Julian Dorey Podcast - #289 - DARPA Scientist on Intelligent Life, The Universe, God & AI | Lee Cronin

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Lee Cronin is a world-renowned scientist focused on bridging the gap between Physics and Biology via Chemistry. He has been involved in Top Secret DARPA projects (much of which he cannot discuss publicly). Lee is also well known for crafting "Assembly Theory" with theoretical physicist, Sara Imari Walker. PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY: INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey LEE CRONIN'S LINKS: - WEBSITE: https://www.croninlab.com - X: https://x.com/leecronin?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Lee Cronin’s Scientific Method, Creationist Hate Lee 08:20 - Understanding How Universe Works 19:00 - Lee Describes Himself as Anarchist 30:11 - Why It’s Important to be Wrong (Albert Einstein) 41:30 - Science in Advancements 52:53 - AI Takeover Breakdown, Complete Universe Breakdown 01:00:01 - AI Doomers are Wrong 01:12:29 - AI Optimists are ALSO Wrong, FB BS AI Chat 01:20:51 - The AI Medic vs Human Doctors, Elon is Wrong 01:27:04 - How Does Instinct Work 01:41:21 - Why We Are NOT in a Simulation, Instinct is Intelligence 01:51:03 - Sam Altman Should have a Real Job, ChatGPT 02:03:47 - Does Lee Believe in God 02:13:21 - Science vs Religion Debate 02:25:19 - Lee on Climate Change & Increase CO2 & Future Implications 02:28:38 - What is Time? 02:39:27 - Lee Working with Sarah, Assembly Theory 02:56:03 - Lee & Sarah’s Paper on Assembly Theory Work 03:09:49 - Are We Alone? Chemputer CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian D. Dorey - In-Studio Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@alessiallaman Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 289 - Lee Cronin Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When people talk about AI and they say AI is going to kill us, let's ask ourselves for a second, what do we mean by AI and life and stuff? Life is matter that tries to perpetuate itself into the future by active acts of replication and evolution. Matter that solves problems to ensure its own survival is unique to living systems. So we have origin of life, instinct, consciousness, abstraction, and the ability to be intelligent. So for me, of life, instinct, consciousness, abstraction, and the ability to be intelligent. So for me, they're all connected together on one lineage. Now human

beings have created technology, and technology is another lineage in evolution. Technological evolution, the ability to imagine things in your head and go, oh, I'm not going to make that car, or make that car, or do this experiment or that experiment, really makes evolution very rapid. So when we start to talk about AI becoming sentient, that's actually not correct because the AI has not evolved on that lineage. It's kind of taken a sidesweep. AIs cannot exist without humans.

This is where the AI doomers are just making stuff up. I mean, you mentioned earlier, you walked us through, you know, the Big Bang and eventually get to Earth. It's 4.2 billion years old, approximately life forms. But like, do you believe in God? Do you think there's something above it that we can't scientifically explain at this time? Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help.

Thank you. You don't have a lot of opinions. You've only been here like a half hour. You seem like a very unopinionated kind of guy, never thought about anything, just going with the flow on all of it. Exactly. As I say, I have no opinions, no views. What was that line you said, though? I like that. You said, you have strong opinions, but they're loosely held. Is that right? Yeah, strong opinions, very weakly held.

It confuses the hell out of everyone, what I'm saying. We're going to do this. It's really great. I've thought about this. This is the thing we're going to do, particularly in my research group. And everyone's like, yeah, yeah, Lee said it, we're going to do it. And then next day, I'm like, no, that was loads of shit. And they're like, what?

I said, well, I got some new evidence. I got some new data. So I like it. Have a strong conviction. Go for something. And as soon as someone explains to you why it can't work and convinces you, gives you the information, then rather than resist, right, flip as quickly as possible and try the new thing.

I think I've noticed a lot of smart people get stuck. They get stuck in this kind of hysteresis where they are unwilling to change their minds. And that's my other Winston Churchill quote. I was going to tell you, it was like, someone who hasn't changed their mind doesn't change anything, has never changed anything, right? So you have to be willing to change your mind.

It's very strange though, because we're kind of living in a world where people try to hold you to a tweet that you put out 10 years ago. You know what I mean? Where everything is so literalized. And yet, you know, forget science for a minute, we'll get there. But with everything, I think it should be exactly what you said, which is that you get new evidence on things. And then you should be with it's not to say like, oh, let's be a flip flopper on everything. But you should be willing to be like, well, that's better evidence. So I i've changed my mind and people shouldn't be able to say well fuck you for that i totally agree i think the internet has really hyped that up i and i mean i try to be consistent

you know people get me particularly the creationists who love me i was on they love you they just love me i'm obviously their new messiah right probably i shouldn't say that but who cares um they're probably offended now it's like no no uh you're not creationist enough for us um i i gave a ted talk uh ted global and and i was presenting work on inorganic biology and chris anderson asked me at the end right this is like years ago like 13 14 years ago and i said well i'm gonna make inorganic life and make new prove that aliens exist and all this stuff and he said well how long do you think it will take you to do it? And I said, oh, it would take about two years, right? Two years.

Two years. But what I say is once I understand the mechanism, and the fact is I still don't understand the mechanism. So everyone says, you said you would solve the origin of life in two years. And I was like, that's not exactly what i said but okay fine um you know and of course i don't know i if you ask me the question now i'd give you a different answer but i think um what you could take from that answer was incredible enthusiasm and motivation to want to solve it and i think one of the things that i want to be trying to do is not have pretend problems that are choose a problem that's so hard

there's always 10 years away and you can never make progress on i want to solve the problem and i think to do that you have to be willing to change your mind and and this idea that you make a statement and that statement is infallible is it doesn't work and so this whole idea that we have on social media say well you said this and and, you said this, but you now change your mind, and therefore you're a bad person or we can't take you seriously, that doesn't make any sense. Like, people need to change their mind in the light of evidence. In fact, we need to praise people who are willing to take new information and shift their position. Between client meetings, managing your business, and everyday tasks, who has time to worry about website hosting? With Kinsta's managed WordPress hosting, you don't have to.

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Kinsta.com that's k-i-n-s-t-a.com kinsta simply better hosting that's the only way that humanity is going to get better by this kind of trial and error does that work oh that doesn't work i'll try that one yeah and so i worry that the internet has actually slowed down our cultural evolution because we're basically going back and saying you said this therefore it's invalid you're an invalid individual we need to cancel you now because you had this opinion. I mean, how many opinions are you going to have right now that in 30 years' time, our culture is going to deem absolutely unacceptable

and cancel you in the present for something that was normal in the past? Sure. Makes no sense. Yeah. Hopefully we'll get through that. I hope we do too because like i was saying it's a social wide problem that's kind of infecting everything

it's interesting that you say the internet is making it kind of anti-evolutionary in the sense that we're going backwards with this because it should be a tool to where we have open source data and we can evaluate way more but this seems to be a problem where, you know, I always cite this on in so many contexts on all different podcasts with all different people. But like in the physics law of life for every action, there's an equal but opposite reaction, which is supposed to create what equilibrium. And, you know, the way you can create equilibrium could be an action that has a pendulum like that, or it could be like that. And society feels way more out here for people listening, not watching. I'm holding my hands way wider. Society feels way more out here. So what happens is forget even changing opinions

when new evidence is presented. People kind of find their meaning in the groups of people who will join them around maybe one idea. And then they'll start to introduce a bunch of new ideas as well that say, because we think this, therefore we all think this. And God forbid you disagree with that, well, now you're not a part of the community. I think that's really funny. That's a good analysis. I'm arguing with some people, um... You know, some of the theories we're developing

are leading to new conclusions, and there is a certain community that say, um... loves David Deutsch, right right David Deutsch is a fantastic scientist and philosopher and he has these let's not call them teachings but his fans are teachings right and so one of his teachings is on critical thinking and then there's these doctrines like there are these statements that he has made that the fans adhere to and then when you question those those statements the fans go crazy and troll you and they're not critically thinking and i think it's quite funny i mean i shouldn't pick on david he's brilliant but i think it's a good example

where you've got people pretending to be scientific and pretending to think but actually there is much of being in the in crowd as possible and And I think that it's hard, right? Because people try and build their brand on social media. So they've got to build their brand for a particular thing and they can't back down. I think that's hard, right? I mean, the problem, you know, like say with one of my favorite theories,

the moment assembly theory, it's quite possibly wrong. In fact, it's almost certainly wrong, but it's probably less wrong than a lot of other things. And so people are like, are you worried if it's going to be wrong? I'm like, no, no, no. I'm worried if it's right. wrong. But it's probably less wrong than a lot of other things. And so people are like, are you worried if it's going to be wrong? I'm like, no, no, no. I'm worried if it's right. Ah.

Right? That's an interesting way to put it. As a scientist, the default, of course, it's wrong. But it seems to be less wrong than everything else. And it helps us go further. But if it's right, holy shit. Like it explains how chemistry invents biology. Yeah.

I want to get there because I want to really go through that theory today, but I kind of want to build up to that. Yeah, yeah, of course. To give some groundwork. But on that point of you even making the theory, which we'll talk about later, you know, that's interesting that you say you hope it's wrong because as someone who is very much not a scientist, I always look at science in particular as the battle to eliminate things, right? So we look at someone really famous like Albert Einstein, a modern – more modern famous scientist. He was so smart and he introduced all kinds of new ideas to the world that some of which have been disproven to this point already and others are going to be disproven as like oh you know 300 years from now they're going to be like heinstein was wrong about all this stuff but him like the weird part about science to me is that him bringing those things to the forefront so that other smart people to come after him could look at

it and and crowdsource it and analyze it critique it and come up with new ideas is where we get closer and closer and closer over time to what the meaning of this whole thing is, which is what science seeks to solve. I think the process of – I mean it's not like I hope it's going to be wrong, right? What I mean is I want to know how the universe works. And for me, what I've been taught was correct. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny. And therefore, I want to then say, well, what I've been taught was correct, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. And therefore, I want to then say, well, what is going on? And what is that that doesn't stand up?

Oh, I mean, the fact that we live in a timeless universe. There's lots of things, like we live in a timeless universe, that physics is deterministic and explains the entire, I don't have any free will because of super determinism, right? There's all these things we can get into. And so there is this thing where my everyday experience and what I'm taught or what I was taught, those few occasions where I was actually in a class being taught, didn't seem correct to me. So I just used to basically just act out and say, that's clearly false.

Why are you telling me that? Why did it seem incorrect to you? Like it sounds like you were thinking that when you were really young. Yeah, I mean, like I think most people only have one idea, right? I mean, but I have one idea, but no one's realized they've only ever had one idea. And so this one idea is kind of along the lines of understanding the, we'll get to it in assembly theory, but understanding that the universe is a process of the history

becoming the future via the present. And that is like a continuous stream. And you can't opt out of it, right? You can't opt out of time. You are in time. And so ever since I can remember, like, you know, first walking and talking, I was fascinated by the fact there was stuff going on around me, and I wanted to understand why that was.

But going back to this kind of being wrong and having opinions that you shift, the only way you can interrogate reality is by looking at the reality and asking questions and trying to solve a problem or have an outrageous idea that clearly is going to be incorrect, but maybe it's not going to be as wrong as you think. You know, I was speaking to my research group last week. I talked to a student who wanted to talk to me, you know, via some organization called the Foresight Nanotechnology.

Sounds cool. Yeah, they were cool. And I talked to the guy, and he was saying, you know, I've started a research group in the U.S. I'm like, oh, that's great. What are you going to do? He's like, well, I don't know. I kind of like people.

I was like, I hate people. He's like, what? I was like, well, no, I don't hate people. It's just like what I mean is it's really hard to do science on your own. But also with a team, it can be fantastic. But you've got to align people and you've got to kind of get them on side and motivate them. And also they have to believe you have to have some shared values. And I was talking to him.

We cooked up this amazing project. And he was telling me he's interested in a thing called non-covalent interactions. Non-covalent interactions so this is a non-covalent interaction exactly so this is when molecules don't bond but they rub off each other so they they have different solvents in water in alcohol whatever so i was brainstorming and i said look why don't we just take all the different chinese tea and extract them like using dry cleaning fluids that's what we like chlorinated solvents and just extract all the natural products and then hack around with them and see what's there. I thought it was a cool idea.

Anyway, I told my research group this the next day, excited, and they were like, that's a really rubbish idea. And I was like, why? They said, well, it's not going to work. I'm like, of course it's not going to work. That's why we should do it. Why should we only be doing experiments? We know they're going to work.

If we only do experiments that are going to work, then in your head, you've already done it. Pick things that aren't going to work. If we only do experiments that are going to work, then in your head, you've already done it. Pick things that aren't going to work, as long as they're not dangerous or stupid, and try them. And then I think we'll have a lot of fun extracting Chinese tea. There's so much Chinese tea in the world. And maybe you figure out something along the way you never thought. I thought we might. I don't know. I just made it up. It sounded good fun for me for the day. And my team were like, no, what are you talking about? Yeah.

You know what? It's funny. Maybe I'm making a little stretch here, but it's kind of similar to the Ed Sheeran creation theory. You ever hear him explain that, like how he makes music? He shows two faucets. And the first faucet on the left side of the screen has a bunch of shit coming out of it it's brown water right and the second faucet looks sparkling clean beautiful water yeah and he explains how you got to do hours of this when you go to sit

down to create to get to this over here to get from dirty to clean and i think when we like it's something we run into in in in in the back here the back here too when we're afraid to try certain things and we're like, oh, that's not going to work. But you kind of have to. You can't worry always about what the instant result is going to be or if people are going to laugh at you because if you're not – like the old quote, if all the shots you don't take, you miss. You know what I mean? So even if you're doing something there that's like a little bit of a joke, sounds like rubbish to use your word. That's British, right? Yeah, that's good.

Sounds like rubbish and everything. Like maybe you get something from that and maybe it leads to, you know, the 10 people working on your team. One of them then is inspired to think about something else. And now you get somewhere you didn't think you were going to get. Yeah, I agree. Being willing to go to a place where you are personally vulnerable, intellectually vulnerable maybe, and just try it is a lot of fun. And I think a lot of people, you know, they say it's okay for you, Lee, you can do this. I'm like, what kind of magic? Well, you're a professor now.

I'm like, sure, but I didn't just wake up one day and change. I have always been this person where i've basically just done random shit and gone why does that work let's try you know i remember when i had my first train set and um my mother it wasn't didn't couldn't really didn't really cope with with me and my brother very well when younger because she she was i think depressed or something so used to get kind of put to bed really early like at 4 p.m or something and i remember in my bedroom i had my train set and i was like look at this train set what's this box here so i yanked the wires out bypassed the transformer and connected the train set directly to the uh to the mains how old were

you i think i must have been about eight wow seven or eight and i just like i've got a screwdriver i smuggled the screwdriver because when they locked the door so i was in my bedroom my brother and we're like we can take this apart so i took out so took out the transformer connect the dc correctly in there and what happened was the train had this big bang and the train literally leapt into the air and hit the roof. So I think it must have been a huge kick on the motor because the AC, so 240 volts AC into a motor that probably was 12 or 24 volt DC motor, smacked into the ceiling, made a dent in the ceiling and tripped all the fuses. How did you know to do that at eight? Well, i was told i had to use i was told i had to use the train in this

configuration i was like there's wires here what is this thing for and i was like i'll just remove it and see what happens so that's the kind of that's that explains me i'm like why does this thing here what is the principle that's needed and now now obviously i understand there's this thing called alternating current and you need to transfer it into direct current but like when I was seven years old I was like what's this take it out boom and that was my modus operandi and it's been my modus operandi ever since the fact that I made it into academia I think I try and encourage everybody to basically ask random questions you know what would happen if I did this what would happen if I did that And then when people dismiss it and say, well, it ain't going to work. I'm like, that's a great reason to do it. Yeah. Right. Because then how

does science make progress? I mean, science makes progress if you try things playfully, if you try and solve problems, and if you try and ask questions. I don't know of anything else you can do. Right. And maybe it fits into the ed sharing um kind of creativity thing sure it's interesting though that you kind of come at it in some ways from both ends like you're a long time academic and very much in that world very much believe in that world but you've also witnessed within that world even including on some of your own stuff where people do that there is a bit of a group think that comes in among smart people who seem to decide that like you can't ask certain questions or this is stupid we shouldn't pull on that thread more was that something that you saw early on in your career as a growing problem

or is that something that's more of a modern phenomenon to you no i think it's been there all the time and also one of the things that disappoints me occasionally with my own research team, I've got a brilliant team of researchers who work with me. And of course, I don't think they really believe it when I say I have strong views and they're weakly held. And then people come to me and say, oh, I want to do this thing, and you told me that it wasn't a very good idea.

And I'm like, so? And they're like, well, did I tell you you were not allowed to do it legally? I said, no. I just said I didn't think that was a very good idea. But I'm not doing the work. And they were like, what? I was like, go and do it. But you said no.

I said, no, I did not say no. If I'm saying no, you'll know about it. I'm paying you. I'm your line manager. I've got to make sure you're safe and everything is legal. If I'm not saying no, and if I'm saying no, you'll know about it. I'm paying you. I'm your line manager. I've got to make sure you're safe and everything is legal. If I'm not saying no, and if I'm just saying I don't think that's a good idea, that should inspire you to go, fuck you. I'm going to try it. I'm going to prove you wrong.

So you're one of those guys who, like, you want to be tough, but you expect people to be tough back to you and kind of be the same way. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So I always encourage people when they're, like like a bit sheepish going, I need to convince you. I'm like, why do you need to convince me? Did I say you could not do it?

Did I say there was no money to do it? Did I say that that was? And they're like, no, no, no. So I said, well, why have you not done it already? They're like, because you wouldn't like it. I'm like, sure. I don't like broccoli some days, but I'm not telling you, you have to make me eat it. Right. And they're like, all right. So I think there is a challenge,

right? That I have to be able to tell people I have strong views, but then there's a challenge for me. How do I make sure that people that are culturally impaired by those strong views, they've maybe come from a background where they were absolutely punished and maybe bad things emotionally and physically happen to them if they disobeyed the rules whereas it's the complete opposite where if you kind of disobey whatever that means as long as it's a intellectual disagreement disobey this you know disobedience um not a professional disobedience, like don't commit murder, don't set bombs off in the lab, don't make methamphetamine, shit like that. Just don't do that, right?

But everything else you should be able to do. And so I'm working very hard, actually, because I think it's a failing of mine that perhaps I don't understand how conformist people are are because I have been an absolute fucking anarchist since I was five years old. If you tell me not to do something, I would do it instantly.

Since you were five? Yeah. What was the event that catalyzed that? I can't remember. I think comprehension. I mean, when people said no, I was like, oh, you look angry. And you're saying no. So therefore, I'm going to do it.

Yeah. So just a rebel without a cause early. I think that, yeah, I mean, the problem is trying to understand how I've spent some time, but maybe mainly in conversations like this, people say, well, what the hell are you doing? How did you do this? And I'm like, well, we can post-analyze it. But, yeah, I think that getting people's attention by making them angry or making them worried is probably quite an interesting thing to do. Because then you're looking at what are your constraints?

What are you concerned about? Why can't I do this? Why can't I connect my train set to the mains? If they went well, because your train set requires direct current and there's AC current and there's a very strong chance you're going to give yourself a very nasty electric shock. I mean, like, oh, yeah, I don't want to do that. Now you've got a reason.

Yeah, yeah. Then obviously I'm not like kind of trying to be an anarchist as in a, you know, literally burning things down. But I'm an intellectual anarchist because how can I build first principles in my head if I'm not allowed to interact with the world in a free, playful way? And that's what I've always done. And it kind of disappoints me. My kids don't want to do that. My kids like nah i'm just gonna um i've got this like workshop where i've got oscilloscopes i've got electron guns i have like i have safe i can 3d it's safe i got i got and they could like they're no they're not interested so i don't know i just build random shit in there

and they're like that so they're not into science at all no how old are they 18 and 7 going on 18 and 16 oh so they yeah this isn't like they're like five and they might grow they've decided now they're they're serious individuals what do they want to do um i don't i so i i think they're incredibly incredibly interesting watching them um they're incredibly so i think my my oldest son's going to be some kind of entrepreneur i guess i don't know he's got a talent for spotting um uh kind of things in the market and also he's very critical he's quite good he's they're both very critical but i think they're just kind of i think they think it's – yeah. Probably I shouldn't even be talking about them on the podcast because they're going to get upset.

Yeah, it's all good. That's cool. So they got aspirations, and it's just – it sounds like they're using some of the skills you have just in a different medium. Yeah, yeah. I mean I never – I think I wasn't one of those parents that basically wanted wanted said you have to become a chemist or a physicist or whatever i was like just be interested in something please yeah the people that are interested in things in the world have nicer lives in general i think so simple but so true so true and what what about you mentioned your mom was like a little distant but like did your

parents did either your parents kind of encourage you with science at all or was it really born out of that one event with the train um they didn't my mother was just very i mean my mother's great but she was she was she's a um she was fearful that i was you know i kept but i bought i remember i bought a soldering iron a soldering iron yeah yeah you know like, for taking up electronic components out of old PCBs. Sure. And I bought one from a second-hand store. I think I was like maybe nine. And she was like, you're going to burn the house down.

I'm like, I'm not going to burn that. It's a frigging soldering iron. What am I going to do? She'll leave it on and burn it down. And she used to keep hiding all the tools I would amass. So it was kind of funny. But I've just incredibly curious and i would take everything apart like any everything they have the sad thing is i would take things apart and they would never work again it's only in my later years suddenly i can actually put things back together i was like

oh it worked you know i fixed so many of my kids iphones over the years i'm like now we just buy a new one but i used to be able to completely re-strip. You would do it? Yeah. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, yeah. So I think they didn't, my father obviously, my father encouraged my curiosity.

My mother worried about my curiosity. The yin and the yang. And I would just, but my parents were divorced. She got separated and divorced when I was like nine years old. And I live with my mother. So, but she wasn't, she didn't do anything bad. She was just like scared that I was going to kind of injure myself or burn the house down. I mean, I did burn the house, no, the garage down.

Oh, that's nice. How did you do that? I was trying to, I wanted to manufacture some CO2, like you do. Sounds like a normal childhood. And it got out of control. I wanted to make a laser. A freaking laser beam? I wanted to make a CO2 laser.

Yeah, there you go. So, yeah. And so I just set a fire, tried to filter the soot out of the fire and set fire to the filter. And then set fire to various other things. It caused quite a lot of damage, but I put it out. It was fine. It was just like,

anyway, it was pretty stupid. How old were you when you did that? Again, it was all like, when I was between seven and like 11 years old. And your mom let you keep going. It was a fucking catastrophe, right? Good for her. That's probably why she locked me in my bedroom,

because otherwise... Well, that's where you have the train set, so you can still do some work. Yeah, yeah my god were you were you good in school too like did you gravitate towards professors in school and teachers in school who in school science i was um put in the remedial class really yep because uh yep and i was in the learning difficulties class until i was 18 till you were 18. All right, this doesn't add up. Well, I mean, whenever the – well, it does. Like the teachers used to tell me to do stuff and I would say, fuck you and do something completely different.

Oh, okay. So it was more of a punishment to put you in those classes. No, no, no. I think they had legitimate concerns. I can't remember really i i i always felt so i was i was determined to be a low iq um when i was i don't know maybe seven i couldn't read or write according to the teachers my handwriting was bad and all this stuff but i could read fine i was reading books like i just didn't want to read their stupid books right so so you had to go towards your interests.

So the nice thing is I got put in classes because I was low IQ. And so they were like, well, we need to get you to read and we need to get you to do some basic math and nothing else. You didn't need to do anything else, right? So then that obviously meant I had all this free time. So I used to go to the library. I used to bunk off school. What do you say in America, bunk off?

Like tr Truant. Oh, hooky. Hooky. All right, okay. Because I get – yeah, so I play hooky all the time and then just go to secondhand shops and buy electronics goods and go to the chemist, the pharmacist, where there was this great pharmacist I used to know. He used to give me chemicals, which I used to set fire to. That's cool. So, yeah.

So, basically. Probably not legal? No, I think it was fine. A pharmacist giving a kid a bunch of chemicals to set fire to? I was building survival kits. He gave me Condi's crystals. Condi's crystals are potassium permanganate for water purification. English.

Also, they're quite good oxidant. So, you can set fire to glycerol with them quite nicely. Okay. So, yeah. So, I set fire to glycerol with them quite nicely. Okay. So yeah, so I used to, so I think that that's what happened at school. And then, and I just, I didn't really realize that I had to do well at school to get to university. And then when... So you still wanted to go to university? I knew I wanted to be a scientist. But then when the teachers were like, what? You're gonna be a scientist. You're not going to get any qualifications. You're going to need to do apprenticeship and you're going to need to, you know.

So that was a long time ago. I thought it was quite amusing. That's interesting, though, that you were open about wanting to be a scientist and you clearly had interests at home that would point to you're on to some things that your mom could certainly talk to your teachers about. But it's almost like, I don't know, I'm reading this from the outside, but they didn't take enough of a curiosity in you to kind of put two and two together and maybe help you on that path earlier than they did? Yeah, I think the UK has got a fantastic educational system

and a terrible one at the same time. It's fantastic in that you can fail at school and still get to university right because i mean if it was in china or in japan or singapore i'd be like you know yeah i don't know cleaning although there's nothing wrong with cleaning toilets i'm sure there is a happy japanese man who cleans toilets right there's a good documentary about this guy but um i think i would have been pretty screwed um but um i yeah i don't know i mean it was i was kind of embarrassed because i was like i'm told i wasn't very smart and and they said look being interested in science is not the same

thing as being good at science oh wow and i was like oh yeah shit it won't take long to tell you neutral's ingredients vodka soda natural flavors ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavours. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? neutral refreshingly simple and the same with mathematics right because i wouldn't do mathematics their way and i was like but that's that's a stupid way to do math i've got a much better way to do math i don't i don't like that quote well i don't like that what they told you at all yeah that's like saying it's cool to love your heroes but you're never going to be one yeah yeah but that's but that was i think that they were like so confused right i i remember you know that was probably one of the most profoundly disturbing events in my life actually my entire life affects me every day still but in a good way because like you know when i went into academia and everyone and you're not your your your paper is shit, your theory is shit.

And I'm like, yeah, I know. Been hearing it for the last 40 years. And they're like, but is it less shit? So I think for me, the preparation at school for academia was quite good. And also I could do what I want. I did it from first principles. I remember trying to measure the charge on an electron. And I was like, in the end I gave up.

But I kind of got somewhere towards that aim. And I like to do first principles thinking. And I was like, well, I want to measure these things. I want to understand how they work. And the intention to understand how it works in my own mind because when you're teaching someone you're giving them a bunch of facts you need them to build a mental architecture and so that mental architecture like it's a bit like if we talked about gravity you know gravity is a really interesting thing because Newton didn't suddenly invent gravity.

Newton's like, huh, well, there's this, you know, maybe the apple did fall on his head, but it clearly didn't. But it's this idea. So there's this thing. So everyone knows that things fall on Earth, right? And he suddenly was able to make a generalization. Galileo was busy looking at moons in the solar system. And so these moons moved around each other and have played the same law that Newton kind of come up with. And suddenly, everyone's like, huh, well, there's this thing that's going on locally on Earth. And this thing

seems to be going on far away from Earth. And then suddenly, bit by bit, mental architectures people built. And this is why I think it's very interesting in science to be good at being wrong because einstein of course is wrong but he's the best at being wrong so far like you know general relativity and relativity is like fantastically been has has you know i think um it hasn't failed at any hurdle okay Okay? And so, but of course, it's not the final story because the problem we have in quantum mechanics and gravity, right? But both quantum mechanics and relativity aren't reconcilable at the moment. They have to be adjusted in some way.

So somebody has to come up with another mental architecture. Yes. And so I think, so what I really enjoy doing is uh when i was at school and then when i was also um um just playing with things it's like what why do things work how do they work so i spend all my time taking things apart and then never working again or taking bits out and seeing what would happen and you know whether it's a mechanical device or piece of electronics or trying to think about how electrons and things work i was obsessed with physics i wanted to be a i wanted to be a

physicist then i wanted to be a mathematician and then i realized i was in the stupid class so you're saying you got the chemistry because the other two were off the table yeah basically how did you get into if if you were in the other two were off the table. Yeah, basically. How did you get into it? If you were in the remedial classes all the way to 18 and everything, you said it's at least possible in the UK to get into university, but were there hurdles you had to do to get there? So I think in the UK you have examinations when you're 16, and I did reasonably well in those.

I did those exams, and I did much better than everyone thought because I was interested in it. So, and there was like, there was some complicated kind of course requirements, but I passed them. And then I went to another, you know, the next stage was called A-levels. And then I was in the kind of bottom stream at A-levels as well. And so they were like, we don't really think you're going to pass your A-levels. And then I was in the kind of bottom stream at A-levels as well. And so they were like, we don't really think you're going to pass your A-levels either. And I was like, you know, so they wouldn't let me do A-level maths, which I still think was hilarious. But in the end, I convinced them and I did chemistry, physics, and design and technology.

Where I basically, the guys that ran the design and technology a level were like we have no clue what the fuck you're building but it looks cool so that's how i got the guy's score because i built a wind tunnel um a wind tunnel yeah i do that well i wanted to i was interested in aerodynamics at the time and i was interested in turbulence so and i could set fire to smoke bombs and put them in a container and watch the air go over an aerofoil so i built a wind tunnel to do that and i wanted to look at different aerofoils next to one another you know how they could adjust how when you produce turbulence at one leading edge and it goes on to another one how can you then convert that turbulence into smooth air and vice versa it's almost like the three dot body problem anyway it never worked properly like

everything i built but i got an. But I got an A. Oh, you got an A. And then I passed chemistry and physics, which meant I could go and do chemistry at university. But not physics. Because I needed mathematics. Oh, you needed that. If I wanted to do mathematics or physics, I would need them.

And they were like, what? You're so bad. There's no way. You're barely going to go to chemistry. But chemistry, I mean, to me, maybe it's just the layman on the outside like physics chemistry and biology are all so important and they and they all explain everything that's around us so it almost never made sense to me that like one would be harder to get into than the other because they're all complex in their own ways you know so i think that's right but i think the issue with the schooling system

of course i'm if you don't have a basic basic it's a bit like um being able to read and then write in mathematics if you're not able to write down and solve um problems in algebra and geometry and maybe complex logic and set theory like you would probably do in A-level then how are you even gonna do this at university? Whereas I wanted to go to university and say I don't think numbers exist and they were like well I was like well... Alright Terence Howard. No let's not do that. And so obviously abstract numbers exist.

But what I mean is what is a physical instantiation? Like where do you see integers in the natural world? And, of course, humans built this system. And then we can have one of something and two of something and actually the concept of zero. I was just super interested in understanding because I wanted to understand why we were here and what is it about our reality that basically makes life work. I figured that being a mathematical physicist was probably the route to understanding the universe. Sure.

However, I think I got off lightly because I probably would have been a very frustrated physicist or mathematician. Why do you say? Because they're completely trapped by the current ontology of physics and mathematics. Like string theory kind of stuff? Well, string theory is kind of an aside. But I would say, no, I would say newton um and laplace so newton basically you had these nice laws of motion and then laplace went huh if i was like a super brain what's a super brain it's like something anyway we'll come to that if you want um if i was god and i knew the

position and and velocity of every particle in the, I would know what was going to happen for all time, this deterministic view of the universe. Well, that is wrong. Like it's provably wrong right now, even though some hardcore physicists will say no. Why is that provably wrong well i can i can take a system a biological system or sorry i can take some chemicals and those chemicals whether they are so a cell is still chemicals i could take some chemicals some sand and i could take some really simple stuff and i could show that the simple things I could in principle simulate what was going to happen in time but then when I get to a certain level of complexity that I could not

simulate what the damn thing was going to do next and that biology seems to be able to mine a novelty from the future mine and novelty from the future that's a very very pretentious way of saying biology seems to be capable of creativity what is creativity it basically is able to do things that you were not were not in your priors yes and are not expected from your priors and you're like holy shit where did that come from yeah right like like you can see this in art and culture all the time you know it wasn't there a guy who went to the guggenheim who basically ate the banana that someone strapped to the wall yeah there's worse ones than that and i was like that's kind of interesting right it's like who

would think you're doing that i'm going to go into an art i'm going to go into a museum i'm actually going to eat the exhibit that i mean okay and people will say that's not an act of creation that's an act of vandalism. But I would disagree, actually. Or maybe it's both. But what I'm saying is, coming back to the point, is that biology seems to be the only place where it shows that the universe is open-ended. And that open-endedness doesn't work with Newtonian physics. It doesn't. It doesn't work with Newtonian physics. It doesn't. It doesn't. And that, I would think, had I become a mathematical physicist,

I would have been trapped in that ontology in academia, and I wouldn't be able to say, because then I would have sounded like Terence Howard. Now, of course, Terence Howard is an extreme example of him just saying things that are, you know, are demonstrably incorrect within a given ontology. And what I mean is we have this ontology of mathematics, or hopefully I'm using the word in the correct term,

we have the axioms of mathematics. So we can quite confidently say that we all agree that 1 plus 1 is 2. Yeah. Right? And so on and so forth, where Terence was like, no, no, they've been lying to you. It's actually this. Yeah, I think it was like one times one can't be one.

Yeah. It's like an action times another action cannot create an action. I'm not going to speak for Terrence, but all I'm going to say is like in the way we do science and technology and we communicate with each other, definitions are quite important

because if we hold those definitions clear, then we can have a reasoned argument. Whereas I think that what Terrence was doing was just generally making shit up. And it's okay. It's all right. He's allowed to do that. But then by saying, oh, academia is like ignoring me, it's like, no, no, we're just – you're just – it's gibberish. You can't take – this is where i'll take academia side you can't take one leap that is demonstratively provably completely false and then maybe have

10 great leaps after that that have some evidence behind them and pretend that the 11th level got somewhere when the first level means that the building was never built yeah you know what i mean i think that i mean academia is quite good i mean academia side doesn't matter right inside there are people all the time that do great things in their lives and then they do crazy thing i mean like you know take i don't know rudolph giuliani was a great was a great i know i didn't think i was gonna mention his low blow here in new york but he was a great mayor at the time yeah he was a great man right and I didn't think I was going to mention his name. It's a low blow here in New York. But he was a great mayor at the time. Yeah, he was a great mayor back then. He was a great mayor, right?

I mean, certainly I was inspired by him, right? After 9-11, corruption, all this stuff. But then the end of his career was outside that porn shop with his fake tan coming off his head. Something like that, yeah. And it was like, you know, so people are people. But going back to the point in physics and mathematical physics is like, and I'm clearly an outsider. And I don't think I have anything necessarily earth shattering to add to physics. But I am not going to be disallowed by asking the question.

If I answer the question in a reasonable and principled way and I listen to criticism and take that back, we should have a lot of fun in science. Because you can have people coming from the outside to say, look, physics doesn't explain biology. Isn't that weird? Should we not adapt physics so it explains biology? For sure. I would think the three have to exist.

Physics, biology, and chemistry have to coexist. Exactly. And right now, all the laws that we have, the universe that we know, we can predict a lot of interesting things from the formation of stars, galaxies and heavy elements, but we can't explain the formation of a cell. Now, in come the creationists and say,

ha ha ha, you know, God did it. Sure. But let's assume our universe does have some regularities and let's assume, let's just take God from inside the universe and let's say, let's position God, relegate God to setting up the universe. Let's try and understand how the actual universe works. And I think that's something that we, you know, I try to as a scientist, if you see what I mean, just ask questions consistently within that.

So that's a lot of fun. And I think that becoming a chemist for me was the best thing that ever happened. I had a lot of fun at university. I met a lot of interesting people. I realized I wasn't as dumb as I thought, but I wasn't that smart either. So, you know, I really had to kind of work hard

but for me first principles thinking got me through my chemistry degree and then got me to my PhD and I had a lot of fun and I'm having a lot of fun being stupid is good fun you see yourself as stupid so probably not

maybe that's a bit too self-pejorative Being stupid is good fun. You see yourself as stupid. Well, I mean, so probably not. That's not, I mean, maybe that's a bit too self-pejorative. But I understand that I don't understand. And that's exciting. Because if I can just make a step where I can understand a little bit more tomorrow than I did today, that's cool. That's the reason to live, right? Yeah. See, that's not stupid, though.

That to me is actually the opposite. That's smart because you're open to the possibilities. Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably more productive talking to people. My own insecurities are irrelevant to some things and relevant to others, right? Because everyone everyone people feel insecure in science and in their positions and things so it's good to talk about that but actually if that becomes like if that kind of stops you from acting because you're fearful one of the things i'm not afraid right this is when people say you know like me like lee you can get away with it sure i i but it's not that I'm not breaking the law.

I'm not running around naked. I'm not being offensive culturally, inciting hate or anything like that. I'm just making you feel uncomfortable because I'm asking questions that you are asking in your head, but you are not brave enough to ask them. And maybe you should be braver. Maybe society needs people in science, in academia, to be asking these edge questions. Not all the time, because if we're all just asking, I have to do what I would say normal science a lot of time.

And that doesn't mean that normal science is bad. Yeah, what do you mean normal science? Normal science is like, I just need to do bookkeeping. I know that that experiment is probably going to work, but I need to do bookkeeping. I know that that experiment's probably going to work, but I need to get the data. I need to get the data to make sure it's safe, right? I need to make sure I've got my molecule, I need to make sure that it's not giving out too much

energy. Textbook stuff. I just need to do some of that, because it's just good housekeeping, right? And occasionally, I can then go off on one, and I go, okay, I'm going to do this other experiment I think is super interesting, but I don't know what's going to happen. And I think you have to be willing to move between those modes. I think some people in academia look down on the crazies and some people who are being more creative look down on the more technical side.

And I think that that is not the right way to do it good technical work allows you to build a foundation where you give you you buy yourself some time if you like to try the new thing because that's how we make advances and and in science advances are often in plain sight right i used to say to my students when they're pouring something down the drains like how many nobel prizes are in that you're throwing away what i was like well you've got this failed experiment you're washing everything away how many nobel prizes in there like what are you talking about it's like well what question can you ask that's going to change the way we think of looking at the system see the way that you behave experimentally internally with your team is awesome but you guys still take everything you

work on there and then you have to put it into the peer review process and into the academia process and it's fair to say that a lot of people in academia unfortunately don't think the way you do they're not willing to try these things this comes back to the kind of the original point we got off on this on maybe a half hour ago but like how do you how do we get and we can apply this to society too but let's focus on science with academia how do we get academia back to a place where curiosity leads the way and not and not i guess like their own form of decorum if you will um so i think academia is like anywhere it's a bit like if you look at people who are in the music business right you've got some people that are pretty good at producing stuff that you know it's not gonna it's not gonna change the the

culture it's not gonna change the vibe but it's kind of okay right and you need it you need you need some notes right you need some sound um and academia is a bit like that i don't think academia is fundamentally broken i do think there's some problems right in that um so the question is how do you the question you ask is how do we get people to be more curious fundamentally basically yes well now i think good mentorship one of the things i try to do with my team is i try and reassure them that what we've got to do is just ask questions and reward each other for asking really interesting questions. Of course, when you're doing a PhD, you need to publish some papers. Excuse me. And then in a postdoc, you want to get a job. And we kind of have this strange system where this need to produce content at an ever-increasing rate sometimes kind of dulls down. And also, you know, you've got these teams where they have these ideas and they almost perpetuate like viruses.

So you have one field that basically just perpetuates itself and it overtakes all of one sub-area of chemistry or something like this and i just say in my team like you know that's great they'll burn out you have to all get money right from the area and so what you should try and do is you want to become a deep thinker and a deep specialist right so there's three three things i like to ask a scientist to do. Be good at something deep, just so people know you can be good at something. Be a good collaborator, so you can work with a team and do cool stuff. But then allow yourself to be batshit crazy.

The perfect researchers for me are deep thinkers, willing to do deep work, willing to collaborate, and willing to collaborate and willing to have a crazy day and what i try and do is get them to you can't you can't do all three of those at once right you can't just be a collaborator because they'll have no content yeah you can't just generate content and not ever tell anyone and you can't be batshit crazy because you won't get anything done yeah right so you need those three things kind of for me that's my formula if you like. The incentives in science are a bit odd.

We're living in a really interesting time in human advancement that arguably our ability to do science and increase the amount of information in the universe, in humanity, is absolutely vital for the future. And we are in a perilous place. Perilous place. Yes, because we're basically demonizing academia. Academia failed and there's all this waste of money and what's going on in the US and cuts in the UK.

And I say, hang on, whoa. Let's let the fact that human beings are allowed to think and do experiments and generate knowledge is the thing we must support more than anything. Knowledge generation is going to create and has created a future that is wealthier, safer, happier, more fun. Right. And so we've got this problem right now where we have this culture whereby we've got this culture of not understanding post the Second World War and COVID and the crash in 2008. And where we are right now, where, you know, the U.S. is kind of gone inward. Europe is kind of defending where we should be saying all these smart people, no, no, we want you to, in the same way being a teacher or working in the healthcare system is a fantastic thing to do, you want people to want to generate knowledge. And so we're kind of messing that up just now, and that really annoys me.

And not everyone has to be publishing in science and nature and getting Nobel Prizes, right? We need to allow people to do their thing, and we want to allow people to work close to industry and far away from industry. You need it all. And okay, academia isn't perfect. But actually, there's a lot of cool stuff that's going on. I don't know what's going on with the cultural stuff in you know liberalism and whatever it is right though yeah where we got this you know where academia in academia you want a bunch of anarchists intellectual anarchists to do crazy stuff mm-hmm and to not break the law of of course, right? And to do things that you might find intellectually offensive, right? And I like to intellectually offend people.

When you're offended... You would never do that. If you're intellectually offended, that's fantastic. Now, your response could be, you're just wasting my time because you're talking garbage and I don't want to do that i don't want to waste people's time i want to provoke them into thinking it's like tell me why i'm wrong if you can get someone who is smarter than you to tell you why you're wrong

and give you their time that's a very precious thing to be able to do but so i try and do that but going back to academia academia it is it has its problems but they will be resolved as as if the world came together you know china the us europe wherever everyone africa india the south america everywhere came along and said look you know what we're going to agree that we're going to put our knowledge into a big database in the sky let's call it internet. And we'll peer review each other's work because it's quite good to actually not put junk out there. And then what we'll do is we'll take that work and layer on that,

and then we might publish it in higher impact journals because that's interesting. And then funders will say, oh, yeah, I want to build a quantum computer or a fusion engine or this, or I want to cure cancer. I want to make something that will bind to RNA to stop mutations that are getting in as you get older

to cause cellular dysfunction. That would be cool, right? These things will happen. But I think right now we risk losing a great deal of time because we have some weird stuff going on in technology. Weird stuff. The AI bros, the AI gods. The AI bros.

Who are the AI bros? I mean, like, you've got the people that are saying that we're all going to be killed by AI. Like, the only user. Exactly. And you've got other people saying that AI is going to literally become the super greatest intelligence ever and solve everything. Both those things are wrong.

They're both wrong. They're just demonstrably wrong. How so? Let's take, well, because, so, AI is not what you think it is. AI is literally a process of taking data and finding correlations in that data. It's nothing more than that, right?

And so the fact that people kind of think that that is somehow going to become sentient and therefore nefarious is a gross mischaracterization and exposes a critical thing that we don't really understand what biology is doing and and i hope you're right by the way and i'm i i like hearing this but can we dig into this a little more, like what evidence you see for that? So it's a very long conversation to have, so let me... Let's do it.

Let's do it. So it will probably need us to go back to the origin of life and define intelligence... You took the words out of my mouth. Let's go. Okay. Let's do it. So I think there are...

So this is one of the reasons why I kind of... I guess it's a good way to set the stall out to say, actually, I could be wrong, go okay let's do it so i think there so this is one of the reasons why i i kind of i guess i i i guess it's a good way to set the stall out to say actually i could be wrong but let's think about it let's just go back to the beginning so back to the beginning there was a big bang big bang produced a load of stuff that stuff turned into plant turned into stars Those stars aggregated into galaxies. Stars started to explode, produced heavy elements. Those heavy elements formed planets. Those planets orbited stars.

And at least in one instance in the universe, if not many more, one planet got life. And how long ago was this? So life on Earth started, the universe is about 14 billion years old, if I can do my math correctly. Earth is about 4.7 billion years old, I think, or maybe a little bit less, but let's say between 4.5 and 4.8 billion years old. And life started on Earth about more than 4 billion years ago, and probably life got going as quickly as it could.

You're talking at like a cellular level? yeah yeah so the last universal common origin so you got origin universe origin of earth origin of life now then life goes on and goes through a series of evolutionary processes terraforms the earth produces oxygen we have multicellularity and then suddenly you have um animals and the the the ability for these animals these animals let's do it correctly the animals developed have senses so they're able to you know as soon as a the animal had senses they could see what's going on so as soon as you started to see then you can start to then kind of um create um you a conscious experience whereby you can anticipate to then kind of create a conscious experience whereby you can anticipate what's going to happen next.

So let's pause for a second. First assumption, because I'd like to list the assumptions because then I'll allow people to attack those assumptions. Biology is a process of matter wanting to survive. So this is kind of interesting by all it all because everyone has really not understood the driving force the meaning of life is existence in my view so second assumption how does it but existence of cool shit the cool shit meaning like the ability to want to not die yeah complex objects basically don't't try and get their information preserved in some way,

whether it's copying, replication, whatever. So biology seems to be a process of taking inorganic chemistry and producing cells that replicate. So at a very simple level, you have cellular replication. So that's what happened on Earth for billions of years.

Cells copying themselves, copying themselves, copying themselves. Then it got a bit more funky where you had cells kind of starting to collaborate. So you could have mitochondria. So these are these little energy-producing cells in your cells. Suddenly you have complex cells, eukaryotes. These eukaryotes then go, oh, I've got more energy.

I can now start to move. I can take energy and move. What could that allow me to do? Acquire more resources to be more to understand the present by remembering the past so that was the that's where suddenly animals and life had got the thing called instinct ah okay now instinct is kind of level one yeah now the animals are like huh i've got this thing called instinct i know i know i mean like there there's this joke, like when you see someone down the street, you're like, can I fight it, fuck it, or eat it? Right?

You know, you can see people. Get the wrong person and say all three. When you look at, you know, go down the street and someone's looking at you like, I wonder what they're doing, and they're thinking to themselves, fuck me, fight me, or eat me. You know, they're probably not thinking anything else right that's the instinct because that's the instinct right that's how you've as evolution produced it but however going a bit more because instinct wasn't enough as you were able to move further in space

suddenly instinct wasn't enough right um because move, instinct allows you to move really fast. But now, if you're able to see far away and you can see the thing you're going to fight, fuck, or, you know, or eat come towards you, you can plan. And so planning then allows you

to have some kind of, build some cognitive capacity. So now you've gone all the way from origin of life to cognition. And then what... Quick question. Sorry to cut you off i just want to make sure i understand when you're talking about instinct and you're saying like it's the ability to take action by remembering the past are you are you now saying that that's infected it infected is the wrong word but it's it's built in at a genetic level meaning yes instinct is based on what your ancestors of your species

were doing ants and termites all these things it's like instinct built in right it's like it might be a little bit of nurture as well as nature but but there is this the instinct is almost like pre-consciousness right if you like like you understand why you you know you understand as a human like you literally do like am i gonna fight fuck or eat you right and you like like you understand why you you know you understand as a human like you literally do like am i gonna fight fuck or eat you right and you're like that's a bit weird yeah i mean i don't want i mean my higher level cognition is like should i talk to you about poetry or this other stuff right but these layers are coming down but yeah then you'll fuck them afterwards anyway but what i think is important is you've got instinct but this is

really important for the ai discussion so those that are like what the hell it is really important because selection is what's happening selection darwinian evolution is is what's happening and darwinian evolution is happening in the environment all the time you've got a survival of the fittest or survival like this just you want to survive. And you are fit, not necessarily just by fighting everyone. There's a bit of cooperation going on. So anyway, the movement from instinct to a higher level requires consciousness to come in. Now, with consciousness, instinct really didn't need you

to remember the past in a, oh, I can remember seeing this thing and now I can do that. That requires active kind of learning. Whereas instinct is like, I see this, see this, do that. It's a bit like my cat. It's like, it knows what to look for a mouse. My cats are hilarious. They'll go out, they get mice, they bring the mice in the house. They fucking lose the mice and they can't see them.

Cats are really good at looking at change so this is why they if you can see a small things moving if the mouse is just standing they can't see it so like they're just like they're completely stupid it's their instinct doing everything there's not much higher level cognition going on instinct is doing that all but suddenly suddenly as your senses developed in you know the senses of sight and touch and smell and hearing all came in suddenly you've got all this other repertoire for problem solving to to survive then consciousness comes in and consciousness evolves very slowly um and it appears that consciousness at the same time language and

consciousness kind of evolve together because you have to be able to label things right and describe to other people because you're almost like you had instinct initial consciousness a bit of problem solving then language and language then kicked your consciousness up another level and you're talking about humans humans now but i think all animals do it to some degree right it's just that we're able to communicate one one another and we've got tool making skills and then suddenly we have so we have origin of life instinct consciousness abstraction and the ability to kind of to um to be intelligent right So for me, they're all connected together on one lineage, right? So no origin of life, no instinct. No instinct, no abstraction.

No abstraction, no consciousness, no language. So they're connected together. So when people talk about AI and they say AI is going to kill us, let's ask ourselves for a second what do we mean by ai and life and stuff life is a thing is matter that tries to perpetuate itself into the future by rep active acts of replication and evolution that is one definition of life that is kind of i'm trying to i will define life in terms of assembly theory later but for now that's a good working definition and matter that solves

problems to ensure its own survival right is unique to living systems now human beings have created technology and technology is another lineage in evolution technological evolution the ability to imagine things in your head and go oh i'm not going to make that car i'll make that car i'll do this experiment on that experiment really makes evolution very rapid because evolution in the good old days was like like a lemming dead dead now i can think about that and go that's stupid i won't do that i won't die so quickly so now the human brain is able to basically think about how to maximize its survival, undergoing selection in the environment by thinking. So when we start to talk about AI becoming sentient, that's actually not correct.

Because the AI has not evolved on that lineage. It's kind of taken a sideswept. AIs cannot exist without humans. This is where the AI doomers are just making stuff up. AI as a technology is dangerous. Sure, in the same way the nuclear weapons are a dangerous technology. Nuclear weapons, we could choose to detonate them. Now, how would AI be dangerous? Well, there's all sorts of mundane ways of being dangerous but the paper clips hypothesis paper clip hypothesis of it's of yard right and it's just nonsense right it it is it is poor scholarly um behavior and they're pulling on people's doom and fear and they're using it and they're making things

up that don't exist and here is this one statement I want to make, which is very important. And, of course, this is just my flawed opinion, right? I could be talking complete nonsense. But I think that intelligence is, we do not understand what intelligence is outside of biology. But I can tell you what intelligence has done for humans. It's allowed us to survive in hostile environments. It's allowed us to send men to the moon,

and hopefully everyone else soon will be going, right? And intelligence allows us to be fitter in our environment and build technologies to keep us warm when it's cold, get us food when food is scarce. And so because we are not defining intelligence in a rigorous way, it is now possible for us to then kind of bastardize that and use it to manipulate people into being scared. So they're the AI doomers, right?

AI doom is nonsense because it's not correctly defined. Because you think that that original chain that you talked about hasn't happened with AI and therefore you can't have... Humans are in the loop. Like, where does the agency come from? What they're saying is that AI can think. That is nonsense. AI does not think.

Because AI itself does not have an imperative to survive. It doesn't have four billion years of evolution programmed into it. It doesn't have the instinct. It doesn't want to fight. It doesn't want to fuck. It doesn't have 4 billion years of evolution programmed into it. It doesn't have the instinct. It doesn't want to fight. It doesn't want to fuck. It doesn't want to eat. It has none of those things built in. AI is a product of our technological evolution.

And of course, with us, integrated with us, it wants to fight, fuck, and eat. But not on its own. Not on its own, but we build it, and then potentially it wants those things because we build it and gets out of control. I don't want to make it too simple and make it like ex machina,

but that's what I'm getting at. The mechanism for that is, no, it's just made up. So I've used this term before. I can make up a term and say, I'm really scared of AG. AG is going to kill us all. What's AG? It's like anti-gravity.

It's like, I wake up one day, and suddenly anti-gravity occurs, and I float away, and there's no air, and I die. OK. Please tell me the mechanism for anti-gravity. Oh, no, no. I'm just going to use the phrase. So the problem is, the problem with the AI doomers is they are not able to make a reasoned hypothesis that

is grounded in experimental and conceptual framework. They keep basically making stuff up. There is no mechanism to get there. There's a mechanism for nuclear disaster. We build a nuclear weapon. We hit the button. We hit the button and it goes. People need to sketch out the scenarios rigorously.

And this is where I think that the ai doomers will fall down and i don't want to elaborate that because of course ai can be used to do bad things with humans in the loop like what can you define what that would look like from your yeah i mean like you like right now right we use we we um use ai to generate false false um um videos and people. Yeah, and we create hysteria or we use it to control people. So the thing is, it's not clear to me. The problem is people think solving intelligence is basically about solving a inference problem.

And intelligence is so much more than that. Intelligence is about how does matter survive. And I'll tell you something that's super interesting. I think the humans, the fact that human individuals and biological cells can die is that death, that ceasing to exist as a finite entity is what you need for intelligence. Oh, the knowledge that you're going to die. Yeah. Well, not just knowledge, the actual physical process as well. It's not clear to me that AI can be bounded in any way, right?

We're talking about AI as a very abstract thing on a data center. Now, I want to go on the record and say one thing super important. It will be possible in the future to evolve AIs. That willient in some way i don't know how it's for people out there can you who aren't familiar can you just define what you mean by sentient yeah so that so we we're sentient beings in that we have our own set of desires we have our own internal decision making and i won't be able to predict in principle what you're going to do next right i might be able to predict a little bit from you but you will be creative right sentient individuals have uh uh have opinions they have a self that they have a personality right this is the cute this is human sentience right there are animals that are sentient as well yeah so i think

there is this like this internal experience. Right now, the AI architectures we build and the technology is not capable of an internal experience. When people like Jeffrey Hinton are saying, oh, it does. We just don't get it. It's really weird and neural network. I'm sorry. That's just not correct. What's his evidence for that?

It doesn't have any. He's using anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism. He's projecting his own personality in there let me again go back to this in where does our internal agency come from it comes from 4.2 billion years of evolution the fate they're facing facing death all the time the fact that with countless of our uh progeny or sorry, our countless potential other entities have been selected out of existence. You're the winner. You are the current winner. My kids are the next winners. And so I think

that agency comes from survival, an evolution-built agency. Now, something interesting has happened. Technology is a result of evolution indirectly, but it is not because human beings build languages and abstraction. But it's not evolution itself. Exactly. And I think that is the problem, right, that I want to get to. And I'm sorry I've been really inarticulate, but I'm getting there. No, this is good. Keep going.

I think it's like, and so I think, and I'm not saying we should dismiss the doomers. That's not right. But there's this kind of this weird argument going, what's the percentage chance of doom? And I'm like, well, that's like such an ill-posed question. Like, why don't we instead think about what intelligence is and why we've misunderstood it?

Because right now, AI has got got it's like it's like the new religion right so there are people that are basically saying and i get a lot of flack from this i get a lot of smart people who who are telling me that i'm just you know i shouldn't be saying these things it's just you know i'm just i'm just i'm dangerous because there go those date those gatekeepers they're just the dogmat. You know, you need to think from first principles. And I think, and this is probably the best statement I can make on this, that we don't really yet understand what life is and why it's here and what the mechanisms are.

We're getting close. And my work, I only have one job. It's like, why the fuck am I here? It's a really interesting job, right? People pay me. And obviously, I'm a CEO of a company, which is making chemical robots. But really, the main-

Casually. But that's a day job. That's my day job. But one of the reasons, why do I have that day job? Well, I am building this chemical internet internet not just to solve cancer cardiovascular whatever diseases build new kind of advanced materials and batteries that technology i'm going to use to solve what the hell life is and so all i would say at the moment is the doomers because they don't know what intelligence is yet it's very hard to start to make stuff up about the danger i'm not saying there isn't so i think um some yan lacoon

puts that very well talks about jet engines now let's go on the positive side ai super intelligence ai is going to outthink us ai is going going to solve everything. That's just, again, nonsense made up by people who don't understand. What we've used AIs to do right now is literally distill human knowledge into a very compact format. And humans are really good at getting knowledge. And so when people say, oh, look, an AI looked at my x-rays and diagnosed what was wrong with me, much better than this individual they don't understand that the ai is not just hasn't done anything magic it's just crown sourced all the best individuals but that's the thing though too and this is what i keep thinking about

while you're saying this i i love your point about how evolution and you explained it way better and i could even rephrase it but how evolution basically formed us into this point where we have this 4.2 billion years of intelligence that said my question would be do you think that our system our brain and whatever gives us life and that whole thing is essentially then as a computer comprised of zero and one code no you don't think it's that? No, and I think I'm very close to proving why life is not computable and that's going to drive everyone's head. Okay, before – I want you to expand on that. being able to, I guess, circumvent some of the things that we've had the benefit of time to form throughout evolution would be the AI is run on basically supercomputer code that will only get

stronger and stronger. And so it can do things and take the element of what would take time and reduce it potentially to no time and then could therefore evolve in and of itself to do things that we didn't intend it to do. And as a kind of bullshit example, but it's, it's one I think about a lot would be the, I think it was at Facebook, I want to say in like 2015, 2016, they invented, they invented, you know, some, a couple of AIs and the AIs invented their own language to talk to each other. And Facebook very quietly pulled the plug because you could pull the plug on this one. When I see something like that, I'm like, well, that's like a first generation creation.

What does the fifth generation look like? I think that was bullshit and I think the way they put it out there was bullshit and it's quite funny how they do it. So this is about crowd control. Crowd control. If you go back, I'm fascinated with a philosopher called Henri Bergson, French philosopher. Can we pull that up, Alessi? Henri Bergson, H-E-N-R-I. And Henri wrote – he was a brilliant mathematician.

He didn't go into mathematics. He went into philosophy. And he wrote some books on time and free will. Yeah, Henri Bergson. Yeah. I didn't say the age. Got it. And he wrote Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. And this guy, I'm kind of like, he, you know, it doesn't annoy me.

I think it makes me even more humble than I am on average. Like, I'm just this stupid human being. Let's not say stupid i'm this curious human being who likes asking questions and but i'm not the first and it's always interesting to say how you can improve on on it and um and i think that honoree kind of um was a very like the one of the best philosophers of the day. And a guy called Bertrand Russell, who's a bit, Bertrand Russell, I shouldn't say this, but kind of fun. So one of my favorite physicists, who is kind of always right, but a bit boring. No, I won't say who it is. But he's, so Bertrand Russell kind of reminds me of this boring physicist who's always right,

doesn't like any creativity. And Henri was like, Henri was like no no no I'm just thinking ahead they're going back to the point about um the the rational people can do great things they can be deluded so Henri started going to seances and seances and looking at psychic phenomena and you know people were there were poltergeists and tables were getting lifted and all this stuff and it's very funny that curious people and creative people are always on the edge, right? In the AI space right now, where people are just making stuff up, they're doing it to control, right?

You know, like, if I want to control you, it's like, there's a conspiracy, you know, the government is hiding the evidence of extraterrestrials. Goddamn right they are. I mean, like, if the government was competent to do that, I would be so impressed. But of course they're not, right? But then people are like, oh, there is, and they're convinced,

and they have this. And I was like, sure. I'm very happy that you have this belief. Beliefs are good things. Now let's turn that belief into more than a belief by interrogating with critical reasoning. Now let's ask the right question. So, well, the by interrogating with critical reasoning now let's ask the right question so well the ai stuff is about critical reasoning we don't know what

intelligence is we have an idea intelligence emerges on earth with autonomous things called cells that can collaborate interact over billions of years and suddenly we have this technology now what is ai really you know let's say i build a, I invent a weapon and I can use that weapon to kill people. That weapon is dangerous, but I, the intention for that weapon comes from me. All the AIs are programmed by programmers. The data has come from human beings. The intention, when someone says, oh, this AI was racist or woke or this. I'm like, no, the programmer was liberal or... Sure. Right?

And that's all where it comes in. Now, what we should be saying is like, we're basically arguing about the wrong thing. The AIs aren't sentient. Jeffrey Hinton, I don't care he got a Nobel Prize. I don't care. He's just making shit up, right? And because he basically wants to... he has a God complex, right? This is not a principled argument.

So what you have to say is like, well, what do you mean by sentient? What do you mean by autonomy? What do you mean by agency? Let's get all these things defined so we can understand. You have a legal status. You have a bank account. You have a national insurance. I don't know what the equivalent is, but you have a social security number, right?

You have legal status, right? Corporations have legal status as well. They're a bit different, but human beings have legal status. Will an AI have a legal status? No, not right now because it can't act on its own volition. Now, people go, oh, no, but you were programmed by your society by your evolution and look at this and therefore the ai is the same like well let's go back to our definitions and be really clear about what we mean all i want to point out at this moment in time is that we are

kind of being we are not critically reasoning when it comes to intelligence we don't know what it is we don't know how we don't yet understand how life produced intelligence we have an idea so let's hold our horses now let's go to super intelligence um before we do that i should pause and say one thing um the ai is a tool a bit like a test tube is a tool right i use test tubes in chemistry all the time they're really important but it doesn't mean the test tube is a tool right i use test tubes and chemistry all the time they're really important but it doesn't mean the test tube should get the nobel prize for the experiment i did right because it was like when everyone says oh should the ai get the nobel prize i'm like no i programmed the ai i used it why do people not accept that ai is just a really good tool when

it's playing a game okay because there are some people in charge of these companies who want to make money, who want to make you believe something different. And that's not very good critical thinking. Now, when we're now looking at a calculator, on my calculator, on my computer, I can write a program that could factorize numbers. I could get it to search for primes. I could, it's faster than I could search for primes, it can do things really fast.

It can also come up with correlations I wouldn't be able to do. In fact, if I have a pencil and paper, with a pencil and paper I can do things, without pencil and paper I cannot do in my brain. Does that mean that the pencil and paper is a superintelligence? No, it's just a piece of technology. So now we've got from the ai doom to the ai will solve everything to the super intelligence but i'll go back to one thing i

started to say about the um the ai medic the ai medic yeah the x-ray the a we use the ai to look at my x-ray and solve that one physician couldn't do of course one physician could get things wrong because they're a human being and they're not crowdsourcing everything. They haven't seen everything. But most doctors are pretty damn good. Will the AI be better? And the human go, like, I just found the instance. Why?

It's intelligent. No, it has all the data across the human race. And that data, it allows you to say, oh, well, you're not, you know, you fit into this category, and therefore I can diagnose you and give you more information. So what's going to happen in health is AI will change the way we diagnose diseases, the way we anticipate that. This is all fine, right? It's not magic. It's a new tool. It's a bit like MRI.

Now we can use an MRI and see inside you because we use a big magnet to jangle the water around and we can get images right and so I think we just need to put it in its place and be principled now let's go to super intelligence there's lots of people peddling this stuff Max Tegmark there were and Elon that right and they don't know what they're talking about it's really funny because like um you know it's just what do you mean super intelligence what what now now if you mean it's going to be faster than me sure i buy that i'll buy that ai but that's not super intelligent what they're trying to say is these systems will have access to reasoning and magic that you don't have. I'm like, no, no, define the magic. And I think that human beings have shown

that they are very good universal explainers. This is one thing where I agree with David Deutsch's philosophy and the mathematicians so far, that although there are things that are really hard to explain, humans are pretty damn good at solving problems and building technologies to get rid of that problem. Nick's Bostrom Superintell intelligence book was a great book but had lots of shit out of me had lots of flaws it's nonsense what what are some of the flaws there well he's saying he says we will have a super intelligence like okay define it explain how

it works give me the mechanism, anti-gravity. Oh, I'm floating. We shouldn't be scared. We should basically have a commission on anti-gravity tomorrow. We should worry about it. Come on, Yud. Come on, Nick. No.

So unless they can explain a proper concrete mechanism, I could worry about lots of things, right? I could worry about when I'm going to get cancer and die, if I'm going to get heart failure, when an asteroid can hit the world, where I'm going to get caught in a storm or whatever, right? I could worry about, you know, when I'm going to get cancer and die, if I'm going to have heart failure, when asteroids can hit the world, where I'm going to get, you know, get caught in a storm or whatever, right? So these are things I have to worry about. All I need to do is put them in some type of order and think and use my resources accordingly. People making stuff up like this to control resources is what's happening. And of course, you think all the doomers, all the really smart people including

people you're mentioning who in some cases are billionaires or brilliant minds within academia who are all on a similar page of like this could surpass us become sentient and fuck us over you think that it is all related back to knowingly for some of them and then even unknowingly for maybe some of the others who go along with it that that it's going to be a use to generate fear to control society? Well, I don't, I mean, I think that they're not doing it in a benevolent way. It's just a way, right? They're trying to create, get clicks, get following, get people scared, get people excited, get people fearful.

You know, buy my product like it's literally it's just like the same thing again and again and again the tech ai is a fantastic technology what i want to worry about what i worry about with ai number one authenticated data i want real data from the universe not made up data because otherwise would it just go to shit really quickly meaning theories because people get people generating synthetic data it's not real data and uh and and this is kind of like this is scary because if you're just generating synthetic data you're not getting any creativity creativity comes from real data in the environment that's another point second point is authenticated users i want real people right i'm not one of these people who wants to talk to an AI and be bullshitted by some kind of random thing.

I want to talk to real people. I'm sorry. The fact that some people out there like AI therapists, great. If it actually helps you do a thing or feel better, awesome. I'm sure that AI therapists might actually reduce the suicide rate dramatically. Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if that happened? Sure. You know, so I'm not saying that it's all, they're all talking nonsense.

What I'm saying is, why are you making stuff up about doom or the fact that AI is going to solve everything? AI is a way of taking data and compressing that data into a high dimensional space and getting out connections from that data. It's what humans do, right? That's what human intelligence does through the act of survival, right? But it does it on its own.

It does it on its own. And so I- And you don't have a fear that that could- I don't see the mechanism for it. We, I mean, if I am successful in my life's work to understand the origin of life, create a new life form, you know, why stop there? Why not create a life form that's also conscious?

That would be great. But then people would be scared because what about that consciousness? If I create a life form that was conscious, like an alien, and it wanted resources, of course it would fight us for the resource. And then we should be scared. And we should go, are you sure you want to do that? But you're saying AI can't become that alien? No. and then we should be scared. And we should go, are you sure you want to do that? But you're saying AI can't become that alien? No, because AI is connected to us

through leuka, not technology. But AI could, with us, do bad things. AI and humans together could... AI with humans together can do bad things. Okay. Can we go back to the original point we tabled on the front end of this, which was when I brought up human beings being considered a computer versus AI?

And you said you have evidence that we're not. Can you explain that? Yeah. So there is this really interesting problem that we have right now in that. And so what I'm going to say is controversial, probably a bit wrong, probably a lot wrong. But if it's not, it's quite interesting. Let's put it that way. You've never said anything controversial before. This is very off-brand. And what I mean by that is like so people are making metaphor between how the brain work work how the brain has done its thing over billions of years um because we don't know you know how instinct works right very well instinct

is evolved it kind of it gets unpacked mechanically if you think about it you think about the the zygote right the the the the your when you were when you were a single fertilized cell you divided into two and then into four and you kept going suddenly, so you've got all the in that cell, you've got all this genetic information and you have feedback from the environment in the womb where the cell is implanted and you get signals

and those signals in the environment the mechanical feedback helped you with the genes produce your arms and your legs your kidneys and everything in the environment, the mechanical feedback, helped you with the genes, produced your arms and your legs, your kidneys and everything. So you have this interaction in time that unfolds. So genes don't just provide information. They kind of provide coordinates where you should roll the stone down the hill so it bounces in the right trajectory to get the thing happening.

So there's all this other stuff going on, right? And so that's really interesting about how biology works and how we can kind of get really complicated entities coming together. So how we then start to think about, you know, how life kind of turns into intelligence intelligence we've got to make sure that causal chain is all connected together right and so i think that we have to keep understanding that so i guess that's one of the starting points right now the brain how the brain works we know that neurons have a uh we know about a lot about

neurophysiology we know about firing neurons we know there's an action potential and we know that you know that there seems to be some connection between how our neurons fire and learn and make connections and there and we think that we can perhaps simulate that let's say that's a given so i'm going to give you two or three different alternatives and then and they're all going to be interesting the first one is like let's just assume that the brain doesn't work the way we think it is we're firing neurons one and zero that there are network effects and there's kind of the brain is like an analog um entity with some error correction, some digital error correction, right?

And that's kind of one way of looking at it. Let's assume the brain is how everyone's projecting right now, like the way we see neural networks on computers where we can simulate them with ones and zeros. And then there's another way that the brain is doing something magical that we don't understand, right? There's quantum phenomena and so on. I don't really mind which of these, because my explanation of why the brain is a computable is actually quite mundane,

but it's really interesting. So now, and it's locked with creativity. So the hint here is, isn't it interesting that human brains can come up with new things all the time that you can't write programs to do? We can't write programs that will come up with creativity. Now, I want to make my position clear. I'm not a dualist. A what? A dualist, where I think that there's a separation between mind and matter.

Okay. Right? That there's a separation between mind and matter. Okay. Right? That there's some kind of spirit. I believe that I believe, I think, I can prove, but I have to have some belief, right? I believe that the material stuff is all we have, right? So in principle, it should be possible to make an artificial brain that has an artificial consciousness. Now, is the brain a computer is a really hard question because it goes back to everything in this conversation is about definitions

right yes what is a computer now a computer is a thing where i can put data in and i have a program and i get that data out and it's reliable right i get a mapping i run an algorithm and the brain is running an algorithm then one goes oh my god you've just broken the church turing thesis and i'm like no the brain is not an algorithm the brain is doing something and this is where i disagree with a guy um very nice philosopher sadly died recently a guy called dan dennett oh yeah yeah he was on brian keating show i think yeah dan dennett wrote a very nice book Very nice philosopher, sadly died recently, a guy called Dan Dennett. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was on Brian Keating's show, I think. Yeah, Dan Dennett wrote a very nice book called Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

It's a fantastic book. It's one of his best books. I recommend everyone to read it. But there's one thing in the book he says that evolution is an algorithm. It's not. Evolution can be approximated using algorithms, but it's not. It's doing something else. Wait, wait, wait. Evolution can be approximated using algorithms, but it's not. It's doing something else. Wait, wait, wait. Evolution can be approximated using algorithms?

You can simulate evolution in a computer. Okay, yes. Right. So what am I saying? So I'm saying the brain is not computable. Now, why is that? Now, one really important thing is about, and I think I'm going to put this as simply as i can

um so what i what did i say i think the argument is like um the the brain is not in principle computable now why is that well a computer has a memory it has a series it has a program. It has an architecture. The problem with the human brain is the human brain is creating new, let's say, the metadata constructs in time. And basically the brain's capacity to work at the boundary between infinity and finiteness is what we find difficult to compute. Now, what do I mean by that? Capacity between infinity and finiteness. Yeah, basically human brains or biological brains are able to mine creativity from the future and instantiate it in the present. Like, what the shit does that mean? All it means is there's more time in the future,

which means you have a bigger state space, a larger number of boxes for you to pull on, and you pull those into the present. Think about your imagination. What is an imagination, right? The imagination is for you to to able to take all the all the experience if you've had in your life and re and using inputs you got from today maybe you might get inspired you might have stubbed your toe like something go ouch didn't like that and then oh i got this idea for this

thing that came from this you mining the environment in the present. Yes. So here's how it works. Your brain is able to process information in a non-deterministic way because there's infinite amounts of data coming at you through your sensors. Your sensor approximates it. And you have this ability to imagine. And I'm explaining it really poorly. But all I'm basically saying is computers don't have enough memory and they don't have enough potential to basically get all the data from the environment and it's that data from the environment and that huge memory is what makes

it non-computable and that's a very nice practical no that's interesting that's really interesting because in principle i cannot compute what a cell is going to do next it does weird stuff so and the thing is we've become totally we're fantasizing about control with neural networks if it's in distribution we can predict it is our distribution we can't i love to be out of distribution that That's what I do. I like to do weird shit on a day. I mean, not weird shit. I don't judge. It's okay. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, who knew that, like, I don't know, 10 years ago, I would suddenly decide at some point I would just wear pink and have pink shoelaces. Yeah, the shoelaces really threw me off. It's like, where does that come from? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. You were at an investor's meeting before this? Ballsy.

I like that. I've got to have a uniform. So I think the fact that – so the very mundane reason why biology is not computable is the number of states you're trying to get access to is just huge. And the information coming from the environment is not noise. And so – and this is – and I'm getting close to it. I can reveal – I've revealed part of it. But there's also things about the fact that people think that natural selection comes through random mutation and random processes, right? And there is some of that, but I'm beginning to see evidence of contingency everywhere. My one contribution to reality is like, huh, the past counts.

Like if like, you know if you say to me you know what one thing would you like to tell people that is most important thing in science it's that phrase the past counts yeah can we can we go back on what you just said though about natural selection yeah with random things happening yeah i don't are you saying like random things the way they're defining it or – let me make one up right now. A bird at the Galapagos where Darwin was first obviously like coming up with this theory. He realized that the beak changed in size on the top over a 200-year period or something so they could catch this fish instead of that one. What about that is random though?

Because to me that says the environment said there's this type of fish that's the one they need to survive so it's not random well then it corrected for that no no the way that biology so it works i mean i go back and forth on this and that the way what happens is sure that's not random that even the environment says hey i'm here what happens the way the the way that natural selection did that is that mutations would generate a large number of birds with different beaks. And through trial and error,

that mutation, which would randomly occur, helped you, it would just, because then that random mutation caused the bird to then be able to get the fish, and it was able to procreate right more effectively got more energy yet that was selected for and that actually is i'm okay with that i mean i'm okay that that that kind of process is random ish but there is contingency in the processes in the environment right and i i don't know that um what i'm saying is materially significant yet

because there's a huge body of evolution that says, look, the neo-Darwinian thesis is like, look, survival of the fittest by natural selection. Natural selection occurs by random mutation in the genome. The random mutation in the genome just gives you a lot of trial and error, and the environment selects. So in a way, from that point of view, that's how it works right and that's fine but i'm saying in biology it's not just random there are other things in the environment that give you information that

you can use and so i think there's a little bit of refining there for the most people it doesn't make a difference but for science right one of the reasons why people got really upset with the assembly theory paper is it basically says something really obvious that is probably correct but they didn't like it because it it really didn't it was just not it just cut across so many paradigms we can come to that in a moment so i i think that biological evolution is very good at creating novelty because novelty is what you need to survive. If you think about the music industry, like, I mean, I used to compose electronic music when I had some time, but now I'm a CEO. You were an EDM guy?

I did loads of crazy stuff. All right, we're going to play some afterwards. It was just like I would love to find the time to do it. But you think about it, in any competitive environment, you can do the boring thing where you can say, well, the culture likes this music. I can just facsimile that and just do a variation on the theme and I'll be quite good and sell some stuff. But occasionally, how do you compete in the environment?

You have to be illogical. You have to do things that you think that people or that people will just know that it won't work and because what else can you do if you've got a completely rational environment and everyone's deterministic and doing the same thing the only way you could actually compete with anyone else is actually something new be illogical yeah yeah and so it's a bit like why maybe you know why the current manifestation of the American experiment is really interesting because the politicians are like, well, yeah,

we're kind of boring having this tit-for-tat with two parties, but let's have a crazy thing happen or a non-deterministic thing happen. And this is just evolution playing out the macro scale, but that's way above my pay grade. But I think there is, biology is capable creativity. That creativity does not seem to be computable and again people are faking it using llms and go look at this it's really creative i'm like sure it's a good tool but you selected it you selected it i'm not saying you

can't use llms to be creative but you have to interact with them and you're saying therefore because your point on imagination is based on our past and everything come together to that we know of to then form this new idea we get i'm taking it to that next level you believe ideas are a faction of the past yeah that's why they come to us i mean so the really weird thing is the past, the future is not in principle predictable, right? Let me say that again. The future is not in principle predictable, right? That's a very strong statement for me to make. Why is it not in principle predictable?

Because the universe is expanding in time. And because you just don't have enough resource. And this is what the computationalists don't like, right? The computation is like, no, no, no, I'm God. I'm going to learn it all. It's like, no, you've got time. Time is – that doesn't mean you can't do useful things with computation. But to think that computation is the base of the universe is kind of without any evidence.

Here's an interesting thing. Here's why we're not in a simulation. Ooh, taking the word. You've done this like three times today, taking the words out of my mouth. I've got to get Riz Virk next to you now. Or why biology is not computable. Let's just imagine, let's just assume that biology is pretty good at putting memories in our brains. And the memories are pretty much a molecular resolution. That means there's individual atoms in my brain that I access.

I remember when I blew up my train set and things like this. These are molecules in my brain. I have memories in my brain. These are molecules. Now, probably every time I replay that memory, it destroys the molecule. I have to remake it again. So maybe the train is a bit changed in color and shape and shit, right? But I did connect it to the mains. That thing...

As long as that's true. If it's not, you're out of here. Yeah, how do we validate that? I think my mother would still call the records. We'll use AI and find a way. But anyway, so... But let's say my brain is storing stuff at molecular resolution, like atomic resolution. To build a computer that can beat atomic resolution, I don't know any

physics that can do that. So my brain is already beating what lithography can do, number one. And I am sensing the environment in an analog way. Yes, I'm using quantum mechanics. There are digital-like things happening. But I'm sampling the environment. I've got infinite amount of data I can get. I've got almost this infinite memory capacity, or I've got a molecular-level memory capacity. And I've got all this data I can get. I can't build a computer big enough.

That's one problem. And because I'm then moving in time, and each time I'm getting more and more data, because I'm not just like, it's not, my memories aren't just isolated in one layer. I'm rebuilding them on my neural network. I'm compressing them. I'm constantly compressing. So yes, I'm doing what LLMs are doing, if you want, to some degree. Yes, I'm doing all this stuff, but it's hyper.

Like, I'm able to do this across all modes, right? Language is not intelligence. It's not? No. Why not? Language is just a small subset. Like instinct is the... Oh, on its own.

You know, like instinct. Yes. You know, when people think that they kind of like, they don't want to fight or fuck or, you know, or eat, right? The thing, the instinct isn't playing. Because what Bergson said, actually, I like it a lot, because instinct going into cognition gives you intuition. Intuition is the thing that you can't yet put into language very well.

You haven't got there. But you've got this thing, right? It's like this again, if you're making music or you're doing art or you're doing math i one of the reasons i was in the in the stupid class for math is i never wrote any math down i could do i was quite good at combinatorial math i was quite good at algebra but i did it all in my head and i knew when it was right because i got emotional you got emotional yeah when i do when i do math now do math now, it's very emotional. So it's kind of weird.

Everyone's like, you're sad. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm just working on something. They're like, what? I was like, I think I solved it. So it could be different emotions you're saying. Yeah, yeah. So basically when I'm pretty, I mean, I feel my mathematics emotionally. So when I'm solving a problem, I get quite, it's quite, it's almost like a depression episode but i'm like oh i'm solving the problem and then i have to wait for my subconscious to give me the problem i don't

make sense it's like a musician right but it's batshit right it's batshit and it's annoying because i look like a complete idiot to everybody because they're like lee doesn't know what he's talking about you know oh there's the equation okay huh you know and i mean that's that's just kind of a little so your brain is very good at doing things in your subconscious so you have this molecular level memory you've got all this data coming at you through your senses you have emotions which tell you which tell you when emotions help you understand your expectation values when things that you weren't expecting happen and they're good you have positive emotions when things you weren't expecting are bad you have negative emotions you know and it's about your environment the information so this is why the brain is not simulatable on a computer

and this is also why reality is not simulatable on a computer either because the resource required... So there's two problems. First of all, the resource required is enormous. And the second problem is like, what is the layer on which the simulation is instantiated upon? Where is the simulation

for the simulation? And then it becomes an infinite regression, or infinite regress. But they could... And R riz talked about this like the computing power you would need they could go to new layers it's nonsense because it's not falsifiable and if it's not falsifiable it's not science we're into religion the simulation hypothesis is a religious hypothesis well wouldn't it be falsifiable if there were proof that the multiverse exists if we could if we could develop proof of that couldn't it now become hypothetical i don't even know how that why that segues in there but no no no no here's how all right so like brian keating

was spent in his life trying to find whether or not the universe was inflationary famously it was not something that he thought he was actually looking at. It turned out to be like universal dust. But if he had proven that the universe was inflationary, he could therefore most likely prove that there is a multiverse that exists. So when I say... No, no, that doesn't follow. That's just...

Why doesn't that follow? He was just making that up to sound good. I mean, like, Brian, like, where does that come from sorry Brian I mean like please do tell so look I think David Deutsch gives a really good reason for why the multiverse

can exist right David Deutsch so for me I have one argument with David it's the same argument like the problem is David's disciples don't really understand it David does basically the universe either has time or it has the multiverse if you have time if time is fundamental you don't need the multiverse okay all right because why well because basically the multiverse is like everything present everywhere all at once

and you just take a line through that multiverse right it's like right now there could be a dinosaur walking through this room on a different transition but um but you the reason for the whole the ontology that created the multiverse was this requirement that you have the schrodinger equation yes the wave function describes the universe it doesn't describe the universe it is the universe right so that's what that's what the hard quantum mechanics it doesn't describe the universe it is It is the universe. It is the universe. So what I'm saying is like quantum mechanics at the base doesn't just describe everything. It is, right? It's like the branches of the wave function are how reality works. But it's just a construct without, you know, there is no real experimental evidence for it beyond some of the things that David says, which are quite nice, which allow it to be falsifiable.

I don't know what Brian's saying. Brian might be adopting some of that. But the thing is, you know. There's a deeper explanation to that, by the way. I'm taking the more simplistic view of what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what Brian says. I like Brian a lot.

It's great. And I think he likes to play on the mystery, right? And it's great. But at the end of the day, we need to encourage people to think critically. I've said a lot of things to you, which I will happily argue with people I have strong opinions on. I'll bet you will. But they're weakly held. Yes.

And when someone says, no, you're wrongly because of this, I'm like, ah, yeah, thanks. Because one of the reasons i like to say what i think right um openly and honestly and hopefully in with a degree of professionalism is like you know maybe jeffrey hinton hears i say he's just making stuff i said no i'm not making stuff up and here's why i think it and i'm like okay but then why are you dramatizing this and saying oh i left google because it was it was too scary and they weren't doing this i'm like no you were just being sassy and it's cool you know being sassy is fine we're all sassy occasionally but i think we have to be principled about we have to the unit what i

really want to happen to humanity is i want the iq of humanity to go up and up and up the critical iq of humanity what i mean by that is people are willing and able and and congratulated for questioning with in a principled way why something works and not being fed nonsensical stuff and then being exploited on their woo-woo-ness right then you know to happen these days. It is. Well, no, it's like anything. Like in the printing press, I'm so excited about AI and the internet and all the technologies we have because in 100 years,

when we've ironed out this cultural shift, we're going to be able to do even greater things with it than we can now. I think when the printing press started, I can't just imagine what it was like. We had the printing press and all we did is we printed the Bible. We just gave everyone the Bible. It's like, but can we not write a Bible? It's like,

okay, thanks for that. This is the greatest technology, Bible. So that's what we're doing right now with the internet and then AI. It's like, we can have this nonsense. And so I think that... Interesting. You know, that's where we are. It's a fascinating time to be alive. You know, if you take a lot of people, the problem I see is that we want people to think critically. People that are rich, have got rich through technology, are propagating this stuff. Like, you know, when Sam Altman says, you know, that OpenAI is going to create an AGI. You're saying bullshit.

I'm not just saying bullshit. I'm saying fraud. I mean, that's just a fraudulent statement, right, to make. He says it so confidently. He's building a bunker, too. Has he? Yeah. I mean, like, the problem is, like, I don't know.

Sam should just have had a real job before you know real job requires actually to do work and stuff and actually build something and you know if he does work i i i like i'd i i've happily debate him and talk to him about it but i think the problem is i think it's really hard to be a ceo i'm a ceo and i get told off, you know, all the time by being, you know, too realistic and like calling BS on everything. And so I think it's really hard. So I think SAM is like OpenAI is doing great things, right? Ideally, it's producing products that people are buying. Will people continue to buy those products?

Well, time will tell. Will it be another, you know, I don't know, what's MySpace or whatever? You know, will it die? I think if OpenAI doesn't actually create products that are going to increase functionality for humans and allow humans to be more creative and do things, then it will just die on the hype cycle, right?

Chat GPT is a pretty good start, though, right? I don't know where I stand on chat GPT. I've used it, right? And I use it a lot. I've used it to help me synthesize information and code and stuff. And I've used Pro. It's quite good. Will I continue to use it?

I see. Am I happy with the fact that it is literally brute forcing the compression of our data? You know, assembly theory is a principled way to compress data, right, with causation. What they're doing with neural nets is just brute force. It's incredibly expensive, incredibly energy intensive, and incredibly disruptive, and get hooking people on hallucinations. Not quite good. Yeah, why do you say hallucinations?

Well, because the way that LLMs work is they don't... If OpenAI or any of them could create a tool that would say, here's the answer to your prompt, and here is a score about how likely it is to be correct. That would be fantastic. Have you tried writing a chat bot and say, when you say a chat bot, tell me about, I don't know, a thing, and it doesn't know anything. It just makes it up.

It's a probabilistic return. Yes. So people don't know what- Probabilistic, yes. Yeah. So what people don't understand is that these systems are probabilistic generators. And, of course, they give you some plausible stuff. In fact, they give you some correct stuff. So it's actually removing humanity's ability to think critically because you get bombarded with so much information like chat gpt although the model that was used to produce chat gpt has read more words than you're

ever going to read but it hasn't read them it has compressed them so the meaning comes from you reading the words and building that fundamental idea i want to measure a charge on electron what's an electron ah electron is you know i want to basically understand how to build a charge on an electron. What's an electron? Ah, an electron is, you know, I want to basically understand how to build a CO2 laser. What's a laser? Well, you get this amplification process, and you're able to pump in energy, and then you get this coherence,

and then you get more coherence, you know, and you're in this exponential growth. Yes. And so this is what I'm saying the entire time in this conversation when it comes to doomers or AI positivists. I'm saying it's easy to get worried about the scale at which this data is being crunched. I get that. I'm sympathetic. But don't need to make stuff up.

I'll just use anti-gravity. Oh, my God, we're really good at flying. Look at the planes. We can fly anywhere. Well, DARPA has anti-gravity weapons. I don't know if you heard about that. Of course it does. gravity oh my god we're really good at flying look at the planes we can fly anywhere well tarpa has anti-gravity weapons i don't know if you heard about that of course it does they were talking to dolphins telepathically in 1992 yeah and i am i in the dimensional portal i've got i didn't actually have to fly to get here i just asked you know morty to give me absolutely right i i know i

was gonna you know there are cameras people can't hear this just reminder but i i want to go back to where we where we went on this weave with what i was starting to introduce the idea of like a multiverse or something when we were talking about the simulation itself so let me just finish that point i hear you on the multiverse and how it's not falsifiable but i want to go no let me yeah sorry i think it might be and i think i i am i don't think what Brian says sounds right, but I could be wrong, and Brian can come back to me and tell me about it. But I think that what I'm saying is David, and maybe Brian by extension, have made some assumptions that then say, oh, it predicts this, but it's indirect and quite weavy. And I would use Occam's razor and say the simplest explanation is likely to be the right one. So I think that seeing an interference pattern, David would say, is evidence of the multiverse.

I'm like, no, no, that's just evidence of loss of contingency, which is a loss of information. Quantum mechanics is not magic. This is a problem. It just looks like it to us no it's it looks like it to me photosynthesis is from wild shit bro no it's all simple it's it's really simple yes like quantum mechanics the light and the plants and growing and shit that seems complex and cool to me yeah yeah it is it is complex it cool, but it's not complicated, right? Yeah, you're twisting around some syllables right there.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I can explain to you photosynthesis. There's nothing magic in it. I think that, but with the multiverse thing, I think there are problems of labeling and ontology and the framework in which we build our scientific abstractions. And it's fascinating, right? Because there's something very wrong with physics,

with the fundamentals of physics, like wrong. And there's me, a chemist, who's gone, oh, I think I've exposed why the last 500 years of physics is actually wrong. I mean, how am I not going to get fired for that statement, right? It's like, well, I am the Regis Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, and I also run a company that is basically digitizing chemistry. I'm not just making shit up in my basement.

I don't have a basement. You don't? No, but I do have a lab at home where I make stuff. I feel like every scientist needs a basement, though. You've got to be able to say, yeah. Next time, bunker, basement. We'll get you one. I'll talk to Sam, get his specs.

Yeah, that's right. Maybe he can pay as well. That would be good because I feel like his is really expensive. Yeah, that would be cool. But so coming back to the multiverse, I think there is a, I love talking to David. I'm talking to him. I've been talking to him on several occasions. We're narrowing.

I'm narrowing in on what I think our disagreement is. But it's hard, right? Because, you know, I'm trying to get David into a position where he will actually, he will have to change his mind. He's fairly wily. But it's okay. Like, he's a fantastic scientist or once in a you know generation scientist it's good that you guys have dialogue on that that gives me hope when i hear stuff like that i like that yeah that means he's willing to talk it out he may defend it

vigorously he may not like your evidence but he's discussing it we both share the same problem which is fascinating i'm like oh that's so. Your problem with symmetry breaking in the multiverse is my problem with symmetry breaking in the universe with time. Ah. And so they're the same problem. All right, well, I want to come to time, but I want to go through that simulation thing to get there.

So what I was saying with if we had had a multiverse or something there could be a simulation the reason i was saying that is because if you did have like these infinite universes there'd be there could be some evidence that says the computing the the for that to happen there would have to be some master for lack of a better complex term here you know computer system overseeing that almost like a video game simulation and then you'd be able to say that okay maybe we do have the the concept of free will the concept of evolution the concept of all these things that may be true in our universe but really they're actually controlled experiments by whatever else is out there what What's the mechanism? What do you mean, what's the mechanism? You said this, like, so the multiverse...

So my guess is that quantum mechanics isn't what it is. People think it is, right? We need to revise quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is actually a collection of things, right? And so the problem with the multiverse and quantum computers right you think that literally you've got your computation occurring over the multiverse i don't really know what that means mechanistically right i can't am i getting data from the multiverse no i can't i'm not allowed to interact with the universe directly. So when people put on these layers,

what they're doing is they're taking pieces of truth, or truth, not truth, consistent theoretical analysis and layering them on and basically making some kind of patchwork of... And when you dig down, you say, no, please give me the mechanism, explain how that works. And it falls over. It doesn't survive scrutiny. fall it doesn't screw it doesn't um it doesn't survive scrutiny again i'll say again and actually david deutsch is right behind this

he his principal argument which i agree for the record against the multiverse is it's not sorry not the multiverse correct the the simulation argument is it's not falsifiable it's an infinite regress because you have this well if i let's assume the simulation i'm in a simulation but where's the simulation occurring and where's that occurring where's that occurring where's that occurring where you know how and how do we know we're at the base when we're at the base layer and i think there is very there is a very good reasoning process he has. And this other argument, I haven't heard of this, the quantum computing one, it seems to be just like, let's just take a load of cool things, add them together and say just because. I mean, there could be an argument made for that for sure.

And it'd be way better if Riz was sitting in my seat to explain his life's work to you, not to say it's correct or incorrect. I don't know.'s interesting though but with the logic you just said for anything I don't know if maybe I'm interpreting this the wrong way but that would mean that there's there's almost like a very limited ceiling to which we can reach to actually ask questions because you're saying we can't we can't try to find a new floor and find a regressive explanation for that. You could use some of it, but look, I am not an expert in the simulation hypothesis, right? First of all, right?

I'm not a computer scientist. I want to be all these things when I grow up. I'm still working on what to do. But all I'm saying is I need to be all these things when I grow up I'm still working on what to do but all I'm saying is I need to figure out an experiment I would do a thought experiment in my head what would be the benefit of being in a simulation of being in the ground truth

so I've got reality and I've got the simulation and then I'm really interested in resource requirements and how that would play out and also the representation of things in the simulation versus reality. And all I'm saying is I haven't seen any evidence that a simulation hypothesis is even meaningful, feasible, or falsifiable. And maybe that's because I haven't paid attention

and I find something in there and I can revise that. But I think you have to be careful of things at infinite regress. attention and i'll find something in there and i can revise that but there is i think uh i think it's uh you have to be careful things are infinite regress a bit like panspermia like the origin of life say oh the life didn't life origin life didn't occur on earth it occurred in space i'm like well where then oh and if you any any explanation that kicks the can down the road doesn't really help you because you've still got to say well where did the simulator come from so i guess what i'm saying is great well done for making a simulation but who created the simulation and how could i work that out and if it's simulations all the way down then

it loses meaning right because then it doesn't it doesn't allow you philosophically in terms of your definitions to start with anywhere you're like we're all in a simulation where do you think it all started i mean you mentioned earlier you walked us through you know big bang and you know they eventually get to earth it's 4.2 billion years old approximately life forms but like do you do you believe in god do you think there's something above it that we can't scientifically explain at this time um i don't believe in god but i believe in wonder i like the fact that i'm like sometimes i'm like you know i have lots of different wonders in my life occasionally i do experiment and and i do the this is really boring actually i do the experiment i know it's gonna i hope it's gonna work i had this idea and if this idea is correct the experiment will just just

beautifully work and everyone else is gonna it's not I do that and the experiment works I'm like wow that's wonder then I see things um I think are I don't understand and I'm able to work them out for me that gives me another amount of wonder and then also I'm able to talk to people from all sorts of areas of life philosophy you know science wanting to do science and um they're pursuing new things through creativity and curiosity and the universe itself is an incredibly creative place and for me i don't think the universe needs any more than itself and one of the things i'm trying to understand is like, if I could help ground or explain the transition from the universe physics to biology via chemistry, not only will that help humans understand how cool it all is, but we I'm trying to build a company is I'm trying to literally grab the future and make it happen in the present. Yes. Right?

That's what I do. That's very cool. I grab that stuff and actually molecules and cure diseases. I build the railway tracks or the computational paradigm for making molecules forever. Humanity will benefit from it, right? And I made that happen with my team, with the funding, with the universe. We created new stuff.

So I think that I don't worry about too much because there's an event horizon I can't go back. It looks like the Big there's an event horizon i can't go back before it looks like the big bang was a event horizon that we can't really look beyond right now we might be able to right i think some very good physicists have thought about this and brian as well might have thought about the limits of that um but i i think that there's enough cool stuff happening within our universe that we don't need to evoke external stuff what i think is important is on our lineage of life in the universe where we are we have created some

incredibly interesting things from cultural artifacts to technology to the things that we are able to manipulate in our surroundings for me um i share desire of some people that we want to make sure that the consciousness evolution biology our technology could live on as long as possible right i'm i don't want to say i necessarily agree with elon because i don't know what elon's going to be saying next week but but you know i think it the the and I don't necessarily think that making humanity multi-planetary. I think making technology multi-planetary is probably a good way to get there. But if we can make origin of life bombs and just infect the universe with life, I think that would be cool. Oh, I see what you're saying.

Yeah. So I think there's other things. You know, I'm not a creationist, but I want to be one. All right, wait. I want to create life. Okay. If I want to create life, because I'm a creationist, I'm not a creationist.

I don't believe in God, but I want to be God. But hold on. Remove for a second God as a construct of any organized religion or how it's talked about among humans. And instead focus on God as one thing, which is that it's the all-being knowledge in whatever form that is. What is the mechanism of God? I mean, again, what's the mechanism? There isn't. But hold on.

Like, it's the one thing that had the knowledge to make this happen. And maybe the Big Bang is fucking a billion layers below what was started before that. And we can't even conceive that. Maybe it's not just assume for a second, the big bang was to start. Like, do you, you have this thing you talk about where you have wonder. So you have emotion, you have feeling, you have, you have joy, you have sadness, you have all these things that are so innately human to our consciousness. Do you think that something, and again, you may not have the direct evidence to be able to support this, but do you think, as someone who said, like, I don't believe in God, removing how you construct God from organized religion, do you think that something that is like a God or some form of creator, that's a better word to use, could have started this process wherever that start may have been. No, I don't see the need for it. So do you think, are you in the Lawrence Krauss camp

that something came from nothing? No. So how, but how can... I mean, I don't know, right? I have lots of friends who are religious. I don't look down on them. I think Lawrence Krauss takes a rather extreme view, right? He's hilarious. Everyone has beliefs, right?

Yes. But I don't believe in a creator with knowledge. I do believe that the universe is creating knowledge, and I want to know why. But where does it start? Exactly. That's why I'm asking where the origin of life is. Isn't that cool?

Yes. But, like, for the origin of life to have not had some form of creator. So, you know, the God you're looking for is actually emerging. God is a meme created by human culture. And that's kind of cool, right? God is kind of a catch-all term for helping us understand that we don't understand everything yeah and i think the pursuit of knowledge is not an act of killing god but an act of replacing that that ghost that we've been given because humans have got more

control but we might get cancer and die that we can't but in the future we might be able to say oh actually i can intervene on that and you will no longer die why do we have death then if there's not something that is creating not all biological entities die i mean i mean the bacteria in your guts they're 4.2 billion years old. If you think about it, the first bacteria divided into two, and they divided into... So they all enter sperm? No, no, no. They just keep dividing, dividing, dividing. So there's a link.

So the bacteria in your gut are billions of years old. Right, but it's not literally billions of years old. Yes, literally billions of years old. So they are in our sperm. What do you mean because for me to be created there had to be a sperm or no when it comes to sex so sex requires death so but i'm saying whether but some life forms on earth some life forms on earth because the bacteria is spontaneously dividing right that spontaneous dividing because i say to people all

right how old are the bacteria in your gut they'll say oh about 20 minutes because they divide every 20 minutes but now i know 4.2 billion years now they're like, no, 4.2 billion years old. They're like, what? They're like, oh, there's a lineage, because that bacteria came from previous bacteria. And they're physically connected. Obviously, they're diluted now, because the methudas come in.

Yes. They come in. For you, obviously, human beings are procreate by sexual reproduction. So two parents give your offspring. The parents can then die. They don't need to keep going. You know, the fact, why do we need to die?

I mean, death, you don't die if you have children, you know, and those children carry on making children and keep going. Your lineage will carry on. The fact that you see yourself as an entity, it's just the ego is generated by evolution to stop you killing yourself long enough to have kids. Ego is generated by evolution to stop you killing yourself long enough to have kids.

Yeah. I actually agree with that. I mean, it's just an illusion, right? I want to put as many Easter eggs in the future as I possibly can. I have maximum autonomy right now. I can control my arms and legs and I don't think and so on, you know, and I can do stuff. But that doesn't mean that the causal chains I set up with Chemify, with my research, assembly theory, won't live on way longer than me, right? If they're useful.

So ideas are living forms of you too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I agree with that too. So I think that God is a kind of, you know, I don't need God, but I need to know, or I want to know what it is about the universe that allows us to turn inanimate matter into biology. And I'm going to say, for me, the meaning of life is persistence. If you can persist as long as you can, right? And yes, humans may hack away.

We may not need to die in the end. We should be able to fix aging to some degree. I don't know when. That's what Brian Johnson's trying to do. I'm sure. Maybe Brian Johnson with Chemify will cure aging. There you go. Shameless self-plug.

But whatever. So we have solved a lot of things through technology it's amazing what we've done um but yeah there's no need for god but we don't need to tell people who believe in god they're stupid because that's not helpful and also not true sometimes i wonder if the greatest you know i i guess like like the greatest trick ever pulled on mankind is that science and religion are in opposition to each other. Because even – like let's go with the definition we've laid out of science all day, which is that we're constantly finding new ways to think we're right about something later to be proved wrong on the road to eventually be proven right. Simple way of putting it. It could be the same thing with religion though too.

And both – the reason I say it, it's interesting that like they're put against each other is because both are seeking the same answer what's the origin of it all what is our meaning and why are we here i i don't so i don't know if that's true i think they should so i think religion is basically a meme used by is it was a technology to control and same like what people are using right now right technology to control there's arguments for that and i do think that the fact that people have kind of falsely or maybe inappropriately taken their wonder and put it into religion is a is a failing on humanity failing and that there is an opportunity for us to say i mean we religion is religion is actually a really bad thing right religion um that puts cultures in conflict and that can be used to be a bad thing yeah yeah so

the idea so the idea that we have these religious factions and they have different cultural standards and not all humans are equal in these religions right it's just for me, you know, I want all humans to have equal rights. Sure, absolutely. Irrespective of any physical attributes, right? Yes. So I think that's a really good thing. And religion, where religion kind of pits people against themselves on that is bad.

Now, the fact that maybe in science that we are not very good at allowing people to ask the wonder questions gives space for religion. But we should. You know, in Eastern philosophy, certainly a lot of that is quite good. So I think that if you replace religion with, I don't know, me, my religion is curiosity. Like, why does that happen? Why does it work? What's the question? I want to keep asking questions. I don't know, me, my religion is curiosity. Like, why does that happen? Why does it work?

What's their question? I want to keep asking questions. I don't think religion asks questions. They give you... Dogma. They give you labels and things. So I don't think religion is asking the why question. It's just telling you.

So I think religion is anti-curiosity, and that's why I have sympathy for Krauss and for Dawkins, because they find religion a kind of a way of – another way of stopping you from being critical, being a critical thinker. It's also how you behave with it though. I always say this. The majority of people I know who are involved in organized religion use it for peace and good in their life and are good people because of it, which I think is awesome. I'm going to call them – we'll even be like liberal with our terms here i'm going to call them the 90 what human history has proved to us though is that maybe it's less than 10 but just for the

sake of round numbers that 10 that uses it for power for control for absolutely sticking to dogma and saying no no you can't ask any questions about how this is written because that's the way it is yeah that's where we have all the problems and by the way that's where all the wars the fucking fake fights for power happen that that cause that cause terrible things in the world and that's why i also have some huge problems with organized religions like you i just find it sad that like something that could be used even if if it weren't right, could be used for goodness for someone to live out a good life while they're here could be taken advantage of by a powerful few who then ruin it for everybody. Well, the same with what we see in social media and so on right now. There are people who are spiritual and curious and science hasn't given them the answer. And they go to religion or have that type of dialogue.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Right. There's nothing wrong with thinking about bigger things and what is there beyond our material reality. What I would like, what I personally think is there's nothing beyond our material reality. But there are really interesting things that happened in our material reality, which are amazing. You know, I think I like a quote of Roger Penrose,

where he says, I'm a materialist, but I don't understand what the material does. Right. So Roger thinks that the brain is also, that consciousness isn't computable, but he's kind of pulling all kinds of weird mechanistic stuff because he lives in the universe where time doesn't exist when a universe where time doesn't exist you have to make you have to bring it invoke collapse of the wave function or

some other thing i think it's much simpler than that but the fact the universe has produced objects that can ask that the the fact the universe can itself think through us is mind-blowing. That's for me, you know, how did that happen? I want to know why, and I want to answer that question. Or I want to contribute to a body of thought, help that happen. Because if humans can help position themselves

into where they exist in the universe, what our culture is doing, and we can understand how technology and philosophy and science in it relate, we're gonna basically have an incredibly interesting future. Yeah. Because, you know, we're gonna understand how evolution works. We're gonna understand

why we want to go to war occasionally, why we want to do these things, and how we can replace those things, right? You know, we... Human suffering does not need to be a necessary future for us. We do not need to have wars in the future. Agreed. You know, the fact we have wars right now and we have, you know, we have inadequate, inequitable distribution of resources,

it's kind of weird given that we can make so much stuff. You know, there's not a shortage of so much stuff you know there's not a shortage of food on planet earth there's not a shortage of fuel it's not a shortage of anything really but who gets a hold of it there's there's as you said a distribution that currently is not sustainable if it continues as it goes but that's the beautiful thing about that that lack of sustainability is it creates problems to be solved which allow us to build new technologies that make us more sustainable, have this hierarchy of things. Like the fact that machine learning right now uses these horrible data centers just chugging out and heating up the planet. And it was like, we need to spend $3 trillion on energy.

It's like, no, no, should we actually develop a new architecture? Because the human brain is pretty good at being intelligent. It uses less than 20 watts. And so we'll get there. And I think that what we shouldn't do is demonize people for burning fossil fuels and do it for progress. I really don't understand

our job, my job as a scientist, as a technologist, as an entrepreneur, as take knowledge and create cool stuff that's going to help humanity and create value. Absolutely. That's a good way to look at it. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's also like a problem of people want the answer

to be the extreme on everything, and that's what the Internet's done to us, right? So it's not enough that like, okay, maybe we're doing X, Y, and Z wrong with fossil fuels. No, we've got to ban all of them. And something has to change in our society. That evolutionary process of how we use the internet has to change. Like I look at it this way and maybe this is an oversimplified way of looking at it.

But when it comes to the internet, whether you're an 18-year-old or an 80-year-old, we're all just teenagers. Like internet 2.0 really started with facebook you could say myspace but let's say it's like that 050607 area that means that here in 2025 people who were zero years old using it which was all of us whether it was your grandma or a kid we are all 18 years old now yeah so we have not matured in how we use this tool and how we work things out and i think as we mature people will start to we'll start to see some of the errors and patterns like i've seen a step back and just outright cancellation of people because people got very sick of like just automatically canceling everyone the minute they say something wrong not to say it still doesn't happen but like

it's not like it was five years ago when we were 12 and 13 and just saying, fuck this. You know what I mean? So maybe there will be a change there that could be for the good. Yeah. Look, again, as we talked earlier about the printing press, initially what was printing press? Print Bibles. What's the internet used for? Manipulate people, right?

Yes. Pack your dopamine. I think that some – so I think we'll all agree that nicotine – smoking is bad for you, right? Yeah. And smoking gives you lung cancer. It gives you heart problems, right? All sorts of problems. So I think that we're going to see, we're going to find in maybe 20 or so years time that the way that we use social, that's our social media consumption, TikTok, Snapchat,

Facebook, X, Twitter, whatever we want to call it, is going to be found to be so bad for our psychological well-being that it will actually, will probably actually ban it, right? Ban it? Like in the UK, we ban smoking, right, in public places. And now we're ban smoking for, I think there's like, my son will never be legal for him to buy cigarettes. Because they've changed the age so you phase it out, right?

That's a product you use, though, that is detrimental for your health. Not to say your point about social media being detrimental for our health is bad, but like it involves speech. So don't you think that's an issue? Well, this is the thing. We're going to have to evolve it. So is nicotine bad for you? Well, nicotine is toxic, but you can deliver it in different forms, which are safer, and people like it, right?

So I don't think vaping is much safer, but it might be better. I don't know. But anyway, so the problem that we have with social media is the way it hacks our kind of our different systems right our kind of our kind of our instinct systems for reward right and attention these these things you can show that they're hacking and they're affecting people's psychological abilities right so there will be people will start to say well do we want our kids to be hacked?

Do we want to be manipulated by social media? How do we create an environment where we have access to these tools, to the fun things? Like I bought YouTube Premium because I got fed up with my kids just watching all the adverts. There's so much content. Game changer. So much content on YouTube. It's like if I want to fix anything, yeah, I could read a manual. I could just type it to YouTube.

Or go to YouTube. Yeah, it's fantastic. It is a revolutionary tool. Yes. Right? So not to say there's not daft stuff on there, and I'm not saying YouTube is perfect, but it's quite good. Yes.

X has become horrible to use because basically it's completely unfiltered. But you can if you pay attention to your, it's like, no, I don't want to see people getting shot all the time. Please remove that, right? So there's things you can do. And self-select. So I think the question is how do we help people have a much nicer psychological environment because these tools are doing real harm. But again, I'm not a but again i'm not an um a psychologist i'm not an educational psychologist i'm not a psychotherapist um i'm a chemist trying

to find the origin of life yeah but i do but i am fascinated with the emergence of new technologies and how they affect our society and i think that we will deal with that i think right now we've got a power struggle but going on between you know regulation um like you know i don't want to feel bad about burning fossil fuels if you're going to regulate and say well don't burn fossil fuels and make it illegal then fine i'll comply i want to obey the law um but until you make it illegal i'm going to burn as much fossil fuels i can and why am i going to burn it because i'm going to generate knowledge and if you allow me to generate knowledge by burning fossil fuel i might just help generate the next technology that allows us to leave fossil fuels behind so that's what i'm saying so then banning it that's an

argument against the regulation of banning it no exactly you don't want to regulate against it what you want to do is you want to basically you want to manage right? The risk of CO2 in the atmosphere increasing, the temperature on the planet, so such that you're going to have mass migration. Look, the good news about CO2 increase is we're going to have more, the planet's going to get greener. There's going to be more life on Earth, not less.

Bad news is we'll probably have to all move to Northern Siberia. And I'm like, you know, that's a lot of people, right? And there's people gonna there's gonna be waters water shortages and you know we just need to think sensibly about how we're going to clean up the planet right now we don't have enough energy to remove the co2 from planet earth but when we get to fusion we'll be able to fix all that co2 because we'll have enough energy to do it and then we'll be able to think about where to place it.

So there's all these different structures. Like, you know, Victorian England was a horrible place in terms of coal and air pollution. But we cleaned it up. Yes. We got there. There were new technologies. So, again, we have to build new technologies as fast as we can. Like what I'm doing with Chemify, just building more molecular technologies.

Cleaner ways to make molecules faster. Great. So I just think… Innovation wins. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. we can like what i'm doing with chemify just building more molecular technologies cleaner ways to make molecules faster great so i just think innovation win yeah yeah exactly so there's a lot to be done there but um you know i have i have so many day jobs right one of them is probably not being a uh i like to not being a i suppose a uh an arbiter of how our culture should evolve. But I am part of the culture and I am thinking. And what I am just saying to everyone is, please, let's enable each other to think critically. The gift we can give each other is the ability to think critically

and not just make stuff up because it sounds good. Yes. And I think, again, I think to your point, as we mature with these tools we've been given, there will get to a point where people who – people will eventually see the chickens come home to roost on those who just throw around things that make no sense. And eventually you'll have enough movement where people break with that later and say, wait a minute, they said all this stuff was true. And it's verifiably not that you will form people who are like, maybe I shouldn't just look at 280 characters and make a determination of what someone thinks. Not to say I'm going to go suddenly be some expert reading all the peer reviewed papers that are written sometimes in

another language, but there's a middle ground there. Yeah, I have so many people who like use my ex account as an argument. They say, oh, I thought you were a horrible person. I'm like, I just tweet random things to offend you into thinking, right? I'm like... I just tweet random things to offend you into thinking. That's a bio. You should make that your ex bio.

Yeah. I mean, I try not to so much now because, I mean, ex is pretty noisy at the moment. It's very noisy. Yeah. And also, you know, people, I think, went through the pandemic. We went through quite an interesting shock during the pandemic. But I don't know. It's fascinating to watch.

I think that we need to stop overgeneralizing on some things and let humans generate new technologies and take it from there. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe I should make a new type of quantum teleportating, computing, computing. You'll get there. Multiverse. After this raise, you'll get there.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We put a pin a little earlier in time. You started to talk about that and then we didn't get into it to it how people have some especially like scientists that they have some interesting theories on this you mentioned sir roger penrose and like i think you said like it doesn't exist like what is your theory on time and what it is i mean i guess i can. If you want, we can go to assembly theory because if you want... If it's a part of it, then yes. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, assembly theory is kind of like, for me, it helped me get where I am. And I mean, I've always, since I was a kid, felt that I'm existing in a flux of time, right? And I always... And for me, time is non-negotiable. It's just it's not a it's not a coordinate. It's an action. Right. It's it's the process of change. And I think physics, the way of, you know, it opens up a new way of looking at the world.

Okay. When did – I'm trying to think the order we should do this in. The two questions would be obviously can you define assembly theory as best as possible for the layman to understand? And secondly, whether you want to answer this first or after you answered the first one, when did you, how did you come up with this? Was this like a long time thinking about it and it kind of morphed into, oh, shit,

or was this like a kind of moment? I think both. I think, like I say, I've've only ever had one idea it's just no one's noticed um i um was always fascinated by the spirit in the object you know this kind of things have a they have a and i i didn't realize i was solely poorly educated and i'm and also didn't read enough philosophy. Right. I think, you know, Leibniz and and Henri Bergson and a few others kind of basically saw the ghost in the machine. And but I'll tell you a story about when I was younger, I became obsessed with survival kits. A bit like Sam Altman building his bunker i wanted to go one step further and say look what is the minimum amount of stuff i would need to reproduce my technology so that i could live comfortably now let's not think about microprocessors and chat gpt and all

that stuff but what i mean how could i produce my own pharmaceuticals clean water food tools shelter you know what would i need and so like basically i could have a list of things that i would need and then critically i'd also want to make sure that they would self be self um uh perpetuating like i would need machines that would allow me to make the machines that make the machine so it's like so what is the minimum i need right the minimum amount of stuff i would need to basically have a self-sustaining society for lee and then i thought okay that's cool i can think of imagine that it's like now what how could i compress that down because that's quite a lot of stuff yes and so you know and i'm and i and i remember uh i had this survival book on how to survive. And then I thought, oh, I could have this massive farm and food and equipment and forest and all this stuff and water. And I was like, well, why can't I compact this down into what I can put on the back of a truck?

And then can I get it into a briefcase? And then I go smaller into a case. And then how could I get into a matchbox? And that was really the invention of assembly theory because in the matchbox and i guess looking at it is why i became obsessed in the matchbox i was like what is the minimum set of tools i could use to make other tools to make other tools to make other tools to make other tools to recreate my way of life now so what is the minimum i would need and that would interact with the environment as given pretty much anywhere so i could just survive and you know it was a razor blade a mirror uh maybe some some cable you know

just all these things i could get together so that was kind of really in a way if you assembly theory is just um a way of saying saying what is the minimum amount of stuff I need, amount of knowledge or things or objects I need? When I combine them together, I can generate other things that will act back on the chain to generate other things. So it's this recursion within a line. So it's a bit, so the assembly theory in one line just basically says the past matters.

But I'm like, okay, we probably need a little bit more information than that. So what I mean is like every event that is occurring has some function of the events that have happened in the past. I call them contingency, right? So and then the things that happened before that. And so and if you could map that and put it on a line on a graph and count the information required at each step to make the next step happen, you would be able to kind of explain the mechanism where you could go from something to a quite complex object. So that's kind of assembly theory in a nutshell. Now, how I got to it was I flipped the problem around. And the problem was this, that I obviously want to know why we're here. Well, that led me to origin of life.

That led me to understand how did life get started. But then people started kind of getting trapped in defining life. Like, you know, life needs to be this. It needs to replicate. It needs to have a metabolism it needs to have error correction and you got all this list of requirements for life and i was like gee whiz um that's a really long list and everyone was arguing about what the requirements are and i was like is there one thing that life does that non-life doesn't do that would allow you to tell that a system was alive or not

and and it's um and then another one line that unpacked which i think was a guy a guy i met at a conference a guy called adam savage i think okay myth busters guy yeah and i was telling him about assembly theory for an afternoon he's like ah what you mean is that um life is this thing that creates complex shit at scale that's that's actually not that's kind of along the lines of how i was picturing yeah yeah so so what i was doing i said oh you've got all these things you call bit of life right what life does and i'm a chemist and i asked myself this one question how complex does a molecule need to be before you go that molecule could not have formed randomly

in the environment without any process of evolution or technology meaning you're not going to the lowest level you're going to the lowest level of what we can define yes i'm defining like the the molecule is a complex enough object now the beginning that really confused people because the physicists went no hang on in a finite universe so i have to get this right because i'm probably wrong in a finite universe where you have infinite time every state is searchable in a finite universe where you have infinite time, every state is searchable. In a finite universe where you have infinite time, you can go to every single possible combination. That's what the physicists say.

And I say, for me, my intuition is like, no fucking way. That's impossible. You can't do that. And the physicists are like, what are you talking about? Yeah, why are you saying it's impossible? Of course you can. You have a finite universe, finite, and you have infinite time, infinite. Look.

And I'm like, yeah, OK. But that doesn't actually happen, right? So then when I realized, if I then qualified and said, look, as a chemist, the reason I viscerally felt this, I really had to do this over a number of years. I realized that when chemists measure molecules, they don't measure one molecule. They measure a large number of identical molecules. They have to. That's how the technique works.

It's like, ah. So what I mean is, if I have a complex molecule that I have a lot of copies, and I know I've got a lot of copies, there's going to be a threshold at which when I have so many copies and I have so complicated complicated it can't possibly have assembled itself by chance and like the example you could use would be an iphone like if you go to mars and you find a thousand iphones or if you found 30 000 teslas or you find you know um uh like all of van gogh's paintings or something like this there's gonna be a threshold, huh, this did not randomly occur.

And that was the birth of assembly theory. So then what I did is I then suddenly said, then I took this stuff and I said, well, how can I measure complexity in molecules? And I found a way to do it using chemistry used spectroscopy. So spectroscopy is a process of shining light on things. And you can then basically, the molecule absorbs the light. And the more parts the molecule has, the more colors it absorbs.

Because of the rules of quantum mechanics. And so that's where assembly theory came out. And basically, we came up with the assembly equation and worked out that suddenly, if I can take a sample and I can find a molecule that has more than, say, 15 parts in it, and I can measure it in the lab, I know that biology produced it. this would be going towards explaining creation itself because you're going to the molecular level and saying there are unique molecules that we can prove in a lab that because there's now a bigger supply of them, we know it had to come from that, meaning like it's selected for that molecule and expanded. Yeah, and then we'll basically look at what is a minimum configuration

where you literally put atoms in, individual atoms, or a lot of atoms aren't many bonds just simple stuff and you get complex stuff out like yeah like the cell is literally a complexity generator it just builds stuff right it doesn't infinitely build stuff because you don't need it or it's just enough for the combinatorial space but there's a lot of features on this right it's so deep in that but but i had to start somewhere so And remember, I was kind of doing this a lot on my own and then a lot in collaboration with Sarah Walker and her team. When did she come in?

How many years into the process? I think I kind of materialized. So I would say I went back to my childhood building survival kits. It was always in my head. And then when I was going into the origin of life stuff and artificial life stuff and everyone was arguing about defining life and NASA wanted to define life so it could go measure it. I was like, there's something else we need to do here. And I think I started to do that about 2014 i met sarah before then and we did a we she organized a conference on

reconceptualizing origins of life and but i met her before a nasa meeting where she was talking about information and life and life and she's an incredibly um interesting speaker in that she's very she speaks very fast she's incredibly articulate but she abstracts in a way that you know that you're being told something interesting but you don't really understand what it is no no no it's much more elegant than that it's really interesting and then when i met her i was like i have no clue what you're talking about but it sounds good and she was like what and i'm quite a you know i'm quite a critical character so so people i think knowing our collaboration think it's quite funny because like how can you guys possibly work

together because she is really nice and very articulate and you're just super critical and i'm like but that's not exactly how it worked right i knew that sarah from listening to sarah she understood there's something missing in physics physics the physics we have right now isn't sufficient to explain um the origin of life and how life works and I knew that the origin of life people were trapped in series of dogmas and then so we started talking and then um and I was we we got, we wrote some grants together that were funded. And our team started working together. Assembly theory was coming through at that time. I kind of invented it with one of my, I actually invented assembly theory with my, with an administrator in my group.

An administrator? Yeah. Not even one of the scientists? No. You're saying invented the name or invented the actual no and did the work like so i was like you know almost a sucker for the smartest secretary i've ever seen um so this is the guy who is my financial admin guy i hired him and i was talking to him one day and he was telling me i'm not sure if you want me to say but probably it's okay i

probably won't mind but he had a it turned out he had a degree has a degree in physics and math convenient and i was like why are you just doing that come on let's talk about science and he was like what and so so anyway i was building the concept for assembly theory um and you know from a chemistry experiment like chopping up molecules and i'm building the algorithms and and he had a go at writing the first algorithm with me and he actually got the algorithm wrong it didn't it was the but the i it was pretty much there we were arguing backwards and forwards and then we we got the algorithm a bit better and then um he actually started a phd i guess a year or two later he got his phd not okay so he made the shift yeah yeah he's still doing financial administration in the group.

But he also does research now as a postdoc. Wow. What a story. Yeah, he's a great guy. And then, but then in that, then Sarah became involved because I realized that actually, although I invented it, I mean, what does that mean? I'm like, well, probably Sarah also invented something similar, if not the same thing. But I guess who cares who invented what?

We both saw that there was a problem that needed to be solved. And science is about problems. Sarah saw there was a problem in physics with information. And I saw the problem in origin of life with dogma and defining life. And that's how we started working together. And our teams have been working together ever since on that and it's kind of interesting because again our teams are like slightly different cultures and slightly different interactions but that's good you need that yeah yeah yeah i think sarah's team are beginning to realize that i have strong

views weakly held so so it's because they're like oh you know sarah says well i think my team will want to do this and they're worried about what you think i'm like fuck that who cares i mean as long as that you could they could explain to me what the theater what they're doing theory wise and there's some you know there's lots of things in assembly theory which are kind of very i have a very strong intuition for but i wasn't able to explain so like for instance i know what you mean yeah so so let me give you one thing which is kind of mind-blowing even now so when you have a molecule um and you chop the molecule up the molecule um there's a shortest path to make that molecule so that means

if you have all the parts let's say you make the molecule and it has you know i don't know all these different bits you can chop it up but then there is a really convenient way to make the molecule on the shortest path and for me the shortest path was really important and my team were like no it's the average path i'm like no no no it's not the average path that's nonsense it's the shortest path and the reason why the shortest path is important is you can measure the shortest path. It's not possible to measure an average path very easily with a molecule because you don't know all the construction ways. But there is a threshold where you can have no shortest path. You can't go below a shortest path.

So that kind of was really interesting. So I guess the assembly theory says, hey, complexity doesn't arise by chance when you have it in abundance. You have the assembly equation, which explains that. There's this thing called the assembly index, which is the number of steps you take on a graph, the shortest number of steps using the building blocks to make the object. So whether the object's made out of Lego or letters or molecules or atoms and bonds, you can do that. And that's how we've been working on assembly theory but where time comes in yeah that's the fourth time today time comes in is like we realize that

if i've got a molecule and then and the molecule is quite complicated and obviously we know the molecule was made by evolution let's say and take a molecule like Taxol, which is a natural product, a secondary metabolite, made in the Pacific yew tree in the bark. Just happens to be quite a good anti-cancer drug. It's devilishly complicated. It has lots of chiral centers, which means it has handed this, right? It has left-handed and right-handed things in it. It has this very complicated kind of structure.

It would take a while for a chemist to make it the enzymes in the pacific u tree can make it it's great right but it's one of those molecules that can't form by chance in a random universe in any abundance it would take too long right even if you have it you know finite universe in infinite time having taxol together in one small volume is just not feasible right good and um and so you know it i then i kind of imagine that that um then now we just take that molecule out and just imagine it can exist without life you can then the assembly index tells you how unlikely it is so now what that means is like if I do all these combinations together, it also gives you a fundamental limit on the amount of time that needs to have passed to make the object.

And now I've got this, the taxol is proof that there was a history, causal structures, enzymes and evolution, and it puts a time limit on how long it took for that to be made, right? And so what I suddenly realized is that evolution requires time. In biology, duh, of course, but if you go to physics and say, evolution requires time because there's contingency in history, the physics are like, well, there's no contingency in the universe why do they say that you have to talk to the physicists about this because they say that it's immersion and they use all these words

because in a universe in physics there is no time right see that's never made sense to me it's like how do you explain then... I could see if you were getting to some of the stuff that you say is not falsifiable. Like, if you got to some of the multiverse and interdimensional stuff, okay, maybe then there's an argument that time is just like a constantly shifting thing. But if we're dealing with what we can falsify and with what we can see in this universe, I'm talking right now. In a second, you're going to

respond and talk that is categorically after no what i just say in the block universe so bertrand russell you might want to get bertrand russell up and try bertrand russell and causation but bertrand russell had made a fund had a he looks like a g a famous. A famous phrase where he said, causation is like the monarchy. Looks good, but isn't needed. Right? Looks good. Interesting. Right?

Because Bertrand Russell was a logician. He actually was a really good mathematician. A logician? Yeah. He basically used logic and mathematics. And he wrote Principia Mathematica, right? And that was going to be the book that explains all the universe of math. Sounds smart as well.

And then Gödel came along and went, no. And what Gödel showed is that you can't, that mathematics isn't a closed system. It's very complicated and very nuanced. And it's basically about. What does it mean, closed system? It's about understanding how to prove something and if something is true or not. And it basically explains the way that layers in language work.

It's quite interesting. But if we go back to causation, physics think that time is a coordinate, that you have this thing called the block universe, and you can go forward in time and you can go back in time. Meaning we could time travel. That's what they... Hypothetically.

Yeah, that's what they say, right? So what physicists say, if the universe, if physics is deterministic, then basically our conversation right now was preordained by the Big Bang. Yes. Right? So we're not creating anything new what physics cannot deal with is creativity and this is why computation based on physics using llms and all that stuff to my get create to distill out creativity there is this this is why this

argument is kind of comes come full circle quite large right now right because of course if you have if you know the history you can machine learn on it you can milk the history but you still can't produce this produce the few produce predict the future so now this is why you have this interplay of different things so assembly theory says hey complicated things can't just in in any abundance don't just happen they needed a history that history is captured in what we call causation, right? And we make an assembly space, right? And in assembly theory, we have four universes. The first universe is like the universe of everything. Like all, everything is possible in this universe. You have infinite universe, infinite time, infinite space. So all possible configurations can exist, but we don't see that. That's the combinatorial universe, right?

Even the laws of physics in the assembly universe, they can have all different laws of physics. Then you have the assembly possible. And that is like, okay, given the laws of physics that we have, what objects are allowed, right? So assembly possible says like, you know, the quantum mechanics has these energies, there's all this stuff, right?

Carbon can have a certain number of bonds, blah, blah, blah. So you can have combinatorial access to the universe. This is like now there's no time in this universe. You can just literally pull on every object in the universe and put it together. Then you have the assembly. So you've got assembly universe, everything. Assembly possible. Then you've got assembly contingent, which is like,

oh no, you can't just have objects that were made way at the end of the universe at the beginning. That's cheating. You've got to do the work. You've got to do the time. So assembly contingent says not all objects are available at each point in time. You have to make them. So the first time you make an object, you have to go through the steps to make the object. And then you have the final universe, which is the universe that we live in which is assembly observed so that means you can make observations to go all these complicated objects they required a certain amount of time to get made so if you take say like some of your technology here if i was to reproduce the technology how much time would it take what's the shortest path

to go from sand to a microprocessor? So what assembly theory basically says is like complex things in abundance aren't spontaneous. They require evolution to make them selection or technology. And technology is connected to evolution selection, number one. It says that also complex objects have an amount of time you have to go through, a number of things you have to do that's non-negotiable. Now, you can have different buds of time where they're not interacting right just like different you just want processes to occur and then um assembly theory says these assembly spaces where you can imagine these objects what they're going to do next now the assembly possible or sorry the assembly possible to the assembly

contingent is very interesting the assembly possible actually by the way is the same as david deutsch's constructor theory it is the assembly possible basically says all transformations in that universe are allowed to act on things and you can make stuff but that assembly possible is a universe with no time and constructor theory which is a way of instantiating quantum information actually in the universe and making computation fundamental says that you don't need any

time. But again, if you need time then if because you don't have access to the future you don't have infinite resource it says that the universe itself is not computable. Wait a second. Access to the future, meaning you can't go there right now, but

that doesn't mean that the future is not going to happen. The future is dependent critically on the past, right? Yes. And if the universe is expanding in time, the only way you can get to the future is actually by doing the operation, by going to the future, by allowing it to happen. Whereas the computationists say, no, no, I can simulate it. And physicists say, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's why they say it's infinite. Yeah. So you have this interesting, the argument we're having is that time doesn't exist on one hand because you've got, if you think about it, the four

things that physics need they need um they need order at the beginning so somehow the big bang was magically ordered and all the things were going to happen in the future were encoded the big bang so this is god if you're a classical physicist today you are religious i would argue right they made see that yeah you you're saying that all of the future is encoded in the past therefore god did it because god had to give you all the knowledge yeah right if you're a super determinist right so you'd say basically number one you're saying god did it number two you're saying time is emergent causation is emergent right and and so and and that you have to have this order now you could replace those four things with one thing to say time is real

and hey presto you explain physical reality there is no time travel it's and that's a that's a nonsense term right because? Because time is... You believe that's not possible. No, it's not possible. It's just not possible. Well, you can travel into the future. You can use time dilation. You can use relativity, right? Yes. You can use... You don't think we can go into the past and manipulate because you believe time is actually on a scale unlike physics that's just like it's yeah it's not it's just not possible time is not a thing that you can it's not a coordinate it is a in um a non-negotiable

process we are all involved in yeah chain and that's where i really love the essentially believe in time the way a normal human does yes rather than what the physicists may try to exactly and i remember. And I remember in my A-level physics argument, my physics teacher about time, she said, no, no, you don't understand time. Time is just about measuring change. I'm like, but no, no, no, evolution says, and we're just taught this. And I think that the fundamentals of physics and quantum mechanics have a problem. As a a chemist though publishing this this is your theory you came up with obviously like i think anytime anyone introduces a new theory they label it controversial so that's kind of par for the course but you got a lot of shit for this for bringing out this idea do you think a big part of that was because it was that almost like religious

inclusion thing where they're like, well, we're physicists. He's a chemist. What the fuck does he know? The paper that we wrote, and so the paper I must say, right, is a – and I'm not just saying because I'm not saying it's not just my fault. But actually that paper, I'm very proud of that paper, and I collaborated very – with Sarah on that. We created that with our teams together, with Abhishek Sharma from my team and then Daniel Sagal from her team worked together. It was a brilliant paper.

And when that paper was built on the experiment, so that I guess the paper went beforehand. Stuart actually, the administrator, became a researcher, was on the paper, which did the measurements for, we kind of measured the assembly theory work, had experimental data that showed it worked. We published that paper a few years before. So that gave us the confidence to build the theory. And we then built the theory or cemented the theory. And then when we published it, kind of, and what happened is that computer scientists said no.

The physicists said no. The chemists said no. The biologists said we don't like it. And the creationists went, no, it's not creationist enough. We said no the chemist said no the biologist said we we we don't like it and the creationist went no it's not creationist enough we said no so basically you had five different disciplines angles yeah but and they all said it was really badly written now sarah she's written a fantastic book called life as no one knows it and everyone should buy a copy there you go i love that plug yeah yeah i hope you don't mind. Not at all. Very good book.

I'd love to have her in here. And she, one of the reasons I love working with Sarah and her team is they have a different perspective from a different discipline. And her way of framing things, because we're stuck, right? We think we've invented a new thing. So then, do you then invent a word and annoy everyone that you've invented the word? Or then do you try and describe the new thing

using current words? Yes. So you broke whatever you do. So Sarah and I, we collaborated quite a lot on writing the paper and we really painstakingly went over it. So when the paper got published and people went, this is the worst written paper ever,

and we were just like, eh. And the people were quite rude, right? They were quite vitriolic. They would never do that. Come on. People aren't rude about this. But they were just like, they were like, they were like, it was, they were like angry.

And I was like, and that made me, that tickled me pink. I was like, that's so funny. You're so angry by a new idea. Get a life. I mean, come on, get out, get out. I know. Did any of it offend you though? Was there any of it that was surprising

that you felt like went beyond the pale? I was, I am, and I still am terrified it's all wrong. Like in an embarrassing way that we made a really stupid mistake. But you said that's what you want it to be. Sure, I want, but, so I've now got so far that of course I'm a human being, right? I have an ego as well, right?

I'm not, even though I know my ego is an illusion, it doesn't mean I don't suffer from it. So of course the scientist in me is like, that's awesome. People can attack it. Right. But also you've got the, the,

the Lee is stupid being told he's stupid since he was like five, six, seven, eight years old. Right. So I'm not sure. Right. I want to do new things.

And so it's kind of hard to do new things sometimes, but I'm like, I don't have anything to lose. Right. I'm really labeled as stupid anyway. So that's fine. it's kind of hard to do new things sometimes but i'm like i don't have anything to lose right i'm really labeled as stupid anyway so that's fine um and so of course assembly theory is wrong but it's not it's it's actually the it's probably not wrong it you know it's a the the paradigm which is shifting needs to be shift and it is a good tool to do it so i guess what

i'm saying to you is like i think very strongly the paradigm it's shifting is correct but i'm terrified that i might have misread it all right about it them wrong exactly um and of course assembly theory isn't the end of the story it's just the beginning. But assembly theory says time is fundamental. Contingency happens. And all it does, really, is it says, hey, everyone, there was evolution before biology. Because contingency in chemistry gives you a combinatorial space that expands and lots of things are possible. And that combinatorial space, interacting with the environment, invented biology. And the only bias went no it didn't it's like why i mean you're all creationists as well so you've got the

creationists which are the physicists you've got the creationist biologists they're all going to hate me for saying this but what else are they saying because if if assembly theory is wrong then how did the first cell form magic righttheory is thought wrong, how did the initial conditions have the construction of this and this all encoded? Magic? So come on, guys, you rational critical thinkers, put up a better theory or shut up. That's the point.

Yeah, shut up. And so that's why it's quite good fun. Yeah, you seem to be taking it in stride. Well, I want to be wrong because I will learn something. That's why my strong views are weakly held. Because Simonson says, ah. Even with the theory you've spent over a decade on. Yeah.

There's many more theories. I'm sure there's many more theories we can build. But the nice thing about it is humans, well, it's certainly making an impact. And I think, you know, we went through the initial storm. Everyone went, we don't like it. It's written badly. I'm like, all right, fine. We can do better.

Sarah and I have just finished the introduction to assembly theory that we're going to pre-print and put out there. Oh, very cool. I mean, assembly theory that we're going to pre-print and put out there. Oh, very cool. I mean, assembly theory, if you think about it, explains all sorts of things. It explains how memes evolve. It explains how capitalism is efficiency. The shortest path in capitalism is like, what is the most efficiency I can grind out of a system so I can beat my competitor?

Yes. Right? Like, what I'm trying to do in Chemify is like, I don't want to do manual labor for all the chemistry. What can I automate to make it easier to make complex molecules using repeating code? Because human beings follow the code of the universe. We're at the base molecular level and all of the actions that we take regardless of the context.

Yeah. That's fascinating. So, I mean, like assembly theory is not that complicated. It's like saying there's a history, and once the universe has invented a mechanism for something, if it can reuse that, that's more efficient than inventing it again. Is there anywhere in assembly theory that accounts for where intelligent life exists?

Meaning, like, is it beyond here, too? Are there aliens out there? Yeah, I think you will be able to measure intelligence using assembly theory. I think one of the reasons why I'm having a lot of fun with AI right now, because the AI people, they don't understand intelligence. They cannot measure it. Think about it. I'm going to make a series of statements now which are just completely hilarious, but I think you're right.

And I've been debating this with Sarah as well. Let's just imagine the universe and also it's gonna sound really grandiose and everyone's like lee's got such an ego he's gonna compare himself to einstein how dare he but i'm like sure you know einstein invented relativity einstein took a leap his leap was the speed of light is constant right from, we got all of relativity. Now, thanks to that, when we started to put satellites into space, namely GPS satellites, we put atomic clocks on them. And then we knew wherever they were, they would actually, they would not say this, we'd have to correct the time because they're frame dragging right so we knew that relativity basically um

change we have to account for the where they are in distance in the gravitational well and relativity helps us sort that out so we can keep track of our atomic clocks for our gps and we can work out where we're on earth lmsLMs, we just mine data from them. Yes. And we just basically think that there's... We just see there's this magical intelligence, because we don't understand the principle that is allowing this to work so well. So we're seeing frame dragging, but we don't know what it is. Assembly theory, if you applied it to LLMs and say, no, there is a way you can take all the information in the universe and compress

it on the shortest path what is the shortest way to generate sam i am sam i am do you like green eggs and ham right it's quite good i think there's only you know like a finite number of words that that dr zeus who's now cancelled but we can bring oh yeah jesus christ but um he wrote that book but it's great because you can work out the shortest path to generate that book. Yes. Right? And you can highly compress it. Some of the computational people that were arguing with me, in fact, there's just one troll who trolls and trolls and trolls and trolls.

And I don't know what's wrong. He needs to get a life a bit. It's saying assembly theory is plagiarist. You just plagiarized it. What did you plagiarize? So basically you have one troll that says assembly theory is both wrong and plagiarized and he invented it already.

And I'm like, hang on, but if you invented it already and it's wrong, are you not saying you invented something that was wrong? So we have all this stuff. So it's kind of funny. But basically they're saying the mathematics assembly theory is like um not new and uh and it's a bit like saying you know um i can the the mathematical representation of assembly theory exists in other things and some elements of it do, but the actual shortest path,

the graph is new. And that's kind of what, and for me, my leap, my leap is to realize, number one, that complexity and abundance doesn't happen by chance. And my second leap is that there is a shortest path and it can be measured.

And the fact we could measure it in the lab when, oh, I'm not entirely wrong. This is not a bad theory. Unlike some things in physics that we can't measure. I gave it some grounding. And I was like, hallelujah. Now, intelligence. What does intelligence do?

Intelligence builds on evolution. Intelligence creates a huge amount of complexity at scale. If we can find that I think there's a way we will be able to make an assembly meter for life, how complex, and we'll be able to make an assembly meter for creativity, which will also tell us about intelligence. So hold on, let's go back to the first one. So you can make an assembly meter for life and like how complex it is, meaning you can count molecules, making this it up, but you can count molecules by shooting your laser beam of life into the atmosphere not literally but figuratively to be like oh there's

a foreign planet and a galaxy over there and there's aliens living there yeah i think so i think we'll be able to do it pretty um quickly and unambiguously. How quick are we talking? I'm not going to fall into that trap again. But I think that once we have verified it and people got used to the statistical aspects, because assembly theory actually is able to give you a lot more certainty than you get from statistical analysis. So that's kind of cool. So you have this feature.

So you can measure life. Obviously, what comes from life, you get a kick in complexity. Like, I'm just finishing a paper. It's on the preprint archive right now where I apply the assembly theory to inorganic matter, to materials. And there are minerals out there. But actually, the most complex minerals known microprocessors you take silicon you etch them right you have all these different parts i have a high copy number the assembly equation is basically a function of you can get the assembly

equation up if you want if you put it into uh it's quite an interesting it's very simple equation um if you just type assembly equation into Google, it should immediately come up, although Bertrand is looking very... If you go to images, it'll probably put one of the equations. Yeah, there you go. The first one. So there you go.

Yeah, looks simple as well. So the assembly A is just a function of the object complexity AI. So that's the assembly index of the object I, right? And then it's a function of its concentration, the number of those objects, Ni, minus 1 over NT. Why did you come up with minus 1 there? Minus 1, I mean, it may not stay in the future, but it's just like if you only have one really complicated

thing, one-off, it can randomly occur, right? So I thought thought let's not count that in the amount of assembly as soon as you got two then it it's meaningful so it's basically just remove that off because random because you can't you assembly theory allows you to tell the difference between randomness and design and evolution which is another thing that blows the mind and it might be that actually in the equation, to make it what's called intensive, you remove the minus one and just say,

I has to be greater than one. You know, it's just me, you know, mathematical idiot as I am, right? But the assembly equation works very nicely. It allows you to quantify the amount of assembly, the amount of evolution. Assembly counts the amount of evolution assembly accounts the amount of evolution um that has been put into a system that produces the object and you can apply this to

things that are not from earth you're saying yeah for sure because again we we go back to this argument about finite finite um universe infinite time but again the copy number if aliens are creating artifacts that have a high assembly index and high copy number they cannot have a form by chance what's the mechanism meaning they'd have to have created yeah yeah so you can so i think assembly theory will help us understand intelligence as well so you think aliens do exist you think we're not alone in the universe i so let me be i yes that short answer But I also think that selection is a fundamental process in the universe. And selection is the thing that creates life, intelligence, and consciousness. Because selection through, you know, whether Darwinian evolution or technological evolution allows us to survive and win, right?

And it's that process that um um is really super important so selection exists everywhere in the universe and where there's selection there's complexification and when there's complexification there has to be some life and when there's some life inevitably some life becomes intelligent life now everyone says well earth took ages to become intelligent well we don't know that for sure. And we don't know if intelligence, what we've got now, there's a phase transition. Cognition of, you know, bacteria undergo cognition. It's just they don't remember very much of the past. What is intelligence?

Exactly. And so it comes back to this quantification. I like measuring stuff. Yes. If I can measure it, then I don't have to, you know, I can falsify it. And I then, you know, I get out of this kind of stupid argument where people going, you know, I'm going to make it LLM and it's intelligent. And, and look, it really has feelings. No, don't be a moron. All the people that wrote the text have feelings. The LLM is distilled that and makes you and has inspired the same emotion so all llms are is llms are evidence of life and intelligence and consciousness because consciousness entities needed to make them and that's my final word on the subject like no the llm is not conscious but the people that generate the data were and look you're measuring that isn't it beautiful that would be beautiful

provided you're right about that i hope you're're right, because it paints a picture of control. But there's no mechanism for consciousness in the silicon chip, right? You know, Turing, everyone is obsessed with Turing, computability. Well, no, not just Turing, just Turing machines and computers. The computer scientists, sadly, are not scientists. They're not taught in the methods of the scientific method. And I'm not trying to be superior or obnoxious. I'm just saying computer scientists seem to be telling us,

they seem to be the new philosophers, the new gods, the new scientists, and the new everything. And I'm like, guys, you're quite good at producing some software. And it's quite interesting. But look, we have TikTok and LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn is actually quite good, right? It's quite good. And TikTok is probably quite good as well, right?

I mean, there's use cases for sure. But it doesn't mean you understand the fundamentals of the universe. No, it doesn't. And I would imagine, and that's more for the scientific community to fight among yourselves rather than me get into it but you know you guys do want some sort of standard to exist across every discipline and i get that yeah i mean look again i'm i'm not i think there's a culture war going on right and and and also there's a war of critical thinking my job my job i think i am being paid to build a company to make molecules at scale i'm also thinking about

science and trying to educate people and trying to get people to be critical thinkers critical thinking is the most important skill that humanity has i agree and and um and that's why i need to be openly wrong or willing to be openly wrong because if you get punished as you said earlier like for being wrong or being cancelled for basically having opinion that is now unfashionable is like like the whole thing like slavery right in the uk right i haven't maybe shouldn't talk about slavery or get told off but like the fact that the uk got rid of slavery because when we realized oh that's probably a bad idea and then we got the road scholar in oxford like he's all the oxford colleges said well we wanted to take the the the statue down but we legally can't i'm like no why

do you rewrite the past assembly theory says the contingency in the path was important to get here you know for me it's like colonialism is understanding the past and why how can you how do you get to the present if you don't understand the past yes so you assembly wash i just made up a new phrase assembly wash see that's scary yeah i don't even like how that sounds you because you're you're you're washing away history and your ability to learn from it. Yeah. And people say, oh, no, we should have the minority view. Sure.

But the minority view did not win. Yeah. It didn't win. That's right. Darwin, like when I saw David Attenborough on Planet Earth or whatever, the new one, and my, you know, there are all these seals going up a thing and all falling in the ocean because of climate change. And you've got, oh, look at poor seal. i was like no i was like no look at them completely

stupid evolution at work look at the seals in the ocean they're not going up the cliff and falling off and dying they have the gene they have the mutation yeah that's quite good environment or change causes evolution evolution causes survival now we can argue about we probably shouldn't turn our planet into a trash can. Yes. But we're not. There's a middle ground. Yeah, we're trying to actually... So I think this kind of radical kind of, we want to rewrite history for power

because power... We don't like the power that won in the past. I find it quite comical, but I don't want to say too much because I'm probably going to get... Well, I don't know. How can you cancel me for saying the history matters? You're not getting canceled. I like your attitude. You're a gunslinger.

You put it out there. You say what it is. This is what it is. Fuck you if you don't like it. I think it's important that we are respectful of one another's views. But at the same time, and also we have propaganda know how do you know what's right okay and but literally evolution it was evolutionary propaganda is like well i'm gonna out compete you that's a fact right it's a fact of the universe that we see and the fact that assembly theory is like well we have

to understand the past here's something that's super interesting though what assembly theory does say is look, you've got this event horizon where you've got the past, where you've got all this contingency. So take molecules. You have certain molecules that have been evolved and they've got bonds and certain patterns in a certain place, a certain shape. Actually, that shape, when they evolve in the future, they can't just become anything. They are contingent upon their past but there's still such a wide space of possibilities that even um not um events from the environment it will them random or highly contingent or otherwise can basically direct those molecules into a different chemical space and so it's really interesting that the future is not predictable by the past because there is something else that happens from the environment injecting new information. And this is what's so exciting about assembly theory

as a new kind of way of understanding time and how to predict things in science in that it accepts the future is not precisely predictable, but you can actually tell coarse grain or probably say something relatively concrete about what the future is going to look like based on simulating the past exactly look if you take the poppy plant the poppy plant has produced the opiates right and the opiates like um say if you take morphine morphine is a really special molecule. It hits a certain receptor in the brain.

It mimics some peptides. And morphine was created by the plant to hack the animals. Whoa, I'm getting high. I'm eating this stuff. Right? It then basically shits out the genetic material, the seeds. Circle. And suddenly it gets distributed everywhere.

Yeah. So the OPA has co-evolved with the brain receptors in the animal. all the seeds circle and suddenly it gets distributed everywhere yeah so morphine so the opiate has co-evolved with the brain receptors in the animal that's how it works right now what i'm doing is the nih a few years ago gave me a prize for i want to cure addiction and opiates i think if i could do one thing that would be useful for society. That'd be sick. So what I did is I said, okay, rather than making cheap shit fentanyl type stuff, we need to basically encode the steps to make morphine. This is one of the things that Chemify is doing, encoding that chemical space. So when we do drug discovery, we have a large number of molecules we can make. We've gone into that chemical space and we can make new variations

because we can guess how evolution will change morphine a billion years oh my god because it co-evolves with the brain and the animal and you think this is realistic to be able to do that oh yeah yeah for sure that's what chemify is going to do right we'll solve the whole problem not the entire problem but it's drug discovery is a big space yeah so you have to go a lot of there's a lot of molecules to make. In fact, in chemical spaces, allegedly 10 to the 60 possible molecules, you could put 10 to the 60 potential drug molecules at the right molecular

weight. There's only 10 to the 80 atoms in the universe. Yeah. We'd have to turn the entire universe into a chemistry lab to make all the possible drugs. How do you cut that down? Well, you look at the lineage

you look at assembly theory go to the base case and so wow so actually chemify is doing evolution of molecules it's a bit of a secret but you know well not anymore now you just told everyone to to basically guess what drugs are going to come next because we can truncate that chemical space get to that complexity that's going to be super cool when we manage to solve those problems because complexity cures disease the one of the problems we have in drug discovery right now is people are making molecules they're too simple so they basically nuke everything but when they get to the later stage in the clinic they die because they they cause side effects if you can make the most exquisite complicated drug that has all the bits the perfect key for your lock and it only hits that lock and nothing else, it gets through the clinic and you discover drugs.

So that's my number one thesis. That's why I went to the effort of encoding chemical space. And to do that, I had to build this thing, the computer, which is a programmable. The computer? Shit, man. We're going to be here all day if we go on that. I told you I would be able to get you out of here for your meeting, though. It's like almost 4.30.

We can go for another half an hour. It's fine. We can? Yeah. All right. Let's keep that going then. Maybe actually we'll put this part on Patreon and go beyond this, get an extra episode. So subscribe if you haven't already subscribed.

We did do a Patreon episode right after this. It's about 20, 25 minutes. Got deeper into what Lee was just talking about, as well as his work at DARPA. So if you'd like to join Patreon, that link is in the description below. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.