The Joe Rogan Experience - #1428 - Brian Greene

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

Brian Greene is a theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. His new book "Until the End of Time" is now available: https://amzn.to/2ug680o

3, 2, 1 It will be coming. No doubt. No doubt. With all your work. So the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe to the end. That's essentially what you're summarizing. Yeah, that's the backdrop to the entire narrative of the book. I basically want the reader to get a feel for the whole thing. How it started, how things like you and me rise up, how consciousness emerges, issues of free will and whether we have it, and then on to the future, what's going to happen to us and the world and the universe as time elapses to the far, far future. I'm just getting to the part where you're talking about how entropy and evolution sort

of co-mingle to create life. And when you think of entropy, a lot of people think of something dissolving into chaos. Yeah, exactly. But that's not necessarily the case. It's only part of the story. I mean, entropy kind of gets a bad rap, right? It's the thing that you want to avoid, but somehow the laws of physics don't allow you to avoid it. It's this disintegration, it's this decay, it's this drive toward disorder. And that's kind of true. But the reality of the situation is more subtle because overall, entropy needs to go up. But that doesn't mean there can't be little

pockets of order that form along the way. And in fact, the universe is incredibly clever. way. And in fact, the universe is incredibly clever. Stars, the ubiquitous feature of the heavens, they are pockets of order that naturally form, but as they form, they increase the entropy in the surroundings. So the net entropy goes up, even though this beautiful, orderly, bright object in the sky appears. And it's only because of the appearance of stars that the universe is an interesting place. Without stars, the particles of the universe would just disperse. The universe would get bigger and bigger, colder and colder, and that would be it.

There wouldn't be any structure in the universe if it wasn't for the force of gravity. Stars themselves, just the fact that they exist, is very strange. That you have this thing, and ours is fairly small right it's a million times larger than earth yeah and it's going to burn for billions of years and it's just hovering there yeah and it creates all the life yeah literally is responsible for all the life

yeah and when they supernova that creates the actual ingredients for life which is even more strange like you can't have biological carbon-based life if it's not for a star exploding yeah i mean we often in a poetic way said that we are made of star stuff yeah that's carl sagan but you can also say that we are are made of you know nuclear refuse right we are the detritus yeah that that the death throes of a star puts out into the universe and it rains down on planets. And at least on one such planet, that stuff comes together and yields life. So it is a cycle.

I mean, I don't want to sound like the Lion King here, but, you know, that's really what it is. Well, what I'm so interested about in getting into your book is the fact that you are sort of detailing all these steps that have to take place in order for all this life, in order for this universe to be what it is and then where it's going to go. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the remarkable thing and sort of the main point at some level is that, look, we're special entities. We can think, we can reflect, we have emotions, but ultimately you and I and everybody else, we're just bags of particles that are governed by physical law. And so there's this continuity between the stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff

of the heavens and us. We all come from the same fundamental ingredients and the same fundamental laws. Now, some people find that that gives them, I don't know, a sense of desperation, a sense that we're not special, a sense that somehow the universe is pointless or meaningless. But, you know, my view on this is it's spectacular that we're made of the same stuff that makes up this bottle of water or any of the wonderful little statues you have on this desk. Because that means that how remarkable that collections of particles can do what we do. And I think that's really the way of looking at the continuity. We don't need to be endowed with some special quality by some external entity. You don't need that. Particles can do miraculous things, and that is the

message that I think you can draw from a more complete understanding of where we came from and where we're going. Darrell Bock That the fear of death and the attitude of the finite life being insignificant, that like what is the point? This sort of existential angst that many of us struggle with, right? Yeah, right. That's something that you touch upon really early on, that this thing that makes us unique is that we know that we're going to die. Yeah, yeah.

That to me is the vital distinguishing feature of our species. You know, we can reflect on the past, we can think about the future and recognize that we're not going to be here in the future, at least for some period of time. And it's an idea and it's powerful motivating influence is one that has been explored throughout the ages. motivating influence is one that has been explored throughout the ages. Otto Ronck, who's one of the early disciples of Freud, who ultimately broke with Freud, developed this thesis that our awareness of our own mortality is one of the driving factors in what we do. And then when I was, I don't know, I was in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. I don't know if you've in my 20s or 30s, I read a book by a guy named Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. I don't know if you've ever heard of this book.

No. It was big in the 70s. It won actually the Pulitzer Prize in the 70s. And it's a wonderful distillation of this way of thinking about why we humans do what we do. And in many ways, in my own book, the one that's coming out actually today, Until the End of Time, it's extending this notion that Becker developed in Denial of Death, but now seeing it in a cosmological setting. Because it's not just we that are going to die. It's every structure in the universe is going to disintegrate in time.

Our best theories suggest to us that even protons, the very heart of matter, there are quantum processes that in the far future will ensure that every proton disintegrates, falls apart into its constituent particles. And at that point, there's no complex matter around at all. What timeline are we talking about here? Well, pretty big, long timeline. In fact,

I'd like to use a metaphor to try to give you a feel for the times involved. I like to use the Empire State Building. And imagine that every floor of the Empire State Building represents a duration 10 times that of the previous floor. So like on the ground floor, it's like one year, first floor, 10 years, second floor, 100, and so forth. So you're going exponentially far in time as you climb up the Empire State Building. And in that scheme of things, everything from the Big Bang until today, you're about at the 10th floor, 10 to the 10 years, 10 billion years. And as you go forward, you are, and I underscore think because we're now at the speculative end of our theoretical ideas, protons will decay roughly in, say, by the 38th floor. So 10 to the 38 years into the future. So we can relax for a little bit.

You can relax for a little bit. But here's the thing. The amazing thing, obviously, is it sounds trite, but time is relative, right? So any duration that seems long, it's only long by comparison to another duration. And on, say, the scale of the entire Empire State Building up to, say, 10 to the 100 years into the future, which is what the peak would represent, 10 to the 38 years is like less than a blink of an eye. I mean, it's nothing on those scales. So you sort of have to be careful with your intuition if you're willing to entertain the kind of fantastically long time scales that you necessarily need to if you're going to think about the very far future. Is there speculation as to what happens when protons do cease to exist?

Yeah. We anticipate that all complex structure will fall apart. So if there are any stars left over, we believe that by the 14th floor, most stars will have used up their nuclear fuel. There'll be dark embers just sort of, you know, smoky out there in the cosmos. But if they're still hovering around by the 38th floor,

they will all just dissipate into their particulate ingredients. So it's hard to imagine past, say, floor 38, that there's going to be any life or any mind or any complex astronomical structures out there in the universe. So the window within which the universe as we know it exists is kind of small when you think about it in terms of the entire cosmic timeline so impossible to understand the actual span of it because it is so long but yet so small like in the human mind yeah it's very hard to hold these durations in mind i mean i don't i don't like I – I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I don't feel like I have an intuition for the durations that we are talking about.

In fact, the Empire State Building, that little analogy helps me to sort of give some relative sense of when things of interest will happen in the universe. But, you know, we're good at understanding days, weeks, months, years, the times of, you know, conventional experience. We have no basis for understanding the universe over these scales that we've never experienced. You know, and that's true not only for time, it's also for space, right? I mean, we have very good intuition about everyday phenomenon. I mean, if I was to take this bottle of water and I throw it at you, you'd catch it. You'd know where to put your hand. You wouldn't have to calculate its Newtonian trajectory to figure out where the water is going.

But if I was to do the same thing with electrons, you don't have, and neither do I, a quantum intuition about the wave functions and the probabilities that govern how a particle-like electron behaves. And that's simply because we were unfortunately or fortunately born as big creatures relative to the scales of quantum mechanics. And because of that, our intuition was never under any evolutionary pressure to understand how electrons behave. In fact, I like to say those of our forebears wandering around the African savannah who started to think about electrons and quantum mechanics, they got eaten, right? They're the ones whose genes didn't propagate onward. And therefore, those of us who are the beneficiaries of the survival of our ancestors, we're good at understanding Newtonian physics, but we're not good at understanding anything else

about the deep reality of the world. Do you anticipate that someday in the future, whatever is next after human beings will be able to understand these concepts? Because if you stop and think about what a human is, we've only really been this for X amount of 100,000 years. That's right. And it's a good question. And it's a tough one. I like to imagine that as we get ever better at creating virtual worlds, virtual reality

or whatever augmented reality, whatever version of that kind of technology takes over in the far future, we might be able to experience these distinct realms in such a powerful way that our innate intuition may begin to shift, to change, so that we grasp the quantum realm the way we grasp Newtonian physics. I can at least imagine that as a possibility. What it would take to actually get there and whether our species will ever last long enough to actually have that kind of an impact on our intuition, I don't know. But it's all about experience and survival. We have been programmed by evolution not to understand the true nature of the world. We've been programmed by evolution to survive. And those are two radically different propositions because you don't need to know the true nature of reality to survive.

It's a distinct attribute and one that is not necessarily one that has any survival value to understand black holes or the Big Bang or general relativity or quantum mechanics or entropy or thermodynamics. These qualities we develop as we go forward and try to understand the world, go beyond mere survival and figure out things that excite us. But it's not something which obviously has any survival value. It may someday. It may. these ideas in a sort of a quantifiable way where you can write things down and sort of express it with other scientists and try to figure out who's right and who's wrong in terms of these calculations. But human beings, I mean, when did we really start pondering the scope of the universe? Pretty recently.

I mean, if you think about the beginnings of modern physics, you know, you can start with Galileo, you can start with Newton, but in any event, we're talking on the order of hundreds of years. about how anything in the world actually works, to the development of Newton's equations, where you can make fantastically accurate predictions about solar eclipses or lunar eclipses or motions of the planets and so on. And then, you know, a couple hundred years after that, we migrate from that understanding, which is basically an encapsulation of the patterns

that we can all discern with the naked eye. We develop a whole new body of physical law called quantum mechanics, which is so completely counterintuitive, which describes the world in terms of qualities that we don't ever see with the naked eye. But nevertheless, we can use the math to make predictions, and the predictions are borne out by experiment. And that progression only took, say, a couple hundred years. And that's where we've gotten. So it's kind of spectacular that we beings who are just coming of age here in the Milky Way galaxy can sit down with a piece of paper and a calculation, a pencil, and we can figure out magnetic properties of particles like electrons to ten decimal places.

That's shocking. I mean, it's stunning, and it's something that I think all of us should be very proud of that our species has been able to accomplish that. Somehow or another, I don't think I'm responsible. I don't feel proud. I don't feel like any of my people were involved. You've contributed your part. No, it really is a collective effort. And that's the beauty of science. In the end of the day, it's not that most scientists are ever going to be remembered.

You stop someone in the street and ask them to name a scientist. Yeah, they may say Hawking, they may say Einstein. That's kind of it, I think, for most people. And I don't think that's a bad thing per se because it's not about the personalities or the people that have pushed the frontiers of understanding. It's the fact that we've got this body of insight that continues to grow and continues to allow us to manipulate and understand the natural world. And I think that's really what it's all about. Don't you think that there are some personalities like yourself, like Feynman, like, I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson, that because of their personality, because they're sort of, they're charismatic people, it actually makes more people intrigued about these possibilities and makes more people attracted to the ideas? Yeah, no doubt.

to the ideas. Yeah, no doubt. And I think that's a vital point because without that impetus from outside the traditional educational system, I don't think we would have the kind of interest in science that I can feel growing in the world around us. I mean, the unfortunate thing in the educational system is that we teach toward examination. We teach toward assessment. And if you want to figure out how to flatten a kid's interest in these ideas, just teach some stuff and tell them you're going to be tested on this on Tuesday. You're going to have to spit out everything that you've learned. So I find it kind of heartbreaking the way in which so much intrinsic interest in these ideas.

You can see it, a five- or six-year-old, right? I mean, I like to say we begin as little scientists. We're exploring the world. We're trying to figure things out. And then we go into the educational system. And it's not by malice. It's just by the nature of how we teach in the current approach to educational philosophy that so many kids wind up seeing these ideas as a burden something i don't want to have to spend time learning about parts of the

cell or how to balance reactions i see with my own kids i've got a 15 year old son a 12 year old daughter and all they are motivated by is next wednesday's quiz and i'm like, hey, these ideas, they're kind of exciting. They're kind of wonderful. Like, no, no, dad, dad, dad, I just want to know enough so I can, you know, do well on the quiz. And once the quiz is over, they just sort of leave the ideas behind. When did these ideas become attractive to you? Well, I was, I don't know, not unusual for a scientist, but unusual, I think, in the spectrum of kids in the world, because at five or six years old, I was just captivated by mathematics. Really? Yeah.

Five or six? Definitely, yeah. My dad was not an academic. My dad was a composer. He was a vaudevillian. He was a comedian. You know, he would, in the early days, would go around the country, and with a harmonica group and a stage show that that's what he did. You know, he liked to say that he was an SPHD, a Seward Park High School dropout, you know, so at 10th grade, he just hit the road.

But he loved scientific ideas. So he taught me the basics of arithmetic when I was about five years old. And then I would ask him to set me problems. And he'd give me these 30-digit numbers by 30-digit numbers. I'd write them out on big construction paper. And I'd spend the weekend just calculating away on these huge arithmetical problems of no interest to anybody on planet Earth. earth but to me the fact that you could learn a little piece of of math and then do something that nobody had ever done before that was exciting to me as a kid and that's really what got me going so you chose the right path clearly yeah your personality whatever it is that attracted you well you always wonder about that i don't know if you wonder you know i always wonder

how can you not what what would have happened if X would have transpired instead of Y? In fact, I have to say, when I graduated college, I had sort of a period of, I don't know, depression is too strong a word for it, but a period of, what have I done? I went to college. I could have studied all the great ideas of the world. And all I did was get a technical education where I could solve Schrodinger's equation and solve Einstein's equations. And I felt like, wow, have I just like squandered the greatest educational opportunity that one could have ever had because I was so completely focused on just trying to understand physics and mathematics.

How'd you get past that? Well, I was lucky. I was given a second chance. I won a scholarship to go to England, to Oxford. And ostensibly, it was to study physics. But when I got there, I realized that I was completely free to do whatever I wanted to do at that point. And so I took a year to study literature. I went to the physics classes, so I was sort of showing up, but I wasn't focused on it at all. And instead, I was focused. I got a, you know, in England, it's a tutorial system.

So I got a tutor, which is somebody at the college that sets you assignments and you write papers. You literally go in and you read your paper out loud. It's not something where you just turn it in and it gets graded. So it's a very personal experience. You write something and you're actually delivering it to this individual that is going to help you in your educational journey. And so that's what I did for a year. And at the end of that year, I kind of said to myself, okay, I've got it. I understand now what it would mean to study these other subjects. And I sort of felt like I'll be able to do this on my own if I continue to be excited about it. And I went back to physics with a vengeance. And basically in that second year, completed my doctorate in that year and moved on from there.

So this time that you took off this year, well, you didn't really take it off, but you changed paths. Yeah, I changed paths, yeah. How beneficial was that for you? Do you think that it helped you sort of appreciate what your original subject of interest was as well? Yeah, hugely so, because, you know, it's funny.

It's the flip side of something I often encounter with people that are interested in science but don't know the math. And they always say, or some say, I'm never really going to understand this body of science because I don't know the mathematics. And I try to convince them, look, at some level, that's true. If you really want to do research in the general theory of relativity, you've got to learn differential geometry and all the tensor calculus. But if you are really interested in the ideas, you really can grasp the ideas without the technical background. So I try to demystify something that can seem impenetrable because you haven't entered the field. And I think the same thing happened to me in reverse for the more humanistic explorations.

It had this aura of grandeur that I was unable to penetrate because I'd never really immersed myself in the ideas. And by spending a year in those ideas, it didn't diminish them in any way, but I felt like it brought it back down to earth as another journey toward truth, another pathway toward insight, and one that you don't have to have a degree in. You don't have to know the ins and outs of the academic version of that subject to understand it and grasp it and spend some time thinking about it. So, you think that for people studying anything, particularly those studying science and mathematics, very rigid disciplines, do you think that they all could benefit from sort of expanding their education into philosophy or art or something that uses your mind in

a different way? Yeah. Some. Some. There are some people in the physics and mathematics community who are so intensely focused that it would almost be a shame to pull their attention away from the deep dive that they're going to do for the rest of their lives and the contributions that they're going to make

and have made are substantial and exciting. But for, I think for many others, and certainly for me, I mean, look, I, as most people do, but not all, but I learned early on that I'm not going to be an Albert Einstein. You know, I can make contributions and I have had contributions to fields like string theory and cosmology, but they're never going to be at the level of shattering our understanding of the world, things that people are going to talk about 500 years from now. That's unlikely. And I think for somebody like that who's able to make contributions but pulling away from the technical work is not going to extract some vital insight

into the nature of the world that otherwise wouldn't be discovered. I think there is great value in doing exactly what you're saying, because by broadening your perspective on what the work you're doing is actually revealing, it's part of the human quest for understanding. And seeing it as an isolated discipline, where it's all about the next equation and the better unified theory or the deeper understanding of the Big Bang, to see that as isolated from the human quest for understanding, I think, diminishes the work that we as physicists actually do.

Was that a part of your initial ambition? Yeah, it was. To leave something that would just rock the world? Yeah. Well, to go back to the comment that you made before about we being the only species that knows that we're going to die, I think part But how do you deal with that recognition of the impermanence of your own life? Well, I think part of it is a symbolic kind of immortality. You create something that will last. You create something that will have such impact that it will stick around for a long, long period of time. So I think, yes.

I mean, part of my motivation in doing physics was not merely to get the next decimal place in this or that physical quantity described in the natural world. It was to try to have some kind of insight that would rock our understanding of the world and have reverberations that would echo out for many, many years to come. That's interesting.

Did that torture you somewhat? I mean, is that something that haunted you? Was it in your head all the time? Not really. But an ultimate ambition perhaps? But an ultimate ambition, yeah, for sure. And, you know, look, I think when you're doing any work whatsoever, the day-to-day, the moment-to-moment is a grind.

You know, I don't know how you find it in the work that you're doing. But if I'm working on a research project, even if in principle the ideas are grand and wonderful and bold, the moment-to-moment is calculating away. It's trying to figure out that equation. It's putting that equation on a computer. I mean, it is not sexy. It is not something that has that glorious quality that you might ultimately describe when you're finished and you look back and you think about the implications of your work. The moment to moment of almost anything that you do is a grind. So I think that's ultimately what is the driver of whatever you're doing in your life, the moment to moment. But yeah, there was certainly a part of me that would have a desire, a hope that the work would reverberate in a powerful way. I think that's true for most physicists,

that notion that you can sort of sit at a table and think and change the way we understand reality the way Einstein did, the way Schrodinger did, the way Niels Bohr did. But what percentage of people have that revelation? Yeah, I think it's pretty few and and far between so everybody else is sort of just contributing contributing and then occasionally someone exactly some light bulb goes off just sort of powerful new insight and you're like okay everything has suddenly

changed uh that's so exciting though and it's what keeps you going it's what keeps you going you know to be the person who who has the light bulb. Yeah, but I tell my students, and especially young students who come in and are still trying to figure out what they want to do, if you're not satisfied with just contributing, if you're not satisfied with being part of the journey but not the person at the head of the breakthroughs, at the head of the breakthroughs, it's probably not the field for you because it's so unlikely because it's not just brain power. It's thinking of the right questions. It's thinking of things in the right orientation. It's being at the right place at the right time with the right DNA that somehow is attuned to the question that's being asked. So it's not even fully under your control. It's not sort of a matter of exercising your mind and building up the muscles of the brain in such a way that you are the strongest person to contribute to this and this idea.

It's luck. It's timing. It's being there when the question's being asked and you happen to see the way forward. It's so interesting to me that there's so many people working on all this stuff, and the average person that doesn't contemplate quantum physics or any of these equations, we have no idea what's going on. Yeah. And all this work that's so critical to our understanding of what the universe really is,

the very fiber of the universe itself. All this is going on. And most people are just sort of, they're reaping the residual benefits of it, but they're just wandering around not knowing. Yeah, hugely so. In fact, there's a number that's quoted that quantum mechanics is responsible

for something like 35% of the gross national product. So it's like, and it's a very concrete way. Now, the problem with that number is I recently looked it up to find the source of it. So I sort of went online and checked it out. And apparently, I'm the source of this number. And I assure you that I've not done a calculation that really fully justifies this. But roughly speaking, anything that has an integrated circuit is the result, a beneficiary of quantum insights. So we use this stuff every moment of our technological lives.

And yet, as you say, for the most part, most of us don't have a deep understanding of the reality that's responsible for the gadgetry that the science has given rise to. And it's a strange – quantum mechanics is an utterly strange reality. Too strange. Yeah. I've tried many, many times to try to understand whether it's Sean Carroll's books or yours or anyone's. Yeah. It's just – it doesn't get in.

Right. And again, it goes back to, you know, our brains just weren't under pressure to think quantum mechanically. But I assure you, you give me a couple hours. I mean, books are one thing because it's a one-sided conversation.

But you give me a couple hours in a back and forth, and I will absolutely get you to a place where you appreciate and have a sense of what these ideas really are telling us about the nature of the world. Here's the thing that I've always wanted to ask someone like you. What do you think was happening before the Big Bang? Yeah, it's a deep question and a subtle one. And there's sort of two ways that I like to think about that question.

One is it could be that the Big Bang was an interesting event, but not the first event in the totality of reality. It could have been the first event that sparked the expansion of our part of space. But it could be that there's a grander realm of space within which we sit as a small part, and that grander realm may have been there's a grander realm of space within which we sit as a small part, and that grander realm may have been there for a far longer period of time. It may have experienced its own Big Bangs, maybe a collection of Big Bangs that may extend infinitely far into the past. So it could be that the answer to the question of what happened before the Big Bang is a lot of other Big Bangs or a lot of other quantum events that were taking place in a larger landscape of reality than we have direct access to.

However, another answer is that the very question may not make as much sense as the words seem to suggest. We know how to parse that sentence. We know what it means to talk about the moment before the Big Bang because we know how to talk about the moment before your birth or the moment before the Civil War or the moment before any event that happened in the world. We fully understand the meaning of that kind of sentence. But it could be that when it comes to the Big Bang, the sentence actually doesn't mean anything. It could be that the Big Bang was the place where time itself started.

And Hawking himself had a wonderful analogy to get this across. He said, look, I'll dress it up a little bit. Imagine you're walking on planet Earth and you pass by someone. You say, hey, can you point me in the direction of north? I want to walk in the northward direction. They point you, continue to walk. You pass by somebody else. Say, hey, which way is further north?

And they point you in that direction. But when you get to the North Pole and talk to somebody there and say, hey, how do I go further north? They look at you and say, whoa, that question doesn't mean anything because this is where north begins. There's no notion of going further north than the North Pole. And it could be that that spatial metaphor applies to time. Talk about a billion years ago or 10 billion years ago, but if you go to 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang, that may be where time started. And you can't go further back in time than the very origin of time itself. That freaks me out. Yeah. See, that's one that it gets in your

head. What do you mean beginning of time? Yeah. Why would time have a beginning? Good. And it could be that time is an emergent quality of reality. I give you an analogy, but what I mean by that is we all know what temperature means intuitively. Something's hot, you feel it. Something's cold, you feel it. Your body understands those concepts. What physics has done is it's gone deeper into the concept of temperature and revealed that it is nothing but the average motion of the particles making up the environment. So if the molecules are moving really

quickly, you've got a hot environment. If the molecules are really moving slowly, it's a cold environment. So temperature emerges from the motion of particles. So if you have like one particle, you can't really talk about it being hot or cold because you need a conglomerate. You need an agglomeration of particles to be able to talk about their average motion. And in that sense, temperature is this emergent idea that rests upon more fundamental ideas, the molecules and atoms that make up reality. Maybe that's true of time. Maybe time as we know it is a property that only makes sense in certain environments when there's enough stuff arranged in the right patterns.

But fundamentally, maybe there are atoms or molecules of time, which when not arranged in the form that we are familiar with, don't yield time as we know it. Time itself may be a quality of the world that exists here in this environment, but doesn't even apply in other environments that are configured radically differently. Whoa. That's a heavy one. Yeah. That's a heavy one.

What also is a heavy one is what caused the Big Bang? Yeah. Why would something smaller than the head of a pin become everything that we see in the cosmos? Yeah. So there are ideas for the answer to that question. Look, all of this is tentative because it's very hard to do measurements that go all the way back to the beginning. it's very hard to do measurements that go all the way back to the beginning. We have astronomical observations that we need to ensure are compatible with the predictions of our theories and so forth. So we as good scientists do what needs to be done to try to test these ideas. But the idea that I think most physicists or cosmologists buy into at the moment is that gravity can have two manifestations. The usual form of gravity that you and I know about is the attractive version.

You drop something toward the earth and it moves downward because the earth and the object pull on each other. That's the ordinary gravity that we experience every day of our lives. But Einstein's equations actually allow gravity to also be repulsive. It can push outward as opposed to just pulling inward. And this is something that we have never experienced because the gravity created by a rocky object like the earth is always the attractive variety. The gravity created by the sun, again, a compact object is always the attractive variety. But Einstein's math shows that if you don't have a rocky object that's isolated in space, but rather energy that is uniformly spread through a region

of space, that that kind of entity yields repulsive gravity. Why is that important to your question? If the very early universe, that little tiny head of a pin that you're talking about, if it was filled with a uniform bath of this energy, we call it the inflaton field. The name doesn't matter. But if it was filled with that energy, it would have been subject to repulsive gravity. What does repulsive gravity do? Pushes everything apart. Causes everything to rush outward. everything apart, causes everything to rush outward. So the bang of the Big Bang may have been a spark of repulsive gravity operating with a tiny region of space that pushed everything

apart. And this concept of repulsive gravity is just theoretical? Have we observed any sort of element in the universe that... It is theoretical, but it's at a level of understanding that I think most physicists would say causes it to migrate into the camp of established understanding of how gravity works. So number one, Einstein's equations have now been tested over and over again in a whole variety of circumstances. The detection of gravitational waves just a couple of years ago is like the crowning triumph of Einstein's math. A hundred years ago, the math says there should be ripples in the fabric of space. A hundred years later, we finally detect ripples in the fabric of space. So we are very comfortable with any prediction that comes out of Einstein's mathematics. And right in the mathematics is the prediction of what I was just describing. You've got uniform energy in a region, repulsive gravity.

The other thing is we currently witness that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, not slowing down. Since the 1920s, everybody thought that, yes, the universe is expanding, but it will slow down over time. Why? Because gravity pulls things back together. You throw an apple upward, it doesn't go up faster and faster. It goes up slower and slower because the Earth's gravity pulls it back. Everybody thought that would apply to the universe as a whole. It's expanding, but expanding ever slower.

The observations in 1998, culminated in 1998, which won the 2011 Nobel Prize, showed that the distant galaxies are moving away ever more quickly. The expansion of space is speeding up over time. It's accelerating. How do we explain that? The best explanation we currently have is repulsive gravity. We believe even today the universe is suffused with a bath of energy. We call it dark energy.

We believe it's uniformly going through space. I like to think of it almost like a Turkish sauna. It's like the steam filling the sauna, this energy filling space. And that repulsive gravity, we believe, is responsible for the observations that the distant galaxies are rushing away faster and faster over time. So it's circumstantial, but the case for repulsive gravity is quite strong. And what would have caused it to coalesce? What would have caused it to compress initially? Why would all that matter be in this tiny, less than a pin-sized object? So I have no idea, and nobody else on planet Earth has any real idea other,

but we do have theories. And one of the theories suggests that in the very early universe, it was a highly chaotic environment, very hot, with all the fields fluctuating wildly up and down. And the idea would be that if you wait long enough, where it's hard to know what wait means in this environment, but don't press me on my definition of time back then, just sort of intuitively. If you wait long enough, on rare occasions, the energy will just happen to flatten out in a region, become uniform, and then that region explosively inflates, grows large. So, you know, imagine you're looking at a pot of boiling water. The surface is, of course, widely undulating up and down. But if you wait long enough, very long time, since you've never seen it, neither have I, there will be a little patch

on the surface of that boiling water that flattens out. Why? That only means that the water molecules happen for an instant to be moving in just the right way to keep that little patch of water from wildly bubbling. It will happen. It's rare. But if you wait long enough, it will occur. Similarly, the widely undulating fields in the early universe, if you wait long enough, a patch will flatten out, you get the uniform energy, plug it into Einstein's equations, that region explosively

inflates. And I mean explosively. It can go from a size that's much less than an atomic diameter to larger than the observable universe in far less than a blink of an eye in 10 to the minus 30 10 to minus 35 seconds that's how powerful rebulsive gravity can be that is so baffling yeah so before that before this happens you just have in this theory you just have all of this energy sort of randomly interacting with other energy in the universe with no physical objects. Yep. Yep. And that could have been forever.

And in fact, that's the main point. There's nobody who is hanging around looking at their watch saying, good God, when is this big bang going to finally happen? So you can have this cosmological pre-show. You can have it last as long as you like. The only thing that you need to happen is that sooner or later a region flattens out and then the cosmological show begins. And if we're looking at this model of the universe being this infinite universes with different characteristics and different qualities to them, This could be happening throughout infinity all over the place. Yeah, and in fact, this so-called inflationary cosmology is the technical name for the subject, says that.

It says that it's quite likely that this explosive inflation of the region that we currently inhabit, it was just one of many such events. And therefore, there are other far-flung regions throughout this larger cosmological landscape where things have also inflated, but the details can be different. The physical details can differ from what we are familiar with. And the differences can be small, temperature differences in one part of space versus another, or they can be far more significant. Even the particles that make up that other realm may be different from the particles that make up our realm. Their masses can be different.

Their charges can be different. Their fundamental physical features can be different. So out there in that wider cosmological landscape, it can be the wild, wild west of realities. And they don't have to worry about proton deterioration. There may be realms in which they don't have to worry about protons falling apart. The wild, the really crazy idea is that if you're very careful mathematically in analyzing these theories, you realize that there have to be realms out there that duplicate ours as well. Many can be different, but there have to be versions of this reality that are also instantiated, occur out there in other realms. there in other realms. So you come to these crazy sounding sci-fi sounding ideas that you and I are having this conversation out there in other distant realms. An infinite number of times.

Perhaps infinite number of times. And moreover, small differences can also arise in these other realms where maybe our positions are interchanged at the table or maybe your name is, you know, Joe Green and I'm Brian Rogan. Or there's like strange realities that can be taking place. And this is not an overworked theorist imagination. This is the careful, dispassionate analysis of the mathematical equations. Now, I should say there are some physicists who see this implication and say, whoa, you guys have fallen off the deep end. Your theory has imploded because any theory that predicts that kind of a wealth of realities that are kind of untestable because they're so far away that we will never interact with them, that's the kind

of theory that we have been trained to avoid, to excise. However, the more forward thinking I like to describe as physicists say, hey, math has proven to be a very valuable guide over the course of hundreds of years. And if this is where the math is taking us, it's at least worthy of our attention to investigate it fully and possibly come to the conclusion that this is how reality actually behaves. Jesus. That's the weirdest one. The weirdest one.

It's like when people talk about intelligent life somewhere in the universe, that you're out there or a version of you or infinite versions of you. Yeah. And it can be disturbing. Like, what do you mean by you if there are many of yous out there, each of whom has an equal claim on being you because they've had the same experiences, they have the same memories?

And maybe have made infinite variations in the decisions that you've made through your life. That's right. So you could meet Brian Greene your age somewhere out there in the universe that's gone left. Made the right choices. Or the wrong ones. Yeah, right ones right exactly become a gambling addict yeah you know it's like a star trek episode where you've got where you've got like spock and evil spock you know the one that had the little beard on right so there's gonna be a little bearded version of me a goatee

out there yeah so yeah you know yeah and and the thing i want to stress is this sounds kooky yeah and the danger of kooky sounding ideas in physics is that there are people who then jump off for it and say, well, if that's possible, then this is possible. Maybe I can, with my mind, affect what other people are. So there's all sorts of crazy ideas that can be inspired by the weird insights of modern physics. And you've really got to keep straight what's real and what's ridiculous. Yeah, that's a problem, right? When people start using, especially if they're articulate, they start using scientific lingo to describe things that are very unscientific.

Sort of like what the bleep. Yeah, oh God. Hey, bleep you. But that was one of those movies where a lot of people, like, there was all this quantum talk and Dr. Quantum was in it with a little cartoon explaining particles and waves. And you're like, there's science behind this. But then at the end of it, really, it was something that was created by someone who runs a cult, who believes they're channeling someone who's like a thousand-year-old alien. Like, that whole Ramtha thing. Yeah, but let me tell you, if you have a moment. Please. runs a cult who believes they're channeling someone who's like a thousand-year-old alien. That whole Ramtha thing?

Yeah, but let me tell you, if you have a moment. Please. So a couple years ago, I was in the middle of a big project. In fact, I described this toward the end of the book, so you'll get to this little anecdote if you choose to carry on reading. I was in the middle of a big project, and a speaking opportunity came in, and I didn't properly vet it. You know, the money looked good and looked like a fine thing, and I signed off on it. And then a few days before I'm going, I realize it's to go to talk to Judy Zebra Knight, who channels Ramtha, the 35,000-year-old Lemurian sage. And I said to, you know, the folks who should have been checking

in on this, like the lecture agent, I can't go. And they're like, hey, Brian, it's tomorrow. It's too late to back out. You know, it's like, Jesus Christ. You know, so I look at some videos online and I see her on like the Merv Griffin show where, you know, she channels Romtha on live television. I don't know what year this was. She snaps her head forward. It goes back. She changes her voice. It becomes like something between the Queen and Yoda.

It's this weird place. And she's like, hello, being. And she's talking to Merv Griffin. And he's talking about an airplane. She goes, what is airplane? It's that kind of thing. Anyway, so I go. And I show up.

And the first thing I see is there are all these people walking around a grassy field with their arms out like this. And I'm like, can they see? And I get closer. They're all blindfolded. And I'm saying, what is going on here? And they describe that each person has a card around their neck where they've written down their life's dream. And an exact copy of that card has been put out on this big field. And they have to feel their way toward the matching card. And if they succeed, this shows that this goal or desire is going to come to pass.

Oh, boy. You know, and I'm saying to those guys, like, so how's it going? He goes, like, really good. You know, one person found their card, you know, in the last few months. Like, you know,

the odds of probability of that happening are kind of not unreasonable, but that's all that this is. And then they take me to the blindfolded archers. Oh, geez. Yeah. You know, so they're taking bow and arrow and they're firing at these targets.

And like, man, I'm like standing way back on this kind of thing. And they asked me, you know, do you want to try it? And I was like, you know, there's a photographer that's come along. I'm like, no, I'll avoid that. And then they introduced him to this woman who is able to predict the next card in a shuffle deck.

And, you know, so she'd pull out these cards and she'd say, OK, it's going to be seven of clubs and it's like a three of spades. And then the next one is a seven of diamonds. And she goes, oh, well, there's the seven that I was talking about, you know, one card before. You know, so it's this crazy circumstance where – and then I go to give my talk, okay, because that's why I was there after all. This was just like the preamble. They were showing me what they do. I walk into this barn and I cross the threshold of barn, and they all give me a standing ovation.

And I'm like, okay, I appreciate it, but, like, why are you giving me a standing ovation? And I go in, and I start to give my talk, and I say to them straight out, what I've seen here is nuts, okay? I say, you know, if you're going to try to predict next cards in the deck, you know, one out of every four times you'll get the suit. One out of every 13 times

you'll get the rank. There's nothing in there but the pure probabilistic laws of mathematics. You know? They rise up and give me a standing ovation. And I say,

it's appreciated, but why are you applauding? I'm telling you that you're wasting your time. And they applaud me again. And I'm like, this is like so totally weird. But then I go to the book signing. I finish my talk at the book signing. And these people, they come up to me and they talk real softly and say, there's a lot of crazy stuff that's happening in this place. But we come here because we feel that there's something else in the world and we want to be around like-minded individuals

that are searching for the deeper truth. So thank you for calling out the silliness that's happening here, but we'll come here anyway and spend our money because we want to be part of the journey. And I have to tell you, I had a degree of sympathy for them because I get the motivation. I mean, as a physicist, what we do is we are

revealing strange features of the world. So I get the urge, I get the desire. The problem is that the methodology that's being employed is something that will never take you closer to the truth, however much you may feel that you're among like-minded individuals. So I get the motivation. I get the sensation. I get the urge. But it's tragic that these individuals feel that this kind of an undertaking is the pathway that will take them toward the deeper truth. And let me just finish up.

So after this, they take me to the dinner. And the dinner's in a mansion at the top of the hill. And that's where Judy is. I'm probably going to get sued for this conversation, by the way. And the dinner's in a mansion at the top of the hill, and that's where Judy is. I'm probably going to get sued for this conversation, by the way. Yeah, I don't know. But I've never spoken about it. Ramsey wouldn't sue you. Yeah, well, no, they're quite litigious.

Are they really? No, they definitely are. So anyway, there's just a one person's opinion. They take me to the mansion at the top of the hill, and that's where she is. She doesn't come down and actually participate in the talk. She's like watching it on closed-circuit television up in the mansion. Oh, boy. And I walk in, and she hugs me.

But it was too goddamn long of a hug. You know what I'm saying? It was like – and she was like, thank you. It was like this big emotional thing, and I was like, I don't get it. But I think that's the way that she brings people into the fold and gets them to spend the big bucks to enter on this so-called journey toward truth where she's channeling this made-up fictitious sage that somehow people buy into. Is this all still going on? It was just a couple of years ago. So I imagine it is.

Imagine if she's really channeling it. We're just missing. That's right. You know, that would certainly rewrite every rule of reality, every law of physics that I understand. Wouldn't that be less weird than the Big Bang itself? You know, no. I tell you why. I tell you why. I tell you why. See, when it

comes to the Big Bang, I can sit down with the mathematics that I understand well, and I can follow the deductive chain of reasoning that gets us to some of these strange implications that we're talking about. Multiple Big Bangs, other realities, and so forth. When it comes to channeling a 35,000-year-old sage, I don't know

what the hell that even means. I don't understand the physical processes by which that could possibly happen. I don't understand how there could have been a being of the sort that she's channel be brought in if you can get people to buy into your vision of how the world works. Well, it's sort of like what they do is they curate ideas and then they run them through their sort of filter of uh woo woo yeah right exactly and then they distribute it in a very palatable way that attracts people that movie yeah i i tell a story i've told this before so i apologize to people who heard it there was a uh a friend of mine at the comedy store had a friend that I don't know her name, but she came to the comedy store and she was so happy. And I'm like, she was like, I'm so happy.

Why are you so happy? She goes, because I found the secret. And now that I know about the secret, I am going to be married. I am going to be this. I'm going to have this fulfilled life. I'm going to reach my dreams. And I'm really excited about that So at the time I had just seen the movie

And then I was just starting to understand The criticism of the movie I was reading all these accounts Scientists were breaking down All the things that were wrong And I didn't dash her dreams I just was like wow And then I saw her a year later

Outside of another one of my shows At a different comedy club And I said hey how you doing didn't dash her dreams i just was like wow okay and then i saw her a year later outside of uh another one of my shows at a different comedy club and i said hey how you doing she's like things are just not going the way i thought i thought because of the secret that everything would be great but my dad is still a pain in the ass and you know now he's moved in with me he doesn't have any money and i can't establish a good relationship and i don't have the job that i wanted i don't understand because i've been using the secret. I think about it every day. Right. And I said, here's my take on this. If you talk to someone who's very successful and you say to

them, hey, how did you get very successful? And they say, I thought about it all the time. I have a vision board. I took that photo of the house that I wanted. I about it all the time i have a vision board i took that photo of the house that i wanted i put it in the vision board that became my house i took uh you know this this idea i want a beautiful wife i want a family i want sports cars and this and that and now i have those things because the mind is a powerful tool and the mind can create reality you're just talking to someone who is successful how many people thought like that and nothing happened? I bet millions. I bet there's so many.

You have a bias in successful users. Those are the ones you're talking to. And just because of the fact that they've been able to have these extraordinarily successful lives while visualizing these things does not mean that visualizing these things creates an extraordinarily successful life. You have to think and you have to act and you have to do. Right. And there's trial and error and there's a lot of lessons to be learned. But if you wanted to simplify it at the end, once you're successful and boil it down to

a philosophy that you could sell a course on. Yeah, sure. That's what it would be. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Look, there's nothing wrong with visualizing success, but that is not the causal ingredient that will yield the success. And the thing that comes to mind is, you know, I don't know if they do it any longer, but there was certainly a time when Olympic athletes would be taught to visualize, say, jumping

over that high bar. And they'd run through the whole thing. But that's not all that they were doing. They were doing 10 hours a day of training that integrated this visualization as part of the training program. Yeah. So it's kind of tragic when people buy into these crazy ideas. And I have to tell you, when they were making that film, they called me to be in it.

And I think it was the director or one of the producers I was on the phone with. And, you know, they were describing what they were doing. And I probed sufficiently hard. And some of my friends did not probe sufficiently hard and were in the film and regretted it. But I probed sufficiently hard. And I said, look, what you're doing to me sounds really dangerous. It sounds like a really bad thing to be doing. And they took offense in that call back then. A year after the film came out, it was either the director or producer, I can't remember the gentleman's name, called me up

and said, I want to apologize to you. You are absolutely right. I have finally realized what a bad film this was to be involved in, and I completely regret it. So that I don't think is the point of view of the school of enlightenment, which is behind this, or at least part whoever it was, saw the light and realized that this is not the kind of information that you want to put out in the world because it can change people's lives in a very negative way. You know, I think your comparison to Olympic athletes is very good because the Olympic athletes are visualizing something that they already do. You know, there's a great benefit in visualizing for athletics for martial arts for a lot of different things visualizing success visualizing potential problems failures of your

process how you're going to adjust on the fly all those things are great because then when things do take place in real life situations you've already prepared for them you know the path right that's what that's all about. I agree with that. And in fact, I have to tell you, you know, in one of the chapters, later chapters of the book, I describe theories about why it is that we, for instance, tell fictional stories. I mean, could there be any evolutionary value in two individuals telling each other a story that they both know is false, that they

know has no connection to the world around them, but yet we've been doing that since the emergence of language. And there are these interesting evolutionary scenarios in which what you're saying is brought to bear in that unfamiliar context. We tell stories because it's the mind's way of rehearsing for the real world, but it mind's way of rehearsing for the real world, but it's a way of rehearsing for the real world that's completely safe. So you can go on all sorts of crazy journeys to the underworld, up into the clouds. You can engage in all sorts of battles. You can fight gods or demigods. All these things can take place within your imagination, so you're completely safe. And yet when you encounter something that's analogous to the stories that you've been

told or retold or embellished or told to others through other accounts, your brain is more attuned to respond in a beneficial way because it's not as novel as it would have been had you not been engaged in this fictional account of telling stories. So there's value in visualizing. There's value in telling stories, but it's not the causal part that some individuals would want us to believe it is. Yeah, the only thing that I would say contrary to that

is some people develop expectations based on fictional accounts. And there's a real problem like romantic movies, where some people will expect behavior that exists in these romantic movies only. Right. And it's not indicative of human beings in the real world. Yeah, yeah. Point well taken.

I mean, I think the vital thing is that your brain has had sufficient experience that it can weight these fictional accounts in a way that can enhance your response to the world but not set undue expectations of things that are just, you know, only going to be true in a fictional setting and not in the real world. It's just so strange to me that we desire those. I mean, hero movies, right? Yeah. Like hero movies in particular especially superhero movies someone who possesses powers beyond anything known to human beings or any life form yeah i get that yeah i mean sure you would love to just snap your fingers and fix everything but i actually see it in in in a slightly different way relevant to what we're

talking about before you know i think that the whole hero worship that we have as a culture comes again from our recognition of how powerless we are against the forces of a being that can transcend the limitations that we mere mortals are always subject to. So, I think it's built into our DNA to respond to the way that we do, in the manner that we do when encountering a hero in the world. I mean, there's Joseph Campbell. Yeah, I was just going to bring him up. Yeah, yeah. You know, so in the power of myth, but his more technical version, the hero with a thousand faces, you know, he goes through the whole notion of what it is to have a myth, and it's basically an individual that's called to action, to rise above the kinds of activities that

mere mortals will be able to undertake, resists the call at first, but then rises to the challenge, goes out into the world, conquers, comes back a changed individual and shakes up the reality from which that individual initially emerged on this journey. And there is ample evidence that across cultures throughout the ages, we have constantly been telling these kinds of mythological tales because they speak to us. They speak to our urge and our desire to transcend the limitations that our physical form

and the laws of physics necessarily constrain us to. Yeah, it is fascinating when you think of how many different languages and how many different cultures share those same archetypal themes. Yeah, yeah. And I do think it all comes, if you look way back into the history of the ideas, it comes from this initial recognition that we are mortal. And the fact that our brains are able to not just fix on the moment but can think about the entire timeline is the one that makes that a poignant realization. I mean, if we couldn't think about the future, what would it matter if we knew that we were going to die?

I mean, it would mean nothing. Right. of ingenuity that allows us to, you know, make the wheel, that allows us to build the pyramids, that allows us to come up with quantum mechanics and Einstein's equations and Beethoven's symphony and Picasso's work. The fact that we can undertake all of these expressions of creative will and the desire to transcend the world around us has a downside. And the downside is we recognize that we are not going to be here for very long. And I think that motivates a certain kind of engagement with the world. And hero worship is part of it.

Kurzweil is a fascinating character. Yeah, he thinks he's going to be around forever. Yeah, that's why I was bringing him up. Have you discussed any of this stuff with him? You know, I don't know him personally. I have certainly gone to some of his talks. And I think he and I had one exchange at some point in the past. And I totally get where he's coming from. You know, he feels that we're perhaps the final mortal generation.

And how sad it is. How sad it is. After, you know, 100,000 generations of humans, if we could only stick around for one more generation, science would come to a point where we would be immortal. And that feels like a tragic state of affairs. I don't think he's right. And I think most people who think about this deeply don't think he's right either. However many vitamins you take and however much science is progressing, the notion that we are just a generation or two from immortality I think is wishful thinking. This is a strange concept of immortality too because it's not necessarily you.

It's a downloaded version of you that will exist in some sort of a computer. Right. Which is is what does that mean right that sounds like hell yeah uh it could be yeah you know how's rem sleep in that computer well i allow for the possibility that that maybe it would be a way of being in the world that uh would have upsides that are hard for us as flesh and blood individuals to appreciate at this point. But it raises the deep question, would that be a good thing? In fact, if you had that opportunity to be downloaded in some form, and that would allow you to hold on to all your memories,

build new memories on top of them, have experience, maybe there's an avatar that you're able to drive through, you know, your mental machinations is out there in the world. Would you do it? I might have said yes before I've had some pretty profound psychedelic experiences. And then from then I've said, I'm going to hedge my bets. I'm going to see what's next. Right. I'm going to see what happens when the lights go out. Oh, really?

Yeah. So you think there may be something that happens when the lights go out? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what, I mean, for sure your body is going to decay and you are going to become a part of the earth. You're becoming a part, unless they cremate you or unless they embalm you with some toxic chemicals and then nothing can use your dead tissue, which is really a shame.

Yeah. It's really a shame that we do that, right? Yeah. I mean, unless someone murders you and you have to exhume you in the past to solve in the future whether to solve a murder right i i don't know what what do you think consciousness is do you think consciousness is clearly just a factor of brain tissue and and energy or do you think it's possible that what our brain is is something that tunes into consciousness? Yeah. Well, I've spent some time thinking about this question.

I think it's perhaps the deepest question that faces science or even humanity at some level. my own personal perspective is that consciousness is nothing more than the choreographed motion of particles in various quantum states inside a gloppy gray structure that sits inside this thing that we call a head. Do I have any proof for that? No. Does anybody have any proof for what consciousness is? Not at all at this moment. But the history of the reductionist program where we've been able to take some of the more spectacular creations that have emerged in the world and recognize that they are nothing but

the product of their ingredients in the laws of physics leads me to extrapolate that idea to the experience of consciousness. Now, having said that, there's a deep puzzle. It's called the hard problem of consciousness. Now, having said that, there's a deep puzzle. It's called the hard problem of consciousness, which is if electrons and quarks and particles

and laws of physics are all that there is, and if you buy into the fact that electrons don't have an inner world, that quarks don't have an inner world, how can it be that by taking a collection of those particles, you can turn on the lights? How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless particles somehow yield mindful experience? And that's a deep question that science has not yet answered. My own feeling is when we understand the brain better, that question will evaporate. We'll look at the brain with our newfound understanding. Maybe it's 100 years in the making, maybe 1,000 years in the making.

And we'll say, aha, when electrons and quarks and protons move in this particular configuration, one of the byproducts is an inner sensation that we call conscious experience. is an inner sensation that we call conscious experience. And that, to me, is the likely answer that we will find. But there are some very smart, well-respected people who go in a very different direction. There are some who say electrons and protons and quarks, they do have a fundamental proto-conscious quality. They themselves are conscious beings of a sort. Now, it's not like you're going to have electrons that are crying

or quarks that are anguishing, but if you have a little proto-element of conscious experience that is imbued into a particle, and then you take a lot of the particles and put them together, the idea is that yields the manifest conscious experience that we're familiar with. I don't buy into that, but there are people who do. Why do you pick a position? Well, I take a position on this because I guess my view is you look out at the world and what you do as a physicist is you move the smallest degree required to explain the phenomena that you are observing.

And to move from our current understanding of the world to leapfrog to a place where electrons are conscious and quarks are conscious, to me, is such a fantastically radical move that I don't consider it justified to make that move with our current level of understanding. There was a time back in the 1800s when life itself was so mystical that people basically said the same kind of thing. How could a collection of lifeless particles ever come together and yield a living being? They said that they can't. You have to induce a life force. You have to inject vitality. You have to inject a life force, and that's what sparks the emergence of life on lifeless particles. I don't think any serious scientist thinks that today. I think most serious

scientists say, yes, life is wonderful. Life is, in some sense, miraculous, but life is nothing but the particles of nature coming together to yield the complex molecules of DNA and RNA, the complex cellular structures, the cells come together to yield the more complex multicellular organisms, and that's all that it takes to have something that's alive. No life force is necessary. That way of thinking about the world has gone away. And my own feeling is that that kind of progression is going to happen for consciousness. Today, it's utterly mysterious how it is that I have this inner voice talking inside my head, how it is that I look around the world and I can see the color red and I can experience the color red. I don't just have sensors that can call that red. I mean, an iPhone can do that.

I actually have an inner world where I feel that color red. Where does that come from? Hard to answer that question, but I think 100 or 1,000 years from now, we'll look back and smile at how we in this era invested consciousness with such mystical quality when in the end it's nothing but particles and the laws of physics, and that's all there is to it. Well, what's interesting, too, to me is that, as a human being, my thoughts on consciousness are very deep and profound, and this idea, like, what is this thing? But if I really break it down objectively, animals have some sort of a consciousness. I mean, including they have instincts, right?

They try to get away from danger. They try to survive and procreate. And we developed something far more complex in our ability to express ourselves in language. And in doing that language or during that creation of that language, we developed all sorts of bizarre concepts, and we've developed all sorts of different ways to describe feelings and emotions and contemplate the future as well. And these things are continually getting more and more complex. If you go to single-celled organisms, work your way up to early hominids, and then get to human beings, you just see this ever-increasing form of complexity in every way. Yes. And in the way that the things see the world,

of course it makes sense that there would be more complexity. Right. But we don't think about that when we think of a parakeet. We don't think of a parakeet as being conscious. But a parakeet, relatively speaking, is far more primitive than a chimpanzee, which is, relatively speaking, far more primitive than a human being. Right.

And it's just going to continue to evolve or if we survive, things will continue to improve due to natural selection and random mutation and all the other factors and will be something that makes this today look like the way we look at single-celled organisms or chimps or whatever. Yeah, I can well imagine that.

Because we see small changes in DNA, a tiny fraction of a percent, yields a radical change in what the being that has that DNA is able to accomplish. But at the same time, you made reference to psychedelic experiences. And I trust you agree but tell me if you don't that those psychedelic experiences were generated by a slight change in the chemical makeup of the particles coursing through your brain and your body sometimes not even a change sometimes a lot of them the heavier ones are actually produced by the brain. Right. So to me, that's a great piece of data that speaks to the fact that all it is is particles and chemicals coursing through a structure because if the mind was somehow external to

the physical makeup and the laws describing it, then how would the injection, say, of some kind of foreign substance or, as you injection, say, of some kind of foreign substance, or as you say, the brain producing some sort of substance that it didn't ordinarily have within its makeup, why would that be able to have such a radical impact on conscious experience? The way I would look at it if I was trying to argue against that would be that your eyes and the organs of the human eye are taking in light and through that light are able to perceive physical objects in the world that they would not be able to do without light yes there's it's a it's something that allows you to see and it allows you to take in

death perception and understand shapes that the human mind and particularly these glands that produce these psychedelic chemicals, when experiencing these chemicals, it allows the brain to experience things that might be there all the time, but that you cannot perceive with normal human neurochemistry. It needs to be enhanced, or the levels need to be changed and shifted. And what's really perplexing about the these chemicals is that these chemicals are produced by your brain and if you do take these like particularly dimethyltryptamine yeah it's the most potent of all the psychedelic chemicals if you take that you have these insanely profound visions right which is you know leads to a lot of

people having these religious spiritual epiphanies have you done anything have you done any psychedelic experiences that you're allowed to talk about yeah uh i i have uh not not many and i'm a complete lightweight in this arena because i hardly drink you know i hardly do anything that it puts foreign uh substance into the body but um yeah i was in uh i was in am. I was there because I was giving a lecture to the Queen of Holland. And I gave the lecture. My wife and I were both there. And after that was over, we decided to do a little experimenting. And for somebody like me who doesn't experiment, I made a mistake.

Because – Did you eat it? Well, the first night we went out and we went to one of these coffee bars and uh i guess i can speak about this you know i am it's legal yeah totally legal exactly you know i we we took the like the the easy way in like the the the novice version and it did nothing to me at all that first night so the next night when we went i went right to the bottom of the list where it was in Dutch or something, but it had like machine guns, you know, pointed at a brain kind of thing. Oh, boy. Yeah.

So I did that version, and it was the most terrifying experience of my fucking life. I didn't mean to say that either. But we were in a club. We were in a club. And all of a sudden, the world changed. And what started happening is my brain started manufacturing versions of myself that would converse with me and convince me that the reality that I was experiencing was real. And then that version of me would destroy that reality and the process would start over and over and over again. Is this something you smoked or you ate?

Smoked. Yeah, wow. Definitely smoked. And again, I suspect that the impact was because my body has no experience. Oh, for sure. And so I think that just enhanced the impact. And it was terrifying. It was utterly – I was in the hotel room and I was clinging to the bed.

And I actually said to my wife, tie me up. Not in any – it sounds wrong. I mean tie me up because I'm like terrified of what I'm going to do. Right. Right. You know? Wow. You know? And so instead, you know, she called the doctor.

And I was like, she was like afraid this would be like in the newspaper because I just like give a lecture to the queen, you know? Right. But, you know, they're so used to Americans getting in over their head with this kind of experience. So it was something that they were completely used to. So, you know, they sent up a, and the doctor basically just gives you sugar. And my wife knew that this was an extreme circumstance for me because I don't eat any sugar. But I was like – he said, eat as much – I was like taking the Milky Way bars. So sugar is somehow another counteract.

Sugar is – I don't know the chemistry behind this, but sugar is the antidote. Caffeine is supposed to help as well. Caffeine can help too, yeah, I guess. But it lasted eight hours. chemistry behind this but but sugar is the the antidote caffeine is supposed to help caffeine can help too yeah i guess but it it lasted eight hours even flying home on the plane the next day all i did is i sat on my seat and i put on the headphones and there was a beatles channel and i just like listened to beatles for like for like seven hours and i was just you know in this in this place that i had never experienced before. Now, for our conversation, this just made it so intuitively obvious to me that my conscious awareness is totally dependent on a few chemicals.

Right. That's all that's happening inside of the head. So in a way, it was a valuable experience. It's not something that I want to ever experience again. Absolutely. But it was something that helped align my intuitive understanding of what consciousness is with the scientific recognition that it all relies upon the stuff that's circulating inside of your mind. Yeah. What's interesting about these heavy-duty psychedelic experiences, because what you took was, by most people's idea, very mild. Yeah, no doubt.

But the more profound psychedelic chemicals that are also produced by your brain, if you just shift that ratio, and not by too much, really. You're not talking about even, you're talking about little small doses of this stuff. Shift that ratio, it produces these profound visions.'s just like ayahuasca type yes ayahuasca is just an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine okay okay they figured out how to you know your brain your gut rather produces monoamine oxidase and it breaks down dimethyltryptamine and so they figured out how to combine an mao inhibitor with the leaves of another plant that has the dimethyltryptamine and i say but you could take it there's synthetic versions of it but the point is this is something that your brain produces your liver produces we

know you we know it's produced in the lungs it's the body makes it yeah right but it's got it's in there but then if you shift the balance and all of a sudden you have these incredibly profound visions. It makes you think, like, what we have now in terms of our balance and our chemicals must be different than what this fella must have had, this chimpanzee thing. Right. And primates before that. As the human, like, when you think of human evolution, do you ever stop to think, what are we going to be like a million years from now if we do survive? Have you ever done this sort of thought experiment where you say, okay, if things keep going the same way, we used to be very strong and very hairy, and we're getting progressively softer as we don't need to use our bodies as much. Our brains are getting larger. Our brains are getting larger.

Our heads are getting bigger. Do you do that sort of thought experiment to see what we're going to become? Not in a systematic scientific way because the process is so fraught with incredible detail that I think it's hard for anybody, even experts in evolutionary biology, to really tell us anything that will hold water. That's really predictive. But on a general level, yeah. I mean, because people often wonder, why is it that we haven't been visited by aliens, right?

This is a thing that comes up whenever you're talking about other life inside the universe. I was going to get to that in a minute. Yeah, yeah. But the answer to that could be quite straightforward. Nobody out there cares about us because we're so ill-developed. We're so young on the cosmic scene that there's nothing interesting for them to find here on planet Earth. So to me, there's a natural explanation for why there can be stuff out of their life out there, and yet they don't hang out around planet Earth. We don't hang around on Ant Hill to try to have a conversation with you know what's going on inside that particular

structure i buy that argument the least you do really because we're interested in butterflies butterflies are so boring we're interested in moles we're interested in you know interested in squirrels we're interested in them for very specific reasons right so typically we're interested either because we want to see the evolutionary development that yields this particular life form or because there's a general curiosity about how this object is put together. If these other beings are so far beyond us

that those kinds of taxonomy questions are no longer of any interest, then hanging around here may not hold anything for them to make the journey and stick around long enough for us to notice. I don't buy that, again, for two reasons. One, because why would we assume that they're so far beyond us that they wouldn't be interested in these talking monkeys with thermonuclear weapons who dominate an entire planet? Yeah.

That would be fascinating. We found some planet somewhere where people are, the politicians all lie to themselves. Everyone gets video through the sky. They fly in metal tubes that hurl over the oceans. They pollute the oceans and eat all the fish. Like these people are fucking crazy. We've got to go there and check this out. But imagine that this civilization, the notion of lording over a planet is like us talking about you know the ant lording over a grain of sand

so they may be uh galactic as opposed to planetary in their hegemony and the notion of some little tiny rock orbiting some nondescript star in the suburbs of this completely ordinary galaxy off there on the side may not have the kind of pull that you imagine that it does. Oh, I disagree. We think it's interesting when we see a chimp use a rock to open up a nut. We think it's interesting that there's an amazing photograph of an orangutan that's spearfishing. Have you ever seen it? I have seen that, actually.

It's really cool. No, it is. He learned it from people, apparently, but it's still interesting nonetheless. Right, but I don't think 100 years from now we're going to be as interested in these kind of qualities, or 1,000 years from now, or 10,000 years from now. Well, why would we assume that these things that come here from another planet are more than 10,000 years? Well, that's a very good question. And I think the answer to that is we look at the history of the cosmos until today and it's, say, let's just call it our universe to be concrete, 13.8 billion years.

And we look at life on planet Earth and it's, you know, a handful of billions of years old. So in a handful of billions of years, you can go from some complex molecules to human beings. I like how you say it, like it's not that long. It's not that long because, you know, imagine that life began a few billion years earlier in some other system, you know, stars and galaxies, they were starting up, you know, a billion years after the Big Bang. So it could be that life in other worlds has a head start on us by a few billion years. And we know what can happen in a few billion years. It can take us from single cell to us. And you can imagine from a few billion years from now into the future, it could be radically different. So to say it's 10,000 years

ahead of us, that to me would be the unexplained coincidence. How unlikely that they started and we started within 10,000 years in the span of billions of years. That seems unlikely to me. Does it seem unlikely when you're talking about the infinite size of the universe and there's perhaps an infinite number of Brian Greens out there talking to an infinite numbers of me? Good point. Good point. Good point. So you're absolutely right. We're almost guaranteed

if the spatial expanse of the universe is infinitely large that there are going to be places where it's within 10,000 years. Sure. But those are going to be a very small number compared to the places where it's not 10,000 years.

Is that true? Or would it be an infinite number of them? Well, it'd be infinite. Not a small number at all. But they're different kinds of infinities. So you mean in the space of the exact scope of the universe itself, a small number relatively speaking to where we are physically. Yeah, so I would say slightly differently. I'd say look at a finite size ball in this large spatial expanse.

So everything is finite now. So let's get a 5 billion light year ball. Right. And within that ball, the number that are differing from us by 10,000 years will be very, very small compared to the number differing from us by, say, a billion years or a couple of billion years. So then – Simply by the law of numbers, if we imagine that they're random processes that are generated. Now, there could be some physical principle that prevents life from emerging before, say, four billion years ago. And if that's the case, and we're not aware of that principle, then you'd be absolutely right, that we'd all be roughly at the same starting point, and there's no reason to suspect that they would be so far ahead of us.

But I don't know of any such principle. But you almost have a reductionist view of this, right? Like, so if you had a guess, if you had $100 to bet, has alien life ever observed us? You would say no. Well, by observed, you mean could they just turn a big telescope in our direction and gather some radio waves, you know? But yes, I would take that bet because, frankly, we've only been generating radio waves for the last 70 years. So it's only a 70 light year ball around us. And within that small radius, very unlikely that there's been some alien world that's examining us. So it would have to be something that would be able to recognize our signal and visit us.

But don't we look at observable planets and solar systems and discover Goldilocks planets. We do. And we examine those planets from vast distances away. Yes. And wouldn't you assume that a life form that is perhaps thousands of years more advanced than us with the exponential increase in technology. I mean, if they ever got to the point where we are, that they would see these Goldilocks planets as well and recognize that Earth is one of them. Yes.

However, if they are so far away, they're going to be examining Earth as it was hundreds of thousands or millions or billions of years ago. So if you truly want them to be examining us in the sense of human presence on planet Earth, then it's a much more difficult proposition to imagine that they've actually been doing that. Is it possible there's another way to examine things where you're not hampered by the speed of light? earth then it's a much more difficult proposition to imagine that they've actually been doing is it possible there's another way to examine things where you're not hampered by the speed of light oh not not not that i know of i mean any signal in the world that we're aware of is restricted by special theory by the speed of travel which is now look there's quantum entanglement which is a

strange property of the quantum world in which distant objects can behave as if they are one and in some sense respond instantaneously to an influence in one location at a distant location no matter how far apart they are. But that isn't really observing. That's more realizing correlations between physical properties at widely separated locations. But I'm not aware of a means of leveraging that to actually observe what's happening in some distant location, even if you do have quantum entangled particles.

For a long time, my operating theory on aliens was when I see something that's interesting, then I'm going to pay attention to it. Right. Because it's too attractive. And it's part of the thing of whether it's ramptha or any of these uh wonky things there's something about woo woo stuff whether it's psychics or channelers that's really attractive to people in some sort of a weird way and so is so are aliens the idea that if we were visited by something from another world, some far advanced space daddy or whatever it is, that comes down here and is going to show us the way.

That's so attractive that I think it messes with your ordinary ability to observe and to objectively analyze what's real and what's not. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think it's an unfortunate feature of the human mind that we tend to look outward for weirdness that will inject into the world more than the everyday that we experience through common everyday encounters. We want there to be more. We don't want it to be that we're just on this rock around this planet and we live for a while and then we're gone. We want it to be more than that. And so we imagine that there's some answer floating out there in the cosmos, that maybe that will be brought down to earth through our space daddy, as you refer to it. And my view of that is it's much more noble to recognize that

there is no answer floating out there in space. There's no space data that's going to come here and say, this is what it's all about. The answer is you and I and everybody else, we manufacture our own meaning. We manufacture our own purpose. And how much better is it that we come up with our own meaning than having it bestowed or forced upon us by some external entity. I don't think that diminishes things. I think it aggrandizes them because it's coming ultimately from ourselves.

That makes a lot of sense. I think the hope is that space data is going to prevent nuclear war and figure out how to fix the ocean. Yeah, sure. No, I mean, and that I could certainly imagine happening because there's knowledge out there in the world that you could imagine that we haven't yet encountered that we could make use of. So, fantastic. But the other thing that's worth keeping in mind, and this I think is surprising to some people, you can do a calculation as to whether consciousness can itself persist indefinitely in the universe.

You can ask yourself, sure, Earth may go away, you and I, we're going to go away, we recognize all this, but is it possible that some kind of conscious being can continue to cogitate indefinitely far into the future, or its progeny continue to cogitate? And you can pretty much establish that thought itself will come to an end in this universe. Thought itself is a limited lifetime phenomenon in the cosmos. So when – at least our universe, right? Yeah. So I'm going to focus just on our universe. So the breakdown of protons, when we get to that point, there's no room for thought no that's part of it but i'm willing to go further i'm willing to imagine that even with the breakdown of protons that there's

some way that the particles that it spawns electrons neutrinos photons whatever somehow through some configuration of widely separated particles is able to have signals going back and forth that allows this group of particles to think. I'm willing to posit that in order to be as general as possible. And with that assumption, you can still prove that the relentless rise in entropy that we were talking about before ensures that any cogitating being that happens to still be able to persist in this unusual realm of particles will ultimately burn up in the entropic waste generated by its own process of thinking. So the process of thought itself in the far future will generate too much heat for that

being to be able to release that heat to the environment and to avoid burning up in its own waste. When you think, you will fry. Dude. and to avoid burning up in its own waste. When you think, you will fry. Dude. It's always been interesting to me, when I've really stepped back and looked at it, that our ideas of the importance of thought are so egocentric.

When we take into consideration the vast scope of the universe and how majestic, so much that we see in the cosmos that there's no thought, at least as far as we know, whatsoever. Like hypernovas, like star nurseries, all these different things that we see in the cosmos

that are infinitely larger than us and responsible for life itself. That these processes create the very elements that are needed to create life but we're so concerned with this one animal's ability to think and ponder and create

and emotions and write stories and to us it's so egocentric because it is everything. How radically self-centered. It's ludicrous. When you think about

the infinite universe I mean we are two finite beings sitting in the valley in front of a wooden desk. It's really weird that we think about it as so important. It's everything to us. It is. It is. And it's hard to not think in those terms.

But I encourage people. And part of the point of this book is to encourage people to think in a cosmic way and recognize the point that you're making, which are with these little tiny finite beings crawling around on this planet. We're here for a brief moment of cosmic time, and that's all there is to it. And some will feel like, oh, my God, that's disturbing. That's distressing. My point is, hey, extol, celebrate the fact that you are here for this brief. Hey, extol, celebrate the fact that you are here for this brief. I mean, think about the collection of quantum events stretching back from the Big Bang until today that had to turn out exactly as they did for you and for me to actually exist.

Each one of these quantum events, and there are nearly infinitely many of them, could have turned out that way instead of this, yielding a universe in which neither you nor I nor anybody else would be here. And yet against those astounding odds, astounding odds, we're here. That is cause for celebration. And you can go further. Not only are we here, we can figure out how we got here. We can create art. We can write the stories that you are referring to. We can create comedy. We can build monuments. We can create films. We can do things that inanimate objects can't. So this, to me, is where the value and purpose and meaning comes from, as opposed to trying to look out and hope Space Daddy comes with the answer of, you know, flashing a neon sign saying, aha, that's what it's all about. That's never going to happen. It isn't. Well, it might.

You might have to eat your words. I admit that it's possible. So every time I say it's not going to happen, I mean unlikely that it's going to happen. Very unlikely, yeah. I agree with that. But it's interesting to me that that's the thing that we look forward to the most.

To the average person, if they think about space, they think about intelligent life. That is far more interesting to them than the fact that there's black holes out there that are devouring planets yeah they're sucking stars into its event horizon yeah this infinite point of density that we can't even really begin to imagine with our own little brains yeah yeah and uh and the fact that all this arose without a guiding intelligence. Yeah. You know, that there are black holes and there are active galactic nuclei and there are black

holes slamming into each other, creating gravitational waves that we can actually detect. I mean, it is a wonderfully rich reality that we are fortunate to be part of. that we are fortunate to be part of. Do you experience much pushback or much conflict from religious people who don't like the fact that you describe things in that way that didn't need an intelligent force or intelligent creator to exist? It's an interesting question because the biological community, people like Richard Dawkins and the like, I think have really borne the brunt of the religious pushback because they're dealing directly with phenomena of life.

And that's the precious commodity that somehow we want to be sacred. And therefore, our religious sensibility will push back on it just being the mindless laws of physics and evolution yielding life on planet Earth. They haven't pushed as hard on the quantum physicists and the cosmologists as they have on the biologists. But I have had conversations. Many of them are respectful as opposed to antagonistic where the view is that I am wrongheaded, that I am missing the point. And some of these religious folks are fantastically accomplished scientists. That's weird.

Yeah. I mean, I went to a gathering. I think I can talk about it now. It was a closed-door gathering. You weren't meant to describe it. I hope you don't get sued by this one. Yeah, that's right. I'm really opening myself up.

And I thought it was called Science and the Spiritual Quest. And it was a bunch of scientists that were being brought together. And I thought it was going to be an interesting but ultimately one-note meeting. I thought everybody's going to basically say the same thing. There could be a God. There's no evidence for a God. We've got the laws of physics and we're going to just press forward under the assumption that physics is all there is until the clouds part and God reveals him or herself or itself to us and at that point we may change our tune. It was not one note. I was the only person who had that perspective in the room. Everybody else was coming at religion from a very different way of thinking about the world. In fact,

there's one Nobel laureate in the room who got up and sang psalms as part of his presentation. And I was sitting there and I was like, what is happening here? This is so unexpected to me. And what it really meant was I was so close-minded into the varieties of religious engagement that happen in the world. And it opened my eyes. And this one Nobel laureate in particular, I did say to him at the end, I said, when you look at me, and you hear my view, what do you think? And he kind of put his arm around me in a vuncular way and said, you know, you're a real smart guy, and you don't understand the true reality. And I think ultimately you will, because you're open open-minded and you're on a journey and I

hope that your journey will finally take you to the place where I have been for many years. That was so unexpected that this Nobel laureate who I respected for his concrete mathematical and experimental work saw the world completely differently from me. Now, was there a spectrum of belief? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. But I was the one who was far out.

I was the one who was- You were untethered. Yeah, I mean, I came in there, I was like, whoa, you know? And now clearly, they arranged the meeting to have a spectrum of perspectives. I mean, this is not something that was randomly designed and it just so happened, but it was an eye-opener. And from that, I went to read – do you know William James' book, Varieties of Religious Experience? Have you been familiar? Yeah. So, it's a book that William James, a great psychologist, wrote in 1902,

and it was based on a series of lectures I think he gave in Scotland. And it is the most heartfelt and rational approach to religion and science that I think has ever been written, and yet most people don't know much about it. Because what he does is he goes through and he documents through his own research and through reading biographies and interviewing individuals the vastly different ways that people think about religion and why they think about religion and the value that religion has in their lives. And when you read that book, it doesn't convert me. I haven't changed my views on whether or not there is a God, but it has changed my views on the value of a religious sensibility, the role that it plays in people's lives. Now, look,

it can be, you know, you talk to people like Sam Harris, and, you know, it's a destructive force in the world, and it has been a destructive force in some ways, but that's not the full story. A fuller story is that for some individuals, it gives a connection to a historical lineage that's deeply valued. For some individuals, it puts their life in a larger setting that allows them to be in the world in a more productive way. So, there are a whole range of roles that religious engagement can play. The problem is, when you start to pit it against scientific insight, then you run into trouble. But religion was never developed to give us factual information about the world. Religion will never give us the electron magnetic moment to nine

decimal places. That's the purview of scientific investigation. And if you can keep these straight in your mind, there's a definite and powerful role for a religious sensibility in the world. Yeah, I feel like it gives people in a lot of ways a scaffolding for ethics and morality and allows them some alleviation of anxiety. Yeah, exactly. It gives them a feeling of purpose. But like you said, as long as it's not conflicting with rigid scientific reality. Yeah, right. Like scientific, provable scientific reality.

Yeah, and I got to tell you, there's a funny thing. You know, Richard Dawkins, I don't know if you've had him on the program. So you know that his MO in the world is very anti-religious. I think you would agree with me on that. I don't want to put words into his mouth. But I did an event with him in New York, the Beacon Theater. I don't know, it was maybe a year ago or something like that. And it was very interesting because in a one-on-one conversation, his views were very similar to mine.

Look, we don't agree in totality. But I was saying to him, there are times I go around the world and I will do things that are utterly irrational. I'll knock on wood for good luck. I'll speak to my dead father. I know that he's not really there. I'll pray to God on occasion if I think that I could use that backup. Not because I think there's some bearded individual in the sky. It's just a behavioral tendency that I find to be comforting and useful. And I said this to Richard. And he said, I totally get it. I was like, what? He was like, I totally get it. He said, in fact, he said, I don't like to sleep in a house that has a reputation as being haunted.

You know? And for me, it was such a beautiful human moment. It was such a beautiful human moment where we were just like being human beings. And he said, we're both sinners. And I agree. We are both sinners in that sense because we know how the world works. We know this doesn't make any sense. And yes, it's still part of somehow how we behave in the world. And I think there's a value to recognizing that that is what it means to be human. You will engage in the world in ways that are not necessarily strictly adhering to some rational perspective of how the scientific world operates.

I would love to see Richard Dawkins outside of a haunted house saying, I'm not going in there. Exactly. Exactly. You know. Yeah. So, you know, it's all just to say that I kind of feel like there are many pathways toward insight in the world. There are many ways to live a life. There are many ways to come to terms with our own impermanence.

And it's not as though something is right or something is wrong. It's a question of is it useful to you? And I think that we have to be very open-minded in the kinds of behaviors that we allow to happen in the world. You know, even Rampta, it's nutty stuff. But if some of those individuals who go there find that it allows them to live in the world in a more productive way, alleviating anxiety, feeling like they're on a spiritual quest so be it yeah that's the thing that's i mean it's hard for people to understand if you're not in that space that headspace that they are you don't need this structure but for some people even scientology or something along those lines it seems loopy on paper, can provide them with legitimate structure and benefit their lives in a tangible way that they could describe to you.

Yeah, exactly. And my feeling is that if there was – I don't know this to be the case. Maybe some biologists will push back on this. for want of a better word, you know, Vulcan-like individuals who approach the world in a completely rational manner, evaluating the data, figuring out the most sensible course of action, competing against a crazy group of individuals like us who will come up with wild fictional ideas, gods in the heavens, you know, demons haunting the world, I think it's the latter group that ultimately would triumph because with that kind of freedom of thought, you get novelty, you get ingenuity, you get creativity. And so I feel as though this is part and parcel of who we are and why we have

survived. And to sort of come at the world with a scientific club that's meant to smash away anything that disagrees with the scientific worldview is an unfortunate way of looking at the world. Yeah, there's something about creativity that it doesn't necessarily have to abide by any laws of logic and it can still be beneficial. Yeah, and that's why it's so stunning when somebody comes up with something, it's like, where did that come from? It didn't come from a rational approach to working out, you know, Brahms' Third Symphony. It emerged from the churning emotions of an individual who happens to be made up of trillions

of particles guided by physical law, responding to the environment, which is impinging his senses with an incredible array of influences. And through that world emerges this spectacular piece of music. That's breathtaking. Utterly breathtaking. Yeah. And it's amazing what that music can inspire as it reaches out to X amount of people and

then causes different thoughts in their mind. And then that causes in turn another branch of creativity, another new line of thinking that they might have never pursued before. Darrell Bock Yeah. And that to me establishes that the notion that language is the only way that we can know about the world. Wittgenstein had this perspective that the limits of my language, limits of my world, but not trying to overlay a narrative upon it. Just feeling your way into reality reveals things about the world that I think are beyond linguistic. Do you ever listen to music when you're pondering an equation or whether you're

going over a problem? It's an interesting question. When I was in college, I couldn't have any sound on when I was trying to say learn quantum mechanics or relativity. I would find that it would capture my brain too fully and I couldn't focus on the equations that I was trying to understand. But the funny thing is, in writing this book, for the very first time, I found that there were passages that I couldn't write if it was quiet. I needed to have music playing because in some sense, by focusing too directly on what I was trying to say, I couldn't say it.

by allowing my brain to fly off through whatever musical experience I was playing and allowing the freedom of thought to then emerge within that unusual, for me, environment. What kind of music were you listening to? Well, it varied incredibly. A lot of Slayer? No. No. So some of it was classical. I remember there's one vital passage when I was writing.

Do you know Pentatonix? They are a spectacular a cappella group who are able to take songs that you have heard and transform them into sort of transcendent performances. So you should check these guys out. But other times, you know, it would just be loud rock loud beatles loud rolling stones uh the soundtrack from the greatest showman you know just blaring that thing and and somehow it just allowed me a certain kind of linguistic freedom that i could not acquire in my normal way of being in the world which is everyone's quiet. Let me just work out my equations and I need total focus and no distraction.

So is this something that you sort of evolved over the course of your career? Absolutely. Absolutely. It was not there early on. And, you know, there's this phenomenon. I don't know if this is anything more than a metaphor or an analogy, but whatever. You know, there are certain things in the night sky that you can't see if you look at them directly. But by looking off axis, you're able to invoke other qualities of the eye that are able to sense those features of the night sky. And I kind of feel like it's the same thing. Sometimes by focusing directly on what you want to do, you can't do it.

And you've got to look obliquely. You've got to look off axis metaphorically, and that's the only way that you can accomplish what you set out to do. And certainly music is one of the ways to take one's attention and shift it in a different direction to get that oblique view of what it is that you're trying to do. And I have found that it allows for progress that otherwise is unattainable. And is that the case also when you were writing this book? It absolutely was the case writing this book. You know, I have a very – a wife who's very understanding.

So we have a house – we live in Manhattan. I'm at Columbia. But she would let me go up to our house upstate with the dogs and by myself. And I would disappear for weeks on end. And I'd hold myself up in this cabin in the woods, and I would sometimes write deep into the night. And there were no neighbors around, so I could turn on the music at whatever volume I found useful, and I would find, you know, that it freed up a certain kind of creative thought process that to me was striking because I had never approached work in that way before. And it was really deeply interesting. So how did you come to this idea of doing it that way?

I was struggling on certain things. I was struggling on certain things, and I felt as though I am approaching this in a very flat-footed way. I want to write about this, say I want to write about human creativity or I want to write about religious engagement, and I am just doing what I've always done, which is I have this equation and I want to solve it. So I'm going to bring the tools of mathematics to bear to solve it. And I was approaching this writing project in exactly the same mind frame. And as it wasn't working, I said, let me smack my brain around a little bit. psychedelics i didn't go that direction but i smacked it around by forcing myself to be subject to a great deal of distraction in the environment around me and it really made a difference it's interesting that you did it in a calculated manner yeah right yeah yeah so so so i i can't break free fully from my my my physicist training you know but it's. I mean, that way of doing it is wise. And it's also a time-tested, you know, from Ralph Thoreau to the beginning of time. Yeah, and the funny thing is it never worked for me in the past because the focus, I think

when I'm doing mathematics, it does need, at least for me personally, to be that kind of non-distracted, total focus on what's going on. As a writer, it's a very romantic notion, too. Yeah. Like, to go to the woods in a cabin total focus on what's going on as a writer it's a very romantic notion too like to go to the woods in a cabin that's what's up right that's what everybody wants to do yeah right right exactly you know what's missing is whiskey you're supposed to get drunk out there that i didn't i had the dogs and it's just like i said i hardly ever drink you know uh but um it it was an unusual creative experience which to me opened up a different way of going about trying to create things in the world. As you write more and more books, do you find it to be more and more difficult or do you find it to be easier?

Well, my early books were all focused on trying to bring scientific ideas out to the general public. The Elegant Universe was about string theory, Fabric the Cosmos, Space and Time. Hidden Reality is about multiple universes. And so in that role, I'm basically trying to translate from the cutting edge research into ordinary human language so that people who don't want to go to graduate school can get the basic idea of what's going on. And this book is a very different proposition. I feel like I've moved in a significantly different direction through this book because, yes, there's science, you know, entropy, evolution, the history of the universe from the beginning to the end, but the focus on why we humans do what we do, why we tell stories,

the emergence of language, why we tell myths, why we engage in religious experience, why creative expression is so important to us, this felt like it was drawing upon things I've been thinking about for decades, but never put into writing. So it was a harder exercise than anything that I did before because it was a different exercise. But in the end, one that I felt was even more gratifying because it was making clear why these ideas matter. As opposed to just trying to tickle the brain of the reader,

I'm trying to actually, if you will, touch the heart and soul of the reader. And that's something which, if it's successful, feels very gratifying. I would imagine that would be very hard to end, to feel how, like, to put the cover on it and to go, that's it. Yeah, right, it is and but that's true almost with with all books you know the the famous adage is that you never finish a book you abandon them you know that that's all that ever happens and that was true in spades in this particular case because the subject was so big yeah and you can always imagine going further in this direction

or enhancing that description. But at some point, you recognize that life is an ongoing process. And a book is ultimately a snapshot of where the author was at the moment that the book was written. And that, to me, is really what happens here. This is a snapshot of my view of the human condition set against the cosmological unfolding. snapshot of my view of the human condition set against the cosmological unfolding. And how much of your perceptions of these things has evolved, you know, as an educator and as a scientist and as a person who's in the public eye? How much of your perceptions on these ideas have changed over the course of your career? Huge, huge.

I think I was a very hard-nosed science thinker when I started. I think part of this may have been I became a professor at a relatively young age. I think I was 27 when I got my first faculty job. So many of the graduate students were the same age as me. So I think I felt the need to have a very rigid scientific outlook on the world because of that. And as I've gotten older, that has changed. And my willingness to entertain a broader range of thought and experience and ways of being has absolutely grown.

The other thing that's had a vast and vital impact on me are students. For 30 years, the only thing I really taught was technical physics courses, quantum mechanics or relativity, you know, thermodynamics. And what do you do there? You're at the blackboard, you're putting equations up there, you're trying to get the kids to be able to solve problems and understand what the mathematics is all about. So the only thing you're really ever doing is touching the cognitive part of their brain. For the last few years, I've been teaching a course, the students didn't know it, that's actually based on this book. So I wanted to try out the ideas with young minds. So I taught a course at Columbia called Origins and Meaning.

And in that course, I had students from across the campus, not just the physics students, I had the neuro students, the anthropology students, the linguistic students, the theologically oriented, you know. So, it was a whole range of students. And to see how their understanding of how their major or subject fits in to the cosmological unfolding changed many of their perspectives on what it is that they're studying and what they're doing. And to have students come to my office and to feel shooken up, shaken up, whatever the right form of that verb is, where they're saying, you know, I've lived my life in such a way, but now when I think about religion as perhaps an evolutionarily interesting and useful development as opposed to something from on high, or when I think about creative expression as something that might seed ingenuity and innovation,

as opposed to something that is just pure inspiration coming from the outer world, I'm thinking about my life differently. And some of them, frankly, would be upset. I'd had students come in tears. And I'd never had them when I teach quantum mechanics. In tears? Yeah.

More than one? More than one. Really? Because they'd say, this course is kind of shaking my sense of who I am and what I am in the world. What was the key aspect of it that was shaking them? Well, for some students, it was the notion of religion because many of them, or at least some of them, had a traditional religious upbringing. And their academic, and their academic life and their religious life were completely separate. And now when you have a

course in which you're focusing upon how it would be that this institution of religion might naturally evolve on planet Earth based upon what we know about humans and human brains and the evolutionary pressures that we've been under, some of them began to think about religion as a very different proposition than the one that they had when they were growing up. And I was in a position that I'd never been before of basically counseling a student and saying, hey, it's okay to have your world shake a little bit. It's okay to think about things. You may come back to exactly where you were before this course, but if a collection of

ideas can make you rethink your life, at least it'll cast it in a different light. It'll illuminate it differently. Go with it. See what happens. And I never had a conversation like that when teaching Schrodinger's equation. And for me, it was the most gratifying pedagogical experience that I've ever had because you're reaching the whole person as opposed to just reaching this cognitive technique of solving equations. If you can talk religion with a really intelligent person who's objective, who has a belief, it's such an interesting subject because it requires suspension of disbelief in order to absorb some of the stories. But there's clearly a history behind this of thousands of years of translations. And you're trying to get to the what did they mean when they wrote this down? How much did they know? And what were they trying to do?

Were they just trying to get everybody to calm down and stay in line? Right. Or were they trying to find some means of gluing the group together by a shared belief? Or, you know, there are folks who basically say that there are qualities of the human brain that naturally leave it open to a religious sensibility. I mean, for instance, we have agency detection systems in our brain where we look around the world and we tend to assign agency to things that happen. That's useful, right? Because if you mistake a windblown branch for a jaguar, yeah, it's fine. You thought it was a jaguar, but it's just a branch. But if the reverse happens, you think it was a jaguar and you think it's a windblown branch, you're going to get eaten. So we tend to over endow agency into the world.

There is evolutionary value to that. So when the wind blows, we tend to think there's a mind up there. When the river gurgles, we tend to think that there's a mind in there. And this is sort of the seed for the kinds of perspectives that you'll find in many of the world's religions. that you'll find in many of the world's religions. So there's natural course of events that can lead to the arising of the institution or at least the ideas behind the institution of religion. And for students that have never encountered that idea before, it can really shake things up, and I think in a very valuable way.

So I think you're absolutely right. Having a conversation with somebody who has a religious perspective is deeply interesting to understand where that mind came to the place that it got to. And from a personal sensibility, I just give you one little anecdote. My dad died. I was 23 years old. And unexpectedly, I'd been visiting home. I was at Harvard at the time. I was visiting from Cambridge, and we had a nice weekend. And by the time I got back to Cambridge on the bus, my mom called me and said, Dad's dead. It was so shocking.

It was like so sudden. It was so complete. And I remember I went back home, and my dad was not a religious man, but we knew that he would want to have a religious ceremony. And we did it. And we had, you know, a minion of Jews coming to the house to recite the Kaddish prayer because we weren't religious. We didn't know what we were doing, you know. And I had no idea what these men were saying.

But it was deeply comforting. In fact, I didn't want to know what they were saying. To me, it was just a collection of ancient sounds. But the sounds connected me across the generations to a culture that had been extending back 5,000 years. And in a moment of crisis, that was a very comforting and useful connection to have. Yeah, that is where I find people get the most out of religion in the fact that it brings communities together in this sort of cohesive ritual where everybody acts together and everybody, you feel like there's completion to it.

Yeah. Like you're putting someone, you know, you're putting someone into perspective and you're doing so with this religious ceremony. And when large groups of people get together and engage in a ritual behavior, something magical happens. I've spoken to evolutionary psychologists like Steve Pinker, who's a wonderful thinker. I've had him in here, too. Yeah, okay. He's a wonderful thinker.

I'm glad I'm in here, too. Yeah, okay. And, you know, Steve is skeptical that this kind of ritual behavior can yield the kind of cohesive bonding that some people suggest that it does. But, you know, you probably have – I have on occasion engaged in these ritual behaviors, you know, mass drumming and movement. And I got to tell you, you are quickly, I find, transported to a place where you are now part of a collective and you feel yourself melting into the group and you are one. And if you've never had that experience, I think it's something that you should have because I think it's a vital part of our heritage. It is part of how we got to be who we are. Yeah, there's something about group acceptance and a group of people acting and doing something together that does create this very strange bond. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily exist amongst individuals.

It's a weird bond. It's a very weird bond because it has nothing to do with the individuals, nothing to do with the personality of Jim or Mary. It's irrelevant at that point. It's somehow joining you together into this mass of humanity that's all engaged in the same practice, and somehow you feel as though your identity melts into the larger whole. I don't know why it happens. There's negative aspects to that sort of thing.

Or that mob mentality. Of course. Like, have you ever been in a situation where things got chaotic and you really had this feeling like anything can happen at any moment i've seen it happen i've never been part of it but very weird but i have a sort of feeling in the air yeah i have an analogous one which is you know my brother is a hari krishna you know and so you know he is 13 years older than me and left college in the 60s, which was a tumultuous time, and went to Europe and ultimately joined into what many people think of as some kind of cultish activity. And so – but he's not a cult thinker. He's an original thinker.

He's a brilliant thinker. He's an original thinker. He's a brilliant thinker. And yet, within this group mentality, you can imagine a certain kind of group think can take over. At least people imagine that this happens. So yes, it has positive aspects and it can have negative aspects. But in the end, I think there is a long lineage in which those of our forebears who survived were the ones who could join together into these more potent, these more powerful groups. And that way, we're able to triumph over other groups, you know, in the ancestral environment. You know, there's different readings of the archaeological record, whether it was a dangerous place in the hunter-gatherer past or a sort of placid place, but one reading says it was a very dangerous place, and therefore those groups that survived were the ones who were able to establish this kind of allegiance to the whole. And certainly I think this kind of ritual behavior may have been part of that.

Bond together through shared experience. Yes. Yeah. And belief. Yeah. And if you're all believing in the same supernatural entity, that's a powerful, in principle, powerful glue. Do you find that there's – I mean, I don't want to say an arrogance in some academics. Maybe that's not the right word, but this being too quick to dismiss any positive benefit at all about religion.

Yes. It's the knee-jerk reaction among a certain group of academics. And it feels deeply unfortunate to me. It almost feels like a religion of its own sort when it's just the response as opposed to a careful, thoughtful, heartfelt analysis of the situation. I frankly wish that more people would read William James's book, because I do think that it's the kind of – because here's a scientist, right, a deeply thoughtful scientist who knows how to analyze data, knows how to rationally engage with the world, who was plumbing the depths of religion in a very, very meaningful and sensitive way. You know, and by the end of these lectures, I think it was lecture number 20 or something, he describes religion as this, as something that helps the journey toward the terror and the beauty of phenomenon. He describes it as the voice of the thunder, the gentleness of the summer rain.

He describes it in terms of the sublimity of the stars. And this kind of transcendent approach to the religious experience, I think, brings it out of the academic guise that is often thrown upon it, which is something that is contravening everything we know about the world. It's causing people to think in ways that are irrational. I mean, this whole trope that you hear, it's not that there isn't some truth to that, but it's an incomplete truth. And if you're willing to approach religion in a way where you discard the pieces that offend you, throw away the parts that you think are utter nonsense, only keep those aspects that are useful to you in your life, then there is a place for it. Well, I think therein lies the problem with a lot of people. They're not willing to do that.

Right. This need for suspension of disbelief troubles them so much that they feel like fools if they buy into something. Right. And we're also dealing with all religions except the ones that are super questionable, like Scientology or Mormonism. Right. Scientology or Mormonism that are very old. And the idea of maybe it would be better if we came up with something that we could all agree on in 2020. Right. Maybe it would be wonderful if we have something that maybe has science in it, maybe something

that has a genuine understanding of how human beings react and what the benefits of community and having these environments where loving, conscious people communicate with each other in a very positive way, that this could be a new form of this thing that we seem to desire so greatly. Yeah, and I agree. And I have to say, I make this point in the book, because the point that I make there is that to truly engage with the world, you have to use a variety of stories. We're fundamentally storytellers. That's what human beings are. Now, there's the reductionist story that physicists are well-equipped to talk about

with particles and laws of physics. On top of that, you've got the chemist story, the complex molecules. You've got the biologist story that begins to talk about cells and life. You've got the psychological story, the neurophysiological story that brings a mind and consciousness. And within that, you then have all of the activities that conscious beings undertake, which includes religion and includes telling other kinds of stories and includes creative expression. You need them all. all. And to sort of say that the scientific account is the only account by which you're ever going to gain true qualities of the world is a very, in my view, limited description of what truth is. There is objective truth in the world that we can measure, that we can describe with equations of so forth, but there's also internal truth, spiritual truth that you get to by

self-examination. It's real in the sense that you're understanding how you respond to the world. And that is something which is deeply personal, but utterly real. And whether it's through psychedelics, whether it's through ayahuasca, whether it's through a spiritual journey, whether it's through religion, regardless, all of this adds color to the story of what it means to be a human being. Do you spend any time meditating? I do. I'm not particularly effective at it.

I think most people are that way. Yeah. Including the most effective ones. Well, years ago, a friend of mine bought me one of these transcendental meditation courses. And I was like, okay, I'll just try it. He spent the money, I'm going to actually go and do it. And it was kind of eye-opening. There was a lot of what you might call woo-woo stuff that was happening in the lectures. And in fact, the funny thing is,

the guy giving the lecture, he did recognize me and I could tell how uncomfortable he was giving his normal description because he kept looking at me sheepishly as he would invoke quantum physics and things of that sort. But I told him, I'm not here to judge you. I'm just here to sort of see what's going on. But the idea of allowing the mind to be in a different mode of operation, which is sort of how I summarize the experience. You know, if you're reciting the mantra in your mind and allowing that to be a sort of pedal point, a driver of how your mind is behaving at that moment, that's a very different way of being in the world from thinking about grocery shopping or solving Einstein's equations.

And I think that, to me, is the value of it. It's a systematic way to put your mind in a different mode of operation. And at times, I find it very useful to move into that place. When you started doing Transcendental Meditation, what about it was weird? Well, what was weird, number one, was doing this in this group setting, which is how you start on this course, and moreover, it being framed in a manner that I had trouble aligning with my understanding of how the world works by virtue of the lectures that were given to us for what it is what we were doing. But through the practice, I sort of found,

I'm sure I'm just translating from what they were saying in the lecture into a language that I'm more comfortable with. And that made it less weird for me, because- Sort of like what you were talking about religion, just kind of cutting out the thing- Cutting out the thing that didn't make any sense to me and saying, hey, what is this really about? What this really is about is breaking the usual chain of thought that is 99.9% of the time of how I live in the world and allowing my brain to have a chain of thought that is artificial because I'm sitting here forcing myself to recite this mantra inside my mind. But that's a very useful way of being because it's unfamiliar and it's novel and

it allows my brain to operate in a different way. So when I translated it into that language, it all of a sudden made a lot more sense to me and became not weird at all. It became an interesting practice. And do you still do it? I do it when I feel I need it. So there are friends of mine who say, I cannot live in the world if I don't do my 20 minutes in the morning. Simply, you know, that's part of my routine. I don't feel that way, but there are moments when I say, whoa, I need to do it. And based on circumstance, based on what's happening in a given moment, it allows a kind of mental reset if that's a language that makes sense. And that reset I consider to be a valuable thing to do.

So do you do this? I do. I don't do TM, but I do meditate. Regular basis. Yeah, regular basis. And I also have a float tank here that I like to use. Really? Yeah.

Like a deprivation? Yeah. In this building? Yeah, it's right over there. I'll show it to you after we're done. Wow. Yeah. Can I do it? Sure. You could if you want if you want have you done it i've never done it before

i find it a little bit terrifying do you live in manhattan i do yeah there's plenty of them there's a bunch of different float places it's not terrifying at all really yeah you just float relax and uh but it's complete darkness oh yeah yeah see because i have i have some claustrophobia yeah and and that's like for instance I can't go into an MRI machine. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, totally. But you're so smart. Why don't you get that out of your head?

I tried. I got to tell you, I trained. So I have a desk in my office where it's only about like one foot high. And I'd slide my body underneath the desk, lock the door because it looked too weird. And I'd stay under there as long as I possibly could just to train myself. Like 15, 20. But I get into the real machine and phew. Really?

Yeah. My wife's mom is like that. Yeah. Like she did an MRI and she's like, it was the worst experience of my life. I'm like, I did two of them last week. I fell asleep. I totally understand her. I totally do.

Really? Yeah. I don't understand why someone as smart as you would not recognize, well, there's just this thing around me. I do. I do. But it's like the irrational part of being. I get in there, my heart starts to pound. Where do you think that comes from?

I don't know because it wasn't always there. Really? And it has gotten worse in certain – there was a time – I'm going to come across like a nutcase in here. Maybe it was that trip to Amsterdam. Yeah. Maybe it was that trip to Amsterdam. Yeah, maybe it was that trip to Amsterdam. Whacked your brain out. There was actually times when I couldn't even go in a tunnel in a car. The claustrophobia was that bad.

Really? Yeah, I was in a taxi cab. I had to go to New Jersey, you know, Manhattan, so I had to take the Lincoln Tunnel. And as the taxi was approaching the tunnel, I said to the guy, I can't do it. I can't do it. And the guy says, well, I can't let you out. It's illegal to let you out. I said, you've got to let me out. I can't do it. And I do it And the guy says Well I can't let you out It's illegal to let you out I said you gotta let me out

I can't do it And I just opened the door And I got out Oh my god That's so crazy But now I'm fine With tunnels So I don't

I don't know what it is That Maybe you're too smart Accentuated it there Maybe you're too smart And maybe your brain Is playing tricks with you And giving you anxiety

To sort of Shake it up the world Yeah maybe Maybe Constantly contemplating The gigantic picture of the actual scope of the universe and yeah but now i'm pretty stable about these things so it's just mri machines where it's really close into your face you gotta just do a lot of mris get over that right exactly i'm sure that that would do it that would absolutely do it probably right if you did mris on a regular basis then i'm sure you get used to it but yeah i just I just do a real simple type of meditation when I probably am eventually going to

take a TM course because uh my friend Tom Papa he's really into TM and he he raves about it yeah but I just sit down and I breathe I just concentrate only on my breath and I and it comes and goes but I concentrate only on my breath. And I find really good relief from that. Yoga is the same thing. I do yoga. I try to do it at least twice a week. Oh, you do? Yeah.

There's a lot of benefit in that in the same way in that it's so difficult. And in the poses, if you can only concentrate on your breath, just balance and concentrate on your breath, you'll be filled with activity enough the with things to concentrate on with the balancing of the posture and then the breath that it it acts as a almost a brain scouring it cleanses the mind of unnecessary anxieties and a lot of other just but you've been doing that for a long time no yoga's been i've been pretty steady for the last four years Right Right Yeah

And my wife does a lot of yoga She keeps telling me That I need to do it It's great You know It's great It's great for the body as well And I think the more comfortable

Your body is The better your At least for me The better my mind works Yeah I have a little doubt Do you exercise I have a little doubt about that You know

Last For the last year I've been doing Peloton bike That's good. You know, but then I herniated a disc in my back. And so for the last two months I've basically been unable to move. How did you do that? Well, you know, I think it was throwing out the Christmas tree.

Oh, okay. You know, bending and, you know, my 92-year-old mother has used this opportunity to say, because we're Jewish, we weren't allowed to have a Christmas tree going up. This is meaningful right here. That's funny. But my Christian wife is all too happy that I'm flexible on that count for sure. What is going on with your back now? Yeah, well, it's bad. It's bad.

Did you get an MRI? I did get an MRI. You went through the screen? You can sort of see it, so i'm i'm is it pushing against the nerves pushing against the nerve yeah have you heard of something called reginokine do you know what that no i don't reginokine is something that i used for a bulging disc and it's incredibly beneficial it's it was uh created by a doctor in germany and uh it was illegal in the united states until a few years back they they moved the process over here. It's not covered by insurance, but it's very, very beneficial for that.

And what they do is it's essentially a more advanced version of platelet-rich plasma. So they take your blood out. They do this process. It takes about 12 hours, and then they re-inject this serum. They take the serum out of the blood. It looks like this yellow serum, and they inject it directly into the areas. So right into the spine.

Right into the area where the spine is bulging. I see. And it allows it to relax. It's the most potent anti-inflammation drug that they can use. It's like instead of cortisone, which is what they've been talking about. Exactly. Well, cortisone can help you as well can at least provide temporary relief but what this does is actually heals the area really yeah it's very beneficial i had a real bad bulging disc in my

neck that was making my hands go numb so my toes are numb yeah yeah yeah but they can give you relief and it's in santa monica there's a place called lifespan medicine i'll connect you to the doctor please i'm so curious about what I just saw a friend of mine there. He had a real problem with his neck. Within two weeks, it was better. He got hit by a car when he was on his motorcycle. My friend, Dean Del Rey, and he was really fucked up. His back was so bad that we were at the comedy store, and people came near him, and he tensed up.

I go, what's the matter? He goes, dude, my neck is so messed up. Somebody bumps into me. I'm in sharp pain. And I'm like, really? And then he started describing it to me. So I said, I've got the thing for you. And I sent him to this place.

Regenikin's amazing. I've had it done several times. Regenikin, I've got to check that out. Yeah, I've had it done on my lower. Well, a lot of athletes like Peyton Manning and Kobe Bryant, they flew to Germany to get this procedure done. Because it was the only place that was legal then. Including the UFC president, Dana White, which is where I found out about it.

And then I found out that they were opening offices in America. In Dallas, they have one. They have one in Santa Monica and I think somewhere else. Maybe New York. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, but it's an amazing procedure. I mean, it really is super beneficial, particularly for that kind of an injury.

Because it's been tough. I mean, for instance, I can't sleep because there's no position. Now, the value of that is I have done so much reading over the last two months because I'm like up half the night and I only conk out when it's like utter, utter exhaustion. Have you used spinal decompression? Have you ever done any of that? I did. I went to this physical therapy place where they put me up on pulleys

and it kind of pulled the feet, I guess, away from the back. It wasn't like being stretched fully, but your own weight was causing the vertebrae to separate. Did that help you? Huge relief. Yeah, you can get a small inversion table. Yeah, I was thinking about that. Yeah, well, I have one out here you could try, too. Do you? Oh, I'd love to try it.

You have a whole gym out here. There's another thing called the reverse hyper machine. And the reverse hyper machine was created by this very famous power lifter named Louis Simmons. And Louis had this idea. He's a very brilliant guy. And he had this idea that they were trying to fuse his discs. He had a bulging disc. Yeah, right.

And he's like, well, a disc is compressed. Like, how do you get it to decompress? disc. And he's like, well, a disc is compressed. Like, how do you get it to decompress? And he developed this machine that strengthens the back when you lift up the legs, but then in the lowering of the legs, it provides active decompression, and it alleviated his problem. Do you wear this? No, no, I'll show it to you. I'll show it to you afterwards. It's a machine that you get. See, we are physical beings right yeah we

have a mind that can sort of the edge of the cosmos man but you got a bulging disc it doesn't matter oh yeah pain is real i mean you have to deal with it and you have to be really careful and for me what's really critical is physical maintenance and i'm very dedicated to physical maintenance even if there's nothing wrong so called building the core yes a lot of chin-ups sit-ups a lot of lower back exercises hyper like back extensions anything to keep things strong squats making sure that the the more tissue you have the more strength you have in that tissue around particularly protecting your joints and your spine the healthier you're going to be yeah it's just no it's absolutely vital because the last few months have been hell, I have to say. Well, I'll show you.

Listen, we've already talked for two and a half hours. So I'll take you to the background now. I'll show you. Brian, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate you. It's great. I appreciate all your work. And tell people your book, One More Time is the title.

Until the End of Time. It's out today. It's out today. Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. Beautiful. Thank you for being here, man. Thank you. My pleasure.

Bye, everybody. Yeah, I'd love to. Thank you.