Latest / Drawn of History / Joe Rogan Experience _1428 - Brian Greene(M4A_128K)

Transcript

Joe Rogan Experience _1428 - Brian Greene(M4A_128K) · Drawn of History

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Three, two, one. Brian Green, ladies and gentlemen. How are you, sir? Good.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Thank you. How are you? Thanks for doing this, man.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: It's my pleasure.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: I've enjoyed your work for many, many, many years. So
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: I really appreciate you coming in here.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: And like I was telling you, I just started your
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: new book.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: And how's it going?
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: It's going well. It hasn't confused the shit out of
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: me yet, but I know it's coming.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: It will be coming.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: No doubt.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: No doubt.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: With all your work. So the beginning of time, the
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: beginning of the universe to the end, that's essentially what you're.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the backdrop to the entire narrative of the book.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: I basically want the reader to get a feel for
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: the whole thing, how it started, how things like you
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: and me rise up, how consciousness emerges, issues of free
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: will and whether we have it, and then on to
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: the future, what's going to happen to us and the
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: world and the universe as time elapses to the far,
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: far future.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: I'm just getting to the part where you're talking about
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: how entropy and evolution sort of co-mingle to create life.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: And when you think of entropy, a lot of people
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: think of something dissolving into chaos.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: But that's not necessarily the case.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: It's only part of the story. I mean, entropy kind
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: of gets a bad rap, right? It's the thing that
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: you want to avoid, but somehow the laws of physics
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: don't allow you to avoid it. It's this disintegration. It's
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: this decay. It's this drive toward disorder. And that's kind
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: of true. But the reality of the situation is more
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: subtle because overall, entropy needs to go up. But that
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: doesn't mean there can't be little pockets of order that
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: form along the way. And in fact, the universe is
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: incredibly clever. Stars, the ubiquitous feature of the heavens, they
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: are pockets of order that naturally form. But as they form,
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: they increase the entropy in the surroundings. So the net
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: entropy goes up. even though this beautiful, orderly, bright object
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: in the sky appears. And it's only because of the
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: appearance of stars that the universe is an interesting place.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: Without stars, the particles of the universe would just disperse.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: The universe would get bigger and bigger, colder and colder,
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: and that would be it. There wouldn't be any structure
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: in the universe if it wasn't for the force of gravity.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Stars themselves, just the fact that they exist, is very strange,
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: that you have this thing of... And ours is fairly small, right?
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: It's a million times larger than Earth. Yeah. And it's
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: going to burn for billions of years. And it's just
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: hovering there. Yeah. And it creates all the life. Yeah.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: Literally is responsible for all the life.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: And when they supernova, that creates the actual ingredients. for life,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: which is even more strange. You can't have biological carbon-based
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: life if it's not for a star exploding.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we often, in a poetic way, say
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: that we are made of star stuff. I guess that
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: was Carl Sagan. But you can also say that we
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: are made of nuclear refuse, right? We are the detritus,
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: that the death throes of a star... puts out into
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: the universe and it rains down on planets and at
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: least on one such planet, that stuff comes together and
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: yields life. So it is a cycle. I mean, I
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: don't want to sound like the lion King here, but
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: you know, that's really what it is.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: Well, what I'm so interested about in getting into your
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: book is the fact that you are sort of detailing
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: all these steps that, that have to take place in
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: order for all this life, in order for this universe
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: to be what it is and then where it's going
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: to go.
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And, um, The remarkable thing and sort of
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: the main point at some level is that, look, we're
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: special entities. We can think. We can reflect. We have emotions.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: But ultimately, you and I and everybody else, we're just
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: bags of particles that are governed by physical law. And
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: so there's this continuity between the stuff of the world,
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: the inanimate stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff of
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: the heavens, and us. We all come from the same
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: fundamental ingredients and the same fundamental laws. Now, some people
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: find that that gives them, I don't know, a sense
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: of desperation, a sense that we're not special, a sense
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: that somehow the universe is pointless or meaningless. But, you know,
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: my view on this is it's spectacular that we're made
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: of the same stuff that makes up this bottle of
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: water or any of the wonderful little statues you have
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: on this desk. Because that means that how remarkable that
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: collections of particles can do what we do. And I
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: think that's really the way of looking at the continuity.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: We don't need to be endowed with some special quality
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: by some external entity. You don't need that. Particles can
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: do miraculous things. And that is the message that I
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: think you can draw from a more complete understanding of
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: where we came from and where we're going.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: The fear of death and the attitude of the finite
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: life being insignificant, that like, what is the point? This
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: sort of existential angst that many of us struggle with, right?
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: That's something that you touch upon really early on, that
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: this thing that makes us unique is that we know
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: that we're going to die.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. That to me is the vital distinguishing feature
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: of our species. You know, we can... reflect on the past,
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: we can think about the future and recognize that we're
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: not going to be here in the future, at least
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: for some period of time. And it's an idea, and
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: it's powerful, motivating influence is one that has been explored
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: throughout the ages. Otto Ranke, who was one of the
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: early disciples of Freud, who ultimately broke with Freud, developed
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: this thesis that that our awareness of our own mortality
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: is one of the driving factors in what we do.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: And then when I was, I don't know, I was
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: a guy named Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. I
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: don't know if you've ever heard of this book. It
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: was big in the 70s and won actually the Pulitzer
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Prize in the 70s. And it's a wonderful distillation of
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: this way of thinking about why we humans do what
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: we do. And in many ways, in my own book,
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: the one that's coming out actually today, Until the End
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: of Time, it's extending this notion that Becker developed in
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: Denial of Death but now seeing it in a cosmological
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: setting because it's not just we that are going to die.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: It's every structure in the universe is going to disintegrate
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: in time. Our best theory suggests to us that even protons,
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: the very heart of matter, there are quantum processes that
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: in the far future will ensure that every proton disintegrates,
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: falls apart into its constituent particles. And at that point,
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: there's no complex matter around at all.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: What timeline are we talking about here?
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: Well, pretty big, long timeline. In fact, I like to
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: use a metaphor to try to give you a feel
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: for the times involved. I like to use the Empire
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: State Building. And imagine that every floor of the Empire
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: State Building represents a duration 10 times that of the
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: previous floor. So like on the ground floor, it's like
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: one year. First floor, 10 years. Second floor, 100 and
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: so forth. So you're going exponentially far in time as
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: you climb up the Empire State Building. And in that
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: scheme of things, everything from the Big Bang until today,
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: you're about at the 10th floor, 10 to the 10 years,
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: 10 billion years. And as you go forward, you are
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: looking at things very far in the future. And to
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: answer your question, we think, and I underscore think because
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: we're now at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas,
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: protons will decay roughly in, say, by the 38th floor.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: So 10 to the 38 years into the future.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: So we can relax for a little bit.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: You can relax for a little bit. But here's the thing.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: The amazing thing, obviously, is it sounds trite, but time
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: is relative, right? So any duration that seems long, it's
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: only long by comparison to another duration. And on, say,
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: the scale of the entire empire state building up to, say,
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: 10 to the 100 years into the future, which is
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: what the peak would represent, 10 to the 38 years
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: is like less than a blink of an eye. I mean,
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: it's nothing on those scales. So, you sort of have
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: to be careful with your intuition if you're willing to
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: entertain the kind of fantastically long timescales that you necessarily
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: need to if you're going to think about the very
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: far future.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: Is there speculation as to what happens when protons do
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: cease to exist?
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah. We anticipate that all complex structure will fall apart. So,
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: If there are any stars left over, we believe that
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: by the 14th floor, most stars will have used up
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: their nuclear fuel. There'll be dark embers just sort of,
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: you know, smoky out there in the cosmos. But if
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: they're still hovering around by the 38th floor, they will
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: all just dissipate into their particulate ingredients. So it's hard
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: to imagine. past, say, floor 38, that there's going to
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: be any life or any mind or any complex astronomical
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: structures out there in the universe. So the window within
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: which the universe as we know it exists is kind
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: of small when you think about it in terms of
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: the entire cosmic timeline.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: So impossible to understand the actual span of it because
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: it is so long but yet so small, like in
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: the human mind. Yeah.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: It's very hard to hold these durations in mind. I mean,
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: I don't feel like I... I've been thinking about this
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: stuff for a long time. I don't feel like I
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: have an intuition for the durations that we are talking about.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: In fact, the Empire State Building, that little analogy helps
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: me to sort of give some relative sense of when things...
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: of interest will happen in the universe. But, you know,
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: we're good at understanding days, weeks, months, years, the times of,
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: you know, conventional experience. We have no basis for understanding
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: the universe over these scales that we've never experienced. You know,
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: and that's true not only for time, it's also for space, right?
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: We have very good intuition about everyday phenomenon. I mean,
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: if I was to take this bottle of water and
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: I throw it at you, you'd catch it. You know
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: where to put your hand. You wouldn't have to calculate
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: its Newtonian trajectory to figure out where the water is going.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: But if I was to do the same thing with electrons,
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: you don't have, and neither do I, a quantum intuition
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: about the wave functions and the probabilities that govern how
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: a particle-like electron behaves. And that's simply because we were
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: unfortunately or fortunately born as big creatures relative to the
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: scales of quantum mechanics. And because of that, our intuition
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: was never under any evolutionary pressure to understand how electrons behave.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: In fact, I like to say those of our forebears
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: wandering around the African savannah who started to think about
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: electrons and quantum mechanics, they got eaten, right? They're the
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: ones whose genes didn't propagate onward. And therefore, those of
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: us who are the beneficiaries of The survival of our ancestors,
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: we're good at understanding Newtonian physics, but we're not good
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: at understanding anything else about the deep reality of the world.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: Do you anticipate that someday in the future, whatever is
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: next after human beings will be able to understand these concepts?
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Because if you stop and think about what a human is,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: we've only really been this for X amount of 100,000 years.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: That's right. And it's a good question, and it's a
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: tough one. I like to imagine... that as we get
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: ever better at creating virtual worlds, virtual reality or whatever,
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: augmented reality, whatever version of that kind of technology takes
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: over in the far future, we might be able to
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: experience these distinct realms in such a powerful way that
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: our innate intuition may begin to shift, to change, so
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: that we grasp the quantum realm, the way we grasp
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: Newtonian physics. I can at least imagine that as a possibility.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: What it would take to actually get there and whether
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: our species will ever last long enough to actually have
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: that kind of an impact on our intuition, I don't know.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: But it's all about experience and survival. We have been
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: programmed by evolution not to understand the true nature of
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: the world. We've been programmed by evolution to survive. And
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: those are two radically different propositions because you don't need
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: to know the true nature of reality to survive. It's
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: a distinct attribute and one that is not necessarily one
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: that has any survival value to understand black holes or
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: the Big Bang or general relativity or quantum mechanics or
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: entropy or thermodynamics. These qualities we develop as we go
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: forward and try to understand the world go beyond mere
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: survival and figure out things that excite us. But it's
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: not something which obviously has any survival value.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: It may someday. It may. What's interesting is also how
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: relatively recently people have been pondering these ideas in a
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: sort of a quantifiable way where you can write things
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: down and sort of express it with other scientists and
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: try to figure out who's right and who's wrong in
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: terms of these calculations. But human beings... I mean, when
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: did we really start pondering the scope of the universe?
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: Pretty recently. I mean, if you think about the beginnings
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: of modern physics, you know, you can start with Galileo,
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: you can start with Newton, but in any event, we're
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: talking on the order of hundreds of years. And the
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: amazing thing, in hundreds of years, we've gone from a
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: complete lack of understanding about how anything in the world
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: actually works to to the development of Newton's equations where
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: you can make fantastically accurate predictions about solar eclipses or
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: lunar eclipses or motions of the planets and so on.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: And then, you know, a couple hundred years after that,
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: we migrate from that understanding, which is basically an encapsulation
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: of the patterns that we can all discern with the
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: naked eye. We develop a whole new body of physical
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: law called quantum mechanics, which is so completely counterintuitive which
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: describes the world in terms of qualities that we don't
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: ever see with the naked eye, but nevertheless, we can
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: use the math to make predictions, and the predictions are
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: borne out by experiment. And that progression only took, say,
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: a couple hundred years. And that's where we've gotten. So
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: it's kind of spectacular that, you know, we beings who
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: are just coming of age here in the Milky Way
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: galaxy can sit down with a piece of paper and
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: a calculation, a pencil, and we can figure out magnetic
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: properties of particles like electrons to 10 decimal places. That's shocking.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's stunning. And it's something that I think
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: all of us should be very proud of that our
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: species has been able to accomplish that.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Somehow or another, I don't think I'm responsible. I don't
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: feel proud. I don't feel like any of my people
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: were involved.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: You've contributed your part. No, it really is a collective effort.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: That's the beauty of science. In the end of the day,
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: it's not that most scientists are ever going to be remembered.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: You stop someone in the street and ask them to
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: name a scientist. Yeah, they may say Hawking. They may
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: say Einstein. That's kind of it, I think, for most people.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: And I don't think that's a bad thing per se
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: because it's not about the personalities or the people that
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: have pushed the frontiers of understanding. It's the fact that
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: we've got this body of insight that continues to grow
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: and continues to allow us to manipulate and understand the
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: natural world. And I think that's really what it's all about.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Don't you think that there are some personalities like yourself,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: like Feynman, like, I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson, that because
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: of their personality, because they're sort of charismatic people, it
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: actually makes more people intrigued about these possibilities and makes
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: more people attracted to the ideas.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no doubt. And I think that's a... That's a
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: vital point because without that impetus from outside the traditional
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: educational system, I don't think we would have the kind
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: of interest in science that I can feel growing in
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: the world around us. I mean, the unfortunate thing in
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: the educational system is that we teach toward examination. We
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: teach toward assessment. And if you want to figure out
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: how to flatten a kid's interest in these ideas— just
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: teach them stuff and tell them you're going to be
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: tested on this on Tuesday. You're going to have to
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: spit out, you know, everything that you've learned. So I
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: find it kind of heartbreaking the way in which so
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: much intrinsic interest in these ideas that you can see
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: at a five or six year old, right? I mean,
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: I like to say we begin as little scientists. We're
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: exploring the world. We're trying to figure things out. And
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: then we go into the educational system. And it's not
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: by malice. It's just by the nature of how we
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: teach in the in the current approach to educational philosophy,
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: that so many kids wind up seeing these ideas as
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: a burden. I don't want to have to spend time
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: learning about parts of the cell or how to balance reactions.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: I see it with my own kids. I've got a
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: 15-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, and all they are
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: motivated by is next Wednesday's quiz. And I'm like, hey,
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: these ideas are They're kind of exciting. They're kind of wonderful. Like, no, no, dad, dad, dad.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: I just want to know enough so I can do
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: well on the quiz. And once the quiz is over,
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: they just sort of leave the ideas behind.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: When did these ideas become attractive to you?
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: Well, I was, I don't know, not unusual for a scientist,
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: but unusual, I think, in the spectrum of kids in
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: the world because at five or six years old, I
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: was just captivated by mathematics.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: Really? Yeah. Five or six?
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: Definitely, yeah. My dad... My dad was not an academic.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: My dad was a composer. He was a vaudevillian. He
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: was a comedian. You know, he would, in the early days,
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: would go around the country and with a harmonica group
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: and a stage show, that's what he did. You know,
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: he liked to say that he was an SPHD, a
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: Seward Park High School dropout. You know, so at 10th grade,
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: he just hit the road. But he loved music. scientific ideas.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: So he taught me the basics of arithmetic when I
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: was about five years old. And then I would ask
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: him to set me problems. And he'd give me these
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: 30-digit numbers by 30-digit numbers. I'd write them out on
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: big construction paper. And I'd spend the weekend just calculating
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: away on these huge arithmetical problems of no interest to
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: anybody on planet Earth. But to me, the fact that
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: you could learn a little piece of math and then
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: do something that nobody had ever done before, that was
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: exciting to me as a kid, and that's really what
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: got me going.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: So you chose the right path, clearly. Yeah, you know.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: Your personality, whatever it is that attracted you to those ideas.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: Well, you always wonder about that. I don't know if
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: you wonder. You know, I always wonder, how can you not?
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: What would have happened if X would have transpired instead
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: of Y? In fact, I have to say, when I
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: graduated college... I had sort of a period of, I
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: don't know, depression is too strong a word for it,
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: but a period of what have I done? I went
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: to college. I could have studied all the great ideas
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: of the world, and all I did was get a
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: technical education where I could solve Schrodinger's equations. and solve
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: Einstein's equations, and I felt like, wow, have I just
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: squandered the greatest educational opportunity that one could have ever
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: had because I was so completely focused on just trying
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: to understand physics and mathematics.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: How'd you get past that?
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: Well, I was lucky. I was given a second chance.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: I won a scholarship to go to England, to Oxford.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: And ostensibly, it was to study physics. But when I
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: got there, I realized that I was completely free to
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: do whatever I wanted to do at that point. And
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: so I took a year to study literature. I went
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: to the physics classes. So I was sort of showing up.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: But I wasn't focused on it at all. And instead,
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: I was focused. I got a, you know, in England,
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: it's a tutorial system. So I got a tutor, which
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: is somebody at the college that sets you assignments and
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: you write papers. You literally go in and you read
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: your paper out loud. It's not something where you just
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: turn it in and it gets graded. So it's a
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: very personal experience. You write something and you're actually delivering
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: it to this individual that is going to help you
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: in your educational journey. And so that's what I did
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: for a year. And at the end of that year,
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: I kind of said to myself, okay, I've got it.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: I understand now what it would mean to study these
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: other subjects, and I sort of felt like I'll be
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: able to do this on my own if I continue
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: to be excited about it. And I went back to
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: physics with a vengeance. And basically in that second year,
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: completed my doctorate in that year and moved on from there.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: So this time that you took off this year, well,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: you didn't really take it off, but you changed paths.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I changed paths, yeah.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: How beneficial was that for you? Hugely. Do you think
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: that it helped you sort of appreciate what your original
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: subject of interest was as well?
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, hugely so. Because, you know, it's funny. It's the
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: flip side of something I often encounter with people that
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: are interested in science but don't know the math. And
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: they always say, or some say, I'm never really going
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: to understand this body of science because I don't know
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: the mathematics. And I try to convince them, look, at
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: some level that's true. If you really want to do
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: research in the general theory of relativity, you've got to
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: learn differential geometry and all the tensor calculus. But if
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: you are really interested in the ideas... you really can
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: grasp the ideas without the technical background. So I try
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: to demystify something that can seem impenetrable because you haven't
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: entered the field. And I think the same thing happened
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: to me in reverse for the more humanistic explorations. It
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: had this aura of grandeur that... I was unable to
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: penetrate because I'd never really immersed myself in the ideas.
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: And by spending a year in those ideas, it didn't
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: diminish them in any way, but I felt like it
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: brought it back down to earth as another journey toward truth,
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: another pathway toward insight, and one that you don't have
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: to have a degree in. You don't have to know
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: the ins and outs of the academic version of that
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: subject to understand it and grasp it and spend some
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: time thinking about it.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: So, do you think that for people studying anything, particularly
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: those studying science and mathematics, very rigid disciplines, do you
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: think that they all could benefit from sort of expanding
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: their education into philosophy or art or something that uses
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: your mind in a different way? Yeah. Some. Some.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: There are some people in the physics and mathematics community
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: who are so intensely focused that it would almost be
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: a shame to pull their attention away from the deep
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: dive that they're going to do for the rest of
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: their lives and the contributions that they're going to make
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: and have made are substantial and exciting. But I think
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: for many others, and certainly for me, I mean, look,
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: I as most people do, but not all. But I
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: learned early on that I'm not going to be an
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: Albert Einstein. You know, I can make contributions, and I
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: have had contributions to fields like string theory and cosmology,
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: but they're never going to be at the level of
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: shattering our understanding of the world, things that people are
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: going to talk about 500 years from now. That's unlikely.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: And I think for somebody like that, who's able to
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: make contributions, but pulling away from the technical work is
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: not going to extract some vital insight into the nature
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: of the world that otherwise wouldn't be discovered. I think
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: there is great value in doing exactly what you're saying,
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: because by broadening your perspective on what the work you're
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: doing is actually revealing, it's part of the human quest
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: for understanding and seeing it as an isolated discipline where
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: it's all about the next equation and the better unified
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: theory or the deeper understanding of the big bang. To
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: see that as isolated from the human quest for understanding,
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: I think, diminishes the work that we as physicists actually do.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: Was that a part of your initial ambition?
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: To leave something that would just rock the world?
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, to go back to the comment that you
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: made before about we being the only species that knows
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: that we're going to die, I think part of that
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: instills in many people, and certainly I see it in
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: my own life, even though at the time that I
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: was making various decisions, I wasn't literally thinking about these
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: kinds of issues of mortality. But how do you deal
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: with that recognition of the impermanence of your own life? Well,
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: I think part of it is a symbolic kind of immortality.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: You create something that will last. You create something that
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: will have such impact that it will stick around for
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: a long, long period of time. So, I think, yes.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, part of my motivation in doing physics was
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: not merely to get the next decimal place in this
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: or that physical quantity described in the natural world. It
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: was to try to have some kind of insight that
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: would rock our understanding of the world and have reverberations
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: that would echo out for many, many years to come.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: That's interesting. Did that torture you somewhat? I mean, is
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: that something that haunted you? Was it In your head
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: all the time?
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: Not really.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: But an ultimate ambition perhaps?
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: But an ultimate ambition, yeah, for sure. And, you know, look,
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: I think when you're doing any work whatsoever, the day-to-day,
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: the moment-to-moment is a grind. You know, I don't know
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: how you find it in the work that you're doing,
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: but if I'm working on a research project, even if
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: in principle the ideas are grand and wonderful and bold,
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: The moment-to-moment is calculating away. It's trying to figure out
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: that equation. It's putting that equation on a computer. I mean,
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: it is not sexy. It is not something that has
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: that glorious quality that you might ultimately describe when you're
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: finished and you look back and you think about the
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: implications of your work. The moment-to-moment of almost anything that
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: you do is a grind. So I think that's ultimately
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: what is the driver of whatever you're doing in your life,
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: the moment-to-moment. But yeah, there was certainly a part of
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: me that would have a desire, a hope that the
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: work would reverberate in a powerful way. I think that's
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: true for most physicists, that notion that you can sort
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: of sit at a table and think and change the
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: way we understand reality the way Einstein did. the way
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: Schrodinger did, the way Niels Bohr did.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: But like what percentage of people have that revelation?
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's pretty few and far between.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: And everybody else is sort of just contributing.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: Contributing.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: And then occasionally someone, some light bulb goes off.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: Just sort of powerful new insight and you're like, okay,
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: everything has suddenly changed.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: That's so exciting though.
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: And it's what keeps you going. It's what keeps you going.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: To be the person who has the light bulb.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I tell my students, you know, and especially
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: young students who come in and are still trying to
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: figure out what they want to do, if you're not
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: satisfied with just contributing. If you're not satisfied with being
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: part of the journey but not the person at the
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: head of the breakthroughs, it's probably not the field for
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: you because it's so unlikely. Because it's not just brain power.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: It's thinking of the right questions. It's thinking of things
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: in the right orientation. It's being at the right place
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: at the right time with the right DNA that somehow
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: is attuned to the question that's being asked. So it's
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: not even fully under your control. It's not sort of
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: a matter of, you know, exercising your mind and building
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: up the muscles of the brain in such a way
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: that you are the strongest person to contribute to this
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: and this idea. It's luck.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: It's timing.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: It's being there when the question's being asked and you
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: happen to see the way forward.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: It's so interesting to me that there's so many people
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: working on all this stuff and that the average person
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: that doesn't contemplate quantum physics or any of these equations,
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: we have no idea what's going on. Yeah. And that
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: all this work that's so critical to our understanding of
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: what the universe really is, the very fiber of the
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: universe itself. Yeah. All this is going on. And most
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: people are just sort of, they're reaping the residual benefits
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: of it. Yeah. But they're just wandering around not knowing.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, hugely so. In fact, there's a number that's quoted
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: that quantum mechanics, is responsible for something like 35% of
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: the gross national product. So it's in a very concrete way. Now,
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: the problem with that number is I recently looked it
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: up to find the source of it. So I sort
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: of went online and checked it out. And apparently I'm
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: the source of this number. And I assure you that
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: I've not done a calculation that really fully justifies this.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: But roughly speaking, you know, anything that has an integrated
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: circuit is the result, the beneficiary of quantum insights. So
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: we use this stuff every moment of our technological lives.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: And yet, as you say, for the most part, most
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: of us don't have a deep understanding of the reality
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: of that's responsible for the gadgetry that the science has
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: given rise to. And it's a strange, quantum mechanics is
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: an utterly strange reality.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: Too strange.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: I've tried many, many times to try to understand whether
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: it's Sean Carroll's books or yours or anyone's. Yeah. It's just,
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: it doesn't get in.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: Right. And again, it goes back to, you know, our
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: brains just weren't under pressure to think quantum mechanically. But
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: I assure you, You give me a couple hours. I mean,
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: books are one thing because it's a one-sided conversation. But
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: you give me a couple hours and a back and forth,
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: and I will absolutely get you to a place where
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: you appreciate and have a sense of what these ideas
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: really are telling us about the nature of the world.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Here's the thing that I've always wanted to ask someone
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: like you. What do you think was happening before the
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: Big Bang?
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It's... It's a deep question and a subtle one.
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: And there's sort of two ways that I like to
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: think about that question. One is it could be that
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: the Big Bang was an interesting event, but not the
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: first event in the totality of reality. It could have
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: been the first event that sparked the expansion of our
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: part of space. But it could be that there's a
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: grander realm of space within which we sit as a
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: small part, And that grander realm may have been there
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: for a far longer period of time. It may have
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: experienced its own big bangs, maybe a collection of big
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: bangs that may extend infinitely far into the past. So
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: it could be that the answer to the question of
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: what happened before the big bang is a lot of
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: other big bangs or a lot of other quantum events
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: that were taking place in a larger landscape of reality
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: than we have direct access to. However, another answer is,
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: is that the very question may not make as much
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: sense as the words seem to suggest. We know how
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: to parse that sentence. We know what it means to
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: talk about the moment before the Big Bang because we
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: know how to talk about the moment before your birth
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: or the moment before the Civil War or the moment
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: before any event that happened in the world. We fully
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: understand the meaning of that kind of sentence. But it
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: could be that when it comes to the Big Bang,
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: the sentence actually doesn't mean anything. It could be that
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: the Big Bang was the place where time itself started.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: And Hawking himself had a wonderful analogy to get this across.
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: He said, look, I'll dress it up a little bit.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: Imagine you're walking on planet Earth and you pass by someone.
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: You say, hey, can you point me in the direction
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: of north? I want to walk in the northward direction.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: They point you, continue to walk. You pass by somebody else. Say, hey,
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: which way is further north? And they point you in
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: that direction. But when you get to the North Pole
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: and talk to somebody there and say, hey, how do
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: I go further north? They look at you and say, whoa,
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: that question doesn't mean anything because this is where north begins.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: There's no notion of going further north than the North Pole.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: And it could be that that spatial metaphor applies to time.
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: Talk about a billion years ago or 10 billion years ago,
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: but if you go to 13.8 billion years ago, the
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: Big Bang, that may be where time started. And you
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: can't go further back in time than the very origin
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: of time itself.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: That freaks me out. Yeah. See, that's one that gets
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: in your head. What do you mean beginning of time?
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: Why would time have a beginning?
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: Good. And it could be that time is an emergent
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: quality of reality. I give you an analogy, but what
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: I mean by that is we all know what temperature
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: means intuitively. Something's hot, you feel it. Something's cold, you
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: feel it. Your body understands those concepts. What physics has
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: done is it's gone deeper into the concept of temperature
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: and revealed that it is nothing but the average motion
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: of the particles making up the environment. So if the
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: molecules are moving really quickly, you've got a hot environment.
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: If the molecules are really moving slowly, it's a cold environment.
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: So temperature emerges from the motion of particles. So if
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: you have like one particle, you can't really talk about
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: it being hot or cold because you need a conglomerate.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: You need an agglomeration of particles to be able to
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: talk about their average motion. And in that sense, temperature
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: is this emergent idea that rests upon more fundamental ideas,
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: the molecules and atoms that make up reality. Maybe that's
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: true of time. Maybe time as we know it is
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: a property that only makes sense in certain environments when
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: there's enough stuff arranged in the right patterns. But fundamentally,
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: maybe there are atoms or molecules of time, which when
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: not arranged in the form that we are familiar with,
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: don't yield time as we know it. Time itself may
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: be a quality of the world that exists here in
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: this environment, but doesn't even apply here. In other environments
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: that are configured radically differently.
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: Whoa.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: That's a heavy one.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: That's a heavy one. What also is a heavy one
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: is what caused the Big Bang? Yeah. Why would something
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: smaller than the head of a pin become everything that
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: we see in the cosmos?
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So there are ideas for the answer to that question. Look,
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: all of this is tentative because it's very hard to...
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: do measurements that go all the way back to the beginning.
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: We have astronomical observations that we need to ensure are
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: compatible with the predictions of our theories and so forth.
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: So we as good scientists do what needs to be
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: done to try to test these ideas. But the idea
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: that I think most physicists or cosmologists buy into at
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: the moment is that gravity can have two manifestations. The
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: usual form of gravity that you and I know about
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: is the attractive version. You drop something toward the Earth
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: and it moves downward because the Earth and the object
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: pull on each other. That's the ordinary gravity that we
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: experience every day of our lives. But Einstein's equations actually
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: allow gravity to also be repulsive. It can push outward
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: as opposed to just pulling inward. And this is something
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: that we have never experienced because the gravity created by
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: a rocky surface object like the earth is always the
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: attractive variety. The gravity created by the sun, again, a
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: compact object is always the attractive variety. But Einstein's math
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: shows that if you don't have a rocky object that's
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: isolated in space, but rather energy that is uniformly spread
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: through a region of space, that that kind of entity
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: yields repulsive gravity. Why is that important to your question?
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: If the very early universe, that little tiny head of
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: a pin that you're talking about, if it was filled
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: with a uniform bath of this energy, we call it
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: the inflaton field, the name doesn't matter, but if it
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: was filled with that energy, it would have been subject
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: to repulsive gravity. What does repulsive gravity do? Pushes everything apart,
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: causes everything to rush outward. So the bang of the
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: big bang may have been a spark of repulsive gravity
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: operating with a tiny region of space that pushed everything apart.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: And this concept of repulsive gravity is just theoretical? Have
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: we observed any sort of element in the universe that.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: It is theoretical, but it's at a level of understanding
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: that I think most physicists would say causes it to
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: migrate into the camp of established understanding of how gravity works.
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: So number one, Einstein's equations have now been tested over
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: and over again in a whole variety of circumstances. The
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: detection of gravitational waves just a couple of years ago
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: is like the crowning triumph of Einstein's math. A hundred
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: years ago, the math says there should be ripples in
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: the fabric of space. A hundred years later, we finally
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: detect ripples in the fabric of space. So we are
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: very comfortable with any prediction that comes out of Einstein's mathematics.
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: And right in the mathematics is the prediction of what
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: I was just describing. You've got uniform energy in a region,
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: repulsive gravity. The other thing is we currently witness that
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: the expansion of the universe is speeding up, not slowing down.
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: Since the 1920s, everybody thought that, yes, the universe is expanding,
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: but it will slow down over time.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: Because gravity pulls things back together. You throw an apple upward,
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: it doesn't go up faster and faster, it goes up
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: slower and slower because the Earth's gravity pulls it back.
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: Everybody thought that would apply to the universe as a whole.
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: It's expanding, but expanding ever slower. The observations in 1998,
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: culminated in 1998, which won the 2011 Nobel Prize, showed
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: that the distant galaxies are moving away ever more quickly.
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: The expansion of space is speeding up over time. It's accelerating.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: How do we explain that? The best explanation we currently
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: have is repulsive gravity. We believe even today the universe
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: is suffused with a bath of energy. We call it
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: dark energy. We believe it's uniformly going through space. I
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: like to think of it almost like a... Turkish sauna.
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: It's like the steam filling the sauna, this energy filling space.
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: And that repulsive gravity, we believe, is responsible for the
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: observations that the distant galaxies are rushing away faster and
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: faster over time. So it's circumstantial. But the case for
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: repulsive gravity is quite strong.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: And what would have caused it to coalesce? What would
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: have caused it to compress initially? Why would all that
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: matter be in this tiny, less than a pin-sized object?
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: So I have no idea, and nobody else on planet
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: Earth has any real idea other, but we do have theories.
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: And one of the theories suggests that in the very
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: early universe, it was a highly chaotic environment, very hot,
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: with all the fields fluctuating wildly up and down. And
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: the idea would be that if you wait long enough,
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: where it's hard to know what wait means in this environment,
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: but don't press me on my definition of time back then,
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: just sort of intuitively. If you wait long enough on
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: rare occasions, The energy will just happen to flatten out
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: in a region, become uniform, and then that region explosively inflates,
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: grows large. So, you know, imagine you're looking at a
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: pot of boiling water. The surface is, of course, widely
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: undulating up and down. But if you wait long enough,
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: very long time since you've never seen it, neither have I,
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: there will be a little patch on the surface of
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: that boiling water that flattens out. Why? That only means
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: that the water molecules happen for an instant to be
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: moving in just the right way to keep that little
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: patch of water from wildly bubbling. It will happen. It's rare.
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: But if you wait long enough, it will occur. Similarly,
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: the widely undulating fields in the early universe, if you
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: wait long enough, a patch will flatten out. You get
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: the uniform energy. plug it into Einstein's equations, that region
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: explosively inflates. And I mean explosively. It can go from
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: a size that's much less than an atomic diameter to
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: larger than the observable universe in far less than a
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: blink of an eye, in 10 to the minus 30,
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: 10 to the minus 35 seconds. That's how powerful repulsive
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: gravity can be.
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: That is so baffling. Yeah. So before that, before this happens,
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: you just have in this theory... You just have all
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: of this energy sort of randomly interacting with other energy
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: in the universe with no physical objects. Yep. Yep. And
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: that could have been forever.
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: And, in fact, that's the main point. There's nobody who
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: is hanging around looking at their watch saying, good God,
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: when is this big bang going to finally happen? So
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: you can have this cosmological pre-show. You can have it
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: last as long as you like. The only thing that
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: you need to happen is that sooner or later, a
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: region flattens out, and then the cosmological show begins.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: And if we're looking at this model of the universe
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: being this infinite universes with different characteristics and different qualities
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: to them, this could be happening throughout infinity, all over
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: the place.
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and in fact, this so-called inflationary cosmology is the
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: technical name for this subject, says that. it says that
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: it's quite likely that this explosive inflation of the region
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: that we currently inhabit, it was just one of many
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: such events. And therefore there are other far flung regions
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: throughout this larger cosmological landscape where things have also inflated,
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: but the details can be different. The physical details can
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: differ from what we are familiar with. And the differences
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: can be small. temperature differences in one part of space
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: versus another, or they can be far more significant. Even
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: the particles that make up that other realm may be
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: different from the particles that make up our realm. Their
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: masses can be different. Their charges can be different. Their
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: fundamental physical features can be different. So out there in
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: that wider cosmological landscape, it can be the wild, wild
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: west of realities.
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: And they don't have to worry about proton deterioration.
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: There may be realms in which they don't have to
• 43:53
  Speaker 2: worry about protons falling apart. The wild, the really crazy
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: idea is that if you're very careful mathematically in analyzing
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: these theories, you realize that there have to be realms
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: out there that duplicate ours as well. Many can be different,
• 44:13
  Speaker 2: but there have to be versions of this reality that
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: are also instantiated. occur out there in other realms. So
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: you come to these crazy-sounding, sci-fi-sounding ideas that you and
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: I are having this conversation out there in other distant realms.
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: An infinite number of times.
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: Perhaps infinite number of times. And moreover, small differences can
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: also arise in these other realms where maybe our positions
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: are interchanged at the table or maybe your name is
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: Joe Green and I'm Brian Rogan or there's like strange
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: realities that can be taking place. And this is not
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: an overworked theorist's imagination. This is the careful, dispassionate analysis
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: of the mathematical equations. Now, I should say there are
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: some physicists who see this implication and say, whoa, you
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: guys have fallen off the deep end. Your theory has
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: imploded because any theory that predicts that kind of a
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: wealth of realities that are kind of untestable because they're
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: so far away that we will never interact with them
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: That's the kind of theory that we have been trained
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: to avoid, to excise. However, the more forward thinking I
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: like to describe as physicists say, hey, math has proven
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: to be a very valuable guide over the course of
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: hundreds of years. And if this is where the math
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: is taking us, it's at least worthy of our attention
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: to investigate it fully and possibly come to the conclusion
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: that this is how reality actually behaves. Jesus Christ.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: That's the weirdest one. The weirdest one. It's like when
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: people talk about intelligent life somewhere in the universe, that
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: you're out there. Or a version of you or infinite
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: versions of you.
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it can be disturbing. Like, what do you
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: mean by you if there are many of yous out there,
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: each of whom has an equal claim on being you
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: because they've had the same experiences, they have the same memories.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: And maybe have made infinite variations in the decisions that
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: you've made through your life that's right so you could
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: meet a Brian Greene your age somewhere out there in
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: the universe that's.
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: Made the right choices or the wrong ones right exactly
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: become a gambling addict yeah you know it's like a
• 46:29
  Speaker 3: Star Trek episode where you've got where you've got like
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: Spock and evil Spock you know the one that had
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: the little beard on right so there's gonna be a
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: little bearded version of me a goatee out.
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: There yeah so yeah you know and thing I want
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: to stress is this sounds kooky yeah And the danger
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: of kooky-sounding ideas in physics is that there are people
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: who then jump off for it and say, well, if
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: that's possible, then this is possible. Maybe I can, with
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: my mind, affect what other people are. So there's all
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: sorts of crazy ideas that can be inspired by the
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: weird insights of modern physics. And you've really got to
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: keep straight what's real. and what's ridiculous.
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a problem, right? When people start using, especially
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: if they're articulate, they start using scientific lingo to describe
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: things that are very unscientific. Sort of like, what the bleep?
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, oh God.
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: Hey, look at you. But that was one of those
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: movies where a lot of people, like, there was all
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: this quantum talk, and, you know, Dr. Quantum was in
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: it with a little cartoon explaining particles and waves, and, like,
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: there's science behind this, but then, At the end of it, really,
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: it was something that was created by someone who runs
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: a cult, who believes they're channeling someone who's like a
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: thousand-year-old alien. That whole Ramtha thing.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but let me tell you, if you have a moment.
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: Please.
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: So, a couple years ago, I was in the middle
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: of a big project. In fact, I described this toward
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: the end of the book, so you'll get to this
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: little anecdote if you choose to carry on reading. I
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: was in the middle of a big project, and a
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: speaking opportunity came in, and I didn't properly vet it.
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: The money looked good and looked like a fine thing,
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: and I signed off on it. And then a few
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: days before I'm going, I realize it's to go to
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: talk to Judy Zebra Knight, who channels Ramtha, the 35,000-year-old
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: Lemurian sage. And I said to the folks who should
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: have been checking in on this, like the lecture agent,
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: I can't go. And they're like, hey, Brian, it's tomorrow.
• 48:32
  Speaker 2: It's too late to back out. It's like, Jesus Christ.
• 48:36
  Speaker 2: So I look at some videos online, and I see
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: her on the Merv Griffin show where she channels Romtha
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: on live television. I don't know what year this was.
• 48:45
  Speaker 2: She snaps her head forward and goes back. She changes
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: her voice. It becomes like something between the queen and Yoda.
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: It's this weird, weird place.
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: And she's all, hello, being.
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: And she's talking to Merv Griffin. And he's talking about
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: an airplane. She goes, what is airplane? It's that kind
• 49:01
  Speaker 2: of thing. Anyway, so I go. And I show up.
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: And the first thing I see is there are all
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: these people walking around a grassy field with their arms
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: out like this. And I'm like, can they see? And
• 49:13
  Speaker 2: I get closer. They're all blindfolded. And I'm saying, what
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: is going on here? And they describe that each person
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: has a card around their neck where they've written down
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: their life's dream. And an exact copy of that card
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: has been put out on this big field. And they
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: have to feel their way toward the matching card. And
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: if they succeed, this shows that this goal or desire
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: is gonna come to pass. Oh, boy. You know, and
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: I'm saying to those guys, like, so how's it going?
• 49:41
  Speaker 2: He goes, like, really good. You know, one person found
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: their card, you know, in the last few months. Like,
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: you know, the odds of probability of that happening are
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: kind of not unreasonable, but that's all that this is.
• 49:52
  Speaker 2: And then they take me to the blindfolded archers.
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: Oh, Jesus.
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: You know, so they're taking bow and arrow, and they're
• 49:59
  Speaker 2: firing at these targets. And, like, man, I'm, like, standing
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: way back on this kind of thing. And they ask me,
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: you know, do you want to try it? And I
• 50:07
  Speaker 2: was like, you know, there's a photographer that's come along.
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: I'm like, no, I'll avoid that. And then they introduced
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: him to this woman who is able to predict the
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: next card in a shuffle deck. And, you know, so
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: she'd pull out these cards and she'd say, okay, it's
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: going to be seven of clubs. And it's like a
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: three of spades. And then the next one is a
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: seven of diamonds. And she goes, oh, well, there's the
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: seven that I was talking about, you know, one card before.
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: You know, so it's this crazy circumstance where– and then
• 50:35
  Speaker 2: I go to give my talk. Okay, because that's why
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: I was there after all. This was just like the preamble.
• 50:40
  Speaker 2: They were showing me what they do. I walk into
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: this barn and I cross the threshold of the barn
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: and they all give me a standing ovation. And I'm like, okay,
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: I appreciate it, but like why are you giving me
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: a standing ovation? And I go in and I start
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: to give my talk and I say to them straight out,
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: what I've seen here is nuts. Okay. You know, I say,
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: you know, if you're going to try to predict next
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: cards in the deck, you know, one out of every
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: four times you'll get the suit. One out of every
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: 13 times you'll get the rank. There's nothing in there
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: but the pure probabilistic laws of mathematics. You know, they
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: rise up and give me a standing ovation. And I say,
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: it's appreciated, but why are you applauding? I'm telling you
• 51:25
  Speaker 2: that you're wasting your time. And they applaud me again.
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: And I'm like, this is like so totally weird. But
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: then I go to the book signing. I finish my
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: talk at the book signing. These people, they come up
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: to me and they talk real softly and say, there's
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: a lot of crazy stuff that's happening in this place.
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: But we come here because we feel that there's something
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: else in the world and we want to be around
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: like-minded individuals that are searching for the deeper truth. So
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: thank you for calling out the silliness that's happening here.
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: But we'll come here anyway and spend our money because
• 51:56
  Speaker 2: we want to be part of the journey. And I
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: have to tell you, I had a degree of sympathy.
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: for them, because I get the motivation. I mean, as
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: a physicist, what we do is we are revealing strange
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: features of the world. So I get the urge, I
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: get the desire. The problem is that the methodology that's
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: being employed is something that will never take you closer
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: to the truth, however much you may feel that you're
• 52:23
  Speaker 2: among like-minded individuals. So I get the motivation, I get
• 52:27
  Speaker 2: the sensation, I get the urge. But it's tragic that
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: these individuals feel that this kind of an undertaking is
• 52:33
  Speaker 2: the pathway that will take them toward the deeper truth.
• 52:36
  Speaker 2: And let me just finish up. So after this, they
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: take me to the dinner. And the dinner's in a
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: mansion at the top of the hill, and that's where
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: Judy is. I'm probably going to get sued for this conversation,
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: by the way. Really?
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know.
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: But I've never spoken about it. Rampsaloon sued. Yeah, well,
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: they're quite litigious. Are they really? Yeah. No, they definitely are.
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: So anyway, there's just a one person's opinion. They take
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: me to the mansion at the top of the hill
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: and that's where she is. She doesn't come down and
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: actually participate in the talk. She's like watching it on
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: closed circuit television up in the mansion. And I walk
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: in and she hugs me. But it was too goddamn
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: long of a hug. You know what I'm saying? It
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: was like, and she was like, thank you. It was
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: like this big emotional thing. And I was like, I
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: don't get it, but I think that's the way that
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: she brings people into the fold and gets them to
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: spend the big bucks to enter on this so-called journey
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: toward truth where she's channeling this made-up fictitious sage that
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: somehow people buy into.
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: Is this all still going on?
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: It was just a couple of years ago, so I
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: imagine it is.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: Imagine if she's really channeling it and we're just missing–
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: That would certainly rewrite every rule of reality, every law
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: of physics that I understand. Wouldn't that be less weird
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: than the Big Bang itself? No.
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: I tell you why. I tell you why. See, when
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: it comes to the Big Bang. I can sit down
• 54:08
  Speaker 2: with the mathematics that I understand well, and I can
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: follow the deductive chain of reasoning that gets us to
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: some of these strange implications that we're talking about, multiple
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: big bangs, other realities, and so forth. When it comes
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: to channeling a 35,000-year-old sage, I don't know what the
• 54:22
  Speaker 2: hell that even means. I don't understand the physical processes
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: by which that could possibly happen. I don't understand how
• 54:29
  Speaker 2: there could have been a being of the sort that
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: she's channeling alive 35,000 years ago because it doesn't have
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: any agreement with the archaeological record. So there's a vital
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: distinction between weirdness that emerges from careful mathematical analysis and
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: weirdness that emerges from an overworked imagination that possibly sees
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: a business model whereby a lot of money can be
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: brought in if you can get people to buy into
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: your vision of how the world works.
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: Well, it's sort of like what they do is they,
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: they curate ideas and then they run them through their
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: sort of filter of, uh, woo woo. Yeah. Right. Exactly.
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: And then they distribute it in a very palatable way
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: that attracts people. That movie.
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: I tell a story, I've told this before, so I
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: apologize to people who've heard it. There was a, uh,
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: a friend of mine at the comedy store had a
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: friend that I don't know her name, but she came
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: to the comedy store and, uh, She was so happy.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, she was like, I'm so happy. Why
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: are you so happy? She goes, because I found the secret.
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: And now that I know about the secret, I am
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: going to be married. I am going to be this.
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: I'm going to have this fulfilled life. I'm going to
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: reach my dreams. And I'm really excited about that. So,
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: you know, at the time I had just seen the
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: movie and then I was just starting to understand the
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: criticism of the movie. I was reading all these, you know,
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: accounts where scientists were breaking down all the things that
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: were wrong. And I didn't dash her dreams. I just
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: was like, wow, okay. And then I saw her a
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: year later outside of another one of my shows at
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: a different comedy club. And I said, hey, how are
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: you doing? She's like, things are just not going the
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: way I thought. I thought because of the secret that
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: everything would be great, but my dad is still a
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: pain in the ass, and now he's moved in with me,
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: doesn't have any money, and I can't establish a good relationship,
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: and I don't have the job that I wanted. I
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: don't understand because I've been using the secret. I think
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: about it every day. And I said, here's my take
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: on this. If you talk to someone who's very successful
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: and you say to them, hey– How did you get
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: very successful? And they say, I thought about it all
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: the time. I have a vision board. I took that
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: photo of the house that I wanted. I put it
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: in the vision board. That became my house. I took
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: this idea. I want a beautiful wife. I want a family.
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: I want sports cars and this and that. And now
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: I have those things because the mind is a powerful
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: tool and the mind can create reality. You're just talking
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: to someone who is successful. How many people thought like
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: that and nothing happened? I bet millions. Yeah. I bet
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: there's so many. You have a bias in successful users.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: Those are the ones you're talking to. And just because
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: of the fact that they've been able to have these
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: extraordinarily successful lives while visualizing these things does not mean
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: that visualizing these things creates an extraordinarily successful life. You
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: have to think and you have to act and you
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: have to do. And there's trial and error and there's
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: a lot of lessons to be learned. But if you
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: wanted to simplify it at the end once you're successful
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: and boil it down to a philosophy that you could–
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: sell a course on, that's what it would be.
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly right. Look, there's nothing wrong with visualizing success,
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: but that is not the causal ingredient that will yield
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: the success. And the thing that comes to mind is,
• 57:57
  Speaker 2: you know, I don't know if they do it any longer,
• 57:58
  Speaker 2: but there was certainly a time when Olympic athletes would
• 58:01
  Speaker 2: be taught to visualize, say, jumping over that high bar.
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: And they'd run through the whole thing. But that's not
• 58:09
  Speaker 2: all that they were doing. They were doing 10 hours
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: a day of training that integrated this visualization as part
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: of the training program. So it's kind of tragic when
• 58:21
  Speaker 2: people buy into these crazy ideas. And I have to
• 58:25
  Speaker 2: tell you, when they were making that film, they called
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: me to be in it. And I think it was
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: the director or one of the producers I was on
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: the phone with And, you know, they were describing what
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: they were doing, and I probed sufficiently hard. And some
• 58:38
  Speaker 2: of my friends did not probe sufficiently hard and were
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: in the film and regretted it. But I probed sufficiently hard,
• 58:43
  Speaker 2: and I said, look, what you're doing to me sounds
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: really dangerous. It sounds like a really bad thing to
• 58:49
  Speaker 2: be doing. And they took offense in that call back then.
• 58:53
  Speaker 2: A year after the film came out, it was either
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: the director or producer, I can't remember the gentleman's name,
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: called me up and said, I want to apologize to you.
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: You are absolutely right. I have finally realized what a
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: bad film this was to be involved in, and I
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: completely regret it. so that I don't think is the
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: point of view of you know the romp the school
• 59:15
  Speaker 2: of enlightenment which is behind this or at least part
• 59:18
  Speaker 2: of what was behind this but at least the director
• 59:21
  Speaker 2: or the producer ever was saw the light and realized
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: that this is not the kind of information that you
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: want to put out in the world because it can
• 59:28
  Speaker 2: change people's lives in a very negative way.
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: You know, I think your comparison to Olympic athletes is
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: very good because the Olympic athletes are visualizing something that
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: they already do. You know, there's a great benefit in
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: visualizing for athletics, for martial arts, for a lot of
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: different things. Visualizing success, visualizing potential problems, failures of your process,
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: how you're going to adjust on the fly. All those
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: things are great because then when things do take place
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: in real life situations, you've already prepared for them. You
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: know the path. That's what that's all about.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: I agree with that. And in fact, I have to
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 2: tell you, you know, in one of the chapters, later
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 2: chapters of the book, I describe theories about why it
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 2: is that we, for instance, tell fictional stories. I mean,
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: could there be any evolutionary value in two individuals who
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 2: telling each other a story that they both know is false,
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 2: that they know has no connection to the world around them,
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 2: but yet we've been doing that since the emergence of language.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: And there are these interesting evolutionary scenarios in which what
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: you're saying is brought to bear in that unfamiliar context.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 2: We tell stories because it's the mind's way of rehearsing
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 2: for the real world, but it's a way of rehearsing
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 2: for the real world that's completely safe. So you can
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 2: go on all sorts of crazy journeys to the underworld,
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 2: up into the clouds. You can engage in all sorts
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: of battles. You can fight gods or demigods. All these
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 2: things can take place within your imagination. So you're completely safe.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 2: And yet when you encounter something that's analogous to the
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: stories that you've been told or retold or embellished or
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 2: told to others through other accounts, your brain is more
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 2: attuned to respond in a beneficial way because it's not
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 2: as novel as it would have been had you not
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: been engaged in this fictional account of telling stories. So
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 2: there's value in visualizing. There's value in telling stories, but
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: it's not the causal part that some individuals would want
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 2: us to believe it is.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the only thing that I would say contrary to
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: that is some people develop expectations based on fictional accounts.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: And there's a real problem like romantic movies. where some
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: people will expect behavior that exists in these romantic movies only. Right.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: And it's not indicative of human beings in the real world. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: Point well taken. I mean, I think the vital thing
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: is that your brain has had sufficient experience that it
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: can weight these fictional accounts in a way that can
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: enhance your response to the world but not set undue
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: expectations of things that are just, you know, only going
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 2: to be true in a fictional setting and not in
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 2: the real world.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: It's just so strange to me that we desire those.
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, hero movies, right? Yeah. Like hero movies in particular,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: especially superhero movies. Someone who possesses powers beyond anything known
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: to human beings or any life form.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I get that. Yeah.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: Sure. You would love to just snap your fingers and
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: fix everything.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 2: But I actually see it in a slightly different way,
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 2: relevant to what we were talking about before. I think
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 2: that the whole... hero worship that we have as a
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 2: culture comes again from our recognition of how powerless we
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 2: are against the forces of nature, against the inevitable death
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 2: that is facing us all. And therefore, there's something deeply
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: seductive about the possibility of a being that can transcend
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 2: the limitations that we mere mortals are always subject to.
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 2: So I think it's built into our DNA to respond
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: to the way that we do, in the manner that
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 2: we do, when encountering a hero in the world. I mean, there's,
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: you know, Joseph Campbell. Yeah, I was just going to
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: bring him up. you know, he goes through the whole
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 2: notion of what it is to have a myth. And
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 2: it's basically an individual that's called to action, to rise
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: above the kinds of activities that mere mortals will be
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 2: able to undertake, resist the call at first, but then
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 2: rises to the challenge, goes out into the world, conquers,
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 2: comes back a changed individual and shakes up the reality
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: from which that individual initially emerged on this journey. And
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 2: there is ample evidence that across cultures throughout the ages,
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 2: we have constantly been telling these kinds of mythological tales
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 2: because they speak to us. They speak to our urge
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 2: and our desire to transcend the limitations that our physical
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 2: form and the laws of physics necessarily constrain us to.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it is fascinating when you think of how many
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: different languages and how many different cultures share those same
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: archetypal themes.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And I do think it all comes, if
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: you Look way back into the history of the ideas.
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 2: It comes from this initial recognition that we are mortal.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 2: And the fact that our brains are able to not
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: just fix on the moment but can think about the
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 2: entire timeline. is the one that makes that a poignant realization.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 2: If we couldn't think about the future, what would it
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 2: matter if we knew that we were going to die?
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: It would mean nothing. But the fact that we can
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: innovate and the fact that we have ingenuity that allows
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 2: us to make the wheel, that allows us to build
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 2: the pyramids, that allows us to come up with quantum
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 2: mechanics and Einstein's equations and Beethoven's symphony and Picasso's work.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: The fact that we can undertake all of these expressions
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: of creative will and the desire to transcend the world
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 2: around us has a downside. And the downside is we
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 2: recognize that we are not going to be here for
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 2: very long. And I think that motivates a certain kind
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 2: of engagement with the world. And hero worship is part
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: of it.
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: Kurzweil is a fascinating character.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he thinks he's going to be around forever.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why I was bringing him up. Have you
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: discussed any of this stuff with him?
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: You know, I don't know him personally. I have certainly
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 2: gone to some of his talks. And I think he
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: and I had one exchange at some point in the past.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: And I totally get where he's coming from. You know,
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: he feels that we're perhaps the final mortal generations. And
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 2: how sad it is after, you know, a hundred thousand
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 2: generations of humans, if we could only stick around for
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: one more generation, science would come to a point where
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: we would be immortal. And that feels like a tragic
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 2: state of affairs. I don't think he's right. And I
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 2: think most people who think about this deeply don't think
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 2: he's right either. However many vitamins you take and however
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: much science is progressing, The notion that we are just
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 2: a generation or two from immortality I think is wishful thinking.
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: This is a strange concept of immortality too because it's
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: not necessarily you. It's a downloaded version of you that
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: will exist in some sort of a computer.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: Which is– what does that mean? Right. That sounds like hell. Yeah.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: I mean– It could be.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: How's REM sleep in that computer?
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: Well, I allow for the possibility that maybe it would
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: be a way of being in the world that would
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: have upsides that are hard for us as flesh and
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: blood individuals to appreciate at this point. But it raises
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 2: a deep question. Would that be a good thing? In fact,
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 2: if you had that opportunity to be downloaded in some form,
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 2: And that would allow you to hold on to all
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 2: your memories, build new memories on top of them, have experiences.
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 2: Maybe there's an avatar that you're able to drive through,
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 2: you know, your mental machinations is out there in the world.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 2: Would you do it?
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: I might have said yes before I've had some pretty
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: profound psychedelic experiences. And then from then I said, I'm
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: going to hedge my bets. I'm going to see what's next. Right.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: I'm going to see what happens when the lights go out.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: Oh, really? Yeah. So you think there may be something
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 2: that happens when the lights go out?
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what, I mean,
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: for sure your body is going to decay and you
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: are going to become a part of the earth. You're
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: becoming a part, unless they cremate you or unless they
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: embalm you with some toxic chemicals and then nothing can
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: use your dead tissue, which is really a shame. Yeah.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: It's really a shame that we do that, right?
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, unless someone murders you and you have to
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: exhume you in the past to solve, in the future,
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: whether to solve a murder. Right. But I don't know what,
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: what do you think consciousness is? Do you think consciousness
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: is clearly just a factor of brain tissue and energy?
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: Or do you think it's possible that what our brain is,
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: is something that tunes into consciousness? Yeah.
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: Well, I've spent some time thinking about this question. I
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: think it's perhaps the deepest question that faces science or
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 2: even humanity at some level. And my own personal perspective
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: is that consciousness is nothing more than the choreographed motion
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: of particles in various quantum states inside a gloppy gray
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 2: structure that sits inside this thing that we call a head.
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: Do I have any proof for that? No. Does anybody
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: have any proof for what consciousness is? Not at all
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: at this moment. But the history of the reductionist program
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: where we've been able to take some of the more
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 2: spectacular creations that have emerged in the world and recognize
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: that they are nothing but the product of their ingredients
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: in the laws of physics, leads me to extrapolate that
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 2: idea to the experience of consciousness. Now, having said that,
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 2: there's a deep puzzle. It's called the hard problem of consciousness,
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 2: which is if electrons and quarks and particles and laws
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 2: of physics are all that there is, and if you
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 2: buy into the fact that electrons don't have an inner world,
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: that quarks don't have an inner world, how can it
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: be that by taking a collection of those particles, you
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 2: can turn on the lights? How can a collection of mindless,
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 2: thoughtless particles somehow yield mindful experience? And that's a deep
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 2: question that science has not yet answered. My own feeling
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 2: is when we understand the brain better, that question will evaporate.
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: We'll look at the brain with our newfound understanding. Maybe
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 2: it's 100 years in the making, maybe 1,000 years in
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: the making. And we'll say, aha. When electrons and quarks
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 2: and protons move in this particular configuration, one of the
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: byproducts is an inner sensation that we call conscious experience.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 2: And that, to me, is the likely answer that we
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 2: will find. But there are some very smart, well-respected people
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 2: who go in a very different direction. There are some
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: who say electrons and protons and quarks, they do have
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: a fundamental relationship proto-conscious quality. They themselves are conscious beings
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 2: of a sort. Now, it's not like you're going to
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: have electrons that are crying or quarks that are anguishing,
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 2: but if you have a little proto-element of conscious experience
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 2: that is imbued into a particle, and then you take
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: a lot of the particles and put them together, the
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: idea is that yields the manifest conscious experience that we're
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 2: familiar with. I don't buy into that, but there are
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 2: people who do.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: Why do you pick a position?
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 2: Well, I take a position on this because I guess
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 2: my view is you look out at the world and
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 2: what you do as a physicist is you move the
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 2: smallest degree required to explain the phenomena that you are observing.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 2: And to move from our current understanding of the world
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: to leapfrog to a place where electrons are conscious and
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: quarks are conscious is to me is such a fantastically
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: radical move that I don't consider it justified to make
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: that move with our current level of understanding. There was
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: a time back in the 1800s when life itself was
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: so mystical that people basically said the same kind of thing.
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 2: How could a collection of lifeless particles ever come together
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 2: and yield a living being? They said that they can't.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 2: You have to induce a life force. You have to
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 2: inject vitality. You have to inject a life force. And
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 2: that's what sparks the emergence of life on lifeless particles.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 2: I don't think any serious scientist thinks that today. I
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 2: think most serious scientists say, yes, life is wonderful. Life is,
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 2: in some sense, miraculous. But life is nothing but the
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: particles of nature coming together to yield the complex molecules
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: of DNA and RNA. The complex cellular structures, the cells
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 2: come together to yield the more complex multicellular organisms. And
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: that's all that it takes to have something that's alive.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 2: No life force is necessary. That way of thinking about
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 2: the world has gone away. And my own feeling is
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: that that kind of progression is going to happen for consciousness. Today,
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: it's utterly mysterious. How it is that I have this
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 2: inner voice talking inside my head. How it is that
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 2: I look around the world and I can see the
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 2: color red and I can experience the color red. I
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: don't just have sensors that can call that red. I mean,
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: an iPhone can do that. I actually have an inner
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 2: world where I feel that color red. Where does that
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 2: come from? Hard to answer that question, but I think
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: 100 or 1,000 years from now, we'll look back and smile.
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: And how we in this era invested consciousness with such
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: mystical quality when in the end it's nothing but particles
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 2: and the laws of physics and that's all there is
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 2: to it.
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: Well, what's interesting too to me is that as a
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: human being, my thoughts on consciousness are very deep and
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: profound and this idea like what is this thing? But
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: if I really break it down objectively, animals have some
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: sort of a consciousness. I mean, including they have instincts, right?
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: They try to get away from danger. They try to
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: survive and procreate. And we developed something far more complex
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: in our ability to express ourselves in language. And in
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: doing that language or during that creation of that language,
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: we developed all sorts of bizarre concepts. And we've developed
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: all sorts of different ways to describe feelings and emotions
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: and contemplate the future as well. And these things are
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: continually getting more and more complex. If you go to
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: single-celled organisms, work your way up to early hominids, and
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: then get to human beings, you just see this ever-increasing
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: form of complexity in every way. And in the way
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: that the things see the world, of course it makes sense.
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: That there would be more complexity. Right. But we don't
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: think about that when we think of a parakeet. We
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: don't think of a parakeet as being conscious. But a parakeet,
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: relatively speaking, is far more primitive than a chimpanzee, which
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: is relatively speaking far more primitive than a human being. Right.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: And it's just going to continue to evolve. Or if
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: we survive, things will continue to improve due to natural
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: selection and random mutation and all the other factors. Yes.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: And will be something that makes this today look like
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: the way we look at single-celled organisms or chimps or whatever.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I can well imagine that. Because we see small
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 2: changes in DNA. A tiny fraction of a percent yields
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 2: a radical change in what the being that has that
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 2: DNA is able to accomplish. But at the same time,
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 2: you made reference to psychedelic experiences. And I trust you agree,
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 2: but tell me if you don't. that those psychedelic experiences
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 2: were generated by a slight change in the chemical makeup
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: of the particles coursing through your brain and your body.
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: Sometimes not even a change. Sometimes a lot of them,
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: the heavier ones, are actually produced by the brain.
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 2: Right. So to me, that's a great piece of data
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 2: that speaks to the fact that all it is is
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 2: particles and chemicals coursing through a structure because– If the
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: mind was somehow external to the physical makeup and the
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 2: laws describing it, then how would the injection, say, of
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 2: some kind of foreign substance, or as you say, the
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 2: brain producing some sort of substance that it didn't ordinarily
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: have within its makeup, why would that be able to
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 2: have such a radical impact on conscious experience?
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: The way I would look at it if I was
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: trying to argue against that would be that your eyes
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: The organs of the human eye are taking in light
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: and through that light are able to perceive physical objects
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: in the world that they would not be able to
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: do without light.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: It's something that allows you to see and it allows
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: you to take in depth perception and understand shapes that
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: the human mind and particularly these glands that produce these
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: psychedelic chemicals, when you... experiencing these chemicals it allows the
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: brain to experience things that might be there all the
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: time yes but that you cannot perceive with normal human
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: neurochemistry that needs to be enhanced or the levels need
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: to be changed and shifted and what's really perplexing about
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: these chemicals is that These chemicals are produced by your brain.
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: And if you do take these, like particularly dimethyltryptamine is
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: the most potent of all the psychedelic chemicals. If you
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: take that, you have these insanely profound visions.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: Which is, you know, leads to a lot of people
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: having these religious spiritual epiphanies. Have you done anything? Have
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: you done any psychedelic experiences that you're allowed to talk about?
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I have. Not many. And I'm a complete lightweight
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 2: in this arena because I hardly drink. I hardly do
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 2: anything that puts foreign substance into the body. But yeah,
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 2: I was in Amsterdam. I was there because I was
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 2: giving a lecture to the Queen of Holland. And I
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 2: gave the lecture. My wife and I were both there.
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 2: And after that was over, we decided to do a
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 2: little experimenting. And for somebody like me who doesn't experiment,
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 2: I made a mistake. Did you eat it? Well, the
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 2: first night we went out and we went to one
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 2: of these coffee bars and I guess I can speak
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 2: about this. It's legal here. Yeah, totally legal. Exactly. We
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 2: took the easy way in, like the novice version, and
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 2: it did nothing to me at all that first night.
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 2: So the next night when we went, I went right
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 2: to the bottom of the list where It was in
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 2: Dutch or something, but it had machine guns pointed at
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 2: a brain.
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: Kind of thing. Oh, boy.
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So I did that version, and it was the
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 2: most terrifying experience of my fucking life. I didn't mean
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 2: to say that either. But we were in a club,
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, the world changed, and what
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 2: started happening is my brain started manufacturing versions of myself
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 2: that would converse with me and convince me that the
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 2: reality that I was experiencing was real. And then that
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: version of me would destroy that reality and the process
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 2: would start over and over and over again.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: Is this something you smoked or you ate? Smoked. Yeah, wow.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 2: Definitely smoked. And again, I suspect that the impact was
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 2: because my body has no experience.
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: Oh, for sure.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 2: And so I think that just enhanced the impact. And
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 2: it was terrifying. It was utterly– I was in the
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 2: hotel room and I was clinging to the bed. And
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 2: I actually said to my wife, tie me up. Not
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 2: in any, it sounds wrong. I mean, tie me up
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 2: because I'm like terrified of what I'm going to do.
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: Right. Wow.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 2: And so instead, she called the doctor and I was like,
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 2: she was like afraid this would be like in the
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 2: newspaper because I just like give a lecture to the queen.
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 2: But they're so used to Americans getting in over their
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 2: head with this kind of experience. So it was something
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: that they were completely used to. So, you know, they
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 2: sent up a doctor and the doctor basically just gives
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 2: you sugar. And my wife knew that this was an
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 2: extreme circumstance for me because I don't eat any sugar.
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: But I was like, he said, eat as much. I
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 2: was like taking the Milky Way bars.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: So sugar is somehow another counteract. Sugar is somehow. I
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: don't know.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 2: I don't know the chemistry behind this. But sugar is
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 2: the antidote.
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: Caffeine is supposed to help as well.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 2: Caffeine can help too. Yeah, I guess. But it lasted
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 2: eight hours.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 2: Even flying home on the plane the next day, all
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 2: I did is I sat on my seat, and I
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 2: put on the headphones, and there was a Beatles channel,
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 2: and I just listened to Beatles for seven hours, and
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 2: I was just in this place that I had never
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: experienced before. Now, for our conversation, this just made it
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 2: so intuitively obvious to me that my conscious awareness... is
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 2: totally dependent on a few chemicals. That's all that's happening
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 2: inside of the head. So in a way, it was
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 2: a valuable experience. It's not something that I want to
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 2: ever experience again. Absolutely. But it was something that helped
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 2: align my intuitive understanding of what consciousness is with the
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: scientific recognition that it all relies upon the stuff that's
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 2: circulating inside of your mind.
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, what's interesting about these heavy-duty psychedelic experiences, because what
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: you took was, by most people's idea, very mild, but
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: the more profound psychedelic chemicals that are also produced by
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: your brain, if you just shift that ratio, and not
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: by too much, really, you're not talking about even, you're
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: talking about little small doses of this stuff. shift that ratio,
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: it produces these profound visions.
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: Is this like ayahuasca type? Yes.
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: Ayahuasca is just an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine. They
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: figured out how your gut produces monoamine oxidase and it
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: breaks down dimethyltryptamine. And so they figured out how to
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: combine an MAO inhibitor with the leaves of another plant
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: that has the dimethyltryptamine.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 2: I see.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: But you could take it. There's synthetic versions of it.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: But the point is, this is something that Your brain produces.
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: Your liver produces. We know it's produced in the lungs.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: The body makes it.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, right.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: But it's in there. But then if you shift the
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: balance and all of a sudden you have these incredibly
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: profound visions.
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: It makes you think like what we have now in
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: terms of our balance and our chemicals must be different
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: than what this fella must have had. Yes. This chimpanzee thing.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: And primates before that, as the human, like when you
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: think of human evolution, do you ever stop to think,
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: what are we going to be like a million years
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: from now if we do survive? Have you ever done
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: this sort of thought experiment where you say, okay, if
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: things keep going the same way, we used to be
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: very strong and very hairy and we're getting progressively softer
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: as we don't need to use our bodies as much.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: Our brains are getting larger. Our heads are getting bigger.
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: Do you do that sort of thought experiment to see
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: what we're going to become?
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 2: Not in a systematic scientific way because the process is
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: so fraught with incredible detail that I think it's hard
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 2: for anybody, even experts in evolutionary biology, to really tell
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 2: us anything that will hold water. That's really predictive. But
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 2: on a general level, yeah. I mean, because, you know,
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 2: people often wonder... Why is it that we haven't been
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 2: visited by aliens, right? This is a thing that comes
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 2: up whenever you're talking about other life inside the universe.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: I was going to get to that in a minute.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the answer to that could be
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 2: quite straightforward. Nobody out there cares about us because we're
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 2: so ill-developed. We're so young on the cosmic scene. That
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 2: there's nothing interesting for them to find here on planet Earth.
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 2: So to me, there's a natural explanation for why there
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 2: can be stuff out of their life out there. And
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 2: yet they don't hang out around planet Earth just the
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 2: way we don't hang around an anthill to try to
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 2: have a conversation with, you know, what's going on inside
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 2: that particular structure.
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: I buy that argument the least. You do? Really? Because
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: we're interested in butterflies. Butterflies are so boring. We're interested
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: in moles. We're interested in squirrels.
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 2: We're interested in them for very specific reasons, right? So
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: typically we're interested either because we want to see the
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 2: evolutionary development that yields this particular life form or because
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 2: there's a general curiosity about how this object is put together.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 2: If these other beings are so far beyond us that
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 2: those kinds of taxonomy questions are no longer of any interest,
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 2: then hanging around here may not hold anything for them
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 2: to make the journey and stick around long enough for
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 2: us to notice.
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: I don't buy that again for two reasons. One, because
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: why would we assume that they're so far beyond us
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: that they wouldn't be interested in these talking monkeys with
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: thermonuclear weapons who dominate an entire planet. That would be fascinating.
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: We found some planet somewhere where people are, the politicians
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: all lie to themselves. Everyone gets video through the sky.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: They fly in metal tubes that hurl over the oceans.
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: They pollute the oceans and eat all the fish. These
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: people are fucking crazy. We've got to go there and
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: check this out.
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 2: But imagine that this civilization, the notion of lording over
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 2: a planet, is like us talking about the ant loitering
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 2: over a grain of sand. So they may be galactic
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 2: as opposed to planetary in their hegemony. And the notion
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 2: of some little tiny rock orbiting some nondescript star in
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 2: the suburbs of this completely ordinary galaxy off there on
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 2: the side may not have the kind of pull that
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 2: you imagine that it does.
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: Oh, I disagree. We think it's interesting when we see
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: a chimp use a rock to open up a nut.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: You know, we think it's interesting that, you know, there's
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: an amazing photograph of an orangutan that's spearfishing. Have you
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: ever seen it?
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 2: I have seen that actually.
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 2: No, it is.
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: He learned it from people apparently, but it's still interesting nonetheless.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 2: Right, but I don't think 100 years from now we're
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 2: going to be as interested in these kind of qualities
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 2: or 1,000 years from now or 10,000 years from now.
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: Well, why would we assume that these things that come
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: here from another planet are more than 10,000 years?
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 2: Well, that's a very good question. And I think the
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 2: answer to that is we look at the history of
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 2: the cosmos until today and And it's, say, let's just
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 2: call it our universe to be concrete, 13.8 billion years.
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 2: And we look at life on planet Earth and it's,
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 2: you know, a handful of billions of years old. So
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 2: in a handful of billions of years, you can go
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 2: from some complex molecules to human beings.
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: I like how you say it like it's not that long.
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 2: It's not that long because, you know, imagine that life
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 2: began a few billion years earlier in some other system,
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 2: you know. stars and galaxies. They were starting up, you know,
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 2: a billion years after the Big Bang. So it could
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: be that life in other worlds has a head start
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 2: on us by a few billion years. And we know
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 2: what can happen in a few billion years. It can
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 2: take us from single cell to us. And you can
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 2: imagine from a few billion years from now into the future,
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 2: it could be radically different. So to say it's 10,000
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 2: years ahead of us, that to me would be the
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 2: unexplained coincidence. How unlikely is That they started and we
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 2: started within 10,000 years in the span of billions of years.
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 2: That seems unlikely to me.
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: Does it seem unlikely when you're talking about the infinite
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: size of the universe? an infinite number of Brian Greens
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: out there talking to an infinite numbers of me.
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 2: Good point. Good point. So you're absolutely right. We're almost
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 2: guaranteed if the spatial expanse of the universe is infinitely
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 2: large that there are going to be places where it's
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 2: within 10,000 years. Sure. But those are going to be
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 2: a very small number. compared to the places where it's
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 2: not 10,000 years.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: Is that true or would it be an infinite number
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: of them? Well, it'd be infinite.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 2: Not a small number at all. But they're different kinds
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 2: of infinity.
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: So you mean in the space of the exact scope
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: of the universe itself, a small number relatively speaking to
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: where we are physically.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 2: Well, I would say slightly differently. I'd say look at
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 2: a finite size ball. In this large spatial expansion. So
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 2: everything is finite now.
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: So let's get a 5 billion.
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 2: Light year ball.
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: Light year ball.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 2: Right. And within that ball, the number that are differing
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 2: from us by 10,000 years will be very, very small
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 2: compared to the number differing from us by, say, a
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 2: billion years or a couple of billion years.
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: So then.
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 2: Simply by the law of numbers. If we imagine that
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 2: they're random processes that are generated. Now, there could be...
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 2: some physical principle that prevents life from emerging before, say,
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 2: four billion years ago. And if that's the case, and
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 2: we're not aware of that principle, then you'd be absolutely right,
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 2: that we'd all be roughly at the same starting point,
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 2: and there's no reason to suspect that they would be
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 2: so far ahead of us. But I don't know of
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 2: any such principle.
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: But yeah, you almost have a reductionist view of this, right?
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: So if you had to guess, if you had $ 100
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: to bet, has alien life ever observed us? You would
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: say no.
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 2: Well, by observed, you mean could they just turn a
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 2: big telescope in our direction and gather some radio waves,
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: you know. But yes, I would take that bet because
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 2: frankly we've only been generating radio waves for the last,
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 2: you know, 70 years so it's only a 70 light
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 2: year ball around us and within that small radius, very
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 2: unlikely that there's been some alien world that's examining us.
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: So it would have to be something that would be
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: able to recognize our signal and visit us But don't
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: we look at observable planets and solar systems and discover
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: Goldilocks planets? We do. And we examine those planets from
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: vast distances away.
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: And wouldn't you assume that a life form that is
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: perhaps thousands of years more advanced than us with the
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: exponential increase in technology, I mean, if they ever got
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: to the point where we are, that they would see
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: these Goldilocks planets as well and recognize that Earth is
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: one of them? Yes.
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 2: However... if they are so far away, they're going to
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 2: be examining Earth as it was hundreds of thousands or
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 2: millions or billions of years ago. So if you truly
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 2: want them to be examining us in the sense of
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 2: human presence on planet Earth, then it's a much more
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 2: difficult proposition to imagine that they've actually been doing that.
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: Is it possible there's another way to examine things where
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: you're not hampered by the speed of light?
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 2: Not that I know of. I mean, any signal in
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 2: the world that we're aware of is... Restricted by The
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 2: speed of travel By the speed of travel Which is
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 2: Now look There's quantum entanglement Which is a strange property
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 2: Of the quantum world In which distant objects Can behave
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 2: as if they are one Yes And in some sense
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 2: Respond instantaneously To an influence in one location At a
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 2: distant location No matter how far apart they are But
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 2: that isn't really Observing That's more realizing correlations between physical
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 2: properties at widely separated locations. But I'm not aware of
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 2: a means of leveraging that to actually observe what's happening
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 2: in some distant location, even if you do have quantum
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: entangled particles.
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: For a long time, my operating theory on aliens was
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: when I see something that's interesting, then I'm going to
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: pay attention to it. Right. Because it's too attractive. And
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: it's part of the thing of whether it's RAMPHA or
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: any of these wonky things. There's something about woo-woo stuff,
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: whether it's psychics or channelers, that's really attractive to people
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: in some sort of a weird way. And so are aliens.
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: The idea that if we were visited by something from
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: another world, some far advanced space daddy or whatever it is,
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: that comes down here and is going to show us
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: the way. That's so attractive that I think it messes
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: with your ordinary ability to observe and to objectively analyze
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: what's real and what's not.
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think it's
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 2: an unfortunate feature of the human mind that we tend
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 2: to look outward for– that will inject into the world
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 2: more than the everyday that we experience through common everyday encounters.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 2: We want there to be more. We don't want it
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 2: to be that we're just on this rock around this
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 2: planet and we live for a while and then we're gone.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: We want it to be more than that. And so
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 2: we imagine that there's some answer floating out there in
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 2: the cosmos that maybe that will be brought down to
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 2: Earth through our space daddy, as you referred to it.
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 2: And my view of that is, it's much more noble
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 2: to recognize that there is no answer floating out there
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 2: in space. There's no space data that's going to come
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 2: here and say, this is what it's all about. The
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 2: answer is, You and I and everybody else, we manufacture
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 2: our own meaning. We manufacture our own purpose. And how
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 2: much better is it that we come up with our
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 2: own meaning than having it bestowed or forced upon us
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 2: by some external entity? I don't think that diminishes things.
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 2: I think it aggrandizes them. because it's coming ultimately from ourselves.
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. I think the hope
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: is that Space Daddy is going to prevent nuclear war
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: and figure out how to fix the ocean. Yeah, sure.
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 2: And that I could certainly imagine happening. There's knowledge out
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 2: there in the world that you can imagine that we
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 2: haven't yet encountered that we could make use of. So, fantastic.
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 2: But the other thing that's worth keeping in mind, and
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 2: this I think is surprising to some people, you can
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 2: do a calculation as to whether consciousness... can itself persist
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 2: indefinitely in the universe? You can ask yourself, sure, Earth
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 2: may go away, you and I, we're going to go away,
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 2: we recognize all this, but is it possible that some
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 2: kind of conscious being can continue to cogitate indefinitely far
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 2: into the future, or its progeny continue to cogitate? And
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 2: you can pretty much establish that thought itself will come
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 2: to an end in this universe. Thought itself is a
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 2: limited lifetime phenomenon in the cosmos.
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: So when, at least our universe, right?
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 2: Yes, so I'm going to focus just on our universe.
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: So the breakdown of protons, when we get to that point,
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: there's no room for thought to exist.
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 2: No, that's part of it, but I'm willing to go further.
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 2: I'm willing to imagine that even with the breakdown of protons,
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 2: that there's some way that the particles that it spawns, electrons, neutrinos, photons, whatever,
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 2: somehow through some configuration of widely separated particles is able
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 2: to have signals going back and forth that allows this
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 2: group of particles to think. I'm willing to posit that
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 2: in order to be as general as possible. And with
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 2: that assumption, you can still prove that the relentless rise
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 2: in entropy that we were talking about before ensures that
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 2: any cogitating being that happens to still be able to
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 2: persist in this unusual realm of particles will ultimately burn
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 2: up in the entropic waste generated by its own process
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 2: of thinking. So the process of thought itself in the
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 2: far future will generate too much heat for that being
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 2: to be able to release that heat to the environment
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 2: and to avoid burning up in its own waste. When
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 2: you think, you will fry. Dude.
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: It's always been interesting to me when I've really stepped
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: back and looked at it that our ideas of the
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: importance of thought are so egocentric. When we take into
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: consideration the vast scope of the universe and how majestic,
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: so much that we see in the cosmos that there's
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: no thought, at least as far as we know, whatsoever.
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: Like hypernovas, like star nurseries, all these different things that
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: we see in the cosmos that are... infinitely larger than
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: us and responsible for life itself. That these processes create
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: the very elements that are needed to create life, but
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: we're so concerned with this one animal's ability to think
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: and ponder and create and emotions and write stories. To us,
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: it's so egocentric because it is everything.
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 2: How radically self-centered.
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: It's ludicrous. When you think about the infinite universe, I mean,
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: we are two finite beings living sitting in the valley
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: in front of a wooden desk. It's really weird that
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: we think about it as so important. It's everything to us.
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: It is. It is.
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 2: And it's hard to not think in those terms. But
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 2: I encourage people. And part of the point of this
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 2: book is to encourage people to think in a cosmic
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 2: way and recognize the point that you're making, which are
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 2: with these little tiny finite beings crawling around on this planet.
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 2: We're here for a brief moment of cosmic time and
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 2: that's all there is to it. And Some will feel like, oh,
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 2: my God, that's disturbing. That's distressing. My point is, hey, extol,
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 2: celebrate the fact that you are here for this brief.
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, think about the collection of quantum events stretching
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 2: back from the Big Bang until today that had to
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 2: turn out exactly as they did for you and for
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 2: me to actually exist. Each one of these quantum events,
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 2: and there are nearly infinitely many of them, could have
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 2: turned out that way instead of this, yielding a universe
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 2: in which neither you nor I nor anybody else would
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: be here. And yet against those astounding odds, astounding odds,
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 2: we're here. That is cause for celebration. And you can
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 2: go further. Not only are we here, we can figure
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 2: out how we got here. We can create Art. We
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 2: can write the stories that you are referring to. We
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 2: can create comedy. We can build monuments. We can create films.
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 2: We can do things that inanimate objects can't. So this
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 2: to me is where the value and purpose and meaning
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 2: comes from as opposed to trying to look out and
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 2: hope Space Daddy comes with the answer of flashing a
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 2: neon sign saying, aha, that's what it's all about. That's
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 2: never going to happen. It isn't.
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: Well, it might. You might have to eat yours.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 2: I admit that it's possible. So every time I say
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 2: it's not going to happen, I mean unlikely that it's
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 2: going to happen.
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: Very unlikely. Yeah, I agree with that. But it's interesting
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: to me that that's the thing that we look forward
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: to the most. To the average person, if they think
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: about space, they think about intelligent life. That is far
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: more interesting to them than the fact that there's black
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: holes outside. out there that are devouring planets yeah they're
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: sucking stars into its event horizon yeah this infinite point
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: of density that we can't even really begin to imagine
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: with our own little brains.
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah yeah and uh And the fact that all this
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 2: arose without a guiding intelligence.
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 2: You know, that there are black holes and there are
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 2: active galactic nuclei and there are black holes slamming into
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 2: each other, creating gravitational waves that we can actually detect.
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 2: I mean, it is a wonderfully rich reality that we
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 2: are fortunate to be part of.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: Do you experience much pushback or much... conflict from religious
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: people who don't like the fact that you describe things
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: in that way that didn't need an intelligent force or
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: intelligent creator to exist?
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 2: It's an interesting question because the biological community, people like
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 2: Richard Dawkins and the like, I think have really borne
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 2: the brunt of the religious pushback because they're dealing directly
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 2: with phenomena of life and that's the precious commodity that
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 2: somehow we want to be sacred And therefore, our religious
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 2: sensibility will push back on it just being the mindless
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 2: laws of physics and evolution yielding life on planet Earth.
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 2: They haven't pushed as hard on the quantum physicists and
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 2: the cosmologists as they have on the biologists. But I
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 2: have had conversations. Many of them are respectful as opposed
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 2: to antagonistic where the view is that I am wrongheaded,
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 2: that I am missing the point. And some of these
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 2: religious folks are fantastically accomplished scientists.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: That's weird.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I went to a gathering. I think
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 2: I can talk about it now. It was a closed-door gathering.
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 2: You weren't meant to describe it.
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right.
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 2: I'm really opening myself up. And I thought it was
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 2: called Science and the Spiritual Quest. And it was a
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 2: bunch of scientists that were being brought together. And I
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 2: thought it was going to be an interesting but ultimately
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 2: one-note meeting. I thought everybody's going to basically say the
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 2: same thing. There could be a God. There's no evidence
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 2: for a God. We've got the laws of physics. And
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 2: we're going to just press forward under the assumption that
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 2: physics is all there is until the clouds part and
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 2: God reveals him or herself or itself to us. And
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 2: at that point, we may change our tune. It was
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 2: not one note. I was the only person who had
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 2: that perspective in the room. Everybody else was coming at
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 2: religion from a very different, different way of thinking about
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 2: the world. In fact, there's one Nobel laureate in the
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 2: room who got up and sang psalms as part of
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 2: his presentation. And I was sitting there and I was like,
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 2: what is happening here? This is so unexpected to me.
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 2: And what it really meant was I was so close-minded
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 2: into the varieties of religious engagement that happen in the world.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 2: And it opened my eyes. And this one Nobel laureate
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 2: in particular, I did say to him at the end,
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 2: I said, when you look at me, And you hear
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 2: my view. What do you think? And he kind of
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 2: put his arm around me in a vuncular way and said,
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 2: you know, you're a real smart guy and you don't
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 2: understand the true reality. And I think ultimately you will
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 2: because you're open-minded and you're on a journey and I
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: hope that your journey will finally take you to the
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 2: place where I have been for many years. That was
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 2: so unexpected.
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 2: That this Nobel laureate who I respected for his concrete
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 2: mathematical and experimental work saw the world completely differently.
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: Now, was there a spectrum of belief?
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But I was the one who was
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 2: far out.
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: You were untethered.
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I came in there. I was like, whoa,
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 2: you know. And now clearly they arranged the meeting to
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 2: have a spectrum of perspectives. I mean, this is not
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 2: something that was randomly designed and it just so happened.
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 2: But it was an eye-opener. And from that, I went
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 2: to read– do you know William James' book, Varieties of
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 2: Religious Experience?
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 2: So it's a book that William James, a great psychologist,
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: wrote in 1902. And it was based on a series
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 2: of lectures I think he gave in Scotland. And it
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 2: is the most heartfelt and rational approach to religion and
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 2: science that I think has ever been written. And yet
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 2: most people don't know much about it. because what he
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: does is he goes through and he documents through his
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 2: own research and through reading biographies and interviewing individuals the
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 2: vastly different ways that people think about religion and why
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 2: they think about religion and the value that religion has
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 2: in their lives. And when you read that book, it
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 2: doesn't convert me. I haven't changed my views on whether
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 2: or not there is a God, but it has changed
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 2: my views on the value of religious sensibility, the role
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 2: that it plays in people's lives. Now, look, it can be,
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 2: you know, you talk to people like Sam Harris and,
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 2: you know, it's a destructive force in the world, and
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 2: it has been a destructive force in some ways, but
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 2: that's not the full story. A fuller story is that
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 2: for some individuals, it gives a connection to a historical
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 2: lineage that's deeply valued. For some individuals, It puts their
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 2: life in a larger setting that allows them to be
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 2: in the world in a more productive way. So there
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 2: are a whole range of roles that religious engagement can play.
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 2: The problem is when you start to pit it against
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 2: scientific insight, then you run into trouble. But religion was
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 2: never developed to give us factual information about the world.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 2: Religion will never give us the electron magnetic moment to
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 2: nine decimal places. That's the purview of scientific investigation. And
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 2: if you can keep these straight in your mind, there's
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 2: a definite and powerful role for a religious sensibility in
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 2: the world.
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like it gives people in a lot
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: of ways a scaffolding for ethics and morality and allows
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: them some alleviation of anxiety.
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: A feeling of purpose. But like you said, as long
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: as it's not conflicting with rigid scientific reality.
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, right.
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: Like scientific, provable scientific reality.
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I got to tell you, it's a funny thing.
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 2: You know, Richard Dawkins, I don't know if you had
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 2: him on the program. So you know that his.
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 2: His M.O. in the world is very anti-religious. I think
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 2: you would agree with me on that. I don't want
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 2: to put words into his mouth. But I did an
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 2: event with him in New York, the Beacon Theater.
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 2: It was maybe a year ago or something like that.
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 2: And it was very interesting because in a one-on-one conversation,
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 2: his views were different. very similar to mine. I felt, look,
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 2: we don't agree in totality, but I was saying to him,
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 2: there are times I go around the world and I
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 2: will do things that are utterly irrational. I'll knock on
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 2: wood for good luck. I'll speak to my dead father.
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 2: I know that he's not really there. I'll pray to
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 2: God on occasion if I think that I could use
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 2: that backup. Not because I think there's some bearded individual
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 2: in the It's just a behavioral tendency that I find
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 2: to be comforting and useful. And I said this to Richard.
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 2: And he said, I totally get it.
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: I was like, what?
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 2: He was like, I totally get it. He said, in fact,
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 2: he said, I don't like to sleep in a house
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 2: that has a reputation as being haunted. You know? And
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 2: for me, it was such a beautiful human moment. It
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 2: was such a beautiful human moment where we were just
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 2: like being human beings. And he said, we're both sinners.
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 2: And I agree. We are both sinners in that sense.
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 2: Because we know how the world works. We know this
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 2: doesn't make any sense. And yes, it's still part of
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 2: somehow how we behave in the world. And I think
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 2: there's a value to recognizing that that is what it
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 2: means to be human. You will engage in the world
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 2: in ways that are not necessarily strictly adhering to some
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 2: rational perspective of how the scientific world operates.
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: I would love to see Richard Dawkins outside of a
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: haunted house saying, I'm not going in there.
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: Exactly. You know. Yeah.
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So, you know, it's all just to say that
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 2: I kind of feel like there are many pathways toward
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 2: insight in the world. There are many ways to live
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 2: a life. There are many ways to come to terms
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 2: with our own impermanence. And it's not as though something
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 2: is right or something is wrong. It's a question of
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 2: is it useful to you? And I think that we
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 2: have to be very open-minded in the kinds of behaviors
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 2: that– That we allow to happen in the world, you know,
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 2: you know even romp that it's nutty stuff Yeah, but
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 2: if some of those individuals who go there find that
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 2: it allows them to live in the world in a
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 2: more productive way alleviating anxiety Feeling like they're on a
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 2: spiritual quest.
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 2: So be it.
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the thing that's something I mean, it's hard
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: for people to understand if you're not in that space
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: that headspace it there you don't need this structure But
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: for some people, even Scientology or something along those lines,
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: it seems loopy on paper, can provide them with legitimate
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: structure and benefit their lives in a tangible way that
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: they could describe to you.
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And my feeling is that if there was–
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 2: I don't know this to be the case. Maybe some
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 2: biologists will push back on this. But if there was
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 2: a race of, for want of a better word, Vulcan-like
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 2: individuals– who approach the world in a completely rational manner,
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 2: evaluating the data, figuring out the most sensible course of action,
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 2: competing against a crazy group of individuals like us who
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 2: will come up with wild fictional ideas gods in the heavens,
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 2: demons haunting the world. I think it's the latter group
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 2: that ultimately would triumph because with that kind of freedom
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 2: of thought, you get novelty, you get ingenuity, you get creativity.
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 2: And so I feel as though this is part and
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 2: parcel of who we are and why we have survived.
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 2: And to sort of come at the world with a
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 2: scientific club that's meant to smash away anything that disagrees
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 2: with the scientific worldview is is an unfortunate way of
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 2: looking at the world.
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's something about creativity that it doesn't necessarily have
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: to abide by any laws of logic and it can
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: still be beneficial.
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's why it's so stunning when somebody comes
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 2: up with something, it's like, where did that come from?
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 2: It didn't come from a rational approach to working out,
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 2: you know, Brahms' Third Symphony. It emerged from the churning
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 2: emotions of an individual who, who happens to be made
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 2: up of trillions of particles, guided by physical law, responding
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 2: to the environment, which is impinging his senses with an
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 2: incredible array of influences, and through that whirl... emerges this
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 2: spectacular piece of music. That's breathtaking. Utterly breathtaking.
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's amazing what that music can inspire as
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: it reaches out to X amount of people and then
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: causes different thoughts in their mind. And then that causes,
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: in turn, another branch of creativity, another new line of
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: thinking that they might have never pursued before.
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that to me establishes that the notions that
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 2: language is the only way that we can know about
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 2: the world. You know, Wittgenstein had this perspective, that the
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 2: limits of my language, limits of my world, that seems
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 2: to me utterly wrong. I mean, the experience of music
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 2: or the experience of cogitating about the world, but not
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 2: trying to overlay a narrative upon it, just feeling your
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 2: way into reality reveals things about the world that I
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 2: think are beyond linguistic.
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: Do you ever listen to music when you're pondering an
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: equation or whether you're going over a problem?
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 2: It's an interesting question. When I was in college, I
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 2: couldn't have any sound on when I was trying to, say,
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 2: learn quantum mechanics or relativity. I would find that it
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 2: would capture my brain too fully, and I couldn't focus
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 2: on the equations that I was trying to understand. But
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 2: the funny thing is, in writing this book, for the
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 2: very first time, I found that there were passages that
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 2: I couldn't write if it was quiet. I needed to
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 2: have music playing because in some sense, by focusing too
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 2: directly on what I was trying to say, I couldn't
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 2: say it. I only found that I could make progress
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 2: in certain kinds of descriptions by allowing my brain to
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 2: fly off through whatever musical experience I was playing and
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 2: allowing the Freedom of thought to then emerge within that unusual,
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 2: for me, environment.
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: What kind of music reels?
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 2: Well, it varied incredibly.
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: A lot of Slayer? No.
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 2: So some of it was classical. I remember there's one
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 2: vital passage when I was writing. Do you know Pentatonix?
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 2: They are a spectacular a cappella group who are able
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 2: to take songs that you have heard and transform them.
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 2: into sort of transcendent performances. So you should check these
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 2: guys out. But other times, you know, it would just
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 2: be loud rock, loud Beatles, loud Rolling Stones, the soundtrack
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: from The Greatest Showman, you know, just blaring that thing.
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 2: And somehow it just allowed me a certain kind of
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 2: linguistic freedom that I could not acquire in my normal
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 2: way of being in the world, which is everyone's quiet,
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 2: Let me just work out my equations and I need
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 2: total focus and no distraction.
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: So is this something that you sort of evolved over
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 1: the course of your career? Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 2: It was not there early on. And, you know, there's
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 2: this phenomenon. I don't know if this is anything more
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 2: than a metaphor or an analogy, but whatever. You know,
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 2: there are certain things in The Night Sky that you
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 2: can't see. if you look at them directly. But by
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 2: looking off axis, you're able to invoke other qualities of
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 2: the eye that are able to sense those features of
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 2: the night sky. And I kind of feel like it's
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 2: the same thing. Sometimes by focusing directly on what you
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 2: want to do, you can't do it. And you've got
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 2: to look obliquely, you've got to look off axis metaphorically,
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 2: and that's the only way that you can accomplish what
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 2: you set out to do. And certainly music is one
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 2: of the ways to take one's attention And shifted in
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 2: a different direction to get that oblique view of what
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 2: it is that you're trying to do. And I have
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 2: found that it allows for progress that otherwise is unattainable.
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: And is that the case also when you were writing
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: this book?
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 2: It absolutely was the case writing this book. You know,
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 2: I have a very– a wife who's very understanding. So
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 2: we have a house– we live in Manhattan. I'm at Columbia.
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 2: But she would let me go up to our house
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 2: upstate with the dogs and by myself. And I would
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 2: disappear for weeks on end. And I'd hold myself up
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 2: in this cabin in the woods and I would sometimes
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 2: write deep into the night and there were no neighbors
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 2: around so I could turn on the music at whatever
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 2: volume I found useful and I would do it. And
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 2: I would find, you know, that it freed up a
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 2: certain kind of creative thought process that to me was
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 2: striking because I had never approached work in that way before.
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 2: And it was really deeply interesting.
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: So how did you come to this idea of doing
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: it that way?
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 2: I was struggling on certain things, and I felt as
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 2: though I am approaching this in a very flat-footed way.
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 2: I want to write about this, you know, say I
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 2: want to write about human creativity or I want to
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 2: write about religious engagement, and I am just doing what
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 2: I've always done, which is I have this equation. And
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 2: I want to solve it. So I'm going to bring
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 2: the tools of mathematics to bear to solve it. And
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 2: I was approaching this writing project in exactly the same
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 2: mind frame. And as it wasn't working, I said, let
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 2: me smack my brain around a little bit. And so
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 2: one way of– it could be psychedelics. I didn't go
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 2: that direction. But I smacked it around by– Forcing myself
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 2: to be subject to a great deal of distraction in
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 2: the environment around me. And it really made a difference.
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: It's interesting that you did it in a calculated manner.
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, right. So, I can't break free fully from my
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 2: physicist training, you know.
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: But it's wise. I mean, that way of doing it
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: is wise. And it's also a time-tested, you know, from Ralph.
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: From Thoreau to, you know, the beginning of time.
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the funny thing is it never worked for
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 2: me in the past because the focus, I think when
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 2: I'm doing mathematics, it does need, at least for me personally,
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 2: to be that kind of non-distracted, total focus on what's
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 2: going on.
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: As a writer, it's a very romantic notion, too.
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: To go to the woods in a cabin, that's what's up. Yeah, right.
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: That's what everybody wants to do. Yeah, right.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 2: Right, exactly.
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: The only thing that's missing is whiskey.
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 1: You're supposed to get drunk out there. Did you get
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: drunk out there? Yeah, that I did.
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 2: And I had the dogs and it was just– like
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 2: I said, I hardly ever drink. But it was an
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 2: unusual creative experience, which to me opened up a different
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 2: way of going about trying to create things in the world.
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: As you write more and more books, do you find
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: it to be more and more difficult or do you
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: find it to be easier?
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 2: Well, my early books were all focused on trying to
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 2: bring scientific ideas out to the general public. You know,
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 2: the elegant universe was about string theory, fabric of the cosmos,
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 2: space and time. Hidden reality is about multiple universes. And
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 2: so in that role, I'm basically trying to translate from
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 2: the cutting edge research into ordinary human language so that
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 2: people who don't want to go to graduate school can
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 2: get the basic idea of what's going on. And this
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 2: book is a very different proposition. I feel like I've
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 2: moved in a significantly different direction through this book because, yes,
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 2: there's science, you know, entropy, evolution, the history of the
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 2: universe from the beginning to the end. But the focus
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 2: on why we humans do what we do, why we
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 2: tell stories, the emergence of language, why we tell myths,
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 2: why we engage in religious experience, why creative expression is
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 2: so important to us, This felt like it was drawing
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 2: upon things I've been thinking about for decades but never
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 2: put into writing. So it was a harder exercise than
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 2: anything that I did before because it was a different exercise.
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 2: But in the end, one that I felt was even
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 2: more gratifying because it was making clear why these ideas matter.
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 2: As opposed to just trying to tickle the brain of
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 2: the reader, I'm trying to actually– if you will, touch
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 2: the heart and soul of the reader. And that's something which,
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 2: if it's successful, feels very gratifying.
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: I would imagine that would be very hard to end,
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: to feel how, like, to put the cover on it
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: and to go, that's it.
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, right, it is. But that's true almost with all books.
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 2: You know, the famous adage is that you never finish
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 2: a book, you abandon them. You know, that's all that
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 2: ever happens. And that was true in spades in this
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 2: particular case because the subject was so big. And you
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 2: can always imagine going further in this direction or enhancing
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 2: that description. But at some point, you recognize that life
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 2: is an ongoing process. And a book is ultimately a
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 2: snapshot of where the author was at the moment that
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 2: the book was written. And that, to me, is really
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 2: what happens here. This is a snapshot of my view
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 2: of the human condition set against the cosmological unfolding.
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: And how much of your perceptions of these things has
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: evolved as an educator and as a scientist and as
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: a person who's in the public eye? How much of
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: your perceptions on these ideas have changed over the course
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: of your career?
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 2: Huge, huge. I think I was a very hard-nosed science
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 2: thinker when I started. I think part of this may
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 2: have been I became a professor at a relatively young age.
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 2: I think I was 27 when I got my first
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 2: faculty job, so many of the graduate students were the
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 2: same age as me. So I think I felt the
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 2: need to have a very rigid scientific outlook on the
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 2: world because of that. And, you know, as I've gotten older,
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 2: that has changed. And my willingness to entertain a broader
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 2: range of thought and experience and ways of being has
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 2: absolutely grown. The other thing that's had a vast and
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 2: vital impact on me are students. You know, for 30 years,
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 2: the only thing I really taught was technical physics courses,
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 2: quantum mechanics or relativity, you know, thermodynamics. And what do
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 2: you do there? You're at the blackboard. You're putting equations
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 2: up there. You're trying to get the kids to be
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 2: able to solve problems and understand what the mathematics is
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 2: all about. So the only thing you're really ever doing
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 2: is touching the cognitive part of their brain. For the
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 2: last few years, I've been teaching a course, the students
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 2: didn't know it, that's actually based on this book. So
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 2: I wanted to try out the ideas with young minds.
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 2: So I taught a course at Columbia called Origins and Meaning.
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: And in that course, I had students from across the campus,
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 2: not just the physics students. I had the neuro students,
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 2: the anthropology students, the linguistic students, the theological students. So
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 2: it was a whole range of students. And to see
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 2: how their understanding of how they're major or subject fits
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 2: in to the cosmological unfolding changed many of their perspectives
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 2: on what it is that they're studying and what they're doing.
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 2: And to have students come to my office and to
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 2: feel shooken up, shaken up, whatever the right form of
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 2: that verb is, where they're saying, you know, I've lived
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 2: my life in such a way, but now when I
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 2: think about religion as perhaps an evolutionarily interesting and useful
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 2: development as opposed to something from on high, Or when
• 2:00:42
  Speaker 2: I think about creative expression as something that might seed
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 2: ingenuity and innovation as opposed to something that is just
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 2: pure inspiration coming from the outer world, I'm thinking about
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 2: my life differently. And some of them, frankly, would be upset.
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 2: I'd had students come in tears. And I'd never had
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: them when I teach quantum mechanics.
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: In tears?
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: More than one?
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 2: More than one. Really? Because they'd say, this course is
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 2: kind of shaking my sense of who I am and why.
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 2: what I am in the world.
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 1: What was the key aspect of it that was shaking them?
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 2: Well, for some students, it was the notion of religion
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 2: because many of them, or at least some of them,
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 2: had a traditional religious upbringing and their academic life and
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 2: their religious life were completely separate. And now when you
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 2: have a course in which you're focusing upon how it
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 2: would be that this institution of religion might naturally evolve
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 2: on planet Earth based upon what we know about humans
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 2: and human brains and the evolutionary pressures that we've been under,
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 2: some of them began to think about religion as a
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 2: very different proposition than the one that they had when
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 2: they were growing up. And I was in a position
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 2: that I'd never been before of basically counseling a student
• 2:01:54
  Speaker 2: and saying, hey, it's okay to have your world shake
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 2: a little bit. It's okay to think about things. You
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 2: may come back to exactly where you were before this course,
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 2: but if a collection of ideas can make you rethink
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 2: your life, at least it'll cast it in a different light.
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 2: It'll illuminate it differently. Go with it. See what happens.
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 2: And I never had a conversation like that when teaching
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 2: Schrodinger's equation. And for me, it was the most gratifying
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 2: pedagogical experience that I've ever had because... you're reaching the
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 2: whole person as opposed to just reaching this cognitive technique
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 2: of solving equations.
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: If you can talk religion with a really intelligent person
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 1: who's objective, who has a belief, it's such an interesting
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: subject because it requires suspension of disbelief in order to
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: absorb some of the stories. But There's clearly a history
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 1: behind this of thousands of years of translations. And you're
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: trying to get to the what did they mean when
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: they wrote this down? How much did they know? And
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: what were they trying to do? Were they just trying
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: to get everybody to calm down and stay in line? Right.
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 2: Or were they trying to find some means of gluing
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 2: the group together by a shared belief? Or, you know,
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 2: there are folks who basically say that there are qualities
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 2: of the human brain. that naturally leave it open to
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 2: a religious sensibility. I mean, for instance, we have agency
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 2: detection systems in our brain where we look around the
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 2: world and we tend to assign agency to things that happen.
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 2: That's useful, right? Because, you know, if you mistake a
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 2: windblown branch for a jaguar, Yeah.
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 1: It's fine.
• 2:03:35
  Speaker 2: You thought it was a jaguar, but it's just a branch.
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 2: But if the reverse happens, you think it was a
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 2: jaguar and you think it's a windblown branch, you're going
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 2: to get eaten. So we tend to over-endow agency into
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 2: the world. There is evolutionary value to that. So when
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 2: the wind blows... We tend to think there's a mind
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 2: up there. When the river gurgles, we tend to think
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 2: that there's a mind in there. And this is sort
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 2: of the seed for the kinds of perspectives that you'll
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 2: find in many of the world's religions. So there's natural
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 2: course of events that can lead to the arising of
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 2: the institution or at least the ideas behind the institution
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 2: of religion. And for students that have never encountered that
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 2: idea before, it can really– shake things up, and I
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 2: think in a very valuable way. So I think you're
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 2: absolutely right. Having a conversation with somebody who has a
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 2: religious perspective is deeply interesting to understand where that mind
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 2: came to the place that it got to. And from
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 2: a personal sensibility, I just give you one little anecdote.
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 2: My dad died. I was 23 years old. And unexpectedly,
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 2: I'd been visiting home. I was at Harvard at the time.
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 2: I was visiting from Cambridge and we had a nice weekend.
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 2: And by the time I got back to Cambridge on
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 2: the bus, my mom called me and said, dad's dead.
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 2: It was so, so shocking. It was like so sudden.
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 2: It was so complete. And I remember I went back
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 2: home and my dad was not a religious man, but
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 2: we knew that he would want to have a religious ceremony.
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 2: And we, and we did it. And we had, you know,
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 2: a minion of Jews coming to the house to recite the,
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 2: the Kaddish prayer. Cause we weren't religious. We didn't know
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 2: what we were doing, you know? And I had no
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 2: idea what these men were saying. But it was deeply comforting.
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 2: In fact, I didn't want to know what they were saying.
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 2: To me, it was just a collection of ancient sounds.
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 2: But the sounds connected me across the generations to a
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 2: culture that had been extending back 5,000 years. And in
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 2: a moment of crisis, that was a very comforting and
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 2: useful connection to have.
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that is where I find people get the most
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 1: out of religion in the fact that it brings communities
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: together in this sort of cohesive ritual where everybody acts
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 1: together and everybody– you feel like there's completion to it.
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: Like you're putting someone into perspective and you're doing so
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: with this religious ceremony.
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 2: And when large groups of people get together– and engage
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 2: in a ritual behavior, something magical happens. You know, I've
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 2: spoken to evolutionary psychologists like Steve Pinker, who is a
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 2: wonderful thinker.
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: I've had him in here too. Yeah, okay.
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 2: And you know, Steve is skeptical that this kind of
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 2: ritual behavior can yield the kind of cohesive bonding that
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 2: some people suggest that it does. But You know, you
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 2: probably have, but I have on occasion engaged in these
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 2: ritual behaviors, you know, mass drumming and movement.
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 1: And I got to.
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 2: Tell you, you are quickly, I find, transported to a
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 2: place where you are now part of a collective and
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 2: you feel yourself melting into the group and you are one.
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 2: And if you've never had that experience, I think it's
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 2: something that you should have because I think it's a
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 2: vital part of our heritage. It is part of how
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 2: we got to be who we are.
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's something about group acceptance and a group of
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: people acting and doing something together that does create this
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: very strange bond. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily exist amongst individuals.
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: It's a weird bond.
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 2: It's a very weird bond because it has nothing to
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 2: do with the individuals, nothing to do with the personality
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 2: of Jim or Mary. It's irrelevant at that point. It's
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 2: somehow joining you together into this massive humanity that That's
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 2: all engaged in the same practice and somehow you feel
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 2: as though your identity melts into the larger whole. I
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: don't know why it happens.
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: There's negative aspects to that sort of thing.
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: Or that mob mentality.
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 1: Like, have you ever been in a situation where things
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 1: got chaotic and you really had this feeling like anything
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: can happen at any moment?
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 2: I've seen it happen. I've never been part of it.
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 1: It's very weird.
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 2: But I have a sort of … There's a feeling
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 2: in the air.
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 2: I have an analogous one, which is, you know, my
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 2: brother is a Hare Krishna. Wow. you know and so
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 2: you know he is 13 years older than me and
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 2: and left college in the 60s which was a tumultuous
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 2: time and and went to Europe and ultimately joined into
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: what many people think of as some kind of cultish
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 2: activity yeah and and so But he's not a cult thinker.
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: He's an original thinker. He's a brilliant thinker. And yet
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 2: within this group mentality, you can imagine a certain kind
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 2: of group think can take over. At least people imagine
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 2: that this happens. So, yes, it has positive aspects and
• 2:08:34
  Speaker 2: it can have negative aspects. But in the end, I
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 2: think there is a long lineage in which those of
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 2: our forebears who survived were the ones who could join together.
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 2: into these more potent, these more powerful groups. And that way,
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 2: we're able to triumph over other groups, you know, in
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 2: the ancestral environment. You know, there's different readings of the
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 2: archaeological record, whether it was a dangerous place in the
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 2: hunter-gatherer past or a sort of placid place. But one
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 2: reading says it was a very dangerous place. And therefore,
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 2: those groups that survived were the ones who were able
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 2: to establish this kind of allegiance to the whole. And certainly,
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 2: I think this kind of ritual behavior may have been
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 2: part of that.
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 1: Bond together through shared experience.
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 2: And belief.
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 2: And if you're all believing in the same supernatural entity,
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 2: that's a powerful, in principle, powerful glue.
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: Do you find that there's, I mean, I don't want
• 2:09:29
  Speaker 1: to say an arrogance in some academics. Maybe that's not
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: the right word, but this being too quick to dismiss
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: any positive benefit at all. about religion?
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 2: Yes. It's the knee-jerk reaction among a certain group of academics.
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 2: And it feels deeply unfortunate to me. It almost feels
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 2: like a religion of its own sort when it's just
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 2: the response as opposed to a careful, thoughtful, heartfelt analysis
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 2: of the situation. I frankly wish that more people would
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 2: read William James' book because I do think that it's
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 2: the kind of... Here's a scientist right, a deeply thoughtful
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 2: scientist who knows how to analyze data, knows how to
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 2: rationally engage with the world, who was plumbing the depths
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 2: of religion in a very, very meaningful and sensitive way.
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 2: You know, and by the end of these lectures, I
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 2: think it was lecture number 20 or something, he describes
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 2: religion as this, as something that helps the journey toward
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 2: the the terror and the beauty of phenomenon. He describes
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 2: it as the voice of the thunder, the gentleness of
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 2: the summer rain. He describes it in terms of the
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 2: sublimity of the stars. And this kind of transcendent approach
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 2: to the religious experience, I think, brings it out of
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 2: the academic guise that is often thrown upon it, which
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 2: is something that is contravening everything we know about the world.
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 2: It's causing people to think in ways that are irrational.
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 2: I mean, this whole trope that you hear, it's not
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 2: that there isn't some truth to that, but it's an
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 2: incomplete truth. And if you're willing to approach religion in
• 2:11:12
  Speaker 2: a way where you discard the pieces that offend you,
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 2: throw away the parts that you think are utter nonsense,
• 2:11:18
  Speaker 2: only keep those aspects that are useful to you in
• 2:11:22
  Speaker 2: your life, then there is a place for it.
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: Well, I think therein lies the problem with a lot
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 1: of people. They're not willing to do that. This is...
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: need for suspension of disbelief troubles them so much that
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 1: they feel like fools if they buy into something.
• 2:11:34
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 1: And we're also dealing with all religions except the ones
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 1: that are super questionable like Scientology or Mormonism. Right. That
• 2:11:42
  Speaker 1: are very old. And the idea of maybe it would
• 2:11:46
  Speaker 1: be better if we came up with something that we
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 1: could all agree on in 2020.
• 2:11:51
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:11:51
  Speaker 1: Maybe it would be wonderful if we have something that
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 1: maybe has science in it. maybe something that has a
• 2:11:58
  Speaker 1: genuine understanding of how human beings react and what the
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 1: benefits of community and having these environments where loving, conscious
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: people communicate with each other in a very positive way,
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 1: that this could be a new form of this thing
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: that we seem to desire so greatly.
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I agree. And I have to say I
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 2: make this point in the book because the point that
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 2: I make there is that to truly engage with the world,
• 2:12:25
  Speaker 2: You have to use a variety of stories. We're fundamentally storytellers.
• 2:12:29
  Speaker 2: That's what human beings are. Now, there's the reductionist story
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 2: that physicists are well-equipped to talk about with particles and
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 2: laws of physics. On top of that, you've got the
• 2:12:39
  Speaker 2: chemist's story, the complex molecules. You've got the biologist's story
• 2:12:42
  Speaker 2: that begins to talk about cells and life. You've got
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 2: the psychological story, the neurophysiological story that brings a mind
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 2: and consciousness together. And within that, you then have all
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 2: of the activities that conscious beings undertake, which includes religion
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 2: and includes telling other kinds of stories and includes creative expression.
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 2: You need them all. And to sort of say that
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 2: the scientific account is the only account by which you're
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 2: ever going to gain true qualities of the world is
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 2: a very, in my view, limited description of what truth is.
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 2: There is objective truth in the world that we can measure,
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 2: that we can describe with equations of self-worth, but there's
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 2: also internal truth, spiritual truth that you get to by self-examination.
• 2:13:24
  Speaker 2: It's real in the sense that you're understanding how you
• 2:13:27
  Speaker 2: respond to the world. And that is something which is
• 2:13:30
  Speaker 2: deeply personal, but utterly real. And whether it's through psychedelics,
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 2: whether it's through ayahuasca, whether it's through a spiritual journey,
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 2: whether it's through religion, regardless, all of this adds color
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 2: to To the story of what it means to be
• 2:13:44
  Speaker 2: a human being.
• 2:13:45
  Speaker 1: Do you spend any time meditating? I do.
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 2: I'm not particularly effective at it.
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 1: I think most people are that way. Yeah.
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 2: Including the most effective ones. Well, years ago, a friend
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 2: of mine bought me. one of these transcendental meditation courses,
• 2:14:02
  Speaker 2: and I was like, okay, I'll just try it. He
• 2:14:05
  Speaker 2: spent the money, I'm gonna actually go and do it.
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 2: And it was kind of eye-opening. There was a lot
• 2:14:10
  Speaker 2: of what you might call woo-woo stuff that was happening
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 2: in the lectures, and in fact, the funny thing is,
• 2:14:15
  Speaker 2: the guy giving the lecture, he did recognize me, and
• 2:14:19
  Speaker 2: you could I could tell how uncomfortable he was giving
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 2: his normal description because he kept looking at me sheepishly
• 2:14:27
  Speaker 2: as he would invoke quantum physics and things of that sort.
• 2:14:31
  Speaker 2: But I told him, I'm not here to judge you.
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 2: I'm just here to sort of see what's going on.
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 2: But the idea of allowing the mind to be in
• 2:14:42
  Speaker 2: a different mode of operation, which is sort of how
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 2: I summarize the experience. If you're reciting the mantra in
• 2:14:49
  Speaker 2: your mind and allowing that to be a sort of
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 2: pedal point, a driver of how your mind is behaving
• 2:14:55
  Speaker 2: at that moment, that's a very different way of being
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 2: in the world from thinking about grocery shopping or solving
• 2:15:01
  Speaker 2: Einstein's equations. And I think that to me is the
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 2: value of it. It's a systematic way to put your
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 2: mind in a different mode of operation. And at times,
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 2: I find it very useful to move into that place.
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 1: When you started doing Transcendental Meditation, what about it was weird?
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 2: Well, what was weird, number one, was doing this in
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 2: this group setting, which is how you start on this course.
• 2:15:30
  Speaker 2: And moreover, it being framed in a manner that that
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 2: I had trouble aligning with my understanding of how the
• 2:15:37
  Speaker 2: world works by virtue of the lectures that were given
• 2:15:40
  Speaker 2: to us for what it is what we were doing.
• 2:15:42
  Speaker 2: But through the practice, I sort of found, I'm sure
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 2: I'm just translating from what they were saying in the
• 2:15:48
  Speaker 2: lecture into a language that I'm more comfortable with. And
• 2:15:52
  Speaker 2: that made it less weird for me.
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 1: Sort of like what you were talking about, religion, just
• 2:15:56
  Speaker 1: kind of cutting out the thing.
• 2:15:57
  Speaker 2: Cutting out the thing that didn't make any sense to
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 2: me and saying, hey, what is this really about? What
• 2:16:01
  Speaker 2: this really is about is breaking the usual chain of
• 2:16:05
  Speaker 2: thought that is 99.9% of the time of how I
• 2:16:09
  Speaker 2: live in the world and allowing my brain to have
• 2:16:12
  Speaker 2: a chain of thought that is artificial because I'm sitting
• 2:16:16
  Speaker 2: here forcing myself to recite this mantra inside my mind,
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 2: but that's a very useful way of being because it's
• 2:16:24
  Speaker 2: unfamiliar and it's novel and it allows my brain to
• 2:16:27
  Speaker 2: operate in a different way. So when I translated it
• 2:16:30
  Speaker 2: into that language, it all of a sudden made a
• 2:16:33
  Speaker 2: lot more sense to me and became not weird at all.
• 2:16:36
  Speaker 2: It became an interesting practice.
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 1: And do you still do it?
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 2: I do it when I feel I need it. So
• 2:16:43
  Speaker 2: there are friends of mine who say, I cannot live
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 2: in the world if I don't do my 20 minutes
• 2:16:48
  Speaker 2: in the morning. Simply, you know, that's part of my routine.
• 2:16:52
  Speaker 2: I don't feel that way, but there are moments when
• 2:16:54
  Speaker 2: I say, whoa, I need to do it. And based
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 2: on circumstance, based on what's happening in a given moment,
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 2: It allows a kind of mental reset if that's a
• 2:17:03
  Speaker 2: language that makes sense. And that reset I consider to
• 2:17:07
  Speaker 2: be a valuable thing to do. So do you do this?
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 1: I do. I don't do TM, but I do meditate.
• 2:17:14
  Speaker 2: Regular basis.
• 2:17:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, regular basis. And I also have a float tank here. Oh,
• 2:17:18
  Speaker 1: you do? Really?
• 2:17:19
  Speaker 2: Like a deprivation?
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:17:21
  Speaker 2: In this building?
• 2:17:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's right over there. I'll show it to you
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: after we're done.
• 2:17:24
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:17:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:17:25
  Speaker 2: Can I do it?
• 2:17:25
  Speaker 1: Sure. You could if you want. Oh, shit. Have you
• 2:17:27
  Speaker 1: done it before?
• 2:17:28
  Speaker 2: I've never done it before.
• 2:17:29
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God. You've got to do it.
• 2:17:30
  Speaker 2: I find it a little bit terrifying.
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: Do you live in Manhattan? I do, yeah. Yeah, there's
• 2:17:33
  Speaker 1: plenty of them. There's a bunch of different float places.
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: It's not terrifying at all. Really? Yeah, you just float, relax.
• 2:17:40
  Speaker 2: But it's complete darkness, right?
• 2:17:41
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 2:17:41
  Speaker 2: See, because I have some claustrophobia.
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 2: And that's like, for instance, I can't go into an
• 2:17:46
  Speaker 2: MRI machine.
• 2:17:47
  Speaker 1: Oh, really?
• 2:17:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally. But you're so smart.
• 2:17:50
  Speaker 1: Why don't you get that out of your head?
• 2:17:51
  Speaker 2: I tried. I got to tell you, I trained. So
• 2:17:53
  Speaker 2: I have a desk in my office where it's only
• 2:17:55
  Speaker 2: about like one foot high. And I'd slide my body
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 2: underneath the desk, lock the door because it looked too weird.
• 2:18:02
  Speaker 2: And I'd stay under there as long as I possibly
• 2:18:04
  Speaker 2: could just to train myself. Like 15, 20. But I
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 2: get into the real machine and– Really?
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. My wife's mom is like that.
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 1: Like she did an MRI and she's like, it was
• 2:18:15
  Speaker 1: the worst experience of my life. I'm like, I did
• 2:18:17
  Speaker 1: two of them last week.
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 2: I fell asleep. I totally understand her. I totally.
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:18:21
  Speaker 1: I don't understand why someone as smart as you would
• 2:18:24
  Speaker 1: not recognize, well, there's just this thing around me. I do.
• 2:18:27
  Speaker 2: I do. But it's like the irrational part of being.
• 2:18:30
  Speaker 2: I get in there, my heart starts to pound.
• 2:18:32
  Speaker 1: Where do you think that comes from? Yeah.
• 2:18:35
  Speaker 2: I don't know because it wasn't always there. Really? And
• 2:18:37
  Speaker 2: it has gotten worse in certain– there was a time.
• 2:18:40
  Speaker 2: I'm going to come across like a nutcase in here.
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 1: Maybe it was that trip to Amsterdam.
• 2:18:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe it was that trip to Amsterdam.
• 2:18:46
  Speaker 1: Whacked your brain out.
• 2:18:46
  Speaker 2: There was actually times when I couldn't even go in
• 2:18:49
  Speaker 2: a tunnel in a car. The claustrophobia was that bad.
• 2:18:52
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 2:18:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was in a taxi cab. I had to
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 2: go to New Jersey, you know, Manhattan, so I had
• 2:18:56
  Speaker 2: to take the Lincoln Tunnel. And as the taxi was
• 2:18:58
  Speaker 2: approaching the tunnel, I said to the guy, I can't
• 2:19:00
  Speaker 2: do it. I can't do it. And the guy says, well,
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 2: I can't let you out. It's illegal to let you out.
• 2:19:05
  Speaker 2: I said, you've got to let me out. I can't
• 2:19:07
  Speaker 2: do it. And I just opened the door and I
• 2:19:08
  Speaker 2: got out.
• 2:19:09
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God. That's so crazy.
• 2:19:11
  Speaker 2: But now I'm fine with tunnels. So I don't know
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 2: what it is that– Maybe you're too smart. Accentuated it there.
• 2:19:17
  Speaker 1: Maybe you're too smart. And maybe your brain is playing
• 2:19:20
  Speaker 1: tricks with you and giving you anxiety to sort of.
• 2:19:23
  Speaker 2: Shake it up the world.
• 2:19:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe. You're constantly contemplating the gigantic picture of the
• 2:19:28
  Speaker 1: actual scope of the universe.
• 2:19:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but now I'm pretty stable about these things. So
• 2:19:33
  Speaker 2: it's just MRI machines where it's really close into your face.
• 2:19:35
  Speaker 1: Well, you got to just do a lot of MRIs,
• 2:19:37
  Speaker 1: get over that. Yeah, right, exactly.
• 2:19:38
  Speaker 2: I'm sure that would do it. That would absolutely do it.
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 1: Probably, right? If you do MRIs on a regular basis.
• 2:19:43
  Speaker 2: Then I'm sure you get used to it.
• 2:19:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I just do a real simple type of meditation.
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 1: I probably am eventually going to take a TM course
• 2:19:51
  Speaker 1: because my friend Tom Papa, he's really into TM and
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 1: he raves about it. But I just sit down and
• 2:19:56
  Speaker 1: I breathe. I just concentrate only on my breath. And
• 2:19:59
  Speaker 1: it comes and goes, but I concentrate only on my breath.
• 2:20:03
  Speaker 1: And I find really good relief from that. Yoga is
• 2:20:06
  Speaker 1: the same thing. I do yoga. I try to do
• 2:20:09
  Speaker 1: it at least twice a week. Oh, you do? Yeah.
• 2:20:12
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of benefit in that in the same
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: way in that it's so difficult. And in the poses,
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 1: if you can only concentrate on your breath, just balance
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 1: and concentrate on your breath, you'll be filled with activity enough.
• 2:20:24
  Speaker 1: With things to concentrate on, with the balancing of the
• 2:20:27
  Speaker 1: posture and then the breath, that it acts as almost
• 2:20:32
  Speaker 1: a brain scouring. It cleanses the mind of unnecessary anxieties.
• 2:20:38
  Speaker 2: And a lot of other just– But you've been doing
• 2:20:40
  Speaker 2: that for a long time. Yeah.
• 2:20:42
  Speaker 1: No, yoga has been– I've been pretty steady for the
• 2:20:44
  Speaker 1: last four years.
• 2:20:45
  Speaker 2: Right, right.
• 2:20:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:20:46
  Speaker 2: And my wife does a lot of yoga. She keeps
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 2: telling me that I need to do it.
• 2:20:50
  Speaker 1: It's great. It's great. It's great for the body as well.
• 2:20:53
  Speaker 1: And I think the more comfortable your body is, the better,
• 2:20:56
  Speaker 1: at least for me, the better my mind works.
• 2:20:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I have little doubt.
• 2:20:59
  Speaker 1: Do you exercise?
• 2:20:59
  Speaker 2: I have little doubt about that. You know, for the
• 2:21:02
  Speaker 2: last year, I've been doing Peloton bike.
• 2:21:04
  Speaker 1: That's good.
• 2:21:06
  Speaker 2: But then I herniated a disc in my back. And
• 2:21:10
  Speaker 2: for the last two months, I've basically been unable to move.
• 2:21:13
  Speaker 1: How did you do that?
• 2:21:14
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, I think it was throwing out the
• 2:21:17
  Speaker 2: Christmas tree.
• 2:21:18
  Speaker 1: Oh, okay.
• 2:21:19
  Speaker 2: That makes sense. And, you know, my 92-year-old mother has
• 2:21:23
  Speaker 2: used this opportunity to say, because we're Jewish, we weren't
• 2:21:26
  Speaker 2: allowed to have a Christmas tree going up. This is
• 2:21:30
  Speaker 2: meaningful right here.
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 1: That's funny.
• 2:21:33
  Speaker 2: But my Christian wife is all too happy that I'm
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 2: flexible on that count for sure.
• 2:21:39
  Speaker 1: What is going on with your back now?
• 2:21:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it's bad. It's bad.
• 2:21:42
  Speaker 1: Did you get an MRI?
• 2:21:43
  Speaker 2: I did get an MRI. You went through the machine? Yeah.
• 2:21:47
  Speaker 1: Is it pushing against the nerves?
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 2: It's pushing against the nerve.
• 2:21:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Have you heard of something called Regenikine? Do you
• 2:21:51
  Speaker 1: know what that is? No, I don't. Regenikine is something
• 2:21:53
  Speaker 1: that I used for a bulging disc, and it's incredibly beneficial.
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 1: It was created by a doctor in Germany, and it
• 2:22:00
  Speaker 1: was illegal in the United States until a few years back.
• 2:22:03
  Speaker 1: They moved the process over here. It's not covered by insurance,
• 2:22:06
  Speaker 1: but it's very, very beneficial for that. And what they
• 2:22:09
  Speaker 1: do is it's essentially a more advanced version of platelet-rich plasma.
• 2:22:14
  Speaker 1: So they take your blood out. They do this process.
• 2:22:17
  Speaker 1: It takes about 12 hours. And then they re-inject this serum.
• 2:22:21
  Speaker 1: They take the serum out of the blood. It looks
• 2:22:23
  Speaker 1: like this yellow serum. And they inject it directly into
• 2:22:27
  Speaker 1: the areas.
• 2:22:28
  Speaker 2: So right into the spine.
• 2:22:30
  Speaker 1: Right into the area where the spine is bulging.
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 2: I see.
• 2:22:34
  Speaker 1: And it allows it to relax. It's the most potent method.
• 2:22:37
  Speaker 1: anti-inflammation drug that they can use.
• 2:22:41
  Speaker 2: It's like instead of cortisone, which is what they've been
• 2:22:42
  Speaker 2: talking about.
• 2:22:43
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Well, cortisone can help you as well. It can
• 2:22:45
  Speaker 1: at least provide temporary relief. But what this does is
• 2:22:48
  Speaker 1: actually heals the area.
• 2:22:49
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It's very beneficial. I had a real bad bulging
• 2:22:52
  Speaker 1: disc in my neck that was making my hands go numb.
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 2: So my toes are numb.
• 2:22:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:22:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:22:57
  Speaker 1: But they can give you relief. And it's in Santa Monica.
• 2:23:00
  Speaker 1: There's a place called Lifespan Medicine. I'll connect you to
• 2:23:02
  Speaker 1: the doctor.
• 2:23:03
  Speaker 2: I'm so curious about what to do.
• 2:23:04
  Speaker 1: I just saw a friend of mine there. He had
• 2:23:06
  Speaker 1: a real problem with his neck. Within two weeks, it
• 2:23:08
  Speaker 1: was better. He got hit by a car when he
• 2:23:11
  Speaker 1: was on his motorcycle. My friend, Dean Del Rey, and
• 2:23:13
  Speaker 1: he was really fucked up. His back was so bad
• 2:23:17
  Speaker 1: that like we were at the comedy store and I'm like,
• 2:23:20
  Speaker 1: people came near him and he tensed up. I go,
• 2:23:22
  Speaker 1: what's the matter? He goes, Dude, my neck is so
• 2:23:23
  Speaker 1: messed up. Somebody bumps into me. I'm in sharp pain. Yeah.
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, really? And then he started describing it
• 2:23:28
  Speaker 1: to me. So I said, I've got the thing for you.
• 2:23:30
  Speaker 1: And I sent him to this place. Regenequin's amazing. I've
• 2:23:32
  Speaker 1: had it done several times. Regenequin.
• 2:23:34
  Speaker 2: I've got to check that out.
• 2:23:34
  Speaker 1: I've had it done on my lower. Well, a lot
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 1: of athletes like Peyton Manning and Kobe Bryant, they flew
• 2:23:41
  Speaker 1: to Germany to get this procedure done.
• 2:23:42
  Speaker 2: Because it was the only place it was legal then.
• 2:23:44
  Speaker 1: Including the UFC president, Dana White, which is where I
• 2:23:47
  Speaker 1: found out about it.
• 2:23:47
  Speaker 2: Huh.
• 2:23:48
  Speaker 1: And then I found out that they were opening offices
• 2:23:50
  Speaker 1: in America. In Dallas, they have one. They have one
• 2:23:52
  Speaker 1: in Santa Monica and I think somewhere else.
• 2:23:54
  Speaker 2: Maybe New York.
• 2:23:55
  Speaker 1: Maybe, maybe. Yeah, but it's an amazing procedure. I mean,
• 2:23:58
  Speaker 1: it really is super beneficial, particularly for that kind of
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 1: an injury.
• 2:24:02
  Speaker 2: Because it's been tough. I mean, for instance, I can't sleep.
• 2:24:06
  Speaker 2: because there's no position. Now, the value of that is
• 2:24:09
  Speaker 2: I have done so much reading over the last two
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 2: months because I'm like up half the night and I
• 2:24:14
  Speaker 2: only conk out when it's like utter, utter exhaustion.
• 2:24:17
  Speaker 1: Have you used spinal decompression? Have you ever done any
• 2:24:19
  Speaker 1: of that? I did.
• 2:24:20
  Speaker 2: I went to this physical therapy place where they put
• 2:24:23
  Speaker 2: me up on pulleys and it kind of pulled the feet,
• 2:24:27
  Speaker 2: I guess, away from the back. It wasn't like Being
• 2:24:30
  Speaker 2: stretched fully, but your own weight was causing the vertebrae
• 2:24:33
  Speaker 2: to separate.
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 1: Did that help you?
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 2: Huge relief.
• 2:24:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you can get a small inversion table.
• 2:24:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was thinking about that.
• 2:24:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I have one out here you could try too.
• 2:24:41
  Speaker 2: Do you?
• 2:24:41
  Speaker 1: Oh, I'd love to try it. You have a whole
• 2:24:42
  Speaker 1: gym out here. There's another thing called the reverse hyper machine.
• 2:24:45
  Speaker 1: And the reverse hyper machine was created by this very
• 2:24:49
  Speaker 1: famous power lifter named Louis Simmons. And Louis had this idea.
• 2:24:54
  Speaker 1: He's a very brilliant guy. And he had this idea
• 2:24:57
  Speaker 1: that they were trying to fuse his discs. He had
• 2:24:59
  Speaker 1: a bulging disc. And he's like, well, a disc is compressed. Like,
• 2:25:03
  Speaker 1: how do you get it to decompress? And he developed
• 2:25:06
  Speaker 1: this machine that strengthens the back when you lift up
• 2:25:09
  Speaker 1: the legs. But then in the lowering of the legs,
• 2:25:12
  Speaker 1: it provides active decompression. And it alleviated his problem.
• 2:25:17
  Speaker 2: Do you wear this?
• 2:25:18
  Speaker 1: No, no. I'll show it to you. I'll show it
• 2:25:19
  Speaker 1: to you afterwards. It's a machine that you get.
• 2:25:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah. See, we are physical beings, right? We have a
• 2:25:25
  Speaker 2: mind that can sort of the edge of the cosmos, man.
• 2:25:28
  Speaker 2: But you got a bulging disc, it doesn't matter.
• 2:25:30
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Pain is real. I mean, you have to
• 2:25:32
  Speaker 1: deal with it. And you have to be really careful.
• 2:25:34
  Speaker 1: And for me, what's really critical is physical maintenance. And
• 2:25:39
  Speaker 1: I'm very dedicated to physical maintenance, even if there's nothing wrong.
• 2:25:42
  Speaker 2: So called building the core?
• 2:25:43
  Speaker 1: Yes. A lot of chin-ups, sit-ups, a lot of lower
• 2:25:48
  Speaker 1: back exercises, hyper back extensions. anything to keep things strong, squats,
• 2:25:53
  Speaker 1: making sure that the more tissue you have, the more
• 2:25:57
  Speaker 1: strength you have in that tissue around particularly protecting your
• 2:26:00
  Speaker 1: joints and your spine, the healthier you're going to be.
• 2:26:02
  Speaker 1: That's just a fact.
• 2:26:03
  Speaker 2: No, it's absolutely vital because the last few months have
• 2:26:05
  Speaker 2: been hell, I have to say.
• 2:26:06
  Speaker 1: Well, I'll show you. Listen, we've already talked for two
• 2:26:09
  Speaker 1: and a half hours. So I'll take you to the
• 2:26:11
  Speaker 1: background now. I'll show you. Brian, thank you very much
• 2:26:13
  Speaker 1: for being here. I really appreciate you. I appreciate all
• 2:26:15
  Speaker 1: your work and And tell people your book. One more
• 2:26:17
  Speaker 1: time is the title.
• 2:26:18
  Speaker 2: Until the End of Time.
• 2:26:19
  Speaker 1: It's out today.
• 2:26:20
  Speaker 2: It's out today. Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning
• 2:26:23
  Speaker 2: in an Evolving Universe.
• 2:26:24
  Speaker 1: Beautiful. Thank you for being here, man.
• 2:26:25
  Speaker 2: Thank you. My pleasure.
• 2:26:26
  Speaker 1: Bye, everybody. Yeah, come on.
• 2:26:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd love to.
• 2:26:31
  Speaker 1: Thank you.