We should make no mistake about it. I think financial elites are nervous. I think you see this in the increased criticism of the Fed, which is really kind of an unusual narrative in the United States, and especially in US politics. And Trump has done something to bring the issue of the Fed to the forefront. You may have noticed that the Vice Chairman of the Fed, Stanley Fisher, was at Howard University earlier this week, I believe, and he talked about how he was nervous and that made him upset that they couldn't raise interest rates. Then he had a great quote. He said, we would be better off if there was a price for using money, right? Also known as an interest rate. And it's interesting because we laugh about that because it seems so self-evident to those of us in the room, right? But the point is not that Stanley Fisher or the 300 mostly Ivy League PhD economists who work at the Fed are unintelligent or clueless. That's not true. On the contrary, these are very bright people. But I think the lesson we have to take from this is they inhabit a very different reality, a very different universe from the one that we think is rational and just from having studied Austrian economics and libertarian theory. And from our perspective, their universe ignores some very important facts. And this is to our detriment, I think. I'm sure a lot of you watched the Hillary Trump debate as it were the other evening. I let my son stay up to watch the beginning of it. And it started off really badly. Did you notice that the very first question was this broad-ended, what would you do, kind of question? And so Trump, I try so hard sometimes to like Mr. Trump, he's gone against progressives and PC. He's gone against this horrible campus atmosphere that students are enduring today. He's spoken out about the Fed. But boy, the very first thing he said in the debate the other night was, well, if these companies want to leave America and go to Mexico, here's how we're going to punish them and here's how we're going to put a tariff on their imported products. So he started off really badly. And then Hillary got her chance and she immediately launched into, well, I believe in profit sharing. Well, I'm sure you do. It's the owner who might have a problem with that, right? And then she talked about the living wage. We're going to decree this living wage. And I was just thinking, profits to be shared by whom? A living wage to be shared by whom? We always get sort of a blank out when it comes to this. And I'll just say this, I'm pretty jaded when it comes to political platitudes. But even now, even well into middle age, I'm still sometimes astounded by this cavalier attitude towards other people's property that you get from the political class without any pushback. But I would say that the political rhetoric is really just a symptom. It's a symptom of our barter culture's rejection of economics. Really a willful rejection of economics as a subject for ordinary people. And I think in many ways we did this to ourselves. We dumbed it down ourselves. I got a phone call last week from a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education. And he was asking in a pointed way about some of these free market-ish think tanks that have risen up around universities across America. And he was asking me whether, you know, can anyone at the Mises Institute or one of these other organizations provide me with some kind of scientific foundation for this? For what he sees as an increasing faith among politicians in the power of markets, free markets, to solve economic and political and cultural problems, to solve societal problems, craft the best outcomes. So he said, where's the scientific evidence for this? Where's the proof? How do we know that all this free market stuff you guys are talking about actually works? So I talked to him on the phone for a while and I resisted, I resisted mightily, that I wanted to respond, well, there's this little thing called the 20th century. You might want to take a look at. But I didn't say that. I talked to him, I know a hit piece when I see one coming. And I suspect he's writing an anti-Coke Brothers article at the end of the day. But I did manage to have a civil conversation with him and gently explain, no, you know, politicians aren't necessarily enthralled with the free market. Most of them actually advocate what we would call a mixed economy and da-da-da. And of course, as a young person, he'd never heard this term mixed economy. This used to be a widely used term, at least when I was coming up. So he'd never heard that, so I kind of explained what I thought it meant. But it's striking to me, the degree to which this journalist, and not to pick on him, and so many people like him, are deeply suspicious of capitalism. They're convinced that there's some sinister plot afoot. And we're gonna impose free market fundamentalism on country, that's actually a term he used. Then of course, he doesn't see state universities or the media or academia or government officials, he doesn't see any of these people as enormously well-funded advocates for his point of view. Now on the contrary, this gentleman imagines himself the underdog in our society. Now I wish, I wish that this were true. You know, that the case for political liberalism and laissez-faire, which those of us in this room would probably say has been made so clearly, both in the theoretical literature and by history, had finally overcome the majority of academics and politicians. And I wish that American universities were not, in fact, nurseries of socialism to use Ludwig von Mises term, but they remain just that and actually much worse. In fact, I would argue that American universities and Western universities have deteriorated rapidly since Mises died in the 1970s. We've really lost any pretext of academic freedom, what we used to call free inquiry, another outdated term, apparently. And if we judge modern universities by one simple criteria, are they committed to seeking and teaching truth above all else? That I think the answer to that question has to be no. I think we have to conclude that they are failing in their central mission. And I think that we have to conclude that they are actually committed, not to truth, but to a cultural, a political, an economic, and a social agenda that has little to do with true seeking. And in a sense, I would argue that today's universities are really just a microcosm of what progressives have planned for us in the broader culture. And part of that vision that they have, it requires a kind of collective amnesia and ignorance about entire fields of knowledge. And this relates to my message for you today, and that's namely that we, intelligent lay people, not just PhDs, have allowed economics to be lost as a subject that's viable for average people. So on this topic, a few weeks ago, we were in Asheville, North Carolina for an event, and I spoke about how economics has become a kind of broken profession. My point being that we now have entire generations of economists, supposedly mainstream economists, who fundamentally don't understand economics as a social science. They see it as a physical science that requires testing of hypotheses. They don't understand money as a market commodity to be provided by the market, rather than to be provided and regulated by the state. They don't understand inflation, therefore, as a monetary phenomenon. They don't understand interest rates as prices, as price signals, rather than some sort of policy tool. And because they don't understand inflation and they don't understand interest rates, they can't explain the booms and busts. These become mysterious events. And perhaps worst of all, modern economists today, especially those under, let's say, age 40 or 50, often know nothing about the history of economic thought. They've simply accepted, without much context, our understanding whatsoever, a whole host of assumptions that make up modern mainstream economics. So if we think about that, imagine that bloodletting had become the consensus method by which we alleviate disease and suffering. What if that had become mainstream medicine? And now 80 years later, all doctors did was talk about, well, let's focus on the rate of bloodletting or the timing of bloodletting or the least painful approach to bloodletting. So by broken, I don't mean to say that the profession of economics doesn't work for those who are actually in it, provides benefits for them, surely. But I mean it's broken in the same way that universities are broken, that it no longer serves truth or society or humanity or a greater goal, but it instead just nakedly serves an agenda. It starts with the wrong premises, it asks the wrong questions, it applies the wrong methods, very important from the Austrian perspective, and thus not surprisingly to any of us, it arrives at the wrong conclusions. And I think the key is that we let it happen. We let this academicization to use a jarbal term of a field that we once expected high school seniors to grasp the basics of. You know, we can call it formalism, we can call it scientism, we can just call it the intrusion of mathematics into a social science, but it represents on a timeline really about a century now of diversion from classical and Austrian economics. You know, at some point in the 20th century, we all became convinced that certain fields were too complicated and too technical to understand. We decided we would let a group of technocratic elites capture economics for their own purposes, and we were encouraged to throw up our hands and say, I give up, I leave everything to the experts, it's too complex. Economics is somehow like advanced physics and it's not something that us average people should worry ourselves about. Now on the subject of mathiness, if you've heard this term, those of us who aren't economists by profession haven't gone through a PhD program, we may not understand the degree to which math really defines and dominates PhD economics programs today. If you want to get a PhD in econ, you have to do some very daunting seven and 800 level math classes. And if you look at especially public but also private US universities, econ PhD programs are often dominated by Asian students because they're coming out of universities in Asia where math was focused on in ways that it wasn't here. So it's really become a mathematics degree and that eliminates a lot of not only bright kids but curious kids who might be far more interested if they saw it as a social science. And the thing about the mathiness of PhD programs today is given the difficulty of this math, we can hardly be surprised if there isn't much time left over for theory. Mises or Manger or Hayek, much less even Samuelson or Keynes. So David Gordon, a name some of you might know as a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, he recommended a book to me. It's called How Economics Became a Mathematical Science by a gentleman named Roy Weintraub and his father was a pioneer in this field and he's writing about his father in this book. I managed to read about half of it on the plane. And what's so interesting about this book is I still didn't completely grasp the degree to which mathematicians in economics think that any economic question can be posed in mathematical language. That if we just pose it correctly as an equation of sorts, it ought to be possible for the economist to reach definitive conclusions. And of course this goes against pretty much everything that the major Austrians counsel that economics is not a prescriptive discipline. So Mises himself certainly did not see economics as a mathematical exercise. He understood economics is a subset of praxeology as a subset of human action itself and therefore proper for all intelligent laypersons to study. And in Mises' economics it's the human elements of consciousness and volition that distinguish econ from physics or chemistry or math. And yet all of us would be alarmed I think if our children graduated from high school unable to write in complete sentences or unable to perform basic algebra or unable to make change at a cash register. But we don't mind sending them out into the world without a single economics class, completely vulnerable to politicians and the supposed experts. And I think we see that in the political debates. We saw that Monday evening and the same falsehoods are repeated ad nauseam every four years, time and time again. I think this ignorance allows us, it helps us to understand how these radicals like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty and Christine Lagarde at the IMF became viewed as mainstream thinkers rather than I said really the radicals that they are when compared to the whole history of economics. So what do we do to correct this? Well it's a difficult question and it's one we wrestle with every day. I'm sure a lot of you in this room do as well. How do we make economics less dismal and more relevant so that we're not this nation of gullible voters who fall for political nonsense and especially how do we convince younger people that economics matters? We might call this saving economics from economists. But I think first and foremost we have to accept that academia with some wonderful acceptance is by and large captured. The Mises Institute, we produce summer fellows and we have a lot of young people who come to our events and our Mises U week and then some of them do decide to go on and get a PhD and then some of them do go become tenured professors at universities across the country really around the world and we're gonna continue to do that and there are Austrian friendly economics departments scattered on campuses. Sometimes that means there's just one or two professors in a department of 20 or 30 but sometimes it means the whole department. But trying to reclaim academia and economics professor by professor I think is an enormous task. From my perspective, the return on investment is far greater when we focus on young people and intelligent laypersons. I think second we need to understand that it's really up to us to create the economics education that the world needs. There's no group that's going to save us. There's no white knight. Certainly no one in the government academia complex is going to do it. But thanks to the digital revolution we don't have to build whole new brick and mortar structures like Radcliffe had to and whenever this building was built I'm sorry I don't know. I mean thanks to the digital revolution new structures, new flat forms can be built far faster and far more cheaply than we imagine. I mean we really can't invert the classroom. We can do away with make work curricula. We can align economics education with the marketplace. Give people what they need and want what the market demands rather than what some administrator in a big university decided. I think more than anything Peter Klein, another one of our senior fellows makes this point. We can reject this one way production model of a lecturer and passive students that universities have been clinging to. This model has existed for 2,000 years since Aristotle and it hasn't much changed. You know I think the Mises Academy is one example of what we can do to make real economics from our perspective available to the lay person. And I'll be frank, we started with online education pretty early in about 2010. And that might as well be 1910 because the online learning landscape has changed so rapidly and is changing so rapidly today. Every six or eight months there's whole new technologies. And so no one has really completely figured it out yet. If you go to Harvard online for example and look at their online program, it's really just a video of their lecturer that you can watch at home and then take a test online or something. It's really, they're really just using the name Harvard to attract people. They're not being dynamic or innovative in the way that they present the material.  So what we're doing is we're trying to build out our online platform slowly but surely to make initially the Mises U experience available to anybody, anywhere in the world, anytime they want. What I'd ask you to do is go to my Twitter feed, I'm at Jeff Dice, or go to the Mises Institute Twitter feed at Mises.  And I would challenge you to send that link to 10 people you know. If you send that link to 10 people you know and say, you know what, take three and a half hours, three and a half hours out of your life. No books, no signing up for classes, no boring lectures. And in three and a half hours, in an interactive online course, you will know more about economics than 99% of the people walking the street. I think that's probably true. Might be sad, but I think it's true. So it starts with a drop in the bucket but it also starts with people in this room today.  You would be amazed how some of the tiny seeds we planted have grown into mighty oak trees later on and influenced hundreds or thousands of young people as a result. But I think finally our challenge really lies in returning to Mises' more visceral approach to make approach to making economics real again. You know, like progressives, we shouldn't be afraid to appeal to the heart as much as we do the head. When we view and talk about economics more as the stuff of life, we can energize and humanize it. We can approach it more like philosophy as the study of general and fundamental human problems involving knowledge and reason. We create a whole new perspective and we introduce logic and metaphysics into the equation. We make it a more vital subject. Economics is not an equation. It's not an equation to be balanced like an algebra. It's not a model to be filled with statistics. I think we need to restore its popularity among bright young people who really do cliche it or not when it changed the world. So in closing, let me just say that from my perspective, I don't think we have to abandon intellectual rigor to sell Austrian economics, but we do have to make it more relevant and more vital to the average person and we have to reclaim it from academics. We have to ask the visceral questions. Why are we so rich and what if it all went away? But we can't begin to do that. We can't begin to understand or address what I would say are very serious structural economic problems when the very science that's tasked with studying them has lost its way. So let's reclaim economics from academia, from mathematicians, from politicians, and especially from the state and its court intellectuals. Thank you very much.


So yeah, best quests to do, first of all the best quests are the elites, because they give the most gold, an XP, and obviously you just kill one mob and you're done. The next best ones are these intelligence report ones, then there's ones where you can loot one item, so you've got like the dream touch dragon egg, you've got the dream engine.  The satin R1 is kind of sketch because it's a lot of mobs, because it's juicy XP, 7.7k per quest. You'd love to see it.


I should warn you, we have the ignominious distinction of being the last panel before lunch. But my warning to you is that even though we're the only thing standing between you and those styrofoam boxes out there, nobody leaves here until Neil says so. I'm going to introduce my two panelists here who I'm very pleased to say have phonetically anagrammed names. Ellen Stofen and Neil Stephenson. Ellen is chief scientist at NASA. Can anybody beat that in this room? Serving as principal advisor to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the agency science programs and science related strategic planning and investment. She has researched the geology of Venus, Mars, Saturn's moon Titan, and Earth, just to keep it local. And was a principal investigator on the Titan mayor explorer proposed mission to send a floating lander to a sea on Titan. Neil Stephenson, who you've already met, Neil is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including the three volume historical epic The Baroque Cycle and Snow Crash, which was named one of Time magazine's top 100 all time English, best English language novels. Now you have to tell me, did you read all the ones ahead of you just to see what you did wrong? Maybe you can move up next time. Because we have to push the book, he is also the author of Atmosphere Incognita, a story in the Hieroglyphs collection. The title of this panel is Lost in Space, How Should We Approach Our Future Frontier? Let me begin by asking this question, how should we approach our future frontier? I'll start. Space is really expensive and hard to get to, and it's a dangerous place to be, so you have to have some reason for wanting to go there. The space program I grew up was based on a kind of heroic quest that was set by President Kennedy, which was the prototype of what we talk about when we refer to a hieroglyph in the sense of this book, meaning a thing that could be explained in one sentence, put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, that everyone could understand and that sounded really cool and that people were willing to get behind. Since then, we haven't really had that. Once we got to the moon, there was kind of a sense of what do we do now, and for various reasons we didn't go where I had always been told we were going to go, which was to giant orbiting space colonies and eventually to Mars. And so there's a whole generation of bitterly disappointed people from the 60s who never got their trip to Mars. So the first thing that I think we have to do is decide why we're doing it. We've got fantastic programs going on with robot space probes that are doing unbelievable stuff, sending people into space. We don't seem to have a super compelling narrative behind that anymore. And so I kind of feel like the first step is deciding why we want to be there and what the goal is. Well, I guess obviously I'm going to respectfully disagree that we don't have a goal. Scientifically, obviously as you say, robotically, we're pushing back the frontier. We're rewriting textbooks every day from the Kepler Space Telescope that in the last several years has discovered several thousand candidate planets around other stars. If that's not science fiction, I don't know what it is, but now it's science fact. And we're going to follow on with the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, to actually start looking at the atmospheres of those planets around other stars, which is just unbelievably cool. If you take it to the next level and say, okay, how are we doing that in our own solar system? We're searching for life on Mars, hopefully sometime soon on Europa. And this is where I think we do have a clear goal for the human exploration program. And that is the president has stated he wants to see a human in the vicinity of Mars by the early 2030s. Why? Well, scientifically, I actually think it's going to take geologists like me, astrobiologists, down on the surface of Mars cracking open rocks, throwing half of them over your shoulder and finding the right rock that's going to really demonstrate to us that life evolved on Mars. And so I think at NASA we feel like we have a clear goal, and the new part is we're trying to do it in a new way. So I'll stop there. Well, no, don't. Feel free to duke it out, because it's important here. I mean, the premise for those of you who haven't read all the paraphernalia, the premise of this whole conference is that Neil was mouthing off about the fact that science fiction writers have been falling down on the job. It goes crow-less and nothing awful about that. Oh, all right. Well, then, okay. You was issuing a complaint to me. Well, let's discuss that. And the fact that, I mean, look at science fiction from when we were young, consider, for example, Planet of the Apes, which was about, you know, ultimately about, well, it's a big Twilight Zone episode, which ends with, oh, it was Earth, after all. And it's all about atomic holocaust and the future civilization, whereas they do it now 50 years later almost, and it's about viruses and animal testing. So, you know, it's substantially the same story, but science fiction is much more interested in internal things and not about sending 40-story buildings into space. Discuss. The vision of the Planet of the Apes Zero was that of the sort of the one that I was raised on, which is this Collier's Magazine spreads by Chesley Bonestell in which there was a certain progression of vehicles and things we were going to build that was going to start with great, big, huge rockets called the NOVA boosters that were going to help us build sort of donut-shaped orbiting space colonies.  Mars has always been the obvious next place that we're expected to go. And the, you know, one vision of why to go there is to do science. And in a lot of ways, that's kind of the most logical reason to go to Mars for all the reasons that you mentioned. The vision that we hear from, say, Elon Musk is, I just want to go there. You know, just, I want to die on Mars just, I think it's somehow the inherent kind of destiny of the human race to expand to other worlds. And that's all the justification that I really need. Well, I think it's a great point. And I actually think science fiction does such a great job of inspiring.  And we actually, our chief technologist, David Miller, has a little circular robot thing up on the space station called Spheres. And he actually invented it with his students at MIT after watching Star Wars and that little circular ball thing that Luke Skywalker trained with. We have one of those now up on the aisle. Well, they don't do training with it. But again, that powerful role that I think imagination plays is something that's a critical role. And actually, I just read about a month or so ago a new book called The Martian where a guy gets accidentally left behind on Mars by an expedition. It's a fun book. So, you know, I think science fiction is still out there. And I love this idea of let's not just have dystopian, you know, as much as I love those stories as much as anyone, that imagining new ways of propulsion, that imagining new ways of exploring, new ways of doing spacecraft is something that, you know, some of those ideas are going to become the reality.  Somebody in this room must know what that floating ball was called because I'm looking around and it's proud and I'm seeing a lot of nerds. It's the closest I've come to Comic-Con. What is it? It's just called a remote? That's not a good enough name. Oh, we have a better name for it. What do you call it? Spears. My theory was that it was actually a pinata and that had he hit it, all his candy would have fallen out. How does it move? Does it have, like, compressed rockets? I'm hoping Tom knows. I'm actually not sure. There's a lot of NASA people in the audience, but I don't know if anybody can help me out, compress the O2 there. O2, okay. Don't use it too much or you'll just fix it. Let's talk about something, a seed you also planted, Neil, this morning about having sort of a centralized system or method for developing, generating, and making ideas happen. In the entertainment business and all of you folks online, don't tell anybody this, but there's sort of this protocol. I will tell young writers if you want to work and show business, you have to know who to go to go in and pitch an idea. But imagine you're trying to pitch an idea to General Motors for a new car. It's very, very hard, right? I've got an idea for the future. I've got an idea for the next version of rocket ships or robots or whatever. How do we make that happen? How do we develop that infrastructure? It's tough because with other types of inventions, particularly in the realm of software, you can make a pitch that will appeal to greed, frankly, to the desire of the investor to make a bunch of money. And so there's a well-trodden path that entrepreneurs can use to get funding based on that. In the case of inventing a new propulsion system for space travel, it's a much harder pitch to make because it's difficult to explain to a business person how they're going to get their money back. It almost obliges, unless there's something I'm not aware of, it almost obliges somebody who's trying to innovate in that area to seek grants, to do things through university labs or government labs of various kinds. We actually have a program at NASA called NIAC. It's the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. And if you guys are ever short on ideas for stories, I'd go look at some of the things we fund. We have spider web type platforms to get really large aperture telescopes, submarines on Titan, advanced propulsion systems. So we do actually, obviously, we're spending most of our NASA resources trying to make sure the space station's operating, launching the 17 satellites we have studying the Earth. But we do put some money into what are things we want to do 25 years from now? What do we want to do 30 years from now? Let's put a little money into speculation, into innovation. Tom talked earlier about the challenges and prizes in citizen science. And that's an area we're really expanding in to say, you know, we don't have all the good ideas. Let's reach out as broadly as we can and get help. Sorry, that begs the question, which I'm asked constantly. I'm sure you are too, Neil. So where do you get your ideas? I think the stock answer is Schenectady. I agree. That's not a good enough answer, though. Well, you mean ideas for fiction? Are we talking about fiction now? I'm more interested in our answer. I thought you were looking at me. You know, I think the thing is, you know, earlier we were talking about the globalization of science. You know, first of all, I think if we're like working on a global exploration roadmap of how are we going to get humans to Mars? You know, we work with our global partners on how to do that. So first of all, we don't just look within the United States. We don't just look within the government. We just don't say, okay, all the good ideas are held within NASA or the federal government. We reach out and form partnerships with universities, with academia, and again, increasingly with people through citizen science, through, you know, going out and saying, what ideas can we actually get huge public involvement in? And I think we're actually changing the way we do things, which is another great example of that, is commercial crew and commercial cargo, saying, you know, if we're going to get to Mars in the future, the space program of the future is going to be much more a public-private than the entirely public-funded effort that we saw going to the moon. Where do you get your ideas now?  So how do we, as science fiction writers, develop things that will, because here you have the chief scientist at NASA saying, we're interested. We're interested in hearing it. Where do we get the ideas? I spent a while trying to come up with new ideas for Space Launch, for how to get things off the ground and into low-Earth orbit. And that was out of a conviction that what we've been doing all along, conventional chemical rockets, are probably not the technology we would pick if we started from scratch and decided what was going to work best. And what I found out pretty quickly was that so many brilliant people have been thinking about that exact problem for so long that it's almost a waste of time. Unless you have, you're privy to some new physics or some new material science to try to invent any novel kind of Space Launch technology because you always end up learning that somebody came up with exactly that idea and 20 other cool ideas like 50 years ago and investigated it and wrote it all down. So there's an amazing zoo of different ideas. I found things like somebody had the idea to drill a two-mile-long slanted hole, a tunnel in the Antarctic ice cap and use it as a giant gun. And I mean, that's just one example of many ideas that people have come up with. So I think innovating in that part of it, which is only a small part of what a space business and a space ecosystem has to look like, is less a problem of coming up with new ideas and more a problem of how do you push those ideas forward in a kind of aerospace ecosystem where we're pretty much locked in on the chemical rocket approach that has been the basis for all space travel until today. Are we seeing advances in alternative means of propulsion? We are. In fact, right now NASA is putting a lot of effort into SEP, which is solar electric propulsion, ion propulsion. We've done some spacecraft to different targets with it, but it's actually, we're developing a much larger ion engine to do an asteroid mission because we think that's the most useful technology that we have at this point in time, say, to move cargo back and forth to Mars because if you're going to have humans on Mars, you're going to have to take a lot of stuff for them. And so ion propulsion is sort of the next step. We certainly have looked over the years as many people have at nuclear thermal propulsion, but that sort of next big step is something that still, as Neil says, it's a huge challenge. Everybody has said, you know, we've got to move beyond chemical propulsion, but it's really hard. Physics is tough. I thought so in college and I think so now. So where do you want to go in space?  I don't think I said that. I mean, the problem with space is you've got to have gravity or your body falls apart and you've got to get away from cosmic radiation. So it's actually a pretty rough environment and so the two ways to do that are you can go to a large planet and dig in, which is kind of what you would be doing in the case of Mars, or you can use in-situ resources like asteroids to build things that rotate to give you simulated gravity and then construct shielding around your living quarters so you don't get just baked by cosmic radiation. So those are kind of the two options and in a lot of ways the building a habitat is sort of more logical because there's plenty of stuff up there. There's plenty of material in Earth-like orbits that could be gone up and grabbed and you can build whatever environment you please in that case. But it lacks the certain kind of romantic element of being able to go to another planet and go places where people haven't gone before and perhaps be confronted with surprises. There's not going to be a lot of surprises on a rotating space habitat. Are we looking at colonization in our lifetime or our grandchildren's lifetime? Our aim right now is to get humans to Mars and as Elon Musk says, to get them safely home again if they so choose. So our focus is really that how do you get humans safely there? How can we make sure with the space radiation and other issues that we can get them there safely and get them home again? And we can do it by the 2030s. I mean, we're really on a path and I think we can achieve it. I think where this community is really helpful is, you know, is this something that you think engages the public? I mean, how many of you would want to go to Mars? Takers? As long as you can come back. You know, and at times, sometimes when I'm talking to people in the general public, because I think science fiction has done such a good job, because CGI has done such a good job, I actually find some confusion in the public about whether we've actually been to Mars or not, which is horribly disappointing, you know, from my point of view. And so I think that this community serves a great role because you guys are probably more maybe enthusiastic about getting humans to Mars than your average person on the street in talking about it, in talking about why it's exciting, why it's exciting to explore, to move beyond this planet, to move out into the solar system and someday beyond. When you say we haven't been to Mars, I mean, we haven't been to the moon, but we've been to the moon. So there's that distinction as well. One of the early problems we had on Futurama was not only, you know, we could just magically terraform and assume there were aliens and all kinds of other life forms in space, but the chief difficulty we had, because we were so compulsive, was the speed of light is a real hard thing to defy and how we could get anywhere even in the galaxy within a reasonable period of time. So we just made this rule that in 2045, the speed of light had been changed. So which we can do, can you? So far we don't think so. We have found no good evidence that you can exceed the speed of light. So that is a limiting factor. And that is the frustration, you know, as again, it's within our grasp, within our lifetimes, I think, to ultimately, we need really large aperture telescopes, but this idea of being able to start imaging planets around other stars is one that I think is so exciting, one I think we're going to see. And the first thing we're going to want to do is go there, but they're obviously really far away. What do you want to see happen? The... Lunch? Yeah, yeah, no, no. Blood sugar. Panel to end. No, no, the... I'm still stuck on the kind of... the more Elon Musk style of heroic space epic. You know, just go to space because it's what we ought to do and just because it would be cool. It's kind of a... almost an adolescent kind of impulse, but I think that's the... those are the arguments that sound most compelling to me. And usually what happens then is then there's some backfilling. So say, well, because if there was a horrible plague on Earth and everyone died, then we would have another planet, you know. So there's always sort of some rationalizations that are backfilled in for the sort of go big mentality about space exploration. But why isn't Manifest Destiny enough? I'm saying it is for me. Yeah, but... Well, I think for a lot of people it's just not. I mean, a lot of people say, well, why don't you invest that money in something else? Why don't you invest that money here on Earth? And that's why I think Manifest Destiny or however you want to say it's our nature to explore. We push boundaries as a species by nature is part of the justification. There is scientific justification. And of course then there's the justification. My favorite Onion article ever was one where they said NASA has been launching billions of dollars into space and they show these rocket ships going off loaded with dollars trailing behind them. We spend all this money here on Earth. These are great STEM jobs. We invest in the best sectors of the economy that help grow this country, help grow economies across the world. So there is that economic piece that we don't always talk about but is there. This is a great investment for innovation that I think is also important. The great concern is when NASA isn't launching that money, what are you doing when you're not launching money into space? We're innovating, we're exploring, we're discovering. We have six people above us right now on the International Space Station doing amazing research. They're watching us now. A minute ago on my phone I pulled up the live stream feed. How cool is that that on your cell phone you can sit there and watch what the astronauts are seeing from space down here on Earth. We're achieving amazing things and the problem is sometimes I think the public is just kind of, you know, they see it every day and it's routine. You know, to me it's never routine. You get to look at the surface of another planet for the first time. You watch a launch. I watched the SpaceX launch a couple weeks ago sending new cargo up to the ISS. You know, we do, not we at NASA, we as a country, we as a civilization do amazing, cool things and it's really fun to be part of it. We can start taking questions or we can just answer all of Ms. Singh's questions now if we have time for that.  I know you've said you don't want us to be negative, but when the space shuttle program was being initiated they were saying, I believe, $100 a pound to put stuff into low Earth orbit. By the time it was done I heard figures that said it was a half billion dollars launch. Isn't that the real killer for space exploration as low Earth orbit, the thing that you wrote about? And how do you think that's going to work out with initiatives like Mr. Musk's? It's certainly a big, it's a big hurdle obviously and that's why the interest in considering other ways of doing it, there's a lot that could be said and has been said about the politics of the space shuttle and how it came to be in the form that it ended up in and how that may have driven its cost upwards in a way its original planners didn't anticipate. So one of the basic issues we're never going to get away with in launch cost reduction is that it's all entwined with politics and with money in a way that's very hard to separate out. If I can jump to one of Ms. Singh's questions. I think the issue of how we work with other countries in the world is really critical and last week I had the great fortune to be able to go up to New York City and put forward a bunch of initiatives for the big UN climate summit. One of those was NASA was releasing really high resolution topographic elevation data over most of the continent of Africa and that data are critical but we're not just throwing it over the transom and saying here world, good luck with this elevation data. We actually have a group called Surveyor that we do with USAID where we go into countries this year it's going to be East Africa, South Africa and we take those data sets and we say elevation data that can help you in your local region help to make better decisions when your sea level is rising when you're going to get storm surges in areas how are you going to use this data to make decisions that are going to affect people's lives affect their economies and so in the government we're trying to make especially climate data much more widely available around the world but not just saying to a country here's the data but here's how to use it here's how you can use it those hard decisions that are going to have to be made in the back I'm kind of wondering about space tourism or it's kind of the functional equivalent in space of eco-tourism it seemed to me many stories in the book talked about wealthy people willing to drink in the first space bar or to go on an eco-tourist venture that foreshadowed Habs in space or on the moon I'm wondering whether or not space tourism has an opportunity to kind of both finance and bootstrap renewed space program and I'm wondering if we can use that to send people like Chris Hadfield to sing David Bowie from the space station or any of the other things because it seems to me you pull a country together I was brought to tears personally listening to him sing David Bowie and this is flying down below me so I guess that's my question where is space tourism on the horizon you know I've watched that video 12 times and I'm a crier and I cried all so I thought it was beautiful you know we're entering into a new ramen now it's a really exciting time to be there with the sort of partnering with the commercial sector with going to commercial cargo for the ISS going to commercial crew and you know part of it with commercial crew you know we had three companies that were buying for this two were selected this has been talked about earlier we're going to a new realm you know by the 2020s are there going to be commercial outposts in low earth orbit will NASA just be a customer instead of the primary customer along with the other space agencies of the world and I think what's going to happen over the next 10 years is going to be fascinating as we move to despite the cost of getting material off the earth even just to low earth orbit the commercial sector wants to play small companies big companies innovators it's a changing world and I think it's really exciting and again that's where you guys come in because it's not clear to me where it's all going I don't think it's clear to anybody at this point but it's clear that that we're going towards commercial low earth orbit what it's going to look like say by 2025 2030 I think it's really an open question two words Disney moon once they put Park up there people will go I mean who went to Orlando before yes actually you had a question sir she hasn't I agree that it's an exciting time for the commercial elements to work as part of you know in DC we call that part of the national defense industrial base there's a growing number of people in organizations that are part of that but Neil made a point earlier this morning as well that commercial interests are not identical to public interests unfortunately there's also then this sort of resource constraint for innovation at the shortage I think it's really interesting to think about whether the shortage is on clever ideas or whether it's about the infrastructure to actually launch literally or figuratively those new ideas how do we think about how the small profit driven or large profit driven commercial side should intersect with the government requirements or public needs whether that's of space exploration of other kinds of technological innovation in a way that as Dan Kaufman this morning talked about pushes that public sector interest but benefits from the commercial side government has a few challenges in terms of procurement and other moving fast in a way that it didn't in the 1960s and so how do we balance all those different constraints and opportunities well just quick answer on that Neil talk about it we struggle with that every day at NASA because you say how do you get the commercial sector involved how do you energize them about the potential of low earth orbit we have a group called CASIS that's affiliated with NASA that runs the national laboratory up on the international space station that's looking for ways to commercialize research they have now sent their second group of commercial research experiments up to the station including just last week with the 3D printer and some other experiments that they sent up so we're moving into that realm but I think we're doing it kind of step by step and trying to figure out it's a complex question are we up and down mass limited yes are we resource limited resources are what they are and you do what you can and you try to innovate as you go along there's massive interaction with government that starts to happen as soon as you a private company starts to do anything related to space if you're trying to build a rocket you're dealing with all kinds of regulatory issues around the fact that you've got this big piece of fire breathing stuff that's going to go over a lot of other people's property and so there's certain standards you have to obey around that and what those standards are going to lead to is that you're probably going to end up launching from an existing government launch facility there's also sort of arms control regulations that kick in if you're building anything that can be defined as part of as part of a weapon then it limits who's allowed to get access who you can talk to about your project and so a lot of these people have to deal with kind of complicated problems around restricting access to information to U.S. nationals or people who are on an approved list so there's massive interaction that happens in a way space is like maybe not a great example of an area where we can do free innovation simply because of these existing factors that it's always going to be a sort of co-production of government and private industry Tell the anecdote I think it's your anecdote about the best thing communism I once knew a grizzled NASA engineer from the Apollo days who said that the Apollo moon landings were communism's greatest achievement just in the sense that the whole reason to go there was to get there before the communists did and it took on elements of a kind of status propaganda project while we were doing it there needs to be market propaganda as well I mean is there inspiration like that out there today? Well again I think if you look at what it would take in the absence of a cold war to motivate a country to do something ambitious like sending humans to another planet, another moon you need a motivation and I think we've talked about the motivation to do it from a human perspective but I think to say practically how can we do it is to go back to this public-private partnership you know the US did it on its own for going to the moon we won't do it on our own to go to Mars it's going to be an international effort and I think it's not just going to be government it's going to be public-private partnerships and I think that's exciting because that's where we're going to get innovation we're going to get new ideas we're going to get great ideas yes sir put a man on the moon but can we get a microphone to that corner of the room first of all thank you so much this has been a fantastic panel our next task is how you as an author and you as a scientist try to enlist younger people into this process of thinking about science and thinking about space exploration it seems like today in literature there has been a migration towards the mystical you have vampires and wizards and werewolves and so how do we poach some of those zombies exactly so how do we poach some of these people back for science well I'll give a quick answer which is also a self-serving answer which is that I have a big near-earth space opera hard science fiction novel coming out in May called Seven Eves which is it's almost exactly me addressing your question which is why is it that in the sort of fantasy and science fiction world the needle has swung way over toward fantasy in the last decade or two so this is an experiment to see if I can swing it back the other way a little bit I think there's a couple things first of all the president has an initiative on STEM education how do we get better science teachers how do we make sure we're teaching kids science in a way a hands-on experience that's fun and exciting I try to get out in the classrooms just about once a month because to me it's fun to go out and talk to fifth graders or junior high school or high school kids and try to get them enthusiastic you figure if you make one convert I've done my job but the other thing where I think we have a lot of work to do frankly is again a question that was asked earlier in underrepresented groups I'm frequently one of the few women in a room when the topic is science and engineering and that's frustrating because we're not going to solve big problems like how to deal with climate change how to get a lot of mass through that thin atmosphere and down onto the surface of Mars unless we have all of our population participating and so I think it's a huge challenge still that we're working on and there's probably an anti-intellectualism that's permeating and anti-science that's permeating our discourse beyond just this subject in on the planet currently well let's talk about your inspirations what did you read what did you watch why did you become a scientist I have a particularly weird, my father worked for NASA I'm actually a NASA brat I went to my first launch when I was four I went to the Viking this dates me terribly I went to the Viking launches and met Carl Sagan and all the people who put Viking on Mars and so to me NASA was something I grew up with but it was that inspiration of seeing people go to the moon on the other hand I was reading dune in a corner you know I was hugely inspired by science fiction and so to me it was that combination of reality we have people on the moon and also reading about science fiction it's the fact in the fiction and you need both I think how about you just sitting on the rug in front of the big black and white TV watching the mercury in Gemini missions you know I mean that was it and who are you who are you fictional you know the usual suspects from that era but for whatever reason the one that sticks with me is Heinlein so I read all that stuff but he had a knack for creating little moments little conversations or little interactions between people that have stuck with me and I have very clearly lodged in my head all these years later there's one in particular that just burns me up I get mad whenever I I got angry when I read it as a kid and my blood pressure still goes up whenever I remember this you want to know what it was? Yes we do it's the one where the I'm afraid we're out of time it's the one where the high school group goes through a teleportation tube to another planet for their like summer vacation their weekend away and then it breaks down and so they get stuck there they get marooned on this other planet for a while and it's years before the earth people can get back to them and so finally the rescue party comes and there's a TV crew and so this guy is going to be the spokesman for these people who've survived on this planet and just before he goes on the air the reporter walks up to him and touches his face and he doesn't quite know what's going on but he does the interview and then later on he realizes that they put war pain on him because the story they wanted to tell on the TV interview was that these people had reverted to savagery and so they just like just you know put war pain on him before he could react and did the interview on that basis just makes me so mad so Heinlein had a genius for creating moments like that is all I'm saying as a writer that sold the technological content of the story better than than the other guys time for one final question and it will be mine which is the better future which is the future you expect Star Trek Star Wars oh good heavens no you must choose I have to say Star Trek you know again that probably dates me the original series you know again to me since you know I'm too chicken to ever actually go explore myself so I get to explore the surface of a titan every time Cassini sends back new data I get to explore Mars every time we get new images from curiosity so the idea of having this group out just exploring to me is perfection well Trek is science fiction and wars is fantasy and I see wars as the camel's nose under the tent that created the swing I was talking about earlier and so it's almost for me a self answering yes the correct answer is Star Trek Star Trek is the future Star Wars is a long time ago in a galaxy far far away what relevance does that have to us today thank you all you may now dine


Put a finger down if you a match with a guy on hinge and he's literally your prince charming like tall dark and handsome I'm talking six four Stunning so not only that he's the best texture. You've ever texted. He's smart witty sarcastic. Just all of the above great We love it. So you're planning your first date. He offers to pick you up But not only that he'd make sure that you're comfortable with it first like he he asked When I get outside he's waiting outside of the car and And says I have two rules for you tonight. You don't touch the door handles car doors restaurant doors, etc You also don't touch the bill. That's all me From there, I'm sold Prince Charming is literally I'm in the car with Prince Charming next to me The date goes amazing sparks are flying. We have everything in common. He's a big boy job makes big boy money Does all the big boy things and I'm obsessed like I great love it the next day I Get ghosted, so am I the only one here or has this happened at someone else? Finally I can comment again. I've been banned for almost two weeks This question is actually pretty easy to answer I've actually kind of answered it in a few of my previous videos You see women don't actually do anything in life Even if you look at industries where women do technically dominate in raw numbers They're still higher positions that men dominate when they say most women are teachers They mean grade school teachers if you go to college most professors or men when you look at nursing. Yeah, sure Most nurses are women most doctors are men though men have to compete to get to the top But unfortunately we also compete at the bottom women. However, don't have to compete at the bottom Unfortunately, there's always some guy out there willing to marry a middle-aged obese woman That's divorced with three kids, but men don't get that same honor So when you look at the gender there's two bell curves and the average for women is higher than men Because women get pulled up by the top of men Women live on easy mode where men have to struggle to survive Two friends sitting in a tree.  They'll be like shit offered to split the bill So one of my buddies had a girl over for dinner one night And she had a few drinks had a nice dinner and he went to the bathroom and for whatever reason while he was gone She started rummaging through his closet at which point she found his handgun She was screwing around with it and drunk and ended up shooting him in the foot and Then was so freaked out that she was gonna go to prison Because she shot somebody that she refused to drive into the hospital Which meant that he had to drive him he'd like wrapped his foot in towels from the bathroom and that had to drive himself to the hospital and Almost passed out from both loss on the way there Something Guys every time I get on live everyone tells me to turn around because there's someone behind me There's nobody behind me Come on Whenever I see a spirit Ever since I was little If your woman is being openly flirtatious with other men That doesn't always mean that she is sexually attracted to them Sometimes all she's trying to do is just warm up the atmosphere and make other people Feel good about themselves to make them open up to her In fact, when a woman really likes a man, she usually Shies away from him instead of being super openly flirtatious with him People often ask me what right do women not have that men do they point to the law and they say look women are equal Into the law, which is great. I'm so glad the law supports women. The problem is culture does not We're still trying to restrict what women do with their bodies i.e. abortions Media still sets an unrealistic expectation of what a woman should look like and women suffer eating disorders and some term to self-harm Because they can't attain what the media says they should be also We still shame women for having sex in the year 2020 So why do I talk about feminism on tiktok because tiktok is a cultural tool and I'm tired of women being treated this way I want to change culture not law culture Oh, honey, there was no denying that I got it I'm stubborn as a mother did not go to the doctor for about two weeks me and one of my girlfriends were looking on Google images and I was like no, that's not what it looks like. It's not herpes. It's a yeast infection We go to CVS like I think I went to CVS two or three times and got a yeast infection kit the monostatic because I was like No, it's not herpes at all But it was I got to the point where I couldn't walk had to pee in the shower and It was like, okay, I need to go to Planned Parenthood laid down on the table spread them the doctor was like, yeah That's herpes like immediately And I just started bawling and was like, oh my god, am I gonna die? That's what I said and she's like no, you're not gonna die so many people have it and that's how I knew You can't get rid of me So you're telling me if you get engaged you get an engagement party a bridal shower Sometimes two bridal showers because the groom's family and the bride's family throws it a bachelor bachelor party and the wedding and Honeymoon on my birthday the reason why you are not dating right now Because my roommate doesn't like the idea of me bringing men home for the last time. We're not roommates. We're married I didn't know you were in here Did you know in the state of Colorado a woman on the stand can tell a judge that she's gonna kill herself and her Child but father can't get custody because he served honorably in the United States Marine Corps as a combat Marine and the stuff He went through as a combat Marine was too violent to be a father to that child So let me say explain something about child support. So if you mean this is a one-day check where I made 25 an hour for five hours They took child support out twice even though I have one child This was my check Let me show you another check Boom this check was supposed to be $900 450 This check was supposed to be I think the gross pay Okay child support didn't come out around Here we go another one this check was supposed to be a thousand dollars 544 This is for a child that lives with me bro. This child lives with me. I could keep going for days. This is 150 This is 150. I got $40. This is the system that we live in Let's see. Uh, boom boom boom boom boom boom. This check was supposed to be 160. I got 40 dollars Let's show you I could do this for days. This check was supposed to be 350. I Got a hundred and forty four dollars Let's see what this one says this check was supposed to be a thousand dollars.  I call her and now and she was like, oh, no, that was just What did she say? Oh because she applied for food stamps and so I was like, all right Well, you feel me.  Are you?  I'm not going through with that I'm like cool. I don't show up to court.  I said, well, what is the balance? She said 23,861 dollars and 63 cents In the state of Florida if you only have one child they can take 60 percent of your check So I had my son Monday through Friday Surviving on $20 checks and $40 checks. I work for a union that's contracted through like three different companies So I'll get a check for $20 and $40 and $70 And I got to live off that and provide for my son and put gas in the car Take him to school do the uniforms tutoring all that