Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - Holiday Message 2018

Episode Date: December 24, 2018

There won't be any regular episodes of Mindscape this week or next, as we take a holiday break. Regular service will resume on Monday January 7, 2019. In the meantime, here is a special Holiday Message. Most likely it will be of interest to very few people -- there's no real substantive content, just me talking about the State of the Podcast and some other things I've been doing. Thanks to everyone for listening, here's looking toward great things in 2019! Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal.

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Visit your nearby Lowe's on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast Holiday Message. I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and as you might gather from the title holiday message, this is not going to be a regular episode of the podcast. I was thinking of just skipping the two weeks, the holiday period for Christmas and New Year's, but I realized I didn't really have an effective way to communicate that fact to the outside world. Not everyone subscribes to the Twitter feed. there is a mailing list that you can sign up for on the podcast website,

preposterous universe.com slash podcast. There you go. And you can either sign up for being notified whenever a new episode comes out, but also you can sign up for announcements like I'm not going to be doing the next two weeks. But that's a tiny fraction of listeners who actually do that. So I hit upon the idea just recording a short little message that would review a little bit about the year. in the podcast, mostly, since it's brand new and everything is new and shiny and new to me anyway.

So this is going to be an extremely self-indulgent, naval-gazing solo mini episode. It might not be your cup of tea. That's perfectly okay. Stop listening now. That's fine. This is just a thank you for all the people who have been listening, supporting, and just enjoying the podcast. So let's go. So as some of you may know, I have been on many podcasts before. I've been a guest of them before. And it's always been a question, you know, should you start your own podcast?

I was a pretty early adopter into the blogging game and relatively early in social media also. But podcasting always just seemed like another level of commitment. You needed equipment. You needed maybe another person. I wasn't sure what it would be. You know, basically the problem was you could either do it completely. solo, right? You could do a podcast with nothing but me talking every single episode, or you could do a team podcast, or you had other people, or you could just do kind of an interview style one-on-one thing.

And I had strong objections to all of these different possible formats, so I wasn't really very tempted by the possibility of doing a podcast myself. In terms of just being solo every single time, I didn't think I had that much to say, and if I did, I could just blog it in terms of assembling a team or something like that. That seems like way too much work. And the interview stuff also seemed like work with the extra downside that I had done a bunch of interviews for my book, The Particle at the End of the Universe, when I wrote about the Higgs boson and its discovery at the Large Hadron Collider. And the act of being a journalist I discovered, and while doing that book, is just not my bag. That's just not what I'm good at, you know, getting other people to tell funny

stories and things like that. However, a couple of things happened. Well, one thing happened, really. A friend of mine sort of prodded me that I really should think about doing a podcast myself. And what I realized is that subsequently I had written another book at The Big Picture, and I had also interviewed people, but it was in a different sense that I was interviewing them. When I was interviewing people for particle at the end of the universe, I really was acting like a reporter, right? Not like a scientist. But when I was interviewing people for the big picture, it wasn't that I wanted their personal anecdotes or their stories of discovering things. It's that I wanted to know what they were thinking, right? I wanted to discover what their ideas were and how I could incorporate that into my book. And that process I really did enjoy. So once that book was over, I kind of lost the license to go around and do that. You know, I got to, I had previously been able to email people and say, hey, would you talk to me for my book? And very often they would say yes. So someone pointed out that doing a podcast would give me that license back. I would be able to talk to people, physicists, of course, in my own field, but all sorts of people all over the place I could talk to.

And that would be a way to get conversations going about a wide variety of different topics. So I looked into a little bit, and I figured I would give it a shot. We'll see how it goes. So far, I think it's going pretty well. I'm enjoying it anyway. I've managed to do one every week since I've started, which is much more than I, might have expected ahead of time. But to be honest, getting it going was way harder than I thought.

As you know, the first episodes came out in July, but I was working for a couple months before then to, you know, you have to buy equipment. It really does take equipment. It's not like blogging. It's not like you can sit down at your computer. You need microphones. You need recorders and wires and things like that.

Plus, you need to upgrade your website, and you need to host the podcast somewhere, and there's a million different things. you need to do. And that was, I did a lot of research on the right way to do it, and that was overall more work than I expected. I'll be very honest about that. It's just me doing the podcast, right? Like, I don't have a studio, I don't have a producer, I don't have a web guru or anything like that. So the guiding philosophy in every aspect of the podcast is how can I get it done with decent quality and minimal effort, minimal work, minimal hours per week. I'm sorry that that's the

guiding philosophy, but it's not my day job. It's a little hobby on weekends mostly. So I have to keep it, you know, compact and manageable. But I did, so that led me to put a good deal of work into the equipment aspect of things, because I figured if I'm not going to have a professional studio or producer or sound editor or anything like that, the, best way that I can get decent sound quality on the podcast without putting in a lot of effort is to get decent equipment. So fortunately, there's a place right near where I live called Vintage King, which is a quite well-known place selling audio and recording equipment, mostly to professional musicians, things like that. That's the benefit of living in Los Angeles. And Robert at Vintage

Kings, shout out to him, was wonderful helping me pick out the right microphones and recorders and things like that. So for those. of you who are fascinated. For most of the podcasting, I use electrovoice microphones. I keep wanting to call them electrovolta, or electron volt, because I'm a physicist, but they're electrovoice RE320 microphones, which are very, very nice, maybe a little bit bigger and bulkier than I would like for portability purposes, but they work great once they're set up. And I record them into a sound design mix pre-3 recorder mixer. It's probably over. kill for my purposes, to be perfectly honest. It's a quite a high quality little recorder,

but maybe as I go more and more and learn more what it can do, then I'll use the actual mixing and you know, on the road adaptability of the machine a little bit more. But overall, I think the sound quality is pretty good. I know that it's not always as good as I want it to be. Part of that is exactly because the podcast themselves, the interviews happen in a wide variety of different circumstances. You know, right now I'm sitting in my office alone and I can make things pretty quiet and pretty good shape, but very often these podcasts are done elsewhere. They're done on the road. So, and I've tried different, you know, recording techniques, whether to use headsets and things like that. But, you know, sometimes I'm in someone's house and there's just

very echoy, right? Like they have no carpets in their room or whatever. Other times I'm recording remotely, so I have to rely on someone else to have their microphones. etc. And, you know, I also have to rely on the ability of them to record the sounds. I do use this thing called Zencaster, which is an online service that I get recorded and they get recorded separately and then their file is sent to me, basically, downloaded. So it's not like Skype where I am recording their voice over the internet. Both I and the guest are recording separately and then I can mix them together. I think that's working pretty well. Somehow, you know, for some guests, despite the fact that I know what microphones they're using and they should be good,

the sound quality isn't always there. So I'm still exploring how to get that as good as possible, but that's all part of learning on the job. So I think that the good news is that once I got started, once I got the equipment and once I got the website going, et cetera, it's been easier than I thought. It's been less work than I thought to actually record the episodes and get them on the internet. I thought that getting the podcast started would be easier than it was, but I also thought that keeping it going would be harder than it was. And frankly, that's a better way for that to have worked out. You know, honestly, I spend a couple, a few hours a week doing the podcast overall,

including inviting people, interviewing them, and turning those audio files into an episode. Like, I don't, it's pretty obvious to you, I'm sure. I'm not doing a lot of post-production on the audio file. There's not a lot of special effects and editing and clipping or anything like that. But, you know, I do put up the show notes on the web page and, you know, send out the Twitter and the email list, et cetera. But all told for a typical episode, it's like three or four hours of work. So that's quite sustainable, I think.

That is, you know, hobby-level stuff. If it becomes even, you know, five or certainly ten hours of work, then that's just very hard to fit into my life because it's not my day job and it's never going to be my job. and it's never going to be my day job. So, so far, so good. And also, the other great news is that finding guests has not been hard. One thing is that when you start a podcast, suddenly people want to be on your podcast, who you've never met before. You get emails out of the blue.

And actually, I'm perfectly happy with people emailing me saying, I want to be on your podcast, because I'm perfectly happy saying no, if I'm not interested. So hopefully they're not insulted by that. I've certainly been on a lot of podcasts, and I've been invited, and I often say no because I get more invitations than I can quite take care of. But sometimes the people who email me, I look into what they're doing and go, wow, that's really kind of cool. So it's a good thing.

So I'm very happy to do that. And also, you know, with some exceptions, I have emailed people or contacted them, people I know and people out of the blue, inviting them to be on the podcast, and some of them have said no. And again, I have zero problem with that. I know that other people are very busy. You know, we're aiming high in terms of getting gas. on the podcast. So when someone says, yeah, I'm too busy to do that, no problem whatsoever for my end. I have more than enough great people coming on. So that's a lot of fun. If anything, I did the one solo episode talking about why is there something rather than nothing. And people keep saying, when are you going to do another one? Honestly, I have too many good guests coming up. I haven't had room in the schedule to fit a solo episode. But I do have that in mind. That's going to happen down the road. As everyone knows, I've set up a Patreon. account for supporters to kick in.

That's been a wonderful thing. And I always say, and I'm going to keep saying it, enormous appreciation for everyone who donates on Patreon. It's certainly, you know, it paid an immediate benefit because by actually making money off the podcast, rather than hemorrhaging money, I was able to upgrade by adding transcripts of all the episodes. So if you go to the actual webpage for Posterous Universe.com,

podcast, every entry for an episode has a complete transcript. So that costs money, but I think it's well worth the value added because for one thing, you can search, right? You can go to the podcast web page, search for quantum mechanics or Bayses theorem, and see where it shows up in the text of all the transcripts. So hopefully that'll be a very useful thing going forward. So enormous thanks to all the Patreon people. I've also been doing monthly Ask Me Anything episodes for the Patreon supporters. And that's been a lot of fun. That's been a little bit more work maybe than I thought because I have to like read through

all the questions. But it's so much fun to do it because there's a wide variety of questions. Not all the questions are really great, but some of them are really, really good and many them are thought provoking and make me think about things that I hadn't thought about. You know, I'm still thinking about the question about whether I prefer the Beatles to the stones. And I mean, the answer is obvious. I prefer the Beatles.

But then, you know, as a science. scientist, as a scholarly person, you want to give the right answer for that. And now I've been thinking for the last couple of weeks about why is it really that the Beatles are so much better than the stones? What I should have said, only ask me anything but didn't, is I even think that the who are better than the stones. So I'm not really the guy to ask if you want support or someone to explain why the Rolling Stones are that great. I have respect for their work over the years, but they're just not my personal cup of tea. Of course, other people, you know, if you listen to the podcast and don't support, honestly, that's all so fine. I get it. I listen to some

podcasts and a couple of them I support and the ones that I will only listen to, you know, a single episode or so, I don't. But I get it, you know, if you're just not in a financial position or whatever or just don't think that that's the way that economics should work. No problem whatsoever. I appreciate those who do support. I don't have any objections to those who don't. to those, there are some people who don't like Patreon as a platform. If you want somehow to send me money for whatever reason and don't like Patreon, there is a PayPal link on the web page. You're going to send payments for the year. If you don't like recurring payments, for example, you can just say, well, there's going to be 50 podcasts this year.

I want to pay a dollar per podcast. I'll just send 50 bucks. That's perfectly okay. The bad news about that is that Patreon, as far as far as far as, you know, I'm going to pay a dollar per podcast, I'll just send 50 bucks. that is that Patreon, as far as I can tell, maybe I'm missing something, but like I said, I did do a bunch of research here. Patreon is the only service which will let me do the two things that I really want. Number one, charge people per episode rather than per month, because I'm not going to guarantee that there will even be podcast episodes every week, much less every month, right? You know, it's not the

highest priority in my life, so it may very well be that nothing happens at some point. And so I want to charge of people for the content that they are actually receiving, not just for, you know, every month or week or something like that. And number two, it's a very easy setup to give the rewards like the Ask Me Anything episodes. It's very easy to give people access if they're pledging on Patreon, and it's hard to do that through PayPal or anything else. Now, maybe that will change. Maybe the landscape is changing.

There's a rumor that the people at Kickstarter are starting their own service that will compete with Patreon, so who knows? You know, I'm not wedded to it, but so far so good with that. Good. So that's the sort of stylistic and procedural aspects of doing the podcast. In terms of the intellectual motivation, I mentioned already, you know, that I wanted to talk to people both inside and outside my own subject area. It's always a little bit different talking with physicists than talking with non-physicists because, you know, both because I know. I know. more about what they do. So like I have to fake it, right? I have to say like, so tell me what is the Big Bang when I know perfectly well what the Big Bang is. But they get that. That's okay. It helps

the audience who might not be made of physicists. But also there's certainly this temptation when you're just talking to another physicist and you both know what you understand. Sometimes you skip some of the background information. So when I'm talking about, you know, cryptocurrency or gene editing when I know nothing, then I'm I'm just being honest, asking the questions I want the answers to. And so with physicists, it's actually a little bit trickier, if anything. And I know, and this is a touchy subject I know, because there's certainly a fraction of the listeners out there who have made their feelings very clear that they want nothing but physics,

that they get annoyed when it's anything other than physics. And, you know, for what it's worth, I get annoyed back at them at you guys. I love all the supporters, but it's my podcast and I want to talk about whatever I want to talk about. And, you know, if you don't want to support it, don't want to listen, that's also completely fine. But I would not do nothing but physics podcast. I have no interest in doing that. I love it when I get suggestions for new things to do. That I like because, you know, well, again, whether I take them or not, I will track them down.

I will, you know, look into it and see if there's a person or a topic that I wouldn't otherwise have covered. That's very, very helpful. But anywhere on the Internet, if you, like, take your time to go to someone who is creating stuff and say, don't create that, create this other thing that I care about, it just doesn't seem like the politest way to be a person on the internet to me. My personal interest is in all sorts of intellectual questions and endeavors. And physics for me is the best of all the different areas we can talk about because it, you know, it digs deeply and it has precise answers and I like the equations and the diagrams and so forth. But it's a small part of the wider landscape of

questions we can ask. And if anything, I think that I would love to see lower barriers between science and other areas of intellectual endeavor, whether it's in universities or in the media or in pop culture or whatever. I think that science should be part of our conversational landscape. We shouldn't silo science over here and then everything else over there. It's the same kind of thing that we're doing, whether it's science or economics or philosophy or, you know, politics or art or design, as we've talked about. You know, we're trying to get ideas that help us comprehend this messy world that we live in. So that's not going to go away. Sorry for those of you who are disappointed by that.

But there's still going to be, you know, more than enough physics on the podcast going forward. So I hope, you know, I should be very clear, most people seem to be totally on board with this. most people seem to enjoy the different kinds of episodes very much. So that's always been gratifying to hear. Again, the suggestions for new things to do are generally welcome, except if they cause more work for me. I'm just trying to be brutally honest here. I know a lot of people would love to have, you know, video

or have the conversations go for three hours or, you know, have more of the conversations in a studio where the sound could be better controlled. and all these would be great, but all these would be much more work for me. You know, I do do preparation for the different guests, especially the ones who are not physicists. And I didn't count that. When I said it takes three hours per week and do an episode,

I did not count the time I spent, you know, reading the book of the person or reading articles that they've written. But I don't count that because that's kind of fun stuff I would do anyway. That's not just podcast preparation. That's just me reading interesting things, so it doesn't really count. But something like video or, you know, more explicit editing and things like that, that's just more work, you know. And if you're Joe Rogan, when you make hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode for podcast, by all means, that's a sensible thing to do. For me, who is, you know, doing it in my office on my spare time, for the foreseeable future, Mindscape is just going to be audio.

I shouldn't be making any promises about the far future because who knows what will have. happen. I do appreciate that video would be better in some sense. It's great to have, you know, the visual impact of seeing someone talk and seeing two people interact with each other. I totally get that. But the value added seems to me to not outweigh the effort required. So that's just a sort of cold-hearted calculation on my part, which, as I said, you know, could possibly change far down the line, but is unlikely to change in the immediate future. So, yeah, so I think it's been a good year or half a year. You know, we launched in July.

Carol Taveris, the social psychologist, was my first guest. And I think in retrospect, you know, that was one of the good choices I made, having Carol as being the first guest, because we talked about cognitive dissonance and biases and how human beings justify their bad decisions and are not perfectly rational. And, you know, one of the aspirations of the podcast is to be a little bit more rational. to be better thinkers about things. And so, you know, mapping out some of the dangerous territory there was a very good way to start. One of the things that I read more than once about starting your own podcast is that you should start with a bang so that you should have like multiple episodes in the first week just so people have a lot of content to look into. And I did that. Carlo Revelli, Alice Dregor, Tony Pinn. I released four episodes that first week. And I feel in retrospect maybe like, I'm cheating a little bit, especially Alice Dregor and Tony Pinn, both of whom gave wonderful interviews,

especially considering that I was brand new at it myself, but they have less listens to those episodes than any of the other ones because there's just a lot of content coming out at the same time. So if you're a relatively new listener, I encourage you to go back into the archives and listen to those because they're really a lot of fun and they're different in interesting ways, because those are two very smart, different people that are good to listen to. I've enjoyed a lot of the episodes. I mean, I almost don't want to pick out episodes and name-check people specifically because then some people won't be named-checked and I feel bad, but I've enjoyed them all.

They've all been great. I don't think there's been any one real dud that I haven't enjoyed. I'm not sure what I would do if I interviewed someone and it was just a disaster. I didn't even want to put it up on the air. But truth, I have not had that happen yet, so we'll see about what goes on. You know, some of the more out there episodes are the ones I've enjoyed the most. Winton Marsalis, which is a special opportunity that I was lucky enough to take advantage of. Scott Derrickson, the movie director, Livoree, the poker player.

Joe Walston and I had a wonderful conversation about population ecology and conservation. Nahanarula talked about the blockchain and cryptocurrency, and these are all kind of way-out things that I don't get to experience in my everyday life. So it's been these episodes that for me have said, yeah, Yes, this is a smart thing that you're doing with this podcast. You get to talk about these ideas that otherwise would just go by the wayside. So I wish everyone could have a podcast so they could talk to these people. And if not, they should listen to this one. In terms of listening to this one, you know, people want to know, like, how do you get your podcast listened to?

How do you build an audience? And so I only have one good piece of advice there, which is to be on Joe Rogan's podcast. I was on Joe's podcast soon after I started. my own, and there's a huge leap, a tenfold increase in the number of people listening to Minescape after that happened. So thank you, Joe Rogan, and thank you to all the listeners who came from there. Since then, to be very honest, the audience has more or less stayed stable. It's stayed at about the same level. It's not been much growth or shrinkage, even from episode to episode. It's been more or less predictable and constant, and I would love to grow it. I'd love

to have even more people listening. But again, not the day job. I don't spend money promoting it. I don't even put much thought into getting it out there. So if anyone has any ways of getting even more people to listen, that would be great. It's already a pretty crowded podcast market out there. So I totally get that as a relative newcomer. It's hard to get people who have their favorite podcasts already to start listening to something new.

So I get that too. But I figure I'm not going to spend a lot of effort in promoting. it, what I will do is just try to make good content, plug away, hopefully the word keeps getting out there. You know, there's always the question of taking ads on the podcast, which I'm not doing yet. I maintain that maybe someday that could happen. I'm certainly not making as much revenue from the Patreon as I would from ads, and I've had, you know, people email me asking to put ads on, but so far, you know, the Patreon

revenue has been enough that I prefer the cleanliness, the sort of. straightforwardness, the simplicity of just having the podcast be the podcast. You know, that could, if ads are in the future, then that's fine. But right now I kind of like it, just keeping it clean and pure and simple that way. Coming up in 2019, like I said, I've already, I have no problem getting people to come on the podcast, which is really good news. I have, you know, interviews scheduled that will take the content through the end of March. Here we are in December of 2018. So, and plenty more great targets out there.

Some old people, some young people, some famous people, some unknown people, physicists, lots of other areas. I like this idea of not letting anyone know who's going to be on the podcast until the episode actually drops. I have no idea, whether that is a clever marketing strategy or a disaster. I did not research that one at all. I just kind of like it that you have no idea what's coming. A little bit of a surprise for everyone on Monday. morning. So my goal over the course of this upcoming year, podcast-wise, is actually to just

get better at my own skill set, right? I mean, I have enormous respect for people who are good at what they do, and one of the things that people can do is be podcast hosts. So I, you know, I have fun at doing it, and I try very hard to make sure the people who I talk to are ones who I can get along with in some sense, have a productive and friendly. the conversation with. So, but I'm definitely learning and trying to get better at it. Early on, I think that I actually tried to plan a little bit too much, you know, how to roadmap for where the episode would go.

And as time goes on, I'm planning less and less. I'm preparing just as much. But in my mind, I, you know, I might have, well, here's the three things I want to talk about. Let's make sure we get there and let's see where it goes. And, you know, usually there's no trouble filling the time. There's never been trouble filling in time. Honestly, we could always keep talking for a long time.

So so far, so good. I'm happy to take suggestions about that. Being an interviewer, being a good host is certainly an area where I could stand to improve and hope to grow. And I'm open to constructive criticism there. You know, it's always an interesting question about how you approach the philosophy of being a host or being an interviewer on a podcast. Like, are you being confrontation? are you, you know, trying to be technical, are you trying to be open? Like, my goal is to give the guest a space in which they can make their points the best way they possibly can.

And I don't want to argue with people, even if I disagree with them. What I will do is suggest the objections I have, and I've done that, and I try to do that better and better. I want the people who are listening to know what those objections might be, but I'm not going to, you know, sit someone down and insist that they, bow down to my superior logic if they've been nice enough to appear on my podcast. I will let the audience know what my objections are and then you folks can go look them up, right? If it's interesting, I think of almost all media, you know, short form media where short is anything an hour or less or two hours or less, you know, you're not going to learn a whole new subject in something like that.

It's not like a semester-long college course. So I think at best you can put some new ideas into people's heads and inspire them to follow up. It's not, you're not going to learn, if I'm talking to David Jalmers, you're not going to learn everything there is to know about the philosophy of consciousness. It's just not going to happen. But you might get a little map of the territory,

and you might think, oh, that's interesting. I'm going to go read it. So that's why I have these links in the show notes for every episode, you know, places to follow up. And some you might not be interested in following up, but they're there. That's more the goal. And so I think this is a good philosophy.

of podcasting. I think it's been pretty good so far. And I'm going to try to get even more people who I don't agree with on the podcast coming up. You know, there are people who I don't want on the podcast. Again, like I want pleasant, productive conversations even with people who I disagree with. That's basically the goal. Sometimes I will agree with them. Sometimes I'll disagree, but it should be a productive intellectual engagement one way or the other. I think that's it. I think that's it for my thoughts, my navel-gazing thoughts on the mind-scale. podcast. There are other things going on, of course, that it did go on through the year. I'm writing a book, as I keep mentioning. I hope people don't get too annoyed at me mentioning my book all the time, but

that is what I've been doing. A lot of my own brain power has been going to that in recent months. So I'm writing a book about quantum mechanics. It's tentatively called something deeply hidden, based on a quote from Albert Einstein, but my publisher has given me rumblings that they might not like that title. So it's subject to change. going to be coming out in September 2019. It takes a long time for a book to be produced and copy edited and all that stuff. And frankly, it's not even done yet. It should have been done.

But the draft is very, very close to being done. It's about quantum mechanics. Does the world really need another book about quantum mechanics? Like just this year, several new books came out, trade books about quantum mechanics. I think there's a couple of things that will separate this book. Of course, every author thinks that even if they're writing, about the topic that has been written about many times, they're doing it better, right? So I'm trying to explain quantum mechanics in the best way I know how, and I have put some effort into doing that

over the years, so I have my techniques for doing that. But the things that otherwise separate the book are, number one, it's supposed to be an explanation of and a defense of the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics. A lot of books on quantum mechanics at the popular level, the trade level, emphasize how mysterious it is. Honestly, they go overboard trying to say how it's so mysterious, we'll just never understand. And even though what I'm doing in something deeply hidden is defending many worlds, more importantly, I'm defending the idea that there can be an answer to this question of what is the deep meaning of quantum mechanics. I certainly mention competition, right, alternatives to many worlds.

And I try to give them a fair hearing, not a balanced hearing, because I have my favorite one, but a fair one. And what really matters to me is that people get over this idea that it's impossible to understand quantum mechanics. I really think that there's more than one way that the world could be quantum mechanical. It's not that there are zero ways. It's more than one way,

and we should figure out which one of them is right. And I think that many worlds is my favorite until some good arguments or data come along and change my mind, which is, of course, always possible. The other thing, the second thing that I think is, different is that I put many worlds to work. Rather than just saying what the theory is and talking about some of the issues,

I try to make the case. One of the reasons why I care about this is because in my own research, in physics, and trying to think about quantum gravity and emergent space time and cosmology, I think these are areas where it really matters what you think about the fundamental formulation of quantum mechanics,

whether it's many worlds or something else. So I talk in the last section of the book, I talk a lot about those things, quantum gravity emergent space time. And there's been enormously interesting, fascinating discoveries, or discoveries might be too strong a word because there are speculations at the moment, but ideas, let's say that, in the last few years, relating entanglement to spacetime geometry and the emergence of a classical world like we live in with a curb space time in it. So all this stuff is very, very cutting edge.

It's not nearly as solid and reliable as the stuff I talk in the first three quarters of the book. But it gives people a flavor for how this is not just sitting back and bullshitting about big ideas. It actually does have applications to important physics research. So that will be a big part of the book. So certainly, you know, I haven't talked about those topics that much on the podcast, but coming in 2019, especially as we get toward September. 2019, there's going to be a lot of quantum mechanics on the podcast. Let's just say that, solo and otherwise. Otherwise, you know, besides writing the book and starting the podcast,

the other big thing that is taking up my time this year is my actual day job of doing science research. To be perfectly honest, this was not a very productive year for science research because precisely of the fact that I started the podcast and finished the book. So I'm very much looking forward in 2019, to going back to a much more normal schedule there. I got a couple papers out this year. I actually got two philosophy papers out, one on falsifiability and the multiverse, and the other one on the question that I had in the solo podcast of, is there something, why is there something rather than nothing?

So those are both invited contributions to big edited collections, which might appear in 2019. You know, I think the Rutledge companion to physics or something like that. But that's a lot of fun to sort of dabble in things that are kind of in my area, but in stretching my expertise, let's put it that way. And then in terms of real physics papers, I had two papers with Ashmeet Singh, who was a graduate student here at Caltech. We're starting from the very basics of quantum mechanics

and seeing how we're trying to lay the foundation for this program that I kind of already mentioned about how quantum entanglement can lead to space time and geometry. So this is the kind of thing where it's a big hard program, right? And it could crash and fail at any moment. You know, in some sense what we have is a new approach to quantum gravity, where I gloss it as saying rather than quantizing gravity, we're finding gravity within quantum mechanics. So the first question is, how do you find anything within quantum mechanics?

You know, like if you just, the thing is that we're so poisoned or influenced by the fact that we human beings think class. We see things, we see baseballs, and we think that they have a position and a velocity, and quantum mechanics comes along and says that they don't really. Those are things you can observe, but they don't exist until you observe them in some sense. So what exists? What exists in quantum mechanics is this thing called the wave function, the quantum state, which is an abstract vector in some giant vector space. And so how do you make the transition from what quantum mechanics really is about to the world we see?

I'm convinced that almost everyone in the world cheats at that question because they already know what we see. So they kind of put in the answer by hand. And so what Ashmeet and I have been doing is working on the question of, how do you get from the quantum state all by itself to say, oh, this is a quantum state representing a cat or a molecule or the universe, right? What are the characteristics of the quantum state that let you say things like that? So we've had a couple of papers out on that. We have this program that we have dubbed Mad Dog Everettianism. If any of you listen to the podcast with Alex Rosenberg, he has been called a Mad Dog naturalist.

So I like that so much that I borrowed it to label Mad Dog Everettianism, which means that not only do you have just a wave function and its evolution equation, the Schrodinger equation, you don't help yourself to a preferred set of observables or anything like that. Ordinarily in a quantum theory you say, this is a theory of a particle with a position or something like that. Then you can go and ask what the position does over time. But the position is the thing you observe. And observing is something that gets done, you know, by subsets of the universe. It's not there at the deepest level of the quantum description all by itself. So that really shouldn't be the language in which you formulate your most basic version of quantum mechanics. So the mad dog Everettian says we start from really quantum mechanics.

mechanics in its own right, in its own terms, and try to show how everything else emerges from that. Again, it's a hard problem, but we're making progress, and we have a bunch of papers sort of in different levels of completion, some essentially finished. I just need to edit them and submit them, and a couple, you know, halfway through and a couple just in cogitation, but all in the general area of this program of starting with the very basics of quantum mechanics and entanglement and using tools from quantum information theory to get how space time emerges. Hopefully we'll make progress on that. Like I said, it's a program.

It could crash and burn any time. We all know that we're taking some leaps here, but I've been working on this for a few years now with some other grad students, Charles Tao, Aidan Chatwin-Davies, and other collaborators. And I think that, you know, it's actually going pretty well. So we'll see how it goes. I'm also trying to get back a little bit into statistical mechanics. I wrote a paper a few years ago with Stefan Lichenauer, who's a postdoc, and a couple of our students at Caltech, where we derive what we call the Bayesian Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Maybe this would be a good topic for a solo podcast someday, but there's been a little mini-revolution in the last 15 or 20 years in statistical mechanics where, based on the idea of fluctuation theorems. You know, we all know entropy goes up, but Boltzmann, back in the 1870s explained to us that it's really, the Second Lof Thermodynamics really says that entropy is just really, really, really likely to go up. And the reason it's really, really likely to go up is because there's a lot of particles, right, 10 to the 23 particles in a macroscopic system. So what if you have just like 10 or 20 particles? Well, then entropy would still tend to go up, but the probability is, you know, closer to 90%, rather than 99.9999%. So the fluctuations around the average behavior become very important, and this is crucially important for the real world, for, you know, biological organisms. In our cells, there's very tiny pieces that usually behave in thermodynamicsly sensible ways, but sometimes fluctuate downward.

So there's this whole new way of thinking about non-equilibrium statistical mechanics that was launched by Christopher Jarsinski and Gavin Crooks and others that has really blossomed. and I'm very interested in it, but I haven't actually, other than that one paper on the Bayesian Second Law, dealt that deeply into it, but I'm getting back into it. I think that there's important connections there

between statistical mechanics and causality, cause and effect, and, you know, like I said, life itself, biophysics, the origin of life, things like that. So I'm looking forward to getting more involved with that. I'm getting more and more involved

with the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, which is an institute devoted to studying complexity. and so, you know, my Caltech colleagues don't really care about all this statmec stuff and complexity stuff, but the SFI people really do, so it's been very stimulating and fun to talk with them and I look forward to increasing that collaboration. That's been most of my stuff. There's been no, you know, major secret projects this year, 2018. In the past, I've consulted on movies a little bit, and there is a movie coming out called

The Avengers Endgame, which I did consider. on. So I can't tell you what it's about. I cannot tell you what we talked about. But hopefully some of the things I said as one of the various science consultants, it's not just me, they talk to a bunch of people. So there should be some really interesting ideas in the new Avengers movie. I'm hoping. You know, science consulting is a weird game because you go in there, you have several hours of intense conversation with directors and screenwriters, and then you leave. And then that's it. And then two years later, a movie comes out. So you don't have much control as a science consultant over how your ideas were actually put into the final script. So I'm as curious as you are to see what the movie's actually going to be. And then to close up, you know, the state of the world. The state of the world right now is a mess. You probably know. As I'm recording this at the end of December, we're having a partial shutdown of the United States government because, let's just say certain important actors in the government, individual one, wants to build a wall that would separate

us from Mexico. And we're not going to go into the details of the immigration debate or the political ramifications or the strategies going on there. But I do think there's a symbolism here that is hard to mistake of building a wall around your country, right? Of shutting yourself off. And it's a very inward-looking, selfish, myopic way to be a citizen of the world, in my view. And I hope that the attitude conveyed in this podcast, and in other things that I do is the opposite of that. Is outward going, is cosmopolitan, is open to new experiences, and varied and diverse and curious and questioning,

and talking to people who you agree with and who you don't agree with. You know, one of the things that I'm fascinated by intellectually as well as practically is the idea of disagreement. You know, one of the many books that I want to write down the road in the future, it would be a book on the nature of disagreement and how it matters and how you deal with it. Like in politics, in science, we try to get rid of disagreement, right? We have disagreement. It's there, but we think that there's a right answer, and you're just going to find it,

and there are techniques for doing that, and there's rationality and evidence and so forth, and these are great. In politics, or further than that, in any question about values or how you live in the world, there's this whole other situation where you might not agree. even if you're both really smart and rational, right? You might have fundamentally different values that you start from. Whether or not you think that you could be sort of Kantian and think that rational people will always uniquely end up

with the same value system, or you could be more humian and you can admit the truth of it, which is that people can just disagree about these things. As a practical matter in a world, in a liberal democracy, where you want to have people govern themselves, the people doing that governing are going to disagree about something. So it's great to try to remove that disagreement through rational argumentation and evidence. But meanwhile, you have to learn to live with disagreement.

You have to learn to get along at least a practical way with people who you don't agree with. And so I'm just fascinated by, and hopefully we'll have some podcasts with good guests talking about how to live in a world where we don't agree with everybody. What is the political philosophy of that? What's the psychology of that? what's the status of how to get to better disagreement when we start with from very different values. So I think that's a fun thing to talk about. I hope that my little podcast, Mindscape, can do its incredibly small part in nudging the world towards looking outward and accepting and trying to make things better rather than huddling inward

and hoping the scary monsters will leave us alone. That's the holiday message here from Mindscape World Headquarters. Thanks very much for listening. and have a good 2019. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors and their clients to thrive. So what if you could? Paid advertisement. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal,

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