Michelle Thaller - NASA, Carl Sagan, Grief & Awe and Fear in Physics - Episode #88

[0:00] Cold open

Michelle Thaller: Why isn't that built into science from the beginning? This is all very emotionally difficult and wonderful. How is it they just let that slide off their heads? It's like, "Oh yeah, no big deal. Time doesn't exist."

[0:28] Commercial fishing in Petersburg, Alaska

Brad Zima: The bear video was wild. You were super close — what an experience. So it sounds like, as a part-time commercial fisherman, you spend some time in Alaska?

Michelle Thaller: I do. I probably go up three or four times a year. When I say "part-time commercial fisherman," there's a big asterisk, because this is basically charity. There's a wonderful family that has a small commercial fishing operation out of Petersburg, Alaska, which is a wonderful town. You can only get there by boat or plane. It's off the tourist path — a true fishing village — and I just love it.

The family lets me come along and help. I'm a good boat pilot. It's a 70-foot fishing boat with winches for all the different netting, and we do crabbing, shrimping, halibut, black cod and salmon. So I'm basically there as free labor. I can take home as much fish as I want, but really, they let me come. That's what it is.

Brad: How long have you been doing it?

Michelle: About five years now.

Brad: How did you get connected to it? Did you know the family beforehand?

Michelle: I knew the daughter of the family. She's an author and an entrepreneur, and we'd been at a young entrepreneurs conference together. She doesn't have anything to do with science, but sometimes I get invited because they want a scientist to talk to people who are in business or doing creative things. She's a really wonderful person.

It was an attempt to stay alive after my husband died. I'm still not OK, but there were two or three years where I just really didn't want to be on the planet. And this woman said to me, "You need to get out of the house. You'll learn something new, you'll go somewhere you've never been before, somewhere that doesn't trigger any memories." And it was fantastic. Alaska is incredible. You like Alaska too?

Brad: I love it. It's one of my favorite places in the world.

[2:42] Midwestern authenticity, tall poppies and odd ducks

Michelle: I often say that being a Midwesterner — being a Wisconsinite — is kind of a hidden superpower. You have a sense of what's real. People here are very real and authentic. It's been fun living all over the world, because I see that there are a lot of false gods out there. I lived in New York for a time and in LA for a time. In LA it's really important how beautiful and famous you are, and as a Midwesterner you're like, "Ha ha. Really? OK, sure." In New York it's, "What shoes are you wearing, and how rich are you?" And you get to watch people go after these chimeras, these things they're never going to catch.

Then I went up to Alaska, and the people are so solid. I've told them this many times: they remind me of my friends who are astronauts. I worked at NASA for 28 years and have many friends who are astronauts. The people in Alaska are incredibly self-reliant. They can fix anything. They can live off the grid, they can hunt and fish, and they can provide for themselves and their families. There's this wonderful quiet humility and a lack of performative bullshit. I find them far more interesting, well read and open-minded than you might think. I love going up there and letting the rat race — all those false gods — just fade away.

Brad: That's so deep and poignant, and I felt the same way when I was there. I get glimpses of that in life when I go deep into the wilderness or work on something tangible with my hands, often out in nature. You get this sense of comfort and solace that builds some of that lack of bullshit. When you have that comfort and that connection, you understand very quickly why it doesn't matter what shoes someone is wearing or who injected the lip filler. It's more about the substance and the journey than the outward facade.

Michelle: Absolutely. It sounds like a cliché, but it's really true. There's something so much more nourishing about being with those people. I think a lot of people around the world don't even understand that there's an alternative to all this surface-level triviality.

And that's one of the things I'm really proud of about being from Wisconsin. "Oh, you're a really big deal" — in Wisconsin that's kind of laughable. We may have a bit of tall poppy syndrome, where if someone stands out too much, you want to nip the head off. You don't want people to be all that different or exceptional. I felt that in my life, because I didn't really fit in anywhere. I always seemed to be a bit of a tall poppy, or at least an odd duck. There is that pressure in the Midwest to fit in. But I really like being from Wisconsin. I'm very proud of it, and very proud of the people I grew up around.

Brad: There are facets of the culture here that are really endearing and so much deeper than the cheese-and-beer stereotypes. That's one of the things we try to shine a light on. And the tall poppy thing is an interesting concept. I'm drawn to the quote-unquote odd duck in my life. I find the odd duck and we have a conversation, because to me the odd duck is generally someone who puts the bullshit aside and says, "This is what it is." There's substance there.

[7:04] Tom the "failed hermit," hunting and teaching a child about melancholy

Brad: I didn't have the video started when you were talking about the commercial fishing. Had you been an angler before that?

Michelle: Oh no, nothing of the sort. I'd never been fishing in my life, and to this day I don't actually enjoy fishing. I mainly pilot the boat, and they're out back fishing or pulling the crab traps. And I can really appreciate their skill.

The grandfather of the family is a man named Tom. He's a Vietnam veteran — he was drafted when he was 19. He's not from Alaska; he's actually from Montana. When he got out of Vietnam, he basically wanted to get as far away from human society as he possibly could. He ran into the woods of Alaska and hunted, trapped and fished, and lived by himself for a decade. He finally got some therapy, and he always calls himself a failed hermit. He says, "I keep trying to withdraw from society, but people keep finding me," because he's so worthy of love and respect.

I've told him he's a spiritual master. I don't know anybody who's more open emotionally and can understand things like grief and the complexities of life. He's a treasure of a human being. He can take a filleting knife and a big halibut, and in one motion the skin is off. There's no wasted meat. You can see through the skin if you hold it up to the sun. He says, "Hey, I've only done it for 10,000 hours."

I can appreciate the skill of hunting and fishing. But I don't enjoy killing things. I leave it to them — and then we all have an incredible crab dinner afterward, and I do partake.

Brad: It seems like people sometimes have a scale, like, "I could do a fish, but I couldn't do a deer." But at its core, it's an interesting thing to go through, and I think it's important. I have a five-year-old, and a year or two ago I got to teach him what the word "melancholy" means. He's a really smart, intuitive little dude. He came out after I had harvested a deer and had very big emotions about it. I told him, "That's really normal, man. I feel the same way. This is a melancholy moment." The height of it is harvesting the animal — you did what you set out to accomplish — but the feeling never goes away afterward: gratitude, remorse, thankfulness. It's a really complex blend of emotions. Even for people who've been doing outdoor activities their entire lives, that feeling isn't for everybody.

Michelle: That's a fantastic thing to teach a child. I'm really glad you delved into that with him. These people are hunters, fishers and trappers, and I have so much respect for them. They took a moose last year and were processing it in the garage — I think they got something like 500 pounds of meat off that one animal. That feeds the family for the winter up there. It really helps them put food on the table.

You talk about superpowers — I'm in awe of them. I've certainly killed some of the fish and lots of the crab. And I think crab are fantastic people. We get the king crabs and the snow crabs, and these are incredible organisms. They're actually pretty intelligent. I've learned how to kill them so quickly they don't even see it coming, and I find that sort of comforting. We smash them over a rod and break them in two, and they're done. But to acknowledge that emotion — that's something I admire a lot.

Brad: That's a big point of intention for me. When I think back to my first few experiences hunting — and nothing against my dad; generations and communication styles are different — we didn't have those conversations about what it really means to take a 150-pound animal's life.

[12:03] Why science needs emotion: Star Wars and Carl Sagan's Cosmos

Brad: This is a perfect segue. I know I'm going to dive into the X's and O's with you, because I'm fascinated by the things you talk about, but I'm resisting — this is too perfect not to go a little deeper. One of the things that drew me to your content is exactly what you're describing now: your communication style. You share extremely deep ideas and weave in a philosophical mindset. And when I saw you on Joe Rogan's podcast, your empathy and kindness screamed off the screen. I'm not surprised to hear you'd be reluctant to kill something. It emanated from you as you were talking.

Has that always been innate to you? Have you always thought about your extremely technical expertise the way you weave it into real life — with empathy, considering all angles? Or is that learned and developed?

Michelle: It's kind of like breathing. Thank you for saying those things; it's very kind of you. All my life, one of the things I've struggled with is people saying, "You don't seem like a scientist. You're not the right personality to be a scientist. You're more emotional, more philosophical." It's been a real struggle to fit into the science world, because that has nothing to do with the topic of science at all. It has to do with how people have culturally defined what a scientist is like.

It seems to me that sprang mainly from who became scientists in the past. In European culture, they were the upper-middle-class or wealthy second sons who weren't running the estates. Send them to Cambridge, send them to Oxford, get them to do something. So you had these somewhat socially isolated men who became scientists. That was an outgrowth of who was chosen to do science, not anything to do with the topic.

For me, the two always went hand in hand. I remember when I was 7, Star Wars came out, and that kind of did it. I loved the imagination of space and a bigger universe. And — this is hilarious, but it's true — it was always wrapped up with these very early crushes on people like Luke Skywalker. I would have been 7 or 8, having that first experience of "What are these feelings? I think that man is really attractive."

Then in 1980, Carl Sagan's show Cosmos came out on PBS, Channel 10 in Milwaukee. I thought he was the most attractive thing I'd ever seen in my life. I loved his charisma. And he brought this sense of emotion: "Wait, let's slow down and actually think about how incredible what we've just said is." All those dramatic moments and dramatic pauses. I had a huge crush on Carl Sagan. In middle school, in the 1980s, instead of Bon Jovi, I had a picture of Carl Sagan in my locker — and Doctor Who, the British sci-fi show. So for me, science and emotion have never been separate. They've always been glommed together.

Brad: That makes complete sense, and I think that's why anything you put online gets eyes on it. It makes it real to the normal person. A lot of that material is very hard to digest. Nobody can grasp 100 million light-years. But someone can grasp a person who knows a lot about it and is also willing to say, "Here's what it means to me, and here's everything we don't know." You're really authentic and transparent about that, and it makes it digestible for the quote-unquote regular person.

Michelle: I've always been amazed scientists don't do that more. It just rolls off their tongues in a physics lesson. I was thinking about it recently, because people often ask — Joe Rogan included — about the nature of time and multiple dimensions of space. It blows my mind that scientists can just rattle this off: "Oh yes, time is probably not real the way we perceive it, and there may be multiple dimensions of space we're not aware of." And there's no emotion. There's no "What an incredible thing to say! Why would you believe that? Take me on that journey with you — and how is it we're not freaking out?"

I was with my cat in bed last night having a good old existential crisis, trying to think about how to explain Einstein. The ideas are not very comforting to a limited three-dimensional creature like me. And yes, it affects me emotionally. I feel everything from awe and joy to fear and despair at what we're learning about the universe. Why isn't that built into science from the beginning? This is all very emotionally difficult and wonderful. How is it they just let that slide off their heads? "Oh yeah, no big deal. Time doesn't exist."

Brad: Even Einstein himself was very uncomfortable with some of his findings. My brain very quickly goes to the philosophical realm. I like thinking about what existence is and what consciousness truly means. And I'm surprised too. Stories are effective at reaching people, and when you have expertise plus a communication style that bridges the very technical with that sense of wonder, it's such a skill. Maybe, as you said, people who don't quote-unquote fit in are drawn to being very, very curious about certain topics, and maybe the communication part feels like the bullshit to them.

Michelle: Absolutely. One person's passion is another person's bullshit. It really does take all types. That's something I always say when I'm brought in to talk to a school: have some respect for what your curiosity and passion are, and don't let anybody tell you that's not right. There are so many things I love. I love following the latest fashions, even though I can't afford them and don't have the body for them. I love history and the arts. I love following Formula One — I was just reading an article about McLaren's possible cooling techniques for their tires. I love delving into ideas, and I don't try to judge whether something is a good thing to be curious about, or whether it's trivial or profound. That's in the eye of the beholder.

[21:24] Struggling through physics at Harvard

Brad: You mentioned a couple of shows that started your curiosity. As far as the academic part — when you decided this was something you were going to chase and chase and chase — how did that curiosity and drive to learn develop?

Michelle: People have a lot of misconceptions about scientists. One is that we can understand what a light-year is. No, we can't. We have the same brains as everybody else. Another big misconception is that science education came easy to us — that of course we went into a field where everything made sense. It wasn't like that at all. I was never a particularly high-performing student in science. Through high school I was pretty good, but I never got much attention from my science teachers. They didn't take me under their wing or encourage me. But I kept up.

I came from an excellent public high school in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and then went to Harvard University. I now realize a lot of incoming Harvard freshmen have already had the first year of calculus at special summer camps — I even taught at those camps later, in college and grad school. But I got completely blown out of the water. I was scared and confused from day one by the way physics was being taught. Picture a lecture hall with 300 people in it and a professor up there, most of the time with his back to you, writing on a chalkboard. This was before the age of electronics, and I was writing everything down in my notebook as if somehow that was going to teach me. Then you get back to your dorm room and look at it, and it could literally have been Greek.

So I flailed. You drop somebody in the deep end and they either sink or swim, and there was nothing pretty about what happened. I flailed and flailed for dear life and somehow didn't sink. I was completely stressed that I was going to be failed out of college at any moment. I would love to go back and experience science education without that fear, that panic, and that certainty that I was an idiot.

So why put yourself through that torment? I was acing so many other classes. I was always very good at history, the liberal arts, visual arts and art history, and that kept my grade point average up while I was getting C's and D's in science and math. So why did I major in physics and eventually even get a doctorate? I could not ignore the profound beauty that was there, hidden under the confusion and fear — and it was terribly taught. There was something glowing underneath, some wonderful truth that I couldn't take my eyes off. It promised some really deep questions. I say deep questions rather than deep answers, because I don't know that science gives us a lot of answers. But it does give us the tools to at least begin to crack at those deep questions.

Brad: That's awesome. The self-view is usually the most critical. I don't think a path to Harvard usually comes with B's and C's.

Michelle: That's true. I got good grades in high school, and I was a very good writer. I think a lot of essays got me into Harvard. There were other things too. I ended up as president of Girls Nation. Do you remember Girls State and Boys State — Badger State here?

Brad: I don't.

Michelle: It's basically a national student government, and I ended up being president of it. That would have been, I think, 1987. I got to meet Ronald Reagan and things like that. So there were other things, but it certainly wasn't science and math. Harvard probably thought, "We admitted you thinking you were going to go into politics, and you went into physics?"

Brad: Well, you were already there. They couldn't send you back. [verify against audio] That's an amazing story, and it's what I try to convey to my students. There's the adage, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." That's pretty pie in the sky. But when you can chase something you're truly curious about — something you lie awake at night thinking about in a good way — and chase it with wonderment, passion and vigor, what else can we ask for from the human experience? It's awesome that you were able to identify it.

Michelle: Once I got out of the torment of the coursework, that's when things got really fun. Luckily, even as an undergraduate I got involved in research projects with professors, and I loved it. I think the professors could feel that innate enthusiasm. Even if I wasn't getting good grades in the classes, they could tell I loved it. In the latter part of graduate school, you've finished your classes and qualifying exams, and you start doing your research. That's really when you start becoming a scientist.

It turns out a lot of scientists had a similar experience. When we talk among ourselves, many of us found the coursework very difficult and confusing. But when we got to actually be scientists — asking our own questions, working with other scientists, going to observatories, taking data and trying to figure out what it meant — that's when the rubber hit the road.

[28:05] From grad school to Caltech, JPL and NASA

Brad: How does that weave into your path to NASA? You spoke very favorably of your time there, through a lens of gratitude, as an environment where everyone was chasing the same goal. How does that young Michelle at Harvard, enamored with research, end up as a director at NASA?

Michelle: So much of my life I've let flow around relationships, and that goes all the way back to graduate school. People say, "You wrote your dissertation on something very obscure, the atmospheres of binary stars." But I arrived at graduate school just interested in astronomy, full stop. I like black holes, galaxies, asteroids — there's nothing I don't like. What I looked at during my first few years of coursework was which professors had a good rapport with their graduate students, enjoyed working with them, took them to conferences, and introduced them to other astronomers.

I had an absolutely wonderful advisor. He'd gotten his doctorate from the University of Texas, and I was his second graduate student. I felt so comfortable and safe with him. He got me working with the group as a junior member. I didn't have to come up with anything on my own. You start by helping people with their work, then you think, "Oh, there's a little bit I could do," and you grow from there.

In a similar way, choosing jobs revolved around the people I wanted to be around. I was going to get a position at the University of Montreal after graduate school, and I was looking forward to it. But I fell in love with another astronomer who was living in Australia. We were both trying to get jobs on each other's continent. There were actually more jobs in America, and he got a job at NASA, so I thought, "OK, I'd better shoot for that."

He got a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California — JPL. That's where NASA builds the Mars rovers, and I think it's the best engineering center in the world. I got a postdoctoral research fellowship at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, which runs JPL for NASA. For people who watch TV, it's famously the home of The Big Bang Theory. That was an odd cultural thing for me. I was an astrophysics postdoc at Caltech, which is the position Sheldon Cooper has when the show starts. And wow, I'm nothing like that. I do have too many science fiction costumes and too many action figures — that's all hilarious and true. But the idea that that's what a scientist is like? Oh boy, no.

Brad: It almost feeds the stereotype.

Michelle: Sure, the show is all about stereotypes. I actually find it very funny, and I enjoy watching it from time to time. I liked the way the women characters evolved — when it first started, it was just Penny and the guys, and then finally more women show up. But that idea that you're that much of an "other," that strange, is a little hard to swallow.

[31:58] Hidden Figures, Nancy Grace Roman and Cecilia Payne

Brad: There's a movie — I've only seen it in glimpses. My wife will watch a movie 100 times, the kind that's on TV at 2 in the afternoon on a Wednesday. It's about female scientists bucking trends, I think in the '50s, in a NASA environment.

Michelle: That's Hidden Figures, about the African American women who were computers and mathematicians.

Brad: Yes, that one.

Michelle: I actually knew that story a long time ago from working at NASA. At the time they didn't have computers the way we think of them, and there was all this math that needed to be done. So they hired women who knew math, and eventually those women became some of the first computer programmers. That center down in Virginia, Langley Research Center, is where the astronauts were trained before the Johnson Space Center in Houston was really built. Katherine Johnson was one of the lead mathematicians there, but there were many others.

And it wasn't just NASA. Another big one was the Manhattan Project — Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They had armies of women doing the computations. In that case, I feel a little separate from them, in the sense that they were never given the chance to be the professors, the people with the doctorates, the people setting NASA's goals. They did the absolute meat-and-potatoes mathematics that needed to be done, because that's all they were offered. Those women are a tremendous inspiration, but so are a lot of women in leadership positions whom people don't know about.

Right now in Florida, they're getting ready to launch a new telescope called the Roman Space Telescope. It's named after Nancy Grace Roman, whom not everybody knows about. She's amazing — I had a chance to meet her a couple of times before she passed. She was the very first head of astrophysics at NASA, in 1958.

Brad: Wow, really?

Michelle: Yes. The first time NASA decided to have a chief scientist for astrophysics, they chose her. There have been women all over science and all over NASA since the beginning. It's interesting that we haven't chosen to feature their stories before.

It goes all the way back to the start of modern astronomy at Harvard. When the first generation of big telescopes came online, they produced in-depth photographs of deep space, and there were workshops of women classifying literally millions of stars on those big glass plates. They discovered things like how far away the stars and galaxies are, and literally what stars are made of. That was a graduate student named Cecilia Payne. In her PhD dissertation she suggested stars were probably made mostly of hydrogen, which we now know they are. But that wasn't the prevailing idea at the time, so her advisor said she had to retract it.

Brad: Wow. So she makes this groundbreaking discovery that isn't commonly believed, gets pushed back against, and is made to repress it.

Michelle: And history bore it out. There's a happy ending: Cecilia Payne eventually became chair of the astronomy department at Harvard. But her dissertation came out in the 1920s, and at the time she was made to retract it. Later the discovery was credited to someone else for a long time, with a reference to her. Now we've gone back and reassessed it, and given credit where credit is due.

[36:46] Obstacles, self-doubt and "hurt people hurt people"

Brad: That's amazing. Decades later, did anything like that ever happen in your career? Did you ever fear something would be looked upon unfavorably, or did someone make you hit the brakes on an idea?

Michelle: Not at all from my male colleagues. There have certainly been people in my career who were more encouraging and more discouraging, but it did not fall along gender lines. My professors in college were very kind to me, even when they saw me struggling. David Latham, more of the old-guard Harvard professor, was just fantastic and encouraging, and I had my wonderful graduate advisor. So the good news is I've worked with men in my career in wonderful, supportive ways.

There have been people who didn't think I was the right personality, didn't think I had enough to contribute — "Why the hell are you here?" The fascinating thing that bears some discussion is that almost to a one — I'm thinking of maybe three or four people who really tried to get in my way, or just really didn't like me — they were women. In academia especially, women of the generations before me had to be so hard as nails and so aggressive to get where they were that when they saw me coming along without that personality, they didn't like it.

Let's talk about my first week of college. I arrived from Waukesha, Wisconsin — my mom drove me to Harvard — and I was paired with a very prestigious woman professor named Margaret Geller. First week of freshman year, I go to her office for an advisory meeting. I'm all excited. I talk with her for about an hour about my hopes and what I'd like to study. And she turns right around and says, "Kid, you're not going to make it. This isn't for you." Your first week of college, from someone who has known you for an hour. In retrospect, that was probably not the best thing to do. But to me it was just another confirmation of what I already believed: that something about me was intrinsically wrong for this. It got filed away in that pile of self-doubt. And it wasn't the only one. Later in my career, the people who said, "We don't understand why you're useful to this group," were women.

Brad: That's interesting. I'm reading a fascinating book right now called The Laws of Human Nature. It lays out famous historical stories, from 1,000 years ago to 10 years ago, and weaves in different personality types and people's motivations. My little guy and I wake up and read every morning, and the chapter I read this morning was about exactly that kind of person. Though I shouldn't say that, because you don't know that person's motivation — maybe that was her way of trying to motivate someone.

Michelle: I actually have a lot of empathy for these people, and I think it goes deeper than that. They're responding to some sort of trauma. They were put down so hard and made to feel so unwelcome that it gave them that defensiveness. And in the past, somebody might have thought, "This department is only going to hire one woman professor, because they're rare. So it's going to be me, not you." That idea that there had to be competition between women was brought in too. Everybody I've met has a reason for behaving the way they do. It's not because they're evil or just assholes. They're responding to something that happened to them. It's not even a question of forgiveness. Something unfortunate happened, but I don't feel at all angry. They were coming at it from some legitimate place.

Brad: It's amazing when you learn that in life. It was life-altering for me. A Stanford professor named Shirzad Chamine wrote a book and built a concept called Positive Intelligence. It's like classic EQ, repackaged a little, through the lens of what trauma does to the brain and your subconscious responses to different environments and people's actions. It was absolutely life-changing. Through my work, we did a nine-month intensive training as a team. We read the book, and Shirzad had made an app you work through to identify your own saboteurs — the ways you respond to certain situations.

It couldn't have happened at a better time. My wife and I had been married a couple of years and were considering kids. I'm a much better husband, father, friend, son and person for understanding that concept. It gets boiled down to "hurt people hurt people," but when you understand what that really means — what trauma-based responses are, and how personality is shaped so much by environment and what's happened to you — it changes everything. I still don't think it excuses the end result. There's a level of empathy I hope people can live with as a guiding light, even without having those things identified. But you're going to run into the squeaky wheels and the people who get in your way.

[44:05] The attack on science and NASA's brain drain

Brad: I want to talk about something that pains me: the current perception of science. People try to invalidate it at times because of how researchers get funding to advance their careers, research what they want and reach conclusions. The general public puts a lot of weight on that. But that perception doesn't match any scientist I've ever met personally. They're so invested and curious about what they're searching for. I'd love to hear your perspective — the perception of science right now, social media disbelief, how people find their answers — and your career experience with the freedom to be curious and find genuine, authentic answers. I feel like that's what the vast majority of scientists are trying to do.

Michelle: I've never seen any example of anything other than that. This is something where I get to say things with a little emotion — things I maybe wouldn't have said while I was speaking on behalf of NASA. It's not OK for people to call me a liar, or to say scientists are lying, or that they're trying to grab money. I think this has been deliberately constructed. It's meant to distract us and divide us. There are so many things happening right now, and it's, "Look at these people — they're your problem." Let's name them: trans people, gay people, immigrants, scientists. None of these are big problems in our culture. They're being used politically to divide us, and it's incredibly sad.

You have to understand that in the last couple of years we've lost thousands of scientists. So many of the excellent people I worked with at NASA are gone — chased out. We've lost tremendous reputation, the idea of how trustworthy the United States is. This is a big deal. The idea that science was ever anybody's problem is mind-blowing to me.

For one thing, it's a huge lie that this is very expensive. At NASA, I worked in the Science Mission Directorate — all the NASA missions that aren't astronaut-based: every satellite, every Mars rover. The biggest chunk of that budget is Earth science. Things like Landsat, which our farmers use — there's not a farmer around here who isn't using Landsat data. Landsat has been taking data about the health of vegetation and the state of all the land on the planet for going on 50 years. There's the state of the oceans and NOAA, and weather prediction — NASA builds the weather satellites. And yes, missions that monitor the climate and the extent of the ice caps.

The biggest thing we do is data that directly serves people through Earth science. We have missions that look at precipitation all over the planet continuously. Every 30 minutes a report comes out, free for anybody. It's used for disaster mitigation and for figuring out how much water the crops need. Then there are missions monitoring what the sun is spitting out at us. That keeps our astronauts safe, and we work with the FAA for airline pilots during big solar storms, and with electrical grids. Then you have Mars, Jupiter and all of astrophysics — the James Webb Space Telescope and so on.

The astounding thing is that's done for a little over $5 billion a year. That's more than 110 active missions — 110 groups of scientists, engineers, contractors and small businesses. When you say $5 billion, it can sound like a lot of money. But that employs hundreds of thousands of people and develops new technology. That money doesn't just sit at NASA, and we don't stuff it into a rocket and set it on fire. It goes out. It supports the people directly involved in NASA missions, and it goes to grants for scientists at universities to use the data.

Say you're a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and you want to support your graduate students. The university doesn't have that money; you need to find it externally. NASA has grants for people to use data from the Webb telescope or the Mars rovers. So we're supporting research at universities everywhere, and that turns into millions of people. Independent economists have studied this for NASA, and conservatively, every dollar invested in science research comes back three times to communities — some studies say ten times. It's some of the least and best money we spend. Five billion a year to be the world leader in science, not to mention things like Landsat for our crops, navigation at sea, and calibrating the GPS satellites. It's so little money with such big impact. Science is so not a problem in our culture that the attack on it has been, I have to say, devastating. I'm depressed. I'm not OK.

Brad: I know, and that's why I bring it up. It's a huge issue. I don't argue that the system as a whole throughout history couldn't have incentivized things better. But rarely, if ever, from what I've seen with my own two eyes, is it the scientist. They're always looking for answers to questions. That's what scientists do. And as you said, this conversation has been very carefully and intentionally constructed by the powers that be.

Working in higher education myself — and the perception of higher education comes along with this — it's uncomfortable thinking about what's next if that snowball keeps rolling down the mountain. We've learned so much because of people who are curious about something and find the fire that you found. This narrative is going to squash that fire for the next generation of problem solvers — the next person who says, "I want to know what's inside that black hole more than anything else in the world." I think it's extremely damaging and dangerous to our future.

Michelle: I think it's something we may have lost to some extent for good. Things change; that's part of life. But especially in physics and astronomy, nobody's getting rich. I was on a federal salary, and I appreciate that. My husband worked for NASA too, so we had two federal salaries and lived comfortably. By the way, we don't get big pensions anymore — that went away in the 1980s. We have a 401(k) like everybody else. But there was this idea that you could have a comfortable life and a job that was supposed to be reasonably stable.

You certainly had to be flexible. As a scientist at NASA, if you want to do your own research, you have to compete with everybody else for time and funding. If you're one of the lead scientists on the James Webb Space Telescope but you want to use it for your own research, you write an application along with every other scientist in the world. It's a public telescope; anybody can apply. And interestingly, we take the names off the applications, so reviewers don't know which one is yours. You need a good idea to win. If you don't win, there's mission work to do: calibration, computer programming, managing data archives. You don't get an advantage.

But it was lovely to have a reasonably stable job. Like most places, you're on probation for three years when you're hired as a scientist. Then they decide whether you're contributing and whether it's working out. They can let you go, or keep you on in a sort of pseudo-tenured, permanent role. The idea was that it was supposed to be stable and reasonably protected. You might not get to do exactly what you wanted, or you might not win that year's proposal, but you had a use on the mission. You didn't have to worry about the job ending on a whim.

What's changed in the last couple of years is that a lot of young people I talk to say, "Why should I work for the government in science if they can cancel your whole program without warning, for no reason?" Boy, that's a tough one.

Brad: And then where does that person go? Is it academia or bust?

Michelle: Academia is under huge pressure too, because so many grants are being canceled. There are very few academic jobs in the United States now. All of my best colleagues at NASA have gone overseas. Let's put it right out there. Europe and especially Canada have picked up many of what I consider our true stars, and it's happening as we speak. So it's not even the next generation; it's the current generation.

Brad: That's absolutely devastating.

Michelle: It's our superstars. One of my best friends at NASA was one of the finalists to be an astronaut. I consider her one of the best managers I've ever met. She's in Switzerland now. Europe has just come at it. China, too, is making offers to a lot of our scientists, and they will leave. When you're a scientist, this really is a passion. You'll do almost anything to keep that line of inquiry, and a relatively easy thing to do is leave the United States.

Brad: That's so discouraging to hear. I was prognosticating, thinking about the future. I didn't know it was already that devastating — people 20 years into their careers. I thought at least you could ride it out.

Michelle: No, some of the real superstars are going overseas now. Or to Canada — not quite overseas, but over the border.

Brad: Over a couple of Great Lakes from where we are.

[58:03] Who becomes an astronaut? Space Camp, Piers Sellers and Artemis II

Brad: You said your friend was one of the finalists who qualified to be an astronaut. I want to learn about that. Did you ever have aspirations to be the one in the rocket going to space? And who gets to do that?

Michelle: When I was a kid, yes. One of my first experiences with NASA was in 1983 or 1984. There was a new thing called Space Camp at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I happened to see it on Channel 4 News in Milwaukee. I was 12 or 13, and I said to my parents, "I've got to go to that." They didn't have any extra money. The only job available to a 12-year-old girl was babysitting — which may be why I never had children. I didn't have any really bad experiences, but as a 12-year-old I changed a lot of diapers and walked a lot of crying babies. I earned most of the money to go, and it was fantastic. I'd never really met my peer group before. I flew down to Huntsville and had a fantastic time. I went twice.

It's a camp that takes you through a pseudo-astronaut training, and it's at a big NASA base, so we got to see some of the facilities the astronauts trained in. But by the time I hit graduate school, I'd developed a pretty healthy fear of flying. I still fly a lot, and it's gotten better — I fly all over the world. Sometimes I take a little tranquilizer and sometimes I just grit through, but I'm not very comfortable. An astronaut who's afraid of flying is probably not the best idea. So I very quickly became the astrophysicist, the person who uses the telescopes and the data.

Of course, working at NASA, a lot of the people around you are astronauts, and a lot of the supervisors especially are former astronauts. Many of my friends would apply. This incredible person, Jodi, was in the final 20 people of a class maybe three classes ago. I think they selected seven, and she wasn't in the final cut. But my God, does this person have the right stuff. She would have made a fantastic astronaut. Once you're down to 20 from the thousands and thousands who apply, they're all good, and I have no idea how they make the final cut.

Brad: OK.

Michelle: That's kept very close to NASA's chest. Even inside NASA, people don't really know how the final decision is made. With so many extremely well-qualified people, you wonder if they pick names out of a hat. The candidates have backgrounds as scientists, medical doctors or military pilots. In my experience, all the astronauts I know are honestly such fantastic, kind people, with a tendency to be a little quiet. If you're going to be in a small container with people for six months on the space station, you want people who are OK keeping a little to themselves — a little more introverted. But they're creative, they can fix anything, and they're very self-reliant. And there's a deep kindness to them. This sounds trite, but I've been so inspired by these people. That's not some media creation.

My supervisor for a long time was Piers Sellers. He was British, and he was an astronaut, and he was the most supportive, team-building, listening supervisor I've ever had. He was a rock star astronaut. He flew up for the job interview at Goddard in one of those T-38 fighter trainer jets. I'm like, "Dude, badass." By the way, he tried to get me over my fear of flying by taking me flying himself, and I'll never do that again. He's like, "Here, take the controls. Oh, I didn't close the door. No worries, you're belted in." I'm like, "Oh, never mind."

Brad: Why did he think he had the answer?

Michelle: I think he thought he'd get me more acclimated.

Brad: I have a running joke with my wife about that. She's terrified of wasps and bees, and she was very upset with me the other day because I said, "I hope you get stung — because it's not that bad." She did not look at it the same way. I was curious to learn about astronaut selection because I'm sure it's a balance of subject matter expertise and those soft-skill things you were just talking about.

Michelle: I think the soft skills are very important.

Brad: They have to be. There are very few things in life that mirror that. Maybe the self-sustaining living we talked about earlier is close.

Michelle: I'm not kidding — the commercial fishermen and the astronauts remind me of each other. There's a commonality to the personality. Especially with this latest Artemis II mission around the moon. I knew two of the crew: I've met Christina Koch, and I knew Victor Glover. That's not a lie — they are that nice. They brought humanity and a sense of fun, even though it was quite a risky mission. There were things that didn't go perfectly. None of it was covered up, but NASA didn't really emphasize it, and I'm sure there were times they were pretty nervous. But they brought a sense of camaraderie, excitement and fun to it. I don't think you could have done better. They were just amazing.

[1:04:56] Quantum entanglement and the next physics revolution

Brad: Now I want to get into some of the X's and O's. I'm going to try to keep up with you, and mostly try to keep my jaw from dropping further and my head from exploding. One thing I've latched onto, which you talked about with Joe, is the electron thing — where you separate two electrons.

Michelle: Oh, quantum entanglement.

Brad: Quantum entanglement. It's absolutely astounding to me. I think the new questions 100 years from now are going to come from this concept. It blows my mind: you separate the two electrons, the distance doesn't matter, you switch one, and the other one starts spinning the other way.

Michelle: When it comes to science, it's really useful to separate the things we know experimentally are true — you put a pin in it, it's done, no doubt — from worthy conjecture. Conjecture isn't bullshit; you take ideas and try to extend them and think about how things really work, and that's when things become theoretical. You need that. But people would sometimes be surprised by the stuff where we can say, "No, that's actually real. That's being done in laboratories all over the world as we speak." Quantum entanglement is one of those things.

And I agree with you — you've said something very prescient. I think this will eventually be the start of our next physics. Usually, when there's a huge physics revolution, there's an experimental result that everybody is seeing in the lab, and we just can't figure out how it could possibly work.

For Einstein, what really kicked it off was when people measured — and they didn't expect this — that the speed of light is always the same no matter how fast you're going. Any observer measuring the speed of light gets exactly the same number. That's crazy. If you were going 90% of the speed of light and turned on your flashlight, how fast would you see the light moving ahead of you? You're catching up with it at 90% of the speed of light, so it should only pull ahead at 10%. But no — the observer going 90% of the speed of light sees the light moving ahead at the same speed of light as everybody else.

Nobody was looking for that. It was an experimental result first. One of the great early measurements was at Mount Wilson, California. The Earth goes around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and they measured the speed of light going with the Earth's motion and going against it, looking for a difference. There was none. It was dead on the same no matter how fast you were going. Nobody expected that, and it took Einstein to turn it into the new physics. And the best physics we have is 120 years old.

Brad: That's crazy.

Michelle: It's crazy that we haven't come up with anything much better. But quantum entanglement is that next step. I think it's the experiment that will eventually make all our physics fall apart, and then we'll reassemble it and go, "Oh, that's how it works." So you're absolutely right: this is real, not theoretical.

The easiest example to understand is the one you described. Atoms have protons and neutrons in a nucleus, with electrons orbiting around them. You can fit two electrons in the same orbit if they're spinning in opposite directions — they have different angular momentum, and that allows them to share the orbit. So you take two electrons in the same orbit and knock them off. Now you have two electrons that you know have to be spinning in opposite directions, and you can separate them by any distance. At first this was done in a laboratory over a couple of inches. Now it's been done over thousands of miles — the Chinese have done it to their space station and back. You could put one in a galaxy millions of light-years away.

If you flip the spin of one of them — you can use an electric field to change it — the other one immediately changes, because they're linked. If one is spinning one way, the other has to spin the other way. And here's what has all physicists going, "Damn." The universe doesn't recognize them as being separated in space. Even the light travel time between them is irrelevant. The signal isn't traveling at the speed of light. The universe says these two things are the same thing — they're linked — so any amount of distance between them doesn't matter.

I think that will eventually make our physics fall apart, once we really understand what's going on. I hate it when physics asks you to stop asking questions — "Don't ask that, that isn't a good question." I think we get to ask how these things are linked when it doesn't matter how much space or time is between them. That's real; it's an experiment. And what's going to fall out over the coming decades is what it really means about reality. We're up against the idea that what we think of as separation in space may not be an intrinsic part of the universe. It may be something our brains and our measurement systems come up with, but not the underlying reality.

Brad: That's where it gets fascinating. Not only the questions it could answer, but what separation truly is. We think of the copious numbers of other galaxies, and it's hard to imagine how far away our physics says they are. But to a different kind of perception or awareness, they could be right next door. We just don't know how to turn the handle.

[1:12:01] Time dilation, GPS satellites and black holes

Michelle: That's one of the reasons I've always been a little skeptical about the classic idea of UFOs and spaceships. Science fiction is often more imaginative than that. Take Interstellar, the Christopher Nolan movie with Matthew McConaughey. These very advanced beings — whether aliens or very advanced versions of humanity — travel using the geometry of space itself, gravity. They don't go there in a little silver ship. They can see every moment in the universe as a whole, everything happening at once, and they use that. I think it may be much more likely that we figure out distance doesn't exist in an intrinsic way. And I've got nothing comforting to say about that.

The experiments of modern physics are telling us that time is a very malleable, stretchable thing. I mentioned that NASA calibrates the GPS satellites. We calibrate them because they're in a different time frame. The satellites are far enough from Earth that time flows faster for them.

Brad: That's crazy to understand.

Michelle: The closer you are to a big source of gravity, the more time slows down. Near a black hole, it's even more extreme. We watch things orbiting black holes in the galaxy, and we see time slow down as they get close. Again, that's not theory; that's real. Space and time are things the human brain thinks of as absolute, and not our theoretical or conjectural physics but our experimental physics is showing that's not the case.

Brad: It's weird — we'll get to why in a little while — but I feel comfortable with it.

Michelle: Good! You might as well. There's not much we can do about it. We can be uncomfortable as humans, and the universe doesn't really care.

Brad: Our perception of it doesn't even matter. It just is. And it's cool to think we might be a little closer to an answer, or at least the next question. Who knows whether there's an end to questions? You don't get to the last one and say, "OK, we know everything now." There's been a cool conversation lately about remote viewing — I've heard Joe talk about it a few times. People say it's done on Earth. Now take that to scale: remote viewing a different galaxy.

Michelle: It gets even stranger than that, because the universe could be some sort of whole thing, in more than our three dimensions. Einstein, 120 years ago — and to some extent even Isaac Newton in the late 1600s — had the idea that if you could see the universe from somehow outside it, you'd see every point of space and time existing at once. A whole structure, from start to finish. The past, present and future all exist; no moment in time exists any more than any other. They all exist, basically, at once.

And you run up against the problems with our language. How do you talk about something outside of time as a human being? We don't have the vocabulary. But that's the direction we're going. With the right perspective, you'd probably see not just all of space, but — in another direction, another dimension — all of time at once.

[1:16:12] Looking back to the early universe

Brad: That's so amazing. I've watched so much of your stuff that it blends together into one big Michelle video in my head. Somewhere you talked about how, when we look out into space through telescopes, we're looking back in time. And you talked about looking so far back that we're seeing the universe before it was everything — when it was just the elements that make it up. I'm doing a terrible job of explaining it, but do you know what concept I mean?

Michelle: I think so. To be clear, we're not able to look back to the Big Bang itself. And this is a fascinating limitation: we know we can't see the whole universe. We don't know how big it is or whether it's infinite, because we're limited by this time effect. It takes light time to travel to us. The sun is about 93 million miles away, and it takes about eight minutes for its light to reach us. So we can never see the sun as it is now — only as it was eight minutes ago. The nearest star is about four light-years away. Light travels 186,000 miles per second, and it still takes about four years. So we see Proxima Centauri, in the southern sky, as it was four years ago.

The Andromeda Galaxy is the farthest thing you can see with your unaided eye. If you look up tonight — it's more of a winter object — you're seeing it as it was 2 million years ago, because that's how long its light took to reach us. We have no way of seeing what it's like today. We assume time has flowed on there. But as you look farther out, and this is why we build big telescopes, you're looking so far back that the universe starts to change. You see objects that no longer exist. Things are denser, more stars are forming, galaxies are closer together.

And finally you reach a limit. A friend of mine, John Mather, shared the Nobel Prize for this — I think it was 2007 [2006]. Two NASA missions measured it. Eventually you look so far out that you're seeing a time only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. Seriously, we can see that far. At that time the universe was nothing but hot hydrogen gas, glowing at about the temperature of the sun's surface. So if you look far enough in any direction, all around us, you eventually look back to a time when the whole universe was so hot it was opaque — as bright and hot as the surface of the sun. It was just hydrogen and a little helium. Everything we're made of — carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, calcium — none of it existed yet. And here's the pin: this isn't theoretical. These are real observations.

Brad: That's so crazy. That's been bouncing around in here since I first heard you say it. I keep trying to wrap my head around it.

Michelle: It just makes sense. You're so far away that the light took so long to reach you that you're looking back in time. There are stars, galaxies, planets and people there now, but that light hasn't reached us yet. There's no way around it: you have to look back in time as you look out. So there's a bubble around us. You look back to a certain time and can't see any further, because it's all opaque hot hydrogen gas.

[1:20:45] We are stardust: how stars make the elements

Brad: So where did all the other elements come from?

Michelle: This is the fact I learned when I was 10 years old watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and it has ruled my life. It's why I suffered through all those years of coursework I was failing. There's only one thing in the universe with a natural nuclear fusion reaction that builds bigger and bigger atoms. We start with the simplest atom, hydrogen, which is one proton — hardly even an atom.

Gravity attracts anything with mass, so it brought together clouds of hydrogen gas in the early universe — trillions and trillions of miles of it. As gravity crushes that gas together, it heats the interior, until it reaches about 20 million degrees. At that point the gas is moving so fast and is under so much pressure that it starts to fuse into bigger atoms. You stick protons together under that gravitational crush and you get helium. That's the same reaction that powers a hydrogen bomb or a fusion reactor, and it's what powers the heart of a star.

So in the very core of a star, gravity alone gets temperatures high enough for natural nuclear fusion, and you make bigger and bigger atoms. Let me say this with periods: The only thing in the universe that makes atoms — iron, calcium, oxygen, carbon, everything — is the heart of a star. That's the only place it happens. Stars go through their lives doing nuclear fusion and getting energy from it. Then they die: they explode, unravel back into space, or form black holes. All that debris with its new, bigger atoms fills the galaxy, and new stars and planetary systems form from it.

And again, put a pin in it — that's something we know. When we look out into the universe at earlier times, we see fewer heavy elements like carbon, iron, oxygen and gold. Closer to us in time, we see them being made. For a long time we'd never actually seen gold being made. We knew it had something to do with stellar explosions. Then we caught a particularly violent star death, and something like 10,000 times the mass of the Earth in hot gaseous gold was created. Check that one off. It's happening all around us, and it's real. The only thing that created the atoms in your body was the inside of a star. Then that star had to die, its debris had to fill space, and new stars had to form from it.

Brad: That's so amazing. That, combined with quantum entanglement, has my entire attention. When I start to bridge those two concepts, it makes me feel so small and so big at the same time.

Michelle: That's a good way to put it. You are vast. The sun orbits the middle of the galaxy, where there's a giant black hole, and we're going about half a million miles an hour around it right now. As we plow through all the debris and dust that dead stars have created, we accumulate atoms. They're falling on us right now. Our Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, with about 500 billion stars, and we've been around it 20 times in the life of the Earth. So in your body right now, there's not just one star that blew up — there's probably the debris of literally billions. You're an entire galaxy brought together. Yes, you're small compared with the galaxy, but you are a vast thing.

Brad: We're a piece of it, and it's a piece of us. We're one thing.

Michelle: There's no barrier between space and the Earth. It's not "here" and "there." The Earth formed from the debris of dead stars. There's no other way to get the iron, the rock, the silica — it all had to be processed inside a star. Astrophysics isn't so much the study of distant stars as the study of why your nose is here and what makes up your bones, and how you get the right elements to make DNA. Look around the room: metal, glass, human bodies —

Brad: Things that can save pictures of us.

Michelle: It's all astrophysics. And the heavier stuff — gold, silver, platinum — is really only formed when the star's death is so violent it forms a black hole, with a giant explosion. One of my favorites: iodine, and bismuth, the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol, are formed in these incredibly cataclysmic stellar deaths — some of the brightest, most energetic events since the Big Bang. Iodine and Pepto-Bismol are the products of unbelievable cosmic catastrophes.

Brad: That's amazing. Go figure — I didn't know that part. And those are two different kinds of black holes, right? There's the one at the center of the galaxy, and the ones that form when a star dies.

Michelle: That's right. The heavier elements need really, really violent explosions. A normal star like the sun, going through its life, will make elements up through carbon, maybe a little nitrogen and oxygen. But there's a lot of heavier stuff — lead, gold, iron, nickel — and you need a violent stellar death to make those bigger atoms. We see them being made in supernova explosions. In some cases, there are two dead stars — neutron stars, the dead cores of stars — that circle each other, collide and form a black hole. That's the only time we've ever seen iodine and bismuth made.

Brad: Crazy. Absolutely crazy.

[1:28:22] Oneness, psychedelics and near-death experiences

Brad: At the risk of getting too into conjecture — because that's where I go from here. I'm really good at coming up with "what if" and "I wonder if" questions that have no answers.

Michelle: That's important. Imagination is so important.

Brad: The reason I wanted to talk about those topics specifically is that you said something elsewhere that meets my world of conjecture. Let me dip into conjecture for a minute. We have this existential question about a creator — what created us, is there a creator? Given everything stars can do, I think if we ask the right question, we might find the answer somewhere down that path someday. And there's the age-old concept that we are stardust.

This concept of everything being connected — I think it was with Joe that you talked about psychedelics briefly. A lot of where my brain goes with this comes from psychedelic experiences and the awe-inspiring takeaways you get from them. One of the main ones for me, and it's a tried-and-true story among many people who've experienced psychedelics, is this strange but comforting feeling of oneness: that I'm no different from the tree I'm next to or a star millions of light-years away. I've left with that feeling many times, and it opens up the conversation in a lot of ways. I thought it was funny when you told Joe you'd thought about it but were chicken.

Michelle: I'm already getting feelings of envy, because I would like to try it sometime. Like I told Joe, I've been scared because I don't know how to do it so it doesn't get overwhelming — how to control the dose, in a safe environment. Unfortunately, it's one of those things our culture has kept in back rooms.

Brad: Talk about another travesty.

Michelle: I'm curious, but I'm scared.

Brad: Rightfully so. It's powerful. Given your career, you probably wouldn't be as uncomfortable as many people, but what makes a lot of people uncomfortable is that it brings up a lot of questions you can't answer.

Michelle: Sure.

Brad: Here's a layer I thought we could add. Have you ever seen any of the conversation or research around near-death experiences — NDEs — alongside psychedelic experiences?

Michelle: Just as someone who consumes media, not in particular. But I've definitely seen videos of people describing near-death experiences.

Brad: I've had an experience in that realm too, and the alignment between the two made me even more awestruck. There are two roads, and I don't know what's at the end of either one, but I've gotten to drive on both for a little while — and they're both Highway 41. They're the same thing. That raises so many questions in my mind.

One of the prime takeaways — and I think you latched onto this, with Joe or in other content — is that it takes away the fear of the unknown, and with it a lot of the fear of death. I feel extreme comfort. The only thing that makes me scared of dying today is knowing I wouldn't get to spend another day with my wife and my son.

Michelle: I was about to say — having kids, I bet, changes that.

Brad: My wife too, my family, the people I'm close to. That's why I'm scared of dying. I don't have one iota of fear of death for myself, because of those two kinds of experiences — and there's been more than one on one side. Even the phrase "we are stardust" gives me so much comfort right now, because I truly believe it. It's another one of those things language can't explain. That's why it's such a travesty we haven't been able to explore it. I love that the state of Wisconsin is spearheading some of the psychedelic research happening right now, at Madison. And it's a travesty it was yanked away from so many people for decades by powers that be wanting to play puppeteer.

I wanted to connect this with grief, because you have an awesome video on YouTube — it's a quick watch, eight or nine minutes — where you talk about your experience with grief and losing your husband. Where all these things intersect, I think there's so much value for humanity if we let ourselves look at it, think critically about it and be curious about it. At the beginning it's going to raise more questions than answers. But like many of the questions you've explored throughout your career, they're valuable, and eventually we find little answers along the way.

[1:35:42] Light outside of time and the limits of language

Brad: I know it gets into the completely unknown, and I'm not asking you to say whether it's right or wrong. But with everything you know right now, is it possible — even the phrase "we are everything and everything is us" — that everything is connected?

Michelle: To some extent, it's almost guaranteed. This is physics. One thing I believe is that what people experience is really important and shouldn't be denied. There's a difference between what you can measure and experiment on scientifically and an experience that's very personal and subjective — your experience alone. Right now we don't have the ability to tap into each other's minds and share a spiritual or psychedelic experience. Maybe someday we will.

Brad: That would be crazy too.

Michelle: That would really be something. But right now it's something I can't really touch with science. Still, I think Joe and I talked about this. Even last night I was trying to think of ways to explain it, because I'm going to be doing more podcasts about it.

Think about something as commonplace as light. We're in a room with fluorescent lights and video lights, and light is all around us. In physics we're left with an actual fact that's very hard to process as a human — I have no wisdom about how to deal with it. Anything traveling at the speed of light — and any massless particle has to travel through the universe at that speed — does not experience space or time the way we define them at all. If you're traveling at the speed of light, time does not exist. Any trip of any length is instantaneous for a particle of light. Of course photons don't have brains or perception, but space and time become useless words. To a particle of light, all moments in time and all places exist as a single whole.

That's real. What we do with that as three-dimensional conscious beings, I don't know. To a particle of light bouncing off us — and we're surrounded by this stuff — the universe never expanded. Everything is a single whole something. So we have evidence that in some way, yes, everything is a single whole thing. That's not conjecture. We just don't quite know how to describe it yet. As I was saying, Einstein thought that if you could somehow look at the universe from outside, you'd see all of space and all of time as real, whole constructs all at once. So we're not talking about conjecture or imagination here. We're talking about what experimental physics is showing us now.

Whether there's a link to clairvoyance, premonitions, psychic experiences or psychedelic experiences — that, of course, we don't know. I can't say it isn't, nor can I say it is. What makes me cautious as a scientist is when we have two things we don't understand and say, "We don't understand how space and time work, and we don't understand how a psychedelic experience works, so they must be connected." That's a leap we need to be careful about. Our minds want to make them similar because we don't understand either.

Maybe they are connected. Maybe something about a psychedelic experience drops a filter our brain uses to process space and time. We certainly know space and time aren't as absolute as we think. So there may intriguingly be something real to it — it somehow drops your conscious filters and lets you experience the universe more the way it really is. It's also possible it has nothing to do with that. And that doesn't mean whatever a psychedelic experience is isn't also real. It may just be real in another way we don't understand yet. So part of me says: experience both and value both. They may or may not be connected.

Brad: Does physics touch consciousness at all?

Michelle: Nobody's been able to define consciousness. Whatever somebody says — "What does quantum entanglement have to do with consciousness?" — maybe something. But what do you mean by consciousness? With so many concepts now, we're running up against a problem with language. Our language is very much based on our three-dimensional brains. We don't have a word for what happens before time. That's a real problem with the Big Bang, because what we experience as time may have started then. That doesn't mean the Big Bang came from nothing, or that there wasn't something there before. But what do you mean by "before time"? Our language breaks down. We're really shackled by it. If we could share these experiences — some kind of cap you'd put on so somebody else could experience your psychedelic experience or your clairvoyance — that would help. Language isn't helping.

Brad: Absolutely. And pair that with the inherently human tendency to become absolutists: "Oh yeah, I know what time is." No, you know a human's perception of time.

Michelle: Nobody knows what time is. I'll tell you that right now.

Brad: That's what I mean. But 99 out of 100 people would say, "Yeah, I understand time. It just goes ahead." That's another rabbit hole — your feet moving through time at a different rate than your head. Even that is a slightly different time zone.

[1:43:17] Fear, mortality and grief

Michelle: And again, that's experimental. We now have clocks accurate enough that you can put one at your feet and one at your head and measure the time difference. It's certainly real by the time you get as far away as the GPS satellites. They'd be about 6 miles a day progressively off if we didn't correct for their different time frame, and NASA does that.

These feelings of oneness, and the idea that you've managed to lose the fear of death — I so envy that. You've done something incredible. I have not found a way to reconcile fear and my existence, and I don't like it. I don't like that I'm spending so much time in fear and anxiety. I've taken antidepressants, and they did help. I got off them because I wanted to know who I was without them. And who I am without them is largely somebody who's scared all the time. I don't know whether I'm supposed to numb myself to that or not. Especially after the death of my husband, I think antidepressants were maybe lifesaving. But if you've had experiences that help you this way in life, that is wonderful. That's a really fantastic accomplishment.

Brad: It's an accomplishment I can take zero credit for. But that's a really deep way to put it — not knowing whether you're supposed to numb yourself to it. That's a valid concern when you think existentially. Is it actually a good thing that I lost my fear of death? It is to me right now. I feel great about it.

Michelle: I think it's a good thing. It seems like a huge waste of my energy, all the fear I'm swimming in, because that fear isn't going to make any of it go away. It's just getting in the way of life. That's a question for philosophers and moralists: is there intrinsic value in wanting to experience what my heart and mind are really experiencing, even if it's not pleasant? I don't know the answer. I may go back on antidepressants; I haven't decided. But I'm not comfortable with mortality. And I'm still very, very deeply angry about my husband's death. That's the straight-out truth. I've been to great grief therapists and processed a lot of it, but I'm really angry about the life that got taken away. Maybe in the decades to come I'll find some way out of that. Some people have talked about psychedelics being a good tool for grief. Maybe one of these days I'll get the courage to try them.

Brad: What makes that statement so deep to me is thinking about the capability to manufacture that peace for myself, or for anybody who's been able to do it. "Fair" isn't the right word, but is it right? Is it a cheat code? When you think of the alignment between NDEs and psychedelic use — did the people who achieve that flip the switch too early, when something says that's where it's supposed to happen? A number of people push fast-forward and get to experience a bunch of life with that switch flipped, when really we had the key all along and didn't know it. It's super interesting to think about.

Michelle: It is. I don't have an answer. But I would say no, there's nothing cheat-code about it. If you've found something that brings you peace, there's nothing wrong with that.

Brad: That's incredibly true.

[1:47:49] Buddhism, bodhisattvas and the Bhagavad Gita

Brad: The last thing before we bring a little levity over some cheese: you've referenced bodhisattvas, and it seemed like you were at least aware of, if not in tune with, Eastern philosophy. What's your depth of knowledge and interest in that area?

Michelle: I'm not a member of any organized religion, and I don't think any organized religion has a particularly better standing. I find things that are beautiful in all of them. I've prayed with people in pretty much every form — I've really enjoyed attending churches, synagogues and any number of temples. I've always loved Japanese art and literature; that was just one of those random things. So of course Buddhism and Shintoism, the nature philosophy of Japan, are very central to that.

To me, Buddhism has a really nice way of trying to manage fear and anxiety without promising any easy way out. It's about getting comfortable with whatever existence is. Parts are very sad and very frightening, and parts are beautiful, and you try to accept all of it without judgment — without saying "this is a good emotion" or "this is a bad emotion." It's input from the universe in ways we don't understand, and the best we can do is act with compassion and help each other. I've found those parts of Buddhism very soothing and useful: how can you live a life with less suffering? You've found a way to find some peace. And I don't think whoever the historic Buddha was had any more divinity than anybody else. These are all human thoughts, and I think they're wonderful and beautiful.

Then there's the more conjectural idea that we're part of something much larger than a single consciousness in a single life, and we're just unaware of it. We're very small things, with small bodies and small minds. Think about how tremendously complex and intelligent an ant is in some ways — but an ant's brain just can't process what ours can. It can't write a symphony or come up with quantum mechanics. The brain just isn't there for it. There might someday be intelligences far more advanced than us — our descendants, aliens, or maybe intelligences intrinsic to the universe, who knows — that can comprehend more of what reality really is, the wholeness of it.

In a prosaic way, a bodhisattva is a being who has been through many lives and become enlightened to the extent that they can see the nature of reality — whatever that wholeness is, all of space and all of time. And a bodhisattva in particular, in the Buddhist canon, decides to stay and try to help. Whether you want to call these beings angels or use the Buddhist word, they're hyper-advanced beings who in some ways guide us, and maybe we're even part of them. A bodhisattva may have had an undefined number of lives — millions — before becoming one, through reincarnation.

Brad: So we're all a past life of a bodhisattva?

Michelle: I think Buddhism would say we probably are. We're all on the path to eventually becoming part of some sort of super-intelligence. That's a beautiful idea. Again, this is spirituality and philosophy, not science. But there have been times when I've been meditating — not under the influence of any chemistry but my own brain chemistry — and I've felt brief moments where things like loss and grief were impossible. The words didn't even have any meaning, because everything is here. Everything is connected. It's not even possible to lose something.

Brad: That's amazing, and it's treading in the same waters. There's a form of meditation called Transcendental Meditation —

Michelle: Sort of a version of that, yes.

Brad: — where you repeat your mantra over and over. I'm a big meditator, but I don't know much about TM in particular. I think the ultimate goal for them is to talk to what they consider the creator. Do you have a regular meditation practice?

Michelle: Not very regular. It comes and goes. This was actually under the guidance of one of my grief counselors, who was taking me through guided meditations. I don't practice in any formal way. I spend a good amount of time in Japan, and I try to seek out very quiet, peaceful temples. I think about doing a residency someday — you can stay a week, a month or six months. I don't think my path is to become a monk. But spending some time learning meditation is tempting.

Brad: It's fascinating. I wish I had a regular practice myself, because it's life-changing. It's almost the natural way. Back to the psychedelic conversation: it's not like you walk through a door and you're on one side or the other. There's a spectrum. I could see the emotions on your face when you talked about that meditation. It's not A or B; it's the entire alphabet — the whole road to wherever you're going — and different people are at different places on the road. That's the part of Eastern philosophy that really drew me in.

Like you, I don't subscribe to a particular religion. But in undergrad I took a throwaway class called Happiness and the Good Life. Classic teacher move — I think about it now. They named the class really well, so I took it as an elective, and it completely changed how I look at life. It was also the hardest class I took in my entire college career.

Michelle: It sounds like a class everybody should take.

Brad: It was unbelievable. We read an introduction to Buddhism and about seven different Eastern philosophical books, and learned the teachings of a bunch of different traditions. If I were going to subscribe to a religious idea right now, Buddhism speaks to me in so many ways, because of exactly what you were saying. It's a really pragmatic view of the path to enlightenment and what enlightenment truly means. It's like the anti-cheat code of the psychedelic realm: it's going to be a fuck of a lot of work, and you have to do a ton of stuff, but the goal is to keep progressing in a direction pointed at enlightenment.

The single thing that's changed me the most is the value of the present moment, which is one of the core philosophies. You can't control what's next, and you can't control what's already happened, but you can control this moment. And wait — that one's gone, but now you get another one, and another one. Thinking about life that way has shifted my lens of reality and given me so much happiness and contentment in each moment. I think that's an underlying reason a lot of people dive deep into a faith. Selfishly, I wanted to know where your mind was on that, because everything you've talked about connects back to it — pun intended. The discomfort comes from not knowing the answer, and in my lifetime I couldn't know it.

Michelle: One of the things I like about Buddhism is that I think people on the outside overemphasize the idea of enlightenment. That's probably not a state any of us is going to attain in this lifetime. Buddhism has the idea that consciousness may go through many lifetimes. But if you can achieve some letting go of anxiety and fear — enjoying what this life is, not asking it to be anything else, not putting a false narrative on how we should all be comforted, dealing with how things really are — then from there you help each other and practice compassion.

The only thing we know we have is each other. We don't know if space and time exist. We don't understand the scale of the universe, where it's going or how it formed. But we know we have each other — people we can really help, love and be compassionate toward. To me, Buddhism is a really useful way to live the life we have and maybe lose some of the fear, rather than worrying about becoming hyper-conscious. I may still be a mosquito compared with whatever becomes enlightened. It's not going to happen here. But those little glimpses in meditation, where you can put down the sense of loss and even the sense of change — where everything is one thing — are precious. It doesn't make them less valuable that we're not that way all the time. Then we have to feed the cat and worry about taxes. But if you can let go of that for a few moments in your life, that's a wonderful thing.

Brad: It's absolutely amazing. Enlightenment was the part I never fully wrapped my head around, even continuing down the rabbit hole well after that class.

Michelle: I don't think anybody has a real definition of it. If you want to put a little physics into it, there's some sort of real universe we're not perceiving. Our brains can't go there. We're three-dimensional, and the universe apparently is not — it's more. Can you see all of time at once and see everything as a whole? I always think maybe that's the definition of enlightenment: when you can actually see the true nature of the universe.

What's interesting about a lot of the Eastern religions is how sophisticated their ideas about this are, going back a long way. Take the Bhagavad Gita — you probably read that in your class. It's an ancient Hindu text that goes back thousands of years. There's a famous passage where a man asks the god Krishna, "What is this all about? There's war, there's famine, there's good stuff going on. It's all confusing. What the hell is this?" And Krishna says, "You really want to know?" He raises the veil on what reality is, and it turns out none of those questions even had any meaning. Why are people fighting? Why are people suffering? What happens next? What is death? The ultimate nature of reality is that time doesn't exist, one event doesn't cause another, and this whole thing you think is going on — you have no idea. It's not even a question of right or wrong, good or bad. The answer is something we didn't even know to ask about yet.

What an amazing thing for people thousands of years ago to be thinking: that the ultimate nature of the universe is something so far outside human perception — outside time and causality itself.

Brad: Wow.

Michelle: Doesn't that say something incredible about the human mind? For thousands of years, before we had any real science, we were already doubting that space and time were intrinsic. We didn't trust them. There's something about us that keeps thinking there's more to this. That's really intriguing, because here we are, trapped in this very biological, three-dimensional, causal life, and it seems like forever we've been saying, "There's something more here."

Brad: What's wild to me is that in all that time of thinking about it, I don't know that we're any further along in our understanding.

Michelle: Well, no — we now have scientific evidence that there's more out there than the human brain is dealing with. Does that have anything to do with Buddhism, enlightenment or Krishna? Who knows. But at least we know it's not as simple as we perceive, and we're never going back from that. It's never going to turn out that spacetime doesn't really curve, or that things aren't really connected quantum mechanically. That's real, and it's going to stay. I think we're on the path to realizing we're in a more complex, more beautiful universe than our brains are built for.

Brad: Absolutely. I hope I get to experience some of the breakthroughs before my time comes, because I can't wait to learn even a little more.

Michelle: There are glimmers. We're at a point where we need the next Einsteinian revolution — the next quantum mechanics, the next general relativity — because we can tell there are broken bits now. That's always when new physics comes in. And the little glimmers of what's coming down the pike are certainly no more comforting: multiple dimensions, different directions in time, all sorts of things that won't be easy for the human brain to comprehend. I do wonder whether someday — whether it's us biologically or, maybe more likely, AIs — something can start perceiving this better. I don't think it's anytime soon. But could an artificial intelligence really get what the fourth dimension is? Because we can't. That would be a really interesting transition in evolution.

[2:04:44] Tyler Childers and Henning's cheddar

Brad: Absolutely. There's a song I'll play after the podcast on one of these records: Tyler Childers' "Tirtha Yatra" [verify title spelling]. I love the context of it. His music career started with a really classic country sound — he's from Kentucky — and then a couple of artists, Sturgill Simpson and a few others, brought this kind of conversation to country music. I say "country" loosely. I don't listen to much radio country. People tell me all the time, "I don't like country music," and I say, "You don't like the country that's on the radio." Tyler Childers is a perfect example. I think you'll get a kick out of that song after this conversation.

And after a conversation like this, you need to get back to cheese. This is Sunset Cheddar from Henning's Cheese [verify product name]. I figured sunset was fitting — funny, the last two episodes have both been Sunset Cheddar. I thought this one was delicious. What do you think?

Michelle: Absolutely. Is there some sun-dried tomato in there?

Brad: I should have said Mediterranean Sunset Cheddar. There are Kalamata olives and a few different Mediterranean-inspired flavors — it has something like za'atar. I thought it was fantastically done.

Michelle: Give me more cheese.

[2:06:38] Lightning round: night skies, Morbier, NASA in Wisconsin, Shorewood

Brad: These questions come from a different angle — more lighthearted. To encourage your enthusiasm: what's the perfect place and time of year to look at the night sky in Wisconsin? If somebody's going to go out and do it, where should they go and when?

Michelle: That's like choosing between your children, because there are so many great times. I have a particular affinity for something I did with my dad as a kid. We lived in Waukesha at the edge of a high school with a big athletic field that was mostly dark at night, and we'd go walk out there, especially in winter, with the snow crunching. There's no wind, so you don't get too cold, and you get that crystal-clear, zero-humidity winter night.

Yes, the more you can get beyond city lights, and the more you can get to a place where trees aren't taking up the whole horizon, the better. But don't put too much stock in that. Just go out and look. Take a walk. Try to get somewhere the lights aren't right in your eyes and there's a bit of a view. And I think this is really important: don't worry about a telescope or binoculars. Just look up at a clear, dark Wisconsin winter sky. Be quiet and realize those lights shining out there are suns. You could fit a million Earths inside our sun. Those are suns traveling with us around the galaxy. We're all going about half a million miles an hour, each in our own orbit. We're flying with these neighbors of ours. It doesn't have to be complicated. Just go out for a night walk. Go on, look.

Brad: When I thought of that question, I thought of my hunting camp when I was 10 or 11, when you had to go outside to use the bathroom in November. I remember feeling so small out there in the pitch-black darkness, seeing all the stars and wondering — not even really understanding what I was wondering about, just wondering — and the feeling that came with it. I figured it'd be a hard one for you to answer.

Michelle: It's a weird one, because as much as I'm still swimming in grief, when I can get under a dark, starry sky, something in me loosens and feels comforted. I've worked at most of the major observatories around the world. I remember spending a night on Mount Palomar in California — the most beautiful telescope ever built. There was another telescope a short walk away, and I went over in the middle of the night to see what they were doing. They were looking for exploding stars — supernova explosions, the ones that make all these atoms. In one night, they found 20 of them.

Think about that. In one night, 20 star systems blew themselves up. If there was any life on planets around those stars, it ended that night. And it created all these atoms that make us up. There I was on top of this mountain with these beautiful giant telescopes, under a sky dark enough to see lots and lots of stars, and it felt almost uncomfortably close: life and death, creation and destruction. The air was thick with it.

Brad: That is absolutely amazing. OK, this is a classic icebreaker question of mine; I've asked it to a ton of people. If you could only have one cheese for the rest of your life, what would you choose?

Michelle: Again, we're choosing between our children here.

Brad: Terrifying question.

Michelle: For me it would probably be something like a smoked Gouda. I like the harder cheeses. A lot of my friends love the stinkier blue cheeses, and I do like a cheese with some flavor. I don't mean to be snobby, but there's a French cheese called Morbier. It's a semi-hard cheese with a layer of ash through the middle. They take a morning milking, add a layer of vegetable ash, then take an afternoon milking and make the cheese from that. It has this beautiful nutty flavor, and the ash gives it a little smokiness. That's probably my favorite cheese in the world: Morbier.

Brad: That's amazing. I've never even heard of it.

Michelle: Go out and get yourself one. M-O-R-B-I-E-R.

Brad: Morbier. You have to do that when you say anything French. All right: if you or I were going to pitch NASA on moving its headquarters to Wisconsin, what would be the central thesis? Why does NASA belong here?

Michelle: You're joking, but maybe 15 years ago there was actually an attempt by the city of Sheboygan to ask NASA to put a launch facility there. Honest to goodness true. I was working at NASA and saw this, and thought, "Oh boy, I've got to explain this to them." I think they'd said they were close enough to Lake Michigan that if you launched in that direction and anything fell, it would fall in the water. We do try to launch near water, so if something goes wrong with the rocket, pieces fall into the water instead of on somebody's head.

But when you have a launch facility, you always want to be near the Earth's equator. The Earth spins as a solid body. If you stand at the North Pole, you just spin in place once a day and hardly move at all. The closer you are to the equator, the faster the Earth's surface is moving — about 1,000 miles an hour at the equator. So if you launch in that direction, you're already going 1,000 miles an hour.

Brad: More propulsion from the beginning.

Michelle: So I told the folks in Sheboygan, "You're too high latitude. I'm sorry — it's not a great place to launch from." But you could certainly have a science center here. So how would we pitch a science center to NASA? Coming from working at NASA, people don't understand how much Earth science we do. When I think of Wisconsin, I think of our natural resources and our agriculture. It's a place with people who have a good work ethic and can do all kinds of different things, and with a real connection to the land and to nature. I think it'd be a perfect place for an Earth science center.

Brad: Awesome. That's the perfect answer.

Michelle: UWM has one of the world's best freshwater research centers. That's not a NASA center, but the natural resources in Wisconsin are just fantastic.

Brad: Last one. I have an affinity for Shorewood — I used to work there. What's the Shorewood hidden gem? If somebody's driving through, what's the reason to get off the highway?

Michelle: When I retired from NASA a few years ago, I had the opportunity to buy an old 1920s home in the historic area of Shorewood, around Lake Park, with all these old stone mansions built by people in the brewing industry and so on. I've lived all over the world, and I don't know a better neighborhood to walk around and appreciate amazing architecture. There are beautiful places like Lake Park where you can walk down to the lake. I live right across from Atwater Park, a really nice little park. Take some time to get off the road, go to Lake Park and start walking around those neighborhoods and old homes. They're endlessly fascinating to me — the incredible architecture and diversity of styles.

I have a Prairie-style home, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was built by Russell Barr Williams, who was Frank Lloyd Wright's project manager and co-architect. I can't believe I have the good fortune to be the steward of that house.

Brad: That's awesome. My answer would have been almost identical.

Michelle: You love the old homes?

Brad: Yes. Walking or even driving through those neighborhoods is awesome. It's like nowhere else I've ever been. There are places that drum up a similar feeling —

Michelle: New Orleans. Walking around New Orleans.

Brad: You're right.

Michelle: So to narrow it down, I'd say go to Lake Park Bistro. It's a restaurant right at the side of Lake Park. You can walk down to the beach and into the neighborhoods. There's a beautiful public golf course, plus croquet and lawn bowling grounds. So base yourself at Lake Park Bistro — they're not paying me anything for this; it's a really nice country French restaurant — and from there, just start walking around all the historic neighborhoods.

Brad: That's good advice, and there couldn't be a better way to end the episode. Michelle, I appreciate your time.

Michelle: Thank you. It's been wonderful talking to you.