The Joe Rogan Experience - #1151 - Sean Carroll

Episode Date: August 1, 2018

Sean Carroll is a cosmologist and physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity. He is a research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Check out "Sean Carroll's Mindscape" podcast, available on Spotify.

Oh, wait a minute. Are we going live? Boom, and we're live. Mr. Carroll, how are you, sir? Very good to be back. Very good to have you back. So, you have a podcast now. I do. I've joined the ranks. You inspired me. Well, it's important. We need people like you out there.

You have, what, seven episodes so far? Seven episodes up. A few more in the can. I'm going to try to dribble them out once a week for the first six months or so, see how it goes. Are you enjoying the process? I am. Mindscape, by the way, is the name for those out there in podcast land. Yeah, I'm loving it. The thing that tilted me over toward doing it, because like, look, I have a day job, right? I can't spend too much time doing this stuff. Because like, look, I have a day job, right? I can't spend too much time doing this stuff. But what I realized, it was an excuse, a license to talk to people who are not just physicists, right? Because like I have intellectual interests that go way beyond just what I do for a living. And in academia, you're not allowed to take seriously anything other than your discipline, your job, right? I'm allowed to be talking about physics, but nothing else. But so now I can talk to historians and economists and philosophers and psychologists, and it's great.

Well, you could have just gone to Evergreen State, and then you could talk about anything. When you're teaching a professor, you could just, if you're a professor, you could teach them dance. We have to break out of the system. We have to do it ourselves. Yeah, man. Gotta break out of that system. So your podcast, you decided that this would be a great venue for you to just expand on subjects and just get into anything that you'd like. Well, you know, I have opinions about things and I've never been one who said you shouldn't talk about things unless you're a PhD credentialed expert, right? I think everyone should be talking about everything, but you should know what your level of expertise is. So if you're not an expert, you should listen to people and you should then make your own decisions, but you should first gather the information.

And so I don't feel quite like I can go – I have a blog. I can write whatever I want on my blog, but I can't really expound on my theories of economics because what do I know about economics? But I can call up a very expert economist and chat with them on the podcast and both I will learn something and hopefully the listeners will. So you're going to just basically talk about anything. The shtick is we sort of try to pick an idea, right? So for the hour or whatever it is, I don't have your stamina. I can't do the two and a half hour thing. I need more of these cavemans. I know. I need more nitrous caffeine in me. But yeah, for an hour, hour and a half, I'll get someone who's an expert and we'll dig into an idea and try to understand what's going on in sort of everyday people's language and how it fits into the bigger picture and things like that.

And trying to mix up good old professors, which are my peer group, to sort of – I got some people coming out of left field. I had a professional poker player. I have a movie director coming up, a chef and things like that. But basically, yeah, whatever I want to talk about. That's awesome. So is this for your own edification or are you just using it as just a platform? Yeah, I think that my – like philosophically, I treat it like it's for me, right? Like I'm not going to do guests or topics or not do topics because the people say so, right?

There's plenty of people out there who don't want me to talk about anything other than physics. Of course. Or at least nothing that involves politics or religion. Stay in your lane, bro. Very much, right. But I love talking about politics and religion. So guess what?, bro. Very much. Right. But I love talking about politics and religion. So guess what? I'm going to talk about those things. And so and then hopefully it finds an audience. Right. And so I'm willing to listen to suggestions, but mostly I have to

treat it like it's for me. Well, I think it's absurd to ask someone to not talk about things if they're interested in those things. People love doing it, right? Like, and I especially love, you know, the commenters saying, oh, you know, of course he's a scientist, so he knows nothing about politics. I'm like, you're an anonymous YouTube commenter. I'm like, why should I listen to your opinions about politics? You definitely can't listen to the opinions of anybody that's willing to take the time to comment on YouTube. That's a problem.

I mean, like, I had a whole bit about it because I was like, what kind of a person does that? time to comment on YouTube. That's a problem. You would think that they would have the self-awareness. I had a whole bit about it because I was like, what kind of a person does that? Like who listens to a video and goes, well, it's about time that I put in my input. It takes a very rare breed unless they have like a real specific expertise in what's being discussed. Like maybe it's about auto repair and like that is not how you replace a transmission. Here's why. Or if you're just asking questions.

Like I love my comments. Like mostly the comments, even on my YouTube. Like, so I send the video. I don't do video, right? I'm just doing audio podcasts, but you can put them on YouTube with a static image. And for some reason, people like that. People listen to podcasts on YouTube, right?

A lot of them. Yeah. And the comments have actually overall been surprisingly good because YouTube is one of the worst, right, overall. But people say like, oh, I didn't know that or tell me more about this or this was interesting. That's great. Like by all means do it. But if you're like don't talk about that, I want to hear about this, then block. Go away.

It only takes a tiny drop of LSD to pollute a whole bucket of water. There you go. That's really what the deal is with YouTube comments. It's just the sheer number of people. The problem is YouTube has a dedicated group of shitheads and trolls for whatever reason. I don't know why, but that platform seems to attract some of the worst in people that comment. And I'm, you know, I cannot claim that I'm immune to reading it and getting annoyed. Of course.

I'm like, you idiot. I know I should just say, forget it. Yes. Move on with my life. But I'm like, damn it. Well, it's interesting in a lot of ways. move on with my life. But I'm like, damn it.

Well, it's interesting in a lot of ways. I mean, there's something fascinating about this new form of communication where someone can send this very just flat text. You don't know anything about the background, the person that's sending it. And there's a style of doing that that's designed to kind of mess with your head. Just to like poke all your nerves, right? And look, let me just, you know, just to redress the balance here. It's great that we have these new ways of talking to each other, right? And part of, you know, I glancingly mentioned the fact that academia wants you to stay in your lane very, very much.

And I think that that's a shame. academia wants you to stay in your lane very, very much. And I think that that's a shame. And so I think that part of the many hidden purposes of my podcast, one of them is to dissolve the boundary between science and the rest of our intellectual life, right? Like I'm not – sometimes I'll be talking about science. Sometimes I won't. Like we tend to silo off science as a thing and then like economics and history and political science is another thing that is out there and relevant to the world. And science is something that is sort of a form of entertainment for a lot of people. And I want to mix it all up. I want like the different people talking to each

other. And so overall, by all means, comment on the YouTube videos and keep that conversation going. That's good of you. That's a very healthy attitude. And that's kind of the attitude that you have to have if you're putting everything out there yeah and and just one more irony is like i'm not uh i don't see conflict i'm a conflict averse person like i just want i don't want to argue with people right but i do want to say things that are true and not everyone agrees about what is true so there's going to be arguments so i put up with that but i'm not seeking it out. So I would like this utopia of rational discourse where everyone is talking about ideas in a dispassionate way and in good faith looking toward moving toward the truth. It would be nice if we had like a system,

like almost like a rating system for humans, like a Yelp for commentators. People are trying that. It's not a bad idea. It really isn't in terms of like people review your comments on things and enough people decide like this is just unnecessary. Yelp for expertise or for commentary in general. Well, all the above. Yeah. I mean, I think we're probably going to move to some sort of a system like that.

In fact, some people are actually advocating that for society to have some sort of a rating system for people and almost a new kind of currency, like a social currency. They're doing it in China, right? Yes. It's scary for people, though, because it's China. Yes. It's scary for people, though, because it's China. And China is a trippy place. And it's very trippy in terms of it's sort of got capitalism going, but it's also a communist dictatorship. It's a big old dictatorship.

And it's controlled by the government. And all the companies are also in – you know the thing with Huawei? Am I saying it right? People are getting mad at me about that. Huawei? I think it's Huawei. It's now the number two cell phone manufacturer in the world, and they're forbidden to work with U.S. carriers.

The United States government does not trust this company, so they've said this company has apparently done some shading things according to them, not according to certain tech people who say it's nonsense. some shading things according to them, not according to certain tech people who say it's nonsense. But now they're keeping them from selling their cell phones with AT&T and T-Mobile and whatever. But they're the number two manufacturer in the world now. They just surpassed Apple.

Because China's just so big. China's a trip. Yeah. Well, they know very well. It's kind of remarkable to me that China has been so stable and successful because there are people who don't like it. There are people who rebel against the system. But they've been so – the government has been so enormously successful at controlling information, controlling what you learn. Like you can't Google Tiananmen Square if you're there in China.

You can't get those images or anything like that. And companies want to do business there. So they'll go along with it. And I'm not sure if it's stable. But I talked about this in my last podcast with Yasha Monk. I'm not sure that democracy is stable either. So when the technological capabilities are changing so rapidly, huge abuses and huge changes are on the horizon even if we don't know what they're going to be. I mean that's my worry about the social credit system, right?

Like, it's so obviously abusable, right? Make the wrong people have bad credit. Make the people you like have—I mean, if this is run by the government, you're going to trust them to do it fairly? I'm a little skeptical about that. Well, I think this last election and the subsequent analysis of the manipulation of the election has been very eye-opening to people. And the Russian troll farms, have you been paying attention to any of that stuff? Yeah. stunning revelation that there's 24-7 businesses where people are set up, where they're hired to just tweet and post things and comment on things. And they're all working in some way

to try to manipulate the way people look at the news. Yeah. And the most interesting thing to me, I thought like, if they were clever, they will do this and they do it. It's not just that they have a policy that they want to push, right, or a candidate they want to push. They want to foment disagreement, right? They will take the most radical views on either side and pump them up just so Americans are tearing at each other's throats. And yeah, that kind of works, right? That's pretty successful so far. There was a Radiolab podcast where these people that were Trump supporters detailed being contacted by these Russian troll farms where they organized these rallies and they organized these protests. And they even hired a fake Hillary. They hired a fake Trump.

And they're going to have the Hillary in a cage and they wanted everybody to yell out, lock her up. And these Russians coordinated this whole thing. Right. And then once it starts, it organically takes over, right? I mean, you probably saw just the other day, this Trump rally where the CNN reporter was trying to do a camera spot and he just got drowned out by people shouting at him and shouting obscenities. And I don't know what – that's bad, right? OK. I mean it's bad.

The media, I wouldn't want that to happen to Fox News. I wouldn't want that to happen to people I disagree with. You got to let the people in the media be the media. They're not the enemy of the people. Well, what he's done is very dangerous. Yeah. It is. be the media they're not the enemy of the people well what he's done is very dangerous you know it's it's very it's very sneaky and very dangerous and it's very manipulative and he's essentially he's in survival mode and when people are in survival mode they he's not thinking at all about

the importance of the press he's thinking about his his situation his stance his position in life preserve that yeah and what's position in life, preserve that. And what's the best way to preserve that? Well, someone's attacking me, attack the people who are attacking me. Yeah, you build yourself up by creating an enemy that everyone can agree on, right? One of the chilling things that Yasha pointed out, there's really, despite the rhetoric, there's never been a successful, truly multi-ethnic democracy in the history of the world. Like democracies that have worked have worked because one group is the boss. And they give rights to the rest of the people and so forth and try to be fair to some extent. But that's changing.

Like as the demographics of the world are changing, we're becoming more of the patchwork that we claimed to be years ago. And people aren't quite happy with that. They're not comfortable with it. And this is something that can be used to gin up emotional reactions. Yeah. People are terrified of change too. There's always this nostalgia for the past. Yeah.

And a past that is not necessarily accurate. Right. A past that they envision. And I'm sympathetic, you know, with the real problems, right? There are real problems with inequality and with health care and with jobs and, you know, not just the number of jobs, but the jobs are changing. Not everyone is really tooled up to be a high-tech office worker in this day and age. And so I take those concerns really, really seriously.

But those concerns are being channeled in very unproductive ways to scapegoat people who don't deserve it. One of the things that's fascinating to me that seems to be boiling under the surface is the possibility that we might need some sort of universal basic income to deal with what's happening with AI and automation. Automation of cars, automation of normal jobs, food preparation, things that people have come

to just take for granted that a human's going to be doing that. It's entirely possible that millions and millions and millions of people are going to be out of work within a very short period of time. And it seems to me that it's one of those really sneaky things that might just catch us before we're ready for it. Yeah, I think that if you extrapolate very far ahead into the future and imagine what

utopia is supposed to look like or the far technologically advanced civilization, why wouldn't we imagine that work is done by robots and machines and human beings are free to be creative or artistic or athletic or just sit on their butts if that's what they want to do. If you believe that that's a possible future, then the way to get there is to, as robots and machines do more and more, make it more and more possible for people to live without working. I think that's at least – I have no idea whether it works in practice. I'm not an economist.

I haven't studied it. But I think it should be taken seriously as an idea. If you looked at it as a pessimist, if you looked at it with a cynical perspective, you'd say, well, people just, they don't have motivation. Then they behave like rich kids or entitled people or people who won the lottery.

They blow all the money. They don't take it seriously because they didn't earn it. It goes against human nature. Yep, I get that. And maybe it does. Let them do it. Who am I to tell people that they need to be virtuous by earning a living in some job that they may or may not be able to keep for very long? People who say that usually haven't gotten fired from their jobs recently, right? Right. Yeah. And I always feel like the people that are actually ambitious, but the real problem I think would be growing up with that.

I think if you got it as an adult, you'd probably recognize it as a safety net that it is. But if it was during your developmental process, you might rely on it as a constant. Yeah. And so that might be a problem in terms of motivation. I think so. And I think that – and you see it, right? I mean I have friends at various levels of income and class that they grew up in. And you can always tell people who grew up in very comfortable environments because they don't have jobs.

They have projects. I'm working on a project because they're not really worried about the project failing. If you grew up without that safety net, you're more cautious. Like you have to have a fail safe. You have to have a backup plan. But what if everyone had that backup plan? What if we could all do projects instead of work? Is that really a worse world?

Do you know any trust fund people? Oh, yeah. Yeah. The ones that I know all blow their money. Actually, I know some very wealthy people who raise their kids really well. As trust fund people. Oh, yeah, as people who never need to work a day in their lives

and they all work really hard. That's so weird. Yeah, it's possible. Find those people and clone them. Yeah. Find out what made them tick. So they found a passion. They found something that they're actually,

that seems to be a giant issue. That's right. And your parents need to sort of encourage that. Parents matter when it comes to like if you are very wealthy, do you feel like you deserve it or do you feel like, oh, I should give something back because I'm really, really fortunate, right? Well, there's cockamamie ideas that come from people that haven't earned their money to. Like one guy came to me with this crazy idea for this project he's doing and wanted me to get involved in it. And I was I was going over the details of it. I was like, I don't think this is going to work.

Like, why? Why is this guy so enthusiastic about it? And then the more I dug into it, I'm like, oh, he got all this money from his dad. Right. Oh, there you go. This guy's just he just he's got pipe dreams. Yeah. I mean, I guess I feel just to be honest about it like I'm very lucky.

Not because I grew up wealthy because I didn't but because I now have a job that represents what I want to do. Like what I would do with my life if I were independently wealthy isn't that different from what I'm doing right now, right? That's bliss. Exactly. But therefore I kind of think that I would like a world where everyone can do that if that's what they wanted. That would be amazing. Yeah.

The real question is, does everybody have an actual interest? And if they don't, is it nurture or nature? And if they don't, do we force them to? Is that what we want to do? Bro, find someone you love. Find something you love. Find a thing. You know, I actually, I never tell people, like, follow your passion or find what you love.

Because, look, there's a lot of people who need to earn a living, right? There's a lot of people who just need to do work because they need to pay the bills. That's fine. That should be respected. In the world we have right now, that's an honorable thing to do. And not everyone gets to just do what they love. That's true. There are some things, though, that you can do for a living that you'll actually enjoy.

Like you need to make a living, but because of your temperament, because of your interests, you can find a thing, whether it's carpentry or whatever it is that you find to be fascinating and fulfilling when you're actually doing it. You're making a living, but you're also doing something like, man, this is very satisfying. Maybe. Maybe that's true. I mean, it's certainly true it can be done. Can it be done for everyone in the world?

I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know. Yeah. Well, there's so many styles of living, too. You know, when you're talking about China, I was in China recently. We spent some time in Thailand, and we flew through China. And one of the things you realize about China is there's a totally different way of moving.

People just walk right through people. I mean, their lines, if there's a space in a line, they don't respect that space. They go right into that space right in front of you. Like, oh, there's a space there. They didn't even think of it as rude. It's not rude. It's not just the think of it as rude. It's not rude. It's just the style, right. Yeah.

It's just how it is. We went through Southeast Asia for a few weeks and visited Vietnam and Thailand. And they're right next to each other, but just the behavior in the city is utterly different. Like just walking down the street. It's just a different culture. I haven't been to Vietnam. What was that like? Vietnam was my favorite.

It was the best. Everybody says that. It's great. I mean, I don't know. I was there for a few days, right? I'm sure that there's depths to the country that I didn't perceive. But, you know, it was coming to life. Literally the week we were there was the first McDonald's was opening in Vietnam, which is not good.

But at least it meant we were there in a pre-McDonald's society, right? And it was physically very beautiful. The food was amazing. It was all scattershot like the, you know, people just go crazy on the streets in any direction they want. And it was not organized or anything like that. But it was very genuine. You know, it was people were trying, you know, to be nice. People seemed to be very friendly like that.

We didn't speak any of the language or anything like that. And it was just a wonderful experience overall. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Asia is a trip. It's a really different's awesome. Yeah. Asia is a trip. It's a really different part of the world. China is – yeah, I've been to China too and it's a – that's a trip for a different reason, right?

And I'm scared by China in the sense that I'm worried that they will succeed while still being a repressive dictatorship, right? progressive dictatorship, right? Like, I remember reading, you know, these memoirs from Bertrand Russell when he visited China. And he was rhapsodizing about this is an amazing culture, amazing people, this is great. And I'm like, does he not know it's a communist dictatorship? And then my brain kicked and I'm like, oh, no, it was 1912. It was not a communist dictatorship at the time. And there's a great tragedy in the way that China has been sort of repressed for so long. I think there's immense potential and promise there, but it's also the possibility that they just remain this autocracy forever and some people's lives improve and a lot of people's just drudgery for billions of people. Yeah, it's totally possible. It's fascinating that they become this combination

of things, a combination of both capitalism and communism. Yeah. Well, I think that's it. They found a release valve. Like you couldn't be – the Soviet Union was going to collapse because it's a terrible system, right? Economically, politically, whatever. And China found this little bit of balance where they still have the repressive dictatorship but they give enough freedom for people to be ambitious and try to get ahead and that improves the economy. And they make some terrible mistakes, right? There are these huge cities that are built,

no one lives there, right? And there's these spooky pictures, right? You've seen the recreations of other large cities like Paris? I've seen that. That's the weirdest thing. And sometimes like cities like Shenzhen, like right next to Hong Kong, it's a city of 5 million people that 30 years ago, it was 50,000 people, right? Like it just – they built it in a couple of years. And other places like, oh, we'll build a shopping mall here where there's – and it's just instantly – it looks like Detroit the next day.

There's no one there and no one makes – no one builds anything. No one does anything with it because it's not really capitalism. It's still a planned economy and there's pluses and minuses for that, no doubt. One of the big fears about China is their experimentation with genetics, is that they're willing to do things ethically that scientists in America and a lot of parts of the Western world are not willing to engage in yet, including use of CRISPR on human embryos. Yep. And I think – so I have mixed feelings about that. I think it's going to happen in all cultures.

I think we're going to do it, right? I actually had – sorry, I haven't released that podcast yet, but stay tuned. I have an excellent podcast coming with Carl Zimmer, who is a science writer who just wrote a long book about heredity in genetics. And, yeah, so what they're going to be doing with the designer babies, it's not science fiction as far as I can tell, it's going to happen. But it's very unclear what it will mean because we're not any good right now at figuring out how genetics turns, how your DNA turns into a person, right? It might be like, you know, that we find something other than if you increase, if you change this particular gene, sure, you can live twice as long, but also you'll have Parkinson's disease when you're 14, right?

Like we don't know what the interdependencies are and stuff like that. But it's coming. embryos to come to term and be people on the basis of their genes before they're, you know, implanted in a uterus is 100%. That's going to happen. And the chance that we're going to be editing them is 99.99% chance. And you're right, China is way more willing to do that. And again, I'm not really sure that's good or bad. You know. I think it's going to come here. What I'm more worried about is that people figure out a system that will make – you can have a baby who's guaranteed to be tall and beautiful and smart and live for 150 years and it will cost you a million dollars. Then that will be a little bit unfair, right? That will be an issue that will come up. Yeah.

But then isn't it unfair that The Rock is The rock? How did he get to be the rock? It is. But I think just psychologically, I think he worked hard. He also had some benefit. Yes, but he's also a giant human. He started in the right place. You know the story of Yao Ming, right? No. So Yao Ming, the basketball player from China, he was basically the result of a breeding program. Really? Like they encouraged his parents who were both really tall basketball players to have a baby.

And, you know, it worked for him. It doesn't always work. It's a crapshoot. But it can work. Yeah. And so. But that's normal breeding. That's like I have a dog and my dog is a good looking dog.

You have a dog of the same breed. Let's put them together. That's right. With human beings, but yes, otherwise normal. Yes. And I think it's different. It's different psychologically because we think it's different winning the lottery than already being rich and therefore being able to afford something that changes who you are. Right.

Right. I think that, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people will think that that's awesome and these people will all be celebrities and we'll follow them on Instagram. But I suspect people will be rubbed the wrong way at that kind of access to something that most people can't afford. They most certainly will. They most certainly will. But I think if you look at it objectively, if you look at the interactions of the species as a completely outside observer, you would say not only is this inevitable, but this is going to lead to some really spectacular changes in what a human being is.

Like think about a big part of what we're concerned with constantly on a daily basis is health care. People are very concerned with people that have to deal with debilitating diseases. If we could just eliminate all those, why wouldn't you want that? Yeah, I don't think you probably will be able to and it will probably happen. That I think is, but then, so almost everyone agrees with that. Like that's not the controversial part, right?

Like, yeah, if we can eliminate, and apparently some diseases we already know, like right there in your DNA, you're gonna get Huntington's when you're 40 years old, right? Yes. And so those are easy to eliminate, peanut allergies or something like that. Other diseases are harder. We don't know what causes them, so it will take time. But I think that that would be uncontroversial if you could just remove diseases from people ahead of time.

It's a little bit different if you're choosing their hair color and skin color and shape of their nose and feet and whatever. That gets a little weirder. It does get squirrely. But it's also the idea of it being a cost-prohibitive issue. Well, isn't that the case with almost all technology as it emerges? It's very – remember when plasma TVs were like $20,000 for a small television? I remember I saw them and it was only like

a 30-inch television or something that was exorbitant and I was like, this is incredible. Like, look at it. It's flat. It hangs on the wall.

This is incredible. But now, everybody has them and they're cheap. You can get one for a few hundred bucks and it's way bigger and way better

than what it was back then. Yeah, and I think actually that's very realistic that maybe it will be $1 million, but then 10 years later it will be $100,000. It has to sort of be $1 million first. Right. It kind of just like cell phones, like everything else,

it has to be a really expensive thing and then eventually it trickles down like cell phones and becomes available everywhere to everybody. Like if you look at the average person's cell phone, if you buy a cheap cell phone for like $300, it is way better than an iPhone from 10 years ago. Yeah. You know, it's just in every way. Yeah.

No, I think that's probably right. And I think that it's one of the things that's happening. Like we're still at the beginning of technology, right? Like technology is not that advanced compared to where it's going to be. Technology is not that advanced compared to where it's going to be. I have another podcast guest coming up who is an expert on aging and how we can fix that by messing with genes a little bit. Was it Aubrey de Grey? No.

No. This was a real scientist at Princeton, someone who's just doing experiments. Isn't he a real scientist? Well, he's – I don't know him that well, so I shouldn't say. But I think of him as an advocate for anti-aging, which is good, which is cool. But my guest, Colleen Murphy, is just like a biologist who's working on things and discovered something, right? She's not trying that hard. You knock out a certain gene in a certain worm and it lives twice as long and without any decay, right? It doesn't get old. Because it's fascinating. Why do we die? Why do we grow old? It's not necessary. Like you could design an organism

that doesn't get older, it would die from random bad things, you get hit on the head with a brick, but you don't need to die. The reality is that evolution programmed aging and death into us, because once we have kids, or once we've outlived our reproductive lifespan, we're not useful anymore. So biology wants us to die. And so that, in other words, it's potentially fixable. You know, it might not be easy, might not happen 100 years from now, but it could. So I think that, you know, aging, genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, you know, all that stuff is going to, within the next 100 years, totally change what it means to be a human being. And we're totally not ready for it. And so

I was saying this to Carl. Carl's like not that, Carl Zimmer is more or less sanguine about it. He's like, don't worry, just, you know, we'll put regulations on it. It'll be fine. And my attitude was, no, actually, we should think of the absolute craziest science fiction scenarios. Because I want to be prepared, right? Even if it doesn't come to scenarios because I want to be prepared, right?

Even if it doesn't come to pass, I want to worry about the least probable things because it might spark something that actually helps us down the road. Yeah, there was a recent discovery. They figured out a way to shut off whatever it is that causes wrinkles and reverse the process. So whatever is causing your skin to get wrinkly and sag, they're reversing that process. We might be members of the last generation to die. Whoa. Or of old age. We won't be immortal.

Well, then if you thought you were immortal, if you thought – well, let's say you thought that your average lifespan was a million years. Would you suddenly become way more cautious? I'd start jumping off buildings and shit. I would do like – I have a friend of mine who does that flying squirrel suit stuff. He holds the world record. You don't become invulnerable. You just donate. Yes, exactly.

That flying squirrel stuff is truly dangerous. Oh, it's super dangerous. Yeah. Base jumping, right? What if they could just fix you? If you like even – But that's a separate thing. Yes, that's possible, right?

Maybe they could back you up. Take your goo. Back you up and then you just die but they build your clone, put you back together. Like all these crazy science fictions here. I don't think that that's – I think that backing up is way harder than people think. And I think that stopping aging is way easier than people think. But we'll see. I agree with you.

I went to the 2045, I think they're calling it, conference in New York City a few years back ago. It's all the Ray Kurzweil advocates that think you're going to download brains into computers and stuff along the way. Not that compelling. That stuff, I was like, what are you going to do? What's going to happen? It seems like everybody had this idea of one day

we'll be able to do this and we'll be able to take consciousness. And I'm like, hmm, maybe. it doesn't violate the laws of physics but it's hopelessly impractical compared to anything we can do right now like the human brain it's just not something you can read out right my question and this was something that really concerned me was what's to keep someone from making hundreds of thousands of versions of themselves like what if what to take someone from some, you know, really rich billionaire character that can afford to do this

and say, I'm going to do this many, many times. Then I'm going to have my clones make clones of clones and I'm going to fill up a whole island with me. Why would you do that though? Because you're a crazy person. Okay. I mean, crazy people are allowed to do crazy things, right? But imagine if you had a hundred Sean Carrolls in your house working on things.

But they're not the same person. What if you found out that 30 of the Sean Carrolls were smoking crack and banging hookers and driving fast on the highway in the wrong direction? Can you imagine? If you realize that after a while, there is a randomness. Totally. I'm sure there is. D.V. being you. Sure.

Yeah, it's evo-devo, right? The environment you grow up in matters. That would be really fascinating. That would be an excellent episode of Black Mirror, where someone cloned themselves and found out that a certain percentage of their clones were just fucking crazy. Or they were the crazy one. All their clones were very different than them, and they were all the same to each other. Yeah, or maybe having all those clones somehow or different than them and they were all the same to each other. Yeah.

Or maybe having all those clones somehow or another set something off in them that made them crazy because they were in competition with all these other people that were exactly like them. This is golden. Yeah. We should edit this out of the podcast so we can write up this episode. There's a real concern with messing with biology in a way that's never been done before. Exactly. And I think that the extent to which it's coming is something we haven't quite faced up to yet. Right. And it's really coming.

It's coming fast and profoundly, and we're not ready. Yeah. And the possibility of just creating a world that we're not prepared for, and we're not prepared for the consequences of. Yeah, exactly. So that's why I'm all in favor of thinking crazy, right? Like just wondering what it would be like. Even if the answer is no, that'll never happen.

At least, you know, be prepared a little bit. You know, think of all the alarmist crazy scenarios. Yeah. Have you really gotten into CRISPR? Have you really looked into that stuff at all? Not that much, you know. It's a little too applied, a little too real world for my taste. For people who don't know what we're talking about,

it's a new technique for editing genes that was discovered accidentally while examining the effects of... The story is amazing. I mean, there are these bacteria. So here's the thing. We think of DNA as where our genetic information is stored, right? Like you have a little code, it's a little list of symbols, A, C, G, T, and they're in a row and that's it. It's handed down from parents to children.

But the reality is way more complicated than that because different parts of the DNA do things and different ones don't. Some of them get turned on and turned off. We have mitochondrial DNA, which are not our DNA. We have these little sub cells within us that get carried along for the ride and have their own DNA. And so CRISPR is this thing that was invented by nature, right? Not by human beings. These bacteria who were trying to resist viruses, right? So the viruses would come in and attack them. And basically, the bacteria learned a way to steal part of the DNA of the virus and keep it as like a facial recognition software thing. It's like a template, like, oh, this DNA thing is approaching me, that's a virus, and I should attack it, right? Like, this is something that I

learn how to fight off. And so to do that, you need to be able to snip out a little piece of DNA. And so scientists, biologists learned that they could train, this is a little bit fanciful way of putting it, metaphorical, but they could train the bacteria to go in there, snip out pieces of DNA, and you can do that for any DNA you want. And you can replace it with something else. It's not really very high precision right now, but that's coming. And so in principle, this is, you know, a little way to change a genetic code. And then they figured out some other way that ordinarily, right, if you have two parents and you have like, you know, brown eyes eyes versus blue eyes and blue eyes are recessive.

So they both need to have the blue eye gene to give you if you want to have blue eyes. But they figured out a way that you can change the DNA and it automatically with 100 percent accuracy gets sent to all of your offspring. Right. It's not, you know, 50-50 chance or whatever. So then you can just propagate a change in the genetic code throughout the species pretty darn quickly. I mean human beings take a long time to breed. But animals and plants, it's a whole other world, right? You can design those very, very rapidly. And there's already been at least one revision of the process, right?

I think so. But, yeah, I think I just told you everything I know about it. I think they're continuing to improve on the process. And it's really going to be very interesting to see where that goes as that advances. Yeah, I think – This was a concern with places like China. Right. They're already doing this.

They're already manipulating genetics and trying to create super people. And I think that the chances that gives them a great basketball team are greater than the chances that it gives them a bunch of brilliant PhD scientists. Well, that's where it starts, right? A lot of it starts in competitive athletics. Have you paid attention? Did you watch the documentary Icarus? No, I did not. A fascinating documentary that's on Netflix right now about – it really is kind of a crazy set of circumstances.

There's a guy named Brian Fogle. He's the director and the producer of the movie. And he was a competitive bike racer. And he decided to document what he wanted to do was compete in a race, a bike race, 100% clean, and then get a Russian scientist to juice him up. So in the process of getting this Russian scientist to juice him up, he stumbled upon a scandal. And in the middle of him making this- I'm shocked. Yeah, but I mean, in a crazy way, because this Russian guy is the head of the anti-doping agency in Russia. And it was just sort of informing him how you would do this. So he

teaches him, informs him how you can do this. While this is all going on, it turns out that the Russians had completely cheated their way through the sochi olympics and it was all documented and so they were getting busted as this is all going on and he films this russian guy who's the head of it escaping russia barely coming to the united states and being chased and testifying all the different strategies that the Russians used in order to completely cheat on at least one entire Olympic team. Every single athlete was on drugs. And they had a record number of gold medals.

And so then he starts detailing the process and how they did it. And they use forensic tests to examine the urine bottles and show that they've been opened, even though they were supposedly not openable, and really, really interesting stuff. But that national pride, the thing about national pride and the ability to win a bunch of gold medals and athletic dominance is so important for the morale of these countries that want to establish superiority. Right. Yeah. And there are some people who say, well, let's just go for it. Let's just have the all dope Olympics, right? Like let people enhance themselves as much as they possibly can.

And there's an ongoing debate about what about people who use prosthetics, right? Is that fair? If you lost a leg and you have a prosthetic leg, could that potentially give you an advantage in a running event or something like that if it were a sufficiently good prosthetic? I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I think it's a little bit weird because we set up these arbitrary categories

for what is it a sporting event, and we invented them, right? They're not out there in the world. And now we're faced with wholly different circumstances to what to do about it. But, yeah, I think that there's the question of what we should do, which is hard. There's the question of what's going to happen, which is it's all going to happen. All these things are going to happen. I was talking to a guy this past weekend who's a Navy SEAL, and his friend lost his hand.

And they gave him a new hand. And they're working on this new hand now that's going to allow him to play piano. So it's a completely artificial carbon fiber hand with all these different things that attach directly to your nerves. And somehow or another, he can control it with his arm

that's going to allow him to play piano. And you're going to tell me he could never play the piano before. Right. Now he knows how. It's programmed. It's in the thing. Yeah. Well, this is what I was saying about the brain-computer interfaces. I think

that's the real, that's even bigger frontier than synthetic biology or genetic engineering because computers are really useful for things. Robots are very useful for things. Yeah. Human beings are just going to sort of blend in. It's not like we're going to have AI and super healthy humans. It's we're going to sort of blend in. It's not like we're going to have AI and super healthy humans.

It's we're going to just have everywhere on that spectrum. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking as well. There's going to be some sort of a symbiotic thing like a chip or, you know, they tried it with the Google glasses to try to get people to wear them, but they were goofy. I put them on. They felt too science fiction-y. Just like the first portable phones were these giant things, right? That doesn't mean, right?

That's not a long-term prognostication tool. Yeah. Lots of people are working on it. Elon Musk has a little company that no one knows about. Well, they do now. Yeah. Well, people know about it if they care,

but it's not like one of his famous ones, right? Right. To implant neural lace, right? To put something in your body that reads your brain. Neural lace. I don't like the way that sounds. Where does it go?

You want it more macho? You pointed the back of your head too. Yeah, you open up your skull and you put... I didn't think of it as lingerie. I was thinking of it as like a mesh. Yeah, that's the idea. It just seems creepy that it's going to latch on your nerves. Yeah, and improve you.

Yeah. Neural lace. You won't latch on your nerves. Yeah. And improve you. Yeah. Neural lace. You won't need your phone anymore. Wow. And where's, you went to the back of your head. Everyone goes to the back of their head. Well,

I always go, well, my front of my head is useful for something else. But I mean, like the matrix, everybody goes to the back of the head. Yeah. I mean,

right now, companies that want to make money in the short term are building these non-surgical, non-invasive things where you like wear something on the front of your head, right? Or a cap or something like that, which can detect frequencies of vibrations in your brain. And you can – it's very primitive, but you can move things around. You can control drones, right, with your brain without touching anything. But yeah, the – if it ever becomes practical, which is very far from certain, but the thing to imagine in the far out science fiction scenario is cracking open your skull, inserting some electrodes in there, closing it back up, and now you're part of the super internet

without doing anything more than closing your eyes. Yeah. And there's also the possibility of enhancing various thought processes, too, with transdermal stimulation. Like if they could figure out – you know they're doing that now. They've performed a series of tests where they have people do like certain tasks, and then they put electrodes into certain areas of the brain and put an electric charge. And that electric charge stimulates various aspects of the brain and then allows them to complete certain tasks quicker and more efficiently. You know, I think, and this is just kind of uninformed belief, but I suspect that the human brain is pretty optimized for what it tries to do. I think that rather than improving the brain or

stimulating it, the way forward is to augment it, like hook it up to calculators and internet and whatever. You know, one thing that I don't see talked about very much but I think will be a real game changer. You know, we talk about phones as if we're carrying around phones. But we don't mostly use our phones to talk to people on the phone, right? We check the email, check the internet, and we take pictures. check the email, check the internet, and we take pictures. Once you really have, and again, it might not be possible, but if you really had a direct connection between your brain and the internet, your eyeballs are a video camera. Everything you see, you can record and store somewhere, right? And you can lend them to other people or people can subpoena them or whatever.

Like there's literally no place in the world that human eyeballs aren't looking at that would not be subject to later inspection. And that is weird and scary and bad, right? It is weird and scary and bad. And what if someone comes up with a better eyeball? Oh, yeah. They let you scoop out your old dull eyes and put in some new awesome ones that you can record with. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

put in some new awesome ones that you can record with. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I don't think that – I think I absolutely agree that enhancing it with electronics is probably the way to go and that having some sort of symbiotic relationship with electronics. But I also think that this transdermal stimulation can enhance that process on top of it. I think there's going to be a bunch of different things going on at once. enhance that process on top of it, I think there's going to be a bunch of different things going on at once. I mean, if you think about CRISPR being something where someone eventually figures out a way

to design various aspects of the human brain that are more open to interface with technology, changing various receptors, make them more efficient for data to go straight to the dome. Yeah. And I think that there is a short-term versus long-term question here, right? Like, even if what I said is a long-term truth, on the short term, improving our thinking skills in direct ways with stimulation or whatever sounds pretty good. But maybe you can just do that through beta blockers or some drugs or something like that. Like, I think that that's another thing very plausible that we'll have safe, super efficient drugs someone can take in over the next six hours.

They're way clearer thinkers than they were before. Is there any concern with what's the end game? Like what's the end game with all this stuff? I hope so. I mean if you're super far advanced, the end game is you realize that life is not that interesting. You went too far. Yeah. You're like, well, why am I here?

What am I doing with all this? Yeah. A little challenge is helpful, actually. Well, in particular, if you develop immortality. Yeah. If there's no concern about getting injured or killed. Yeah. I think that people who envision super far ahead science fiction scenarios, and especially people who envision uploading brains and consciousness, underestimate the importance of our bodies to who we are

as human beings, right? Not just that we're in a body, but like hunger, thirst, exhaustion, being horny, like these are motivating factors that really affect who we are and what we say and what we do and if you remove all that if you're just a thinking processor in a computer what's your motivation why are you going on right like why are you doing anything at all like i don't think it'll be i don't think it'll be anything like the personality the person who you were if your body is taken away that's the big question about artificial life, right? Or artificial intelligence, rather. Like what we have very specific needs that are addressed by our ambitions, right? Biological needs, the idea of transferring your genes, keeping your bloodline going,

all that stuff. Yeah. There's all these survival instincts that we have that you necessarily – wouldn't necessarily have if you were in artificial life form. Like why would you care if someone pulled the plug on you? Why would you try to survive? What's your purpose here? Right, exactly. It seems sort of futile if you're –

There's a lot of talk in the AI existential risk community, like worrying about artificial intelligence, about value alignment, like making sure that the AIs value the same things that we do, like our existence, for example, right? But I think a little bit, at least what I hear, and I'm not an expert, but what I hear seems a little bit off the mark because they're talking about what to program into the AI. But if it's in any sense really an AI, it can reprogram itself, right? Yeah.

You can change your mind as a human being. You can change your values. You can change your motivations. Artificial intelligences should be able to do the same thing. And in fact, they better be able to do that if they're going to be truly intelligent. If they're going to mimic what a human being can do, it can't be something where we program them to just do a task because that's not intelligent, right? So if that happens, yeah, then, you know, who knows what they're going to eventually be motivated to do, if anything. Like you said, like what is their motivation even to do is start a process that's some sort

of a perpetual, exponential domino effect of technology where this new artificial life is going to create better artificial life, which creates better artificial life, which expands to godlike powers within a very short period of time and decides we're stupid and useless and just eliminates us. Yeah time and decides we're stupid and useless and just eliminates us. Yeah, and then it gets bored and shuts itself off. Yeah, it goes, what are we doing here? The sun's going to burn out in X amount of billion years.

These are hard things to even extrapolate because they're so far beyond our experience. But I do think that we're opening up doors that we never had before between genetic modifications of human beings, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces. We don't have the experience or the capacity to really even ask the right questions about these things. We're sort of rudimentary. We're rudimentary.

The ideas that we have of like what is necessary are really based on our own biological needs. We have family. We want to keep everybody healthy. We enjoy our community. We want to keep it safe. We enjoy our earth. We want to keep it clean. We want to save things for the future generations.

And all these concerns that we have that are very biological. They just won't exist for artificial life. I think that's exactly right. And I think that what we're really good at or what we're better at in terms of imagining the future is taking what already exists and just expanding it, right? Like, so when people, I think maybe we talked about this on the last podcast, but when people first started imagining mechanical devices to carry you around, mechanical transportation in the late 1800s, they imagined a mechanical horse because they knew that horses existed, right? And the car was a totally different thing and people hadn't thought of that

originally. And then when people did think of cars, they thought of flying cars because they saw there were flying animals, right? And the flying cars haven't appeared because we didn't – what they should have been thinking about is how are cars going to change our cities and our commutes and how we live, right? When people invented the internet, they weren't sure what they were going to do with it. And I think that the same thing is true when – if we can imagine blending the barrier between our biological existence and some virtual existence, we don't even know what questions to ask about that.

Yeah, and I think we are getting close to those other things that you mentioned, though. Boston Dynamics is getting really close to artificial dogs and artificial horses. I mean, they have things that you can't kick. You kick them, and they don't get knocked over. They can open doors. Yes, they can jump incredible distances, incredible heights. There's some amazing ones that do acrobatics now. Have you seen that?

Yeah. Where they're going to replace stuntmen in movies that could potentially get harmed with these robots that can do crazy backflips and jump off buildings. The next big war is going to look very, very different than the last big war. Very weird, right? Yeah. Hopefully it won't happen. The next big war is going to look very, very different than the last big war. Very weird, right? Yeah. Hopefully it won't happen. But if it does, yeah, there's a big emphasis on automated things, not just drones, but physical things that are running around on the ground.

It can make decisions, right? Yes. Give it a little bit of AI. Do you watch Dark Mirror? I haven't seen it. It's in my queue. There's an insane episode on, do you remember the name of it the one with my mirror black mirror they say dark mirror yeah black mirror there's insane episode on these little robots that are chasing metal face metal head something like that yeah it's about

robots chasing after this lady. And it literally is these little tiny Boston dynamic robots, but they can kill you. Yeah. And they're on a mission. And this is not outside the realm of possibility at all. Nope. It really isn't. And like I said, we don't even know.

It's easy to extrapolate right ahead to sort of the simple differences. There it is. That's Metalhead. Oh, yeah. That's from the episode. It's a fantastic extrapolate right ahead to sort of the simple differences. There it is. That's Metalhead. Oh, yeah. That's from the episode. It's a fantastic episode, too. There's so many good episodes of that show. Black Mirror is just amazing.

Yeah, I got to start watching that. But that's a concern. I mean, there's a real concern. I mean, we're doing it right now with drones. You know, if you talk to people that are really, that have paid attention and studied drone warfare and how incredibly inhumane it is and how different it is from any other type of warfare in terms of like the ability to rationalize targets when you're not there and you're, you're nowhere near and you're just pressing buttons and you decide, well, there's a very good possibility this person's in here. Fuck it, nuke the building.

Yeah, I think we're doing that. Yes. That's absolutely happening. But on the other hand, the drones are also delivering pizzas. Are they, though? I think so. Who's got a pizza with a drone? I think so.

If you looked at the amount of people that have delivered pizzas with drones versus the amount of people that have been killed by drones. Probably the killing is bigger. Well, the innocents are the scariest. Drones are really good at killing innocent people. Not so good at killing the people that are specific targets. But I think my point is just that there are going to be pluses and minuses. Yes, for sure. So I think that it's going to change. Like if we combine this idea of interfacing with computers, with this idea of drones doing some drudgery work, with this idea of giving people a basic income, everyone is just going to sit in their rooms and write on their Tumblrs all day.

That's going to be the future. I don't think they're going to be writing anymore. I think there's a real possibility that we're going to create virtual reality that's indistinguishable from regular reality and people are going to live in there like Ready Player One. Well, it would be better. That kind of thing. I think the big flaw to me in things like Tron or Ready Player One is that they make the virtual reality look too much like the real reality.

There's no reason why virtual reality has to have gravity. There's no reason why it has to be three-dimensional. There's no reason why you have any limit on how strong you are or how fast you are or anything like that. There's no reason why you has to be three-dimensional. There's no reason why you have any limit on how strong you are or how fast you are or anything like that. There's no reason why you have to have only one body. I mean, there's a million different ways in which it could be very, very different. Well, it also could be implemented with something like the tank, the float tank that we were talking about earlier.

I mean, you could climb into that float tank with some sort of apparatus, hook these gloves on, put this helmet over, and literally not be subject to the whims of gravity. You can't even feel it. The effects of gravity will be inconsequential because you will feel like you're floating. And then from there, you'll be able to fly around and do all sorts of weird stuff. Yeah, I think this weird period between the year 1900 and 2000 or 2100 or whatever it's going to be, it'll be a weird transitional period in human history where we invented technology and not really put it to work yet. And there might be some equilibrium that we reach in 100 or 200 years

where the whole mode of life is utterly different than what it is now. If you could put priorities in terms of like what you think people should concentrate on first in regards to this kind of stuff, what do you think those would be? Like if someone said, Sean, you're a super smart dude. Let's get on the ball here and figure out what direction should we take this in? I mean what I do for a living is more like foundational. What are the laws of physics kind of things, right? So I'm not the person to speculate on this stuff. But who is? Well, I think this is why I said earlier, like, I think

we should be talking to each other because nobody is. No one person is, right? Like, that's why we need to have people from different areas of expertise talk about each other's areas, if only then to be corrected, right? But, you know, to be open to that dialogue. So I think that, for example, an enormous amount of effort has been put into nanotechnology, building tiny little machines. I suspect that mostly the real advances there are not going to be in nanotechnology, but in synthetic biology, where you take bacteria or multicellular organisms that already exist and adapt them for your purposes, make them do whatever you want. Because biology has already solved a lot of the problems that

technology is still struggling to figure out. So the concept of nanotechnology is you're going to take almost like a cell-sized machine and many of them are going to go into your body and find areas that are damaged or that are problems. Or do whatever. There's a woman, a professor

at Caltech who gave a talk a few months ago about she builds robots out of DNA. So these little DNA robots can go in and right now they're at the level where what they can do is sort things. So like if they have molecule one and molecule two scattered across some surface, this little DNA robot will go in and move all molecule one to the left, all of molecule two to the right. And so she says that's the beginning. Like in the future, you'll have your little DNA box and you'll say, you know, I'm allergic to tomatoes. And then it will invent a little machine that will run through your body and fix your allergy to tomatoes, right? You don't need that anymore. Whoa, with a machine. With a DNA robot.

So it's literally, so why DNA? Because you think of DNA as carrying the genetic code, but DNA is a wonderful molecule because it is relatively stable, but it's not just a crystal, right? It's not just doing the same thing over and over again. So it contains information and it can adapt. It can hold on and grab onto certain things and let go and do things.

So DNA is a wonderful testing ground for building little really, really tiny things in your body that will change who you are. Well, here's a question that's not totally related, but you might be a good person for this. What is quantum computing? Now, I keep hearing about this. It's one of the big breakthroughs in computers is going to be quantum computing. Right. I'm almost the right guy. I'm not completely the right guy.

I actually did teach a course at Caltech that involved quantum computing. So I'm above average. Definitely the best guy. I don't know that. But yeah. So quantum mechanics. This is the book that I'm writing right now. It's going to be out a year from now called Something Deeply Hidden. It will be about quantum mechanics, this is the book that I'm writing right now that's going to be out a year from now called Something Deeply Hidden.

It will be about quantum mechanics and the goal of the book will be to make quantum mechanics understandable to everybody and convince them that quantum mechanics really does imply the existence of multiple worlds where things look very much the same except for tiny differences. And one way of thinking about what quantum mechanics says is in classical mechanics, which is what came before quantum mechanics, let's imagine you have a bit, right? That is something is either zero or one, right? One piece of information. In quantum mechanics, you have a quantum bit, a qubit as they call it. Very clever. So the difference is that instead of it being a zero or a one, like it would be classically, quantum mechanically, it is in some superposition of zero and one. It's some combination of a little bit zero, a little bit one. And it's not that you don't know which one it is. It's that it really is both. It might be 90% zero and 10% one or something like that. So take that fact, number one, okay? Fact number two is that quantum mechanics has a thing

called entanglement, which means that if you have two bits classically, so you have 00, 01, 10, 11, right? Four different possibilities. So quantum mechanics says it's not that this one bit is in a combination of 0 and 1 and this other bit is also in a combination of 0 and 1. It's that the two-bit system is in a combination of 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, right? So it might be that it's 50% 0, 0 and 50% 1, 1. So you don't know what either bit is, but you know they're the same, right? So that's entanglement. So you take these two ideas that you have a combination of zeros and ones rather than just one or the other, and the different bits can be entangled with each

other. And then you just say, well, what is a computer? A computer is something that takes bits in, does manipulations, and spits out the answer, right? You solve problems. That's what's literally going on in your computer is a bunch of zeros and ones being pushed around. So a quantum computer is pushing around a bunch of qubits, right? A bunch of spinning particles or something like that. The spin of a particle that can either be spinning clockwise or counterclockwise is a qubit. And so these particles can interact with each other. They can become entangled and you invent a quantum algorithm, right? Like there's algorithms for, you know, finding the area of a surface or something like that. Factoring large

numbers, you know, solving the shortest distance between two different points. You can do this using the rules of quantum mechanics instead of the rules of classical mechanics. And the belief, which is not yet 100% established, but we think is true, is that there are some problems that are really, really hard to solve for a classical computer, which means that you can easily make the problem long enough that it would take the lifetime of the universe to solve it on a classical computer, which quantum computers can solve quite quickly and efficiently. And so it's – we're not – we haven't proven that.

That's not a mathematically precise statement. Trevor Burrus Why would they think that quantum computers would be able to solve it quicker? Peter Van Doren There's more information in the quantum computer. Like if you have two bits, 00, 01, et cetera, there's only four things it can be, right? If you have a quantum computer, there's an infinite number of things it can be

because it's any combination of those four things, right? 10% this, 20% that. So there's like a continuum of possibilities. It's analog rather than digital in some sense. And so what you can do, the quantum computer can just sort of take advantage of that extra power to look – I mean because of this entanglement, this is – I'm going to get in trouble with my quantum computing friends because it's not quite fair.

But roughly speaking, rather than manipulating bit by bit, because of the entanglement between the bits, the quantum computer can move all the bits a little bit at once. Because of the entanglement between the bits, the quantum computer can move all the bits a little bit at once. So let's say that you're searching for something in a list, right? A very elementary computer science program is I'm giving you a list. Find an element that is equal to a certain number, right? It sounds easy, but if that list is 10 trillion things long, that's hard, right? So what the quantum computer can do is say take every element in the list, right? So what the quantum computer can do is say, take every element in the list, nudge it a little bit towards zero if it's the wrong answer and towards one if it's the right answer. And you don't know where it is in the list, but you can do that nudging over and over

again. And at the end of the day, you look for where's the one, it's very easy to find. So you can get the answer much quicker, it is believed. And so things like cryptography, privacy, right, are dramatically changed by this by this because one of the things that we think quantum computers should be able to do faster is factor large numbers, which is the difficulty in factoring large numbers is the basis for much modern cryptography. But also simulating systems that were just too difficult to simulate. You know, it took too much computer power to do it. Now maybe we can do it because nature is truly quantum mechanical at the core. It turns out to be very hard because the problem is you have all these bits. If you touch one of them, if the outside world bumps into one of them, right, like a cosmic ray or an atom hits it, the whole entanglement is ruined between everything.

So it's very, very delicate. it, the whole entanglement is ruined between everything. So it's very, very delicate. And that's what the, you know, right now they're working on systems of, let's say, dozens of qubits entangled at once. You would like it to be way more than that because you can store an enormous amount of information in these things. And if it works, I think it'll be way better at computing if it works. I'm not at all sure that quantum computers will be efficient or cost effective or anything like that in the near term. But doing computations faster is something that a lot of people want to be able to do. So right now they're working with dozens of qubits and what's preventing them from expanding

that? Or are they doing it slowly to sort of make sure that it all works correctly and get an accurate model? Yeah, so the problem is if you have a qubit, it can be in a combination of 0 or 1, right, any combination whatsoever. But as soon as you look at it, you never see the combination. You see 0 or you see 1. That's it. And you've ruined, you've erased this preexisting combination. If you see 0, now it's in the state zero.

If you see one, it's in the state one. So if you have a group of many, many qubits, what I mean by look at is literally anything else in the world bumping into it. So like I said, if photons hit it, if particles, if molecules of air and oxygen or nitrogen bump into the qubit, that will count as an observation and it will collapse, as we say. It collapses the wave function and all of your quantum information is ruined. So you have to make them sort of very cold, very isolated, very shielded from external influences. And the more qubits you add, the harder that is to do. Now, is there a proof of concept to this? Yep.

They have working quantum computers. Oh. I forget. There was a joke. Scott Aronson, who's a friend of mine, who's a genius theoretical computer scientist, used to joke that the quantum computers are able to say that the number 15 is equal to 5 times 3 with very high probability. That was the state of the art.

I think they're able to say that 21 equals 3 times 7 with very high probability. That was the state of the art. I think they're able to say that 21 equals three times seven with very high probability now. But what you would like to say is, you know, some hundred digit number is the product of two other numbers. They're not able to do that right now. Now, what are they looking at with this? When they're looking in terms of the future, this stuff, how do they want to implement this?

Lots of different ways, actually. Like, you know, the actual physical technology that they're using. Some people are using atoms. Some people are using sort of features of condensed matter systems, like two-dimensional systems where electrons are moving slowly and can wind around each other and things like that. This is way beyond what I actually know about. But also, the sort of side light

of this is that this existence of entanglement is kind of a shared information between two different things in a way that classical physics just would not allow. And that's interesting and exciting because it opens up ways for, you know, for sharing information that other people can't get to because you have some information, your friend has some information, but you need both pieces of it to get to it, right? Seth Lloyd, who's another friend of mine, an MIT professor, said that he was – he tells a story where he was in a hot tub with the Google guys, right? With Sergey and Larry and the heads of Google, the founders. And he said, oh, I came up with this brilliant new idea where we can use quantum mechanics, build a quantum computer so that a person who does a search, a Google search using this quantum computer, they can do a search and they can get their answer, but it is literally

impossible for anyone else to ever know what they searched for. And the Google guys were very excited, and they went away. The next day they came back and said, oh, we realized this is the opposite of our business model. It's really important to us that we know what you searched for. Yeah, right? That's the whole thing with them. Google Ads, Google AdSense.

When you go to another website, it shows you, oh, Sean's been looking at Lenovo laptops. Bam, there they are. Yeah, and they follow you around on all your other devices, right? Yeah, it's weird. Your cookies. Creepy. But yeah, so in quantum computing, there's quantum money.

There's quantum cryptography. There's quantum eavesdropping, things like that. So it's easy to speculate about. I would not say the actual technology is very far advanced right now, but I can't tell you how quickly it will happen. Well, wouldn't someone like Google just have to adjust? Because prior to these Google ads, you never really knew what someone was interested in unless they took surveys or unless they had purchasing history or there had to be some way that you could... Now they're just detecting off of searches and that's what their business model is. But that doesn't mean they can't come up with a better new business model.

They will have to adapt, but they are not in the business of making that happen. No. Especially now it's so effective. If they were really smart, they would have given Seth $100,000 and said, tell no one about this ever again. Right. Is that enough? Yeah. We found out with the Stormy Daniels case that $100,000 doesn't buy a lot of privacy. Two-thirds of a Stormy Daniel. Right. Is that enough? Yeah. We found out with the Stormy Daniels case that $100,000 doesn't buy a lot of privacy.

Two-thirds of a Stormy Daniel. Right. What do you think they'll – like what will be the first way they try to use something like this? They try to use quantum computing. I don't know. I think that the people who are really interested in it now are the NSA and the DOD, right? National Security Agency and the Department of Defense because secret messages are the most obvious thing. Cracking codes and things like that.

That's like the killer app that we know about right now. Physicists, of course, want to use it to simulate quantum mechanical systems, to learn about the behavior of materials. Like maybe you'll build a better superconductor or something like that right away. Maybe you'll do better designing of your genetically engineered DNA on a quantum computer, right? Like there's sort of the generic thought that you'll be able to do computations faster. That's interesting. Then there's more specific things like if the system you're trying to simulate is itself quantum mechanical, then simulating it on a quantum computer might be the way to go.

Yeah. To most people, that just went, whoo, right over the head. What are these guys talking? Quantum is so weird. Like one of the things that you said earlier when you were talking about quantum, you were talking about worlds that are very similar but with very small differences. Right. Yes.

So, yeah, I forget whether we talked about this last time, but, you know, so there's this whole version of quantum mechanics. Well, let me back up because we have time, right? Sure. Quantum mechanics is weird because, among other things, it is by far the most successful theory of physics ever invented. We've tested it to enormous precision, right? There's zero evidence that quantum mechanics is in any way not right. But we don't understand it. We don't, we like, not just people on the

street, like professional physicists don't know exactly what quantum mechanics says. So how do you practice it? Well, we have a recipe. We have a black box, right? The way that I put it in the book is, imagine you had a website you could go to and you would say, you know, if I threw a ball with certain velocity in a certain direction, how far would it go? And it would give you the answer right away. Depending upon the atmosphere. Yeah.

You put all the details in. It gives you the answer. Does that count as you knowing the laws of physics? You know, no. You just have a black box, right? Right. Well, that's what quantum mechanics is right now. If we set up an experiment, we can say what the probability of every answer is going to be, every outcome.

But if you say, well, why? What happened? We don't know or we don't agree. Like different people disagree with each other. And so this version of quantum – there's different versions that try to answer this question. What's really going on beneath the surface, right? What's the deep down story of the world? And one of these stories is the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

And it was invented by a graduate student, Hugh Everett, in the 1950s who was instantly kicked out of physics. world. And one of these stories is the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. And it was invented by a graduate student, Hugh Everett, in the 1950s, who was instantly kicked out of physics. Because really, yeah, oh, yeah, there's a long, unglorious history of people trying to think deeply about quantum mechanics and being shunned in the community for doing so. Because we've set up this weird thing where I mean, there was literally a memo that went around the major physics journal in the United States that said we will not even look at papers to try to think about the foundations of quantum mechanics. It's embarrassing. It's terrible. It's like we need to do like real work, like shut up and calculate.

We need to build bombs and things, not think about the nature of reality, which I think is very much antithetical to what physicists should be doing. But anyway, so what many worlds says is, well, so when we do talk about quantum mechanics, let's say we have a qubit, we have a spinning particle, right? We have this combination of spinning clockwise and counterclockwise. And so we call that the wave function. The wave function is just, it's 10% clockwise, 20, you know, 90% counterclockwise or whatever. So to every possible measurement outcome, you give me a number and that number is basically how I figure out the probability of that measurement outcome coming true and that's the wave function.

So for a long time, people thought, well, this is just a trick. This is just like some – it characterizes our inability to be precise, right? We have a probability of this, a probability of that. But someday, they hoped, Einstein, for example, had this hope that we'll have a better theory and we'll know exactly how to predict everything with perfect precision. So whatever it says is no, no, no. It's the other way around. This wave function is reality. That's the whole world, right? That's what reality is. It is a superposition, a combination of all the different possible outcomes. It's not any one outcome. There's no such thing as where the electron is.

It's all spread out. And the problem with that is that when you look at the electron spinning, you never see it as a combination of spinning clockwise and counterclockwise. You always see one or the other. And Everett says that's because you have a wave function. You live as a superposition of different possibilities. And when you look at the electron, what happens is before there was you and there was an electron and a combination of counterclockwise and clockwise. Afterward, there is the electron was spinning clockwise

and you saw it spinning clockwise. Plus, that's 10%. Then 90%, the electron was spinning counterclockwise and you saw it spinning clockwise. Plus, that's 10%. Then 90%, the electron was spinning counterclockwise and you saw it spinning counterclockwise. And both possibilities are real, but they're separate. They've branched off from each other. They've gone their own ways. They're separate versions of the world, separate copies of reality. That's why it's called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Possibilities is always a big feature. That's the thing that people are constantly discussing, right? Yeah. What are the possibilities? Predicting the possibilities. And when it comes to human beings, this is also randomly discussed because we talk about determinism versus free will. We talk about what's created. what are the possibilities that is created to Sean Carroll, and why do you think the way you think, and why are you going to say the next thing

you're going to say? And is it how much of it is biological? How much of it is your life experience? How much of it is information that's dancing in your head? How much of it is you interacting with me? The last thing that I've said to you. Yeah. So I had, I was on Sam Harris's podcast. We had a long conversation about this because he is very anti-free will. And I think that it's, I disagree with him, but I don't care. I think it's kind of boring to be honest. Do you think it's boring really? I think it's boring because here's why I think it's boring. Because there's two questions. One question is how does the world work? The other question is what words should be attached to how the world works? And the first one is words should be attached to how the world works?

And the first one is interesting. The second one is kind of boring. I see what you're saying. And Sam and I agree on how the world works, right? But I am what philosophers call a compatibilist when it comes to free will, which is I don't think that I have some ways of thinking my way into overcoming the laws of physics, right? Like I'm made of atoms, made of particles that overcoming the laws of physics, right? Like I'm made of atoms, made of particles that obey the laws of physics. If I talk about myself as a large collection of atoms and particles obeying the laws of physics, then clearly there's

no free will. There's just the solution to the equations and sometimes the wave function branches and there's now two of me but that's whatever it is. There's no spark of consciousness that lets me overcome what the equations say is going to happen. But guess what? That's not a fruitful way to go through your life in terms of talking about human beings. When you meet somebody for the first time and you say like, you know, what do you do? Who are you? They don't give you a list of their atoms and say what every atom is doing and say, let go ahead and solve Schrodinger's equation to figure out what's going to happen next, right? You tell a story.

You say, like, you're a person. You grew up in a certain place. You have a certain job, stuff like that. You dramatically condense the information about who you are into a few salient points. And among those salient points are I am a person who thinks and makes decisions. Every person in the world, no matter how anti-free will they are, talks about people as if they make decisions. And the reason they do is because that's how people are. That's the best way to talk about people.

It's not like just a compromise. Like if you don't know the atoms and molecules in somebody's body and you're not infinitely computationally powerful so you can predict the future, then it's correct to talk about people as agents who make decisions. We call that free will. I call that free will. Most philosophers call it free will. If you don't want to call it free will, be my guest. I don't really know. It doesn't really matter to me. I agree with what you're saying. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think that really simplifies a very complex issue. When I looked looked at it and I have had this conversation with Sam as well, uh, I totally see his point and I think he makes a hundred percent sense. It's just, there's no arguing with it. I really think it's, it's very rational, that approach.

But I also think that it's very much like what we were talking about earlier, that it's not necessarily just a one or a zero, that it's a combination of these things. Free will, there is some mechanism that chooses to do one thing versus another. There is some computation. There's calculation, there's debate, there's discussion. There's a thing inside of you, whatever it is, whatever that process is that's causing you to, I mean, how many times have people stayed up all night going over

and over and over a certain idea trying to find a rational conclusion? Oh, yeah. All the time. What is that? Right. Well, what is that? Is that free will? Is that, is that? Yeah. This is where the, it actually becomes interesting to talk about the vocabulary we use, right? Because it becomes very, very hard to know where to attach the word I or you when you're talking about this. Like we tend to say, I made a decision. Okay, that's fine, right? I decided to have this can of pure caffeine that you put in front of me and drink it. I could have decided otherwise. So that's the question. Like, does it make sense to say I could have decided otherwise?

And if you define yourself as the following list of atoms and particles in a certain configuration, then no, then the laws of physics said that that was going to happen. But I don't know what all that is. That's not a useful way of talking. So there's a whole nother way of talking that says, I'm a person and I kind of like coffee, but I already had a cup this morning. And, you know, there's a chance, there's a probability, like you say, that I would drink this and a probability that I would not. And those are completely compatible, although they're different. The only way you get into trouble is if you mix up those two different ways of talking. If you say, like, I chose to have the coffee because my atoms were in a following configuration

or something like that, right? That's like talking about us as humans and then switching vocabularies, talking about us as atoms, and that's where you get in trouble. Yeah, it's a weird reductionist take on what it means to be a person that thinks. Yeah, yeah. I think if you say there's no free will in your atoms, then I'm with you. I'm on board. But no one in the world goes through life that way for good reason, and they never will. It's not going to happen. Yeah.

Well, and you could break that all the way down to creativity, right? Like when someone sits down and writes something, like where is all that coming from? Is that just determinism as well? There is an interesting question about how much we will ultimately be able to unpack and understand about that, right? Right now the brain is kind of just a mystery box to us. And there's so much we don't know about how people make decisions, how they remember things, how they come up with new ideas. So where it matters is how we treat people.

The obvious case is responsibility, blame. If you think that a person makes choices, then you can assign responsibility to them for making the choices they made. That's what we do in the world. If someone chooses to rob a bank, we choose to put them in jail, right? Yes. And someone could come along and say, no one ever does this, but someone could come along and say, well, they're just a bunch of atoms obeying laws of physics. How can you blame them, right? That would be dopey. That doesn't make any sense. But what if you were minority report, right? What if you could like put someone in an MRI, in a brain scanner and say,

yeah, you know what, tomorrow they're going to rob a bank. Do you arrest them? Is that enough, right? The fact that their brain was hooked up to violate the law in the future, is that enough to assign personal responsibility to them for that? Or do you do the opposite and say, well, it's going to happen no matter what. We can't really blame them. Isn't it possible to correct that thought process with education or some sort of awareness training or something where you could shift the consciousness and abruptly sort of disassemble determinism at its most problematic point? Yeah. So there's a whole kind of interesting set of ideas that are very popular among philosophers right now, which is the question of moral luck. So if you're driving down the street

and you're buzzed, you're drunk, right? Maybe you get home fine. Maybe someone jumps in front of your car and you run them over because you don't have the agility or the reflexes because you're drunk, right? So you're the same person. You went home, you're drunk, right? So you're the same person. You went home, you're drunk, and you're driving home.

But depending on the outside world, you ran someone over and killed them or you didn't. But in the world, we blame the person who ran somebody over. We punish them much more severely than the person who got home safely, right? That's not their responsibility. They sort of got unlucky there in the world. So should we blame people who had the chance of doing it? No one knows the answer to these questions. These are these are tricky things. Like we're not very good human beings at thinking about these probabilistic counterfactual questions. Yeah, that's a good one. That is. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. What who are you then? Yeah. Are you lucky?

Oh yeah. Right. I mean, so much of what happens to us in life, we don't get responsibility for. Sure. I mean, we're interfacing with randomness every time we step out the door. That's right. But can you treat people that way consistently? It's hard, right?

It's tricky. I'm not giving the answer because I don't know. There is no, right. Yeah. This is tricky stuff. We're certainly not, like, if you lived in a world where you thought that what happened in the world was preordained, that there was all the great playing out as a master plan or at the very least that there was some sort of karmic influence that made good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people, then the world makes more sense, right? I don't believe any of that stuff. But at least then the world seems if there's something random,

you can attach a reason why it happens. There seems to be something to karma in that when you do good things, you make people feel better, they feel about you better, and then they interface with you in a more positive way, and that sort of like has this outgoing effect. That's not karma. That's just a psychologically smart thing to do. I think that you're right that we – and maybe this is just sort of a Western post-enlightenment way of thinking. We tend to sort of think about immediate consequences for our actions for better or for worse

and in the real world sort of generally trying to be good can often pay back in good ways. But the woo-woo thing is that we're putting out this good energy and the good energy is coming back to us. And it's a fun way to look at things, although there's no evidence that points to it. Yeah, exactly. Like if I'm in a yoga class and my yoga instructor is talking about different energy flowing through different chakras or whatever, I don't care. Like it doesn't bother me. Like as long as it makes me, you know, do that exercise. There's not even a little Sean Carroll eye roll?

There's a little. There's a little. But I'm not going to speak up. Let's put it that way. Right. Of course. You're not going to go, stop this class. You're teaching bullshit. I would rather have that than, you know, if people want to come up with an excuse to be a good person, that's okay. It's funny that yoga class is always the base. It's always where people go to talk about like where woo-woo comes from. Yeah. Yeah. It's there because I've had, you know, I mean, if you've done yoga, you know, like there's a whole spectrum, right?

Like there's teachers who are basically just physical therapists and there are people who are complete crazy hippies. Oh, yeah. You know, you have to think the right thoughts. Yeah, but people are always searching for some understanding of really complex issues, and behavior is a very complex issue. Sure. Behavior and how you feel, like whether you feel good, whether you feel spiritually enriched, whether you feel positive about humanity. All these things are like we're always trying to manipulate these states, whether it's through meditation, mindfulness training, trying to figure out a way to positively interface. You know, it's true. And it goes back to where we started talking about YouTube comments, because like I said,

I do react badly to bad, to stupid YouTube comments. Well, you're a human being. Well, I'm a human being, but I think, and I think that the internet does magnify some of our bad tendencies, right? And I think that, you know, among these, and so I totally include myself as a bad actor here in the sense that it's just so easy to be sarcastic and put people down and, you know, disagree in sort of dismissive ways. And I don't think that's good. I would like to live in a world where people,

including myself, even when we disagree with people, even when we disagree with people who are stupid and we're not trying to engage them or improve their lives, just, you know, get on with our own lives rather than trying to have a snarky comeback. Like, I get that there's a purpose to snark and sarcasm and whatever, but it weighs you down, right? Like, you know, this is why people complain about Twitter and social media. Like, it's so much psychic energy just gets sapped by reading all of these complaints on either side.

There's no, you know no political bias, right? Like whatever your feelings are, someone else is making you feel down on the internet somewhere and it does weigh on you. comments this is reductionist take on things to reduce a person down to maybe one statement or misinterpretation of one position and then have that person be dismissed yeah and i think instantaneously yeah and it's uh tough like i i after thinking about a little bit i think that it was a bad decision that james gunn got, for example. I don't know if you followed that little thing. Guardians of the Galaxy guy. The Guardians of the Galaxy guy. Well, those were really bad tweets.

Oh, yeah. They just weren't funny. And he wrote a bunch of them. And there were a lot of it about pedophilia. So I totally get it, right? I'm not shocked that he got in trouble that way. But I also think that his response was immediate and correct and grown up he said he didn't say like oh i was young it was a different

time he said like oh yeah i did that it was shitty and it was wrong and i take responsibility and i do think we got to let people grow right like that's what most people in this sort of post me too era have not done when they've been accused of these things they haven't taken responsibility they've made made excuses and And I think that on Twitter, especially, you know, I love Twitter. I think it's my favorite social medium, but it is too easy to be reductive. It's too easy to be simplistic and to respond. And, you know, one of the things that annoys me the most about Twitter is when someone tries to be good and then 20 other people say, well, you're not being good in precisely the right way. Even though I fail to live up to it myself, I'm trying to be better.

I want to be charitable when I deal with other people. I got in trouble on Twitter the other day for defending Kellyanne Conway a little bit. What did she do? Well, years ago, she did the alternative facts thing. Remember when she said when they were talking about the inauguration? Right, the size of the crowd. And people pointed out like, no, that's just factually incorrect. And she says, well, there are alternative facts.

So like I don't want to defend Kellyanne Conway. I'm not a defender of her in general. But I think that she just misspoke that one time. I think that what she was trying to say was there are additional facts that we could also look at, right? And of course, it's in a bigger context where she lies all the time and she lets other people – she is an apologist for other liars. But I think that the idea that these people who I disagree with politically are so divorced from reality that they think they can just make up their own reality, no one actually thinks that way. Like the people who I disagree with politically are so divorced from reality that they think they can just make up their own reality.

No one actually thinks that way. Like the people who disagree with me about politics or religion or whatever, it's comforting for me to think that they are just cheerfully making up facts and reality by themselves. They don't think of themselves that way. They think that they're being truthful. They think that they're being truthful. They think that they're being rational and correct. And so I should at least grant them that that's what they think in their own right. Well, I'm going to disagree with you on that because I don't think that – first of all,

I don't think that she's granted any sort of autonomous decision-making capabilities. And I think this is probably something that was sat down that they sat down with a team of experts or you know air quote experts team of people that were in that in our that you know room whether it's press people or spin doctors where they're trying to figure out a best way to get out of this and one of the best ways was this concept of alternative facts. Very similar to one of the ways where Trump was in that meeting with Putin, that very famous, awful meeting that happened recently, where he said, I don't see any reason why it would be Russia that's interfering. And then he said afterwards, obviously, I misspoke. I thought it was clear what I meant to say.

I didn't see any reason why it wouldn't be. Right. I shouldn't say. But it's clear if you watch him say it. Yeah, that's what he said. That's not what he said. That was entirely bullshit. Entirely bullshit.

Dangerous bullshit. But I think so. Scary bullshit, in my opinion. Yes. It's. Because it's such a lie. Right. And it's so blatant.

In context, the way he's expressing himself, it's clearly he's dismissing it. Like, why would it be? Why would it be Russia? He's not saying, why wouldn't it be Russia? Because he's standing right next to Putin, and he would be saying that in a much more measured and he would be accusing. He would be accusing. Yeah, that was clearly a case where he did something really bad and he came home and all of his advisors said like, no, we have to fix this a little bit. They came up with a really clumsy, incredibly – But that's all they had.

That's all they had, right, because it was so blatant. I think alternative facts is also all they had. Well, you might be right actually. I didn't really study it very carefully. I think that it was just a spontaneous blurting out. You might be right actually. I didn't really study it very carefully. I think that it was just a spontaneous blurting out. You might be right too. Because here's why I think that that's probably right because I don't think – like I was trying to say before, I don't think that's their self-conception. Like people often think that the people who they disagree with think false things.

That's very natural. think false things. That's very natural. But they also, also like uncharitably say they know they're thinking false things and they're, you know, they're, they're happily making up their own version of reality.

And I think that's very rare. I think that happens. Like if you're just a con man or whatever, but I think that more often than we want to admit, people are sincere in their very false beliefs. Right. So I, so I just find it implausible that, I mean, Kellyanne Conway, again, lies all the time. That is not my defense of her. My defense

of her is it was just that she would not go out there and say, oh, yes, but we're making up new facts. That's just not the kind of thing someone would say. But she didn't say it that way. She said there are alternative facts. Now, you got to think that he's playing to the dumbest people in the room all the time. And fortunately for him, that's a big number. Yeah. And there's a recent thing where he was defending his behavior saying that anyone can act presidential. his behavior saying that anyone can act presidential. And he stood on stage and he did this sort of robotic, boring walk back and forth.

And then he started talking in a boring way and mocking it. And what's interesting about the video is not just him doing this, which is very silly, but it's also the people behind him thinking it's hilarious. I did not see this. See if you can find it. There's a video of him saying that anyone can act presidential. This is very, very recently. And a lot of people were watching this going, what? He also thinks you need ID to buy groceries.

Yeah. There's a lot of that. Well, he also thinks that stealth bombers are invisible. Yeah. Do you see that? They can't see them, right? They can't see them? They're invisible.

You're right behind it, asshole. You can look at it. Do you follow Kellyanne Conway's husband on Twitter? Do you know about him? I don't even know who he is. George Conway, he's a lawyer, and he's very vocally anti-Trump. It's hilarious. Really?

He's constantly subtweeting and making fun of Trump. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Wow, that's got to be fun. That's a fun household. But this is what gets me. Go full screen in this. You can't.

What's interesting is these dummies behind him. Yeah. behind him yeah like while this is happening one of the interesting things about this to me is that his back is to all these people which is very odd right so they're all behind him instead of having a static backdrop you you're getting to part of the thing is the other people It's not just him. It's their reactions. Yeah, it's a sense of belonging to a weird group. Yeah. And everyone has that, like leftists and rightists and whatever all have this weird belonging. But when it's, again, it goes back to the China thing, right?

Well, we have Fox News. We have a way of giving people information that if you follow, I follow Fox News on Twitter because I want to see what they're telling people, right? Yes, yes. It's a weird thing because it's not like it's all lies, right? There's often lies. They're there. But it's like a very different mixture of things than you would get from the rest of the media. And a lot of it is – it's very clear if you follow Fox News, like they're targeting an older white rural suburban audience, right?

So there's a lot of like weird human interest stories about an alligator popping out of the sewer and things like that. Like things that are not – they have no political agenda, but they're just trying to – Get those old white people to pay attention. Yeah. Well, they're sending a message that the world is kind of scary and weird and we need to protect ourselves. There's an alligator on the golf course. Yeah, like they love those stories, right? The alligator on the golf course is my favorite.

It's just local news. It's the 10 o'clock local news put nationwide and added in there with some cheerleading for this bizarrely dysfunctional administration. Well, isn't Sean Hannity now the number one watch cable news program? Something like that. Yeah, I don't know the numbers. I think it's number one, and it's fucking awful. There was just a poll. This goes back to the social credit thing.

They did a poll, what is the most trusted news source? And Fox News came in number two. What's number one? BBC. That makes sense well cnn is just taking a giant hit because his constant constant berating of them and then you see jim acosta you know the whole these all these pro wrestling fans like giving them the finger and screaming at them and yeah and it's what i i I do worry that this is a hard thing to come back from because, you know, once you, you know, like another thing that Trump said was that, you know, don't believe anything you're told, right?

Unless you hear it from me. And Sean Hannity says the same thing. No, I was sorry. Tucker Carlson said the same thing, right? Did he say that too? Tucker Carlson said like, yeah, any other show than this one, don't believe it. Yeah. Look at this.

Fuck the media he has on women for trump yeah it's just what and then after listening to this radio lab podcast about these russian troll farms and about how they implement these things you got to think is all of this organic is how many of how much of this is orchestrated how much of this organic? How much of this is orchestrated? How much of this attacking CNN is orchestrated? Part of it is. Part of it is just it builds on itself. All you need is just a little bit of a push. I was talking to someone who is boasting about how hard Donald Trump works.

That like compared to previous presidents, he's really just putting in the hours. Oh, that's not true, right? Which is like really the least plausible thing that you could think about. Yeah, he wakes up late. He watches eight hours of TV a day. He plays golf every day. He like spends all the time at his own resorts. Like of all the fantasies you could invent, that's a very weird one.

Well, people just love to find narratives that fit what would be acceptable for their opinions, this side that they've taken. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. And so he – give him credit. He gives people a narrative that works for them. Well, CNN does it too because CNN – they spent so little time going over Donna Brazile's

book about how the DNC had been corrupted and about how they had rigged the primaries for Hillary and really screwed Bernie Sanders over. This was not a narrative that they dwelled on. They didn't dwell on the fact that she illegally deleted 30 plus thousand emails and said they were about yoga classes. That shit is just as preposterous – it's just as damning against CNN as some of the nonsense that Fox News does. There's no one pure organization of news that's wholly objective. It's not just as damning. I think that Fox News is special.

Especially damning. I think that Fox – I mean Fox News was founded by a guy who was a political operative for the Republican Party, right? Like individual reporters for most news organizations tend to be liberal. But they also sometimes tend to overcorrect for that, like to try to bend over backwards to be fair. Like way more Republicans are quoted in the New York Times than Democrats ever are. And I think that there are certainly biases and certainly misrepresentations of reality from all these different outlets.

But I think Fox News is special among the major ones. I would concede that. But I also think that one example, like the New York Times is different because the New York Times, I feel like because of the fact that it's actually writers and it's in text, you're not dealing with people that have to be comfortable performing in front of a camera, which eliminates a large swath of intellectuals. Right. It's a very different medium.

It's a different- And they fact check and- It's carnival. Corrections in a way that the TV does not. Yeah. It's theater. It's a different thing. And people like Sean Hannity, that if you read his written word, I don't think you would

stand out. No, and again, like I said before, I worry about what happens next because I don't think that Trump will win again. I think he will. All right. I don't think so. I think it's entirely possible he'll win again. Yeah, it would be – but again, I didn't – Did you think he was going to win the first time?

No, I didn't. So I was just going to say don't listen to me. Like before Donald Trump, I was really good at predicting who was going to win elections. And I have no ability once he's in the game. But I worry that the people who sort of are on his side are going to feel even more disenfranchised and disenchanted and angry after he loses again than they do now. And that's going to be a problem. I think that's a real fear. And I think that one of the reasons why I said it's entirely possible and I don't know if he will win again, but I don't even know if I believe he'll win again.

But I think it's a possibility. And I think that one of the reasons why I think that is I don't see who's the big candidate on the other side that's opposing him that stands out right now. Yeah, that's a problem. I think there's a real issue with people not wanting the job. It's a really scary job. Yeah. You know? I mean, it sucks you dry like a vampire that's hooked up to the back of your neck.

It's just so, even with him, with his unique ability to sociopathically sort of navigate the waters of accusations and guilt, he still looks beaten down by this job. Yeah, but people want it. Maybe not the people we want to want it, right? Who wants it on the Democrat side? Who wants it on the left that stands out? I mean, I think I'm not excited by any of the people right now, but I think- No one is. I bet there's going to be 10 people running at least. I mean, I think that Biden has at least a 50% chance to run. Elizabeth Warren is definitely going to run.

Do you think Elizabeth Warren, though, she's got that real problem with the whole Pocahontas thing. That whole Indian thing. Whether you're going to run is different than whether you're going to win. Right. But that is a giant problem. The thing that she may have faked, whether or not she has Native American heritage and she's not willing to take a DNA test. And that's this Native American heritage she claimed is how she got into Harvard. And she used that in order to get special status.

And that's a problem. You know, whether or not you should forgive someone for something they did a long, long time ago, which I think you probably should. The problem is it sort of in some ways negates a lot of the good work and things that she said, because people say, I can't trust her. She lied about her actual ethnicity. Yeah, it's but what is hard for me to do is to predict how much it will matter, right? Like in 2008, we had a race between a Vietnam War hero and a black guy whose middle name was Hussein. If you had told me that a few years earlier, who's going to win? I would have gotten that one wrong.

We also had Sarah Palin. Yeah, exactly. This is what we don't know. If he had taken a better running mate, it's entirely possible McCain would have been president. I think that people were really tired of George W. And I think that McCain was just not a good candidate. I think he was going to lose no matter what. Well, I think also Obama was so charismatic and so uniquely intelligent and smooth and relaxed and statesmanlike.

I think he fit the bill of what we wanted a president to be. But remember, people were worried about like he went to Jeremiah Wright's church and things like that, right? Right. Stuff that didn't – like at the time, it was a big deal. And who cares? Eight years later, right? So I Stuff that didn't – like at the time, it was a big deal and who cares eight years later, right? So I don't know about the Pocahontas stuff. That's a big one though. The Pocahontas stuff is a big one because it's a personal lie.

I don't know. But again, I mean I think Cory Booker is going to run. Kamala Harris might run. Who knows? There's a bunch of people. I would not be at all surprised if Joe Biden didn't run. I kind of don't think that he should but

he's getting up there and he's a Washington insider which is not really what the country wants in 1988 in Boston we used to have Joe Biden night at the comedy clubs and Joe Biden night was a night where we would do other people's material because this is when Joe Biden got busted

with Kennedy speeches. Yeah, well, and Neil Kinnock, the British politician. Yes. He stole from him, too. And this was when he was running for president in 88. Right. And so we— He's never done very well running for president.

No. Like, he's run several times. So I think that he was a good vice president, and people like him for that, and they might not want him to do more than that. Vice president is a great job if you want no one to pay attention to you yeah you know exactly it's like being the the you know the the co-star in a buddy cop movie with a huge super very few responsibilities go to some funerals yeah right easy yeah unless you're mike pence where you're trying to you know make it the handmaid's tale behind the scenes. He seems like he's kind of laying back, though, especially over the last few months.

Trump is so insane that you see very little Mike Pence. I don't think you see very little of him, but I think that he's trying his best to put in policies behind the scenes. Well, what is this new thing that Jeff Sessions is trying to push? Religious freedom. Yes. Which means you have to obey whatever the fundamentalist Christians want to do.

Yeah, well, this is what, you know, Michael Malice was tweeting about this the other day when he tweeted this. He said, when I said that a version of Sharia law could very well be coming out of this administration, this is what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. It's a weird backward thing where you define religious freedom to be

let fundamentalist Christians do whatever they want, right? Yeah. And do it by law. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's tricky because, yeah, I don't know. I mean, if someone wants to, part of me is a little bit libertarian when it comes to personal action. Like if someone doesn't want to deal with you, that's their right. But when whole groups are being subject systematically to discrimination, like gays are, then the government steps in to protect them a little bit. And I think that's okay. And a lot of this is, you know, doctors don't want to do abortions or, you know, health care providers or insurance providers don't want to pay for things because of their religious beliefs or insurance providers don't want to pay for things because of their religious beliefs

or Catholic universities don't want to do certain things. And I think that these are legitimate questions, and we're not really having a grown-up intellectual conversation about them. We're just throwing feces at each other in this particular arena. Well, it's also strange when someone comes up with some sort of a new idea like that that goes against the separation of church and state. And it's being promoted by a guy who's openly religious and says a bunch of really preposterous things. And generally someone who's not a very trustworthy source of intellectual discourse.

That's right. And there's this fascinating question about why white evangelicals are Trump's biggest support group, right? Yeah. Like huge, despite the fact that he is not religious himself, that he's the biggest sinner ever to be in the Oval Office,

but they love him. And it's a weird thing. And I think a lot of it comes, well, so there's sort of the strategic questions. A lot of it comes down to abortion, right? They want Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade. And whoever – however they're going to get that is good for them. But then there's a whole much more elaborate apologetics about how God is using Donald Trump as his instrument to make the country better make the country better, even if he himself is a flawed vessel.

Sometimes God works through flawed vessels. Well, if you position yourself as an ally, even if you have previously sinned, the beautiful thing about Christianity is all you have to do is say, that's not me anymore. I found Jesus. And he's like, I don't have a past. And he's like, I am born again. I do not have a past. Do you? And he was going on about this whole thing about this concept of Trump is now an agent of God.

But I don't necessarily even think it's Christianity. I think that religion can be infinitely malleable to the purposes of the moment, right? Sure. He wouldn't have said that about Obama or whoever, right? Right. You pick and choose when you apply your criteria. Like I did this once as an exercise for myself. There's certain phrases in the Bible or certain passages

in the Bible which are sort of unapologetically left-wing and socialist, right? Just like there are others that are unapologetically right-wing and authoritarian. It's a big book full of different things. So I wondered like how – what do they tell themselves? What do people who don't fall on that side of the spectrum tell themselves about these passages in the Bible. So there's one very famous passage about how it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, right? Clearly, I think that anyone who reads this says this is an anti-rich person statement. So you can Google it, like, so what do people say about this? So my favorite explanation was that, sure, it's impossible for camels to pass through the eyes of a needle except if Jesus helps them. Or if you grind the camel down to a very fine dust.

They interpret this as Jesus – that only through Jesus do we get into heaven. That's really the only lesson they get from it. Oh, okay. So that's nice. It has nothing to do with rich people. All you's really the only lesson they get from it. Oh, OK. So that's nice. It has nothing to do with rich people. All you have to do is find Jesus and if you're rich, you're good. Well, this is why – But on your own, you're fucked.

This is why I can't – even though I'm an atheist, I'm very happy to explain why I don't think that God exists. But I don't blame religion most of the time for people's bad actions because I think that religion is just sort of a catalyst. It lets people find excuses for their bad actions. But it's usually the bad actions, the desire to do bad actions that comes first most of the time. Do you ever look at religion as a potential almost evolutionary software program that's allowed people to sort of adopt morality and impose certain standards of behavior that are conducive to civilization. So people talk about that. And again, I'm not an expert there. I'm a little skeptical because it sounds like too much of a pat story to tell after the fact, right? I think

that we are a little bit quick to attribute ideas and cultural concepts to evolution. But certainly, you know, religion was not like just science done badly back in the day, right? Like what religion was was something much more expansive, interleafed with your life overall. So it was not just how the world was created and whether God exists. It was how to be a good person, how to live in your community, things like that. And, you know, disentangling these things is one of the reasons why religion is still hanging around, right? Like even after the kind of underpinnings of the religion in terms of understanding

how the world works have been removed by science, the other functions are still there. And I'm a big, you know, critic of my fellow naturalists who have not put enough effort into replacing the other functions of religion, now that the claims about the world are no longer viable. That's a great way to present it. Yeah. And it's really a problem when there's so many versions. It's really a problem when there's so many versions. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the many, many reasons why I think that it's not really credible to be religious intellectually is because if – in the classic traditional Western religious sense where there's a god and he cares about us, right? So there's all sorts of questions about where we define the boundary of religion, whether Buddhism is a religion or something like that.

But in the usual sense that we grew up with in this country, surely if that were true, God would have done a much better job of explaining himself to us, right? Like why would God give us his message through a bunch of people in a tiny country who didn't write? You know, like the New Testament wasn't written down until decades after the event. None of the people who wrote it down were eyewitnesses. Why is it only shared there? I mean, God is God, right? Like he could easily have showed up to everybody in the world, talked to them, explained how things were going,

and let them make their own choices. That would have been a much more efficient way of getting the message out. And so it's just not really sensible to think that – so if God didn't exist, then what you would imagine is that in different countries and different parts of the world and different periods in history, people would tell their own stories and they'd all be a little bit different. They'd be adapted to their local circumstances and they'd be utterly incompatible with each other. And that's exactly what you find. Do you speculate as to what the origins of the concept of God are, since so many different groups of people all over the world have a very similar idea, at least, that there's some omnipotent superpower that's controlling the destiny of everything? Yeah. So number one, I think that the idea of omnipotence was actually somewhat late coming onto the scene, right?

Like if you dig into what was happening before 2,000 years ago, you know, the Hebrew god was not omnipotent at the beginning, right? I mean the Hebrews came out of a polytheistic society where there were lots of different gods around. And you can trace how their god evolved over time and first became their god, right? Like this was one god that the Hebrews were worshipping and the Egyptians and the Babylonians would worship other gods. Then they started saying, well, our god is better than all the other ones. And then they started saying, well, the other ones don't even exist, right? And it was an evolution over time. And omnipotence came late. Like you would talk about God's quarreling. If you were a polytheistic, a pagan culture, it's actually makes more like a lot of the world makes more sense. If you believe there's a whole bunch of gods out there who disagree with each other. Right.

Suddenly, lots of aspects of reality come into focus. But the idea there's supernatural, very powerful influences in the world. I mean, that's just an obvious idea I think. Like we're human beings. We tend to as our first guess in understanding the world treat the world as you know humanist. Like we're

anthropomorphic right? Like if something exists it must have been designed. There must be a reason. There must be a purpose. Things work in a certain way because someone made them that way and we don't see that person hanging around so it must be a reason. There must be a purpose. Things work in a certain way because someone made them that way. And we don't see that person hanging around. So it must be up there in the sky or something. I don't think it's that hard to imagine that all sorts of different cultures would evolve. Do you think it's also a function of us growing up with mentors and father figures and leaders and chieftains? And there's always someone who is the big kahuna.

So this is the sky daddy. Yeah. Sky daddy overlooks the big picture. I think there's that and also the idea of your ancestors and ancestor worship or veneration, right, which is also very almost universal, you know, in primitive cultures. Like you don't want to admit you died, right? That's a sad thing to sit through. So I don't know. I'm sure there are real experts who know a lot about the actual origins of these

things but again but my point is just that i don't take the commonalities between different sets of religious beliefs as evidence for anything other than there's a very human thing to invent people search for meaning and they take meaning from whatever religion or ideology that they subscribe to and they use it as sort of a reason why they're living. It gives them hope. It gives them something. Yeah, it's a very common theme among religious thinkers that if it weren't for the existence of God or whatever, there'd be no reason to live, there'd be no reason to be a good person, and

so forth. And, you know, I think it's it goes back to the motivation we have as having bodies versus being in a computer. Like, there's plenty of reasons to do different things. Like, in the big picture, in my last book, I talk a lot about you know, it's okay to admit that we as human beings have desires, that there are things we care about,

that we want to be true. And you can talk about why that's true from evolution, from biology, and whatever, but it doesn't matter why in some sense, we have goals. We're not completely aimless. Like we want to survive, we want to flourish. We want to be friends with people. We want to have families. Whatever it is we want to do, all that we put together in terms of morality and ethics and meaning and purpose comes out of thinking hard and carefully, hopefully, about how to systematize and grow those existing desires that we have into a way of living in the world. We don't need anything external to make that happen. We just need to sort of think about where we are already and try to make it better. But you as an intelligent person who is also an atheist who thinks very deeply about things,

what do you cling to as a purpose for life? Do you have one? Do you have like a – when you sit and think, what's the point of all this? Do you? I don't have a single one. I don't have a monolithic purpose. I have plenty of intermediate-sized purposes, right? Otherwise, why continue living?

I think that there's plenty of things I want to do, to achieve, to experience, to share, to give to the world, right? That's a big feature, right? The give to the world. Absolutely. The way you interact with other human beings and your effect on other human beings gives you purpose. Yeah. And even if I think that when I die, I will no longer exist and my feelings won't matter, I have feelings right now about what the world will be like even after I'm not here anymore, right?

So I can still be motivated to make the world a better place in ways that will outlive me even if I think that when I die, it's really the end for me. And do you get down sometimes? Do you ever – do you get like these periods of like you're like, what is the purpose of all this? Especially if you see some ridiculous thing in the news or some horrific tragedy and – I'm pretty – I mean so for horrific tragedies, no. I'm just fortunate enough to be pretty even-keeled when it comes to that stuff. I don't have – I don't struggle with depression or despair or existential anxiety or anything like that. When I was a kid, when I was first starting to think about the universe and science and things like that, I would start wondering about, well, what if the universe hadn't existed at all?

What if I wasn't here? And that made me lose sleep that night. And I think like many people, there was a very definite moment when I realized that I and everyone I knew would die. So I woke up crying and my mom had to comfort me because I was like, grandmom's going to die and you're going to die

and I'm going to die. And yeah. But as a grownup, no, to die and I'm going to die. And, you know, yeah. But, you know, as a grown-up, no. I think that, you know, I'm more or less – so again, one of the future podcast guests that I'll be – next week's podcast will be by a woman who is part of the death positive movement. Have you heard about this? Yeah. This is real stuff. What?

Who? So don't distinguish. Don't confuse it. There is a whole movement like an anti-natalist movement or something like that. I forget what they call themselves. But there's a whole movement that wants human beings not to exist. That's crazy. Yeah.

But there are people who like that. The death positive movement is the following. Like we're going to die. We should face up to it. We should accept it and we should deal with it in a personally and culturally positive way. So for example, like right now, especially in the United States, even compared to Europe or other countries, we're terrible at dealing with death. We put people in hospitals, we take them away from their families, away from their homes. We refuse to admit that

they're going to die. So we treat it as if the whole purpose of the game is to squeeze out as many more hours of life as possible, no matter what the quality of that life is. And all that is just rubbish. And we should be much more grown up about it. We should plan ahead. You know, when Obama suggested that in the health care system there should be, you know, some planning for what happens when you die, Sarah Palin came along with death panels.

That was a very effective rhetorical strategy. We don't want to think about the fact that we're going to die. We don't want to plan for it. If we did plan for it, it could be better. We could die at home. We could die with less pain. We might not live as long. We don't like

do every single medical intervention possible just to squeeze out a few more breaths. But it could be a much more life-affirming experience to die because the people around us who are there come across with an acceptance of what's going on rather than the feeling that we should just do everything we can to prevent it. I had a similar situation happen recently with a dog of mine who was a mastiff. It reached 13 years old. And for mastiffs, that's very old. And we had to put him down because he couldn't walk anymore. And it was brutally painful to watch him try to get up and fall down.

But one of the things I was thinking was that if this was my grandfather and not my dog, I would have to watch him suffer until the bitter end. I knew this dog wasn't going to go backwards in time and become a puppy again. Right. And knew his days were numbered. He couldn't do anything. Most days he just slept all day until it was time to eat. But it was getting to the point where I had to carry him to his food. Yeah.

And I knew that it was over. There's no quality of life, right? There's no quality of life. In some sense, it's even harder with the dog because you can't talk to them, right? You can't explain to them what's going on. They can't explain to you what their wishes are. So you have to be the responsible one. explain to them what's going on. They can't explain to you what their wishes are. So you have to be the responsible one. But yeah, so everything legally and culturally in the United

States is we're not allowed to relieve that pain or that despair that you have near the end of your life. Some states, including California, are passing death with dignity laws where basically it's what used to be called assisted suicide, but we don't call it that anymore. A doctor is allowed to give you the means to end your own life when you're near. You have to be near a point of no return, but still clearly thinking enough to be able to make that decision for yourself. And there's also an issue with our real concern is their fear and their this this experience being this terrifying sort of step into the great beyond and there's a tool to mitigate that and the tool that has been shown to mitigate that is psychedelics one of the big ones being psilocybin. Psilocybin has a remarkable effect on people that are going through stage four cancer. And Johns Hopkins has studied it.

There's quite a few studies that have shown that people, when you give them psilocybin, they're much more relaxed and much more comfortable with this idea of ending this life, of this life. It's gone through its course, and it's an inevitable thing. And it's really our biological limitations that are terrified and sparking up all these intense primal fears of the end. Yeah, I'm actually 100% in agreement there. My wife, Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer, wrote a book called Me, Myself, and Why, Searching for the Science of Self. And one of our friends said, oh, if you're going to write a book about the self, you got to do LSD. And so we did. And she researched it. And it's a fascinating history, right?

And Aldous Huxley, I don't know if you know about Aldous Huxley's story. And he took LSD to do exactly this. He had throat cancer and it completely helped. It's never fun to die. Right. reality of our eventual deaths, we're also very culturally conservative and squeamish about drugs, right? And so we don't even let people do research on some of these drugs. And so I think that, yeah, we have a lot of growing up to do when it comes to not just living a good life, but also having a good death. And also paying attention to actual scientists who have studied these compounds and really understand what the effects of them are and have researched them deeply and have personal experiences with them and are saying, well, these things have been demonized. Yeah. And there are tools that we can use to sort of mitigate a lot of the real issues that we have, whether it's culturally or personally, with these transitionary times.

Like death is inevitable. So now that we know it's inevitable, you tell me what the main problem would be with someone taking psilocybin before they die and letting them ease their way through this. But, you know, it's the same reaction that doesn't want people to have a basic income. Yeah. Right. There is a sort of moral feeling that you're weak if you don't struggle against death, everything.

And it's silly, right? It makes no sense. But it's very, very common. Yeah, it's so weird that the universal basic income topic is one of those knee-jerk reactionary topics that I myself, my friend Eddie Wong introduced it to me for the first time. And my initial knee jerk reaction was, oh, you can't do that to people. Human nature, people are going to get lazy. And then the more I thought about it, I was like, well, if you just cover their food and their rent, are they really going to get,

is it really going to kill their ambition? Like, why would that kill it? Is our own, is our ambition uniquely tied to just survival? That doesn't make any sense. Well, and it's a weird – it's the same weird thing that people use against having a progressive tax system. Like if we have – if we tax people's money, they won't want to work anymore. Right. But if – you still want more money. Like we don't tax them so much that you have less money the harder you work.

That's not how it works. And I think like what, so, but, but also for the, for the universal basic income stuff, I think people have to reconcile themselves. So what if someone wants to just sit around and play video games all day? Right. Is that the worst thing in the world? Like, I mean, I think that there will be people like that. There will still be other people who want to write poetry and build sailboats and, you know, build spacecraft, et cetera, or build artificial intelligence. I mean, it wouldn't, what if everyone, you know, could do whatever they want when they were kids, when they're 10 years old, they were taught a good programming language and could, you know, make up whatever apps and programs they wanted. Like that would be a whole different world than what we live in right now.

And it might be very exciting. Well, creatively, it could possibly expand a lot of people's potentials, right? Where they no longer have to have a job, so they could do whatever this one thing is that they were thinking about doing, write a book, screenplay, develop something. And in the short term, I don't know if a basic income works sort of economically. But I think that if we believe that there's more and more stuff that can be done by computers or by robots or whatever, automation, then it's absolutely something that should be taken seriously. Yeah. So I think that the whole theme, this is great because we've been talking in a lot of different angles about the fact that the shape of the world is changing in a way that makes what it means to be human changing. Yeah.

world is changing in a way that makes what it means to be human changing. Yeah. And facing up to what those changes are, the fact that we die, the fact that we make up purpose and meaning for ourselves and our lives, and the fact that what we are physically in terms of bodies and machines and so forth is also changing. So part of the theme of my podcast, I hope, is that to think through some of these issues to sort of, I don't know the answers, but I want to ask the questions about, you know, who we are, what we're living, what we should be doing about it, because God's not going to give us the answer. Well, I think podcasts like yours and, I mean, any podcast where people are really carefully considering issues, I think what's important about them that really didn't exist before is that someone can sort of digest these very complex subjects through two people having a conversation about it that perhaps are more informed and have more data and have more

thought about these particular issues. So what you can do and what Sam Harris can do and a lot of people can do that are creating these podcasts about these really complex issues is you start that conversation and this seed gets planted into someone's head and maybe they carry with them at work, they carry it with them when they're on the subway or during their commute home, and then they become a part of the broader conversation that we have as a culture. Exactly, yeah. And that's why I sort of want to not draw a distinction between science and other ways of thinking deeply about the world, because I want people to, you know, I've often said this as a joke, I want to live in a world where people work hard in the factory and they go out for a

drink afterward and talk about their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics. Whoa. I want that to be the kind of thing people are bullshitting about over beers. That would be a world I want to live in. Is that possible? Have you ever run into a quantum mechanics conversation at a bar? There are far too many people who think they understand something about quantum mechanics and are going to explain it to me. So I want the existing conversations to be a little bit more informed.

Yeah. Well, there's a few people online that someone has tried. You've got to get this guy on. And then I've listened to them talk and I'm like, I'm pretty sure that that guy is full of shit. But I can't really point out how I know that. A lot of crackpots. Feel free to email me. I will help you out.

Yeah. Well, I don't want to bring this one guy up on but I'll talk to you about it off the air. There's a lot of woo-woo out there, but also it's quantum mechanics. A lot of very respectable people who sound crazy if you don't know too deeply what they're saying.

That is the Feynman quote, right? If you think you know quantum mechanics, you definitely don't know quantum mechanics. Exactly, which is the whole point of my book is to overcome that feeling. Because I think what happened is, you know, it's true that we don't agree, we physicists don't agree on what quantum mechanics says. But we now fetishize the fact that we don't understand it. Like, it's good that we don't understand it. Like, if you try to understand it too hard, you're wasting your time. And I so disagree with that point of view. So I think that quantum

mechanics is and should be understandable by everybody. What a squirrely concept. It's, yeah, yeah, it's weird. And that's why a lot of people, there's a lot of people who I know who are friends of mine who are professors in philosophy departments because they got a PhD in physics and they realized what they really wanted to do was to think about quantum mechanics in a deep way and they would never get a job in a physics department doing that. But philosophy would let them do it. Oh, wow. Yeah. Interesting. What they're really doing is physics, but they're doing it in a way that philosophers are happy with and physicists aren't. What year did the concept of quantum mechanics become invented and discussed?

It started in 1900, exactly. 1900. But they sort of perfected the modern version around 1927. What was the original thought process? Do you know? Yeah. The history is amazing and messy because there was so much weirdness going on. It was Max Planck, right? Of Planck radiation, if you ever heard of that. German physicist. So blackbody radiation,

something glows when you heat it up, right? So basically what happens when you heat something up is all the atoms and molecules start vibrating. There's a lot of charged particles. A charged particle has an electric field around it. And if you vibrate it, the electric field starts vibrating. We call that light or radiation, right? Electromagnetic waves are being emitted. So you could, in the year 1900, you could sit down and do a calculation. What should that look like?

If you heat everything up, how much radiation should it give off? And the problem was it should give off an infinite amount of radiation at very long wavelengths, which is obviously false, right? It's obviously not how things really work. So there was this blatant disagreement between everything we thought we knew. Because in the 19th century, in the 1800s, people really thought in physics that they were close to the answer, right? They had a picture where there were particles like electrons and protons, and then there were fields like the electromagnetic field and the gravitational field, and the particles were matter, and the fields pushed them together. They interacted. They were the forces,

right? And this picture was so good and so compelling that people were basically like, we're almost done with physics. Right. We almost have it all figured out. And then there were a couple of little things like the blackbody radiation that you made a prediction. It was wildly off. And so stream of radiation. Maybe it's like individual little packets of energy. He had no reason to say that. Like it's just out of the blue. It's just pulled out of his butt, right? So he was just sitting there with a pad, just contemplating. And he said, like, what if? And he goes, what if? He gets exactly the right answer.

It fits the data, right? And he said, there it is. And he's like, he published. And he himself like wasn't sure what to make of this And he's like, he published, and he himself like wasn't sure what to make of this. He's like, I got this idea. It gives the right answer. Who knows? That is crazy. And it was five years later, a young man named Albert Einstein said, well, I know what's going on. Those little packets of energy are themselves particles, that light is not a wave. There's

particles that are being given off, photons, what they were later called, right? And that's what he won the Nobel Prize for. Einstein never won a Nobel Prize for relativity. He won the Nobel Prize for inventing photons, basically. And then, so there was that, so that was, there were two tracks going on. Remember, I just said in the 19th century, it was the world is made of particles and fields. So the first thing that happened is people started thinking about these fields, the electromagnetic field, and Einstein says, well, there's something a little bit particle-like about it, right? It's not a hard and firm distinction.

Then separately, they looked at atoms, right? So you have an electron orbiting an atom, orbiting the nucleus of an atom. You have this picture that everyone has seen of a cartoon of an atom, right, with the electron orbiting around. Again, you can make a prediction that that electron moving around the nucleus of an atom should be giving off light. It's a moving electron. When you accelerate an electron, it gives off light. So it should lose energy and spiral into the middle. It should not just stay in the same orbit. It should be losing energy by radiating energy away. You can calculate for a typical atom, how long should it take before the atom shrinks to zero size? And the answer is like 100 billionth

of a second. So all the atoms that you and I are made of should just go right away. Evaporate. Yeah, evaporate. Give off light and scrunch down to zero size. That's a problem, right? That's not compatible with the data. So Niels Bohr in 1913-ish comes along and says, I have an idea. What if the electrons don't do that because they can't? What if there's certain orbits that they're allowed to have and they're not allowed to have any other ones? Again, just pulled out of nowhere, like for no good reason. But he says, if that's true, I predict the following spectrum of radiation from hydrogen. Look it up. It's exactly right.

Fits the data perfectly. And people are like, what the hell is going on? And then it was – so that took like another 10, 15 years before people like Heisenberg and Schrodinger built that up into saying it's not just that waves of light have a certain particle-ness. It's also that particles like electrons have a certain waviness, and there's a wave function, and they're inventing quantum mechanics. And we're still arguing about it to this day. Well, it's such a difficult concept to wrap your head around that it's been distorted, right?

It's especially by the woo merchants. I have a fun part in my book. I list like 20 titles that came up in Amazon when you type the word quantum in. So there's like quantum love, quantum power, quantum yoga, quantum healing, quantum politics, quantum theology. It's used for every crazy bit of nonsense that you've ever heard of. How do you mitigate that? Write more books, have more podcasts, keep talking, right? Like, you know, you'll never get rid of it entirely there. You know, as you may have heard, there are people who still believe the earth is flat. Oh, I have heard.

So you're never going to completely get rid of the wrong ideas, but you can get the right ideas out there more effectively. Yeah. Do you think that it's possible that, I mean, this concept was created and invented somewhere around the 1900s. Is it possible that another theory that's just as revolutionary is being developed right now? and its search for understanding the elementary particles of the universe, is it possible that we could develop a new theory? And are there any that are being contemplated right now? So it's absolutely possible. That was what Einstein tried his best to do, right? He thought that he could do better than quantum mechanics, and he did not succeed. The big difference is that when real quantum mechanics was developed between 1900 and 1927,

at every step, it was because there was some dramatic disagreement between the theory and the data. And right now, our theories are good enough that they fit the data really, really well. So we're trying to make—I and others are proposing new ideas to try to understand, you know, how space-time emerges in quantum mechanics and things like that. And you can try to do better than quantum mechanics. But it's all just on pure principle, right? On pure, like, coherence and beauty and elegance because we have a theory that fits the data. Fine. And it's so much harder to make progress when you're just trying to do it in your brain rather than doing it by data.

so much harder to make progress when you're just trying to do it in your brain rather than doing it by data. So as for right now, there's nothing else being contemplated. That's pretty unique. It is being contemplated, nothing promising, nothing emergent. Like there are people who think they can do better. There is no one who agrees that someone else is doing better right now. Are there any standout theories that people have sort of? I think replacing quantum mechanics or even improving quantum mechanics is because there's no guidance whatsoever from experiments.

There's not even a sort of leading thing. In fact, I don't think it's the right way to go. I think that given right now, given the fact that we have quantum mechanics and yet don't quite understand it, our job should be to understand what we got.

What has come out of the Large Hadron Collider? I know that there was some discussion as to whether or not they found the Higgs. Is it boson or bosson? I say boson, but boson. Boson, like with a Z? It's pronounced with a Z, but it's spelled with an S. B-O-S-O-N. Oh, it is pronounced – because I only read it. I never –

Yeah, physicists say boson. Boson. Yeah. Okay. So the Higgs boson. There was some discussion that they had absolutely proven its existence, but then there was also some debate about that. So it's actually a very bittersweet story, the Large Hadron Collider. Damn it. I hate a bittersweet story.

I know. Well, life doesn't promise you a rose garden. We found the Higgs boson fairly quickly after getting the Large Hadron Collider up to speed. We found it in 2012. You can read that in my other book, The Particle at the End of the Universe. But we didn't find anything else. So did we find the Higgs boson? Yes. It is crystal clear that we found a particle and that particle is exactly what we predicted 40 years before that the Higgs boson would look like. It talks to the other particles in the same way. It has the right mass. It has the same lifetime and all those things. But there is a puzzle. So this is what we have. We don't have blatant disagreement between theory and experiment.

What we have are puzzles, right? What we have are mismatches between our informal expectation and what reality is doing. So in one way, so there's a number, which is the mass of the Higgs boson. We measured it, OK? 130-some times the mass of the Higgs boson. We measured it, okay? 130-some times the mass of a proton. But there's a guess as to what the mass should have been. If nature were natural, nature is natural, but if our notion of nature worked out the way it was,

what should the mass of the Higgs boson be? And it's literally a quadrillion times bigger than what it actually is. What's a quadrillion? 10 to the 15th. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm not making this up. You can Google this.

The mass of the Higgs boson should be enormously bigger by sort of what our intuitive feelings about quantum mechanics and quantum field theory say. So this is a known problem. This has been known for a long time called the hierarchy problem. And so even before we discovered the Higgs, we knew it wasn't that heavy. We knew it was much that heavy. We knew it was much, much lighter than what it should be. So the hierarchy problem was a known thing. And people said, how could it be true? Well, you have to change the theory a little bit. You have

to like add some new particles or predict some new features of physics going on. And many, many people, myself included, were very optimistic that the Large Hadron Collider would find evidence for what was going on, would find more particles than just the Higgs boson. And it's found nothing else. Maybe it would find supersymmetry or extra dimensions or strings or, you know, some new kind of combinations of old particles. It's found nothing else. So now we have a puzzle and no answers, right? And that's the most frustrating thing because they're, I mean, people don't want to say this out loud, but here we go since no one's listening to this, right? The last time particle physicists were surprised by an experimental result from a particle

accelerator was in the 1970s. Since then, we found new particles, but they were already predicted and expected to be there. We've never found a particle since the 70s that no one had anticipated finding long before. Well, just the idea of a particle collider as a lay person, as a person just looking on the outside, like you got to create crashes. Like that's the only way to figure out what's going on with the basic building blocks of the universe.

You have to crash things into each other. I know. Yeah. Well, so the secret to that is that really the world is not made of particles. It's really made of fields, right? That's quantum field theory is the label given to this. So for the electromagnetic field, for the light coming out of the light bulbs, that makes sense. We figured out the fields first and only found the particles later.

coming out of the light bulbs. That makes sense. We figured out the fields first and only found the particles later. But it's also true, as we were just talking about, for the particles, like electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos. These are all vibrations in fields.

So what you should think about when you think of colliding particles, it's not little P-shaped things that are bumping into each other and smushing, right? It's really like a little vibration in two fields that are coming into the same place

and overlapping. And all the particles that could potentially exist are fields that are out there in the world. And usually they're just quietly sitting there not doing anything. But when these particles that you made in the Large Hadron Collider hit each other, that sets up vibrations in every field in the universe, like very faint little jiggles up and down. And then you look and you see, and quantum mechanics says there's a probability it will look one way versus another. So the way you make it, how in the world do you make a Higgs boson by colliding protons, even though the Higgs boson is over 100 times heavier than a proton, right?

The answer is really you're setting up vibrations in the Higgs field, which was always there all along. And then you very quickly, actually, you can't. The Higgs boson disappears so quickly, you'll never see it. You see what it decays into. You see what it converts into. The vibrations in the Higgs field get transferred to vibrations and other things. And that's what we observe in our detector. So if you are able to do this sort of conceptual switch from particles to fields, then the reason why we need an accelerator and a collider to make new particles begins to make a bit more sense. Doesn't it? Don't you agree?

Oh, I get it now. There was something that I had read. I'm trying to remember it. One more thing. If you're in a room with two pianos and you play one piano, the other piano will start vibrating along with it a little bit. Ah, that's an interesting way to look at it. That's the one field, the quarks and the gluons and the protons start the Higgs field vibrating a little bit. And that's what we eventually see. I'm glad you mentioned gluons.

That's one of the things that I had read about that they did, they had either discovered or were able to observe with the Large Hadron Collider was a, I believe it's called quark-gluon plasma. That's right. You got it right. Thank you. Which is an immensely dense thing that the way they described it was something like something that was a fraction the size of a sugar cube would weigh as much as the Earth itself.

Yeah, that's right. So usually what you try to do with particle accelerators is discover new particles, right? So to do that, why haven't you discovered them already? Usually it's because they're too heavy. It takes a lot of energy to make them. E equals mc squared.

If their mass is big, you need a lot of energy in as small as possible region. That's how you make new particles. So to do that, you take some particles that are pretty small, like protons, and you smash them together. And that's how you make new particles. So to do that, you take some particles that are pretty small, like protons, and you smash them together. And that's how we discover the Higgs. And we're looking for other things. But maybe your goal in life is not to discover new particles, but to

understand the particles that we already know about, right? In that case, maybe you want to see what happens when you get, like you say, a huge number of particles together in the same place with a lot of energy and see how they interact with each other and make a plasma. Like a plasma is like what's at the center of the sun, right? But instead of electrons and photons, we're going to make out of quarks and gluons. So instead of smashing together protons, a proton has three quarks each, right? We smash together the nucleus of a heavy atom, like an iron or lead atom, right, which has, you know, dozens of protons and neutrons in it. So we get as many particles as we can

squeezed together in the same place. So the energy is a bit more diffuse, but we get to study how they interact with each other, because that's what conditions were like near the Big Bang, lots of particles going on. It wasn't just two particles smacking into each other. So we're learning a lot about what conditions were like in the very, very early universe. What is the mass of this stuff, this quark-gluon plasma? There's some insane number that I remember reading. Yes, but my neural implant is failing me, so I cannot remember the number right now, but we could Google it. Yeah, I don't know. It's very dense. The plant is failing me, so I cannot remember the number right now, but we could Google it.

I don't know. It's very dense. Gigantic. Massive. It's a bit of a cheat, right? So I always – I get laughs when I give talks on the Higgs boson because I mentioned that the lifetime of the Higgs boson – I already said it disappears very quickly, right? So I say it's one zeptosecond, which is true. And just like you – when I say quadrillion, you're like, what is that number? And I said 10 and 15, but who cares?

The point of a zepto second is really short. So I say it's a zepto second, which is a really short period of time. And everyone laughs. It's 10 to the minus 21 seconds, but who cares? Like if I had said 10 to the minus 28 would that have changed your opinion of the Higgs boson in any way? Like it's a really short period of time.

Right, like 5 quadrillion. Is that more than four quadrillion? Yeah, it doesn't really affect your life in any meaningful way. What is going on right now with science that is particularly compelling to you other than things we've already discussed? You know, I'm very interested in entropy and complexity, complex systems. There's a wonderful place in New Mexico in Santa Fe just called the Santa Fe Institute, which is devoted to the study of complex systems. Physicists are really, really good at studying simple systems, a couple particles at a time, right?

And there's certain techniques they have. This is why we have theories that explain all the data because we're asking questions about the simplest possible things that we can. Once you have a bacterium or an elephant or an economic system or an internet, these are very of these complex systems that we wouldn't have noticed if we just studied them piece by piece. And the answer is a little bit yes. I hate to keep advertising my podcast, but we had Jeffrey West on the podcast who was— Why do you hate it? Yeah, I shouldn't hate it. That's the whole reason to be here.

I'm lying. I'm not actually telling the truth. You saw through me there. I love advertising my podcast. I had Jeffrey West, who's a brilliant physicist, who actually started as a particle physicist. And then when we were going to have – remember, we were going to build the superconducting supercollider in the United States. This was going to be our version of the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider. But the SSC would have been both sooner and better.

It would have been higher energy, more powerful. That was during the Clinton administration, correct? That's right. And well, it started during the Reagan administration, and then Clinton let it be killed by Congress, basically. So Jeffrey West, who was a particle physicist at the time, said, like, that's my life's work. Like, I was hoping for this to come online.

I'm not going to see it. What else can I do? work. Like I was hoping for this to come online. I'm not going to see what else can I do. And he found that in biology, there are what is known as scaling laws. So if you look at different organisms like mammals or whatever, right, you can plot different quantities like their mass and their metabolism or their lifespan, things like that. And it turns out that they are related to each other. It's not, you know, if you know how heavy a mammal is, you know how long it's going to live. You can figure that out. And in fact, it's related to the metabolism also. So there's a wonderful, so basically, the bigger you are, the longer you live. Also, the bigger you are, the slower your heartbeats,

and they exactly cancel out. So that every mammal lives for about one and a half billion heartbeats on average. I've read that, and I relayed that to my friends that are runners. And I was like, you've got to think, if you're an ultramarathon runner, like my friend Cameron Haynes, he runs these 240-mile runs. It's ridiculous. My nephew just did that in Death Valley. I keep saying badass, but it's like the bad water. Yeah.

135 miles. These races are crazy. So you've got to think the exertion over long periods of time. You're juicing up your battery. You don't get a finite number, a fixed number of heartbeats to begin with. But you know what they do do, though? It lowers their resting heart rate, which is fascinating. That's right.

So all this extreme exercise, oh, you're wasting heartbeats. But also your heartbeat is probably like 78, whereas theirs is 34. Yeah, now they're winning overall. Yeah. It totally compensates. It's weird, right? It's a weird sort of counterintuitive thing. But again, the billion and a half is just an average.

But the point is, so Jeffrey West and his collaborators said, why? Why is it that, you know, you can't make an animal that's twice as big and lives the same length? Yeah. What's going on? So they actually came up with a theory based on the fact that our bodies are networks, right? Our circulatory system or our respiratory system or our nervous system, they all have the same structure like trees, right, like fractals. And and they are able to show that if our if the resources that our biology uses travel through these fractal networks in a three dimensional space. Right. We're three dimensional beings. Then you get these scaling laws. You get this universal behavior. And it fits the data. And now, you know, you can extend it to the behavior of things like cities and corporations

and stuff like that. So when you get people in a city, they walk faster, right? Like people in little small towns mosey down the street and everyone in the big city walks faster. And why is that? Like what's going on? And there's – you would not be surprised to learn that there are more patents that are generated in a big city than in a small town. But there are even more patents per person in a big city. Like living in that dense environment changes the rate of innovation and things like that. So they're studying how we can try to extract these not quite as precise as particle physics, but still very general, robust

relationships between these large systems and learn from that how to make things more sustainable, more creative, more innovative, more livable, and things like that. So I think all this stuff is very fascinating. They've actually done studies where they've put cameras up on streets and they watch people walk by, and the amount of footsteps they take per minute, they can accurately predict how many people live in that city. I believe that. That's cool. It's insane.

Yeah. Just based on how – and also how fast you talk. Yep. How fast you talk, how fast the line moves in the DMV and the post office. And I think it's Dublin. I'm not exactly sure. But Jeffrey West has this picture of Dublin. There's this tourist area.

And so it's both a big city where a lot of people live, but it's also a famous tourist destination where foreigners come in and wander around, right? And the locals who live in a big city and want to get where they want to go became so frustrated with all these moseying tourists, they literally made walking lanes for the locals where you have to walk fast, right? You're not allowed to meander. Oh, wow. That is interesting. That's interesting. Listen, Oh, wow. That is interesting. That's interesting. Listen, thank you very much for doing this.

Thank you for being you. Thank you for this podcast you're putting out, the books you write. It's so important for people like me to have someone like you that can sort of illuminate a lot of these things. And I really, really appreciate your time. My pleasure. Thanks for being a role model and help inspiring me here. My pleasure. And Mindscape podcast. That's right.

It's available now everywhere podcasts are heard. Hopefully, yeah. Tried. Beautiful. My pleasure. And Mindscape podcast. That's right. It's available now everywhere podcasts are heard. Hopefully, yeah. Tried. Beautiful. Thank you. Sean Carroll, ladies and gentlemen.