Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise.

I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk.

Join me, Evan Ratliff, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, this is Shannon Dordy, host of the new podcast, Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordy. In this podcast, I'm going to be talking about marriage, divorce, my family, my career. I'm also going to be talking a lot about cancer, the ups and the downs, everything that I've learned from it. It's going to be a wild ride. Listen to Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. For this week's Select, I've chosen one of my favorite episodes in honor of the birthday of my favorite person, my dear sweet wife, Yumin, whose birthday is today. Since this episode is so cool and Yumin is too, I figure it was just logical, and logical stuff really floats my boat. Plus, what better way to send off a not too bad year considering everything, especially the last couple of years, than with a real head-scratcher, fascinating, interesting episode. I hope you enjoy it. Happy birthday to you, me, and happy New Year to everybody.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. This is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.

You're about to say that's the blank edition.

Yeah, it was, but I couldn't think of anything.

It was literally the blank edition.

What was it?

I mean, you couldn't think of anything.

You were blank. No, that's right. It was the blank edition. Oh, gosh, it's a terrible start, Chuck.

How about this just to divert ourselves from that disaster. What was not a disaster were our live shows we did.

Oh, yeah.

We finally got up on stage, everyone, first time since January. Yeah. Kicked the rust off in Chicago and Toronto.

And both of them were we just killed. They were great. Yeah, everybody. The audiences were great. Everyone had a really great time. They told us so. They seemed to be legitimately meaning what they were saying.

Yeah, it was really, really great to get back on stage with you, my friend.

And also, hats off to Chicago for showing up. They showed up. We called you guys out and you responded. Thank you very much. And thank you, Toronto, for not making us call you out.

But there are still tickets remaining for August 29th in Boston at the Wilbur in Portland, Maine. We're venturing up into the hinterlands of America.

To go see you. What's next after that? But Canada.

August 30th, there are still plenty of great tickets left there. And then the same can be said in October and Orlando and October 10th. I think I said October ninth, right? In Orlando, October 10th in New Orleans.

Yep, that's right.

Brooklyn, I'm not worried.

About that. It's already all sold out.

The.

Whole thing? All three nights.

Oh, man. Shall we add a fourth?

Jeez. I don't know. We'll talk about it.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who came out. It was a lot of fun, and this is a good one, so you don't want to miss it.

Yeah, so come on out, especially you, Portland, Maine. Let's get with it.

All right, now, Nuclear Semiotics, which I didn't know I loved, but I do.

Really? Do you remember 99 % Invisible did a very famous episode on this very topic?

Oh, I didn't.

Hear that. I specifically avoided going back and listening to it because I don't want to be stunk upon by its taint. Does that.

Make sense? You don't want Roman Mars's taint stinking.

On you. It's just such a classic episode that I don't want it to leak in. I don't want to.

Accidentally rip it off. Yeah, well, we certainly can't 99 Invisible this thing because that is the show that exists at the top echelon of this industry.

Sure. So -But so do we. Sure, we're up there. All right. But if you like this one, if this stuff floats your boat and you're like, I want to know more, go listen to the 99 % Invisible episode.

Yeah, this thing really triggered a lot of synapses firing for me. And I think I really enjoy this thought experiment, problem-solving stuff. Oh, yeah. I think I would really dig like that part of the zombie Apocalyptic is figuring this stuff out as a team. Right. Because the whole time I was reading this, I was thinking, Great idea. Terrible idea. They should do this. They shouldn't do that.

Go sit down. Yeah. You, I like the cut of your chip.

It was really cool. I dug this. I'd never heard of it, so thank you.

Oh, you're very welcome. I actually heard of it before Roman Mars made the episode, so I can't really thank him.

Well, not before you heard of it, because I think it's well known that Roman's first words were nuclear semiotics.

That's true. Yeah, even before Mama. That's right. I could totally believe that, actually. Yeah. So what we're talking about, as Chuck said a couple of times for those of you who don't know, is nuclear semiotics, and that is a very specialized branch, interdisciplinary branch of, I guess, science that involves basically any field of research that you can throw at the wall would probably have some function to play in the field of nuclear semiotics. And to make a long story short to do the too long, didn't read version of this T-L, semicolon, D-R, is nuclear semiotics seeks to figure out how to warn the future humans to come.

Or whatever is here. Sure.

Let's be honest. Sure, good point. I mean, why to terminate, right? Yeah. To warn the future humans or the future super intelligent jellyfish, whatever, to come, Hey, this is a very dangerous, radioactive dump site that we've put here. Stay away.

Yeah, it's that easy.

Yeah, it sounds easy. The problem is if you presume that it's easy, you're making a lot of assumptions that aren't necessarily going to hold up.

Oh, yeah, a lot of times are like, They should just do, and I would even stop halfway through my thought because it's like, No, that.

Wouldn't work. It's true because our languages might be gone by then. Our symbols don't necessarily make sense outside of the context that we understand them in. Civilization might be ridiculously advanced by then. Civilization might be in a state of collapse by then. We have no idea. But the point of nuclear semiotics is to figure out how to come up with a message that is understandable to everybody in any situation in the future. And the current state of the art is, let's figure out how to speak as far as 10,000 years into the future.

Yeah. And that's like being generous. It needs to go beyond that.

It does, because the whole point of nuclear semiotics, the whole point of warning the future is this stuff, this nuclear waste that we're putting into the ground now is going to be dangerous for tens and tens of thousands of years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. There's something called technetiumfrom '99 has a half-life of 211,000 years. Another one is 1.7 million year half-life. This is the nuclear waste that we're creating now and are putting in the ground.

Yeah, and Julia Leighton, who is one of our writers who does great work for us, she made a lot of great points, which is the history of human evolution is 200,000 years. Yeah. We've only been reading and writing for how long?

About 5,000, less than 6,000 years.

Yeah. Like you said, it sounds simple. In so many times, I thought I had it cracked.

Only.

To think. I was like, Why don't they just do something purely visual and stage a play of people at that site digging in and then dying. Then I was like, Well, what do you do with it? I was like, Well, just put it on a DVD. Sure. That just plays on a loop. Right. It's like, Well, how are you going to power that thing?

What happens when everybody's converted to Blu-ray?

Yeah, exactly. Or then put a solar panel up. Oh, yeah, that's cool. Because that'll last forever. But what if it doesn't? What if there's a forever nuclear storm or whatever? What if the sun never shines again on Earth in 8,000 years?

Which could happen. That's the cool thing about thinking into the deep future.

Is all the things that will go wrong?

Yeah, it makes you realize how specific everything you think, and know, and understand really is to your current time.

Yeah, it's very cool. She brings up the point about an apple. When you see the word apple, you don't see the word apple. You see you visualize the symbol that is an apple. Right. So it's almost like the words, very much the words will just not have anymore at some point. Right. Man.

Well, let's dig into it. I love this stuff. Are you ready? Let's do it. So to start, we should talk about where this all came from. It came from a new type of nuclear storage solution, nuclear waste storage solution. It's called long term geological repositories. It is basically digging into the earth, a couple of miles into the earth, putting our nuclear waste there. Again, waste that's going to be harmful to health for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, and sealing it up and then covering over the site and then putting a warning on there. Right now, the general consensus is that salt beds are the best place to put that nuclear waste. And there's actually some pretty good reasons why.

Yeah, we could do an episode on nuclear storage, I think. I really want to. In and of itself? Yeah. I don't know if that's a shortie or a longie.

It's.

Probably a longie. Yeah.

But just briefly, the reason salt beds are preferable is because the fact that they're even there suggests that there's no water. If there was water, they would have been dissolved long ago. It's really relatively easy to mine into them. And then what's awesome about salt is that when you mine a shaft into a salt bed and you put your deposit there, then you pull back out. The salt bed actually heals itself over just a few decades.

Heals itself back up, right?

Yes. So you put a container that's been engineered to hold the nuclear waste inside for 10,000 years.

Yeah, it's also in a container. You should point that out. Right.

You're putting it into a borehole in the salt. The salt is going to grow back around it and entomb it, perhaps permanently, in the salt.

It's very strong, too, right?

Yeah, it is fairly strong. I mean, if you're mining using modern mining equipment, it's really easy to mine into. But if you just have a pickaxe or something, it's rock, too. It's salt, rock to you. Saltrock is what it's called, right? Yeah. So there's a lot of reasons why people have figured out like, this is not a bad idea to entomb nuclear waste. But here's the thing. We can't just entomb it and walk away. We have a responsibility for those of us generating this waste today to warn the future. Sure. It's on the future. If they listen to us or not, that's on them.

Right. But we have to make them able to listen.

To us. Exactly. We have a responsibility to do that. Because some people have proposed like, hey, let's just bury and forget about it. The chances of somebody actually finding it are pretty slim. Just bury and forget about it. And that's probably the best way to go. And people said, it's not a bad idea, but it's actually a pretty bad idea.

See, actually, I thought that one wasn't the worst idea.

It's not.

That was a behavioral psychologist. He was like, and he wasn't like, just forget about it. He was like, Maybe the smartest thing to do is to leave it unmarked.

Right. Because as we'll see, attracting attention to something like that attracts.

Attention to it. Exactly. I know. It's an interesting thought.

Experiment, right? That psychologist, by the way, was Dr. Percy Tenenbaum.

Oh, really? No wonder I.

Liked it. Of the East Hampton Tenenbaums.

We should point out that there's a couple of big times that this has been commissioned like, hey, we need to think of something. One for a site that never happened and one for a site that has happened. The one that has happened is the only one in the United States right now.

The only one in the world, as far as I know.

No, it's number three. Oh, really? It's the third largest.

Okay.

I didn't see what the other.

Two were. It must have been the first in the world then.

Yeah, probably the first in the world. Okay. Yeah, which makes sense because the other two are bigger. But this is in New Mexico. It's called the WIP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. This one, they're actively guarding. They've committed, the Department of Energy is committed to guarding it with people for 100 years.

They've hired Barney Fife into a 100 year contract to look over this.

Nuclear waste. For at least 100 years. It's not like at the end of the 100 years, they're going to just put a padlock on it and walk away. I imagine they will keep guarding it as long as they feel like it needs guarding.

I don't know if that's true. I don't know, man. I mean, we're talking about a government run program here.

At least 100 years, we can at.

Least say that. Yes, they agreed to that.

So the whole idea arose before that, though. What was the other one? In Nevada?

That's the Yucca Mountain one. That was the.

First one. Right. That's the first one that never happened. Right. But that's when in the '70s is when this idea came about. And I think it was in 1982 when it was codified as an official, I guess, science or...

Yeah, it is. It's an interdisciplinary branch of science, Nuclear Semiotics. It's because the EPA came up with a rule in 1982, Allah, really, that.

Said- '81, I got that wrong, by the way.

So it's '81 that they came up with.

The law? Well, it became a discipline in 1981 with that Yucca Mountain.

Repository Project. I think from that Yucca Mountain Repository Project, because we were starting to figure out how to deposit the stuff for a long time, the EPA came up with a rule, I think it was 1982 that said, if you're going to create these repositories for nuclear waste, you also have to figure out how to come up with a permanent warning sign. Everybody was like, That's no problem, of course. Then the EPA said, Think about it. It's harder than you think.

They said, Just slap that nuclear waste logo that everyone knows. Sure. Everyone was like, Everyone doesn't know that.

It's been around forever. Everyone doesn't know that now, much less in 200,000 years.

Yeah. Did you see how that was created?

Yeah, it was a group doodle. I don't know how that happens. I think that means they can't ascribe it to one person.

They know there was five people on one of those giant silver spoons, pencils, or crayola crayon.

Yeah, this is in 1946. It was at Berklee? Yeah. And it was a group doodle in the science class.

Is that an album name or a band name? Group Doodle.

It's.

Like the Wiggles or something?

Yeah, I think it's an album title, for sure.

So the Wiggles, group doodle.

Absolutely. Okay, good. That's probably a real thing.

That's our gift to you, Wiggles.

But I saw this was interesting. In 1948, the symbol came under consideration for wider use because at first it was just a group doodle. And then the Brookhaven National Laboratory requested a standardized symbol of standardized colors for their radiation safety program. There was more argument about the colors than the actual symbol, because at first we were like, You can't use yellow because we use yellow for a.

Lot of stuff. Yeah, they wanted to make sure that it didn't get overused. People just become blind to it because they saw it.

So much. They were like, Have you heard of striper? Exactly. Can't use yellow and black.

They were like, No, I haven't heard of it. Give us 40 years you'll have heard of them, believe me.

Then in 42 years, no one will have heard of them. That's right. I think the original design was...

I saw them in concert. We won't even talk about that. Oh, I believe it. It was magenta blades on a blue background was the original design. It was chosen because it was uncommon. But then in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they went with the yellow background in 1948, later on in 1948, and I guess it stuck.

That's where the Oak Ridge boys were all scientists.

That's right.

It was originally magenta on blue, right? Yes. The logo we're talking about, for those of you who don't know, it's called the nuclear trefoil. You know it. It's a circle and then three partial circles around it, blades. They call blades. From what I saw, one of the original group doodlers explained it as it's supposed to be an atom with activity around it. Yeah. That's it, which I never saw it before. But now that I've read that, I can't unsee it. That is really what it looks like. It's a pretty great little doodle. But it's like you said, that is not a universally accepted symbol, which is a big problem. And it doesn't evoke like, oh, an atom, of course. I know what an atom looks like. I just saw one go down the street a second ago, and this looks like an atom. It's a symbolic representation of an atom, which means that after people stop thinking about what atoms look like maybe a thousand years or 5,000 years down the road if something happens, no one's going to look at that and be like, Oh, it's an atom activity around an atom. That must mean there's radiation here.

Hence this is a danger sign. That's not going to happen.

Right. The other thing you would think is just put up in a bunch of languages. Done.

Yeah.

Here's the thing. Languages are disappearing. I'm going to ask you, actually, what is your best guess? A language dies out every blank.

Nine million seconds. Is that right? Did I nail it?

You jerk. I got to get out of calculator. A language dies out every 14 days.

I'm pretty sure that's.

Nine million seconds. Isn't that staggering? God, what if it was. Are you about to do that?

Yeah, you keep talking.

That's about 25 languages per year that die out.

That's really sad.

It is, and it is very sad. Granted, these aren't major languages, but they're important to the people who speak them. Sure. But that's just to get across the point that throwing it up in a bunch of languages, there's no guarantee. In fact, in all likelihood, in 50,000 years, there won't be English, or German, or French. There may not even be humans. That's a really.

Good.

Point. We may be- What's the calculation?

446 days. That was a little off. Oh, okay. We may all be like post-biological humans, uploaded our consciousness onto the internet or something, in which point that really won't matter to tell you the truth where the nuclear waste is buried. But who knows? It could be an intelligent species. It could be humans who don't know how to read or write. The fact is the stuff that we take for granted changes a lot faster than you think. And even if it doesn't necessarily die out, the changes that come along are pretty alarming. I found aI've been watching a lot of Silicon Valley lately, I told you.

Yeah, great show.

My vocal delivery sounds a lot like Jared's. It's occurring to me a lot.

Oh, you think? I never really put those two together.

Well, keep an ear out for it now and see what you think. I mean, tell me I'm wrong. Prove me you're wrong, sir.

I don't know. I would have to disassociate so much because I like you and Jared is such a pedantic bureaucrat.

Oh, I love him.

I mean, he's fun to watch, but I wouldn't say that he's the most likable character. Maybe he is. I don't know.

I would say pedantic bureaucrat is not entirely off for me.

No, Jared needs a girlfriend. That's his deal.

Okay, so I do not because I have a fine wife. That's right. Let me give you an example of how English has changed. This is a quote from Sir Galway and the Green Knight. It was written in 1,375.

Oh, boy. Is this.

Middle English? That's 650 years ago. This is in English. The steel of a stiff staff, the stern hit be gripped that was wounden with iron into the wand's end and I'll be graven with green and gravious works. You should see.

It spelled. Oh, yeah. I was an English major. We had to go through this stuff. It was.

A slog. Do you have a guess at what I just said?

Yeah, you said that the Green Nights sat down and watched some Silicon Valley.

That's right. It's that the grim man gripped it by its strong handle, which was wound with iron all the way to the end and graven and green with graceful designs. That's English. Six hundred and fifty years ago. English is.

Still around. Six hundred and fifty years. We're talking about thousands, tens of thousands.

Of years. Exactly. That's a problem. Languages evolve, languages die. Symbols don't quite make sense out of context. So there's a lot of challenges that face the people who try to explain this stuff or figure out how to explain it to future people, I think is a better way to put it.

That's right. They have looked at semioticians for people who really wonk on this stuff. I think I'm an amateur Simeiotician after reading this. That's great. But one thing that they're looking for, because what you want is ideally instant recognition and not something. I mean, yeah, maybe if you have to figure it out. But what you want is something that conveys danger right when you look.

At it. Like, just steer clear of this place. Not come closer and start poking around. Just go away.

That's right. She makes a great point, though, that it's a double edged sword, like you were talking about earlier. If human beings, if you show an extreme skier or sign this is dangerous, don't ski this way. He's going to say, brah, let's do it. Yeah, give.

Me some homicide power drink.

There's a very fine line between warning people and enticing people.

Yeah, even inadvertently. Exactly. She points out haunted houses because I'm like, yeah, not everybody's a Red Bull extreme sports person, but people do like haunted houses, too. So the abandoned, scary place is so creepy. Let's go there for Halloween because maybe Halloween survived, but the English language didn't. Who knows? So, yeah, you really walk a fine line here between warning people away and saying, I dare you, right?

Yeah, my whole jam is I think they need to... What will survive if there are humans at all is emotion. So I think they need to appeal to human emotions like fear, but more than words and symbols.

Okay, well, let's take a break and we'll get back into this, all right? Because this is fun. Yes.

When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure.

That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks. And when.

I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all.

They have cans of spray paint, and they're just putting big X's on machines. And it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up, left, right, and center. And then like, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it. Getting to Mars, done an excuse, being a total, but I want the reader to see it in action.

My name is Evan Ratliff, and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to Ayn Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, this is Shannon Dordy, host of the new podcast, Let's be clear with Shannon Dordy. You may know me from, let's see, 90210, Charmed, Mall Rats, Heathers, probably also know me from my stage four cancer diagnosis and sharing that journey with so many of you. There's something so authentic about a podcast. It's me connecting, me talking raw in the moment. That's what my goal is to give you to talk about why I feel that cancer, to a certain extent, is a gift, what my responsibilities are as a person with cancer, because I think that there's something so much bigger than me. And to be honest, I'm still trying to find out what that is. And maybe together, we'll find it. It's going to be a wild ride. So I hope that you all tune in. Listen to Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordie. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

At the Planet Money Podcast, we ask questions like, Who decides when we're in a recession? Why does every insurance company seem to have a mascot. Do food exploration dates even matter? I'm Jeff Guau, co-host of NPR's, Planet Money, where we bring you stories about people, about weird schemes and wonderful mistakes to show you how the economy actually works. Listen to Planet Money from NPR on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Chuck. We've talked about how things go away, languages fall away, symbols don't make sense anymore.

It's the ephemera.

It is. It really is. That's right. So what will last? What have nuclear semioticians come up with? And should we explain what semiotics is in general?

What is it? I don't even know.

Oh, just in shorthand, semiotics is basically the study of how and why signs have meaning. Okay. Right? Like you were saying earlier, how the word apple doesn't evoke thoughts of the word apple. It evokes thoughts of the round, shiny, tasty fruit that grows on a tree. That's a sign in semiotics. That's specifically a curse of sign because it uses language.

So what they've done in many cases is, and this is a great idea for stuff like this, is to have a competition. They had one at UCLA, I think, in 2001 called the Desert Space competition. And what won that year was a cactus, a yucca cacti, glowing blue. And then the idea was plant a field of these regular green cacti and then over the place where the waste is, the repository. And then if you see the sign of a glowing blue one, I mean, I don't think I didn't see the rest of them, but I didn't think this one was that great. It wasn't that great.

I'm sorry to the person who came up with it, though.

I know. I think something they should do is go even further back to younger children, because sometimes go to an elementary school and ask kids or a high school.

Or you just take each kid out and rub their face in the sand and be like, You see this? You stay out of here.

No, I mean, have the kids throw out ideas because I.

Think- Oh, I see.

Yeah, I.

Think the- I liked my idea.

I think a lot of times children can cut through to the simplicity of something much better than adults can.

Easily.

So that's my idea. Throw it out as a science fair project.

Well, I think that's one of the cool things about nuclear semiotics is it's so inviting to... Anybody can come up with a great idea. It's just so confounding, but it's also so accessible.

Yeah, we'll get ideas. In fact, we want to hear from you if you think you have a cool idea. That's a good idea. I guarantee you we're going to get some good ones. We're not going to pass them along or anything.

So rather than just pooh-poohing the glowing Yucca one, here's the problem with the glowing Yucca idea. It requires explanation. Right. So part of the glowing Yucca is to say these things have been genetically engineered so that when there's radiation present, they glow. So if you see this yucca glowing, it means that there's radiation here, stay away. Right. Way too much. If you lose that additional story that has to go along with the glowing yucca, then you just have glowing yucca. And I can't think of a more attractive thing that's going to draw people to a sight than the legendary glowing yucca that only glows in this one spot on Earth.

Yeah.

That's the problem with it.

I liked this other idea from that same year a little better that did not win. Fields of Asphidil, which is a Eurasian lily, they said, Let's just cover the site with metal blades that screech when the wind blows, it makes a horrible noise.

Right.

Not bad.

Here's the problem with that. Okay. Moving parts. Okay, sure. It's been pretty well established that if you're trying to convey something to the people into the distant future, you need to have something that's monolithic and made of one piece. Because if you have multiple parts, that's an opportunity for weathering to occur through the place where the two parts meet or three parts or five parts. And if it's a moving part, just kiss the movement goodbye.

What.

About this?

I've had the thought earlier today about just a mountain of razor wire.

Okay, here's the problem with that.

Okay.

And this is the same problem also with.

Thewhat is.

The problem? -the steel stuff thatsure to move and everything. This doesn't move, though. I know, but you want to use stuff that has no value whatsoever, not just financially.

But usefulness. Why? Because someone will say, I can harvest that razor wire.

Yeah, I can go use that to keep the cows in my house next door.

Yeah, but if you have so much of it-.

Over time, over 10,000 years, people take and take and take and take. There's going to be no razor wire left. I mean, that's why the pyramids are stripped of their more attractive outer. They used to have a white, I think, limestone shell encasement. It's gone because the locals were like, Oh, I can use that to build a fine little huts for myself. To build a pizza hut. Exactly. That's what people will do if you place something of any useful in Savannah. That's true. That is the beauty of this. Every idea is wrong. As a whole.

It's so great.

It's.

Pretty great. I love it.

One of the most often cited bodies of work is from 1982, '83. This was a call for ideas from the German Journal of Semiotics that basically said the same thing. It's like, what are your ideas? This one got a little goofy, to say the least. Someone suggested an artificial moon as a storage vessel.

There's just a huge flaw in that one, if you ask me.

I don't even get that.

Well, it was like, how do you make sure that the information about this site stays protected? Put it into an artificial moon and orbit around Earth. But it's like, how do you get to the.

Artificial moon? I didn't get that's what they meant. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense.

That's what I think.

I guess they were, I mean, it said, oh, were they beaming it down to a TV that won't play?

That's a different one. Yeah, and I just don't understand this at all.

I don't understand the radioactive cats either, even though that's a decent band name.

That was a big part of the 99 % Invisible episode on Nuclear Semiotics. They talked about the Raycats. I think they actually hired a musician to create a song because just like with The Glowing Yucca, you have to explain what's going on when the cats glow, you need to stay away. They had somebody come up with a Raycat song, I believe, for the episode.

Was it Hoody and the Blowfish?

Yes, it was.

That was a good guess. Now, this one I thought it was interesting, at least. This cementician named Thomas Sebiac, he said this, What has survived more than anything else? Religion. Religious texts that date back a couple of thousand years in the Catholic Church. Not a bad start.

Yeah, the ideas that you hear at Catholic mass today are a couple thousand years old in some instances. If you go back to the original text, which we can still read, fortunately, you can say, Yep, this is what they're talking about. Those ideas have survived that long because of the.

Practices they used. Interesting idea, but it gets a little goofy because he thought, Why don't we almost create a fake religion around this thing? A fearful myth that you can generate appointing an atomic priesthood to tell people and tell them to tell future generations. But I guess the idea is that it's all false and it's just a big, made.

Up story. Yeah, the atomic priesthood would know the truth and they would indoctrinate people, but out in society around them, it would be a closely guarded secret because everybody else thinks that whatever this fake myth about why you have to stay away from this haunted evil area is true when really the atomic priests are the ones who know. Actually, there's radioactive stuff right here. They just came up with this 3,000 years ago to scare everybody away.

But initially, a decent idea as far as trying to make it or incorporate what religion does, but it's just definitely strange.

It is. To me, though, it is at its base, despicable. It's a despicable idea because it is purposefully introducing fearful, false, superstition into the future. We're going to purposefully introduce fearful false superstition into the future just to scare people off from radioactivity? What sweeping side effects? What wars might start over this? How many people will die to defend this fake thing that they don't realize is fake? Because Thomas Sebiok came up with this idea to keep people away from a single site in New Mexico. That's crazy.

It didn't fare too well either among his colleagues.

No, and rightfully so, because again, it's a.

Despicable idea. He was on the human interference task force. We mentioned the Nevada site. That was what was launched for that Yucca Mountain site back in '81, from '81 to '83.

So whatever C. B. Y. 'S original idea was, he had some other closely related ideas that were great, though. Yeah. He's not like it's a total nut job hacker or anything. I think it was just a misfire in an otherwise illustrious career, I think. I don't know that much about him. But one of his other ideas was, okay, well, let's take the atomic priesthood away. Let's take the religion and all that stuff away. And let's just give them the facts. But let's figure out a way to make sure that those facts get passed down. And what he came up with was called the meta message, where it's a message that says this place has nuclear radiation. It can kill you. You need to stay away from it. And we invite you to take this message and translate it into whatever languages you guys have on Earth at.

The time. Assuming you can read this. Right.

But if you do that often enough, there will always be somebody who can translate it. Oh, sure. And then that way you form a bridge between now and as far into the future as people are around to read and add their own interpretation or their own translation of it. But then you want to leave the original so that if there's ever a disagreement about what word meant, hopefully somebody can go back language to language to language and connect them so that they can see the original version.

Yeah, but what if a society develops an isolation that knows none of these languages?

You're just totally tossed. Yeah. That's when the symbols come in.

Right. What they settled on as a panel, though, from '81 to '83, was what's called long term communication was going to be the most effective thing, like what you were just talking about. They said a system that combines physical markers and archives that cover the two major forms of this long term communique, direct and successive. Direct utilizes markers and successive is humans like you were talking about, I guess, with this meta message. I guess you could write it down, but it's still humans carrying a message.

Through time. Well, it's more like a direct one. You can write an inscription on a monument, and that monument is going to deliver that message directly to people 10,000 years from now.

Yeah, I mean, it's a physical thing.

Right. Whereas with successive, it's passed along like a.

Game of telephone. Exactly. And you know how that goes.

Right. It can get a little hanky.

That's right. But it's always fun at a slumber party. For sure.

They came up with multiple ones like you were saying. They settled on a monument that had massive stone structures. Remember, you want monoliths. They're engraved with warnings in all currently known languages. It's a lot of languages. You want a buried vault that has all the info you need about radioactivity, about the site, all that stuff. You want a bunch of barriers around the site, not necessarily to definitely keep people out, but enough to basically say, hey, we're trying to impede progress here.

Yeah, I mean, to me, that's one of the most obvious ones. If you see a huge wall, again, it might entice you, but it for sure indicates to any culture that you're not meant to come beyond this.

Right. And then the last one is a network of archives, basically the same information you would have in that buried vault, but elsewhere scattered around the world. So if something happens to the buried vault, somebody can come across the archives somewhere and be like, oh, wait, we want to stay out.

Of there. Right. And along with that, they said while we're at it, can we at least all agree around the world on a nuclear warning symbol? Right. If it's the triphoil or whatever, let's just all codify that as the thing, which is not the case right now.

No, there was a triangle with an arrow pointing down, and then in the head of the arrow was the biohazard symbol, which is not great because you want something that's going to be so simple that even as.

People-that confused me. I need to see it, I guess.

Yeah, even when you see it, you're like, Wait, what? But you want something simple enough so that as people create a shorthand version of it, it still retains its meaning or visually.

All right, so that stuff was the Yaka Project in the early '80s. They decided not to do that. They just packed it up, put it away. And then it all came back again with this New Mexico plant. When the Department of Energy said once again, hey, we need to think of a sign and a symbol or whatever you can come up with, and we need the best and the brightest thinking of this. So call up Carl Sagan.

Get me Sagan. Get me Sagan. Get me Percy.

Tenenbaum, Stath. And this guy named John Lombberg, who's a science writer and space illustrator, and he had worked in Semiotics before for NASA on their mission to Mars. Sagan was in ill health, so he declined to come. But he sent a message from the present, I guess, that said skull and cross bones. Done. Yeah. Universal.

Everyone knows it. He gave a really good example. He said it's marked the lintels of cannibal dwellings, the flags of pirates, the insignia of SS divisions and motorcycle gangs. He makes a pretty good point. A lot of people out there see a skull and cross bones and no, it means like danger, problems, hang-ups.

Yeah, it means this will be you. You'll be a skull.

And so the working group for the whip project, they said, no, that doesn't work. It's a Youngian archetype. It doesn't really exist outside of the west. Yeah. To me, I'm like, no, Sagan was definitely onto something.

I think so. I mean, tell me if you go to China and hold up a sign with a skull and cross-bone. They'd go, Huh? I would think so, wouldn't they? I mean, that's a dire warning, isn't it?

I think their point is that the skull used to be like a memento mori, where it meant like, rebirth and prepare for death.

They could be like, Oh, wonderful. A skull and cross-bone.

Sure. But to me, that is the one enduring symbol that's always going to be around as long as there are humans. Because what happens when you die in rot? What's left? Your skull? Every human knows that. Even humans in the future are going to know that. Even ones that are in a post-collapse tribes are running around and have lost all of the languages that are around today, they're going to know what a skull looks like or what a skull means, or at least one of them is going to be like, Wait, I don't think this is saying that the rainbow is coming. I think it means death or danger.

All right, let's take another break. Yeah? Sure. We'll come back and talk about the approach that the whip panel took and what they came up with right after this.

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Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles... And stuff you should know. You know I got to defend Sagan. It's my boy. Sure. I love that guy.

Someone should ask Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Sure.

Why not? I bet he's got a good idea or two.

I bet they have asked.

He's coming to Atlanta for a show.

Oh, yeah, where?

Fox? I think Cobb Energy Center.

Oh, yeah. I think it's even more.

Seats than the Fox. No, it's less.

Oh.

Sorry, Neil. I think it's like 3,000 people, which is nothing to put up a stink about. That's a lot of folks.

We have not hit that. No, we're not. No, we haven't. Did you hear the Star Talk I was on?

Oh, no. Was it good?

It was pretty good. Yeah. If I do say so myself. If it was supposed to be rapid, fast responses. We got to like four questions in an hour.

You were like, rapid, fast response is not my specialty, Neil.

Let me just do a little distracting here.

I'm more deliberate. All right, so speaking of deliberate, the whip panel was very deliberate and methodical. They divided into teams and approached it from the two things we were talking about: direct and successful forms of communication, debated a lot, deliberated a lot, the recommendations. They had two proposals, and they did overlap a little bit. What I thought was pretty smart is they both had a multileveled approach from the surface down that got more specific and intense as you went down.

Yeah, the first one was basically like, you, Ding-Dong, this is dangerous. Go away. Exactly. That's like level one. Then level two is like, okay, Ding-Dong, and you're a smart friend, explain to Ding-Dong that the reason this is dangerous because there's something buried here and it's going to hurt you.

All right, we should we don't talk about the real things?

Oh, sure. I thought I was.

Group A, this was theirs. They studded the surface of the site with what they called Menacing Earthworks. A field of spikes and then a big massive disk painted to look like a black hole. I didn't quite get that part.

That's.

So dumb. I get the spikes.

I think it's the yeah, of course. But the black hole, I think it's supposed to just mean like a void or chaos? I don't know.

I'm not sure.

I could see how you would think that that was universal, like nobody wants to fall into a hole or something, and maybe it evokes that stay away. All right.

Then they have large markers all around the site, which like you said, are the really basic messages and the warnings, including, and I thought this is so interesting, faces that invoke Edvard Munch's The Scream.

The ones I saw were The Scream. Yeah. It was a line drawing of the guy from.

The Scream. Yeah, like in great agony and pain.

That to me- Not bad. -is not bad. I don't know, though, is that more universally understood than a skull and.

Cross bones? I don't know. Or if art survives, or people like, Oh, I wonder if that painting is.

Down there. Well, I think what they're saying is, and cementicians feel this way, is that Edvard Monck so perfectly nailed the scream that even without the art, if you see that, you understand that that person you're seeing is in agony.

Did I say Monch?

No, I think you said Monk. Did I say Monch?

You said Monk. I might have.

Said Munch. No, I think you said Monck. Is it Monch?

I think it's probably Monck. There's no way his name is Monch.

I'm almost positive you said Monck. Jerry, can you rewind for a second?

Munch.

Oh, you did say munch. I would have sworn you said Monk.

So group A below the surface, this is when they actually start talking about nuclear waste, what it does to you, the details about the structure and all that stuff.

Right.

Not bad.

Where they teach a little bit about radioactivity.

So Group B, they went super informative. And really what they relied on was that people had a little bit of knowledge in the future about stuff like this.

But they also trusted that people didn't have to just be spooked or scared or something like that. That it's like, here is the facts and information. Here is why you want to stay away from that.

Yeah, their big above ground work was these big earthen walls in the shape of the nuclear trip foil. Not bad. I imagine you have to see it from above to even know.

Though, what that was. Yeah, but that's part of one of the requirements was that you want it to be easily visible, not just with human cognition, but remote sensing too. Right. So magnetic surveys, they said we should put some magnets in here, not just from when you walk up to it.

Right. And you also have to be able to see it from your flying exhaustor.

Exactly.

And then inside the walls, they have at various steps have these big markers. And here's where they use symbols and pictographs, all kinds of languages writing in different languages. And then more human faces increasingly contorted in agony as you go down. Yeah.

It looks to me like the guy's getting drunker and drunker.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's what it looks like.

Well, maybe that means there's a.

Happening bar. Exactly. That's how I would take it if I were a future human, post-collapse.

Got to go. Got to go down here.

There were also pictograms. You're just digging through the sand to get to it. There are also pictograms that showed under the ground, real easy to understand drawings of the radioactive waste, the groundwater flowing through it, taking the radioactive waste up to the plants, which are then eaten by the humans in the picture, one of whom dies. Which makes sense. You don't need to understand anything about radioactivity. You don't need to be able to read anything. It makes sense, especially if some people are sitting there thinking.

About it. Was the final image of skull and cross bones or a pile of bones?

No, it was like a person, three people standing and one of them, the last one was dead, and I think he might even have X's for eyes.

Well, I was about to say, though? I mean, if you think about 20,000 years from now, maybe they're like, Oh, this induces a nice nap.

Maybe.

But to your point, though, the bones is where you need to end up. Right.

Yeah, maybe somebody would be like, Oh, these veggies here give you a great buzz if you throw them on the ground.

Yeah, X is.

For eyes. Right. Yeah, the bones do make a lot more sense. I think Sagan was right. That should be a T-shirt, a stuff you should know T-shirt. Sagan was right. Sagan was right. Don't even need to have any context.

We're going to make an email in a few days.

We're from the guy. From the estate of Carl Sagan saying, Do not make that T-shirt.

What did they go with in the end, though?

They went with a earth and work, earth and burn, basically to provide an obstacle and to block easy access, some granite slabs, monoliths that have warnings written in seven languages.

Yeah, Navajo and then the six languages of the UN.

Arabic, Chinese, English, Spanish, French, and Russian.

Correct.

Which makes a lot of sense. But then they took Thomas Sebiak up on his idea. They built on the earlier people. They had fake religion. Right, exactly. They left blank spaces in their plan, they leave blank spaces on these slabs for future generations to add their own translations of the inscriptions.

That's a good idea.

It's a.

Great idea. And the faces of humans in pain and anguish. Right. That did survive in the end.

That was the final report on this Whit panel. It's a pretty good idea. Makes a lot of sense because it not only... So there are two groups that they're trying to say, Stay away. Not really like Urban Explorers or Thrill Seekers or whatever.

They can die.

They would have virtually no chance of getting down to the actual radioactive material. Two and a half miles. The people they were worried about were technological advanced civilizations that were drilling for resources.

Right.

Like an accident. Like God help this waste disposal site if salt becomes incredibly important in the future. Then less advanced civilizations that could accidentally change the flow of groundwater to go through the salt bed through massive irrigation projects. It covers all of it.

Yeah, my whole thing is just make it inaccessible. Why is it in New Mexico? Why is it out?

Well, I mean, that's pretty inaccessible.

It's not as inaccessible as Siberia.

No, one of the recommendations for nuclear waste disposal is shooting it into space. Just send it out in the outer space and forget about it. And if you believe in the Fermi paradox that it says we're the only intelligent life in the universe, man, more power to you. That's actually not that bad of an idea. It's a horrific idea, but it's actually a.

Good idea. Yeah, but then I wonder about the danger and the risk involved. I mean, we've seen rockets blow up and space shutters blow up. That would be bad. What if the thing that they're shooting it out there, malfunctioned or something? That'd be really bad. That'd be really bad.

That's a.

Great point. It's like all of our nuclear waste has just been released.

Oh, into the atmosphere. Yeah. That's a great point, Chuck.

Here's the thing. Is all of this just wasted effort? Because I was getting so into this stuff and then the end of this article was a real sad trombone. Because it seems like nobody really even cares the people that matter.

Well, the first group, their whole thing will probably never be implemented because the Yucca Mountain Project got shut down. But the whip group may actually have their plan come to fruition because it is an EPA rule that you have to create this marker, and they've got until about 2040 until they estimate the place is going to shut down. So it's entirely possible that in 2040 or sometime in the 100 years after 2040, when the DOE stops protecting the site or the DoD, they may implement this earthenworks and these 16 granite slabs, and we may live to see something like this.

Well, outside of the US, it seems like no one is super concerned. Sweden in 2011 had an application to build a repository in Foursmark. And in their literal application, they basically said, You know what? We're going to worry about that later. In 70 years when this thing's finished.

They said, See this can? We just kicked this 70 years down the road.

And the Swedish National Archives, they consulted on their application. They said, That's really insufficient. It said it gives the impression that one intends to postpone important documentation efforts until the closure of the repository in 70 years. And it's like, It doesn't give the impression. It literally said that.

Right.

I.

Think they're being ultra polite.

Yeah, I think, well, Sweden. Good people. In the.

Us, though-Don't tell ASAP Rocky then.

I don't even know what that means. That's a.

Singer, right? Yeah, he is a rapper. He's in prison in Sweden right now.

I did not know that. Oh, man. What did he do?

He got into a fight with some Swedish kids, and it may or may not have been their fault. It looks on video like they definitely provoked it. Really? But the king of Sweden is like, Sorry, rule of law applies to everybody, including super famous Americans. Well, true. Donald Trump called them to try to get the thing resolved at the behest of Kanye West. Oh, God. And apparently, it just made everything worse. Now the King of Sweden is like, There's no chance he's getting released early.

Wow. Man, where have I been?

This is reality. What I just said is actual fact. It actually happened here in 2019, everybody. Humans of the far future, can you believe it?

Humans of the near. John Lomberg, that guy we were talking about earlier, who was on that original 1991 whip panel. He told Vice just a couple of years ago. A lot of us had been around the block a few times before because he was back then doing the same thing and knew this is going to be a report the government only did. This is the US, and we're putting more thought toward this than anyone.

Yeah, which is.

Really surprising. He said they only did this because they needed to show compliance. They didn't really care what we said. From the 1981, human interference task force during the competition, they basically said the most effective sign will be the dead bodies of those foolish enough to ignore-Which makes sense. -whatever sign. So basically, who cares? Someone will get in there and they'll all die, and then that'll be the big warning.

Right, which makes sense if humans are in communication around the globe and you've got the same morning around. But if they're not, then it's catastrophe. But at least we fulfilled our part of the bargain where we really tried to warn everybody.

Agreed.

You got anything else?

No.

If you will indulge me, I would like to plug The End of the world with Josh Clark. The what? The end of the World with Josh Clark. If thinking about things in far deep time in the future of humanity and all that stuff floated your boat, I would recommend my little podcast series, The End of the World with.

Josh Clark. For sure. This is right up your alley.

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