you take the different cultures on earth, you'll come up with very, very different things. Some of them don't even bother trying to find a definition for life because they think that everything is living. It's being part of this huge organism where the

only thing that's really true is that everything interacts, so there is a balance that needs to be kept. And you oftentimes find this type of description and they don't bother. Again, we are talking about in science, we absolutely have to have this transition between living and non-living. And some people say, well, does this really matter? If there is a transition, does it matter? Are you less living if you are right there than a nanose second letter. So it really depends how you want to view the universe. I think that science, and I've been talking a lot about all those things, so I'm losing my mind here. I don't know if I already said that to you or not, but if I repeat myself, that's okay.

No problem. You know, it's just, I think that perspective, it's really all that matter. Science tries to understand nature by measuring it. This is how we understand nature. And then spirituality or intuition is really the way to explain everything you can't measure. And these two things are not separated. As a scientist, I spend a great deal of my life in thought experiments. And as all of them, you oftentimes come to the best experiences or the best theories by trying to become what you are actually trying to figure out. And so there is a good deal of intuition into that. So I don't think that these are two separate things and I don't think that in the grand tapestry of science, you necessarily need to have a definition for

everything. In terms of intellectual framework, you need to have a goal. Give yourself a goal and objectives and science question and draw hypotheses and maybe theories down the line to build your experiment. This is a guideline. That's not the truth. I mean, with a capital T, and you have to accept that, which sometimes is a little bit difficult to get across to the public, is that there's this aura of the scientist has to come up with questions. We are very happy when science takes us to the next level. But what we want is to give… Let me take this and say that our vision and our understanding of nature and the universe evolves with time and the resolution we can observe the things that we want to understand with. Just like JWST, the knowledge we just acquired, we didn't

have like two years, three years ago. The James Webb Space Telescope, yes. Yeah. And this gives us a new perspective, a new lens. So every time you bring in a new instrument, you are diving deeper, getting a new understanding. And so our vision of the universe of ourselves is going to evolve and continue to evolve. What is very important is to be able to step back and gather the information, say where we stand, just not to be too reductionist all the time.

the information say where we stand, just not to be too reductionist all the time. But people have to understand that reality is relative to our way of perceiving it. Oof, I mean, I gotta say, this is a beautiful perspective. I bet it's unsatisfying to the reporters who say, is there life in the universe other than us? And you say, well, what is life? I mean, maybe everything is alive.

That doesn't really give people what they wanted, right? People want to say, no, where's the aliens, man? Well, I'm going to tell you something. I am going to tell you something. First, Carl Sagan said something before I did, which is, you know, if we are alone, that's a big waste of space, right? Oh, yes.

That's a huge waste of space. And second, I'd say that, well, you know, maybe the first time is the hardest. We're here. So if you are taking the principle of mediocrity, which I think you know what that is, having done all this philosophy, it means that we are probably representative of the most common type of life that exists in the universe. And now you have to go back to a few assumptions. The first one is that, and again, that will depend on how you look at this, but if we're taking the Earth as a typical example, because according to the principle of mediocrity, which should be a

typical example, then it takes a long time to get from simple life to complex life. I don't even mean us complex, I mean tiny animals. On the other hand, apparently it becomes clearer and clearer every day that life showed up on the earth pretty much as soon as the crust of the planet cooled down. So that's big. That's really big. Then it took forever to get to complex life. And then again, things started to accelerate it and as we go, it's becoming more and more exponential.

So when you look at this and you say, well, if we're following the principle of mediocrity, then it means that the universe should be full of a simple life. Might not be the one that builds telescopes and send radio signals throughout the universe, but they still might leave signatures in their atmosphere. And because, and Jeremy has been showing that in one of his experiments, you see if you shine life long enough into some atoms, you're gonna get photosynthesis.

So I am saying that cyanobacteria will be all over the place in the universe. So that's my bet. I hope so, I would like to find some. Yeah, and you know, if now you take the time from the Cambrian Revolution, you know, six, 700 million years ago to now, which is really nothing in terms of geology,

you see how fast civilization, you know, start to show up. And intelligence as we define it, which is not satisfactory right now, but look, today we have about 200, 300 intelligent species at the surface of the earth that we recognize as intelligence. Other primates, elephants, whales, dolphins, et cetera, we're starting to communicate with them. So they are intelligent, they are social. And then there is us. We are the only species. They're really the only thing that defines us or separates us from the rest is really that we have built a technology that allows us to escape our environment of origin. Because other species are social.

Some of them are using tools from time to time. We tend to use tools just for play and we are creating things that we don't need, which nature doesn't do. They are using tools, you know, for a purpose, but it takes time, but then you get to that outlier zone where you have intelligence species. So it's going to take a lot more time to get to that point and, uh, there will be a lot less of them. But again, look at what James Webb tells us.

I mean, what does it tell us? Look at what James Webb tells us. I mean, what does it tell us? We are seeing so many more galaxies than we thought so early in our universe. Uh, the number of galaxy is now in, in, in trillions or, or, or even more, each of them on average having a hundred to a hundred billion stars, as many planets as you know, as many planets. If we are taking our solar system as an average, there might be 250 moons around each of those planets. Some of them might have a habitable environment.

It isn't likely that a moon like Europa or Enceladus, who would know about it, would lead to a technologically advanced civilization, but might still lead to a complex life. Europa might have a chance to have small animals. I'm not talking whales, but little complex microorganisms. Crabs. I don't know about that. Bugs. I said fish.

I couldn't believe that. I, but I, I read that. So, you know, we'll see. Uh, but what I'm saying is that the numbers are there and it's not just statistics, people, especially journalists keep telling something, telling me something that I, I wrote, which is right, but it's taking a little bit outside of the context, says that it will be a statistical absurdity if we are alone.

And- Yeah, it would be ridiculous to have all of those planets, trillions and billions of them, and if, like you say, life is a necessary product of thermodynamics, how could it be possible that it isn't nowhere? It's an incredible lab where life is going to emerge. And I don't like to talk about origin and life appearing

like there was some magic wand and all of a sudden it appeared. I really think about emergence. I am really of those who think that environment and life are tied together and one emerges from the other and they stay connected to each other through time, through coevolution. And so, we're seeing this right now with how fast our planet is changing, which is a direct result of our actions. And so, it's not so much the numbers,

it's about combination, possibilities. I would say that even by accident, life has had to happen somewhere else. Well, is there a good reason if, you know, we think life must be so endemic that we have not found it yet? I mean, it is frustrating, isn't it? Good old Fermi. Yeah. Good old Fermi.

Tell us about it. Is it too far away? What is going on? You know, I'm not too much of a fan of the Fermi paradox, which is really funny when you're the director of the Carl Sagan Center at the study institute. But I think it's, here's what I like about it. It's a good way to get the conversation going about that subject.

But on the other hand, to me, it epitomizes how anthropocentric our search is because everything that is stated in the Fermi paradox, which as you say, if there are so many out there, why we haven't seen any of them yet. And so they are saying, well, they are hiding. They are hiding because they are afraid that someone will want to destroy them if they are discovered, for instance. To me, that was absolutely mind-blowing to see a great mind like Steve Aukin subscribe

to this kind of thing because this is so anthropocentric. We have to believe that aliens are going to think like us, that they are going to be war-driven and belligerent like us. When you are approaching this from the standpoint of coevolution of life and environment, remember that we are the product of four billion years of coevolution on our own planet.

Coevolution meaning the sun. When you have... Okay, I'm going to explain the coevolution real fast. At the very beginning, the Earth is formed. So it's formed at a certain distance from the sun and it has some physical and chemical characteristics, which means that some chemical reactions are not going to be possible. It's too hot or it's too cold for some of them. This physical world of the Earth is going to give the constraint to the type of biochemistry,

the chemistry of life that can emerge from it. For instance, you cannot have a chemistry of life that starts at minus 250 degrees Celsius or centigrade on Earth. That's not possible, right? Just because the Earth is a specific experiment, it has its sets of temperature, its specific gravity, etc., etc., specific pressure, and this is driving what kind of biochemistry is going to be possible. Now life emerges from these conditions.

Well, guess what? The first thing that it does start to mess up the environment. The atmosphere we breathe, as you know, is not the result of a physical evolution of the year or chemical evolution of the earth is the result of tiny little bacteria, ranging from one micron to 60 micron, millions of, you know, some, so it's just, they take the CO2 from the atmosphere, which was the, you know, predominant gas in the atmosphere of the Earth at the very beginning and used it for their metabolism and injected oxygen in the atmosphere instead. So if they started injecting oxygen, the oxygen went to the ocean for as long as it could, as long as mineral could actually take that oxygen in, it started to oxidize everything.

This is what gave us the beautiful outcrop of the great oxygenation event where you see the bended iron formation that you learned of. This is this time in the history of earth where life modified the environment. Now the environment is modified. This is the very first ecological catastrophe because it kills about 90% of life on earth, which is prepared to breathe oxygen to be an aerobics. Wow. Okay. So, and then.

That was the very first example of life creating climate change, right? Absolutely, totally. Yeah. You get it. Which makes it seem ridiculous that people think that humans can't have changed the climate now when literally we're the result of climate change.

We are coming from a great lineage. Yeah. But now we tend to be willing to go back to a more CO2 warm atmosphere, which we've been before. Yeah, apparently we wanna go back to the atmosphere being full of CO2. Here is the difference, Adam, is that cyanobacteria created an environment

that at least was good for them. Yeah. And in fact, the injection of oxygen created the pathway to the biodiversity that we need on whether we have on earth right now. Whereas us idiots, we are injecting more and more crap into the atmosphere and CO2 and we're basically killing the environment that's good for us. Yeah.

Okay. That's the main difference. But to go back to more interesting things, here's an example of life modifying the environment. And then you have the natural cycle of climate changes because those exist. We have the cycles, solar cycle, glacial cycles, interglacial periods, et cetera. And then life has to adapt with that. Some of it is going to adapt, some of them it's not going to adapt. The more resilient is going to last up until now. And sometimes you have big catastrophes.

Then for some reason, all of a sudden, the CO2 gets trapped into the atmosphere because it gets cooler. And then you have this runaway effect in the other direction. The CO2 gets trapped into the atmosphere because it gets cooler. And then you have this runaway effect in the other direction. The volcanism is not that abundant. And then the temperature gets cooler. There is a runaway effect. The earth transformed into a snowball. It's a big environmental catastrophe for the existing life. 80% of all life in the ocean or on land is killed.

And 50 million years later, talk about the winter, that was the first mobile. Imagine that at that time, 2.7 billion years ago, out of a period of 90 billion years, let me say 70 or 90 million years, 75 million years were spent trapped in ice for life. So, but when it came out of this, all of a sudden it exploded, right? Yeah. all of a sudden it exploded, right? And so, environment forces life to evolve, life transformed the environment and it's not only the atmosphere.

When life does its things, it is going to modify the environment by changing the texture of rocks, the texture of soils. It changes the way water flows on earth. And I'm talking about microbes here. I'm not talking about beavers. Water flows, energy flows, and information flows. This is how much life and environment are pulled together.

They are the same thing, really. They are the same thing. So where do you put the transition into that? So to some extent, that went to the Gaia hypothesis where the Earth is… But some go farther than that because Gaia was still an environment trying to maintain life. Whereas if you look at this from a completely holistic perspective, is there really a difference between the living and the non-living? Because once you have life emerging on the planet, you can never say anymore that you have life and environment.

You have a living planet where everything modifies everything all the time. And so how does that idea of coevolution impact our, you know, search for life on other planets? Cause that's where we started. You said you had a brief explanation of coevolution and instead you gave a long, beautiful, revelatory one, which I love, but now I've forgotten how we got there.

Yeah. So, well, how it helps, the reason it helps it's because just what I said, a planet that has life on it is not anymore just an environment. Its complexity is going to be different. Its signature is going to be different. It's no pun intended, but complexity has a lot to do with it. But complexity is a complex thing. Life can make a planet more complex, but it also sometimes can simplify a lot landscapes. So we still have to figure out this one. But I like complexity. It's very difficult to get a handle on it just because of that, but that and thermodynamics, and I think that we have more tools today

to be searching for life elsewhere. And this co-evolution is going to give you a signature that you are not expecting. The problem with it is that you have to have a blank in your mind of what the planet would have looked like without life on it. So I wanna end with this. I mean, these ideas are so huge. There's so many rapid discoveries here.

What are you most excited about in the next decade or two of the search for life? Do you think we're gonna make any large discoveries in your lifetime or in my lifetime or in the lifetime of our listeners? Yeah, you know, there are so many ways of asking this question. People are often asking me, you know,

when do you think we are going to discover life and where do you think we are going to discover it first? And first to respond to your question, the big revolution, the big discoveries, et cetera. I think we just lived through one, which to me is almost the equivalent of the Copernican revolution, which was the Kepler mission. And all of a sudden, we discover that the universe is populated by planetary systems, that our galaxy hosts as many

planets as stars. Now, every time you go outside at night and you look up at the stars, you say around every single one of them, there is at least a planet that's circling around. And that's very profound because once again, Copernicus helped us not being at the center, understanding how our system worked. But today we understood that we are not unique. There is this dis-sentry kind of thing happening too. So we are just living through one right now and measuring the magnitude of this revolution every single day.

And just wait until GWST is done and all the other ground and space telescopes that are coming, that are going to blow our mind. You have to imagine that some of the ground telescopes that are being built now are going to be more powerful than some of the space telescopes we currently have. This is like 10 years from now. Ten years from now in the solar system, we are going to have our first hint of what potentially life as we don't know it could be by visiting Titan, which is our best look at a very different system. I can see for me, I can see quantum physics being the next huge revolution in our way of understanding who we are, what life is, and how everything fits.

And that goes back to our discussion of the very beginning, because then you're going to be able to tie up together neuroscience that gives us some ideas about consciousness. What is reality? What is our understanding of the universe? Is this totally out of whack? Is it real? Are we really connected all the time with the universe? When you're looking at quantum physics and the sluET experiment, if atoms are capable of communicating from one end of the

universe to the next, do we need radio telescopes to listen for messages? Can we maybe find other ways to tap into whatever quantum physics is going to tell us to find out if there is somebody at the other side of this universe and maybe others, because well, that's in the play as well, that is out there and also seeking if there is life somewhere else. So to me, quantum physics is a big one. The connecting bridges between quantum physics, neuroscience, and astrobiology is going to be one spectacular revolution. And I give it, we are going to start seeing, we're starting to see the first, just like this tsunami, you're starting to see today the wave receding for now. I think that the wave is going to come crashing 10, 15 years from now.

In terms of finding life, well, it can come from anywhere. I know it's not going to satisfy anybody what I'm saying, but we have been exploring the solar system now for 50 years. We are starting to have a much better handle on the habitability of our solar system. And we're starting to ask good questions. And the reason I'm saying that is that we're finding what we are looking for. This is not yet a discovery, but we are finding what we are looking for. So we're expecting to find what we're looking for. To me, I'd love to see something. Enceladus is really my little darling child with Titan. But for SETI, it can be anytime, anywhere. It can happen anytime, anywhere. It might be that we

already have a message in our archive, but we didn't have the tools before to decode that message. We're getting the tools now with AI, which is really helping a lot. The one that's going to be a little bit more difficult for us is actually where the revolution is coming from, the exoplanets, because they are far away. In the solar system, you can bring back samples, you can look at them, or even if it's difficult because we don't have this term definition of life. And for study, if you have the spacecraft landing in Washington, then we know they are there. But for an exoplanet, you can look at an atmosphere and see things like methane and oxygen and all these things that are so tantalizing and never be able to tell that it's actually life or something else. Until, unless we find this synthetic component

that tells us that somebody is messing, like pollution in an atmosphere. Somebody is messing with their world. Well, what I love about talking to you is that you're making me realize that we may discover life elsewhere in the universe, but we may easily, we may just as well discover that life is more than what we thought it was.

And that we may discover more life around us than we thought there was, which is an incredible revelation. And to me, I'm going to tell you something that might surprise you, and I think is an important message for the public in particular. Because it's often something that people don't realize is that astrobiology is such a marvelous mirror for ourselves. Remember, we only have one model of life, it's us. And so whatever question we put out there, searching for life is actually

a question about ourselves right now. And by looking at the notion of habitability, environmental thresholds, the evolution of atmospheres, we're actually learning what those notions are and bringing them back to earth to understand our planet. And if something good happens from astrobiology in the coming years, I think this is where probably its greatest contribution is going to be, which is to help us go through that crisis.

That is so beautiful, Natalie. I can't thank you enough for coming on the show today. The name of your book is The Secret Life of the Universe. People, of course, can pick it up at factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people follow your work? Where can they find you? You can find me, well, at the CETI Institute, on ceti.org, of course.

I do also have a platform on Facebook. It's called planetary landscapes. We are a nice cozy group of 1.8 million people now. So it's a, it's a, well, it's not a group. It's open. Everybody can come as long as they behave. Uh, but it's my corner. It's a, for me, a grassroots movement where, you know, it's

really a population from all over the world. It's open to everybody. And I'm trying to show the beauty of the universe through images, but also through news, uh, you know, by posting the latest discoveries, et cetera. So it's more if you prefer of a digest of what's going on, but the thing that I do is that when people have questions, I answer those questions. And so, you can find me there,

otherwise you can find me on ex-Twitter and LinkedIn, of course. Thank you so much for being here, Natalie. It's been incredible having you. Thank you very much, Adam. Pleasure. My God, thank you once again to Natalie for coming on the show for that fascinating conversation. If you want to pick up a copy of her book,

again, head to factuallypod.com slash books. Any book you purchase there will support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. Thank you so much for doing so. If you want to support this show directly, and I hope you do, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode we do ad-free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the credits of this show

and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues. This week, I want to thank, most recently, Codename Italian Italian Matthew Reimer, Ethan, Barack Pellet, Gabriel G, Kerry Hill, Ed, Ruben Solvang, Valen, CryptocurrencyAttorneys.com, and A Screaming Batman. If you would like to put your weird nickname

or an ad for your cryptocurrency attorney business in the credits of this show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. We would love to have you there. Of course, I wanna thank my producers, Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman, everybody here at Head Gum for making the show possible. Head to adamconover.net for all my standup tickets and tour dates, and until next week,

I'll see you on Factually. I don't go anywhere I don't go anywhere