Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2363 - David Kipping
Uploaded: 2025-08-09T17:00:41.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2363 - David Kipping' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2363 - David Kipping' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-09. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2363 - David Kipping

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
What's up, man?
How are you?
Pleasure to meet you, sir.
Pleasure to be here.
Thanks, Joe.
I really enjoy your content online.
It's been really fascinating.
So I've been doing a deep dive into a lot of your videos over the last few days
and enjoying
the hell out of it and particularly enjoying, I wanted to talk to you about so
many different
things, but one of the most pressing things, one of the reasons why I wanted to
bring you
in, because you are very knowledgeable in all things space, is the James Webb
telescope and
all the different stuff that they've been finding, particularly about these
galaxies that were
formed very shortly after, not shortly, not within our lifetime shortly, but
cosmologically
shortly after the Big Bang, that it seems like we have to figure out why these
things are
forming.
Is the universe older?
There's all this different kind of speculation.
Maybe the Big Bang is not 13 point whatever billion years old, but maybe 22, 24.
Like, what is your take on all this?
Yeah, the James Webb telescope is such an incredible instrument.
The data has just blown us away.
You know, when you build this thing and you look at it unfolding in space, you
think there's
so many ways it could go wrong that we all were just like, you know, this thing
was 215 moving
parts or something had to unfold.
So, you know, just the fact that it just all worked was just remarkable.
And then when we got those first images, they just kind of blew us away as well,
because
we had sort of these engineering expectations of what it would do, but the data
was just
even better than that.
So when it, you know, of course, the first thing you want to do is point it to
the most
distant part of the universe and see what's out there in those darkest patches.
And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things.
It started finding quasars, which are kind of the center of these very active
galaxies.
These are supermassive black holes that have loads of crap falling in, and they're
spewing
out all this energy, they're kind of feeding supermassive black holes.
And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe
should be able
to build them, because to make a supermassive black hole means things like a
hundred million
solar masses.
Imagine that, a hundred million suns have not only been born, but died, gone
through their
entire life cycle, died, collapsed into a black hole.
And then those black holes have presumably somehow merged together into this
super behemoth of
this hundred million solar mass thing.
So we're finding those just, you know, 300 million years after the Big Bang.
And that was like, hold on, that doesn't make any sense.
Like, how can this be?
And similarly with the galaxies, we were seeing these images, these galaxies,
and you can date
roughly how old they should be based off the redshift.
So, you know, the universe is expanding.
So therefore, if something is very far away from us and the universe is
expanding, its light
gets stretched more and more and more as it journeys over space.
And so we can use that redshift to kind of date how old these things are.
When we use those dates, we look at these images, again, they seem suspiciously
too old.
You know, you really shouldn't be able to form these things that early on in
the universe.
And so that kind of puzzled us.
I think for the galaxy thing, there was a bit of a resolution there.
One of the resolutions is that we probably miscalculated how easy it is to form
these galaxies in the first place.
So we had these models for galaxy formation.
We had these models for how stars should form, how quickly they should live.
But it was all essentially calibrated on what we see around us, like right here
in this part of the universe, in the local universe.
And then we kind of realized that those same models probably need to be tweaked
if you're going to apply them to the early universe,
where the density is so much higher, the gas temperature is much hotter.
Everything's just, you know, completely different in the early universe.
So when you kind of make those corrections, it actually looks like maybe it's
actually possible to make those galaxies earlier than we thought.
So I think the galaxy problem is a bit easier to explain.
I think the quasar problem to me is more interesting.
How do you get those supermassive black holes so early?
There's a certain kind of maximum rate you can feed these things called the Eddington
limit.
And that's sort of you throw mass into a black hole and so much energy is going
in, some of it spews back out.
And the energy which spews back out stops other stuff coming in, right?
So there's a maximum limit.
You can't build a black hole faster, in principle, than this Eddington limit.
And yet, when you do the calculation, these black holes must have been fed what
we call super Eddington, so faster than Eddington.
So something's wrong with our models, right?
Either we've got the universe age wrong, which I think is possible, but I would
say that's probably a much less likely solution,
or we've got the astrophysics wrong.
Why do you think that the universe's age is a less likely solution?
Because we've got this, you know, like in particle physics, we've got the
standard model,
which includes all the particles and the electron, the baryons, all these kind
of stuff.
And in cosmology, we have a similar kind of model.
It's called lambda CDM.
And so the lambda stands for dark energy, and the CDM is cold dark matter.
So this is our standard model, and we have used it to explain so much stuff in
the universe, Joe.
I mean, we're talking about the cosmet microwave background, oscillations in
the skull, it's baryonic acoustic oscillations, the stretching in the universe,
Cepheids.
You can use it to explain so much stuff, and it works beautifully.
I mean, it works down to like the 0.01% level.
So if you say the universe's age is wrong, you have to give that up.
So maybe it is wrong, but if you give that up, you have to come up with a
radical new idea,
which can now explain all of this stuff at that same level of precision.
The much more likely answer in my book is that astrophysics, like the gas swirling
around, the plasma colliding with each other,
that's just more complicated in my mind than the natural model of just the
simple expansion of the universe,
which actually is a fairly simple geometric model.
Fairly simple in that you can use whatever methods that we're using currently
to measure everything that's out there,
and it makes sense.
Yeah.
But if we're using something like the James Webb telescope, so we're getting a
much deeper view of the universe,
how limited is the James Webb in comparison to James Webb 2.0, 3.0?
Like, are we going to have to continually revamp what our understanding of this
process is?
Yes, we will.
That's exciting.
That's what I love, right?
That's what scientists love.
Every time we've built a telescope that is, you know, 10 times more precise
than the last thing,
every time we've done that, we have been surprised.
And so these early galaxies are a good example.
The cosmological experiments that are going on now, one of the big, like,
surprises is this thing called the Hubble Tension.
Have you heard of that?
Hubble Tension?
So Hubble Tension is measuring the expansion rate of the universe, how fast are
things flying apart.
And you can do it two ways.
You can use the cosmic microwave backgrounds.
That's the earliest radiation that we can detect.
This is that stuff that's about three Kelvin warm.
You can detect in the microwave.
And this is the light which has traveled basically when the universe was 380,000
years old.
It's that light, and we see it in all directions.
That's how we know the Big Bang kind of didn't happen in one place.
It happened everywhere because you just see this light coming in from all
directions.
And from studying that radiation, you can kind of get a model of the universe,
and then you can calculate using this model how fast should the universe be
expanding today if I run the clock forward.
And you get a number.
And then if you do that same experiment but locally, you actually measure the
stars.
You measure the supernovae around us, these pulsating stars, and you actually
measure how fast is stuff expanding, you get a different number.
They don't line up.
And so this is really weird.
And so somehow something's wrong, right?
Either our measurements of the local universe must be wrong in some way, or
this model that we're using to calculate the whole history of the universe,
something is wrong with that model.
So this is a very famous growing problem in cosmology.
It's now what we call a five sigma level.
So that means the chance of this being random is just, like, zero, essentially.
It's just this is a real effect.
And now we just have to figure out who's wrong.
Is it the observers or is it the theorists?
Wow.
It's an exciting time.
Where do you fall on this?
Yeah, it's hard.
I go, I swing between both ways, you know.
I'll talk to my cosmology colleagues, and they'll, you know, depending on who I
talk to, they'll convince me either way.
So I think the—
That's disturbing that people are convinced.
You know, if these new telescopes keep showing us this new puzzle, it's kind of—it
always bothers me when someone is, like, rigidly convinced.
Everyone has a certain pet theory, right?
They're trying to push.
Yeah, I mean, we all have biases, right?
Human beings.
Yeah, I mean, if you've spent—it's hard, right?
If you've spent 20 years of your life, you know, most of your academic career,
studying this one thing, it's really hard to turn around and say, you know what?
I screwed up, right?
The last 20 years of measurements, they were all wrong, and I have to eat
humble pie.
That's not easy.
But it has happened in some cases.
One of my favorite stories about this is the first exit planet that was ever
claimed, a planet around another star, one of the first ones.
It was wrong.
So it was a pulsar that had a planet, a supposed planet around it, on a six-month
orbital period.
So exactly half the Earth's orbital period around the Sun.
And they saw this signal in their data, this pulsating star was doing something
weird, and they figured out there was a six-month period around it.
So the dude published this paper, Matthew Bales, brilliant astronomer, and he
realized later on it was wrong.
And instead of it being a real planet, he hadn't quite corrected the orbital
eccentricity of the Earth.
So the Earth is not on a circular orbit.
Its eccentricity is 0.0167.
It's a tiny number.
But that number hadn't been accounted for in the calculation.
And so he had to stand up in front of hundreds of astronomers at this famous IAU
meeting, and he admitted he was wrong.
And he got a standing ovation.
Oh, good for him.
It's awesome.
It's one of the few times I've heard someone doing that, and I think it's dope.
I think we need to encourage people to concede that.
Well, with something that's so massive and is such a puzzle, this is just bound
to happen.
If you get people that are rigidly attached to their belief systems in terms of,
like, a very limited understanding of a fantastic thing that is almost beyond
imagination when you think about the sheer size of the universe and the age of
the universe.
I mean, when we're talking about aging, when we say 13 billion or 22 billion,
those numbers don't even register in your mind.
They're not real.
You know what I mean?
It's like you see a one and a three and you kind of get it, but you don't get
it.
There's no way.
Intuitive.
No, it's not possible for our puny little minds to imagine 13 plus billion
years.
It's just too crazy.
So if you're rigid with that, like, God, man.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, part of the journey of being a scientist is knowing what your own
biases are.
And I remember, you know, one of my threads of my caree