Ep. 9- the earth is amazing and so are you (because you are earth)

Hey man. Today we are celebrating Earth Day by going through the entire history of the planet we all share.  From space dust to guacamole, there really is a lot to talk about. 

Join us as we sit by the river and find some stuff to be grateful for about our planet. 

Make sure to subscribe on youtube and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We also have a book! If you like this podcast we know you’ll love it. There is also a WLY patreon if you would like to support us there!

Support us on Patreon!

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hey man. Hey man. Welcome to Hey Man. Today we are talking about Earth Day. We are talking about all things Earth to celebrate this wonderful day.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Yeah. Today we're in Malibu Creek and we go through the entire history of Earth. We don't skip a step.

unknown 0:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 0:17

We go through every single minute, minute by minute, through the last 4.5 billion years.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Every single thing that has occurred on Earth.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

We talk about some of our favorite things about Earth, some of our most exciting things about the history of the Earth, and a little bit of ways to find gratitude for this planet we all share.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

Yeah, and at some point a giant night heron flies over the head of us. So make sure to stay tuned for that.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

If you're just listening to this, you can find uh the video version on YouTube. And so tune in for that. It's uh it's fun, it's very beautiful out today.

SPEAKER_02 0:47

Um there's some creak sounds babbling in the background, but we hope you enjoy them. I think it's quite relaxing. I know it's relaxing for me.

SPEAKER_03 0:53

Check us out on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Uh and make sure to support us on Patreon uh if you can. It's the place to support us.

SPEAKER_03 1:02

Or also buy our book. Uh find it in bookstores near you. We love you, an optimistic guide to life on a rock floating through space.

SPEAKER_02 1:07

Check it out.

SPEAKER_03 1:08

Let's talk about Earth.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Let's talk about Earth, baby. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about you and me. We love you.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Hey man. Hey man.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

Hey hey. Welcome back. What is that? We're having a great time on here. Thank you, buddy.

SPEAKER_03 1:32

I don't know if you guys can see them, but there's actually a crowd. There's 400 people. There's people from Omaha can I hear from Omaha?

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Omaha. Oh wow, they have drums. They're real funny in Omaha. Thank you. We appreciate that.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

We appreciate that. What even time is it? It's podcast time.

SPEAKER_02 1:55

It's podcast time. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome back to Hey Man. A We Love You podcast.

SPEAKER_03 2:03

Uh today we are in the beautiful Malibu Creek. Is it a state park? It's a state park. It's Malibu Creek State Park. It's a state park. We are hanging out here in Malibu Creek by the side of a creek.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

We are in that very creek, yeah. It's a beautiful time. We had a beautiful little approach in to this very spot we're sitting right now.

SPEAKER_03 2:21

Yeah, we had to crawl along or I guess scramble along the side of uh the cliff face that goes right along the watering, like rock pit, rock holes, rock watering holes. What are those called? Rock pools.

SPEAKER_02 2:32

Rock pools, yeah, giant rock pools um that you can swim in and you can climb on and climb over. We've brought friends over here, and uh we're so used to the the scramble, the little approach to get into this back beautiful area right here. Yeah. But we've had friends fall into the deep depths of the rock pools when it's uh absolutely freezing out.

SPEAKER_03 2:52

My girlfriend, uh Madeline, fell on the very last move on her way out. She did so good on the way in. Yeah. And on the truly the last step when she wasn't uh like above ground, she slipped and fell all the way to the top of her head.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

Just completely immersed in the cold waters.

SPEAKER_03 3:10

But you know, she wasn't as much of a climber, and she was such a good sport coming out and exploring with me. And she had a great time. And then um It's uh honestly a little dangerous to be good people. Um but it is so beautiful and so much fun.

SPEAKER_02 3:22

And it's worth it back here. I mean, take a look around. We'll uh get a little video for you guys.

SPEAKER_03 3:26

We saw a family of ducks on our way.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:29

Uh there were a few like little babies. Little babies shaking out their their feathers as they were diving around looking for grubs.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

I'm about to get a video.

SPEAKER_03 3:39

Um right now we're here, Andy's getting a video. Look, I'm waving. Hello.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

Hello, happy earth day, everybody. We love this holiday. It's probably it should be a much bigger holiday, I think. Of course. It's like this one thing we all guaranteed we share, you know? Yeah, everyone It's a national holiday.

SPEAKER_03 3:56

It is a national holiday, but it's not people don't get work off or anything. It's just a commemorative day for the earth.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

Uh but as we should, we should uh all hold hands and rejoice in and uh to be grateful for this this one planet we have.

SPEAKER_03 4:10

It's a very special day because I mean, no one can dislike the earth as a whole. People can have qualms certain parts of each Dr.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Dufenschmerz, I think, has a thing. I that's just with the tri-state area.

SPEAKER_03 4:21

Yeah, that was the tri-state area.

SPEAKER_02 4:23

But uh He loves the Earth.

SPEAKER_03 4:26

But I think it's a very special, important day to take a moment to appreciate the beauty of the Earth and appreciate uh important conservation efforts that are going on. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:35

And Earth Day is always a tough one because you know a lot of bigger companies or even oil companies uh use it to greenwash their whole, you know, their whole image, right? They they have a huge campaign for Earth Day. I guess that is that better than nothing?

SPEAKER_03 4:51

Is it better than nothing, or does it just allow them to continue to destroy the environment while uh pretending to be these earth lovers? It is that. It is that it's it is that it is that um but then also Earth Day is a time when a lot of companies will make large donations to important causes, uh, though that it's debatable how much of that actually that actually gets into like it like tree planting, for example, is is a very controversial subject that oral companies uh donate to consistently. I mean uh carbon capture as an entire field is is a bit controversial because yes, you can plant trees that will technically take in that carbon, but you're planting monoculture in previously deforested land, which now opens up more deforestation credits for large logging companies. Yeah. But it's earth day!

SPEAKER_02 5:39

But it's earth day, and uh, we should also whoa, e-gads. It's like it's a bit windy here. It's a bit windy. Um hopefully the audio's okay. We're kind of just uh hoping and praying.

SPEAKER_03 5:48

Yeah, maybe you'll hear some water now and then.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Here, yeah, check it out. Yeah, listen to the water. Listen to the calm sound of the water. Isn't that nice?

SPEAKER_03 6:02

But Earth Day is difficult, but it also is a wonderful celebration time. I don't want to just be all doom and gloom about it. What's what's a good way to celebrate Earth Day? This is a good conversation because there should be something that we do. You know, that you have the Super Bowl or the big game where we all go and get a bunch of finger foods and all sit down and eat the floor.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

Or you have Christmas or even the Fourth of July where we kind of do the opposite of Earth Day and just like pollute the air.

SPEAKER_03 6:25

Yeah, let's make the air as dirty as possible and cause as many wildfires as we can. So here are our pitches for how to celebrate Earth Day because so far I feel like we haven't come up with a good way to all uh collectively celebrate.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:40

Okay, so my number one. Yeah. Uh roll around in the dirt. Roll around in the dirt, yeah. Are you are you clothed? I think it's clothing optional. Unless you're in public, then it would have to go with what the whatever the local ordinance is on a public nudity.

SPEAKER_02 6:56

But is this like required? Is it does everybody have to do this?

SPEAKER_03 6:58

I think it's like as much as you're required to do an Easter egg hunt, you're required to roll around in the dirt and mud on Earth Day.

SPEAKER_04 7:04

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 7:04

Because it's kind of a reminder that you came from the dirt, all I guess not we didn't necessarily come from the dirt, but all of the creatures of this earth came from, you know, muddy little pools of water. And uh and that's where we kind of still need to get back to something.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

I mean the salty ocean as well. Well, that is where like most likely. Similarly, we should take a dunk into the very ocean we came from, you know? Yes. Um and pretend we're those mudskippers that uh I mean, mudskipper like fish. They they they weren't mudskippers specifically. Yes. Uh do you remember the name of the fish? Yes, I do. The the first fish that came out of the waters, we all should pretend we were like that fish and slither onto the shore uh entirely naked, might I'd add.

SPEAKER_03 7:49

And reenact the experience of discovering dry earth for the first time.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

First, you have to like slowly get on, and this is over the course of a hundred years, but you're gonna do this. Not in many, many millions of millions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not hundreds of years, sorry, millions of years. Yes. Um but slowly like progressing upon the shore.

SPEAKER_03 8:07

Be in be in a tide pool for a little while and then try to like jump onto a rock, then fall off. Then jump onto a rock, then fall off.

SPEAKER_04 8:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:13

What was the name of that thing?

SPEAKER_04 8:15

TikToka.

SPEAKER_03 8:16

It's an it's a cool name, too. It's like Takanaka. That's the the guitar guy. Oh, that that's Masayoshi Takanaka.

SPEAKER_02 8:23

Masayoshi Takanaka.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

This is an awesome Japanese guitarist who Alex just saw, actually. No way. Yeah, apparently it was an amazing concert.

SPEAKER_02 8:29

Yeah, people are going crazy for him right now. And for this fish, I hear.

SPEAKER_03 8:32

Yes, this fish is having a big moment in the culture. It's uh Cameron Winter, Olivia Rodrigo, and the first fish to all dating. They're all dating. But yeah, so I like the idea of rolling around in the mud.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

You like the idea of Pretending, like it's it's sort of a like a play or a uh a cultural phenomenon that we all take part in.

SPEAKER_03 8:51

We all Oh, and there's like big articles like Did you see how Heidi Klum celebrated Earth Day? Yeah. She she was covered in scales and she rolled around on a Tahiti booth. Who the heck is Heidi Klum? I think she was like on America's Next Top Model or something. Oh really? Yeah, she was like a supermodel. Alternatively, it could be like a boycott day of boycotting buying gas or doing things that are really environmentally demanding or have big environmental impacts. Which it really should be.

SPEAKER_02 9:19

It it really should be. And I I think another part of that is really just getting out of nature and embracing this beautiful earth that we live in, you know. Uh no matter where it is, you can find nature all around you.

SPEAKER_03 9:30

Yeah, even if it's just taking a time to squat down and look at a little flower planter and appreciate the beauty of a flower's bloom or a bee pollinating that flower, uh, because that's that's all earth, even if it's in a little planter box. Yeah. Other ways to celebrate Earth Day. Big cake that looks like earth?

SPEAKER_02 9:47

Big cake that looks like earth could be good. How do you make a ball cake?

SPEAKER_03 9:50

Ooh, yeah, everyone has to make a spherical cake.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:53

Did you see how spherical Heidi Klum's cake was?

SPEAKER_02 9:57

Hers was a perfect sphere. Perfect sphere. You know, and Earth isn't a perfect sphere. Yeah, it's slightly egg-shaped. Slightly egg-shaped.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

And it's a little bit uh little bit bowed at the equator because of uh the spinning, I believe.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:11

Uh we could also all put out a globe on their table, the week of Earth, Earth week. You know? A globe on their table. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Instead of a Christmas tree or or something like that. It could be a big globe on their table. And everyone's gonna be able to do it.

SPEAKER_02 10:23

Yes, and you could decorate it in your own way with the things you love most about Earth.

SPEAKER_03 10:28

Yeah. What what comes to mind when you think of the things you love most about Earth?

SPEAKER_02 10:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 10:32

Um We have a segment later on that's goes to Heidi Klume. Yeah, Heidi Klume is one of Earth's greatest phenomena. Have you seen her?

SPEAKER_02 10:42

I truly don't know who we're talking about.

SPEAKER_03 10:44

Oh, she's like uh I don't even really know who she is either. I just I just know that occasionally she's like TMZ has an article about it. Not that I read TMZ. I don't even know if TMZ has articles. I would put um a couple uh redwood branches on around my glue.

SPEAKER_02 11:03

Oh, a couple redwood branches. Uh very interesting. Would you glue them on?

SPEAKER_03 11:07

Yes, I would glue them on with uh water-soluble, eco-friendly glue.

SPEAKER_02 11:13

Good. That's very good.

SPEAKER_03 11:14

Maybe some seashells? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:16

Yeah, pieces of the earth that we that we love dearly. Maybe uh fingerprints of my loved ones? Interesting. Feels grim in some way.

SPEAKER_03 11:24

I don't know why, but Well, I guess there is a certain connotation to finger fingerprints. Um but it's also a beautiful little pattern that came about naturally in this earthquake. That's true, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

Little spirals, right?

SPEAKER_03 11:34

Yeah. Leave a little comment below what you would put on your Earth Day Globe, which is now how we're officially celebrating.

SPEAKER_02 11:40

Yeah. Put your favorite foods on there. Yeah. Covered in mac and cheese. Mac and cheese. Over the course of the year, you collect these little pieces of earth that you love so dearly, whether it's shells or feathers, or shiny rocks. Shiny rocks, little pieces of glass, and even little man-made objects, like little figurines or something.

SPEAKER_03 11:58

Carvings and put them around your globe, and then on Earth Week, you know that these are things that matter matter to you about this little ball a ball in space we're all on together.

SPEAKER_02 12:07

Exactly. We all put them around one giant like oven, which is the sun. Oh yes. And they all And they all melt. They all melt. Which is beautiful in a way.

SPEAKER_03 12:18

Which is beautiful because as we know, in case you don't, um the Earth is in the habitable zone of our sun. And that's why we're able to have liquid water and plant life and animal life and us. Yeah. Uh but that habitable zone is only habitable because of the current current uh size and energy level of our star. And uh technically before too long, uh meaning a couple of billion years or so, so no worries about it. No worries for us, don't worry. Uh the planet will no longer be in the habitable zone of of our star. But we don't have to necessarily worry about that or anything.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

No, we really don't. No, it's it's it's a tough thing to wrap your head around. And the time frame in which it would happen is so far away from any of our lives. Yes, you know. And likely any human life. Any human life, potentially, you know. Uh we could make it. You know, we might be young. We're only a couple hundred thousand years old. Humanity has only existed for 300,000.

SPEAKER_03 13:16

300,000, 130,000, if we're talking like completely anatomically modern humans. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:21

Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs that were lasted.

SPEAKER_03 13:23

There were sixty-five million years ago is when they died out. Yeah. And in more than a billion is when we're talking about the earth potentially being swallowed by the sun's rays. Right. Um even though I know that doesn't that isn't a bad thing for my lifetime, yeah. It does make me a little sad.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

It does make me a little sad, and it is interesting that we are 80% done of the way through of our Earth's lifetime.

SPEAKER_03 13:46

Yeah, because if you don't don't know, like there's the Earth is uh 4.5 billion years old. Exactly. And it's in an ability, and it'll probably not be very habitable anymore. But we're saying that like that soon. That's an unfathomably large amount of.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

Humanity throughout the course of time has has had these issues worldwide, you know, whether it was the plague or these giant, you know, devastating weather events.

SPEAKER_03 14:13

Things that seemed like the end of the world. Earth Day is definitely a time when you think about climate change and the environment. And like, yes, things are very grim, especially if you are someone who cares about the environment and wants to address climate change in a real way when the world seems to not be doing that. Um But there is also there is hope. We don't know what the world will look like in a hundred years, and yes, we can do things right now that they won't be able to do in a hundred years. Um, but I think there's still a lot of good that humanity is gonna have, and it's not the end of the world necessarily. Yes. Right? I mean it might not be the end of the world. So I don't want to live in a topiary made by future humans of all the species that were left behind from the first dying that we caused, you know? It could be cool though.

SPEAKER_02 14:54

Yeah, maybe Earth is that in some way, you know? Some previous super intelligence. I don't want to promote that though. I I don't know if that's true. No, I know. Yeah, yeah, that's not what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_03 15:08

But yes, like there's so much biodiversity that we currently have that is untamed, non-human wilderness, which we can still protect, which is why it's so important to to talk about that and to to do that on Earth Day. Not just to do that on just Earth Day, but to do that in general. Yeah. But I like to think about, like you're saying, that future of humanity humanity's history.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

Of when Right, we're talking about the now with Earth, but what is the the very distant future future of humanity look like and Earth.

SPEAKER_03 15:36

Because we're talking about a billion years, but even a hundred thousand years, which is uh one one thousandth of that, is an unfathomably long period of time in human history.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

Yeah, think of how much has changed in the past two hundred.

SPEAKER_03 15:51

Yes, it's completely unrecognizable to the world that people were living in two hundred years ago today. Yeah. They didn't have bidets back then. They didn't even have bidets. They were barbarians. No, but it is really interesting to think about uh how exponentially human culture has changed in the last 250 years, and to try to extrapolate that forward into 100, 200 years, a thousand years, a hundred thousand years, you get pretty alien pretty quick. Totally. To where it's completely like yeah, maybe we will be zipping around the stars in um a million years, thinking about the time when I remember when we thought that the earth was going to be the end of humanity? Now we are a space folk. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:30

But we've been trying to find these beautiful like integral pieces of technology and not just technology, and guess what time frame that lives in. For example, cheese. When was cheese invented?

SPEAKER_03 16:42

In your head, try to imagine when cheese happened. The first cheese. It feels pretty modern, right? You're like, oh, you probably had to have a cheese factory, and that couldn't have been h happening that r until that recently. Uh cheese factory. Cheese factory. Where how do you make cheese? You just put milk in a sock and wait? Is that what you do?

SPEAKER_02 16:59

No, you uh uh there's different ways to make cheese. There's uh bacterial ways. Yes. I mean, it's usually milk and bacteria.

SPEAKER_03 17:06

Yeah. Uh but cheese, how old is cheese, Andy? Uh around 8,000 BCE. Andy asked me the other day, uh, how old do you think cheese is? And I think I said 5,000 years, because I remember hearing about a really old cheese that came out of an Irish bog, and that sounded kind of gross, but also a little yummy to me. Just a little bit yummy. And so that's why I remembered that.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

What do you think that bog cheese tastes like?

SPEAKER_03 17:32

What do you think would pair well with a b nice bog cheese? A 5,000-year-old bog cheese? Bog cheese, a nice um. I feel like a saltine.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

Ooh, a fig jam. Something really briny, like pickles. Ooh, yeah. Ooh. Or olives. Herring. Herring. Pickled herring and drinking.

SPEAKER_03 17:48

Pickled herring and bog cheese.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

Bog cheese.

SPEAKER_03 17:50

That's our nicknames.

SPEAKER_02 17:51

Pickled herring. Bog cheese. These little elements of are. I shouldn't eat while I'm No.

SPEAKER_03 18:00

I think you can eat. You guys, it's okay. He's eating a banana really quickly, so he has energy to talk. Monkey. Monkey mode. Monkey mode. 1K, when you're playing this game, you do get this weird tapestry of of human time. You do kind of have a general vibe of most things. But there were something some things that surprised me. Like when do you think the company uh what was the company? It was Yamaha, right? Yamaha, yes. Which makes electric keyboards and motorcycles. Um Japanese company. Japanese company. I was thinking maybe it was founded in the 1930s or 40s, uh, but it was founded in the 1890s. Uh because it began as a reed organ repair company, and now uh and now there's people flying by on motorcycles made by them.

SPEAKER_02 18:45

It's so interesting it started out as a purely musical company, but yeah, they make everything.

SPEAKER_03 18:51

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think a lot of things are like that. Like a lot of companies will begin in niches uh that are kind of innocuous and small, whether that's like, oh, it's a sweet soda beverage or oh, it's a little mom and pop burger restaurant. Right. And then they always trend towards the mega industrial forces of industry. Uh, we encourage you to try it with your friends. Just come up with random nouns and say and say when was that invented?

SPEAKER_02 19:15

And whether it's a chain like a safe way or a local restaurant. Or even like a McDonald's and stuff. It really gets you in touch with your community and grounds you in this um kind of beautiful little uh uh narrative of uh the humans in your area.

SPEAKER_03 19:32

Yeah, because it's really easy to walk through your day-to-day life of like, oh, that's that's obviously this is the grocery store, that's the restaurant that I eat at occasionally, and it's all just stuff that's here right now. But we were digging back through like the grocery stores in our hometown when they were opened and what they were first called and stuff like that. And all of a sudden our hometown had this whole folksy little history to it. Right. Um and that's the there's that same history everywhere, no matter where you go. Even if it's just that it was built by some uh developer, it's still there were people building that and there was a decision made to why it would have the art the vaulted roof versus the flat roof. Exactly. And there's little names for it. Moving on from this little game. Yes. Uh because it's Earth Day, we wanted to go through a little history of uh the planet we're all on, a little history of Earth. Uh and this is just a very simple summary of all these things. There is lifetimes of study to be done on each of these moments throughout history.

SPEAKER_02 20:29

So s bear with us. So are we going the Big Bang?

SPEAKER_03 20:33

Yeah. I mean, all we know for sure is that there at some point 13.7, 13.8 billion years ago, all of a sudden there was a universe, right? Well, like there was a universe, there was space, there was time, uh, and it was expanding. It was very dense and hot in the beginning, and it became less dense and cooled over time.

SPEAKER_02 20:54

It was a it was a bunch of space dust that cooled into these weird space gas, into these conglomerations.

SPEAKER_03 21:02

That became the first galaxies, and those galaxies gathered together because of gravity, and gravity pulls mass towards other mass, and so when you have a pocket of an uneven pocket of of space dust or space gas in one place, things will eventually gravitate towards it, and over billions of years that will get so hot and hot and high pressure that it will turn into a star.

SPEAKER_02 21:25

So our star was formed 4.6 billion years ago, right? Yeah. And not long after, our Earth was a bunch of dust around the star. Around the star. It's called a solar accretion disk. And yeah, not too long after that, a giant Mars sized body smashed into Earth as we knew it, and created a it took a little chunk of I mean, it's debatable whether this is the exact way the moon formed.

SPEAKER_03 21:50

But this is the theory of why we have such a large moon that seems to be made of the same stuff that the Earth is made of. Yeah. Uh if you can picture like two global globules of water floating in anti Gravity uh like bumping into each other, uh like one little droplet kind of shot out, and that became the moon. Which is kind of cool because the moon is incredibly important to so many parts of life here on Earth.

SPEAKER_02 22:11

Oh yeah. I mean, if we didn't have the moon, our weather patterns and uh our our tides and everything, I we wouldn't be able to exist. Yeah, there's a good chance life would never have formed. Our our you know, our winds would be 300 miles per hour, you know. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 22:26

And intertidal zones would never have really been a thing because the water would just stay where it was. Yes. In also in that early period of time, it was called the Hedean Eon. Like it was basically Earth was all molten rock.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

It was just lava all the way through. The whole atmosphere was toxic gas, basically.

SPEAKER_03 22:41

Yes. But it was in that time when all that rock was molten that some people think we got a lot of our water because a lot of the rock that the earth is made of is uh chondrites, which have uh the makings of water in the bound up in the rock, and so that's where we think some of the water came from. Uh but it's all theorized. The c where water came from on earth is a little bit of a question mark still.

SPEAKER_02 23:03

Yeah. And making a big old jump, first microscopic life around or 4 billion years ago.

SPEAKER_03 23:09

Yeah, these were little tiny microbial bits of life.

SPEAKER_02 23:13

So thinking about like 4.6 versus it it's a difference of six million years, right? Or six hundred million years. Sorry, six hundred million years.

SPEAKER_03 23:20

Yeah, you don't think like you're like, oh, four point six billion years, four point five billion years, four billion years, those are all pretty close together. Yeah. This is ten times as many years as it has been since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. This is so, so much time.

SPEAKER_02 23:31

So much time.

SPEAKER_03 23:32

And when we're dealing with these huge swaths of time, it's easy to kind of like reduce it in your brain to like, oh, that but yeah, the time kind of sped up. You kind of imagine a time lapse of mountains forming and stuff. But no, time was passing at the exact same rate that it's passing now. And for a long time it was just microbial life.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Right. Uh in these like little gas vents under the sea.

SPEAKER_03 23:51

For so, so, so, so, so, so long, all that life was anywhere in the known universe was a bunch of like bacteria like buzzing around, single cellular style. Yeah. Uh, in the bottom of the ocean. Like, that's that's what life was. In our book, we did this whole thing where we which is also was also done by Carl Sagan, which breaks down the history of the universe and of the earth into like a day's the history of a day. Uh and it doesn't have until very late in the day that multicellular life actually comes into Right.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

We're in the final two minutes of the day. Uh the the humanity is, not life. Dinosaurs are in the last hour. Yes. Right? And and they dominate for that entire hour and then the last two minutes. Two minutes. That's humanity. That's humanity, baby. That's all we've been around for. So think of all we could do with that time.

SPEAKER_03 24:39

Yeah. And imagine where we could go if we have anywhere close to as long as the dinosaurs had. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:45

We could fight off those asteroids. Yeah. We could figure something out. Figure something out. We made the PSP. Just a giant rubber band.

SPEAKER_03 24:52

Picture this. Giant rubber band. Asteroid coming down.

SPEAKER_02 24:56

Fling it out that way.

SPEAKER_03 24:57

Uh slingshot made out of a rubber rubber rubber band, line it up.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:00

Asteroid hits. Shoop, shoom. Boom. See you later, asteroid.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

Fling it at Saturn.

SPEAKER_03 25:07

Yeah. So tell me when did Saturn was my favorite planet. When did the first multicellular fine life form?

SPEAKER_02 25:14

9 p.m.

SPEAKER_03 25:15

But what how many years ago?

SPEAKER_02 25:16

Oh, uh let me pull that up specifically. Potentially 541 million years ago.

SPEAKER_03 25:21

But really up to 2.5 billion years ago.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

There could have been just, you know, mul multicellular life floating around there for millions and millions and millions of years.

SPEAKER_03 25:33

Yes. And these are such vast periods of time. It's actually most of the time that life has existed. Yeah. It's been very, very simple single cellular life. It somehow happened that complex life began. And some of the like the theory of how this originally happened was there was one little microbe that ate another microbe and then didn't digest it.

SPEAKER_01 25:56

Right.

SPEAKER_03 25:56

And and then that thing multiplied and multiplied, and it was helpful to have more little organs inside the microbe, and it became complex life because now there was specialization within the cell, and uh it could do more complex things. They kind of just like you and me. They kind of like us for real. They kind of like us for real. I mean they literally are us. Yeah. And all of a sudden, complex life gets a lot more exciting than the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion. All sorts of crazy stuff is happening. Weird little creepy crawlies, things with mouths, things with legs, things like that.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

You've got jellyfish, and then you've got fish, and then you've got weird off branches of uh of slugs and weird sponges.

SPEAKER_03 26:40

Yeah. All all so many things that we can't we can't even explain it with the little tiny document we have on our phones. The seas got a lot more exciting than they had been.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

But if you want to look into it more, like the the this vast tree of life, there's this awesome website that you should definitely check out.

SPEAKER_03 26:56

Where you can zoom in on any branch of the evolutionary tree and find when you were can when humans were connected to sea cucumbers and the biggest ancestry.com there is.

SPEAKER_02 27:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 27:06

And it's amazing because you really can trace back uh the roots of life through all of life's history.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

And see how you're related to the dragonfly sitting right next to us right now. Literally right now.

SPEAKER_03 27:17

And it's not just like, oh, that's because the scientists say that's that's what that is. You can literally trace back and you okay, you look a little bit more similar to that thing that's our cousin, and that thing looks a little similar to that thing. Yeah. And you can see it flow, and it's this beautiful tapestry of all this complex life. And so complex life existed, and then you guys know how it goes.

SPEAKER_02 27:37

There's a great dying.

SPEAKER_03 27:38

There's a great dying, there's mass extinctions. In there, life figured out how to survive on land, which was actually very not trivial. Hank Green has some really cool videos on how animals figured out how to survive on land. Because it was very difficult to turn from a fish into uh whatever we are now. It was har it's hard to breathe air, it's hard to see out in out in the air because it has a different refractive index than water.

SPEAKER_02 28:00

Yeah. And during the age of the dinosaurs, the um the great break breakup of Pangaea occurred over millions of years.

SPEAKER_03 28:08

Oh, I want to talk about Pangaea.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

I know. We I mean there's a lot to talk about with this whole earth thing we've got going on. Yeah. But yeah, it it slowly broke up into these like sort of pieces resembling what we uh are living on today.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

And you can see the evidence of that because the continents kind of fit together.

SPEAKER_02 28:28

Yeah, it's like a weird, strange puzzle.

SPEAKER_03 28:30

Well, how would the world be different if we all lived on one supercontinent?

SPEAKER_02 28:33

On one Pangea?

SPEAKER_03 28:35

Or or Gondwana land, which is another supercontinent that happened before.

SPEAKER_02 28:40

Gondwana. Gosh, that's so interesting.

SPEAKER_03 28:42

Like uh Oceans have done so much for the flow of history and culture.

SPEAKER_02 28:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:47

Because there's been little microcultures here and there. I mean, there would still be mountain ranges and and divisions.

SPEAKER_02 28:53

But you know, I it it would have been easier to traverse all of this across the mountains and it would be kind of like One Piece.

SPEAKER_03 29:00

Because there'd be a huge ocean.

SPEAKER_02 29:02

Huge ocean and then they still have countries in One Piece, right?

SPEAKER_03 29:06

I haven't watched enough of it to know. Let us know if you're a One Piece fan in the comments. I mean, I can see the world either reaching world peace faster because we've all been together the whole time. Right. But I could also see the world existing under some some kind of tyranny more easily.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

Yeah. I mean, that's that's really interesting. Would we even have developed in a similar way? Yeah, would we even have governments and cultures if we didn't have maybe we would just exist in this peaceful, loving, caring environment, you know?

SPEAKER_03 29:37

And I guess that eventually that gets us to um I mean, you guys know what happened to the dinosaurs. Uh the sky grew dim, and the plants started to die, and it was their time to lay down in the the shade.

SPEAKER_02 29:53

Well, there were some volcanic explosions.

SPEAKER_03 29:55

Yes, but there was also most of the.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

But then there was uh asteroid.

SPEAKER_03 29:58

Asteroid giant asteroid.

SPEAKER_02 29:59

Which blew up and uh decimated over 90% of the the life on Earth. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:05

Which is really quite insane. And all the dinosaurs died, except for the avian dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_04 30:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:12

Uh which survive to this day in the form of our birds. Chickens, roosters, roosters, which are both chickens. Chickens, uh, herons, ibises, storks. Those are all the same too. Um fish survived, sharks. Sharks. Sharks have been with us the whole time. Yeah. Uh not with us. We weren't even here yet. Crocodile. And slightly m uh mammalian creatures uh that slowly became more and more mammalian and their limbs moved in different ways, and they became uh they became us eventually.

SPEAKER_02 30:40

Eventually, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:41

And how long ago was it that we became humans, Andy?

SPEAKER_02 30:44

I mean 300,000 years ago were Homo sapiens, right? Yeah, and before that there were there was, you know, Australopithecus and Homo erectus and then Homo Neanderthalensis and So yeah, yeah, so the Cenozoic era, 66 million years ago to the present, is when this vast boom of mammals started to take uh shape.

SPEAKER_03 31:03

And then until incredibly recently, on the scale we're talking, uh we were animals like any other animal.

SPEAKER_02 31:08

To to all the other animals in in this world, we're pretty weird.

SPEAKER_03 31:12

We're very strange. Yeah. And you know, if you technically trace all of us back to a common ancestor, we are technically fish too. Right. If you consider both sharks and like trout fish, then we are also on that same branch. Yes. But I was watching this documentary by uh Werner Herzog yesterday called Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which is about Chauvi Cave in France that was discovered in the 1990s that had the oldest cave paintings ever found. And it's like these 32,000-year-old cave paintings all in this amazing cave.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Right.

SPEAKER_03 31:42

Uh and these were anatomically modern humans who which essentially means they were probably just as intelligent as we were. Like they would if they were born today, they would have turned into the same kind of people that we turned into. And it's just so amazing to think about those early people walking the earth with woolly rhinos and woolly mammoths and they were in France, and these cave paintings have lions and giant cave bears and rhinos and the Eiffel Tower.

unknown 32:08

And the Eiffel Tower.

SPEAKER_03 32:09

Which of course formed around that time.

SPEAKER_02 32:12

Formed around that time, yeah. It's it's a beautiful geological formation.

SPEAKER_03 32:14

It's so amazing that it just formed there. That's why it's so famous. That's why it is, yes. Believe it or not, all waffle houses, too. Also just they were just there. Uh it's just so amazing to me to think about, to try to empathize with that era of humanity, people who were just as intelligent as we were, but walking this earth that had no context to it, had no history of of science as far as we know. No written language, no written language, just like the natural world, a very icy world, because it was the ice age, so just trying to think what they would make of life and of the world and think of their place in the cosmos.

SPEAKER_02 32:49

Yeah. Speaking of early humans, uh, I think it's a really fun thing that we do when we're at the beach. Yeah. Uh is we try and communicate with only grunts and just exclamations of all sorts. Yeah. To try and replicate what it is to like uh to be an early human, right? It's the best. It's something we've done for a while. A surprise you can get across m many, many complex ideas with just a series of grunts and exclamations and uh you know the the way you shape your face and otherwise.

SPEAKER_03 33:22

And what you are gesturing to, and also because you're all you're sharing the same information. So what we do is we'll like we find giant pieces of driftwood and build a structure on the beach using only grunts. Yeah. And we slowly build a culture and a world and a life in this structure we've built.

SPEAKER_02 33:37

Exactly, and we create a goal. Yes. Like uh, we just did this like two weeks ago for Thomas's birthday.

SPEAKER_03 33:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:43

Happy birthday, Thomas.

SPEAKER_03 33:44

Oh, thank you. I'm 25 years old now, everybody. I can rent a car. Oh. But this, yeah, this one was one of my favorites we've done.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

The whole goal at the end was to take the cup, uh, this piece of trash that we found.

SPEAKER_03 33:59

Off the top of the structure we built. Yeah. And the only way to get there was by running up this huge log that we'd propped up on our structure.

SPEAKER_02 34:06

That is incredibly slippery. Yes. You you formulate like a challenge like that, and it's just this uniquely human sort of nonsensical thing that has this natural beauty to it. This, like, we're making something out of sim the simplest things around us. The raw material.

SPEAKER_03 34:25

Even though it was totally a joke, it did immediately form a rule set and a sensical meaning. Yeah. Because like we kind of found out this idea that you could you could only run up the log when someone was drumming on the on the sticks. Right, right. And say, okay, and because if someone's trying to go then go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:42

You have to wait. It's like it's part of the the ritual, the ceremony, uh, the experience.

SPEAKER_02 34:47

And I think if you So that's how we spent Thomas and 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_03 34:51

I wouldn't have done a single thing differently.

SPEAKER_02 34:53

By the way, it was raining the entire time.

SPEAKER_03 34:55

It was pouring rain. We were at the beach uh around this point, and it was on and off, like raining cats and dogs. We get drenched, all of our bags are completely drenched. Uh, we didn't even swim in the water, but we were completely soaked. So soaked. Which made it even harder to run up the log. See, my friend Alex, who was there. Sup, Alex. Shout out, editor. You know, you also find that the people specialize in just the way we do in human culture. Alex wasn't quite as good, maybe, as running up the log, but he was so good at throwing a pine cone to hit the cup off the Right. And so we know, like, okay, he'd be the marksman.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

Right. Of this early human tribe.

SPEAKER_03 35:34

Yes. And it was it was deeply freeing and a wonderful experience to to spend my my coming of age. Trying to empathize with early humans also puts our own experience in a sort of context, because as much as we like to pretend that we have all these answers and all this wonderful information, which we do have more information, of course, um, but we also did just come into this world with without any r seemingly obvious reason why, and we do have to just figure it out in the same way they did. And that's there is this kind of unfathomable magic and beauty to that. Uh that's kind of hard to put into words.

SPEAKER_02 36:10

Um But it is really interesting, um spending a birthday or something like that, you know, coming of age, turning twenty-five, a big year in your life. Yeah. If a quarter of your life is, you know, up, yeah, or a quarter of your life is added up.

SPEAKER_03 36:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 36:24

Um I'm a quarter of the way through whatever it is. Exactly. It's really good to get in touch with that really core human, you know, and and have a uniquely human experience.

SPEAKER_03 36:35

Like that early human we're talking about is most of the time humans have been on the planet. Right. You know, really culture and civilization and agriculture didn't start until the last, you know, very, very generously 15,000 years, 12,000 years.

SPEAKER_02 36:50

Oh, that's generous. That's very generous.

SPEAKER_03 36:53

Very, very, very generous. Uh more let's say you can't.

SPEAKER_02 36:56

Are we saying like Mesopotamia?

SPEAKER_03 36:57

Or are we going to No, I mean like early, early agriculture Paleolithic, like small tribes and stuff. Yeah. You know, we've been doing civilization between 20 and and 8,000 years. And for the but so most of the time the humans have been humans on the planet has been us hanging out in caves, doing paintings, and enjoying ourselves. And also probably living troubling lives at times too.

SPEAKER_02 37:19

Yeah. So your next birthday, spend it doing just the y most unique, uniquely human stuff.

SPEAKER_03 37:28

Yeah, because I think it's really easy in modern life to kind of keep yourself on the other side of a like a a rhetorical barrier from real life. Because you know, okay, I'm going to work, which is kind of a fictionalized agreement we all have. I'm listening to a podcast, or I'm listening to music, or I'm and all that's very human too. It's it's conversation and music. But if you just get out into nature, or if you're just goofing around with your friends, like that is undeniably that that is humanity. That is what human life is. Yes. And so try and get in touch with that a little bit. It was it was therapeutic for a big day. Talking about my uh my birthday like it's uh like something really serious. It was a troubling day for me. It's troubling. But yeah, so for a hundred and thirty thousand years, humans have been walking the earth 150,000 years, 200,000 years. And all in the very last sliver of this huge history of Earth is when all of human culture has happened. It's when Egypt happens, it's when uh every dynasty of every major culture has happened, it's when uh Mr. Beast was invented, it's it's when Todo made the song Africa. It's everything. It's everything. Name a thing. Guacamole. It's when guacamole was invented. It's when name another thing. The Man in the Mirror. The Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson was invented. Was invented. It was written. And all of this immensity of all the world and all of human history is this tiny little fingernail on the armspan of history, which is kind of humbling because you see how small we are, but also kind of cool to see how much we've done.

SPEAKER_02 38:59

Only in the last two hundred years, you know, have has has this country been around. Yeah. Right? Uh and now you're at you. Yes. Right? You are twenty-five years old. Yes, me. You were born in 2001. That's me. Uh, when the internet was very early, this very thing you're listening to right now.

SPEAKER_03 39:20

Yeah. And when I think about the future of humanity, like we were saying earlier, I think it could be much longer than we've been around. I think a lot of people might disagree with that. Uh I think our future could be larger than our past. Do you agree? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:36

Yeah, I I I think, you know, we we talked about earlier, uh humanity perseveres.

SPEAKER_03 39:43

Yeah, man. It's what we're good at. And also making making up games.

SPEAKER_02 39:46

Making up games.

SPEAKER_03 39:47

Really good at that. What strikes me about this whole history of Earth on this wonderful Earth Day celebration is how every step along the way, there's something that was it would have been very easy to not happen that has happened or has occurred, then that has been completely necessary for life to come into existence. You know? Like whether that's the formation of the moon or the earth forming where it where it formed in relation to the sun or Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:14

I mean, how unlikely it is for even the universe to exist in the first place, or then making the jump to where we are. I mean, and it's it's a weird logical fallacy because of course we exist. In a place where we could exist. But uh the rarity of that and trying to find a planet, you know, searching for a planet that's anywhere near as habitable as ours. Is nearly impossible in this, you know, potentially vast exp ever expanding universe that we're in.

SPEAKER_03 40:43

Yeah, I mean the closest ones are light years light years away.

SPEAKER_02 40:47

So so far. Maybe we could do some wormholes to get there.

SPEAKER_03 40:50

Who knows? Who knows? The earth needs to ha like the earth, because it was molten at one point, has this molten spinning core on the inside that protects us, that creates our magnetic field, which creates uh pr that protects us from cosmic rays. And we have what? Big night heron. Oh, it's a night heron. While you're looking at this night heron, just consider that this is only possible uh because of the Earth's magnetic field, which is only is only possible because the Earth was molten. And the only reason the Earth was able to cool down and not continue to be bombarded by asteroids was because it formed in a solar system with some a planet like Jupiter, which is so massive that it is a gravity well for asteroids throughout the entire area of the solar system to be sucked towards it rather than be launched towards us. All this had to be exactly as it's been for life to form on this one planet that we have. Uh and as this night heron walks around through the shallow pools of a Malibu River, uh think about how special it is and how important it is to protect this one place we have together. Oh man, that's a big one.

SPEAKER_02 42:03

That's a dinosaur.

SPEAKER_03 42:04

That is an avian dinosaur.

SPEAKER_02 42:09

This is what Earth Day is about. You know, a giant night heron flies overhead.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:15

Which are these beautiful creatures. You know, there's a lot of them in Half Moon Bay as well. They they tend to like these kind of boggy environments.

SPEAKER_03 42:22

Where there's long moss or long grass that they can look for little snacks in.

SPEAKER_02 42:26

And they're little, um their babies look so different than they are. They they kind of look like giant parrots. Oh, cool. Uh uh in Half Moon Bay there's these giant, almost redwood trees. I I'm not sure what they are. Maybe they're Douglas fir, that they build these giant nests in, and you could see all of them, they're oranges coats, and their parents come by and and feed them every once in a while, as a heron should.

SPEAKER_03 42:51

Yeah. You know, we could all learn a little something from the night heron. Yeah. For example, feed your kids even if they look weird. What are your favorite biomes on Earth?

SPEAKER_02 43:02

Good question.

SPEAKER_03 43:03

There's deserts, forests, oceans, tide pools, mountains, swamp, grassy plains, uh savannah.

SPEAKER_02 43:13

Well, of course, the forest is a place where I feel most at home. Yeah. Um but also the high desert. I'm I'm a huge fan of. Yes. Uh a nice arid climate with in a mountainous area. Um there's something so beautiful about that. And that it's every everything that lives there has to, you know, be nice, uh like hardy and has to go through a lot just to exist in such a harsh climate.

SPEAKER_03 43:41

It gives everything this austere beauty. Like all the plants are have spines on them, and all the animals are always darting from one place to another.

SPEAKER_02 43:49

And they look old and like uh wrinkled.

SPEAKER_03 43:54

You're talking about the animals or the people? No, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

And and in a similar way, uh like. This the same sort of people who live there are you know a more weathered and desert folk. A desert folk, which is very cool, like very uh and free feeling.

SPEAKER_03 44:12

Yeah, it's really cool to s see how environment and exact climate and biome shapes the personality of a of an area and of the people who live in a place. Yeah. You know, beach towns are relaxed, and I guess of course cities are busy because the only thing to do is to be busy in a really major city. I really like tide pools. Nice. We were just tide pooling not too long ago. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:39

With um braiding seagrass. Shout out to Braiding Seagrass Callista.

SPEAKER_03 44:43

Callista of Braiding Seagrass, find her on Instagram and YouTube. Um really, really cool.

SPEAKER_02 44:48

It was my first time ever seeing a Nudebrank.

SPEAKER_03 44:50

It was an amazing, like opalescent?

SPEAKER_02 44:53

Opolescent, yeah. Is is uh opalescent little creature with these little spines coming out of its back, wiggling in the with the tide.

SPEAKER_03 45:03

It's this unbelievably small little creature, sea slug, hiding at the base of some seagrass. That we were we were searching through all the tide pools for Nudibrank. Yeah. And we found it.

SPEAKER_02 45:12

I mean, we didn't honestly didn't know where to find them.

SPEAKER_03 45:14

Yeah, it was Callista who was able to find it. Yeah. And the cool thing about those little Nudibranks is obviously they kind of look like Pokemon because there's all these different colors of them.

SPEAKER_02 45:22

But they are like Pokemon because they're so rare. Yeah. And all uh there's specific kinds that are more rare than others.

SPEAKER_03 45:29

And this one we saw was is the kind that eats sea anemones and then uses the sea anemones stinging cells to like arm itself. Yeah. Which is so Pokemon coded.

SPEAKER_02 45:38

Totally. But to wrap things up, uh I hope you're having a wonderful Earth Day this Wednesday.

SPEAKER_03 45:43

Yeah. Take a moment today uh to say happy earth day to a friend. Uh thanks for listening to the pod.

SPEAKER_02 45:51

I hope your globe is full of all of your favorite pieces of the earth.

SPEAKER_03 45:55

I hope your globe's mac and cheese is extra stinky. Uh we hope you enjoyed another video episode of the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 46:02

And I hope you get out into the uh the beautiful world that we all share. It's such a beautiful day out here, and I hope it is for you, wherever you are. Um, but I hope you can find the beauty in this earth we all share regardless.

SPEAKER_03 46:16

Yeah. It's kind of a special little thing that just that just happened. And we're here in it. Yeah. And your mindfulness mission uh for this week is to do a little earth-centered uh meditation of some kind that's just giving a bunch of gratitude back to the earth that you came from.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

Focus on one of your favorite aspects of the earth, whether it's the creek babbling by, or the night heron, or the Cambrian explosion, or the mountain range by your house.

SPEAKER_03 46:45

Yeah. Or whatever it is. Uh take a moment to just recognize it for what it what it is, which is the earth being there for you to make you exist.

SPEAKER_02 46:55

And noticing how all the pieces are connected right back to you.

SPEAKER_03 46:59

Even if it's as simple as going about your day and just realizing that everything is here because the entire universe has happened in just the right way for all this stuff to be here. And even whether it's peeling an orange or saying hi to a friend or just looking at the underside of a leaf, uh, taking a moment and recognizing that the entire universe has conspired to support your existence, it can be a really good way to to find some gratitude.

SPEAKER_02 47:23

Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_03 47:24

Anyway.

SPEAKER_02 47:25

We. Love. You. Bye bye. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_00 47:36

Hey man. Hey man.

SPEAKER_04 47:38

Where do you love you?