Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2318 - Harold "Sonny" White
Uploaded: 2025-05-08T17:00:51.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2318 - Harold "Sonny" White' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2318 - Harold "Sonny" White' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2318 - Harold "Sonny" White

Joe Rogan Podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day. Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day.
What's happening? No worries, sir.
Hey, how's it going, Joe?
Pleasure to meet you.
Yeah, thank you for having me here today. I appreciate it.
My pleasure. Well, as soon as I saw the subject, I was like, oh yeah. Like,
what are you doing?
Right, right, right. Advanced Power and Propulsion. Kind of been a passion of
mine for the last 20-some-odd years.
I suppose if I kind of look back through the annals of my life, right, I've
been thinking about Advanced Power and Propulsion ever since I was a teenager.
What do you think inspired that? Was it space missions? Did you look at it and
go, I think we can do better? Like, what was it?
Well, you know, I grew up in Washington, D.C., and so I got a chance to spend a
lot of time in the air and space Smithsonian.
I don't know if you've ever had a chance to go to that.
Growing up in D.C., getting a chance to go to the air and space Smithsonian, I
got to see all these awesome examples of people working together to try and
accomplish amazing things, right?
And, you know, you might walk into the air and space Smithsonian and you just
think about, wow, this is full of a bunch of stuff, but it's not just about the
stuff, right?
It's about the people that worked together to do all these amazing things,
right?
Like the Bell X-1 rocket.
I mean, if you really want to go back, the Wright Flyer, right, that's
something where two guys worked together that made bicycles for a living that
decided to go create something that flew.
And then in less than 50, you know, 50, 60 years from when they flew that
Wright Flyer, right, were putting human beings on the surface of the moon.
And so all that really resonated with me as a kid and I think tended to make me
gravitate towards a technical field, although it wasn't a straight line, right?
I'd like to say, you know, I knew at an early age what my calling was and what
I was going to do.
But I bounced around for a little bit until I finally got on a path that, you
know, I really connected with.
And so I think I knew very early on in my journey in university, right, when I
was going and getting my degree, that I wanted to work in advanced power and
propulsion.
And so at that point, everything I did kind of worked towards how do I get the
skills, how do I get the math and physics training that helps me kind of work
in this domain?
Because I was thinking about the idea of space warps very early on, right?
It's amazing that you were so focused so early.
What a great head start, you know?
It's a huge advantage to know what you're really interested in at such an early
age.
Well, there were a few speed bumps along the way.
We took a few detours like any human, right?
You're like, I don't know if I want to do this yet, right?
Well, it is pretty extraordinary if you look at that number that you said, like
from Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright to space travel, like how quick that is.
I mean, and we think about in terms of ancient history, how long it took us to
get to this point and that kind of acceleration so rapidly inside of a lifetime
to see just world-changing events and the internet all happening simultaneously,
right?
Absolutely.
You know, there's another interesting story, right?
So my background is I've got a Ph.D. in physics and a master's in mechanical
engineering, so I'm both a scientist and an engineer.
So I have, you know, deep appreciation for both disciplines.
But within the discipline of science, right?
You know, we just talked about the Wright-Flyer and then going to the surface
of the moon, and that's more of a kind of an engineering story.
On the topic of science, you know, think about E equals mc squared.
You've probably heard that or saw it on a coffee cup.
I don't really honestly know what it means.
It's a theory of relativity.
It's theory of relativity.
I could say it to people like, come on, man.
Right, E equals mc squared.
You actually need to actually explain it.
What is the theory of relativity?
So E equals mc squared, right, is an equation that relates energy to mass.
If you were to take some modest piece of mass, say you've got some tidbits here,
the mass that's in this pen right here.
If you take the mass that's in this pen and you convert it to energy, that
equation helps you understand exactly how much energy you can potentially
release.
And so that equation, why it might sound very humble, right, oh, E equals mc
squared, that's cool, but it had super big implications.
And you just talked about how quickly things move.
So let's talk about that for just a second.
E equals mc squared.
Einstein comes up with this equation, 1911.
Somebody will look it up on the Internet and correct me if I'm wrong.
Comes up with the equation in 1911.
They split the first atom in 1928, 1932 time frame.
I can't remember the exact time frame.
In 1942, we had the first nuclear reactor underneath the squash court at
University of Chicago.
They did things very differently in the 1940s, Joe.
Under a squash court?
Yeah, right.
Did they let the people playing squash know?
Who knows, right?
What happened to them?
Are they X-Men now?
Yeah, right, exactly.
That's the origin story.
That's the Spider-Man origin story, right?
Yeah.
That's where Phoenix came from.
Yeah, your friends tell you, I think I can hear the color blue now, right?
Yeah, so anyway, I had the first nuclear reactor underneath the squash court in
1942, and then the Trinity test.
That's the atomic bomb test in 1945.
And so in the span of just a few decades, we go from a cute coffee cup worthy
equation to a paradigm shift in human existence, right?
And that's without computers in the way we think of it.
That's without machine learning and without AI.
And so as we continue to move forward, right, we've got, you know, if you think
about everything we know in physics today, general relativity and quantum
mechanics are kind of the two bookends of everything that we know.
We're going to continue to expand our knowledge and we will come up with new E
equals MC squared kind of equations.
But now we're equipped with computers, we're equipped with machine learning, AI,
and so it's going to be exponential growth, right?
So it'll be interesting to see how quickly we go from, hey, I have this new
insight, found this funny thing in a lab to, wow, it changes everything, how we
do everything as a culture and community, right?
So there's several problems with the current propulsion systems, right?
And the big one is like biological entities being able to absorb G-force, right?
No matter if you super hyperengineer something and have it really crazy.
But the things that we're seeing in the sky, the things that people describe,
like Commander David Fravor, when he described that tic-tac, that vehicle, that
thing, whatever it was,
that went from above 50,000 feet to sea level in a second and shot off at
insane rates and speeds, biological entities can't survive that kind of G-force,
we think.
Yeah.
So I think in terms of a human ability to take Gs.
Yeah, I should say human, not like tardigrades could.
Right, right.
Right.
Yeah, so a human being can, well, trained human beings can take potentially up
to nine Gs.
Have you ever done that before?
I have not.
I did it once with the Blue Angels.
Yeah.
I got to seven and a half Gs.
It was bananas.
That's awesome.
You have to force.
I bet that was an experience, man.
Oh, it was.
Oh, my.
I am so jealous.
Mad respect for those guys.
Mad respect for those guys.
Yeah, yeah.
First of all, the biggest thing when you go to that area, like, these guys are
jacked.
They're in, like, insane shape because you're literally forcing blood into your
brain to
tolerate the G-force.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So they have to hold on to their stick, their, you know, their joystick, and
they're going
hoop, hoop, hoop, while they're flying, you know, through the canyons.
It's bananas.
Yeah.
Like, extraordinary.
Yeah.
So imagine a person being able to tolerate that on a regular basis and perform
fine motor
skill functions, like, you know, pointing and aiming and shooting and all the
crazy stuff
that those guys are capable of doing.
Being able to think, and in some cases, if they're in combat, being able to
make critical
decisions.
Oh, yeah.
In some ways, what you're talking about, when you look at NASA's astronaut
corps, right,
as part of their regimen, they have to go up in T-38s on a regular basis to try
and help
train with the whole, how do you make decisions, right, when your life is on
the line and the
time is finite, right?
So there's a whole aspect of this that's kind of geared towards keeping those
portions
of the brain trained and sharp, right?
Right, which is the best argument for AI taking over.
So when you hear about stories about these fighter pilots finding these objects
in the sky that
exhibit extraordinary capabilities and don't have all the signatures of
traditional propulsion
systems, what is your thoughts?
Generally, I tend to be agnostic to the topic.
I have a lot of friends that are extremely interested in a lot of things that
are out and about in
the media and in the literature.
But generally, I tend to be agnostic.
And here's why.
In everything that's currently out that people talk about and highlight, it's
difficult for
me to take the data and the evidence and then pull that into the work that we
do in the lab
with some of the different test devices we work with as we kind of explore the
frontiers
of where physics and propulsion might intersect.
It's hard to take that and turn that into some kind of an action plan, if you
will.
So I'm certainly aware, like David Fravor, the experience that he had with, I
think he
calls them Tic Tacs, right?
An amazing account.
And there's multiple people that saw it, multiple platforms that saw it.
And so to start with, right, I thought maybe there was a small chance that was
just like
we have stealth technology, right?
Where if you want to hide a plane, what if we had the ability to project
something, right,
through some mechanism where we could make people go where we wanted them to go,
right?
Because I know there is a technology that uses like two different lasers that
triangulate
a certain point in open air, and they put enough energy into a particular
location that they ionize
the air, and so it creates like a bright pixel.
And so they use that to create three-dimensional displays that kind of look
like they're just
floating out in air.
Now, they're not quite as big as what we saw described with the Nimitz
encounter on the
West Coast.
So I thought for a little while, maybe that might be something that we're
seeing.
They can project plasma as well, right?
Is that the same thing?
It's the same thing, right?
So the two lasers intersect, they ionize the air, which creates a plasma.
And they can do this over long distances as well, right?
I don't know about long distances.
I know they can do it over short distances.
Okay.
And so for a while there, I wondered if that might be something that could
explain some
of what...
That makes sense.
...what David Fravor and the group saw.
The only problem would be the radar, because I don't know...you wouldn't pick
up that on
radar, would you?
Because it's not a mass, right?
So, well, the plasma would certainly absorb a radar signal, right?
Because it's going to polarize any electromagnetic wave that tries to go
through it.
So it would show up?
It might.
It might.
It might.
Would it be possible to make something that big that's 20 feet long out of that?
It's hard for me to imagine that.
Right.
But so I think there's one piece of data that just came out in the last few
weeks.
I think David Fravor's wingman, Alex, I think her name is Alex Dietrich.
I can't remember the name.
I think you're right.
Something like that.
So she came out.
And so in all the things associated with that particular encounter, right, one
of the things
I've been trying to figure out is 