Michelle Thaller

Thaller argued that no one yet knows what time fundamentally is and that answering this would require a new revolution in physics.

“I don't think we have an answer to what time is. What are we measuring? I think right there, I think you're asking for the next revolution in physics that we don't have yet”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 28:52

Thaller said astronauts spending a year on the space station return about one hundredth of a second younger due to motion-based time dilation.

“If you are on the space station for a year, you come back about one one-hundredth of a second younger than you should be”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 22:32

Thaller said that without correcting for relativistic time effects, GPS positions would drift about six miles in a single day.

“if we didn't take into account the time difference these things are in, that we'd be about six miles off. I mean, in a single day”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 20:58

Thaller said psilocybin should be an optional therapy for grief, reflecting on her husband's death.

“But I thought it should be a therapy, an optional therapy,”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 2:13:27

Thaller said she is not willing to dismiss people reporting alien or spiritual experiences as mentally ill, but science requires reproducible evidence beyond individual experience.

“no, I'm not willing to dismiss them as being mentally ill necessarily. I honestly don't know what it is, the experience”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 2:00:52

Thaller said NASA scientists universally believe life exists elsewhere, finding life only on Earth untenable.

“All of us to a person at NASA thinks that there must be life out there. The idea that there's only life on the Earth seems untenable”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 2:00:10

Thaller said the first hard chemical evidence of life beyond Earth may come from a planet around another star rather than Mars or outer-planet moons.

“I would never have thought the first evidence of life outside the Earth, like a really hard chemical scientific evidence, would be on a planet around another star”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 14:48

Thaller said NASA hopes to launch the Dragonfly mission to Titan around 2028, with a six-to-seven-year journey.

“NASA's hoping to launch a new mission to one of the moons of Saturn, hopefully in like 2028”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 10:26

Thaller said the Bennu sample contained all nucleobases of DNA and RNA, which she argued is not a coincidence for life's chemistry.

“all of the nucleobases of our DNA, not just little molecules, the letters of our DNA and our RNA are in that sample. We don't think that's a coincidence”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 2:30:41

Thaller said quantum computing may force people to confront how different reality is from what human senses perceive.

“I wonder if quantum computing is going to have us really have to confront what reality is, how different reality is from how our senses tell us it is”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 2:23:46

Thaller said she does not believe current models of the earliest moments of the Big Bang are literally correct, because gravity and quantum mechanics are not yet reconciled.

“Do I think this is right, literally? No. I think we've got a lot to understand about how gravity works in high-density situations”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 1:51:29

Thaller suggested gravitational waves might eventually allow scientists to observe the universe beyond the point where it is opaque to light, possibly back to the Big Bang.

“Waves in space and time itself might be the way we can see even farther back into the universe”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 1:34:29

Thaller said Webb's little red dots may be black holes surrounded by pseudo-stars, seeds of supermassive black holes, an explanation that fits the data well.

“at the moment, it's one of the best explanations we have. And it fits the data quite well”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 1:18:27

Thaller said current models of dense matter fail to predict observed neutron star sizes, implying new physics is needed.

“pretty much every model so far doesn't match what we actually measure from these things. We cannot describe them yet. We need better physics”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 1:14:17

Thaller said instantaneous communication via entanglement, as depicted in The Three-Body Problem, could be theoretically possible.

“I mean, that's fantastic science. And as far as I can tell, that could be theoretically possible”

The Joe Rogan Experience: #2506 - Michelle Thaller (May 28, 2026) · Listen from 35:05