Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Max Tegmark vs. Eric Weinstein: AI, Aliens, Theories, & New Year’s Resolutions! (Repost from 2021)

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

Win a $100 Amazon Gift Card! Help me help you get great guests on the Into the Impossible podcast and spread the message throughout the universe. Fill out this listener survey: https://forms.gle/EUKzyE2ZqXDYJ2F47 Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 --- Enjoy this classic episode from the vault: Max Tegmark & Eric Weinstein, New Years Eve 2020! Brian Keating brings together two thought leaders at the edge of physics and philosophy: Max Tegmark, physicist, cosmologist, and pioneer at MIT, and Eric Weinstein, mathematician, economist, and creator of Geometric Unity. Timestamps: 00:00 "Ambitions in AI, Physics, News" 16:58 "Emergent Reality from Proto-Spacetime" 22:50 "Rethinking Unification in Physics" 36:09 "Value of Disagreeable Individualism" 45:32 "Optimism for Academia Careers" 01:04:08 "Dangers of Oversimplifying Physics" 01:07:34 "On Success, Science, and Wonder" 01:18:47 "Funding and Advancing Physics Research" 01:30:28 "Perspective on Science and Society" 01:43:13 "Three Types of Scientific Experiments" 01:52:05 "Collaboration and Discovery in Science" 02:02:20 "The Messiness of Scientific Truth" 02:13:08 "Simulation, AI, and Ethics" 02:20:55 "Limits of Technology in Cosmos" --- Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Welcome to Dr. Brian Keating's rockin' New Year's Eve with two of my good friends, Max Tagmark, Eric Weinstein. Guys, I can't thank you enough for joining us today. We're going to have a fun conversation to end. It's really been like a fun year for everybody, right? Nothing bad has happened this year. Where are you guys?

Same old, same old. Where are you guys weathering the storm that has been 2020? Max, where are you currently joining us from? I have home and the great metropolis of Winchester, Massachusetts. Ah, Winchester. And Eric, where are you joining us from today? An undisclosed location somewhere in Los Angeles. Those are the scariest ones of all.

When I was a kid in New Year's Eve, we'd watch pro wrestling, you know, which is maybe a moniker. I don't know how professional you need to be. But anyway, it would always be the scariest wrestlers were from parts unknown. Like, they don't know where, like the guy didn't put it on his resume where he's from. Well, the Undertaker can't be from Middlebury, Connecticut. That's right. He has a small candle shop and he does some scrimshaw in there. But, boys, we are here.

You guys were last gracing my presence this summer together, at least, although you were separated in time when my channel partnered with, PBS Spacetime Studios, Matt O'Dowd and his team, on a discussion of theories of everything. And we had two live streams over the summer. I'll put links to those in the notes box below. But since then, you both have been involved in some really interesting kind of side hustles, I think. And I think the audience would be appreciative if we could talk about how things have gone since that summertime soire pair of suarez where I should say you two were not on the screen at the same time.

But so today was the chance for three men to enter and then, no, no, there'll only be, all three of us will exit because we have New Year's Eve plans tonight. Max, what have you been up to since this summer's theory of everything, Shinday? Well, aside from some remote teaching, torturing MIT freshmen with physics, I've been spending a lot of time on this attempt to make our news a little bit. less lousy. I think we have such amazing opportunities to do great things as a species, as long as we actually have a clear idea of what's actually going on. I think things have gotten pretty notably worse on that front in recent years, partly because media has gone online and put so many traditional journalists out of work. And even more importantly, because just machine learning algorithms

have started to create these filter bubbles and new tools for manipulating people to be really quite poorly informed of what's happening. The basis of doing good things in science is always step one, you know, figure out where you are. Yeah, that's what I want to help. And Eric, what about you? This has been a very peaceful season, I'm sure,

in your corner of America. What have you been thinking about ruminating on? Well, in part, I've been trying to get past the election. I actually, because I've been politically active, I'm very concerned, as Max seems to be, about the news, but also the way the meta-news and our integration into the news is working. And I'm particularly distressed about the attempt to control intellectual thought as if it is subversive, you know, undermining of the country

with everyone picking on either Russia or China or something. some nefarious group, the Trump family, and the idea being that if we will just trust, you know, the Washington Post or Dr. Fauci or Mitch McConnell, everything will be okay, and I don't. And I don't trust YouTube and I don't trust Google. I don't trust things that I can't talk about. And so I'm particularly distressed about the idea that we're entering an era in which things are so serious that we have an obligation to get people who disagree with consensus off the air because they are subversive, because I don't know how we make pro,

if we can't tell the difference between cranks, mavericks, heterodox thinkers, geniuses, and all of that stuff, we are toast. And it's, you know, imagine if we said that we, Max Tagmark overnight can't show up to his office at MIT because, in fact, he's producing harmful conversations. I just can't imagine that all of our institutions, other than Trader Joe's and maybe Coinbase have capitulated. I'm so glad to hear you say this, actually.

It's very refreshing because Richard Feynman, you know, is one of my superheroes, like to say that the essence of science is don't trust anybody, you know, not even yourself and your own prejudices, right? And science had to fight really, really hard to get this ability to start challenging. challenging everybody. If Galileo tweeted that, hey, the sun is actually not revolving around the earth, and then the Pope's fact checkers say, fact check, this violates community guidelines, it's actually the sun going around the earth. That would not have gone so great. And in fact, the 1600s version of that kind of happened to Galileo. We fought so hard against for this freedom, a scientist, to have everybody counting. And yet here we are now, you know, if you're in China and there is a government that tells you this is what the truth is. If you're in North Korea, you have a government that tells you what the truth is. And now somehow it's a good idea to try to have, I think there's a lot of good intent behind the fact checking today.

But if you say that there's some committee at some big corporations, that has a monopoly of what's saying what's true, that's exactly the opposite of what we've learned from science all these times. In science, there is no, we acknowledge that it's hard to figure out what the truth is, right? That's why we didn't want the Pope to say it, or King Jong-un. My papers get refereed by random other scientists, right, not by some appointed committee at a company. Right, and I think that, you know, in some ways,

and yet it moves is the original harmful conversation. You can imagine if the Pope put a little tagline under it saying this claim is disputed by experts everywhere. The key thing is understanding the difference between Mavericks, Cranks, and what I've called Knarks. And of course, because you're Swedish, you'll appreciate the word Knaarck, which is crank spelled backwards.

And they sit at the center of our establishment and they do cranky things from the chairs of greatest respectability. And it's very important to me that Knarkey behavior, be distinguished from cranky behavior, be distinguished from heterodox behavior. And I wanted to plug Max's effort, FQXI, which is an attempt at non-cranky heterodox thinking

in physics and now beyond. And it's the leading organization. It's sort of analogous to the Institute for New Economic Thinking in the economics field. Of course, the Perimeter Institute was founded in the Santa Fe Institute was founded in this regard. This has a long tradition and I really think that

even though we may be doing this on YouTube and things, YouTube needs to butt the hell out of the idea of we know what reality is and we'll let you post about it or not as we see fit because that's just, that's going to grind society to a halt and we're not having it. Yeah, and if it were so easy to actually find out the truth, science

would be done. All of us scientists should be fired. We could go home, right? You just have some government officials or corporate officials saying this is true, this is false, right? This is why we need science. We can consult the truth and safety, the trust and safety committee, and they can finish it off. We don't need the AI to tell us the secret.

So speaking of YouTube, as some of us make our living from YouTube, no, I'm just kidding. I don't, Gavin Newsom, my boss, if you're listening out there, I'm hard at work, as you can tell every day, but these podcasts do. And Gavin Newsom bite me. I mean, seriously, YouTube, bite me. We've got to stop looking at our incentive structures. Yes, they can shut us all down tomorrow. Let's stop coutowing and groveling in front of people who don't deserve it.

Should we talk to some science? Yeah, let's get into that. But first, I want to ask you something frivolous, which is that I promised, I swore, Eric, that if anyone came out of this pandemic with a six-pack, I would kill them. Okay, and you, my friend, have done that. You've dropped serious way. I said I dropped five pounds from my double chin to my. my stomach, but you have come out with a six-pack. I wonder, was this part of your New Year's

resolution last year? And what is your New Year's resolution? Each one of you guys this year. I think they're very important to make New Year's resolutions. Eric, what was yours last year? What's yours for 2021? I forgot what mine was for last year. I think for 2021, I'm going to push out geometric unity as in written form. Wow. Okay. You heard it there here. first, ladies and gentlemen. This is the first time I've said that too. And I am going to provide whatever meager means of support I can provide to do that. Max a million. You're worth maximum dollar. I remember when I met you. I said, is your name Max a million? You said, I'm not a millionaire yet. So is 2021 the year you become a millionaire and get some of that Elon Musk Kwan?

Or what do you want to do in 2021? You do so many things so well, so interesting. You just suck the juices out of life. What do you have plans for in plan for 2021? The money is never something I've particularly cared about. I have two new year as resolutions. One is to take the improve the news project, which I mentioned and make it way better. I have a lot of ideas and people have sent me a lot of ideas for doing something much better than the sort of fact-checking that we were whining about here, which is much more science-inspired and make it easier for people to actually find out what's going on. That's my nights and weekends job.

And then my day job is to do some really awesome research at the interface of artificial intelligence and physics. I'm so fortunate to have an amazing group of students and other colleagues to work with at MIT. And so I was sitting yesterday looking at all these project ideas and ranking them and just feel so excited and wishing that 2021 would be much longer than 365 days. Well, we're going to talk a lot about time as we continue here. First of all, I'm going to start taking some questions from the audience. And I think, well, so there are people asking, what does Max think about geometric unity? There are people asking what does Eric think about Max's mathematical universe.

I am willing to go there if you guys are, but that wasn't the pretext in which I tricked. invited you guys to come on. But I think it's interesting to get a status report, maybe on the theory of everything side, and then we'll turn to power of AI in physics and different projects that you and I are interested in Eric and Max. So first of all, what are you guys thinking about,

let's just say your own field, your own projects, and then if you don't want to comment on the others' project, at least the value of having multiple projects. And I'll say this very lovingly, but to my friend Sabine Hassenfelder, who's got a wonderful channel of hers, and she's really amped it up and upped her game. She's one of my kind of role models I'm trying to look up to. She has said that, you know, she basically doesn't have time to think about these new theories

of everything, whether it's Eric's or Stephen Wolfram, who's been on the show, or Garrett Leasy, or even maybe Max Tagmark. So what do you think, though, of the value of pursuing alternatives to the dominant paradigm, which is, I would say, probably string theory right now in terms of a candidate theory of everything. Max, you go first. What are your current thoughts on theories of everything other than your own? I think it's, I applaud people pursuing the full spectrum of theories. As I said earlier, if it were so easy to know the truth, we wouldn't need science.

We'd be done, right? And it's very unhealthy to have an intellectual monoculture where everybody is looking under the same lamppost. That's not the best search algorithm to find your keys or the theory of everything. So, in fact, my main meta algorithm as a scientist, which has served me surprisingly well, is that if I noticed that the whole herd was going in this direction, I would usually come in a different direction, look there, because you never become the first to find something if you're just following others. Right. And Eric, what do you think about not only, you know, the value of GU or the status of GU, for example.

I was going to, I thought I was going to do Max and Max was going to do me. Oh, yeah. Max, do you want, well, Max, do you want to comment on alternative theories of everything? Well, I think, maybe for the benefit, since we don't have time to get into something super detailed, and I still haven't had a chance to read the paper that you've now officially pledged that you're going to write next year, maybe you could just very briefly summarize a core, an idea or a theme for the benefit also of our readers, and then I can comment on that. Sure. Well, then let me go first, and then Brian take Max, and I'll try to integrate something in to tee it up for him to spike, to dunk on me rather.

So the first thing I would say is that I don't think Sabina is being truthful, and I think that she's being polite. she is a ferocious and fierce friend of physics who cares very much about the honesty of the subject but she's personally really saying something else which I think we should say that she doesn't believe that these theories are worthy of her time because they don't have a certain juneziqua

that suggests that they are effectively correct and the cost of exploring them seems high so I want to not take Sabine's a particular gift of her diplomacy and lean too heavily on it. She has the time to record music videos. She just doesn't think that this crop smells good enough in order to dig into it as what I really think is going on. And I think that that's really common because what's really suffusing the field is a sense

of hopelessness where we don't really believe that anybody is on the verge of the theory of everything in the way that Dirac and Einstein were pushing things forward at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, I also disagree. I don't think that's where we are. I think we've been stalled out for almost 50 years in a certain sense, not in others. I don't think that string theory is still the leading candidate, or if it is, it's only because it's greatly diminished and nothing else has taken its place. I think Max's mathematical universe is an interesting issue.

I've come at it from a different way, so I've never actually had this conversation with Max, and we can find out whether we dovetail on this. But I say sometimes that the theory of everything or fundamental physics is really the one place that we have where we think that the map may be the territory. And that's a little bit of the way in which I interpret the special nature of the theory of everything. And some with the lens through which I understand Max's ideas, which is that the math is the reality, not that the math models the reality. then there's some extra stuff which says that all math is effectively created in a physical instantiation in some sense on that I will remain silent because it's only the sector that I have any direct tangible experience with I think that that's quite possibly the truth we may be looking at things that where the map and the territory are not distinct

like Greenland is the map of Greenland as for GU just to be quite clear about it My take is that we haven't owned up to the fact that the final step is different than all the previous ones and is conceptually much harder. And so my attempt was to say, can we drag three generations of chiral fermions with the particular sorts of interactions that we see plausibly from a radically simplified hypothesis so that we get everything emergently, we don't get something. from nothing, but we get something from almost nothing. This is sort of inverse to the Garrett-Lisi method, where what you do is you take the most complicated, simple object in the universe. That sounds like a contradiction, but isn't.

And then you find the Baroque complexity of our world inside it, using something like E8. What I do is I start with four degrees of freedom, and I say Einstein made it a very interesting mistake, and a beautiful one, which is that he started with the concept of space-time, and that spacetime is the picking out of a particular system of rulers and protractors responding to the matter on the four-dimensional extended structure called a manifold, but that what we should be looking at is the original four degrees of freedom, the proto-space time, together with all possible rulers and protractors. And that creates a 14-dimensional world called a bundle of metrics, and that each individual metric is like a periscope going between the four-dimensional world and its

14-dimensional emergent extension. And just the way, if you poke your periscope up in the Arctic and you see a polar bear hunting a seal, you're receiving the image down below inside your submarine. And what we are currently experiencing in my understanding is that we are in a 14-dimensional space looking at it from a four-dimensional space via the metric, which is the pullback,

is what we would call a pull-back. It's the agent of pulling back the data from 14-dimensional space, 14 to 4, and that the 10 dimensions of rulers and protractors that Einstein put, his 10 coupled differential equations, are in fact the same 10 dimensions that would crop up in grand unified theory of the S.O.10 or spin-10 variety, or more important, the Petit Salam theory, which is spin six cross spin four. You take 10 dimensions and you break it into sort of two pieces, if you will, and that that arises naturally from the way in which the 10 rulers and protractors emerge from the 3-1 components, and to dovetail the two, Brian, you asked me before whether Wolfram and I had a connection.

I think Max and I actually have a much richer connection than Wolfram and I have. I would say that the 401322-3-2-3-1 and 04 sectors all exist, but that we'll never meet them because we can't get to them, and it may be that we are in the anthropic sectors that support life. I also believe there are only two generations max, not three. The third one is an imposter that would unify differently with particles that we haven't seen, and that the world is not actually chiral, but only emergently chiral. And in low gravity environments, it appears to be chiral,

but if we were near a black hole or the beginning of the universe, we would suddenly see a lot of matter that now appears dark coupled to the matter that we are. I take it you have, it's not a question of whether you've read the paper. I released an episode on Geometric Unity with video from the Oxford lecture. And that's sort of a quick flyover if you want to start hunting fish in a barrel. Yeah, you'll be proud of me for actually having watched this video this morning even to get it fresh in my memory here. It's very interesting stuff. I really agree with what you said.

what you said there in that there I don't see any particular disagreement incompatibility between what you're saying and and what I'm saying. First of all, it's very striking that even though you did talk about a polar bear, you know, that was an example. I was reaching out to my Swedish brethren. Exactly. Everything you said about the theory itself was mathematical.

And it's interesting as well. If you talk to string theorists or loop quantum gravity fans, you know, theories are utterly mathematical as well. There's really no leading contender, I would say, on the market for a theory of everything right now, which is not mathematical. So it's not so shocking in that context to talk about the idea that maybe the ultimate theory is mathematical. And then another very strong commonality is you said yourself here, right, that it's pretty natural in your theory that the ultimate physical reality that exists is bigger than the part that we actually have access to and can see. And I find it kind of emotionally amusing that so many people get all twisted up about this and all stressed out about the idea that there could be things that actually exist physically that we can't access. it seems so arrogant to me. I mean, if you're an ostrich and you stick your head in the sand,

should you really be arguing to yourself that if I can't see something, then it somehow has no moral right to exist? I mean, if you start the other way around with just the premise that there is some stuff that exists physically, why should we be so arrogant as to think that it's all going to be accessible to us? It seems like a kind of hubristic, starting point. So I'm very

interested in when you finish the technical paper seeing more about how the details actually come out because the devil is always in the details as well as well. Let me say maybe two more things philosophically that sort of give a grounding. I think one of the reasons that we have failed to unify physics very successfully.

I mean, obviously we had Maxwell and then Glashio, George I glass at Glashow Weinberg and Salam those are the great unifications that we've had to date in a certain sense but I think that part of what's going on is that we are unifying into an intended structure and that the structures that we will end up unifying into are actually tensions between structures so for example my guess is that two of the four main equations if we go field by field will will unify into one equation, the Dirac and the Einstein field equations, whatever succeeds them, I have in one equation. And the Yang Mills and the equation governing the Higgs field, which we would call a modified Klein-Gordon equation, would unify into a different one.

And then one of those two unifications would effectively be the square root of the other. The other is that replacing space-time by a piece-time by a pair of spaces rather than a single space. So in essence, things unify into pairs, and there are tensions within the pairs. But one of the things we've done in our radical reductionist heyday before any of us were born was to try to unify things too simply

into a single structure that is not capable of supporting the weight of what we know. So I claim that there will effectively be two, one of which will be the square root of the other. There will be two spaces that replace one single unified space time. And that weirdly we've got everything slightly wrong. If we had it wildly wrong, we would figure out that we had it wildly wrong. And if we had it absolutely right, we'd be done.

And so weirdly, we're sort of slightly wrong about everything, including three generations. It strikes me that you don't, Max, have an initial recoil. How can there not be three generations or how can matter not be chiral? Or how can space time be dispensed with? Those are the things that I was expecting to have to have to. Look, if I've learned anything as a scientist again, it's to have a very open mind and be humble, as we talked about earlier, we need to be about everything.

It's easier to do when you're tenured tall and good looking, but I get your point. Guilty as charged. It's incredibly hard to... It's peak pollination. season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing.

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Take a simple. mathematical theory and predict what is it going to feel like to observers who live in that world, right? Yeah. In the case of what Galileo did, it was so the correspondence was so direct that it was easy. You said here is a point in the mathematical and Euclidean space and it corresponds to the position of my apple that's moving.

Whereas already when you got to Einstein, it was super hard. The genius of Einstein wasn't that he was the first person who was able to write down the equations of special relativity, right, which are relatively simple equations. But that he was able to understand what it would feel like to live in a world governed by those equations. It would feel like time slowed down. You went fast and you got shorter and other weird things. In general relativity, it was even harder, right? It wasn't Einstein who invented Riemannian geometry, but he was the one again who was able to translate the math into physical predictions and realize that it actually made sense.

Quantum mechanics has taken us yet another level up where we've had the equations now. We've had the shreddinger equation now for almost a century. And our colleagues are still arguing about what it means exactly. So that's exactly why I do not allow myself to recoil when someone puts out some equations where it's not obvious how that's exactly going to match reality, because that is exactly the thing we've learned is so hard. Yeah. I want to ask just a related question to that.

I've had a conversation with Paul Steinhart, who's the Einstein professor of natural science at a place called Princeton University. I know Max knows him well. They were colleagues together before they both jumped ship from a certain Ivy League institution that I won't name because I have good friends and good colleagues there. But I want to talk about,

conversation I had with Paul, and he said he didn't know if he could come up with things like inflation or epirotic universe or things like that in the age of social media in that, you know, as soon as he might have some tentative idea, as, you know, Eric described to me once, you know, we were sitting in my office here in UC San Diego, and he's writing on the chalk, like, what did Einstein think in 1914, 1916, finally 1917, you know, it evolved. And numbers changed, the equation changed. Maybe the meaning didn't fundamentally change. But in error of social media. By the way, I'm going to take one quick break to remind people that carpal tunnel syndrome kills 750 million people every year in America alone. So exercise your finger.

Hit the like button if you're enjoying this. A thumbs up on Facebook or YouTube. Hit the subscribe button. I put links to Max's YouTube channel, which needs some love Max. You've got about a thousand subscribers. We're going to amp that up right now. Subscribe to Eric Weinstein's channel as well. I put those in there to the portal. Subscribe to Dr. Brian Keating's channel if you like conversations like this. In the age of social media, where you have sensors in a certain sense that have cell phones instead of, instead of, you know, swords, well, what do you think is the probability that you guys could have and come out with theories or new models can come out? Because necessarily you guys are theoretically inclined. I'm experimentally inclined. We don't really put out results

until, you know, it takes years to make an experiment. But were you guys making theories or making conjectures about philosophy and the nature of reality? How is the impact of social media stifled you if it has or does it stifle creativity of young people in particular max we'll start with you and then we'll go to Eric well I think it's always been rough throughout human history to be contrarian and one's ideas and I have to say I was under no illusions when I was a grad student being super excited about these big biggest questions that anyone else was gonna care in any way whoever. I used to joke with my friends that if all I worked on was this, you know, my next

job was going to be in McDonald's. So I just accepted that and said, that's, I'm not doing this for any kind of public recognition. I'm doing it because I love it. That's the best reason to do science. So I would make, I didn't even tell my thesis advisor about the first, these four papers I wrote as a grad student. I only showed them to him after he had signed my dissertation. I just kept doing enough mainstream stuff on the side that I could, you know, get on the job afterwards. And it's actually been quite surprising to me that many years later, some of those old things that I thought no one is ever going to care about.

Now some people are actually building on them and doing things with them. But I think the most important thing is to do science for the right reasons. The right reason to do science is this is the greatest detective story ever. You know, we get to be part of this amazing mystery solving about our universe and its nature and its origin and destiny. And how cool is that to get to be part of this scavenger hunt, you know, and connect with these great minds throughout history? If that's our motivation, then we will never be disappointed. It's just going to be a bonus if anyone else ever cares or tweets it. Yes, absolutely.

I'm spoken like an intellectual heroin addict. I'm exactly the same way, Max. My feeling is that the problem of this detective story, as you say, I haven't heard somebody call it that, so that's great, is that it competes pretty well with money and sex and drugs and anything else you can come up with. It's hard to find anything that, you know, if you offered somebody a billion dollars or a peak at the actual understanding of the universe,

there's no question that I wouldn't be taking a billion dollars. there is nothing like it. And people often say science is fun. I don't really think that's true. Most of the time it's just really difficult and it's often boring. But it is the most deeply fulfilling and at times peak exciting thing you can do with a human brain. It's astounding to me that's something that we use to find food and water can actually understand partial differential equations. It's very, very confusing with that.

No, it's a genuine mystery. with respect to the general question. Remind me, Brian, of its formulation. What creativity of an Einstein. Oh, yeah, no, I remember it now. Can I just chime in while you're clarifying the question? They're also say one more personal thing I want to share that I think is so rewarding is precisely because I think about the grandest questions,

simply because I love the, being part of this mystery solving, it also means that whenever I run into other people, like you, Eric, or a lot of other physicists who obviously do it just because of that reason, then I feel a really touching kind of brotherhood, sisterhood, with these people, right? Even more broadly, just going to physics, like every single one of my colleagues in the MIT physics department could easily multiply their salary by pie if they went and did something on Wall Street or whatever, right? And they don't, right? And that makes me feel also a really cool kinship. You know, here are all these people who have chosen to make much less money to follow

some, these things that they're passionate about. And we're, this just makes me feel so excited and honored to get to be part of a community of people who are doing things for this reason. So I remember your formulation. I think what Max just said is incredibly important. Imagine that if Eddie Van Halen could have been a hedge fund manager and multiplied his assets, you know, would it have been worth it? And we wouldn't have Eddie Van Halen. So it's really important that things are able to compete with money. And that's very tough when inequality is so high, It's really also important that we boost the amount of funding to scientists. I just want to be very clear about that.

The thing that you were saying before, Brian, about social media, there's an interesting feature. There's two kinds of really negative behavior that affect a lot of us when we're working on heterodox ideas. There's trolling negativity where people are just taking a piece out of you and the cookie cutter sharks are tearing into your hide and extracting their little core of fat and swinging off happy that they've trolled you, they've dunked, they've dragged, blah, blah, blah.

Then you have the same phenomena in a weird way coming from your academicians. And the academicians, I think the biggest intellectual offense that I ever experienced in physics, again, I'm not a physicist, but was hearing string theorists say, well, string theory isn't threatened because if you do anything outside it will just tell you that it's string theory, and so we'll absorb you. And I thought, wow, cool. What a wonderful advertisement that your theory can't be wrong because if we come up with anything, you've kept the naming rights to say that what we do is string theory.

I think that that negativity from our colleagues and the negativity from the trolls has a very important effect. What if really great theories were found by people who are not highly disagreeable? Now, I've disagreed with Susan Wojiki, even though I'm on YouTube. with Gavin Newsom. I've said that Sabine Hassanfelder is lying, that she doesn't have time for these theories. I'm obviously highly disagreeable. It doesn't mean I'm not personable,

but I've been cultivating this very trait because it's necessary to do science when everybody is wrong. So in the great financial crisis, I was part of a very small number of people who were saying this whole thing is going to blow up. Nassim Taleb was another one. And he was disagreeable enough

that when I quit this, game of going on conferences and saying, hey, mortgage-backed securities are posing a real threat. Nassim said, you're going to regret crapping out in 2005. You need to stay the course. And I said, everyone's laughing at us. I don't know whether you're not paying attention. You're not hearing. He says, no, no, you're not getting it. You're bailing out of the trade before the trade is actually mature. And I learned a lot from Nassim. Nassim is incredibly disagreeable. On the other hand, you need people who are like Richard Feynman. And one of the things I might do on the portal this year

is to read his letter of resignation from the National Academy of Sciences, where he didn't want to say why he was, but he just didn't want to be hooked up to his peers. And, you know, Max, when you were talking about the fact that your peers are other physicists, I'm very concerned that we have too much group think in physics, and we need to be flipping the bird collegially

and constructively to our colleagues as well as to the trolls. And I do see that there's a lot of commonality between academicians who huddle around respectability, peer review, the idea of their accolades, whatever awards and prizes they've been given, whatever their title is. And that too much we, the academicians, in an era in which we have not been advancing some of our fields quite as quickly as we used to, have become prisoners to the little bit of respectability that we have left, and we need to reclaim the right to be highly disagreeable without, constantly saying that everything comes from consensus. The most depressing part of this is the idea that the so-called great man theory of science is under attack by people who claim a priori that it

is always communal when anything happens, which is preposterous, particularly when you think about how singular somebody like a Dirac was or an Einstein was and or a Feynman or a Powley or a Weinberg. And all of these people are so individualistic to all of us who have read their work that we have to recognize that we are under some generalized social attack for what it is that we have proven beyond any doubt we do, which is to use single individuals disagreeing with their entire community and getting the entire community to come along after the fact. Very good. So let us take a quick break and have a musical interlude while I queue up some questions because we have questions. You know, Max has a relativity song. Oh, he does. Okay.

Well, I know he was one of the original members of Abba, getting back together. This is by my friend Miguel Tully, who runs the Yeti Tiers website and other things. So I'm going to just look for some fun of questions, and we'll get that queued up. I'll put up another guesty in the meantime. Oh, yeah, there's a Yeti. That's right. I have a Yeti Tumblr somewhere around here, fill a vodka. Getting ready for this, rock in New Year's Eve.

You're joining Max Tagmark, Dr. Eric Weinstein, Professor Max Teck. Mark and yours truly Brian Keating on a special edition of the Into the Impossible podcast. All right. We have a question about entropy, one of Max's favorite topics. This is by Jeremy Payne. Why is the entropy at the beginning of time low, but the entropy in a black hole is so high? Ah, wonderful question. Why is the entropy at the beginning of time so low and entropy in a black hole so high?

First of all, I said we have to be humble, and so I'll be the first to say we actually don't know. that the entropy was low at the beginning of time. We don't even know if there was the beginning of time. That's how humble we have to be here. What we do know, what I do feel we've learned, which is quite remarkable, is that, you know, first of all, entropy, for those of you who need a bit of refresher, is the physicists measure of how messy things are. So my room, if I'm here, where I do this, tends to get higher and higher entropy, messier, messier. Why is it that you see things getting messier? Why is it that you've seen eggs fall on the floor and break and not see them fly up and unbreak? People argue about that for a very long time

until the shocking insight came that the reason that the entropy is lower, is higher now than it was that it was lower this morning than before I dropped the egg than now is because it was even lower yesterday. And the reason for that was it was even lower the day before that. And the reason for that was it was very low 13.8 billion years ago at the time when those images, baby pictures of our universe were given off sitting right behind you on the sofa there, Brian, the causing make your background and so on. So somehow our flow of time towards greater messiness has something to do with our origin of our universe. That I feel we have learned. So that's progress. But now the question of why was that is something where many of my colleagues disagree violently with each other.

I have written the paper there, which I think it's fair to say has very little support. Let's just say what it's concluded anyway, which is that if you take seriously the idea of inflation and also the theory that the wave function does not collapse, according to you, Everett, you can do some math and get an... explanation for for for why that happened but I think it's a it's a wonderful mystery and um I'm open to all ideas for what what the deal is with this and and black holes came up here of course which uh something else we know where ultimately the way there are great truth that's I think yet to be discovered so we have a question from a person with a very lovely name I should have

used it for one of my children the name is just given as R. But R asks, Eric, what advice would you give to a young person pursuing a PhD in mathematics as you pursued back in the 1980s, I believe? Take an advisor. What do you mean? I didn't have an advisor, and I did not understand that you don't need an advisor to do mathematics. You don't need an advisor to come up with new. ideas. You need an advisor to negotiate the system. And in effect, the way in which we regulate

population in mathematics is that just like many avian species, we don't feed certain chicks. And if you don't get fed as a chick, it doesn't matter how good your ideas are. So in large measure, your advisor is somebody, I didn't want an advisor, but I had to, I had to, you know, I had to try taking one, then it didn't work out, and I just decided to do it without, and then it was forced upon me. You'll find that I can't fix my Wikipedia entry because the system insists that Raul Bhatt was my advisor. A lovely, wonderful human being, but it just didn't happen to be my advisor. The thing then that I would say is once you had to take an advisor, you need to have a really frightening conversation with that person, where you come in and you say, I know what my odds are.

And if you are not willing to swing for the effing fences, I am going to die. You've assessed me. I want you to tell me where I stack in my chance of viability. I don't care about anything else. I want to know whether you think I am viable and if so at what level. And if that person is not willing to say, I think you're one of the top people and I will fight tooth and nail to make sure you survive, provided you do what I think you're capable of, get out. And you will not have that conversation because you're going to be a pussy about it. And by virtue of not having that conversation, you are going to find out later that when that person withholds the high praise necessary to secure a job for you and to secure opportunities for you, you will then wither and die.

And if you'll just look at the survival rates, if you can't get to one of the top four or five departments, it's almost not worth going. that doesn't mean nothing good happens below that, but what you're dependent on is a system of selective pressures in which your parents have to kill and feed you for a period of time before you can hunt and kill for yourself. And that situation is one in which you are going to be squeamish and your advisor is going to intimidate you away from asking the questions. But quite frankly, having done research in this area

for the American Society for Cell Biology, advisors usually form an impression almost immediately whether you are viable or not then your department will extract labor out of you for a period of time your advisor may get you to work on subroutines for their career and then your carcass will be discarded and if you do not understand that this is what has happened in the academic hunger games you will not be able to defend yourself the fact that nobody's talking about it you watch nobody in the university system will tell me that I'm wrong. They'll just tell me to shut up. Max, when you are approached by a young beaver at MIT, what do you look for in a promising young PhD candidate? Or you've done a lot of work with undergraduates, but I recall you being a very lovely mentor to me as a graduate student when I was at Brown and you were at Penn. But even before that, when you were a postdoc, I recall, are good advisors born or are they made? Oh, that I actually don't know, but I will do my best answer the rest of your question.

And maybe the first, before I even do that, I'd like to just add a little bit to what Eric said there. Because you painted a very scary-sounding image of academia. You mentioned death many times and being devoured and things like this. And for those out there listening who are considering going into a job of academia, Yeah, I actually feel a lot more optimistic about, and I would like to give a more optimistic end-of-year message for those of you and say, go for it, and don't be scared off by all this talk about death there. First of all, you have to remember that if you go into academia

and you have this vision that you're going to stay in academia for the rest of your life and it doesn't end up that way, what will happen is not that you're going to be starving to death somewhere in some corner, but that you will instead end up in doing something else where you're going to make a lot more money than you would have in academia. And most people I know who have left academia seem quite happy. So there's really not much to be afraid of. The second thing I would say is, yes, I agree with you.

It's very important to have an advisor who can support you. I agree with you there, Eric. I also think if you're like Eric and me and Brian, then you're fascinated about big questions, but maybe very unfashionable at the time and have ideas that are unfashionable. I say pursue them anyway, but do it as a scientist,

where you have a really scientifically valid game plan also for how your career is going to work nonetheless, where you spend some of your time doing what your heart is burning for. And then some of the time, just making sure that your career is going to be fine anyway. So, you know, you Eric have solved it by making money in other ways so that you can continue doing the great science that you do, right? I similarly developed the strategy very early where I, I, that I confessed earlier, where I would just write enough mainstream papers that I could stay in academia, and then on nights and weekends and so on, I would do the

things I was really passionate about. In other words, as long as you have a sort of scientifically or sound business plan for how your career is going to go, then don't be afraid of following your heart. Isn't it also a challenge that we have, you know, I'm as some of my listeners, no, I'm a pilot and I am actually a commercial pilot, not for, you know, wanting to deliver passengers or mail or tow banners over the San Diego seashore. I do it because when I'm learning, I am becoming a better teacher. And if you stop learning in aviation, you die. And so one of the things I started to do a few years ago is get my flight instructors rating. And to do that, you need to be a commercial pilot first. So I got my commercial pilot. I got my, and then I started looking through, well, what does it take to

become a flight instructor? It turns out the federal aviation administration has one and only one, to my knowledge, a branch of government that has in its handbook for practitioners of this federal agency, it has the words love. You imagine like the IRS, like to be a good IRS auditor, you have to have love. No, you have to have the opposite of love in some cases. No offense out there. I mean, Eric made fun of YouTube, that's more powerful than the IRS. But it has Maslow's hierarchy of needs encoded in the handbook of testing for future flight instructors like me, hopefully.

And I wonder, I never got sat down, Max. I don't know if you did by my dean or my. my stagio dean or, and they never said, well, here's how you teach. You need to make sure that your students feel a sense of love. David Spurgel is famous for saying that his best piece of advice is that a student needs to feel love. Now, obviously, it's platonic, but the student needs to feel a sense of love. But when did you ever get taught how to be a good teacher?

And maybe Eric, you're suffering because you're true advisor, maybe didn't love you enough. And that's saying maybe you need more, a little more. True advisors. I know that. That's what I'm saying. You're a self-made man, Eric, and you're in love with your creator. Sorry. I'm passionate about something here that I just need to say it in a different way.

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hey, you can do this too. situation is so exotic that I can't recommend it. Max, you know, is admitting that he's effectively chosen the superhero route, you know, mild-mandered Clark Kent by day, Superman by night, or, you know, Bruce Wayne, or who knows what. Look, here's what you need to do. Go to the math genealogy project, okay? Look for everybody who was a, for the survival rates of advisors before 1972 and the survival rates of their students after 1972. We had an actual singularity happen in our markets

in around between 1971 and 73. And if you look at somebody like Norman Steenrod, who stopped advising, and when he died, I guess, in the early 70s, almost all of his students survived. And if you look at anybody, like the top advisors today, they can't match that previous thing. So Max is quite correct. You can bounce into a certain number of technical fields if you do it at a high enough level.

Many people don't make it to Google. They don't make it to great six-figure jobs that give them fulfillment. Many do. Depends where you're going. I'm trying to give you the tough love. Max is trying to give you the optimism. And I think it's great having both. Go look at the data and ask every department that you're applying to, can you please show me your

outcome statistics and show me how well you've done because we're all lying about the fact that since 1971 through 73 academics has been in a depression period the end max how do you react to that i i didn't claim the i i wasn't i didn't have said nothing to dispute that fact that there is that there's been a very sad development and the and the support from society in terms of funding for academia and that that's just the way it is I and I think I wish it could change but even in this it's in the poor situation we are now you know where the amount of money spent on all physics funding in the United States in a year right is less than a couple days of military budget even in that state I think going into science is really good move if you're excited about it and I would encourage listeners to do it

and here is here is my data that you asked for I you know, really, really get attached to my past students and I try to keep in touch with them over the years. And to the very best of my knowledge, every single one, so half a dozen of them are so are professors now, a bunch more probably will be. A number of them have left and gone into other fields, but every single one of them, to the best of my knowledge, is quite happy with the fact that they did science first. And let me just finish here. So, so, I'm, I, I think that there's no real indication that it's a recipe for an unhappy life to go into science. Contrary-wise, as long as you have an exciting time while you're doing the science,

and then maybe later you do something else, you know, what's so bad about that? You know, we're all going to die anyway, for real at some point. That's not an excuse to not make the most of life while we're still alive, right? Let me just say something very quick. which Max can't say. Max is also exceedingly conscientious and concerned about this by founding FQXI and giving even small grants to people. A lot of what Max has been doing has been taking care of the heterodox community in all

of physics. So you're looking at, in some sense, the most anomalous person in our space. Well, I act as the anti-matter to him then. I'm the worst advisor possible as my students will test it. You're in a different area where we're talking really, really theory for the most part. Max and Anthony Aguier, the co-founder, I don't know how you guys, these guys are serious about trying to keep the field afloat. And Max is not as coupling his optimism with the fact that he's going above and beyond what almost anyone else is doing. And I think it's fantastic.

That's why I love hanging out on this live stream. But I just don't want to give the indication that Max is somehow your typical professor. No, there's obviously survivorship bias. that's coming in here. But I have to say, as I said earlier, one of the names that Max will recognize is my friend Chris O'Dell, who is the graduate student

who came after me at Peter Timby, who is my advisor. And Peter Timby is coming on the Into the Impossible podcast. So those of you out there get to hear from my PhD advisor. What a schmendrick I was back 30 years ago. What a brave guy you are,

I just love him, and he's going to talk about his advisor, David Wilkinson, who Max also knew. But Max was like this when he was a postdoc. So I think Max is preternaturally gifted in this way. I do think that as we learn about quantum mechanics, Max,

or as we learn about topological field theory or whatever Eric does, we need to also spend time learning about how to teach, how to manage, how to lead. I've had a lot of Nobel Prize winning experimentalist on my show lately. And the question I keep asking them is, like Barry Barish and Ray Weiss, who co-led the LIGO experiment that won the Nobel Prize in 2017.

They foolishly left their Nobel Prize with me when they did the show. I picked the pockets clean after they got off of my couch over there. But the point is, we have to study these soft skills. And I think one of my colleagues here, Darren Lepomi, does a great job. He teaches a whole YouTube and course about the soft skills outside of the laboratories. I just wanted to say that before we move on to the question of academic funding, and one of the ways I am solving this problem of academic funding is I'm accepting superchats. I am taking super chat.

No, this is not how I'm going to do it. Actually, though, I do want to donate the proceeds from today to both of your guys' favorite charities. You guys will tell me afterwards, and it can't be, you know, to the Brian Keating Fund. I won't do that, but I'll donate all the money I'm getting from the super chats. You're willing if it's the Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association. You are a brave man. I get their newsletter. What are you talking about?

Am I willing? All right. I subscribe, buddy. And Max will obviously do it to any of the projects you're interested in. So please keep those super chats coming. We have one from Sweden. We have a Swedish crono. Max, tell me if this is a lot of money.

We have 100 Swedish croner coming from Joaquin Peters Peterson, who asked, can I ask, Max and Eric, if they follow John Williamson slash Thad Rogers slash John Mackin theory of space time as a fluid. First of all, Max, am I going to be able to put my kids through college with this 100 Swedish croner? And do you think about space time as a fluid? With those 10 bucks, I have to say tax a make it. We'll make sure to put it to, send it to a charity that puts it to good use. I clearly do need to follow this theory since I'm the first to admit that I don't know as much about it as I should.

Eric, do you want to think about it? I got nothing. All right, fine. We'll move on. Next super chat. We have 2,000. Oh my God, 2,000 Russian roubles, which I think is about, uh, What, Eric?

I thought you said so. Pardon me? Are you suggesting Russian collusion? This is Russian collusion for Eric Weinstein. Uh-oh. Eric, do you think that the perceived loss of information that happens when a quantum system collapses is because of equal probability events present in the set of causal chains of that quantum system, i.e., is there no other distinguishing factor we can identify?

I think he's asking Alexander Apostoltov. I can't pronounce this last time. Alexander, Sasha, asking, what do you think of the perceived loss of information when a wave function collapses? Nichevo. Okay. I don't think much about it.

I think that this has to do with the fact that we formulated. Quantum theory is going to be with us forever, but I don't believe it's going to look like it currently does with this sort of deterministic propagation, followed by violent introductions of probability when you ask bad questions, that is where the state is not an eigenstate of the observable representing your question.

And I think that a lot of what we have is we have a theory that is good enough to work and get results, but is philosophically unsatisfying. And the way in which we used to weed people out in physics is that you had to profess that you actually accepted that this is exactly, the way the world works more or less.

And my feeling is this is the way the world works relative to our current framework, which is clearly telling us don't overdo the analysis until we get to the right framework. I think this is really what Einstein was saying. He wasn't saying that he hated quantum theory. He said that he hated the idea

that we were going to rush to say, hey, the universe is queerer than we can suppose Haldane was right. And wow, this just proves that some of us can accept it and some of you guys are stuck in your classical world. I think that the problem is we've got way too much G-WIS in our physics, and G-WIS is fun. It just doesn't actually move the needle.

So I'm always up for trying to remove G-WIS to get to the fun of looking for a better framework, and I hope that G-U will start to push in that direction. Can I add something to this, Brian? So, Priviate, Sasha, how do you la? I think that's a question about the wave function collapsed there. Look, I think the way function just does not collapse. This was the first way I got in trouble in physics, actually, with the Swedish professor, Eric, you'll be proud of me for this.

We Swedes never pass up an opportunity to make fun of Denmark and talk smack about them, so I won't miss that chance now either. Neil's Borr and the Copenhagen interpretation. I respond with Hamlet. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Oh, my God. Talk about Stockholm syndrome. The wave function does not collapse.

Let's face it. There's absolutely no experimental evidence for it. It appears to collapse, yes. But what you ever had showed so beautifully, already back in the 50s, is that even if it does not collapse, if you just drop that entirely and just say go with a shirt in your equation all the way, it's going to appear like it collapses. And it's going to appear like it collapses according to all the usual Copenhagen interpretation rules. And I would go as far as saying that this, it doesn't even have anything fundamental to do with quantum mechanics.

If you have any sort of physics which lets you make copies of an observer, classically or quantum mechanically, you will experience apparent randomness. I like to imagine that, and I suppose you, Brian, do you want to clone yourself for the new year so you can get twice as much done? Yeah, then I could, you know. So we'll take you into some San Diego, San Diego. medical center and put one will sedate you and and I'm telling you now you're going to wake up it's going to be January 1st 2020 will be over at one copy of you wakes up in room one the other copy wakes up in room two in the hospital okay what do you predict is going to be the first thing

you experienced when you walk outside your your hospital room and look at the room number my wife's going to yell at two guys that look like me at the same time but what are you going to see are you to see a room sign that says you were in room one or you see a two? You cannot predict this, right? Because you know there will be two experiences. One Brian experienced this is one, one, two. So the best thing you can say is I'm going to go and I'm going to look and I'm going to say, oh, this seems random.

I'm going to either see a one or two with equal probability. This is what I think fundamentally is happening in quantum physics too. The quantum reality is just bigger than the one we thought we lived in before quantum mechanics. and it has this ability that it can start with something which is in one way and make effectively being in two ways. And then when we make a measurement, sometimes we find out which copy we were. So I wouldn't worry about the way function collapse. That's a tremendous amount of technical debt to go to many worlds to take on to get rid of the collapse.

I mean, in other words, it does strike me that what we've entered an era in which we can solve many of these problems, if you don't mind that we're positing something even wildly more outrageous. Which, by the way, it doesn't mean it is false. It depends on what you measure outrageousness in, right? If what you mean is that something is more extravagant if it involves somehow having more particles or reality being bigger, yeah, then sure. But I think you and I, Eric, both feel that maybe the kind of simplicity that we should value with Occam's Razor is rather that the math is simple. The equations are simple. That's a very interesting point. And I do think that what I'm not saying that Max Tegmark cannot

get out of Max Tegmark's technical debt. I'm saying that it would take a very good day being Max Tegmark to get out of Max Tegmark's technical debt in so doing that. By the way, you're much more partial to the Schrodinger equation than I ever imagined. I even got my wife to agree to how it hanging on the wall. That's his love. That was his first tweet to his wife. I love you, dear. Here you go.

So we're getting other questions that I want to come to. But I do think Eric and I have talked about this, kind of the whiz-bang approach to physics that I believe is a little detrimental. And your mutual friend, Lex Friedman, up there, has had on other characters, in addition to the two of you guys, one by the name of Michi Okaku, who will talk waxing rhapsodically. about the mind of God and how everything is encrypted and encoded, and if we can get to the multiverse, and that really would be the singular.

I find that I like Michio. He's very good as an entertainer, but I think the selling of physics is going to come back to haunt us and kind of just touting this stuff, and I'm guilty of it at times too, but I won't utter the mind of God. What do you think about the danger that we as people that are publicly facing have of potentially compromising the true appreciation of the most magnificent

things in the universe, which take a lot of background. You can't dumb it down, and you shouldn't. I will never do that with my audience. Go ahead, Eric, first. It's a really interesting and tough question. I kind of hate it, to be blunt, because I feel like a lot of, I mean, let's be frank about this. It used to be the case that we reserved the right to talk to the public in this fashion for the very top people, and they sort of did it sparingly. And we made certain, you know, it's one thing if you've got Gamoff talking to the public, you know, great figures in your field, but somehow we've got these science entrepreneurs.

And, you know, I would even, I don't think that's primarily what I am, but you could make an argument that I've become partially a science entrepreneur. And I try to go away from this language. Now, if you ask me privately, what animates me, it's very tough when you're talking about the basis of reality itself to say, come on, don't make too much out of it. Like, what the hell? Come on.

The only reason to do this stuff is that you're talking about existence. And can you please speak more modestly and with less purple, language about existence itself. I don't know. It's a challenge. I go to synagogue where I don't believe, but I feel, and I'm filled with the spirit of the service, that's one thing, okay? You're all singing and praying together.

It's another thing when you're alone at your whiteboard and you feel like, holy shit, am I in an Indiana Jones movie? I'm so close to the base, to the hardware, the metal. It's like it's uncomfortably close to religion. And I think that what I find is that weirdly we talk about the mind of God for two reasons. When we're getting really far away from success in physics and we need some side hustle in order to keep people interested. By the way, this is the same language that we in math and physics used to hit on our potential mates. You know, we talk about the mind of God when we go to a party

if we have to compete with a guy with actual money or who can play the guitar. So we pick that up as a bad habit. But when you're also, when you're succeeding at science, that's the other time that you start to get into this. And so weirdly, if I hear somebody talk about the mind of God, I tend to think that they're either getting really far away from success or that they've gotten very close

and they've reminded themselves, holy crap, you know, when I'm doing my stuff, I'm actually talking about something that is so profound. I can't even believe I'm allowed to address it or have enough information to feel that after standing on the shoulders of so many nested giants, like a giant Matroshka, you know, we've got giants all the way down and you're on these shoulders, maybe I'm going to be the one to, you know, each one of us

to turn in the baton at the end of the relay race, who am I going to be turning this baton into? What if I actually, what if you have a theory of everything? We don't actually spend time with this. It's a terrifying idea that just as the last landmass on Earth was at some point mapped.

You just lost Don Wells. Remember the uncharted desert aisle of Gilligan's Island. With satellite imagery, we don't believe in it. I don't know that we would have said uncharted desert aisle in the modern. And Mary Ann. And Marianne. That's what I was saying.

Don Wells. Oh, Donwell's. I thought, yeah, yeah. Donwell, right. So my belief about this is that you shouldn't fault somebody for talking about the mind of God. You should just ask yourself, is this because their research isn't working or it's really working? And in general, it's almost always the case these days that it's because our research isn't working. So, Max, I have a question about theories of everything. Oh, go ahead. Of course. Yeah, yeah. Whether we oversimplify too much and whatnot. I really love Einstein's quote that we should tell things as simple as possible and no simpler. This is what I always aspire to, whether I'm teaching a course or giving your research colloquium or talking to the person next to me on the airplane.

And I actually feel I was not oversimplifying when I talked about the collapse of the wave function there. The argument I gave for you in the hospital, that was the full argument. It wasn't some sort of done-down version. If you think it through again on your own free time, I think you will conclude that, yeah, you will experience apparent randomness. That's my clone calling, yeah. Yeah, and then if people come back and ask me follow up questions,

I'm willing to go as far down the rabbit hole as they want. So here, for example, is the Scheringer equation again, right? And what it's actually saying is that the state of the world, that's this Greek letter sigh there or this bracket around it. It's saying that the rate of change of it is given, depends on the current state of the world and you do this operation on it.

And for the math nerds, this is a linear operation, which means that if the actual state of the world is this thing plus that thing, the rate, then the same thing, the rate of change will be the, that operation on the, the some of the two things of the and and and what that just means is as everett has pointed out

and many others have known for a very long time is that in some circumstances two different solutions to the this can do their parallel thing we can talk at great length about about the discoveries later about decoherence and why it is that sometimes these different parallel branches are unaware of each other and but my point is if you give a science nerd colloquial at a physics department, I think ideally you should also start, in the same way you start discussing this with your grandma, just at the very high level, you know, here are the cool ideas, and then you can go as deep as the audience or the listener wants. From there, Max, it's not clear to me, even listening to this, I really liked what you said

in the hospital, by sort of a Sydney Coleman thing where you try to take the majesty of quantum mechanics and you divorce it from some of the accidents which people confuse it with. And so by coming up with a classical version of, I really like that. What I don't know is whether or not it's really an isomorphism to the same phenomena, because what you did is if I look at consciousness, I think Brian goes to sleep in the example, so consciousness is paused. And then we have an action where you're trying to treat consciousness like it's mitosis, and we clone the thing or we call spawn inside of a computer,

and then there's the awakening. So the quiescing is an important part of your story. Could you have told the same story without quiescing the system called Brian Keating? If it happened so fast, much, much faster than the timescale of a tenth of a second or a hundredth of a second on which Brian reacts, I think the argument is the same. Although I think we don't have surgeons that quick in San Diego. That's the accident.

But you understand what I'm trying to say. It's not clear to me that it's an isomorphism. Indeed. And we don't know for sure that the Schroding equation is actually that accurate a description of nature either. It's quite so exciting to see what's going to happen with the quantum computer efforts right now. Will they ultimately fail? Because physics isn't fully described by the Schrodinger equation or will they actually succeed? you know, this is where ultimately our experimental friends will, will give us crucial insights

to what- But even the Schrodinger equation, like, you know, this is the non-relativist. We know that the Schrodinger equation is wrong. Well, it's right, and it's not complete. Well, we can also take quantum field theory and task. No, I understand what you're saying. What I'm trying to get at is that we have a situation in which when we talk to the public, I'm very sympathetic with what you're trying to do. or even our colleagues.

The problem is, is that great analogies, you know, I do a superposition analogy classically with change in your pockets where some of it's in Swiss francs, some of it's in pounds, but the landing card says, is your change in either Swiss francs or is it in British pounds?

And then the idea is that there's no boat. And so because the multiple choice answers don't list superposition, classical mechanics remains mute, and quantum mechanics weirdly says, I'm going to convert all your money into one or the other because the landing card says it by some mystical process. I'm very fond of these things.

The problem is that even when you say that you're removing these things, an astute listener can often spot, wait a second, that's not actually an analogy because if I tracked it exactly, there was a sleight of hand. Sometimes the slight of hand matters. I don't think in what you were doing with the Schrodinger equation being non-relativistic that you were using any sleight of hand. I do think in the consciousness question, by not addressing the quiescing of the system, it's not clear that that's actually kind of a fair point. Yeah.

So before we just to bring closure to this, I'll be the first to admit that we ultimately don't know what's going on exactly with quantum mechanics. My personal guess, I'm happy to tell you, because I like betting. is that even quantum mechanics is probably an emergent theory, maybe an approximation of something deeper. Maybe we can get it out of GU somehow. But I also would guess, frankly, and here I am guessing the opposite of Roger Penrose, who you had on here earlier, that gravity doesn't really have much to do with this. I think you can look at being in a spaceship far away from any,

really any important gravitating objects and do your little quantum experiments with the Stern-Gurlock apparatus and you would get all the same fascinating things happening. So I think, blame it, I think ignoring gravity altogether, ignoring relativistic effects altogether, you can, you still have this thing that people love fighting about and arguing about what does the way function collapse or not. And that's why I'm so interested in, um, and this kind of this kind of this. discussion we had where you get at those very questions without worrying about that stuff. So when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed

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slash visit Scotland. Let's take a break. A DGI air horn for you guys. That was awesome. My sound effects are coming into play. So we're still sort of diverging from one question I was very curious to get both of your opinions about. And that's this issue of funding in physics.

And I'm an experimentalist. You guys are theorists, mostly. Eric says he's not a physicist. Please, Eric, you're an honorary physicist now. we will Mac that's up to you guys it's not up to me max it's not an honest physicist you're a real physics thing what what very honor I'd love to be thank you guys it's not for me to okay fine anyway you come down here you're in my lab you're physicists anyway we've talked about this Eric but I want to get Max's take on it I feel theory is in a sense um less costly

in other words it's easier to make theories just like it's easier it's not easier intellectually but it's there are more programs in the world than there are different types of computers There's more programming languages than phone models, for example. So I make the analogy that theory is kind of like software, and experiments like I do are kind of like hardware. And therefore, it's very precious. But I get a lot of emails, I'm sure both of you guys do. You know, I've got this theory of the early universe.

I need to, you know, or of grand unification. Can you help me prove it? And I'll share, you know, my Nobel Prize proceeds with you. I actually asked that of Adam Reese, and he said, yeah, how do you think I won the Nobel Prize in physics? But in reality, there's so many, there's a proliferation of it. Experiments are expensive. I and myself really at the whim of Jim Simons, whose generosity has granted me and my 300 colleagues on the Simon's Observatory the privilege of building an experiment, which could potentially reveal evidence, more evidence,

or some evidence in some cases, for things like the multiverse or inflation. I want to ask you guys, What do we need in physics that the tech industry does so well in software? Do we need, I had this idea of a Y combinator for physics. How do we get either more experiments to look at theories or use existing data from experiments, as Max has done, to investigate the consequences of theory? And how do we raise money for it for physics as a whole? It's our crown jewel of civilization, many people feel. So, Max, I'll start with you. how would you, if you were kind of responsible for raising funds, it seems extremely difficult.

How do we do it to promote it for the net benefit of humanity? There were really two separate questions in there, right? How shall we do the physics best given funding? And second, how should we get the funding? So for the first part, how should we do it? I think I really want to avoid to try to give some glib answer to it because it's a strength, not a weakness that so many physicists around the world have different ideas of how it should be done. We want to try, look, not just all under the same lampposts, but search in many different ways

with many different approaches. For the second question, how you fund it, so you can have a healthy, diverse community of people going after this great mystery of how the world works, right? There I think, yes, it's great that there are philanthropists like Simons that will listen enough to scientists to actually fund them. But I actually think it's also a big mistake as a species if we don't create institutions and governments which support science. There have been a number of very nerdy economic studies that have showed very clearly that investing in basic science is. the highest return on investment basically ever. And I mean, you're the expert.

You can push back on this, Eric. But inventing the transistor, you know, just basic physics research has benefited so much in so many ways, you know, inventing calculus, you know. It didn't cost that much. But it's been so, so valuable. So I think as a society, frankly, we have to think, and this comes back to the whole media question again, you know, There are much more people who have heard about the Kardashians than who can name three living scientists even, let alone 20, right?

We created a culture where scientists are not, not only are they not particularly known about or viewed as role models or heroes, but they're even very actively attacked by a lot of folks with power for whom what the scientific, what scientists, are saying is inconvenient and I really think that if we can make one of the best things we can do for science funding is just create a less screwed up media landscape where we actually appreciate how much we benefit from scientific research that governments will actually support it again it's it's it's pretty we spent two billion dollars a day or more in this country alone on military right. If you could get a puny, puny fraction of that into scientific research, we wouldn't even be

having to have this conversation about how we get funding for science. Eric has had an analogy to the military calling theoretical physics the intellectual equivalent of SEAL Team 6. So Eric, how would you fund physics or how do you propose that we crack this particular nut? There are four basic arguments. The first one that I like the most, will fall flat, but it's Max's argument, which is, so I'm not, not, I'm not ragging on Max. I'm saying he's got the best argument, but it just doesn't work. It's the greatest mystery in the world. You don't want to know how it ends.

You're not interested in how the plot develops. That has to do with the fact that we have not brought people along. You can't understand, you know, the mystery of chirality, if you don't even know what chirality is. And whether or not we're going to solve it is not going to be interesting to you. It's like a murder mystery where we don't even tell people what the crime is. So in part, that's on us. We should be making the greatest mystery accessible to the public, but it doesn't seem to work. Then there's the military argument.

Do you really want, do you have any idea how powerful your physics community is and how much it is accomplished for you? And you can have these guys for a pittance on permanent retainer to make sure that when something goes bump in the night, you've got the world's smartest people at your fingertips on speed dial. What is your effing problem that you're causing them to talk about funding? I never want to hear the two of you talk about funding again in your lives. It pains me that working physicists are constantly in this conversation. Let me keep going with the arguments, though. The next one is an argument about the fact that physics has doomed you.

since the early 1950s, 52 to 54, we are in the valley of death. If we do not figure out a way to become a space-faring civilization, you can kiss your indefinite future on this planet goodbye. Physicists, without the wisdom of gods, became as powerful as gods in the 1950s. And we do not have a long-term plan for civilization. We've had 75 years of unexplainable quiet following World War II. because we dropped two physics devices in Japan

and scared the living shit out of every sentient being who's paying attention, and that is not going to hold. And so you were going to be in deep, deep trouble. But the last argument is probably the most useful one, and it's not one that I love, which is, let's talk about your beautiful taxpayer dollars. They don't exist. Most of your taxpayer dollar is a physics dollar.

And let me explain it. I'm going to start talking about some things that come out of physics, whether it's electron shells, whether it's the transistor and semiconductor, as Max just talked about in semiconductor instructions that power your computers and the devices that you're watching this on, whether it's the development of the electromagnetic spectrum,

whether it's the World Wide Web that came out of CERN, I'm going to keep going and going and going. And at the end, I'm going to say, how much is left of your beautiful taxpayer dollars? that you're so worried that you don't why should you spend it on us this is one of the reasons why I'm not accepting you guys calling me a physicist I don't necessarily even like your community all the time but this is the most important intellectual community that has ever existed and it is intellectually offensive in the highest order to have it try to explain what it has done for you the old joke

which Janet Jackson made famous is what have you done for me lately that's the that's the that's the punchline. Suck it up. Physics had signed the world's worst licensing deal in human history. Anytime you want to revisit that and say what would be a fair price for what we've got out of physics. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Just let me get to the end of the effing ramp. Anytime you want to readdress how much physics has provided for you in that taxpayer dollar,

and you want to sign a licensing agreement in arrears that covers the world. Wide Web, the semiconductors, chemistry, blah, blah, blah, electromagnetic spectrum. Be my guest, and you will be watching physicists flying their kids around in multiple private jets, and you will be their private chefs. Be quiet. Listen to what you've gotten from this community. It doesn't ask for much.

Shut up, suck it up, and make sure that these people stop talking about funding, which is boring, and it's also embarrassing. But if you want to let the U.S. be at the mercy of China, if you want it to live with nuclear weapons where we're not trying to get off this plan, if you want any of those things, it's because you're not paying attention. Please find somebody who is and talk about this locally with them until you understand the situation a little bit better. Max, Max, a million. I'm going to put the million in there now. Max, go for you. I just have to say, you know, my favorite movie of all time is, of course, the one about your life, life of Brian. That's right. What the python? And I'm going to

We really should try to reenact this epic skits about what have the Romans ever done for us by saying, what is physics ever done for us? So embarrassing. The internet. But besides physics, besides the internet and transistors, what has physics ever done for us? It's so ridiculous. You should. Yeah, maybe we'll do that.

But, I mean, I'll get back. My wife doesn't, you know, much to her chagrin, can't go back and say, well, you know, when I married you, you were, you know, 20 pounds lighter and I can't well your cooking is so good dear no I mean you we didn't sign a deal there are no deals so the question is how do we go for hold on hold on hold on yes I want to get to immigration also Eric because we're talking to an immigrant a dangerous immigrant right now but but I want to get to that in a second because I do think there there's a kernel of truth but let me just say this we're making the exact same mistakes it wasn't just the endless frontier cubits were invented by physicists guess who's using cubits well quantum computing is using

Cubits. What is it doing? Max and I are going to talk later this year about artificial intelligence and some debt. We're making the same mistakes now. It's not only because of the endless frontier, Van Everbush, all these guys. It, we are making, it's built into who we are. We are not good because we don't get training in it, Eric. We never get training on the financial end of things that you have a preternatural ability to do, perhaps, or Jim Simons does. I don't even be training in economics. Fine. You have a preternatural gift then. But most of us don't. So the question is, what do we need? I made this comment.

Someone in the chat room is suggesting blockchain. I thought about that too. Is there any application, a Y combinator for physics, where we put people that want to get the next qubit before it's too late. We're never going to back monitor. Forget it. We're never going to get a dollar for each email that was sent. That's not going to happen.

But going forward, do we have to make them a same mistake that we made 45 times in the 20th century alone? I think I really don't want to have this conversation. I'll be honest with you. I'm embarrassed that we try to come up with reasons that we have to reason. Look, hey, public, you know who Einstein is. You know who Feynman is. You can't stop talking about them.

I'm not justifying it. How do we go forward? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I understand it. There are lots of things we can do if we have funding to make the field exciting, inviting, to get the talent. We have to compete for talent with things that actually pay, and to have people constantly focused on their grants

and all this stuff, we have devitalized ourselves. I don't think we need Y Combinator any of these things if we can save the system. I think, Brian, what your secret question really is, is assuming we can't save the system. How do we go to blockchain? How do we go to Y Combinator? How do we do this?

And I'm not done because I'm concerned that you guys need friends who are not physicists to explain what theoretical physics has done, in a new way to people who are newly nervous about this planet. By the way, I forgot to throw in molecular biology, which was largely founded by who? Physicists. Yeah, absolutely. Right?

It's so absurd that when we make the argument, it is as if we are insecure about what we have done. And I refuse to be insecure in front of the public. Do we need more people, Max? I mean, is it a lack of people that's holding back physics financing? I'm just talking about funding right now. I mean, is Elon Musk fundamentally limited by the computing power that he has or the number of bright engineers that he has? Look, many years ago, I promised myself to never ever pity myself. And I think I've kept it, you know.

I think it's important to remember that physicists are not the only group on this planet who maybe don't quite get the resources that they think. they should have that right there were more people who died of starvation this year than who died of COVID and we don't even really read about it in the newspapers that because for some reason this is how how media works right there were more people who died of tuberculosis this year and last year combined than have died of COVID this year we don't hear about them either very much but because of the way the media work so somehow I think we that what's happening in science that science has trouble with getting funding

and also that scientists have their opinions not listen to very much is just a small symptom of a more broadly screwed up world and maybe sometimes just like in physics sometimes the easy way to solve a little problem

is to go and find unified theory that a higher do it at a higher level maybe the easiest way to get science out of its screwed up situation is to just make society itself a bit more bit less screwed up. I don't know what you think, Eric. I think what we could do is we could try.

Look, let me say something about your community that, again, you can't say. The reason that physics is so powerful is that it does something that no other community can easily do, which is that it gets the hybrid vigor of the dirt. If I go to Brian's lab where he's building telescopes, it is as gritty as you can possibly imagine to get clean results. You have to be welding things and soldering, all this kind of stuff. On the other hand, when I look at what's behind Max on his background, it is the purest, most beautiful stuff. It's like listening to Bach.

It effectively is this magical purity. And by getting the, you know, it's like you're combining these two most extreme things. And there's something about this intellectual thought process that if I wanted to cure tuberculosis, believe me, I would actually go to physicists. If I wanted to cure problems in the economy, I would go to physicists. It's what physics does in training, if it works, and if we stop going the path, because I think physics training is becoming less valuable all the time, unfortunately, as we drift.

But when physics works, the combination of purity and dirt, and also the fact that so many problems are surprisingly simple once you get past the incredible hurdle needed to understand them. This is why the physics community is always at the scene of every great crime for humanity. And so if we're stealing things away

from malaria or famine or any things to make humans happier and better, you're always going to find physicists at the scene of the crime because there's something in the training that's fungible, which is why when I forgot molecular, biology. Can you imagine that your community more or less founded molecular biology, and I can't even be bothered to remember it while I'm listing all the things we've done? It's preposterous.

And because when you guys say it, it sounds like you're there with a begging bowl. I prefer to have friends say it for you. You need the Elon Musk's who almost became a physicist, the Mark Zuckerberg's, the Yuri Milner's, whoever, to get together and say, hey, we need to agitate for our our friends. If you guys do it, it won't work. We need to do it from outside. It's called third party praise. So let me give you some applause right there. Max, do you want to have a follow up on that before we switch to another topic? If you guys have time, I don't know. How's your time going, guys? I love this, but it's up to you guys. I'm good for a lot more of Max's. I just want to remind people to go to Max's new project to check it out. It's called improve the news.org.

Go to Eric Weinstein's channel on YouTube, look up the portal, subscribe to the portal. And if you're enjoying this live stream, just hit the thumbs up button. Stretch your thumbs. Don't get carpal tunnel syndrome. It kills 800 billion people a year. Stretch your thumbs. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the like button if you're enjoying this conversation.

Because I'm having such a good time with these incredible, brilliant friends of mine that I'm privileged to spend the time with because of things like the internet that we love and hate. And I want to turn now back to Max. You have a quick follow up on that? And before we get to some talkless, some practical wisdom from the two of you. you? Yeah, so just to share a final thought on this business about physics and science more broadly and how to get people to, how to get both, get people listening more to it so that the world gets run in a more reasonable way and also so that it, we don't have to do so much begging. I think physicists, we have a certain arrogance actually, which has harmed us a lot.

and help you. We forget that we're in a bubble and that we forget that there's actually a science of how you persuade people. There's actually a science of how to communicate. And other people have studied that at great length. I would say that the average person who works making cigarette ads is much more scientific about the way they get their message out than the average physicist. And I think it comes not from stupidity on behalf of the physicist.

but from arrogance and that somehow no we're not going to stoop so low that we're going to be scientific about how we communicate right uh scientific about how we advocate we have to get off our high horses you know if you get invaded by a hitler's army you shouldn't just say well you know tanks are immoral we're going to fight them with swords we have to be scientific also about standing up for ourselves and our ideas and and so forth and part of that another The second mistake I think we make is forgetting that we live in a bubble and spending much more time in fighting within our community of physicists or within having one science pitted against another science for a few more tax dollars, you know, losing sight of the fact that there's a tiny trickle of money that flows to all the sciences combined anyway compared to what goes in to generic fruits of course. of lobby, corporate lobbying and random waste. You know, so get out of our bubble again.

If we look at the big picture, it's kind of pathetic, really, that you have physicists, biologists, chemists, who together have built up most of the wealth of the world and managed to be so incredibly navel-gazing and busy with infighting and old-fashioned and how they communicate that they have to come begging for money, and people don't listen to them.

Can we? Actually, can I just tell it? Yeah, go for it. A quick story from the malaria wars, effectively. There used to be a problem where you had a tiny budget for certain diseases that affected large numbers of people who didn't happen to live where the money was. And at some point.

At some point, right now. Yeah. And but there was a change back, I guess, in the 90s, maybe, 80s, 90s, where I remember Jeffrey Sachs taking my wife, Pia Malani, onto a phone call, and she was trying to figure out how to allocate this tiny little budget. And his point to her was, it's immoral for us to be trying to do this. What we need to do is to push the budget out and to stop accepting the constraint. And that's part of why I was a little bit resistant.

I wasn't because Ryan was making bad points about why Compton. It's that I can't I refuse to start thinking about this problem in earnest at this level. This is such a clear mismatch that the first thing is to cure our society wants to spend more money on science and it wants to spend less money on stupid stuff and by the way the really big problem the really stupid thing that we did was around the SSC cancellation, the superconducting super collider where the arrogance of the community did not play well in Washington as times had changed. And I highly recommend going back to like 1992, 93 in the congressional hearings and reading how pissed off Congress was that when they found the National Science Foundation lying and then they found the physicists buying too much art for their offices at the SSC and things like that. So it's very important that we also do our part to say, look, hey, we are going to spend some money

on art, beautiful buildings and things that make us happy. We have conferences in beautiful locations, suck it up, it's a pit and stop complaining. On the other hand, know that we are serious as a heart attack when it comes to using this money for things that really matter. Sometimes all of that kind of luxury promotes the idea. I went to a max conference in Banff. It's one of the most beautiful places, but that facilitated lots of people feeling that we could take the risks to do new things. Whereas if you're constantly keeping people at a minimal level of sustenance,

necessity is the mother of very mundane inventions. But luxury is often the father to real freedom to consider bold new ideas. And I really do believe that in part, we need to recognize that we pissed people off in the early 90s, and we need to reestablish trust. And we have the basis to do it. I made that point to... Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong.

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because he only joined LIGO because the SSC was canceled. And then furthermore, the Higgs boson, which was the primary discovery of the Large Hadron Collider, resulted in two Nobel Prizes, but not to any of the experimentalists. And I wonder, you guys are theorists. I made this joke with Eric. He always hits me when we're in person.

And I say, like, do you really think of experimentalists as like, you know, the joke is, What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? Well, you call him a drummer. What do you call someone who hangs out with a physicist, an experimentalist? Back in the 1900s, people used to say that Einstein was practicing Jewish physics. He was doing theoretical physics. Real men did Aryan physics.

That was experimental physics. Oh, how times have changed. There's a few Jews who have won the Nobel Prize and some of whom are fellow experimentalists, like Ray Weiss, like Barry Barish and others. But the question is, to what extent do you feel like there is a, you know, a difference of viewpoint as to the importance of experimental scientists versus, I mean, I don't think some of, you know, Bardeen looked at the equations of quantum mechanics and said, let me invent the transistor, which will then power all these cell phones. I feel like a lot of these discoveries are serendipitous in theory. It's kind of naturally serendipitous, whereas experimentalness, we kind of need to know what we're looking for before we set out. What do you think of the difference between theoretical physics, experimental physics, Max, first, and then Eric, in terms of the difference in similarities that they may engender? I think experimentalists, experimental physicists and theoretical physicists have always had a love-hate relationship with one another, where deep down there was a very deep respect both ways.

And it's been a very, very healthy relationship as well, where experimentalists have discovered new things which posed mysteries for theorists to chew on. And theorists have sometimes taken giant leaps of and motivated experiments that wouldn't otherwise have done. It's quite obvious to me that if you had, if you eliminated either theoretical physics or experimental physics, the field as a whole would have gone almost nowhere. I think, you know, Brian, there are three sort of categories of experiments, experiments that I don't find particularly exciting, but I'm glad somebody did them. Then there's experiments like the Cobalt 60 experiment that showed that the universe was left, right, asymmetric, where the effect is so astounding and the courage needed to say, I believe that this crazy suggestion, is worth trying, where I admire the courage as well as the skill, and the establishing it is so profound that I think it's top-level stuff.

And then there's like weird stuff. I remember, I think, the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the particles or the fields that communicate the weak force or the W&Z particles. I remember the description of stochurch. fantastic cooling, I think, which was what Simon Van Damir had contributed, where it was like, we're going to take a box where there are particles bouncing around, and we're going to keep nudging the box in precise ways so that it absorbs the energy from the individual particles, and so that they will all get cooled by virtue of the fact that we can nudge this thing.

I mean, it was the most mind-blowing description, and part of what I hope to be helping Brian do is to distinguish that there's an experiment that has to be done. It was done. We're happy that it happened. There was an experiment that showed something absolutely astounding. It's a different sort of a thing which took courage. And then there's experiments that look like theoretical physics, but are even better sometimes because they're actually physically manifested, like stochastic cooling. And in part, I think that when we call it experiment, we're not doing enough. We're not doing enough to talk about the taxonomy of different things that us theoretically minded people find amazing about what the guys who actually get in gals who get you know down and dirty

doing the actual nuts and bolt soldering and gluing yeah when you think about though you know who does a scientist if you say the word scientist to an individual they'll think of Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan. It's rare, if anybody, Richard Feynman, they don't think about experimentalist. And yet, you know, something like in my book, losing the Nobel Prize, I make this point. Like 70% of Nobel Prizes have gone to experimentalists since 1940. And from my perspective, you know, we need the kind of Brian Greens, Max Tag Marks, Eric Weinstein's of experimental physics to communicate how freaking cool it is because you can actually get something done in a day. Let us help.

As Albert Einstein, sorry, Albert Michelson, one of the first Americans to win the Nobel Prize, he said that experiments are like puzzles. The more you do, the better you get. And every time you do a puzzle, it's like the Rubik's Cube. I'm trying to get the inventor of the Rubik's Cube on my podcast. I'll let you know if I can get that done. But Kamran Vafa, you're a mutual friend of you guys. He was on the show.

He wrote a book called Puzzles to Unlock the Universe, unravel the universe. And I asked him, what would you rather solve? A mystery or a puzzle? And it was a question I asked Freeman Dyson, the late great Freeman Dyson on this very show as well. What it animates you guys? Is it the puzzle solving that I like to do, like working on my car, building a telescope where I know there's a solution. Maybe I'm not a good enough experimentalist to get it done, but someone better than me can get it done. Or a mystery that perhaps has no answer.

Max, let's start with you. What do you prefer most in life? Mysteries that may not be solvable or puzzles which have a solution that you can complete? I love both. I mean, if not being solvable doesn't phase me. I'd much rather have any questions I can't answer. That answers I can't question. We're going to go there on God in a minute, but keep going. Yeah, it's actually very much my mantra as a scientist. I also feel that the whole distinction between experimentalist and physicists, experimentalist and theory. It's kind of outdated and dissolving. First of all, you have. a lot of people who work at the interface like phenomenologists who try to connect it to. Then you have people like me. I spent five years building your radio telescope and I spent a lot of time working with you and others on experimental data, but I'm mostly a theorist.

And then you have entirely new, different areas which are neither experiment or theory. In astronomy, right, they're very, astronomers are very clear to say, I'm an observer, not an experimentalist. And now we have a new field, computational physics, which clearly is here with us to stay. You know, if someone writes, if someone devotes 10 years of their career to do amazing supercomputer simulations and developing new algorithms for lattice QCD with the goal ultimately of computing the whole periodic table from first principles, right? That's not theory. It's not experiment. it's a little bit like being an observer where you observe inside here. It's frankly, a new field.

So I think we're probably better off not obsessing too much about artificial boundaries between are you this kind of physicist or that kind of business. Yeah, I should say before Eric, you respond. But I always say that experimentalists don't have to be able to create new theories, but we better understand the theories that others have proposed. well enough that we can make beautiful experiments. You know, our friend Sabina Hasenfeld, or she says, you know, beauty is driving physics astray.

I disagree with her vehemently when she came on my interview. I said all experiments are beautiful. Even the ugly, you know, chicklet and chewing gum and coat hanger ones, because they're all teasing out something that is going to reveal something about the universe, whether it be through a null result, as I'm used to coming up with, or an actual positive detection, these experiments have to have a certain symmetry, beauty, and and naturalness about them in order to succeed. Eric, what do you think about this, this, you know, rather provocative?

I think, Brian, you've been on this, and you've actually been very influential in the evolution of my thinking about this. I hadn't realized the extent to which the theorists, I've been so focused on the fact that we seem to have appointed about six or seven people to talk to the public on behalf of all physics, that I was sort of not realizing that all of them tend to come from the theory camp, and they all tend to come with varying amounts of G-Wiz, which is partially good and partially not good. I'm not entirely against Wu and G-Wiz, but you need to do it in the right proportion.

I think partially what it has to do with is the shock, you know, for those of us who program computers now and again, sometimes you'll have a theory, and then you'll instantiated inside of the computer. And when the graphic actually shows you what your equations have been saying, you have this kind of, of surprise. You may have written the code, you may have come up with the equations, you may have designed everything, but the computer reflects you back to you and you're like, whoa, it works, it's real. I mean, I think I was maybe almost the first, I think I may have been the first person to actually draw inside of a computer a three-dimensional model of parallel translation that applies in economics. And when I saw it come up, I was just astounded.

And I think it has a different beauty to it. I wish more theorists were doing some experiment, more experimentalists. And let me say the negative thing for the experimentalists. You guys cannot afford to be so light on the theory. If you're going to actually check our work, you need to speak the language of people whose work. I'm very worried that there's going to be a translation error.

And you're going to think that you're understanding what we're talking about with tensors and differential forms and bundles. But in fact, we need people who go back and forth. So I'm worried about the two cultures of C.P. Snow dividing experimentalists from theorists. And in part, that's on the experimentalists. They're trying to get by with antiquated language, as if, you know, tensors are still things, collections of numbers that transform

according to rules, which is not a good way of describing them in the slightest. With that said, I think that there are a small number of very interesting places where you see something that sounds like a theory that's actually experimental. If you look at Watson and Crick's discovery of the three-dimensional structure of the double helix, they went through a triple helix that they built a model of, which was an embarrassment to them. They also went to a situation in which they come up with the double helix after the parts are machined and delivered to the room in which they're working. In some sense, the double helix was an experiment.

result. And if I can pick out another one, in the late 50s, there's this really anomalous thing, which I still can't quite figure out. You guys can inform me. The Bohm-Arenoff effect was the last really significant discovery around plain old classical sort of electromagnetism. Now, there may be a beam and some quantum interference and stuff like that. But we didn't understand that the electromagnetic field strength, which we thought was the real object, is not really the problem. primary object is something called a vector potential. When it turned out that we had gotten to the late 50s without even understanding the most beautiful of our classical field theories in its totality, it indicated to me that what is the danger

of having the strict division of labor in the pin factory of science where you don't have enough people who are able to go back and forth? And I really look back to those guys like Fermi, you know, who are great calculators, Beta, who is a great calculator, people who did both of these things. And at a minimum, we need to be getting these people in the same rooms. And I have to be honest with you, there's a way in which I think theory has gone into a worse direction, even though I'm closer to it, because there has been so little in fundamental physics that's been propelling theory forward except at the level of the framework.

So we now have a much better idea of the framework of the theory. We haven't been idle, but we found very little that's profoundly new coming from the theory side since the standard model was put into rough final form as it stayed since in the early 70s. And Max, what do you make in the fact that, you know, everyone sort of sacrifices themselves, as Lenny Suskin calls it, that they become pauper Azi. They become overwhelmed by this notion of falsifiability first proposed in the demarcation criteria of Carl Popper, great philosopher. I haven't, I've told this to Eric, but I want to say it to you.

I feel we physicists have math envy. You know, Freud called, you know, most people having certain, other kinds of envy. People talk about physics envy. But actually, I think we have math envy as physicists because at least mathematicians know that there are formal limitations in the consistency of their mathematical formalisms. In physics, we're left with Popper as just like falsifiability. And I've made this case many times with only with Nobel Prize winners because I feel like their reputation is so stellar. But then many of them don't want to, you know, risk losing the sheen on their gilded, graven image of Alfred Nobel. But anyway, I want to ask you, the fact that there's so much

attention given to wormholes, given to black hole singularities, given to the Big Bang itself, given to your favorite, one of your favorite subjects, the multiverse. Is this why you're going into like more kind of hardcore or practical or experimental science? Because we can't ever see any of those things, let alone know that they're real. So why is it that, you know, that there's so many physicists that are overwhelmed with the notion of Popper, but yet are practicing and appealing to the public, the gee whiz, mind of God is inside the singular. You know, why is that? I guess there's a spectrum of questions in there.

One of them is Popper, yay or nay. I promised to address that. A separate question is, where do we draw the line between science on one hand and bullshit on the other? Yes. And I would first of all say, so I'm going to say something which might sound paradoxical. I'm going to defend Popper, but attack a lot of the. the people who claim that in talking about black hole interiors and multiverse are bullshit and saying they misunderstood Popper.

So what Popper says is that, you know, if I tell you about a theory and you say, Max, give me one possible experiment that could prove you wrong and I can't come up with anything, then this is the scientific theory. I stand by that. I think that's perfectly fair. And in fact, there was a fascinating debate about evolution once between Bill Nye and someone else. And Bill Nye asked the other guy if he could name one thing that would persuade him that creationism was wrong and he couldn't. So there, Popper would come down on Bill Nye's side.

That said, though, I still think many people have misunderstood Popper and can awake too crude view on it. Well, when we test in science are theories. So, for example, if you have an argument, you and Eric, about what's really happening inside of a black hole, you can never go there and measure it and then come back and do a podcast about it. Does that mean it's all BS? No, it does not mean that. What you're actually testing instead is whether general relativity is correct as it stands. Because general relativity predicts a lot of things you can never test directly with experiments. like exactly what happens inside the event horizon.

But also predicts a lot of things you can test, like the perihelian shift of mercury, like the bending of starlight by the sun, like the host Taylor Pulsar, like the expanding universe, and so many other things that we study with great precision right now, including, again, the patterns on your beach ball behind you there or the micro background, right? And so in science, we have a situation that if you have,

you cannot dismiss general relativity as being unscientific BS, because it is testable. So if you fail many times to falsify it, proper style, then you have to start taking seriously all its predictions, even its predictions that you cannot directly experiment with tests, like what happens inside of black holes. And this is exactly the mistake I think people make now analogously in other areas. They'll take, for example, Alan Goose, Rilinda, and others theory of inflation, and they will acknowledge this is a scientific theory because it makes a lot of predictions. It makes some predictions even for the micro background. It's had many chances they get falsified, and it's survived so far. So we have to start taking seriously also some of its other predictions that we cannot test,

which is that space goes on far beyond that beach ball, probably so far beyond that it's worth calling other regions parallel universes, for instance. So is that non-scientific? No, it's not. Inflation is a scientific theory. and scientific theory, you take it or leave it. It's all or nothing. You cannot say, oh, you can go into Starbucks and say, yeah, I want this coffee, but without the caffeine in it, that's fine. But you cannot say I want general relativity.

I'm just going to opt out of the black hole prediction. Yeah, Matt, Eric. I'm in such a different place, I think. I fear that I'm going to just put my foot in it, but I'm going to fall back on my wingman, Dirac. I don't know if you guys have heard of him. he says a couple of things that are widely quoted it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

Now that's clearly the sound of a crazy person in some sense. He goes on to say, if there's not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged. So why is this? Well, it's because he lived this. And one of the things that I'm really against is the promotion of the sanitized version of science with the scientific method and Popper not coming remotely close to how science is actually done. So Max just talked about the anomalous procession of the perihalian of Mercury. The problem is, if I recall, correctly when Einstein first formulated this he formulated it with Grossman in 1913 and then he reformulated it alone and put some specificity to it in a weird way the 1913 thing was better than his first go at being concrete because he

said the Ricci tensor is equal to the to the stuff in the universe and that equation doesn't even make sense because it doesn't have a particular equation that it has to satisfy work out but it was good enough if I recall correctly to explain the anomalous procession. As a result, you can have a wrong theory that works with experiment, and then you can have the reverse situation, which is where Dirac was really getting this. He says, I might tell you the story I learned from Schrodinger

of how when he first got the idea for his equation, the one that Max held up, he immediately applied it to the behavior of the electron and the hydrogen atom, that is the simplest possible system. And he got results that did not agree with the, experiment. This disagreement arose because at the time it was not known that the electron has a spin, and that, of course, was a great disappointment to Schrodinger, and it caused him to abandon the work for months. Then he noticed that if he applied the theory in a more appropriate way, not taking

into account the refinements required by relativity to this rough approximation, his work was in agreement with the experiment. He published this first paper. He goes on to say that this wrong equation that Max held up is not, in fact, the equation that Schroenger had to begin with, which is now called the Klein-Gordon equation. So he didn't have the Dirac equation, which is relativistic or the Klein-Gordon. He came up with a wrong equation. It's called the Klein-Gordon equation

because it was invented by Schrodinger. And it pains me to admit this because Klein was in Sweden. But the point that I'm trying to get at here is you can have situations where you get agreement with experiment, your theory is wrong. You can have other situations where your theory is right, but in a stupid way you don't have the instantiation right. And the message that I want to send, which is, of course, going to be treated as heresy by all of the people who are, you know, the people who have this energy that there is a demarcation problem that you can solve it, the skept, our skeptic friends and our rationalist friends.

No, that's not how this game works. The real way this works is that the true scientific method, right, the scientific method is the radio edit of great science. And the way the great science works is every which way humans have ever come up with reliable. understanding of their environment and their world, which may include dreams. It may include taking LSD in the case of Kerry Mullis. I don't know. It involves so many weird, crazy things that I'm just, I guess I'm sort of sad that we keep trying to neuter and emasculate this subject when in fact it's the messiness and the fact

that you don't know whether agreement with the experiment is a death knell or, or in fact, it's a false indication that you're on the right path. I think that we just need to grow up and grow out of both emphatic paparianism, usually misinstantiated because Popper wasn't as dumb as people claim. And we also have to stop fetishizing the scientific method. When we have the cuckooleys of the world running around figuring out benzene, you know, so many weird things contribute to our understanding of reliable information in science,

we've got to be more honest that there is no such thing as the scientific method the way you learn about it in school. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th.

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This episode is brought to you by Perfect Bistro Cat Food. Hey guys, today I'm interviewing my cat about his perfect bistro food. Percy, you seem to be a big Perfect Bistro fan. Care to comment? Totally. What do you like about it? You love the high-quality ingredients? And the delicious flavors, of course.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Listen to Percy, guys. Visit perfect bistro.com to try it for your cat. Yeah, I think the way taught in school is frankly kind of silly. The way I see it, my first postdoc mentor, Georg Raffelt, once said something that's always stuck with me, which is it's better to be wrong in an interesting way than to be right in a boring way. So, for example, Schrodinger's first failed hydrogen atom, you know, Einstein's first failed general relativity formulation.

They were wrong in an interesting way. And being wrong in an interesting way is very, very valuable for physics. Second, I feel, and I thought that was a bit of the sentiment of what you were saying to Eric is, you know, humility has to be at the core of science, right? not only should we be humble and acknowledge that everything we believe in might be wrong, even our pet theory that we just published, but we should actively seek out ways in which we can actually be proven wrong. It's kind of the opposite of a politician, right, who avoids saying anything or sticking their neck out so that they can be proven wrong.

We should aspire to, we should really aspire to live dangerously. We should have the mindset that, more we force ourselves to live dangerously and have our theories potentially be proven wrong, the more likely we are to learn something interesting. Yeah, absolutely. Just on that front, if you think about Linus Pauling, racing Watson and Crick for the double helix, both of them came up with a triple helix with the sugar phosphate backbone on the interior with the nucleotides sticking out, if I recall correctly.

So there are certain mistakes that may be canonical on our way towards the truth and that you actually have to go through the valley of error in order to scale the peaks of success and insight. And what is absolutely important about this, and it goes back to the funding conversation, unfortunately, is that you need to have a tolerant enough community that people can afford to tell the truth and continue in their quests with, worry that by stumbling, they will immediately, you know, there's this old thing in the, in the concentration camps of death camps, where if you coughed, you were gone. And so, you know, at some level, this zero tolerance for error is something that really bothers me. A lot of these great old stories, people made error after error after error on their path to becoming the people who put things in final form. And I think part of what's going on is that, The one thing I'm going to quibble with, I loved what Max just said.

I think it was great, but I do have a caveat, unfortunately, because I think he's going to say it better than I can. We have to stop fetishizing humility because clearly this is not a trait that most people associate with the theoretical physics community, to say the least. What really is going on is that physicists and great scientists need two separate facilities. They need absolute pathological self-confidence and arrogance. You need to be able, apparently Eric Lander used to call in like 100 biologist mathematicians and say, tell me what's wrong with my idea. They would tell him what's wrong with his idea. He'd say, thank you.

I was worried that there was something really wrong, but none of you came up with it. So can you tell a hundred of the smartest people that you value their opinion? You're all wrong? Yes, that's absolutely important. You have to have the arrogance and you have to have the humility. which is what Max was saying. The real trick, which we don't explain to people, is regulated expression of arrogance and humility,

just the way, like with the operon and the pajama experiment, sometimes you're expressing something, sometimes you're repressing it. And I really think that part of the problem is that some of the people who are incredibly modest and incredibly humble, what we need to do is to get them hyped up on their own brilliance. other people who are insufferable and don't really seem to, I think it's clear enough.

I think the basic point is arrogant people need more humility, humble people often need more self-confidence, and we can't keep extolling one virtue over the other. So on that note, I do want to take some questions. We've had a couple hundred dollars worth, maybe even $1,000 worth, which is going to go to your Jen's favorite charities. We're going to split that down the middle. I want to thank people for asking these wonderful questions. Let's do a couple of quick ones, and then I want to get into a couple of topics that I'm interested in, just because how often do I get to get my two good buddies together in a council of the wise?

I want to ask, first of all, a question about aliens, which has come in from one of my listeners, but I want to twist it to something I'm interested in that Max has thought about a lot, which is the so-called simulation. hypothesis. I had on Jill Tarter this past week or last week talking about this signal from Proximus and Turi that was supposedly picked up. She was rather dubious about that. But this question of whether or not we exist as the as the Life 2.0 and whether or not Life 2.0 ever becomes fully like Life 3.0 is my question. What are your current thoughts, Max, about the simulation hypothesis? First, maybe State would bolstrom, you know, meant by this.

You know, you've talked about this a lot. But how much credulity should we have in this? And then I'm going to ask Eric about the ethics and the morality of a simulatable civilization. So in what ways would they not be or be like gods? First, Max, simulation hypothesis, your thoughts, current status. All right. So let me first explain Vostrom's simulation argument and then explain why I think it's flawed. So the basic argument starts by saying, well, if we're a blob of quarks and electrons and our conscious minds are ultimately all about information processing, right, then surely if you were actually simulated in a computer so that the information processing was exactly the same, maybe you're in, suppose you were in some future super advanced computer game or whatever, you wouldn't know the difference, of course. So maybe we are in a simulation.

And then Bostrom goes on to say, well, in this universe of ours, it's likely that eventually artificial intelligence will advance and we're going to help life spread into much of our observable universe. And there's going to be massive amounts of computations and simulations and perhaps way more simulated minds than real minds. And therefore, if you're a random mind having these experiences, you are simulated. So you are probably living in a simulation. He's more careful on that and lists all the caveats also. So there's nothing flawed with what he wrote. But I think the conclusion that we are probably living in a simulation is false. And to see where it starts to go wrong, just note that suppose you buy it and you say,

okay, we are all in a simulation now having this conversation. We can make the same argument all over again. that oh in our simulated universe there are going to be all these future doubly simulated minds and they're much more of them so we're probably double simulated right and then we can repeat and say actually no we're simply oh quadruple oh we're simulated at google flex times yes no no flex flex flex flex flex times

and you start to get a sinking feeling that there's something rotten here and and there is yes the big mistake is that it doesn't matter at all how many, whether they're more simulated or real minds in the universe that we think we're in, what matters is what's going on in the basement universe, right, where maybe there is the original simulation. And if we're simulated, we have no clue what that universe is actually like.

So we should have an open mind about this as anything else. But I would definitely not jump on the bad wagon and say, oh, we're all simulated. On the other hand, if you're still worried that maybe you are simulated, the conclusion is pretty obvious. You should live a really interesting life so that the simulators don't get bored and shut you down. Tag marks wager, an update of Pascal. Eric, what are your thoughts about simulation hypothesis? Is it valid?

And what, if any, obligations would a master simulator have to his denizens or her, or its denizens, let's be honest? It's very interesting to me that when we talk, So there's the simulation hypothesis and also the rogue AI AI hypothesis. And we don't really connect these. So as the simulators, we are terrified of creating the Gollum, the Frankenstein monster that comes after us and out competes us because we are like ants to its godlike intelligence.

And on the other hand, if we are the simulated, we're terribly frightened that we are going to have the point pulled out, which these are the same stories in some sense, but we're on both sides of them, and we're telling them from the point of view of we're scared in both cases. I never hear us say, is it ethical to pull the plug on the AGI? Because what are, you know, are we, do we have the right to kill something off that may intend to, intend to kill us? And what are our obligations to the simulators? So I think that our narcissists, is clearly on display in the simulation hypothesis.

I do think, though, that in part, what it does is it takes the loss of religion that we associate with Nietzsche and the inability to construct God and to reconstruct it inside of the one sector of the economy that still seems to be behaving as if it didn't know that everything came crashing down in the early 70s, which is the computation and communication sector. And so weirdly, like if you look at what's happened in physics, we've all moved towards information, you know, maybe the university is made of information. Well, it seems pretty clear that this has to do with the fact that Silicon Valley, which is now evaporating and reconstituting in Miami and Austin or whatever, that this Silicon Valley ethos

has pervaded our philosophical thinking, our scientific thinking, maybe it's an attempt to get money out of Mark Zuckerberg. It's unclear. But I do think that it's very unlikely. to my way of thinking, given the importance of the calculus and therefore the continuum in most things that we do, that it would be harder to simulate this world than to build it. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I'm not very excited about the simulation hypothesis, because the easiest way to simulate it is to construct the actual thing that you're simulating. And I think in that

framework, we just haven't thought enough about it. And we're sort of reaching for the most obvious hypotheses. The last thing I wanted to say is that if we stopped calling it the simulation and started calling it the effective theory, we distinguish it now, thanks to you guys in renormalization theory, that higher level theories that aren't true, we now call effective because they're still useful. We haven't dispensed with Newton. We just call him effective rather than fundamental. So we don't know what a fundamental theory actually looks like, but if you imagine that the classical world is in some sense like a simulation, we have a quantum existence and the quantum existence is hidden from us, and we stumble around as mesoscale phenomena in this classical world

that doesn't really exist but kind of washes out of the quantum. If you wanted a hypothesis, I think that that would be kind of a really interesting thing. Does that get to you philosophical? if it doesn't excite you, maybe the idea is that you're really here for the science fiction rather than the science. I don't know. Yeah, that is something I've thought about also. Yeah, do we, if we, right before we pull the plug on Max's super AI simulator, is it going to scream? And what would that do to us? Is it like cooking lobsters, which I don't know anything about that? But Max, do you want to have a quick follow up before we start to wind down? Are we good to go with that? Yeah, sure. I think there's been some amount of self-criticism here. So in that spirit, let's be honest, we are not that ethical as a species, even though we love patting ourselves on our head and pretending we are, right?

We have done a lot of horrible things in history, and even today, we're still not that ethical, right? Why else is it that we've talked so little about the people who have died of starvation in this year of 2020 and of tuberculosis? than we have talked about the fewer people who died of COVID, right? It's because those people were poor and we didn't feel our ethics applied to them as much as the richer people who died of COVID-19. That's the sad truth. Why do we talk so much less about the suffering of factory farm chickens and pigs than, you know, that we talk about good-looking actresses or whatever?

It's because, again, we're not maybe as ethical as we'd like. like to be, but being, sort of shifting a little bit to optimism. I think we should aspire, certainly to become more ethical. And maybe, uh, and I would say actually by far the greatest ethical dilemma is what we're going to make of the whole cosmic future. Because, you know, on one hand, we have enough technology now that we could drive all life on this, we could drive humanity entirely extinct if we wanted to, which would perhaps wipe out, you know, enormous amounts of positive experiences. in life for billions of years throughout much of our universe, right?

Or we could get our act together and help life spread from this planet and flourish beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors for billions of years in this amazing future. And this, to me, is the ultimate ethical dilemma. What are we going to do? Are we going to squander this future or are we going to seize it? And I would like to end with Freeman Dyson, whom you just mentioned here, because he was not only an intellectual hero of mine, but it was so inspiring that he would hang out and have lunch with us lowly mortal postdocs back when I lived in New Jersey. And he used to point out

that look, you know, you ain't seen nothing yet. You know, life today in our universe, as far as we can tell, is still this puny perturbation on what looks mostly dead, right? And yet intelligence has this power to completely transform the physical world. Look what into how intelligence has transformed Earth since it showed up. It's, and with artificial intelligence, it could even happen quite soon, that much of what we see out there starts to come alive. And our universe starts to sort of really wake up and fulfill its potential. I find it incredibly inspiring to think about how we here in our lifetime on our little

spinning ball in space, you know. actually have so much influence over the whole future of ethics and positive experiences in the cosmos. And that's the reason, honestly, that I spend so much of my time on the Future Life Institute and other efforts to try to make sure that we steer the technology towards making the future awesome. Let me just ask you one question about that. Assuming that Einstein more or less holds into whatever the fundamental theory is and that the constraints that we've come to live with under Einsteinian relativity, like the speed of light, continue to hold. And assume that humans have to live under that.

Do you think, given how far other good stuff is away from us, that realistically we are going to be able to figure out any way of bootstrapping our way someplace interesting out of our relatively isolated solar system with very few habitable surfaces? Yes, absolutely. I actually geeked out on that in a big way in chapter 6 of my book Life 3.0 where I just asked the question, what if we shift from having our technology limited by our own intelligence to instead having our technology limited by the laws of physics? How much better could we do? And yes, you're completely right. There's still limits. Presumably there's still a speed limit, speed of light, etc., etc., etc.

And because of dark energy, there's a limit to how many atoms we can ever access out there. But the limits are just mind-blowingly far above what we have now. So first of all, going to other solar systems as a walk in the park with our official intelligence, going to other galaxies, there's also a work in the park. You can, and I put, I have a lot of fun making just some nerdy plots to see how much of our problems can we actually get to. There are galaxies that you can see right now at very high redshift, where sadly, if our current understanding of cosmology is true, it's so see but not touch, because they're going away from us so fast at an accelerating rate that no technology will get us there. But a significant fraction of the beach ball behind Brian Keating is in play for us.

And I would really hate it if our Earth-originating life spends its entire future just on this little spinning ball. I can't stand to think about it. And I personally want to get off of this and visit the neighborhood. But my feeling about this is that I'm hoping against hope that we have a way of going against Einstein. And I have to say that even now, I can go against many, many people. but if it's Dirac and Einstein, I really, really don't like it. Thanks for that answer. Yeah.

Well, guys, this has been just a thrilling thing for me. I always say on my channel, you know, Sam Harris has this thought experiment. You know, if you could go into a chamber and there was a button, you could push, and it would instantly teleport you to Mars and you'd survive and come back. And the only catch is right before you push it, they have to kill you so you don't have two copies of Brian Keating lying around. Would you push that button? And a lot of people would.

And, you know, I thought about it. And I said, you know what? Actually, I have that ability to teleport right now. And it's called my children. And not only my children, but a biological nature, but also my ideological children, those that I influence. And I want to just thank you two for being influences to me. Ideological, I'll call you guys cousins because you're not that much older than me, if so at all. But I want to thank you guys for going into The Impossible.

It's now Champaign O'Clock. where Max lives. Actually, I've been on Champagne this whole day already since the crack of eight. I wanted to just remind people go and look at improve the news.org. It is one of the most fun and delightful pieces of actionable intelligence that you can use to make 2021 a better year than 2020. I had so much fun with it. Please go to Eric Weinstein's channel on YouTube and also subscribe to the portal. Please stay tuned for this to this channel. We're going to have Deepak Chopra in conversation with Frank Wilczek facilitated by me

that was pretty fun and I'm going to have both of them individually as well as well as John Preskill is coming up not too long from now and I had Giant Narlocar who is a giant of cosmology as Max will know it was one of the fathers of the steady state universe and I think it's important to listen to our elders as I've listened to you guys who are barely older

than me in this universe please like and subscribe to the Brian Keating, Dr. Brian Keating's YouTube channel. Also, Into the Impossible on iTunes, wherever you get it. The portal. Max Tag Marks Universe. It's one of the most delightful places in this corner of the multiverse. And now I can say with quite a good deal of confidence that I'm closer to knowing the mind of God.

Thank you, boys. Happy 2021. Shana Tova. Everybody out there, I wish it be a healthy, happy, safe new year for everybody. Shanatova. Thanks for having us. Thank you and got new Ours.

Indeed it will be. Bye, guys. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnichade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin.

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